Virtually everyone reading this will, at some point in their lives, have experienced the sadness that comes with losing a beloved pet. In the case of a working animal, like a renowned police dog, the death of an older animal can hit extra hard — because it also involves the knowledge that you’ll have to…
Anyone who has ever had first-hand experience of substance abuse will know that, however much a person might want to quit, ending this kind of dependency isn’t a simple on/off mechanism. But what if it could be? While science has not yet advanced to that point with humans, researchers from Scripps Research have demonstrated that…
Leon Neal/Getty ImagesAt lunchtime on March 21, 2006, a 29-year-old programmer named Jack Dorsey sent the world’s first tweet. “Just setting up my twttr,” he wrote, using the preliminary name that he and his co-founders were using for the microblogging service. That day, the message was read by only a handful of people. Twitter was…
In Lagos’s Brazilian quarter, Good Friday means frejon. Rich with savory black beans, fragrant with coconut milk and cloves, and sweetened with a few spoonfuls of sugar, frejon is somewhere between a pudding and a soup. It’s a perfect dish for Nigerian Catholics on Good Friday, when meat is forbidden. Invented by enslaved West Africans who’d been…
The Van Gogh House in London. © Claire ZhaoBefore Vincent van Gogh embarked on some 2,100 paintings—Starry Night, Sunflowers, and many self-portaits among them—the Dutch post-Impressionist worked a myriad of jobs across Europe, including as an art dealer for the Goupil gallery, headquartered in Paris. The company had agents stationed everywhere from Brussels to Vienna…
Boys eating school lunch in New York City, 1919. NYPL/Public DomainAlana Dao couldn’t figure out which was worse: going to school with a lunch box full of hummus, or pulling out Chinese pork floss buns in front of her classmates. In the 1990s, Sugar Land, Texas, was a steak and potatoes kind of place. In…