New orca behavior unlocked. They’ve been known to sink boats and wear salmon for hats; now they’re ramming fish so hard they explode . “Orcas were observed to hold sunfish in their jaws while a second whale smashed into the target at high speed…”
It’s our ethical duty to understand large numbers . “Our world is increasingly moving towards extreme values: Damages from climate change, deaths due to genocide, wealth that knows no bounds. We can’t tackle them if we can’t wrap our heads around [them].”
A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out. “Once everyone was back at school on Tuesday, the high schoolers lawyered up during their lunch hour.”
The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program awards each recipient $8,000 in unrestricted cash.
“A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy .” (AI bots and prediction market dipshits.)
A recently shared letter from Yuko Kikuchi, who resigned from her post in January, asks the British institution to address its “culture of systemic racism.”
What's not to love about a pillow with personality? 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 Playful Knitted Pillows by Donna Wilson Infuse Interiors with
Michael Wellen and José Luis Blondet get the nod, Tate names a new director, and the Immigrant Artist Biennial is back for another edition.
“In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.” On the good and bad types of nostalgia .
The fact that the quill of David d’Angers’s statue of the third US president broke during the nation’s 250th anniversary provides more than an irresistible symbolic trope.
Rebecca Solnit on the Tate brothers, The Odyssey, and the misogyny of classical literature & the contemporary world . “Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.”
The absurdist performance art event at Times Square felt more like an elegy during this national moment.
This week: the Louvre reopens the room where it happens, a Texas artist’s outdoor collection, Nancy Drew in the public domain, Rachel Cusk and Natalie Portman have beef, and more.
Following a prompt from Joanna at Cup of Jo … The local deli or sandwich shop names a sandwich after you. What would be on it? Perhaps another way of asking the question: what’s your favorite sandwich that’s a little bit unusual? I love a classic BLT, banh mi, or jambon
Why are American ambulances so expensive? In part because Medicare pays only a fraction of the actual cost of an ambulance ride and the uninsured often don’t pay at all, so the privately insured get bills of $13,000 for a $2600 ride.
We’re Squandering LEDs’ Potential to Save Our Night Skies . “Our main failure isn’t a technical one. It’s that we have yet to revise our thinking about lighting at night. We use LED technology just as we did the old sources of light.”
In addition to leading the animation studio at the National Film Board of Canada, René Jodoin made several animated films that explored geometric forms and motion, including the one above, A Matter of Form from 1984. Set to the rousing notes of Schubert’s Military March, this
For more than four decades, the artist has reimagined the technical and sculptural capabilities of one simple material: twigs. 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.
An online edition of all 85 of the Federalist Papers , presented as they were originally serialized in newspapers, with on eye on good typography and readability .
“ This map shows the predicted density of underground networks created by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These networks form one of Earth’s circulatory systems, moving massive amounts of carbon, nutrients, and water across plant communities.”
“The Carr family took in Steven Judy, hoping to ‘save’ a troubled teen. They didn’t know he would become one of the most hated men in America.”
To the trained eye, the personalised homes of Queens, NYC, evoke everything from a Venetian streetscape to a Chinese temple - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon
The late artist’s digital paintings at Serpentine, Tate gets a new director, beyond the myth of Brazilian modernist Chico da Silva, and more.
Rooted in Brazilian modernism, anthropophagy devours and transforms culture, subverting colonial fears of cannibalism - by Sofia Cándano Read on Aeon
Writing is always going to be hard and why it's worth the struggle.
One of the best traditional bakeries in New York has a kitchen you can see from the counter. People wait in line for their handmade French baguettes, and the confirmation that they were made right here and right now is reassuring. I noticed that the baker was using a mechanical
Though it’s traditionally meant “last in a progression or series,” as Merriam-Webster puts it, the word ultimate has been more often used in recent decades to mean “the best or most extreme of its kind.” The name of a recently launched digital archive performs a rare inversion,
We previously brought you the BBC series of short animated videos, A History of Ideas. Produced in collaboration with the UK’s Open University and narrated by Harry Shearer, these fun introductions to such philosophers as Simone de Beauvoir and Edmund Burke, and such weighty