Archivo: The New Yorker
Pandemics and the Shape of Human History
Outbreaks have sparked riots and propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions and redrawn maps.
The Neurons That Tell Time
The discovery of brain structures that apparently mark time has raised a larger question: What is time, anyway?
The despair of learning that experience no longer matters
Two Princeton economists suggest that rising white-working-class mortality might be related to another phenomenon: people are aging but aren’t getting what they think they’ve earned.
The Last of the Channel Island Turkeys
We often think of conservation in terms of wildlife sanctuaries and breeding programs, but its Janus face is eradication. The survival of one population of animals, like the fox, sometimes necessitates the destruction of another, like the turkey. This is especially the case on islands, which are arks for vulnerable flora and fauna.
The Really Big One
The next full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the American continent.
Listening to the Brain Below
Ever since the Columbia University anatomy professor Michael Gershon launched the field of neurogastroenterology, in 1999, by pointing out that the human gastrointestinal tract is home to some hundred million neurons, scientists have been amassing evidence of the so-called gut-brain connection, the hardwired link between emotion and digestion.