In the latest in its ongoing series about objects the world once considered indispensable but has somehow managed to live without, Collectors Weekly turns its attention to match holders, which… Read the rest of the article: Stranger than friction: when matches were dangerous
Why is it so hard for so many Americans to get their heads around the science behind climate change? Well, according to Rebecca Onion, it may be because of the… Read the rest of the article: How Americans got so weird about science
Over at Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix has just written an incredibly in-depth history of the hula, from its roots as a sacred dance to its kitschy personification as a dashboard… Read the rest of the article: How America's obsession with hula girls almost wrecked Hawai'i
Maurice Collins has written a terrific new book about his collection of bizarre and outlandish gadgets and doohickeys called — wait for it — Bizarre & Outlandish Gadgets & Doohickeys.… Read the rest of the article: Bizarre and outlandish gadgets and doohickeys
On Tuesday November 8, 2016, tens of millions of Americans enthusiastically cast their presidential ballots for a tax-cheating, racist demagogue who literally said anything to get the votes of common… Read the rest of the article: Intelligence on the wing: The Genius of Birds
Lisa Hix of Collectors Weekly has just published a great interview with Sarah Archer, whose new book, Midcentury Christmas: Holiday Fads, Fancies, and Fun from 1945 to 1970, explains how… Read the rest of the article: Nothing says Christmas like an aluminum tree
Besides white supremacy, one of the key drivers of the last election was trade, with outsourcing being the main scapegoat (even though any economist able to count to 10 will… Read the rest of the article: Mechanical movements of the Cold War: how the Soviets revolutionized wristwatches
It is obviously unfair to dismiss the entire contents of a book for a single tin-eared statement, but the clunker that comes near the end of The Earth and I… Read the rest of the article: The Earth and I – is climate change moving too fast for a new book on climate change?
See sample pages from this book at Wink. New Deal Photography: USA 1935-1943 by Peter Walther Taschen 2016, 608 pages, 5.9 x 7.9 x 1.7 inches (hardcover) $16 Buy a… Read the rest of the article: Taschen's hefty New Deal Photography goes well beyond familiar Depression-era images
This summer, I spent a month aboard a research vessel in the Indian Ocean. At one point, we crossed the equator, which meant that those of us who had never… Read the rest of the article: 400 years of equator hazings, and how I survived one
See sample pages from this book at Wink. Castro's Cuba: An American Journalist's Inside Look at Cuba 1959-1969 by Lee Lockwood Taschen 2016, 360 pages, 10.3 x 13.6 x 1.4… Read the rest of the article: Castro's Cuba – 50 years later, the island nation is still Castro country
See sample pages from this book at Wink. Chihuly on Fire by Henry Adams (author) and Dale Chihuly (artist) Chihuly Workshop 2016, 212 pages, 9.3 x 12.1 x 0.9 inches… Read the rest of the article: Glass artist Dale Chihuly plays with fire and the audacity of beauty
Previously: Investigating the Great Earthquake of 2012 This year for the 4th of July, I varied my routine ever so slightly by spending the day aboard the R/V Marion Dufresne… Read the rest of the article: The mystery of our 12-hour delay: the Mirage Expedition
On April 11, 2012, a magnitude-8.6 earthquake, followed a few hours later by a magnitude-8.2, struck the Wharton Basin, which lies approximately five kilometers below the surface of the Indian… Read the rest of the article: Investigating the Great Earthquake of 2012: the Mirage Expedition
Lisa Hix of has written a lengthy piece for Collectors Weekly on the Oneida Community of the late 19th century, and how it morphed from a group of men and… Read the rest of the article: The polyamorous Christian socialist utopia that made silverware for proper Americans
When I was a kid in the late 1960s, I briefly washed dishes and carried equipment for a light show called Garden of Delights, which was based in Sausalito, California.… Read the rest of the article: Lightman Fantastic: this artist drenched '60s music lovers in a psychedelic dream
See more sample pages from this book at Wink. GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human by Thomas Thwaites Princeton Architectural Press 2016, 208 pages, 5.9 x 8.6… Read the rest of the article: GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human
Who were the Harvey Girls, and what were the Harvey Houses in which they worked? It's actually more innocent than it sounds, as Hunter Oatman-Stanford explains in his latest piece… Read the rest of the article: Railway Paradise: How a Fine-Dining Empire Made the Southwest Palatable to Outsiders
About four months ago, cigar boxes, matchbooks, and coffee tins bearing the name and likeness of 19th-century poet Walt Whitman began appearing on the Show & Tell section of Collectors… Read the rest of the article: Walt Whitman — patriotic poet, gay iconoclast, shrewd marketing ploy, or all three?
In honor of Record Store Day, I got on the phone with Russ Solomon, who founded Tower Records in the early 1960s — the late-great chain was also the subject… Read the rest of the article: If you're too young to remember the magic of Tower Records, here's what you missed
