An atlas is an argument about what is worth looking at
The Atlas of Curiosity is a publication about things that are genuinely remarkable and largely unknown. We started it because the internet is full of surprising facts and almost empty of surprising writing. A curiosity deserves the same treatment as a serious subject, because it usually is one: a lake that changes colour is also geochemistry, a disused railway is also economic policy, a single inherited object is also a family's whole century.
What we mean by curiosity
Curiosity, for us, is not novelty. It is the moment when something you assumed was settled turns out to be more complicated. We look for subjects with three qualities: they are real, they are documented, and they resist summary. If a piece can be adequately delivered in a sentence, it belongs in a caption, not in the Atlas. If it only sounds astonishing because nobody has checked it, it does not belong here at all.
We are not a travel guide and we do not rank things. Nothing here is described as the world's most anything unless a specific body has measured it and we can cite them. We write about places you cannot visit as readily as places you can, and about objects, organisms, structures, events and people with equal seriousness. The nine categories are a filing system, not a promise of coverage: the collection grows in the direction of whatever we can actually verify.
How we work
Every entry is researched from primary or specialist sources — surveys, papers, archives, museum records, local reporting — and each one ends with a list of what we read, linked wherever the material is public. Where the evidence is contested or thin, we say so in the piece rather than smoothing it into confidence. Where we are wrong, we correct the entry and note that we have.
We take image rights as seriously as facts. Every photograph, map and diagram on this site carries its creator, its source and its licence, visibly, next to the image itself — not buried in a data attribute or a credits page. If a licence does not allow us to publish an image, we publish the entry without it. We would rather run a page with no picture than a page with a stolen one.
The Atlas is written by a small editorial team. We publish when a piece is finished rather than on a schedule, and there is no advertising in the body of an entry. If you have a subject you think we have missed, or a correction, we want it.