Unfulfilling Forty-one years before Maureen O’Connor dove into Pornhub’s user data for this issue’s cover story, Molly Haskell found herself in her local movie theater on 86th Street, two seats away from a man who was enthusiastically masturbating. Onscreen was an X-rated movie titled Inserts, which had made its way into conventional distribution channels. We’ve all read stories about the gradual mainstreaming of porn, but the early 1970s were really when it first happened: The explicit films Deep Throat and I Am Curious (Yellow) had survived legal challenges to their exhibition, and the old d

In a new book, University of North Carolina-Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks says that racism in science is alive and well. This stands in sharp contrast to creationist thinking, Marks says, which is, like racism, decidedly evident in our society but most certainly not welcome in science. In Is Science Racist?, Marks writes: "If you espouse creationist ideas in science, you are branded as an ideologue, as a close-minded pseudo-scientist who is unable to adopt a modern perspective, and who consequently has no place in the community of scholars. But if you espouse racist ideas in science,

This article is accompanied by an illustration by Eleanor Davis that is available at no charge to clients of The New York Times Op-Ed service. In 2011, Ben Trumble emerged from the Bolivian jungle with a backpack containing hundreds of vials of saliva. He had spent six weeks following indigenous men as they tramped through the wilderness, shooting arrows at wild pigs. The men belonged to the Tsimane people, who live as our ancestors did thousands of years ago — hunting, foraging and farming small plots of land. Trumble had asked the men to spit into vials a few times a day so that he could map