Popular mythology holds that a tolerant and affirmative view of human sexuality prevailed in classical Antiquity until it was crushed by puritanical and repressive Christianity. I passively accepted ...

One of my joys in traveling to Brazil, which I did recently for the seventh time, is dining. In general, Latin America is the great underdiscovered frontier for top-tier food. Most of the region is ...

The cities they run function as vertically integrated conglomerates that benefit not just from the success of their local ...

Most Americans think of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue as problems that affect people in other countries, not their own. Until recently, they would have been largely ...

Over three thousand years ago, on a plain beside the Orontes River in Syria, two great armies clashed in what may at the time have been the most colossal battle ever seen: the Battle of Kadesh. The ...

In the twentieth century, a radical change took place in global architecture. The modernist movement emerged in the 1920s, favoring unornamented designs, exposed modern materials like steel and ...

Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land ...

At the beginning of the 1833 dry season, a monk named Mongkut set out for Sukhothai, the old capital of Siam. Long journeys by boat and on foot for study, teaching, and religious observance were ...

Who is right? Does daycare traumatize children or does it turn them into upstanding citizens? Or perhaps both are true, and daycare sacrifices the emotional health of toddlers in order to turn them ...

In September 2022, a new kind of pig farm opened in China: a twenty-six storey high-rise in Ezhou, near the Yangtze River. Months later, a second tower went up. Inside, pigs are kept by the tens of ...

In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away ...