Every year, Mardi Gras revelers line the streets of New Orleans to drink and score some plastic beads. They also line their stomachs with a sugary, colorful cake known as King Cake, which, on occasion, contains a small plastic baby. Meant to symbolize baby Jesus, the King Cake baby bestows good luck upon its recipient, who, according to tradition, must bring the cake to the party the following year.
But another King Cake baby roams New Orleans during Carnival season—one that's much more terrifying and life-size. Once a year, around Mardi Gras, the city's resident basketball team, the Pelicans, brings out the King Cake Baby. Clad in a bib reading "I <3 King Cake" and the world's most dubious diaper, the baby cheers on the team and doles out King Cake to fans. But given his enormous, unblinking eyes and penchant for scaring unsuspecting pedestrians, it's no surprise that the King Cake Baby has been described as "created in a fever-dream."
The baby, which is the invention of one Jonathan Bertuccelli, has been a part of the team's roster since before the Hornets renamed themselves the Pelicans in 2013. It's also been part of a trio, alongside a king and jester, that appears around the Bacchanalian yearly carnival.
Mascots, creepy or not, have been mainstays at sporting events for decades. But the idea is far older, and the practice is rooted in a once-popular, 19th-century French opera, La Mascotte. In it, a woebegone farmer's crops are dying, until a chance visit from a woman named Bettina brings him good luck. The mascot has since evolved to symbolize good fortune and, in many cases, beloved creatures. A San Diego college student—who suited up in a chicken costume in 1974—became so popular that people came to Padres games just to see the chicken perform (granted, the team wasn't very good back then).
But times have changed, and it's safe to say that sports fans don't go to Pelicans games just to experience the King Cake Baby's antics. Most people prefer to stick to cake.
One of the internet era’s unlikely art stars, the Charleston-based Matt Wilson has made dozens of headlines for his intricate metal sculptures. Many share a common, curious motif: They depict animals and birds, all improbably made from cutlery.
Wilson’s artistic journey has been just as unusual as his work. He grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and eventually pursued a drawing and painting degree at Winthrop College. But, feeling burnt out, he left school with one year to go. “I'm not a great student,” he says. So he headed to Charleston, where he did landscaping while beginning to explore metal sculpture as a medium. Looking for work, he applied for a job at Detyens Shipyard, Inc., in hopes that he could also hone the skill of welding for his art.
It turned out to be a serendipitous choice. During the hiring process, he met the owner of the shipyard, Loy Stewart. After hearing about Wilson’s background, Stewart made up a job for him on the spot. Wilson became the shipyard’s artist in residence, drawing ships that came in to be serviced as gifts for their respective captains. After a year of learning to weld and work with metal, he began making miniature ships instead of sketches, occasionally working on other projects, too. Stewart, he says, “wanted to see me become an artist.”
After ten years at the shipyard, Wilson has gotten faster and faster at crafting ships, giving him more time to focus on non-nautical art. Earlier, his mother had given him a bag of old utensils to have around his workshop at the shipyard. After considering a set of spoons, he bent the metal into simple shapes that suggested two birds together. He called the piece “Lovebirds.”
Upcycling—that is, turning discarded or inexpensive materials into something new—became the name of Wilson’s game. Now, in addition to the wonders within his Etsy store, AirtightArtwork (temporarily empty as he restocks), Wilson makes statues on commission. Pictures of his work have traveled across the internet, and have been published in newspapers as far away as Hong Kong. Just last week, he says, he was invited to participate in an upcycled art show in Paris.
The shipyard is a natural and rich source for material (or, as he puts it, “all kinds of cool metal”). When a local industrial sewing facility closed after 100 years in business, Wilson traded a large handmade owl statue for the opportunity to net a century’s worth of tiny metal bobbins and pulleys. These days, Wilson patrols 11 thrift stores around Charleston in search of silverware. He admits he could probably ask store owners to set aside utensils for him, but the chase is too good to give up. Stainless steel often makes an appearance in his work, along with silver-plated metal. Almost everything is usable, he says, with one notable exception: IKEA cutlery, which snaps whenever he tries to work with it.
In Wilson’s sculptures, the bowls of spoons become the curved heads of birds, while handles evolve into jaunty tails. After years of forging birds from spoons, Wilson began mixing it up with other cutlery as well. The shift in cutlery type has yielded other treasures: The tines of forks and steak knives form wing feathers, and slotted serving spoons bloom into rounded chests.
Living near the ocean means Wilson has also dipped into depicting sea life. One commission, from Hawaii, requested that Wilson make a metal whale. To craft the creature, Wilson used metal serving tongs for its fins.
Most of his birds still start with two spoons, which comprise the body. However, Wilson is reluctant to disclose how exactly he bends and welds his creations together. “It’s something I’ve defended for a long time,” he says of his technique, citing rampant copycats. “It took so many years to get where I’m at, from those first simple birds that were just two spoons.” Part of the joy of Wilson’s work, too, stems from sussing out how the disparate elements of each sculpture seamlessly fit together to form these winged creatures.
Viewers may have to also make some guesses as to the breeds of his sculpted creatures. Unless it’s a commission, Wilson usually doesn’t make specific birds. At the craft shows he attends, though, people will come up to him and start categorizing his birds on display. ”They'll just start pointing out, 'Oh, that's a wren, that's a chickadee, this is obviously a blue jay,” he says. “I get a lot of birders telling me I’m doing things just right, though.”
In 1811, a group of English and German scholars happened upon the Aphaia Temple, on the Aegina Island, in Greece. The temple dated from around 500 BC, and despite the centuries that had passed, at the time the site still held the remains of marble sculptures from the temple's east and west pediments. These figures depicted scenes of the Trojan wars, and although weathered and partly broken, they also contained an intriguing detail: visible signs of red and blue paint.
In 2006, the German archaeologists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann examined one of these figures more closely, using raking light and ultra-violet photography. What they found was that the Aphaia's Trojan archer, crouched low, bow taut and barefoot, was actually once painted in an array of colors, from his cap to his feet. Patterns of diamonds, animals, and zigzags adorned his clothes. In his painted hands—believed to be a mixture of rose madder and red ochre—he held a golden bow. (The original sculptures are still on display at the Glyptothek Museum in Munich; as with the Parthenon before it, artifacts from the Aphaia Temple were plundered and sold).
“We’re so used to seeing—because of museums, because of plaster casts, because of the way sculpture has come down to us—[classical sculptures] denuded of any color,” says Renée Dreyfus, Curator of Ancient Art and Interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where she curated the recent exhibition Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World. Variations of this exhibition have been on display at a number of museums since 2003, and all of them are based on vibrant reconstructions of how the ancient world would have actually looked. Now, there is also a book, edited by Dreyfus, Brinkmann and Koch-Brinkmann, of the same name.
Polychromy—painting sculpture or architecture with color—was widespread in antiquity, and the reconstructions presented in the exhibition and book present a very different vision to the white marble statues that silently adorn the classical galleries of museums around the world.
As classical art was rediscovered during the Renaissance, Dreyfus says, it was not always possible to see the traces of paint. In some instances, after being unearthed, sculptures were "scrubbed clean." With the excavation of the neighborhoods around Pompeii, however, more solid examples of polychromy were discovered. “Anything from Pompeii was well preserved because it was covered in ash,” explains Dreyfus.
Further examples followed. In 1805, the British scholar Edward Dodwell and the Italian painter Simone Pomardi traveled to Greece. There, they observed faded color on the Parthenon and the Erechtheion. The paintings that both Dodwell and Pomari created show vestiges of paint on both sculpture and architecture, and “are really wonderful at documenting what the monuments originally looked like. They were seeing it in 1805, and it’s astounding how much more color they had in 1805 than they do today,” says Dreyfus.
At the time of his trip, Dodwell observed:
Besides the custom of painting statues, the ancients had various other methods of enriching their appearance; most of which are irreconcilable with our ideas of beauty or congruity. Some were gilded; many of them had eyes composed of coloured stones, gems or glass.
And yet the idea of all-white marble classical sculpture continued to dominate. This misconception can be traced to the 18th-century art historian Johann Joachim Wincklemann. Although Wincklemann recognized that color was in use in antiquity, he diminished its importance. “What he really waxes poetic about—and people read his work—was the form. And the form seems to have taken on more of an emphasis,” says Dreyfus.
Wincklemann also clearly revered the whiteness of the stone, writing, in 1764: “Colour contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty itself, though it generally enhances beauty and its forms. Since white is the colour that reflects the most rays of light, and thus is most easily perceived, a beautiful body will be all the more beautiful the whiter it is, and nude it will thereby appear larger than it actually is… .” It's notable here, as some critics argue, that Wincklemann not only downplayed the importance of polychromy, but at the same time promoted whiteness as an ideal.
Such was Wincklemann's influence that, despite the evidence, polychromy continued to be debated throughout the 19th century. It wasn't until the 1960s that classical sculptures began to be examined with ultra-violet photography; today, technologies such as “x-ray luminescence, for example, fluorescence, the ultra-violet and infra-red light,” says Dreyfus, can clearly examine the details contained in ancient, faded pigment.
And it's these precise details that inform such dazzling reconstructions. From the Acropolis, the figure of Chios Kore wears a garment of bright blue and red with a yellow cloak, with braided hair painted yellow-ochre. From the same site, a breastplate is reimagined in gold leaf, surrounded by a pattern of leaves. But it was not only marble and stone that was painted.
In 1972, two bronze statues were hauled from the sea off the coast of Calabria, Italy. They revealed extraordinary details: their eyes were cast from stones of different colors; their mouths were moulded from copper; and the teeth of Warrior A were made from silver relief. By analyzing sulphur residue, Brinkmann and his team could hypothesize on the skin and hair of the original bronzes. These figures were also reconstructed. “They used 3D modeling to create the mold and then actually cast them in bronze," says Dreyfus. "On the original they had copper eyelashes, copper lips, copper nipples, the eyes were inlaid with stone ... you could even see the different colors the bronze had been treated in the originals for an older and a younger man."
These reconstructions allow us to glimpse how the streets and buildings of antiquity might have actually looked. And, while Dreyfus notes that classical art and architecture was repainted over time, “we also know their idea of the perfect sculpture is the one that duplicates reality the best," she says. "So if you look around you and the world is in bright living color, statues would also have to be in color.”
Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, was a 16th-century French writer, astrologer, and prophet. In his 1555 book Les Propheties, he laid out predictions for centuries to come: all in rhyme, of course. According to believers, Nostradamus successfully predicted the French revolution, the World Wars, and the election of Donald Trump.
But Nostradamus had another mystical power that’s less well known: the ability to whip up fabulous jellies. In 1552, he published the Traité des fardements et confitures, or the “Treatise on Cosmetics and Jams.” One of them was even an aphrodisiac.
The book didn't come completely out of nowhere. Nostradamus was, among other things, an apothecary. Combining herbalism and pharmacy, he devised and recorded remedies. It’s even said he was kicked out of university when his past career as an apothecary was revealed: Tradesmen were considered sordid, and badmouthing actual doctors didn't help his cause. But Nostradamus bounced back to travel Europe as an in-demand apothecary and famed plague fighter.
Oddly enough, his favorite plague remedies can be found in Traité des fardements et confitures. While it might seem odd to include medicines, sweets, and beauty tips all in the same volume, early recipe books often offered such hodgepodges. Plus, sugar was so rare and valuable that it was often regarded as medicinal, especially, according to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, for "warming [the body], and as an effective laxative." During Nostradamus's time, apothecaries often controlled the sale of sugar. (Unfortunately, neither his sweets nor his herbal remedies could save his wife and two children, who died of plague.)
