Mary Ann Duignan

The Most Dangerous Woman in the World

“Chicago May” was a classic swindler who conned her way around the world in the early twentieth century. She was also a sign of hard times.
Academy Award statue

A Night at the Oscars

All (or at least a lot) of what you need to know before going to this year’s Academy Awards watch party.
Alvin, the Navy research submarine

A Cold War Baby: Happy Birthday, Alvin!

The submersible Alvin is sixty years old this year. Numerous overhauls and upgrades have kept the craft going down (and coming back up!).
J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Annotated Oppenheimer

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
Coal burning power plant with pollution in a twilight situation.

Not All Forms of Carbon Removal Are Created Equal

The carbon market and offsetting system have created “carbon cowboys” and perpetuated forms of neo-colonialism and other inequities.
A rose, Zéphirine Drouhin, against a black background

What Do Gardens and Murder Have in Common?

Writers have long plotted murder mysteries in gardens of all sorts. What makes these fertile grounds for detective fiction?
Police find bog body dated over 2,000 years in Bellaghy. Police Service of Northern Ireland

A Body in the Bog

The bog is where forensics and archaeology meet to solve “cold cases.”
The cover of the Chinese edition of Three Body Problem

Chinese Science Fiction Before The Three Body Problem

Viewing the genre as a means to spread modern knowledge, Chinese novelists have been writing science-fiction stories since at least 1902.
Portrait of Tokugawa Ieyasu

Shogun, Evolving Eyes, and a Feast of Drunkenness

Well-researched stories from Smithsonian Magazine, Atlas Obscura, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, 1964

Using False Claims to Justify War

Hardly the recent innovation it’s frequently mistakened to be, deception as a path to war has been used by American presidents since the 1800s.