Go to a meeting with any male politician today and you’re almost certainly going to be standing in front of a man wearing pants, except perhaps in Bermuda, where the eponymous shorts are the nation’s official dress. But in Imperial Rome, obviously, things were a little different—no man of honor would think of wearing what was considered the garb of a savage barbarian.

When Marcus Tullius Cicero, an eloquent orator and lawyer, was defending the former Gaul governor Fonteius from accusations of extortion, he cited the wearing of pants as a sign of the “innate aggressiveness” of the Gauls—and an extenuating circumstance for his client:

Are you then hesitating, O judges, when all these nations have an innate hatred to and wage incessant war with the name of the Roman people? Do you think that, with their military cloaks and their breeches, they come to us in a lowly and submissive spirit, as these do (...)? Nothing is further from the truth.

Think of it as the “Trouser Defense."

“Good orators were using rhetoric in a rather sophisticated way—they were picturing foreign tribes in the way that mostly suited their needs, from fierce aggressors to backwards folks and they were relying on visual imageries to make sure that ‘barbarian otherness’ would stand out,” says Susanne Elm, a historian from the University of California, Berkeley, who studies Rome’s relationship with the tribes to the north, which they collectively referred to as “barbarians.” The breeches were, in this case, a powerful symbol of “otherness.”

Cicero was not alone in relating pants to a primordial, uncivilized life. In 9 A.D. Ovid, by then an acclaimed poet, was exiled by Emperor Augustus, for reasons that remain unclear (but may have had to do with Augustus’s niece). In what is now Tomis, Romania, the poet first encountered barbarians: “The people even when they were not dangerous, were odious, clothed in skins and trousers with only their faces visible.”

There were no particular hygienic reasons for the Roman distaste for pants, says Professor Kelly Olson, author of “Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity.” They did not like them, it appears, because of their association with non-Romans.

But opinions change with time, and not long after, the historian and senator Publius Cornelius Tacitus listed pants among a range of “exotic” behaviors of Germanic tribes, whom he praised for having morals unweakened by civilization: river-bathing, ponytails ("wisted tufts resembling horns or plumes”), and pants.

It is not as though every person walking around ancient Rome was wearing a toga—they were more like formal wear. Tunics where the most common garment, sleeveless or short-sleeved for men, and long-sleeved, ankle-length for women. Squeezing one’s legs into stitched fabric was simply not tradition, and not generally demanded by the Mediterranean climate.

However, as the empire expanded, this began to change. Romans and tribes from newly annexed northern lands fought side-by-side to protect their borders from still other barbarians, such as the Visigoths. So military trousers used by Germans or Gauls became the outfit of choice for Roman troops—presumably because they’re more practical on a northern battlefield than flappy tunics.

Evidence of this early trouserization of Roman troops can be seen in the spiral bas-relief of Trajan’s Column, the 98-foot-tall, 12-foot-thick marble monument erected in 113 to honor the emperor’s triumph over the Dacians, pants-wearers from what is now Romania and the region around it. In that depiction, generals and other high-rank figures wear tunics or togas, while common soldiers wear leggings.

Like with GPS and the internet, innovations from the military sector slowly spread to civil society. By 397, trousers, in all their odiousness, were becoming so common that brother-emperors Honorius and Arcadius (of the Western and Eastern empires, respectively) issued an official trouser ban. The ban is cited in a code named for their father, Theodosianus, which read: “Within the venerable City no person should be allowed to appropriate to himself the use of boots or trousers. But if any man should attempt to contravene this sanction, We command that in accordance with the sentence of the Illustrious Prefect, the offender shall be stripped of all his resources and delivered into perpetual exile.”

“What the ban basically does is that it bans civilians from wearing a military outfit in the capital,” says Elm, “so one could see it as an indirect way to make it easy to distinguish civilians from military men at a time where tension was high.” Four years prior, Emperor Valens had been killed in battle within Roman borders, and a third of the army had been wiped out. So banning trousers could have been a way to make sure that the capital was easier to police, and that fighters were kept out.

The ban could also be read as the desperate attempt of late-period emperors to cling to a sense of Roman identity at a time where the empire had become a melting pot of traditions, after hundreds of years of expansion and cultural appropriation. Long hair and flashy jewels soon joined boots and pants as forbidden fashion.

“Barbarian influence on fashion was something that emperors wanted to control, but then their own bodyguards, which presumably they trusted, were barbarians,” says Elm. “So rather than anti-barbarian, they were mostly anti-barbarian-identity.” Restoring concepts such as “purity” and “identity” is not uncommon in fading empires—authoritarian ways to make rulers feel in control at home in the face of external weakness.

It’s not clear whether the trouser ban had any impact on Roman identity, or was even actually enforced. There is no legal evidence or angry letters. But 13 years after the ban, Visigoth fighters led by King Alaric violently marched into and sacked Rome, an event that most historians consider a critical shove in the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The ban was more or less rendered moot.

Of course, pants won in the end. By a century later, the barbarians had claimed the battle for the sartorial soul of the court of Constantinople, the only Roman court left. “By the fifth and sixth centuries, suddenly the so-called barbarian custom, sleeved top and trousers, had become the official uniform of the Roman court. If you were close to the emperor, that’s what you would wear.” says Olson. “Scholars have not yet been able to explain how that happened, trousers going from being banned to be legally required clothes for the Roman court.”

Many centuries ago, back in the Middle Ages, Europeans started making the crucial beverage known as beer. At first, they made ales, which require a certain strain of yeast, Saccharomyces cervisiae, and was fermented at warm temperatures, from about 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit. But around 1400, Germans started making a different kind of beer, a crisp and cool lager.

Lager ferments at much cooler temperatures, thanks to a different, more cold-resistant yeast used in its production. Now, according to NBC News, Alberto Perez of Universidad Catolica de Temuco, has found an even earlier example of cold-resistant yeast being used to make alcoholic beverages.

Last year, Perez discovered ceramic bowls dating back 1,000 years in the forests on the Chile-Argentina border, NBC News reports. When that pottery was tested for traces of organic material, the analysis showed traces of a cold-resistant yeast, Saccharomyces eubayanus, on the pottery. It is, Perez told NBC, the “first archaeological evidence and earliest evidence of any kind of Saccharomyces eubayanus being used in alcohol production."

Saccharomyces eubayanus has only been known to science since 2011, when a team found it living on the bark of southern beech trees in the forests of Patagonia, not so far from where Perez discovered the pottery. Those scientists were looking for the other half of the pair that created the yeast used to make lagers today, Saccharomyces pastorianus, which is a hybrid of Saccharomyces cervisiae, the ale yeast. The researchers knew that the other “parent” yeast had to be cold-tolerant, but no such yeast had ever been found growing naturally in Europe.

In the northern hemisphere, yeast species can be found growing in oak trees, and southern beeches occupy a similar ecological niche in the southern hemisphere. After analyzing 123 isolates of cold-resistant Saccharomyces, the scientists discovered one, Saccharomyces eubaynus, that was a genetic match with today’s lager yeast. The other half of the equation had been found.

Since then, Saccharomyces eubayanus has been found growing in China, North America, and New Zealand, but it’s never been clear exactly how it made it to Germany in the 1400s. If it had come from the Americas, the timing would have been tight, for instance, and some scientists believe that it probably traveled to Europe from China, over Silk Road trading routes.

This new discovery indicates that, at the very least, South American people started brewing alcoholic drinks, possibly like the chicha made in the region today, using Saccharomyces eubayanus at least 200 years before Europeans had the chance to. It may be one of those cases where two people in very distant places had the same great idea. Or, in some way, we may have inventive South American brewers from 1,000 years ago to thank for the lagers of the world.

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

There's a new all-corduroy fashion line out there called The Cords & Co, which is in the midst of rolling out seven dedicated corduroy stores globally.

Speaking to The Evening Standard, founder Michael Söderlindh emphasized that he built an all-corduroy brand because the public is ready.

“There are lots of brands that have done their take on corduroy but there has never been a brand that has completely dedicated themselves to it,” Söderlindh said. “I am convinced that people are looking for a lasting alternative to denim. We want people all over the world to rediscover their love for corduroy.”

