The Iconic Glass House Built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—and the Lawsuit That Cast a Shadow Over It

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It’s tempt­ing, in telling the sto­ry of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “Peo­ple who live in glass hous­es should­n’t throw stones.” For the res­i­dence in ques­tion is made pre­dom­i­nant­ly of glass, or rather glass and steel, and its first own­er turned out to have more than a few stones for…

The Life & Death of an Espresso Shot in Super Slow Motion

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Some YouTu­ber post­ed online a pret­ty nice clip of an espres­so shot being pulled from a La Mar­zoc­co FB80 espres­so machine at 120 frames per sec­ond. They rec­om­mend mut­ing the sound, then putting on your own music. I gave it a quick shot with the famous sound­track for Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I’ll…

The Real Science Experiments That Inspired Frankenstein

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With the Hal­loween sea­son mere months away, the time has come to start think­ing about what fright­en­ing reads to line up for our­selves this year. Some of us may reach for Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein; or, The Mod­ern Prometheus, a sto­ry we all think we know. But a look into its con­text reveals that what’s…

The Devilish History of the 1980s Parental Advisory Sticker: When Heavy Metal & Satanic Lyrics Collided with the Religious Right

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Frank Zap­pa called them the “Moth­ers of Pre­ven­tion,” the group of wives mar­ried to mem­bers of Con­gress who decid­ed in the mid-80s to go to war against rock lyrics and whip up some good ol’ con­ser­v­a­tive hys­te­ria.

We’ve talked about this time before on this site, espe­cial­ly as Zap­pa him­self tes­ti­fied in front…

Revisit One of the Most Polarizing Albums in Rock History: Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Which Came Out 50 Years Ago

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Fifty years ago this month, Lou Reed near­ly destroyed his own career with one dou­ble album. Met­al Machine Music sold 100,000 copies dur­ing the three weeks of sum­mer 1975 between its release and its removal from the mar­ket. More than a few of the many buy­ers who prompt­ly returned it would have been expect­ing…