Adnan Syed may or may not have been at this public library near Woodlawn High School during the twenty-one minutes after school on January 13, 1999 when the prosecution said Hae Min Lee was killed. Asia McClain, a student at WoodLawn High School, claimed in a series of letters to have seen Adnan at this time. This would have provided an alibi for Adnan, but it was never used by his defense in the case.

You can find out more in episode 01 of WBEZ Chicago's podcast Serial.

view full location details...

On January 13, 1999, Hae Min Lee, a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, disappeared. After her body was discovered a few weeks later, her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed, also a senior at Woodlawn, was arrested for her murder. He was later convicted and then sentenced to life in June of the following year.

The case against Adnan is examined in depth in season one of Sarah Koenig's podcast Serial.

view full location details...

Although it's now off-limits to the public and currently serves as a bird sanctuary in the Harbor Heron Preserves project, North Brother Island was once a quarantine zone for people with infectious diseases.

North Brother Island held several cases of smallpox, tuberculosis, and other diseases, but the most famous resident was undoubtedly Typhoid Mary.

Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant who worked as a cook, was visibly healthy to an inspection. After following a trail of fevers and infections in 1906, researcher George Soper connected the dots to Mallon.

Mary was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever, meaning that she carried the disease without suffering from the symptoms. She was forcibly quarantined (twice) on North Brother Island until her death from a stroke there in 1938. She was 69 years old.

View a recent photo essay of the North Brother Island ruins.

view full location details...

Rancho de la Luna is a recording studio in Joshua Tree about two hours from LA out in the California desert. Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Arctic Monkeys, earthlings? and Foo Fighters are just a few of the bands that have recorded here over the years.

Fred Drake and David Catching founded the studio in 1993, and David has continued to operate the studio after Fred's death in 2002.

It's been featured in Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, in the Los Angeles episode of Foo Fighter's HBO series Sonic Highways and in a short Vice documentary by Eagles of Death Metal frontman Jesse Hughes.

view full location details...

Located at this address in sunny Calgary, Canada, is the Transcanada Corp office.

Transcanada is the brain trust that is shoving the XL Keystone pipeline down America's throat via an insecure Congress desperate to prove that they can get something- no matter how ill-conceived and unbeneficial to Americans- done.

The US $12.2 billion project is set to bring tar sands oil from Alberta that is rich in sulfur and other tasty stuff to the only shit pot in North America that will process it- Houston, TX.

But what about the jobs created? The number of actual jobs gets hyper-inflated with the zealousness of the proponent, but a recent Forbes article shows that Transcanada's own applications state they expect (on the top end) only 6,000-6,500 short term jobs created for the complete construction and approximately 35 full time jobs once it's online.

In comparison, Amazon.com is hiring 80,000 short term jobs for the holiday season (view source here).

We, the energy thirsty masses, get to bear the brunt of increased air pollution from the processing and the risk of leaks, contamination, and spills that a 1,200 mile (1,900 km) pipeline brings.

But environmental disasters related to industrial energy use rarely occur, unless you count the Gulf BP oil spill, or the Exxon Valdez, or the Fukushima nuclear power plant, or Chernobyl, or Three-Mile-Island or this rather long and depressing list of recent oil spills.

And then there’s that whole global warming thing that we didn’t get to talk about...

view full location details...