It sounds like an absurd, perhaps even improbable idea for a clothing line, yet here we are in 2017, at the cusp of embracing once-unfashionable cords all over again.

According to Refinery29, in fact, “the corduroy comeback is in full swing.”

Though its popularity has waxed and waned over the decades, the fabric certainly has its staunch devotees. Take Miles Rohan, the the founder of the Corduroy Appreciation Club. Here's how, back in 2006, explained to Maximum Fun in 2006 why he’s such an unabashed corduroy fan: “If I’m not wearing at least one piece of corduroy, I don’t feel right. The repetition, the parallel lines, the thickness I’ve always thought, provided a kind of order and support. And because I’m not entirely the most orderly person, it helps. But even when I was little I loved corduroy. It made me feel grown up and sophisticated. I’m more of a pin wale person, but at times I love a nice wide wale.”

(Note his use of the term “wale,” the common terminology for the number of ridges per inch that a piece of corduroy has.)

Now, corduroy didn’t naturally start out in its gracefully tufted form.

Corduroy’s roots are in the ancient Egyptian city of Al-Fustat. Located near the Nile river, the city became something of a ground zero of tough woven fabrics around the second century.

It also, at least for a while, played a significant historic role—in 641, it became the first Arab settlement in Egypt and served as the country’s capital for two separate periods totaling more than 300 years. But in the midst of the Crusades, the city’s top political official ordered the city burned in a desperate attempt to prevent its wealth from being stolen.

Since that time, Al-Fustat has lost its high level of influence in the region, as nearby Cairo, which was only founded in 969 AD, usurped it in the 12th century to become Egypt’s capital.

As it turned out, this lost city’s biggest legacy in the Western world was the predecessor fabric to corduroy, which became known as fustian, a clear riff on the Egyptian city’s name. It’s a heavy cloth that works well for things like pants, but unlike corduroy, it doesn’t feature any raised cords.

The 1870s textbook Textile Fabrics highlighted this lineage.

“Fustian, of which we still have two forms in velveteen and corduroy, was originally wove at Fustat on the Nile, with a warp of linen thread and a woof of thick cotton, so twilled and cut that it showed on one side a thick but low pile; and the web thus managed took its name of Fustian from that Egyptian city,” the Very Rev. Daniel Rock D.D. wrote.

The fabric at one point was closely associated with the Catholic Church, after a Cistercian abbot forced chasubles—the outer vestments worn by priests—to be made out of basic linen or fustian, rather than more expensive materials. The fabric had a tendency to be both associated with high-minded pompousness (see the fact that Shakespeare turned fustian into an adjective of that nature) and working-class living. And this was before corduroy even got any cords.

In the book The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, German philosopher Friedrich Engels noted how common fustian fabric was among the people he was writing about.

“The men wear chiefly trousers of fustian or other heavy cotton goods, and jackets or coats of the same,” Engels recalled. “Fustian has become the proverbial costume of the working-men, who are called ‘fustian jackets,’ and call themselves so in contrast to the gentlemen who wear broadcloth, which latter words are used as characteristic for the middle class.”

The book doesn’t mention of corduroy, alas, but its modern-day form came from a similar working-class roots—and is widely believed to have gotten its corded magic in Manchester, England. At least that’s the claim the corduroy hawkers at Brooks Brothers make.

An 1891 edition of the Transactions of the Philological Society, a London-based group, puts the creation of corduroy at between 1776 and 1787, though there is a 1774 mention of imported corduroys from Britain in the Newspapers.com archive.

In her 1973 Chicago Tribune article on corduroy, Marylin Stitz mentioned that the name of the material is French in origin, standing for an anglicized “Cord du Roi.” The Philological Society, however, did not share that view.

The philological group, which studies the development of languages, stated that the French variation of the word was in fact referred to as “the king’s cord,” but in an already Anglicized way—kings-cordes, to be specific. Meanwhile, other elements of the English language didn’t make it to France.

“The word duroy as the name of a coarse woollen fabric, manufactured with verges and druggets in the West of England in [Robinson Crusoe author Daniel] Defoe's time, has evidently no connexion,” the society explained.

The society additionally discussed the possibility that the fabric was named after someone named Corderoy, only for that linguistic meaning to get morphed slightly.

We'll likely never know for sure because history is hazy on this point, but a 1772 mention of “corderoys,” in reference to the fabric being imported, supports the claim, for what it’s worth.

It’s either that, possibly, or that someone saw the cords on these pants and thought it fit perfect with “duroy.”

Corduroy may be the ultimate always-going-in-and-out-of-fashion fabric.

To prove the point, we’re going to play a game here. Below are quotes from three trend pieces about how corduroy is coming back into style. Guess the year for each:

1. “It’s amazing. People are coming in like crazy and asking for corduroy slacks and sport coats—even with patches on the sleeves.”
2. “Its royal roots may be in question, but there’s no debating that corduroy has made a grand comeback.”
3. ”One of the ‘new faces’ on the fashion scene this season is corduroy. Although this cotton is a traditional classic, new treatments give it a lease on life.”

If you guessed 1994, 2002, and 1952, you are correct.

Of course, corduroy wasn’t always in comeback mode. If you were, however, to set a single decade as “peak corduroy,” which decade might you choose?

If you said the 1970s, ding ding ding we have an answer! In 1973, the Chicago Tribune’s Marylin Stitz really nailed the interest in corduroy at the time:

When you think about transitional dresses, playtime outfits, and back to school togs, one fabric comes to mind. Corduroy.

Why? Because it’s luxurious and functional at the same time. It can look dressed up or dressed down. It holds its shape and is easy to care for. It adapts well to clothing for your entire family. It’s durable—and economical.

As for the 21st-century resurgence, it appears modest so far. Rohan of the Corduroy Appreciation Society started an all-corduroy online store in 2016, which sells tufted ties and jackets. All outfits are designed by Rohan, with cloth coming from the birthplace of modern corduroy, Northern England.

As neat as corduroy is, it doesn’t generate a ton of die-hards. Folks who are really into the fabric, like Rohan, are few and far between. Corduroy is the fashion industry’s variation on the McRib—an inoffensive-enough product that retailers can go back to when they need a short-term hit, something that has just enough novelty to it that people will buy it because they’ve read somewhere that corduroy is making a comeback.

For the rest of us, we don’t really think in terms of wales all that often.

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

Liberia is re-opening its national museum—but there's a problem. In 2016, UNESCO provided $400,000 of funding to revitalize the 155-year-old building and fix its leaky roof. Now, it's ready to go, bar one all-important thing: the stuff inside.

During the 14 brutal years of Liberia's two civil wars, an estimated 5,800 artifacts made their way out of the country and into the hands of private collectors or foreign museums. Culture Minister Joyce Kenkpen last week announced a "Let's Save Our Museum" campaign, which aims to source new artifacts, from artists, and reclaim some of the stolen or lost ones.

"We don't want to open a museum with just a handful of artifacts on display," she told the Liberian Observer. The three floors of the museum might be state-of-the-art, but, at the moment, they're sitting empty. "This will not attract the visitors we expect," she said. Kenkpen hopes that they'll be able to reclaim about half of the "arts and artifacts" currently elsewhere. "We have written these museums we know have Liberia's artworks about the need for them to return them," she said. "And the discussion is ongoing fruitfully."

In 2005, the BBC reported that there were fewer than 100 objects left in the museum. In the meantime, foreign museums have a wealth of Liberian treasures, whether looted in the civil wars or acquired earlier, when the laws were less stringent. Some of these appear in anthropology collections: In the "ethnology" section of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, there are over 600 artifacts thought to be from Liberia, ranging from masks to "divining sets" to bracelets. The Pitt Rivers, in Oxford, has 36, including imitation glass leopard teeth and a bag made out of monkey skin.

While Liberia waits on the return of its treasures, here is a selection of some of the Liberian artifacts on display elsewhere.

