Judging from this footage shot at Coney Island in 1905, school girls haven’t changed all that much in the past hundred years. Even way back then they were still taking forever to get situated in the car, strolling the boardwalk in unwieldy, impossible to navigate groups, playing mean tricks on their unsuspecting chaperone, and happiest when splashing about in the ocean — albeit with full-length dresses on. But you know what has changed? The amusement park rides. They are terrifying. The medieval contraptions that these girls gleefully hop aboard make the Cyclone look like a kiddie coaster. We sincerely hope Miss Knapp’s Select School had their parents sign permission slips.

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For a while there it seemed like every new painter who caught our eye was deeply entrenched in the whole hyperrealism trend. What can we say? We’re a sucker for the bait and switch of a painting that looks exactly like a photo, but isn’t. UK-based artist Nathan Ford, whose work we spotted thanks to Booooooom, may have finally broken that spell. With him, it’s all about the paint. Thick oil drips down his canvases, giving the dark, urban landscapes a life of their own. There’s an ethereal quality to these nighttime street scenes, like they’ve only briefly surfaced, but could wash away at a moment’s notice — almost like you’re looking through a pane of glass that’s about to fog over. Hurry, click through before they disappear completely!

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When it comes to World War I-era verisimilitude, Downton Abbey sure looks authentic. But what about the dialogue? We’ve certainly caught the characters using phrases that sound awfully contemporary — and we’re not the only ones. Linguist and writer Ben Zimmer has also noticed some anachronistic usages on the show, from “I’m just sayin’” to the use of “contact” as a verb, and has made a short video compiling his observations. For those who are curious to hear more about language on Downton, Zimmer will be discussing it in both the Boston Globe and in his Visual Thesaurus column, “Word Routes.”

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Frank Lloyd Wright is generally considered to have been an arrogant, irascible curmudgeon, whose voracious egotism was and remains legendary. But he could be a gingerly grandfather as well. Case in point, the Jim Berger doghouse. As Architects & Artisans reports, Wright designed the canis domus in 1956, after the 12-year old project’s namesake wrote the famous architect asking if he would fashion a house for the Berger family’s then 4-year old black Lab, Eddie. The boy, who specified in his letter that he would cover the expenses of the plans and materials with wages he earned from his bike route, wrote to Wright in June of 1956, saying that he “would appreciate it if you [Wright] would design me a dog house, which would be easy to build, but would go with our house.”

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He’s already conquered basically all other forms of social media, from Tumblr to Instagram, so it was only a matter of time before we’d find Barack Obama on Spotify. Vulture has posted the president’s complete playlist, and since it was most likely compiled (or at least approved) by a committee of PR specialists, we can probably infer from it a whole lot about the image he’s hoping to project. So, after the jump, we’ve grouped what Obama’s listening to based on who he’s trying to reach, from progressives to Middle America to his own wife.

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In today’s media-saturated market, who has time to invest in watching and reading everything out there? Not us — and we assume that we devote more time to pop-culture consumption than most. But you don’t have to feel left out of your friends’ conversations about Harry Potter, Doctor Who, or even The Bold and the Beautiful. Luckily, there’s a way to catch up the  television shows, movies, and other classics that everybody’s talking about — and it’s much more fun than reading the summaries on Wikipedia. We’ve put together some of our favorite video condensations of famous franchises to keep you up to date.

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Photographer Viktoria Sorochinski began this project in 2005, when the young 23-year-old mother and the 3-year-old daughter’s bond was most dramatic. “It was often hard to tell who held the power and control between the two, and who was learning the essence of being a human in this world,” she writes. So, she brought out the co-dependent and child-like nature of both through folk tale-influenced, phantasmagoric scenes. As time passed, both grew and the young child drifted off into an imaginary world of her own. The dynamics of this changing relationship come to life in a beautiful series Anna & Eve, currently on view through February 25 at the Courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. See the series in our slideshow — part documentary, part enchanted family album.

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Rampart, Owen Moverman’s tough urban drama featuring Woody Harrelson as a somewhat less than principled LA police officer, goes into limited release tomorrow (following a brief Oscar-qualification run in December), and while the movie itself is pretty good, we must take some exception to its bold poster and trailer tag line: “The most corrupt cop you’ve ever seen on screen.” Well, that is a might tall claim. After the jump, we’ll run down ten previous movie cops who could give Harrelson’s Dave Brown a run for his money.

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Jay-Z and Kanye West only play “Niggas in Paris” like 158 times at every performance, so there’s been some speculation as to why they’ve taken so long to make a music video for it. Now, it seems like they may have delayed the concert footage-heavy clip simply to build our curiosity about what it’s like to see them do the song live. So, was it worth the wait? Well, that depends on how you feel about strobe lights, Gothic architecture, Will Ferrell interludes, big cats, and feeling like you’re trapped inside a kaleidoscope with the rappers and their hot-girl entourage. Watch and decide after the jump, but first a word to the wise: That epilepsy warning at the beginning of the video is no joke.

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Now that The Artist has made its star, Jean Dujardin, a household name in the United States, where can we expect to see him next? Perhaps, like such other European crossover stars as Christoph Waltz and Javier Bardem, he’ll play a villain in a big, American action movie. In a hilarious and — because it does star Dujardin, after all — charming new video, Funny or Die imagines what that audition process might look like. See 2012′s biggest silent-film idol point a gun at James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, and even the Bridesmaids ladies, after the jump. And then, just try to stop yourself from daydreaming about where we’ll really see him next.

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