When Tim Newton heard a noise on his deck last Tuesday, September 27, he decided he'd better go check it out. Newton lives in Alaska; in the past, his backyard has been visited by bear, moose, and other large creatures.

When he looked out his window, though, his concern evaporated. This was just a pack of seven little kittens, horsing around. But then he glanced down at their paws. These kittens, it turns out, were lynxes.

Newton is a big lynx fan: "I was thrilled," Newton later told KTUU. Luckily for the world, he also happens to be a hobbyist wildlife photographer, and was thus well-equipped to share his joy.

He spent the next half hour snapping photos of the kittens as they gamboled all over deck, pouncing on each other, batting at his petunias, and—eventually—bringing their mom over to look at the strange indoor primate with the loud clicking machine in front of his face.

After a short visit, the kittens' mom led her kids back into the wilderness. But over the course of the week, Newton's photos of them have gone viral, gaining coverage from Miami to London to Singapore—almost as though difficult times call for supersized kittens, and lots of them.

So even if you've already gazed upon these kittens, you may want to take a minute and give yourself another dose. You can see (and get your paws on) a couple of dozen lynx photos on Newton's website.

Late last year, Maarten Inghels of Antwerp, Belgium, was reading the paper when a news story caught his attention. Yet another camera system was about to be installed in the city, he read. Not only that, this particular system was smart, an active rather than passive watcher. "[It said] they could track down a car in 15 minutes—recognize a license plate and track down that car," Inghels says.

Inghels is an artist and a poet, and he likes to write and think about invisibility and disappearance. He is also, this year, the official City Poet of Antwerp, so he was looking for ways to integrate these interests with those of his community. He began wondering how far this new network's capabilities stretched. Could the cameras, for instance, recognize individual pedestrians? Did they know where he went every time he left the house?

"That's how I came up with the idea," he says, "to find the last way to stay invisible in a public space in Antwerp." Inghels set out to map an entirely camera-free path, which he eventually named "The Invisible Route."

In modern urban life, surveillance is essentially a given. Although worldwide figures are difficult to ascertain, the most CCTV-heavy cities, including Beijing, London, and New York, have thousands or even tens of thousands of active cameras trained on public spaces. (As of 2013, Britain had about one camera for every 14 people.) Proponents of the systems argue that ever-watchful mechanical eyes help law enforcement catch perpetrators, and serve as a crime deterrent. Skeptics counter that blanket video surveillance doesn't actually achieve these aims, and that such systems are ripe for abuse. As these arguments get hashed out, though, more and more cameras keep popping up.

Antwerp is no exception. Over the last few years, Inghels says, the number of cameras in his city has tripled. It's now over 300, and that's not counting the home security systems, storefront CCTV rigs, and other private cameras that are proliferating at the same time, without government involvement. (Inghels is himself intimately familiar with this upswing: "I have two cameras pointed at my house," he says.)

For his mapping project, Inghels used a combination of internet research and good old-fashioned grunt work. First, he found a list of camera placements on the Antwerp Police website, and used that to narrow the routes down to a few possibilities. Then, last December, he hit the pavement. "I decided to walk them individually, to see if there was a shop camera, or a privately owned camera," he says. Often, he'd be well on his way, feeling hopeful, and then find himself staring down the barrel of a lens, a feeling he describes as "disappointing." It took him months to find a route that worked.

In June of 2017, he finally did. Antwerp's Invisible Route starts on the southeast side of the city, near the modern art museum. It heads north, cuts through a small park, and crosses a railroad track. It then sneaks into the city proper, where it begins doubling back, dodging cameras left and right. (Inghels has drawn individual cameras as black circles with dots in them, so that the whole map looks alive with cartoon eyes.) It ends about six miles after it began, up on the city's northeast side.

Inghels, who has lived in Antwerp for 10 years, says that plotting the route taught him new things about his city. "I discovered some hidden, small passageways—routes only for pedestrians," he says. "I really like them. They're like back doors of the city."

He's not necessarily against the cameras. "I can see the useful opportunities there," Inghels says. Instead, the work is "more an ode, in honor of the art of disappearing." While constructing the route, Inghels thought often of the poem "Crowds," by Charles Baudelaire, in which the writer celebrates the unique, messy joy of wandering alone in a bustling city until you forget who you are, and the empathetic overload that results. "It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude," Baudelaire writes, but "...the man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights."

In another work, "The Painter of Modern Life," Baudelaire adds that "the passionate spectator" prefers "to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world." Now, Inghels explains, would-be multitude-bathers can't even take that first step of embracing anonymity. "That's something that doesn't exist anymore," Inghels says, "because of the cameras."

This poetic dimension also influenced the project's form. Other contemporary camera map projects aim to stay up-to-date, so that people may avoid cameras or seek them out to feel safe (or to do performance art), or simply to keep people aware of their presence.

By contrast, Inghels's map—which was also published as an insert in Issue 11 of Oogst Magazine—exists only in static form, as a piece of paper that reflects one moment in time. "It's a naive exercise," he explains. "It's about a time and a world that doesn't exist anymore... a world where you can be unseen." The map, he emphasizes, is dated June 21, 2017: the last day he walked the route, and thus the last day he can be sure it was entirely invisible. It's less a tool than an artifact, a vestige of something almost gone.

Indeed, the world is changing so fast, Inghels warns, that if you try to use the Invisible Route for its most literal purpose, it will almost certainly fail you. "Over the summer, the government has installed new cameras," he says. "So it's already out of date."

The first Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition was making its way across the Indian Ocean in early December 1956 when the scientists on board noticed a meteor shower—about 300 meteors every hour—coming from an unusual part of the sky. The bright bits of rock burning up in the atmosphere seemed to be centered around the Phoenix constellation. But the shower also seemed to be a one-off, and the so-called Phoenicid meteor shower wasn't seen again—until 2014. The origin of the meteors has been a mystery, but astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan now say they're remnants of a comet last spotted in 1820.

The comet, 289P/Blanpain, was first seen by Jean Jacques Blanpain in November 1819, when he observed that the tailless comet had a "very small and confused nucleus." Other observers in Europe saw the comet in the morning sky until January 1820, when it disappeared from view. It was calculated to return around five years later, but the hunk of rock, ice, and dust never reappeared.

The fate of 289P/Blanpain became a little clearer in 2005 when scientists determined an asteroid discovered in 2003, WY25, follows the long-lost comet's orbit. It was, they figured, all that was left after the ice, dust, and gas that made it a comet had dissipated. Every time Earth passes through the dust trail the comet left behind, the Phoenicid meteor shower lights up the night sky.

With this in mind, in 2010 Japanese scientists calculated forecasts for several future showers—including the one in 2014. Now, a new study has formally compared the 2010 predictions with the 2014 observations. Timelapse footage from North Carolina's Sandy Point in 2014 shows plenty of aircraft crisscrossing the night sky—as well as a few meteors.

The trajectories of the meteors matches simulations of the comet's dust trails, confirming the connection between the comet and meteor shower. But the scientists only spotted about 10 percent of the meteors they were expecting, which means that the comet's gas and ice appear to be trailing off. It's making the transition to an inert asteroid much more quickly than expected.

Our next date with the Phoenicids will be in December 2019, and the scientists will be watching close for more information about 289P/Blanpain.

The slums of early-20th-century New York were, to a certain white, upper-class clientele, exotic, foreign, even exhilarating. In Chinatown, gunfire might spontaneously break out between rival gangs. The visitors might sit down to dine on “authentic” chop suey, among people speaking an unfamiliar tongue. They might see white women lounging in seedy opium dens with Chinese men. They might leave convinced that they had seen“one of the world’s wickedest spots.” But they had no way to know that much of what they had seen was an elaborate stage show, put on to fool gullible white tourists, engaged in the act known as “slumming.”

Slumming is a tourist practice that made its way to the United States from the United Kingdom sometime in the 1880s. It initially came from the reform impulse, but quickly consumer culture kicked in, and it became a means for more affluent white Americans and Brits to gawk at those with radically different ways of life. In September 1884, The New York Timesran the headline“A Fashionable London Mania Reaches New York,” and described how slumming was certain to become the amusement of choice for “our belles” that winter.

