The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our

We are digital hoarders. Some of us make plans for the custody of our accounts after death, but our online legacy is mostly trash. It’s decades’ worth of political rants and throwaway jokes on social

I’m a bit Elon and Twittered out, but I want to capture a basic prediction about all the shenanigans. As for my take on things, I will just say that Elon miscalculated a number of things in his handli

My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastic

Update, Oct. 3, 2022: Jack Thomas, journalist who poignantly wrote of his terminal diagnosis, dies at 83 AS A TEENAGER, I often wondered how my life would change if I knew that I would die soon. Morbi

The Dance of Death, created in 1493 by Michael Wolgemut, inspired by the Black Death. (Credits: Wikipedia) The origins of the deadly Black Death have been discovered more than 600 years after it enter

Two-thirds of the way through his claustrophobic 2021 comedy special Inside , Bo Burnham briefly strips away all the humor and launches into “ That Funny Feeling .” It’s an intimate, quiet song that d

This story most recently aired in the May 5, 2020 episode of Crosscurrents. The Hum is a mysterious low pitch noise that bothers up to 2% of people worldwide. It’s been annoying residents in San Franc

Canada is experiencing something like the US’s January 6th event in what’s being called a “Vaccine Protest” and a “Freedom Convoy 2022”, alluding to it being made up largely of truckers. To my uninfor

I’ve always been fascinated by this aphorism. The original form pretends women don’t exist. Hard Times Create Strong People. ↓ Strong People Create Good Times. ↓ Good Times Create Weak People. ↓ Weak

I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb pe

As I write about in the philosophy of Westworld , life is really about meaning loops. They’re the structures that make us want to strive and improve, and that make life matter. Everybody has them. For

I’m not sure who needs to hear this, so I’ll just put it here in hope it reaches someone who does. Your value to most people in the greater uninterested world comes from your output. Not your ideas. N

It’s so simple that it can be easy to overlook: In the commotion of daily life, people forget to thank their partner for the myriad things they do. During the pandemic, significant others have made ev

How to Build Resilience in Midlife Credit... Sarah Williamson Much of the scientific research on resilience — our ability to bounce back from adversity — has focused on how to build resilience in chil

Guest Essay We’re Living Through the ‘Boring Apocalypse’ Dec. 10, 2021 Credit... Félix Decombat By Dr. Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, the author of “Think Again: The Power of Know

What Will the World Be Like in 20 Years? Looking at demographic data can help us assess the opportunities and challenges of the coming decades. Credit... Mirko Ilic By Published Nov. 27, 2021 Updated

Peter Boghossian was assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University until he felt forced to resign last week. His resignation letter went viral – it was a righteous blast against the g

Guest Essay I Will Never Forget That I Could Have Lived With People Who Loved Me Sept. 16, 2021 Credit... Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times By Mr. Cancel is the founder of an organization dedicate

How to Let Your Mind Wander Research suggests that people with freely moving thoughts are happier. Easy, repetitive activities like walking can help get you in the right mindset. Credit... Illustratio

Mindfulness may have many benefits – but the latest research shows it can also make some people more selfish. Mindfulness is said to do many things for our psyche : it can increase our self-control, s

Wealth is easy to measure but hard to value. When George Vanderbilt moved into Biltmore – the largest home in America at 178,000 square feet – one newspaper in 1899 wondered what the point was. The go

A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appe

A class at Gen.G Elite Esports Academy in Seoul. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Inside the ‘Deadly Serious’ World of E-Sports in South Korea Each year, thousands of young South Koreans comp

Penises are shrinking and genitals becoming malformed because of pollution, an environmental scientist has warned in a new book detailing the challenges facing human reproduction. Dr Shanna Swan write

A few weeks ago, I met my first Millennial grandparent. I was interviewing a woman in her late 30s about President Joe Biden’s new child-tax-credit proposal, and she mentioned that it would benefit no

On Monday morning, my partner laid a carry-on suitcase down on the floor, preparing to pack for his first post-vaccination trip to visit his parents. The moment he unzipped the bag, our cat Calvin pro

The Death of the Middle The emergence of department stores opened up a vast array of choices for the everyday consumer. No longer did they have to go to the corner store and hope their store clerk was

” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. T he other afternoon, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden . It turned out

No skill is more valuable and harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems. If you can think through things better than others, you’ll have fewer problems and more free time

Why Spy Agencies Say the Future Is Bleak Climate change, technology, disease and financial crises will pose big challenges for the world, an intelligence report concludes. April 15, 2021 By The editor

Image credit: Colin, Wikimedia CC BY SA 2.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ March 25, 2021 It’s 2 p.m. on a Sunday, several months into a war that I’ve been fighting in as a remotely pilo

Alan Lightman , the physicist who brought us The Accidental Universe , has also written several works of fiction, including Einstein’s Dreams , presented as dreams Einstein might have had while workin

If we see someone throwing money away, we call that person crazy. Money has value. Wasting it seems nuts. And yet we see others—and ourselves—throw away something far more valuable every day: Time. Un

The biggest change in my professional maturity came when I became Actually Responsible for things. Not in the sense of “if there’s a mix of dashes and em-dashes in this powerpoint deck someone will ge

Books are a uniquely portable magic. Stephen King Stephen King The more I read the more I find it difficult to talk to people who don’t. I am aware of how bad that sounds, but it’s not what you’re thi

A new book makes the case that sperm counts have been falling for decades — and a major reason is chemicals in the environment that disrupt the body's hormonal system. Why it matters: The ability to r

Strange things are happening at the outer edges of our solar system. An object up to ten times the mass of Earth is pulling others towards it. Is it a planet, or something else? As we head towards the

Our obsession with being informed makes it hard to think long-term. We spend hours consuming news because we want to be informed. The problem is, the news doesn’t make us informed – quite the opposite