The best American science and nature writing

2000-Foreword

Introduction : The vine-tree / by David Quammen

Men, women, sex, and Darwin / Natalie Angier

Back to the land / Wendell Berry

Africa's wild dogs / Richard Conniff

http://www.wheniÌøseÌønougheÌønough?.com / Paul de Palma

Something happened / Helen Epstein

Under water / Anne Fadiman

The cancer-cluster myth / Atul Gawande

Clock of ages / Brian Hayes

That sense of falling / Edward Hoagland

A new germ theory / Judith Hopper

Heavy grace / Wendy Johnson

The wisdom of toads / Ken Lamberton

The island at the end of the earth / Peter Matthiessen

Lulu, Queen of the Camels / Cullen Murphy

The demon in the freezer / Richard Preston

Brilliant light / Oliver Sacks

This is not the place / Hampton Sides

Gorilla warfare / Craig B. Stanford

String theorists find a Rosetta Stone / Gary Taubes

Contributors' notes

Other notable science and nature writing of 1999.

2001-Iterations of immortality / David Berlinski

To save a watering hole / Mark Cherrington

New life in a death trap / Edwin Dobb

Abortion and brain waves / Gregg Easterbrook

Baby steps / Malcolm Gladwell

In the forests of Gombe / Jane Goodall

The doubting disease / Jerome Groopman

The recycled generation

Stephen S. Hall

Endurance predator / Bernd Heinrich

Harpy eagles / Edward Hoagland

Why the future doesn't need us / Bill Joy

A killing at dawn / Ted Kerasote

Seeing scarlet / Barbara Kingsolver and Steven Hopp

The best clock in the world / Verlyn Klinkenborg

The wild world's Scotland Yard / Jon R. Luoma

Breeding discontent / Cynthia Mills

Ice station Vostok / Oliver Morton

Being prey / Val Plumwood

Troubled waters / Sandra Postel

The genome warrior / Richard Preston

Megatransect / David Quammen

Inside the volcano / Donovan Webster.

2002-Violent pride / Roy F. Baumeister

Braised shank of free-range possum? / Burkhard Bilger

Mind over matter / K.C. Cole

In the realm of virtual reality / Richard Conniff and Harry Marshall

Saving us from Darwin / Frederick C. Crews

Welcome to cancerland / Barbara Ehrenreich

The most important fish in the sea / H. Bruce Franklin

Examined life / Malcolm Gladwell

As good as dead / Gary Greenberg

Is that a mountain lion in your backyard? / Gordon Grice

The dirt in the new machine / Blaine Harden

Life's rocky start / Robert M. Hazen

Mothers and others / Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Sound and fury / Garret Keizer

The pursuit of innocence in the golden state / Verlyn Klinkenborg

Ripe for controversy / Robert Kunzig

Wall Street losses, Wall Street gains / Anne Matthews

Dumb, dumb duh dumb / Steve Mirsky

"I have seen cancers disappear" / Judith Newman

How Islam won, and lost, the lead in science / Dennis Overbye

A little reminder of reality's scale / Chet Raymo

Why McDonald's fries taste so good / Eric Schlosser

Shock and disbelief / Daniel Smith

The sting of the assassin / Peter Stark

The know-it-all machine / Clive Thompson

One acre / Joy Williams

Very dark energy / Karen Wright.