Some of Nostradamus’s recipes in the Traité, which are collected in The Elixirs of Nostradamus, seem downright poisonous. Beauty treatments call for scary ingredients such as lye (for giving hair blonde highlights) and crushed crystal (for a teeth scrub). To make a beard darker and softer—or to dye whiskers the color of “black amber”—Nostradamus recommends soap mixed with ashes and walnut juice.
The Traité’ also includes some genre-bending (at least by modern standards) recipes, such as a jelly-like love potion that contains the blood of seven male sparrows, cinnamon, and mandrake apples. (Swallows are thought to mate for life, which makes them a potent love symbol.) The syrup that results from boiling and straining the mixture, Nostradamus claims, must be stored in a gold or silver container. A mere spoonful causes a fiery passion that can prove dangerous if unrequited. After all, Nostradamus writes, it was invented by Medea, the famous female villain of legend.
But other recipes are more recognizable and downright edible. In the Traité, sugar is touted for its ability to preserve fresh fruit, and many of the recipes resemble modern jam and jelly techniques. A recipe for morello-cherry jelly involves fruit cooked until soft enough to strain out the pits and skins, then mixed with sugar. If a dab of the jelly on a plate doesn’t slide around, Nostradamus writes, then it’s ready to be stored.
But at the time, sugar was fabulously expensive. This is probably why Nostradamus writes that several of his sweet concoctions are intended only for nobility or kings. Consider his quince jelly recipe. Nostradamus turns up his nose at those silly enough to peel their quinces before cooking them: The rind and peel, he writes, enhances the jelly. After boiling the fruit, straining it, and adding sugar (taking care not to overcook), the final product has the color of a ruby and is “fit to set before a king.”
Nostradamus didn’t just write about jellies. One recipe for preserved pumpkin is touted as having fever-reducing abilities. He also includes a recipe for marzipan, a type of sweet almond candy still popular today. Though he admits that the recipe is simple and common, he defends its inclusion on the basis that ordinary men and women may not know how to make it. Plus, he adds, it’s medicinal and tastes great. It doesn’t take a soothsayer to deduce that the same probably can’t be said of the sparrow blood-soaked love potion.
In 2014, Dachhiri Sherpa placed 86th out of 87 athletes who completed the 15-kilometer cross-country skiing race at the Sochi Winter Olympics. He didn’t go to Russia with any illusions about winning gold, or even placing in the top 50. As Nepal’s only Winter Olympian, Dachhiri just wanted to represent his country. In an interview with NBC Sports, he said “the placing is not important if I can teach young people in Nepal about the Olympic spirit. This spirit is in my heart.”
Sochi was Dachhiri’s third and final Olympics and, for now, the end to Nepal’s participation in the quadrennial event (another skier competed in 2002 as well). The country that holds eight of the 10 tallest mountains in the world doesn’t have anyone competing in PyeongChang. So why, when winter sports such as skiing and snowboarding are developing in places such as Kashmir or Kazakhstan, doesn’t Nepal have a growing winter sports industry?
Craig Calonica first went to Nepal 37 years ago, and to say he isn’t afraid of heights would be an understatement. He has helicopter skied—dropped down onto untouched slopes from a hovering whirlybird—across the Annapurna region in the east and Humla region to the west. In 2001, he helped found Himalayan Heliski Guides with an eye toward building the industry there. Seventeen years later, Calonica cautiously holds on to this hope.
“It’s a little better now, but the government is very stuck on an old, outdated system on how they do business,” he says. Calonica cites inefficiencies in the conservation park permit process, corruption, and expensive maintenance costs as obstacles preventing things from really taking off. Plus helicopter skiing runs at least $2,500 an hour.
Besides the political and economic challenges, Nepal’s main tourist attraction—its mountains—present another hurdle. Interested skiers need to trek at least 12,000 feet up valley passes and hills to reach areas with sufficient snow. And they need to do this in particularly remote areas—even popular trekking regions such as Annapurna are not easy to get to—during a short season, from mid-January and late March. They also must be fearless and experienced, and they need cash—lots of it.
“To really do it [skiing] right you need a chairlift and a gondola, and then a place for the people to stay," says Calonica. "Right now, the only place to do that is Humla.” Snow consistency is key and Humla, Calonica says, can get up to 12 feet a season, which makes it a dependable location. However, the lack of infrastructure and direct flights means it is difficult and expensive to reach.
Calonica sees a challenge as big as a mountain, but he thinks that it can be climbed. “You really need to have a nation that has skiers, you can’t depend on skiers from all over the world going there to fill up ski areas,” he says. There are few Nepali skiers and he estimates that it would take 10 to 15 years to build that community, at least $80 million to develop ski resorts with lifts, and more time for those resorts to break even. “You could probably do it in Nepal, but it’s going to take a lot of effort and money,” he adds. Winter sports are also expensive and equipment-intensive, which puts them out of reach for many Nepalis.
To achieve these results will require an increase in sports education, development, tourism, local business involvement, and a solution to the long-standing issues related to governance and investment. It seems, to Calonica, like a never-ending cycle.
That isn’t stopping Utsav Pathak from trying. In 2016, he founded the Ski and Snowboarding Foundation Nepal (NFSS) to develop a ski culture. He encountered initial skepticism from friends. “Everyone was afraid,” he says. “They told me skiing is a very dangerous game.” But Pathak, a student at the Nepal Academy of Tourism and Hotel Management University, still believes it is possible, and with the help of German skier Jalle Seidenader, he began to organize group events.
In February 2016, NFSS held its first “Ski for Nepal” event on 15-degree slopes in Na village, in Rolwaling, near the Tibetan border. Seidenader taught 45 Nepalis, including two women, with 12 pairs of skis total. It was the first time for many, including Pathak. The next year, Red Bull sponsored NFSS’s training and produced a highlight reel, which garnered some local interest on social media. NFSS also trained Nepali army officials in ski emergency rescue, and on January 25, 2018, held its first ski festival in Kalinchowk, in northeastern Nepal.
As a model, Pathak has studied the success of Nepal’s biggest tourism sector, the trekking industry, as well as its pitfalls. One of the most glaring issues in that business is the lack of women at all levels of the industry (with the exception of a few female-owned trekking companies, such as 3 Sisters). So he is courting women specifically with his skiing and snowboarding effort. “Last February, there is an increasingly number of girls participating,” he says. “In 2016, there was only two girls, but in 2017 there was eight girls.”
Fenchoke Chuttin Sherpa is one of those women who joined Pathak from the beginning. “My family owns a mountaineering business and father summited Everest. From a childhood, I had interest in hilly areas” and traveling, she says. Despite adventure sports being in her blood, her parents were against this new adventure, especially after the deadly earthquake on April 25, 2015. It took some time for her to convince her family, but they saw her passion and now fully support her. Today she helps NFSS with programming, local outreach, and ski rescue awareness.
“Last time when the earthquake hit Himalayan areas, many people died in avalanches and it was very hard to find people, as helicopters are very expensive, and many people lost their lives,” she says. That’s why NFSS’s training with the Nepali army is important. It could help boost rescue efforts in areas that are largely inaccessible. In addition, she wants to make sure that women like her can feel comfortable and empowered in this new arena. With world-renowned Nepali runners such as Mira Rai and mountaineers such as Pasang Lhamu Sherpa Akita, Sherpa sees the possibility for female skiers with Olympic dreams to break through. “We can’t think backward with this kind of sport for women,” she says, “if you push yourself everything is possible.”
Like Calonica, Pathak and Sherpa are fully aware of the challenges they face. But they also see in advantages in Nepal that Sochi, PyeongChang, or the Alps don’t have—such as trekking, unique mountain views, Nepali culture, and, perhaps one day, the bragging rights of shredding on the roof of the world.
Himalayan Ski Trek, another young company offering ski trips for the adventurous, recently held its fifth annual international ski competition in Muktinath, Mustang, and plans to hold more competitions. The company’s founder, Krishna Thapa Magar, is also planning a new indoor ski facility, and is working to incorporate sports education into Nepal’s school curricula. Magar and NFSS look with hope to skiers such as Safal Ram Shrestha, who has qualified for international races in the slalom and giant slalom, as a candidate for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Perhaps Dachhiri Sherpa’s aspirations are inching closer.
But there will need to be changes for that to happen. Sherpa, Nepal’s last Winter Olympian, lives in France full-time and visits Nepal every so often. When asked about his quest to find Nepali winter sports talent, he sighs. The Nepal Olympic Committee asked him several times to be a coach, but he had trouble when he tried to follow-up with them in person. One time he met with them, they brought two professional boxers and told him to coach them. Sherpa was flabbergasted.
“I am hopeless because the people in the Committee have never put their feet in the snow,” he says. Though he’s seen the push from Himalayan Ski Trek, NFSS, and others, he says he’s grown weary of false promises and lack of support. “I had a lot of dreams, but it’s difficult in Nepal.”
If you need post-Valentine's Day inspiration this year, look no further than the helmeted honeyeater. The endangered Australian species—whose population once fell as low as fifty birds—is having a great breeding season this year. As the Australian Associated Press reports, 36 helmeted honeyeater couples—a new record—have welcomed 61 new fledglings into the bird's largest wild population, at Yellingbo Nature Conservation Reserve. And it's all down to a judiciously applied mixture of love and fear.
There are about 170 known species of honeyeater in the world. All are unique to Australia, New Zealand, and the neighboring Pacific islands, and most eat nectar, which they get by sticking their long tongues into flowers or between pieces of bark. The helmeted honeyeater, a subspecies distinguished by its golden cap of feathers, has been the official bird of the Australian state of Victoria since 1971. Fans call them "HeHos."
According to the Victorian Department of Sustainability and the Environment, the HeHo population "declined steadily throughout the 1990s." Things became dire in the early 1980s, when several colonies were lost to a devastating series of brushfires. In 1989, the state began a concerted recovery effort. Conservationists now monitor a few wild populations, including the one at Yellingbo.
Those conservationists enhance the bird's wild numbers with captive-bred individuals born and raised in two sanctuaries, including Taronga Zoo in Sydney and Healesville Sanctuary, which is run by Zoos Victoria. This past fall, four birds raised at Healesville were added to the Yellingbo population, so that they could join the love-in.
Affection has its limits, though. Like other animals raised in captivity, honeyeaters born in the sanctuaries also need to learn when to fear, or they won't survive the big world outside their enclosures. As the AAP puts it, "When a helmeted honeyeater enters the wild, it not only fails to evade its main predators, but often flies directly towards them, resulting in its untimely death."
To avoid this, the Healesville Sanctuary puts its birds through what they call a "stranger danger program" by staging scary mock goshawk attacks. Employees put a goshawk in an enclosure near the honeyeaters, and encourage it to fly back and forth. At the same time, they drop a shade cloth over the honeyeater's enclosure. The noise and darkness scares the birds into hiding, and they eventually learn to associate this fear with the goshawk.
This season's Yellingbo fledgling numbers are "fantastic news for the recovery program," government ornithologist Bruce Quin told the AAP. "It means the birds that are reaching breeding age are replacing lost birds or, in some cases, finding their own breeding sites."
Their ability to spurn goshawks has helped as well. Since the anti-predator training started, the survival rate of rereleased birds has gone from about 45 percent to above 90 percent. To make it in this world, you have to know when to love and when to protect yourself.
We heard about dried bubblegum, boogers, lint, tiny book scorpions, dead head lice, and other unsavory discoveries. Six different correspondents wrote to us with stories about finding strips of fried bacon. (Can someone please enlighten us as to why anyone would use bacon as a bookmark?) Many people use books as hiding places, and the most common find was money, from a few dollars to thousands. Second to money was reports of carefully pressed marijuana leaves (and one sheet of LSD).
