What Archimedes Did Two Thousand Years Before Newton
He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.
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Long stories about long-dead people.
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The Coroner’s Report
How people died, and what killed them.
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All stories → The Coroner’s Report June 10, 2026 · Island on the Rhine, Basel, Bishopric of Basel (modern Switzerland)
The Pogrom That Came Before Strasbourg
Five weeks before the Strasbourg massacre, Basel built a wooden house on an island in the Rhine, locked roughly six hundred of its Jews inside, and burned it.
Read the story →The Explosion Ten Days After the Towers
On 21 September 2001 a fertilizer plant in Toulouse exploded with the force of a small nuclear bomb. France first assumed it was terrorism. It wasn't.
Read the story →The Decade Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Mud
In the 1850s the central business district of Chicago was raised four to fourteen feet on jackscrews while continuing to operate. People kept eating at the hotels.
Read the story →The King Murdered in a Castle Basement (Maybe)
Edward II of England was forced to abdicate, locked in a Gloucestershire castle, and died there in September 1327. Or did he escape and live another fourteen years?
Read the story →The Librarian Who Measured the Earth With a Shadow
Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
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