Arts & Culture | Smithsonian.com

How New Fonts Are Helping Dyslexics Read and Making Roads Safer

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:10:22 GMT

A sample of Dyslexie, a tyepface designed to help dyslexic people (image: Christian Boer via Scientific American) We all have the wacky family member or coworker who insist on decorating their emails with a variety of fonts and colors. And woe to the poor soul who sends a graphic designer an email written in comic sans. But choosing a font is more than just a matter of decoration and taste. A well designed typeface, like a well designed…well, anything, can make a brand iconic, can benefit the public good, and it can even improve lives. An example of a typeface with such potential is Dyslexie, from studiostudio graphic design. It’s estimated that about 15 percent of the wor

The Daily Planet in Film and Television

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 02:57:13 GMT

The E. Clem Wilson Building, designed by Meyer & Holle, photographed circa 1935 (image: Security Pacific National Bank Collection; Los Angeles Public Library) As a follow-up to our article on the history of Daily Planet building in Superman comics and a response to a few comments, I thought we’d take a brief look at some of the Art Deco buildings used to represent the offices of the Daily Planet in live action film and television depictions of Superman. In the first season of the television series “The Adventures of Superman” (1952-1958) starring George Reeves, the part of the Daily Planet building was played by the E. Clem Wilson Building (1929), designed by Los Angeles architect

Where Bourbon Really Got Its Name and More Tips on America’s Native Spirit

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 02:44:50 GMT

Kentucky Bourbon. (Photo courtesy of flickr user Markyboy81). If there’s just one thing I take away from my conversation with Louisville, Kentucky, historian Michael Veach, it’s that there is no wrong way to drink bourbon. Dilute it with water, mix it with ginger ale, or stir in a liqueur or two and call it something fancy like “The Revolver.” According to Veach, makers of America’s native spirit are just as pleased to see their product served up with a maraschino cherry as they are watching it poured straight into a shot glass. And you know? I believe him. Because when it comes to all things bourbon, Veach is Louisville’s go-to source. As associate

The Architecture of Superman: A Brief History of The Daily Planet

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 01:49:26 GMT

The first appearance of the iconic Daily Planet building in the “The Arctic Giant,” the fourth episode of the Superman cartoon created by Fleischer Studios. Original airdate: February 26, 1942 “Look! Up in the Sky!” “It’s a bird!” “It’s a plane!” “It’s a giant metal globe hurtling toward us that will surely result in our demise! Oh, nevermind…Superman took care of it.” Whenever disaster strikes Superman’s Metropolis, it seems that the first building damaged in the comic book city is the Daily Planet – home to mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, his best buddy Jimmy Olsen, and his gal pal and sometimes rival Lois Lane. The enormous globe atop the Daily Planet building

The Vibrant Patterns of Portuguese Men-of-War

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 05:41:00 GMT

© Aaron Ansarov Aaron Ansarov experienced some depression after retiring from his post as a military photographer in 2007. But, one of the things that made him happy was walking in his backyard with his son, pointing out beetles, salamanders, praying mantis and other creepy crawlies. “One day, he just said, ‘Daddy, let’s take pictures of them,’” says Ansarov. “That just never occurred to me. That’s when everything changed.” Aaron Ansarov over his light table. Photo courtesy of Aaron Ansarov. Ansarov, who lives in Delray Beach, Florida, has three children: a 12-year-old, a 3-year-old and a 2-year-old. He transitioned from photojo

From New York to Mumbai, the Top 100 Design Trends of the Urban World

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 07:08:00 GMT

BMW Guggenheim Lab, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin (image: Christian Richters © 2012 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York) The BMW Guggenhim Lab is, as the name suggests, a research collaboration between the automaker and museum franchise. Based on the belief that cities are catalysts for innovation and human progress, the joint venture takes the form of a “mobile urban laboratory” that, over the last two years, has traveled to three major world cities holding free programs and workshops to inspire and cultivate ideas about design and urban living. Recently, the Lab launched a website listing the top 100 urban trends in the three cities they visited–New York City

Mapping the Smells of New York, Amsterdam and Paris, Block by Block

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 01:49:00 GMT

Designer Kate McLean creates detailed smell maps of cities around the world, such as this map of the the “Smelliest Block in New York.” Click to enlarge. Image © Kate McLean In 2011, Kate McLean, a designer and cartographer, was pretty new to the Scottish city of Edinburgh. As a graduate student studying fine art, she sought to use design to probe people’s emotional connections to a place, and had the novel idea of charting the surfaces and textures people encountered throughout the city—in essence, creating a tactile map of her adopted home. Soon afterward, she was tasked with an unexpected assignment. “I was told that I needed to do a solo exhibit

How Kids’ Television Inspires a Lifelong Love of Science

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 07:03:14 GMT

When you’re a parent in the thick of raising young children, the days go by in such a blur that it’s hard to remember what your kids learned when. But Trina Helfrich, a mother of two, has a vivid memory of the day her son Henry, who was around four, learned one of his first science and math lessons. The TV had been tuned to “Sid the Science Kid,” a show for children ages three to six. The theme of the episode was measurement. The children on the show—puppet-like creatures created via 3-D animation—were learning about how all sorts of objects can help them measure and compare the sizes of large things. One of the main characters, a preschool-aged boy na

Architect James Wines Talks Putting a Chapel in a Denny’s and Making Art from Garbage

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 02:24:00 GMT

A 1985 project turns a highway into a jungle gym in a topsy-turvy fashion typical of James Wines. Highway 86 Processional section of ghosted vehicles, 1986 World Exposition, Vancouver, Canada, 1985. Architecture: SITE (James Wines, Alison Sky, Michelle Stone, Joshua Weinstein). Engineers: Geiger Associates. Construction: Halse-Martin Construction. Photo: SITE There’s little that James Wines hasn’t done. The highly acclaimed architect has designed commercial showrooms and fast food chains, museums and parks, and is currently working on a cemetery in South Korea. He wrote one of the early tomes on green architecture, urging practitioners to look for holistic and not just tec

5 1/2 Examples of Experimental Music Notation

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 03:05:00 GMT

The score for John Cage’s indeterminate composition “Fontana Mix” (image: BBC Radio 3) With the development of music notation, music was set free from the delicate bonds of oral and aural traditions. A standardized, underlying structure meant that everything from Gregorian chant to “Johnny B Goode” could be preserved and proliferated with relative ease. However, beginning in the years after World War II, some more progressive musicians and composers began to think that the music staff might be more restricting than liberating and began to experiment with new, more expressive forms of graphic music notation. American composer John Cage explored the use ch

The Story Behind the Lacoste Crocodile Shirt

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 05:53:29 GMT

When French tennis players Henri Cochet and René Lacoste met at the net in this undated photo, Lacoste was sporting his signature crocodile on his blazer. © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis Frenchman René Lacoste was a superstar tennis player. In 1926 and 1927, he was ranked number one in the world, and during his tennis career, he won seven Grand Slam championship tournaments. But he found the attire associated with the sport restrictive. Tennis whites, as they were called, consisted of a white, long-sleeved button-down shirt, long pants and a tie. It was a lot of clothing to wear when racing to the net to make an overhead shot. Lacoste was seeking a shirt that was more accommodating

How to Convert X-Rays From A Distant Star into Blues, Jazz and Classical Music

Fri, 31 May 2013 03:45:00 GMT

As part of the Star Songs project, X-ray emissions from the EX Hydrae system (above, near center)—in which one star pulls matter from its partner—are converted into music. Image via Las Cumbres Observatory For most people, the study of astrophysics means poring over calculations, charts, texts and graphics. But Wanda Diaz-Merced, a graduate student at the University of Glasgow, and fellow researcher Gerhard Sonnert have pioneered a different approach. Its underlying motif is simple: Space produces music. She grew up with an enthusiasm for science and space, but in her early 20s, as a physics student at the University of Puerto Rico, her vision swiftly deteriorated due to

The Evolution of the Treble Clef

Fri, 31 May 2013 02:50:00 GMT

The Grand Staff. Treble Clef on upper staff; Bass Clef on lower staff (image: wikipedia) The curving flourishes of music notation have always been something a mystery to me, although every day I, like many people, use other arcane symbols without thinking twice about it. The at (@) sign, the dollar sign ($) and the ampersand (&), for example, all function like ligatures or some sort of shorthand. They’ve been demystified by popular use in email, clues on “Wheel of Fortune,” and their inclusion on computer keyboards. But music notation is a semantic system that is entirely different from the written word; a non-spoken alphabet of pitch and rhythm. So, with apologies

What Animal Sounds Look Like

Thu, 30 May 2013 04:09:00 GMT

Humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). Image by Mark Fischer. Those who have a neurological condition called chromesthesia associate certain colors with certain sounds. It’s these people that I think of when I see Mark Fischer’s Aguasonic Acoustics project. Fischer systematically transforms the songs of whales, dolphins and birds into brightly colored, psychedelic art. Minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata). Image by Mark Fischer. The software developer from San Jose, California, gathers the sounds of marine mammals in nearby Monterey Bay using a hydrophone and the chirps of birds in his neighborhood with a digital recorder; he also collects audio of other hard-to-

How to Grow a Nanogarden

Wed, 29 May 2013 02:21:00 GMT

Image courtesy of Wim Noorduin. Wim Noorduin has a green thumb—but, he doesn’t grow your standard garden-variety roses, tulips and other flowers. The postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, instead, tends to microscopic “buds” that he carefully cultivates in his lab. The blooms—delicate and fragile—are made out of crystal. Image courtesy of Wim Noorduin. “The technique is remarkably easy: fill a beaker with a solution that has a salt and a silicon compound dissolved in it. Put in a glass slide or a bit of metal to act as the soil on which the crystal ‘plants’ will grow. All

Hong Kong Fell in Love With This Larger-Than-Life Rubber Duck

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:01:00 GMT

A massive inflatable rubber duck floats in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor, adding a flash of bright yellow to the cityscape. Courtesy of Flickr user Zanthia Earlier this month, a new type of waterfowl paddled into Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong. The bird was of the plastic variety: specifically, the world’s largest inflatable rubber duck, measuring 46 feet tall and 55 feet long. The floating sculpture migrated to the harbor by tugboat on May 4 after stops in Sydney, Osaka and Sao Paolo. The art installation, created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, drew thousands of camera-toting locals and tourists to the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. But last week, the six-story-tall duck was te

The Robot Revolution Is for the Birds

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:01:33 GMT

Festo’s Smartbird (image: Festo)\ Human flight has become boring. Air travel is a testament to man’s ingenuity and imagination. In the words of comedian Louis CK, “you’re siting in a chair – IN THE SKY.” It’s amazing. And yet, in only 50 years or so, flight, something scholars and inventors have been investigating for centuries, has become a banality. Sometimes, even an inconvenience! And though we may have mastered the skies to the extent that unmanned aerial vehicles can be sent anywhere on the planet, there is still some mystery left to discover. For while drone technology may seem to be the only area where advancements in flight are being m

A Brief History of Robot Birds

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:54:10 GMT

Bubo the robotic owl from the 1981 film Clash of the Titans (image: still from Clash of the Titans)e Our recent post on the history of the cuckoo clock inspired some research into other examples of early, non-timekeeping robot birds. For centuries, birds–pigeons and canaries in particular–have been a popular subject for inventors and engineers experimenting with early mechanical systems and robotics. Take, for example, Bubo, the ancient clockwork owl seen in the 1981 film Clash of The Titans. Bubo was forged by Hephaestus to aid Perseus in his quest and Bubo was, of course, purely fictional. There were however, actual avian automatons in actual ancient Greece. The earliest

The Amazing Grace of Underwater Portraits

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Photographer Henrik Sorensen takes a fluid approach to the body in motion

Yeasts of the Southern Wild

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

As I entered the one-story, brick-and-galvanized, gaily illustrated Buttermilk Drop Bakery and Café in New Orleans, to the smell of cinnamon and sugar glaze, I heard this exclamation from deep inside: “The devil’s music shall not be heard in the house of the Lord!” And again. A little differently. And again! A little differently. And no music at all. What kind of bakery, I wondered, is this? Well, that was just the Buttermilk Drop’s proprietor, Dwight Henry. He was rehearsing for his role as Marvin Gaye’s father in Sexual Healing, a forthcoming biopic about the great Motown singer. Three years ago, an arty young film crew, who had come to know Henry th

Would You Eat Something Wrapped in a WikiCell?

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Harvard bioengineer David Edwards believes he’s found a way to cut down on packaging waste

Olympic Rowers, King Tut Lessons and More Books to Read This Month

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown “This book,” the author begins, “was born on a cold, drizzly, late spring day when I clambered over the split-rail cedar fence that surrounds my pasture and made my way through the wet woods to the modest frame house where Joe Rantz lay dying.” That sentence is a fitting summation of this fairy-tale-like meander through the wet scenery of the Pacific Northwest with a stunning story waiting at the other end. Although the subtitle promises to tell of nine Americans, it is really Joe Rantz—perhaps the unlikeliest Olympian to end up with a gold

Michael Pollan and Ruth Reichl Hash out the Food Revolution

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The biggest problem was figuring out where to eat. When you live on opposite sides of the country and have wildly conflicting schedules, choosing a restaurant is the least of your troubles. Michael Pollan and I couldn’t even figure out on which coast we wanted to dine. We finally settled on the East, but that still left the choice of town. For various (not very interesting) reasons, we ended up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. After that it was easy; Bell & Anchor was the obvious choice. Proprietor Mark Firth left Brooklyn (where he’d been a restaurant pioneer with Diner and Marlow & Sons) to become a farmer in the Berkshires. But he’s a relentlessly hospitab

America’s Oldest Sweet Shop Gets a Hipster Makeover

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Grinning the widest of grins and sporting the snuggest of suspenders, Ryan Berley shimmies past the carved hardwood display cases at Shane Confectionery like a kid in a candy store. A 36-year-old kid, but a kid nonetheless. He’s entitled: It’s his candy store. Berley and his 32-year-old brother, Eric, recently bought and restored Shane’s, the oldest continuously operated candy shop in America. The Philadelphia landmark, a couple of blocks from where in 1732 Benjamin Franklin printed the first Poor Richard’s Almanack, has been turning out sweets since 1863. The first candy men at the spot, Samuel Herring and Daniel Dengler, were primarily wholesalers. A canned

“Pineapple”

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The idea was to draw a pineapple on a table, but I began with the telephone poles and the wires sagging between them in the background, for I had made the mistake of placing the pineapple on a picnic table outdoors instead of a cloth-covered table by a window, and that is also why I was drawn to the low mountains in the distance and the higher ones beyond them. What still life would be complete without a sun with shine-lines in the sky? I asked, but no one answered. And so I continued with the magnificent clouds, shaded on their undersides, and even a few isolated seagulls in flight here and there in the expanding world of my sketchpad, my pencil running wild into the nonexistent blue

Princeton University Celebrates the Art of Science

Tue, 21 May 2013 01:24:42 GMT

Starry, Starry Night, by Barry Jacobs and Casimir A. Fornal, Department of Psychology and Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Courtesy of the Princeton University Art of Science Competition. Sometimes the connection between art and science is clear. When Barry Jacobs, a psychology professor at Princeton University, and Casimir Fornal, a research scholar, took a micrograph of a mouse’s hippocampus (shown above), they felt compelled to call it Starry, Starry Night, after the 1970s song by Don McLean about Vincent van Gogh. The dark, star-like bursts in the golden image are glial cells in the brain called astrocytes (“astro” meaning star in Greek). A jury of photographers

The Past, Present, and Future of the Cuckoo Clock

Fri, 17 May 2013 02:54:51 GMT

A selection of traditional cuckoo clocks “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” So says Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the 1949 film The Third Man. Welles added those lines himself to a script based on Graham Greene’s original story. And though he may have been a genius, Welles was wrong about the history of the Cuckoo clock. “When the film came out,” he told Peter Bogdanovich, &

Where’d You Get Those Creepers?

Thu, 16 May 2013 02:42:05 GMT

Typical creepers. In modern slang, a “creeper” is that odd, socially awkward guy you know from the office, dorm, neighborhood, local restaurant. You can also call him a creep. A couple of years ago, Andy Samberg and his Lonely Island crew premiered the digital short called “The Creep,” with filmmaker and creeper John Waters, on “Saturday Night Live,” spawning a series of YouTube imitators mimicking the stilted, zombielike dance. Going back 50 years, another dance spawned a different sort of “creeper.” The dance was done to the 1953 hit ”The Creep,” from big-band leader Ken Mackintosh. A slow shuffle movement, it was embrace

Air and Space Curator Margaret Weitekamp Explains Why ‘Star Trek’ Matters

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:59:33 GMT

Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine in the 2013 ‘Star Trek Into Darkness.’ On the eve of the release of the latest feature-film from the “Star Trek” mega-brand, scholar and curator Margaret Weitekamp argues that the fictional series of space exploration helped define and inspire real world parallels. From advancing diversity in NASA to anticipating new technologies, “Star Trek” left its mark on American culture. Weitekamp, the Air and Space Museum’s curator of space science fiction materials, including a 11-foot model of the Enterprise, says, it will continue to do so. Since the original series aired in the 1960s, “Star Trek” has grown t

When F. Scott Fitzgerald Judged Gatsby By Its Cover

Tue, 14 May 2013 08:08:00 GMT

left: Francis Cugat’s original gouache painting for The Great Gatsby. right: a first edition of the book (image: USC) It’s one of the most recognizable book covers in the history of American literature: two sad female eyes and bright red lips adrift in the deep blue of a night sky, hovering ominously above a skyline that glows like a carnival. Evocative of sorrow and excess, this haunting image has become so inextricably linked to The Great Gatsby that it still adorns the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece 88 years after its debut. This iconic work of art was created by Spanish artist Francis Cugat. Little is known about Cugat –also known as Francisco

Amazing Sea Butterflies Are the Ocean’s Canary in the Coal Mine

Tue, 14 May 2013 07:27:00 GMT

The shelled sea butterfly Hyalocylis striata can be found in the warm surface waters of the ocean around the world. Photo: © Karen Osborn The chemistry of the ocean is changing. Most climate change discussion focuses on the warmth of the air, but around one-quarter of the carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean. Dissolved carbon dioxide makes seawater more acidic—a process called ocean acidification—and its effects have already been observed: the shells of sea butterflies, also known as pteropods, have begun dissolving in the Antarctic. Tiny sea butterflies are related to snails, but use their muscular foot to swim in the water instead

TKO By Checkmate: Inside the World of Chessboxing

Tue, 14 May 2013 03:14:02 GMT

There’s a boxing ring planted in the middle of a London nightclub. So far, nothing too out of the ordinary. But there’s also a folding table in the center of the ring, and on it, a chessboard. And rather than gloving up to start sparring, the two boxers, hands wrapped, sit down to square off over the board. Because this isn’t regular boxing—it’s chessboxing. Chessboxing is a hybrid sport that is exactly what it sounds like: Chess plus boxing, or, more specifically, a round of chess followed by a round of boxing, repeated until someone comes out the victor. As Tim Woolgar, founder of London Chessboxing, says, “If you know how to play chess and you know

Benjamin Franklin’s Phonetic Alphabet

Fri, 10 May 2013 05:02:00 GMT

Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic alphabet (original image: omniglot) Benjamin Franklin was many things. Politician, scientist, inventor, printer author, he was a visionary whose ideas helped shape America. But he also had some notions that, while founded on sound logic and pragmatism, seem quite bizarre in retrospect. For instance, there’s his suggestion that the turkey was a more appropriate national symbol than the eagle, which he saw as “a bird of bad moral character.” Franklin’s vision for American didn’t stop with independence and iconography. He also proposed a redesigned alphabet – a new language for a new nation. Franklin developed his ph

Macoto Murayama’s Intricate Blueprints of Flowers

Fri, 10 May 2013 04:11:00 GMT

A side view of Lathyrus odoratus L. 2009-2012. By Macoto Murayama. Image courtesy of Frantic Gallery. The worlds of architecture and scientific illustration collided when Macoto Murayama was studying at Miyagi University in Japan. The two have a great deal in common, as far as the artist’s eye could see; both architectural plans and scientific illustrations are, as he puts it, “explanatory figures” with meticulous attention paid to detail. “An image of a thing presented with massive and various information is not just visually beautiful, it is also possible to catch an elaborate operation involved in the process of construction of this thing,” Murayama on

What Happens When a Keyboard Goes From Tactile to Touchscreen?