2003-Weighing the Grandma factor / Natalie Angier

At home in the heavens / Tim Appenzeller

Four ears to the ground / Alan Burdick

A skeptical look at September 11th / Clark R. Chapman and Alan W. Harris

DNA as destiny / David Ewing Duncan

Astronomy's new stars / Timothy Ferris

Terminal ice / Ian Frazier

Finding a wild, fearsome world beneath every fallen leaf / James Gorman

My mother, the scientist / Charles Hirshberg

Embryo police / Brendan I. Koerner

Ice memory / Elizabeth Kolbert

Treasure under Saddam's feet / Andrew Lawler

False testament / Daniel Lazare

Memory faults and fixes / Elizabeth F. Loftus

Homeland insecurity / Charles C. Mann

It's easy being green / Bill McKibben

The royal we / Steve Olson

A new view of our universe / Dennis Overbye

The blank slate / Steven Pinker

Anybody out there? / Oliver Sacks

The fully immersive mind of Oliver Sacks / Steve Silberman

Fat heads sink ships / Adam Summers

What if it's all been a big fat lie? / Gary Taubes

Sounding the alarm / Bruce Watson

The very best telescope / William Speed Weed

Raising the dead / Scott Weidensaul

The truth about missile defense / Steven Weinberg

Maine's war on coyotes / Ted Williams

The bottleneck / Edward O. Wilson.

2004-Genesis of suicide terrorism / Scott Atran

The battle for your brain / Ronald Bailey

Fearing the worst should anyone produce a cloned baby / Philip M. Boffey

The bittersweet science / Austin Bunn

The new celebrity / Jennet Conant

The mythical threat of genetic determinism / Daniel C. Dennett

We're all gonna die! / Gregg Easterbrook

Far-out television / Garrett G. Fagan

A war on obesity, not the obese / Jeffrey M. Friedman

Desperate measures / Atul Gawande

The stuff of genes / Horace Freeland Judson

The bloody crossroads of grammar and politics / Geoffrey Nunberg

Ask the bird folks / Mike O'Connor

Where have all the Lisas gone? / Peggy Orenstein

The design of your life / Virginia Postrel

Caring for your introvert / Jonathan Rauch

All the old sciences have starring roles / Chet Raymo

Sex week at Yale / Ron Rosenbaum

The cousin marriage conundrum / Steve Sailer

Bugs in the brain / Robert Sapolsky

Through the eye of an octopus / Eric Scigliano

Captivated / Meredith F. Small

Parallel universes / Max Tegmark

In click languages, an echo of the tongues of the ancients / Nicholas Wade

A prolific Genghis Khan, it seems, helped people the world / Nicholas Wade.

2005-My God problem - and theirs / Natalie Angier

Hollywood science / Connie Bruck

Out, damned blot! / Frederick Crews

Twilight at Easter / Jared Diamond

My little brother on drugs / Jenny Everett

Stumbling into space / Timothy Ferris

Getting over it / Malcolm Gladwell

Personality plus / Malcolm Gladwell

The grief industry / Jerome Groopman

Keeping the faith in my doubt / John Horgan

The homeless hacker v. The New York Times / Jennifer Kahn

20,000 microbes under the sea / Robert Kunzig

A two-planet species? William Langewiesche

Crossing the red line / Bill McKibben

Please stand by while the age of miracles is briefly suspended / James McManus

Getting in nature's way / Sherwin B. Nuland

The man or the moment? / Sherwin B. Nuland

To hell and back / Jeffrey M. O'Brien

The X prize / Ian Parker

In the river of consciousness / Oliver Sacks

Miracle in a bottle / Michael Specter

The curious history of the first pocket calculator / Cliff Stoll

Dining with robots / Ellen Ullman

106 science claims and a truckful of baloney / William Speed Weed

Whose life would you save? / Carl Zimmer.

2006-Almost before we spoke, we swore / Natalie Angier

Dr ecstasy / Drake Bennett

His brain, her brain / Larry Cahill

My bionic quest for bolero / Michael Chorost

Show me the science / Daniel C. Dennett

How animals do business / Frans B. M. De Waal

Buried answers / David Dobbs

Conservative refugees / Mark Dowie

The blogs of war / John Hockenberry

The forgotten era of brain chips / John Horgan

The mysteries of mass / Gordon Kane

Future shocks / Kevin Krajick

The mummy doctor / Kevin Krajick

X-ray vision / Robert Kunzig

The illusion of gravity / Juan Maldacena

The coming death shortage / Charles C. Mann

The Dover monkey trial / Chris Mooney

Remembrance of things future / Dennis Overbye

Out of time / Paul Raffaele

Torrential Reign / Daniel Roth

Are antibiotics killing us? / Jessica Snyder Sachs

Remembering Francis Crick / Oliver Sacks

Buried suns / David Samuels

Lights, camera, Armageddon / Josh Schollmeyer

Taming lupus / Moncef Zouali.

