Every winter, millions of monarch butterflies from the eastern part of North America migrate south to a forest in the middle of Mexico, where they see out the season until fall comes.
The forest, which was first discovered in the 1970s, is officially called the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, and has been a protected site in Mexico since 1980. But ever since then—and likely before—the forest has remained threatened by illegal logging.
On Tuesday, Mexican authorities announced steps towards fighting that threat, in the form of the closure of seven sawmills that had been operating illegally in the reserve, according to the Associated Press.
The closures come around two months ahead of the butterflies' arrival and amid a wider crackdown on illegal logging in the area.
The total preserve is some 215 square miles, or about the size of Chicago. But a smaller, core area of the zone is where officials have focused their efforts, almost cutting in half the amount of illegal logging there from 2015 to 2016, according to the AP.
All of which is good news for the monarchs, who need all the help they can get. Their populations have declined massively in the last 10 years, and scientists still aren't quite sure how—or if—they can be saved.
Wyndclyffe, a mansion in Rhinebeck, New York, which is about 100 miles north of New York City, has been in bad shape for decades, ever since it was abandoned in the 1950s after a series of owners couldn't afford to maintain it.
Owing to its size, it's not hard to see why: 24 rooms on 80 acres, a pre-Civil War manor house that preceded the Gilded Age, when many such mansions were routinely built, that later fell into disrepair.
But Wyndclyffe (also spelled Wyndcliffe) has a more colorful history than most. The American novelist Edith Wharton spent time there as a child, for one thing, and it's also is believed to have inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses," after its original owner, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, a New York socialite.
These days, the dilapidated mansion sits on just 2.5 acres, the rest having been carved up and sold in the past several decades. Its latter-day value also matches its condition: just $312,900, modest for most homes along the Hudson.
Any new owner will have a difficult project on their hands, with the option to either tear down a piece of history, or spend hundreds of thousands more to rebuild.
Keeping up with the Joneses, in other words, is about as expensive as you would think.
This Fleischer Studios cartoon from 1932 opens on a live-action shot of Cab Calloway and his band, with the bandleader performing his iconic boogie.
The toon takes its name from one of Calloway's most popular songs, "Minnie the Moocher." Minnie, played by Betty Boop, is a depressed flapper who can't bring herself to eat her immigrant parents' food. Like so many angsty teens she hatches a plan to run away because they're "not so sweet," and makes her escape with her puppy friend, Bimbo. Betty and Bimbo don't make it very far before they're frightened by shadows in the forest, so they take refuge in a cave. It's here that they're met by Cab Calloway himself—sort of.
Max Fleischer (who created Betty Boop, Koko the Clown, and Popeye) used rotoscoping, a technique he invented, to animate Calloway into the cartoon. First he filmed the bandleader performing his famous strut, then projected the film stills onto the back of a glass easel. On the other side of the easel, the animator then traced over over each frame, thus transforming Calloway from the dapper jazzman into a walrus specter. (Why a walrus? Unclear.)
Rotoscoping produced an uncanny result. While the dance troupe of skeletons wiggle their cartoon spaghetti limbs, the phantom bandleader moves in an eerily human manner. This, along with other creepy sights like ghosts impervious to electric execution and kittens that suck the life out of their own mother, drive Betty and Bimbo back to the safety of their own home.
A cautionary tale? Maybe. An impressive example of early cartooning? Definitely.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
The year was November 1983, and the State Department needed to admit something pretty embarrassing.
For two weeks, it seems they had been able to keep quiet the accidental transfer of highly-classified documents to the Lorton Reformatory, a one-time D.C. prison with a long-time federal partnership. But when a local reporter returned some of the “stratospheric secrets” to the State Department, they had to come out with it, and in headlines across the country, the news broke that the government had lost track of the precious papers. To deliver the Department of State’s side was spokesman Joe Reap.
Who was Joe Reap?
Well, according to another New York Times piece from 1974, nine years prior, he was a graduate of Georgetown University Law School, deputy press officer under eight Secretaries of State, the husband of Anne, and the father of eight children.
MuckRock has submitted multiple requests to follow up, but while we wait, we’re wondering: can you find Joseph Reap faster than a FOIA?
Twenty MuckRock requests to the person who can satisfactorily solve this mystery, and, in the meantime, we’ll find some humor knowing the CIA isn’t the only agency with spooks.
To a casual pedestrian on Houston St., the southern border of New York's East Village, Red Square might not look much different than any other tall-enough apartment building in the area. But when this building was completed in 1989, it was, depending on your perspective, a bold real estate move to bring upscale housing to a new neighborhood or one of the harbingers of doom for an East Village golden age. It also had a secret, starting in 1994: If you looked up to the roof, from the right angle, you could see a statue of Vladimir Lenin on the roof, one arm raised in the air.
If East Villagers had mixed feelings about the building, the statue was a point of pride. This week, though, it was removed from Red Square's roof, reports local blog EV Grieve.
After dark, a crane came and lifted the 18-foot-tall statue from the spot on the roof where it lived for more than 20 years. Lenin came to Red Square after the fall of the Soviet Union: the statue had been commissioned from a Soviet artist but never went on display. A friend of one of the building's owners found it "in the backyard of a dacha outside Moscow," the New York Times reported in 1997. Lenin was positioned on the roof so that he faced "Wall Street, capitalism's emblem, and the Lower East Side, 'the home of the socialist movement,'" the Times noted.
Red Square is reportedly under contract for sale, and presumably the buyers have plans that don't include quirky Soviet statues gracing the roof. And Lenin? Bowery Boogie reports that, like so many New Yorkers who are priced out of their neighborhood or forced out of their building, he's landed in a new spot in the city—and he didn't even have to go too far. Lenin now lives on the roof of 178 Norfolk Street, just down the block from his old place.
In news that might be a plot point from a Da Vinci Code sequel, a Washington, D.C. Joan of Arc’s sword has been stolen. As NBC Washington is reporting, a statue of the famous warrior was robbed of its weapon recently, and this isn’t even the first time it’s happened.
Located in Washington’s Meridian Hill Park, the bronze Joan of Arc statue was installed in 1922, a gift from the French women’s group Le Lyceum Societie des Femmes de France. The statue depicts the historic giant in full armor, riding triumphantly astride a horse, holding her blade to the heavens. Unfortunately, her triumphant pose makes her sword pretty easy to steal.
The first time it was taken was back in 1978, when someone broke off the extended blade. It wasn’t replaced until 2011. Now, just days ago, another thief once again snapped off the statue’s blade.
Park authorities are looking into the theft, though Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton blames the parks service for not realizing that the sword would be an attractive target in the first place, and failing to take steps to prevent its theft.
A massive conspiracy involving dead presidents, shadowy sects of the Catholic church, and Joan of Arc’s true identity, has assumedly not been ruled out either.
A marriage over the blacksmith's anvil in Gretna Green, Scotland. (Photo: Keystone-France/ Gamma-Rapho/ Getty Images)
Love in 18th century England wasn’t the private affair we think of today. When a couple wanted to marry, they not only needed official permission from their parents, but social approval from their whole town. For many English citizens of the era, the only way to live with their sweethearts was to elope in a runaway marriage. Thousands such couples had secret weddings in Scottish border towns each year until the 1940s, often in a decidedly un-romantic venue: the sweaty, stifling shop of the local blacksmith. These ceremonies were known as “anvil weddings.”
Today, most historians agree that fishermen, weavers, and horse saddlers performed most runaway 18th-century weddings rather than blacksmiths, who were highly valued and paid for their trade. “The ‘blacksmith’ is a myth,” English travel writer Charles George Harper wrote in 1907, “deriving no doubt from the more or less poetic idea of indissoluble bonds being forged.”
Yet weddings believed to be unofficial have been referred to as “blacksmith weddings” since the 1500s, and in 1843, a blacksmith from the Scottish border town of Gretna Green wrote to the London Times, asserting that he had performed more than 3,500 weddings.
An 1844 depiction of a wedding at Gretna Green in Scotland, with a blacksmith's anvil and horseshoes on the wall. (Photo: British Library/Public Domain)
Regardless of who generally performed them, the anvil wedding’s appeal exploded in the 1700s. At the time, English bureaucrats were unsettled by a growing number of marriages done without paperwork, a priest or public license. So the government made written parental permission a legal requirement for young couples, with the Marriage Act of 1753 (full title: An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage).
