Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Science & Technology

Lucy Jakub

The Oldest Forest

The promise and pitfalls of commercializing kelp.

December 17, 2020 issue

Tim Flannery

In the Soup

Tracing the research into the earliest beginnings of life on earth.

December 3, 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

Jessica Riskin

Just Use Your Thinking Pump!

What is the scientific method, and when, where, and how did it become, as the kids say, a thing?

July 2, 2020 issue

James Gleick

Simulating Democracy

Jill Lepore’s new book looks into the origins of our diet of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and clickbait.

October 8, 2020 issue

A life-size model of the early Cretaceous tyrannosaur Yutyrannus huali; from Mark Norell’s The World of Dinosaurs: An Illustrated Tour. Originally part of the American Museum of Natural History’s 2016 exhibition ‘Dinosaurs Among Us,’ curated by Norell, it is twenty-three feet long and is now in the permanent collection of the Dinosaur Gallery at the Center of Science and Industry, Columbus, Ohio.

Verlyn Klinkenborg

What Were Dinosaurs For?

It has become impossible to think about extinction in the old ways, to regard the end-Cretaceous demise of some 80 percent of life on earth as a remote, alien fact.

December 19, 2019 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

The Latest

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

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

Jenny Uglow

The Imperial Gardener

How Joseph Banks made the royal garden at Kew the most outstanding botanical collection in the world.

January 14, 2021 issue

Gavin Francis

Changing Psychiatry’s Mind

Two books investigate the science and pseudoscience of diagnosing mental illness.

January 14, 2021 issue

Bill McKibben

It’s Not Science Fiction

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s anti-dystopian novel, climate change is the crisis that finally forces mankind to deal with global inequality.

December 17, 2020 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

A Noah’s Ark of Books

Reaktion’s colorful ‘Animal’ series tries to capture the richness of biological life on Earth.

December 17, 2020 issue

Colin Thubron

Cartographers of Stone and Air

On Tim Robinson’s intensely focused survey of a small patch of the Irish landscape and Lyall Watson’s sweeping inquiry into the mysteries and mysticism of wind.

December 3, 2020 issue