The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel
The Atlantic asked a dozen scientists, historians, and technologists to rank the top innovations in history. Here are the results.
November 2013
In This Issue
The 50 greatest breakthroughs since the wheel, the world's top inventors, the riddle of Amazon, Flannery O'Connor's fierce irony, the biology of war, and more
The Technology Issue
Technologies to Bet On
The venture capitalist John Doerr predicts two coming breakthroughs
Why We Live 40 Years Longer Today Than We Did in 1880
The golden age of medicine—in one chart
Who Will Tomorrow's Historians Consider Today's Greatest Inventors?
We asked leading figures in technology, science, medicine, and design for nominations. Here's what they said.
All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines
We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?
The New Science of Old Whiskey
Bourbon makers attempt to perfect a 2,000-year-old invention.
The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think
Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind
Get the digital edition of this issue.
Subscribers can access PDF versions of every issue in The Atlantic archive. When you subscribe, you’ll not only enjoy all of The Atlantic’s writing, past and present; you’ll also be supporting a bright future for our journalism.Dispatches
Matt Dorfman The Case for Hate Speech
How Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell, and Orson Scott Card have advanced the cause of gay rights
Ricardo Moraes / Reuters A Brief History of Dude
You know ... if you're into the whole brevity thing
Levi Brown Life After QWERTY
A keyboard layout for the thumb-typing generation
Ross D. Franklin/AP The Amazon Mystery: What America's Strangest Tech Company Is Really Up To
Investors love Jeff Bezos's global-everything store, even though they aren't making any money from it yet—and it's not clear how they will.
The Real Drivers of Growth Aren't Small Businesses—They're New Businesses
A graphical antidote to political hype
Reuters Why You Look Like Your Dog
Behind the phenomenon of pet/owner resemblance
Unicornblack The Burka Avenger
The star of a new Pakistani cartoon fights crime in a decidedly modest getup.
Razmarinka/Shutterstock How Takeout Supports the Working Woman
A very short book excerpt
Danilo Sanino/Shutterstock I Inherited a Chunk of Frozen Venison
Our advice columnist to the rescue
The Culture File
Kevin Christy The Passion of Flannery O’Connor
A prayer journal kept by the writer in her early 20s sheds new light on her biblical ironies.
Kelsey Dake Eating Bugs and Testicles: A Woman's Journey Into Macho Food Culture
Gender dynamics on a transgressive, guy-dominated foodie frontier
O.O.P.S. Why the U.S. Is So Good at Turning Immigrants Into Americans
As a glance at Europe shows, it's not as easy as it looks.
Christopher Felver/Corbis How T Bone Burnett Plays Hollywood
By getting his folk-musician friends together and making soundtracks, a once-quirky record producer has stirred up a roots-music revival.
Clay Rodery Watching American Movies in Paris
The illuminations of familiar culture in a foreign setting
Ji Lee Why Can't We All Just Get Along? The Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality
Squaring recent research suggesting we're "naturally moral" with all the strife in the world
Liveright Cover to Cover
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession, paired for the first time
Departments
The Conversation
Responses and reverberations
Graham Roumieu The Big Question
What was the best fictional meal ever?
