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Race

DNA and Our Twenty-First-Century Ancestors

Home DNA ancestry kits include no ancestors, instead comparing customers to other present-day people based on assumptions about race and ethnicity. So what are they actually selling?

Duana Fullwiley

Science & Nature

Medicine's Machine Learning Problem

As Big Data tools reshape health care, biased datasets and unaccountable algorithms threaten to further disempower patients.

Rachel Thomas

Science & Nature

How Americans Came to Distrust Science

For a century, critics of all political stripes have challenged the role of science in society. Repairing distrust today requires confronting those arguments head on.

Andrew Jewett

Race, Science & Nature

Racism and Respiration

COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black communities is just one of many respiratory inequities shaped by systemic racism.

Adam Gaffney

Science & Nature

Our Vaccine Infrastructure Needs a Radical Overhaul

We must reimagine how to make life-saving vaccines available to everyone.

Ravi Gupta

Forum

How to Fix the Climate

Biden may have rejoined the Paris Agreement, but diplomacy isn’t enough. To decarbonize the economy, we must integrate bottom-up, local experimentation with top-down, global cooperation.

Charles Sabel, David G. Victor

Politics, Science & Nature

How to Fix the Climate

Biden should rejoin the Paris Agreement, but diplomacy isn’t enough. To decarbonize the economy, we must integrate bottom-up, local experimentation with top-down, global cooperation.

Charles Sabel, David G. Victor

Politics, Science & Nature

From the Editor: Thinking in a Pandemic

COVID-19 is not just a public health crisis. It is also a crisis of public reason.

Matt Lord

Global Justice

How to Talk about COVID-19 in Africa

To ask why COVID-19 hasn’t been deadlier in Africa is to suggest that more Africans should be dying. We need better questions.

Nanjala Nyabola

Science & Nature

To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

Waiting to ensure uninterrupted power for everyone as we transition away from fossil fuels will cost too much time—and too many lives.

David McDermott Hughes

Politics, Science & Nature

The Trouble with Carbon Pricing

Carbon pricing has dominated conversations around climate policy for decades, but it is ineffective. Only a bold approach that centers politics can meet the problem at its scale.

Matto Mildenberger, Leah C. Stokes

Science & Nature

How Early Modern Empire Changed Medicine

Global trade, enslaved labor, and colonial warfare created demands for medicines that would work for anyone, anywhere. That pressure to view patients as interchangeable remains with us today.

Zachary Dorner

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