Coming to you with some great stories. Finally learned why Japanese companies tend to produce vast amounts of unrelated things like pianos and motorcycles.

Why Japanese companies do so many different things

Toto is not just the Japanese toilet company: its advanced ceramics division makes electrostatic chucks, the precision ceramic plates that hold silicon wafers flat while memory chips are etched with plasma. AI demand has made that obscure component so valuable that it now generates most of Toto’s operating profit. The broader pattern is very Japanese: companies that look oddly diversified from the outside often carry deep manufacturing capabilities from one old business into a completely different strategic bottleneck.

'Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary' - the crazy story behind the first British person in space

Helen Sharman was a 27-year-old food scientist at the Mars factory when she heard a radio advert looking for an astronaut with “no experience necessary.” Two years later, she launched on Soyuz TM-12 and spent eight days aboard Mir, becoming the first British person in space through a strange Anglo-Soviet commercial mission rather than a national space programme. The route from Slough traffic jam to Star City is wonderfully improbable Cold War texture.

Why Live in a Vintage 1969 RV?

A family trades suburban life for a restored 1969 Dodge Travco: a 27-foot fiberglass “big blue bus” with no refrigerator, unfinished plumbing at the start, and a transmission leak that smells like grapefruit. Fewer systems mean fewer dependencies, and fewer comforts can mean more contact with weather, place, family, and luck. There’s nowhere to get to, because if you can stop by a Colorado roadside, patch the bus, watch the mountains soften in the evening light, and still feel at home, you’re already there.

Why the Ferrari Luce looks like that

Everyone wrote about the new Ferrari. I thought it looks a bit weird outside but the interior is superb. I think it'll sell like hotcakes (or like any other Ferrari). Arun Venkatesan, who is one of my favorites bloggers, wrote the best blog post about this launch, why the car looks this way and who will buy this.

Inside the Roman apartment building

After the collapse of Rome, the secret of concrete was lost. But while they had it, Romans used it to build multi-story apartment buildings that closely resemble the living accommodations of hundreds of years into the future. Here's a story on how they looked and worked.