Coronavirus

In “How to Lie with Statistics,” a best-selling book from 1954, the journalist (and tobacco apologist) Darrell Huff details common techniques for manipulating people’s understanding of reality, [...]

In March, 2020, Chelsea Kay, a twentysomething music lover who lives in New York, went to see the Australian band Rüfüs Du Sol play a packed show at the Orpheum Theatre in the heart of New [...]

Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth-century philosopher, spent much of his life arguing that we can’t have it all. Read the Full Article here.

During the first year of the covid-19 pandemic, the public-health expert Ashish Jha posted hundreds of detailed Twitter threads, fielded thousands of interview requests, and was mentioned sixty [...]

At the beginning of 2022, Hong Kong stood out as a pandemic success story—proof that the so-called Zero covid approach, whatever its costs, could squash the virus’s medical toll. Less than one [...]

In September, 1904, a twenty-year-old Grenadian man named Walter Clement Noel disembarked in New York after an eight-day voyage from Barbados. At the time, few Black people were permitted to [...]

There’s an urban legend about a Texas man who takes a rifle to the side of his barn and sprays bullets across the wall, more or less at random. Then he finds the densest clusters of holes and [...]

In 1909, the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep published a book called “The Rites of Passage.” In it, he explored the rituals that cultures use to transition people from one stage of life to [...]

For much of the past year, Americans have guided their behavior using a kind of cognitive triangulation. First, we’ve judged the risks of a coronavirus infection; second, we’ve assessed our [...]

The covid-19 pandemic, like every pandemic before it, is a story of equilibriums: between viral biology and human immune response; between news of the pathogen and fear of it; between the damage [...]