Many airports have dedicated stores for luggage, despite most passengers having luggage with them already

In 2024, US airports generated over $1B of revenue—partly due to overpriced airport food

Some in the airport industry argue that charging street prices in airport restaurants isn't sustainable because it's more expensive to run a business inside an airport.

Find out how airlines quietly became banks

Some experts suggest airlines lose money on every flight. This video dives into how airlines have leveraged their loyalty programs to make billions of dollars, effectively evolving into banks.

CT scanners at airports take images across energy bands to identify baggage contents

Old X-ray scanners' inability to distinguish between water and explosives has driven strict liquid bans and longer wait times through airport security. New scanners combine multi-angle images across the energy spectrum to determine an object's density and atomic composition for improved threat detection.

Denver International Airport is associated with numerous dark conspiracy theories

Since opening in 1995, the country's largest airport has spurred a variety of conspiracy theories. Some believe the runways form a hate symbol; others believe its giant horse statue is cursed.

Commercial air travel made international vacations more commonplace

Long-distance commercial flights became more common in the 1980s, allowing tourists to travel internationally more easily. For those who could afford it, travel by airplane allowed them to see everything the world had to offer, harkening back to the philosophy of the Grand Tour.

Dollar stores often place staple items at the back of the store

This forces customers to encounter other, less-necessary items on their way there, leading to impulse buys. This video explains other ways that dollar stores make money while selling extremely cheap products, keeping dollar store profit margins relatively high.

Read about 'skiplagging,' a money-saving travel hack

A consumer loophole known as "skiplagging" is a travel hack where travelers purchase a cheaper flight with a layover in their destination city. The hack works when flights to other cities with layovers at your destination are cheaper than direct flights to your destination. Airlines don't like the practice, but there's no specific law forbidding it.

In 2013, American Express became the first credit card company to open an airport lounge

American Express opened its first airport lounge, the Centurion, in Las Vegas more than a decade ago. Since then, not only has American Express increased the number of lounges it has in airports across the country, but other credit card companies have also opened lounges.

Randomly boarding passengers onto a plane is often faster than using boarding groups

Although boarding back to front or windows to aisles appear to be sensible approaches to quickly filling a plane, these methods still suffer from passengers stowing away their luggage, which too often halts the boarding flow. Research has shown that the ideal process, called the Steffen method, optimized efficiency by allowing boarding to continue even while stowing is underway.

Smithsonian artifacts that tell the story of 9/11 (w/photos)

Hundreds of objects linked to the attacks, from office supplies recovered at the World Trade Center to firefighters’ gear used at the Pentagon to fragments pulled from the crash site of Flight 93, reside in the national collection. Read about 31 Smithsonian artifacts that help unravel the complex story of 9/11 and its aftermath.

Airbnb started as a vacation rental startup and soon disrupted the hospitality industry

In this podcast episode, Airbnb gets the "How I Built This" treatment. The "How I Built This" host speaks with the entrepreneurs behind today's largest businesses about how they got started. In this episode, Airbnb's cofounder Joe Gebbia talks about how he built Airbnb.

Are smart cities a dumb idea?

Smart cities require vast troves of data to run, making their systems attractive to hackers. Listen to this one hour podcast to learn about the risks and what is being done to mitigate them.

Why Japan builds airports on water

Some of Japan's roughly 100 airports are built on water—that is, engineers have created new land in bodies of water specifically to construct airports. This six-minute video explains why the country is doing so despite the higher cost of such airports.

One of LVMH's key business innovations was widening the luxury market's target audience

While certain items under the LVMH umbrella can cost thousands of dollars, like large Louis Vuitton bags, others, like coin purses or lipstick, cost significantly less. Some argue that these comparatively lower-priced items allows LVMH's target audience to be much larger in size than it would have been if it only targeted the world's wealthiest shoppers, whereas others argue that it makes the brand more vulnerable to economic downturns.

MLB teams can travel with roughly 12,000 pounds of gear and luggage

Each of the league's 30 teams has travel directors facilitating intricate logistics to move players and luggage to the next city, often after a game and the night before another game day. This video breaks down the wild planning required.

