Warner Lew claims he has witnessed two people moan with rapture while eating smoked shad. Not just two people—two teenagers. They happened to have stopped by Lew’s kitchen right as he was taking a batch of canned shad out of the pressure cooker, and they were willing to give it a try. “I wish I had recorded the sound,” says Lew. “I have not seen people moan with rapture many times. How many people moan with rapture over fish?”

Smoking and canning shad, a bony fish that once filled rivers in Pennsylvania and Maryland, was an experiment for Lew, a fisheries biologist and fleet manager based in Seattle. When a fisherman friend had mentioned that he had about 40 pounds of shad chilling in his freezer, Lew knew what to do with it. He would smoke it and can it. He had created award-winning canned herring using this strategy, and he was convinced that the same technique would melt the shad’s bones and make the fish irresistible. Moan-inducing, even.

That first batch was such a success that Lew is now racing to sell canned shad to the masses. “We just have to get people to fall in love it,” he says. “Everyone will be eating shad instead of bacon for breakfast.”

Shad may be a rare treat these days, but it was once as ubiquitous on American menus as chicken is now. The fish served as a key food source for early colonists, so much so that Connecticut and Pennsylvania once started an armed conflict over a particularly abundant shad territory. Like salmon, shad live in the sea but swim upriver to spawn. Over time, river dams on the U.S. East Coast eventually shrank their numbers in that part of the country, by making it harder for the fish to reproduce.

On the West Coast, the fish’s fate is reversed. There are abundant shad in the Columbia River today, which runs along the border of Oregon and Washington. At the request of California fish commissioners, shad were brought to the Pacific Ocean by Seth Green, a New Yorker who pioneered fish farming. In 1871, Green packed 12,000 young shad into four 8-gallon milk cans and loaded them on a train; a week later, the fish arrived in California with their numbers only down a couple thousand. The shad thrived in their new home; by 1880 they had discovered the Columbia river, and in 1885 young shad were purposefully seeded in the river. Now, millions of shad regularly run up the Columbia River each season, far outnumbering salmon.

But in the Pacific Northwest, shad are treated like a trash fish, rarely harvested on purpose and usually turned into fish meal or cat food when they show up as bycatch. If fishermen use gillnets to catch shad, they often snag salmon as bycatch. In the Pacific Northwest, salmon fishing is closely regulated, and any salmon that show up in shad nets count against a fisherman's salmon numbers for the year. Commercial fishermen generally prefer to go after salmon on purpose. “No one wants the shad,” says Marty Kuller, the fisherman who provided Lew with 40 pounds of frozen fish. “The shad fishery has gone to the wayside.”

Lew believes that could and should change. “I’ve eaten smoked shad, and I think it’s phenomenally good,” he says. “If it was mediocre, I wouldn’t be as excited about it. But I think it’s pretty damn good. It’s a shame we don’t eat something that good, compared to the fish we do eat. Tilapia? Give me a break. Or catfish? It’s like the tofu of the sea. It’s the vehicle for the sauce.”

He wants to be clear that he is not knocking tofu—he eats a lot of tofu, probably more than most people. The point is that shad has flavor. Though it’s a big fish and cooks up white like tilapia or catfish, it had an unusually high oil content, which is what makes fish delicious.

Lew has long been invested in convincing people to eat under-appreciated seafood. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, he tried to gin up interest in the culinary potential of sea cucumbers, geoduck clams (an intimidatingly large species native to the Pacific Northwest), and salmon roe. Maybe it’s his parsimonious nature, he says; maybe it’s the influence of his Chinese grandmothers and a food culture in which nothing’s wasted.

His greatest success so far has been with herring, which caught his interest back when he was working as a deckhand in Bristol Bay, Alaska, where herring are caught mostly for their roe. Back in March 2011, Lew was eating sardine toast at the Walrus and the Carpenter, a Seattle restaurant, and thinking “we’ve got some fish as good as this.” He brought in a sample of three frozen herring and gave them to the kitchen. One of the restaurant’s founders, Renee Erickson (who’s since won James Beard award), is a “big fan of small fishes,” says Lew. “It was a natural fit. I started supplying her with frozen fish.”

A couple years later, a skipper friend taught him how to smoke and can fish, using a technique from a village near Nome, where his mom was from. “It’s pretty simple, but there are a couple of tricks that he taught me,” says Lew. “I gave a sample to Renee, and she liked it.” Soon Lew was canning “Deckhand’s Daughter Smoked Herring,” which won a Good Food award this past February.

Lew’s shad will get essentially the same treatment as the herring. “If you just can it, it’s okay, but when you smoke it, that pushes it over the edge,” he says. If he can convince a wider audience that shad is moan-inducingly delicious, he and Kuller, the fisherman, could take advantage of the abundance of shad flooding the Columbia River each season. Oregon and Washington have started giving out experimental permits that allow commercial fisherman to catch shad with a purse seine net, which could reduce the salmon by-catch and make shad a more attractive catch for fisherman. “Warner’s interest has sparked my interest in it,” says Kuller. “There’s a resource that’s kind of untapped right now.”

“We just have to get people to fall in love with it,” says Lew.

The oceans are filled with gold, just floating out there for the taking! The trouble is figuring out how to extract the precious metal. For over a century, dreamers, con artists, mad men, and well-intentioned inventors have been trying to find a way to kickstart an oceanic gold rush. So far, the search for all those riches has proved fruitless. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t still trying.   

According to the National Ocean Service, our oceans hold some 20 million pounds of gold, suspended in normal seawater. But this gold is spread throughout the normal mineral content of seawater to the tune of “parts per trillion.” As the NOAA puts it, “Each liter of seawater contains, on average, about 13 billionths of a gram of gold.” There are also gold deposits within the seafloor, but profitably mining them is far beyond our current abilities.

Nonetheless, gold is gold, and it has a way of making people believe all sorts of speculative things. Ever since British chemist Edward Sonstadt discovered that there was gold in seawater in 1872, there have been those who have tried to capitalize on it, honestly or not.

The earliest, and largest, attempt to mine the oceans for gold took place in the 1890s. And it was all a hoax. The scam began when New England pastor Prescott Ford Jernegan claimed to have invented a “Gold Accumulator” that could suck gold from seawater via a process involving specially treated mercury and electricity.

Claiming that the inspiration for the contraption had come to him in a heaven-sent fever dream, Jernegan, along with childhood friend Charles Fisher, started the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company. Jernegan performed a seemingly successful demonstration of the accumulator to some potential investors, and they were off and running. An attractive prospectus was drawn up that claimed there was “enough gold in the waters of Long Island Sound to pay off the National Debt and leave a larger gold reserve in the Treasury than the Government has yet possessed.” According to the New England Historical Society, by 1898,Electrolytic Marine Salts had garnered around $1 million in investor cash.

The company opened a gold-extraction plant in remote Lubec, Maine, where their operations would be less likely to be inspected. The operation was to use 1,000 of the accumulators to drag the waters for gold. Excitement about the operation became such that work on a second, larger plant began, with the hopes that Lubec might be turned into a gold-rush boom town.

However, in July of 1898, things fell apart. As the shareholders began wanting a closer look at their investment, both Jernegan and Fisher disappeared. According to The New York Times, Jernegen had recently taken out $80,000 in government bonds. It would come out that during the initial demonstration, Fisher had swum down to the accumulator and replaced the pure mercury with his own gold-laced mixture. The accumulators turned out to be little more than trumped-up soup kettles.

When the hoax was exposed, hundreds who had come to Lubec for work were instantly unemployed, the plant was shut down, and the investors were out of their money. Jernegan fled to Europe with his family, and managed to weasel his way out of jail time, while Fisher was simply never heard from again.

This wide-ranging scam may have dampened the initial enthusiasm about the gold in seawater, but it certainly didn’t stop people from dreaming about it.

In 1900, London inventor Henry Clay Bull filed a patent for a “Method of extracting gold from sea-water,” although it doesn’t seem to have been put to use.

In the 1920s, German chemical-weapons developer and Nobel Prize–winner, Fritz Haber sought to refill Germany’s post-World-War-I coffers by developing a process to take gold from the sea. Haber and a team of scientists spent years trying to perfect a profitable extraction method, involving centrifugal force and electrochemistry, before finally realizing he had made a mistake in his initial calculations that had overestimated the potential yield of gold. The project was abandoned. Haber and his team discovered the one major flaw that has plagued every honest attempt to extract gold from seawater: it costs more to get the gold out than the net gold is even worth.     

