Let’s address a touchy, but undeniable fact: interesting people (and their homes or offices) don’t always smell good. Geniuses and eccentrics can easily lose sight of little things, like cleaning or hygiene, in their intellectual fervor. Luckily, our idea of how they should smell has been lovingly distilled into a collection of literary-themed scented candles.
Frostbeard Studio offers a range of "Book Lover's" scents inspired by specific titles, including “The Shire” (The Hobbit and TheLord of the Rings trilogy), “Sherlock’s Study” (the Sherlock Holmes canon), and “Winterfell” (A Song of Ice and Fire). But their most intriguing scents are the more broadly described ones, such as “Old Books” or “Reading at the Cafe.” The whole concept evokes what you want interesting people (and places) to smell like, even if that’s not always the reality.
While some reviewers argue that the candles don’t smell exactly like used books, we’re still intrigued by any scent that makes us feel like we should be reading.
Female birds often get short shrift. Sometimes smaller and less flamboyantly hued than their male counterparts, they’re often imagined to be quieter, too.
Sex-specific song information only exists for about a quarter of all songbird species—but of those species in which males are known to sing, 64 percent also have female singers. In some species, female song might be a little less complex or weaker than male versions, but can also be quite the opposite: Some female owls, for instance, have longer, more emphatic calls, or use more notes.
Even if female song is pretty pervasive, documentation is scant. That’s partly due to what Karan Odom, a researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, dubs a “temperate bias.” Historically, a lot of research into bird song has been concentrated in temperate regions, where male song predominates—instead of in more tropical zones, where there’s more parity. (Out of the 660 known species with female singers, only 18 percent are found in the continental U.S., Hawaii, or Canada, Audubon noted.)
Even when researchers have listened for female songs in the tropics, it can be difficult to tell the singer's sex from a distance: Both males and females often wear blazing hues and bold ornamentation. “In the majority of species, unless I knew that bird really well, I couldn’t tell just by listening," says Odom. Banding birds with sex-specific bracelets can help researchers distinguish between them. In species for which researchers know that incubating and nest-fluffing are the exclusive domains of females, those behaviors can also offer clues about who is making all that noise.
Odom argues that there’s much to be gleaned by listening in to female song, whether that happens to be in the tropics or by craning an ear to the Northern Cardinal perched in a tree outside my New York City window. That was the thrust of a commentary that Odom and her collaborator Lauryn Benedict of the University of Northern Colorado recently published in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, calling on other researchers—and citizen scientists—to keep an eye and ear out for female birds and their songs. Odom has turned to troves of recordings collected over the span of decades, such as those in the wildlife-focused Macaulay Library. Paired with field notes, these snippets offer valuable information about who is singing, and where. Contributors can also upload sound clips and field observations to the Female Bird Song project, which Odom manages with partners at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
By examining species where females sing, Odom says, researchers can probe all sorts of evolutionary, ecological, and neurobiological questions. Song is a complex, learned behavior. At what point in their lives do females learn their song? Then, where and when do the female birds belt their little hearts out?
In male species, Odom says, complex songs are often thought of as being tied to sexual selection, indicating that a bird might make a good mate or a ferocious defender of territory. “So then the question is why do females songs become complex?” The reasons might be different, she says—complex female songs could indicate a bird’s ability to defend resources, or acquire food for her young. There's plenty more to learn, Odom says. “Males are only one-half of the story."
The population of the South Asian hispid hare has declined since it was placed on IUCN’s endangered red list in 1986. Human migration into the hare’s low-grasslands habitat and controlled grassland burning to develop healthy grazing areas are partly to blame. In Nepal, scientists last spotted the furry creature in 1984 at Chitwan National Park and believed the mammal was long gone. However, a new photo of a baby hare proves the hispid hare hasn't left us.
Bed Khadka, a Chitwan National park conservation officer, captured on camera the youngling nestled in low grasslands and recently published details of his rediscovery in Conservation Science.In a press release he said “the fact that the hispid hare was a baby indicates that there are also parents and both male and female.”
Current conservation efforts in Chitwan focus on protecting larger endangered animals such as the tiger and rhino. The rationale is that saving larger animals could conserve the entire ecosystem, including tinier critters like the hare.
“Now I see a need of some programmes to protect some of these small animals too,” said Khadka.
Further research needs to be conducted to build such programs, but for now, the rare sighting is a win.
The winter that spanned 2013 and 2014 was frigid, and the Apostle Islands Ice Caves, on the lakeshore of northern Wisconsin, were spectacular. Some years the ice will thaw and freeze and thaw and freeze, but that year the ice formed and never really melted. The cave was full of crystalline formations, and tens of thousands of visitors trekked over the lake’s frozen surface to see them.
Since then, ice cave fans have been waiting for another chance to visit this spectacular spot. But except for a short window in 2015, the ice at the lake’s shore has never frozen solid enough to allow visitors to make the journey. This year, a cold December raised hopes that the ice caves would be open, but earlier this month, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore wrote on its Facebook page that this would be “another winter without accessible ice caves in the park.”
For the park to allow visitors to hike out to the caves—a treacherous journey even under the best conditions—the ice leading to the caves must meet certain criteria. The park considers the thickness of the ice (at least 10 to 12 inches, depending on the quality of the ice), the length of time it’s stuck around, and its extent—it needs to be locked between points of land.
The stretch of shore where the ice caves are located has little to protect it from the wind, and ice will only really be solidly locked in if it reaches Lake Superior's north shore, in Minnesota, explains Julie Van Stappen, a park spokesperson. There might be a shelf of ice a mile wide and a couple of feet deep extending from the shore, but wind can still sneak underneath and break it up.
When conditions are cold and calm, a layer of blue or clear ice can form—that’s solid ice. But more often, a few inches of ice form, get broken up, and pushed towards shore by the wind. That broken-up ice can refreeze together, but it’s less strong. The park staff will think it’s approaching conditions that would allow them to open the ice caves, but then “we get a big wind and it blows out,” says Van Stappen.
The park staff has monitored ice conditions more closely in the past few years, after the influx of visitors in 2013-14, so it’s difficult to make an exact comparison between the current streak of disappointment to conditions in the past. But locals remember a few years in the past when it wasn’t possible to visit the ice caves, and a separate study looking at records for a nearby ferry indicated that, since the early 20th century, the period of ice cover had shortened by a full month.
“The winters are milder than they used to be,” says Van Stappen. “They just are.” In 2014, Park Superintendent Bob Krumenaker wrote that, with Lake Superior’s surface temperatures rising and the duration and extent of its ice falling, “climate projections for future ice conditions suggest that access across the Lake to the ice caves would be an increasingly rare experience.” The lake ice just won't freeze strong enough to bear the weight of the people hoping to experience the strange beauty of caves full of dazzling ice formations.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, and even into the mid-19th century, the world’s most exclusive violin makers sourced wood felled in the south slopes of the Alps that their dealers floated down the Po River to the Italian town of Cremona. Antonius Stradivarius and Giuseppe Guarnerius, Cremona’s most prominent luthiers, famously bought wood sourced from the Swiss Alps and the Carpathian Mountains.
New York violin maker Samuel A. Stochek had a different approach. In the 1940s, his tonewood came not from renowned European mountain ranges, but from 19th-century New York buildings and houses under demolition during the Great Depression. Though his sources were unorthodox, his success was undeniable. Stochek’s floorboard violins were played in Carnegie Hall by the world’s most famous violinists.
Stochek was a rising star in the violin community in 1940 when the legendary New York beat reporter Meyer Berger interviewed him in his midtown store for the New York Times. “Stochek prowls around old buildings,” he wrote. “He will kneel in a deserted dwelling and he will examine the floorboards. He will appraise supporting beams with his sharp eyes.” Stochek himself, then 36, was no less poetic when describing how he saw his violin-making materials. “People have lived with this wood. People have died with this wood,” he said. “They have sat by the fire and they have loved and hey have quarrelled … Ahhh! Someone will play and the wood will tell these stories.”
But what became of those improbable violins, each a portal to another century? And who would tell their stories?
A recent Internet name search turned up Stochek’s daughter: a Westport, Connecticut violinist named Bernice Stochek Friedson, who owns three violins made by her father. She was not aware of any others that have survived.
At her home, Bernice picked up a battered violin case covered in crackled alligator skin. She proudly explained the craftsmanship: The back was a solid piece of maple, the sides had maple ribs, and the front was beautiful spruce. Then she opened up two more old cases, revealing the ¾-sized violin her father made for her when she was in first grade, and a violin he had crafted for a forgotten 1940s performer named Ossy Renardy, who died in a car crash at the height of his fame, aged 33.
Bernice said her grandmother Yetta had pressed her father to play at seven, on a violin her grandfather bought for a few dollars. Her dad had resisted his lessons even though he did have a natural musical ear; he loved the music but hated people telling him what to do. To disappoint his Yetta further, Samuel quit school in sixth grade, and wouldn’t return.
As a teenager Stochek found work in an auto shop, where he discovered he loved working with his hands. His cheap childhood violin had always been an embarrassment. Even as he managed to trade up for more expensive models, he toyed with idea of making his own. He caught wind of Paul and John Homenick, two Ukrainian brothers in their 30s who had brought their Old World mandolin skills with them to Ellis Island. As soon as they had a mandolin business going at 166 East 2nd Street they added violins. The Homenicks were of Catholic faith, but had opened their shop in a crowded immigrant Jewish community. Many an older New Yorker will joke that Jewish boys in this neighborhood of immigrant strivers had two choices back then: to follow the path of violin superstar Jascha Heifetz or to pursue science like Albert Einstein.
The Homenicks took on the dogged Jewish kid as an unpaid apprentice, and asked him to make a violin. In 1925 they sold it for $50. Stochek got so excited he made 12 more that year, which he soon learned was an okay output for a quickish buck, but not conducive to quality. His workmanship was good, and it took a while for his skill to really solidify. But Stochek knew he had found his calling, and committed himself professionally in 1927. His greatest obstacle was affording quality tonewood—wood with tonal quality, like sycamore, spruce and maple.
In the old guilds of Europe, by tradition, a violinmaker might pay it forward and save top-notch tonewood for the next generation. More often than not American luthiers in the 1920s secured their preferred wood from Italy and Yugoslavia or Germany, and got their supply shipped to New York docks.
Even into the early 20th century, before you could hang out a shingle in Fribourg or Berlin or Munich and call yourself a violin maker you would have had to study for four years, then work as a journeyman. Then you would have to go back and study for another two years, to get your masters papers. Until you became a master violin maker, you couldn’t make a violin with your name on it. One could not say, “I’m a violin maker, I’m self-taught.” But Stochek did.
Stochek couldn’t afford to ship wood from suppliers in Europe, so he hit upon the cost-effective strategy of reclaiming perfectly usable tonewood from New York’s wrecked and gutted buildings—conveniently pre-aged lumber. According to his daughters Bernice and Gloria, he told them he knew where to concentrate first: homes near Canal Street; buildings at least 70 or 80 years old. Uptown there was too much steel. But even in the squarely midtown district he had some luck.
Through the Homenick brothers, Stochek also got ahold of a “How To” book called Violin-Making, As It Was and Is: Being a Historical, Theoretical and Practical Treatise on the Science and Art of Violin-Making for the Use of Violin Makers and Players, Amateur and Professional. The book was written in 1884 by Edward Heron-Allen, who had apprenticed with master violin maker Georges Chanot. On his own, Stochek perfected his templates, varnish, and all the details of gradation, and then set up his first small shop in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
As to where, exactly, the wood for Stochek’s violins came from, in Berger’s original article there’s mention of a 150-plus-year-old curly maple floorboard from a lean-to in New Brunswick, New Jersey. There’s a hundred-year-old board marked for a violin back that came from an old house on Elizabeth Street near Canal Street, one for which Stochek paid 15 cents to an old watchman. There’s also mention of a light-brown spruce log from the back of an old house near where a racetrack once stood in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, a quartered log destined to be a sound post or bass bar, or both.
