Allison C. Meier is a former staff writer for Hyperallergic. Originally from Oklahoma, she has been covering visual culture and overlooked history for print and online media since 2006. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.
In Brief
Some scribbles dismissed in the 1920s by the then-director of the Victoria & Albert Museum as "irrelevant notes and diagrams in red chalk" were recently revealed to represent Leonardo da Vinci's first record of the laws of friction.
Art
Since 1997, the Knoxville, Tennessee–based View Productions has created a series of reels highlighting 20th-century design and architecture, particularly forms that are difficult to capture in two dimensions.
Books
Neon and New York City had their ups and downs over the 20th century, from the glowing signage being an innovative advertisement in the 1920s and '30s to already telegraphing seediness with its flickering in the 1940s and '50s.
News
Something rotten is preparing to bloom in the Bronx: one of the world's largest flowers that smells like death.
Art
A combination of roadside attraction novelty and greater architectural freedom resulted in some very strange 20th-century buildings.
Art
Before coming across an unusually calligraphic painting of a mountain, Williams College Museum of Art Curator Kevin Murphy considered the turn-of-the-century artist Abbott Handerson Thayer "a one slide guy," a man known for portraits of placid angels, who in an art history class might get one mentio
Art
From the world's oldest ham to corvettes crushed in a sinkhole, some of the greatest wonders of our museums are available 24/7 through online webcams.
Art
Robbers, prostitutes, and fallen tightrope walkers: the craniums in the Hyrtl Skull Collection in the Mütter Museum at College of Physicians of Philadelphia are fractured remains of imperfect lives.
Art
As an opera where a colossal snake and enchanted instrument play a pivotal role, perhaps it's no surprise Mozart's The Magic Flute inspired some fantastic set and costume designs since its debut in 1791.
Art
Consider a wanderer 10,000 years in the future discovering a strange construction of granite thorns in the New Mexico desert, their points weathered by centuries, their shadows stretching at sinister angles.
Books
The Morgan Library and Museum continues to spotlight some of its glittering books beneath the revamped lighting in its historic 1906 McKim Building.
Art
More than 5,000 wine labels at the University of California, Davis, chronicle the industry from the 1800s to the 1950s, before and after Prohibition in the United States.