Copenhagen Commuters Get A Big, Slithering Surprise
Forget snakes on a plane. Copenhagen has snakes, really big ones, on a bus. Crushing the entire bus, in fact. Bates Y&R art director Peder Schack squeezed the award-winning idea out of his brain to “make the most possible impact for a very small budget.”

Corrugated Steel Shelves Line A Church-Turned-Poetry-Shop In Shanghai
Peer inside Shanghai’s St. Nicholas, an Orthodox church from 1932, and you won’t see pews or traditional iconography. Thanks to architectural firm Wutopia Lab, the renovated building now serves as a shrine to verse.

Artist Builds Installations in Big-Box Stores Without Permission
Mass is a site specific installation project by Carson Davis Brown about creating visual disruptions in places of mass. At an intersection between Street Art and Land Art, installations are made without permission, using found materials within the retail landscape.

Behind The Scenes At Rotten Tomatoes
Humans, not algorithms, determine those ubiquitous scores. The Tomatometer is run by a team of “curators” who read just about every known review from a gigantic pool of approved critics, then decide if each is positive or negative. Once a movie has five reviews, it is Tomatometer-eligible.

The Rise Of The Wind Ships
Commercial shipping – for many years resistant to the low carbon revolution sweeping other areas of transportation – is changing fast. Could a new generation of innovative propulsion technologies that harness the power of the wind help the shipping industry clean up its act?

Michael Jordan The Story Versus Michael Jordan The Man
Jordan was the closest embodiment of the ideal athlete that we’ve ever witnessed. After his retirement, however, the intimate identification he inspired during his career soured into something weirder and sadder.

Online Streaming: Television’s Looming Car Crash
As the distribution model for entertainment is remade, a revolutionary ardour has seized the industry: the choice is to win the streaming battle against the likes of Netflix, or face commercial oblivion. The immediate result has been clear: more television than ever before. There were 496 scripted TV shows made in the US last year, more than double the 216 series released in 2010.

How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games
Fairness is the unspoken promise of most video games. Controlled by an omniscient and omnipotent designer, a video game has the capacity to be ultimately just, and players expect that it will be so. And yet, when video games truly play by the rules, the player can feel cheated.

How 17 Outsize Portraits Rattled A Small Southern Town
Newnan had prided itself on its quiet charm. It offered small-town living just 40 miles southwest of Atlanta and had earned the nickname “City of Homes” for its antebellum architecture. The town decided to use art to help the community celebrate diversity and embrace change. Not everyone was ready for what they saw.

The Inevitable Decade Of Marvel
On July 21, 2019, ‘Avengers: Endgame’ became the highest-grossing film ever, on its way to adding nearly $2.8 billion to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s $22.5 billion global box office total. The 2010s were defined by this superhero takeover—though the plans for it were laid even before the decade began.

Idyllic Landscape Paintings By Artist Tomás Sánchez Render Nature’s Meditative Qualities
For nearly three decades, Cuban painter Tomás Sánchez has been painting serene landscapes of clam waters and verdant forests full of towering palms and dense shrubs.

Inside HBO Max, The $4 Billion Bet To Stand Out In The Streaming Wars
Bob Greenblatt, Kevin Reilly and Sarah Aubrey — the executives leading the charge for WarnerMedia’s ambitious HBO Max streaming venture — outline their vision for a global platform to compete with Netflix, Amazon, Disney and others in TV’s new frontier of the direct-to-consumer cavalcade.

LEGO Launches Braille Bricks For Children To Learn Braille
At the Sustainable Brands conference in Paris, the LEGO Foundation and LEGO Group announced their new project to help blind and visually impaired children learn braille through custom LEGO Braille Bricks.

War Propaganda: How To Get A Country To Go To War
The war propaganda function in the United States is finely tuned. It’s sophisticated and most of all it blends into the media terrain. While the names of the countries changed, and of course each circumstance was different, there were some parallels that cried out for examination.

We Asked An AI To Write A Column For Us. The Results Were Wild
We’ve been testing weekly short fiction pieces scribed by GPT-2, a text-generating artificial intelligence algorithm originally built by OpenAI. We give the algorithm a sentence from a real article, and the algorithm iteratively generates what it thinks the next word should be.

The Ever-Growing Car: Why Do They Keep Getting Wider?
We all know cars getting bigger and heavier. Most of us know why they are getting bigger, too. To comply with today’s stringent crash regulations – by passing offset, side and roof impact tests, as well as those evaluating pedestrian protection performance – cars require considerable cubic metres of controllably crushable bodywork.

The Inventive Chef Who Kept His 700 Paintings Hidden
Ficre Ghebreyesus had no art gallery representation during his lifetime. Now his widow is working with Galerie Lelong in New York to show the work that summed up his search for identity.

What Makes A Masterpiece?
What do we mean when we call an artwork a masterpiece? Who gets to decide what becomes one? Who makes them? And is it still a constructive label to dole out when we talk about art? What Makes a Masterpiece?

Drone Photos Capture A Fresh Take On Tuscany’s Iconic Landscapes
Photographer Gabor Nagy took his new drone with him on an adventure to Tuscany, to see if he could capture this instantly-recognizable Italian landscape from a different perspective. The result was a beautiful series of eye-catching aerial photos called “Tuscany from Above.”

William Eggleston’s Colorful Photographs Of The Everyday Shocked the Art World
The self-taught, Memphis-born photographer William Eggleston was making vivid images of mundane scenes at a time when the only photographs considered to be art were in black and white — color photography was typically reserved for punchy advertising campaigns, not fine art.

Italian Artist Peeta Blends Graffiti And Abstract Forms Into Optical Illusion Murals
Italian artist Peeta combines elements of graffiti and abstract art to paint murals that appear to morph and dissolve architectural structures. Abstract shapes swirl around and cut into walls to form M.C. Escher-like scenes that play tricks on the eyes and change depending on the viewing angle.