Art
Images, objects and the stories around them.
Chekhov’s gun: what the quote really said
Every writer knows the rule that a gun on the wall must go off. The sources say it was spread across three different remarks.
Computers began as looms
The first machine controlled by punched cards was not a calculator. It wove silk.
Kazakhstan’s national symbol might be a woman
The “Golden Man” on top of Almaty’s Independence Monument is a Saka warrior found in 1969 in a costume of about 4,000 gold pieces. Archaeologists still can’t say for sure whether the warrior was a man.
Pandas are almost absent from classical Chinese art
Dragons, tigers, cranes and even crickets fill Chinese painting and poetry. The animal now synonymous with China barely appears at all.
The “Laughing Buddha” isn’t the Buddha
The cheerful, round-bellied figure in restaurants and gift shops is Budai, a Chinese monk from about a thousand years ago, not Siddhartha Gautama.
The golden ratio is less magic than you’ve heard
φ ≈ 1.618 really does appear in sunflowers and pentagons. Most claims about the Parthenon, the Mona Lisa and “perfect beauty” are myths.
The mixtape we sent to the stars
Two spacecraft leaving the solar system carry a gold-plated record with whale song, a kiss, 55 greetings and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”.
The Mona Lisa became famous by being stolen
In 1911 a handyman walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa under his smock. The two years it was missing turned it into the most famous painting in the world.
The same face, three different emotions
A 1920s Soviet experiment showed that audiences read emotion into an actor’s blank face, depending on the shot that came before it.
The Terracotta Army was found by farmers digging a well
In 1974 farmers near Xi’an dug into an army of more than 8,000 clay soldiers. The emperor’s tomb next to it has never been opened, and the soil around it contains unusually high levels of mercury.