Author: Ms. R.

Akash Muralidharan’s quest to find forgotten South Indian vegetables began when he cleaned out his bedroom. It was January 2020, and he had just returned to his home city of Chennai after finishing his master’s degree in Food Design and Innovation in Milan. Like many students returning home after graduation, Muralidharan found that his childhood bedroom had become a storeroom. Muralidharan was clearing space for himself when he spotted it: his grandmother Kamala Natarajan’s copy of Samaithu Par. Published……

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Statues have been on Emily Gorcenski’s mind for a while. Three years ago, she was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the tumultuous week of protests over the removal of Confederate statues and monuments, during which a white supremacist drove a vehicle into a crowd of peaceful protesters and killed activist Heather Heyer. Seeking to track the judicial progress of hate crime cases, Gorcenski used public records to build First Vigil, a database of legal proceedings related to far-right and……

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Several rooms of a Pittsburgh materials testing laboratory called Matergenics have been dedicated to an unusual collection: 30 years of failure, consisting of broken things and twisted metal. Although it may all look like junk, each item, the materials failure it represents, has a story to tell and a surprising lesson to impart. The hands-on museum contains pieces ranging from a corroded Olympic diving board to exploded gas lines. The museum’s curator, materials scientist and Matergenics owner Mehrooz Zamanzadeh……

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Had Granville T. Woods been allowed to focus on his work—and pay less attention to lawsuits—who knows how many more inventions he’d have to his name? The Black American inventor, born in Ohio in 1856, secured more than 60 patents before he died in 1910, at the age of 53. His output ranged from egg incubators to enhancements for telephones and phonographs, though he is now best known for his work on railway systems and transportation safety. In 2004,……

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As soon as you pull into the parking lot of Yuzuan Restaurant, you know it’s special. The lot is dotted with intriguing objects from the owner’s personal collection, from the large shark statue to the small version of the famous Cat Bus from the Ghibli classic My Neighbor Totoro. The entire experience of eating at Yuzuan has a distinct Kochi-style whimsicality to it. Customers may sit at a table overlooked by a large statue of Ryoma Sakamoto (a local hero) or beneath……

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In the predawn hours of November 29, 1864, troops from the Colorado Third Volunteers, derisively called “The Bloodless Third,” under the command of Colonel John Chivington, attacked the peaceful camp of the Black Kettle Band of Cheyennes on the banks of Big Sandy Creek, on the plains of southern Colorado.  The troops plunged in, firing indiscriminately, and all the troops participated with relish. All except Company D of the First Colorado Calvary, under the command of Captain Silas Soule, and……

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Just 45 miles north of Cheyenne, Wyoming, is the small town of Chugwater. It would be hard to guess that this town of roughly 200 was the headquarters of the Swan Land and Cattle Company, once one of the largest cattle and sheep ranching operations in the United States. In recent years, its notoriety comes from the Chugwater Chili Cookoff, an annual, competitive cookoff held every June. Perhaps the best-kept secret is that the town is also home to the……

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Dearfield is the ghost town of a former Black American farming community on the plains of Colorado, established by entrepreneur Oliver Toussaint Jackson. Jackson was born to formerly enslaved people and spent his early years in Ohio before moving to Denver in 1887. Working as a caterer, Jackson eventually earned enough money to purchase a small farm outside Boulder. Jackson went on to run two successful restaurants in Boulder and Denver, manage the catering and concession service at the……

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Italy’s Amalfi Coast, with its cliff-perched houses and harrowing roads, has mesmerized many visitors. One Amalfi village in particular became a lifelong fascination for M.C. Escher, the 20th-century Dutch artist and illustrator, and he revisited it repeatedly in his works.  Atrani, located just east of Amalfi, near the center of its namesake coast, resembles a fantasy castle: A series of tall arches springs from the sea to support an acute curve in the cliff-hugging coast road. Within this hairpin……

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