Works in Progress

Alex Chalmers reviews Armies of Sand by Kenneth Pollack.

Taste is subjective. But when it comes to architecture, there is a surprising level of agreement.

The massively multiplayer online game was created in the 1980s.

We’ve invented microbes that can eat plastic, detect landmines, and extract rare metals. They’ve been swallowed by a black hole.

What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

People are right to want less police intrusion in their lives. The way to get there is more precision, not less.

Who benefits when we ask transit to pursue social goals?

What if instead of editing a gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?

Its royal family used a charm offensive where military power failed.

If it had a clear effect on children we would know by now.

Economic growth gives us cleaner air, healthier rivers, and safer workplaces. Happier animals could be next.

Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes. Fewer know how much faster it could be progressing.

Selective breeding has pushed horses to the limits of biology. But at what cost?

Modernity has meant fewer children in virtually every culture around the world. Holdouts like Orthodox Jews might have lessons for the rest of us.

Two Dutch brothers invented a system that transformed a city previously ravaged by fires

Continental drift is as fundamental to geology as natural selection is to biology. Why did it take us hundreds of years to discover it?

Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.

Large swaths of America’s cities were originally underwater. We stopped half a century ago, but there is plenty more land left to take.

The AI buildout is bottlenecked by energy. But America has the electricity to power its data centers; the problem is getting it to them.

Vaccinating wild animals can protect human health, and spare animals from extinction and suffering.

Rats have conquered nearly every place on earth where humans live. Only Alberta soldiers on.

Just beyond central Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building one of the most ambitious and unusual housing developments in the world, and getting rich in the process. How they did it has lessons for the whole world.

For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city.

Benjamin Spock told mothers in the mid-twentieth century to buy six dozen cloth diapers and a covered pail. Within a decade, both were obsolete.

Most ancient architectural traditions have withered, but one is enjoying a golden age: Hindu temple architecture.

Wheeled vehicles existed for 5,000 years before someone thought of running a bus service.

By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips.

Britain gave an elite group of engineers sweeping power and massive resources to deliver a nuclear power revolution. But their nuclear dreams crumbled.

Many countries want to copy Australia’s immigration rules. But its most-copied border policy is not the one that worked.

Japan’s railways are the finest in the world. Other countries can copy its formula.

Instant coffee seems unremarkable. It’s just powder and hot water. But making it work took decades.

Sports solved a problem that nearly killed television.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.

How a single unappetizing shrub became dozens of different vegetables.

Communism had reforming optimists too. Understanding why they failed can help today’s reformers to avoid the same fate.

Not all NIMBYs are alike. Dividing the most unreasonable ones from the rest might be the key to getting homes built.

The secrets to extending human lifespans might lie in the animals that can already live for centuries.

Many Victorian cities grew by tenfold in a century. Could ours ever do the same?

Clean drinking water is a modern miracle. But it has become expensive, and it doesn’t need to be.

Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective. It can turn a service people tolerate into one they’re happy to use.

The first vaccine was a lucky accident. Now we can design new vaccines in weeks, atom by atom.

It is often suggested that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from that of the ancients. This essay proposes an alternative.

Every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them. The rest of the world can learn from Korea’s catastrophe to avoid the same fate.

Competition makes capitalism work. A new method for measuring it may be the holy grail of economic regulation.

Quartz helped Japan’s watchmakers nearly drive Switzerland’s watch industry out of business. But the Swiss fought back.

Millions of years of evolution have given us genomes that are like giant datasets for drug development. Finally, we are learning how to study them.

English prose has become much easier to read. But shorter sentences had little to do with it.

If we ever want to live in space, we need to work out a way of creating artificial gravity.

The cities of the developing world could be its growth engine if their streets were not so gridlocked. The solution is laying out wider roads.

Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But replacing humans with AI is harder than it seems.

America’s food banks had a broken distribution system. University of Chicago economists fixed it.

The world is warming faster than we can cut emissions. Volcanoes are already cooling the planet, with particles that reflect sunlight. Maybe we can too.

Antibody therapies are four of the world’s ten best selling drugs. If they were cheaper, they could prevent millions of deaths from rabies, malaria, and dengue.

Science has forgotten that the greatest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who are able to take a fresh perspective.

Chinese dams will hold billions of people downstream to ransom. Could solar-powered desalination make them irrelevant?

Systems thinking promises to give us a toolkit to design complex systems that work from the ground up. It fails because it ignores an important fact: systems fight back.

France built 40 nuclear reactors in a decade. Here’s how they did it, and how the world can follow their lead today.

