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Maison de Verre

No house in France better reflects the magical promise of 20th-century architecture than the Maison de Verre. Tucked behind the solemn porte-cochere of a traditional French residence on Rue Saint-Guillaume, a quiet street in a wealthy Left Bank neighborhood, the 1932 house designed by Pierre Chareau challenges our assumptions about the nature of Modernism. For architects it represents the road not taken: a lyrical machine whose theatricality is the antithesis of the dry functionalist aesthetic that reigned through much of the 20th century.

Mallakhamb

Mallakhamb is a traditional Indian sport in which a gymnast performs feats and poses while hanging from a vertical wooden pole or rope.

Moai statues

Moai statues are massive megaliths on Easter Island. The stone blocks, carved into head-and-torso figures, average 4 meters tall and 14 tons.

Masato Akamatsu

Masato Akamatsu is a Japanese baseball player. In August 2010, Masato made sports headlines by denying batter Shuichi Murata a home run with what sportswriters dubbed the Spider-Man Catch, rapidly scaling the outfield fence before snaring the ball in mid-leap.

Maison Louis Carré

The Maison Louis Carré is one of the most important private houses designed by Alvar Aalto.

Maurice Bavaud

Maurice Bavaud was a Swiss theology student who in 1938 attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

Mikhail Krug

Mikhail Krug was a Russian singer, one of the leading singers of the style of songs known as blatnaya pesnya (songs about criminals). A significant portion of Mikhail Krug's songs invoke the secret code of Russian prisons and the symbolism of prisoner tattoos. They describe the emotional emptiness and the despair of the prisoners who are separated from their families and loved ones. He also wrote many love songs, and songs about Tver. Krug liked to associate with criminal elements, which inspired his music and his diamond ring was a gift from the notorious criminal Khobot. In writing his songs, Krug used a 1924 dictionary of underworld slang, compiled by the NKVD. In the late evening of June 30, 2002, Mikhail Krug was fatally wounded in his Tver house by unknown intruders. He died in a hospital a few hours later.

Victorian microscope slides

A microscope slide was originally a slider made of ivory or bone, containing specimens held between disks of translucent mica. These were popular in Victorian England until the Royal Microscopical Society introduced the standardized microscope slide in the form of a thin sheet of glass used to hold objects for examination under a microscope.

Mariages Freres

Mariage Frères is one of the finest well- known French tea companies, based in Paris. It was officially founded on June 1, 1854.

Mason Pearson

Mason Pearson, the company that made, and kept, a name for itself with a boar-bristle brush, has been run by the same family for four generations. The brush’s design has changed little since the original was created in 1885. It still features a soft rubber pad (thought to be easier on the hair), which might not seem like the biggest deal but was pretty much hair-care heresy in the late 1800s.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

Mike