Oliver Hayes

196 Cars a Day Picture a small-town grocery store parking lot on a busy Saturday afternoon. There’s a good chance it sees more cars than pass down a certain highway in Alaska over an entire day. That highway is the Dalton Highway, officially Alaska Route 11, a 414-mile (666 km) stretch running north from Livengood, … Read more

Fed, Hugged, and Called Family in an Hour Michael Powell and Juergen Horn built a project around one simple idea: move to a new city every three months, live there like a local, then move on. They call the project For 91 Days. During one of those three-month stretches based in Savannah, Georgia, they drove … Read more

The Photo That Started the Questions A hand-drawn symbol at the bottom of a driveway does not look like much: a faded scribble in chalk, sitting right where the sidewalk meets a front path. But according to a story that has circulated online since Halloween 2008, that scribble once carried a message. It was left … Read more

A Half-Life Movie Nobody Paid For In February 2009, a short film called Half-Life: Escape from City 17, built around the story of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One, spread well beyond gaming circles. It showed a city collapsing under a reactor meltdown and a desperate run through a trainyard, the kind of scene … Read more

Somewhere, a Wampug Sleeps in a Cave Picture a living room beamed straight out of a galaxy far, far away. A Millennium Falcon bean bag chair slouches in the corner. An AT-AT Imperial Walker stands against the wall, doing quiet duty as a liquor cabinet. And curled up on the floor, in what looks like … Read more

Walk Across the Skulls At the Ardel Gallery of Modern Art in Bangkok, an exhibition called “What Will You Leave Behind?” turned an entire gallery floor into a carpet of hand-built porcelain skulls, laid edge to edge from wall to wall. Accounts of the piece differ on the exact count, some put it around 100,000, … Read more

Meet the Couple That Never Was Stare at American Gothic long enough and your mind fills in a backstory. Most people assume it’s a married couple: a stern farmer and his wife, standing in front of a quiet rural home. That’s not what Grant Wood painted, and it’s not who’s actually in the frame. The … Read more

The Sound Everyone Knows, From a Place No One Expects You can probably hum the sound a Nokia phone makes when it rings. Estimates of how often it plays vary wildly, from around 800,000 phones a day to a much larger claim of 1.8 billion plays a day from a 2009 report. Neither figure traces … Read more

The Five-Minute Test Set a timer for five minutes. Then try to name ten of the highest-grossing movies of all time that never got a theatrical sequel or prequel. No spin-offs, no shared universe entries, just a movie standing entirely on its own at the box office. Try it before reading on. Most people rattle … Read more

It Sounded Like a Train On the evening of Tuesday, January 21, 2014, the Trebo family was inside their farmhouse in Ronchi di Termeno, known locally by its German name, Tramin, a village in northern Italy’s South Tyrol region, when the hillside above them let go. Herbert Trebo, who ran the farm, later said the … Read more