Stochek also mentioned a fine piece of wood he rescued from the last days of Hotel Shelburne. Long gone from public imagination, the magnificent Hotel Shelburne, built at the tail end of the 1800s, was once the last survivor of the “Big Four” Brooklyn Atlantic seaboard hotels popular in the Gay Nineties and beginning of the Jazz era. The enormous guesthouse was foreclosed in 1928 to make way for an Art Deco six-story apartment building called the Shelbourne Apartments, with added o, that still stands at 3100 Ocean Parkway. Even during Prohibition, the Shelburne, with 200 rooms and 75 private baths, generated revenue off its dance floor and shore dinners of lobster and steaks.
In May 1928, after the hotel’s interiors, furniture, and diningware was auctioned off, the Shelburne was razed. Stochek told Berger he picked out spruce and maple from the ruins.
Sam knew that in order to be taken seriously as a luthier, he’d have to relocate from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and settled on a site near the performers in the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. In 1938 he launched a second store at 117 West 48th Street, right above Budapest, a Hungarian restaurant with a floorshow that was part of the racy nightclub scene that openly reestablished itself after Prohibition.
In 1938, the globally celebrated young violinist Ossy Renardy, double blinded with a mask and scarf, played a Stochek violin and a Stradivarius at a violin expo to prove that Stochek’s work sounded as good as the master luthier’s. Renardy must have liked what he heard because in 1938 he used the Stochek violin he had tested to record Paganini’s Caprices No. 3 and 4 on a popular Victor recording. Afterwards, Renardy wrote him a letter that he had framed and displayed in his 48th Street store: “Not even the critics could detect any difference in the tonal quality of your instrument as compared with the Guarneri and Guadagnini used for the remaining recordings. Please accept my congratulations upon your achievement in creating a very fine violin.”
It was not until the beginning of the 1940s that Stochek starting getting his biggest press, partly because his newest violin shop was now in the theater district and on the beat of several newspaper columnists, including Meyer Berger. A photo spread in Popular Science marveled that as "a ‘buff’ follows fired engines, so Stochek trails wreckers demolishing outdated buildings. Friends help keep him informed of fresh hunting grounds. His object is not primarily to save money, or in these places he finds he kind of lumber he likes. After fifty years or more of seasoning, the wood is just right.”
A spiffy profile in general-interest magazine Coronet followed, and then a three-page step-by-step how-he-does-it photo piece in the glossy See magazine, so popular with soldiers because of the pinup stars on its covers. “Stochek instruments take three months to make, three to six months more for the Stochek-blended oil-varnish to dry,” began See.
Now that the business had really started to take off, the Stocheks moved again, finally to the fancy violin makers’ street of West 57th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues. The best were here, clinging to the action of Carnegie Hall, and the biggest commercial studios further west along 57th. Here Stochek sold his violins for $1,000 each—double what standard U.S.-based luthiers could fetch for their instruments.
Delaware-based violin maker and appraiser David Bromberg thinks three things have to happen for a violin maker to get really good: “One, you need goods hands and dexterity, and good hand-to-eye coordination. Two, you need to have an idea how to make a violin. Third thing people forget—you need access to really good violins to study, but very people however have access to the finest violins. It’s not like Stochek could have slept with a Stradivarius under his pillow.”
Well.
According to both of Stochek’s daughters, one day a man in ill-fitting clothes showed up at the store, wanting to buy a cello. “Gonna be $800,” their father said dryly to get the schnook out of the store. As Stochek kept working the man handed him a check with NYC millionaire Horace O. Havemeyer’s famous name on it. The cello buyer was a Dr. Catlin and the son–in-law of Horace O. Havemeyer, President of National Sugar, who owned, among other things the “Batta Cello” made in 1714, and the King Joseph De Gesu, a 1737 violin acknowledged as the masterpiece of Guarnerius. “In the violin world," Bernice Stochek added, “that was the instrument that was not just the cream of the crop. The Del Gesu is the one with the cherry on top of the cream.”
Dr. Catlin was in the store again to pick up his cello when he heard Stochek’s daughter Bernice practicing, and was impressed by her credentials, which Stochek happily rattled off, including full-length violin recitals at the age of seven in the John Wanamaker department store and the Barbizon Hotel. Much to their delight Catlin then asked her to play for his famous father-in-law who owned all those priceless violins. She went with her father to the Havemeyers’ extravagant home, where the last Vermeers to be privately owned were prominently displayed in the living room. And then, much to Bernice’s amazement, Havermeyer announced he would lend her the Kiesewetter Stradivarius crafted by the master around 1723, and later owned by German composer and violinist Christophe Gottfried Kiesewetter. Stochek was beside himself, almost crying.
With a famous Stradivarius to secretly study, Stochek got even better, and got even sweeter prices in wartime New York. Stochek made significantly fewer instruments by the end of the ‘40s, three or four each year, for such concert and radio artists as legendary cellist Leonard Rose, William Lincer, the principal violist of the New York Philharmonic, and even child prodigy Ruggieri Ricci. After a debut at nine, Ricci had once been profiled as one of the most famous six children in the world along, with Jackie Coogan and seven-year-old Queen Elizabeth.
In 1948, Bernice played one of her father’s violins on the big-time TV show Arthur Godfrey and His Talent Scouts, a precursor to American Idol and America’s Got Talent that launched everyone from Pat Boone to Tony Bennett to Patsy Cline. She won.
In 1951, Stochek moved to Mount Kisco in Westchester, north of the city, and opened a music store where he sold and repaired all instruments: brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments and of course strings. After this final career change, he barely made another violin. In 1976, he died in his home from emphysema.
In his well-appointed office at Christie’s, head musical instrument appraiser Kerry K. Keane was enthralled by this lost story. But even after his wows, he was still hesitant to appraise Stochek’s work. “What is indisputable [is that] Stochek is truly an American phenomenon,” he says, “and the value here is the marvelous American story, about this ability for anyone to hang out a shingle and call himself a violin maker.”
“The three violins located are priceless to his daughters, that’s for certain. If we cannot pin down a significant value, we do know where his place is in American music history. And that’s quite a valuable find, too.”
Recently, on an overcast March day, a couple of hundred cows tromped out to a field, arranged themselves into four discrete lines and a dot, and clearly formed the word "Hi." Soon after, a satellite whooshed overhead, photographing this remarkable greeting, and proving that these most Earthly of creatures had successfully sent a message into space.
The cows, unfortunately, did not do this on their own. The mastermind behind the trick was Derek Klingenberg, a Kansas farmer who moonlights as a YouTube personality. In the past, Klingenberg has arranged his herd into a number of shapes—the Olympic rings, the Pi sign—which he usually films from a drone. For this project, he wanted to see if he could go one better, and make a shape that would be visible from space. He was inspired, he says, by SpaceX's recent launch of a Tesla Roadster.
Klingenberg uses a service called FarmersEdge, an agri-tech company that uses satellites to photograph fields from space. (They also sponsor his YouTube channel.) The technology is useful for things like aerial crop monitoring, says Klingenberg. "But," he adds, "then I also thought, you know, it'd be fun if I could take a picture of my cattle. So that's where I got the idea."
Timing everything right took some detective work. As Klingenberg explains in the video, he doesn't know the satellite's schedules—they're secret—but judging from the images he receives, they seem to pass over at about the same time each day. To figure out exactly when, he looked at aerial photos of his farm. By pretending his grain silo was a giant sundial, he clocked the satellites’ general flyby time at around 10 a.m.
So one recent morning, he herded his video stars out to a light patch of ground on his farm, to maximize the contrast. He then used his truck to make precise lines out of cattle feed, in the shape of a large “Hi.” The cows duly took their places—“they just want food, you know?” says Klingenberg—and he kept circling, doing his best to keep them in position for as long as he could. Eventually, they broke ranks, thanks to some tasty-looking green grass a few yards away.
A couple of days later, Klingenberg checked the new satellite uploads and discovered his success: There in the middle of the field was a blurry greeting. “I couldn't believe it,” he says. “I never do anything right the first time, ever.”
As for the chosen message: "I just thought I'd say 'Hi' to all the UFOs out there," says Klingenberg. Now it's on them to respond.
Today’s dentures are expertly crafted oral prosthetics made from resins and synthetic materials. But in the dark ages of dentistry, wealthy people could turn to real human teeth to fill in gaps in their smiles.
Such ghoulish dentures are usually referred to as “Waterloo teeth,” thanks to the practice of yanking perfectly good teeth from battlefield casualties. No one is quite sure where that name originally came from, and it's even a bit misleading. But none of that makes the history of humans filling their mouths with the teeth of other humans any less fascinating.
“It’s kind of a misnomer, because the Waterloo battle was in 1815, and human teeth were in use in dentures already,” says Andrew Spielman, associate dean for academic affairs at the NYU School of Dentistry. According to Spielman, human teeth had been used in dentures for at least a century before the Battle of Waterloo, and were routinely culled from battlefields since at least the French Revolution in the late 1700s.
Tooth replacement of some kind or another goes back to ancient times, using blocks of bone or animal teeth to replace lost or bad teeth. In earlier eras of dentistry, dentures and replacement teeth were used primarily for cosmetic purposes, instead of being designed to function as chewing tools.
Spielman says that the practice of using human teeth in dentures began largely because of the particular tastes of wealthy French aristocrats. “It was primarily because of the aesthetic demands of the nobility. The rise of modern dentistry after Pierre Fauchard [the father of modern dentistry], essentially led to the demand for human teeth,” says Spielman. Human teeth were thought to look better and be more comfortable than false teeth up to that point, which were often carved from bone, ivory, or animal teeth. Most sets of dentures from this time only included a handful of human teeth among other false parts.
Human teeth were sourced in a number of different ways. Some teeth came from the dentists themselves. Early dental procedures were often carried out by a wide range of tradespeople, from wigmakers to blacksmiths, who dabbled in fixing teeth on the side. Sometimes traveling dentists would set up in a market square and offer to pull teeth. “Not only rendering treatment, but collecting teeth for future cases. That was the norm even before battlefields provided abundant amounts,” says Spielman.
Teeth were sometimes collected by grave robbers, but during wartime, battlefields could provide a fertile hunting ground. After large battles, like those of the French Revolution and Waterloo, grimly opportunistic scavengers would descend on the scene, taking what they could, including teeth. As the BBC notes, molars were usually left alone because they were too difficult to remove and reshape.
No matter where they came from, human teeth would generally be hung on a string in sets and sold for relatively expensive prices. According to a 1795 price list from the Baltimore Telegraph provided by Spielman, just one uncut, unmounted tooth cost $7, a small fortune at the time.
America’s most famous denture wearer, President George Washington, had some human teeth in one of his sets of false teeth, and it's possible he may have gotten some of them from the mouths of slaves. “Washington had seven or eight sets of dentures. He spent more money on his dental needs than on the medical needs for his entire family and his servants,” says Spielman.
The popularity of human-teeth dentures peaked in the 18th century, although replacement human teeth were still being sold well into the mid-1800s. The use of human teeth in dentures fell out of favor with the rise of more stable and customizable alternatives such as mineral paste replicas, and eventually, porcelain dentures. Like animal teeth before them, real human teeth were prone to putrefaction, so while they looked better, they didn't do any favors for the wearer's breath.
Today, the use of Waterloo teeth is a grimly fascinating footnote in dental history, but for Spielman, the nickname still leaves a sour taste in his mouth. “They were used even before that, which is why I have some objection as to why they would suddenly be called Waterloo teeth, when other battles have been used to collect human teeth,” he says. “The carnage that happened in 1815 yielded a larger amount of teeth than usual, but by 1815, there were [already] alternatives to human teeth.”
