Take a break from your everyday life – particularly the monotonous one we might all be inhabiting right now — and disappear into legends, wonders, and hidden locations the world over. “Give us 15 minutes and we will take you someplace incredible.” That’s the promise of host Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura, the creative company that made the crazily popular book of wonders for the curious to seek out or just visit from their much more prosaic couches. Each tiny episode encapsulates a world of wonder, sharing unusual and surprising stories and the people behind the places that draw us to them. Like The Museum of Bad Art and the oldest swimming pool in Iceland. Lost at home? Find yourself in the world that’s right out there, albeit in your headphones, even if it's beyond reach in our real lives right now.  

“I may never see Antarctica’s Blood Falls or travel to the aptly Inaccessible Island, but knowing they are out there expands my world and brings me real joy.” — Dylan Thuras

The podcast Decoder Ring with Willa Paskin takes something that we are or have been obsessed with and breaks down the reasons why. Listen to the one on The Cabbage Patch Kids Riots, that tracks the bad grown-up behavior that came from one of the most popular toys ever (also see the slightly disconcerting The Babyland General Hospital in Georgia), or the one on Unicorn Poop which documents how often in toy form this idea brings together our fascination with the scatological and mythical. We’d recommend listening to Sad Jennifer Aniston too which examines how this fairytale gone-bad has served our narrative needs in service of the magazines that wrote it. 

“Decoder Ring is a podcast about cracking cultural mysteries. In every episode, host Willa Paskin takes on a cultural question, object, idea, or habit and speaks with experts, historians, and obsessives to try and figure out where it comes from, what it means, and why it matters.”

A striking bi-annual travel and photography magazine that has storytelling at its heart, Rucksack gets you into the glorious world of the unexpected. Since its first publication in 2017, editors Mirko Nicholson and Laura Pendelbury have approached each edition as ‘a concept or a feeling we want to portray'. The most recent issue Abandoned, with its images of empty landscapes and decaying buildings, feels like an anti-inspiration volume, fitting our desolate pandemic mood. We pick up Rucksack for the journey, for what might happen when we leave our comfort zones behind and see where its pages take us. 

“Old cars and derelict buildings. An empty diner and decaying motel, letters crumbling from its sign. It has been a while since these places had many guests or visitors. These are things that time has forgotten; silent spaces full of memories from moments passed. The space a deep nostalgia for a time I never knew and never lived. I wonder at what happened here, at these empty places that once held such significance, at the stories of those who passed through. But, perhaps, it is the mystery of the unknown that makes these places all they are now. It gives them soul.’ – contributor Arnaud Montagard