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The end of casual sex.

My methods and my madness.

Samuel Hughes reviews From Shame to Sin by Kyle Harper

Vienna has five times more people than Graz, Austria’s second city.

The world’s third best Italian food.

A pricey kitchen stove left Charles C Mann with a question: what on earth is Dekton?

China is not the world’s largest command economy.

The biggest empire the world has ever seen was run by a small elite who partied all night, drank liters of port, and stayed in bed until the afternoon.

The technology to eradicate mosquito-borne disease already exists.

Iron weaponry brought down the empires of the Bronze Age.

Alex Chalmers reviews Armies of Sand by Kenneth Pollack.

Taste is subjective.

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

We’ve invented microbes that can eat plastic, detect landmines, and extract rare metals.

What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

People are right to want less police intrusion in their lives.

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.

Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes.

Selective breeding has pushed horses to the limits of biology.

Ugly architecture stops homes getting built.

Is it really plausible that children survived the hardship of medieval life without devoted parents?

Modernity has meant fewer children in virtually every culture around the world.

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.

Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go.

Large swaths of America’s cities were originally underwater.

The AI buildout is bottlenecked by energy.

Childbirth may be the most painful thing a person can experience, but we have the technology to numb the pain.

In 1688, England swept away the encrusted vetocracy that had held back economic growth for centuries.

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.

Europe’s housing shortages are even worse than America’s.

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.

Most flags used to be ugly.

Multiple myeloma is brutal.

For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace.

In the 1940s, scientists made a discovery now fundamental to biology: genes are encoded in DNA.

How a grasshopper caused the 1873 panic, and why recessions are usually just bad luck.

What Americans take to be a borrowed European tradition turns out to be a national style all of their own.

How Works in Progress editor Ben Southwood learned to stop worrying and love democracy.

The traditional European apartment city has declined almost everywhere.

A disease that was once a death sentence is increasingly treatable.

‘Artificial’ didn’t scare Americans in the 19th century.

Benjamin Spock told mothers in the mid-twentieth century to buy six dozen cloth diapers and a covered pail.

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.