According to a 1934 article in the Times, an early Dow Chemicals plant on North Carolina’s Kure Beach, which was primarily employed for extracting bromine from seawater, told the American Chemical Society that they would be profitably taking gold from the oceans within a decade. They claimed that, like bromide, which was previously also hard to take from the water, gold (along with silver, radium, and other precious metals) would quickly become an easily separated mineral. In their view, once the “secret” of extracting the gold was discovered, it would be produced as a simple waste product of the bromine extraction process. Unfortunately, the secret was never discovered.

A similar article appeared in the Times in 1941, stating that Columbia professor Colin Fink had developed a method to take gold from seawater as part of the bromide-extraction process. He even filed for a patent for his process in 1942. Once again, this optimism proved unfounded. The article also mentioned that Willard Dow, of Dow Chemicals, had given up his quest for sea gold “after having recovered no more than a pinhead of gold from a ton of seawater.”

As chemical analysis processes improved throughout the 20th century, the minuscule amount of gold in seawater was more accurately determined, and dreams of taking out enough to get rich dwindled. In 1990, New Scientist shared a study that determined that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans contained “1 gram of gold for every 100 million tonnes of sea water.”

Still there are those that are still trying to make the most of this seeming treasure trove. A 2002 article in The Hindu claimed that Indian scientist Joy Prakash Agarwala had developed a new method for extracting gold as a chemical process, although this doesn’t seem to have turned into a font of wealth either.

Maybe the most famous modern case of someone claiming to get gold from the sea is that of biomedical engineer and inventor Mark Sullivan, who developed an engine that claimed to use the planet’s Coriolis Effect to produce energy. As a byproduct, his oceanic turbines would end up filtering gold from the seawater. Sullivan’s invention gained a fair bit of notoriety when he took it on the popular show Shark Tank in 2012 looking for funding. The investors on the show weren’t interested in his generator, but he earned a reputation as a bit of an eccentric inventor, bringing the concept of mining sea gold to modern eyes of a mass audience.

To his credit, Sullivan says that his intention for his generator was never to mine the oceans for gold, but to create clean energy. "My motivation is to help people," he says. The gold just happens to be an enticing natural side effect. To date an operational Sullivan Generator has yet to be implemented, because as Sullivan told us, "it may be 20 years ahead of its time." He says his next major energy project will seek to harness the power of gravitons.

Given our modern understanding of the difficulties surrounding taking gold from seawater, there is still a surprisingly high amount of scammers trying to trick people into thinking it’s a reality. Although looking on gold refining forums, you can still find evidence of people trying to suggest that they’ve developed some secret method.

The century-old quest for the ocean’s gold might seem like a fool’s errand, but the fact remains that seawater is laden with one of our most valuable minerals. It’s not impossible that one day in the future, scientists will develop a way to reach into the water and come out holding a handful of gold. It just might take a lot of time and effort.

Argentina has a complex history of social rebellion, political unrest, and enduring leftist movements. As with most political legacies, Argentine socio-politics have had a way of manifesting themselves in institutions and traditions, whether it’s new forms of government, or plazas named for revolutions that become meeting grounds for citizen protests. One might not expect, however, that revolutionary history would be something that people eat throughout the day.

In Buenos Aires there are perhaps more bakeries than any locally made food shop or restaurant, and it’s here one will find not only tasty baked goods and pastries, but a look at the origins of Argentina’s anarchist movement.

Argentina’s first trade unions formed in the 1880s. The bakers’ union was one of the earliest, organized in 1886 under the leadership of Ettore Mattei, who had been exiled from his native Italy and worked with fellow exiled Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta. Malatesta was commissioned to draft the principles of the union, called la Sociedad Cosmopolita de Resistencia y Colocación de Obreros Panaderos (in English: Cosmopolitan Society of Resistance and Placement of Bakery Workers).

Two years after its founding, the bakers’ union went on strike in Buenos Aires for 10 days, demanding better conditions and higher wages.  Workers clashed with the police and not only stood up for their rights, gaining a 30-percent wage increase, but cleverly manufactured a permanent political mark in their craft itself: the bakers decided to give blasphemous and anti-state names to bread goods that are still eaten daily across the nation.

Anyone who has dined in a cafe or shopped at a bakery in Argentina will immediately recognize menu items such as bolas de fraile, suspiros de monja, vigilantes, cañones, and bombas. For those who don’t speak Spanish, the pointed political metaphors the bakers cooked up start to make sense in translation: monk balls, nun’s sighs, vigilantes, cannons, and bombs.

Monk’s balls, a sweet bun often filled with dulce de leche, can be taken literally as jabbing at the church by offering up a friar’s testicle in pastry form. The nun’s sigh, to put a fine a point on it, can be considered a reference to an orgasm. The other goods are targeted toward the state and the police: vigilantes are made in the shape of a police officer’s baton; the cannons are long, hollow, and filled with a sweet filling; bombas are a choux puff pastry.

Even the Argentinian word for baked goods that are eaten at breakfast, or for late afternoon snacks, has a labor-related meaning. The word is facturas, which, in nearly every other context, means “bill” or “invoice.” The particular, revolutionary names for facturas have remained to this day, and so certainly has an activated working class.

The perseverance of these names can perhaps be explained by the significant political turmoil that dominated Argentina throughout the late 19th century.

The political climate at the time was a dangerous one for radical anti-state leftists, and even moreso for indigenous populations. In 1879, General Julio Argentino Roca led a genocidal military campaign in Patagonia against indigenous Argentines, “physically obliterating” them from the region, according to A. Dinerstein’s America: Organising Hope.

Roca became president of Argentina in 1880, and despite his bloody rise to power, Argentina’s economy grew substantially in the early 1880s as Buenos Aires became a major manufacturing and exportation hub. This was the same time that the country received an influx of Spanish and Italian immigrants, who brought anarchism with them.

In 1886, when the bakers’ union was formed, Roca’s predecessor, Miguel Juárez Celman, was in year two of his presidency (to which he was fraudulently elected), and Buenos Aires saw an explosion of union activity regarding pay and working conditions. A new party formed to take Celman out of office.

Following the bakers' strike in Buenos Aires, other unions and anti-government political parties quickly organized and took action. Rail and steelworkers went on strike in Rosario, Argentina, the same year. The anti-government Youth Civic Union formed in 1889, and rebranded as the Civic Union in 1890, revolted against Celman in the Revolution of the Park. Celman was forced to resign.

In 1901, the largely anarchist Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA) was founded, bringing together 35 unions (the group underwent many divisions and changes throughout the early first decades of the 20th century, but still exists in some form today). The anarchist dockworkers union successfully fought for a nine-hour work day in 1902. Between 1889 and 1910, Global Connections states that anarchists organized six general strikes. The original articles of association written by Malatesta for the bakers’ union served as a model for many of these subsequently formed unions.

The unionization of Argentina’s working class was a struggle in the truest sense of the word, and the radical christening of the facturas can be read as incisive, clever, and celebratory simultaneously. The bakers' union and strikes came at a critical moment of economic growth and political tyranny, the likes of which the nation has experienced in various fashions ever since. While the complicated political landscape continues to shift, the facturas remain.

Broome men crack holy grail of bird watching - rare sighting of Australia's most mysterious bird, the night parrot https://t.co/eyXJgnpC8opic.twitter.com/LGdc4IZeua

— ABC News Perth (@abcnewsPerth) March 22, 2017

A few years ago, a community of night parrots, which were presumed extinct, was discovered in Queensland, Australia, the first such sighting of live night parrots in over 100 years. 

The parrots are very colorful, and yet still known for their elusiveness; for most of the 20th century they simply were not seen. 

But that changed in 2013, with the Queensland sighting, and, now, some bird enthusiasts in Western Australia have snapped a photo (seen above) of a night parrot there, too, confirming their existence in the country's largest state. 

“The calls to us were unfamiliar,” Bruce Greatwich, one of the enthusiasts, told the Guardian. “We are quite experienced in these habitats so to hear something new was quite exciting.”

The bird was initially spotted by another enthusiast as he walked through the grass. That enthusiast then called the others over. 

“We were able to go down and re-find it and we had our cameras at the ready to get a photo,” Greatwich told the Guardian. 