2007-Introduction / by Gina Kolata

The theory of everything / Tyler Cabot

Manifold destiny / Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber

Looking for the lie / Robin Marantz Henig

Face blind / Joshua Davis

Stereo Sue / Oliver Sacks

Probling a mind for cure / Stacey Burling

A depression switch? / David Dobbs

With lasers and daring, doctors race to save a young man's brain / Denise Grady

Being there / Jerome Groopman

God or gorilla / Matthew Chapman

The score / Atul Gawande

Truth and consequences / Jennifer Couzin

The man on the table was 97, but he devised the surgery / Lawrence K. Altman

Butterfly lessons / Elizabeth Kolbert

In ancient fossils, seeds of a new debate on warmilng / William J. Broad

John Koza has built an invention machine / Jonathon Keats

Mind games / John Cassidy

Schweitzer's dangerous discovery / Barry Yeoman

Cooking for eggheads / Patricia Gadsby

Hollywood's science guru / Gregory Mone.

2008-Zonkeys are pretty much my favorite animal / Jon Cohen

The interpreter / John Colapinto

The universe's invisible hand / Christopher J. Conselice

Untangling the mystery of the Inca / Gareth Cook

Restoring America's big, wild animals / C. Josh Donlan

Our biotech future / Freeman Dyson

The coming robot army / Steve Featherstone

Malaria: stopping a global killer / Michael Finkel

The first assassination of the twenty-first century / James Geary

Our silver-coated future / Robin Marantz Henig

Children are diamonds / Edward Hoagland

The selfless gene / Olivia Judson

The autumn of the multitaskers / Walter Kirn

First churches of the Jesus cult / Andrew Lawler

A curious attractions / Jon Mooallem

Swingers / Ian Parker

Science and Islam in conflict / Todd Pitock

Deadly contact / David Quammen

How to trick an online scammer into carving a computer out of wood / Ron Rosenbaum

A bolt from the blue / Oliver Sacks

Darwin's surprise / Michael Specter

The CSI effect / Jeffrey Toobin

Numbers can lie / Andreas von Bubnoff

A mighty wind / Florence Williams.

2009-Foreword

Introduction / by Elizabeth Kolbert

Faustian economics / Wendell Berry

The ethics of climate change / John Broome

Is Google making us stupid? / Nicholas Carr

High-tech trash / Chris Carroll

Intel inside / Andrew Curry

Blown apart / Keay Davidson

Did life begin in ice? / Douglas Fox

The day before Genesis / Adam Frank

The itch / Atul Gawande

The mushroom cloud's silver lining / David Grimm

Last of the Neanderthals / Stephen S. Hall

Virtual Iraq / Sue Halpern

Chain reaction / Walter Issacson

Wasteland / Frederick Kaufman

Minds of their own / Virginia Morell

Back to the future / J. Madeleine Nash

To take wilderness in hand / Michelle Nijhuis

How we evolve / Benjamin Phelan

Pop psychology / Virginia Postrel

Contagious cancer / David Quammen

The reality tests / Joshua Roebke

Darwin and the meaning of flowers / Oliver Sacks

Animalcules and other little subjects / Mark A. Smith

Big foot / Michael Specter

Red is the new green / Patrick Symmes

Stayin' alive / Gary Wolf.

