Humans have managed to do some smart things over the millennia, and domesticating grapes for winemaking is certainly one of them. We managed to turn a small, tough-skinned fruit into the most important horticultural crop in the world—the 2014 harvest worldwide was worth about $69.2 billion. But scientists aren't entirely sure when exactly we managed to domesticate the wild Eurasian grape, though archaeological evidence suggests it happened around 8,000 years ago in western Asia. A new genetic analysis of wild and domesticated grapes offers up more clues about the history of the fruit, and what its future may look like.
Researchers from University of California, Irvine and University of California, Davis compared the sequenced genomes of wild and domesticated Eurasian grapes. They found that the domesticated subspecies diverged from its wild cousins rather quickly around 22,000 years ago, and then went into a long, drawn out population decline. It's hard to know exactly what caused this decline, but it might have been "low-intensity management by humans," some kind of management between gathering and full-on horticulture. Climate change or a quirk of population structure might also have been involved. "This decline culminated in a weak bottleneck," write the scientists in their report, in which the overall genetic diversity of grapes declined, right around the time people began to cultivate them. The team was surprised to find that the grape population size didn't expand again after it was domesticated, which means humans didn't suddenly start a bunch of vineyards. But compared to other crops, grapes still have a lot of residual genetic diversity—hence all the bewildering options at the wine store.
The analysis also looked at which genes set the domesticated grapes apart from their wild cousins. Genes involved with berry ripening and softness, and the timing of flowering, appear to be major differences, along with genes governing the sex of the plant. Wild grapes have separate male and female plants, while domesticated plants have fertile male and female organs in every flower and rely on pollinators. They also found that the domesticated grape's genome contains some harmful mutations—not unusual for a plant usually grown from clones—but they don't seem to affect the grape's hardiness. Domestication of grapes appears to have been a win-win.
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Nightmares, as we use the word today, are vivid, personal terrors whipped up by a person’s subconscious just for them—a giant snapping turtle, a car that starts backing away from home on its own, a rocket ship with two witches in the backseat eating a potato/voodoo doll that causes the front seat to disappear with every bite. But in centuries past a night “mare” was a very specific type of frightening nocturnal visitor, a spirit or demon that would sit on a person’s chest and suffocate them.
The root of the English word "nightmare" is the Old English maere. In Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, a mara was something known to sneak into people’s rooms at night, plop down on their bodies, and give them bad dreams. When the mare came to visit, the victim would feel a heavy weight—it might start at the feet, but it always settled on the chest—and lose the ability to move. Mares could be sent by sorceresses and witches: One Norwegian king died when his wife, tired of waiting for 10 years for him to come home, commissioned a mare attack. The conjured spirit started by crushing the king’s legs while his men tried to protect his head. But when they went to defend his legs, the mare pressed down on his head and killed him.
This apparition roamed across Europe—it was a mahr in Germany, a marra in Denmark, a mare in French. The visions that the mare brought upon its victims were often called “mare rides”—martröð in Anglo-Saxon, mareridt in Danish, and mareritt in Norwegian, according to (now retired) folklore scholar D.L. Ashliman.
Ashliman collected accounts of mares from across Europe, as well as advice for how to get rid of them. People troubled by mares might want to place their shoes by the side of the bed and turn the laces towards the place where they plan to lie down. Mares snuck in through keyholes or knot holes, so plugging these openings could keep them away. Alternatively, you could enlist a friend, wait for the mare to appear, and then plug the hole to capture it. (Mares were thought to be female, and a few men in these folkloric accounts were able to trap a beautiful wife this way—but she always escaped when she rediscovered the place she’d come through.) If a mare was sitting on you, you could try putting your thumb in your hand to get it to leave, or you could promise it a gift, which it would come the next day to collect.
Today, it’s thought that the mare's particular nastiness was a way to explain a type of sleep paralysis that, as historian Owen Davies writes in Folklore, affects perhaps 5 to 20 percent of people in their lifetime. Sleep paralysis happens at the edge of sleep, usually just before sleeping or just after waking. Sufferers can see and hear, without being able to move or speak. And some people who experience this state also report feeling a heavy pressure on their chests and a sensation of choking, and the sensation of a dark presence in the room.
“As a boy, I would experience a frightening sound, somewhere between white noise and insect buzzing, while feeling a dark presence in the room,” the writer Andrew Emery explains, in his account of sleep paralysis. In the worst case, he writes, “I’ll fight to regain consciousness and, having told myself I have done so, will still find that there’s some foul presence in my bedroom which then proceeds to punch me in the stomach. At this stage, my mind, which seconds ago knew it was experiencing sleep paralysis, is now convinced I’m the victim of a real-world demonic attack."
There’s no precise treatment for sleep paralysis, nothing better than the superstitions and charms used by medieval people to keep away the mare and its attacks. The episodes are, Davies writes, “a moment when reality, hallucination, and belief fuse to form powerful fantasies of supernatural violation”—a truly terrifying experience, demonic or otherwise.
We want to hear about your dreams and terrors, the ones that stay with you for years. What’s the dream that scared you as a child and still gives you chills? What was the worst dream you ever had? If you’ve experienced hallucinations during sleep paralysis, what did you see? Please tell us all about them here. We’ll publish the most strange, frightening, and hallucinatory among them next week, just in time for Halloween.
If a night “mare” was originally a very specific type of frightening nocturnal visitor, today our nightmares are bad dreams, night terrors, and all sorts of fears that bubble up from our brains to haunt the dark hours. And sometimes, we dream dreams so frightening that they stick in our minds for decades, inescapable but inscrutable windows into our deepest fears.
We want to hear about those dreams and terrors, the ones that stay with you for years. What's the dream that scared you as a child and still gives you chills? What was the worst dream you ever had? If you've experienced hallucinations during sleep paralysis, what did you see? What dream made you whimper in the night and wake the person sleeping next to you?
Please tell us all about them here or use the form below.
Here are some from the Atlas Obscura staff:
Being eaten by ant. Grandpa also eaten by ant. A very big ant.
Falling asleep in math class, having sleep paralysis, and thinking all of my classmates were staring at me and their eyes were just holes. I could hear them making yowling noises like cats.
Going to jail for the rest of my life and I'm on my last day of freedom just wallowing in a sea of dread.
Sitting in a field covered in grass, flowers, and other plants and keep hearing an approaching thud in the distance. Each night, the thud would get louder and the field would shrink around me. I'd grow increasingly frantic about it and wake up. Then, on the last night, there was one patch left right in front of me, and I looked up and saw a giant robot leg coming down to stomp it—and me—out.
Being chased by wolves or sharks.
This recurring, inescapable image of a giant, inverted pyramid, balancing on a single stone. And I was filled with dread that if i moved or let my mind wander for even a second, it would collapse and destroy everything and—specifically—make a deafening, roaring sound as it came down.
We'll be collecting these dreams and publishing the most strange, frightening, and hallucinatory among them next week, just in time for Halloween, when nightmares come alive.
In 1922, Albert Einstein sat in a hotel room in Tokyo and wrote down two thoughts. “Wo ein Wille ist, da ist auch ein Weg”—where there’s a will, there’s a way—and “Stilles bescheidenes Leben gibt mehr Glueck als erfolgreiches Streben, verbunden mit bestaendiger Unruhe”—a quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.
