The Great Beer Tragedy of 1814

On October 17, 1814, a wooden beer vat burst at Meux & Co.’s Horseshoe Brewery in London. The force of … More

Secrets of the Sargasso Sea

I’ve always thought it’d be neat to visit a point in the ocean where there’s absolutely no land in sight. … More

Some years ago, Samoa skipped Friday. In 2011, Samoans lived through Thursday, December 29 (just like everyone else in the … More

Here he is in a 14th century silk portrait. He’s also on Mongolian banknotes, on Mongolian vodka bottles, atop this … More

Want to get away from it all? Yeah, me too. And I know just the place. The most remote uninhabited … More

Heavily armed military zone? Tourist attraction? Why not both! The Korean Demilitarized Zone runs right across the Korean peninsula, on … More

What’s the world’s best monument featuring a rotating dictator? Is it the Arch of Neutrality in Turkmenistan? Of course it is! … More

Like whisky? How about whisky that’s been buried in Antarctic ice for over a century? Well, good news! That exists. … More

When Pope Formosus died in 896, after a five-year jaunt as pope, he was interred in St. Peter’s Basilica, where … More

It’s probably this guy: Vice admiral Vasily Arkhipov. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Arkhipov commanded a flotilla of Soviet submarines. … More

Varosha in North Cyprus was once the hottest tourist spot in the region. It had all the makings of a Mediterranean … More

Most human heads have a pretty simple story. They spend a few decades on top of a body and then, … More

I live by the ocean. Just a few feet above sea level. Sea-level living is all right, I guess — … More

Obviously, the best kind of swimming is lake swimming. Nothing like floating around the middle of a lake, imagining the … More

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia. The only really successful slave rebellion in history was the Haitian Revolution. Other slave … More

This is a picture of Hiroo Onoda, an imperial Japanese soldier during World War II. In 1944, Onoda was sent to … More

I like a good centuries-old building. But sometimes these old structures can get a bit dank and gloomy inside. So … More