Thursday, October 1, 2026
ArchiveGoodnight Baghdad: US troops leave Iraq after 23 years
A C-17 ramp in 2007; the last plane out in 2026. The end of America's 23 years in Iraq, written by someone who deployed there rather than someone watching the handover from a desk.
Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?
A few hundred Spaniards, a continent they knew nothing about, two empires gone in two and a half years. Sheppard works through why the standard answers — disease, horses, steel — don't finish the job.
What Does the Fourth Dimension Actually Look Like?
Miller doesn't try to picture four dimensions at once. She watches them as a flipbook of three-dimensional frames — and once you borrow the trick, the unimaginable gets oddly tractable.
Map of the Lighthouses of the World
Every lighthouse on Earth, each beam sweeping its real arc at its real range, live. Find your own coastline and the twenty minutes you'd budgeted for something else are gone.
It may soon be possible to create “mirror life”
Scientists are getting closer to building life from scratch using mirror-image molecules—which could revolutionize medicine but also create serious biosecurity headaches.