Under this act non-royal English citizens under 21 couldn’t get married without signed permission from their parents, and had to publicly announce the marriage in their town so others could object if need be. Scotland, on the other hand, had very different laws: girls over 12 and boys over 14 could get married by “declaration,” meaning they only had to announce vows in front of witnesses. Parental permission was not required.
Scottish law allowed any citizen to perform a marriage, and anyone else present to bear witness. Gretna Green innkeeper Thomas Little, who performed weddings in his inn, the Maxwell Arms, is thought to have been the first to capitalize on the legal differences between the two countries, inventing the concept of the “Gretna Wedding.”
Many runway weddings were performed in inns or public buildings, but another central town fixture also played a chief role: blacksmith cottages, near where the blacksmith made the couple’s rings. Perhaps the most popular blacksmith’s shop for marriages at the time was the smithy of the Scottish estate Gretna Green, conveniently located less than a mile from the border with England, near the River Esk.
Gretna Green became so famous for runaway weddings, that today it is known for little else. Moonlighting priests collected a small fee for their services; the fee sometimes included a room for couples who wanted to consummate the marriage bond straight away. In general, these “anvil weddings” were seen as disreputable, yet very romantic. The “priest,” who had no formal qualifications to lead the wedding, would conclude the marriage ceremony by pounding the anvil in the blacksmith’s shop, symbolically joining the couple the way a blacksmith joins metal.
Runaway weddings were flooded with young lovers and high-status couples who wanted privacy. But anvil weddings were not always forged from pure romance; kidnapped brides were forced to marry at Gretna Green and other border towns, too. One kidnapping that made headlines was “The Shrigley Abduction,” in which the 15-year-old heiress Ellen Turner was captured and coerced into a Gretna Green anvil wedding by 30-year-old Edward Wakefield and his team of accomplices, in order to access her funds (after a court case, the marriage was annulled).
It may not have been common for blacksmiths to conduct anvil wedding ceremonies, but near the turn of the 20th century, entrepreneur Hugh Mackie and his employee Richard Rennison brought the legend to life. In 1890, Hugh Mackie bought Gretna Green and worked as an "anvil priest" (along with his wife), uniting couples by striking his anvil and announcing, “Right-o! Carry on.” When Mackie retired in 1926, Richard Rennison became the blacksmith priest until 1940, when wedding by declaration was outlawed and the authenticity of these marriages were questioned.
Richard Rennison performed more than 5,000 marriages over his blacksmith anvil, some of which were contested but upheld decades later in court. The anvil became so popular some people even threatened to steal it. The popularity of runaway weddings also surged in other Scottish border towns, including toll houses in Lamberton, and Coldstream, where cobblers and “mole catchers” who doubled as priests competed with Gretna Green.
Sometimes it was possible to get married by an actual minister: the coastal village of Portpatrick was home to a minister who ignored Scotland’s marriage law residency requirements in order to wed passengers arriving on a daily ferry route from Northern Ireland. Couples were able to hop off the boat onto land, get married in less than an hour, and then ride the ferry back home in a single day.
In 1856 residency requirements for Scottish weddings put a halt to these marriage ceremonies, naming them invalid unless one member of the couple resided in Scotland (this requirement was removed in 1977). But the difference between the marital laws in Scotland and England still remains: the age of full marriage consent in England is 18, and in Scotland, it’s 16.
Yet the romance of running away to start a new life after a secret wedding at the border has hardly faded. These days couples in both countries have to get a license to make it official, though they can still relive the fantasy of getting married over the anvil.
Like a Scottish Las Vegas, Gretna Green has attracted modern tourists and lovers to its wedding ceremonies for the last few decades, and the blacksmith shop still marries around 1,000 couples per year.
This past summer, paleontologists from Siberia's Tomsk State University took a pilgrimage to Mamontovoye Village, armed with picks and shovels. They carried out their planned dig, finding a typical array of interesting bones.
Just as they were about to leave for home, they figured they'd dig just a little deeper. And then they hit the jackpot: the densest mammoth graveyard ever found.
"We went further down in one location, and then another," Sergey Leshchinsky, a Tomsk State University professor and the leader of the dig, told the Siberian Times. "As we went deeper, we found [a] concentration of mammoth bones that we never had before."
Mamontovoye Villageis a well-known mammoth hotspot. Locals regularly unearth bones while installing new pipes or digging up potato fields, and "Mamontovoye" is Russian for "Mammoth." But this latest haul is unique for the long slice of history it provides.
The bones were diverse, with limbs, ribs and vertebrae all piled together, and they were "incredibly well-preserved," Leshchinsky says. Excavators found as many as 100 bones within three feet of each other. In addition, remains of mammoths from about 10,000 years ago were layered on top of even older ones, from about 30,000 years ago. Older mammoths were about twice as big as the more recent ones.
Besides the mass of mammoths, researchers also found bones from horses, bison, and smaller animals—potentially prehistoric foxes and rodents, some of which had been chewed on by larger predators.
More riches likely lie in store. But the paleontologists resisted the urge to dig further—for now. "We would never have returned from Mamontovoye in [that] case," says Leshchinsky.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Born in the late 1870s, England, Aleister Crowley was one of the great characters of the 20th century—a poet, a magician, a journalist, an alchemist, a philosopher, a spy, a self-affirmed drug fiend, and a sex addict. He was also known as "The Great Beast" and the "wickedest man in the world." He played a major role in the creation of alternate religions like Wicca, the A∴A∴, and the Ordo Templi Orientis, and he founded the Order of Thelema, a semi-Satanic cult whose famous edict was "do what thou wilt."
Crowley is to the occult as Tolkien is to fantasy—he set the stage that everyone else plays in. Basically, if you're dabbling in things dark and dastardly, Aleister was probably there first.
In all of his doings, Crowley traveled a lot. He pursued exploits in Egypt, India, the Far East, Australia, all over Europe and North America, dotting the map with sex magick and weird stunts. Here are a six places in the Atlas where the infamous occultist left his mark.
Blythe Road, the former site of the London temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (Photo: Philip Perry/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Though he was interested in the occult from childhood, Crowley's first foray into organized magic (or "magick," as he preferred to spell it) was with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Well liked by its co-founder, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Crowley advanced in the ranks very quickly. However, not everyone was a fan. The London chapter, which had already found faults in Mathers' leadership, particularly disavowed him for the eccentric, bisexual Crowley. This caused a decisive rift between two factions of the Order, but Mathers wasn't ready to concede his leadership.
In 1900, while the poet and London chapter leader W. B. Yeats was heading a meeting, he was attacked by an "astral siege" from none other than Aleister Crowley. Crowley, wearing a black Osiris mask and a kilt, and his mistress burst into the temple, casting spells and brandishing daggers. They intended to take the temple for Mathers', but were unsuccessful. The police came, the scuffle went to court, and the London chapter of the Golden Dawn won (as they paid the rent on the space). Now the nondescript George's Cafe resides in the former site of the secret society's temple, with no indication of its former life.
Boleskine House was steeped in darkness long before Crowley moved in. The manor is allegedly built atop the ruins of a 10th century church that burnt to the ground during a service, killing all the congregants inside. Crowley bought Boleskine House to seclude himself and perform magic from The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. It was during this period that Crowley became famous for his occultism and black magic, both around the Scotland and later, the world. Sometime during this period Mathers called Crowley to Paris. He left without dispelling the "12 Kings and Dukes of Hell" he had summoned, and many locals blame the house's unlucky history on evil spirits left behind.
First, Crowley's housekeeper's two children died mysteriously and abruptly. Crowley also bragged that one employee of the estate who had long abstained from alcohol got drunk and attempted to murder his entire family. After the house had changed hands, it still wasn't free of dark energy. In 1965, the army major who owned the house committed suicide by shotgun. The next owner, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, spent very little time at the estate, instead bequeathing it to a friend who didn't mind the unexplained creaks, groans, and various ghostly apparitions, but was bothered by the Crowley and Page fans who frequently attempted to break into the house and defile the grounds. Later owners dismissed any notions of hauntings or witchcraft at the house, but in 2015, the residents returned from a shopping trip to find the house completely in flames.
