Thing Explainer

Thing ExplainerBy: Randall Munroe From the No. 1 bestselling author of What If? the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams ('blueprints' if you want to be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from the nuclear bomb to the biro. It's good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it's much more interesting to know what they do. Richard Feynman once said that if

By: Iain Levison  All Iain Levison really wants is a steady paycheck

he performs surgery (on stuffed animals)

who do not realize that Rufus

Sometimes it seems like you are speaking completely different languages

Escaping her small Texas town and the judgment of her friends and neighbors

as Detective Eve Dallas searches for a Casanova killer with a deadly appetite for seduction

Though we have glimpsed her across the years in films and on countless canvases

Rule boxes: Grammar and punctuation rules are made simple with a short explanation

she impulsively flees to the vast

where Lucas had predicted she'd fit right in

an adorable character from the creator of Worm

of corpses