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Category / How to start a subculture

Dig Through the World’s Largest Sketchbook Library

There’s an art library in Brooklyn where anyone and everyone can be a contributor to the collection. It has existed for almost 10 years and yet it’s fittingly one of those wonderfully and unusual things that few New Yorkers know about. The Sketchbook Project has over 35,963 sketchbooks in its library submitted by more than 162,081 creative…

NYC’s Little-Known “Harvard for the Poor”

The American Ivy League is a powerful label, a prestigious academic ‘club’ that counts household names such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton among its members. The elite label has also been known to leave the “other” universities in the shadows and one such academic underdog sits just 20 blocks from the famous Ivy-League University of Columbia in New…

The Rooftop Pigeon Men: A New York Subculture

When I was about twelve or thirteen, I remember watching an episode of my favourite Nickelodeon cartoon, Hey Arnold, entitled “Pigeon Man”, about a mysterious hermit who lived on a New York rooftop with pigeons. Very few people had seen him and only rumours circulated amongst the neighbourhood kids about the ‘Legend of the Pigeon…

The New York Pizza Project (it’s not just about the Pizza)

Can you believe that I’ve never tried real New York pizza? I know. It’s on my “To Do Urgently” list. And yet despite my unenlightened tastebuds, even I can see that New York pizza is not just about the pizza itself, but about the people and the places that are the beating heart and soul behind New York City’s favourite…

The Grumpy Comic Book King of Queens, New York

“The kids can’t read anymore, they’re a bunch of morons, so what are you gonna do?” And that pretty much sums up the legend that is Joe Leisner, the no-bullsh*t owner of Comic Book Heaven, formerly located in Sunnyside, Queens NY. Let’s meet him…

The Most Exclusive US College that You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

What if I told you there was an elite college as exclusive as Harvard and as remote as the North Pole? That it consistently tops Harvard’s yield rate and evades suspicions of being a cult, that it requires its students to engage in 20 hours of manual labor per week and doesn’t let them leave…

The Beatle that Got Fired

If you’re not a mega Beatles fan, or particularly well-versed in early Beatles history, that handsome chap on the drums there in a line up of teenage Greasers, might not look so familiar. That’s Pete Best, the original drummer for the iconic band, who was sacked under the direction of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison in 1962…

The Vending Machine Supermarket, 1948

Welcome to the the first fully automated grocery store in the United States; a most futuristic shopping experience that the world just wasn’t ready for… We’re in Memphis Tennessee, 1948, at the Keedoozle store, a vending machine concept developed by the man behind Piggly Wiggly, Clarence Saunders, who had patented the concept of the “Self-Serving Store” in 1917.…

A Brief Compendium of the Weirdest Stuff Sold Online (Like Your Soul).

The Internet, that “alien life form” as David Bowie decreed in a prophetic 1999 interview, has changed a lot in the past decade. The dial-up shriek is no more, AIM Bots are probably withering away in a black hole next to MySpace, and the glory days of weird eBay auctions are behind us. Or so…

So What’s the Deal with Those Quakertown Pyramids?

We just love it when two utterly opposite worlds collide, which is precisely the case with the mysterious pyramids sitting smack in the middle of Quakertown, USA. That’s right, States-bound folks: you can now eschew a visit to Cairo and just head to rural Pennsylvania to get a taste of an esoteric society, the “Rosicrucian Order”,…

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