Evangeline Adams' New Hampshire home, where Aleister Crowley spent his magickal retirement. (Photo: Courtesy of J.W. Ocker)
In 1916, Crowley spent four months at the home of renowned medium Evangeline Adams in what he called a "magickal retirement." This didn't mean taking a break from cocaine, heroin, sex magick, and prolonged rituals. Quite the opposite in fact. In Hebron, Crowley doubled down and did a great deal of writing, poetry and magical instruction alike. He was even a ghost writer on several of Adams' books of astrology.
In another magickal retreat, Crowley spent 40 days and 40 nights (a la Jesus Christ) on a tiny island in the Hudson River. His mission was translating the Tao Te Ching, a 4th century Chinese philosophical text. He hadn't brought much food but had packed plenty of red paint, and also put himself to work painting Thelemic graffiti on the island's rocks. Curious families watching the bald, robed man on the island from the banks of the Hudson began bringing him rations. He was also visited by fans and artists, who brought him food, drugs, and company.
Much later Crowley reported experiencing visions of his past lives during his stay on Esopus Island, all of which were somehow very influential figures. His former selves included legendary Taoist Ge Xuan, Renaissance Pope Alexander VI, alchemist Alessandro Cagliostro, and the magician Eliphas Levi. Today, the island is open to the public so long as they can reach it by boat. There are even camping amenities for those who wish to follow in the footsteps of the infamous occultist.
Any eccentric worth his salt has to fake his own death at least once. When visiting Portugal in 1930 and feeling annoyed by his current mistress, Crowley gave appearance he had committed suicide at the Boca de Inferno ("Mouth of Hell") caves. His friend, poet Fernando Pessoa handed Crowley's suicide note to newspapers, helpfully explaining the magical symbols and translating the mangled Portuguese to police and media alike. Three weeks later, Crowley reappeared at the opening of an exhibition of his works in a Berlin gallery, suggesting this whole affair was more publicity stunt than anything else. Today, there is a small white plaque mounted on the rock provides the text of Crowley's note: "Não Posso Viver Sem Ti. A outra 'Boca De Infierno' apanhar-me-á não será tão quente como a tua," which translates roughly to "Can't live without you. The other mouth of hell that will catch me won't be as hot as yours." That might be touching if any of it were genuine.
Crowley's magickal career came to its peak in a little Sicilian town. For a small amount of money, he, his two lovers, their small children, and miscellaneous followers moved into one story house facing the Mediterranean sea. They called it the Abbey of Thelema. The common room was dedicated to ritual practices and held a scarlet "magick" circle marked with the sign of the major Thelemic deities. Crowley’s own bedroom, labeled by himself as "la chambre des cauchemars" (or "the room of nightmares") was entirely hand-painted by the occultist with explicitly erotic frescos, hermaphroditic goblins, and vividly colored monsters. This private room was used for specific night initiations involving psychoactive drugs which gave terrifying cinematic life to this Bosch-like vision of hellish debauchery.
Crowley considered his temple a school of magick, and gave it an appropriately collegiate motto: "Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum"—"A College towards the Holy Spirit." The Cefalù period was one of the most prolific and happy of his life, even as he suffered from drug addiction and had to write the scandalous Diary of a Drug Fiend to finance his community. The growing interest in dark magic and the occult provided him with an ample student body (pun intended). But in 1922, the experience in monasticism ended when Raoul Loveday, a young disciple, tragically died from typhoid fever contracted from drinking contaminated spring water, though Loveday's wife maintained it was from drinking cat's blood.
Crowley and his people were evicted by Mussolini's regime in 1923. The dictator had no sympathy for pornographic art or mysticism. Once the Abbey closed, the villagers whitewashed the murals, which they somewhat correctly saw as demonic. This erased much of the history and work of Crowley in Cefalù. The Abbey of Thelema is still there, a hidden monument of mysterious, magickal decay.
The earliest version we have of the Bible, as we read it today, is called the Codex Amiatinus, which dates to the 8th century and sits in a library in Florence. Before that, all we have are fragments: stray books, scrolls and various other versions of the book.
But researchers in Israel, using a new scanning technology, recently uncovered a portion of the book of Leviticus that is, in fact, pretty much the same version we read today, according to the Associated Press. And the portion—found on a charred bit of a scroll that had been sitting in an archaeologist's storeroom for decades—dates to over 2,000 years ago, or right around the time of Jesus.
This squares with what many experts have long felt, that the modern Bible is indeed that old. But this is the first time researchers have actually found proof.
"This is quite amazing for us," Dead Sea scroll scholar Emmanuel Tov told the AP. "In 2,000 years, this text has not changed."
The researchers unveiled their findings in a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, proving among other things, that the book we read today is about as antiquated as we thought.
On sandy beaches in Australia, Thailand, and other regions of the Indo-Pacific, you may stumble across these strange star-like patterns in the sand. Tunneling their way up through the surface after the tides recede, sand bubbler crabs emerge from their damp, grainy dens and quickly transform a smooth, picturesque beach into a plain of sandy pellets.
In the time-lapse video, the cute globular crabs raid a beach in Koh Lanta, Thailand. The sand bubbler crabs look like they are infesting the beach as they uplift the terrain, but the tiny crustaceans are actually harmless. Measuring about just a centimeter across, sand bubbler crabs can cover an entire beach in little sand balls within just a couple of hours after a tide retreats. The radial formations left behind have been described as “sand ball flowers” and “sand ball galaxies”—pieces of art.
Their odd bubble-shaped bodies, and two projecting eyes gave the sand bubbler crab, species Scopimera inflata, its name. The crabs easily blend in to the environment, as their exterior matches the shade of the sand, and have claws perfect for digging and sifting through grains.
During low tide, a sand bubbler crab will poke out from the mouth of a burrow, surveying the beach to make sure it’s safe to emerge. Then, it will clear the sand surrounding the burrow by pushing it with its legs. When satisfied, the sand bubbler crabs will began their sandy feast. They will scrape the surface of the sand by alternating their claws, spooning it into the mouth to filter and consume microanimals. The crabs will then rotate and form a little pellet of residue sand, and kick it off to the side with their legs.
You can see Malaysian sand bubbler crabs create the slimy balls of sand up close in the clip below filmed by Matthew Davidson.
These crabs are crafty in more ways than one. Males will also perform a funny dancing display to show others their dominance over the territory. They straighten their legs, stand tall, and stretch their claws high above the body. Then they'll pull all their limbs back in quickly to go into attack-mode stance.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Plaza de la Raza at Columbus Park, otherwise known as La Raza Park. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
A version of this piece originally appeared on Denverite, a newsletter and news site for Denver newcomers, know-it-alls and everybody in between. This story was written by Erica Meltzer.
Eduardo Lucero was working the burrito stand with his very pregnant wife and 12-year-old son the day things came to a head.
“I looked over to my left and saw a wedge formation of police,” he said. “And I told my wife, ‘They’re going to get us.’ And I looked to the right and saw another wedge. I said, ‘It’s a pincer move.'”
On a summer day in 1981, Denver police were clearing people out of the park because this event — the annual commemoration of the community’s takeover of the park back in 1970 — didn’t have a permit. It would turn into a day and night of tear gas and dogs, bricks and bottles, beatings and arrests.
Within a few years, the city closed the park’s pool forever, filled it in, covered it up, and the community lost something it would never get back.
This is a “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” story.
It’s a story about a green city block on West 38th Avenue between Navajo and Osage streets that was at the center of Denver’s Chicano movement in the 1970s.
Just about anyone around there will tell you the name of the park is La Raza Park, but the sign says Columbus Park. That’s part of this story too.
The park was named Columbus in recognition of the Italian-American community that dominated the neighborhood for decades. The restaurants along 38th and the park name are some of the last remnants of Denver’s Little Italy.
Mexican-Americans have also lived in the neighborhood for a long time, but by the 1960s, they had overtaken the Italians. As their numbers increased, their political power and sense of themselves also changed. People began to organize around educational disparities, around the lack of job opportunities, around the killings by police of unarmed young men in the community.
Corky Gonzalez founded the Crusade for Justice in Denver in 1966. That the community should have control of the institutions — the schools and parks and community centers — that serve it was an important tenet of the Crusade for Justice and the broader Chicano movement, and it was implemented in La Raza Park.