In one form or another, it persisted as a form of tourism until the beginning of the World War II. At that time, the rise of suburbs and television, among other factors, seemed to put it to rest. But beginning in the 1980s, slum tourism has come back with a vengeance and a more international flavor, with tours that see affluent white visitors passing through what are considered slums in countries such as India, South Africa, and Brazil. It’s sparked controversy and moral outrage. Some see it as a racist exercise that taps into a universal fascination with inequality and the less fortunate. Others claim it pumps money into critically poor neighborhoods, as well as the pockets of tour operators. Indeed, in some cases, a significant proportion of slum tourism profit has been pumped back into the communities. But it still represents, to many, poverty as entertainment.

It was different when it began in 19th-century London, where wealthy people traveled through poorer or ethnic neighborhoods in the guise of a “reform enterprise.” At its best, the practice might result in lobbying for improved lighting or ventilation, or even the whitewashing of walls of low-income housing. In more oblivious moments, so-called “flower charities” would distribute “floral gifts” to the downtrodden people they saw. The Times gushed, “What a pleasure it must be to a sufferer imprisoned in one of these tenements to receive a flower, with its color and its green leaves and stems!"

The pretense of high-minded purpose was swiftly abandoned in its American incarnation. Sometimes guided groups swept through Harlem or the Lower East Side, and flung open the front doors of unsuspecting residents. Wealthy observers saw what was to them almost incomprehensible poverty. At that time, New York was the most densely populated city in the world: Parts of the Lower East Side had up to 800 residents per acre. “Ladies and gentlemen” donned common clothes and went out, the Times reported, “in the highways and the byways to see people of whom they had heard, but of whom they were as ignorant as if they were inhabitants of a strange country.”

Much of what they saw was indeed representative of the ordinary lives of the people who lived in these areas, but, in slumming, some saw an opportunity. A homegrown industry quickly arose to give the gawkers something to gawk at, and to keep them spending money. Slummers went on these expeditions to see scandal or, at the very least, impropriety, often in ways that would reinforce the sexual and racial stereotypes they already held. They wanted to see the unclean, the “primitive,” the highly sexed. “The women and men who found themselves on the receiving end of this practice did not always take kindly to the primitivism that slumming reified,” writes Chad Heap in Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940. Understandably, the residents were similarly displeased by the “seemingly constant traffic of outsiders that surged through neighborhood streets.” But where there was demand, there was money to be made.

In some cases, this involved the opening of “authentic” eating and drinking establishments, which stayed open far later than ordinary neighborhood demand would require, to appeal to wealthy pleasure-seekers. Many examples in Chinatown, Heap says, were not necessarily owned by Chinese immigrants or Chinese Americans. “They tended to be run and operated by other immigrant groups, like Italian or Jewish immigrants, often.” Chop suey joints, for instance, opened throughout Chinatown to serve a bastardized version of a Cantonese noodle dish as late as 3 a.m. In 1903, The New York Timesdescribed it as a “cheap and substantial dish” (waiters didn’t even require tips!), served to the “midnight supper crowd.” Many of these restaurants served both “exotic” food and typical American fare for those with less adventurous tastes. In time, chop suey grew so popular that it spread across the city and, eventually, the country.

Affluent slummers often employed guides or joined organized groups. Industrious young men—independent “slumming guides”—capitalized on the crowds by introducing them to brothels or saloons that were accustomed to hosting slummers, or had sprung up specifically to do so. Usually white and working-class, these “lobbygows,” as they came to be known in Chinatown’s pidgin English, marketed themselves as critical cultural conduits to the exotic, unfamiliar Chinese. They even advertised in local papers and came to be seen as legitimate businesses. In Chicago, for instance, in 1905 a local resident sought police approval to establish “a guide system to escort slumming parties and show strangers the sights.”

One of the most famous was Chuck Connors, who declared himself Mayor of Chinatown and took celebrities such as actress Ellen Terry and businessman and tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton on his trips. Connors was made famous by his 1904 book Bowery Life, which described his curious dress—"a short coat with white pearl buttons, a white tie and a very small hat”—and was mostly written in an odd attempt at his own vernacular: “It nearly took me bre'th away t'inkin' uv it, an' I ain't got over it yet.” Connors took his tours to a Chinese restaurant, the popular Chinese theater, the Mott Street “joss house” or temple, and what slummers believed to be an opium den, where wide-eyed Chinese people lolled around, seemingly stoned out of their minds.

Visitors could hardly believe their eyes—and they would have been right not to. These opium dens were entirely staged, with Chinese actors employed to give viewers something to look at. With or without a guide, slummers would likely not be allowed into “real” opium dens simply to gawk. “I don’t think an opium den would have welcomed, or allowed access to, slummers to come through if they weren’t there to smoke themselves,” Heap says. Some whites did indulge, and sometimes developed serious addictions—but not in the ersatz recreations Connors showed his clientele.

In these places, everyone was a professional actor. In at least one case, the Chinese actor playing one addict was secretly married to his white, drooping female companion. They repeated the hammy performance many times in an evening. Slummers left feeling as though they had seen something decadent, degenerate, depraved, and possibly even dangerous.

Meanwhile, on the street outside, a fight might break out. The Tong Wars, Chinese gang infighting, were covered extensively by the local tabloids. As gunfire sounded on Pell or Mott Street, slummers got a taste of danger. They likely would not have imagined that this was a show, timed for their arrival and designed to shock. Visitors who didn’t see something that made them duck or clutch at their pearls were often disappointed. A former New York police officer, Cornelius Willemse, remembered, “They’ve built up such fantastic ideas [of Chinatown] that if they don’t see a few Chinamen disappearing down traps in the pavement pursued by somebody with a hatchet of a long curved knife, they haven’t had any fun and they go home disappointed.”

A 1908 film satirizing these practices, The Deceived Slumming Party, features white actors in racist yellowface portraying Chinatown locals. A touring car of slummers sees a series of shocking sights: a police raid, the apparent suicide of a white female opium addict, roughhousing that descends into murder. Just in time they are whisked back to safety—and their tour guide runs back to pay the actors. In San Francisco, trips of this sort were eventually banned. The Timesreport on the ban finished: “The opium smokers, gamblers, blind paupers, singing children, and other curiosities were all hired.”

There was little actual danger. After an undercover study in the late 1910s, an investigator reported that the “sham and fake in the Village for the benefit of the uptown slummer crowd” was “about as dangerous as a Sunday school sideshow.” It’s hard to know whether people knew they were being fooled, because so few first-hand accounts of the practice have survived, Heap says. “I think they’d go thinking they were seeing something authentic. And I think sometimes they did see things that were really authentic, and in cases they’d see things that were really staged."

Out-of-towners were particularly susceptible to being duped, while locals might be more astute. The poet James Clarence Harvey, in 1905, wrote: “Slumming usually means paying a price to see others do things you wouldn’t do yourself for the world, and which perhaps they wouldn’t do except for the price you pay.” People wanted a spectacle, and they got it. Some local residents were frustrated by these attempts to play to the rubberneck crowds. In 1936, Loeng Gor Yun wrote, in Chinatown Inside Out, “Smokers and non-smokers alike are outraged by this false local color daubed on Chinatown by bus companies, but they are powerless, beyond a sneer or a smirk, against the lies they hear being fobbed off on groups of gullible tourists.”

It was in one sense a profoundly inauthentic view of life in poor or ethnic neighborhoods, but Heap is more circumspect about what “authenticity” means here. The behavior might have been staged, but the slumming venues were authentic, inasmuch as they were doing what they were set up to do—immersive theater. Chop suey wasn’t “real” Chinese food, but itself became a genuine, distinctive dish. “Some of these venues are creating a new kind of authenticity,” he says. “It’s not like people are transported away to the old country and are getting a glimpse of ‘what really happened.’” Indeed, the boring routine of everyday life, though different uptown and downtown, was what slummers were trying to escape in the first place.