People also leave things in books that they want to keep safe, or items that have a particular resonance with the volume itself. One reader found a original news clipping about the sinking of the Titanic in a book about the ship and its survivors. Another found a suicide note in a book about suicide. We heard stories of forgotten love letters, family photos, medical scans, and notes from famous figures—all tucked between pages and then forgotten.
Here are some of our favorites.
Family photos
My favorite possession: Complete Works of Shakespeare, complete with beach photos…. Throughout this book the previous owner has taped old photos, seemingly unrelated to Shakespeare. Also, a newspaper clipping about a change in leadership at an insurance agency in Keyser, West Virginia. —May Helena Plumb, Austin, Texas
Not just money ... really old money
An old family Bible contained an envelope with a note on the outside saying, "Grandfather’s revolutionary war pay." Inside was a colonial currency bill and a signed receipt for its payment for service in the Connecticut 2nd Continental line. —W. Kevin Dougherty, Brackney, Pennsylvania
Incredible coincidences
Unbelievable but true. I bought a second-hand book in Rathmines, Dublin, in 1982. There was an old-looking negative.... I was in a camera club, so I brought it in and developed it. It was a photo of me at three years old outside my first home, the number on the door visible. Showed it to my mother and she was amazed as she had never seen the photo....
I still have the book, Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen. I often wondered if it had been my godmother’s book. She originally lived two doors up and was an avid reader. There's no name or inscription on the book, but it's an explanation and she always gave her old books to charity. Although it was 15 years after the photo was taken, Dublin was smaller then. Still a bit weird but nice. —Anna McManus, Ireland
Sketchy notes
I've found many things in old books, some interesting, some just okay.... I found a drawing of what looks like a woman smoking. It's small and made with a pencil and ballpoint pen. On the back, in Portuguese, you can read "From Guida, To Rosário, From the notorious day." No dates, nothing else is given.…
Another interesting thing was a photograph of a big dog lying down, looking kinda sad. On the back you can read, "Born on February 17th, 1971,” also in Portuguese, in the handwriting of a child.... And the last one was an unrequited love poem, handwritten, by a woman. I think she meant to give it to her lover, but could never get the courage to do so. —Thiago Amaral, São Paulo, Brazil
Food for thought
I used to work in a bookstore, so I have perhaps found more surprises inside of books than the average bear. Sometimes these surprises were pleasant notes, sometimes they were boogers (okay, most of the time it was boogers), but one time I found an entire apple tart inside of a book about computer programming. —Grace, California
Forgotten tickets
A 1967 Red Sox World Series Ticket , unused in mint condition. —Robert Bolduc, Boston, Massachusetts
Lost letters
I work in an antique bookstore, so I have found many, many pressed flowers, bizarre receipts, photographs, notes, etc., tucked into books. But I think my favorite is a letter that I found tucked into a French book about Byron published in 1929. The letter, from "Savvy," is on the Associated Press letterhead, dated March 14, and is so full of longing. —Moira Horowitz, Baltimore, Maryland
Genetic material
A pretty large lock of brown hair, still tied in a decaying bow, fell out of the pages of a turn-of-the-century photo album onto me in an antique store. GROSS. —Jody Amable, San Jose, California
Body parts
While I didn’t find it myself, a finger was found in a book in the library where I worked in Italy. This is the same library where Sharon Tate worked before moving to the United States and becoming an actress. —Amy Robbins-Tjaden
News clippings
A circular from 1890 about how the local sheriff (of my hometown) shouldn't be blamed for the escape of a murderer from the jail. —Edwin Douglass, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Hidden truths
I love old books. Deeply, passionately. I work in a bookstore so I spend my days with books. My favorite find was a letter. I don't remember in which book, possibly a Hungarian classic novel. It was a short letter, never sent. A teenager wrote it to their parents. From a summer camp. Nice story, isn't it? Absolutely not.
It happened during communism, when teenagers were forced to visit summer camps to learn the rules of dictatorship.... The children had to write letters to home. About how fantastic is the camp, how generous and perfect is the political system. Every letter was checked; they had to say and write what they were told. And this was another kind of letter. The writer says she wants to go home, because the whole camp is like Hell.... I loved this letter because it was a piece of our past. Not just a simple letter, the truth about that great FAIL. —Lili Palatinus, Budapest, Hungary
Lost pets
I was about eight years old and had a small goldfish bowl with one goldfish in it on top of a small bookcase in my room. One day he just disappeared and we couldn't figure out where he went, until the day I was reading one of those books and found a petrified goldfish between the pages. —Rebecca MacLeod
Ham
In September 2005, I visited Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, and bought a used trade paperback copy of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Inside I found a credit card receipt for the book, which had been purchased on July 10, 2004, at LAX airport. I also found a boarding pass for an American Airlines flight on July 21, 2004, from New York's JFK airport to LAX, issued to the same person whose name was on the book receipt. But none of that was the really interesting part.
Also in the book were a Russian 50 ruble note (worth about 87 cents today) and small scrap of paper bearing the words "I LIKE HAM!" printed in black Sharpie. The other side of the paper bore a faint repeating pattern of a yellow Chihuahua dog. Was it the dog who liked ham? Did the owner of the book buy ham in Russia and get 50 rubles in change? And, most important, did he like the book? —Michael Rene Zuzel, Talent, Oregon
Creepy messages
In an old copy of The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, I found an old Post-it note that read, "With thoughts such as these, he slowly watched the water turn to wine." It was about halfway through, and I found it when I was up late reading. Creepy! —Casey Abribat, New York, New York
Secret devices
A World War II hidden radio —Ron G. Woering
Historical documents
I was looking up something in the narrative of the voyage of HMS Adventure, a forerunner of Darwin's Beagle, in the special collections room of my university library when something fell out. It turned out to be a folded "stampless cover" (a folded letter) written and signed by Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle, simply confirming his position on such-and-such a date and sent to his employer, a shipping company. (This was, of course, long before the telegraph or other rapid means of communication!) —Art Shapiro, Davis, California
Mysterious photos
Two vintage photographs of rather creepy-looking circus clowns. One with a child at his feet. The photographs were in an old, well-used volume of short stories that I bought at a huge outdoor book sale at a large church in Columbus, Georgia. Neither photo, obviously ancient, was dated, but the picture of the “coy” clown with his finger to his mouth had the name “Pirrus,” or “Pirris,” scrawled on the back in pencil. — J.L. Strickland, Valley, Alabama
Important research notes
A slip of paper in an old Tom Clancy book listing every page where a swear word could be found. —John May, Dallas, Texas
Plans
Found in an old hardcover book about the siege of Fort Sumter, on the discount rack outside of Second Story Books in Dupont Circle. A faded tan piece of construction paper, torn along the bottom edge, as if hastily ripped out of a notebook. Yet the text is carefully typed and dripping with the hope and excitement you'd expect from the title at the top: "MY TRIP AROUND THE WORLD." It spans from 1970 to 1982, and has our unknown adventurer deep-sea fishing, hunting tigers, sailing distant seas, touring Europe and Asia, and ultimately arriving in San Francisco, where the plan is to, "Sell boat buy land and start cattle ranch." —Bruce Falconer, Washington, D.C.
Notes from the rich and famous
A letter written in hand by King Edward VII on Buckingham Palace stationery. —Don Love, Toronto, Canada
Extra-appropriate four-leaf clover
Found a four-leaf clover pressed in a book of Robert Pinsky's poems. The book is called The Figured Wheel. —Gleb Boundin, Brooklyn, New York
The white-letter hairstreak, a brown butterfly with a distinctive white "W" marking on the underside of its hindwings, was last seen alive in Scotland in 1884—until last summer, when Iain Cowe from the nonprofit Butterfly Conservation spotted an adult flitting around wych elms near Lennel, in the southeastern part of the country. This year brought more evidence—in the form of minuscule eggs—that the white-letter hairstreak is back in Scotland for good.
“Last year was an impossible find, but this year’s egg discovery is beyond anything we thought possible," Cowe said in a statement. The eggs, which are smaller than a grain of salt, were spotted by volunteers Ken Haydock and Jill Mills under the branch of an elm tree. Among them was an old, hatched shell, suggesting that the butterfly has bred in the area since at least 2016.
“It was a lovely sunny morning and we were searching the elm trees by the River Tweed at Lennel when Jill called me over," Haydock said. "I could see by the look on her face that she had found something." The find is pretty remarkable—a grain of salt in a forest is harder to spot than a needle in a haystack, even if you know where to look. And the insect's eggs turn brown during winter, helping them blend in.
White-letter hairstreaks were once a common sight across England and Wales but the population declined by 72 percent when Dutch elm disease wiped out millions of their favorite trees in the 1970s. Over the past 10 years volunteers from Butterfly Conservation have been observing a gradual recovery and spread northward—perhaps a result of warming climate. The Scottish sighting is the northernmost reported by the team so far.
“We will need to have a few more years of confirmed sightings before we can officially class this butterfly as a resident species in Scotland,” said Paul Kirkland, director of Butterfly Conservation, in the statement. “ If this happens, it would take the total number of butterflies found in Scotland to 34, which really would be something to celebrate."
In Canada, a rare wind is blowing up cylindrical “snow rollers”—a phenomenon that occurs only when wind, snow, and moisture synchronize in a rare confluence of conditions.
When the wind is strong—but not too strong—and the snow is light—but not too light—and sticky, a steady wind can roll snow into neat, spiral cylinders. They dot a field of snow like icy bales of hay. They start small but can grow around two feet in diameter.
In the past few years, snow rollers have appeared in Ohio,Idaho, and Scotland. They’re most likely to be found in place with a slope, which can help the snow roll.
Snow rollers can be kind of cute as they skate across a field—but just imagine if you didn't know anything about these and came across a field of mysterious cylinders. Aliens? Nope, just nature.
If you happen to spot a small hole in the bottom of a fence or brick wall in Barnes, a neighborhood in South West London, there’s a good chance that you’ve stumbled upon a hedgehog crossing, and that Michel Birkenwald is responsible for it.
A jeweller by trade, Birkenwald has become one of London’s most enthusiastic engineers of infrastructure for animals. He founded and self-financed Barnes Hedgehogs around four years ago. The group drills the holes for free and generally advocates for the welfare of wild hedgehogs. Once Birkenwald has crafted a passage, he usually affixes a sign reading “Hedgehog Highway,” with the creature’s spiky silhouette.
Even with a diamond drill tip, the work can be slow going. Victorian bricks are tough, and it can take upwards of an hour to carve a shape roughly the size of a CD—the smallest circumference that can comfortably accommodate the girth of “a porky hedgehog,” says Emily Wilson, of another advocacy group, Hedgehog Streets.
Whatever Birkenwald lacks in academic credentials—he doesn’t have much background in environmental science or zoology—he makes up for in earnestness. “I am just an average guy who decided to help one of our most adorable mammals,” he says.
Britain’s hedgehogs, for all their iconic cuteness, have fallen on prickly times. Their predilection for green spaces is written into their name—porcine snout and penchant for hedgerows. The trouble is that those rows are fewer and farther between than they once were, for a variety of reasons, and resident hedgehog populations—in the countryside and in their urban habitat—have suffered as a result.
It’s difficult to be precise about the decline, because hedgehogs throw up numerous obstacles to a reliable census. They’re nocturnal and they bed down in compost, leaves, and other nooks and crannies. They’re more often reported as roadkill than as living creatures. But when Hedgehog Street compiled data on hedgehogs from three surveys of garden sightings and road fatalities conducted by the British Trust for Ornithology and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, patterns emerged. (Hedgehog Street also launched its own tracking tool, a crowdsourced map that updates in real time.)
