Distillations magazine

Arsenic cycles through racism and empire in the Americas.

Is it right to publish research from an unrepentant murderer?

Desperate women, mistreated by the 19th century’s medical establishment, risked black-market remedies and the wrath of Anthony Comstock’s moralizing thugs.

Segregated lives of privilege, pride, and peril on Firestone’s Liberian plantations.

Often dismissed as a “trash fish,” the porgy anchors black maritime culture.

Can a new look unlock a new life?

Essential oils have long straddled the lines between magic, medicine, and scam.

Modern agricultural practices are unsustainable. Is tree farming the answer?

The Bronx Zoo’s strange obsession with an even stranger bird.

How the investigation into a grisly murder shocked 19th-century France and framed the scientist as an accomplice.

The gas mask’s grip on our collective consciousness.

How popular narratives of the atomic age obscure the bomb’s first victims.

Pyro enthusiasts converge on Lake Havasu City, Arizona, for an annual event known as the Western Winter Blast.

A promising young man from a politically marked family navigates China’s era of Maoist upheaval.

Seduced by a racist idea, archaeologists hyped an outrageous hoax.

Seventy years ago, a group of Philadelphia scientists and a brave 18-year-old pushed surgery to its final frontier.

How did a field meant to reclaim genetics from Nazi abuses wind up a haven for race science?