Intellect Plus
Art
1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 5 of 21.
- Tilt cards trace back to corrugated pictures older than photographyThat winking-eye postcard works because a sheet of tiny ridged lenses sends each thin stripe of an image in its own direction. Tilt it, and your eye catches a different picture. T…
- How a surreal Western at a Chelsea cinema turned midnight into a cult ritualIn December 1970, a surreal Mexican Western by Alejandro Jodorowsky opened at midnight in New York's Elgin Theater and sold out night after night for months. Fans came back weekly…
- Mie, the Japanese prefecture that guards Shinto's holiest and oldest shrinesMie Prefecture on Honshu holds both Ise Grand Shrine, counted as Japan's holiest Shinto site, and Tsubaki Grand Shrine, called its oldest. The same prefecture also claims the birt…
- The Moulin Rouge was built to let rich Parisians go slumming in MontmartreWhen Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler opened the Moulin Rouge on 6 October 1889, the idea was to lure wealthy visitors into raffish Montmartre, where they would mix with workers, a…
- Mother-of-pearl is a wall of microscopic bricks thin enough to bend lightNacre, the shimmering lining of oyster and abalone shells, is built like a wall of tiny hexagonal bricks of aragonite glued together with springy protein. Each brick is thin enoug…
- Natural history once covered everything, from the stars to human superstitionWhen Pliny the Elder published his Natural History around 77 to 79 AD, it took in astronomy, geography, medicine, human inventions and superstition along with plants and animals. …
- Medieval necromancers were often clergymen who borrowed prayers to summon demonsIn medieval Europe, the people accused of raising spirits were mostly literate clerics, not village witches. Trained in exorcism and armed with astrology texts, they blended Chris…
- British MPs cannot legally resign, so they take a sham Crown job insteadNo member of the House of Commons is allowed to quit. Yet every one of them can leave whenever they like, by asking the Chancellor of the Exchequer for a ceremonial post such as C…
- A looping Bob Dylan record named the loudest design group of the 1980sOn the night of December 6, 1980, Ettore Sottsass gathered young designers to plot an escape from Modernism while a Bob Dylan record kept looping. They took its word Memphis as th…
- No one has found a natural English sentence using each letter exactly onceA pangram squeezes the whole alphabet into one sentence. The fox that jumps over a lazy dog has done that job since at least the late 19th century, testing Western Union's telex l…
- A pope was crowned in a paper tiara, and it was no jokeWhen Pius VII was crowned in Venice on 21 March 1800, the papal tiara he wore was papier-mâché. The humble mix of scrap paper and paste began in Han dynasty China around 200 CE, a…
- The four gospels disagree on who carried the cross and what hour it wasThe Passion, from the Latin for suffering, covers the last days of Jesus and is remembered every Holy Week. Read side by side, the gospels diverge: Mark sets the crucifixion at ni…
- Before anyone knitted a sock, people were stitching fabric with one needleNålebinding, a Scandinavian word meaning needle-binding, builds cloth by dragging the entire working thread through every loop. A fragment found in the Judean Desert dates to arou…
- A pleasure palace that was never built fed straight into the Centre PompidouNeo-futurism grew from mid-century structural experiments by Alvar Aalto and Buckminster Fuller into a movement blending art, technology and design. Cedric Price's Fun Palace of 1…
- The first NFT sold for four dollars; seven years later one fetched $69 millionIn May 2014 Kevin McCoy registered a short video on the Namecoin blockchain and sold it to Anil Dash for $4 at a New York museum talk. That token, Quantum, launched a market that …
- A court ordered every copy of Nosferatu destroyed, and the film survived anywayF. W. Murnau's 1922 silent vampire film borrowed Dracula without permission, renaming the count Orlok and moving him to a German town. Bram Stoker's widow Florence sued and won an…
- Most of a hydrogen bomb's power comes from cheap, ordinary uraniumThe fusion fuel in a thermonuclear weapon is not where most of its energy comes from. Fast neutrons from fusion split the outer jacket of uranium-238, a cheap leftover of enrichme…
- Sardinia is studded with more than 7,000 stone towers left by a people without writingFrom about 1800 BC the Bronze Age inhabitants of Sardinia raised cone-shaped stone towers called nuraghi, roughly one every three square kilometres. They left no texts of their ow…
- The Oregon Trail's easiest mountain crossing was found by traders detouring on their way homeAbout 400,000 people followed the 2,170-mile Oregon Trail from the Missouri River to the Pacific Northwest. Its key gap through the Rockies, South Pass, was stumbled on by fur tra…
- Otaku began as a stiffly polite way of saying youBefore it meant an obsessive anime fan, otaku was an honorific word for someone else's home, used as a distant, courteous you. Fans meeting at conventions adopted it in the 1970s,…
