A Hull Built from the Recycling Bin On March 20, 2010, a 60-foot catamaran named Plastiki left Sausalito, California and set a course for Australia. The crossing covered roughly 8,000 nautical miles, and the boat docked at Sydney Harbour on July 26, 2010, about 128 to 130 days later. What made the voyage unusual wasn’t … Read more
The Most Unlikely Game You’ve Never Heard Of Dodgeball has been a gym-class staple for roughly a century. The bow and arrow spent most of human history as a weapon designed to kill people at a distance. In 2011, John Jackson of Waterloo, Indiana looked at both and decided to combine them. The sport he … Read more
The Deal That Looked Like a Sure Thing In 1965, a French civil law notary named André-François Raffray made what looked like a patient, methodical investment. His client, Jeanne Calment, was 90 years old, owned a large apartment in Arles, and wanted to stay in it for the rest of her life. Raffray agreed to … Read more
The Man in the Hat and Nothing Else Robert John Burck has spent decades standing in Midtown Manhattan wearing white briefs, white cowboy boots, and a white cowboy hat, playing guitar and accepting tips. It has worked consistently enough to make him one of the most recognizable figures in New York City. Burck grew up … Read more
What Happens When Fast Food Workers Stop Caring Most food safety violations are invisible: a thermometer skipped, a surface not properly wiped down. The ones that made national news between 2008 and 2013 were different. Employees didn’t just cut corners, they documented themselves doing it, posted the footage publicly, and waited to see what would … Read more
Beyond the Mustard Bottle Picture a hot dog: sausage, bun, mustard, maybe ketchup. Now picture the same concept in Brazil. The sausage is simmered in tomato sauce with onions and seasoning, then topped with shredded Parmesan and crunchy potato sticks. Depending on the region, you might also get corn, peas, mashed potatoes, shredded carrots, a … Read more
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