Kirsten Bakis first wrote her story of biomechanically-enhanced, hyper-intelligent dogs 20 years ago, and it’s been a cult favorite ever since. So why create a post-modern Frankenstein story with dogs at the heart of the tale?More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Science and Technology
How A Novel About 'Monster Dogs' Can Help Us Rethink Our Relationship with Our Own Canine Companions
Before John Muir and Charles Darwin, there was Alexander von Humboldt, the German scientist who shaped our understanding of nature. Now, he’s largely forgotten, but biographer Andrea Wulf says he was once the world's most famous scientist. More
If climate change is the most urgent problem facing humanity, why are there so few novels about it? Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh believes that’s a big problem. He says climate change is less a science problem than a crisis of imagination.More
Yuval Noah Harari is the big-thinking historian who warns that whoever owns the data owns the future. He told Steve Paulson that it’s become the most important resource in the world.More
A pioneering computer scientist thinks we should delete our accounts, while an internet ethicist argues we should fix the system rather than abandon it entirely.More
Viral videos and memes are good for a laugh — but how often do you think about where they came from? Digital culture scholar Whitney Phillips says the internet is both playful and mean. And we’re not good at telling the difference.More
Steve spoke with Yale astrophysicist Priya Natarajan about the search for invisible parts of the universe, dark matter, and the mind-boggling nature of black holes.More
Francis Halzen, the lead scientist of the IceCube Neutrino Detector, explains how light sensors buried deep in the ice at the South Pole detected a neutrino that traveled four billion light-years.More
Other than getting angry, is there a better way to respond to people who’ve treated you badly? A smarter way to deal with injustice? Richard Davidson thinks so. He says what we need is to learn how to love.More
Tina Bertoni provides a commentary on what it was like to hunt a bear.More
"Field and Stream" Associate Editor Kim Hiss tells Anne Strainchamps about her first hunt.More
Humans are not the only creatures who vocalize. Birds, whale and frogs have voices too—but are we listening? Bernie Krause has been recording environmental sounds all over the world since the 1970s. He says it's time for humans to shut up.More
As media historian Jonathan Sterne tells Craig Eley, signal processing shapes the sound of all vocal media, from your telephone calls to the music of T-Pain.More
In her new book, "Now I Know Who My Comrades Are," Emily Parker profiles a few online activists, and writes about how they're transforming life in China, Cuba and Russia.More
How painting radium on watches and instrument dials killed more than 50 young women working in Ottawa, Illinois.More
The Center for Humans and Nature provides a forum for wider discussion on the link between our evolution as a species and the emergence of religious thought and morality, including several essays by evolutionary biologists David Sloan Wilson and Jeff Schloss.More
If you think of your life as a series of births, what changes? Why does the birth metaphor matter?More
Mushrooms have inspired scientists, chefs and even musicians. Mycologist Lawrence Millman says they’ve also inspired a few composers, including Vaclav Halek and John Cage.More