Sara Herschander

No, Rome was not built in a day, but it was built at breathtaking speed, its temples, amphitheaters, and aqueducts rising with the help of a magical blend of volcanic ash and lime. Today, that mira...

“We should look for love!” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy bellowed while flanked by his nine children at the Great American State Fair in June: “Get married, and have lots of kids!” In a braze...

Jonathan Hale was ready to lay down his paint rollers. Hale, a law student turned viral road safety advocate, had run into legal trouble for painting his own DIY crosswalks across some of Los Angel...

There’s no place like Kansas, a state whose howling winds are so fierce that in the 1800s, the roaring soundscape drove local farmers into madness. It is so windy in Kansas that every so often, tra...

Buried beneath every American city is a mysterious jumble of cables, pipes, and gas lines, entangled like a pair of wired headphones the moment you pull them out of your pocket. Every time a contra...

There is a kind of terror-tinged embarrassment that comes from dozing off on your beach towel on the sand, only to find a rising tide intrude upon your mid-nap bliss, lapping at your toes and sweep...

Nearly two decades ago, a group of researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory ran a secret experiment, known as the Aurora Generator Test, on a massive emerald green diesel generator. Using 30 li...

On stage at Davos in the Swiss Alps earlier this year, Bill Gates, before an audience of the global do-gooding elite, announced a $50 million partnership between his foundation and an unlikely new ...

In 2012, Southern California was besotted with an unlikely celebrity: a telegenic mountain lion who had crossed one of the state’s most perilous freeways, seeking a territory to call his own. Widel...

During a tense vote on a data center being built in her drought-stricken Arizona district last summer, Tucson City Councilmember Nikki Lee made an unlikely pitch: “We’re going to get a little out-o...

“If this is democratic socialism,” wrote one New Yorker under a mayoral Facebook post, “maybe it is the change we need.” She was referring neither to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s heavily scrutinized plan...

Dolly Parton was on her way to the studio to polish off “Blue Smoke” when the SUV she was riding in collided with a sedan in a Nashville intersection in 2013. At the hospital, she struck an unlikel...

In the teensy Midwestern town of Braham, homemade pie capital of Minnesota, something unusual in the municipality’s computer systems knocked the city’s entire water supply offline last week. Within...

Well before he became CEO of one of the most valuable startups of all time, Dario Amodei was a 26-year-old PhD student studying biophysics at Princeton, obsessing over how his money would leave its...

Maybe it was never a great idea to build so many golf courses in the desert. But in the 1990s, when Tiger Woods mania was at its peak, Las Vegas went on a fairway construction spree, dotting the ci...

If the US wanted to be the world’s police officer, then why not try to be its doctor too?  Just two months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush announced an ambitious plan to pump $1...