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Bryan Walsh

Bryan Walsh

Bloomberg

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The US is still a magnet for top foreign students — for now

For most of the 20th century, the center of gravity in science was anywhere but the US. On the eve of World War II, the great laboratories were in...

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Vox

Bryan Walsh

AI is resurrecting the voices of dead famous people

Before Franz Kafka died in 1924, he had a simple wish for his friend and literary executor Max Brod: burn all of Kafka’s unpublished writing and...

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Vox

Bryan Walsh

Your washing machine is actually a time machine

If Good News had a patron saint, it would be the Swedish professor of global health Hans Rosling. Rosling, who died in 2017, was a wizard at using...

10.11.2025 6

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Why peanut butter is back on the kids’ menu

If, like me, you’re a parent of a young child, there’s one thing you’ve come to fear above all else. (And no, it’s not “Golden” from KPop...

03.11.2025 5

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The Ozempic effect is finally showing up in obesity data

For years, obesity rates in the US have gone in one direction: up. From the first year it was launched, Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being...

01.11.2025 8

Vox

Bryan Walsh

How the US turned sports into one big casino

Sports betting has become so ubiquitous and so massive in the US that it can be difficult to remember that at the start of 2018, it was only legal in...

24.10.2025 1

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The traffic revolution that’s making cities cleaner — and happier

While walking my son to school a couple of weeks ago, I noticed something odd happening on Court Street, a major thoroughfare that runs through our...

18.10.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The world is producing more food crops than ever before

If you ever find yourself in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan, turn down Vesey Street toward North End Avenue. You’ll arrive at something...

11.10.2025 3

Vox

Bryan Walsh

2024 was a record-setting year for lifesaving vaccines

There’s a “paradox” at work in global health, as the philanthropist Bill Gates wrote last week. Even as funding for global health is declining,...

06.10.2025 6

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The age of endless AI slop is here

Really, it’s almost unfair to hold a tech company to its mission statement. From Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” to WeWork’s “Elevate the...

03.10.2025 3

Vox

Bryan Walsh

How America cut deadly city fires in half

My family lives in a heavily-trafficked part of Brooklyn, and most nights you’ll hear the occasional whine of fire engine sirens through our living...

28.09.2025 4

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The accessibility revolution hiding in your AirPods

As a person firmly ensconced in middle age — 57 percent of the way through life, to be precise, if government actuarial tables hold — I have begun...

21.09.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Is this the “sickest generation” in American history? Not even close.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the fractious debate over American health policy, you’ve probably heard this phrase: “the sickest...

13.09.2025 4

Vox

Bryan Walsh

How Ireland wrote the modern story of progress

One of my vacation habits is to take along a book about the place I’m visiting — which is how I found myself on Ireland’s spectacular Atlantic...

06.09.2025 4

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The decline of drinking, explained in one chart

Today, around 8,200 or so Americans will turn 21. Which means, of course, they will become eligible to engage in that time-honored habit of adulthood:...

16.08.2025 100

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Stop romanticizing the 1990s. The data shows today is better.

Let me introduce you to four of the most dangerous words in politics: “the good old days.” Humans have a demonstrated tendency to remember the...

12.08.2025 20

Vox

Bryan Walsh

We’re hardwired for negativity. That doesn’t mean we’re doomed to it.

Over the past week or so, the US economy took a major hit, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was no longer in the business of...

10.08.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The surprising reason fewer people are dying from extreme weather

From the wildfires that torched Los Angeles in January to the record-setting heat waves that cooked much of Europe in June, the first half of 2025 has...

02.08.2025 6

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Four stories that are more important than the Epstein Files

Over the past couple of weeks, one story has overshadowed every other, no matter how important they might be: Jeffrey Epstein.  Unless you’ve been...

26.07.2025 5

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The brain tech revolution is here — and it isn’t all Black Mirror

When you hear the word “neurotechnology,” you may picture Black Mirror headsets prying open the last private place we have — our own skulls —...

19.07.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

America is finally moving past its post-9/11 security theater

On Tuesday, the TSA — a federal agency not known for its generosity — gave American travelers a gift: They will no longer have to take off their...

12.07.2025 20

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Heart attacks aren’t as fatal as they used to be

A day before my 47th birthday last month, I took the subway to Manhattan’s Upper East Side for a coronary artery calcium scan (CAC). For those who...

05.07.2025 20

Vox

Bryan Walsh

How the largest digital camera ever made is revolutionizing our view of space

Last Thursday, I took my son to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s Museum of Natural History. In the Hayden Planetarium, we watched a...

28.06.2025 20

Vox

Bryan Walsh

5 reasons to be grateful for air conditioning

Lee Kuan Yew, the iron-willed founder of modern Singapore, was once asked what the most important invention of the 20th century was. He didn’t say...