There are a lot of kinds of danger. Some threats are loud and obvious, others are covert and subtle. Some are immediate, others take months, years, or centuries to develop. We got some of each kind when Atlas Obscura contacted museums that know danger—places dedicated to weapons, espionage, natural history, and disease—and asked: What’s the most dangerous thing in your collection?
We got everything from berries to bombs, from flammable nitrate films to radioactive dust. What this diverse group of objects share is the way that they remind us that there are shades of danger everywhere—in the sky, in the ground, and deep beneath our own skin. In short the world has innumerable ways to hurt you, and they're often fascinating.
Field Museum
Poison plants collection, 20th century
When people think about dangerous specimens in natural history collections, they might imagine rattlesnakes or scorpions, “but there’s a lot of plants that can do you harm,” says Christine Niezgoda. She would know. As the collections manager for the flowering plant collection at Chicago's Field Museum, Niezgoda has millions of specimens under her care, and some of them were once highly poisonous.
One such object is an herbarium of pressed hemlock, the plant that felled Socrates, though it is sub-lethal because rootstalks—the most potent portion—are absent. Other poisonous plants include rosary peas, belladonna, wolfsbane, and castor beans, which contain the toxin ricin. Luckily, most of what you see on display couldn't possibly hurt you, since many of the museum’s plant installations are made from wax. “You can’t display the richness and the way they look in nature with a dried specimen,” Niezgoda says. So researchers bring back specimens from the field and model leaves, berries, and bark to represent the the more-desiccated specimens organized behind the scenes.
Niezgoda isn’t taking any chances, though. She keeps all of the poisonous plants in a locked cabinet in a portion of the museum that’s only accessible to researchers and staff. “I don’t want to be responsible for someone trying to eat one.”
In 1921, Marie Curie on an American publicity tour that also conveniently served as a chance to replenish her supply of radium. When she passed through Pennsylvania, she presented the College of Physicians of Philadelphia with a piezoelectric device built by her husband and collaborator, Pierre. It the first instrument designed to measure radioactivity. The problem was, the contraption was also radioactive itself.
“Everything in the Curie lab—the pencils, paper, desk—was radioactive,” says Mütter Museum curator Anna Dhody. “They didn’t understand the safety protocols. They were using radium for years and years and years. It was the halcyon days between the time when radium was discovered and the time they realized, ‘Oh, this stuff can kill you.’” That window allowed in an industry of radioactive consumer goods, from lipstick to jewelry.
The piezoelectric machine was placed on view at the College, which houses the Mütter Museum. It was stored in a large case for decades, until the 1980s, when a visiting physician asked whether anyone had whipped out a Geiger counter to make sure it was safe. They hadn’t. “Sure enough, it was radioactive,” Dhody says.
The threat of radioactivity is a matter of exposure and dosage, Dhody says. We're exposed to the rays every day. An annual visitor to the Mütter would have no ill effects, and neither would a curator making weekly rounds, probably. Even so, to be on the safe side, it was pulled off display and received a thorough cleaning to remove any loose radioactive particles.
When she became curator in 2007, years later, Dhody went looking for other potential dangers. The staff scanned storage facilities for mercury vapors, because “lord knows how many broken thermometers” have shattered down there, she says. She also wields her own $100, battery-operated radiation detector, “because I’m a little paranoid now,” she adds. “Every new donation that comes into the museum, no matter if it’s associated with anything radioactive or not—even if it’s a bar of soap—I scan it. Trust but verify, you know?”
It’s no surprise that England’s Imperial War Museum has a vast collection of past threats, namely weapons. The collection also includes objects that weren't intended to be dangerous but are now, such as old nitrate films of historic battles, which are highly flammable. (They’ll be moved to the British Film Institute for long-term storage in a sub-zero facility, says Rhodri Cole, the museum’s corporate communications officer.)
One especially visible reminder of the war’s devastation stands in the atrium of the London branch. The hulking V-2 rocket, terror of the homefront, stands just yards away from the site where one of the ballistic missiles dove into an apartment building and killed 43 people in 1945.
V-2 rockets were cruelly ingenious in their speed and stealth. Fueled by alcohol and liquid oxygen, the missiles arrived “unseen and unheard,” packing a ton of explosives at 3,500 feet per second, the museum states. Some 1,054 of them reached Britain between September 1944 and March 1945. Tens of thousands of workers lost their lives constructing the high-octane explosives, BBC reported, even before they killed several thousand people upon arrival. This rocket has been in the museum since it was brought from Germany in 1946. At almost 46 feet tall, it nearly grazes the ceiling. The V-2 carries a Free Form Explosives Certificate, last updated in 2012, confirming that it is now safe.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Arsenic wallpaper, circa 1840s
For years, green wallpaper had a frustrating habit of fading, or spoiling into a brownish hue. That changed in 1775, when Carl Wilhelm Scheele devised a green pigment to last. The green is still blazing in the floral scene on the museum’s 1836 sample, long after the rest of the design had aged to a ghostly outline. Unfortunately, the chemical that accounts for that staying power is dangerous. The paper is lousy with arsenic.
The risk of poisoning wasn’t limited to licking or nibbling on the wallpaper, says Gregory Herringshaw, the museum’s curator in charge of wall coverings. “The toxins are released mostly when they’re handled—rolled or unrolled, or when you’re pasting the back, which adds moisture,” Herringshaw says. That moisture kickstarts reactions that release the toxin into the air, he adds. When they’re off display, such objects are wrapped in glassine tissue and tucked in a mylar folder. Stored at a consistent humidity and rarely subjected to handling, the curator says, they don’t pose much of a threat. He doesn’t even wear gloves when he handles them, but “Of course, I do wash my hands immediately after.” And he does like to show them off. “Especially students, just for the shock value,” he says. “They all kind of step back when you tell them it’s arsenic.”
The Museum of Human Disease, housed within the University of New South Wales School of Medical Sciences in Sydney, Australia, holds 2,000 tissue specimens as much as a century old. A few of these samples pose potential risks, even today. “We have prion diseases, like ‘mad cow disease,’ which may still be virulent,” says Dean Lovett, the museum’s education officer. “We also have a specimen depicting asbestos, which is a major contributor to mesothelioma and other very serious diseases.” Other samples aren’t risky to the people who encounter them, but testify to the ubiquity of everyday dangers. One diseased lung, for instance, illustrates the deleterious effects of smoking.
This slice of brain tissue shows the hemorrhage that a 57-year-old woman suffered as a result of a stroke. Smoking also dramatically increases risk of strokes, and worsens the damage that they cause. Like many other objects in the museum’s collection, this one reminds viewers about lethal pathologies that are everywhere, but hardly ever so visible.
The International Spy Museum—a nonprofit institution in Washington, D.C.—is full of curious examples of subterfuge. There’s a lipstick canister that shapeshifts into a 4.5 mm pistol, for instance. And then there's these eyeglasses, which hold a lethal secret.
The story goes like this: If a captured intelligence operative was worried about buckling under intense questioning, he or she could nonchalantly nibble on one of the temple tips. The spy would appear to be gazing off into space, lost in thought. In fact, the action would release a small cyanide pill—and even that little dose promised a swift death. Such devices might be found across the world of international spooks, but the museum traces this one to the CIA.
"Spy artifacts, or spy tools, are created intentionally not to be tracked down, or tracked to their original owners," says Aliza Bran, the museum's marketing coordinator. "It's a weird case." The museum authenticates its arsenal of dangerous devices with the input of an advisory board consisting of former members of the KGB, CIA, FBI, and other agencies that you know nothing about, in case anyone asks.
For decades, Alfred Hitchcock was a cinematic giant. Decades of making films such as The Birds and Dial M for Murder established his reputation as “The Master of Suspense.” It was a reputation Hitchcock played up off-set as well, even at dinnertime. At two of Hitchcock’s dinner parties, every single item of food was blue. At another, every dish was death-themed.
Hitchcock’s culinary quirks stemmed from his love-hate relationship with food. He had an uneasy childhood as the son of an English grocer. Once, when his parents stepped out at night while he slept, young Hitchcock woke up unexpectedly. His parents found him eating cold meat and crying. As an adult, he couldn’t stand cold meat, and he loathed eggs (their shape unnerved him) and cheese. Food took on meaningful quality in many of his films as well, from the sinister sandwiches in Psycho to Grace Kelly’s coy offer of “a leg or a breast” of chicken in To Catch a Thief.
Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, also a director and screenwriter, was a fantastic cook. But she didn’t enjoy Hitchcock’s practical jokes, which could be downright cruel: He locked one actress, who was afraid of fire, into a phone booth and filled it with smoke. (Tippi Hedren, the leading lady in The Birds, has accused Hitchcock of sexual assault, suggesting an even darker side to his callousness.)
Some of Hitchcock’s pranks took the form of dinner parties. Hitchcock himself said he didn’t enjoy entertaining much, but he held many perfectly normal dinners, which were often attended by leading actors and celebrities. Other times, though, Hitchcock let his showmanship take over.
One such party was more of a practical joke than a soiree. He held his blue dinner in the upstairs room of a London restaurant called the Trocadero, on a date Hitchcock fails to mention (and his famous guests kept quiet, perhaps out of embarrassment). Speaking about the dinner in a 1970 interview, Hitchcock was unable to keep himself from chortling. “And all the food I had made up was blue! Even when you broke your roll. It looked like a brown roll, but when you broke it open it was blue. Blue soup, thick blue soup. Blue trout. Blue chicken. Blue ice cream.” Even the insides of the peaches were blue.
Hitchcock’s guests included actor Sir Gerald du Maurier (father to author Daphne du Maurier) and Gertie Lawrence, a Broadway star, both famous in the 1920s. Not content with just dyeing the food, Hitchcock also put a whoopie cushion on Lawrence’s chair. Later, Hitchcock repeated the dinner. According to actor Jimmy Stewart, who was a guest, the food, flowers, and silverware were all blue.
In the same interview, Hitchcock described another memorable meal, which he held at his house in Bel-Air. Instead of using large tables, he rented 45 TV-dinner tables and 45 chairs, and set them in a large circle. That would be esoteric enough, but the filmmaker also put name cards on each table. None of the names corresponded to any of the guests, which sent attendees on a spinning gauntlet around the tables looking for their seats. (Jimmy Stewart was a victim this time around too.)
In 1956, Hitchcock threw a morbid haunted house party that perfectly fit his spooky reputation. He invited Warner Brothers executives and members of the press to a rented house in New York, and each guest received an invitation that doubled as a menu. The meal consisted of a whole list of horror tropes: “Morgue mussels, suicide suzettes, consommé de cobra, vicious-soise, home-made fried homicide, [and] ragout of reptile.” He also served a cake made to look like a decrepit church and graveyard.
Life magazine photographed the event, and photos show attendees dressed to the horror-movie nines wandering through cobwebby halls. While it was the strangest of Hitchcock’s parties, it was one of the few where guests were forewarned.
There was one dinner party that Hitchcock never got to have. Hollywood star Carole Lombard was the Hitchcock family’s landlady, renting her home to them starting in 1939. But while still living at the house, Lombard, disgusted by a shrunken head that her husband Clark Gable owned, buried it in the house’s garden. Hitchcock proposed that a party should be arranged to dig it up. But in a twist worthy of one of Hitchcock’s movies, Lombard died in a plane crash, putting an end to any festive feelings.
In 1878, Thomas Edison’s star was on the rise. A few years before, when he sold his quadruplex telegraph design—an industry-changing innovation that allowed four signals to go over one wire—he had used the proceeds to build his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Soon enough, he would start work on his lightbulb and the motion-picture camera, the work that would make him one of America’s most lauded scientists. But already newspapers had started hailing him as a genius, after he debuted the phonograph in 1877.
