Essay
Today’s Battle Over the Confederate Flag Has Nothing to Do With the Civil War
Popular Well Beyond the South, It Is Now a Modern Symbol of White Grievance and Nostalgia for Crumbling Hierarchies
Three years ago, Dylann Roof murdered nine people in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina and renewed a long-running debate about the meaning of the Confederate battle flag. …
Essay
Long Before It Was Groovy, LSD Was a Medicine and a Weapon
How the Positive Side of Psychedelic Drugs Got Lost in the Mayhem of the 1960s
In the fall of 1965, a 33-year-old father of three named Arthur King—a patient in the alcoholics ward at Baltimore’s Spring Grove Hospital—swallowed an LSD pill and lay back on …
Essay
LSD’s Long, Strange Comeback
The 1960s Counter Culture Soured America on Psychedelic Drugs. Now, They’re Returning to Our Laboratories (and Possibly Our Medicine Cabinets).
In March 2014, for the first time in over 40 years, a study of the therapeutic benefits of lysergic acid diethylamide—more commonly known as LSD—was published in a peer-reviewed medical …
Essay
How the Lowly Mosquito Helped America Win Independence
The Blood-Sucking Insect Has Played a Leading Role in the Rise and Fall of Empires Throughout History
In recent months, millions of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have been at work spreading the Zika virus in South and Central America. This summer, millions more, all capable of conveying the …