As trends in genre fiction go, you’d be hard pressed to find a more indelible example than the paperback horror novels of the 1970s and 1980s. All manner of depravity, from Nazi leprechauns, psychic spawn, ghost trains, and... Read More

Burning Man, festival beyond words in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, attracts 70,000 utopians for a weeklong experiment in barter, selfless giving, artistic self-expression, and unchecked revelry. But don’t get the wrong idea. The event... Read More

Lonely Planet wants you to visit the far reaches of weird. Are you prepared for three hundred jars of human brains in Lima’s Museo del Cerebro? How about the sight of ten million hay-colored bats flying over your head as you wander... Read More

Ancient, enigmatic Georgia, enviably positioned between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, lays claim to one of history’s greatest civilizing feats: the first domestication of wild grapes more than five thousand years ago. This... Read More

God felt so guilty about creating France as the most beautiful place in the world that he somehow needed to make amends. So he created the French people. Bada bing! But he also sprinkled the population with incomparable French chefs and... Read More

Back again to the ongoing attempt to wrap one’s brain around the unwrappable, the unbrainable evil that was the Holocaust. This time in the guise of a tiny book of photos and reflections on Auschwitz-Birkenau. Birken, German for birch,... Read More

All the world’s Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus—they’re peas in a faith-based pod. But Buddhists don’t belong in there. No, the Buddhist gig is more about waking up to what’s real, realization of how the universe really... Read More

What is American history other than a record of stuff that happened somehow related to the people and places of this country. Everything in the past is history, and no matter how insignificant, it factors into the character and identity... Read More