On irony poisoning and the importance of being earnest.

A blog series in which I reread LOTR 50 years after I first read it, age 10, over the winter of 1975-76. Pippin and Merry come as a double act (not exactly ‘dumb and dumber’, but not a million miles from that either) in the Jackson film version of LOTR, providing both light relief and…

Ava Kofman reports on Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang, the Los Angeles couple who ran Mark Surrogacy, an agency that they used to hire more than a dozen women to carry their children.

On war and what we have to choke down.

To HIV researchers, I am an ‘elite controller’ – someone whose immune system has enabled them to live for decades without symptoms or medication. I hope that one day science will understand this tiny but lucky minority

Artemis II astronauts updated the iconic 1968 image during their 2026 loop around the Moon.

Mismanagement and political campaigning have sucked the joy out of an event meant to bring people together

Like Imperial Japan before us, the United States has substituted tactical and operational planning for strategic thinking.

I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very...

Five Italian divers died in a cave at 55 m. Before anyone delivers a verdict, here are the questions Just Culture demands we ask first — and why their sequence matters.

Criticism of public schools is not entirely wrong – but by ignoring unequal conditions, it misdiagnoses the problem and misplaces responsibility.

A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.

Experts analyze why Covid severity has declined, who still benefits from booster shots, and if a once-feared virus is now more like plain old colds or flu.

William Shatner was excited to go to space last year. He didn't realize he'd be overwhelmed with sadness and go through "the strongest feelings of grief" that he'd ever experienced.

With peptides like BPC-157, we are seeing 'the wholesale substitution of consumer enthusiasm for clinical evidence.'

I work in a sector that speaks out on racism and human rights, yet on this issue I have felt the boundaries of acceptable speech narrow around me