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Category / Nostalgia

The Rare Jewels Salvaged from America’s Old Auto Factories

What’s more finite and limited than diamonds? Surely not something found on the skids of an old car factory? Well get this: in the 1940s, the American automobile industry started painting cars with a hand-spraying technique that would accumulate overspray, which would build up and be baked repeatedly in ovens to cure the paint on…

When Big Brands were Getting High in the Seventies

In the late 1960s and 70s, America’s big corporations could see the psychedelic writing on the wall and they knew they had to do something. A wave of psychedelia was taking over pop culture and the LSD-infused hippie aesthetic was huge. The influence of drug culture on some of the most iconic brands saw everyone…

Behind the Façade of Potemkin Villages

Who wouldn’t want a library or a museum named in their honour? A namesake to remember us by long after we’re gone. But we can’t all be so lucky with our legacies. Case in point: 18th century Russian military leader and lover of Empress Catherine the Great, Gregory Potemkin, whose name would come to define…

Berlin’s Curious 1920s Polar Bear Craze

Once upon a meme, Germany had its own precursor to the internet’s LOLcat – in the form of a life-sized fake polar bear. As the story goes, some time in the early 1920s, two (actual) polar bears arrived at the Berlin Zoo and became the talk of the town. Families came from all over the…

Did Jesus Escape to Japan?

Greetings from Shingo, a rural village, 650km north of Tokyo that is believed by its inhabitants to be the last resting place of Jesus Christ. Make the pilgrimage to its quiet hills, and you’ll find yourself in a veritable slice of the Twilight Zone where the Christian prophet led a double life as a garlic…

This Abandoned School became his Personal Mansion (but you’re invited)

Okay, this probably sounds creepier than it really is. In Japan’s Iya Valley, considered one of the country’s most beautiful but unexplored regions, a remote elementary school was abandoned for nearly a decade, before Yohei Aoki came along and made it his home. Since 2017, the former office worker has also been welcoming off-beat travellers…

Get Schooled by the World’s First Sexology Institute of 1920s Berlin

They called him “the Einstein of Sex”. The German doctor who went (quite literally) where no other had gone before in his research, founding the massive Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or Sexology, just before the Nazis eclipsed bohemian Berlin and its costumed, sexually liberated splendour. His name was Magnus Hirschfeld (see the dude with the glasses…

The Poisoned Paradise Island

We all know that America conducted nuclear bomb testing during the Cold War, somewhere out there, far away from us. Whatever damage was done has probably been healed by now, right? The above picture of a beautiful paradise island, listed as one of the top diving sites in the world, may seem idyllic but it’s…

Found Snapshots of a Secret 1960s Drag Resort in the Catskills

If you were to journey to Jewett, NY today, you would find yet another semi-abandoned white hamlet, deep in the hillside, ramshackle and in need of a facelift. Nothing out of the ordinary to the naked eye, but delve further into this particular dwelling’s history and you’ll discover that it was here, almost 60 years…

Here’s What a Futurist World’s Fair Looked like Behind the Iron Curtain

The World’s Fairs used to capture the public’s imagination. From the millions who attended such iconic Fairs as the ones held in New York in 1939 and 1964, to the nostalgia they’re viewed with today, the World’s Fairs were places where people could catch glimpses of a futuristic better world; seeing such technological marvels as…

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