Part of the problem is that farmers don’t much care for the scruffy environs that hedgehogs thrive in. By yanking out hedges, clearing scrub, and tidying up piles of dead wood, Wilson says—all part of what she describes as a yield-maximizing, profit-driven quest for “agricultural intensification”—they’ve made the land less welcoming to the erinaceids.
A report released this month has some cheerier news for urban hedgehogs, though. Their rate of decline appears to be slowing. “It’s implying that hedgehogs are basically moving into our towns and cities,” Wilson says. “They’re quite sturdy, and able to live alongside us quite well, as long as we make space for them and link green spaces together.”
But we don’t make it easy on them. The infrastructure built up and laid down to make our lives easier often has the opposite effect for those who slither, flutter, or scuttle. Researchers have found that urban animals often behave differently than their more rural counterparts, and human activity shrinks animals’ ranges—they move less when we’re around. Cities can resemble oceans of concrete speckled with glass islands and mere flecks of green. “How does an animal get from one [green space] to the next unless it’s a bird that can fly?” Wilson asks.
Hedgehogs need help from their human neighbors, Wilson says. Some 47,000 people have signed up to be “hedgehog champions” with Hedgehog Street, and take steps such as setting out piles of logs or leaves and letting some corners become overgrown. The group also advocates putting out little buffets of meaty dog or cat food, cat biscuits, and a shallow dish of water—but not milk. (Hedgehogs are omnivorous, but lactose intolerant.)
In addition to the holes and tunnels that Birkenwald drills in fences and walls, Hedgehog Streets is in talks with fencing companies and developers to manufacture and install dividers with predrilled holes. Though Wilson says some people worry about their dogs wriggling through—or about the snacks attracting vermin—getting people invested in helping hedgehogs isn’t an especially tough sell. “Everyone seems to love hedgehogs,” she adds. “It’s a really, really easy ask.” In 2013, the hedgehog bested badgers (their primary predators!) and oaks to scurry away with 42 percent of the vote and the top place in a BBC poll to crown a national species. “It is a quintessentially British creature," Ann Widdecombe, a former MP and a patron of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, told The Guardian.
Tunnels add to hedgehog-friendly habitats by reconnecting a network of green spaces—parks, gardens, yards—that had been fractured. The scaled-down crossings provide safe passage past obstacles—similar to how how dozens of overpasses and tunnels have been built to give grizzlies, wolves, coyotes, and other large mammals a safe way across the four lanes of the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park. Only smaller, and British.
There’s still a lot to learn about how animals use these types of structures, and how much they help. In Banff, researchers have spent decades trying to compile credible data, including by scrutinizing surveillance footage and analyzing DNA from bears on either side of the highway. In London, researchers have been setting up cameras in local parks, says Chris Carbone, a senior research fellow in biodiversity and macroecology at the Zoological Society of London. This work is still in the early stages. “We hope to get an understanding of the population sizes of hedgehogs in the main London strongholds,” Carbone says, “but first we need to determine where these are.” Researchers are clued in to hot spots by “word of mouth and local experts like Michel [Birkenwald],” Carbone says.
Next, researchers will investigate whether other animal infrastructure projects, such as amphibian tunnels or bridges for dormice, have appeal across species. They’ll also document the features of roads that see the highest number of animal collisions, and then explore traffic-calming measures such as better signage and lower speed limits. Researchers at the University of Reading are currently analyzing thousands of data points gathered from a Hedgehog Street census that tried to gauge whether the creatures were nesting in homemade or store-bought homes, called “hibernacula,” that people had set out for them.
Meanwhile, Wilson is sensitive to the need to stabilize or boost hedgehog populations without making them totally dependent on humans. Hedgehogs are a “fanatically followed” lot, Wilson says: It’s not entirely uncommon for well-intentioned people to nurse them in rabbit hutches, or want to put a warm, dry, roof over their heads. Have a look at those sparkling eyes and cute little snout, and it’s not hard to understand why. “Some people are dedicated to the bone,” Wilson says, and those caregivers sometimes worry that “they couldn’t maybe even go on holiday without the risk of their hedgehog starving to death in the garden.” Wilson says it’s important to remind enthusiasts that hedgehogs are still capable wild animals, and any efforts to help them should be supplementary—not the animal’s main source of sustenance. Oh, and be sure to close up the backyard snack bar during hibernation season.
In any urban environment, boundaries between the built and natural worlds are smudged, if not entirely collapsed. Our ecosystems overlap in ways we don’t yet totally understand. To hear Wilson and Birkenwald tell it, at least, the best path forward is to tunnel through.
Just because you can't make it to Pyeongchang for the Olympics doesn't mean you can't enjoy the food. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and local specialty markets, people cheering their countrymen on from outside Korea can toast a figure skater landing a triple axel with a 2,000-year-old rice wine or fortify themselves for a long night of curling with a war-era stew—all without getting on a plane.
To make this traditional Korean appetizer and side dish, chefs soak peeled acorns in water for up to a week, then grind them into a powder that they cook with water and sugar. The end result is dotorimuk, a light brown jelly with a silky texture and mild, savory flavor when eaten plain. Chefs can easily customize dotorimuk to individual meals, but the most traditional seasonings are soy sauce, sesame seeds, pickled cabbage, red chili, and green onion. Outside of the lengthy soaking time, the dish is relatively simple to make and goes with just about anything.
On the streets of Seoul, you might find vendors sizzling up little nuggets that look like coffee beans but smell like seafood. These are actually crunchy, rich silkworm pupae known as beondegi, and you can order them to enjoy at home. Of course, the packaged version won't be as fresh as it would be streetside, but you can customize the bugs however you like. Common seasonings include salt or even sugar if you prefer your silkworms sweet.
Once the drink of choice among farmers on their breaks, this light rice wine has recently become something of a hit trend in cities both in Korea and abroad. It's about as light as a beer (6 to 8 percent alcohol), with a slight lingering fizz from fermentation. Don't let the milky color fool you: Makgeolli has a sweet tang, making it the perfect pairing for spicy dishes.
Where to get it: You can find bottled makgeolli in Korean stores and markets around the world. Some Korean restaurants, especially in New York and Seattle, also serve fresh versions. And if you're up for it, you can order a DIY brewing kit online.
It may be named for a tragic biblical figure, but this tea is a warm, nutty delight. The sweet beverage is a blend of the Job's tears grain, corn, walnuts, almonds, black beans, black sesame, brown rice, and lots of sugar. Some fans say that when you mix it with hot water, the result is a creamy, crunchy mix that tastes like a peanut-dipped ice cream cone. Thanks to the plethora of vending machines around Korean cities, the drink is a preferred pick-me-up among workers and students. Those outside Seoul can simply buy the powder online and mix their own. A warm cup might be the perfect chaser of comforting sweetness after watching your favorite Olympic skier have his dreams dashed on the slopes.
Make like an athlete and load up on carbs and protein with this savory stew of SPAM, hot dogs, noodles, and beans. Budaejjigae, or "army base stew," is just that: During wartime food shortages, some Koreans had to purchase or scavenge army leftovers. The options weren't always stellar (sometimes the scraps contained cigarette butts), but when combined with local ingredients such as kimchi, garlic, vegetables, and gochujang, the processed meat made for a hearty, satisfying stew. So satisfying, in fact, that a black market for American processed meats emerged after the Korean government banned importing them. Thankfully, the ban was lifted, and budae jjigae has become a popular hot pot option at Korean restaurants, especially among college students.
Where to get it: Outside Korea, you likely won't be able to simply order Army Base Stew online. But budae jidgae is easy to make, and most of the ingredients are available at any grocery store. Korean seasonings such as gochujang are available online, as are many great recipes, such as this one.
Most nights, the streetlights that illuminate Ashland, Massachusetts, are a uniform white. They shine down on typical small-town things: families getting dinner on Main Street, kids bicycling home from each other's houses.
But for a month in the summer of 2016, nighttime Ashland looked a little different. The town hall and its parking lot were tinted in green. The area around the Historical Society was bathed in purple. Around twilight, a group of people wearing all white might have walked through, clutching blank maps and handfuls of crayons and following a man with a determined expression.
Their leader, local artist Dan Borelli, was born in Ashland in 1973. For the past eight years, he's been using art to draw attention to one of his hometown's hidden histories: the legacy of Nyanza Color & Chemical Co., a dye factory that once stood in the center of Ashland and dumped over 45,000 tons of chemical sludge into its land, air, and water.
Besides turning the streetlights rainbow, Borelli—who lost several childhood friends to a cancer cluster eventually connected with the toxic waste—has put together an exhibition about the plant, and built a stained-glass pavilion, both located within and aimed at the immediate community. He calls his work The Ashland-Nyanza Project.
When you grow up with a contaminated site in the background of your life, "you can't shake it as you grow," Borelli explains. "It shapes you." He can't shape it back: The area around the former factory is now a Superfund site, permanently capped by the government to prevent more toxins from escaping. But at least, he figures, he can color it.
The first dye plant moved to the center of Ashland in 1917. Although the building changed hands a number of times, it produced textile dyes straight through until 1978, when its last occupant, Nyanza, went out of business. Although Borelli doesn't have firsthand memories of the plant—he was five years old when it closed—local lore and his own research have painted a picture for him, full of color bleeding into places it didn't belong.
A pink fog might roll over the town, and at least once, it snowed blue. Workers would come home from the plant and literally sweat out the day's pigments. Young people had colorful encounters on running trails, or at the local T-ball field, which was right across the train tracks from the factory. "Kids just a few years older than me played on that field," Borelli says. "You'd hit a foul ball and you'd go to get it and you'd pull it out of a puddle and it was orange."
Those hues hid dozens of different harmful chemicals. In 1971, authorities found mercury in the nearby Sudbury river, and the state ordered Nyanza to stop illegally discharging waste. By the time Borelli was old enough to chase down foul balls, the town had moved the T-ball field. The EPA declared the former plant a Superfund site in 1982, one of the first in the country. Officials began the long process of containing the toxins, sloughing the contaminated sludge into a set area, and capping it with clay, plastic, and a top layer of grass and dirt. It now looks like an ordinary field.
But by the time the cap was completed in the early 1990s, some of the wastes' effects had already soaked in. When Borelli was in his late teens and early 20s, at least five of his peers developed rare forms of cancer. One of them, Kevin Kane, spent the last years of his life talking to his neighbors and to public health officials, trying to figure out whether these concurrent diagnoses were truly a coincidence.
Kane died in 1998. In 2006, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health completed a study that bore out his suspicions. Although an earlier report had found no link between cancers reported in Ashland and the former site, this one concluded that "the relative risk of developing cancer was greater for study participants with some types of reported exposures in areas of the Nyanza Chemical Waste Dump." In other words, children who had splashed in those multicolored puddles were over twice as likely to get sick.
Before he started this project, Borelli says, he'd always thought of color the way most artists do: as a tool for expression, and a fruitful site of philosophical inquiry. He hadn't really thought about its role in his town's history until about 2010, when he ran across information about Nyanza while doing research for his thesis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. "I had never conceived of color as having a negative environmental impact," he says. As he puts it in a talk he gives about this project, “I could no longer separate phenomenology from ecology, [or] color from carcinogen."
He changed up his research, and decided to focus on Ashland. If he hadn't known about this, he thought, how many others didn't? After five years of digging through town archives, interviewing community members, and raising grant money, Borelli began rolling out his project in the fall of 2015. The first place he chose was the Ashland Town Library, which, thanks to the work of local activists during the 1980s, was already home to a cache of official documents detailing the plant's history, diagnosis, and remediation. (The EPA now creates these "field repositories" at most Superfund sites.)
