Elements
Tracing (and Erasing) New York’s Lines of Desire
By Robert Moor
The crusade to get the city’s walkers to stick to the beaten path.
Business, Science & Tech
Elements
A Computer to Rival the Brain
By Kelly Clancy
Artificial intelligence has achieved much of its recent success by mimicking biology. Now it must go further.
Elements
A Nineteen-Fifties Love Machine
By Siobhan Roberts
Long before artificial intelligence came into its own, a pioneering programmer taught a computer to write love letters.
Currency
Snap and the Future of the Internet
By Om Malik
By presenting itself as a camera company, the social platform offers a useful indicator of where technology and the user experience are going.
Elements
Earth’s Magnetic Field, Stored in a Jar
By Marcia Bjornerud
What Iron Age pottery can teach us about our planet’s strangest feature.
Spotlight
Elements
Quantum Theory by Starlight
By David Kaiser
How a group of physicists used the vastness of the cosmos to test one of nature’s tiniest, and most confusing, phenomena.
American Chronicles
The Atomic Origins of Climate Science
By Jill Lepore
How arguments about nuclear weapons shaped the debate over global warming.
Annals of Wildlife
Lions of Los Angeles
By Dana Goodyear
Are the city’s pumas dangerous predators or celebrity guests?
Annals of Medicine
The Heroism of Incremental Care
By Atul Gawande
We devote vast resources to intensive, one-off procedures, while starving the kind of steady, intimate care that often helps people more.
Video
How to Send Us Sensitive Information
By The New Yorker
Strongbox allows you to send tips, information, and files with a greater degree of anonymity than conventional e-mail.
Discoverers
Personal History
Brilliant Light
By Oliver Sacks
Chemistry as I knew it, the chemistry I loved, was either finished or changing its character, advancing beyond me.
Profiles
Out of the Ego Chamber
By Jeremy Bernstein
Arthur C. Clarke’s poetic imagination.
Annals of Science
Dream Machine
By Rivka Galchen
How a reclusive physicist spread the gospel of Many Worlds and quantum computing.
Profiles
Scientist and Mob Idol
By Alva Johnston
Life as a world hero brought its own difficulties for Albert Einstein, especially as Hitler rose to power.
The Weekly Cartoon
