Oliver Hayes 
A Portrait Made of Forest and Sky Picture a face built out of trees, a shoulder dissolving into fog over distant mountains, or a head full of birds where hair should be. This “double exposure” portrait style shows up constantly on Instagram and movie posters, and it looks like something only a film photographer with … Read more
Something Odd on Avenue des Gobelins Paris’s 13th arrondissement isn’t short on charm, but one short stretch of Avenue des Gobelins, about 984 feet (300 meters) long, started drawing a different kind of attention in 2018. A giant teddy bear turned up in a bookshop window, tall enough to reach a grown adult’s shoulder. Another … Read more
Somewhere, Someone Is Building a Dalek in Their Garage Picture a Dalek: the pepper-pot-shaped alien that glides across a floor, eyestalk twitching, gun arm humming, a flat metallic voice ordering someone to “EXTERMINATE.” Now picture it not on a BBC soundstage but in a garage in some ordinary town, built from scratch by a fan … Read more
A Vegetable Legend From the Land of Ice Alaska doesn’t exactly scream “vegetable garden.” Six months of weak daylight, short summers, and ground that stays frozen through much of the year aren’t growing conditions anyone would pick on purpose. Yet this is the place people point to when giant rhubarb comes up, stalks thick enough … Read more
Scan the Whole Planet Chris Fisher studies dirt for a living. He’s a professor of anthropology at Colorado State University and a National Geographic Explorer who has spent years flying over forests with lasers pointed at the ground. With geographer Steve Leisz, he founded a nonprofit called The Earth Archive, with an ambition that sounds … Read more
HEADLINE: Pepper-Sprayed at Occupy Wall Street, She Found Love and Had “Occubaby” ARTICLE: The Photo Everyone Remembers for the Wrong Reason On September 24, 2011, a clip from an Occupy Wall Street march near Union Square in New York City started showing up everywhere online. In it, a group of protesters, most of them women, … Read more
A List Nobody Was Supposed to Remember On December 19, 2013, the blog Neatorama posted a holiday gift guide for its online shop, NeatoShop: “50 Geektastic Christmas Gift Ideas.” The pitch was unglamorous, everything 20% to 50% off in a “Final Christmas Sale of 2013,” with shipping cutoffs for last-minute shoppers, order regular shipping on … Read more
The Guy Who Looked Like He’d Lose In 1975, Sylvester Stallone was 29, broke, and typecast as muscle. A difficult forceps birth had left him with nerve damage, a drooping lip, and slurred speech, so casting directors only saw him for thugs and henchmen. Then he watched a boxing match on television, sat down, and … Read more
The Rocks That Come Back At Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona, rangers occasionally open a padded envelope and find a chunk of 225-million-year-old fossilized wood wrapped in tissue paper, with a note tucked beside it. Some notes run two lines, some run for pages; some are signed, many are anonymous. Staff have been … Read more
Three Comfort Movies, One Weird Feeling You pull up an old favorite, something you’ve watched a dozen times, and around minute twenty a line lands wrong. Nothing dramatic, just a small, cold beat where the joke used to be automatic and now isn’t. The Bad News Bears, Heathers, and American Pie have nothing in common … Read more