2010-The believer / Andrew Corsello

One giant leap to nowhere / Tom Wolfe

The missions of astronomy / Steven Weinberg

Cosmic vision / Timothy Ferris

Seeking new earths / Timothy Ferris

Don't! / Jonah Lehrer

Out of the past / Kathleen McGowan

Brain games / John Colapinto

The alpha accipiter / Gustave Axelson

Flight of the Kuaka / Don Stap

Modern Darwins / Matt Ridley

The superior civilization / Tim Flannery

Still blue / Kenneth Brower

The Lazarus effect / Jane Goodall

Darwin's first clues / David Quammen

All you can eat / Jim Carrier

A formula for disaster / Felix Salmon

Not so silent spring / Dawn Stover

The Catastrophist / Elizabeth Kolbert

The sixth extinction Elizabeth Kolbert

Scraping bottom / Robert Kunzig

A life of its own / Michael Specter

Purpose-driven life / Brian Boyd

The monkey and the fish / Philip Gourevitch

Graze anatomy / Richard Manning

Hearth surgery / Burkhard Bilger

Green Giant / Evan Osnos

India, enlightened / George Black.

2011-The organ dealer / Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Nature's spoils / Burkhard Bilger

The chemist's war / Deborah Blum

Fertility rites / Jon Cohen

The brain that changed everything / Luke Dittrich

Emptying the skies / Jonathan Franzen

Fish out of water / Ian Frazier

Lies, damned lies, and medical science / David H. Freedman

Letting go / Atul Gawande

The treatment / Malcolm Gladwell

Cosmic blueprint of life / Andrew Grant

The (elusive) theory of everything / Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

Spectral light / Amy Irvine

The spill seekers / Rowan Jacobsen

New dog in town / Christopher Ketcham

Taking a fall / Dan Koeppel

The first church of robotics / Jaron Lanier

The love that dare not squawk its name / Jon Mooallem

Could time end? / George Musser

Sign here if you exist / Jill Sisson Quinn

Face-blind / Oliver Sacks

Waste MGMT / Evan I. Schwartz

The whole fracking enchilada / Sandra Steingraber

The new king of the sea / Abigail Tucker

The killer in the pool / Tim Zimmermann.

2012-pt. 1. Bacteria/microorganisms: The teeming metropolis of you / Brendan Buhler. Our body the ecosystem / Virginia Hughes. The peanut puzzle / Jerome Groopman

pt. 2. Animals: The long, curious, extravagant evolution of feathers / Carl Zimmer. How to hatch a dinosaur / Thomas Hayden. Faster, higher, squeakier / Michael Behar. The wipeout gene / Bijal P. Trivedi. Deep intellect / Sy Montgomery. Ants & the art of war / Mark W. Moffett

pt. 3. Humans (the good): The scent of your thoughts / Deborah Blum. Sleeping with the enemy / Elizabeth Kolbert. The touchy-feely (but totally scientific!) methods of Wallace J. Nichols / Michael Roberts

pt. 4. Humans (the bad): The feedback loop / Thomas Goetz. What you don't know can kill you / Jason Daley. Beautiful brains / David Dobbs. The brain on trial / David Eagleman

pt. 5. Society and environment: Crush point / John Seabrook. Ill wind / David Kirby. The city solution / Robert Kunzig

pt. 6. Technology: Test-tube burgers / Michael Specter. Mad science / Mark McClusky. Dream machine / Rivka Galchen. The crypto-currency / Joshua Davis

Mind vs. machine / Brian Christian.

2013-Foreword / Tom Fogler

Introduction: On tenderness / Siddhartha Mukherjee

False idyll from Orion / J.B. MacKinnon

Last distinction from Harper's magazine / Benjamin Hale

Talk to me from Outside / Tim Zimmerman

Beyond the quantum horizon from Scientific American / David Deutsch and Artur Ekert

