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.

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Memorial Day, May 25, Mahmoud “Mike” Abumayyaleh got a panicked phone call from a teenage employee at the store he owns with his three brothers. “Mike! Mike! They’re killing him,” she said. “My heart dropped. Like, it fell to the ground,” Mahmoud told me. He had no clue what she was talking about. At first, he assumed a customer was accosting a worker.

After contracting the coronavirus in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris, even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier. Several weeks after Erica Taylor recovered from her Covid-19 symptoms of nausea and cough, she became confused and forgetful, failing to even recognize her own car, the only Toyota Prius in her apartment complex’s parking lot.

What happens when there are two competing definitions of death, confounding our understanding of the end of life? On 9 December 2013, Jahi McMath, a 13-year-old African-American girl living in Oakland, California, entered the hospital for a tonsillectomy, still one of the most common surgical procedures performed on children and often recommended for sleep apnoea, a condition she had been living with.

Amazon’s first employee, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, and one of the world’s richest women is rewriting the philanthropy playbook

Researchers are exploring ways to use people’s voices to diagnose coronavirus infections, dementia, depression and much more.

The long read: How one magic word became a way of justifying Silicon Valley’s unconstrained power

When you read and listen to discussions about J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, you will often hear someone say something along the lines of this: When you’re fifteen you think Holden’s a genius; when you’re twenty-five you realize he’s just a brat. Before I’d even read the book, I remember seeing it referenced in an episode of Family Guy, where one character berates another character by saying:

“Is Donald Trump really a billionaire?” everyone seemed to be asking Sunday night, after the New York Times dropped a bombshell report about the president’s taxes, which detailed big losses in some years and limited income in others. The answer: Yes, he is indeed.