Science originated in taking no one at their word, but today we’re told to “trust the science.” Can we balance these two impulses?

Powerful individuals are the best allies to crazy new ideas. Science is no exception.

In 1959, the U.S. government gave an elite group of physicists classified information and free reign to research. The JASON program’s rise and fall tracks a golden age of American science.

The U.S.-Mexico border is a landscape in constant flux. A surreal journey to the frontier reveals the interplay of state security, organized crime, and personal ambition.

The year is 2053. A nuclear renaissance has transformed society. Here is how it all happened.

Reflecting on over fifty years of environmental advocacy, a sober, scientific perspective warns against fear and apocalypticism. There’s work to be done.

Mankind’s environmental destiny is to build garden empires, synthesizing ecology and industry together into a new form of life.

Beginning his career as a countryside priest, Henri Gregoire was an unlikely figure of the French Revolution. Outrun by its upheavals at first, his ideas have become crucial in modernizing revolutions since.

As young people flock to the global cities to work, what happens to the rest of the world?

The future of energy will be more mineral-intensive than ever before, leading China and the U.S. to compete for the world’s mining and refinement capacity.

In the eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII fought local rulers who dominated the church. To counter them, he created Europe’s first modern bureaucracies and changed the organization of power forever.

Soon after my interrogation by Transnistria’s state security, mysterious assailants attacked their headquarters with rocket launchers. The nearby war is drawing in the pro-Russian breakaway state.

Divides in Europe have undermined France’s dream of regional sovereignty. Increasingly, its leaders are looking south toward the Mediterranean region instead.

In 1994 Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev made a plan to revitalize the Eurasian economic space. Nearly thirty years later, that world struggles to be born.

In this previously unpublished essay, the late historian Carroll Quigley outlines the history of Western epistemology and how George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four shows us its future.

North Korea is regrowing its forests in a program of nationalist ecology. As environmental crises unfold, other countries will come to share its strategy.