“Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.” — Lucretius, On the Nature of Things I T IS SPRING IN HOUSTON , which means that each day the temperature rises and so does the humidity. The bricks of my hou
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Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to The Atavist Magazine today for access to our full archive. American Hippopotamus A bracing and eccentric epic of espionage and hippos. By Jon Mooallem The Atavis
T owards the end of a conversation dwelling on some of the deepest metaphysical puzzles regarding the nature of human existence, the philosopher Galen Strawson paused, then asked me: “Have you spoken
Norm Macdonald at his home in Los Angeles, with his 18-year-old cat, Kitty. Credit... Peter Yang for The New York Times Feature Norm Macdonald, Still in Search of the Perfect Joke He has won a cult fo
O n election night in 2016, four years before the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, the Proud Boys threw a party. That November evening, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes—my former boss—summoned
Credit... Photo illustration by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari The Great Read The Health Issue New research is intensifying the debate — with profound implications for the future of the plane
If you are reading this obituary online, you owe your digital safety to him. Daniel Kaminsky, at his Brooklyn office in 2010, was widely hailed after finding a serious flaw in the internet’s basic plu
In early April , Paul Hiley was kicking back in the executive suite at Desert King International LLC, gazing out the window at the San Diego sunshine and daydreaming about his golf game. California ha
What’s the difference between physics and biology? Take a golf ball and a cannonball and drop them off the Tower of Pisa. The laws of physics allow you to predict their trajectories pretty much as accurately as you could wish for. Now do the same experiment again, but replace the cannonball with a…
Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise. I’ve smoked since I was sixteen, behind the high-school football bleachers in Northfield, Minnesota. I used to fear the embarrassment of dying youngish, letting people natter sagely, “He smoked, you know.” But at seventy-seven I’m into the actuarial zone. I know…
Article body copy On a late-summer morning in 2018, Paul Melovidov walked into the freezer section of the Trident Seafoods processing plant. The weather-beaten building stands where breakwater meets land in Saint Paul, Alaska, a community of around 500 residents on an island in the Bering Sea.…
T he first surprising thing about the worm that landed in Philip Porras’s digital petri dish 18 months ago was how fast it grew. He first spotted it on Thursday, November 20, 2008. Computer-security experts around the world who didn’t take notice of it that first day soon did. Porras is part of a…
I t was early morning in early summer, and I was tracing my way through the woods of central North Carolina, steering cautiously around S-curves and braking hard when what looked like a small rise turned into a narrow bridge. I was on my way to meet Tami McGraw, who lives with her husband and the…
Jerome Jacobson and his network of mobsters, psychics, strip-club owners, and drug traffickers won almost every prize for 12 years, until the FBI launched Operation ‘Final Answer.’ Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast On Aug. 3, 2001, a McDonald’s film crew arrived in the…
Workers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center's biocontainment unit practicing safe procedure on a mannequin Jonno Rattman Image above: Workers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center's biocontainment unit practicing safe procedure on a mannequin A t 6 o’clock in the morning, shortly…
MEMBERHS / exopixel / Prostock-studio / Shutterstock / The Atlantic Horseshoe crabs are sometimes called “living fossils” because they have been around in some form for more than 450 million years . In this time, the Earth has gone through multiple major ice ages, a Great Dying , the formation and…
Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas and Louisiana last August, causing $125 billion in damage, dumped more water out of the sky than any storm in U.S. history. By one calculation, roughly a million gallons fell for every person in Texas. The water rained down on a flat former bayou that had become a…
Kent Hernandez Update 3/12: Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration announced that all testosterone products must be labeled to include information about the possible increased risk of cardiovascular problems as a result of using the drug. The evidence is not overwhelmingly clear. Some…
Ulises Fariñas A ll parents remember the moment when they first held their children—the tiny crumpled face, an entire new person, emerging from the hospital blanket. I extended my hands and took my daughter in my arms. I was so overwhelmed that I could hardly think. Afterward I wandered outside so…
Editor’s note : As you navigate a world of choices, revisit this 2011 magazine story on the paralyzing effects of decision fatigue. Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had…
