At its height in the 1990s, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong housed about 50,000 people. Its population is unremarkable for small cities, but what set Kowloon apart from others of its size was its density. Spanning only 2.6 hectares, the tiny enclave contained 1,255,000 people
Americans doing “e‑mail jobs” and working in the “laptop class” tend to make much of the quantity of coffee they require to keep going, or even to get started. In that sense alone, they have something in common with Civil War soldiers. “Union soldiers were given 36 pounds of
A trick question is designed to fool us into proposing the wrong answer (example below). A trap question, on the other hand, stops the train completely. A trap question demands an answer, and the answer will paralyze us and keep us from the work at hand. “Yes, but how many
Image via Wikimedia Commons In 2013, the food writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan stumbled across an article in the Boston Globe describing a trove of digitized documents from Ernest Hemingway’s home in Cuba that had been recently donated to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and
This month: Gordon Parks’s iconic photographs, Wendy Red Star’s Indigenous abstractions, Chiffon Thomas’s unsettling mixed media sculptures, a celebration of Juxtapoz Magazine , and more.
“[I] have always worked from the perspective of starting with home, then street, neighborhood, city, world,” the artist told Hyperallergic critic John Yau.
"It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real... It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain."
What Dix conveys so deftly is that terror and trauma are felt, not thought, and art about these experiences fails when it tries to make sense of things.
The timeless tale of the stork delivering babies is, like many myths, difficult to trace to a single source, as the story unfolds in folklore throughout Europe, the Americas, North Africa, and the Middle East. In the short film “Impossible Journey” —directed by YUCA and
Wells Fargo analysts ordered 75 identical burrito bowls from 8 different Chipotles and found that portion sizes varied wildly . The biggest bowl was almost 2x heavier than the smallest. Wild that they don’t standardize this from a cost perspective. 💬 Join the discussion on
I just found out over the weekend about my pal Emily Witt’s new book, Health and Safety , and lo, there’s an excerpt of it in the fiction issue of the New Yorker. I didn’t know what to include here, so I just took the opening paragraphs…the rest of it is pretty intense. On
A love-ly new artwork curls through the bustling Duke of York Square in central London, thanks to Yoni Alter ( previously ), who celebrates the most enigmatic and important emotion in human experience. Approachable from various vantage points, the piece appears like a squiggly
Ohhhhh coooool, a grinning foreskin robot . A team recently “unveiled a technique for creating lifelike robotic skin using living human cells”. Don’t watch the video if you ever want to sleep again. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →