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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
Ignoring the legacy of William Shakespeare is difficult for any writer, let alone one as quintessentially English as "Lord of the Rings" author J.R.R. Tolkien.
The separation of pleasure from procreation may occur throughout the cosmos, providing an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
A Harvard astronomer went to the bottom of the ocean, claiming he recovered alien technology. But what does the science actually indicate?
The path of a curling stone on ice — and how it can be influenced — is a revealing metaphor for life's decisions.
The outrage machine is fueled by toxicity. But there are practical steps that we can take to recapture control over our emotions.
Will we ever unravel the mystery of consciousness? Two academics made a 25-year bet on it. The scientist lost.
Get ready for the most peculiar road trip that will help you understand the vastness and emptiness of the solar system — and Sweden.
No, Gandhi did not single-handedly bring about Indian independence. Pacifism alone usually gets you killed.
The biggest nuclear blast in history came courtesy of Tsar Bomba. We could make something at least 100 times more powerful.
When done right, dark humor can help us face inconvenient truths and question stifling social conventions.
But it's still challenging to build a 22,000-mile elevator.
Roosevelt had become president but not in the way he wanted. Still, he understood that he had been given the rare opportunity to make history.
Headlines have blared that quasar ticking confirms that time passed more slowly in the early Universe. That's not how any of this works.
Perhaps there was something theatrically satisfying about a learned man waving around a flask of pee, looking at it from all angles, sniffing it, and making bold proclamations.
If you want to write and speak well, use common words, not grandiose ones. Unless you're Shakespeare, you're more likely to annoy people.
Math can explain why your laces spontaneously come untied — and how to stop it.
Functional complex systems arise from functional simple systems. Failing to heed this advice can and will lead to disaster.
For thousands of years, we puzzled at how far away the Moon was. Today we know its distance, at any time, to within millimeters.