Japan faced some of the world’s toughest planning problems. It solved them by letting homeowners replan whole neighborhoods privately by supermajority vote.

Inflation targeting is now standard in central banking. But it began with an offhand comment and a political gamble in New Zealand – long before economists took it seriously.

Animal drugs are approved much faster than human drugs. Perhaps we could adopt the same model for humans without compromising on safety.

Lead has been all but eliminated in most of the developed world. Doing the same for the rest of the world might not be difficult.

Brain implants are letting people move, speak, and interact with machines using only their thoughts. The first FDA approvals may arrive within five years.

How a dubious theory of radiation damage based on fruit flies and a secretive weapons testing program came to be – and why its time may now be up.

Ordinary yellow pineapples were once so precious they were rented for display at dinner parties, but centuries of innovation made them commonplace.

Many women face a choice between career advancement or motherhood. But emerging fertility technologies could allow women to have it all.

The Hanseatic League united merchants to bargain with kings, blockade cities, and even win wars. But when technology changed, defections began and the coalition fell apart.

Life in the state of nature was less violent than you might think. Most of our ancestors avoided conflict. But this made them vulnerable to a few psychopaths.

Land value taxes are once again becoming a popular all-purpose solution to housing issues. But implementing them in early 1900s Britain destroyed the then-dominant Liberal Party.

China builds towers in a park, while America, and nearly everyone else, builds squat mid-rise blocks. The difference comes down to regulation, not culture.

Why do high-cost cities have more homelessness? It’s not just about rents — it’s also about the rooms friends and family can’t afford to share.

Madrid tripled the length of its metro system in just 12 years — faster and cheaper than almost any other city in the world. What can its expansion teach other cities?

When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?

What do cryogenics, butterfat tests, and genetic data have in common? They’re some of the reasons behind the world’s most productive dairy cows. Here’s how it all started.

Airports and cities may face delays and rising costs, but cruise ships keep breaking records. They show what can still be built.

Buildings are not just art – they are the places people live in, work in, and experience every day. True functionalism combines utility and beauty for the people who use it most.

Pour-over coffee has long been popular with coffee enthusiasts, but it frustrated coffee shops because it takes so long to make. That’s changing.

Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure.

How we calculate inflation has always been a subject of debate. Small changes that might seem trivial can lead to enormous changes in how well-off we think we are.

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.

Libraries contain books, yes. But they also contain latex rubber, carbon fiber fabrics, and graphene aerogel. And in some materials libraries you can cut, cast, drill, sand, scrape, and sculpt too.

Advance Market Commitments allow us to buy technology from the future to support its development: vaccines, carbon capture technology, and even spacecraft. Here’s how you can start your own.

Prediction markets are legal, contrary to popular belief. But they remain unpopular, because they lack key features that make markets attractive.

It has taken almost 60 years to bring traffic congestion pricing to New York. This is the story of how politicians and advocates built the coalition it needed to finally happen.

Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.

Inventing new materials is only the first step. Getting them into mass production and use is just as hard.

Britain had its fastest ever house price growth not in the 2020s but in the 1970s. Houses then were also getting smaller and worse. The problem was a lack of supply.

Gentrification can be a real problem for people it pushes out. But the root cause is inflexible housing supply, and solutions that don’t tackle that can make the problem worse.

Too few people donate their organs, dead or alive. How can we make it easier to donate, but avoid the abuses that some fear from cash payments?

I was deliberately infected with Zika to test a vaccine. Human challenge trials like my one could save millions of lives by developing prophylactics more quickly.

Homeowners are often the biggest opponents of building new homes. An Israeli reform reversed this by making homeowners the main beneficiaries of development.

We used to dig up roads to put trains underneath – cheaply. Ever-better tunnel boring machines have made the disruption this causes unnecessary.

Silk is stronger than steel or kevlar. We are already using it to transport vaccines without cold chains and make automatically dissolving stitches. What else could it be used for?

SGLT2, a protein in the kidney, takes glucose out of the urine and puts it in the blood. Blocking this reduces diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease – but we’re not exactly sure why.

Asbestos was a miracle material, virtually impervious to fire. But as we fixed city fires in other ways, we came to learn about its horrific downsides.

The earth’s core is hot. So hot, that if we drilled deep enough, we could power the world millions of times over with cheap, clean energy, supporting renewables when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. But getting there is tough.

Many scientific papers receive little attention initially but become highly cited years later. What groundbreaking discoveries might have already been made, and how can we uncover them faster?

