Need a good bachelor party activity? Tell your guests to hop on a plane at Girona–Costa Brava Airport in Spain (GRO), and fly to Tsentralny Airport in Omsk, Russia (OMS). From there, if possible, have them grab another flight to Manchester International, in England (MAN). Once they've touched down, they will have experienced three vastly different cities, sure. But they also will have spelled out a word: GROOMSMAN.
Most of the world's functioning airports have a three-letter identification code, assigned to them by the International Air Transit Association. For instance, New York's John F. Kennedy Airport is JFK, Los Angeles International is LAX, and Frankfurt Airport is FRA. Aviation professionals use the codes as shorthand while tagging baggage or flying from place to place. But as artist Parker Higgins recently realized, you can also use them to play a fun game: inventing three-city itineraries that spell out nine-letter words.
Higgins was inspired by a friend of his, who used to spend a lot of time between London, Stockholm and Berlin. "The location field on her Twitter bio said LONSTOBER," he says. This always struck him as a great word, he says, although technically it isn't one. He figured there must be others like it, only realer.
Higgins wrote a Python script that stuck together trios of three-letter airport codes, and cross-referenced the results with an actual dictionary. He then posted the results on Twitter:
As far as I can tell, the longest words you can spell entirely out of airport codes are each 9 letters long. It's quite an evocative list of words, too. pic.twitter.com/ssNMRz3s5O
So how many are there? As with most thought experiments, mileage may vary depending on your criteria. "There are two weird pressure points you can push on," Higgins says. "The first is, what counts as a word?"
Higgins started with a fairly limited vocabulary list, and came out with just 36 words that qualified, from AEROMETER (Sochi, Russia + Nome, Alaska + Terceira, Portugal) to TRICHROME (Bristol, Tennessee + Châteauroux, France + Nome again, Nome again, jiggity jig). (You can see these mapped here.) Later, he decided to use the entire Mac OS dictionary instead, which spit out far more contenders—over 100.
The second thing up for debate is, what counts as an airport? Some of the codes that work well as infixes or suffixes belong to airfields that are difficult to get to. If you want to fly ENSHELTER, for example, you'll have to get a flight out of a one-runway airport in the Netherlands that only hosts local aviation clubs. LAXATIVES counts only if you give a pass to tiny Darke County Airport in Ohio.
Regardless of one's stringency—and the feasibility of the trips—piecing together these itineraries invites pleasing coincidences. DABBLINGS, for example, starts in Daytona, Florida, crosses the whole United States to Bellingham, Washington, and then hops way over to Nagasaki, Japan—a great trip for a geographic dilettante. And if you love the capital of the Netherlands, you can jet away without really leaving—fly from there to Portugal and then Damascus, and you'll spell out AMSTERDAM.
Other word-journeys are more ironic. Two out of three of the destinations that make up GLOBALIST are in the same country. TRIANGLED—Bristol, Tennessee to Angoulême, France to St. Petersburg, Russia—does technically form a triangle, but it is, as Higgins points out, an extremely obtuse one.
It's difficult to imagine actually taking one of these trips. If you're hell-bent on making one happen, though, your best bet is probably SUNBURSTS: appropriately, an American West Coast jaunt that takes you from Hailey, Idaho to the Californian climes of Burbank and Santa Rosa. Higgins has already thought about it: "It's about $350 to do SUNBURSTS," he says, although it involves connections in San Francisco, which you would have to gloss over when bragging.
But his favorite is a little less practical. "Suppose you're flying from Brownsville, Texas to Washington D.C.," he says. "If you go just a little bit out of your way, and connect in Melbourne, Australia, you can fly BROMELIAD." Hey, a word nerd can dream.
Forty years ago, opening a KFC franchise in Tehran was a sign of progress. Today, it’s against the law.
Before the 1979 revolution—before religious clerics took control of the country—Iran’s capital, Tehran, was a cosmopolitan city that glittered with Western influence: secularism, mini-skirts, and fast food chains such as McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken. But the new ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, pushed a return to Islamic values and removing American influence. And so, women were forced to cover, Western texts were removed from schools, and American franchises were suddenly contraband.
In cutting its Western alliance, Iran became an isolated nation focused on traditionalism and hounded by morality police. Beneath the surface, though, most Iranians maintained an appreciation for Western culture, whether that meant banned literature or McDonald’s-style burgers. If there was one thing the government couldn’t suppress, it was taste. That’s why Iran is now home to dozens of knockoff franchises, from Mash Donald’s to Sheak Shack, that have taken advantage of hostility toward American fast food to serve dangerously delicious burgers, fries, and burritos. You can find the golden arches in Iran; they just have no official connection to McDonald's.
In the 1970s, Tehran was urbane and opulent. But it was also corrupt. The Iranian government had essentially been under Western control since 1953, when democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was ousted in a coup organized by the United States and Britain. Like many Middle Eastern affairs, oil fueled the conflict—Mosaddegh tried to audit and then nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, so they retaliated.
The Shah Reza Pahlavi I assumed increasing power after the coup, and the family’s totalitarian reign tightened under his son, Reza II.* Dissenters mysteriously disappeared, and anyone who resisted got a visit from the Shah’s secret police. Many fled, were imprisoned, or worse. Under the leadership of high priest Khomeini, a swarm of people decided they’d had enough and revolted. Bloody demonstrations followed, and in 1979, the Shah left in search of exile and cancer treatment. Khomeini became Supreme Leader of Iran.
The Revolution and the change that followed created both more tension with the United States and a sizable Iranian diaspora in the West. Many secular Iranians left the new theocracy for Europe, Canada, and the United States. Others fled what followed: The arrests, inflation, and violence, including a certain hostage crisis at the American Embassy; tightened borders and U.S.-led sanctions; and a bloody, eight-year war with Iraq (who the United States backed) in which young boys were drafted and bombs rattled major, historic cities. Years later, the exodus would help expose those left behind to the rest of the world.
Iran’s government became less rigid in the 1990s, after Khomeini’s death, and citizens grew gutsier about flouting some strictures on Western ways. Women wore bright lipstick accented by veils, with sandals peeking out below mandated overcoats. And Iranian entrepreneurs, inspired by fast food’s success abroad, opened imitations in Tehran. (They later expanded to medium-sized cities.)
Despite the government’s efforts, Iranians maintained contact with the West through satellite television and visits from the diaspora and their American-born children. Fast food, then, became another way Iranians could experience the outside world.
“Iranians got tired of limited food options and were looking for a quick bite to eat,” says Holly Dagres, Iranian-American journalist and analyst and curator of “The Iranist” newsletter. “Fast food seemed the way to go, especially since many Iranians travel to Dubai and try American fast food franchises there.”
At the start of the fast-food wave, these restaurants were seen as places of status. Dagres recalls that Super Star, a Carl’s Jr. knockoff, was the place to be seen in the ‘90s. “Not every Iranian could afford a burger that cost almost as much as a kabob dish,” she says.
Over the next few decades, the copycat trend snowballed into outright saturation: Mash Donalds, Boof Burger, Subways, Sheak Shack, Pizza Hat. Menu item names, such as Dahbel Dahn (KFC Double Down) and Wooper, were adjusted to fit the Persian vernacular’s rich vowels. In other cases, traditional ingredients met Western formats to create one-of-a-kind dishes, such as lavash-wrapped burritos stuffed with jujeh (chicken) kebab, grilled vegetables, saffron rice, and yellow raisins.
“Fast-food in Iran is very much from other countries and cultures,” says Mahan Kazemi, a fast-food enthusiast based in Tehran. Despite the people’s appreciation for Western culture, sanctions, tariffs, and government hostility deprive Iranians of famous brands and international food: They can’t open a bona fide KFC franchise or access the Colonel’s fabled blend of herbs and spices. (Although Coca-Cola and Pepsi are widely available again, via subsidiaries and local production, after a Bill Clinton-era ban.) Imitation through fast food, then, is their answer.
In most countries, these restaurateurs would have to worry about lawsuits from Chipotle, Shake Shack, and KFC. But Iran’s murky relationship with the United States gives these entrepreneurs some leverage.
The legal institutions do exist for McDonald’s lawyers to shut down Mash Donalds. Iran may not belong to the World Trade Organization, but Iran’s Patent and Trademark Office is part of the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Madrid Protocol, and Iran has special courts that handle these cases.
“Nothing in the existing sanctions prevents a U.S. company from registering a trademark in the Islamic Republic,” says David Jacoby, an intellectual property partner at New York’s Culhane Meadows law firm. “In fact, the U.S. Government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has a general license under which American companies can take steps to protect their intellectual property rights in Iran.” In 2010, for example, Baskin-Robbins managed to shut down five bootleg franchises.
A post shared by Raees Coffee, Iran's Starbucks, on Instagram.
But such cases are rare, as the dysfunctional Iranian-American relationship makes enforcing intellectual property in Iran unfulfilling for fast food chains. Culhane Meadows partner Felicia Traub describes Iran as unfamiliar trademark territory. “For starters, Iran might not even allow the registration of every mark that might have qualified for registration elsewhere.” Traub cites the example of the Islamic Republic refusing trademarks that include portraits of women. That means no trademark for the Columbia Pictures logo and no trademark for Aunt Jemima pancakes.
Jacoby explains that given the unfamiliar legal terrain and lack of diplomatic ties to help navigate legal missteps, companies are inclined to devote their limited time and money to enforcing trademarks in bigger markets. As Dagres sums it up: “Why go through the trouble of pushing for a trademark infringement when your company doesn't have a presence in the country to begin with?”
Instead, the larger concern for the Iranians behind Sheak Shack and Subways is the Iranian government. Iran’s imitation fast food chains, Dagres says, are “the symbol of American cultural imperialism, which was one of the driving forces of the 1979 revolution.” Authorities can shut them down for promoting gharbzadeghi, a Persian term for “westoxification.” In 1994, for example, the Basij, a parliamentary, volunteer-based militia established after the Revolution, famously threatened a McDonald’s imitator with arson. The restaurant shut down within two days. More recently, in 2015, when a Turkey-based imitator of KFC opened in Tehran, it was shut down due to the “grave danger” it posed.
In the end, the restaurant owners play a balancing act: imitating Western chains enough to draw Iranians who want to try those brands, but not so closely that the government accuses them of corrupting and Westernizing the country.
On weeknights, the food courts at Tehran’s Palladium Mall buzz with customers. Located on the famous shopping center’s first and third floors, the courts are dotted with modern yellow and lime green chairs and towering fake palm trees.
On trays and counters, American staples and pizza cohabitate with tostadas, chicken katsu, and Irish breakfasts. People wait up to 10 minutes in line, soaking up the hype. Several of these chains aren’t even knockoffs—they’re original concepts.
“There's always a fast food restaurant popping up somewhere,” Dagres says. Many Iranians see fast food as a novelty that enlivens nights out, or they prefer “catering” their parties with take-out burgers and burritos to spending hours in the kitchen.
“Iranian franchises like Boof and Apache compete with each other, but their bigger concern is if tomorrow an original Western franchise opens up,” Dagres says. “If McDonald's opened up, Iranians would likely never go back to an Iranian franchise. Not necessarily because McDonald's tastes better, but because it's trendy and a Western franchise.”
Iran has a long way to go before it can repair its relationship with the West, and that depends on political will on both sides. In the meantime, ordinary Iranians just want to get a bucket of fries and enjoy the foods they crave most.
*Correction: This post has been changed to clarify the balance of power after the 1953 coup.
On a narrow street in the town of Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland, is B. Corcoran, a men’s clothing store. It’s been in operation since 1956, a fact which is evident from its storefront: above a painted olive green exterior, a wedge-shaped sign spells out "B. Corcoran Ltd." in burgundy scripted lettering.