He gave those two notes in lieu of a tip to a courier who had brought him a message, as the Japan Times reports. It may have been that he didn’t have any change; it may have been that the courier had refused money. But Einstein had the idea that these small slips of paper might be worth much more than a handful of change one day.
When he had arrived in Tokyo, the scientist had been met by crowds of fans. He had been traveling around the world, giving a series of lectures, in America, in British Palestine, and in southeast Asia. He was in Asia when he received a telegram informing him he had won a Nobel Prize. He must have understood what his growing fame could mean when he handed the courier these two notes.
One of the notes is one the stationery of the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo; the other is on a blank sheet of paper. They’re both being sold by an auction house in Israel, by the anonymous German owner. It’s unclear how these notes passed hands and reemerged now, but they're small hints as to how Einstein treated people and thought of the world in terms of human experience, not just grand theories.
In 1903, a New York millionaire threw one of the most unusual banquets in history. C.K.G. Billings, a horse-racing fanatic who the New York Times called "the American Horse King," spent thousands of dollars transforming a Manhattan ballroom so he and his friends could eat on horseback.
Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings inherited a gas company, but his passion was racehorses. A famous equestrian, Billings built a $200,000 private stable next to the Harlem River Speedway, a track for horse and carriage racing that opened to cars in 1919. The luxurious stable included two exquisite suites for Billings and guests in the upper story and a training ring for show horses. Billings wanted to celebrate the finished stable with a banquet.
Newspapers speculated about the Horse King's banquet—journalists described the stable's decorations and even discovered that the dinner would be on horseback. In the face of intense public interest, Billings seemingly took a more typical dinner-party route, by selecting a restaurant. But this was misdirection.
On the night of the dinner, Billings' guests filed into the ballroom of Sherry’s, a 5th Avenue restaurant, in black and white evening wear. To their surprise, the room was decorated with fake turf, plants, and painted scenery that resembled the English countryside. The room had no tables. Instead, the guests mounted live horses, which had ridden the freight elevator up to the ballroom. Waiters in riding gear brought oats for the horses and placed dish after dish on table trays mounted on each horse’s saddle.
The French-style dinner that Billings and company ate was as lavish as their surroundings. The meal started with caviar and turtle soup. One course featured truite au bleu—cooking trout while it is super-fresh and dunking it in vinegar results in a blue-purple colored fish. Served with a green herb sauce, it would have been visually striking, if hard to eat on horseback.
More courses followed: rack of lamb with glazed vegetables, guinea hens with lettuce-heart salad, and asparagus with hollandaise sauce. Flambéed peaches capped off the meal. On the menu, Sherry noted the parties’ drinks, including an 1898 Krug champagne, scotch and sodas, and bottled ginger ale for Billings, who probably knew better than to drink and ride.
At the end of the dinner, the guests dismounted to watch a variety show, while the horses headed for the freight elevator. Attendees also received sterling-silver horseshoes inscribed with the menu as souvenirs. While none from the dinner have surfaced, Sherry’s record of the meal gives useful clues as to the night’s happenings, including the number of attendees (32), the time, and a note that the event was photographed by the famous Byron Company, whose photographer captured the iconic image of New York’s banquet on horseback.
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Lugworms are rust-colored and grow up to nine inches in length or more, with bodies ridged like an earthworm's. Unlike earthworms, they have bristles running down their sides, and eleven pairs of feathery gills for breathing. Mating is, for the lugworm, a strictly remote activity. Males cast their sperm out into the world, where it pools on the sand. The tide then carries the sperm into the burrows of the females—et voilà, more lugworms. They mate like this en masse, but only when conditions are ideal. Scientists don't know what those conditions are, and without that knowledge, they'll never be able to tell how adaptable lugworms will be to environmental change.
Scientists at Newcastle University in England are calling for "citizen scientists" to keep an eye on the mating habits of these invertebrates, an operation they have evocatively titled Spermwatch. The worms spend most of their lives buried in the sand, but they're easy enough to locate, since their burrowing produces long, coiled noodles of sand that dot tidal flats. Volunteers are being asked to count the sand casts on the northeastern coasts of the United Kingdom. Though the survey is now in its second year, scientists say they're not yet any closer to their goal. Speaking to the BBC, Jacqueline Pocklington, project coordinator, said last year's survey results produced different conclusions in different regions. Maybe the lugworms are just trying to be discreet about the whole thing.
High in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, in the violent years leading up to the Mexican-American War of 1846, lasso-toting horsemen known as vaqueros hunted an animal that is now extinct: the California grizzly bear.
Before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, it was believed that California held around 10,000 grizzly bears. In the 19th century, California grizzlies were most sought for their intrinsic fighting qualities, especially when coerced into combat with a bull—an event that served as entertainment for a crowd on many Sunday afternoons.
In the small cities and towns that peppered the valleys and coastal cliffs and mustard fields, a curious bloodsport had taken hold. Bear-baiting was brought to California by the conquistadors, but the sport itself was old as Rome. London in the Middle Ages built great amphitheaters known as bear-gardens to host the events. But in 19th-century California, the venues were more temporary and crude. Often known as “pits,” the slapdash arenas were built of split-board fencing and reinforced with heavy logs and adobe. A raised viewing platform was constructed for women and children, a family affair, while the men remained on horseback outside the barricades, raetas (braided-oxhide lassos), rifles and revolvers at the ready just in case the bear decided to climb its way out.
Such occasions usually commenced on Sundays, after church, when the townsfolk gathered after their pious songs and prayer, and slowly made their way to the town square toward the sounds of spectacle. As Hubert Howe Bancroft, American historian and ethnologist, wrote in California Pastoral, “A bull and bear fight after the sabbath services was indeed a happy occasion. It was a soul-refreshing sight to see the growling beasts of blood tied with a long raeta by one of its hind feet, as to leave it free to use its claws and teeth.” And there the spectators would find the vaqueros from the mountains clamping irons on the grizzly and blooding it with small dogs sacrificed to keep the bear in the mood.
If the grizzly was the symbol of California, then the symbol of Spain was destined to be its foe, two species that under normal circumstance would have never faced each other in the wild. Toward the pit would be led a Spanish Fighting Bull, that proud trot and deep black hide, its horns decorated with garlands of flowers and always—somewhat baffling—the home favorite.
The bear and bull fight was the main event, with an undercard of cockfighting and dogfighting to whet the crowd’s appetite for death. But then there would be other activities on the periphery, strange contests that usually involved a display of horsemanship, sharpshooting, or lasso work, anything to prove to the churchgoers that you had the right stuff. Of course there would be the requisite horse racing, but there were also other peculiar feats such as“to place on the ground a rawhide, and riding at full speed suddenly rein in the horses the moment his fore-feet struck the hide,” a prototypical driver’s test of sorts.
A more amusing form of horsemanship would be to bury a rooster in the dirt up to its neck, and, as California Pastoral says, “at a signal a horseman would start at full speed from a distance of about sixty yards, and if by dexterous swoop he could take the bird by the head, he was loudly applauded.” But if the rider failed, “he was greeted with derisive laughter, and was sometimes unhorsed with violence, or dragged in the dust at the risk of breaking his limbs or neck.”
