The Reformed Nazi Cult trying to Open its Colony to Tourism

I was sent down a deep and dark rabbit hole today when I came across a new movie trailer for Colonia. The film is based on true events which took place in 1970s Chile at the Colonia Dignidad, a dangerous cult that was revealed to have Nazi ties and to have used torture among other atrocities within its inescapable walls.…

The Day the Black Cats Invaded Hollywood

I’m not really a fan of cats per say (because they’re totally evil creatures unlike dogs) but I think these photos taken at a black cat audition in Hollywood in 1963 are just brilliant. They also raise many questions concerning the sanity of cat-owners in the sixties.

Hong Kong’s Forgotten City of Darkness

It was the most densely populated place on Earth for most of the 20th century, where a room cost the equivalent of US$6 per month in high rise buildings that belonged to no country. In this urban enclave, “a historical accident”, law had no place. Drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes lived and worked alongside kindergartens,…

The Venetian Island of No Return

If you’ve ever been to Venice, you’ll remember that it’s a chock-a-block city. Not just with with tourists but with houses, shops, palazzos and basilicas that seem to pile on top of each other, squeezed into every nook and cranny. In Venice and most of it’s surrounding islands of the lagoon, there is no more…

A Secret World Hidden Beneath the Vineyards of Champagne

The Champagne region of France is one of its most famous; home to such grand wine houses, as Taittinger, Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin, Krug, Pommery and Ruinart, as well as dozens of smaller vineyards that make the sparkling wine known the world over. But underneath the lush, rolling landscape lies a secret world : miles of complex tunnels,…

The Stylehunters of Soviet Russia

In communist Russia of the 1950s, members of a provocative subculture put their own original twist on street style. Labeled “Stilyaga” or “Stilyagi” (plural) by disapproving outsiders – a name that literally translates to stylehunter – a group of dandy youngsters dressed up in colorful American-inspired get ups to meet on Leningrad and Moscow’s main…

The Hippie Caves of Matala that housed Joni Mitchell

In a sleepy fishing village on the island of Crete, where Joni Mitchell had found herself a nomadic home inside manmade Neolithic caves carved into the sandstone cliff, she sang her folk songs, “under a starry dome…beneath the Matala Moon.” It was the 1960s and a community of backpacking hippies had settled in Matala, a remote corner of…

But Have you Drank Wine from a Volcanic Vineyard?

I’ll see your Vintage Bordeaux and raise you a glass from a volcanic vineyard. If aliens are out there somewhere and they happen to enjoy the occasional bottle of wine, this could be what their vineyards would look like. But alas, this is just plain ol’ planet earth being totally and completely awesome again. We’re…

The Mysterious Chapel of Prosthetic Limbs

New Orleans is a city blessed with many beguiling and beautiful cemeteries. From the celebrated, above ground crumbling mausoleums of St. Louis No.1, the faded gothic grandeur of the walled-in Lafayette, to the curious secret society graveyards of the Metarie. But by far the most enchanting, and by equal measures, peculiar, is the St. Roch… The…

The Vault

The Mysterious Murder of the Beautiful Cigar Girl

High on a hilltop in Brooklyn’s historic Greenwood cemetery, is an imposing mausoleum. Written large on the granite stone lintel is the name John Anderson. He was once the owner of an upscale tobacconist’s in Lower Manhattanm but one hundred and seventy six years ago, he was also at the centre of one of the…

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