This past fall, a popular TV channel aired a very brief, very controversial documentary. It was debauched and violent, packing a betrayal, a screaming match, and a bloody fight into fewer than three minutes. Outlets including Entertainment Weekly and USA Today covered the clip and the fervent social media response, calling it "shocking" and "disturbing." "This is why I don't want to be in a relationship," one viewer Tweeted.

This contentious clip wasn't on A&E or Fox News. It was a National Geographic wildlife documentary called "Homewrecking Penguin," about three Magellanic penguins caught in a love triangle. When the first penguin returns from fishing, he's confronted by his mate and her new boyfriend, who has moved into his nest. The two males scream and beat each other up—one even loses an eye—and after watching them battle for her affections, the female eventually chooses her new paramour, leaving her original mate out in the cold.

As Twitter user Javi Moreno said, "he should of just skipped the bullsh*t and taken her to Maury."

This clip's massive popularity and outsized response—according to Nat Geo News, hundreds of thousands of people watched it the day it was released—rides on the apparent ridiculousness of the pairing: all this blood-soaked drama from penguins? But if you look back at the history of human-penguin relations, this clip isn't really an anomaly. Over and over, through centuries of shifting scientific standards and evolving social mores, humans have been scandalized by penguins.

A fight breaks out when a husband comes home and finds his wife with another penguin. pic.twitter.com/9ejYGcJ5TJ

— Nat Geo Channel (@NatGeoChannel) November 4, 2016

As far as we know, the first person to be shocked by penguin depravity was a surgeon named George Murray Levick. Part of an early British expedition to Antarctica, Levick spent much of his free time observing the large colonies of Adélie penguins that live on Cape Adare, and he later published several family-friendly descriptions of the species' lifestyle, habits, and characteristics.

"When seen for the first time, the Adélie penguin gives you the impression of a very smart little man in an evening dress suit," begins one chapter of the very pleasant Antarctic Penguins, published in 1914. "His carriage is confident as he approaches you over the snow, curiosity in his every movement."

But eventually, Levick's experience took a darker turn. The Cape Adare penguins, being animals, treat sex differently than most humans do, and Levick was sufficiently outraged by some of their predilections that he sometimes abandoned the pretense of scientific objectivity. "Cocks were often seen whose passions seemed to have passed beyond their control," he wrote in an early journal entry.

He began referring to these unattached males as "hooligans," and described their activities—mating with injured females, with dead penguins, with each other, and occasionally with the snow itself—with breathless fury. "I saw another act of astonishing depravity today," he wrote on December 6th, 1911, after witnessing a group sex act. "There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins."

Levick was disturbed enough by what he saw that he did his darndest to make sure his accounts of it would never fall into innocent hands. When he remembered, he switched into the Greek alphabet to write about penguin sex, in order to assure that people without a university education—in other words, the innocent—couldn't read the offending sections. When he forgot, he went back and rewrote his original observations, pasting the coded Greek version over the original in his notebook.

Levick did try to publish the fruits of these notes as part of a longer paper, but his editors cut all the graphic parts out. (They did keep some copies for their own use, though.) It took until 2012 for ornithologists at London's Natural History Museum to finally dig up Levick's "Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin"—by which point scientific inquiry had matured enough that they were able to publish it.

In the meantime, humans were busy making a huge deal out of entirely different penguins. In the mid-2000s, the scandal spotlight landed on Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo. When the two first started hanging out in 1998, they were merely one of the world's many same-sex penguin couples. They eschewed female companionship, and spent their days entwining their necks and singing to each other.

After zookeepers observed them pretending a round rock was an egg, they gave them a real one, and the two raised up a baby female named Tango. When they eventually broke it off, in 2004, it shouldn't really have made ripples outside their immediate circles.

But thanks to their location (New York City, a gossip hotbed) and their timing (right in the thick of contemporary gay rights activism) it caused an nationwide incident instead. The breakup "rocked the gay scene," wrote Andrew Sullivan in the Times of London. Conservative groups—who had, just months before, extolled March of the Penguins for its celebration of traditional family values—jumped in to slander the ex-couple, going so far as to use Silo's new partner—a female—to delegitimize his old relationship. According to the American Library Association, And Tango Makes Three, a picture book about Roy, Silo, and their baby, was the fourth most controversial book of the 2000s.

Remember the gay penguins, they are very important. pic.twitter.com/8yug00ID8T

— nic (@JustAFanMore) March 10, 2017

To this day, same-sex penguin couples—both their existence and their occasional separation, for breeding purposes—continue to rile up people across the globe. Although many scientists are scandalized by the scandals, others understand where our hysteria comes from. "We tend to identify with penguins because they walk upright and are social," writes Dr. P. Dee Boersma, a penguin expert at the University of Washington, in an email. She also points out that many do act like humans in other ways too—many do pair off and stay faithful, sometimes for many years.

In the end, it's probably these similarities that make us so prone to judging these penguins. If these animals—which look like us, but cuter—are capable of cheating, or of attempting to raise stone eggs, or to mate with the snow, what might be lurking just beneath our socialized veneer? As Twitter user BeautifulChaine put it, after watching that National Geogaraphic video, "I never knew I could relate to one until now." 

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, refers to the comma that appears just after the penultimate item and before the coordinating conjunction of a list of three or more things. As in: "The story you're reading right now might also be referred to as an item, post, or article"—the Oxford comma, in this case, being the punctuation mark just after the word "post." 

But the necessity of that comma has long been debated, and, indeed, many style guides, including the Associated Press Stylebook, advise against using it. Others argue (correctly, we'll note) that it adds clarity and reduces the risk of ambiguity. 

Still, the stakes of whether to comma or not are usually very low, more the domain of barroom arguments between certain sets of, well, nerds, than real-life consequences. 

Until Monday, that is, for a group of delivery drivers in Maine. That's when the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in their favor in a case that hinged on an (unused) Oxford comma. 

The (non-) comma in question came in this passage of Maine's overtime law, concerning what drivers cannot be paid overtime for: 

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

Agricultural produce;
Meat and fish product; and
Perishable foods

"As it happens," Judge David Barron wrote in the court's decision, concerning the lack of a comma after the word "shipment," "there is no serial comma to be found in the exemption's list of activities, thus leading to this dispute over whether the drivers fall within the exemption from the overtime law or not."

The comma, Barron then wrote, was important, since ambiguities "must be construed liberally" under Maine law, meaning that the delivery drivers, who had sued for overtime pay, might in fact be entitled to such pay since "distribution" in the law is not unambiguously separate from "packing for shipment."

The drivers had sued a dairy that employed them, a company, as it turned out, that was less the victim of its own grammatical decision than that of Maine's lawmakers. 

Still, the court's decision on the matter isn't final—a lower court will now reconsider the case—but it is, possibly, an important victory for the drivers, while also being, unambiguously, an important victory for Oxford comma advocates.

You can read the entire decision here.

Just wanted to let you guys know wheelchair fish is still doing well and got an even more comfortable wheelchair pic.twitter.com/AwjeJU0pFL

— Taylor Nicole Dean (@taylorndean) March 15, 2017

In feat of both ingeniously simple engineering and heart-exploding cuteness, a San Antonio man built a wheelchair for a goldfish.

According to the BBC, an aquarium store worker and hero known only as Derek, designed and built the little contraption after a customer brought in their sick goldfish. The goldfish suffers from a defective swim bladder, which is the organ that allows fish to control their buoyancy in the water. Without the full control of this organ, they often float near the surface of the water, leaning on their side, or flipping completely over, helpless.

To get the fish swimming again, Derek made an underwater “wheelchair” by wrapping some crimped aquarium hose around the fish, and added a little piece of buoyant styrofoam at the top that keeps the fish upright. He had to experiment with adding just the right amount of weight to the bottom of the rig, but eventually he got the ratio just right, allowing the goldfish a full range of underwater movement.

After images of the build were shared on Twitter by Derek’s friend Taylor Nicole Dean, who often posts educational animal videos on Twitter, the adorable invention led to multiple requests for similar rigs for fish suffering from the same affliction.

