In September 1922, Swedish filmgoers settled in for the most expensive Scandinavian film of the era: Häxan, later known as Witchcraft Through the Ages. At the Stockholm premiere, audiences enjoyed a live orchestra and illustrated playbills introducing the film’s cast and creative process. This level of pomp and circumstance was typical for high-profile...

We’ve been missing Halloween at Atlas Obscura, so we decided to bring a little horror into early summer: Welcome to Rites of Spring, a curated collection of frights from around the world. Over the next week, we’ll take you to the vast, arid deserts of the Gobi in search of the Mongolian death worm. We’ll dive beneath the Pacific to witness the horrors...

This week's Atlas Obscura puzzle comes to us from the students in Atlas Obscura's Creating Crossword Puzzles course in March 2024, along with their instructors, expert crossword creators Brooke Husic and Natan Last. If you’re interested in learning how to create a crossword puzzle like this one, the next course is scheduled to start on September 10,...

In some parts of France, World War I has never ended. These are the Zones rouges—an archipelago of former battlegrounds so pockmarked and polluted by war that, more than a century after the end of hostilities, they remain unfit to live or even farm on. WWI was the first industrial war and a laboratory for all kinds of military innovations, including...

Each week, Atlas Obscura is providing a new short excerpt from our upcoming book, Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders (September 17, 2024). Once a year, the corals of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef pull off an orgy so massive it can be seen from space. Warmed by the water, tugged by the tides, and sparked by the full...

Macarons may be distinctly French confections, but they're far from monolithic. In addition to the famous Parisian macaron, there are several other key regional variants. One particular kind is the macaron d'Amiens, which, as its name suggests, is a specialty from the city of Amiens in the Picardy region. Introduced in the 16th century and said to...