JSTOR Daily

When Texas was still an independent republic, abolitionist lawyer Stephen Pearl Andrews tried to sell Texas to Great Britain in order to free Texas’s slaves. The thing is, he had no authority to do so.

Many people feel stuck in a meaningless job, but zookeepers might be the exception—a 2009 paper studied zookeepers and found that the profession was about the closest anyone in the modern, secular world comes to having a calling.

In the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Energy recognized an ethical obligation to store nuclear waste in a manner that would protect future humans from its health hazards. But there was a catch—low-level plutonium remains hazardous for 24,000 years; our best containment systems will only last for 10,000 years. Two decades later the government found an unlikely solution: they commissioned two teams of anthropologists, artists, linguists and semioticians to develop “markers” that would warn humans ten millennia into the future—when no known languages and cultural symbols are expected to remain.

A history of the world’s first experiments with blood transfusions.