Kafka has become such a cultural icon that even the most private, obscure, or fragmentary of his writings have reached huge audiences: diaries, letters, unpublished notes, mystifying aphorisms, or conversation slips he made while dying. Because so much of his…

Last month, at a gathering at New York University, a group of prominent biologists and philosophers widened the perimeter of a very exclusive club. They declared that there is “a realistic possibility” that insects, crustaceans and fish experience consciousness. This was an expansion of…

“I’m the great sage on top of the mountain,” Margaret Atwood says with a smile, on a video call from her home in Toronto. “If you’ve lived to a certain age people think you know something because they haven’t got there…

Bumblebee nests may be overheating, killing off broods and placing one of the Earth’s critical pollinators in decline as temperatures rise, new research has found. Around the world, many species of Bombus, or bumblebee, have suffered population declines due to…