Everyone loves the streets of old cities like Verona, Bruges, and Prague. The reason might seem obvious: they are lined by beautiful historic buildings. But people also love the streets of Osaka, ...

‘You just piss it oot,’ my friend Stuart Ritchie has always told me. In a politer register, other friends have expressed scepticism too. But for a long time, despite the wisdom of my smartest ...

January 2022. TikTok had chosen its villain of the week. West Elm Caleb was a six-foot-four mustachioed lothario who had strung along several different women. They took to TikTok to tell their ...

Subscribe Ruxandra Teslo and Niko McCarty on Chinese biotech Pieter Garicano on Emmanuel Macron Saloni Dattani on smallpox eradication Jamie Rumbelow on the internet's infrastructure Samuel Hughes on ...

Dan Wang is a columnist for Works in Progress and the author of an annual letter at danwang.co ...

Paradoxically, porcelain is both one of humankind’s oldest high technologies and one of its newest. The earliest proto-porcelain was created more than three thousand years ago, and was, for the time, ...

The height of skyscrapers is limited by physical, economic and regulatory barriers, but we should want to overcome them and build taller. Here’s how we can do it. There’s a pattern that we frequently ...

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. How they did it has lessons for ...

Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives — but we need to find ways to scale ...

In 1796, when Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine, against the smallpox virus, no one knew what viruses were, let alone connected them to diseases. Jenner’s discovery in the eighteenth century ...

If you want a picture of biomedical research, imagine a boot stamping on a biologist’s face – for decades. The boot is labeled ‘medicinal chemistry’. This should not be taken as an insult to medicinal ...

War is hell. But by allowing more effective states to rule productive regions, it may have been a catalyst for Europe’s early modern advancement. One of the most fundamental facts of life is that ...