As students all over the world begin the fall semester, students at the University of Guam are instead meeting roommates, scheduling classes, and cracking open books for fanuchånan.

As Pacific Daily News reports, the university recently gave its academic semesters new names. All are based on the terms for seasons in Chamorro, the island's traditional language.

The fall semester is now fanuchånan, or "the rainy season," while the spring semester is fañomnåkan, or "the dry season." (The terms translate directly as "a time for rain" and "a time for sunshine.") Fall break is now tinalo', or "in the middle," and summer sessions are finakpo', or "at the end."

The Chamorro language is spoken by the Chamorro people, Guam's indigenous residents. Like many such languages, its use has declined precipitously over the years. As Michael Lujan Bevacqua and Kenneth Gofigan Kuper write in an article about Chamorro, when the United States took over governance of Guam in 1898, attempts to "Americanize" the population led to bans on speaking Chamorro in public, including in schools. Although the people of Guam fought these changes, after a period of Japanese occupation during World War II, "language resistance evaporated," and the decline worsened.

By 2010, the U.S. Census counted a mere 26,000 Chamarro speakers on the island, out of about 160,000 total residents. More recent studies have it at closer to 10,000, and most of these speakers are over 55.

The past decade has seen a variety of efforts to encourage people to speak Chamorro, including immersion schools, apps and websites, and a Youtube soap opera, called Siha.

This effort from the university has been made in the same spirit. "We all know there's no fall or spring in our part of the world," university president Dr. Robert Underwood, who spearheaded the change, explains in a video. "But we do have a rainy season and a dry season... [this change] will mark us as uniquely Guam."

"Have a wonderful and successful fanuchånan," he closes out.

For two years, the marine geophysicist Jean Roger had been looking for traces of an old earthquake. In 1755, Portugal shook with a quake that would have topped 8.0 on the Richter scale—so large that Lisbon was leveled and the resulting tsunami wave reportedly made it all the way across the Atlantic and hit the Caribbean. But evidence proving that the wave had in fact reached that far had, thus far, been impossible to find.

As Eos reports, though, a tip from an archaeologist working in Martinique recently led Roger to exactly what he was looking for: proof of the wild reports of the power of the 1755 tsunami.

The archaeologist had come across a strange layer of sediment during a dig in the city of Fort-de-France. What they'd found was a layer of white sand a little less than half an inch thick, topped with a 3-inch layer of black sand. Based on clay shards in the surrounding layers, the researchers were able to date the unusual layers to between 1726 and 1783. The only event in that time period that could have been responsible for creating those layers was the 1755 earthquake.

The white layer, which was also full of shells, pretty clearly originated with a coral reef in the nearby bay. But, as Eos reports, the origins of that thick layer of black sand was a mystery until the researchers happened to find a black sand beach on the river that bisects the island.

The volcanic sand there was a match for the black layer. Roger and his colleagues now think that the tsunami caused a bore—essentially a giant wave that moves along a river—to sweep throughmangrove drainage channels and carry the sand to the place where it was discovered. For all those years, the ground hid the evidence of the tsunami's extent, but Roger now has the proof he was after, which shows just how large of an impact it had.

The numbers behind the destruction wrought by Hurricane Irma, which in early September ripped through the Caribbean at Category 5 level, then hit Florida, are staggering. In St. Bart's and French St. Martin, the cost of damages is an estimated $1.4 billion, according to the AP. About a million people lost power in Puerto Rico, and 90 percent of the electrical infrastructure in Anguilla was impacted by the storm. And for the first time in 300 years, reports CNN, no one lives on the island of Barbuda.

Before and after images from NASA satellites offer a stark visual of the damage. Islands that are normally covered in lush vegetation now appear muddy and barren. Maximum sustained winds of 185 miles per hour stripped trees bare in the Virgin Islands. Barbuda is now a dark shade of brown, contrasting with nearby Antigua, which remains fairly green—the island escaped the eye of the storm.

But according to Edmund Tanner, a biologist who studies how plants weather hurricanes, the lowland areas of the islands will likely be green again in about six months.

"Native vegetation on these islands has been through hundreds of hurricanes since the last major change of climate [at the end of the last ice age] and have been naturally selected to lose leaves and small branches and re-sprout," Tanner said in an interview with NASA's Earth Observatory blog. "On the ground, there will be lots of sprouts on tree trunks. For larger trees, the surviving branches will produce leaves and small branches and slowly these will shade out and kill the [sprouts] produced on the lower parts of trunks."

In the small areas where tree roots were flooded with salt water from the ocean, recovery will take much longer. If the trees died, said Tanner, "the soil will need to be desalinated naturally by rain, and seeds will have to germinate and grow."

John Buchna, head of the Downtown Erie Business Improvement District in Pennsylvania, considers his city’s trolley service a huge success. Established in 2006, it runs in a loop downtown Thursday through Sunday, shuttling tourists and residents to Erie’s main attractions. The trolley, he says, is “a tremendous asset,” for drawing both tourists and suburbanites into the city.

By trolley, though, he doesn’t mean trolley exactly—at least not in the technical sense of the word. This trolley has rubber wheels and runs on pavement. Some might call it a bus. But with arched windows, brown, wood-like panelling, and a brightly painted body, it’s designed to emphatically reject that label.

Erie isn’t alone in its affinity for these types of vehicles; buses dressed-up as century-old trolley cars have become a staple of American cities. Whether exclusively serving tourists or functioning as part of a public transit system, they can be found in cities as geographically diverse as Miami, Florida and Juneau, Alaska.

Yet despite their prevalence, no cities or companies lay definitive claim to the trend. Some point to San Francisco’s iconic (real) trolley cars as inspiration; others just point to a neighboring city that got a trolley route a few years earlier.

So where did these “trolley-replica buses” (as they’re sometimes called) come from? I posed the question to an official at the American Public Transit Association.

“I’ve worked here 14 years,” she said. “You’re the only person who’s ever asked me about them.”

One of the earliest and most influential adopters of these vehicles was Chris Belland, CEO of multi-city sightseeing company Historic Tours of America. In the 1970s, before becoming “the king of trolley tours,” as one trolley-industry insider described him, Belland was living in Key West, the southernmost point of Florida, and a city that's currently recovering from Hurricane Irma, which hit it in early September. There he was buying and restoring historic properties, and giving tours of the island’s downtown. And downtown Key West, it turns out, was a ripe breeding ground for trolley mania.

“In the 1970s Key West was a down-and-out city,” Belland says. A large portion of the Navy Base that anchored the island's economy closed in 1974. After that, tourism was seen as crucial to the area’s survival.

One long-standing attraction on the island was the “Conch Tour Train.” This rubber-wheeled amusement-park-like ride that had been giving guided tours of Key West since 1958. The miniature train played into the provincial, far-from-the-mainland vibe that the Florida Keys had long cultivated and used to attract visitors.

And like any successful enterprise, it had a budget-friendly competitor: “The Conch Town Trolley.”

“[The Conch Town Trolley] used cut-down bread trucks that pulled a boat trailer, with plywood on the top and park benches bolted down for seats,” says Belland. “It was a very, uh, homemade type of tram.”

Belland and his business partners bought The Conch Town Trolley in the mid 1970s, which by then (after being sued by the Conch Tour Train for having too similar a name), was renamed the Old Town Trolley. They began to experiment with different types of vehicles and tours, looking for ways to stand out from their more popular and entrenched competitor.

One night in 1979, Belland found the vehicle he was looking for.

“I was up in Miami—I saw a [replica] trolley in the Orange Bowl Parade and I said, ‘Boy, that would be just the thing to compete with the Conch Tour Train!’ Because it has the same thematic value, and played into the town’s history.”

Key West—like so many other cities in America—once had streetcar lines. Streetcars were a defining piece of urban infrastructure in the pre-automobile era, and one that, by the 1970s, existed in only a handful of cities and towns. Trolley replica buses recalled those streetcars, and Belland had a hunch that evoking this history would work in their favor. They bought six “themed vehicle trolleys,” and started giving tours of Key West in 1980. That year they drew 77,000 riders.

