The Celebrity Who Breaks the Pattern Most famous actors follow a rhythm you could set a watch to: a movie to promote, a late-night couch, maybe a scandal that blows over in a news cycle. Shia LaBeouf has refused that rhythm for years, going quiet for long stretches, resurfacing with strange performance art, and giving … Read more
A Giant Roll of Paper for the Price of a Coffee Walk into the front office of a local newspaper, hand over a dollar or two, and walk out with a roll of blank paper so big it’s taller than a toddler. No printing on it, no ink smudges, just clean, blank newsprint, unspooled from … Read more
A Spade Hits Something That Isn’t a Pipe In 2007, Terence Castle was digging a pond in his back garden in Stamford Hill, Hackney, with three others helping him. Partway down, a spade struck something that wasn’t a pipe, brick, or scrap metal. It was gold. By the time digging stopped, 80 coins lay stacked … Read more
Dear Evolution, We Need to Talk Picture a letter landing in evolution’s inbox, written in the tone of someone who’s been wronged. The sender: emperor penguins. The complaint: my wings, what did you do to them? The letter asks why wings had to become flippers at all, then signs off noting it lives at the … Read more
A Legal Minicar That Sleeps Four The Honda N-Van Compo is a camper built on one of Japan’s smallest road-legal vehicles, the Kei car class. At 133.7 inches long (3,395 mm), it’s about 20.4 inches shorter than a Mazda MX-5 Miata, a car most people already think of as compact. Yet Honda and its Japanese … Read more
The Cookie That Took Two Hours In December 2019, the crew of the International Space Station set out to bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies. On Earth, the DoubleTree by Hilton recipe they were using takes about 16 to 18 minutes in a convection oven at 300°F (149°C). In orbit, the same dough took … Read more
The Detail That Doesn’t Glorify, It Instructs When a news report walks through exactly how a mass shooting unfolded, the usual worry is that detail turns the attacker into an anti-hero others might imitate. Two engineers at New York University found a stranger possibility underneath that worry: for someone chasing fame through violence, a detailed … Read more
7 PM, Every Night For a few weeks in the spring of 2020, cities went quiet at exactly the same moment. People stepped onto balconies, leaned out of windows, and banged pots and pans. Some just clapped. It was for nurses, doctors, delivery drivers, anyone keeping things running while the world shut down. It felt … Read more
The Halloween List That Wasn’t About Costumes On October 27, 2015, Neatorama published a roundup of ten DIY projects inspired by The Walking Dead, promising help for “a Walking Dead themed night of fun.” But there was no simple “dress as a zombie” entry. Instead: special-effects makeup tutorials, edible props shaped like body parts, and … Read more
The Elephant Who Took 3,000 Doses On August 3, 1962, researchers Louis Jolyon West and Chester Pierce dart-fired 297 milligrams of LSD into Tusko, a 14-year-old, roughly 7,055-pound (3,200 kg) Indian elephant at Oklahoma City Zoo. They were testing whether LSD could trigger musth, the violent state male elephants periodically enter, and scaled the dose … Read more