Works in Progress

In September 2022, a new kind of pig farm opened in China: a twenty-six storey high-rise in Ezhou, near the Yangtze River. Months later, a second tower went up. Inside, pigs are kept by the tens of thousands on each floor, monitored by cameras and fed, watered, and moved with mechanical precision. More than a million pigs are born, raised, and slaughtered each year without ever setting foot outside. These high-rise factory farms are only one example of a common pattern.

Medical innovation has transformed our lives, but hardly anyone realizes it. You can tell people that global life expectancy has doubled in a century and watch it fail to register – it just sounds like an abstract number, and numbers don’t convey how different life used to be. So let me describe it another way. If you collapsed with a heart attack in 1950, hardly anyone around you would know how to help. CPR wouldn’t be invented for another decade.

Mins In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away to win by 31 lengths, nearly three quarters of a football field. The other horses were so far behind they weren’t even in the television frame. Fifty years later, billions of dollars have been poured into breeding and training, yet Secretariat’s record still stands.

Words by Mins Western countries used to let landowners build almost anything anywhere. Now, strict rules freeze the character of most neighborhoods, banning change and densification. Why? One theory is that modern buildings tend to be ugly, leading residents to support rules that exclude them from their neighborhoods. If this is true, then designing beautiful buildings could lead to more development. Housing reformists have vigorously debated this theory.

Growing up, I acquired a vague idea that medieval people did not view childhood as we do. I was told they saw children merely as defective or incomplete adults, and that they did not love their children as we love ours, perhaps as a way of coping with high infant mortality. As I grew older, I came to associate this idea with the name of Philippe Ariès, a French historian who argued in the 1960s that medieval childhood was profoundly remote in these ways.

What would it take for the world to turn around the widespread decline in births? Ultra-orthodox Jews may have something to teach us. They live squarely in the urban centers of the US and Europe, including in New York City, but unlike most city dwellers, they have very high birth rates. Today, a Yiddish-speaking woman in the United States can expect to have 6.6 children, compared with 1.6 for the country as a whole.

In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was likely the wealthiest city in the world. Global trade and local industry financed its artistic masterpieces and furnished the abundant foods and household goods that Dutch painters immortalized in still lifes and domestic scenes. But material abundance and industrial activities also heightened an ancient danger: they added fuel to the flames of urban fires. ‘People of all ranks owned more clothes and furnishings.

Words by Mins Nothing in geology makes sense except in light of plate tectonics: the idea that mobile plates float on top of a thick layer of molten rock surrounding the Earth’s core, and currents in that rock move continents and the ocean floor. Plate tectonics explains earthquakes, the formation of mountains and deep sea trenches, and the fossilized sea creatures found miles from the ocean.

Chernobyl was the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster. The reactor was built to a flawed design. In 1986, its operators disabled automated safety systems and removed control rods to perform a late-night test. The coolant water overheated, speeding up the reaction until it flash-boiled into steam and violently shattered all the nuclear fuel in a matter of seconds. The graphite in the reactor then caught fire. Six hundred workers were present when this occurred.

Some of America’s most famous land was reclaimed from the sea. The Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and the Reflecting Pool all sit on earth reclaimed from Potomac River tidal flats in the early twentieth century. Treasure Island was built in San Francisco Bay for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition. Chicago’s Northerly Island was filled in from Lake Michigan to complete Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan of the city.