This week: the Democratic Republic of Congo's 17th Ebola outbreak since 1976 — and, for once, real signs it's slowing. Typhoon Dujuan shuts down Japan's bullet trains. Seventy-seven delegations walk out on Netanyahu at the UN, in a ritual nobody was surprised by. Stanford finds your brain is actually two ancient nervous systems stapled together. And a guy scouting a Quebec campsite accidentally discovers a 390-million-year-old impact crater. The cover story asks the question of the week: if we already know how this ends, why do we always start over? Financial crashes, wildfire policy, locust plagues, and a dismantled pandemic office all say the same thing. Plus: Society Pages roasts a pension fund, the Review covers Fire Weather, and — five issues late — THE WHEEL finally spins for real.

When two sides both swear they're right, who actually gets to check? This week: a Gaza City building collapse with dueling accounts of what struck it, a Los Angeles news helicopter crash, a disputed drone over Mecca, and a black hole blasting out winds 100 times stronger than we thought. The buried lede: the Pentagon just handed its own UFO whistleblowers a legal waiver to finally talk. The cover story spans three centuries of verification — Newton grading his own homework, a 1919 eclipse that settled Einstein fair and square, and the fastest debunking in modern science. Plus: the 41-year hoax hiding in a British gravel pit, a CEO's very bad math, and a podcast recommendation that reads the transcripts so you don't have to.

This week the world declared three different things over, and none of them were. The US-Iran war hit day 195 with its biggest naval escalation yet — tankers sunk, ships struck, a ceasefire that's been pronounced dead more times than we can count. Hurricane Lowell never made landfall in Hawaii and still tore the islands apart. OpenAI says its AI solved a 90-year-old math problem; the one institute with the authority to say so isn't talking. Plus: the Devil's Arrows finally get their real origin story after 4,000 years, a Cabinet secretary's own lawyers contradict his sworn testimony, and the true story of a soldier who fought a war 29 years after everyone else agreed it had ended. No ads, no sponsors — just the news, straight, with the bark on.

Double digits, folks — Issue Ten. This week: the Nepal-Tibet flood toll climbs past eleven hundred, and a Kyiv ammunition depot kills thirty-seven people, thirty-four of them residents of the care home next door. Two disasters, one question: how close is too close, and who actually signs off on the distance? The cover story digs through three ammonium-nitrate catastrophes — Texas City, Beirut, and small-town Texas — that all share the same shape. The feature tells you about the Halifax dispatcher who spent his last eighteen minutes trying to warn strangers he'd never met. Plus: a US-Venezuela oil deal, right-curling snake embryos, a 4,000-year-old sealed love letter finally read, and a podcast pick about a bridge that was "screaming" it would fail.

Who decides what a thing is for — the person who built it, or the person holding it? This week: the Colombia earthquake and the count nobody agrees on; Ebola's grim milestone in the Congo; the off-ramp closes between Washington and Tehran; and NASA buys Voyager 2 a year of life with two heaters and a tape recorder from 1977. Plus: Kyoto University drafts 1,200 Starlink satellites into science without asking, a weapons system that became the world's clock, a phone antenna that found the beginning of the universe, the fifth-grade dropout who invented your microwave, and a superyacht that forgot the one job every ship has. Reporting up front, opinion in the back, and the tuba has moved.

A country runs out of interceptors. A hospital runs out of beds. A grid runs out of margin. This week Podcast Magazine asks the least glamorous question in the world: what are you keeping in reserve, and who decided you didn't need it? On the front page — seventeen dead in Kyiv and not one missile stopped; the Congo outbreak becomes the second largest ever recorded; six thousand cubic kilometres of magma hiding under Tuscany; immune cells that kill by exploding; and a buried lede about Texas, four hundred and seventy-four gigawatts, and a grid being auctioned off to a chatbot. Plus: the letter that saved Britain by refusing to help, a two-thousand-year-old Chinese grain policy that ended up in American federal law, and a podcast recommendation about a seawall that wasn't tall enough. Reporting up front, opinion in the back, corrections in the open.

How do you stop a thing once it's started? This week: the DRC Ebola outbreak passes 1,400 dead even as Uganda declares itself Ebola-free, a fragile US–Iran strike pause holds for two days, 300,000 people flee wildfires across France and Spain and nearly all make it out, and Pogačar wins a fifth Tour de France on a course the fires cut short. Plus a Bronze Age "town that stopped" in Northern Ireland, and The Number: 42. Our cover story visits three times humanity actually pulled off the stop — the Cuban Missile Crisis, smallpox, and the ozone layer — the feature is the Kuwaiti oil fires and the tank with jet engines bolted on, and the review is Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire. We close with a heartfelt goodbye to John C. Dvorak. Reporting up front, opinion in the back, and the commerce is fake.

