Isegoria

China is running the most systematic effort by any outside power to convert the Ukraine war’s lessons into military advantage: The first offensive lesson is economic.

The biggest empire the world has ever seen was run by a small elite, Samuel Hughes notes, who partied all night, drank liters of port, and stayed in bed until the afternoon: Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STE…

In its first season, Sold a Story argued, “Kids are not being taught how to read, because for decades teachers have been sold an idea about reading and how children learn to do it.”

Modern life makes it easy to forget the world in which we evolved, Marc Defant reminds us, the Environment of our Evolutionary Adaptedness: Most people in developed societies live at a considerable distance from predation, starvation, and violent death.

That liberal democracy is in a state of terminal decline Martin Gurri takes to be beyond dispute: Like Alice in the rabbit hole, those of us who dwell in democratic societies suffer from a nauseating sense of falling without ever landing on solid ground.

On September 20, 2014, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), a Liberian man named Thomas Eric Duncan arrived at the Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport — unaware that he was infected with Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus: Feeling ill after his arr…

Russia’s new Dan-T loitering munition is effectively a small cruise missile: It has a slender cylindrical fuselage with swept wings and a conventional tail, rather than the broad delta-wing shape characteristic of the Geran family.

Back in the mid-to late 1990s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), Congress and the White House launched a series of domestic preparedness programs requiring the federal government to regularly sponsor full-scale biological-attack exercises — so…

When he worked at NASA in the 1990s, Tim Conners was the lead propulsion engineer for the agency’s Blackbird program.

Back in 2003, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established a multibillion-dollar national syndromic surveillance system called BioSense: Under the BioSen…

The United States does not have a vaccine for plague, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), for reasons that are complicated: Russia’s vaccine, called Live Plague Vaccine, or LPV, is understood to have been created from an attenuated, or weakened,…

Key figures in Silicon Valley are betting on alternatives to higher education: “It used to be the case that you could rely on somebody who went to an Ivy or Ivy-equivalent to be top notch,” said Jordan Hirsch, who runs Palantir’s semester-long intensive M…

Biological war can begin with an accident, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War): A large-scale attack with a biological weapon can set off a pandemic, but so can a lab leak.

If you’ve been reading about biowarfare, you really don’t want to see that nearly 200 people are under observation after an Irkutsk lab worker died from plague: Health authorities in Siberia’s Irkutsk region have placed nearly 200 people under medical obs…

After the anthrax scare in 2001, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), gain-of-function research quickly became normalized within government-funded science: Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and

If mental fatigue limits physical performance, then athletes can be trained to become resilient to it: “The idea is to put yourself into a state that’s both physically and mentally exhausting, by combining cognitive and physical training,” Ring said.

As if what had happened on 9/11 wasn’t terrorizing enough, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), just days later, a biological weapons attack unfurled across the East Coast and in the state of Florida: Envelopes laced with weaponized anthrax bacter…

In The American prison experiment, C.J.

In 1989, one of the the Russian biological weapons program’s highest-ranking scientists defected to the West, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War): His name was Vladimir Pasechnik.

The American prison experiment has a 250-year history of good intentions and bad results: Eastern State Penitentiary is one of the places where the American prison experiment began, and where one of its most bizarre iterations was tested on human beings.

Because the Russians’ biological weapons program was a clear violation of the BWC treaty, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), the Soviets went to great lengths to disguise it: Igor Domaradskij was the first scientific director at Obolensk, and the

During his tenure as defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov recognized that Ukraine needed to fight deep behind Russian lines: “Russia always works at operational depth,” he said.

The engineered plague Annie Jacobsen posits (in Biological War) is designed not only to be more virulent, more transmissible, and resistant to antibiotics, but it also has a secret back door — as originally conceived by Soviet bioweapon engineers during t…

America’s cities are, by and large, bad: The easiest way to see this is to understand the primary reason why they’re so bad: crime.

Plague has been responsible for several of the most fatal pandemics in human history, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), including ones in the sixth, fourteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries: From around 1347 to 1352, the disease killed

Covenant, a U.S.

