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A four-year-old who says "I goed outside" has never heard anyone say goed. She invented it, by applying a rule nobody taught her, and in that small mistake lies one of the deepe…
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In 1545, the story goes, an Andean herder chasing a stray llama up a bare mountain found silver showing through the ground. Within a generation the mountain, Potosí, had a city …
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A thirteenth-century student in Paris who wanted to understand Aristotle would probably read him alongside the commentaries of a Muslim judge from Cordoba, and if that student f…
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Nobody is in charge of the world. There is no global police force to call when one country invades another, no court that can make a superpower show up, and no parliament that w…
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Somewhere under the plains of Pakistan and northwest India lie the drains of cities as old as the pyramids of Giza, built by people whose writing nobody can read. Four thousand …
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How do you govern a hundred million people with a few tens of thousands of officials, no telegraph and roads that turned to mud every spring? Chinese emperors managed it, on and…
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In the late 1930s, a federal appraiser could shade a city neighborhood red on a map. Today, on a summer afternoon, many of those same streets are measurably hotter than the ones…
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Somewhere just below your ribs, two filters the size of your fists are screening the watery part of your blood dozens of times a day and handing back almost everything they catc…
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Finland has topped the world's happiness rankings year after year, yet few people would call Finns famous for beaming at strangers. That small puzzle opens a large one. "Happy" …
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Every time someone calls a politician left wing or right wing, they are describing where a group of deputies happened to sit in a crowded hall at Versailles in the summer of 178…
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Most of the energy you are using to read this sentence probably came from three grasses. Rice, wheat and maize were once scrappy wild plants, and the way people tamed them, grew…
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Some of the cavalrymen who rode to war in August 1914 still carried lances. Four years later the survivors were ducking aircraft, tanks and drifting clouds of gas. In between, a…
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In 1989 a man who had once been sentenced to death in Texas walked out of prison, helped along by a film that restaged the murder he was convicted of over and over, each time th…
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The world has never burned more coal than it does now, and it has never built solar panels faster. Both facts are true at once, and the tension between them is the story of ener…
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Give two groups of students the same passage. One group rereads it and walks out feeling ready; the other closes the book, struggles to recall what it said, and walks out feelin…
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On the island of Guam, a snake that probably slipped ashore in military cargo helped turn quiet forests into tangles of spider webs. It ate the birds, and the birds had been eat…
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An economist once sent engineers to drill core samples out of newly built village roads in Indonesia. The asphalt told a story no official report would: about a quarter of the m…
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In 1959 the vice president of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union stood in a model kitchen in Moscow and argued, on camera, about washing machines. It sounds li…
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In 1960 a Black citizen of Mississippi who tried to register to vote could lose a job, a home or a life, and the law offered almost no help. A decade later Black Mississippians …
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Table salt is made from a soft metal that bursts into flame in water and a green gas that was used as a weapon in the First World War. Bonded together, they turn into something …
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In 1951 a hospital kept a few cells from a dying woman's tumor without asking her. Their descendants are still growing in laboratories around the world, and they helped build th…
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On the night of 3 December 2024, South Korean lawmakers climbed over fences to reach their own parliament, because the president had just declared martial law and soldiers were …
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In February 2003, as the United States made its case at the United Nations for invading Iraq, a woven copy of Picasso's Guernica hanging near the press area was covered with a b…
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In 1906 a young man from the Congo named Ota Benga was put on show in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo, and visitors were told he was a missing link. Less than a century later,…
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