Don’t worry; none of Atlas Obscura’s most popular stories of 2016 had to do with the U.S. presidential election. Of course, we did write about the never-ending race, but more often than not our readers elected to visit our website for escapism and counter-programming.
You gravitated towards secret histories and linguistic mysteries, stories delving into hidden aspects of cities, the scientific world, the historical record, and the odder corners of the internet. These articles spanned the globe, from Chernobyl to Canada, the Marshall Islands to Mexico. Yet the majority of our top stories illuminated discoveries and events in the United States, where a large share of our readers live. Our most-read article of the year was set in the New York Public Library, just across the East River from the Atlas Obscura office in Brooklyn.
Here are the 25 most popular stories that we published this year.
Christianity took shape with the support of female leaders and mystics and activists. But what we have left of them now are only the remembrances of a handful of men.
In terms of visual design, the cards are simple: Five different shapes—a five-pointed star, a circle, a square, a cross, and three wavy lines—printed in black on a white background, with an abstract blue pattern on the back like you’d find on a regular deck of cards. But what the cards are designed to do is a bit more complicated. They’re intended to test something that half of Americans believe in and most of the scientific community says doesn’t exist at all: extrasensory perception, or ESP.
Since the 1930s, Zener cards, also known as ESP cards, have been used to quantify psychic ability, testing for telepathy and clairvoyance (you might remember them from that scene in 1984’s Ghostbusters, when Venkman tests the “effects of negative reinforcement on ESP”). The cards straddle the intersection of science and the paranormal, pseudoscience and legitimacy. In a lot of ways, that’s a space also occupied by the man who pioneered their use, Dr. Joseph B. Rhine, founder of the Duke Parapsychology Lab.
Rhine’s interest in the paranormal took hold in 1922, when he was a young plant physiologist earning a Ph.D. in botany at the University of Chicago. Rhine and his wife Louisa were both dedicated scientists, but they had questions that simple biological reductionism didn’t seem to answer; Rhine had once thought of joining the ministry, until his wife steered him towards science. And then, in May of that year, they sat in the audience to hear Sir Arthur Conan Doyle make his case for life after death.
Doyle, best known for creating hyper-rational detective Sherlock Holmes, had been an avowed Spiritualist since 1916; he believed that spirit communication via mediums could offer scientific proof of a spiritual beyond. His 1922 lecture tour of America was a kind of Spiritualist mission, spreading the good news that the veil separating the bereaved living from the beloved dead was thin and easily broached by psychic perception. This message resonated with an American public still aching from the devastations of the Great War.
“I stand but ankle deep in a vast ocean of psychic knowledge, but even if I am only ankle deep, I can perhaps bring some message to those who stand dry shod on the shores,” Doyle told an enraptured audience, according to a contemporary Associated Press report. “This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had in years,” Joseph Rhine reportedly wrote later.
It wasn’t Spiritualism itself that attracted the Rhines, but rather the idea that science could examine the kinds of answers Spiritualism offered. “Both of my parents as a couple were searching for answers to the Big Questions of Life, perhaps typical of their era, when encountering scientific thinking in college disrupted the religious beliefs of their youth,” Dr. Sally Rhine Feather, the Rhines’ oldest daughter and herself a clinical psychologist, told me by email. Feather described her parents as “serious young people from fairly simple farm backgrounds in the Midwest,” each of them the first in their families to pursue any advanced education. Science had replaced religion for them, but it wasn’t enough. They wanted to use science to study the kinds of experiences that had, until recently, been the province of religion alone.
After graduating in 1925, Rhine took a job teaching botany at West Virginia University, but his true passion remained with these big questions. He and Louisa soon “began extracurricular study of psychical research material,” Feather said. In 1926, the opportunity arose to study under Dr. William McDougall, a psychologist interested in what was then called “psychical research,” during his sabbatical from Harvard University. Rhine and Louisa leapt at it: They resigned their teaching positions, sold all of their furniture, and moved to Boston.
“They decided to just abandon careers in plant physiology to see if they could find scientific evidence for the afterlife,” said Feather. One of the first places they looked was in the dark, stuffy parlor room of Mina Crandon, a prominent medium who often performed séances clad in only a dressing gown and stockings. The Rhines found her performance risible. As Stacy Horn recounted in her fascinating book, Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, the Rhines published their account of Crandon’s fakery in 1927 in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, making “an argument that would be turned against them for the rest of their lives”: “If we can never know to a relative certainty that there was no trickery possible, no inconsistencies present, and no normal action occurring, we can never have a science and never really know anything about psychic phenomena.”
What Rhine wanted was proof—verifiable, scientific, replicable proof. But this put him in a kind of no man’s land. He was too skeptical to be a glassy-eyed believer, willing to mistake goose fat-covered cheesecloth for ectoplasm, but not so skeptical that he dismissed the entire possibility of psychic phenomena. At the same time, religion had no use for his work and may even have seen it as a threat; Horn noted that if Rhine’s work was successful, it might offer up alternative explanations for phenomena previously considered miraculous. “If you look at it, both sides were rooting against him,” she said in a recent phone conversation.
What Rhine did have going for him, however, was sheer force of character. Passionate about his research, led by his understanding of scientific method, and supported by his wife and partner who believed in his work just as strongly as he did, Rhine was ideally suited to drag psychic phenomenon away from the tipping tables and Ouija board and into the world of science.
In 1927, McDougall, Rhine’s mentor in psychology and psychical research, moved to Duke University; the Rhines soon followed. Rhine taught psychology as an instructor, but the bulk of their work in the first few months was devoted to analyzing the copious records of a man called John Thomas, who had compiled 750 pages of notes on conversations he had with his late wife via spirit mediums. Rhine satisfied himself that the mediums referred to information about Thomas and his wife that they could not have accessed through conventional means. But, he noted, that didn’t mean the information was actually coming from the deceased – it could just as easily be coming from Thomas’s mind.
This, to Rhine, was a much more plausible avenue for research: the ability of the human mind to gain information outside of basic limiting principles such as time, space, and physics. These abilities, which he was convinced existed, he termed “extra-sensory perception.” He did that, he wrote at the time, “in order to make it sound as normal as may be.”
Rhine abandoned the search for proof of survival after death and instead began to focus on ESP. His first efforts at testing telepathy were informal: He used a numbered card or a normal playing card to see whether subjects—regular people, usually students, and not mediums or people who had built a reputation as being psychic—could guess the card without seeing it. What he found, however, was that people tended to have favorite cards, and would suggest those rather than try to really guess what card was being help up. Rhine wanted an entirely new set of cards, featuring images that had no previous associations in the minds of his subjects. For this, he turned to his colleague in the psychology department, psychologist Dr. Karl Zener.
Zener, whose usual work focused on conditioned responses (think Pavlov’s dogs), selected the five simple symbols—the star, the square, the circle, three wavy lines, and the cross—because people didn’t seem to have a bias towards any one. The Zener deck came with five sets of the five symbols, meaning that the chances of guessing the first card correctly was one in five, but the chances of making 10 or more correct guesses in a run of 25 cards was about one in 20.
“Nothing magical about the method, but it was simple, could hold attention, subject to evaluation, etc.—a paradigm for how ESP could be tested,” explained Feather. Feather, who was born in 1930, grew up at Duke with her father’s work. She remembers her mother using the Zener cards to test neighborhood children around the kitchen table in their Durham home.
The tests were fun and popular with the Duke students, so they had no shortage of subjects; in 1931 alone, Rhine conducted 10,000 ESP tests with 63 students, many of whom he found scored better than chance. Some scored so well above chance so as to be statistically significant, including Duke divinity graduate student Hubert Pearce—who once made 25 consecutive correct guesses, a full run of the Zener deck. Meanwhile, Rhine had begun to gather a team of graduates and undergraduates who were intrigued by his work. Feather recalled a palpable energy among the new parapsychology researchers; when they got a remarkable result “they’d be running in and out and jumping up and down… They were just excited about what they were doing.”
In May 1934, Rhine published Extra-sensory Perception, a book analyzing his by then 90,000 ESP trials. According to his 1981 obituary in the American Journal of Psychology, the book created “both a popular and professional stir. The popular reaction was largely uncritical and approving; the professional one was the opposite.” By the following year, Rhine’s work saw a massive boost when a wealthy patron gave him and his lab $10,000 a year for two years, with the possibility of extending that to $10,000 a year for five years if all went well. With the money, Rhine set up his own lab, still under the Duke auspices but separate from the psychology department. Thanks to his donor, the lab the most well-funded in the university—his budget was one-tenth of the entire Duke budget, Horn reported in her book.
That Rhine was able to conduct this kind of research, and be so well supported in it, had a lot to do with when and where he was doing it. For one thing, Duke was a new university and was, as Feather suggested, more open to exploring new, unestablished science. And secondly, though most contemporary scientists were not interested in Rhine’s research, some big names were. People like William James, Thomas Edison, and Sigmund Freud all entertained some degree of fascination with the paranormal, although some were less open about it than others.
Einstein’s discoveries, Horn noted, had cracked open a realm of unseen possibilities and scientists at this time were less closed to explanations that seem to defy basic limiting principles and established physical laws. Most of mainstream science was still hostile to the study of parapsychology—Horn described much of Rhine’s correspondence from other scientists as “vicious and nasty.” But in some ways, the scientific community had never been more open to the idea that Rhine’s research could be valuable.