The numbers only grew. And little did visitors on Old Town Trolley know, soon these vehicles would be coming to a city near them.

Today Belland’s idea to “play into the town’s history” as a way of drawing tourists may seem obvious. But when Old Town Trolley bought those vehicles in 1979, that idea was just entering the mainstream. In fact, it was almost a reversal of how many people viewed urban tourism in the decades prior.

“In the 1950s and 60s, you had urban renewal projects tearing down historic city centers, and urban disinvestment, with the thought that the city would be remade with a new image,” says Phil Gruen, Associate Professor of Architecture at Washington State University School of Design + Construction. In these decades older buildings and neighborhoods were often ignored and shunned by governments and developers. Large-scale projects like Government Center in Boston and Penn Center in Philadelphia came to epitomize dominant design trends of the era, wherein older buildings and neighborhoods were demolished and replaced with a Modernist-inspired combination of government buildings, high-rise housing, and office space. Highways were key to this strategy as well, as planners and designers sought to create a streamlined, car-centric city of the future.

Genuine trolleys and streetcars had no place in this brave new world.

But in the ‘60s and ‘70s, tastes in urban design and development began to shift. Developers started to find value in recalling the look and feel of cities of the 19th century. Urban forms that had been viewed as obsolete and inefficient in the ‘50s and ‘60s (crooked streets, cobblestones, pedestrian-centered neighborhoods) came to be viewed as quaint—nostalgic, even. Historic city centers were suddenly seen not as places to demolish or ignore, but to celebrate. And profit from.

Belland’s company, Old Town Trolley Tours, rode this wave of nostalgia—what better way to transport tourists through spiffed-up historic neighborhoods than in a modern recreation of a historic streetcar?

Throughout the ‘80s, demand for these anachronistic vehicles grew across the country. Companies like Chance Manufacturing, an amusement ride manufacturer based in Kansas, expanded their operations to include building high-quality bus/trolley hybrids.

But it wasn’t just the streetcars that made Belland’s tours stand out.

“We made a ‘continuous loop tour’ [in Key West]—now known as a ‘hop-on-hop-off’ trolley concept.” Belland says. “Everybody’s doing ‘hop-on-hop-off’ now—I’m pretty sure we were the first.”

Kitschy-looking trolley replicas shuttling tourists on a hop-on, hop-off tour route proved a winning model. Old Town Trolley spread. First to Boston, where they bought up a similar trolley tour company, and then onto cities across the country. Today the company—now called Historic Tours of America—operates in six cities around the United States, and carries about 3 million passengers annually. Belland even trademarked a word to describe the experience the company provides: “transportainment.”

“If you see anybody using it, let me know,” he says with a laugh.

In the last few decades, these vehicles have further embedded themselves in American urban life, as municipal governments hopped on board the trend, too.

William Kyrdeck Jr., former vice-mayor of Coral Gables, Florida, described how his city came to include trolley replica buses in its public transit system. In the late ‘90s Coral Gables—an affluent city right next to Miami—began exploring new transit options to help connect its historic center to Miami Dade’s mass transit system. After hiring consultants and surveying residents, they decided on a slightly unorthodox option.

“We like the small-town feel [of Coral Gables], and the trolley kind of helps support that,” he says. It’s not like getting on a big bus, it’s like getting on a…little trolley.”

The “little trolleys” were a big hit—they surpassed all their ridership expectations the first year of operation, and currently serve around 1.25 million riders per year.

Erie, Pennsylvania launched its weekend downtown loop trolley service in 2006. It’s a “great visual tool,” says John Buchna. “By giving a more historical look to it, it’s more approachable to tourists. [You] step onto it knowing you’re going to be taken on a tour. You know you aren’t going to get on the wrong route.”

Asked about the origins of these trolleys, Buchna summed up the feelings of many: “I don’t know who invented them, but I’m sure glad they did.”

Sometime around 1919 (reports vary as to the exact date), the Rubicon Point Lighthouse shut down.

During its brief existence, having been completed just three years earlier, in 1916, it illuminated the water of Lake Tahoe for passing steamers and mail ships. It did so from an elevation of 6,300 feet, making it the highest lighthouse in America. But it wasn’t spectacular to look at. Wooden, square, and only 12 feet tall, it didn’t have the capacity for a lighthouse keeper, or anything else really aside from an acetylene gas lantern that flashed every five seconds onto the lake below. After it was replaced by the Sugar Pine Point Lighthouse, Rubicon Point remained in situ. For many years, hikers mistook it for an outhouse.

Rubicon Point is just one of many abandoned lighthouses across the United States. There is even a lighthouse "Doomsday List" published by Lighthouse Digest, of those on the brink of destruction (Rubicon Point was on the list in the 1990s, although it has since been renovated). Some are famous, such as the St. George Reef Lighthouse that lies six miles off the coast of Northern California. Constructed of granite and concrete atop a treacherous outcrop of rocks, it was designed to withstand the monster seas that frequently roiled around this area of the coast. The only way onto the lighthouse was via a 60-foot boom, which would winch up small boats. Both keepers and Coast Guards lost their lives trying to reach the St. George Reef. One particularly unforgiving storm produced a wave so fierce it broke the glass in the lantern room.

The St. George Reef Lighthouse was decommissioned in 1975 and replaced by a floating buoy. It sat, empty and abandoned, until the St. George Reef Lighthouse Preservation Society took over management of the site in 1996 and began to operate helicopter tours to fund its preservation. In March 2012, an automated light was installed, giving the tower a second chance at life.

Not all of America’s abandoned lighthouses are as isolated, or as dangerous. Off the coast of North Carolina is the Frying Pan Shoals Light Tower, a squat, steel lighthouse that more closely resembles the platform of an oil rig. It operated as a light house for 13 years, but today, thanks to its 5,000-square-foot living space and helipad, it's a bed and breakfast for adventurous tourists.

These lighthouses appear—along with many beautiful, still-functioning ones—in the new book Lighthouses of America. Of the enduring charm of lighthouses, the book's editor and former Coast Guard rescue pilot Tom Beard writes, “Open seas in darkness is an eerie, sometimes frightening experience for navigators, but a distant, flashing light to sailors conveys a symbol of hope, tranquility, and comfort. Inside the tower, stalwart lighthouse keepers, tending lights in all manner of weather and personal privation, add to the mystique.”

Today many lighthouses run on solar power or make use of LED technology, but they still evoke a nostalgic mood of beacons flashing quietly through the night, illuminating remote coastlines and isolated islands. Below, a selection of images from the book shows how these landmarks have evolved over time.

The island of Chapelle Dom Hue is a small hunk of land off the coast of Guernsey, itself a small island in the English Channel. For many years, people have found bits of pottery and flint there that date back to the medieval period, but beyond that the island’s history has been lost. Another small island nearby had been home to medieval monks and, when archaeologist Phil de Jersey started excavations on Chapelle Dom Hue back in August, it seemed possible that he would find evidence showing that the monks used the island as a retreat, The Guernsey Press reported.

Instead, he found something much stranger: a carefully dug burial, of the type where one might expect to find human remains, but that instead held the remains of a porpoise. The grave, which contained a porpoise skull and bones that look to be shoulder blades and ribs, was also aligned east to west, as a person’s would have been. It is, de Jersey says in a YouTube video, “one of the strangest and most bizarre things I’ve ever come across” in 35 years of archaeological work.

Why would a porpoise have been buried so carefully? With the sea so close by, de Jersey points out, it would have been easy to dispose of it in some other way. One theory is that the cetacean was buried to preserve its meat, and then never recovered. But it could have had some other meaning. As Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan or, The Whale, wrote in The Guardian, this isn’t the first time that porpoise remains have been found buried in a deliberate way. In 1958, an archaeologist’s young assistant found a porpoise jawbone buried with 9th-century jewelry and other treasures.

The newly discovered marine mammal's burial contained no comparable grave goods, though. It is, de Jersey told The Guardian, a “slightly wacky kind of thing,” but also a “wonderful surprise.” There are no answers yet, but the fascination with a find like this one comes from the unexpected questions it raises.

