On April 5, 1968, a cream-colored hearse pulled up next to a plane on a Memphis tarmac. The crowd pressed close around the wings didn’t make much room—milling mourners, newspeople, and police officers stepped back just enough to allow the vehicle’s rear doors to open. When they did, a few men removed a coffin carrying the body of Martin Luther King Jr. and placed it onto the plane, bound for services in Atlanta.

In the tragedy that unfolded slowly in the hours and days after King was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel, the 1966 Cadillac Superior Royale Coach was a prop. It carried the civil rights leader’s body from the hospital to a brief viewing at R.S. Lewis and Sons Funeral Home, where long lines of mourners filed past his open casket. After the trip to the airport, its role was complete, and it returned to its regular duty for the funeral home.

Soon, R.S. Lewis and Sons exchanged the hearse for a newer model, and the Cadillac ended up in a warehouse. And that’s where it stayed for 40 years, until Jimmie DeRamus’s family purchased it in 2007 from Zane Smith, the dealer who originally sold it to the funeral home.

The DeRamus family—who starred on the History Channel’s show Cajun Pawn Stars—brought the car back to their home state of Louisiana, where they spent the next few years restoring it. “It was literally in pieces when we did it,” Jimmie DeRamus says. The hearse needed much more than a fresh coat of paint and new chrome. Under the hood, he repaired mechanical systems, and felt a certain sense of urgency. “You can’t get parts of these if you wait too long,” he says. In the end, he says, “We made a beautiful piece of art out of it. We put it back together just like it came from the factory.”

Once the restoration was complete, the family put it on display at their shop, Silver Dollar and Jewelry in Alexandria, Louisiana. It even made a few trips back to Memphis, including one in 2014 to carry the body of Zane Smith.

The hearse is the somber focus of a funeral procession. For a family in mourning, it carries literal and symbolic weight: the body of the deceased as well as the heft of a final goodbye. Once the procession is over, the hearse moves on to the next before being retired or junked like any other car—but some, eventually, enter the world of curators, scholars, and collectors. The specialized vehicles can be seen and treated as design objects—ornate, even ostentatious. And to transportation historians, they help tell the story of how America became a country of cars.

When the National Museum of Funeral History opened in Houston in 1992—in a nondescript brick building that shares a campus with a funeral services school—its first permanent exhibition was a fleet of historic hearses. “We have a fascinating collection, everything from a horse-drawn hearse to motorized. You can see how they have changed over time,” Genevieve Keeney, the museum’s director, told the Houston Press. “Car enthusiasts really enjoy it." The collection includes a Packard funeral bus, dating to 1916, that could carry more than 20 mourners. An opulent 1921 model features cascading curtains and creeping foliage—all carved, by hand, from wood. By the mid-20th century, Cadillac, Lincoln, and other mainstream car manufacturers produced hearses, too. The museum also exhibits the sleek, chromed hearses that carried the bodies of Grace Kelly, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford.

It’s not surprising to see hearses in a museum devoted to the funerary arts, but some other museums have them, too. The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, for instance, acquired both a horse-drawn hearse and a motorized one. They’re in the permanent collection, alongside an Allegheny steam locomotive from 1941—one of the biggest trains to chug across the country before the adoption of diesel—and an 1896 Quadricycle, Ford’s first shot at a gas-powered car. The hearses in the collection are part of the story of the vehicle’s “role in American life,” says Matt Anderson, curator of transportation.

The horse-drawn hearse, from around 1875, for instance, points to the evolving—and increasingly elaborate—set of rituals that came to surround death in America. With its glass panes and ruched curtains, it’s a far cry from earlier, more utilitarian wagons used to transport simple coffins. It is one facet of the transformation that also resulted in rambling, grassy cemeteries dotted with grand tombstones and monuments, the museum writes.

For now, Anderson says, the museum probably has all of the hearses it can handle. They are, by necessity and desire, large vehicles, and they require “a little more in the way of caring and cleaning,” he says, because of their elaborate bodywork, ornate detailing, or extra upholstery. Anderson says they’d consider another, but only under the criteria that they would use to evaluate any potential acquisitions. They’d assess whether it fills gaps in the collection, if it’s in presentable shape, and what kinds of alterations it had undergone. Then, Anderson says, they’d be curious about the backstory. “We’d be looking for a hearse with a number of stories to tell,” he says. “Do we know who might have been carried in it, where was it used, what funeral home owned it, why did they buy this particular hearse?”

Telling those stories is a delicate task, Anderson adds, because displaying hearses—particularly those that carried famous bodies—can easily tilt into the macabre or sensational. Exhibiting them also runs the risk of reducing someone’s life to the way it ended. For that reason, he says, collecting hearses from high-profile funerals adds a fresh challenge: “How do you display and interpret it sensitively?”

To hear DeRamus tell it, though, restoring the Cadillac hearse from Memphis was key to keeping its story from rotting away in that storage shed, rusty and forgotten. “It would not have been saved if I had not bought it,” he says. “Period.”

Charles Manson is remembered as many things: a murderer, a madman, a cult leader. Behind it all, he was a product of the same 1960s culture that his crimes brought to a shocking and tragic end. It’s sometimes forgotten that he was also an aspiring musician in that same scene. Artifacts related to Manson are not entirely uncommon, but one of the most fascinating and telling is the guitar that is currently held at Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

While Manson likely owned any number of guitars throughout his life, the one at the museum touches on almost every aspect of his story. A wooden acoustic instrument with Manson’s name crudely etched on the headstock, it still bears the evidence tag it was given after the police seized it during a raid on the cult leader’s California ranch. “When you think about objects that have to do with Charles Manson, this is it,” says Rachael Penman, director of artifacts at Alcatraz East. “This is the holy grail. Because his desire to get into the music business is what motivated him to get involved with people like [Dennis] Wilson. Which got him angry at the producer who lived at the house, who unfortunately didn’t live there anymore.”

As Penman suggests, not only did Manson have a brief friendship with The Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, but also, in some ways, it was the musical dreams that led directly to the night of horrors his followers perpetrated in July and August 1969. In and out of prison for the majority of his life, Manson is said to have learned to play guitar from fellow inmate and infamous “Public Enemy #1,” Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. “Karpis didn’t think a whole lot of him,” says Penman. Manson was also notoriously influenced by The Beatles. He thought that some of their songs were coded messages about a coming race war (see “Helter Skelter”) and, according to Penman, he strived to reach their level of fame and influence. “Basically, by the time he got out of prison, he got it in his head that he was going to be like The Beatles. That he was God’s gift to music, and that he was going to hit it big,” she says.

In pursuit of his musical dreams, Manson managed to ingratiate himself with Wilson by the summer of 1968. “I don’t know who a comparable musician would be today, but someone like [Manson] just becoming friends with a major musician like that just seems crazy. But that’s what happened,” says Penman. During their acquaintance, Manson and his “Family” stayed at Wilson’s house, and Manson partied and played among some of the other greats of the day, including Neil Young and John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. The Beach Boys even recorded a reworded version of one of Manson’s songs, with “Cease to Exist” becoming “Never Learn Not to Love.” Manson was paid for the rights with cash and a motorcycle. However, as retold in a 2017 Washington Post piece about their relationship, Manson later said that he left a bullet on Wilson’s pillow because he was angry that they changed the lyrics.

Thanks to Manson’s erratic and frightening behavior, he and Wilson grew apart, but Manson's musical dreams never disappeared. Even after he was locked up for what would be the rest of his life, he was still trying to get his music out there. The only somewhat-official album of Manson’s recordings, Lie: The Love and Terror Cult, was released in 1970, after he had been captured.

The guitar on display at the Alcatraz East Museum was taken from the Barker Ranch during the raids in late 1969. It’s not clear how often Manson used it, or if it held any special significance to him, but Penman speculates that he may have held it close. “I would imagine that if you’re that kind of personality, this guitar was with him all the time," she says, "as one of his most valuable possessions."

Pity the unicorn. Though mythical, the beast can't seem to catch a break. Whether portrayed in medieval bestiaries or Harry Potter, they are constantly chased by dogs, trapped, or killed for their horns. According to ancient scholars such as the Greek physician Ctesias, the horns' magical properties included purifying water and banishing poison in food.

Luminaries from Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci believed unicorns to be real, and physicians in the Middle Ages began claiming the purity of unicorn horns could detect poison. That claim made unicorn horns a popular item among the royal and rich. Accounts abound of European nobility using horns to puzzle out if their food was fatal.

But how do you get a unicorn horn in a world without unicorns?

Sometimes, the answer was rhino or walrus horn. But the most common item taken by royals as unicorn horns was what is now considered one of the most expensive materials in all history: narwhal tusks. Narwhals are small whales with Arctic swimming grounds, and their single ivory tooth can reach nine feet in length and swirl, tapering, to a point. Long hunted by the Canadian and Greenland Inuit for food, they were also hunted by another group: Vikings. When they roamed the seas in the early Middle Ages, Vikings hunted and harvested narwhal horns, which they sold without revealing their origin. These horns became so emblematic that by the 12th century, the twisted shape of the narwhal tusk became the accepted image of the unicorn horn.

Their potential mystical powers made them rare nearly beyond price. In his paper A Goblet of Unicorn Horn, art historian Guido Schoenberger commented that "among the things sought by man to protect life and prevent death, none was more highly regarded than the horn of the unicorn."

Pure-white unicorns were a potent symbol. Often, their purification powers were attributed to a holy connection to Christianity and Jesus Christ. Other times, they signaled courtly love. But neither of these high-minded associations kept royalty from buying horns that necessarily came from dead unicorns. Lorenzo de Medici owned a narwhal tusk that was worth 6,000 gold coins, while Queen Elizabeth I reportedly received one worth £10,000 (the price of an entire castle). Danish rulers were once crowned on a throne made of "unicorn" horns—the royal chair is still visible at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen.

There were many uses of not-actually-unicorn horn. Powdered narwhal tusk was sprinkled on wounds and swallowed to cure disease. But it was most often used to detect poison. Chunks of tusk were turned into goblets, knife handles, and amulets to be worn around the throat, while even tinier pieces were used to test food and wine. Poison was present if the ivory changed color or started to sweat. The complete lack of successfully discovered poison didn't discourage the horn trade.

For the backstabbing nobility of the late medieval era and the Renaissance, poisoning seemed all too likely. While most royals likely died of natural ailments, the undetectability of poison in the years before modern medicine created healthy suspicion among those with many enemies. The vindictive Medicis were big fans of unicorn horn, and Mary, Queen of Scots, wanted it to test her food while held captive by her cousin, Elizabeth I. But in addition to the unicorn horn, royalty usually had a person try their food as well, which was probably much more effective.

We all have objects that we notice every day, that ground us in our communities. Maybe it's a particular mailbox, or a nice street tree. Maybe it's a sign on the way to work that makes you laugh. Or maybe it's a pickle jar, perched on a concrete wall next to a highway ramp.

Such is the case for many who drive through Des Peres, Missouri. On the ramp that leads from I-270 North to Manchester Road, near a grocery store and a busy shopping mall, there often sits a quiet and mysterious jar of pickles. When it falls, breaks, or disappears, it is always replaced. It is the highway's warty lodestar.

Barb Steen, who lives nearby, first noticed the jar in 2012. She's been watching it ever since. "Every day for six years, I brushed my teeth, I got in my car, and I looked for pickles," she says. Seasons changed: the sun beat down, then snow piled up. Construction and protest actions shut down the highway. "And the pickles remained," she says. "Like there was some aura around it or something, protecting it."

