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Category / Editor’s Picks

Let’s Raise a Glass to America’s Black Wall Street

Something else they forgot to tell us about in history class: Black Wall Street. Why is it that our textbooks neglected to tell us about the African Americans who opened their own banks, did business with the Rockefellers and prospered as entrepreneurs decades before the Civil Rights Movement? Yes indeed, long before desegregation, America had…

Swimming with Ghosts at the Spectacular Sutro Baths

Water parks used to be a lot different before the days of chlorine pools, lifeguards, and road trips. Take, for example, San Francisco’s Sutro Baths… The Sutro Baths were built in Lands End in 1894 by wealthy San Franciscan Adolph Sutro, a German immigrant who had made a fortune by figuring out how to drain and…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DLXI)

1. Once upon a time, you could ride a train right through the orange groves in Southern California The Super Chief was one of the named passenger trains and the flagship of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The streamliner claimed to be “The Train of the Stars” because of the various celebrities it carried between Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California. Florida had one too:…

What’s Up with all the Lady Parts in Medieval Prayer Books?

Let’s say you’re flipping through a medieval Christian prayer book (as you do), and suddenly you come across a curious illustration amongst the prayers and psalms of something that looks unmistakably like female genitalia. A scolding voice in your head tells you to get your mind out of the gutter. But you wouldn’t be alone.…

Dog Lover Restores Historic Mansion while her Labradors Live the Downton Abbey Dream

Is it normal to be envious of a dog’s life? Meet the youngest Lady of this soon-to-be-restored 17th century Georgian mansion near Bath in the English countryside. Her name is Dizzy and she’s a very lucky lady, because as you’re about to see, she is currently living the real-life “Downton Abbey” dream. Along with her older…

When Big Brands were Getting High in the Seventies

In the late 1960s and 70s, America’s big corporations could see the psychedelic writing on the wall and they knew they had to do something. A wave of psychedelia was taking over pop culture and the LSD-infused hippie aesthetic was huge. The influence of drug culture on some of the most iconic brands saw everyone…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DLIX)

1. Cano’s Castle “After first building an underground potato cellar on the site, the castle began in 1980 when Cano built a steam room above the cellar, and took improvised shape as found materials presented themselves over about twenty years.” Born in 1948, ‘Dominic “Cano” Espinoza’s enlisted in the US army in 1968 and, upon…

Behind the Façade of Potemkin Villages

Who wouldn’t want a library or a museum named in their honour? A namesake to remember us by long after we’re gone. But we can’t all be so lucky with our legacies. Case in point: 18th century Russian military leader and lover of Empress Catherine the Great, Gregory Potemkin, whose name would come to define…

Meet the Godfather of Voguing

Willi Ninja did far more than “strike a pose”. Before Madonna was Voguing for the masses on MTV in 1990, the niche dance form was being created by black and latino drag queens during the ballroom era of 1960’s Harlem, New York. It was Willi Ninja, an ambitious young dancer, who pioneered Voguing, and used it to…

Berlin’s Curious 1920s Polar Bear Craze

Once upon a meme, Germany had its own precursor to the internet’s LOLcat – in the form of a life-sized fake polar bear. As the story goes, some time in the early 1920s, two (actual) polar bears arrived at the Berlin Zoo and became the talk of the town. Families came from all over the…

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