21.06.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The stunning reversal of humanity’s oldest bias

Perhaps the oldest, most pernicious form of human bias is that of men toward women. It often started at the moment of birth. In ancient Athens, at a...

15.06.2025 20

Vox

Bryan Walsh

We’re secretly winning the war on cancer

On November 4, 2003, a doctor gave Jon Gluck some of the worst news imaginable: He had cancer — one that later tests would reveal as multiple...

07.06.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

These stories could change how you feel about AI

Here’s a selection of recent headlines about artificial intelligence, picked more or less at random: For some recent graduates, the AI job...

31.05.2025 60

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The US is squandering its two most important privileges

In 1965, then-French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came up with the “mot juste” for describing the way that the supremacy of the...

28.05.2025 40

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The case against summer

Close your eyes and think of the word “summer.” What comes to mind? Is it long days at the beach, a drink in one hand and a book in the other,...

26.05.2025 50

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Why we need a Memorial Day for civilian victims of war

The first observance of what came to be known as Memorial Day was on May 30, 1868, when a Civil War general called on Americans to commemorate the...

26.05.2025 40

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Something remarkable is happening with violent crime rates in the US

The astounding drop in violent crime that began in the 1990s and extended through the mid-2010s is one of the most important — and most...

24.05.2025 20

Vox

Bryan Walsh

How the US turned the tide on drug overdose deaths

In 2020 and 2021, before I came to Vox, I worked as the future correspondent at Axios — yes, that was the actual job title — and I found myself...

17.05.2025 40

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Americans are dying younger. 5 science-based tips could reverse the trend.

After more than a century of steady, upward climb, US life expectancy hit 78.9 years in 2015. Since then, it’s been mostly downhill. US life...

11.05.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The life-or-death case for self-driving cars

I have some bad news: You are almost certainly a worse driver than you think you are.  Humans drive distracted. They drive drowsy. They drive angry....

04.05.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

5 ways we’re making progress on climate change

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here! Any time I try to convince skeptical people that the world...

26.04.2025 30

Vox

Bryan Walsh

How commerce became our most powerful tool against global poverty

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here! Back in 2022, sunglasses-wearing U2 frontman and rock star...

12.04.2025 8

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The slow death of American science has already begun

In Ezra Klein and Derk Thompson’s new book Abundance — which maybe you’ve heard of — they tell the story of Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian...

09.04.2025 6

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Could an inexpensive vaccine help stave off dementia?

Anyone who has watched a loved one descend into the fog of dementia knows the tremendous toll that neurodegenerative diseases of aging can exact. ...

05.04.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The most important number in the world

I was an English major in college, and my favorite poet was the first-generation Romantic William Wordsworth. For one thing, there’s the name, the...

29.03.2025 5

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Zero-sum politics is destroying America. We can build a way out.

If you’re anything like me — a policy dork who spends too much time on X — you’ve been unable to escape discussion of a new book called...

22.03.2025 8

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The Covid pandemic was catastrophic. But don’t overlook what went right.

For most people, the Covid-19 pandemic, which officially began five years ago this month, marked their first encounter with case counts and N-95 masks...

15.03.2025 9

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Humanity isn’t asteroid-proof yet. But we’re getting closer.

In 2012, astronaut Ron Garan did an AMA on Reddit. In between questions about aliens (he didn’t see any in space) and where his coffee came from...

08.03.2025 6

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The AI revolution is here. Can we build a Good Robot?

There’s a thought experiment that has taken on almost mythic status among a certain group of technologists: If you build an artificial intelligence...

05.03.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

We’re all drawn to bad news. Here’s how to fight it.

Welcome to the first edition of Good News, the weekly newsletter dedicated to covering the remarkable, optimistic things happening all around us. Now,...

01.03.2025 4

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The AI that apparently wants Elon Musk to die

Here’s a very naive and idealistic account of how companies train their AI models: They want to create the most useful and powerful model possible,...

28.02.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

What’s behind Trump’s colonial dreams?

On Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump shocked the world with a proposal that was, even by his standards, totally out of the blue: that all...

06.02.2025 6

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The Doomsday Clock is running out of time

On Sunday afternoon, I went to the National Football Conference championship game at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. At one point early in...

29.01.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

There are no “acts of God” anymore

Why do disasters happen? The ancient Greeks had an all-purpose explanation, as I’ve been learning from my Greek myth-mad 7-year-old son: the gods....

22.01.2025 10

Vox

Bryan Walsh

Your brain is lying to you about the “good old days”

Vox reader Dov Stein asks: Why do people think the past was so much better when so many things have drastically improved? That’s an excellent...

15.01.2025 30

Vox

Bryan Walsh

The 14 predictions that came true in 2024 — and the 10 that didn’t

Making predictions is a tricky business, and here at Future Perfect, we don’t pretend to have a crystal ball. But we do think there’s real...

30.12.2024 3

Vox

Bryan Walsh