Today is September 11 – in case you’d forgotten, in which event you must not be a Patriot (today is also Patriot Day) – the 8th anniversary of a certain event that changed the course of modern history. Of course, no horrifying act of death and destruction is beyond the purview of advertisers constantly looking [...]

Maybe it’s because buildings tall and short seem to be slapped together over a few weeks or a couple months these days, or maybe people just realize that watching long construction processes reduced to a 20-second video is really cool, but we’ve become addicted to time-lapse clips of epic skyscrapers rising from their foundations [...]

As drought-prone areas experience some of the driest seasons on record ever, both the Southern and Northern hemispheres have witnessed some of the worst wildfires in years in 2009. This weekend a massive wildfire was knocking at Los Angeles’ gates, but California, the Northwest and even Alaska have been getting lit all summer, as have [...]

Suburban design has clearly reached its sad and tragic end, but finding a way to make something out of the mess it’s left behind all over North America and the world is a massive and intimidating project. It seems as though for every suburb there’s an environmentally-sensitive plan for how things could be better. Well, [...]

Today is International Left-Handers Day, which means that all around the world people will be joining hands (only their left hands, somehow) and celebrating the rich lives and momentous accomplishments of left-handed folk everywhere. And with only 7 to 10 percent of the world’s population being left-handed, it’s kind of amazing to see how much [...]

Yesterday a huge typhoon hit Taiwan and China, and it’s still too early to accurately measure the death toll and damage, but estimates are grim. To get some appreciation of what it might have been like – and what any number of other massively destructive weather systems might be like – we’ve weathered The 10 [...]

Hey, so, it’s basically Moon Week this week, with the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing coming up on Monday and tomorrow marking the date that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong lifted off in Apollo 11. Accordingly, every media outlet is knee-deep in nostalgic moon-gazing coverage, but we’re more interested in the ways that [...]

Today, for some unfathomable reason, is the day when going down to the woods is sure to give you a big surprise. We’re told there’s lots of wonderful things to eat (humans, presumably) and wonderful games to play. Beneath the trees, where nobody sees, they play hide and seek as long as they please, because [...]

On our bike ride to work (20 minutes), we pass under, alongside and near a highway (the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) that basically cuts three successive neighborhoods off from the city, not to mention burying their immediate surroundings in noise, shadows and imposing concrete superstructures. Not a day goes by that we don’t wish that bulky aberration [...]

Michael Jackson’s mega-epic memorial service takes place today at Los Angeles’s Staples Arena, with over 17,000 people attending and a long list of celebrities lined up to pay their respects. But how does the guest list of Kobe Bryant, Brooke Shields, Berry Gordy, Mariah Carey, Jennifer Hudson, Magic Johnson, Al Sharpton, Usher, Stevie Wonder, Smokey [...]