atlas obscura
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Notable NYC: 1/21–1/27
Saturday 1/21: Women’s March on New York City. Resist. On Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, 47th St and 2nd Ave, 11 am, free. Eléna River, Ryan Collerd, and Carol Snow discuss works of poetry. Berl’s Poetry Shop, 7 p.m., free. Mahogany L…
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Fading into Mystery
For Atlas Obscura, Abby Norman retraces Barbara Newhall Follett’s mysterious history: She is called a child prodigy, a literary luminary, a spirit of nature. So why have so few people heard of her or read her work? For one, Barbara…
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Living in the New York Public Library
For Atlas Obscura, Sarah Laskow delves into the secret apartments of the New York Public Library system. Most people only dream of living in a library, but for some people, this was reality. The apartments—which were in the Carnegie libraries—were branches of…
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Crying on Cue
While it sounds pretty weird, this was standard practice back in the day. According to Patrick Miller in his article “Music and the Silent Film,” Hollywood director D.W. Griffith enlisted a brass band to encourage extras during the battle sequences of…
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Macaroni Men
The seemingly non-sequitur first lines of “Yankee Doodle” sound like they’re about food, but Michael Waters in Atlas Obscura reveals the lyrics’ gender-bending history: The Oxford Magazine similarly described the macaroni as not belonging to the gender binary: “There is indeed a kind of…
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A Library for Two Countries
Situated along the US-Canada border, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House “is the only library in the world that exists and operates in two countries at once,” Atlas Obscura reports.


