The Fix Archives

Could Managed Consumption Be a Better Form of Treatment for Alcoholism?

Managed alcohol programs, which provide homeless alcoholics with housing and small amounts of booze, may seem counterintuitive, but they fit squarely within a philosophy of addiction treatment known as harm reduction—and they're working.

Sasha Chapin

The Turtle Liberation in El Salvador

The Mangrove Association and its allies in El Salvador are showing that conservation works best if it has grassroots organizing behind it.

Jimmy Tobias

The Lucrative Art of Chicken Sexing

The poultry industry's secret weapon? Uniquely skilled workers who can identify a chick's gender in the blink of an eye.

James McWilliams

How to Undrain an Actual Swamp

Why big, boring bureaucracy is the best tool for restoring wetlands around the Bay Area.

Eric Simons

Breaking the Cycle of Poverty, Two Generations at a Time

New anti-poverty programs, focused on helping children and parents both, are succeeding where others have failed.

Dwyer Gunn

Nathan Myhrvold, founder and chief executive office of Intellectual Ventures and primary author of the Modernist Cuisine books, speaks onstage at The New York Times Food for Tomorrow Conference in 2015.

‘The Ultimate Patent Troll’

In the words of technology reporters.

Morgan Baskin & Jack Denton

Engineering the End of Malaria

Intellectual Ventures has put some of the profits from licensing patents into developing breakthrough health-care technologies that nobody else has been able to pursue.

Julian Smith

How to Improve the Primary Process? Make It Less Democratic.

It sounds counterintuitive—and would be a hard sell—but making the way the two major political parties nominate candidates less traditionally democratic could also make it more open to compromise and negotiation.

Seth Masket

Inside the Mind of America’s Favorite Gun Researcher

John Lott is a one-man pro-gun research machine whose work has been cited nearly 200 times by the National Rifle Association. The problem? Many of his peers have major misgivings about his methods.

Peter Moskowitz

This Native Tribe Is Reintroducing a Disappeared Species on Its Own Land

And the federal government can't do much about it.

Jimmy Tobias