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Science & Nature

The Why of the World

Allured by the promise of Big Data, science has shortchanged causal explanation in favor of data-driven prediction. But ultimately we must ask why.

Tim Maudlin

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Science & Nature

Science & Nature

Apocalypse Now

What Brazilian conservatives gain by letting the Amazon burn.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi

Science & Nature

Is Science Political?

Many take the separation between science and politics for granted, but this view of science has its own political history: it was developed, in part, as an anti-communist tool of the Cold War.

Michael D. Gordin

Reading Lists, Science & Nature

Highway to Hell

A reading list for our time of climate crisis. 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Science & Nature

It Was Not Supposed to End This Way

The Anthropocene challenges liberalism’s vision of permanent progress. So why has it become another technocratic tool of liberal bureaucracy?

Geoff Mann

Science & Nature

Is There a Human Blueprint?

Two new books from intellectual giants Robert Plomin and Nicholas Christakis revive the “nature vs. nurture” debate about what makes people different from one another.

C. Brandon Ogbunu, C. Malik Boykin

Class & Inequality, Science & Nature

Overdosing in Appalachia

Harm reduction strategies have their roots in 1980s HIV activism, but they are starting to spread in rural America in response to the opioid crisis.

Lesly-Marie Buer

Gender & Sexuality, Science & Nature

Who's Your Daddy?

The meaning of fatherhood remains elusive, even in the age of DNA-based paternity testing.

Nara Milanich

Science & Nature

The Sins of “Smart” Cities

What happens when we reframe complex social and political issues as technical puzzles? Two new books challenge modern cities' over-reliance on data and technology.

Ruth Miller

Science & Nature

Climate Gut Check

Beneath the jargon, a new UN report serves up a revolutionary response to climate change.

Troy Vettese

Politics, Science & Nature

No Collision

In the face of climate apocalypse, the rich have been devising escape plans. What happens when they opt out of democratic preparation for emergencies?

Bonnie Honig

Science & Nature

Defensible Space

“Megafires” are now a staple of life in the Pacific Northwest, but how we talk about them illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself.

Jessie Kindig

Science & Nature

Programming My Child

Through the experience of parenting his daughter, a software developer came to see Google and Facebook as the first digital children. 

David Auerbach

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