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When the Dried Plum Lobby Tried to Make Pruneburgers Happen

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Imagine it’s 2003, and hordes of sixth-graders are pouring into the school cafeteria to buy a new kind of lunch food: a hamburger made out of prunes.

That was the vision of the California Dried Plum Board, an organization that represents and lobbies on behalf of nearly 100,000 dried plum growers and packagers. Founded in 1952 as the California Prune Board, it’s less of a lobby than a marketing group—the outgrowth of a 1949 marketing order that allows for coordination among farmers and distributors of select agricultural products (including raisins, cranberries, and hazelnuts).

The California Dried Plum Board’s burger plan was radical: They wanted to turn patties made with prune puree into a staple of U.S. public school lunches.

At the time, the industry was in desperate need of a saving grace. Since the 1970s, growers had struggled with a prune surplus, but the problems reached a peak in 1995, when prune sales themselves began to shrivel. Fearing a precipitous drop in prices, the industry kicked into overdrive: They had to sell more prunes, and fast.

Rich Peterson, who had served as the Board’s executive director since 1986, was the man for the job. Under his leadership, the Board ditched their old marketing plan, which emphasized the high fiber content of prunes in order to attract older consumers seeking laxatives. Instead, the California Prune Board set their sights on younger generations, who they feared now too closely associated prunes with constipation relief. Their rebrand was simple: Instead of “prunes,” they would call their products “dried plums,” and they would change their name to the California Dried Plum Board. To Peterson, the move was propelled by rigorous study. “We didn’t go into this blindly,” he told Failure Magazine. “We had done some good research, and seventy percent of consumers preferred the name dried plums.”

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Peterson enlisted Dan Haley, the Board’s Washington lobbyist, to sell the plan to the federal government. Haley’s impassioned pleas for Americans to adopt a more European view of prunes earned him coverage in The Washington Post. In Europe, he said, “younger people see any dried fruit as very healthy,” while in the U.S., “people see prunes as a laxative for oldsters.” With Haley’s help, the rebrand got off to a good start: In 2002, the FDA approved approved the name change.

But the new name wouldn’t be enough to draw hordes of fresh-faced, dried plum enthusiasts-to-be. They also needed a new product.

Enter pruneburgers.

Turns out, growing, harvesting, and drying plums is not a cheap process, and the industry had long lost money on small prunes, which customers ignored in favor of their bigger, juicier counterparts. Previously, the California Dried Plum Board had struck a deal with the FDA to remove from sale those money-losing prunes and grind them into animal feed. But now they had a better idea. They would instead puree them, inject them into beef patties, and sell them as healthy hamburgers to middle schools.

To solve the sales crisis, Peterson knew he needed the support of the United States Department of Agriculture, which regularly bought up prunes for food subsidies. If he and Haley could convince the USDA to dramatically increase its stake in prunes, they would end the surplus, stabilize prune prices, and add to the paychecks of prune growers and distributors. Creating a new class of healthy hamburgers seemed like the smartest way in.

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The timing could not have been better. A panic about the nutritional value of public school lunches was setting in, and pruneburgers—which mixed ground beef with prune puree—promised less fat than regular burgers. And as Haley argued, they even tasted better: Most beef patties served in public schools were very dry (“like hockey pucks, Haley claimed), and burgers mixed with prune puree made for a softer, more pleasant eating experience.

The California Dried Plum Board wasted no time in printing brochures called “Prune the Fat” to promote the burger’s nutritional benefits. They also organized taste tests in public schools across the United States, including in California, Colorado, Maryland, Florida, and Washington, D.C.

According to Seattle PI, the pruneburgers received positive reviews: “The hamburger was good. It tastes like a grilled burger,” said a 12-year-old student. (Another culinary invention the USDA tested, “turkey-prune hot dogs,” also received high marks.)

Donna M. Wittrock, who oversaw food and nutrition in Denver’s public schools, had a similar reaction after watching 1,000 of her students do a blind taste test of pruneburgers. “It helps us reduce the fat in baked products and results in a product with better holding properties and general acceptability,” she said.

Though the local media’s insistence on describing the patties as “pruneburgers” frustrated an industry in the midst of rebranding, the taste tastes were very successful.

In 2003, Haley secured an impressive government contract. He convinced the USDA to buy 10 million pounds worth of prunes—a massive jump from the 360,000 pounds they had purchased in 2002—and funnel them into school lunches.

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It was a coup, but Haley benefitted from precedent—the prune industry wasn’t solely responsible for fruitburgers. Bolstered by research from Jennifer Leheska, then of Texas Tech University, competitors were already racing to sell their own products. Leheska had found that meats fused with fruit contained more antioxidants and less fats than their fruitless counterparts. In 1999, public schools in Bloomington, Illinois, started serving burgers laced with cherries to their 58,000 students, and the blueberry industry tested their own product in Florida. Both cited potential health benefits.

Around 2006, though, attempts to introduce fruitburgers into schools appear to have ceased. Neither Leheska nor the current California Dried Plum Board leadership has an explanation for their disappearance, but in the case of the prune industry, a sudden drop in plum production was likely the cause. That year, American plum output fell 49%, a dramatic shortfall that cut into the surplus around which the industry planned its entire pruneburger strategy. As The Washington Post noted at the time, “Many of [the prune industry’s] efforts are expected to be scaled back this year because of the projected inventory shortfall.”

“It's frustrating because we think there are opportunities for expanding our sales,” Peterson, who has since retired, said at the time. “But you can't fully capitalize on that when you have low inventories.”

Instead, the Dried Plum Board shifted its surprising lobbying might to convincing then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare January “California Dried Plum Digestive Health Month” in 2007, and, in 2012, signing up former Olympic swimmer Natalie Coughlin as a spokesperson for prunes.

Today, despite the disappearance of hamburgers made with prunes, at least one fruitburger is still thriving: cherry burgers. Recipes and reviews abound on the internet, and many of them rave about the taste and health benefits. At The Cherry Hut in Michigan, for instance, you can order a hand-pattied cherry burger, which the menu proudly proclaims offers “65% less fat than ground beef!”

Peterson would have been surprised. In 1999, he claimed cherry burgers were doomed to fail because they looked undercooked. But it’s the cherry, not the prune, that weathered the fruitburger trend and snuck its way into American cuisine.


Found: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Coffin in a Wine Cellar

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Everyone knew that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was buried in St. Michael's Church in Highgate, London. There was even a stone set in the church floor, engraved with the epitaph that Coleridge had written for himself. But no one was quite sure where exactly the influential poet and thinker's body was actually placed.

Intrigued, retired parishioner Drew Clode recently went on a hunt for the poet's remains in the church's crypt. Appropriately, he found Coleridge's coffin behind a brick wall inside what had once been a wine cellar. Four more coffins accompany Coleridge's: that of his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandson.

The church stands on what once had been a mansion, Clode says, whose wine cellar was built in 1694. When Coleridge died in 1834, he was interred at the local Highgate School for two centuries. By 1961, Highgate School could no longer house the coffins of Coleridge and his family, and so they were transferred with pomp to St. Michael's crypt. Over the years, however, knowledge of the reinterment and the crypt degenerated. "The crypt is an absolute ruin," Clode says.

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As a great admirer of Coleridge, Clode feels like that's a shame. Many people are familiar with Coleridge—and works of his such as "Kubla Khan" and "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner"—from high school and college English classes. Clode, meanwhile, speaks of him as Britain's only poet-philosopher.

Coleridge's life was quite difficult, and his epitaph reflects that. Coleridge was often ill and suffered from depression, so he self-medicated with alcohol and laudanum, a tincture of opium. He believed that taking laudanum made his poems, which often dealt with the demonic and supernatural, more creative. The famous stanzas of "Kubla Khan" likely came to him in an opium dream. His epitaph, visible on the marking stone, is suitably thrilling: Coleridge asked passersby to pray that he who "Found death in life, may here find life in death!"

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Clode says that rediscovering Coleridge's resting place was "quite gothic." He searched in the dark for clues and walked on a rubble-covered floor. But by peering through an air vent below where Coleridge's commemorative stone was set, he and church warden Adam West picked out the shapes of three to five coffins.

Now, the rediscovery is being put to use. On June 2, St. Michael's is hosting Coleridge Day to raise money for a crypt refurbishment. The church's goal is to "refurbish the entire area both as a fitting tribute to the man and his place in Highgates." Several of Coleridge's descendants will also be present. Richard Coleridge commented to the Guardian that the Coleridge family was supportive of the effort, even though the Romantic poet's remains lying in a hidden wine cellar could be considered poetically apt.

All the Charming Things Your Childhood Heroes Sent You

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Not so long ago, writing physical fan letters was just about the only way for a regular person to communicate with someone famous. These days it's not so unusual to get a quick Twitter reply from someone you admire, but in the pre-social media age, if you were lucky, you might've received a far more amazing artifact: a signed photo, or even a hand-written note. And boy are they delightful.

Earlier this month, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to send us photos of the incredible things they've received from their heroes. In response, we received hundreds of letters and photos. The celebrities who wrote our readers back range from Isaac Asimov (when did he have time to write so many replies?) to Burt Reynolds (see his glorious mustache below). Not only do these exchanges provide a window into a very specific type of epistolary relationship—between that of idol and fan—in many cases, they also provide a peek into the minds of some of the icons of yesteryear.

While we couldn't feature all of the wonderful submissions we received, we've collected our favorites below. Perhaps they'll inspire you to reach out to a hero of your own.

Isaac Asimov

"Isaac Asimov wrote back to me when I was 12!"—Rachel Coker, Apalachin, New York

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"This was my most treasured possession as a child. I had never written to anyone outside my family, and for the most famous writer in the world (to me) to write me back was just amazing."—Tom Hayden, Florida

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"In response to a letter I wrote to Dr. Asimov he responded with this…"—Kirk Aplin, Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Charles M. Schulz

"I made a card for Charlie Brown, of Peanuts fame, because none of the other characters ever gave him one and it made him sad. I sent it c/o the San Francisco Chronicle, which must have sent it on to Schultz. In due time, I got this back."—Marta Randall, Ocean View, Hawaii

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Ray Bradbury

Submitted by Sharon Brause of Sedalia, Missouri.

