Forbes Pigment Collection

A Seattle restaurant pushes diners to eat beyond their borders through its embrace of global street foods. 

The Pan-American Highway is considered the longest road in the world – it stretches nearly 20,000 miles, from Alaska to Argentina. In her new docuseries Pati Jinich Explores PanAmericana, Pati talks with people along the famous route about the different ways we form our identitie ... Show More

Early polar explorers faced long nights and dangerous expeditions. To entertain themselves, they wrote and published niche newspapers and periodicals. Atlas Obscura’s community editor Allegra Rosenberg reads an essay exploring this unique polar tradition. Read her full essay here ... Show More

Pigments color the world all around us, but where do those colors come from? Historically, they’ve come from crushed sea snails, beetles, and even ground-up mummies. But new pigments are still being discovered in unexpected places, and for researcher Mas Subramanian, a new color ... Show More

It's now a childhood classic, but the modern Crayola crayon has roots in the same company where carbon black was made for car tires at the turn of the 20th century. But people were creating art with colored implements before Binney and Smith made theirs. Learn more about your ad- ... Show More

In light of current events, we are re-posting one of my favorite episodes (from June, 2018) on the Black Death.Between 1346 and 1351, the Black Death killed tens of millions of people - at least half the population - in Europe and the Middle East. This great mortality, one of the ... Show More

From 1520 to 1560, the style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad immortalized their adventures in dressing in a series of stunning, hand-painted portraits that provide a window into the period within which they lived. Historians Ulinka Rublack and Maria ... Show More

From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas betw ... Show More

Here at 99% Invisible, we think about color a lot, so it was really exciting when we came across a beautiful book called The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair It’s this amazing collection of stories about different colors, the way they’ve been made through history, and th ... Show More

A 109 year old Black woman fights for reparations for her neighborhood that was burned to the ground when she was a child. The first woman on to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List was a Black Panther. The richest person of all time, an African king, gave away so much gold that ... Show More

In part one of our Autumn 2023 edition of Unearthed!, we have some oldest things, books and letters, projects specifically related to gender, edibles and potables, and animals.  Research:  “Early humans deliberately made mysterious stone 'spheroids'.” PhysOrg. 9/10/2023. https:// ... Show More

In her recent LRB Winter Lecture, Hazel V. Carby discussed ways contemporary Indigenous artists are rendering the ordinarily invisible repercussions of ecocide and genocide visible. She joins Adam Shatz to expand on the artists discussed in her lecture, and how they disrupt the w ... Show More