Farmers have long relied on things that function without human intervention—bees to pollinate, worms to turn the soil, ladybugs to eat aphids—to make sure that crops grow the right way. Now a team of British researchers is trying to take this hands-off thinking in a high-tech direction. Last October, scientists at Harper Adams University in Edgmond, England, started an experimental farm called the Hands Free Hectare in an attempt to make the entire process of farming—from sowing and fertilizing to sample-collection and harvest—fully automated. The project has just come to fruition with five tons of robot-grown spring barley.

"We believe the best solution is that in the future, farmers will manage fleets of smaller, autonomous vehicles," the researchers explained in a press release. "These will be able to go out and work in the fields, allowing the farmer to use their time more effectively and economically instead of having to drive up and down the fields."

At the moment, agricultural machines—very large, very heavy, very expensive—can cover a lot of space quickly, but without much precision. For example, fertilizer gets sprayed over entire farms, regardless of the different needs of different crops. “There’s been a focus in recent years on making farming more precise, but the larger machines that we’re using are not compatible with this method of working. They’re also so heavy that they're damaging farmers’ soils," researcher Jonathan Gill told Live Science.

So Gill and his colleagues went smaller: a tractor, a combine, and a harvester, which they equipped to follow a programmed route, using GPS. They also used drones to collects samples with grippers. Altogether, they spent less than £200,000 on equipment, and used open-source technology and a drone's autopilot for their navigation system. Eventually, they reason, the system will be sophisticated enough to treat different parts of a field, or even individual plants, differently.

The team is quick to caution that they don't want to put farmers out of work. Instead of driving the tractor, they said, the farmer will manage a fleet, and monitor and analyze their crops. As for the hectare, the next stop for that barley will be a brewery. That's not going to be completely automated. At least not yet.

Large boulders shaped like nearly perfect spheres can be found in a handful of places around the world. Perched amid craggy, sandy landscapes, these curious orbs have been confounding onlookers for centuries. Some are so superbly round they appear to defy nature, which has led to wild speculation as to their origins: Ancient gods? Alien eggs? Evidence of giants?

In fact, spherical boulders are molded over millions or even billions of years by a natural but long-misunderstood geological phenomenon called concretion. The concretion process occurs when sediment that has not yet hardened into rock accumulates around some sort of hard nucleus, such as a fossil or shell, and then binds together with a cementing mineral such as calcite. A natural concrete then forms in the space between sediment grains, banding the layers of sand together around the core, often in a spherical shape.

These balls of bounded sediment can later become embedded in a rock of a different composition, such as sandstone or shale. But since the cemented material is often harder and more resistant to weathering than the host rock, over millions of years the surrounding rock is eroded away, leaving just the concretion exposed, standing on its own like an otherworldly orb.

Naturally occurring balls of rock can vary drastically in size. In the "Valley of Balls," or Torysh Valley in western Kazakhstan, a stretch of semi-desert landscape is covered in concretions ranging from tiny marbles to huge boulders nearly the size of a car. The larger concretions still originate with a small nucleus such as a shell, leaf, fossil, or marine skeleton. But if conditions are just right, the binding phenomenon can occur for extra-long periods of time, resulting in giant spheres sometimes called “cannonball concretions."

Some of the biggest examples can be found at Rock City, part of a Kansas state park featuring nearly 200 large sandstone concretions (claimed to be the largest such collection on Earth). Here, the roughly spherical boulders have grown to nearly 30 feet across.

Before geologists understood the concretion phenomenon, these remarkably round rocks led to a number of theories and legends across different cultures. According to local Maori lore, the Moeraki Boulders on the Otago Coast of New Zealand’s South Island are the remains of a legendary shipwreck long ago. As the story goes, a canoe called the Arai-Te-Uru wrecked on the shore after returning from a voyage to a mythical land to collect potatoes and gourds, and the baskets of goods magically turned into boulders gathered at the shore.

In the Australian Outback, a crop of iconic concretions known as the Devils Marbles, or Karlu Karlu (which literally translates to “round boulders”), are connected to a variety of ancient legends, and they hold great spiritual significance for many of the Aboriginal peoples. Many of these stories are passed down through generations and said to be kept secret from non-Aboriginal visitors.

Mysterious rock balls have unsurprisingly inspired more than one alien conspiracy theory over the years as well. The rare geologic makeup of the tiny, extremely hard, 3 billion-year-old Klerksdorp Spheres found in South Africa led some to claim they must be products of another planet, perhaps even proof of ancient aliens. The truth, though lacking spiritual magic or extraterrestrial life, is no less delightful. These natural spheres are very much an Earthly wonder, just another trick up Mother Nature’s sleeve.

Nick McCabe is developing a special relationship with a legend. Pig Nose, weighing in at over 700 pounds and 10 feet long—that’s “longer than a tall man, and wider around than a curbside mailbox,” as Atlas Obscura reported last year—is a sturgeon, the most famous resident of Fraser River, in British Columbia. Last year, McCabe, a local guide for River Monster Adventures, managed to catch the near-mythical fish after a two-hour struggle.

Now, he’s come face to face with the fish for a second time.

This year, it only took him an hour to land Pig Nose.

"I had a gut feeling it was him," the guide told the CBC. "Just the time of year and how the fish was acting ... but as we got it up to the shore I was like, 'This guy looks pretty familiar.'"

Pig Nose is more than 80 years old and can be identified not only by his flattened, porcine nose, but by a microchip embedded in his body years ago.

A sturgeon can be any one of 27 different species of fish. They are among that class of creatures that are like dinosaurs living among us. Considered “primitive fish,” they first evolved all the way back in the Triassic period, and they haven’t changed much since. They can grow to be incredibly large; a European sturgeon caught in 1922 was 23 feet long, for instance, and an albino sturgeon caught in the Fraser River in 2015 was more than 11 feet long and weighed more than 1,000 pounds.

Pig Nose is distinguished as much by his distinctive nose and by his age as by his size. McCabe was glad to see the aging fish was still putting on weight, he told the CBC. Last year, Pig Nose weighed in around 650 pounds; this year he's up to 700. May he live for many long years to come.

In late September, visitors to the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, were subjected to a surprise temptation. In the middle of the third floor geology exhibit, there's a pink-tinted crystal. It's displayed in a glass case, and captioned with a garden-variety information card: it's from Arkansas, it's all-natural, it's quartz.

But sometime around the end of the month, the crystal gained a second, more hot-blooded label. It read: "GO ON TOUCH IT."

When museum staff saw this directive, they knew immediately what had happened. The Canterbury Museum phantom labeler had struck again.

As Radio New Zealand first reported, the Canterbury Museum's first experience with unauthorized labeling was a few months ago, when a label popped up accusing the Mummy of Tash pen Khonsu of having a sour expression, using less delicate terminology.

Next came a question about a Buddha icon—"WHERE DO I KNOW THAT GUY FROM"—along with the crystal label, which, deputy director Jennifer Storer told the outlet, the institution took down immediately.

Atlas Obscura reached out to the museum about what, if anything, they planned to do about these interventions. "We are not interested in pursuing the perpetrator," Storer replied. "We just want to gently discourage it from continuing, but at the same time recognize that this was yet another form of interaction or engagement with our collections."

She said that when they made that clear to the rogue labeler, he sent them a thank-you note, promising not to return. He also left one last label, this time on their own museum window:

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.

Here are some instructions for preparing human bones for display, from circa 1543:

Step 1. Acquire a corpse. No, no hints about where or how. You’re on your own there.

Step 2. Cut away as much flesh as you can. Watch the joints and ligaments—you need those intact.

Step 3. Acquire a body-length box, with holes in the walls. Place the bones inside, and cover with quicklime (used for centuries in agriculture, warfare, and cemeteries, and now available online). Sprinkle with water and wait a week. Presumably, leave the box someplace where no one will accidentally open it.

Step 4. Locate a stream or other body of running water in which to place the box. Give it a week, to allow the stream wash away the now loose and decaying flesh.

Step 5. Clean off any leftover flesh, and leave the skeleton to dry in the sun. The ligaments should keep the bones together.

There—your very own human skeleton.

