MSFT closed today at a market cap of $3.84 trillion. At Microsoft’s IPO (1986), Bill Gates ’ stake is commonly reported in the ~45–49% range...

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” - Trump to his top military leaders today. Put aside th...

Next month the Nobel Prizes will be announced. Trump has already warned the committee that if he doesn't get a Peace prize he will send ...

For my fellow nerds. Atlantic, 1776: British colonies were ~5,000–6,000 km from Britain. Crossings typically took 6 to 8 weeks (fast packets...

Excerpt from Will Storr's Selfie ... The self’s ingestion of culture can be tracked, in a startling form, in the brain of a growing baby...

"A trumped-up charge is a deliberately false or fraudulent accusation made with the intention of punishing someone unfairly or making t...

I love Jill Lepore. Here she talks about her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution and it is a conversation that at le...

All of these late-night comedians getting cancelled makes me wonder if at least a portion of the MAGA crowd will decide they don't want ...

John Adams’s letter to Josiah Quincy III, February 9, 1811. Adams pushes back against “reverence” for the founding generation: “I ought not ...

  Those Others, by Jim Moore We lived at the end of an empire. Sometimes we gathered in huge auditoriums and tried to un...

Time travel’s problem isn’t engineering; it’s non-disruption. We’ve allegedly cracked it three times, but each visit into the past edited aw...

Stephen Colbert has been cancelled. Jimmy Kimmel has been pulled off the air because of something he supposedly said about Charlie Kirk. Her...

It's not always easy to understand how someone else feels but here's something that might help those of you who lean off to the MAGA...

They couldn't tell if his last words were "Carpe diem," or "Carpet demons."   And the question of which haunted them...

Wealth is curious. To be in the top 1% for height, you need to be only 6'4". Median is 5'9". To be in the top 1% for wealt...

We have a tendency to romanticize the past, to gloss over its ridiculous problems. The historian Gordon Woods tells about life in the US in ...

The Greek and Roman gods animated the lives of Athens and Rome - visible in temples and statues, invoked in conversations, explanations, and...

Japan has set a new record of nearly 100,000 people who are 100 years old. The secret to their success seems to include diet (less sugar, sa...

One of the darker inventions of our gatekeeper-free media landscape is something now called stochastic terrorism. The phrase captures a dyna...

In the 1960s, acceptance of interfaith marriage (e.g., Catholic-Protestant, Christian-Jewish) was often in the teens or twenties. Today, mor...