Military Pigeons and Ghost Towns

Project Pigeon

Ben Naddaff-Hafrey | From The Archive | 9th October 2025

Before he became famous for his work on operant conditioning, B.F. Skinner approached the US military with a proposal to train pigeons to guide a missile to its target. The project was eventually deemed too eccentric and dropped. It did leave the world with three legacies — modern animal training, reinforcement learning for humans, and the touchscreen display technology used in smartphones (1,400 words)

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The Quest To Resurrect A Ghost Town

Lauren Hough | Texas Highways | 13th October 2025

Dispatches from a trip through Texas’s ghost towns by an enthusiast. Texas has over a thousand of them, places “for which the reason for being no longer exists”. Specialised travel guides offer information about where to find them. “The stereotypical ghost town is a mining camp. The mine goes bust when the minerals run out or when the market for those minerals disappears. So people move on” (3,000 words)