Last week's snowstorm brought a solid stack of white stuff to much of the Northeast. The Amtrak station above—which has been identified as Rhinecliff, New York's—wasn't spared. So when a southbound train came screaming in, it was a physics problem come to life: what happens when a really fast, really big thing slams into a few yards of packed-in snow?

As the train hit the edge of the snowbank, kicking up a good wake, passengers took out their phones to capture the matchup. Nick Colvin, who shot this video, set his to slo-mo.

And then... well, I won't spoil it. Let's just say some physics lessons are more painful to learn than others.

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.

The city of Acre sits on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, just north of Haifa. Back in the 13th century, this place was one of the most important strongholds left to European Crusaders defending Christianity in the Holy Land. In the city’s bay, marine archaeologists have found the remains of a ship dating back to the last years that the Crusaders held the city. The ship may even have been used to flee the city when an Egyptian sultan finally captured it.

After the ship was discovered, archaeologists were able to date its wood to 1062 to 1250 A.D., around the time of the Crusades. But the most spectacular part of the find, 30 golden coins, showed that the ship likely sailed even later than that. The coins were golden florins, minted in Florence, Italy, starting in 1252. The ship, therefore, must have sailed sometime in the last half of the 13th century.

When the soldiers of the Egyptian sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil arrived in Acre, many of the Europeans living in the city tried to escape. While one group of Knights Templar defended their fortress to the death, merchants and other civilians would have used gold florins to try to buy their passage back to Europe. Whoever tried to escape on this ship had bad luck, though, as it sunk into the sea.

In many cuisines—Chinese, French, French Canadian, Kazakh—eating horse is no big deal, and sometimes even considered a delicacy. But in the U.S., the U.K., and much of the modern English-speaking world, the idea of horses as food is considered a big no-no, even among avid meat eaters.

The practice of eating horses goes back to the time of early man, with evidence of horse consumption dating back to the Paleolithic era. But using horses as food has long presented both practical and emotional quandaries. Almost universally, horses have long been seen as companions and beasts of burden. “It’s an animal we anthropomorphize, but it also comes from this tradition of herbivores that we feel more comfortable eating," says Amy Bentley, a Food Studies professor at New York University, who has never tried horse meat herself. "So, I’m sure that makes it more flexible in that way.”

There has also been a nearly ever-present religious objection to eating horse. Religions such as Judaism and Islam forbid the consumption of certain animals, including horses, as a general tenet. Within Christianity, horse-eating became taboo with a papal decree in 732, when Pope Gregory III deemed the consumption of horse meat to be a pagan practice (possibly in an effort to preserve horses for more practical purposes, such as war). This decree still forms much of the historical foundation of the Christian aversion to eating horse.   

The cultural development surrounding the production and eating of horse meat differs from country to country, but for the most part, it has been eaten out of necessity. "Here’s this huge animal with hundreds of pounds of meat on it,” says Bentley. “If you’re going to eat animals, it’s a pretty logical animal to eat.”

In places such as the U.S. and the U.K., horse has been eaten during war and recession, when other animal foods weren’t easily available. This has given equine meat a reputation as a cheap food eaten mainly by the poor. 

In both the U.S. and the U.K., the countries that today are arguably the most easily offended by the concept, eating horse meat was not uncommon into the 1930s, although it was often passed off as more desirable meats.

In America, horse-meat consumption tapered off slowly, as traditional taboos reasserted themselves along with economic growth and people's ability to be choosier about what they ate. “It is a luxury to declare certain foods off-limits,” says Bentley.

The practice did, however, hold on in certain circles. A 2007 article in The New York Times mentions several situations in which horse meat briefly came back into vogue (or never left). For instance, in 1950s Oregon, horse meat experienced a small comeback and Time even shared cooking tips in an article about the trend. As explored in an article on Priceonomics, during the post-boom recession in the mid-1970s, the price of beef soared, and a shop in Connecticut started selling horse meat. It became so popular that they were eventually able to put out a cookbook.

In at least one case it wasn't poverty, but tradition that kept horse in people's mouths. The Harvard Faculty Club kept horse on the menu into the late 1970s, largely due to the fact that the meat was taboo. It made their little club feel even more exclusive. They only stopped serving it when it became difficult for the delivery truck to reach the club.

But from the 1980s on, eating horse meat became even more of a cultural bogeymeat. Probably the most famous case of horse meat causing a scandal in the U.S. occurred in 1981, when a food producer from Australia was found to be selling horse (and kangaroo) meat to the U.S., labeled as beef. The meat was headed for fast-food chain Jack in the Box, to be used in their tacos. The meat never made it to the mouths of customers, but the persistent rumor that the chain was using horse meat lasted for years.

In 2013, a scandal rocked the U.K. when it was discovered that many of the meats being sold as beef in grocery stores and fast-food chains were in fact horse meat. In some cases, horse meat was found to be mixed in with actual beef, while in others, the whole thing was 100 percent mislabelled horse meat. The scandal led to months' worth of headlines, multiple investigations as to the origins of the illicit flesh, and emptied supermarket shelves as millions of burgers were recalled.

Some of the religious implications of unknowingly consuming the meat were no joke, but any health risks were negligible aside from a concern about veterinary horse drugs making it into food. Once again, the actual problem was mostly about the fact that the meat was misrepresented, pointing out major holes in the supply chain that allowed horse meat to be substituted for the advertised meat. Still, the public's response was revulsion.

According to a 2014 BBC article, the horse-meat scandal caused many British shoppers to start going directly to the butcher as opposed to buying pre-processed meat that might contain horse. When speaking about how people had soured on frozen foods after the scandal, a representative for one consumer research company said: “It kind of confirmed matters when people saw that a frozen ready meal turned out to be all horse and no meat.” For many, horse simply isn’t for eating.

From France to Germany to Italy, people still enjoy horse meat in limited amounts, and countries such as Mexico and Canada still export horse meat all across the world (even the U.S. had horse slaughterhouses for export until 2007). But horse meat still makes headlines. The European Union is working on tightening regulations to avoid a repeat of the 2013 scandal, and there are still stories of people smuggling horse meat into countries where it is seen as taboo. Things may eventually get dire enough that horse meat will once again seem acceptable in the English-speaking world, but until then, it’s likely to remain pretty scandalous, mainly because of our love of our equine pals. “I think My Little Pony might kill it actually,” says Bentley. “There’s way too many My Little Ponies out there."

In 1933 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, three Etruscan warrior sculptures of black terracotta clay towered over their audience in an all-new exhibit. The ancient art, believed to be from the fifth century B.C., had never been displayed before: two warriors stood eight and six feet high, and a four-foot tall head stared into the audience from under its war helmet and big, curly beard.

The curator who acquired them, John Marshal, wrote “I can find nothing approaching it in importance,” in a report for the museum; these pieces challenged known history of ancient Italian art. They were in amazing condition.

There was just one problem: they were fakes. And for the 28 years they were on proud display, even skeptical experts couldn’t help the Met evade one of the most embarrassing scandals of the art world.

Marshal and his colleagues at the museum acquired the statues one-by-one from an artifact dealer named Pietro Stettiner between 1915 and 1921, believing that they were exquisite and unusual examples of Etruscan art that was more influenced by ancient Greek statues than usual in size and aesthetic—the shapes of the eyes, mouths, and general features. The statues were convincing: weathered and cracked, the old warrior statue was missing a finger and an arm; their striking black glazes seemed just like those of other ancient works. While acquiring one of the warriors, Marshal’s college wrote with glee about the artifact’s “wonderful preservation” and added that the asking price was “quite fantastic.” It all seemed too good to be true—which, unfortunately for the Met, it was.

According to the New York Times’ article on the forgeries in February, 1962, the museum had been “uneasy for years” about the large sculptures. The Etruscan culture influenced and invented much of what we think of as Roman, and there were plenty of scholars studying the society’s art; Italian historians in particular began voicing their concerns before the sculptures were displayed. After Marshal’s death in 1928, more rumors circulated about Stettiner’s supposed excavators of the pieces, who were linked to other forgeries in Italy.

While the Met’s 1933 Bulletin insisted that the warriors had been “compared with vigor” and they seemed to compare with other Etruscan works from the fifth century, critics concluded that the sculptures seemed a bit out of place; they were the wrong shape and size. The statues were amazingly complete and well-preserved for their age, yet the old warrior was missing a whole arm. The big warrior was weirdly proportioned, with one oddly long arm and a stocky frame on classically formed legs. According to some experts, they weren’t even particularly good examples of Etruscan artwork. More concerns fluttered into the museum as its exhibit descriptions crept around Europe.

