Mar 15
The following are my picks for the best St. Patrick’s day ever, with a few post-St. Patrick’s day reconciliation-style inventions thrown in for good measure.
Mar 13
In 1805, a twenty-three year-old Bostonian named Frederic Tudor launched a new industry: the international frozen-water trade. Over the next fifty years, he and the men he worked with developed specialized ice-harvesting tools, a global network of thermally engineered ice houses, and a business model that cleverly leveraged ballast-less ships, off-season farmers, and overheated Englishmen abroad. By the turn of the century, the industry employed 90,000 people and was worth $220 million in today’s terms.
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Mar 09
Why Doesn't NYC Have a P Train?
Posted in: Today's Chili
New York has one of the oldest and biggest subways in the world, and as it has expanded, the city has used almost every letter in the alphabet to name its new lines. Conspicuously absent? The P line. Probably for the exact reason you’d imagine.
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Mar 07
How Hipsters Ruined the Bowery
Posted in: Today's Chili
With news this week that the famous Salvation Army—a haven for the homeless on the Bowery—would be replaced with an Ace hotel—a haven for hipsters—some would say it’s the end of an era. But they’d be wrong. That era ended a long time ago.
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Mar 06
Beautiful arches, like the art deco skeletal system of a lost urban era, can be found throughout New York City, from Grand Central Terminal to bars and restaurants. Created with tiles by the Spanish father-and-son duo, Rafael Guastavino and his junior namesake, these structures were also marvels of artistic engineering, combining intricate brickwork with functional arrays of vaults and pillars, all leading to a kind of Mediterranean dreamworld of colonnades "hidden in plain sight," as a new exhibition suggests, around the city.
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Mar 05
Tattoo is among humanity’s earliest and most ubiquitous art forms. Cultures from every habitable continent have embedded permanent dyes in their bodies for more than 5000 years—as mystical wards, status symbols, rites of passage, or simply as personal decoration. That tradition continues today, just with a much smaller chance of infection.
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Mar 04
While today’s emphasis on all-things-celebrity seems at times all-consuming, the mashups of certain couples’ names have
entered our lexicon, dating all the way back to the ill-fated
relationship of "Bennifer" [Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez]. Others like
"Brangelina" [Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie] have stood the test of
time, while the dubbing of the would-be coupling of "Kimye" [Kim
Kardashian & Kanye West] portends a short-lived hook-up. On a much
more somber note, combining the names of Hitler and Putin – to ‘Putler’. . .
Mar 03
Although our ties with Russia sometimes walk across a political tightrope, there’s no underestimating this nation’s scientific and technical contributions. Across the centuries, many inventions that have changed the course of our daily lives have emanated from the briliiant minds of Russian scientists. Here are ten for your reading edification.
Feb 28
Two thousand ago, the Thomas Edison of the ancient world lived in Alexandria, Egypt where he tinkered, built and wrote about some of the most amazing and whimsical machines the pre-industrial world had ever seen.
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Feb 27
Even after the gold fever died down, gold itself was in the air in San Francisco—as long as you knew where to look. That place would be in the San Francisco Mint. In a majestic granite and sandstone building downtown, bullion was turned into gold coins—as well as lots and lots of gold dust.
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