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Category / Life is Messy

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 Most Radioactive Place in New York City

The street in front of Alberto Rodriguez’s auto repair shop in Queens is radioactive. There is also a deli and a construction business on the same block where the first contamination happened almost a hundred years ago. This is the story of New York’s most radioactive site that is now New York City’s third superfund…

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…

That Time a Wheat Field Grew in Downtown New York

The 1980s was a weird time to be in New York. Punk was flourishing, but so was crime. There was Basquiat and Keith Haring. The creative energy was non-stop, but tumultuous, and living conditions were gritty and hard for many. But in 1982, one artist’s knee-jerk reaction to that reality was breathtakingly simple: in the face of…

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…

Oh, just an Utterly Insane Ghost City of Fake French Chateaux

This is not Photoshop. I repeat, this is not Photohop. Ever heard of “duplitecture”? It’s the term that’s been coined to describe replica architecture which has been popping up all over China since the 1990s (and let’s not forget Las Vegas either), where iconic landmarks and entire towns are constructed using lower-quality building materials to clone centuries…

Pinterest Trend du Jour: Hair Braiding No Average Woman could Possibly Achieve

We’ve got fishtails, french crowns, greek style, cage buns, cross plaits and five strands– who knew there were so many impossibly intricate ways to braid hair. Are there braiding schools I missed out on? Pinterest ofcourse, is the place to find your hair braiding inspiration. [Follow Shelly McOwen] [Follow Emily Sanborn]…

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…

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

1. Train Travel in the 1800s The interior of a Rococo period Pullman train car. Found on the Newberry Library. 2. An opera house on the US–Canada border where the stage is in one country and half the audience is in another The Haskell Free Library & Opera House. 3. Tarantino’s original cast wish list for…

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