Author: Ms. R.

Twenty miles north of Asunción, hugging the west bank of the Paraguay River, sits a bustling cattle-ranching hub called Villa Hayes. This dusty city serves as the capital of Paraguay’s Presidente Hayes Department, features a Hayes Primary School, and boasts a statue of its namesake: Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th President of the United States. Hayes may be obscure in his homeland, but citizens of this South American nation absolutely revere the long-dead president. “Rutherford B. Hayes is our……

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Every micronation has its own reason for “independence.” Sometimes it’s resistance, sometimes it’s a prank, and sometimes it just happens. In the Naminara Republic’s case, it was simply to boost tourism. Located in the city of Chuncheon, the crescent-shaped Nami Island, also known as Namiseom, was formed in the Han River as the result of the construction of a dam in 1943. In diameter, it is approximately 2.5 miles wide. Its name comes from General Nam Yi, whose body……

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Peace and Harvest are male and female statues, respectively, located in a downtown public plaza, at the west corner of Main and Jefferson Streets. The eight-foot figures were sculpted from Indiana limestone in 1938 and 1939 by Mary Andersen Clark as part of the Works Progress Administration federal art project. Originally sited in front of the Peoria Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium (which was located approximately six miles northeast of downtown Peoria), Peace and Harvest were dedicated on September 3, 1939…….

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Although states across the U.S. are opening back up at varying speeds, COVID-19 is still keeping most of us close to home. Thankfully, we can experience many of North America’s regional and sometimes quirky delights without having to hop in a plane. “Whoopie pies are undoubtedly our top seller,” says Daniel Finnemore of his mail-order business Box of Maine. “You’ll find them everywhere in Maine: at grocery stores, gas stations, fairs … there’s even an annual Whoopie Pie Festival.”……

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Every year around Valentine’s Day, hundreds of great blue herons (Ardea herodias) descend upon the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Northeast Ohio to engage in their annual courtship and mating rituals. The birds build their nests in communal rookeries called heronries. Heronries typically appear in secluded areas, and the birds are ordinarily cautious and skittish. They’re usually surrounded by marshland, and observable only by the most intrepid birdwatchers. The Bath Road Heronry is unusual because of its proximity to……

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Just outside Atocha Station (a transportation hub also known for its own tropical garden), a pair of gigantic, realistic baby heads greet passengers. Made of bronze, they stand 3 meters (or nearly 10 feet) tall and weigh over 2 tons each. Although they may seem slightly creepy, the story behind these sculptures is a sweet one. The baby heads,  installed here in 2008, are the work of the Spanish artist Antonio López García. They represent “Day” (Día) and “Night”……

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Charles “Doc” Herrold was a pioneer.  After founding his College of Engineering and Wireless in 1909 inside the Garden City Bank building at 50 West San Fernando Street in San Jose, California, he launched the world’s first radio broadcasting station, which beamed music, news, and notably, advertising to listeners on a regular basis. Herrold and his team at Station FN, which included his own wife, the world’s first female disc jockey, epitomized the mantra of many a Silicon Valley……

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One of the most spectacular structures in Montreal’s Saint-Henri neighborhood looks like a supervillain’s lair. Dozens of tightly-packed silos form a massive wall, flanked by two derelict towers. The Canada Malting Silos have been described as a “cathedral of industry.” For Montreal’s urban explorers and graffiti artists, they’re more of a Mount Everest. The silos’ resemblance to a pack of beer cans is entirely appropriate, as Canada Malting was once a key supplier to many distilleries and breweries. Built……

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Brandon Waite was packing up after an evening playing board games with his friends when he noticed “1 to 4 players” written on the side of one of the boxes. Just like that, he stumbled onto the idea of playing games by himself. “I had just never heard of that before, or I thought I hadn’t,” he recalls. “But of course, most of us have played solitaire at some point.” Since the release of “Settlers of Catan,” in……

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The Atlantic bluefin tuna hunts like a wolf and is built like a barrel. “They’re power-packed animals,” says Mike Jech, a fishery biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Often stretching more than six feet long and topping 500 pounds, hefty Thunnus thynnus travel in packs, zooming in and out of various types of formations, from long lines to dense clusters. Typically, the titanic tuna swim at the pace of……

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When the coronavirus pandemic escalated in early March and Colorado’s governor ordered all restaurants to end on-site dining, Eric Skokan prepared to watch his life’s work slip away. Instead, he’s delivering carrots and arugula to his neighbors like a vegetable-slinging ice-cream-truck driver. Skokan and his wife, Jill, own two restaurants and a farm in Boulder, Colorado. After closing their restaurants Black Cat and Bramble & Hare, the duo scrambled to come up with new ideas to keep the business……

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In 1997, New Jersey–based photographer George Steinmetz decided to learn to fly, when he was assigned to shoot in the central Sahara and learned that his bush pilot had backed out. Steinmetz’s aircraft of choice was not an airplane but a motorized paraglider, which is more or less a backpack-mounted motor connected to a single-seat harness hanging under a parachute-like wing. “I originally got into paragliding because I wanted to fly in the Sahara,” he says, “and where I……

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More than 1,300 veterans have been laid to rest in the Fort Douglas Post Cemetery in Salt Lake City since it was established in 1862. Each of these graves, of course, tells a story. But one of them, on its own, complicates the entire narrative. The headstone belongs to Paul Eilert—a German prisoner of war who died in Utah in 1944. It is marked with more than the average epitaph. Eilert’s headstone, in an American military cemetery, is inscribed……

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