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Category / Nostalgia

A Brief History of the Mom & Pop Business of Public Execution

In Paris, when his father died in 1644, Louis Desmorest inherited his family’s execution business at the age of 10. His mother had been part of an established execution family that had been in business for the past 100 years. Desmorest’s mother’s clan also hatched the most notable of all the execution families, the Sansons,…

How American Drugstores nearly replaced the Paris Bistro

Legendary pin-up Lana Turner is said to have been discovered perched on a bar stool bound in a tight sweater at the famous Schwab’s Drugstore on LA’s Sunset Strip. The Drugstore was the quintessential, aspirational, all-American immersion, where the cool kids hung out, fell in and out of love, plotted and gossiped behind the soda…

The Great Binge: An Unsettling Reality Check of the Drug-Fuelled “Belle Epoque”

Curiously absent from our historical timelines is “The Great Binge”, a more recently-coined but arguably more appropriate term for that famous period at the turn of the century which we typically refer to as the “Belle Epoque” or the “Gilded Age”. This wasn’t just a time when culture and industry flourished however, it was also…

Forget Versailles, Tune into the Forgotten Château that Became France’s Abbey Road

Imagine the sweet sound of a duet between Elton John and Frédéric Chopin, or a Van Gogh painting interpreted in song by David Bowie. What if the lyrics for a Fleetwood Mac verse or a Pink Floyd anthem were ghost written by the famed 19th century female novelist George Sand? There’s only one place that…

What Became of the Ancient Greek City they Found in Afghanistan

What was once essentially a completely Greek city in the depths of Afghanistan, was lost under the desert sands for almost 2,000 years, hidden from history until its sensational rediscovery in the 1960s. It was christened by archeologists as Ai-Khanoum, or ‘Lady Moon’, after an Uzbek princess who had lived on its rocky summit. But…

A Spiritual Revisiting of the Lost Beatles Ashram

‘Roll up! Roll up! for the mystery tour’… a mystery indeed, given the chaos that subsequently engulfed The Beatles on their return from India to the West in 1968. Following the ground breaking success of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Fab Four plus an entourage of no less than 60 people (including wives,…

Update from his Ghost Town: Time Capsules, Mine Exploration & Disaster

It’s been 7 months since our Zoom Date with the guy who bought a ghost town and 8 months since he started living there alone as the pandemic took hold of the United States. A lot has happened in the abandoned mining town of Cerro Gordo since. We’ll start with the bad heartbreaking news. The…

The Tour de France is a Beautiful Mess and Maybe that’s How it Should Be

For a long time, I didn’t really “get” the appeal of the Tour de France. A bunch of men in spandex torturing themselves on two wheels, each producing enough sweat to flush a toilet 39 times? (That was one of the more unusual statistics I found floating around out there). And how does anyone take…

Tips, Tricks & Takeaways from a 15th Century Arabic Sex Manual

Lucky you – today we’re signing you up for some sex ed from the Arab world 600 years ago, courtesy of a 15th century sex manual that, despite most of the general population having never heard of it, once attained status similar to that of The Arabian Nights. Commissioned in present day Tunisia, during what…

I Went to Rome’s Last Surviving Adult Theatre So You Don’t Have To

The Romans are famous for a lot of things – building and conquering empires, trade, art, food – and don’t forget sex! Pompeii was excavated at the end of the 19th century and the archeologists who uncovered the city found themselves surrounded by erotic images at every turn. For more than a hundred years, there…

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