Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian Bengali polymath. Had he been born in the West he would now be as revered as Shakespeare and Goethe, according to Ravi Shankar.
Hashima Island
Hashima Island is an island off the coast of Nagasaki in southwest Japan. Coal mines operated on Hashima from the 1890s, and at one point in time it was the most densely populated place in the world. At its peak, over 5000 miners lived with their families on an island measuring just over a kilometre long and half as wide, working in mines at depths of up to 660m. When the mine closed there was no reason for anyone to reside here, and in the early 1970s the entire island was abandoned, leaving the structures and contents to rot.
AtomAge magazine
AtomAge magazine was a fetish magazine published in Britain by the clothes designer John Sutcliffe.
Giant soap bubbles
Giant soap bubbles have extremely thin film of soapy water enclosing air that forms a hollow sphere with an iridescent surface.
Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz spent time at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin before finally graduating from New York University in 1935. Soon after graduation, he made his parents' disastrous marriage the subject of his most famous short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" which was published in 1937 in the first issue of Partisan Review.
Liberum veto
Liberum veto (Latin for "I freely forbid") was a parliamentary device in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It allowed any member of the Sejm to force an immediate end to the current session and nullify all legislation already passed at it by shouting Nie pozwalam!
Victor Gollancz
Victor Gollancz studied the classics at Oxford University and during World War I began his life in publishing. In 1927, he set up his own publishing house and his career took off. Gollancz was ahead of this time and placed full-page adverts for his books in newspapers (very rare for this period) and his designers established a recognizable style featuring powerful typography and yellow dust jackets. Gollancz was creating branding 50 years before marketers embraced the buzzword.
Skippers Road
The Skippers Road is one of New Zealand's most scenic roads. This gravel road, with a length of 16,5 miles, carved by hand by miners over 140 years ago is made from a very narrow cut in the middle of a sheer cliff face. It’s a road so dangerous that your rental car insurance won’t be honored if you drive on it.
Tunguska Event
The Tunguska Event was a powerful explosion that occurred over the so-called Southern swamp, a small morass not far from the Tunguska River in Russia. Although the cause of the explosion is the subject of debate, it is commonly believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5-10 kilometres above the Earth's surface.
Moscow gold
Moscow gold refers to the operation by which 510 tonnes of gold, corresponding to 72.6% of the total gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, were transferred from their original location in Madrid to the Soviet Union a few months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.