I always read the New Yorker on the elliptical torture machine at the gym, mostly to avoid the repugnant boredom of exercise. But I also find that the effect of the endorphins, combined with the great writing in the New Yorker, fires up ideas. I have lots of bad ideas (I can tell they are bad because  ...

George Washington, whose birthday is today, didn’t go in for wigs. But he did powder his hair white. Most men did in his day, including the other major figures of the American Revolution. Yet this innocuous fact of fashion, according to recent research, may be coloring our perception more than 200 years later, when white hair implies extreme old  ...

George Washington, whose birthday is today, didn’t go in for wigs. But he did powder his hair white. Most men did in his day, including the other major figures of the American Revolution. Yet this innocuous fact of fashion, according to recent research, may be coloring our perception more than 200 years later, when white hair implies extreme old  ...

On February 16, in Mia’s Pillsbury Auditorium, five literary and performance artists will offer their takes on AfroFuturism, the burgeoning cultural movement that projects people of color into the future. It’s an expansive notion—an extension, if not a rebuttal, of Black History Month—encompassing the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra, the dystopian science fiction of Octavia  ...

After dozens of visits to Mia, I still find it as beautiful as the first time I came, though I can’t quite remember when that was. In high school, driving in from Chaska in search of something new? Not until I moved to Dinkytown to take journalism classes at the U? Whenever it was, my  ...

At the end of 2016, China extended a potential lifeline to elephants, rhinos, and other ivory-bearing animals. China has vowed to shut down its country’s commercial trade in ivory by the end of this year, closing the world’s largest market for tusks, horns, and other ivory material. If the ban is effective, it could dent the alarming rise in  ...

At the end of 2016, China extended a potential lifeline to elephants, rhinos, and other ivory-bearing animals. China has vowed to shut down its country’s commercial trade in ivory by the end of this year, closing the world’s largest market for tusks, horns, and other ivory material. If the ban is effective, it could dent the alarming rise in  ...

Among the sticking points about reviving American manufacturing’s heyday, when millions of men flooded into factories every morning, is that their jobs have been replaced by robots. And soon, artifical intelligence may have a go at more than just mundane work. Last summer, a European “neural network” studied the paintings of Van Gogh, Munch, and other  ...

On the first day of my first dig, in central France, I uncovered a dead man’s foot. It was the 1980s, the first of four seasons I spent digging a Late Iron Age/Early Roman site in the Auvergne during the hot summer months. The man had likely died in the first century CE and was  ...

On the skyway level of the Thrivent building in downtown Minneapolis, amid a coffee shop and a guard station and throngs passing through, is a simple brown door. Behind it is a kind of heaven. Rembrandt. Albrecht Dürer. Picasso. They’re all here, among some 1,200 prints and a small number of Old Master paintings, in the  ...