Drain the swamp! It is an old cry. Swamps are badlands where malaria breeds, mists settle, tracks disappear, criminals lurk and bad things happen. Bog or mire, morass or swamp, even their names give wetlands a bad reputation. Unlike scary jungles, which have been successfully rebranded as magical and biodiverse rainforests, wetlands are for many people still stuck in a quagmire of disregard. That includes many policymakers, and even some environmentalists. Ahead of the climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, many delegates have championed the cause of conserving and restoring forests as a way to soak up carbon dioxide and fight climate…

LIKE many constructions, it started small. But now thousands of children with autism are making friends and learning social skills by playing a version of online building game Minecraft. Stuart Duncan got the idea through a popular blog he ran about his own experiences with autism as well as bringing up a son with autism. Other parents with autistic children started telling him that their kids were crazy about a game that let them explore a randomly generated wilderness. However, despite loving the game, many of the children were being bullied by other players. So, in 2013, Duncan, a web developer in…

A recent editorial in a leading medical journal urged Congress to make it a felony to publicly criticize Dr. Fauci. Encouraging his own deification, Dr. Fauci has declared that all those who questioned his pronouncements are “anti-science.” But who is Dr. Fauci really? In my new book, I show that Dr. Fauci has done little to earn the sobriquet  “America’s Doctor.” Instead, he has survived 50 years as the J. Edgar Hoover of public health by consistently prioritizing Big Pharma profits over the welfare of his countrymen, and through mercenary homage to the chemical and agricultural industry, the military industrial complex,…

Last winter, when vaccines were still incredibly scarce in the United States, Ashish Jha told The Atlantic that he was feeling optimistic about summer: By July 4, Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, expected enough people to be vaccinated that he could host a backyard barbecue. Indeed, Jha confirmed to me this week, he will be grilling burgers and hot dogs for friends this Fourth of July. He had predicted back in the winter that guests would still need to mask up indoors, but even that feels unnecessary now. “Fifteen, 20 vaccinated people inside my house, if it…

If you’ve made a personal commitment to saving energy and maintaining a greener earth, you might also consider the benefits of bringing some of those habits and practices into your local government office. The Greening Household Behaviour survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed that almost one in five households said they weren’t even aware of what recycling collection services were available in their area. That’s a pretty good indication that we can all do a better job of being environmentally friendly at home and at work. While there are plenty of global reasons for working toward a…