Why can't we just turn the empty offices into apartments?

As both rent prices and mortgage rates rise across the US, many companies have simultaneously continued operating hybrid or remote workforces post-pandemic. A podcast episode dives into why city dwellers aren't all living in their prepandemic break rooms just yet.

How parking infrastructure reveals a region's values

As cars became more popular, the need for city parking increased. In Europe, well-established cities with limited space generally opted for more expensive underground parking beneath public spaces to preserve aesthetics. Available land and decentralized planning in the US saw more parking lots and garages built. These decisions reveal broader policy realities for these regions.

Macy’s announced a series of pandemic-era store closures in January 2021

Specifically, as mall foot traffic declined, Macy’s sought to grow elsewhere (as did many other retailers around the same time).

Listen to a podcast episode from 1440's editor in chief that explains how a credit card transaction works behind the scenes.

When you buy even something as small as a $5 latte, a global relay between banks and networks like Visa and Mastercard is triggered. It all started with a 1958 campaign from Bank of America that jump-started the credit card revolution.

'Statelessness: Citizens of Nowhere' podcast examines how statelessness erodes identity

This podcast series explores how millions live without citizenship or legal status. Through expert interviews and personal stories, it examines how history, borders, and policy can leave entire populations without citizenship and rights.

Two main types of inflight WiFi connections are air-to-ground and satellite-based

ATG systems rely on aircraft antennae to catch signals from cellphone towers, while the latter uses a network of satellites transmitting data from space. As of 2022, airlines like Delta and United hosted over 1.5 million monthly WiFi sessions.

Some people are against Black Friday, saying it promotes consumerism

This comprehensive podcast video episode from NYU Professor Scott Galloway offers a deep dive into the economics of Black Friday, Galloway believes Black Friday allows corporations to exploit the worst parts of Americans’ consumerist impulses, and warns Americans should not believe purchasing things leads to greater happiness.

The rise of the museum gift shop

While museum gift shops are commonplace now, they weren’t when the Met opened in 1870. Nevertheless, the museum was one of the first to offer copies of several of their paintings for visitors to display in their own homes. Read about how the museum gift shop has evolved and how they decide what to carry with this look behind the scenes from Artsy.

Tracing the history of refrigeration

Refrigeration has become critical to most of our lives. But not long ago, it wasn't available. How did we become so dependent on our fridges and freezers? This fun, informative podcast traces the history of keeping it cool with ice and...

Nashville's economy is benefitting from bachelorette parties at what some say is a cultural cost

In the past decade, Tennessee’s capital has gone from a destination known for its music scene to the country’s bachelor/bachelorette party hub. This podcast episode reveals that despite the financial benefits that bachelorette tourism brings, residents worry about how these specific tourists could threaten Nashville's reputation as a music city.

When a Paris department store hesitated to sell Estée Lauder's perfume, she 'accidentally' broke a bottle, causing the smell to spread throughout the store and shoppers to start asking to buy the scent.

US consumers collectively owe more than $1T to credit card companies—almost as much as they owe in auto loans.

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

While the first exchange-traded fund (a 'basket' of different assets that can be bought and sold on a stock exchange) in the US only launched in 1993, the global ETF market has grown to more than $10T in the short time since.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

Power lines are dotted with large, brightly colored balls to improve the visibility of these thin wires to helicopters and small planes and help prevent potential crashes.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

Fireworks-related ER visits are on the rise—in 2024, they increased by 52% as compared to the prior year.

Urushiol, the oily toxin in poison ivy, can remain allergenic on clothing for years.

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Some researchers have labeled nomophobia, the fear of being without your phone, as 'the phobia of the 21st century.'

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

Explore what it's like inside a patient isolation unit, used in situations such as treating a patient or suspected patient with Ebola.

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

Abraham Lincoln was almost assassinated weeks before his inauguration as he traveled from Illinois to DC through Baltimore in 1861; it took two independent claims for Lincoln to be convinced the threat was real

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

Take a 3D tour of the Hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca, undertaken by over 1.5 million Muslims.