- Sumerians pictured a Gulf trading hub called Dilmun as a paradise gardenLong before Islam, Bahrain sat at the heart of Dilmun, a Bronze Age trading power whose sweet groundwater and safe anchorages drew goods from as far as the Indus Valley. Mesopotam…
- Singapore's president holds a second key to the national savingsSingapore's head of state is mostly ceremonial, yet since 1991 the office has carried an unusual power: the elected president can block any budget that dips into reserves built up…
- Malaysia has had ten premierships but only nine prime ministersMahathir Mohamad is counted twice in Malaysia's list of leaders, as fourth and seventh prime minister. On his return he took the oath 62 days short of his 93rd birthday and left o…
- Pastiche takes its name from an Italian pie stuffed with mixed fillingsImitating another artist's style sounds like cheating, yet pastiche is built on affection rather than mockery. The word comes from pasticcio, an Italian pâté of assorted ingredien…
- The first camera photograph of a real scene needed hours or days of exposureWhen Nicéphore Niépce pointed a camera obscura at Le Gras in 1826, his bitumen plate was so sluggish that the shutter effectively stayed open for hours, possibly days. Within abou…
- A painter was billed for rebuilding the Paris column he helped toppleIn May 1871 the Paris Commune pulled down the Vendôme Column, Napoleon's bronze-clad salute to Austerlitz. Once order returned, Gustave Courbet was ordered to fund its reconstruct…
- Sony lost about 300 dollars on every early PlayStation 3 it soldThe PlayStation 3 was pitched as a living-room supercomputer, and its bill of materials proved it. Analysts put the cheaper launch model at roughly 806 dollars to build against a …
- Aristotle's lost book on comedy left only his thoughts on tragedyAround 335 BCE Aristotle wrote the first surviving treatise devoted purely to literary theory, and half of it vanished. The part on comedy was lost in antiquity, and the remaining…
- A 1974 McDonald's till stored key numbers only as multiples of threeLong before tablets on shop counters, a McDonald's cash register built in 1974 ran on an Intel 8008 chip, kept three copies of every important figure and could keep a whole restau…
- Paris streets once served as the poor man's picture galleryIn the 1890s the walls of Paris became an open-air exhibition. Colour lithography let printers turn out huge, cheap, vivid sheets, censorship of public space had eased, and advert…
- The Spanish university town that helped shape the modern calendarSalamanca's university, founded in 1218, ranks among Western Europe's oldest. Its scholars wrote the first grammar of Spanish, debated Columbus's voyage and sent calendar studies …
- Paris's first great salons were held around a hostess's bedBefore the late 17th century, a French literary gathering often meant a lady reclining on her bed while friends pulled up stools beside it. The gap between bed and wall, the ruell…
- Santiago Calatrava tilted a Seville bridge pylon at the Great Pyramid's angleThe Alamillo bridge in Seville hangs from a single concrete pylon 142 metres high, leaning at 58 degrees, the same slope as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Its own weight balances the …
- Schönbrunn began as a Habsburg hunting ground stocked with boar and pheasantsVienna's most visited sight started life in 1569 as a fenced floodplain where an emperor kept deer, ducks and boar for sport. It grew into a 1,441-room Baroque summer palace, host…
- A bowling-shirt machine helped turn screen printing into the T-shirt boomIn 1960 Michael Vasilantone began selling a rotating press built to print team names on bowling shirts. It was soon redirected to a new craze, the printed T-shirt. Today garments …
- Engineering makes a product work once; quality assurance makes it work every timeLong before factories, medieval guilds policed the standard of their members' goods, and an English king sent an overseer to inspect his ships. Quality assurance grew from those r…
- Fassbinder made more than 40 films before dying at 37Rainer Werner Fassbinder often skipped rehearsals and kept the first take. Working that fast with a loyal troupe, he could finish four or five low-budget films a year, and in bare…
- Why nearly every French king was crowned in one Gothic cathedralReims Cathedral rose unusually fast after a fire in 1210, partly because its builders used stones cut to standard sizes. The church already had centuries of royal prestige behind …
- Retrofuturism is nostalgia for a future that never actually arrivedFlying cars, robot butlers and holidays among the stars were once confidently predicted. Retrofuturism takes those old forecasts and treats them as a style, blending vintage looks…
- A child's taunt about Mickey Mouse launched Roy Lichtenstein's Pop ArtIn 1961 one of Roy Lichtenstein's sons pointed at a Mickey Mouse comic and bet his father couldn't paint that well. The result, Look Mickey, used hard outlines and hand-painted pr…