Former boxer Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales, right, with Cesar Chavez, formed the Crusade for Justice in 1966. (Photo: KRMA/Denver Post/Denver Public Library/Western History Collection/X-RMN-049-9397)
The lifeguards at the park were mostly white, the children and families using it mostly Chicano. In 1970, community activists took over the park. In his book on the Chicano movement, “The Crusade for Justice,” Ernesto Vigil describes young people tearing down the fence and jumping in the pool, where they taunted police who tried to arrest them. Over two seasons, they staged “splash-ins” and taunted the lifeguards, and when the white lifeguards quit, Chicano teenagers who had been training for this opportunity moved into their jobs. By 1971, the park was effectively under the control of the Chicano movement.
Activists staged similar takeovers at Lincoln Park, renaming it La Alma, and Curtis Park, which they renamed Mestizo Park.
In a 2014 interview with La Madre Tierra, a Latino environmental organization, Arturo “Bones” Rodriguez, who was one of the organizers of the takeover and who ran the pool there, quoted the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata: “The land belongs to those who work it.”
The actual takeover of the park was for jobs for youth, but it also had a social-political agenda: if we could have a space that reflected our culture and what we define as a Chicano. It was developing a new man and a new woman, based on our historical raíces, from indigenismo to the mezcla of our people from Europe to Africa to China and so forth. That was one thing that we really promoted in three square blocks, a sense of community, a sense of a peoplehood and how we could transform it.
This was when people started calling the park La Raza Park.
La Raza means simply “the people,” but it’s a powerful idea in Mexican and Chicano identity. “La raza cósmica” represents the mixture of all races in the Latino people. In Latin America, the day we mark as Columbus Day is Día de la Raza. “La Raza” could be considered the opposite of Christopher Columbus. It does not celebrate the colonizer, but the colonized, the people who emerged from and survived this cataclysm.
View of the tennis court in Columbus Park at 38th Avenue and Osage Street in Denver, Colorado. Between 1930 and 1940. (Photo: Denver Public Library/Western History Collection/X-20330)
Lucero, now 73, moved to Denver as a young boy and later became involved in the Crusade for Justice. Following the crops, his family came north from New Mexico and settled in with relatives in the Northside. He remembers being at the park nearly every day in the summer.
Before the community took over the park: “The pool was filthy. There was broken glass. The park was run down. They were not taking care of it at all,” Lucero said.
And after: “We cleaned it. We painted it. We started having community forums. … It became a political gathering place of the Northside.”
Juan Espinosa, now retired from the Pueblo Chieftain, was a student at the University of Colorado Boulder in the early 1970s. He co-founded El Diario and worked as a photographer for United Mexican American Students (UMAS) publications. He remembers La Raza Park as the place for young, politically aware Chicanos. People would come from around the city and around the region to be there.
One night in 1972, while he was still in Boulder, he got a call to head down to the park. The police were planning to make a show of force against people violating the park curfew.
Espinosa describes the police “lined up on one side and like a forced march they pushed people out of the park. People were running, and people were taking people in and hiding them in their yards.”
There were dogs. There was tear gas.
“This wasn’t a political rally,” he said. “This was just people who lived in the neighborhood using the park because it was a pretty dense part of the neighborhood.”
Espinosa took pictures of police officers abusing two young women spread across a patrol car and soon found himself under arrest in the back of a paddy wagon.
He said the police took his film and then took him and a dozen other people in the back of the van on a “rough ride” for about an hour. He later pled no contest to interfering with a police officer.
These types of confrontations became commonplace in the early 1970s. Sometimes there were shootings and fire bombings in the neighborhood. Plenty of people weren’t happy with the situation. With the Hispanic vote divided between two candidates, Italian-American tavern owner Eugene DiManna was elected to what was then the District 9 council seat in 1971. According to Vigil, DiManna told police, “I want them Mexicans out of the park, and if you have to break heads to do it, then do it,” and he criticized the city administration for “handcuffing” the police. Vigil writes that DiManna would personally call in sweeps of the park and even had his own code name, Ocean 9.
Chicano activists circulated petitions for a recall in what would prove to be a years-long process riven with legal challenges. Sal Carpio, one of Denver’s first Hispanic elected officials, finally replaced DiManna in 1975.
Members of the Crusade for Justice (La Crusada Para Justicia) march in protest down 15th Street in Denver, Colorado. Between 1966 and 1970. (Photo: Shannon Garcia/Denver Public Library/Western History Collection/AUR-2152)
Diane Medina, 59, grew up in the neighborhood and moved into a house on Navajo across the street from the park in the mid-70s. Her mother still lives in that home, and she lives next door. Not everyone in the community agreed with the Crusade for Justice’s approach, but in her mind, the Chicano movement taught her to question the status quo by the examples set in the park and around the community.
Diane Medina sits under the kiosko in La Raza Park. This is a place with spiritual significance for her. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
“It caught my attention in that the folks who were talking looked like me,” she said.
Medina said she usually wasn’t allowed to go to the park. Newspaper accounts describe drug-dealing and youths who antagonized police, but in her memory, the trouble never started with the people in the park. It started when the police showed up.
Sitting in the park, she points to the playground in the northeast corner of the park at 39th and Navajo, the corner that has always held the playground, and describes police approaching the park from the north down Navajo, shoulder to shoulder in their helmets and gear, such that the first thing they hit was the playground.
“And you can imagine the parents of those kids watching the police coming that way,” she said. “It’s kind of scary. My parents saw a lot of stuff like that. I saw a lot of stuff like that. This community saw a lot of stuff like that.”
Lupe Garcia, Diane Medina’s mother, on the porch of her home, where she’s lived since 1970. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
The memories of police brutality cannot be neatly separated from the good memories of the park, but what Medina most wants to remember is the feeling of pride and the feeling of being cared for by the community.
“It will never be the same, but I want it to have that same family, friendly, safe feeling that I had when the swimming pool was here because I really believed the people who worked here sincerely, truly, with all of their hearts cared about the community,” she said. “They would always be cleaning and picking up and making sure that you were safe when you were here. I saw that on a daily basis.”
Every year, there would be a “grand opening” to celebrate the anniversary of the takeover of the pool. This was a big party with food and music and dancers and speakers. No one had ever gotten a permit for this party, though technically gatherings of 25 or more people needed one.
In 1981, the police decided to break up the party, not at night to enforce the curfew, but in the middle of the day. The ostensible reason for this was the lack of a permit.
Lucero said hundreds, maybe thousands, of people — including parents looking for their children — were given less than five minutes to clear the park before the police moved in. He describes a “frenzy.”
“They started throwing tear gas, and people started throwing things back — bricks, bottles,” he said. “Then they let the dogs loose on everyone, on little kids. It was pandemonium.”
Lucero made this video about the riot:
Medina remembers this day as well, though in her mind it blends in with other nights.
People came running from the park to her parents’ house.
They asked her father for water to clean their eyes and huddled on the porch for safety. A police officer marched into the yard and demanded that he make all the people on the porch leave.
The spigot on Diane Medina’s parents’ home where people tear-gassed at La Raza Park across the street came seeking relief. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
“And my dad said, ‘I will not do that. This is my property. You need to leave.’ And I was so proud of my dad because my dad was quiet, a hard worker, but when he stood up like that … I was so proud of him.”
Activists filed a lawsuit against the city, but a jury rejected their case in 1984 with a finding that the police and community members were equally at fault.
That same year, the city demolished the pool.
There were reasons: The pool was old, and its pumps failed constantly. It cost less money to build a new pool at 44th and Navajo, and that was all the money there was for pools. Other parts of town needed pools too, you know.
Vigil notes bitterly that the pool was allowed to deteriorate under the watch of Carpio and that it was demolished under Federico Peña, Denver’s first Hispanic mayor.
In return, the community — eventually — got the kiosko, the pyramid-like structure that sits in the center of the park today. It was dedicated in 1990, and earlier this year, Denver artist David Ocelotl Garcia completed beautiful murals inside it.
Depopulated of ‘threatening’ Latinos, La Raza Park could more easily be appreciated by middle-class newcomers as a visual amenity and a space of restive solitude. In discussing the park with me, Denver Parks and Recreation employees always emphasized how the grass is green and how it is now maintained as a visual asset along the commercial corridor of West 38th Avenue. When I asked middle-class newcomers about North Denver Parks, most of them, first admitting that their preferred outdoor experiences were hiking and skiing in the nearby mountains, mentioned how well kept they seemed. This is how formal regulation facilitated La Raza Park’s transformation from a vibrant Latino zócalo for Northside Latinos into a quiet visual amenity for middle-class newcomers.
