When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet. He would ask for it sometimes, poring over the…
Read more DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of IncestThis article was originally published by Knowable Magazine. The stories have become horribly familiar: houses so overrun by bedbugs that the bloodsucking insects pile an inch deep on…
Read more The ‘Unthinkable’ New Reality About BedbugsSeveral years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to eat more plants. Doing so, I assumed, would be better for my health, for animals, and for the…
Read more ‘Plant-Based’ Peanut Butter … And Shampoo … And BoozeAfter decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor…
Read more Trump’s Plan to Police GenderOne night in July, a few weeks after my son was born, I lay awake, desperately scrolling through photos of injured feet. The mounting pain from an ingrown…
Read more Pregnancy Can Change Your Shoe Size ForeverThanks to Donald Trump’s presidential term, the conservative legal movement has been able to realize some of its wildest dreams: overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, ending…
Read more A MAGA JudiciaryWhen Donald Trump first took office, he put a premium on what he called “central casting” hires—people with impressive résumés who matched his image of an ideal administration…
Read more Loyalists, Lapdogs, and CroniesWhere to even start in cataloging the most ridiculous—and alarming—recent rulings to come out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit? There’s a case about…
Read more Why the Fifth Circuit Keeps Making Such Outlandish DecisionsThe last time I stepped on a plane for vacation, for fun, was more than three years ago. I haven’t been able to visit California, whose coast I…
Read more Hospitals Have Gotten Too NiceWhether it begins next week, next year, or next decade, another pandemic is on its way. Researchers can’t predict precisely when or how the outbreak might begin. Some…
Read more The Other Group of Viruses That Could Cause the Next PandemicWhatever basketball’s blue-collar bona fides, whatever its associations with the barbershop and the neighborhood blacktop, its culture has proved hostile to at least one category of everyman: the…
Read more The NBA Is Harder NowIn the early 1990s, while studying preeclampsia in Guadeloupe, Pierre-Yves Robillard hit upon a realization that seemed to shake the foundations of his field. Preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication…
Read more An Unusual Theory Suggests That Sex Helps the Body Tolerate a FetusThis article originally appeared in Undark Magazine. When Kevin E. Taylor became a pastor 22 years ago, he didn’t expect how often he’d have to help families make…
Read more Where End-of-Life Care Falls ShortThis article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up…
Read more What Happened When Oregon Decriminalized Hard DrugsFor most Americans, voting for a member of Congress is one of their simplest civic duties. Every two years, they pick the candidate they like best—usually the same…
Read more A Radical Idea for Fixing Congress“Let’s travel now to moonlit valleys blanketed with heather,” Harry Styles says to me. The pop star’s voice—just shy of songful, velvet-dry—makes it seem as if we’re at…
Read more Your Phone Is a Mindfulness TrapHarvesting wild local produce in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park may not seem like the best idea. And yet, on a foraging tour of the lively public park last month,…
Read more The Missing Piece of the Foraging RenaissanceReal-life Ron DeSantis was here, finally. In the fidgety flesh; in Iowa, South Carolina, and, in this case, New Hampshire. Not some distant Sunshine State of potential or…
Read more Ron DeSantis’s Joyless RideIn 1856, an amateur chemist named William Henry Perkin mixed a batch of chemicals that he hoped, in vain, would yield the malaria drug quinine. When Perkin’s failed…
Read more American Food Will Never Look Natural AgainKyrsten Sinema knows what everybody says about her. She pretends not to read the press coverage—“I don’t really care”—but she knows. She knows what her colleagues call her…
Read more The Kyrsten Sinema Theory of American Politics