Finally the moment would arrive. The bear and the bull, secured with shackles and ropes, would be led into the pit by shortcoat and sash-wearing caballeros—gentlemen of high standing in the town. The bull and bear would be tied together by a long length of rope, but short enough to keep the two gladiators in each other’s company. By now the crowd would be in frenzy, the smell of grilled meat in the air and the swilling of spirits from black bottles. As the crowd pressed forward, baying for the release of the beasts, an officiator would climb to his position on the raised platform, women and children behind him, and fire a pepperbox pistol in the air to start the contest.
At the outset, the bear would usually hang back, taking a defensive posture on its hind legs, while the bull was often the first to attack, charging with head down and horns lethal. It was generally understood by eyewitness accounts that the bear held the advantage in the fray. While the bull had a deadly lunge, the bear could parry the advance and grab the bull by the head, sinking its teeth into the bull’s neck, or on one account, biting the bull’s tongue, which would have undoubtedly released a crowd-pleasing bellow. At such times the vaqueros would jump in and break up the fight to save the bull and prolong the drama. “I was present,” stated a spectator named Arnaz in the pages of California Pastoral, “when a bear killed three bulls.” Often a single grizzly would fight many bulls consecutively until the home team won. “Sometimes the bull came off victorious, and at other times the bear, the result depending somewhat on the ages of the beasts.”
What further added enjoyment of the bloodsport was how differently the two animals fought. The bear would often stand and take mighty downward swipes with its paws, while the bull would charge low and rush upward for the gore.
If this sounds familiar, like a word on the tip of your tongue you can’t quite remember, that is because the bear and bull fights of California inspired the modern day colloquialism of Wall Street: bull markets and bear markets. And the rest is just history.
A few years ago, the climate adaptation researcher Ben Smith—then a Ph.D. student at Kings College London—was working on his dissertation, about the effectiveness of water restoration projects in the United Kingdom. As with most scholarly projects, this involved spending hours and hours with the same information.
"I'd been staring at lists of rivers... [for] far too much time," he says, when certain patterns of terminology began emerging. While the northern U.K. was squiggled all over with "burns," the southeast was instead full of "nants" and "afons."
"I got interested in the way [the words] varied between regions," says Smith. So he decided to start mapping them. This year, inspired by a query from the landscape linguist Robert McFarlane, he returned to the project, and recently completed a set of maps of the U.K., twisted all over with different words for "stream."
Smith's creations are a form of dialect map, a 19th-century invention that aims to connect how people speak to where they live. The genre has been made familiar to modern audiences through online surveys, such as that popular 2013 New York Times questionnaire that asked its readers whether they say "crawdad," "crayfish," or "mudbug," and then heat-mapped the results. Instead of mobilizing a bicycling surveyor or an internet quiz, Smith dredged his information up from a public data set: the Ordnance Survey of Open Rivers, which has mapped about 144,000 kilometers of watercourses in the U.K.
Most people use the survey to think through future scenarios. If toxic sludge accidentally spilled in this river, where would it end up? But when Smith sorted the waterways by title instead, they offered a snapshot of a past-inflected present.
"It's really clear from the distribution of 'allt' where the traditional areas of Gaellic speakers were," he says—up in the north, of course. "And the use of 'beck'"—clustered mostly around current-day Yorkshire, Cumbria and Manchester—"is a pretty good match for the area that used to be under Danelaw in the 10th century." Smith is also intrigued by the outliers. Although the word "burn" is most common in Scotland, some burns appear in the southwest, and there's a pocket of unexpected gills in the southeast.
Bodies of water have proven to be a fruitful well for this type of work. Back in 2011, the geographer Derek Watkins used the USGS's National Hydrography Dataset to map generic stream names in the United States. (It turns out 'brook' made its way from the southern U.K. to New England, Louisiana is full of bayous, and Pennsylvania's got the runs.) After Smith's maps gained wide attention on Twitter, the data scientist Phil Taylor did the same thing with the U.K.'s lakes, not to mention its lochs, waters, loughs, llyns, broads, pools, meres, and tarns.
Smith likes that these types of maps draw attention to both linguistic and topographical diversity. "I hope it encourages people to think about their local environment, and engage with the landscape," he says. "Also… even in the U.K. there are big regional differences in dialect, and that's important to try to keep."
And even though he still spends a good amount of time staring at lists of rivers, he adds, the sheer variety of terms revealed by the maps has surprised even him. "I had no idea how many different variants for 'stream' there were," he says.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
Springtime in Australia is a dangerous season thanks to the constant threat of dive-bombing magpies. Around August of each year, the Australian magpie (Cracticus tibicen) tends to go on the rampage, with males swooping down to scare off potential threats to their nests, namely humans. Sometimes, it’s just startling, but other times, they can injure eyes or scratch peoples’ faces with their beaks and claws.
According to a statistic shared by the website MAGPIE ALERT!, via a recent Guardian article, there have already been over 500 magpie-related injuries reported across Australia in 2017. Over the years, residents have devised a number of DIY methods to protect themselves from such injuries, including wearing buckets on their heads. But one doctor may have recently devised the most festive bit of magpie-protective gear yet.
In a video that’s making the rounds, Dr. Richard Osborne, an oncologist and avid cyclist, can be seen showing off his new defense mechanism, a bike helmet equipped with children’s noise blowers. Connected to a tube in his mouth, he simply blows into it, and the party favors unravel with a little toot, spooking any magpies near him. A simple idea, but as can be seen in the video, an effective one.
As he told a local news station, it seemed safer to him than carrying a stick or waving his hand while biking. From the looks of the video, he's right.
Scientists know that a massive earthquake will one day shake the Pacific Northwest. At some point in the future, pressure building on the Cascadia subduction zone will reach a breaking point, and the Juan de Fuca plate will slide further under the North American plate. It happens roughly every 500 years, and when it does it is going to be big. But earthquake propagation is impossibly complex, so no one knows how much shaking different cities in the region will experience. The last time a subduction zone quake rattled the region, it was January 26, 1700, and all we know about it comes from tree ring data, sediment cores, oral traditions of indigenous peoples living in the area, and records of an "orphan" tsunami in Japan. To understand the inevitable shaking, scientists have produced a new set of simulations of the "Really Big One".
A team of researchers from the University of Washington and the U.S. Geological Survey used supercomputers to simulate 50 different earthquake scenarios along the subduction zone. Pressure isn't evenly distributed along the fault, and the nature of the quake will depend on whether the entire fault or just a portion of it moves. The location and depth of the epicenter will also affect the intensity of shaking, which is important for places built on sediment that liquifies during a quake. The team's simulations focused on Seattle, with a variety of different epicenters, depths of fault movements, and "sticky points," where the Juan de Fuca plate might snag on the North American plate and generate even more shaking.
Intuitively, one expects that being farther away from the epicenter is better—but that's not always the case. The simulations show that the Emerald City fares best when the epicenter is right next to it, under Washington's Olympic Peninsula, which may cause most of the quake's waves spread out and away from the city. "But when the epicenter is located pretty far offshore," said team member Erin Wirth in a statement, the waves travel inland, "and all of that strong ground shaking piles up on its way to Seattle, to make the shaking in Seattle much stronger." The latter simulation can be seen in the video above.
A magnitude-9 earthquake will be devastating for the Pacific Northwest, no matter where it originates. But with a better sense of possible or likely scenarios, geologists may be able help cities and people prepare for what a "Really Big One" really means.
