The Sunday Read: ‘Has the Amazon Reached Its ...

In his latest public health crusade, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, is asking why millions of Americans have been taking psychiatric drugs for far longer than ever intended. In the process, he’s highlighting an open secret in medicine: that doctors are better at sta ...  Show more

The writer Tom Junod has spent a career crafting profiles for men’s magazines like GQ and Esquire, often of famously complicated men like Norman Mailer, Kevin Spacey and Tony Curtis. But another man loomed behind Junod’s interest in these figures, informing his own sense of mascu ...  Show more

In this episode:00:45 Tree islands bring biodiversity benefits for oil-palm plantationGlobal demand for palm oil has resulted in huge expansion of the palm plantations needed to produce it, causing widespread tropical deforestation and species loss. To address this, researchers p ...  Show more

Brazil's president-elect, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is renewing calls to protect the Amazon and rein in the deforestation. Climate scientists are encouraged but so far there aren't a lot of specifics of how this might happen. NPR's Kirk Siegler traveled to a remote Amazonian res ...  Show more

The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest but this crucial carbon sink is facing increased deforestation. Land clearing for mining or agriculture has increased under Brazil's president Jair Bolsanaro. But the world needs the Amazon jungle to keep absorbing carbon if more ambit ...  Show more

It has taken him 40 years, but Omar Tello has turned a patch of exhausted farmland in Ecuador back into rainforest. One of his biggest challenges was repairing the soil. His land was so degraded he had to make enough new soil - from unwanted wood shavings and chicken manure - to ...  Show more