Time And Space
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Culture
The board game Monopoly — now a byword for ruthless capitalism — was adapted from a game a progressive woman patented decades earlier to teach players the evils of monopoly and land-grabbing, and she was paid $500 for it and left out of the story entirely
Rocket Science
A Brazilian researcher just found a 153-day route to Mars inside a file that asteroid trackers had already discarded as too rough to use, and it raises a reasonable question about what else is in the bin
Mind & Meaning
Psychotherapist Alfred Adler believed the cure for our unhappiness is oddly outward, and it isn't confidence — it's social interest, the turn from "what do I get" to "what can I give"
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day by Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "All things are petty, easily changed, vanishing away."
Early Earth
The modern potato traces back to an ancient chance encounter between a wild tomato and a small tuberless plant approximately nine million years ago in South America, in a hybrid event that produced the first underground storage organ neither parent could have made on its own
Aerospace
A fully built, fully tested lunar rover named VIPER faced dismantlement for parts after its 2024 cancellation, and NASA is now considering sending a Mars engineering testbed that has spent its working life in a JPL rock yard to the Moon instead
Psychology
Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter in late 2010 that his own children had not used the iPad, and that he limited technology at home, even as the tablet he had unveiled in San Francisco months earlier was on its way to selling hundreds of millions
Africa News
The last missing royal tomb of Ancient Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, belonging to a pharaoh named Thutmose II who ruled approximately 3,500 years ago, was announced by a joint British-Egyptian archaeological team in February 2025, in the first discovery of a pharaonic tomb near the Valley of the Kings since Tutankhamun's was found by Howard Carter in November 1922.
Mind & Meaning
The Moon has been three days away for more than half a century, and almost no one has stopped to ask what it will feel like when stops being the answer to "how far is the Moon" and starts being the answer to "how long is the flight"
Constellation
Astronomers have found a planet where it rains diamonds, a Jupiter-mass world orbiting a dead star whose carbon atmosphere grows soot clouds that harden into diamond deep inside, and whose composition rules out every known way a planet can form.
Human Behaviour
Elite freedivers can hold their breath for more than eleven minutes on a single breath of air — and one oxygen-assisted record stands at nearly thirty. Most untrained people tap out well before ninety seconds
Mind & Meaning
Within a single four-minute window on a football pitch in Mexico City in June of 1986, a five-foot-five Argentine named Diego Maradona scored the most notorious goal in World Cup history and then the most beautiful — both in the same match, both against England
Mind & Meaning
For most of the past decade, the world's most-visited city has not been Paris, London, or New York — it has been Bangkok, which topped the Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index in six of seven years through 2018 and hosted more international overnight visitors annually than any other city on Earth
Mind & Meaning
In 1979, the Chinese city of Shenzhen was a fishing village of approximately thirty thousand people directly across the border from Hong Kong — and within a single generation, its population has grown to over seventeen million, and it is now home to some of the largest technology companies in the world including Huawei, Tencent, and BYD
Mind & Meaning