Accidentally Wes Anderson

The battered fish in fish and chips arrived in England via Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition in the 16th century. This was a technique born from religious necessity, not culinary ambition. Jews would batter and fry their fish on Friday before sundown, thereby preserving the fish for consumption throughout the Sabbath, during which they were prohibi...

The Richardson Hotel is one of the few hotels where getting lost on the way to your room is architecturally intentional, not a design flaw. Guests sometimes have to walk back through the lobby just to reach a room on the opposite wing, a byproduct of a floor plan drawn up nearly 150 years ago for a very different kind of guest.

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Some bad reviews have the power to change an entire industry. For London’s taxicabs, that moment was the Exhibition of 1851. The fair’s Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was an engineering marvel, and the entire populace wanted to experience the glass structure close up. The problem? Many cabmen at the time, transporting fairgoers in their hackney carriages, had a lot of difficulty...

Good news coming out of bad news can be hard to come by–but for this church, it was fated. Resting in solitude on top of Danish hill, this brilliant white “hermit” has stood as a landmark to locals for over eight centuries without any accompanying village. Due to its high position, the church has achieved a lighthouse-like status amongst sailors passing through the nearby Lit...

At the corner of Addison and Clark, thousands gathered under the neon-red light of the stadium marquee, anxiously awaiting the final out. It was game seven of the 2016 World Series, and their team was up 8-7, only needing to get one more out to win. A trickle of shouts from lucky mobile phone users erupted into a cacophony of elation as the scoreboard updated to “Cubs Win.” A...