Every story is a pin on the map. Click to read where it happened.
Every story belongs to one of three editorial columns. Pick the one whose voice you want to read in.
Long stories about long-dead people.
Deep historical deep-dives. Patient, novelistic, primary-source-heavy. The pieces meant to reward a slow Sunday read.
Read this column →How people died, and what killed them.
Deaths, disasters, and accidents — the dramatic, the absurd, the avoidable. Written with restraint, never with cheap thrill.
Read this column →Short, strange, sourced.
Brief pieces of weird trivia, each one a single surprising fact unfolded into its smallest necessary essay. Five-minute reads.
Read this column →The Antikythera mechanism was not the only thing on the 60 BC Greek shipwreck. Spongers in 1900 brought up four life-size bronze sculptures and a marble youth that nobody could date. Then they found the planetary computer. The other finds have been quietly upstaged for a century.
Read the story →Alfred Lacroix arrived on Martinique six weeks after the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée had killed thirty thousand people. He spent the next four years on the island reconstructing exactly what had happened. The science of volcanology, more or less, is what he found.
Read the story →Caroline of Ansbach, Queen of Great Britain, had been carrying a strangulated umbilical hernia for fourteen years when it ruptured in November 1737. She had concealed it from everyone including her doctors. She died after twelve days of pain. She was 54.
Read the story →When the French king Charles IV died in February 1328 without a male heir, the French throne passed to his cousin Philip of Valois under a specific reading of the medieval Frankish *Salic Law*. The reading excluded the rival English claim of Edward III through his French-princess mother Isabella. Edward eventually decided he disagreed.
Read the story →On 15 February 2013 a 20-metre stony asteroid exploded over the southern Russian Urals at an altitude of about 30 kilometres. The blast injured 1,500 people, mostly from flying glass. It was the largest atmospheric impact event since Tunguska in 1908 — and the first to be captured on car-dashboard video.
Read the story →Cholera had been an endemic disease of the Ganges delta for centuries. In 1817 it suddenly became a global pandemic — moving across Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and eventually Europe over six years. The trigger was probably the Tambora eruption of 1815 disrupting Bengali agriculture two years earlier.
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