Science & Technology

Love for Sale

Eva Illouz’s The End of Love presents a world starkly divided between male and female, straight and gay, sex and love, dignity and humiliation.

January 13, 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

Tim Flannery

Flies Like Us

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

December 16, 2021 issue

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran

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

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Digging for Utopia

In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom. But must we find our future in the past?

December 16, 2021 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

John Gray

The Mind’s Body Problem

The belief that we’re different from other organisms may be an incurable human illusion.

December 2, 2021 issue

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

The Latest

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

Leah Aronowsky

The Limits of Climate Change Litigation

For two decades, climate scientists have been developing tools to pin the blame for hurricanes, floods, and heatwaves on fossil fuel companies. But judges say climate change is too big for court.

November 3, 2021

Robert Kuttner

Bringing the Supply Chain Back Home

Is Biden ready to insist that national economic planning is not just ideologically permissible but urgently necessary?

November 18, 2021 issue

Natalie Angier

Claw & Order

What do we owe nature, and how might we do a better job of coexisting with species that do not exist for our pleasure and sustenance?

November 4, 2021 issue

Tim Flannery

Out of Savannastan

A new book provides convincing evidence that our earliest direct ancestors evolved in Europe, and that they were walking upright as early as six million years ago. But it is overly confident in its challenge to the idea that the genus Homo arose in Africa.

November 4, 2021 issue

Ian Johnson

Chinese Medicine in the Covid Wards

One doctor’s mission to show that traditional healing arts could help in a national crisis.

November 4, 2021 issue

Bill McKibben

The Future Is Electric

Because electricity is so much more efficient than combustion, totally electrifying our country would cut primary energy use about in half.

November 4, 2021 issue

Jerome Groopman

What Does the Microbiome Do?

In Gut Feelings, Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty remind us that despite exaggerated claims from marketers, few applications of microbiome manipulation have been proven effective by clinical studies.

October 21, 2021 issue