Slavoj Zizek - Israel, Palestine & the Future #philosophy

The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great.  But because the cassette was so much cheaper and easier to use and portable, a lot of people [...]

In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you’ll hear kids playing outside the local elementary school. You’ll hear the highway that [...]

In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada -- not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages.  The city became known as the "Divorce Capital of the World." For much of [...]

Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent and beyond, they encountered a formidable adversary [...]

For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating, medicalized environments. But around the world, a new [...]

It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key part of one's experience with a record or tape or CD. The [...]

Over a decade after Elvis Presley’s death, the king of rock & roll took over headlines once again as Americans weighed in on which portrait of Elvis would be forever immortalized on a 29 cent US [...]

Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the central highway in the heart of the city, encountered every [...]

This week we have two stories featuring the devil.An infamous "training video" teaching cops how to spot and stop "satanic crimes." And a stretch of highway with the misfortune of being officially [...]

The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world. It took a relative newcomer and architectural outsider to dream it up, but the saga of making this world [...]

Oddly disconcerting footage of eyes being stamped onto the faces of flexible plastic dolls at a toy factory in Adana, Turkey.

Ally the Piper performed a badass cover of the classic Ozzy Osbourne song "Crazy Train" on bagpipes inside a moody industrial setting.

Walking Bass Piano Man performed a jazzy piano cover of the Sesame Street them, increasing the jazz factor by seven more levels.

A Sulcata tortoise named Penzi shared a vegetarian meal with a cheetah named Tuesday at Carson Springs Wildlife in in Gainesville, Florida.

Mark Rober created a nine-part underwater maze for his pet octopus that included incrementally increasing the difficulty levels.

A Clearasil ad from 1989 shows a young and rather big-haired Mark Ruffalo zapping newly sprouted zits with great enthusiasm.

NativLang created a knowledgable animation that looks into how modern culture was able to interpret and pronounce Coptic.

A tiny snoring French bulldog puppy fell sleep on her back with her head in her food bowl and her mouth still full.

Black Sabbath brilliantly performed their groundbreaking song "War Pigs" live at L'Olympia in Paris on December 20, 1970.

Technology Connections took a look at the "popcorn" button on microwave ovens, noting that popcorn companies advise against its use.

There was a time when we imagined that most ancient sculpture never had any color except for that of the stone from which it was hewed. Doubt fell upon that notion as long ago as the eighteenth [...]

Cognitive scientist Tomer Ullman, head of Harvard’s Computation, Cognition, and Development lab, may have inadvertently blundered into an untapped vein of LEGO Icon inspiration when his interest in [...]

The iPod shuffle recently enjoyed a bit of a comeback on TikTok. Can the Mikiphone be far behind? The invention of siblings Miklós and Étienne Vadász, the world’s first pocket record player [...]

Here’s a holiday season deal worth mentioning. For Cyber Monday, The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) is offering every course for $40-$60. The sale runs until midnight on Monday [...]

Observers have expressed a variety of reactions to the organizational drama unfolding even now at OpenAI, the non-profit behind the enormously popular ChatGPT. Some have already written speculative [...]

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon turned 50 earlier this year, which perhaps makes it seem easy to dismiss as an artifact of a bygone era. It belongs to a period in popular music history [...]

Dance was as much a baked-in part of Prince’s allure, as his suggestive lyrics and mastery of multiple instruments. The public got its first taste of his affinity for the form at a John Hay [...]

Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with [...]

FYI: Masterclass is getting an early jump on Black Friday, running a “Buy One, Gift One Free” deal. Here’s the gist: Masterclass’s annual plans are typically available at $120 a year [...]

Above, we have the menu for an 1899 Thanksgiving dinner at the Plaza Hotel in New York. If you were a turkey, you had it relatively easy. But the ducks? Not so much. On the menu, you’ll find [...]

Edison Studios film showing the lights of Luna Park and Dreamland during the peak of the famed New York amusement district.

In the 1850s, as photography took its first steps toward commercial reproducibility, a more intimate use for light-sensitive plates briefly bloomed. It had a few names: heliographic drawing, [...]

Handmade book showing Paul Claudel's scenario, with illustrations by Audrey Parr and Hélène Hoppenot, for Darius Milhaud's ballet *L'homme et son desir*.

The recommended cut-off dates to order from our shop by to ensure delivery in time for Dec 25th.

19th-century German chromolithographs of paper lanterns, the kind used to celebrate St. Martin's Day.

Levitation was the last thing Teresa of Avila wanted. It drew the wrong kind of attention and embarrassed her in public. She tried to remain grounded, clinging to furniture when the weightlessness [...]

An examination of the three books that Frankenstein's monster reads to educate himself about human life.

A big batch of new prints is added to our online shop — and also free shipping, and discounts on multiple orders.

A map and pamphlet that proposes dividing Central Europe into 24 sector-shaped cantons, among other eccentric reforms aimed at peace.

Skeletal illustrations supposedly replicating a lost manuscript by a wine and women–loving Zen monk.

“Aquarium of Leaves” A 37-year old Japanese artist who goes by the name Lito has been living with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) his entire life. Lito had been searching [...]

2023 felt like a turning point for Japan. After several years of covid-induced seclusion, tourism rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. And although just anecdotal, so many people we spoke to who [...]

As a child, growing up in Japan, there was one book that terrified me. Luckily, I didn’t own it. The red hardback sat on the bottom shelf in my friend’s room and every time I went over to play I [...]

I like to eat apples and bananas. Yuni Yoshida, the creative director known for her mind-bending visual illusions, likes to alter them, creating visually arresting compositions that make you look, [...]

Yuho Tanaka (田中幽峰) was an accomplished artist and draughtsman active in Kyoto during the late-1800s. At the height of his career in the 1890s he created numerous graphic patterns inspired by [...]

all photos courtesy Eizan Electric Railway Along Kyoto’s Eizan Electric Railway is a section known as “Maple Tree Tunnel” (momiji tunnel, in Japanese) that is lined with hundreds of [...]

Ah, it’s Halloween weekend. And that means it’s time for our favorite Japanese festival Jimi Halloween, where people dress up in costumes so mundane they have to be explained. The tradition was [...]

Tsuchiya Kaban, the 58-year old Japanese leather bagmaker known for their highly-specific bags, has released their very first line-up of pet products. And their doggy randoseru is absolutely [...]

If you’ve boarded the Tokyo Metro this month, there’s a good chance you walked into a train car that was…well, different. Perhaps you felt unobstructed, light and fluid as you [...]

As Japan’s population continues to grow older—one in 10 residents are aged 80 or above—care for the elderly becomes an increasingly important issue. And while elderly populations are [...]