Fruit flies helped us win six Nobel prizes in medicine. Architects have been inspired by termite hills. Ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson explains why bugs are so essential to the world we live in.
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Posted inHighlight, Quotes, Science & Nature
From the Sewer to the Syringe
Biomedical researchers find remedies for antibiotic-resistant infections in grody places.
Posted inCulture, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes, Science & Nature
Here’s What Put Thousands of Californians in the Path of a Blaze
Forest mismanagement, political corruption, and PG&E’s corporate culture created a highly combustible situation.
Posted inArts & Culture, History, Science & Nature, Story
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors
Mirrors are sparkly and shiny and hypnotic. They’ve fascinated us for thousands of years. And they might show us a lot more about our society’s misplaced priorities than we care to see.
Posted inBlog Post, Longreads News, Quote Posts
With Your Support, We Can Continue to Be a Space for First-Person Storytelling
Personal narratives are powerful. Help us support writers and artists who have these stories to tell.
Posted inStory
Longreads Best of 2020: Music Writing
Music has been a salve this year, helping us cope with the myriad challenges that 2020 brought. Here are some favorite pieces of music writing we picked in 2020.
Posted inHighlight, Science & Nature
The Terror of Being Awake
“I thought, ‘This is it, this is how I’m going to die, right here on the table, and my family will never know what my last few hours were like because no one’s even noticing what’s going on.’”
Posted inNonfiction
How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance
In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
Best of 2019
The Best of 2019 series is made up of guest-curated collections across food, sports, music, investigative reporting, science & nature, and other categories. Contributing writers and editors to these lists include Deborah Blum, Pamela Colloff, Danielle A. Jackson, Morgan Jerkins, Emily Raboteau, Sam Riches, Helen Rosner, Matthew Salesses, Mayukh Sen, Michael W. Twitty, and more.
Posted inNonfiction
The Difficult Case for Assisted Plant Migration
To protect them from climate change, concerned citizens are moving clones of California’s ancient sequoias to Oregon in a process known as assisted migration, but should they?
