Author: Ms. R.

Along the shores of the Red River in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is a tower of curving glass, steel, and alabaster, a bright place even in the dead of winter. In a gallery on the first floor, conservator Stephanie Chipilski checks equipment that monitors the room’s temperature and humidity. She slips on a pair of gloves and approaches a curving 40-foot wall of cedar that displays hundreds of items, many mounted on wooden blocks. The……

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This bear pit is the finest surviving example in the United Kingdom, and its superb condition of the structure is thanks to the many years it was used as Yorkshire’s biggest compost pit. This is a Grade II listed structure and was built in 1836 to home Bruin, a black bear whose sole entertainment was a tree placed in the middle of the pit for him to climb, according to research by local historian Alison Hunter. Sadly for Bruin,……

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It was 15 years ago when they first started talking about dirty words. Tamanna Mishra and Neha Thakur often discussed how uneasy popular Indian expletives made them. Mishra, a communications consultant in Bengaluru, and Thakur, an Airbnb host in Mumbai, noticed increasingly casual use of these profanities in mainstream entertainment. The problem wasn’t the swearing itself, but they were bothered that many of these expressions seem to have biased, bigoted, or misogynist origins. This spurred the two women to……

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Roberta Saltzman shopped a lot on eBay. Often, her purchases fit into one narrow category: Jewish cookbooks, the more obscure, the better. Never mind that Saltzman, who died in 2014, was by all accounts not that interested in cooking. Over the years, she accumulated 700 Jewish cookbooks, with a particular focus on community cookbooks from small-town America. Despite being chief assistant librarian at the New York Public Library’s Dorot Jewish Division, Saltzman used her own money to build her……

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On the outskirts of Hanga Roa, Easter Island’s only town, the Museo Rapa Nui has a small but striking collection. It includes a rare female version of the monolithic statues known as moai, and sets of piercing moai eyes made from white coral and red volcanic rock. Finely worked obsidian tools sit alongside displays on the Birdman contest, which involved swimming through shark-infested waters and searching an offshore islet for a seabird egg in order to claim the spiritual……

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To step into one of Scandinavia’s surviving stave churches is to enter the past. Shadows shift and tell stories in the elaborate carvings of intertwined beasts that are hallmarks of the churches’ unique architecture. Sounds reverberate off the timber as if traveling across centuries. The air feels dense with the tang of hewn wood, peat smoke, and pine tar. As early as the 11th century, builders began erecting these churches all over the region. Much of Europe was raising……

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In the city of Tarragona, the ruins of a massive structure stand by the water’s edge. Built in the second century, this amphitheater once held up to 15,000 spectators for various events including brutal gladiator fights. From a distance this structure looks like a semi-circular Roman theatre, but the original plan was a complete oval. It was located outside the city, near the forum and the entrance of the town.  The reason for its current appearance is that in the sixth……

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There’s a blue road running by Souq Waqif known as Abdullah Bin Jassim Street. The unconventional idea to paint the road blue was approved by Ashghal, the Public Works Authority, as a pilot project designed to reduce heat radiating from the asphalt. The exact composition of the paint is not a matter of public knowledge. All that is known is that the paint consists of four coats, resulting in a thick layer of heat-reflecting blue paint, with hollow ceramic……

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