Think pieces the internet over (ahem) would have you believe that rose gold—a.k.a. “millennium pink,” “pale dogwood,” and “rose quartz”—was the definitive color trend of 2016. This writer respectfully disagrees. The year’s biggest color trend wasn’t a single hue, at all. It was a blend of them. More precisely, it was ombré (the ten dollar word for color gradients). Consider Pandora’s new logo. In October, the music streaming service ditched its muted blue...

Something was wrong with the Jackson Pollock. For one thing, 3-D images from a stereomicroscope revealed that the signature was traced with a needle—forged. And, working with a hyper-precise Raman microscope, a tool capable of analyzing sample areas as small as a thousandth of a millimeter across, Jamie Martin identified the presence of Red 170, a pigment that wasn’t widely available until decades after Pollock’s death. Yep. The painting was a fake. When art historians, museum curators, or law enforcement...

The Vifa Copenhagen wireless speaker ($600) is somewhat large for a wireless, portable speaker. Its squareish size and long top handle are reminiscent of a boom box, brief case, or big lunch box. But unlike those everyday products, the Copenhagen is almost entirely covered in earthy, colorful fabric. This makes sense, since it’s lauded as an example of Nordic design, and one thing we all know about the North Atlantic region is that it’s cold. So why not wrap your...

A little over a decade ago, neuroscientists began using a new technique to inspect what was going on in the brains of their subjects. Rather than giving their subjects a task to complete and watching their brains to see which parts lit up, they’d tell them to lie back, let their minds wander, and try not to fall asleep for about six minutes. That technique is called resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging, and it shares a problem with other...

When you take a vacation in a foreign city, you like to visit the museums, old historical churches, and possibly pop into a boutique or two. Your loved one, on the other hand, would gladly spend the entirety of the trip digging through dusty crates in some weird little record store. It’s an obsession! But it makes them happy. In fact, the only thing they like more than collecting records is listening to them. Here’s the stuff that will keep...

Forgive us if we’re starting to sound like a broken record, but 2016 has been a great year for music—so great, in fact, that there are likely a whole bunch of great albums that never even landed on your radar. Here are some choice sleepers—ranging from decadent dance-jams to cabaret-glam to honky-tonk—that kept us (happily) up all night during the last twelve months. Luke Bell, Luke Bell Bell’s self-titled debut—the latest release out of East Nashville’s renowned Bomb Shelter studio—is...

America didn’t get its first woman president this year. That title went to a reality TV star instead. But on reality TV tonight, odds are that America will get its first woman Ink Master—contestants Kelly Doty and Ryan Ashley Malarkey are two of the three finalists. And if it happens, it will very likely be because the women on the show took a hint from the Obama administration. The women on the Spike TV show formed an alliance that systematically worked...

There aren’t many saloons where you can get into a decent pistol duel nowadays. But at the Mariposa in Sweetwater, you can walk in, order a shot of bourbon, and straight-up Aaron Burr a robot—all to the strains of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, courtesy of a player piano that happens to be ever so slightly out of tune. “That’s the twist,” says Ramin Djawadi, the composer for HBO’s Westworld. “In the show, everything is so real, until you look closely. The music is a...

If you learned how to drive in the US, there’s a good chance you suffered through Red Asphalt—the famously gory driver’s ed film the California Highway Patrol has been making and remaking since the 60s. Now the time-honored tradition of scaring teens into staying sober behind the wheel with gruesome images has taken on a new dimension: virtual reality. Diageo, the British liquor company that owns Johnnie Walker, Baileys, and Guinness, has tapped VR tech to convey the...