Bryan Walsh

Should you be worried about the hantavirus outbreak? Should you be afraid? Should you be panicking? Should you start freaking out? If you’ve been following the coverage of the hantavirus outbreak a...

There are few news subjects more reliably depressing than nutritional science.  A glance at the headlines will tell you that sugar is bad for you, red meat is bad for you, and alcohol is really, re...

In a lab room, a toddler, deaf from birth, sits while a tone plays. There’s no reaction. His face does not change.  Six weeks later, after a single injection of an experimental gene therapy, the sa...

In the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, in those days when public spaces emptied and hospitals filled up, I used to see this magazine cover from 2017 being passed around social media. The story w...

For more than a century, the world has run on coal. When Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street electrical station in Lower Manhattan fired up in 1882, it ran on coal. Coal survived the oil era, the nuclear ...

Devon Fritz had his midlife crisis a little early.  He spent his 20s writing tax software, staying on track to hit all the life targets he’d set for himself: house, kids, financial security. And th...

Butter chicken has disappeared from some restaurant menus in India. Sri Lanka declared every Wednesday a public holiday. Laos cut its school week to three days. Egypt ordered shops and cafes to clo...

On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a brief, clinical report in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report about five young men in Los Angeles who had developed...

How old am I? Old enough to have flown on planes that had ashtrays in the armrests. Old enough to remember restaurants with smoking sections separated from the nonsmoking section by, essentially, n...

For a sport that’s more than 150 years old, the opening of the 2026 Major League Baseball season is set to feature an unusual number of firsts. The official Opening Day on March 26 is the earliest ...

On February 9, 1970, Johnny Carson did something that would be unthinkable for a late night host today, or really anyone on TV: He gave a full hour of The Tonight Show to a Stanford professor. But ...

The gas prices are unmissable. Since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, Brent crude oil has surged past $100 a barrel for the first time in four years, briefly topping $119 ...

On March 10, 1876, a 29-year-old Scottish immigrant named Alexander Graham Bell sat in a modest laboratory at 5 Exeter Place in Boston and did something no human being had ever done: He spoke into ...

I was fortunate enough to spend several days last week at the Aspen Institute’s Crosscurrent summit on AI and national security in San Francisco. My first takeaway: I very much recommend being in s...

The United States is in the middle of one of the most dramatic crime declines in its history — and almost no one seems to know it. (Unless, of course, you read this newsletter.)  FBI data shows vio...

When the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema Naturae in 1735, he set out to classify every living thing on Earth — inventing the naming system we still use today and personally describ...

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth sometimes appears as if he’s more interested in the optics of playing the part of a military leader than he is in actually being a military leader.  Maybe that’s why h...

Everything about the American economy right now feels weird. The hiring picture is weird; the stock market is weird; and AI infusion into work is very, very weird.  But here’s a number that, if you...