In September 1885, a bunch of librarians spent four days holed up in scenic Lake George, just over 200 miles north of New York City. In the presence of such library-world luminaries as Melvil Dewey—the well-organized chap whose Dewey Decimal System keeps shelves orderly to this day—they discussed a range of issues, from the significance of the term “bookworm” to the question of whether libraries ought to have a separate reference-room for ladies.
They then turned their attention to another crucial issue: handwriting. As libraries acquired more books, card catalogs needed to expand fast in order to keep track of them. Though the newly invented typewriter was beginning to take hold, it took time and effort to teach the art of “machine writing.” Librarians still had to handwrite their catalog cards. And this was causing problems.
“The trouble in handwriting,” said Mr. James Whitney, of the Boston Public Library, “is that there is apt to be too much flourishing.”
Professor Louis Pollens of Dartmouth College agreed: “We want a handwriting that approaches as near to type as possible, that will do away with individual characteristics.”
A Mr. C. Alex Nelson, of the Astor Library in New York, then mentioned that “T.A. Edison, the inventor” had lately been experimenting with penmanship styles in order to find the most speedy and legible type of handwriting for telegraph operators. Edison, Nelson recalled, had ultimately selected “a slight back-hand, with regular round letters apart from each other, and not shaded.” With this style, Edison was able to write at a respectable 45 words per minute.
Hearing this, Dewey set out a catalog-minded mission for the group: “We ought to find out what is the most legible handwriting.”
This was the beginning of “library hand,” a penmanship style developed over the ensuing year or so for the purpose of keeping catalogs standardized and legible.
Influenced by Edison and honed via experimenting on patient, hand-sore librarians, library hand focused on uniformity rather than beauty. "The handwriting of the old-fashioned writing master is quite as illegible as that of the most illiterate boor," read a New York State Library School handbook. “Take great pains to have all writing uniform in size, blackness of lines, slant, spacing and forms of letters,” wrote Dewey in 1887. And if librarians thought they could get away with just any black ink, they could think again real fast. "Inks called black vary much in color," scoffed the New York State Library School handwriting guide.
Dewey and his crew of “a dozen catalogers and librarians” spent, in his estimation, “an hour daily for nearly an entire week” hashing out the rules of library hand. They started by examining hundreds of card catalogs, looking for penmanship problems and coming up with ways to solve them. They concluded that the “simpler and fewer the lines the better," and decided that, while a slant was best avoided, a slight backward slant was acceptable. Then they got to the more nitty-gritty stuff, such as whether to opt for a "square-topped 3" or a "rounded-top 3." (The rounded-top 3 won out, as it is less likely to be mistaken for a 5 during hasty reading.)
Since the aim was legibility, not haste, library hand wasn't so speedy to execute—but the pace depended on the scribe. Dewey conducted a test in which four cataloguers wrote the Lord’s Prayer in both “catalog hand” and their standard note-taking hand. One cataloguer took three-and-a-half minutes in note-taking hand and almost 12 minutes in catalog hand. But another took three-and-a-half minutes in note-taking hand and four-and-a-half minutes in catalog hand. And the time saved among librarians who had previously mistaken 3s for 5s was priceless.
Now that card catalogs have been replaced by electronic indexing, library hand is a rare sight—unless you know where to look. After the New York Public Library removed its physical card catalog in 1971, every card was photographed and composited onto the pages of an 800-volume set of black books. These books, collectively known as the Dictionary Catalog of the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library, 1911-1972, can be found on public shelves in the main branch of the NYPL, as well as in over 65 libraries around the world. Though most of the cards are typed, you'll find many examples of library hand in these black books. Below is a selection.
Drugs are important to different kinds of people. For the police, they can be an opportunity to make an arrest. For dealers, they are an opportunity to get paid. For users, they are an opportunity to ... well, you get the idea.
Many drugs are also illegal of course, including, in many places, the popular drug marijuana. The demand for that drug, though, also creates a massive market, frequently forcing dealers to resort to creative measures to get their product into the hands of users.
And so it happened last Friday that agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, patrolling near Douglas, Arizona, came upon a group of people in the desert, who, after spotting the agents, quickly fled. Upon closer inspection, the agents discovered the device you see above: a catapult, attached to the south side of a U.S.-Mexico border fence. Nearby, the agents also found 47 pounds worth of marijuana.
The catapult as a drug delivery device has been tried before, the primary benefit—as opposed to say, simply tossing the drugs over the fence—apparently being that a catapult would allow for more drugs to be flung over the wall.
According to C.B.P., Mexican authorities took and dismantled the catapult, while American authorities kept the marijuana, each seizing the items that were found on their side of the fence. Despite its high-flying adventure, the authorities did not say whether the marijuana would be used to get anyone high.
Since last week's release of the new Michelin Guide France, people have been flocking to the Bouche à Oreille, on Route de la Chapelle in the small town of Bourges. Michelin gave the restaurant—a roadside diner specializing in inexpensive French staples, like €13 beef bourguignon—one of its coveted stars, a sign of quality and sophistication.
The problem? They've got the wrong Bouche à Oreille.
As The Local explains, the famed guide, published last week, meant to list a different restaurant, also named Bouche à Oreille. That one is on the Rue de la Chapelle in the South of France, and serves more rarified stuff—lobster tarts, veal sweetbreads, things like that. Michelin plans to correct the mistake.
In the meantime, the diner's owner, Veronique Jacquet, is tickled, but also a bit nervous. Her regulars are local workers, and she doesn't want them to get pushed out by the sudden influx of would-be tastemakers. "I'm starting to get snowed under," she told The Local. "We don't have a big area and we only have four hands." Sounds like the makings of a new culinary movement.
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.
One of the baseline geological facts of the world is that there are, in our current age, seven continents—North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, and Antarctica. But a new paper published in GSA Today, the journal of the Geological Society of America, argues that list is incomplete. The paper’s authors suggest the existence of an eighth continent, Zealandia.
Zealandia, they report, extends 1.9 million square miles and is 94 percent underwater. The land that peaks above the ocean surface is primarily the two islands of New Zealand and the island of New Caledonia. But this land mass is elevated relative to other parts of the ocean floors and is isolated from Australia.
You might think that a continent is defined by its huge mass of land, and previous to this New Zealand was considered part of "Oceania," a catchall for the non-continental parts of the world. But there are particular features that define continents, which don't necessarily include large amounts of land above the current level of the oceans.
"The identification of Zealandia as a geological continent, rather than a collection of continental islands, fragments, and slices, more correctly represents the geology of this part of Earth," the researchers write.
The idea of Zealandia has been around for at least two decades, but this is the first peer-reviewed paper to make the case for it. For New Zealand geologists, the idea is "nothing new," The Guardian reports. Australia seems remarkably sanguine about the separation, especially considering that, as The Sydney Morning Herald reports, "Zealandia also includes parts of Australian territory, Lord Howe and Norfolk islands." Perhaps this will finally explain the great Australia-New Zealand rivalry—they're not just two English-speaking countries lumped together one corner of the world; they're two English-speaking countries on totally different continents.
Update: An employee of American Disposal Services wrote Atlas Obscura to say that the raccoon reached safety. "As soon as we knew he was hitchin' a ride, the driver pulled over and made sure he was okay while we waited for Animal Control," the employee, a training coordinator at the company, said. Long live garbage truck raccoon. Our original post is below.
This morning, Helena B. Evich, a reporter at Politico, spotted a raccoon. But not just any raccoon: one that appeared to be hanging on for dear life on the back of a garbage truck.
This raccoon is having a rough morning-just wanted some trash & ended up in Rosslyn!
That's a raccoon who surely didn't think it'd end up in this situation.
Evich later tweeted that she'd contacted the garbage company, who, she said, was "super responsive" and had the truck's number.
The raccoon itself seemed to have a good grip, later crawling farther up the truck after Evich took the photo.
It's unclear what ultimately happened to garbage truck raccoon, as Evich eventually lost track of the animal, agreeing with one Twitter user that she hopes garbage truck raccoon is all right.
As do we. Stay safe out there, garbage truck raccoon.
Ever wonder how pilots manage to stay on course without road signs or anything? Well, sometimes they don’t. And just like regular, land-locked drivers, sometimes they have to stop and ask for directions.