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Mr. Rogers

"My childhood hero (who is still one of my heroes) was Mr. Rogers. When I was 17, I read an article in TV Guide about him, stating that he wrote letters back to anyone who wrote to him, and that he always sent autographed pics to anyone who requested them. I wrote to him--I don't remember exactly what I said, but I must have mentioned that I'd just been named valedictorian of my (tiny) graduating class--and he responded very kindly."—Elizabeth Fletcher, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

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"This postcard from Mr. Rogers has been a treasured possession since he sent it to 5 year old me back in 1969, as a thank you for a drawing I made for him. I was over the moon when I got the postcard, it felt like I had a real connection with Mr. Rogers. Such a small gesture on his part, but it had a huge impact on me."—Kathy Kelley, Freehold, New Jersey

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Beverly Cleary

"When I was a child, I discovered her books and read every single one of them. I loved them all. They really captured my imagination. Somehow I got the idea to write to her, and I sent her a letter detailing how I enjoyed each of her books, and she replied with a heartfelt note. I was thrilled."—Stephen Padre, Washington, DC

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Roald Dahl

"He replied to my letter, which I wrote after reading Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and other of his books as a 3rd grader, with a nice postcard."—Andrew Dolson, Richmond, Virginia

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Chuck Jones

"I was recovering from back surgery and had recently read Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones. Watching his classic Looney Tunes cheered me up immensely so I wrote my first and only fan letter to Mr Jones, to tell him how much I admired his work. Not only did I receive a signed card and note from his assistant, weeks later I got a letter and card from Chuck!"—Katie Fingerson

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Burt Reynolds

Submitted by Anne Sewell.

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George Burns

"As a kid, I asked George to send me a signed photo, and I requested he burn his cigar on it."—Josh Rosenthal, New York

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Jay Ward

Submitted by Tom Nixon of Los Angeles, California.

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Bob Barker

"When I was a kid, I'd watch The Price Is Right with my mom every day, yelling out prices for items that I certainly did not purchase. My first year of college, watching The Price Is Right every day during lunch in the student union became a tradition, and, for whatever reason, I always bid, "$1,100, Bob!" I wrote to Mr. Barker, telling him this story of how The Price Is Right had become a lifelong tradition for me, and, of course, told him the correct price is "$1,100, Bob!" He wrote back, sending me an autograph, and actually wrote on it, "P.S. It's $1,100, Jennifer!" This is the only response I've ever gotten where I actually dropped down and cried. There are tear spots on the autograph now from where I dripped on it. It's the little things that can mean so much!"—Jennifer Campbell, Mississippi

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Dr. Seuss

"I sent a letter to plea with Dr. Seuss to speak at our medical school graduation. Apparently he does not answer fan mail, but his secretary pulled my letter out of the pile and made hime answer me (she was MSU '57). I got this wonderful letter in response. It is framed in my study where I can enjoy it every day."—Anne Swinford, Ann Arbor, Michigan

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Douglas Adams

"He doesn't recommend Biggles."—Matthew Petty, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

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"I had read and re-read the Hitchhiker series and was ass-over-teacup in love with Douglas Adams, and who wouldn’t be—6”6” tall, big grin, absolutely brilliant, right? So I wrote him and asked him to marry me. Of course he was with Jane by then so his return letter mentioned nothing about the proposal! Tactful man, that."—Cindy Rose, Wyoming

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Madeleine L'Engle

Submitted by David Carter of Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Carrie Fisher

"The late Carrie Fisher sent me in separate mails, a personally autographed still of her character Princess Leia and a personally typewritten note thanking me for sending her a copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 for her birthday."—Thomas Izaguirre, Edgewater, Maryland

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John Denver

"My absolute favorite star was John Denver. In late 1975, I was about 14 years old, and I sent him a handmade, leather belt that I had embossed with the words "Rocky Mountain High." A few months later, I received a Thank You letter, on John Denver stationery[.] That letter made my world! I framed, and displayed that letter, proudly!"—Christie Haun, Whittier, California

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Bill Keane

"To my surprise, not only did Bill write me an extremely nice note (on his special stationery), but he accepted four of my ideas for The Family Circus and paid me $60 for them, as well. The entire exchange was extremely flattering and gratifying."—Rick Kaufman, Dover, New Hampshire

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Royal Canadian Mounted Police

"I was fascinated by them as a child. I wrote them a letter and they sent me a whole kit of information with photos, history, and more."—David Kindy, Plymouth, Massachusetts

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John Cleese

Submitted by Kenyetta Carter of Seattle, Washington.

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Daniel Handler

"A few years ago, my favorite childhood author, Lemony Snicket (AKA Daniel Handler), visited Cambridge, MA, where I was a first year student at Harvard. That was the third time in my life I had seen him, and that time, I handed him a letter that said 'Fan mail?' A couple of weeks later, I received a letter in the mail with the sender's address scratched out. Intrigued, I opened it, and found a letter back from Daniel Handler. It was very characteristic of him, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. "—Amanda Flores, Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Show Us What Makes Your Favorite Local Bookstore Special

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For all the convenience of ordering online, nothing beats getting lost in the rows and shelves of a local bookstore. The personalized service, the atmosphere, the sheer element of discovery—these are the qualities that keep us coming back despite all the alternatives. It's no secret that many independent bookstores are in a battle for their lives, and that just makes the ones that remain all the more precious.

Independent Bookstore Day is coming up on April 28, and we want to see what makes your favorite local bookstore special. Maybe it’s a private alcove that’s perfect for reading, or a friendly staffer who’s always ready with a great recommendation, or even a plucky shop cat that prowls the stacks. Whatever it is, every independent bookstore has its own unique atmosphere, and we need your help to capture as many of them as we can.

Fill out the form below and tell us about why you love your local independent bookstore. Then email a snapshot that you think captures your shop's particular charm with the subject line "Independent Bookstore" to eric@atlasobscura.com. We’ll feature our favorites in an upcoming article on Independent Bookstore Day.

The Art of Dressing Mannequins in Rare and Historic Garments

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In Gallery 899 on the second floor of The Met Fifth Avenue in New York City stands a headless mannequin dressed regally in a late 18th-century French sack-back gown. Also known as a robe à la française, the silk, champagne-pink gown is patterned with intricately sewn flower petals and leaf designs across the conical bodice all the way down to edge of the rectangular skirts. The skirts are lined with fly fringe trim and laced with embellishments of the same soft pinkish color. The delicately woven ribbons line the bodice and the skirts, almost like a ceramic tiled mosaic. Clasped in the mannequin’s white hands is a printed fan that matches the dark sea-green color of the bodice.

The beautiful and intricate garment captivates onlookers, who probably aren’t thinking about the just-as-delicate process of the centuries-old garment onto the mannequin. The placement appears simple, like the mannequins people encounter as they shop in retail stores. Yet, the art of dressing a mannequin, no matter the setting, is not as easy as it seems. When it comes to historic garments, like the gown above, the mounting process is a bit more complicated, and involves several pairs of hands.

The process for museum exhibitions begins with a trip to the archives or looking at the garment says Kathleen Kiefer, a textile conservator at The Art Institute of Chicago. Conservators and curators will study paintings, photographs, advertisements, or handwritten letters to understand the historic silhouettes of a garment’s time period. These resources give them a grasp of how such clothes were worn and the popular fashion trends. Archival analysis also provides insight into the desired mannequin and form shapes associated with a time period.

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Archives came in handy when Kiefer mounted several outfits created by the American designer Roy Halston Frowick for an annual Indianapolis Museum of Art exhibition in the Textiles Galleries in 2008. Known first for his hat designs, Halston came to prominence in 1961 when he designed former U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s dome pillbox hat that she wore to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Later in the 1970s, he created his own fashion line using fabrics such as silk jersey, cashmere, and ultrasuede that provided a natural drape to women’s figures. His patterns served as a stark contrast to the structured girdled outfits of the 1950s.

During the U.S. sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, women wore bras less often or completely stopped. This social change, along with the new pop-cultural prevalence of very slim models like Twiggy, seeped into mannequin manufacturing. Gradually full-length, thin, pear-shaped mannequins with nipples and natural lower bust shapes emerged. Such historical details are important considerations because conservators like Kiefer aim to accurately represent the garment, the designer’s intention, and the wearers’ measurements. She and her team used “old 1970s department store mannequins that worked really well for the Halston” pieces and the fit each model’s frame.

Whether it’s a 17th-century brocade wedding dress or a 16th-century kimono, each historical garment brings a unique challenge, says Kiefer. Rarity is subjective, but she cites the Halston pieces as some of the most interesting garments she’s ever mounted on a mannequin. Few conservators get such opportunities to dress prominent designers’ work.

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Like Kiefer, costume historian Colleen Callahan from Costume & Textile Specialists has worked on a lot of one-of-a-kind garments that are far older than Halston’s designs, such as a purple brocade dress owned by Martha Washington that dates back to 1770 and a 1700s off-white linen jumps, which are undergarment bodices, embroidered with multicolored silk floral motifs. For those outfits, the process isn’t as simple as using department store mannequins. These types of endeavors take anywhere from 24 hours to one month to pull off depending on the institution, the exhibition, or the needs of the garment. Sometimes, there’s a little bit of lugging around fiberglass appendages from room to room, cutting busts off with a chiseled saw, padding in waists with foam, and accessorizing with the finest jewelry a time period can offer. Molding forms into lived beings is all part of day’s work.

“As conservators, we create the form to fit the garment rather than changing the garment to fit a mannequin,” says Kiefer. The process requires conservators and curators to take measurements of the garment and assess its points of fragility, such as a worn seam or zipper, that might need some extra padding or foam for support. The conservators, collection manager, and mount maker will also determine the important design aspects they want to highlight to convey the garment’s historic silhouette, such as the inside of a gown slit or the length of a swooping bridal train.

The next part is building the right mannequin or form that can achieve an exhibition-specific look and support the garment. Some institutions might use a Kyoto Costume Institute (KCI) mannequin for 18th- to 19th-century garments or other brands such as Goldsmith, Schleppi, or Rootstein for 20th- and 21st-century garments. The 20th- and 21st-century mannequins have broader shoulders, lower busts, visible nipples, and slimmer shape to reflect modern-day women. KCI mannequins come in different body types of four eras from the 18th- and early 20th-century. For example, Kiefer says, their 18th-century mannequins have longer torsos whereas a 19th-century mannequin has a fuller, bell-like rear to accommodate the bustle silhouette of that time period.

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Some KCI mannequins come without a waist. That’s because back in 18th- and 19th-century, many garments came tailored with corsets. Instead of establishing one particular waist size, the Kyoto Costume Institute eliminated the waist from the mannequins so conservators could shape the waists. Depending on the garment’s needs and vulnerabilities, the team uses a mixture of padding, ethafoam, tubular stockinette, stockings, lycra, acid-free tissue paper, and other archival materials to prevent garment strain and tear.

Conservators also use these support materials to build out the particular waist size of the garment and mimic the exact measurements of the person who wore the outfit. If someone had a 33-inch waist size and a 43-inch bust, conservators have to account for this in molding the mannequin frame and shape.

At their woodshops, mount makers will also cut available mannequins in half at the waist, if a garment requires it. They’ll put on their safety goggles, place their noise-canceling earmuffs around their ears, and start cutting the mannequin’s waist with a reciprocating saw. White dust fills the air and smatters the woodshop like snow, but the result is a mannequin split in half that's ready for building by conservators in a conservation lab.

