Bryan Walsh

It’s been feeling very 1995 lately.  Oasis, whose last good song came out back when Macs were still see-through, was the second-biggest tour on the planet last year. Gen Z is snapping up the flip p...

America is a uniquely sick, unhealthy country — just ask Americans. We’re addicted to ultraprocessed food and succumb to deaths of despair. The current US health secretary, who insists we’ve been r...

As temperatures blew past 100°F in cities across Europe last week, it was difficult to tell what was generating more hot air: the weather or the discourse around the right way to endure it. On the ...

America in the summer of 1976 was not in a good place.  The president who presided over the country’s Bicentennial, President Gerald Ford, only had the job because the previous president and vice p...

In 1954, years after he led the project that created the atomic bomb, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was called to testify before the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The ostensible subject of the ...

Most major sporting events do not live up to their names — literally, at least. Major League Baseball’s World Series apparently envisions a world that only includes the US and Canada. The National ...

I turned 48 this week, which meant it was time for my annual physical. After the usual battery of questions from my doctor — How much did I drink? Was I exercising? How was I sleeping? — it was my ...

How do we know when the world has changed? On June 1, a team of scientists published a preprint scientific paper claiming they had edited human embryonic DNA with more precision than any previous a...

In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood at a podium and in a voice that sounded as if he was reading from the phone book, recited a set of ...

There are many ways to bomb a college commencement speech.  You can tell everyone you composed the talk while high on ayahuasca, like Chris Pan at Ohio State. You can deliver the entirety of your s...

You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the...

If there’s one thing Americans can agree on — beyond the fact we hate data centers and love Dolly Parton — it’s that we’re busier than ever, and it’s all too much. We don’t have time to socialize, ...

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...