Ideas

Science & Technology

Tim Flannery

Electrome Dreams

Could the bioelectricity generated by our cells be responsible for more than communication in the nervous system?

June 12, 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

Jerome Groopman

Measles Gone Wild

During a burgeoning measles outbreak, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has continued to make contradictory remarks, publicly endorsing the measles vaccine while raising doubts about its safety.

May 15, 2025 issue

Jenny Uglow

Lunar Myths and Mysteries

Two new books explore our growing scientific understanding of the moon as well as its powerful appeal to the imagination.

April 24, 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

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

Sue Halpern

For the Love of Money

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s damning memoir of working at Facebook exposes the predatory cupidity of the company’s executives.

May 29, 2025 issue

Jenny Uglow

Orchid Frenzy

The discovery of a Brazilian orchid with huge red-and-purple flowers in the early nineteenth century set off a mania for the exotic plants in Victorian England.

June 12, 2025 issue

Can Health Care Be Cured?

Nathan Whitlock

Where Health Care Is a Human Right

How does the single-payer system work in Canada, and does it need reform?

November 19, 2020 issue

First responders at the Riverside University Health Systems Medical Center, Moreno Valley, California, May 15, 2020

Timothy Snyder

What Ails America

Although I did not understand this then, I had a severe infection in my liver. I was in a condition known as sepsis; death was close.

September 3, 2020

David Oshinsky

Health Care: The Best and the Rest

Ezekiel Emanuel’s new book makes a comparative study of eleven of the world’s health care systems. Who are the winners and losers?

October 22, 2020 issue

Nellie Hermann

Cancer Under Capitalism

In ‘The Undying,’ Anne Boyer rejects the conventions of the cancer memoir in favor of a manifesto.

November 5, 2020 issue

Arnold Relman

On Breaking One’s Neck

A doctor’s near-death experience and what it reveals about the US medical care system

February 6, 2014 issue

Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband

Putting Profits Ahead of Patients

Health care in the US is enormously costly, often in ways that are baffling not only to patients but to doctors themselves.

July 13, 2017 issue

Daniel J. Kevles

Why Is Medicine So Expensive?

The system of prescription drug pricing is a patchwork product of history, vulnerable to manipulation by the pharmaceutical industry.

February 21, 2019 issue

Marcia Angell

Right Diagnosis, Wrong Treatment

‘America’s Bitter Pill’ by Steven Brill

April 23, 2015 issue

The Latest

Gavin Francis

What Do You Expect?

The surprising power of placebos demonstrates how the mind influences both the experience of ill health and the evolution of illness.

June 26, 2025 issue

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

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

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

Adam Hochschild

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

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