Small windows into a big world

Ai Weiwei filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds. Each seed was made by hand in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen by 1,600 artisans over two years....

Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety made only two feature films in his life. His 1973 film Touki Bouki follows two lovers trying to escape Dakar for Paris. It was almost lost until Martin Scorses...

In Ethiopia, the coffee ceremony involves roasting green beans over charcoal, grinding them by hand, and brewing three rounds in a clay pot called a jebena. The entire process takes about an hour. Ref...

The Step Pyramid at Saqqara, built around 2670 BC, was designed by Imhotep, the first architect in recorded history whose name we know. He was also a physician and was later worshipped as a god. He st...

Architect Luis Barragan used no decorative elements. Just colored walls and light. His house in Mexico City, built in 1948, looks like it was designed yesterday. When he won the Pritzker Prize, he sai...

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made Close-Up in 1990 about a man arrested for impersonating a famous filmmaker. He cast the real impersonator and the real victims, then filmed the actual trial. The...

The total length of DNA in a single human cell, if uncoiled, stretches about 2 meters. Your body contains roughly 37 trillion cells. That means the total DNA in your body would stretch from Earth to P...

The Shakers, an 18th century religious community in America, believed that making something well was an act of prayer. Their furniture, with clean lines and no ornament, looks exactly like modern Scan...

Jiro Ono has made sushi in the same 10-seat Tokyo restaurant for over 70 years. His apprentices spend their first year just learning to squeeze a hot towel properly. He still tastes every piece before...

Marie Curie's notebooks from the 1890s are still so radioactive they must be stored in lead-lined boxes. Anyone who wants to read them must wear protective clothing and sign a liability waiver. Her pe...

Hilma af Klint painted large-scale abstract works in Stockholm in 1906, years before Kandinsky. She believed the paintings were dictated by spirits and stipulated they not be shown until 20 years afte...

Tarkovsky's film Stalker was shot three times. The first time, the film stock was defective and all footage was lost. The second time, an earthquake destroyed the set. The third time, Tarkovsky shot i...

In 1900, sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera found a corroded bronze lump in a Roman shipwreck. It took 70 years to realize it was a mechanical computer that predicted eclipses, tracked...

Mark Rothko accepted a commission to paint murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. After visiting the space, he returned the $35,000. He said he wanted to paint something that would ruin t...

During WWII, a Polish soldier named Witold Pilecki voluntarily got himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz to gather intelligence. He spent nearly three years inside, organized a resistance movement, t...

Andrei Tarkovsky's father was one of Russia's greatest poets. The son put his father's poems into the film Mirror, read by the father himself. The father hadn't spoken to the family in years. It is on...

Remedios Varo fled the Spanish Civil War, then fled the Nazis in France, and finally settled in Mexico City. There she painted surreal worlds of women scientists performing alchemical experiments in t...

The ancient Nabataeans carved Petra into sandstone cliffs, but their real achievement was water. They built a hydraulic system that moved 12 million gallons daily through a desert. The city supported...

Hypatia of Alexandria was the ancient world's most famous mathematician and philosopher. She taught pagans, Christians, and Jews alike. In 415 AD, a Christian mob dragged her from her carriage and kil...

El Anatsui, a Ghanaian sculptor, makes enormous shimmering curtains from thousands of flattened bottle caps collected from recycling yards. Each piece weighs hundreds of pounds but drapes like cloth....

Korean celadon pottery from the Goryeo dynasty (918-1392) achieved a jade-green glaze so specific that Chinese potters, who invented celadon, admitted they couldn't replicate it. The technique was los...

In 1904, a waffle vendor at the St. Louis World's Fair ran out of plates. The ice cream seller next door rolled his waffles into cones. The ice cream cone was born from a shortage, not an idea.

Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto takes photographs of movie theater screens with exposures lasting the entire length of the film. The screen appears as a glowing white rectangle. An entire movie...

The Djenne Mosque in Mali is the largest mud-brick building in the world. Every year after the rainy season, the entire town gathers to replaster it by hand. The festival has been happening for over 6...