Woman with a home pregnancy test

Home Pregnancy Tests

Before the arrival of home pregnancy tests, women had to seek answers at the doctor’s office, which was costly, inconvenient, and potentially embarrassing.
American actors Cindy Williams (right) and Ron Howard as Laurie and Steve on the set of the Lucasfilm production 'American Graffiti',

The Sonic Triumph of American Graffiti

In 1973, George Lucas joined forces with sound designer Walter Murch to celebrate a bygone era. They ended up revolutionizing the role music plays in film.
Linda Brown Smith, Ethel Louise Belton Brown, Harry Briggs, Jr., and Spottswood Bolling, Jr. during press conference at Hotel Americana, 1964

Brown v. Board of Education: Annotated

The 1954 Supreme Court decision, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, declared that “separate but equal” has no place in education.
The Strand, London, with St Mary's Church, and Somerset House, 1753

What Was It like to Be an Inuit in London in 1772?

London had long been described as wearying and unreadable, so it's not surprising that Inuit visitors considered it unfathomable and irrational as well.
Photograph: A diving horse mid-dive with the rider clinging to its neck, c. 1955

Diving Horses, Turing Machines, and Life with Germs

Well-researched stories from Atlas Obscura, Quanta Magazine, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
Central High School Annual Yearbook, Cleveland, Ohio,1920. Langston Hughes’s senior portrait is on the far right.

Class Production

A collection of high school yearbooks from Cleveland captures the rise, fall, and uncertain future of the American middle class.
Dried meat in Bhutan

In Bhutan, Real Citizens Don’t Eat Meat

The fusion of Buddhism and politics in Bhutan has forced “good citizens” to reconsider their relationship with the procurement and consumption of meat.
An animation of a cat that shifts between the cat being alive and the cat being dead

Why Do We Love Thinking About Schrödinger’s Cat?

In physics, the whole point of the thought experiment is that it’s absurd. But in literature, it’s been used to explore all sorts of ideas and possibilities.
AI generates images, text and videos, cute robot reaching out computer screen, holding file icons, artificial intelligence creates visual content provides it to user, vector illustration isolated

Artificial Intelligence: An AI-Generated Reading List

ChatGPT generated this annotated bibliography for us. Don't worry, we'll ask (and pay) a human to write one too.
Bob Gutowski, 1957

Pole Vaulting Over the Iron Curtain

When it became clear that the United States and its allies couldn’t “liberate” Eastern Europe through psychological war and covert ops, they turned to sports.