What happened at the Gardner Museum has become the most famous art heist ever, not only because of the money involved—$500 million, making it the largest art theft in history—but also because of the countless FBI agents, private detectives and art dealers who’ve tried and failed to solve it.
As a god, your disciples don’t view you as ruling over them even though you are, but as their benevolent leader showing them the light to salvation. A leader that though figuratively and literally followed to the ends of the earth. Now, that is real power.
Many of our coastal cities are imperiled, but none have plotted an escape quite as audacious as Jakarta’s. President Joko Widodo plans to pick up and move the capital, along with 7 million people.
American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under? A lot — and Kevin Kelley wants to stop that.
Forest City is being built in the Malaysian state of Johor in the southern part of the country. Here, the Johore Strait acts as a natural border between Malaysia and the independent city-state Singapore. It is one of the most ambitious urban development projects currently underway. An entire new city built from scratch.
Brand deals have dried up; sponsored posts have been delayed. The great reckoning is unlikely to topple the influencer industry—by now, it’s already too big—but the business of influence is going to change.
As art institutions continue to raise ticket prices and roll out blockbusters, we may come to see shows that will be curated entirely by optimized algorithms. What happens when a museum becomes curator-less? Will this be the end of art history as we’ve known it, or the dawn of a techno renaissance?
The second half of humanity is joining the internet. People in countries like India will change the internet, and it will change them. You have a whole bunch of languages that don’t enjoy very good support in terms of web browsers or input. And you have a whole bunch of people who can’t actually read or write.
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.
If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we will surely long for the best years of the American century.
Prince Sultan bin Turki II was cut off from the Saudi royal family’s cash flow after criticizing the regime. So he appealed to Prince Mohammed bin Salman for help—and was never seen again.
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has been covered by more than 300 other artists in virtually every genre. It’s an impressive feat by any standard, but even more so when you consider that “Hallelujah” was originally stuck on side two of an album that Cohen’s record label deemed unfit for release.
“Friend” by Paek Namnyong was first published in 1988 in North Korea where it became a bestseller and a television series. Thirty years later, Friend has become the first state-sanctioned North Korean novel to be published in English. It is, most surprisingly, a novel about love, marriage, and divorce.
We dose up on antioxidants as if they are the elixir of life. At best, they are probably ineffective. At worse, they may just send you to an early grave.
Carlsberg gifted Niels Bohr, the famous Danish physicist, a home complete with a pipeline that pumped fresh beer directly into his residence. It’s a great story and one that has been reported on by publications such as Forbes and The Guardian. The only problem with the story is that it isn’t entirely true.
What the novel coronavirus has revealed about the cruise industry is a “hidden in plain sight” problem — an international maritime regulatory structure that obfuscates and often ignores legal and social responsibility, accountability and culpability.
Lost & Found is a stop motion short film that tugs at the heartstrings. A knitted toy dinosaur must completely unravel itself to save the love of its life. Directed by Andrew Goldsmith and Bradley Slabe.
To shed light on the essential workers who are healing the sick, stocking our groceries, delivering our packages and cleaning our streets, there is a new political art campaign called Immigrants Are Essential. It’s a project of non-profits Resilience Force and the National Immigration Law Center.
Mohammed bin Salman is about to find out what happens when the world does not need his oil. In the past, the standard response to that hypothesis was condescending looks. Not any more. The prospect of Saudi becoming a debtor nation is real.
Vincent van Gogh was hardly alone in his pursuit of truth through self-portraiture, and he is not the only artist to have done so. And sometimes, self-portraits created during the final stages of a career can prove to be the most truthful images of artists.
What is happening on the other side of the barrier? There we find people who respond to state controls with creativity and spunk. While some spend their days trawling cat videos, others create oases of subversion within the reality that they’ve been dealt.
It wasn’t coronavirus that hobbled Deliveroo: it was its small margins and the crippling costs of competing both in its home market and abroad. In the UK, there are three big players in the market, in the US there are half a dozen, in Europe there are over 20.
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.
Ocean water is saturated with salt, and undrinkable. Most of the freshwater is locked away in glaciers or deep underground. Less than one percent of it is available to us. So why can’t we just take all that seawater, filter out the salt, and have a nearly unlimited supply of clean, drinkable water?
A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?
A transwoman mechanic lives between running her family’s auto shop during the day and expressing her femininity at night until an unforeseen event threatens the balance of her compartmentalized life.
Huge amounts of rice straw are left over after the harvest in Thailand. Farmers often burn it, which is terrible for the environment. A young entrepreneur has found a new use for the material. Turned into paper, it can replace plastic food packaging.
Over 30,000 plants and 5 miles of hornbeam hedges cover the newly completed Kö-Bogen II commercial and office building by German architecture firm Ingenhoven Architects. Located in Düsseldorf, the verdant structure features Europe’s largest green façade.
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.
Transactions have given rise to a complex data-selling ecosystem. At the heart of it are credit card processing networks, including Visa, American Express, and Mastercard, the latter of which took in $4.1 billion in 2019 for services that include marketing analytics as well as fraud detection.
Today, prefabrication in the United States is stunted. The small manufacturers that exist cannot invest in research and therefore cannot produce the more sophisticated projects that are needed today. Plus, in many cases, it can be less costly to ship a project over from a more experienced or innovative fabricator.
Ontario’s Big Sandy Bay has a hidden sandy beach that will give you exotic vibes. Located on Wolfe Island, Big Sandy Bay is just a boat ride away from Kingston, and it has a secret swimming paradise.
As the coronavirus continues to kill thousands each day, tech companies are seizing the opportunity to extend their reach and power. Towards a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone.
We live in a society where we are not aware of the amount of plastic around us. Four children, from 6 to 11 years old, in recognizable two-color environments, where the plastic that coexists naturally with us stand out. Nobody cares. The kids will tell us what we are doing with our oceans and our planet.
The rise of technology is a huge opportunity for the construction industry; enabling it to overcome many of its challenges while broadening its appeal to young talent. From predictive design to 3D printing and even autonomous machines on site, this is what the future could look like if we automated construction.
“Sick Souls, Healthy Minds” offers us a lifeline at this moment. As we tell each other what to watch, what to cook, what to read and what exercises to do, John Kaag invites us to ask, together with America’s greatest philosopher, William James, what makes life worth living.
The coronavirus is providing a global rallying cry for conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists on both sides of the Atlantic. People seizing on the pandemic range from white supremacists and anti-vaxxers in the U.S. to fascist and anti-refugee groups across Europe.
Fredagsmys, or Cozy Friday, is a beloved Swedish tradition. Across the Scandinavian country, families stay home on Friday night, watch TV, and eat Tex-Mex-style tacos. This dinner choice is so common that, for most Swedes, Cozy Friday is also Taco Fredag, or Taco Friday.
