Bryan Walsh

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...

A few weeks back, in the run-up to Christmas, my family was doing what it always does during the holiday season: watching Home Alone. And, around the time that Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern’s Wet Band...

Had William Foege been a military general or a CEO or a politician, his death on January 24 would have been bold-type, front-page news. Elementary schools and highways would have been named after h...

Did you notice something… weird on your social media network of choice this past weekend? (I mean weirder than normal.) Something like various people posting about swarms of AI agents achieving a k...

Not everyone wants to rule the world, but it does seem lately as if everyone wants to warn the world might be ending. On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveiled their annual resetti...

In the spring of 2010, I was one of a few journalists invited to travel down to the coast of Ecuador to join an ocean-going TED conference. With me aboard a National Geographic science vessel were ...

If it feels like the tech people in your life and on your timeline have collectively lost their minds — but, like, more than usual — that’s just the Claude Code experience at work. Now if you know ...

Let’s start with the bad news. There’s a decent chance, perhaps as high as 11 percent if you’re unvaccinated, that some time over the course of this winter, you’ll be overcome with chills, followed...