For more information on The Charm of Hope check out the production’s official page. Step aboard the world of piracy and one quickly finds that even swashbucklers had their own jargon. Movies and theme parks…
Read more →Paris at night is a familiar sight—cobblestone streets, dim bistros, the distant twinkle of the Eiffel Tower. But descend through a hidden trapdoor or manhole and the city takes on a very different aspect. In…
Read more →Paris at the end of the ancien régime was a city literally under siege by its own dead. The centuries-old Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, wedged into the heart of bustling Les Halles, had become a toxic…
Read more →In the 19th century, when the first cameras were assembled and the earliest daguerreotypes began to shimmer on glass plates, something deeper than curiosity stirred in the human psyche. To the eye unaccustomed to the…
Read more →In fiction and film, a tired trope persists: the foreign character who speaks in halting, ungrammatical English, think everyone from Kafka’s castle guards to countless comic-relief sidekicks. Yet readers (and viewers) increasingly bristle: do people…
Read more →In the damp silence beneath Paris’s 14th arrondissement, a stone warning greets the few who enter: “Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort” – “Stop! This is the Empire of Death.” The grim injunction is…
Read more →Imagine reading a novel where a refugee character laments “Kaung not have enough money.” Would you cringe, or accept this stilted phrasing as the character’s actual voice? In fact, most linguists and writers agree it’s…
Read more →Mixing fact, folklore and outright hoax, the Jackalope has long been America’s favorite horned rabbit. In Hugo Lunny’s thriller Castigation, the Jackalope even figures as an “exotic and elusive delicacy” sold in a Wyoming deli[1].…
Read more →True life imitates myth in unsettling ways. In recent decades, dozens of documented cases have revealed people and fringe groups literally drinking blood or enacting blood rituals — not as fantasy, but as a quest…
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