If you find this set of instructions foul, so did Andreas Vesalius, the 16th-century author from whom they’re derived. Vesalius was a hotshot Renaissance scientist with a talent for self-promotion. He was young, cocky, and skeptical of the medical establishment, which was still reliant on ancient Greek medical work that was already more than a millennium old at the time. In Vesalius’s opinion, skeleton-making was “time-consuming, dirty, and difficult," according to Oregon State University historian Anita Guerrini.

He preferred a different strategy for revealing human skeletal anatomy. First, boil the body in a “capacious cauldron,” then skim away the fat and clean the boiled flesh from the bones. That way, you could actually see the joints, instead of leaving them hidden behind blackened ligaments.

“Now most of the skeletons used in medical schools are plastic, but the ones that were used a couple hundred years ago—they were all people,” says Guerrini. For centuries human skeletons have been bought and sold, though it's rare for a commodity to have once been part of a person. But despite the long practice of hanging human bones in museums and academic institutions, “we really don’t have a good history of skeletons,” says Guerrini. After noticing how overlooked they had been, she began investigating the history and iconography of skeletons—how they were they used, how they were made, and how that knowledge was passed down through generations of scientists. Vesalius's technique was one among many proposed strategies for creating a pristine set of human bones.

Vesalius’s description is the oldest-known set of such instructions, but by the 1540s, the practice had been around for some time, perhaps going as far back as the 1300s, as Guerrini recounted in a talk at Columbia University this past September. One 14th-century scientist, for instance, mentions “making an anatomy” from fleshless bones.

Vesalius became a professor in Padua, as chief of surgery and anatomy, in 1537, when he was just 23 years old, and he wrote De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), which contains the skeleton instructions, before he turned 30. “He was brilliant, and he was very brash,” says Guerrini. His book, unusually, had a portrait of himself on the title page, and another on the frontispiece. While his older colleagues deferred to the medical works of Galen, the Greek physician who lived in the 2nd century, Vesalius preferred direct observation of the human body. He taught using dissection and seemed to have no qualms about using human remains. “With characteristic macabre whimsy he recommended posing the skeleton with a scythe, or a poke, or a javelin, and suggested stringing the ear bones onto a nerve to make a necklace,” Guerrini said in her talk.

He didn’t care much about the aesthetics of the bones themselves, though. The boil-and-carve strategy he advocated for would have left the bones mottled and brown. As skeletons became more popular as objects of display and learning, their appearance became more important.

They remained rare objects, though, until the 17th century, when the new science of osteology, the study of bones, increased their use in anatomical study. By the middle of that century, skeletons, both human and animal, started showing up in the catalogues of natural history collections and cabinets of curiosities, such as the elaborate, skeleton-filled dioramas built by Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch.

Soon students of both art and anatomy were expected to study human skeletons as part of their training, and the public grew curious as well. By the 1660s, there was a market for them in Europe. By the 18th century, displaying human skeletons became trendy. Guerrini found a 1716 advertisement for “The Moving Skeleton,” a public attraction “which by a mechanical projection performs several very strange and surprising actions, also groans like a dying person, smoaks[sic] a Pipe of Tobacco, and blows the Candle out, as naturally as if alive.”

By this time, anatomists wanted to produce clean, white bones. One physician made sure to leave his bones out for months to bleach in the sun. Another eschewed boiling bones and instead left corpses to rot in water, changed periodically. This “maceration” technique required pulling softened flesh away from the bones and would have required a steely constitution. But the demand for skeletons was high enough that more people were taking on this job: In the early 18th century, one surgeon offered a course in skeleton-making.

While researching this history, Guerrini found that, some time in the 200 years after Vesalius, anatomists became more circumspect about their habit of stripping corpses of flesh and putting it on display. Vesalius, with his ear-bone necklace and artfully posed skeletons, was boastful of his work. By the 18th century, anatomists were less eager to crow about it. Alexander Munro, an expert in osteology, wrote a whole book on bones without ever once mentioning how to make a skeleton. William Hunter, a generation later, told his students that they should acquire a skeleton for personal use, but never published his lecture notes explaining the process of creating one.

“I was struck by Hunter and Monroe’s aura of secrecy,” says Guerrini. “Looking at Hunter, in particular, he never published his anatomy lectures.” The only reason she knows about his skeleton how-tos is that his students took notes, and those notes are still in archives, hidden away from public view.

There is something eerie about the instruction that all, say, 30 students in an anatomy class should somehow acquire their own human skeletons. Hunter, Guerrini says, never specified where they were to find bodies, but students likely would have had to resort to grave-robbery, “resurrection men,” or bribing gravediggers or hospital workers. (Hunter’s brother was apparently an ace at body procurement.) Attitudes toward death had been changing in Europe, and the idea of a carving up a not-insubstantial number of bodies and selling their bones started to seem distasteful, even morally reprehensible. While Vesalius could joke about the fate of these bodies, “William Hunter acknowledged the ‘necessary inhumanity’ of dissection,’” Guerrini says.

That didn’t stop him from offering his own new-fangled techniques for skeleton-making. Like Vesalius, Hunter had strong opinions about the best strategies. “If you want the Bones to be white inject by the Aorta for two or three Hours which will return by the Veins,” he wrote, without specifying what, exactly, should be injected. “Then expose them to maggots.” Or, if you had enough time, you could simply bury a body in a box by an anthill. It was, at least, a less hands-on method of stripping flesh from bones.

At first glance, Iranian photographer Pouria Khojastehpay’s landscapes seem vaguely recognizable. The buildings have a familiar, brutalist style, the monolithic statues look as though they’re from a totalitarian state, the letterbox format suggests that they could be stills from a movie. But these images—collectively called Dustwound—are purely fictional, products of Khojastehpay’s imagination, cinematic influences, and elements of his personal history.

“I was born in Iran and spent almost six years in a refugee camp in the Netherlands,” he recalls. “I later grew up in Eindhoven, which back then was a quite raw city that mainly consisted out of bricks and concrete. To describe the environment in more detail, think of industrial buildings, street prostitution, back then legal, so it was big, and rainy gray weather. I think this influenced me unknowingly.”

There are also other, more direct influences—the war stories from his father. “He is a war veteran and fought during the Iran-Iraq war in the ’80s. Both my parents experienced the Islamic Revolution, followed by the war against Iraq, I think that environment inspired my landscapes the most.”

Each of his dystopian visions has a strong cinematic mood. There are hints of life—a plume of smoke, a parked car—as though someone has just run out of the frame. While the cinematic feel is intentional, Khojastehpay is influenced by documentaries more than film, particularly the work of Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan and Serbian photographer Boogie.

The starting point for any of his imagined landscapes is research. “I gather information from different sources, both digital and analog,” he explains. “For example the local newspaper publishes a photo of an irrelevant small fire in a town, I can use the plume of smoke, resize it to make it look huge and combine with a photo of damaged asphalt near a construction site that I took with my iPhone while driving around. This is a simplified description of my process, of course. The research and gathering of material takes me a while before I have the right ingredients to cook, if that makes sense.”

Dustwound creates an apocalyptic, dystopian world that is both eerily familiar and mesmerizingly strange. Or, as Khojastehpay describes it, “handfuls of dust in a desolate future past.” Atlas Obscura has images of his work.

From August 29 through September 2, 2004, a series of protests erupted in New York in response to the 2004 Republican National Convention and the nomination of George W. Bush for the impending election. Nearly 1,800 protesters were arrested during the convention, and later filed a civil rights suit, citing violation of their constitutional rights.

During the protests, a steady team provided support to anyone who needed information amid the confusion: a modest group of socially conscious librarians from around the United States, armed with folders of facts ranging from legal rights in dealing with police to the locations of open bathrooms.

“We wanted to operate as if we were bringing a reference desk to the streets,” explains Lia Friedman, Director of Learning Services at University of California San Diego, who was at one of the protest marches in 2004. At the time, fewer people had smartphones, making this service both new and important. When someone asked a question that wasn’t included in their traveling reference desk folders, other librarians waiting at their home computers were poised to research and deliver information by phone.