Over the years of the exhibit, the museum’s experts explained this and other doubts away, possibly because of the pure high of new discovery and an attitude in the Western art world that assumed superiority and beauty of classical art. In 1921 art historian and authority Gisela Richter seemingly got carried away in the museum’s Papers on the Etruscan warriors; the find agreed with the exquisite descriptions of Etruscan art in historical writings. “Whom did our warrior represent? Was he a god or a mortal?” she wondered. Richter regretted that her colleagues didn’t know its original location, but believed it might have represented a god—the edge of an altar base seemed to be preserved. Other historians agreed, and examined the statues with wonder.

Weirdly, while the statues’ flaws evaded Richter and others, museum staff examined the pieces closely enough to know specific details, including that the large warrior was “built free hand from the bottom up.” Richter’s paper had also explained that the statues were “Under Greek influence but Italian in nature,” which became a popular deflecting argument in years to come. This last bit, at least, was technically correct, but the Italians who made it were much more modern than expected.  

In Italy in the early 20th century, three brothers Riccardo, Teodoro, and Virgilio Angelino Riccardi, and their colleague Alfredo Adolfo Fioravanti were living an archeological forger’s dream: they had easy access to actual artifacts, and both legitimate and corrupt antique dealers who wanted repairs and copies made of their wares. According to George Kohn in The New Encyclopedia of American Scandal, the forgers were long suspected to have made unauthorized excavations in Italy by the government, but managed to avoid actual prosecution. In their studio, the forgers sculpted the large warriors and painted them black, broke them up to fire the sections in their small kiln, and then sent the pieces to their artifact dealer covered with a smattering of mud.

For decades, experts murmured back and forth about the authenticity of the statues, but they lacked evidence to discredit them. Finally, in 1960, ceramic archaeologist Joseph V. Noble of the Metropolitan Museum of Art found a way to test the sculptures: by replicating the methods that the ancient Etruscans used for pottery, he found they used a three stage firing process to make the black glaze and ordered tests of the pottery’s chemical makeup that revealed a black pigment containing manganese, which Etruscans did not use. Noble and a colleague published the exposé, which included tests, researched documents and letters as proof.

There were other red flags that could have been seen earlier on, too. Authentic pieces should have had vent holes to let air circulate through the large ceramic pieces if they had been made and fired whole, but small vent holes were found in two of the statues; the old warrior, which had none, would have exploded had it been made the correct way. In 1961, the surviving forger of the group, Fioravanti, was finally persuaded by museum investigators to appear before the U.S. consulate in Rome to confess the crime holding the left thumb of the big warrior, which he’d kept as a souvenir, according to the New York Times’ description of the events.

The big reveal of the sculptures’ inauthenticity paired with their long-term display was about as scandalous as it could get for a highly esteemed art institution. The forgers had copied the big warrior from a picture of a small bronze Greek statue in a book from the Berlin Museum; the old warrior from an Etruscan coffin at the British Museum, which Kohn writes also turned out to be fake. Most embarrassing of all, the large warrior head was modeled from a head found on a small Etruscan vase in the Met’s own collection. The weird proportions of the big warrior were, it turned out, the result of a short ceiling and small studio. The arm was missing from the large warrior because, as Kohn writes, Fioravanti and the Riccardi brothers couldn’t agree on which way to attach the original arm.

According to the Times in 1962, after the sculptures were outed as fakes, they were locked up in a “morgue” in the basement with restricted viewing for students and scholars, never to be fawned over again. But, for a time, the clumsy art of some Italian potters made experts point in awe—leading to the first time the Met would ever admit to forgeries in an esteemed collection (though, thanks to Noble, not the last). While detecting forgeries is tricky, one thing is certain: if the authenticity of a piece of art is important to you, it pays to be careful.

On Tuesday, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federally funded facility outside San Francisco that focuses on nuclear research, released 63 rare, restored and declassified nuclear-test films. 

The films, uploaded to the lab's YouTube account, are part of a trove of some 10,000 that have been in storage since they were originally shot between 1945 and 1962, and had been held in secure vaults since then. 

The initial release is just a fraction of about 750 that Greg Spriggs, a physicist at the lab who has worked on the project for five years, declassified on Tuesday. And even that number is small compared to some 6,500 films that have been found of the 10,000 that were estimated to have been shot at the height of the Cold War. 

The goal in preserving and digitizing them, Spriggs said in a news release, was to keep the films for future study, lest they decompose and disappear forever. 

"You can smell vinegar when you open the cans, which is one of the byproducts of the decomposition process of these films," Spriggs said. "We know that these films are on the brink of decomposing to the point where they'll become useless. The data that we're collecting now must be preserved in a digital form because no matter how well you treat the films, no matter how well you preserve or store them, they will decompose."

What that means for viewers of the lab's YouTube account is a lot of mushroom clouds. Like this explosion named Harlem, which occurred off Kiribati in 1962 in a series of tests known as Operation Dominic. 

Or this explosion, part of a series of tests at the Nevada Test Site that took place in 1955 that was known as Operation Teapot. This particular explosion was called Tesla.

The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear bombs during war. In 1945, at least 100,000 men, women, and children were instantly killed when bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to tens of thousands more who later died because of the bombs' after effects.

For many years now, stories about the conditions at the now-shuttered Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland, have circulated among locals. Little by little, those stories started gaining wider reach. The children who lived there never learned to speak correctly. They had lice in their hair. There was a pile of bones in the septic tank in one corner of the grounds.

Earlier this month, an investigative commission in Ireland confirmed what locals and advocates had long suspected: there was an unofficial, unsanctified tomb at the Mother and Baby Home, where "a number"—likely dozens, if not hundreds—of fetuses, babies, and children as old as two or three had been buried.

As recently as the 1970s and '80s, if an unmarried woman in Ireland became pregnant, she might have been sent to give birth at a place like Tuam. Run by religious orders but funded by the government, mother-and-baby homes operated as quasi-public institutions for decades, starting in the 1920s. Their main function? To hide out-of-wedlock pregnancy from public view.

Women who gave birth in these homes were given little choice about keeping their children—almost universally, their babies were left in the care of the homes. Since 2015, Ireland’s Mother and Baby Home Commission has been investigating such institutions in order to report on the circumstances in which women were admitted, the living conditions at the homes, and their mortality rates and post-mortem practices.

The system that kept unmarried mothers and their children from sight, though, was more extensive than the 14 institutions under investigation. Mother-and-baby homes were part of an interlocking set of organizations, both publicly and privately funded, that tried to control the scandal of babies born outside of marriage. Once in this system, women and their children could find it difficult to disentangle themselves from it.

“After 1922, in order to project Ireland as a Catholic and morally pure society, the new fledgling political state deferred responsibility to Catholic religious orders for education, health, and social welfare policy,” says James Smith, an associate professor at Boston College and author of Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment. “They contained and confined and rendered invisible what Irish society didn’t want to be confronted with. They allowed most people to buy into the fiction of a holy, Catholic Ireland.”

Mother-and-baby homes were not found only in Ireland; some of the first homes were set up by an order of nuns based in England, where there were similar institutions for unmarried mothers, some run by Protestant and lay groups. In Ireland, though, the homes were closely associated with the Catholic Church, which abhorred women who became pregnant outside of marriage.

“It was the greatest scandal,” says Smith. “It threatened the respectability of the family. It impacted opportunities for siblings. It would result in the Catholic priest coming to knock on the door and instruct the family to send the girl out of the house and out of the village.”

Most of these women had few options. Abortion was (and remains, for the most part) illegal in Ireland. Adoption was only made legal in 1953. There were private institutions dedicated to hiding pregnant unmarried girls, but for those without money, entering a mother-and-baby home and leaving the child there was often the only choice.

