Longreads

A melancholy Swede … Henning Mankell’s Wallander (Krister Henriksson). Photograph: Yellow Bird/BBC One of the functions of fiction is to serve as a kind of tourism, either showing us places,…

Monday, August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima. A few seconds after 8:15 A.M., a flash of light, brighter than a thousand suns, shredded the space over the city's center. A gigantic sphere of fire, a…

Julie Delpy plays a single woman in her latest film, 2 Days In New York. Photograph: Patrick Fraser for the Guardian. Click on image for full portrait Julie Delpy

This 10,000-rpm, no-pulse artificial heart doesn't resemble an organic heart--and might be all the better for it By Dan Baum Posted 02.29.2012 at 11:13 am Artificial Heart Jack Thompson Meeko the…

When he arrived at the warehouse, the first thing he noticed (after “the beautiful, sweet, mellow smell of aging Canadian whiskey,” he says) was the black stuff. It was everywhere—on the walls of buildings, on chain-link fences, on metal street signs, as if a battalion of Dickensian chimney sweeps had careened through town. “In the back of the property, there was an old stainless steel fermenter tank,” Scott says. “It was lying on its side, and it had this fungus growing all over it. Stainless steel!” The whole point of stainless steel is that things don’t grow on it.

The concept of the "killer ape" offers a pessimistic reflection of humanity and its genesis, but the latest research shows that a primate species whose success is based on mutual aid and pleasure, not violence, is a better model for human origins.