Daniel Engber

American Masters, an award-winning documentary series in its 39th season on PBS, promises to tell “compelling, unvarnished stories” about the nation’s most important cultural figures. The program’s most recent story, though—Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, about the cartoonist-author of […]

The lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins comes in many forms. Here is Donald Trump’s: A scientist in Wuhan walked outside to have lunch, maybe with a girlfriend or something. “That’s how it leaked out in my opinion, and I’ve never

In October 2020, Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email that maligned a colleague. A few days before, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, had, with two others, put

Mia is a teenage girl from Mexico who can read her mother’s mind. Akhil is a young man in New Jersey who is seeing things through other people’s eyes. And Lily parleys brain-to-brain with friends who are far away from

Germs are in the air again: Indicators indicate that the winter wave of flu and COVID is finally under way. Are you on the verge of getting sick? Am I? My 5-year-old does feel a little warm to me; his

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has some thoughts about Ozempic. According to the nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the government should not provide the drug for millions of Americans, but instead address obesity and diabetes by

Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services, is

For anyone who teaches at a business school, the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schroeder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations when they first went up, on a Saturday in early summer 2023. Schroeder teaches management and

Taken on its own, the number is astonishing. According to the CDC, as of August 2023, 40.3 percent of U.S. adults—some 100 million people—met the clinical definition for obesity. But this same estimate, which is based on National Health and

On a presidential-debate stage 17 years ago, a moderator posed what was then a kind of  gotcha question: “Do you believe in evolution?” he asked John McCain. The senator froze for a moment before delivering a “yes.” Then, after several