After giving birth, the new mothers were required to stay and work at the home for as long as two years, caring for their child and the other children who lived there. If a family wouldn’t take the unmarried mother back and she couldn’t support herself, she might then be sent to one of Ireland's Magdalene laundries, also run by religious orders, where "fallen women" were confined and made to work for free. Separated from their mothers, the children born in mother-and-baby homes were often sent as five- or six-year-olds to “industrial schools,” set up by religious orders to care for orphaned or neglected children. Sometimes they were illegally adopted to faraway families, in England, Germany, or the United States.

Thousands of people passed through these institutions: in 1951, for instance, there were 1,983 women and children held in mother-and-baby homes and Magdalene laundries across Ireland, plus 5,844 children in industrial schools. The conditions in these places could be “Dickensian,” say advocates and historians: in the early decades of mother-and-baby homes, nuns might oversee a birth without the help of a midwife or doctor, and children were not well-fed or well-cared for. While institutions like these might be expected to have a slightly higher mortality rate than the general population, before the 1950s, the mortality rate for children under one year living in mother-and-baby homes could be five times as a high as for the country overall, Smith says.

Some pregnant women tried to leave Ireland for the less stringent conditions of mother-and-baby homes in England. There, there was still shame associated with being an unmarried mother, but the homes were usually less restrictive than in Ireland.

“If an unmarried mother found herself in a mother-and-baby home in Ireland, the minimum about of time that she’d have to spend in such a home was two years,” says Paul Garrett, a senior lecturer at NUI Galway, who has studied the movement of these “Pregnant From Ireland” women. “That’s a considerable chunk of someone’s life. If they got a ferry over to England, after staying in a mother-and-baby home, they could go after three months. There were considerable advantages to them.”

Catholic organizations, though, feared that Irish babies born in Ireland might be adopted to Protestant families. So they worked to identify these women, convince them to come back to Ireland, and connect them with Catholic mother-and-baby homes. One organization, the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society of Ireland, took anywhere from 100 to 230 mothers back to Ireland each year for decades, and in total assisted in the repatriation of 2,600 unmarried mothers, Garrett has found.

While the Tuam revelations have made big headlines, advocates think the scandal should extend to the day-to-day conditions in these homes, too. “Why did these children die from malnutrition or commonly treatable ailments?” asks Mari Steed, the U.S. coordinator for the Adoption Rights Alliance, an advocacy group based in Ireland. “Those are the bigger questions.”

Steed is part of a group of advocates who have been working for years now to uncover different parts of this story. She was born in Ireland and adopted by an American family early in life, and around the time she was looking for her birth mother in the 1990s, an archivist at the National Archive in Dublin was clearing out a storage area when she came upon records detailing the adoption of 2,000 Irish children to American families. Around that same time, a mass grave was found at a Magdalene laundry, which intensified interest in these institutions, the last of which closed in 1996. Steed, whose birth mother had also spent time in one of the laundries, is a co-founder of Justice for Magdalenes, which pushed, successfully, for the Irish government to officially apologize for the laundries.

The current mother-and-baby commission doesn’t go far enough in the scope of its investigations, Steed and other advocates believe. “They need to look at all those different routes that fed adoption in Ireland,” she says, including private institutions.

Although more details about conditions in mother-and-baby homes and other religious-run institutions are coming to light now, the homes and the conditions there were never entirely secret. There were concerns within the government as early as the 1930s about mother-and-baby homes, and Smith, the historian, says that middle-class families would warn their children that they’d end up in these institutions if they went down the wrong path.

“One thing that’s emerging more recently is the ways in which these institutions had traffic passing between them,” he says. A woman might have grown up in an industrial school, released with little sexual knowledge, been confined to a mother-and-baby home once she got pregnant, and sent to a Magdalene laundry afterwards. This whole system of "coercive confinement," as one scholar calls it, could capture people and punish them for years for their behavior without any judicial process. Once inside, they would disappear.

*Every person in #Ireland collectively screams in horror* #RailtownCafe#StPatricksDaypic.twitter.com/3D44LKiDu2

— Laura (@ElleEmSee) March 14, 2017

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, a Vancouver restaurant upset a number of Irish people with an image of a poorly poured pint of Guinness.

According to CBC Radio, Dan Olsen innocently posted an image on Facebook asking followers to spend St. Patrick’s Day at his Railtown Cafe restaurants. At first the image seems innocuous enough, showing a little pot of breaded appeteasers on a wooden block, next to an overflowing pint of dark Guinness ale. But it’s that last bit that seems to have started a minor international incident. 

The morning after Olsen posted the photo, he began being inundated with angry messages, taking him to task for his careless pour. As a matter of Irish national pride, correctly pouring Guinness is somewhat of an art, and should leave the pint with a thick layer of foamy head, never overflowing. Olsen's sloppy draught violated most of the rules of properly poured Guinness—and in support of St. Patrick’s Day no less—leading the Irish Independent to call it “sacrilegious.”  

Other response from the Emerald Isle was vicious. Olsen is quoted as saying, "Let's just say that Jesus Christ was brought into it on more than one occasion. One comment actually said that Jesus wept when he saw our pint of Guinness."

Olsen, who admitted to the inadequacy of his pour, has tried to make good on his gaffe by releasing a corrected image, and inviting anyone with an Irish passport to a free Guinness and shot of Jameson on St. Patrick’s Day.

Have you seen a bear? Have you also seen a wolf? Do you think you know what the difference is?

Before you answer that question, have a look at the video above. Now, without cheating, do you think that is a wolf or a bear? 

"I thought it was a bear," said Rhonda Miller, the woman who shot the video Friday in Canada's Northwest Territories, according to the CBC, "and I thought, it can't be a bear because it was the wrong time of year."

Miller was right. It was not bear—nor was it a man, which she thought it might have been before she thought it was a bear.

It was, in reality, a black wolf, which Miller said she realized as her car pulled closer to the beast. Soon enough, she spotted another black wolf, also running "flat out" along the road. 

After spotting the wolves, Miller told the CBC that, for a minute, she felt fear, but that eventually made way to something like awe. 

"I think just the power of them and the beauty of them, seeing them running like that, flat out, is pretty inspiring," she said.

It was quite the unlucky rollout. Ahead of St. Patrick’s Day, President Trump’s online shop debuted a green version of his signature “Make America Great Again” hat. To “capture the luck of the Irish” this March 17, the back of the $50, limited-edition cap featured a gold-embroidered, four-leaf clover. But the emblem of St. Patrick, and a broader symbol of Ireland, is an altogether different species: the three-leaf shamrock, which, legend has it, the celebrated saint used to teach the concept of the Holy Trinity in his fifth-century ministry. Many Irish, long accustomed to the confusion, quickly called out the sham on social media, and the hat soon after vanished from Trump’s website. Clover-gates aside, though, the shamrock is no stranger to politics this time of year, thanks to the annual “Shamrock Ceremony” at the White House.

On or around St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish taoiseach, or prime minister, presents the U.S. president with a crystal bowl brimming with live shamrocks as a symbol of the close ties between the two countries. After the leaders confer, a luncheon, and sometimes dinner, follows. The reception toasts the long legacy of the Irish in America and overflows with every manner of green attire and stilted lilts. Today, the Shamrock Ceremony can seem like an inevitable fixture of American-Irish affairs, but it began with a tiny sprig of diplomatic genius.

On March 17, 1952, President Harry Truman was viewing some baby seahorses at the Key West Aquarium. Back in Washington, Irish Ambassador John J. Hearne left the president a small box of shamrocks, traditionally pinned on a lapel or blouse to mark St. Patrick’s feast day. Nearly 70 years later, those humble tufts bloomed into the full-on cultural institution we take for granted today.

To many Americans and Irish alike, the symbolism of the Shamrock Ceremony verges on diddly-eye tokenism. Consider a few of the most groan-worthy Irish jokes presidents have told at the event over the years. Eisenhower once offered: “Wouldn't it sound funny if I tried to say O’Eisenhower?” Gerald Ford started off an address: “All Americans know there is a bit of the green in the red, white, and blue.” When not threatening Democrats with shillelaghs, Reagan quipped of the holiday: “Leave it to the Irish to be carrying on a wake for 1,500 years.” George W. Bush jested: “Taoiseach, good morning—or should I say, top o' the morning.” And last year, Obama attempted some Irish lingo while touting his heritage: “The Obamas of Leinster are nothing if not welcoming. We’ve got trad. We’ve got pints of black. It’s up to you to provide the craic.”

