Boardwalk. St. Charles Place. Atlantic Avenue. If you grew up playing Monopoly, you’ll be familiar with these place names. While they may sound like they’re from a generic U.S. city, dreamt up by the game’s inventor, they exist in real life—in Atlantic City, New Jersey. But they are no longer what they once were.

Today Atlantic City has a reputation as a destination for coach-loads of seniors looking to spend a day at the slots. But when Parker Brothers first produced Monopoly in 1935 it was one of the most luxurious and famous resorts in America. Grand hotels, saloons, dance halls and theaters stretched along the Atlantic Ocean for seven miles. The casinos were still 40 years away, but cocktails flowed for over half-a-million pleasure-seekers every year.

Part of Atlantic City’s appeal was in being open to everyone; from the well-heeled promenading down the Million Dollar Pier, lit by Thomas Edison, to the bawdier pubs and bordellos along the backstreets. “Businessmen learned quickly,” wrote Nelson Johnson in Boardwalk Empire, “working-class tourists had money to spend, too. What they lacked in sophistication they made up for in numbers.”

One of the last traces of old Atlantic City is the Claridge Hotel. Found on the corner of the two most expensive properties on the Monopoly board—Park Place and Boardwalk—the Claridge was known in its heyday as the “skyscraper by the sea.” Opened in 1930, it had an Art Deco opulence that wouldn’t be out of place in midtown Manhattan.

Stepping outside though, you are very quickly confronted with the grim air of the new Atlantic City.

Running alongside the hotel is Indiana Avenue, one of the highly desirable “reds” in Monopoly. It was once home to the iconic Sands Casino, whose Copa Room had been graced by Frank Sinatra. Bankrupt and demolished in 2006, it was repurposed into Artlantic, a public art project hoping to revitalize the beachfront after Hurricane Sandy. The project failed, and, like much of Atlantic City, was torn down.

When playing Monopoly, there’s nothing quite as pleasurable as having your opponent land on one of your properties filled with houses or hotels, then squeezing them ever closer to bankruptcy while watching your cash roll in. According to Parker Brothers, Monopoly was created by Charles Darrow, a heating engineer from Pennsylvania, put out of work by the Great Depression. “It was the game’s exciting promise of fame and fortune,” the rules explain, “that initially prompted Darrow to produce this game.”

But that doesn’t tell the whole story of Monopoly; for the game was actually invented a generation before, by a woman. Elizabeth Magie worked as a stenographer, writer and actress. At the age of 37 she came up with the idea for a board game that would show the dangers of greed and economic privilege of monopolists like John D. Rockefeller through the entertaining medium of a parlor game. In 1903 she filed the patent for “The Landlord’s Game” based upon Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty.

It might have been forgotten altogether except for a dinner party held in Philadelphia in 1932. After dessert, the Landlord’s Game was brought out. One of the guests, Charles Darrow, asked for a copy of the rules as he left, and he produced his own version, which included Atlantic City street names.

Off-seasons in most seaside resorts are subdued, but Atlantic City holds an especially sombre feel, a garishly decorated ghost town, where many of the grand casinos are empty, bankrupt and abandoned.

Atlantic City has been through this before; following World War II, automobiles and cheap airfares drew away the holiday makers who once packed the trains from New York and Philadelphia, but now summered in destinations slightly more exotic than New Jersey.

Grand old hotels like the Marlborough-Blenheim on Park Place, which had been inspired by ancestral palace of the Duke of Marlborough, and the exclusive Traymore on Illinois Avenue—a hotel so opulent it was capped in gold—fell empty. As Atlantic City turned barren and boarded up, the city tried to reinvent itself, and turned to casinos.

In 1976, the Resort Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue (green on the Monopoly board) was transformed into the first legal U.S. casino outside of Nevada. Over the next two decades, gamblers flocked to Atlantic City as glitzy new high-rise casino resorts jostled for space along the Boardwalk. One local resident told NPR, “one of my fondest memories is ... standing on the Boardwalk while people lined up to get in the casino. Ten o'clock in the morning, security guards open the door and these people, with their coin cuffs and change, ran—ran—to the slot machines.”

These vast, billion-dollar, behemoths offered every pleasure imaginable. And none were as spectacular as Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal. Today it sits empty on S. Virginia Avenue (pink), the latest of the grand casinos to fail. As gaudy as it was luxurious, with 72 gold minarets and nine elephants, it opened in 1990 at a cost of $1 billion, with Michael Jackson as the star guest. Trump boasted that its gambling floor, the world’s largest, was the “eighth wonder of the world.” Even though Trump sold his ownership in 2009, the enormous, towering Taj Mahal still bears his name.

By the time the Taj opened, cash-rich Atlantic City was dominated by Trump. At one point his casinos were generating a third of all gambling money in the city.

This was the second golden age of Atlantic City, an era when Mike Tyson held all his fights here, when gambling money flowed into the casinos. But for some, the warning signs were already there. One market analyst, Marvin Roffman, compared the city to a house of cards. As newer casinos sprouted up in Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania, the crowds left Atlantic City. Crippled with debt, Roffman told the Wall Street Journal that the Taj Mahal alone needed $1.3 million a day just to survive.

One by one, the hulking casino hotels along the shoreline began to fold. The Playboy was the first to go in 1989, consumed by Trump’s World’s Fair, which itself failed a decade later. Trump Plaza, where high roller Akio Kashiwagi once lost $10 million in one of the most famous games of baccarat ever played, closed in 2014. Three other casinos closed the same year, devastating Atlantic City’s economy. The Taj Mahal finally closed in October 2016. Today it sits silent and forlorn, a golden folly on the seashore. Even though it’s been abandoned for a matter of mere months, the gilded paint is already beginning to peel.

As the casinos struggled, so did Atlantic City. Over a third of the 40,000 residents now live below the poverty line. On Pacific Avenue (yellow), prime real estate on the Monopoly board, vacant lots and boarded-up homes provide a desolate backdrop for one of the most violent cities in New Jersey, where five of the last nine mayors have been found guilty of some form of corruption.

At the far end of the deserted boardwalk are the light-blue streets of Oriental and Vermont Avenues. Here sits one of the most astonishing projects built on the east coast, the 52-story Revel. The casino hotel was built for over $2 billion in 2012, completely covered in blinding mirrored glass and chrome. The Revel was to be the great hope for Atlantic City. But within two years it was bankrupt and closed.

In the shadow of this gleaming mirrored empty monolith are a few, surviving old wooden row homes, belonging to those who refused to move. Nowhere is the difference starker between old and new Atlantic City than a walk along Oriental Avenue.

As desperate as the situation in Atlantic City seems, there are some green shoots of recovery. Caesar’s Palace, Bally’s and the Tropicana are still open on the Boardwalk, and the Borgata is the model of a successfully run, high-end casino, located a few miles northwest.

