![The informal paths known as desire lines can be found all over the city and all over the world, scarring pristine lawns and worming through forest undergrowth.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170222001122im_/http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/desire-lines_wp-728-375.jpg)
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.
By presenting itself as a camera company, the social platform offers a useful indicator of where technology and the user experience are going.
What Iron Age pottery can teach us about our planet’s strangest feature.
How a group of physicists used the vastness of the cosmos to test one of nature’s tiniest, and most confusing, phenomena.
How arguments about nuclear weapons shaped the debate over global warming.
Are the city’s pumas dangerous predators or celebrity guests?
We devote vast resources to intensive, one-off procedures, while starving the kind of steady, intimate care that often helps people more.
Strongbox allows you to send tips, information, and files with a greater degree of anonymity than conventional e-mail.
Chemistry as I knew it, the chemistry I loved, was either finished or changing its character, advancing beyond me.
Arthur C. Clarke’s poetic imagination.
How a reclusive physicist spread the gospel of Many Worlds and quantum computing.
Life as a world hero brought its own difficulties for Albert Einstein, especially as Hitler rose to power.