The Bittersweet Story of the World’s First Motel

It’s as American as Apple Pie in all its neon-lit glory, evoking our collective cultural memory of 1950s road-tripping, film noir fugitive hideouts and the golden age of kitsch. The motel is as much a part of the American open road as the gas station and the roadside diner, an indispensable amenity to the roving motorist; the…

How a Mechanical Chess-Playing Turk gave Birth to the AI Debate 250 Years Ago

As we traverse the world of modern digital technology from smart phones to artificial intelligence, the game of chess still captivates and challenges people the world over. Chess, it seems, has thrived due to the advancement in connectivity. But 200 years earlier, before this electronic wizardry, there was an automated, mechanical marvel that would transfix…

A Boat Trip through the Paris Sewer

Forget boat rides down the Seine, if you were a tourist in Paris in the 19th and early 20th century, the subterranean sewers were the hot ticket. In an 1869 travel guide to the city of light “for the English and American Traveller”, Paris’ new system of sewers came highly recommended in the sightseeing section. “Passing over the…

The Louvre’s Secret Apartments

The Louvre; or, as we’ve prefer to call it, Paris’ most exhaustingly gorgeous tourist trap. In the MessyNessy guide, Don’t Be a Tourist in Paris, there’s even a chapter called, “Anything but the Louvre” that steers folks away from its selfie-stick jungles, and into the arms of more overlooked museums in the city. But this weekend, we decided to pay…

Haunting Postcards of Parisian Homicide

Note: Some of the images below contain disturbing content. Alphonse Bertillon was bad at a lot of things, but excellent at two: solving crime, and pissing people off. Both were honed during his long career at the Prefecture de Police in mid-19th century Paris, one of the grisliest eras for tracking down criminals in the rapidly growing metropolis.…

The World’s First Sex Therapist and his Temple of Hymen

Self-styled Scottish ‘doctor’ James Graham may not have been the original snake oil salesman but he wasn’t far from it. The ultimate eccentric showman who spotted innumerable untapped business opportunities in the sex industry, James Graham gleefully administered a cocktail of somewhat questionable, shall we say, ‘fertility treatments’ to his well-to-do aristocratic patients, who were…

We went on a Picnic in a Parisian Nazi Bunker

I‘ve been on some adventures in my lifetime, but none of them ended with a candlelit banquet in an abandoned Nazi bunker. And it is with great pleasure that I finally get to share this surreal experience with you. The idea began with the proposal of a picnic with a few friends, somewhere a little…

Building Mr. Eiffel’s Penthouse Apartment: A Tower Under Construction

A Parisian friend dropped some very interesting photographs in my inbox this week, some that I’d never seen before of the Eiffel Tower in its earliest days. I had previously come across time-lapse photographs of the Eiffel Tower in its various stages of construction, but none like this; none that went behind the scaffolding, right up close inside the growing skeleton…

Sex, Lies, and LSD: The CIA’s Untold Story of Operation Midnight Climax

Did you ever hear the one about the CIA-employed sex workers who were trained to drug, bed and interrogate unsuspecting American citizens while they were unwittingly tripping on LSD as government agents secretly watched? You’d think you’d remember a story like that but Operation Midnight Climax has conveniently evaded the public consciousness for decades. We’re…

The Vault

Biblical Bad Girls and Their Ancient “Time’s Up” Scandal

Welcome to Rouen, France, a city where the cider flows freely (it’s a Normandy thing), and the streets are lined with crooked, half-timbered houses that send a singular, ye-olde message: you’re on some seriously ancient stomping grounds. Rouen’s power and influence can be traced from its founding by a sturdy Celtic tribe, to its pivotal…

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