An online museum of Chinese cigarette packaging art.

The words shark (the animal) and shark (a predatory scoundrel) may have two different origins. “This would make ‘shark’ possibly the only word borrowed from a Mayan language into English directly.”

Parachord is “a new kind of music player that invites all your streams, local audio files, and playlists scattered across multiple services to the same party”. Interesting!

Every Fashion Designer, Explained. If you don’t know anything about fashion, this video will get you up to speed quickly. Vivienne Westwood, Nigo, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, Dapper Dan, Hubert de Givenchy, etc. etc.

300+ issues of the UK music magazine NME from 1969-1983. The ads alone are incredible.

“The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”

Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. There’s the 1631 Bible that says “thou shalt commit adultery” but James Joyce resisted some of his corrections: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”

Paris now has a cycling network bigger than Amsterdam and “more daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car”.

Photographer and drone pilot Pio Andrea Peri captured this overhead photo of a Sicilian city called Centuripe. Perched atop hilltops, the city looks like a person from above — even on Google Maps. (via daily overview)

Tags: drones · pareidolia · photography · Pio Andrea Peri

Gender Play in Nineteenth-Century Theater. “The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and Iago…”

A study pitted adults vs little kids to see which was better at making paintings in the style of Jackson Pollack. “The researchers found that the kids’ paintings made in this manner resembled genuine Pollacks more than did those from adult painters.”

Dawn Wilcox’s quest to chronicle the life & death of every woman in the US killed by a man. “Did women have no choice, Wilcox wondered, but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?”

Checking in with Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, kinetic machine sculptures that move under their own power along the beach. Some of the most recent versions are quick fast and can even tow humans along behind them.

This is maybe the best baseball catch you’ll ever see. Or the most fun one anyway.

Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8 billion. How good of a person do you expect her to be? “I got to thinking about all this the other day while mulling the curious, oft-repeated fact that Miuccia Prada was, in her 1960s youth, a Communist.”

“Birds in the United States are not only declining, but they are declining faster, especially in areas with intensive agriculture, according to new research.”

A playable CSS-only Super Mario Bros game. Wow.

A generator for VHS slipcovers, cassette tape inserts, CD labels & inserts. You can paste in Spotify URLs, search for movies, etc. Really cool and fun.

The chess program available on Delta Air Lines’ seatback screens is an ELO monster that can beat almost all opponents on easy mode. This guy used a series of increasingly powerful bots to see just how good the Delta chess bot is. Can it beat a grandmaster-level bot? (via clive thompson)

Tags: chess · Delta · games · video

What does it feel like to be struck by lightning? “Some have to relearn simple things, things they’ve done their whole life — how to read, how to sing, how to ride a bike.”

Trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. I like that Tom Holland. I’m into it.

The Fascinating Engineering of the Titanic: How the Great Ocean Liner Was Built. “Issues of the journal The Engineer published between 1909 and 1911 contain detailed photographs of the construction of both the Titanic and Olympic…”

Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years. “Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977.”

This is a mindblowing time capsule of ordinary life: video of a group of friends taking the NYC subway to Coney Island in 1987. Because it was before mobile phones, they had to arrange to meet one of the group members in the first car of the train along the way. The film ...

Jamelle Bouie says the SAVE Act will take us back to Jim Crow South: “a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.”

“This is an interactive story about In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) told from two perspectives: Parent and Child. Select one to continue.”

The Mysterious Redditor Who’s Changing the Way We Do Laundry. “Most of the world uses powdered laundry detergent, which allows for more enzyme flexibility; Americans generally prefer liquid, which doesn’t always contain these precious enzymes.”

Am I a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images by Richard Nadler because I am a fan of Richard Scarry books and Wes Anderson movies or am I a fan of Scarry & Anderson because I’m a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images? (Or is it because I’m aphantasic and require external imagery for this level of detail?) See also Mark Alan Stamaty’s NYC Illustrations and Infinite Illustrations. Tags: Richard Nadler

Twin adventurers are cleverly testing modern vs. historic gear. “If they went on an expedition, and Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas, any difference in performance…could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.”

The teaser trailer for Dune: Part Three. I am nonplussed by this trailer, both in the traditional and modern senses.