About two years into this routine, Steen decided to spread the love. She started a Facebook group, "Team Pickle." "These Pickles need a Fan Page!" she explained in the group's description. "There has got to be a story behind these pickles and inquiring minds want to know." She closed out with a prophetic goal: "Let's make them famous!!"

At first, about 25 people joined this condiment community. Members described sightings, and shared blurry drive-by photos. They posted pickle jokes and memes, as well as theories about the jar's provenance. Perhaps it was a kind of shrine, meant to honor someone who had loved pickles. Perhaps it was aliens.

Steen has her own favorite conjecture: "Maybe it's somebody with a forbidden love, and they put the pickles up there at their work exit: "Hey, know i'm thinking of you.'"

Attention has its downsides. Quite soon after the Facebook group began, the first pickle jar disappeared. It had been pretty gnarly: half-evaporated, with its label rubbed off, and "just this nude color, no real green to it," says Steen. Still, members mourned. One wrote a poem: "A jar / Viewed from afar / Has left a scar / Upon our hearts / Alas it departs!" That February, after it had still failed to return, another fan put it more simply: "I miss the pickle jar."

But some objects can transcend their original form. Over a year after the first jar vanished, another showed up. It was a different brand and quantity—fuller, more verdant—but that didn't matter. The group was jubilant.

This cycle continued: A jar might topple, empty out, or otherwise abscond. It would soon reappear anew. There have been yellow-lidded jars filled with mostly brine and red-labled ones packed full of slices; Mt. Olives decorated with a festive bow and Vlasics reinforced by Tupperware. But while the particulars of the jar change, its spirit stays the same. Team Pickle members tend to describe each incarnation as "the pickle jar," or simply "the pickles"—as in "the pickles are back."

Just this month, after a Reddit thread was posted about the pickles, a spate of local news reports began to bring new attention to the jar. Fox 2 news in St. Louis told the story and asked for reader tips. The Kansas City Star compiled the best jokes and memes. Then the story went national, picked up by TV and radio stations far from Missouri. The membership of Team Pickle has since risen from a few hundred nearby fans to over 2,500 from all over the place. "We've got the U.K., we've got Hawaii," says Steen. "It's crazy."

This fame has had some positive effects. Curious onlookers who had formerly been going solo—like the aforementioned Redditor Ian Cunningham, who took the time to hop out of his car and take close-up portraits of the jar—now have a place to gather.

Some of these new members have been searching for briny brethren for years. "I've been talking about them ever since early 2012… I started to think that I was losing my mind," wrote one. "I am a tow truck driver and have drove past it numerous times and I can say I’m glad I’m not the only one that has noticed this jar of pickles," added another.

New clues have emerged: one member swears there was "a mystery volleyball in the same location" just a few years ago. Another has connected the pickles to construction sites, saying that workers drink the juice to prevent cramps. One put a slice of the mystery to rest, admitting that she put a new jar on the ledge back in 2016.

But as with any move to the mainstream, there are cons as well. Some old-timers have posted worrying that people will sour things, either by messing with the pickles or by trying too hard to find answers. At least one has already proposed a stakeout. "Even today, other pickles have showed up in St. Louis at other exit ramps," says Steen, who adds that even though she started the group, she hopes the original pickles' provenance remains a mystery: "Sometimes, guessing is more fun than knowing."

Perhaps the biggest downside is that the pickle jar has once again disappeared: As of the morning of April 6, 2018, the concrete ledge is empty. Overall, though, the group is not despairing. If there's anything they have learned, it's that the jar always comes back. It just might not be quite the same.

What happens to old hardcover books that no one wants any more? There's donation and recycling, but it seems that as often as not they end up forgotten, in boxes and piles in garages, attics, or basements, where they can grow musty and moldy. But sometimes they can be repurposed, and if they find themselves in the hands of illustrator Isobelle Ouzman, they can be art. Her ongoing project, Altered Books, takes donated or discarded hardcovers and converts them into hidden, three-dimensional landscapes.

“My altered books happened accidentally,” Ouzman says, in an email interview. “I came across a cardboard box full of hardback novels one day, sat outside in the rain. As a lover of books, I brought them home to dry out, and repaired some of the bindings, determined to use them in some way.” Instead of reading them—she wasn’t a fan of the genre—she began to draw on the first page of one of them. “I don’t quite remember what brought me to start carving into the pages, but a few months later I had my first finished altered book. That was back in 2012. Ever since then I have been developing them into what they are now, trying to find the best way to build them.”

When opened, her creations reveal intricate holloways made of paper: dense forests, layers of long grass, moonlit leaves, and hidden doors, inhabited by owls, deer, and wolves. “I have always been very quiet and shy, especially after moving to the United States from England as a teenager, and making friends was difficult,” she explains. “Early on, I was able to find comfort through reading and have continued to do so now as an adult. Tales of enchanted creatures and forests fascinate me, as it’s something that seems to be embraced across all cultures, and they wildly ignite my imagination.”

Ouzman mostly uses books that have been donated to her by friends, family, or fans of her work. For a commissioned piece, she will sketch out her ideas but otherwise, she doesn't tend to plan it out, “as I tend to change my direction multiple times throughout the piece,” she says.

Since that first serendipitous meeting in the rain six years ago, Ouzman has produced somewhere between 20 and 30 altered books. "I haven’t kept a record of them until maybe the past couple years" she explains, noting that in the beginning, they were created just as gifts for friends and family. “One altered book can take me anywhere between 25 to 35 hours to complete. Because they take so long and with [me] being so easily distracted, I often work on multiple books at a time." One work usually takes a minimum of 12 weeks.

Ouzman has also recently started producing miniatures. As with her altered books, they are made from repurposed material—scraps from the hardcover books, the backs of sketchpads, or old journals. "I try my best to repurpose as many materials as I can with my work" she says. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images of Altered Books.

Like so many of his peers in the hospitality industry, Paul Lake, the manager of Baltimore’s Rennert Hotel, spent the early weeks of March 1933 glued to his local newspaper stand. In the months leading up to then, reports out of Washington D.C. had suggested politicians were flirting with a repeal of the 18th Amendment. While the wholesale abolishment of Prohibition would take months—if not years—to wriggle its way through the United States Congress, rumor had it legislators were considering a bill that would immediately legalize certain beers and wines. Lake could only imagine how such a law might increase profit margins in his hotel restaurant.

On March 22, 1933, the bill passed. Known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, it only decriminalized beverages below 3.2 percent alcohol by weight. Still, this detracted little from what would later become known unofficially as “New Beer’s Eve.” After 13 long years, alcohol would once again flow in Lake’s hotel starting on April 7, at 12:01 a.m.

Lake didn’t scrimp on pomp and circumstance. To tend bar that night, he re-hired the last two bartenders to work at the Rennert before Prohibition. He installed a brand-new countertop on his bar, and, hoping to attract Baltimore’s press, he shrewdly invited the city’s most famous living writer: H.L. Mencken. Renowned for his polemics against puritanical America, Mencken was also a notorious beer enthusiast. “There is nothing I would like better than to personally hand you the first glass of beer at the reopening,” Lake wrote to Mencken on March 31—to which the writer promptly responded, “Needless to say, I will be delighted.”

When April 6 finally came, Lake ensured his delivery men were among the first in line at the Baltimore Brewery, which had promised to wheel out kegs at midnight. A hotel employee soon returned with a fresh barrel, and Lake ordered his bartenders to tap the keg. The dense crowd initially groaned as a stream of murky water rushed out. “But presently,” the BaltimoreSun gushed, “the milky brew rushed forth, eager, gurgling, foaming and spattering in its excitement.”

At 12:29, the bartenders passed their first successful pour to Lake, who then handed it to Mencken. The writer accepted it with a smile, cocked his drinking elbow, and took a dramatic pose.

“Here it goes!” he said.

As Mencken downed the beer in two long gulps, the audience silently anticipated his appraisal.

“Pretty good,” Mencken said, still smiling. “Not bad at all.”

As it turns out, Mencken was lying. The beer was actually “sad hog-wash,” he later admitted. Still, for him and other anti-Prohibition provocateurs, the brew’s quality was insignificant. What really mattered was that the scales of public sentiment were finally tipping their way. “America had largely become a beer-drinking country by 1920, when the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act both went into effect,” says historian William Rorabaugh, author of Prohibition: A Concise History. “As far as a majority of Americans were concerned, legal beer was the end of Prohibition.”

Many legislators in the federal government shared this view. Signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on March 22, 1933, the Cullen-Harrison Act came during the peak of the Great Depression. Viewing the 18th Amendment as a roadblock to recovery, the Roosevelt administration had already launched a repeal campaign weeks earlier. In the meantime, it saw the legalization of low-alcohol beer as a dry run for America’s re-acclimatization to public drinking.

Based upon contemporary newspaper reports, constituents in the 19 or so states that had agreed to recognize the Cullen-Harrison Act were more than game to participate in this experiment the weekend of April 7. On what’s now celebrated as the first National Beer Day, throngs of onlookers gathered outside local breweries at midnight. According to the New York Times, revelers across the country navigated sidewalks already packed with newly-licensed hospitality representatives “to watch the lines of trucks waiting for blocks around, see them piled high with cases and kegs of beer at the loading platforms and then adjourn to a nearby restaurant or ‘coffee pot’ and drain a few glasses of brew from the same brewery one had been visiting.”

Outside one unspecified brewery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a Times journalist reported seeing participants carting away beer in “private automobiles, taxicabs, and even baby carriages.” Not to be outdone, “one elderly gentleman with handlebar mustaches came out of the brewery with a tin pail of beer in each hand and made his way to a near-by tenement house amid cheers of the bystanders.”

Similar scenes played out in Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. In the latter city, enthusiastic crowds packed outside the Anheuser-Busch plant starting at noon on April 6. After midnight, the same crowds flocked to restaurants and hotels, where live orchestras provided soundtracks to their first public drinks in more than a decade. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, this revelry endured well beyond daybreak. Restaurants brimmed with lunchtime customers looking to complement sandwiches with a frosty brew. As crowds of customers turned over and over, chaos ensued as restaurateurs realized most of their servers had been too young to work at the onset of Prohibition. Many “waitresses struggled to acquire the knack of opening bottles,” the Post-Dispatch reported, and “service men found themselves unskilled in serving beer.”

Confusion reigned on an even larger scale in Salem, Oregon. Though Oregon was indeed one of the states that had agreed to participate in April 7 activities, local breweries and restaurants weren’t completely sure if the government had officially signed off on Cullen-Harrison by midnight. They pushed forward anyway. “Up to noon,” Salem’s Daily Capital Journal reported, “there had been no complaint filed with the city recorder against any local dispenser and at the rate the beverage was disappearing down parched throats it was practically certain that there would be no evidence left by the time the authorities got around to taking action.”

As the Harrisburg Gazette described this mass intake the next morning, “Enough beer went down the hatch in the United States yesterday to float a battleship.” By midday, pride in this accomplishment had already started to wane, as establishments quickly ran through initial provisions. The Times wrote the next morning that restaurants, beer gardens, soda fountains, and other dispensaries “reported in scores of cities that their supplies had been exhausted by early afternoon”—news the Post-Dispatch corroborated beneath what’s now a classic front page headline: “St. Louis Drinks Breweries Dry in Less Than 24 Hours.”

