New Hampshire's largest city has a rich industrial history as mill town. Today, it's a hub for tech and companies and education. Today, a Manchester resident says it's time the re-awakened queen city got a new guide.
Plus, a comprehensive map of the world’s weirdest places – from Brazil’s Snake Island to an Icelandic elf school, to a giant burning hole in Turkmenistan, Atlas Obscura's new book is sure to make your next vacation a little stranger.
Listen to the full show.
An Insider's Guide to Manchester
As the largest city in New Hampshire and the largest city north of Boston, the queen city of Manchester has a long history from its early start as an industrial center and mill town, to a present day hub for tech companies. Manch-Vegas as it is lovingly referred to by residents, gets a lot of attention in election years as a popular stop for candidates and news crews, but our guest thinks it deserves the royal treatment every year.
Will Stewart is a southern ex-pat, a Manchester resident and the author of a forthcoming guide book all about the queen city: From Hanover Hill to Waumbec Mill: An Insider's Guide to Manchester.
Check out the Kickstarter here: An Insider's Guide to Manchester
Real Estate Entertainment
For generations, a patch of land and a home for raising a family represented a safe, attainable way of pitching a stake in the American dream. Today, dreaming of the perfect home is entertainment.
House Hunters along with a bunch of spin-off shows, and websites like Zillow, Curbed and EZ Street have made real estate addictive - indulging the homeowner fantasies of tens of millions of people, with none of the anxiety, and no down payment. Willa Paskin is Slate's television critic, who wrote about how Zillow and House Hunters Have Made All of Us Into Real Estate Experts.
Here Be Dragons
Arctic explorer Henry Hudson set sail from England 400 years ago in search of the Northwest Passage - a route that would cut down the travel time on trading routes between Europe and Asia. Instead of finding the passage, he was marooned in what is now known as Hudson Bay - a region that remains mysterious today. Reporter Emily Corwin found a contemporary arctic explorer searching for answers.
You can listen to this story again at PRXorg.
Atlas Obscura in Print
Atlas Obscura is not your typical travel guide. It won't point out the best restaurants in London or Paris, or the best views of the pyramids of Giza, or Stonehenge. But, if you're the kind of person who'd rather visit a 2300 year old mummy in Denmark, a Namibian ghost town, or Minnesota's Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, then this is the guidebook for you - and best of all, you can still enjoy without going anywhere: Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders compiles some of the most wondrous places from the delightfully addictive Atlas Obscura website into a hefty book.
Ella Morton is co-author with Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras, and Ella joined us to tell us more about the guide.
