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

Inescapable Poe

Autumn is the season for Edgar Allan Poe, and in our October 11, 1984, issue Harold Bloom read the complete works of Baltimore’s bard.

The Latest

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

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

Sue Halpern

The Human Costs of AI

Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.

October 21, 2021 issue

Gregory Hays

A Mind in Pain

For Robert Burton, describing melancholy was a way of describing the world. Two recent books on depression suggest that today, virtually all we know about the subject is still open to debate.

October 21, 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

Jessica Riskin

Nature’s Evolving Tastes

In a new collection of essays on Darwin’s Descent of Man, a number of scientists claim that human and animal cultures emerge from the “purposeless process” of natural selection. Darwin himself said the opposite.

October 21, 2021 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Rolling Along

The beauty, eccentricity, and precariousness of life on the river side of the New Orleans levees.

October 7, 2021 issue

Zoë Schlanger

Our Silent Partners

Merlin Sheldrake explores how fungi challenge our understanding of nonhuman intelligence and complicate the boundaries between one organism and another.

October 7, 2021 issue