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Some time in December, Ben Hooper will step on to a beach in Dakar, Senegal, and plunge into the warm blue waters of the Atlantic. He will not stop swimming until he hits Natal in Brazil. The distance is 1,763 miles. But that’s only if he goes in a straight line. And swimming across the Atlantic in a straight line is a bad idea: “The currents in the centre are so strong, I’d never get there. It’s an absolute car wreck in the centre. Great for rowers, great for sailors, horrible for swimmers,” he says. Instead he will go in...

The first woman bishop in the Church of England could be in the Gloucester diocese, a senior clergyman has said. The archdeacon of Cheltenham's comments came during an open meeting where some 70 people shared their views on what qualities the new bishop should have. The Venerable Robert Springett said he felt the likelihood was "really pretty high" as the diocese could now pick the best person regardless of gender. The Right Reverend Michael Perham, stepped back as bishop in August. He had been due to retire in November. He was interviewed by the Metropolitan Police investigating two allegations of...

Mysteries come in many forms: ancient, modern, unsolved, and unexplained. But the world's most mysterious buildings are a physical force to be reckoned with. They've become popularized on websites full of user-generated and editor-curated like Abandoned-places.com, weburbanist.com, and AtlasObscura.com, an exhaustive database of the unusual. "In an age where it sometimes seems like there's nothing left to discover, our site is for people who still believe in exploration," says AtlasObscura.com cofounder Joshua Foer. Our definition of mysterious is broad and varied. Some buildings on our list are being eaten alive by the earth, such as a lava-buried church in the...

October 21, 2003 A Face Lift for The Times, Typographically, That IsBy THE NEW YORK TIMES tarting today, the front page and main news sections of The New York Times are receiving a gentle typographical face-lift. In place of a miscellany of headline typefaces that have accumulated in its columns over the last century, the newspaper is settling on a single family, Cheltenham, in roman and italic versions and various light and bold weights. A narrow variation will be used for The Times's signature one-column headline, which often appears at the top right of Page A1 on the main article...