One of Terry Pratchett's neatest jokes in the Discworld novels concerns the troll (big creatures made of rock) system of counting, which entails only the words "one," "two," "many" and "lots"—a...

In Prospect’s February issue, I reported on John and Alfred Donovan, two men with a combined age of 150 years in a house in Colchester who have been trying relentlessly to prick holes in one of the...

Logically enough, the maximum possible size of ship it is possible to fit through the Panama canal is called a "panamax"—which happens to be 294.1 metres in length, 32.3 metres in width, 12.0...

I find Wikipedia-bashing tedious and somewhat ungentlemanly. For columnists looking to fill space, it is simple sport to find an error—though usually a trivial one—in a Wikipedia entry on a topic...

I thought I'd cross post this from The Great Beyond, which is a blog we recently started at Nature to complement our own news coverage. The blog rounds up the science stories that, for one reason or...

Earlier this year in Prospect, psychologist Judith Rich Harris previewed the BBC1 series Child of our Time, due to be broadcast in May. The article attracted quite a lot of coverage at the time,...

Heretic. Physicist Freeman Dyson offers some controversial thoughts on global warming and other issues (you'd think he'd been reading Steven Pinker). He also owns up to some bad advice he once gave...

Cyberman. William Gibson tells Salon why Second Life both is and isn't his vision of cyberspace, how Google has changed the way he works, and why no one knows what the hell is going to happen...

As has been widely reported in the papers over the last few days, Prospect contributor Charles (or CAR) Hills--who wrote a column about life in Clapham for us a few years ago, and has more recently...

How did you get here? It's easy enough for me to find out—I can just browse any one of a number of back-end blogging widgets we have installed to see, for instance, how many unique page views we're...