Society
essay
The environment
Our contaminated future
In Fukushima, communities are adapting to life in a time of permanent pollution: a glimpse of what’s to come for us all
Maxime Polleri
essay
Addiction
Why we crave
The neuroscientific picture of addiction overlooks the psychological and social factors that make cravings so hard to resist
Zoey Lavallee
essay
History of technology
Care from afar
For over a century telemedicine has promised healthcare for all. But will it ever replace seeing a human being in person?
Jeremy A Greene
video
Human rights and justice
The staggering cruelty of Ireland’s Church-run ‘mother and baby homes’
18 minutes
essay
Environmental history
Contaminated kinship
If your hometown were beset with toxic dust, like Australia’s Broken Hill, would you feel any less connected to it?
Lilian Pearce
essay
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
The humane asylum
As a society we are failing people with severe, persistent mental illness. It’s time to reimagine institutional care
Madeleine Ritts & Daniel Rosenbaum
essay
Education
Sex on the curriculum
Sex education is a battlefield over morals and young bodies, and has exposed fractures in American life for over a century
Kristy Slominski
video
Work
Emergency first responders meet chaos with dissonant calm in this gripping short
9 minutes
video
Public health
When two punk bands came to a psychiatric hospital, beautiful chaos ensued
27 minutes
essay
Anthropology
Safety is fatal
Humans need closeness and belonging but any society that closes its gates is doomed to atrophy. How do we stay open?
David Napier
essay
Anthropology
Longhouse lockdown
On a regular cycle, the Nias islanders of Indonesia would retreat into enforced seclusion. What can we learn from them?
Andrew Beatty
essay
Illness and disease
The wisdom of pandemics
Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story
David Waltner-Toews
essay
Economic history
Economics for the people
Against the capitalist creeds of scarcity and self-interest, a plan for humanity’s shared flourishing is finally coming into view
Dirk Philipsen
essay
Public health
It didn’t have to be this way
A bioethicist at the heart of the Italian coronavirus crisis asks: why won’t we talk about the tradeoffs of the lockdown?
Silvia Camporesi
idea
Economics
Private gain must no longer be allowed to elbow out the public good
Dirk Philipsen
video
Public health
Basic healthcare and clean needles is all in a day’s work at a roving addiction clinic
16 minutes
essay
Environmental history
Human crap
We are demigods of discards – but our copious garbage became a toxic burden only with the modern cult of ‘disposability’
Gabrielle Hecht
video
Childhood and adolescence
‘I want to take the bullet and save my friends’ – the grim reality of safety drills in US schools
3 minutes
video
Public health
‘I know it looks barbaric.’ Can a fight club curb street violence?
9 minutes
essay
Medicine
We need worms
You might think they are disgusting. But our war against intestinal worms has damaged our immune systems and mental health
William Parker
idea
Public health
How the marvel of electric light became a global blight to health
Richard G ‘Bugs’ Stevens
idea
Bioethics
More people should choose to have children with Down syndrome
Chris Kaposy
essay
Medicine
Viral rescue
When antibiotics fail, could phage therapy succeed? The germ’s-eye view of infection might open up revolutionary treatments
Emily Monosson
essay
History
The flavour revolutionary
Henry Theophilus Finck sought to transform the modern United States, by appealing to Americans’ tastebuds
Nadia Berenstein