Biological warfare is illegal, and biological weapons are illegal, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), yet biological weapons exist: Over 100 years ago, the international community banned the use of biological weapons with the Geneva Protocol of 192…

Though all new soldiers who join the Army now get basic drone familiarization in basic training, those who join the 15X MOS move on to the 15-week Advanced Individual Training in Arizona, where they learn to assemble, fix, and fly a variety of small, medi…

We may not realize until too late, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), that we have become the victims of a biological attack: It is not until days or weeks after such an attack has taken place—after the first wave of deaths—that we will most likely recog…

If you were an adult in 1995, when the original Toy Story came out, you probably had some exposure to old westerns and some exposure to old children’s shows, if only through spoofs of puppet shows or clown shows, so Woody seemed like a classic toy from a…

Great Britain and Canada began investigating biological agents and delivery systems in 1940, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), but President Franklin D.

Iran has fielded a new generation of ballistic missiles that can evade American air defenses and strike with far greater precision: The centerpiece of that shift is a highly mobile ballistic missile Iran calls the Kheibar Shekan, or “Castle Breaker,” which

When Ken Alibek collaborated on a secret history of the Soviet and American programs after his defection, as he explains in Biohazard, he was amazed to discover how closely the research efforts of both countries dovetailed between 1945 and 1969: The same…

California-based Swarm Aero on Monday unveiled a new low-cost unmanned aerial system capable of carrying a payload of more than 2,800 pounds: In a press release, the company said Gamera is the first UAS designed to carry bomber-class strike munitions such…

In October 1990, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), they were informed that a “trilateral agreement” had been reached between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain to organize a series of reciprocal visits to suspected biological warfare…

The casualty toll at the Pentagon on 9/11 could have been much worse, but the damage was mitigated by reinforcement work that had begun on the building, which was built in 1941 and had marked its 60th anniversary that year: In light of troubling world eve…

It was impossible to believe, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard) that their most important military rival, the U.S., wasn’t pursuing an active biological warfare program: As part of my duties at Biopreparat I reviewed our budget regularly with Gosplan, the

A couple years ago I noted that Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, about a nationalist Japanese plot to cripple the US economy and seize US-controlled islands, is best remembered for presaging the 9/11 attacks, and Roo_ster found “echoes of Jerry Pournelle and h…

Lewis and Clark brought an air rifle on their expedition, back in 1803-06, and now, a couple centuries later, Ian of Forgotten Weapons discusses the almost-semi-automatic non-firearm: Apparently Girardoni and Girandoni were both accepted spellings of the…

Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard) what happened when a Soviet bio-weapons researcher did not return from a trip abroad: “Who gave him permission to go?”

Many seemingly basic questions of area, length and tangents could not be solved by the ancient geometers: Even when solutions could be found, they were always ad hoc.

The Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), provided many of the Soviet Union’s breakthroughs in bio-weapons production: One of its most notable contributions was a milling machine that used a powerful blast of air to…

According to the 2026 National Firearms Survey, 32.7% of U.S. adults (95% CI 32.2% – 33.2%) personally own firearms, suggesting that approximately 88 million American adults own guns: Following the practice of major survey programs such as the General Soc…

The first recorded outbreak of the virus we now call the Marburg virus occurred in 1967, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), at the Behring pharmaceutical works in Marburg, an old university town seventy miles north of Frankfurt: An animal keeper died two…

Panama is paying a price for stepping away from Beijing: Recent reporting indicates that Chinese authorities have sharply increased inspections and detentions of Panamanian-flagged ships after Panama’s Supreme Court struck down the concessions held by Hong

Gorbachev came into office in March 1986, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), determined to break up the corrupt bureaucratic fiefdoms of the Brezhnev era and to create a stronger, more cohesive government: He was the reformer my generation had been waiti…

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Harold Robertson explains, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in s…

Of all the diseases that have tormented mankind, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), smallpox has left the oldest and the deepest scars: Recorded as early as 1122 B.C. in China, it altered the course of history, ravaging eighteenth-century Europe and deci…