Ross Andersen

With every passing day, it is harder to remember that Elon Musk was not always a political firebrand. The old Musk advocated for his business interests and professed to care deeply about climate change, but he largely stayed out of […]

Updated at 3:15 p.m. ET on February 28, 2025 Field research in Antarctica is an extended exercise in endurance. Grant approval alone can take more than a year, long enough to grow a beard like one of Ernest Shackleton’s shipwreck

Another billionaire space enthusiast could make his way into the Trump administration. Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post / Getty December 5, 2024, 5:32 PM ET Yesterday, President-Elect Donald Trump announced his nomination of Jared Isaacman, a 41-year-old entrepreneur, private

In the early months of 2023, the astronomer Željko Ivezić found himself taking part in a highly unusual negotiation. Ivezić is the 59-year-old director of the Vera Rubin Observatory, a $1 billion telescope that the United States has been developing

Lately, I’ve developed an unhealthy fixation on the presidential election. Maybe you have too. The New York Times needle hasn’t started twitching yet, but for weeks now, I’ve had this full-body fourth-quarter feeling, and an impulse to speculate endlessly about

Sunday was supposed to be one of the greatest days of Dwyane Wade’s life. Back in January, Pat Riley, the longtime president of the Miami Heat, announced the team’s plans to honor Wade with a statue, and now it was

At a gate topped by barbed wire just north of White Sands Missile Range, a miles-long line of vehicles formed before dawn on Saturday. Once or twice a year, the U.S. Army rolls this gate open so that ordinary citizens

To watch baseball or any other sport is to confront the fundamental unpredictability of the universe, its utter refusal to bend to your wishes, no matter how fervent. In recent years, some broadcasters have sought to soothe this existential uncertainty

Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the Far Future” is one of my favorite webpages from the internet’s pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010. “Certain events in the future of the universe can

For nearly five decades, Richard Dawkins has enjoyed a global fame rarely achieved by scientists. He has adapted his swaggering Oxbridge eloquence to a variety of media ecosystems. He began as an explainer of nature, a David Attenborough in print.