How Did Gold Beat Out Every Other Precious Metal To Become Humanity’s Dominant Currency For the Last 2,600 Years?
Why has gold reigned as the world’s go-to precious metal for over 2,600 years? It’s not as rare as platinum, durable as diamonds, or malleable as copper. What is it about this metal that made it the s...
21 Jan 202536min
The 160-Minute Race to Save the Titanic
One hundred and sixty minutes. That is all the time rescuers would have before the largest ship in the world slipped beneath the icy Atlantic. There was amazing heroism and astounding incompetence aga...
16 Jan 202547min
200 Years Before the French Revolution, German Peasants Tried to Overthrow The Holy Roman Empire
The German Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 was the largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants—roughly 2% of the male ...
14 Jan 202554min
What the Middle Ages Can Teach Us About Pandemics, Mass Migration, and Tech Disruption
The medieval world – for all its plagues, papal indulgences, castles, and inquisition trials – has much in common with ours. People living the Middle Ages dealt with deadly pandemicsmass migration, an...
9 Jan 202553min
Did Orson Welles’s 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast Really Cause a Mass Panic?
On a warm Halloween Eve, October 30, 1938, during a broadcast of H G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Orson Welles held his hands up for radio silence in the CBS studio in New York City while millions of pe...
7 Jan 202548min
A Talk With The Polar Geographer Who Discovered Shackleton’s Endurance Under 10,000 ft of Frozen Water
On August 1, 1914, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackelton and his crew sailed from England, set on making history as the first to cross Antarctica. Their ship never returned from her maiden voyage. On...
2 Jan 202543min
The Founding Fathers Were 20 and 30-Somethings. Why Is America Now a Gerontocracy?
A house on the Florida coast. An assisted living program. A lively retirement community. Medicare. Our modern concept of old age—and even the idea of old age as a distinct stage of life—are products o...
31 Dec 202442min
A Pre-WWI French Philosopher Was More Popular Than Elvis and Possibly Entered the US Into the Great War
In New York City, 1913, French philosopher Henri Bergson gave a lecture at Columbia University, resulting in fanfare, traffic jams, and even fainting spells among the thousands of people clamoring for...
26 Dec 202443min