As seen in a YouTube video shared by The Aviationist, a fully-loaded Kazakhstani helicopter recently plopped itself down on in the middle of a snowy Kazakhstan highway, so that they could get out and ask a passing truck driver for directions. In the video, one of the passengers can be seen exiting the helicopter and running over to the parked truck, like he’s just making a neighborly request. After gesticulating wildly over the right directions with the driver, the military passenger gets back in to the chopper and they fly off.
According to The Aviationist, the Kazakhstan Ministry of Defense said that the surprise landing was part of a training exercise to teach their helicopter crews to find their way if they get lost in a storm, or their equipment becomes unreliable. Among the suggested techniques was “human survey.” So, just asking for directions.
My hunt for hearts began, as I'm sure at least a few other meals have, with a still of Daenerys Targaryen tearing into a raw stallion's heart. I had been thinking about hearts, and I kept coming back to the idea of eating one, which is no casual meal. Hearts are food for hunters. They convey power, and eating one promises to transform a person by bestowing the qualities of the dead animal. Looking at Daenerys, knowing she was fictional, I still wondered, what would it be like to eat a horse's heart? Could I do it?
Practically, of course, no, I could not. In the United States, horses aren't considered food for people, except in extreme situations. But I started to wonder what other hearts might be available to me. I had never considered heart as an appealing food before, but after a few quick minutes of research, I had a list of hearts that people did eat—beef hearts, duck hearts, lamb hearts, pigeon hearts, chicken hearts—and I was sure there must be more.
In most places in the world, I imagine it might be difficult and probably impossible to obtain a heart to eat. I live in New York City. The question flashed into my mind: How many different hearts could I try? How many different hearts could I buy in one day?
It was a challenge to myself and to my city. I've lived here for more than seven years, not long by some standards, but longer than I've lived almost anywhere else. New York and I have settled into a comfortable relationship, a Sunday kind of love, of familiar tiffs, pleasant routines, and favorite pastimes. But if I were to search for hearts, I would have to open myself up to the city's possibilities and explore again. I had some ideas about where I might start on this heart hunt, but I didn't know where it might take me.
New York is full of speciality shops that somehow make a business of selling obscure items and foodstuffs, and I imagined that to find a heart at all, I would have to visit a hipster butcher or a meat market in a more diverse neighborhood. But I was wrong. The first hearts I found were at the Stop & Shop in Atlantic Center, right by a Target and a Best Buy.
The morning of the heart hunt, I began by looking at the supermarkets on my way to work. I live in a wealthy neighborhood in Brooklyn, where grocers are stocked with ingredients for both adventurous cooks and a wide array of ethnic cuisines; it seemed unlikely but possible that I might find what I was looking for there. I first tried the supermarket around the corner from my apartment, where I found a surprising variety of animal parts—lard, neck bones, shin bones, cow feet, sliced liver, tripe, chicken gizzards, oxtails, chicken feet, pig feet, smoked hocks, pork skin, and a lot of imitation crab meat. No hearts, though.
A few blocks down, at Key Foods, there was still more variety of parts: slab bacon, fat back, smoked turkey tails and necks, pigs' tails, both white and black pudding, lamb necks, marrow bones, rendered duck fat, ground buffalo meat... and still no hearts.
When I got to Stop & Shop, I wasn't expecting to find anything: their meat selection was more basic than the other two markets'. But there with the chicken, instead of just gizzards, was a styrofoam package of gizzard mixed with hearts. Hearts! I picked them up and paid $2 for my first hearts of the day.
Perhaps, I thought, this would be easier than I expected. Preparing for the hunt, I had started to worry that New York might let me down. The first couple of butchers I called said that they sometimes had heart meat available, but there could be no guarantee that they would have it on any particular day. "Sometimes our beef has a heart and sometimes it doesn’t," one butcher told me. I was nervous enough that I would end the day with no hearts at all that I ended up ordering a beef heart in advance. It's always good to have a heart on layaway, a backup to rely on at the end of the day, when all other options have been exhausted.
So I knew I would end the day with one type of heart, at least, and now I had two.
The next heart, though, was harder to come by. After lunch, I set out from my office and visited the Polish meat markets in the Brooklyn neighborhood where I work. I had always intended to peek inside these places, but at the end of the day my body would always switch to the automatic routine where it rushed home or off to meet friends. When I walked inside the first one, I guessed immediately I would not find what I was looking for. I was met with the toothsome smell of smoked meat and cases of well-crafted sausages, in all shapes and sizes. There was fresh meat, too, but a limited selected. Still, I asked. They did not sell heart. Neither did the shop across the street. I had to go further.
Brooklyn's been blessed in the past decade with ambitious butcher shops that treat meat like a treasure, promising ethically raised, tasty cuts, for a price. The popular enthusiasm for off-cuts might have crested a few years back, but I still thought I would try my luck at Marlow and Daughters, which buys whole animals from small farms. They didn't disappoint. They had beef heart, and I kicked myself for my lack of faith in New York City serendipity. They usually had chicken hearts, too, but they had sold their last tub of guts, they said. Only one of the farms that sold them pork sent the heart along, and it wasn't the one that had delivered this week. After an hour's search, I was heartless. I headed to Chinatown.
Of New York's three main Chinatowns, the one in Manhattan is the most tourist-oriented. But it was closest, and I held out hope that I could still find what I was looking for. A few blocks from Canal Street, I walked into the Bayard Street Meat Market, and my own heart grew hopeful. The meat cases were stocked with every random cut of meat I has seen earlier in the day, plus more. There were whole blocks of black blood; there were chickens, including black-skinned Silkie chickens, on ice with their feet and head still attached; in the freezer, there were testicles from more than one kind of animal. But as many times as I walked up and down the shop, I didn't see a heart. When I asked, they had only bad news: no hearts were available that day.
The next shop I went to was on Catherine Street, on the other side of the Bowery, past the spot where I had waited with my college boyfriend for a Chinatown bus to go... I couldn't remember where now, no matter how much I tried. This small area of Manhattan, squished behind the Police Department and between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, feels a little cut off from the rest of the city, and I could remember coming here only once before, to find a book that only the library branch located here had in. When I found the meat shop, I was optimistic. While the one I had just visited had signs in Chinese and English, this sign's shops were entirely in Chinese.
When I asked for a heart, the man behind the counter said, "Pork heart?" and nodded yes. He showed me a tray full of little red coins of meat, and I was surprised—they were so small! Was that what pork heart looked like? When he asked me how many I wanted, I hesitated. "Five?"
"Five pounds or five pieces?" he asked.
"Five pieces?" I was unsure, and he looked surprised. He went into the back, came back carrying a bucket, and it was only then that I noticed at the back of the tray three large hearts—hearts, clearly hearts—and realized I had made a mistake. I only wanted one, I told him, and he laughed, because five hearts! That was a lot of heart to order. He weighed one for me, and handed it over. It cost $3.
Carrying that heart, I felt for the first time the weird weight of the mission I had started on. A pig's heart looks almost exactly like a human heart, and I started wondering whether I had ever seen one before. I knew the heart when I saw it; I knew exactly what it was supposed to look like. But where would I have encountered a heart? In photos, only. Was this the first heart I had ever seen in real life? Later, I realized that I must have seen a human heart preserved in a jar, most likely at the Mütter Museum. Still, this was the first time I had held a mammal's heart, a heart like my own, in my hand.
From there, the hearts came more easily. I went to Greenmarket at Union Square, where I bought the last package of lambs' hearts (it came with two) from Shannon Brook Farm. At the duck stand, I found duck hearts, only they were freeze-dried as dog treats, not meant for people. Another stall sometimes sold goat heart, but it was the end of the season, so they were out. They could offer me a veal heart, though, which I balked at when I saw it was 1.86 pounds. (When I had ordered the beef heart, the butcher had told me it would be 2 to 3 pounds, but if the veal heart was so heavy, how much larger might the beef heart be?)
It was around this time, chicken, pork, and lamb hearts already acquired, that I started worrying that I wouldn't get enough hearts. Had I bought enough chicken hearts in the morning? Would I be able to find more than four kinds? Suddenly four hearts didn't seem like enough, and I started hoping for a goat heart. I had just enough time before I needed to be back at the office to visit the meat-packing district, where at a meat market on 9th Avenue, I bought a whole package of chicken hearts only. Dozens and dozens of them. Too many chicken hearts.
