From Matt Baker of UsefulCharts, this chart traces the evolution of our familiar alphabet from its Proto-Sinaitic roots circa 18 | Continue reading
Mountain Monks is a short film by Fritz Schumann about a group of Japanese monks called the Yamabushi who regularly commune with | Continue reading
Moon Rivas, a cyborg artist, has sensors implanted in her feet that vibrate whenever an earthquake is detected anywhere in the wor | Continue reading
Something incredible happened during the super blood wolf moon eclipse that took place on Sunday night: a meteorite struck the m | Continue reading
This commercial from Mexican airline AeroMexico cleverly reminds some Americans of the melting pot nature of our nation, where e | Continue reading
In what she calls a "time-tunnel artwork", photographer Annie Wang has been taking a periodic photo of her and her son o | Continue reading
Featuring the ideas of cheese expert Paul Kindstedt, this TED-Ed video is a quick animated look at the history of cheese and che | Continue reading
A group of divers with One Ocean Diving recently swam with Deep Blue, a great white shark that is believed to be one of largest | Continue reading
Comics fans and the internet at large have been enchanted by the new author of the classic Nancy comic, Olivia Jaimes. This comic | Continue reading
Not all hour-long podcasts are worthwhile, but I found this one by The Atlantic's Matt Thompson and Alexis Madrigal to be pretty c | Continue reading
Not all hour-long podcasts are worthwhile, but I found this one by The Atlantic's Matt Thompson and Alexis Madrigal to be pretty c | Continue reading
1969 is getting all the attention right now, as huge historical landmarks celebrate their 50th anniversary. But what about 1959, | Continue reading
One of the best things about the contemporary NBA is that the league is overflowing with villains, great players that it's easy | Continue reading
Using one of my recent favorite mental models,1 Tim O'Reilly writes about some technology-related changes happening in the world w | Continue reading
In the cover story for the March 2019 issue of The Atlantic, Yoni Appelbaum clearly and methodically lays out the case that Congre | Continue reading
About 30 years ago, the Menendez brothers of Beverly Hills murdered their parents, collected a hefty life insurance policy, and th | Continue reading
For Vox, Jane Coaston writes about why Republicans too 15 years to act on House member Steve King's racism. I found her point abou | Continue reading
I love how simple questions can reveal deep truths about how the universe works. Take "why is the night sky dark?" It's | Continue reading
The brain is a fascinating organ. If you're lucky enough to wake up after having a stroke, there's a chance you might have some ne | Continue reading
Spinning disks of ice can form naturally in slow-moving parts of streams and rivers. What happens is a large chunk of ice gets c | Continue reading
Check out these elaborate and colorfully decorated origami creations by paper artist Cristian Marianciuc.To create these i | Continue reading
Colin Morris recently analyzed a corpus of comments from Reddit for misspellings by searching for words near uncertainty indicator | Continue reading
For more than a year now, Jon Lefkovitz has been making short videos of iconic scenes from films backed by the same musical score, | Continue reading
When Sonia Vallabh lost her mother to a rare disease called fatal familial insomnia, she soon found out that she had inherited the | Continue reading
Designer Scott Reinhard takes old geological survey maps and combines them with elevation data to produce these wonderful hybrid t | Continue reading
When Tim and I first started the Noticing newsletter, I got a note from Rob Walker, a design and technology journalist whose work | Continue reading
Ok, this is fascinating. In "dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets", Jonathan Logan shares how vendors on the dark | Continue reading
Yesterday on Twitter, Guillermo del Toro shared "10 personal musings about ROMA", the film by Alfonso Cuarón | Continue reading
In a Nutshell is a mesmerizing stop motion animation directed by Fabio Friedli that attempts to sum up the entire world in just | Continue reading
In their latest video, Kurzgesagt asks: "Is Organic Really Better? Healthy Food or Trendy Scam?" Using the results of | Continue reading
In 1995, Fred Rompelberg set the record for the fastest speed on a bicycle: 167 mph. In September 2018, drafting behind the same | Continue reading
Artists Irene Posch & Ebru Kurbak have built The Embroidered Computer, a programmable 8-bit computer made using traditional em | Continue reading
This gave me a solid laugh this morning: perhaps the most local local commercial I've ever seen. Jemele Hill called it "the w | Continue reading
I don't know about you, but my house was blanketed with VHS tapes. The tapes were filled with episodes of Star Trek and movies m | Continue reading
For Outside magazine, Rowan Jacobsen talks to scientists whose research suggests that the current guidelines for protecting human | Continue reading
When the story about Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women broke, the NY Times took the unusual step of publishing | Continue reading
This is mesmerizing to watch for a few minutes: a time lapse map of weather activity across the entire US in 2018. I was thinkin | Continue reading
In an essay adapted from his forthcoming book, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human | Continue reading
For Vox, Cleo Abram explains why game designers use triangles when designing 3D animated games (and not, say, circles or rectang | Continue reading
What would the Grand Canyon look like as a Grand Mountain, i.e. if its depth became its height? Not quite as Grand perhaps, but | Continue reading
I love this photo of the Space Shuttle Endeavour rising through the clouds on a plume of smoke during its last launch in 2011. W | Continue reading
Toph Tucker has designed an algorithmic version of the US flag called the Flag of the Popular Vote, where the size of the stars | Continue reading
In 1981, a Berkeley urban design professor named Donald Appleyard published a book called Livable Streets (now out of print). In i | Continue reading
In Surely You're a Creep, Mr. Feynman, science historian Leila McNeill writes about the difficulty in separating science from the | Continue reading
One of the defining features of the United States is a deep and long-lasting economic inequality between white and black people in | Continue reading
Technology is so ubiquitous now that bits of our digital interfaces make their way into real life -- like people saying "hash | Continue reading
In this video, Luke Palmer makes a surprisingly compelling case that Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer is actually a sequel to the belo | Continue reading