How selfish are our genes, anyway? (Aeon)
J Arvid Ågren
Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene gave the public a new way to understand evolution. Biologists have learned a lot since then, but the metaphor remains a powerful tool for helping us think about why life forms do what they do.

In search of the real Viking women (CrimeReads)
by Nancy Marie Brown
Maybe the gender divisions we attribute to medieval Scandinavians are at least partly a product of the Victorian scholars who began describing them.

The oceans are glowing (The New York Times)
by William J. Broad
Sea travelers have long known that parts of the deep ocean sometimes light up with a blue-green glow. Now scientists are using satellites to find masses of the luminescence, some the size of several states, and figure out why they appear and disappear.

The clever legal move behind the Texas abortion ban (The Atlantic)
by Mary Ziegler
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision not to act, Texas has effectively banned most abortions without technically criminalizing the procedure. The move to use civil courts in this way was a legal strategy decades in the making.

The new floods of the twenty-first century (The Conversation)
by Russ Schumacher
Hurricane Ida brought unprecedented torrential rainfall in the northeast, flooding New York subway stations and resulting in more than forty-five deaths. Welcome to the new reality of extratropical cyclones.

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