A 5 min read Columnist: The idea that many historical events can be explained by postulating as yet undiscovered conspiracies is generally rejected by historians because it is quite unlikely that complex arrangements...

A 3 min read Advik: Most stores in our town with fewer than five employees are owned by women. Every antique store in our town has fewer than five employees. However, none of the antique stores in our town are owned by...

A 4 min read Newspaper article: People with damaged knees and hips can now undergo minimally invasive joint-replacement surgery. In this new procedure, less tissue and muscle are cut than in traditional surgery, with the goal of...

A 4 min read Economist: In Nation X, the number of unsold homes on the market recently reached a twenty-year high. The last time the number of unsold homes was that high, a severe economic recession soon followed....

A 4 min read The date of the Rimienti World Map, drawn in Italy, is unknown. The map accurately depicts the coastline of western Africa down to the Cape of Good Hope, near Africa’s southern tip. In 1488 Portuguese...

A 4 min read In a ten-year study, one group of volunteers was given a medical screening for disease X every year, whereas an otherwise similar group of the same size was only screened for disease X at the end of the study. Nine...

A 5 min read The play La Finestrina, written and first produced in Italy in the eighteenth century, is now being performed at the central theatre. A reviewer has claimed that the current production is unfaithful to the...

A 4 min read Customers of ZQX financial services often call their financial advisers at ZQX for help in understanding the quarterly personal financial statements ZQX sends to customers. For years, there have been consistent...

A 4 min read Historians create ideas we call “history,” which are derived from an order existing in the real world of historical fact. Since the patterns discovered in that world depend in part on the aims of the...

A 3 min read Newspaper editors should not allow reporters to write the headlines for their own stories. The reason for this is that, while the headlines that reporters themselves write are often clever, what typically makes them...