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Ideas

Science & Technology

Evolution in the Dock

In her new book, Brenda Wineapple brings to life one of the most inflamed chapters in the history of America’s culture wars: the Scopes trial of 1925.

January 16, 2025 issue

James Gleick

Bad Readers

AI chatbots have been trained on trillions of words—but all in the service of plausibility over truth.

November 23, 2024

Tim Flannery

The Sense of an Endling

In the early nineteenth century, the idea of species extinction was an alien concept. That changed after an expedition to Iceland in search of the last of the great auks.

December 5, 2024 issue

Oliver Whang

The Next Mass Extinction?

As avian influenza spreads to the farthest reaches of the planet, scientists have expressed both urgency and fatalism.

April 14, 2024

Zadie Smith

The Dream of the Raised Arm

In early Thirties Germany, as the Nazi threat grew, the state’s propaganda machine began to penetrate the dream life of its citizenry. What of our dreams today, under the influence of the algorithms? And what will come with the return of Donald Trump?

December 5, 2024 issue

Carl Elliott

The Horrors of Hepatitis Research

Sydney Halpern’s Dangerous Medicine shows that the abusive experiments on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School were only one part of a much larger unethical research program.

November 21, 2024 issue

Andrew Katzenstein, Willa Glickman, Daniel Drake, and Lucy Jakub

In the Path of Totality

Dispatches from the 2024 solar eclipse

April 12, 2024

Adam Hanieh

‘Every Molecule of Hydrocarbon Will Come Out’

Gulf States are increasingly shaping global climate policy, even as they plan to accelerate fossil fuel production.

February 21, 2024

Dinosaurs!

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

Tim Flannery

Dinosaur Crazy

In Terrible Lizard, Deborah Cadbury sets herself the task of explaining how the curious Victorian image of dinosaurs—“Would it not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill?” mused Charles Dickens in Bleak House—came to be.

January 17, 2002 issue

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

First Fine Careless Raptor

“Mammals and dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor about 260 million years ago. Dinosaurs subsequently evolved to fill every possible ecological niche, from which they ruled the earth for 160 million years and became the most successful vertebrates in the history of the planet. During all that time we mammals managed to evolve into nothing larger than a cat.”

April 4, 1996 issue

Stephen Jay Gould

Dinomania

When dinosaurs get the Hollywood treatment, will museums follow suit?

August 12, 1993 issue

The Latest

Howard W. French

Toffler in China

The work of the eclectic American futurist exerted a profound and unanticipated influence on China’s digital transformation since the 1980s.

April 10, 2025 issue

Wendy Doniger

The Rise and Fall of Warhorses

You can tell the history of a large part of the world by who had what horses when.

April 10, 2025 issue

Jonathan Mingle

Planet Ooze

We cannot grow the crops that feed eight billion people and counting without phosphorus. At the rate we waste this precious element, how long will supplies last?

April 10, 2025 issue

Laura Marsh

A Self Divided

Since the rise of cable TV, corporations have sought to capture our valuable attention. But the way social media shatters our ability to focus has new implications for public discourse and politics.

March 27, 2025 issue

Ben Tarnoff

The Labor Theory of AI

Artificial intelligence may be the first attempt to automate and discipline human labor that even its creators don’t fully comprehend.

March 27, 2025 issue

David Oshinsky

Vaccines at Warp Speed

The development of the Covid vaccine relied on a public–private partnership that built on years of research into synthesizing RNA molecules. Will the next generation of RNA-based pharmaceuticals have the same basis in careful study and experimentation?

March 27, 2025 issue

Fred Kaplan

Rebooting the Pentagon

Bringing Silicon Valley’s drive for innovation to defense contracting has been a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has led tech firms to plunge into the war business.

February 27, 2025 issue

Anna Louie Sussman

Waiting by the Phone

Have our intimate lives taken on the worst features of the free market?

February 27, 2025 issue

Michelle Nijhuis

Life in the Ruins

Two new books consider the delusion of the human quest to be free from the constraints of nature.

November 21, 2024 issue

Christine Henneberg

Calculated Risks

Since the overturning of Roe, it has once again become a subversive act to provide medical care for women as though their lives are as valuable as men’s.

November 7, 2024 issue