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Why the Purple Skittle Tastes Different Outside America
Succulent blackcurrants waiting to be picked. (Photo: Public Domain)Pop quiz: What flavor is the purple Skittle? If you grew up tasting the rainbow in the U.S. of A, the answer is clearly grape. But in...
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How Nevada Became the Only State Where You Can Vote for 'None Of These...
An empty senate chamber, circa 1873. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-cwpbh-03299)Sometimes voting feels like a very tough SAT question: none of the choices seem right. What to do when you can't put...
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Sound II at Winchester Cathedral in Winchester, England
Sir Antony Gormley's sculpture entitled Sound II has stood in the Crypt below Winchester Cathedral since the late 1980s. During the rainy months the mysterious sculpture can often be found holding...
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World's Largest Shuffleboard Club in Saint Petersburg, Florida
As far as hometown superlatives go, possessing the world's largest outdoor shuffleboard court is ridiculously specific. Nevertheless, the shuffleboard club in St. Petersburg represents the story of...
View ArticleWatch a Mysterious Video of a Truck Driving Through an Interstate Flood
Deadly flooding this year in Louisiana has been a slow-moving disaster for the state, displacing hundreds of thousands of residents and causing millions in damage. It got pretty bad, in other words,...
View ArticleWatch This Tiny Rainbow Peacock Spider Dance the Performance of His Life
Male spiders will do a lot for the loving attention of a female. The famous peacock spider has quite the demonstration. He sways, struts, bobs, shudders, waves his arms, and exposes his brightly...
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Cours des Miracles (Court of Miracles) in Paris, France
The poor and homeless population of Paris ballooned during the reign of Louis XIV, from 1654 to 1715, leading to terrible slums in the city center where the unemployed and destitute relied on begging...
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A Chinese Billionaire is Likely Behind a Huge Aluminum Stockpile in the...
(Photo: mjneuby/CC BY 2.0)In 2014, photos taken from the sky revealed that around six percent of the world's aluminum—or around a million tons—was sitting in a desert in Mexico. As the Wall Street...
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Outer Banks Futuro House in Frisco, North Carolina
In 1970, when Futuro houses were still a novel technoutopian experiment, Lee and Mary Jane Russo bought a plot of land in North Carolina and decided to buy one of these newfangled houses to put on the...
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The UN General Assembly Plans Meeting Over 'Superbugs'
SUPERBUGS! (Photo: John Voo/CC BY 2.0)UN meetings aren’t all boring commissions on tariffs and diplomacy, sometimes they are about creating a worldwide defense against “superbugs.” According to Science...
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Jeffrey City Ghost Town in Jeffrey City, Wyoming
A once thriving uranium mining town, Jeffrey City now sits forgotten, forlorn, rotting away in the Wyoming sun, rain and snow.It started in 1931, when Beulah Peterson Walker found herself in desperate...
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Cours des Miracles (Court of Miracles) in Paris, France
The poor and homeless population of Paris ballooned during the reign of Louis XIV, from 1654 to 1715, leading to terrible slums in the city center where the unemployed and destitute relied on begging...
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An Ode to Concrete
Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria. (Photo: decar66/CC BY 2.0)In the middle of the 20th century a new wave of modernism swept over the architectural world, and it was made of concrete. The material’s low...
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Auroville in Bommayapalayam, India
A dozen miles north of Pondicherry, India, there is a town to which you already belong and already have citizenship, and which awaits your arrival.To live there you will need to give up some of the...
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Arthurdale Historic District in Newburg, West Virginia
Established in 1934, Arthurdale was Eleanor Roosevelt's first federally funded experiment in collectivist living.At a time when strong support for her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,...
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Frank Lloyd Wright Gas Station in Cloquet, Minnesota
In 1927, at the height of his career, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a gas station. Part of a utopian city plan that he championed throughout his professional life, this little piece of Wright’s utopia...
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From Waxed Canvas To Movie Screens, the History of the Air Mattress
A "hipster mattress." (Photo: iris/CC BY-ND 2.0)A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.Nine months ago, I made a lot of...
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The Centuries-Old Shrine Where Indians Pray for U.S. Visas
Statues at the front gate of the temple depict the unearthing of the god's image from the anthill. (Photo: Tim Williams)Every year, thousands of pilgrims travel to a small temple in the Indian village...
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A Map of the Last Remaining Flying Saucer Homes
Futuro at the WeeGee Exhibition Centre in Espoo, Finland. (Photo: J-P Kärnä/CC BY-SA 3.0)The Futuro House, in all its space age retro splendor, is like a physical manifestation of 1960s optimism....
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We Asked 32 Trekkies How They Would Create a Perfect Future
(Screenshot by Eric Grundhauser/Netflix)Forget all of the spiritual gurus and ambitious cult leaders, maybe no one in history has given more thought to the concept of utopia than Star Trek fans.For 50...
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