Commuter trains often stop at the edge of cities. Short tunnels can link them up, creating metro networks for a fraction of the cost of building them from scratch.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Japan faced some of the world’s toughest planning problems. It solved them by letting homeowners replan whole neighborhoods privately by supermajority vote.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Inflation targeting is now standard in central banking. But it began with an offhand comment and a political gamble in New Zealand – long before economists took it seriously.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Animal drugs are approved much faster than human drugs. Perhaps we could adopt the same model for humans without compromising on safety.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Lead has been all but eliminated in most of the developed world. Doing the same for the rest of the world might not be difficult.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Brain implants are letting people move, speak, and interact with machines using only their thoughts. The first FDA approvals may arrive within five years.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
How a dubious theory of radiation damage based on fruit flies and a secretive weapons testing program came to be – and why its time may now be up.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
We’re looking for new authors and article pitches.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Ordinary yellow pineapples were once so precious they were rented for display at dinner parties, but centuries of innovation made them commonplace.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Many women face a choice between career advancement or motherhood. But emerging fertility technologies could allow women to have it all.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
The Hanseatic League united merchants to bargain with kings, blockade cities, and even win wars. But when technology changed, defections began and the coalition fell apart.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Life in the state of nature was less violent than you might think. Most of our ancestors avoided conflict. But this made them vulnerable to a few psychopaths.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Land value taxes are once again becoming a popular all-purpose solution to housing issues. But implementing them in early 1900s Britain destroyed the then-dominant Liberal Party.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
New York’s skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that still warms the city. While the rest of the world moved to hot water, Manhattanites still buy steam by the megapound.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
China builds towers in a park, while America, and nearly everyone else, builds squat mid-rise blocks. The difference comes down to regulation, not culture.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Why do high-cost cities have more homelessness? It’s not just about rents — it’s also about the rooms friends and family can’t afford to share.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Madrid tripled the length of its metro system in just 12 years — faster and cheaper than almost any other city in the world. What can its expansion teach other cities?| Works in Progress RSS Feed
When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives — but we need to find ways to scale them.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
What do cryogenics, butterfat tests, and genetic data have in common? They’re some of the reasons behind the world’s most productive dairy cows. Here’s how it all started.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Airports and cities may face delays and rising costs, but cruise ships keep breaking records. They show what can still be built.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Buildings are not just art – they are the places people live in, work in, and experience every day. True functionalism combines utility and beauty for the people who use it most.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
We now have the power to genetically modify entire species by inserting certain genes into them with brute force. Doing this to malaria-carrying mosquitoes could allow us to wipe out humanity’s most deadly killer.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Pour-over coffee has long been popular with coffee enthusiasts, but it frustrated coffee shops because it takes so long to make. That’s changing.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds. Beating nature took decades of hard graft and millions of pounds of pressure.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
How we calculate inflation has always been a subject of debate. Small changes that might seem trivial can lead to enormous changes in how well-off we think we are.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Libraries contain books, yes. But they also contain latex rubber, carbon fiber fabrics, and graphene aerogel. And in some materials libraries you can cut, cast, drill, sand, scrape, and sculpt too.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Advance Market Commitments allow us to buy technology from the future to support its development: vaccines, carbon capture technology, and even spacecraft. Here’s how you can start your own.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Prediction markets are legal, contrary to popular belief. But they remain unpopular, because they lack key features that make markets attractive.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
It has taken almost 60 years to bring traffic congestion pricing to New York. This is the story of how politicians and advocates built the coalition it needed to finally happen.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Inventing new materials is only the first step. Getting them into mass production and use is just as hard.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Britain had its fastest ever house price growth not in the 2020s but in the 1970s. Houses then were also getting smaller and worse. The problem was a lack of supply.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Deterrence alone might not stop crime. But, as the campaign against drunk driving shows, it could help create the norms that do.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Gentrification can be a real problem for people it pushes out. But the root cause is inflexible housing supply, and solutions that don’t tackle that can make the problem worse.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Unwinding Russian serfdom took half a century. To eventually do it in the face of powerful opposition took a remarkable approach that let peasants vote themselves into freedom.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Too few people donate their organs, dead or alive. How can we make it easier to donate, but avoid the abuses that some fear from cash payments?| Works in Progress RSS Feed
