Author: Karen McCann

“This is it,” said Rich, staring around in awe. “The epicenter of nuttiness.” Yep, it truly was. We were in a town I hadn’t even planned to write about; Palencia was meant to be a simple 24-hour stopover to break the convoluted journey from Oviedo to Pamplona. And I’d vowed to skip writing about houses…

​“And now you will see the most famous thumbs in the city,” said our guide Luis. Rich and I exchanged delighted glances. What new nuttery was this? Were we visiting the town’s Picasso, famous for its distorted hands? The miraculously preserved relics of Saint Eubondiga the Eight-Fingered? A science experiment run amok? The legendary vanishing…

​“Lucy?” I asked. “Is that you?” As you’ve no doubt noticed, it’s never easy to tell one 3-million-year-old protohuman from another. Was this really the famous Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis discovered in 1974 and named for a song by the Beatles? (For younger readers: that was Paul McCartney’s old band.) The skull itself wasn’t labeled,…

Those who say GPS and Google have taken the mystery out of travel have clearly never visited Jaén, Spain. It’s a modern city with an old-fashioned attitude about sharing information: “If you live here you don’t need to ask, and if you don’t live here, you really don’t need to know.” Everything was shrouded in…

Just watching the videos makes me weak in the knees. First the strongest men form a base and begin constructing the human tower. Then lithe, sinewy women clamber over them to build the higher levels. And finally, when everyone is in place and you can see their muscles trembling with effort, a little girl begins…

​“We knew we were very, very different,” said my friend Lonnie, when we got to talking about his childhood in the Bronx. This is what I love about my amigos . Every one of them has a backstory that makes you sit up and think, “Wait, what?” “Different?” I asked. “In what way?” Lonnie explained…

Ever taken tango lessons? Once, in a moment of optimistic insanity, Rich and I signed up. After we’d stumbled haplessly through the low-cost introductory lessons, our instructor sat us down and said, “I’m not going to lie. You people need a lot of work.” Then she tried to sell us a package costing $5000. (To…

​As Silicon Valley’s wealthiest techies glance at the calendar and wake up to the fact the grim reaper may someday be heading their way, they’ve started pouring serious money into cutting-edge longevity research. The result is a raft of companies such as the Methuselah Foundation, which aims to make “90 the new 50 by 2030.”…

​Somewhere in Manhattan an expectant couple is keeping very, very quiet about being the ones who dyed this young domestic pigeon pink, most likely for a gender reveal party, then abandoned him downtown. He did not fare well, being unable to fly, unfamiliar with foraging for food, and an obvious target for every street-savvy bird…

Do you love your job? Are you 100% sure you chose the right profession? If you’re a lumberjack, chances are you’ll answer with a resounding “yes!” Because according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, people who work in agriculture, logging, and forestry have the highest levels of self-reported happiness and meaning of any major…