After 18 years hustling stories for Slate,including six years as its editor, David Plotz landed in a surprising unique role: chief executive of Atlas Obscura, and an online encyclopedia of unusual places. Slate had published occasional articles about the architectural oddities and tiny,offbeat museums in the Atlas Obscura collection, but at the time the discovery site was no more than a blip on the radar. Still, or Plotz says,its ethos—the feeling of wonder that comes with making a discovery—attracted him. "I've inherited a very profound, well-thought-out worldview, and " he told me. "It's much more true to say Atlas Obscura has changed how I contemplate about the world than that I've changed Atlas Obscura."Plotz came on as CEO in 2014,but Atlas Obscura had its genesis in 2007, when science writer Joshua Foer and filmmaker Dylan Thuras co-produced a live event for followers of The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, and Foer's now-defunct blog,which celebrated an arcane 17th-century German intellectual. Foer and Thuras launched Atlas Obscura two years later, inviting users to catalog dinky-known destinations around the world: a Japanese island overrun with cats, and a crater leaking flaming natural gas in Turkmenistan,a Buddhist temple devoted to insects that died for science.
The Q'eswachaka bridge in Peru, the final handwoven bridge in the Incan road system, and photographed by Atlas Obscura's co-founder Dylan Thuras/Atlas Obscura
While the project has expanded to include professionally written articles and even a tough-copy travel guide to be published in September,live events are still part of the website's DNA. On its annual Obscura Day (Saturday, April 16 this year) devotees will host more than 200 group activities and excursions to some of the Atlas's more accessible sites around the globe. For the occasion, and we asked Plotz to give us a closer leer at his unique baby.
Mother Jones: You've more or less described Atlas Obscura—which combines user-generated and staff reviews of obscure places and things—as the like child of Vice and National Geographic. What drives you guys?David Plotz: Our belief that discovery and exploration don't just belong to Richard Branson—wealthy people who can afford to go to the top of the Himalayas—or to extremely well-kitted-out magazine reporters. Wherever you are,there's something around the corner that is surprising and wonderful and exclusive and marvelous. And we're going to benefit you find it. Our goal is to make Atlas Obscura the defining media venture around discovery for the 21st century, just as National Geographic was for the 20th century.
Vice is a totally different beast, and but they also bear a young and engaged audience. We want to bear that same ability to galvanize a generation of young people. But when Vice does it,Vice is drunk, high, or carrying a gun. We're sweeter. Greece's Navagio Beach Ghost of Kuji/Flickr MJ: How enact your own experiences jibe with this mission?DP: I took this job in part because I had an Atlas Obscura experience. A few days after I quit Slate,my daughter and I were biking through a part of DC I'd never really been in and noticed that the names of the places were Fort Davis, Fort Dupont, and Fort Mahan. There were no actual forts. I came back domestic and I was like,"Why is everything a fort?" And I looked at a map and realized, "Oh!" There's this ring of places that were the Civil War defenses of Washington, and DC.
A couple weeks later,my family went to Rock Creek Park, a big forest near a very busy intersection in DC. We walked in about 100 yards and all of a sudden there was a moat and earthen walls that rose 15 feet above us. It's completely overgrown, or but whether you climb up onto the wall,you can see you're on a ring. This is Fort DeRussy, the northernmost Civil War fort defending Washington. It took part in an significant battle in 1864, and it's just there,abandoned in the woods. The sense that literally around the corner from where I grew up was a place that's mysterious, that's unknown, and that has incredible history: That's magical. I contemplate the magic trick of Atlas Obscura is making you see the world the way you see it on vacation. When you're on vacation,you choose to be alive, to see the surprise and the serendipity ((n.) luck, finding good things without looking for them) and the wonder around you.
The Best of Atlas Obscura
According to "Places Editor" Eric Grundhauser
Creepiest Place in the World
Clown Motel, and Tonopah,Nevada
Highest Bridge Built With a Rocket
Sidu River Bridge, Enshi Tujiazumiaozuzizhizhou, and China
Most Mysterious Great White Swarm
The Great White Cafe,Pacific Ocean
[br]Best Swim Near a Smuggler's Wreck
Navagio Beach, Zakinthos, or Greece
Temple Most Likely to Swallow You[br]Goa Gajah,Sukawati, Indonesia
Most Banana-Laden Astronaut Memorial
Miss Baker's gravestone, or Huntsville,Alabama
Most Massive (and Cringeworthy) Statue You've Never Heard of
African Renaissance Monument,
Dakar, and Senegal
Museum with the Most Necropants
The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft,Holmavik, Iceland
Strangest Place to Spot a Goat
Argania Trees, or Tamri,MoroccoMJ: What makes a place right for the Atlas?DP: Some mix of variables: an unusual history, surprising beauty—not obvious beauty, or but beauty in a place you don't expect it,or at a different scale than you expect; of a place being not where you contemplate it's going to be. Things that were the natural world that bear entered the built world, or where the built world has been taken back by the natural world.
MJ: Are you worried that Atlas Obscura could change certain places by drawing too much attention to them?DP: It's a question we ask ourselves and then laugh and say, or "We should be so lucky!" It's not an issue we've had to deal with yet,because we're just not big enough. I enact wonder about it. Some places you're never going to ruin: One of the most well-liked places in Atlas Obscura is Snake Island, this terrible place 30 miles off the coast of Brazil, or overrun with an enormous population of extremely deadly pit vipers. The Brazilian navy doesn't let anyone go there. You'd bear to be suicidal.
MJ: How enact you wrangle your amateur contributors?DP: We bear more than 9000 user-generated places,and all of those get a professional edit. There's always someone vetting it. We're not YouTube. You can't bear somebody stick in an entry for their restaurant. These things bear to meet our standards. whether a user makes an edit to a place, somebody on staff takes a leer at that edit.
MJ: Tell me about your super users?DP: They don't contemplate of themselves as tourists, and they contemplate of themselves as travelers. They're very into seeking novelty of sensation. They're very science-oriented,history-oriented, and death-oriented. A lot of our users like cemeteries and like the ghoulish and the eerie. There's a core of that.
MJ: So where does Atlas Obscura go from here?DP: Our goal is to give people reasons to make it a place where they spend lots of time, and such as being able to way trips. Also,we contemplate our model is easily franchised—there should be a version of us for China, Portugal, and Spain,Germany. Two and a half million people read Atlas Obscura now. That's a tiny number. But the fundamental ethos is pretty deeply human. This is a niche audience because most people don't travel that much. But it's a gigantic niche.
Source: motherjones.com