Ulfur Atli
The European Green Deal was never just about the climate
Europe's landmark environmental policy is incoherent as global climate strategy and entirely coherent as everything else. The gap between those two things is the...
Passport power – why the world’s most powerful passport isn’t American
Singapore is a city-state of six million people with no permanent seat on the UN Security Council, no nuclear arsenal, and a military budget...
Attention economy – why your brain was not built for the...
Last night, somewhere around 11pm, you probably did something your nervous system interpreted as a near-death experience. You read the news, or scrolled Twitter,...
The geography of sleep: why entire nations are chronically underrested
There is a Japanese word — inemuri — that translates, literally, as "sleeping while present." It means dozing off in a public or professional...
How the world decided what time it is — and why...
On the facade of the Bristol Corn Exchange there is a clock with two minute hands. One is red, one is black. The red...
Sykes-Picot Agreement – how a border drawn in 1916 is still...
In June 2014, the Islamic State's media wing released a short video titled The End of Sykes-Picot. It opens with a bulldozer gouging through a...
How the metric system became a geopolitical weapon
The number is $327.6 million. That is what the Mars Climate Orbiter cost before it ceased to exist on September 23, 1999, burning up...
How the Black Death accidentally created the conditions for the Renaissance
In the autumn of 1401, the Arte di Calimala — the Florentine guild of wool importers and cloth finishers, one of the city's oldest...
Why do cars have touchscreens instead of buttons and dials?
Driven to Distraction - How the car industry put a slot machine on your dashboard — and why no one stopped them
In March 2020,...
Why is the sky blue?
The physics behind the most ordinary miracle in the sky — and how that sky has changed, in color, across 4.5 billion years of...