Issue 21

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.

In 1965, married American women did 34 hours of housework weekly. By 2010, that had fallen to 18 hours. The dishwasher wasn’t the only cause, but it certainly helped.

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.