All of which made for a bird-watcher's dream, though if you're looking to find your own night parrot in Western Australia, you won't get any help from Greatwich or his colleagues. The exact location where they captured the bird, they say, will not be made public, to avoid attracting poachers, meaning that for other bird hunters the night parrot will remain almost as elusive as before.

Forget space camp, one U.K. teenager found and corrected a data error on the International Space Station in his free time.

According to the BBC, 17-year-old Sheffield student Miles Soloman, taking part in a project with the Institute for Research in Schools, was looking over a spreadsheet of the radiation data recorded on the space station when he noticed something funny. Down at the lowest levels of the readings, a negative amount of radiation was recorded. Since detecting a negative amount of energy isn’t a thing, Soloman knew something was up.

He contacted NASA with his findings, and they said that while his discovery was appreciated, it was already a known issue. However, scientists thought that the anomaly was only occurring once every few years, but Soloman’s information indicated that the discrepancy was occurring multiple times a day.

His discovery might not have been Earth-shattering, but detecting these kinds of anomalies is just one small, but essential, part of keeping us in space.

In the winter of 1956, the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys went to visit his friend, the painter Pinot Gallizio, in his hometown of Alba, Italy. When he got there, though, he found that Gallizio had some other guests. A community of Roma people, who for years had camped out in the town square when they passed through, had been forced by the local government to move their caravans, and had ended up on Gallizio's property.  They had set up camp on a muddy bit of grassland next to a river—in Nieuwenhuys's words, "the most miserable of patches"—and, in the absence of the city pillars where they normally hung their tents, had built some temporary shelters out of petrol cans and planks.

During his trip, Nieuwenhuys spent a lot of time with the Roma, talking with them and playing flamenco guitar. Seeing the adversity the group faced stirred something in him. As he later recalled, "That was the day I conceived the scheme for a permanent encampment for the [Roma people] of Alba."

As he pursued this idea—and learned more about the ways in which the Roma themselves approached life—his goal slowly expanded. What if, rather than sheltering one group of people in one static structure, all people pursued a mobile, itinerant, interconnected way of living, and all structures reflected that? What would a city designed for such a lifestyle look like?

Nieuwenhuys wanted to find out. For the next 15 years, the artist dropped everything to work on a set of far-out, multimedia plans for what he called New Babylon, which he described as "a camp for nomads on a planetary scale." After sitting in storage for decades, the artworks resurfaced last fall in an exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, in the Netherlands. According to Laura Stamps, the curator of the exhibition, it was right on time: "What he called [nomadism] has, in a way, become a reality for a number of groups of people," from freelancers to refugees, she says. "The world is struggling to deal with this." In her view, Nieuwenhuys's work can help us explore the consequences and possibilities of our ultra-mobile, connected world.

When he started work on New Babylon, Nieuwenhuys was already a renowned painter and sculptor. He had spent his early career as a founding member of the COBRA collective, a European avant-garde movement inspired chiefly by children's drawings.

"The child knows no other law than their spontaneous zest for life, and has no other need than to express this," Nieuwenhuys wrote in the group's manifesto. He saw this attitude as a good counterpoint to his experiences of the adult world, which, he wrote, had "a morbid atmosphere of inauthenticity, lies and barrenness."

In 1953, Nieuwenhuys left COBRA and took up with the New Situationists, a posse of artists and activists convinced that those two pursuits were intertwined. With the help of this interdisciplinary group, he further explored his ideas about contemporary life, and began to think about ways to change it.

After a brief stint in London, during which he walked through the recently bombed city every day, he found himself fixated on how urban environments constrain the lifestyles of their citizens. As the curator Mark Wigley later wrote, Nieuwenhuys eventually came to see the modern city as "a thinly disguised mechanism for extracting productivity," where everything from the overall layout to the structure of individual buildings encouraged particular behavior from people living there.

It was his visit to Alba that brought all of these disparate threads together. If modern cities were built to exclude certain lifestyles, perhaps the key to bringing back the playfulness and freedom of childhood lay not in art, but in architecture. As Nieuwenhuys's original plan for a permanent Roma encampment became something further-reaching, he quickly abandoned all of his other work, selling his old COBRA paintings to fund this new endeavor. After his friend, the theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord, called the emerging project "Babylon," Nieuwenhuys stuck a "New" in front of it, in homage to three exciting cities that already existed— New York, New Delhi, and New Orleans. Then he got to work bringing it to life.

In Nieuwenhuys's vision, New Babylon was a city built for a specific aspect of the human personality: what he called Homo ludens, or "the playful man." After automation took care of production, he thought, people would be free to be purely creative, and would embrace an environment that enabled this. To that end, every single structure in New Babylon would be made from interconnected units called "sectors." The citizens of New Babylon could rearrange these sectors at will to create different types of space, and customize the aesthetic environment within each sector—color, temperature, light, texture—with the help of "technical implements" they carried around.

Nieuwenhuys believed that creating these spaces, and exploring those made by others, would scratch a long-dormant itch in the human psyche. In New Babylon, "life is an endless journey across a world that is changing so rapidly that it seems forever other," he wrote. "Competition disappears… barriers and frontiers also disappear."

When getting these ideas across proved tricky, Nieuwenhuys marshalled a number of different media types. "He tried a lot of ways to communicate his message—everything that was within his reach," says Stamps. He constructed miniatures out of steel and plexiglass, so as to reveal layer upon layer of customized city architecture, and placed them over maps of the Netherlands, Europe, and the world. (This photo shows his pet monkey, Joco, perched atop an early miniature.)

He wrote a detailed manifesto, complete with definitions of relevant terms, and profiles of the city's ideal citizens. He made collages, paintings, drawings, and models of everything he thought the city's citizens might eventually build: huge helix-shaped towers, graceful atria with circular roofs, precarious stacks of boxy sectors connected by ladders.

In 1960, in a speech to a full house at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, he outlined his plan in what Wigley calls a "militant tone," sharing perhaps the most complete iteration of his plans. The interconnected sectors of New Babylon would rest above existing cities, suspended on columns like those the Roma lost when they were kicked out of Alba's town square. Cars would be relegated to the earth below, left to drive on roads that had been paved atop the ruins of what once were factories, and farms and nature preserves would also dot that lower landscape. All roofs would serve as open-air terraces.

Eventually, Nieuwenhuys even built some immersive environments, which he unveiled at different museum exhibitions. Inside, "you could experience a bit what it was like to be a New Babylonian," says Stamps. One example, put up again for last year's Gemeentemuseum exhibition, is "Playful Stairs," a 1968 work in which thin wooden platforms are suspended from the gallery ceiling by thin black chains. Each hangs at a different level, so as to enable a kind of three-dimensional climbing.

While Nieuwenhuys's individual architectural decisions may not have held water—many have since come up again, and been roundly critiqued by urban design professionals—their motivating ideas were potent, and by the late 1960s and early 1970s, at least some of his general spirit had rubbed off on the larger populace. Other cultural movements began citing New Babylon as an influence. "They mean to prove Nieuwenhuys right in his prophecy," one reporter wrote of the Provos, a group of young rabble-rousers who sought to disrupt political traditions and whose slogan was "provoke!" They eventually won a seat on the Amsterdam City Council, where they proceeded to lobby for car-sharing, a public bicycle network, taxes on air pollution, and freely available contraceptives.

And then, in 1974—after 15 years of living and breathing this new world—Nieuwenhuys stopped. At the close of a big exhibition at the Geemeentemuseum Den Haag, he sold all of his New Babylon works to the museum, and returned to painting. "This was as far as I could go," he said later. "The project exists... It is safely stored away in a museum, waiting for more favorable times." (Nieuwenhuys passed away in 2005.)

According to Stamps, those times may have finally come. She sees shades of Nieuwenhuys's ideas in everything from the refugee crisis to smart homes. "The network that Constant envisioned, [with] sectors that were all connected to each other, can be compared with the digital network situation we live in today," she says. She has also noted an influence on young artists, who she says are drawn to experiential installations and aren't afraid of political expression. "A lot of artists today feel strong because of a project like this," she says. Strong—and, Nieuwenhuys would hope, playful, too. 

In Paterson, New Jersey, on Thursday morning, the people of Mill Street saw a surprising creature walking the block—a very large cat that they weren’t quite able to identify.

“One person said it was a tiger,” an animal control officer told The Record. “And a few said it was a bobcat.”

