Author: Ms. R.

At this fifth-generation, family-owned brewery, the beer has a not-so-secret ingredient: rocks. Not just any rocks, but hunks of granite heated in a roaring open fire. Once the stones glow dull red, the brewer carefully extracts them from the flames and adds them to 120-year-old granite vats. The white-hot granite caramelizes the malt sugars in the wort, lending a pleasantly toasty flavor to the finished Steinbier (literally “rock beer”). Steinbier is hardly a new invention. Until the end of……

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According to founder Gary Hinegardner, Wood Hat Spirits sprang from an epiphany: Missouri is home to dense forests of white oak that supply the worldwide whiskey industry with barrels for aging, and the state grows plenty of corn and wheat. With the two key ingredients nearby, why not open a distillery and make whiskey in Missouri? As for the handmade wood hats, well, Hinegardner loves them, so why not sell them too? Since its opening in 2014, Wood Hat Spirits has……

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In the Thamesmead area of London, a sinister-looking housing estate surrounds an artificial lake that is forever associated with its appearance in Stanley Kubrick’s dark sci-fi masterpiece A Clockwork Orange. Southmere Lake was constructed in the 1960s as part of the ambitious Thamesmead Plan to address the growing population south of the Thames river. The housing estate was built in the Brutalist architectural style, which was popular during the post-war period. Brutalist designs often incorporate reinforced concrete and steel……

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Half a mile off the coast of the Furness Peninsula in North West England lies a 50-acre island in the dark waters of Morecambe Bay. Grey seals outnumber the human population here, which hovers around 10. Although civilization has existed on these shores for more than 3,000 years, there are only two surviving buildings of any note: a crumbling 14th-century castle once used by Savignac monks to guard against marauding Scottish pirates, and the Ship Inn, a 300-year-old pub…….

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Umberto Eco’s fictional anecdote in The Name of the Rose about finding an obscure volume in a bookstore in Buenos Aires is actually quite plausible: used book shops and open-air book markets are a trademark of the city’s culture. The one in Parque Rivadavia is amongst the oldest and largest, and also quite off the beaten tourist track. Open since 1953, this large book market sells and trades used and new books, records, and comics. Patient browsing of their……

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On land originally known as the William and Mary Tract, Zachariah Waters built a saw and grist mill some time around 1810. The mill processed grain, lumber, and linseed oil made from pressed flax seed. While the mill stopped operating around 1895, an interesting piece of local history explains the demise of the miller’s house, which are now separate ruins that are located where the Hard Rock Trail crosses Lake Ridge Road less than half a mile away. The……

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Born in 1920, Henrietta Lacks suffered a severe hemorrhage after giving birth to her fifth child. At Johns Hopkins, the only hospital in the area that treated Black patients at the time, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer and died nine months later at the age of 31. During her treatments, two samples, one of healthy tissue and the other cancerous, were taken from Lacks’s cervix and given to cancer researcher George Otto Gey. He later created the first……

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In early September, the flames ate their way across hills forested in chestnut and cork oak. The inferno would come within a mile of the tiny whitewashed village of Genalguacil, perched on a steep slope high in the dry air of southern Spain. The sky darkened and a hot autumn wind brought the scent of fire to the hamlet’s 600 or so residents as they gathered their livestock, packed their belongings, and evacuated. As a trail of cars, trucks,……

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This abandoned village in western Sicily is one of a number of farmers’ villages (borghi rurali) built at the instruction of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Known as Borgo Amerigo Fazio, the village was built in 1939—only a few years before the end of Italy‘s fascist regime. The idea was to create a design with clear structures: church, school, administration buildings, police, and public health offices in the center, surrounded by private residences. Mussolini believed that if the amenities of a……

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In 1919, Rockland County Attorney General, Thomas Gagan, bought this house along Route 9W in Haverstraw, New York. His daughter, Amo, lived there for 50 years. According to local history, as a 13-year old, she saw Edward Hopper seated at his portable easel on the gravel sidings of the train track creating the painting that would become a masterpiece of American art and the prototype for an iconic image from American cinema. The house was built in 1885 and……

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The Slayer’s Slab is a medieval gravestone that, though lacking an inscription detailing the tomb’s occupant, is attributed to a local dragonslayer who rid the village of the fearsome dragon, the Knucker of Lyminster. Originally found in the graveyard of St. Mary Magdalene church in Lyminster, West Sussex, the slab was moved inside the church so as to prevent further weathering. It bears the marking of a cross over a herringbone pattern, though some claim it is in fact……

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Ulysses S. Grant spent the last six weeks of his life in a hilltop cottage in upstate New York, a few miles from the Hudson River. The former president was broke, having lost all his wealth in a Ponzi scheme, and he knew he was dying—but he was determined to finish his memoir first, in the hopes that its royalties would be enough to support his wife Julia after his death. Grant had been invited to use this cottage……

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For decades, the history of Baltimore’s Black community was filed away—somewhat chronologically, in banker’s boxes and bound volumes. It was stored with care, but without enough space or the expensive climate control measures to ensure long-term survival. This archive of the country’s longest-running Black family-owned newspaper—the Afro-American, which still publishes today—got its start as what’s known in the newspaper industry as a morgue, a resting place for reference files of newspaper clippings in the days before Google. Now Savannah……

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