Wed, 08 May 2013 01:39:51 GMT

A close-up of the iPad keyboard, showing the haptic indicators on the F and J keys. Since writing last week’s post about the possible origin of the QWERTY keyboard and the viability of new digital alternatives, I’ve been especially mindful of every keyboard I use. As a footnote of sorts to that post, I’ve noticed that there’s a particularly strange feature on the iPad’s virtual keyboard: a raised bar on the F and J keys. On physical keyboards, these raised indicators allow touch typists to orient their eight fingers on the center row of the keyboard without looking. So why would a flat touchscreen have these raised indicators? One word. Skeuomorphism.

Will the Real Great Gatsby Please Stand Up?

Tue, 07 May 2013 03:30:10 GMT

Years after he wrote The Great Gatsby, in the back leaf of another book, F. Scott Fitzgerald scribbled a list of his most famous novel’s nine chapters. Next to each one, he wrote down his sources. There were the old-money, polo-playing Rumsies and Hitchcocks and the impressive parties thrown by movie director Allan Dwan and by Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor of the New York World. There were his own memories, of the ash heaps, of days spent in New York City, and, in particular, of one wedding—the wedding of Ginevra King, his first love. Out of the whole book, he marked only three chapters as “an invention,” “inv” or “all an invention.” Fitz

Creepy or Cool? Portraits Derived From the DNA in Hair and Gum Found in Public Places

Fri, 03 May 2013 03:02:27 GMT

Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and her DNA-derived self-portrait. Photo by Dan Phiffer. It started with hair. Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Heather Dewey-Hagborg collected hairs from a public bathroom at Penn Station and placed them in plastic baggies for safe keeping. Then, her search expanded to include other types of forensic evidence. As the artist traverses her usual routes through New York City from her home in Brooklyn, down sidewalks onto city buses and subway cars—even into art museums—she gathers fingernails, cigarette butts and wads of discarded chewing gum. At 12:15 pm on January 6, 2013, Dewey-Hagborg collected a cigarette butt (above, right) on Myrtle Avenue (above, le

Fact of Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard

Fri, 03 May 2013 01:34:57 GMT

U.S. Patent No. 207,559. The first appearance of the QWERTY keyboard. (image: Google patents) What came first: the typist or the keyboard? The answer depends on the keyboard. A recent article in Smithsonian’s news blog, Smart News, described an innovative new keyboard system that proposes a more efficient alternative to the ubiquitous “universal” keyboard best known as QWERTY – named for the first six letters in the top row of keys. The new keyboard, known as KALQ, is designed specifically for thumb-typing on today’s smart phones and tablets. It’s an interesting and by all accounts commercially viable design that got me thinking about the rationale behind the QWERTY keyboar

For Perusing Pleasure, Zandra Rhodes’ New Online Fashion Archive

Thu, 02 May 2013 05:11:40 GMT

(c) Zandra Rhodes 2012. Paris, Frills and Button Flowers, Autumn/Winter 1971. If you want to lose a few hours, head over to the online fashion archive of designer Zandra Rhodes. Born in 1940 in southeast England, the pink-haired, flamboyantly dressed Rhodes was first exposed to fashion by her mother, a fitter for a Paris fashion house. She immersed herself in sartorial studies, and more specifically textile design, when she enrolled in the Medway College of Art and then the Royal College of Art before opening her own London boutique with Sylvia Ayton in 1967, the Fulham Road Clothes Shop. She got her break in 1969 when Diana Vreeland featured a few of her pieces in Vogue. From there,

Want to See How an Artist Creates a Painting? There’s an App for That

Thu, 02 May 2013 02:30:00 GMT

The Repentir app reveals an artist’s creative process by allowing users to peel back layers of paint with the touch of their fingertips. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Hook. Artwork © Nathan Walsh An artist’s studio is usually a private space, and the hours spent with a paint-dipped brush in hand mostly solitary. So, the final products we gaze at on gallery walls are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the makers’ creative processes. For Nathan Walsh, each of his realist paintings is a culmination of four months of eight to 10-hour days in the studio. Now, thanks to a new app, we can go back in time and see how his work came to be, stroke by stroke. Repentir, a free

Decoding the Range: The Secret Language of Cattle Branding

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:09:32 GMT

samples of a few brand characters (image: we made this) To the untrained eye, cattle brands, those unique markings seared into animals’ hides with a hot iron, might just seem like idiosyncratic logos or trademarks designed to clearly and simply indicate ownership. However, unlike the graphic logos and trademarked images of popular commercial brands, they must comply with a rigorous set of standards and are developed using a specific language ruled by its own unique syntax and morphology.Livestock branding dates back to 2700 BC, evidenced by Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ancient Romans are said to have used hot iron brands as an element of magic. But brands are most famously ass

Strawberries Still Green? You’re on Trend!

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:56:26 GMT

Green strawberries for sale from Yerena Farms at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo courtesy of CUESA. In April, most seasonal restaurants tend toward green foods. As the weather shifts, and new crops come to life, plates are decorated with tender young peas, asparagus, green garlic, and spring onions. And now, the green strawberry is joining the ranks. Picked earlier than their red cousins (and abundant this time of year), green strawberries have been popping up on high-end menus for the last several years. And they show no sign of going out of style any time soon. Evan Rich, chef at the new San Francisco hot spot Rich Table, decided to take the plunge this year

The Strange Beauty of David Maisel’s Aerial Photographs

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:07:53 GMT

Terminal Mirage 2, 2003. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE For almost 30 years, David Maisel has been photographing areas of environmental degradation. He hires a local pilot to take him up in a four-seater Cessna, a type of plane he likens to an old Volkswagen beetle with wings, and then, anywhere from 500 to 11,000 feet in altitude, he cues the pilot to bank the plane. With a window propped open, Maisel snaps photographs of the clear-cut forests, strip mines or evaporation ponds below. American Mine (Carlin NV 2), 2007. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE The resulting images are beautiful and, at the same, absolutely unnerving. What exactly are those blood-red stains? As a nod to the con

Decoding The City: The Road Graffiti Placed by Utility Workers

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:02:49 GMT

Infrastructural graffiti in the streets of New Haven, CT (original photo) Cities around the world are covered in spray-painted hieroglyphics and cryptic designations scrawled on public surfaces; unintelligible tags and arcane signs intended to communicate messages to a specialized audience with a trained eye. Such markings are so prevalent that they just blend into the urban patina of dirt and disrepair and go largely unnoticed. I’m not talking about illegal graffiti. Rather, the officially sanctioned infrastructural “tagging” employed by public works departments around the country. You’ve probably seen these markings on streets and sidewalks. Multi-colored lines, arrows and

The Story of Elizabeth Keckley, Former-Slave-Turned-Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:49:52 GMT

Mary T. & Lizzy K. runs through May 5, 2013, at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. Illustration by Jody Hewgill. Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery in 1818 in Virginia. Although she encountered one hardship after another, with sheer determination, a network of supporters and valuable dressmaking skills, she eventually bought her freedom from her St. Louis owners for $1,200. She made her way to Washington, D.C. in 1860 to establish her own dressmaking business and met first lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Just after Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, in 1861, the FLOTUS hired Keckley (also spelled Keckly) as her personal modiste. Keckley took on the role of dressmaker,

Eight New Things We’ve Learned About Music

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:33:09 GMT

Music works deep into our brains. Photo courtesy of Flickr user antonkawasaki In one those strange twists of modern life, we were reminded last week of the power of music–at a hockey game. It was at Boston’s TD Garden, two days after the explosions that contorted so many lives, and as singer Rene Rancourt began the Star Spangled Banner before the game between the hometown Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres, he noticed that many in the crowd were joining in. Rancourt got only as far as …”what so proudly we hailed” before he pulled the microphone away from his mouth and motioned to those in the stands to carry on. They did, in full voice, building to a stirring

Before and After: America’s Environmental History

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:21:37 GMT

A difference of nearly four decades: at top, a ski area in Aspen, Colorado last year, captured by Ron Hoffman; at bottom, the same location in 1974, shot by Dustin Wesley. Credit: US EPA In 1971, about 70 photographers, commissioned by the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, set out to document the American landscape on just 40 rolls of film each. They trudged through coal mines and landfills, traversed deserts and farms and discovered big cities’ small corridors. The end result was DOCUMERICA, a collection of more than 15,000 shots capturing the country’s environmental problems—from water and air pollution to industrial health hazards—over six years. Decades lat

Our Battle Against Extinction, 100 Recipes and More Recent Books Reviewed

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America by Jon Mooallem “We are living in the eye of a great storm of extinction,” writes journalist Jon Mooallem. And we will do some pretty kooky things to halt the hemorrhage: airlift drugged polar bears who have stuck around developed areas longer than they should have; employ a man whose sole responsibility—day in, day out all year long—is to whack at a particular weed so that an endangered butterfly has a hospitable place to call home; or dress up like birds to teach them to fly. Mooallem’s book examines the haphazard nature of our attempts to maint

How Do You Make a Painting Out of Sounds?

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Entering Jennie C. Jones’ studio in Brooklyn, a visitor is drawn to a series of artworks on a whitewashed wall. At first, they look like simple abstract canvases with warm tones of gray and black subdivided by precisely painted yellow lines and rectangles. But there’s more to them than that. For one thing, they’re made from acoustic panels. “Come closer,” Jones said. “Listen to them.” She passed her ear across two panels, pausing between them. “If you listen closely, you’ll hear what I mean.” It was true. The ambient noise in the studio, mostly muffled traffic rumblings from the nearby Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, resonated gentl

“Stem Cells”

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In the hospital’s hothouse, cardiac strawberries blink on a vine. A walnut-shell hides a brain rich in good fat; a lychee’s peel, a pale eyeball high in vitamin C. The doctor has good news! His pharmacopeia has given way to a cornucopia, one that spills ovarian grapes and bananas that promise never to go soft. A single stem has borne, has birthed fruit that shall not be forbidden us. The pomegranate spleen, yea, the kidney-bean kidney shall be ours. Splendid! delights a voice over the hospital PA system. Splendid, you summer-sweet sons of Adam— using an apple-seed of Knowledge to grow the Tree of Life! No one can say whose voice it is, but its hiss is like a scythe&rsq

The Real Deal With the Hirshhorn Bubble

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

UPDATE, June 5, 2013: The Smithsonian Institution announced today that it will not proceed with the "Bubble" project. For more details, read our latest post on Around the Mall. UPDATE, May 23, 2013: The Hirshhorn board of trustees was unable to reach a decisive vote on the fate of the museum's bubble project. As a result, director Richard Koshalek resigned from his position, effective later this calendar year. For more details, read our post on Around the Mall. A little over three years ago, what looked like a droll New Yorker cartoon landed in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. An architect’s rendering depicted a glowing, baby-blue balloon bulging up through

Before There Was Photoshop, These Photographers Knew How to Manipulate an Image

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Jerry Uelsmann and other artists manually blended negatives to produce dreamlike sequences

Never Underestimate the Power of a Paint Tube

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The French Impressionists disdained laborious academic sketches and tastefully muted paintings in favor of stunning colors and textures that conveyed the immediacy of life pulsating around them. Yet the breakthroughs of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and others would not have been possible if it hadn’t been for an ingenious but little-known American portrait painter, John G. Rand. Like many artists, Rand, a Charleston native living in London in 1841, struggled to keep his oil paints from drying out before he could use them. At the time, the best paint storage was a pig’s bladder sealed with string; an artist would prick the bladder with a tack to get at the paint. But there was no

Egypt’s Murals Are More Than Just Art, They Are a Form of Revolution

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Forgetfulness is the national disease of Egypt. But a new generation, born from the revolution that erupted during the Arab Spring, refuses to forget and insists on recording everything and anything. When I co-founded the April 6 Youth Movement to promote peaceful political activism, I believed that the most effective tools for documenting our struggle were social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. (See Ron Rosenbaum’s profile of Mona Eltahawy for an inside story of Egypt’s revolution.) Yet, I’ve come to learn that there will always be new tools—graffiti is one of them. Graffiti was a rare sight until two years ago, when artists began documenting the crimes of

The Revolutionary Effect of the Paperback Book

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The iPhone became the world’s best-selling smartphone partly because Steve Jobs was obsessed with the ergonomics of everyday life. If you want people to carry a computer, it had to hit the “sweet spot” where it was big enough to display “detailed, legible graphics, but small enough to fit comfortably in the hand and pocket.” Seventy-five years ago, another American innovator had the same epiphany: Robert Fair de Graff realized he could change the way people read by making books radically smaller. Back then, it was surprisingly hard for ordinary Americans to get good novels and nonfiction. The country only had about 500 bookstores, all clustered in the bigg

Intriguing Science Art From the University of Wisconsin

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 06:41:12 GMT

ZnO Fall Flowers. Image by Audrey Forticaux, a graduate student in the Chemistry Department. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.” —Jules Henri Poincare, a French mathematician (1854-1912) Earlier this month, the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced the winners of its 2013 Cool Science Image contest. From an MRI of a monkey’s brain to the larva of a tropical caterpillar, a micrograph of the nerves in a zebrafish’s tail

Do Teachers Need Their Own “Bar Exam”?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:56:42 GMT

Do teachers need to train more like doctors? Photo courtesy of Flickr user WoodleyWonderworks Question: What’s needed to raise the quality of school teachers in America? Answer: A bar exam? So say the head of the country’s most powerful teachers’ union, the governor of New York and the U.S. secretary of education, among others. Their contention is that the only way teachers can truly elevate their profession–and with it the level of public education–is if they follow the lead of doctors, lawyers and engineers and are required to pass a test to prove mastery of their subject matter and how to teach it. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federat

Q+A with Chadwick Boseman, Star of New Jackie Robinson Biopic, ’42′

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 04:53:30 GMT

Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment In 1947, when Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke major league baseball’s color barrier, the world was still 16 years away from the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Movement as just getting organized. The Montgomery bus boycott was eight years away and housing discrimination based on race would remain legal until 1968. In his first season with the MLB, Robinson would win the league’s Rookie of the Year award. He was a perpetual All-Star. And in 1955, he helped his team secure the championship. Robinson’s success was, by no means, inevitable and in fact he earned

The 64-Square Grid Design of ‘Through the Looking Glass’

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:35:00 GMT

“For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country – and a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook. ‘I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!’ Alice said at last.” (original drawing by John Tenniel) Painters, sculptors and musicians have long since found inspiration in the complex movement of thirty-two pieces across a chessboard. We previously looked at examples from Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and others. But writers too hav

An Artist Creates Artificial Fog in San Francisco

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 01:32:37 GMT

An artist’s rendering of Fog Bridge at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Image courtesy of the Exploratorium. Artist Fujiko Nakaya believes in the transformative power of fog. The first time she realized that her fog sculptures could change a person’s memory was in 1976 during the run of Earth Talk, a fog sculpture made for the Biennale of Sydney, Australia. After seeing her sculpture, an electrician told her how he had taken his family to see the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. The mountain was fogged in at first and he couldn’t see it, but the fog cleared and the view of the mountain was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. “The instant he saw the

‘I Remember’: An Artist’s Chronicle of What We Wore

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:29:01 GMT

A fashion spread, Hollywood movie or advertisement usually doesn’t reflect with accuracy what everyday people actually wore at a given time. Historically speaking, to really get a sense of the fashions of the times, old newsreels, photojournalism and catalogs offer more true-to-life examples of what was in style. The cover of Joe Brainard’s I Remember One literary source is the book-length poem I Remember, by writer and artist Joe Brainard. When it was originally published—in three parts between 1970 and 1973 by Angel Hair Books—the small print runs sold out quickly. Most recently it’s been published by Granary Books. The 1,000 entries in this work all begin with “I rememb

Where Are the Greenest Schools in the Country?

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The definition of being eco-conscious is so much more than having solar panels on a roof

The 10 Worst Teachers and Principals From Pop Culture

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to Mean Girls, on-screen educators have a talent for causing trouble. Here are the worst offenders.

