The 12 Absolute Best Ways to Eat Watermelon This Summer 17 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2k4qPHB Among the fruits and vegetables we can’t get enough of this time of year, watermelon ranks high. Biting into thick slices and letting the juice run down our arms is easily the most well-loved approach, but the fruit can…
Sympathy for the Semicolon 17 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2lzXftF Among my fellow punctuation nerds, I have a reputation as someone who has no use for semicolons. I don’t hate semicolons; I hate writing about semicolons. Fortunately, now I don’t have to, because Cecelia Watson, a self-identified “punctuation theorist”…
Edward Lear’s Nonsense Botany (1871–77) 17 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2JA8E6e With his Nonsense Botany series the Victorian artist and writer Edward Lear turned his peculiar brand of verbal and visual invention to the world of plant taxonomy. A little over two centuries earlier the Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus…
Do You See What I See? A Poetic Vintage Art-Science Primer on the Building Blocks of the Perceptual World 17 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2legybT A lovely illustrated serenade to a world strewn with “lines making patterns of beauty.” “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe reflected in the spring of her visionary career. “The art of seeing…
How to fight off a bad case of “CHS” Flu 15 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2LTcNE8 Unfortunately, an exotic flu epidemic has broken out in Washington, DC. Dubbed the “Canadian Hot Sauce Flu,” it uniquely afflicts a particular group of Democratic officeholders and operatives. CHS Flu renders its victims weaker than Canadian hot sauce, leaving…
Uncertain future for Uzbekistan’s avant-garde museum 15 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2jYdO1U The remote Uzbek city of Nukus may seem an unlikely destination for art lovers. But thanks largely to the efforts of by one man, Igor Savitsky, it is now home to a world-class collection of avant-garde paintings, rescued from…
65 years ago: Looking back at the hottest day St. Louis has ever seen 14 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2G9jH4b On July 14, 1954, temperatures in St. Louis soared to where they had never been before – hitting a high of 115 degrees – a record that has never been approached since. via ift.tt/2YUIErI ift.tt/2M9OU8T
Langston Hughes’s Ardent Public Fan Letter to the Young Nina Simone 14 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2JKa3WM “She is strange. So are the plays of Brendan Behan, Jean Genet, LeRoi Jones, and Bertholt Brecht. She is far-out, and at the same time common. So are raw eggs in Worcestershire and The Connection.” On February 8, 1949,…
Visionary Maps of Time, Space, and Thought by America’s First Female Cartographer and Information Visualization Designer 14 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2lowUyV Revolutions in design and education technology, underpinned by the conviction that women “are an essential part of the body politic, whose corruption or improvement must affect the whole.” “The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere,” Hannah…
The Fascinating Science of How Trees Communicate, Animated 14 July 2019 0 img.youtube.com/vi/V4m9SefyRjg/0.jpg “Trees are the foundation of forests, but a forest is much more than what you see.” “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the…
St. Louis Decertifies 5 Firms That Claimed Cherokee Ancestry to Get Minority Contracts 14 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2JU1g4X St. Louis has removed five businesses from its list of certified minority-owned firms. The move comes after those companies were featured in a massive L.A. Times investigation that revealed how businesses use "unsubstantiated claims" of Cherokee ancestry to land…
Forest Park to break ground on new, 17-acre nature playscape 14 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2xKak6r The area won’t include traditional playground equipment. Kids and families will be encouraged to build, get dirty and have fun. via ift.tt/2Sg8DaE ift.tt/2M9OU8T
Brian Eno’s Soundtrack for the Apollo 11 Moon Landing 13 July 2019 0 ift.tt/32rrqEz 50 years ago, the Apollo 11 moon landing was televised live to some 600 million viewers back on planet Earth. One of them was future Long Now co-founder Brian Eno, then 21. He found himself underwhelmed by what he…
Relive all your web frustrations with User Inyerface 12 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2LN4uJS NEWS – Have you ever visited a frustrating website? You know what I mean – the one where the buttons don’t work, hint characters don’t clear from text boxes, tab order doesn’t work and so on? The folks at…
Savage tick-clone armies are sucking cows to death; experts fear for humans 12 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2YQuMPc Enlarge / Engorged Haemaphysalis longicornis female tick. 0 with 0 posters participating Ravenous swarms of cloned ticks have killed a fifth cow in North Carolina by exsanguination—that is, by draining it of blood—the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer…
A Family House in Kyoto with a Tree Growing in the Middle 12 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2NRqBSd Designed for a family of five in a quiet neighborhood in northern Kyoto city, the House in Kyoto has an open living plan that allows the parents to keep an eye on their active children. The location proved challenging…
3D Print Your Very Own BMW Vision M NEXT Sports Car 12 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2GbMAgf The BMW Vision M NEXT is an electric sports car concept designed with an assumption in mind: that even in the coming epoch of autonomous vehicles, the BMW enthusiast will always retain a strong appreciation for the thrill and…
A Flamethrowing Electric Guitar Built From Car Scraps 12 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2JCcavZ Andy George of How To Make Everything put his industrial and musical skills to excellent use with his idea to build a playable Mad Max: Fury Road Coma-Doof Warrior style electric guitar with a working flamethrower attached. Before George…
A Simple Homemade Bread Recipe So Good, I May Never Go Back to Buying It 12 July 2019 0 ift.tt/30ol5aW Whenever I’m having a bread crisis, I turn to King Arthur. Not the head of the Knights of the Round Table—the flour brand and virtual compendium for all things carb. So on a recent Saturday, days-deep in some random…
10 French Chicken Recipes to Make Right Now 12 July 2019 0 ift.tt/2YLKhI0 The French have a way with chicken — a certain poultry-based je ne sais quoi, if you will — that allows them to turn that often-finicky, sometimes-bland bird into a riot of textures and flavors (crispy, creamy, garlicky, mustardy,…
