Tagasode, meaning “whose sleeves?”, are Japanese folding screens depicting magnificent robes draped over lacquer stands against fields of gold. The women who own them are absent, but their patterns, perfume bags and personal objects remain as clues to their beauty and taste. Inspired by an old poetic association between sleeves, scent and longing, the screens are portraits made entirely from what someone has left in the room.
Concha García Zaera was a Spanish digital artist who began using Microsoft Paint in her mid-seventies, after the smell of oil paint disturbed her ill husband. Working point by point with a mouse, she spent weeks constructing detailed landscapes inspired by photographs and postcards her husband had sent from his travels. Her granddaughter opened an Instagram account for her, and at 87 she became an unlikely star of pixel art. Disney later commissioned her to recreate the poster for Mary Poppins Returns entirely in Paint.
Park Wang-yeol’s Drone Escape was an alleged 2026 plot to fly the convicted killer out of a Philippine prison while suspended beneath a heavy-lift drone. Park, who had already escaped custody twice, reportedly spent around $74,000 on a machine capable of carrying 75 kilograms. The plan unravelled when footage of a man hanging from the drone during a test flight appeared in the local media. Park never made the flight and was transferred to South Korea soon afterward.
Arthur J. Williams Jr. is a Chicago counterfeiter turned artist who learned the trade as a teenager from a printer nicknamed “Da Vinci.” When the US Treasury introduced a redesigned $100 bill in 1996, Williams reverse-engineered its security features using hand-drawn watermarks, automotive paint for the colour-shifting ink and thin paper obtained from the ends of newsprint rolls. His bills passed through banks and casinos, and he is estimated to have printed around $10 million over a decade
Zoroastrian Towers of Silence, or dakhmas, are roofless circular funerary structures usually built on isolated hills. Because earth, fire and water are sacred, the dead were traditionally neither buried nor cremated. Instead, corpse-bearers arranged the bodies in three concentric rings—men, women and children—beneath the open sky. Vultures removed the flesh, the sun bleached the bones, and the remains were placed in a central well fitted with lime and underground filters. Among Parsis, the body’s final usefulness could be understood as an act of charity to other creatures.
Fortunes of War is a 1987 BBC series following newlyweds Guy and Harriet Pringle as the Second World War drives them from Bucharest through Athens and onward to Cairo and Damascus. Travelling by train and refugee ship, they pass through grand hotels, borrowed apartments and fading British institutions, accompanied by penniless aristocrats, diplomats and assorted expatriates. It is a romantic portrait of travel at the end of an era, as Britain’s imperial world begins crumbling faster than its inhabitants can acknowledge. Countries fall, borders close and the British continue arranging lectures.
New York City’s Swimmobile was a swimming pool mounted on a truck and sent into neighbourhoods without easy access to one. During the 1960s and 1970s, the vehicles parked in city streets for the day, let children swim in shifts, then rolled away at night. By 1976, five Swimmobiles were travelling from Randalls Island across all five boroughs. New York addressed the shortage of swimming pools by putting several in traffic.
The Stipa-Caproni was an experimental Italian aircraft built in 1932 around a hollow, barrel-shaped fuselage. Its engine and propeller sat inside the tube, making the entire aeroplane one enormous ducted fan with two open cockpits perched on top. It flew quietly and was so stable that test pilots found it difficult to change direction, but the barrel created enough drag to limit its speed to 131 km/h.
Motorcycle chariot racing was an eccentric 1920s and 1930s spectacle in which men dressed as Roman charioteers stood behind pairs of riderless motorcycles and steered them using reins. Early versions sometimes used chariots made from wine barrels; later races appeared at British stadiums and Australian police carnivals, encouraged by the popularity of Ben-Hur. It remains one of the few occasions in which motorcycles were treated as livestock.
The Leningrad Human Chess Match was played across Palace Square in 1924 using people as pieces. Members of the Red Army formed the black side, while the Soviet Navy played white; horses carried several of the larger pieces. Chess masters Ilya Rabinovich and Peter Romanovsky directed them by telephone as around 8,000 spectators watched. For one afternoon, an imperial square became a chessboard and the military obeyed two men seated at tables.