Coastal flooding could wipe out up to 9.3 percent of the world’s annual output by 2100 (a Swedish-French-British team in 2015). It could create losses of up to $2.9 trillion in that year (a German-Bri...
Climate scientists encountered Lorenz’s ideas in 1965, when he gave the keynote address at a conference in Colorado called The Causes of Climate Change, the first big scientific gathering devoted to t...
Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D. Known collectively as Mississippian cultur...
But this second wave of conservationists rarely claimed that one race or culture was intrinsically superior to another. Vogt, again, is an example. No apologist for his own stock, he reserved special...
As any biologist would predict, this success led to an increase in human numbers—slow at first, then rapid, tracing Gause’s S-shaped curve. We began rising up the steepest part of the slope in the six...
Mounting a sustained war. Unhappily, these intriguing speculations
Where does government come from? Haas asked. What makes people decide to surrender some of their personal liberty to it? What did they gain from it? Philosophers have been asking this question for cen...
Valencia’s plan was conversion by proxy: he and the rest of the twelve would open the eyes of the Indian priesthood to the beauties of the true faith, gaining their adherence by reasoned theological d...
The monks explain that they have been sent by the one who on the earth is the greater speaker of divine things, the pope, to bring the venerable word / of the One Sole True God to New Spain. By worshi...
The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priorit...
Only in 1905 was the panels’ puzzling behavior explained—by Albert Einstein, a newly minted Ph.D. with a day job in the Swiss patent office. In what may have been the greatest intellectual sprint for...
Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for their comfort and convenience, the American landscape had come...
All states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s wil...
A company’s engineers develop new equipment that can pump out more petroleum at a lower cost, the effective size of the reservoir increases. Not the actual size—its physical dimensions—but the effecti...
Two years after winning the divisive 1968 election, President Richard Nixon, a Republican, declared that the environment, the great question of the ’70s, was a cause beyond party and beyond factions....
This meant, Stoneking hypothesized, that clothing also dated from about 107,000 years ago. The subject was anything but frivolous: donning a garment is a complicated act. Clothing has practical uses—w...
The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that...
That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burners in Amazonia.
That one’s as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them. [Emphasis
Technologically speaking, China was so far ahead of the rest of Eurasia that foreign lands had little to offer except raw materials, which could be obtained without going to the bother of dispatching...