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Why the Renaissance Began in Italy
In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Italian peninsula was not a country. It was a quarrelsome collection of city-states, some ruled by merchant oligarchies, others by…
HISTORY
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How Bronze Forged the First Connected World
The Bronze Age did not begin with a war, a king, or an empire. It began with a mixture. Somewhere in the highlands of Anatolia or the Caucasus,…
ARTS
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Why “The Night Watch” Is Considered Rembrandt’s Greatest Masterpiece
In 1715, someone in Amsterdam’s city hall needed Rembrandt van Rijn’s enormous militia portrait to fit between two doors. The solution was simple and brutal: workers sliced off…
LITERATURE
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How Othello Became Shakespeare’s Definitive Tragedy of Jealousy
In the final act of Othello, a decorated general kills his innocent wife in their marriage bed, convinced beyond doubt that she has betrayed him. He has no…
PHILOSOPHY
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Why “Balance” Is the Most Misunderstood Word in Confucian Philosophy
Ask someone to describe the Confucian idea of zhongyong (中庸), often translated as the Doctrine of the Mean, and you will usually get some version of the same…
PSYCHOLOGY
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Why Rumors Travel Faster Than the Truth
In March 2018, a team of MIT researchers published one of the most detailed studies ever conducted on how information moves through a social network. They tracked roughly…
ECONOMICS
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Why Financial Crises Keep Coming Back
In September 2008, a Federal Reserve chairman with a doctorate in the Great Depression watched a crisis unfold that resembled, in eerie detail, the one he had spent…
SOCIETY
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How Democracy Was Born
In the summer of 508 BC, an Athenian aristocrat named Cleisthenes made a decision that should not have worked. Losing a political struggle against a rival backed by…
SCIENCE
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What Keeps the Heart Beating Without Ever Stopping to Rest?
Every other muscle in the human body eventually gives out. Run up a few flights of stairs and your legs will burn. Grip a pull-up bar too long…
TECHNOLOGY
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How Does a Browser Turn Code Into a Web Page?
Every time a web page appears on your screen, a browser has already made thousands of small decisions in a fraction of a second. It has read text,…
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What Is a Society, and Why Is It So Hard to Define?
A single person stranded on an island is not a society. Two strangers waiting at a bus stop, standing a few feet apart, are not a society either,…
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Why the Moon Always Shows Us the Same Face
For as long as humans have looked up at the night sky, they have seen the same lunar features: the same dark patches, the same pale highlands, the…
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Why We Can’t Keep a Secret to Ourselves
A friend tells you she is leaving her job. Nothing has been signed, nothing announced, and she has sworn you to silence. For a week, you manage. Then,…
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Why Prices Keep Rising: The Hidden Machinery Behind Inflation
A cup of coffee that cost a dollar a generation ago now costs three or four. A house that a young couple could once buy on a single…
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Why Human Memory Can’t Be Trusted
In 1984, a college student named Jennifer Thompson was raped in her North Carolina apartment. During the assault, she made a deliberate decision: she studied her attacker’s face,…
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Why Haven’t We Found Aliens? The Question Fermi Asked Over Lunch
In the summer of 1950, four physicists sat down to lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory and started talking about flying saucers, which were then a fixture of…
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The Night Boston Lost Half a Billion Dollars in Art
It was 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, and Boston was still recovering from a night of St. Patrick’s Day parties when two men in police uniforms rang…
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How Gabriel García Márquez Became the Master of Magical Realism
In 1967, a novel appeared in Buenos Aires that opened with a firing squad, a block of ice, and a colonel remembering both in the same breath. Within…
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Why Mesopotamia Became Humanity’s First Civilization
Roughly five thousand years ago, in a hot, flat stretch of land between two rivers, something happened that had never happened before. People who had spent generations living…
