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Category / Lost & Found

Trying to Sell the World’s Largest Record Collection

Five years ago, a young director made a documentary about a man named Paul Mawhinney who owns the largest record collection in the world. The short piece told the story of Paul’s struggle to keep his archive alive. In 2008, he had to close his store, Record-Rama, where he sold music and kept the last copies…

The Buried African Folklore behind the Pop Culture Zombie

There is a law still in effect in the Haitian criminal code that dates back to 1883, making it illegal to try to turn someone into a zombie. The word “zombie” in fact, comes from “nzambi,” a word that means “spirit” in the voodou religions of Haiti and the African diaspora, but the Haitian zombie…

A New York City Misfit Museum, like No Other

Woody Allen pulls off one of Groucho Marx’s best lines in Annie Hall — you know, the one that goes, “I wouldn’t want belong to any sort of club that would have me as a member”. He’s kidding, of course, but the line perfectly reflects that charming New York brand of pessimism, and because it…

Parisian Woman and a Cat in her Cannabis Garden: A Short Story Challenge

It’s amazing to see how our minds can wander in different ways; how many variations of a story can come from a single picture. We recently proposed a challenge for our readers to become the storyteller, prompted by a historical found photograph with a brief caption as the only clue: “Parisian Woman with her Cat in…

Hedonist Hollywood’s Lost Garden of Allah

Before James Dean moved into the Chateau Marmont and made it a Hollywood landmark and go-to spot for stars to get up to no good, there was the far more notorious, but now long-forgotten Garden of Allah. The hotel’s ambrosial name certainly had no reflection on its reputation as the never-ending house party on Sunset…

Where are the Black Archeologists?

“Why are there so few Black American archeologists?” asked Maria Franklin in response to a landmark 1997 survey which found that only 2 out of 1500 Archeological respondents identified as Black. Years later, the status of her question posed in a paper published by the Cambridge University Press in 2015 – and its answer –…

Paradise Lost at the Moonhole Mansion: An Abandoned Crusoe Dream

At night, the rising moon peers through the natural volcanic arch, revealing the silhouettes of windows and doorways alluding to a crumbling fortress, guarding a paradise lost. It shares its walls with the rocks, built haphazardly into the Caribbean cliff on the western tail of the island of Bequia, but the rooms are empty, the whole structure eerily lifeless. Like the centrepiece of…

The Lost Art of Hotel Luggage Labels

Hotel Select, still open. If a hotel told me they would slap one of these beautiful design labels onto my luggage upon checking in, I’d probably book a room just for that reason. There’s nothing more emblematic of the golden age of travel than these scrumptious stickers that came in all shapes, sizes, colours and…

The Story behind “Keep Calm and Carry On”

It’s one of the most recognizable posters in the world, an internet meme reinvented thousands of times over and yet do any of us actually know the story behind it? This excellent little video schools us on the origins of the wartime poster and how it was actually lost in history until 2000 when it…

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…

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