When Modern Art Met the Classic Chess Set

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 01:46:13 GMT

Josef Hartwig’s 1924 chess set (original image: MoMA) Last week we published a history of the Staunton chess set, which was developed, in part, out of a need to standardize pieces for international competition. In a response on his blog, Jason Kottke published some terrific images of beautiful pre-Staunton sets –the St. George, the Selenus, and the Regence– and explained some of the confusion that prompted the creation of the Staunton. While following up on some of these early chess sets, I learned that there is a trove of artist-designed chess sets in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art. The largely minimalist chess pieces, created by artists including Man Ray, Marcel Ducha

The History of the Flapper, Part 5: Who Was Behind the Fashions?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:14:51 GMT

Ballerina Desiree Lubovska in a dress by Jean Patou. Photography by Adolf de Meyer, c. 1921. Have a look at the paintings of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and other Cubist painters whose work included hard, geometric forms and visible lines. As these artists were working in their studios, fashion designers, particularly those in France, were taking cues from their paintings. With la garçonne (the flapper, in French) in mind, the designers created fashions with the clean lines and angular forms we now associate with the 1920s-and with Cubism. The styles we’ve come to connect with Louise Brooks, Norma Talmadge, Colleen Moore and other American actresses on the silve

Lilly Pulitzer: Remembering the ‘Queen of Prep’

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 01:08:39 GMT

Lilly Pulitzer fits a model with one of her creations. Carlo Allegri / Getty Images Anything is possible with sunshine and a little pink! —Lilly Pulitzer It all began with an orange juice-stained dress. American fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer, who died this weekend at age 81, started her iconic clothing line out of necessity. She had moved to Palm Beach, Florida, in the early 1950s after eloping with her then-husband, Peter Pulitzer, who owned citrus groves in the area. She opened an orange juice stand and while working there, discovered that squeezing juice was a messy business. To camouflage the inevitable stains, she said, she designed brightly printed sleeveless dresses. The st

When The Gap Was Everywhere

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:28:39 GMT

Art Club 2000, Untitled (Conrans I), 1992-93. Chromogenic color print, 8 x 10 inches (20.32 x 25.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and the Estate of Colin de Land “We knew that nostalgia goes hand in hand with style as the driving force behind all these decisions. What art succeeds or gets remembered and functions again? What has shelf life? What makes it? It’s all nostalgia. We knew we were engaging in that. History is always as close as the person you’re talking to and what they’re talking about.” —Art Club 2000, Art Forum, February 2013 In 1993, seven students from Cooper Union formed an artists’ collective called Art Club 2000 with the help of Colin

Decoding the City: The Fire Diamond

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:39:57 GMT

An NFPA 704 sign out in the wild. According to the sign, whatever is behind that door is very, very dangerous and cannot be exposed to water. (image: Flickr user johnwilliamsphd) Cities are full of signs. Signs telling us where to go and how to get there; signs suggesting things to buy and signs keeping us from where we shouldn’t be. Every sign is a code of sorts, a graphic system linked to something else – an idea, an instruction, a building. Typically, these codes are carefully designed to be decipherable by as many people as possible – everyone, ideally. They reduce meaning to its most essential components: RED=STOP. But occasionally in cities, there are signs that

Every Day a Different Dish: Klari Reis’ Petri Paintings

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:21:38 GMT

April 4, 2013: Taylor Swift, by Klari Reis. For all 94 days of 2013 thus far, Klari Reis has kept to her resolution. The San Francisco-based artist has posted a new petri dish painting—eye candy for any sci-art lover—to her blog, The Daily Dish. Reis’ circular art pieces are explosions of color. The yellows, pinks, purples, greens, oranges, reds and blues in the paintings take on a smattering of different shapes, including amorphous blobs, radiating fireworks and wavy veins that resemble, quite intentionally on Reis’ part, what a scientist might see when gazing through a microscope. The artist gives her creations playful names, little quips, really, that spring to mind whe

How the Chess Set Got Its Look and Feel

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 02:13:00 GMT

Traditional chess pieces in the Staunton design (image: Chess USA) Prior to 1849, there was no such thing as a “normal chess set.” At least not like we think of it today. Over the centuries that chess had been played, innumerable varieties of sets of pieces were created, with regional differences in designation and appearance. As the game proliferated throughout southern Europe in the early 11th century, the rules began to evolve, the movement of the pieces were formalized, and the pieces themselves were drastically transformed from their origins in 6th century India. Originally conceived of as a field of battle, the symbolic meaning of the game changed as it gained popula

Michael Benson’s Awe-Inspiring Views of the Solar System

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 01:35:38 GMT

Jupiter’s innermost large moon, Io, is extremely volcanic. “If you look closely on the upper left and upper right horizon, you can see eruptions in the process of happening,” says Benson. “We know that at least 400 volcanos are continuously blasting magma into space from Io.” Mosaic composite photograph. Galileo, July 3, 1999. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures. At the outset of both his new book, Planetfall, and his exhibition of the same title now at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, photographer Michael Benson defines the word “planetfall.” Pla

How to Tour Frank Sinatra’s Las Vegas

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 02:37:46 GMT

Even though most of 1950s Vegas is long gone, there are still many ways to relive the haunts of Ol’ Blue Eyes and the Rat Pack

Sagging Pants Butt Up Against the Law

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 02:16:36 GMT

Super low-slung pants. A campaign in Massachusetts is determined to put an end to wearing saggy pants by enforcing a law enacted back in 1784 and amended in 1987. According to Section 16, “Open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior,” under the “Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency, and Good Order”: A man or woman, married or unmarried, who is guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than three years or in jail for not more than two years or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars. Up to three years in jail and a few hundred dollar fine just for wearing your pants low?! Omar Re

What Major World Cities Look Like at Night, Minus the Light Pollution

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 06:00:58 GMT

San Francisco 37° 48′ 30″ N 2010-10-9 Lst 20:58. © Thierry Cohen. Last week in Collage, I interviewed Caleb Cain Marcus, a New York City-based photographer who spent the last two years documenting glaciers around the world. When he composed his photographs of glaciers in Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Alaska, Marcus obscured the actual horizon. It was an experiment, he explained, to see how it affected his viewers’ sense of scale. The idea was born out of the Colorado native’s own experience with city living. “Living in New York City, unless you live very high up, you never see the horizon, which is really kind of odd,” said Marcus. “I’

Free Online Courses Mean College Will Never Be the Same

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 02:12:28 GMT

Will going to class become quaint? Photo courtesy of Coursera. Depending on who you’re listening to, Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, are either the greatest boon to the spread of knowledge since Gutenberg cranked his first press or the biggest threat to learning on campus since the coming of cheap beer. No question that they are the most disruptive innovation to come out of universities in a very long time, although it’s still too soon to say if that’s “good” disruptive or bad. A quick refresher: Though free online courses, notably through Khan Academy, were already starting to build an audience, the first MOOC by a university professor popped up

Now You Know the History of G.I. Joe. And Knowing Is Half The Battle

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 02:02:41 GMT

U.S. Patent 3,277,602 for a “toy figure having movable joints” aka the original G.I. Joe. Issued on October 11, 1966 (image: Google Patents) In the G.I. Joe sequel opening this weekend, the original “Joe” is played by the over 50-year-old Bruce Willis – the other All-American Hero. In reality, the nearly 50-year-old G.I. Joe was an 11 1/2-inch-tall plastic action figure produced by former pencil makers the Hassenfeld Brothers, who the world would eventually come to know simply as “Hasbro.” In the late 1930s the Hassenfeld Brother –Henry, Hilal, Herman– expanded their textile and school supply business to include toys. The move proved lucrative and by 1960, they

The Minivan Turns 30

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 07:15:25 GMT

Dimensions of a 1984 Plymouth Voyager (image: allpar.com) The minivan turns 30 this year. If it were a person, it might be shopping for a minivan of its own to haul the kids to soccer practice and take family vacations to Myrtle Beach. But it also might stare at itself in the mirror, check for a receding hairline, and ask some serious question like “How did I get here?” and “What am I doing with my life?” To celebrate this important milestone in the life of the minivan, let’s look back on its origins. When Chrysler introduced the Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager in 1983, the company was on the brink of collapse. It was a situation that sounds like it co

The Otherworldly Calm of Wolfgang Laib’s Glowing Beeswax Room

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 03:04:08 GMT

Wolfgang Laib, Wax Room. (Wohin bist Du gegangen-wohin gehst Du?/Where have you gone-where are you going?), 2013. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Photo by Lee Stalsworth. When I step into the newly installed Laib Wax Room at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the floral smell of beeswax wafts through my senses. Psychologists say that scents can quickly trigger memories, and this one transports me back to my childhood: The fragrance of the amber beeswax coating the walls instantly reminds me of the crenellated sheets of beeswax, dyed pink and purple, that came in a candle making kit I had as a kid. I remember rolling the sheets into long tapers for Advent. The warm

The Debate Continues Over How to Rebuild New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:14:15 GMT

Make It Right homes in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans (image: Make It Right) It’s been five years since the Make It Right organization broke ground on their first house in the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood in New Orleans, an area that was completely devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The non-profit was formed in 2007 with the optimistic and ambitious plan to build 150 sustainable homes for returning residents who were struggling to rebuild. From the very beginning it was a high-profile project, partially because of the 21 renown architects commissioned to design new homes and duplexes for the area, but mostly due to the fact that it was founded by actor and architecture enthusiast Brad

A Refreshing Take on Fashion Television: A Q&A with L.A. Frock Stars’ Star Doris Raymond

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 04:38:28 GMT

The Way We Wore team, from left, Jascmeen Bush, Shelly Lyn, owner Doris Raymond, Sarah Bergman, Kyle Blackmon (c) NHNZ If your wardrobe is seriously lacking the next time you have a red carpet event on the horizon, consider taking a trip to The Way We Wore. The vintage boutique, its proprietor Doris Raymond, and her upbeat staff are the subjects of a new series called “L.A. Frock Stars,” which premiered last week on the Smithsonian Channel. Over the course of six episodes, the docu-reality show follows Doris and members of her charismatic team as they travel from California to Texas to New York on the hunt for rare fashions to stock in her Los Angeles shop. We’re not tal

Caleb Cain Marcus’ Photos of Glaciers on a Disappearing Horizon

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:35:24 GMT

Perito Moreno, Plate I, 2010. Patagonia. © Caleb Cain Marcus. What happens when you lose your grip on the horizon? How much does it warp your sense of scale? One trek on the 97-square-mile Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia and Caleb Cain Marcus was hooked by these questions of perspective. With that experience, in January 2010, the New York City-based photographer launched a two-year odyssey, documenting, in his own minimalist style, glaciers all around the world—in Iceland, Alaska, New Zealand and Norway. Marcus shares 3o photographs taken in his travels in his latest book, A Portrait of Ice. The images—three of which were recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—are R

“In the Sistine Chapel”

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The angels, please! It's Michelangelo showing off again, mixing what's believable with what's not, work at heart exaggerated, with those Schwarzeneggar biceps and superhero legs that, because of the fresco's illusion, seem to drop from the ceiling, more entertaining than strictly religious, as if the crowd crammed into the chapel were to be cloaked in an enormous page not out of Genesis but of Marvel, enfolded in the powers of red and blue pastel. When one has seen too much, how can one then accept too little? The stars herald the tour de force we're supposed to ooh and ahh at— The Creation of Adam, now so ho-hum and cliché (I can barely admit it, it's so perfect) after

The Top Ten Most Influential Travel Books

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:21:33 GMT

William H.H. Murray's guidebook to the Adirondacks “kindled a thousand camp fires and taught a thousand pens how to write of nature,” inspiring droves of American city-dwellers to venture into the wild and starting a back-to-nature movement that endures to this day. Of course, Murray's slender volume was part of a great literary tradition. For more than two millennia, travel books have had enormous influence on the way we have approached the world, transforming once-obscure areas into wildly popular destinations. A detailed selection would fill a library. So what follows is a brazenly opinionated short-list of travel classics—some notorious, some barely remembered—

Michael Pollan, World War II and More Recent Books Out This Month

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan For more than a decade, food writer Michael Pollan has been telling us just how much is messed up about the way most of us eat. His advice—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”—has become a clarion call for 21st-century foodies. In his best-selling 2007 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he famously deconstructed the Chicken McNugget; here he explores the construction of something superior to the processed foods that make up too much of our diets. Cooked is a from-the-atom-on-up exploration of the ways in which ingredients are transformed—from roasting to stewing to baking to fermenting&mdash

Kon-Tiki Sails Again

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The most harrowing scene in Kon-Tiki, the new Oscar-nominated Norwegian film about the greatest sea voyage of modern times, turns out to be a fish story. In the 2012 reconstruction of this 1947 adventure, six amateur Scandinavian sailors—five of whom are tall, slim and valiant—build a replica of an ancient pre-Incan raft, christen it Kon-Tiki and sail westward from Peru along the Humboldt Current for French Polynesia, more than 3,700 nautical miles away. In mid-passage, their pet macaw is blown overboard and gobbled up by a big bad shark. During the scene in ques- tion, one of the tall and slim and valiant is so enraged by the bird’s death that he thrusts his bare hands

How David Mamet Became a Memorabilia Addict

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

When they were young, I took my two eldest daughters browsing on London’s Portobello Road. Down in the basement stalls we found a fellow selling jam jars. These, when full, had held Dundee marmalade. They were now empty, and their apparent similarities fell before his lecture on the evolution of the jar. We were talked through the early Victorian birth of the great potteries, through the difference in tint from clay mined in the north and in the south; he explained how subtle changes in the lip of the jar were due to increased automation, and he taught us to date the jars by judging the smoothness of the glaze, and the brightness of the ink. It was the best learning experience we t

Meet the Artist Who Blows Things Up for a Living

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Internationally lauded “explosives artist” Cai Guo-Qiang has already amassed some stunning stats: He may be the only artist in human history who has had some one billion people gaze simultaneously at one of his artworks. You read that right, one billion. I’m talking about the worldwide televised “fireworks sculpture” that Cai Guo-Qiang—China-born, living in America now—created for the opening of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. If you’re one of the few earthlings who hasn’t seen it, either live or online, here’s Cai’s description: “The explosion event consisted of a series of 29 giant footprint fireworks, one for each Oly

A Partial History of Headphones

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 08:05:00 GMT

Koss SP3 headphones (image: Koss) It’s nearly impossible to walk around a city or college campus or shopping mall, or really anywhere these days, without seeing at least a few dozen people wearing little earbuds stuffed into their ears, or even huge headphones that look like something a 747 pilot might wear. The ubiquity of modern headphones could perhaps be attributed to the Sony Walkman, which debuted in 1979 and almost immediately became a pop culture icon. As the first affordable, portable music player, the Walkman became such an prominent characteristic of the young urban professional that it was even featured on the cover of The Yuppie Handbook. But of course, the history

Haiku Highlight the Existential Mysteries of Planetary Science

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:54:20 GMT

Artist’s rendition of a ethane lake on Titan. Image via NASA/Karl Kofoed Science conferences are hotbeds for jargon. In fields where dissertation titles tend to have a string of polysyllabic words, followed by the requisite colon, followed by another string of polysyllabic words; where abstracts of scholarly articles are packed with the names of chemical compounds, isotope ratios and undefined program acronyms; where images are multivariate graphs of curves traced through dots crisscrossed with error bars, the instances where an outside person can read a summary of science written for scientists by scientists are naturally rare. And why not go whole hog with the language of your

The Perils of Wearing Clothes

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 02:30:28 GMT

High, high heels. Courtesy of Wikicommons Last month, Chinese school uniforms made the news. Studies had shown that possibly as many as 25,000 children in Shanghai, China, were wearing mandated uniforms that were essentially poisoning them. The fabric contained toxic aromatic amines, thought to be carcinogens and found in plastics, dyes and pesticides. Ingesting, inhaling or absorbing the chemicals is considered hazardous and some countries have banned them. Students were told to stop wearing the outfits made by Shanghai Ouxia Clothing Company until a complete investigation had taken place. Horrifying, but not particularly surprising, considering how much China appears in the headlin

The Aughts: When People Wore Their Causes on Their Sleeves, Literally

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 05:06:27 GMT

John Kerry at a campaign rally, showing off his wristbands. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert At every stump speech, meet and greet, and town hall gathering during the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry wore a very distinctive bracelet: the bright yellow LiveStrong wristband. He wasn’t the only recognizable figure to embrace the cancer cause through a silicone band. Usher, Lindsay Lohan and Ben Affleck were also some of the 80 million-plus people who made it known they supported a good cause, and felt cool doing it too. What followed was a charity wristband explosion, a distinctive way to wear your heart on your sleeve, or your cause on your wrist. Silicone gel “awareness bands&

A New Meaning to Green Urban Design: Dyeing the Chicago River

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 04:11:26 GMT

A high resolution photo of the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day (image: Mike Boehmer via Wikimedia Commons) Every year on March 17, monuments around the world go green for 24 hours to celebrate St. Patrick’s day. The most famous of these temporary interventions is the dyeing of the Chicago River. The tradition started in 1961 when water pollution controls were first enforced in the Windy City and a Chicago plumber was trying to locate a pipe that was dumping waste into the Chicago River. In order to find the waste line in question, a green dye was dumped into several waste systems to determine which one was dumping into the city’s eponymous river. It’s a simp

Fresh Off the 3D Printer: Henry Segerman’s Mathematical Sculptures

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:00:46 GMT

“Bunny” Bunny, by Henry Segerman and Craig Kaplan. The pattern on the bunny consists of copies of the word “bunny.” Listen as the artist describes the sculpture in this YouTube video. To say that Henry Segerman is schooled in mathematics is an understatement. The 33-year-old research fellow at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, earned a master’s degree in math at Oxford and then a doctorate in the subject at Stanford. But the mathematician moonlights as an artist. A mathematical artist. Segerman has found a way to illustrate the complexities of three-dimensional geometry and topology—his areas of expertise—in sculptural form. First things first

Who Really Invented the Smiley Face?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 03:37:00 GMT

An original Harvey Ball smiley face (image: The World Smiley Foundation) In the 1994 Robert Zemeckis film, Forrest Gump stumbles into the history books as he runs across the country. At one point, he meets a poor T-shirt salesman who, Gump recalls, “wanted to put my face on a T-shirt but he couldn’t draw that well and he didn’t have a camera.” As luck would have it, a truck drives by and splashes Gump’s face with mud. He wipes his face on a yellow T-shirt and hands it back to the down-on-his-luck entrepreneur, telling him to “have a nice day.” The imprint of Gump’s face left a perfect, abstract smiling face on the bright yellow t-shirt.

