Works in Progress RSS Feed

Why Japan has such good railways

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:36:00 GMT

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

A brief history of instant coffee

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

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

Microbubbles

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:54:15 GMT

It’s incredibly hard to deliver drugs to the right organ, especially to reach the brain. Tiny gas-filled spheres that burst on command could change that.

Escaping the Ogallala trap

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:23:23 GMT

There is a closing window to stop driverless cars from creating omnigridlock.

How the world’s first electric grid was built

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:36:44 GMT

In 1918, fifty systems supplied London’s electricity. Turning these into a grid required war, nationalization, and an act of engineering insubordination.

How TV learned to sell itself

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:51:33 GMT

Sports solved a problem that nearly killed television.

The market for marriage

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:31:00 GMT

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

Meet your greens

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:30:42 GMT

How a single unappetizing shrub became dozens of different vegetables.

Why Communist reforms nearly always failed

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:44:26 GMT

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

The NIMBY problem

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:29:32 GMT

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

Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 07:05:04 GMT

Europe’s cutting edge firms are falling far behind the American frontier because of restrictive labor laws.

The wonder of modern drywall

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:52:46 GMT

No person should get excited about a blank wall. But your wall at home is a reminder that most advancements are almost entirely invisible.

The dysfunctional tiger

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:23:04 GMT

Hong Kong has land to build on, an autocratic government, and the world’s most expensive housing. Why doesn’t it build more?

The perks of being a mole rat

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:44:09 GMT

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

Urban expansion in the age of liberalism

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 11:50:24 GMT

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

Fixing retail with land value capture

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:24:28 GMT

How to create beautiful shopping streets everywhere.

The gold plating of American water

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:06:29 GMT

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

Fermenting revolution

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 12:12:51 GMT

The scientific and technological battle against bad bread had a role in women’s liberation.

The United States needs fewer bus stops

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:12:53 GMT

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

Cheap ornament and status games

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:23:10 GMT

Was modernism originally a way to signal taste instead of wealth?

The value of technological progress

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 19:03:50 GMT

Evidence from the life of Matt Clancy.

The golden age of vaccine development

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:20:07 GMT

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

The Renaissance book that heralded growth

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:06:14 GMT

Long before modern science, Europeans learned to see their own time as an age of invention rather than decline.

Were classical statues painted horribly?

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:48:53 GMT

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.

The evolution of bacteria

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 12:57:38 GMT

Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia. By speeding up Darwin’s clock, scientists have watched evolution happen in real time, and it’s changed how we understand natural selection.

Two is already too many

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:58:05 GMT

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.

How to spot a monopoly

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:58:08 GMT

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

Watch men

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:46:50 GMT

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

Nature’s laboratory

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 13:43:08 GMT

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.

The triumph of logical English

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:04:31 GMT

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

The Great Downzoning

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:24:18 GMT

It was once legal to build almost anything, everywhere. Then, in the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?

Inflatable space stations

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 13:16:31 GMT

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

The three-thousand-year journey of colchicine

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:00:00 GMT

For centuries it was a poison. Then colchicine rewrote treatment for gout, heart disease, and later, the debate over drug exclusivity.

Washer woman

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 22:32:38 GMT

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 developing world needs more roads

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 17:08:32 GMT

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.

How Airbus took off

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:13:21 GMT

Airbus is an example of successful industrial policy and the rare European company that is better than its American rival. Could its success be copied elsewhere?

Turning trains into trams

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 12:18:20 GMT

Trains often stop at the edge of town centres, forcing inconvenient transfers. Running railway lines onto tram networks provides a solution.

How a Norwegian chemist defeated lead paint

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:45:02 GMT

Lead paint was banned in the late twentieth century. Before that, it was outcompeted by a cheap and safe alternative.

The merits of unified ownership

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 15:10:39 GMT

Why do some neighborhoods get garden squares and graceful streets, while others don’t? The answer isn’t zoning or taste, it’s who owns the land, and how unified that ownership is.

The beauty of batteries

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 20:38:29 GMT

Keeping the grid stable requires overbuilding generating capacity, driving up costs. Batteries fix that.

Toronto’s underground labyrinth

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 18:06:43 GMT

Pedestrian tunnels are often thought to undermine urban life. The opposite happened in Toronto.

The first non-opioid painkiller

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 14:57:59 GMT

For nearly two centuries, pain relief meant effective but addictive opioids. Scientists have finally made something better.

