Ideas

Science & Technology

The Digital Planet

Digital technologies may worsen environmental problems, but they can also assist in the protection and restoration of ecosystems —and strengthen our relationships with them.

April 18, 2024 issue

John Washington

Burning Up

Reading John Vaillant’s Fire Weather and Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First, you may wonder if civilization is getting so hot that we’re no longer thinking straight.

May 9, 2024 issue

Jerome Groopman

Seeing the Power in Blindness

A writer narrating his increasing loss of vision asks fundamental questions about sight and cognition.

April 18, 2024 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

The Cost of Our Debris

The stated purpose of Jay Owens’s new book is to “think with dust,” specifically “human-made” dust and what it reveals—the forensic fingerprint, so to speak, that our species has left upon this planet.

March 21, 2024 issue

Jessica Riskin

Every Creeping Thing

In his late writings and correspondence, Charles Darwin was thinking about how mortal beings strive to make what they can of themselves.

March 21, 2024 issue

Tim Flannery

Ready to Rumble

A new book by the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer details the gifts and destruction brought by volcanoes, and the sublimity and terror experienced in their presence.

March 7, 2024 issue

Natalie de Souza

The Dark Tangle of Alzheimer’s

Recent breakthroughs in dementia treatments have been hailed as successes, but after decades of disappointing research it is difficult to be optimistic.

February 22, 2024 issue

Laura Kolbe

Month to Month

What we as a society prefer not to know about periods extends beyond menstruation itself to its management and the management of women’s health more broadly.

February 8, 2024 issue

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Halpern

The Coming Tech Autocracy

A functional government, committed to safeguarding its citizens, might be keen to create a regulatory agency for AI or pass comprehensive legislation, but we in the United States do not have such a government.

November 7, 2024 issue

Samuel Earle

The Problems with Polls

Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.

October 17, 2024 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

What the Ocean Holds

Most of our planet’s biosphere exists in the dark of the deep ocean. Will we protect it? Or will we cash it in without concern for the harm we’re causing?

October 17, 2024 issue

Elizabeth Kolbert

Savvy in the Grass

Some botanists maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, others that tropical vines have a sort of vision. If plants possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response?

October 3, 2024 issue