The group of librarians soon formed into the first-ever chapter of the Radical Reference Collective, a non-hierarchal volunteer collective who believe in supporting social justice, independent journalists, and activist causes. Since the group’s first action at the Republican National Convention of 2004, the group, originally based in New York, has spread across the United States as a collection of individual local chapters. New collectives formed via library listservs, the Rad Ref’s website, and word of mouth.

Because the organization is non-hierarchical, there is no consensus on exactly what the “radical” in Radical Reference really means, nor what kind of work it might imply. Members come from different backgrounds; one New York City Rad Ref member is personally involved with a group that provides street medics training to help people medically during protests; other members are from academia or are involved in work with prisoners or science archives. The website for Rad Ref points out that in no way does the word “radical” specifically denote a political affiliation of any kind; the word “radical” is used to challenge “mainstream meaning which largely marginalizes the term and along with it certain groups.” But, members do form their own opinions on the matter.

"In my opinion, using the word ‘radical’ means advocating for change, whether that is political, societal,” says Friedman. Audrey Lorberfeld, Digital Technical Specialist at The New York Academy of Medicine and longtime member of the New York Rad Ref group, says that this inherent politicization of information is apparent to librarians regardless of their specialty: in the introductory information sciences courses for those pursuing a Masters of Library Sciences in the U.S., librarians-to-be become well-versed in the American Librarians Association code of ethics, which includes intellectual and informational freedom. According to both Lorberfeld and Friedman, who were interviewed separately for this article, to many librarians, the idea that information is neutral is a myth.

Now, amid a divisive political climate in the U.S., the original New York group is continuing to provide open-access information for all, be it about a specific historical fact, civil rights infringement statistic, or the complex laws regarding immigration. Often this support is lended to social justice organizations, independent journalists, and, as their website states, “anyone who questions authority.”

Some of the Rad Ref groups use social media to communicate and promote events, talks, and workshops with the public and activist organizations, while others meet face-to-face. The topics vary wildly; some events may concern more local issues, like planning support for a library worker strike, while others could involve “creating or using a resource guide on a relevant issue, i.e. Black Lives Matter, Critical Librarianship, Fact Checking basics" says Friedman.

Rad Ref has sizzled in the background of protests, local workshops and activist groups across the U.S. since its inception, although participation varies, and each local group is unique. Friedman spent years providing information through the Rad Ref website, which formerly acted as a virtual reference question desk. More recently she has participated on a smaller scale within the San Diego group, which sometimes has only a few members; both Friedman and Lorberfeld noted that since librarians tend to be involved in multiple projects and membership is voluntary, the numbers of a group can fluctuate. Occasionally, the groups have gone on hiatus, as the New York group’s online reference presence did in 2013, when its members didn’t have time to devote to the struggles of running a volunteer-based organization.

That hiatus hasn’t lasted, though: New York City’s Rad Ref was reinvigorated after President Donald Trump took his oath of office in early 2017. And these librarians are ready to radicalize their role as information champions. During their first meeting post-hiatus, the room was overflowing with activists and librarians who deeply cared about organizing to preserve information. “It was an amazing feeling,” says Lorberfeld.

Right now, the New York group’s goal is to build a community of knowledgeable experts on the art of finding and delivering information, which can become a resource for librarians and activist organizations alike. “We’re trying to look inward and educate ourselves, from anything from immigration rights to grassroots organizing best practices,” says Lorberfeld. “One member is making a guide about Unions in New York City; what they are, how to join them,” and another is creating a map of available free meeting places for organizations throughout the city.

Friedman and other Rad Ref volunteers once helped a writer who was working on research for a nonfiction book on resistance and struggle within women’s prisons, for example, and needed access to statistics and facts that were not easy to find, such as the amount of prisoners in a specific county in a specific year. Through the website, Rad Ref librarians were able to provide specific numbers she used throughout her book by pooling their skills in data research and law. While the reference service aspect of the website has been inactive since the hiatus, the website is still available as an archive, and librarians will still answer the occasional question in the Rad Ref inbox.

It might seem like information is open to everyone today: the internet is common and most people know how to type a sentence into Google. But as Friedman and Lorberfeld explain, there’s often more to it than that when trying to find specific and often very meaningful details and information. Sometimes, the only thing keeping data from, say, a government website like that of the Environmental Protection Agency from being removed or tampered with by politicians may be the librarians, working behind the scenes to preserve that information—something that actually happened earlier this year.

“We used to teach that a .gov site was trusted. And that’s a little bit more challenging to do now,” Friedman says. A Google search often isn’t curated or necessarily fact-checked, and doesn’t always provide multiple and balanced sources. Sometimes key information is behind an academic journal’s steep paywall, or buried in government documents under specialized lingo. “We really wanted to support independent journalists and activists, and really wanted to give people access to information, which is a pretty librarian thing to do,” says Friedman.

It really is a pretty librarian thing to do. Despite librarians’ public image of glasses-clad women hushing pesky kids, library workers around the world, from South Africa to Sweden, have formed similar organizations to Rad Ref, according to Alfred Kagan in his book Progressive Library Organizations: A Worldwide History. Since the 1960s in the United States, many library workers have committed to “social responsibility,” the democratic giving of information to the public and to free speech. Kagan writes that progressive groups have used their independence from the American Librarians Association (ALA), the major national librarian group in the U.S., “to take radical stances.”

A subunit of the ALA includes the Social Responsibilities Round Table, which has, according to its website, worked to democratize the ALA with human and economic rights in mind since 1969. Similar groups exist around the United States, such as the Progressive Librarians Guild, which aims toward an international agenda. Rad Ref participates in this tradition, though it differs in that it's comprised of local librarian groups who work within their individual volunteer base’s skills and goals, without a central governance.

“We all sort of have a really core sentimental belief of information access as a human right, and I feel like that really governs what we do within the group,” Lorberfeld says. By using their diverse backgrounds and talents, Rad Ref is now readying itself to help activist groups by promoting information that aids in furthering social equality.

During the Nashua Dodgers’ 1946 season, a local chicken farmer offered 100 baby chicks for every home run hit. That season, a newcomer to the team, catcher Roy Campanella, hit 14. Campanella sent all 1,400 chicks to his father, who used them to start a poultry farm just outside of Philadelphia.

This is the kind of place Nashua was at the time—small, rural, the type of town where a farmer would give away his chickens in support of his local team. It was also the place where Roy Campanella would begin making history.

Campanella’s minor league stint in New Hampshire was historic for far more than chickens. Along with pitcher Don Newcombe, Campanella helped the Nashua Dodgers become the first integrated professional baseball team of the sport’s modern era.

Before they arrived in New Hampshire, Campanella and Newcombe had been thriving in the Negro League, the racially segregated professional baseball league of the day that featured many players who were putting up stats on par with or exceeding that of white players. “Their talent outshined many others,” says Ray Doswell, curator of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. Anyone with an eye for talent and a team to field would have been hard-pressed to deny these two players spots on their rosters. One such eye was Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey.

Rickey had begun to approach players and owners in the Negro Leagues, at first with the claim that he wanted to start his own black baseball league. “I asked him, if he was so interested in Negro baseball, why hadn’t he contacted the two Negro leagues that had been operating so long,” as Newark Eagles owner Effa Manley recalled in the oral history Voices From the Great Black Baseball Leagues. Manley was right to be suspicious. Rickey wasn’t out to form a competing league—he was there to take players from the Negro leagues to the big show. He had his eye on three players: Jackie Robinson, then with the Kansas City Monarchs; Don Newcombe with the Newark Eagles; and Roy Campanella with the Washington Elite Giants. Rickey wanted these players, but there was one problem: America didn’t want them.

Rickey signed Robinson to Montreal, the Dodgers’ farm team in the International League, while Newcombe and Campanella were signed to Danville, Illinois, in the Three-I League (Illinois-Indiana-Iowa). Newcombe and Campanella never made it Danville, though. As Newcombe would later recall in an interview with the Orange County Register, “When the president of the league heard about that, he called Branch Rickey and said ‘I’ll close the league down. They’ll never play here.’ There was only one club left in the Dodger farm system where we could go, and that was in Nashua, New Hampshire, in the New England League.”

