Issue 24

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.