At the far end of the Boardwalk is one of the last traces of the Atlantic City of Boardwalk Empire. The venerable Knife and Fork seafood restaurant, which opened in 1912, still thrives with locals. When Monopoly came out, Atlantic City was a pleasure palace filled with holiday makers. Ironically, given how the board game is played, the race to buy up property and develop hotels has all but ruined Atlantic City. Today in winter it feels like a gilded ghost town, dominated by bankruptcy and the threat of unemployment—a startling modern parable to the perils of greed and gambling, you can’t help but think that Elizabeth Magie would sadly nod her head and say “I tried to warn you.”

Basking Ridge, New Jersey, is saying goodbye to one of its oldest and most famous residents: a 600-year old oak tree.

Predating the town that currently surrounds it, the massive white oak tree is thought to be the oldest of its kind in North America. And, as CBS New York notes, the tree would have been standing at the time of Columbus. These days, it's located next to a Presbyterian church, its roots tied up in a Revolutionary War cemetery at its feet.

But despite six centuries of staying power, the tree was declared dead last year, the apparent victim, the New York Times has said, of old age and some volatile weather. Now it's being cut down completely, to protect the church and cemetery below.

The cut wood from the old tree will be used to make crosses and mementoes for churchgoers, and since the roots are likely tangled up in the historic human remains, the stump will also be left in place, and a plaque will be put on the site.

Also nearby: a newer, 25-foot tree nearby that was grown from an acorn dropped by the original. In a very real way, in other words, the old white oak might still live on.

Dutch Schultz, whose given name wasn't Dutch Schultz, had a lot of secrets.

Fatally shot in 1935 while urinating at the Palace Chop House and Tavern in Newark, Schultz was a noted gangster in a time of noted gangsters, when men such as Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel walked the Earth. And, like many of his peers, Schultz had a lot of business interests, one of which was bootlegging, an activity which made a lot of criminals rich. Schultz was also, authorities later found out, running an underground distillery in Pine Plains, New York, that was largely forgotten until recently.

Today, that distillery is operating again under the name Dutch's Spirits, and its CEO, Lydia Higginson, says that the new—completely legit, this time—operation is still unearthing the remnants of Schultz's original activities. "There's some critters down there," Higginson said, referring to a system of underground bunkers (and the animals that populate them) that Schultz used to conceal his distillery from the prying eyes of the feds.

The bunkers have since been excavated and opened to visitors, but before 2010 they were mostly a local rumor. Like a separate rumor of buried treasure in nearby Phoenicia, they might've just lived on as an urban legend, had the owners of the site not done some digging and rediscovered the reason why agents, in 1932, raided what appeared to be a quiet Hudson Valley farm. Some 15,000 gallons of mash and two 2,000-gallon stills were destroyed in the process, though Schultz himself somehow avoided charges.

All of this suggests that Schultz, who was 33 when he died, probably would have liked that his eponymous liquor operation is up and running again, at the site where he first built one. He'd have appreciated the attention, too, since like a lot of gangsters of his era, Schultz liked publicity. He had even changed his given surname, Flegenheimer, to Schultz, because the latter "was short enough to fit in the headlines."

Schultz also, at one point, became something of a media critic, after seeing some language he disliked in The New York Times. Schultz, the paper wrote in a 1933 story, was "a pushover for blondes," a fact that Schultz himself did not dispute. His beef, rather, was that the phrase appeared in what ostensibly was a family newspaper. ''I only remember it made me feel bad when I saw it in The Times," Schultz said then. "I don't think 'pushover for a blonde' is any kind of language to write for a newspaper like The Times.''

A little over two years later, Schultz was dead, the victim of a hit by other mobsters, who were angry that he did not agree to abandon his plan to assassinate the prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey (who died, of natural causes, in 1971).

Still Schultz's legacy lives on, in the form of a largely unsourced Wikipedia page and in Dutch's Spirits, a local, "farm-to-bottle" distiller that's thriving in part because of the law, not despite it. The Farm Distillery Act, which then-governor Eliot Spitzer signed into law in 2007, has facilitated a boom in distilleries across the state, including Dutch's Spirits, which was founded in 2010 and made a name for itself selling moonshine. Higginson says that the current governor, Andrew Cuomo, has continued to encourage the development of such small distilleries. "I think Governor Cuomo realized that this would be another value-added product," she said. "I’m not saying it’s easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it does facilitate the growing of crops and the ability to do it."

For now, however, the distilling takes place off-site, while corn and soon rye are being cultivated on site, where there's also a tasting room. A 12,000-square-foot barn intended to house stills is in the works. The ghost of Schultz, meanwhile, still lurks, providing something of a competitive advantage, though Higginson says that any rivalries (two other distilleries operate in Dutchess County alone) are pretty friendly.

"When I try to explain to Europeans that our country could not legally drink for 10 years their eyes light up," she says, adding what she thinks makes Dutch's unique "It’s the moonshine and our history."

You can visit Dutch's Spirits and explore Dutch Schultz's Prohibition-era operation on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017.

Plastic is pretty much forever. That polyethylene plastic bag you used to bring your groceries home can last for centuries in a landfill or the ocean. Scientists have tried using bacteria and fungus to break down plastics, but a team of researchers in the England and Spain have shown that a humble larva might be a much better fit for the job.

Frederica Bertocchini, a biologist at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology in Spain, noticed some wax worms had managed to eat their way through the plastic bags they were being kept in. While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they'd eaten about 4 percent of the bag, according to findings published Monday in the journal Current Biology. That may not sound like much, but that's a vast improvement over fungi, which weren't able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after six months.

It's not just that the wax worms are particularly efficient chewers. Bertocchini's team spread some wax worm guts on plastic and found that ate through the plastic, too. The worms produce an enzyme that can break down the plastic—into ethylene glycol, which can be used to make polyester or antifreeze—so a next step for scientists will be isolating that chemical.

Munching on plastic isn't that big of a change in diet for wax worms. Wax moths, their adult form, usually lay their eggs in beehives, and newly hatched larvae eat their way through beeswax. "Wax is a polymer, a sort of 'natural plastic,' and has a chemical structure not dissimilar to polyethylene," Bertocchini said in a press release. Hopefully the wax worm's special skills can help us do something about the billions of plastic bags thrown away every year.

On Friday, a 12-year-old boy departed Kendall, on Australia's eastern coast, for Perth, on the western coast—around 2,700 miles away. The boy was driving his family's car, and was about 800 miles into his solo trip when police officers in Broken Hill, a mining town in western New South Wales, noticed that the bumper on his car was dragging on the road.

The boy was subsequently pulled over Saturday morning and arrested, but was lauded for his efforts on social media, according to 9News. "Clearly he's a top driver," one Australian wrote.

A police officer told the station that the evidence suggests otherwise. "It appears [the boy] did have an accident while driving," the officer said, though it seems no one was hurt.

