Trainyard (App Store link) is a neat little casual game about making the trains run on time. And also about them, you know, not crashing. It may be a small… Read the rest of the article: Trainyard, and where it came from

My mother lives in a high-rise in downtown Philadelphia. We were talking on the phone last week when she suddenly stopped and said, in a wondering voice: "Look at that.… Read the rest of the article: The birth of the Conan blimp

Okay, so maybe I just have the USSR on my mind right now: I'm racing through Matthew Brzezinski's "Red Moon Rising," a compulsively readable account of the geopolitical intrigues that… Read the rest of the article: Glorious synths of the workers' state

Minnesota newspaperman James Lileks, whose site is your one-stop destination for sharply-annotated pop culture ephemera, has unearthed another beauty and is posting four pages a week through the summer, apparently… Read the rest of the article: The last days of post-war California

Frank Jacobs' great Strange Maps blog turns up a real treasure this week: "A Night-Club Map of Harlem," drawn ca. 1932 by cartoonist Elmer Simms Campbell. The map hits all… Read the rest of the article: Drop me off in Harlem

Mark blogged some etiquette posters from a Japanese subway system back in December. And they're fine, as far as they go. They just don't go far enough. They don't liken… Read the rest of the article: How to behave on the Tokyo subway

I love many things about chef J.Kenji Lopez-Alt, not least his fantastic name, but today I'm enamored of his take on the cleaver. A cleaver is both metaphorically and literally… Read the rest of the article: Expensive cleavers are a waste of money

A few weeks ago I speculated about whether an advertisement for Samsonite luggage was, as the ad-industry blog Copyranter declared it, "the dumbest ad I've ever seen," or whether it… Read the rest of the article: This week in bad advertising

Herman Miller's Lifework blog today turns the company's impeccable eye to a design object most of us take for granted: The lowly pencil. Blogger Brian Greene highlights five models, from… Read the rest of the article: Pencils!

I like haircuts and I like Popsicles — hell, who doesn't? But I will apparently never be an art impresario, let alone a performance art impresario, because it never would… Read the rest of the article: Haircuts and Popsicles

Of all the places I never expected to learn anything cool about the Apollo astronauts, number one would have to be the blog run by ukinsurance.net. ("For many years we… Read the rest of the article: Home-made life insurance, the Apollo way

They don't call The New York Times "The Gray Lady" for nothing, and it isn't like the Gray Lady to shill for a television show. That said, the paper's "Mad… Read the rest of the article: Time, Life and Mad Men

As Kodachrome passes into history — photojournalist Steve McCurry, who shot the famous 1984 "Afghan Girl" cover for National Geographic, processed the last roll of the stuff last week in… Read the rest of the article: The Kodachrome curtain

"Floating Point" is a lovely time-lapse video by photographer Samuel Cockedey. By now the conventions of this type of video are pretty well established: The high perspective (usually urban), the… Read the rest of the article: "Floating Point"

While it's certainly true that Japanese Snack Reviews tells me a ton about Japanese junk food, it's not true that it tells me, in the site's slogan, "more than (I)… Read the rest of the article: Spicy, happy foodtime blogging now!

This is my new favorite image of World War II — the Allied High Command in what looks very much like the moment after photographer David E. Scherman told them… Read the rest of the article: February 1944: The High Command takes five

A few months back, in one of my first posts for Boing Boing, I wrote about the plight of the SS United States, the fastest ocean liner ever built. It… Read the rest of the article: Update: SS United States saved from the scrapper (for now)

Mark Duffy, the crank behind copyranter, calls this "the dumbest ad I've ever seen." (Actually, he tags it with a question mark, so there's a little wiggle room there.) I… Read the rest of the article: The worst ad ever made (print division)?

Here's a crazy cool project at the intersection of art and environmentalism: CDSea, a new installation by British artist Bruce Munro. Munro has been collecting castoff CDs from donors, and… Read the rest of the article: CDSea

The practical applications aren't immediately clear, and this certainly falls under the rubric of Krazy Koncept Devices That May Never See Daylight. But at least we can say this much:… Read the rest of the article: Okay, Share Happy. See if you can guess how I'm feeling now.