My last stop was Esposito Meat Market, which has been in business since 1932 and seemed like the sort of business that's hard to find in New York now. While I was waiting to be served, a customer walked in, and the butcher greeted her by name—"Hi, Audrey." A few minutes later, another regular came, and told the man behind the counter, "Give me the breast this week, Mitch," as she pointed to the chicken. When it was my turn, I found that I could have come straight here, if all I wanted was heart. What kind of heart did I want? They had pork heart, beef, sheep…
"Goat?" I asked. They sold me a goat heart, a small, frozen handful of flesh. I put it into the bag with my other hearts, which had started to feel a little bit creepy. As I rode the subway, I wondered what other people would think if they knew that I was carrying around a collection of animal hearts. The pork heart, the sheep heart, and the goat heart all looked like different-sized versions of the exact same organ, small, medium, and large. What kind of creep carried around four hearts? Even then, before I was faced with the problem of eating them, I started feeling queasy about the meat I had chosen. Most meat is easy enough to distance from living animals, but a heart is proof of death: in Snow White, the Queen asks the hunter to bring back the maiden's heart. Carrying these hearts, I had to face more directly the fact that these animals had died, and I would eat part of them.
Later that evening, when I picked up the beef heart I had ordered from the Meat Hook, another small, hip butcher shop, it only added to the weight I was carrying: it was a whopping three-and-a-half pounds.
I had fulfilled the task I had set for myself. New York had lived up to my expectations, even dazzled and charmed me. I remembered again why I love this city, and I had acquired many hearts, almost certainly too many hearts. What was I going to do with them all?
Eating heart meat is uncanny because, I think, the experience is both similar and distinct to the experience of eating more common cuts of meat. People kept pointing out that, after all, it's just a muscle, and though I started out from that place, I came to feel it wasn't accurate. I started pulling out knowledge lodged in my brain from high school biology and talking about the distinction between skeletal muscle, which we eat most often, the smooth muscle of the esophagus and stomach, and cardiac muscle, which isn't quite like either of the others. Like the smooth muscles of the body, the heart works involuntarily, without direction, but it looks a bit like skeletal muscle, strong and striated. But heart cells are organized differently, which means that the muscle's texture—the meat's texture—is different. There was a gap between eating other meat and eating heart meat, and it required a bit of bravery to cross. (Is that what they mean when they say "take heart"?)
I went looking for heart recipes, and despite the fad of nose-to-tail butchering, the internet wasn't much help, although I did learn that a small number of people have a passion for fresh venison heart, grilled or corned. Still, most of the recipes I found came from paleo diet blogs and basically advocated for a quick sear. The cookbooks I had at home were of no help at all. For this, I needed experts.
"With all animal hearts you have two choices—cook it fast and rare or long and slow," says Jennifer McLagan, a Toronto-based chef whose cookbook Odd Bits covers all manner of offal. "Anywhere in the middle is awful." This, I learned quickly, was the main piece of advice for preparing heart. One of the most popular preparations for beef heart, for instance, is Peruvian anticuchos, where the meat is marinated with peppers and lime, then skewered and quickly grilled. The other options is to braise the meat, either whole or sliced: heart is stewed with various vegetables and spices everywhere from Portugal to the Philippines.
Anissa Helou, a London-based chef and author of Offal, prefers the fast-and-hot preparations.
"The treatment would change according to the heart," she says. "If it is from a medium to a big animal, sliced thinly and grilled very quickly on a griddle would be perfect, and if they are from a small animal such as chickens or ducks, grilled quickly on skewers would be great. You can also stew them but they won’t be so good."
McLagan also had a recommendation for one preparation in particular. "Heart tartare is amazing," she said.
I tried the beef heart first. When I first unwrapped it, perhaps because it was so fresh, it smelled stronger than any other piece of meat I'd ever had—not bad, but a sharp tang of metal and blood. I seared a piece of it like I would a steak. After it rested, I sliced it thinly and took a bite. It did taste like steak, but also not—the texture was mushier, more like baby food, and the taste stronger, more like meat boiled down to its umami essence. It wasn't unfamiliar, though I couldn't quite place where I had tasted it before. Later, I would read that commercial ground beef could contain a certain percentage of beef heart meat, and I placed the taste: the thin patties of fast-food burgers.
The chicken hearts were next, marinated with lemon juice and garlic and skewered on rosemary, a recommendation I'd picked up at Marlow and Daughters. They looked like little grey nuggets of meat, and when I tasted the first one, I was surprised how much I liked it. While the beef heart had tasted like bizarro steak, the chicken didn't taste like anything else I'd tried. It didn't taste like chicken; it was meatier and smoother. I had a few more.
In McLagan's book, she offers suggested substitutions for each of her recipes, and it seemed like many of the hearts were interchangeable. The "Peruvian heart kabobs" could be made with beef heart, lamb heart, or poultry hearts; the beef heart in the heart salad could be subbed for lamb heart or pork heart. When I asked her how I should choose what to do with my many hearts, she told me to consider that "it really is just like any other piece of meat." The beef would taste like beef, the pork like pork, the lamb like lamb. Treat it accordingly.
I wanted to braise at least one of the hearts, so I replicated a pork stew I had made when I was trying out a medieval diet. I sliced and grilled pieces of goat heart plain. I marinated more beef heart to make the Peruvian anticuchos; I saved some of the beef heart—there was so much of it!—and the lamb heart for the tartare.
None of it was impossible to eat. Each time I started working with a heart, I noticed that my fear of it slipped away when I sliced it into pieces and it looked like more familiar meat. Each time I went to eat it, though, the fear returned a little bit. It did taste like any other piece of meat, except that it didn't. Something was always a little different. The texture was both softer and chewier; the aftertaste more metallic. I enjoyed the goat heart, which I thought tasted milder than other goat I'd had, and the beef anticuchos were different enough from any other beef kabobs I'd had that they tasted like a new treat. The pork heart from the stew did not taste bad; it had a mild porkiness to it and a stronger, liver-like flavor.
I tried the tartares last. The beef was darker than the pinkish lamb, and I mixed them both with the salty and sharp condiments of tartare, minced shallots and capers, a dash of dijon mustard, and umami worchestire sauce. I put a bit on a cracker and tried it. The meat melted away, soft and pleasant and rich. Of all the ways I had prepared the hearts, this was the first one where I thought: I could keep eating this. In that moment, it felt like the hunt had been worth it. I had learned to love something new.
Where to buy heart in New York City
Stop & Shop 625 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn, Marlow & Daughters 95 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY Catherine Meat Market 21 Catherine St., New York, NY Shannon Brook Farm Union Square Greenmarket Big Apple Meat Market 529 9th Ave., New York, NY Esposito Meat Market 500 9th Ave., New York, NY The Meat Hook 397 Graham Ave, Brooklyn, NY
Blood-red water is a bad sign, reminiscent of horror films and shark attacks. When the citizens of Fort Myers, Florida saw that the creek near the high school was running crimson, they feared the worst.
In this case, though, it just meant someone dyed. According to NBC2, nearby Lee Memorial Hospital hired a contractor, NALCO Water Treatment Company, to test for leaks in their cooling towers, which they did by tinting the water red. "In the process, gallons of the dye were dumped into the drain pipe, making its way into the creek," they write.
This is, of course, also bad. Although the hospital insists the dye is 99% water, residents are not pleased. "They should be a little more cautious," Cynthia DeJesus told NBC2.
The drain pipe has since been plugged, and the hospital and contractor are working together to clean the creek. No word on whether this orange alligator is heading down to help.
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.
On February 18, 1930—87 years ago this week—Clyde Tombaugh, a telescope operator at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, was flipping through photo plates when he spotted what he had been seeking for months. Tombaugh, just 24 years-old at the time, had been given the tedious job of searching for a new planet: Every night, he would take long-exposure images of the night sky, and every day, he would compare photos taken a few nights apart.
Among the tens of thousands of pinpricks of light in the images he was examining, most stayed in the same position from one day to the next, giving away their status as stationary stars. But one tiny dot was moving, progressing along its orbit, blithely unaware of the young astronomer who was about to find it out. "It electrified me," Tombaugh later remembered. "When I saw that, I knew instantly that was it."
Tombaugh had been searching for the fabled Planet X, which orbital math suggested was several times heavier than Earth. This, instead, was Pluto, a heavenly body so tiny, it's not even technically a planet. It was so much smaller than expected that Tombaugh passed it over entirely on his first few sweeps of the sky. He might have missed it for good if it weren't for one thing: its shiny heart.
