Works in Progress

Beauty In My Backyard - Works in Progress Magazine

Ugliness might stop houses being built - but not in the way you think.

25 min read

Works in Progress

Did medieval people love their children? - Works in Progress Magazine

Is it really plausible that children survived the hardship of medieval life without devoted parents?

4 min read

Works in Progress

Chabad life - Works in Progress Magazine

Modernity has meant fewer children in virtually every culture around the world. Holdouts like Orthodox Jews might have lessons for the rest of us.

7 min read

Works in Progress

How Amsterdam invented the fire department - Works in Progress Magazine

Two Dutch brothers invented a system that transformed a city previously ravaged by fires

9 min read

Works in Progress

On the origin of continents - Works in Progress Magazine

Continental drift is as fundamental to geology as natural selection is to biology. Why did it take us hundreds of years to discover it?

14 min read

Works in Progress

How to lie about radiation -

Drinking a beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 at once. Radiation is similar.

13 min read

Works in Progress

Why the West stopped making land - Works in Progress Magazine

Large swaths of America’s cities were originally underwater. We stopped half a century ago, but there is plenty more land left to take.

16 min read

Works in Progress

Why American data centers can't plug in

The AI buildout is bottlenecked by energy. But America has the electricity to power its data centers; the problem is getting it to them.

20 min read

Works in Progress

The wonder of epidurals - Works in Progress Magazine

Childbirth may be the most painful thing a person can experience, but we have the technology to numb the pain.

7 min read

Works in Progress

How the Glorious Revolution crushed the NIMBYs

In 1688, England swept away the encrusted vetocracy that had held back economic growth for centuries. Could we do the same today?

21 min read

Works in Progress

Why we should vaccinate wild animals - Works in Progress Magazine

Vaccinating wild animals can protect human health, and spare animals from extinction and suffering.

11 min read

Works in Progress

How Alberta eradicated rats - Works in Progress Magazine

Rats have conquered nearly every place on earth where humans live. Only Alberta soldiers on.

12 min read

Works in Progress

Should European housing politics be Americanized? - Works in Progress Magazine

Europe's housing shortages are even worse than America's. So why does nobody there talk about zoning?

9 min read

Works in Progress

How the Squamish struck gold in Vancouver

The Squamish nation has built one of the world's most exciting bottom-up high-density developments: Senakw. This is its story.

17 min read

Works in Progress

The flag stranglers - Works in Progress Magazine

Most flags used to be ugly. They were probably better that way.

7 min read

Works in Progress

The blood cancer that became solvable

Multiple myeloma is brutal. We may finally have a cure, but American regulatory inertia means that it was discovered abroad.

14 min read

Works in Progress

Samurai city - Works in Progress Magazine

For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city.

11 min read

Works in Progress

The Great Downzoning - Works in Progress Magazine

It was once legal to build almost anything, anywhere. Then, in the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the West banned densification.

35 min read

Works in Progress

Steam networks - Works in Progress Magazine

New York's skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that still warms the city. While the rest of the world moved to hot water, Manhattanites still buy steam by the megapound.

23 min read

Works in Progress

How bacteria solved the mystery of inheritance - Works in Progress Magazine

In the 1940s, scientists made a discovery now fundamental to biology: genes are encoded in DNA. The story involves bacteria, dead mice, and a kitchen cream separator.

10 min read