Langegger also connects the closure of the pool to the rise in gangs a decade later. Social reformers going back to Jane Addams have advocated for parks and recreation programs to give teenagers the sense of self-worth they need but might otherwise find in less wholesome places.
Back in the 1972, after confrontations between police and community members at La Raza Park, Chicano activist Rudy Garcia wrote in an op-ed in the Denver Post that people concerned about violence on the Northside should advocate for more parks, not more police.
Give Chicanos parks and recreation facilities comparable to Washington Park and in the end it will prove less expensive than bombed buildings or the lives of policemen, Chicanos or bystanders. … Give our young people what they need and the trouble will subside.
La Raza Park was home to swimming and diving teams that were a source of neighborhood pride.
But in 1984, pool manager Charlotte Rodriguez told the Denver Post the new Aztlan Pool was overcrowded and mostly attracted younger kids. The pool was smaller than the closed La Raza Park pool, and it didn’t have any diving boards. Teenagers weren’t going there.
Councilwoman Debbie Ortega proposed formally renaming the park La Raza-Columbus Park in 1988 but in the face of intense opposition from the neighborhood’s Italian-Americans, the City Council voted 7-6 to reject the change.
Medina said La Raza Park remains an important place historically, politically, even spiritually.
But it’s not the same.
“There’s no laughter,” she said. “The kids are not here. It became very quiet. … It’s what you see now.”
Medina watches from her window, as she has for 40 years, and she calls the city when she sees a need or a danger, and she doesn’t stop until something happens. Picnic tables. Benches. Wood chips to replace the sand in the playground when she saw that another nearby park got that treatment first.
Diane Medina peers through her front door into La Raza Park across the street. (Photo: Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite)
Now the neighborhood is changing again, with middle-class white families moving into the area. Blocks of new townhomes with rooftop decks replace one-story bungalows with front porches. Brewpubs replace corner bars. For the first time in decades, Latinos are no longer a majority in these neighborhoods.
And there is a new effort afoot to change the name. Councilman Rafael Espinoza of District 1, elected last year, is circulating a petition to again formalize a hybrid name. He said the city should rename the park both to honor its history but also for pragmatic reasons. It might be confusing to people who don’t know the area and are trying to find La Raza Park to see a sign that says Columbus Park.
And a hybrid name recognizes both the Italian-American and the Chicano history.
“It’s not appropriate to erase the history of one with the other,” he said. “And my view is that you don’t get one without the other. … There are multiple layers of history there, so let’s do the right thing.”
Medina said she’ll advocate for the name change, but it doesn’t really matter what the city does or doesn’t do.
“It’s going to be La Raza Park until I die,” she said.
If you found a piece of pizza in the street, would you eat it? If you found a random USB drive in your mailbox, would you plug it into your computer?
Your answer to these questions, at any rate, should be"no", but, for some fraction of humanity, the answer, on occasion, is, "yes." Maybe it depends on the day. Say it's a random Thursday in late September, and life is feeling pretty short. And you're feeling a little dangerous. That random USB drive that showed up in your mailbox? Why not give it a whirl. What's the worst that could happen? Or, better: what's the best?
Lately, a lot of Australians have been encountering this exact dilemma, after some random USB drives have been showing up in mailboxes in the Australian state of Victoria.
Police say that the drives are "believed to be extremely harmful," though you wouldn't really know it until you tried it out yourself, wouldn't you?
"Upon inserting the USB drives into their computers victims have experienced fraudulent media streaming service offers, as well as other serious issues," police said Wednesday.
This seems like a small price to pay for a brief moment of thrill, though you can be your own judge on the matter.
So far, the drives have just been seen in Pakenham, a suburb of Melbourne, in what is either a silly prank or a low-tech hacking attempt. But the fun could be coming soon to a city near you.
At a nature reserve in southern Spain, last Friday the park manager discovered "the headless body of Sauron," a dominant male bison, after the herd has been acting strange for a couple of days, Agence France-Presse reports. The bull, who was named after the Dark Lord of Mordor because "he was the biggest and most powerful," park staff told AFP, weighed close to 1,500 lbs.
Overhunted European bison went extinct in the wild in the early 20th century, but a conservation program has been building up herds and re-establishing the bisons' presence at reserves across Europe. This herd of bison arrived at the Valdeserrillas reserve in Valencia, less than a year before this incident.
As AFP reports, the animals had been behaving unusually for a couple of days before Sauron was found dead—they had wandered away from their usual haunts and seemed nervous. When Sauron was found, three other bison were missing, including the second bull found decapitated.
It looked like the herd had been poisoned, and the park staff believes that whoever decapitated the bison was acting not out of malice but greed—the heads could be mounted and sold as trophies.
The police are currently investigating. The two other missing bison were found safe.
Every year, at a location disclosed only to invitees, there is a secret puzzle party.
Fans, craftspeople, and collectors gather to share the latest innovations and creations in the realm of mechanical enigmas. From tricky puzzle boxes to untouchable puzzles contained in glass bottles to misleadingly simple stacking games, the International Puzzle Party (IPP) is the place to find unique works by some of the world’s leading puzzle creators. If you can get an invite.
In the last century, a devoted collector culture has grown up around games like puzzle boxes, Rubik’s Cubes, and other mechanical enigmas. However it wasn’t until the advent of the IPP that this disparate fan group had a good way to get together and share their ideas. “Puzzle-solving, even though it feels and sounds like a singular experience, it really isn’t,” says Nick Baxter, captain of the U.S. Puzzle Team, and current director and organizer of the IPP. “It’s a virtual shared experience and people who like puzzles really enjoy sharing their experiences.”
The International Puzzle Party was first established back in 1978 by noted puzzle collector and scholar, Jerry Slocum, who hosted the first gathering in his living room for a hand-picked selection of collectors. After that first gathering of like-minded puzzle collectors, Slocum continued to host the event every year, and the attendance continued to grow as word-of-mouth spread throughout the puzzling community, enticing people from all over the world to come and trade their puzzles. “It already had an international flavor,” says Baxter. “It was in Los Angeles, and folks were coming from Japan, were coming from Europe.”
The IPP began being hosted by different people across the planet. The ninth IPP was the first to be held outside of the U.S., taking place in Tokyo, and each year since, the party has rotated between different locations in Europe, the U.S., and Japan.
Since its inception, the IPP has become somewhat of a rallying point among the puzzling community, helping to bolster and encourage collectors across the globe. “I was surprised that there are hundreds of people who are interested in the mechanical puzzle,” says JinHoo Ahn, a collector and designer whose three-piece symmetry puzzle, “Bitten Biscuits,” received honorable mention at this year’s IPP. “In my country, it's hard to find a person who likes to collect puzzles. So it was a great experience to meet these people in IPP.”
“The IPP is very important to me,” says Gál Péter, a Hungarian collector whose puzzle, “Matchbox Playground,” was one of the top puzzles in the design competition at this year’s IPP. “It’s a thrill to meet so many people who all share the same interest, and yet have such different personalities.” While the event has become a beacon of puzzling camaraderie and togetherness, getting in takes a lot more than a handshake.
Baxter first began attending the IPP in 1993, and has been an integral part of the gathering each year since, taking over leadership of the event just four years later, when Slocum retired. In the years since he began overseeing the IPP, Baxter has maintained Slocum’s original vision of the gathering as a place by-and-for puzzle collectors, and has maintained a strict policy of only inviting members of the collector community, as well as the occasional special guest (including our own co-founder, Joshua Foer!). They tend to shy away from press, and don’t provide any public information about the IPP until after the fact. Even then, dispatches from the event are scarce, other than the results of the yearly design competition.
Baxter says that there are a few reasons for the IPP’s relative secrecy. “Part of it is a little bit, for lack of a better word, paranoia. From Jerry. From the early years,” he says. “Because there were some Chinese knock-off producers that tried to crash the party a couple of times, to basically get ideas.” Most of the attendees are puzzle makers and collectors only in their spare time, and ideally, are not attending the IPP as a commercial event, to have their designs bought or even stolen. Baxter stressed to us that the IPP is not a trade show. In fact, even people who make puzzles, but aren’t necessarily interested in the collecting aspect, are seen as suspect. “Anyone who is purely a designer that ends up being invited to the Puzzle Party has paid their dues in some sense,” says Baxter. “They are recognized as an integral part of the community.”
