Culture — older stories

A dagger next to a book's name on the New York Times bestseller list means something specific. Here's what actually decides which books make the cut, and why some vanish just as fast.

Rotten Tomatoes crunched the numbers on 400-plus remakes and reboots, and the verdict is almost uniform: the original usually wins.

The feathered edges on some book pages look like a defect. They're a callback to hand papermaking that collectors have paid extra for since the 1600s.

Blame usually lands on a phone in your pocket, but most hotel key card failures trace back to expiration timers, encoding mistakes and aging locks.

The evidence says a camera flash barely dents what museum lighting already does to pigment each year. The real reasons galleries still ban it are older than digital cameras.

White sheets and towels look like a design choice. They're actually a decades-old laundry and branding decision the rest of the hotel industry copied because it worked.

A book carrying two ISBNs usually isn't a printing error. It's either a leftover from the industry's 2007 switch to 13 digits, or separate codes for separate formats.

From "The Graduate's" near-silent ending to "Dune's" eight-minute scroll, here's why movie credits ballooned, and why the industry keeps making them longer.

That slow house-lights fade before a movie starts is not ambience for its own sake. It is borrowed from how rods and cones trade off in your retina, and it happens to be easier on the equipment too.

Two rival record labels raced to replace the fragile 78 in 1948, and neither backed down. The result is still spinning on turntables today.

Traditional and Dome IMAX theaters curve their screens to fight distortion and widen your field of view — but not every IMAX auditorium does.

CD sales grew six times faster than vinyl's in the first half of 2026, per Luminate. Here's why, and what it means for a format everyone assumed was finished.

AMC now warns ticket buyers to expect 25-30 minutes of ads and trailers before the film begins. The company’s own math behind the gap — and why it is shrinking.

Everyone repeats the same line about a 2:30 trailer limit. A data analysis of nearly 7,000 trailers going back to 1930 shows the opposite is true.

Charles Douglass built the Laff Box to fix bad studio audiences in 1953. It ended up scoring six decades of sitcoms — until international pushback and a new comedy genre finally let the laughter go quiet.

Olivia Wilde didn't recognize her own film after watching it on a flight. The reason in-flight movies get re-cut has little to do with the airline and everything to do with an invisible vendor.

Clear glass looks appealing on a shelf, but for olive oil it's a slow-motion quality problem. Here's the food chemistry behind the dark bottle, and where even dark glass falls short.

The rule against clapping between symphony movements is younger than it sounds, born from claques, Mahler's objections and the arrival of recording equipment — and some top conductors think it should go.

The company that gave the world 'elevator music' mostly never played it in elevators at all -- it engineered the soundtrack of the American workday instead.

Eighty-five percent of Netflix viewers now watch with captions on, and most of them can hear just fine. Mumbled dialogue and a generation raised on TikTok text are why.