Storefronts such as this one are a visual treasure for the graphic designer Trevor Finnegan. For the past eight years, in his spare time, he's been exploring and photographing traditional Irish stores all over the country. The ongoing project is a way to document an important part of Ireland’s visual traditions and crafts, says Finnegan. “Their unique design style and the typographic styles really appeal to me,” he explains. “They are the face of local business and the give a real sense of friendliness that you find in these types of places here in Ireland.”
There’s another reason that Finnegan wants to document the storefronts: they’re in decline. Smaller, family-run stores suffered during the recession, he says. “With many young people now living and working in the bigger cities such as Dublin, Cork, and Galway, many of these shops just simply closed down.” There is also the seemingly inexorable shift toward larger or more homogenous stores. “People’s shopping habits have changed and bigger chain stores have moved into towns across Ireland,” he says, “which has really affected local smaller businesses like these.”
Finnegan's project is not just about aesthetics. Wherever possible, he’ll speak to the people inside to learn about the store’s history. When it comes to framing his images, he takes a similarly direct approach: a straight-on view, showing the entire facade, and an uninterrupted view of the colors and typography.
Over the years, Finnegan has noticed certain visual patterns. In West Cork, Kerry, and Limerick, he noticed a greater use of ceramic lettering, "while shopfronts in more northern counties such as Donegal and Cavan tend to use the Gaelic spelling of their names on the frontage." He also notes that designs would have been dependent on the local craftsmen. “So for instance some towns might have very beautiful hand-painted signage done by the local sign-painter, while others might be more focused on the skills of a local carpenter.”
Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Finnegan’s project, which you can follow through the Instagram account our.type.
Just 50 years ago, the International Symbol of Access did not exist. Known variously as the Wheelchair Symbol and “the little blue sign,” the icon features an individual sat on their wheelchair, apparently motionless, with their arms perched on the sides. Created by the Danish design student Susanne Koefoed in 1968, in the original version, the person on the wheelchair was missing a head.
Today, the ISA appears all throughout the built environment: bathrooms, accessibility ramps, automatic doors, parking lots. It has become part of the world’s ISO-ordained pictographic vocabulary—as instantly recognizable as signs that tell you which bathroom to use, where the elevators are, or not to smoke. For decades, it has served as a way to tell people with disabilities “you are welcome here,” in a world that doesn’t always make the arrangements for accessibility that it should.
“It's something that we sort of take for granted,” says Rochelle Steiner, co-curator of the exhibition Access+Ability currently on show at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. “That we see all over the U.S. and all over the world as a symbol of disability.”
Over the last few years, however, a rogue icon has rolled quietly into sight. The “Accessible Icon,” as it’s known, began as a Boston-based street art project. In the past eight years, however, it has mushroomed into an international movement, with the symbol now on signage around the world. The symbol has even been codified in emoji, appearing on iOS devices in a cluster of blue squares, between P for parking and WC for water closet. Yet however ubiquitous it may appear, this rival wheelchair symbol has prompted a spectrum of reactions. It has variously been called ableist and empowering, and been deemed federally illegal and officially rejected by the ISO, despite having been adopted by the states of New York and Connecticut. But where did it come from, and why has it provoked such controversy?
The Accessible Icon was by no means the first attempt to adjust the 1968 Wheelchair Symbol. Around 2009, the design and disability studies researcher Sara Hendren began cataloguing alternative accessibility icons on her blog, Abler, where she also tracked developments in prosthetics and topics related to the human body. Without fanfare or hubbub, in certain corners of urban space, the figure in the wheelchair had been ever-so-slightly adjusted. In some iterations, the person’s body was simply less blocky, with organic, rounded shoulders and arms—arguably more recognizably human than Koefoed’s original stick figure. In other variations, the person’s arms reached back to push their wheels.
Hendren began to notice these altered icons across the United States—in the bathrooms of MOMA in New York, for instance, or in a Marshalls department store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They were subtly different—in the Marshalls version, speed lines had been added to show a person in motion—but each made some effort to show a person with disabilities moving around the world. Brian Glenney, a graffiti artist and philosophy professor at Norwich University in Vermont, saw potential for a project. In a comment on Hendren's original blog post in late 2009, he wrote: “I suggest a tagging run of these. We create the signage and ‘replace’ old signs … What would be best is an ‘overlay’ design, that makes use of the passive wheelchair image but makes it active.”
Together, Glenney and Hendren designed a transparent overlay of a person in a wheelchair, colored a vivid orange. The figure in the wheelchair seems dynamic—the outline of two wheels suggesting furious motion, with their torso shunted forwards, as if propelling themselves into some glorious unknown. In 2011, around 1,000 of these icons were pasted over the top of existing accessibility icons around Boston, in an attempt to generate questions about what Hendren describes as “disability and the built environment, in the largest sense. … Framing this work as a street art campaign allowed it to live as a question, rather than a resolved proposition. At least at the outset.”
They had had no intention of creating a new symbol, or even in leading the charge for widespread adoption of their design. It was, Glenney says, simply a street art project “that got a lot of attention and traction.” But as the decals received more and more media coverage, they realized that there was genuine hunger for systematic change.
So, to move from guerilla design activism into functional, socially aware design, the pair partnered with Tim Ferguson Sauder, a professional graphic designer, to bring the icon in line with professional standards. They scrapped the orange, adjusted the wheels so that it could be easily stenciled, and then thrust it out into the world in September 2012, making it open source, so that it could be used by the people who needed it the most. “We switched gears,” Glenney says. “We essentially said: ‘This is yours, now. We’re putting it into the public domain. Please, just take it, and do what it what you will.’ That’s kind of the way that things changed.”
In the years since, Hendren and Glenney have seen hundreds of icons in use all over the world. It’s on parking information at a hospital in Delhi, India; on a printed U.S. Department of Treasury sign; stenciled on curbs; and in MoMA’s permanent collection. Organizations such as the nonprofit Triangle Inc., which is based in Malden, Massachusetts, have used it as a way to bring people with disabilities together, employing them to replace signs and icons across the country. Other campaigners have still greater designs: The Forward Movement, in Ontario, Canada, wants the “Dynamic Symbol of Access,” as they call it, introduced across the province, and currently have six cities, including Toronto, on board.
Those anxious for change see the old symbol as a relic of an unsatisfactory past. Like the word “handicapped,” which was removed from New York state signage in 2014, advocates say the ISA icon is dated both in design and what it represents. The Canadian activists Jonathan Silver and Dylan Itzikowitz, who are behind the Forward Movement, believe the ISO symbol places the emphasis on the wheelchair and disability, before the person. By contrast, they say, the new symbol “shows movement, a symbolic action that emphasizes differing abilities.”
Mike Mort, who runs the blog Disabled Identity, also favors the new icon. “I don't mind the older symbol,” he says, “but I definitely think this is a step, roll if you will, in the right direction. To me, the more active look of the ‘revamped’ icon better represents the freedom and equality that accessibility truly brings.” It might not represent him absolutely—Mort is a power-chair user—but he appreciates the meaning behind it, and acknowledges that “it's impossible to capture the diverse experiences and needs of the disabled community with a singular design.”
Some detractors do object to the design itself, and what it might imply, however. In 2016, CT News Junkie quoted Cathy Ludlum, from Manchester, Connecticut, who spoke publicly about Connecticut’s embrace of the new icon. Ludlum has spinal muscular atrophy and professed her preference for the old symbol. “The old symbol leaves everything up to the imagination,” she said. “The new symbol seems to say that independence has everything to do with the body, which it doesn’t. Independence is who you are inside.” Like the figure in the old symbol, she said, “I am blocky and rigid.”
Others are more concerned about its origins. Glenney speaks with clear regret about the people who see it as ableist, “because the people that designed it weren’t people with disabilities. That’s definitely something that I’m sympathetic to, I agree with,” he says. “Had we known that our little street art project was going to change into something that was an advocacy project, we wouldn’t have done it the way that we did it. We would have essentially taken a back seat, and worked with people with disabilities, and have them design it and apply it. We would have just collaborated with them.”
But what many do seem to agree is that, at the end of the day, a symbol change can only do so much—what matters most of all, Mort says, is the accompanying dialogue about how people with disabilities are viewed within society. Brendon Hildreth from North Carolina, who uses a wheelchair and has been involved with advocacy work for the Accessible Icon Project, feels the same. Hildreth says he’d like to see the new symbol adopted alongside contextualizing information that explains why change is necessary. “I hope the new symbol can bring about conversation as to what is necessary for a person with disability needs in their community,” he says. “Accommodations should be automatic.” And even if some of his colleagues in the disability activism community don’t agree on the specifics of the design, Mort says, the very fact that these discussions are taking place is powerful.
Perhaps surprisingly, Glenney and Hendren are comfortable—pleased, even—with people disliking the symbol, and its official rejection from many standardizing institutions. Its existence, they say, has facilitated discussions that might otherwise never have taken place. “My favorite thing about this project,” Glenney says, “is that it gave [Ludlum] a platform to talk about how she views her disability. That’s the success of our project.” The icon’s limited legality and adoption seems, in a sense, to serve as a kind of metaphor for the restricted access that many people with disabilities experience all the time. “We really like the situation we’re in,” Glenney says. “It gives visibility to the context of people with disabilities. It keeps them ‘in the market’ of ideas, so to speak. Our symbol is most successful when it’s not fully legal—when there’s lots of wrinkles and questions.” As long as conversation channels are open, he says, there’s still the possibility for change even greater than the simple replacement of one blue and white sticker with another.
The weeks and days before the Chinese space station’s imminent reentry into Earth’s atmosphere have been busy ones for Marco Langbroek. He’s a trained archaeologist and a passionate amateur satellite tracker, and his followers want to know when and where Tiangong-1 will chart a fiery course through the sky. In pursuit of an answer, he’s logged long stretches at his computer in the Netherlands, fiddling with predictions about what’s going on up there.
One thing’s for sure: The space station is falling. Tiangong-1, which launched in 2011, stopped communicating with ground control in March 2016. With no way to bring it down into a controlled descent, scientists have only been able to wait for its orbit to decay. It’s expected to tumble to the ground or ocean sometime in the next few days.
Both amateurs like Langbroek and government agencies want to figure out where and when it will arrive. For weeks, Langbroek has been posting daily forecasts on Twitter and his blog. His mission is both aesthetic and logistical. Like a meteor, it could leave a remarkable streak across the sky; if the weather cooperates, anyone in the vicinity will be able to see it with the naked eye. And when it touches down, any pieces that weren’t incinerated will need to be found and possibly repatriated to China. (Under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the 1972 Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, anything falling from space is the property of the country that put it up there.)
Predicting its path and crash site is no simple task. There’s a lot of data to wrangle, and some wildcard variables, such as the thickness of the atmosphere where it enters, which can change with little warning (as the result of a solar flare, for instance). Tiangong-1 itself is a variable, because while its surface area is known, the oblong space station could be spinning, and its drag will be affected by its orientation. Without detailed images, it’s hard to know for sure which end is coming down first.
Depending on whom you ask, these unknowns are either a headache or fuel for the chase. Langbroek gets a kick out of them. Each day, he pulls raw orbital data from the Joint Space Operations Center tracking network. He also uses the free programs SatAna and SatEvo, and a model atmosphere from NASA to forecast time and location. He often models multiple scenarios—adjusting for different orientations, for example. Even so, as late as Wednesday evening, the geographic estimate for Tiangong-1’s reentry was vast—spanning thousands of miles and multiple continents.
The lines on this map are where #Tiangong1 can come down within the current +- 1-day uncertainty window. Cities with populations > 1 million people are also marked on the map, and those on the lines could see a reentry over them. The risk to these cities is however *very small* pic.twitter.com/QFnoLx1dbV
As the orbital decay continues, the estimated time and location have gotten more precise. Since March 13, Langbroek’s predicted margin of error has decreased from plus-or-minus six days to less than a day. But specifics are still elusive and things could change dramatically. As it descends, the space station is moving around 17,000 miles per hour, and completes an orbit every 89 minutes. “Even if we are working with orbits only two or three hours before the actual reentry, we still have uncertainty of many thousands of kilometers,” he says.
