Paradoxically, porcelain is both one of humankind’s oldest high technologies and one of its newest. The earliest proto-porcelain was created more than three thousand years ago, and was, for the time, ...

‘You just piss it oot,’ my friend Stuart Ritchie has always told me. In a politer register, other friends have expressed scepticism too. But for a long time, despite the wisdom of my smartest ...

Popular mythology holds that a tolerant and affirmative view of human sexuality prevailed in classical Antiquity until it was crushed by puritanical and repressive Christianity. I passively accepted ...

One of my joys in traveling to Brazil, which I did recently for the seventh time, is dining. In general, Latin America is the great underdiscovered frontier for top-tier food. Most of the region is ...

Dan Wang is a columnist for Works in Progress and the author of an annual letter at danwang.co ...

Tyler Cowen is an economist. Although Viktor Zhdanov's name is little known today, he spearheaded one of the greatest projects in history. Who was he and what did he do? Read more → ...

Charles C Mann is a correspondent for The Atlantic. Although Viktor Zhdanov's name is little known today, he spearheaded one of the greatest projects in history. Who was he and what did he do? Read ...

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

Ordinary yellow pineapples were once so precious they were rented for display at dinner parties, but centuries of innovation made them commonplace. In 2020, an odd food product hit the shelves of ...

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 ...

Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting ‘rationally’. But instead of building up a messier and messier picture of human behavior, we need a new model.