The Greatest Factory We Ever Built: How Mass Education Rewired the World
For most of human history, literacy was a luxury good. Like silk or spices, it belonged to the gentry and priests who could afford the time, tutors, and texts. For everyone else, literacy was unnecessary - and dangerous. A literate peasant was a questioning peasant—prone to challenge his station, his lord, or, worst of all, his taxes. Ignorance suited the social order. The masses toiled with their muscles while a small elite safeguarded humanity's accumulated knowledge in mon
5 days ago10 min read
The Acid and The Glue: Science and the Paradox of Progress
For 2,000 years, Europe believed women had fewer teeth than men. Why? Because Aristotle said so, and nobody bothered to count. Questioning Aristotle was heresy. (1) That is how most of human history worked. The ancients—Aristotle, Confucius, the Prophets—knew everything worth knowing. Our job was to preserve their wisdom, not question it. Progress wasn't a consideration because the golden age lay in the past. Then something extraordinary happened. We developed Science, a syst
Dec 28, 202514 min read
Print, Profit, and Upheaval: How the Press Broke the Medieval World
For most of human history, books were a bit like medieval castles: rare, expensive, and exclusively in the hands of elites who could afford them. A single manuscript Bible might cost the equivalent of a modest estate and bear the marks of a scribe's two years of cramped labor. Knowledge circulated slowly and expensively, each copy bearing a scribe’s quirks, flourishes, or more often, mistakes. Audio and/or video version of the article From Luxury to Mass Production The invent
Dec 14, 20257 min read
The Sorcery of Ink: How Writing Conjured Modern Civilization
Before writing, humanity suffered from collective amnesia. A master architect's ingenious drainage solution died with him. A physician's discovery about infected wounds evaporated after three generations. A merchant's trade route to distant tin mines became legend, then myth, then forgotten. Every society was trapped in a perpetual present, unable to accumulate knowledge faster than it could forget. Writing changed everything. Not because it made humans smarter—after all, t
Nov 30, 20256 min read