The algorithm will see you now

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:01:45 GMT

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

How market design can feed the poor

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 09:02:00 GMT

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

Sunscreen for the planet

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 10:36:38 GMT

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.

How to make an antibody

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 10:04:56 GMT

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.

Why science needs outsiders

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:55:22 GMT

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

The death rays that guard life

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:21:16 GMT

We disinfect water before we drink it. Germicidal ultraviolet could make airborne disease as rare as those carried by water.

Rivers are now battlefields

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:33:39 GMT

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

Magical systems thinking

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 09:34:28 GMT

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.

Liberté, égalité, radioactivité

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:56:01 GMT

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

How to redraw a city

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:15:50 GMT

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

The magic of through running

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:15:50 GMT

Commuter trains often stop at the edge of cities. Short tunnels can link them up, creating metro networks for a fraction of the cost of building them from scratch.

How one Kiwi tamed inflation

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:15:48 GMT

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.

The secret fast track for animal drugs

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:15:38 GMT

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

The end of lead

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:15:36 GMT

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-computer interfaces

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:15:33 GMT

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

The bad science behind expensive nuclear

Tue, 27 May 2025 13:00:35 GMT

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.

How to write for Works in Progress

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:16:20 GMT

We’re looking for new authors and article pitches.

King of fruits

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:30:00 GMT

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

Fertility on demand

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:30:00 GMT

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

The rise and fall of the Hanseatic League

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:30:00 GMT

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.

The prehistoric psychopath

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:30:00 GMT

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.

The failure of the land value tax

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:30:00 GMT

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.

Steam networks

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:26:45 GMT

New York’s skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that still warms the city. While the rest of the world moved to hot water, Manhattanites still buy steam by the megapound.

Chinese towers and American blocks

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:26:18 GMT

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 housing shortages cause homelessness

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 14:34:36 GMT

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.

How Madrid built its metro cheaply

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 12:45:58 GMT

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?

The world of tomorrow

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 12:42:40 GMT

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

Animals as chemical factories

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 11:29:45 GMT

Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives — but we need to find ways to scale them.

How big data created the modern dairy cow

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 10:53:34 GMT

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.

Progress unmoored

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 10:20:03 GMT

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

Machines for living in

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 05:39:00 GMT

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.

The ultra-selfish gene

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 11:37:12 GMT

We now have the power to genetically modify entire species by inserting certain genes into them with brute force. Doing this to malaria-carrying mosquitoes could allow us to wipe out humanity’s most deadly killer.

How pour-over coffee got good

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 10:38:31 GMT

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.

Lab-grown diamonds

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 16:00:00 GMT

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.

Where inflation comes from

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 16:00:00 GMT

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.

Doom scrolling

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 14:00:00 GMT

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 of matter

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 14:00:00 GMT

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.

How to start an advance market commitment

Fri, 31 May 2024 14:52:55 GMT

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.

Why prediction markets aren’t popular

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:00:29 GMT

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

New York’s long road to congestion pricing

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:00:22 GMT

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.

The beauty of concrete

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.

Getting materials out of the lab

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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

Britain’s forgotten financial crisis

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.

How the war on drunk driving was won

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:00:00 GMT

Deterrence alone might not stop crime. But, as the campaign against drunk driving shows, it could help create the norms that do.

Gentrification as a housing problem

Fri, 17 May 2024 09:00:00 GMT

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.

The road from serfdom

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:30:56 GMT

Unwinding Russian serfdom took half a century. To eventually do it in the face of powerful opposition took a remarkable approach that let peasants vote themselves into freedom.

Compensating compassion

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:30:52 GMT

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?

Life in the time of Zika

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:30:48 GMT

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.

How Israel turned homeowners into YIMBYs

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:30:44 GMT

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

Why we stopped building cut and cover

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:30:40 GMT

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

The future of silk

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:30:36 GMT

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?

The promise of SGLT2 inhibitors

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:30:32 GMT

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.

The asbestos times

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:18:37 GMT

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.

Watt lies beneath

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:18:31 GMT

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.

Waking up science’s sleeping beauties

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:18:27 GMT

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?

The entrepreneurial state

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:18:20 GMT

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.

How mathematics built the modern world

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:18:16 GMT

Mathematics was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry, modernity, and the world we inhabit today.

