‘Every time I look at one, I smile!’: how axolotls took over the world

Our passion for these cute-looking salamanders means they are everywhere – except in the wild, where the species is under increasing threat

Julio Cortázar / Axolotl

Paula Cocozza
Wednesday 21 January 2026

A

xolotls are the new llamas. Which were, of course, the new unicorns. Which triggered a moment for narwhals. If you are an unusual-looking animal, this is your time. Even humans who have never seen an axolotl – a type of salamander – in the smooth and slimy flesh will have met a cartoon or cuddly one. Mexican axolotls have the kind of look that is made for commercial reproduction. The most popular domestic species is pink. Some glow in the dark – and their smile is bigger than Walter’s in the Muppets.

 THE NATURE OF

A piranha: it is boiling the water you’re swimming in and taking bites out of you

This article is more than 5 months old

They don’t chew: they bite, the meat goes straight into their stomach, and they bite again

Helen Sullivan

Imagine a bulldog flattened with a meat tenderiser, shaved and sprinkled with glitter. Imagine more, and everywhere, or else: when I was a child, as sure as all cartoon sand would turn into quicksand, in every fictional body of fresh water swam very real fish with very real, sharp, tiny little teeth.

In The Simpsons, Millhouse is more worried about piranhas than that his mother will stop loving him. Bart is reduced to a skeleton by piranhas from a hosepipe.

We’ve been thinking about animal sexuality all wrong

WE’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT ANIMAL SEXUALITY ALL WRONG

A new documentary, Second Nature: Gender & Sexuality in the Animal World, explores our misconceptions of the animal kingdom

Raquel Brodsky

24 June 2024

I want to take you back to the year 2008, when New York City’s Museum of Sex Launche an exhibit on the sex lives of Animals.The exhibit ran for a full decade,  and I have the chancrto check it out about a year or so before it closed in 2018. “The Sex Lives of Animals” exhibit is, in fact, where I learned that ducks possess massive, corkscrew-like penises. But duck genitalia aside, the Museum of Sex’s intention, nearly 20 years ago, was to reveal the “astonishing array” of sexual behaviors animals routinely engage in, from kissing to hugging to, well, everything else. And definitely not always male-on-female. 

A wheelchair user explores the Vatican Museums, highlighting the importance of accessibility at one of the world's most visited cultural landmarks

Andrea Stoler’s guide to an accessible Vatican

Practical advice for wheelchair users visiting the Vatican Museums and Saint Peter’s Basilica

15 JULY 2026, 

BRENDA LEE BOHEN

The Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel welcome all visitors with mobility issues and are committed to making their programmes and services accessible to everyone. Personal wheelchairs, both manual and electric, are allowed in the museums and the Sistine Chapel.

Exterior view of the Carson Pirie Scott & Co. department store building, located at the southeast corner of South State and East Madison Streets in Chicago’s Loop, decorated with bunting and flags in celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday (1909)

Chicago and the birth of modern architecture

Steel frames, glass façades, and the evolution of architectural thought in the industrial age

15 AUGUST 2026, 

BRENDA LEE BOHEN

 

The artist in this social context must not be a simple artisan, but rather an intellectual prepared in all disciplines and all fields.

(Leon Battista Alberti)

Back in touch with Professor Sabine Frommel

 

Giuliano da Sangallo (attr.), Ideal City (Urbino), about 1504

Back in touch with Professor Sabine Frommel 

Discussing the understudied discipline of painted architecture

15 FEBRUARY 2024, 

BRENDA LEE BOHEN

Until now, representations of architecture in panel painting, drawings, frescoes, and intarsia have been relatively understudied, and further investigations are warranted, explains Professor Sabine Frommel.

Books to Inspire Hunger and Thirst

Luke Wohlgemuth

Books to Inspire Hunger and Thirst

Wine textbooks are crucial, but they may only rarely move you. What about books that teach you not only how to think about wine but how to feel about it?

Eric Asimov

13 May 2021

It’s a tossup over whether my overstuffed apartment holds more wine or more books. The number of bottles tumbled about, particularly over the pandemic year, is rivaled only by the scattered stacks of volumes that sadly will never earn shelf space.

Mayuko Okada

 

Mayuko Okada

I started to be attracted to kimonos from a young age, influenced by my grandmother, who was a shopping queen as well as a kimono lover. I majored in Japanese painting at university with a dream of kimono related art.

Christopher Berry-Dee is the UK’s all-time bestselling true crime author. Is he also a violent abuser of women and children?

Christopher Berry-Dee

Books

Christopher Berry-Dee is the UK’s all-time bestselling true crime author. Is he also a violent abuser of women and children?

The British writer is known for his unique ability to get inside the heads of serial killers. But a Guardian investigation reveals multiple accusations of assault and child sexual abuse. What is the truth about the man described by his own daughter as ‘absolute evil’?

