internet explorers club | world's fairs that last

I am now the biggest fan of illustrated essays, even if it means that I can't send them to my Kindle to read. With that in mind, a British Airways pilot wrote this beautiful essay about flying from London to Japan, and I loved every moment of it.

I was already going to write about World's Fairs, but we went to see Tomorrowland last night, and it just confirmed it. The beginning takes place at the 1964 World's Fair, which was a seminal event in my Dad's childhood (pictured below, third from right), and he says it was like stepping into a time machine.

As it happens, the New York Pavilion from the 1964 World's Fair is decaying, and as a result I have been having a lot of conversations about World's Fair architecture recently, which started with this and a visit to the Northwest Folklife Festival over Memorial Day, which takes place on the grounds of the Seattle World's Fair (or the Century 21 Exposition). Those buildings were built to last—they're still used to this day. New York's, on the other hand, were not.

There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason as to which Fairs built things to last and which ones don't—the Palace of Fine Arts from the World Columbia Exhibition in Chicago, for example, was built with brick under the plaster façade only to ensure it was fireproof! Recently MakerFaire has taken over the grounds of Flushing Meadows yearly, and the Pavilion has its own non-profit dedicated to its preservation, who just released a documentary about it, so here's hoping this leads to good things.

I'm convinced that scientists have discovered a vampire, because she was found a) fully preserved, b) buried in a lead coffin, and c) was buried with the heart of her husband. On two similar but different tacks, I'm fascinated by this article about a Komodo Dragon dissection, and there's a trailer for a new Macbeth adaptation and it looks AMAZING.

Etcetera: Photos of really cool Australian fungi. Really satisfyingly pretty "cheat sheets" for soccer commentators. John Waters gave a great commencement address at RISD. A new Star Wars comic introduces an as-yet-unknown wife of Han Solo (what is reality?!)

—Emily