Texts that teach you something

Canals, railroads, bridges, and bold explorers. Type your way through the stories that built the United States.

When the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, it stretched 363 miles across upstate New York, linking the Hudson River at Albany with Lake Erie at Buffalo. Digging began on July 4, 1817, in the town of Rome.

• The Erie Canal
• The Golden Spike
• Lewis and Clark
• The Statue of Liberty
• The First Flight
• Jefferson's Library
• The Pony Express
• The Brooklyn Bridge

Geysers, canyons, fireflies, and the open road. Learn what makes America's favorite parks and highways special.

In 1872, Yellowstone became the first national park in the United States. Most of it lies in Wyoming, with edges in Montana and Idaho, and it sits on top of a huge volcanic system.

• Yellowstone's Geysers
• The Grand Canyon by the Numbers
• Route 66
• Fireflies in the Smokies
• Yosemite Falls
• Death Valley's Extremes
• Acadia's Carriage Roads
• Mammoth Cave

How basketball, volleyball, the Super Bowl, and the modern Olympics got started, and the moments that changed the games.

In December 1891, James Naismith, an instructor at the YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, needed an indoor game to keep a restless class active during the long New England winter. He hung two peach baskets from the gym balcony, about 10 feet off the floor, and wrote 13 basic rules.

• The Invention of Basketball
• Baseball's First Hall of Famers
• The First Super Bowl
• The First Modern Olympics
• From Mintonette to Volleyball
• Why a Marathon Is 26.2 Miles
• The Game That Made the Forward Pass Famous
• Fenway Park and the Green Monster

From the Moon landing to the James Webb Space Telescope, plus the everyday physics behind a blue sky.

On July 20, 1969, NASA's Apollo 11 lunar module, named Eagle, touched down in the Sea of Tranquility. Neil Armstrong radioed back the famous words, "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed." A few hours later, Armstrong became the first person to step onto the Moon, and Buzz Aldrin soon followed.

• Apollo 11 Lands on the Moon
• Voyager's Golden Record
• Glasses for Hubble
• Life on the Space Station
• The James Webb Space Telescope
• Old Sunlight
• The Moldy Cantaloupe
• Why the Sky Is Blue

Practical, evidence-based guidance on exercise, sleep, sun safety, and healthy eating from U.S. health agencies.

The CDC recommends that adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity every week, such as brisk walking. That can be split into 30 minutes a day, five days a week.

• How Much Exercise Do You Need?
• Better Sleep Habits
• Five Steps to Clean Hands
• The Talk Test
• Sun Safety Basics
• From Pyramid to Plate
• How Much Caffeine Is Too Much?
• The Hidden Salt in Your Diet

Compound interest, credit scores, 401(k) plans, and more. The money basics every adult should know.

Compound interest means you earn interest not only on the money you save but also on the interest it has already earned. Over time, that snowball effect can make a big difference.

• Compound Interest and the Rule of 72
• What Is a 401(k)?
• What Goes Into a Credit Score
• Checking Your Credit Reports
• How Your Bank Deposits Are Protected
• What Dollar Bills Are Made Of
• Why the Fed Aims for 2 Percent
• Building an Emergency Fund

Giant trees, record-breaking nests, migrating butterflies, and clever ocean creatures from across North America.

Each fall, millions of monarch butterflies from the eastern United States and Canada set off on a journey of about 3,000 miles to the mountains of central Mexico. Remarkably, no single butterfly has made the trip before.

• The Monarch Super Generation
• The Biggest Bird's Nest
• The General Sherman Tree
• Bison of Yellowstone
• The Waggle Dance
• Three Hearts and Blue Blood
• The Sea Otter's Fur Coat
• Periodical Cicadas

Where favorite American foods came from and the kitchen science that makes them work.

In 1930, Ruth Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, bought an old toll house on the outskirts of Whitman, Massachusetts, roughly halfway between Boston and New Bedford. They turned it into the Toll House Inn, and Ruth's cooking, especially her desserts, drew crowds.

• The Toll House Cookie
• Why Popcorn Pops
• The Science of Browning
• Who Invented the Ice Cream Cone?
• Nathan's Nickel Hot Dogs
• The Melted Chocolate Bar
• Clarence Birdseye and Frozen Food
• Why Onions Make You Cry

Classic research on persuasion, pricing, and reviews. Type your way through the experiments that explain why people say yes.

