Marlon Wright articles

Energy stories usually start on land. This one doesn’t. It begins far offshore, where heat slips through rock and water, and where engineers and scientists see possibility instead of empty darkness waiting quietly below us.

High in the Andes sits a temple that never relied on spectacle alone. Its power came through experience, the kind that worked slowly on the body and stayed lodged in memory. Archaeologists once saw stone, skill, and symbolism here. Then the bones changed the conversation. This story moves past admiration into discomfort, asking how belief gets built and who pays for it. It is not a comfortable story, but it is a human one. Keep reading. The details matter more than they seem.

Egypt was running out of time. Persian armies gathered at the borders while priests at Karnak buried precious gold beneath temple stones. That desperate act just rewarded archaeologists with a stunning glimpse into ancient anxiety.

Between 1870 and 1920, Philadelphia minted millionaires. It became home to powerful industrials. All those industrial titans built massive fortunes through railroads, banking, textiles, and manufacturing. These nouveaux riches craved country estates that reflected European aristocratic taste.

Across the United States, grand mansions once built to showcase power and ambition now stand empty, weathered, and largely forgotten. Each crumbling staircase and silent hall tells a story and still raises questions.

One skeleton is making medical historians question their entire timeline. The bones belong to someone who survived major surgery before farming, before metal, before civilization as we know it. Their healed leg rewrites human capability.

Nothing ruins a balmy afternoon like a final bill that makes you flinch. You feel the sun warm your shoulders, hear waves lap at the shore, and then—boom—you see a charge that’s three times more than expected for a couple of drinks. You ask yourself: “Did they really just jack up prices because I’m a visitor?” That frustrating moment is more common than you’d think, and it isn’t always illegal. However, it should make you wonder about fairness and what rights you actually have when you’re abroad or even close to home. Prices hitting the roof after you order and sip can feel downright exploitative, especially when you didn’t consent to the hike. Nevertheless, there’s a distinction between sour business strategies and what’s actually unlawful.

The ruins at Narbonne stand on the spot where Rome first planted its architectural and cultural flag beyond the Italian Alps. Founded in 118 BC, Colonia Narbo Martius marked the beginning of Roman urban life in Gaul, a milestone that reshaped economic and political power across what is now southern France. Centuries later, the city’s remains reveal planned street lines, a curtain wall nearly 100 feet long, and the foundations of a round tower. These discoveries are reshaping how historians understand early Roman planning outside the Italian peninsula. Together, they point to a once-bustling hub of trade and administration that linked the Mediterranean to the wider Roman world.

Deep inside a German cave, archaeologists have uncovered something extraordinary that challenges everything we thought we knew about Neanderthal intelligence. In the Einhornhohle cave of the Harz Mountains, researchers discovered deliberate engravings carved into a giant deer phalanx by Neanderthal hands over 51,000 years ago. These aren't random scratches or accidental marks from sharpening tools. They're intentional geometric patterns that required planning, effort, and a clear artistic vision. The discovery pushes back the timeline of symbolic thinking in human evolutionary history and proves that our ancient cousins were far more cognitively sophisticated than previously imagined. For decades, scientists believed symbolic art was exclusively a modern human trait, something that separated Homo sapiens from other hominin species. These German cave engravings shatter that assumption completely and force us to reconsider what made Neanderthals truly human in their own right.