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Yao Tongbin was one of the most important scientists in Maoist China. He had earned a doctorate in metallurgy in England, spent three years at a research institute in West Germany, and left it all to return to China in 1957. He spent the next 11 years building China’s first-ever
In December 1916, with German and Austro-Hungarian armies closing in on Bucharest, the Romanian government made a decision that must have felt entirely sensible at the time. Romania had gambled its way into the Great War a few months earlier, sending its army across the Carpathian Mountains to grab Austro-Hungarian
There’s a reason why your next iPhone is about to get a lot more expensive: the northern long-eared bat. This species of bat is federally recognized as endangered, and it nests in a stretch of forest in upstate New York. And it’s the reason why tech companies can’t build a
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Schiff Sovereign’s CEO, Viktorija, who is originally from Lithuania but splits her time between Mexico and Panama.] The first time I came to Panama was about 16 years ago, and I felt like someone was always yelling… either yelling at me, towards me,
It was the spring of 1982. Ronald Reagan was just over a year into his first term, and the US economy was still in pretty rough shape. Interest rates remained sky-high, inflation was still hovering around 7%, and deficits continued to rise. But even with all that despair, the US
On New Year’s Day in the year 1829, a 29-year-old young lady from Washington DC named Peggy Timberlake married John Eaton— a powerful senator from Tennessee. Eaton was also close friends with the incoming president Andrew Jackson. Peggy, on the other hand, was rumored to be somewhat of a harlot.
20 years ago, if you recognized how deep America’s problems were, it was easy to feel like you were the crazy one. Banks were handing out mortgages to people who plainly couldn’t afford them. Wall Street bundled those mortgages by the millions and sold them on as some of the
Every morning until eight, you can walk straight down the middle of this palm-lined beach avenue, and feel like the whole coast was built for people, because there isn’t a single car in sight. That’s because this city clears its main beach road of traffic every morning from 5 to
On April 3, 1973, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper stood on a sidewalk in Manhattan, raised a two-and-a-half-pound prototype to his ear, and placed the world’s first handheld cellular phone call. The man he dialed was his chief rival at Bell Labs. Cooper wanted him to hear the news
There are things that a free market will never do, and it’s usually for very good reasons. Running fiber-optic cable down a twelve-mile dirt road costs a fortune, and the handful of households scattered along that road will never pay enough in monthly bills to justify the cost of laying
Late Monday night on a quiet residential street in north Belfast in Northern Ireland, a man pinned his neighbor to the pavement and literally tried to cut off his head with a kitchen knife. Bystanders screamed that he was trying to decapitate the man before someone intervened. The victim survived,
Every spring, the US government performs one of its rare acts of radical honesty: the Social Security Board of Trustees publishes an annual report stating, in plain language, exactly when the program will run out of money. It arrives without a press conference and with barely any news coverage —
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