Author: Ms. R.

Bison meatballs bathed in blueberry sauce. Roasted fiddlehead ferns. Acorn crêpes topped with maple cream. These are just a few examples of what Indigenous chefs are serving at restaurants across California. Three spots in particular are dedicated to championing Native foods and culture in the state. Their chefs cite the same formative experience: growing up wondering why every other culture had a restaurant featuring its cuisine, but seeing none that reflected their own Native foodways. Cafe Ohlone, the first……

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Crystal Wahpepah is a member of the Kickapoo nation of Oklahoma, but growing up, she spent most of her time in Oakland, not far from the location of her new restaurant. Her goal is to introduce diners to the beauty of Native foods. While she gets much of her produce from local Indigenous farmers, she features a variety of beans, corn, rice, and other foodstuffs from Native producers across the country. Wahpepah was the first Native contestant on the……

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THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE MAY 21, 2022, EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURA’S FAVORITE THINGS NEWSLETTER. YOU CAN SIGN UP HERE. The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. Decades of propping up the dairy industry—by buying up surplus milk and turning it into processed commodity cheese—had backfired, hard. The Washington Post reported that the interest……

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In November 1944, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Arrow Cross released a decree to establish a Jewish ghetto within Budapest. From December 1944 until January 1945, this area was then locked down.  While the last remaining piece of the original ghetto wall was destroyed to make way for construction in 2006, this memorial is where the Budapest ghetto’s wall once stood during the darkest days of the Holocaust. During this period, 70,000 Jews were crowded into an……

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Monsignor Luis Miguel Cantón Marín was born in Progreso either in 1937 or 1938, son of Luis Cantón Mas (who was born in China, and whose paternal surname is likely based on what is still the most common Spanish name of the city of Guangzhou) and Florencia Marín Sánchez. Following his mother’s death, he was sent as a boy to study in Mexico City, and after returning to Progreso, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1964. Initially based……

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El Impenetrable National Park is as daunting a landscape as the name suggests. Stands of quebracho—often called the hardest wood in the world—dominate the park’s uplands; elsewhere, thick knots of locust trees, palms, and even cacti create a dense patchwork of forest. The Teuco River winds through this corner of northern Argentina’s Chaco Province like a muddy yellow serpent, flooding seasonally and making much of the area impassable for weeks at a time. But the river also sustains resident……

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For three days in March 1898, this house hosted the first congress of what would become the Russian Communist Party. The event was held in utmost secrecy in the Minsk, Belarus, home belonging to the railway worker Rumyantsev. All participants knew what would happen if they were caught—the cover story for the meeting was that they were celebrating the name day of Rumyantsev’s wife. No minutes were taken from any of the six sessions held but the resolutions were recorded,……

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The timber trestle bridge was built in 1915 at the Orbost end of the Bairnsdale-Orbost railway line. At one time, the line had many trestle bridges over its 100-kilometer (62-mile) length, but many have been lost over time. The Snowy River Floodplain Railway Bridges are two sequential and exceptionally long and low timber railway bridges across the Snowy River floodplain. They measure 770 meters (2,526 feet) and 183 meters (600 feet) long, and make up the state’s longest timber……

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A spit is a peninsula of loose sediment deposited by longshore drift. Longshore drift occurs when the prevailing wind is not perpendicular to the shore, so the incoming waves tend to move sediment along the shoreline away from the wind. When the shoreline bends abruptly, the moving sediment doesn’t follow the bend and keeps going straight. Depending on other factors such as water depth and currents, it can build out to form a peninsula known as a spit.  Dungeness……

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Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, producer Baudelaire Ceus searches for the resting place of famed author Richard Wright among the graves other cultural icons—Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Sadegh Hedaya, and more—in Paris’s most famed cemetery. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along……

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This 20-foot-tall obelisk stands in the middle of a small community park surrounded by central Texas farmland.  Why is it here?  Where did it come from?  and… What is it doing? On the back side, a short description of its origin tells us that it was created by Austin-based artist, Matthew Johnson, and inspired by the words of the late author Michelle McNamara. Funds for the limestone monument were raised via a Kickstarter campaign in 2018.  But there it is……

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