We never talk about how sensitive poison frogs can be. It might be the name—who among us would choose to have our most toxic traits advertised so baldly? Poison frogs, for example, are very seldom described as cuddly, caring, or considerate. But when it comes to their young, they're all three. The amphibians are remarkably thoughtful parents, who ferry their tadpole offspring around on their backs with sticky mucus. The parents take the tadpoles to various rain forest pools to help them grow and develop.

New research, from the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, and Harvard University, indicates an especially strong nurturing streak. When unrelated, "foster" tadpoles are placed on the backs of adult brilliant-thighed poison frogs, their parental instincts kick in, and they take the foundlings to exactly the same pools as they would their own babies. More than that, having tadpoles on their backs seems to trigger some kind of memory—a madeleine that guides them back to the pools of their own infancy. "The adult poison frogs don't just march off," researcher Andrius Pašukonis said in a release, "the touching also stimulates memories of distant pool locations in the forest."

Scientists have mostly focused on parenting "triggers" in birds and mammals. This is one of the first forays into frog foster parent behavior. Researchers tracked the movements of the foster parents with tiny transponders, which also showed that even female frogs, who do not usually take on a piggybacking role, assume this parental duty when tadpoles are placed on their backs.

It's tempting to imagine that the frogs carry some sense of parental duty, but researchers think it is more likely the tadpoles simply prompted some as-yet-unknown mechanism and instinct kicked in. "These findings are interesting, as they show how one stimulus can trigger such complex behavior," added Pašukonis. Does that make the behavior any less endearing?

Greek mythology gave us the Shirt of Nessus, a garment so soaked in monster blood that even mighty Hercules withered in its embrace. While the world of chemistry makes no allowance for magical beast drippings, it provides us with more than enough deadly substances—and history offers at least one example of poisonous pants.

The year was 1961 and the setting no more mythic than Fresno County, California. An eight-year-old boy sat pale and glassy-eyed in his classroom. When his teacher noted the boy’s quickened pulse and exaggerated breathing, it was time to call mom. She picked her son up and took him to Valley Children’s Hospital, where his already confused state worsened with muscle twitches, abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea.

The case quickly spiraled into not only a medical emergency, but a mystery. The hospital called in Fresno pediatrician Dr. John P. Conrad, Jr., who conducted a barrage of tests to isolate the cause of such an aggressive illness. The results quickly ruled out shigellosis, a diarrheal illness caused by bacteria. Based on his experience with accidental insecticide poisonings in the area, Dr. Conrad came to suspect poison—and he had a hunch which one it could be. He ordered a blood test for the common insecticide organophosphate. It came back positive.

Organophosphate works on mammals as a nerve toxin. It binds up the enzyme acetylcholinesterase, which prevents it from decomposing the neurotransmitter acetylcholine—which you can think of as a chalkboard for nerve signaling. Without acetylcholinesterase around to clean the chalkboard between uses, the board just continues to relay the same outdated message from before. The old signal bombards the nerves, distressing multiple body systems.

Dr. Conrad now had the necessary information to treat the boy, but one question remained: How had he acquired the poison? The most obvious suspect was local agricultural use. Fresno was a big farming area, the pesticide was common, and it absorbs through the skin. And yet, when questioned, local sprayers said they hadn’t used organophosphate in recent weeks.

The question of exposure remained, but the patient himself improved. Six days after discharge from the hospital, Dr. Conrad inspected the boy once more and found him perfectly healthy. Then, on the ride home from the physical, the boy’s symptoms resumed with a vengeance.

After stabilizing the boy once more with fluids and a pair of powerful poison blockers, Dr. Conrad and the Fresno County Public Health Department turned their attention once more to the mystery of transmission. Where had he come into contact with organophosphate?

A search of the family car, garage and home turned up negative, but inspection of the boy’s clothes finally cast suspicion on a mundane pair of blue jeans. Indeed, they proved contaminated with organophosphate. Each time he slipped them on, the poison in the fabric began its work anew. The boy’s mother revealed she’d bought five pairs at a recent trucking company salvage sale.

The insecticide’s stain proved difficult to distinguish on the pants, save around the label and seams, but a health department test revealed just how much organophosphate had been absorbed by the jeans. They placed the five pairs of unwashed jeans in a caged mosquito colony and watched for signs of distress among the insects.

According to Dian Dincin Buchman’s "The Mystery of the Poisoned Boy," published in a 1994 edition of ChemMatters, the jeans not only killed the entire colony within 15 minutes, they also wiped out a second, separately enclosed colony in the same lab a mere five minutes later. Around this time, a second poisoning case emerged in the Fresno area: an eight-year-old male patient and yet another pair of poisoned pants.

According to a 1963 Journal of the American Medical Association article co-authored by Dr. Conrad, the Fresno County Health Department and the state Public Utilities Commission began a search for the source of the poisoning. Local TV, radio and newspapers urged anyone who had bought jeans at a salvage sale to bring them in.

The investigation quickly solved the rest of the mystery. Eight months earlier, the blue jeans had shipped in a truck alongside machinery and chemicals. An accidental spill of the organophosphate pesticide Phosdrin contaminated 10 pairs of jeans. While the chemical dried and went undetected, the client returned the jeans to the trucking company due to their less-than-shelf-worthy appearance. Stuck with them, the trucking company sold them off at a salvage sale.

The chemical spill ultimately poisoned six children. It was a miracle no one died, especially when you consider this fact from a 1963 American Journal of Nursing article: The five-gallon insecticide spill contained enough organophosphate to kill 9,000 eight-year-old children.

Following the case, the California legislature introduced a bill prohibiting the shipment of hazardous chemicals alongside food or clothing. Tighter laws and industry standards have improved shipping conditions since the poisoned pants incident, but cross contamination remains an issue, especially in international, bulk cargo trade.

Still, if we’re to learn anything from the 1963 case of deadly jeans, it’s that you don’t have to be the son of a Greek god to risk the wrath of poisoned pants.

Mexico's monk parakeet invasion began like most monk parakeet invasions. The small, green, South American bird escaped from somewhere in the pet supply chain. Over 20 years after they were first sighted in Mexico City, the monk parakeet population has exploded and expanded—the birds can now be found from Hermosillo in the north to Huajuapan in the south. According to a new study, this boom is the result of two specific policy changes, one in Europe and one in Mexico.

Monk parakeets are found in cities around the world thanks to the international pet trade, with notable populations in Brooklyn and Barcelona. The small, adaptable parrots may be an interesting and surprising sight, but they often end up building their large nests around heat-producing electrical infrastructure, which sometimes results in fires.

There was never much of a market for the pets in Mexico, but in 2005, the European Union banned all non-poultry bird imports, citing avian flu as a concern, a ban that was extended to all wild-caught bird imports in 2007. The following year, Mexico banned the purchase of native parrot species for pets. This opened both a market and a supply for the parakeets, and between 2008 and 2014 (when their import was banned in Mexico), close to half a million birds were brought in.

Those policy changes and the volume of imports track with monk parakeet sightings in cities around Mexico. The researchers compiled citizen science reports and scientific surveys from across the country for a 16-year period. The birds were first spotted in Puerto Vallarta in 1999. By 2008 they had only been spotted in five cities. By 2015, that number was 97. At the end of 2016, the Mexican government classified monk parakeets as an invasive species and resolved to develop a management plan. This study provides an important baseline for determining the next steps.

Few professionals ask more of their trousers than farmers. Their rugged, often dirty work no doubt taxes the cleanliness and durability of any garment. Perhaps the least a farmer can ask of his pants is that they don’t spontaneously burst into flames. But in the case of a number of agricultural workers in 1930s New Zealand, it turns out, that was indeed too much to ask.

Fans of Discovery’s long-running science-and-explosions show, Mythbusters, might be familiar with the strange spate of self-immolating trousers that briefly plagued New Zealand farmers in the 1930s. What's less commonly known about this unusual saga is that it all began with a weed called ragwort.

