Where did the word "OK" come from and how did it become so popular? Young Boston intellectuals in the early 1800s us | Continue reading
For Motherboard's The Most Unknown series, physicist Davide D'Angelo and geomicrobiologist Jennifer Macalady travel to Laborator | Continue reading
Eric Klinenberg recently wrote an opinion piece for the NY Times called To Restore Civil Society, Start With the Library.Librari | Continue reading
One of the ways that climatologists know that the dramatically increasing amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide (and corresponding | Continue reading
Ah, these kids today and their addiction to wireless telegraphy! | Continue reading
Yeah, I'm not sure what else needs to be explained here, it's what it says on the tin, etc. Owen Wilson likes saying "wow&q | Continue reading
Photographer Beth Moon travels the globe documenting some of the biggest, oldest, and rarest trees in the world -- dragon bl | Continue reading
Using years of satellite data and photography, researchers have constructed an extremely detailed terrain map called the Ref | Continue reading
These nudibranchs (sea slugs) are lit up like the midway at a county fair because they're warning predators that they use stingi | Continue reading
In Mark Slutsky's short sci-fi film "Final Offer", a traffic ticket lawyer awakens in a doorless room and discovers he | Continue reading
A research company called Morning Consult had 1900 people watch the new Nike commercial featuring Colin Kaepernick and record th | Continue reading
Since 2011, brothers Morgan and Mason McGrew have been working on a shot-by-shot recreation of Toy Story 3. They've built sets, | Continue reading
Color Leap lets you time travel back through the color palettes of history, from colorful Egyptian sarcophagi circa 2000 BCE to st | Continue reading
I've been keeping track of every media thing I "consume", so here are quick reviews of some things I've read, seen, hear | Continue reading
From The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again):Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for ye | Continue reading
Choreographer & acrobat Yoann Bourgeois and pianist Alexandre Tharaud have collaborated on a performance that combines a tra | Continue reading
A pair of notebooks kept by Leonardo da Vinci have been scanned and put online by the Victoria & Albert Museum. The notebo | Continue reading
Ok, if you started using the web 15-25 years ago, prepare yourself for the nostalgic blast of the Web Design Museum.I remember | Continue reading
In Michael Jackson's transition from child singer to the electrifying King of Pop, Evan Puschak argues that Don't Stop 'Til You | Continue reading
In 2014, Ruben Bolling created an updated version of Richard Scarry's Busytown (as seen in What Do People Do All Day? and Busy, Bu | Continue reading
NY Times film critic A.O. Scott recently discussed the technology he uses to do his job. Near the end (spoiler!), he highlights so | Continue reading
This is a pitch-perfect mashup by Funny Or Die of Amazon's new series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan (starring John Krasinski) and The O | Continue reading
This is a fun thing to play around with: an animated function plot by Jeff Baumes at Observable. Everything at Observable is don | Continue reading
Bob Woodward's much-anticipated book, Fear: Trump in the White House, comes out next week. The Washington Post somehow "obtai | Continue reading
Tycho just shared his sunrise DJ set from this year's Burning Man.This is going to be on repeat today and for the rest of the | Continue reading
I loved Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels so much that that I almost couldn't bring myself to watch the trailer for HBO's upcom | Continue reading
Steven Johnson's new book comes out today. Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most details the relatively lit | Continue reading
Word is filtering through the NYC food community that Kenny Shopsin has passed away. Together with his wife and children, Shopsi | Continue reading
So for the past year or two, almost nonstop, I've been reading and rereading JRR Tolkien's The Silmarillion, the great, weird ps | Continue reading
Maybe it's because I'm part of the cassette generation, but I'm just charmed by IBM researcher Mark Lantz's ode to that great in | Continue reading
While Isaac Newton and the 17th century were more decisive for understanding the physics of color, you can't beat the late 18th an | Continue reading
Joel Embiid is (probably) the most talented and (easily) the most entertaining young player in the NBA today. It's really not even | Continue reading
Astronomers using an infrared telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile recently released an infrared photo of the | Continue reading
Netflix is finally releasing The Other Side of the Wind, a film by Orson Welles that has been unfinished since filming was compl | Continue reading
Festivals dedicated to the celebration and modification of Vespa scooters are held in various places around Indonesia. Photogr | Continue reading
Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He is a progressive Democrat, Rhodes scholar, served a tour of duty in Afghani | Continue reading
In the 50s and 60s during tests of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, thousands of British soldiers were deliberately exposed | Continue reading
Over the past few months, a team at Lego has been building a full-scale model of a Bugatti Chiron supercar using only Lego Techn | Continue reading
Stephen Colbert is a *huge* J.R.R. Tolkien nerd. When Rolling Stone asked the late night host to break a song down, he chose &qu | Continue reading
The Tables is a short documentary about the ping pong tables in NYC's Bryant Park and the cast of characters who play there freq | Continue reading
I'm not sure how underwater photographer Todd Bretl manages to take such close-up snaps of sharks -- diving cage? underwater t | Continue reading
For the beginning of school, second-grade teacher Aeriale Johnson had each of her students mix up a container of paint that matc | Continue reading
Last night's sunset threw all of these crazy colors into the sky. If you're into that sort of thing, these images available | Continue reading
French illustrator Antoine Helbert is a great fan of the architecture of Byzantium and has created more than two dozen intri | Continue reading
In a piece called The Algorithmic Trap, David Perell writes about the difficulty of finding serendipity, diversity, and "re | Continue reading
From TED-ed and tea expert Shunan Teng, a short video on the history of tea, from its invention in China to its role in globaliz | Continue reading
On Twitter, @InstantSunrise wrote an entertaining thread "in which I drag every single US president in order". She start | Continue reading
Published by the North American Cartographic Information Society, the upcoming 2018 Atlas of Design showcases 32 of the best maps | Continue reading