- Mexico's rain-soaked Tabasco holds the heartland of the Olmec civilizationUnlike most of Mexico, Tabasco gets heavy rain all year, around 2,550 millimetres on average, so rainforest and wetlands cover much of it. The south-eastern state also holds La Ve…
- The soft green rock that may have cradled the first life on EarthSerpentinite forms when seawater is forced deep into rock beneath the ocean floor. The reaction releases hydrogen, feeds microbes far underground, and runs most of the chemistry n…
- Stalin built seven Moscow skyscrapers so foreign visitors would not sneerIn 1946 Stalin decided Moscow needed skyscrapers, reportedly fearing that visiting foreigners would compare it unfavourably with capitalist cities. The result was seven towers bui…
- The avant-garde group whose slogans covered the walls of France in 1968The Situationist International lasted only from 1957 to 1972, but its ideas escaped the group. Blending libertarian Marxism with the rebellious spirit of Dada and Surrealism, it a…
- Frank Lloyd Wright's only museum took 15 years and 700 sketchesHilla von Rebay wanted a temple of spirit for abstract art, and in 1943 she and Solomon Guggenheim wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright, although she assumed he was dead. He was 76 and ver…
- Why red is the hardest colour to get right in a stained-glass windowRed glass coloured strongly enough to hold its hue looks almost black at the thickness a window needs to survive the wind. Glassmakers solved it by fusing a thin skin of red onto …
- From Egyptian tombs to Maya plazas, upright slabs of stone kept the recordsA stele is simply a slab, usually taller than it is wide, set upright and covered in carving, painting or text. Egypt and Mesopotamia raised them, while China and the Maya seem to…
- Wounds of the crucifixion on living bodies: the strange history of stigmataIn 1224, two years before his death, Francis of Assisi went to Mount La Verna for a forty-day fast and, according to legend, left bearing wounds like Christ's. He is widely counte…
- The lowest-ranked genre in painting was also among the best-sellingStill life sat on the bottom rung of the traditional hierarchy of painting genres, yet buyers loved it. Its roots run from Egyptian tombs, where painted food was meant to become r…
- Painters needed cheaper mirrors before the self-portrait could really take offAn Egyptian sculptor named Bak carved his own likeness around 1365 BC, yet self-portraits only became common in Europe from the mid-15th century. Better, cheaper mirrors and the r…
- Caligari's villain was modelled on a real army psychiatristCarl Mayer faked madness to dodge service in the First World War and was grilled by a military psychiatrist. That man became the model for Dr. Caligari, the sinister hypnotist of …
- A three-week sanatorium visit stretches to seven years in Thomas Mann's great novelHans Castorp climbs to a Swiss clinic to see his sick cousin for three weeks and does not come down for seven years. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain spends almost half its length…
- Bulgakov burned his masterpiece, just as his hero the Master doesIn 1930 Mikhail Bulgakov threw the first draft of his novel about the devil in Moscow into the fire, convinced he had no future as a Soviet writer. He started again, kept revising…
- Picasso cut the Weeping Woman out of Guernica, then painted her obsessivelyWhile painting Guernica, Picasso sketched a weeping woman and slipped her into a corner of the mural, then scraped her out, fearing she would upstage the other figures. She would …
- Why a perfect photograph of the Mona Lisa still lacks something, according to BenjaminWriting in Paris exile in 1935, Walter Benjamin argued that even a flawless copy misses one thing: the original's presence in a particular time and place. He called that quality t…
- Tiki bars were invented in Hollywood by a former rum-runner from TexasThe Pacific never produced a tiki bar. The style began in 1933 when a young man with a rum-running past opened Don's Beachcomber in Hollywood, mixing Cantonese food, Caribbean rum…
- In 2009 hackers from 4chan rigged Time's influence poll to spell a jokeWhen Time let readers vote in 2009, the winner was Christopher Poole, founder of the message board 4chan, with more than 16.7 million votes. Organised pranksters had gamed the tal…
- Takashi Murakami trained in classical Japanese painting, then put his art on handbagsA Tokyo painter with a doctorate in Nihonga ended up designing Louis Vuitton bags, Kanye West's Graduation cover and plush toys. Takashi Murakami argues that Japan never drew a ha…
- An amulet wards off evil, but a talisman is meant to attract luckPeople often treat the words as twins, yet they point in opposite directions. An amulet defends its owner against harm, while a talisman is supposed to draw good fortune in. For o…
- The Avalanches stitched a classic album from roughly 3,500 vinyl samplesA Melbourne band built its debut out of crates of second-hand records, then took sixteen years to follow it up. Since I Left You, assembled by the group's own estimate from about …