I was deliberately infected with Zika to test a vaccine. Human challenge trials like my one could save millions of lives by developing prophylactics more quickly.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Homeowners are often the biggest opponents of building new homes. An Israeli reform reversed this by making homeowners the main beneficiaries of development.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
We used to dig up roads to put trains underneath – cheaply. Ever-better tunnel boring machines have made the disruption this causes unnecessary.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Silk is stronger than steel or kevlar. We are already using it to transport vaccines without cold chains and make automatically dissolving stitches. What else could it be used for?| Works in Progress RSS Feed
SGLT2, a protein in the kidney, takes glucose out of the urine and puts it in the blood. Blocking this reduces diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease – but we’re not exactly sure why.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Asbestos was a miracle material, virtually impervious to fire. But as we fixed city fires in other ways, we came to learn about its horrific downsides.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
The earth’s core is hot. So hot, that if we drilled deep enough, we could power the world millions of times over with cheap, clean energy, supporting renewables when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. But getting there is tough.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Many scientific papers receive little attention initially but become highly cited years later. What groundbreaking discoveries might have already been made, and how can we uncover them faster?| Works in Progress RSS Feed
War is hell. But by allowing more effective states to rule productive regions, it may have been a catalyst for Europe’s early modern advancement.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Mathematics was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry, modernity, and the world we inhabit today.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
New Zealand passed the most ambitious upzoning reforms in the world. Now comes the backlash.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Cocktails aren’t what they used to be – and that’s a good thing. The search for fresher and more novel ingredients from ever further afield continues to revolutionize mixology for the better.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Unlike nearly all other arts, architecture is inherently public and shared. That means that buildings should be designed to be agreeable – easy to like – not to be unpopular works of genius.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Local government faces incentives just like everything else. If we want voters to encourage growth near them, we need to make it worth their while.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Today’s world requires vastly more copper than you could imagine, and the world of electric vehicles will require even more. That means finding new ways to find and extract copper from the earth.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Hundreds of thousands of people die from malaria each year, but it took 141 years to develop a vaccine for it. Advance market commitments could speed things up next time.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Houston was notorious for its sprawl. But it has seen a gentle density revolution since the 1990s. Allowing neighborhoods to opt out of citywide reforms was crucial in its transformation.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Building a state is not a matter of copying first world institutions. It is a tough process of deals and compromises. 19th century Mexico is a good example.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
The West has been below replacement fertility once before. Then came the Baby Boom. Understanding that boom may help us deal with today’s bust.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
The history of attempts to reform planning in Britain is proof that political willpower is not enough: you need to be smart, not just brave.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Thomas Edison is often accused of not having invented the things he gets credit for. He did something even harder: he built the systems needed to get them to market.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Washington, DC, has avoided the worst price rises that have plagued many other growing American cities. Arlington’s transit-oriented development might be the reason.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Olivine is a green mineral that reacts with CO2 in the ocean to form a harmless silt. This reaction might be the key to slowing down climate change, or reversing it altogether.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Cheap, safe nuclear power is possible, but is all but prohibited in most Western countries. A regulatory sandbox for fission could shake us out of our regulatory sclerosis.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Ending acid rain was one of humanity’s greatest environmental successes. Here’s how it happened.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
As climate change threatens crop yields, we need a second Green Revolution – one that, this time, is driven by genetic engineering.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Samuel Hughes, a contributing editor at Works in Progress, visits cities around to learn about gentle density.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
We’ve learnt to see the world through the eyes of our prey. All the better to eat them with.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Building infrastructure doesn’t need to come at the cost of the environment. But it does need smarter rules.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Power outages force businesses across Africa to rely on expensive, dirty diesel generators. Price caps block improvement, but removing them isn’t easy.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
