Number of words: 320 In 1897 the first Zionist Congress assembled in Basle. The transactions of that historic gathering were perhaps less significant than the gathering itself. For the first time in Jewish history, representatives from Jewish communities throughout the world had assembled to discuss a programme of action for the Jewish people. Zionism, they … Read more

Number of words: 418 Israel is one of the youngest states in the world, and yet it is among the oldest. Other peoples have recovered their independence after centuries of subjugation, but they existed as a compact entity, living on their own soil, speaking their own language, and enjoying a greater or lesser degree of … Read more

Number of words: 423 A recent discovery revealed that pain-sensing nerves help fight skin infections and prevent its spread, suggesting a new type of immunity. “These pain-sensing nerves can detect pathogens, and for the first time, we’ve shown that they activate an immune response and also signal protective immunity in sites adjacent to the infection. … Read more

Number of words: 596 It was the evolutionary leap that defined the species: while other apes ambled around on all fours, the ancestors of humans rose up on two legs and, from that lofty position, went on to conquer the world. The benefits of standing tall in the African savannah are broadly nailed down, but … Read more

Number of words: 2,282 In February 1719, two months before the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe proposed in the Weekly Journal that the South Sea Company – founded just eight years earlier to manage the national debt and awarded a contract to supply the Spanish colonies in Latin America with several thousand African slaves … Read more

Number of words: 427 At the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico city A 21 year old American named Dick Fosbury shocked the judge and 80,000 spectators at a session of track and field, by winning a gold medal and setting a new Olympic record with a new jumping technique. This technique revolutionized the high jump and … Read more

Number of words: 1166 Most people act as if there were no secrets left to find. An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at … Read more

Number of words: 506 The power law is not just important to investors; rather, it’s important to everybody because everybody is an investor. An entrepreneur makes a major investment just by spending her time working on a startup. Therefore every entrepreneur must think about whether her company is going to succeed and become valuable. Every … Read more

Number of words: 164 Our results at Founders Fund illustrate this skewed pattern: Facebook, the best investment in our 2005 fund, returned more than all the others combined. Palantir, the second-best investment, is set to return more than the sum of every other investment aside from Facebook. This highly uneven pattern is not unusual: we … Read more