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Abkhazia is a partially recognized state on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. Currently, nature is reclaiming thousands of ruined buildings across the region, from the concrete skeletons of nondescript townhouses to the solemn grandeur of Tsarist-era sanatoriums and hotels.
The Amber Room is a chamber decorated in amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors. The room was looted by the Nazis during World War II and recreated in 2003. The original room is estimated to be worth 500 million dollars. It has yet to be featured on MTV Cribs.
Arthur Koestler began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud's. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish civil war, he met W.H. Auden at a party in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, and Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn't die. Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicholson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.
The African civet is the only remaining member in its genetic group and is considered to be the largest civet-like animal on the African continent.
Arcana Books specializes in new, rare and out of print books, catalogues, and ephemera on 20th and 21st century.
A Magazine is a fashion magazine curated by a single person each issue.
Air racing is a highly specialized type of motorsport that involves airplanes or other types of aircraft that compete over a fixed course, with the winner either returning the shortest time, the one to complete it with the most points, or to come closest to a previously estimated time.
The argonauts are a group of octopuses unlike any other. The females secrete a thin, white, brittle shell called the paper nautilus. Nestled with their arms tucked inside this beautiful, translucent home, they drift through the open ocean while other octopus species crawl along the sea floor.
Andrea Palladio made the most sublime villas.
In the landscape of television, public access has always been the equivalent to the wild, wild west. It’s a field that many an artist and personality has created and prospered in. One man that fits this bill is Art Fein and his long-running Los Angeles access show, Art Fein’s Poker Party. Billed as a rock and roll talk show and running since 1984, Fein’s likable personality coupled with a history of stellar guests, including Brian Wilson, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Richard Carpenter and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy have all helped make Poker Party a cult favorite.