Langbroek’s calculations often align pretty neatly with ones that have been issued by various official bodies, such as the U.S. Air Force Joint Space Operations Center. But they have just as much chance of being wrong as anyone else. The European Space Agency, which is also making reentry forecasts, admitted as much: “At no time will a precise time/location prediction from ESA be possible,” they stated. A miscalculation of just, say, 20 minutes for reentry time could put the falling space station on another continent.
When it comes to tracking satellites and other space junk, “historically, amateur [astronomers] have served an incredibly important purpose,” says Lisa Ruth Rand, a postdoctoral fellow in history and a space junk scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “They were the only ones in the game at first.” Legions of teenage and adult space enthusiast-nerds mobilized in 1957 to track Sputnik I through Operation Moonwatch. Today, Langbroek and others also suss out and keep tabs on “dark sats”—surveillance satellites and other objects that are visible, but mysterious in purpose and incognito by design. “You can get a lot of information from amateurs more easily, probably, than from the state surveillance network,” Rand says. “[They’re] basically revealing secrets—things that the government can’t tell us, or won’t tell us.”
Langbroek is in it for the curiosity, the challenge, the puzzle of it, but some amateurs are more interested in securing a front-row seat to a reentry. In contrast to Tiangong-1, other falling satellites sometimes have a more controlled descent and regular shape, which can make reentry easier to predict and plan for.
Authorities often try to position these reentries over the vast, sparsely populated Southern Pacific Ocean. If you’re in that vicinity, “You might have a bigger chance of seeing something, but then again, they choose that area because they assume nothing is there,” Langbroek says.
When reentry dates and locations are known well in advance, some intrepid amateurs or retired professionals have spotted business opportunities. When the Russian space station Mir reentered the atmosphere in 2001, 50 people paid an average of $6,500 for a window seat on a chartered flight to watch the show (only half the window seats were sold, since the spectacle would be on one side only). The pilots vowed to stay outside the danger zone, but close enough for a great view—roughly 200 miles from the falling space station, ABC News reported. The director of the Russian Aerospace Agency, Yuri Koptev, stressed that this was a bad idea. Tourists flocking to the site of a descent defeat the purpose of orchestrating it over a less-populated area. “Apparently these people are driven by a spirit of adventure,” Koptev told the New York Times, “but we would recommend that they not go there.''
Some clearly ignored him. American brothers Rick and Bob Citron led an expedition to Fiji. “God bless all of you who think we’re on a wild goose chase,” Bob, a retired engineer, told the South Florida Sentinel. A crowd of roughly 200 enthusiasts gathered on a beach and clapped as the space station flashed overhead. Ten seconds later it was gone—en route to a watery resting place.
When a reentry approaches, as one is right now, updates zoom back and forth on Twitter and email lists for amateur astronomers. Some sites, such as the Virtual Telescope Project or SatView, run live-streams or share real-time images and maps. Most enthusiasts are probably more likely to see it that way—racing across their screens rather than above their heads.
Langbroek has yet to see a reentry in person, though he often gets his hopes up. “I’ve tried on several occasions,” he says. In 2013, he was optimistic about the reentry of the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer; it was forecast to pass over the Netherlands. He drove out to a rural road, pulled over, and craned his neck. No luck—he missed it by a few hours. Another time, the sky happened to be blotted out with clouds, which obscured the show. Earlier this week, a different reentry was visible from Italy, just a little too far from his home country. “That was one I narrowly missed,” Langbroek says. “But one day I will be successful.” It may be this weekend. Or maybe not.
In the winter of 1944, the city of the Hague was going hungry. In fact, all the cities of the western Netherlands were hungry. Railway workers and the country’s government in exile had defied German occupiers with a strike. In response, the Nazis significantly cut off the country’s most populated region from food supplies. The canals also froze, making transportation and escape impossible. What resulted was the “hunger winter,” a famine of unprecedented scale.
Solutions were few. Fuel ran out quickly, and some residents even ground up tulips to make flour. One group, however, wasn’t suffering as much as expected. In the Hague’s Juliana Children’s Hospital, pediatrician Willem Karel Dicke noticed that the children in his care with celiac disease were improving, even as they starved.
Doctors had known about celiac for years. But there was no consensus on its cause, or how to treat it. It acquired its name in 100 A.D., when Turkish physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia was stumped by an ailment with symptoms of weakness, malnutrition, and diarrhea, which he dubbed koiliakos.
Today, celiac disease is known to be a genetic autoimmune disorder. Those afflicted have a severe reaction to gluten, a protein found in grains such as wheat. It can be a challenge to diagnose, but once identified, the treatment is simple: eating a diet free of gluten.
But at the dawn of modern medicine, celiac remained a frustrating mystery to doctors. Even worse, the disease had the greatest effect on children. Celiac was often a death sentence. By inflaming the small intestine and causing malnutrition, the disease could irreparably stunt physical growth and mental development. Children with advanced celiac disease had horrifying symptoms: rashes, withered limbs, and large swollen bellies, like famine victims.
By the time Dicke entered the field, others had already been working on a remedy. Doctors observing children with celiac eventually ruled out a bacteriological source, especially since it seemed to affect children from all backgrounds. In fact, it particularly affected wealthy children. (Although one doctor, Christian Archibald Herter, theorized that poorer children succumbed too quickly for a diagnosis.)
One thing actually seemed to work: a banana diet. Sydney Haas, an American doctor, started promoting bananas as a cure in 1924, believing that complex carbohydrates, such as starch, were the culprits. Ripe bananas contain nearly no starch. Luckily for children with celiac, they also contain no gluten. Haas’s theory was widely disseminated, and it received so much support from banana companies that fellow doctors accused him of advertising on their behalf. Parents frantically sought the fruit for their “banana babies.” Though he likely saved many lives, Haas incorrectly believed his banana diet resulted in a permanent cure. Adults with the disease reintroduced wheat and other grains into their diets, often with deleterious effects.
Dicke, a pediatrician, had long suspected that wheat was the main celiac offender. In 1932, he attended a meeting of the Dutch Society for Pediatrics, where another doctor presented a medicinal powder to combat celiac. However, the powder was sometimes administered alongside bread and marmalade. Dicke noticed that relapses corresponded with the bread. In 1936, the same year he became the director of the Juliana Children’s Hospital at age 31, he began a long-running observation of a child with celiac. The boy ate wheat-free while at the hospital. But when he returned home, the boy’s parents reintroduced a typical diet against Dicke’s wishes. When Dicke mapped the boy’s growth patterns, they corresponded to his time spent at home and at the hospital.
But war was looming. In 1940, Germany occupied the Netherlands, and the next few years were brutal. The Nazi-led occupying forces killed resistance fighters and civilians, and deported most of the nation’s Jewish population to concentration camps. Meanwhile, Dicke chipped away at his theory. Months into the Nazi occupation, he presented a speech to the Dutch Society of Pediatrics. In it, he observed that the banana diet popularized by Haas did ward off celiac. But there was one problem: The wartime Netherlands had no bananas, and the whole country was under strict rationing. He proposed the following alternative: absolutely no bread, the occasional biscuit, and “sweet or sour porridge” that had no wheat flour.
One person best remembers Dicke during this time: his son, Karel A. Dicke, a hematologist and oncologist now living in Texas. Dicke describes his father as a driven leader with a calm facade, and he says his father fought against the occupation. (He also describes his mother as a "powerhouse" who joined the Dutch resistance and sent information on minefields and German defenses to London.) When Karel was a small child, his father was arrested for hiding stranded Allied pilots in the hospital basement. “He was betrayed, and the Germans took him to prison,” Karel says. He wasn't shot only because the city needed doctors, especially pediatricians.
1944 was the beginning of the end of the war. In September, the exiled Dutch royals ordered a railroad strike, which was meant to hinder German troop transport. Liberation seemed so close that 65,000 Dutch collaborators fled to Germany. In retaliation, Germany halted supplies into the western Netherlands. Food dwindled quickly, and soon the Dutch were eating tiny amounts of bread, potatoes, and sugar beets. “Nothing was so important as food," wrote survivor and journalist Henri A. Van Der Zee. "I remember getting up in the morning thinking of food: the whole day long we talked about food; and I went to bed hungry and dreaming of food."
While the Allies slowly liberated southern areas of the Netherlands, Nazis tightly controlled the west. Approaching the hospital was “a minefield,” Karel recalls. Within the hospital, Dicke's wife later explained, her husband ordered tulip bulbs in for patients to eat. This was risky: Tulip bulbs have nearly no nutritional value, and they contain glycoside, which can be poisonous. But many Dutch had no choice, and 140 million bulbs were eaten throughout the war. “Let me tell you," Karel says, "it’s better to have tulips in the backyard than to eat them.”
But to Dicke’s surprise, something remarkable happened. “To the [celiac] children, the shortage of food was less severe than the toxic effects of wheat products,” he reported. Karel remembers that while other children were “miserable” for the lack of bread, his father’s celiac patients were thriving. When there was beschuit, or twice-baked bread, the children became sick once more. "There was a clear-cut difference,” Karel says. The mortality rate of children in the Netherlands with celiac fell during the food shortage from 35 percent to nearly zero.
On April 29, 1945, Allied forces began airdropping supplies to hungry Dutch citizens. The liberation of the Netherlands, led by Canadian forces, was finalized on May 5. “It was not raining bombs, it rained bread,” Karel recalls reverentially. He and his brother were thrilled. The first American Karl met in the Hague was a black soldier, the first black person he had ever seen. The soldier carried him on his shoulders through the celebrating city. “His name was John,” Karel says. “It was maybe a 15 minute encounter. I will never forget it.”
Though the family had a terrifying wartime experience, they recovered. “We all survived, so we counted our blessings,” he says. But children once more began suffering from celiac disorder. Dicke, who contemporaries considered a vigorous scientist, embarked on five years of research to prove and record what he had observed during the war. In 1948, using five test subjects, Dicke provided different cereals for them to eat, carefully measuring patient weight and examining feces for fat absorption. In 1950, Dicke published his findings that wheat and rye flour aggravated celiac symptoms. Importantly, he also gave the children wheat starch to no ill effect, discounting the theory that complex carbohydrates were the cause. With the help of other colleagues, he later pinpointed gluten as the ultimate culprit.
Almost immediately, writes Emily K. Abel in her paper The Rise and Fall of Celiac Disease in the United States, doctors reproduced Dicke’s results and gluten-free diets became the standard treatment for celiac in Europe and Australia. Adoption was much slower in the United States, though, as the banana treatment remained the norm due to the influence of Haas, who dismissed Dicke’s discovery. During a 1947 visit to America, Dicke told doctors about his theory. “Nobody believed him,” a colleague later said. Many cases of celiac in the U.S. still go undiagnosed.
The Netherlands Society of Gastroenterology drew up an award for outstanding work in the field, and the first Dicke Medal was given to Dicke. But he was almost awarded a greater honor: the Nobel Prize for Medicine. The committee discussed a Nobel for Dicke in 1962. A week later, however, Dicke died at the age of 57. Nobel Prizes, unfortunately, are not awarded posthumously.
But Dicke was a humble man, and Karel says he wouldn’t have wanted the prize. Dicke had known he had a terminal case of cerebrovascular disease, and that knowledge hung over them both as Karel shadowed his father as a young medical student. Karel remembers his father dismissing the award as unimportant. Instead, Karel says, Dicke would have appreciated that millions of people thrive while living with celiac today. Ultimately, Karel sums up his father’s life in a few words. “For the children,” he says. “For the hospital. For medicine. For Holland. And for us as a family.”
