Barbara Tuchman's March of Folly was published in the mid-1980s. She wrote about how Renaissance popes lost northern Europe to the Prote...

Silicon Valley got its name because of employee law that California inherited from Spain. In states back east, if you worked for a shoe cobb...

  I post all the time about politics, policy and stats that seem to describe our world because I have to live with the consequence of your v...

Abraham Lincoln rather famously grew a beard just before he was elected president, apparently inspired by an 11-year-old girl who suggested ...

Excuse the language but this is simply too good not to share. In 1980, Apple had gone public. This meant that Steve Jobs had more money but ...

Like many churches, the Castle Church of Wittenberg where Luther would nail his 95 theses had relics. More than 19,000 of them. The collecti...

The 15th amendment was ratified in February of 1870. It states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied...

The United States was founded at the expense of two great empires. Each paid dearly to address the debt America left them. After the 7-year ...

1% of household net worth is $1.3 trillion. Household net worth rose $19 trillion from 1Q to 4Q 2020. In the Spring of 2021, Biden is propos...

There was an American pediatrician named Dr. Walter J. Sackett Jr. who suggested that you ignore crying babies. He wrote a bestseller in 196...

The opening lines of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations are, "The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the grea...

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born 12 February 1809. Lincoln is still the only president to hold a patent, which is a delightfully...

The gap in wealth because of education is big and growing. In 1989, the average wealth of high school dropouts was 21% that of college grads...

A curious thing happened through the course of the 20th century: companies shifted their focus from making things to making money. This shif...

Forced to social distance by COVID, we're online in greater numbers and greater frequency than ever before. Beyond that, COVID strangely...

There is a big penalty for living in the past. Massachusetts was one of the first states to outlaw slavery, back in 1783. Washington and Cal...

I don’t know which came first: April Fool’s day or this being the opening day of baseball. In any case, fans from 30 different teams all bel...

In one of my earliest memories, I was sitting in a tree with my sister and neighbor Jeff, older kids I was apparently trying to impress. I s...

Between 1900 and 2000, life expectancy rose from 49 to 77 and the average workweek dropped from 53 to 37 hours. If retirement remained const...

These poor kids trying to get into UCs. It's not enough that the average GPAs for the kids they admit are over 4.0. The success of these...