In 1988, at the behest of Volkswagen, author Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter of advice to people living on Earth 100 years in the fut | Continue reading
The latest video in the New Yorker's Annals of Obsession tracks the transformation of ramen from a cheapo dorm room food to curr | Continue reading
Kareem Waris Olamilekan is 11 years old and makes very realistic drawings like these of his friends, family, and other faces he ru | Continue reading
Based on the available archaeological evidence, researchers had assumed that bread and agriculture developed around the same time. | Continue reading
Last week, I stood in the middle of the caldera of a supervolcano, walked on rocks billions of years old, and traveled back in tim | Continue reading
In a recent study called The impact of the 'open' workspace on human collaboration, a pair of researchers tracked the digital and | Continue reading
It's Prime Day! Or is it tomorrow? Prime Day, a holiday invented by Amazon to sell stuff in the lull between Memorial Day and Labo | Continue reading
Americans generally have a skewed view of their country's place in the world, both metaphorically and geographically speaking. F | Continue reading
I really like these drawings of NYC with a historical bent by illustrator and "amateur historian" Julia Wertz. The | Continue reading
President Obama is heading to Africa this week for the first time since he left office. In preparation, he shared a recommended su | Continue reading
Using a JavaScript machine learning package called TensorFlow.js, Abhishek Singh built a program that learned how to translate s | Continue reading
In the early 90s, a digital typeface designed in the 80s -- but based on the letterforms used in a Roman column completed in 113 | Continue reading
iOS programmer Glenda Adams made a cross-stitch embroidery of the original Control Panel for the Macintosh. Lots of parallels be | Continue reading
Art director Yuni Yoshida has created these pixelated food photos by manually cutting up the foods in question into little cub | Continue reading
National Geographic recently announced the winners of the Travel Photographer of the Year contest for 2018. You can look at | Continue reading
Ridley Scott and Asif Kapadia are working on a film adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Scott | Continue reading
Pete Souza spent 8 years photographing President Obama as the official White House photographer. Souza compiled some of the best | Continue reading
In the late 1920s & early 1930s, African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston interviewed an Alabama man named Cudjo Lewis about | Continue reading
Few directors allowed their movies to speak for themselves more than Stanley Kubrick. Still, when it came to 2001: A Space Odyssey | Continue reading
Using a 360° GoPro camera, Jeb Corliss films his ride on a roller coaster and, with some help from image stabilization i | Continue reading
At first, I thought these images by Dennis Wojtkiewicz were photographs of backlit fruit slices, but they're actually super-re | Continue reading
From a 1970 issue of New York magazine, Buckminster Fuller on the massive economic lever of technology:We must do away with the | Continue reading
Brian Stelter is known for media scoops, but sometimes, he can bring the insight too. On CNN and in his nightly newsletter, he b | Continue reading
This excerpt from Margaret Guroff's history The Mechanical Horse focuses on the democratization of the bicycle at the end of the | Continue reading
Lately, I've been getting more and more interested in dreams, as experiences and as psychological phenomena. I don't have a fanc | Continue reading
No, you're burned out and just want to look at pretty pictures of books artfully arranged in architecture! Luckily, Condé Nast T | Continue reading
Last fall, The Big Picture did a series of photographs of tea workers in China. According to the accompanying short article, &qu | Continue reading
This was a new term for me:keyword void, or search void, n.: a situation where searching for answers about a keyword returns an | Continue reading
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