Sublime

In her jaw-dropping 2013 book Plutopia, University of Maryland historian Kate Brown compares and contrasts American plutonium production at Hanford and its Soviet twin, Ozersk. The American understanding of the risks people ran when they came into contact with radiation may have been weaker than the Soviets’. The Soviet government was at least secu

Redundancy provides insurance against loss. The American chestnut largely disappeared from the forests of the northeastern United States, but other species filled its niche. In 2004, though, when Chiron, one of only two companies providing flu vaccines in the US, announced that its plants in Liverpool were contaminated, our house of cards was at re

As people increasingly take power into their own hands, I expect inequality’s newest frontier to lie in biology.

An Institution for the Amateur Biologist (diybio.org).

These are worlds that will be revealed not by better instruments but by new models and frameworks that allow us to see the familiar world in unfamiliar ways—to transform domains described into domains rigorously quantified and observations informally sensed into those formally understood.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we still are stymied by the complexity of the biosphere, and, just as with our financial systems, our efforts to intervene have often led to confounding results.

The problem wasn’t natural gas. It was excessive regulation. Every time Clark had to give a pig an antibiotic shot, the law now required that he have a veterinarian write a prescription. That was fifty dollars per farm call, plus the cost of the medication. What really burned Clark up, however, wasn’t just the cost of the vet; it was the fact that