20 Questions with the Real Woman Who Voiced Siri

Today, we meet Messy Nessy’s most unusual muse du jour: Susan Bennett, AKA the real Siri. In the early 2000s she did a hefty chunk of voice work for an intermediate company – unbeknownst that, years later, it would be used to create the personality of the iPhone assistant technology that dotes on roughly 500…

Don’t Mess With the Jiu-jitsu Suffragettes

It’s Edwardian Era Glasgow, circa 1914, and the stress mounting in St. Andrews’s Hall is unbearable. Flocks of Suffragettes and policemen are waiting for the woman of the hour, Emmeline Pankhurst, to magically surface and fight against her own arrest — the tension is so palpable, you could cut it with a knife. Or karate-chop…

The Women Warriors who served Wine on the Battlefield

Forgotten feminist icons of the French military, the Vivandières, alternatively known as cantinières, was the French title for women attached to military units who sold wine to the troops and offered better cuisine on the battlefield than the army could offer. An often overlooked part of women’s and military history, while they were not sanctioned to do any…

The First Man to Reach the North Pole was an African American Desk Clerk the World Forgot

“I think I’m the first man to sit on top of the world,” is not something many people can boast, especially if they lead perfectly normal lives, say, working a desk job in the city in relative anonymity. But for many years, that was the truth of Matthew Henson. In 1908, the unsung African American…

The Vault

The Real Life ‘Indiana Jones’ Was Just as Cool as You Think.

He said he “was born under a lucky star”. Yet, Roy Chapman Andrews, that good ‘ole American chaser of bandits, dinosaur eggs and lost civilisations, was always the kind of man who made his own luck. He charmed a generation of daydreamers with his stories of the Gobi desert — and that hat —and while there’s…

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The Little Provencale Hotel with More Important Art than Most Museums

Paris has the Café Flore, Venice has Harry’s Bar, New York had the Stork Club. There are some places that just had that “je ne sais quoi“, a power to lure in the world’s most fascinating people where legendary conversations, untold flirtations and scandalous altercations took place at candlelit tables in the corner by the bar. Nestled in the…

How did the King of 20th Century Fashion Disappear into Oblivion?

They compared his legacy to Picasso’s and called him the “King of Fashion” in America and Le Magnifique in Paris. He liberated women from corsets, dominated Belle Epoque fashion with his lavish draped designs and was the first French couturier to commercialise his own perfumes, now an industry standard marketing concept. Paul Poiret should be a…

Advanced Love: The Secrets of a Lasting (and Stylish) Relationship

Welcome to the world of Advanced Love, courtesy of photographer, author, and fellow bleeding heart, Ari Seth Cohen. Following the success of his Advanced Style universe, celebrating the sartorial flair of the senior set (in book and film format), comes yet another round of mature fashion mavericks living life to the fullest – only, this…

The Girls We Should Thank for Kickstarting Hollywood

Did you know know that half of all the films copyrighted in between 1911 and 1925 were written by women? A hundred years ago women were involved in nearly every aspect of production and held key positions in the industry. Alice Guy-Blaché, a Parisian secretary, was the first person believed to have directed a narrative film.…

The Secret History of Lipstick

Its recipe has taken thousands of years to perfect, and if we follow the forgotten trail, its secret history can lead us from the ancient tombs of antiquity to underground societies that paved the way for freedom of expression. Contrary to popular assumption, lipstick was in fact genderless for most of its existence, and as…