The Northern Lights—From Scientific Phenomenon to Artists’ Muse

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 01:52:18 GMT

Jesper Kongshaug’s Northern Lights display at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Photo by Margot Schulman. The aurora borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, is a spectacle to behold—so much so, that it is hard to put into words. I think Smithsonian‘s former senior science editor, Laura Helmuth, did it justice a few years back. “Try to imagine the most colorful, textured sunset you’ve ever seen, then send it swirling and pulsing across an otherwise clear and starry sky,” she wrote. Helmuth also handily described the physics behind the natural phenomenon: “Your planet is being buffeted by solar wind—particles of protons and electrons that

An Early History of the Parachute

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 04:29:00 GMT

Floyd Smith, patent 1,462,456 for a parachute pack and harness, 1919 (image: Google Patents) I recently went skydiving for the first time. It was possibly the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done in my life. A couple days later, once I had time to process everything, my thoughts turned to that backpack that kept me alive. When was it designed? Who was the inventor that made it possible for me to survive a fall of 10,000 feet? Some quick research told that that I owed my life to a Russian actor named Gleb Kotelnikov, who is credited with inventing the first backpack parachute in 1911. Surprisingly little is written about Kotelnikov –at least in English– but assuming

The Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge of New York City

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:34:20 GMT

A submission from the 2010 photo contest

The (Natural) World, According to Our Photo Contest Finalists

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 04:12:12 GMT

The Milky Way Galaxy Exploding from Mount Rainier. Photo by David Morrow (Everett, Washington). Photographed at Sunrise Point in Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, October 6, 2012. David Morrow, a 27-year-old aerospace engineer by day and budding photographer by night, was perched at Sunrise Point on the evening of October 6, 2012. From the popular viewing spot in Mount Rainier National Park, he had a clear view of Rainier, the 14,411-foot beastly stratovolcano to his west. As he recalls, at about 9 p.m. the sun had set and the stars began to appear. Filling the viewfinder of his Nikon D800, quite brilliantly, was the Milky Way. “It is not often that you see the Milky Way

Hot Air Balloon Travel for the Luxury Traveler of the 1800s

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:24:00 GMT

A colored print of La Minerve (image: National Air and Space Museum) From the moment the first hot-air balloon took flight in 1783, the earliest pioneers of human flight believed that the true future of aviation depended on the lighter-than-air inflatables and the creation of massive airships. Benjamin Franklin believed hot-air balloons “to be “a discovery of great importance, and one which may possibly give a new turn to human affairs.” He even suggested that they may herald an end to war. By the late 19th century balloons had been used for sport, travel, commerce, adventure, and, despite Franklin’s dreams, even war. But these designs rarely deviated from the

The Greatest R&B Singer Who Never Existed

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 02:02:00 GMT

From 1968 to 1977, Mingering Mike and his crew made more than 80 records and performed in sold-out venues around the world. Not bad for a made-up superstar. All photos courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collections: the tape recorded songs and a curious cache of hand-made imitation record albums of a make-believe R&B artist, known as Mingering Mike. The collection was discovered nine years ago when Dori Hadar, a record digger who owned more than 10,000 records at the time, found a stack of the faux albums early one morning in a Washington, DC flea market. Hadar is a criminal investigator for a Maryland law firm, and he som

Digital Files and 3D Printing—in the Renaissance?

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:12:21 GMT

The titular draughtsman looks through his perspective machine in this still from Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film The Draughtsman’s Contract 3D printers and digital mapping services are making it drastically easier to produce infinite identical copies of anything, for better or worse, for humanitarian or for destructive purposes. A digital map can be accessed by anyone with a smartphone or computer and a replica of Michelangelo’s David can be made at home just as easily as an assault rifle. While the relatively new technology of 3D printing is proving popular with designers, fabricators and the general public, it hasn’t yet reached the ubiquity of the home printer. B

Transforming Raw Scientific Data Into Sculpture and Song

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:15:00 GMT

For Nathalie Miebach, the stars aligned with this sculpture, inspired by a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. © Nathalie Miebach In 2000, Nathalie Miebach was studying both astronomy and basket weaving at the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was constantly lugging her shears and clamps with her into the room where she’d study projections of stars and nebulas on the wall. Understanding the science of space could be tricky, she found. “What was so frustrating to me, as a very kinesthetic learner, is that astronomy is so incredibly fascinating, but there’s nothing really tactile about it,” says Miebach. “You can’t go out and to

Where Does the Tooth Fairy Put All Those Teeth?

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 04:27:00 GMT

About the tooth fairy’s exploits, curator Katherine Ott says of her mystery game, “As far as I know, no one really knows what happens to the teeth, so it was ripe for solving.” Photos by Leah Binkovitz As a curator of medicine at the American History Museum, Katherine Ott is used to seeing some odd things. But when she started spotting collections of teeth tucked around the museum, she got suspicious. With the help of other curators and even the director, Ott put together a video documenting her hunt for answers. Turns out, lots of odd things had been happening across the collections and all signs pointed to one culprit: the tooth fairy! Spoiler alert, the documen

Birds and Bards: Beautiful Japanese Images from the Edo Period

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 03:48:35 GMT

Birds were a popular part of Japanese art during the Edo period. Eagle hanging scroll by Kishi Ganku, ca. 1802. Courtesy of the Freer Gallery Two new exhibits at the Freer Gallery explore the riches of the Japanese art collections and reveal how pieces of everyday life make appearances in works of art. Together, “Arts of Japan: Edo Aviary and Poetic License: Making Old Worlds New” show how artists of the Edo period (1603 to 1868) were influenced by a growing field of natural history, as well as evolving literary traditions and practices. Selections from the exhibits, depicting some of these elegant representations of birds and bards, are featured here. Poetic License The

How to Survive China’s Pollution Problem: Masks and Bubbles

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:51:38 GMT

The AirWaves mask by Frog Shanghai (image: Frog) Last January, air pollution reached new levels of toxicity in China. Just how bad did things get? According to the Chinese Air Quality Index (AQI), measurements of particulate matter in the air reached more than 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter the northeastern part of country. That probably doesn’t mean anything to you without context though, so here it is: anything above 300 is considered “hazardous” and citizens are warned that they “may experience more serious health effects.” For even more context, consider that the U.S. AQI only goes up to 500. Air quality in China is a constant concern and while the recent toxic cloud

Snakes in a Frame: Mark Laita’s Stunning Photographs of Slithering Beasts

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:07:08 GMT

Rowley’s Palm Pit Viper (Bothriechis rowleyi). This venomous snake, which ranges from two and a half to five feet in length, lives in the forests of Mexico. © Mark Laita. Mark Laita captured plenty of photographs of snakes striking, their mouths agape, in the making of his new book, Serpentine. But, it wasn’t these aggressive, fear-inducing—and in his words, “sensational”—images that he was interested in. Instead, the Los Angeles-based photographer focused on the graceful contortions of the reptiles. “It is not a snake book,” says Laita. As he explained to me in a phone interview, he had no scientific criteria for selecting the species he did, thoug

The History of the Flapper, Part 4: Emboldened by the Bob

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 02:30:59 GMT

Actress Louise Brooks with bob and bee-stung lips, 1920s. On May 1, 1920, the Saturday Evening Post published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” a short story about a sweet yet socially inept young woman who is tricked by her cousin into allowing a barber to lop off her hair. With her new do, she is castigated by everyone: Boys no longer like her, she’s uninvited to a social gathering in her honor, and it’s feared that her haircut will cause a scandal for her family. In the beginning of the 20th century, that’s how serious it was to cut off your locks. At that time, long tresses epitomized a pristine kind of femininity exemplified by the Gibson girl. Hair may have been wor

The Story of How An Artist Created a Genetic Hybrid of Himself and a Petunia

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 02:36:00 GMT

DNA splicing joins one of the artist’s genes (red) and an antibioticresistance gene (yellow) in a bacterium, which inserts the genes into petunia cells. Photo by Eduardo Kac. The most radical figure in the biodesign movement is Eduardo Kac, who doesn’t merely incorporate existing living things in his artworks—he tries to create new life-forms. “Transgenic art,” he calls it. There was Alba, an albino bunny that glowed green under a black light. Kac had commissioned scientists in France to insert a fluorescent protein from Aequoria victoria, a bioluminescent jellyfish, into a rabbit egg. The startling creature, born in 2000, was not publicly exhibited, but

With Biodesign, Life is Not Only the Subject of Art, But the Medium Too

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:34:00 GMT

“This project was inspired by the universe of unseen organisms that inhabit our bodies,” author William Myers says of Julia Lohmann’s mural Co-Existence exhibited in 2009 in London. Photo courtesy of The Wellcome Trust. When Julia Lohmann set out to create an artwork for the street-level windows of the London headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, the health research foundation, she chose a classic subject: the female body. But where Lohmann broke from tradition was her medium. The German designer created her large-scale portrait of two reclining nudes using 9,000 petri dishes, each containing an image of live bacteria. Suzanne Lee, a British fashion designer, is attem

Micro Apartments Are the Future of Urban Living

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 06:48:21 GMT

Micro-unit LaunchPad, Clei s.r.l/Resource Furniture; architecture by Amie Gross Architects (image: John Halpern, courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York) There’s a housing crisis in major American cities: it’s too damn expensive to live in one. In New York City, for example, there are many more single adults –representing a whopping 33 percent of the population– living alone than there are small, affordable apartments. And there’s not much sign of things improving soon. In response to these changing demographics, The Museum of the City of New York launched the exhibition Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers to explore how design can reshape the city’s hou

How Gorillas Emerged From Africa and More New and Notable Books

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm by Monte Reel Gorillas have so thoroughly permeated popular culture—from King Kong to Dian Fossey’s friends to Nintendo’s Donkey Kong—that it’s hard to imagine a time (not so long ago) when we had little idea that they existed. In the mid-19th century, gorillas were little more than shadowy, quasi-mythical beasts dwelling in some of the most impermeable stretches of the African jungle. Then along came the intrepid explorer Paul du Chaillu, a French trader’s son raised in Gabon. In 1856, Du Chaillu became the first non-Afri

Billy Collins’ “The Deep”

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Here on this map of the oceans everything is reversed— the land blank except for the names of the continents whereas the watery parts, colored blue, feature topography and even place names like the Bermuda Rise, which sounds harmless enough as does the Cocos Ridge, but how about exploring The Guafo Fracture Zone when you're all alone? And from the many plateaus and seamounts— the Falkland, the Manning, the Azores— all you could see is water and if you're lucky a big fish swallowing a school of smaller ones through the bars of your deep-sea diver's helmet. And talk about depth: at 4,000 feet below the surface, where you love to float on your back all summer, we enter th

What Does Citizen Kane Have to Do With Mass Effect 2?

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

The figure stands in a darkened room. Pale light falls from the window. Diagonal shadows obscure his face. There has been a murder, as we can see from a woman’s body pierced by a bullet on the floor. And just from the way the scene is presented, we know this mystery figure is morally ambiguous, caught between light and dark in more ways than one. It isn’t Humphrey Bogart in some vintage film noir. He’s a green-skinned, reptilian alien, holding a futuristic rifle. His name is Thane Krios, master assassin. And he’s not in a movie but the best-selling video game Mass Effect 2. Video games have come a long way from the pixilated romps of the 1980s. As production v

Locking Eyes With Spiders and Insects

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:03:40 GMT

Male Paraphidippus aurantius (a species of jumping spider), by Thomas Shahan Thomas Shahan came eye to eye with a jumping spider in his backyard about seven years ago when he was living and attending high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Since that first encounter, he has been “smitten,” according to a December 2011 spread of his macrophotography in National Geographic. “I began learning about their names and their ways, then looking for them in local parks and reserves like the Oxley Nature Center,” he wrote in the magazine. Holcocephala fusca (robber fly), by Thomas Shahan For the past seven years, Shahan has developed a hobby of photographing arthropods—insects,

The History of the Lava Lamp

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

At a certain moment in the late 1960s, the lava lamp came to symbolize all things countercultural and psychedelic—although, as you might expect, those who basked in its lurid glow sometimes had trouble recalling exactly why. It’s like asking, “Why did we like Jackson Pollock?” says Wavy Gravy, the longtime peace activist and Grateful Dead sidekick. “Because it was amazing! It causes synapses in your brain to loosen up.” The mesmerizing light fixture, which turns 50 this year, has risen and sunk and shifted its shape in the cultural consciousness for decades. The lamp was invented by Edward Craven Walker, a British accountant whose other claim to fame wa

There’s More to Celtic Music Than “Danny Boy”

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Beyond “Danny Boy” Celtic music, says Richard Carlin, a record producer who has long specialized in the genre, “runs far, far deeper than something like Riverdance.” For the just-released Classic Celtic Music, he combed the Smithsonian Folkways vaults for 23 choice tracks, recorded between 1945 and 1986, that would brighten anybody’s St. Patrick’s Day: a jig by fiddler Michael Gorman and banjoist Margaret Barry, an air with Billy Pigg on Northumbrian smallpipes, a song by the Irish vocalist Sorcha Ní Ghuairim in the lilting, haunting style known as sean-nós. Dancing encouraged but not required.

The History of the Flapper, Part 3: The Rectangular Silhouette

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 04:19:16 GMT

Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts & Sciences, 1925-1926. If a woman in the 1920s had a boyish figure and was naturally skinny, she was all set to slip on a slim sheath, a signature look of the 1920s. But if she was plump and curvaceous, she might choose certain undergarments to help achieve the fashionable unisex flapper shape. The flapper silhouette was distinctive, and if you’re a fan of PBS’s “Downton Abbey,” you’ve seen it in full effect this season: angular (basically rectangular), androgynous, slender and straight. It was influenced by Braque, Picasso, Leger and others artists whose work had hard, geometric forms and visible lines. Under

The Drones of the Future May Build Skyscrapers

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 01:45:09 GMT

Gramazio & Kohler, Flight Assembled Architecdture, FRAC Centre in Orléans, France, 2011-2012 (image: François Lauginie via Gramazio & Kohler) Drones can’t just destroy, they can create. Although the military uses of drones are widely debated, less discussed are their potentially revolutionary civilian implications. They aren’t yet widespread, but drones are being used by hobbyists, photographers, farmers, ranchers, and they may even herald an entirely new type of architecture. Last year, Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler, in collaboration with Raffaello D’Andrea, developed “Flight Assembled Architecture” – an experimental concept structure that employed

A Valentine for Sci-Art Lovers

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:46:56 GMT

Mates for Life, by Jacqueline Schmidt at Screech Owl Design. Happy Valentine’s Day, Collage readers! I’ll be brief. I just wanted to pass along this cool find—a print by artist and designer Jacqueline Schmidt. In a style that smacks of scientific illustration, Schmidt depicts 12 species that, generally, remain loyal to a single mate over the course of a lifetime. With gray wolves (#1, in the diagram), couples pair off Sadie-Hawkins style. The female determines her mate. The alpha female and alpha male are the only pair to breed, from January to March each year, in a pack of wolves, and they keep things monogamous. Meadow voles (#6) are quite loyal. The rodents make the mos

The Origins of Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleeve

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 03:46:50 GMT

Actress Raquel Torres, by Ruth Harriet Louis, 1920s. Courtesy VintageGal It was during the Roman Empire that St. Valentine is said to have left a note to his jailer’s daughter, “From your Valentine” before his execution on February 14. Today, thanks to St. Valentine, cards expressing one’s heartfelt emotions, a. k. a. valentines, are given to that special someone. To defer to a classic idiom: It’s a day to wear our heart on our sleeve. We use the phrase casually, to mean exposing our true emotions, making ourselves vulnerable and letting it all hang out. The phrase is so pervasive that from Ringo Starr to Eminem to Carrie Underwood, those words-turned-lyrics have found their way int

Outrageous Taxidermy, the Subject of a New Show on AMC

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 03:49:26 GMT

Judges Paul Rhymer, Catherine Coan and Brian Posehn. Photo courtesy of Ben Leuner/AMC Taxidermy: dying trade or resurgent art form? As an outsider—I have never hunted, let alone stuffed and mounted an animal—I was tempted to think the former. Then, I spoke with Paul Rhymer, a former Smithsonian taxidermist and model maker.”Taxidermy is alive and well,” he says. “Commercial taxidermy, for hunters, has probably never been stronger than it is now—and probably never been better. The skill levels have just gotten so good with all the different advances in materials and techniques.” Rhymer is a traditionalist. He hails from the museum world, where he spent 26 years (

10 Fresh Looks at Love

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 05:45:27 GMT

Scientists are still wrestling with how love works. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Hamed Masoumi It should probably tell us something that the most frequently asked question on Google last year was “What is love?” Clearly, most of us are clueless on the matter; otherwise we wouldn’t be turning to algorithms for an explanation. Which explains why scientific research on love continues unabated. We want answers. So, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, here are 10 recent studies or surveys trying to make sense of matters of the heart. 1) You light up my brain: Researchers at Brown University in Rhode Island say that based on brain scans, they may be able to predict if

Unmanned Drones Have Been Around Since World War I

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 05:45:57 GMT

The Kettering “Bug” (image: The United States Air Force) Recently, the United States’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been the subject of much debate and scrutiny. But their history dates back a lot further than the war on terror. The first true UAVs, which are technically defined by their capability to return successfully after a mission, were developed in the late 1950s, but the American military actually began designing and developing unmanned aircraft during the first World War. Military aviation was born during the years preceding the World War I, but once the war began, the industry exploded. Barely more than a decade after Orville and Wilbur Wright

The Masked Merriment of Mardi Gras

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 02:57:52 GMT

Vintage Mardi Gras postcard, date unknown. Shrove Tuesday is a day to be remembered by strangers in New Orleans, for that is the day for fun, frolic, and comic masquerading. All of the mischief of the city is alive and wide awake in active operation. Men and boys, women and girls, bond and free, white and black, yellow and brown, exert themselves to invent and appear in grotesque, quizzical, diabolic, horrible, strange masks, and disguises. Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds, beasts and birds with human heads; demi-beasts, demi-fishes, snakes’ heads and bodies with arms of apes; man-bats from the moon; mermaids; satyrs, beggars, monks, and robbers parade and ma

Imagining a Drone-Proof City in the Age of Surveillance

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 07:46:00 GMT

Shura City (image: Asher J. Kohn) As drones become increasingly common tools of war and surveillance on the battlefield and in our cities, how are architects and designers responding? Previously, we’ve looked at personal counter-surveillance measures, but it’s likely that future designers will move beyond the scale of the individual to larger projects such as drone-proof architecture or perhaps even urban-scale counter-surveillance. Concerned about what he sees as the improper or unjustified use of drones, law student Asher J. Kohn has imagined how an anti-drone city might look and function. This isn’t a science fiction scenario, but a seriously considered urban desi