Meanwhile, the general public’s appetite for ESP research was seemingly limitless. By 1937, you could buy Zener cards from the local newsstand for 10 cents a pack. Rhine’s new book New Frontiers of the Mind was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection, ESP experiments became the subject of radio shows, and everyone wanted to talk about telepathy. “The average American was more open to his results than the average scientist,” Horn said.
Rhine’s reputation as the country’s preeminent parapsychologist meant that people who’d had weird, inexplicable experiences or felt that they had abilities that others did not thought of him as their champion—a scientist who was, to paraphrase Ghostbusters, ready to believe them. “Every time something strange would happen, people would write the lab. It was the only game in town—the letters are like a 30-year history of everything weird happening in America,” said Horn.
But popular acceptance and the tentative embrace of established science were not enough to cement parapsychology as an “acceptable” discipline. Despite the initial promise of the lab, and the hundreds of thousands of trials that Rhine and others believed established the validity of ESP, parapsychology still had the taint of occult. The distance between Rhine and established science grew. Zener, who spent the rest of his career at Duke as a perceptual psychologist and later became chair of the department, asked that the cards no longer be called “Zener cards,” because he no longer wanted to be associated with Rhine’s ESP research (it didn’t entirely work—though the Lab made an effort to call them “ESP cards,” the popular audience that had adopted the cards tended to stick with the original name). McDougall, Rhine’s champion and mentor, and William Preston Few, the Duke president who agreed to Rhine’s lab, had both died; the Parapsychology Lab was funded from outside sources (including the Office of Naval Research, the Army, and the Rockefeller Foundation), but its lack of support within the university still put it in jeopardy. In 1948, the Lab became a non-teaching independent unit within the University, losing its access to graduate students and further distancing itself from the school.
When Rhine retired in 1965, the lab closed. He founded a nonprofit research center, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, to continue the research, and continued to be involved in ESP research until his death in 1980. The Rhine Research Center still exists, in a tidy red-brick office park in Durham; it still uses (and sells, via the website) Zener cards. Its mission remains to explore the “frontiers of consciousness and exceptional human experiences in the context of unusual and unexplained phenomena,” although there is somewhat less funding available to conduct that exploration than in the past. “In recent years, there is more work on bioenergy work, macro-PK including occasional field investigations of such, qualitative studies of case material,” Feather, who is on the Board of Directors of the Center, wrote in an email. The question that sparked Rhine’s initial interest in psi phenomena—does consciousness survive after death?—is not among the Rhine Center’s research topics: “The Rhine has enough of a job with the topics we started with,” said Feather.
Despite the Center’s continued work, it’s not clear exactly what Rhine’s legacy will be. “I think he brought legitimacy to the murky world of the paranormal by setting standards for a new experimental science,” Feather wrote in an email. “He created a standard method so that hundreds of replications were possible here and elsewhere, a standard vocabulary, a professional peer-reviewed journal (1937 to present), a graduate training program, and ultimately an international organization. He used the same techniques found in professional psychology of his day, much improved now.” His AJP obituary lauded him for establishing a middle ground between science and psi, in which real research could continue.
Horn, however, says it’s a bit more complicated. If you accept that psi ability is scientifically valid, then Rhine’s lab was never able to answer the one question it needed to: how psi abilities worked. “Without the ability to control and enhance them, which was probably the military’s interest, funding starts to dry up,” said Horn, calling the mechanism of psi the lab’s “Holy Grail.” And if you don’t accept that psi ability has any basis in science, then it’s a different picture all together: “I think he’s always a tragic figure, because for all that he did to refine the controls and analyze his results, he did not get the respect that he deserved,” Horn said.
Today, what seems most remarkable is that Rhine was able to establish a paranormal research center at all. To suggest that this research is on the fringes of the established scientific community would be an understatement: The National Science Foundation, in its surveys on public perception of science, refers to ESP and psychic ability as “pseudoscience.” The official case for the existence of “real” ESP or psi abilities is considered tenuous; attempts to replicate studies that seem to prove psi have not been consistently successful. “Parapsychology doesn’t pay well, carries a stigma, and it’s not wise for a young person to risk this as a career path,” Feather acknowledged.
But Horn, and certainly Feather and her father, might say scientists are not giving psi a fair shake. “So many [scientists] that I talked to were all, ‘This all junk science, period, end of story,’ and they actually don’t study the work,” said Horn. “I am somewhat sympathetic with that because there is a lot of junk science out there, but you’re certainly not going to win hearts and minds by belittling people… I’m skeptical, but I researched [the Rhines’] experiments and found that all the reasons that people used to discount them were not valid. I’m kind of like Rhine, ‘Okay, these are interesting effects, but we can’t explain them, but nonetheless they’re real.’ You would think you would want to find out.” With few exceptions, she said, no one she talked to in researching her book seemed interested in finding out. “That doesn’t mean anything necessarily paranormal is going on, but something is going on, why not look into it? There is so much going on in the physical world that we don’t understand, this might give us a clue.”
Still, just as it was in Rhine’s day, even if established science dismisses ESP and psi, the general public remains fascinated by it. A 2011 YouGov poll found that 48 percent of Americans believe in ESP, more than believe in ghosts or reincarnation. And, just as you could in 1937, you can buy your own pack of Zener cards, thought for considerably more than 10 cents. However much on the fringe parapsychology is, it looks like it will always have a home.
Black velvet requires darkness. In sunlight, it fades.
The dark of Northern Canada is unlike any other dark in the world. The deep darkness—“noon-moon” as it’s called—lasts for months, yet the black skies often dance with the psychedelic projections of the Aurora Borealis, a natural laser light show of green and pink and purple and blue that is a result of electrically charged sun particles caught in the magnetic grasp of the North Pole.
In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, an unlikely trend took root in these frostbitten tundras. Black velvet painting—those kitschy relics of a bygone age; a staple of tiki dives, bad motels, and pot-tinged dorm rooms—became popular in the area’s remote Inuit communities, particularly in the Yukon and Nunavut territories. The story of how these paintings arrived in these Arctic communities was even more unlikely, one by way of Palestine, and the Tex-Mex border.
In the 1960s, a successful grocery store owner by the name of Doyle Harden discovered velvets, and later began to mass produce them. He built a massive black velvet factory named Chico Arts right on the border of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez that, at its height, was capable of pumping out around 10,000 Velvet Elvis’, nude pinup girls, and Dogs Playing Poker every single day. Harden was a shrewd and practical businessman—a man who once cited“compound interest” as the eighth wonder of the world. In less than a decade, he emerged as a kind of Willy Wonka-esque figure.
Thanks to Harden, Juárez in the ‘70s was to velvet painting as Montmartre was to Impressionism, or the San Fernando Valley was to the Golden Age of Porn. To some, it was a new kind of Gold Rush—or, perhaps, more accurately, a Velvet Rush.
Meanwhile, about 2,000 miles north, in a Canadian province whose namesake—princess Louise Caroline Alberta—was herself renowned for painting, a group of Palestinian salesmen set out to “develop and dominate the Canadian velvet market.” Icy Canada may have seemed an improbable destination for entrepreneurs from the Middle East, yet due to a welcoming stance on immigration and its jobs and connections to the Mid-East Oil Company (Alberta being the heart of the Canadian oil industry), the country experienced a small uptick of Arab immigrants in the years directly following the Six-Day War, particularly in Edmonton where to this day exists a vibrant Palestinian community.
The Palestinians were determined salesmen. According to Harden—who accompanied a number of the expeditions—the salesmen would strap velvets onto their backs and sell them door-to-door. When that proved successful, writes Sam Quinones in his indispensable book Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream, they expanded. They bought a van and drove from town to town across the provinces selling the paintings whenever, wherever they could. After that, they took to the skies. They had a new, untapped market: the Inuit.
To maximize profits, the salesmen tied as many paintings as they could to their planes. The planes then, covered in enough velvet to costume a lifetime of sad lounge singers, would take off from Edmonton’s City Centre Airport and fly from village to village trying to find Inuit communities to sell their paintings. As Harden recalls:
“You’d get to a large lake. On the shores would be a village. The plane would circle. They’d land it on the water…the people come to you. The dogs come out barking, and the kids come out to see who you are.”
The trips were a success. The Palestinians were often able to sell hundreds of paintings in a single visit. The Inuit were eager to pay top-dollar for these lovable, tacky odes to offbeat Americana. On the flip side, Inuit portraiture began to find its way into black velvet’s ever-broadening catalog, and faint traces of its influence could be found in Inuit art, such as the work of Alaskan born Robert Mayokok. Or, perhaps, Arctic Elvis.
The Palestinians' arrival came at a pivotal inflection point in modern Inuit history. Many Inuit villages were changing quickly. The traditional—some of which had been largely unchanged for thousands of years—was being replaced with the new. Residents of Povungnituk, for example, in the Nunavik region of the Nord-du-Québec, were trading in their igloos and dogsleds for prefab homes and snowmobiles.
The populist, throw-away appeal of velvet cannot be understated. This wasn’t a medium that was meant to last. Velvets were cheap thrills, to be taken in like a cigarette, and then forgotten. Paintings that“belong in a gin mill, not a museum,” once quipped Edgar Leeteg, widely considered to be the father of American velvet painting, a gonzo ex-cowboy who sold his first velvet for a sandwich, and whose sleazy exploits in booze, bikes, and brawls would have given the members of Mötley Crüe a run for their money.
