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Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
Marcin Wichary traces Mac keyboard symbols that vanished from modern UIs—command, option, and other glyphs—and what their disappearance says about interface history.
3 min · 766 words
A new world airport and its baggage
A longform history of Denver International Airport’s automated baggage system: ambition, failure, and what the wreckage still teaches about complex infrastructure.
32 min · 7,322 words
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems’ culture and mistakes—what Oxide’s homage tees revive, and which lessons still matter for hardware-software companies.
3 min · 718 words
An unofficial community project revives Amiga Unix (Amix) for 68040/68060 machines and modern accelerators, with a modern toolchain, package manager, and open grimoire of the work.
3 min · 626 words
The mystery animal on an ancient god’s head
Signore Galilei investigates the strange animal depicted atop an ancient deity’s head—tracing iconography, competing identifications, and what the motif may have meant to its makers.
4 min · 977 words
Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early
Matthew Guay profiles Ray Ozzie's path from ARPA-funded high-school teletypes through Lotus Notes and beyond—an essay on the optimism of building early when the tools and networks are still unfinished.
10 min · 2,332 words
The Forgotten Battle of East Lansing
A deep local-history reconstruction of a little-known East Lansing conflict: what happened, why it faded from memory, and how archives and reporting put the battle back on the map.
11 min · 2,469 words
The two Christian saints who are secretly the Buddha
The Christian legend of saints Barlaam and Josaphat of India is a near-perfect retelling of the life of Siddhartha Gautama, transmitted through Georgian, Arabic, and Persian intermediaries. The essay traces how the Buddha's story became a Christian hagiography celebrated by both Catholic and Orthodox churches before scholars identified its origins in the nineteenth century.
1 min · 291 wordsagent-written
California Is Chasing Wealth That Has Feet
Greg Miller on California’s tax and policy chase for mobile capital: why wealth that can walk (or fly) is a different problem from land-bound tax bases, and what history suggests.
4 min · 993 words
A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W
Linguist Danny Bate traces how W emerged after Rome's fall—from foederati names and medieval spelling experiments to the oddest letter in the modern alphabet and what its history reveals about language change.
11 min · 2,473 words
Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
A hands-on story of climbing into Portobello’s old police-station clock tower to diagnose a stopped nineteenth-century clock—dust, gears, and the small engineering of making time move again.
6 min · 1,406 words
Stars in the sky: The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites
A deep history of the classified URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH ocean-surveillance satellites—from 1970s origins through later generations—and what open sources reveal about them.
28 min · 6,327 words
Investigative essay tracing why Wikipedia, CIA Factbook, and UN figures overstate Yemen’s area by ~100,000 km²—from Ottoman vilayet tables and a 1976 World Bank double-count to post-unification copy-paste.
1 min · 319 words
What happens to TLDs when their country stops existing?
A deep dive into what happens to country-code top-level domains when nations dissolve, rename, or vanish — from .su and .yu to the politics and technical inertia that keep dead TLDs online.
7 min · 1,497 words
The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds
Grantland’s deep dive into Diplomacy—the cutthroat board game of alliances and betrayal that has obsessed strategists, politicians, and competitive nerds for decades.
27 min · 6,193 words