Is space digital? from Scientific American / Michael Moyer

Sweet spot in time from Virginia quarterly review / Sylvia A. Earle

Machines of the infinite from Scientific American / John Pavlus

Which species will live? from Scientific American / Michelle Nijhuis

Larch g from Orion / Rick Bass

Shattered genius from Playboy / Brett Forrest

T-cell army from New Yorker / Jerome Groopman

Artificial leaf from New Yorker / David Owen

Deadliest virus from New Yorker / Michael Specter

Our place in the universe from Harper's magazine / Alan Lightman

Out of the wild from Popular science / David Quammen

Altered states from New Yorker / Oliver Sachs

Recall of the wild from New Yorker / Elizabeth Kolbert

Polar express from New Yorker / Keith Gessen

Crisis of big science from New York review of books / Steven Weinberg

Autism inc. from New York times magazine / Gareth Cook

Life of pi and other infinities from New York times / Natalie Angier

Super humanity from Scientific American/ Robert M. Sapolsky

Patient scientist from Scientific American / Katherine Harmon

Can a jellyfish unlock the secret of immortality? from New York times magazine / Nathaniel Rich

Is Facebook making us lonely? from Atlantic / Stephen Marche

Measured man from Atlantic / Mark Bowden

Wisdom of psychpaths from Scientific American / Kevin Dutton

Contributors' notes

Other notable science and nature writing of 2012.

2014-Mixed up / Katherine Bagley

The great forgetting / Nicholas Carr

The social life of genes / David Dobbs

What our telescopes couldn't see / Pippa Goldschmidt

A race to save the orange by altering its DNA / Amy Harmon

A life-or-death situation / Robin Marantz Henig

23 and you / Ferris Jabr

O-rings / Sarah Stewart Johnson

When animals mourn / Barbara J. King

Where it begins / Barbara Kingsolver

Danger! This mission to Mars could bore you to death! / Maggie Koerth-Baker

The lost world / Elizabeth Kolbert

Awakening / Joshua Lang

Imagining the post-antibiotics future / Maryn McKenna

The return of measles / Seth Mnookin

Ants go marching / Justin Nobel

TV as birth control / Fred Pearce

The madness of the planets / Corey S. Powell

Learning how to die in the Anthropocene / Roy Scranton

Under water / Kate Sheppard

Twelve ways of viewing Alaska's wild, white sheep / Bill Sherwonit

The separating sickness / Rebecca Solnit

Trapline / David Treuer

The rebirth of Gorongosa / E.O. Wilson

Bringing them back to life / Carl Zimmer.

2015-Foreword / by Tim Folger

Introduction / by Rebecca Skloot

Waiting for light / Jake Abrahamson

In deep / Burkhard Bilger

A question of corvids / Sheila Webster Boneham

The health effects of a world without darkness / Rebecca Boyle

Spotted hyena / Alison Hawthorne Deming

Life, death, and grim routine fill the day at a Liberian ebola clinic / Sheri Fink

No risky chances / Atul Gawande

Linux for lettuce / Lisa M. Hamilton

Down by the river / Rowan Jacobsen

The empathy exams : a medical actor writes her own script / Leslie Jamison

The deepest dig / Brooke Jarvis

Phineas Gage, neuroscience's most famous patient / Sam Kean

At risk / Jourdan Imani Keith

Desegregating wilderness / Jourdan Imani Keith

Into the maelstrom / Eli Kintisch

The big kill / Elizabeth Kolbert

Digging through the world's oldest graveyard / Amy Maxmen

One of a kind / Seth Mnookin

A pioneer as elusive as his particle / Dennis Overbye

Blood in the sand / Matthew Power

Chasing Bayla / Sarah Schweitzer

Partial recall / Michael Specter

The city and the sea / Meera Subramanian

Curious / Kim Todd

The aftershocks / David Wolman

From billions to none / Barry Yeoman.

