Author: Ms. R.

This small museum boasts an impressive collection of both living and preserved insects, taxidermy, antiques, art, and other oddities. It’s the work of Nina Salem, who has amassed a collection of some 2,500 insects over the course of her life. Salem opened the Insect Asylum in 2022, wanting a space to share her passion for the natural world. “I didn’t have a school to learn all this, and I was told it was weird and it was wrong, and that’s……

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Imagine a Chinese potsticker dumpling with a white dough wrapper, browned in a frying pan. It’s huge. There’s only one per serving, because each is as big as a plate. And when it’s put in front of you, it’ll have caramelized onions on top like pierogies do. Cut it open and you´ll find the same sort of peppery potato filling you’ll see in knishes. These are boova shenkel, the traditional filled dumplings of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Once a staple……

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Daniel “Mad Dog” Morgan is one of Australia’s most notorious bushrangers, once described as “the most bloodthirsty ruffian that ever took to the bush in Australia.” Born in 1830 to parents Mary Owen and George Fuller, the future outlaw started stealing horses and cattle in his teenage years. As time went on, he became a notorious horse thief. Time in jail hardened Morgan.and eventually he moved onto a career as a bushranger. There is no hint of the image……

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Sitting on top of a hill above a quaint village below, Hume Castle looks a bit like a cardboard cut out of a castle from a 1950s B-movie. For centuries, this castle served as a major defensive site in between the often-fluctuating border between England and Scotland. Throughout its history, the castle has been burned and destroyed multiple times in attempts to prevent the fortification from falling into enemy hands. The hill itself stands 750 meters above sea level,……

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Excerpted from Sewer, by former Atlas Obscura Senior Editor Jessica Leigh Hester, available November 3, 2022, from Bloomsbury. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Most of the people wandering the blocks of London’s Covent Garden neighborhood on a chilly evening in September 2019, nursing frothy beverages in the gold glow beaming from café windows or hurrying past sleepy tobacconists and hat shops, probably had no idea that the pipes far below their feet were gunked up with globs of……

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Only a 30-minute boat ride from the coastal town of Nasugbu, an island adorned in classical Grecian aesthetics awaits. As you approach this 27-hectare (67-acre) rustic island, your gaze will gravitate towards the Grecian columns adorning the rocky outcrop that dominates the island.  Fortune Island was constructed in 1995 as an exclusive luxury resort owned by former Batangas Governor José Antonio Leviste. He steered the project, deciding to build it in a classical Greek style complete with an Acropolis……

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Many new blocks of flats come with communal features to attract buyers, but an air raid shelter able to hold 48 people is rarely one of them. In 1938, the builders of a new residential block of flats in Mortlake, South West London, must have sensed which way world affairs were going, because they decided to build just such a shelter under the lawn of St Leonard’s Court. The architect, F.G. Fox, was prescient: the shelter was soon in……

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On a humid summer morning in the mountain-backed metropolis of Gwangju, a cluster of fifth graders shuffled into an auditorium at 5.18 Freedom Park. Here were the former barracks where the South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan and his forces imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, and in some cases killed thousands of civilians in May of 1980. Today, Koreans refer to these events as “5.18,” marking the first day of the Gwangju Uprising, when city residents demanded democracy in the wake……

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