Oenosthesia

Jo Burzynska, aka Stanier Black-Five, dropping her hydrophone into a wine barrel. Photograph from the Stanier Black-Five website. Jo Burzynska is a New Zealand-based wine critic who also happens to be an experimental sound artist working under the name Stanier...

Starbucks Urbanism

This is too much fun not to share: Slate is challenging its readers to identify world cities purely by the geographic pattern of their Starbucks locations. In the interest of not spoiling your fun, I won’t post any of the answers, but I will say that if you know...

Summer Soup

Writing in The New York Times, author William Bryant Logan describes the contents of the dense blanket of air that descends over the city during a heatwave — a “summer soup” made up of “tiny particles of silicon, organic matter, threads, starch,...

Mapping McDonald’s

McDonald’s recently opened its 34,492nd restaurant, which was also its first in Vietnam. In response, The Guardian crunched some data in order to make its own McMap of the world. IMAGE: Number of McDonald’s by country at the end of 2012, from an...

The White Noise of Aquaculture

IMAGE: Seaweed farming rafts off the coast of the Chinese province of Jiangsu, south of the city of Qingdao, Bing Maps, via Mammoth. Via Mammoth’s Rob Holmes, we learn that the coastal city of Qingdao, China, is experiencing what local officials, channeling Don...