What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

Just as the US seems to be turning away from trying to make contact with extra-terrestrial life, China has built a huge custom radio dish for the very purpose. The author visits the dish, examines China’s long history of astronomy and reviews its current attempts to drive scientific innovation.

A New Theory for why Voters are so Angry – That Actually Makes Sense

An interview with a professor who researched a recent book through numerous interviews with people living in rural communities in Wisconsin. These conversations convinced her that while fact-driven policy did come into their electoral choices, it had far less impact than fundamental questions of identity, tied up in numerous issues, but boiling down to – “Who am I for, and who am I against?”.

Hiroshima

The New Yorker devoted its August 31st 1946 issue in its entirety to this article on the nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima a year earlier. The article would later be described, in the same magazine’s August 31st 2016 issue, as “a landmark in journalism, in publishing, and in humanity’s awareness of itself and its own awful potential.”

Welcome to Pleistocene Park

An extraordinary piece profiling the scientists in Siberia that are seeking to restore the Ice Age by bioengineering woolly mammoths and other creatures. Their ambition is on an epic scale – to reforge a lost world in order to preserve our present one.

Sitting Up

A piece describing itself aptly as ‘A brief history of chairs’, looking at how different societies approach the act of sitting.

A Natural History of Walter Rothschild

Beautifully written piece examining the life of a man who possessed a great fortune and an even greater interest in exotic animals. A man who “simply wanted to possess the world in all its endless variety.”