Articles by Sarah Laskow

An amateur artist captured now-rare flowers in great detail.

An idea imported from Australia, they helped enable the "secret" part of secret ballots.

From above, the textured landscape can be almost abstract.

The first scientists to describe the animal thought it might have walked.

Please retain for the next thousand years or so.

How folk tales and traditional life snuck into avant-garde kids' books in the 1930s.

In the spirit of Halloween, consider a tour of graveyards, memorials, and other places in touch with the afterlife.

Once far above sea level, this gravesite is now deep under the ocean.

"Stone babies"—or lithopedions—are incredibly rare.

Rebecca Winters's grave is one of the few that were marked at all.

In 1915, South African forces fought Germans for control of territory in southern Africa.

There's a bunch of gross stuff, besides human bodies, hiding under graveyards.

A new book collects fantastic literary geographies.

Reviving the Triforium.

Slab City might be the "last free place," but that freedom requires work.

The whole place was once a monumental graveyard.

A groundbreaking female cartographer charted the evolution of the United States—and the dispossession of Native Americans.

And helped launch a corporation now worth more than $40 billion.

The inexplicable delight of moon-moons, sub-islands, and other recursive places.

These hybrid productions are unique in mapmaking.

Why are these devices so important to spacecraft?

Not only does it taste gross, but castor oil was used as an instrument of political control for years.

Orchids were once considered the world’s most difficult and exotic flowers. So why can you buy one for $12.99 at Trader Joe’s?

Maria Goeppert Mayer was relegated to unpaid and "volunteer" positions for most of her academic career.