France was once Europe’s superpower, thanks above all to its enormous population. Its decline coincided with a collapse in its birth rate – now we know why.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
We have learned to fear plutonium – one of the world’s most useful materials. But as long as you don’t eat it, you’re probably safe.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Plastic is eating the roads. It might be a cleaner, quieter, ready-made alternative to asphalt for the next generation of paving.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Exposing misinformation online is hard to do at scale and can veer into outright censorship. The wisdom of crowds can lead us to the answers.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
ARIA is the UK’s visionary new scientific funding body. It has £800m and the freedom to make big bold bets on the scientific trajectories it thinks will benefit Britain – and change the future. We interviewed chief executive Ilan Gur and chairman Matt Clifford, to better understand what inspired ARIA and how they aim to make it a success.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Nobody had a plan to get vaccines out of freezers and into Americans’ arms–except VaccinateCA. Its CEO tells the story of how a small team brought order to a chaotic rollout.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
International development was revolutionized by experiments and evaluations of its methods. Meta-science can learn from it.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Fire has almost disappeared as a cause of death in the developed world. A similar approach could do the same for infectious diseases.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Snakebites kill between 80,000 and 140,000 people every year. Better antivenom should be a high priority – thankfully new technology can help.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Though we tend to see history as just one political event after another, it’s technology and ideas, not politics, that change our lives the most. History should reflect that.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are forcing skeptics to eat their words. We should take its risks seriously too.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Scientific papers are dense, jargon-filled, and painful to read. It wasn’t always this way – and it doesn’t have to be.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Is a build up of generic regulations together causing us to be three times poorer than we need to be? Probably not. But the insidious rise of risk aversion is still a big drag on economic growth.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Stripe Press’s Tamara Winter sits down with J. Storrs Hall, whose book ‘Where is My Flying Car’ inspired this issue, to talk about stagnation and the possibility of progress.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it’s almost free.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Nanotechnology sometimes sounds as much like science fiction as artificial intelligence once did. But the problems holding it back seem solvable, and some of the answers may lie inside our own bodies.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
We may not have flying cars but we do have incredible information technology. We’re mismeasuring the huge benefits it is bringing.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Americans famously love to sue one another. Are out of control product liability lawsuits the to blame for the crash of the personal aviation industry?| Works in Progress RSS Feed
A documentary from Stripe Press that follows the evolution of a rudimentary gaming network between friends in Cuba into a DIY internet that serviced most of the island.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
The world’s first round-the-world solo yacht race was a thrilling and, for some, deadly contest. Its contestants’ efforts can teach us about the art of maintenance.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
When America’s economy overtook Britain’s a century ago, it remade the world order. How it happened is still debated.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Outdated forms of peer review create bottlenecks that slow science. But in a world where research can now circulate rapidly on the Internet, we need to develop new ways to do science in public.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting ‘rationally’. But instead of building up a messier and messier picture of human behavior, we need a new model.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Until recently, roads were shared between a messy mix of cyclists, stagecoaches, carts, horses, and pedestrians, with no dominant user.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacterial cells – were almost forgotten in the age of antibiotics. Now as bacterial resistance grows, they may return to help us in our hour of need.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
History’s most famous innovation prize—the longitude rewards—is misunderstood. Innovation prizes are best at promoting refinements, not revolutions.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Gas heating is bad for the environment. But home-built heat pumps aren’t perfect either.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
A monstrous plan to build major motorways through some of London’s greatest neighborhoods fell apart. But the price was the birth of the NIMBY movement, and a permanent ceiling on Britain’s infrastructure ambitions.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Polyester went from being the world’s most hated fabrics to one of its favorites. It’s so successful that many people don’t even realize they’re wearing polyester today.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Some think of advances in science and technology through the metaphor of low-hanging fruit: we “picked” the easy ones, and the rest will be very difficult.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Duels can be brutal and even lethal. But duels emerged in societies around the world for an important reason: to control and manage violence, not just to celebrate it.| Works in Progress RSS Feed
Ireland’s housing bubble and bust has become emblematic of what not to do in housing debates around the world. The only problem is nobody agrees what actually went wrong.| Works in Progress RSS Feed