How Eli Whitney Accidentally Started the War
Imagine inventing a machine so consequential it helps cause a civil war, then manufacturing the weapons used to fight it. That is the actual, deeply contradictory life of Eli Whitney: a Massachusetts ...
10 Jun 19min
How Death Valley s Sailing Stones Move
On a perfectly flat, sun-baked lake bed in Death Valley, heavy rocks, some weighing hundreds of pounds, sit at the end of long trails scraped deep into the cracked earth. No footprints, no tire tracks...
10 Jun 18min
How Cotton and Gold Forced Native Removal
By the 1830s, the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations had done exactly what the United States demanded of them: built large farms, written constitutions modeled on the U.S. go...
10 Jun 23min
How Catherine the Great Seized the Throne
A 15-year-old girl from a minor, cash-poor German noble family arrives in a freezing foreign country, speaks not a word of the language, and is married off to a man she detests. That girl, born Sophie...
10 Jun 23min
How Anna Delvey Scammed New York Elite
No hackers, no vault, no elevator shafts. Anna Sorokin scammed major banks, luxury hotels, and New York's elite out of hundreds of thousands of dollars armed with Microsoft Word, fake AOL email addres...
10 Jun 23min
How Al-Khwarizmi Invented Algebra and Algorithms
Every time you run a search, open an app, or follow a digital map, you are using a concept named after a ninth-century scholar. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi's Latinized name became the word "algorit...
10 Jun 18min
How a Firing Squad Made Dostoevsky
On December 23rd, 1849, a 28-year-old former military engineer stood third in line before a firing squad in St. Petersburg, dressed in a white death shirt with five minutes left to live. Seconds befor...
10 Jun 22min
Zheng He and the Vanished Treasure Fleet
In 1405, the horizon off the Chinese coast disappeared behind a wall of wood and canvas: 317 ships carrying 28,000 men, a floating city of soldiers, doctors, linguists, and astronomers, setting sail n...
10 Jun 23min