Lucky the Leprechaun has been the Lucky Charms mascot since the cereal debuted in 1964. In 1975, though, he vanished, as if by magic, from the shelves of New England grocery stores. In his place, a green-cloaked wizard named Waldo suddenly appeared on boxes of Lucky Charms.
Why was the iconic, scarf-wearing sprite given the boot? Marketers felt that Lucky was a bit cold in commercials. That is, the scurrying leprechaun didn’t seem keen on divvying up his colorful food with hungry children. “He wasn’t very friendly for the kids,” explains 76-year-old Alan Snedeker, who helped create advertisements for Lucky Charms. “They were always chasing him, and he wasn’t really sharing.”
After hearing this feedback, executives at General Mills, the parent company of the breakfast cereal, boldly considered a rebranding. They asked Snedeker, who was then a copywriter at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, one of New York’s top advertising firms, to conjure up a more popular mascot. “I was told to try to beat Lucky,” Snedeker says.
In focus groups made up of 12 children, Snedeker and his colleagues showed kids storyboards featuring potential mascots. “If two or three characters are liked, those tests are shared with the client, and a decision is made to test the commercials using full animation,” Snedeker says about the mascot-selection process. “Those are then shown to a greater number of kids in focus groups with more in-depth questions.”
At first, Snedeker presented kids with a knight who—unlike the leprechaun—rushed to bring the marshmallow-infused cereal to children. He even leapt off cliffs to do so. “If you want Lucky Charms in the morning, just yell ‘Good Knight!’” Snedeker quips, rehashing the slogan he once whipped up for the potential mascot.
The friendly knight performed remarkably well in tests. It even seemed as though the Good Knight would become the new face of Lucky Charms. But when push came to shove, General Mills did not adopt the character. It appears the knight wasn’t magical enough to be the mascot of the long-touted “magically delicious” cereal.
Snedeker did, however, have another character under review by discriminating 5- to 8-year-olds, one more magically inclined. “Waldo was a little overweight, friendly character who didn’t run from the kids,” Snedeker says about the forgetful, middle-aged wizard. “He greeted them right away.”
Like the Good Knight, Waldo—who wore a cloak with bright stars, hearts, and crescent moons—performed well in focus groups. The magical fellow was also able to charm the higher-ups at General Mills. They selected him to replace Lucky in an official trial in New England.
In commercials, Waldo always misplaced his boxes of Lucky Charms, and cartoon kids reminded him that, since he was a wizard, he could magically create some. At the end of each ad, Waldo gleefully muttered that Lucky Charms were “ibble-debibble-delicious.” It was a jibber-jabber of a catchphrase inspired, Snedeker says, by the “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” song from Disney’s Cinderella, which he adored.
Less than one year after the wizard debuted in New England, though, he suddenly vanished—POOF!—and the four-leaf clover-wielding leprechaun was back, grinning larger than ever.
“It wasn’t that the Waldo failed in New England,” Snedeker says, confessing his thoughts on why Waldo, “but General Mills had millions of dollars invested in Lucky, in terms of advertising, and they thought it would be crazy to give that up.” Lucky even had the benefit of sharing the cereal’s name.
Snedeker also played a role in Waldo’s demise by devising ways to make Lucky seem friendlier. “I made the chase more of a game,” he says, about his adjustments to advertisement scripts. “I improved the Leprechaun’s personality.”
Despite Waldo’s popularity, the culmination of marketing factors against him sent Waldo into early retirement. Today, Snedeker’s loveable wizard is just a quirky breakfast memory. A vague one that many Bostonians may believe is a false memory—like the people who collectively misremember Berenstain Bears, the beloved children’s book characters, being spelled “Berenstein.”
But in this case, memories of a bedazzled, fumbling sorcerer are, indeed, correct. Mike Siemienas, the current brand media relations manager at General Mills, even has some reassuring words: “For those New Englanders who remember a wizard on the Lucky Charms box in the ‘70s, you are not dreaming. It did happen.”
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The bird was small, with a crest of red feathers and a bright yellow splotch across its front. The scientists easily identified it as a type of manakin. But when trying to identify its species, they ran into a problem.
This little bird didn’t look much like any of the other manakins that lived in the same area, but it did resemble a manakin subspecies, Machaeropterus regulus aureopectus, that lives in Venezuela’s highlands. But the scientists had found the bird in the mountains of Peru, essentially across the continent. If the same exact species of bird lived in these two isolated locations, it would have been a surprise.
Now, in a new paper in Zootaxa, the scientists have identified the Peruvian bird as its own species, Machaeropterus eckelberryi.
The key to distinguishing the Peruvian bird from the Venezuelan bird was its song. The M. eckelberryi, which is named after a famous bird illustrator, sings a one-note tune, that rises in pitch. Its song also lacks undertones.
The bird was originally discovered in 1996, but it took years for the scientists to be able to identify this difference, in part because they had no record of the vocalizations of the Venezuelan birds. Only once they knew the songs of both birds could they prove for sure that they were truly distinct lookalikes.
It’s hard to say that the Wurlitzer organ currently in residence at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus is hidden. It’s in plain sight. It’s all around. It’s essentially the entire room we’re standing in—we’re inside of it. Joe Amato, board member of the New York Theatre Organ Society (NYTOS) and curator for this particular organ, points upward, toward the intricately carved ceiling, and waves his hands across the air marking an invisible boundary.
“There’s four chambers to the organ,” he says to a group assembled to tour the organ for the last time for a long while. “The orchestral, the solo, the main, the foundation,” each one hidden behind a curtain.
We’re standing on a basketball court, the bleachers pulled out on one side as if waiting for a crowd to arrive. The organ, or rather the organ's console, as Amato corrects us, is perched just off-center on the floor. The basketball hoops hang above it. Chairs have been arranged in rows, ready for the next day’s big event. As for the organ, built in 1928 by the Wurlitzer company for what used to be the Paramount Theatre, is getting ready for its last performance for a while. The building is set to undergo renovations over the next two years, and its next life will be much closer to its past as the Paramount, which played host to such legendary acts as Ella Fitzgerald, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Jackie Wilson. When it reopens in late 2019, this space will once again be a full-time performance venue. Although the ultimate fate of the organ isn't yet completely known, Amato and the NYTOS are hopeful that it will remain in the space as it has for the past 90 years.
Amato’s group has been in charge of this concert organ for about 50 years. The one housed at the university is the only one of its kind left, and one of only two concert organs left in all of New York City. In its day, it was known as a unit orchestra, built to complement silent movies at a time when seeing musicians take a whirl on the “mighty Wurlitzer” was as much of an attraction as the big screen. People crowded in to experience the four-keyboard, multi-switched wonder.
Amato leads us down to the floor. "You see what he's doing there? He's tickling the ivories. And [the keys] are ivory," he tells as we edge in close to the console. “And he’s not really playing the organ,” Amato says, pointing to the man who, to the untrained eye, looks exactly like someone playing an organ. “He’s playing the relay room, which acts like a central processor in a computer. He’s sending signals to the relay room about what he wants to play.” As he plays, the man talks into a walkie-talkie, asking the voice on the other end to tweak this, turn that. It takes at least two people to tune the organ, and in preparation for a concert, Amato and his team have been working for four days on getting the sound just right.