New Hampshire seemed like an odd fit, but Rickey had seen how Robinson was being welcomed in Montreal, and he figured that Nashua, with its proximity to Canada and its large French-Canadian population, might do the trick. Nashua was “a microcosm of what was good about Montreal,” says the baseball historian Charlie Bevis.

Not everyone was thrilled with their move, however. Fellow Negro Leagues player Othello Renfroe famously remarked on Rickey's "audacity" to send Campanella and Newcombe to Nashua. It wasn't so much that Renfroe was unhappy to see the men make the move to the “big” leagues, rather that compared to the competition they were facing in the Negro Leagues, in his eyes, it wasn’t exactly an upward trajectory. “It was a joke,” Renfroe said at the time. “We had a good, tough league.” Doswell of the Negro Leagues Museum agrees with Renfroe's assessment. “The level [of play] wasn’t high enough in Nashua for [Campanella and Newcombe], who were good enough to be at the top level of the Dodgers’ system. They were better than the competition they would have faced. They weren’t challenged there.”

Still, Nashua represented a chance to prove that they belonged, to prove that the racist owners, fans, and players who kept them off the field all those years were wrong. Matched competition or not, they were going. In his autobiography, It’s Good to Be Alive, Campanella described Nashua as “a nice little friendly town” full of people who didn’t have “much racial prejudice.”

Nashua may have been relatively friendly, but there was another tough aspect of the move: a pay cut. Campanella was a top player in the Negro Leagues, and his pay reflected it. Between the Negro Leagues in the summer and the Mexican League in the winter, Campanella had been earning as much as $5,000 per year. In Nashua, he was only making, as he described it, "a big $185 a month." The two men made their marks in Nashua, though, eventually making their way up from Class B ball to the majors, with Campanella to Brooklyn in 1948 and Newcombe right behind him in 1949. Campanella went on to become an eight-time All Star, a three-time National League MVP, and a World Series champion, while Newcombe was named National League MVP, Rookie of the Year, and a Cy Young Award winner.

They excelled in the league despite the resistance to their inclusion, and ultimately both men reported being happy with their time in New Hampshire. They were eager to prove that they could play at any level, with any team. “Those early players, what they had to do to be the first ones on the line,” says Doswell. “They were doing well in the Negro League, and to give up that comfort is a source of bravery. It takes those early years, up until 1969—the long struggle—to really prove the lunacy and hypocrisy of their exclusion. It was absurd that they were left off in the first place. The game is better for their contributions.”

Some Americans, to learn about their ancestors, can dig through documents detailing when they passed through Ellis Island or flew in or got married, or where they lived at the time of a census. But for some Basque families in the United States, the only record they have of their immigrant ancestors is carved into trees in secluded aspen groves throughout the West. Names, dates, hometowns, and other messages and art scar the pale bark of aspens where Basque men watched over herds of hundreds of sheep from the 1850s to the 1930s.

The Basque are a genetically and linguistically distinct people from a region of the western Pyrenees straddling France and Spain. They speak Euskara and are believed to be the oldest indigenous group in Europe. Many came to the United States in the 19th century in search of opportunity—often in the form of gold or jobs—and ended up in parts of the Great Basin—Southeastern Oregon, central Idaho, and Nevada. Some started ranches, while others found themselves in sagebrush-covered hills and mountains, alone but for hundreds of sheep, a donkey, and some dogs to keep them company.

"This is a pretty anonymous group," says John Bieter, a Basque historian at Boise State University in Idaho. For many of them, there aren't records of them emigrating from Europe or entering the country, or employment records detailing where they were taking on sheep. But they did make tree carvings, known as arborglyphs, which are often found near campsites or rest stops where the herders and their charges would spend the hottest hours of the summer days. The biographical information they carved with knives now allow researchers and descendants to track their movements around the West. "It's about as close as a documentation trail as you're going to get," says Bieter.

Herders often returned to the same places, year after year, and updated the trees they had signed, which has created a record of cultural shifts. "When you track herders over time, you find Americanizing influences," says Bieter. The first time they signed, for example, many used a Spanish or Basque spelling and a European date format, with the date first and month second. But later arborglyphs show that some herders changed the date format and how they spelled their names—from Lorenzo to Lawrence, for example.

Some got a bit more creative. Certain arborglyphs include markers representing hometowns or favorite soccer teams. Others depict churches or farmhouses from back in Basque Country. Animals and fishing boats have also been found. One carver managed to fit part of a poem on a single tree. Other carvings feature naked women in a variety of positions—references to encounters with prostitutes, in some cases. "As you move later into the 20th century, you get a lot more political," says Bieter. As tensions mounted between the Basques and the Spanish government, and when the Spanish Civil War broke out, sheepherders carved messages expressing support for Basque causes and their dislike for dictator Francisco Franco. Aspen trees are usually between three and 18 inches in diameter—with such a limited canvas, herders carved what was most important to them. What remains is a guide to how that changed over time.

Today it's rare to find an arborglyph with a date from the 1800s. Aspen trees live for around 150 years under ideal conditions, and many of the earliest arborglyphs were carved on trees that have since died. "We're trying to document as fast as we can the ones that are still remaining," says Bieter. "What we're trying to beat now is just time and fire." Climate change is shortening the tree's longevity, as extreme weather patterns and larger wildfires affect the regions where arborglyphs are found. Vandalism is also a concern—people have even cut down trees to steal particular works.

Thousands of these trees have been documented in Idaho, California, Oregon, and Nevada, and databases hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno and Boise State University contain photos, drawings, and transcriptions gathered by historians, forest archaeologists, and community groups. We may have already missed out on the first 50 years of Basque sheepherder history, but there's still a chance to document what remains—a seemingly neverending task in a vast landscape dotted with the welcoming shade of aspens.

Bilbo Baggins is hardly the stuff of Aryan racial fantasy. It’s hard to imagine Tolkien’s furry, gluttonous protagonist goose-stepping the halls of Bag End or organizing mass rallies in the idyllic Shire countryside.

But for thousands of Italian fantasy fans, hobbits are the symbol of a radical movement to reimagine fascism and restore far-right movements to glory.

Tolkien’s misanthropic halflings make for unlikely fascist heroes, and their rise to iconic status among Italy’s far right is a story almost circuitous enough to be worthy of the author himself.

Not long before Tolkien first published The Hobbit in 1937, Italy was a great laboratory of experimental thought. Futurists composed music made entirely of motor noises, Marxists preached against “cultural hegemony” from jail cells, and Theosophists hunted for evidence of the primordial “root race”.

From this heady mix emerged Julius Evola, one of history’s most influential philosophers of fascism. Borrowing from Eastern philosophy and Western lore, Evola’s magnum opus, Revolt Against the Modern World, describes the history of European civilization as one of inexorable decline. The stated cause of this decline, paradoxically, was progress—progress away from mythical traditions and perennial wisdom, toward industrialization and cultural miscegenation.

As a solution, Evola proposed a radical program to resurrect the myths of “traditional” societies through art, religion, and, initially, politics. At first, Evola saw fascist leader Benito Mussolini as his great hope for the rebirth of “traditional” society, even authoring for the dictator a doctrine of “spiritual racism” that would rank the world’s races according to their closeness to the “perennial” tradition.

But as the Second World War unfolded, Mussolini failed Evola’s ideological purity test. Italy embraced “scientific” racism and the rhetoric of “progress,” and modern fascism revealed itself to be a kind of Evolian antichrist—a once-heralded usher of a Golden Age turned catalyst of an even more rapid decline.

Edged out of the mainstream, Evola faded from fashion. But elements of his philosophy, known as “Traditionalism,” lingered sacrilegiously on the edges of mainstream thought. Like Tolkien’s ring of power, they lay dormant, waiting for their moment to rise again.

While Evola was theorizing a radical break with modernity, J.R.R. Tolkien was living it. After decades cloistered in the English department of a medieval university, rearranging the elements of Anglo-Saxon lore, Tolkien published The Hobbit, in 1937, followed, almost 20 years later, by The Lord of the Rings.

