Sublime

David Keith, a professor of applied physics at Harvard, has been described as “perhaps the foremost proponent of geoengineering,” a characterization that he bristles at. “I’m a proponent of reality,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 2015. Keith founded the university’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program in 2017, and he

the uptick rule—regulation that had been introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1938 to prevent investors from continually shorting a stock that was falling. (In other words, before a stock could be shorted, the price had to rise, indicating that there were active buyers for it in the market. Theoretically, the rule would prevent s

He’s referring to Operation Merlin, a botched effort from a few years back that’s just been leaked to the press. In a bid to entrap the Iranians into building a nuclear weapon in contravention of the ban, we apparently arranged for an asset to pass them plans for a contraband firing mechanism, sneakily—or so we thought—adapted to render the system

Von Neumann was worried about global warming long before most people were—but mostly he worried about nuclear war, fearing that “mankind might not survive another twenty-five years but instead would become the victim of its own self-destructive inclinations.” However, charged with less abstract

By inventing ammonia synthesis, Fritz Haber became arguably the single most consequential organism on the planet.