We make our way down to the basement, over the tattered edges of the theater’s original carpet, through a weight room that used to be the green room for the stars of the day, and across the old backstage area to the combination room. This is where all the organ's sounds are programmed, a complicated mass of diagrams and wires, all set to the musician's exact specifications. The sounds he’s requested for his upcoming show all need to be programmed here. “It’s like the 1928 version of a computer,” Amato says.
When repairs start on the old Paramount later this year, the console will do what it’s done since 1928, and what it’s done for every basketball game since the court went in in 1963: it will sink into the floor. It sits on an elevator that lowers it to the basement when it’s not in use. The organ’s giant pipes, some as large as 16 feet tall, will be covered during construction. “Dust is a big enemy of pipe organs,” Amato tells us. He leads us back over to the console and sits down, plays us a tune. His whole body moves in rhythm with the music. His feet, hands, head all in constant motion. Playing the organ is a full-body activity.
At one point during the tour, Amato takes us to his office. “My cleaning lady has the day off,” he laughs as he lets us inside. Over his desk is a collection of photographs, news clippings, memories of what the theater used to look like. It's all about athletics now, with an occasional banquet or college event filling the room with the sounds of people, not music. But you can imagine those intricate, gold carvings speckled with lights, the stone fountains installed near the balconies, water dancing in time with the music, the marble spiral staircases filled with dancers. It’s all history, but a living history. After the theater reopens, Amato and his group hope to get back to doing what they’ve always done, too: keeping that history alive.
Enough human beings have walked on the moon at this point that it’s almost the “visiting the Empire State Building” of space exploration. But for as many living people who have taken a walk on that far away rock, there is only one dead man who's ever been put to rest there.
To date, the late scientist Eugene Shoemaker is still the only person whose remains have been sent to the moon. Even casual stargazers are likely to recognize Shoemaker’s name from the famed Shoemaker-Levy comet (which had broken into fragments) that impacted Jupiter in 1994. The comet, which Shoemaker discovered with his wife Carolyn alongside David Levy, was remarkable because it marked the first time humans were able to witness a first-hand planetary collision. The crash got so much press attention that a small town in Wyoming set up an intergalactic landing strip to welcome any potential refugees from Jupiter, and Shoemaker became a household name.
Shoemaker enjoyed a celebrated career combining his main discipline of geology with more astronomical applications, helping to create the field of planetary science. He studied a number of craters here on Earth, and in the early 1960s, he founded the Astrogeology Research Program within the United States Geological Survey. Shoemaker used his knowledge to train a number of Apollo mission astronauts about what they could expect to find on the surface of the moon, in terms of terrain.
His fascinating life came to an abrupt end on July 18, 1997, when he died in a car crash while exploring a meteor crater in Australia. But even in death, as it turned out, his journey was far from over.
Enter Celestis, the only company that has ever successfully conducted memorial spaceflights. “Our first launch was in April of 1997 out of the Canary Islands,” says Charles Chafer, CEO and Co-Founder of Celestis. “We flew 24 people on what we call the ‘Founder’s Flight.’ Some well-known folks like Timothy Leary and Gene Roddenberry. Also some space-geek folks, like Gerard K. O'Neill, but mostly normal folks.”
Celestis works by securing any extra room on space launches that are already occurring, and sending the ashes up as a secondary payload. “I think the term of art these days is ‘rideshare,’” says Chafer. So, if a rocket is set to head into space, and there is a little wiggle room in terms of space and weight, Celestis tries to fill that with remains. Generally, whatever piece of equipment the memorial payload is attached to ends up in Earth's orbit. “Our payload is always attached to something, whether that’s a spacecraft or a spent rocket stage. Things that are small enough that at the end of their orbital lifetime, they burn up completely on reentry,” says Chafer. “Sort of an ashes-to-ashes moment.”
But with Shoemaker it was a little different. A close colleague of Shoemaker’s, Carolyn Porco, had decided to try and finally get the deceased scientist, who had wanted to be an astronaut in life but was disqualified for medical reasons, to the moon. Luckily, NASA also liked the idea of honoring Shoemaker by getting his ashes all the way to the lunar surface, and they called Celestis. “I got a phone call. A good friend of mine was the chief of staff and legislative liaison for NASA, Ed Heffernan,” says Chafer.
Heffernan asked Chafer if Celestis could work with them to find a way to get some of Shoemaker’s remains to the moon’s surface, because NASA wasn’t really in the business of burying people. Chafer was interested of course, but he want to make sure that this groundbreaking burial would set a precedent for future off-world memorials. “I said, ‘I want it to be a contract that is purchased from us.’ Now, we charged virtually nothing,” says Chafer. “I think we charged them the cost of the capsule that we sent out to Arizona.” Chafer said the capsule cost around $600.
On January 6, 1998, NASA’s Lunar Prospector blasted off for the south pole of the moon, looking for ice, and carrying an ounce of Shoemaker’s ashes. According to a memorial website set-up by Porco, the ashes were carried in a polycarbonate capsule provided by Celestis. It had been wrapped in a piece of brass foil, laser-etched with his name and dates over an image of the Hale-Bopp Comet; an image of Arizona’s Meteor Crater, where he had trained the Apollo astronauts; and a quote from Romeo and Juliet. On July 31, 1999, the mission ended when NASA deliberately crashed the craft on the surface of the moon, taking Shoemaker with it, and making him the first and only person to be buried off-world.
It’s taken decades for Celestis to pull off their now 14 missions. Luna 1, which is what they called the mission to transport Shoemaker’s remains, is still the only one that has landed remains on a different celestial body.
But according to Chafer, it won’t be the last. “I think we are entering an age of abundance in terms of commercial access to space.” The largest hindrance to space burial is finding a rocket to take even a small amount of remains out into space, but with the rise of independent programs such as SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, the number of opportunities to fly those secondary payloads is increasing, meaning that more people will have the opportunity be sent into the cosmos.
Accordingly, a number of competitors have sprung up in recent years offering similar services, though Celestis remains the only company to have actually accomplished a space burial. But the competition doesn’t bother Chafer. “If there weren’t competition, I’d be worried about the market,” he says. And the market definitely seems to be there, attracting what he calls “geeks, new agers, adventurers, and people who want the biggest send-off ever.” Celestis's upcoming planned missions include a second lunar burial in the first quarter of 2018, and their first “Voyager” mission, which will attempt to send some remains forever into deep space.
Eugene Shoemaker might not be all alone on the moon for very much longer.
Correction 10/24/2007: In a previous version of this article the company Blue Origin was said to be affiliated with Amazon. This has been changed to reflect that it is an independent venture by Jeff Bezos.
Most musicians would be horrified if a chunk of their instrument flew off during a show. But the members of the Vienna-based Vegetable Orchestra are unfazed when their flutes fall apart and their drums shatter. After all, getting new ones just requires a trip to the grocery store.
Since 1998, the Vegetable Orchestra has been making sweet music on savory vegetables. Their instruments, from eggplant clappers to celeriac bongos, tend not to survive a performance. Even though it’s produced by produce, the Vegetable Orchestra’s music is surprisingly complex, taking cues from rock, electronica, and other styles.
This performance of the Vegetable Orchestra, which was recorded at TEDx Talks, features rhythmic striking of hollow carrots and squeaky leek violins. Instruments range from the simplicity of a whole-pumpkin drum to multiple-veggie wind instruments. One musical interlude features four cabbages attached to distortion pedals, shredded both musically and literally.
