The Creator Is Also the Game Master Pendleton Ward, creator of Adventure Time, once ran a live role-playing game where strangers became players just by typing a tweet. No app, no account, no dice. Just a reply box. You’d expect something like this to need a studio and a team of programmers. Instead it was … Read more
The Object That Broke the Pattern On October 19, 2017, astronomer Robert Weryk was reviewing images from the Pan-STARRS1 telescope at Haleakalā Observatory in Hawaii when he spotted something unusual: an object about 21 million miles (33 million km) from Earth, on a path matching nothing born in our solar system. Researchers named it ‘Oumuamua, … Read more
There’s a Commune in Your Kitchen Drawer Open the silverware drawer in many American homes and there’s a good chance you’ll find Oneida flatware, pure wedding-registry Americana. The name comes from a real place that once held one of the stranger religious communities in US history. Before the company made forks and spoons, its members … Read more
Running Blind Picture a mouse sprinting down a tunnel with no walls to see, no lights, no landmarks drifting by. No whiskers brushing a surface, no shift in the air. Yet it slows down right where it needs to and stops right where the reward waits, no guesswork, no overshoot. You do something similar more … Read more
A Tree That Breathes Out Methane (Wait, What?) When you picture sources of methane, you probably think of cows, landfills, or swampy wetlands. Trees don’t usually make that list, but some of them should. Melaleuca quinquenervia, the paperbark tree, is a wetland species native to Australia with bark that peels off in soft, papery sheets. … Read more
Class Is in Session… in a Video Game? Picture a lecture hall built entirely out of pixels: a professor’s avatar clicking through a slideshow while student avatars sit in neat rows of virtual chairs. This was a real class, taught by a real university, inside a video game called Second Life. The mid-2000s were the … Read more
You Don’t Even Have to Touch It In 1866, a Queensland surveyor named A.C. Macmillan wrote that his packhorse brushed against a plant in the rainforest, went wild with pain, and died within two hours. That plant still grows across the wet forests of Queensland and New South Wales, and still carries the name people … Read more
The Game That Doesn’t Want You to Be Right Neatorama has been running a weekly feature called “What Is It?” for so long that on November 7, 2013, it reached its 300th round. That’s 300 separate weeks of readers staring at a strange photograph and typing their best guess into the comments. Most games built … Read more
The Case That Couldn’t Lose On the evening of February 4, 1924, Father Hubert Dahme, the 56-year-old pastor of St. Joseph’s Church, was walking along Main Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when a man stepped up behind him, pressed a revolver near his ear, and fired once. The priest died two hours later at St. Vincent’s … Read more
The Hook: A Courtroom Over Orange Juice Picture a courtroom in Dubai, the kind of place where you’d expect to hear about theft or fraud. Instead, the case on the docket involved two people and a carton of orange juice. A 28-year-old Russian woman, identified as O.D. and a 30-year-old Lebanese salesman, identified as S.O. … Read more