Temporada 1
Issue No. 1 — Built to Last
Issue No. 9 — Lead Time
America buries a 900-pound steel time capsule with orders not to open it until 2276 — from a country that can't pass a budget by Friday. In our debut issue: the strange discipline of deep time engineering, from the Svalbard seed vault to the government committee that wrote "this place is not a place of honor" and meant it. Plus: Marie Tharp, the woman who mapped the ocean floor while the experts called her data "girl talk"; a fake ad for a watch with one hand; an honest review of Dava Sobel's Longitude; and the week's front page — a record-hot ocean, quantum entanglement you can almost see, and new Mozart, 235 years after the man stopped writing. Closing essay: what we choose to keep, and why the committee won't do it for you. Reporting up front, opinion in the back, fake ads in the middle — labeled, always.
How much warning does it actually take to save you? This week: a glacier collapse buries villages across the Nepal-Tibet border with zero warning system in place, while a Greenland glacier tells scientists exactly where it'll crack next — years in advance. A Pakistani hospital nursery burns with its exits reportedly locked. The cover story traces three warnings through history: Galveston's deadliest-ever hurricane (the warning existed, the bureaucracy was too slow), the 2004 tsunami (no system existed, one ten-year-old's geography lesson saved a beach), and Japan's 2011 earthquake alert (a system that worked perfectly and still missed the real killer). Plus: the 1946 tsunami that took five hours to cross the Pacific with nowhere to deliver its warning, Venice Film Festival's broken parity pledge, and a pangolin species that's been correctly labeled in a museum drawer since 1836.
Who decides which number is true? This week the desk un-inducts a superyacht (first de-induction in Society Pages history), reads the count that made Congo's outbreak the largest in its history, and asks why Colombia's missing are 379 people or 4,000, depending on who's holding the pencil. Cover story: a button salesman who counted the plague, a nurse who weaponized a chart, and the hurricane toll that went from 64 to 2,975 in one revision. Feature: the census Congress threw in the trash for nine years. Plus a Pentagon file about a triangle that blocked out the stars, and Planet Money's hunt for the most common American. Double-drop week — Issue 7 is here too. No ads. Somebody counted.