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The dessert of the future might be nutrient gel.
food

A Dinner at the End of Our World

An author and a chef imagine how we'll eat if bees and fish vanish.
Anne Ewbank December 4, 2017
A neem tree poking through a shop in Varanasi, India, from <em>Wise Trees</em>.
books

2017's Most Wondrous Photography Books

Great gifts for the impossible-to-shop-for.
Anika Burgess December 1, 2017
food

This Food Was Once Packaged Military Rations

You can make combat rations look better, but they still won’t taste good.
Anne Ewbank November 29, 2017
Chapel, Sancho-Madridejos, 2000, Valleaceron, Spain.
churches

A Tour of the World’s Most Unrepentantly Modern Churches

Worship at the altar of striking architecture.
Anika Burgess November 28, 2017
Bookkeepers prepare for a gas attack in Odessa, Russia, 1935.
photography

When Gas Masks Were an Inescapable Part of Everyday Life

“It may be a little irksome at first, but you’ll soon get used to it.”
Anika Burgess November 15, 2017
<em>The Party Chiefs</em>.
soviet history

Candid Portraits Smuggled From Behind the Iron Curtain

One American photographer's inside look at the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
Anika Burgess November 10, 2017
New Zealand birdwatchers survey the coast of North Korea.
politics

The New Zealand Birdwatchers Who Fly to North Korea in the Spring

The quest for a bird that continues to defy international sanctions.
Natasha Frost November 7, 2017
Nsutite and cacoxenite minerals (Image of Distinction).
science

The World's Tiniest Wonders, Revealed Through Photomicrography

Under a microscope, even a toothbrush can be a work of art.
Anika Burgess November 7, 2017
Berthe, later Berthold, Buttgereit's travel pass makes no mention of tranvestitism. But "B.B. is not forbidden to wear man’s clothes" was written on the back.
nazis

The Early 20th-Century ID Cards That Kept Trans People Safe From Harassment

The radical days of the Weimar Republic, just before the rise of Nazism.
Natasha Frost November 2, 2017
Have some baking powder, lest a demon creep up while you sleep.
victorian

Victorian Culinary Trading Cards Are a Feast for the Eyes

But maybe not for your stomach.
Paula Mejia October 27, 2017
Langley researcher Elton W. Miller in Langley's Propeller Research Tunnel, 1927.
space exploration

100 Years of Rocketry and Research at NASA’s Langley Facility

See pioneering mathematicians, giant wind tunnels powered by submarine engines, and hypersonic rocket models.
Anika Burgess October 20, 2017
The remnant of a supernova that occurred 160,000 light years from Earth. The stellar explosion would have been visible in the Southern Hemisphere around 1600.
space exploration

The Most Beautiful Space Images on Earth

Stargazing through the ages.
Anika Burgess October 19, 2017
aviation

The Brief, Wondrous, High-Flying Era of Zeppelin Dining

The Hindenburg’s fattened ducklings and caviar were essentially German propaganda.
Natasha Frost October 18, 2017
Photographer Blaine Dixon befriended activist Pat Carey, who was, he says, "a tireless Mother Teresa to the runaway teens" of the area in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This image, of three men in makeshift loincloths on Polk Street, dates from 1980.
31 days of halloween

See Two Decades of San Francisco’s Wildest Queer Halloween Parties

The rise and demise of the night of the living dead.
Natasha Frost October 16, 2017
Living candelabras sat or stood unflinching as hot wax dripped onto their bodies, forming incredible sculptures and shapes.
cemeteries

A Dispatch From the Other Side of the Veil

In Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, Atlas Obscura's "Into the Veil 2017" was a night of sublime contradictions.
Natasha Frost October 16, 2017
Jeweled cover, <em>Lindau Gospels</em>, c. 875.
libraries

See the Most Luxurious Medieval Manuscripts in Existence

Feel free to judge these books by their covers.
Anika Burgess October 12, 2017
<em>Kitchen</em>, c. 1944–46.
31 days of halloween

The Grim Crime-Scene Dollhouses Made by the ‘Mother of Forensics’

They're perfectly to scale, and all based on real cases.
Anika Burgess October 6, 2017
An image from Pouria Khojastehpay's series <em>Dustwound</em>.
art

How to Build an Unsettlingly Real Apocalyptic Landscape

One artist’s stark, brutalist, dystopian vision of the future.
Anika Burgess October 3, 2017