illustration

The School of Life sets out principles for making attractive cities, arguing that the art has been lost in the modern world.

Noodle explores how retro pixel art was designed for CRT displays and why games look different on LCDs, with input from pixel artists and CRT researchers.

A Wendover Productions video on how the art market works, arguing that prices are driven by wealth, storage and tax mechanics rather than artistic value.

A Vox explainer on how many of the British Museum's treasures were taken during British imperial rule, focusing on the Benin Bronzes and requests for their return.

Half as Interesting explains why the Eiffel Tower's night-time lighting is under copyright, which makes publishing photos of it at night legally problematic.

A look at Le Plessis-Robinson, a French suburb transformed from modernist urbanism into traditional mixed-use fabric with local-style architecture, green space and a more balanced housing supply.

Tom Scott explains why a vivid pink pigment by artist Stuart Semple cannot be fully shown on a screen, and touches on the dispute over exclusive rights to the blackest black pigment. It is a short explainer on color gamuts and pigment politics.

3Blue1Brown builds toy SIR models to simulate how an epidemic spreads and tests scenarios like social distancing, travel restrictions, central gathering places and quarantine. It was made during the early COVID-19 outbreak.

The first episode of a Cities: Skylines series on urban politics and planning, focused on parking. It uses the game to show how parking minimums shape cities, drawing on Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking.

3Blue1Brown illustrates how enormous the 256-bit search space is, showing how infeasible it is to find a hash or key by guessing and checking.

CGP Grey explains how the 2015 UK general election showed the flaws of first-past-the-post voting, with parties like UKIP winning many votes but few seats.

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains that waste heat from ever-growing energy use could eventually boil the oceans in a few centuries, whatever the energy source. She discusses proposed ways to cool the planet.

Not Just Bikes explains that car-dependent suburbs are not the only option, using Toronto's Riverdale as an example of a pre-war streetcar suburb. These walkable neighborhoods are popular but are now effectively illegal to build.

An animated adaptation of Captain David Marquet's talk on greatness, based on his book Turn the Ship Around!. It argues for pushing decision-making down to the people doing the work instead of controlling everything from the top.

A short Not Just Bikes video on the 1960s plans (Plan Jokinen) to cut highways through Amsterdam to accommodate cars. It shows how radically different the city would look had they succeeded.

Mick West shows new night-vision reference footage indicating the Navy's supposed flying pyramid UFO is just an out-of-focus light, likely a plane near LAX, rendered triangular by bokeh. He identifies other lights as Jupiter and stars.

A short animated explainer that stages a $100 footrace in which contestants start at different distances from the line, depending on the advantages or disadvantages they inherited. It uses the race as a metaphor for how unequal starting points shape outcomes, citing US census income and poverty figures.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

A three-minute excerpt from Milton Friedman's Free to Choose in which he uses a pencil to show that no single person knows how to make it. He argues that the free market coordinates countless strangers peacefully.

A Vox Borders explainer on Hong Kong's housing crisis, the least affordable market in the world, and the tiny cage homes and subdivided flats people squeeze into. It looks at why prices keep climbing and how land policy contributes.

Numberphile interviews Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown about Bertrand's paradox, where different reasonable ways of picking a random chord of a circle give different probabilities.

Short Curious Droid video on why NASA could not simply rebuild the Saturn V's Rocketdyne F-1 engine for the SLS boosters. It explains that the engines were hand-tailored and that much of the know-how was never documented, so the blueprints were not enough.

Veritasium explores how synchronization arises spontaneously in nature, with metronomes, fireflies and bridges, drawing on Steven Strogatz's work on chaos and complexity.

A short Boeing-supplied clip where the 737 MAX program's chief project engineer explains how the lengthened landing gear of the MAX 10 folds up. It shows the gear model in motion.

An animated map showing the borders and populations of European countries for every year since 400 BC. Vassal states and colonies are excluded from population counts.

A two-minute minutephysics video explaining why turning a bicycle requires first steering briefly the other way. It covers counter-steering and balance with slow-motion footage and 3D animation.