Oliver Hayes

Seventy Years, Same Nickel When Coca-Cola first went on sale at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta on May 8, 1886, a glass cost five cents. Walk into a store in 1950 and you’d still pay five cents for a 6.5-ounce (192 ml) bottle. That price held through two world wars, the Great Depression, and decade … Read more

The Egg That Could End a Shopping Trip The process required real patience: crack an eggshell carefully, insert a small explosive device, glue the shell shut, slip it back into a carton. That carton would travel to a supermarket in northeastern Italy’s Veneto or Friuli-Venezia Giulia region. Someone would buy it, take it home, and … Read more

A Secret Slice of Wilderness Most people who picture Curaçao see the pastel-painted Dutch colonial facades of Willemstad, or the coral-rich dive sites along the south coast. So it is genuinely disorienting to find that roughly one-tenth of the island is a blank on the map: no roads, no resorts, just a stretch of ragged … Read more

Stones That Sing Somewhere in the granite hills of Karnataka, India, there is a temple where you can play the walls. Not metaphorically. The pillars of the Vijaya Vittala Temple in Hampi produce clear, resonant musical tones when struck with a finger or a stick of sandalwood. The stone doesn’t thud. It rings. Hampi sits … Read more

Beyond the Ticket Counter A building designed to move people through as quickly as possible is now somewhere you book a table weeks in advance. That reversal is one of the more satisfying stories in modern architecture: the old train station that outlived its trains and found something better to do. Across the world, decommissioned … Read more

Two Scenes, One Woman, Twenty-Six Years of Silence In November 2000, partial human remains were found in a wooded area off Halsey-Manor Road near Manorville, New York. Investigators had biological material, an open case, and no name. The woman was catalogued as Jane Doe No. 6; the case went cold. In April 2011, more remains … Read more

The Car That Came Back Covered Imagine walking back to your car and finding it coated, top to bottom, in thousands of sticky notes. Bonnet, windows, license plates, every flat surface buried under blue and white paper. No damage, no broken glass. Just color, everywhere. That is what one driver in Brazil discovered. The reason … Read more

The Powerhouse Plush Picture a care worker’s busiest shift, and you might imagine medication rounds or paperwork, not a giant teddy bear. At 4 feet 6 inches (137 cm) tall and weighing roughly 507 pounds (230 kg), RIBA-II is exactly that: a robot with a soft, bear-like face and the strength to lift a person … Read more

The Photographer Who Gave Up Choice Since 1996, Los Angeles-based filmmaker and photographer Joe Stevens has been doing something that sounds, on first description, like a recipe for monotony. He drives around the American West looking for surviving custom and conversion vans, and whenever he finds one, he photographs it. Every photograph uses the same … Read more

The Healthy Alternative Trap There’s a reasonable logic to “sugar-free.” Less sugar, fewer calories, better teeth. For people managing diabetes or trying to eat lighter, xylitol-sweetened products can be genuinely useful. So a devoted dog owner might snap off a corner of a sugar-free cereal bar, or let their dog lick the spoon after making … Read more