Long before Mario jumped over his first barrel, before the Game Boy disappeared into millions of backpacks and before families swung Wii Remotes in front of television screens, Nintendo sold pieces of decorated cardboard.The company’s story...
Read article
Open a familiar rectangular world map and something strange happens to the planet. Greenland appears enormous, sometimes looking almost comparable to Africa. Russia stretches across the top...
Read
On the evening of October 29, 1969, a student programmer at UCLA began typing a word into a computer. The machine was connected over a network to another computer at the Stanford Research In...
Read
Taste a drop of seawater and the answer seems obvious: the ocean contains salt. The more interesting question is how it got there. There are no gigantic salt deposits steadily dissolving int...
Read
Step out of a dark cinema into brilliant afternoon sunlight and, for some people, the reaction is immediate. The eyes narrow, the nose begins to tingle and within seconds comes an involuntar...
Read
For 73 years, the Titanic existed in two places at once: in history, where the details of its final night were argued over in inquiries, newspapers and survivor testimony, and somewhere in t...
Read
Look closely at the tip of your finger and you are looking at a landscape that began forming months before you were born. Ridges curve, split, stop and rejoin in patterns so detailed that th...
Read
You walk into a café you have never visited. The tables, the light from the window and the conversation at the next table suddenly feel uncannily familiar. For a few seconds, there is an ove...
Read
Draw a line from Miami to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third back toward Florida, and you have the rough outline of one of the most famous imaginary places on Earth. T...
Read
Few foods carry a national story as neatly as Pizza Margherita. Red tomato, white mozzarella and green basil seem to reproduce the Italian flag on a circle of dough. According to the story r...
Read