Poles of Beauty

Dec 22, 2017

An image recently published by one of my favorite blogs, Astronomy Picture of the Day, made me realize that our planet earth posses perhaps...

Checkpoint Charlie

Dec 20, 2017

For nearly thirty years until the end of the Cold War, Berlin lay divided both physically and ideologically by the infamous Berlin Wall that...

Ethiopia’s Churches In The Sky

Dec 19, 2017

The ancient Kingdom of Axum, now a part of Ethiopia, was one of the first nations in the world to adopt Christianity. The religion took stro...

How Clowns Trademark Their Face By Painting On Eggs

Dec 15, 2017

Every clown’s face makeup is unique, or at least, they should be, for there is an unwritten rule within the clowning community that no clown...

Toronto’s Camouflaged Electric Substations

Dec 14, 2017

More often than not, industrial infrastructures are an eyesore, especially when they are smack in the middle of a beautiful city like Toront...

Cultybraggan: Britain’s Last POW Camp

Dec 12, 2017

The Cultybraggan camp located near the Scottish village of Comrie, in Perthshire, is one of the last remaining World War 2 Prisoner of War C...

Decorating Fences With Trash, The New Zealander Way

Dec 9, 2017

New Zealanders have a unique way of discarding their trash—they hang them on fences. Bras, boots, toothbrushes, bicycles, everything that ha...

The Dark Legacy of Gruinard Island

Dec 8, 2017

Halfway between the villages of Gairloch and Ullapool in the North-West Highlands of Scotland, sits a small oval-shaped island named Gruinar...

Leiden’s Love Affair With Poems And Equations

Dec 7, 2017

Scattered throughout the city of Leiden, in The Netherlands, are over one hundred poems carefully hand-painted on the exterior walls of buil...

Chateau de Chenonceau: The Chateau Built Over A River

Dec 6, 2017

Château de Chenonceau, located near the small village of Chenonceaux in France, is one of the best-known chateau of the Loire valley. The ch...

The Southern Pole of Inaccessibility

Dec 6, 2017

The cold hard stare of Lenin penetrating the icy air is the only thing you’ll come across the vast frozen landscape in this part of Antarcti...

The German Hyperinflation of 1923

Dec 5, 2017

There was a time when an average German carried billions of marks in their pockets but could still buy nothing. A loaf of bread cost 200 bil...

The Fungus That Makes Mummies

Dec 4, 2017

In 1647, construction workers carrying out repairs on the Church of Saint Andrew in the small city of Venzone, in the province of Udine, Ita...

The Abandoned Hotels of Kupari

Dec 4, 2017

Affixed to the wall near the city gate in the town of Dubrovnik on Croatia’s beautiful Dalmatian Coast, is a map showing the scale of damage...

Derbent: Russia’s Oldest City

Dec 1, 2017

Located on a narrow strip of land between the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains in the far western end of Eurasia, is the city of Derbe...

The Mega Hotels of Mecca

Nov 30, 2017

A mammoth new hotel is rising in Saudi Arabia’s holy city Mecca. When completed it will have 10,000 rooms spanning more than 1.4 million squ...

The Rise of Vertical Cemeteries

Nov 29, 2017

According to the Population Reference Bureau , there are approximately 101 billion dead people on earth with 7 billion more to join them wit...

Copenhagen’s Urban Birdhouses

Nov 28, 2017

Thomas Dambo—you may remember him from a couple of months ago, where he constructed giant troll-like wooden sculptures and hid them around ...

Modern Potemkin Villages

Nov 27, 2017

In 1787, Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, was scheduled for a grand tour of the newly acquired lands of Crimea and New Russia—now...

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin’s Color Photographs of Pre-Revolution Russia

Nov 25, 2017

Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian chemist and photographer, best known for his pioneering work in color photography during t...