Early estimates for April 7 beer sales sat between an astounding 1 and 1.5 million barrels. The Times reported that taxes on Friday sales alone had racked up $10 million for federal, state, and local governments (roughly $191 million in today’s money). According to Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, one cannot overstate the importance of this haul. “The advent of the Depression and the precipitous collapse of federal revenues meant a replacement source of government income had to be found,” Okrent says. “The tax on legalized alcohol was the obvious one.”

Perhaps more important to politicians, the Cullen-Harrison Act also created thousands of jobs. New York breweries employed 2,000 people in the last two weeks of March alone. In St. Louis, August Busch Jr. told the Post-Dispatch that he had added 1,700 jobs at his brewery in a similar span—this at a time when national unemployment rates exceeded 20 percent. “Bringing back alcohol was a jobs program,” Okrent says. “Brewers, distillers, bottle makers, truck drivers, taverns, liquor stores all needed to staff up. Before Prohibition, the industry as a whole, including all the ancillary businesses, was the sixth largest employer in the U.S.”

The importance of all of this was not lost on Mencken and the raucous crowd at Baltimore’s Rennert Hotel in the early hours of April 7. As the writer roistered with old friends, and unhindered by prohibitory law, he realized the night had taken on added meaning. More than an inconvenience, he had always viewed Prohibition as an affront to personal liberty. In this way, he later told the Boston American, April 7 was more than a quick fix for a struggling economy or a fun night out on the town for old drunkards—it was “an epochal event in the onward march of humanity—perhaps the first time in history that any of the essential liberties of man has been gained without the wholesale emission of blood.”

Artist “Red” Hong Yi once recreated Ai Weiwei’s face from 20,000 sunflower seeds. She's depicted Jackie Chan using 64,000 chopsticks, a piece of art Chan himself commissioned for his 60th birthday. World-renowned for her gargantuan portraiture made from ordinary materials, Red’s talents have been lauded by the likes of The Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal. But when she isn’t working on massive depictions of celebrities, she doesn’t stop creating. Her plate-sized works—smaller, but no less awe-inspiring—look good enough to eat. And that’s exactly what she does after she's done with them.

These modestly sized creations were the result of a personal challenge of Red's: to make plated pieces of art, entirely from food, for 31 straight days. For an artist used to working on a more substantial scale, the project became, in her words, "a way to push myself to create and deliver, even if I wasn't happy with the end product."

Not so long ago, Red's artistic projects were only a hobby. In 2012, she was employed at an architecture firm. She designed residential towers that kept her glued to a screen. Each building took years to complete. “I worked on art projects as a breather from the computer,” says Red. She was looking for opportunities to create things using her hands. So began the transition to art.

That year, a video of Red using a basketball to paint Yao Ming's face went viral on Youtube. Not long after, commissions from international corporations starting coming in. By 2013, she was dreaming up massive art installations—influenced by large-scale artists Chuck Close and El Anatsui—as a full-time job.

After working in grand schemes and using bulk materials (think 2,000 socks at a time), Red decided to downsize. So everyday in March of 2013, culinary staples became her paint and plates became her canvas.

Red began the project looking for inspiration around markets in Malaysia—her birthplace. "I would walk through markets and stare at vegetables and allow their patterns and textures to inspire visuals in my head," she says, adding, "I definitely got a lot of annoyed and curious looks from vendors." After buying bunches of the same raw materials, she experimented with possibilities of folding, piling, arranging, and twisting until a pattern piqued her interest.

But her works aren't just beautiful and clever—they're an eye-catching platform for political and social commentary. She's used vegetables to advocate for marriage equality in Australia, Tang to discuss the dissolution of the Malaysian parliament, and soy sauce to express heart-felt concern during the military stand-off in Sabah.

Red recently posted these chocolate critters on her Instagram as a discussion piece on the Paris Climate Agreement. She conveyed a sense of responsibility to protect the environment on behalf of future generations. The caption addressed to her 176,000 followers closed with, "Let's act together to protect our Mother Earth before it's too late."

The melting ice cream bar took several tries and multiple hours to complete, because Malaysia's extreme heat and humidity melted the first three bars. The secret to mastering the fourth attempt? "Working on it with half my body stuck in a fridge," she says.

Each plate takes between one and four hours to complete, and the variability comes from the unexpected challenges of using different foodstuffs. Fashioning four pure white dogs from melting Oreo cream highlighted another tropical weather challenge: Carving shapes created sticky cookie crumbs that readily attached themselves to the filling.

Red loves the familiarity of food as a material, and the unfamiliarity of presenting it in a different way. She says rice is her favorite ingredient to work with. "I have a thing for little dots and strokes," she says. Fruit and vegetables are a more challenging medium, as they tend to dry out and look gross. Nonetheless, Red isn't one to make waste. After she's finished with her creations, she typically stir-fries them.

Currently, Red is working on client projects, one of which involves suspending tea leaves in resin. But balance is important, and after she finishes commissioned work in June, she'll be back to working on her own pieces. Whether a finished work ends up in an exhibition or in her lunch, it's safe to say no one will be advising Red not to play with her food.

A few months ago, a team of archaeologists sent a fleet of drones flying over the Peruvian desert. They were looking for something new, but familiar: signs of looting around protected heritage sites. Instead, they found something old and strange: giant images, sketched into the sand by ancient civilizations.

As Michael Greshko reports at National Geographic, the team discovered "more than 50 new examples" of geoglyph art in the region's Palpa province. Some of them are so-called "Nazca lines," drawn by the Nazca culture "which held sway in the area from 200 to 700 A.D.,” writes Greshko. "However, archaeologists suspect that the earlier Paracas and Topará cultures carved many of the newfound images between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D." (You can see images of the new lines over at Nat Geo.)

Nazca lines—sometimes styled as "Nasca lines"—are massive desert drawings, visible only from above. Many depict animals, plants, and mythical creatures, and some stretch as long as 890 feet. Very little is known about the culture that created them—or about its predecessors, the Paracas and Topará—including exactly why or how they were drawn. The discovery "opens the door to new hypotheses about [the drawings'] function and meaning,” archaeologist Johny Isla, co-director of the Nasca-Palpa Project, told National Geographic.

Rather than being carved into flat ground, most of these newly discovered lines were drawn into hillsides, suggesting that people in villages below could look up and view them. They're also focused on a different subject matter: "Most of these figures are warriors,” one archaeologist told the outlet.

These days, when Nazca lines show up in the news, it's often because people have accidentally destroyed them. Earlier this year, a truck driver plowed through one of the sites, marring the design with tire tracks. Back in 2014, Greenpeace protesters unrolled a banner right next to a giant geoglyph hummingbird, and left footprints. It was this destruction, ironically, that led the Peruvian archaeologists to start using satellites and drones to map the lines and inspect the nearby sites.

In doing so, they "have flagged hundreds of potential sites that Peruvian archaeologists will continue ground truthing this fall and winter," Greshko writes. More lines may be discovered yet.

The subway doors slide open, commuters shuffle in and out, and swarm the platform. Philip Ashforth Coppola doesn’t seem to notice the bustle at all. He stays put, feet planted, close to the wall, flicking his eyes between the tiles and his notebook. He inches a blue pen across the page, making hundreds of precise vertical lines. He’s copying every single tile and other details that all those commuters barely register. There are a lot of them.

Coppola has spent four decades documenting and annotating the architectural features of the New York City subway system in a series of exacting pen-and-paper sketches. While the drawings are black and white, Coppola jots down the colors, from cobalt to peach, and orange ochre to viridian.

It’s work of great attention, and chronicling the art and architecture of each and every station has taken a lot longer than he thought it would. “I’ve spent a lot of years on it, but I haven’t accomplished that much,” he says in a 2005 documentary. That, of course, depends on how you look at it. Coppola has made his way through 110 of the city’s 472 stations. His 2,000 sketches have consumed 41 notebooks.

Jeremy Workman, who directed the documentary, and his coeditor Ezra Bookstein sifted through all of those notebooks to select 120 sketches for a slimmer, curated volume, which will be published by Princeton Architectural Press next month. An exhibition of Coppola’s work is also on view at the New York Transit Museum’s gallery at Grand Central Terminal. Both have the feel of a mid-career retrospective of an artist who has many more sketches ahead of him.

The book is titled One-Track Mind: Drawing the New York Subway, but Coppola’s gaze roams far beyond the tracks themselves. The city’s stations are, to a greater or lesser degree, heavily ornamented with mosaics, reliefs, plaques, and more. Such decorative elements were practically proscribed by the city’s first transit contract, in 1900, which reminded architects to envision stations“with a view to the beauty of their appearance, as well as to their efficiency.” While beauty and efficiency are probably not what most New Yorkers think of when they imagine the subway, one must admit that the stations aren’t boring. And Coppola aims to prove it, one mosaic at a time.

Once an art student, Coppola became fascinated with the ornamentation dating to the early years of the century-old system, and started sketching it in 1978. He gravitated in particular to the work of architectural firm Heins & LaFarge, which was commissioned to create Brooklyn's grand Borough Hall station. “It’s like the Roman Empire come to life, it’s such a regal station,” he told The New York Times. “It’s simply the height. The apex.”

Coppola is, as Bookstein and Workman put it in their introduction, “part outsider artist, part master draftsman, part preservationist.” He has reproduced some of the dizzyingly detailed faience plaques that narrate the city’s history: at Fulton Street, a 1905 depiction of a steamboat churning up the Hudson, for instance, or, at Grand Central, a chugging locomotive. Other sketches are of places that most commuters won’t ever see, such as the old City Hall station, which closed to trains in 1946 but occasionally opens for tours. Coppola has carefully copied its vaulted ceilings, ornate ticket booth, intricate brickwork, looping tracks, and mosaic leaded-glass skylights. Their color in his telling? Amethyst.

Many of the other mosaics, plaques, flourishes similarly aren’t seen by most commuters, but not because they’re hidden or closed off. People just don’t notice them amid the buskers, crowds, delays, and irritated claustrophobia of commuter life in the Big Apple. Riders can be forgiven for forgetting how wondrous the subway can be. But Coppola’s work is a compelling reminder to slow down, step out of the throng, and look closer.

The seven-bay porch of Rohman’s Inn and Pub faces away from the rest of the unincorporated village of Shohola—its handful of homes; its post office, bank, and church; and its 25 or so other buildings. It’s as if the grand old hotel realizes how poorly it fits into this remote area in northeast Pennsylvania. Originally built in 1849, the two-and-a-half-story wood-frame building stopped functioning as an inn at least 40 years ago. But Rohman’s Pub, on the first, basement-level floor, is still a fixture for contractors and retirees who come to play pool, use the jukebox, and order freshly-squeezed screwdrivers at the 54-foot wooden Brunswick bar. “We have a good local base, anywhere from regular beer drinkers to shot drinkers,” a bartender tells me on a winter day. “Nothing too fancy schmancy.”

When the weather’s nice, the bar attracts weekend bikers from New Jersey or even New York City, 100 miles away. Some of them will rent a lane upstairs in one of the country’s most unique bowling alleys, where you have to set your own pins and follow your ball down the lane. Some will grab a beer, stand out front on Rohman Road, and smoke cigarettes all day. A placard behind the bar captures the Rohman’s spirit: “Everyone can bring happiness into this room,” it reads. “Some by coming in, others by going out.”

