Science & Technology

Weaponizing the Web

Nicole Perlroth’s investigation into the shadowy world of cyberweaponry predicts an unsettling future for global security.

April 8, 2021 issue

Jessica Riskin

When Engineers Were Humanists

During the Renaissance, mechanical inventions served as a medium for experimental thinking about all aspects of the cosmos.

March 11, 2021 issue

Elizabeth Kolbert

Chemical Warfare’s Home Front

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

February 11, 2021 issue

Lucy Jakub

The Oldest Forest

The promise and pitfalls of commercializing kelp.

December 17, 2020 issue

Tom Scocca

How the Awful Stuff Won

Andrew Marantz’s and Megan Phelps-Roper’s books explore the dark and far-reaching consequences of our dependence on the Internet.

November 5, 2020 issue

Alexandra D. Lahav

Medicine Is Made for Men

In medical research, drug regulation, and product design, the male body is too often considered as the default—which can have dangerous, even fatal, consequences for women.

February 11, 2021 issue

‘The Happy Way’ by Pushwagner; from Soft City, published by New York Review Comics in 2016

Tim Wu

Bigger Brother

Once your behavior is known, to the extent that it can be predicted, it—you—can also be manipulated.

April 9, 2020 issue

Michelle Nijhuis

Buzz Buzz Buzz

Humans have spent decades trying to teach other animals our languages, but we’ve made little effort to learn theirs.

August 20, 2020 issue

From the Archives

Good Children’s Books!

Children’s book people are always fussing that they are not taken seriously enough. They should instead recognize their good luck and be still lest the bad fairy hear them and grant their wish.

Two of Maurice Sendak’s drawings for Pierre: A Cautionary Tale, from his Nutshell Library, 1962

The Latest

Anna Della Subin

The Rules of the Confidence Game

The Book of Charlatans provides an unusual glimpse into the street life of medieval Islamic societies rarely captured in more elevated Arabic literary sources.

May 27, 2021 issue

Tim Flannery

Why Did They Vanish?

Recent advancements in archaeology and genetics have granted us previously unimaginable insights into Neanderthal life.

May 13, 2021 issue

Natalie de Souza

Editing Humanity’s Future

With CRISPR, our species can turn its inexorable will to control nature back onto itself. Eventually, we could guide human evolution. Does this mean that we should?

April 29, 2021 issue

James Gleick

Eclipsed by Fame

There’s a scientific story to tell about Stephen Hawking, but most of his later life served to conceal it.

April 29, 2021 issue

Colin Thubron

The Companionship of Nature

Running like a troubled thread through Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights is the tension between a profound human need for the solace of animals and the acknowledgment, even the insistence, that they are creatures apart.

April 29, 2021 issue

Namwali Serpell

Black Hole

Black pussy is our absent center. It is everywhere and nowhere on the Internet.

March 26, 2021

Adam Kirsch

The Symbolic Animal

The philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s most timely insight is that even in a scientific age, people are prone to magical, mystical thinking.

April 8, 2021 issue

Peter C. Baker

The Bloodhound

A distinct thread of anger runs through all of Nicholson Baker’s work: anger at what people with power get up to in the shadows, anger at how they lie about it, anger at how we forget.

March 11, 2021 issue