On a spring morning in 1906, those readers of the Wichita Daily Eagle who made it all the way to page 5 found themselves faced with a breathless news item. "HUGE WAVE COMING IN ARKANSAS RIVER," the headline promised. The article went on to explain that a massive wall of water, the result of snowmelt from up in the mountains, was on its way to the Kansas city.
Although it was destroying some crops, it was mostly harmless: "It is said that the huge wave is a most beautiful sight as it roll[s] down the river," the item promised. It would reach the Douglas Avenue Bridge, in the center of Wichita, at 10 a.m.
A can't-miss sight already. But wait—what was this? Further reading revealed that as the wave was heading down the river, something else was coming the other way: a frog parade. "Myriads of frogs are migrating northward," explained the article.
Thanks to the very same snowmelt, thousands of amphibians had recently hatched and metamorphosed, and were now moving up the river. It was a veritable "army of 'hoppers,'" the article promised, "a moving mass of green as far as the eye can reach." And what's more, the frogs were scheduled to reach the Douglas Avenue Bridge precisely at—that's right!—10 o'clock sharp.
Napkins flew and cereal spoons clattered as families left the breakfast table and rushed down to the river. You can forgive them for missing the date line stretching across the top of the page: "Sunday Morning, April 1st." The whole thing was a dastardly prank.
Luckily for us modern-day gawkers, a rival paper was on the scene to capture the aftermath of this 1906 example of fake news. "April Fool Joke Perpetrated by Wichita Eagle," the Topeka Daily Capital reported, responsibly, three days later. Further subheads explained what went down:
"Said Wave 11 Feet High Would Sweep River.
BIG CROWDS TURNED OUT
To See the Sunday Phenomenon.
Didn't Catch on To April 1st Fun."
According to the Daily Capital, "Thousands of people were taken in by the April fool's joke and gathered at the river to see the flood, which of course, did not appear." There's only one way they could know that, of course: a hopeful Capital employee must have showed up, too. After all, a Wichita Frog Wave is a once in a lifetime experience, if that. What reporter could resist?
For a month each year, residents of San Biagio team up to build life-size structures made of local herbs, cereals, and bread. This monumental display is both centuries old and one of Italy’s most fantastical traditions: the Arches of Bread.
The festival’s origins trace back to the establishment of San Biagio Platani, a village in southwest Sicily, in feudal times. In the 17th century, Sicily was ruled by Philip IV of Spain, who incentivised the establishment of rural fiefs to meet the Spanish Empire’s growing demand for wheat. In 1635, local landowner Giovanni Battista Berardi bought a farming licence and charter for the pricey sum of 200 ounces and founded a new village called “Lands of San Biagio.”
Carmelo Navarra, a native San Biagese and artistic director of the Arches of Bread Festival, says that it was custom throughout the empire to welcome visiting authorities by constructing sumptuously decorated arches of triumph, such as the Baroque-style “Porta Nuova” in Palermo. But San Biagio was not Palermo. It was a rural town in the Sicilian hinterland. “What could a village of farmers offer to a visiting ruler?” says Navarra. “We lacked marble or tapestries, so we made arches of bread instead.”
Around the mid-18th century, when new rulers no longer demanded ornate displays of welcome, the people of San Biagio adapted the concept for a religious context. “During Easter, the ruler is Jesus Christ, who defeats death and comes back to meet the Madonna,” Navarra explains. As attested by a document kept in San Biagio’s main church, the Church declared that a portion of the village harvest should be used to make the “Arches of Bread.”
Every Easter since, residents have teamed up to build towering structures made entirely of locally sourced, organic ingredients. Men, women, and children build the arches with inlaid sugarcanes, willow, wild fennel, and asparagus under the supervision of local artisans. On Good Friday, they decorate the arches with rosemary, which symbolizes grief. And on the night before Easter Sunday, they replace the rosemary twigs with round-shaped bread loaves, chandeliers decorated with dates, mosaics of made of rice and legumes, and marmurata, a sweet, unleavened bread glazed with white icing.
Each ingredient takes on a symbolic meaning stemming from Christianity and local farming culture. “Bread symbolises farmers’ hard work,” says Navarra, “but it’s also the symbol of the body of Christ.” Decorations reflect this dual symbolism too: Motifs from local folk traditions—such as the sun, moon, and stars—appear alongside Christian icons such as white doves.
Initially, townspeople built just a few arches. But as the tradition evolved, more and more structures were added. “Eventually there were arches on both sides of the original arches,” Navarra say. “So in a way, it resembled the inside of San Biagio’s cathedral, which is made of three naves.”
That’s when things got more fun. Participants started to intentionally position the arches in a way that resembled the inside of the cathedral: a central aisle surrounded by two lateral naves, one leading to the altar of the Virgin Mary, and another leading to the altar of Jesus Christ. Historically, the altar of Mary was curated by the confraternity of Madunnara while Jesus’s was curated by the Signurara. The entire population of San Biagio belongs to one of the two “teams.”
“We decided to play a game,” Navarra says. “Each confraternity would prepare arches for their respective side of the church, and then we would pick a winner.”
A few months before Easter, each team nominates an artistic director whose job is to create an impressive food design. Secrecy is essential, so the planning and building takes place in abandoned warehouses that become food-sculpting labs. Away from prying eyes, each team makes chandeliers from dates, mosaics from barley, legumes, and pasta, and, of course, a varied assortment of bread loaves. Everything gets coated with a natural resin that make the Arches of Bread festival rainproof.
Everyone from toddlers to nonnes (grandmas) is involved. “Children have a lot of fun,” Navarra says. “They usually start with small tasks like making sourdough or gathering seeds and legumes needed to make mosaics. But one day they will run the show.”
This communal aspect of the festival is what means the most to Navarra, who, together with Giuseppe Savarino, the owner of a popular bar on the main street, has led a local initiative to save the festival from recent financial and political turmoil.
Last year, for the first time since the tradition started, San Biagio cancelled its historic Arches of Bread festival due to lack of funds. The town had asked the regional government, which typically provided funding, for an estimated €100,000 that never materialized. While last January, the mayor of San Biagio stepped down after being accused of Mafia ties, which jeopardized this year’s event.
“Skipping the event for two years in a row would have have been a huge loss, and not just for our economy,” Navarra says. “During the months that lead up to the event, the whole town wakes up to life just like nature wakes up from winter. If you take it away, it’s like being stuck in winter.”
Eventually, things turned out for the best. During a heated social media debate about the future of the festival, Navarra came up with a motto: “We surely won’t let the mafia stop the creativity of our people.” Several days later, residents launched a campaign to crowdsource funding and resources. Cafes and restaurants stepped in to sponsor large sculptures; families turned their homes into labs; and many artisans, including Navarra, agreed to build their creations out of pocket.
This year Navarra is working on an organic bas-relief that represents Peppino Impastato and Father Puglisi (two figures who challenged the Mafia). “What’s great is that everyone did what they could to make it happen,” he says. “We are an isolated community, and our ability to be creative with the products of our land is our greatest asset.”
Walking out onto the historic Hyde Street Pier after dark feels a world away from the glittering San Francisco skyline and the iconic cable car just up the block. The pier is lined with half a dozen historic schooners, ferries, and tugs. Standing on the thick rigging ropes that keep the creaking ships from floating away, sleek night herons scrutinize the frigid waters of the San Francisco Bay, searching for fish. The occasional loud splash signals a sea lion swimming by. Every few seconds, the lighthouse lamp on Alcatraz Island blinks out in the bay.
About halfway down the pier is where, on the first Saturday evening of every month for the past 37 years, San Francisco’s sailors, maritime enthusiasts, and a variety of singers and musicians have gathered on the Eureka, a steam ferryboat built in 1890. For three hours, from 8 to 11 p.m., the small crew sings call-and-response work songs about life on the seas, from sailing around Cape Horn to tales of tragic whaling expeditions.
There’s no set list or agenda. And there are only three rules: no drinking, no smoking, no falling off the pier. This is the Chantey Sing.
At the helm of the event is Peter Kasin, a park ranger in the Interpretation Division at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, which includes the Hyde Street Pier. Little has changed since Kasin attended his first sing in November 1989. Started by retired ranger Dave Nettell in 1981, the “sing” was adopted by several other rangers who inspired and ultimately passed the lively tradition down to Kasin in 1996.
The Chantey Sing is part of the park’s emphasis on buoying the public’s interest in all aspects of maritime culture, including sea music. In addition to daily docent tours of the pier, this is accomplished with an events calendar, including what has become the nation’s longest-running sea music concert series, started by ranger Celeste Bernardo in 1989. The park also hosts a “floating film” series, special event sing-alongs, and author events on topics as wide-ranging as the legacies of women in maritime trades, African-American chanteys, and early Hollywood depictions of life on luxury ocean liners.
The wholesome public singalong feels like a throwback to another era, not only because it’s a longtime San Francisco tradition, but because of the concerted efforts of Kasin and his crew to create a welcoming, family-friendly environment. “I think of the chantey sing as a safe place to sing,” Kasin says. “I remember how shy I was about singing [when I first started attending the event], so I encourage people at all levels to sing and try to create a non-judgmental atmosphere.” His success in cultivating an encouraging environment sustains the event’s most devoted fans, some of whom come wearing naval-style caps and jackets.
Traditionally, chanteys hold a dual purpose: to entertain off-duty crews, and as work songs sung to lighten the load of grueling onboard chores or harbor-side stevedoring. Chantey songs derive from many cultures, spanning the West Indies to Ireland to African port towns, and come in many languages including English, French, and Welsh. As with other folk-derived work songs, there remains debate about the degree to which enslaved people influenced the style of chanteys sung by paid maritime crews.
These diverse songs are divided into several subgenre classifications. According to the Library of Congress, off-duty deepwater fisherman sing fo’c’sles, or songs sung on the forecastle (the front lower ship deck used as living quarters). Chanteys unique to sailing barges on the River Thames are known as bargeman’s songs. There are also pulling shanties, typically sung by laborers in the Caribbean as they pull heavy objects down a beach. Even the word chantey has variant spellings—chanty, shanty—owing to the global reach of work songs sung by multicultural sailing crews.
At the San Francisco singalong, many guests come with their favorite songs memorized. These span the lengthy history of sea chanteys across oceans, as well as across many generations of naval sailors and merchant marines. Many of the chanteys reference San Francisco specifically, owing to the seaside city’s historic Golden Gate strait and numerous cargo ports, including the infamous Gold Rush-era Barbary Coast district.
Even though the songs are meant to be sung from memory, someone occasionally brings sheet music for reference or inspiration; others use their smartphones to look up lyrics. A few musicians carry their own instruments, from concertinas to mandolins, and stand to lead a or two.
In previous eras, many attendees also brought their own mugs. Usually, there’s a roughly 15-minute break every hour, during which hot beverages are served from the galley of the Balclutha, which is typically docked on the opposite side of the pier from the Eureka. Hot chocolate and cider are free, though tips are encouraged. Paper cups are provided to those who don’t bring their own. (At the time of publication, however, the Balclutha is undergoing maintenance and while the singing breaks continue, drinks are on temporary hiatus.)
The call-and-response style of work songs make sea chanteys particularly alluring to all level of singer and sea music fan. Accordingly, the San Francisco sing draws a cross-section of amateur and professional folk performers. Most months, local musicians, including Walter “Salty Walt” Askew and Riggy Rackin, sit up front, facing the crowd like friendly choir directors, leading when there’s a lull or helping a singer from the crowd if he forgets a verse.
Attendees can come from as far away as Australia and as close as Canada. It makes sense that this singalong would draw visitors from out of state and out of country. While there are other maritime-themed public singing events in the United States, including in Seattle, Staten Island, and aboard the USS Constitution in Boston, the San Francisco chantey sing is the oldest.
