Kanita Bajrami
Kanita is a wanderlust-fueled traveler with an inclination for unraveling the mysteries of history, the paranormal, and the bizarre world of medicine. As a true crime buff, Kanita's nights are often spent delving into the depths of chilling mysteries. Yet, it's not just the paranormal that captivates her—her background in medicine fuels a fascination with the weird and wonderful world of medical oddities, from twisted historical practices to the myths and legends that shroud the field. From exploring haunted locales to uncovering the strange and morbid tales of medical history, Kanita is your guide to the unconventional, the unexplained, and the downright eerie.
The Coolest, Weirdest Things to Actually Go See in Portugal
Portugal has a reputation for being pleasant. Tiles, custard tarts, beaches, elderly men playing cards in the shade. All accurate, all lovely. It also has a chapel decorated with five thousand skeletons. And a village where the houses wear boulders as roofs. And a lake with a giant hole in the middle that looks like…
Read More 
Viking Misconceptions That Still Won’t Go Away, According to People Who Study Vikings
In 1876, a designer named Carl Emil Doepler put horns on the helmets for the first Bayreuth production of Wagner’s Ring cycle. They looked appropriately mythic under stage lighting. The image escaped the opera house, got picked up by illustrators, and never left. A hundred and fifty years later it’s on a professional football team’s…
Read More 
The Imperial Regalia of Japan: The Three Sacred Treasures No Emperor Has Ever Actually Seen
On May 1, 2019, Emperor Naruhito ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne. Court chamberlains carried two black lacquered boxes into the Pine Room and set them on tables beside him. He took possession of them. Nobody opened them. That’s it. That’s the ceremony. The most important objects in Japanese imperial tradition changed hands. Not one person in…
Read More 
Viking Runes: What They Actually Meant, and What’s Just Modern Invention
Every time you connect your headphones, you’re looking at Viking runes. The Bluetooth logo is two of them stacked together, ᚼ and ᛒ. Those are the initials of a tenth-century Danish king called Harald Bluetooth. He united Denmark and Norway, so the engineers naming a protocol that unites devices thought it was funny. That’s a…
Read More 
Émilie du Châtelet: The Physicist Who Translated Newton and Never Got the Credit
If you read Newton’s Principia in French today, you are almost certainly reading Émilie du Châtelet’s translation. Not a modern one. Hers, finished in 1749, published a decade after she died. It remains the standard French edition of the most important book in the history of physics. She also worked out that the energy of…
Read More 
The Winter War: How Finland Held Off the Soviet Invasion Everyone Expected to Lose Fast
On November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. Stalin expected the whole thing wrapped up within a couple of weeks, and on paper that was a reasonable assumption. The Red Army outnumbered the Finns four to one in soldiers. It had roughly a hundred tanks for every one Finland could field, and thirty aircraft…
Read More