It’s no coincidence that multicultural melting pots, border towns, and immigrant communities were at the center of black velvet’s cultural and commercial proliferation—bought and sold by the politically, culturally, and socially dispossessed. The savvy Palestinians invested their earnings, and moved on to larger ventures.
The art form's most permanent legacy might be in the courtroom cases it inspired. The signature Velvet Elvis painting, known as “Velvis”, initiated a copyright war that Harden fought and lost, and later, according to the Dallas Observer, Elvis’ Estate filed over 50 lawsuits to try and rid the country of every last one. Chico Arts pivoted further into truck stop ephemera—cheap Native American themed knickknacks that many of its staff found offensive; they later took legal action against Harden for cultural misrepresentation. Eventually, Harden sold Chico off. Black velvet production slowed worldwide. Soon after, it mostly disappeared.
If any velvets remain from the Palestinians' trips they’re likely scattered, hidden in junk shops, or tucked away in someone’s garage—sold, as always, to make a quick, cheap buck. “Bought for $3 and sold for $25,” said one vendor, selling velvet paintings of Inuit girls online. Did these paintings have a connection to those sales trips? Had these girls once seen velvet planes appear in the sky above their villages? We’ll likely never know.
The vendor went on to say he’d bought them from a collector, but he didn’t know exactly where they were from. All she’d said was that she found them in Canada. “That distinction,” he said, “may make a difference.”
According to conventional wisdom, Latin is a dead language. But a simple Amazon search shows that it still has a surprisingly active life not just in medical and law terminology, but also in children’s books.
After serving as the chief language of ancient Rome, and then as the language of scholars and holy men, Latin mostly faded out of modern usage. Even its study is becoming increasingly rare. But there are still some publishers and scholars who are taking modern works, mainly kids’ books, and translating them from modern English into what can best be described as a kind of modern Latin.
From picture books like Walter the Farting Dog, to longer works like Winnie the Pooh, and the first two books in the Harry Potter series, a wide variety of titles have made the jump to Latin over the years. Children’s books make good candidates for such translation work due to their simplified language and length, and in turn can give the study of Latin a more contemporary feel. But this doesn’t mean that turning these book into Latin in the first place is any small feat.
“Green Eggs and Ham was very difficult,” says Terence Tunberg, who has been teaching Latin for over 30 years. Along with his wife, Jennifer, he has translated a number of children’s books into Latin.
“[They’re] a good teaching tool, there’s no doubt about that. We did not try to write simple Latin," says Tunberg. "We tried to translate it the best we could given the resources of the Latin language without dumbing it down.”
Tunberg, who specializes in neo-Latin, the use of Latin after the Romans were dead and gone, never planned on translating kids’ books, but was contacted by prominent Classics textbook publisher Bolchazy-Carducci, who had purchased the rights to some of Dr. Seuss’ works. Given his background with the language, and his interest in how Latin evolved after Rome, the prospect of translating these modern works was right up his alley. Of course, the real reasons for the project didn’t escape him.
“As a textbook publisher, they’re out to make money. They caught on to the idea that if they have very young children's stories in Latin along with the regular books by Caesar and Cicero and all these other people, it would be a draw. And they were right. I still get royalties,” says Tunberg.
But the books, especially those of Seuss, presented a number of unique translation problems. As Tunberg explains, the real trick to a good translation isn’t always in the word-for-word conversion, but in maintaining the meaning and the voice of the original work. Given Seuss’ penchant for nonsense words and rare poetic meters (anapestic tetrameter, anyone?), converting his writing into a dead language, with its smaller vocabulary for describing certain modern concepts, wasn’t easy. Certain changes had to be made.
For The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, Tunberg relied on a poetic form from the Middle Ages that could work in Latin, yet sounded more modern than traditional Latin poetry. “The challenge there was obviously the Seussian wording, but also he had his own kind of rhythmical rhyme. We wrote How The Grinch Stole Christmas in a very alliterative prose,” says Tunberg. While the Latin might not have been able to recreate the book’s rhyme scheme, by relying on alliteration, Tunberg was able to maintain the playfully poetic feel of Seuss’ original.
Another issue, of course, is Seuss’ made-up language. How should one describe a concept like Whoville in How the Grinch Stole Christmas? In order to effectively translate the invented words from Seuss’ original work, they had to look at what the author intended. “The Whos are happy, contented people. The Grinch is jealous, lonely, and wants to strike out at those he feels are having a good time when he’s not having a good time," explains Tunberg. "So the Whoville people were ‘the happy ones,’ ‘the contented ones.’ We produced a little coinage in Latin, ‘Laetopoli,’ which sounds good. It sounds kind of Seussian, and it means ‘Happyville.’”
By facing the unique challenges of these modern translations, Tunberg was effectively reviving the language and using it to make brand new (and somewhat silly) words. These days, the Latin children’s book genre continues to sell well among new and seasoned students of the language, bringing in new readers and translators every year, and making the ancient language seem ever more approachable.
In recent years Tunberg stopped translating modern children’s works, choosing to shift his attentions to his research. There are still books he’d like to see translated into Latin, though, like Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Lord of the Rings (a Latin translation of The Hobbit, Hobbitus Ille, was published in 2012). To him, these swashbuckling stories are a great match for the vocabulary of the Latin language.
“If you want to keep Latin alive, and you want to keep people interested in it, the availability of that stuff is always good," says Tunberg. "Ultimately the classics gain too, because the student who reads my imagined version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is more likely to end up reading Virgil and Cicero.”
It might seem strange to be reverse-engineering modern works into a dead language like Latin, but it’s the only way we’re going to keep it alive.
After listening all day to relentless warnings of “severe winter weather” and poring over equipment manuals to determine the lowest operating temperature for various pieces of photographic gear, I decided to stick with the plan. A few hours and several miles of snowshoeing later, I was hard at work in the diminishing February twilight, setting up lines of strobes and high-speed cameras along gaps in the tree canopy that framed a forest lake at the edge of Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness. I knew this lakeshore to be a primary movement corridor for a resident female northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus), and based on observations from previous nights, I expected my nocturnal subject to launch herself across the lake sometime between 2:20 and 2:50 a.m.
By that time, the temperature was expected to be in the neighborhood of minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit, greatly increasing the chances of camera failure. But it was a risk I was willing to take, since I knew how spectacular that night’s acrobatics were likely to be. February marks the start of the northern flying squirrel’s mating season in Montana. On a typical night during this period, each female will be escorted through the forest by a squabbling squadron of ardent males. It was those energetic males and their dizzying aerial mating chases that I sought to film.
Until recently, flying squirrels were assumed to be passive gliders, using their expansive patagium—the furry wing membrane that spans from the squirrel’s neck to its forelimbs and back to its hind limbs—to simply prolong jumps across canopy gaps, and to lessen impacts upon landing. During passive gliding, travel occurs along a declining linear path. This is what paper airplanes do, trading height for horizontal distance. Although gliding like this is the cheapest form of locomotion, it is also the least stable, because any change in posture, wing symmetry, or weight distribution has the potential to disrupt the glide and result in an uncontrollable fall. Imagine a paper airplane with the sudden addition of a heavy weight on one side, or with one wing that suddenly changes size or shape.
Once scientists began studying flying squirrels in the lab, it didn’t take long to discover that there is nothing passive or constant about the species’ flight. Researchers would ultimately document in flying squirrels a wider variety of aerodynamic modifications and flight types than had been described in any other species of animal glider. In a single flight episode, a flying squirrel might use a dozen separate flight-control techniques and—frustratingly for the graduate students and research assistants tasked with documenting the patterns—different squirrels would use different combinations of these techniques. Ironically, the one type of flight that has never been observed in this species is passive gliding.
As more and more squirrels flew through wind tunnels and along blocked-off biology department corridors, it became clear that flying squirrels have a marked disregard for basic aerodynamic constraints. For example, the squirrels were frequently recorded moving through the air with extraordinarily high “angles of attack,” which is the angle between the wing—in this case the patagium—and the direction of oncoming airflow. Aircraft typically stall when their angle of attack reaches 15 to 20 degrees. Flying squirrels routinely reach 60 degrees, far exceeding values that would result in the stall and crash of even the most advanced military jets. Stalling is caused by a loss of lift. This occurs when the main source of lift, air vortices—the swirls of air that form at the leading edge of a wing as a result of differences in the pressure below and above the wing—essentially slide down the wing surface at high angles. Except, evidently, when the wing belongs to a flying squirrel.
Another lab research finding that challenged the basic aerodynamics of gliding was the flying squirrel’s ability to carry heavy objects in flight without compromising height or trajectory. In the lab, the squirrels are routinely observed generating lift forces up to six times their body weight, a feat that makes it possible for them to take flight with such things as stolen peanut-butter sandwiches—or, under more natural conditions, enormous pine cones. Indeed, even advanced stages of pregnancy seem to have little impact on the squirrels’ flying capabilities.
Laboratory studies also found that the squirrels fly at remarkably high speeds and have a puzzling ability to control their acceleration throughout the flight. The benefits of this are clear: Increased speed enhances maneuverability, which is critical for an animal that flies through an obstacle-strewn forest at night. However, the recorded speeds vastly exceed those that could be generated by a glide itself. Somewhere in the flying squirrel’s little body resides a mysterious mechanism that, without the power of flapping or internal combustion, generates exceptional lift, comparable to that of powered flight.
