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A Visit to India's Last Colony of Magicians And Acrobats
All images courtesy of BOND/360The Kathputli colony, located on the outskirts of New Delhi, is where families of magicians, puppeteers, acrobats, and artists converge. Hand-built by the residents over...
View ArticleAnnie Edson Taylor's 1901 Retirement Plan: Go Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel
Photo: G.G. Bain News Service/WikipediaThe first daredevil to ride over Niagara Falls in a barrel wasn’t some brash young man looking to make headlines. It was a 63-year-old school teacher who just...
View ArticleFOUND: A Large And Creepy Gathering of Kangaroos
In a park on the edge of Melbourne, a cyclist was going for a perfectly normal bike ride when he started seeing kangaroos. First just one appeared:A few second later, he saw more in the distance. And...
View ArticleFleeting Wonders: Read a Book, Ride the Bus for Free
Everyone should read on the bus! (Photo: Cogiati/Wikipedia)If you've been lamenting the large amount of people who sit on the bus and subway with their faces buried in a Kindle or studiously focused on...
View ArticleWhen Disaster Strikes, Museums Call In The A-Team
Restoring a painting at the FAIC Cultural Recovery Center in Brooklyn. (Photo: Courtesy Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works)You’ve got a muddy 18th...
View ArticleA Ruined French City, Resuscitated In a Garden
The city of Reims, c. 1916. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) In the ancient French city of Reims there is a magnificent turreted town house that dates from the 13th century. It is surrounded by a...
View ArticleFrom Pony Express to Amazon Drone: The Strange History of Delivering Packages
Rural Free Delivery, 1914. (Photo: Library of Congress)These days, with maps that tell you exactly when a bus is coming and weather apps that notify you exactly 12 minutes before it will start raining,...
View ArticleFOUND: Painted Japanese Doors from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
One of three newly found paintings (Photo: Chicago Park District)In 1892, Japanese workers began building a pavilion on the Wooded Island of Chicago's Jackson Park. The next year, as part of the 1893...
View Article100 Wonders: The Great Green Wall of Africa
Clocking in 4,750 miles long and 9 miles wide, the Great Green Wall of Africa is as ambitious as it is necessary.While only 330 miles of greenery have currently been planted in northern Senegal,...
View ArticleDrunk, Angry Wasps Are Coming For Your British Marmalade
German wasps on their way to the bar, or in this case, a rotting apple. (Photo: Bernie/Public Domain)"Drunk" and "angry" are just about the last two words you'd want to associate with a swarm of giant...
View Article150 Years of Coney Island Thrills in Photos
'Modern Venus of 1947, Coney Island'. (Photo: Courtesy Brooklyn Museum Collection)Coney Island has long been an accessible, one-day vacation for New Yorkers wanting to escape the heat. The first...
View Article'Wet Hot American Summer' On a Bus: The Decadent Thrills of Teen Tours
Arches National Park, one of the many itinerary options for teen tours. (Photo: Jean-Christophe Benoist/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)For the youth of America, camp has an undeniable allure (the lack of...
View ArticleFOUND: Two Giant Black Holes at the Heart of a Quasar
Whoa, double black hole! (Image: Space Telescope Science Institute)Quasars are unbelievably bright. When astronomers first found them, they thought they might be really, really luminous stars—they can...
View ArticleFleeting Wonders: Watch A Chinese Sinkhole Eat a Bus Stop
News of sinkholes hits the headlines on a surprisingly consistent basis. So much so that sometimes it feels as though we are all just walking around on the thin crust of a hollow Earth, waiting to take...
View ArticleMechanical Beach Monsters No Match for Boston Crowd Control
A Peabody Essex Museum volunteer coaxes a Strandbeest forward. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)Strandbeest Handler #4 was having some trouble. It was time to promenade, and her charge—a ten-foot-long scaffold of...
View ArticleHow Kurobe, Japan Became the Zipper Capital of the World
A close up of a YKK zipper. (Photo: Chris 73/ WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)There is not a groin in the world that the city of Kurobe has not touched. It has done so through the auspices of YKK, the world’s...
View ArticleFOUND: The Mysterious Shigir Idol May Be 11,000 Years Old
The Shigir Idol (Photo: Владислав Фальшивомонетчик/Wikimedia)The Shigir idol was found in 1894, in a bog in western Siberia. Bogs are unusually effective at slowing the decay of organic matter: the...
View ArticleWarren G. Harding Was The First Celebrity-Endorsed President
Warren G. Harding campaigns for the presidency in 1919. (Photo: Library of Congress)Nearly a century after his death, Warren G. Harding is having a moment in the limelight.Thanks to timeless curiosity...
View ArticleFleeting Wonders: A Surprisingly Huge Ice Sheet on Mars
Surface evidence of the massive ice sheet found on Mars. (Photo: NASA)As NASA's Curiosity rover makes its way across the Red Planet, the images coming back have been breathtaking. And thanks to the...
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