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Category / Nostalgia

What if the First African American Woman to Run for President Had Won?

Shall we for a moment, imagine an alternate reality where Shirley Chisholm became President of the United States in 1972 instead of Nixon? As the first African American woman in Congress, as well as first woman and African American to run for President, Shirley campaigned under the powerful mantra, “Unbought & Unbossed“. And let’s just…

What made these Forgotten Ancients build Glorious Cities only to Burn Them Every 60 Years?

Forget Atlantis, we want to know more about the mysterious, ancient Cucuteni-Trypillians, who were not erudite space lizards, despite their name, but Neolithic humans whose settlements were so advanced, and so vast, that they pioneered the concept of the city as we know it in Eastern Europe. The trouble is, unlike the cool kids over…

There’s a Miniature Earth in the Desert of Arizona with a Very Strange Story

It may sound (and look) like something from a sci fi movie, but it’s a real place. In the middle of the desert, beneath a glass dome, are wetlands, savannah grasslands, a rainforest, fog desert and an ocean with a coral reef. Constructed between 1987 and 1991 in Oracle Arizona, Biosphere 2 remains the largest…

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…

Play the New Sheriff of this Ghost Town for Sale

Cerro Gordo was “the Silver Thread to Los Angeles,” the once violent pioneer town whose grounds saw the rush of miners and cowboys mark it on the map in blood. The literal translation of its Spanish name, “Fat Hill,” helps express that unshakeable bond to good ‘ole Western greed in Nevada — even if these days, Cerro Gordo is spread rather…

Inside the Real-Life “Hunger Games” City: A Decaying Parisian Utopia

We’re quite spoilt here in Paris, surrounded by elegant cream-colored stone Haussmanians, gifted with pockets of bucolic cobblestone streets and charmed by old-world cafés and façades. But stray to the suburbs of Eastern Paris and you’ll find what looks like an alternate universe in comparison, a failed post-war “city of Babel” with Pharaonic structures of decaying…

The Radium Girls and the Generation that brushed its Teeth with Radioactive Toothpaste

The Radium Girls were so contaminated that if you stood over their graves today with a Geiger counter, the radiation levels would still cause the needles to jump more than 80 years later. They were small-town girls from New Jersey who had been hired by a local factory to paint the clock faces of luminous watches, the latest new…

Even With a Name Like Aloha Wanderwell, You’ve Probably Never Heard of Her

You could say she was the female Indiana Jones, except of course, Indie was a fictional character, and Aloha Wanderwell was very much the real deal. After landing a seaplane on an unexplored stretch of the Amazonian River, she captured the first-known visual recordings of Stone Age peoples while living amongst the Bororo tribe, and when…

Treat Yourself to a Moment with this Artist

There are moments in my endless hours of browsing the web, digging for my next rabbit hole, when I stop and find something a little bit magical– something that opens that door to Narnia that I’m forever searching for, if only for a few seconds. Miena’s moving illustrations (literally and figuratively moving) are one of those…

The Secret Swimming Pools of the Paris Catacombs

It felt like the pavements of Paris could have melted these past few days. The city’s swimming pools were overflowing with splashing bodies and escape from the heat seemed futile. But there is one place, beneath the baking pavements, where only few will venture and plunge into the cool waters of the underworld. So let’s follow them…

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