Last week, the National Institutes of Health finally got some good news. A Senate subcommittee voted, with support from both parties, to increase the agency’s $48 billion budget—a direct rebuke…

For the better part of the past century, the case against nicotine was simple: Smoking a cigarette might feel nice, but it will eventually kill you. Nearly one in five…

Vinay Prasad, until Tuesday one of the country’s top medical regulators, just got a bitter taste of what it means to have real power. In recent months, the academic hematologist-oncologist,…

Police are still investigating what exactly prompted a gunman to kill four people in a Manhattan office building yesterday evening, but perhaps the clearest aspect of his motive is the…

Americans have a long history of enduring heat waves by going outside. In a 1998 essay for The New Yorker, the author Arthur Miller described urbanites’ Depression-era coping mechanisms: People…

Every summer, there is a brief window—call it August—when the produce is exquisite. The cherries are at their best, as are the peaches, plums, and nectarines. The watermelon is sweet.…

For decades, countries around the world have held up the United States’s rigorous approach to vaccine policy as a global ideal. But in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health…

Mark and David Geier were a father-and-son team of researchers who operated on the fringes of the scientific establishment. They were known for promoting a controversial treatment for autism, and…

For all of the eons that animal life has existed on Earth, the sun has been there too. And for all of those eons, animal life has had only one…

The early aughts were the worst possible kind of golden age. Tans were inescapable—on Britney Spears’s midriff, on the flexing biceps outside of Abercrombie & Fitch stores. The Jersey Shore…