Poke around the Psychedelic Fortress of a Self-Made Saint

Venturing down an unassuming gravel road grown over with grass in rural Marion County, Georgia, you’re met by a huge pair of piercing blue eyes. Look around, and you’re met by many more sets of eyes staring out from intense faces emblazoned with vivid reds, greens and yellows, adorned in geometric patterns and spiritual symbols.…

Meet the President’s Daughter, a “Wild Animal That Had Been Put Into Good Clothes”

In a world rife with lifestyle influencers and “content houses,” where building one’s own notoriety is big business, it’s tempting to dismiss being famous for being famous as the most banal and basic kind of renown. But there was a time, with a burgeoning American press beginning to define itself and a brash and pithy…

A Brief Compendium of Preserved Pieces of Cake

Ever since humanity invented cake, we’ve been trying to have it and eat it, too. And while we haven’t yet figured out how to do both, we have been saving slices of this most celebratory of desserts for several millenia now. The Egyptians gave us the world’s oldest known cake–and also the world’s oldest Tupperware…

Atlanta’s Phantom of the Fox and His Secret Theatre Apartment

Theatres are inherently haunted places. By night, actors tread the boards, conjuring the spirits of those who lived and those who never were. We can hardly expect all those shades to simply evaporate into the ether after the final curtain. Instead they seep into dark and secluded backstage corners – an underground lake, perhaps –…

London’s Frosty, Forgotten Tradition of Partying on the Frozen Thames

Daily life could be grim in early modern London. Plague and other diseases seemed to lurk in the shadows. Education was out of reach for most. And the contents–or lack thereof–of your dinner table relied almost entirely on forces of nature beyond your control and which were running amok in a period of global cooling…

Lulu White and her Belle Epoque Mansion of Interracial Sex Work

In New Orleans, stories seem to seep out of the soggy ground. Something about the heady mix of influences– African, Caribbean, Native American and French – against a landscape of backwaters and bayous creates a culture of permissiveness where characters invent the most outlandish versions of themselves in ways that would be dismissed as implausible…

The Nautch Girls: India’s Forgotten Dancers

You arrive at the gardens after nightfall with the full moon casting a cool, pale glow over the muggy evening. Two dozen torch bearers stand by to light your way, and as you approach the crowd, you sense the anxious anticipation of the delights to come. Soon the musicians strike up their instruments, and a…

There was No Business like Show Business in Ye Olde English Royal Court

With the lights of Broadway and the West End lit once again, live theatre fans are dazzled anew by crashing chandeliers, green-skinned witches and rapping revolutionaries. But for all their glitter and grandeur, no modern musical can approach the absolute spectacle of the royal costume parties that played out on stage during the English Renaissance.…

The Misunderstood Nomadic Women who Danced Their Way to Liberation

Centuries before Betty Friedan and the sexual revolution challenged social mores in the West, the women of the Ouled Nail in Algeria enjoyed the freedom to earn their own fortunes, choose lovers and engage in sexual relationships outside of marriage in a society that placed no shame on these choices – and indeed valued these…

He’s the P.T. Barnum of the Deep South, leading a One-Man Art Movement

Butch Anthony’s cabinet of curiosities, aka the Museum of Wonder, isn’t easy to find. Beyond the help of Google Maps down these sparse backroads of rural Seale, Alabama, you have to rely on Anthony’s hand-drawn map. There’s no sign, just an ordinary black mailbox. Your one clue that you’ve found the place is the address…