Pluto's heart—also known as the Tombaugh Regio, after the man who first spotted it—is a wide, smooth swath that covers about 990 miles of the dwarf planet's surface. We Earthlings first saw it clearly in July of 2015, when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft beamed back a set of up-close Pluto portraits. As interplanetary messaging, this was nearly as romantic as Saturn's rings. "Pluto has sent a 'love note' back to Earth," NASA reported. Memes proliferated, showing the planet holding its heart out to Earth, begging for acceptance back into the planetary ranks.
But the heart meant even more to astronomers and geologists—it was proof that Pluto was, in a sense, "alive." "In your worst nightmare, you’d have convinced NASA to go all the way to the end of the solar system and you’d have a cratered ball," New Horizons team member Bill McKinnon told New Scientist in 2015. Although Pluto has its share of pockmarked, dead-looking surface area, the Tombaugh Regio is anything but.
Its western lobe, called the Sputnik Planitia, is a massive basin covered in nitrogen ice—a dense, volatile material that, at Pluto's temperature of 40 degrees Kelvin, is prone to forming slowly shifting glaciers. These glacial plains are strewn with strangely shaped columns, which might indicate a cycle of nitrogen snowfall. Two large, scoop-topped cones just off the southern tip of the heart may even be ice volcanoes.
Overall, the region's lack of craters indicates that it smoothed itself over sometime within the last 10 million years, a brief tick in solar-system time. New research suggests that we'll be able to see the glaciers flowing out and retracting over the next few decades—it will look, one scientist said, like a heartbeat.
Astronomers continue to investigate just what makes Pluto's heart tick. Some, though, are also taking it as a prod to venture even farther afield. The Kuiper belt—the huge scattering of ice chunks and space detritus where Pluto lives—is home to at least three more dwarf planets, called Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. Previous wisdom held that they were just too frozen to be dynamic, but the findings about Pluto's heart—cold, but still beating—are overturning this assumption. "There's no reason that many of the others, maybe all of the others, shouldn't do the same," New Horizons team leader Alan Stern told New Scientist.
Eighty years ago, Pluto's shiny heart beckoned us out to the edges of the solar system. Now, closer examination of it might inspire us to look even farther.
Heart transplant patient John Bell knows the exact whereabouts of the heart he was born with. It’s floating in a three-gallon jug of formaldehyde next to hundreds of other human hearts at a large storage facility at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. Every time he returns to the hospital, the 74-year-old retired sales and marketing professional contemplates whether or not he should pop in to give his old heart a visit.
Because at Baylor University Medical Center, Bell can do something very few people will ever be able to experience: hold his own heart in his hands.
“It was fairly emotional, that first encounter,” Bell, who lives in Fort Worth, recalls. “I can’t actually explain why. I was just almost overcome with emotion when I was able to hold it.”
Bell is one of over 70 heart transplant patients who have had the rare opportunity to see and hold their old hearts through Baylor’s “Heart-to-Heart” program. Most medical institutions properly dispose of surgically removed organs and body parts after running pathological examinations in the lab. But at Baylor, the medical center has the space and resources to keep the hearts from its transplant patients and autopsies. In 2014, Dr. William C. Roberts, a cardiac pathologist and executive director of the Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute, started allowing patients to reunite with their former hearts. Through the program, he educates people about various causes of heart failure.
It’s understandable why some heart transplant survivors have sought out their former hearts. In 2013, a photo went viral of a woman who holding her heart after receiving a transplant. In September 2016, a 45-year-old computer analyst from Berkhamsted, England, saw his organ, which was being studied at Royal Brompton hospital. But these one-off instances were relatively unheard of.
“In general, as we remove organs, we pass it to the scrub nurse. The scrub nurse will then, with the aid of the circulating nurse, place the organ in a transport container to be taken to the pathology lab where it will be analyzed and processed,” as Allen Kamrava, a colon and rectal surgeon at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, told the online magazine Hopes and Fears. “Patient[s] often times ask if they can have the organ, and my response is that I as a matter of policy always send everything through the pathology lab.”
After organs, limbs, or tissues are analyzed, they're usually disposed (unless there are special circumstances). According to Roberts, there may be institutions that keep some autopsy specimens and hearts of transplant patients, but it’s difficult to financially and physically support large, long-term storage.
“I could tell you that probably 99.5 percent of hospitals throw the hearts away after they describe them and send out a report,” says Roberts. “We keep them all.”
Since joining the staff at Baylor in 1993, Roberts has been preserving and saving hearts indefinitely for study. The bank of hearts has allowed the medical staff to conduct second pathological examinations, compare the progress of different diseases among various individual organs, and pursue longitudinal studies. In 2016, Roberts and his colleagues published a paper that detailed observations between hearts of transplant patients from 1997 to 2015.
The Heart-to-Heart program began in January 2014 after word passed around the center that Roberts was informally showing patients their former hearts. John Bell was among the first group of patients to have the experience. Bell had suffered 25 years of heart problems, beginning with triple bypass surgery at the age of 50. Then in March 2014, he underwent transplantation due to congestive heart failure, a condition where the heart is unable to sufficiently circulate oxygenated blood throughout the body. While he was recovering, he asked if he could view the video of the operation, but was even more thrilled to find out he could see his old organ in person.
Carefully holding the slices together in his hands, he stood with his heart in front of his chest at approximately the same place where it had previously lived just 12 days prior.
“It was quite a bit larger than I had imagined,” Bell says. “The visual impression that I had of it at first was that it looked like a piece of roast beef laying on a platter.”
Bell was expecting something more akin to a bright red, typical heart-shape you’d see in a Valentine card, he says. Instead, the flesh was a pale gray. The whole organ was dissected and covered in yellow adipose tissue, or fat.
“Many of the patients are overweight, and I show them the fat on the heart,” says Roberts. “Some people have so much fat on their hearts that they float in a container of water.”
Roberts also holds a consultation with the patient to show specific features and conditions (no two hearts are alike, he says). For Bell, he was shown the original vein and artery grafts from the bypass surgery he had in 1993, and how two were carrying the load of a third that had not worked properly from the start. His family members also got to see his heart, and the experience had an even more dramatic impact on his son, influencing him to make healthier lifestyle choices.
There are an estimated 6 million Americans living heart failure, but only about 2,200 receive hearts in a year in the United States, according to Roberts.
“I try to stress to these people that they are very special and very lucky. They are one of the few that get a heart and can start life over again," he says. To Roberts' knowledge, there is no other program like Heart-to-Heart that allows patients to intimately view and hold the organ.
Bell recommends that heart transplant survivors view their native hearts if they get the chance. Whether graying in formaldehyde or sliced for observation, holding such a critical organ can be a meaningful and surreal experience. For Bell, it gave him perspective on how he should treat his body and his heart. He now exercises as much as his age can allow and maintains an almost vegan diet. Holding his heart also gave him much-needed closure on the organ that had caused him so much trouble.
“It had caused so much pain and misery,” he says. “I guess I just wanted to get a last look at it and say, ‘Hey, I won.’”
In Naica, Mexico, there’s a fantastic cave filled with giant crystals. First discovered by miners looking for silver and other valuable minerals, the cave is hot, anywhere for 104 to 140ºF, and it is crisscrossed with ancient crystals of gypsum, which can grow as long as 50 feet. It’s been called “both Fairyland and hell,” the Associated Press says. "It is tear-inducingly beautiful down there,” Penelope Boston, the director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, told reporters. ”I wrote several poems about it actually."
Boston, who NASA describes as “a leading astrobiologist and science explorer,” was down in the cave trying to find life. As she announced at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, NASA astrobiologists were able to extract and reanimate microbes from inside the cave’s crystals. The microbes may have been living there for anywhere between 10,000 and 50,000 years.
They are a form of “super life,” Boston told reporters. They survive on iron and manganese were first extracted from the crystals in 2008 and 2009, with sterilized drill bits. In order to work in the caves, scientists have to wear special suits to keep their bodies from overheating. Back in the lab, Boston said, researchers were able to reanimate the microbes.
This is a controversial claim: can any life form really survive isolated and in the dark for so long? But Boston and her team believe that these microbes are not the result of contamination, in part because they’re so different from any microbes that had been discovered before. The purpose of this research is to help scientists understand the extreme conditions under which life can thrive and to imagine where we might one day find life somewhere else out in the universe.
On Sunday, an antique red rotary telephone sold at auction for $243,000, according to the BBC. The reason for that lofty price tag? It was used by Adolf Hitler.