Another mitigating factor is capacity. IPPs taking place in the U.S. and Europe nowadays can see around 200 puzzlers in attendance. Those that take place in Japan see fewer attendees, just due to travel concerns, but they’ll still have well over a hundred collectors.
Gaining entry to one of the IPPs is sort of a puzzle unto itself, the solution to which is a lifestyle devoted to puzzle collecting. Those who do earn an invite get to experience a weekend of pure puzzlement.
As Baxter told us, the event usually takes place over the course of a few days, usually on a weekend. In addition to banquets, lectures, and tours of the local host city, there are two main components to the conference: the exchange and the party.
“The first interesting event is called the exchange, where everybody who signed up brings a copy of a puzzle they either designed or produced,” says Baxter. Participants bring puzzles and designs they have created, and everyone swaps with everyone else. So if you come with 72 copies of your original puzzle (“In Japan [2016] we had, I think, about 72 people.”), you will walk away with 72 different, new puzzles for your collection, and bewilderment. “It’s typical for what someone might bring to the exchange, [to be] something they designed, but they need someone else to produce it because they don’t have the skills. Or they’ve designed and produced it themselves, or it’s a collaboration of some sort. Or they’re none of the above,” says Baxter. Really the only rule is that you can’t bring a commercially available puzzle, lest someone already has it in their collection.
The second main event is what’s known as the party, which usually takes place the day after the exchange. This is where the collectors get to set up tables and show off a fuller breadth of their collection and creations. “The party is basically somewhere between a swap meet and a trade show, where participants will have a table, and they’ll have puzzles for sale that they’ve made, or resell from someone else, or puzzles from their collection that they’re just trying to unload,” says Baxter. In the early days of the IPP, people mainly swapped puzzles amongst one another, but Baxter says, as the community grew, and people became more aware of the relative value of the items in their collections, it became a mainly cash operation.
After the party, to close out the IPP, the winners of the Nob Yoshigahara Design Competition (named after a famous Japanese puzzler) are announced. The winners are decided by a jury of puzzle collectors, including Baxter, who judge the entered puzzles by a number of criteria including design and ingenuity. Other awards are voted on by the attendees. All kinds of puzzles have won honors at the IPP, as trends in the puzzling community ebb and flow. “For the first couple years, it seemed as if high-functioning Japanese wood puzzles were the automatic trophy winners,” says Baxter. “One of the designers called it, 'Big Wood.' A euphemism for fancy wooden puzzles that got everybody excited.” He says that in recent years, “twisty puzzles” (think a Rubik’s Cube), have been popular thanks to advances in 3D printing among other things.
But when it comes to what wins awards at the IPP design competition, anything goes. Baxter told us of one winning “packing puzzle” that was just a single block that had to be placed in a box, but could only fit in one orientation thanks to magnets embedded in the piece. While it was a simple puzzle, its inventiveness could not be ignored. “That kind of ‘aha!’ whether it be in the solution or in the design, those seem to be awarded a bit more readily these days,” he says.
The winner of the 2016 Grand Jury Prize was a puzzle called “Marbles Cage,” by collector/designer Volker Latussek. This seemingly simple puzzle consisted of nothing more than a box with holes in it, and a collection of marbles that the puzzler needed to take out and put back in. But even for Latussek, who has been collecting puzzles for near 25 years, and attending IPPs since 1997, the event is all about the community. “It was always great to see the other guys in person, to discuss and joke with them,” he says.
After the IPP ends, entrants to the design contest are posted online, but talk of the event goes right back to the puzzling forums and password-protected IPP website, usually garnering almost no media attention. The 2016 IPP took place in early August in Kyoto, Japan. If the date and location for the 2017 IPP have been decided, only the puzzlers know.
Satan has come to Salem! In a match seemingly made in Hell, the Satanic Temple is opening its new headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts, according to Reuters.
In a move that has some locals wringing their hands, the cultural and political organization known as the Satanic Temple, has set up shop in an old Victorian mansion in the city. The old house seems like the perfect space for the organization to base their international headquarters, as it used to be a funeral home. However, most recently, prior to the Satanists moving in, the space operated as an art gallery, a trend the Temple intends to maintain, although with a more devilish bent.
The new HQ opened its doors to the public this week, to show people in the community what they had to offer. A number of Satanic artworks were on on display, including a 7-foot tall bronze statue of the goat-headed demon, Baphomet.
While some in the local community seem worried about the Temple’s Satanic imagery, Salem City Council President Josh Turiel, doesn’t see what the fuss is about, telling Reuters, "We've had weirder things pretty much on every other street corner."
Despite the devil imagery, the Satanic Temple is mostly devoted to civic causes relating to the separation of church and state, and they hope to become a valued member of the Salem community. To that we say, Hail Satan!
In July 1845, British curiosity-seekers headed to London’s Egyptian Hall to try out the novelty of the summer. For the price of one shilling, they could stand in front of a wooden bureau, pull a lever, and look behind a panel where six drums, bristling with metal spokes, revolved. At the end of its “grinding,” what it produced was not a numeric computation or a row of fruit symbols, but something quite different: a polished line of Latin poetry.
This strange gadget, a Victorian ancestor of the computer, was called the Eureka.
The Eureka was the brainchild, and obsession, of a man in southwest England named John Clark. The eccentric Clark was a cousin of Cyrus and James Clark, founders of the Clarks shoes empire (which went on to popularize the Desert Boot in the 1950s and is still going strong). Clark built the Eureka at a time when such devices were all the rage. As literature scholar Jason David Hall explains in an academic article on the Eureka, the machine joined other proto-computers like the Polyharmonicon, a machine that composed polkas, and the Euphonia, which “spoke” when a person played an attached keyboard.
But a Latin hexameter verse—that was something else. The hexameter is the meter of ancient epic, of the poets Ovid and Virgil. Each line has six metrical units called feet. A foot can be either a spondee—two long syllables—or a dactyl, a long syllable followed by two short ones. However, the fifth foot of the line is almost always a dactyl, and the sixth is usually a spondee. So there are strict rules for writing poetry in Latin hexameter that make it akin to following a mathematical formula.
_ ͜ ͜ | _ ͜ ͜ | _ _ | _ _ | _ ͜ ͜ | _ _
To ensure that the Eureka’s lines of automatic poetry not only scanned metrically, but made sense, Clark gave the words on each of the drums similar meanings, and had them obey the same syntactical order each time:
The number of possible permutations the Eureka can run through is a dizzying 26 million. “If we had it running continuously, it would take 74 years for it to do its full tour before it started repeating itself,” says Karina Virahsawmy, a curator at the Alfred Gillett Trust, the nonprofit that preserves the history of the Clark family and their company. “Every time I think about it, I’m still mind-boggled as to how somebody did that in the early 19th century.”
The Eureka was one of the forerunners of the programmable computer, invented by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. “From what we’ve seen and researched, Babbage would have gone to the exhibition,” Virahsawmy says. “There’s a possibility [Clark and Babbage] would have known each other.” Babbage once described Clark as being “as great a curiosity as his machine,” possibly due to his odd manner of dress: he was fond of wearing a wide-open shirt and a neckerchief.
The exhibition of the Eureka was successful enough that Clark retired on the proceeds. After he died in 1853, the machine ended up in the family shoe factory in Street, Somerset. It is now in the holdings of the Trust, where for years it sat gathering dust in a storeroom.
With a grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, however, the Trust and a team of conservators and scholars (including Hall) just restored the Eureka to working order, and they are now creating a full-scale modern replica of it. The team also plans to use 3D scans to make an interactive virtual replica that can be used online. The whole process will be chronicled in a short documentary film scheduled for release in early 2017.
The question remains, though: why Latin verse? The Greek and Roman classics were central to elite education in Victorian England, especially prosody (the study of metrical verse). When it originally went on display in the 1840s, the Eureka tapped into debates about education then swirling. Reformers wanted to dethrone the classics and broaden curricula to include subjects like chemistry and modern history. Whether a Victorian saw the Eureka as a celebration or a parody of classical education may have depended on his or her stance on reform.
