Worldwide

While many people in arid regions of the world struggle just to find water, others in rain-soaked developing countries face a different challenge: getting water that is safe enough to drink. What will it take to turn their precious water clean—so they can stay healthy, and we can stop spending scarce resources on mountains of plastic water bottles?

While school officials in the U.S. seem to have done their best in recent decades to eliminate play from the school day, things might be turning around: innovative projects like Providence PlayCorps continue to push back against that cultural shift. An example of families playing together include the now well-known Maker Faires, held in cities…

Cooled dairy desserts have been known for millennia, but gelato is the child of refrigeration. Who invented it? Nobody and everybody. It’s a testament to the uncanny appeal of frozen cream that so many people made the effort to develop it further. Before refrigeration, of course, there was ice and snow: Emperors of the Zhou…

After being called out for deceptive advertising by a watchdog organization, and then the FTC, Walmart tries to fix the problem by creating a web of confusion. The watchdog’s legal counsel believes the company’s website still violates a variety of FTC rules. But no one seems to be doing much about it.

For another Craftsmanship story, “The Puppeteer,” I profiled an unusual puppet-maker and performer named Michael Montenegro. As it turns out, the puppet and toy theatre worlds share a lot of common ground—sometimes performing at the same festivals, and being active in the same organizations. Here, then, are some resources for both endeavors: The National Puppetry…

Welcome to Craftsmanship’s inaugural gift guide, where we list the best (or at least the most unusual) items that we could find during our first year exploring the artisan world. Our discoveries include fine kitchen knives, cooking pottery, guitars, harmonicas, alcoholic drinks, and, of course, some real children’s toys.

The late Lawrence “Butch” Morris demonstrates his improvisational approach to conducting jazz, which he saw as so much his own that he defined it with a registered trademark: Conduction®.

The late Butch Morris, a figure from the outer edges of jazz, reimagined conducting as a form of composition, coining his own word for the combination of the two.

You drink eight glasses of water a day. But you consume far more through the food you eat. A special report.