In @nytopinion In the 18th century the East India Company was the most powerful and dangerous corporation the world had ever seen — that is, until the A.I. giants turned up, William Dalrymple writes.

A 1.4 billion person civilization is now producing babies at 18th-century volume China recorded 7.92 million births in 2025 That’s roughly what China was producing around 1738....when the whole country was only about 150 million people Same baby count Almost 10 times the population China is already at roughly half the replacement rate That means China is set to lose around 600 million people in this generation alone You can’t immigrate your way out of this. That’s just moving people around on a shrinking map You would need almost two entire Americas to move to China just to replace them.....it's impossible

Ep. 268: News and misinformation in early America In 18th century America, news traveled slowly across the Atlantic. Newspapers reprinted secondhand reports, private letters, and unverified stories from abroad, leaving readers with multiple versions of reality. In a world educated by an unverifiable news cycle, how did misinformation shape early American life? @TheFIREorg's @NicoPerrino sits down with Jordan Taylor, historian of American history, to explore how news, rumor, and misrepresentation influenced the course of the American Revolution and the nation that followed. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:05 How colonists got their news 08:28 Why foreign news dominated early newspapers 17:33 How colonial newspapers verified information 22:32 Did miscommunication help spark the Revolution? 29:57 The XYZ Affair and the Sedition Act 39:21 The First Amendment’s original meaning 44:34 Current day parallels 55:41 Outro

What's happening in Iran right now—if it's not more important for the world than Europe's Renaissance and the Enlightenment in the 18th century—is not less. We all need to support the people of Iran NOW—for our future generations. This could reshape the globe, our priorities and things to focus on for many years.

We are convinced that the gospel of Jesus Christ has the power to transform lives, families, communities, and entire nations. Historians tell us that the Wesleyan revival transformed 18th century England, saving it from the bloody revolution France expe...

Why do Vermont and New Hampshire look like a square that's split at an angle? They look like a square cut on the bias because they were never designed as two states. They were one contested colonial claim, then sliced by a river. Put Vermont and New Hampshire together and the outline is roughly a block: Canada on the north (the 45th parallel), Massachusetts on the south, New York on the west, Maine and a sliver of Atlantic on the east. That outer box is the leftover of 17th- and 18th-century English land grants. The slash through the middle is the Connecticut River. New Hampshire began as a coastal grant. In 1629 John Mason received the land between the Merrimack and Piscataqua Rivers, running about 60 miles inland. That is why the state is fat at the bottom and pinches toward the north. Vermont is the opposite shape—wide against Canada, narrow against Massachusetts—because its western side follows Lake Champlain and a surveyed line with New York, while its eastern side follows the river. The river became the cut because two colonies claimed the same interior. New York’s 1664 patent to the Duke of York ran east to the Connecticut River. New Hampshire’s governors later claimed west as far as Massachusetts and Connecticut did: 20 miles east of the Hudson. From 1749 to 1764, Governor Benning Wentworth sold that claim as the New Hampshire Grants—more than a hundred six-mile-square towns on the west bank of the Connecticut, in what is now Vermont. New York sold overlapping titles to the same land. King George III settled the colonial fight on July 20, 1764: the boundary between New Hampshire and New York would be “the western banks of the River Connecticut.” That order is why the two states look like halves of one block. Everything east of the west bank stayed New Hampshire. Everything west became New York on paper, then the Vermont Republic in 1777, then the 14th state in 1791. The river does not run due north–south, so the cut is angled. It rises in the Connecticut Lakes in far northern New Hampshire, then trends generally south with a southwest lean through a valley that already existed as a travel corridor. On a map that reads as a diagonal. Vermont is the western triangle; New Hampshire is the eastern one. Flip either state and it roughly fits the other. That is the “square split at an angle.” Two later fights locked the line in place. During the Revolution, Vermont annexed a string of New Hampshire towns east of the river. George Washington told Vermont to drop the claim if it wanted to join the Union. In 1782 Vermont did, and gave up any jurisdiction east of the low-water mark on the western shore. A century and a half later Vermont tried to tax mills in the river. In 1933 the Supreme Court held Vermont to that 1782 concession. New Hampshire owns the river. Vermont owns the bank. The border is the ordinary low-water mark on the Vermont side, not the middle of the channel. So the geometry is an accident of grants, a royal order, a river that was already there, and a republic that traded the water for statehood. Nobody drew a square and then drew a diagonal through it. The box is the old claim. The slash is the Connecticut.

This blew my mind: between 1403 and 1407, the Ming Dynasty emperor commissioned an encyclopedia - now called the Yongle encyclopedia, after the emperor - that was so vast in scale (around 400 million Chinese characters) that the only other encyclopedia that finally exceeded it was Wikipedia in 2007, 6 years after its launch! This is yet another example of West-centric our sense of intellectual history is: in French education we're taught that encyclopedias as a concept started with Diderot and d'Alembert's "Encyclopédie" in the mid-18th century, which we're told was the first attempt in history to gather all of human knowledge in one place. Not only was the Yongle encyclopedia completed 350 years earlier, and not only is it 20 times larger than L'Encyclopédie, but it was itself a very late entry in a Chinese tradition of encyclopedias which started with the Huanglan - more than 8 million characters in length - compiled around 220 AD ( Unfortunately much of the encyclopedia has been lost: out of the original 11,095 volumes, only around 400 are known to have survived (300-ish of which are in China). But we sometimes find new ones, like two volumes that surfaced in 2020 in the attic of a French family, descendants of a naval officer who had received them as a gift from corrupt Chinese officials in the 1870s. They went to auction in Paris with a starting price of 5,000 euros and sold for 8.12 million to a Chinese textile entrepreneur, Jin Liang, who donated them to China's National Archives of Publications this summer (