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Category / Nostalgia

November 16, 2018

Diary of a Tomb Raider

Can you imagine being among the first to study an ancient site? How you would feel brushing your fingers against those ancient monoliths, untouched for thousands of years, hidden in the thick of the jungle. You would think the days for such an adventure are long gone; that there’s nothing left to discover nowadays– but…

November 15, 2018

America’s Beauty School Dropouts: A Brief Compendium

We miss the days when estheticians waxed eyebrows in a Paul Bunyan-ready cottage, perfected their perming skills in a nondescript clapboard shack, and barbers painted their 1969 Volkswagens to match their salon. More than mere institutions for a cute ‘do, the beauty schools and barber shops of yesteryear were visible extensions of major cultural shifts.…

November 14, 2018

The Real Life ‘Indiana Jones’ Was Just as Cool as You Think.

He said he “was born under a lucky star”. Yet, Roy Chapman Andrews, that good ‘ole American chaser of bandits, dinosaur eggs and lost civilisations, was always the kind of man who made his own luck. He charmed a generation of daydreamers with his stories of the Gobi desert — and that hat —and while there’s…

November 13, 2018

Here’s What Japanese Art Looked Like in the Aftermath of the Atomic Bombs

The cultural shift between pre and post-WWII world Japan was complicated and often divisive, but if you were photographer Eikoh Hosoe, that tension became fuel for creative expression that turned into a surrealist dreamworld – or nightmare, depending on who you asked. The Japanese artist’s works mirrored the state of a shell-shocked country in the…

November 8, 2018

A Secret Archive in New York City that Saved Tiffany Lamps from Extinction

Whose job is it to safeguard one of the most hated designs in decorative history? In the case of the Tiffany lamp, it fell to a New York City orthodontist and immigrant from Austria who happened to be furniture shopping in Greenwich Village in 1935 when his wife spotted a “strange, old-fashioned lamp”. Dr. Egon Neustadt and…

November 7, 2018

For Sale: The Lost Island Kingdom of a 1920s Bad Girl

“I ran a country”, boasted the tattooed, cigar-smoking, openly gay It-girl of the 1920s, whose life reads like an unwritten book by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She built her own private island kingdom, was hailed the “fastest woman on water” as a champion motorboat racer and had her suits made on Saville Row. But Marion Barbara ‘Joe‘ Carstairs said herself, she…

November 6, 2018

Three NYC Bookshops That Will Steal Your Heart

New York City has no shortage of vast bookstores where you can easily spend an hour peacefully browsing the endless shelves and genres, but what I’m looking for is a bookshop that makes my heart ache a little; one that makes me want to swap lives with the bookseller and live inside their world. So…

November 2, 2018

A Kitschy Weekend Guide to the Australian Outback

We’ve got that itch for a little road trip once again, and this time it’s taking us to the Land Down Under, specifically, to the town of Broken Hill— no sandy beaches, no respite from a sun that (literally) shines longer and brighter than most places on earth, but it’s the keeper of some of…

November 2, 2018

Unlocking the Secrets of Vinegar Hill, New York

How can you escape from the New York City grind on an MTA card budget? Make a break for Brooklyn’s Vinegar Hill, the sleepy neighbourhood that’s managed to safeguard its 400-year-old, cobblestone streets from the clutches of big development. It’s on small but hallowed ground, bound together by a tight-knit community whose homes look like…

November 1, 2018

So What’s the Deal with Those Quakertown Pyramids?

We just love it when two utterly opposite worlds collide, which is precisely the case with the mysterious pyramids sitting smack in the middle of Quakertown, USA. That’s right, States-bound folks: you can now eschew a visit to Cairo and just head to rural Pennsylvania to get a taste of an esoteric society, the “Rosicrucian Order”,…

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