Now, though, Edison was focused on improving the telephone—a job he took on for Western Union, which was eager to rival Alexander Graham Bell’s new communications company. In March, Edison wrote to William Orton, Western Union’s president, updating him on a conversation they’d had in person about a new telephone design:
“You were partly correct, I did find a ‘bug’ in my apparatus, but it was not in the telephone proper. It was of the genus 'callbellum.' The insect appears to find conditions for its existence in all call apparatus of telephones.”
That coinage is sometime attributed to U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who in 1947 found an actual bug (a moth) in a Mark II computer. She taped the moth in a log book and wrote beside it, “First actual case of a bug being found.”
But by the 1940s this type of bug was already well-known. Edison started using the term in the 1870s, while working on the quadruplex telegraph, which needed a “bug trap” to work properly. By 1878, it had become part of his lexicon: He used it often in his notebooks and had started spreading the term outside his own lab, to people like Orton.
Orton kept the 1878 letter; it came to Swann Galleries as part of a larger estate that included, as well, the draft of a contract between Edison and Western Union. The “callbellum” bug that Edison was referring to was likely in the wires that connected the receiver and transmitter, says Marco Tomaschett, a Swann Galleries specialist.
At this point in his career, Edison was invested in maintaining a strong relationship with Western Union, a major source of income for him.
“He didn’t write this way always, but he was trying to give a good impression—he’s about to renegotiate his contact,” says Tomaschett. “He wants to make a good impression. But he’s famous, so it’s not as if he’s groveling. He’s got quite a bit of clout.”
Eventually, Edison worked out the bug in the telephone. Western Union used his work, along with designs from other inventors, to try to challenge Bell Telephone's hold on this new technology. The two communications companies fought over the telephone for years in court, until Bell Telephone walked away triumphant. By then, Edison was onto a new battle—the so-called "War of Currents" that determined how electricity would flow over wires into households across America.
The way Goran Kneževič tells it, you wouldn't be wrong to mistake his grandfather for a character out of a fairy tale.
A kindly headmaster assigned to an impoverished farming region of eastern Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia), Jože Brilej created a school so special that children begged to attend. So esteemed was his work that he was bestowed Slovenia's highest award for educators: enough money to build a cottage in the forest next to a babbling brook. With any free time they had, the headmaster and his family escaped to the cottage for peace and communion among the flora and fauna of the woods.
But their peace did not last long: Drunken passersby returning home from the market at night began to suspect that lamps in the cottage had been lit by witches. As rumors of unnatural activity grew louder, Brilej made plans to dismantle the cottage and rebuild it deeper in the forest, further from curious eyes.
Instead, he thought, why not make the rumors true? Out of building scraps and discarded materials, Brilej created a witch, complete with a pointed hat, and hung her in the trees near the footpath. The fear of the villagers turned to delight, and he added more enchanted figures, filling the woods with characters and scenes from beloved fairy tales—all made with his own two hands.
Before long, his forest haven drew visitors from distant lands—and the children who had been his students were bringing their own children to see his sanctuary of imagination and ingenuity.
However fantastical it might sound, the enchanted hillside is decidedly real. Brilej built the cottage—its first structure—in 1967, and in 1990, he opened it to the public. He remained involved in its operations until his death in 2015 at the age of 91. Koča pri Čarovnici (in Slovenian, "Witch's Cottage") includes the original dwelling and a winding forest path lined with Brilej's creations, named Dežela Pravljic in Domišljije, the Land of Fairy Tales and Imagination. In the years since he created his first friendly witch, the park has remained a small but determined part of the tourism infrastructure that now sustains Slovenia's Podčetrtek region.
Since the country first voted for independence from Yugoslavia in 1990, tourism has risen sharply, most dramatically after Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004. The industry got a head start in Podčetrtek, says Janez Bogotaj, a Slovenian ethnologist, with the area’s early investment in its natural hot springs. In 1966, the region's long-famed therapeutic waters were made publicly available in Terme Olimia's first wooden pool, and the spa is now one of Slovenia's most popular.
As tourism in the area has increased, so has traffic to Koča pri Čarovnici: Kneževič estimates it draws up to 10,000 visitors annually.
In the height of summer, the attraction is easy to miss from the road, with little more visible than a hand-lettered sign, a stream-fed water wheel, and Brilej's original witch, broom, and scarf still hanging mid-air. Up a set of stone steps is the cottage, now converted into a "How They Once Lived" museum depicting the Slovenian farm life of Brilej's youth. The cottage also houses a trinket shop: Witch dolls hang from the ceiling and witch-head-topped pencils crowd earthenware jars.
Beyond the museum is the park itself, a forest footpath lined with more than 60 scenes from fairy tales, folk tales, and Slovenian children's films. To visitors from abroad, the mix of familiar and foreign can be exhilarating. Here is a recognizable tableau of Snow White's dwarves gaily making music, mouths open mid-song. Nearby, there is a miniature log cabin where, inside a darkened shadow box, twinkling fairy lights illuminate the flaxen-haired Twinkle Sleepyhead, heroine of a well-loved Slovenian fairy tale. Motion-triggered sound and movement give displays an element of surprise. Many, like the Flašefon, a handmade instrument of glass bottles, invite visitors to interact with them.
A huge part of the park's appeal is that it is self-made. No sign, structure, or creature appears prefabricated; nothing looks new. Much of this was by necessity.
"Thirty years ago, you didn't have stores where you can go and buy material, wood, plastic… so my grandfather built from scrap material… old houses, old washing machines," says Kneževič. Slovenia's markets have since changed. Since 2004, modern materials and E.U. funds to support tourism development have become easier to obtain, says Kneževič, but he and his family will continue doing things the old way, by reusing and recycling materials, many of them from nature. To do otherwise, he argues, would be to abandon his grandfather's values.
When he created Primary School Podčetrtek, Brilej imagined a place where children ages 7 to 15 would acquire knowledge and skills by operating miniaturized versions of real-world institutions. The school had a bakery, a bank, a garden, an apiary, and a radio station—all run by and for students with the goal of teaching sustainability and conservation. A lush imaginary world built conspicuously by hand, often of discarded bits and pieces, Koča pri Čarovnici also seems to encourage self-sufficiency and respect for the natural environment in its visitors.
"The point of our fairy tale land is to make things with used materials and do it on our own, not to call some firm [to do it for you]," Kneževič says. "It's another way of educating children."
Many of the park's repeat visitors were first introduced to it shortly after Slovenia got its independence from Communist Yugoslavia. Kneževič, himself just a boy at that time, thinks children's imaginations have since changed. Back then, he says, video games and television cartoons were less widely available, and children’s play was largely outdoors; as a result, childhood fantasies were grounded in nature. Additionally, he says, parents worked shorter days and were more available to read to their children. Now, there's less time for all of that.
Irena Mrak and Irma Potočnik Slavič, geographers at the University of Ljubljana, agree: Slovenians now work longer hours than they did before the country’s markets became globalized. While Slovenia considers itself “a nation who likes to go back to nature,” longer work days have translated to less hours outside, and encounters with nature that once prioritized tranquility now prioritize efficiency.
When parents return to the park with children of their own and wander its meandering paths, Kneževič says, some of the old Slovenia gets revived. And what parents may not think to say, the park says for them: Each curio and hand-painted sign whispers the pride of making new from old. It also sends a message about the responsibility to preserve creatures of fantasy and the forest that provides their home.
As they have for decades, Brilej's descendants meet at the cottage on weekends and holidays to perform upkeep. In good weather, men restore aging structures and rewire electrical connections while women rebuild dolls. In the winter, they gather to produce the handmade souvenirs sold in the park's shop.
Several years ago, Kneževič returned to Podčetrtek from a brewery job in Serbia to take over full-time management of the park with his wife, a kindergarten teacher, their two "little witches," and his extended family. He hasn't looked back; keeping the place true to his grandfather's original mission sustains the park, his family, and himself.
"Back then, people used to laugh at my grandfather: 'What is the principal of the primary school doing, building dolls in the forest?' Now, I see why it was so important for him," he says. "I never come home in a bad mood, sad, or angry. It's such a stress release, working in the forest, making your imagination come true. Whatever you want, you can build there."
As a historical tool, high-school yearbooks provide a great deal of insight into youth in all its awkwardness and heightened emotions.
For the alumni of Topaz High School in Delta, Utah, those feelings are more than complicated.
On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which created a “military exclusion area” on the west coast of the United States, forcing about 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry into incarceration camps for the rest of World War II.
One of these sites was located in rural Delta, Utah. Opened in September 1942, it was called the Topaz Internment Camp, or Topaz for short.
Topaz held so many prisoners that it became Utah’s fifth-largest city during World War II, nearly four times larger than the better-known Manazar camp in California. The population swelled so much (around 8,300 people at its height) that the Buddhist Churches of America, or the B.C.A., relocated their headquarters to Topaz. The camp boasted a sizable number of school-aged children. Two elementary schools, a junior high, and a high school all served as major parts of the community.
Between 1942 and 1945, several Japanese-American high-school students attended Topaz High School, an institution created specifically for them. Taken from their homes, imprisoned by the U.S. government, and placed in a completely unfamiliar environment, they recorded in their yearbooks a unique version of the typical American high-school experience.
Utah State University has archived the 1943 and 1944 editions of the Topaz High School Ramblings yearbook. With a cursory browse, the Topaz High Rams look just like any other 1940s high school students. They played sports, printed alma mater lyrics that probably nobody knew by heart, and produced a slick-looking literary magazine. Topaz High was a prison camp school for unjustly incarcerated Americans, but the yearbooks provide the perception of normalcy.
In the 1943 Ramblings, the beginning dedication reads, “This year finds us vastly different from our naive selves of previous years.” Alongside photos of students, the old high schools they attended, mostly in California and Washington, are listed directly above their Topaz High School activities.
Modern educators and social service workers repeatedly say that kids are resilient when faced with difficult situations. The Ramblings attest to this sentiment. Most of the students in the yearbook photos look bright-eyed, ready to face their future. Others seem awkward and not wanting to be at school. Despite clothing rations of the time, the students look their best for Picture Day.
Some spreads in the Ramblings allude to intense patriotism. The senior superlative page (which includes the category “Brainiest of the Brainer Girls”) is entitled “So Proudly We Hail!” This is taken from a line in the Star Spangled Banner.
Throughout the Ramblings, references to the student body’s love of the United States abound. In fact, several detainees contributed to the Allied cause or served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II.
In Delta, Utah today, most of the incarceration camp buildings are long gone. Plain yet bold signs mark where the hospital, housing blocks, churches, and yes, schools used to stand.
The Topaz Museum, a few miles down the road from the old site, is the result of a multi-year school project carried out in the late 1980s and early 1990s, courtesy of former Delta High School journalism teacher Jane Beckwith. It contains various artifacts from the camp and showcases artwork by detainees.
Beckwith's newspaper students through the years also played a significant role in helping found and execute planning for the museum, which was built in 2013.
During this multi-year project, community interest spread. Soon enough, the project grew from a local history project in a journalism classroom to the Topaz Museum. Beckwith says the museum was “mostly the students’ idea.”
It’s fitting that high-school students brought awareness and eventually a museum to commemorate the Topaz site. Like the Ramblings, the museum is full of life, its artwork and artifacts bringing insight into a dark past.
The photographer James Monnington went to considerable lengths—and depths—to capture the free diver Julien Borde descending into a cenote in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. “This was a challenging shot that required a long breath-hold so I could swim away from the light into the inky black cavern,” said Monnington in a recent artist statement. Only then would he be in position to "wait for Julien to make his descent through the shards of light spilling in from above."
The resulting image is equally dramatic: in stark black and white, Borde appears as a small, diagonal figure suspended in water, under streams of light, and engulfed by the cavernous depths around him. The photograph is among those shortlisted in this year’s Sony World Photography Awards.