The adolescent will not be charged with a crime for driving 800 miles alone, and he has been released to his parents. What he was running away from, meanwhile, remains unclear.

In Wiltshire, England, a stretch of land is being redeveloped into future housing for Army families, and as part of the work to prepare the site, archaeologists have uncovered tunnels and trenches that were built in the 1910s to prepare soldiers for battlefield conditions in World War I.

The training was intense, as The Guardian reports: even though there was a base nearby, the men would spend weeks in these tunnels during “the brutal winter of 1916-17.”

The excavation has turned up many artifacts of daily life from a century ago—“mess tins, combs, toothbrushes, cigarette and tobacco tins and pipes, candlesticks and candle stubs, tins of condensed milk and meat paste,” according to The Guardian. One tin held Australian toffees, and a bucket showed signs it had been used as a make-shift brazier to help keep the tunnel-dwelling men warm. The men also left behind marks—the walls are graffitied with the names of the men who served here.

In the course of the excavation, archaeologists found 200 grenades used in training. Half of them were still live.

But though the evidence of the tunnel’s use during the early 20th century was the most abundant, the team found signs of more recent visits—and of the tunnel’s use long ago. Hidden in the tunnel were a red sports car from the 1930s and a motorbike from the 1950s. But the team also uncovered “a miniature pottery beaker found with the bones of three children buried 4,000 years ago,” TheGuardian writes.

Springtime in Boston means swan boats in the Public Gardens, bars blasting WEEI all night, and wild turkeys getting up in your face. Over the past couple of months, the birds have been making themselves known throughout the city, strutting down sidewalks, rushing at pets and people, and generally being hooligans.

It's gotten so bad, the Boston Globe reports, that the Massachusetts Department of Fisheries and Wildlife has sent out an explanation to residents, along with some safety tips.

"March through May is breeding season for wild turkeys, which means some turkeys may be seen acting aggressively," the missive begins. In past years, Massachusetts turkeys have formed a gang in Foxborough, made life hell for a Cape Cod mailman, and forcibly attempted to attend Harvard University, among other locally relevant crimes.

So there are turkeys in the middle of downtown Boston right now pic.twitter.com/gofPfparxC

— ‽David Bartlett‽ (@potusbabyhands) February 1, 2017

Lovestruck turkeys may also "completely ignore the presence of people." This second strategy was likely in play on April 6th, when two of the birds crossed six lanes of rush-hour traffic on I-95, forcing cars to swerve around them.

Other times, they just act plain weird. Those turkeys that got caught two-stepping in a circle around a dead cat in early March? Boston turkeys. Experts are still a bit stumped by that one, but think they may have originally been trying to suss out what they saw as a predator, and then got distracted by their own dance.

They also like to charge at shiny things. If they're attacking something of yours—a motorcycle mirror; a buffed hubcap—it's probably because they're angry at their own reflection. This problem can be solved by covering the offending object.

And if it seems like they're targeting you? "Turkeys may attempt to dominate or attack people that they view as subordinates," the officials write. Best of luck with that, gentle Beantown soul.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

On the very first evening after Ryan Garitta moved to Jaco, Costa Rica, a small beach town on the Pacific Coast, he had dinner with about 2o other recent arrivals much like himself. Garitta had only just graduated from college, and had never spent much time out of the United States before, but “right away I wasn’t alone in a foreign country,” he says. “We were all in the same weird boat, and all shared our passion for poker.”

Not long before, on April 15, 2011, the day online poker players came to call “Black Friday,” the U.S. federal government had unsealed an indictment charging the founders of the world’s largest online poker sites with fraud and money laundering. Immediately, the sites stopped letting American players bet real money and cut them off from their accumulated winnings. Within weeks, some professional poker players started moving abroad—to Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, and more far-flung locales—to regain access to their accounts and keep playing.

Black Friday nudged these players—mostly men, mostly in their early 20s—into a dream life. They alternated the grind of online gaming with the thrills of living well off their winnings: drinking, dancing, and exploring the other pleasures of their exotic new homes. But, six years later, the legal situation for online poker in the United States is little changed, and these “poker refugees” have become a special class of digital nomads, stuck in a sort of exile. To come home, they would have to find new careers. After years of living large abroad, some are starting to wonder: What comes next?

In the months after he arrived Costa Rica, Garitta and his new friends fell into a rhythm. They worked during the day and met up at night and on weekends to eat, drink, travel the country, raft, zip-line, and ride ATVs. New players kept coming, too. “There must have been more than 50 American poker players living in a two-mile radius,” Garitta says.

Communities like these were forming all over the place. Playing online poker professionally “can be a bit isolating and lonely,” says Kristin Wilson, who founded her company, Poker Refugees, to help players relocate. “The players like to be in the same area.” As Wilson poured over the news on Black Friday, she kept wondering: What are all those thousands of professional pokers players going to do? They aren’t going to stop playing poker. It is their main source of income—what they are good at. They are going to have to move. Having lived in Costa Rica for six years, she knew from experience that it takes time to learn the rules and complexities of living abroad, and she figured that these players had no time to waste.

She could help them move—and fast. Some of her clients made up the core of a group that Business Insider called the “Poker Frat of Playa del Carmen” in 2014, when the routine was “Play poker, go diving, go clubbing, go drinking. Repeat.” There were other groups of expat poker players in Rosarito, Mexico, in Canada, in San Jose, Costa Rica, and on the Mediterranean island of Malta. That dinner that introduced Garitta to other poker players in Jaco had been organized by Wilson’s company. These communities had their own gravity, which drew new people in and kept them in place. “Without the group of poker players in Jaco, I might have been home way before the three years that I lasted there,” says Garitta.

If these players didn’t initially move by choice, many soon grew enamored of their new homes. “I knew that I had to make the move out of the country to continue to live my dream,” says Chris Hunichen, a top-earning player who moved to Costa Rica with a group of friends. “I was horrified at first and nervous at what my new life would entail,” he says. That fear soon disappeared. Hunichen and his friends planned to stay in Costa Rica for three months. Six years later, they are still living there and have convinced more friends to join them. “We became somewhat local celebrities, it seemed," Hunichen says, "and the partying and women came plentiful.”

It may not be the most sustainable or healthy of lifestyles, but it can be fun. Each year since Black Friday, Wilson says, her company has relocated around 100 people—and that does not appear to be slowing. Among those relocations are players who had originally moved in 2011 and have asked Wilson to relocate them multiple times, to change up the adventure and try out different countries.

