In Hugo Lunny’s unsettling mockumentary We Regret Nothing (2019), a near-whispered voice recounts a candlelit ritual in rural Langley, British Columbia. The camera pans slowly to a pale young man, face half-hidden, as he describes…
Read more →At twilight in an old forest, a faint emerald glow edges out of the dark: the ghostly lantern of a mushroom. It’s the centuries-old phenomenon called foxfire or fairy fire, a dim, bluish-green light emanating…
Read more →They begin with the body. The obsession with blood, its scent, its shimmer, its promise of continuity, is the oldest superstition in the human archive. Civilizations have bled themselves for gods and for glory, and…
Read more →Long before cocaine ever darkened the headlines, the coca leaf grew as a sacred gift. In Andean myth, coca sprang miraculously from the earth—one legend has it that Kuka, a bewitching maiden, was slain and…
Read more →On a sleepy night in Santiago, the unremarked apartment building at Calle San Isidro 332 hides a hidden drama. Inside, Kasia Pomes—a Polish immigrant in her mid-50s—quietly manages this old tenement. Unbeknownst to many, Kasia’s…
Read more →Corpses are supposed to repose in peace. Yet reporters have uncovered cases where the dead have become raw material for profit. In one recent Colorado scandal, a mother-and-daughter funeral home team “stole the bodies or…
Read more →In a London suburb during the 2020 lockdown, an otherwise innocuous house was raided. Inside, police found eight Romanian women wearing face shields and masks, not patients, but sex workers under surveillance. A giant bottle…
Read more →On an April dawn in 1964 a Danish laborer discovered an unnerving scene at Copenhagen’s harbor: the city’s beloved 100-year-old Little Mermaid statue lay headless, her neck expertly sawed through. Tourists and Danes alike stood…
Read more →In Hugo Lunny’s novel and screenplay The Moment Has Gone, a widower named Cy Perrottet finally gets his shot at vengeance, or maybe at healing. After losing his wife Naomi to a drunk driver named…
Read more →It turns out “sleeping with one eye open” is more than a figure of speech. Neuroscientists have documented a first-night effect: when you crash in an unfamiliar bed, one hemisphere of your brain actually stays…
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