Author: Ms. R.

In Japan, it’s quite common for shopping malls to come equipped with “lost child centers,” which serve as a sort of lost-and-found for children. A precursor to this feature existed even in the Edo period, the last age of the samurai, which lasted from 1603 to 1867. Back then, the district of Nihonbashi flourished as a castle town as well as a key point of traffic, where the famous Five Highways of Edo started. People came from all across……

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  Though the Wright brothers are generally accepted as the first people to have achieved sustained powered flight, claims have been made that some managed to achieve the feat before them. Gustave Whitehead was one such inventor. Born in Germany in 1874, Whitehead immigrated to the United States as a young man and became involved with early aeronautics. After building and testing numerous gliders, kites, ornithopters, and model airplanes, Whitehead developed the No. 21— a full-sized engine-powered flying machine……

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In New Zealand, the Māori people have upheld a long tradition of creating wooden or stone carvings of deities, ancestors, or sacred animals. These carvings are known as tiki, which is also the name of the first man in Māori mythology. These carvings were often placed in and around sacred areas that corresponded to what the characters represented. The tradition of tiki would spread throughout the Pacific region over time, and has since become a somewhat wrongly-attributed staple of Hawaiian culture……

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The demons are tiny, and legion. Scowling, tongue-flicking devils, no bigger than a thumbnail, and strange animals pile together in a tangle of dog legs and rabbit ears, each smaller than the next. The lines of the painting are so fine that the tiniest figures seem to pull the viewer into an infinite Satanic menagerie. The story of how the demonveggen, or demon wall, came to be is as strange and disturbing as the mural itself. It’s a tale……

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A towering pair of statues of the ferocious-looking lion-headed goddess Sekhmet stand at the entrance of the Egyptian Museum of Turin. The imposing statues seem to be both guarding and inviting the visitor to explore the archeological treasures within.    The Egyptian Museum of Turin is one of the oldest collections of Ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world. It dates back to the 1750s, when King Emanuelle III instructed and funded the expedition of the famed Italian botanist Vitaliano Donati…….

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This article is adapted from the October 9, 2021, edition of Gastro Obscura’s Favorite Things newsletter. You can sign up here. In 2017, I joined Atlas Obscura. Gastro Obscura did not yet exist, and I was given the dreamy job of assembling a team and launching a quirky new food publication. Ever since, our crew of food nerds has tried to share the wonder and curiosity we feel when learning about the history, culture, and surprising stories behind how……

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Though they shared a name, it’s said the two lighthouse keepers, the towering Thomas Griffith and the middle-aged Thomas Howell, didn’t get along, and could empty pubs with one of their heated arguments. In the winter of 1800 to 1801, the two men were stuck on the most remote island in Wales, 20 miles from shore, operating Smalls Lighthouse. The brutal winter weather turned what should’ve been a month-long stay into a grueling, almost five-month exile. Then, four months……

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