Until September 2016, the San Francisco sing ran until midnight, with the final hour reserved for bawdy sea chanteys. Think songs about romancing the captain’s daughter or what debauchery awaits when you and your mates get to port. Since then, the cutoff time has been 11 p.m. “It is of course sad that after 35 years of chantey sings running until midnight, this change is necessary,” Kasin wrote to his chantey sing email list, citing late night safety concerns and a mutual decision between U.S. Park Police and pier personnel. “Your safety comes first,” he added.
Still, the tradition lives on, with more than 100 regulars and visitors filling the ferry deck folding chairs every first Saturday. Some regular attendees have made the sing such a part of their lives, Kasin has witnessed them grow as they’ve gathered to harmonize together over the years.
“I've seen kids grow to adults. I've seen shy people come out of their shell and begin singing in public for their first time. I've seen people meet at the sings and form relationships,” Kasin says. “One couple met there a few years ago and are now engaged to be married.”
It's spring in the northern hemisphere, and winter is melting away. At NASA, a team of scientists has been working to understand the details of exactly how a single snowflake transforms from a frozen crystal into a water drop. Above, you can see the results of their work: a 3D model of a snowflake melting away.
Scientists have long been interested in snowflake formation: How does water turn into crystalline structures?
We can grow snowflakes in a lab and explain why each is unique. But the microphysics of snowflake melt have remained mysterious, even though this simple phenomenon has a huge impact on precipitation and climate. As NASA explains, about two-thirds of the rain that falls from the sky spent some time as snow, and these clouds of frozen flakes can block radio signals, affect flights, and cause other difficulties. Knowing how they behave, scientists could better model precipitation and global climate behavior.
It's difficult to capture snow in the process of melting. Scientists once used spiderwebs to capture flakes and watch them disappear. But in a new report, published in the journal Atmospheres, the NASA team was able to describe the melting process mathematically, creating a model that shows how a single flake disappears.
What they found is that meltwater begins to gather in the concave parts of a snowflake. As that pool grows, the water forms a shell around the remaining ice, until the whole structure dissolves. Snowflakes that have formed into tiny ice pellets take longer to melt than delicate crystal structures like the one above, which is less than half an inch long.
The blue-painted pub in Bromley, London, has been there for a while. Since 1848, some sources say. The Widow’s Son used to be a house, the story goes, where a widow lived with her son. When the son wanted to join the navy, the grieving mother told him that she would wait for him. Every year on Good Friday, she promised, she'd make a fresh hot cross bun.
Unfortunately, her son never got his hot cross bun: he was lost at sea. Still, the mother made a hot cross bun every year and set it aside for him. She didn't throw out the old buns, so they piled up higher and higher. When the widow died, a pub went up on the site of her house. But, curiously, sailors started appearing every Good Friday to hang a bun above the bar.
Soon, there was quite a collection. In 1921, Leopold Wagner, author of A New Book about London: A Quaint and Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore, counted 84 buns in a net above the bar. That was enough to date the custom back to 1837—and perhaps to the widow herself.
It's unclear whether the legend is true. But hanging hot cross buns has a long history in the United Kingdom. In ancient times, worshippers ate sweet buns marked with a cross to honor Eostre, the goddess of the dawn. When “Eostre” became “Easter,” the buns stuck around. By the 18th century, British Christians associated the spiced rolls with Good Friday, the day said to commemorate Jesus’s crucifixion. Hot cross buns baked on Good Friday, legend had it, would never decay. When nailed or hung off walls, they could ward away evil and fire.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way at the Widow’s Son. Twenty years ago, a fire in the pub half-destroyed the buns. In a more recent turn of bad luck, the pub closed and was put up for sale in 2016. The proprietors took the remaining buns with them. Distraught locals and sailors, including many who had attended bun ceremonies for decades, held Bun Day at another nearby pub.
But in 2017, the pub's new owners revived Bun Day. A delegation from the H.M.S. President arrived on Good Friday. A massive hot cross bun, which was emblazoned with the traditional cross and the year, awaited them. (Publicist Tas Tarafdar says the pub will also embalm all their buns in preservative glaze to keep them from crumbling on customers' heads, which they have in the past.) Following tradition, one of the sailors was lifted by his mates to deposit the bun in a hammock above the bar. In the past, hot cross buns were handed out to anyone who wanted them. That’s still the case, but Bun Day is also now celebrated with drink specials and a DJ.
For a year, a single lonely bun has hung above the bar. When I spoke to Tarafdar, she told me that the Widow’s Son is trying to get the old ones back from the pub’s previous owners. Then I received an email. “Good news, the old buns have been returned to the Widow’s Son.” If the widow’s son ever returns from the sea, the buns made for him will be waiting. But after seeing the moldy, charred-looking loaves, he might settle for a pint instead.
Who doesn't love maps? Here at Atlas Obscura, we certainly do (surprise!). Whether you're a longtime cartographic collector—or have one in your life—we've compiled this gift guide for true map fans. Check out these beautiful wall maps, essential books, and other map-related accessories, all designed to help you become a better explorer (or at least look the part).
If you're planning on getting out there and exploring parts of the world where cell phones don't always work, it’s important to keep your paper maps in good working order. A foldable map case protects your maps from the elements, plus it makes you look like a seasoned explorer.
Maps are great at telling you how to get places, but only if you already know where you are. No explorer (or map lover) should be caught without a reliable compass. Pretty much essential gear for everyone.
So you’re out in the wilderness or wandering around a strange city, and you don’t have a map. No problem, just make sure to carry a notebook with grid pages, and you can make your own. Most of us aren’t natural born cartographers, but having a rough guide makes the task easier.
If all this fuss about protectors, hand-drawn notebook maps, and even folding is just too much to be bothered with, a Crumple Map is probably for you. Printed on durable, waterproof material, these city maps are ideal for the adventurer who just wants to shove their map in their pocket and not feel bad about it.
Anyone can slap a print in a frame, but a true map lover invests in a wall map you can feel, like Woodchart’s carved depth maps. Displaying different bodies of water in topographical 3D, these nautical maps have a somewhat hefty price tag, but they're some of the most beautiful and fascinating maps out there.
World maps are generally presented as curving ovals or globes, but Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projection throws all that out the window. The legendary architect and designer envisioned the world in an interconnected string of sharp triangles, colored in reds and grays based on temperature.
Still the best way to personalize a wall map. Stick them on the places you’ve been or the places you want to go. Either way, it makes any map seem less like a decoration, and more like a living document.
Okay, so a glass globe decanter isn’t technically a map, but it makes a wonderful addition to any map-lover's study or office. We all need something to pour fine whiskey from as we wax at length about our latest adventure.
Map design is itself a diverse and complicated field, but this book on how colors, fonts, and other elements are used to make maps readable is a good place to start. Whether you’re creating your own maps, or trying to decide why one of your favorite maps looks the way it does, this book is for you.
The author Rebecca Solnit has produced a trio of incredible books about three of America’s great cities. Her guides, Unfathomable City (New Orleans), Non-Stop Metropolis (New York), and Infinite City (San Francisco), include fascinating original maps that explore each city's quirks both geographically and culturally. They’re unlike any other atlases on the shelves, and they belong on yours.
Stan Thornton had just three days to get from his town of Esperance, Australia, to San Francisco to claim his prize. To hustle things along, a radio station in Perth paid his airfare, and U.S. officials expedited his visa. When he boarded the plane in July 1979, the 17-year-old packed a fresh outfit, a toothbrush, and some charred space debris.
When metal rain stopped falling, plenty of people went outside to pick through the debris. One community took the doors off their town hall to squeeze a chunk of the space station inside. (“Very good for the tourist industry,” the mayor said.) Thornton brought some black nuggets he retrieved to California, where he claimed a $10,000 bounty offered by the San Francisco Examiner, for being the first to bring pieces of the station to the newspaper’s office. He easily made the 72-hour deadline with 14 hours and 38 minutes to spare.
At the time, NASA officials told the Associated Press that it was safe to pick up pieces of Skylab—they weren’t radioactive, and they’d likely have cooled by the time they reached the ground. But as the Chinese space station Tiangong-1 nears the end of its decaying orbit and approaches the atmosphere this weekend, it’s important to know that that a space junk treasure hunt is not a good idea—however fun it may sound.
To be clear, it’s unlikely that Tiangong-1 will hit land, and even less likely that it will come down in a populated area. True, its descent is uncontrolled, and it’s nearly impossible to forecast the precise time and location of reentry. But it comes down to numbers, says Lisa Ruth Rand, a postdoctoral fellow and space junk scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Given that nearly three-quarters of the planet is ocean, the space station is much more likely to crash into water than someone’s yard.
In the improbable event that it does plummet near you, observe it from afar. Anyone who spots a piece “should absolutely not approach it,” Rand says. “One hundred percent, keep distance.”
Any object steaming on the ground could be dangerous, and Tiangong-1 could be particularly hazardous because it may hold hydrazine fuel, says Marco Langbroek, an amateur astronomer who is carefully tracking the space station’s position. There could be any number of other dangerous compounds in or on the space station, too—what, specifically, isn’t known because the Chinese space program “hasn’t told anyone what it’s actually made of,” says J.D. Harrington, a public affairs officer at NASA.
If there is hydrazine on board, it could be dangerous in water, too—but there’s little data about its reactivity, as Michael Byers, an Arctic expert at the University of British Columbia, explained to The Star in 2016, when a Russian rocket stage thought to be carrying hydrazine was set to fall into Baffin Bay. Up close, remnants of this corrosive propellant could “do some very nasty things to your skin,” Langbroek adds—and if you inhale it, “that basically kills you.” If you do spot debris, Harrington says, call local authorities.
Salvaging space debris can also run people afoul of the law, as some souvenir hunters learned when they gathered fragments of the shuttle Columbia in 2003, after it tragically broke apart during reentry. In Texas, some residents beat authorities to the wreckage—the debris field spanned hundreds of square miles—and put pieces of alleged debris up for sale on eBay. “People should not be collecting that at all,” NASA spokesperson Bruce Buckingham told the Associated Press at the time. These incidents also raised ethical questions, because all seven crew members lost their lives in the disaster. And the law is clear: Objects in space are the property of the state or company that put them up there, and that holds true back on Earth as well. At least two people in Texas were indicted in 2003 for collecting wreckage from Columbia, and faced prison time and fines up to $250,000. Skylab was a different scenario, because NASA wasn’t interested in retrieving the material. People were allowed to keep what they found, unless they wanted to file an insurance claim for injury or property damage, for which the U.S. government would be responsible. No one did.
As Tiangong-1 reenters the atmosphere, your best bet is to watch it on your computer (or look up, if you’re very lucky), and stay far from any debris if it comes down near you. If you truly must see some space junk in person, you can always plan a trip to see Skylab’s remains, some of which are on display near where Thornton and others found them, on Australia’s southwest coast. “Esperance Museum is proud to have items of Skylab as one of our displays,” says Lynda Horn, the shire’s cultural officer. “We always receive comments from visitors saying that they have come to see what we have in the museum as well as more specific comments that they are here to see Skylab.” It’s quite unlikely that Tiangong-1 will end up in a vitrine. But if you do catch a glimpse overhead, enjoy the show.
Maps are great and all, but they’re generally just snapshots—a region as it exists at a very specific point in time. But since we’re living in the future, of course we've found a way to make maps change with time. A cartography project called Historic Aerials is attempting to create an interactive photographic map that lets you change the year—as if Google Maps had existed since the 1940s. And like many great innovations, it sort of began by accident.
Historic Aerials makes money by selling historic land and property photos, but their lasting legacy may be the map tool they built to make this possible. The project is an offshoot of Nationwide Environmental Title Research (NETR), a company that provides research for investigations into cases of environmental contamination. NETR’s work often involves looking into land use and property lines as they once existed, for comparison with how they exist today, to determine who was doing what and where. The company ended up amassing a large collection of aerial photography (sometimes dating back as far as the 1920s) from the United States Geological Survey and other government archives, as well as private collections. While the images themselves provide an interesting look at land history from 35,000 feet, they aren’t perfect maps by themselves, in part because they come from different altitudes and often aren't taken from directly overhead.