Auctioned off by the Maryland-based Alexander Historical Auctions, the phone had spent the decades since the end of World War II in a box in an English estate. Originally, the phone had sat next to Hitler’s bed in his famous bunker, and according to the auction house, was used by the dictator throughout the final two years of the war to dictate orders to the Nazi forces. At the end of the war, Soviet soldiers liberated the phone from the bunker, and gifted it to a British officer, Ralph Raynor, who kept it in the family until the present day.
The phone was finally put up for auction by Raynor’s son, Ranulf, who told CNN that he was happy to have it gone, saying, “It's a fairly sinister bit of kit and I've always lived in fear of someone trying to steal it. I've also been told it'll bring me bad luck."
A utilitarian phone that was originally a flat black, for Hitler’s use it was painted red, and engraved with his name beneath the eagle-and-swastika crest of the Reich. The winning buyer, who purchased the artifact over the phone, has not been revealed.
“In Havana, where every vice was permissible, and every trade possible, lay the true background for my comedy.” — Graham Greene, Ways of Escape, 1980.
Ending up being detained in a rough, remote Cuban prison wasn’t really supposed to be part of the plan. My original idea was this: To explore Cuba, a nation suddenly on the brink of reconciliation with the United States, using the English author Graham Greene’s iconic 1958 spy novel Our Man in Havana as a travel guide. I’d track down the same locations, hotels, and bars he visited for inspiration, and hopefully gain some insight into the extent of Cuba’s inevitable transformation. True, about two-thirds of the way through the book, Greene’s protagonist does find himself apprehended by the Cuban police, but the story I had in mind was less windowless, concrete interrogation rooms and more sipping daiquiris in the Floridita bar.
A week before my encounter with la policia, I’d arrived at the José Martí airport on one of the first scheduled passenger flights from New York to Havana in more than 50 years, with a dogeared copy of Our Man in Havana. The comic novel tells the story of an English vacuum salesman posted to Cuba, who is reluctantly recruited as a spy by the British Secret Service, MI6. A hapless divorcee, James Wormold takes on the job mostly to secure his wayward, beautiful, and headstrong daughter’s financial future. Inventing a staff of agents and informants from the phone book and newspaper articles, Wormold begins to file creative intelligence reports and dreams up high-tech military installations based on vacuum-cleaner parts; all of which are hoovered up, as it were, by British intelligence.
Greene himself didn’t necessarily set out to capture Cuba on the precipice of upheaval. He visited the country in the 1950s, and “enjoyed the louche atmosphere of Batista’s city,” when Havana was dominated by the American mafia, and rife with brothels, casinos, and saloons. At the same time, he became more intimately familiar with the realities of Batista’s Cuba. Greene sympathized with the rebels so much he ended up trafficking warm winter clothing to Fidel Castro’s men camped in the mountains, befriending Castro in the process. Our Man in Havana was published in October, 1958; three months later, Castro descended from the Sierra Maestra to finally seize Havana.
The outside view of Cuba is that it still hasn’t changed much since then. It has long been an island, as Christopher Hitchens described it, “stranded in time and isolated from many recent currents of history and political economy… the city of Havana has been compelled to remain very much as Greene described it.” Using Greene’s novel as a reference point would therefore be the perfect snapshot, a literary guide to a Cuba frozen in the late 1950s.
Traveling to Cuba from the United States is still technically prohibited, although the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has issued licenses to travel for 12 categories; I was traveling for ‘journalistic activity,’ but in reality no one in Cuba asked why I was there. Passing through passport control, I passed a line of wooden desks manned by nurses in pristine, white dresses collecting health questionnaires handed out on the plane (also not checked). My taxi driver, Elliot, had studied civic law and practiced in Havana for six years, but had turned to shuttling visitors to and from the airport as it earned him more money. It also helped him practice his English, which is not widely taught in Cuba. We made our way into Old Havana.
When Americans think of Havana, the first things that spring to mind are the music, the 1950s cars, and the faded pastel buildings. Up close, the first impression you get is of the noise—crowded narrow streets thronging with wild dogs and cats, street hawkers selling cigars and rum, bells and music blaring from the pedal-taxis. Elliot hadn’t heard of Graham Greene, but he loves “Ernesto,” Cuba’s favorite adopted literary son. Dropping my bags at the casa particular where I was staying, part of a government authorized program where families can rent out rooms in their homes, I made the one block walk north to Lamparilla Street.
Stretching lengthways across the entire breadth of the teeming Vieja Habana, Lamparilla Street is the fictional home of Wormold’s vacuum cleaner shop. It’s from here that he futilely tries to sell ‘Atomic Pile’ suction cleaners to the residents of Havana, and it’s here that he first encounters Agent Hawthorne of MI6. Greene has Wormold living at number 37, but walking down Lamparilla Street, I discover that the numbers skip from 35 to 39, number 37 disappearing much as Hawthorne does after the initial approach, into “the square at the top of Lamparilla Street… swallowed up among the pimps and lottery sellers of the Havana noon.”
Much of Our Man In Havana takes place, as do many of Greene’s novels, in the friendly confines of a bar. Wormold’s principal haven is the Wonder Bar, my next stop. Fortunately, Greene provides exact directions: the corner of Virtudes and the Paseo. Greene even describes how long it should take to get there from Wormold’s shop:
“Seven minutes to get to the Wonder Bar; seven minutes back to the store; six minutes for companionship. He looked at his watch. He remembered that it was one minute slow... By the corner of Virtudes, Dr. Hasselbacher hailed him from the corner of the Wonder Bar... Wormold turned into the bar from the Paseo.”
Starting at number 35, I headed west through the old city, and seven minutes later, did indeed end up at Virtudes street, only to find no Wonder Bar. The only wondering I encountered was whether anything in Greene’s nearly 60-year-old novel would actually exist.
Graham Greene’s life spanned most of the 20th century. He was also, according to William Golding, “the ultimate chronicler of 20th-century man's consciousness and anxiety.” An insatiable traveler, he was drawn to what he called “the world’s wild and remote places,” often finding himself in aging colonial outposts on the brink of violent upheaval, preferably with a well-stocked bar at the end of it. His travels to the former French Indochina (now Vietnam), Haiti, Sierra Leone, Mexico, and Cuba formed the inspiration for some of his greatest books. He worked as a journalist, author, film critic, and spy, vividly portraying rumpled, disillusioned Englishmen, often in romantic upheaval, but always nursing a bottle of whiskey.
Not to be deprived of a ‘cooling morning daiquiri,’ I headed up the Paseo in the direction of another of Wormold’s havens, Sloppy Joe’s. The Paseo is a wide, European style boulevard, a promenade lined with palm trees and marble benches that separates the faded Spanish Colonial grandeur of the Vieja Habana from the sprawling tenement slums of the Centro neighborhood, until it reaches the sea. Once the promenade had been lined with opulent mansions, theaters, and American car dealerships, all of which are now mostly closed and lying in ruins.
Sloppy Joe’s opened in the 1930s, and featured one of the longest mahogany bars to be found in the Americas. An oasis from the humidity of the sweltering city, the 60-foot bar was as much a haven for American celebrities such as Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy as it was for regular tourists enjoying a break from Prohibition back home. The Los Angeles Times once described it as enjoying “the status of a shrine,” and its long cocktail list and sumptuous, dark decor wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Fifth Avenue hotel bar in Manhattan.
“For some reason that morning he had no wish to meet Dr. Hasselbacher for his morning daiquiri… so he looked in at Sloppy Joe’s instead of at the Wonder Bar. No Havana resident ever went to Sloppy Joe’s because it was the rendezvous of tourists; but tourists were sadly reduced nowadays in number, for the President’s regime was creaking dangerously towards its end.”
In Greene’s book, this is where Wormold is approached by Hawthorne to become an agent for the British Secret Service. But like most things associated with the excesses of American influence, Castro had the iconic bar first nationalized, and then finally closed in 1965. For decades, the opulent columned building, like much of Havana, was gradually allowed to fall apart.
However in 2007, restoration work began on the bar, overseen by the Office of the City Historian of Havana. Using archival photographs, Sloppy Joe’s was painstakingly restored, reopening in 2013 looking almost just as it did when Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene drank here. For Eusebio Leal of the City Historian’s Office, “what interests me is to work to restore my city… a whole series of things that form part of its memory… the final objective is not commercial, it’s not to exploit a name. The opportunity it brings is to recover an important memory of Havana.” The frozen daiquiris are excellent by the way, but just as Greene described over 50 years ago, there were no Havana residents enjoying them.