To arrive at the shortlist, the judges had a formidable task: nearly 320,000 images were submitted from over 200 countries and territories around the world. The competition, produced by the World Photography Organization, has several different divisions. For the title of Photographer of the Year (plus $25,000 in prize money) professionals are judged on a body of work across a range of subjects, from landscape to news reporting to fine art. Within the first category are otherworldly icescapes from Antarctica, shot by Dan Welldon; brightly colored, linear shapes of playing fields in Guangzhou, shot from above by Varun Thota; and Tomasz Padło’s Greetings from Kazakhstan, which features landscapes with a twist: they have been printed on construction banners in the country's capital, Almaty.
The Open category is judged on a single image, and that shortlist has some startling entries, such as Justyna Zduńczyk’s painterly image of deer in Sequoia National Park, or Paranyu Pithayarungsarit’s photograph of a monolithic sand dune in the Namib Desert. From the commended list, Rita Wong’s rose-pink desert dunes appear like ripples of ice cream, toying with the viewer’s perspective.
Atlas Obscura has a selection of gloriously surreal landscapes from the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards shortlists; winners will be announced on April 19, 2018.
Dominique Vandendriessche has shrimp fishing in his blood. Now in his twenties, Vandendriessche lives and works on the Belgian coast, in the small town of Oostduinkerke, where he is one of the last fishermen alive who catches shrimp from the back of a horse. As a little boy, he says, he accompanied his parents to the shore and watched as his father, Johan, made his way into the waves on the back of a towering Belgian draft horse. Now, Vandendriessche is carrying on the family profession, accompanied by his horse, Jim.
Oostduinkerke is on the southern edge of the frigid North Sea. Its beach is flat and empty, sloping gently into the water, without obstructions or obstacles. From the shore, the water looks unremarkable, if a little chilly. But beneath its surface is an abundance of tiny crustaceans: common, grey-brown shrimp that cluster in shallow waters. Not even two inches long, they are a gourmet treat, served cold as tomate-crevette—hollowed-out beefsteak tomatoes, filled with a tangle of shrimp and mayonnaise—or hot, in a deep-fried, battered croquette. More simply, they are sometimes boiled in lightly salted water and served whole, as a snack alongside local craft ales.
First, however, they must be caught. The fishermen, known in Flemish as paardenvissers, ride Brabant horses, a regional breed that is large and sturdy (generally around 5’7”, or 16 hands, at the withers), with dense feathering on their lower legs, flaring out over their hooves like the bell of a trumpet. The Vandendriessches have six. A few times a week, they harness a chosen horse to a cart via a special wooden saddle and bring it down to the shore. The cart is piled high with equipment—nets, clothes, baskets, and sieves—and the fisherman must perch on its side.
On the grey-blue beach, beset with flocks of seagulls, the horse waits while the fisherman pulls yellow waterproofs over his clothes—pants, secured around the ankles with twine, and a hooded oilskin. The pair walk into the waves, rider on horseback, until the horse is breast-deep in the surf, jerking its head to avoid the seawater that licks at its nostrils.
Behind them, a 30-foot funnel-shaped net stretches back into the waves. As the horse walks, a chain dragged over the sand creates vibrations—causing the shrimp to jump into the net as gaily as if they’d been called for supper. Slowly, they go to and fro, walking the length of the flat coastline, as the net fills with shrimp. Once every half hour, they return to the beach: The horse has a few moments to rest as the fisherman empties the net, using wooden sieves to sift through the catch.
Jellyfish, small fish, and other unwanted sea life are jettisoned back into the ocean, while the shrimp are placed into vast baskets dangling by the horse’s sides. Once they have enough, perhaps 20 or 30 pounds of shrimp, they will return home, where the shrimp are washed, and washed, and washed again before being boiled in a pot over an open flame. (Exactly what each fisherman adds to their pot is a closely-kept secret.) When their sand-colored shells turn a deep puce, the shrimp are ready to be sold on the beachfront or to local cafés. It is labor-intensive and unprofitable: In 2007, fisherman Eddy d’Hulster told the New York Times that the tourist board makes up the shortfall by providing free pastures and stables and financial stipends that help cover equipment costs.
The process looks slow and meditative—the horse and rider winding back and forth—but the practice requires considerable skill and knowledge of the ocean, tides, and the horses themselves, says D’Hulster. “The fisherman must love their horse, the sea, and the fishing. It’s a combination of all three.” Choosing the right horse is a crucial part of the equation, D’Hulster told the Times. "The first time a horse sees the sea and the waves, you can see it running back. They don't like it." But the right horse is a lifelong companion. "There is such a love story between the horse and the fisherman," he said. "Once he has a horse that works, he is married to the horse. Sometimes we say we like our horses more than our wife." The two must trust one another absolutely, especially in the face of occasionally strong currents.
Barely a century ago, shrimp fishing on horseback was a common sight along the Belgian coast and throughout Europe, preserved in the paintings of 20th-century Belgian artist Edgard Farasijn. But it’s fallen victim to urbanization, commercial fishing boats, each of which can pull in 75 tons a year, and dwindling interest from town residents. That’s part of the reason why Oostduinkerke wants to protect the practice and ensure it isn’t forgotten. In the summertime, children and tourists congregate around the fishermen on the beach while, in nearby Koksijde, the National Fisheries Museum chronicles the history and culture of horseback shrimp fishing. This attention, along with a handful of media appearances and a coveted spot on the UNESCO intangible heritage list, helps fund the tourism board that, in turn, keeps the trade alive—albeit as a museum piece.
Each family, therefore, continues much as they have for years or generations. The Vandendriessches have a strict division of labor: Dominique and his father fish; his mother cleans and cooks, serving the shrimps in their family restaurant. According to Marina Laureys, from Belgium’s Arts and Heritage Agency, “Since knowledge is often passed on within the households, families teach their children at a young age how to handle the horse in the specific conditions that the craft requires."
That intergenerational knowledge encompasses all aspects of the trade—weaving the nets, maintaining the wooden apparatus, the actual fishing—along with the ins-and-outs of horsemanship, including reshoeing the horses and grooming them. Most present-day practitioners come from these families. Still, fishermen and local residents alike hope that safeguarding the craft and ensuring its financial stability may draw in new and enthusiastic young practitioners with a background in keeping horses. But it’s methodical, unglamorous work, D’Hulster says, and unsuited to those doing it simply for the attention of tourists and the media. Successful fishermen must have discipline and a deep love for the sea, their horse, and their heritage. “The horses require your passion all year long,” he says. “All year long.”
University of Bath researchers have unearthed a 66-million-year-old pterodactyl with a 30-foot wingspan in Northern Morocco. Including this winged reptile, the research team uncovered six new species of pterodactyls, also known as pterosaurs, from three different taxonomic families. Their wingspans ranged from 6 feet to 30 feet.
Pterodactyls were once the largest animals to soar the skies, but an asteroid collision in present-day Mexico propelled a massive extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, which wiped them out. Their population was thought to be already on the decline up to that point. However, the new finding suggests the pterodactyls’ population had not been decreasing prior to the asteroid collision, but rather thriving.
“The Moroccan fossils tell the last chapter of the pterosaurs' story—and they tell us pterosaurs dominated the skies over the land and sea, as they had for the previous 150 million years,” said research team member Brian Andres from the University of Texas in an interview.
In order for these large reptiles to take flight, they needed light skeletons and hollow tube-like bones to provide the right aerodynamics. “But unfortunately, that means these bones are fragile, and so almost none survive as fossils,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Nick Longrich.
Based on this limited fossil record, paleontologists long believed the pterodactyl population had been dying out during the Cretaceous period. Turns out pterodactyls lived across ecological zones, from Mexico to Morocco, and were extremely diverse in beak shape, neck length, and size.
“I believe there are many more species to find,” Longrich said.
A couple weeks back, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about the places that make them feel a sense of fernweh, a German word that literally translates as "farsickness." Put another way, it's the concept of feeling homesick for a place you've never been or could never go. The responses are in, and they are beautiful.
By far the destinations that our readers said invoke that strange sense of foreign homesickness more than any other are the misty green landscapes of Scotland and Ireland, with an overwhelming number of responses invoking those two regions. Icelandic and English locales were also popular places that you miss without having been there. Still others wrote in to tell us about their feeling of connection with fictional places such as The Shire and Narnia.
But the common thread among nearly all the responses is a sense of poetry. Your responses speak of places both real and imagined, in lush, often evocative verse that paints a vivid picture of your own personal fernweh. Since we received hundreds of responses to our question, we couldn't share them all, but a selection of our favorites can be found below!
What Is This Feeling?
I have always felt that C.S. Lewis described best the experience of fernweh in Mere Christianity. It is a place I long to visit, with no more pain and every tear wiped away. "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." — Helen Ernst, Santa Barbara, California
Scotland, Ireland, England, and Iceland
The Scottish Highlands. I think it's because of all the pictures showing the rocky landscape blanketed in fog, and it gives an almost liminal look to it. It makes me want to walk over and under the hills and get lost in it. It's a place to disappear to. — Valerie, Quebec City, Canada
Cornwall, U.K. In high school (in the '70s) I watched Poldark on Masterpiece Theater. Then I read all the books. Ever since, I’ve wanted to go there. — Carol C., Long Beach, California
The Mill House on the River Dee sat on my grandfather's mantle, and my father's mantle my entire life. The great house, up the road from a paper mill, with peacocks in the yard, sat framed in front of us as we heard countless stories about it. Almost every year my father and grandfather would travel to Aberdeen and spend time at the mill house. From the cutting of the haggis, to the bagpipes played at dinner, I felt like I had been there with them. I felt like I had seen men weep at the playing of the Scottish national anthem, and shared in whiskey and stories. But I never did. Since then, I've grown up and begun to travel myself, even to Aberdeen, but I have never been to the Mill House on the River Dee. Just before I started traveling, it was sold, and my family hasn't been able to go back since. I feel like I miss it, because of the stories that have been passed on to me, and the experiences that I will never have there. The Mill House on the River Dee makes me homesick, even though I have never been. — Daniel Bellerose, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Both Irish countryside and the Scottish Highlands. I yearned for them (especially Scotland) so much when I was young that I cried, and knew every library picture book on Scotland from cover to cover. For my graduation recital in college I poured my heart into Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy, even researching the folk songs upon which his themes were based, which included "I'm a Doun for Lack 'a Johnny" and "Scot's Wha Hae." I also took bagpipe lessons, and my senior paper was on The Great Highland Bagpipe. — Paula Akbar, Frederick, Maryland
Iceland. Landscape of peace. Sounds of Sigur Rós. Smell and flavors of year-old whale meat. Winter of white emptiness. — John
My heart is in Ireland. My great grandfather had the choice of going to jail or going to the USA after killing a man in a fight. The fight was of course not sanctioned, but a rather common occurrence in those days (1865). He was a pugilist (bare-fisted fighter). He buried my first great-grandmother in Ireland. She died giving birth to my grandfather. Once in the U.S., he purchased a tavern, Jimmy's Irish Tavern, and continued to fight. But this time with his patrons. If they could beat him, they didn't have to pay their tab. I have to admit we all have Great Grandpa Jimmy's fight, just not as literal. I want to feel the earth and touch the streets and buildings where I began. I see photos of Ireland and feel a déjà vu. I feel as if I used to walk those streets and live in a little run down cottage on a lane outside of town. And I was happy and very much at peace there. It's very hard to explain. Long after my mother passed away, I found out that she too was from a family in Ireland. She was an orphan so it was hard to determine her genealogy. Thank you, DNA. Once again I am taken back to Ireland. — Debbie Brown, Jackson, Michigan
I’m a Texan, born and raised, but there is a yearning in the deepest part of me to be where the air is crisp and the water ripples across stones that have been smoothed by centuries of sameness, a green place with rolling hills and structures built of the same centuries old stones. I want to hike through the Scottish Highlands or explore the beautiful architecture of Glasgow. Scotland calls to me. I must go. — Becky Middleton, Austin, Texas
I've been longing for the U.K. as long as I remember. I've visited London, which is the most beautiful city in the world, Stonehenge and Salisbury, but I always see myself at one point in life enjoying a walk near the lakes or anywhere near the sea/ocean. Sitting outside of some old cottage, reading a book and looking at the ocean that has no end. Any place by the sea from Cornwall and Devon to Cumbria and Northumberland. — Daria Bizacky, Coppell, Texas
I have a feeling of fernweh about the British Isles, but especially Scotland. I know I have a lot of ancestors from all over the British Isles, and I feel inexplicably connected to the islands and long to visit there. It’s almost like a collective memory. Additionally, as a history teacher, I am drawn to the incredibly rich history of the British Isles. I sometimes have a daydream of hiking through misty highlands and stumbling upon ruins of castles and being able to literally touch hundreds of years of history. It feels like home. — Sarah M., Colorado
Cape Cod
I've been to 60 countries and dozens of states, but never to Massachusetts. In the '50s I fell in love with Patti Page's hit single, "Old Cape Cod," and used to dream of watching sunsets there. In the Kennedy era, my fernweh was heightened, and now I want to visit the John F. Kennedy Library there, and take ferries to Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. — Terri Elders, Westminster, California
Cape Cod. I dreamt of it often as a child, and only identified it as an adult. — Dave Hall, Staffordshire, England
Victorian England
I'm often perplexed by my fernweh for visual depictions of Dickensian villages and life. While on one hand I find myself longing for the top hat style and coziness of a cold village lit by flickering candlelight with soft snow falling, I do not know why I would want to likely suffer the poor social conditions that often come with the world. — Steven Hascher, Washington, D.C.
