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Politics, Science & Nature

Technology Can't Fix Algorithmic Injustice

We need greater democratic oversight of AI not just from developers and designers, but from all members of society.

Annette Zimmermann, Elena Di Rosa, Hochan Kim

Science & Nature

What Is Medicine For?

The era of personalized and precision medicine has overpromised but underdelivered. In place of the hype, we need a more sober evaluation of the meaning of health and health care.

Robert A. Aronowitz

Arts in Society

AI’s Human Problem

Two new books about machine creativity mostly reveal how little appreciation we still have for the full range of human creativity.

Alexis L. Boylan

Philosophy & Religion, Science & Nature

What Makes Science Trustworthy

The “scientific method” of high school textbooks does not exist. But there are scientific methods, and they play an essential role in making scientific knowledge reliable.

Philip Kitcher

Science & Nature

Global Warming, Market Opportunity

On the lure of climate entrepreneurism.

Troy Vettese

Reading Lists, Science & Nature

“Listen to the Science”

Are scientists more virtuous than the rest of us? Can religion and science be happily reconciled? 

Matt Lord, Boston Review

Science & Nature

The Why of the World

Allured by the promise of Big Data, science has shortchanged causal explanation in favor of data-driven prediction. But ultimately we must ask why.

Tim Maudlin

Science & Nature

Is Science Political?

Many take the separation between science and politics for granted, but this view of science has its own political history: it was developed, in part, as an anti-communist tool of the Cold War.

Michael D. Gordin

Science & Nature

Is There a Human Blueprint?

Two new books from intellectual giants Robert Plomin and Nicholas Christakis revive the “nature vs. nurture” debate about what makes people different from one another.

C. Brandon Ogbunu, C. Malik Boykin

Arts in Society

A World of Electric Children

Science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote the story for the Academy Award–winning film Arrival. Now his new collection of short stories gives us further glimpses of possible futures.

John Crowley

Gender & Sexuality, Science & Nature

Who's Your Daddy?

The meaning of fatherhood remains elusive, even in the age of DNA-based paternity testing.

Nara Milanich

Race

Black Resistance in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley

In Revilletown, which was founded by freed slaves, a petrochemical company has seized ownership of an ancestral cemetery. But an attack on the dead is an attack on the living.

Robin McDowell

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