Over time, however, Wilson’s clientele has started to change. Most of the people moving to play online poker are still young men, but she has also started hearing from people who waited to finish school and some who tried other jobs before coming back to poker. Elena Stover had only recently started her career as an online poker player when Black Friday happened, and she didn’t have the resources to move abroad right away. “I was forced to dust off my Ph.D. and take some stuffy jobs in the academic sector, but in my spare time I continued to play on a few sketchy poker sites that were still serving U.S. players,” she says. She made regular trips to Canada, where regulations are looser, to play, but it wasn’t until 2014—after building her skills and bankroll—that she was ready to move abroad and play poker full time. After stints in Playa del Carmen and Malta, she moved to Berlin, where she can continue to develop her online career, and also easily travel to live tournaments across Europe. That Ph.D., it is worth noting, is in cognitive neuroscience, and she studied how different areas of the brain work together when people make risky decisions.

For online poker players, though, the world in which they can pursue the dream is getting smaller. Increasingly, Americans are being joined in online poker meccas by players from other countries with limiting online poker laws. "Now my clients come from Poland, Israel, Greece, and Portugal,” says Wilson. Sometimes someone contacts her and says, “My country just banned online poker,” and she has no idea what country they’re talking about.

Even when countries legalize online poker, they can still drive their professional players abroad if they restrict the game to their own residents. To make a living playing poker, professionals need a large group of people to play against: Money is changing hands, someone has to lose, and more players means a larger number of less-skilled players who are more likely to lose. Those pools can be too small for professionals to making a living without moving to a freer poker environment. And as the international pool of players contracts and fragments, it become that much harder to make a living at the game: Professionals must play against fewer, often more-skilled opponents.

Among the players who moved soon after Black Friday, some have settled abroad and put down roots. Hunichen, for instance, married a woman he met in Costa Rica. He’s been helping to care for her four-year-old son almost since he was born, and they recently had another baby. “My life has changed a lot from partying to family man,” he says. “It mostly revolves around them!”

Now that he has a family, Hunichen is thinking differently about the possibility of returning to the United States. “If you asked me two or three years ago, I probably would have said I would never come back to the U.S.,” he says. “But a lot has changed in the past few years, and now I would most likely move my family to Las Vegas if poker came back to the U.S.” He’s even considering moving back next year, regardless.

Garitta has already returned. After three years in Costa Rica, he spent some time living and working in Mexico and Malta, before he got married and bought a house in Florida. After close to ten years of playing poker, he felt “a little burnt out,” he says. “I do like traveling, but also having a house and settling down was appealing.”

Poker players don’t consider the game they love a test of luck, but of skill. There’s variance in the game—a player can “run good” or “run bad” over a stretch, but ultimately the most skillful players end up ahead. They sometimes use this same language to describe life outside of the game. They might call a good stretch of years "life run good."

On that first shocking day, it might have seemed like Black Friday was a stroke of bad luck for the online poker community. But for many of the players it led to a stretch of interesting, adventurous years. It pushed them to explore the world and try something different. As they think about what comes next, though, it’s less clear that life will continue to “run good.”

Back in the United States, Garitta is starting to find the legacy of Black Friday troubling again. He worked a nine-to-five job, “which just made me miss and appreciate poker and the lifestyle that much more,” he says. “I really have only known poker my whole life. I am not sure what is next for me, but I will figure it out in time.” Life, like poker, has a variance to it.

It’s no secret that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were legendary frenemies. But while they may have sparred over fantasy and religion, they shared one little-known viewpoint: a disdain for the works of Walt Disney.

Literary friendships are often thought of in the driest abstract, with learned people of letters sitting in stuffy rooms debating only the most important intellectual issues. But like anyone, sometimes a couple of authors just go to the movies. And on at least one occasion, the architect of Middle-earth and the father of Narnia went and saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs together.

According to an account in the J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, Tolkien didn’t go see Snow White until some time after its 1938 U.K. release, when he attended the animated film with Lewis. Lewis had previously seen the film with his brother, and definitely had some opinions. In a 1939 letter to his friend A.K. Hamilton, Lewis wrote of Snow White (and Disney himself):

Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs' jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated--or even brought up in a decent society?

In another instance, Lewis called the evil queen's design unoriginal, and described the dwarves as having, "bloated, drunken, low comedy faces."

Tolkien didn’t like the goofball dwarfs either. The Tolkien Companion notes that he found Snow White lovely, but otherwise wasn't pleased with the dwarves. To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross simplification of a concept they held as precious. “I think it grated on them that he was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct,” says Trish Lambert, a Tolkien scholar and author of the essay, Snow White and Bilbo Baggins: Divergences and Convergences Between Disney and Tolkien. “Here you have a brash, American entrepreneur who had the audacity to go in and make money off of fairy tales.”

Consider the context here: Tolkien’s book The Hobbit was first released in the U.K. in September of 1937, just a couple of months before Snow White hit theaters in the U.S. Both works highlighted a gaggle of dwarves as major supporting characters, but they could hardly have been more different. Disney’s dwarfs were jolly, goofy miners (hey, Dopey), rooted in the stories of the Brothers Grimm; Tolkien’s dwarves were a grim, mythical race (although not wholly without whimsy), born from Nordic myth. “Isn’t it interesting that Tolkien and Disney, almost concurrently, came up with dwarves that are not evil?” notes Lambert. “I researched, is there any possibility that there was a connection? And there’s not.”

Across the ocean and seemingly independent of one another, two of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century had a case of parallel invention, although this is not to say that Tolkien and Disney were unaware of one another. There are unflattering references to Disney's early cartoons in Tolkien’s letters, and according to Lambert, Tolkien would most certainly have been aware of Snow White before its release. “I don’t have any way of proving this, other than the things he’s written on Disney in the general sense, but I suspect [Snow White] irritated the heck out of Tolkien,” she says.

Tolkien’s opinion of Disney didn’t get any better over the years. In a number of letters dated after his Snow White date with Lewis, Tolkien refers to Disney’s works as “vulgar.” Tolkien also believed that fairy tales had become hopelessly infantilized, noting in his 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories that “the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history.”

Years later, in a 1964 letter to a Miss J.L. Curry at Stanford University, likely spurred on by the controversy surrounding Disney’s treatment of Mary Poppins, Tolkien further laid bare his true feelings on Disney’s work. He described Disney’s talent as “hopelessly corrupted,” writing, “Though in most of the 'pictures' proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea…” He goes on to call Disney a “cheat,” noting that while he too had a profit motive behind his work, he wouldn’t stoop to working with Disney.

Just two years later, Joy Hill, a representative of Allan & Unwin, Tolkien's publisher, would approach Disney Studios about turning the Lord of the Rings trilogy into an animated film. Disney Studios declined, thinking that it would be far too expensive to produce. The Tolkien Companion assumes that this conversation occurred without the Tolkien's permission.

The relationship between Tolkien and Lewis is often viewed in light of their religious differences, or contrasted by nerdy arguments about Narnia vs. Middle-earth. But in the eminently relatable experience of going to see a Disney movie that they both disliked, their relationship seems less fantastical, and all the more human.

