What’s both a punch line and a wine-ordering strategy? The second-cheapest wine.

If you enjoy wine but don’t know too much about vintages and varieties, you may have fallen into the following logic: You’re not sure whether you want wine with “hints of cherry”; you don’t know whether 2015 was a good year for Argentinian wine; and you think Pinot Noir is the type of wine you like, but you don’t quite remember. Honestly, apart from red vs. white and sparkling vs. not, you don’t think wines taste terribly different. So why not just order the cheapest wine? Or, if that feels a little cheap and too obvious, how about the second-cheapest one?

People often joke about ordering wine this way, usually while making self-deprecating jokes … Read the rest

One December night in 2014, a group of wine aficionados congregated in front of Thomas Keller’s famed French Laundry restaurant. They hadn’t called ahead to see if the Yountville, California, institution, which has an infamous, months-long waitlist, could accommodate them. Since it was Christmas night, the restaurant wasn’t even open.

Regardless, the crew got what they came for. They broke in and walked out with over $500,000 worth of wine, including some of the most coveted bottles in the world.

Nearly four years later, investigators have recovered all but a handful of the 110 missing bottles. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice released a statement confirming that two of the thieves—Alfred Georgis and Davis Kiryakoz—also conspired with others to steal and transport fine wines from … Read the rest

If you want to register dissatisfaction with a piece of legislation, you’ve got a few options. You can contact your local representative. You can join a protest or campaign. Or—if you want—you can embroider the most frightening creature you can imagine onto a piece of satin, and stitch the name of said legislation underneath it, as above.

This creature was embroidered by Eleanor B. Roosevelt—not to be confused with the other, more famous Eleanor Roosevelt, who probably would have represented the New Deal in a very different way. Eleanor B. was married to Theodore “Ted” Roosevelt, Jr., the oldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt. Both Eleanor and Ted were staunch Republicans: When Ted’s fifth cousin, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, won the Presidency in 1932, Ted resigned … Read the rest

The first thing Lorraine Etchell sees each morning is the sun rising over the Sonoran Desert and illuminating the iconic Camelback Mountain. She doesn’t even have to leave her bed to become one with the desert: From her mattress, she can see the horizon stretching out before her and watch groups of Gambel’s quail scuttling around the cacti and creosote bushes.

Her view is uninterrupted by city high-rises and accompanied only by the sounds of quail calls and shrieking hawks.

That’s because Etchell is a resident of one of the world’s most unusual dorms. The second-year graduate student at the School of Architecture at Taliesin (SOAT) in Scottsdale, Arizona, lives in a desert shelter, carrying on a tradition started by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937.… Read the rest

In Grenoble, France, the short story addict doesn’t have to go far to get their fix. Across the seven square miles of the central city, 14 orange-and-black machines are dotted like Easter eggs in train stations, municipal buildings, and even the local museum. At the push of a button, each one will unspool a little piece of literature, printed on a long strip of paper, like a grocery store receipt. You can select for length—one, three, or five minutes—but precisely what you’ll be served up is in the hands of the gods. These are story dispensers, built by Grenoble-based publishing company Short Edition.

When the company began producing the machines in 2015, they were hardly set on global domination. But today, they are found around … Read the rest