When a Salvador Dalí Sketch Was Stolen from Rikers Island Prison (2003)

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In 2003, a Sal­vador Dalí draw­ing was stolen from Rik­ers Island, one of the most for­mi­da­ble pris­ons in the Unit­ed States. That the inci­dent has nev­er been used as the basis for a major motion pic­ture seems inex­plic­a­ble, at least until you learn the details. A screen­writer would have to adapt it as not a…

How Thieves Stole Priceless Jewels at the Louvre in 8 Minutes

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On Sun­day morn­ing, some auda­cious thieves stole price­less jew­els from the Lou­vre Muse­um. The heist took only eight min­utes from start to fin­ish.

At 9:30 a.m., the rob­bers parked a truck with a portable lad­der in front of the Parisian muse­um. They ascend­ed the lad­der, cut through a sec­ond-floor win­dow, entered the muse­um, smashed…

The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, According to 750,000 Readers in the UK (2003)

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In the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, the read­ers of Europe went mad for epis­to­lary nov­els. France had, to name the most sen­sa­tion­al exam­ples, Mon­tesquieu’s Let­tres per­sanes, Rousseau’s Julie, and Lac­los’ Les Liaisons dan­gereuses; Ger­many, Goethe’s Die Lei­den des jun­gen Werther and Hölder­lin’s Hype­r­i­on. The Eng­lish proved espe­cial­ly insa­tiable when it came to long-form sto­ries com­posed entire­ly out of let­ters:…

The First Electric Guitar: Behold the 1931 “Frying Pan”

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The names Leo Fend­er and Les Paul will be for­ev­er asso­ci­at­ed with the explo­sion of the elec­tric gui­tar into pop­u­lar cul­ture. And right­ly so. With­out engi­neer Fend­er and musi­cian and stu­dio wiz Paul’s time­less designs, it’s hard to imag­ine what the most icon­ic instru­ments of decades of pop­u­lar music would look like.

They just…

The Surprising Power of Boredom: It Lets You Confront Big Questions & Give Life Meaning

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The twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry so far may seem light on major tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs, at least when com­pared to the twen­ti­eth. An arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence boom (per­haps a bub­ble, per­haps not) has been tak­ing place over the past few years, which at least gives us some­thing to talk about. Before that, most of us would have named the…