Scan the Whole Planet Chris Fisher studies dirt for a living. He’s a professor of anthropology at Colorado State University and a National Geographic Explorer who has spent years flying over forests with lasers pointed at the ground. With geographer Steve Leisz, he founded a nonprofit called The Earth Archive, with an ambition that sounds … Read more
HEADLINE: Pepper-Sprayed at Occupy Wall Street, She Found Love and Had “Occubaby” ARTICLE: The Photo Everyone Remembers for the Wrong Reason On September 24, 2011, a clip from an Occupy Wall Street march near Union Square in New York City started showing up everywhere online. In it, a group of protesters, most of them women, … Read more
A List Nobody Was Supposed to Remember On December 19, 2013, the blog Neatorama posted a holiday gift guide for its online shop, NeatoShop: “50 Geektastic Christmas Gift Ideas.” The pitch was unglamorous, everything 20% to 50% off in a “Final Christmas Sale of 2013,” with shipping cutoffs for last-minute shoppers, order regular shipping on … Read more
The Guy Who Looked Like He’d Lose In 1975, Sylvester Stallone was 29, broke, and typecast as muscle. A difficult forceps birth had left him with nerve damage, a drooping lip, and slurred speech, so casting directors only saw him for thugs and henchmen. Then he watched a boxing match on television, sat down, and … Read more
The Rocks That Come Back At Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona, rangers occasionally open a padded envelope and find a chunk of 225-million-year-old fossilized wood wrapped in tissue paper, with a note tucked beside it. Some notes run two lines, some run for pages; some are signed, many are anonymous. Staff have been … Read more
Three Comfort Movies, One Weird Feeling You pull up an old favorite, something you’ve watched a dozen times, and around minute twenty a line lands wrong. Nothing dramatic, just a small, cold beat where the joke used to be automatic and now isn’t. The Bad News Bears, Heathers, and American Pie have nothing in common … Read more
Seven Miles Down On March 26, 2012, James Cameron climbed alone into a submersible called DEEPSEA CHALLENGER and dropped into the Pacific Ocean about 200 miles (322 km) southwest of Guam. After a descent of two hours and thirty-six minutes, he settled onto the floor of the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep at a corrected depth … Read more
The Photo Nobody Could Place Every week, Neatorama runs a feature called “What Is It?” where editors post a single photo of some obscure object and ask readers to name it, no background, no scale reference, nothing but the image. On July 17, 2014, installment 336 showed a glass-fronted cabinet trimmed in brass, with tiered … Read more
A Staircase at the Beginning, a Staircase at the End Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as a director opens on a staircase. His last film closes on one. Between them lies a career spanning more than 50 years, with the same simple piece of architecture standing guard at both ends. In 1925, “The Pleasure Garden” opens … Read more
The Bird That Wouldn’t Fly Away In September 2012, Karen Gwillim was driving through the village of Craven, Saskatchewan, when a bird at the roadside caught her eye. It was a double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus), the only cormorant species found in Saskatchewan, and it was clearly struggling. Her first thought was an injury. It wasn’t. … Read more