One day a number of years ago, I was deep into a game of draughts on holiday with my daughter, then almost four, in the small library of a beachfront town. Her eye drifted to a nearby table, where a black-and-white board bristled with far more interesting figures (many a future chess master has been innocently drawn in by “horses” and “castles”).

The long read: The troubled times we live in, and the rise of social media, have created an age of endless conflict. Rather than fearing or avoiding disagreement, we need to learn to do it well

In her new novel Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler paints a bleak portrait of a social media–addled world saturated with loneliness and alienation. It’s incredibly accurate. But there must be a way out of the nightmarish social landscape she depicts.

We live on a wild planet, a wobbly, erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void. Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earth’s surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything. Our planet is fickle.

The name of Nance Legins-Costley could resonate amid the likes of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and other abolitionist figures. But her story is hardly known. Not in Illinois, where – despite anti-slavery laws – she was born into bondage. Not in the city of Pekin, where – despite anti-Black attitudes – she became a beloved community figure. And certainly not in Peoria, where – despite her impressive life – she is buried in ignominy.

It’s past 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and Zarifa Ghafari is running late for work. Six days a week, she commutes from her home in Kabul to Maidan Shar, the embattled capital of Wardak province, where she serves as the youngest female mayor in the country. Her office is just 30 miles southwest of the Afghan capital. But getting there requires a drive down National Highway 1, a massive U.S.-built showpiece once hailed as “the most visible sign” of America’s commitment to...

Solar power is up to 50% cheaper than thought, according to new analysis from the International Energy Agency. 

A day after Joe Biden's inauguration, the headline in Axios read: “Trust in media hits a new low.” Felix Salmon wrote that “for the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media.” The Edelman survey showed overall faith in the press dropping to 46%.

Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fears—and his bighearted solutions—are more urgent than ever.

Deciphering the most beloved, most reviled children’s-book author in history.

The long read: The wolf is considered a threat to our way of farming, but our fear may be misplaced. Perhaps predators are needed to bring nature back into balance

Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning. Every few weeks or so, Grete Fält-Hansen gets a call from a stranger asking a question for the first time: What is it like to raise a child with Down syndrome?

How many people in the United States have died from COVID-19? At the end of October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s official tally passed 215,000, making COVID the nation’s third-leading cause of death. But can we trust that number? The CDC count surpassed 200,000 at the end of September, yet the New York Times reported that the “true coronavirus toll” had topped 200,000 a full month and a half earlier, on August 12. Then there are the skeptics who have claimed that the official numbers grossly exaggerate the situation.

Benjamin Franklin liked his with a zesty oyster sauce. The American revolutionary and polymath was so enthusiastic about eating turkey that he pioneered a new slaughtering technique to make the flesh “uncommonly tender”. He also nurtured a patriotic sentimentality about the bird itself. In a letter to his daughter in 1784, Franklin joked that the new country’s emblem should not be a bald eagle but a turkey, “a true original native of America…that would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards”.

No story excites children quite like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. First published in 1964 by English author, Roald Dahl, the story continues to capture imaginations. 1 The premise is simple, a usually unlucky boy is one of five winners of a worldwide competition. The prize is a once in a lifetime opportunity to tour a world famous chocolate factory. As an added bonus, the winning children are given a lifetime supply of sweet treats. There is scarcely a child who would not want that.

In early October, a dead Soviet satellite and the abandoned upper stage of a Chinese rocket narrowly avoided a collision in low Earth orbit. If the objects had crashed, the impact would have blown them to bits and created thousands of new pieces of dangerous space debris. Only a few days prior, the European Space Agency had published its annual space environment report, which highlighted abandoned rocket bodies as one of the biggest threats to spacecraft.

When I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May, he and I and nearly everyone else had reason to be worried. A few days earlier, the official tally of Covid-19 infections in the United States had climbed above one million, unemployment claims had topped 30 million and the United Nations had warned that the planet was facing “multiple famines of biblical proportions.” George Floyd was still alive, and the protests spurred by his killing had not yet swept the nation, but a different kind of protest, led by white men armed with heavy weaponry, had taken over the Michigan State Legislature building.

Sierra was one of the biggest game publishers of the 90s. Then they got an offer that was way too good to be true, but too good to decline.

Just before sunrise in Istanbul on 11 November 2019, a determined thumping on her iron front door stirred Emma Winberg from a brief sleep. Blurry-eyed, she grasped at the empty space in bed next to her, pulled on a pair of trousers, fumbled with a bedside lamp, then ran across the bedsit to the kitchen next door. “James wasn’t there,” she said. “And that’s when I just knew.”

"I want crystal clean water and air." That's what Donald Trump said in the first chaotic presidential debate with Joe Biden. But there is scant evidence of that desire in the actions of his administration, which has spent nearly four years systematically dismantling core environmental protections, some of which stretch back decades.