They Had to Bleed First Before any scan was taken or any polymer printed, Dov Ganchrow sat down with raw flint from the Negev desert and started hitting it with a rock. That is knapping: the technique humans used to shape stone tools for most of our species’ existence. You strike flint at a precise … Read more
The U-Boat That Delivered Medicine to Baltimore On July 9, 1916, a German submarine glided into the waters off the Virginia coast and made contact with a waiting tugboat. No alarm was raised. No shots were fired. The submarine had come to do business. The crew was feted at banquets, American textile merchants clamored for … Read more
Not Your Doorstep Jack-o’-Lantern Picture the one on every porch in late October: two triangular eyes, a gap-toothed grin, a tea light guttering inside, a silhouette cut into a vegetable, readable from twenty feet away and not meant to be examined up close. Jon Neill’s pumpkins are meant to be examined up close. The faces … Read more
A Very One-Sided Fight On August 16, 1956, the U.S. Air Force scrambled two of its best interceptors over Southern California. The target: a single unmanned drone, painted bright red, with no weapons and no pilot. By any measure, this should have been easy. It was not. The event became known as the “Battle of … Read more
The Medieval King Had to Ask Permission, Too The standard movie version of a medieval king needs no introduction: throne, crown, absolute authority. One wrong word and the guards are called. It makes for good drama. As history, it leaves out quite a bit. The Middle Ages stretched from 476 AD through to 1453. Over … Read more
The Chef Notices Everything Picture a Friday evening at a well-regarded sushi counter. A table of four settles in confidently, they know their nigiri from their maki, one has ordered omakase, and within minutes the itamae behind the bar has quietly registered three or four etiquette violations. Nobody at the table has any idea. This … Read more
The 35-Shilling Saboteur On July 12, 1942, a latex weather balloon drifted over occupied Europe, trailed a steel wire across a 110,000-volt transmission line near Leipzig, and triggered a catastrophic failure at the Böhlen power station. The explosion and fire knocked 250 megawatts of generating capacity offline and caused an estimated £1 million in damage. … Read more
The Face Behind the Finger If you’ve seen the “I WANT YOU” poster, you already have a face memorized: that stern, white-haired man with the direct stare and the extended finger. What almost no one knows is whose face it actually is. It belongs to the illustrator himself. James Montgomery Flagg created the image for … Read more
The Chain That Fed America By 1965, one restaurant chain was outselling McDonald’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined, not outperforming each one separately, but all three added together. Ask anyone born after 1990 to name it, and the answer is usually a blank stare. The chain was Howard Johnson’s. At its peak it … Read more
The Factory That Never Existed Somewhere in the hills of the Eifel district, according to a report published on April 10, 1917, the German military was running a factory unlike any other. Dead soldiers arrived on carts; out the other end came lubricating oil, soap, candles, fertilizer, and pig feed. The report even named a … Read more