If you want to bowl the fastest perfect game ever, it helps to bowl 50 games a week. And it really helps to work at a bowling alley. Ben Kertola was well prepared to bowl 12 strikes in a row in 86.9 seconds on April 5. Once league bowlers left for the night, Kertola got to work, rapid-fire bowling a perfect game over ten empty lanes, running back to use the first and second lanes for his final two strikes. This won't be his last attempt at a bowling stunt. "Next time I may set up all spares on the lanes and see how fast I can make those," Kertola told Syracuse.com.

Kertola's speedy perfect game may not be certified by the U.S. Bowling Congress (that is, with an approved lane and ball, earning the bowler a ring, kind of like winning the Super Bowl), but it joins a long list of distinctive displays of perfection. The previous fastest perfect game took Tom Dougherty 110.99 seconds to roll. Hannah Diem was just nine years, six months, and 19 days old when she bowled 12 consecutive strikes back in 2013, which set the record for youngest bowler with a 300. And the mark for oldest person to bowl a perfect game is held by Arthur Ulmer, who was 89 years, six months, and 11 days old when he bowled his second-ever perfect game in late 2010.

Perfect games are more common these days thanks to improvements in bowling ball technology and lane oiling techniques. For decades there was only one certified perfect game every few years, but by the late 1980s, the number of bowlers rolling 300s exploded. Now, many consider a perfect series—three perfect games in a row—the mark of a true great. The first perfect series was sanctioned in 1997, when Jeremy Sonnenfeld, then a student at the University of Nebraska, accomplished the feat. The mark has since been matched 31 times.

You can try to roll your own perfect game—though it will take much longer than Kertola's, since the pin mechanism is reloaded manually by a crew of pin-boys—and learn about bowling history at the historic Holler House on Obscura Day, May 6th, 2017.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

In 1993, The New York Timesprinted its first page in color, far later than most of the rest of the newspaper industry, and one of the only other big holdouts at that point was a competitor: The Wall Street Journal.

But on September 12, 2001, when every front page in the country ran a large photo of the most important news story of the 21st century—except one.

“We didn’t run a photo, where I think every other paper in the world, including the international edition of the Journal, ran a photo,” recalled Jessica Yu, the senior visual editor of the Wall Street Journal, in comments to The Atlantic.

The Journal, in fact, didn’t have a single photo on the front page—and not a single picture of the 9/11 attacks until page A6. There were a few color pages in the front section that day, but they were all paid ads.

The next year, the newspaper introduced a bold redesign that added color, along with more photography, which is now an integral part of the paper.

Years of tradition—and certainly cost—played into newspapers' decisions to forgo color for so long, of course. One barrier that didn't exist? The technology. The stage had been set, in fact, more than 200 years prior, on a piece of limestone.

When German playwright Alois Senefelder, frustrated by the high costs associated with printing his play in the late 18th century, started experimenting with a greasy writing substance, a wet piece of limestone, and an oil-based ink, he found more than just a cheap way to print his books.

He created lithography—a technology that ultimately helped push forth the Gutenberg press into the modern era by using the chemical properties of oil and water to create the first flat-surface printing press.

The process wasn’t good for printing a newspaper at the time—it was slightly more complicated than the traditional printing process allowed for—but it proved very effective for artists, who finally had a medium that made it possible for them to draw flat objects and make numerous copies that were just as attractive as the originals.

In 1816, Engelmann and a colleague, Charles-Philibert de Lasteyrie, came up with a two-color lithography process that relied on multiple stones. Engelmann and others kept improving it, and at the time he received a patent for it in 1837, the process was effective, even if it was complicated. The results of Engelmann’s three-color and four-color prints were just too realistic-looking to ignore. (Engelmann, alas, died just two years after his patent was locked into place.)

Soon enough, the technique found success globally, in large part because of the way that it democratized art, making it inexpensive enough to put into homes and to use for advertising and product packaging.

(It wasn’t the only technique for printing documents, however, and competing technologies occasionally bested lithography. In 1843, botanist Anna Atkins published the first book consisting of nothing but photographs when she published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, a book that took advantage of the photographic properties of contact printing to capture the details of British seaweed on a printed page. The result, though in a strongly blue hue due to the nature of the contact-printing process, picked up an incredible amount of detail from the original object. Cyanotypes later became better known for their use in “blueprints” of architectural drawings.)

Lithography eventually made its way to the United States, where German immigrant August Hoen had made a name for himself and his company, A. Hoen & Co., with its multi-color prints, which were often closely associated with tobacco labels and early poster-style ads.

Hoen added his own innovations to the mix, including the invention of the lithocaustic process, which adds a layer of acid to the mix, allowing lithographic printers to see exactly how the shading is affecting a specific layer of the lithographic stone.

In his initial patent for the lithocaustic technique, Hoen explained that, before he came up with his technique, it was basically impossible for lithographic printers to know how the shading would look until the end of the process—in other words, there was no print preview. From the patent:

The most serious defect of this process is found in the fact that the artist can never know with certainty the depth of the lines, and he can only guess it by the strength of the acid, by the time it remains on the stone, and by the nature and chemical composition of the stone itself. Another difficulty is caused by the continual stopping out of the finished parts, which completely prevents the artist from seeing the progress of his picture. His memory is his only guide, and this is very apt to confuse and mislead him. Furthermore, the gradation from one tint to the other will always be more or less visible, showing by decided marks the previous covering with ink. All these difficulties are avoided by the use of my composition for producing the picture.

Lithography, in its original form, isn’t quite so common these days. (Instead, we have printers.) But it does persist with artists, with most of its advantages still apparent.

Still, even as we moved away from stones, lithography inspired pretty much every mass-printing technology of the past 200 years. Stone gave way to metal plates; drawings gave way to photos; and offset printing and lithography concepts often go hand-in-hand.

(If you really want to stretch it, there’s probably a case to be made that compact discs and microprocessors, which both rely on the transfer of information from one surface to another, also share a lineage with lithography.)

One particularly important innovation was illustrator William Kurtz’s 1893 patent for the first color-separation technique reliant on a combination of three separate plates—cyan, magenta, and yellow—to cover the array of colors.

Kurtz’s technique is subtractive in nature, meaning that when the colors are combined, they block waveforms of light from being seen. (Computers, for comparison’s sake, use the colors red, green, and blue, which are considered additive in nature.)

The technique was further improved in 1906 when the Eagle Printing Ink Company introduced the four-color wet ink process, based around the CMYK color set. (CMYK, by the way, stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and “key”—also known as black.)

As the processes improved, they often became faster, more sophisticated, and easier to use—making the technology accessible for newspapers and magazines.

And newspapers, despite their later reluctance to the concept, were actually early to the game. In 1894, Joseph Pulitzer acquired a color printing press for The New York World, allowing his first-of-its-kind comics page, The World’s Funny Side, to run as a full supplement on Sundays, complete with elaborately colored illustrations.

