There is an incredible amount of scientific effort put toward understanding the past and bringing some of it back to life. Everyone agrees it’s nice to have some old structures around—like the pyramids at Giza and the Great Wall of China—but what about the living...

How humans moved large rocks to construct monuments has fueled many theories, even though it is a matter of physics and coordinated efforts by a large workforce. A more interesting concept to explore for prehistoric cultures is what made people care so much about...

By the late 2010s, China’s “social credit system” (SCS) was increasingly viewed as a notorious government effort to monitor personal behavior, shape public conduct, and control access to services. While the system traces back to the 2000s, it was officially expanded and formalized in...

After the end of World War II, the U.S. employer class—the capitalists—faced overlapping threats, both domestic and foreign. On the domestic side, a coalition of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), two socialist parties, and a communist party had grown large and powerful during the...

The deportation case of Maryland resident and Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia has drawn major attention to the practice of sending migrants to El Salvador for detention. One man looking to capitalize on this trend is Erik Prince, the former CEO of the...

In March 2025, hundreds of workers at the JSW Steel facility in Ohio became the latest to unionize under the United Steelworkers Union (USW). Though not the country’s largest union, its full name—the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied and Industrial...

Imagine you are a low-income country. You suffer from a heavy debt burden. You’ve been trying to catch up to the more affluent countries for decades, but you’ve been unsuccessful, mainly because of that debt hanging around your neck like a giant millstone. And you...

Without archaeology, there is no way to truly examine economic inequality, its causes, and its consequences over very long time spans on a global scale. Until recently, most grand narratives that purported to tell the story of human inequality over time tended to focus either...

The plant Cannabis sativa is an herbaceous flowering annual that was originally native to central and eastern Asia. It has been cultivated throughout recorded history as a source of fiber for fabric and rope, seed oil, animal feed, and medicine. Evidence exists that some ancient...

President Donald Trump promised to unleash mass deportations on immigrants during his presidential campaign. But he has gone much further, with the disappearing of hundreds of Venezuelan nationals from the United States to El Salvador’s notorious gulag. It’s a warning shot—one that has serious consequences...