Like any other genre of film, television or literature, Folk Horror has its own collection of traits, tropes and tendencies.

I need your suggestion, you wise and brilliant minds! I'm preparing a talk about all things underground (nuclear, drilling, mining, data archive in salt mines, etc) for #res17 anyone knows of artworks dealing with the topic?

In the darkest depths of terra firma, springtails, a humble class of creepy-crawlies, quietly go about their business. Researchers documenting life in the world’s deepest cave, Krubera-Voronya on the eastern side of the Black Sea, discovered four new species of springtail, including the eyeless Anurida stereoodorata (inset), which subsist on fungi and decaying organic material. The intrepid scientists monitored sections of the cave for a month, looking for life using pitfall traps baited with cheese. Two of the species, Plutomurus ortobalaganensis (pictured above), found 1980 meters down, and Schaefferia profundissima found 1600 meters down, now hold the record for deepest living underground invertebrates, researchers report today in Terrestrial Arthropod Reviews. Their new finds bury the previous record-holder for deepest-dwelling springtail, Ongulonychiurus colpus, a Spanish cave creature found 550 meters down. And since these new species were one of the most common decomposers in Krubera-Voronya cave, they probably have no need to snatch creatures from the surface for food—as H.G. Wells’s subterranean Morlocks did in The Time Machine.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the citizens of, say, Tunisia or Egypt, to name two countries whose populations recently tapped the power of social media to help upend the existing political order, few North Koreans have access to Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. In fact, except for a tiny elite, the DPRK’s 25 million inhabitants are not connected to the Internet. Televisions are set to receive only government stations. International radio signals are routinely jammed, and electricity is unreliable. Freestanding radios are illegal. But every North Korean household and business is outfitted with a government-controlled radio hardwired to a central station. The speaker comes with a volume control, but no off switch. In a new media age awash in universally shared information—an age of planet-wide instant messaging and texted manifestos

The London Underground. Every Londoner has used it, but has everyone really seen it? The old map is looking a bit dusty. Perhaps its time for Geographic precision or maybe 3D projection. If we add bicycles to the map, is it still an underground?

Chris Bohn is the editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and the generally non-mainstream since 1982, featuring a span of artists from Ornette Coleman to Björk to David Sylvian to Jim O’Rourke to field recordists like Lee Patterson to emerging Chinese sounds artists like Yun Jun. The magazine is also well known as a rarity in its industry for both its profitability and its loyal, growing readership. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Wire1 I was reading a slightly older profile of the magazine in the Telegraph. It had a quote from you saying that The Wire is best thought of as a magazine that does not cover certain types of music rather than a magazine that does cover certain types.