Medieval pointy shoes and 7 more of our most-read stories this year

The celebrity tortoise breakup, the island with its own fluffy cloud, and more. Email not displaying correctly? View in your browser. December 31, 2019 Pointy Medieval Shoes Perhaps one of the silliest and most fascinating trends in medieval fashion were long, carrot-shaped shoes that tapered to impish tips, some as long as five inches beyond the toe. For the glitterati of medieval Europe, poulaines were less a fad than a status symbol. Read More → Tortoise Breakup In 2011, after nearly a century together, Galápagos tortoises Bibi and Poldi called it quits. We still don’t know why. Read more → Belle Epoque Crimes At the end of the 19th century, Parisian police officer Alphonse Bertillon devised a new system of crime scene photography, inviting detectives, jurors, and newspaper readers into scenes of violence and private interiors never so starkly revealed before. Read more → LÍTLA DÍMUN, FAROE ISLANDS Tiny Fluffy Cloud The smallest of the 18 main Faroe Islands has the power to create its own fluffy cloud. Read more → 21 Underrated Buildings Brutalist hotels, college buildings, and ‘robot heads’ are just a few of the unfairly maligned buildings Atlas Obscura readers shared their love for. Read more → Ferret Assistant When magnets essential to testing a 200-billion-electron-volt particle accelerator kept failing, physicists at the National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, proposed a low-tech solution for a high-tech trouble: a ferret named Felicia. Read more → WILLIAMSPORT, PENNSYLVANIA Escape Burial Hatch A retired firefighter from Pennsylvania created a contraption so he and his family wouldn’t die if accidentally buried alive. Read more → NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI Gravestone Staircase When Florence Irene Ford died at the age of 10, her mother made a strange request. She asked that her daughter’s coffin be fitted with a small window, with stairs leading down to the casket so she could still comfort her dead daughter during storms. Read more → Visit AtlasObscura.com · View in Browser · Unsubscribe · See All Newsletters 61 Greenpoint Ave #622, Brooklyn, NY 11222