Author: Ms. R.

Nearly a century ago, a new hotel at the corner of Main and Bank streets was the talk of New Port Richey, Florida. The Hacienda Hotel was a luxurious building with pink stucco walls and a sprawling courtyard. In the decades since it was built, the Hotel has played host to movie stars, served as a healthcare facility, and even intrigued a few ghost hunters. Located on the banks of the Pithlachascotee River, the building was planned as a……

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Amigo Bob Cantisano, instantly recognizable with his waist-length dreadlocks and handlebar mustache, can often be found searching for treasure in the California mountains. But he’s not looking for the gold which drew droves of miners to the area in the mid-1800s. Instead, Cantisano hunts for what those early migrants left behind—a trove of long-lost crops, from grapes to chestnuts and everything in between. This journey has taken him across the region’s abandoned homesteads, where he’s found trees and vines……

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Crews squelching their way through sewer systems in cities around the world sometimes find that they’re not alone. Their headlamps and flashlights occasionally fall across fellow creatures—rats scampering through the filth, or bugs, or even amorous amphibians. Some Victorian-era Londoners circulated stories about feral swine thriving down in the damp, and New York City residents have been talking about subterranean alligators for more than a century. In mid-November 2020, crews working on a sewer project in Athens stumbled across……

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When Mongolia closed its borders earlier this year due to the pandemic, Marinel de Jesus was organizing an all-female trip there and filming the annual winter migration of nomadic families in the Altai Mountains. She focused her documentary work on female Kazakh herders, from the country’s largest ethnic minority. “While doing research on the Kazakh nomadic migrations, I quickly learned that most of the articles or films about the subject involve merely the voices of local males or male……

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A walk through Pyrgi, an island town with a population around 1,000, is a colorful tour of geometric designs and motifs. As one of the “mastic villages” that once made the picturesque Greek island of Chios renowned and rich—the sap obtained exclusively from its mastic trees to make medicines, foods, liqueurs, and natural chewing gum was a highly valued product from the time of the ancient Greeks through the Ottoman era—it is little changed since medieval times.  Mastic production……

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Until the mid-16th-century, Europe’s minting techniques had not progressed from ancient Greek coinage, which was struck by hand using dies and a hammer. Eventually, this method became ineffective as a large amount of bullion was imported from across the world and the mints had trouble keeping up. To solve this problem, minting machinery was invented in 1550 based on Leonardo da Vinci’s ideas and using hydraulic wheels. It was first adopted by France, followed by England in 1560, Spain, and……

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In the congested traffic along a prominent Decatur thoroughfare, commuters may notice an unusual garden of giant metal sculptures, and a man playfully encouraging them to wake up from their lulled complacency. According the Clark Ashton, the exhibition’s sculptor and designer, the commuters are part of the “mechanical river,” and his garden, towers, and metal throne are all part of his Mechanical Riverfront Kingdom.  Ashton has been creating giant metal sculptures in his yard since 1989, when we welded……

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