Borelli turned the library into a multimedia exhibit. Just above the shelves of EPA documents, a monitor screened video interviews with community members and government scientists. (In one, a member of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health describes interviewees who told her that as children, they used to lick the colorful icicles that hung off the factory building "like popsicles.") Display cases inside the library held Nyanza memorabilia: advertisements; yarn samples; colorful swatches of cloth. Borelli installed a 3D-printed model of the Sudbury River, and arranged it so the water, which was made of mirrored glass, reflected the shifting colors of the two hand-dyed tapestries hung nearby.
As part of the exhibit, Borelli and the project's intern, Ming Tu, also made an interactive map of the contaminated plume of groundwater that still sits beneath the town. Using data from 20 years of EPA reports, they figured out where certain chemicals had been found offsite even after the cap was complete. Just last year, the town began looking at legislation that would mandate the consideration of the plume in zoning decisions. Before that, Borelli says, barely anyone even knew about it. “There are predominantly renters in the plume, and it had never been communicated [to them],” he says. With the map, you can click it into visibility: choose a particular chemical, and a cloud of color suddenly appears, obscuring the area where that chemical has been found.
The digital map was effective. After the exhibition was removed at the end of 2015, it stayed in place, and it is now a permanent part of the library. But Borelli still found it a bit too abstract. If you can fit something on a screen, he says, you don't always understand its true size. "Most people can't read scale," he says. He started thinking about the cartographic practice of ground-truthing: after you make a bird's-eye view of someplace, you have to walk it, using your body to verify what your mind has measured.
And so in June of 2016, Borelli teamed up with Ashland's Department of Public Works and put colored gels on the town's streetlights. The colors matched the collective concentration of chemicals in the groundwater plume, from red—denoting a high amount—to purple, for a low one. The gels stayed up for about a month, during which Borelli led twilight mapmaking tours for interested parties, starting in the green-tinted parking lot of the town hall. "I would give them a black and white map of Ashland, and then a box of eight different Crayola crayons," he says. "And I'd say, alright, let's go for a walk."
He finally got the visceral reactions he had expected. "I don't think people fully understood the depth and breadth of the contaminated groundwater plume until they walked it under the lights," he says. "When they did that, they went, 'Oh, boy.'" He says he even surprised himself, as well as fellow members of an activist group, the Ashland Citizens Action Committee (ACAC), that had formed a few months earlier in response to a proposed housing development near the Nyanza site. ACAC now incorporates Borelli's materials into their messaging.
Borelli had used color to provoke understanding, curiosity, anger, and action. But he wanted to do something else with it, too. That same summer, he began working on the most recent piece of the project: a memorial space, which he calls the Ashland Healing Garden, located on town land just south of the Superfund site.
The garden's centerpiece is a stained-glass pavilion. It has dozens of panes, tiled in the shape of an umbrella and arranged in rainbow order, like a color wheel. If someone is standing nearby when the sun hits the plexiglass, they're immediately spangled by red, orange, blue, or purple. But they don't have to worry about these strange hues, or wash them off. As Borelli says, the pavilion was designed to be a place where "people could go and experience color, but in a healing way."
The garden has been the most successful communal effort yet. While Borelli was researching the land it stands on, he found out that it used to belong to the Nipmuc people. When it came time to dedicate the pavilion late last summer, he invited a Nipmuc healer to perform a ceremony, alongside Kevin Kane's mother. Families take their kids to hang out under the pavilion. All of the construction is being done by students from the nearby New England Laborers Training Academy, who are clearing land and building paths there as part of their safety training. "They're taking it to a level of completion that's far beyond what I originally envisioned," says Borelli.
But it has also been a flashpoint for pushback. Late last summer, vandals broke every pane of glass in the pavilion. Some residents have accused Borelli of trying to drive property prices down. Borelli is distressed by these reactions, which he sees as an unwillingness to learn about or from the past. "Since when did not knowing become the best option?" he says. "When I'm feeling like a real smartass, I'll say, 'You can take the ostrich approach in life, but you definitely shouldn't bury your head in the sand in Ashland.'"
Last summer, Borelli thought the project was coming to a close. But the vandalism, combined with the current EPA's deregulation-oriented strategy, "has reinvigorated me," he says. He's now raising funds to rebuild the pavilion, and he may even try to get the Nyanza site designated as a historic landmark. He thinks of it as a ruin, he says. "In much the same way that the Forum signifies the failure of the Roman Empire, this landform… signifies a ruin of a particular political moment, when industry was unregulated." If the poison might always be there, at least something else will be, too.
Back in the Victorian era, protecting one's mustache was an important concern for high society tea drinkers, which led to the invention of the “mustache cup.” These were tea cups or mugs with a thin strip of ceramic just inside the rim that acted as a guard for the drinker’s facial hair.
Mustache cups are not the hot trend they may once have been, but facial hair is as popular as ever. Enter the Whisker Dam. Place one on the rim of nearly any standard glass or mug, and suddenly you've got your very own Victorian mustache cup. This particular brand of mustache guard also features a rugged, heritage look that pairs well with a cup of coffee or a pint of beer.
Andy Holbrook first laid eyes on the fatberg in October 2017, the day before his birthday. A collections care manager with nearly two decades of experience under his belt, he’d been dispatched by his colleagues at the Museum of London to pay a visit to “a slightly baffled but quite amused” team at Thames Water, the local sewage utility, to see about harvesting a slice of the congealed behemoth to display at the museum. “It felt like the most bizarre birthday present ever,” Holbrook says.
This fatberg, allegedly the largest ever hauled from any sewer, threw a famously putrid roadblock in London’s subterranean infrastructure in 2017. Fatbergs are often comprised of a slurry of used napkins, diapers, and other squishy detritus. This particular gloopy mess of discarded oils, fats, and more grew to more than 130 tons, and sprawled 250 meters long. Then, worse yet, it began to saponify—think of plaque hardening along an artery, leaving scant space for the blood to flow. The mass had no trouble clogging the centuries-old pipes under Whitechapel Road.
When the museum’s staff started chewing on the idea of putting a chunk of it on display, Holbrook says, some detractors sniffed at the premise—it had the whiff of a gimmick. But as part of the institution’s City Now City Future programming, which considers the promises and perils of urban life, Holbrook finds that it raises provocative and complex questions about what it takes to keep a metropolis churning, as well as the often-icky logistical challenges that arise when so many people share a space.
Beginning this month, pieces of the fatberg are on display at the museum in a series of nestled vitrines. Many museums employ these boxes to protect fragile objects from visitors, who meddle, accidentally or otherwise, in all sorts of ways—an errant elbow, an uncapped pen, and all hell breaks loose. The fatberg inverts that logic. It’s a slab of an object that spent its entire life marinating in sewer juices, and the hazardous gases that attend them: The boxes are keeping us safe from it.
Atlas Obscura chatted with Holbrook about dangerous collections, trial-and-error, and why the fat-striped lump looks surprisingly celestial.
How did you determine it was safe to interact with the fatberg?
We agreed that we would monitor it at the sewage works. We still had to go through quite a lot of processes to see if this was something we could safely collect, let alone safely display. We wanted to see, if we put it into a showcase in the public gallery for six months, how it was going to behave. Principally, was it going to offgas, let off all sorts of nasty substances that might cause the case to explode, or be a health risk or a fire hazard?
[The sewage facility was] looking at things like methane concentrations, hydrogen sulfide concentrations, carbon monoxide concentrations. They advised us that there basically wasn't an issue with any offgassing.
You decided to dry it out. Why go that route?
We also looked at possibly freezing or freeze-drying, as well, which we do all the time for a lot of the archaeological materials—things like wood, leather, any organic materials that we find in a wet environment, we freeze-dry. To be honest, we suspected that we would just contaminate all of our equipment. We have a big vacuum chamber that sucks all of the moisture out. We just didn't think we could ever clean it after we'd done it.
We didn't know how the fatberg samples would respond—whether they would crumble or fall to bits. It was a bit of a calculated risk. We didn't have a map for where we were going with this. We just slowly air-dried it out over two-and-a-half months, and found that it retained its shape, it retained its integrity. It did change color: It was a much browner color originally, and it changed to a bony, ivory color. And it did shrink.
Many conservators focus on halting decay, or even restoring things to a more-pristine condition. What was your goal?
Our philosophy was, let's try and make it safe and usable for the lifetime of this exhibition, which runs through until later in the year. It was more about how you manage the environment safely, reduce the risk for pests, manage the hazards.
Since the fatberg went on view, a fly has hatched and started zipping around in the case. When the object in the case is literally garbage, is that a big deal?
We live in this world where everything on display has to be slightly clinical, and clean and tidy, and dust-free. Certainly, within conservation, we don't like insects being in there with objects, as a rule. Part of our work is pest management. We're worried about moths eating our costumes, and woodworm eating our furniture. Almost instinctively, you see a fly in a showcase and you think, oh, there's a problem here.
But because we're taking a more sanguine view of the longer-term status of this item, we kind of just let it be there. So far, we've only got one fly. If it wants, it's got a whole fatberg to eat. It doesn't seem to have any friends. And in fact, it's sort of added a bit a bit of drama and a bit of sense of place to the exhibit.
You had to wear a hazmat-style suit to insulate yourself against gases and other risks. Have you been in other conservation situations you’d describe as dangerous?
I have, I'm afraid to say. My job prior to this was working at the Imperial War Museums, so I've worked a lot with weaponry and drugs. We have a drug collection here, as well. Lots of 18th- and 19th-century medicine kits, which have things like cocaine, laudanum, morphine. Two of the more recent drugs [include a] cocaine wrapper with no cocaine on it, and also an ecstasy tablet. We have a lot of 20th-century collections with asbestos in them, as well. If you're working with items like that, you have to be fully suited up.
What kind of gear do you have to wear?
[With drugs], just gloves, so you don't absorb anything through your skin. The main area where we do wear those full hazmat suits are asbestos. I've normally got a bit of a stubble-y beard. One time, when I was working with an asbestos collection, I had to shave my beard off just so I could put the mask on properly and get a good air seal.
From the outside, the fatberg looks a bit like a rock. What’s it made of?
We sent a 200-gram sample up to [the researcher] Raffaella Villa at Cranfield University, and she ran a load of mass-spectrometry analysis. It’s about two-thirds fat and 20 percent ash and grit. Of the fat component, about half was palmitic acid, which you find in palm oil—mainly cooking fats.
You X-rayed the slice to look out for sharp things that could pose a risk when you handled it. What did you see when you looked inside?
Nothing exciting like gold, or syringes, or bones. [The X-rays] were beautiful, I think. Really, really beautiful. They almost look like nebulae, like pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.
I've seen other samples of fatbergs where it's almost a matrix of fat and these wet wipes all kind of glued together. The samples we have don't really have anything like that. They're pretty much all fats. [On the X-ray], you have this black field and this changing grayscale of the fatberg itself, showing the different densities and everything. What you can see, and the reason that it looks like something in deep space, is that you can see where there are little pinpricks of very bright, high-density particles, which we think are bits of grit. We found quite a lot of grit when we did the analysis. That's pretty much the only thing you can see—these tiny little bright spots, like stars.
It seems like there was a lot of hands-off time, when the fatberg was drying out. How often did you interact with it?
I was a bit like its surrogate father, really. I would go and check on it every couple of weeks [at Thames Water, or at the museum’s storage facility] and just see if it was drying out, check on the status of the flies, see if there was any mold growth. We obviously tried to keep handling to an absolute minimum, because all the reading about sewage and sewage handling did make us quite nervous.
When you did get up close and personal, how did it affect the rest of your day?