Pulitzer’s highly visual look bled into the rest of the newspaper (mostly in its Sunday editions), but the paper’s graphical, illustrative approach did not catch on with the broader newspaper industry for nearly a century afterwards.

In fact, it didn’t get love from magazines until the 1930s, in part because advertisers felt that the technology wasn’t ready. Eventually, however they were won over as reproduction improved, according to Harvard University curator Melissa Banta.

(But even there, there were some limitations at scale. National Geographic used an outdated four-color letterpress printing technology decades after it had fallen into disuse everywhere else. The reason? The magazine had such a wide subscriber base that newer technologies proved impractical.)

Perhaps the most important pre-computer-era publishing innovation came from Lawrence Herbert, a Pantone employee who bought the company in the early 1960s, and changed its direction immediately, moving it toward creating a language around specific colors, making them easier to track.

This move allowed Pantone to define the color printing industry for decades afterwards—even after computers went into wide use.

But we wouldn’t be quite where we are with color printing without the influence of August Hoen. In his own quiet way, he probably did more to bring color to the world than any other American. He didn’t just use the chromolithographic technique—he kept improving on it, to the point where it became incredibly sophisticated.

Now, the building where his company did so much of that work, actively from 1902 to 1981, is getting a revamp that works much in the spirit of innovation.

The 80,000-square-foot Hoen & Co. building is being converted from a dormant manufacturing facility to a large multifunction space, with the goal of revamping the local neighborhood in East Baltimore. The facility will include a workforce training center, a bookstore, a writers’ workshop, a coffee shop, and even a farmers’ market. Additionally, the company is renovating a number of nearby homes, with the goal of making those livable for those with low or moderate incomes.

It’s a major endeavor—a $22 million one, according to the Baltimore Business Journal—but the developers see the effort bringing back a little of Baltimore’s color.

“When Hoen is underway, we’re going to see the whole community shift,” project executive Larry I. Rosenberg told the Business Journal.

We may be in an era when smartphones dole out more colorful images than do sheets of paper, but in a quiet way, Hoen’s colorful legacy will live on in the neighborhood that used to call his company home.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

It may be difficult to imagine from the perspective of the 21st century, but the North Korean capital city of Pyongyang once had at its center a community of Americans—Christian missionaries who lived there from 1895 to 1942.

This long-lost mission, almost unknown even to Korea experts on both sides of the Pacific, was part of a pre-Second World War American Christian presence in Korea that achieved its greatest success in Pyongyang. The current capital was then the home of the largest Christian community in Korea and the center of the Presbyterian Church in Asia.

Major cities throughout Korea had Protestant missions from the Presbyterian and Methodist Churches during the first four decades of the 20th Century. Christians received official permission from the king of Korea to spread their religion in 1884, and by the turn of the century, American, Canadian and Australian Presbyterians and American Methodists had opened missions from Pusan in the south to the Yalu River in the north. American Presbyterians opened a mission in Pyongyang (spelled “Pyengyang” in English then) in 1895, which all nationalities and Protestant denominations in Korea joined. Their work made Pyongyang and its surrounding region the most heavily Christian area of Korea, and the city became the hub for Presbyterian mission activity throughout Asia, including in China. The success of Christianity in the city led to it being called the “Jerusalem of the East” in the missionary community.

The Pyongyang mission had an array of religious, educational and medical institutions that served the city and its Christian community. They included Union Christian Hospital, Union Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and Union Christian College, the latter the first four-year college in Korea, founded in 1905.

The American community of Pyongyang numbered over 200 for most of the 1910s through the 1930s. It included clergymen, professors, medical doctors, and instructors and administrators at the seminary, college, and medical school. Women were active in the work of the mission as leaders of educational and job training programs for women and as teachers and administrators in the school for American and other foreign students. Children numbered over 100 for most of this time, including students at the American school sent by American, British, Canadian, Australian, and other foreign families in China and Japan.

They lived and worked on the same ground where today the signature landmarks of the North Korean regime stand. The most familiar site in modern Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung Square—known to countless news viewers as the site of North Korean military parades, and to thousands of tourists as a place to take selfies—used to be the site of the residences of American missionaries and of church events.

Union Presbyterian Theological Seminary was founded in 1905, the “Union” name reflecting the school’s foundation as a unified multi-national institution run by American, Canadian and Australian Presbyterians. In 1907 it graduated its first class of seven, who became the first Koreans ordained as Christian ministers.

West Gate Church and the seminary disappeared after the Second World War and the Korean War, destroyed either during the war or by the post-war regime. On their former location lies Mansudae Art Theater, built in 1976, which serves as the stage for many of the largest indoor official spectacles of the regime, including the welcoming ceremonies for the visit of the New York Philharmonic in 2008.

Union Christian College on the southwest side of the mission was its largest and most significant institution. As the first four-year college in Korea, it became a magnet for people from all regions of Korea seeking higher education. The college also included schools for boys and girls, called the Sungshil Academy, that were the leading middle- and high schools in Pyongyang.

The father of Kim Il Sung, Kim Hyong Jik, was a Presbyterian and a student at the Sungshil Academy as a teenager in the 1910s. He attended school in this schoolhouse on the Union Christian College campus.

Pyongyang Foreign School, the American school of Pyongyang, began in 1900 as a one-room schoolhouse with eight children and grew to a boarding school with over 100 students by the late 1920s. Its students included children of the mission, Canadian and Australian mission children from elsewhere in Korea, and children of many nationalities from China and Japan. It lasted until 1940, when the entire school was evacuated in anticipation of war between the United States and Japan.

Hockey between North and South Korean teams made news at the Women’s World Championships in 2017, but in the 1930s, hockey between teams from Seoul and Pyongyang was an annual event. Chosun Christian College in Seoul regularly sent its team to Pyongyang to meet the Americans from Pyongyang Foreign School, with games often played on the frozen Taedong River.

The school’s Boy Scout troop was a part of American life transplanted to Pyongyang. As a branch of the Boy Scouts of America, it flew the American flag in Pyongyang.

The American community in Pyongyang receded during the late 1930s and finally disappeared in 1942. As tensions with Japan rose, Presbyterian mission leaders gradually recalled their people from Korea and then evacuated most of the remainder in October 1940 after the U.S. Department of State warned that all American citizens should leave Asia in anticipation of war with Japan.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the last 99 Americans in Korea were placed under surveillance by the Japanese and finally deported in April 1942. In the 75 years since, the long presence of Americans in Pyongyang has been forgotten, and today it exists only in the memories of a few individuals who were born there and lived the first years of their lives there, the remnants of a remarkable group of Americans who called Pyongyang home.

