Nearly 50 Years On, a Forbidden Seaside Ghost Town is about to Re-Open

Imagine a millionaire’s resort; one to rival St. Tropez, Italy’s Portofino, or Miami’s South Beach – abandoned overnight. Imagine the luxury hotels suddenly emptied of their guests and left to slowly decay, the boutiques, bars and nightclubs reclaimed by nature, sunbathers replaced by sea turtles nesting on the deserted beaches and the once vibrant holiday spirit silenced; nothing more than a whisper in the wind. Perhaps in 2020, such scenes are less difficult to imagine, but this is not the story of a temporary travel ban to control the outbreak of a virus. This is the story of a near 50 year lockdown of the Cypriot seaside city known as Varosha, once regarded as one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations during the early 1970s. 

- Messy Nessy Chic

“Ghislaine, Is That You?”: Inside Ghislaine Maxwell’s Life on the Lam

For a year leading up to her arrest, the vanishing act of Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime friend, lover, and alleged accomplice vexed the authorities, the press, and the women who accuse her of luring them into a web of sexual abuse.

- Vanity Fair

Les Romains étaient-ils des obsédés sexuels ?

Les hommes et les femmes de l'Antiquité entretenaient un rapport au corps et à la sexualité moins pudibond qu'aujourd'hui. Un essai explique pourquoi.

Dans son essai, Les Femmes et le sexe dans la Rome antique (Tallandier 2013), Virginie Girod, docteur en Histoire ancienne, nous offre un vivant panorama de la sexualité féminine à l'époque romaine. L'ouvrage est d'autant plus précieux que l'Antiquité sexuelle a envahi notre imaginaire, au moins depuis le XIXe siècle, à travers la peinture, puis au cinéma et, aujourd'hui encore, dans la BD et les téléfilms. On associe souvent l'Empire romain à des images sulfureuses et orgiaques.

- Le Point

The First American Restaurants’ Culinary Concoctions

A study of historical fine-dining menus yields surprises. Like six preparations of frog, and delicious lamb testicles. 

COVID-19 is changing the way we dine out, but how such changes will transform the experience in the years ahead remains an open question. One thing we do know is that restaurants change over time. There’s a history to them. And historian Paul Freedman has been reading the menus from the dawn of the American restaurant.

- JSTOR Daily

Photographer Updates Postcards Of 1960s Resorts Into Their Abandoned Ruins

I found the old matchbook lying on a desk, writes Pablo Maurer. It was buried under some papers, beside a thick, water-logged book frozen solid in the January chill. I ran my fingers down its spine and read the title: “How to Run A Successful Golf Course.”

The owner of the Penn Hills Resort in the Poconos probably hadn’t followed whatever advice the author had to offer. They boarded the place up years ago, and there’s a gaping hole in the roof of his old office. Muted greens and yellows, shag carpeting peek at me through a sheet of ice.

The matchbook, which looks to be from the 60s, is about half empty – whoever was sitting here when this place finally went under surely needed a smoke.

- Flashbak

The Overwhelmed Mom Still Finding Time for Lots of Sex

This week, a woman who’s working full time while her unemployed husband takes care of their twin girls: 40, married, Queens :

9:00 a.m. We all sleep late in our family. I’m married to a great guy, Tyler, and we have twin girls who are 10 years old. They’re awesome kids, but we’re all on the brink of serious COVID breakdowns. It’s been a very, very, very stressful few months but Tyler and I still have an active sex life. Most of my friends don’t believe me, but we manage to do it a few mornings a week and a few nights a week.

- The Cut

SKATEBÅRD - MIX PIKNIC 2018

Skatebård is the pseudonym of the Norwegian DJ and producer Bård Aasen Lødemel. Skatebård was born in 1976 in Harstad, grew up in Hovdebygda, but has since relocated to Bergen. He is also a notable electronic artist who generally fits into the Italo disco genre.

This is Keith Richards' favorite drug

Keith Richards is a revered veteran of the music industry, and quite possibly one of the last true rock stars still walking the Earth. The guitar maestro of the Rolling Stones has been active in the music scene since the 1960s, and has either witnessed or been an active part of a huge chunk of rock history. His personal habits alone are the stuff of legend. At this point, he's survived so many strange situations and drug-fueled adventures that there's a saying: "The only two things to survive a nuclear war would be cockroaches and Keith Richards."

- Grunge

The History of the Picnic

It is hard to disagree with W. Somerset Maugham’s view that ‘there are few things so pleasant as a picnic lunch’. Even if ants and wasps occasionally join the fun, picnics are the very epitome of innocent pastoral delight. But they haven’t always been so carefree – nor so bucolic.

Where the word ‘picnic’ comes from is something of a mystery. The French root may derive from the verb piquer (‘to peck’ or ‘to pick’) and the noun nique (‘a small amount’ or ‘nothing whatsoever’); but this is just speculation. What is certain, however, is that, originally, it did not refer to anything we would now recognise as a picnic. 

- History Today

25 Facts About Jaws On Its 45th Anniversary

Daah dun, daah dun, daah dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun. On June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws—the original summer blockbuster—arrived in theaters and scared moviegoers out of the water. Here are 25 things you might not have known about the Oscar-winning shark flick.

- MentalFloss

«Les montagnes russes»: ceci est mon corps, et il est à moi!

Le deuxième tome d’Extases, série auto-érotico-biographique du bédéiste français installé au Québec depuis 2003, Jean-Louis Tripp, devait paraître le 9 avril. COVID-19 oblige, la mise en librairie a été reportée, ici, au 4 juin même si l’album est bel et bien paru en mars dernier, en France. Un bien drôle de timing étant donné que le thème central de cette série, la célébration de la sexualité, en prenait pour son rhume en cette saison de distanciation physique. C’est, bien évidemment, un des sujets qui ont été abordés lors de la discussion, via écrans interposés, avec l’auteur.

- Le Devoir

From Bukowski to Kerouac: Tom Waits created a list of his top 10 favourite books of all time

Tom Waits is a man who places extreme importance on the aspect of intellectual culture. A singer-songwriter, an actor and a composer, a poet and an avid reader of literature, Tom Waits devours artistic information like a boozehound searching for his next drink.

Waits’ ex-girlfriend, Bobi Thomas, once described the endless nights he would tirelessly stay awake until five or six in the morning with no other companion than his mountain of reading material. “He’d tell me how inspired he was by some short story or other, and I think that was the source of his muse,” Thomas wrote in the 2009 biography Lowside of the Road. “Some writers go to the movies to get that emotional power, and then they write,” Thomas said before adding: “I think Tom got a lot of it from books.”

- Far Out