That is Genius

If you missed the Egyptian royal family…

A film made by the Egyptian royal family about a coup d’état that was lost for nearly sixty years

What an Omar Suleiman girl group would sound like

Mubarak’s Angel of Darkness would have yelped and wailed just like this

Latest in the battle over the Mohamed Mahmoud mural

The New York Times blog The Lede picks up the battle over street art in Cairo


Tracking how the Egyptian government is doing

Before the revolution, Egypt had no politics. Now it does, and the small things matter

Marilyn Monroe fifty years on

Marilyn died half a century ago. Gosh, though, she photographed well

I still don’t understand the Higgs boson

The discovery is the e=mc² of our day: it sounds big but few really understand it


A ride through war-torn Homs

It looks a lot like downtown Beirut after the civil war in the 1970s

Bruce Lee: Real? Fake? Whatever: I believe

Bruce Lee plays ping pong and lights matches with uncanny accuracy

What that Venus transit thing looked like

It won’t happen again for 105 years but, honestly, it is better on video


Queen Victoria’s journals now online

The Empress of India’s 43,765 pages: a record of Britain at its peak that you can’t access for long

An ex-Googler pokes China in the eye

An insider explains why tech companies can’t win in China and what it costs them to try

A few moments in the life of Hugo Chávez

A Venezuelan revolutionary to some, a dictator to others, but always colorful


A.A. Gill’s magnificent defense of London

Gill — bless him — dispenses with the cheeky cockneys and pearly kings of the imaginary London

Graffiti history written on your sneakers

A new store on Lafayette in New York brings back 1970s graffiti artists for custom work

Rediscovering the joys of web surfing

MapCrunch randomly pulls street scenes from Google Maps. Most of it is ugly, yet irresistible


And the winner of the greasiest palm is…

An anti-bribery website in India actually tries to answer that question

Al Jazeera goes undercover in Syria

Al Jazeera has become the essential media; even US networks that demonize it rely on its video feed

Retna graf going up on the Deitch wall

It’s slow work but the graffiti artist Retna is dancing on the sidewalk along Houston St


Arctic Monkeys still rock

They were young and massively hyped when they started. But there’s no denying they’re great

Caught in the middle of a firefight in Syria

A terrifyingly close view of what it means to fight an irregular war in the middle of a city

Unseen Robert Frank photos at the New York Times

Promoting the New York Times on the eve of Robert Frank’s landmark book, ‘The Americans’


The Atlantic opens our eyes to the American Civil War

The US Capitol building under construction and a country tearing itself apart

Taking to the air to document a revolution

The remote-controlled toy helicopter comes of age

Photographer Martin Klimas and the color of sound

Marrying Abstract Expressionism to every heavy metal kid’s discovery that speakers produce air waves