Upzoning New Zealand

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:18:10 GMT

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

The cocktail revolution

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 14:23:00 GMT

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.

Making architecture easy

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:05:35 GMT

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.

Growing the growth coalition

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:03:18 GMT

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.

The discovery of copper

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:03:06 GMT

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.

Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:02:51 GMT

Hundreds of thousands of people die from malaria each year, but it took 141 years to develop a vaccine for it. Advance market commitments could speed things up next time.

Houston, we have a solution

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:02:27 GMT

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.

How Mexico built a state

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:02:13 GMT

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.

Understanding the Baby Boom

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:01:31 GMT

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.

Why Britain doesn’t build

Tue, 23 May 2023 12:36:06 GMT

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, tinkerer

Tue, 23 May 2023 12:34:37 GMT

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.

How DC densified

Tue, 23 May 2023 12:34:12 GMT

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.

Olivine weathering

Tue, 23 May 2023 12:33:34 GMT

Olivine is a green mineral that reacts with CO2 in the ocean to form a harmless silt. This reaction might be the key to slowing down climate change, or reversing it altogether.

Taming the stars

Tue, 23 May 2023 12:33:15 GMT

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.

The end of acid rain

Tue, 23 May 2023 12:33:01 GMT

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

Every grain of rice

Mon, 22 May 2023 20:41:24 GMT

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

Gentle Density

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 20:47:00 GMT

Samuel Hughes, a contributing editor at Works in Progress, visits cities around to learn about gentle density.

On the origins of empathy for other species

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 08:00:59 GMT

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

Building back faster

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 08:00:41 GMT

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

Every generator is a policy failure

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 08:00:33 GMT

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

France’s baby bust

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 08:00:32 GMT

France was once Europe’s superpower, thanks above all to its enormous population. Its decline coincided with a collapse in its birth rate – now we know why.

The most dangerous substance known to man

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 08:00:26 GMT

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 roads

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 08:00:00 GMT

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

Markets in fact-checking

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 08:00:04 GMT

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.

A look at Britain’s new DARPA

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 11:32:12 GMT

ARIA is the UK’s visionary new scientific funding body. It has £800m and the freedom to make big bold bets on the scientific trajectories it thinks will benefit Britain – and change the future. We interviewed chief executive Ilan Gur and chairman Matt Clifford, to better understand what inspired ARIA and how they aim to make it a success.

The story of VaccinateCA

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:02:00 GMT

Nobody had a plan to get vaccines out of freezers and into Americans’ arms – except VaccinateCA. Its CEO tells the story of how a small team brought order to a chaotic rollout.

Developing the science of science

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:10:00 GMT

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

Pandemic prevention as fire-fighting

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:08:00 GMT

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

Advancing antivenom

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:06:00 GMT

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

History is in the making

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:04:00 GMT

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.

AI from Superintelligence to ChatGPT

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:02:00 GMT

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

The elements of scientific style

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:00:00 GMT

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

Anti-growth safetyism

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 23:12:00 GMT

Is a build up of generic regulations together causing us to be three times poorer than we need to be? Probably not. But the insidious rise of risk aversion is still a big drag on economic growth.

Interview: J. Storrs Hall on getting lost in stagnation

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 23:10:00 GMT

Stripe Press’s Tamara Winter sits down with J. Storrs Hall, whose book ‘Where is My Flying Car’ inspired this issue, to talk about stagnation and the possibility of progress.

Making energy too cheap to meter

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 23:05:00 GMT

The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it’s almost free.

Nanotechnology’s spring

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 13:15:00 GMT

Nanotechnology sometimes sounds as much like science fiction as artificial intelligence once did. But the problems holding it back seem solvable, and some of the answers may lie inside our own bodies.

There was no great stagnation

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 13:14:00 GMT

We may not have flying cars but we do have incredible information technology. We’re mismeasuring the huge benefits it is bringing.

Planes, claims and automobiles

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 13:12:00 GMT

Americans famously love to sue one another. Are out of control product liability lawsuits the to blame for the crash of the personal aviation industry?

A look at Cuba’s grassroots internet

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 16:12:00 GMT

A documentary from Stripe Press that follows the evolution of a rudimentary gaming network between friends in Cuba into a DIY internet that serviced most of the island.

The Maintenance Race

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:00:22 GMT

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.

The decline and fall of the British economy

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:00:22 GMT

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

Real peer review has never been tried

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:00:16 GMT

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.

