Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Science & Technology

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

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

Jenny Uglow

Beauty in Ingenuity: The Art of Science

A sense of excitement defines the exhibition, “The Art of Innovation: From Enlightenment to Dark Matter,” as visitors zig-zag through 250 years of art and science.

November 22, 2019

Fritz Zwicky at the Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory, California, circa 1936

Freeman Dyson

The Power of Morphological Thinking

January 16, 2020 issue

The Latest

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

Clair Wills

Learning to Grieve

A poet and a psychologist consider the necessity of mourning our dead.

November 19, 2020 issue

Claudia Dreifus

‘Social Media Reward Bad Behavior’

The former head of Reddit on how platforms like Facebook have amplified disinformation—and don’t want to stop—because attention equals profit.

October 26, 2020

An edition of Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death bound in human skin, 1898

Mike Jay

The Hide That Binds

A medical librarian’s history of books covered in human skin.

November 5, 2020 issue

A crowd entering the 96 St station of the Q line extension of the Second Avenue Subway on opening day of phase one, New York City, January 1, 2017

Eric Goldwyn

Costly Subway Lessons

The incredibly high costs of phase one of the Second Avenue subway highlight three problems that plague transit-infrastructure costs across the country.

September 22, 2020

An ACT UP activist being arrested during an AIDS demonstration outside the headquarters of the American Medical Association, Chicago, April 1990

Jerome Groopman

Lessons from the Worst Years of AIDS

September 24, 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

Jonathan Freedland

Disinformed to Death

Perhaps the moment is ripe for three new books on disinformation.

August 20, 2020 issue

Daniel J. Kevles

The Scandal of Our Drug Supply

‘Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom’ by Katherine Eban

July 23, 2020 issue

A coronavirus research technician technician at the Sinovac Biotech laboratory, Beijing, China, April 29, 2020

Tamsin Shaw

The Race for Biodata Amid a Pandemic

The gold standard for predictive biodata in the Covid-19 pandemic is the DNA information of affected populations. Yet America’s response to the public health crisis has exposed a shocking lack of preparedness.

May 13, 2020