History's Greatest

In 1642, a teenage Frenchman built one of the world's first mechanical calculators to spare his father the tedium of manual arithmetic. By his mid-twenties, Blaise Pascal had founded probability theory, overturned two thousand years of received physics, and established himself as one of the foremost mathematical minds in Europe. Then, on the night of November 23, 1654, something happened that redirected him entirely. He wrote it down immediately, sewed the document into the lining of his coat, and carried it against his body for the rest of his life. Multiple copies were found sewn into his clothing after his death. He had told almost no one it existed. What followed was not an abandonment of his intellectual standards. It was the same rigorous mind turned toward harder questions — about human nature, self-deception, and how a mortal creature should live with honesty and purpose. Pascal is one of history's most complete minds. This is his full story.

Walk through the Golden Gate of Diocletian's Palace in Split, Croatia, and you enter one of the strangest and most extraordinary places in Europe. Not a ruin. Not a museum. A neighborhood. Coffee shops occupy spaces where the emperor's servants once worked. Laundry hangs between columns that have stood for seventeen centuries. At the center of it all, a cathedral rises from what was once an emperor's mausoleum - the man's own tomb, converted to Christian worship within a century of his death, still functioning as a place of worship today. Diocletian's Palace is the only Roman imperial residence still fully inhabited. It has been continuously occupied for more than 1,700 years. The city of Split did not grow up around the palace. It grew up inside it. Understanding why that happened - and understanding the man who built it - turns a visit to Split from a pleasant afternoon into something considerably more interesting.