A few blocks farther down the Paseo is the grand old Hotel Sevilla. Opened in 1908, the 10-story pastel pink hotel features a glittering rooftop ballroom designed by the New York architectural firm responsible for the Waldorf-Astoria and the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. It is amid these imposing confines, in room 501, that Wormold finally accepts Hawthorne’s approaches to become a paid spy for Great Britain, taking on the code name 59200 stroke 5. He’s given a copy of the children’s book Tales From Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb to use as a cipher.
Like Sloppy Joe’s, the Hotel Sevilla is also being renovated. For a cash-strapped economy like Cuba, tourism is a vital source of income, and preserving Old Havana, one of the jewels of the Caribbean Spanish Colonial crown, has become imperative after decades of neglect.
“All going well?”
“I think we’ve got the Caribbean sewn up now sir, Hawthorne said... I was more uncertain at first about 59200 stroke 5.”
“Stroke 5?”
“Our man in Havana, sir. I didn’t have much choice there, and at first he didn’t seem very keen on the job. A bit stubborn.”
“That kind sometimes develops best.”
As British intelligence falls for Wormold’s imaginary reports, Greene’s novel begins to lampoon the bumbling, outdated service for which he’d worked undercover in Sierra Leone during World War II. A far cry from fellow intelligence employee Ian Fleming’s depiction of the debonair world of 007, Greene’s Secret Service, as Hitchens writes, is “a place of crumbling scenery and low comedy, populated by a cast of jaded misfits.” Wormold’s creative talent for inventing intelligence reports based on the inner workings of his vacuum cleaners proves such a success in London that MI6 increases his staff with a radio operator and a female code-breaker, Beatrice, with whom he develops a romance.
“After supper they walked back along the landward side of the Avenida de Maceo… the rollers came in from the Atlantic and smashed over the sea-wall. The spray drove across the road, over four traffic-lanes, and beat like rain under the pock-marked pillars where they walked. The clouds came racing from the east, and he felt himself to be part of the slow erosion of Havana.”
The Avenida de Maceo is more commonly known today as the Malecón, and was my next port of call. If Paris has the Champs Élysées and Manhattan has Broadway, so Havana has the Malecón. One of the world’s great thoroughfares, it stretches for five miles along the northern coastline. It is the soul of Havana, teeming with fishermen, musicians, and lovers rendezvousing on the long sea wall, set against a backdrop of vast, crumbling mansions.
“The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks… the shutters of a night club were varnished in the bright crude colours to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea.”
All four traffic lanes are filled with vintage cars. I’d expected to see a few of the iconic 1950s American automobiles that grace the covers of every guide book to Havana, but I didn’t realize just how many there are. Virtually every second car is a brightly colored, lovingly cared for, hulking behemoth of vintage U.S. steel. I was traveling westwards along the Malecón in a taxi, a beautiful, eggshell blue Buick convertible dating to 1952, at least twice as old as its proud owner, Jordanka.
We were heading in the direction of one of Havana’s rare jewels that has remained beautifully preserved, the illustrious Hotel Nacional de Cuba. Built by New York’s most prestigious architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White, the Nacional looms large in Havana’s recent history. It’s perched high on a hill, at the site of the old Santa Clara Battery, overlooking the Malecón and Havana harbour. A hotel of refined, Art Deco elegance, the Nacional opened its doors in 1930 to such illustrious guests as Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Sir Winston Churchill, and Errol Flynn. This is where the historic Havana Conference of 1946 convened, the infamous meeting of the heads of the U.S.-based mafia.
In Greene’s novel, the Nacional is the site of a trade meeting where enemy agents attempt to poison him.
“He made his way through the lounge of the Nacional Hotel between show-cases of Italian shoes and Danish ashtrays and Swedish glass and mauve British woolies.”
Today, in stark contrast to much of crumbling Havana, the Nacional is a gleaming, elegant jewel where peacocks roam the lush gardens and waterfalls overlook the ocean. It’s also where the nightly room rate costs close to the average monthly wage in the city.
A peculiar relic of pre-war ostentatiousness, the Tropicana Club, located in the swish suburbs, is a remarkable throwback to the 1950s, when Cabaret Guide described it as “the largest and most beautiful night club in the world.” This is where Wormold hosts a party to celebrate his daughter’s 17th birthday. Greene describes the lurid exhibition:
“It was a more innocent establishment than the Nacional in spite of the roulette-rooms, through which visitors passed before they reached the cabaret. Stage and dance-floor were open to the sky. Chorus-girls paraded twenty feet up among the giant palm-trees, while pink and mauve searchlights swept the floor. A man in bright blue evening clothes sang in Anglo-American about Paree.”
Today the Tropicana still regularly hosts glittering cabaret shows, where guests are entertained by extravagantly plumed and bejeweled ‘las diosas de carne’ (the goddesses of the flesh).
If the Tropicana has endured in an atmosphere of 1950s kitsch, sequins, and Desi Arnaz, the next stop on my Graham Greene tour was a big change of pace: Centro Habana and El Barrio Chino. Tourists may largely stick to the bustling Old City, but to the other side of the Paseo lies these two densely populated areas. Here, the idea of there being money to spend refurbishing historic Havana feels more like a distant dream. Street sanitation is virtually nonexistent. Homes are crumbling as much as the roads that pass by them.
When Wormold’s elaborately invented web of spies and subterfuge starts to unravel, and his unwitting network of subagents begin to attract the lethal attentions of his Soviet counterparts, he descends into the depths of the Centro to rescue a stripper by the name of Teresa. Thanks to a combination of energy-efficient streetlamps alongside regular electricity shortages, even today being here at night feels like stepping into a film noir.
“The night was hot and humid, and the greenery hung dark and heavy in the pallid light of the half-strength lamps.”
I was headed in the direction of the former location of the long-closed Shanghai Theater, one of pre-revolution Havana’s most notorious clip joints. Even during the naivety and innocence of the 1950s, the Shanghai was modestly billed as ‘the world’s rawest burlesque show.’ The Shanghai closed in the wake of Castro’s revolution. But walking along Zanja Street, and through the narrow, cramped tenements of the Centro, is in many ways to experience the real Havana—the dark streets, swamped with friendly, chattering people; the corner bars lit by glaring fluorescents, each one packed with musicians playing traditional songs; the air thick with tobacco, mint leaves, sugar, and rum.
“The time arrived for his annual visit to retailers outside Havana, at Mantanzas, Cienfuegos, Santa Clara and Santiago... before leaving he sent a cable to Hawthorne. ‘On the pretext of visiting sub-agents for vacuums propose to investigate possibilities for recruitment... calculate expenses of journey fifty dollars a day.”
And so like the enterprising amateur secret agent of Greene’s imagination, I left Havana, heading south in the direction of Cienfuegos, to see more of what is a surprisingly vast country. (Caribbean islands are generally thought of as small, but Cuba has a larger land area that Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut put together.) Driving through Cuba, it takes a while before you realize that there are virtually no advertisements anywhere. There are billboards, but relatively few, and close inspection shows them all to be government propaganda.
My destination was Trinidad, a charming colonial town on the coast, five hours southeast of Havana. If Havana is said to be trapped in the 1950s, Trinidad is largely stuck a century before that. Once a thriving town built on the sugar and slave trades, Trinidad has remained one of the best-preserved Spanish Colonial hamlets anywhere. Horses and carts are as common as vintage cars, if not more so. Family homes date from as far back as the early 19th century, while the town’s squares are decorated with the mansions of former plantation owners, churches, and fountains. One of the few harsh reminders of more modern concerns are the remnants of an American U-2 spy plane shot down and exhibited in the Casa de los Conspiradores.
It was amid these lush surroundings, in the mountains of Sancti Spíritus, that I found myself detained by the police. In Our Man In Havana, Wormold is apprehended for breaking a late-night curfew. I’d booked a taxi back to Havana to be shared with two strangers, a pair of Cypriot tourists, and manned by a young driver. Upon approaching a routine checkpoint, our driver decided the best course of action was not to slow down, as indicated, but rather to floor the gas pedal, leaving la policia covered in dust.
