My Neighbor Totoro Inspires a Line of Traditional Japanese Handicrafts

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We sup­pose it’s con­ceiv­able that a gift of a wood­en Totoro fig­urine, hand-carved from a sin­gle block using 50 dif­fer­ent kinds of chis­els, might spark a rev­er­ence for tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese craft and nature in the next gen­er­a­tion…

Or, they may be left wish­ing you’d giv­en them a vast­ly more hug­gable machine-made plushie ver­sion,…

Dance Like David Byrne! An Easy-to-Follow Instructional Video Shows You How

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This dance is seri­ous. This dance is nec­es­sary. Do you feel that change? — David Byrne

Every­one can dance, though some of us need a push from an enthu­si­as­tic, encour­ag­ing instructor…like singer-song­writer David Byrne.

Move­ment has long been a hall­mark of the for­mer Talk­ing Heads frontman’s per­for­mances, when he was a…

Watch the Moment When a 13-Year-Old Becomes the First Person to Ever “Beat” Tetris

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On Decem­ber 21, Willis Gib­son, a 13-year-old from Still­wa­ter, Okla­homa, became the first per­son to push Tetris to its absolute lim­it. Around the 38:20 mark of the video above, Gib­son advances to Lev­el 157 and soon encoun­ters Tetris’ “kill screen.” Real­iz­ing that he’s bro­ken Tetris for the first time (Alex­ey Pajit­nov designed the game in…

How Londinium Became London, Lutetia Became Paris, and Other Roman Cities Got Their Modern Names

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They Might Be Giants achieved pop-cul­tur­al immor­tal­i­ty when they cov­ered Jim­my Kennedy and music by Nat Simon’s nov­el­ty song “Istan­bul (Not Con­stan­tino­ple)” in 1990. Key to the the lyrics’ humor is their simul­ta­ne­ous fix­a­tion on and appar­ent dis­in­ter­est in the rea­son for the re-nam­ing of the Turk­ish metrop­o­lis. As often as you hear the…

The Surprising Map of Plants: A New Animation Shows How All the Different Plants Relate to Each Other

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Are pinecones relat­ed to pineap­ples? This was the unex­pect­ed ques­tion with which my wife con­front­ed me as we woke up this morn­ing. As luck would have it, Dominic Wal­li­man has giv­en us an enter­tain­ing way to check: just a few days ago he released his Map of Plants, through which he gives a guid­ed…