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A clearer view of a changing world.
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Discovery
Long-form features, visual explainers, timelines, historical investigations and data stories. The slower half of the newspaper.
History Desk
Before Silicon Valley there was Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia, a glider factory in St. Paul and a laboratory in Norwalk, Connecticut. The first American computers were built in places that made typewriters and aircraft parts, by companies that no longer exist, in towns that do.
4 min read · interactive timeline · archival placeholders
Clear answers to large questions, with the evidence attached.
2 min read
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Developments likely to shape the next decade, with a prediction tracker that revisits past forecasts.
Archives, timelines, then-and-now comparisons and the industries that shaped American towns.
Reusable interactive charts that name their source, period, units and limitations.
Governments have met repeatedly since 2023 to coordinate on advanced AI, producing declarations, a network of national safety institutes and, in this demonstration scenario, a 2026 agreement to share test results..
Reading paths assembled by the editors.
Factories, companies and machines of early American computing.
3 articles
From answering questions to completing work, and what that means for jobs.
6 articles
How discoveries reach patients and what the trials actually show.
6 articles
Telescopes, dark matter and distant planets.
3 articles
The World in Numbers
Transistor counts for selected microprocessors and systems-on-chip, as published by their manufacturers. Logarithmic scale.
In 1956 a trucking executive loaded fifty-eight metal boxes onto a tanker in Newark. The shipping container that resulted did more to create global trade than any treaty.
2 min read
The first commercial computer weighed about thirteen tons, used more than five thousand vacuum tubes and was sold by a typewriter company. Forty-six were built. The age they began has not ended.
3 min read
A space telescope that sees in infrared, ground observatories with mirrors the size of buildings, and a survey that will photograph the whole southern sky every few nights. Each answers questions the last generation could only pose.
2 min read
A typewriter maker bought the two most important computer start-ups in America, led the industry for a few years and then lost it. The corporate history explains a great deal about how technology businesses rise and fall.
2 min read
A single employer could build a town's housing, fund its schools and set its rhythm for a century. When the industry moved or died, the town remained. Local history is largely the history of that relationship.
2 min read
Coding was the first job that AI agents did well, because code is the rare kind of work that tells you immediately when you are wrong. The consequences for who programs, and how, are still arriving.
2 min read
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Updated Oct 14, 2026, 2:00 PM
Software systems that plan and carry out multi-step tasks on a person's behalf have moved from research demonstrations into workplace trials.
Updated Oct 14, 2026, 9:00 AM
Fusion has been demonstrated in the laboratory, including a 2022 experiment that released more energy from the fuel than the laser energy delivered to it.
Updated Oct 13, 2026, 11:00 AM
Record volumes of solar, wind and battery projects are waiting to connect to the grid in the United States while transmission lines and interconnection reviews lag.
Updated Oct 12, 2026, 10:00 AM
Two antibody drugs that clear amyloid plaques are approved in the United States and modestly slow decline in early disease.
Updated Oct 11, 2026, 6:00 AM
The first commercial computers in the United States were built by companies better known for typewriters, punched-card machines and adding machines.
Updated Oct 10, 2026, 4:00 AM