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Today is Multiple Personalities Day, which, it seems to us, should really be celebrated over the course of multiple days, but nobody asked us. For now, the best we can do is to take this opportunity to look at the various ways that people (mostly fictional) with multiple personalities have affected our lives. Here, then, [...]

By no means do we consider ourselves pizza purists. We are willing to put most anything on top of a nice crusty pie: for a long time we were fond of pistachios as a topping; we once garnished a cheese pizza with a banana; a couple of years later we eve tried using peanut butter [...]

Every so often, web users with various sorts of artistic skills and different understandings of telecommunications will try to create maps of the Internet. Why, earlier this week The New York Times ran this piece about the shape of the Internet featuring two interesting maps by Peter Morance. Of course, being the comprehensive Internet cartographers [...]

Today is National Pig Day in the U.S. of A., a holiday celebrated throughout the Midwest and in select cities (in New York you can find Pig Day celebrations at the Central Park Zoo), and though we have celebrated our smart, porcine companions on multiple occasions in the past, we didn’t dare deny them a [...]

Exactly 140 years ago today, a prototype for a pneumatic train system was unveiled in New York City–built secretly, no less!–running for one block underneath Broadway between Murray and Warren Streets. Evidently, despite the cool, super-quick rides pneumatics promised, the idea never really caught on outside the world of sci-fi narratives like Futurama or The [...]

Paper money is pretty amazing, beyond the strange suspension of disbelief involved in assigning some very abstract value to some relatively insignificant pieces of paper and cotton, but also for all the weird and unusual uses you can put it to. No, don’t worry, this is not the intro to our pyramid scheme pitch (although, [...]

A major retrospective of the drawings, prints, animations, videos, performances, set designs and installations of South African artist William Kentridge opens at the Museum of Modern Art today (after stops in San Francisco, Texas and Florida), but over the last few days (and despite an excellent profile in a recent New Yorker) we noticed that [...]

On this date, a couple days before the February 25 anniversary of the day it was officially renamed the Soviet Army in 1946, some former Soviet block nations celebrate Red Army Day. Though we think of ourselves as socialists rather than full-fledged communists (a distinction some would challenge, no doubt), we have to admit that [...]

Today is World Thinking Day, a rather broad and abstract holiday that we think is very strange, and which apparently has something to do with the founders of the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. For our part, though, we like to take a little extra time on Thinking Day to reflect on all the brilliant [...]

We can always use a little more escapism in our day; not too much, just a short journey to the outer reaches of the human consciousness and imagination. More often than not, this trip is enabled by drugs incredible and transporting short films. Not incidentally, then, you’ll notice that most of these 10 Surreal Animated [...]