True laughter—not the strained, polite variant you find in offices, or the monotonous guffawing you hear on comedy podcasts, but real, involuntary, gasping laughter—is an escape from death, or at least the dread of it: you can think about death while laughing hysterically, can even, if you’re a sociopath, watch…

Of the many downsides to being a human being—as opposed to, say, a squirrel, or some kind of fantastically plumed bird—exercise is one of the more egregious. Awareness of mortality is bad enough—do we really have to jog, on top of that? Still, animals are like us in so many ways that it’s worth wondering whether they…

Unless there are some truly radical advances in catheter technology, having to pee and not being able to will remain a universal predicament, albeit one more acute for some (Amazon warehouse workers, for instance) than for others. Certainly it can feel, in the moment, like you’re doing real, irreversible damage to…

Certain Boomer basements are little shrines to obsolescence, untidy stockrooms of the one-time cutting-edge: VCRs, corded telephones, immense beige PC monitors, etc. Way fewer Millennials will have basements to store trash in (‘home ownership’ itself quickly verging on obsolete), but presumably, once climate change…

Is the 2004 Ashton Kutcher vehicle The Butterfly Effect a good movie? Definitely not, no—but try telling that to me at age thirteen. And then wrap your head, once more, around the fact that if you had told me that, you might have set in motion the utter annihilation of the human race—the whole notion of the butterfly…

Certain platforms might take down your homemade pornography, or censor your conspiracist podcast, but in the U.S. the internet is a fairly open place. As long as what you’re peddling isn’t actively illegal—or as long as you’re not peddling illegal wares too flagrantly—you’re free to set up shop elsewhere.

Memory’s ungovernable, a ceaseless shaming pain: you’re either scrambling to retrieve it (rooting around for keys, or the name of some acquaintance) or you’re scrambling away from it, wishing it wouldn’t toss up, for the seven hundredth time, this or that miserable incident (deaths, bad dates, awkward elevator talk,…

With de-extinction hovering on the edge of being a thing, it is worth asking at least one question. That question is not “why?” or “is this a good idea??”—if it can be done, it will be, and that’s that. No—the question is: which formerly extinct animals should we domesticate? The cat/dog paradigm has reigned for far…

Probably no more than ten people on Earth have a “favorite” texture, and these are almost certainly not people you would like to know. Conversely, pretty much everyone has a least-favorite texture. What do slugs, unsightly thigh boils, and disease-ridden swamps all have in common? They are all, of course, slimy. But…

One hundred degrees might seem hot, when you’re sweating through your shirt in July—but on a cosmic scale it barely registers. The Sun itself is over 15 million degrees; and in a hottest-object contest, the Sun wouldn’t even rank. Scientists, in fact, have produced temperatures many times that, right here on Earth (in…

Anyone who’s ever watched a nature documentary knows that the animal kingdom is rife with—is, in some sense, composed entirely of—sex fiends and perverts. They’ve got all kinds of genitalia out there in nature, and these are put to frequent, energetic use. Still, some species are surely less sex-crazed than…

The notion that we’re headed towards some kind of populational apocalypse—that there exists a line which, once crossed, will lead inexorably to mass starvation, and a whole planet like Penn Station at rush hour—has been used to stoke fear and sell books for more than a century. The discourse surrounding these concerns…

When brain chips break big, and commercial tech giants start sifting our thoughts and swapping cherished memories for subscription wine box ads, there will be plenty of reasons to be skeptical. But if this future is inevitable, we might as well dwell on the good stuff. New colors, for instance: for years we’ve been…

An asteroid slammed down and did away with all the dinosaurs, paving the way for such developments as the human race, capitalism, and posting on the internet: it’s the story we all know and love. Yet if things had shaken out differently—if the asteroid had stayed in its place, and the dinosaurs allowed to proceed with…

There might be some contrarian physiologist I’m neglecting here, but it does not feel controversial to say that, among people who study exercise, there is 100 percent consensus re: working out being good for you. Yet for those of us who have adjusted to feeling physically awful all the time, “good for you” might not…

It’ll be a fine day for Poland Spring, when Mars is finally colonized: bottled’s the only option, when you’re living on a planet whose last substantial traces of flowing liquid water disappeared a few billion years ago. That ancient water has occasioned much study and debate, and provided the name for at least one …

Some things never change. Dying terribly from bone cancer, for instance: that’s something humans have been doing from about the beginning of our time. Has it always been like this, or was there some blissful period, in our species’ salad days, in which no one perished from bone cancer? Which sickness has burdened…

We’re all familiar with the flashy, big-ticket organs: the heart, the brain, the lungs. Their celebrity often obscures the work—humbler, less heroic, but often no less essential to the maintenance of a life—performed by those organs only doctors know about: the body’s back-up players, pulsing and pumping in relative…

It’s difficult to change someone’s mind if they have anything like a strong opinion on the risks of vaccination, or the usefulness of orbs and essential oils in the treatment of late-stage liver cancer. But if you’re ever going to stand a chance of doing so, you’re going to need to wipe the rage-spittle off your face…

The world is trash. Even leaving aside the garbage of regular citizens—the many stadiums’ worth of shit and piss, plastic cups and pill bottles, scrapped cars and dead dogs dispensed of every day, every hour of every day—there is the world-withering, endlessly-accumulating waste of the industrial variety, which could…