The Purity Testing Kit
Happy Mondays' biggest album just got reissued as an actual gold pill. The label that put it out didn't survive what came after.
Bound for Scrap
In 1993, two years after Nintendo said the game was finished, a factory ran it again — a hundred copies, headed straight for a smelter. Ninety-seven never got there.
A Cat-Machine
Since the mid-'80s, a lost shipping container has been feeding a French beach with pieces of a Garfield telephone, one at a time. A new short film finally sits with the people who've been finding them.
The Wave and the Tower
Brussels carpeted its main square in 750,000 dahlias to rebuild Hokusai's Great Wave, marking 160 years of friendship with Japan. The same fascination once paid for a pagoda across town — with a fortune pulled out of the Congo.
Ten Days to Tear It Down
In 1939 the city gave itself ten days to demolish the Obelisco — the monument its own mayor called "the soul of Buenos Aires" and everyone else called worse. This year it turned 90, opened to the public for the first time ever, and held the whole country's heart twice in one week.
