In the autumn of 1818 the parish of Dedham, Massachusetts, chose a new minister. The parish was every taxpayer in town, and the taxpayers wanted Alvan Lamson, a young Harvard man of the liberal, Unitarian kind. The church was the […]
In 1492 the abbot of Sponheim, Johannes Trithemius, wrote a treatise called In Praise of Scribes. Monks, he argued, should keep copying books by hand even though the new presses could produce them faster. Copying was devotion. A scribe meditated […]
Historic events usually don't arrive on a date. The numerals Europe counts with didn't have a launch day. Leonardo of Pisa, the mathematician later called Fibonacci, brought the Hindu-Arabic system to Italian merchants in his Liber Abaci in 1202, and […]
Every society keeps a list of its problems. In ours the list is made by whatever gets measured, argued about in public, and funded: housing, crime, inflation, the border, the budget. It's a useful list. It's also incomplete in a […]
Ask most people why government issues the currency and you'll get a shrug — of course it does, who else would? The monopoly feels less like a policy choice than a fact of nature, the same way a national anthem […]
Imperial County, California, sits over a groundwater basin that took millennia to fill, in a region already contesting every acre-foot of Colorado River allocation it has left. In early 2026, a developer proposed a data center there just under a […]
"Unsafe Safety" argued that "safety" earns the deference it currently gets for free only when a claim survives being checked — a stated mechanism, a measurable harm, a cost that's actually been weighed, and a review process that puts the […]
The Right to Remember made the case that a public ledger converts what would otherwise be a standing positive right — continuous, fundable, defundable preservation work — into something closer to a structural guarantee: a record that doesn't need an […]
Even more troubling are the writings of George Bradford (aka David Watson), one of the major theorists at Fifth Estate, on the horrors of technology — apparently technology as such. Technology, it would seem, determines social relations rather than the opposite, a notion that more closely approximates vulgar Marxism than, say, social ecology. ‘Technology is […]
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