You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus by James Hamblin - Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain…

Out of the wild by David Quammen - Where will the next pandemic come from?

How Plagues Really Work by Wendy Orent - The next pandemic will erupt, not from the jungle, but from the disease factories of hospitals, refugee camps and cities

Nature’s Bioterrorist by Michael Specter - Is there any way to prevent a deadly avian-flu pandemic?

Darwin’s Surprise by Michael Specter - Why are evolutionary biologists bringing back extinct deadly viruses?

What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism by Lindy West - Guess what? You’re a feminist

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay - If I am, indeed, a feminist, I am a rather bad one

The Women’s Movement by Joan Didion - The half-truths, repeated, authenticated themselves. The bitter fancies assumed their own logic

Lift And Separate by Ariel Levy - Why is feminism still so divisive?

What the Hell Am I (and Who the Hell Cares)? by Neko Case - Don’t Peggy Olsen me motherfuckers

No Offense by Jia Tolentino - The offense is supposed to go somewhere and do something. Of course, in practice, that’s not what happens at all

Civic Memory, Feminist Future by Lidia Yuknavitch - A personal and political history 

As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes by Jenny Turner - So long as she works hard and doesn’t throw bricks or ask awkward questions, she can have as many qualifications and abortions and pairs of shoes as she likes 

Feminism and Abortion by Martha Bayles - Why pro-choice arguments reflect the ambitions, hypocrisies, and contradictions of contemporary feminism

Trickle-Down Feminism by Sarah Jaffe - While we all worry about the glass ceiling, there are millions of women standing in the basement—and the basement is flooding

James Baldwin - One of the greatest essayists of all time

Zadie Smith - Amazing reads by a great essayist/novelist

Malcolm Gladwell - Fascinating psychology and more

Roxane Gay - Incisive analysis from a leading voice

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Hard-hitting, stand-out journalism 

John McWhorter - Amazing articles about language and race

Toni Morrison - Essential essays by an outstanding novelist

Kiese Laymon - Deeply personal writing from a great talent

(Click through to read some of their best work, all free online!)

What Is Everything Made Of? by Charles Sebens - To answer whether the fundamental building blocks of reality are particles, fields or both means thinking beyond physics 

What If Everything We Know about Dark Matter Is Wrong? by Katia Moskovitch - It’s the biggest puzzle in science: we see only five per cent of all matter. This is the epic tale of the unending hunt for dark matter

Gravitational Waves Exist by Nicola Twilley - The inside story of how scientists finally found them

Chasing the Higgs by Dennis Overbye - It was the longest, most costly manhunt in science. For an elusive particle that was said to be key to the workings of the universe… 

A Theory of Consciousness Can Help Build a Theory of Everything by George Musser - Neuroscience is weighing in on physics’ biggest questions

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition by Daniel Markovits - Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable. Maybe there’s a way out…

Why Does It Feel Like Everyone Has More Money Than You? by Jen Doll - Financial help from parents comes in many forms, and it’s the basis of so many success stories. So why do millennials act like it doesn’t exist? Jen Doll examines the myth—and tyranny—of the “self-made” success story…

The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman by Jia Tolentino - How we became suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization…

The Radical Implications of Luck in Life by David Roberts - Acknowledging the role of luck is the secular equivalent of religious awakening

When Are You Really an Adult? by Julie Beck - In an age when the line between childhood and adulthood is blurrier than ever, what is it that makes people grown up?

No One ‘Has It All,’ Because 'Having It All’ Doesn’t Exist by Lindy West - Look at me, “eating” my “cake”! And that “other” “cake” too!

Learn How to Trust Your Future Self by Jeff Wise - Being a human is hard. We know the sorts of choices we ought to make, and we earnestly intend to make them, but when the time comes, we don’t…

Take the Easy Route by Jeff Wise - Change is hard. Everybody knows that…

Personal Best by Atul Gawande - Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?

How Life (and Death) Spring From Disorder by Philip Ball - What’s the difference between physics and biology?

