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
Mexico City is known for its museum and art scene. The collection at El Museo del Juguete Antiguo – The Antique Toy Museum – encourages visitors to lean into their imaginations – and reflect on the rich history and culture in this city.
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This is how you do Christmas in the desert. Every year, the city of Chandler, Arizona creates a Christmas Tree made entirely of the diaspore of this Western plant.
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Seltzer has been around for thousands of years. And one factory in Brooklyn, New York called the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys is preserving the history of this simple drink.
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Around 60 people live full time in the town of Helvetia, West Virginia. But once a year, the population swells to 20 times its size – when masked revelers dressed as moons, suns, monsters, possums, and everything in between descend. This is Fasnacht, a Swiss-German celebration of Fat Tuesday that was brought to the area by immigrants in the 19th century. In the 20th, Fasnacht almost died out…before being revived by two creative loc...
In the early 1920s, walking around Orange, New Jersey at night, you might have seen young women coming out of a factory, with hair, skin and clothes softly glowing in the dark. Some called them “ghost girls.” Newspapers would later call them “radium girls” because the glow on these women came from radium-based paint that they used to make glow-in-the-dark watches for the US Radium Corporation. They thought it was perfectly safe to ...
When you think of Orlando, Florida and the area around it, a certain cartoon mouse might come to mind. But in recent decades the area has also become a destination for Latin American food and culture. Today we visit Coqui Snacks, a cozy snack shop in Kissimmee offering up classic Puerto Rican comfort foods…including a popsicle called a limber, which has a surprising connection to aviator Charles Lindberg.
You can learn a lot about a person from their hands. In this episode, we hear the story of a doctor who made it possible for us to hold onto the stories of presidents, astronauts, musicians, artists and more… through bronze molds of their hands.
READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/adrian-e-flatt-m-d-hand-collection
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Gastro Obscura writer Sam O’Brien takes co-host Kelly McEvers on a tour of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous tributes to the turkey – and makes her case for why these big, beautiful birds are worth paying attention to.
Read Sam’s article on the history of the turkey: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-the-turkey-thanksgiving
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Carpets are everyday objects we rarely stop to think about. But they’re far more than decoration or something soft to step on. Each one holds an origin story – threads that run through centuries of history, connecting small villages of master weavers to sprawling, power-hungry empires.
Historian Dorothy Armstrong, author of Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets, takes us on a journey through the surprising and ...
When Elliott Long’s dad started planting a forest of “bottle trees” with trunks of steel and old bottles for leaves, Elliott immediately understood that one day, it would be his job to keep his dad’s forest alive. He wanted nothing to do with it. And then his dad died, and Elliott had a decision to make.
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Atop a mountain in a picturesque Colorado town is the frozen corpse of a Norwegian grandpa. We get the tale of how this came to be, from the person who for years has trekked up and down the mountain for this unique preservation mission.
READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/frozen-dead-guy-days
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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
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