The Beauty Who Created the Beast

Of the six original Universal Monsters, none is so ubiquitous and iconic as the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The film, released in 1954, still screens regularly at theatres dedicated to classic cinema. What few knew until recently however, is that the credit for the Creature’s iconic design was cruelly stolen from one of the…

The Fateful Lovers’ Suicide that put the World at War

On the morning of January 30, 1889, three friends of Rudolf, the Crown Prince of Austria, broke down On the morning of January 30, 1889, three friends of Rudolf, the Crown Prince of Austria, broke down the bedroom door at his hunting lodge to find him dead, sitting by the naked corpse of his teenage…

A Brief Compendium of Advertising Fans

Folding fans have been long associated with feminine hands and wiles, whether they were used to pass clandestine messages to a lover, be rhythmically twisted by a flamenco dancer, or simply held close to keep a church lady’s neck cool. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to monetise the…

An Ode to the Card Catalog

Before books were easily printed and accessible to nearly everyone, before they even took the form of books specifically, there was a different story. Information was scarce in its written form, and so scribes and scholars developed a meticulous system for organizing libraries of tablets. That’s right: the oldest known form of organizing books predates…

The Country Bumpkins who gave us Parisian Café Culture

When we think of Parisian café culture, we might think of the “intello-chic” literary crowd that congregated at the Café de Flore with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre in the 1950s, or the glamorous flappers that held court on Boulevard Montparnasse during the Années Folles, mesmerising artists like Man Ray and Picasso. It’s…

And Now, a Brief History of Poisoning

Never was there a weapon of more romance than poison. From the tragic double-suicide of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, back to the death of Socrates and even the more recent murky business surrounding the death of several Russian defectors under Putin’s reign, poison has fascinated everyone who has ever encountered it. For those mystified by…

The Overlooked Art (and Drama) of Courtroom Sketching

As 2021 came to a close, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on charges of sex-trafficking in connection with her former partner and accomplice, Jeffrey Epstein. However, it wasn’t her misconduct or the salacious details of her lifestyle that went viral, but rather a courtroom sketch … of Maxwell sketching the sketch artist back. The…

The Question Is, Which Actress Should Play Lady Caroline Blackwood In A Hollywood Biopic?

She was legendary, and she was a legendary drunk, though she claimed her family’s stout was undrinkable. Perhaps you know her as the heiress to the Guinness fortune, or for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, who painted her famous 1952 portrait, “Girl in Bed.” Her third husband, poet Robert Lowell, described her as…

A Brief Compendium of Historical Karens

2020 was called “the year of Karen”. The meme undoubtedly reached its height during the pandemic, but the concept itself is arguably nothing new. In the antebellum era, there was “Miss Ann”, widely used amongst the African-American community to refer to European-American women (or sometimes Black women) who were arrogant, “uppity” and condescending in their attitude,…

Once Upon a Time in a Real “Westworld” Hoax Town

The American West has had a reputation of being wild since the continent was first colonized, but the inhabitants of one Nevada town, Palisade, made sure they really embodied the sentiment. During the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, Palisade (named for the valley that obstructed the railroad’s construction) was the site of an elaborate hoax during the…