A selection of the most illuminating music to come out of a dark year, handpicked by our staffers
Progressives’ message in the Senate runoffs could find traction in an unexpected place.
Out of an estimated 1,500 active volcanoes, about 50 erupt every year, spewing steam, ash, toxic gases, and lava.
The president is threatening to veto a military funding bill because it would rename 10 Army bases that honor Confederates.
The helmeted hornbill can’t procreate without a particular type of tree hole, so scientists are trying to build it artificial ones.
Christmas will look a little different this year, but everyone is still jonesing for a tree all their own.
The year 2020 shattered America’s shared reality.
Perpetual outsiders, Mormons spent 200 years assimilating to a certain national ideal—only to find their country in an identity crisis. What will the third century of the faith look like?
How does a country balance its values and its interests when it shares a border with China?
The company is operating at megascale, one writer argues.
United Airlines is betting on carbon removal as the key to climate-friendly air travel.
If phosphine is lurking in the planet’s atmosphere, the source could, just maybe, be alien life.
Three ways the outgoing president’s postelection fight changed the political landscape
Evermore, the singer’s second surprise folkie album of the year, sees the cringes-to-chills ratio move in the wrong direction.
A specious lawsuit against four swing states that was batted down by the Supreme Court was a victory for the man who filed it.
The architecture of the modern web poses grave threats to humanity. It’s not too late to save ourselves.
When we look back on 2020, will we see past all the things that didn’t happen?
More than most, four men shaped the oft-cited “strategic tensions” over the South China Sea.
Are the new online services that allow you to buy jeans or shampoo in installments—interest-free—too good to be true?
Like Jeff Sessions before him, the attorney general discovered that all that matters to Trump is personal loyalty, not ideology.
This spring, thousands of researchers paused their projects in order to study the deadly disease, COVID-izing their disciplines.
No spy novel has captured England—or the human capacity for duplicity—like John le Carré’s hunt for the mole.
He revealed more about the country’s ruling class than any political writer of his era.
In a time of rampant lies, a KFC-Lifetime rom-com is about as refreshingly blunt as you can get.
Young people are weathering the pandemic by posting photos of themselves in 17th-century plague-doctor outfits.
I know I sound naive, but this wasn’t like a “normal” affair.
A lack of data instills trial-court judges with enormous, largely unrestrained sentencing power.
If Jill Biden wants to flaunt her Ed.D., who are we to object?
And what it lost in the process
A few glimpses of the landscape of Virginia, and some of the animals and people calling it home