Half a century ago, one of the hottest questions in science was whether humans could teach animals to talk. Scientists tried using sign language to converse with apes and trained parrots to deploy growing English vocabularies. The work quickly attracted media attention — and controversy. The research lacked rigor, critics argued, and what seemed like…
The camera zooms in on a large woman, sitting on a cooler at the beach. It cuts to a shirtless man, also quite large, his face blurred out. The next shot shows another overweight man, sitting on a beach towel with plastic grocery bags arrayed in front of him. “America has now become the fattest…
In 2012, not long after he decided to dedicate his professional life to 18th-century wares, Casey Samson spent a weekend at a colonial-era fair in Bardstown, Ky., selling leather mugs out of a tent. On his first night there, Mr. Samson sat alone by a crackling campfire, smelled the wood smoke and felt as if…
I’ve always been a daughter on Mother’s Day. Even after my sister and I had our own kids, Mother’s Day meant visiting Mom at our childhood home with its untouched 1980s kitchen, bearing flowers and platters of bagels and lox. I would pick up the Russ & Daughters order, my sister would arrange the peonies…
There was dog urine on the carpet, vomit on her blouse and a queasy 7-year-old to look after, but Dr. Whitney Casares had just a few spare moments to clean up and change so she could resume the keynote presentation she had been giving when the school nurse called. Dr. Casares, 42, a pediatrician in…
A person, typically a woman, is talking gently into a microphone. She’s paying close attention to you. Perhaps she’s asking you about your day, or role-playing the part of an aesthetician or doctor or your best friend at a slumber party. Maybe she’s about to give you a facial. Or examine your eyes with a…
This article is part of our Design special section about water as a source of creativity. In the science fiction epic “Dune” (books and movies alike), the people who inhabit the brutally harsh desert planet Arrakis wear garments called stillsuits that allow them to drink their own recycled bodily waters. These full-body survival suits, which…
In October 2023, Oscar Avilez Marquina and Luis Lopez, newlyweds from New York, flew to Europe to spend two weeks on a city-hopping tour between Nice, France; Paris; and Amsterdam. JetBlue had just launched direct flights to Paris from Kennedy International Airport, and the deal was too good for the couple to pass on. “Going…
El pasado diciembre, un par de semanas antes de Navidad, olvidé la botella de agua en el gimnasio. Mientras volvíamos a casa, mi marido me dijo: “¿Quieres volver?”. “No”, le dije. “La recogeré mañana”. Pero estaba enfadada con Eric por no darse la vuelta. Un minuto después, estaba llorando. “Voy a volver”, dijo. “¡No!”, respondí.…
For more than half a century, Thailand’s state-owned tobacco monopoly mass-produced cigarettes at a sprawling industrial estate in Bangkok. A steady stream of heavy trucks brought raw tobacco into the heart of the city and hauled millions of cigarettes away. But now, that cancer-inducing complex has given way to something completely different: green space that…