With each of thee discoveries, it became increasingly obvious that flying squirrels are so overbuilt for flight that simple laboratory challenges of gliding from perch to perch, or up and down flights of stairs at the prodding of research assistants, were not enough to reveal their complete flight repertoire. I needed to take my study to the wild, where flight performance is a question of life and death, or at least of mating success. And that is what brought me to this forest in northwestern Montana in the middle of a frigid February night.
On the lakeshore that night, shortly after 2:30 a.m. under a nearly full moon, I was treated to an unforgettable air show. It started with a cloud of snow dust kicked up by two males chasing each other on the upper branches of a spruce tree high overhead. One of the males lost his grip and dove into a glide over the lake, to be followed immediately by the rapidly accelerating glide of the second male. Both landed and resumed their squabble in the upper canopy on the other side of the lake, seemingly without much loss of elevation despite a glide of at least 50 meters.
Soon after, I spotted the female sitting quietly above me on a snow-covered branch. She was perched up against the tree’s trunk in mid-canopy, inspecting a large cone likely left by a red squirrel earlier in the day. A few seconds later, a third male parachuted down from a nearby tree, somehow steering at the end of his near vertical descent to land on the trunk just below the female. A moment later, the female crouched, and in a powerful 40-degree jump, with body fully extended and limbs outstretched, she launched herself high into the air.
For a second or so, her patagium remained completely folded, with her flattened tail held vertically, giving additional lift. When she reached the peak of her jump, with the high-speed strobes illuminating her every move, she spread the patagium wide, completely flattened the silvery fur on her body and tail and seemed to freeze in midair for a couple of moments before gracefully gliding out of view across the snow-covered lake. For several minutes, I could see the occasional puff of snow dust and could hear the muted squabbles drifting over the frozen expanse. Then, just like that, the group disappeared into the darkness and the night’s silence was restored.
I would spend the next several weeks analyzing frame-by-frame the footage I captured from this stunning performance, deciphering the array of elegant solutions the squirrels employed to solve major aerodynamic problems—some previously unknown, others suggested by laboratory research. Foremost among the latter was the squirrels’ extensive deployment of a “wing tip”—a protruding cartilaginous rod outside the wrist—sort of a long sixth finger. This trait was first described 20 years ago by mammalogist Richard Thorington at the Smithsonian Institution, who speculated that the wing tips were used in the same way as the winglets of modern jets. These vertical metal plates added to the ends of wings revolutionized air travel after NASA began installing them in the 1970s. Flying squirrels evolved wing tips about 20 million years earlier, and have been perfecting their use ever since.
In both the squirrels and the aircraft, the wing tips deflect and retain large air vortices that form along the leading edge of wings and thus generate substantial lift. But in a crucial difference compared to the aircraft, flying squirrels can independently and dynamically control their wing tips on the left and right, folding and extending them as needed to modify the speed and trajectory of glides in mid-flight. This enables them, for example, to make sharp turns in mid-air to avoid obstacles or evade attacking owls.
Generation after generation, natural selection has continued to refine flying squirrel aerodynamics. While air vortices tend to form naturally during a glide, flying squirrels take this a step further. They actively generate additional vortices, and increase lift, using an ingenious adaptation that human engineers copied in the design of the world’s first supersonic jet in 1969. Unlike most gliding mammals, flying squirrels have an additional fur-covered membrane between their necks and wrists that directs air flow to the main portion of the patagium just behind. This flap can be curved down, guiding airflow and generating significant forward acceleration and lift during take-off, then retracted during high-speed chases, or flattened and merged with the main patagium in long-distance glides. In the course of a single flight, the flying squirrel integrates precursors of some of the best inventions of human aircraft engineering over the last century, morphing flawlessly from a canard supersonic airplane design to an agile jet to a blended wing-body aircraft.
And then there is the squirrel’s ultimate secret weapon: the patagium itself. It appears early in each squirrel’s development as a massive outgrowth of skin between hind and forelegs—making a brood of baby flying squirrels in a nesting cavity look remarkably like a stack of pancakes. As the young squirrels grow into their oversized skin, diverse muscle and nerve groups fill the patagium. The result is distributed control of the membrane, with some muscles being controlled locally and others by distant nerve centers.
The importance of such distributed control is that the squirrel can adjust the membrane’s billowing and stiffness independently across the patagium, and between the left and right sides. Part of the wing can be rigid while the other part is pliable, all in response to nerve signals from local stretch receptors that detect minute changes in airflow. Combined with a wide range of limb movements during flight, such local control allows squirrels to actively modify wing size, shape, and stiffness during an aerial chase—from a thin, fully extended membrane in the middle of long-distance glides to fully inflated furry parachutes for slowing down at the end of steep descents. Designing a wing that can instantly change in stiffness and configuration in response to minute changes in local air pressure and flow remains a dream for human aircraft engineers.
Muscles in the patagium also control the orientation of specialized hairs at the membrane’s edges. For example, unusually long, stiff hairs on the leading edge of the patagium are often held at variable angles during take-off and landing, generating multiple mini-vortices that are then trapped on the wing’s surface, providing lift. A band of these hairs along the sides of patagium also generates substantial local turbulence during flight and—together with a pliable wing surface—seems to create a traveling corridor for air vortices along the edge of the gliding membrane.
It’s now clear from our field observations that mid-flight changes in lift and acceleration are closely associated with a change in billowing of the gliding membrane and, in particular, with the formation of waves on the patagium surface. Amazingly, the squirrels appear to actively direct trapped air vortices across the membrane surface. The closest analogy from human engineering would be tiltrotors—aircraft, such as the V-22 Osprey, with variably tilted rotors attached to fixed wings that combine the high speed and range of a conventional plane with the lift capacity and take-off versatility of a helicopter. The crucial difference is that flying squirrels can instantly modify the size, number, and location of their “rotors” in response to minute changes in airflow and pressure—an achievement that is well beyond modern aircraft engineering.
At the end of a long field season, while waiting in the Great Falls International Airport for my flight back to the University of Arizona, I walk through one of the largest private collections of aircraft models showcased there. Most inventions in aerodynamic design are represented—from the delta-wing and wing-body airplanes of the familiar Concord and B-2 stealth bomber to the lesser known variable-sweep wing design that converts a fighter jet into a long-range cruiser in mid-flight to bizarre looking canard airplanes with two pairs of wings.
As I browse, I try to imagine what a collection of nature’s innovations for animal flight would look like. Nature had about a billion years longer to experiment with various ways to get animals as diverse as insects, frogs, reptiles, and mammals airborne, so one would think such a collection would be enormous. Surprisingly, this is not the case. That’s because, over the course of evolution, a typical animal flier might accumulate dozens of redundant aerodynamic solutions—some nearly perfect, some half-working, but all contributing to getting an animal airborne, while at the same time preserving uninterrupted paths for future adaptations. The end result is a prized combination of functional versatility and exceptional robustness of nature’s flying solutions—something we have yet to achieve in human engineering. The flying squirrel is a premier example of this, easily encompassing in one small furry package the content of several of the display cases in front of me: the aerodynamic features of heavy transport planes, agile military jets, movable-rotor helicopters, flexible-wing parachute gliders, and many innovations we’ve yet to achieve.
Centuries ago, before modern medicine, in a time when humans fought disease and sickness in more, uh, mystical ways, ancient Romans centered on a solution that today might get you reported, or at least looked at askance: amulets for you and your children shaped like giant penises. The amulets—and also, frequently, wind chimes—were shaped like a fascinum, or a divine penis, to ward off disease and the evil eye.
But they were used for more than that, too, as ancient Roman boys also wore the amulets, called bullae, to indicate their social status (like whether they were slaves or free boys), while young girls had a similar counterpart. In order to increase the efficacy of a bulla or another adornment, such as a kid’s ring, they were crafted into the shape of, or adorned with, giant penises.
"The sexual energy of the phallus was tied directly to its power in reproduction,” according to classicist Anthony Philip Corbeill. The fertile power of a phallus, it was thought, would keep them safe.
This was important, primarily because in the Roman world, children were exceptionally vulnerable to sickness, with up to half of all Roman children dying before the age of five, according to the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Which made it understandable, then, that mothers resorted to magical methods to protect their offspring.
But, as Pliny the Elder noted in his Natural History, fascina weren’t just limited to kids: “Infants are under the especial guardianship of the god Fascinus, the protector, not of infants only, but of generals as well.” Which means that when a general was parading through Rome in triumph, surrounded by booty and slaves, he’d likely also have a fascinum hanging on his chariot. Or, as Pliny described: “It is the image of this divinity that is attached beneath the triumphant car of the victorious general, protecting him, like some attendant physician, against the effects of envy.”
Other fascina are double-headed. One side of the amulet is a penis, the other a clenched fist. What does the latter symbolize? A fist with the thumb thrust up between the index and middle figures is often called the “fig,” or mano fica. It’s a dirty thumbs-up that’s symbolic of a penis and genitalia in general; so carving both a talisman with both a fascinum and a “fig” on it would make this twice as powerful at warding off evil.
