Around a decade ago, a patient in the Netherlands went to his doctor with a request for euthanasia. He was in his 40s, suffering from depression and psychosis, and haunted by feelings of despair, ...

The New Yorker ran a cartoon in 1989 of a guru sitting cross-legged on a large pillow while men in suits stand in line, waiting to meet him. One businessman is turned to another and appears to be ...

CROSS SECTIONS: Dissecting the contentious and the controversial — with science at the core. Recent approvals by the Food and Drug Administration have focused on medications that shrink the sticky ...

After a decade of mostly declining to finance large hydroelectric dams, the World Bank is getting back into the business in a big way. Throughout the last half of the 20th century, the bank was the ...

What’s the best way to discuss vaccines with a politically polarized public? Jeffrey Morris has been considering this question since the Covid-19 pandemic, when he created a dedicated blog and ramped ...

In March 2013, a 27-year-old man showed up at the Fifth People’s Hospital in Shanghai, China, with a high fever and cough. Within 48 hours, he was admitted to the intensive care unit with severe ...

The project was so secret, most members of Congress didn’t even know it existed. In 1942, when an elite team of physicists set out to produce an atomic bomb, military leaders took elaborate steps to ...

Writers whose subject is the natural world, and the overwhelming changes that humans have inflicted upon it, grapple regularly with a maddening dilemma: how to convey that all hope is not lost, while ...

Our relationship with death is a complex one. At an intellectual level, we understand our mortality, yet we go to great lengths to banish the notion from our minds. In most circumstances it’s a taboo ...

On a cloudy fall day in 2023, Alfred Pebria and his fellow construction workers were installing a wind turbine in Solano County, California. They were trying to hoist a nacelle — a ...

Welcome to Entanglements. In this episode, a special guests asks hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild: How did the first season go? And what’s on deck for Season 2? On most episodes of Entanglements ...

Can we predict the ebb and flow of infectious disease the way meteorologists predict the weather? The federal government has bet big on the concept with a new nationwide network called Insight Net, ...