T he common cold has the twin distinction of being both the world’s most widespread infectious disease and one of the most elusive. The name is a problem, for starters. In almost every Indo-European language, one of the words for the disease relates to low temperature, yet experiments have shown…
Money may not be able to buy love, but here in Japan, it can certainly buy the appearance of love—and appearance, as the dapper Ishii Yuichi insists, is everything. As a man whose business involves becoming other people, Yuichi would know. The handsome and charming 36-year-old is on call to be your…
1. After Pablo O n the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellín, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, ridiculously, gunned down by a…
Imagine a group of volunteers, their chests rigged with biophysical sensors, preparing for a mission in a military office building outfitted with cameras and microphones to capture everything they do. “We want to set up a living laboratory where we can actually pervasively sense people,…
On a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear’s living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium’s first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain…
T he team of color scientists hovered in their white coats and hairnets, staring down at a clear plastic box full of strangely colored M&Ms. “They look like pebbles, ugly little pebbles,” said Rebecca Robbins, the color-chemistry manager for Mars Chocolate. She propped open the lid to show off a…
T he son of a minister, Ohene Asare grew up poor. His family immigrated from Ghana when he was 8 and settled down in West Bridgewater, Mass., a town 30 miles south of Boston, where he was one of the few black students at the local public school. “It was us and this Jewish family,” Asare remembered.…
IN THE MENAGERIE of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs — bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into…
For two days, the crowd sits in darkness in plush theater seats, watching the church stage. There are smoke machines and LED screens, harnessed climbers scaling a scaffold “mountain” and raising their arms in symbolic victory over the startup world’s arduous climb. There’s talk of destiny-defining…
L ike many astrophysicists, Sara Seager sometimes has a problem with her perception of scale. Knowing that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, and that each might contain hundreds of billions of stars, can make the lives of astrophysicists and even those closest to them seem insignificant.…
How likely is the virus to escape the laboratory? Credit Illustration by Sachin Teng On May 21, 1997, a three-year-old boy died in Hong Kong from a viral infection that turned out to be influenza. The death was not unusual: flu viruses kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. Hong Kong is…
Disabled retroviruses—fossils of molecular battles that raged for generations—make up eight per cent of the human genome. Credit JOOST SWARTE Thierry Heidmann’s office, adjacent to the laboratory he runs at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, could pass for a museum of…
Dairy scientists are the Gregor Mendels of the genomics age, developing new methods for understanding the link between genes and living things, all while quadrupling the average cow's milk production since your parents were born. Reuters. While there are more than 8 million Holstein dairy cows in…
There’s a moment in the history of medicine that’s so cinematic it’s a wonder no one has put it in a Hollywood film. The scene is a London laboratory. The year is 1928. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish microbiologist, is back from a vacation and is cleaning up his work space. He notices that a speck of…
Prologue: You Are What You Have Read Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google…
By David Dunning (Photo: Gregg Segal) Last March, during the enormous South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! sent a camera crew out into the streets to catch hipsters bluffing. “People who go to music festivals pride themselves on knowing who…
Theranos founder, chairwoman, and C.E.O. Elizabeth Holmes, in Palo Alto, California, September 2014. By Ethan Pines/The Forbes Collection. The War Room It was late morning on Friday, October 16, when Elizabeth Holmes realized that she had no other choice. She finally had to address heremployees at…
For seven years before the murder, Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blancharde lived in a small pink bungalow on West Volunteer Way in Springfield, Missouri. Their neighbors liked them. “'Sweet' is the word I’d use,” a former friend of Dee Dee’s told me not too long ago. Once you met them, people said, they…
The credo of Thiel’s venture-capital firm: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Credit Photograph by Robert Maxwell Peter Thiel pulled an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and held it up. “I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he said. “Compare this with the…
He wore a Western hat, never spoke a word, and robbed bank after bank. When the feds finally arrested him, they discovered that their suspect was actually a soft-spoken woman. They thought they’d never hear from her again— but she had other plans. P EGGY JO TALLAS WAS, BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the classic…
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