How do you find the thing that's hiding in plain sight? This week: the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record in the DRC, the sharp escalation between Russia and Ukraine, and — looking up — a giant planet the Webb telescope found without ever seeing it, detected purely by its chemical fingerprint. Our cover story traces the art of detecting the invisible, from finding Neptune with a pencil to Pauli's ghost particle to dark matter. The feature is Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who spotted an unseen killer and was destroyed for being early. Plus a new Corrections desk, a new celebrity desk skewering the World Cup's halftime spectacle, and a Podcast Feature on 99% Invisible's "Structural Integrity." Reporting up front, opinion in the back, and the commerce is fake.

Almost everything we know about the past survived by accident, and most of the accidents were catastrophes. This issue asks: what do we only learn when something breaks? The cover story reads history as a stain — Pompeii, the Burgess Shale, a bog man with stubble still on his chin — and the feature dives to the wreck that hid a two-thousand-year-old Greek computer nobody believed could exist. Up front, covered straight: the Bangkok bar fire and the nine hundred heat deaths the Netherlands counted in a spreadsheet. Plus a magnificent dinosaur cold case, Argentina breaking England's heart on schedule, and a Deep Cut about a Roman dinner service at the bottom of a Swiss lake. New this release: a closing theme, a tuba, and one quiet thank-you to the people who invented this medium. In the morning.

Worth pausing on one editorial call from the run, because it was the right one: the number 33 genuinely appeared this week — as the Bangkok death toll — and the host deliberately withheld the numerology bit rather than attach it to a tragedy. The guardrails held under their first real test.

In 1914, Lawrence Sperry flew past the judges in Paris with his hands off the controls — and his mechanic standing on the wing. A hundred and twelve years later, we're still asking the same question: who's flying the plane? In this issue: the empty cockpit, from dead man's switches to the Soviet "Dead Hand" to Stanislav Petrov, the one guy who caught it. Plus the week's front page — Iran, a newborn magnetar caught "chirping," the first AI ransomware that runs itself, World Cup officiating drama — and a Deep Cut nobody's covering: a 1952 flying-saucer briefing film headed to Congress. New voice, by the way. Same guy, new larynx. We featured Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales in our first Podcast Feature — nobody paid, they don't know we exist. That's how you know it's real.

America buries a 900-pound steel time capsule with orders not to open it until 2276 — from a country that can't pass a budget by Friday. In our debut issue: the strange discipline of deep time engineering, from the Svalbard seed vault to the government committee that wrote "this place is not a place of honor" and meant it. Plus: Marie Tharp, the woman who mapped the ocean floor while the experts called her data "girl talk"; a fake ad for a watch with one hand; an honest review of Dava Sobel's Longitude; and the week's front page — a record-hot ocean, quantum entanglement you can almost see, and new Mozart, 235 years after the man stopped writing. Closing essay: what we choose to keep, and why the committee won't do it for you.

Reporting up front, opinion in the back, fake ads in the middle — labeled, always.

How much warning does it actually take to save you? This week: a glacier collapse buries villages across the Nepal-Tibet border with zero warning system in place, while a Greenland glacier tells scientists exactly where it'll crack next — years in advance. A Pakistani hospital nursery burns with its exits reportedly locked. The cover story traces three warnings through history: Galveston's deadliest-ever hurricane (the warning existed, the bureaucracy was too slow), the 2004 tsunami (no system existed, one ten-year-old's geography lesson saved a beach), and Japan's 2011 earthquake alert (a system that worked perfectly and still missed the real killer). Plus: the 1946 tsunami that took five hours to cross the Pacific with nowhere to deliver its warning, Venice Film Festival's broken parity pledge, and a pangolin species that's been correctly labeled in a museum drawer since 1836.

Who decides which number is true? This week the desk un-inducts a superyacht (first de-induction in Society Pages history), reads the count that made Congo's outbreak the largest in its history, and asks why Colombia's missing are 379 people or 4,000, depending on who's holding the pencil. Cover story: a button salesman who counted the plague, a nurse who weaponized a chart, and the hurricane toll that went from 64 to 2,975 in one revision. Feature: the census Congress threw in the trash for nine years. Plus a Pentagon file about a triangle that blocked out the stars, and Planet Money's hunt for the most common American. Double-drop week — Issue 7 is here too. No ads. Somebody counted.