At first glance, you might think it’s a pumpkin or a sweet potato pie. Yet bean pies, a unique specialty in some Black American Muslim communities, are made with creamy navy beans, spices, and a whole-wheat crust. The sweet pies, sold for fundraising and at bakeries across the United States, can be traced to the writings of the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, who in two books laid out guidelines for a healthful diet, excluding pork and sweet……
During Peru’s near-300-year-period under Spanish rule, Spaniards introduced deep-fried dough balls called buñuelos to the region. Unfortunately, colonizers also brought the African slave trade. It was enslaved African cooks who refitted the original buñuelos recipe to make use of Peruvian sweet potato and squash. They kneaded flour and salt with mashed produce and fried spoonfuls of the orange dough in hot lard. To finish off the warm, chewy treat, they doused its crisp exterior in sweet syrup. Peru regained……
The first impoverished German immigrant to fold oats into leftover ground meat didn’t do so out of culinary whimsy; nor did they expect their descendants to attend Cincinnati’s Goetta Festival centuries later. Enslaved West Africans in colonial Peru who reconfigured their captors’ leftovers couldn’t have known their hardscrabble bread pudding would be forever embedded in Peruvian cuisine. Most shockingly, food-stretched American mothers defied every presumptive rule of baking and respectability by making cakes from tomato soup during World War……
Museo Omero is a tactile museum in Ancona, Italy, and one of the few places in the world where the knowledge of art is transmitted not through sight but through touch. The museum aims to help the visually impaired to experience art but its unique multi-sensory exhibition is accessible to everyone. Established in 1993, the innovative museum hosts various copies and casts of real archeological finds and pieces of art like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de……
Every spring, the basement of the Ray and Maria Stata Center becomes a racetrack for tiny self-driving cars that tear through the halls one by one. Sprinting behind each car on foot is a team of three to six students, sometimes carrying wireless routers or open laptops extended out like Olympic torches. Lining the basement walls, their classmates cheer them on, knowing the effort it took to program the algorithms steering the cars around the course during this annual……
Elaborate murals once tattooed the walls of thousands of residential complexes across ancient Teotihuacán. Today, many of them live in an unassuming museum within the archaeological site: The Beatriz de la Fuente Teotihuacán Murals Museum. Named after Mexican art historian Beatriz Ramírez de la Fuente, the museum houses over fifty millennia-old murals along with several artifacts recovered from on-site temples and palaces. The museum consists of nine main rooms, each with its own thematic focus, spanning space and time…….
One of the world’s most unusual LGBTQ support centers sits on 15 acres of farmland in Gujarat, India, by the side of the Narmada River. Rustic farmhouses are clustered near millet fields, mango trees, and a white bull with spectacularly large horns. Riya Patel, who was born in the U.S. and now works as a manager and farmer at the center, advises against taking a dip in the river: A swimmer once became crocodile lunch here, Patel says. “We……
When you take a stroll through Tivoli, the largest park in Ljubljana, you may come across four cast-iron dogs sitting gracefully at the foot of Rožnik Hill. These statues stand guard on a staircase that leads to a beautiful mansion, might look ordinary to any passerby. But don’t be fooled—they are all missing a vital muscular organ, and are somewhat of an enigma. These four iron-cast hounds were made around 1864, by the sculptor Anton Dominik Fernkorn. The Austrian……
William Rufus loved hunting. Really loved hunting. He would have been more than happy to have spent all day, every day tearing after game through the forests of England. This was just as well really, as much of England had been turned into a giant playground for the Norman nobility that had assumed control of the country after the 1066 invasion. One of the first things that Rufus’s father, William I, also known as William the Conqueror, did upon……
During the past few months of lockdown, I’ve been taking daily walks around my Brooklyn neighborhood. As I’ve strolled the same streets week after week, I’ve started paying attention to buildings in a way I never had before. My roommate and I turned this into a sort of historical scavenger hunt. Each of us takes photos or writes down addresses during our separate constitutionals, and back at home we look up the history of the buildings. We’ve learned that……
In late March, local leaders from academia, health care, and the private sector joined a conference call to hear state officials paint a grim picture: Hospitals in Massachusetts would need millions more units of personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep health care workers safe during the Covid-19 pandemic. Local manufacturers with experience making things like active apparel and footwear were eager to help, but to do so they’d need to figure out what to make, how to make it, and……
Just outside of Abomey, a subterranean town of over fifty dwellings lies thirty feet beneath the ground. Known as the Agongointo-Zoungoudo Underground Town, the series of rooms and passageways was rediscovered in 1998 during a construction project in Bohicon, when an unsuspecting bulldozer toppled into one of the caverns. The sprawling subterranean town is believed to date back to the late-16th or early-17th century during the reign of King Dakodonou, the second king of Dahomey. Agongointo-Zoungoudo consists of over……
Like many industries in the wake of the global pandemic, real estate seems to be completely frozen. Without viewings, housing sales are dipping; without customers, commercial leases aren’t getting signed; and without economic growth, property prices are declining as investors wait for clarity in the weeks and months ahead. On the tech side though, real estate may just be one of the most interesting verticals in which to launch a company and raise capital today. Startups have tried for……
Built above the abandoned Underground station Osterley Park, Osterley Bookshop was opened in 1967, and has been a wondrous place for bookworms and lovers of the obscure ever since. It features a wide range of second-hand books, from classics to children’s, almost all for under £10, stacked on top of each other in seeming chaos that only the owners seem to understand. What makes this bookstore truly special—apart from the fact that the station below with quite a history of……
Honda has confirmed a cyberattack that brought parts of its global operations to a standstill. The company said in a brief statement Tuesday that the attack caused production issues outside of its headquarters in Japan. “Work is being undertaken to minimize the impact and to restore full functionality of production, sales, and development activities,” according to the BBC. It follows a tweet from the company, now pinned to the top of its Twitter feed, stating that its customer service……
