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
The Fish That Still Looks Dangerous Dead From March 15 through May 12, 2013, the Nara Kenko Land hotel in Nara, Japan, hosted an event called the “Big Amazon Mysterious Fish Exhibit.” Among its three featured dishes was something called “Pirania No Amazonesu”: a piranha, dusted lightly with flour, deep-fried, and served whole over rice … Read more
The Studio in a Single Link Back in 2009, getting a professional-looking video interview onto your blog usually meant either arranging an in-person meeting or fighting through software that seemed designed to punish you for trying. David Lee had a different idea. His personal project, which he developed with co-founder James Lee and which eventually … Read more
The Art of the Self-Arrest Police work gets romanticized as a battle of wits, the shrewd investigator running down the cunning fugitive. But a surprising number of cases require almost no detective work at all, because the person responsible essentially does it for them. Consider the robbers who stormed behind the counter at a pizza … Read more