Soccer emerged from chaotic folk games, elite school rivalries, and evolving rules that transformed a rough pastime into the beautiful game.
America’s first Gilded Age reveals how concentrated economic power erodes democracy and offers a warning as similar forces reemerge today.
Vague predictions and post hoc revisions help astrology feel meaningful, even while it fails empirical testing.
Banded mongooses highlight the deep link between cooperation and conflict in nature.
Tourism and environmental threats are shaping the fragile future of these iconic, surprisingly intelligent island predators.
As mental health diagnoses become more common and expansive, the labels meant to help us understand our suffering may instead oversimplify it.
Long before today’s debates, immigration was already transforming the American accent into something distinctively its own.
From Swedish playgrounds to American kitchens, how we design our spaces broadcasts our priorities and can help spark broader cultural shifts.
As SpaceX slashes launch costs, governments are gaining new capabilities, while potentially outsourcing their sovereignty to Musk’s private empire.
Jan Morris’s biographer confronts the limits of storytelling while trying to capture a life defined by contradiction and reinvention.
Your sense of self isn’t located in a single part of the brain — it emerges from a complex interplay of cognitive processes that change over time.
Germany built aggressive systems to combat hate speech, but the line between defending democracy and undermining it may be beginning to blur.
George Szpiro explores the philosophical ideas that explain why justice — not freedom or efficiency — may better anchor a fair society.
In this excerpt from her new book, Jennifer Shahade argues that the smartest move in life, as in chess, is sometimes a sideways one.
In this excerpt from The Wage Standard, Arindrajit Dube explains how “monopsony” gives some employers the power to set wages below competitive levels.
When America lost access to German dyes, the crisis revealed a startling truth: color was chemical, tactical, and essential to warfare.
Once land plants, seagrasses staged one of evolution’s boldest reversals — returning to the ocean and reinventing their biology to thrive beneath the waves.
Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman contends that our modern sense of altruism can be traced back to the radical shift in ethical thinking sparked by Jesus’ teachings.
By better understanding how the brain constructs pain, we may transform how we treat chronic suffering.
In this preview, the Stanford professor muses on how emergence, arriving at complex patterns from simple parts, explains AI, brains, and life itself.
A preview of the latest book by Chinese history expert Charlotte Brooks
A preview of the latest novel by the New York Times bestselling author.
In this excerpt from Separation of Powers, Cass Sunstein explains how the U.S. Constitution prevents such a concentration of authority from turning democracy into despotism.
In this excerpt from Wired on Wall Street, Tom Hardin (aka “Tipper X”) shares how he began gathering intelligence on insider trading for the FBI.
In this excerpt from The Laws of Thought, Tom Griffiths shares how George Boole developed a mathematical theory of logic.
In this excerpt from The Intimate Animal, Justin Garcia shows why curiosity and self-disclosure — not attraction alone — help build intimacy and sustain it over time.
In this excerpt from Think Like a Mathematician, Junaid Mubeen explains how tiny actions can shape complex systems, revealing the limits of prediction and control in our lives.
In this excerpt from How to Live a Meaningful Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans discuss how flow transforms ordinary moments into deeply human experiences.
In this excerpt from Flourish, Daniel Coyle shares how stillness, presence, and attention help people build meaningful connections.
Ernst Stromer discovered Spinosaurus in Egypt. His fossils were destroyed in WWII, yet still shape how we imagine this mysterious dinosaur today.