Since their publication, many critics have labored to decode hidden allegories of real-world events in the adventures of the Fellowship. Because of its racial essentialism and black-and-white morality, Tolkien has often been accused of crypto-fascism.

“Good and evil are separated like oil and water,” wrote Robert Westall in a 1981 review. “The orcs are simple hero-bait, to be slaughtered ad infinitum, piled in heaps and burnt. They are given a lower status than rats.”

Critics have read Bilbo’s furious love of rural Shire life as a sign of bourgeois elitism. Some have even suggested that Mordor’s hordes, with their innumerable number and cockney accents, are a parallel for the working poor of Tolkien’s day and the threat of proletarian revolt.

Others point to his protagonists’ casual attitude to the mass murder of orcs as an indication of their suppressed genocidal nature.

“[Hobbits] are not merely good natured, comfort-loving, seedcake-eating hedonists,” wrote literary critic Peter Firchow. “Under the influence of a powerful wizard and a group of assorted warlike companions, [they can become] very different sorts of beings whose actions are at times reminiscent of some of the worst phenomena of recent European history.”

Tolkien never answered these criticisms by admitting any parallels with real politics. Yet his project of resurrecting and reinterpreting the ancient lore of England had much in common with Julius Evola.

Tolkien and Evola’s paths never actually crossed. Even in the post-war years, when they shared a mutual dislike of American cultural imperialism, Tolkien’s work was never associated with Traditionalism in the English-speaking world.

But when The Lord of the Rings was first published in Italian, in 1971, the latent politics of his stout-hearted heroes bubbled to the surface. Appearing when it did, The Lord of the Rings had an outsized influence on the Italian cultural scene. In the early 1970s, Italy was in the midst of a cultural upheaval as great as that Evola felt in the aftermath of the First World War.

Across Europe, the cultural dominance of the Left, cemented by the defeat of fascism, was beginning to be challenged by a new movement called the nouvelle droite or “New Right.” The central claim of the New Right was that they were not your father’s fascists, and not to blame for the horrors of Nazism. They were your grandfather’s fascists, better, your great-great grandfather’s, fascists who still worshipped the pagan gods and yearned for simpler times of cultural homogeneity and ethnocentrism.

The movement found great success in Italy, where Evola had already laid much of the philosophical groundwork. For Italy’s disillusioned youth, Tolkien’s books seemed to affirm the noble struggle of traditional societies against the encroaching menace of industrialization, progressive politics, and groupthink.

Tolkien quickly became required reading for the serious among Italy’s “neo-fascist” youth groups. But even with the adventures of Sam and Frodo to bond over, many in this crowd felt isolated and overwhelmed in the face of a culturally dominant Left.

In 1977, leaders from Italy’s far right party and youth movement planned to change that. They proposed a fascist Woodstock, a two-day “back to nature” retreat organized around the celebration of Tolkien’s work. They called it “Camp Hobbit.”

Held in the oppressive heat of July, among the rolling hills of southern Italy, Camp Hobbit was equal parts music festival, Tolkien seminar, and anarchist commune. “A stage covered with musical instruments and amplifiers, a colorful tent city, stalls selling posters, trinkets, books and t-shirts,” recorded one diarist.

It was Occupy Wall Street meets the Glastonbury music festival, but the specter of fascism was not far away. “About a dozen muscular guys maintaining order, distinguished by an armband with a Celtic cross,” the diarist wrote, adding, somewhat optimistically, “The crowd was quite diverse, dominated, naturally, by [fascist haircuts], military clothing, [and] black handkerchiefs, but also some long hair and beards.”

By bringing together youth from the radical right and left in an orgy of creative activity, organizers had hoped to spawn new Traditionalist literature, cinema, music, and art, and indeed, a few bands formed among the tents of Camp Hobbit.

“[It was] freedom, liberation from old patterns and mental habits,” says Mario Bartoluzzi, the frontman for Compagnia dell'Anello (“The Fellowship of the Ring”), a Traditionalist band founded at Camp Hobbit. “There was in all of us the desire to get out of the ghetto of exclusion.”

Many attendees saw themselves as transcending the binary of Italian politics by fusing Leftist social critiques with the militancy of fascism. Beneath its festive spirit, Camp Hobbit had hoped to “recode” the language of the hippie left with the Traditionalist philosophy of Evola, according to historian of fascism Roger Griffin.

Camp Hobbit spawned two successful sequels, drawing several thousand attendees. But the coalition emerging from Camp Hobbit quickly fell to infighting. By the mid-’80s, the New Right was again on the margins, primarily associated with anti-communist terrorism. Though it experienced moments of political power, it never succeeded in achieving cultural dominance over its enemies on the progressive Left.

In recent years, however, the movement has seen somewhat of a resurgence. In July, members of Italy’s new New Right organized “Campo Hobbit 40,” an attempt to resurrect the spirit of the original camp on its fortieth anniversary. Evola, too, is enjoying renewed popularity, beloved by adherents of the American Alt-Right.

As for Tolkien, the political meaning of his work is as murky as it ever was. Despite a cast of hundreds, Middle Earth remains an empty stage onto which ideologues of all stripes can project their politics. Even six feature films and countless imitators have failed to bring Traditionalist critiques into the mainstream.

Perhaps his revolutionary fans should have considered the view of his harshest critic, Michael Moorcock: “In Tolkien, everyone’s in their place and happy to be there. We go there and back, to where we started. There’s no escape, nothing will ever change and nobody will ever break out of this well-­ordered world.” So much for revolution.

Dragonflies are mesmerizing to watch—dart, hover, land, dart again, this way and that—and fast. Unfortunately for scientists, that agility and speed make them difficult to study. Their larvae, called nymphs, are water-dwelling and much easier to observe and catch, so plenty of studies have definitively described what nymphs eat (other bugs and tadpoles). As for the diet of adults, however, all we have are occasional observations, which are probably biased toward larger prey that we can actually see them eating, like frogs. But thanks to some diligent Finnish scientists, we now have a better idea of what's on the adult dragonfly menu.

If you want to figure out what an organism is eating—and can't just watch it eat—waste is a good option. But even that kind of observation is tough when it comes to dragonflies. They're thorough chewers, so finding identifiable bits and pieces of their prey in their tiny insect feces is near-impossible. So the researchers, from the University of Turku and the University of Helsinki, turned to technology. They captured 74 dragonflies and closely related damselflies and collected all of their droppings from a 24-hour period in captivity. Then they extracted DNA from the samples and sifted through that genetic material for unique chunks of DNA, a process called DNA barcoding. They found genetic material from 41 distinct prey the dragonflies and damselflies had eaten, most of which the scientists could identify to the genus level. It turns out that flying insects such as midges and dark-winged fungus gnats are popular meals.

This information can help scientists understand how dragonflies and damselflies interact with other species. Their diets, for example, have considerable overlap with local bat species, which means competition. The researchers write in their report that more studies are needed to track diets over time and nail down their place in the food web.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham is awful quirky for a man sometimes known as the father of modern utilitarianism. He had a pet bear, an adored black cat (named the Reverend Doctor Lankhim), and a penchant for showing dinner party guests the two glass eyes he kept in his pocket. The eyeballs were part of a larger project: Bentham wanted his body publicly dissected; his skeleton cleaned up, fully articulated, and padded with straw; and his head mummified for display.

He would be, he said in his will, "the Auto-Icon," visited by friends or occasionally wheeled out for gatherings and parties. But after his death in 1832, the preserving process went a bit ... awry. Bentham had asked a friend, Thomas Southwood Smith, to embalm his head using traditional New Zealand Maori methods. The process—he was essentially smoked, and fitted with the eyes from his pocket—didn't work as hoped. The result is not quite party-appropriate. Today the darkened, leathery, expressionless head is usually kept locked away, though Bentham's body—topped with a wax head—remains propped up in a wooden box with a glass front at University College London.

