You say you want to be a crime writer? Ever thought of studying physics? I’m serious. While many automatically think of an English degree as the gateway to literary success, it’s also true that science-savvy novelists have excelled in every genre. Think of Primo Levi and E.L. Koingsburg, both chemists, Vladimir Nabokov, who was an entomologist and lepidopterist, mathematician Lewis Carroll, and contemporary authors Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist, or physicist Alan Lightman.

Glen Assoun was innocent of murder, but he was having a hard time proving it. With his long, dark hair and big, bushy beard, he paced in front of the jury in a Nova Scotia courtroom in August 1999, trying to convince them he didn’t rape the woman he was cross-examining. If he could show he was innocent of that crime, perhaps he could convince the jury he also hadn't murdered his wife.

We cannot much longer ignore the discomforting truth that the economies we’ve inherited from the twentieth century are poorly designed for the production of human beings. As digital technologies weave economic logic deeper into the temporal fabric of everyday life, we’re debasing economic society’s most complex, valuable, and neglected production: human consciousness.

A median of 45% across 34 surveyed countries say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values. However, public opinion on this question, as well as the role of God, prayer and religion varies by country, region and economic development.

Whether you are concerned about your health, the environment or animal welfare, scientific evidence is piling up that meat-free diets are best. Millions of people in wealthy nations are already cutting back on animal products. Of course livestock farmers and meat lovers are unsurprisingly fighting back and it can get confusing. Are avocados really worse than beef? What about bee-massacring almond production?

Recently, I saw a friend post an alarming pro-Police copypasta and say that “White Privilege” isn’t real. In response, I have written an essay that addresses Systemic Racism that I think everyone can benefit from. You will find the text of the copy pasta and my rebuttal including sources for my claims below. This is long but I implore you to be an active participant in the discourse.

As Germany emerged from its coronavirus lockdown in May, police commandos pulled up outside a rural property owned by a sergeant major in the special forces, the country’s most highly trained and secretive military unit. They brought a digger. The sergeant major’s nickname was Little Sheep. He was suspected of being a neo-Nazi. Buried in the garden, the police found two kilograms of PETN plastic explosives, a detonator, a fuse, an AK-47, a silencer, two knives, a crossbow and thousands of rounds of ammunition, much of it believed to have been stolen from the German military.

Phillip Lafayette Gibbs met Dale Adams when they were in high school, in Ripley, Mississippi, a town best known as the home of William Faulkner’s great-grandfather, who ran a slave plantation, fought in the Mexican-American War, raised troops that joined the Confederate Army, wrote a best-selling mystery about a murder on a steamboat, shot a man to death and got away with it...

In June 1348, people in England began reporting mysterious symptoms. They started off as mild and vague: headaches, aches, and nausea. This was followed by painful black lumps, or buboes, growing in the armpits and groin, which gave the disease its name: bubonic plague. The last stage was a high fever, and then death.

Absence of human contact is associated with declines in cognitive function. But as the COVID-19 pandemic brings concerns about the potential harms of isolation to the fore, researchers are still hunting for concrete evidence of a causal role as well as possible mechanisms.

America today faces a terrifying danger: political correctness. It is an existential threat not just to the United States, but all of human civilization. By this, obviously, I mean right-wing political correctness. Maybe you’re surprised to hear this. In the U.S. media, there’s no shortage of lamentations about political correctness and how it chills debate — but they’re almost always about the threat of left-wing PC.

The long read: The great trick of online retail has been to get us to shop more and think less about how our purchases reach our homes

An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells 'Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.' Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey.

Last August, during the second-hottest year on record, while the fires in the Amazon rainforest were raging, the ice sheet in Greenland was melting, and Greta Thunberg was being greeted by adoring crowds across the U.S., something else happened that was of great relevance to the climate movement: An attorney who has been battling Chevron for more than a decade over environmental devastation in South America was put on house arrest.

While Nike’s Vaporfly Next has survived a ban from the 2020 Olympics, any future versions of the shoe will be outlawed. And the trainers have changed running forever.

In the Midwest, Christian entrepreneurs are searching for relief from the corrosive grind of company-building—while some faith leaders preach the gospel of crushing it.

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten – it's practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they're "there to be broken".

From her reporting on the first ascent of Everest to her acclaimed career as writer and historian, Jan Morris – who transitioned from male to female in the 70s – has led an extraordinary life. Now, at 93, she is publishing what may be her last book.

This year began with huge bushfires in southeastern Australia that drove one community after another into temporary exile, killed an estimated billion animals, and turned Canberra’s air into the dirtiest on the planet. The temperatures across the continent broke records—one day, the average high was above 107 degrees, and the humidity so low that forests simply exploded into flames.

The long read: After decades among the hidden homeless, Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath a public park. But his life would get even more precarious