War is hell. But by allowing more effective states to rule productive regions, it may have been a catalyst for Europe’s early modern advancement.

New Zealand passed the most ambitious upzoning reforms in the world. Now comes the backlash.

Cocktails aren’t what they used to be – and that’s a good thing. The search for fresher and more novel ingredients from ever further afield continues to revolutionize mixology for the better.

Unlike nearly all other arts, architecture is inherently public and shared. That means that buildings should be designed to be agreeable – easy to like – not to be unpopular works of genius.

Local government faces incentives just like everything else. If we want voters to encourage growth near them, we need to make it worth their while.

Today’s world requires vastly more copper than you could imagine, and the world of electric vehicles will require even more. That means finding new ways to find and extract copper from the earth.

Houston was notorious for its sprawl. But it has seen a gentle density revolution since the 1990s. Allowing neighborhoods to opt out of citywide reforms was crucial in its transformation.

Building a state is not a matter of copying first world institutions. It is a tough process of deals and compromises. 19th century Mexico is a good example.

The West has been below replacement fertility once before. Then came the Baby Boom. Understanding that boom may help us deal with today’s bust.

The history of attempts to reform planning in Britain is proof that political willpower is not enough: you need to be smart, not just brave.

Thomas Edison is often accused of not having invented the things he gets credit for. He did something even harder: he built the systems needed to get them to market.

Washington, DC, has avoided the worst price rises that have plagued many other growing American cities. Arlington’s transit-oriented development might be the reason.

Cheap, safe nuclear power is possible, but is all but prohibited in most Western countries. A regulatory sandbox for fission could shake us out of our regulatory sclerosis.

Ending acid rain was one of humanity’s greatest environmental successes. Here’s how it happened.

As climate change threatens crop yields, we need a second Green Revolution – one that, this time, is driven by genetic engineering.

We’ve learnt to see the world through the eyes of our prey. All the better to eat them with.

Building infrastructure doesn’t need to come at the cost of the environment. But it does need smarter rules.

Power outages force businesses across Africa to rely on expensive, dirty diesel generators. Price caps block improvement, but removing them isn’t easy.

We have learned to fear plutonium – one of the world’s most useful materials. But as long as you don’t eat it, you’re probably safe.

Plastic is eating the roads. It might be a cleaner, quieter, ready-made alternative to asphalt for the next generation of paving.

Exposing misinformation online is hard to do at scale and can veer into outright censorship. The wisdom of crowds can lead us to the answers.

International development was revolutionized by experiments and evaluations of its methods. Meta-science can learn from it.

Fire has almost disappeared as a cause of death in the developed world. A similar approach could do the same for infectious diseases.

Snakebites kill between 80,000 and 140,000 people every year. Better antivenom should be a high priority – thankfully new technology can help.

Though we tend to see history as just one political event after another, it’s technology and ideas, not politics, that change our lives the most. History should reflect that.

Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are forcing skeptics to eat their words. We should take its risks seriously too.

Scientific papers are dense, jargon-filled, and painful to read. It wasn’t always this way – and it doesn’t have to be.

The world’s first round-the-world solo yacht race was a thrilling and, for some, deadly contest. Its contestants’ efforts can teach us about the art of maintenance.

When America’s economy overtook Britain’s a century ago, it remade the world order. How it happened is still debated.

Outdated forms of peer review create bottlenecks that slow science. But in a world where research can now circulate rapidly on the Internet, we need to develop new ways to do science in public.

Until recently, roads were shared between a messy mix of cyclists, stagecoaches, carts, horses, and pedestrians, with no dominant user.

Bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacterial cells – were almost forgotten in the age of antibiotics. Now as bacterial resistance grows, they may return to help us in our hour of need.

History’s most famous innovation prize—the longitude rewards—is misunderstood. Innovation prizes are best at promoting refinements, not revolutions.

Gas heating is bad for the environment. But home-built heat pumps aren’t perfect either.

Polyester went from being the world’s most hated fabrics to one of its favorites. It’s so successful that many people don’t even realize they’re wearing polyester today.

Some think of advances in science and technology through the metaphor of low-hanging fruit: we “picked” the easy ones, and the rest will be very difficult.

Duels can be brutal and even lethal. But duels emerged in societies around the world for an important reason: to control and manage violence, not just to celebrate it.

Ireland’s housing bubble and bust has become emblematic of what not to do in housing debates around the world. The only problem is nobody agrees what actually went wrong.

