The Photo That Started the Questions A hand-drawn symbol at the bottom of a driveway does not look like much: a faded scribble in chalk, sitting right where the sidewalk meets a front path. But according to a story that has circulated online since Halloween 2008, that scribble once carried a message. It was left … Read more
A Half-Life Movie Nobody Paid For In February 2009, a short film called Half-Life: Escape from City 17, built around the story of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One, spread well beyond gaming circles. It showed a city collapsing under a reactor meltdown and a desperate run through a trainyard, the kind of scene … Read more
Somewhere, a Wampug Sleeps in a Cave Picture a living room beamed straight out of a galaxy far, far away. A Millennium Falcon bean bag chair slouches in the corner. An AT-AT Imperial Walker stands against the wall, doing quiet duty as a liquor cabinet. And curled up on the floor, in what looks like … Read more
Walk Across the Skulls At the Ardel Gallery of Modern Art in Bangkok, an exhibition called “What Will You Leave Behind?” turned an entire gallery floor into a carpet of hand-built porcelain skulls, laid edge to edge from wall to wall. Accounts of the piece differ on the exact count, some put it around 100,000, … Read more
Meet the Couple That Never Was Stare at American Gothic long enough and your mind fills in a backstory. Most people assume it’s a married couple: a stern farmer and his wife, standing in front of a quiet rural home. That’s not what Grant Wood painted, and it’s not who’s actually in the frame. The … Read more
The Sound Everyone Knows, From a Place No One Expects You can probably hum the sound a Nokia phone makes when it rings. Estimates of how often it plays vary wildly, from around 800,000 phones a day to a much larger claim of 1.8 billion plays a day from a 2009 report. Neither figure traces … Read more
The Five-Minute Test Set a timer for five minutes. Then try to name ten of the highest-grossing movies of all time that never got a theatrical sequel or prequel. No spin-offs, no shared universe entries, just a movie standing entirely on its own at the box office. Try it before reading on. Most people rattle … Read more
It Sounded Like a Train On the evening of Tuesday, January 21, 2014, the Trebo family was inside their farmhouse in Ronchi di Termeno, known locally by its German name, Tramin, a village in northern Italy’s South Tyrol region, when the hillside above them let go. Herbert Trebo, who ran the farm, later said the … Read more
A Death Announced on the Family’s Own Terms Christopher Lee died on Sunday, June 7, 2015, at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, at age 93, following three weeks of treatment for respiratory problems and heart failure. An official with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea issued a death certificate the next day, June … Read more
The Map That Translates America Almost any U.S. town, river, or lake carries a name that began as a phrase in a Native American language before settlers adopted it and let the original meaning fade. National Geographic, working with graphic designer Oliver Uberti, built an interactive map that restores those meanings, translating hundreds of place … Read more