Engineering the disposable diaper - Works in Progress Magazine
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The Sigmoids Won't Save You
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The Invisible Landlord of Global Shipping
How Britain built a system where cargo-dependent nations pay rent forever. And why that system is finally cracking.
Why Spain has the world's greatest cities - Works in Progress Magazine
Why Spain has the world’s greatest cities
Emerich Juettner: The One Dollar Counterfeiter
In fiction as well as in real life, counterfeiters have always been portrayed as master forgers and artists who reproduced banknotes with as...
Asymmetry is all you need
What drives information markets, and why the transformer is unlike the telegraph, ticker, and terminal
Shall We Play a Game?
Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement.
The Secret History of Silk in Ancient China | TheCollector
Widely referred to as the queen of textiles in the ancient world, silk helped to transform ancient China in myriad ways.
The Donut Empire: Demythifying the USSR
How the Soviet Union inverted the logic of empire, and why it explains everything Russia does today.
The Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle upon Tyne - The Haunted Palace Blog
Newcastle upon Tyne is best known for its proud history of industry, its football club, and its vibrant nightlife. Many people who walk the busy streets of the Toon, are unfamiliar with its dark history: real life witch trials, public executions, and of course, the terrifying…
Language Birth
Since 1960, the world has lost hundreds of languages — and gained thousands.
Toki Pona has only 120 words. None of them change form, in any way, in any context. The grammar is nearly the bare minimum — specified word order, and a few particles to denote a predicate, a direct object, subordination, negation. Interpreting any utterance takes a lot of context clues, or a lot…
The Age of the Amplifier
As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.
The “Sour” History of Scurvy, the Disease That Decimated the World’s Greatest Navies
The bane of sailors for centuries, scurvy is a disease that has caused immense suffering, even to the present day.
The Celtic Curse: How a Bronze Age mutation became Ireland’s deadly inheritance
The genetic disorder that turns the body into an iron trap
Alan Lomax's Massive Music Archive Is Online: Features 20,000 Historic Blues & Folk Recordings
A huge treasure trove of songs and interviews recorded by the legendary folklorist Alan Lomax from the 1940s into the 1990s has been digitized and made available online for free listening.
They Came to Spy on America. They Stayed to Coach Little League.
In the wake of the Cold War, some Soviet bloc spies decided their fake American lives weren’t so bad.
How far back in time can you understand English?
An experiment in language change
The Greatest Double Agent Ever: How a Spanish Chicken Farmer Became the Most Important Double Agent in WWII
Juan Pujol García was one of the rare individuals whose participation in World War II made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire and earned him the Iron Cross. He gained that unlikely distinction in perhaps the riskiest of all roles in espionage, that of a double agent.
The Machine That Made China Rich
Thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video! Download unlimited stock media at one set price with Storyblocks: https://storyblocks.com/PrimalSpaceDid you...
Vigilantes at Dawn - Longreads
A forgotten deportation, a family archive, and the cost of belonging.
How Queen Nzinga Outsmarted the Portuguese Empire With a Human Throne | TheCollector
Learn about Queen Nzingha’s fierce leadership, her resistance against Portuguese colonization, and her legacy in African history.
The wonder of modern drywall
How gypsum changed construction
Hawaiian Pidgin: The History of a Creole Language | TheCollector
The grammatical features of the Creole language known as Hawaiian Pidgin tell us of a society built on the efforts of its multicultural workforce.
What We Get Wrong About Technology
Blade Runner (1982) is a magnificent film, but there’s something odd about it. The heroine, Rachael, seems to be a beautiful young woman. In reality, she’s a piece of technology — an organic robot …
The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated.
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The Birth of Espresso: The Story Behind the Coffee Shots That Fuel Modern Life
Espresso is neither bean nor roast. It is a method of pressurized coffee brewing that ensures speedy delivery, and it has birthed a whole culture.
Swaziland: The Last Autocratic Monarchy in the World | TheCollector
With a history of expansion, struggle, and scandal, Eswatini’s monarchy continues to make headlines.
How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device? - Slashdot
Sixty years after a team of American and Indian climbers abandoned a plutonium-powered generator on the slopes of Nanda Devi, one of the world's most forbidding Himalayan peaks, the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge that the mission ever happened. The device, a…
The strangest letter of the alphabet
The rise and fall of yogh
How Did These 5 Ancient Languages Have Such a Historical Impact?
According to scientists, written languages appeared some 5,500 years ago. And from these myriads of ancient tongues, these five produced the biggest impact.
The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day
Strap Rail
The early history of the United States runs along with the first years of the railroad.
The 5 Most Significant Non-Abrahamic World Religions and Philosophies | TheCollector
Read on and discover five non-Abrahamic World Religions to better understand yourself and the world you live in.
The Strange History of Why North Is Always Up | TheCollector
South-up maps are challenging traditional views of the Earth—and the political and cultural beliefs that go with them.
Why Real Biblical Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly Angelic
Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe in angels, at least according to a statistic often cited in recent years. But what, exactly, comes to their minds — or those of any other believers around the world — when they imagine one?
Miller–Urey experiment - Wikipedia
The "Critical Minerals" Crisis of 100 Years Ago
I review a fascinating dissertation on interwar metals trading and the "Age of Alloy Steel"
How the Spice Trade Redrew the World Map | TheCollector
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the desire to expand and control the spice trade was one of the driving forces behind the Age of Exploration.
How Underwater Shells Became the First Global Money | TheCollector
How did underwater shells from the Maldives become an instrumental form of currency in the Transatlantic Slave Trade?
The thousand-year story of how the fork crossed Europe, and onto your plate today
From scandal to staple: how the fork travelled from Byzantium to Lithuania, helped by Queen Bona Sforza and centuries of changing table manners.
‘Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like’: The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof gang
In the 1970s, the radical leftwing German terrorist organisation may have spread fear through public acts of violence – but its inner workings were characterised by vanity and incompetence
How Byzantium Beat the Vandals at the Battle of Ad Decimum
The Battle of Ad Decimum in 533 CE marked Byzantium’s victorious return to Africa, defeating the Vandals and restoring Roman rule in Carthage.
Why Is Moscow So Weird?
Why so far north? So cold? Why not on a big river or a coast? Why the biggest city in Europe? Why the capital of the biggest country on Earth?
The Colorful, Scandalous, True History of the Machine That Created American Pop
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The jukebox got its start earlier than you might think, but it truly became iconic when rock 'n' roll took over in the 1950s
Liberté, égalité, radioactivité
France built forty nuclear reactors in a decade. Here's what the world can learn from it.
Features - How to Build a Medieval Castle - Archaeology Magazine - September/October 2025
Why are archaeologists constructing a thirteenth-century fortress in the forests of France?
Why Knights Fought Snails in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts
The snail may leave a trail of slime behind him, but a little slime will do a man no harm... whilst if you dance with dragons, you must expect to burn. - George R. R. Martin, The Mystery Knight As any Game of Thrones fan knows, being a knight has its downsides.
What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker
Hans Luther was the principled and respected president of the Reichsbank—but he wouldn’t accede to Hitler’s demands.
TheCollector
The Mongols are known for their brutality when it came to warfare. But just how brutal were they?
Order of Operations in a Regime Change
A review of Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, by Vladislav Zubok
The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen
From a dying adviser to a clumsy editorial, the Revolution was a cascade of accidents and oversights.