The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Pathogens

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 09:34:38 GMT

E. coli, by Luke Jerram. Few non-scientists would be able to distinguish the E. coli virus bacteria from the HIV virus under a microscope. Artist Luke Jerram, however, can describe in intricate detail the shapes of a slew of deadly viruses pathogens. He is intrigued by them, as a subject matter, because of their inherent irony. That is, something as virulent as SARS can actually, in its physical form, be quite delicate. Clearly adept at scientific work—as an undergraduate, the Brit was offered a spot on a university engineering program—Jerram chose to pursue art instead. “Scientists and artists start by asking similar questions about the natural world,” he told SEED magazine in a 2009

The History of the Flapper, Part 2: Makeup Makes a Bold Entrance

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 04:14:16 GMT

Clara Bow with compact, 1920s. Let us take a look at the young person as she strolls across the lawn of her parents’ suburban home, having just put the car away after driving sixty miles in two hours. She is, for one thing, a very pretty girl. Beauty is the fashion in 1925. She is frankly, heavily made up, not to imitate nature, but for an altogether artificial effect—pallor mortis, poisonously scarlet lips, richly ringed eyes—the latter looking not so much debauched (which is the intention) as diabetic. Her walk duplicates the swagger supposed by innocent America to go with the female half of a Paris Apache dance. Flapper Jane by Bruce Bliven The New Republic September 9, 1925

The Privacy Wars: Goggles That Block Facial Recognition Technology

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 07:01:01 GMT

Execution of Facial Detection. Area in Green Frame Indicates Successful Detection (image: NII) Camouflage Couture is all the rage. As drones, security cameras, social networks, and even our personal computers have become more sophisticated, the use of facial recognition technology is becoming increasingly widespread. For some people, this is a great convenience and for others it’s an invasion of privacy. For designers, it’s a new frontier to be conquered. Previously, we saw how one designer, Adam Harvey, recently unveiled a line of “anti-drone” clothing for personal counter-surveillance. As a student, Harvey, in collaboration with hair stylists, fashion designe

The Year’s Most Outstanding Science Visualizations

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 10:09:00 GMT

First Place and People’s Choice, Photography: Biomineral Single Crystals. Credit: Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert and Christopher E. Killian; University of Wisconsin, Madison. When Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert, a biophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her colleague Christopher E. Killian saw the scanning electron micrograph that they took of a sea urchin’s tooth, they were dumbstruck, says the journal Science. “I had never seen anything that beautiful,” Gilbert told the publication. The individual crystals of calcite that form an urchin’s tooth are pointy, interlocking pieces; as the outermost crystals decay, others come to the surface, keeping the too

The History of the Flapper, Part 1: A Call for Freedom

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 07:55:16 GMT

Women’s dress of the 1910s. In the age before the Roaring Twenties, women were still wearing floor-length dresses. Waists were cinched. Arms and legs were covered. Corsets were standard on a daily basis. Hair was long. The Gibson girl was the idealized image of beauty. And the Victorian attitudes toward dress and etiquette created a strict moral climate. Then the 1920s hit and things changed rapidly. The 19th Amendment passed in 1920 giving women the right to vote. Women began attending college. The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed by Alice Paul in 1923. World War I was over and men wanted their jobs back. Women, though, who had joined the workforce while the men were at war,

Honey, I Blew Up the Bugs

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 04:15:08 GMT

A leaf grasshopper (Phyllophorina kotoshoensis). Courtesy of the museum exhibition “Bugs…Outside the Box.” As a kid, I was an avid bug collector. I had one of those screen-covered bug boxes, and I carried it with me on backyard adventures and forays into the woods behind my house. I have fond memories of the first nights of summer when the fireflies came out–I’d cup the air and catch one, put it in my box and lie belly in the grass, with the box at my nose, watching the little thing light up. My brother and I had ant farms, sea-monkeys and kits to grow monarch butterflies from caterpillars and frogs from tadpoles. Seeing little critters up-close was fasci

Are Punch and Judy Shows Finally Outdated?

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 06:19:33 GMT

A puppet show about wife-beating and sausage-eating sounds like something that would have gone the way of Shakespearean English or minstrel shows. For many confounding reasons, however, the Punch and Judy show remains, continuing to inspire laughs all over the world for more than three and a half centuries. The show centers on Mr. Punch, a rascally hand puppet whose primary vocation is whacking his saucy, nagging wife, Judy, and various members of the constabulary with a stick. Mr. Punch has performed for English kings and American presidents, been chased by crocodiles at the British seaside and anacondas in Brazil, and even appeared in some of the first movies ever made. Not bad for a sq

All about Valentine's Day

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 04:53:39 GMT

The History of Sweethearts, How Data is Changing How we Date, the Top Demonstrations of Love and More on Valentine's Day

Drone Couture: Designing Invisibility

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 03:47:28 GMT

The Stealth Wear hoodie in thermal IR (image: Adam Harvey via ahprojects.com) Invisibility has long been a dream of man. Popular culture has depicted it as both a science –think Star Trek’s cloaking devices and the Invisible Man’s formula– and magic – Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak comes to mind– but the distinction between the two classifications may be, as Arthur C. Clark famously postulated, only a matter of technological advancement. For example, late last year a team of scientists at Duke University took one step closer to making magic a reality when they developed a “meta-material” capable of bending light to cloak a two-dimensional object from microwave radi

How to Tour Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 05:35:20 GMT

Jazz is synonymous with the Big Easy, and there’s no bigger name in the history of the genre than Satchmo

Beatboxing, as Seen Through Scientific Images

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 05:32:25 GMT

Doug E. Fresh (shown above, performing at the Legends of Hip Hop Tour in February 2011) was a beatboxing pioneer in the 1980s. © Briana E. Heard/Corbis It is always interesting to watch a beatboxer perform. The artist, in the thrust of performing, can reach a compulsive fit as he musters up the rhythmic sounds of percussion instruments a cappella-style. But what does beatboxing looking like from the inside? That is the question that University of Southern California researchers Michael Proctor, Shrikanth Narayanan and Krishna Nayak asked in a study (PDF), slated to be published in the February issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. For the first time, they used re

The History, Science and Culture of the Super Bowl

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 07:02:30 GMT

Catch up on everything you wanted to know about the Big Game -- What's its history? What makes a good advertisement? -- and much more

How to Tour Jane Austen’s English Countryside

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 08:15:00 GMT

Follow in the footsteps of Mr. Darcy and the Bennet sisters and take in the manors and gardens of rural England

American Myths: Benjamin Franklin’s Turkey and the Presidential Seal

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 07:29:44 GMT

Artist Anatole Kovarsky’s image from the cover from the November 24, 1962 issue of The New Yorker (image: Anatole Kovarsky via New Yorker cover archive) While researching our recent article about the Seal of the President of the United States, I came across a few couple myths about the National Emblem that required a little more investigation. First up, the idea that Benjamin Franklin, in his infinite wisdom and wit, wanted the National Bird to be the turkey. According to the United States Diplomacy Center, this myth is completely false (though I’ll dive into the murkier parts of that myth in a moment). The center points to the fact that Franklin’s proposal for the G

Mona Lisa Travels by Laser, to Space And Back Again

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 06:13:38 GMT

Art buffs are not the only ones intrigued by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. In a fun experiment in 2005, a group of researchers from the University of Amsterdam analyzed Mona Lisa’s famous smile. They ran a scanned reproduction of the painting through “emotion recognition” software, which concluded that Mona was precisely 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, 2 percent angry, 1 percent neutral—and completely unsurprised. In 2010, scientists in France used X-ray fluorescence spectrometry on the painting and found that da Vinci applied layers upon thin layers of glazes and paints to achieve the subject’s flawless complexion. Then,

The Story Behind Banksy

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:04:00 GMT

When Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy—graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur—for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga. He supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally) over his head. Most of his fans don’t really want to know who he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him). But they do want to follow his upward trajectory from the outlaw spraying—or, as the argot has it, “bombing”—walls in Bristol, England, during the 1990s to the a

Who Designed the Seal of the President of the United States?

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 08:13:00 GMT

A scaled and dimensioned drawing of the Presidential Seal, as attached to Executive Order 10823 (image: Wikimedia Commons) During President Obama’s inauguration on the Capitol steps, he stood behind a lectern, as he always does when speaking in public, adorned with the Seal of the President of the United States. Later that evening, after the ceremonies and parades, he danced across the symbol with the First Lady. It’s on the floor of the Oval Office and on stamped on the Presidential Physical Fitness Award certificate (or so I’m told). The Presidential Seal is one of the most recognizable symbols in the world and one of the few examples of American heraldry, but who

"Evolution of the Host"—A New Poem by Robert Pinsky

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

The primate that for a time rose to dominate that planet Communicated with its peers using a code of grunts Exhaled from the orifice of ingestion and shaped By lips and inner membranes, muscles and teeth. The creature communicated also with its descendants, With memorized patterns of those same brute sounds made Eloquent and urgent as the dance of a worker bee Miming the precise distance and bearings of sustenance. In the language of sustenance and honey, host and guest Are two pronunciations of a single word: primeval guttural Khoust: meaning sacred obligations and ceremonies between A stranger who accepts bread and a stranger who gives it. Or before the sacred obligations and ceremonies

An Illustrated Guide to the World’s Creation Myths

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Each culture has its own version of how the universe began. Artist Noah MacMillan brings this “visual vocabulary” to life

Origami: A Blend of Sculpture and Mathematics

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 03:17:00 GMT

This origami structure, called “Green Cycles,” by Erik Demaine and his father Martin required a week of improvisation to assemble. Credit: Renwick Gallery The shape of a Pringle, mathematically speaking, is called a hyperbolic paraboloid. Artists have been folding paper into this shape for years. The twist? Hyperbolic paraboloids shouldn’t exist in origami—it’s impossible to make such a 3D shape using only the creases pressed into paper by hand. By that logic, some of Erik Demaine’s artwork shouldn’t exist either. Demaine, the world’s top computational origami theorist, has created a series of sculptures by folding concentric squares into

Polaroid Portraits: Capturing President Obama's Second Inauguration

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:33:06 GMT

We sent photojournalist Tamir Kalifa to the inauguration to ask attendees why they came to the National Mall

Listen to Doc Watson Picking Away at his Banjo

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

In 1960, the producer Ralph Rinzler paired the forgotten banjo legend Clarence Ashley with an obscure young guitarist named Arthel Watson. The recordings they made (Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley: The Original Folkways Recordings, 1960-1962) introduced “Doc” Watson’s bluegrass flatpicking to a national audience. That’s just one reason Rinzler, who died in 1994 at age 59, was recently inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. He was also a mandolin and banjo player of note, a tireless folklorist and a promoter, co-founding the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and helping the Smithsonian Institution acquire Folkways Records. What do you think the

New Books, Reviewed: Animal Emotions, Deconstructing Detroit and the Science of Winning

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures by Virginia Morell As any dog owner knows, canines can communicate a great deal. (Those wide eyes and drooping tail upon your imminent departure are no accident.) Animal communication, cognition, personality and other thought processes are the subject of this charming book about animal intelligence. A science writer for National Geographic and Science, Virginia Morell feigns journalistic neutrality toward her subject, but she cannot hide her excitement at the mental feats and displays of emotion she describes: birds with an artistic sense, cheetahs that die from heartbreak, ants that teach each other how to navigate a new terr

A Nike Shoe, Now a Part of the Smithsonian

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

When the Nike shoe company asked runners what they wanted from a shoe, the athletes “would describe all the characteristics a sock would offer,” says Nike designer Ben Shaffer. So last year the company knit them a shoe, the Flyknit Racer, which is now in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City. Cooper-Hewitt textiles curator Matilda McQuaid calls it an “innovative use of knitting”: The company had to develop a polyester yarn of varying elasticity, thickness and strength, plus machines to weave it into a virtually seamless mesh upper that expands and contracts with the wearer’s foot. The manufacturing process minimizes waste, and the resu

Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar Is Wrong

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” It’s a great story, but it’s a myth. And so is that so-called grammar rule about ending sentences with prepositions. If that previous sentence bugs you, by the way, you’ve bought into another myth. No, there’s nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction, either. But perhaps the biggest grammar myth of all is the infamous taboo against splitting an infinitive, as in

The Psychology Behind Superhero Origin Stories

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

“Why is every superhero movie an origin story?” complained Entertainment Weekly film critic Adam Markovitz after seeing a trailer for this summer’s Man of Steel—yet another version of the 75-year-old Superman saga. Perhaps we love origin stories, Markovitz suggested, because they “show the exact moment when a normal guy goes from being Just Like Us to being somehow better, faster, stronger.” I’m inclined to disagree. As a clinical psychologist who has written books about the psychology of superheroes, I think origin stories show us not how to become super but how to be heroes, choosing altruism over the pursuit of wealth and power. I’ve lear

Why Hypercolor T-Shirts Were Just a One-Hit Wonder

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 04:03:03 GMT

It was 1991: “Roseanne was on TV, Terminator 2 was on the big screen, Color Me Badd was on the radio and Hypercolor t-shirts were on the backs of millions of middle- and high school-age kids across America. The Hypercolor fad gripped the nation that year, thanks to the Seattle-based sportswear company that created them, Generra. In fact, in a brief three-month span, between February and May 1991, the company sold a whopping $50 million worth of color-changing, heat-sensitive T-shirts, shorts, pants, sweatshirts and tights. Touchable Hypercolor T-shirts in action. In addition to its color-morphing cool factor, the “mood-ring of the ’90s” also had game-c

What Django Unchained Got Wrong: A Review From National Museum of African American History and Culture Director Lonnie Bunch

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:53:00 GMT

Jamie Foxx as Django. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Digital Inc. For more than two centuries slavery dominated American life, the shadow of slavery shaped everything from politics to the economy, from Westward expansion to foreign policy, from culture to commerce and from religion to America’s sense of self. And yet, contemporary America has little understanding or tolerance for discussions about the enslavement of millions. In many ways, slavery is the last great unmentionable in American public discourse. So I was hopeful and interested when I learned that Quentin Tarantino was to tackle the subject of slavery in his movie Django Unchained. At nearly three hours

Poetry Matters: Lessons From America’s First Inaugural Poet

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 04:53:00 GMT

In this week of the Presidential Inauguration, it must be said that poetry serves another function when deployed in public: it is classy, it adds tone and the aura of high-minded literary prestige. This is where poetry gets into trouble: when it gets stuffy, pompous, and stiff. Robert Frost was the first poet included in an inauguration when he spoke at John F. Kennedy’s ceremony. Photo by Walter Albertin, 1961. Courtesy of the Library of Congress All of these characteristics, the Inauguration has in spades. Inaugurations have gradually gotten bigger and more complicated over time. Certainly, we are far from the day when Jefferson walked over to the Capital from his boarding

The Gory Details of Artist Katrina van Grouw’s Unfeathered Birds

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 03:30:06 GMT

Great Hornbill (Buceros bicornis). © Katrina van Grouw. Katrina van Grouw’s new book The Unfeathered Bird is a work of passion. A former curator in the ornithological division of London’s Natural History Museum, the fine artist, based in Buckinghamshire, England, has used her experience in ornithology and taxidermy to draw, over the course of her career, 385 beautiful illustrations of birds—all, as the book’s title suggests, without their feathers. Her work shows the skeletal and muscular systems of 200 different species, from ostriches to hummingbirds, parrots to penguins, in life-like poses. Collage of Arts and Sciences interviewed van Grouw by email. When did you

Jicky, the First Modern Perfume

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 07:20:00 GMT

According to Guerlain, the bottle is inspired by a 19th century medicine jar with a stopper shaped like a champagne cork, intended to evoke movement and celebration – “a clever nod to parties and the sparkling woman who wears the fragrance.” One hundred years after the French Revolution began, the Eiffel Tower rose above Paris as a testament to the new century’s innovations in engineering and construction. It could be seen from everywhere in the city; an inescapable sign of a different type of revolution. But the Eiffel Tower wasn’t the only technological innovation to dominate the streets of Paris in 1889. That same year, the first modern perfume was cre

The First Major Museum Show to Focus on Smell

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 01:09:00 GMT

Installation view of The Art of the Scent exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. (image: Brad Farwell) While walking through the Museum of Art and Design’s exhibition “The Art of the Scent (1889-2012)” my mind was flooded with memories of a nearly forgotten childhood friend, an ex-girlfriend and my deceased grandmother. It was a surprisingly powerful and complex experience, particularly because it was evoked in a nearly empty gallery by an invisible art form—scent. It’s often cited that smell is the sense most associated with memory (both are processed by the brain’s limbic system), and the iconic fragrances exh

How Kraft Uses Patents to Dominate the Mac and Cheese Wars

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 05:46:00 GMT

Dracula shaped pasta. Image courtesy of Google Patent Search Posted from Dan Lewis’ fantastic Now I Know newsletter. Subscribe here or follow him on Twitter. The arms race is vicious and cut-throat. Competitors urgently strive to strike big-ticket deals with media companies. At the same time, their lawyers are running out and filing patents to protect multi-million dollar designs. And that is just the first step. Drafting the pieces seems simple but in actuality borders on the impossible. All lines must intersect, and each one has a minimum viable thickness to which it must adhere. The hard pieces must be able to retain their shapes even when placed in boiling water for as long

Covered in Ink, Cross-sections of Trees Make Gorgeous Prints

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 05:16:00 GMT

Ash, 80 years old. © Bryan Nash Gill. When I phoned Bryan Nash Gill last Thursday morning, he was on his way back from a boneyard. The New Hartford, Connecticut-based artist uses the term not in its traditional sense, but instead to describe a good spot for finding downed trees. “I have a lot of boneyards in Connecticut,” says Gill. “Especially with these big storms that we have had recently. Right now, in the state, the power companies are cutting trees back eight feet from any power line. There is wood everywhere.” Eastern Red Cedar, 77 years old. © Bryan Nash Gill. Gill collects dead and damaged limbs from a variety of indigenous trees—a

The Fisher Space Pen Boldly Writes Where No Man Has Written Before

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 02:06:50 GMT

The Fisher Space Pen, Model AG7 (image: Fisher Space Pen Co.) Recently on Design Decoded, we looked at President Obama’s favorite technologically advanced pen and today we’re looking at mine. During my last visit to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, there were two things I had to do: see the original 1903 Wright Flyer and buy a Fisher Space Pen. I couldn’t help but wonder though, just who was this “Fisher” and what makes the Space Pen so space-y? The Fisher Space Pen was created by inventor, pen manufacturer, and (brief) JFK political opponent Paul C. Fisher. Fisher had been an innovator in the pen industry for years, even before he started h

Beautiful Artwork Cut Out of Feathers

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 05:04:00 GMT

Amazon parrot and macaw feathers. © Chris Maynard. Chris Maynard is obsessed with feathers. The artist, based in Olympia, Wash., thinks feathers show “life’s perfection,” in the way that they overlap and contour to a bird’s body. “Their complexity as a covering beats any clothing we make,” he writes on his Web site. Turkey feather. © Chris Maynard. Going back a few years, Maynard started by photographing feathers. Then, he arranged them in shadow boxes. But, in his experiments in showcasing feathers, Maynard eventually came up with his own unique art form. The artist creates fascinating, feather-light sculptures, by cutting the silhoue

President Obama’s Autopen: When is an Autograph Not an Autograph?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 04:33:29 GMT

The modern Autopen “Atlantic” models (original image: Autopen.co) President Obama was in Hawaii when he signed the fiscal cliff deal in Washington D.C. last week. Of course, it’s now common for us to send digital signatures back and forth every day, but the President of the United States doesn’t just have his signature saved as a JPEG file like the rest of us lowly remote signatories. Instead, he uses the wonder that is the autopen – a device descended from one of the gizmos in Thomas Jefferson’s White House. President Barack Obama’s signature. It would take a well-trained eye to spot the difference between a hand-written signature and an autosig

The Tolkien Nerd’s Guide to The Hobbit

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 04:56:28 GMT

For readers of The Hobbit, which became an almost overnight classic following its 1937 debut, the new movie may elicit some puzzlement. Seemingly extraneous flourishes clog up what many remember as a simple fairy tale, and random characters appear at every twist and turn throughout Middle Earth. Yet those fans who went on to immerse themselves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s wider lore will find inspiration. For the most part, director Peter Jackson does not exercise an extra heaping of artistic license. Rather, Jackson—reportedly something of a nerd himself—borrows from the larger Tolkien literature to create a rich Hobbit tableau. “Jackson knows the lore pretty well and wan

Are You Ready for Shirley MacLaine’s Entrance on Downton Abbey?

