Sensing an opportunity, the Trump campaign amplified messages that linked Black Lives Matter (BLM) with looting and violence. In early September, in the aftermath of a BLM protest marred by ...

According to a familiar story, science was born as a pastime of seventeenth-century European gentlemen, who built air pumps, traded telescopes, and measured everything from the size of the earth to ...

This past April, the FBI made an admission that was nothing short of catastrophic for the field of forensic science. In an unprecedented display of repentance, the Bureau announced that, for years, ...

In 1947 Julian Huxley, English evolutionary theorist and director-general of UNESCO, wrote Mohandas Gandhi to ask him to contribute an essay to a collection of philosophical reflections on human ...

This June, a month marked globally as LGBT Pride Month, an online debate has reignited over the question of whether (partial) nudity, fetish wear, and kinky activity ought to have a place in Pride ...

Two years ago this month, activists from the Global Women’s Strike convened a virtual conference. Selma James, then nearing her ninetieth birthday, was one of several speakers. “We are carers,” she ...

This essay appears in print in Thinking in a Pandemic. Recent history tells us a lot about how epidemics unfold, how outbreaks spread, and how they are controlled. We also know a good deal about ...

As the national economy reopens, prices have been rising. Year over year, the consumer price index (CPI) increased 5.4 percent in both June and July—the largest annual increases observed since the ...

What responsibility does the artist have to society? Speaking at Amherst College in 1963, John F. Kennedy gave one answer to that perpetually nagging question. For a politician it was a highly unusual ...

Editors’ Note: Read responses to this essay by epidemiologists Marc Lipsitch and John Ioannidis, as well as a final response by Jonathan Fuller. All these pieces appear in print in Thinking in a ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

This essay appears in print in Reclaiming Freedom. On January 18 the Atlanta police, DeKalb County police, Georgia state troopers, and a SWAT team descended on a protest encampment in the Weelaunee ...