Michael Erard pokes away at the "administrative hypothesis," the idea that ancient writing had its origin in accountin | Continue reading
Here are three essays that make very different arguments but are worth reading, and (I think) worth reading together.1. "Ho | Continue reading
At CityLab, Brentin Mock makes a compelling case for rethinking the causes and consequences of black Americans' 20th century rel | Continue reading
Wonder Woman aside, DC's recent movies haven't been very good, but their recent comics have been extraordinary. In particular, w | Continue reading
My friend, the historian Dan Bouk, has a fascinating find in the 1940 U.S. census. Over 200,000 people are listed as "partn | Continue reading
The Land of Matrimony, 1772The Public Domain Review has an interesting collection of allegorical maps of love, courtship, and m | Continue reading
Francis Galton, a Victorian eugenicist and statistician, was obsessed with measuring reaction time as a proxy for general intell | Continue reading
I really enjoyed Amber Case's essay "The Hidden Cost of Touchscreens." It's a quick but surprisingly thorough look at | Continue reading
A courthouse intern on a housecleaning project named Maya McKenzie turned up a slew of rarely-seen original documents of the Montg | Continue reading
I don't live in Cleveland or Akron. I live, and grew up, just north of Detroit, in an inner-ring suburb known for Thai and Vietn | Continue reading
The Straight Dope -- which some readers might know only as an online message board with impressive Google Juice -- is closing up t | Continue reading
Between 2003 and 2012, civil engineers in Amsterdam excavated a brand-new North-South metro line along the banks of the river Am | Continue reading
National Geographic is making digital copies of its century-plus archive of maps available to the public... with a twist. Immedi | Continue reading
This newly released photo of the chaotic clouds of Jupiter would make a great marbled paper pattern.NASA's Juno spacecraft too | Continue reading
When World War I started, color photography was still in its experimental stage so most of the imagery of the war is in bl | Continue reading
Mick Kalber is posting daily flyover videos of the eruption of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. This one, from June 23, is one of | Continue reading
100 useful things "is an expanding collection of durable objects presented by the people who use them every day".W | Continue reading
At ArchDaily, José Tomás Franco walks us through the cut patterns that are most used to saw wood into diff | Continue reading
Watch as Peter Song of Kung Fu Kitchen and Shuichi Kotani of Worldwide Soba make noodles by hand.I can watch people pull noodl | Continue reading
In a lesson for TED-Ed, David Dunning explains the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias in which people with lesser abilities t | Continue reading
Of course you know he designed the album cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico...Warhol's name (and not the band's or the al | Continue reading
The design of the automatic-drip coffee maker is super simple and clever. By using a one-way value to pump the water to the top of | Continue reading
In this 90-second video, Kurt Vonnegut provides eight guidelines for writing a good short story.1. Use the time of a total str | Continue reading
Humans are so small compared to the size of the Earth, it's sometimes difficult to comprehend the scale of things like, say, the m | Continue reading
I've been a bit lax about getting the word out about this lately -- been busy in the content mines and with the Noticing newslette | Continue reading
Justin Peters takes stock photos and combines them into fantastical and mind-bending scenes. I've seen lots of this sort o | Continue reading
A couple of years ago, Wayne Easton witnessed the Mahlongwa River cutting a new channel into the Indian Ocean. As the video abov | Continue reading
In 1988, Dr. James Hansen testified in front of Congress about the future dangers of climate change caused by human activity. That | Continue reading
From Dr. Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch and Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at George Mason Un | Continue reading
Alexis Madrigal is great at the systemic sublime -- taking an everyday object or experience and showing how it implicates intercon | Continue reading
This week's crisis of children separated from their parents, and both parents and children sent to jails or camps (in most cases | Continue reading
The Yale Babylonian Collection has four cuneiform tablets that contain the world's oldest known food recipes -- nearly four thou | Continue reading
In partnership with over 30 museums and institutions from around the world, Google Arts & Culture has launched Faces of Frida, | Continue reading
In Here Are the 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People, Cloe Madanes gives us some advice at how to succeed at self-sabatage (or, re | Continue reading
Dan Mancina has lost 95% of his eyesight but that hasn't kept him from skating. Red Bull has an interview with Mancina, who stop | Continue reading
Back in 2014, a lovely short film by Shaun Bloodworth called The Putter went viral. The film shows Cliff Denton making scissors fo | Continue reading
Elizabeth Kolbert writing for National Geographic: There's No Scientific Basis for Race -- It's a Made-Up Label."What the g | Continue reading
Harkening back to when visual effects teams used colorful liquids & chemicals to simulate space travel for films like 2001, | Continue reading
Russian writer Varlam Shalamov spent 15 years, from 1937 to 1951, in a Soviet gulag (forced labor camp) for engaging in "coun | Continue reading
With an eye on the current political situations in the US, Turkey, Russia, and China, Cass Sunstein reviews three books that shed | Continue reading
A supercut montage of dance scenes from over 300 movies (like School of Rock, The Wizard of Oz, Footloose, Dances With Wolves, W | Continue reading
On Tinker Fridays, industrial designer dina Amin takes apart an item and makes a playful stop motion animation out of its parts. | Continue reading
Earlier this year, 30,000 teachers in Oklahoma walked out of their classrooms to protest teacher pay and education budget cuts. Th | Continue reading
TANK is a short animation by Stu Maschwitz that's based on the look of vector arcade games from the 80s like Battlezone, Tempest | Continue reading
In this video, 70 people from 70 different countries from all over the world show how they count money in their respective count | Continue reading
In The Death of a Once Great City Kevin Baker argues that the current affluence of NYC has made the city "unremarkable" | Continue reading
All through the 1980s, a disgruntled Department of Defense analyst adorned his daily desk calendar with all sorts of illustr | Continue reading
In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five spacecraft to orbit the Moon to take high-resolution photos to aid in finding a good landing spot | Continue reading