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“In a way,” says Peabody Essex Museum Curator of Fashion and Textiles Petra Slinkard, “you are creating a sculpture out of padding.” At the Chicago History Museum, she worked with lead conservator Holly Lundberg, costume collection manager Jessica Pushor, and a team of conservation volunteers to mount the blood-soaked black velvet cape Mary Todd Lincoln wore the night her husband, the 16th U.S. president, was assassinated. This exhibit was held at the Ford Theater in Washington D.C. in 2015.

If a museum has the resources, a few conservators might create a copy of a fragile garment to the precise original measurements to test if the mannequin will fit, then make adjustments accordingly. In most instances, they’ll carefully secure the actual garment and accessories onto the mannequin. If they want museum visitors to pay close attention to the inside of a coat, they will adjust the mannequin’s arms to make it look like the mannequin is holding the coat open for display on a rotating platform. These are small tweaks museum institutions make to animate the garment and show it in motion.

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For Mary Todd Lincoln’s cape, Lundberg and her team created “a petticoat and a pinafore to be used underneath the cape to support it but also give the context of how the cape would have been worn because we didn't have the dress that she wore underneath it,” says Slinkard. Then, Slinkard styled the cape with photographers to showcase the complexity of the design in a photo shoot.

All of the sawing, the padding, the measuring, the styling, and the stress amount to an expertly crafted display. While the museum goers who awe at a garment may not know the work behind the glass, they can visualize the people who wore the outfits, and the history that brought the garment to life.

See Yourself as You Truly Are in This Mysterious Metal Mirror

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In Aranmula, Kerala, a heritage village on the banks of the Pamba river, a group of skilled, metal-casting artisans spend their days in hot and dusty workshops, crafting metal mirrors, a tradition that goes back 500 years.

For centuries, the craftsmen, who belong to the Vishwakarma community, have been working in the Aranmula Parthasarathy Temple. It is one of the oldest temples in South India, dedicated to Lord Krishna, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. Originally, these artisans were known for creating exquisite bronze idols of deities. But around 500 years ago, they handcrafted a special mirror known as the Aranmula kannadi, which surpassed the idols as their most famous product. The mirror is made from a copper-tin alloy with trace elements. To this day, the composition remains a closely guarded secret, passed from one generation to the next.

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It is believed that keeping an Aranmula kannadi in the house brings prosperity and luck to the owner. For this reason, it is given as a gift during weddings and housewarming ceremonies. People are typically intrigued that a mirror made of alloy has reflective properties like a plane glass mirror, and also surprised that the alloy is brittle.

As historical information related to the origins of the mirror are sketchy and unreliable, the legends have become the story told about these unique artifacts.

According to the main legend, centuries ago, the high priest of the temple noticed a crack on the crown of the deity. The King ordered the craftsmen to make a new crown in three days. The craftsmen were worried, as they didn’t have the requisite raw material. The head craftsman’s wife prayed and had a dream, in which the deity appeared and gave her the secret proportion for creating an alloy that would shine like a mirror. The next day, the women of the community surrendered their gold ornaments. The men sold them to buy the raw material and a crown was made. It shone bright, and when polished, showed reflective properties like a mirror. The crown was called the kannadi bhimbom (mirror image).

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The King was pleased. The artisans then created a vaal kannadi (hand-held mirror) using a similar composition, which was popular with Kerala’s royalty and aristocracy. The King decreed that the mirror be part of the ashtamangalyam set, a brass plate featuring eight auspicious items that is used in religious rites.

The uniqueness of the Aranmula kannadi is that it is front-reflecting, unlike plane glass mirrors where reflection takes place on the back surface of the glass, where the reflective coating is applied. In plane mirrors, light travels through the glass and back, so it gets refracted and changes direction. This can cause aberration or distortion of the image, and this distortion can vary depending on the quality of the reflective coating. In the case of the Aranmula kannadi, the light does not penetrate into any refractive medium like glass: The reflection is on the top metal surface.

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In a thatched-roof workshop, with the summer sun bearing down and the fire from the furnace raising the temperature several degrees, the artisans toil, focused on their tasks. The process of crafting the mirror starts with the making of the alloy. The next step is molding, then casting the mold with the alloy in the furnace stoked by a fire. The molds are cooled and then broken, to reveal the rudimentary mirror that is formed from the molten alloy. This is then cut, filed, polished, and finally mounted on a brass frame. The entire process is time consuming and painstakingly done.

Creating the mirror is a relatively green process. The material used is eco-friendly and obtained locally. There is minimum waste and most of the material is recycled, as the mold bits can be ground again, and the alloy pieces re-melted.

Not long ago, the craft was languishing. According to Pazhani Gopakumar, secretary of the Viswabrahmana Aranmula Metal Mirror Nirman Society, which is a society of artisans, there was no patronage and no promotion of the product. In the past 15 years, however, there has been a slow revival. The society is creating awareness of the product, in craft fairs and exhibitions outside Kerala.

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Sheela Chandrachudan, an 81-year-old musician who is passionate about Indian crafts, owns a big kannadi, and has had it for the past 35 years. It occupies a place of pride in her home. Having moved several times over the years, she says, it is still in perfect condition. She laments the fact that many people from Kerala don’t know about the mirror’s cultural existence. She treasures her piece, now a family heirloom, and plans to pass the possession down to one of her daughters.

Aranmula kannadis are expensive. A small three-inch mirror costs, at a minimum, Rs. 3,000 (around $50). The price can go up to Rs. 100,000 (around $1,550) depending on the size of the mirror. Since they are expensive, cheaper fakes are flooding the market. These are made with tin sheets, and for a buyer, it can be difficult to discern if it is a genuine piece or a fake.

But like a plane glass mirror, this metal mirror does break. So for a non-expert, the only way of knowing if their mirror is genuine, and not a counterfeit tin version, is to drop it. If it breaks, well, it was a genuine mirror.

These Literary Vending Machines Serve Up Short Stories

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In Grenoble, France, the short story addict doesn't have to go far to get their fix. Across the seven square miles of the central city, 14 orange-and-black machines are dotted like Easter eggs in train stations, municipal buildings, and even the local museum. At the push of a button, each one will unspool a little piece of literature, printed on a long strip of paper, like a grocery store receipt. You can select for length—one, three, or five minutes—but precisely what you'll be served up is in the hands of the gods. These are story dispensers, built by Grenoble-based publishing company Short Edition.

When the company began producing the machines in 2015, they were hardly set on global domination. But today, they are found around the world, with some 30 dispensers across the United States alone. (A map of the machines can be seen here.) In restaurants and hotels, libraries and government buildings, loiterers and literati alike can help themselves to these free stories, pulled from a digital bank of more than 100,000 original submissions.

The stories come from writing contests, with each entry carefully evaluated by Short Edition’s judges. At some point, they hope to translate them, and to "have some Asian authors read in Europe or America, American authors read in Africa or South America, etc.," Loïc Giraut, an international business developer for the company, told LitHub. “We want to create a platform for independent artists, like the Sundance Institute,” Kristan Leroy, export director at Short Edition, said in an interview with the New York Times. “The idea is to make people happy. There is too much doom and gloom today.”

The Desert Architecture School Where Students Build Their Own Sleeping Quarters

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The first thing Lorraine Etchell sees each morning is the sun rising over the Sonoran Desert and illuminating the iconic Camelback Mountain. She doesn’t even have to leave her bed to become one with the desert: From her mattress, she can see the horizon stretching out before her and watch groups of Gambel’s quail scuttling around the cacti and creosote bushes.

Her view is uninterrupted by city high-rises and accompanied only by the sounds of quail calls and shrieking hawks.

That’s because Etchell is a resident of one of the world’s most unusual dorms. The second-year graduate student at the School of Architecture at Taliesin (SOAT) in Scottsdale, Arizona, lives in a desert shelter, carrying on a tradition started by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937.

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Wright was 70 years old when his doctor recommended that he spend winters in a drier, warmer climate. He and his apprentices began making annual treks from Wisconsin to Arizona, where they lived in canvas tents during the construction of Taliesin West. Taliesin West served as a winter escape from the original Taliesin, Wright’s residence in Wisconsin, and provided a place for the architect’s apprentices to live and learn alongside him.

Wright, known for creating “organic architecture” that prioritizes harmony between buildings and the natural environment, liked minimalist desert living so much that he encouraged his protégés to continue building rudimentary desert shelters after construction was completed. In addition to providing hands-on practice, the shelters forced aspiring architects to become intimately familiar with nature’s impact on living spaces.

The School of Architecture at Taliesin West continued accepting students after Wright’s death, and today, its 20 or so students are still strongly encouraged to try desert living. Most do. The school requires students to build a shelter or enhance an existing one.

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“It’s a sense of freedom that I had never felt before. And it’s a powerful thing,” says Etchell, who lives in Japanese House, a 250-square-foot, window-filled redwood structure built in the early 1990s by Ryosuke Isoya, an apprentice from Japan. The shelter sits on a cantilever and creates the sensation that “you’re hanging, in this sort of nest, this perch … You’re protected [from nature], but you’re not separated.”

During the day, Etchell’s routine resembles that of architecture students at other schools: Go to class, eat in the dining hall, work on projects in the studio until obscene hours. But when it’s time to go to bed, she changes and washes up in a communal locker room where her clothing and toiletries are stored. Then, wearing shoes underneath her pajamas, she walks a half-mile or so into the desert.

The path is strewn with loose stones and prickly cacti, and dangerous animals like rattlesnakes and scorpions come out at night. These obstacles are shadowy under a full moon and much harder to make out on a moonless night. Still, most students say they can navigate safely to their beds by muscle memory, no flashlight needed.

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Most shelters are more exposed to the elements than Etchell’s, consisting of a roof and a bed platform and little else. Some students simply live in tents.

"The original sheep herder tents were very ephemeral ... a simple masonry base and the canvas tents would be disassembled and stowed away for the summer when the students were in Wisconsin," says Etchell. "Most recent shelters require continuous maintenance."

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“They’re strong-willed, to be out here in these shelters, to say the least,” teaching fellow Ryan Scavnicky says of his students. Although he says living in a desert shelter is “something I never would have done,” Scavnicky calls the structures “unique and super fun.”

That’s partly thanks to special zoning rules that essentially create an architectural sandbox in the Taliesin West desert, allowing students to experiment without running afoul of city regulations. As for how long the shelters last, that's "in direct proportion to what they are made of," says Christopher Lock, a SOAT student. "Structures of thin canvas and wood often blow away within a year or two, other wooden frameworks may hold on longer—but the dry air makes them brittle and rain, sun, and wind often warp them over time."

Some of the most visually arresting shelters—like “Hook” and “Hanging Tent”—have serious flaws. Hook’s cutting-edge design was featured in magazines after it was built in 2003, but it had no protection from rain, sun, and wind. (It was made more livable with the addition of a plexiglass roof and canvas walls last winter.)

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“Hanging Tent” floats beautifully five feet above the ground, but its construction broke with the principles of organic architecture by creating a path of destruction through the desert. The design missteps, however, are an important learning process that won’t impact any clients and can be modified by future architects-in-training.

