When I edited a city magazine, a smartass friend suggested a department called Why So Ugly? There would be no shortage of examples from the built environment. Big boxes, glass towers, strip malls—it is as though a child drew these shapes, then crafted them from whatever cheap stuff was close at hand and […]
The invention and evolution of insurance make for fascinating stories. According to historians, the first insured were not people but merchant shipments out of, and into, ancient India, Greece, or Babylon. Should your precious cargo disappear at sea due to bad weather, or on land thanks to banditry, and be covered in […]
The nightly news used to be a ritual, and my grandmother used to shush us—not for the Vietnam body count or the latest on Watergate, but for the weather. She drew her excuses from it. Housework could not possibly be done in July or August; nor could the oven be lit. Running errands […]
Reading the news these days is hard. I open last week’s issue of The Week and learn that “forever chemicals”—human-made PFAS that keep our eggs from sticking to the pan, our hiking clothes from getting soggy, and our floss gliding between our teeth—will cost billions to remove from the planet. PFAS can take […]
The waiter has a toilet plunger over his shoulder. “He locked his keys in his car,” the bartender explains. “He’s trying to get the window down.” I feel ancient: my first thought was a coat hanger. “In my day,” I say—oh my God did I actually just start a sentence that way? […]
“Automatic flushing toilets, which use sensors to detect when a person has finished using the toilet and flush automatically, are designed to improve hygiene and convenience by eliminating the need for manual flushing.” That, at least, was the plan. But if you walk into a public restroom, fifty-fifty odds say you will […]
Washington University just issued some sensible guidance to researchers excited about the latest AI capabilities: check accuracy, be transparent, be vigilant. A friend who works in the public sector tells me he has outsourced all the boring parts of his job to chatbots. I have begun to ask them frivolous questions: “If I […]
Though I often prefer other species, humans do have an extraordinary ability to use language, tell stories, make art, share symbols, show altruism, and improve our own well-being. Why? A new study is the first to identify 267 genes that distinguish modern humans from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. Nearly all those 267 genes helped […]
Antibiotics have received a great deal of media attention in the wake of the recent discovery of teixobactin, a new soil bacterium with strong antibiotic properties. Northeasten University professor Kim Lewis and a team of scientists found teixobactin in soil samples from a grass field in Maine through the use of an iChip, a board with holes […]
