Reina Gattuso

  • The Tuscan Town Famous for Anarchists, Marble, and Lard

    The Tuscan Town Famous for Anarchists, Marble, and Lard

    AT FIRST GLANCE, THE APUAN Alps of northwest Tuscany’s Carrara region are pure white. Alison Leitch first saw them from a train window when traveling through Italy in the early 1980s. From a distance, she writes, their dazzling tops looked like snow. Her seatmate told her otherwise: The blinding whiteness was actually marble dust, a powdery byproduct…

  • Eat Like Royalty With This Cookbook From the Emperor Who Built the Taj Mahal

    Eat Like Royalty With This Cookbook From the Emperor Who Built the Taj Mahal

    IT WAS THE MID 1600S, and Friar Sebastian Manriquea, a Portuguese priest who had come to visit the Mughal Court, wanted to witness a royal supper. It was a rare sight. The Mughal emperors, who ruled territory across the northern Indian subcontinent, usually didn’t dine with anyone but their wives and concubines. But on this day,…

  • A Low-Grade Fever: On Aziz Ansari’s Comeback Netflix Special

    A Low-Grade Fever: On Aziz Ansari’s Comeback Netflix Special

    Maybe it was his nice-guy image or the fact that Master of None was so endearing. Maybe it was because the scene of mounting sexual pressure “Grace” described was, unlike the outsized horror of the Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby allegations, so disturbingly familiar. Whatever it was, for women across the internet, the sexual assault…

  • Lesbian bars are disappearing. We spent a night at one that’s still standing.

    Lesbian bars are disappearing. We spent a night at one that’s still standing.

    Walking into Henrietta Hudson feels like taking off a heavy backpack. It’s a humid June night in New York’s Greenwich Village, and inside the reggaeton-pulsing bar, a sparse crowd drinks beer and laughs. My shoulders instantly relax, and not just because I’ve escaped a spring downpour. Read more at The Washington Posts’s The Lily. Photo:…

  • The Scholar Mapping America’s Forgotten Feminist Restaurants

    The Scholar Mapping America’s Forgotten Feminist Restaurants

    THERE ARE NO WAITRESSES AT Bloodroot restaurant. There’s no meat, either. When a small collective of women founded the Bridgeport, Connecticut, café and bookstore in 1977, they eliminated both meat and table service as part of a sweeping feminist vision. Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: LES Library, Public Domain

  • German Researchers Are Investigating the Science Behind Soft-Pretzel Scent

    German Researchers Are Investigating the Science Behind Soft-Pretzel Scent

    WORKING NINE TO FIVE IS no way to make a living, so why not quit your job and become a professional food smeller? These highly trained sensory savants are regularly hired by food manufacturers and scientists. They analyze the subtle pepper notes in coffee, the juicy, pear-like aroma of fine white wine, and—as in a study…

  • The Struggling Vineyards That Helped Inspire Karl Marx’s Communism

    The Struggling Vineyards That Helped Inspire Karl Marx’s Communism

    A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING TRIER, Germany—the spectre of Karl Marx. Today, tourists to the small Rhineland city visit the house where Marx was born and gaze at the armchair he died in. They take selfies in front of a larger-than-life Marx statue, gifted to the city in 2018 by the Chinese government.  Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo:…

  • After Hurricane Katrina, Home Gardeners Saved New Orleans’ Iconic Squash

    After Hurricane Katrina, Home Gardeners Saved New Orleans’ Iconic Squash

    “WE NORMALLY DON’T HAVE A spring crop,” says Paul D’Anna, a home gardener in Metairie, Louisiana. But this year—maybe it’s the weather or, though he’s loathe to talk himself up, maybe it’s his green thumb—he got lucky: His backyard vines have already produced around 70 fruits. Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo:  David Monniaux, CC BY-SA…

  • Solved: The 300-Year-Old Mystery of Barbados’s Pigs

    Solved: The 300-Year-Old Mystery of Barbados’s Pigs

    RICHARD LIGON’S 17TH-CENTURY MAP OF Barbados shows an island surrounded by sea monsters. But the most mysterious inhabitants of Richard Ligon’s Barbados are also the most banal: five curly tailed pigs. Half of them are hairy and feral; the other half are smooth. Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: Public Domain.

  • For Sale: 300-Year-Old “Shipwreck Wine” Rescued from the Bottom of the Sea

    For Sale: 300-Year-Old “Shipwreck Wine” Rescued from the Bottom of the Sea

    IN 2010, A TEAM OF underwater salvagers toasted a deep-sea discovery with a rare vintage. Their discovery? The very wine they were about to drink: 350-year-old bottles they had fished out of a decrepit shipwreck off the coast of Hamburg, Germany.  Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: Mark Mornati, Unsplash.