“You can’t live like this and not have this slowly permeate your conscious,” Lock says of the shelter program. “I doubt that anybody who goes through this program, living several years like this, is going to make a dead room, is going to make a boring ho-hum bit of architecture.”

Lock says that “‘normal’ houses seem so dead to us, because they’re just boxes of drywall” with “no air moving, there’s no nature, there’s no light.”

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Although Etchell will meet the design requirement with a structure in Wisconsin, where students spend the summer months, she’s already left her mark in Scottsdale. When she first set eyes on Japanese House, it was hardly the elegant space it is now. Students were at one point forbidden to enter for safety reasons and the school was considering tearing it down.

With the help of her construction-savvy fiancé, Etchell tore out rotting structures, replaced the missing ceiling, cleared out pack rat nests, created a built-in desk, and oiled and painted the floor.

She relishes the shelter’s simplicity and lightness, and finds herself returning to it during the day if she grows creatively frustrated.

“I spend most of my time in the study area where my desk is. And I’m so happy to have that, because to get into your creative mode, it’s hard to do in the studio,” she says. But “to be sitting in this room, this entire room that is literally floating on these two tiny little rods? Yeah. I’m interested in that.

“The whole valley opens up and there’s nobody in front of me,” she adds dreamily, taking a sip of tea. “Every morning is different, every evening is different, every time of day is different. And I am alive, in the shelter that is living with me. And that’s natural architecture.”


How Better to Protest Federal Policy Than With an Embroidered Scorpion Demon?

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If you want to register dissatisfaction with a piece of legislation, you've got a few options. You can contact your local representative. You can join a protest or campaign. Or—if you want—you can embroider the most frightening creature you can imagine onto a piece of satin, and stitch the name of said legislation underneath it, as above.

This creature was embroidered by Eleanor B. Roosevelt—not to be confused with the other, more famous Eleanor Roosevelt, who probably would have represented the New Deal in a very different way. Eleanor B. was married to Theodore "Ted" Roosevelt, Jr., the oldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt. Both Eleanor and Ted were staunch Republicans: When Ted's fifth cousin, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, won the Presidency in 1932, Ted resigned his seat as ambassador to the Philippines. When reporter Inez Robb wrote up the embroidery in 1940, she described the couple as "out-of-season Roosevelts."

Eleanor began the embroidery at the 1940 Republican National Convention, and finished it three months later, in the lead-up to the election. At the time, FDR was running for his third term against Republican challenger Wendell L. Willkie. The needlework was meant to act like a more traditional political cartoon, portraying the progressive legislation as a hideous monster, "in the theory that a stitch in time may sew up the election for… Willkie," Robb wrote in the International News Service.

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"It's the most horrible and gruesome thing I could devise," Eleanor told Robb. "The evil in it is very subtle." Subtle may not be the right word for the piece, which apparently was sewn with bright red and gray threads into pale blue satin, and features no fewer than four separate skulls, one of which appears to have had a bite taken out of it.

It's unclear exactly what species it is supposed to be: the Library of Congress calls it "a hairy scorpion with the head of a skull," while Robb preferred "a body one-part lizard and two parts hairy spider." (She eventually threw up her hands, describing it as "a dandy little entomological misfit… right out of a Welsh rarebit nightmare.")

It’s also unclear precisely what Eleanor found evil about the New Deal—the series of federal programs, projects, and stimuli that FDR introduced in 1933 to combat the Great Depression. But if she was on the same page as other Republicans, she probably considered it to be an overreach that didn't work. Willkie got the party nomination by making arguments along these lines, telling the New York Times that "government monopolies... need [a] licking if the people's liberties are to be preserved," and that, by increasing federal debt, the policy "puts this country on a highway which will come to... a smashup."

The creature's hodgepodge nature befits its creator. As curator Beverly Brannan details at the Library of Congress, even when she wasn't creating skillful, politically cutting pieces of needlework, Eleanor was a real Jackie-of-all-trades. She was, at various times, the president of the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York, the head of a YMCA canteen in Paris, and a member of the editorial advisory board for Whiz Comics.

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She published articles about her home life, and took thousands of photos, which she kept in meticulously ordered scrapbooks, along with relevant newspaper clippings and letters. She also often went with Ted when he was stationed overseas—when he was governor of Puerto Rico, Eleanor was instrumental in securing a living wage for female needleworkers on the island, Brannan writes.

By the time she sewed her New Deal monster, she was familiar with political campaigning, too. When Ted ran for New York State Assembly in 1921, Brannan writes, Eleanor "breached the taboo against women speaking in public and gave stump speeches for her husband." Stumping led to stunting: In September of 1921, she participated in a mule race against the wife of another local politician, Anne Webb. "It was the most exciting mule race ever seen on the course," a New York Tribune reporter declared. (The race was a tie, and Roosevelt won his seat.)

Her frightening needlework was less effective: FDR, of course, went on to win his third term, earning 449 electoral college votes to Willkie's 82. There's no evidence that Eleanor tried quite the demon needlepoint strategy again, although she continued to create high-quality pieces of embroidery that were featured in various magazines. The scorpion creature stayed hung up in the family drawing room—"in a dark corner," Eleanor B. explained to Robb. "I wouldn't want to frighten timid guests."

How a Gang of Thirsty Thieves Stole Over $500,000 Worth of Wine

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One December night in 2014, a group of wine aficionados congregated in front of Thomas Keller’s famed French Laundry restaurant. They hadn’t called ahead to see if the Yountville, California, institution, which has an infamous, months-long waitlist, could accommodate them. Since it was Christmas night, the restaurant wasn’t even open.

Regardless, the crew got what they came for. They broke in and walked out with over $500,000 worth of wine, including some of the most coveted bottles in the world.

Nearly four years later, investigators have recovered all but a handful of the 110 missing bottles. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice released a statement confirming that two of the thieves—Alfred Georgis and Davis Kiryakoz—also conspired with others to steal and transport fine wines from Alexander’s Steakhouse in Cupertino, California (that theft clocked in at $32,000). Additionally, Kiryakoz admitted that he'd been part of a group that swiped $290,000 worth of wine in 2013, from San Francisco’s Fine Wines International, according to SF Gate. Both men have since been sentenced to time in prison.

That this band of thieves pulled off several large heists is remarkable. The bandits planned sophisticated, well-surveilled thefts—they robbed the French Laundry, for instance, the day after it closed for a months-long renovation. No one was on the premises, so they easily pried open the door, then stepped into the wine cellar. The French Laundry’s state-of-the-art alarm system—which had been deactivated, for once—didn’t stop them either. And not just any thief could have absconded with such valuable booty.

Currently, not much is known about Georgis and Kiryakoz, their relationship, how many others worked with them, or why they chose to target the French Laundry. (Wine thefts at restaurants are relatively rare; thieves prefer warehouses.) According to the Justice Department, Georgis hails from Mountain View, California, and is in his fifties. Kiryakoz, of Modesto, California, is in his mid-forties. What’s clear is that they had insider knowledge and an appreciation of fine wine.

Georgis and Kiryakoz didn’t swipe just any bottles. In the French Laundry’s wine cellar, they beelined for dozens of bottles of the ultra-fine wine made by the Burgundy producer Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (for context, 12 bottles of DRC wine recently sold at auction for roughly $47,650). At Alexander’s, they strategically stole rare bottles of Bordeaux. “They knew exactly what they were going for,” said Maxwell Klassen, the wine director at Alexander’s. “They took the most expensive bottles.”

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Pilfering bottles unscathed is the easy part, though. Much like stealing classic artworks such as Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” or Leonardo da Vinci's “Mona Lisa,” the rarity of stolen bottles makes them both valuable and difficult to re-sell. (Imagine trying to quietly offload a one-of-a-kind item while the small world of people who both appreciate and can afford it is buzzing about the theft.) At the highest levels, buyers are wary of nebulous origin stories, though sometimes a work will change hands between dealers on the black market, then wind up in a private collection. Wine is tougher to trace, though, especially given the propensity of fraud.

Still, the estate that makes DRC—one of the most esteemed wine brands stolen by Georgis and Kiryakoz—only releases between 6,000 and 8,000 cases a year, and has just one gatekeeper who imports it to ultra-exclusive restaurants and locations in the United States. So the appearance of an unknown supplier invites scrutiny.

This dynamic ended up doing these thieves in. In January 2015, the Napa County Sheriff’s office received a call from an attorney in Greensboro, North Carolina. His client was a local buyer, who had unknowingly purchased the stolen wines from a broker he had previously worked with. Due to the press surrounding the French Laundry break-in, and the anomaly of finding a trove of such rare wine, he suspected that the bottles might be stolen.

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In North Carolina, authorities confirmed that the bottles had indeed come from the French Laundry thanks to unique serial numbers—which the restaurant had fortunately noted, then provided to the Napa agents. Unfortunately, a comprehensive database of wine serial numbers for individual bottles, which would greatly aid in solving and deterring wine crimes, doesn’t yet exist.

It remains to be seen what role if any Georgis and Kiryakoz had in the wine world before pulling off these heists, along with the identities and fates of their accomplices. Georgis was recently sentenced to 37 months in prison, and Kiryakoz received 15 months in federal prison last year. Wine is likely a sour subject for the two: They’ve been ordered by the court to pay $585,715 each in restitution to victims.

Do You Order the Second-Cheapest Wine?

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What’s both a punch line and a wine-ordering strategy? The second-cheapest wine.

If you enjoy wine but don’t know too much about vintages and varieties, you may have fallen into the following logic: You’re not sure whether you want wine with “hints of cherry”; you don’t know whether 2015 was a good year for Argentinian wine; and you think Pinot Noir is the type of wine you like, but you don’t quite remember. Honestly, apart from red vs. white and sparkling vs. not, you don't think wines taste terribly different. So why not just order the cheapest wine? Or, if that feels a little cheap and too obvious, how about the second-cheapest one?

People often joke about ordering wine this way, usually while making self-deprecating jokes about knowing nothing about wine. But is ordering the second-cheapest wine just a joke? Or is everyone ordering it all the time? Do restaurant managers and bartenders all know this, and think carefully about which wine should be the second cheapest on the menu?

We’ve been investigating these questions, and we want to hear from you. How do you pick wine? Is it ever by choosing the second-cheapest bottle? Would learning that everyone else orders the second-cheapest option change your strategy? Has your approach changed as you learned more about wine? If you work in wine or at a restaurant, is this an ordering strategy you think about?

Let us know by filling out the below form. We’ll publish what we learn—including some of our favorite stories that you send in—in a future article. This is going to be fun.

The 'Pedestrian' Who Became One of America's First Black Sports Stars

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On April 10, 1880, New York’s original Madison Square Garden was packed with sports fans. Men in the arena roared. Ladies waved their handkerchiefs. A band struck up “Home Sweet Home,” the classic 1823 American folk ballad. They had come to see Frank Hart, one of the best “pedestrians” of his day.