The height of skyscrapers is limited by physical, economic and regulatory barriers, but we should want to overcome them and build taller. Here’s how we can do it.

Society has free-ridden on women for millennia, benefiting from the children they’ve had while bearing few of the costs. But as women have gained other options, birth rates have fallen.

Many modern buildings put up today seem uglier than traditional ones around them. Some say this is because we’ve torn down the ugly old buildings, and only see the survivors. Are they right?

Plagiarism is unforgivable in academia but it’s not plagiarism itself that should trouble us. It’s carelessness and a lack of originality.

Without new humans, growth will slow, and we will be less likely to reach the stars. But pro-natalism has been captured by a range of unsavory voices. There is an alternative.

Our success is based on scientific discovery, so it’s not surprising how much faith we put into it. But we now trust science so implicitly that our trust undermines the institution itself.

The kitchen of 2020 looks mostly the same as that of 1960. But what we do in it has changed dramatically, almost entirely for the better—due to a culture of culinary innovation.

How do technologies get off the ground? As well as seed funding, many of the best technologies require Buyers of First Resort, which buy products until they improve enough to get to efficient scale.

We have eradicated smallpox, cured many bacterial diseases, and invented a vaccine for Covid-19 within the year. But for a very long time we haven’t had a single good treatment for obesity.

Could an asteroid wipe out human civilisation like it may have eliminated the dinosaurs? Big asteroids come along extremely rarely and our monitoring systems are effective and well funded.

Covid-19 brought death, suffering and financial straits, so it was unsurprising that depression rose around the world. But when the data came in, we found suicide did not – and it’s a mystery why.

Everybody loves to hate Bitcoin. Yet big business is spending hundreds of millions on it, helping to drive the price higher and higher. It’s easy to dismiss that as a marketing fad.

Researchers have known for decades that lead poisoning damages brains and worsens crime, but millions of Americans still drink contaminated water every day. Here’s how we can fix that.

Is the popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe a sign of art in decline? It’s common for people to assert that film, art, music and literature are getting worse. This is why they’re wrong. 

Are technology and the environment friends or foes? In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss climate policy, activism and ecomodernism with Ted Nordhaus.

The conversation around science is full of ideas for reform, but how do we know which ones will be effective? To find out what works, we need to apply the scientific method to science itself.

Critics of scientific reform say that transparency comes at the cost of speed. What can disciplines learn from each other to break away from this crisis?

Protecting people’s health during the pandemic will increase debt, but the economic consensus is that we shouldn’t be concerned.

As rental prices continue to climb in San Francisco, tech firms have looked to relocate in other cities. Without major housing reforms, the next Silicon Valley will face the same fate.

Crises upend plans, force people to re-evaluate their priorities, and bring into focus new goals. Financial markets give us hints of what we can expect from the aftermath of Covid-19.

While rents have been soaring for years in urban areas around the world, one Australian city has weathered the storm. What can the world learn from the experiences of Sydney?

Bad incentives, muddled theory and no practical use. The condition of the social sciences has been blamed on a great variety of things; what’s really at fault and how do we know?

Building traditionalist architecture today is derided as inauthentic pastiche. But this perspective turns a blind eye to the dramatic and sophisticated ways that design has been applied throughout history.

Some of the greatest advances in technology have emerged from bringing intelligent people together to solve problems. How do tech clusters develop & how can we use them to replicate past successes?

Electrical interference has restricted what humans can observe with telescopes. To make leaps as a species, now’s the time for us to build a telescope on the far side of the moon.

Scientific research today is afflicted by poor reliability and low utility, despite the best efforts of individual researchers.

Many have argued that innovation develops in a simple linear fashion – from research to experimentation to engineering.

New technologies can be dangerous, threatening the very survival of humanity. Is economic growth inherently risky, and how do we maximize the chances of a flourishing future?

In spite of major technological progress, tech is often envisioned in the media with pessimism and dread.

Many low-income countries are unable to provide effective governance for their citizens, trapped in a cycle of slow growth and persistent corruption. Charter cities may provide an answer.

Polls show that the majority of Americans want to reduce their consumption of meat, but many struggle to do so.

Modern psychiatry appears to be at a standstill, wanting for better treatment and a substantive theoretical framework. Evolutionary theory has the potential to reinvigorate the field.

Throughout history, states struggled to maintain power, having to rely on private agents and enforcers to fund themselves and govern their citizens.

For a time in recent history, R&D labs seemed to exist in a golden age of innovation and productivity. But this period vanished as swiftly as it came to be.