“The photos aren’t really spatially correct, and you can’t really line them up with streets, and you couldn’t really locate, with pinpoint accuracy where [an] actual boundary was,” says Brett Perry, one of the minds behind the Historic Aerials project. When Historic Aerials translates an old image for use in their modern map tool, they correct for ground elevation, the height from which the image was taken, and other measurements to correlate their old images with modern ones. “When you’re just looking at a raw photo, the only part that was actually correct was the part that was directly below the planes. All the other information corrects for that, just as they do with the modern imagery, but we have to do that with the historic stuff.”
While there are all kinds of online mapping tools that allow you to place filters, overlays, and other information on aerial and satellite imagery, this map tool makes time a variable, so you can see what a location—roads, buildings, forest, and more—once looked like. You can then add all the modern overlays we're used to—like opening a portal across decades. “We refer to it as a virtual time machine,” says Perry.
Right now, the maps only cover certain parts of the United States, but Perry and his small team will continue to acquire images and fit them in. This discovery process, however, is slow and inexact, so the expansion of the map is irregular. At present, the map has the most coverage in areas such as New Jersey, Las Vegas, and Arizona, where NETR is based. “For Las Vegas you can go back literally every single year," Perry says. "Eventually we’ll have that for Phoenix."
Since the project began with environmental investigation, many of its early users were environmental consultants. Increasingly others have been finding new uses for the map tool. “We have landscape architects, archaeologists, attorneys, land developers,” says Perry. “People who have metal detectors who are trying to locate areas that might be prone to have old coins and old structures. Then you have other enthusiasts, like model train builders who are trying to see what an old train depot looked like way back when. It’s a pretty wide spectrum.”
Though the growth is slow, Perry says that he would one day like for the Historic Aerials interactive map to cover the entire world, for as long as aerial photos have been possible. “Right now we’re trying to get the ’80s. The ’80s, for some reason, has been sort of a challenge to get good quality imagery,” says Perry. “[I’d like] at least something in every decade from at least the ’40s, if not the ’30s. Europe pre-WWII. To be able to go back and see buildings that were lost during the war, whether that’s London or Germany or something like that.”
Check it out, see if your home region is covered, and get a sense of just how much it's changed.
Mundane Madness is a month-long quest to anoint the most overlooked everyday objects. Also check out the original call for entries, and how Round 1,Round 2, and Round 3 went down.
When we asked for nominations for our Mundane Madness competition, we expected to be inundated with wondrous workaday inventions—and we were. Readers suggested all sorts of unsung objects, from zip ties to lighters, that make their lives a little easier. Many were discrete and fairly forgettable, the kind of stuff you keep in your junk drawer until you need it.
But as the competition rounds progressed, those types of inventions lost ground to the sort of things that make the modern world possible, but are still somehow overlooked.
Here's how we narrowed the field:
The final contenders are paper and the sewer. Few would argue that they're not critically important. Atlas Obscura readers love books, and the sewer has stoked people's imagination, too, as a forbidden place, home to a slew of urban legends.
If these inventions are overlooked, it's partly due to their scale and ubiquity, which makes their impact nearly impossible to measure. A tree ground to pulp and pressed into paper can carry ideas across continents and millennia. The sewer system, by removing refuse from homes, made cities possible and has saved countless lives. Both are simultaneously common and miraculous. Sometimes it seems like we don't realize this until something goes wrong.
So which will it be? Cast your vote below, and use the #mundanemadness hashtag to make your case on Twitter. We'll declare the winner on Monday, April 2.
Almost every holiday comes with its own accompanying foodstuff. For Thanksgiving, it is turkey; for Hanukkah, donuts filled with a thick plug of sweetened jelly, or latkes. Many Muslims break their Ramadan fast each day with dates; people in Japan greet the New Year with mochi and soba noodles. Easter treats seem self-evident: chocolate, eggs, chocolate eggs. But for hundreds of years, the English ate something entirely different at Easter: a sweet, herbal concoction—somewhere between a pancake and an omelette—known as a tansy.
Tansies took their name from the herb tanacetum vulgare, which grows wild across the United Kingdom. With yellow flowers the shape of flying saucers, it had various charming nicknames, including bitter buttons, cow bitter, and golden buttons. Recipes for the simplest tansies are short and to the point. Per a “Mrs. Rendle”: “Pound a handful of green tansy in a mortar, add the juice to a pint of batter, and bake it.” As time went on, however, other herbs found their way into the mix. A recipe in the 1588 Good Housewife’s Handbook used the juice of tansy, feverfew, parsley, and violets, mixed with “the yolkes of eight or tenne eggs, and three or four whites, and some vinegar, and put thereto sugar or salt." It was then fried. Essentially, it was a big, flat, slightly sweet pancake, with a faint greenish tinge.
It’s likely that tansies originally had a medicinal purpose. The herb itself was believed to cure various ailments: One 16th-century medical tract, Treasurie of Health, prescribes it soaked in a pint of wine for “a drinke for them that be hurte or brused,” while another claims that “it is good to dissolve windiness of the stomach and guts, and to kill worms in the belly, expelling them out. It is used also to provoke urine, and to break the stone of the [kidneys].” (Tansy is now known to be slightly poisonous.)
Its appearance on the Medieval Easter table, therefore, makes some sense. Throughout Lent, Christians endured a long, boring diet of lentils and dried fish. Tansies, one early recipe claimed, were “good for the stomach, on account of discussing the Flatulences generated by eating Pulses and Fish during Lent.” In short, they were probably a practical solution to post-Lenten gut squalls. (But tansies had other, year-round medicinal uses: In the early 19th century, physicians told women with “hysteritis” to place a “tansy pancake” against their abdomens to ease uterine pain.)
But a curious religious element also seems to have linked the herb with the holiday. Despite commemorating different events, Easter and the Jewish festival of Passover have striking overlap beyond their often-coinciding springtime dates. The word “paschal,” which derives from the Hebrew Pesach, can refer to either holy day. In Italian, Easter is Pasqua; in French, it is Pâques.
For English Christians, eating tansy seems to have been a nod to Easter’s ancient roots—with a strange note of anti-Semitism. In an 1885 Notes and Queries, the scholar Edward Solly traces “the custom of eating tansy pudding and tansy cake at Easter” back to the “the Jewish custom of eating cakes made with bitter herbs.” However, to make it clear that this was still a Christian festival, he wrote, people made a point of eating pork or bacon with the cakes “to take from it any Jewish character.”
Although many Lenten dietary rules were relaxed or forgotten during the Reformation, people continued to eat tansies. Over time, however, they became increasingly decadent. Many omitted the eponymous herb altogether in favor of ingredients such as ground almonds, rose syrup, bread crumbs, grated nutmeg, brandy, artery-choking quantities of cream and butter—and sometimes all at once. Tansies transformed from a kind of herbal pancake into something more reminiscent of a sumptuous clafoutis.
Tansies also played an important role in raucous, regional Easter celebrations. Residents of what is today the northern part of Cumbria would make a “tansy puddin’” on Easter Monday to carry through town to the public bakehouse. A 1905 glossary to the region’s dialect explains: “During the day, women carried flour about and threw it at any one whom they passed. Young men would often steal the puddings or pies from the women. The day ended with a supper and dance.” Held in the church or cathedral, these balls involved “slow, stately dancing, … solemn chanting,” a religious service, and the distribution of tansies with a rich, rum sauce. These were called “tansy neets” or “tansy suppers,” and culminated with young men slipping the fiddler a shilling at the end of the night.
By the early 20th century, however, people were speaking of these puddings and traditions as vestiges of the past. Tansies and tansy neets vanished from Easter plates and celebrations. The Easter Adventurer, from 1826, calls tansy “as essential [to the holiday] as pancake to Shrove Tuesday, furmity to Midlent Sunday, or goose to Michaelmas day.” Today, those holidays and their culinary accompaniments are all but forgotten. And though we celebrate Easter, our chocolate egg hunts and subsequent gluttony would be unrecognizable to any flatulent, flour-throwing, tansy-pinching Easter Monday reveler from centuries past.
Imagine winding down the switchbacks of a rural mountain road into the tiny town of Buena Vista, Virginia. You glide down sleepy Main Street, passing renovated Victorian-style homes and small businesses, when suddenly you spot three eight-foot-long ants affixed to the facade of an old three-story brick building. Blinking, you spy giant cartoonish grasshoppers peering down from nearby fire escapes and rooftops. A mosquito clinging to a pharmacy sign. A giant spider perched in a park tree. A praying mantis gazing at the doors of a church.
This is the latest addition to 57-year-old artist Mark Cline’s 30-year tradition of April Fools’ pranks. Each year, Cline crafts a sculpture and arranges it in a public space, typically within 50 miles of his studio in Natural Bridge, Virginia.
In 2017, there was a life-sized house-painter desperately clinging to a balcony at the Robert E. Lee Hotel in Lexington, Virginia. The year before that, a giant octopus devouring a jon boat emerged in nearby Lake Robertson. Back in 2012, a 50-foot-long Russian submarine replete with saluting captain appeared in a public pond. Other years, it was Spiderman swinging from a fire escape. A family of truck-sized dinosaurs waiting to cross a country road. Batman perched on the roof of a local bank.
Most notable was Cline’s 2004 handmade life-size foam replica of Stonehenge. Positioned in a hilltop meadow just off a well-trafficked highway near Lexington, the installation caused enough ruckus to nab a mention on the Today Show, and a feature in the Washington Post.
While for most, such acts would entail a major undertaking, these are but small bursts from Cline’s prolific imagination.
Often referred to as the “Poor Man’s Disney,” throughout the 90s and early 2000s, Cline earned a reputation for creating offbeat roadside tourist attractions. In Virginia Beach, there was Professor Cline’s Time Museum. Constructed in 1999, the chain-driven coaster carried visitors through an animatronic dark-ride featuring a Wild West shootout, an escape from ancient Pompeii, and an alien abduction in the Bermuda Triangle. In 2004, there was Captain Cline’s Pirate Adventure Ride, also in Virginia Beach. Traveling through a ghost ship, patrons encountered pirates battling a giant octopus, a monstrous shark, and dinosaurs.
More recently, Cline’s work has found an unexpected home in art museums. In 2012, Virginia’s Taubman Museum of Art asked him to do his first formal show. The result was a 20-piece exhibit entitled, Blue Ridge Barnum. There was a huge sculpture of King Kong on an outside balcony, a 12-foot-tall Frankenstein-headed chicken entitled “Franken Chicken,” and a T-Rex scarfing down a screaming Union soldier. At his “lecture,” Cline raised eyebrows by instructing 400 visitors to inflate and, in unison, sit on whoopie cushions.
The exhibition was extremely popular. “There was a tremendous amount of traffic,” says the Taubman’s current deputy director of communications, Sunny Nelson. “We had people coming in from up and down the East Coast.”
However, there was some controversy. While many defended Cline’s ingenuity, others decried him as a tasteless fashioner of kitsch. The debate was best captured in a Wall Street Journal feature, which asked: But is this really art?
“Luckily, I don’t view myself as an artist so much as an entertainer,” says Cline. “I have this philosophy, like, the world is a serious enough place as it is. My hope is, you see these things and have a chuckle. If I can startle a person into forgetting their woes and feeling good, even if it’s just for a second—that’s my metric for success.”
Cline discovered his knack for art and sculpture at an early age. Even then, his aesthetic inclined toward shock-and-awe weirdness.
“I was such a terrible student I’d celebrate a D-minus,” he says. “So, when I realized I had this bizarre knack for drawing and making things, I guess I innately started trying to deflect people’s attention toward that, as opposed to my half-ass academics.”