High school basketball coach Brad Jones was flying his drone on Easter Sunday when suddenly he heard a gunshot, according to Ars Technica. Moments later, Jones' drone began falling out of the sky.

Jones often flew his drone above the land surrounding his home, but this was the first time it had been shot at. When Jones recovered the drone, he found that one of the rotors had a bullet hole in it.

Man takes drone out for a sunset flight, drone gets shot down https://t.co/HgkhMR62oV by @cfarivar

— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) April 25, 2017

It’s unclear who shot down the drone, although Jones suspected a neighbor. But that neighbor denied shooting the drone to authorities, and, as Ars Technica notes, the laws surrounding personal drones and airspace are considerably muddy, meaning that it’s unclear the extent to which shooting a drone is a crime at all.

"The short answer," as Ars Technica writes, "is that American courts have not addressed the question adequately."

All of which, for now, doesn't help Jones, who's stuck with a broken, shot-up drone he hasn't even tried to fly again.

“It didn’t hit the ground as hard as it could have,” Jones told Ars Technica. “When it hit, it broke the left landing gear arm, snapped the molding off the Inspire. But it was still running. Didn’t damage batteries, rotors were intact. Everything was fine, except the left rear motor with a bullet hole in it.”

There are only around 4,000 snow leopards left in the world, most of which live in China, where they maintain a reputation for being notoriously difficult to spot, much less study. But recently some scientists with the conservation group Panthera caught not one, not two, but three of the big cats lounging around in front of a camera trap. They snuggled and napped, among other chill activities.

The trap was located near a monastery in Qinghai province, in central China. It was set up after one researcher came upon some howling dogs, who had apparently interrupted another snow leopard's breakfast, Liu Mingyu wrote on Panthera's website.

The camera trap was then set up in what turned out to be a very fortuitous position, and within a few days captured what you see above: snow leopard gold.

On September 13, 1881, in room 13 of Manhattan's Knickerbocker Cottage, 12 expectant men sat around a table. The meal was all set out: big platters of lobster salad, each moulded into the shape of a coffin, surrounded by 13 crawfish. The decorations were perfect: 13 candles exactly, and a big banner that read 'Nos Mortituri te Salutamus'—Latin for "We who are about to die salute you." They were just waiting on one man.

When an hour or so passed, and the last guest hadn't shown himself, the dinner's host, William Fowler, took matters into his own hands. Smiling, he grabbed a nearby waiter, who immediately began trembling. Fowler was just about to put the waiter through some initiation rites when the tardy invitee finally arrived. The frightened waiter was released, the first of 13 toasts was made—and thus began the inaugural meeting of the Thirteen Club.

In the murky annals of superstition, the number 13 maintains a special place. While historians aren't quite sure why we don't trust it, it can't seem to shake its bad reputation. Fear of the number has been attributed, with varying degrees of evidence, to the Vikings, the Ancient Romans, and the people of 14th-century France. Even today, many new buildings still don't have 13th floors.

In Fowler's time, fear of the number 13 was most often associated with the Last Supper, where Jesus dined with his twelve disciples shortly before he was crucified. As one superstitious person explained in 1863, "since the Last Supper, whenever there are thirteen persons assembled, one of them is sure to be a Judas." This belief was common enough to interrupt social occasions. Such luminaries as Victor Hugo would reportedly leave a table if exactly twelve other people were there.

Fowler himself, though, thought this was bunk. He'd lived a varied, happy life, and as he grew older, he realized that it featured repeated appearances by the number 13. He had attended P.S. 13, and graduated at age 13. During a brief stint as an architect, he built 13 public buildings. Later, he fought in the Union Army, and survived 13 battles. Eventually, he adopted the number as a sort of talisman.

Like many men of his time, Fowler had another great love: social clubs. (He eventually belonged to—you guessed it—13 of them, one of which was just him and one friend drinking boiling hot whiskey.) In the late 19th century, "club life" provided an easy way to make friends, eat lavish meals, and, in some cases, engage in various goofy, themed pursuits.

New York City boasted scores of these clubs—from the more traditional "Loto" and "Union" Clubs to the "Liar's Club" (for men who loved to trick each other) and the "Candor Club" (for brutally honest ones). When Fowler took over the Knickerbocker Cottage, he decided it was time to found one himself. Its aim, he decided, would be to fight the fear of 13—and various other superstitions—by engaging in as many unlucky practices as possible.

Although it took him nearly a year to drum up 12 other members, after their first meeting, the Thirteen Club began to grow, thanks largely to Fowler's sense of humor and pitch-perfect flair for the gothic. Menus generally numbered 13 courses, and wine lists were often shaped like gravestones.

Members came dressed in black suits, neckties, and top hats; before sitting down, they made a point of walking under a ladder, brought indoors for the occasion. "The atmosphere was funereal, and suggested a feast at which undertakers only were bidden," the New York Timeswrote of April 1882's meeting, which featured a cake with a black cat on it. Other meetings included mirror-smashing, salt-spilling, and mock trials of members who had purportedly acted superstitiously.

When they weren't tempting fate at dinner, the Thirteen Club's members advanced their cause in other ways. They wrote to local officials, asking them to rehabilitate Friday's unlucky reputation by "inducing Judges to select some other day… for hangings." (In at least one case, they succeeded.) They racked up high-profile honorary members, including Grover Cleveland, Chester A. Arthur, and Theodore Roosevelt. Some insisted on sitting only at tables of 13 even at other club meetings.

Word of these exploits spread quickly, and the Thirteen Club soon enjoyed a certain amount of renown. One 1886 dinner on Coney Island brought in 400 attendees. Chapters opened up in Chicago, France, and England. Sub-branches popped up, too, including New York City's "Thirteen Cycle Club," which traded lavish indoor banquets for outdoor clambakes. In 1891, New York's flagship Thirteen Club began inviting women to certain dinners. (Each one got a welcome gift: a tiny glass bottle of perfume, with a stopper shaped like a human skull.) Two years later, 13 women opened up their very own chapter, in Iowa.

Despite this burgeoning popularity, though, some remained unimpressed. "The club has shown that it is as ignorant of the nature of ill-luck as it is reckless in trifling with it," wrote one opponent in the Times. Bad luck did occasionally rear its head. At one club meeting, a waiter fractured his skull when the traditional indoor ladder collapsed on him. Another time, someone blew up the New Jersey clubhouse with dynamite. (The members inside escaped with bruises.) The club ran into some crying-wolf problems, too—after one New York meeting place collapsed in 1888, causing several injuries, officials were so busy joking about it that the club had to agitate for an investigation.

Mortality is the worst luck of all, and everyone dies eventually, even devoted flouters of superstition. Fowler passed away suddenly in 1897, and in the following decades, this particular type of club life began petering out. Starting around the mid-1920s, searching for the Thirteen Club in newspaper archives brings up only obituaries of former members.

