New books about the opioid crisis — “Dopesick,” “Fight for Space” and “American Fix” — have different ideas about who’s to blame and what to do next. Our critic says regulating supply can have deadly consequences, and we need to address users’ pain.
Search results
Posted inEditor's Pick
Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food
To early Chinese Communists, if you couldn’t stand spicy food, you weren’t equipped to fight for the revolution. Science suggests this association between strength, risk and Maoists might have to do with the chemical interactions between the chili pepper, culture and certain personality types.
Posted inHighlight, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes, Science & Nature
Dog Cloning: Controversial and Downright Creepy
A clone is not a clone, it’s a twin born at a different time — one that is only ever about 85 percent the same as the original.
Posted inBooks, History, Science & Nature, Story, Unapologetic Women
A British Seaweed Scientist Is Revered in Japan as ‘The Mother of the Sea’
Kathleen Drew-Baker died never having set foot in Japan, and never knowing what an impact her research would make. Plus, how to build a lazy bed, how to cook Irish blancmange, and other surprising seaweed stories.
Posted inCurrent Events, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes, Science & Nature
The Toxic Legacy of Building 606
The San Francisco police officers stationed on the Hunters Point Superfund site worked atop the literal and figurative fallout of the US Military’s WWII-era atomic testing.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Looking for Life on a Flat Earth
Alan Burdick spent two days at a North Carolina convention for Flat-Earthers. In a post-truth era, should more people shed their spherical beliefs and admit science may not be science at all?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Science & Nature
The Death and Birth of the Los Angeles River
The authors describe the river as a “postindustrial terra incognita,” a place “of discarded things and marginalized people”. Can the city change that?
Posted inQuotes, Science & Nature
Who Needs Jurassic Park When We Have Liaoning, China
Liaoning’s wealth of fossils is helping paleontologists better understand dinosaurs’ relationship to birds — and making China a paleontology hot spot, for better or worse.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
‘They’ve Forked Baby Hitler’
High-stakes time travel adventure from sci-fi writer Jo Lindsay Walton.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story
How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King
The encyclopedists’ plan to catalog knowledge seemed harmless enough. But what they intended was far more subversive: to restructure knowledge itself.