2016-Back to the land / Chelsea Biondolillo

Tracking ivory / Bryan Christy

They helped erase ebola in Liberia. Now Liberia is erasing them / Helene Cooper

Rotten ice / Gretel Ehrlich

Why are sports bras so terrible? / Rose Eveleth

The man who tried to redeem the world with logic / Amanda Gefter

A very naughty little girl / Rose George

The false gospel of Alcoholics Anonymous / Gabrielle Glaser

Thirty million gallons under the sea / Antonia Juhasz

The bed-rest hoax / Alexandra Kleeman

The siege of Miami / Elizabeth Kolbert

What's left behind / Kea Krause

The will to change / Robert Kunzig

The modern moose / Amy Leach

The lost girls / Apoorva Mandavilli

Solar, eclipsed / Charles c. Mann

Return of the wild / Emma Marris

Perfect nails, poisoned workers / Sarah Maslin Nir

Attack of the killer beetles / Maddie Oatman

The whole universe catalog / Stephen Ornes

Bugged / Rinku Patel

My periodic table / Oliver Sacks

The really big one / Kathryn Schulz

Begin cutting / Gaurav Raj Telhan

Telescope wars / Katie Worth.

2017-The art of saving relics / Sarah Everts

Altered tastes / Maria Konnikova

The secrets of the wave pilots / Kim Tingley

The billion-year wave / Nicola Twilley

The case for leaving city rats alone / Becca Cudmore

The battle for Virunga / Robert Draper

The new harpoon / Tom Kizzia

A song of ice / Elizabeth Kolbert

Something uneasy in the Los Angeles air / Adrian Glick Kudler

Dark science / Omar Mouallem

The parks of tomorrow / Michelle Nijhuis

How factory farms play chicken with antibiotics / Tom Philpott

The invisible catastrophe / Nathaniel Rich

The devil is in the details / Christopher Solomon

The physics pioneer who walked away from it all / Sally Davies

The DIY scientist, the Olympian, and the mutated gene / David Epstein

Inside the breakthrough starshot mission to Alpha Centauri / Ann Finkbeiner

He fell in love with his good student

Then fired her for it / Azeen Ghorayshi

The woman who might find us another Earth / Chris Jones

Out here, no one can hear you scream / Katrhryn Joyce

The amateur cloud society that (sort of) rattled the scientific community / Jon Mooallem

The man who gave himself away / Michael Regnier

Unfriendly climate / Sonia Smith

It's time these ancient women scientists get their due / Emily Temple-Wood.

2018-Foreword

Introduction

Part I: Transformative science: "We are not just resistors, we are transformers." Pleistocene park / Ross Anderson ; It'll take an army to kill the Emperor / Jacqueline Detwiler

Part II: Rethining established science: "What do we want? Evidence-based science. When do we want it? After peer review." The squeeze : Silicon Valley reinvents the breast pump / Sophie Brickman ; The case against civilization / John Lanchester ; Cancer's invasion equation / Siddhartha Mukherjee ; The island wolves / Kim Todd

Part III: Environmental science: "At the start of every disaster movie is a scientist being ignored." Firestorm / Douglas Fox ; Tragedy of the common / J.B. MacKinnon ; The irreversible momentum of clean energy / Barack Obama ; Wealthier people produce more carbon pollution

even the "green" ones / David Roberts

Part IV: Profiles: "So bad, even the introverts are here." Dr. Space Junk unearths the cultural landscape of the cosmos / Ceridwen Dovey ; Of mothers and monkeys / Caitlin Kuehn ; David Haskell speaks for the trees / Paul Kvinta ; A science of the soul / Joshua Rothman ; The detective of Northern oddities / Christopher Solomon

Part V. Political science: "I'm not a mad scientist

I'm absolutely furious." Female scientists report a horrifying culture of sexual assault / Kayla Webley Adler ; A behind-the-scenes look at Scott Pruitt's dysfunctional EPA / Rachel Leven

Part VI: Space science: "It's not rocket science ... (actually, some of it is)." Two stars slammed into each other and solved half of astronomy's problems. What comes next? / Rebecca Boyle ; The starship or the canoe / Kenneth Brower ; Astonish me : anticipating an eclipse in the age of information / Susannah Felts ; Greetings, E.T. (Please don't murder us.) / Steven Johnson ; Arabella (Araneus diadematus / Elena Passarello ; Tiny jumping spiders can see the moon / Ed Yong

Part VII: Neuroscience and psychology: "Stop inhibiting my action potential" When your child is a psychopath / Barbara Bradley Hagerty ; Exposure therapy and the fine art of scaring the shit our of yourself on purpose / Eva Holland ; Fantastic beasts and how to rank them / Kathryn Schulz

Contributors' notes

Other notable science and nature writing of 2017.

