This story originally appeared in The Guardian as an exclusive and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called […]

We have a choice. We could leave our goals and values fuzzy. We can value things like wisdom, communication, friendship, or community. These are recognizable and very human values. But without further sharpening, we will probably disagree viciously about how to apply them.  Or we can make our values mechanical. The more explicit and mechanical […]

If 2025 proved one thing, it’s that Americans’ interest in maximal fitness is higher than ever.  Participation in running races broke records. The New York City Marathon in November had almost 60,000 finishers, breaking the previous year’s record by several thousand, and ultrarunning events, which involve running longer-than-marathon distances, recorded historic participation levels. Meanwhile, extreme […]

Judges rarely complain openly about the Supreme Court, for the same reason that most people do not publicly chastise their bosses. Attacking your boss is a good way to ensure that your own work will be discounted — or worse. So it’s remarkable just how many judges have published opinions criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision […]

On Sunday night, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell gave a surprise video statement declaring he was under threat of criminal indictments, having been served with grand jury subpoenas from the Department of Justice. On paper, the matter was over cost overruns for renovations to historic Federal Reserve buildings and Powell’s related testimony to Congress. But […]