Works in Progress

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.

One of the most expensive projects in history is under construction in Abilene, Texas. This joint venture, Stargate, is the flagship of a bigger project by the same name led by OpenAI and Softbank, and is expected to cost well over $40 billion for a high-performance computing campus that will train new generations of AI models.

In Irish mythology, a man forces his heavily pregnant wife, Macha, to race the King of Ulster’s horses on foot. She wins, gives birth to twins at the finish line, and then curses the warriors of Ulster: for nine generations, they will be afflicted with five days of labor pains in times of war. Childbirth is very painful, as Irish storytellers knew when they described this curse upon the men of Ulster two thousand years ago.

Words by & Mins Industrial modernity was invented in the English midlands around the end of the eighteenth century, kicking off an unprecedented global rise in living standards that continues to this day. But what made this revolution possible was a lesser-known political revolution that took place in the previous century: a period known in English history as the Glorious Revolution.

The Coyote Getter, invented in the 1930s, was a hunting device that spewed cyanide into the mouth of any coyote that bit its scented wool bait. Thirty years later, researchers revisited the device. But rather than revamping it to kill more efficiently, they wanted to replace the cyanide payload with something wholly different: a coyote vaccine. Wild animal vaccines are remarkable for many reasons, but the most remarkable might be that they exist at all.

Most of us accept rats as a fact of life. They live in tunnels and sewers, gnaw through walls, contaminate food, and resist nearly every attempt to push them back. A 2023 put New York City’s rat population at about three million animals, roughly one rat for every three human residents. Almost nowhere do authorities try to get rid of rats altogether. The goal is usually to reduce sightings of them, limit the damage they cause, and coexist as painlessly as possible. That makes one place stand out.

Words by Mins European policy debates often become Americanized because of the American domination of social media. This tends to be troublesome, leading Europeans to see their policy problems through frames into which they do not really fit. But it seems to me that the housing debate in Europe, and especially in continental Europe, might actually be improved by borrowing some ideas from the Americans. Here are some claims that many Americans agree on.

Words by Mins In a corner of the prestigious Kits Point suburb in Vancouver, eleven great towers are beginning to rise from their foundations. This is Senakw (pronounced sen-AHK), a new development owned, managed and championed by the Squamish Nation, an indigenous group native to British Columbia. It will ultimately house 9,000 people, and represents seven percent of Vancouver’s entire projected housing output up to 2033. Senakw has an unusual history.

Words by Mins Each autumn in early modern India, certain men drifted out of the central provinces to take up their craft. Known as ‘Thuggees’, these men were said to be inspired by a bloodthirsty goddess and would attach themselves to a caravan on the road, posing as a merchant glad of the company or a cook looking for work. Days passed, sometimes weeks. The Thuggee played his part and earned the trust of the men he travelled with, and he waited.