Tattoos suppressed during colonization are experiencing a revival

Tattoos, explained

Tattoos last because immune cells trap ink beneath the skin—but there's more to the story. This overview looks at how ancient cultures used tattoos for status, spirituality and punishment; how technology like the electric tattoo machine transformed the art form, and where innovations like smart tattoos could take it next.

'Skin stitching' is an ancient tattoo method that's made a comeback

In the slow method, artists use needles to puncture the skin. Then, pigmented thread is drawn through the punctures to create the tattoo, resembling embroidery in the flesh. The method is experiencing a cultural revival within Canada’s First Nations communities.

The medieval origins of Māori and Moriori culture

New Zealand, also known as Aotearoa, was one of the last large land masses inhabited by humans. This 18-minute video explores the ancient origins of Polynesian people and their medieval journey to New Zealand and the nearby Chatham Islands archipelago.

Tattoos remain visible on your skin thanks to immune cells called macrophages

Around 32% of American adults have at least one tattoo

Tattoos have waxed and waned in popularity over the centuries, depending upon the social standing of their wearers. Throughout US history, they were often considered taboo. However, growing acceptance of tattoos means they’re more visible in the public eye.

Women in WWII used tattoos to avoid capture

During World War II, Japanese soldiers kidnapped women from Southeast Asian countries and forced them into sexual slavery. But they hesitated to capture married women, a fact that women from the island of Timor exploited, painstakingly poking tattoos onto their bodies that marked them as married women.

The Takaro Lodge, a therapeutic New Zealand community turned wellness cult

Founded by Slovenian "energy" healer Aiping Wang, the lodge members were promised spiritual growth, healing, and even radical gifts like flight and foresight. Things turned dark as the group embraced extreme beliefs and practices.

Experience Maya culture through art—both ancient and modern

This gallery showcases how Maya culture endures through both ancient monuments and modern artistic expressions, tracing visual traditions from pre-Columbian carvings and murals to contemporary works created by Maya artists.

Native American tribes still are waiting for museums to return the remains of their ancestors

The remains of more than 100,000 Native Americans are held by prestigious US institutions, despite a 1990 law meant to return them to tribal nations. Here’s how their ancestors were stolen—and how tribes are working to get them back.

Indigenous art's influence on pop art often goes uncredited

Keith Haring’s iconic imagery, often known for its accessibility, was deeply inspired by the artwork of the Indigenous people of Australia. Their artwork influenced aspects of Haring's paintings, such as flat block colors and symmetrical compositions. While some critics find Haring to have appropriated their culture, others find his work to be pushing a message of unity and togetherness.

Read the New York Times profile of TAKI 183

The 1971 article about the young graffiti artist and his many acolytes exposed the burgeoning subculture to a large audience and also detailed the effort to clean the work from the city's walls. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Rediscovering the Inca Empire

In 1991, anthropologist Johan Reinhard was trekking up the snowy face of a dormant volcano when he came face to face with the mummified remains of a teenager who had been sacrificed to the Incan gods centuries earlier. The story of “Juanita the Ice Maiden” is just one of the riveting tales featured in this four-part series from the popular podcast "History Hit".

See how faces on magazine covers have changed over time

This piece examined an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2014, focusing on 327,322 faces from the archive. Read what the researchers learned.

With no textbooks or antibiotics, this WWI surgeon pioneered facial reconstruction

New Zealand surgeon Dr. Harold Gillies made extraordinary advances in the field of reconstructive surgery during World War I and after. This 36-minute NPR podcast interviews historian Lindsey Fitzharris, author of Gillie's biography, The Facemaker, charting how the good doctor reconstructed the faces of numerous soldiers in an age before antibiotics and plastic surgery as we know it today.

Listen to storytellers explain the legacy of memories shared between children and their mothers

In this podcast, people describe the strength of certain memories, what events stay with them, and when and why grief washes over them. One describes the challenging task of selling her mother's cemetery plots; another, keeping a promise to her son to learn to swim; and in the third, a son discusses the strength of familiar food smells.

A researcher thinks she knows why people keep touching museum exhibits

A museologist who studied unauthorized touch at the British Museum concluded that people may feel it's difficult to learn about things "unless you handle them" and that people are trying to connect with the past, viscerally. Her work has included interviewing British Museum visitors who committed unauthorized touches and spending extensive periods observing people touching prohibited items across 2004 and 2005.

