Celebrate 50 Years Since the Moon Landing with a Cheat Sheet of Mind-Blowing Moon Trivia

There’s a lot of interest in the Moon again lately and not just because this weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969. Only 12 people have walked on the moon, and no one has been back since 1972, over four decades ago. If all goes well, Nasa has plans to return to…

10 Ways to Fall in Love with Paris (Again) on a Boat

Parisians are drawn to the water. But so, too, are tourists. Boatfuls of them are ferried north, south, east and west throughout the year, with a steady soundtrack of tour guides indicating “to your left, you will see…”. Give the “Bateaux-Mouches” a wide berth this summer and experience the Seine and Napoleonic canals like a…

Adored by Many, but Loved by Chanel: A Forgotten Parisian It Girl

Proust, turned her into a fictional princess and Ravel turned her into music. Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec couldn’t stop painting her. Picasso was a confidante, Serge Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes, a best friend, and Coco Chanel – her “soul sister”; possibly her lover too. Belle Epoque Paris bloomed with opulence and a languid, if not…

Volunteering for Life on Mars, or Something Like it

Somewhere out in the Utah desert right now, there are a bunch of folks pretending to live on Mars. The simulated Martian habitat, known as the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), is the closest you can get to the red planet here on earth, where science projects are created for space, and tasks that astronauts…

Don’t Be a Tourist in New York: The Soundtrack

Of course Don’t be a Tourist in New York comes with its own soundtrack! It’s less about the Franck Sinatra clichés, and more about the sounds of gritty New York in seventies and the folk singers that flocked to the East Village in the 1960s. You’ll also find plenty of talent born and bred in…

What was the Deal with Marcel Duchamp and Chess?

It’s a question we asked ourselves recently in a Messy Nessy editorial meeting after finding yet another photograph of the 20th century artist playing chess in some unusual, avant-garde manner. Discovering a person’s hobby can be so deliciously voyeuristic. It’s a window into the way they switch-off from the world, and one made all the…

Hollywood’s Doom Book and other Tales of Blacklisting in American Cinema

Before we even knew it as “Hollywood”, the American film industry was a very different place, producing a surreal amount of extraordinarily liberal and raw movies that would give today’s rated-R movies a run for their money; featuring nudity, strong female characters, sex, drugs, violence, abortion and even homosexuality. But everything changed in the year…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCLX)

1. Starcourt Mall from ‘Stranger Things’ is actually a real dead mall The Verge: There’s a reason why the Starcourt Mall, the principal location for the third season of “Stranger Things” looks so real: it’s built inside of a real shopping mall. Specifically, it was built inside of Georgia’s Gwinnett Place Mall, which was built just a…

The Fascinating Daguerrotypes of Victorians Breastfeeding

You know the daguerrotypes. Stiff scenes of Victorian families in too much clothing, expressing about as much enthusiasm for one another as one would have for a lamppost. That’s why we did a double – no, triple – take when we found a small selection of Victorian breastfeeding portraits in the depths of the web.…

The Tale of Hollywood’s Most Curious Career Imposter

Sex sells, and it sells even better with a dash of mystery. For every housewife in mid-century America, the enigmatic charm of Indian performer Korla Pandit was the ticket to getting weak in the knees before the kids came home from school. In the 15 minutes allotted to The Korla Pandit Program, the performer brought…