Environmental Issues

A large digital thermometer sits at the entrance to the gleaming mid-century-modern visitor center in Furnace Creek, California. When I arrived on Sunday afternoon, it was thronged with people with their phones out, taking pictures. A mood of anticipation hummed through the crowd. A few hours east of us, in Las Vegas, temperatures would rise … Read more

Updated at 10:14 a.m. on July 19, 2024. For just $65, the skin-care company Selfmade will sell you a kit that will purportedly help you feel more stable and confident in your relationships—and get better skin all the while. According to the kit’s marketing copy, it comes with a serum that enhances “safety and comfort … Read more

J o Franco still remembers the moment she realized that her nose worked. Growing up in Wilmington, a Los Angeles neighborhood dotted with oil refineries and next to one of the largest port complexes in the country, she’d always assumed she had a fever, or allergies: “I could never breathe through my nose at all,” … Read more

Joe Biden’s problem isn’t his age. It’s his ability to function. America has known a number of exceptional octogenarians who have demonstrated the cognitive and physical stamina to serve in demanding leadership roles. In 1787, at age 81, Benjamin Franklin, who a few years earlier had negotiated a highly advantageous treaty to end the Revolutionary … Read more

Several years ago, in my work as a palliative-care doctor, I cared for a man in his 60s who had been mostly healthy before he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. After three different treatments had failed him, his oncologist and I told him that a fourth treatment might buy him a few weeks at best. … Read more

Last Thursday was not a good day for Joe Biden. During the president’s shaky and at times incoherent debate performance, he appeared weaker and frailer in real time than the American public had ever seen. Friday appears to have been a much better day. At a campaign rally in North Carolina, clips of which his … Read more

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Times are tough for omnivores. By now, you’ve heard all the reasons to eat less meat: your health, the planet, the animals. All that might be true, … Read more

This article was originally published by Undark Magazine. For more than a decade, in blog posts and scientific papers and public talks, the psychologist Hal Herzog has questioned whether owning pets makes people happier and healthier. It is a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical … Read more

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. This is an edition of The Weekly Planet, a newsletter that provides a guide for living through climate change. Sign up for it here. The thermometer read 121 degrees Fahrenheit when 71-year-old Steve Curry collapsed outside a restroom in Death Valley National Park last … Read more

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.” I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of … Read more

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. This is an edition of The Weekly Planet, a newsletter that provides a guide for living through climate change. Sign up for it here. Summer has only just officially begun, and the world is already sweltering. This week, two counties in northwestern Maine were … Read more