Project Manhigh
Project Manhigh along with Project Excelsior was a pre-Space Age military project that took men in balloons to the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Belmond Villa San Michele
Belmond Villa San Michele, a former monastery, now a hotel, is nestled on a hilltop surrounded by trees and terraced gardens, overlooking the city of Florence below. Dating from the 15th century its facade is attributed to Michelangelo.
Lo-life
In 1987, New York City was home to two gangs, both utterly obsessed with the fashion label Ralph Lauren – and neither was made up of WASPY, country club types. There was Ralphie’s Kids from St John’s and Utica in Crown Heights, and the amusingly titled United Shoplifters Association hailing from Marcus Garvey Village in Brownsville. They would occasionally pass each other, exchanging knowing nods or stopping to pose for group pictures, until the following year when members Thirstin Howl the 3rd and Rack-Lo would bring the two parties together. Their respective names were ditched and the Lo Lifes were born – a tribe of stylish young men with a love of Polo by Ralph Lauren.
WET
A magazine of gourmet bathing was published in Venice and Santa Monica between 1976 and 1981.
Darius Kinsey
Darius Kinsey was a photographer active in western Washington State from 1890 to 1940. He is best known for his large-format images of loggers and all phases of the region's lumber industry.
Varosha
Varosha is a quarter in the Cypriot city of Famagusta. Prior to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, it was the modern tourist area of Famagusta. Its inhabitants fled during the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and has remained abandoned ever since.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
Begun when W.N.P. Barbellion was 13 years old, The Journal of a Disappointed Man at first catalogues Barbellion's misadventures in the Devon countryside - collecting birds' eggs, spying girls through binoculars - but evolves into a deeply moving account of his struggle with poverty, his lack of formal education, his flailing attempts at love, and most harrowing of all his slow death from multiple sclerosis.
Slim Keith
Slim Keith invented her persona as a teenager, growing into a chic woman who became known among the socially elite as Slim. Film director Howard Hawks and Broadway entrepreneur Leland Hayward divorced their wives to marry her; and although she was pursued by the likes of Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway, the one love of her life, she writes, remained Hayward, who in turn left her for another woman. Her next and last husband was British banker Kenneth Keith, who provided her with a title and whom she left in 1972 after a 10-year marriage. Her "memoirs of a rich and imperfect life," written with freelancer Tapert, is compulsively readable, an account of a determined striving up from the middle class to join the Beautiful People. Keith, a woman of style, is revealed also as boastful and betraying, as a gossiper who spared few friends - the real-life Lady Coolbirth of Truman Capote's infamous Answered Prayers.
Neil Leifer
Neil Leifer was a sports photographer.
The Manuscript Found In Saragossa
In Jan Potocki's literary masterpiece, we are given over to a mind-bending number of stories, stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories. There is, however, also a strong framing narrative, involving a young Wolloon Guard, Alphonse Von Worden, and his peregrinations through the possibly haunted Sierra Moreno and beyond, in the company of, amongst others, cabbalists, sexy lesbian Muslim sisters, gypsies, bandits, and hanged men.