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Category / Obscure history

The Forgotten Treehouse Bars of Bygone Summers in Paris

There was once a place that drew crowds of Parisians away from their grand boulevards and sidewalk cafés to rediscover their inner child, wine & dine in chestnut tree houses and celebrate summer like Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps you’ve heard of a “guingette”, a sort of French equivalent to a summer hoedown, traditionally located next to the river and particularly…

The Curious Career of Living as a Real-Life Garden Gnome

If you were out of a job in 19th century England and seeking new employment, there was a chance you might find a peculiar advertisement in the newspaper that read something like: “WANTED! Ornamental garden hermit“. The profession would essentially require you to become a human ornamental folly on the grounds of a wealthy family…

So in Albania, the Number of Abandoned Bunkers is Kind of a Problem

Once upon a time, during the Cold War, Albania’s paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha forced his country to build 700,000 bunkers, one for every four citizens. Today, the country is still trying to figure out what to do with his concrete mushrooms that have become synonymous with the landscape. A number of them have been creatively…

When Native Americans Took Back Alcatraz

Fifty years ago, their revolution emerged like a Phoenix from the ashes. It was 1969, and a fire had just destroyed the San Francisco American Indian Center, which had proved an indispensable resource for over 30,000 members of the urban indigenous population. With no other options, local activists had to get radical. They found their…

Time Travel to the Real-Life Peaky Blinders Village

Peaky Blinders fans, hold onto your flat caps. In the heart of “Black Country”, an area of the West Midlands that became Britain’s own furnace, powering the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, an entire 26 acre village exists for you and I to experience a day in the life of Tommy Shelby… The Black…

Greetings, from the Desert of Ghost Ships

Only 30 years ago, this was home to our planet’s 4th largest inland water mass; an ancient sea so vast, even Alexander the Great wrote of his struggles to cross it; where fishing commerce boomed and holidaymakers once flocked to its seaside spa town. Now, for the first time in 600 years, the Aral Sea…

So Anaïs Nin Was Also an Electro “DJ”

Anaïs Nin is our favorite breed of artist: the kind who just can’t be bound to a single era, movement, or category. Diarist? Definitely. Muse? To many, most notably American novelist Henry Miller. Yet her oeuvre spans a good portion of the 20th century, and includes everything from those notorious diaries (about bohemian Paris in…

America’s Last Snake-handling Cults

I wandered into the weird part of the internet again this morning, through the doors of a snake-handling church in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, to be specific. I stumbled upon a peculiar documentary from 1977, an in-depth portrait of a snake cult that exists still to this day, in a tiny unincorporated community…
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Sneaking into the Forbidden City with our Travel Heroine du Jour

“Why isn’t her face on a bank note yet?” is one of several slack-jawed questions you’ll ask yourself when reading about Alexandra David-Neel, the Franco-Belge éxploratrice whose life reads like an Oscar-winning film. She was an opera singer, and an anarchist; a student of philosophy, feminism and (rumoured) seductress of monks. And when she wasn’t meeting in…

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Trolling Nazis (and the world) with Forged Art

The accepted number of authenticated Vermeer paintings today is 34, but that number became mysteriously higher during World War II. Hermann Göring himself, a leader of the Nazi party and notorious art looter, traded 137 of his prized stolen paintings for a newly-discovered Vermeer, one of several 17th century works that had suddenly emerged in…

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Hidden beneath the surface layers of the internet, there’s a place where we keep our most secret addresses, untapped archives, creator’s inspiration,  collector’s guides, explorer’s manuals, obscure research and much more… And it’s made for our keyholders only!

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