2019-Foreword

Introduction

A compassionate substance (from Lapham's Quarterly) / Philip Ball

The search for alien life begins in earth's oldest desert (from The Atlantic) / Rebecca Boyle

Glimpses of a mass extinction in modern-day western New York (from The New Yorker) / Peter Brannen

This sand is your sand (from Outside) / Chris Colin

The brain, reimagined (from Scientific American) / Dougals Fox

Little golden flower-room: on wild places and intimacy (from The Millions) / Conor Gearin

The endling: watching a species vanish in real time (from Pacific Standard) / Ben Goldfarb

What if the placebo effect is not a trick? (from The New York Times Magazine) / Gary Greenberg

The great rhino U-turn (from Mongabay) / Jeremy Hance

The fading star: a constellation (from Lapham's Quarterly) / Holly Haworth

Saving baby boy green (from Wired) / Eva Holland

The fire at Eagle Creek (from Topic) / Apricot Irving

Deleting a species (from Pacific Standard) / Rowan Jacobsen

The insect apocalypse is here (from The New York Times Magazine) / Brooke Jarvis

No heart, no moon (from The Southern Review) / Matt Jones

The scientific detectives probing the secrets of ancient oracles (from Atlas Obscura) / Kevin Krajick

Your really don't want to know what it's like to be a right whale these days (from Atlantic) / J.B. MacKinnon

How extreme weather is shrinking the planet (from The New Yorker) / Bill McKibben

The story of a face (from The New Yorker) / Rebecca Mead

How to not die in America (from Splinter) / Molly Osberg

Why paper jams persist (from The New Yorker) / Joshua Rothman

The professor of horrible deeds (from The Chronicle of Higher Education) / Jordan Michael Smith

Welcome to the center of the universe (from Longreads) / Shannon Stirone

The hidden toll: why are black mothers and babies in the United States dying at more than double the rate of white mothers and babies? The answer has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America (from The New York Times Magazine) / Linda Vilarosa

When the next plague hits (from The Atlantic) / Ed Yong

Paper trails: living and dying with fragmented medical records (from Undark) / Ilana Yurkiewicz.

2020-A journey into the animal mind (from The Atlantic) / Ross Andersen

Sleep no more (from Wired) / Kelly Clancy

What remains (from The California Sunday magazine) / Daniel Duane

With a simple twist, a "magic" material is now the big thing in physics (from Quanta Magazine) / David H. Freedman

The eighth continent (from The New Yorker) / Rivka Galchen

The tumultuous history of a mysterious brain signal that questioned free will (from The Atlantic) / Bahar Gholipour

Younger longer (from The New Yorker) / Adam Gopnik

Right under our noses (from Wired) / Sara Harrison

I, language robot (from Los Angeles Review of Books) / Patrick House

Beauty of the beasts (from The New York Times Magazine) / Ferris Jabr

Ghosts of the future (from The Washington Post ) / Sarah Kaplan

Intelligent ways to search for extraterrestrials (from The New Yorker) / Adam Mann

Total eclipse (from Aeon) / Deanna Csomo McCool

"We have fire everywhere" (from The New York Times Magazine) / Jon Mooallem

Vaccines reimagined (from Scientific American) / Melinda Wenner Moyer

New blood (from The New Yorker) / Siddhartha Mukherjee

The day the dinosaurs died (from The New Yorker) / Douglas Preston

The final five percent (from Longreads) / Tim Requarth

The next word (from The New Yorker) / John Seabrook

Troubled treasure (from Science Magazine) / Joshua Sokol

The hidden heroines of chaos (from Quanta Magazine) / Joshua Sokol

The hunt for planet nine (from Longreads) / Shannon Stirone

A different kind of theory of everything (from The New Yorker) / Natalie Wolchover

The brain that remade itself (from OneZero) / Andrew Zaleski.

