history
In her 2020 book, “The Alchemy of Us,” Ainissa Ramirez explores how important material inventions shaped the course of human experience.
In America, Cup Noodles has succeeded by hiding its Japanese roots.
It’s that time of year when the hours of meticulous wrapping of Christmas toys are viciously undone in seconds by tiny children.
France is split in two by its very own “desert,” the Empty Diagonal. The area’s depopulation is fairly recent, and Paris is to blame.
Astrophysicists once believed in a static Universe, containing only the Milky Way galaxy. Science definitively proved otherwise.
Society incorrectly blamed a “population bomb” for problems that had other causes. A wrong diagnosis produces ineffective solutions.
For such a near-universal concept, the definition of “heroism” is difficult to pin down.
It’s all well and good to discuss how our humanity evolved – but what even is humanity?
Even without the greatest individual scientist of all, every one of his great scientific advances would still have occurred. Eventually.
Cities overstimulate our senses and are full of people we don’t know. Maybe humans were meant for this.
Today, every Homo species is extinct besides humans. But one of our close evolutionary relatives still lives on in our DNA.
When we try to recreate simpler versions of natural ecosystems, we invariably make mistakes, argues author and biologist Rob Dunn.
Far from acting as the conduits of a benevolent deity, these religious leaders threw the teachings of their own church out of the window.
Washington believed that particular Thanksgiving in 1789 was a crucial occasion.
The early colonists thought they were being pulled by God into a void left by plague.
Using DNA from samples of extinct flowers, synthetic biologists managed to approximate long-lost floral scents.
The insurmountable contrasts between their visions help explain Russia’s stunted development and hint at its destructive future.
The decades-long conflict is best understood not through secondhand accounts of historians, but the primary accounts of people who actually experienced it.
Although equal parts Hollywood blockbuster and Putinist propaganda, “Trotsky” still manages to capture the good, the bad, and the ugly of Russia’s revolutionary past.
Society-changing ideas form through a three-stage process, argues author Michael Bhaskar.
By taking Satan out of the religious context, storytellers explored the nature of sin in new ways.
From textiles and transportation to chemicals and microchips, a group of researchers proposes a new way to measure the impact of innovation.
Although many dinosaurs never left the ground, they still possessed the basic structural framework for flight.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.
According to literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s talents were on par with those of William Shakespeare.
Looking with lasers, researchers discovered that many Olmec and Mayan ruins seem to have been constructed from the same blueprint.
Discover the history of homemade sugar skulls, home altars, and fantastical spirit animals.
Growing up in the United States, I remember on Halloween my mother used to say, “Honey, this is not just a day for costumes and candy. You must also remember […]
There’s more to miracles than turning water into wine.