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

Free from the Archives

Mysterious Japan: A Diary

In 1970 Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief visited Japan and documented a nation experiencing a dazzling economic miracle, and the nascent environmental movement such economics necessitate.

Panorama of Tokyo Station. Photograph by Yuya Sekiguchi

The Latest

Mark O’Connell

Uncanny Planet

A new collection of essays by Nathaniel Rich argues that there is no going back to whatever might be meant by “nature.”

July 22, 2021 issue

Robert Macfarlane

The Landscapes Inside Us

Our navigational ability as a species is closely connected to our ability to tell stories about ourselves that unfold both backward and forward in time.

July 1, 2021 issue

Priyamvada Natarajan

All Things Great and Small

The origins and fates of atoms and galaxies are closely intertwined.

July 1, 2021 issue

Jed S. Rakoff

Sentenced by Algorithm

Computer programs used to predict recidivism and determine prison terms have a high error rate, a secret design, and a demonstrable racial bias.

June 10, 2021 issue

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