Guatemala’s Regina José Gallindo's works protested abuses against women

In this in-depth interview with Bomb magazine, she discusses her motivations and inspirations for pieces like Recorte Por La Línea, in which she invited a plastic surgeon to mark everything he would change on her body to make it “ideal.”

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

A Canadian tourism campaign turns every whale sighting—including ones from decades ago—into a live, crowdsourced migration biography

Humpback flukes (or tails) are as individually distinct as fingerprints, which means a single photo is enough to match a whale to its full sighting history. Every upload adds a chapter (the database goes back to the 1970s) and the site uses AI to render that data as narrative, not just data.

How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist

A man leading a faction of the US white nationalist movement took part in a psychedelic trial on the pleasantness of social touch and came away from it with his beliefs reportedly upended. He left researchers a note on a form, stating, "this experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do."

Norman Rockwell had a 21st-century resurgence

For decades, he was written off by the art world as a simplistic commercial artist, but critics began to reconsider Rockwell's work many years after his death. Arguably, the height of that resurgence came in 2011, when President Barack Obama hung "The Problem We All Live With" (on loan from the Norman Rockwell Museum) in the White House to mark the 50th anniversary of Ruby Bridges' desegregation walk.

What's behind the cassette renaissance

Cassettes fell out of fashion in the late 1990s as the popularity of compact discs ascended. But in the streaming era, tapes are having a moment thanks to changing audio preferences, the desire for tangible objects, and a healthy dose of nostalgia. This article explores the recent resurgence, asking whether it's the future of music consumption or just another passing trend.

All the ways colonists protested the absurd breadth of the Stamp Act

Philadelphia publisher William Bradford replaced his paper's required revenue stamp with a skull and crossbones. It read: "O! the fatal Stamp," and staged elaborate mock funerals for liberty, a comic protest trend that spread across the colonies until the act's repeal in 1766.

Read excerpted accounts from some of the 8,000 residents with leprosy on Moloka'i

Accounts preserved by the Kalaupapa National Historical Park describe how residents felt about being sent to live in this remote location and knowing they would never be allowed to leave. In 2012, 20 residents with the disease continued to voluntarily live in the area.

Two-spirit relationships and identities

Queer relationships and transgender people aren’t new. Even though gay marriage has been legalized fairly recently in Western countries, people all over the world have engaged in relationships beyond heterosexuality throughout the centuries. Although contemporary tribes have various views around homosexuality, there are numerous examples of queer relationships within indigenous traditions across what is now called the Americas.

The Zulu krewe dons black face paint, but says it's not blackface

The majority Black organization was founded in the early 1900s, when Mardi Gras was still segregated. They painted their faces black, both to comply with the Mardi Gras rule requiring masks and to reenact a vaudeville sketch. In recent years, their facepaint has been criticized by some as a form of Jim Crow minstrelsy.

Eight British children have been born via mitochondrial replacement therapy

In July 2025, a decade after British lawmakers signed off on allowing three-parent IVF, scientists announced that eight healthy babies had already been born using this approach. The news was included in a pair of research articles published in a peer-reviewed journal that noted the oldest kids were already more than two years old, and that they were hitting developmental milestones as expected. (Some users may encounter a paywall.)

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

Fish populations in the Great Barrier Reef have increased after installing waterproof speakers on the ocean floor that played recordings of sounds from healthy coral reefs.

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

The concept of phantom limbs, the perception that amputated limbs are still present, dates back to a French military surgeon in the 16th century.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that was home to an estimated population of 200,000 to 400,000.

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

Cultural norms about how to handle the bodies of loved ones in communities in West Africa have hampered Ebola responses.

The identity of the Tank Man in the iconic photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests remains unknown and was possibly killed.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

Volcanoes 'die' when their supply of magma runs out, if they are shifted away from their underlying magma reservoir, or if they get clogged by collapsing or their magma cooling back into rock.

Fast-casual restaurant Chili's is experiencing a resurgence, with its parent company recently reporting a nearly 32% increase in sales, thanks to passionate Gen Z fans on TikTok.

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.

Some Pokémon have been named after real and fictional organisms, while some real-world species have been named after Pokémon, such as Chilicola charizard and Binburrum zapdos.

The hormonal disorder PCOS was renamed PMOS in 2026, a move designed to improve care and research by shifting the focus to the hormonal causes of this condition that affects 1 in 8 women.

Some coin denominations have ridges etched on their sides, partly to prevent counterfeiting, in a practice called 'reeding.'