“I’ll break those white fellows’ hearts!” Hart, an immigrant from Haiti, vowed before the race. “I will—you hear me!”

Eighteen men competed in the race. Three of them were African Americans, including Hart. After Hart crossed the victory line, fans showered him with bouquets of flowers. His trainer handed him a broomstick to hold the American flag aloft during his victory laps.

Hart had won a “six-day go-as-you-please” endurance race. “The rules were simple,” explained Mile High Card Company, a sports auction house, in 2010. “Participants, called ‘pedestrians’ were free to run, walk, crawl, and scratch their way around an oval track as many times as possible in the course of six days, sleeping on cots within the oval, and usually for less than four hours per day.” Hart set a new world record by walking 565 miles, or 94 miles per day. His prize was $21,567, including $3,600 he legally betted on himself. It was the equivalent of almost a half million dollars today.

Hart broke racial barriers in sports just 12 years after African-Americans achieved full citizenship with the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And yet, in the 21st century, he has been largely forgotten. However, the recent discovery of a Frank Hart trading card, now for sale through Heritage Auctions, the nation’s largest collectibles auction house, has illuminated his legacy once more.

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For a brief period from the late-1870s through the 1880s—at the dawn of professional baseball in the United States—pedestrianism was the national pastime. And Hart was one of its leading names.

After emigrating to the United States from Haiti sometime in the 1870s when he was in his teens, Hart worked in a grocery store in Boston. There, he began competing in local races to make extra money. Daniel O’Leary, a savvy Irish immigrant and sports promoter, who had previously held the record for six-day racing, spotted Hart’s talent and decided to finance his career.

Hart’s given name was actually Fred Hichborn. But when he became a professional athlete, he figured “Frank Hart” had more of a commercial ring. The press soon nicknamed O’Leary’s client “Black Dan” because the two men shared similar racing styles. Newspapers also referred to him as the “Negro Wonder.”

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While the national press was adulatory, it nevertheless wrestled with stereotypes. As documented in the book Pedestrianism by Matthew Algeo, a Brooklyn Daily Eagle editor saluted “Our Friend Mr. Hart,” whose exploits proved that “there’s nothing in a black skin or wooly hair that is incompatible with fortitude.” The Salt Lake Daily Herald headlined its laudatory story, “The Colored Boy Gets Away with the [Championship] Belt.”

Hart endured his share of racial abuse and violent threats from hostile spectators. Competitors refused to shake his hand at the starting line. An Irish rival with a brogue dismissed him as “the nagur.”

“[During a Boston competition,] a spectator tried to throw pepper in Hart’s face, though for reasons unclear,” writes Algeo. “The attack may have been racially motivated, though it may have been just as well motivated by gambling.”

There is some controversy among historians surrounding an attempted poisoning during a race in 1879 at Madison Square Garden. O’Leary firmly denied it, but in an academic paper titled “Old Time Walk and Run,” the historian Kelly Collins concludes otherwise: “After a spectator gave him some soda water he became severely ill and it was determined that he was poisoned.” Hart won the race anyway.

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But the heyday of pedestrianism in America was short-lived. In the late 1880s, the craze gave way to baseball as the number one sport. A handful of black ballplayers appeared in the major leagues in the mid-1880s before they were systematically banned by an unwritten Jim Crow system known as the “color-line” in 1887. By then, Hart’s best option to eke out a living as an athlete was to play professional baseball in the Negro Leagues.

During the 19th century, white baseball kept incomplete records, and the Negro Leagues kept virtually none. Hart thus suffers from the historical indignity of being unattached to a specific team. Most accounts simply link him to the nameless Negro League baseball team in Chicago. In May 1884, The Washington Bee reported that the “colored pedestrian plays shortstop for a colored baseball club known as the St. Louis Black Stockings.”

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Hart should have been able to retire. “Keep in mind, in 1880 a good weekly wage in the U.S. was approximately $11, or less than $600 a year,” the journalist Kevin Paul Dupont wrote in The Boston Globe.“Hart’s take for that one [1880] event approached nearly 30 years’ worth of wages.”

Alas, he burned through his fortune. “Like many other sporting men, he was a big liver and a good spender,’’ reported the Cleveland Gazette in Hart’s obituary, as noted on Track and Field News. The Gazette revealed that Hart lived the last 20 years of his life off “the charity of friends.” Playing big league baseball surely didn’t help. Most white professionals played for very little money, and black players for even less.

Hart died young, like other legendary African-American athletes, including Josh Gibson (known as “the black Babe Ruth”) who died at 36 and Jackie Robinson, who broke the color-line in 1947 by becoming the first African-American player in Major League Baseball in the 20th century. Robinson died at 53. The famed pedestrian took his final step at age in 1908 at 50 years old in relative obscurity. The cause of death was listed as tuberculosis.

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In the collecting community, cards featuring Gibson and Robinson are highly collectible, but Hart’s are not, despite their extreme rarity. Heritage Auctions is selling what is believed to be only the third Hart trading card ever found. (The sale ends April 18, 2018.) Both were issued in packages to stimulate sales of cigarettes. Hart was certainly one of the first black superstars featured on his own trading card. But while photo cards of Hart were in great demand in his heyday, very few of them have survived. In contrast to cards of baseball players, those of pedestrians were not keepsakes after the sport fizzled.

A contractor uncovered the latest Hart card, and 286 other sports and non-sports cards, while cleaning out an attic in an old house in Hartford, Connecticut. It is part of a rare sports set produced in Rochester, New York, by a company promoting a brand of cigarettes.

“Frank Hart should be remembered as a pioneer ultramarathoner who pushed the limits of human endurance,” notes Black Past, a digital reference guide to African-American history. “He offered hope that blacks and whites could compete against each other as equals. He was also wildly popular with thousands of spectators of all races who followed the sport.”

Send Us Your Ideas for Dealing with Minnesota's Rogue Bog

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Minnesota has a bog problem. After we ran writer Andrea Appleton’s story about “The wild beast of North Long Lake,” a four-acre, floating peat bog that has been causing havoc recently, our readers were eager to offer some ad hoc solutions for how to deal with the troublesome natural phenomenon. And we want to hear more!

The giant roving island naturally detached from its former home, bound to the shore near a summer camp, and has bounced around the lake. At nearly 30 feet thick in places, it destroyed residential docks and boat lifts. Though it has come to rest back at the summer camp’s swimming beach, the bog requires a more permanent solution, before it drifts off to cause more damage.

"I come right out and admit, I am not an engineer," says Randy Tesdahl, the head of the American Legion in Minnesota, who helped devise the current plan for dealing with the bog, and who spoke with us for an update. Tesdahl and company's current plan is to lasso the whole thing with chains, swing it towards a less intrusive part of the lake, and stake it in place. It's an ambitious plan, but the whole community is pitching in. Along with the North Long Lake Association and the Department of Natural Resources, Tesdahl and other members of the Legion plan to complete the operation in a single day. If he gets his way, there will even be a volunteer breakfast in the morning and a celebratory barbecue at night. "I'm a retired marine, and I know that if everybody pulls together, humanity can do some pretty cool things."

If this bog were in your backyard, how would you deal with it? Would you try to blow it up? Let it wander the lake as a floating reserve? Scoop it up with a giant plane? Give us your ideas of how to deal with such a unique problem below, no matter how silly or strange. We’ll collect the best and post them in a later article!

Making Art for Bees

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When humans want to grab a bite to eat, they can raid the pantry, hop down to the corner store, or make a reservation at an expensive restaurant. When pollinating insects want a snack, they, too, choose among local plants. But for a few years, bees in Dookie, Victoria also had a fast-casual option: the Synthetic Pollenizer, a mechanical canola flower that serves up real nectar and pollen. The machine, made by artist Michael Candy, stood in a field in Dookie for part of last year. It's designed to give bees an experience usually confined to the human realm, while letting humans in on a slightly more bee-like one.

Candy, who lives in Brisbane, specializes in creations that interact with their environments at various scales: his other works include a chair that "walks" with the help of the person sitting in it, and a public statue that weeps whenever a bombing occurs anywhere in the world. After spending time with field biologists at a conference a few years ago, he was inspired to make "a sculpture for a different species," he explains. He began collaborating with some experts, including a beekeeper and a resource ecologist.

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Scientists have long created artificial pollination devices to help them study bees. But, Candy explains, these tend to be "really boring flowers—just jars with holes with them." The Synthetic Pollenizer is more of a multisensory bee experience, providing decor as well as nutrition. Canola pollen, which Candy purchases in bulk, courses from a repository up through a hose and ends up at a brass flower, where it is extruded by a "mechanical anther." Meanwhile, nectar moves through a similar system and squirts out of the center of the flower. There's even a surveillance element: When a bee visits, a small, motion-activated camera clicks on, and streams footage of the customer to YouTube.

When it's placed in a field of natural canola, the Pollenizer is clearly an imposter. It looks like a "real" plant the same way that a fast food joint looks like a "real" restaurant: it's got smoother surfaces, brighter colors, and more visible automation. While other flowers sway organically in the breeze, it stands stiff and still. And rather than being tucked demurely into stems and roots, its plumbing is clearly visible: gears twist, pistons fire, and pollen and nectar chug through tubes.

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Still, it didn't take too long for bees to get used to the new establishment. According to Candy's rough estimate, they patronized the Pollenizer at about the same rate that they supped at real flowers. At times, Candy used peer pressure to give them a push: "With some of the prototypes, I'd even put a dead bee [on the fake flower] so that other bees could see how to land," he says. "Once they know how to do it, they visit a lot more."

Honeybees are facing a number of high-profile problems right now, including nutritional deficiencies, mites, and habitat loss. But Candy is quick to point out that the Pollenizer is not really meant to solve any of them: "Bees are very topical," he says, "but that was never my focus." Indeed, many advocates argue that the public focus on honeybee preservation actually distracts from more important conversations regarding native pollinator species.)

Instead, he's just trying to see if it's possible to slot a machine into an existing biological process without causing too much harm. He cites a Richard Brautigan poem that reads, in part, "I like to think.../ of a cybernetic forest/ filled with pines and electronics / where deer stroll peacefully / past computers / as if they were flowers." "Agriculture is somewhere where technology is usually totally invasive," he says. "[Pollination] works fine already, but I’m seeing if technology could actually be a part of this, non-invasively."

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Indeed, it's bee-oriented to the degree that human viewers sometimes feel alienated. During a recent exhibition, a display Synthetic Pollenizer was shown alongside a livestream from the working one, which was positioned in a nearby field. "The curator sent me a message two days into the show and was like, 'This [livestream] is really boring,'" Candy says. "And I was like, 'Yeah!'... It's not really catered for humans. It's an interactive artwork for bees."

