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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
In this excerpt from "Seven Rivers," historian Vanessa Taylor explores how Ancient Egyptian pharaohs harnessed the Nile River to build empires and secure their power.
How to look cool in post-war France in black and white photos.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
The universe is filled with unlikely events, but it is also full of ways to fool ourselves.
We don't learn from history because we can't learn from history.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
It's not just an odd quirk of numbers that makes it true, but a deep mathematical insight that dates all the way back to Pythagoras.
10 years ago, LIGO first began directly detecting gravitational waves. Now better than ever, it's revealing previously unreachable features.
Questions about our origins, biologically, chemically, and cosmically, are the most profound ones we can ask. Here are today's best answers.
Even when leaders know disruption is a smart long-term decision, the pain of transition can produce a titanic shambles. Just ask Kodak.
The fear of unleashing forces beyond control has haunted science for centuries.
The red planet, Mars, may once have been teeming with life, just as Earth is today. Finding "organics" on Mars, however, doesn't mean life.
In revolutionary Russia, a group of forward-thinking philosophers offered an alternative to both futurism and communism.
In “On Liberalism," Cass Sunstein argues that liberalism can only endure if we reclaim its core commitments and revive its spirit of freedom and hope for the future.
It's the origin of our entire observable Universe, but it's still not the very beginning of everything.
Here are three ways to do it better.
A dialogue with Angus Fletcher — author of the bestseller "Primal Intelligence" — exploring the unique engines of human progress.
JWST isn't the first telescope to peer into this factory of star-birth some 5500 light-years away, but its views are the most educational.
About six million years ago, the Mediterranean was sealed off from the Atlantic, and over centuries it ran dry. One megaflood reversed that.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.