In spite of all of the pageantry, it’s “a deadly serious day” for the Irish government, says Dr. Michael Kennedy, Executive Editor of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. “In officialdom, this is something absolutely unique to have 15-20 minutes with the most powerful person in the world. No other small country like Ireland has it.” He adds: “You can tell jokes about paddywhackery until the cows come home, but you’ve still got that access.”   

Back in 1952, Hearne shrewdly recognized “the soft power of shamrock,” Kennedy says. Dubbed Ireland’s Thomas Jefferson for his work in drafting its 1937 constitution, Hearne was the first official Irish ambassador to the United States. Then, the young republic was eager to be seen as a modern state. But its relations with the U.S. had soured over its neutrality during World War II and refusal to join N.A.T.O. What’s more, Ireland detested the previous U.S. ambassador, Thomas Gray. Hearne’s box of shamrocks was a small but strategic effort to hit reset.

Hearne’s most brilliant move, though, may have come the following St. Patrick’s Day. As entered in Eisenhower’s presidential diary: “The Ambassador requested, thru Protocol, an appointment with the President in order to make presentation of shamrock to the President for St. Patrick’s Day … [Chief of Protocol] John Simmons stated that similar presentations have been made in the past, and recommended that the President receive him.”  

Thanks to Hearne’s cunning follow-up, the tradition “greened” the White House over the next 11 administrations, almost without interruption. Eisenhower invited the first taoiseach in 1956. Under Kennedy, Ambassador Thomas Kiernan introduced the media and the now-traditional crystal for the U.S.’s first Irish Catholic president.

By the time of the Obama administration, which first dyed the White House fountain green, the ceremony had settled into its current fanfare, though it also remains a critical occasion to discuss political and financial issues between Ireland and the U.S. Now, Michael Kennedy says Ireland’s yearly face-to-face with the president gives it more diplomatic “wiggle room” at the U.N.

For such a high-profile event, the shamrock comes from Living Shamrock, “a single grower in Ballinskelligs, County Kerry,” says Horkan’s Garden Centre, which coordinates shamrock gift shipments around the world. Roots intact, it arrives in Washington primed for planting.

But the State Department’s 2007 “Report of Tangible Gifts” suggests the shamrock, valued at $5.00, was “handled pursuant to the United States Secret Service policy”—that is, destroyed for security purposes, or, as some Irish have joked, massacred. A comment by Ford in 1975 suggests, though, he may have taken his to Camp David, while Obama indicated his 2010 shamrocks made it into the White House garden.

“I cannot confirm nor deny the Ford and Obama stories,” Dr. Matthew Costello, Senior Historian at the White House Historical Association says by email, “but I would highly doubt that these shamrocks were saved and planted elsewhere.” Shamrocks, he explains, are a potentially invasive natural species that must be destroyed by law.

But Costello says one cluster of shamrock did find a final resting place. As TheWashington Post reported on March 19, 1964: “Mrs. John F. Kennedy paid a St. Patrick's Day visit to her husband's grave in Arlington National Cemetery Tuesday and placed on it a cluster of shamrock which had been presented to her by Ireland's Ambassador Thomas J. Kiernan.”

As for the bowls? For the past several administrations, the Department of the Taoiseach tenders designs from glass-crafters from around Ireland each January, says the State Protocol office. Based on quality, price, and workmanship, they commission a piece from the winner. The National Archives and Presidential Libraries now house dozens of these gifts, as a 1966 law prevents federal employees from keeping foreign gifts exceeding, currently, $390. (Obama’s 2015 bowl, as catalogued by the State Department’s Protocol Gift Unit, is estimated to be worth over $10,000.)

“Most presidents kept the bowls in the [White House] during their time there,” says Costello, as is permitted before they head to the archives. Reagan notably filled his with his beloved jellybeans—green ones. And “Clinton mentioned the Irish crystal was on display on the Second Floor of the White House in the Residence,” according to Costello. And Hearne’s fateful box? “I’m afraid we just don’t know exactly where it is,” Costello says.

The public won’t see the 2017 bowl, handmade by Criostal na Rinne, until its ceremonial debut. But a lot of Éire eyes won’t be looking out for crystal (or four-leaf clovers): They’ll be watching how Taoiseach Enda Kenny interacts with President Trump. Many Irish hoped the taoiseach would leverage the soft power of their shamrocks in a symbolic break from the longstanding tradition this St. Patrick’s Day. But Kenny will be coming, bowl of shamrocks and all: Hearne’s simple sprigs, plucked so many decades ago, have sunk some deep political roots.

Howard Strickling’s phone was always ringing. First it might be Jean Harlow, panicking that William Powell had gotten her pregnant. Then it might be a security guard, informing him that he’d removed a belligerent Spencer Tracy from yet another bar. Once it was Marlene Dietrich, distraught after discovering John Gilbert’s dead body.

As the head of publicity for MGM, Strickling “handled” all these potentially scandalous affairs for the studio’s stars. From the 1930s through the 1960s, he worked with MGM general manager Eddie Mannix to maintain the carefully curated images MGM had built for each of its movie stars. That meant keeping damaging stories out of the press—or, if it was too late, making those stories disappear.

Mannix and Strickling were an unlikely team. Mannix, a thug who hung out with mobsters, first caught the eye of film-executive brothers Nick and Joseph Schenck while working construction at their amusement park in Fort Lee, New Jersey. (Josh Brolin plays a loose version of him in Hail, Caesar!) Strickling was a “dapper former journalist” who transitioned over to MGM publicity in 1919. But together, they quashed almost every type of tabloid item imaginable, as detailed in The Fixers by E.J. Fleming.

When Harlow, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, and countless other MGM actresses found themselves pregnant out of wedlock, the two men procured hasty abortions. (They covered up the visits with false names and even false ailments. Jeanette MacDonald had an “ear infection.”) Well aware of Tracy’s alcoholism, Strickling assigned an entire “Tracy Squad” ambulance team consisting of a driver, a doctor, and four “attendants” who were really security guards.

When “difficult” stars refused the help of Strickling and/or Mannix, the fixers had no qualms about throwing them under the bus. After closeted actor Nils Asther refused to keep up his sham marriage to vaudeville actress Vivian Duncan any longer, Strickling greenlit a 1933 article in Screenland Magazine that questioned why Asther did not live with his wife and child—and heavily implied the problem was not dalliances with other women. Asther was fired soon afterwards.

But perhaps the wildest example of the studio fixers’ intricate work was Loretta Young’s curious “adoption” of her biological daughter Judy Lewis.

Young became pregnant by her costar Clark Gable in 1935, while they were shooting The Call of the Wild. At the time he was married to his second of five wives, Maria Langham, and according to Young’s daughter-in-law, the sexual encounter was not consensual.

Young was Catholic and refused to have an abortion, so Strickling sent her into hiding. He first told the press she was on vacation, then simply ill, but when she missed her sister’s wedding, reporters went into a frenzy of speculation. So he arranged for an interview between his friend, a journalist at Photoplay, and Young, who was nearly nine months pregnant. Young remained in a bed piled high with strategically placed pillows and blankets for the entire conversation. A studio nurse was sent in several times to replace a prop intravenous bottle.

After Young gave birth to her daughter, the system went into high-gear. The baby girl stayed at a bungalow in Venice Beach for several months, and was then placed in an orphanage. Over a year later, Young announced that she planned to adopt two orphan children. But in a surprise turn of events, she explained, the biological mother came to claim the totally nonexistent second baby. So she simply wound up with Judy, her actual biological child. The MGM fixers helped her plan every step of this elaborate story, which Young stuck by publicly throughout her lifetime. She only confirmed the truth to her daughter in 1966, and to the world in her 2000 posthumously published autobiography.

Throughout this complicated case, Strickling and Mannix were following Young’s express wishes. Technically, they were working in her best interest. But the two fixers also committed horrific transgressions against women to protect the studio, and nowhere is that more apparent than with Patricia Douglas.

