Well-researched stories from Longreads, the New York Times, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

The archerfish has an unusual skill: it spits water directly at its prey, knocking the bugs out of the sky. But how?

Before current foster care programs were in place, Americans depended on farmers to take care of kids in exchange for hard labor.

Some animals use chemical camouflage, even altering the way they smell in order to avoid predation.

When plastics were first invented, they seemed to promise a utopian future.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Irish women, who had traditionally only spun flax into thread, took over the traditionally male job of weaving linen as well.

Perhaps, instead of thinking of burnout as a disease to be dealt with at the individual level, we might collectively address it as a social problem.

The famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously loathed commercialism, and yet he (reluctantly) designed commercial homewares to be mass produced.

What is artificial photosynthesis, how does it work, and why would we need it?

Blake’s works offer an alternative to the failures of the Enlightenment, which couldn’t muster a consistent argument for abolition.