What if America Went Completely Dark? “We came up with some very astounding numbers. If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.” And it could last months?

Now We Can Sing is the first single from Max Richter’s upcoming album, While the Flood Rages, which will be available wherever you stream your music on Oct 16.

This is a fun daily game: Catfishing. You guess the Wikipedia article from its categories.

Terry Riley’s In C is a composition where any number of musicians improvisationally play 53 melodic fragments in the key of C. This web app lets you play multiple In C live performances layered on top of each other. In C to the power of In C, if you will.

“The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions.”

“The Romanian Football Federation (FRF) has introduced a new black card to help prevent abusive behaviour from parents at youth-team matches.” If, after two warnings, the black card is shown, the match is permanently cancelled.

Lego’s biggest set ever is coming out soon: the 12,060-piece Sagrada Família. $800. It will take as long to build as the actual cathedral — you may not live to see it finished.

What If We Just Stopped? “We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.”

What If We Just Stopped? “We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.”

Using a handheld scanner, designer/illustrator Noah Nolet captures textures from surfaces in cities around the world, including Tokyo, LA, Paris, Kyoto, NYC, and Berlin. On his website, he offers city packs of hundreds of scans for sale and free sample packs as well. You can also check out how he captures the textures on Instagram and YouTube. This is a modern take on stone rubbing. Tags: cities · design · Noah Nolet · photography

Homer’s Catalogue of Ships from the Iliad. Where the Greek ships that set out for Troy were from and what they may have looked like. “No Homeric ship survives. What we have are pictures: a handful of painted sherds of the twelfth century BC…”

Practical Engineering: Are beavers actually good at building dams? (A: Yes, duh.)

The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth. Brad Pitt returns as Booth, the character he played in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but 8 years later. Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, directed by David Fincher.

Trace is a daily puzzle game where you build a “recipe” of up to 4 steps to turn a starting set of numbers into another set of numbers.

The lessons four Islamic polymaths — al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi — hold for students today: “breadth over specialisation, and never let constraints get in the way”.

50 Songs That Explain America. “The songs were chosen on the basis that they told me something, sonically or lyrically or emotionally or vibrationally, about America and the idea of America.”

{Ira Glass voice} On this week’s episode of This American Life, the story of middle schoolers too young for social media chatting in the comments section of NPR’s podcasts on Spotify. From the transcript: And it was just, like, gibberish. There was a bunch of new comments...

How to rescue an orphaned baby elephant. “The baby elephant needs a mother to run to. And the fact is that the mother is a 30-year-old Nigerian man right now.”

I visited Jimbōchō today, a neighborhood that’s home to more than 100 used bookstores. Many sell only Japanese books, but some of them have books in English or sell magazines, posters, or visual books that are interesting to browse no matter what language you speak. I visi...

Robert Eggers is doing Romeo & Juliet. “When it comes to dialogue, sources say that this adaptation will feature actors speaking in Elizabethan English (aka early modern English), with lines straight from the play.”

Play Solitaire Alone Together. “It’s Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet.” A little more social than solitaire, but not by much.

The Museum of Time-Based Art. “My idea for this site is to build an exhaustive, authoritative compendium of every art project that uses time as part of the work.”

I can’t remember where I heard about this, but judging by the trailer, Hope by Korean director Na Hong-jin looks pretty good.

For New York magazine, Emily Gould writes about her quest to cry again: I Miss My Tears (archive). I looked over at my husband, Keith, whose eyes were red, and felt … nothing. Not a clench in my chest, not a pang, not an incipient burning behind my eye sockets. It wasn’t t...

Chimpanzees use tools to collect food and deliberately teach other chimps (often their offspring) to use them for ant dipping, algae fishing, and termite fishing.

Some advice on giving good advice. “Not every situation warrants advice. Sometimes, the person just wants to gauge a reaction or to share.”

I love these black & white photos of Devils Tower by Zac Henderson. A butte of a rare kind of volcanic rock that formed a mile underground 50 million years ago, Devil’s Tower is visible now thanks to erosion of sedimentary rock. The tower features the world’s large...

TIL they can do wing replacements on injured butterflies…just take a look at this repair video.

Engaging read on how the Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? was made. “To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion.”

The 25 Photos That Changed Fashion Forever. “It didn’t matter if an image was meant as a fashion photograph, so long as the picture later inspired a designer, collection or trend, or it changed how we might think about style.”