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 07:04:00 GMT

Shirley MacLaine makes her debut as Martha Levinson this Sunday in “Downton Abbey.” Photo courtesy of NBCUniversal/Carnival Films Curator Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery is a regular contributor to Around the Mall Silver polished? Feathers fluffed? Good—then like me, you are properly primed to receive the opening salvos of “Downton Abbey“’s third season, which begins airing on PBS this Sunday, January 6. The hugely popular soap opera froths over this year when Shirley MacLaine arrives with the subtlety of a blunderbuss. MacLaine portrays Martha Levinson, the social climbing New York mother of Lady Cora who, as one of the American

Bringing Extinct Birds Back to Life, One Cartoon at a Time

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 04:48:31 GMT

Dodo, by Ralph Steadman. Filmmaker Ceri Levy was working on a documentary called The Bird Effect, about how our feathered friends influence our lives, when he took on a side project, organizing an exhibition, “Ghosts of Gone Birds,” at the Rochelle School in London in November 2011. “Its purpose was to highlight the risk of extinction that is faced by many bird species in the world today,” Levy noted. “The premise of the show was to get artists to represent an extinct species of birds, and to breathe life back into it.” Great Auk, by Ralph Steadman. Levy sent a list of nearly 200 extinct bird species to famous artists, musicians, writers and poet

Seven Must-See Art-Meets-Science Exhibitions in 2013

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 05:05:14 GMT

Courtesy of the Water Tank Project. This New Year’s Eve, in addition to the typical resolutions to exercise more or spend more time with family, consider resolving to take better advantage of the cultural offerings of America’s cities and towns. Whether you seek to attend concerts, listen to lectures by authors and visiting scholars or become regulars at area museums, a few exhibitions slated for 2013 on the intersection of art and science will be must-sees in the New Year. The Water Tank Project Courtesy of the Water Tank Project. The skyline of New York City will be transformed next summer when 300 water tanks in the five boroughs become public works of art, calling at

A 24-Hour Movie That May Be the Biggest (and Best) Supercut Ever

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 04:41:56 GMT

In most cases, movies are a two-hour escape from the minutiae of daily life. Watching Christian Marclay’s The Clock—a massive and impressive video supercut now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—is a full-scale immersion in it. Marclay, a Swiss video and sound artist, has masterfully knit together more than 10,000 film clips in service of one animating idea: the mundane minute-by-minute passage of time. The monumental work is 24 hours in total, with each clip featuring a clock or watch showing the actual time of the world outside. The segments range in length from just a few seconds to a minute or more, and come from a broad range of films—everything from the

A History of Sequins from King Tut to the King of Pop

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 03:23:00 GMT

What do Michael Jackson, King Tut and Leonardo da Vinci have in common? A penchant for sequins. At some point between 1480 and 1482, Leonardo whipped together a sketch for a machine that, using levers and pulleys, would punch small disks out of a metal sheet. Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch for a device for making sequins. Sketch from the Codex Atlanticus housed at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Since the device was never actually made, we don’t know if the Renaissance jack-of-all-trades dreamt it up to glamourize the gamurra, a typical women’s dress of the time, or if it had some greater utilitarian purpose. Going back centuries before Leonard, there’s Tutan

Architecture to Watch in 2013

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 09:32:05 GMT

Before we put 2012 behind us, we thought it would be fun to take a quick look at some of the building projects we’re looking forward to in 2013. Whether they’re breaking ground, topping off, or, as is the case with one incredible building in China, breaking ground and topping off, these structures represent important technological and cultural advancements in architecture. SFMOMA A rear-view of Snøhetta’s addition to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art A project that will be starting construction in the coming year (after an important exhibition of the work of the recently deceased Lebbeus Woods) is the ambitious expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Our Ten Most Popular Stories of 2012

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 03:08:56 GMT

1. 20 Best Small Towns in America Earlier this year we thought it was high time to focus on small-town America—towns with populations less than 25,000—specifically. There is a certain charm to places like our top slot, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which mints its own currency—BerkShares bills—to boost the eat-local movement in town, plays host to international festivals and is sandwiched between Monument Mountain and the Berkshires. If you didn't agree with our picks this year (many of you didn't), stay tuned for the 2013 edition to come out this spring—maybe your small town will make the cut. 2. Matt Groening Reveals the True Location of Springfield

Take a Tour of Victor Hugo's Paris

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 04:54:37 GMT

Legend has it that Victor Hugo, the prolific French scribbler whose body of published work amounts to seven novels, 18 volumes of poetry and 21 plays, also holds the record for the world’s shortest correspondence. In 1862, while in exile on the British Isle of Guernsey for speaking out against Napoleon III, Hugo telegrammed his publisher “?” demanding the reaction to the release of his latest novel, Les Misérables. The reply: “!” A century and a half later, “!” is still an apt description of Hugo’s epic masterpiece, which is still spawning numerous iterations on the page, stage and screen. In fact, many modern admirers may only be fam

A Twinkling Christmas Tree, Powered by…an Electric Eel?

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 03:43:18 GMT

If you were to walk into the Living Planet Aquarium today in Sandy, Utah, and meander through the “Journey to South America” gallery–past 10-foot anacondas, piranha and caiman alligators–you’d meet Sparky. The nearly four-foot-long electric eel draws a crowd, particularly in December, when it causes the lights on a nearby Christmas tree to twinkle. That’s right: twinkle. Electric eels have to navigate the dark, murky streams and ponds where they live in South America. (Or, in Sparky’s case, his large tank.) The slender, snake-like fish have tiny eyes that are not very effective in low-light conditions. So, to wayfind, electric eels, tr

Slice of Life: Artistic Cross Sections of the Human Body

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 06:30:35 GMT

Female Torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak. Lisa Nilsson was on an antiquing trip three or four years ago when a gilt crucifix caught her eye. The cross was crafted using a Renaissance-era technique called quilling, where thin paper is rolled to form different shapes and patterns. “I thought it was really beautiful, so I made a couple of small, abstract gilt pieces,” says Nilsson, an artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts. She incorporated these first forays in quilling into her mixed media assemblages. Almost serendipitously, as Nilsson was teaching herself to mold and shape the strips of Japanese mulberry paper, a friend sent her a century-old, hand-colored

Nimbus Clouds: Mysterious, Ephemeral and Now Indoors

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:58:48 GMT

Nimbus II. © Berndnaut Smilde. While we would all love to control the weather most days, no mere mortal has succeeded in this endeavor. Berndnaut Smilde, however, seems to have the magic touch. Hailing from Groningen, a northern city in the Netherlands (a country well acquainted with clouds and rain), Smilde uses a very precise science to create nimbus clouds indoors; he then photographs the fleeting moment that each cloud is suspended in air. Nimbus clouds are clouds that produce precipitation, characterized as well for their low altitude and great volume. Smilde certainly manages low altitude; he conjures his faux clouds under a roof, after all. But, fortunately for his venues, no r

Is White Christmas the Best Popular Song Ever Written?

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 02:00:00 GMT

Actor Bing Crosby, Actresses Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen, and Actor Danny Kaye, during the 1954 Paramount production of “White Christmas.” Underwood & Underwood/Corbis Curator Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery is a regular contributor to Around the Mall I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, Just like the ones I used to know. Where the treetops glisten and children listen To hear sleigh bells in the snow “White Christmas” launched a revolution. Before this Irving Berlin song topped the charts in October 1942, the airwaves between Halloween and December 25 did not blare relentlessly with Christmas carols. Thanksgiving served as a qu

How One Museum Looks to Combat Ageism

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

I walk alone through the tunnel-like hallway, surrounded by large-lettered questions in stark black on white: “Is being old good or bad?” “At what age will you be old?” “Are you curious about the future?” The future looms sooner than I expect, in the yellow simulation room at the end of the tunnel. I strap heavy white metal shoes over my flip-flops and clomp up a set of stairs. The effort of hoisting my weighed-down legs makes this everyday task more arduous. “Aging causes loss of muscle mass,” a sign near the stairs explains, adding that this can lead to decreased strength and speed. The simulation room is part of the “Dialogue With

LISTEN: Stephen Wade’s Banjo Diary

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

It’s hard to think of anyone who knows more about the banjo than Stephen Wade, the roots music expert who has played, studied and evangelized the instrument for five decades. He developed the one-man song-and-dance theatrical show Banjo Dancing (and performed it at the White House in 1979). On his debut CD for Smithsonian Folkways, Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition, released
in September, Wade passes on what he has learned from a lifetime of seeking out American music
at its roots, from his native Chicago to deep in the Appalachians.

Why Japan is Obsessed with Kentucky Fried Chicken on Christmas

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 07:23:00 GMT

The Colonel is ready for his Christmas closeup. © TWPhoto/Corbis It’s Christmas Eve in Japan. Little boys and girls pull on their coats, the twinkle of anticipation in their eyes. Keeping the tradition alive, they will trek with their families to feast at … the popular American fast food chain KFC. Christmas isn’t a national holiday in Japan—only one percent of the Japanese population is estimated to be Christian—yet a bucket of “Christmas Chicken” (the next best thing to turkey—a meat you can’t find anywhere in Japan) is the go-to meal on the big day. And it’s all thanks to the insanely successful “Kurisumasu ni

Handmade Christmas Cards Sent By Famous Artists to Their Friends

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 06:27:02 GMT

Arturo Rodríguez used a postcard from the Louvre to create this Van Gogh-inspired holiday card to Helen L. Kohen, ca. 1980-1999 The head of Hallmark, Donald Hall, is worth an estimated $1 billion, according to Forbes. Founded in 1910, the company has grown into the biggest greetings card manufacturer in the United States and by now, its brand is commonplace during the holiday season. But Mary Savig and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art are here to remind you that not all cards come from a store. In her new book, Handmade Holiday Cards from 20th-Century Artists, Savig includes 190 illustrations of the original holiday cards held in the Archives. Some famous names pop up,

The Legend of the Christmas Stocking

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 03:18:00 GMT

Christmas stockings made by a “Gentleman of German heritage,” 1950s. “The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.” – A Visit From Saint Nicholas As far back as 1823, when Clement Clarke Moore (or possibly Henry Livingston Jr.) wrote “A Visit From Saint Nicholas,” stockings were hung near the fireplace, awaiting a visit from Santa Claus. At the end of the poem, St. Nick “fill’d all the stockings; then turn’d with a jerk,/And laying his finger aside of his nose/And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.” Hanging stockings, 1954. Stockings have been an essential pa

What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 11:25:58 GMT

I couldn’t help thinking of John Le Carré’s spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union Square in Manhattan. Le Carré’s espionage tales, such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, are haunted by the spectre of the mole, the defector, the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to. And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of bei

How to Bring Manufacturing Back to the USA in Small-Batch Format

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 04:37:49 GMT

Steel rule dies that are used to cut leather for mass production Location: Baikal Inc. Handbag Manufacturer Over the last few years, numerous tools and templates have come along to help individuals create websites, produce indie publications, start ecommerce brands and build social networks. The digital realm can be very amateur-friendly. But it’s much harder to just decide one day to start producing physical objects. Design is specialized, and manufacturing is technical, not to mention inaccessible—at least seemingly so—to the average person. Factories exist in a separate sphere from our daily lives, and increasingly, over oceans. While the notion of supporting American-made goo

The Novice’s Guide to Venturing Into the World of Craft Beer

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 03:16:48 GMT

America can’t get enough craft beer. Microbreweries, regional breweries, and brew pubs per capita as of April 2012, according to the Brewers Association Dan Koester wants to assure you, there’s nothing to fear. Despite having names such as the Worthy Adversary, Alimony Ale and Nippletop Milk Stout, craft beers aren’t as intimidating as they appear, though just try ordering a Fulton Lonely Blonde without feeling like a crusty, old sailor. But Koester, craft enthusiast and author of The Definitive Guide to Buying Craft Beer: Discover Everything You Need to Know About Buying and Enjoying Craft Beer, says craft beer is for everyone. Koester says he hasn’t met a cr

Ask Smithsonian

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 04:50:36 GMT

Your questions answered by our experts

Don’t Wait til Mardi Gras for Your King Cake, Celebrate Tres Reyes This Weekend

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 02:40:00 GMT

A Roscon de Reyes, courtesy of Tamorlan (WikiCommons) For years I thought it was just because the Spanish like a good party that they dragged their Christmas celebrations out until the night of January 5, when they had another round of parades and gift giving for Los Reyes Magos, the coming of the Three Kings, also known as Tres Reyes, or simply Reyes. It’s only recently that it clicked that, actually, they got it right. While the rest of us are waiting for Santa to deliver his celebratory gifts for Christmas, Jesus didn’t actually get any until 12 days later, when Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar finally showed up with their gold, frankincense and myrrh. Christmas is a bit of a Johnny

Will We Be Able to Prevent an Asteroid Strike and More Questions From Our Readers

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Will we ever really be able to deflect a comet or asteroid that has targeted us for extinction? Bruce McPhee West Yarmouth, Massachusetts We can deflect such objects big enough to cause regional damage; the key element is how long a warning we have. Even with only a decade or so, we might deflect an asteroid of perhaps 100 meters in diameter, using spacecraft or nuclear weapons. With sufficient warning—say 50 years—we could deflect an object several hundred meters in diameter. Extinction-scale threats have been ruled out for the next few hundred years, so you can relax. Tim Spahr Director, Minor Planet Center, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Why are penguins not

Spotlight

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Water Wise Ends September 15 The Anacostia River, which flows 8.5 miles from Bladensburg, Maryland, through some of the poorest wards of Washington, D.C., was so abused and neglected for so long it was called the “Forgotten River.” But now it’s undergoing a multiyear, multibillion-dollar restoration. To show how riverfront development has influenced urban life, for good and ill, the Anacostia Community Museum has organized “Reclaiming the Edge: Urban Waterways and Civic Engagement,” an exhibition of artwork and research highlighting watershed moments in other cities from London to Louisville. Fresh Faces Ends October 27 Together for the first time: Amerig

Discussion

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

From the Editors Readers say hurray for our American Ingenuity Award winners. Chris Hedges’ profile of the justice advocate Bryan Stevenson quickly garnered thousands of “likes” on Facebook. Fans of the movie director Benh Zeitlin, winner of the visual arts prize, cheered his Beasts of the Southern Wild. “It illustrates that family is where love resides and love can bloom in poverty and despair,” Robinson Yvette says. Robert Gibbons of Washington, North Carolina, saluted Elon Musk, our technology award winner, who is setting out to revolutionize the automotive industry and human space travel. “Musk truly deserves this award,” Gibbons says. “I

Contributors

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Jill Greenberg A photographer, celebrity portraitist and artist, Greenberg is known for her ability to capture humanlike emotions on the faces of animals, featured in her books Monkey Portraits and Bear Portraits. Still, shooting the photogenic infants for “Born to Be Mild” may have been even more difficult. “We shot on a raised platform, so we needed to have spotters all around it to ensure the babies didn’t crawl off the edges,” Greenberg says. “Between that and the fact that they were all teething and drooling profusely, it was an interesting day, to say the least.” Joshua Keating An editor at Foreign Policy, Keating began examining the cultur

The History of Mapmaking, Jared Diamond’s Latest and More Recent Books Reviewed

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond The author of the prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel is no stranger to sweeping assessments. Jared Diamond’s new book, The World Until Yesterday, is a macro examination of what Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic societies (WEIRD is Diamond’s handy, oft-repeated acronym) lack compared with traditional societies. His argument is presented as a series of studies grouped around themes—child care or diet, for example. How does our infant care compare with that of the !Kung of Botswana, whose babies spend 90 percent of their first years in skin-to-skin contact with their mothers? The constant proximity, Diamond writ

Last Minute Food-Themed Gift Ideas

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:11:07 GMT

Give the gift of food this holiday season. Image courtesy of Flickr user poppet with a camera. This year, I made an extra effort to knock out my Christmas shopping as soon as I could. I enjoy gift exchanges—at least to the extent that it’s a way to show I appreciate the people nearest and dearest to me and that I’m keeping them in my thoughts. Frankly, I’d much rather spend the month of December baking (and sharing the resultant wealth of goodies) and being social. But some years, I’m completely strapped for ideas and find myself—days before Christmas—manically browsing shopping websites or, as a last-ditch effort when sanity has completely escaped me, venture o