As a human viewing the artwork, its power comes from realizing how many of the machines we've built don't just affect our interactions with other species, but eliminate them entirely. "Beekeeping is so much fun," Candy says, near the end of our conversation. "I really want to get a hive, but I live in a warehouse." The robotic flower, too, is living in a box right now, he adds: "I don't have a garden. I don't know where I'd put it."

Istanbul Closes the Books on its Public Scribes

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On a side street near Istanbul's Çağlayan Courthouse, an electric sign reading “Petition Writer” points to the open door of 67-year-old Hayrettin Talih's tiny, one-room office. A casual passerby might think it a typical Turkish workplace, unadorned except for the obligatory photograph of Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and a framed verse of the Quran.

While those pillars of Turkish society never change, it appears that little else changes in the office either: Talih sits in front of a manual typewriter, in the same pose as a black-and-white photograph of himself, from 40 years earlier, which is tacked on the wall beside him.

Occupying the chairs opposite his desk are a couple of older citizens who are explaining a property dispute with a relative. Talih listens, demands clarification where necessary, and finally applies his fingers to the chattering typewriter, producing an affídavit that the couple will use to start proceedings at the courthouse, and hopefully get their rightful dues.

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Although he is not a lawyer, Talih has clients who clearly trust him to translate their experiences into Turkish legalese, which is replete with archaic Ottoman words—much like the Latin phrases beloved of English-speaking lawyers. An understanding of this obscure language is vital to Talih's work as a public scribe or arzuhalci, a profession he entered almost 50 years ago. Now, he is one of the last of his kind.

When asked why he has kept using his old typewriter, Talih replies that computers are merely another way of writing, not a source of reliable information. “There's a form used in the courthouse,” he says. “Do you know what it says on it? 'Do not put all your trust in the information you read on the computer.'” Talih cautions against referring to legal advice found on the internet. “The computer can only give the form, but people don't know what to write. That's the basis of our job: what do you want and how are you going to say it?” he says.

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Public scribes were a necessity in the Ottoman era, when the language used in state documents was even farther removed from ordinary speech and a large percentage of the population was illiterate. On top of legal work, the scribes also made a living by writing love notes and letters for soldiers who travelled to fight in the wars that consumed the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the earliest accounts of the profession is from 17th-century traveller Evliya Çelebi, who wrote that there were around 500 scribes in Istanbul at the time. An imperial decree of 1764 noted that the scribes had been a regulated guild since the early years of the empire, with their own licenses and entrance exams. Iconic author Yaşar Kemal spent some years working as a scribe and wrote several novels that include scribes as characters.

When asked how many of his colleagues remain in Istanbul, Talih says, “They're so few that I could count them on my fingers.”

Meanwhile, scribe Adnan Gültek sits with his typewriter outside the Social Security Center in the old city's Unkapanı neighborhood. The image of the scribe consulting with clients on the street has inspired paintings by Fausto Zonaro and Osman Hamdi Bey, as well as photographs by Marc Riboud and Ara Güler. These artworks depict the scribe as an archetypal part of Istanbul's street culture, which is now set to vanish.

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“It won't be long before people stop coming to us. Some of our work has already gone to the internet, and once the rest goes there'll be nothing left to do,” Gültek says, in reference to an online system that allows citizens to file court cases via the internet, unveiled by the Department of Justice in 2015.

While Talih spent 40 years outside the old Sultanahmet courthouse with his typewriter, things changed when the Çağlayan courthouse opened in 2012. “A big group of us worked on the street for one month,” he says. “There was a complaint made against us and so the municipality took all our typewriters. They said that working on the street was absolutely forbidden there, and if they saw us they'd take our equipment again. So I was forced to find this shop.”

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Gültek would prefer to work in an office but says he cannot afford the rent. “I'm tired of working on the street. It isn't easy talking and listening with all this noise,” he says. “If it rains we're here with our umbrellas, and in the mud and the snow. If stones fall from the sky we'll still be here.”

Turkish bar associations have created difficulties for the remaining scribes. In 2012, an Istanbul court sentenced eight scribes to one year in prison and a fine of 7,300 lira ($1780) for composing legal documents for clients, an activity that the court considered to be “using authorities that belong to a lawyer.” A similar case in Niğde this year ended in acquittal, suggesting that there is some inconsistency in the application of the law.

Meanwhile, the scribes say that they do not claim to be lawyers, as they merely help clients to express themselves on paper. “Let's say I wrote something I don't know about, and the person lost all his expenses and lost the case. Won't he turn around and complain about me for putting him in that loss? It's better not to write something you don't know,” Talih says.

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Both scribes defend their profession as the only option for those who cannot afford a lawyer. “Never mind the work that we do here, just consulting a lawyer costs 250 or 300 lira [$73]. We give the information they need, we write what needs to be written, and we take 15 lira [$4],” says Gültek.

But according to İmmihan Sadioğlu, a lawyer at the Istanbul Bar Association, the scribes' work is not as harmless as it might appear. “Their legal knowledge is made up of hearsay or things that they've heard without receiving a school education. The laws change every day and there's a very complicated set of procedures,” she says. According to Sadioğlu, the legal labyrinth cannot be navigated by an amateur, and the specific wording that the scribes use in the initial documents can be crucial. “The documents that arzuhalcis write are very important, and they open the way to a loss of time and rights that can't be regained afterwards,” she says.

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After all, there is a government system in Turkey that covers the costs of those who cannot afford to pay a lawyer. The bar association's concern is that the scribes, while offering an inferior service, take advantage of people who are not aware of this system. As this government support becomes better known, Sadioğlu and her fellow lawyers believe that the last scribes will see the writing on the wall.

“If a disadvantaged person can access justice easily, then he won't look for other solutions. As for the state, it should increase the level of funding for legal aid,” Sadioğlu says. “Someone who can receive a better and higher quality service from a free lawyer will not consider risking his rights by using a scribe.”


The Rise and Fall of the Hormel Girls, Who Sold America on SPAM

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In 1945, the war that wracked the world was finally over. American women who had served as military translators, typists and, even pilots suddenly found themselves out of a job. At the same time, the SPAM Man was trying to sell tinned pork.

Jay C. Hormel was the SPAM Man. Head of Hormel Foods, he was the canny heir to his father’s canned-meat business. Under him, the company introduced the smooth, spiced pork product known as SPAM right on the cusp of the Second World War. But there was a problem. By wartime’s end, 90 percent of Hormel’s inventory was shipped overseas, as food for American troops and allies. The company now needed to market wartime, tinned food to a peacetime audience.

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So, in 1946, the Hormel Company started hiring for the Hormel Girls, a drum and bugle corps of female musicians who had served in the war. As a veteran himself of World War One, Hormel was concerned for his employees who served. During the war, according to authors Jill M. Sullivan and Danelle D. Keck in their paper The Hormel Girls, he had sent letters to enlisted male employees assuring them that their jobs were waiting. When two managers devised a marketing strategy of an all-female, military-style band to promote Hormel products, Jay Hormel was quick to support it. As Sullivan and Keck point out, it was designed to push a “quasi-patriotic” button for consumers, who associated Hormel with the American military.

The requirements to be a Hormel Girl reflected the times. Most of the performers were white, and all were unmarried. They also had to play instruments. Ladies’ bands weren’t unusual. Even in the late 19th century, all-female troupes promoted American music and American brands. Hormel had even established a touring group of musicians to promote Hormel’s chili con carne with Mexican music in the 1930s.

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On August 29, the Hormel Girls completed their first month of training. Their test was the 29th American Legion National Drum and Bugle Corps Championship, held in New York. In neat uniforms, they played hits such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” As the competition’s first female team, they finished 13th. There was avid media interest, both positive and negative. The New York Times reported on an injunction brought by noise-sensitive neighbors near the Corps’s Connecticut training grounds, but that was outweighed by the spectacle of the musicians performing and on parade. Hormel soon realized that the group was an advertising powerhouse.

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Twenty girls from the original 48 agreed to stay on, and those numbers soon grew. They marched in parades, played in shows, and sold Hormel products (especially SPAM) door-to-door. Advertisements proclaimed that when “talented ex-G.I. Drum and Bugle Girls” came to town, they distributed free SPAM or chili in stores. Driving 35 matching white Chevrolets, the performers proceeded like a caravan, drawing attention wherever they went.

In 1948, the Hormel Girls went to Hollywood and took to the airwaves. According to Sullivan and Keck, they changed their style for radio. While before they had played a mix of military and popular music, the Music with the Hormel Girls show featured big-band music, punctuated by regular reminders that Hormel’s chili and ham was the best. It proved a good combination. By 1953, the show was “number four in the yearly [Nielsen] rankings.”

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The Hormel Girls were famous. Soon, they stopped going door-to-door, and only pitched Hormel products to stores. The Girls earned bonuses for selling lots of meat, with a premium for SPAM sales. But selling wasn’t the main requirement: It was still all about performing. “I didn’t want to sell anything,” former Hormel Girl Martha Awkerman told Sullivan and Keck. “I was there to play my horn.”

In the early 1950s, the show expanded to include dance. The Hormel Girls wore elaborate costumes and performed for locals and grocers. Jay Hormel, channeling his inner bandleader, decided who would sing and play which instrument. (Some of the musicians considered him nitpicky, but he may have just been passionate about music. Several of his children and grandchildren became performers.) As the group reached its peak, many newer Hormel Girls were photogenic professional musicians, instead of G.I.’s.

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It was an in-demand job. The weekly salary of $50 was better than other wages for women at the time. It was glamorous, too. The women were known as“the Darlings of the Airwaves,” or, more often, “the Spamettes.” Motorcades of police cars escorted their Chevrolets into town. It was an unprecedented opportunity for young women to travel while earning good money. Despite the double-duty of performances and sales (and the possible indignity of being called a Spamette), most Hormel Girls described the experience fondly.

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But in 1953, the show came to an end. The caravan was costing the Hormel Company $1.3 million dollars a year, and Jay Hormel was sick and would die the following year. As television proved to be cheaper advertising, the last performance was held on December 13, 1953. Laverne Wollerman, one of the final performers, told Sullivan and Keck that the curtain was quickly pulled to hide that many of them were crying.

Hormel Girls went on to other jobs at the company, or in music. But there was no denying their effectiveness. In the years that the Hormel Girls performed, Hormel’s sales doubled, and SPAM successfully made its transition from food of necessity to classic Americana. Still, in a 2010 interview, Hormel Girl’s announcer Marilyn Wilson Ritter noted that SPAM wasn’t even her favorite. “I liked the chili con carne,” she said.

How a Frozen Pizza Brand Became Norway’s Unofficial National Dish

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The Nordic countries are often name-checked for their progressive politics, an enviable education system, and for exceptional Eurovision skills. But one of their great culinary contributions to society is often overlooked: Scandinavian nations—specifically Norway—are leading the rest of the world when it comes to eating pizza.

