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Almost ten years ago to the day, I woke up in my hotel room in Bangkok and flipped on the TV; it was late, late in the evening in the UK, and the BBC News was broadcasting live coverage of the Brexit vote. As the results slowly trickled in and
Emmanuel Saez is an expert. A PhD economist from UC Berkeley, Saez has devoted his entire career to diligent research in a complex and dynamic field. He has numerous publications and citations under his belt, and his “h-index” (which tracks research productivity) is off the charts. So when Saez came
In the year 1484, a thirty-something year old sailor from Genoa was working in Lisbon when he stumbled upon a bold idea. For the previous decade, he had served as a crewman on several Portuguese commercial expeditions to haul physical resources like gold, ivory, and fish from Asia back to
Last Tuesday, in a manufacturing plant outside Des Moines, Vice President JD Vance stood in front of an Iowa crowd and reported on what his new federal anti-fraud task force had managed to find in its first six weeks of operation. There are 186,000 dead Americans still listed as active
Henry VIII probably thought he was being extremely clever when he started debasing his currency in 1544… and assumed that, if he reduced the silver content slowly and gradually enough, perhaps no one would notice. But the King was hilariously wrong. Despite centuries of warfare, invasions, and plagues, English rulers
The year was 1998. Titanic was still pulling people into theaters. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were chasing Roger Maris’s home run record. And the Dow Jones Industrial Average had punched through 9,000 for the first time. The Cold War was over. The Internet and cell phones were starting to take
Mark Zuckerberg had his hands full last week trying to calm the storm at his company. In an employee conference call, he had to quell a great deal of panic over the company’s performance. Growth at Facebook/Meta is slowing, the stock price is down, and the company is dealing with
In April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles tasked a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb with finding out whether the United States could do what the Soviets were rumored to have figured out: control human minds with drugs. His methods were absolutely insane; Gottlieb set up a brothel in San Francisco where
The US presidential election of 1912 almost sounds like the setup to a joke. Two Republicans, a Democrat, and a Socialist walk into a bar… But it’s true: William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican vote (with Roosevelt starting his own “Bull Moose” ticket). Woodrow Wilson was on
On April 22, the Telegraph published the results of an investigation showing that London landlords are advertising rental properties based on religious preferences. The listings appear on Facebook pages openly named “Renting room in London for Muslims” and “Muslim rents,” with language like “only for Muslims,” “for 2 Muslim boys
In the spring of 1946, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were coming home from Europe and the Pacific, maimed, bruised, and shell-shocked. The economy they returned to was upside down. Detroit was making tanks, not automobiles. Factories were making bullets, not baby carriages. Food was rationed. Fuel was scarce.
In 1909, a British journalist named Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, claiming that war between major global powers had become obsolete. Nations were too interlinked, he argued. Capital was too entangled. Trade was too valuable. And no nation would put that prosperity at risk. War and conquest were things
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