California Voters May Force Meat And Egg Producers Across The Country To Go Cage-Free

California voters will soon decide whether to ban the sale of all veal, pork and eggs from farm animals raised in cages, even when raised in other states.
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The Polish Halloween: All You Need to Know about Dziady

Dziady, Halloween’s Polish counterpart, has a rich tradition dating back to old Slavic times. Rather than Jack-O’-Lanterns, it’s linked to Karaboshka masks, the great literature of the Romantic era and, by some, to the Greek god Dionysus. Read on to find out what this grave custom is about and what place it holds in the universe of Poles.
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Disgusting Food Museum - 80 of the world’s most disgusting foods. Opening October 31 in Malmö.

Disgusting Food Museum invites visitors to explore the world of food and challenge their notions of what is and what isn’t edible. Could changing our ideas of disgust help us embrace the environmentally sustainable foods of the future? The exhibit has 80 of the world’s most disgusting foods. Adventurous visitors will appreciate the opportunity to smell and taste some of these notorious foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinkiest cheese? Or taste sweets made with metal cleansing chemicals?
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Montreux Jazz Festival 2015

Caro Emerald
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How Bhutan Avoids Being Overrun by Tourists

The Himalayan kingdom has managed to avoid the crowded, tourist-infested fate that befell many other picturesque destinations.
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As Bill Freehan lies in hospice care, his wife reveals their love story

Detroit Tigers great Bill Freehan taught us how to live. Now, at the end stages, his wife is teaching us something even more important.
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Smuggler's Notch

I arrived early in the morning to the walkway by Smuggler's Notch to find the whole area engulfed by a void of fog. I was exploring around and shooting some reflections of the trees in a nearby pond when I suddenly noticed the fog was slowly receding, revealing the amazingly colorful foliage on the hills. It was a pretty magical start to my week-long photography stay-cation in Vermont.
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The art museum entirely dedicated to cats

Fluffy felines may have ruled the internet for years, but they have influenced the art world for centuries. Amsterdam’s KattenKabinet exclusively showcases the art inspired by cats.
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Africa’s slender-snouted crocodile is not one but two species

At first glance, the slender-snouted crocodiles living in Lake Tanganyika in Central Africa look very similar to the ones in the Gambia River in West Africa. But as it turns out, the crocodile is not one but two distinct species: one unique to West Africa and the other to Central Africa.
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Police are using artificial intelligence to spot written lies

A tool that identifies false robbery reports is being rolled out across Spain
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Why Sex Is Not Binary

The complexity is more than cultural. It’s biological, too.
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The bookshops of Scotland

Photographer Celeste Noche's pictures of bookshops and libraries in Scotland.
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Paris has a brutal(ist) side.

Brutalist architecture has an unavoidable presence in every major metropolis, even Paris. In fact, the French capital is something of a haven for futurist concrete architecture. Brutalist boomed here during the 60s and 70s in response to Modernism’s utopian vision. (All photos courtesy of Anthony Saroufim).
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America’s Next Civil War

The United States shows all the warning signs of impending social and political collapse. By Stephen Marche.
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Thousands Of Swedes Are Inserting Microchips Under Their Skin

Proponents of the chips say they're safe and largely protected from hacking, but one scientist is raising privacy concerns around the kind of personal health data that might be stored on the devices.
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Hong Kong Street Food. Chopping Piglets, Ducks, Pigeons, Chickens in Sham Shui Po

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A Baseball Bat Dies, and Chopsticks Are Born

The Japanese, meticulous in their approach to baseball, recycling and reuse, have figured out how to make good use of splintered bats.
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At 63, I Threw Away My Prized Portrait of Robert E. Lee

I was raised to venerate Lee the principled patriot—but I want no association with Lee the defender of slavery.
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It’s Official: Poland's Election Results

The official results of the local and regional elections in Poland are now in, and the biggest story is what did not happen.
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The massacre men

When Shelton Laurel and the Appalachian war are mentioned at all, they are too often perceived as an exception, wiped off with a “war's hell” or blamed on the ways of those peculiar mountain folks. By David Forbes.
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The global tide of blood in history, medicine and culture

Tilli Tansey navigates the extraordinary story of the life-giving liquid.
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New York Sues Exxon Mobil, Saying It Deceived Shareholders on Climate Change

After an investigation of more than three years, the state's attorney general has sued Exxon Mobil, accusing it of downplaying the risks of global warming to its business.
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Watkins Glen

This is in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, taken a little over a week ago. I highly recommend visiting this place in the fall as it is one of my favorite places in the US northeast. FYI - I am not actually off trail here, my camera is resting on a railing. Photo by Matthew Macpherson.
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No No Man

Steven Jesse Bernstein
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Using technology to fight counterfeit medicines in Africa and South Asia

Hundreds of thousands of people have died in Africa and South Asia due to the widespread scourge of counterfeit medicines. So social entrepreneur Bright Simons founded a company to use technology to let people verify a medicine’s authenticity with a simple text message.
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The bookshops of Scotland

Photographer Celeste Noche's pictures of bookshops and libraries in Scotland. In an increasingly digital age, the series documents the importance of the physical book - how people continue to make space for books, and conversely, how books create space for people.
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All Hail the Condom King

Bill Gates highlights the work of Mechai Viravaidya who has helped save millions of lives by promoting easier access to contraception.
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Why Are Japan’s Cherry Blossom Trees Blooming in Fall?

