Phi Ta Khon is a ghost festival held in Dan Sai, northeastern Thailand. Villagers parade in patchwork costumes and towering masks traditionally assembled from sticky-rice steamers and coconut husks. According to local tradition, the spirits first appeared during the joyful return of Prince Vessantara, emerging from the forest to join the celebration.
Moskva Pool was a 130-metre-wide outdoor swimming pool built in central Moscow in 1958. Its circular basin occupied the foundations of the Palace of the Soviets, an enormous government building planned after the cathedral previously on the site was demolished, but never completed. The pool was heated year-round, allowing thousands of people to swim through Moscow winters beneath clouds of steam.
Ato Boldon is a Trinidadian sprinter who won four Olympic medals without ever winning gold. At the 2000 Sydney Games, he took silver in the 100 metres and bronze in the 200 while wearing Oakley Over the Top sunglasses: mirrored lenses held in place by two aluminium-coloured bands arching across his shaved head. The design looked more like protective machinery than eyewear and became one of the most recognizable pieces of equipment in Olympic history.
In 2016, Dutch police began training eagles to intercept unauthorized drones. The birds were taught to recognize the machines as prey, seize them in mid-air and carry them away in their talons. France followed with four golden eagles named after the Three Musketeers, raised around drones and rewarded with meat placed on them. The idea offered a remarkably medieval answer to a modern problem, but both programs were eventually abandoned in favour of electronic detection and jamming.
W. Reginald Bray was an English accountant who spent decades testing what the postal service was willing to deliver. Beginning in 1898, he mailed unwrapped turnips, a bowler hat, a rabbit’s skull, his dog and postcards addressed only with riddles or drawings. In 1900, he had himself delivered to his parents’ house, earning the name “the Human Letter.” He also mailed autograph requests to thousands of public figures, eventually building a collection of more than 15,000 replies.
The Mamuthones are masked figures who appear during Carnival in Mamoiada, Sardinia. Twelve men wear black wooden faces, dark sheepskins and up to 25 kilograms of cattle bells strapped across their backs. They advance in two rows, using synchronized steps and shoulder movements to make every bell strike together, while brightly dressed Issohadores circle them with ropes. The procession’s original meaning remains unknown.
Casa do Penedo is a house built between four enormous boulders in the mountains of northern Portugal. Completed in 1974 as a family retreat, the rocks serve as its foundation, walls and parts of its ceiling, with smaller stones filling the gaps between them. Despite standing beside a wind farm, the house has no electricity. Its attempt to disappear into the landscape instead made it one of Portugal’s most recognizable homes.
The Choux de Créteil are ten cylindrical apartment towers completed in 1974 in Créteil, a suburb southeast of Paris. Each is covered in two-metre-high concrete balconies shaped like petals, giving the complex the appearance of a field of enormous cabbages. The balconies were intended to provide privacy and support cascading plants that would change colour with the seasons. Developers cancelled the planting, leaving the residents to live inside bare concrete vegetables.
Hagop Sandaldjian was an Armenian musician and microminiaturist who made sculptures small enough to stand inside the eye of a needle. Using dust, lint, paint and strands of human hair, he produced tiny figures of Napoleon, Pope John Paul II and Disney characters under a microscope. A single work could take fourteen months. To prevent his pulse from ruining it, Sandaldjian learned to move his tools between heartbeats; a sneeze could erase months of work.
The Carrington Event was an immense solar storm that struck Earth in 1859. Auroras appeared across much of the world, reaching as far south as the Caribbean and illuminating the night brightly enough for people to read newspapers outside. Telegraph networks malfunctioned, machines sparked and several stations caught fire. In Boston and Portland, operators disconnected their batteries to protect the equipment and discovered they could still exchange messages, powered entirely by electrical currents induced in the wires by the storm.