On a Friday morning when the jobs report is released, you can read the room before you see the numbers if you walk past any coffee shop close to a financial district. With their mouths already forming sentences about “temporary factors” and “weather distortions,” suits are leaning into phones and…

It was meant to be a typical dinner. Mike Fincke and his crewmates settled in aboard the International Space Station, floating somewhere over the Pacific, 250 miles above anyone who could assist them, after a long day of preparing equipment for a spacewalk that was scheduled for the following morning.…

Developers are sitting in front of design documents for games that will never be produced somewhere—in a Santa Monica office park, a Stockholm studio campus, or a converted warehouse in Austin that was once referred to as a creative hub. Before they were made public, the projects were canceled. After…

There is a location in the Pacific Ocean where the water temperature is slightly above freezing and the seafloor is located about four kilometers below the surface, roughly halfway between Hawaii and the western coast of Mexico. It is not exposed to sunlight. No moonlight. Not a single star. Most…

Imagine a midsize office in Columbus, Austin, or Charlotte. It would have an open floor plan, a snack wall, and a #random Slack channel that no one uses anymore. The desks are occupied. The meetings are taking place. We are scheduling the quarterly reviews. Everything appears to be more or…

Every winter, people would travel for hours to see something that used to happen in a forest in the Michoacán mountains of Mexico. The oyamel fir trees’ branches would buckle under the combined weight of tens of millions of monarch butterflies, which weigh less than a dime after traveling up…

Tim Sweeney operates Epic Games from a campus that once seemed to be the future of interactive entertainment, somewhere in Cary, North Carolina, a sleepy suburb that doesn’t look much like the hub of a billion-dollar gaming empire. Fortnite was making a lot of money. Everyone had a license for…

In desperate situations, a certain kind of hope emerges—not the cautious, well-reasoned kind, but the urgent kind, which arises when all other options have been exhausted. This urgency has found a new home in the West Bank, where the unemployment rate is approximately 18% and the Palestinian economy has been…

There was a certain silence on Wall Street when Nvidia momentarily surpassed a $5 trillion market valuation in October 2025, becoming the first company in history to do so. It felt more like people doing math than awe. $5 trillion. more valuable than Japan’s total GDP. The graphics processing units…

The scene is nearly identical to what it was fifteen years ago when you walk into any Costco warehouse on a Saturday morning. concrete floors. A mid-sized office building’s worth of paper towels, 48-count muffin packs, and industrial-sized containers of olive oil were piled high on towering steel shelves. A…

When a signal that bond traders have spent years explaining away suddenly becomes unexplainable, a certain kind of unease descends upon them. Since mid-March, when the 2-year Treasury yield surpassed the federal funds rate target and the Treasury curve resumed its flattening, that sentiment has been subtly permeating fixed-income desks.…

A collection of Hubble photos sat quietly for years, seemingly unremarkable, in the digital vaults of NASA’s Mikulski Archive, a repository containing decades’ worth of telescope data from over a dozen space missions. While perusing that archive, UCLA planetary scientist David Jewitt discovered observations of 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák, a tiny comet shaped…