Redacted art book
From 1966 until 2016, English artist Tom Phillips created a new story out of the Victorian novel A Human Document; he did not add any words, but selectively drew or painted over each of its pages to surface something entirely new.
Author: The Generalist
I live in Auckland, New Zealand, and am curious about most things.
The magician’s toilet
John Nevil Maskelyne was a turn of the century stage magician who created the first levitation trick, built an automaton that could play whist, revealed the secrets of card sharks, and invented the pay toilet.
Featured category: Animals
The pelican in her piety; the oldest individual animal on the planet; the insects with natural gears; and the lizards who play evolutionary rock-paper-scissors.
From the archives: All that jazz
The beautiful slang of a remarkable hepcat-orooni; Alice Coltrane’s jazz harp; jazz in 19/4 (!) time; and the fascist jazz of World War II.
Theatre of silence
Andrea Bocelli’s Teatro del Silenzio only hosts one concert a year; every other day, the open-air theatre is silent.
Experimental pi
If you have a piece of striped paper and some sticks, you can estimate the value of pi through a simple experiment.
Human blood type systems
Your blood type is most commonly defined by two systems: ABO (blood types A, B, AB, and O) and Rh (+ or -). But these aren’t the only systems; there are more than thirty others.
Sky tubes
A Bangladeshi engineer named Fazlur Rahman Khan revolutionised the design of skyscrapers by modelling them on bamboo tubes.
Animal actors
From 1951 to the 1980s the PATSY Award celebrated the greatest animal actor in Hollywood; from 2001 to today the Palm Dog Award celebrates the greatest canine actor showing at Cannes.
Featured category: The oceans
The space cemetery in the middle of the Pacific; the inaccessible island in the middle of the Atlantic; the largest ocean current in the world; and the pivot points around which the global tides turn.
From the archives: Metric
100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 10 hours in a day; the American highway with kilometre signs; the $327 million dollar NASA metric mix-up; and that time pirates prevented the United States from getting the metric system.
Beer beetles
The Australian beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli attempts to mate with discarded beer bottles, sometimes to the point of its own death.
Pirate democracy
In the 18th century, a new pirate crew would come together to elect a captain and quartermaster, and agree on a shared code of conduct: what we today call the pirate code.
Deciphering a secret society manual
Around 1730 a German secret society recorded their initiation rituals in an encrypted manuscript. In 2011, that cipher was finally decoded.
The riff repeats
The opening riff of Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” bears a strong resemblance to the 1984 song “Eighties”… which in turn bears a strong resemblance to the 1982 song “Life Goes On.”
Rational dress
The Rational Dress Society, founded in 1881, fought the strictures of the Victorian corset, crinoline, and high heels.
The Generalist Academy 