And then there are the penis bullae with wings carved on them (cue the Red Bull ad here). Why turn a fascinum into a half-genital, half-bird hybrid? Flying capabilities made them more effective threats—and thus better protectors—against invidia (envy, or the evil eye), but they were also a throwback to the ancient Greeks, from whom the Romans co-opted some cultural and religious ideas. In this case, it might’ve started with language. “The Greek word for ‘wing’ also served as a euphemism for phallus,” Erich Segal wrote in The Death of Comedy. This pun also rears its head in Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Eros (erotic love) has to grow his wings before he can “take flight.”
As a result of the fascinum’s effectiveness, Pliny claimed its worship formed “part of the Roman rites.” Its worship was “entrusted to the Vestal Virgins,” the chaste priestesses of the goddess Vesta. It might seem a bit odd to give a giant phallus monument to virgins, but the Vestals were actually all about fertility. As the classicist Mary Beard noted in a 1980 article, “it seems as if the virgin was not looked upon as sterile but as a mediator of stored up, potential procreative power.”
And, today, fascina live on in the English language, in the word "fascinate." If you’re fascinated with something, in other words, you might just be thinking that it looks like a penis.
It's the holiday season, and sometime over the course of the past few days, odds are good that you cracked some nuts. Maybe you used a simple metal nutcracker. Maybe you used one of those fancy ones that look like toothy men.
Or maybe, accidentally, you used something else entirely. According to China Radio International, a man from Shaanxi recently realized that his trusty nutcracker, which he has been using for the past quarter century, was actually a hand grenade.
The object, which has the long handle and blunt end of a good walnut-smasher, doesn't look much like a grenade. A friend had given it to him in 1991, the man said. But when he came across a police safety leaflet with illustrations of lesser-known bombs and grenades, "he realized [he] possessed a forbidden explosive, and had been banging it against things for years," writes CRI.
He has turned the rogue nutcracker over to police, who will try to figure out if it can still explode. In the meantime, he is getting blown up on Weibo. "Why would a friend gift him a bomb?" one commenter asked. Perhaps they just wanted to make his life more exciting.
Uluru, in Australia, is one of the wonders of the world: a massive rock in the middle of pretty much nowhere that is sacred to indigenous peoples and very hot all of the time.
It also doesn't rain very much, but this week, it did, making for some impromptu, and very beautiful, waterfalls. Here's a video of some of them:
In case you didn't see the rain at Uluru, here's another video to wet your appetite courtesy Rees Hughes #SeeUlurupic.twitter.com/8iVpEVuYB5
How scarce is rain there? Normally, the rock only averages about 11 inches a year—but this year, according to Sky News, it saw nine inches of rain on Christmas night alone, which officials said was a once-in-50-years weather event.
And while it's too late for you to catch this in person, you should visit, as nearly a half million people do every year—to climb, take pictures, and, occasionally, remove their clothes.
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.
Back in 2011, MuckRock user Jason Smathersfiled a FOIA with the CIA for all responses they had sent to requesters containing the term “record systems.” This was a reference to two earlier rejections he had received from the Agency, which cited the inability to preform a search in the system based on the terms Smathers had provided.
Smathers immediately appealed, on grounds that it beggared belief that he had been the only requester to have ever had an exchange with the CIA that contained the words “record system.”
Six years goes by, and we hear nothing from the Agency regarding this request. Then, just this week, this letter arrives in the mail.
Which is worse? The casual admittance that they haven’t done anything for over half a decade, or unfathomable audacity of putting Smathers on deadline? And while two months sounds pretty generous, keep in mind that they’ve been sitting on this for 72 months - a mere 36 times what they’re giving him.
To give this some further context - Smathers’ request was assigned an internal MuckRock tracking number of 238. If you were to file a request today, you’d be given a number in the 31,000s.
To the CIA FOIA officer (not) reading this: There have been children born since this appeal was filed that you could have a conversation with. This is bad, and you should feel bad. Please don’t be bad, be good instead.
As 2016 draws to a close, just about everyone is thinking the same thing—boy, are we going to miss it! Every year must end, but something about this one was special: maybe the unceasing political turmoil, or the spate of celebritydeaths, or all those charming, friendly clowns.
Nothing gold can stay. But if you want to squeeze just a little more out of 2016, we've got just the place for you to do it: Baker Island, a tiny, saucer-shaped atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Located halfway between Hawaii and Australia, Baker Island is one of only two named pieces of land in the world to fall within the time zone UTC-12:00. (The other is its neighbor, Howland Island.) This makes it the last place on Earth where each day—and thus each year—finally ends. Below is a brief guide to this prime New Year's Eve location, where, surrounded by bird poop and boobies, 2016 will breathe its dying breath.
What is Baker Island?
Baker Island is an atoll—an island made out of a jutting coral reef—about 1,500 miles southwest of Hawaii. It is not quite a mile square, and is, for the moment, completely uninhabited (by people, at least). Although it was certainly frequented by Polynesian sailors, its first "official" sighting was in 1818, by the occupants of the whaling ship Equator, and for a few decades after that it served mainly as a place to bury dead seamen. In 1855, it was sold to the American Guano Company, who set up camp there to harvest the plentiful mounds of bird poop, which one expert called the "finest he had seen."
Attempts to make the island anything more than a giant bird poop repository—a would-be settlement in 1935, a military air base project in 1943—have mostly been stymied by the enormous number of birds that already live there. In 1974, the US gave up and declared Baker Island a National Wildlife Refuge, part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.
How can I get there?
Like most worthwhile New Year's Eve spots, if you want to visit Baker Island, you'll have to make your plans far in advance. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sends a boat over once every two years or so to make sure everything is still going well. In order to be on it, you need a special permit that is generally only afforded to researchers and educators. If you get past these bureaucratic bouncers, you're facing eight days at sea, after which you'll arrive at a small landing on the island's west coast.
What should I wear?
Baker Island is located just north of the equator. According to the CIA World Factbook, it enjoys "scant rainfall, constant wind, [and] burning sun"—so dress accordingly! For this special occasion, you may want to coordinate your outfit with the island's vegetation, which consists mostly of grasses, short shrubs, and vines that grow on the ground.
Who will I meet there?
Currently, most of the residents of Baker Island are seabirds—largely boobies, frigatebirds, and sooty terns. Two types of reptiles, the snake-eyed skink and the hawksbill turtle, also hang out there, along with hermit crabs and various insects. A contingent of 40 bottle-nosed dolphins generally greets boats on arrival. There are also a heck of a lot of Norway rats, which eat bird eggs.
What attractions should I be sure not to miss?
At a slim 0.8 square miles, you'd think there wouldn't be a lot of Baker Island to love—but what there is of the island packs a wallop. You can squelch around remnants of the guano trade—one 2006 travelogue describes a scraped-out basin beside several remaining "piles of low-grade guano." Once that gets old, there's an overgrown former airstrip, a decrepit radio tower, a lone cistern, and a crumbling day beacon that fills with shade-seeking hermit crabs during the hot days. The most stunning attraction, however, can't be visited at all—like most atolls, Baker Island lies atop an enormous underwater volcano, which dates back to the Cretaceous era. Just because it hasn't blown in a while doesn't mean it won't on New Year's Eve—think of the fireworks!
If Baker Island is too crowded, where should I go instead?
There is one other named piece of land that falls within the UTC-12:00 zone—Howland Island, which is much the same as Baker, with the added distinction of having been the intended destination of Amelia Earhart when she disappeared in 1937. Let's hope the same fate does not befall 2016—which, for all its faults, is at least guaranteed a final landing on these islands before it finally relegates itself to the guano heap of history.
Recently, the main Dublin branch of the National Museum of Ireland, which focuses on archaeology, received a series of mysterious envelopes addressed to “The History Museum, Kildare St., Dublin.”
The envelopes were brown and had no return address or postmark. Inside, museum staff found four fascinating objects dating back thousands of years into Ireland’s past.
Two of the items were axes from the Bronze Age, one about 3,300 years old and the other more than 4,200. The other items were more recent—rare Viking jewelry that might have come to Ireland from Norway.
The museum believes the items may have been excavated using a metal detector, without the necessary license. In Ireland, it's illegal to use a metal detector to search for archaeological objects, and without a "Detection Consent" permit, finding an archaeological object using a metal detector is subject to a hefty fine and possible prison time. (If a person finds an archaeological object accidentally, while they're, say, digging in a garden, that's okay.)
Despite the illegality involved, the staff is hoping the finder will come forward so that they can learn more about the context in which these objects were discovered.
Sometimes in nature, it’s not about who works the hardest, but who cons the smartest. Such is the case in the complicated relationship between drongo birds and meerkats in the deserts of Southern Africa.
This video shows the development of a plot line worthy of a Shakespearean play. A drongo bird watches meerkats scavenge for food in the desert. Rather than waste its precious energy following their example, it decides to wage a psychological war against them.
First, the bird gains the meerkat’s trust by warning them when an eagle approaches. But as soon as it has secured their confidence, it uses it against them by sounding a false alarm and swooping in to eat the food they left behind in their panic.
The betrayal doesn’t end there. The meerkat’s confidence has been lost and the bird cannot fool them twice with the same trick. Instead, it employs an even more treacherous trick by learning to imitate the warning call of the meerkat’s leader. With their catch lost and their pride hurt, the meerkats are left in a tragic state while the drongo bird enjoys its feast.
If you want a surefire way to teach your children about the unfair ways of the world, just make them watch this video.
