‘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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Western countries used to let landowners build almost anything anywhere. Now, strict rules freeze the character of most neighborhoods, banning change and densification. Why? One theory is that modern ...

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 Irish mythology, a man forces his heavily pregnant wife, Macha, to race the King of Ulster’s horses on foot. She wins, gives birth to twins at the finish line, and then curses the warriors of ...

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 ...