In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting booth in an upscale grocery store near Stanford University. On some days the table held 24 flavors of jam; on others, just 6.

• The Famous Jam Study
• The Foot in the Door
• The Power of Because
• How Reviews Move Sales
• Why Prices End in 9
• Candy with the Check
• The Endowment Effect
• The Decoy Effect

Practical facts for anyone selling online: marketplace fees, cash flow, shipping rules, sales tax, and customer service.

Starting a business is a long game, and federal data shows just how long. The Bureau of Labor Statistics follows private-sector establishments from the year they open.

• How Long New Businesses Last
• Cash Buffer Days
• Know Your Marketplace Fees
• Shopify Started with Snowboards
• Why Carts Get Abandoned
• Answer Within the Hour
• Online Sales Tax After Wayfair
• The 30-Day Shipping Rule

Model emails, memos, and chat habits backed by research, so you type faster and write clearer at the same time.

Military writers have a habit worth stealing: BLUF, short for bottom line up front. In a 2016 Harvard Business Review article, author Kabir Sehgal explained how it works.

• Bottom Line Up Front
• Write It Plain
• Meetings That Start with Reading
• Chat Etiquette That Saves Time
• Where the Workweek Goes
• The Hidden Cost of Interruptions
• Why Video Calls Are Tiring
• Breaks Between Meetings

Resumes, applicant tracking systems, interviews, LinkedIn, and negotiation, explained with real data.

Your resume has only a few seconds to make a first impression. In a 2018 eye-tracking study, the job site Ladders found that recruiters spent an average of 7.4 seconds on an initial resume screen, up from about six seconds in its 2012 study.

• The Seven-Second Resume Scan
• Screened Out by Software
• Why Structured Interviews Work
• The Power of the First Offer
• LinkedIn and Your Profile
• How Long People Stay
• The Strength of Weak Ties
• The STAR Method

What research says about habits, memory, and motivation, and how to use it in your typing practice and everyday life.

How long does it take to form a habit? The popular answer, 21 days, has little scientific support. In a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Phillippa Lally and her colleagues at University College London asked 96 volunteers to pick a daily healthy behavior, such as eating a piece of fruit with lunch or running for 15 minutes before dinner, and to report each day how automatic it felt.

• 66 Days to a Habit
• If-Then Plans
• Ebbinghaus and the Spacing Effect
• Test Yourself, Don't Reread
• The Marshmallow Test, Revisited
• The Fresh Start Effect
• Temptation Bundling
• Unfinished Business

From the QWERTY keyboard to the first web page: the people and moments that built the tools you type on.

The QWERTY layout you're typing on dates to the 1870s. Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer and newspaperman in Milwaukee, patented a typewriter in 1868 whose keys were arranged roughly alphabetically in two rows, a bit like a piano.

• Where QWERTY Came From
• The Web Began as a Memo
• Ada Lovelace and Note G
• The First Computer Bug
• The Women Who Programmed ENIAC
• The First Message Was LO
• How @ Got into Email
• The Mother of All Demos

Short public-domain passages from great American writers and speakers, quoted exactly from reliable editions.

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln spoke at the dedication of a soldiers' cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His address begins: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

• Lincoln at Gettysburg
• Thoreau Goes to the Woods
• Emerson on Self-Reliance
• Tom Sawyer's Great Law
• Franklin's Little Book
• Douglass Learns to Write
• Whitman and the Astronomer
• Dickinson on Hope

Realistic JavaScript, Python, SQL, and Git snippets, heavy on brackets, quotes, and symbols, each with a line of context.

To total a shopping cart in JavaScript, Array.prototype.reduce() walks the array and carries a running value from one item to the next. The second argument, 0, is the initial value; without it, calling reduce() on an empty array throws a TypeError.

• JavaScript: Totaling a Cart with reduce()
• JavaScript: Optional Chaining and ??
• JavaScript: Checking fetch() Responses
• Python: List Comprehensions and f-strings
• Python: Reading a CSV Export
• SQL: WHERE vs. HAVING
• SQL: Finding Rows with No Match
• Git: A Feature Branch with git switch