Native to Europe, Jacobaea vulgaris, commonly known by the unattractive nickname ragwort, made its way to New Zealand in the 19th century, and quickly became more than a nuisance. Mature ragwort looks sort of like a taller dandelion, producing a bright yellow flower with long, thin petals. But the weed is also poisonous to horses and cows, making it a serious problem if it begins to gain a foothold in grazing pastures. Sheep and goats are more readily able to stomach ragwort, and often the development and spread of the weed is kept in check simply by allowing sheep to eat it. But in early 20th-century New Zealand, the ragwort situation began to get out of control.

As the scholar James Watson writes in a 2004 essay, The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers: Reflections on an Aspect of Technological Change in New Zealand Dairy Farming Between the World Wars, dairy farming became more widespread in New Zealand in the first few decades of the 20th century. As this shift unfolded, more and more pasture space began to be given over to cows, and less to sheep. Since cows generally avoid ragwort (see: poison), this allowed the weed to begin spreading like, well, a weed, pushing out other beneficial grasses and plants as it did so. The growth of ragwort was so rapid and widespread that by 1930, some farmers began looking to the Department of Agriculture for answers. One of their early solutions was to use a chemical herbicide, sodium chlorate.

Inspired by a 1930 article that extolled the virtues of the toxic compound as an effective ragwort killer, the government began encouraging farmers to spray down affected areas. And sure enough, they managed to kill a ton of ragwort. But in addition to being a highly effective herbicide, sodium chlorate is also highly caustic when dry, a fact that many farmers found out only as their pants began to explode.

One of the earliest cases of exploding pants, and the one most closely associated with the phenomenon, involved a farmer named Richard Buckley, who made the local news after some of his pants exploded in his house. After wearing them to spray the sodium chlorate, he hung them in front of the fire to dry out. Out of nowhere, his trousers exploded with a bang. According to a news report from the day, he was able to snag his now flaming pants and throw them out onto the grass where small explosions continued to erupt in the garment. Buckley was alarmed, but unharmed.

Around the same time, similar reports of spontaneously combusting pants began to appear, and not all of them were as harmless as Buckley’s. One report claimed that a farmer was riding his horse when the friction caused his pants to begin to smolder right there in the saddle. Another pair of pants were hanging out to dry when they suddenly burst into flames. Then there were the unfortunate souls who happened to be wearing their pants when the chemical reaction got started. Some survived with serious burns, while at least a handful of farmers died from the ignitions. One person, referenced in Watson’s paper, died after lighting a match in his electricity-free home, just trying to check on his baby.

The problem was that in order to apply the sodium chlorate, the chemical was mixed with water to create a solution, which was then sprayed and spread, getting all over the pants of the farmers using it. As the clothing dried, the water was removed, leaving nothing but volatile sodium chlorate crystals bonded to the fibers. In essence, it created explosive cloth that could be set off by flames, heat, or even just a strong impact.

Luckily New Zealand’s exploding pants epidemic didn’t last long, quickly becoming an odd historical footnote after use of the dangerous chemical slowed. It remained in the cultural consciousness thanks to local legend and records like Watson’s essays, and that episode of Mythbusters. It even became the titular case for New Scientist’s 2011 collection of odd tales of accidental science, Farmer Buckley’s Exploding Trousers and Other Odd Events On the Way to Scientific Discovery.

Ragwort remains a noxious weed found all across New Zealand. A number of other attempts have been made to control the plant, including the use of further herbicides, as well as introducing biological controls such as the ragwort flea beetle and the cinnabar moth (which was actually introduced in 1926). Thankfully, none of these have caused anyone’s pants to explode.

The year was 1884, and Oscar Wilde was already something of a London celebrity. Though he had not yet published the plays that would earn him his spot among the Victorian literati, he had made a name for himself as aesthete, man-about-town, and lecturer—with public views on everything aesthetic, including clothes.

At the beginning of the year, he announced his engagement to Constance Lloyd, who he had met in Ireland some years earlier. Newspapers frothed about the news, and appeared relieved that Wilde, and his new wife, would not be moving to Dublin: “there was some fear lest London should lose its lion and society its favorite source of admiration and ridicule. … Happily this danger is averted. We keep Oscar.”

But Wilde also appeared in the papers that year for another reason. In a series of letters published in the Pall Mall Gazette, he wrote about how women ought to dress. The following year, in the New York Tribune, he published his essay “The Philosophy of Dress,” in which he stressed the important relationship between clothing and one’s soul.

At that time, women commonly wore heavy, restrictive underwear, and long, cumbersome skirts with crinolines or bustles. Corsets were certainly uncomfortable, but they could also be lethal, deforming skeletons, compromising fertility and even driving internal organs into places they oughtn’t have been. Despite that, people continued to wear them, and to “tight-lace,” ignoring doctors’ concerns and claiming these devices improved posture.

It was in this climate that people began to call for dress reform, with some asserting that these corsets were immodest and promoted an objectifying take on women’s bodies. In time, “dress reform” would come to be seen as a crucial part of the fight for women’s equality. It’s ironic, then, that many of the “reformed” clothes suggested as an alternative were themselves deemed shocking and morally questionable.

Wilde’s letters were strongly in favor of simple, comfortable outfits for women, with minimal “fringes, flounces and kilting.” More radically, he expressed his fondness for the “divided skirt.” This controversial article of clothing was essentially an extremely wide-legged pair of trousers. It had caused some anxiety in the British press, amid concerns that two-legged clothing for women would promote immoral ideals. The divided skirt—a trouser posing as a skirt—was a compromise of sorts. In a public letter, Constance, Wilde’s wife, described it as trying to “look as though it were not divided, on account of the intolerance of the British public.” Those who did wear it loved the liberty it afforded them. One wearer described“the delightful sense of freedom that results from the removal of petticoats.”

Constance was propelled to stardom through her celebrity marriage. Even the New York Times reported on her wedding dress, which Wilde is alleged to have designed. (In his biography of Wilde, Richard Ellmann describes“rich creamy satin,” “a delicate cowslip tint … a high Medici collar; ample, puffed sleeves [and a] veil of saffron-colored Indian gauze.”)

On her honeymoon, the now-Constance Wilde ruminated on what to do, beyond being mother and wife, writing to a friend that she wanted a career: “I am thinking of becoming a correspondent to some paper, or else going on the stage.” Though she didn’t go on the stage, nor became a reporter, she was instead a star campaigner for multiple causes. Women’s dress reform, and the divided skirt, would be one of her most public targets.

A few years earlier, in 1881, Lady Frances Harberton had launched the British arm of the Rational Dress Society, an organization that later promised to“promote the adoption, according to individual taste and convenience, of a style of dress based on considerations of health, comfort and beauty.” Staggeringly, it advocated for underwear that weighed under seven pounds. The Society came four decades after the bloomers craze of the 1850s, but similarly promoted towards the liberation of bifurcated leg cladding: the “divided skirt.”

The satirical magazine Punch had plenty to say about the “divided skirt”: in June 1881, it published a not-inaccurate poem about what, exactly, the divided skirt was:

“Skirts be divided—oh, what an atrocity!
To ‘dual garmenture’ folks must attain.
True that another skirt hides this insanity
Miss Mary Walker in old days began;
Yet it should flatter our masculine vanity,
For this means simply the trousers of Man!”

The following month, they decried it simply as “revived Bloomerism,” and proposed that its proponents be nicknamed “Pantaloon-atics.” Bloomers were Turkish-style trousers popular in the early 1850s, for similar reasons to the “divided skirt”. It was short-lived, but the media furore it provoked continued, and it loomed large in the popular imagination.

Constance seems to have agreed with, and sought to propagate, Wilde’s strong views on women’s clothing. She dressed as much for him as herself: The actress Elizabeth Robins remembered meeting her at home, where she wore a white muslin dress, despite the relatively cold August day. Seeing Robins staring at her “midsummer frock”, Constance is said to have remarked: “My husband likes me to wear white.” On other occasions, onlookers remembered Constance’s “very peculiar and eccentric clothes,” which she wore apparently “to please Oscar, not herself.” At a private viewing, “instead of looking at the pictures on the walls, a great many people were asking each other if they had seen Mrs. Oscar Wilde.”