About 15 miles outside of Trinidad, a bucolic stretch of Caribbean coastline, two police cars formed a more effective barricade across the road. Sparing any niceties, the police roughly grabbed the driver from behind the wheel, slapping on handcuffs and pushing him against the hood of the car, leaving myself and the two Cyprus lads somewhat bewildered as to what was going to happen. With no cell phone coverage and limited Spanish, we waited by the side of the road for three quarters of an hour until another police car picked up the taxi and drove us all to a nearby police station. At first we thought we were going to be allowed to carry on our journey, but the police refused to open the locked trunk of the taxi so we could get our bags, keeping us detained.
The interior of this rural Cuban police station was rudimentary, but teeming with people. Its concrete walls were bare save for posters of Castro, with holding cells in the back and a sparingly furnished front room. We were asked to write a report of what had happened, but with little Spanish, no phone, I refused to write or sign anything. After three or four hours, during which our driver was somehow allowed to wander around the police station on his phone, we are finally allowed to leave. Finding a nearby official taxi service, we restarted our five-hour journey back to Havana.
The first place I headed to on reaching the suddenly safe-feeling capital was the Floridita Bar. Located at the far end of Obispo Street, it is known as la cuna de la daiqiuri, or ‘the cradle of the daiquiri.’ The Floridita’s literary connections are strong: Hemingway still holds the record for daiquiris consumed in one sitting (allegedly, 16) and his presence looms large, especially via a lifesize bronze statue that holds down one end of the bar, where he looks out genially at visitors with a glint in his eye. In Our Man In Havana, the Floridita is where Wormold meets his first wife for the first time. The plush red decor matches the tailored jackets sported by a first-rate bar staff. Sipping a daiquiri, I reflected on where I’d found myself that morning.
Graham Greene’s novel was published at the end of 1958, and remains one of his most popular books. The Havana he describes is, remarkably, largely as it was: a beguiling island, at least for now, frozen in time.
Ready to explore Cuba and its fascinating history for yourself? Join Atlas Obscura on our upcoming Hidden Havana trip! Details here.
The Mall of America, which Wikipedia describes as “a shopping mall located in Bloomington, Minnesota” and which is also the largest mall in the United States, is looking for a writer-in-residence.
During a tough era for the traditional shopping mall, the Mall of America, opened in 1992, has persevered and is turning 25. As part of the celebration, the mall is looking for “a special scribe” to celebrate the mall and capture its evolution.
The job: Spend five days “deeply immersed in the Mall atmosphere” and write “on-the-fly impressions” of the place. The position is open to all sorts of writers (journalists, poets, musical comedy writers, etc.) of various levels of experience. The initial application involves writing a short pitch about “how you would approach this assignment.”
The compensation: The Mall will put the writer up in the on-site hotel, give them $400 for food and drink, and a “generous honorarium.”
Emoji, like the one you just used to send a dumb text message to your friend, are, on their face, pretty simple: a small graphical icon representing happiness or rage or befuddlement or booze or an airplane or a slice of pizza or, maybe, after a job is well done, a simple thumbs-up.
And while their popularity probably has to do with efficiency and simplicity—a picture, after all, really can be worth a thousand words—the range of emoji in circulation we use to explain ourselves is still fairly limited.
That's because every emoji originates from a standardized set of characters decided upon by the nonprofit Unicode Consortium, which acts as the technological gatekeeper for not just emoji but also any new kind of digital character or symbol in the world.
The current emoji set includes every national flag in the world, but not regional flags, nor any of the flags for U.S. states.
All of which hasn't stopped a lot of Texans from, wittingly or not, sharing a flag emoji that looks very similar to theirs—that belonging to Chile.
Normally, this sort of error would just be chalked up to standard online incompetency—take a minute to remember, just for example, the staggering amount of idiocy that's occurred on Twitter over the past month alone. But these aren't normal times, and a Texas state lawmaker is upset enough about the matter to spend some of his time drafting a resolution urging everyone to stop.
State Representative Tom Oliverson says in the resolution submitted last week that although the Chilean flag is a "nice flag" it cannot "in any way compare to or be substituted for the official state flag of Texas," according to Reuters.
The resolution is meant to be "educational," Oliverson told Reuters, not a new law. Regardless of whether the resolution passes, Oliverson said he was pleased with the publicity it received, saying that he's already achieved his objective.
The resolution itself might be moot soon anyway: the Unicode Consortium said in December that it was considering adding regional flags such as Texas's.
At which point all you proud Texans will have even less of an excuse.
In these modern times, it's easy to travel from point A to B without paying much mind to the infrastructure supporting the journey. How often do you drive over a bridge and think, thank goodness that bridge wasn't a couple feet lower, or I wouldn't have made it? Feats of engineering tend to go overlooked when everything is well-designed and functioning properly. But when roads, bridges, or transit systems break down, that gets people's attention—and can help put the work of architects and engineers into perspective. With that in mind, here are five classic examples of transportation infrastructure failing, in an utterly spectacular fashion.
At first glance, this bridge appears to be an innocent railroad trestle. But this is no ordinary trestle. Built more than two feet below the current minimum clearance standards, it will mercilessly scalp any too-tall vehicle that tries to pass underneath. It’s infamously known among locals and truckers as The Can Opener.
This architectural dysfunction occurs because when the bridge was erected about 100 years ago, no vertical clearance standards were in place. So the bridge stands a mere 11 feet 8 inches above the road, making it dangerously low for modern trucks to pass safely beneath without a cacophonous and melodramatic shave off the top. The bridge claims, on average, one vehicular victim each month.
Looking as though it was miraculously transported from a more urban area, the abandoned Viaduct Petrobras rises out of the lush South American jungle, a testament to mismanaged government spending.
Construction on the Rio-Santos Highway began in the 1960s, and by 1976 the stretch of road was due to be linked to the existing highway. However, plans were altered at the last minute so that the existing road was linked to a coastal route instead, and the newly constructed viaduct was simply abandoned. Over 40 meters tall and 300 meters long, the elevated roadway features tunnels, retaining walls, and a massive concrete foundation all being slowly taken over by the surrounding greenery.
The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened on July 1, 1940, and collapsed into Puget Sound five months later. The common explanation for its collapse is that the bridge’s resonant frequency matched the frequency of the wind, and set the poorly designed bridge on an ever increasing oscillation, twisting and rolling until it eventually collapsed. But this is now known to be false. The real culprit is a phenomenon known as aeroelastic flutter, and though the idea of a feedback loop between the air and the movement of the bridge is correct, it had little to do with the natural frequency of the bridge.
It took the state of Washington about ten years to rebuild the Narrows Bridge, and it was designed so a disaster of this scale would not happen again. The newly rebuilt bridge opened in 1950, longer and wider than the original. Meanwhile, the remains of the original Narrows Bridge are in much the same place they fell. The wreckage has created an artificial reef, and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
There's more than one bridge project that's been dubbed the "Bridge to Nowhere," but this one is a classic. It's a truss arch bridge that was built in 1936 just north of Azusa, California, in the San Gabriel Mountains. During its initial construction, Los Angeles County claimed that the bridge and connected highway would be one of the most scenic roads in America. Unfortunately, these thoughts quickly changed when the road that provided access to the bridge was washed out during a massive flood in 1938, just two years after the bridge’s completion.
The entire project was then abandoned and the bridge was left forever stranded in the middle of the Sheep Mountain wilderness, without having a single car ever cross it. The Bridge to Nowhere remains one of the most bizarre artifacts of the San Gabriel Mountains, unused and alone in the wilderness.
When the London Underground was being constructed in the 1860s, rather than tunneling under existing buildings, deep tunnels were dug right through the city and then covered up again. But not all of the properties razed to make way for the railway were rebuilt. The houses at 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens were demolished to build the tunnel, but the sacrificed homes were never reconstructed, leaving a rather unsightly hole in an otherwise picturesque block. So a false façade was constructed to conceal the wound.
The façade matches its neighbors in every important detail, except that the windows are painted on, rather than being made of glass. You could live in that neighborhood for years, walking by this address frequently, and still not notice the deception if you’re not looking for it. From the back of the block, however, you can see what’s going on. The houses on either side are braced against each other by a number of sturdy steel struts, and the Underground tracks are visible—and most audible—just below.
We know him as a war hero and the first president of the United States, but George Washington was also a practiced chartmaker and cartographer. He became an official land surveyor in Virginia at the age of 17, and was involved in creating many maps throughout his life, including the map above of his home, Mount Vernon.
