Longform

  • Home
  • Best Articles
  • Podcast
  • Sections
    • Arts
    • Business
    • Crime
    • History
    • Politics
    • Science
    • Sex
    • Sports
    • Tech
    • World
    • All Sections
  • Collections
  • Reprints
  • Random Article
  • Lists

    • Best of 2019
    • Best of 2018
    • Best of 2017
    • Best of 2016
    • Best of 2015
    • Best of 2014
    • Best of 2013
    • Best of 2012
  • Archive

    • Publications
    • Writers
    • Tags
  • More

    • Newsletter
    • Suggest Article
    • About
    • Contact
    • Advertise
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Newsletter
  • RSS Feed

Get our Newsletter

Great articles, every Saturday.

Sections

Science

Science

Animal Planet

An ambitious new system will track scores of species from space—shedding light, scientists hope, on the lingering mysteries of animal movement.

Sonia Shah The New York Times Magazine Jan 2021 15min Permalink

Science World

The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try.

A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

Elizabeth Weil ProPublica Jan 2021 15min Permalink

Science World Food

Seeding the Ocean

Inside a Michelin-starred chef’s revolutionary quest to harvest rice from the sea.

Matt Goulding Time Jan 2021 20min Permalink

Crime Science

Larry Farwell Claims His Lie Detector System Can Read Your Mind. Is He a Scam Artist, or a Genius?

Thirty years after it was first pioneered, the Brain Fingerprinting system is finally being put to the test.

Tim Stelloh OneZero Jan 2021 20min Permalink

Science

The Last Two Northern White Rhinos On Earth

What will we lose when Najin and Fatu die?

Sam Anderson New York Times Magazine Jan 2021 30min Permalink

Science Health

Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us

As vaccines roll out, the U.S. will face a choice about what to learn and what to forget.

Ed Yong The Atlantic Dec 2020 25min Permalink

Science Health Travel

The Secret Formula

Could shrunken heads from the Amazon hold the key to curing cancer? One man thought so—and spent a lifetime trying to prove it.

Steven Lance The Atavist Magazine Dec 2020 1h10min Permalink

Science

The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort Of) Rattled the Scientific Community

A cloud enthusiast becomes an advocate for a new type of cloud.

Jon Mooallem New York Times Magazine May 2016 20min Permalink

Science

Love in a Time of Terror

Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair.

Barry Lopez Orion Aug 2020 15min Permalink

History Science

The Skeletons at the Lake

Genetic analysis of human remains found in the Himalayas has raised baffling questions about who these people were and why they were there.

Douglas Preston New Yorker Dec 2020 25min Permalink

Science

The Big Thaw: How Russia Could Dominate a Warming World

Climate change is propelling enormous human migrations as it transforms global agriculture and remakes the world order — and no country stands to gain more than Russia.

Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica Dec 2020 Permalink

Business Science Health

“We Are Slowly Being Poisoned.”

How toxic fumes seep into the air you breathe on planes.

Kiera Feldman Los Angeles Times Dec 2020 25min Permalink

Best Article Science Health

How Science Beat the Virus

And what it lost in the process.

Ed Yong The Atlantic Dec 2020 20min Permalink

Science

They're Among the World's Oldest Living Things. The Climate Crisis Is Killing Them.

California’s redwoods, sequoias and Joshua trees define the American West and nature’s resilience through the ages. Wildfires this year were their deadliest test.

John Branch The New York Times Dec 2020 20min Permalink

Science

The Social Life of Forests

A growing body of research suggests that trees can communicate and cooperate in the wild.

Ferris Jabr New York Times Magazine Dec 2020 25min Permalink

Science

Gaétan Dugas and the 'AIDS Mary' Myth

The Canadian scapegoat of the AIDS epidemic.

Guy Babineau Xtra West Nov 2007 20min Permalink

Science Health

Covid's Cassandra: The Swift, Complicated Rise of Eric Feigl-Ding

He’s an expert on Twitter virality, but not on infectious disease. Does he do more help or harm?

Jane C. Hu Undark Nov 2020 Permalink

Best Article Science World

The World in Its Extreme

A 17,000-word exploration of the Sahara Desert, the hottest place on Earth.

  1. Part 1

  2. Part 2

  3. Part 3

William Langewiesche The Atlantic Nov 1991 1h10min Permalink

Science Health

The Last Children of Down Syndrome

Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning.

Sarah Zhang The Atlantic Nov 2020 35min Permalink

Science

The Woman Who Fell From the Sky

The pandemic comes to Star City, the secretive home of Russia’s space program.

Polina Ivanova Reuters Nov 2020 20min Permalink

Science World Religion

Milk

For a few days in 1995, many Indians believed a religious idol had developed a lifelike ability to drink milk.

Sukhada Tatke Fifty Two Nov 2020 20min Permalink

History Science

The Uncertain Heavens: Christiaan Huygens’ Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life

Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and inventor Christiaan Huygens’ early work on probability paved the way for his very modern evaluation of what alien life might look like.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams The Public Domain Review Oct 2020 20min Permalink

Science

Silence Like Scouring Sand

A trip to one of America’s quietest places and the guy who has dedicated his life to keeping it that way.

Kathleen Dean Moore Orion Nov 2008 15min Permalink

Politics Science Health

Data Disappeared

Data is the lifeblood of a functioning government. Over the past four years, the Trump administration has destroyed, disappeared, or distorted vast swaths of the information the state needs to protect the vulnerable, safeguard our health, and alert us to emerging crises.

Samanth Subramanian Huffington Post Highline Oct 2020 50min Permalink

Science

A Toxic Secret Lurks in Deep Sea

How the waters off of LA became a DDT dumping ground.

Rosanna Xia Los Angeles Times Oct 2020 30min Permalink

2 3 ··· 42
Older