The hidden world of plant roots
Plant roots don’t have a nervous system, yet can produce sophisticated responses. What does that say about intelligence? - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon
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The Art World Is a Joke
April Fools’ round-ups, Aruna D’Souza on the abstract painter who’s everywhere this year, art books to read this spring, and more.
The house is a work of art
Frank Lloyd Wright exalted the individual and made ordinary life beautiful. But his life was marked by scandal and grief - by Andrew Deming Read on Aeon
The Good Catholics of Buffalo
With thousands of US soldiers dying in Vietnam, a righteous group of young New Yorkers embarked on a secret mission to bring the war machine to its knees.
The Camps Promising to Turn You—or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male
"At the Men of War Crucible, you bear-crawl through rivers. At Warrior Week, you dig your own grave. At the Squire Program, your teen-ager can take part, too."
Who sets your agenda?
It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it. Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are settings where time, tools, and options are severely limited. But even in these settings, we have
Discover the Retirement Home for Elderly Musicians Created by Giuseppe Verdi: Created in 1899, It Still Lives On Today
Among my works, the one I like best is the Home that I have had built in Milan for accommodating old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young did not possess the virtue of saving. Poor and dear companions of my life! —Giuseppe Verdi Is there a remedy for
Do Not Spare Yourself
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly
“ LLM-generated passwords…appear strong, but...
“ LLM-generated passwords…appear strong, but are fundamentally insecure , because LLMs are designed to predict tokens – the opposite of securely and uniformly sampling random characters.”
10 Art Books for Your Spring Reading List
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s first catalog in 25 years, Molly Crabapple chronicles the Jewish Bund, a photographer captures a Black Southern waterway, and more
Great Unreleased Track From Kendrick Lamar: Bloody Murder
This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube
Could Colorado Create the Country's First Artist Corporation?
A new bipartisan bill could help enshrine intellectual property rights and expand healthcare access for cultural workers.
The Courage of Vulnerability: Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters to Her First Love
One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los
Kamrooz Aram Breaks Down the Grid
Rather than deconstruct Western modernism or reinsert Islamic visual idioms, the artist loosens the grip of the grid.
From Heatmap News & MIT, the Electricity Price Hub is...
From Heatmap News & MIT, the Electricity Price Hub is “a new public data platform that provides monthly, utility-level estimates of residential electricity rates and bills across the United States going back to 2021…”
The Best April Fools’ Jokes in the Art World This Year
In addition to our own fresh and feral stock of jokes, we wanted to show some love to a few other examples of shenanigans across the arts and humanities.
Remembering Glen Baxter, Pat Steir, Melvin Edwards
This week, we honor an absurdist cartoonist, a trailblazing feminist artist, and a sculptor who probed the history of violence in the US.
Scientists have genetically engineered tobacco plants to...
Scientists have genetically engineered tobacco plants to produce five psychedelic compounds , including psilocybin, DMT, and psychedelic compounds secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad.
On Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything
I was thankful to read Marcin Wichary’s review of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything . I first heard about the book months and months ago; it sounded potentially interesting but I was afraid it was going to suffer from a now-familiar myopia of the “tech” old guard.
A Palestinian-American Photographer’s Intimate Gaze
Dean Majd captured images of his inner circle for a decade, deconstructing performances of masculinity in the process.
Not sure what level of prank/gag/stunt this is (note...
Not sure what level of prank/gag/stunt this is (note today’s date), but this is supposedly a fully functional compass that only points to the Olive Garden in Times Square .
The Pioneering Coffee House Serving Since 1645 ....
The Pioneering Coffee House Serving Since 1645 . “In Oxford, ‘runners’ would go from coffee house to coffee house, picking up all the best news and delivering it back to customers, said Garner. You’re talking human wi-fi.”
Opposing ICE Might Save the Country. It Could Also Ruin Your Life.
"For months, lone vibe coder Rafael Concepcion has obsessively built tools to counter the federal immigration crackdown—pivoting as he’s been outmatched. He’s also lost his job and become a target."
After two years off, Tom Scott is back with a new...
After two years off, Tom Scott is back with a new YouTube series : “I took a road trip through every county in England, and filmed something interesting in each of them.”
Gillian Welch: This Land is Her Land
"You don’t need to shout it for the entire world, but you need to give hope to the people who need it, who you can speak to."
Street Artists Take On Monumental Infrastructure in ‘Impossible’ Photos
Joseph Ford's ongoing series 'Impossible Street Art' invites street artists to imagine their work in inaccessible sites. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The
How James Cameron Shot Titanic’s Hugely Complex Sinking Scene
The dark arts of “Hollywood accounting” make it difficult to determine film budgets with precision. But according to reasonable reckonings, James Cameron may have directed not just one but several of the most expensive movies of all time. The underwater sci-fi spectacle that
“All of Humanity’s Problems Stem From Marc Andreessen’s Inability to Sit Quietly in a Room Alone”
Tech investor and billionaire Marc Andreessen has many bad opinions (as evidenced by his investment portfolio). On a recent podcast, he shared a real boner : that he isn’t introspective, that people 400 years ago weren’t at all introspective, and that introspection was a
Why Are We Not Better Than We Are: How Poetry Saves Lives
"...a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time."
The Three Elements of the Good Life
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of