A Different Kind of Co-pilot Picture a microlight aircraft cruising low over the hills of the Cantal region in southern France, with a skein of geese flying alongside it, matching its speed, holding formation, wingtip to wingtip. Not fleeing. Actually flying with it, the way birds fly with each other. That is Christian Moullec’s working … Read more
The Slice That Cheats You, or Doesn’t Picture a pizza that wasn’t cut through its true center. Someone makes three straight cuts through a single point set off to one side, spaced evenly, turning the pie into six wedges. Two people split it by taking alternating wedges, three apiece. Whoever ends up with the wedge … Read more
The Plane That Landed Itself On February 2, 1970, a U.S. Air Force F-106 Delta Dart touched down in a snow-covered wheat field near Big Sandy, Montana. Gear up, engine still running, the airframe largely intact. There was no pilot inside. No autopilot had been engaged. Nobody on the ground had guided it in. A … Read more
The Most Profitable Joke You Never Heard Of During the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney ran a program with a simple premise: if you came up with a comedic gag that made it into the film, you got paid five dollars, not as a bonus, but as a direct purchase … Read more
It Just Left, With the Dumpster Vandalism earlier in 2013 pushed the owners of Edelweiss, a German restaurant in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to install security cameras over the back alley. On Tuesday night, July 30, 2013, those cameras caught something nobody expected to review the next morning. A bear walked up to the restaurant’s dumpster, … Read more
A Question That Really Didn’t Need This Much Setup Picture the set of Good Morning America: bright studio lights, a co-host nodding along like the topic matters, a chyron running across the bottom of the screen. The guest is introduced as a “millennial lifestyle expert.” Her name is Chelsea Krost. The question waiting for her, … Read more
The Trap You Didn’t Set Picture a small blog about cooking, science, or local history. Running for years, it has accumulated thousands of reader comments. Somewhere in that archive, a visitor once posted a link to a news article. That URL was later bought by a company running pirated content. The blog owner never saw … Read more
Excuse Me, That’s the Art At Art Southampton in July 2016, a sculpture sat waiting for the VIP preview at Nova’s Ark Project in Bridgehampton, New York. It depicted a large, overflowing trash can beside a sculpted raccoon, brightly colored rubbish spilling over the rim, priced at $8,000. Its actual title was “Keep America Great … Read more
The Guest List Changed. The Party Didn’t. Somewhere in Atlanta, Carol and Willie Fowler were looking at a bill for a wedding that no longer existed. Their daughter, Tamara, had called off her engagement, leaving the couple holding a fully paid reservation with no ceremony to fill it. Instead of arguing with a caterer over … Read more
The City Whose Colors Belong to One Man Most people who photograph San Francisco’s Victorian streetscapes assume they’re looking at something that evolved gradually, a happy accident of neighborhood taste accumulated over generations. The vivid corals and sage greens, the gold trim, the contrasting window frames: surely these color combinations grew out of the Victorian … Read more