Punk is not only not dead, it’s getting a fresh burst of energy, thanks to The Unglamorous Music Project, a female collective in Leicester.

In accordance with punk tradition, musical ability is not a primary concern.

Shockingly, life experience is.

With five, six, and seven decades worth, Unglamorous Music Project participants have no illusions about how women their age – with the possible exception of Patti Smith – are perceived.

Rather than content themselves with crumbs and conform to societal expectations, they are going hard in newly formed bands like The Wonky Portraits, Dada Women, BOILERS, Velvet Crisis and The Verinos, above.

“This is definitely not ‘cutesy grannies have a go at punk’ band,” BOILERS’ Allison “Fish” Dunne emphasized to The Guardian:

I’ve got no fucks to give any more about what anyone thinks of me…We write our own music and we’ve got a lot to say about everything we’re angry about. I’ve been enraged for years.

The Verinos’ 61-year-old Ruth Miller, founder of The Unglamorous Music Project, told RNZ  how she tapped into an […]

Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most prestigious award, in 2004. She was then in her early fifties — practically a schoolgirl by the standards of her profession — and had only completed four buildings. Yet the Pritzker committee already suspected that she saw possibilities in the built environment, and perhaps entire dimensions, that others did not. Indeed, she would spend her remaining dozen years proving them right, as evidenced by the legacy of impressive structures she left all across the world, from the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and the BMW Central Building in Leipzig to the London Aquatics Center and the Guangzhou Opera House.

Living in Seoul, I myself have occasion every so often to pass through a Hadid building: the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, which opened in 2013. Essentially a collection of shops and exhibition spaces, it has become best known as a quasi-public gathering place full of backdrops suitable for Instagram photography.

In its size, shape, and aesthetic, the DDP stands well apart from its urban context, looking like a spaceship […]

ChatGPT, the system that understands natural language and responds in kind, has caused a sensation since its launch less than three months ago. If you’ve tried it out, you’ll surely have wondered what it will soon revolutionize — or, as the case may be, what it will destroy. Among ChatGPT’s first victims, holds one now-common view, will be a form of writing that generations have grown up practicing throughout their education. “The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations,” writes Stephen Marche in The Atlantic. “It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up.”

If ChatGPT becomes able instantaneously to whip up a plausible-sounding academic essay on any given topic, what future could there be for the academic essay itself? The host of YouTube channel EduKitchen puts more or less that very question to Noam Chomsky — a thinker who can be relied upon for views on education — in […]

Many of us built our first LEGO models in childhood and, a few years thereafter in adolescence, read our first Lord of the Rings novel. We continue to look fondly back on such formative cultural experiences in adulthood, and indeed, some of us retain a genuine appreciation for the artifacts themselves well into middle age.

It is toward that very intersection of enthusiasm and means that LEGO has targeted its latest and largest Lord of the Rings-themed set: a 6,167-piece model of the Rivendell, the sanctuary located in the eponymous Elvish valley, which is set to retail for $500 USD.

This new LEGO Rivendell has room “for the entire Fellowship to debate The One Ring, and the shards of a particularly noteworthy sword,” writes The Verge’s Sean Hollister, and it includes “tiled rooftops, imaginative arches, and enough distinct spaces to recreate multiple scenes from the movies.”

This marks a considerable improvement on the sets that came […]

The vinyl record–we’ve shown you how they were made way back in 1937, and also in 1956. But how about nowadays, during the renaissance of vinyl? Above, Wired visits Jack White’s Third Man Records vinyl pressing plant in Detroit, Michigan to “find out exactly what goes into the creation of a vinyl record; from cutting and pressing to making sure they sound great.” If you’re in the Detroit area, you can take a tour of Third Man Records’ pressing plant. Get more info here.

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