Farther Afield
My nonno, Angelo, sailed from Northern Italy to Australia in the 1940s and never returned. I am a second-generation Australian, but I long to be in nonno's home town in Torino. I have always felt that I carry a ticket inside me that can only be validated when I get there. I have vivid daydreams of plunging my bare hands into the dirt there. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel it between my fingers. I can almost smell rain falling onto dirt and turning my grandfather's forgotten footprints into mud… — Peta, Western Australia
Tasmania. I’m obsessed. I look at pictures every day. For years I have done this. My great grandmother was from there so maybe that’s why. I never knew her though. I just have an ache for it. — Missi Chenier, Belle River, Ontario
France. I used to spend every Sunday afternoon armchair traveling the French countryside via Google Street View. It was like driving down French country roads and sometimes I felt like I missed it so much, I would even cry! And I have never been to France. Yet some of the countryside seemed so familiar. More home than my real home. It made me happy and sad at the same time. — Eleanor, New Orleans
This question requires the difficult task of sorting through my boundless wanderlust, but if I have to choose a place I believe would feel like home, my answer is San Francisco. As a proud New Englander, I've still always been intrigued by the romance and mystery of the West Coast, especially California which spans so many topographical zones. San Francisco in particular seems like more than a city of art, but a work of art itself, with its wealth of independent bookstores and rich musical history and trolleys clanging through the streets. I picture myself strolling through its hills and being reminded of the seven hills of Rome, another city I love. Creative and prone to dreaming as I am, I believe I could be quite comfortable in San Francisco. — Cecilia, Connecticut
Mongolia. I have no idea why, but I want to see the nature, the steppe, the people, the animals. — Annette Trolle, Denmark
New Zealand! A magical treasure with so much beauty, culture and diverse ecosystems. Every Kiwi I have met is warm and genuine. And being from the crowded, East Coast U.S., I can only imagine life on a faraway island with less people than NYC. My heart pangs for New Zealand and my biggest wish is to "reunite" with it. — Joanna Corwin, Maryland
The Farm of Your Dreams
Our pugs love to chew on hooves purchased from the pet store. My husband thinks they stink and hides them. I find a nostalgic and familiar comfort in the scent of the hooves, redolent of cow manure and grass. One day I sniffed a hoof, and said, “The smell reminds me of my days on the farm.” My husband accurately responded, “What farm?” I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis. Baffled, I had no answer, but I know and miss the place. — Paisley Kauffmann, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Middle-Earth
Obviously I can't visit The Shire but I first read LOTR in 2000 and I was immediately struck by a weird sense of familiarity when reading. It's so welcoming and there's a great sense of community. It almost feels like a childhood neighborhood that I made a lot of memories in. The movies only intensified the feeling. Even now, 18 years later, I feel a weird homesickness for it. — Beth Yoakem, Ashland, Kentucky
The World Through the Wardrobe
Narnia was always my fernweh. When I was little I would wait in my backyard for an entrance to open so I could go there. I was absolutely convinced that my wind chimes would catch the air just right one day, and suddenly I would be walking on the path to the single lamppost in the middle of a beautiful wood. Although Narnia is fictional and I will never go there, whenever I think about it, I feel that when I was a child my heart was there every day. I miss it, and I miss the playful magic there! — Amy Mason, Minnesota
As a child, I read through the Chronicles of Narnia many times, and I never got tired of that journey, even though I knew it so well. Narnia often wasn't comfortable or nice, but I would have gone there without hesitation! I still remember pretty vividly the way I imagined it. Even when I wasn't reading about it, I thought about it and wished I were there. — Carol Mangis, Bronx, New York
Queuing Up On Platform 9 3/4
Hogwarts. I am 70 years old, yet am entranced by everything Hogwarts/Harry Potter. Perhaps it's the "Peter Pan" effect. I never outgrew that one, either. — Cynthia M. Perry, San Angelo, Texas
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I'm still waiting for my letter after all this time. — A. Lee, Malaysia
Not at Home in This World
I find myself longing to live in the English village of Agatha Christie's creation, St. Mary Mead. With the occasional side trip to Badger's Drift, the fruit of Caroline Graham's creative mind. I long to visit the vicarage for tea and listen to the vicar as he wanders down the paths of church history, while his wife offers an insightful quip about a parishioner. I long to read my latest book from the library in my walled garden, whilst my gardener spritzes the roses to keep the green fly at bay, and my cook bakes up some scones for tea. All is well with the world even if the neighbors keep dropping like flies… — Sunny Rose, Canada
Anne McCaffrey’s Pern—an entirely fictional planet with native life-forms similar to mythical dragons, colonized by humans in the far future. I read the Pern novels as a pre-teen and the sheer freedom of an entirely pastoral planet with beautiful dragons, noble dragonriders, unexplored spaces, and endless mysteries to be discovered and solved seemed like heaven to me. McCaffrey painted it so boldly and compellingly through her works that it seemed inconceivable to me that Pern did not truly exist—that this world wasn’t actually waiting just around some corner in the time-space continuum. I was well into young adulthood before I really stopped feeling that odd, lingering wistfulness for this place I knew I would never actually see. - Valerie, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
A fictional sleepy small town called Winhill from Final Fantasy VIII. It's a remote, mostly abandoned small town with Tudor-looking buildings. From what I can tell, the cities economy revolves on flowers—there are flower fields and the main building in town is the flower shop. And everyone in the town decorates the insides of their homes in fresh flowers, and they seem to do nothing but laze about. A cute remote/abandoned town covered by and surrounded by flowers—I wish it existed! — Ashley Polikoff, Brooklyn, New York
The secret garden and the surrounding countryside from the movie The Secret Garden released in the U.S. in 1993. The solitude and open lands that Colin rides. How lovely to be alone and feel and smell the air. Then in the secret garden to be secluded and cozy surrounded by flowers, and water fountains, and baby animals. To be on the swing and later to rest and picnic in the sun, napping in the shade of the garden wall in the heat of the afternoon. — Tammy Moran, Maine
All in Their Heads
When I was a kid, I must have dreamed of two rooms. They were above a garage, and you had to go on a rickety narrow hallway to get to them. But one was a PERFECT children’s library. Shelves and shelves of books and cozy chairs to read in. And the second room was a playroom. There was a low narrow door connecting them. I can even picture how the rooms felt and smelled. For years I was convinced it was a real place I longed to go back to. But it must have been a dream, because my parents swear I was never any place like what I described to them. — Sarah, Pennsylvania
The mind always wanders, but through its romps and davering adventures, sometimes a new place is discovered, one that is more welcoming than one we were born into. Ever since I was a child, I have experienced that nameless longing one achieves when feeling a homesickness for a place that cannot be found on our world map. Why I have felt this way, I cannot tell you. it might have something to do with my lonely and miserable childhood, or it might have to do with a general feeling of dissociation and unwantedness, and while I have never felt as though I have belonged anywhere really, there is one place I have mysteriously always pined for. In a rather shocking twist of fate, this country is called Frewyn (nothing to do with fernweh), the southeastern-most country on the Two Continents. It is a Regency-style kingdom, with its own culture, its own languages, and its own peoples, and I have visited it every day for the last 16 years. Ireland is probably the country closest to its dress and customs, and when I visited the Emerald Isle herself, to see whether there really was any similarity between the two places, I felt right at home, as though I had already visited countless times. I cannot explain these things, science must do it for me, and if the mind is indeed a quantum machine, then perhaps Frewyn does exist somewhere, swirling in the scintillating morass of time and space. — Michelle Franklin
A giant forest residing next to cliffs, falling to the sea. This landscape has haunted me since I was a child. To me it calls forth freedom, peace, isolation, and a gravitational sense of place. I think fernweh exists to allow a space within ourselves for the things we desire most. An outward longing for our own internal emotional landscape. — Ann Tetreault, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Pure Poetry
It exists there in my mind's eye at all times. The beautiful place I have never been. Perhaps it is a compilation of all the things I think are beautiful in this world, perhaps it is something more. I yearn for that cozy clifftop cottage, where the crashing of the waves against the dark gray rocks below joins the sound of a crisp constant breeze and the gentle welcoming of ancient chimes. The calf-high grass moves like the ocean-pitching and yawing to its own tide. There is an old wooden fence, devoid of paint, protecting the pasture from the perils of the drop off. Mountains wax grand and grey through the photographer's Gaussian fog that settles just beyond the ridge of pines that line the land. The ivy-covered cottage comes to greet the rough dirt and stone pathway with an air of joviality, as if it has waited a lifetime to revisit the road. There is civilization in the valley below, close enough for modern comforts, but far enough that there is no sound of squealing brakes or pungent tang of exhaust. All the colors are lively and pure, all the experience as Creation intended, in its undiluted form. There is something beyond time about this place. And while I have never known it in more than a dream, it has borne to me homesickness, the depth and breadth of which is deeper than the sea beyond the edge of that enchanting land. — Samantha Puchlerz, Massachusetts
I long for the stars.
I long to see the arms of the Milky Way flung across space through a great glass window, to look out and see swirling stars and faraway points of light and possibility.
I long to traverse the universe, knowing that I'll never know how large it is, where space works like a soft surface at times and like a blanket always.
I long for exploration and discovery.
The discovery that is remembrance.
I want it to be like Saga, where my vessel is a tree that responds to thought and touch, but also like Dune where every sentence carries a world of meaning and magic.
Theme from Star Trek: TNG on every time we go to warp.
I'd visit the Pillars of Creation, though I know outside that great glass window they would not be as colorful as they are in National Geographic.
And I'd love to navigate through an asteroid field, though it wouldn't nearly be as dangerous as it is on TV.
I long for the impossibly dark expanse of space, and I would not be afraid. The darkness of space is the same darkness one finds in a deep cave, the darkness of the womb.
It is calling us.
It is home.
Engage.