But now, as part of a wider university project, the head has been brought back out for display. This exhibition, called What Does It Mean To Be Human?, puts Bentham's head on show alongside that of Egyptologist Flinders Petrie. "What does the scientific interrogation of our dead bodies tell us about how we think about ourselves?" the exhibition posits. This is the first time in decades that Bentham's head has been removed from its special wooden box in this way. (Apparently, according to Buzzfeed, it smells something like "vinegar and feet and bad jerky and damp dust.")

No one's entirely sure why Bentham wanted to be preserved in this way, though it's possible that he, likely an atheist, didn't want to give large amounts of money to the church for his burial, and both cremation and secular burial were basically unheard of at the time. Others have suggested that he might have intended it as a joke of sorts, or been attempting to encourage more people to donate their bodies to science. An advocate for abolition, women's rights, and the decriminalization of homosexuality, Bentham was reliably ahead of his time. “The exhibition positions Bentham’s head within the context of his scholarship and his beliefs, with reference to prevailing ideas of the time about death and dead bodies," said curator Subhadra Das in a statement. "It asks the question, why did he believe donation was important? And forces us to ask what that means to us today."

But there's another interest: Bentham's genome. Mark Thomas and Lucy van Dorp, both of the university's Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, have been attempting to extract Bentham's DNA from his head with cutting-edge technology and assistance from London's Natural History Museum. This, Das told The Telegraph, is like "looking at the shredded pages of a book, so much information is missing." It's hoped that by testing Bentham's DNA, scientists may be able to shed light on a 2006 theory that he had autism spectrum disorder (genetic tests can reveal certain autism risk factors). This diagnosis might also explain his unusual postmortem requests, since, the forensic psychologists behind the theory write, autism spectrum disorder "renders more understandable the oddness of these utilitarian desires."

Myths and legends and history have a way of getting confused, mixed, and remixed over the years. That's certainly the case for Santa Claus. The cherubic, white-bearded, red-dressed icon has his roots in a 4th-century Christian saint, St. Nikolaos, who served as Archbishop of Myra, in modern-day Turkey. The patron saint of merchants, thieves, sailors, archers, and pawnbrokers, among others, he picked up a reputation for gift-giving from a 10th-century legend that saw him provide a poor family with dowries for its three daughters. His story traveled north, and was combined with local folklore. Since then, time and savvy marketing have enshrined the benign, basically secular image we know today. But because he remains a saint, and a well-known one at that, his relics are coveted, and various communities have long disagreed over who holds his remains. Maybe they all do. Now, a recent find in Turkey is adding to the confusion.

St. Nicholas is thought to have been buried in Myra, and it is alleged that in 1087 some merchants stole his bones after an earthquake damaged his tomb. They were then supposedly installed in a basilica in Bari, Italy. There, each year on May 9, worshipers gather to celebrate a miracle—the release of a perfumed oil from his bones. But Venice claims to hold some of these oil-producing bones, and scientific examination has shown that the bones in both Italian cities came from the same set of remains. In fact, churches across the world—Germany, Bulgaria, Russia, and even Canada and the United States—also stake claims to possession of some part of him.

In 2013, the Turkey-based Santa Claus Peace Councilwrote to Pope Francis to request the return of at least some of the saint's bones to his home country. But a new discovery in Myra might render that request moot. A team of archeologists has detected what they think could be the remains of a church, on the site where historical accounts place his original grave. One theory is that the church survived the earthquake, and that the stolen bones belong to some other holy man from the region.

Cemil Karabayram, head of Antalya’s Monument Authority, was conducting a digital survey below the surface of the church site when he encountered what appears to be a untouched shrine. "We believe this shrine has not been damaged at all, but it is quite difficult to get to it as there are mosaics on the floor," he said to Turkish paper Hürriyet Daily News. Getting to the tomb beneath will take some time, as first the mosaics must be carefully moved. As with any discovery of a site related to a saint or a historical figure, it's best to regard this one with a healthy grain of salt until archaeologists know more.

Humans are obsessed enough with flowers that you’d think all the good ones would already be widely known. But on a trip to Northern Madagascar, a group of botanists stumbled across a little-known orchid that not only had big, beautiful flowers but a lovely scent, almost like champagne.

Madagascar has a wealth of unique orchids, but as the team reports in a paper published in Kew Bulletin, earlier collectors didn’t spend much time in the island’s more northern reaches, which can take days to reach. But when Anton Sieder, from the Botanical Gardens of the University of Vienna, and his wife Christa Sieder, made the journey, they found an orchid that they couldn’t believe no one had formally reported before.

It had a broad, white flower, close to two inches wide—larger than the flowers of C. Gigas, “which until now was the most impressive species in the genus,” they write. The flowers were also “strongly and pleasantly scented.”

A year later, a group from the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens went to see it for themselves. The flowers, The English Garden reports, grow all along the road and nearby rock faces. The locals, of course, are quite familiar with these flowers, and, according to Johan Hermans, the lead author of the paper, quite amused by the attention they were getting. “It is like a group of people suddenly studying the daisies growing in your front lawn,” he told The English Garden.

Along with this superstar flower, the team reports on nine others that are new to science. But the champagne-smelling flower, which the team calls “instantly recognizable,” has one more special characteristic: It’s named C. christae, after co-discoverer Christa Sieder.

The Antikythera shipwreck is the archaeological discovery that keeps on giving. In the most recent expedition to explore the famous wreck, archaeologists from the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities and Lund University in Sweden have uncovered fabulous pieces of bronze statuary, including this giant bronze arm, as The Guardian reports.

First discovered in 1900, the shipwreck is perhaps most famous for the Antikythera Mechanism, the mysterious, clock-like contraption that’s still puzzling scientists. But underwater archaeologists also uncovered incredible bronze statutes—a rare find—including the Antikythera Youth. (No dinglehoppers, though.)

In antiquity, bronze statues were often melted down and the metal reused, so it’s rare to find examples of bronze art this old. Since these sunk to the bottom of the ocean, though, no one was able to cannibalize them for some other purpose, and they were preserved until today.

In 2014, archaeologists started a new project to more thoroughly excavate and explore the site. Last year, they turned up a skeleton of a person who went down with the ship; the results of DNA analysis revealing the person’s gender and age are forthcoming.

This year, the team expanded the area they were working on and, using an underwater metal detector, located the remains of still more sculptures. According to the team, there are at least seven and perhaps nine sculptures hiding beneath boulders on the sea floor. They also found a bronze gear-like disc, that may either be part of the Antikythera Mechanism or a decorative badge.

In mid-September 1770, the sky over the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto turned crimson. Hundreds of thousands of people would have been looking up at an enormous aurora that stained huge swaths of the night sky. New research, published in the journal Space Weather, combines ancient accounts of the phenomenon with astrometric calculations to suggest that this heavenly light show may have been caused by the largest magnetic storm ever observed.

A similar storm in 1859 caused significant disruption to communication networks across Europe and America. This Japanese storm, however, may have been as much as 7 percent larger. It's unusual to see auroras outside of the polar regions, except in the case of particularly severe magnetic storms caused by solar flares. Written records of these out-of-place auroras are usually the best guide scientists have to where and when big space storms occurred in the past.

To study this one, researchers from the National Institute of Polar Research worked with the National Institute of Japanese Literature. They drew information from a detailed painting in the manuscript Seikai, or Understanding Comets, and a recently discovered diary from the prominent Higashi-Hakura family. The diary describes how, late that night, "red clouds covered half of the sky to the north, toward the Milky Way," and “a number of white vapors rose straight through the red vapor." Based on the painting and description, and the location of the Milky Way in the sky at the time, scientists were able to determine the geometry of the aurora and, in turn, estimate the strength of the storm that caused it. "The enthusiasm and dedication of amateur astronomers in the past provides us an exciting opportunity," researcher Kiyomi Iwahashi said in a statement.

Massive magnetic storms present serious risks to communications and power grids, and it's hoped this kind of work will help us understand them a little better. But it's hard to tell just how at risk we are. "We are currently within a period of decreasing solar activity, said researcher Ryuho Kataoka, "which may spell the end for severe magnetic storms in the near future." Only last month, however, an "extremely fast coronal mass ejection," which could have been powerful enough to cause problems, just missed the Earth. Phew.