Our Obsession with Art Heists

A deeply ingrained interest in stolen objects and their recovery reflects our collective uncertainty over how we value art.
Daniel Craig in No Time to Die

Why James Bond Villains Prefer Post-Soviet Architecture

In No Time to Die, Bond blows up the villain’s post-Soviet missile silo—just as he does every other modernist building he encounters.
An abstract spectrum of colored dots on a black background that cohere together to represent sound waves or a music equalizer.

How to Hear Images and See Sounds

Artists Shannon Finnegan and Andy Slater talk accessibility, transdimensional hearing, alt-text as poetry, sound descriptions, and Instagram captions for McSweeney’s Audio Issue.
Mario Montez

How Latin Camp Rocked the New York Underground

Puerto Rican queers produced theater and film that made them mainstays of the New York underground arts movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
Silhouette of office lady using smartphone in city

Fake News: A Media Literacy Reading List

Compiled by graduate students in a 2016 course on “Activism and Digital Culture,” at University of Southern California.
Daguerre's diorama

Diorama, qu’est-ce que c’est?

Before his daguerreotype, the French inventor Louis Daguerre unveiled a new kind of “virtual reality” on a British stage.
5 types of vacation

The Five Types of Summer Vacation

Each of them has a distinctive structure and a complex history.
Unite the Right rally

Is Doxxing the Right Way to Fight the “Alt-Right?”

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, people with similar names to white supremacists involved in the march were also caught in the crossfire.
Alan Emtage

Meet Alan Emtage, the Black Technologist Who Invented ARCHIE, the First Internet Search Engine

Internet search has had a profound impact on our own internal makeup—on how we learn, and how we think.
The inside of a newsroom

Four Hard Truths about Fake News

Skeptical, self-aware interaction with digital data is the critical foundation upon which democracy may be maintained, explains media scholar Alexandra Juhasz.