Boy scouts in CA, 1915

Why Do Boy Scouts Shoot Rifles?

It wasn't a big focus at the beginning of the scouting movement. So what changed?
Sierra Tarahumara

Where Drug Trafficking and Climate Change Collide

With mounting pressure from cartels and worsening environmental conditions, Mexico’s Indigenous Rarámuri communities face a fraught future.
Bell Rocket Belt

The Rise and Fall of the Jet Pack

Well, mostly the fall.
Big Jim Colosimo by Pauline Boty and Portrait fragmenté by Evelyne Axell

The Women of Pop

In addition to bringing attention to overlooked artists, one scholar argues that art criticism has contributed to their obscurity.
Photo taken in the Bourbaki Congress of 1938 in Dieulefit

The Mathematical Pranksters behind Nicolas Bourbaki

Bourbaki was gnomic and mythical, impossible to pin down; his mathematics just the opposite: unified, unambiguous, free of human idiosyncrasy.
Illustration from the cover of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

How Octavia E. Butler Became a Legend

The early inspiration and experiences that shaped the visionary science fiction storyteller.
Metropolitan Community Church of Washington DC

The Origins of LGBTQ-Affirming Churches

As far back as the 1940s, religious LGBTQ people organized groups and congregations that welcomed them.
Illustration: UFO

Source: Getty

Alien Evolution, Texting while Walking, and a Maya Life

Well-researched stories from Quanta, Wired, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Suicides_of_Meleager_and_Althea_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Why Suicide Was a Sin in Medieval Europe

Although there were historical and scriptural precedents for honorable suicide, Christian theology saw it much differently.
Sofia, a skeleton from the Durankulak Necropolis

How the Gender Binary Limits Archaeological Study

One case study demonstrates how contemporary assumptions about gender in ancient societies risk obscuring the larger picture.