Two typhoons followed by warm weather may have triggered Japan’s iconic trees to blossom months ahead of schedule
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New Orleans

Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong
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This Hidden Oil Spill Has Been Going For 14 Years, And Is About to Overtake The BP Disaster

An oil spill that has been quietly leaking millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico has gone unplugged for so long that it now verges on becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in US history.
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How Sears Kit Homes changed housing

These mail-order dwellings democratized homebuying, one kit at a time
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In Poland, another blow to the Catholic Church

Political entanglements undermine a once-authoritative and beloved institution
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Cross-stitch murals bring a traditionally domestic craft out into the world.

Ana Martins, the 22-year-old Portuguese artist and graphic embroiderer fell in love with textiles while working on her bachelor’s degree in graphic design, and now she works to “deconstruct, decontextualize and transform a traditional technique into a modern graphic, connecting cultures and generations.”
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The anti-politics of the poor: Unemployment, income and low trust in government

There is an increasing fascination among political scientists with the concept of anti-politics, an apparently growing sentiment of distrust with existing political institutions. It may be worth recalling then, that distrust in politics has economic roots. Bluntly, the economically marginalised do not trust politicians and this makes sense- if you’re not doing so well out of society, you will not trust those who run it.
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I pulled a 1,500-year-old sword out of a lake

People are saying I am the queen of Sweden because of the legend of King Arthur
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Postcards From Big Brother: The Curious Propaganda of a Brutal Soviet Era

Compared with the sophisticated technology Russia employed to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, the Soviet propaganda in Brutal Bloc Postcards, published by FUEL Design and Publishing, seems downright quaint. Many of these postcards, published by governments of the U.S.S.R. between the 1960s and 1980s, depict the bland, 1960s five-story concrete-paneled apartments known as “khrushchyovka” as if to say, “Look at the modern wonder of collective worker housing!”
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The flower that blooms every 12 years

One of the rarest flowers in the world, the Neelakurinji blooms just once every 12 years in India’s south-western state of Kerala, when it covers the hills in a violet hue.
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How Navajos Are Reclaiming Their Native Food Culture

Widespread poverty and food deserts left Native Americans with the highest rate of diabetes in the country — but change is on the horizon
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Eerie hum discovered in Antarctica

Scientists say this sound could be used to monitor how Antarctica's largest ice shelf is responding to climate change.
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A data-driven look at the devastating efficacy of a far-right judge-education program

More than 40% of US federal judges have attended Manne seminars, a notionally "bipartisan" educational conference presented by a Florida "Law and Economics" institute whose invited ideological allies explained to judges why pollution is good for minorities (polluted neighborhoods are cheaper and therefore affordable by poor people), unions are bad, monopolies are economically efficient, discrimination in punishment is economically efficient, insider trading is economically efficient, and so on.
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The Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish

When Jews fled Spain during the Inquisition, they carried their language with them. Today, Ladino reflects the trajectories of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora, but can it survive?
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How the Finnish survive without small talk

Their desire for avoidance is a predisposition so common that it’s become hard-baked into Finnish culture.
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Antarctic ice shelf 'sings' as winds whip across its surface

Winds blowing across snow dunes on Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf cause the massive ice slab's surface to vibrate, producing a near-constant set of seismic 'tones' scientists could potentially use to monitor changes in the ice shelf from afar, according to new research.
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Stone Mountain: The Largest Confederate Monument Problem in the World

Stone Mountain has been called “a blight” upon the state of Georgia. But to others it is a key part of Southern heritage.
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Miniature signs around the city convey confusing messages.

Australian artist Michael Pederson, better known as ‘Miguel Marquez Outside,’ isn’t interested in art galleries. He prefers to hide his strange and witty signs throughout cities like Sydney to be noticed and enjoyed by the public. If all the official signage that can be found around an average city bores you, you might not even notice the ones that are a little bit off, warning you of dangerous pigeons and tiny sinkholes.
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The Japanese museum of rocks that look like faces.

In Chichibu, Japan, there's an odd museum; perhaps the only one of its kind. It's called the Chinsekikan (which means hall of curious rocks) and it houses over 1700 rocks that resemble human faces.
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Viking ship found buried next to busy Norwegian freeway

A 20-metre Viking longship, five longhouses and a number of burial mounds are discovered next to a busy Norwegian freeway using a high-tech georadar.
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Was Gary Hart Set Up?

What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987?
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The Remains Of Stalin’s Dead Road

In Russia’s arctic wilderness, the remnants of one of the Soviet Union’s most tragic gulag projects now lies largely forgotten.
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Miyu Kojima Creates Miniature Replicas of Lonely Deaths

Twenty six-year old Miyu Kojima works for a company that cleans up after kodokushi (孤独死) or lonely deaths: a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and remaining undiscovered for a long period of time.
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