2021-This overlooked variable is the key to the pandemic / Zeynep Tufekci

They say Coronavirus isn't airborne

but it's definitely bourne by air / Roxanne Khamsi

The difference between feeling safe and being safe / Amanda Mull

I'm an ER doctor in New York. None of us will ever be the same / Helen Ouyang

The Covid drug wars that pitted doctor vs. doctor / Susan Dominus

The soft butch that couldn't (or: I got Covid-19 in March and never got better) / Heather Hogan

What happened in Room 10? / Katie Engelhart

It's not too late to save Black lives / Julia Craven

The scramble to pluck 24 billion cherries in eight weeks / Brooke Jarvis

Rabbit fever / Susan Orlean

An atlas of the cosmos / Shannon Stirone

Periwinkle, the color of poison, Modernism, and dusk / Katy Kelleher

The unsung heroine of lichenology / Sabrina Imbler

Happiness won't save you / Jennifer Senior

Out there, nobody can hear you scream / Latria Graham

The empty space where normal once lived / Bathsheba Demuth

This is how we live now / Emily Raboteau

What the Coronavirus means for climate change / Meehan Crist

River of time / Namwali Serpell

Fish out of water / Maya L. Kapoor

Cancel earthworms / Julia Rosen

Long may they reign / Nora Caplan-Bricker

A toxic secret lurks in deep sea / Rosanna Xia

SpaceX is taking over a tiny Texas neighborhood / Marina Koren

The friendship and love hospital / Jiayang Fan

The last children of Down Syndrome / Sarah Zhang.

2022-Nature is magnificent. The body's most embarrassing organ is an evolutionary marvel / Katherine J. Wu ; What slime knows / Lacy M. Johnson ; Too big for the universe / Arianna S. Long ; Heads up! The cardiovascular secrets of giraffes / Bob Holmes ; How far does wildlife roam? Ask the "internet of animals" / Sonia Shah

Nature is roiled. Our summer from hell / Jeff Goodell ; How rising groundwater caused by climate change could devastate coastal communities / Kendra Pierre-Louis ; How we drained California dry / Mark Arax ; The climate solution actually adding millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere / Lisa Song and James Temple ; In the oceans, the volume is rising as never before / Sabrina Imbler ; The nature of plastics / Meera Sabramanian

Humans are a part of nature. Black bears, black liberation / Rae Wynn-Grant ; Finding freedom in the natural world / Cynthia R. Greenlee ; Humanity is flushing away one of life's essential elements / Julia Rosen ; Poisoned

Part 1: The factory / Corey G. Johnson, Rebecca Woolington, and Eli Murray ; Future moves / Yessenia Funes ; There's a clear fix to helping black communities fight pollution / Rachel Ramirez ; To be a field of poppies / Lisa Wells

Ways of knowing. To hell with drowning / Julian Aguon ; To speak of the sea in Irish / Claudia Geib ; A tight-knit island nation hopes to rebuild while preserving "the barbudan way" / Mikki K. Harris ; Thriving together: salmon, berries, and people / Cuagilarkv (Jess Hausti) ; Your face is not your own / Kashmir Hill ; Quantum enlightenment / Ruth Robertson

Futures we could have. Why combining farms and solar panels could transform how we produce both food and energy / Chris Malloy ; A recipe for fighting climate change and feeding the world / Sarah Kaplan ; Power shift / Justine Calma ; Beavers are firefighters who work for free / Lucy Sherriff ; New wind projects power local budgets in Wyoming / Jane C. Hu ; Work from home, fave the planet? Ehhh / Emily Atkin ; In Amsterdam, a community of floating homes shows the world how to live alongside nature / Shira Rubin ; A river reawakened / Jessica Plumb ; There's a global plan to conserve nature. Indigenous people could lead the way / Somini Sengupta, Catrin Einhorn, and Manuela Andreoni.