All of these things collided—Constance’s sudden shunt into the limelight; her readiness to wear unusual clothes; Wilde’s strong and supportive views on dress reform; her desire to do something beyond being Wilde’s wife and mother to their two sons. She quickly became one of the Rational Dress Society’s most vocal and visible advocates.

In this, she was well-supported by her husband. (Wilde loved clothes of all sorts, and wrote to the Daily Telegraph that waistcoats ought to“show whether a man can admire poetry or not.”) In November 1888, she gave one of a few lectures for the society, entitled “Clothed in Our Right Minds,” in which she modeled the “divided skirt” herself and spoke out against the claims that such garments were indecent. Around the same time, she became editor of the Rational Dress Society’s gazette.

Wilde himself was unambiguous about the divided skirt—that it should not be “ashamed of its own division,” that “the principle of the dress is good,” and that it was “a step towards … perfection” in women’s clothing. If anything, he called for even more radicalism in women’s legwear. “If the divided skirt is to be of any positive value, it must give up all idea of ‘being identical in appearance with an ordinary skirt’;” he wrote. “It must diminish the moderate width of each of its divisions, and sacrifice its foolish frills and flounces; the moment it imitates a dress it is lost; but let it visibly announce itself as what it actually is, and it will go far towards solving a real difficulty.” Indeed, he said that he would like to see women in “some adaptation of the divided skirt or long and moderately loose knickerbockers.”

All the year before, Constance had become more and more confident as a Dress Reformer, wearing the “divided skirt” in public as proof that it could be an elegant, beautiful garment, worn in her case as part of a suit of striped cheviot wool, trimmed with blue fur and birds’ wings.

In the meantime, Wilde was busying himself with the editorship of the Woman’s World, a regular magazine for women about life, culture, and fashion. When asked to edit it, in 1887, he responded enthusiastically: “No one appreciates more fully than I do the value and importance of Dress, in its relation to good taste and good health.” He seems to have hoped that the magazine could be a vehicle for progressive views, and attempted to lower the cover price so that it was easily accessible to women of all classes. Constance, too, was drawn in to write a couple of articles about children’s clothing, in which she spoke out in favor of the “divided skirt” for little girls: “The Rational Dress should be adopted by all mothers who wish their girls to grow up healthy and happy.”

But their enthusiasm for these projects—the Woman’s World, rational dress reform, even the divided skirt—waned as Oscar’s star rose in the 1890s. He became not just a celebrity, but a celebrity playwright. Then, in 1895, he was a cause célèbre, sentenced to two years’ hard labor on charges of sodomy and gross indecency.

Even without the Wildes’ involvement, the push for the “divided skirt” hurried, or perhaps shuffled, onwards. Their celebrity had undoubtedly added momentum and public attention to the cause, though many years would pass before trousers and their antecedents were anything other than shocking for women. In 1898, Lady Harberton, the founder of the society, was refused entry to the Hautboy Hotel for wearing a later incarnation of the divided skirt. And the suffragettes, 10 years on from that, were labeled“droll objects” for wearing the divided skirt while campaigning.

It would not be until the 20th century, and long after Wilde and Constance’s deaths, that trousers became de rigueur for women—though both would surely be pleased about their own small part in making that happen. Sadly, though, waistcoats that demonstrate poetic appreciation are still far from the norm.

When you die, how would you like to be remembered? Each person probably has a different answer, but you could do worse than having a secret video game hidden in millions of homes all over the world, dedicated just to you.

As Polygon, Gizmodo, and others are reporting, a version of the classic 8-bit game, Golf—dating all the way back to 1984—has been discovered, hidden in the code of Nintendo's latest console hit, the Switch. The easter egg seems to have been placed in the new hardware as an homage to the old game’s creator and Nintendo CEO, the late Satoru Iwata. Before he became the leader of the company that saved video games from oblivion, Iwata coded games for the iconic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), such as Golf, which he managed to fit on one of the console's low-storage cartridges with an innovative compression tool of his own design.

Uncovering the tribute is no easy task. In fact, in the console's code, the game isn't even called Golf. It's called "Flog."A complicated series of inputs is required to unlock the game, including setting the date on the console to July 11, the anniversary of Iwata’s 2015 passing, and mimicking a motion he famously did during a 2014 press video. Holding the Switch’s controllers (called Joy-Cons, but we’re not calling them that), you must raise them up toward either side of your head, and then extend your arms out. If all of the steps are performed correctly, Golf will play automatically.

While it is a sweet tribute to one of video gaming’s more influential figures, it is far from the first time a memorial has been written right into a video game. For example, in Dungeons & Dragons Online, players can find a tombstone for the game’s creator, Gary Gygax; Borderlands 2 features a character based on a fan of the game who passed away from cancer; and after Leonard Nimoy’s death, Star Trek Online installed Spock statues in-game to honor him. There are many more examples.

Golf doesn’t play as well on the Switch as it once did on the NES, but as a memorial it plays perfectly.

Trees are beautiful organisms, beacons of both change and stability. Each year, they herald the seasons, their green spring leaves giving way to the fiery hues of autumn. Whole ecosystems are housed in their branches. But have you ever wondered what they would look like in jeans?

Up until a few years ago, a quick trip to Sweden would let you find out. Dispersed about the grounds of Malmö's storied Wanås Konst sculpture park stood "Untitled (Tree Pants)," a series of trees dressed up by the New York-based artist Peter Coffin.

Coffin, who is the nephew of the pioneering land artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, has always enjoyed playing in the overlap between human and natural systems. His works include a human-sized version of a bowerbird's nest made entirely out of blue objects, and a model of the universe inside a hollow log.

The seeds for the Tree Pants piece were planted years ago, when Coffin was a child in California. On shopping trips to the clothing retailer Miller's Outpost, he often found himself drawn in by the Levi's display. "They had these giant jeans," he says. "They sort of stuck in my mind."

Decades later, while working on an exhibition at the Wanås Foundation, he recalled those giant pants. "We were surrounded by these serene woods, and I thought it'd be fun to do something silly in that context," he says. Without telling anyone, he got ahold of some denim, roped in a seamster, and decked out a particularly attractive tree in a pair of well-fitting jeans.

It was supposed to be a kind of prank—a one-time, anonymous poke in the ribs of a serious artistic institution. But visitors couldn't get enough. "People got such a kick out of it, the sculpture park convinced me to do many more," Coffin says. He spent a few months cruising around the woods in a four-wheel-drive cherrypicker, looking for models—attractive trees with appropriately positioned limbs.

He reached out to Levi's, who donated some of those giant jeans, and teamed up with students at a fashion institute in Malmö, who tailored them. "We did about a dozen in the end," he says.

Some jeans are positioned low on the tree; others higher up. Some blend demurely into the landscape, while others proudly stick out. In one, the jeans partially obscure patches of moss, an effect that is almost cheeky, like a Calvin Klein ad. Another, with crooked branches, looks like it's kicking up its heels.

By now, those original trees are naked once again—even the best denim can't hack a decade of Swedish winters. But the idea survives, and Coffin has made new versions for several private collectors. "There's a pair up in Greenwich, Connecticut," he says. "There's a pair out in Amagansett... They exist here and there."

Over the course of his career, Coffin has worked on a number of other variously vegetal artworks. He has an ongoing project, "Music for Plants," for which he invites acclaimed musicians to play inside greenhouses, and another multi-genre work based on the illusionistic designs of Japanese gardens. For a photo exhibit at the Horticultural Society of New York that showed the tree pants in all seasons, he put a tiny pair of jeans on a dried-out sunflower.

Although he encourages audiences to find humor in these pieces, he's careful to note that, in each of these cases, he's not trying to make fun of the plants. Instead, he wants to point out our own relentless tendency to anthropomorphize things, to ascribe human emotions, lifestyles, and preferences to all kinds of definitively nonhuman entities.

"It's a funny thing we do," he says. "I think it's significant and fun to consider why and how we do it." Plants are an especially fruitful example of this tendency. "We understand that they're living," he says. "But we also think of them as objects. They're this in-between thing, which is why involve plants in my art."