But some unexpected bits of their legacy live on. According to one contemporary reporter, the Thirteen Club may be inadvertently responsible for one of today's most iconic bad luck charms: Friday the 13th. Although both Friday and the number 13 have both been considered unlucky for centuries, it's possible that no one made a point of combining them until the Thirteen Club, reporter Trevor Timpson writes. "Two of these vulgar superstitions you have combated resolutely and without flinching," commended the club's scribe in 1883. In their zeal to disprove each of them, the Club may have created a superstition superbug instead.

A short Times article, from 1887, also suggests the club may have had a hand in a piece of consistent good fortune: the weekend. That year, Justice David McAdam, a Thirteen Club branch president and a member of the New York City Court, declared Saturday an official half-holiday, during which public offices must close after noon. He did this, he said, partially to restore more esteem to Friday—a Thirteen Club priority.

"If the new idea met popular favor Friday might yet become the sailing day of all our ocean steamers," the Times wrote, "And Saturday, now less than half a day for business purposes, would in a short time become a full holiday for pleasure." About four decades later, in 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America successfully demanded a five-day work week.

So this Saturday, set aside a toast (or 13) for Fowler and the Thirteen Club—they might have the luckiest legacy of anyone.

The top of the Golden Gate Bridge stands 746 feet above the strait between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. From that height, when the Bay Area's famous fog has cleared, the city’s skyline shimmers in the distance and tiny cars seem to creep along six lanes of road below. It’s a view that few, save bridge workers and birds, have ever seen—until, that is, the drones came along.

Aerial photography has a long history, but drones and sturdy, high-resolution digital cameras have introduced a new way of seeing the world from above, and made the perspective more accessible than ever before. “It is so different from images taken by satellite or plane or helicopter or, on the other hand, street view images,” says Dronestagram founder Eric Dupin. An active drone photographer, Dupin launched Dronestagram in 2013 after he realized there were few online communities just for this new breed of aerial photographer. Within two years, it reached 30,000 users and now a new book is showcasing the best of their work.

Although drones have democratized aerial and elevated photography, there are still important limitations. Regulations have been introduced to protect wildlife, aircraft, and even celebrities from the intrusion of camera-carrying drones. The biggest challenge for Dronestagram user GotShots, however, was the notorious, unpredictable weather around the Golden Gate Bridge. As he details in the book, he spent six months returning to the site for the right conditions to capture a shot that would have once been impossible, even with aerial photography.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Dronescapes: The New Aerial Photography from Dronestagram.

On the India-Bangladesh border,* the Border Security Force discovered a smuggling tunnel almost 90 yards long that started in a tea garden and went under the border fence to north Bengal. Its intention, they believe, was to smuggle cattle under the border.

Cattle smuggling across this border has long been a problem—the demand for Indian beef is high at Bangladesh’s cattle markets, and there’s money to be made by smuggling cattle over the border. The border patrol says it has cracked down on smugglers and reduce the amount of smuggling by 99 percent, says India Today. But some are skeptical of this claim.

Most cattle aren’t smuggled through tunnels; water routes are a common way of crossing. But tunnels are particularly hard to detect: one of the only ways of finding one is through intelligence gathering.

*Correction: The tunnel was found underneath India's border with Bangladesh, not Pakistan.

Which do you like better, trees or baseball? It's a pretty tough question—some might even say too tough. But Queen Anne's High School in Centreville, Maryland was forced into the choice over the weekend, when someone planted a sapling smack in the middle of the baseball field, near the pitcher's mound.

According to the Queen Anne's County Sheriff's Office, "Someone had planted a tree in front of the pitcher’s mound and had scratched in the dirt on the mound 'Earth Day 2017.'" They suspect a "senior prank."

"The field has been repaired," writes WMAR—a euphemism, we assume, for "the tree has been removed." Baseball wins again.

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.

Blood Falls is an on-again-off-again flow of red-orange water—striking against Antarctica’s sweeping grayscape—from the toe of Taylor Glacier, not far from McMurdo Station research base. The color comes from iron in the salty water, which is thought to originate from a pocket of brine trapped deep beneath the glacier for more than a million years (and supporting its own, unique microbial ecosystem). But how that water gets through the glacier has been a mystery since the falls was first described in 1911.

Now a team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Colorado College has used ice-penetrating radar to track the flow of red water almost 1,000 feet into the glacier. They encountered a circulatory system within, of brine pools and pathways, and now surmise that Blood Falls is a release valve for some of the pressures that emerge over 34 miles of slow-moving ice.

Blood Falls is also a special case, because the Taylor Glacier is so cold that it really shouldn’t have any liquid water flowing through it at all. In this case, the scientists found, the saltiness of the water (which lowers the freezing temperature) and the latent heat of freezing—which is definitely a thing—helps explain how Blood Falls keeps flowing.

“While it sounds counterintuitive, water releases heat as it freezes, and that heat warms the surrounding colder ice,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist Erin Pettit in a statement. “Taylor Glacier is now the coldest known glacier to have persistently flowing water.”

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) triggered one of the biggest ever cosmic controversies when they changed the definition of a planet in 2006, kicking Pluto off the list of the most important orbs in our solar system. Planetary scientists and the public weren't pleased. But a recently discovered Kuiper belt object 8.6 billion miles away from Earth is the latest challenge to the restrictive redefinition.

That discovery, a "distant dwarf" nicknamed "DeeDee" (that's 2014 UZ224, officially), is a tiny, icy orb that astronomers spotted with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a telescope in Chile. It clearly fits two of the three IAU qualifications for planethood. DeeDee is about 395 miles across, just massive enough to form a sphere, thanks to gravity. DeeDee also orbits the sun and isn't a satellite like the moon, but it hasn't "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit," which it shares with asteroids and other bits of space stuff. Pluto fits the same criteria, so by the IAU's standards, both Pluto and DeeDee are dwarf planets.

But, some argue, if a few nearby asteroids can knock a planet down to dwarf status, then Earth is in the same boat. NASA has observed more than 15,000 asteroids that orbit the sun at roughly the same distance as the Earth. Even giant Jupiter hasn't truly cleared its neighborhood—around 6,000 asteroids occupy its orbital path.

Over a decade after the definition change, the IAU and some big names in astronomy are not backing down from Pluto's demotion. So planetary scientists mostly ignore the IAU's definition. They still treat Pluto (and Earth) like full-fledged planets. A group of scientists made up of six members of NASA's New Horizons team even proposed a new definition at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March. It's a lot more inclusive: any round object that hasn't undergone nuclear fusion, but that would include moons too, putting our solar system's planetary population at more than 110.

That's a few too many planets to fit into a tidy mnemonic—"My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos"—but scientists behind the new definition don't see that as a problem. It's no different, they argue, than learning just a few of the 88 constellations or the 118 elements of the periodic table. That might make DeeDee the seaborgium of the solar system.