Some people found a baby seal crying for attention far away from the open sea, in the city of Sundsvall, in eastern Sweden. Apparently, instead of calling some emergency service, they just filmed her with their cellphones. A sad sign of the times, I guess. So eventually she was like "wtf, screw you humans," went back into the water, and left.
British architect David Chipperfield was chosen to build Stockholm’s Nobelhuset today, more than a year after a competition to design it got underway. This 275,000-square-foot complex will house a museum and administrative center for the Nobel Prize, along with a cafe and a library. Wonder how long before TED will build a museum dedicated to itself? [Bustler]
London’s plan to grow up might go down, Elon Musk’s quest to make electric cars cool, and funny anti-Rob Ford ads appear in Toronto. Plus: Learning from streets in Vietnam, Paris, and Manhattan. All this and more in this week’s Urban Reads.
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The city of Kiruna, Sweden, is sinking—the iron mines beneath it are making the ground collapse. So, over the next two decades, its 20,000 residents will be relocated, along with their homes, offices, stores, and schools, to another, brand-new city about two miles to the east.
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Ikea is already the gold standard for furniture that moves well, but this year its designers are pushing the art of nomadism even further. Images of Ikea’s new PS collection have arrived, and its name—On the Move—says it all.
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The design of disco supergroup Abba’s stagewear was not just influenced by the sequined needs of being a dancing queen; the design of their clothes was also a form of tax evasion.
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What’s cooler than being cool? Ice cold. Exactly. The Swedish town of Luleå took that saying literally because they formed an incredible ice orchestra called Ice Music that uses musical instruments sculpted from ice—yes, ice—to performs songs inside a concert hall that’s basically an igloo.
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With a literacy rate hovering around an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the population during the Middle Ages, only a select few of society’s upper echelons and religious castes had use for books. So who would have use for a sextuplet of stories bound by a single, multi-hinged cover like this? Some seriously busy scholar.
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Bo Bergman, a 73-year-old Swedish man living in the quiet locality of Simlångsdalen (population about 500) is not reading this right now. This is because Bo Bergman really hates the internet. Like, a lot.
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In a recent study, 33% of Swedish parents surveyed (521 total) admitted that their phone and tablet use was a sore point with their kids. The children said that their parents spend too much time on the devices. And experts are weighing in about the developmental damage this could cause.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