At first, it's very weird and you're wary and probably a little nervous. Have I washed my hands enough? Have I taken all the steps I need to? You are very wary, and you're hypersensitive, I think—if you get a tickly cough, or you just feel a bit tired, you start to try maybe attribute it to the fatberg.
I don't mean this in a complacent sense, at all, but your exposure to it does normalize. I never had to plan my lunch around it or anything like that. People become pretty cool with it, and even start to enjoy spending time around it.
The fatberg is displayed behind two layers of glass or plexiglass. Can visitors smell anything through them?
You can't smell it, which a lot of people are disappointed about, actually. People were almost willing it to be a bit more disgusting than it is.
If you imagine an expensive bottle of wine, what comes to mind? You may have visions of a vineyard in France or a dusty cellar where centuries-old bottles are removed with care. Or perhaps you think of sloshing liquid poured in a rounded wine glass, where it is swirled, sniffed, and tasted. Whatever association comes to mind, most people would agree there’s no rush to consume an expensive wine.
That’s an idea the wine world wants to instill in customers. Learning tidbits about a wine’s place of origin—or holding it up to the light—are crucial to building up the prestige of a high-end product. It’s with this sense of ritual and backstory that Jerry Toth, co-founder of To’ak Chocolate, hopes to elevate a traditionally cheap, sweet treat into the luxury market, with chocolate bars starting at $295.
Several hundred dollars may seem like a lot to pay for one bar of chocolate. But according to Christopher Olivola, assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, a $295 price tag is also a selling point. Most customers believe that if something is expensive, it’s bound to be a better product (better ingredients; more attention to detail). In contrast, it’s impossible to convince someone that a one-dollar chocolate bar or five-dollar wine is the world’s best. This phenomenon is known as the price heuristic.
But a high price is not enough, of course. Selling a luxury product—including Toth’s To’ak chocolates—requires good storytelling.
When he presents his bars to customers, Toth describes the chocolate’s route from Ecuador to their hands. The story, which Toth printed in a 116-page booklet, begins with 5,300-year-old cocoa trees in Piedra de Plata, the valley in Ecuador where Toth sources the chocolate. He compares it to Bordeaux, France. The narrative then highlights 14 growers who hand-sort and shell the beans, which then go through no less than six phases of quality control.
“The more effort and time it takes to hand-make something,” says Olivola, “the more people are willing to add a value to it.” Olivola points to Starbucks’s conversion of coffee as a ho-hum beverage to artisanal commodity as one example of this effect, which is known in psychology as the effort heuristic.
Toth himself has a pretty good backstory. A graduate of Cornell University, he escaped the world of New York investment banking to explore Central and South America. He worked odd jobs for five years, until a job as foreign correspondent in Ecuador focused his attention on unsustainable development. He became convinced that politics wasn’t going to address those issues.
A year later, he co-founded Third Millennium Alliance, a rainforest conservation foundation, with an Ecuadorian sustainability expert and an American ecologist. They created the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve, and there, they discovered semi-wild cacao trees whose fruits the group began making into chocolate—inside a bamboo house the group built by hand. The homemade bars led to the creation of To’ak and a tangible product Toth could export to promote his mission of saving the rainforest.
Whether intentional or not, Toth leverages the effort heuristic when he discusses (and sells) the founding story of To’ak Chocolate. He doesn’t quote the price and walk away. He emphasizes the care put into each bar (weeks of work by hand). He provides historical background on cacao, which lets him weave in the message that his chocolate is rare. He keeps the storyline top of mind for customers who purchase To’ak by placing a single, roasted cacao bean in the center of each bar in altar-like fashion. And, of course, he holds tastings and educates people on how to appreciate and savor $300 bars of chocolate.
Similar to champagne and wine, To’ak Chocolate is meant to be smelled, savored, and meditated on. Toth’s team recommends a quiet, smell-free room. Ideally, tasters should open the packaging, breath in the bar’s aroma, and pick it up with a provided pair of tongs that prevent the melting of any precious material. From there, Toth suggests placing a square of chocolate into your mouth, breaking it into small pieces with your teeth, and letting it melt. No chewing.
Rituals like these are common among artisanal products, and almost anything can be pushed into this category, says Olivola. “Rituals bring people together. Throughout culture, people partake in fun or painful rituals. It makes them feel like they can control the outcome by taking part.”
If this all seems like a bit much—or not even to sell hundred-dollar chocolate—consider wine and wine tasting, which evolved from humble roots.
“The criteria for a good wine was [once] dramatically different than it is today,” says Kolleen Guy, associate professor of history at University of Texas at San Antonio. Initially, wine was judged using elements of Galenic medicine (hot, cold, wet, dry) to balance foods, and, into the 18th century, wine tasting meant a worker in a warehouse or cellar engaging in quality control. Poetic language such as green, cherry blossoms, and citrus only arose in the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution created a growing middle class and more emphasis on good taste.
Similarly, Rachel Speckan, an advanced sommelier, points out that the rise of wine as an intellectual pursuit only began in earnest in the 1970s. She cites the founding of the Wine & Spirits Education Trust at the time, as well as the first master sommelier examinations by the United Kingdom’s Court of Master Sommeliers. Both remain leading institutions. And while visiting a winery is now common, such intense interest in a wine’s origins and the viticulturists is relatively modern—a contrast to the traditional business-to-business nature of the wine industry.
Chocolate is arguably headed on the same path: While the industry was once mostly milk chocolate marketed to kids, it’s increasingly common for adults to buy expensive truffles and visit artisanal chocolate factories. To’ak just represents a (hopeful) leap into the future.
“The tasting procedure is something that has been around for a long time, and originated in the wine industry,” says Toth, who once aspired to become a sommelier and openly concedes to following the industry’s playbook. “[Chocolate tasting] might be a new concept, but we’re not re-inventing the wheel.”
But an important part of that playbook is authenticity, and the feeling that the stories and the process is not cynical. The success of To’ak Chocolate will likely be determined not by the effort heuristic and rituals, but by the sincerity of Toth and his team.
“What we're trying to do is bring respect back to [the cacao bean], which was once so highly regarded that it was used as currency by civilizations around the world,” says Toth. “Theobroma, the Latin name given to cacao by early Spanish explorers, means ‘Food of the Gods.’”
Toth describes To’ak Chocolate as a way to educate the world about the rich history of cacao, to pay farmers the right price for their work, and to rescue chocolate from being relegated to a cheap, check-out impulse buy. And when you think of it that way, $300 seems like a small price to pay to help restore glory to Ecuador’s cacao tree.
In scholarly circles, menus are called "ephemera," along with sheet music, posters, and pamphlets. That is, they are paper with a transient purpose: printed to advertise, to sell, or to inform about an issue or upcoming event. As the term suggests, ephemera was never meant to last, and unbound paper is obligingly impermanent.
The history of the menu isn't all that long, and its origins are murky. Menus were needed once restaurants became gathering places that served a variety of foods, starting in 18th-century Paris. Later banquets often provided printed menus as souvenirs for attendees, who could take a soup-spattered piece of paper home to dream about delicacies past. Today, nearly every restaurant has a menu, and some even let you take one home.
Not many libraries have menus collections, but they are still a vital part of the historical record that reveals tastes, trends, and even local environmental conditions. Menu collections are often passion projects, gathered by enthusiasts over a lifetime. Perhaps the most famous examples are Frank M. Buttolph, who collected 25,000 menus that eventually ended up at the New York Public Library, or Louis Szathmary, a chef whose collection is split between two universities and ranges from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural ball to a space-age feast. A quick tour through menu collections from around the world reveals a wide range of interesting or unusual holdings, from the elegant to the esoteric to the downright furry.
The Conrad N. Hilton Library in New York is a part of the other CIA, the Culinary Institute of America. The library houses 30,000 menus from 80 countries dating back to 1855, and features notable examples from famed restaurateurs and chefs. But it also has this furry menu, which is a bit of a mystery. It was donated to the library by a Patty O'Neill, and it's almost certainly a novelty item, offering delicacies such as "Flat Cat," "Caribou Stew," and a range of dog dishes, from "German Shepard Pie" to "Collie Hit by a Trolley."
First Battalion A.I.F. Association Dinner Souvenir Menu, October 20, 1928
The National Library of Australia's ephemera collection includes this menu for a reunion dinner of the First Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force (the full menu can be seen here). According to the Australian War Memorial, they were "the first infantry unit recruited for the AIF in New South Wales during the First World War." At this beery memorial event 10 years after the end of the war, the guests of honor were famed aviators Charles “Smithy” Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm. Earlier that year, they had made the first transpacific flight—from Oakland, California, to Brisbane, Australia. Within ten years, both men had disappeared, their planes going down at sea.
Freemason Grandmaster Banquet Menu, December 18, 1892
Barilla, along with being the world's biggest pasta brand, also has a gastronomic library in Parma, Italy. Their menu collection clocks in at 5,000. This triangular menu, covered in arcane symbols, comes from a banquet held at the Naples Masonic Lodge in 1892 to honor the Grandmaster of the Grand Orient of Italy, Adriano Lemmi, a banker and merchant. It was a sumptuous affair, featuring the prized oysters of Lake Fusaro in Campania and hearty rosbif, or roast beef.
The New York Public Library has one of the world's most prominent and public menu collections. Of its 45,000 menus, many are digitized and available online. More than 25,000 of them had been collected by Frank M. Buttolph in the early 20th century and, like the menu here, are marked with her trademark blue stamp. This menu is one of several from the Thirteen Club, a supper club whose goal was to rehabilitate the number 13 and make fun of superstition. Meals often had 13 courses, members sat 13 to a table, and dinners took place on the 13th of the month. The above “simplified” menu was probably a send-up of a concerted effort by philanthropists and politicians in 1906 to simplify American English for the benefit of society.
From the Woman’s Club of Coconut Grove Records at the University of Miami comes this appropriately coconut-husk-wrapped menu. Founded as the Housekeepers Club in 1891, it is Florida's first and oldest women's organization. Flora McFarlane started the organization to ease the isolation of homesteading women in the still-rural Miami area. Over more than a century, the club has supported environmental preservation in the Everglades and lobbied for social welfare issues in the state and abroad. This menu came from the Club's Blue Pheasant Tea Room, which, according to the Club's website, was operated in the early 1920s as a fundraising venture.
Menu from National Space Institute Gala Breakfast to Celebrate the Apollo-Soyuz Lift-Off, July 15, 1975
Hungarian-American chef Louis Szathmary had quite a life. His collection of cookbooks, menus, and cooking-related objects, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands, took up 31 rooms. A celebrity chef with an equally famous restaurant, Chicago's The Bakery, Szathmary created the menu for this breakfast gala, a celebration of the first joint U.S.-Soviet space flight. The collaborative spirit was epitomized by the cocktail of choice, Russian vodka mixed with American Coca-Cola. A dish created for the occasion was Eggs Apollo-Soyuz, with all-American Smithfield ham and Russian sturgeon. The dish also includes stroganoff sauce and Bontrae, a soy-based "ham of tomorrow." The menu is signed with Szathmary’s iconic caricature-signature.
The Los Angeles Public Library has almost 9,000 menus in its archives, most of which have been digitized. One of the highlights of their collection is this menu from Valhalla, a long-gone restaurant in Sausalito, California. Though founded in 1870, the restaurant was given a new lease on life in 1950 when it was purchased by Sally Stanford, a famous San Francisco madam whose notorious, popular brothel was shut down the year before. Valhalla advertised itself as the haunt of movie-makers, rum-runners, and Jack London, while serving high-end American cuisine. (The whole menu is visible here.) In 1976, Stanford was elected mayor of Sausalito.