Some Victorian observers were discomfited by the notion of a machine writing poetry, a challenge to human creativity if ever there was one. The controversy over artificial intelligence has only intensified since then. Maybe that’s why a device so seemingly esoteric still captures people’s interest.
Earlier this month, shortly after the restored Eureka returned to Somerset from the University of Exeter, the Trust exhibited it for a few days, ran some demonstrations, and got “great numbers” of visitors, Virahsawmy says. “It was very much eye-opening and awe-inspiring when people came in,” she says. After 170 years, this singular device is still mirabile visu (“marvelous to behold”), to quote one of Virgil’s immortal hexameters.
Throughout the course of his prolific 40-year career, photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris amassed an extraordinary archive consisting of nearly 80,000 negatives. Starting in the 1930s, Harris documented Pittsburgh's African American community for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the country's leading African-American newspapers. He captured over 3,000 portraits between 1957 and 1977 for one regular column alone; in the 1960s, almost ten of his images ran per issue of the Pittsburgh Courier.
Today, this vast and significant collection, much of which has been digitized online, resides with the Carnegie Museum of Art. Over the years, the Museum invited various curators to stage exhibitions of his work. The most recent focused on performance, and now, with an election looming, Teenie Harris Photographs: Elections highlights Harris’ work chronicling Pittsburgh elections.
Known as "One Shot" due to his ability to capture his subjects quickly, Harris' photographs encompass the political process over several decades, including the organization around the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In one photograph, K. Leroy Irvis is captured in a voting booth in 1962. In another, taken ten years later, Shirley Chisholm receives a bouquet from Delta Sigma Theta sorority members.
Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the exhibition, which runs through to December 5, 2016.
K. Leroy Irvis standing in voting booth for 15th District of Fifth Ward, Pittsburgh, November 1962.
Attorney Byrd Brown shaking hands with basketball player Maurice Lucas wearing championship basketball jacket inscribed "Luke," outside campaign headquarters for Byrd Brown for Congress, c. 1970.
Linda Starkey handing bouquet to Shirley Chisholm, surrounded by Delta Sigma Theta sorority members, including Christine Jones Fulwiley on left, Vivian Mason Lane, and Marcia Davis, in Loendi Club, March 5, 1972.
Republican campaign billboard with slogan "Make Our Homes and Streets Safe! Vote Republican" possibly on Morgan Street, Hill District, October 1949.
President John F. Kennedy speaking from podium, with Senator Joseph S. Clark and Pennsylvania Governor David L. Lawrence seated behind him, Monessen, Pennsylvania, October 13, 1962.
Four women, and man wearing ribbon inscribed "Talley worker, Pull the first lever," gathered around sample voting machine, September-November 1947.
Harry Truman campaigning for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and running mate Estes Kefauver, at intersection of Centre Avenue and Dinwiddie Street, Hill District, October 1956.
Alpha Phi Alpha members, from left: Atty. A. D. Stevenson and Alexander Allen, with officers swearing oaths: George Mason, H. D. McCullough, Dr. R. W. Taylor, Wilbur C. Douglass, Dr. Charles R. Cephas, and Charles H. Cuthbert at Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity house, 3046 Centre Avenue, January - February 1951.
William P. Young speaking before President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Hunt Armory, October 9, 1956.
Jaye Derrick has a special relationship with the television sitcom Friends. Years ago, she began to notice a recurring pattern: whenever she had a fight with her boyfriend she would turn on her television and watch reruns of the popular sitcom. From her sofa in Buffalo, New York, Derrick noticed that Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe were beginning to feel like an extended group of friends.
Following the group's zany dramas and misunderstandings with one another—and seeing how they propped each other up—provided Derrick with a sense of support when her own personal life was on the rocks. The show's theme song “I’ll be there for you” rung true for her. She soon purchased a DVD box set of the show.
“Watching these episodes seemed to be taking away some of the feelings of rejection or distracting me long enough that the argument wasn’t a problem anymore,” says Derrick, a social psychology professor at the University of Houston in Texas, who was inspired by her relationship with Friends to study the phenomenon known as parasocial relationships.
These are one-sided, non-reciprocal relationships, often with a celebrity or other media persona. Parasocial relationships are strong emotional bonds with people you’ve never met and who do not relate back to you—or can't, if they are fictional characters.These relationships grow as you seek out more information about the person, reading magazine articles, watching interviews on YouTube, and discovering their intimate likes and dislikes on Instagram or Twitter.
Joey, Monica, Rachel, and Ross really can be your friend, parasocially. (Photo: Giphy)
People have formed parasocial relationships with an array of popular and surprising subjects, from television characters to real-life actors, singers, and public figures. If you have imagined that Jennifer Lawrence is your best friend, have a secret romantic relationship with Kit Harrington, or created a universe where you could hang out with Harry Potter every day (I know I did)—then you’ve been in a parasocial relationship.
“In the work that [our lab has] done, we’ve seen that almost everyone has done this,” Derrick says of parasocial relationships. “As soon as you explain it, they say ‘oh my god. I do that.’”
Similar to real-world friendships, where the parties are continuously caring and nurturing for the relationship between meetings, often through social media, those in parasocial relationships are keeping up with the latest developments of their chosen star's life, while waiting for the next TV show, album, or film to arrive. These days, Kim Kardashian’s feelings on various topics are less of a mystery than the feelings of many of those around us.
This common psychological scenario stems from our tendency to latch onto and identify with the people around us. In one-sided relationships, a screen is not a barrier. Even if that person will never know us or meet us, keeping up with their lives brings us joy. However, once fans know so much about the inner worlds of their favorite celebrities, it can be hard to feel at a remove from them.
“We as a species are dependent on social interaction to survive, and there is a part of our brain that can’t differentiate the face in front of me in real life with the face on TV,” says Gayle Stever, who has been studying fandoms and adult parasocial relationships for past 28 years at SUNY Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, New York. “It’s normal to be attracted to people in media, just as it’s normal to be attracted to people in real life.”
There are striking resemblances between parasocial relationships and the real life relationships we have with our siblings, best friends, coworkers, and romantic partners. Even though a celebrity or television character may not reciprocate your feelings, you experience the same emotional and psychological ups and downs in a parasocial relationship as you do in real life social relationships, says Derrick.
“Obviously with a parasocial relationship, they can’t provide physical support. So if you’re sick they can’t give you soup, but there are still parts of these parasocial relationships that seem to give us a sense of social support in the emotional sense,” says Derrick. “You feel like your TV characters are there, providing emotional support. They care about you.”
Parasocial relationships are found across ages, gender, social groups, and cultures. Studies by researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Calgary surveying young adults revealed that 90 percent felt a strong attraction to a celebrity, 65 percent felt strong attachments to multiple celebrities, and 30 percent even wished to be the celebrity they admired, reports Pacific Standard.
In our media-saturated world, where many people see actors through screens more frequently than they see their close friends, parasocial relationships have become some of our most important relationships. And while you may you may not be willing to tell others of your secret relationship with Beyoncé, you should know that millions of others probably share a close imaginary relationship with her, too.
While the phenomenon is generally associated with the rise of mass media in the 1950s, some psychologists believe that it stretches back much farther. “It’s definitely something that people have been doing ever since there have been stories and narratives around,” says Riva Tukachinsky, a communications professor at Chapman University in Orange, California.
The term, however, only dates to 1956, when Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl introduced the idea of parasocial interactions, hypothesizing that people form “an apparently intimate face-to-face association with a performer.” As radio was ubiquitous and television was becoming commonplace, the first relationships studied were with news anchors and radio hosts. Horton and Wohl initially reasoned that these interactions were a result of isolation and lack of time spent with other people—a stereotype that wouldn’t be debunked until the late 1980s.
Parasocial relationships are not strictly limited to celebrities or television characters. Both Derrick and Tukachinsky have heard of research subjects having parasocial relationships with book characters, video game characters, and even cartoons.
Paraocial connections can be made with heroes and heroines in novels. (Photo: Sonia Belviso/CC BY 2.0)
We form parasocial relationships for different reasons. They can be used as an escape, as a cognitive development benefit, or simply as a source of enjoyment, explains Tukachinsky. How we think, feel, and fantasize about our favorite media personas is based on a brain that has developed to treat parasocial contact like direct contact.