Published in 1801 after his death, Map of General Washington’s Farm of Mount Vernon from a Drawing Transmitted by the General depicts the farms on the estate from the eyes and words of the founding father himself. It was adapted from an assortment of sketches and notes in a letter sent to a well-known English agriculture expert, Arthur Young, in 1793. While Washington did not directly draw the final version of this particular map himself, he made many other maps of his farms, as well as maps of the nearby city of Alexandria, Virginia.
As a general, Washington well understood the dire need for accurate cartography. He once wrote:
"The want of accurate Maps of the Country which has hitherto been the Scene of War, has been a great disadvantage to me. I have in vain endeavored to procure them and have been obliged to make shift, with such sketches as I could trace from my own Observations.”
Long before he became commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, Washington had an established career as a land surveyor in Culpeper County, Virginia. He'd originally wanted to join the British Navy, but his mother disapproved, leading him to the field of land surveying. It was an important profession in Virginia, “where colonial settlement was pushing rapidly,” explains Mark Mastromarino of the Washington Papers project. “He gained familiarity with the colony’s back country while developing methodical habits of mind and wilderness survival skills.”
“Between 1747 and 1799, he had surveyed over 200 tracts of land,” writes Edward Redmond, a reference librarian in the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division. In addition to surveying terrain and producing charts, Washington also collected and analyzed maps, resulting in a personal library of at least 190 maps.
The Mount Vernon estate had been owned by the Washington family since 1674, with George Washington inheriting the land in 1761. Residing on the banks of the Potomac River, he would end up growing the estate into an 11,028-square-foot concern with five different, fully operating farms.
The 1801 map of Mount Vernon is among the first large-scale maps of Virginia to be published at the time. It includes the Mansion House Farm as well as the River, Muddy Hole, Dogue Run, and Union farms, which were the crux of agricultural activity on the estate. Mount Vernon produced a variety of crops, at first planting tobacco and then switching to grains in 1766. Washington devoted much of his life to expanding and developing agriculture and husbandry, searching for expertise on how best to cultivate the land. Between 1786 and 1799, Washington exchanged nearly 30 letters with Arthur Young, a British agriculturist who wrote dozens of books on farming, writes Redmond.
Young offered advice and supplied seeds and equipment, while Washington described the agricultural techniques and practices of the United States. In a 1793 letter, which contained sketches and details that helped create the map, Washington informed Young of the acreage and crops of his farms, seeking advice on renting out parts of the estate. The map gives a detailed visualization of the topography of the farms, roads, structures, and boundaries of the fields as it looked in 1793.
On the top of the map are notes in Washington’s handwriting. His words demonstrate his love of this property, describing the estate as “a most beautiful site for a Gentleman’s seat” and the farm's “pleasant sites for houses on the banks of the River [Potomac].”
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
Last Thursday, a man named Dustin Hinkle, who is 26-years-old, was practicing some parkour with his friends in Denver when he jumped onto a chimney cover, which immediately gave way.
Hinkle then fell 40 feet down the abandoned shaft, becoming lodged for almost two hours before rescuers were able to free him.
Hinkle was promptly arrested and charged with trespassing, but that didn't prevent him from giving an interview to local TV station KCNC, in which he explained that the incident had changed his life.
He now believes in God, for one thing, because for much of the time he was stuck he thought he was going to die.
Hinkle, who is 6'5" and weighs 170 pounds, also says he can't imagine going back out to practice more parkour.
"Not after this," he told the station.
Which is probably best for everyone.
At the very least, we'll always have this local news headline to cherish, from the Denver Post: "Parkour mishap leaves tall, thin man stuck in downtown Denver chimney."
In recent years, the “sport” of competitive eating has gained greater and greater popularity, even producing its own small band of celebrity competitors. But centuries before the antics of a Kobayashi, or the dominance of a Joey Chestnut, there was Nicholas Wood, the Great Eater of Kent, who may just be one of the earliest examples we have of a true competitive eater.
Before he came to be known by his more colorful nickname, it seems that the Great Eater was a regular 17th century guy named Nicholas Wood. As the story goes, Taylor encountered Wood in an inn in Kent, and was amazed to see the man devour some 60 eggs, a good portion of a lamb, and a handful of pies, remaining hungry for more.
Wood was a self-made farmer when Taylor found him, but the Great Eater had already gained a reputation as a nearly superhuman feaster. Wood made a name for himself as a glutton by performing feats of feasting at fairs and festivals, as well as by taking part in dares and wagers with nobles. As recounted in Jan Bondeson’s book, The Two-Headed Boy, and Other Medical Marvels, Wood had, at various times, devoured such incredible meals as seven-dozen rabbits in one sitting, or an entire dinner feast intended for eight people.
Wood’s reputation was impressive, but far from impenetrable. On at least two occasions, he was in fact defeated by food. During a visit with a man named Sir William Sedley, Wood ate so much that he fell over and went into a serious food coma. Waking up the next day, Sedley had his men put Wood in the stocks to shame him for his failure. In another instance, a man named John Dale bet that he could sate Wood’s appetite for just two shillings. Wood took the bet, and Dale fed him 12 loaves of bread that he’d soaked in a strong ale. If it wasn’t the sheer bloating influence of such a terrifying meal, the ale got Wood so drunk that he passed out. Dale won the bet, and Wood was once again humiliated.
Yet despite these instances of completely understandable weakness, Wood’s reputation as an eater kept bouncing back, and he maintained a sort of celebrity in Kent. After Taylor witnessed his incredible fortitude at that inn, the poet decided that they could both make some money on Wood’s voracious appetite. As recounted in his very own pamphlet, Taylor offered Wood payment, lodging, and massive amounts of food should he agree to come stay with him for a time in London. Wood had never travelled to London, and Taylor saw an untapped audience for the glutton’s talents.
Taylor’s plan would have had Wood perform daily feats of overeating at the city’s Bear Gardens, which at the time hosted animal fights. Among the suggested meals to give the “most exorbitant paunchmonger” were a wheelbarrow full of tripe, as many puddings as would stretch across the Thames, and an entire fat calf or sheep.
For better or worse, this gluttony exhibition never came to pass, as Wood, who was getting on in his years, and who had lost all but one of his teeth after eating an entire mutton shoulder, bones and all, declined Taylor’s offer, saying that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to perform to expectations.
Even though Wood bowed out of what could have been the exhibition of his life, Taylor did not seem to bear him any ill will. A large portion of Taylor’s hagiography of Wood is spent comparing his monumental feats of gluttony to the achievements of historic giants such as Charlemagne and Alexander the Great, writing, “Therefore this noble Eatalian doth well deserve the title of Great. Wherefore I instile him Nicholas the Great (Eater). And as these forenamed Greats have overthrown and wasted countries, and hosts of men, with the help of their soldiers and followers; so hath our Nick the Great, (in his own person) without the help or aide of any man, overcome, conquered, and devoured in one week, as much as would have sufficed a reasonable and sufficient army in a day[.]” The poet’s florid description of Wood gives him such names as “Duke All-Paunch” and the “Kentish Tenterbelly.” Even as his talents faded, it’s clear that Taylor still saw Wood as a champion.
As for Wood himself, according to Bondeson, the Great Eater left Taylor’s house one day and was never heard from again. He slipped away into the fog of history, and yet our love of monstrous appetites has survived him pretty much intact.
He and Gilbert had met on a houseboat in 1938. The war had started the next year. Gilbert had not wanted to go; he had tried to fake epilepsy to get out of it. But he was conscripted and became Gunner H.G. Bradley.
Gordon wrote him often. Usually he would sign his letters “G,” and when Mark Hignett of the Oswestry Town Museum first acquired three of their letters, he assumed it was a correspondence between a man and a woman. Only after he began collecting more did he realized that “G” was Gordon and that he had discovered something much rarer, a series of love letters between two men, written at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in Britain.
Letters like these are rare because so many of them were destroyed, and, as the BBC reports, Gordon did ask his boyfriend to destroy these, too. “Do one thing for me in deadly seriousness,” he wrote. “I want all my letters destroyed. Please darling do this for me. Til then and forever I worship you."
But Gilbert kept the letters. After he died in 2008, they were collected by a cleaning company and sold to dealer of military mail, as the BBC reports. Hignett eventually spent more than $1,200 tracking down 300 of the two men’s letters on eBay. He plans to write a book detailing the whole love story.