Abraham Lincoln's Presidential Inaugural Ball Bill of Fare, March 6, 1865
The Culinary Arts Museum isn't open to the public; it's a resource for students and researchers. But many of its 200,000 objects of culinary interest are digitized and available online. Louis Szathmary donated much of his collection to Johnson and Wales, including this menu for the Presidential Ball celebrating Lincoln's second term in office. Szathmary believed this menu to be only one of three still in existence. It features typical high-end American cuisine of the time, including terrapin, renowned for its luscious taste. Other dishes included ornamental pyramids of "nougate" or "cocoanut" and "white coffee" ice cream. When the banquet was served at midnight, guests descended on it in a frenzy, creating a huge mess. Chillingly, this boisterous feast came a little more than a month before Lincoln's assassination.
At the beginning of 1900, French wine-making brothers Maurice and Georges Roger had an estimated 1.5 million champagne bottles and 500 casks of other wine safely stored in the cellar below their family estate in Épernay, in northern France. But during a particularly damp February that year, part of the estate collapsed—right into the cellar, trapping the precious bottles under 80 feet of dirt and debris. Worried that attempting to dig survivors out would cause more damage to the estate, the brothers left them there.
So it was with great surprise that last month, 118 years after the collapse, that the Roger family, which still makes champagne there, discovered a new passage into the long-lost cellar during the construction of a nearby packing facility. "In a moment of euphoria we decided to enlarge the passage and after further digging we found some fully preserved bottles," Damien Cambres, deputy cellar manager at Pol Roger, told French news site franceinfo.
The bottles are estimated to date to the years between 1887 and 1898, according to a statement issued by the company. Because they have not been exposed to sunlight, and have been at a constant temperature, they may still be drinkable."We will find a lot of roundness and freshness, because there has been no alteration of acidity," Dominique Petit, the outgoing cellar master at Pol Roger, told franceinfo. "And some notes of maturity and grilled aromas."
This would not be the first time that experts get to taste 19th-century wine. The record for oldest champagne tasted goes to a 1825 Perrier-Jouet opened in 2009. "Although there was only a hint of bubbles left it was perfectly fresh, the color was fine and it resembled a very great chablis, with a note of white truffles and chocolate," wine expert Olivier Cavil told U.K. daily The Times.
Further excavations of the Pol Roger cellar have now stopped due to weather conditions, but the company plans to dig further. “We found one bottle the first day, then five or six the next day, then we had 19, then we stopped," CEO Laurent d’Harcourt told Wine Spectator. "They’ll definitely be tasted, but we’re taking our time.”
At a New Year’s Eve Party in 1969, the Australian journalist Richard Neville turned to his OZ magazine co-editor Jim Anderson and worried aloud that he was becoming old and boring. It must have seemed utterly inconsequential at the time.
Less than six weeks later, however, in the February 1970 edition of the magazine, the editors placed an classified advertisement in its back pages. “Some of us at OZ are feeling old and boring,” it began, “so we invite any of our readers who are under eighteen to come and edit the April issue.” Applications could be individual or group, and chosen participants would not be paid. Instead, the editors wrote, “You will enjoy almost complete editorial freedom. OZ staff will assist in purely an administrative capacity.”
Just over a year later, the resulting issue of OZ would spark the longest obscenity trial in Britain’s history, and a landmark case in the history of counterculture. Over the space of a few months, hundreds of letters were sent to British newspapers arguing over the case, and inches upon inches of column space taken up by hand-wringing commentators. Seething resentment between two generations had come to a head. The OZ trial became the emblem of this cultural clash.
OZ magazine began in Sydney, Australia, with Neville. There, he and his co-editors were charged twice for printing an obscene publication. In September 1966, he came to London without plans to resurrect it. But, he said in Jonathon Green’s oral history, Days in the Life: Voices From the English Underground, “I sensed there was a substratum of genuine irritation with the society. There was no access to rock ’n’ roll, pirate radio had gone, women couldn’t get abortions.” Most of all, he noted the lack of an underground press: “This again was something which seemed like another piece of repressive puritanical behavior that one wanted to fight.”
Whether as an answer to this or a rallying call against society, the first issue of British OZ was published in January 1967. Its 24 pages included an obituary for “the novel,” a feature on why there were so many penises in American pornography, and a comic strip entitled The Somewhat Incredible Turning On of Mervyn Lymp, Bank Clerk Extraordinaire. (At that time, “turning on” meant opening up your mind, usually—though not necessarily—through taking drugs.)
OZ was satirical, irreverent, and psychedelic. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t very lucrative. Speaking to Green in 1986, Anderson remembered paying their many contributors nothing, or whatever they could afford. Issues sold perhaps 30,000 copies apiece. (Readership, however, was much larger–it was the kind of rag you might pass around to your friends once you were done with it.) From an aesthetic perspective, it was scrubby and anarchic—the designers, he said, had been “set loose on an IBM typesetter with several trips of LSD inside them.” Inside, there were ribald jokes and cartoons, gig listings and calls to readers to “TAKE THE PLUNGE! Commit a revolutionary act. Subscribe to OZ.”
By the time 1970 rolled around, there were three men at the paper’s center—Neville, in his late twenties; Anderson, in his early 30s; and Felix Dennis, who turned 23 that year.
Neville was the paper’s engine. Impossibly charming, he inspired cultish devotion in those around him. “No one else would ever have managed to get me working for nothing,” said Dennis, who would go on to be a publishing magnate worth over a billion dollars. “He used to charm birds off trees.” Sandy-haired Anderson, who had trained as a lawyer in Australia, saw himself as a satirist. He was camp, ironic, and openly gay at a time when it was dangerous, even illegal, to do so. Whiz kid Dennis was a failed musician who had caught the group’s attention when he submitted a home-recorded tape to the magazine explaining what was wrong with it. Now, he was responsible for their finances, advertising, and distribution.
A memorable crew of movers and shakers buzzed around Neville and the magazine, among them the feminist writer Germaine Greer, the illustrator and artist Martin Sharp, and the artist and political activist Caroline Coon. “[Neville’s] idea of a good time was going round getting fantastic people to write for the magazine,” Dennis told Green in 1986. “That was his talent. He lived on his wits.” Between the celebrity endorsements, the off-the-wall content, and a genuinely explosive anti-establishment streak, the magazine grew popular with “countercultural” teenagers and young adults.
All of this led to the most infamous issue of OZ: number 28, the Schoolkids issue. Dozens of teenagers had seen the advertisement in the back pages of OZ 26. In early 1970, a little over 20 chosen favorites crowded into the magazine’s headquarters: a basement flat in Notting Hill Gate, London, with a lingering scent of marijuana, incense, vegetarian food, and laundry. (In the decades since, some of these young volunteers have gone on to considerable success: the journalists Peter Popham and Deyan Sudjic; photographer Colin Thomas; and Harper’s editor Trudi Braun.)
In a 2001 article for The Guardian, Charles Shaar Murray, now a music writer, remembered the basement as “dimly lit and exotically furnished.” In that room, the “glitterati of the metropolitan underground” mingled with teenagers from across the United Kingdom and handed them the reins to the magazine. “All three were at least as interested in us as we were in them,” Shaar Murray wrote. “As actual (rather than notional) kids, we were interrogated for our opinions on education, politics and society as well as on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Given access to the magazine, what would we want to say?”
Over the course of the following weekends, these teenagers put their heads together to answer that question. The result was literally puerile. Obscene, and thoroughly intended to be, the cover boasts blue, pneumatic breasts, while on page 10 a lewd cartoon of a masturbating teacher reaches for a teenage boy’s bottom. Phalluses proliferate. A rambling opinion piece talks about the various ages at which girls in a contributor’s school had lost their virginity. The final result, aesthetically and otherwise, is somewhere between Ronald Searle’s Molesworth, Rabelais, and The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film.
Eventually it went out onto stands, didn’t sell all that well, Shaar Murray recalled, and seemed to have been quickly forgotten.
Two months later, the Obscene Publications Squad raided the basement flat. The doors were locked, the phones disconnected, and 400-odd issues of OZ 28 carted away as evidence. There were a number of reasons for police interest in the magazine. One was a general disdain for, and fear of, the underground press. Another was the ongoing clash of cultures between the old guard and a rising tide of dope-smoking, free-loving hippies. The other was more technical, Anderson told Green. Police harassment of “underground” printers had forced them to go to increasingly hardcore presses, which usually printed highly illegal pornography. OZ wasn’t exactly pornographic, but did have a preoccupation with “sexual freedom and sexual liberation,” Anderson said. “If we wanted to publish a picture with sexual content it would also have a point to make, and we would insist on publishing it.” Connections with these pornographic printers didn’t help the magazine’s legal situation.
And so, in late June 1971, Neville, Anderson, and Dennis found themselves in court number two of the Old Bailey. They faced numerous charges, among them charges of “conspiring with certain other young persons to produce a magazine containing obscene, lewd, indecent and sexually perverted articles, cartoons, drawings with intent to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and other young persons and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted desires;” publishing the issue; sending it out through the post; and possessing 474 copies of it for publication for gain.
Police, Dennis told Green, seemed to have entirely misunderstood the premise of the issue—rather than being for school children, it was by them. “They understood it towards the end, just about, but they didn’t believe that children could have produced it,” he told Green. “They actually truly believed that we’d got a bunch of children and that we pretended they’d written it but that really we’d written it.”
What followed was six weeks of legal squabbling, costing the British public some £100,000—well over a million pounds in today’s money. The judge, Michael Argyle, wanted to make an example of these three men, with their long hair, seemingly radical ideas, and vibrant clothing. Members of the jury were almost entirely over the age of 50, and seemed to feel little sympathy for the editors from across a cultural and generational gulf.
One after another, witnesses were interrogated over the content of the magazine and the effect it might have on young minds—even whether the cover illustration might “turn” a heterosexual young woman into a lesbian. Among them were psychologists, teachers, writers, and principals, who were all asked time and time again, whether this material would indeed corrupt the minds and morals of schoolchildren. Some said yes, others thought the suggestion was laughable. In court, Anderson responded: “It was never my intention to do any such thing. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
A particular source of contention was a comic strip by Robert Crumb, adapted by Vivian Berger, one of the teenager contributors. In it, the children’s character Rupert the Bear is shown graphically “deflowering” his girlfriend, known as “Gipsy Granny.” It is not clear whether the woman, whose upper half isn't shown, is conscious or consenting. In essence, Neville said later, the establishment was “deeply morally outraged by school children talking about teachers having erections or demythologizing Rupert Bear. They were absolutely freaked out by the fusion of sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and schoolkids all in dayglo.”
As the prosecution team made reference to the men’s lifestyles, long hairstyles, and language, the defendants feared that Anderson’s sexuality would become a point of contention. Homosexuality had been decriminalized a few years earlier, but was still often conflated with degeneracy and even pedophilia. The prosecuting counsel Brian Leary seemed to know that Anderson was gay, Anderson said, and made knowing, though not explicit, references to it, designed to throw the defendant off-guard. Dennis explained: “Now this was a schoolchildren’s issue and while Jim wouldn’t have touched a schoolchild if you put a gun to the bastard’s head, that was still not what a jury would think.”
The case received unprecedented public attention, sparking headline after headline and thinkpiece after thinkpiece. At least part of this furor was due to the deliberate efforts of OZ and its “friends.” “Press kits” were put together for reporters, and outside the trial, people sold buttons and t-shirts of a topless woman, emblazoned with “OZ obscenity trial.” These had the dual function of helping to pay the magazine’s many expenses and raising awareness of the trial. Famous supporters also chipped in: A gallery on the King’s Road hosted a fundraising exhibition (“Ozject d’Art”) with works from Yoko Ono, David Hockney, John Lennon, Germaine Greer, and many others. Lennon even released a charity single, though it failed to take off.
