Well-researched stories from The Atlantic, Aeon, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

American mycologist Violetta White Delafield painted over 600 stunning watercolors of mushrooms as part of her fieldwork. Here they are in all their glory.

The current vogue for the Amherst poet needs to give credit to the way she readily examined her childhood ideas about fixed and immutable truth.

The wildly popular books helped people understand farming and health through the movement of the planets, in a way compatible with Protestantism.

Japanese workers, many of them women, worked up to 17 hours a day in the early 20th century. Yet experts still wondered why they “wasted” time.

The containment of COVID-19 raises pressing questions related to the freedom of scientific information, civil liberties, and human rights, one scholar explains.

Scientists have different ideas about whether viruses are living beings. But they have solid advice on how to destroy them: wash up.

In the period immediately following World War II, the femme fatale embodied a host of male anxieties about gender roles.

You could get stung by a jellyfish even when there don't seem to be any around. Meet Cassiopea xamachana and its "stinging water" weirdness.

What did women coming of age in the 1950s think of Doris Day in Calamity Jane? Does her filmography have the same meaning now?