Like our social relationships in real life, parasocial relationships vary in type and depth. Relationships can be profound and develop over decades, while others are more like casual acquaintances. A person can have multiple parasocial relationships—some are romantic, some are friendships, and some are mentorships. Lady Gaga fans, which she calls “Little Monsters,” for example, often refer to her as “Mother Monster.”
Most parasocial relationships are completely harmless—the equivalent of caring just a bit too much about Brangelina's impending divorce. But the ones that get the most attention are the few cases where extreme parasocial relationships cross the line into stalking or other threatening behavior, generally in a person with underlying mental illness.
In 1981, John Hinckley Jr. believed he was in relationship with Jodie Foster, and thought by shooting Ronald Reagan he could get her attention. He was later not found guilty by reason of insanity. Margaret Mary Ray, who suffered from schizophrenia and believed she was married to David Letterman, was arrested eight times for trespassing on the television host's property, and stealing his Porsche. Ray was convicted of stalking, and spent much of her sentence in a psychiatric hospital.
Lady Gaga - or "Mother Monster" to her "Little Monster" fans. (Photo: proacguy1/CC BY-SA 2.0)
Various kinds of parasocial relationships can serve different functions throughout life. Stever categorizes parasocial contact into three tiers of varying intensity: parasocial interactions, parasocial relationships, and parasocial attachments.
Parasocial “interactions” occur while you are physically consuming the media, and begin to feel emotionally invested in it. Whenever you scream at a character to not go into the dark creepy cellar alone, or to break up with a vindictive boyfriend, you are interacting with the character. Shouting at a football player when he fumbles is a one-way parasocial interaction, an expression of frustration that he will never hear.
Meanwhile, parasocial “relationships” form when you continue to think about the celebrity in question when everything is turned off. During the height of the Twilight series, teens and college students expressed their parasocial relationships with both actor Taylor Lautner and his character Jacob Black, even sometimes referring to the two interchangeably, says Tukachinsky. Some parasocial relationships are powerful enough to influence big life changes. Mae Jemison, the first female black astronaut in space, spoke about how she was inspired by Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols who played the original Lieutenant Uhura—the lone black woman on the bridge of starship Enterprise.
“When I relate to someone and I’m thinking about them when I’m not watching the show, that’s a parasocial relationship,” explains Stever, who studies the Star Trek fandom extensively.
People can become deeply and emotionally invested in their parasocial relationships, which can be reflected in things like trending Twitter hashtags that show support, pressure a media outlet or program to make changes, or simply express heartbreak when a character dies.
Mae Jemison (left) was inspired to become an astronaut by Nichelle Nichols (right) and her portrayal of Lieutenant Uhura. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain/Public Domain)
Parasocial “attachment” runs a little deeper. An attachment develops when a person has a desire to be close to someone in order to feel more secure. Stever interviewed a woman with stage four cancer who could only get through her chemotherapy sessions by listening to songs by Josh Groban—the presence of his voice comforted her.
Aspects of the attachment phenomenon can be age-specific. Children often form relationships with cartoon characters, which can play a role in socialization and facilitate learning. Teenagers have been found to have romantic parasocial relationships with celebrities; it's now seen as a normal part of adolescence. Several researchers noted that parasocial relationships can help the elderly overcome the loss of a loved one.
In some cases, parasocial relationships can serve as a kind of therapy. For one of her studies, Stever interviewed a recent divorcee, who would watch reruns of The Andy Griffith Show online because seeing the community of characters reminded him of his childhood growing up in a small town similar to that on the show.
Stever has also encountered widows who noted that their parasocial relationships have led them to consider dating again. She met a widow in her mid-fifties standing outside of a Josh Groban concert. Her husband had died of cancer a few years before, and when the widow realized that she was attracted to this singer, she was stunned she could still have those feelings. “She said, ‘I'm thinking about maybe dating again,’” recounts Stever. “I hear that a lot.”
People in parasocial relationships can also experience messy breakups. Tukachinsky recalls a student who came to her office in tears, and between sobs explains that one of her favorite shows, All in the Family, was going off the air. She had formed a tight friendship with each one of the show’s main characters, and felt like “all of them were abandoning her all of a sudden,” Tukachinsky says.
The same feelings you experience during a real life breakup percolate when a show ends, members of a musical group go their separate ways, or when you simply lose interest and move on to your next parasocial relationship. People are also known to show a great deal of grief when celebrities die.
David Bowie fans gather around a memorial wall painting in Brixton in January 2016. (Photo: Mr Seb/CC BY-ND 2.0)
Such visceral displays demonstrate how influential parasocial contact has become, an aspect that has been enhanced by greater celebrity interaction through social media.
Platforms like Twitter have transformed the nature of parasocial relationships, both intensifying them and making them harder to define, as more celebrities actively interact with fans and share personal information. Through Twitter, fans now have the opportunity to hear back from a celebrity, eliminating the one-sided nature of parasocial relationships and transforming them into something closer to acquaintanceships.
@NiallOfficial Have a great day niall,stay happy and smile lots.I love you so much :)
“While parasocial interaction is largely imaginary and takes place primarily in the fan’s mind, Twitter conversations between fans and famous people are public and visible, and involve direct engagement between the famous person and their follower,” Alice Marwick and Danah Boyd wrote in the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. “These interactions take the celebrities out of the realm of fantasy and reposition them as ‘real people.’”
In Marwick and Boyd’s study, they reviewed tweets of fans of multiple celebrities, including Mariah Carey. One fan explained why she followed her with a tweet: “I follow @MariahCarey becoz she has been with me through her music everyday of my life 4 the last 15 years! She inspires me!” Since there is now a possibility that Mariah Carey could respond, the parasocial dynamic shifts.
Twitter creates a new expectation of intimacy that didn’t exist before, Marwick and Boyd conclude. Some celebrities, like Josh Groban, even recognize fans, or Grobanites, by their faces or Twitter handles, says Stever. While Groban doesn't know each individual fan as they know him, he is aware of them as a group and follows their posts, Tweets and movements enough “to have a sense of who they are, how they think, and what they want from him,” she writes in one of her papers.
Stever also notes that this direct form of contact has also caused frustrations, as people are still restricted from the celebrity and lack control over the relationship. One of the subjects she interviewed said “sometimes I feel frustrated by Twitter because he has all the power” and “sometimes I feel a bit teased by the situation-but it’s not like it’s fault.”
“If you’re tweeting at a favorite celebrity and they tweet back, I can imagine that some people may have more trouble dissociating reality from fantasy,” says Derrick.
Despite some parasocial relationships’ increase in intensity, the vast majority of people understand that it’s not a ‘real’ relationship—even if psychologically it feels like one. “People know that Justin Bieber isn’t really on the other end of the telephone,” she says.
Kate McKinnon as Justin Bieber. Most people understand they are not in a relationship with either of them. (Photo: Giphy)
For decades, many people endorsed Horton and Wohl’s 1956 conclusions about the phenomenon, that those who formed parasocial relationships were lonelier and had low self-esteem. Several studies in the 1980s attempted to link loneliness to parasocial relationships, but the connection couldn’t be made. Conversely, researchers from the University of Delaware discovered those people who seek more relationships in real life are more likely to form more parasocial relationships.
In a 2008 study, Derrick found that people with low self-esteem can benefit from parasocial relationships. “Thinking about a favorite celebrity allows low self-esteem people to become more like who they would ideally like to be,” she says. They also provide those people with safe and reliable relationships (unless, of course, the television show ends, or your favorite character dies.)
Social relationships lie on a spectrum, says Tukachinsky. Some relationships are more imaginary than others. Even parts of our real life relationships are imaginary to an extent. When we talk about what our good friends are doing, based on their Facebook posts or Instagram feeds, we don't actually have much more insight than when we discuss the movements of Taylor Swift.
Yet parasocial relationships are real relationships. The person on the other end of the relationship may never know you, but those feelings you form when you read a blog about them or watch them on screen are real. Expanded media offerings have expanded our network of human connections, too.
“A lot of people talk about this online trend as being isolating—now you don’t have real friendships,” says Derrick. “That doesn’t look like that’s the case. Parasocial relationships are really normative. If you’re good at making friendships in the real world you’re also good at experiencing parasocial relationships.”
