An Emblem of Extinction, Lonesome George Goes on Posthumous Display in NYC
Lonesome George at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC (all photographs by Michelle Enemark) With a neck that stretches for days, the taxidermy of the late, last Pinta Island giant tortoise...
View ArticleLeave No Black Plume as a Token: Tracking Poe’s Raven
J. W. Ocker, the author of Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe, out now from Countryman Press, discovered a surprising array of sites and artifacts connected to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The...
View ArticleHow I Spent My Summer Vacation: Living Alone at the End of a Fjord in a Faroe...
Mists of Mùli (all photographs by the author)In the Faroe Islands, automatic transmission vehicles are hard to come by. And I soon found that my quick practice run around the block in a borrowed...
View ArticleTurning Museums Inside-Out with Beautiful Visible Storage
Visible storage at the Luce Foundation Center for American Art (photograph by Cliff/Flickr)In the world’s largest museums, only a small fraction of their collections are ever placed on display. This...
View ArticleDoomed Belgian Village Strives for Salvation by Inviting Street Artists into...
Doel, Belgium (all photographs by Chris Staring/Skaremedia)Despite the fact that Doel has existed for more than 700 years, this small village will soon be erased in order to make way for the constantly...
View ArticleHolloways: Roads Tunneled into the Earth by Time
Sunken lane in Normandy, France (photograph by Jean-François Gornet/Flickr)Appearing like trenches dragged into the earth, sunken lanes, also called hollow-ways or holloways, are centuries-old...
View ArticleJoin Kcymaerxthaere and Atlas Obscura on the Road to a Parallel Universe in...
From August to September, Eames Demetrios, Geographer-at-Large for Kcymaerxthaere, is serving as the Geographer-in-Residence at Atlas Obscura. Read his previous posts & discover places in a world...
View ArticleObjects of Intrigue: The Spiders Who Spun in Space
Anita in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (photograph by beccapie/Flickr)Alongside the huge airplanes and spacecrafts in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is a...
View ArticleHaunted Houses: Tokyo's Real Estate Listings with Problems
A well & water bogie spirit (illustration from "Books and Bookmen," 1899, via Internet Archive Book Images)The Japanese are renowned for the supernatural — the yokāi (roughly "monsters"), and yūrei...
View ArticleIncredible Photographs of the Monumental Power Station That Electrified the...
Main Support Frame of Engine Unit, March 20, 1902. (Courtesy of New York Transit Museum)The steam-powered trains that first provided New York City with mass transit quickly became a sooty mess,...
View ArticleThe Cemetery Owned by No One: Philadelphia's Abandoned Mount Moriah
Gate of Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia (all photographs by the author)Philadelphia's Mount Moriah Cemetery has been officially closed and abandoned since 2011, its 380 acres now overgrown, the...
View ArticleOffice by Day, Gallery by Night: An Experiment in Dual Identities in Istanbul
All photographs by Rachel FriedmanIstanbul is a city with zero public funding for the arts, so private money has swooped in to fill the gap by supporting a wide range of spaces and projects. Among them...
View ArticleSix DIY Glass Houses Built from Bottles
People who live in glass houses often just had a lot of bottles around, and in a sort of DIY-Philip Johnson style, constructed a transparent, fragile fortress. From an embalming fluid bottle house in...
View ArticleHeroes in Taxidermy: The Collectable Postcard Edition
Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, design by Michelle Enemark.Among the millions of pieces of anonymous taxidermy throughout the world, some are special. Some have names. Some are heroes.Be...
View ArticleFrom a Jar of Moles to Robot Convicts, A Visit to Five Offbeat Taxidermy...
Taxidermy on the move in the Bouten Workshop in Venlo, Netherlands (all photographs by Robert Marbury)In a digital world where technology can archive and reproduce almost anything, taxidermy holds a...
View ArticleThe Parlor Poet vs. The Raven in a Battle of Literary Statues
Detail of the new Edgar Allan Poe statue being unveiled in Boston this weekend (courtesy Edgar Allan Poe Foundation of Boston)One of the greatest literary rivalries in history is revived this weekend...
View ArticleOf Shipwrecks and Wrist Bones: The Story of St. Paul’s Remains
Fresco of St. Paul's shipwreck in St. Callistus from "The Open Court" (1887) (via Internet Archive Book Images)A long time ago, a man named Paul was on his way to Rome to be tried as a political rebel...
View ArticleMorbid Monday: Maps of the End of the World
Back in 1919, a Baptist reverend named Clarence Larkin published an unusual book breaking down each verse of the Book of Revelation into charts. The Book of Revelation; a study of the last prophetic...
View ArticleOn Poe's Death Day, A Memento Mori of Lost Lenore
Diagram of a Raven's skull, from "The myology of the raven (Corvus corax sinuatus.) A guide to the study of the muscular system in birds" (1890) (via Internet Archive Book Images)Today in 1849, Edgar...
View ArticleA Bangkok Zoo Where People Ask for and Escape Death by Crocodile
Samutprakarn Crocodile Farm and Zoo (photograph by the author)On the afternoon of September 12, a 65-year-old woman from a rural suburb of Bangkok traveled an hour to the Samutprakarn Crocodile Farm...
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