For more than 100 years, through different owners, iterations, and major fires, Rohman’s has somehow survived in Shohola. It was once one of dozens of hotels and boarding houses that served visitors of a long-disappeared tourist attraction called Shohola Glen, where New Yorkers came to ride the incredible Gravity Railroad and explore Hell Gate, Terror Grotto, and other natural attractions. Some of America’s most important cultural icons stayed as guests; so did survivors of a great Civil War train wreck. But today almost everything that once drew hundreds of thousands of people to Shohola is buried by forest and flood, abandoned to the elements. Only Rohman’s remains, and I was there for its 32nd Olympics.

Rather than towards Shohola, Rohman’s faces New York state, the Delaware River, and, just across the street, the train tracks that once brought as many as 10,000 passengers a day to Shohola. A mile or so down those tracks, two trains crashed head-on during the Civil War in one of the worst collisions in American history. Nowadays, the tracks are where the kegs are tossed.

For the past 32 years, Rohman’s has hosted its own men’s Olympics each winter. On a recent gray and drizzly February afternoon, around 350 people assembled to watch or participate. There were many locals, but most traveled for the event. A yellow school bus showed up filled with firemen from Long Island, many of whom have been coming to Rohman’s Olympics for years. After a low-key torch lighting in which an approximately four-year-old girl declared, “Let the games begin,” the emcees announced that horseshoes and target shooting with a .22 rifle would be the day’s first events. But the first event that anyone cared about started 30 minutes later: the keg toss.

Twenty burly men stepped onto the train tracks, lifted a dented half-barrel keg weighing approximately 35 pounds, and, after a couple between-the-leg swings, tossed it overhead. The first man—wearing untied steel toe boots and a t-shirt that read, “You’re killing me, Smalls!”—threw somewhat casually. His keg landed about 15 feet behind him. Not too bad. The next man up—a skinny vet with a Harley cap—landed his keg about two ties shorter. Several competitors later, an intimidating, bald fireman from Long Island about matched Smalls. Then Bubba Fountain stepped up to the tracks.

Shohola’s first act, which established the remote woodlands as a place of interest worthy of a grand hotel, was as a rich source of natural resources. I learned this from George Fluhr, who, an hour before the Olympics started, said he wouldn’t go because of traffic.

Fluhr is both the Shohola Township and Pike County historian and a foremost expert on the area. He lives two turns and 500 feet up a steep hill from Rohman’s. During the Olympics, parking spaces run out, so people put their cars wherever the heck they want, and Fluhr didn’t want to deal with that. He’d recently had a toe amputated and was walking with a cane. “I can’t walk any distance,” he says. “I’m also very sensitive with a crowd if somebody’s going to step on my toe that’s not even there.”

Fluhr likes to tell New Yorkers that Shohola Township—in which the village of Shohola is just a tiny speck—is roughly the same size as the Bronx, the 40-square-mile New York City borough that holds about a million and a half people. “Shohola Township has 2,000,” says Fluhr, “So we’ve got lots of room.”

European settlers first came to Shohola in the 1700s because of its enormous trees. They were centuries old, four feet in diameter, a couple hundred feet high, and they covered the area. Loggers dragged the giant trunks to the river with horses and shipped them down the Delaware to be used for sailing ship masts, among other things. Workers came from New York City and sometimes straight from the immigration station at Ellis Island, and eventually they felled all the largest trees. The wood built houses between Shohola and Philadelphia and New York City. And in 1848, bluestone was discovered, and hundreds of quarries opened up. Bluestone quarried in Pike County, and adjacent Wayne County, helped construct the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and West Point. “It was the place to make a fortune,” says Fluhr.

In 1849, building off the area’s growing industry, the Erie Railroad started coming through Shohola—offering an easy way for pollution-saturated city folk to get to the fresh air of the river valley. That same year, Chauncey Thomas, a businessman with local lumber interests, built what was called the Thomas Tavern House in Shohola. Decades later, it would become known as Rohman’s. A guidebook called The Thomas Tavern House “a neat little hotel” where you could find “a clean bed and a private room.” It soon became known as the Shohola Hotel, and during the Civil War, it played an important role in a tragic train crash in 1864.

Just a mile or so from the village, an eastbound train pulling 50 coal cars met at a blind curve with a westbound Erie Railroad train carrying more than 800 captured Confederate soldiers. The first prison car, which contained 38 prisoners, was reduced to a length of only six feet—all but one soldier died. A survivor of the great prison train disaster described the terrible embrace of the two locomotives as “like giants grappling.” Overall, at least 60 prisoners, guards, and railroad staff were killed, and most were buried alongside the track in a 75-foot trench.

Shohola residents brought survivors east to the Shohola Hotel. Locals donated clothing and food, and Thomas provided shelter at the hotel, plus ham and pork shoulders. Local legend has it that one Confederate prisoner escaped after the crash, but was found dead in the attic of an unoccupied house that is still haunted by his ghost. Other stories tell of Confederate escapees shaving their beards and starting new lives near the Delaware.

When Bubba Fountain stepped onto those same tracks, at the 2018 Olympics, and took hold of the keg, it quieted the onlookers. Earlier that morning, I was told by Mary Herbert, whose mother Sheila Farrell owns Rohman’s, that Bubba usually wins every event. It was not difficult to see why. Six foot four and a deceptively lean 280 pounds (heavier than Lebron James), Bubba swung the keg expertly overhead and between his legs three times before tossing it five rungs further than anyone else would that day. Tossed it so far, a witness 70 feet down the tracks had to jump out of the way of the bouncing metal cannonball. Thus confirmed the legend of Bubba.

In 1872, under new ownership, the hotel caught fire and burned to the ground. But this seeming disaster ultimately spurred the golden age of the inn and coincided with Shohola becoming a major vacation destination.

A new owner rebuilt the hotel in 1875, and then sold it to a bluestone baron named John Fletcher Kilgour 10 years later. Before his death, Chauncey Thomas had an idea to turn Shohola into a great tourist attraction. Kilgour turned Thomas’s dream into reality. He transformed Shohola into Shohola Glen and deemed it “The Queen of Summer Resorts.” At its peak, Shohola Glen drew more than 100,000 people each year, many of whom took one-dollar “excursion” trains from New York City to Shohola Station. The renamed and expanded Shohola Glen Hotel, which held 50 guests, was just one of dozens of hotels and boarding houses serving overnight guests for $4 to $7 a week.

The Glen took advantage of the area’s natural beauty. Kilgour built walking paths, scenic overlooks, and romantic seclusions with names like “Fairy Bower” and “Solitude Rest.” There was “Lover’s Walk” for couples and a wishing pond called “Wood Nymph Grotto.” Natural formations were given dark titles like “Satan’s Nose” and the “Spirit of Dark Waters.” Underneath a railroad bridge, Kilgour built a roller rink and dancing platform, and refreshment stands sold frankfurters and soda. The Glen also had a merry-go-round, picnic areas, and a natural bathhouse. Five cents bought a ride on a water-powered switchback Gravity Railroad, an early thrill ride and precursor to the roller coaster.

In 1907, the Erie stopped the inexpensive trains to Shohola, which spelled the end of the Glen, too. A lumbering operation bought the land, and the attractions were ignored. In 1955, Hurricane Diane caused massive flooding that buried or destroyed much of what remained of the amusement park. Fluhr says a few archaeological remnants of the Glen can be found by those in the know and willing to trespass. In 1997, Fluhr helped get Rohman’s into the National Register of Historic Places. The application states that the building “is all that remains of the busiest tourist destination that ever operated in the Upper Delaware Valley.”

One of the stranger Olympic events at Rohman’s is called Polish skiing. As the crowd watches, four men tied by their feet to a single pair of wooden planks coordinate around a corner. Surprisingly, I didn’t witness any major spills.

“We’re not supposed to call it Polish skiing, to be politically correct,” says Sheila Farrell, the 72-year-old owner. When I ask where it originated, Farrell says, “Somebody told us about it. Probably somebody from Scranton, where they have all the Polacks.”

There’s also the bed race, in which four men push a wheeled, iron-framed bed complete with a mattress and supine teammate. Women help judge the cooking contests, but don’t compete. (A younger patron tells me she once secretly signed up for an event, but another woman ratted on her. Farrell says they’ve tried to hold a women’s Olympics, but it’s never worked out.)

Although Rohman’s unorthodox games began several decades ago, their spiritual origins are the next stage in Rohman’s history. It’s unclear exactly how he raised the money at age 22, but in 1909, a local named Arthur Rohman bought the hotel, renamed it after himself, and kept it alive through pure force of personality.

Rohman ran the inn for 64 years—through Prohibition, the Great Depression, another fire in 1941, the rise of the automobile, and two world wars—and he was no ordinary innkeep. George Fluhr knew Rohman and says he rarely left the building. He lived upstairs, came down to the bar first thing in the morning, and left when the last customer did. “He was a landmark himself,” says Fluhr. Rohman’s first patrons were lumberjacks and stonecutters, but over the decades, transitioned to farmers, fishermen, hunters, and, finally, curiosity seekers. When a writer in 1964 visited the bar, he asked Rohman how he kept the place afloat. Rohman said: “You have to have some identity.”

The bar molded itself around Art Rohman’s eccentricities. When the Pennsylvania liquor board insisted that a bar must have seats, Rohman installed 13 hinged, pull-down railroad engineers’ stools on his hand-carved bar because his customers liked to stand. (The stools are still there, but the springs are wonky.) His clientele were geographically diverse, so he collected phonebooks. They piled up until it became tradition for customers to bring new ones. Though the holidays were popular with customers, Rohman never allowed a Christmas tree after his wife died on Christmas Eve in 1933. In 1970, a writer for the Sunday Record declared Rohman’s an institution and a landmark. The writer asked an 83-year-old Rohman if he would ever sell. “Never,” he said. “I need to be occupied.”

Rohman smoked 12 to 15 cigars a day, according to one customer who called that estimate “conservative.” Every time Fluhr went in, Rohman gave him a cigar, even though Fluhr didn’t smoke. He did the same with everyone. After Rohman died in 1973, the cigar salesman came to ask why his products didn’t seem to sell anymore. “They were never sold,” says Fluhr. “They were always given away.”

Passenger trains stopped arriving in Shohola altogether in the 1960s. But Rohman’s remained even after Art Rohman died. In the mid-1980s, Sheila Farrell and her siblings purchased the building; today Farrell owns it along with a business partner. Though the phone books are gone, a collection of patches begun by Art Rohman—first from WWII veterans, and now from police and fire stations—still hangs behind the bar. On the far wall hangs a plaque that a local Lions Club dedicated in honor of the inn’s role helping victims of that great prison train wreck.

If you ask to see “the scrapbook,” you’ll be handed “The Story of Rohman’s,” which Fluhr put together. The book contains copies of articles going back decades. They describe the famous people who have been to Rohman’s, including writer Zane Grey, boxers Jim Stewart and Jack Britton, and actors Mary Pickford, Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, and Paul Newman. Smokey Joe Wood, who went 34-5 in 1912 for the Red Sox, lived in the area and brought his friend Babe Ruth. Other articles show Art Rohman towards the end of his life and as a schoolboy, and the old Shohola train station (where the lumber supply now sits).

