Science & Technology

The Downward Slope

In A Cure for Darkness, Alex Riley responds to his depression by turning outward, placing his experience and its purported remedies alongside the experiences of fellow sufferers past and present.

March 24, 2022 issue

M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin

Why Biology Is Not Destiny

In The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Harden disguises her radically subjective view of biological essentialism as an objective fact.

April 21, 2022 issue

Mark Borrello and David Sepkoski

Ideology as Biology

E. O. Wilson corresponded for years with a notorious proponent of race science, advocating for his research behind the scenes. What does it tell us about his most controversial work?

February 5, 2022

Tim Flannery

In Hot Water

“The decline of coral reefs is accelerating so quickly that we may live to see the end of them.”

March 24, 2022 issue

Martha C. Nussbaum

What We Owe Our Fellow Animals

Can we develop a theory of justice that encompasses nonhuman animals?

March 10, 2022 issue

Jonathan Mingle

Reasons for Concern

The IPCC’s latest report, with warnings for supply chains and food security, may be the most suspense-filled document in human history.

March 9, 2022

Willa Glickman

Fruits of Empire

The plant explorers of the USDA succeeded in bringing the world’s fruits to American supermarkets. But at what human, ecological, and gustatory cost?

November 12, 2021

Elizabeth Kolbert

The Waste Land

Two crucial and interconnected resources—human feces and arable soil—face crises of mismanagement.

February 24, 2022 issue

The Latest

Ginia Bellafante

Mothers Under Pressure

The culture of contemporary child-rearing brings anxiety and guilt without relief. Does Emily Oster’s call for more relaxed parenting offer the solution?

June 9, 2022 issue

Ethan Zuckerman

Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.

June 9, 2022 issue

Caroline Fraser

‘Anxious for a Mayflower’

In A Nation of Descendants, Francesca Morgan traces the American use and abuse of genealogy from the Daughters of the American Revolution to Roots.

May 12, 2022 issue

Gavin Francis

Intimate and Invasive

The prostate has caused difficulty for men and medicine for centuries. A new “biography of the prostate” examines the haunting terror it creates.

February 10, 2022 issue

Jonathan Mingle

The Unimaginable Touch of Time

Searching for meaning in geological rupture

February 10, 2022 issue

Anne Diebel

The Dungeon Master

Peter Thiel is full of contradictions—a libertarian who founded a company that aids government surveillance, a critic of tech who supports Facebook’s mission for world domination, and a defender of free speech who helped to kill a media outlet.

February 10, 2022 issue

Dan Rockmore

Prove It!

A recent book surveys different styles that can be used to prove a single theorem—a mathematical version of musical variations on a theme, inspired by the Oulipo writer Raymond Queneau.

January 13, 2022 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Exhilarating Antihumanism

Joy Williams’s Harrow, a screwball fantasia of environmental collapse, is mercilessly contemptuous of the pieties of our age.

December 16, 2021 issue

Tim Flannery

Flies Like Us

Jonathan Balcombe’s Super Fly explores the immense world of flies.

December 16, 2021 issue

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Inventing the Science of Race

In 1741, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results help us see how Enlightenment thinkers justified chattel slavery.

December 16, 2021 issue