Accessible only by ship, the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha hosts a resilient human population—and heck of a lot of rock lobsters.

Or, how to follow the Christmas holiday with a festival of pranks, trick-or-treating, and drunken revelry.

How did people find out where their local boundaries were before there were reliable maps?

A strange initiation ritual involving a toad was required for members of a secret caste of nineteenth-century horse mystics.