Patricia Douglas was not a name like Loretta Young, and that’s the way she wanted it. The young dancer ended up in Hollywood only because her mother harbored dreams of designing movie costumes. As David Stenn wrote in Vanity Fair, “she did not drink, date, or dream of film fame.” But she had appeared in musicals for Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures, which is how she came across an MGM casting call in 1937. While she believed it was for another dancing role in a movie, it was actually for a party.

The party was part of a five-day sales convention to celebrate MGM’s big year. This particular bash, according to the convention schedule obtained by Vanity Fair, was a “stag affair, out in the wild and woolly West where ‘men are men.’” The men had, at this point, been drinking for three days straight. After Douglas arrived at the studio-owned “ranch” with 120 other dancers in short cowgirl outfits, she slowly realized she’d been bused over as a plaything for drunk, lecherous businessmen. One of them was especially interested in her.

Douglas found David Ross creepy from the start, and tried to dodge him by escaping to the ladies’ room. But when she reentered the party, he and another man, by her recollection, held her down and poured liquor down her throat. She broke free to throw up in the bathroom and stumble outside for fresh air. It was there that Ross found her, dragged her to his car, and raped her.

Douglas was taken to the hospital and examined by a doctor practically owned by MGM. None of the cops at the party bothered to file a criminal report. Undeterred, she filed a complaint against Ross with the Los Angeles district attorney’s office and took her story to the press. Mannix, who had been at the party, leapt to defend MGM. He systematically strong-armed potential witnesses into slandering Douglas. She was painted as a lying lush, despite the fact that she never drank. Some who had previously given statements supporting her claims would not repeat them in court. Her criminal case failed, and MGM also succeeded in stalling her civil suit (which named Mannix). She tried one more time, only for her own lawyer to betray her. There was no other recourse, and her story was effectively erased for decades.

When later asked about Douglas, Mannix supposedly joked, “We had her killed.”

Strickling and Mannix’s fixer days ended in the 1960s. Strickling retired in 1969 and Mannix died in 1963, as the studio system was already heading towards collapse. No true successor rose to take their place, since traditional fixers made little sense outside a traditional studio system, where actors are owned and beholden to morality clauses. But Fred Otash might be considered the imperfect heir to Strickling and Mannix’s shady empire.

Otash was a former LAPD cop turned private investigator who took on celebrity clients including Peter Lawford, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, and Judy Garland. Sometimes he spied on people to help his clients with messy personal affairs. Other times he provided security. (Garland’s ex-husband recalls Otash guarding her home.) But Otash played both sides. As a freelancer for the sleazy tabloid Confidential, he helped to out several closeted stars and spread other damaging dirt.

Due to Otash’s reputation, his sensational stories were often questioned—sometimes by the man himself. Although Otash told associates he rushed to Lana Turner’s home the night her boyfriend Johnny Stompanato was stabbed by her daughter Cheryl Crane, and even removed the knife from the body, Otash dismissed the story in a 1991 interview. "Beverly Hills police chief Clinton Anderson once accused me of removing the knife from Stompanato's body, wiping off Lana Turner's fingerprints, putting on Cheryl Crane's fingerprints and then shoving the knife back into the body,” he said. “Crazy."

So much of Strickling, Mannix, and Otash’s work is bound up in contradictory reports and rumor. But if their confirmed deeds are any indication, it was the fixers—not the filmmakers—who concocted the most twisted tales in old Hollywood.

For rocks, time on Earth can be rough. Over billions of years, they might be crushed, eroded, melted, and transformed from what they once were. A rock might have started out as a piece of the planet’s original crust, but 4.3 billion years later, it’s been so changed that no one would know. Aging hurts.

But two scientists believe they have found a piece of rock that includes components of the Earth’s original crust, as they report in Science. It’s the most direct evidence ever found of how the crust on this planet was composed when it first formed.

The scientist, Jonathan O’Neil and Richard W. Carlson found the rock in question in Canada, on the eastern shores of the Hudson Bay. Parts of the rock, a granite, are 2.7 billion years old—relatively young, as ancient rocks go. O’Neil and Carlson used a cutting-edge technique, though, to track the decay of samarium-146, an element present only in the early days of the planet, into neodymium isotopes. The neodymium signature of the rocks suggests that the granite was formed directly from the Earth’s original crust.

What that means is that this section of the original crust, likely a type of basalt, hung out for 1.3 billion years unchanged, before a melting event turned it into granite. That has implications for scientists’ understanding of the development of plate tectonics: if the crust could spend 1.3 billion years in tact, there might not have been much movement of the newly birthed crust.

The challenge now is to find more instances of this same signature—places where the Earth’s crust has only gone through limited transformation from its very first state.

In 1972, 21 construction workers posed for a newspaper photographer in front of a loop of raised highway. A group of Irish immigrants, they appear tired but proud, smiling at the camera and standing before their latest accomplishment. Forty-five years later, we finally know who they were.

In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, thousands of immigrants flocked from Ireland to Birmingham, England. Many found work in the burgeoning construction industry, which was modernizing the city with new roads, reservoirs, stadiums, and municipal buildings.

The best-known of these infrastructure projects is probably the Gravelly Hill Interchange on Highway M6, nicknamed "Spaghetti Junction" for its tangle of intertwining roads. After its completion, 21 of the workers posed for the photo above, and last August, the Birmingham Irish Association called for the public's help in identifying these men.

Today—St. Patrick's day—they announced their success. "We had people contacting us about the Spaghetti Junction photograph the world over," Association member Yvonne Price told the BBC. They managed to identify all 21 people in the photograph, and to collect even more pictures that show what working life was like for this group of immigrants. The information and photos are currently on display at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, in an exhibition called "We Built This City."

In some of the photos, the workers goof around, lifting each other off the ground and balancing precariously on high-up beams. Other images reveal details of their work clothes, which often include tweed jackets. In one, a team toasts each other with stout on the top of a finished building.

"I think they would have made health and safety go grey if they'd been around then," Carmel Girling, the daughter of worker Fabian Cowan, told the BBC.

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.

There is a fine tradition of taking the wind out of the stuffed shirts who run the literary world by tricking them into publishing the work of fictional authors. In the 1940s, an Australian poetry scandal erupted over the invented poet Ern Malley, disgracing the publisher once the hoax was revealed. More recently in the U.S., the wunderkind author JT LeRoy was exposed as a fake persona created by a writer named Laura Albert. But a similar ruse from early 20th century Russia may be the only such literary scandal that ended with two men shooting at each other.

According to an account in the Russian book The Fate of the Silver Age Poets, in August of 1909, Russia’s preeminent literary arts publication, Apollo, received a curious letter. The envelope contained poems written in exquisite handwriting, on perfumed paper, signed only with the Cyrillic letter Ч (che). The unsolicited submission raised the suspicions of Apollo’s de facto publisher and noted Russian art scene figure, Sergey Makovsky, until later that day, when the author called their office.

The woman on the phone identified herself as Cherubina de Gabriak, an unknown poet, looking to find her break in Apollo. Makovsky, who found the mystery poet’s voice quite charming, agreed to publish her work. In the October issue of Apollo, 12 of de Gabriak's poems were included.

While the author remained a near complete mystery, tidbits of information about de Gabriak emerged through her poetry and correspondence. Supposedly, she was a young girl of French-Polish descent who lived in an oppressive Catholic household, which did not allow her to associate with the outside world. Her admirers caught only glimpses of her life, such as a poem that described her family’s coat of arms, but the riddles surrounding her past just made her all the more alluring. Soon, she was being published in a number of magazines, not just Apollo.

The mystique surrounding de Gabriak created quite a stir among the Russian poets of the day, and a number of Apollo contributors fell in love with her. Most famously, then up-and-coming poet Nikolay Gumilyov, who would go on to become a giant of Russian Symbolist poetry, began a red-blooded correspondence with de Gabriak, writing her a series of love letters.

Not everyone in the scene was quite convinced of the enigmatic poet, however, noting that if she was such a talent, she had no reason to hide.

In November of 1909, it was finally revealed that (as you have surely surmised) Cherubina de Gabriak was a fake persona. In reality, de Gabriak’s true identity was Elizaveta Dmitrieva, a school teacher who had worked with the poet Maximilian Voloshin to scam their contemporaries and get her work noticed. The name Cherubina de Gabriak, was a combination of references to a short story and a wooden imp that Voloshin had once given Dmitrieva. Voloshin was also an editor at Apollo, and knew Makovsky well enough to know what buttons to push to make their character appeal to him. 