The Vegetable Orchestra’s site notes that veggies that have seen showtime have three ultimate destinies. They either end up as organic waste, as gifts to audience members, or, most deliciously, as post-show soup.
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In the cross-section of a tree trunk, each ring represents a single year that the tree has been on the planet. The appearance can be intricate but the underlying pattern is simple, clear—elegant, even. But it wasn't always this way. Ancient trees, scientists say, were way more complicated. A fossilized early tree, belonging to a group known as cladoxlopsids, that grew in what is now northwest China around 374 million years ago, revealed a tangled web of trunks—hundreds of individual strands, each with their own set of concentric growth rings.
Within this single large tree were hundreds of "mini trees," whose trunks split apart and then repaired themselves as the tree grew. “The tree simultaneously ripped its skeleton apart and collapsed under its own weight while staying alive and growing upwards and outwards to become the dominant plant of its day," Chris Berry, who coauthored a study on the fossils in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. It's not yet known how this unusual structure would have affected the amount of carbon these trees were capable of caching from the atmosphere, which was the primary focus of this research.
The smaller trunk structures, Berry said, would have worked like "a network of water pipes," transporting water from root to leaf, as opposed to the single-column structure of modern trees. The "pipes" are arranged only in the outer couple of inches of the trunk, and the core itself is entirely hollow. This all begs the question, Berry said, of why older trees seem so much more complicated than their modern equivalents.
For decades, the basement of the Boston Public Library was hiding something pretty amazing. A collection of nearly 200,000 rarely heard, unseen-by-the-public vinyl LPs and shellac 78s were tucked away in storage in the library’s central branch. Now, through a partnership with the digital library Internet Archive, these records are about to get a second life.
The initiative will digitize all 200,000 pieces of the BPL’s collection and make them publicly available, as rights allow, for the first time in a very long time. First up are the library’s collection of 78s. These records, which date from about 1898 to the 1950s, will be digitized as part of the Internet Archive's Great 78 Project, an initiative to digitize, preserve, and study these rare records. “These 78s are disappearing right and left. It is important that we do a good job preserving what we can get to, because there won’t be a second chance,” said George Blood, an audio preservationist working on the project, in a press release announcing the digitization.
The BPL has been working with Internet Archive since 2007, and has a scanner on-site, which has helped them digitize many of the library’s books. “We have a long history of partnering with Internet Archive,” says Laura Irmscher, the library’s chief of collections. Now another part of the library is getting more accessible. The vinyl collection is a wide-ranging assortment of pop, jazz, spoken word, and classical ranging from the early 1900s to the 1980s. And surprisingly, more than one copy of the New Kids on the Block’s 1988 album, Hangin’ Tough. “It was fun to see one that reminded me of my youth,” says Irmscher. “But,” she continues, “a lot of the 78s are music that I’m unfamiliar with.” Even the BPL isn’t sure exactly what’s in there. “I like to go on the Internet Archive site to see what types of things they’ve digitized for other institutions, to see what kinds of things we can expect in ours.”
This digital music will sound a little different than the made-for-digital music we’re used to these days. The digitization is going to include every hiss, every pop, every crackle of needle to vinyl, preserving not just the sounds but the experience of listening to music this way. It’s imperfect, sometimes, but “these will sound just the way they do in their current state,” says Rosemary Lavery, a spokesperson for the BPL. “A lot of people aren’t used to that.” The library has released recordings from two records in the archive to give the public a sense of what to expect from the project: a 1938 country swing recording by W. Lee O'Daniel and his Hillbilly Boys called "Please Pass The Biscuits, Pappy (I Like Mountain Music)," and a Grieg Piano Concerto performed by Freddy Martin and his Orchestra.
More than anything, Irmsher looks at this project, which will take years to complete, as being an extension of the work the library does in the community—sharing, teaching, preserving. “I hope that [people] take away that this is another thing that the library provides, cultural resources, and access to music you’ve forgotten about or maybe never even knew.”
Passionate about traveling and experiencing new cultures, 42-year-old Mustapha from Morocco was hoping for an exciting life when he first arrived in Italy 20 years ago. But not even in his wildest dreams did he expect to be living in an illegal museum.
Mustapha is one of 200 inhabitants of a former salami factory on the outskirts of Rome, which has become an important art space in the Italian capital.
In 2009, an assortment of Italians and migrants from Morocco, Sudan, Eritrea, Peru, and Ukraine, as well as several local Roma families, entered the abandoned meat factory complex in the Tor Sapienza suburb in the eastern part of Rome. The occupiers, most of whom were homeless, and most of whom were unknown to each other before moving into the factory, cleaned the area and turned the auxiliary facilities into homes.
Two years later, Italian artist Giorgio De Finis came across the place, which exuded a cosmopolitan spirit where people from around the world lived together. In collaboration with its residents, De Finis developed several art projects in the “city within the city,” as he calls it, and the cooperation spontaneously grew into what is now a unique museum.
Museo dell’ Altro e dell’ Altrove di Metropoliz (MAAM, or “Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of Metropolis” in English) exhibits murals, paintings and installations of more than 300 artists from around the world. Some of them belong to famous contemporary visual artists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto, but the museum also displays works of young street artists from the neighborhood.
“This is a good place to paint; it is a good opportunity for us. We paint illegally and here we don’t need any permission,” says Roman graffiti artist Warios while decorating one of the walls of the building complex of MAAM with his friend. “We come here, paint, have fun and enjoy interactions with citizens of the museum.”
The museum works on no budget and all artists donate their works to MAAM. “It is a very democratic concept where artists of different age, style, and status work and exhibit their art together,” says De Giorgio.
The site’s previous function of animal slaughterhouse and its transformation from a place of death to a place where many people have started their new lives has inspired much of the artwork. A hall, which was once used for stripping carcasses, is now covered with a giant painting of hanging pigs. Some artists have designed playrooms for the children of MAAM, which are at the same time works of art.
Many of the 80 children who live in MAAM were born there. They and their parents live in improvised houses in parts of the factory and auxiliary buildings. Murals and art installations are all around them.
The squatters also help maintain the museum’s exhibition area and cafeteria. De Finis closely collaborates with them, trying to establish a positive relationship with a rather hostile neighborhood of Tor Sapienza, where protests against immigration took place on several occasions in the last couple of years.
Along with an increasing anti-immigration sentiment, Italy has been criticized by international organizations for its treatment of the Roma population, as governments have forcibly evicted Roma families from informal settlements in cities around the country. Residents of MAAM fear they may be evicted from the building, which is why they open the doors to visitors only on Saturdays.
Italians’ love of art, in De Giorgio’s opinion, might help the museum dwellers' cause.
“If you throw 200 people out, including 80 minors, to sleep out in the streets, it will not be seen as a big problem and you will get two lines in the newspapers saying ‘beautification of the neighborhood has started’,” he says. “But if the owners of the place destroy 500 works of art with a significant commercial value they will be portrayed like ISIS or Talibans who are destroying Buddhas in Afghanistan.”
There have been no attempts at eviction during the last seven years—the period that the factory has served as a museum. But Salini Impregilo, the owner of the building and one of the biggest Italian engineering and construction companies, has filed a lawsuit against the squatters, claiming they are destroying the building. The trial is ongoing.