The scrapbook also includes a rendering of the Shohola Glen Hotel in its heyday—think men with canes and top hats and all—and copies from the old hotel register. One page stands out: In November 1927, the book was signed by Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Just below her name is Ruth Elder, the female aviation pioneer. And, just six months after flying the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh signed the book, putting his address as the “Entire World.”

During the Olympics, the beer pong tournament showcases Rohman’s most unforgettable feature. On the second floor, in what used to be an enormous dining room, Art Rohman built a four-lane bowling alley in 1941. There is nothing mechanical in the room (aside from an old jukebox that plays at whatever volume it feels like). Nobody even works the upstairs. You pay an hourly fee at the bar and the alley is yours. After sending your ball down a lane, you have to walk the same path to reset the pins and send your ball back via a gravity-driven pair of rails. After a couple games, your legs have gotten a good workout. Decades back, children earned a few cents working as pin-setters. Nowadays, the few children willing to set pins get five dollars an hour.

Bubba Fountain, a pipeline technician, didn’t participate in most events in 2018. But in years past, he won two-man saw, the turkey shoot, the bed race, and the-event-that-isn’t-supposed-to-be-called Polish skiing. He says he wanted to give others a chance to win this year. But a couple hours after winning the keg toss, he decided to win the triathlon, too, which meant hitting a target with a .22 rifle and bow and arrow, and then chugging a 32-ounce beer. Afterward, Bubba wore his medals proudly and took home a snowboard and a Yuengling umbrella as prizes. “Great people come here. Great owners, great people. It’s just a good time,” he says. “I don’t really go out to the bar much, but if I do, I come here.”

The Olympics ended with little drama, transitioning into a regular night at the bar. The emcees shouted less and less decipherably from the second-level porch, and nightfall came to Shohola. The crowd thinned until everyone but the smokers escaped the cold rain inside Rohman’s Pub. Steve the bartender served drinks to a crowd of locals that all knew each other, and the last of the Shohola Glen hotels—where masters of the sky and screen once drank alongside loggers and stonecutters, and where Civil War soldiers healed—carried on for another night.

If you had ridden the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in the American northeast sometime in the 1920s or '30s, you might have noticed a passenger who seemed unusually invested in her environment. While you snoozed through Cincinnati, or looked out the window at the approaching Chicago skyline, this woman was probably carefully measuring the height of the seats, or laying cloth swatches over them to check the colors.

As you chose your supper in the dining car, you might have seen her sampling every single item on offer. The next morning, when you blearily left your bunk, she might have greeted you, and asked you how you slept.

This was Olive Wetzel Dennis, the world's first "Service Engineer." During an era when few women even set foot on trains, let alone helped design them, Dennis spent most of her time riding the rails for the B&O, thinking of ways to improve the average traveler's experience. Over her decades-long career, the "Lady Engineer," as she was called, introduced scores of improvements to the company’s railroads—from footrests and reclining seats to special ventilators she designed herself. As the BaltimoreSunput it years after her death, "she took the pain out of the train."

Although she entered the field late in life, Dennis was "a born engineer," says historian Sharon Harwood, who often presents on Dennis's life at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore. As a child, when relatives gave her dolls to play with, she built houses and furniture for them instead. If she was late coming home from school, it was likely because she'd stopped to talk shop with local construction workers.

In 1896, when Dennis was 10, her father—proud, but also tired of his daughter mucking up his woodworking equipment—gave her a tool set of her own. She quickly got to work building a scaled-down streetcar for her younger brother, "complete with seats that would turn over, steps that moved up and down, and a pivoting pole."

Dennis went to Baltimore's Goucher College, and then to Columbia University in New York. She then spent a decade teaching math at a technical high school in Washington, D.C. Throughout, she later told the Sun, "the idea of civil engineering just wouldn't leave me." In 1919, she enrolled in a Master's program in civil engineering at Cornell University. She graduated in the spring of 1920, knocking out the two-year curriculum in half the allotted time, and becoming the second woman to ever receive that degree. As she walked up to the podium on graduation day, a man in the audience apparently yelled out, "What the heck can a woman do in engineering?"

A rude question—but, if you consider the tenor of the times, not an entirely ridiculous one. Railroading in particular "has always been a male industry, bottom to top," says Harwood. Although women worked as station-keepers, restaurant staff, and clerics—and eventually, during World War I, as metalworkers and pipe-fitters—it was pretty much unheard of for one to lean over a blueprint. So when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad hired Dennis, as a draftsman in the bridge engineering department, heads turned. One Evening Sun article—headlined "Woman Civil Engineer Enjoys Technical Work"—described Dennis as "one of the few practicing woman civil engineers in the country and, so far as is known, the only one in Baltimore."

Although Dennis always said her coworkers respected her, the article gives a good idea of the kind of overall environment she faced. "Women are not supposed to have mathematical minds, you know," the Evening Sun reporter informs Dennis at one point. Later, he describes her as "not of the mannish type," and informs readers that she is a good singer, can darn a sock, and "isn't afraid of mice or snakes, but has an abiding horror of bugs."

This kind of thing did not set Dennis back. (As she herself once put it, "There is no reason that a woman can’t be an engineer simply because no other woman has ever been one.") Soon after starting her job, she designed her first railroad bridge, in Painesville, Ohio. Within a year, she had gotten herself a meeting with Daniel Willard, the president of the railroad.

For the first time in her life, Dennis found herself in a situation where her gender was seen as a professional asset rather than a liability. As America's roads filled with cars and buses, the B&O was struggling to retain passengers, and Willard had decided to court a demographic that they had previously overlooked. "I was told to get ideas that would make women want to travel on our line," Dennis later recalled. Willard was operating under the assumption, she continued, that "if women went on it, men would follow." He appointed Dennis to a brand new position, which involved coming up with new ideas to smooth out the journey. She was now the B&O's first "Engineer of Service."

In order to improve the passenger experience, of course, Dennis had to have a bunch of passenger experiences herself. And so for the next several years, she spent much of her time riding the rails. She'd take a B&O train all the way to the end of the line, get off, and immediately hop on one going back the other direction. She also traveled exhaustively on rival trains, including the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central.

All told, over the course of her career, Dennis traveled somewhere between a quarter and half a million miles, identifying and solving problems all along the way. Dressing rooms too cramped? She expanded them, and added paper towels, liquid soap, and disposable cups. Window seats too drafty? She invented a ventilator that stabilized temperatures, and kept cinders out without blocking the scenery. "Once she took a trip to Chicago just to sleep both ways," the Baltimore Sun reported, testing one mattress brand on the way there and one on the way back. Thanks to her, in 1931, the B&O introduced the world's first completely air-conditioned train.

"Miss Olive Dennis … probably is the world's greatest housekeeper," began another reductive article in the St. Louis Star and Times. In reality, though, the job was equal parts social research and design engineering. Although she was initially told to focus on female travelers, she soon found all passengers wanted improvements. When businessmen told her they had planned to prepare for important meetings, but kept falling asleep after eating in the dining car, she added salads and soups to the dinner menu. After long nights in coach—awake this time—she prescribed (and helped design) reclining seats, dimmable ceiling lights, and all-night onboard lunch counters that served sandwiches and coffee.

"No details were insignificant in her view," says Harwood. When the onboard china lost its luster, she designed a whole new set, with scenic locations depicted in the plates' centers, and historic trains chugging along the outside. Other improvements she made include simplified timetables, easy-to-clean upholstery, onboard nurses, dining car configurations that eliminated the need for high chairs for children, and shorter seats, so all women could comfortably rest their feet on the floor.

Dennis preferred certain of these jobs to others: "She would rather puzzle over the arrangement of doors and cabinets to avoid blocked passages or detect flaws in the construction of a Pullman berth than compose a color scheme for a new club car," the New York Times reported. But she pulled off both. (In her spare time, she leaned into her left brain, entering—and often winning—puzzle contests under the nom de plume "N. Jineer.") Eventually, the B&O put her in charge of designing an entire train, the Cincinnatian, which incorporated all of her improvements, and and which Harwood calls "the crowning glory of her career."

Dennis retired in 1951, at age 65. She died six years later at her home in Baltimore. Throughout her time with B&O, she spoke to women's groups about her life and career, encouraging them to pursue their interests to the highest possible level. "There is not a doubt that other women were inspired by her passion for civil engineering," says Harwood. "She was an excellent role model for aspiring and achieving."

Her direct legacy, though, remains largely invisible. Dennis signed over most of her patents to the railroad. Her name does not appear in publicity materials for the Cincinnatian, the train she designed. She also went unmentioned in the advertisements the company took out touting the many new comforts she originated. And as Harwood puts it in her talk, most people outside of the railroading community don't know who she is.

So next time you climb onto a train, settle into your seat, and find yourself giving sigh of relief, spare a thought for Olive Dennis. And if you groan in pain instead, feel free to think of her anyway—she probably would have fixed it.

In folklore, sprites and elves flit and frolic amid mushrooms and moss. According to astronauts and atmospheric scientists, they also live high up in the sky, too, in the form of mesmerizing weather patterns. With a new tool on the International Space Station, researchers are about to learn a lot more about them.

On Earth, we’re used to seeing lightning shooting downward, in the direction of the ground. In the stratosphere, mesosphere, and ionosphere—roughly 31 to 62 miles above storm clouds—sprites and other so-called Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) crack the other way. The dazzling electrical discharges often accompany thunderstorms, but they’re not quite lightning. Blue jets and red sprites spark like fireworks, shooting flares up higher into the darkness, and dangling tentacles beneath them. Elves are electromagnetic pulses that flash horizontally and vanish in milliseconds. (Their name is generally lowercased, but it's technically a fanciful acronym to shorten "Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources.")

Because they manifest so quickly and so far from us, these otherworldly weather entities are uncommon sightings on Earth—not entirely unlike their fantastical counterparts. Pilots reported spotting some throughout the 20th century, but it wasn’t until 1989 that video footage—captured accidentally during a rocket launch—backed up those anecdotes. That prompted NASA to take a closer look at other tapes, where they found a smattering of similar events.

Still, these spectacular bursts have remained somewhat enigmatic. A certain degree of mystery lingers right in their names. The late geophysicist Davis Sentman gave sprites their moniker in 1990s, concluding that they were elusive and fleeting, like those mythical forest dwellers.

The name has stuck, and many questions have hung on, too. “We don’t know how often these lightning phenomena occur, or under what conditions, or what effect they have on our atmosphere,” said Andreas Mogensen, a European Space Agency astronaut who was sent up on a 2015 mission to document the phenomena. Mogensen’s voyage included a lightning-imaging project christened Thor, after the prickly Norse god of thunder and lightning. Mogensen returned to Earth with beguiling footage of the crackling action.

Now, scientists are hoping for a front-row seat to much more of it. Last week, SpaceX launched a batch of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station—including the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM), which will be installed this Friday. When it’s up and running, it will gather data about elves, sprites, jets, and more.

The researchers hope that ASIM's cameras, sensors, and other instruments will crack open the mystery of the physics and chemistry behind these events. "We don't really know what's inside lightning. It happens so fast and it's so dangerous,” Torsten Neubert, a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark and ASIM's lead scientist, told the BBC. This project could be a window in, he added—and it’s a landscape with a pretty magical view.

On April 20, 1868, a dozen women filed into Delmonico's. The New York restaurant was the most famous in America, and the women were all middle- and and upper-class. But many of the women worked, which was an anomaly in the mid-19th century. And their lunch was even more of an anomaly: It was the first time American women deliberately dined in the public eye without the accompaniment of men.

