56 min read
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Lalibela: A Holy City Carved From Stone
A vast complex of monolithic churches carved from living rock in medieval Ethiopia, Lalibela was conceived as a “New Jerusalem”…
Tag: History
21 min read
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Getting High with Shakespeare? It Might Have Happened
From clay pipe residues to cryptic sonnet lines, a long-running theory proposes that William Shakespeare experimented with mind-altering substances, raising…
105 min read
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The Eccentric Soviet Composer Who Conducted a City: Arseny Avraamov and the Sound of a Future That Never Arrived
In September 1922, amid the fifth anniversary commemorations of the October Revolution in the capital of Azerbaijan, a little-known Russian…
9 min read
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A Loud Minority? Investigating the Subculture of Audiophiles in Japan
Stories of Japanese audiophiles installing personal utility poles have become legend, but behind the myth is a shrinking, aging subculture…
16 min read
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One Free Ride: When Texas Prison Inmates Became Rodeo Cowboys
For more than fifty years, the Texas Prison Rodeo turned incarceration into public entertainment, drawing massive crowds to Huntsville to…
48 min read
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The Bulldozer Exhibition: When the Soviets Tried (and Failed) to Literally Crush an Art Show
In 1974, Soviet authorities used bulldozers, arrests, and violence to destroy an unsanctioned outdoor art exhibition, only to ignite an…
16 min read
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Ancient Roman Brutalism? This Tomb Defies Classical Expectations
Two thousand years before concrete brutalism, this ancient Roman tomb built to honor a former slave appears staggeringly modern, but…
13 min read
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The Belgrade Phantom: The (Mostly) True Story of Yugoslavia’s Most Legendary Car Chase
A stolen white Porsche 911 in 1970s Yugoslavia turned an ordinary car thief into an urban legend. For several nights,…
27 min read
1
X‑Rays You Can Hear: Soviet Bootleg Music’s Non-Clinical Birth, Death, and Rebirth
During the Cold War, access to music in the Soviet Union was tightly restricted by state censorship. Despite the risks,…
6 min read
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Not Just Propaganda: Graphic Experimentation From the Other Side of the Curtain
Founded in 2018, COMRADE Gallery has grown into one of the most compelling new archives of Eastern Bloc visual design.…