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 investigation by the local gas company, PG&E, did not find any gas leaks, though. And as KQED reports, no one else would take responsibility for the smell, either. “More than a half-dozen city and federal agencies, Pacific Gas and Electric and the city’s garbage collector say they don’t know what caused it,” the station reported.
San Francisco is not the only city to be blanketed with mysterious foul smells in the past week, it turns out. Philadelphia was subject to its own sulfur-smelling cloud late last week. In that case, though, the source was eventually found—it was coming from refinery across the river that has lost its power and as a result had some “flaring and odor” problems.
The New Year might be the worst time to have a birthday. A birthday party in the early days of January struggles to attract attendees, you probably get combined holiday and birthday presents, and everyone else is too preoccupied thinking of all the resolutions they’re going to break to care about your big day.
Unless, that is, you’re from the Korean peninsula where everyone cares about your New Year birthday—because it is everyone’s birthday.
Koreans essentially have two birthdays: their Korean birthday, which is celebrated on the lunar New Year, and their “actual” birthday, which is celebrated on the day of birth. Both of these celebrations are important, but they do not hold the same weight.
Eunjoo Shin, a South Korean citizen from Gunsan who resides in Seoul, says “I love my individual date of birth, but we consider New Year’s more important.” This importance is derived from Korean emphasis on collectivity.
The Lunar New Year, which typically falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice, is a communal affair. Traditionally, entire families gather and spend the day cooking food to place on the home's ancestral table as an offering. With the offerings, they bow and pray to the ancestral spirits for good luck in the new year. A meal is then shared with all the family, which includes a seaweed soup called tteokguk. Eating this soup is what makes you a year older.
The Korean birthday, eumnyeok saeng-il, is thus celebrated collectively, as all members of the family turn a year older at the same time. Once the meal is over, juniors offer a bow, sebae, to their elders, who in turn present them with gifts and money that are considered, as Shin puts it, good fortune. The rest of the day is spent in games, meals, and storytelling.
This collective birthday gives Koreans a very particular concept of age. Once born, a baby is considered to be one year old, accounting for the time spent in the womb. The baby will turn two not a year after it is born, but in the Lunar New Year. The new year will be celebrated in 2017 on January 28. This means that babies born on January 27, 2017, will be two years old in Korea, and one day old in the rest of the world.
In the Korean peninsula, this difference is extremely important. Korean culture organizes hierarchical social relationships based on age. Junior must treat seniors with respect, so knowing someone’s age is critical. Everyone born in the same lunar year shares the same age, so they are equal. But a person born a day before the lunar new year will be a year older than a person born a day after, and will thus be their senior.
What happens on a person’s “actual” date of birth, or yangnyeok saeng-il? It is still an occasion to celebrate, it’s just not as big. Shin says that she usually has a small party with around five people, or goes out to eat with friends and family.
Only certain birthdays, like the dol, or one-year birthday, and the 60th birthday, are considered of great importance. This is because for most of the peninsula’s history, many people died before these birthdays due to lack of medicine and markedly varying temperatures. If a baby survived after the first year, the chance of mortality decreased significantly, so it was an occasion for a great party. Likewise, it was not common for someone to live over 60, so it was seen as proper to revere elders who did.
Not only do Koreans have two ages, but they use both ages officially. For regulations on things like the age of consent and the commencement of school, the “actual” age is used. For other regulations like being able to buy tobacco and alcohol, what matters is the Korean age. That’s right, no Korean has had to wait patiently until their birthday to be able to go out with friends who turn of age just a couple of months before them.
The New Year tradition, like all traditions, cannot withstand the winds of change. Shin explains that Christians in Korea usually celebrate New Year with the family, but forego the memorial service for the ancestors, as it is contradictory to their faith. She sees this as a direct influence of western culture. She also says that younger generations are not as interested in memorial services because they take too much effort. A great part of the day is spent cooking the meals offered to the ancestors, and she says that younger people “want to go on a trip or relax at home rather than hold the memorial service.”
Despite these cultural shifts between generations, the New Year remains the most important festival of the year, and age continues to define the social structure of the peninsula.
On the night of December 30, millions of mixed martial arts (MMA) fans around the world will watch fighters "Rowdy" Ronda Rousey and Amanda "Lioness" Nunes pummel the living daylights out of each other as they battle for the women's bantamweight title in the Ultimate Fighting Championship league.
For many fans, however, the real drama happens today at the weigh-in, with a ritual that has come to be commonplace before MMA and boxing bouts: the staredown.
The concept of the staredown is pretty self-explanatory: fighters, typically mere inches apart, stare into each other's eyes while the press and fans gawk. Photos are taken, and posturing ensues. Combatants may be aggressive, playful, serious, menacing, theatrical, sloppy, happy, foolish, bored, or all of the above. Whatever they are, they're usually entertaining. In fact, many MMA fighters have come to be known as much for their staredown antics as their fighting success.
The performance originated in boxing, from which professional MMA has drawn so much of its promotional and organizational structure. According to Eric Raskin, a veteran boxing writer and a former editor of Ring Magazine, archive photos from the ‘30s and ‘40s show boxers doing early forms of the staredown: fighters standing in various poses, turned toughly toward each other or the camera. He speculates that the modern form took off because it made for more compelling pre-fight publicity shots.
"If [fighters] are staring at each other from two feet away, you get this big dead space in the photo and it doesn't work as well," he says. "So somewhere along the line someone was nudging these fighters to get closer, get right up in each other's faces."
When former UFC lightweight brawler Tyson Griffin starting competing in 2006, he didn't really care about staredowns. His staredowns were largely tactical; he would focus on his opponent's chin to help him visualize where to land his punches. As he took on more and more opponents, however, he started to appreciate the psychological benefits that came from a good old-fashioned hard stare. He's come to believe that "you get to learn a lot about people just by looking in their eyes." A quality staredown, Griffin says, involves "two fighters that have trained hard, are hungry, and want what the other person has." The staredown is an opportunity "to look into this guy's soul and see who it is I'm fighting."
For MMA writer Eugene Robinson, the ideal staredown is like a seduction. "It's a very gentle dance, where you lull the opponent in, eliminate the physical distance, get some sort of intimate comfortability—and then turn on the steel. If you pull that off, it's pretty wonderful," says Robinson, author of the book Fight: Everything You Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You'd Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking.
"You try to be a silverback gorilla," says Robinson; animals and other carnivores (including humans) will want to run for cover. A quick journey through YouTube will confirm this observation: input "MMA staredown" into the search field, and watch the shit-talking, scowling, and other conspicuous displays of dominance roll.
Professional fighter Ilima-Lei Macfarlane—fight name "The Iliminator"— doesn't put much stock in the staredown, however, apart from its potential hype value. The flyweight, who fights for Bellator (a rival MMA league to UFC), smiles during her staredowns. "I'm a friendly person. I've never been a shit-talker or have animosity toward my opponents, so it's just natural for me to smile when I stare at them."
Macfarlane acknowledges that most fighters probably don't share her philosophy—especially Rousey, who is well known for going wild at her staredowns. A fighter's performance is often judged against his or her level of staredown intensity (or insanity). The greater the disconnect between them, the greater the scorn.
As an example, Macfarlane cites the 2014 bout between Julian "Julz the Jackal" Wallace and Ben Nguyen. During the weigh-in, Wallace tried to aggressively intimidate a nonchalant and smiling Nguyen; less than 30 seconds into the fight, Nguyen knocks his tormentor out. A video of the staredown and the comeuppance has over 20 million views on YouTube. "People were like, Look at this guy trying to be all hard. And then he ends up getting knocked out," says Macfarlane.
"I think that all your talking should be done inside the cage," she says. If she had to choose a favorite staredown technique, however, she prefers ones that are clever, like the staredowns by Sean O'Connell, whose moves have included playing rock, paper, scissors and taking a selfie with his opponent. Despite her own lack of interest, she readily admits the media value of dramatic staredowns. "Of course, [MMA] is a business and you need to sell the viewers and get people excited to watch."
Accordingly, it makes sense that UFC president Dana White has called the staredown his "second favorite thing" after fights. In a 2013 blog post on BJPenn.com, a popular MMA news site, writer Christopher Murphy explained how the UFC has seized on the staredown's hype potential: "What had typically been limited to an event with press and media, the UFC transformed into an arena-filling event for fans. They stream it online for millions of viewers, and weigh-ins have even aired live on network television."
In boxing, staredowns have long been used as viewer-pumping performances. Many of Mike Tyson's staredowns in the 1990s and early 2000s were SportsCenter ratings gold and undoubtedly contributed to the huge purses paid out for his fights. Tyson could also take things too far, to put it mildly. Raskin points to the press conference for Tyson's 2002 fight with Lennox Lewis: a brawl broke out between the fighters' entourages, and Tyson allegedly bit Lewis's leg during the melee. It's not in fighters'—or Pay-Per-View executives'—interest to have injuries before a bout, however, so non-scripted scuffling is rare.
Whatever its publicity value, the staredown can evoke something much deeper than just pre-fight hijinks for some fighters. "It's an incredibly powerful experience. It underscores how much we have nonverbal conversations," says Robinson, who compares the ritual to Marina Abramović's 2010 work of performance art, "The Artist Is Present." Over a two-week period, Abramović famously logged 700 hours staring at volunteers willing to return her silent gaze from a chair at the Museum of Modern Art. "I like the idea of having a staredown competition without the fight."