Either way, the cat was much larger than any stray cat one might normally expected to be seen on the streets of Paterson.

Animal control had to tranquilize the cat, which was “out of control,” they told The Record, in order to nab it. The cat then went to Wildlife Freedom, in Wanaque, New Jersey, where it’s being held until the state’s Division of Fish and Wildlife can arrange for different housing. The cat, according to the owner of Wildlife Freedom, is an F1 Savannah Cat, a type of mixed breed that has a serval cat as a father.

These cats are sometimes bought as pets—for a price, which can go up to $30,000. Supposedly they’re more interactive than regular old disdainful house cats. Presumably the cat has an owner but he hasn’t come forward yet. A local CBS station may have tracked him down:

One man claimed to know its owner, and said the cat escaped.

“He left the window open and went back in. Everybody know him, it’s always on the window. Real nice cat,” he said.

But when the station tried to reach the alleged owner, he hung up on the reporter. The state’s committed to caring for the cat until its owner is found, the Associated Press reports.

 

A post shared by Co (@cocoanext) on Feb 25, 2017 at 4:58am PST

“Do you know how many lightning rods you can climb in Shanghai? The answer is 23. Of course, there are many more for us yet to discover.”

That text accompanies the above Instagram post from user cocoanext—one of a ballsy group of Shanghai-based “rooftopper” photographers. His images often show a smog-masked figure, sometimes with a selfie stick in hand, on top of a spire less than a foot wide or similarly seemingly impossible location. The backdrops feature vast panoramas of high-rise buildings, the wide angle splaying their roof tops like grass stalks bending in the wind.

The term “roof topping”—coined in the 2005 urban exploration manual Access All Areas—involves accessing rooftops and other high vantage points of metropolises around the world. Its popularity began soaring  around 2011 with the ascent of social media platforms, particularly Instagram. In China the roofer community is relatively small compared to Western cities, with only about 30-40 people. But in a country sprouting new crops of tall buildings every year, the art has reached new heights. Shanghai is an obvious mecca, with a building program so massive that the city is sinking at around two centimeters—over three-fourths of an inch—per year due to the weight of all the new glass, steel and concrete goliaths. And it’s produced a whole new terra incognita of rooftops to explore, otherwise known only to the construction workers who built them.

 

A post shared by haha (@a.haha.h) on Dec 26, 2016 at 2:25pm PST

In contrast to urban aerial images captured using drones, roof-topper photography exudes a sense of sheer elation at being there. Images often feature a lone figure on a spire, crane boom or precipitous ledge peering into the urban abyss. A tiny human exclamation point in response to the sheer immensity of the vista.  

In one night shot a cyber punky figure climbs a narrow spire above an urban canyon backlit by the street level glow. It’s like an illustrated cover for an Isaac Asimov novel—except that it’s breathtakingly real.

 

A post shared by Jennifer Bin (@jenniferbin) on Sep 13, 2016 at 5:26am PDT

Foregrounds may feature a pair of trouser legs and sneakers hanging nonchalantly over a dizzying drop, reminding you that someone actually managed to climb up there and hold the camera steady—as well as revealing the photographer’s taste in footwear. Sometimes the climbing feats captured are even scarier—like cocoanext’s photo of a mirror-shaded climber clinging one-handed to a thick metal cable on the roof. The images are rich fodder for hungry social media platforms and every week, tens of thousands of followers vicariously enjoy these vertiginous visions on their smartphones.

The core of Shanghai’s roofer community is made up of small, close-knit groups of two to three people, often posting on social media platforms via pseudonyms. Like several of them, cocoanext came to roof topping from the visual arts. “I was a photographer before I started urban exploring, but I was only doing portraits,” he says. “Then two years ago I came across some photos by blackstationwang, a local Shanghainese architecture photographer.”

Since then cocoanext says he’s been inspired to explore the city from a whole new perspective with his team mate roofercyril. On occasion he shoots with a couple of other prominent Shanghai rooftop photographers, panvelvet and jenniferbin. “We don’t have an organization or anything like that, but we have our own social circle.”

Toronto-born Bin works in Shanghai as a UI/UE designer. Reputedly one of the most followed Instagrammers in China, she’s renowned for her bright pink hair and dazzling, sci-fi fandom-infused futuristic posts. This past winter Bin spent over 10 cold overnight hours on a rooftop expedition near the Bund—Shanghai's waterfront area—with two teammates, waiting for the sun to rise. “As the sky became brighter, we were rewarded with low fog following along the river and the sun inching up in the sky.”

With such premium views usually only accessible to an ultra-wealthy penthouse elite, roofers like Bin feel that they’re liberating these views for wider enjoyment. That takes nerves of steel. Reporting for That’s Shanghai, journalist Dominic Ngai tagged along on one of their excursions only to find his legs shaking uncontrollably. The height didn’t seem to bother the experienced photographers he was with—“it’s become part of their lives,” he wrote. 

Extreme tenacity is another roofer prerequisite. It took cocoanext 13 attempts to make it onto his current favorite Shanghai rooftop, the Royal Meridien Hotel. Why go to all that trouble? “The coolest thing about it are its two spires which are the tallest in Shanghai,” he says. “To accomplish something like this is thrilling and full of surprises as well as danger.”

The GoPro selfie he took on the Royal Meridien’s lightning rod is his most prized shot so far.  ”I waited for a whole year for the opportunity to take that photo,” he says. “It is extremely hard to get on that roof, and the possibility of a successful mission is extremely low … therefore the moment that I finally made it was unforgettable.”

Cocoanext is always in search of fresh locations—once he’s posted a new image, other people try to find the place and photograph there, too.

 

A post shared by Co (@cocoanext) on Jan 29, 2017 at 4:33am PST

Despite the obvious dangers, increased social media exposure and copycat activity have increased the numbers of people attempting to access roofs in Shanghai over the past year, and since October 2016 a lot of the coveted locations have been locked and closed down. Cocoanext says that he’s already photographed at most of these sites, so it’s only “inconvenient” when he’s asked to shoot from specific spots for a client. He visits other cities with active high-rise construction like Chongqing from time to time, but avoids cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen where a lot of people have already photographed.

“They feel like tourist sites,” he says. “To take photos from perspectives that dozens of other people have already used, that’s just really boring and uncreative."

When Sheriff Uriah S. Gregory—those who knew him called him Sandy—made his way into disputed territory for the second time, he must have known it would not go well for him.

When he crossed from land that surely belonged to the state of Missouri onto land that might have belonged to the territory of Iowa, there wouldn’t have been much of anything to designate the difference, in the flat expanse of grass and trees. Whatever markers John C. Sullivan had left when he surveyed the line in 1816—scratches on trees, small mounds of sod, the occasional wooden post—would have faded into the landscape in the 23 years since.

But Gregory knew he was heading into an area where he was not welcome. Missouri claimed this land all the way to the Booth line, another survey line drawn in 1836 about nine miles north, but the people who lived here considered themselves part of Iowa. The last time Gregory had crossed the Sullivan line, back in October, he had met a group of locals at a house raising, and when he had explained, carefully, that he had come to collect their taxes on behalf of the state of Missouri, they told him that it would be in his best interest—best for his personal safety—if he went back over the border.

Since then, the border conflict between Missouri and Iowa had tensed into what historians would call “the Honey War,” after some unknown Missourian went over the border and cut down three bee trees filled with honey. It was about to escalate even further.

The trouble that would cause the Honey War began in 1816, with some less-than-perfect surveying work. John C. Sullivan had been tasked with drawing a border described in a treaty with the Osage. He started at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers and marked a line due north, for one hundred miles. That part went well.

When he started working his way east, though, Sullivan’s calculations went wrong. He forgot to account for the difference between magnetic north and polar north, and so as his line went east, it strayed gradually northwards, at a tilt. The errant line ended at the Des Moines river, which would become a point of contention later on. In 1821, when Missouri became a state, the official description used "the rapids of the river Des Moines" as a reference point for the eastern end of Sullivan's line. The Des Moines river didn't have any rapids of note; however, if Sullivan's original line had kept going east, it would have intersected a set of significant rapids in the Mississippi River, which were named, confusingly enough, the "Des Moines rapids."

At the time, these confusions were of little interest to white people: few settlers were interested in that land. About two decades later, though, Missourians and Iowa settlers both were very interested in this stretch of fertile land. In 1837, the governor of Missouri had the border re-surveyed, by John C. Brown. Brown planned to start from the opposite end of the border, the eastern-most point, located—he thought—at rapids in the Des Moines river.