The Times of London received more letters about the trial that summer than they had about the Suez crisis in 1956. “Opinion among our correspondents has been, roughly, equally divided for and against the defendants,” the editors wrote. Some chastised the Times for their lack of support for the magazine. Others were firmly on the side of the establishment. A letter writer called Bernard V. Slater labeled the magazine “sex propaganda,” while another who went by A. D. Faunce proclaimed that “Pedding a product harmful to the minds of children seems to me as antisocial as pushing drugs. Society has a duty to protect the young.”
What seemed to really rankle people, however, was the wastefulness and lack of common sense displayed by the trial. The 1959 Obscene Publications Act was, in its origin, an attempt to stamp out hardcore pornography. OZ might have been obscene, but it didn’t seek to be pornographic. Representative of some of the complaints, a letter by a Times reader named Laurie Kuhrt called the case “a triumph of injustice,” with “the pornographic industry continuing to thrive while OZ is threatened with bankruptcy.” Later, the New Law Journal described the case as without purpose, with “no less than 27 working days of a court” dedicated to a trial that resulted in “no substantial improvement of the law relating to obscenity, and certainly no other advantage to the public interest.” It was, in short, a colossal waste of time.
On Wednesday, July 28, members of the jury retired for three hours and 43 minutes. When they returned, a majority of 10 to one found the editors guilty of four of the five charges—publishing an obscene article; sending obscene articles in the mail; and two counts of having obscene articles for publication for gain. At the close of the trial, they were hauled off to the psychiatric ward of Wandsworth prison, where their long hair was shorn. Eventually, Neville was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment; Anderson to 12; and Dennis to just nine months. The two Australians were recommended for deportation. Outside the Old Bailey, protesters clashed with police, burned an effigy of the judge, and set off smoke bombs. (The following day, they would be immortalized in an Express tabloid headline: “The Wailing Wall of Weirdies.”)
In the end, the editors served barely a week in prison. A successful appeal found that the judge had grossly misdirected the jury, amid a number of other miscarriages of justice. The convictions were overturned. A fine of £1200 was reduced to £50, the deportation recommendations were lifted, and the men walked free, wearing long, extravagant wigs.
Afterwards, circulation of OZ soared, and then nosedived. Neville’s heart, he said, was no longer in it. “Somehow in packaging our defense I felt I was becoming more and more a propagandist and less and less of Richard Neville hanging out in London, working with a group of people that I liked and respected, trying to give writers and cartoonists a platform—which was basically what OZ was about.” Being forced to justify their work on high moral grounds put a dampener on OZ’s spirits, he said. In November 1973, facing bankruptcy, the magazine folded, and the three instigators moved on with their lives.
For decades, copies of the magazine were few and far between, hard to find, and prized by collectors. Then, in 2014, OZ was given back to the public through a collaboration between Neville and the University of Wollongong, in Australia. Now, every issue is available online, with its obscene comic strips, sporadic typesetting, and genuinely revolutionary fervor on show for all to see.
Sumo wrestlers have always been huge, but they’ve also never been bigger. An influx of Hawaiian and Mongolian champions over the past decades has sent the average weight of champion wrestlers soaring from just under 300 pounds in the 1930s to well over 400 today. Naturally smaller Japanese competitors must eat all they can to keep up.
In sumo, the heavier competitor has an advantage—there are no separate weight classes, and the small ring has gotten no larger to accommodate heftier competitors. Wrestlers, therefore, will eat and eat and eat in a highly regimented fashion to get as large as they can. At the heart of this process is a stew called chanko, sometimes known as chanko-nabe. ('Nabe' means pot.) Chanko defines their lives so completely—most wrestlers eat it at almost every meal for years—that it has come to symbolize the sport and dominate their lives even after they retire.
Technically speaking, anything prepared and eaten by sumo wrestlers can be called chanko—the dish is defined by its association with the sport rather than a recipe. But the average Japanese person will tell you that chanko is a stew or soup: a pot of bubbling broth, to which ingredients are added or removed. In some respects, it’s not so different from shabu shabu or other hot pot dishes. It usually features one kind of meat or fish, tofu, vegetables, and big chunks of calorie-dense mochi, a starchy cake made of pounded glutinous rice. (A matchbox-sized hunk of mochi might have as many calories as an entire bowl of rice.) The broth may be chicken, miso, soy, or salt-based: Training houses usually have their own signature soup. It’s cheap, hearty fare, but in ordinary quantities, not intrinsically fattening.
Instead, it is the way chanko stew is consumed that makes it a cornerstone of sumo dining. An ordinary person might have one or two bowls of chanko. Wrestlers, meanwhile, skip breakfast to work up an appetite, then regularly eat as many as ten bowls for lunch, washed down with copious amounts of beer. All that chanko is converted into extra bulk by taking a hard-earned nap straight after lunch. As David Benjamin writes in Sumo: A Thinking Fan's Guide to Japan's National Sport: “When you’re a sumo wrestler, you get to live in a clubhouse where no girls are allowed. You’re encouraged to eat all you want and have ‘thirds’ on dessert. You nap all afternoon, and drink beer all night.” Matches are a few seconds long—you’ll never be late for dinner—and held in a comfortable, climate-controlled environment.
This is all true, but downplays the structure and rigor of “the clubhouse,” more commonly known as a heya, training house, or stable. Every heya has its own rules, structure, and traditions, and almost all are run by a training master (oyakata) and his wife. These two take an almost parental role in the lives of their charges, many of whom move into the stable at the age of just 15 or 16. Each wrestler has chores to perform, which change with their superiority. A surprising number of these revolve around chanko.
At the most lowly end, chanko chores involve setting up the eating area, cycling to buy groceries, or chopping vegetables. (The highest-ranked wrestlers are usually tasked only with making public appearances or entertaining patrons.) While kitchen duty may be entry-level, being in charge of the kitchen—chankocho—is a position of respect. Beyond chopping and menu planning and budgeting, writes R. Kenji Tierney in an essay in the journal Food, Cultural & Society, “[It is] also an acknowledgment that the wrestler’s future is not in the ring, but in some faraway kitchen.”
Not every wrestler can be a champion. For the vast majority who leave the house after a decade or two, chanko can be the route into another profession. In these instances, the non-wrestling skills they have learned in the stable are often the most useful—chopping, certainly, but also managing others in the kitchen, cooking, and keeping to a budget. “As a wrestler ascends in seniority, depending on his wrestling trajectory, he will either gain cooking duties with more responsibility or he will be excused from the kitchen completely to fulfill the duties of a prominent wrestler,” Kenji Tierney writes. Many retired wrestlers work at sumo-themed restaurants called chankoya, where high-end seafood chanko is the main attraction. The most famous among them will even open their own eponymous chankoya, where their stardust attracts clients as much as what’s on the menu—among them, Kotogaume Tsuyoshi, who enjoyed some high-profile success in the 1980s and 1990s. For such men, chanko continues to define their lives long after retirement.
In the heya, each meal has a strict structure. Every day, junior wrestlers rise early to train and then prepare the meal while their superiors snooze. At lunch time (wrestlers do not eat breakfast), they must serve them. At any one time, only five or six wrestlers can sit around the pot, with the heavyweights getting first dibs. Chanko is served with bowls of rice—eaters reach into the pot for particular morsels, and occasionally raise their hand to indicate an empty bowl. Junior wrestlers are expect to watch hawkishly and anticipate the needs of hungry seniors.
Only when a wrestler has finished can the one below him in rank sit down and take his place around the roiling pot. As a result, the junior wrestlers are often left with the dregs of the stew, after the top wrestlers have taken all of the best ingredients. At that point, they may add instant noodles to bulk it up and make the most of the paltry tidbits that remain.
In Japan, the national love of sumo has brought chanko well and truly into the mainstream: at specialist chankoya, in ordinary restaurants, and even at the supermarket, via chanko-flavored instant ramen. It’s also possible to enjoy chanko as a guest in the training house. Often, these invitations are a perk for patrons who subsidize wrestlers’ salaries and costs. It is rare for them to be extended to foreigners. The rapper and author Action Bronson was one such guest, while doing research for his book F*ck, That’s Delicious: An Annotated Guide to Eating Well. He reviewed it positively: “I think the chankonabe was by far the best soup I ever had … I mean, it was better than any broth ever in the history of life.”
But not every review is so superlative. “Sometimes, the most authentic chanko actually tastes bad,”writes Kenji Tierney. Chanko is above all fuel, rather than food—the taste is important, but a secondary concern. Inexperienced chefs or underfunded training houses may make deeply underwhelming stew that still passes muster. For foreign wrestlers who have moved to Japan to live, train, and compete, this can be hard, Tierney writes, as they struggle to adapt to eating chanko “day in and day out.” The flavors are unfamiliar, and even young Japanese wrestlers find it hard to adjust to this gastronomic tedium, especially if, as is often the case, they’ve grown up eating food from all over the world.
Nonetheless, the stew persists, and for reasons that are as symbolic as they are practical. Sure, in large enough quantities, chanko can beef up wrestlers at minimal expense. But more than that, it defines the sport and its participants. In a separate essay, Tierney describes commentators discussing how long a wrestler had been competing in terms of the stew—veterans are often said to have “the flavor of chanko … steeped into [them].” Sumo wrestlers might not always be in the mood for chanko, but it is as much a part of their world as the sport itself. Each competitor owes his bulk, and his success, to pot after pot of this all-important stew.
Everyone was wrong about baby rabbits—including us. In 600 A.D., the story goes, Pope Gregory issued a proclamation to the Catholic world. Fetal rabbits, also known as laurices, aren't meat, he said. Suspended in amniotic liquid, like fish in water, they shouldn't be treated as animals of the land—and hungry Catholics shouldn't think twice about snacking on them on fast days or Lent. So began rabbit domestication, with monks scrambling to set up grisly fetal rabbit factories. That's how, after decades of selective breeding, the bunnies went from rangy, feral rabbits to tame and cuddly balls of fluff.
If it sounds far-fetched, that's because it is. Pope Gregory never said such a thing, according to a new study of rabbit domestication published last week in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. And bunnies seem to have been domesticated much, much earlier, during the last ice age. Archaeologists Evan Irving-Pease and Greger Larson, from the University of Oxford, were both familiar with the story. "I had cited it, colleagues of mine had cited it, it's all over Wikipedia, it's all over the web... but it turns out that the modern story is a complete house of cards," Larson said, in a statement. "What was really interesting to me then was why nobody's really thought about it or been critical about it."
Looking at the story with new, skeptical eyes, Larson and Irving-Pease found that scientists of the past had confused Pope Gregory with St. Gregory of Tours, a French religious historian who had made a passing reference to a man named Roccolenus. Roccolenus, he said, in “the days of holy Lent … often ate young rabbits.” The misattribution somehow led to a complete rewriting of rabbit history. Not only is the religious history wrong, the scientists report, but the science seems to be off, too. DNA evidence doesn't narrow rabbit domestication to that time period and instead seems to have been a long, drawn-out process with no clear beginning.
In the paper, Irving-Pease and Larson suggest that it might have started all the way back in the Paleolithic era, when humans likely first hunted rabbits. In the millennia since, they've been kept and bred in Roman and medieval enclosures for ease of capture, and eventually as pets. "For the vast majority of human existence, no one said, 'I am going to grab this wild organism and bring it into captivity and, voila, I will create a domestic one,'" Larson said. "We know a hell of a lot less about the origins of the things that matter most to us than we think we do," Irving-Pease added.