Your Guide to the Most Delicious Drinks for the Holidays

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 06:29:00 GMT

Imperial Stout is a high-alcohol rendition of standard English stouts born about 300 years ago through a series of sea voyages between England and Russia. It stands in ably as a Christmas Eve nightcap—and can be squeezed into a stocking. Photo by Andrew Bland. With Christmas tunes, ugly sweaters and tacky plastic reindeer out in full force, it seems it’s time again to blend up some rum-spiked eggnog—but today, I’m going to stoke up a different sort of holiday spirit: really strong beer. ‘Tis the season, after all. We often see a spike in the number of extra potent beers about now, the common notion being that a touch more alcohol will warm the bones on co

Smithsonian.com’s Top Books of 2012

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 04:29:18 GMT

How Music Works by David Byrne David Byrne takes readers on an intimate excursion through the past and future of the music industry in his book, How Music Works. The former Talking Heads frontman covers a range of topics—from the technology that has transformed the way music is recorded, to the business of making successful albums, to the science behind how our brains process music—in a comfortable, conversant way. Read an excerpt of Byrne’s book and an interview, in which he offers advice on how to enjoy music. The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro There is Ahab and his white whale, and then there is Robert Caro and his behemoth biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson,

PHOTOS: The Wit and Genius of the Father of Video Art Nam June Paik

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 01:30:00 GMT

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (detail), 1995 He built robots, pioneered the field of video art and coined the term “electronic superhighway” in 1974 to predict our age of communications technology. When he died at the age of 73 in 2006, Korean American artist Nam June Paik was described by the New York Times as ”a shy yet fearless man who combined manic productivity and incessant tinkering with Zen-like equanimity.” “A lifelong Buddhist,” the obituary went on, “Mr. Paik never smoked or drank and also never drove a car. He always seemed amused by himself and his surroundings, which could be overwhelmi

Flower Power, Redefined

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 03:09:50 GMT

Beehive ginger. © Andrew Zuckerman. With a stark white background and a splash of color, minimalist master Andrew Zuckerman has reinvented the way we look at the world around us. Known for his crisp photographs of celebrities and wildlife, Zuckerman turned his lens on the plant kingdom and captured 150 species in full bloom for his latest book Flower. © Andrew Zuckerman. The filmmaker/photographer culled through over 300 species—even visiting the Smithsonian Institution— to select plants both familiar and exotic. Armed with a 65 mega-pixel camera, Zuckerman’s images capture the color, texture and form of each flower and showcase them in a way never seen before. Smithsonian.com

Your Guide to Selecting the Best (or Is It Worst?) Ugly Christmas Sweater

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 03:47:00 GMT

Matching mother/daughter candy cane sweaters from Leisure Arts, 1989. Knitting pattern via Etsy. Spending quality time with family, drinking cider by the fire and playing Secret Santa all encourage getting into the festive holiday mood. So, too, is taking out your ugly Christmas sweaters—and, if you’re really lucky, showing off your tackiest at an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party. In recent years, ugly Christmas sweaters have emerged with newfound public acceptance: They’re no longer creations made by craft store-obsessed grandmas and foisted upon family members only to wind up at a thrift store. Instead, they’ve become a cultural meme, filled to the brim with an egg

Start Hoarding Your Beans, Thanks to Climate Change, $7 Coffee May Be the Norm

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 07:42:00 GMT

How much would you pay for a cup of coffee? Wikimedia Commons. When Starbucks announced in late November that it was unveiling a new $7-per-grande-cup brew in select stores, reaction was mixed. Seattle Weekly’s food writer, Hanna Raskin wrote about an office taste test, “The consensus was that the coffee’s good, but not appreciably better than Starbucks’ standard drip.” And yet, the Costa Rica Finca Palmilera Geisha has been doing okay. The Los Angeles Times reported that the online stock sold out in 24 hours, at $40 a bag. While the news might elicit a Liz-Lemon worthy eye-roll or shooting pangs of jealousy depending on the person, it might actually be

Can Tattoos Be Medicinal?

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:39:28 GMT

Bracelet-like tattoo of the 5,300-year-old Iceman. Photograph © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology/Eurac/Samadelli/Staschitz. “The earliest evidence we have of tattoos, not surprisingly, is cosmetic,” says Lars Krutak. Tattooed on the upper lip of a 7,000-year-old mummy from the Chinchorro culture of northern Chile and southern Peru is a thin pencil mustache. “But, the second oldest we have is medicinal,” he adds. The Iceman and his tattoos. © Lars Krutak. Krutak, sitting at his desk in the bowels of the National Museum of Natural History, is referring to Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old mummified “Iceman,” so named by researchers because he was discovered

The Best in Fashion History: Penny Loafers, Forgotten Suitcases and Hermès Scarves

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 03:47:00 GMT

Bass Weejun loafers for Christmas (c. 1960). The Bass Weejun loafer is not named after a Native American tribe. Suitcases sometimes are time capsules. And a postal worker can design high-end scarves. What follows is Threaded’s second blog roundup of sartorial curiosities from around the web, turning on their head assumptions about what we wear and why we hold onto things. “There’s something about Weejuns that says something about you.” Bass Weejun ad, 1960s. The classic loafer, and various bedazzled iterations of it, have come roaring back into public consciousness since residing on the feet of dressed-down corporates for the past couple decades. How the

Holiday Gift Guide: Ideas for the Design Enthusiasts in Your Life

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 02:29:58 GMT

The Makerbot Replicator 2 desktop 3D printer In preparation for the holiday season, we’ve put together a selection of gift ideas related to some of our favorite Design Decoded posts. The following items are all some combination of useful, beautiful, clever and iconic. We’ll let you decide which is which. Have a very designy holiday! Home 3D Printer: After writing about 3D-printed footwear, you might be inspired to try fabricating your own products at home. Currently, domestic-scale 3D printers are not cheap, but the number of models available is increasing, and the price may drop as this becomes a more common practice. Music for Airports: Brian Eno coined the term “ambi

Nine Gift Ideas For the Science-Loving Art Enthusiast on Your List

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 04:12:47 GMT

Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library. Given the growing public interest in artsy science and sciency art, I like to think these gifts are sure to impress your friends and family this holiday season! For the movie buff: If there is a participating theater near you, grab tickets and take a movie-loving friend or family member to see the documentary Chasing Ice. Inspired by a trip to Iceland in 2005, photographer James Balog embarked on a massive project called the Extreme Ice Survey. He deployed time-lapse cameras across the Arctic as a means of gathering visual evidence of climate change. “His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mou

Collecting the World’s Collections of Small Oddities One Day at a Time

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 05:12:35 GMT

Diana Zlatanovski is meta. As an anthropologist, a museologist, and a curatorial research associate at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she spends her days going through collections of art and artifacts, and with her extra time, she takes photos of those collections and many others she finds outside the museum as part of an ongoing project she calls The Typology. By assembling and examining a grouping of objects with shared attributes, Zlatanovski aims to reveal patterns and information that wouldn’t be visible if looking at each individual piece in isolation. She has gone hunting for these revelations in photos of tools, vegetables, shells, landscapes, portraits, old coins, an

Five Ways to Deck Your Halls With Food this Christmas

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 03:33:00 GMT

Popcorn and cranberry chain. Image courtesy of Flickr user rcoder. I love decorating my apartment for the holidays. The day after Thanksgiving, the tree goes up and it—along with windows and tables and other flat surfaces I can do without for the next four to six weeks—are festooned with whatever seasonal odds and ends I’ve amassed over the years. Not sure what it is, but when I walk into my home at night and am greeted by scads of novelty lighting, I suddenly feel at peace with the world. In recent years, I’ve indulged my love for shabby chic (or maybe just campy) decor by making beer can reindeer, which I’m currently using to decorate the living room sh

Dress Codes and Etiquette, Part 3: The Death of the Dinner Jacket on Open Water

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 09:43:00 GMT

Dining aboard the RMS Caronia, from a 1950s World Cruise brochure. As the sun dips below the ocean’s horizon on a cruise ship, swimsuits and flip-flops give way to the evening’s dictated dress code. Depending on the cruise, that means suits or tuxedos for men and formal gowns or cocktail dresses for women. The dining room code, in contrast to the informality elsewhere on the ship, is a relic of another time. Cruise ship dining with white gloves, 1960s. Ship dining rooms were formal from the start, at the beginning of the 20th century. They reflected the lavish lifestyle that their wealthy transatlantic passengers enjoyed on land and the attire that was typical when hig

Why Peanut Butter is the Perfect Home for Salmonella

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 07:09:00 GMT

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It’s not peanut butter jelly time. In fact, put down the peanut butter and walk away slowly. If the spread you are putting on your morning toast is from a jar of Organic Trader Joe’s Creamy Salted Valencia peanut butter, you may just want to stick with jelly. The reason? The Food and Drug Administration issued a summons to shut down the country’s largest organic peanut butter processor earlier this week, per the Associated Press. Salmonella in peanut butter is no new discovery—in 2007, contaminated Peter Pan products resulted in 329 reported cases in 41 states—and this past September, Trader Joe’s voluntarily re

The Insane Amount of Biodiversity in One Cubic Foot

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 03:02:30 GMT

The cube was submerged in Tennessee’s Duck River. © David Liittschwager. When one sets out to document the diversity of life on Earth, there’s a real advantage to limiting the sample size. “I thought one cubic foot would be manageable,” says David Liittschwager, sitting behind the wide, unadorned work table that fills the dining room of his San Francisco flat. Framed images of some of the thousands of animals and plants he’s photographed during the past 25 years hang on the walls. “A cubic foot fits in your lap; you can put your arms around it. If you stand with both feet together and look down, it’s just about the size of your footprint while standing still,” he says. “I though

A Holiday Shopping Reminder: Do We Really Need That Extra Pair of Jeans?

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 09:32:00 GMT

Higbee’s department store, 1963. via Cleveland State University, Michael Schwartz Library Special Collections, Cleveland Press Collection. With Thanksgiving behind us and the new year on the horizon, we have officially entered holiday shopping season. Black Friday buying frenzies gets more frenetic every year as ads remind us, repeatedly, to shop early and shop often. It’s tough not to get sucked into the mindset that the only way to be festive is to consume. It’s stating the obvious, but getting into the holiday spirit still means slowing down and spending time with family and friends. It’s also about being more considered about our wish lists and deliberate

A New Life for Old Breweries

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 04:30:00 GMT

A rendering of The Brewery development in Milwaukee, WI (image via The Brewery) Our previous post on the origin of Pabst’s blue ribbon got me thinking about the current state of the former Pabst Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Pabst left Milwaukee in 1996 after more than 100 years of brewing and the 18.4 acre site, which is listed on the National Historic Register, remained unoccupied until 2006, when its 16 decaying buildings were saved from becoming yet another industrial ruin. The late developer and philanthropist Joseph J. Zilber bought the entire property with the aim of transforming one of the city’s most prominent locales into one of the city’s most promine

Why Do We Hiccup? And Other Scientific Mysteries—Seen Through the Eyes of Artists

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 03:25:15 GMT

What drives plate tectonics? Illustrated by Marc Bell. “Today we’re spoiled with an abundance of information,” write Jenny Volvovski, Julia Rothman and Matt Lamothe, in their latest book, The Where, The Why, and The How. “We carry devices that fit in our pockets but contain the entirety of human knowledge. If you want to know anything, just Google it.” Why, for instance, are eggs oval-shaped? The authors wondered—and, in a matter of seconds, there was the answer, served up in the form of a Wikipedia entry. Eggs are oblong, as opposed to spherical, so that they roll in a contained circle (less chance for wandering eggs). They also fit into a nest better th

A Pie Champion’s Award-Winning Sweet Potato Pie Recipe and More Holiday Advice

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 03:47:00 GMT

Nothing more American than apple pie, except maybe the Great American Pie Festival. Photo by the American Pie Council When Schwan’s Consumer Brands North America, Inc. asked the public in 2008, who makes the best pie, “mom” earned 27 percent in favor with store-bought brands following close behind at 26 percent. Poor “grandma” only got 17 percent of the vote. But the correct answer, according to the American Pie Council’s 2012 Championships, is Jennifer Nystrom. At least, in the category of amateur sweet potato pies. Nystrom’s original recipe for her maple pecan sweet potato pie took home first place in April. Though she’s been competin

Where Did Pabst Win that Blue Ribbon?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:56:00 GMT

A vintage Pabst Blue Ribbon advertisement from the mid 1950s. “Go get me a blue ribbon.” I must’ve heard my grandpa utter those words hundreds of times as we sat together fishing off our small dock. Even before I could read I knew which beer to grab for him – the one with the first prize ribbon on the can. I didn’t realize it as a child of course, but that ease of recognition was a testament to the power of branding. Pabst Blue Ribbon beer –PBR to its friends– may today be best known as the preferred beer of old Midwestern fisherman and mustachioed hipsters, but that instantly recognizable ribbon is more than just a symbol or marketing ploy.

Esperanza Spalding Took on Bieber, Now Takes on Jazz

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Esperanza Spalding, the 28-year-old bassist, composer and vocalist, is shushing her audience - many of whom have paid good money for the privilege. During the middle of her set at Chicago’s City Winery, a trendy restaurant and music venue, she holds the microphone close and admonishes: “Sssshh.” Her virtuoso bass playing and spellbinding vocals had the audience in the palm of her hand for the first half of her show. But an extended instrumental interlude showcasing her band has been marred by talking in the crowd. “I wanna hear them,” she tells her listeners, gesturing toward her 12-piece ensemble. There’s nervous laughter from the audience. A woman nea

How Benh Zeitlin Made Beasts of the Southern Wild

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Ed. Note (January 10, 2013): Congratulations to Benh Zeitlin and the cast and crew of Beasts of the Southern Wild for their four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Zeitlin. Sprawling on the edge of a levee along a deadened twist of the Lower Mississippi is a compound that, from 1894 to 1999, was the only leprosy hospital on the U.S. mainland. It’s late summer and, at my suggestion, Benh Zeitlin is exploring the facility that once housed hundreds of patients, many of whom were disfigured, feared and shunned. Clouds mass in the Louisiana sky as the 30-year-old filmmaker roams the long masonry arcades with Mr. Pete, a leprosy survivor who’s lived on

Karen Cusolito Lights Her Artwork on Fire

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Meet the artist who burns her creations to amazing effect

Penn Jillette Reveals the Secrets of Fire-Eating

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

I didn’t learn fire-eating to conquer my fears. I learned fire-eating because I desperately wanted to be in show business. You don’t want to learn fire-eating from a book, but that’s how I started. I read Step Right Up! by Dan Mannix—the 1950 memoir of a real-life carny—and I wanted to be “with it.” Dan didn’t explain how to eat fire, but I felt I could read between the lines and figure it out. I was 19 years old, and like many men that age, I felt invincible. I wasn’t, and you aren’t. Remember that. Do not eat fire! I practiced all afternoon and burned the snot out of my mouth and lips. My mouth looked like wall-to-wall herpes s

What Do Alicia Keys, the Boss and Wagner Have in Common?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

There are two kinds of flames in Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire.” From the first measure there’s the sharp tap of the snare drum rim, with the emphasis on the third beat constantly unexpected, keeping the rhythm slightly off-kilter. Those are the sparks, while a few seconds later Springsteen’s voice—low, airy, sometimes almost mumbled—enters, smoldering in an unhurried melt. In art and music—as in science and engineering—fire has been the fuel of creativity, the very symbol of inspiration. “The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire,” the sculptor Auguste Rodin said, adding that the artist must also &l

Discussion

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

From the editors We have a winner! Of the thousands who tried Ken Jennings’ Great American History Puzzle (October), the first to solve all 11 challenges was Jeff Davidson, a 23-year-old software engineer in Mountain View, California. You can play (for fun) at Smithsonian.com/puzzle. And here’s the solution to the first challenge, which was launched on page 39: Jefferson’s “greatest creation” was the Declaration of Independence. In the “Puzzle Code,” each number pair denotes a word, and a letter within that word, in the Declaration. The selected letters spell out: Famous last words will help you trace the hidden American icon on this magazine cove

Where Does Your Thanksgiving Meal Come From?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 05:03:00 GMT

No, the answer is not the grocery store (though technically, that is correct). While that may be the last place your Thanksgiving fowl hung out before you brought it home, chances are the turkey was born and raised on one of the farms on this map created by ESRI and compiled from data from the United States Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture (2007). The map also has data on three of the traditional side dishes: sweet potatoes, cranberries and green beans. See a larger version of this map. Some cliff notes before you say grace: Turkeys Turkey production in the U.S. is a nearly 5 billion dollar industry—254 million turkeys were produced this year alone in prep

The Science of Cooking a Turkey, and Other Thanksgiving Dishes

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 03:00:00 GMT

Christopher Kimball on the set of America’s Test Kitchen with Bridget Lancaster. Photo by Daniel J. Van Ackere. Christopher Kimball, the bow-tied host of America’s Test Kitchen and founder of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, knows the difference between good cooks and great cooks. Great cooks—and he has built his empire on this premise—understand the scientific principles involved in their techniques. They are fluent in the different modes of heat transfer: radiant heat, convection and conduction. They can explain how diffusion and osmosis maintain equilibrium in their recipes. And, perhaps most impressively, they harness this scientific knowledge to defy gra

Giving Thanks to Clothes That Stretch

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 05:27:00 GMT

We can offer our gratitude this Thanksgiving to the English inventor Thomas Hancock for allowing our clothes to give a little as we indulge in a holiday feast. Without Hancock, we might not have elastic. And without elastic, this holiday could be very uncomfortable. Thomas Hancock’s Masticator. Hancock was a key player in establishing the British rubber industry. While patenting and producing elastic fastenings for gloves, suspenders and stockings in 1820, he was struck by how much rubber he was wasting. An early environmentalist, he invented a machine called the masticator that shreds scraps of rubber and allows those remnants to be recycled. Fun fact: Before patenting the mast

Death of a Twinkie: What’s a Trash Foodie to Do Without Hostess?

