August 30, 2021

Spite House For Sale The house at 44 Hull Street in Boston’s North End neighborhood has handsome exposed brick and a bathroom with vivid blue tiles, boasts a lush, green private yard and possesses enviable views from the roof deck. It’s also really narrow. At its roomiest, the two-bedroom, four-story home measures a bit more than 10 feet wide and 30 feet long. The svelte structure is reportedly a spite house, and it’s up for sale for $1.2 million. READ MORE → WESTMINSTER, MASSACHUSETTS The Spite Wall Speaking of spite houses, have you heard of spitewalls? When Edmund Proctor purchased his farm in Westminster, Massachusetts in 1852, he didn’t see any issue working on all seven days of the week. Farwell Morse, his neighbor across the street, thought differently, and expressed his displeasure with Proctor’s decision to work on his farm even on Sundays. So in order to end the dispute—and perhaps irritate his neighbour,while he was at it—Proctor constructed an 11 foot tall, 60 foot long stone wall between the properties. READ MORE → Argentina’s Highest Observatory High on La Puna de Atacama, the arid plateau Argentina shares with Chile, there is a lonely portal to the cosmos. The Transient Optical Robotic Observatory of the South (TOROS) sits at 4,660 meters, or more than 15,000 feet above sea level, where researchers have the chance to observe some of the universe’s most enigmatic phenomena. TOROS is the lone research outpost in this beautiful but haunting expanse of Argentina’s Salta Province, and staff have likened its conditions to Antarctica. But what is it like to live and work at the remote site? READ MORE → ATLAS OBSCURA EXPERIENCES Radical Spirits Discover the shared roots of alternative spirituality and progressive politics during this 90-minute experience with occult scholar and historian Mitch Horowitz. This is real history that opens a new window into our shared past and present—and reveals how occult spirituality and protest politics have often grown together. LEARN MORE → GASTRO OBSCURA Eat Your Weeds Meet Tama Matsuoka Wong, New Jersey’s ‘Meadow Doctor.’ Wong’s path to meadow doctoring—the process of restoring, monitoring, and caring for native meadow spaces—started with weeds in her yard, which today it sports over 255 plant species, none of it hand-sown. The goal of the meadow doctor is to prune invasive weeds, keep an eye out for disease, and identify encroaching pollution. Wong uses her skills to help meadows around the country survive even against the most damaging human infrastructure—ultimately helping to find a place for weeds in an increasingly weed-intolerant world. READ MORE → YONKERS, NEW YORK Saw Mill River Daylighting The Industrial Revolution saw the proliferation of mills and factories, along with the draining and covering up of many natural waterways. Now, with a lot of industry gone, various municipalities are looking to undo the damage by reopening these streams and rivers, though perhaps not as bold as the project in Downtown Yonkers. READ MORE → FROM THE ARCHIVES A Great White Shark Mystery “Cluster of Sharks in One Spot Off Carolinas Coast Grows More Intense, and Mysterious,” read a February 10, 2020, story in The Charlotte Observer. Satellite data seemed to back it up: eight great whites’ tracking devices pinging in waters right off the border of North and South Carolina, with no tagged sharks elsewhere along the East Coast, according to the ocean data nonprofit OCEARCH. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, scientists say this “mysterious cluster” is neither mysterious nor a cluster. READ MORE → CREEDE, COLORADO Wheeler Geologic Area High in the La Garita Wilderness sits a once-popular, but nearly forgotten, otherworldly landscape formed when a volcano exploded in the southern Colorado Rockies around 25 million years ago. It ejected approximately 1,200 cubic miles of material into the atmosphere—an explosion so massive, the exact range of the ash fall is still unknown. READ MORE →