time — Bunk History

The Geologic Time Spiral showing different periods over millions of years.

Deep Time and the Civil War Dead

The Civil War's vast death toll joined Earth's deep time story, magnifying its meaning as part of God's creative acts across eons.

by Caroline Winterer via Princeton University Press on October 15, 2024

Refugee camp.

The Right Side of Now

Appeals against the war in Gaza are often framed through the lens of the future: “You will regret having been silent.” What about the present tense?

by Lauren Michele Jackson via The New Yorker on June 24, 2024

Ferris wheel at Cony Island.

Spending My Free Time Researching Free Time

One academic tells the story behind his new book -- and his next one.

by Gary Cross via HNN on February 27, 2024

The Fight for the Sabbath

The partnership between rabbis and labor that delivered the two-day weekend.

by Avi Garelick via Jewish Currents on February 21, 2023

Liquor on Sundays

A new book sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week.

by Anthony Grafton via London Review of Books on November 17, 2022

People sitting on a hill overlooking a harbor

How We Became Weekly

The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it.

by David Hinkin via Aeon on November 30, 2021

Birthday candles lit on top of a cake.

The Strange Origins of American Birthday Celebrations

For most people, birthdays were once just another day. Industrialization changed that.

by Joe Pinsker via The Atlantic on November 2, 2021

Still from upcoming short film “Write No History” by Black Quantum Futurism, 2021.

Project: Time Capsule

Time capsules unearthed at affordable housing sites offer alternative, lost, and otherwise obscured histories.

by Camae Ayewa, Rasheedah Phillips via E-Flux on June 14, 2021

Antoni Jażwiński’s Tableau Muet, based on the original “Polish System” for charting historical information, later revised in France and the United States, 1834

Visualizing History: The Polish System

For the Polish educator Antoni Jażwiński, history was best represented by an abstract grid.

by Adam Green, Hunter Dukes via The Public Domain Review on May 5, 2021

It's 2020 and You're in the Future

Some people are young, just not you.

by Tim Urban via Wait But Why on January 2, 2020

The Physics Of Why Timekeeping First Failed In The Americas

The world's greatest clockmaker sent a clock to the new world – and everything went haywire.

by Ethan Siegel via Forbes on September 21, 2018

Poster reading "Victory! Congress Passes Daylight Saving Bill," and "Get Your Hoe Ready!," depicting Uncle Sam and clock-related imagery.

100 Years Later, the Madness of Daylight Saving Time Endures

Unfortunately, there’s not an unlimited amount of daylight that we can squeeze out of our clocks.

by Michael Downing via The Conversation on March 9, 2018

When We Repealed Daylight Saving Time

Who sets the time? After the first repeal of Daylight Saving Time in 1919, the question only became harder to answer.

by Kate Wersan via Edge Effects on November 2, 2017

Timeline

Putting Time In Perspective

Putting massive amounts of time in perspective is incredibly hard for humans, so we made this graphic.

by Tim Urban via Wait But Why on August 22, 2013

A flooded road.

Jamestown Is Sinking

In the Tidewater region of Virginia, history is slipping beneath the waves. In the Anthropocene, a complicated past is vanishing.

by Daegan Miller, Greta Pratt via Places Journal on March 15, 2025

Prehistoric people seen through a pair of glasses.

The Abuses of Prehistory

Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors.

by Udi Greenberg via The New Republic on May 10, 2024

Digital image of Lindsay Lohan, saying "Lindsay all grown up."

Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon

This tale of two girlhoods, Shirley Temple’s and Lindsay Lohan’s, sheds light on what “woman” means in the world of eroticized youth.

by Katherine Fusco via Dilettante Army on April 16, 2024

Two 1950s cars in front of a diner

You Can’t Go Home Again

Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.

by Charlie Tyson via The Hedgehog Review on March 19, 2024

A scene from "Time Bomb Y2K" depicting a situation room filled with computers.

Heritage 2000

Some years wield such power that you must comply with them.

by Dan Piepenbring via n+1 on January 26, 2024

Silhouette of Oppenheimer wearing a fedora.

How Do We Know the Motorman Is Not Insane?

Oppenheimer and the demon heart of power.

by James Robins via The Dreadnought on December 20, 2023

A turntable and records.

What’s Old is New Again (and Again): On the Cyclical Nature of Nostalgia

Retro was not the antithesis to the sub- and countercultural experiments of the 1960s, it grew directly out of them.

by Tobias Becker via Literary Hub on December 13, 2023

Shirley Horn in a publicity shot, 1960.

How to Take It Slow

Following the rhythm of Shirley Horn.

by Lauren Du Graf via Oxford American on December 5, 2023

A photograph of the back of a woman's head, superimposed over a photograph of a body of water as if looking out over it.

What if Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be?

As our faith in the future plummets and the present blends with the past, we feel certain that we’ve reached the point where history has fallen apart.

by Thomas Mallon via The New Yorker on November 20, 2023

Fossilized footprints

North America's Oldest Known Footprints Point to Earlier Human Arrival to the Continent

New dating methods have added more evidence that these fossils date to 23,000 years ago, pushing back migration to the Americas by thousands of years.

by Brian Handwerk via Smithsonian on October 5, 2023

Texas Mission bell.

A Bell's Journey Through Texas History

For those in later years, the bell’s value lay not in its powerful sound, but in its visual representation.

by Kristin Dutcher Mann via Commonplace on October 3, 2023

Walden Pond Revisited painting depicting a man standing among nature.

Making a Living Is More Than Work

Thoreau’s loafing and the purpose of life.

by Jonathan Malesic via The Hedgehog Review on August 1, 2023

Empty, dimly lit interior of shopping mall.

Nostalgia's Empire

We should interrogate nostalgia’s primacy without advocating for its eradication.

by Grafton Tanner, Johny Pitts via Public Books on June 8, 2023

A window through which an otherwise black and white leaf can be seen with a rainbow.

Native American Histories Show Rebuilding is Possible — and Necessary — After Catastrophe

What the Medicine Wheel, an indigenous American model of time, shows about apocalypse.

by B. L. Blanchard via Vox on March 24, 2023

U.S. soldier in Iraq

Iraq Veterans, 20 Years Later: ‘I Don’t Know How to Explain the War to Myself’

Nearly 20 years after their deployment to Iraq, veterans grapple with their younger selves and try to make sense of the war.

by Petra Epperlein, Michael Tucker via New York Times Op-Docs on March 15, 2023

Early phonograph.

How the Phonograph Created the 3-Minute Pop Song

And how streaming is changing it again.

by Clive Thompson via Medium on February 25, 2023

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