— Gerardo Trinidad Galán, Michoacán, México
Holy crap I could never describe it. Something like a peacefully haunted, rocky, hilly, mossy, coastal spruce grove. Where the fireflies dance in the cool night air. Where it is foggy until noon, where water as clear as crystal trickles through the cracks. I hike because I know this mystical place is remote, I search for it in books, in pictures. I have even tasted it, if only just barely. Yet its full location eludes me. My heart strings tear when I see hues of my far away home, goosebumps envelop me when I see those hues. I think a part of my soul is waiting for me there, and I’m on a hike to look for it. I’m going for a long walk home. — Feather, Florida
Some responses have been edited for clarity and readability.
Our planet produces all sorts of sounds, but some of them—perhaps because they are rare, or at very low frequencies, or overwhelmed by other sounds—have eluded our ears. For example, amid the din of a volcanic eruption, electrical discharges course through the ash plume, generating lightning and thunder. Scientists have now recorded this most metal of all geological sounds for the first time. It's volcanic thunder, live from the Aleutian Islands!
In March and June 2017, geophysicists were studying the eruption of Bogoslof Island, in the Pacific Ocean near Alaska. The stratovolcano—comprised of sandwiched layers of lava and ash—is mostly submerged, but the top 300 feet breach the surface. The researchers studying it were recording audio using an array of microphones on the island of Umnak, roughly 40 miles away.
The actual sound of the volcanic thunder is not quite what you might expect, in part because it has been sped up to make it audible. The rolling rumble in the recording below—evocative of a heavy summer downpour—is actually coming from the eruption itself. Listen closely for the clicks that sound like clacking typewriter keys. That's the thunder.
In some ways, capturing the recording was a lucky break. “This was an opportunistic observation,” says Matt Haney, a scientist at the Alaska Volcano Observatory in Anchorage, and leader of the project. Haney and his collaborators had the microphones set up to collect various types of data. They noticed that Bogoslof’s eruptions brought a lot of lightning. Where there's lightning, they reasoned, it's a good place to listen for thunder. “It's just a question of whether you can distinguish it from the noise that the eruption itself was making,” Haney says. “That was the real challenge.”
Volcanic thunder is hard to detect because it occurs at such a low frequency, and within the cacophony of an eruption itself. A middle C is about 261 Hz, and volcanic thunder is around 10 times slower—around 26 Hz. The sound of the eruption is slower still, around 2 Hz. The researchers first saw the thunder in their data, but they didn't know whether they'd be able to decipher it sonically. "When I played it at normal speeds, it didn't make any sounds on phone or laptop,” says Haney. So they had to tinker—once sped up 60 times, the series of clicks became particularly audible and distinct.
In their new paper, recently accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, Haney and his colleagues explain why seismic activity of a submarine volcano in a remote region of the ocean matters. Even though the area is sparsely populated, Haney says, “thousands of people per day will pass over it in airplanes.” The islands lay along the airplane routes that arc between the western United States and Asia, and volcanic plumes can grind travel to a halt. "We monitor the volcanoes because it's important to keep aviation and ash clouds separated,” he adds. “They don't mix."
Forty-two years ago, Gabriele Rausse received a phone call from a childhood friend who told him he had to “drop everything and come to America.”
The phone call was from one viticulturist to another. Rausse was 30 years old and working on a French vineyard. (He had been working in Australian wine, but his visa was revoked on a technicality.) His childhood friend, Gianni Zonin, was president of the Italian winemaking company Casa Vinicola Zonin. The two had grown up together in Italy’s Veneto wine region, and their phone call forever changed the U.S. wine industry.
Together, Zonin insisted, he and Rausse were going to establish the first Virginia vineyard to have commercial success growing Vitis vinifera, the species of grape responsible for fine wine.
“I was worried,” says Rausse. “All I could think was, ‘My God, he’s gone insane.’”
The year was 1976, and at that time, the idea of making premium wine in Virginia was crazy. While Napa Valley was establishing itself as a world-class producer, few had taken the idea of making European-style fine wine on the East Coast seriously since Thomas Jefferson tried and failed some 200 years earlier. The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services warned that vinifera varieties would not survive the winter. Even if they did, native pests and diseases would kill them off. According to wine-historian and journalist Richard G. Leahy, East Coast vineyards of the time made beverages that were almost universally “more relatable to winos than wine.” Crafted from French-American hybrids or native grapes that yielded flavors comparable to bubble-gum (think Boone’s Farm), the wines were essentially considered a bad-joke by connoisseurs.
On the call, Rausse debated how to tactfully turn down his friend. But he had a second thought.
“My only plan was to get my visa fixed and return to Australia. Suddenly, I realized going to America would let me practice my English,” he says. “So, I accepted. But with a big caveat. I told Gianni, ‘I’ll help you with your fool’s errand. But once I get my visa, I’m gone.’”
Zonin had considered establishing an American vineyard since visiting Napa Valley in 1961. He hoped to create a distribution center and further Casa Vinicola Zonin’s reach. He also worried that his family’s 11 vineyards might be nationalized by communists who seemed capable of winning elections in Italy. After inheriting the company presidency, the sixth-generation scion set out on a grueling survey of “every American viticultural region willing to build a winery.” After traveling to Oregon, New York, and California, he visited an Italian-born friend at the University of Virginia.
The visit coincided with the bicentennial of Jefferson breaking ground at his Monticello estate. Charlottesville was celebrating.
“I remember studying Jefferson’s attempts to cultivate vinifera in Virginia,” says Zonin. “I was fascinated by the idea of a president being a viticultural pioneer.”
Touring Monticello and the mountainous countryside surrounding Charlottesville, Zonin was reminded of his home in northern Italy. “It was so beautiful and somehow familiar. I was falling in love with the area,” he muses. He began to ask questions about soil, rainfall, and climate.
Then he learned of Jefferson’s enlistment of one of the 18th century’s most prestigious wine personalities, Philip Mazzei, an Italian, to manage his experimental vineyard. He also learned of Jefferson’s assertions that the venture would have succeeded if Mazzei’s vines had not been trampled by horses during the American Revolution. Says Zonin, “I began to think, ‘Maybe they chose this place for a reason.’”
Zonin returned to Italy, but Charlottesville stayed on his mind. In his spare time, he studied the region’s microclimate and traced the city’s latitude across the globe, comparing the data to that of sister regions in Italy.
“I noticed the average rainfall and temperature were nearly identical to areas in central Italy,” says Zonin. Virginia had long summers and mild, extended falls that often featured low rainfalls—ideal conditions for growing grapes. “That’s when I knew I wasn’t going to establish just another California vineyard. I was going to do this in Virginia.”
Rausse’s plane touched down in Charlottesville in early 1976. To his chagrin, he discovered Zonin had yet to buy a property. Over the next few weeks, they toured some 25 estates.
“They all looked very good. But Gianni kept saying: ‘No, this is not right,’” explains Rausse.
Then came Barboursville. The hilly, 900-acre estate dated to the 18th century and featured the ruins of an 1814 manor designed by Jefferson for his friend and political ally, James Barbour. Zonin took this history as a sign. Or, as Rausse puts it, “like we were being smiled upon by Mr. Jefferson.”
Though the purchase came as a relief, Rausse soon grasped the contentiousness of their project. “Everyone who knew anything about making wine was laughing at us, and doing it very publicly,” he says. “They didn’t just say, ‘Oh, this is silly.’ I believe they hoped for us to fail.”
Op-eds criticized them as buffoons. Locals cracked jokes about them being in the Mafia. An arsonist burned down the barn housing their winery. Farmers who had planted French-hybrid vines spoke out against them. Officials viewed them with suspicion—as if the endeavor were actually a ruse to undermine the East Coast’s so-called wine industry or mislead local farmers.
When Virginia’s commissioner of agriculture ascertained what was happening, he summonsed Rausse to a conference room in Richmond. For two hours, 24 scientists and professors took turns lecturing. Plant pathologists explained American diseases and virologists told of native viruses. One after another, they said Rausse would fail. The meeting adjourned with the commissioner pointing to a cigar box: “Tobacco is the real future of agriculture in Virginia, not wine.” A Virginia Tech professor added, “The moment you get a Virginia farmer excited about something that does not make any sense, we have a duty to step in and stop you.”
Rausse says he did not like being told what he couldn’t do. He decided he no longer cared about Australia. Walking the busy streets of the capital, he vowed to stay and make Zonin’s impossible vision a reality.
To make fine wine in Virginia, Rausse would have to solve three major problems: cold winters, virulent native pathogens, and late-summer droughts. Vinifera was particularly susceptible to all of these.
To combat occasional droughts, Rausse bought a bulldozer, affixed a huge red plow to its blade, and dug his furrows four feet deep. By creating a wicking system, he hoped to tap moisture from the deep, damp soil during dry spells.
To protect against pathogens and pests, he consulted with growers in the central Italian regions identified by Zonin. From them, Rausse learned about specific chemical sprays and techniques, as well as which vinifera varieties performed best at their highest elevations. These, he reasoned, would be more resistant to cold.
In search of more cold-weather solutions, Rausse researched American predecessors and experiments conducted around the world. A Virginian named Treville Lawrence, who had fallen in love with wine in France, was tending a half-acre plot of vinifera like a garden and had formed the Vinifera Wine Growers Association in 1973. He became an enthusiastic ally and friend, but he’d only so far managed to make a few bottles. So Rausse spent long days making phone calls to winemakers and looking in the library through microfilms of old magazines and newspapers.
Eventually, he discovered Ukrainian viticulturist Konstantin Frank, who immigrated to New York in 1951 and devoted himself to establishing vinifera. Approaching the task like a scientific experiment (he was a Cornell University researcher), Frank purchased a 100-acre homestead in 1958, and planted 66 varieties of vinifera. In 1962, he founded Vinifera Wine Cellars after producing a small batch of Riesling.
“When I discovered he had done this, I was so excited,” says Rausse. “I spoke to him as soon as I could.”
As the long-time butt of establishment jokes, Frank proved a willing conspirator. Based on his success growing vinifera in Ukraine and New York, Frank advocated grafting vinifera buds to rootstock from native vines. This provided two benefits. One, indigenous varieties were immune to native diseases and resistant to certain soil pests—such as phylloxera insects that preyed on tender young vines. Second, the roots would go dormant in the winter and cause the vinifera to do the same.
But there was a catch. Frank buried his vines to protect them from the harsh New York cold. In the spring, he’d dig them up. The process was costly and labor-intensive, and made profitable commercial-scale production unfeasible. Furthermore, it had a tendency to damage the vines. For Barboursville to succeed, its vines would have to survive on their own.
When Rausse cited the area’s winter temperatures, Frank got quiet. “It might just work,” he murmured. “Then again, you may lose everything.”
Undaunted, Rausse purchased 3,000 grafts from a Maryland nursery. He selected the Italian-recommended varieties and had them attached to the American rootstock suggested by Frank. Throughout the spring of 1976, he, Zonin, and a small team of Italians worked 14- and 16-hour days to plant them. Meanwhile, Rausse and Zonin bought cattle and sheep, hoping to offset the cost of the experiment. “That way,” says Rausse, “Gianni would not have to explain a total loss.”
As the vines began to grow, a renowned Italian viticultural professor paid a visit.
“He comes and inspects the vines and declares, ‘You will lose everything,’” recalls Rausse. The judgement was an unexpected blow. “Part of me was believing he would be impressed. That part was expecting to hear, ‘Look at what you have done, you are a genius!’”
Unfortunately, the professor’s warning proved accurate. By the end of the following winter, more than 60 percent of the vines had been killed by the cold. The rest were badly damaged. The experiment was a failure.
Though the catastrophe was hard to stomach, Rausse entered the spring of 1977 feeling more confident. During the previous summer, he’d seen the loss coming, and, in the process, made a discovery.
Rausse and Zonin had traveled to Napa Valley. There, they toured nurseries, looking to secure another source for grafted stock. Observing the plants and processes up close, Rausse was struck by an epiphany he describes as harrowing and extremely simple.
