Behavioural Borders

As a curious coda to my previous post, in which Kew’s Plant Health and Quarantine Officer, Sara Redstone, notes the frequent mismatch between biological and political borders and discusses the role of quarantine in creating an artificial biological boundary, I...

Plants Without Borders: An Interview with Sara Redstone

Sara Redstone is the Plant Health and Quarantine Officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, home of the world’s largest collection of living plants. In addition to screening and isolating all incoming or outbound plant material, she is currently overseeing the...

Vermeer’s Kitchen Fantasies

IMAGE: The Milkmaid (detail), Johannes Vermeer, about 1657–58, oil on canvas; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, via The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid is currently on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on loan...

Aerial Sandwiches

By the end of this month, Subway, the ubiquitous and mediocre American sandwich chain, will have installed a franchise on top of a crane. According to the New York Post, the shop will be “fitted into a shipping container-like structure,” which will then be...

Wrecked

IMAGE: The Hindenburg zeppelin, which caught fire as it tried to dock in New Jersey at the end of a 1937 cross-Atlantic voyage. Last week, the New York Post reported that “a charred bottle of beer that survived the explosion of the Hindenburg will be auctioned...