The Atlantic

Drive too fast along Red Lion Road, beside Philadelphia's Northeast Airport, and you will miss the low-rise cement building where the biotech company MedImmune has been quietly pumping out swine flu vaccine at about a million doses a week. Through the summer and fall, workers wearing protective gear that covered them from head to toe brewed up batches of live, genetically modified flu virus. Robots then injected tiny doses of virus-laden fluid into glass vials, which were mounted into nasal spritzers, labeled, and readied for shipment at the… more

Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer, the authors of the November 2009 story "Does the Vaccine Matter?", answer questions about H1N1 diagnosis and immunity. ... Original Article

In the summer of 2000, David Poor, a direct descendant of a founder of Standard & Poor's, flew me to his family's Nantucket home on a private jet.

The unincorporated community of Mountain Pass, California, has little to recommend it to tourists. A scraggly outcrop of rocks and Joshua trees alongside Route 15, it has no kitschy landmarks like the 134-foot-tall thermometer that nearby Baker, California, installed in the Mojave Desert, and no casinos like Las Vegas has an hour up the road. But behind a Band-Aid-colored industrial gate lies an attraction of sorts: a 55-acre open-pit mine created by a 21st-century gold rush, one result of the… more

But apart from the fact that they kicked up dust, not sea spray, in their wake—the men were pirates. Eliza Griswold, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Wideawake Field (2007), is working on a book about Christianity and Islam, ...

Desperate Somali women are flocking to the coast to marry pirates! This is perhaps the most outrageous claim of the past ten days, during which Somalia’s pirates have succeeded, more than any aid or news organization so far, in drawing the world’s attention to the plight of their country--the world’s longest running failed state.

SHANNON BROWNLEE: As somebody who was born and raised in Honolulu, and who went to the same school as our new president, I would imagine a lot of people in ...

Barack Obama has said we need a "Google for government." It's a nice line, but what does it mean? Federal agencies have been online since the mid-'90s. Obama's first crack at a Google-for-government law led to USAspending.gov, a budget tracker that looked like everything else the feds had put up on the Web--until I saw one geek-speak phrase on the home page, so small I almost missed it: API Documentation. To understand its significance, let me tell you how I got subway schedules on… more

Last year, in the town of Dera Ismail Khan, near South Waziristan, a Pakistani friend of mine joined a gang--a "peace force," he called it, but it sounded like a gang to me. The Taliban, flushed from Afghanistan into Pakistan's tribal areas, had begun to spread out of the tribal areas, and to terrorize residents and attack police stations in places like Dera Ismail Khan. Until gangs (or lashkars) like my friend's formed, not even the police dared to stand against the Taliban. Now, just a… more