World War II has faded into movies, anecdotes, and archives that nobody cares about anymore. Are we finally losing the war?

William Shatner was excited to go to space last year. He didn't realize he'd be overwhelmed with sadness and go through "the strongest feelings of grief" that he'd ever experienced.

Like Imperial Japan before us, the United States has substituted tactical and operational planning for strategic thinking.

A blog series in which I reread LOTR 50 years after I first read it, age 10, over the winter of 1975-76. Pippin and Merry come as a double act (not exactly ‘dumb and dumber’, but not a million miles from that either) in the Jackson film version of LOTR, providing both light relief and…

In 2013, education reformers tried to help poor students the using the best tool at their disposal: The 16th most popular Ted Talk.Special thanks to Marcus Credé! Where to find us: Our PatreonOur merch!Peter's newsletterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSo...

Mismanagement and political campaigning have sucked the joy out of an event meant to bring people together

<strong>Exclusive: </strong>The strange and lonely death of Bikram Lama exposes a glaring gap in homelessness services. What hopes and dreams brought him to Australia, and what went wrong?

The photographer who snapped the photos of the Artemis II crew’s return to Earth spent years honing his craft on a Navy aircraft carrier.

If you asked me today, and if you'd asked me two years ago, I'd tell you I'm very fond of my house. It's nothing special. It's a townhouse surrounded by other townhouses that look just like it, forming a semicircle of beige brick at the end of a street. There's no garden, because when I

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

I work in a sector that speaks out on racism and human rights, yet on this issue I have felt the boundaries of acceptable speech narrow around me

Ava Kofman reports on Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang, the Los Angeles couple who ran Mark Surrogacy, an agency that they used to hire more than a dozen women to carry their children.

NFTs, the metaverse and AI are the most recent Silicon Valley enthusiasms. Does anyone remember how to build a consumer product?

I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very...

A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.

Hey folks! I am working on finishing up some things this week, so I thought I would post the text of the keynote I gave at the Prancing Pony Podcast Moot earlier this December. I've made some minor edits to conform a bit more to the form of a blog post, but this remains very…

On irony poisoning and the importance of being earnest.

The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the...