A native of Waynesboro, Virginia, Cline landed himself in the local paper at the age of eight by sculpting a human-sized snowman rendered to look like the Statue of Liberty. Four years later, he made his second appearance after crafting a billboard-sized comic strip depicting an assortment of movie monsters. By high school, he was making silent-films featuring homemade special effects and costumes. To advertise upcoming screenings, he staged live street-battles between his protagonist and various villains. That too got him in the paper.
After graduating high school, lacking the grades necessary to attend art school, Cline opted to spend a year as a “wandering bum,” he says. Eventually, he came home and got a job in a workshop casting toy figurines from resin. Though the gig didn’t last long, it was there he discovered the possibilities of molding.
“The owner pulled me aside and showed me how to make a mold of my hand,” he explains. “When I saw the finished product, I was like, ‘Holy shit, you can make anything out of this stuff!’”
Soon thereafter, the 19-year-old Cline got an idea. In 1980, he was reading a magazine with an article about a Hollywood Monster Museum. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s a great idea, but it’s been done,’” he says. “Then I started thinking about what makes monsters scary. About the nature of fear. So much of it’s subconscious. They’re these remnants of childhood we never really confront. Like, being scared of what’s in the closet or under the bed.”
Inspired, Cline envisioned an interactive museum where adults and children could have a first-hand encounter with such archetypes. In the process, those experiences might rob the nightmares of their power.
Initially, he sought patronage to build along Virginia Beach’s oceanfront tourist strip, but hit a wall.
“I was so naive. I thought I’d go in there and pitch city officials and business owners, and they’d be blown away,” says Cline. “They either refused to see me, laughed in my face, or, in one instance, had security guide me to the nearest exit.”
Refusing to give up, Cline subsequently managed to negotiate a land-use contract for a large warehouse and adjacent buildings on the outskirts of the unincorporated community of Natural Bridge. Due to its dilapidated condition and rural location, rent was next to nothing.
He spent the next two years working odd jobs to fund improvements to the property and his sculpture-making. Professor Cline’s Monster Museum opened in 1982. By 1990, it had been incorporated into a larger attraction called the Enchanted Castle.
Outside, there were castle towers, parapets, bungee-jumping pigs, and a courtyard with dinosaurs attacking vehicles, which were piloted by bionic soldiers. Inside were 10-foot spiders and ticks with saddles, Escher-ian stairways to nowhere, a tornado room, and a sinking Titanic. Featuring dragons, hidden passages, a working river, a magic show, and a walkable rainbow leading to a pot of gold, a visit to the Enchanted Castle was like entering a real-life Wonka factory. Tourists flocked by the thousands.
As word of Cline’s talent spread, he says he began to get work designing props for high-end putt-putt courses, science museums, billboards, theme parks, films, Broadway plays, and companies contracting to rock stars like Alice Cooper. Meanwhile, he continued expanding his own attractions.
In 2001, tragedy struck. The Enchanted Castle, Monster Museum, and most of its surrounding fixtures burned to the ground.
Cline was quick to rebuild. Within weeks, he’d negotiated a deal with the then-owners of the geological formation and tourist attraction of Natural Bridge, and launched a wholesale renovation of a Victorian mansion on the property. Upon completion, Cline’s new and improved 30-plus-room Haunted Monster Museum was home to hundreds of monsters. En route to the house, visitors passed by Foamhenge (which was relocated to a farm in Northern Virginia when the property became a State Park in 2014) and the Dinosaur Kingdom, a walkthrough attraction depicting the disastrous results of a group of Union soldiers’ attempts to train a herd of lost dinosaurs.
Unfortunately, the Haunted Monster Museum was ill-fated as well. In 2012, after 11 years of operation, it too was destroyed by a fire.
Considering Cline’s most beloved works have twice been reduced to ashes, you might expect him to be embittered. However, that’s far from the case.
“I used to close my Enchanted Castle tours by saying, ‘There are no endings, only beginnings,’” he explains. “The nature of our life on this planet is impermanence. And that’s how I look at these things. I chose to take these fires as a sign it was time to move on and do something new.”
Following the 2012 fire, Cline leased 16 wooded acres and set about constructing an aggrandized version of Dinosaur Kingdom. Based on the same sci-fi yarn about dinosaurs being involved in the U.S. Civil War, Dinosaur Kingdom II now includes more than 100 dinosaurs and sculptures. It was opened for limited viewing in 2014, and has been expanded each year since. Cline anticipates it will be fully realized by 2020, but says that, barring another catastrophe, he’ll likely add to it for the rest of his life.
Inside Dinosaur Kingdom, you’re presented with a 28-page comic-book telling the story of the park. From there, to a soundtrack of roars and screams, you pass through Professor Cline’s time machine—a rumbling, revolving tunnel equipped with strobe-lights and fog effects. You emerge onto a gravel path winding through a ruined 19th-century mining village featuring Bigfoot, slime creatures, embattled Union soldiers, a clapboard church, bionic Stonewall Jackson, and, of course, dinosaurs.
In early 2016, Cline was invited to do another formal show at the William King Museum of Art in Abingdon, Virginia. The exhibit was titled, Roadside Attractions: The Weird and Wonderful Worlds of Mark Cline, and was described by museum personnel as an “overwhelming success.”
Plans for more shows are in the works. Cline says he’s presently talking with a number of D.C. and New York venues, and has a show in the works at Meow Wolf in New Mexico.
With Dinosaur Kingdom II receiving a glowing write-up in US News & World Report in the summer of 2017, he says things are looking up.
“If you would have told me this is what my life was going to be like when I was 18 or 19, I’d have laughed in your face,” he reflects. “The goals I set for myself were probably the craziest, most inscrutable things a person could come up with. And if I told you right now a thousand of my wildest dreams have come true, that would be the absolute truth.”
Fluid sloshes in glass vials when Danielle Swanson, the Tenement Museum’s collections manager, pulls open a shallow metal drawer full of little perfume bottles and other cosmetics. Even through sealed plastic baggies marked with tidy, scribbled labels, they smell vaguely medicinal, slightly floral, pleasantly antiseptic.
Like everything else in this basement storage space on New York’s Lower East Side, the perfumes were once trash—forgotten, left behind, or tossed away. The museum is known for having preserved or restored a handful of cramped living spaces and businesses in two tenement buildings—the kind that typified the neighborhood throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was a dense immigrant enclave. Today, its tours give visitors some sense of what life was like for Kosher butchers, Puerto Rican garment workers, and more. As the museum combed through these cramped, dilapidated apartments and storefronts, they exhumed plenty of debris that generations of residents had left behind.
The museum’s archive of antique garbage and cast-offs is off-limits to visitors. The trove, some 6,000 items, is south of the visitors’ center, down two flights of stairs, past a darkened room full of whirring servers, and beyond cabinets stacked with printer cartridges. A few pieces are on display in the museum’s restored apartments, but the vast majority of it lives down here—cleaned, catalogued, preserved, then tucked away.
Typically, once artifacts go from a dig site (or historic renovation) to a museum, their management becomes about stalling time and halting entropy with the right kind of storage materials, climate control, and careful handling.
The Tenement Museum’s trash collection has it a little different. “It’s not actually the most ideal storage space,” Swanson says. In a dream world, she adds, the museum would be able to stow this material in better conditions and make it more available to the public, but that’s not how things stand right now. Though there’s a precision to everything—each drawer and bag is labeled and numbered, and everything is cradled by archival-quality foam or kept in acid-free boxes—the basement isn’t designed for precious things. A rat poison sign is fastened to the wall and little glue boards are laid out to intercept insects. A dehumidifier squats in a corner. The ceiling hangs low enough that it is striped with yellow-and-black caution tape. Water rushes through overhead pipes with a slurp, loud enough to interrupt a conversation.
Most of the trash in the archive turned up when the museum worked to stabilize the floors, ceilings, or staircases of 97 Orchard Street, one of the two tenements it owns. The five-story, multi-family building went up in 1863. Between then and the end of the 1930s, tens of millions of immigrants landed in New York City, and the museum estimates that roughly 7,000 of them passed through 97 Orchard. The tenants came from all over Europe: first from Germany, Russia, and Eastern Europe, and later Turkey, Greece, Spain, and Italy. People lived in the building until 1935, when the owner decided to board the apartments up rather than continue to update and maintain them. Shopkeepers operated out of its street-level storefronts for decades after the apartments went vacant—for more than 50 years—even as the neighborhood filled with new arrivals from China and Puerto Rico. The museum’s cofounders began leasing the building in 1988, and had purchased it by the time the first exhibition opened to the public in the mid-1990s.
Preservation, stabilization, and restoration were conducted piecemeal. “We talk about it as bringing a floor online at a time,” says Dave Favaloro, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs. Updating the wiring, stripping beadboard to reveal fireplaces, pulling up floorboards—all jarred loose small items lost or stashed by their owners, or secreted by rodents, over the years. “From what I understand, rats like shiny things,” Favaloro adds. “How else would they have become clumped together?”
Trash is perhaps the greatest currency of archaeology. It tells stories, but they don’t always have a beginning, middle, and end. Favaloro says there’s not much to be gained by thinking about this material as something that can be excavated layer by layer. Many of the pieces—newspaper clippings, wedding invitations, ledgers—are, at best, snapshots. “Imagine somebody came to your home 150 years from now and opened up your kitchen floor,” he says. “Your junk mail happened to slip through the cracks, and somebody tried to glean the nuances of your own daily life from that.”
But there is still much to be learned—especially about immigrants’ daily routines, challenges, and aspirations. Favaloro was surprised to discover in the collection a tin of Durkee curry powder. “I didn’t expect to find [one] in a home that, at the time, was home to mostly Eastern European Jewish immigrants,” he says. The debris also includes dried-up raspberries and a waxy, half-eaten bagel that found its way behind a fireplace. There’s a common misconception, Favaloro says, that European immigrants couldn’t afford fresh produce or meat, and instead subsisted on meager meals of bread and soup. Historian Hasia Diner contests that idea in her book Hungering for America, in which she describes a Lower East Side teeming with food merchants. Fruit pits discovered in the footprints of old kitchens also dispute that idea, and each gets its own bag in the basement. (Their neighbors include a naturally mummified mouse and a little skeleton that Swanson and company haven’t yet been able to identify.)
The museum hasn’t quite decided what to do with this unusual archive. Some kind of visible storage or a digital gallery might be an option, Favaloro says. Then again, “This isn’t the type of museum where an object stands alone and has meaning in and of itself,” he says. “These objects acquire meaning in the context of the stories that we weave around them.”
The neighborhood around the museum is certainly no time capsule. Sam’s Knitwear, with its rusted iron grate and sun-bleached sign, remains, but across the street is a two-story artisanal coffee shop and a storefront advertising a luxury condo development rising nearby. Though the museum limits additional acquisitions—they simply don’t have the space—the staff does occasionally salvage things from local stalwarts on their way out. Tucked in among the centuries-old trash are boxes, for example, from M. Schames & Son, a hardware store that had been operating out of 3 Essex Street since 1927. The business relocated, so the museum took in some material that would have otherwise landed in a dumpster.
Even without too many new things piling up, there are still boxes upon boxes of older detritus and donations that have yet to be processed. Before the building’s yard was added to tours a few years ago, Favaloro says, the collections team could sift through stuff back there. Now they’re looking for a new space to accommodate the dirty work. “You can’t really do that on a street corner,” he says.
There is a little conservation workstation in a corner of the storage room, but it doesn’t get much use—it can be sweltering down there. Still, it’s set up with with gloves, Q-tips, and alcohol. Along with colleagues in the education department, Swanson will continue to dip into the archive, swabbing and searching for stories. This conservation work calls for a light touch, she says—just a little cleaning that preserves the patina, the age, the story. “I think it adds some of that historic value,” Swanson says. “It came out of the floor.”
