The Atlas Obscura Podcast
An audio guide to the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Co-founder Dylan Thuras and a neighborhood of Atlas Obscura reporters explore a new wonder every day, Monday through Thursday. In under 15 minutes, they’ll take you to an incredible place, and along the way, you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories. Our theme and end credit music is composed by Sam Tyndall.
Episodes
Today, we’re sharing an episode from The Detour: a show about going places, that actually goes places. Host Sam O’Brien and geologist Becky Nesel take a trip to the Shawangunk Mountains (aka the Gunks) just a couple hours north of New York City. And Becky shows Sam what makes these mountains unique – including an incredibly rare ecosystem that might be the only one of its kind in the world.
This episode was produced in partnership ...
We chat with writer Alessio Perrone about what he learned from the people who hunt for Italy’s unexploded bombs, leftover from times of war.
READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/italy-unexploded-ordnance
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Char Adams is the author of Black Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore. She chronicles Black-owned bookstores in America – from David Ruggles, all the way to the stores that opened up in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter uprisings.
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In 1905, a Bulgarian named Stamen Grigorov made a discovery. Inspired by a wave of researchers studying the secret to long life, he decided to put under the microscope a food that he ate daily: yogurt. Today, the Bulgarian bacteria he found is memorialized in a one-of-a-kind museum in his hometown.
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Reporter Teresa de Miguel joins host Kelly McEvers to talk to her about these floating gardens called Chinapas in Xochimilco, Mexico City. Today, many of these chinampas are vanishing but efforts are being made to preserve them.
This story Teresa reported was a collaboration between the Associated Press and Mongabay
.
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A tiny island off the coast of Brazil is known for being a dangerous place … purely because its inhabitants are, well, snakes. But we speak to a researcher who’s seen it up close and says it’s time for this place to shed its reputation.
READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/snake-island-ilha-de-queimada-grande
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We visit a quaint Dutch fishing village and attempt to unravel the mystery that unfolded there… a mystery that involved strange and curious letters and a voyage to the other side of the world.
READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mr-kaors-portrait
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In the 1920s the world was small. This was an exciting time for scientists and explorers. And among these explorers were Ted and Kemit Roosevelt who traveled to China to find a rare animal back in those days, the giant panda.
Author Nathalia Holt joins us to tell this story from her new book: The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda.
About 100 years ago, the Great Lakes were inundated with an unwelcome visitor – the leech-like, blood-sucking, creepy-looking sea lamprey. For decades, a small governmental organization has kept the lampreys (aka Vampire Fish) in check. But now, thanks to federal budget cuts, it's not clear who will win: the Great Lakes or the sea lamprey.
Read Katie Thornton’s full story in the New Yorker: https://bit.ly/3WIEz9F
Artist and architect Danny Shaddick and the rapper Shad have known each other since high school, and they both wound up in Toronto making art together. Now, they’ve made an unusual musical robot that incorporates drums, found objects, and field recordings from around their shared city.
Watch a short documentary about Danny and Shad, and listen to their original song in full: https://www.atlasobscura.com/hubs/toronto
This episode w...
We go to Tokyo, to a particular place that is both nemesis and best friend to all those procrastinators out there. (Yes, we’re looking at you :)
LEARN MORE: The Manuscript Writing Cafe is open Saturdays and Sundays and you can reserve your seat online.
https://koenji-sankakuchitai.blog.jp/ManuscriptWritingCafe/
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This San Francisco museum, curated by a super-fan of the Beats, is a shrine to an incredibly influential cultural movement and a destination for folks keeping it alive today.
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Journalist Eliot Stein explores the tradition of the djeli – African storytellers who memorize and pass down oral histories – tracing it all the way back to the Mali Empire. Along the way, he tracked down a modern djeli, who is upholding and remixing the tradition. And he found him in an unexpected place: working in a convenience store.
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A while ago, we asked you to send us stories about your collections – and we got so many great responses, that we decided to make another episode about it.
Plus, we want to hear stories about the fictional places you wish were real. Tell us why this place lives in your imagination. What resonates with you about this place? And how did you discover it? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave us a message telling us your name an...
On the heels of the World Series, Kelly and Amanda discuss an unusual tradition in baseball: the fact that, before each game, every single ball is rubbed with mud sourced from a secret location in the Delaware River Basin.
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Sigmund Freud’s famous psychoanalytic couch is preserved in his final office in London, England.
READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/freud-museum-london
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The Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki has been home to an infestation of Chilean recluse spiders for more than 50 years.
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There’s a mansion in New Orleans with a truly horrific past. Author Colin Dickey, who has joined us every Thursday this month, reveals the real life horrors that took place here, its once sadistic owner and its haunted reputation.
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When the city of Buffalo, New York invited landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to town in the late 1860s, they were hoping he’d replicate the success of his most famous design: New York City’s Central Park. But Olmsted had other ideas. Instead of creating one centralized park, he argued, why not make Buffalo a city within a system of interconnected parks? It was a plan that would change the course of urban design.
From long flights to strenuous trips, listeners share stories about traveling with their kids for the first time.
Plus, we want to hear stories about the fictional places you wish were real. Tell us why this place lives in your imagination. What resonates with you about this place? And how did you discover it? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave us a message telling us your name and story. Or record a voice memo and email it t...
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