Since that river didn’t really have rapids, Brown kept traveling north along the river until he found a rippling spot of river he liked the look of. “The decision to choose those particular ‘rapids’ was evidently based on nothing substantial,” writes David D. March in The History of Missouri. “They were not the first ‘rapids’ encountered as the men moved up the river...they were no more important than any of the other eleven along the river’s course.” Starting at the this spot, though, moved Missouri’s border about nine miles north of the Sullivan line on its eastern end and about 13 miles north on the western end. (Brown, unlike Sullivan, managed to mark out a straight border line.)

Not long after this second line was drawn, Iowa and the federal government organized a third survey of the same border. At the end of that work, the federal representative, Albert Miller Lea, unhelpfully reported that there were four lines that could legitimately be considered Missouri’s border—the Sullivan line, the straight line Sullivan was supposed to have drawn, the Brown line (the farthest north), or a line south of the Sullivan line that intersected the rapids on the Mississippi river.

That territory, then, was up for grabs. Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs claimed that his state had jurisdiction over the land up to the Brown line—the border most advantageous to Missouri. Iowa Territorial Governor Robert Lucas issued a counter-proclamation that claimed jurisdiction down the Sullivan line and called on local law enforcement to protect Iowa’s land.

This was what Sheriff Gregory was walking into. After his first, failed foray, he had written to Governor Boggs, who issued yet another proclamation urging Missouri law enforcement officials to do their duty and collect taxes up to the Brown line. In 1839, for the second time, Gregory went back into the disputed territory, but this time the Iowa settlers were waiting for him. He was quickly jailed by Sheriff Henry Heffleman and charged with “usurpation of authority.”

The governor of Missouri took this an excuse to rally the militia.

Neither the Missouri militia nor the Iowa militia was very impressive, although all accounts agree that the Missouri militia was larger. They also agree that some of the Iowa recruits showed up with some very creative weaponry, including but not limited to pitchforks, swords left over from the War of 1812, flintlock rifles, a plow blade strung on a chain, a butter churn dasher, a sausage stuffer, and a six-foot sword, of sorts, cut from sheet iron. In the cold of winter, neither side was well-supplied, though, with food or shelter; the Missouri militia raided a store in LaGrange for food. (The state government later reimbursed the store owner.)

Even before the troops had massed along the border, though, more level-headed men were trying to calm tensions rather than, like their governors, inflame them. Various delegations were traveling back and forth across the border, and soon both sides agreed that they probably shouldn’t start an actual war over these lines. The Missouri militia was sent home; the Iowa militia discovered the armed conflict had been called off when they went to look for the Missouri militia and found their enemies gone.

The militia men themselves didn’t actually care that much about the issue at hand. They were just hoping to be paid for their services. But the Missouri militia men, at least, were annoyed enough by the whole ordeal that they acted out a strange pageant to express their disgruntlement. They took a quarter of venison they had shot earlier, divided it into two pieces, and hung both up from a tree. One half was supposed to represent Governor Boggs, the other Governor Lucas. The men “fired a few rounds at them, until we considered them dead! dead!!” reported one participant. The militia then gave the two pieces of venison a mock military burial. “They were interred by the honor of war,” the militiaman wrote. “We fired over their graves, and then returned the encampment.”

Although the most tense part of the war had ended, it would take years for the disagreement over the actual border between the two states to be resolved. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court would decide that the original, crooked Sullivan line was the true border. The line was resurveyed one more time, and this time, the surveyors marked the border with more lasting stone monuments.

Sheriff Sandy Gregory had been moved farther away from the border when the militias started gathering. But after the militia disbanded, he was set free. For another few years, the legal issues from the incident continued to follow him, but the charges against him were eventually dropped. The state of Missouri paid him a handsome $250.75 for his troubles—enough, one hopes, to make up for the trouble his small but key role in this drama caused him.

Portland, Oregon, is known (and sometimes ridiculed) for its staunchly iconoclastic residents and attitude. What not many outsiders know is that the city even has its own iconic drinking fountains, known as Benson Bubblers.

These four-headed brass fonts take their name from the man who gave them to the city, the early 20th century lumber baron and philanthropist Simon Benson. After suffering a number of financial blows, Benson moved to Portland in 1880 to start his life over and got into the logging business, where he was able to make himself a reasonable fortune. He built himself a house, and eventually purchased a hotel that bears his name to this day.

Having established himself as a prominent figure in his adopted home city, Benson decided to give back. In 1912, he made a $10,000 donation to the city specifically to create public water fountains. Benson’s initial grant funded 20 brass drinking fountains, which cost around $500 each. The water stations had a regal, four-bowl design that gave them a unique look, and they burbled out water all throughout the daylight hours. The first Benson Bubbler was placed at SW 5th & Washington, and the rest were installed throughout a segment of what is now downtown Portland.

Benson’s motivations for donating water fountains to the city are unknown, although a couple of theories have become popular among locals. One story goes that Benson, a teetotaler, provided the water fountains to the city as a way to get workers from the various logging mills to stop getting drunk at lunch. Another, more dramatic version of the story says that Benson witnessed a little girl crying at a Fourth of July parade because she couldn’t find a drink of water. “We think Portlanders are more apt to believe the story about keeping loggers out of bars on their lunch breaks,” says Jaymee Cuti, public information officer for the Portland Water Bureau.

Either way, the bubblers proved to be a hit. By 1917, the first 20 water fountains had been put in place, including one in front of Benson’s own home. The city would go on to commission more of the four-headed fountains, including a couple in 1975 that were forged at a local high school to save money on the expensive brass casting.

These days, getting a new bubbler put in place is nearly impossible, even within the city itself. “We lived in an area of the city called Irvington that’s designated as a historic district, so I was on the land use committee,” says Thomas Mertes, a history professor at Linfield College who lived in Portland from 2007 to 2015. “They have been trying for at least the last seven years to get a bubbler put in at the corner of 15th and Broadway.” That's because in the 1970s, the Benson family (Simon passed away in 1942) specifically requested that Benson Bubblers not be installed outside of their chosen boundaries in downtown Portland, since their proliferation would make them less special.

The Bensons got their wish. Today, there are 52 of the bubblers spread across historic downtown Portland, and that’s pretty much the only place you’ll find them. A single bubbler was donated to two of Portland’s nine sister cities, Sapporo, Japan, in 1965, and Suzhou, China, in 2016, and another ended up in a Washington, D.C., museum, but beyond that, the iconic drinking fountains have managed to remain unique to Portland. There are also a further 74 one-bowled versions of the bubblers that were created later, but purists insist that these versions don’t count.

Though many of the fountains are over a century old now, for the most part, they are all still flowing, thanks to devoted conservation efforts. Some small changes have been made to the fountains in order to improve efficiency and conserve water, but otherwise they work just like they did during Portland’s heyday as a timber town, issuing drinking water from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., 365 days a year.

Portland continues to cherish its bubblers. “Part of it is that Portland thinks of itself as being so precious,” says Mertes. “Also, I think they’re a sign of community. A sign of uniqueness. It also has a socio-democratic aspect to it. There was a real sense that the working class actually had some influence and strong traditions in the city, and I think these water fountains speak to that working class ethos.”

The Benson Bubblers are just another facet of Portland that sets the city apart from anywhere else in the world. Just as most Portlanders would have it.

On January 13, 1956, a specially modified Air Force C-119 roared over the Sea of Japan in pursuit of a high priority target. The plane, callsign “Center 39,” suddenly made visual contact with what looked like a huge, translucent teardrop floating 50,000 feet in the air.

The crew quickly typed out a “cut down code” and watched a box drop from the bottom of the teardrop before deploying a set of parachutes. After a painfully tense series of unsuccessful passes, the crew finally succeeded, at 9,000 feet, with the difficult task of snatching the object with a grappling hook extended out of the rear of the aircraft.

This daring aeronautical maneuver was a part of one of the Cold War’s most incredible intelligence gathering stunts. In an effort to gather information from behind the Iron Curtain, the U.S. Air Force launched hundreds of spy balloons to float over the Soviet Union, collect photographic coverage, and hopefully reappear in friendly airspace for midair recovery.

