Author: Ms. R.

If you found yourself in 16th-century London with a bit of spare money and free time, you might have wedged yourself into an inn or a playhouse to see a performance. The space may have been a square, circle, or polygon, and it might have had a roof—thatched or tiled, and perhaps celestial in design, splashed with blue and spangled with stars. It might even have a trap door or two—one to welcome gods and goddesses to Earth, another……

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Editor’s note: This article describes racist imagery and slurs. In early June, an ice cream truck jingle rang out in Brooklyn, yet it drew no children, produced no soft serve, and evoked no nostalgia. It was midnight, and it came from an unmarked NYPD cruiser. It was the third night of an 8 p.m. citywide curfew, issued by Mayor Bill de Blasio, ostensibly to curb looting and violence. Despite the order, peaceful protests continued well past 8 p.m. It……

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The walkways underneath raised roadways are often gray and grim. But that’s not the case under the Inverness motorway bridge in Danderyd. With the addition of some bright paint and six elegant crystal chandeliers, this underpass was transformed in 2014. Before the makeover, residents of the area considered this underpass unsafe. The landscape architect Sofia Didrik came up with the unique and whimsical idea of installing high society ‘bourgeois’ lighting fixtures under the viaduct to literally brighten it up…….

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Dating back to the Neolithic Age, La Starza is the oldest known settlement in Campania. To the untrained eye, all that remains of the hamlet today are unrecognizable ruins in the middle of the countryside—a rocky formation overlooking a spring—but the site is, in fact, a cache of ancient pottery, earthenware, animal and plant remains, and metal artifacts. The settlement was erected nearly 9,000 years ago and was continuously inhabited for eight millennia— throughout the Neolithic Age, Iron Age,……

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Many modern-day Americans wouldn’t be able to survive a summer without a central air conditioning system. Those systems owe much of their existence to this small cluster of about 20 homes in the North Austin neighborhood of Allandale. In the first half of the 20th century, air conditioning was a luxury that was only found in commercial business settings. But things began to change in the 1950s, when the National Association of Homebuilders came up with the novel idea……

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This towering formation of basalt rock can be found along the shoreline of the Cloughfin Townland on the Islandmagee Penisula in Northern Ireland. The sea stack has been nicknamed “The Lord” for its powerful prominence standing along the battered rocky shoreline. Stacks like these are the result of years of erosion from crashing waves. This stack is made of basalt, a dark-colored rock that forms when magma hardens. It rests on a base of amygdaloidal basalt, which has a……

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A lonely spire of stone rises from the rocky promontory of Bradda Glen on the Isle of Man, looming over the sleepy village of Port Erin and its namesake bay. While this dark tower might seem at home in a Stephen King novel, or a place to sequester a fairy-tale princess, Milner’s Tower was originally erected to honor (not imprison) a local philanthropist and benefactor. William Milner was a wealthy safemaker who moved to Port Erin from Liverpool in……

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The artist Matthew Willey used to instinctively avoid bees, as so many of us do—until one fateful day in 2008. “I was in my studio in the East Village and a little honeybee flew in and landed right in the middle of the rug,” Willey shares. “She was walking along the carpet, not flying around, so I had the opportunity to get down on the floor and really study this bee.” Leery but curious, he grabbed a magnifying glass……

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Pelle Cass is a street photographer—sort of. Since 2008, he’s been taking his camera and tripod to public plazas and tourist hubs in Boston, New York, and other major cities, where, over the course of an hour or more, he takes several hundred photos of a fixed point. Back in the editing room, he spends anywhere from 20 to 80 hours Photoshopping a single image, finding, masking, and layering the people that make it into the final frame—a “still……

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Chapman State Park is located along the Potomac River a 30-minute drive south of Washington, D.C. Until 1914, the grounds were owned by the Chapman family. The state of Maryland purchased the property in 1998 and turned it into a public park. Nathaniel Chapman, a wealthy Virginia planter, bought the land and plantation in 1751. On the property is Mount Aventine, a mansion built between 1800 and 1860 that served as the center of the plantation. For many decades, the……

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