“Brazil knows how to party, but are they serious enough?” In my second photo-essay for The Atlantic‘s city-specific edition, Scenes From Carnaval, the ‘Largest Street Fair on the Planet’, I go inside the colonial view that Carnaval is evidence Brazil is not serious enough: Six million people have taken to the streets of Rio de Janeiro [...]
Flamengo Beach is about to get crazy. It’s time for the Flying Orchestra! The Orquestra Voadora (“Flying Orchestra”) is a band of musicians that met in 2008 playing in different Carnaval street parades and decided they wanted to bring the funk year round. Their Carnaval party kicks off at 3pm on Carnaval Tuesday. The crowd gathers. The band rolls [...]
It’s pre-Carnaval in Rio, and Rio is already a hundred-something deep into a superpartyschedule of over 500 street parties. Most of them are nothing like the mega-spectacle you’re imagining. They’re chill out, neighborhood affairs, like this bloco in Copacabana. Above: The Skate Gang holds court to Ja Rule in a Petrobras parking lot in Copacabana [...]
Rio+20 “ended here as it began, under a shroud of withering criticism.” Greenpeace called the sequel to the 1992 Earth Summit an epic fail. Unsustainable nonsense. This photo of an Indian aiming an arrow at security guards in the garden of Brazil’s National Bank just might have been the highlight. Also noteworthy: Rio correspondent Taylor Barnes’ coverage [...]
Construction delays and corruption charges be damned – if Ian McKee and Vicente Mello have their way, World Cup 2014 will go down as the first Green Cup in history. McKee and Mello are on a mission to build the world’s first LEED Platinum soccer stadium – the highest standard of sustainable building on the [...]
Rio just finished throwing the biggest street party on the planet. But will there be enough port-a-potties for World Cup? After Carnaval in Rio went off with a record 5 million partiers – and without major incident – the international press had to find some more creative angles. Reuters notes that despite an aggressive campaign against peeing in [...]
The last of the 3,800 orange-clad street sweepers in charge of cleaning up after the biggest New Year’s party on the planet put the finishing touches on Copacabana Beach, New Year’s Day 2012. The biggest New Year’s party on the planet went down last night in Copacabana Beach, where over 2 million people dressed [...]
Rio de Janeiro inaugurated the world’s largest floating Christmas tree this week with a crowd of 10,000 spectators and a fireworks show that would have put Disneyland to shame. That’s right, floating Christmas tree. It floats in Lagoa, a lagoon bordered by some of Rio’s most famous neighborhoods, including Copacabana and Ipanema. And it doesn’t just [...]
Let’s call this genre favela melodrama. In Deadly Games, ESPN writer Wright Thompson swings from a helicopter and wonders what it’s like to be shot at in a post-apocalyptic picture of Rio de Janeiro gang warfare that literally opens with a burning cross and ends with a reference the devil. Favela melodrama, popularized by Brazilian [...]
The biggest surveillance screen in Latin America spans 860 square feet in a new building called the Ops Center that most residents of Rio de Janeiro don’t even know exists. 80 interchangeable digital panels project live video feeds from 450 cameras and three helicopters, plus a dizzying array of tricked-out Google Maps of schools and [...]