In the days before reconnaissance satellites, balloons were seen as a safer alternative to proposals for manned overflights, and less provocative than plans to attach cameras to cruise missiles. But the audacity of the balloon program also reflected the tremendous appetite for recon information in Washington. In his 1991 history of the Moby Dick program, as it was known, Curtis Peebles describes how “the reconnaissance balloon had the highest national priority of 1-A. The only other project to share this priority was the hydrogen bomb. Knowledge is power.”

The Air Force began work on high-altitude balloon prototypes after World War II, and accelerated the programs during the 1950s. (One of the unintended results of these tests were a crop of purported UFO sightings across the U.S. Southwest.) Through trial and error, they discovered that tropospheric jet streams meander west to east, meaning that balloons released from Western Europe would hypothetically fly over the USSR toward NATO bases in Japan. But flight at this altitude posed its own challenges. To cope with temperatures of -70℉, the balloons employed a special polyethylene that wouldn’t crack in the cold.

The balloons carried a 150-pound metal box with the approximate dimensions of an old television. Inside, a camera, film, and electronics were shielded from the conditions by several inches of styrofoam. Two additional tubs of ballast provided the balloons with rudimentary navigational aids. If sensors indicated a drop in altitude, magnetic valves inside the tubs could gradually release its steel dust to lighten the load.

Altitude was a critical detail, because in addition to taking advantage of the jet stream, balloons cruising at 50,000 feet were hypothetically out of reach of Soviet air defenses. Peebles' history of the program describes optimal flight conditions: “Each morning as the sun rose, the photo cell would turn on the camera. The sunlight would heat the gas, causing the balloon to rise. Later, the gas would cool, causing it to descend. At sunset the balloon would glow red, green and blue in the darkening sky. The fading light would cause the photo cell to shut off the camera, the day’s photo run complete... Each day the cycle would repeat.”

Still, even the most optimistic assessments admitted that there was a possibility that some of the balloons would veer wildly off course. To aid in recovery, a cartoon and multilingual placard was included, encouraging them to be brought to U.S.-allied bases for a reward.  

“THIS BOX CAME FROM THE SKY
IT IS HARMLESS
IT HAS WEATHER DATA IN IT
NOTIFY THE AUTHORITIES
YOU WILL RECEIVE A REWARD IF YOU
TURN IT IN AS IT IS”

The program officially commenced on January 10, 1956, with eight launches from Incirlik, Turkey, and one from Giebelstadt, West Germany. Wave after wave followed over the coming weeks, quickly racking up some 448 successful launches.

On February 4, the Russian ambassador presented the U.S. with a formal protest note, complaining about the “gross violation of Soviet Air Space... incompatible with normal relations between states.” The Russians also started searching for ways to attack the unarmored intruders. MiG pilots discovered that the balloons dropped in altitude at night and were easy prey at first sunlight.

An estimated 90 percent of the balloons either crashed or were shot down in this manner. And on February 6, two days after the Soviet protest, President Eisenhower met with his Secretary of State and ordered an end to the problematic launches.

The loss rate “wasn’t as bad as it sounds,” says Tom Crouch, senior curator of the Division of Aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum. That’s because the 44 surviving balloons came back with 13,813 photos covering over a million square miles of Sino-Soviet territory, roughly 8 percent of the nations' landmass. Peebles concurs in his book, writing that the cost per square mile was "$48.49... significantly cheaper than the cost of getting mapping coverage of the U.S., then or now.” In the end, the balloon program provided illuminating information about Soviet infrastructure, and led to the discovery of a huge nuclear facility at Dodonovo, Siberia.

Soviet scientists examining the captured balloons also got something out of the program. Inside the hundreds of downed cameras they found temperature-resistant, radiation-hardened film that promised to solve a problem that their outer space program had been struggling with. When the Luna 3 probe recorded the first pictures of the far side of the moon in 1959, it did so using captured American film.

Good news for fans of Mark Twain and competitive frog jumping competitions: California’s endangered red-legged frog, the star species of the author’s breakout short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, is making a comeback!

When Twain wrote the 1865 story, the frogs were abundant, and they were later named the official amphibian of California.

But since the story's publication, their numbers have sharply declined, due to everything from loss of habitat to invasive species. Today, they are federally listed as a threatened species, and are protected by law.

But legal protection can’t make frogs have babies. Luckily, years of conservation and reintroduction efforts can, and to their elation, scientists with the National Park Service recently found nine egg clusters in the Santa Monica Mountains. These new batches of eggs are evidence that their efforts to regrow the red-legged frog population are working. 

The hope is that some of these eggs can be transplanted to other regions, and bolster the frogs’ population across the state, all the result of some animal sex that Twain himself would surely be delighted by.

For centuries, fishermen off Newfoundland fished cod, which remained plentiful until the early 1990s, when their populations, the Canadian government found, fell off a cliff. 

And so a moratorium on fishing cod was declared, giving the fish a breather and a chance to recover, which they have in impressive numbers, National Post reported Thursday. The only downside? The return of the cod has come at the expense of another commonly caught seafood: shrimp. 

That's because both shrimp and tiny fish called capelins feed on zooplankton, and the cod, in turn, feed on the capelins to survive the winter. And capelin and shrimp, it turns out, are not great at coexisting. 

“You can’t have both,” Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, told the National Post. 

For now, the capelins appear to be winning, which has been a boon for cod but bad for shrimp fishermen, who are contending with government-imposed quotas that are increasingly smaller.

For those that have built lives relying on shrimp, that means yet more unpredictability in a business that already contains a fair amount of surprises.

"I started at this fishing when I was 14 years old," one fisherman, Theodore Genge, told the National Post. "There was never a year that looked good before you started. I’ve survived. With fishing you’ve either got to go in or get out."

Tom Gibson was working as a milkman when he started collecting trains; he bought his first set from one of his milk customers. Later in life, he was able to turn his hobby into a profession, when he opened Teddies and Trains, a toy store, in Sacramento.

Gibson’s own train collection was extensive. But his family had no idea exactly how large it was until after he died of a rare blood disease and they went to his warehouse.

"We knew he had a warehouse, we just didn't know how big the collection was until we opened it up," his daughter told local station KXTV.

Gibson’s train warehouse was giant—about the size of a basketball court, according to KXTV—and full of trains, dating all the way back to the 1900s. Many of the pieces were still in boxes and are now for sale: Gibson's family didn't inherit the train collecting gene. For anyone who loves model trains, though, the warehouse could be a treasure trove.

Do you have $1.5 million lying around? Do you want to spend it on your very own town? Today is your lucky day—the village of Reduction, Pennsylvania has been on the market for nearly half a year, waiting for a buyer with equal amounts of cash and vision.

At its start, Reduction was, literally, a garbage town—it was built in the early 20th century for employees of the nearby American Reduction Company, a waste management facility that processed trash from Pittsburgh, TribLive reports.

The trash plant is now gone, along with many of the original buildings. But the town still boasts farmland, a one-room schoolhouse, and 19 homes—some of which have river views. About 60 people live there.

The property is currently owned by Dave Stawovy, the son of a dairy farmer, John Stawovy, who bought Reduction in 1948 for about $10,000. Dave is now trying to sell it for about 150 times that, saying he can't keep up with the operating costs. "I've got to be the mayor, the fire marshal and the dogcatcher," he told TribLive.

If that sounds like your kind of life, you can check out the property listing here.

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.

During World War II, the painter, illustrator, and cartoonist William Gropper offered his services to the U.S. Treasury Department and the White House’s Office of War Information. He received a “Citation in recognition of fine assistance” from the Treasury Department and personal thanks from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for “giving pictorial form to specific war information objectives” through propaganda posters and paintings. It seemed logical that after the war, the State Department, too, would find value in the famous artist’s social-realist portrayal of American culture—a logic that would soon find Gropper trapped within the surrealist labyrinth of McCarthyism.

Between 1946 and 1953, the State Department’s Overseas Library Program collected and distributed some 1,744 copies of William Gropper’s America: Its Folklore, a colorful depiction of 61 legends, tall tales, and literary heroes—characters like super-sized cowboy Pecos Bill in New Mexico, steel-driving phenom John Henry in Alabama, and witty trickster Br’er Rabbit in Georgia—superimposed over a familiar projection of the Lower 48.

