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Category / How to start a subculture

Saving the Carmen House on the Seine

At approximately 1.45pm this afternoon in Paris, I received a text message from my friend who has a restaurant in the 11th arrondissement: “There’s a woman here who says she wants you to help save the Carmen House,” it read. I raised an eyebrow. My phone buzzed again. “She came in for lunch, figured out that I knew…

The Strangely Underrated Artistry of Japanese Playgrounds

I don’t know about you, but the playgrounds where I pottered around in my day, eating too much sand and earning my first set of stitches on the jungle gym, did not look like this. Surreal nocturnal scenes of colossal, if not slightly traumatising cement playground equipment in Japan, that looks better suited for a contemporary art sculpture…

The Girl with the Impossible Waist

If you look up “hourglass figure” in the dictionary, Betty Brosmer’s picture should probably be next to it (if you Google it, she’s right there next to Kim Kardashian). Meet the highest paid pin-up girl of the 1950s, considered by many as the first true supermodel, Betty appeared in thousands of magazine including LIFE, Time, Fortune,…

The Honey Hunters of the Himalayas

Monday mornings at the office won’t seem as treacherous once you see where the Gurung men of the himalayas head to work. Hunting for honey high in the himalayas foothills, men older than most people claiming retirement risk their lives to harvest the nests of indigenous honeybees. For this incredible photostory, I’ve come back to…

North Korean Interiors Looking Suspiciously like a Wes Anderson Film Set

I‘m quite sure this room reminds me of a new design restaurant I went to recently and thought was so cool, that I didn’t really care what the food tasted like or how much they were charging me for “locally-sourced rice”. Slowly but surely, we seem to be moving from the old world Parisian café replicas and small town general…

The Art of Squatting in Underground Paris Galleries

I first met one of the founders of Madame Lupin in the Paris catacombs on Halloween one year, sharing a bottle of red wine, squatting on some ancient limestone. He told me about the secret gourmet picnics he liked to organise in abandoned chateaux around the city. He then met a girl who worked in…

The Spear Hunting Egomaniac responsible for Alabama’s Most WTF Museum

Dedicating a museum to yourself is typically a bold move, but not so much for the self-proclaimed “Greatest Living Spear Hunter in the World.” America’s first and only Spear Hunting Museum, located in Summerdale, Alabama, houses a unique collection of taxidermy and weaponry from the exploits of retired US Air Force Colonel Gene Morris. Gene…

10 Vintage Trailers up For Sale just in time for a Summer Road Trip

See, you’re just like me– you see a picture of a vintage trailer and you click on it! And that pretty much sums up how I ended up on my latest internet treasure trove, Tin Can Tourists. A true appreciation society for vintage trailers, Tin Can Tourists was actually founded long before the internet came…

Police in Iceland are having Way more Fun than You on Instagram

I didn’t even know police forces having instagram accounts was a thing, but apparently it is. The NYPD even has time for one. But no one gets it quite like the official Instagram account of the Reykjavík metropolitan police. From silly selfless, posing with adorable kittens to re-enacting their own scenes from Baywatch and using all the right…

How a 1960’s Band of Outsiders Wanted Us to Experience Paris

What if there were walkways over the Paris rooftops, if the metro was open after midnight for pedestrians to navigate by foot, and if all museums were abolished and their masterpieces displayed in restaurants and bars? These were actual proposals put forward by the Situationist International, a playful group formed in 1950s which comprised mainly…

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