The Unsung Craftspeople Who Built Ancient Egypt
A new publication reflects a growing interest in the lives of the makers behind the civilization’s arts and crafts, long marginalized and erased by mythologized depictions of the ancient world.
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Chimpanzees use tools to collect food and deliberately...
Chimpanzees use tools to collect food and deliberately teach other chimps (often their offspring) to use them for ant dipping, algae fishing, and termite fishing.
Remembering Lucia Laguna, Rodrigo Cass, and Nelson Garrido
This week, we honor a Brazilian painter inspired by nature and another who drew on Catholicism, and a Venezuelan photographer who challenged power.
Can You Draw a Perfect Circle?
This maddening little web toy on vole.wtf challenges visitors to draw a perfect circle and judges them on how well they do. After dozens of tries with a mouse, I could only manage 92.9% perfection (which looks more like 80% tbh). Then I tried it on a touchscreen and got much
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
Woodland Creatures Inhabit an Imaginary World in Kanako Abe’s Intricate Paper Cuts
Abe imagines dreamlike scenes reminiscent of childhood narratives and folk tales. 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 article Woodland Creatures Inhabit an
Some advice on giving good advice. “Not every situation...
Some advice on giving good advice . “Not every situation warrants advice. Sometimes, the person just wants to gauge a reaction or to share.”
Thomas Hart Benton's Sanitized American Idyll
His ambition to capture the full experience of living in the United States had its limits.
The Earth in the Sky
I love these black & white photos of Devils Tower by Zac Henderson . A butte of a rare kind of volcanic rock that formed a mile underground 50 million years ago, Devil’s Tower is visible now thanks to erosion of sedimentary rock. The tower features the world’s largest known
Derrick Adams, Randy Polumbo, Wills Glasspiegel & More Artists Project Newly-Commissioned Works Onto Historic Hangars in Brooklyn
Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy gathers 21 artists for the second biennial Floyd Bennett Field! Public Arts Festival on October 3
Gather 'Round, Willie Birch Is Speaking
Across five decades of work, he always asked: What's my neighborhood, and what does it need?
TIL they can do wing replacements on injured...
TIL they can do wing replacements on injured butterflies… just take a look at this repair video .
John Wilson’s ‘The History of Concrete’ Is Anything But Mundane
Wilson's movie debut is primed for absurdity, delving into something that's immanently mundane yet fundamental to the way we live. 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
How to Be a Poet: Elizabeth Alexander on the Yin-Yang of Connection and Contradiction
“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote. “Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” No matter how slant they may tell it, that truth tells us back to
Engaging read on how the Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera,...
Engaging read on how the Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? was made . “To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion.”
The 25 Photos That Changed Fashion Forever. “It didn’t...
The 25 Photos That Changed Fashion Forever . “It didn’t matter if an image was meant as a fashion photograph, so long as the picture later inspired a designer, collection or trend, or it changed how we might think about style.”
He Was One of the World’s Most Wanted Men. So He Bought a West African Country.
"How Jos Leijdekkers turned Sierra Leone into a drug-dealer’s paradise."
How the West was fun
Be it movie mythos or nostalgia for a ‘simpler’ time, there’s an undeniable allure in stepping into the American West - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon
How Tarot Survived for 500 Years
Plus: Protesters call on MoMA to ditch Leon Black, and our exhibition fall guide for the Bay Area.
Badge vs Scoreboard
Our world is shaped by contagious and competitive games. Along the way, we invent scoreboards that change the culture, and badges that we award to various players. An example: How did we end up with weddings that cost $200,000? It’s a great example of a runway cultural dynamic,
When Salvador Dalí Gave a Surrealist Lecture in a Diving Suit … and Almost Suffocated (1936)
Many a foreigner has visited England and found it an unexpectedly surreal place. Some of that effect has to do with encountering familiar icons — Big Ben, double-decker Routemaster buses, Marmite — in cold, damp reality. More of it may be induced by the country’s simultaneously
Watch Interplanetary Revolution (1924): The Most Bizarre Soviet Animated Propaganda Film You’ll Ever See
In 1924, Zenon Komissarenko, Youry Merkulov and Nikolai Khodataev produced Interplanetary Revolution, which might just be one of the strangest Soviet propaganda films ever produced. First, the film is animated using not only traditional cel animation but also collage and stop
Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life
"To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's its task."
Art Problems: If I Have a Day Job, Am I a Real Artist?
Ever been shamed for having a nine-to-five job as an artist? Paddy Johnson can relate.
Met Museum Brokers Return of Three Artworks to Nigeria
Collector Ceil Pulitzer provided detailed provenance of the works, but the museum preferred another route.
Duo Calls to Oust Leon Black in Protest Outside MoMA
The protesters handed out zines that detailed the billionaire trustee’s links to Jeffrey Epstein and several sexual assault allegations brought against him.
Some Newsletter Tidying
Just a short note to say that because of some internet scammer shithousery, I had to bulk-unsubscribe a bunch of email addresses from the KDO Newsletter subscriber rolls. If you subscribed to the newsletter back in Dec 2025 and don’t get the next issue (which I’m sending out a
Tarot for a Broken World
With some of the oldest surviving tarot decks on view, the Morgan’s exhibition traces how a Renaissance card game became something far more powerful.
A thoughtful review of Nolan’s The Odyssey, comparing it...
A thoughtful review of Nolan’s The Odyssey , comparing it to the original Planet of the Apes movies. “I was very influenced by seeing The Planet of the Apes when I was a kid. We had the Statue of Liberty half destroyed. That idea of a fallen monument.”
Microscopic Universes Come Alive in Nikon’s Small World in Motion Contest
This year's cycle received more than 340 video entries from 40 different countries. 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 article Microscopic Universes Come
Mary Cassatt: The Impressionist Who Painted The Mind
I always learn so much from Evan Puschak’s videos about art. In this one , he takes a look at the work of Mary Cassatt, who, unlike many of her male peers, used the flattened perspective of Impressionism to reveal the thoughts and feelings of her subjects. Like Manet, she’s