Author: Ms. R.

What do you do when your home starts overflowing with strange, curious, and possibly cursed objects? If you’re author Joshua Ginsberg of Tampa, you reach out to a used bookstore to create a mini-museum window display.  During the research for his books, Ginsberg accumulated a trove of trinkets and memorabilia from the various places he visited throughout Florida and the southeastern United States. Not wanting to part with these items, but also not wanting them to continue to pile……

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The Merrill Fountain sits in the middle of Palmer Park in Detroit, Michigan. Built in 1901, the fountain once occupied a place of honor in front of the old Opera House. Though the Detroit Opera House is long gone, its stunning white marble fountain remains.    Palmer Park is located at the corner of Merrill Plaisance Street and Second Avenue.  The park is home not only to the fountain,  but also to a public golf course tennis courts, a playground,……

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Despite the historical significance of this site, it has very few visitors, and is secured by a single guard who is very happy to tell you all he knows of the site. The Barbar Temple is actually three Dilmun temples, built on top of each other, starting in the third millennium B.C. (For context, the Egyptian Pyramids at Giza started construction in the middle of the second millennium B.C.). Temple 2 was built approximately 500 years after Temple 1,……

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As an abolitionist leader, John Brown is a complicated figure in American history. In the wake of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, the state of Kansas became awash with pro-slavery “border ruffians” from Missouri and “Jayhawkers” from the east, with a mission to influence the state’s stance on slavery. After a rash of violence on abolitionist structures in Lawrence, Kansas, Brown led an attack on the pro-slavery instigators, attacking them with broadswords, leaving five dead. Three years later, Brown……

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In the sleepy village of Wilflingen, in southern Germany, stands the house of Ernst Jünger, an eccentric and controversial best-selling German novelist. A pioneer of sci-fi and magical realism, Jünger was a rebel, a philosopher, a decorated WWI veteran, an entomologist, a psychonaut, and a centenarian. After fighting in the First World War, Jünger studied biology and wrote his most famous work In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel), which chronicled his personal experience of the war and went on to become……

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This 800-year-old castle boasts incredible views of the whole east coast of Guernsey and across to the other islands of Herm, Sark, and Alderney. It is steeped in history that includes the English Civil War and the German occupation of the castle and islands during World War II. Formerly a tidal island, this plot of land was first fortified as a castle in the early 13th century. In its earliest days, the castle comprised a keep, a chapel, two courtyards,……

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The Lunch Box Museum is near the shores of Clear Lake in rural California’s wine country. Right off Highway 20 in the town of Nice, it resides in what looks like a garage. But what’s inside will surprise visitors as they are treated to all things retro, including lunch boxes to suit any childhood—from Strawberry Shortcake to the Lone Ranger (thermos included in most cases). The collection spans the walls, rests on shelves near the ceiling, and fills the……

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Splatters of color, red as viscera and yellow as bile, stain an otherwise ghostly landscape. Salt formations resemble bones and body parts when seen from overhead, creating an unsettling piece of art that might be mistaken for a crime scene photo. Photographer Timothy Moon, who captured this arresting image of Australia’s Lake Tyrrell using a drone, compared the site to “a beating heart laid bare.” The vivid colors in Moon’s photograph, taken from about 250 feet above the lakebed,……

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This piece was originally published in The Guardian and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. When caterpillars of a beautiful butterfly were introduced to the tiny island of Sottunga in the Åland archipelago, scientists hoped to study how the emerging butterflies would disperse across the landscape. But researchers did not realize that their introduction of the Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) would lead to the emergence of three other species, which sprang out of the butterfly like……

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