The purchase was part of postwar efforts to disseminate “facts and solidly documented explanations of the United States.” Based on a painting Gropper completed in 1945, the 34-by-23-inch pictorial map was published by Associated American Artists, and sold by mail order—$5.00 unframed, $14.50 mounted—in the New York Times, Life, and other popular publications. An accompanying 16-page brochure told viewers more about Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and their folkloric ilk.

While the State Department exploited the map’s propaganda potential abroad—its playful characterization of America as a fun-loving, welcoming, and, most important, free land—librarians and teachers took advantage of its educational usefulness at home. Throughout the late ’40s and early ’50s, newspapers from coast to coast ran stories about students studying literature with the help of America: Its Folklore. Municipal libraries even lent framed copies, making it easy for students to show off their newfound knowledge at home.

But the cartographic darling fell from grace in the spring of 1953, when attorney Roy Cohn toured State Department libraries around the world as part of his and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against Communism. Cohn identified William Gropper as one of the “fringe supporters and sympathizers” whose supposedly Communist-directed works had infiltrated the Overseas Library Program. Gropper was promptly subpoenaed to appear before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—and earned the dubious distinction of being among the first blacklisted artists in McCarthy-era America.

Gropper arrived on Capitol Hill looking “as rumpled as the sofa in front of the television set,” as one commentator observed. Surrounded by Klieg lights, television cameras, police, and press, his interrogation began simply, with chief counsel Cohn asking, “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” As far as Cohn and McCarthy were concerned, they already knew the answer. But after the artist invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer so as not to bear witness against himself, Cohn pressed:

Mr. Cohn: Are you the William Gropper who has prepared various maps?
Mr. Gropper: I don’t understand that question. Prepared various maps?
Mr. Cohn: Did you prepare a map entitled “America, Its Folklore”?
Mr. Gropper: Have you got the map here?
Mr. Cohn: No; I don’t have the map here. Did you prepare a map entitled “America, Its Folklore”?
Mr. Gropper: I painted a map on American folklore, yes.

Gropper explained that he had received an advance from Associated American Artists, but that “no royalties came in.” Cohn wanted to know if part of Gropper’s advance had supported Communist causes. Again, Gropper pleaded the Fifth Amendment. When Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri asked the painter if an individual “could be a member of the Communist party and at the same time be a good, loyal American,” Gropper demurred: “I would rather talk about my field, where I am equipped. I don’t understand these things.” Moments later, Gropper tried to distance himself further from his celebrated pictorial map, explaining, “I don’t even make maps. I am a painter.”

No matter that Gropper had, in fact, tried his hand at mapmaking; no matter that Gropper was not, in fact, a Communist. The damage was done. The next day, the left-leaning, 55-year-old Jewish artist from Brooklyn found his name on the front page of national and local newspapers. The message sent down from McCarthy’s perch in the Senate was clear: William Gropper was a Red. His map was un-American.

There is nothing immediately offensive or subversive about America: Its Folklore. True, contemporary folklore purists may have taken issue with it for including so-called tall tales and legends that originated in print culture rather than oral tradition (Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle appears, for example, as do Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and E.E. Hale’s Philip Nolan). But to quibble with the American scene that Gropper depicted would be scholarly inside-baseball indeed. What matters is that overnight—thanks to what he would later describe as the “American Inquisition”—his work became the most notorious pictorial map in history.

Today extant copies of America: Its Folklore are exceedingly rare. The Library of Congress has two examples, while the Illinois State Library and the University of Michigan each have a copy, as do a handful of others. Well-loved survivors do surface from time to time—a paltry $9.99 on eBay in 2010, $120 from a pair of pickers in Michigan in 2017—but never with the original supplementary brochure.

One could argue that the blacklist led to the map’s erasure from popular culture, and there is some evidence to support that interpretation. The State Department systematically destroyed its 1,744 copies. Surely many domestic institutions did the same. But even after America: Its Folklore scandalized Washington and led to the downfall of its creator, teachers continued to use it in their classrooms.

Indeed, another way to explain the map’s scarcity today is through its enduring popularity yesterday. Teachers, librarians, and especially students literally used it to pieces (and most copies that do survive bear physical witness to that use). Perhaps the greatest testament to its contemporary appeal is the vacuum it left when thousands of copies were destroyed on purpose and countless more were destroyed by exchanging hands in classrooms, public libraries, and living rooms.

Within a year of Gropper’s Capitol Hill evisceration, the National Conference of American Folklore for Youth began selling a similarly sized, similarly whimsical American Folklore & Legends by John Dukes McKee, because, as the English Journal put it, teachers across the country “kept asking for [it].” And after that map went out of print a few years later, the General Drafting Company produced Frank Soltesz’s Folklore and Legends of Our Country in 1960 for distribution in Esso gas stations—the perfect cartographic distraction for kids in the back of the family station wagon, while their parents argued about politics.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

Captain Cook's waistcoat passes at auction but local buyer in negotiations with sellerhttps://t.co/yMF1mHlDNVpic.twitter.com/yy4q6doLXf

— ABC News Sydney (@abcnewsSydney) March 26, 2017

Even though he was first European to sail around New Zealand, explore certain parts of Australia, and make landfall on Hawaii, Captain James Cook’s waistcoat failed to sell at auction Sunday. The reason? The price: The coat was valued at over $800,000, but bids only reached as high as around $438,000

According to ABC.net.au, the explorer’s coat, which was being auctioned off by Sydney, Australia’s Aalders Auctions, is one of the more prominent pieces of Cook memorabilia they’d ever put on the block.

The coat had been in the possession of Cook’s family after his death in 1779, before passing into the hands of a wealthy industrialist, who then gifted it to a prominent Australian pianist, who had it fitted for a female and actually took to wearing it to formal events. Eventually, it went to a private seller who connected it with Aalder Auctions. It remains in remarkably good shape (save for a wine stain from its time with the pianist).

And while there were no takers to meet the reserve during Sunday’s auction, a high bidder is said to be in negotiations to purchase the jacket. It, in other words, probably won’t be unsold for much longer.

The current U.S. passport includes 13 inspirational quotes from notable Americans. Only one belongs to a woman, the African-American scholar, educator, and activist Anna J. Cooper. On pages 26-27 are words she wrote in 1892: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

If equality is a journey, then it should come as no surprise that passports have helped American women to cross some of society’s most entrenched cultural borders for more than a century.

U.S. passports predate the Declaration of Independence, but the documents were issued on an ad hoc basis until the late 1800s, when the process began to standardize. By then, a single woman was issued a passport in her own name, but a married woman was only listed as an anonymous add-on to her husband’s document: “Mr. John Doe and wife.”

“Restrictions on travel rarely took the form of government policy or officials actively preventing women traveling abroad. Rather, restrictions came in the form of accepted social ideas,” says Craig Robertson, author of Passport in America: History of a Document.“Put simply, it was not acceptable for a married woman to travel outside of the country without her husband; he, of course, could travel without her. More generally, a married woman’s public identity was tied to her husband, and passports reflected that in being issued to the husband, with his wife being a literal notation.”

Married women were technically required to apply for independent passports if they planned to travel separately from their husbands, though Robertson didn’t find examples of those applications existing before WWI.

The lack of a paper trail may be due to the fact that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most countries didn’t yet require passports in order to enter (Russia and Turkey were notable exceptions). So the absence of a passport wasn’t a deal-breaker for women who wanted to travel independently but found the “passport nuisance” too cumbersome or expensive to bother with.

However, Robertson says that while a passport was not necessarily required, it did represent a written request for protection and assistance from the government. “At least from an official perspective, the passport offered a single woman traveling alone the protection that it was assumed a married woman would get from her husband,” he says.

As the passport continued to evolve as an official marker of American citizenship, it attracted the interest of women’s rights activists. Shortly after her wedding in 1917, writer Ruth Hale applied for a passport under her maiden name before departing for France to work as a war correspondent. Her request was denied, and when Hale returned to New York a year later, she embarked on what became a lifelong crusade to use her maiden name on legal documents. In 1920, Hale was issued a passport under the name “Mrs. Heywood Broun, otherwise known as Ruth Hale.” She returned the document, and though the State Department experimented with various alternative phrasings, Hale never received a passport she found acceptable.

Instead, the bureaucratic back-and-forth inspired Hale to co-found the Lucy Stone League, a group dedicated to protecting a woman’s right to her maiden name. “The Lucy Stone League saw passports as the most important battle of all because passports were the ultimate form of identification,” says Susan Henry, author of Anonymous in Their Own Names: Doris Fleischman, Ruth Hale, and Jane Grant.“A married woman who kept her name would truly preserve her independent identity if her passport name was her birth name. Beyond that, the Lucy Stone League assumed that if the State Department recognized a married woman’s birth name as her legal name, then all government bodies would have to do the same.”