The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman by Jia Tolentino - How we became suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization…

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain by Leslie Jamison - The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars

The Female Body by Margaret Atwood - The Female Body has many uses…

No One ‘Has It All,’ Because 'Having It All’ Doesn’t Exist by Lindy West - Look at me, “eating” my “cake”! And that “other” “cake” too!

How to Shake Hands with a Woman by Lindy West - What’s next – dogs on their hind legs wearing pith helmets and taking all the best gentleman explorer jobs!?

Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet by Amanda Hess - We have been thinking about Internet harassment all wrong..

Why Women Smile by Amy Cunningham - Despite all the work women have done to get and maintain full legal control of our bodies, not to mention our destinies, we still don’t seem to be fully in charge of a couple of small muscle groups in our faces

A Thin Line between Mother and Daughter by Jennifer Egan - It can be eerie, in light of our presumed uniqueness, to discover how closely the experiences of one’s contemporaries parallel one’s own…

Pause by Mary Ruefle - I wanted to die. Literally, to kill myself – with an iron, a steaming hot turned-on iron. This was not depression, this was menopause

What Do Women Want? by Daniel Bergner - How cutting-edge research is helping to unravel the many complexities of female desire

The Invisible Barriers to Women in Science by Meghan Sullivan - If we hire a smaller fraction of women as professors than there are women with PhDs we have basically thrown away talent 

What It Takes to Be a Trial Lawyer If You’re Not a Man by Lara Bazelon - In more than a decade of arguing cases in court, I’ve witnessed the stubborn cultural biases female attorneys must navigate to simply do their jobs 

On Being a Woman Writer by Lidia Yuknavitch - A very smart man tells me the thing I have written is too much about my self. Too much “I.” Could I please write something else? Differently? 

Maid to Order by Barbara Ehrenreich - The politics of other women’s work

Work Sucks by Kassandra Vee - People don’t need any convincing to hate their jobs—their jobs do that for them

The Real Future of Work by Danny Vinik - Forget automation. The workplace is already cracking up in profound ways, and Washington is sorely behind on dealing with it.

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think by Arthur C. Brooks - Here’s how to make the most of it…

What Makes the Perfect Office? by Tim Harford - What if the ideal office isn’t the coolest or the most aesthetically visionary? 

Why Big Companies Squander Good Ideas by Tim Harford - Organisations from newspapers to oil majors to computing giants have persistently struggled to embrace new technological opportunities, or recognise new technological threats, even when the threats are mortal or the opportunities are golden…

A World Without Work by Derek Thompson - For centuries, experts have predicted that machines would make workers obsolete. That moment may finally be arriving. Could that be a good thing? 

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us? by Kevin Drum - Smart machines probably won’t kill us all—but they’ll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think

Your Fabulous Job Sucks by Clive Thompson - The studied hipness of new media is a fascinating and rather devious cultural illusion…

They’re Watching You at Work by Don Peck - What happens when Big Data meets human resources? The emerging practice of “people analytics” is already transforming how employers hire, fire, and promote

Phoning It In by Stanley Bing - She gave me this long and involved story about a huge slight that was inflicted on her operation by some other entity someplace, and I was looking out the window and thinking, whoa, look at that BMW Z8 

But is it Science? by Jim Baggott - There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit…

The Trouble With Scientists by Philip Ball - How one psychologist is tackling human biases in science…

The Hi-tech War on Science Fraud by Stephen Buranyi - The problem of fake data may go far deeper than scientists admit. Now a team of researchers has a controversial plan to root out the perpetrators…

Saving Science by Daniel Sarewitz - Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing. To save the enterprise, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world…

The Mistrust of Science by Atul Gawande - What it means to be a scientist in a time of increasing mistrust toward the scientific community…

The Unthinkable Has Happened by Jayson Greene - You learn to believe in your child’s existence. What happens when she’s killed by a piece of your daily environment?

Later Abortion by Missy Kurzweil - A love story

Death on Demand by Christopher de Bellaigue - Has euthanasia gone too far?

The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer by Alice Gregory - How do you live after unintentionally causing a death?

When Things Go Missing by Kathryn Schulz - Reflections on two seasons of loss