quote [ Overcoming threats to cease-and-desist, Las Vegas?s iconic Elvis weddings live on. ]

quote [ On October 22, 1797, a sizeable crowd gathered at Parc Monceau in Paris to witness a daring spectacle. Frenchman André-Jacques Garnerin was set to perform a parachute jump from a hot air balloon, using a new parachute design he had created. ]

quote [ There?s a curious expression used in Provence by pétanque players. ?Embrasser Fanny? or to ?kiss Fanny?, is a small recompense for making a fool of oneself to put it simply. But where does this mischievous phrase originate from? ]

quote [ The sight of a skeletal corpse rarely inspires a rollicking jig. Yet for more than half a millennium, the dance of death in European visual art has imagined a tango between the quick and the dead. Allison C. Meier tracks the motif?s evolution across history, discovering how ? through times of disease, war, and economic inequality ? printmaking offered a means to both critique social ills and reflect upon new forms of human devastation. ]

quote [ Off the coast of Cornwall, on the English Channel, about 14 km south of Rame Head, lies a group of rocks, half submerged and half exposed, known as the Eddystone Rocks. These seaswept and eroded formations have been a hazard for ships for centuries. ]

quote [ The story of early cinema may have been different had Wordsworth Donisthorpe been better at blackmail. Irfan Shah goes digging in the archives to recover the details of this forgotten polymath ? political individualist, chess reformer, inventor of a peculiar kind of film camera ? and finds a fierce debate about the history of English wool combing improbably implicated in the rise of motion pictures. ]

quote [ The annual rite of passage has always been more about the ambivalence of adults than the amusement of children. ]

quote [ Researchers extracted parasitic DNA from preserved teeth and bones, revealing how malaria spread across the globe in a new study ]

quote [ Created for US insurance firms during a period of devastating fires across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Sanborn maps blaze with detail ? shops, homes, churches, brothels, and opium dens were equally noted by the company?s cartographers. Tobiah Black explores the history and afterlife of these maps, which have been reclaimed by historians and genealogists seeking proof of the vanished past. ]

quote [ Scattered throughout the old neighborhoods of Istanbul, particularly in an area known as Okmeydan?, are several stone steles erected in the 18th and 19th centuries during the Ottoman era. ]