In 1922, a press agent named Doris Fleischman dropped a steamer ticket to Europe along with an ultimatum to her boss, the publicist Edward L. Bernays: “If you’re not going to marry me, I’m leaving.” Bernays duly proposed, and Fleischman decided to go to Europe anyway. With the help of the “Lucy Stoners,” Fleischman applied for a passport under her maiden name, and in April 1923, she received a document issued to “Doris Fleischman Bernays, professionally known as Doris E. Fleischman.” She then embarked on a three-month business trip across Europe — without her new husband. (Her adventures included delivering a dozen tins of coffee and a crate of grapefruits to Sigmund Freud in Vienna.)

In 1925 the Lucy Stoners encouraged Fleischman to take another crack at the State Department, in order to prod the agency into overturning its rule against issuing passports to married women solely in their maiden names. “Despite arguments about whether a married woman could be known and identified through her maiden name, much of the official concern seemed to be about the ‘embarrassment’ of the perception it would create, i.e. that although a married man was traveling with his wife, it would appear that he was traveling with a single woman because she did not have his name,” says Robertson of the agency’s reluctance to capitulate.

This time, Fleischman added a note to her passport application, which read: “Since it is apparent that the purpose of a passport is to establish identity, I assume you will not wish me to travel under a false name.” Though other women had recently filed similar suits, Fleischman’s application set off a press firestorm, thanks in no small part to her expertise as a publicist. In June, a passport was issued to “Doris E. Fleischman,” who promptly set sail for France, this time with her husband in tow.

Fleischman’s passport was the first legal document issued by a federal agency to a woman under the name she preferred and the first U.S. passport issued to a married woman that didn’t designate her as the “wife of” her husband. However, though other women could request passports with similar wording as Fleischman’s, the State Department continued to issue passports referring to most women as “the wife of Mr. John Doe” until the late 1930s.  

The decision to drop marital information entirely was unceremoniously announced in a 1937 memo by longtime Passport Division head Ruth Shipley, who later became notorious for denying passports to suspected communists during the Cold War. Shipley’s memo was surprisingly straightforward considering the length and public acrimony of the battle over a woman’s right to travel under the name of her choice. It read in part: “because our position would be very difficult to defend under any really definite and logical attack, it seems the part of wisdom to make the change.”

And with that, women’s rights advocates gave American passports their stamp of approval.

Around 10 years ago, the Royal Canadian Mint, which produces both coins for regular use as currency and some designed especially for collectors, produced a very large coin, nearly two feet in diameter and over an inch thick, with a legal value of one million Canadian dollars. 

The coin, like some others produced by the mint, was made of pure gold—at least 99.999 percent pure, the highest of any bullion coin in the world. It wasn't meant to be spent so much as to be looked at, and at 221 pounds, it's not exactly pocket change. 

Since 2010, the coin has been on display at the Bode Museum in Berlin until, early Monday morning, it went missing. Thieves—likely more than one for reasons that should be apparent—snuck in through a window and made off with the prize around 3:30 a.m., apparently with the assistance of a ladder later found near some railroad tracks, according to the Associated Press. 

Police didn't say much about who they think pulled off the heist, or if they had surveillance footage or other evidence, but it's safe to assume that whoever took the coin didn't take it at face value. The gold alone, at current market rates, is worth $4.5 million.

Quick—what does a brain sound like?

Time's up! The answer is, of course, "nothing." If you said "lightning and sparks," though, you're forgiven. Odds are good that every "trip" you've taken inside the brain has featured a CGI image of squiggly gray matter, accompanied by the sizzling sound of electricity.

This and other sonic clichés—blood whooshing through veins, organs squishing and pulsing—are as much a part of a certain type of hour-long TV drama as a plot twist before a commercial break. They're also a staple in documentaries, where such sounds accompany visuals depicting smaller dramas, like the journey of a blood cell, or the ravages of puberty.

The professionals who add sound to these environments have the difficult job of taking us inside the human body, a place both intimately familiar and almost impossible to access. So where do they get their auditory touchstones? And how do they keep them fresh—or, at least, fresher than the corpses they're sometimes asked to soundtrack?

For many film and television sound designers, the first step involves diving right in—literally. "I start, sonically, underwater," says Michael Babcock, who has taken viewers inside bodies for several TV shows, including Preacher and Limitless. He traces this approach back to his childhood, when a Walt Disney documentary taught him that the human body is mostly water. "I imagine what things sound like in a pool or an ocean, or even a bathtub under the water line," he says. He then recreates those effects in his studio.

Chad J. Hughes, who was the assistant sound designer for over 100 episodes of CSI, concurs. "Any time you remove outside noise that involves air hitting the eardrum"—for instance, by dunking your head underwater—"it can give you the sensation of what it's like inside of a body… those gurgling sounds," he says. Hughes says he's used an underwater microphone to record people swimming, and then used that to simulate the sound of blood flowing through a vein.

Other times, he records props on dry land and tweaks them with effects. "Anything that squishes, or makes an organic kind of noise—you can take a sound like that, pitch it way down, slow it down, and roll the high frequencies off," he says. "It then gives you that sense of muted, fluid motion." (Squishy objects, like raw chickens or hair gel, are especially helpful for digestion scenes: for the IMAX film The Human Body, Anthony Faust and Kenny Clark recorded themselves stirring around a mixture of wallpaper paste and spaghetti.)

A supercut of scenes depicting bodily processes—like hair growing or cells dying—gathered by Svein Hoier. 

More familiar sounds, such as gurgling stomachs or gushing blood, are one thing. But what if the camera travels somewhere less accessible—inside the brain, for instance? Svein Hoier, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, recently analyzed hundreds of "inside the body" scenes from popular educational miniseries, crime shows, and medical dramas produced over the past two decades, and published his results in The New Soundtrack.

Every CGI brain he came across, in documentaries and fictional shows alike, made the same type of noise: a crackling, electric hiss. "Visuals that show the firing of neurons are combined with sound effects connected to the various sounds of electricity," he writes. (Hoier traces this convention back to a particular episode of Body Stories, an educational anatomy show that aired on the Discovery Channel in the late 1990s.)

Hoier found that many more outwardly silent bodily activities had acquired standard sound effects, too. In films and TV shows, straining muscles squeak against each other, intestinal valves smack open and shut, and dying brain cells "pop" out of existence. When strands of hair grow, they sound like creaking sailboat ropes, or trees bending in a windstorm. Even though viewers know these sounds are invented, they generally don't question them. "[There is an] understanding of such sounds being illustrative rather than documenting the inside of bodies," says Hoier. The use of CGI, rather than live-action film, helps with this separation.

But how do sound designers come up with them in the first place—and why is there such unity across genres? According to Hughes and Babcock, those decisions are mostly based on the infrastructural makeup of the body, and the idea that, as the camera zooms through this environment, it's encountering different materials. "If there's a bone, we're going to hear cracking," says Hughes. "If it's something like an organ, it's going to be coddled, given some movement."

Having baseline sounds that conform to viewer expectations also gives designers raw materials with which to craft drama and emotion. On the show Preacher, which follows a priest possessed by a devil and features scenes in which the camera travels from a "demonic" heart up through the esophagus, "the challenge was to make the sound [go with] the violence of the visual," says Babcock. What did this usually sound like? "Heartbeats topped with explosions," he says.

A supercut of CGI "brain scenes," compiled by Hoier.

The many creative deaths of the CSI franchise make for a series of auditory challenges. In one episode, Hughes says, the camera zooms in on its first victim, a very burned body. "When we're close to the body, we're hearing more practical elements like the crackling and the charring," he says. "Very subtle, but we're selling that this body has been overcooked." If they had gone even further in, he might have replaced the standard underwater plunge with the sound of a volcano. "Maybe a low rumble, with charred embers simmering," he imagines.

It may be gruesome, but to its practitioners, it's an art. "We ask, 'What is the story trying to tell at that moment?'" says Hughes. "Then we come in with our set of tools." Those tools just happen to be underwater microphones, volcano recordings, and giant bags of paste and spaghetti—the craziest parts of the outside world, used to bring us inside ourselves.