Well-researched stories from Longreads, The Atlantic, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

Ada Lovelace wrote extensive notes on the world’s first computer. Her innovations foreshadowed those used in twentieth-century PCs.

Researchers say that dolphins are so smart that captivity causes them psychological harm. But getting data in the open ocean can be tricky.

Nixon targeted Foreign Service officers who served in China in the 1940s as communist sympathizers and "fellow travelers." Then he opened trade relations.

The reality of wild rice defeated the best efforts of Europeans to domesticate it.

100 years ago, Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, opened the doors to her legendary bookstore, Shakespeare & Co.

“Trapping was not a ‘business for profit’ among the Dakota but primarily a social exchange,” one scholar writes.

In nineteenth century America, young women took to studying botany—a conjoining of interest, social acceptance, and readily available schooling.

The black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was one of the first to make films for a black audience, a rebuke to racist movies like The Birth of a Nation.

One group of researchers found distinct differences among songs from groups of humpback whales that are geographically isolated from each other.