At the time, American society was strictly segregated by sex, and the streets were a male sphere. A middle- or upper-class woman alone in public attracted intense attention, and working women were often invisible. For all women, a male companion was a necessary ticket into a restaurant. (Private dining rooms where solitary women could eat out of sight were the norm, and only for the most elite women.) According to food historian Paul Freedman, very few establishments accommodated women shoppers and travelers. In 1850s New York, for example, only a handful of ice cream "saloons" allowed women to eat by themselves.

But in 1868, reporter Jane Cunningham Croly was fed up. Charles Dickens was touring the United States, and the New York Press Club threw a dinner in his honor at Delmonico's. Croly wanted to attend the Dickens dinner, scheduled for April 18. But the Press Club refused, even though she was a member. After she protested, the Club leadership relented, but they insisted that she and other female members stay behind a curtain where they could be neither seen nor heard.

Infuriated, Croly didn't attend. But she was intent on doing something about her treatment, and she was well placed to do it. Croly was a well-known reporter who, under the pen name Jenny June, was one of the first American women to write a syndicated column. Later, she became one of the first female journalism professors.

In response to her treatment, Croly founded the first American women's club, which she named Sorosis: a scientific term for the group of budding flowers that form a fruit. She recruited fellow upper-class professional women, such as the journalist Kate Field and the minister Ella Dietz Clymer. For the first meeting, Croly approached the restaurant proprietor Lorenzo Delmonico. She asked him to host her "risky and outré" group of unaccompanied women for a lunch just two days after the Dickens dinner. Gracious as well as progressive, Delmonico agreed, providing a dining room for the first meeting.

The choice of Delmonico's was a statement. Not only had Charles Dickens been hosted there (he declined Croly's invitation to attend the first Sorosis meeting), but Delmonico's was the culinary center of America. Founded in 1827 as a pastry shop, Delmonico's became America's first true restaurant, an island of good taste and good food in a country previously indifferent to fine cuisine. During its mid-century glory years, the kitchen was ruled by French chef Charles Ranhofer, who created dishes such as Lobster Newburg for the politicians, luminaries, and upper crust who frequented Delmonico's. Croly made the restaurant Sorosis's headquarters.

As the first club entirely run and administered by American women, Sorosis immediately attracted attention and censure. The club's goal was to bring together "women of thought, taste, intelligence, culture, and humanity," and to encourage women to work. Guest speakers attended regular women's lunches at Delmonico's, lecturing on the topics of the day. In January 1869, an editorial in the New York Times poked fun at the development of a charitable coalition between Sorosis and Susan B. Anthony's "Revolutionists," which aimed to help the working women of New York. "But the dear creatures are as impractical as ever," the anonymous journalist wrote about the discussion. Magazines portrayed club members in cartoons as combative shrews. One unflattering 1869 illustration derided both African-American and women's suffrage, with the caricature of the suffragette holding a knobby club labeled "Sorosis."

Even under duress, Croly defended Sorosis. "The traditional home life is insufficient for our needs, mental and physical," she said in 1869. Croly understood this well, since the illness and death of her husband made her the family breadwinner. Croly was a product of her time—she also advised women to be good homemakers and mothers. But she simultaneously worked for 40 years as an author and journalist, and helped found the New York Women's Press Club and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

The club flourished, and by the end of its first year, 83 female historians, writers, artists, and physicians attended its precedent-setting lunches. Before Sorosis's founding, wrote Lately Thomas in his book Delmonico's: A Century of Splendor, there had been "no garden clubs, no bridge clubs, no associations for professional women, not even church or missionary societies carried on solely by women." Sorosis sparked a slew of women's clubs across America, and many Sorosis branches are still active today. The lunch at Delmonico's in 1868 kickstarted the emergence of women into the public sphere.

Yet change was slow to come. Certain restaurants and clubs remained off-limits to women well into the 20th century. Two women travelers in 1906 described how a waiter hedged and questioned them until he found out that no man was joining, at which point he refused to let them eat at his establishment. As the 20th century progressed, more and more women worked outside the home and needed places to eat. Yet as late as the 1960s, many restaurants refused to admit women.

While the concept of barring women from restaurants now seems dated, there is once more a national movement of women fighting for the right to pursue careers without harassment. In light of that, as well as the 150-year anniversary of the first meeting of Sorosis, the modern Delmonico's will offer an updated 19th century menu for a week, starting at a debut lunch on April 20. Under chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton, beef bouillon with Madeira, jellied consommé, soft-shell crab, and brûléed rice pudding will be served. It may very well be what Croly and her recruits ate 150 years ago.

Though the early Sorosis meetings didn't involve alcohol (the members didn't want to raise even more eyebrows), Delmonico’s special events director Carin Sarafian thinks the original Sorosis members would want to celebrate the gains that women have made in the last 150 years. "I think they'll be here in spirit, toasting this remarkable day," she says.

On the heels of the Maldivian presidential election in September 2013, police investigated an entity accused of rigging the entire thing. They didn't question a disgruntled campaign manager, though, or place a mole in a hacker collective. Instead, authorities took a coconut into custody. Its crime? Possible involvement in a black magic ritual with electoral consequences.

A resident found the coconut on Guraidhoo, one of the many islands comprising the Maldivian archipelago, near a school used as a polling station. Authorities then launched an investigation to determine if the coconut had meddled in the election. Eventually, a white magic practitioner declared the coconut to not be cursed after all.

This was not the first coconut to come under scrutiny for political reasons in the Maldives. That same week, as local outlet Minivan News reported, a young coconut (known as a kurumba) inscribed with Arabic verses was found in a home garden. Concerned residents said that the coconut had been used in a fanditha, a combination of black magic, folk medicine, and spells.

In local practices including fanditha and sihuru, verses from the Quran are often used. That's why the coconut near the polling station caused alarm: It had been inscribed with a verse, and its presence suggested possible foul play. While the overwhelming majority of Maldives residents are Sunni Muslims, belief in black magic persists. It's not uncommon for occultism to be entwined in daily life, and people have been known to practice magic from a young age. Practicing certain strains of fanditha (with approval from the Ministry of Health) has been legal in the Maldives since the late 1970s.

Coconuts bear both positive and negative ritualistic significances in many cultures. In the Afro-Caribbean religion Palo, priests perform divination rituals with coconut shells. A central part of the Hindu festival Thaipusam involves breaking hundreds of thousands of coconuts, as an offering.

But coconuts have been used in black magic rituals, particularly during politically tense times in the Maldives, because they represent “a life structure,” Ajnaadh Ali, the president of the Spiritual Healers of the Maldives organization, noted in 2013. Which means that in black magic rituals, coconuts are believed to make spells even more potent.

“During elections, black magic is used to gain votes and make people ill,” Ali said. This explains why in the the months leading up to the election, one school’s administrators wouldn’t allow election officials to put a ballot box in the building. They believed that it had the potential to draw black magic and make students sick.

Yet as Himal Magazine notes, the coconut incidents of late brought more visibility to the Maldives beyond being a tourist destination for the affluent: It shed light on the region's longstanding political turmoil. The 2013 election was especially tense, as former president Mohamed Nasheed ran against Abdulla Yameen, the half-brother of former dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. (Yameen eventually won.) While some residents genuinely believed that someone used these coconuts in a malevolent black magic ritual, others saw it as a way to detract from political problems which remain stubbornly resistant to magical solutions.

Everyone’s always going on about the sound of the leaves rustling in the trees, but if you want your mind blown by plant sounds, check out rhubarb growing in the dark.

Forced rhubarb, which is made to mature in near total darkness, grows at such an alarming rate—as much as an inch a day—that it actually makes squeaks, creaks, and pops as it gets bigger. It makes for sweeter rhubarb, growers say, and sick beats.

“I’m not patient enough to sit in the building, but I have heard the noise before. Growing against each other. You really have to listen for it,” says Brian French, a fifth-generation rhubarb grower and co-owner of the Lennox Farm in Melancthon, Ontario. French says that while he generally can’t hear the cracks and pops made by the rhubarb because of the loud fans and other noise, the sounds are definitely there.

The method of growing forced rhubarb dates back to the early 1800s, and continues in much the same way today. Farmers let the rhubarb grow out in the open for two years, as the roots collect and store calories. Then the plants are transplanted to lightless growing sheds around November, where they continue to grow—warm, but out of season and in the dark. The rhubarb grows without photosynthesis, which normally makes the plant tough and fibrous. “You get a lot more tender, less tart rhubarb. There’s not too many strings. Outside rhubarb is quite stringy. When you’re cooking with [forced rhubarb] you use around 40 percent less sugar,” says French. The process also results in deep, red stalks, without the normal green shading.

As the stalks burst up out of their initial buds, they create a distinct popping sound, and as they get larger, the stalks rub together and create squeaks and creaks. “It’s growing over an inch a day. It’s not like your field or garden where things are growing two to three feet apart," says French. "Every root is right tight to one another."

According to a terrific Munchies article on the process, forced rhubarb production saw its heyday around World War II, when there were hundreds of farms within the United Kingdom’s “Rhubarb Triangle.” The popularity of the labor-intensive vegetable and pie staple saw other pockets of growers spring up across the pond as well. Today, however, there are relatively few left. “In Canada, in the 1970s, before the oil crisis hit, there were more than 70 growers. We’re one of the last,” says French. “I know of another guy who grows a little, but he’s an older gentleman as well, and I don’t know if he’s carrying on the tradition or not. There’s a fair bit in Michigan, and out in Washington state.”

While forced rhubarb isn’t as popular as it once was, its sounds still stand out, even if the farmers themselves don’t always have the time to take it in. “If you want to turn all the power things off and sit there and relax," French says, "it would be kind of neat to listen to.”

If you sit on a bench in a New York City park, perhaps with a snack, you are likely to have feathered company. They may emit a soft, gurgling coo as they bob around your feet, waiting for a drop. If you're like most people, you're much more likely to try to shoo them away than you are to pause and admire the ubiquitous pigeon. But photographer Andrew Garn isn't like most people.

“Watch a flock of pigeons in your local park or sidewalk—at first impression​ you might think they were all alike,” he says. “But if one were to observe for a few minutes, you would not only note the startling range of feather patterns​, but behavioral diversity as well.”

Like many New Yorkers, Garn started out ignoring pigeons. But thanks to a visit to a pigeon coop years ago, he’s become an unexpected flag bearer. His new book, The New York Pigeon: Behind the Feathers, showcases their overlooked beauty in a series of sometimes humorous, sometimes startling images.

As part of this project, Garn photographed the birds both on the streets and in a studio. These avian portraits were arranged through Wild Bird Fund, a rehabilitation center, and each of his sitters had its own story. Fido, for example, was found, starving, under an elevated train in Queens. Apollo, a pale gray pigeon treated at the center, now lives outside its headquarters. And Jana came in with torticollis (neck twisted to one side), likely caused by lead poisoning. In her portrait she is captured while flying gracefully through the frame.

Atlas Obscura talked to Garn about why pigeons get overlooked, their innate intelligence, and how it’s possible to appreciate nature even in one of the world’s most populous cities.

Tell us a little about how this project began.

