A Fictional Home Made of Real Plaster The Lars homestead appears in three Star Wars films. In A New Hope (1977), it’s where a young Luke Skywalker stares at the twin suns before his life changes; it appears again briefly in Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005). On screen it … Read more
The Roast Chicken That Isn’t The first thing most people notice about this object is that it looks like it belongs on a dinner plate. At roughly 2 inches (5 cm) tall, though more precise measurements put it closer to just under 2.4 inches (6 cm), and carved into an abstract, rounded shape, the Venus … Read more
The Pump That Couldn’t Count to Four Sometime in the months before May 2008, a Virginia state inspector visited the Orlean Market and Restaurant, a country store in Fauquier County about 50 miles (80 km) west of Washington, D.C. He looked at the diesel pump, confirmed it was working correctly, and took it out of … Read more
The Invisible Ceiling of Fandom Wear Picture the scene: you’ve been watching a sci-fi series for years, the merch finally drops, and the design is exactly right. You go to order the shirt. The size range stops at 2XL. You close the tab. It happens more often than the fandom community tends to discuss. Geek … Read more
The Map Was Wrong Picture a lakeside village in New Guinea in the early 1930s. The men are arranging decorations, practicing dances, and gossiping. The women head out to fish and organize the food supply. Present the scene to a Western audience of that era with the labels swapped, and nobody would blink. Which raises … Read more
The Neurological Bypass Most of us treat charisma as a gift. The German sociologist Max Weber, writing in the early twentieth century, described it as a quality that sets certain people “apart from ordinary men,” treated by followers as if it were of almost divine origin. Science has a different answer: charisma is a set … Read more
The Candy Bar That Became a Cheesecake At some point, a home baker named Danielle unwrapped a bag of Rolo candies and decided to fold them, whole, into cheesecake filling. Not crushed into a topping, not melted into a ganache, just dropped in as-is. She pressed graham cracker crumbs into the bottom of an 8×8-inch … Read more
From Hearth to Table The first chopsticks were never meant to touch your lips. About 5,000 years ago in China, according to the California Academy of Sciences’ Rietz Collection of Food Technology, people were using sticks for a single purpose: fishing food out of boiling pots. Not carved, not refined, just twigs, held like tongs … Read more
The Musician Earning More Than the Doctor A Cuban hospital doctor finishing a twelve-hour shift takes home a state salary in Cuban pesos, enough for rent and staples from the state store, and not much beyond that. A few blocks away, a guitarist wraps up a set at a tourist bar, pockets $200 in tips, … Read more
The Steam-Powered Pigeon of Syracuse Most people draw a mental line between “ancient times” and “technology.” Archytas of Tarentum suggests that line is in the wrong place. Around 400 to 350 BC, this Greek mathematician built a wooden bird, roughly the size of a pigeon, and powered it with steam. Suspended from a pivot bar, … Read more