Warning: this article contains descriptions of sexual abuse and violence

Lucy Osborne

Sirin Kale

Saturday 15 August 2026

From the outside, it looked like the sort of happy family home a child might draw. Red brick, surrounded by rolling countryside, in Curdridge, near Winchester. Here lived the true crime writer Christopher Berry-Dee, with his second wife, Tracey Dee, and their two young daughters, Zoe and Sasha, in the early 1990s. Inside, it was a house of horrors, full of murder memorabilia. In a wardrobe were the clothes a nine-year-old girl had been murdered in. One afternoon, Zoe was playing when she found them. The now 38-year-old council worker from Romsey says she remembers “putting it all on … going downstairs and everyone being absolutely traumatised”. Later, another gruesome memento was added to the collection: the Austin Metro that convicted murderer Michael Sams had used to transport a body in 1991. Bloodied sections of the seatbelts had been cut out for forensic tests.

Karen Hadaway (left) and Nicola Fellows Photograph: PA

BBC was warned of author’s claim to possess missing clothes of child murder victim

Corporation was told of claims by Christopher Berry-Dee that he had clothing, which was lost while in its possession 

Quentin Shih / Women

WOMEN
by
Quentin Shih

Beautiful Women / Natalia Morante

Donne

Natalia Morante

Ashvin Harrinson / Women

Ashvin Harrinson

MUJERES

Beautiful women / Katherine Díaz Meneses

  

Katherine Díaz Meneses

 

Some thoughts on painting, by Lucian Freud

Published on 24 October 2019

"The painter’s obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work..." As his self-portraits go on show at the RA, we share Lucian Freud's only published statement on his creative process. It reveals the uncompromising intensity behind his approach to painting. 

 

© Sergio Aquindo

Some random thoughts on books

Pat Carl Watson
11 August 2026

The status of books in America today hovers between out-of-control production and irrelevance. There are probably more books being printed and published now than ever before. The ease of self-publishing, combined with the lack of literary gate keepers, produces a flood of new books every week—poetry, memoir, fiction, opinion, etc. Just send your manuscript to Amazon and they will make a book for you. Congratulations! You are a published author! Nobody will care if its good or not because almost nobody will pay attention to it.

The art of being ornamental

 

The Ladies Waldegrave is a group portrait painted by Joshua Reynolds between 1780 and 1781, now housed in the Scottish National Gallery, which acquired the painting in 1952. The work depicts the three daughters of James Waldegrave, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, and Maria Walpole. From left to right, they are Charlotte, holding a skein of silk; Elizabeth, winding Charlotte’s silk onto a card; and Anna, producing tambour lace

The art of being ornamental

Rococo fashion, hyper-femininity, and the politics of spectacle in 18th-century aristocratic culture

Mariana Carrera Díaz de Ita
30 de July 2026

The Rococo period of the early to mid-18th century represents one of the most visually extravagant moments in Western fashion history. Emerging in France during the reign of Louis XV, Rococo aesthetics celebrated lightness, sensuality, artifice, and ornamental excess. Pastel silks, cascading ribbons, lace flounces, and architectural silhouettes transformed women into living embodiments of refinement and spectacle. Yet beneath this softness lay a complex system of power, performance, and social hierarchy. Rococo fashion was not merely about beauty—it was about visibility.

 

© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Diane von Furstenberg Tells the Story Behind Her Iconic Andy Warhol Paintings

Diane con Furstenberg
6 August 2026

Happy Birthday, Andy! Today marks what would have been 98 years of Interview renowned founder. To celebrate, one of Warhol’s closest friends and muse, Dian von Furstenberg,wrote him a birthday note reminiscing on the fateful night these Polaroids were captured and how they went on to become some of the most well-known works in Warhol’s oeuvre. The following letter provides a snapshot of the artist at work, as well as a taste of the bustling social scene of ’70s New York City. More of Warhol’s Polaroids are currently on display as part of the Andy Warhol Family Album exhibition at the Whitney Museum running now through October 19. —BRENDAN KENNEDY

Dressing the woman within

A woman lies in bed, elegantly dressed in delicate lingerie

Dressing the woman within

Reclaiming sensuality and sexiness in style and self

Virginie Tolly
22 October 2025

Having worked with many women over the years in fashion styling, I’ve noticed something striking. Most shy away from the word “sexy.” They say they prefer to be seen as “feminine,” “elegant,” or sometimes “sensual,” but almost never sexy. And yet, aren’t these just different expressions of the same experience? Different tones of the same music? It’s like a volume dial turning up from feminine to sensual to sexy. In truth, the word “sexy” doesn’t really exist on its own. It’s not something separate from us, a label we choose to wear or reject. It’s part of the much broader, richer experience of being a woman. When we resist the word, we’re often not rejecting our own sensuality; we’re rejecting what society has made the word mean. Because the problem isn’t the feeling, it’s the social consequences of embracing it.

Where have all the warriors gone?

 

A statue of a man riding a horse, depicting a samurai in traditional Japanese armor

Where have all the warriors gone? 

A reflection on men, style, and identity crisis

Virginie Tolly
2 September 2025

More than ever, men seem to have lost their connection with style. That quiet but powerful language that once said everything before a man ever spoke.