A few days from now the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris will begin. A spectacle that costs about €9 billion – and probably will leave some abandoned places behind… like in Japan! Japan’s history as a host of the Olympic Games dates back to 1964, when Tokyo was home of the Summer Games.

This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.

Four years after the release of Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, children in the British Isles were treated to another misleadingly cheerful-looking jaunt through a postlapsarian landscape in Graham Oakley’s 1986 book Henry’s Quest.

The following is adapted from a lecture given at Columbia University in April, 2018, and some of the images are reprinted from the author’s Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. A revised and expanded edition of Wonderbook was published this month.

In 1930, a year into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes sat down to write about the economic possibilities of his grandchildren.

Joel Sternfeld is an artist-photographer whose work is concerned with utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience.

You have probably heard the theory, that the health of forests depends on common mycorrhizal networks. Trees send resources to their neighbours through strands of hyphae, which act as an underground arboreal postal service, connecting root systems within the soil.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, mass-produced, modular, modernist kiosks sprouted up across Central and Eastern Europe. Vendors sold goods from these kiosks like food, flowers, and newspapers, but like phone booths, many have gone out of use or vanished over the years.

One day 16 years ago, the writer Rosa Ribas visited Toledo, the hulking Spanish city that looms over the Tagus and stands as a testament to the country’s medieval and imperial power.

A century of mass media and technology makes it easy to believe that so many of the ideas we experience are new or recent. But as an old book says, “There is no new thing under the sun.

In the run-up to the Edinburgh festival fringe last year, comedian John Tothill was having “horrific hallucinations of being pulled into hell by the devil”.

The day is slowly turning into night, and the American special operators are growing concerned.