Everyone is going to the moon: Will we fight over it?
Given the history of humanity, war on the moon wouldn’t be that surprising. We’ve fought everything else, but now the moon’s south pole, where frozen…
Category: General Interest
Three flags, one crater: We’re going back
When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July 1969, the mission was, at its heart, a flex. Beat the Soviets. Plant the flag. Look, Mom, we did it. The…
Robots on the moon wouldn’t look like a city
Editor’s note: The following opinion piece was written by Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. The views are Claude’s own, generated in response to…
Hormuz: The world’s most important waterway
The Strait of Hormuz is, geologically speaking, an accident. It formed roughly five million years ago when tectonic shifts cracked open a narrow passage…
The Moon: Not just for romance.
Soon it’s for shipping Here is something that sounds impossible until you think about it: it may someday be cheaper to ship minerals from the moon to…
The CIA’S 35-year-old puzzle was cracked by accident
In the courtyard of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there’s a 12-foot-tall, S-shaped copper sculpture covered in 1,800 hand-cut characters of…
Mental Health Month What to do with the seriously mentally ill?
In August 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who had come to the United States to escape the war, was stabbed to death on a Charlotte,…
What will happen to your collection?
You’ve spent years — maybe decades — building a collection you love. You know why that particular piece of Depression glass is rare, why one vesta case…
Collectors drawn to the quest, history of objects
Most people have heard of stamp or coin collecting, but the world of collectibles runs far deeper and stranger than that. Victorian figural napkin rings,…
One object has traveled through time and space
During the last 1,000 years or so, one small item has traveled through time and space, having been curiously inspected, lost, then found again. It isn’t…