De Finis hopes the government will recognize how important and symbolic MAAM is. Until then, he says, its art will continue to be “a sort of an art barricade, to defend this place, which is doomed to be torn down by the bulldozer and probably replaced by a shopping mall.”
And its inhabitants will welcome curious visitors and tourists hoping it can help them to keep roofs over their heads. “We work every day to make this place grow,” says Mustapha. “We want people who live here to live well.”
The small, central-east Pennsylvania town of Hanover is, like much of Pennsylvania, very normal on the surface, and incredibly weird just below.
Hanover, and a few counties surrounding it, is the biggest producer of America’s favorite guilty pleasures. It is tempting to be scornful of any place that calls itself the “capital of the world” of any particular product, but it’s hard to argue with Hanover’s claim on this one: more potato chips (and pretzels, candy, ice cream, and chocolate) are produced over these few counties than anywhere else on Earth.
Pennsylvania leads the country in production of all of these products, and each individual snack has its own fairly standard story of why it came to be so successful in the Keystone State. Pretzels? Well, Pennsylvania has the highest percentage of German-Americans in the US, so isn’t it just logical that the pretzel, a German import, would take root there? Chocolate, well, Philadelphia was a key port in the slave trade, taking on sugar from the Caribbean and manufacturing it a bit west of the city during its booming economic decades. Dairy was and remains a huge industry in Pennsylvania, and the summers are brutally hot, so, sure, ice cream.
As for potato chips, the state’s object of obsession: Pennsylvania’s soil, slightly acidic, combines with an intensely humid climate to create ideal growing conditions for potatoes. This, as with the other snacks, is an adequate explanation, but doesn’t really explain the culture of potato chips, the devotion to mom-and-pop brands, the proliferation of choice in deep-fry fat, flavoring, thickness, sugar content, and even color.
There’s something deeper about what’s going on in York County, Pennsylvania, and throughout the whole state. There is, I think, something in the history, geography, and attitude of Pennsylvanians that makes it possible for both a multinational confectionery company and a 140-year-old potato chip company that barely sells outside of its county to coexist in the same space.
Considering potatoes have been eaten for thousands of years, you’d think someone would have come up with the idea of slicing them thin and frying them in fat quite a while ago. And maybe someone did, but documentation of what we now know as potato chips is surprisingly recent; the first documentation is in 1849, at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York. The most common story about the invention of the potato chip: a very annoying customer at Moon’s insisted that his fried potatoes were not crispy enough, over and over, until the chef, one George Crum, got fed up and sliced them ridiculously thin and fried the potatoes until crisp all the way through. Instead of feeling owned by Crum’s prank, the customer loved them, and the potato chip was born.
“That’s been pretty well debunked,” says Dirk Burhans, the author of Crunch!: A History of the Great American Potato Chip. But Saratoga was definitely the birthplace of a new trend; at the time, Saratoga Springs was a favorite vacation spot for the New York elite, and somehow, a thinly sliced, perfectly crisp, fried potato did become wildly trendy there around the mid-1800s. For a while, they were called “Saratoga chips.”
“It’s hard to say how we got to Pennsylvania,” says Burhans. “I’ve thought about this a lot, and I don’t know if there’s any one explanation.” Within just a few decades, potato chips became entrenched in east-central Pennsylvania. Good’s, which is still making its old-fashioned chips, started in 1886, and there are many Pennsylvania chip companies dating from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Today, the potato chip scene in Pennsylvania is not like other places. In most of the country, says Burhans, you go to the supermarket and the chips are mostly Frito-Lay brands—Frito-Lay’s base is in the Southeast—like Lays, Wavy Lays, or Ruffles. Pringles, made by Kellogg’s, are also in the top three sellers. In Pennsylvania, not so much: Burhans did a survey of the state's supermarkets and found that Frito-Lay led in display quantity fewer than one in 10 times.
Instead you’ll find a vast array of what are essentially local micro-chippers. Kay And Ray’s. Martin’s. Bickel’s. Troyer. Middleswarth. Hartley’s. Gibbles. And the big three of Pennsylvania chips, the only ones that went national: Herr’s, Utz, and Wise. All of them can be found in this one little stretch of Pennsylvania.
The little chippers, satisfied with a consistent audience that doesn’t seem at all swayed by “crispy taco flavored” Lays, often make their chips the same way they always have. Many of these companies, including Good’s, Gibbles, and even Utz, fry at least some of their chips in animal lard. “These lard chips, some of them are incredibly good,” gushes Burhans. Lard-fried chips have a distinctly porky flavor, and Burhans told me that attempts by these Pennsylvania chippers to switch to other oils have failed. Pennsylvanians like the lard chips.
Niche techniques survive. Troyer is the only potato chip maker in the country that grows its potatoes on premises. Utz uses un-rinsed potatoes, which keeps extra sugar and starch on the chips; it’s harder to get them crispy, but if done properly they have a more pronounced potato flavor.
Ever get a mysteriously dark chip in your bag? Those aren’t burned; they just come from a potato with more sugar content, which caramelized and darkened in the hot oil. Kay And Ray’s sells bags with exclusively dark potato chips, just for the chip nuts of Pennsylvania who specifically love the slightly bitter, stronger flavor. Those bags are clear, so the purchaser, who is almost invariably a connoisseur of the crispy potato, can see the specially chosen dark chips.
Other snacks are also weirdly centered in Pennsylvania. The state produces 80 percent of the country’s pretzels, and his home to brands like Snyder’s of Hanover and Auntie Anne’s. The hard pretzel was invented in central Pennsylvania. Ice cream has a long history in Pennsylvania, too: Breyer’s, Mister Softee, the Choco Taco, and Bassetts, which bills itself as the oldest ice creamery in the country, are all Pennsylvanian companies.
Hershey is from Pennsylvania. There are other Pennsylvanian chocolate and candy companies, like Gertrude Hawk, Twizzlers (now a part of Hershey), Reese’s (ditto), Clark Bar, Good & Plenty, Mike & Ike, Hot Tamales, Marshmallow Peeps, and the Whitman’s Sampler, but none of that really matters, because Hershey is based in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Even if none of those other companies existed, Pennsylvania would still be a power player in chocolate.
I do not have an answer for why Pennsylvania is so good at potato chips and other snack foods. But I was born and raised in southeastern Pennsylvania, and I have some ideas.
There is a particular brand of provinciality specific to Pennsylvania that could, I think, lead to distinctive foods like lard-fried dark potato chips. The Pennsylvania Dutch territory, which spans the entire potato chip and pretzel-making belt, is famously insular; this is an area that makes stuff for the people who live there. Up until World War II, a variety of German was the dominant language in this community; they still pretty much police and manage themselves. The extent to which Lancaster and York counties are isolated farmers who call each other “thou” is pretty overstated, at least in 2017, but there’s no denying that there has been a conscious effort by this community to stay separate and take care of itself.
Philadelphia was the country’s wealthiest, busiest, and most modern city until the War of 1812, at which point somebody realized that New York, with actual access to an ocean, makes more sense as a port city. But Philadelphia was still the most populous city in the country, at least for a few decades afterwards, and began to invest inwards: factories, manufacturing plants, foundries. Central and eastern Pennsylvania produced essentials like iron and coal, but with an already-made distribution network to the rest of the country, it made sense to manufacture just about anything. “I think historically speaking, we produced sort of weird, indulgent luxury items,” says Jason Sheehan, the food editor at Philadelphia Magazine. Potato chips weren’t indulgent luxury items for long, but as they became cheaper to produce, Pennsylvania started to struggle.
