Somewhere in the mountains of Central Asia, five thousand years ago, a farmer pulled a bulb from the ground, broke it into cloves, ate some and pushed the rest back into the soil. We do not know his name. We never will. But almost every head of garlic eaten on earth today is descended from … Read more
Chronometron – Time, Attention, and the Idea Whose Time Has Come
Is time an asset, or is it something else? A person is an expert on a topic because they have spent more time thinking about it than most people. Some experts have gone in very deep and narrow on a very specific topic, and they get paid a lot because few people have dedicated that … Read more
British Sailors Stranded, Marooned, and Absorbed on the West African Coast, 1750–1860: A Research Report
The history of British seamen who ended up stranded, shipwrecked, abandoned, or marooned on the West African coast during the era of the slave trade and the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery patrols is fragmentary, but a small body of named first-hand accounts and scholarly reconstructions does exist. The following report assembles the most concrete documented cases … Read more
Box 1386 – Ultra decryption and knowledge of the Holocaust
Two great sources of information on this topic: Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 and Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew On July 18, 1941, less than a month after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, a radio operator at a British … Read more
Who Gets the Cream?
Surplus, Delegation, and the Oldest Question in Political Economy Every society produces more than it needs to survive. After the fields are tended, the widgets assembled, and the code deployed, after the cost of food, shelter, and keeping the lights on, there is something left over. Call it surplus, profit, margin, or cream. The central … Read more
Play Street With No Traffic – Lyda D. Newman
On the evening of September 1, 1915, West 63rd Street was closed to cars. Not permanently, just from three in the afternoon until nine at night. It was called a “play street,” which was a new idea then, part of a Progressive Era experiment born of the ugly arithmetic of children and traffic sharing the … Read more
The Fracture Line
There’s a story going around about artificial intelligence and work. You’ve probably heard it; AI will hollow out the middle tier of knowledge jobs (squeezing analysts, paralegals, junior consultants) while leaving plumbers and CEOs more or less intact. The bottom does physical work that machines can’t replicate. The top makes judgment calls machines can’t match. … Read more
The Discipline of Taking a Beating
Your grandmother can join a sit-in. She cannot join a guerrilla cell. This simple observation explains more about the success of non-violent movements than any amount of moral philosophy. When ordinary people see a protest, they ask themselves whether they belong there. A march full of young mothers pushing strollers, retirees in lawn chairs, teenagers … Read more
Carrots For Data Centres
How a vegetable, a lie, and a room full of women with telephones won the Battle of Britain In the winter of 1940, a young Royal Air Force pilot named John Cunningham shot down a German bomber over the skies of southern England. Then he shot down another. And another. By the time the war … Read more
We can’t win what we want without each other
Social change doesn’t happen because people are persuaded to be better. It happens when groups realise they cannot achieve their goals without each other. Not “I should help you because it’s right” but “I literally cannot get what I want unless you also get what you want.” This interdependence – not empathy, not representation, not … Read more