Archive - Jay Hancock

How To Think About Nuclear Energy Now

An environmentalist decides we need more uranium-powered electricity. His book is a model of honest analysis in an argumentative age.

Jan 20 •

December 2024

Word History Is Human History

The Oxford English Dictionary shows how changes in language mirror changes in society.

Dec 2, 2024 •

November 2024

Under Trump, Inflation Bonds Are A Buy

Coming decades offer a higher risk of rising price inflation. Investors can insure against it while earning government-guaranteed, inflation-beating…

Nov 10, 2024 •

June 2024

Death and Caring in the Ebola Epidemic

Obstetrician Benjamin Black was in Sierra Leone for the worst known outbreak of a horrible disease. West Africa's crisis was virtue's opportunity. Many…

Jun 4, 2024 •

April 2024

The Search For History's Ordinary Folk

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who died last year, discovered a minutely detailed medieval world in the Vatican archives. His kind of social history lives on.

Apr 24, 2024 •

January 2024

The mental shift that launched modernity

Maybe you don't like math, but math likes you. Society had to learn to think quantitatively before scientists and entrepreneurs could improve the world.

Jan 31, 2024 •

September 2023

Vaccines are centuries old. Antivax spite, too

Threats against scientists, quack preventives, blaming foreigners -- infectious disease causes social symptoms as well as medical ones.

Sep 26, 2023 •

July 2023

She Resurrected The World of Henry VIII

Lacking a professorship, with little academic or financial support, Muriel St. Clare Byrne produced one of the great works of English history…

Jul 20, 2023 •

April 2023

Will The Fed Bail? The Doubt is Gone Forever

Regulators love pretending they might not intervene with magic money and other powerful tools when economies wobble. That little trick is no longer…

Apr 25, 2023 •

Join me on Notes

A new place to connect

Apr 12, 2023 •

February 2023

Lost Letters Show Erasure Of DNA Heroine

Previously unknown letters from two Nobelists reveal shameful new details of the campaign to minimize Rosalind Franklin's role in finding DNA's…

Feb 8, 2023 •

November 2022

The Most Important News Story Ever Printed

John Hersey's 1946 dispatch from Hiroshima helped create a taboo on using nuclear weapons that even Vladimir Putin hesitates to break.

Nov 29, 2022 •

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