Norway is only a fraction of the size of the United States, in terms of both landmass and population. Yet every year, the country’s 5.3 million inhabitants consume 47 million frozen pizzas. And what’s even more remarkable is that nearly 50% of those pizzas are Grandiosa frozen pizzas. In fact, Grandiosa is a brand so synonymous with Norwegian culture that in 2004, 20 percent of the population surveyed considered Grandiosa an unofficial national dish. But how did a humble frozen pizza brand come to dominate a country whose cuisine has historically been defined by the likes of meat, fish, and potatoes?

Italian immigrants began opening up pizza shops around the United States soon after the turn of the 20th century. One of those entrepreneurs included Frank Pepe, an illiterate Italian teenager who immigrated to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1909, only to return home a few years later to fight for his country in the First World War. After returning to the U.S., Frank and his new wife Filomena opened Pepe’s Pizzeria in 1925, serving up an unassuming dish from their beloved home on the Amalfi Coast.

At this pizzeria, an employee named Louis Jordan honed his pizza-making craft by working with Pepe’s wood-fired ovens. Jordan and his wife, Anne, eventually decided to move to Norway, where Anne's ancestors were from. And in May of 1970, they opened their own pizzeria in Oslo named Peppes.

The Jordans’ decision to launch Peppes in Norway couldn't have happened at a better time. For years, Norway’s food culture had stagnated, and seemed impervious to global food trends. Norwegians growing up during the 1970s and 1980s describe the food during those years as “somewhat depressing.” So when Peppes arrived in Norway, boasting nine varieties of Italian and American-style pizza, their unique menu soon attracted a following. The couple swiftly opened additional restaurants across Norway to accommodate the growing demand. Today, Peppes is considered one of the most popular pizza chains in Norway, with 70 restaurants scattered around the nation.

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“Pizza is incredibly popular in Norway,” says Erlend Brandshaug Horvei, who lives in Askøy, an island located northwest of the Bergen Peninsula. “Every little town or village has a pizza restaurant of some sort, usually a combined pizza and kebab shop. With a kebab shop within 20 minutes of almost every house, getting a pizza is never really an issue.”

Pairing a kebab shop with a pizza parlor is a partnership that extends beyond convenience. In recent years, Nordic countries—especially Sweden—have seen an influx of Middle Eastern immigrants, which has made several dishes, including kebabs, more ubiquitous. Norwegian pizza restaurants such as Peppes and its competitor Dolly Dimple's are known for their distinctive array of pizza toppings, which fuse the traditional elements of an Italian pizza with additions such as corn, cashews, pineapple, spinach, and eggplant.

Serving pizzas adorned with kebabs, topped with French fries, and drizzled with Béarnaise sauce is common in Norway, as are white pizzas, where the tomato sauce is swapped out in favor of crème fraîche or sour cream. Regional Norwegian cuisine relies heavily on animal proteins, and restaurants eagerly supplement pies with everything from mincemeat to reindeer. Reluctant to simply lay the toppings above the cheese, one particularly Norwegian innovation involves combining and pre-cooking the sauce and toppings, before constructing and baking the pizza.

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For Norwegians, eating tacos is a regimented affair, too. A 2012 study showed that 8.2 percent of Norwegians enjoy tacos for dinner every Friday night (known as “fredagstaco” or taco night). This affinity for the Mexican staple extends to pizza, as well: To make taco pizza, many Norwegians position nachos under the pizza’s cheese, adding mincemeat seasoned with spices such as cumin, paprika, or Piffi, a Scandinavian salt-based spice medley.

Grandiosa’s own meteoric rise from little-known frozen fare to national institution is a journey that happened swiftly and largely by accident. Even with the success of chains like Peppes, many Norwegians in the 1970s hadn't been exposed to pizza yet. According to Norwegian pizza lore, the factory manager at Stabburet (Grandiosa’s parent company) agreed to manufacture frozen pizzas without actually knowing what a pizza was. This small detail aside, Grandiosa began production in February of 1980 with the goal of creating a pie large enough for families to enjoy at home together. By the time the 1990s rolled around, sales had doubled and Grandiosa had cemented its place in Norwegian food history.

The company’s original product—a standard pizza topped with mild tomato sauce, Jarlsberg cheese, and paprika—is still its most beloved offering, and sells over 9 million pies annually. Locals have been known to hack the pizza by adding additional cheese before drowning the pie in ketchup and serving it on the famed, vibrant Grandiosa cardboard packaging. Some Grandiosa fans are so devoted that they’ve incorporated the pizza into their traditional Christmas Eve dinner, serving it in in place of more conventional holiday dishes such as pinnekjøtt (cured lamb ribs) or svineribbe (pork ribs).

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While some local food snobs quibble over the quality of Grandiosa pizza, everyone can agree that the brand’s marketing team has been instrumental in establishing it in the cultural conversation. In 2006, Stabburet even dropped a pizza-themed single called "Respekt for Grandiosa," which topped the country’s music charts for eight straight weeks.

So what is it about Grandiosa that has made the dish such a phenomenon? Some suggest the pizza’s popularity owes more to laziness and loyalty instead of quality ingredients. Others, like Erlend, take a more pragmatic approach. “It’s the perfect hangover meal,” he says. “It has just enough food in it to make up for one of the five dinners you need the day after a big night out and it doesn’t take forever to make.”

The Ancient Walled Gardens Designed to Nurture a Single Citrus Tree

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A windswept speck of land in the Mediterranean boasts a unique innovation found nowhere else on earth: a circular garden wall that creates its own nano-climate. But this invention isn't new: It dates back over a thousand years.

The remote Italian island of Pantelleria is so far from the rest of Italy that it's actually closer to Africa. On a clear day, you can even see the coast of Tunisia from the island's lofty volcanic peak.

Pantelleria has a hypnotic beauty that entrances the few travelers who reach its shores: Ancient mule tracks wend through patchwork vineyards dotted with crumbling ruins, while passing cars are so rare that hard-working farmers wave at every one. In all directions, wherever you look, the denim-blue sea sparkles.

The main challenge faced by Pantelleria’s 7,000 inhabitants, aside from the isolation that sequesters them from the outside world, is the weather: The island is constantly battered by winds, but rarely sees any rain. The soil is dry and full of volcanic rock.

How to eke out a living in such a place? For thousands of years, different groups have done so during different periods. But at some much-debated point, Pantellerians devised an ingenious garden design now known as the giardino Pantesco: Italian for "Pantellerian garden." What makes these enclosures extraordinary is that each giardino Pantesco was built, with months of backbreaking labor, not to nourish rows of vegetables, but instead to protect a single sprout: the sapling of a lone lemon or orange tree.

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"Of all agricultural systems, no other architecture involves so much work to grow a single tree," notes Giuseppe Barbera, Professor of Arboriculture at the University of Palermo and one of the world's few experts on Pantellerian gardens.

"The enclosed tree is a citrus—usually an orange or a lemon—that otherwise couldn't grow on the island without the protecting wall," Barbera adds. "Pantelleria’s windy, arid climate and the total absence of fresh groundwater wouldn’t otherwise allow trees like these to live."

Giardini Panteschi are almost always circular, and are precisely calibrated to have walls of a specific height: tall enough to block the wind, but short enough to allow in as much sun as possible. For as long as anyone can remember, farmers have expertly employed an age-old construction technique called muro a secco. Without using any mortar, they stack basketball-sized boulders freehand to form five-foot-thick walls that curve to encircle an enclosure 30 feet in diameter. They leave a single small opening through which the builder can crawl.

"The Pantescan farmer tore the stones from the ground with his bare hands, and used them to construct garden walls," says local vintner and retired politician Calogero Mannino.

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The top of the circular wall always slopes inward, so the crevices of the volcanic rock catch morning dew and atmospheric condensation, which then drips onto the soil—even on otherwise dry days.

At the center of all this, the farmer plants just one seed in hopes of eventually growing a full-size citrus tree, which he then allows to branch outward in all directions and fill the whole space with several trunks (unlike the more familiar practice in modern citrus orchards of pruning away all side-shoots to produce a tree with a single central trunk).

The end result of all this labor is a new ecosystem within the wall's embrace, where the tree experiences temperatures measurably cooler on hot days and warmer on cold nights, an effect confirmed by ongoing studies. "The research has shown the importance of dew condensation on the garden walls, which reaches considerable quantities because of the atmospheric humidity and the porosity of the rocks that increases the surface area,” says Barbera, who is monitoring climatic data being collected at the best-preserved giardino. “This contribution of water is so important that it allows citruses to be cultivated in the total absence of irrigation."

Giardini Panteschi have been described as self-sufficient agronomic systems, because they create a nano-climate that simultaneously waters the tree, protects it from relentless wind, retains any rainwater channeled into the garden under the access door during rare rainstorms, allows in sunlight, and radiates stored solar warmth on cold nights. Once built, it "operates" without any need for further human intervention.

Pantellerians were pioneers in sustainability before there was even a word for it. They did not get stones from some far-off quarry, but instead used rocks dug from the enclosed garden area itself. As Pantelleria sits atop a dormant volcano, the terrain comprises basically nothing but fractured volcanic rock, without much topsoil. Every square inch of vineyard and farmland on the island had to be hand-cleared of countless stones; on the island, people joke and conjecture that the garden walls probably evolved as the answer to the conundrum, What do we do with all these rocks we just dug up?

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A giardino Pantesco—also known as a "jardinu" in local dialect—is only one component of a traditional Pantellerian homestead, each element of which has an immediately recognizable vernacular architecture. At the center is the dammuso, or living quarters, with massively thick walls and a distinctive domed roof. The unforgettable, undulating shape is also unique to Pantelleria, and designed to collect rainwater and channel it down to a subterranean cisterna. A hardened pathway from the dammuso downhill to the jardinu also serves as a rainwater conduit, funneling runoff under the small garden gate. Farmers thresh grain in a nearby aira (another perfectly circular area but with lower walls) and sun-dry grapes and figs in the stinnituri, a south-facing wall with angled buttresses.

All these architectural features developed to deal with the constant hot winds known as sirocco that blow in from the Sahara and the Levante winds that blow in from the Near East. These winds dominate Pantelleria's weather as many as 300 days per year.

No one knows for certain who built the first giardino Pantesco: Some attribute it to the Phoenicians, who colonized the island 3,000 years ago. Others cite the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, or one of the many other civilizations that occupied Pantelleria over the millennia. Most often credit is given to the Arabic-speaking settlers who invaded in 700 A.D. and stayed for centuries; many of the island place names—such as Gadir and Bugeber, which belong to an ancient Arabic dialect similar to Maltese—date to this period.

"The surviving gardens were mostly built between the 18th and 19th centuries," Barbera points out, "but it is probable that they have been present on the island since ancient times."

Despite the relatively arid climate and chronic shortage of fresh water, the slopes of Pantelleria now appear surprisingly verdant. Vineyards dot the island, a situation made possible because the local grape variety, Zibibbo di Pantelleria, has evolved to survive with minimal irrigation. The centuries-old technique for keeping grape vines alive on Pantelleria—extensive pruning so that they hug the ground, behind yet more hand-built stone walls—is the only farming practice UNESCO deems "An Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity."

