Long before today's opioid epidemic, doctors shared stories of their own experiments with the drugs they prescribed their patients.

New findings shed light on how humans' ancestors interbred, but the Denisovans remain quite mysterious.

When Silent Spring was published, the response was overtly gendered. Rachel Carson's critics depicted her as hysterical, mystical, and witchy.

Early 20th century intellectual W.E.B. DuBois countered the then-popular idea that African-Americans could be scientifically proven to be inferior.

Ballet has been slow to accept African-American dancers in major companies, and those who make it tend to be offered limited roles.

The term “miscegenation” was coined in an 1864 pamphlet by an anonymous author.

Before American concepts of race took hold in the newly-acquired Louisiana, early 19th-century New Orleans had large population of free people of color.

Humans and mosquitoes share a surprising amount of genes and have similar hunger controls.

Science fiction isn’t limited to predicting tech developments: It’s more broadly concerned with imagining possible futures, or alternative presents.

Well-researched stories from The New Yorker, Pens and Needles, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.