Humanity’s failure to avert the crisis of a warming climate is sometimes framed as a grand technological problem: For centuries, countries relied on fossil fuels to industrialize their economies and generate wealth, and it was only in recent years that alternative ways of powering a society, like…

The 1918 influenza pandemic, the deadliest pandemic in modern history, is typically associated with a single year, but it actually lasted for more than two. The virus that caused it is thought to have emerged in the United States in January of that year, and it claimed its tens of millions of…

Wednesday night’s debate between Senator Kamala Harris of California and Vice President Mike Pence may have been more conventional than last week’s presidential debate — not a high bar to clear — but there were many ways in which it did not qualify as normal. In one corner, you had the man first…

In May, a medical research scientist named Rick Bright, who had just been ousted from the government after filing a whistle-blower complaint about the Trump administration’s coronavirus response, testified before Congress and issued a dire warning. Without rapid federal action, he said, the…