Tom Burson

If you’ve never seen a severed arm in a box hooked up to a voltmeter, now’s your chance
There’s an anus on an island. It’s massive. Although the ratio of colon to rectum may be off, it’s a surprisingly accurate recreation – the digestive tract, coloring, and veins, at least – of a puckered asshole and its internal organs. Is this a joke? Maybe. Is it suggestive statement that islands are shit? Hopefully.
Opposite the anus, a human wrist, foetus, and a squid are hooked up to voltmeters, as a c...

It’s 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday and a few hundred people are dancing atop a péniche in the river Seine. The club Concrete’s sporadic soiree has just begun, and, for the next nineteen hours, as many as a thousand or more people will stop by for dance-fueled, boozy brunch like something out of the “after-midnights” in Paris. Down the road, detox yoga and meditation at the club Wanderlust is about to start for those seeking to cure—or at least temper—Saturday night’s demons. And down in the catacombs...

A few hundred years ago, witches procured deadly apples from the thorny trees across the dark forest, and vibrant herbs along the forest floor turned princes into frogs. Roman soldiers called it Silva Negra because of its wall of darkness, even at high noon. This same darkness inspired Grimm folklore and childhood fairy tales of foreboding. Today, bright red rosehip dangles from mountainside shrubs. Exotic—and toxic—mushrooms test hikers' palates. Wild cherries form the base of the region’s i...

A few dozen people crowd the platter-filled tables at Komkommertijd, a vegan buffet on the outskirts of the spired, medieval city-center of Ghent, Belgium. It’s a Thursday evening but the restaurant has a Friday-night crowd, as clanking plates and a mishmash of Dutch, French and Danglish chatter accompanies a few organic beers, some chickpea curry, beetroot stew and far more coconut cakes than one should consume in a single sitting.
This isn’t the stereotypical image of French-fry-riddled, ha...

A hundred or so people crowd along the edges of Würzburg’s old medieval bridge, the Alte Mainbrücke. It’s midday on a Thursday, but almost everyone is sipping wine, while group of twentysomethings are performing blushingly cheesy—or maybe cheeks are rosy from the rosé—German covers of songs nearly impossible to identify over the chatter brought after three bottles of Silvaner.
This isn’t the stereotypical image of beer-guzzling, Oktoberfest-happy Bavaria, but, then again, Würzburg isn’t like ...

How speakeasies and boutique hotels are thriving in between injection rooms, and what that means for Bahnhofsviertel.
“When I first moved here, my parents told me to avoid this area,” said Lisa, a student at Frankfurt’s Goethe University.
“During my first year living in Frankfurt, I never came here, and that’s how it was for everyone I knew.”
Walking through Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel, the city’s red-light district, feels a little like stepping into the film Trainspotting; except, rather tha...

Courtesy of Tom Burson
Maybe it’s rutiluphilia, maybe it’s that bizarre Dutch humor, or maybe it’s some subconscious Freudian fascination with Van Gogh, but the town of Breda in the Netherlands absolutely adores redheads.
Every September thousands of natural redheads from around the world travel to the small Dutch town to celebrate “Roodharigendag,” the Redhead Days, a festival devoted to the fire-haired family.
I went to the festival this year — here's what it was like.
Every year thousands ...

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Flights to Iceland are about to cost less than most domestic flights in the States....

Like celebrities, airlines also offer their own own signature scent to relax passengers, and Delta Airlines just released the details of their special fragrance, Calm....