Sublime

The railroad was the disruptive technology. It reached into every aspect of industry, commerce, and daily life, a complex network emanating from the center of the largest cities to the remotest countryside. Railroads led to, in Karl Marx’s words, “the annihilation of space by time” and the “transformation of the product into a commodity.” A product

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Before other auto promoters, Charles Hayes saw that industry leaders had to reshape the traffic safety debate. As president of the Chicago Motor Club, Hayes warned his friends that bad publicity over traffic casualties could soon lead to “legislation that will hedge the operation of automobiles with almost unbearable restrictions.” The solution was... See more

Hong Kong was a cutting-edge template for an evolving entity, the “zone,” which is the primary object of Slobodian’s analysis. Zones—free trade zones, export-processing zones, industrial parks, economic and technology development zones, free ports, and more—have pockmarked and hollowed the neat geography of the world map from Hong Kong to Dubai, wi... See more

Pierce, to put it simply, was asking himself: What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless? In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things: A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years. Research could be terminated with

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The oldest conflict in American politics is the one between individualism and centralism. Reagan changed the terms by inverting them: the descendants of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, with their desire for independence, became sturdy car-company executives and investment bankers yearning to breathe free of big government. The heirs of Hamilton’s arist

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Going in the other direction, the cargo often consisted of U.S.-bred hogs, their pork considered a great delicacy in Cuba. The aroma that wafted from the resultant stockyards on Trumbo Island lent an entirely new aspect to close-quarters life on Key West, with nearby residents able to reckon what kind of day it was going to be by the direction the

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