Seriously Though, How Did the Most Beautiful Library in America Get Demolished?

The old Public library of Cincinnati was the sort of place you only see in a Harry Potter film; colossal cast-iron book alcoves and spiral staircases that went several stories high, checker board marble floors that shone beneath the skylight roof; a magnificent maze of books that is now lost forever. In 1955, without a whimper, the building was demolished when…

Documenting the Disappearing Record Stores of Paris

Record stores are a little bit like urban legends nowadays; the types of places you have to know people to get to the good stuff, through a door in the back and a ladder to the basement where you might find boxes of the owner’s dusty 45’s that have been there for years. And even those places are rare…

Hollywood’s Iconic ‘Gone with the Wind’ Movie Set Has Been Hiding in a Barn for Decades

It was the first ever film to receive more than five Academy Awards, one of which was bought by Michael Jackson when he bid $1.5 million on the 1939 statue for Best Picture. Re-released in theatres in the US eight times, it raked in more than $400 million, which when adjusted for inflation is anywhere between…

What was Found (and Still Edible) Inside a 150-year-old Sunken Steamboat

In 1856, the Steamboat Arabia was frontier bound, loaded with supplies for 16 towns. With two hundred tons of precious cargo aboard, it left Kansas up the Missouri river on a routine trip, but waiting silently at the water’s surface, lost in the glare of the setting sun, was the thick trunk of a huge, fallen walnut…

The Guy Who Digs up Lost Cities Buried at Sea

For the last thirteen years, he’s been busy digging up a lost underwater civilization the size of Paris off the coast of Egypt. The remarkably well-preserved ruins that were discovered have been sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea for the past 1,200 years, at long last solving the mystery of the lost city of…

The Lost Photo Collectors

What happens to the photographs taken over a lifetime that no longer have a home in which to be framed on the wall or treasured inside the family albums? Who will appreciate and preserve those anonymous snapshots of moments and strangers in time? “The American Dream” It’s a sort of subculture that exists at garage…

Once a Californian Boom Town, Now a Sunken City at the Bottom of a Lake

At one time Kennett, Ca, had 40 saloons, dozens of trade stores, a hotel, hospital, a schoolhouse– it even had an opera house– that is, before it was sitting at the bottom of the huge man-made Lake Shasta. Kennett is now completely invisible, buried as deep as 400 feet below the water’s surface. There is no…

An Interview with an Icon: The Lost Tape Recordings

For as long as the technology has been available, journalists have preferred documenting their interviews on little tape recorders rather than relying on their note-taking skills. Who can scribble down notes fast enough to catch every precious word anyway? Recordings give us that extra embellishment; something said under the interviewee’s breathe, a laughter that wouldn’t…

The Dark Secrets of a Tiny Tropical Island Occupied by Descendants of Pirates

There’s a paradise island in the Pacific Ocean that no one wants to live on. Food and water is plentiful, the land is fertile, it’s surrounded by the most pristine ocean habitat in the world, and yet a potential extinction of the island’s current population (primarily direct descendants of pirates who shipwrecked themselves here 200 years ago)…

10 Reasons Why Archeology is the Coolest Job Ever

Indiana Jones may have exaggerated a little bit about the job, but you still get to dress like Alan Grant from Jurassic Park, travel all over the world and uncover some mind-blowing relics of the past. Here’s 10 reminders of why this is the coolest career going. 1. That time they discovered the Easter Island Statues have Bodies There…