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.
Jul 2 202618 mins