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On the night a government fell in Petrograd, much of the city carried on as usual: trams ran, restaurants served dinner and the theaters stayed open. A few streets away, armed w…
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The architect who gave Istanbul its most famous skyline was born a Christian in a village in central Anatolia, levied for the sultan's service as a young man, converted, and tra…
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In 1254 a Flemish friar watched Christians, Muslims and Buddhists argue about God in a tent city on the Mongolian steppe, at the invitation of a grandson of Genghis Khan. A gene…
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For most of the last thousand years, Japan's emperors reigned without ruling. Regents governed through marriage, shoguns through armies, oligarchs through a constitution and gen…
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Picture a child born in Lagos, Hanoi or Algiers in 1945. That child is a colonial subject, ruled by officials no one local elected, from a capital thousands of miles away. Befor…
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In 1781 the crew of a British ship pushed more than a hundred chained Africans into the sea, and the lawsuit that followed was argued as a dispute about insurance. That one fact…
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Around 1157 BC the men who carved the royal tombs at Thebes put down their tools, walked to the temples on the west bank and sat down. Their grain was weeks late, they said, and…
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Somewhere in a data center right now, a chip colder than deep space is holding information in a state so delicate that a single stray photon could wreck it. Meanwhile, governmen…
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On a Sunday in October 1900, a Berlin experimenter dropped by a colleague's house and mentioned some awkward numbers about glowing ovens. By that evening Max Planck had a formul…
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Ask a room of physicists what really happens when an electron is measured and you will hear several answers, from people who all agree on the numbers. Quantum mechanics predicts…
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In 2015 a team at Delft spent about 220 hours collecting just 245 measurements on two electrons in labs more than a kilometer apart. Those few numbers helped close an argument t…
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Somewhere in northern Iraq, a king sat beside the body of his best friend for seven days and refused to let him be buried, until he could no longer pretend death had not happene…
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In 1920 the Czech writer Karel Čapek needed a name for the artificial laborers in his new play, and his brother Josef suggested one built from robota, an old word for forced lab…
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Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer, kept fighting in the jungle of a Philippine island until 1974, because no one he trusted had told him the war was over. In a sense …
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In 1521 a friar stood before the most powerful ruler in Europe and said he could not act against his conscience. Within a generation, Christians who prayed the same Lord's Praye…
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Around the age of twelve, an enslaved boy in Baltimore spent fifty cents on a battered schoolbook full of speeches and read it every chance he got. Frederick Douglass grew up to…
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Four places you visited, with the times you were there, are usually enough to pick you out of a crowd of a million and a half. Your phone shares far more than four. Meanwhile th…
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Every time your phone puts a blue dot on a map, it is quietly allowing for the fact that time runs faster on a satellite twenty thousand kilometers up than it does in your hand.…
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A dentist's numbing shot and the poison of a pufferfish do the same thing: they jam one tiny protein gate in the wall of a nerve cell. Your brain runs on billions of gates like …
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A spider once bought every story in the world from the sky god, paying with a python, a leopard, a swarm of hornets and a fairy, each caught by a trick. Akan tellers in Ghana st…
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Sing the first two notes of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and you have just doubled a frequency. Hum the "Amen" at the end of a hymn and you have played a cadence that composers …
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In 1772 a prince's orchestra, kept too long at his country palace, played a new symphony in which the musicians stopped one by one, snuffed their candles and walked out until tw…
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In 1939 a ship carrying more than 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany was turned away from Havana, then from Florida, then from Canada, and sailed back to Europe. Twelve years later, …
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In January 1077 the king of Germany stood barefoot in the snow outside an Italian castle for three days, waiting for a pope to forgive him. Two decades later knights from France…
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