We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:00:15 GMT

Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting ‘rationally’. But instead of building up a messier and messier picture of human behavior, we need a new model.

Reclaiming the roads

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:00:03 GMT

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

Age of the bacteriophage

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:55:10 GMT

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.

Why innovation prizes fail

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 07:30:55 GMT

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

Local warming

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 07:30:53 GMT

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

London’s lost ringways

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 07:30:23 GMT

A monstrous plan to build major motorways through some of London’s greatest neighborhoods fell apart. But the price was the birth of the NIMBY movement, and a permanent ceiling on Britain’s infrastructure ambitions.

How polyester bounced back

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 07:30:12 GMT

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.

Scientific slowdown is not inevitable

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 07:29:05 GMT

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.

Why we duel

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 07:28:06 GMT

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.

Why Ireland’s housing bubble burst

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 12:20:48 GMT

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.

Womb for improvement

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 12:20:44 GMT

Pregnancy can be arduous, painful and for some women impossible. New technology may allow more women to have children, and save the lives of more prematurely born infants. How do we get there?

Why skyscrapers are so short

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 12:20:40 GMT

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.

Parenting as a public good

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 12:20:36 GMT

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.

Against the survival of the prettiest

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 12:20:11 GMT

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?

Who cares about plagiarism?

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 12:15:14 GMT

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

Natalism for progressives

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:00:57 GMT

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.

How trust undermines science

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:00:50 GMT

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.

Better eats

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:00:46 GMT

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.

Buyers of first resort

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:00:34 GMT

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.

The housing theory of everything

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:00:11 GMT

Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.

The future of weight loss

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 07:59:32 GMT

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.

Asteroid spotting

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 07:58:40 GMT

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.

Why didn’t suicides rise during Covid?

Thu, 20 May 2021 11:01:07 GMT

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.

How we fixed the ozone layer

Thu, 20 May 2021 11:00:56 GMT

The story behind humanity’s greatest environmental success is too rarely told and too often taken for granted. This is how humanity fixed the ozone layer and why it matters.

Why Tesla bought bitcoin

Thu, 20 May 2021 11:00:40 GMT

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.

Burying the lead

Thu, 20 May 2021 11:00:31 GMT

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.

This is what peak culture looks like

Thu, 20 May 2021 11:00:27 GMT

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.

Interview: Ted Nordhaus on ecomodernism

Thu, 20 May 2021 10:58:29 GMT

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

We don’t know how to fix science

Thu, 20 May 2021 10:57:09 GMT

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.

The speed of science

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 16:19:17 GMT

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?

How I learned to stop worrying and love the debt

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 16:19:03 GMT

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

The great reinforcer

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 16:18:46 GMT

Alongside all the successes of science in the Covid era, the pandemic has also sparked an outbreak of viral misinformation and sloppy research, revealing the glaring flaws in our scientific system.

Why tech cannot escape expensive housing

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 16:18:33 GMT

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.

How Covid brought the future back

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 05:23:18 GMT

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.

A place in the sun

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 05:14:53 GMT

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?

What ails the social sciences

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 05:13:52 GMT

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?

In praise of pastiche

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:56:05 GMT

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.

Clusters rule everything around me

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:55:52 GMT

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?

Seeing on the far side of the moon

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:55:39 GMT

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.

Escaping science’s paradox

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:55:26 GMT

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

Innovation is not linear

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:55:12 GMT

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

Securing posterity

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:54:59 GMT

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?

Interview: Mike Solana on tech and its critics

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:54:45 GMT

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

The daily grind

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:54:27 GMT

Before grinding mills were invented, the preparation of flour for food was an arduous task largely carried out by women for hours every day. How did it affect their lives and why does it remain a tradition in some places even today?

Build state capacity by building charter cities

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:56 GMT

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.

Practical veganism

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:20 GMT

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

The evolution of psychiatry

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:19 GMT

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.

How to build a state

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:16 GMT

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

Epidemic disease and the state

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:10 GMT

Western democracies appear to have floundered in their responses to Covid-19. Is there a relationship between health and freedom, and can it be unraveled?

The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:01 GMT

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.

The story of Viktor Zhdanov

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 15:45:00 GMT

Although Viktor Zhdanov’s name is little known today, he spearheaded one of the greatest projects in history. Who was he and what did he do?