Dmitrieva had been stricken with tuberculosis at a young age, leaving her with a lifelong limp that made it extremely difficult for her to walk. Her brothers were known to taunt her by tearing one leg off of each of her dolls. Far from being a poet princess cloistered in some far off tower, Dmitrieva was a teacher and studied French and Spanish literature. She had been trying to get her poetry published for some time, including sending unsuccessful submissions to Apollo.

As Voloshin would tell it, when they first met in the summer of 1909, she was writing “simple, sentimentally sweet poems.” But over time, her work evolved. Once the hoax was revealed, many found it hard to believe that Dmitrieva’s talent could have sprung from obscurity, instead choosing to believe that Voloshin must have been the true author. Both Voloshin and Dmitrieva insisted that it was she who wrote the words, while Voloshin edited her (today, it is widely accepted that Dmitrieva was the true author based on comparisons with her later work).

Neither Makovsky nor Gumilyov took the news very well. Both men, embarrassed at having been had, began publicly disparaging Dmitrieva. At one point, Voloshin overheard Gumilyov talking rudely about his affair with Dmitrieva "in the crudest sexual terms," as 1994's Dictionary of Russian Women Writers puts it. Voloshin, who was equally enamored with Dmitrieva, decided that enough was enough. He slapped Gumilyov in the face, inviting him to a duel.

Dmitrieva truly did have feelings for Gumilyov, and Voloshin as well. A critical analysis of her poetry from a 2013 issue of The Slavic and East European Journal describes her as "a natural seductress who maintained complex love relations with a number of Modernist poets, and was the cause of the well-publicized duel between Voloshin and Gumilev, both contenders for her heart and hand."

Gumilyov agreed to the duel, and they met on the shore of the Chernaya River on November 22, near the same spot where the famed Russian poet and novelist Alexander Pushkin had been fatally wounded over half a century earlier. Gumilyov, an excellent marksman, fired at Voloshin but missed, possibly intentionally, and Voloshin’s gun repeatedly misfired. Both men walked away with their lives, though animosity would characterize their relationship for years to come. 

Voloshin and Gumilyov went on to become some of the most important Russian poets of their time. As for Dmitrieva, while she continued to write, she was never able to reach the same level of fame during her lifetime as she had when she was de Gabriak. 

Today, Dmitrieva's life and work is finally receiving some much deserved attention. In addition to more academic explorations of her poetry, in 2008, the playwright Paul Cohen unveiled a poorly reviewed stage play based on the story of the hoax, Cherubina. The Village Voice said that it "softened and simplified the story [...] bleaching it of much of its nuance and oddity." Still, critical analysis of Dmitrieva's work is beginning to place her as a vital member of the Symbolist movement, even if her story will always be tied to the scandal that brought her into the light.

Alexandria man wakes up to disoriented driver in his house, lucky to be alive after launching car into lake. https://t.co/euSRz9nArMpic.twitter.com/GZylzxCErj

— Star Tribune (@StarTribune) March 15, 2017

Last Friday, James Sundby, a 38-year-old man from Wadena, Minnesota, was driving on a road near Lake Le Homme Dieu, about 120 miles northwest of Minneapolis. At some point, he missed a turn at a T in the road and drove off a 40-foot embankment, going over some open water before landing upside down on the lake's remaining ice, a bit farther from the shore. 

He then, according to the Star-Tribune, somehow got out and made it to a nearby resident's house, bloodied, disoriented, and unsure exactly what happened. 

When Andy Armstrong, the homeowner, finally awoke at 3:30 a.m., Sundby had apparently managed not only to gain access to the inside of the house, he'd also changed the channel on the television and turned on most of the lights. 

Armstrong, understandably, confronted Sundby, who apologized, refused help, and then promptly left. He was found about 20 minutes later by police, alive but "cold and disoriented," as Alexandria, Minnesota's Police Chief, Rick Wyffels, told the Star-Tribune.

Sundby, Wyffels added, did not have any drugs or alcohol in his system and has no recollection of what happened.

Which means we may never know exactly how Sundby's miraculous crash happened. As for Armstrong, he was just happy he remained calm.

"Fortunately for the both of us, I was able to take a second to get a grasp of the situation instead of coming out swinging with a golf club," he told the Star-Tribune.

The scene above, from the classic Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, has a unique premise. Death—a cloaked figure with a very pale face—has come for Antonius, a knight fresh off the Crusades who just wants to live out his life in peace. Understandably frustrated, Antonius does what any of us would: he challenges Death to a game of chess, with his soul as the prize.

A regular schmo watching this scene picks up on a few things: the terror, the suspense, the artful composition of the shots. A chess aficionado, though, is only looking at one thing. That game board that decides Antonius's fate? It's set up totally backwards.

Movies and television shows are full of blunders, some more noticeable than others, and each with their specific guild of victims. Ornithologists fume when British period dramas are overdubbed with American birdsongs. Government employees will tell you that the supposed main White House staffer in Contact has a nonexistent job. Archeologists hate movie shipwrecks, and marine biologists are already mad about the zombie sharks in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean installment, which, as cartilaginous fishes, should not have ribs—even ghostly ones.

But these are merely occasional grievances. There's one group of experts who can barely flip on the television without being exposed to egregious, head-on-desk mistakes: chess players.

"There are a ton of chess mistakes in TV and in film," says Mike Klein, a writer and videographer for Chess.com. While different experts cite different error ratios, from "20 percent" to "much more often than not," all agree: Hollywood is terrible at chess, even though they really don't have to be. "There are so many [errors], it's hard to keep track," says Grandmaster Ilja Zaragatski, of chess24. "And there are constantly [new ones] coming out."

Chess errors come in a few different flavors, these experts say. The most common is what we'll call the Bad Setup. When you set up a chessboard, you're supposed to orient it so that the square nearest to each player's right side is light-colored. (There's even a mnemonic for this—"right is light.") Next, when you array the pieces, the white queen goes on white, and the black queen goes on black. "When I teach six-year-old girls, I say 'the queen's shoes have to match her dress!'" says Klein.

Six-year-olds may get this, but filmmakers often do not. Along with The Seventh Seal, movies that suffer from Bad Setups include Blade Runner, Austin Powers, From Russia with Love, The Shawshank Redemption, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.Shaft and What's New Pussycat may not have much in common, but they do both feature backwards chessboards.

Slightly less common, and a little more understandable, is the Dramatic Checkmate. This blunder occurs when one opponent surprises another by winning out of nowhere—or, similarly, when some extra-smart character walks by a game in progress and points out a checkmate opportunity the players didn't spot. (There are a bunch of good last moves and shocked faces in the helpful Checkmate Supercut above.)

While this is understandable from a dramatic standpoint, or even a character-building one, it's not at all realistic, says Klein. "Two reasonable chess players never get surprised when checkmate happens," he says. "That would be like a team making a three-pointer, and the other team only then looking at the scoreboard and suddenly realizing they'd lost." Real players also don't make a big thing out of winning: "Chess players almost never reveal any emotions," says Zaragatski. "Being cool is key."

Doggers notes another Dramatic Checkmate move: the felled king. "Tipping over your king as a way of resigning the game is only done in movies," he says. (See Mr. Holland's Opus, in which Jay Thomas slaps his king down after being owned by Richard Dreyfuss). A normal chess player will just go in for a good-game-style handshake. "This falling king thing has somehow become a strong image in cinematography," he says, "But chess players always think: 'Oh no, there we go again…'"

Finally, there are the Deep Cuts—those errors that only the most knowledgable and dedicated chess hounds will notice. "Occasionally there is simply an illegal position," says Klein—in other words, a midgame setup that just doesn't make sense. In Back to the Future Part III, when Marty McFly loses a chess game to Copernicus the dog, he does so despite an illegal position, and one Season 5 episode of The Officehas Jim with both of his bishops on white squares, an impossible orientation in that particular game.

In at least one case, unusual play has sparked decades of academic debate: Experts still argue over whether HAL, the computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, was cheating in his game against astronaut Frank Poole, or whether Kubrick simply made a mistake.

