Month: March 2019

The three best male marathon runners of their generation, racing on the fastest, flattest course in the world, in a faceoff between Nike and Adidas, with the distinct possibility of a huge new world record: the men’s elite race at tomorrow’s Berlin Marathon has much to recommend it. The likelihood, however, is that most American…

At the Seeing Eye guide dog facility in Morristown, New Jersey, puppies spend the first three weeks of their life in plastic kiddie pools—the blue kind, speckled with colorful undersea cartoons. Lined with fleece and towels, the wading pools are perfectly sized for a litter of soft, tiny puppies and their mama to lounge and…

When US troops return home from a tour of duty, each person finds their own way to resume their daily lives. But they also, every one, complete a written survey called the Post-Deployment Health Assessment. It’s designed to evaluate service members’ psychiatric health and ferret out symptoms of conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress, so…

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It’s a sunny October day on the outskirts of the west German town of Bottrop. A quiet, two-lane road leads me through farm pasture to a cluster of anonymous, low-lying buildings set among the trees. The highway hums in the distance. Looming above everything else…

A quarter century ago, Steven Spielberg created velociraptors that were viscerally compelling enough to toe-claw tap dance straight into our nightmares. Last year, the VFX team behind Rogue One gave us a posthumously CGI-reanimated Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin, and that inspired a different and unintended kind of unease. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s famous…

At the beginning of the month, Vice President Mike Pence announced that the US, at long last, will go back to the moon. At least, some day. Pence didn’t give a date, details, or even a ballpark cost during his speech at the opening of the National Space Council. But he did give a morale…

This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There’s something different about the crop of Democrats running for Congress in 2018. As in previous years, the party has recruited a small army of veterans in high-profile races and in Republican-held districts. There are loads of state legislators, business owners, and government officials.…

A sheen is starting to appear on Rocky Blumhagen’s forehead, just below his gray hair. He’s marching in place in a starkly lit room decked out with two large flatscreens. On both of the TVs, a volcano lets off steam through wide cracks glowing with lava, their roar muffling the Andean percussion and flutes on…

This year, for the first time in my life, I’ll be hosting my family for the holidays. And to their deep disgruntlement, we’ll be celebrating it without a Christmas tree. No, this isn’t some principled stance against the yuletide-industrial complex or a personal front in the war on Christmas. I’m just much more interested in…

I remember the Christmas tree when I was younger. It had these large colored bulbs—they were pretty, but you couldn't touch them. Yes, these were the old style incandescent lights, and they could get wicked hot. They were essentially smaller versions for the bulbs you would put in your lamp. Today, many people still use…