Of course, just because Coffin recognizes the goofiness of anthropomorphism doesn't mean he himself is immune. Indeed, when he thinks back on the work, he can't help but muse about another potential audience.

"It's hard to imagine the woods having a sense of humor," Coffin says. "But if you imagine that they could, they might enjoy something as funny as this."

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

There is not a groin in the world that the city of Kurobe has not touched.

It has done so through the auspices of YKK, the world’s largest manufacturer of zippers, which produces roughly half the world’s supply—some 7 billion a year. Yet to understand how Kurobe became the zipper capital of the world, one must travel back to the very birth of the zipper, to a time when the zipper wasn’t even the zipper at all.

It was in the midst of the Victorian Age that mankind suddenly grew disquieted with the button. Along with brooches, buckles, and pins, the button had ruled supreme as a clothes-fastening device since ancient times. Yet it would soon face its stiffest competition to date. Elias Howe, the magnificently coiffed inventor of the sewing machine, sounded the first warning shot against the button’s dominance when he patented an “automatic continuous clothing closure” in 1851. His invention was forgotten amid all the hemming and darning, but ripples were already spreading out into the placid pond of fastener innovation.

They reached the obsessive Chicago inventor Whitcomb Judson toward the end of the 19th century. Judson abruptly felt the need to free people from the tyranny of high-button shoes. He intended to do so through the creation of what he termed “clasp lockers.” But his invention was too bulky, and his fanatical redesigns grew ever more complex and impractical. Abetted by his financial backer, Colonel Lewis Walker, Judson founded the Universal Fastener Company, even though the device had a fatal flaw—a propensity to burst open at inopportune moments. The pair’s most high-profile sale was to the U.S. Postal Service, which tried them on its mail sacks. But they bought only 20.

Perhaps Judson’s alarmingly wide array of interests—he designed both street railways and nose rings for hogs—prevented him from perfecting the device. It was left to Gideon Sundback, a Swedish inventor working for the Universal Fastener Company, to finalize the design with his own "separable fastener" in 1914, and at long last it seemed as if the world was ready to embrace the device. It was, after all, the era of the motor car, the tank, and the airplane. The natural was rapidly being supplanted by the man-made. So, too, in the world of fasteners. Out went the old organic forms—discoidal (circular) buttons and hook-and-eye fastenings—and in came a clothes conjoiner for a new mechanical age, in which two rows of protruding metal teeth clamped together like some fearsome haberdasher dentata.

The separable fastener was something out of a Futurist’s utopia. All it needed was a suitably modern name. That eventually came thanks to the B.F. Goodrich rubber company, which installed Sundback’s fastener on its boots in 1923. As recounted in Robert Friedel’s essential zipper tome, the boot was originally called the "Mystik," but it sold terribly. The inspiration for the new name came from the company president: “What we need is an action word … something that will dramatize the way the thing zips … Why not call it a Zipper?”

It was a moment akin to Lennon meeting McCartney, Jobs meeting Wozniack, Kanye meeting Kim. The device’s onomatopoeic name sang of the modern, of speed and frivolity. Ziiiiip! The world of pants would never be the same.

The Universal Fastener Company, renamed Talon, set up shop in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and began mass-producing its zippers. By 1930, 20 million Talon-made zippers were being sold a year, but mainly for unglamorous functions such as pencil cases, bun-huts, and engine covers. However, when the fashion designer Elsa Schiaperelli used them in her 1935 spring collection (which the New Yorker described as “dripping with zippers”), the humble closure entered the world of high fashion. Menswear followed. In 1937 Esquire announced that the zipper had beaten the button in the "Battle of the Fly." By the end of World War II, Meadville was selling some 500 million zippers a year and was renowned as the zipper capital of the world. Its radio station was named WZPR.

So how did a small rural town in Japan, half a world away, come to dethrone this zippering behemoth? It was through the single-minded visionary purpose of Tadao Yoshida, the founder of Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha (Yoshida Manufacturing Shareholding Company) from which YKK is necessarily abbreviated.

Yoshida had grown up in Kurobe, the son of an itinerant bird collector. After a slew of business failures, he moved to Tokyo and, seeing the growth of the zipper market, opened his own zipper firm in 1934. The success of Talon was known around the world and Yoshida shamelessly copied its products and machines while adding some distinctive touches—such as using aluminum instead of copper. When World War II began, he kept in business by supplying the Japanese Imperial Navy with zippers, and when his factory was burned to the ground during the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, he relocated to his hometown of Kurobe and began all over again.

Yoshida’s remarkable stick-to-itiveness had been spurred by reading Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth. Now, as if infused with the reciprocal force of the zipper, he too created a quasi-philosophy that he termed the Cycle of Goodness™. This stated that “no one prospers without rendering benefit to others.” It is a simple but enlightened creed that suggests that well-treated workers create a better product, a better product benefits customers, and satisfied customers, in turn, benefit YKK. In short, Yoshida wanted to use his zippers to bind together not only clothes but also the very fabric of society.

YKK was unusual in that it produced everything used to make its zippers in-house. Brass, aluminum, polyester, yarn, were smelted and woven in Kurobe. Workers lived in dormitories opposite the factory and a leadership cult quickly grew up around Yoshida and his Cycle of Goodness™. Gripped by zippering inspiration, YKK’s designers began churning out thousands of different types of zippers aimed at specific industries and individual customers. It made the world’s smallest zipper, the concealed zipper, the first nylon and polyester zippers and the world’s thinnest zipper. A pantheon of patented fastenings rolled off the factory line—Beulon! Eflon! Zaglan! Ziplon! Minifa! Kensin! Natulon! Excella!—each seeking to create a more perfect union. Soon YKK was opening factories across the world, the better to offer their services to local manufacturers. By 1974, YKK was making one quarter of the world’s zippers, enough in one year to stretch from the Earth to the Moon and back again.

By contrast Talon, which in the late 1960s was producing 70 percent of the United States’ zippers, was barely producing half of that. Its decline was rapid. By 1993 Meadville no longer had any zipper factories within its town limits at all.

Meanwhile, Kurobe and YKK goes from strength to strength. It now makes silent zippers for soldiers on the battlefield, fire-retardant zippers for firemen, airtight zippers for astronauts. It makes zips for drainage ditches, zips for rockets, and zips for fishing nets. Occasionally there are snags, such as when an exporter in the deep South of the United States began importing zips with KKK on them to appeal to local markets, or when YKK was accused of operating a zippering cartel. Similarly, market share is constantly being eroded by thousands of tiny Chinese zipper concerns that have managed to reverse-engineer YKK’s closely guarded zipper-making machines, as YKK once did itself.

Nevertheless, YKK remains a universal brand. Its zippers sit like tiny symbiotic aphids on our clothes, offering immediate access or exclusion to our bodies. From its headquarters in Kurobe, YKK has become the gatekeeper to the world.

This article was first appeared on August 31, 2015.

You know the international sign for "honk your horn:" a closed fist pumped vigorously up and down, usually aimed at a truck?

According to a recently uploaded Youtube video, this gesture is transportation-inclusive. It works on bicycles, cars, buses, trains, hot air balloons, and blimps.

The video above, called "Blimping," was made by Joshua De Laurentiis, a musician from Melbourne. "I've been making that signal to heaps of different things since I was a little kid," he says.

He says the compilation took almost a year to complete: "Most of them I did on a couple of different days, but the blimp and the hot air balloon [were] pretty much just patience and a bit of luck!"

The video has caused a certain amount of controversy on Reddit, where some viewers have accused blimps and hot air balloons of not having horns, and De Laurentiis (or someone) of having uploaded the last part of the video as long ago as last October.

That would make this video a shameless, audio-shopped bid at virality, and one that seems to be succeeding: the video is currently #13 on Youtube's "Trending" list. (We have followed up with De Laurentiis about these matters.)

Regardless, it's hard to argue with the video's joy, or with De Laurentiis's rationale: "It's just a fun, harmless thing to do," he says. "It's always great getting a response from anyone."