Griffin takes a similar view of the staredown's relevance. In his opinion, the staredown in MMA or boxing is just an exaggerated version of real life. "Our bodies and brains are so similar it doesn’t even matter if it’s a competition for combat or two salesmen at a car lot," he says. Whenever humans go up against each other, a staredown is sure to follow. "A staredown happens every day in the streets."
On New Year’s Eve, Times Square and its giant ball have seemingly monopolized the dropped-at-midnight industry. However, there are objects dropping simultaneously all over the country as the calendar flips, ranging from other giant objects, foods, even living creatures. In 2011, Seaside Heights in New Jersey lowered the reality television star Snooki. Here are some of the most bizarre projectiles that have become tradition in their respective towns.
The town of Eastover, North Carolina, aimed to celebrate New Year’s in a quirky way that celebrated the town’s past. Eastover, located on land formerly known as Flea Hill, is a sandy area that was previously prone to bug (especially flea) infestations. “We had to do something that was original, a little quirky,” Mayor Charles McLaurin stated. The town made the decision to honor the land’s history of pests by dropping none other than the insect it was named for. The 30-pound insect, named Jasper, is made of fabric, wire, foam, and plywood, and was created by a local resident. Despite the flea drop’s infancy, it is growing in popularity and has successfully scratched Eastover’s itch for a zany tradition.
A more recent New Year’s tradition began last year. The folks of Marietta, Georgia, were treated to a mystery drop in 2015—in the form of an eight-foot cube designed by engineers from Kennesaw State University. In the inaugural ceremony, the cube opened at midnight to reveal not a ball but… a trapeze artist. The gymnast performed for several minutes while suspended in the air, and although the event was unique, it was met with mixed reviews on social media. This year, the cube is returning and will feature another mystery drop, but its contents will be new.
When it comes to creative New Year’s drops, Pennsylvania is a contender in terms of quantity and quality, with cities dropping pickles, wrenches, roses, and a slew of other items related to local lore or industries. One of the more popular events is Lebanon’s bologna drop, a tradition in its 20th year, featuring a 16-foot bologna that is lowered in a metal cage emblazoned with lights. The gargantuan lunch meat is lowered and then donated to local missions (don’t worry, it never touches the ground!)
Lebanon isn’t the only ones with giant foods, however. Mobile, Alabama, celebrates their wildly popular “Moonpie Over Mobile” event with a 12-foot electronic replica Moonpie, a confection consisting of two graham cracker cookies connected with marshmallow filling and dipped in chocolate. The treats were well-known for being tossed in Mardi Gras parades in Mobile, and the New Year’s event began in 2008. The city hosts musicians, fireworks, a parade for the event. While the New Year’s Moonpie is inedible, the Chattanooga Bakery (creators of the Moonpie) create a giant moonpie that is very edible, which is sliced and served to the public.
Two residents of Prairie Du Chien, a Wisconsin town on the Mississippi river, came back from a peach-dropping ceremony in Savannah, Georgia, and decided that their town needed its own tradition to celebrate the holiday. Based on their location by the river, the residents decided a fish made sense for their town. After learning of a Chinese belief that eating carp on New Year’s brings good luck, they adopted the idea of dropping a ceremonial carp, aptly named Lucky. Each year, a carp is selected to play the role of Lucky, who is frozen until the time of the event. However, Lucky isn’t actually dropped, but is rather lowered by a crane—met at ground level by a line of adoring fans waiting to kiss the fish for good luck. The event was originally small, but now attracts crowds of a couple thousand, and has been converted into festival, Carp Fest. After the festivities complete, Lucky is refrozen until the spring, where the fish will have a proper burial under a newly planted maple tree.
Another creature living a second life in holiday celebrations is Spencer, the stuffed possum dropped every year in Tallapoosa, Georgia. Much like Jasper, the aforementioned flea of Eastover, the tradition gets its roots from the area’s former (albeit unofficial) name of “Possum Snout.” According to the event’s website, Spencer was originally found on the side of the road by local taxidermist Bud Jones and taken home to be brought back to life. Now, the marsupial has been reincarnated as a popular western Georgia tradition, lowered every year in an illuminated cage. The event even got national attention, featured on TLC’s once-popular show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
Brasstown, North Carolina, has a similar event to the one in Tallapoosa, but with one distinction: their possum is alive. The possum, stored in a plexiglass box and lowered at midnight, has been an on-and-off tradition for the residents of the town. Fierce battles between organizers and animal rights groups have sparked debate in and out of the courtroom over the ethical treatment of the possum, who is left in the cage during the event and subjected to loud noise by way of music and fireworks. For the 2014 celebration, a compromise was met with a pot of possum stew being lowered instead (a stew that was eaten the next day). However, last year, they returned to the original event. It is yet to be decided what will happen this New Year’s.
The possum festivities in Georgia and North Carolina served as inspiration for the people of Princess Anne, Maryland, when it came time to choose their aerial object of choice. Hunters in the area have a long history trapping muskrats, and with the word of possums spreading to the north, Princess Anne residents made a similar appointment. Yet, this is no ordinary muskrat. The stuffed marsh creature named Marshall is decorated in a top hat and a cape, and rides down a zipline to greet the midnight hour. The event also features a competition to crown a Queen Muskrat, a highly sought-after title that is won through a trivia contest. Although the event was inspired by possums, “frankly, we think a muskrat is a whole lot better-looking," said Ben Adler, one of the creators of the event. And with an outfit like Marshall’s, who are we to argue?
Throughout Southeast England, a small batch of modern pilgrims have been traveling to visit and sleep in ancient churches. They’re not necessarily seeking a religious experience—rather, they are part of a modern movement called champing, a portmanteau for church camping.
Organized through the Churches Conservation Trust, an organization that oversees the preservation of historic churches throughout the country, champing provides rural villages a way of offsetting the maintenance of these historic buildings, while offering travelers a very unusual place to stay. The Trust’s website promises that “apart from a few weary pilgrims, monks, and a tired vicar or two,” champers will be amongst the first to spend the night in the space.
The Churches Conservation Trust first piloted champing in 2014 at All Saints’ Church in Aldwincle, Northamptonshire. The medieval church, which features limestone arches and a square tower, is situated on the outskirts of town. Visitors can pass their time exploring the church, canoeing on the nearby river, or exploring the small village and surrounding woodlands and meadows. From the church tower, guests are offered a sprawling view of the surrounding countryside. Just under three hours from London, the church is conveniently located for city dwellers looking for a unique getaway.
In 2015, the Trust expanded their offerings to four churches. That year, nearly 300 people stayed overnight during the champing season, which runs from May until September. In 2016, nearly 650 champed in the seven available churches. These champers were mostly between 26 and 44 and from urban locations. Most were couples, but there were also many families with children, not to mention seasoned walkers, cyclists, and canoeists. Though there are no specific records, the Conservation Trust reports that a handful of guests champed more than once in the season.
The location of the champing churches might explain the appeal to these demographics. All of the current churches are in southeast England, no more than two or three hours from London, making them convenient for weekend getaways. All are located in small villages that have few tourist attractions, but are close to charming traditional English towns and areas of natural beauty.
One of the more popular destinations is in Fordwich, England’s self-proclaimed smallest town. Located along the Stour River, it was in the Middle Ages a port for boats making their way to Canterbury, two miles upriver. Though the town is little more than a bend in the road as you make your way south from the town of Sturry towards the eastern end of the Kent Downs, it played a small, if vital, role in both the protection of Britain from outside invaders and in the economic development of the towns upriver.
At the center of town sits the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. The original structure was built in the Norman era and was expanded in the 1200s. Legend has it that St. Augustine, the Benedictine monk who reintroduced Christianity to England in 600 A.D., is buried outside of the church’s north wall. Some evidence suggests that Shakespeare may have performed inside during his exile from London during the plague.
On one wall is listed the names of the church’s rectors beginning in 1283. Tomb markers on the floor date back to the 17th century. Historically the center of the town’s spiritual life, the church has been closed since 1995, but in 2015 it was resurrected as a spot for champing. Though the town offers little more than two pubs and an historic town hall, its location along the Stour River provides guests with easy access to hiking trails and canoeing note.
Proximity to nature is the primary draw of St Michael the Archangel Church in Booton, one of the top three most popular champing destinations in 2016. Located in the countryside along the Marriot’s way footpath, the location is ideal for hikers and cyclist looking for a secluded place to spend the night. The nearby Bure Valley Railway offers families the opportunity to ride a traditional steam engine train throughout the scenic countryside.
Though champing churches are open to the public during the day, guests have the entire church to themselves for the night, when they are free to explore every nook and corner. Local volunteers prepare the church for arriving guests, providing electric candles, light snacks, bottled water, and camping chairs, as well as sleeping bags and pillows for international guests who may not have been able to bring such bulky items.
As these provisions suggest, champing is a true camping experience, not a hotel; the churches are all unheated and have no running water, and all but two lack traditional toilets. Instead, churches are equipped with dry-separating toilets. According to the pre-arrival packet provided for guest, the toilet “does exactly what it sounds like...When using the loo, you must sit down, even the male of the species...When you sit down the mechanism works that opens the two containers below...it doesn’t whiff, honest.”
