Iconic authors
Themes
Bibliography of the day
Hunger and Conscience in Lancashire, How the Cotton Famine Tested the King Cotton Wager
The defenders of slavery bet that cutting off cotton would force Britain onto the side of the South. The famine came, Lancashire went hungry, and the bet failed. It failed because people argued over the hunger, not because they agreed about it.
The Earth as a Bad Clock, How the Measure of Time Stopped Following the Turning World
Clocks first abandoned the wandering sun for an averaged day. Then astronomers found that the Earth's spin was itself being braked by the tides, and the measure of time had to stop trusting the world it was meant to track.
