Analog Nation

Earth’s salvation rests in a display case on the Upper West Side. It is a cloth, somewhere between a rug and a shawl, with long, wispy tassels. A dizzying pattern weaves up and down its length, the work of many hands. It is a nearly perfect shade of gold. Dozens of pins hold the cloth [...]

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One of the basic tenets of popular culture is that the villain is always one piece away from completing his master plan. Sauron needed the One Ring. Belloq needed the Staff of Ra. Megatron needed the Allspice, or something — honestly, that movie made so little sense, my back started to hurt (I’m not kidding). [...]

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Let’s say you’re a scientist. You wear a lab coat, you rock the clipboard, you nudge the bridge of your glasses to keep them from sliding down. You have been in the private sector. You have delivered results. And as you toil away in your fluorescent, dust-free environment, you have one goal: To accidentally doom [...]

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The Scots called it Dùnrath. It lay on the northern coast of the isle, keeping watch as the cold waves broke upon its shore. No one’s quite certain where the name came from, but it is thought to derive from an ancient stone fort nearby, called a “broch.” In 1437, invaders from Clan MacKay met [...]

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“Aren’t you nervous?”
“Nope.”
-Manhattan Project physicists Isidor Rabi and Kenneth Greisen, lying on the ground one minute before the first atomic bomb test, July 1945
“Now I’m scared.”
-Greisen, as the countdown hit 10 seconds
On the day of the The Trinity Test, Enrico Fermi offered a bet to any takers. Would the device incinerate the atmosphere? And if [...]

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Let’s talk about good ideas for a minute.
Good ideas are like building blocks. Pretty much everything worthwhile, from a fun weekend to a breakthrough in medicine, begins when someone puts a good idea out there into the ether. Sometimes that idea stands alone, a self-sustaining entity. Sometimes it is met in kind with other good [...]

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