Author: Ms. R.

The Golden State Model Railroad Museum is home to highly detailed models and dioramas of Central and Northern California towns, roundhouses, street scenes, and stations. Various types of freight and passenger trains, from steam to modern diesel, wind their way through the scenes. The museum was opened in 1985 to celebrate the impressive models made by the East Bay Model Engineers Society. The Society is one of the oldest modeling clubs in the United States, founded in 1933 in San……

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Lovecraft Arts & Sciences is an eclectic little bookstore hidden away in the Arcade Mall in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Despite its smaller size, the shop is densely populated with a niche yet wide selection of weird fiction, art, esoterica, academic texts, collectibles, and ephemera. Staffed by a rogues gallery of friendly bookworms, Lovecraft Arts & Sciences is a valuable resource for anyone new to genre fiction; the booksellers are always willing to offer guidance and recommendations. The store……

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Follow the flames. Oi Man Sang, a restaurant in Hong Kong, can be located by the fire and smoke that emerges from its streetside, semi-open-air kitchen.  Restaurants like this were once common in Hong Kong. They were known as dai pai dong, and at their peak, numbered in the hundreds. As early as the 1940s, Hong Kong’s health department started banning them, refusing to offer the “big license” (the eponymous dai pai) that permitted them to operate on the……

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When it was originally founded in 1617, the Tokyo branch of Kyoto’s Nishi-Hongwanji Buddhist Temple stood in today’s Higashi-Nihombashi district, until it burned down in the Great Fire of Meireki (1657). It was then set to be reconstructed in another location, closer to the sea. The Tsukiji area, famous today for its former fish market, was created for this purpose; the name, Tsukiji Hongan-ji or Hongwan-ji, literally means “reclaimed land.” The second Hongan-ji, built in 1679, again burned down in……

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This article is adapted from the April 5, 2025, edition of Gastro Obscura’s Favorite Things newsletter. You can sign up here. “It’s a very interesting question to ask, right? How do you define a pasta?” says Amay Borle, a research chef based in Berlin, Germany. “Would you eat, in Italy, a pasta with bread?” “Italian-Americans would,” I reply, thinking of my own family dinners. “Italian-Americans would,” Amay agrees. “But not Italians, right? For Italians it’s the primo, and the……

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This story was originally published in bioGraphic and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Like a chicken nugget in an air fryer, our planet is getting hotter and drier all the time. This, coupled with centuries of fire suppression and ecosystem mismanagement, has created a world that’s prone to bursting into flames. Large wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe. Preventing them from getting even worse will require cutting carbon emissions and righting centuries of flawed……

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