The lamentable advent of Bud Select 55 got us thinking about the history of nutritional science—or, rather, the ways in which dodgy scientific claims have been used to peddle all manner of food products. We’re of a mind that such science-y pitches do an excellent job of reflecting cultural neuroses. So just as today we’re […]
More than we might care to admit, cultures are defined by their attitudes toward alcohol consumption. And so it makes sense that amateur anthropologists can learn a lot by paying attention not only to consumption habits, but to the psychological tactics that societies use to scare folks away from Demon Rum. Those tactics are on […]
Tags:addiction·advertising·alcohol·anthropology·art·France·Soviet Union·The Netherlands
Explicitly Communist architecture gets a unfairly bad rap from critics. Sure, builders behind the Iron Curtain were overly fond of dismal panelaks and other multi-dwelling units that reeked of dingy misery. But when the last true believers in the dictatorship of the proletariat decided to go the triumphalist route, man, did they ever pull it […]
Tags:architecture·art·Communism·dictatorship·mythology·Nicolae Ceausescu·Romania·statues
Since 1983, the average amount of time a condemned American convict spends on death row has tripled to 153 months. Yet that mammoth stretch of time is nothing compared to that endured by Sadamichi Hirasawa. When he passed away from natural causes in 1987, the alleged mastermind of Japan’s most infamous and lethal bank robbery […]
Tags:art·death penalty·Japan·Sadamichi Hirasawa·Teigin Case·Unit 731
The industry that exists to service laboratory primates is surprisingly vast. Our close genetic cousins can’t just live off kibble while caged, nor can their brains remain limber with nothing more than a hamster wheel to occupy their time. So companies like New Jersey’s Bio-Serv exist to peddle “primate enrichment” products designed to make captivity […]
As of this very moment, we have a new life goal: becoming one of the scores of celebrated creative types with a Mercury crater to their name. Yes, we realize the odds of this happening are slim to none—we’ve got a long way to go before we join the hallowed ranks of Utagawa Kunisada or […]
Tags:art·astronomy·literature·Mercury
Many moons ago at the Bronx Museum, we caught a great bit of satiric video art entitled Why Cybraceros?. We’ll let the artist himself, Alex Rivera, explain the riotous concept: In his second film, Why Cybraceros? (USA 1997), Rivera sarcastically imagined a future in which migrant farm workers (or Braceros) could work in America, but […]
Tags:Alex Rivera·art·Bronx·Bronx Museum·comedy·Cybraceros·immigration·museums
We were never the biggest fan of Iron Maiden’s music, with the possible exception of “Prowler” (later memorably covered by the great Trans Am). But we’ve always had a soft spot for the band’s ghoulish cover art, starring a wrinkly, gore-loving skeleton called Eddie. So yesterday, when we saw a fellow Harlemite non-ironically sporting a […]
Should any of y’all find yourselves near Doylestown, Penn., in the coming weeks, carve out a few hours to check out “From Swords to Ploughshares” at the James A. Michener Art Museum. The exhibit features 300 pieces of “trench art”—that is, baubles produced by 20th-century soldiers as they awaited their ghastly fates. Most of the […]
