A visual survey of abandoned greenhouses explores why structures built to nurture plants have been left behind and what happens when cultivation stops. Photographs from urban explorers and other contributors show glasshouses across Europe and the United States, where vines, trees, and other plants have taken over beds and frameworks. The central appeal is the reversal of a greenhouse’s usual purpose: after neglect, it can become more exuberant with growth, while rust, broken glass, snow, and encroaching foliage transform it into a quiet, almost post-apocalyptic landscape.
The examples range from a greenhouse at England’s Alton Towers, whose grounds became a theme park in 1980, to the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers, founded in 1924 to study plants and improve the food supply. The institute moved to Cornell in 1978 after air pollution and property taxes made its original site untenable; its buildings remain in limbo. Other images include overgrown commercial greenhouses in Ohio, giant agaves in the Netherlands, and a Victorian glasshouse at Villa Maria in northern Italy, photographed in 1985 and since restored. The collection also notes the personal history attached to these places, including a former worker’s gratitude for the mentor who ran Otto’s Greenhouse. It closes by contrasting ruin with Kew Gardens, whose Victorian-era glasshouses and extensive plant collection remain carefully maintained.
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Wearable devices from Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and others increasingly record and summarize people’s surroundings, conversations, and daily activities. The EFF argues these products make privacy a shared concern, because one person’s recording choices can affect everyone nearby. (eff.org)
A rogue Wikipedia editor, Jagged_85, made more than 87,000 edits that falsely credited Islamic Golden Age figures with inventions and discoveries. Those claims spread across the internet and even entered scholarly writing through repeated citation. (cremieux.xyz)
GNU Emacs maintainer Eli Zaretskii said the project would accept technically sound code even if it was knowingly produced through slavery. The author argues that this stance ignores how code is made and confuses software freedom with ethical responsibility. (flyingpenguin.com)
A daughter joins her father, grandmother, and uncle on a chaotic autumn road trip along China’s Yalu River border with North Korea. The journey brings family tensions and memories into focus against the region’s striking landscape. (longreads.com)
An interactive site compares all 13 versions of The Secret of Monkey Island side by side across 12 matching scenes. It uses emulator captures with consistent scaling and includes CRT effects and version details. (monkeyisland.pages.dev)
The US government will end efforts to restrict apps and Facebook groups that report Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The groups and apps share information about ICE activity with their users. (reuters.com)
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