To the experts, such errors seem needless. "It's like if you were reading something, and you see spelling mistakes," says the chess historian Bill Wall. Wall has occasionally worked as a film chess consultant. Although most films don't bother hiring one of those, there are other options: "There are around 6 million chess games easily accessible in online databases," says Zaragatski. 

They aren't the only ones bothered. Browse over to one of the many forum posts on the topic, and you'll find people noting down movie titles and scenes as though they're working on a hit list. "I just wanted to know if I could find some moral internet support after seeing... illegal moves, repeat positions, the knight called a horse, etc." writes Chess.com user Politicalmusic, beginning one such thread. "I haven't seen a good chess scene in a non-chess movie since Harry Potter," gripes user TitanCG.

There are some upsides to being one of the lonely few, says Klein, who admits to pausing most movie chess scenes to try to puzzle them out. "I enjoy being a detective," he says. Sometimes, what he finds brings a bit more satisfaction: if a knowledgable person set up the board, it could be a puzzle, or a historical reference. He and Doggers both cited a recent Simpsons episode, which guest-starred chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, as a good example, full of in-jokes and recreations of historically important games. "It's so cool when the chess part is actually done very well," says Doggers. "That's just great."

And when it's not—well, most people will think the film is smart because it has chess in it, while a small group is left burdened with the truth.

If a steep mountainside in a remote national park gives way and drops 200 million tons of rock into deep glacial water, will anyone hear?

In the case of the massive landslide that fell into Taan Fjord, Alaska, the answer was no—and yes.

No one heard the mountainside fall into the fjord on a rainy night on October 17, 2015. No one saw an almost unimaginably huge and powerful wave crest at 600 feet and sweep down the inlet. The tsunami obliterated forests on both sides of the inlet, and its rush to the sea dragged an iceberg over a marine spit and out into coastal Icy Bay. The enormous wave, an estimated 60 feet high in the middle of the inlet, traveled eight miles to open water and made it all the way to about five miles north of Icy Bay Lodge.

Thousands of miles away, at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory north of New York City, a pair of geologists noticed an unusual squiggle on a seismograph. The team of Göran Ekström and Colin Stark has in recent years pioneered a new method of detecting unusual seismic events that don’t send out the fast-moving compressional waves characteristic of earthquakes. Instead they look for subtler surface waves, or undulations, that radiate much more slowly through the surface of the earth. These are the kinds of waves sent out by collapsing volcanoes, calving ice sheets, and massive landslides.

“There are not that many landslide detections by us in a given year, maybe just half a dozen,” says Ekström. “We now know that when we detect something, it is often spectacular. We had just detected another landslide in the Yukon a week earlier, and had it confirmed, so I was quite excited when I saw another detection in the Saint Elias range, especially since it was not detected by anyone else, and because it was so large."

Few landslides and only one wave in the written history of North America can compare. About 150 miles to the south, also in southeastern Alaska, a major earthquake in 1958 loosened a steep mountainside high above Lituya Bay and dropped it thousands of feet into a narrow inlet, creating a “megatsunami” over 1,700 feet high, killing two fishermen.

It’s not a coincidence that both colossal landslides and subsequent tsunamis occurred in the Saint Elias mountains. At over 18,000 feet, Mount Saint Elias stands taller than any other mountain in a coastal range on the planet. The peak towers just 13 miles away from the site of the Taan Fjord landslide and tsunami. In the last five years, five monstrously large landslides have been recorded in these rapidly uplifting mountains, totalling hundreds of millions of tons of rock.

“It’s the land of hyperbole,” says Andrew Mattow, a geologist who helped lead expeditions to the tsunami site in 2016. “Saint Elias is the second highest mountain in North America and hardly anyone has heard of it. It’s a mean mountain. The weather off the Gulf of Alaska is legendarily horrible. It’s steep and rugged, with huge glaciers. Icy Bay [near Taan Fjord] was full of glaciers as recently as 100 years ago.”

Because glaciers are retreating rapidly in these mountains, experts expect more such colossal landslides and tsunamis.

“It is plausible that there will be more large landslides as the climate warms,” Ekström says. “First, there is water around, and water tends to destabilize mountains slopes. Second, and probably an important factor for the Taan Fjord landslide, the retreat of glaciers removes the buttressing effect of glaciers in these steep valleys, also destabilizing the slopes.”

As the climate warms, glaciers retreat, and the slopes they carved out of the rock are exposed. As recently as 1961, the Taan Fjord was filled to its mouth at Icy Bay by the Tyndall Glacier, which at one time stood as much as 1,000 feet high. In a little over half a century, the Tyndall Glacier has retreated ten miles up the fjord, away from the ocean. Today, the raw rock slopes it left behind stand open to the weather. The 2015 landslide, and the risks its collapse revealed, drew tsunami experts from around the world.

Bretwood “Hig” Higman, a tsunami expert from Alaska who oversaw a major scientific expedition to the site last summer for Ground Truth Trekking, is one of many tsunami researchers who’ve been contemplating ways to reduce the risks of disaster.

“We can look at this as an analog to what could happen in places like [nearby] Glacier Bay, where there are steep slopes and deep water inlets where cruise ships with two or three thousand people visit in the summer, and fjords in Norway where communities could be threatened by this sort of tsunami,” he says. “The next step is to build an accurate scientific picture of what is happening, and get specific. Say you have a cruise ship in Glacier Bay. With better models, there might be some ability to provide warning, or there may be areas where a ship could be in the bay without much worry. In other parts of the fjord, there may be bad places to be in case of a tsunami.”

Bre MacInnes, a tsunami modeler who was part of the Ground Truth expedition, worried that another landslide might fall while they were at the site of the October 2015 tsunami.

“In all honesty I was nervous,” she says. “There’s no reason it couldn’t happen again. We were all talking about it. Everyone had mapped a way they would run if we started hearing loud sounds from the glacier.”

Higman, who spent weeks at the site, continually tried to picture what happened during the moments of the event. He says it became a very real and intense experience, like seeing a massive volcano erupt and build toward the sky, but all in an instant.

“At the beginning it’s not really a wave so much as it is an impact crater,” he says. “You get a crater in the water, and as we know water wants to be flat, and at that instant it is very very not flat. You get a splash 100 meters high, and a hole in the water, and huge quantities of rock. For a brief moment when the landslide enters the water it creates a bubble big enough to fit an entire small town inside of—it’s an incredibly dynamic 60 seconds. In the ensuring moment it forms a fairly conventional wave, a big hump with a trough behind it, moving down the fjord.”

Andrew Mattox says he couldn’t really understand the power of the tsunami until he clambered a difficult 600 feet up the side of the steep inlet slope, surveying the so-called “run-up.”

“I’m a geologist and I’d say it was one of the most impressive events I’ve ever seen the aftermath of,” he said. “At the mouth of the fjord, the tsunami scraped everything off the rock—the trees, the soil, everything. It wasn’t until I reached the top that I realized how big this was and had a sense of the unimaginable destructive force. And it all happened in a matter of minutes.”

Higman still thinks about the tsunami, which was an estimated 40 feet high by the time it reached Icy Bay, about eight miles from the landslide’s fall into the fjord.

“Right around the corner is Icy Bay Lodge,” he says. “It was night and it was raining and I picture guests in there streaming movies and only realizing what happened when they came out the next morning and found loads and loads of shredded forest coming out into the bay."

The population of bats living in Alberta, Canada, is lucky: so far, the deadly white nose syndrome that’s wiped out other bat populations hasn’t devastated bats here. Scientists and conservationists are trying to make sure it stays that way: some of the province’s popular caves have been closed to human explorers for years now, in order to keep people from accidentally exposing the bats to the disease.

At the same time, bat researchers have recruited cavers to help understand how bats are using caves and mines. Recently, the Wildlife Conservation Society reports, the collaboration led to the discovery of the Alberta’s largest bat hibernation site outside of the Rocky Mountains.

The cave was formed by sulphuric acid dissolving bedrock, the group says, and scientists believe that a population of at least 200 endangered bats use it as a winter hibernaculum.  Compared to some large bat populations, this one is tiny, but it’s good news for bats in the region—it means that they may be finding safe places to spend the winter outside the mountains.