The End of Bananas? (The Guardian)
by Nina Lakhani, Alvin Chang, Rita Liu, and Andrew Witherspoon
A fungus once wiped out the world’s supply of bananas. It could happen again. And, as climate change brings unprecedented chaos to agriculture, it could happen to many more crops as well.
What it Takes to Stop Malaria (Knowable Magazine)
by Matthew Laurens
A ground-breaking vaccine against malaria is a massive win for global public health. That might make this the perfect time to double down on fighting the disease on all fronts.
What’s in a Name? (The Atlantic)
by Kathryn Hymes
Does your car have a name? What about your phone? Or your bedside lamp? Naming objects can change the way we relate to them, even down to how our brains encode them.
The Conspiracy Against Returning African Art (The New Yorker)
by Julian Lucas
European and US museums are beginning to return stolen African art. That’s something African countries urged them to do in the 1960s and 1970s, during a largely forgotten movement that European museums resisted aggressively (and successfully).
Orangutan Talk (Salon)
by Eric Schank
What are orangutans’ communication styles like? To answer that, it turns out, you need to know which orangutans you’re talking about—and how big their social worlds are.
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