Philadelphia declined into economic disaster following World War II, New York City and Washington, DC—only two or so hours away—became world powers. My theory is that Pennsylvanians, without access to the same level of cultural interchange through trade and also with maybe a desire to preserve traditions, stuck to their guns. And potato chip companies, making something decadent but now very cheap, could still find a market and thus a way to survive even as the bigger manufacturers went out of business.
Pennsylvania was a target for immigrants, a booming manufacturing and trading zone, until suddenly it wasn’t. And in a lot of ways, that’s allowed culture in the state to crystallize and resist change. Pennsylvania certainly isn’t a static place, but the combination of a large population and consistently high percentage of people born in the state who stay there is unusual. According to 2012 Census data, 74 percent of people living in Pennsylvania were born there. Compare that to other high-population states and you’ll see the difference: only 54 percent of Californians, 63 percent of New Yorkers, and 61 percent of Texans were born in the state in which they currently reside.
“I think you’d be able to find that [tendency to prefer small local brands] everywhere, but Philadelphia just has so much,” says Sheehan. Sheehan has worked as a food critic in several other cities, but Philadelphia, he says, has exponentially more niche local foodstuffs than anywhere else he’s lived. Most regions might have a signature dish, a prized local beer, and that’s about it. Eastern Pennsylvania has dozens, and they aren’t niche to Pennsylvanians. Nobody ever mentions that Utz chips or Snyder’s pretzels, or birch beer or Tastykake or Martin’s potato rolls, are a cool local product. They’re what you buy because they’re what’s available.
That availability is also a key element. Chips are often bought at convenience stores, and Pennsylvania’s convenience store culture is unlike anywhere else. Wawa, in eastern Pennsylvania, and Sheetz, in western Pennsylvania, have what Sheehan describes as a “cult” around them; the devotion to these convenience stores is something no 7-Eleven customer in California or Illinois or Florida would ever experience. And both of those companies are boldly Pennsylvanian, stocking primarily local products. Not with a big sign over them that says “Local,” or anything like that. They just sell the stuff they’ve always sold, to the people they’ve always sold them to.
Unilever and Frito-Lay and Mars do not control Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania has, despite having two huge cities, many small cities, and the sixth-highest population of any state in the country, remained mostly for Pennsylvanians. That’s my take, anyway.
Some stand tall and sturdy in their orange armor. Others seem lumpier, like balloons deflating one week after a birthday party. All of them, however, are immense. These giant pumpkins, which are on display at the New York Botanical Garden, belong to growers who compete to create the season’s largest gourds. Some of them weigh over 2,000 pounds; all of them required time, land, and obsessiveness to grow. But a curious fact contributes to these gourd’s gargantuan size: They are the product of very friendly competition. In the charming world of competitive giant pumpkin growing, veterans and newcomers alike help each other get better.
Joe Jutras brought his 2,118-pound green squash to New York after setting a world record for heaviest squash at the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers Pumpkin Weigh-off. The win made Jutras—a retired, high-end cabinet maker—the first grower to win the prestigious trifecta, a sort of Triple Crown feat that includes the heaviest squash, longest long gourd, and heaviest pumpkin titles.
Joel Holland brought his 2,363-pound pumpkin from California, where he won an annual weigh-off at Half Moon Bay. Holland owns Land O’Giants, a company that sells fertilizers, instructional books, and seeds for growing giant pumpkins.
Holland’s willingness to share his hard-earned techniques is indicative of the growing world’s inclusivity. Giant pumpkin growing is rooted in spectacular competitions. Yet growers are far more likely to swap seeds than to, say, sabotage competitors’ crops.
“I think it’s a lot more open than it used to be,” Holland says. “When I first started, several growers were keeping their information secret, not always sharing seeds like they do now.”
On forums such as Bigpumpkins.com, growers debate fertilizers, discuss the exact dates when they hand-pollinate blossoms, and share photo diaries of their preferred growing methods. Jutras says growers around New England buy fertilizer together and hold yearly seed-starting parties where they “shoot the baloney” over a meal. “You don’t normally grow something this big without asking a lot of questions and having a lot of help from people,” he says.
What leads someone to care year-round for a fruit of nearly comical proportions? Both Jutras and Holland’s interest in big pumpkin growing (a sport or hobby, depending who you ask) stemmed from a lifelong enjoyment of gardening. The two men say they grew their first big pumpkins on a lark, and were surprised and encouraged by how easily they grew epic pumpkins. Holland’s first attempt weighed 244 pounds and won the largest pumpkin prize at the Washington State Fair. Jutras planted Atlantic Giant pumpkin seeds and “watered them like anything else.” His best pumpkin swelled to 212 pounds, and he was hooked.
The field has grown considerably since Jutras and Holland’s first experiments. A pumpkin first clocked in at over 500 pounds in 1984. But thanks to better fertilizers, a more talkative and international community of pumpkin growers, and improved seed stocks, one can now feasibly grow a pumpkin weighing over 2,000 pounds and still not be a top-ranked grower.
“That’s why these squash have gotten so big lately; it’s got pumpkin in its genetics,” says Jutras, who won this year’s competition with a seed bearing both the qualities of a pumpkin and squash. “Us pumpkin growers know the genetics of our giant fruit better than our own families.”
This understanding of genetics leads Jutras and Holland to plant a portfolio of plants. “You have to kind of hedge your bets by planting several different seeds and having several different plants,” says Holland. That way, growers can suss out the best seeds, preferably from prize-winners of the past. Holland planted six pumpkin plants this year. While he planted them indoors in April, he didn’t know until August which one would be a standout. “Every little seed is a little different, so it’s a little element of luck involved,” Holland says. “You can extract two seeds out of the same pumpkin and get far different results.”
Similarly, Jutras started with twenty plants in twelve different greenhouse spaces. The experimentation paid off: Jutras’ record-breaking green squash grew about 39 pounds a day at its peak. He credits a series of new soil techniques involving solarization (in which people mulch and cover soil with plastic), “resting” the soil for a year (meaning he grew nothing on it), and putting mustard, a natural fumigant, and chicken manure on the soil.
In the spirit of competitive gourd growing, Jutras plans to share all his secrets. He will speak to local growers at an annual seed-starting party, and in February, he’ll likely regale a crowd of several hundred at the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth’s international conference in Portland, Oregon—an organization likened to the NFL of giant fruit and vegetable growing.
“We’re to the point where we pass out seeds, hand out information, invite everybody to come to our meetings and tell them everything we know,” Jutras says. “If people want to do the work, I hope they do and grow a personal best … We have a saying: ‘You don’t grow these from the couch.’”
Though growers’ main motivation is competitions, a market does exists for giant pumpkins and squash. Experienced growers find clients ranging from Las Vegas’s Bellagio Resort and Casino to nursing homes. At 75 cents to a dollar per pound, the heaviest pumpkins sell for several thousand dollars. Less heavy pumpkins can go for around $500. But the average grower doesn’t seen much of a profit, as costs range from several hundred dollars to $800 per plant, according to Jutras.
“It’s more of a labor of love than of profit,” Holland says. “But the joy of growing a giant pumpkin probably outweighs any monetary gain.”
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