The longest road trip I ever drove was across the United States, 2,600 miles in all, which took just 2.5 days. At the end, I couldn't have been happier it was over. That thing about mountain majesties and amber waves is true. But no matter how many times you win the license plate game, long drives can make a person crazy.

In Russia, however, city planners are trying to challenge that thinking. They're hoping that in the future, you'll be able to travel from Europe to Asia and then—a few weeks later—to the Americas without getting on a plane. The only catch is all via an extremely long road trip, currently envisioned from London, ...

We’ve all heard about China’s incredible pace of development. Now, finally, we have a symbol of that runaway growth: pork.

Demand for pork in China is growing so fast, farmers can’t keep up. The average Chinese person eats 86 pounds of pork a year, more per capita than any country, and five times more pork than in the 1970s. China has traditionally preferred to be self sufficient with food production, but it now needs to look abroad for ways to feed those pigs. Imports of soybeans, the primary feedstock for pigs, are rising so quickly that demand in countries far away from China are pumping out as many soybeans as ...

On October 31, 2011, between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., a baby born in India—or it may have been in Somalia or the United States, no one really knows—became the seven billionth person on Earth. The milestone was major, especially when you consider that just one billion people existed 150 years ago, and only a few million people several centuries prior.

Demographers are in the business of knowing where those people live and where they’re going. One clear trend is toward mass urbanization. By 2030, nearly 1 in 10 people will live in large cities, called "megacities" to account for populations of more than 10 million. ...

George Washington never liked the name of the American capital that was being built on a swamp in the 1790s. He was too modest to appreciate the name Washington City, as it was called. He saw the fanfare more befitting a monarchy than a constitutional democracy. So one can imagine his discomfort at the giant obelisk later built for him, still towering two centuries after he died in 1799.

The Washington Monument has become the physical symbol of America's separation of powers. In Washington D.C., it sits at the center of the people's congress, the highest court, the president's mansion, and the memorials for two other presidents, Lincoln and Jefferson. The structure has been ...

About a year ago, during a trip to Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, I had the strange and rare experience of emailing a head of state, being invited over for coffee, and knocking on her front door. That’s just Iceland, people told me. You can look up anyone in the phone book, even the president. These days, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir is a former head of state in semi-retirement after sitting in office from 1980 to 1996.  As we talked, I asked her one of the most softball questions in politics:

“What would you say was your biggest accomplishment as president?” I said.

Without even ...

Every few months, a new report on climate change comes out that spells doom for the future of the planet. Sometimes it’s from the International Panel on Climate Change. Sometimes it’s the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Just as often, individual scientists present their papers and studies at conferences.

The news is almost never good, Elizabeth Kolbert, the environmental scribe and thinker, has observed over years writing about the planet. Every year, scientists warn time is running out to reel back emissions. And each year, the world emits about three to five percent more greenhouse gases. In the western nations that burn the most fossil fuels, what needs ...

The biggest barrier to innovation is sometimes the fact that it’s cheap enough to do things the old way. Why develop new foods when the old ones are popular? Why create new cars when existing ones fit everyone’s needs?

That rationale is particularly true at the moment for energy, and especially gasoline. As environmental groups call for cleaner and more sustainable ways to produce energy, the inconvenient fact is that fossil fuel is cheap. Natural gas continues to be found in great abundance. And for much of 2014, as a result of booming supply and advanced technology to drill in more remote places, oil prices have cratered, reaching their lowest ...