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 →Ada Lovelace's 1843 translation-and-commentary on Luigi Menabrea's paper on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine contains, in Note G, what is now considered the first published computer program. The Analytical Engine was never built in Babbage's lifetime. Ada died of cancer at 36, the same age as her father.
Read the story →Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under Caliph al-Ma'mun in the 820s. His *al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala* gave Europe the word algebra. The Latinised version of his name — algoritmi — gave Europe the word algorithm. He introduced the Hindu decimal numeral system to the Arabic-speaking world and from there to Europe.
Read the story →Alan Turing was found dead at his Wilmslow home on 8 June 1954, aged 41. The coroner ruled suicide by cyanide poisoning; a half-eaten apple lay beside the bed. The Crown Prosecution Service had convicted him of gross indecency two years earlier and ordered chemical castration as an alternative to prison. The pardon arrived in 2013.
Read the story →Alexander the Great's Macedonian army of approximately 47,000 defeated Darius III's Persian army of approximately 100,000 east of the Tigris river on 1 October 331 BCE. Darius fled the field. The Persian Empire that had existed for two centuries collapsed within months. Darius was murdered by his own satrap nine months later. Alexander died of fever at Babylon four years after that.
Read the story →Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared on 2 July 1937 between Lae, Papua New Guinea, and Howland Island. The Lockheed Electra was on the final third of a planned round-the-world equatorial circumnavigation. The largest naval search in US history at that point covered approximately 250,000 square miles but found nothing. The fate of the aircraft and its two occupants remains formally unresolved.
Read the story →Salomon August Andrée and two companions launched a hydrogen balloon called the Eagle from Danes Island in Svalbard on 11 July 1897, intending to fly over the North Pole. The balloon crashed onto the ice three days later. The three men spent three months walking to White Island, where they died in early October 1897. Their bodies, their cameras, and their journals were found by a Norwegian fishing expedition in August 1930.
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