Section
Science
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What If the Body Politic Kept the Score?
Bringing story and social action back into the healing process is the unfinished work of addressing existential suffering.
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Science Turned Upside Down: Carolyn Merchant’s Vision of Nature, 40 Years Later
The Death of Nature wrote a new narrative of science that explored the costs of modernity for nature and humankind.[none-for-homepage]
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Anticipating Extinction in the Tales of Two Fish
Deciding to not order the tuna or eel at a restaurant won’t save those dying species. But imagining a new kind of “multispecies thriving” might.
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Public Thinker: Shobita Parthasarathy on Why We Need to Diversify Expertise
“I’ll say something controversial. Bioethics tends to not interrogate the details of science, let alone the more technical questions.”[none-for-homepage]
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The World Is a Factory Farm
If factory farming is the source of pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, could smaller-scale farms and communities—even in China—be the safest alternative?
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What Birders Don’t See
Rather than studying birds—and birders—in isolation, the time has come to see both as linked to the crises of racism and climate change.
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Public Thinker: Donna M. Riley on Engineering, Ethics, and Social Justice
Donna Riley is a lifelong social activist and student of liberation theology who also happens to be a … [none-for-homepage]
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Dead Cosmonauts, Space Cowboys
Heroes are in the skies. This was true for the Greeks, who named constellations for great hunters and queens; for First Nations astronomers, who told stories …
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Public Thinker: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on Dark Matter and White Empiricism
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is one of fewer than a hundred Black American women … [none-for-homepage]
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Building Utopia in Space
Utopianism is having a moment. Everything from the box office success of big-budget science fiction films like Interstellar and The Martian to the groundswell of support for the Green New Deal …
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More Nurture, Less Nature?
What if genes weren’t the perfect blueprint we’ve been led to believe they are? What if your body was constantly being shaped by its environment? What if your children’s …
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Our Mothers, Ourselves
I intended to begin with a personal admission. “I didn’t like being pregnant,” I was going to write, before describing the bodily discomforts (hypersalivation!) and psychic stresses (due date during finals!) I experienced while carrying my children. At the end of the review, I would loop back with a second admission: that reading journalist Angela…
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“What Invisibility Looks Like”
Richard S. Leghorn, the Pentagon official who coined the phrase “Information Age,” in 1960, never thought it would catch on. More than half a century later, no …
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Turning History Inside Out
It’s not hard to imagine the Hollywood pitch meeting for an adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s new novel, Washington Black. “It’s 12 Years a Slave meets Jules Verne …
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Unsex the Lab
Kit Owens, the protagonist of Megan Abbott’s Give Me Your Hand, is a postdoc in the research lab of academic rock star Dr. Lena Severin; Severin has just received a prestigious research grant when Kit’s …
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Toxic Masculine Cosmology
Cosmologists are obsessed with origin stories. We are the physicists and astronomers who take on the task of explaining why spacetime and its …
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The World in a Blot of Ink
What might this be? A moth, a bat, a winged musical conductor, a spaceship? Whatever you may see, you are also looking at Card I of the Rorschach test …
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Science and the Wolf
Once upon a time there was Science. Pure of heart, untainted by the kingdom’s societal structures or geopolitical context, Science was simply Science: an apolitical quest for objective truth and beauty. …
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Losing Their Religion
Rarely do we pity the pious Victorian patriarch. Why should we sympathize with the privileged men who stoutly believed that God had placed them at the apex of a “Great Chain of Being”? One of the many marvelous feats of Francis Hardinge’s gorgeously written novel The Lie Tree is that it secures some pity for…
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“The Passing of the Great Race” @100
2016 marks a century since the publication of The Passing of the Great Race, a book described by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould as “the most influential tract of American scientific racism.” Its author, Madison Grant, a genteel dabbler with impeccable establishment ties, was a pure and unabashed bigot, a patrician who defended social…
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Paying Attention Like Primo Levi: An Interview with Ann Goldstein
Stuart Woolf, a British historian and the first English-language translator of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, wrote that Levi’s “interest in the translation of his books was exceptional.”1 This comes as no surprise, given that translation is a fundamental aspect of Levi’s writing, and that he considered it a vital tool in…