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 07:19:00 GMT

Twinkies. Image courtesy of Flickr user Christian Cable. The first thing I did when I got into the office this morning was a Google search for DIY Sno-Balls because I woke up to the sound of NPR confirming my worst fears: Hostess, the bakery responsible for Twinkies, is declaring bankruptcy and liquidating its assets in light of a labor strike that began on November 9. I’ll leave the discussion about how the bakery ran afoul of its workforce to other information outlets and instead focus on the actual baked goods. In the pantheon of novelty foods, Hostess was the prima domestic diva bar none. Not only were her wares fun to look at—a Sno-Ball’s shaggy mound of pink co

Contributors

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

dream hampton The first female editor of the hip-hop magazine The Source, hampton, who spells her name with lowercase letters in a nod to poet bell hooks, has co-authored biographies with Jay-Z and Q-Tip. In profiling pioneering jazz phenom Esperanza Spalding (“Beyond Jazz”), she found an artist intent on taking her craft to the masses. “She occupies some very mainstream spaces, from the White House to the Grammys,” hampton says. “At the same time, she very much self-identifies as a jazz musician and wants to bring young people into jazz. It’s reaffirming.” Seth Mnookin Mnookin, the author of The Panic Virus, which chronicles Americans’

Trash as Treasure: Crocheting Plastic Coral Reefs

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 03:08:46 GMT

The Retail Reef, by Helle Jorgensen. Image courtesy of AAAS. Helle Jorgensen walks the beaches near her home in Sydney, collecting trash that the tide brings ashore. Her bycatch is varied: ropes, cigarette lighters, even toothbrushes. And, plastic bags—the real catch she is after—are bountiful. According to the artist, white, gray, blue and green bags are abundant in Australian waters. She also supplements her supply with imports. “I get lots of bags from all over the world,” says Jorgensen, in an audio slideshow produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). When she is traveling in the United Kingdom, for instance, Jorgensen snags fantastic o

James Bond’s Dapper Dinner Jackets

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 02:33:00 GMT

Sean Connery getting fitted for one of his classic suit jackets by Anthony Sinclair. Along with the requisite high-tech gadgets and gizmos, it wouldn’t be a James Bond movie without 007 sporting an impeccably fitted dinner jacket (usually accompanied by some high-stakes hijinks). The dinner jacket—or tuxedo, as it’s less elegantly referred to in the United States, or smoking (as in le smoking), as it’s wonderfully called in some parts of Europe—has been around since the late 19th century when the Prince of Wales lopped of the tails of his tailcoat for less formal, but still fancy, dinner parties. It’s thought to have made its way across the pond af

The World’s Largest Collection of Coffee Cup Lids

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 05:08:00 GMT

What Harpman calls the true beginning of the reusable lid. Image courtesy of Google Patents. Under Louise Harpman’s bed, in acid-free boxes, there are superior double-walled, climate-controlled and UV-protected cases filled to the brim with plastic coffee cup lids. Over 550 to be exact—and the number is growing. “When I’m in a 7-Eleven and I see a lid I’ve never seen before I think ‘Oh wow! This is fantastic!’ So I grab a couple thinking there is somebody out there who is going to want to trade with me,” Harpman says. “Most of the time, I am surprised if there are three other people in the world that are interested in this stuff.&

A Photographer Turns Her Eye to the Recycling Process

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 03:15:00 GMT

Going Knots, by Huguette Roe. Courtesy of the artist. For her Recycle Series, photographer Huguette Roe visited more than 100 recycling facilities in the United States and France. Each time, she got the proper clearance to be on the premises, but still she felt a bit like a spy. “It’s trash, but it’s very guarded,” Roe said. Wearing a hard hat and a reflective work vest, she would tour each plant under close supervision. “I had to scan very quickly in order to find the details that I liked,” Roe said in an interview with Science magazine. At many of the facilities, materials were sorted by type—soda cans, telephone wires, aluminum pipes, shr

In the Future, You Will 3D Print Yourself as an Action Figure

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 02:42:00 GMT

This headline is somewhat misleading, since it is actually already true in the present—for a few lucky Japanese people—that you can have a 3D-printed miniature version of yourself. A Tokyo-based company called Omote 3D will soon debut their next-level photo booth at a pop-up shop Harajuku, one of the world’s most fertile seeding grounds for new style trends. Those lucky enough to book a reservation will be asked to stand still for 15 minutes while a photographer scans their body all the way around. They will then get to select one of three sizes for the tiny, full-color replica. I’m already seeing these on top of wedding cakes a few years down the line. At lea

Designing a 51-State Flag

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 02:22:00 GMT

One suggested design for the 51-star American flag (image: Reddit) Back in January, when Newt Gingrich was still a GOP hopeful, he presented the idea of making the moon into the 51st member of the United States. Fast-forward a few months: Gingrich did not win the nomination, the moon remains uncolonized, but the notion of another state was in fact a very real part of the 2012 election. In Puerto Rico, a clear majority of citizens voted for the island’s statehood. This doesn’t mean that Puerto Rico will be promptly admitted to the union. A number of factors and decisions still stand between the vote and the final outcome. However, it does beg the question: What would a 51-

5 Essential James Bond Accessories

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 03:57:00 GMT

Desmond Llewelyn as Q in License to Kill showing Bond (Timothy Dalton) the camera gun that, when put together, became a sniper rifle. James Bond’s accessories are never what they seem, thanks to the ingenuity of “Q” as Desmond Llewelyn was known in the 17 007 films in which he appeared. A watch was never just a timepiece. A briefcase was never a mere file holder. His accessories weren’t chosen for style (although, of course, if they were Bond’s, they were always stylish), but for their function. In those 17 films, audiences would await Q’s customary arrival. He’d present an impeccably dressed Bond with his new handy—and always handsome&m

Amazing Close-Ups of Seeds

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 03:18:41 GMT

Delphinium pergrinum. Courtesy of Rob Kesseler, Wolfgang Stuppy and Papadakis Publisher. About an hour south of London, in Sussex, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are preparing seeds for storage. Researchers at 48 partner institutions in 16 countries collect seeds and send them to Kew, where the specimens are cleaned, dried for about a month and then stored for perpetuity in an underground vault, kept at a chilly -20 degrees Celsius. The Millennium Seed Bank, as it is called, was founded in 2000 as an effort to stock away viable seeds, now, should we need them to restore plant populations in the future. Nearly 100,000, or about one quarter, of the world’s plant spec

Meet the Salak, the Ubiquitous Indonesian Fruit You’ve Never Heard Of

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 02:21:00 GMT

A bowl of gleaming snakefruit beckon tourists to indulge at a hotel in Bali. Photo by Rachel Nuwer At a morning market in Bali, the usual gaudy suspects – papayas, mangos, dragon fruit and heaps of rancid-smelling durians - are on display. For Western visitors seeking culinary novelty, however, the most enticing fruit likely will not be the biggest or the brightest, but a humble, shiny brown offering called the salak. For the uninitiated, this fleshy, spongey morsel offers a perfumed cocktail of bright flavors, with hints of pineapple, citrus, honey and possibly even soap. In Indonesia, salaks are as common as apples or oranges in the U.S. Also called snakefruit, this strawberr

Five Ways to Cook With Cauliflower

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 03:51:00 GMT

Roasted cauliflower. Image courtesy of Flicker user Andrew Scrivani. Should you ever encounter my Mom’s mom and get her on the subject of cauliflower, she will go on to tell you about the best deep-fried cauliflower recipe in the world, the one with the nutmeg in the batter that made the snack sing and how she could sit down and eat a whole bowl if she didn’t watch herself. She will then go on to tell you how, after making up a batch, she spent an entire workday thinking about diving into the leftovers in her fridge only to come home and find that one of her daughters beat her to it. Due to dietary restrictions, she hasn’t had it in a number of years and she, always

Art as Therapy: How to Age Creatively

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 03:07:19 GMT

Approaching Storm, by Ernest Lawson, 1919-20. The Phillips Collection. A few minutes late, I tiptoe into an alcove of the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., where Brooke Rosenblatt is leading a discussion with ten museum visitors about Ernest Lawson’s oil painting Approaching Storm. “Where do you think this scene takes place?” asks Rosenblatt. “Have you ever been to a place that looks like this?” She calls on audience members, who are all seated in folding chairs. The landscape of rolling hills and a stream lined with cattails seems to remind each person of a different place—Scotland, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, France, Switzerland

Redesigning The Vote

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 05:52:00 GMT

The infamous Florida butterfly ballot from the 2000 election. Americans head to the polls today to vote for the next President of the United States, as we traditionally have on November Tuesdays since 1845. However, there is no tradition dictating how we vote. In America there is no standard ballot, so depending on where voters live, they may use a pencil, pen, punchcard, lever, or computer. There are thousands of different ballots in America, and while I’m sure many ballots are clear and concise, too many are illegible and confusing. Generally speaking, voting in America is terribly designed. From the queues to the machines to the ballot itself, it seems absolutely absurd that

Favorites From the Cooper-Hewitt’s New Online Collection

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 03:25:00 GMT

Matchbook in the shape of a folded men’s shirt, with incised checkerboard-patterned weave, cuffs and bib, smiling child’s head peering out from opening at collar. Reverse inscribed “New York Clothing House, 102 & 104 Baltimore St., Baltimore.” Upper curved section swings open to reveal match compartment, c. mid-19th century. Image: Cooper-Hewitt The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, has recently digitized 60 percent of its collection and made it available to the public. If my math is correct, that means that 123,802 objects spanning 24 centuries can now be viewed online. Prints, drawings, graphic design, decorative

The Science of Good Cooking: Tips From America’s Test Kitchen

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 03:30:00 GMT

Christopher Kimball on the set of America’s Test Kitchen with Bridget Lancaster. Photo by Daniel J. Van Ackere In 1983, Christopher Kimball, founder of Cook’s Magazine, received a letter from an irate grandmother unhappy with his presentation of recipes and cooking. “You don’t cook from your heart,” she wrote. Kimball responded in the affirmative. “Yes,” he said, “I cook from my head.” That approach helped Kimball, a slim man never without his bow tie and glasses, build an empire of inquisitive, science-based cooking with his magazine now named Cook’s Illustrated and PBS shows America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Co

The Return of the Hand-Painted Sign

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 03:12:00 GMT

Jeff Canham’s painted letters (image: Princeton Architectural Press) Last fall, I went on a reporting road trip through the American South. Eating was not the main purpose of the trip, but the need to find food along the road between North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana provided a great secondary mission. As a guide, we relied on Garden & Gun magazine’s list of the 50 Best Southern Foods. I referenced it time and again during the trip, and the image that accompanied each page became like a visual symbol of the journey. Hand-lettered chalk sign by Dana Tanamachi for Garden & Gun magazine (danatanamachi.com) A few months later, that familiar picture

Beetles Invasion: One Artist’s Take on the Insect

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 02:50:41 GMT

The artist’s studio. Courtesy of Joan Danziger. Perched on a stool in her studio in northwest Washington, D.C., artist Joan Danziger pages through the book Living Jewels. “This one influenced me,” she says, pointing to Phaedimus jagori, a green-and-gold beetle from the Philippines. The book contains flattering portraits of beetles taken by photographer Poul Beckmann. “See this one?” Danziger asks, showing me a yellow-and-black striped beetle from Mexico called Gymnetis stellata. “It became the ‘Tiger Beetle’ up there.” Clinging to a white wall in front of us are dozens of beetles—sculpted in all different shapes, sizes and colors.

Incredible Political Fashion Statements From Past Elections

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 06:54:00 GMT

It’s hard to believe—especially as the East Coast reels in the aftermath of Sandy—that the election is just a few days away. While the candidates crisscross battleground states in last-ditch efforts to win over undecided voters, and volunteers go door to door to get out the vote, voices are growing hoarse with strain. Of course, if all else fails and laryngitis sets in, you can communicate your campaign message through dress! Usually, that means the requisite campaign T-shirt, button, baseball cap—or mask, if you really want to make your point. But occasionally, campaign-wear turns more creative. Rocky paper campaign dress for Nelson Rockefeller, 1960s. The most

Food During Times of Grief

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 06:43:00 GMT

Pan de muerto. Image courtesy of Flickr user sierravalleygirl. There comes a point in every person’s life where they must decide how to take care of their mortal remains. There are tons of possibilities. There’s traditional: the crematorium or a simple pine box set six feet under. There’s the avant garde: artist Jae Rhim Lee’s prototypical mushroom suit where fungus spores grow on and break down the corpse. Some get especially inventive, such as comic book editor Mark Gruenwald, who had his ashes mixed in with ink and used to print a comic book, or Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry who had his ashes launched into space. There’s also the debate as to whet

Alan Dudley’s Wondrous Array of Animal Skulls

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 02:42:04 GMT

North Sulawesi Babirusa (Babyrousa babyrussa). Credit: Nick Mann. Alan Dudley is obsessed with skulls. At the age of 18, he found a fox carcass near his home, skinned the animal and prepared its skull for museum-like display. “His single fox became a fox and a bat; then a fox and a bat and a newt; then fox, bat, newt, anteater, owl, cuckoo, monkey; and on and on,” writes Simon Winchester, a bestselling author, in a new book. The 55-year-old taxidermist now has more than 2,000 skulls in glass cases and mounted to walls in his home in Coventry, England. His personal collection, thought to be the largest and most comprehensive in the world, is only growing, as he continues to

Candy Land: A Coast-to-Coast Tour of America’s Sweet Treats

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 02:37:00 GMT

Red state, blue state; no matter what the regional specialty, this is candy country. Photo by Jack Lyons Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. And sometimes you feel like a regionally-specific, hometown-proud confection that you just can’t find anywhere else (or if you can, everyone knows they won’t be as good). This Halloween, we’re saluting those finds that marry place and taste for a lasting bond. Given our country’s proclivity for sweets, it’s no surprise that the Census Bureau has collected data on the confectionery industry since 1926. All so the government can tell us that in 2010, the average American consumed almost 25 pounds

Why Does Dracula Wear a Tuxedo? The Origins of Bram Stoker’s Timeless Vampire

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:10:00 GMT

Bela Lugosi’s onscreen debut as Count Dracula (image still from Dracula, 1931) 2012 is the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s death. Although we now know him best as the author of Dracula, Stoker was better known, at the time of his death in 1912, as the manager and biographer of the great Shakespearian actor Sir Henry Irving. In fact, in an editorial accompanying Stoker’s obituary, his “fantastic fictions” were described as “not of a memorable quality.” History would prove otherwise. Stoker’s immortal Dracula has proven to be a truly timeless work of literature that has forever defined the idea and aesthetic of the vampire. A few weeks

The Halloween Tradition Best Left Dead: Kale as Matchmaker

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 02:32:00 GMT

Meet the Cromartie Fool, the goofy man holding a kale stock. According to Celtic tradition, it was believed that this jester presided over Halloween festivities—many of which involved single men and women uprooting kale stalks to determine their future. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The commemoration of the last day of the ancient Celtic calendar was a major influences on how we celebrate Halloween, but one significant tradition has (thankfully?) not survived. Kale, that leafy salad green, was a tool of marriage divination, identifying life partners for men and women in ancient Scotland and Ireland. But first, some context: According to the Celtic calendar, on the mornin

12 Creepy Kids in Halloween Masks

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 03:24:00 GMT

Pumpkinhead and cat(?), date unknown. It wouldn’t be Halloween without masks. Jokers, scary clowns, gorillas and, when the presidential election converges with Halloween, tricker-or-treaters in presidential candidate masks (the Nixon mask never gets old) come out in all their anonymous glory. Pop culture aside, masks have been around for thousands of years. In fact, the oldest preserved mask is about 9,000 years old. That said, it’s assumed that masks were made centuries and centuries prior. Used for ceremonies and rituals, decoration, camouflage, entertainment (comedy and tragedy drama masks, of course), sport and protection, they’re handy, multipurpose accessorie

Nikon Announces the Winners of its “Small World” Competition

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 02:43:52 GMT

1st Place: The blood-brain barrier in a live zebrafish embryo. Image by Dr. Jennifer L. Peters and Dr. Michael R. Taylor. Last week, Nikon unveiled the winners of its 38th annual Small World Photomicrography Competition. What’s photomicrography, you ask? Well, while there are many techniques involved, the genre, simply put, is photography captured through a light microscope. Researchers use photomicrographs as a means of scientific inquiry. The images depict life in all its glorious, magnified detail. “But a good photomicrograph is also an image whose structure, color, composition and content is an object of beauty, open to several levels of comprehension and appreciation,

Scientific Illustrations: Your Go-To Guides for Halloween Costumes

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 02:53:11 GMT

A Mexican funnel-eared bat. Courtesy of BHL. One of the core missions of the Smithsonian Institution is to understand and sustain a biodiverse planet. Many projects have been implemented across the Smithsonian with this noble intention. One of my personal favorites is the Biodiversity Heritage Library, for which the Smithsonian Institution Libraries is a founding member. Launched in 2005, BHL is an impressive one-stop web-shop where researchers can access digital copies of thousands of scientific books and journals from 14 natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries and research institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Seven years into the ambitious undertak

The Witches of Halloween Past

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 02:17:00 GMT

If recent memes are any indication, it’s likely you’ll wind up as Big Bird, a face-eating zombie, Psy or the Ecco Homo fresco for Halloween. Or, there are the classics. You know, the default ghosts, scarecrows, clowns and witches our parents’ and even our grandparents’ generations wore for Halloween. (Turns out that my grandmother, my mother and I all had our turns as teenage witches, going door-to-door clad in black pointy hats collecting our bounty.) Contestants in the Halloween Slick Chick beauty contest in Anaheim, California, 1947. Silk stockings ad from Ipswich Hosiery, 1927. Halloween is thought to date back more than 2,000 years to a time when Celti

The History of Cooking and Other New Books, Reviewed

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:30:00 GMT

Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson To the extent that we devote any prolonged thought to the items on our plate, it’s probably to obsess over the ingredients. Are they organic, low-fat, whole-grain, local, genetically modified, raised with loving care? But what about all the tools we use to get things down our gullet? Bee Wilson’s spirited history of kitchen implements ranges from the humble wooden spoon to the cutting-edge sous vide machine. A British food writer and historian, Wilson is learned and personal, wise and charming. “There are fork cultures and there are chopstick cultures, but all the people of the world use spoons,” she writes sternly, then admits: &ldqu

Spotlight

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:30:00 GMT

Northern Exposure Ends January 2, 2013 The first recorded contact between Europeans and Inuit occurred in the 1570s, but explorers from Northern Europe had been visiting the American Arctic for centuries before then. The Inuit artist Abraham Anghik Ruben contrasts the lives of natives and newcomers in the 23 works of “Arctic Journeys/Ancient Memories: The Sculpture of Abraham Anghik Ruben,” at the American Indian Museum. His figures of stone, bronze and tusk incorporate both Norse and Inuit traditions and highlight a kinship between two cultures rooted in the rigors of the polar north. A District in Full Coming October 30 In the mid-1800s, before Washingt