1938 New Yorker cover by Constantin Alajalov, from the fantastic The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs.

We already knew that iconic architect Frank Lloyd Wright was also a little-known but brilliant graphic artist, but did you know he was also a brilliant doghouse designer? Here’s his charming correspondence with a 12-year-old boy for whom he designed the doghouse above.

Josh Brill’s brilliant minimalist geometric portraits of dog breeds, best thing since Noma Bar’s minimalist portraits of cultural icons.

(↬ this isn’t happiness)

Dog topography, from the 1973 children’s book Something Queer is Going On (A Mystery)

(↬ Vintage Kids’ Books My Kid Likes)

Small animals shake the fastest in order to generate the force required to overcome the surface tension that holds water to fur, whereas large animals — whose size makes it easier to generate sufficient force — move slower to reach a comparable degree of dryness.

The science of the wet-dog shake – depending on how much skin it has to shake around, each animal balances its mass and size to optimize the drying process with minimal energy spent.

(ᔥ It’s Okay To Be Smart)

Old but gold – 5,000 years of dogs in art. Also see this illustrated history of dogs in books.

“The condition for the existence of what we think of as a language is its translatability. So the boundary between our species and others is indeed an unbridgeable gulf until we learn to translate them.”

David Bellos explains why the language of dogs is more sophisticated than you think. Also see how dogs became dogs.

(↬ The Dish)

Mister, Billie Holiday’s dog, found in William Gottlieb’s iconic photos of jazz greats, 1938-1948.