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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD57IkvzE50 When everybody had one or two vodkas and smoked a few joints, it was always the time for the blowgun. —John Giorno From 1974 to 1982, writer William S. Burroughs lived in a former locker room of a 19th-century former-YMCA on New York City’s Lower East Side. When he moved on, his stuff, including his worn out shoes, his […] A Look Inside William S. Burroughs’ Bunker is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZgjNeXXTjU A house cat is not really a fur baby, but it is something rather more remarkable: a tiny conquistador with the whole planet at its feet —Abigail Tucker As part of its Annals of Obsession video series, The New Yorker invited science journalist Abigail Tucker, author of The Lion in the Living Room, to reflect on “how felines took over […] Why Humans Are Obsessed with Cats is a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H464u4q_JGk The state of our troubled planet dictates that disposables are out. Reusables are in. And anyone who’s taught themselves how to mend and maintain their stuff has earned the right to flaunt it! A quick scroll through Instagram reveals loads of visible mending projects that highlight rather than disguise the area of repair, drawing the eye […] The Japanese Traditions of Sashiko & Boro: The...

Image via the Wiltshire Museum The burial rites of ancient and exotic peoples can seem outlandish to us, but there’s nothing particularly normal about the funeral traditions in the United States and the UK, where corpses are sent off to professional undertakers and made to look alive before they're sealed in boxes and buried or […] Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Dead Relatives...

Léonide Massine may not be not the most famous name to grace socialite Elizabeth Fuller Chapman’s home movies. In terms of 21st century name brand recognition, he definitely lags behind art world heavies Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brâncuși, Henri Matisse, composer Igor Stravinsky, novelist Colette, playwright Thornton Wilder, the ever-formidable poet and collector Gertrude Stein, and her longtime companion Alice B. Toklas. Such were the […] Watch Home Movies Starring Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse,...

Everything old is new again and Tuscany’s buchette del vino—wine windows—are definitely rolling with the times. As Lisa Harvey earlier reported in Atlas Obscura, buchette del vino became a thing in 1559, shortly after Cosimo I de’ Medici decreed that Florence-dwelling vineyard owners could bypass taverns and wine merchants to sell their product directly to the public. Wealthy wine […] The Wine Windows of Renaissance Florence Dispense Wine...

Remember early April, when we threw ourselves into the Getty Challenge, turning ourselves into historic art recreations in lieu of climbing the walls? Seems like ages ago, doesn’t it, that you wrapped a shower curtain around your head and rifled through the button box, rabid to make yourself into a masterpiece. While it’s not accurate to […] Get the Ancient Roman Look: A Hair &...

Funeral rites, burials, and other rituals are held near-universally sacred, not only due to religious and cultural beliefs about death: We preserve our connection to our ancestors through the records of their births and deaths. For many Black Americans in the U.S. south, grief and loss have been compounded by centuries of violence and tragedy, […] New Digital Archive Opens Access to Thousands of...

Those of us who’ve dedicated a portion of our isolation to the art of sourdough have not suffered for a lack of information on how that particular sausage should get made. The Internet harbors hundreds, nay, thousands of complicated, contrary, often contradictory, extremely firm opinions on the subject. You can lose hours…days…weeks, agonizing over which method to […] Cambridge University Professor Cooks 4000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient...

The Paris Catacombs is “one of those places,” wrote photographer Félix Nadar, “that everyone wants to see and no one wants to see again.” If anyone would know, Nadar would. He spent three months in and out of the underground city of death, with its macabre piles of skulls and crossbones, taking photographs (see here) […] Take a Virtual Tour of the Paris Catacombs...

The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.  —Lewis Wickes Hine, “Social Photography: How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift” (1909) Long before Brandon […] The Photos That Ended Child Labor in the...

Negro Dive Raided. Thirteen Black Men Dressed as Women Surprised at Supper and Arrested. —The Washington Post, April 13, 1888 Sometimes, when we are engaged as either participant in, or eyewitness to, the making of history, its easy to forget the history-makers who came earlier, who dug the trenches that allow our modern battles to be […] America’s First Drag Queen Was Also America’s First...

Only recently has “actor” become an acceptable gender-neutral term for performers of stage and screen. Prior to that, we had “actor” and “actress,” and while there may have been some problematic assumptions concerning the type of woman who might be drawn to the profession, there was arguably linguistic parity between the two words. Not so […] <i>Radical Women</i>: Stream the Getty’s Podcast That Features...

New York City is in a constant state of flux. For every Nets fan cheering their team on in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and every tourist gamboling about the post-punk, upscale East Village, there are dozens of local residents who remember what—and who—was displaced to pave the way for this progress. It’s no great leap to […] The Lost Neighborhood Buried Under New York City’s...

Krampus—the Christmas “half goat, half demon” of Germanic folklore—has become a figure of some fascination in popular culture recently. We might call the appetite for this “anti-St. Nicholas… who literally beats people into being nice and not naughty,” National Geographic writes, a testament to a widespread sentiment: Hang the forced cheer, Christmas can be dreadful. […] When People Gave Anti-Valentine’s Day Cards: Revisit the...

The Smithsonian sets the scene for this Christmas card sent in 1933, a few years into the Great Depression. They write: Despite the glum economic situation, the Pinero family used a brown paper bag to fashion an inexpensive holiday greeting card. They penned a clever rhyme and added some charming line drawings of Mom, Dad, […] A Simple, Down-to-Earth Christmas Card from the Great...

Those of us who are deeply disappointed to learn we won’t be seeing Harriet Tubman’s face on a redesigned $20 bill any time soon can dry our eyes on a Tubman tea towel… or could if the revered abolitionist and activist wasn’t one of the family-owned Radical Tea Towel’s hottest selling items. The popular design, based […] Radical Tea Towels Offer a Graphic Crash Course...

Forewarned is forearmed, so in 1943, the United States Office of War Information created a training film to prevent soldiers bound for Great Britain from earning their Ugly American stripes. The excerpt above concentrates on pub etiquette, casting actor and Army Air Corps captain Burgess Meredith in the role of a discreet military Virgil, explaining in hushed tones the […] How to Behave in a British Pub: A...