When the silent film The City Without Jews first aired in New York in July 1928, it was panned by the city's papers. The New York Times described it as "one of the most fatuous productions imaginable," with "a title to attract attention, but ... no problems, no acting above subnormal, no interesting situations and no unusual photographer." The critic professed to have no idea as to "why the Fifth Avenue Playhouse volunteered to bleed and die, if need be, in order to get it."
Yet while the film's plot might have seemed ludicrous to some audience members in the 1920s, to many modern watchers, its events are eerily prophetic. First released in 1924, The City Without Jews is an Austrian expressionist film, based off the satirical novel of the same name by the novelist and journalist Hugo Bettauer. It predicts a future in which Jews are forcibly expelled from their homes in an unnamed European city and piled into stock car trains, before being shipped east, and out of the country.
The film had been lost for decades before being found in a Paris flea market in 2015, the BBC reports. Now, after a major crowdfunding campaign from Austria's national film archive, it is being screened in cinemas across Europe for the first time in as much as 80 years, starting in Vienna, Austria.
When the novel and film were released, "at the beginning of the 1920s, just after Austria's First Republic was founded, political anti-Semitism was growing incredibly, much more than during the monarchy," Nikolaus Wostry, director of collections at the Filmarchiv Austria, told the BBC. "That all brought [Bettauer] into big conflicts with the right wing in Austrian society, which was quite dominant at that time."
In the novel, and subsequent film, the city's citizens initially celebrate the departure of the Jews, who had become political scapegoats for the city's rising unemployment and prices. But there's a happy ending, of sorts: As the economy begins to crash down, with theaters going bankrupt and other businesses suffering, a popular movement demanding the Jews' return gains pace; the proto-fascist party in power falls; and the expulsion law is repealed. The film ends, however, with the revelation that the entirety of the plot has been a dream. The anti-Semitic Councillor Bernard awakens with the sudden revelation that the Jews, in fact, are a "necessary evil."
Bettauer intended his novel to be controversial. Born to a Jewish family in Austria, he spent much of his life in the United States and abroad, after running away to Alexandria, Egypt at the age of 16. At 18, he converted to Christianity. He was, in many respects, a political radical, variously being expelled from Prussia for exposing police corruption; arguing for legalized abortion; and supporting the rights of gay people. This novel was an attempt to skewer what he perceived to be a growing current of racism and intolerance in Viennese society, aimed at a popular audience. "As both a journalist and an author," writes the scholar Kenneth R. Janken, "he understood how to combine capitalistic forms of publishing and entertainment with socially relevant and progressive ideas."
The book was hugely successful, and sold more than 250,000 copies. The film, though popular, performed less well with audiences, and has since been considered one of the most overtly anti-Nazi films of its time. Its screenings were sometimes the site of protests by Nazis, where stinkbombs were thrown into the audience. For Bettauer personally, the film's release provoked a major hate campaign, Wostry said. "His private address was published and in the newspapers, it was explicitly said that such a person shouldn't be part of society." In 1925, he was murdered by a young member of the Nazi party, Otto Rothstock, who claimed to have killed Bettauer "to save German culture from Jewish degeneration." He was declared insane, but served only 18 months in a psychiatric institution.
The film's release this year does not take place in a political vacuum, Wostry told the Washington Post. “In today’s Europe, we can clearly see the exploitation of people’s fears once again," Wostry said. "Politicians focus them on target groups—be it immigrants or followers of religions. And as Austrians, we have a special responsibility.” Recent allegations of and investigations into anti-Semitism across Europe provide part of that backdrop, the Post reported, while the success of the film's crowdfunding may, in part, have been a response to political events across the globe. “We received enormous financial support from abroad," Wostry said, "including from Americans following the 2016 U.S. election."
In just over five years, the apostles of insect eating have moved entomophagy in the Unites States and Europe from a Fear Factor sideshow to a regular fixturein food industrytrend lists. These entopreneurs, dozens of newly minted bug farmers and cricket-laced protein bar hawkers, built their culinary foothold through compelling arguments about nutrition and sustainability. Crickets, for example, provide leaner protein than animal meats, require minimal feed and water to rear, and produce far fewer greenhouse gas emissions per pound. These claims may be overblown, but they’re effective.
Common wisdom holds, however, that the industry still faces one major headwind: culture. While the vast majority of the world has some history or current practice of insect eating, Europe and America, many insect eating enthusiasts and experts claim, do not. In the absence of precedent, we’re primed to see eating creepy crawlies as loathsome.
There’s a little problem with this common wisdom, though. America does have a history of insect eating. Native communities across the modern United States developed culinary traditions around dozens of insect species, from crickets to caterpillars, ants to aphids. White settlers and other newcomers ultimately denigrated these traditions. But well into the 19th century, they occasionally participated in them, or formed limited insect-eating cultures of their own. In some communities, insect eating remained relatively common well into the mid-20th century; a few continue today.
The origins of these foodways are not as well documented as the development of, say, cakes or bagels. But we do know that by the time Europeans and other newcomers encountered American Indians, many had highly developed insect harvesting practices. In the 19th century, the Shoshone and other Native communities in the Great Basin region formed massive circles and beat the brush to drive thousands of grasshoppers into pits, blankets, or bodies of water for mass collection; they then roasted them on coals or ground them into flour. The Paiute and other groups out West dug trenches with precise, vertical walls around trees, then smoked out caterpillars for regularized, large-scale harvests. Some Paiute communities around Mono Lake in California reportedly organized their calendar around the life cycles of certain larvae, as well as other types of small game such as rabbits or lizards.
Some of this insect eating just made practical sense. Grasshoppers were thick on the plains during average seasons, and in heavy swarm years, a plague of hoppers-turned-locusts could blot out the sky. Into the 20th century, lumberjacks in Oregon claimed that caterpillars were so plentiful that, during their month-long feeding season, the sound of their crap falling from the trees was like an unending sleet storm. Harvesting this bounty was a time- and energy-efficient way of gathering protein.
But in many communities, insect eating was not merely a matter of survival or convenience. American Indians with plenty of other options for hunting or harvesting collected insects as a delicacy. A mid-20th century account of the Cherokee in North Carolina notes that they dug up young cicadas, removed their legs, and fried them in hog fat as a treat. Sometimes they baked them into pies or salted and pickled them for later. They also apparently loved roasted cornworms and yellowjacket grubs, which were hardly as convenient to harvest as a locust swarm. The arctic Tlicho reportedly let gadfly larvae grow on meats they’d hunted so they could be picked off and eaten raw as a treat on par with gooseberries. And the Onondaga supposedly enjoyed a good ant here and there for the citrus bite it could add to a dish.
Some groups, including a few communities in New Brunswick, used ants as a medicinal food as well. The Kitanemuk of the western Mojave—and possibly other tribes in south-central California—even consumed red harvester ants as a spiritual hallucinogenic. All told, experts estimate that between 25 and 50 percent of Native American communities have some sort of insect-eating tradition.
Europeans actually had their own insect-eating traditions too, although they were poorly documented. Still, we can see snippets of them in accounts of German soldiers in Italy in the early 17th century snacking happily on fried silkworms, or of people in what is now Ukraine using an ant-based liquor, murashkowka, to make medicinal punches in the early 19th century. But according to David Gracer, an expert on insect-eating history, none of these traditions, to his knowledge, transferred into America.
Colonists did at times interact with Native insect-eating traditions, though. According to archaeologist and insect eating history buff David Madsen, Native Americans in the Great Basin traded an insect fruitcake (a mash of nuts, berries, and insect bits, usually katydids, dried into a bar) to immigrant wagon trains in the mid-19th century. This trade sustained segments of the westward migration in America, and may, according to a 2013 United Nations report, have saved the earliest Mormon settlers in Utah. “One account said something to the effect that, while the initial reaction to [these fruitcakes] was not that favorable, that soon wore off and the settlers ate it with gusto,” says Madsen.
Some settlers even developed their own insect-eating traditions. In 1874, notably, a massive locust swarm decimated crops throughout the Midwest, forcing some farmer-settlers to give up their homesteading lands. To address the food scarcity in the region, Missouri entomologist Charles Valentine Riley developed recipes for eating the locusts, which he managed to get endorsed by a well-known St. Louis caterer and disseminated throughout the region.
Most of these flirtations with insect eating were short-term affairs: matters of survival that lasted only as long as the wagon trains rolled across the plains or the crops were decimated. But a few traditions had staying power. Lumberjacks in Maine and Quebec, for instance, reportedly caught and ate carpenter ants from the early colonial era into the 19th century. “We think they were warding off scurvy,” says prominent insect chef David Gordon, “because they taste citrus-y.”
While settlers may have been, at times, open to eating insects, Gracer points out that the overarching story of white-dominated settlement in America is one of subjugating nature and replicating favored European foodways. He also notes that Europeans especially, and other settlers as well, weaponized unfamiliar practices—including insect eating—as a sign of Native Americans’ inferiority. The 19th century French missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet went so far as to call one Western tribe, the Soshoco, uniquely “miserably, lean, weak, and badly clothed” because they relied on insects more than nearby Native groups. And in the mid-20th century, the entomologist Charles T. Brues notes, viewing other cultures’ insect-eating traditions “served royally to bolster up the feeling of race superiority, Nordic or otherwise.”
Culturally dominant Western sensibilities eventually marginalized any form of insect eating in America. “It probably was a class issue,” notes Rosanna Yau, an editor at The Food Insects Newsletter. “It was probably shameful for Europeans to admit to eating insects, or even lobsters, because it was a poor person’s food.” Industrialization and urbanization also made it increasingly difficult to harvest insects.
Missionaries and settlers heaped open scorn on Native communities, and their foodways were often a target. Writing in 1946, Brues noted that “the recent influx of wide-eyed and hilariously mirthful tourists” out West “made the Indians bashful” about practicing their traditions, including entomophagy. More brutal and systematic tactics came into play as well, such as shipping Native children to boarding schools where they were beaten and coerced into conformity.
It speaks to the power and extent of these traditions that they survived, if under the radar and at diminished scale, in many Native communities well into the 20th century. Anthropologists had no problem finding people willing to show them extant harvesting methods in the 1950s, says Madsen, and newspaper articles attest to caterpillar and grasshopper gathering in the 1990s. “I have heard several current or recent examples of small Native communities gathering and sharing insect foods” to this day across the Great Basin, adds Gracer.
A few accounts suggest that limited entomophagy may have long survived in some white settler communities, at least on the Great Plains. Kelly Sturek of the Nebraska-based insect eating startup Bugeater Foods has heard stories of children eating cicadas growing up. Their families, he says, treated this as normal, not a gross-out childhood dare. If anything, they were chided for spoiling their appetites.
It is not surprising that America’s insect-eating traditions, lived or historical, are little known. Most of America engages with Native history selectively, if at all, points out Jenna Jadin, author of a pamphlet on cicada eating. Native peoples may choose not to put their insect eating cultures on open display given persistent stigmas. Meanwhile, Americans have developed a set narrative about who colonial settlers were, says Sturek. “We were frontiersmen,” he explains. “We hunted. We fished. We farmed. Insects don’t really fit into that.”
As a result, most Americans first encounter insect eating when traveling in (or watching travel shows about) Southeast Asia, where insect eating is mainstream. Even though finding a cultural correlate is usually a good way to push seemingly novel products such as grasshopper bars, most American entopreneurs miss or gloss over this history of local, traditional practices.
The West’s new interest in insect eating opens an opportunity to explore a long-neglected element of American history. Better yet, it's a chance to offer those with a historic stake in American entomophagy the ability to influence the industry’s development, and perhaps to benefit from the revival of cultural practices once used to denigrate them. By instead failing to explore American insect-eating traditions, indigenous or otherwise, the current trend implicitly erases and marginalizes this history yet again.
