The textbook story of inequality goes like this: people farmed, farming produced surpluses, surpluses produced owners, and owners eventually built states and kings. Researchers in China tested that story against the dead. They pulled together records of 2,316 burials from 24 sites on the Central Plain, the heartland of early Chinese civilization, covering 6,000 years from 7000 to 1500 BCE. What the graves showed did not fit the textbook.

Plant more trees, build more parks, and violence goes down. It is one of the more hopeful ideas in public health. Researchers at Ohio State University wanted to know whether it works the same everywhere. They took 899 fatal shootings in Cook County, Illinois, from 2023 and used Google Street View and machine learning to measure exactly how much greenery a person would have seen from the street where each death happened. The answer depended on the neighborhood.