“I realized they were using a ‘V graft,’ which is very fragile,” he explains. “And mistakes they made during the heating process resulted in the callus [the tissue bonding the rootstock to the vinifera bud] being doubly weak ... I knew then this would probably kill our vines.”
In California’s mild winters, the plants could recover. “But in Virginia, where the winters are much harsher, the graft has to be perfect. It has to be very strong,” says Rausse. “Otherwise, the plants will simply fall apart. And that is exactly what happened.”
Part inspired, part horrified, Rausse pulled Zonin aside. With no reliable source to provide grafts, they would have to make their own. Excusing themselves, the two booked the first return flight to Virginia.
Back in Charlottesville, they renovated an old greenhouse and constructed a nursery. Once again, Rausse hit the books. Digging into the past, he discovered grafting techniques employed by Russians to make wine in extreme northern climates. Combining those with what he’d learned working in northern Italy, Rausse devised a solution.
“We decided to use an omega graft, which is very strong and kind of resembles a puzzle-piece,” he says. “Also, we standardized the heating process.”
Tucking the grafted vines into a box full of wet peat moss, Rausse boosted room-temperature to 90 degrees and held it there for four days. This was followed by another 20 days at 80 degrees. The process allowed for the formation of a much tougher callus.
That spring, Zonin and Rausse doubled their plantings. The confidence proved justified. Their vines survived the winter and were, soon enough, producing grapes. Although the vineyard had not yet acquired the certifications for a commercial winery, Rausse produced a test batch of 500 bottles of Virginia-grown vinifera wine.
“I still remember that wonderful feeling when we harvested the grapes,” says Rausse. “I knew that we had done something very, very special. In fact, that same Italian professor called me and said, ‘By God, what you’ve done will change everything!’”
When word of the success began to circulate, orders for the miracle graft came by the thousands. In 1978 alone, he and Zonin sold more than 100,000 vines.
“The demand was unbelievable,” says Rausse. “We sold everything we had very fast and could not keep up.”Buyers flocked from up and down the East Coast, and they included three of the first Virginia wineries to follow in Barboursville’s footsteps: Meredyth Vineyards, Piedmont Vineyards, and the Oasis Winery.
Zonin and Rausse’s discovery effectively marked the beginning of Virginia’s fine-wine industry. Further, it proved vinifera could be grown on a commercial scale in traditionally inhospitable regions. The success quickly led to investment and advancements in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere.
Today, of Virginia’s more than 280 vineyards, Barboursville remains the most esteemed and award-winning. Its Octagon vintage has played a crucial role in establishing the state as a world-class producer—most notably, when it was served at the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.
For this and other reasons, Wine Enthusiast named Zonin the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.
Claiming the “most challenging and therefore most enjoyable work” was finished, Rausse left Barboursville in 1981, in favor of helping would-be entrepreneurs establish new vineyards. Since then, he has served as the primary consultant, planner, and orchestrating agent for more than 100 Virginia vineyards, and founded his own winery.
Of his achievements, Rausse is most proud of his work at Jefferson Vineyards where, in the early 1980s, he realized Jefferson’s dream of a Monticello vineyard.
“To me, Thomas Jefferson is the true father of Virginia wine,” says Rausse, standing on the Monticello hillside. Gazing down at the city of Charlottesville, his adopted home, he raises a glass of red wine. “I always toast to him. I say, ‘Mr. Jefferson, if it was not for you, I would be living in Australia!’”
There's something about the name Steve. Variously a Flight of the Conchords punchline; a parody society of 1,425 scientists who "support evolution;" and the human second fiddle to Blue's Clues' Blue, it now has another, more celestial, claim to fame. Steve is an aurora: a vast, glowing ribbon of light in the night sky, lit up a brilliant lilac and kelly green. This week, the BBC reports, the mysterious aurora made an appearance in Scotland, where it was sighted on the remote isles of Skye and Lewis.
Steve is perhaps the greatest astronomical discovery by citizen scientists of all time. Spotted by a group of aurora watchers from Alberta, Canada, in 2017, it made its official scientific debut last week in a paper published Wednesday in Science Advances. While other phenomena enjoy less glamorous names—"proton arc", say—Steve's unusual moniker is a gift from its finders.
"Shall we start calling it a gas ribbon, or shall we stick with Steve for now?" mused one member in April 2017, in their aurora watchers' Facebook group. In response, another member quoted the 2006 children's film, Over the Hedge: "Why would you want to change its name? It's a pretty name... Steve sounds nice." (It's since been decided that Steve stands for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, for what it's worth.)
Unlike the Northern Lights, Steve can be observed much closer to the equator, and comes from a spot nearly twice as high in the sky, at an altitude of a 280 miles. Its recent discovery belies its prevalence, researcher Eric Donavon told the European Space Agency. “It turns out that Steve is actually remarkably common, but we hadn’t noticed it before," he said. "It’s thanks to ground-based observations, satellites, today’s explosion of access to data and an army of citizen scientists joining forces to document it." That extraordinary name might have been more fitting than its citizen scientists originally thought—after all, there are an awful lot of Steves out there.
Last week, a striking image circulated online: a grainy triptych of registration photos of a 14-year-old Auschwitz prisoner named Czesława Kwoka. Auschwitz’s prisoner photos were all shot in black-and-white, but this one is rendered in soft color that makes each detail — from the red triangle on her uniform to the crimson dried blood on her lower lip — that much more jarringly lifelike. Marina Amaral, the 23-year-old Brazilian artist who meticulously colorized the image nearly three-quarters of a century after the photograph was first taken, released the colorized version on her blog in 2016 for Holocaust Remembrance Day. “I wanted to give Czeslawa the opportunity to tell her story, which is the story of so many other victims,” Amaral says. “I wanted to emphasize that they were not numbers or statistics, they were real human beings.”
Adding color to historical black-and-white images isn’t a new phenomenon, but in recent years, a community of artists has emerged online as interest in their work has surged. In 2012, Danish artist Mads Madsen shared a portrait of a military general named Gershom Mott in full color, from the gleaming brass buttons on Mott’s uniform to the salt-and-pepper tones in his beard. The photograph looked as though it could’ve been a modern-day reproduction—yet the original was shot in 1864 during Mott’s service in the American Civil War, decades before the advent of color photography and more than a century before it became commonplace. As the photo made its rounds on Reddit, over a thousand commenters chimed in, many noting not only the image’s realism, but also the way it just seemed uncannily lifelike compared to static, black-and-white archival images from the era. “I love how colorized photos enable me to imagine these guys walking around today,” one commenter remarked. “I feel like I saw this guy at the store,” wrote another.
Madsen spent hours reconstructing the pigments in Mott’s portrait, from researching the exact color of the general’s ribbons and medals to meticulously building up his skin tone, layer by layer, in Photoshop. He was 17 years old at the time and self-taught with no artistic background. “I couldn’t draw a stick figure,” he now jokes. The Mott portrait was the first of Madsen’s work to go viral; the ensuing attention inspired him to found the Colorized History subreddit, a community where a select group of artists like Madsen and Amaral now regularly share high-quality colorizations of historical images, the very next day.
Five years later, Colorized History has more than 300,000 subscribers and has become one of the fastest-growing communities on Reddit. The images span eras, content, and tone: from somber military scenes, like Robert F. Sargent’s ominous 1944 shot of the Normandy Landings (“Into the Jaws of Death”), to portraits of historical figures—Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Rosa Parks, Sugar Ray Robinson—all painstakingly, vividly brought back to life. The comments on most of the subreddit’s posts echo a shared wonder at the eery, uncanny valley-like effect of seeing a frozen-in-time image made so much more relatable. Of a colorized portrait of Abraham Lincoln, one user observed: “I feel like I’m looking at the man, and not the legend.”
Why do these reproductions resonate so deeply with so many people? Color images have a greater impact on our visual memory, and allow details we might otherwise gloss over to leap off the page. Take Amaral’s colorization of“Migrant Mother,” the iconic Dust Bowl image shot by Dorothea Lange at a California migrant camp in 1936. The image, already stunning in black-and-white, looks strikingly, startlingly familiar in color. Every detail, from Florence Thompson’s sun-burnished skin to the frayed fabric on her tattered sleeve to the scuffs of dirt on her son’s cheek, seems to take on new dimension and feel more alive. The hardship embodied feels timeless, more viscerally human. Similarly, in the photographs of Czesława Kwoka, an already-haunting image takes on new dimension. “We can better understand what she and millions of others went through once we see the bruises, the cut on her lip and the red blood on her face,” Amaral says. “I hope people look at Czeslawa and understand that she was a 14-year-old girl who was tagged as a political prisoner and was murdered for absolutely no comprehensible reason. And she was only one among millions of others.”
Technology and the accessibility of software like Photoshop has allowed colorizing to become not just an artistic hobby, but for artists like Madsen and Amaral, a career. Amaral first began to experiment with colorizing in 2015 on a cache of black-and-white World War II photos she found online. The artist is now collaborating on a book, The Colour of Time, with historian and author Dan Jones. She restored over 200 historical photos for the project, many of which have never been seen in color before. “I never imagined or planned that this would become my profession and that I would built an entire career out this,” she says.
The amount of time an artist pours into a single image can vary wildly—“days, weeks, or hours,” says Madsen. He spent roughly six hours on a portrait of Winston Churchill, while more complex compositions, like a scene of Hitler in the Reichstag, can eat up as much as 50 hours in total. “There's about a hundred people in that, all in different uniforms, plus Hitler himself,” he explains. “Everything had to be colored, from the buttons and ribbons on the uniforms to the tables in front of them.” Amaral recalls spending the better part of a month on this early 20th-century photo of New York's banana docks, agonizing over each hat, each face, each strip of fabric in the composition. (A 2017 Vox documentary details how that process actually unfolds on the screen.)
Before the artists even launch Photoshop, of course, there’s the research. Madsen says he and his fellow historic colorizers take great measures to ensure their work is as historically accurate as possible; on past projects, he’s referenced everything from historical records to eyewitness accounts to military-issued uniform manuals. Amaral says she is constantly reaching out to historians for their input on everything from uniforms in the foreground to signage in the background in order to prevent mistakes and anachronisms. “The research is the most important part, because we are dealing with historical documents, and we need to respect that,” she says.
While they all share a fundamental interest in history, each colorist has found themselves gravitating to different eras and styles of photography. Madsen is partial to portraits in general, and has worked on a number of images from the Civil War, but recently began exploring the American Revolution. Amaral says her preferences shift, but has lately found herself favoring historic portrayals of everyday life: “regular people carrying on with their daily duties who had no idea they would be seen decades after through a computer screen,” she says.
Amaral regularly receives messages from strangers thanking her for helping them gain a better understanding of historical images after seeing her work. “I'd say that's the best compliment I can receive,” she says. Madsen, too, has heard from people who “are not really history fanatics, but have started enjoying history on a deeper level once they've seen colorization and how it affects the human mind,” he says. That’s not to say there isn’t backlash: Madsen says the artists are occasionally accused of “defiling” history, though he and his fellow artists see their work as more of a complement than a replacement. (For what it’s worth, color photography elicited its own fair share of raised eyebrows back in the day.)
While purists may take umbrage at the idea of reworking history, there’s no question that these images have a powerful effect. Madsen describes black-and-white images as “sort of alien” in how they feel like relics from a bygone era. In grayscale, a historical photograph can feel trapped under museum glass. When color is added, Madsen says, everything changes. Wars waged, leaders assassinated, a nation’s greatest moments of pride and disgrace — color doesn’t just make these images attractive or more palatable. It throws its subjects’ humanity into high relief and forces us to see historical events as things that happened in real life to real people, not events that unfolded in the chapters of a history textbook. “Suddenly, it's right there in front of you,” Madsen says. “You can almost feel it.”
