If something strange is happening in your neighborhood this Halloween, you might want to call the librarian. Concord Public Library in New Hampshire is encouraging patrons to borrow a ghost detector or thermal imaging camera as part of its October Halloween programming. Alongside crafts and a...
Somewhere, someone has decided that a drawer containing 171 eyeballs is worth $2,640. Presumably, they’ve also decided where to put it. The early 20th-century German prosthetic glass eyes sold at Potter & Potter’s Oct. 1 auction after 11 bids, according to the auction house’s listing. The...
New York City has found a new use for the tap card: opening a public toilet. The city is installing 17 modular bathrooms across its five boroughs. Visitors can unlock a door with a text message, QR code, app or card. The bathrooms are free, which may...
Spain took home the trophy. The digital economy took everything else: our attention, our sleep, our snack budgets and, apparently, our remaining sense of distance. Uber data supplied to PYMNTS says one fan treated a 266-mile ride from Arlington to Houston as perfectly normal match-day...
The Super Bowl is a one-night luxury product; the Olympics is an infrastructure project with medals. The FIFA World Cup 2026 is a roaming retail platform: 48 teams, 104 matches and 16 host cities across three countries. Through 44 matches, attendance had topped 2.85 million,...
The World Cup is supposed to be a monthlong festival of flags, chants, bad wigs and beautiful irrationality. But in the final days before kickoff, the 2026 tournament is beginning to look less like a sporting celebration and more like a checkout page designed by...
At some point between decorating soldiers’ graves and debating whether a patio sectional “completes the outdoor room,” America discovered the retail potential of solemnity plus a Monday. Memorial Day, which this year falls on Monday, May 25, still asks the country to pause, remember and honor...
Mother’s Day is the annual moment when otherwise rational adults look into the maw of modern commerce and ask a spiritually revealing question: Is brunch enough? Usually, yes. But at the far edge of the digital economy, Mother’s Day has quietly become a glorious, over-caffeinated...
Few technologies generate as much cocktail-party anxiety — and screenplay fuel — as artificial intelligence. Hollywood, naturally, got there first. For the past two decades, movies about AI have doubled as dispatches from the human condition: loneliness, vanity, convenience, grief and the recurring belief that...