Summer reads
A new collection of our most beach-friendly articles
One day a personalised diet—apps and algorithms telling you what to eat and what to avoid through devices implanted under the skin, as we set out in this imagined scenario for 2035—may be the answer to a long and healthy life. Happily for the gourmands among you, there are other ways.
You could try learning from a “Blue Zone”, as places with lots of centenarians are known. One is a community of Seventh-day Adventists in California. It must help that they frown on ultra-processed food. Just how bad is it for our bodies? You could think about your brain’s own nutritional needs, by understanding the emerging field of nutritional psychiatry. And if you hoped that counting calories was the solution, this story helps explain why the measure is so misleading.
Stephanie Studer
US digital editor
Expand your mind
What if everyone’s nutrition was personalised?
How the mass adoption of personalised nutrition is changing people’s health—and the food industry. An imagined scenario from 2035
What makes ultra-processed foods so bad for your health?
They are calorie-rich, nutrient-poor and hard to stop eating
Christian Californians may have a solution to America’s obesity
Lessons in longevity from Seventh-day Adventists
How food affects the mind, as well as the body
It turns out you are what you eat after all
Gentle distractions
1843 magazine | Death of the calorie
For more than a century we’ve counted on calories to tell us what will make us fat. Peter Wilson says it’s time to bury the world’s most misleading measure
How to eat to 100
Dan Buettner’s book explores America’s healthiest cuisines
A Belgian company wants to create woolly-mammoth burgers
DNA from extinct species is inspiring other business plans, too
Human diets are becoming less diverse, a new book warns
Dan Saladino tells delicious tales of rare foods and the people trying to save them
Our book guides
The five best books for understanding Silicon Valley’s history
Pentagon officials, hippies and whizzkids all feature
Our Paris bureau chief picks seven books to make sense of modern France
A readers’ guide to understanding the paradoxical country at the heart of Europe
Our former Moscow correspondent picks seven books on Russia
A readers’ guide to the mystery that is Vladimir Putin
Five essential books on football
An eclectic selection covering the beautiful game and why it matters
Dive into 1843
1843 magazine | Inside the European forest that geopolitics has turned into a graveyard
Belarus ferried thousands of migrants to the border of the European Union as a political stunt. Now they’re wandering in a cold, wet purgatory
1843 magazine | The Russian draft-dodgers who fled to Alaska in a dinghy
Sergei and Maksim eluded military sentries and braved a gale to avoid fighting in the war in Ukraine
1843 magazine | I don’t: my very modern marriage
Here comes the tax break, or why getting hitched should be about finance, not love
1843 magazine | Shoulda, woulda, coulda: why FOMO won’t let go of us
The pandemic suspended our fear of missing out. Did it also teach us how to handle it better?
1843 magazine | Oxford University’s other diversity crisis
Good luck trying to become a professor if you don’t have family money
Summer watching
Explainer
El Niño returns with a new ferocity
The combination of global warming and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) may be calamitous
Behind the data
What are Max Martin’s rules for songwriting?
Join us as we uncover the secret to the pop maestro’s success
Ask me anything
Chatbots will change how we use the internet
And they are challenging Google’s monopoly on search
Weird and wonderful
1843 magazine | Look who’s stalking: the black leopards of Gloucestershire
Frank Tunbridge has spent three decades trying to prove that big cats are prowling England’s green and pleasant land
Why everyone should eat more ugly seafood
In praise of the monstrous, abundant and delicious monkfish
1843 magazine | Hocus focus: how magicians made a fortune on Facebook
A group of illusionists got rich making addictive videos for social media. Did it cost them their souls?
1843 magazine | Billions of banknotes are missing. Why does nobody care?
Banks, gangsters and the strange resurgence of cash