As I grew up in Manhattan, I actually never really noticed pigeons. I saw them, but never genuinely looked at them. In late 2007, pigeons came to mind when I was searching for a ​new, underexplored photography project. Under-recognized topics have been a ​consistent theme in my work over the years—I have documented ​U.S. penal architecture, Stalin-era industrial plants built with forced labor, the Las Vegas homeless, and 42nd Street/Times Square, pre-Disney.

​Pigeons seemed to fit the mold perfectly, so​ I visited a coop where I was able to get close to pigeons for the first time. I was immediately mesmerized by the iridescence, the color variations, and the eyes​. As I began photographing the birds, I saw them as these incredibly precious objects. What truly astonished me was capturing their midair flight in a makeshift studio. Here before me was this beautiful, delicate feathered​ entity that could fly in dazzling, acrobatic configurations.​

​It became a very long a commitment, around 10 years​, one of those projects that took on a life of its own. As I got more involved, more layers of pigeon culture became apparent and I became part of a larger pigeon community.

How did you produce the studio portraits?

​My first shoot was in a pigeon coop, then I moved to the street using a makeshift studio in a box. It was very difficult to control lighting, and to catch pigeons, so I decided to bring my lighting and camera to where the pigeons were.​ In 2012, the Wild Bird Fund opened its doors, and I contacted the director Rita McMahon about photographing some of the convalescing pigeons​. Coincidentally, she had seen an art exhibit I did on pigeons that included photographs, video, and live pigeons, so she knew of my work and welcomed me to visit.

What are pigeons like as subjects?

In the studio, I have observed certain attitudes from pigeons—some, like Apollo, are very sweet and compliant, while others more aggressive, attempting to establish a dominance over the photographer, like the cover pigeon, Dr. Brown. There are many similarities with photographing humans actually. I am striving to get personality from pigeons, so it's a matter of waiting for that moment or pose.

Many times I will focus on the head and neck—the eyes and iridescent chest feathers are especially beautiful, but I also capture wing patterns​ or the overall pigeon.

Did you discover anything surprising about pigeons while you worked on this project?

The history of the human-pigeon relationship is deeply faceted. In fact, pigeons​ were the first domesticated bird. There are dovecote ruins in Masada (Israel) and Petra (Jordan). About 5,000 years ago, Egyptians started building multistory pigeon houses to keep them for food, but also, most importantly, for their guano—the Nile Valley was first​ fertilized by pigeon poop.

Pigeons have been used as messengers since perhaps the time of Noah, who is said to have used a pigeon to search for land after the floodwater receded. The Romans used pigeons to broadcast the results of chariot races. Genghis Khan established a pigeon post system throughout Asia and Eastern Europe. Pigeons were integral to warfare in World War I—both the Germans and British used pigeons for surveillance and to carry messages across enemy lines.

And because of their keen vision and intelligence, pigeons have been used in numerous experiments on missile guidance and cognitive behavior modification.

What do you say to New Yorkers who dismiss pigeons as a nuisance?

For many New Yorkers, the only wildlife we get to see are squirrels​ or pigeons. I suspect that these common animals can become the "gateway drug" to nature for many city dwellers. This theory is backed by the university study called "The Pigeon Paradox," which posits that pigeons are the only real nature people in cities are exposed to, and how important that is to the appreciation and enjoyment of natural world in general.

I am always amazed at the broad diversity of people feeding pigeons in my local park—from high school students to older pensioners.​ Through exhibitions of my photographs and other presentations, I have happily converted many people to the world of pigeon appreciation. Many people have told me, unsolicited, that "I never liked pigeons, but now that I have seen your photos, I have a newfound appreciation for them."

Six months after Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico, the archipelago's communities are still working hard to heal themselves. Students are helping to field-test drinking water. In areas that remain without electricity, people are agitating for its return, and sharing what power they do have.

Meanwhile, in aviaries tucked into the island's forests, the iguacas are also doing their part: They're laying eggs.

At about 2 weeks, each baby #iguaca is fitted with an aluminum leg band with a unique ID number. These numbers allow us to identify each bird in the population and keep track of them in all our future records. Here's a quick clip of the staff attaching a leg band today. pic.twitter.com/ZhfUWMJrE8

— Tanya Martínez (@iguacachick) April 9, 2018

Puerto Rico is the only home in the world for the iguaca, a green parrot with a raucous call, blue-tipped wings, and a distinctive red spot above its beak. As we reported in November, Irma and Maria were devastating to the parrots. A large flock that had lived in El Yunque National Forest vanished completely. Another, at Rio Abajo, largely survived, but researchers worried that the environmental devastation would affect the parrots' ability and desire to mate.

Meanwhile, three government-run aviaries—where scientists raise birds in captivity before releasing them into the island's forests—lost power, as well as cages, incubators, artificial nests, and other vital equipment. One facility, at Maricao State Forest, was so badly damaged that researchers there decided to move all of their birds. Researchers at the other two sites worked day and night torebuild the necessary infrastructure in time for the breeding season, which began back in February.

Another Monday, another nest check! We're up to 22 #iguaca nestlings in Rio Abajo's captive breeding facility. Check out our lint covered gum balls.... I mean... adorable baby parrots. pic.twitter.com/1Znauyw0wh

— Tanya Martínez (@iguacachick) April 9, 2018

Now that the spring has come, the scientists are able to make some assessments about how well things went. The good news? The captive population is doing well. According to Twitter posts by the researcher Tanya Martinez, birds at both remaining aviaries successfully laid eggs, and the first nestlings began emerging a few weeks ago. As of this week, the Rio Abajo aviary is up to 22 baby birds, which, according to Martinez, look like "lint-covered gum balls."

Out in the wild, the news is a bit more mixed. Martinez writes that the wild parrots of Rio Abajo haven't started breeding yet, and are now over a month behind schedule. (At press time, nest checks were still in progress—if the researchers find any eggs, we will update the article.) A wild flock in Utuado lost 46 parrots, reducing their numbers from 150 to 104. And the missing parrots of El Yunque never returned: "Only 3 of the 56 native specimens survived, according to officials," the Village Voice reported last month.

With so much uncertainty outside the aviaries, the researchers have temporarily halted the release program: “We have to see how the forest behaves, how the vegetation recovers, and how much food is available," USFWS biologist Jafet Vélez explained to the Voice.

But within the aviaries, at least, things are hopeful. At this point, some of the oldest fledglings have been out of their shells for over two weeks, and have been fitted with silvery leg bands for tracking. Someday, when it's safe, they'll be released into the nearby forest—a changed place, but the only one they will have ever known.

Honduras is a country of churches. There’s the buttercream facade of Santa Rosa de Copan’s Roman Catholic cathedral, the Mission revival-style St. Peter the Apostle cathedral in San Pedro Sula, and the geometric grid of the Latter Day Saints’ church in Tegucigalpa. Crosses dangle from necks and rearview mirrors and are you adorn tombs in graveyards across the country. Christianity—be it Catholic, Protestant, or, increasingly, Mormon—dominates the landscape.

But nestled on a quiet street in the country’s second-largest city of San Pedro Sula is a different kind of religious sanctuary. Half shielded by palm trees, it’s set back from a parking lot, so it’s not entirely noticeable at first glance. The gold-covered qubba (domes) pointing upwards and topped with crescent moons are unmistakable, though, and if you strain your ears on a Friday afternoon you might hear the faint call to prayer. Welcome to the only mosque in San Pedro Sula, and one of just two in Honduras.

Pakistani factory owners, converted Honduran military generals and Cuban flaneurs are just a few of the people who attend jumu’ah (Friday prayers). Imam Mohammed, who leads the service, estimates there are around 1,500 Muslims in Honduras, though Pew Forum research put the number closer to 11,000 in 2009. Regardless of the total, only around 30 people attend prayers at the mosque on a weekly basis.

Arnaldo Hernandez, a Garifuna fisherman, drives three hours from his home in the coastal town of La Ceiba to attend Friday prayers. He converted to Islam from Christianity 26 years ago, though, as he is quick to point out with a huge grin, “we are all Muslims.”

Hernandez is one of the older members of the community, before there was even a physical mosque. “We used to pray in a room close to the hospital,” he explained after jumu’ah. It’s not uncommon in non-Islamic countries for Muslims to pray in makeshift locations when proper mosques are nonexistent. In towns across Italy, Muslims pray in warehouses and supermarkets; in Hong Kong, devotees worship in a former car repair shop.

Latin America has the largest Arab population outside of the Arab world. For many years, Honduras was the only Latin American country without a mosque—despite the fact that up to 25 percent of San Pedro Sula’s population is of Arab descent. Now, there are two: the one in San Pedro Sula, and a smaller one in the capital city of Tegucigalpa.

The introduction of Islam to Honduras is linked to the waves of Arab immigration, explains Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, a historian at San Pedro Sula’s Museu de Antropologia e Historia.

“In 1870 the national railroad pact was signed with the British,” Fasquelle said, while giving a tour around the museum’s exhibit of 19th-century artifacts. “It was a great fiasco—it never got past the mountains—but it did connect San Pedro Sula to the coastline. And as the city became an internal port, it became crucial to trade with the outside world.” Goods came, and so did immigrants from Europe, North America, and increasingly, the Middle East. Arab migration came in three waves: from 1895-1915 as the Ottoman Empire suffered a string of crises; from 1925 to 1940 in the wake of the First World War; and again from 1950-1970, after visas became easier to obtain.

The first two waves of migration were mostly comprised of Christian Arabs; records from the time indicate that only 15 percent of immigrants were Muslims. Regardless of religion, at the turn of the century most migrants arrived in Honduras with an Ottoman Empire passport, earning them the nickname “Turcos,” a generic and incorrect identification that still holds today. After 1925, many of the Arab immigrants came from Palestine, notably around Bethlehem. These Palestinian migrants were well-educated, multi-lingual, and had strong social networks and business ties that allowed their community to flourish. Given their skills, many were able to work with U.S. companies in the lucrative banana and tobacco industries.

By 1918, Arab immigrants owned over 40 percent of businesses in San Pedro Sula. Although Arab immigrants, according to a 1929 law, had to deposit $2,500 upon entering the country, they had more capital to buy land and set up business than indigenous Hondurans did. Even with legal restrictions, by 1979, 75 percent of San Pedro Sula stores were Palestinian-owned. “They became a part of the social fabric,” says Fasquelle. Despite accounting for 3 percent of the country’s total population, Arab Hondurans evolved from a merchant class to one dominating the business, political, and economic environment.

Though the Arab population is well-integrated today, many Hondurans view “los Turcos” as land-owning oligarchs. Part of the image problem might come from the Club Hondureño Árabe, a country club located in San Pedro Sula’s ritziest neighborhood boasting an $8,000 initiation fee—the country’s average monthly salary is less than $300. Founded in the 1960s as a cultural space for the Arab community, the club has ballooned into a $15 million complex that hosts elaborate Levantine brunches, lavish weddings, and sports tournaments. Until 1994, members had to be of Arab origin; the club has since relaxed its rules to allow anyone who can pay the membership dues.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t deep-rooted biases or tensions against Muslims within the Arab community. When asked if the Arab community thought Syrian refugees should be granted asylum in Honduras, one club employee exclaimed “No, thank God!”

Honduras’s constitution protects freedom and practice of religion—though the government only officially recognizes the Roman Catholic church; all other religious groups are categorized as religious associations and have fewer rights and privileges. Despite the institutionalized imbalance, and Honduras’s generally high crime rate, religious violence and discrimination is low. “We haven’t had any problems with racism,” says Mohammed, the Pakistani-born temporary imam of the mosque.

