The cities they run function as vertically integrated conglomerates that benefit not just from the success of their local ...

Most Americans think of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue as problems that affect people in other countries, not their own. Until recently, they would have been largely ...

Over three thousand years ago, on a plain beside the Orontes River in Syria, two great armies clashed in what may at the time have been the most colossal battle ever seen: the Battle of Kadesh. The ...

At the beginning of the 1833 dry season, a monk named Mongkut set out for Sukhothai, the old capital of Siam. Long journeys by boat and on foot for study, teaching, and religious observance were ...

Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes. Fewer know how much faster it could be progressing. Medical innovation has transformed our lives, but hardly anyone realizes it.

In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away ...

Growing up, I acquired a vague idea that medieval people did not view childhood as we do. I was told they saw children merely as defective or incomplete adults, and that they did not love their ...

The AI buildout is bottlenecked by energy. But America has the electricity to power its data centers; the problem is getting it to them. One of the most expensive projects in history is under ...

In 1688, England swept away the encrusted vetocracy that had held back economic growth for centuries. Could we do the same today? Industrial modernity was invented in the English midlands around the ...

Just beyond central Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building one of the most ambitious and unusual housing developments in the world, and getting rich in the process. How they did it has lessons for ...

For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city. Cities are often centers of agglomeration ...