This jokey tone is typical of Churches Conservation Trust material. In contrast with the ancient beauty of the churches, the Trust’s correspondence is surprisingly chatty. ”It’s nearly Champ O’Clock,” guests are informed via email prior to arrival. In answer to whether champers need to be Christian, the website FAQ assures us that “that’s like saying that you need to be...a teenager to shriek at a One Direction concert (...ahem)!” Elsewhere, the FAQ informs guests that “the space had adapted to the requirements in the previous centuries and champing is just the latest chapter in this ongoing tradition of change.”
It remains to be seen whether champing will be enough to offset the expense required to upkeep these churches, though the modest growth seen between 2015 and 2016 was enough for the Trust to expand its offerings for the 2017 season. Starting in May, champers will have their choice of 12 new churches spread across all of England, not just the southeast. The Churches Conservation Trust will also look for ways to broaden its appeal by offering tiered pricing structure based on guests’ desired level of comfort, promoting the option for guests to visit more than one church per season, offering licensed merchandising, and improving the amount of local information on the local area for champers.
If recent trends continue, there will be no shortage of churches available for champing. In the past 15 years, the number of Britons identifying themselves as Christian has dropped from 75 percent to 25 percent, and only 1.4 percent of Britons attend weekly church services. The Church of England reports that nearly 20 additional churches are closed to worship each year.
Some of these churches are offered for sale to be turned into private residences or commercial spaces, but others will join the 350 non-operational churches currently overseen by the Trust. Champing is perhaps the last chance for preservation of some of these ancient churches, which were central to English life for so long.
At Walt Disney World, the weeks around Christmas are one of the most crowded times of the year: from all over the country and all over the world, families flock to Orlando to be in this special space for just a few days. Most Disney patrons would probably call their trip a vacation, but to anthropologists, religious studies experts, and art historians, a visit to Disney World looks a lot like another, older form of travel—a pilgrimage.
“Appetites for direct contact with Disney’s creations have transformed the trek to Disney World into a genuine form of pilgrimage,” writes historian Cheryl Krause Knight, author of Power and Paradise in Walt Disney’s World. In the modern world, a trip to Disney has become a rite of passage that transforms those who make the trek, and the design of the park heightens that experience: Disney World resembles a medieval pilgrimage center, designed to connect pilgrims with the supernatural, represented by Mickey Mouse and company.
In 1980, Alexander Moore, an anthropologist at University of Southern California, wrote one of the first critical analyses of Walt Disney’s theme parks. After visiting the park and observing its form and function, Moore concluded that the Disney World “borrowed—quite unconsciously—from the archaic pilgrimage center,” he wrote in Anthropological Quarterly.
In Moore’s description, a pilgrimage center is “a bounded place apart from ordinary settlement, drawing pilgrims from great distances as well as nearby.” (Sounds right so far.) Once pilgrims reach this set-apart space, they undergo transformational, transcendent experiences. After they leave, changed by their visit, they are reintegrated into society.
Pilgrims to Disney World do not have to spend months trekking to Orlando, but the approach to Disney sets the park apart from the space of normal life. To reach the Magic Kingdom requires a journey of many stages. Travelers must pass through private land, on highways owned by Disney, where all signs of the normal world are replaced by signs from Disney World. After parking, visitors make their way, perhaps by tram, across the vast expanse of asphalt to the ticket gates, where they gain entrance to the park. Even after that, though, their journey has one more step: they must take a special form of transportation, either ferry boat or monorail, to the entrance of the Magic Kingdom.
Inside, Disney mimics the sort of European park reserved for royalty. As Moore puts it: “The bounded circular form of the Magic Kingdom is no accident, for it, simplified and quintessential, is the form of the baroque capital, itself derived from a playground, the royal hunting park.” At the center, where in a European city the church would sit, is Cinderella’s castle, the spire of which ascends upwards, towards the heavens, like the church’s spire.
From that center, pathways lead outwards, like “a baroque sundial.” Those paths divide the park into quadrants with contrasting themes—republicanism vs. monarchism (Main Street and the Palace), the past vs. the future (Frontierland and Tomorrowland), and childhood vs. adolescence (Fantasyland and Adventureland).
By exploring these sections of the park, visitors can symbolically pass through time and enact different parts of the American ideal. “Traditional pilgrimage centers evoke the supernatural, or at least mythic-heroic past. Walt Disney World does both,” Moore wrote. When pilgrims enter individual rides, they travel along defined paths, exploring themes of journey, danger, or even, in the Haunted Mansion, death and rebirth. They never leave a ride from the same place they started—these are journeys of transformation. On each ride, the pilgrims must face some danger, which is defeated, as the architectural critic Charles Moore puts it, by “that curious Disney touch that so hams up and thereby emasculates evil.”
But how far can the comparison to a religious pilgrimage really go? The counterargument is that Disney is a commercial place, a brand extension of one of the most powerful companies in America, selling an experience that will lead people to buy more of its products. To the extent that it acts like a religious space, that aura is only a screen to mask its true purpose.
“If you think of how the sacred is treated in many religions, there’s a tendency to create a space that’s demarcated from profane space. Disneyland mimics that,” says Debra Parr, an associate professor of art and design history at Columbia College Chicago. “But what happens inside Disneyland is this microcosm of capitalism and all kinds of profane activities.”
In 1989, Parr, with her then-husband Chris Parr, undertook an analysis of Disneyland using the framework of cultural and religious studies, in particular the ideas of Jean Baudrillard, the French critical theorist, and of Mircea Eliade, a theorist of religion. Baudrillard was skeptical of Disneyland: he wrote that it was, essentially, a hollow copy of historical systems that let people create meaning in their lives.
But although the two young scholars cast a critical eye on the space, ultimately, Debra Parr says, they were moved by the power it had. Like Moore, they saw how it traded in older religious tropes. “Disneyland was created on an orange grove, out in the desert, as a walled garden,” says Chris Parr. “That’s our idea of paradise.” As in Disney World, in the middle of the park, a castle draws the eye up towards the sky. “The spire is the key thing that marks the sacred axis. As the altar has the cross on it, the spire goes up toward the heavens.”
There’s also the power of Disney’s symbolism. “Disney has come to dominate both the narrative world and the symbolic imagination of the western world’s children for over half a century now ,” says Chris Parr. “It’s the shared child world of toddlers and kids. When you go to Disneyland, you are given the opportunity to actually meet Mickey. He’s walking right along the street. Minnie’s right behind him. Main Street is always sparking.” In the sacred space of Disney, the fantastical is made real. Visitors can see and touch these unreal and magical symbols, just as a medieval pilgrim could see a relic, perhaps touch the reliquary that contained it. Commercialism aside, “You can’t avoid recognizing that’s mirroring the religious activity of pilgrimage,” say Parr.
Since the 1980s, both Disney parks and Disney scholarship have expanded. But though scholars have expanded on the symbolic power of Disney, the basic analysis remains the same, only stronger: Disney operates as pilgrimage site, creating sacred space where people can transcend the ordinary. Even as the number of parks has proliferated and a select group of people have dedicated themselves to visiting every one, Disney World remains the primary site of pilgrimage. “Disneyland and the foreign parks are satellite shrines,” writes Knight in Power and Paradise in Walt Disney’s World. “Disney World is the seat of power.” For a true believer, a journey to Disney World is the truest expression of devotion.
When you open the cover of a pop-up book, components of the story spring to life. While they may often be associated with children's books about monsters and fairy tales, artist and photographer Colette Fu uses the moveable, three-dimensional elements of pop-up books to capture the life and culture of forgotten minority tribes in China.
"My pop-ups are a way for me to speak and inform," Fu writes on her website. "Constructing pop-ups allows me to combine intuitive design and technical acuity with my love of traveling as I try to understand the world around me."
Since 2008, Fu, whose mother is a member of the black Yi tribe, has ventured throughout China photographing the unique culture, food, folktales, and lifestyle of minority tribes. The Philadelphia-based artist returns to her studio where she edits and prints photos, and cuts and folds them into one-of-a-kind single-spread, pop-up books. She uses up to 20 photos to create one scene.
In the animated video above from her pop-up book series titled "We are Tiger Dragon People," you can watch colorful scenes unfold of minority tribes in the Yunnan Province, China's most southwestern Province. At the 12-second mark you can see an enticing spread of food cooked by the Dai people, and the Wa people in the midst of their Hair Swinging dance at the 29-second mark. Some of the covers of the books have a motif that symbolizes the photograph and the story inside.
Below is a close-up view of Fu's 8 1 Village pop-up book. She explains that the unmarried Yao women of 8 1 village wear black turbans, while the married women wear red conical-shaped hats. In earlier times, the leader of the group would wear a red plantain flower on the top of their head.
While learning more about her Yi ancestry in her mid-twenties, Fu got the idea to craft a pop-up art series inspired by the minority cultures of Yunnan Province. The region, dotted with snow-capped mountains in the northwest and tropical rainforests in the south, is home to 25 of the 55 minority tribes in China. These tribes make up only 8.5 percent of the nation's population, Fu explains.
Currently, Fu is expanding her collapsible book series to feature more ethnic minority groups, traveling to other regions including Shanghai, Mongolia, and Hunan Province.
"While I am directly unable to help these groups preserve their identity and ways of living, I can use my skills as an artist to spread knowledge and provide just a brief portrait of their existence," Fu writes.
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.
