A collection of 389 posts
Ancient DNA has given historians a new archive, and in two decades it has settled long-running arguments about who migrated, who conquered, and who replaced whom.
Despite her professed atheism, Kathryn Paige Harden insists on making quasi-religious claims about free will and moral responsibility.
Chelsea Follett's new history shows how wretched life was before the industrial revolution, but our escape from it began long before the steam engine.
The dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive.
An OpenAI agent’s breach of a Medicare portal shows that the real danger from AI is a mundane one—and the labs’ fixation on a coming machine god is making it worse.
Bernie Sanders wants to outlaw artificial superintelligence. The risks he points to are real—but the answer to a powerful new technology is regulation, not prohibition, and China has no intention of pausing.
The digital revolution is not remaking the world as the industrial one did.
The mainstreaming of therapy culture may be driving us all out of our minds.
The Trump administration’s scientific illiteracy about rates of autism is going to have catastrophic results.
Treat a warming planet as an engineering problem rather than a moral failing, and it starts to look solvable.
The knowledge and infrastructure needed to engineer a pandemic pathogen, once confined to a handful of elite military and civilian research institutions, are quietly becoming more accessible.
The evidence for innate sex differences has been accumulating for decades. Steve Stewart-Williams's new book is a welcome inventory.
How decades of invisible science produced two cancer breakthroughs.
Thirty years as a high-functioning neurodivergent project manager.
Humans have not merely been shaped by evolution—we have shaped it too, through the environments we chose to inhabit and the lives we chose to lead.