Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Smart News / Smart News Arts & Culture

A modern mocha

Your Mocha is Named After the Birthplace of the Coffee Trade

The port city of Mocha, in Yemen, was once a vast coffee marketplace

Cool Finds

Degas’ Rare Sculptures Are Stuffed With Wine Corks

X-rays show the artist fleshed out his wax and clay personal projects with bits and pieces found around the studio

Could New York be the Gotham we prize without the Guggenheim?

What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Chinese Art Exhibit Coming to the Guggenheim

As questions of animal cruelty, artistic freedom swirl, three major works were pulled from “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World”

The inspiration for the bendy straw came while Joseph Friedman was watching his young daughter try to drink from a tall glass.

Why You Should Appreciate the Invention of the Bendy Straw

It’s the straw that bends, not the person

In this Saturday March 29, 2014 file photo, a woman drives a car on a highway in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as part of a campaign to defy Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving. Saudi Arabia authorities announced Tuesday Sept. 26, 2017, that women will be allowed to drive for the first time in the ultra-conservative kingdom from next summer, fulfilling a key demand of women's rights activists who faced detention for defying the ban.

Trending Today

Saudi Women Win the Right to Drive

Next June, women in the ultra-patriarchal society will become the last in the world to receive driver’s licenses

Jennifer Zetlan who plays Rhoda in "Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt"

Family Travel

Watch a Dinosaur Opera at New York’s American Museum of Natural History

Sink your teeth into the family friendly “Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt”

Guillaume Rondelet was an early anatomist who founded his own dissecting theater, which was a thing people did in the sixteenth century.

A Sixteenth-Century Hot Date Might Include a Trip to the Dissecting Theater

Anatomy theaters were an early site for science as spectacle

Africa’s Largest Contemporary Art Museum Opens in Cape Town

But some critics have questioned whether the institution adequately represents black African artists

Make your art better with this highly trained AI named Vincent

Watch This AI Turn Sketches into Masterpieces

Trained on the ‘history of human art,’ this system can transform your scribbles

Josephine Peary, wife of the legendary Arctic explorer Robert Peary, wears a parka in 1892

Family Travel

Explore the High Fashion of Exploration

From the Arctic to the Moon, a new exhibit shows how the outfits of exploration have impacted the outfits of the runway

Tim Renner, undersecretary of state for cultural affairs, at a 2016 press conference for the Urban National Museum for Urban Contemporary Art.

Museum Devoted to Street Art Opens in Berlin

The façade of the five-story building is covered in large murals

Family Travel

Check Out This Awesome Trilobite Corn Maze

The elaborate Wisconsin maze honors the state’s geologic history

Vinnie Ream was not even 20 when she was commissioned by the U.S. government to create the statue of Lincoln that still stands in the Capitol today.

This Ambitious Young Sculptor Gave Us A Lincoln For the Capitol

Vinnie Ream was the first female artist commissioned to create a work of art for the U.S. government

Amidst Heated Criticism, Queer Art Exhibition Is Shuttered in Brazil

Protestors accused the exhibit of promoting pedophilia, bestiality, pornography and blasphemy

Hank Willis Thomas' sculpture photographed by Steve Weinik for Mural Arts Philadelphia

Cool Finds

Pop-up Monuments Ask What 21st-Century Public Memorials Should Be

A collective of artists adds new, thought-provoking works to Philadelphia’s parks and plazas

Trending Today

New York City Could Finally Lose Its Prohibition-era Dancing Rule

The infamous “Cabaret Law” is rooted in racism

Maori Translation of ‘Moana’ Is a Hit in New Zealand

Experts hope the film will spark a renewed interest in the Maori language

A VR animation of a 1945 design for a massive elevated airport over the Hudson River

New Exhibit Imagines the Buildings New York Could’ve Had

From a gigantic airport, to an urbanized Ellis Island, the show reveals the many fascinating ideas for New York City that never made it off the page

A newspaper's photograph of six men, all of different ethnicities. The caption reads: "Through by birth the men in this group, photographed at a National army cantonment, are as diverse as one could possibly imagine, they stand together in their readiness to fight for Uncle Sam."

Cool Finds

Help Find Historic Cartoons in World War I-era Newspapers

The crowd-sourcing effort is the first project in a new digital workspace that aims to make the Library of Congress’ vast resources more accessible

The ice cream cone came to the attention of American audiences at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

The Amazing, Portable, Edible Ice Cream Cone

Unlike foods that came before it, ice cream in a cone could be eaten on the go–without a spoon

Page 180 of 286