Mohammed invited us to attend the men’s prayer, which he led in a mix of Spanish and Arabic. The decorations are the same as any mosque in the world: green carpets, gilden Quranic verses. Outside, you could bite into the Honduran humidity like a marshmallow, but inside it was air-conditioned and cool. The men slowly trickled into the room over the next hour, and performed their prayers; a few older gentleman with swollen ankles sat on plastic stools. We could have been anywhere in the world—Turkey or Tunisia or the Comores—but we were in San Pedro Sula.

“I started studying Islam alone, and the path of Allah came for me,” Colonel Orlando Ajalla Gaños told us. Raised Catholic, the colonel has spent the last nine years commuting weekly to the mosque from his home in Tegucigalpa. “I was always happy but since becoming Muslim I am even more happy—you can call me Saif,” he added, referring to his Islamic name as he adjusted his taqiyah (cap).

Perhaps because the community is so small, there is a real sense of camaraderie among the worshippers. After prayers, they laugh and joke out in the parking lot. There are weekly dinners organized by Mr. Yusuf, a Pakistani Muslim who owns a string of factories and is one of the country’s richest men. Everyone contributes to the mosque’s upkeep—a donation box is passed around after the prayers. In this sky-blue Caribbean mosque, the best parts of Islam—equality, fraternity, love—seem to shine.

“There’s no distinguishing between race and color. We are all brothers, that’s the base of Islam,” Hernandez, the Garifuna fisherman, said. “It’s a benediction to have this community.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation as part of its Adelante Latin America Reporting Initiative. Special thanks to Jenny Núñez and Catty Calderón.

Underneath a laboratory’s fluorescent lights, Rachel Dutton examines a cheese morsel. It’s not so much a treat as it is a mystery. That's because Dutton is a scientist—a molecular biology detective of sorts—who has devoted her career to studying the tiny bacterial communities that live in and on cheese. Her tool of choice is a microscope, which she uses to pore over evidence hidden within microscopic crumbles. Ultimately, she hopes to uncover how these microbes create colonies within these creamy and waxen morsels.

From Camembert to cotija, making any type of cheese essentially starts in the same way. Cheesemakers take fresh milk, then curdle it into clumps. This results in watery whey, which they then mold into shape. From there, all the cheese has to do is sit and age. Yet it’s the near-invisible community of bacteria that not only gives cheese its funk, but is also capable of transforming a few simple ingredients into an addictive kitchen staple. Many mass-produced cheesemakers use packets of bacteria to form these cultures. But change the bacteria within cheese, and it becomes an entirely different beast.

Along with her lab crew at UC San Diego, Dutton has made immense progress in identifying the myriad bacteria, yeast, molds, and viruses that live on wheels and in wedges of cheese. Some bacteria and fungi stick together, forming the rind that lines a wheel of cheese's exterior. Others devour the inside of the cheese, and create the kinds of lapis-hued blooms within blue cheese. And some burp carbon dioxide when they consume lactic acid inside the cheese, which is what gives Swiss cheese its distinctive interior.

Dutton believes that studying the minutiae of bacteria can teach us about the microbial communities—also known as microbiomes—found on virtually every conceivable surface, in the human body, and in the ocean. “We’re kind of using cheese like our lab rat,” explains Dutton. “The goal of using a simple microbiome, like cheese, is to understand how these communities are built and how to manipulate them if we want to.” It's no wonder that her intriguing approach to food science has caught the attention of kitchen innovators, such as Momofuku's David Chang, who Dutton collaborated with several years ago.

Dutton originally studied molecular biology at Harvard University’s medical school. After earning her PhD, she worked in the cellars of Vermont cheesemaker Jasper Hill Farm for several months; there, she marveled at how each morsel of cheese contained a tiny world within it. That fall, she went back to Harvard, this time starting her own lab focused on teasing out how these worlds form.

In 2014, Dutton’s lab studied some 150 types of cheese from 10 different countries to determine similarities and variances. Similar work had been done in France, but nothing on the same scale as Dutton. “A lot of what she’s doing is groundbreaking ... it was a big project, big thinking,” says Mateo Kehler, co-owner of Jasper Hill Farm where Dutton began her research and a celebrated cheesemaker in the U.S.

During her tenure at Jasper Hill, Dutton found ample variances between microbes and types of cheese. For example, hard cheeses, such as cheddar, have a common bacterial makeup regardless of where they were produced. Cheeses with a washed rind—or those that have a sticky, fleshy exterior—can have colonies with 20 types of microbes living together, maybe more. The same goes for soft cheeses, including brie.

“How the cheese is made sets a very specific environment,” says Dutton. “These microbes are eating the protein and fat in the milk and breaking those down into flavor molecules, using the cheese as food for themselves. In the process of doing that, they spit out all these byproducts which we perceive as interesting smells and flavors.”

The resulting gases, enzymes, and molecules are what create pungent, cauliflower-like smells or the veins within blue cheese. “Each microbe is different, so it’ll do slightly different things depending on the microbes you have,” Dutton explains. Cheese isn’t unique in hosting microscopic living organisms, though. These ecosystems also exist in other fermented foods. “The production of fermented foods relies on highly reproducible communities on a fast timetable,” Dutton says.

Dutton’s stint at Jasper Hill Farm proved formative, not only for her research but for the creamery, too. While Dutton was the first microbiologist to work there, Jasper Hill has hired a full-time microbiologist since her departure. Through this, the creamery has learned, for instance, that 80 percent of the microbes in raw milk come from the outside of their cows. Incremental changes that happen while feeding livestock, and even in the cows’ bedding, can dramatically change milk’s microbial composition.

“It was all chance,” Kehler says. “We stumbled into this relationship with her and it’s really changed our business. She called us up and we didn’t really have any intention of building a microbiology lab or doing any of the work.” He adds: “I credit her to a large degree with setting us up to do really interesting things.” These days, the creamery is especially interested in exploring the flavor profiles associated with brachybacterium, one particular strain of bacteria that can impart a strong broccoli or clam-like flavor profile. Through this newfound focus, the creamery was also able to entirely eliminate listeria, a potentially deadly contaminant, from their farm.

Panos Lekkas currently works as Jasper Hill Farm’s staff microbiologist. Lekkas, who has a background in agriculture and in researching human pathogens, now hunts for bacteria hidden in the creamery’s barn and among its hay. To do so, he swabs surfaces and exposes petri dishes to the elements to catch any bacteria cruising through the air.

Sometimes, this testing results in happy accidents. “There’s one bacteria that I grew a lot of people smell it and they say it smells like Ovaltine. I don’t try to understand it,” Lekkas says. “I just say ‘Oh, great.’” Eventually, Jasper Hill hopes to create a cheese using only native cultures from the farm. To get there, Lekkas is experimenting with the different strains of bacteria in the cheesemaking process. “There are so many strains where we don’t even know what they do, but they’re there. And they give us a great taste and aroma and appearance and texture,” Lekkas says.

Over thousands of years, humans have learned how to harness microbes to create a varied—and delicious—product. For contemporary food scientists like Lekkas, examining cheese at the microbial level reinforces a return to early cheesemaking techniques when bacteria came from local environments rather than mass-produced packets. “Nature knows its balance, and we’re trying to imitate that,” says Lekkas.

The implications of understanding microbes goes far beyond making the perfect cheese. But it’s through cheese that Dutton hopes to learn about the formation of bacterial colonies, and ultimately how they can be manipulated. That could translate to improving human health, and the health of the world around us, too. “I have a different perspective on cheese,” Dutton says. “As a microbiologist, you learn to appreciate that microbes are wonderful and everywhere and they’re just a part of our world.”

On a chilly spring afternoon, a handful of trash-loving artists hung around the backyard of Brooklyn’s quirky City Reliquary museum, surveying each other’s work and talking about their personal stockpiles of rubbish art supplies.

“I don’t save everything,” said Tyrome Tripoli, who makes large wall installations from deconstructed tricycles and other contraptions. “Most of it goes into the recycle bags.” He gestured up into a tree, where there was a garland of mangled, brightly colored plastic. “Detergent bottles?”

“That’s a thing I can’t save, either!” said Jeffrey Allen Price, who had crafted bamboo-like stalks from stacks of cat food cans.

“I save the caps,” said Debbie Ullman, who turns old newspaper vending machines into artistic compost bins. Barbara Lubliner, an artist who makes plants and balloon animals out of water bottles and spice containers, has more caps than she could ever need, so she passed some on to Ullman, who promised some to Tripoli. Making art out of garbage, it seems, requires being both selective and generous. “It’s about your space,” Tripoli said. “If you have 10,000 square feet, you’re gonna fill it up.”

Tripoli, Ullman, Lubliner, Price, and other artists have work on view in at the City Reliquary through April 29 as part of NYC Trash! Past, Present, and Future, an exhibition that focuses on how the city has wrangled waste over the years.

They are all part of a long tradition. Modern and contemporary artists have used castoff material, of one sort or another, for over a century. Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons brought ordinary urinals and basketballs into art galleries. Tracey Emin displayed the entire contents of her bedroom, from mussed sheets to loose change to stubbed-out cigarettes. Robert Rauschenberg and Kurt Schwitters collaged bits and pieces of garbage onto their canvases and installations. These artists were radically challenging the idea of what art could look like, and which tools and materials an artist could use to make it. “I consider the text of a news­paper, the detail of a photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint,” Rauschenberg wrote in 1956. The artists also leaned on everyday debris as as a way to hold up a mirror to society or themselves.

Garbage or found materials are now not unusual in modern art museums, and more recently art made from trash has been in the service of (sometimes heavy-handed) messages about pollution. A lot of art made from garbage today sets out to sound the alarm about waste entering the oceans, for example. Last summer, Greenpeace worked with the artist John deCaires Taylor on a project called Plasticide, a sculpture of a family enjoying a picnic at the beach—flanked by seagulls vomiting up shards of plastic. It’s a grim scene that depicts a real threat to wildlife. Roughly 1.8 trillion pieces of trash have coalesced into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, prompting artist Maria Cristina Finucci to issue passports to the mythical, dystopian Garbage Patch State. (We’re all already citizens, whether we have passports or not.)

Some of the artists at the City Reliquary do describe their work as a kind of activism—Ullman’s boxes are meant to normalize composting as a practice—but most of the artists in the show appreciate trash not only as statement but also a material for silliness and surprise. Lubliner’s bottle garden features succulent rosettes made of plastic bottles—both of which are known for storing water. The puns roll on: She called her first balloon-animal-like dog, also made of bottles, Pupsi.

For Lubliner and her fellow artists, scrounging is an engine for creativity. “I think of plastic as a new ‘natural resource’ because it’s just so prevalent,” she says. “Yes, there’s a statement about artificiality and overuse of plastic, but I’m also responding in a creative way, like, ‘Look what we can do with this abundance of trash.’ I respond to what’s around.” She has weaved metal tapestries from leftover circuits from a lighting factory, and fashioned little figures from tubes that once held bolts of fabric.

Price finds it to be a stimulating. creative challenge, too—and one that feels personal because his materials come from his own life. Empty glue tubes, crusty paint brushes, aluminum foil, tea bags, tape—"everything that’s byproduct can be made into art,” he says. Eventually, he hopes to make his supplies available to any artist who wants to come experiment. “We see art everywhere,” he says. “Like, ‘What can we do with this?’”