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About 400 giardini Panteschi survive today, in various states of disrepair. Of these, 300 are precisely circular, while others are rectangular, pentagonal, or even teardrop-shaped due to the nearby terrain.

Whatever its shape, there's something almost mystical about entering a jardinu, as if you're entering a temple to the tree itself. The space inside feels set apart from the real world outside. "One enters them bowing, the shade and the coolness immediately felt, the imposing walls giving the feeling of entering a sacred place," Barbera ruminates.

Why citrus, and not some other tree? As far back as the Middle Ages, it was known that fresh fruit, especially citrus, prevented scurvy. Giardini Panteschi may have provided the only source of vitamin C on the island.

The only giardino Pantesco officially open to the public is managed by the Fondo Ambiente Italiano in the vineyards of the Donnafugata winery near the village of Khamma. But some of the dammusi rented to vacationers have their own giardini, and any leisurely drive around the island will reveal a few of the unmistakable circular walls (but always ask permission before entering).

Famed architectural philosopher Bernard Rudofsky visited Pantelleria and became fascinated by the unique design of its gardens, marveling about them in his book The Prodigious Builders. "The Pantellerian giardino represents an unheard-of extravaganza,” he writes. “It embodies the archetype of 'paradise' (originally a Persian word meaning 'circular enclosure'), complete with the tree of sour knowledge."

The Day Without News

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Imagine you had a very special time machine: one that could take you back to any April 18 in all of history. When and where would you travel to? You could go to Boston in 1775, and watch Paul Revere take his famous midnight ride. You could head to Zimbabwe in 1980, and experience the birth of a country.

These are good and fine choices. Some of us, though, are tired. We might choose instead to jaunt back 88 years, to a British living room—any British living room. On Friday, April 18, 1930, at 8:45 p.m., people all over Britain settled in to catch the BBC News evening bulletin. But when they flipped on their radios, they heard a soothing announcement instead: "Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news." For the rest of the 15-minute time slot, the station played only piano music.

From our current point in time—April 18, 2018—it is hard to imagine a day with no news. Writing this in New York City, at barely noon, we have already learned today about peace talks between North and South Korea, a blackout in Puerto Rico, and the death of the last royal Corgi. The BBC, which had a head start, has also reported on a nurse’s strike unfolding in Zimbabwe, a pet raccoon that overdosed on marijuana, and the escape of a Bitcoin heister from custody in Iceland.) We hear the news on the radio and from wide-eyed friends and colleagues, and see it on Twitter and Facebook and via alerts beamed to our phones. Constant news consumption is such a part of contemporary life that when people actively eschew it, we put them in the papers.

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In this context, "the Day with No News is a wonderful historical reminder," writes Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, in an email. "I think it's a great way to think about what the BBC was supposed to be, and how that differs from what news as a category is today."

In 1930, the BBC was only about a decade old, and had very specific goals. "The BBC's approach was directly counter to what the U.S. was doing with radio, [which was] opening licensing and allowing competition between a wide variety of commercial approaches," writes Zuckerman. Instead, they were the only game in town, chartered by the crown with a monopoly over the airwaves. This model came with a very specific mandate: "Rather than opening things up and appealing to everyone, the BBC aimed on raising the moral character of the nation," he writes. "It took on a mission that feels pretty elitist today." (It was a spirit that suffused the endeavor: When the announcer decreed that there was no news, he almost certainly did so in a dinner jacket, even though no listeners could see him.)

In other words, the BBC decided what was worth reporting on, and according to them, it was better to stay silent than to fail to clear this bar. Radio announcers got their stories from Reuter's, the Press Association, the Central News, and the Exchange Telegraph Company, "whose 'tape' machines disgorge their varied treasure into the News Room all day," as the outlet's 1931 Review of the Year explains. They'd then pick and choose from this disgorgement. As the 1930 Review put it, "A very definite standard of quality was aimed at, and ... when there was not sufficient news judged worthy of being broadcast, no attempt was made to fill the gap."

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Even so, it’s not like there wasn’t anything major happening in and around England that day. In fact, as Zuckerman points out, other historical news sources tell us that there were at least two important things going on. For one, the British government was apparently trying to respond to some allegations that had been printed in a newspaper the day before—and since the papers were taking the Good Friday holiday off, they might have tried to go on the radio. “It's possible that Day of No News was a form of asserting press independence,” Zuckerman writes: “[They may have been saying] ‘We won't be the mouthpiece for the government, and so no news for anyone.’”

For another, Surya Sen, a Bengali independence fighter, had successfully led a raid against a colonial police outpost in Chittangong. This time, technology foiled the story: Even if they had decided to report on this, “they couldn't have gotten the news, as Sen's forces cut the rail and telegraph lines,” Zuckerman points out.

There were surely plenty of other things afoot as well. But at that time, "the news wasn't reporting on the vast majority of people's experiences and events," Zuckerman says. "On a day where nothing happened to world leaders and elites, the affairs of the hoi polloi weren't newsworthy." As he puts it, according to the BBC’s judgment, “Nothing happened on April 18, 1930 that a well-to-do, properly cultured British man needed to know about … And if there's nothing worth learning about, some pleasant music will be at least as good for your moral character."

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Today, of course, things are different. Our sense of what is newsworthy is vastly different than the BBC’s in 1930, in a variety of ways: “If we had a day where Trump did nothing absurd … we’d happily fill the newshole with reports that don’t get enough attention,” such as the opioid epidemic and the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Zuckerman says. Or we’d fill it with a highway pickle mystery. Plus, while newsrooms are often out to change minds, they’re also generally trying to make money. “The notion of a day without news is inconceivable in a commercial context—it’s a bakery without bread,” Zuckerman says. And so there is never no news.

This year, in particular, it's hard not to look back on the days of empty newscasts with nostalgia. Oh, to open Twitter and be greeted with a blank space and a softly tinkling piano! But as Zuckerman writes, imagining the gatekeeping that led to such silence can also serve as “a reminder of just how political [news-related] decision-making can be.” In that spirit, I would like to wish readers everywhere a happy anniversary of the Day Without News. I wonder what else will happen today?

Russia's Patriotic Alternative to Coca-Cola Is Made Out of Bread

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A Russian domestic scene: A mother of two serves her children dinner around a table set for four. Everything is well-lit, pine-paneled, idyllic. Daddy’s arrival seems imminent. The door swings open—and a man who may or may not be Gene Simmons saunters in. (He’s in full Kiss regalia, and clutching a plastic bag of groceries and a bottle of cola, with a star-spangled label.) His wife is stricken; his children equally fraught. “Simmons” holds up the bottle, narrows his eyes, and begins to ululate. The little girl bursts into tears.

In 10 seconds, the scene has descended into kitchen sink absurdism. The culprit is the brown liquid in the bottle—an American invasion into a Russian home. But there’s a solution. Simmons begins to drink a tall glass of a different brown drink, labelled with the Russian brand name Nikola. (If you say it aloud in Russian, it sounds like: “not cola.”) Immediately, his get-up falls away, and the make-up disappears. Our hero is just another Russian dad, home from work, and his daughter throws herself into his arms. Order is restored. Cyrillic text appears on the screen: “"No to cola-nization. Kvass. To the health of the nation.”

This is a 2007 television advertisement for kvass, a brewed Russian drink traditionally made from a heady combination of fermented rye bread, yeast, malt, sugar, and water. The result has a tart, fizzy sweetness not unlike kombucha and sits stickily on the tongue. It’s slightly alcoholic—around 0.5 percent—though historically drunk somewhat like a soda. (Commercial brands such as Nikola are sweeter and mostly malt-based.) Kvass fell out of favor as the Iron Curtain came tumbling down, but, in recent years, it’s been marketed as a patriotic alternative to “cola-nizing” American sodas. This approach ties into a rich history of kvass-centered patriotism that dates back to the early-19th century.

By that time, kvass of one form or another had been drunk in Russia for close to a thousand years—the earliest known reference dates back to 989 A.D. At the baptism of one Prince Vladimir, guests apparently enjoyed “food, honey in barrels, and bread-kvass.” It was the drink of choice of monks (its antibacterial properties made it safer than water), and has a well-established literary pedigree that includes appearances in the writing of both Tolstoy and Pushkin. (The latter describes one character who “has never drunk anything except kvas since the day she was born,” while in his Eugene Onegin, the Russian people “needed kvas no less than air.”) It is, in short, an exceptionally Russian drink—perhaps even more so than vodka.

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For a long time, kvass seems to have had no particular political inflection. But from the 16th century onwards, foreigners often spoke of the drink in fairly sniffy tones—Medieval Swedes compared their well-to-do compatriots’ wine-drinking habits to the less refined “Russian Voivods [who] sit in their smokehouses and drink kvass and water.” This may have fed into Russia’s Western-oriented intellectuals choosing to snub the drunk, which they viewed as a symbol of Russia’s backwardness, in the mid-19th century. But this anti-Russia, anti-kvass position only increased the drink’s popularity: Russians drank it because they had always done so, but also because it became a declaration of Slavic pride and love for the motherland.

In the 1820s, under the threat of the rising West, people began making an observable and special point of being “Russian,” which involved drinking a lot of kvass, and wearing what they perceived to be quintessentially Russian garb. This backlash prompted the Russian aristocrat Pyotr Vyazemsky to coin the term “kvass patriotism.” For the past 200 years, it’s been used by scholars and critics to describe a particular kind of Russian “jingoism”—what the Russian economist Anna Sanina describes as a sort of “wrong love to the motherland, when people praise their ‘own’ just because it is their own and reject all the ‘strange’ things just because they are ‘foreign.’”

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In the 1960s, kvass entered a new era of mass production—and Soviet leaders even hoped it might conquer the world. In 1964, the New York Times reported that then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced his plans to launch kvass internationally. “Kvass is to com­pete with Coca‐Cola and the rest of the imperialist brews and is to be pushed by advertising methods barely distin­guishable from those of the hated capi­talists. A campaign slogan has not yet been chosen but, on the home front at least, is likely to be something on the lines of ‘It's fun reaching your production norm with Kvass.’”

In actual fact, marketing generally centered upon kvass’s apparently beneficial effects on the digestive organs, the cardiovascular system, and “the breathing of the life cells.” Coca-Cola executives were correctly “unconcerned” by this show of Soviet neo-colonialism, the paper reported, and the drink did not take off worldwide.

Within the Soviet Union, however, where neither Coke nor Pepsi could be bought or sold, kvass had never been more popular. From 1967, vendors sold the drink on street corners out of iconic yellow barrels, labeled квас. Before Pepsi’s three billion dollar deal with the Soviet Union, 240-gallon “tanker-cistern trailers”, originally designed for transporting milk, were filled with the drink and wheeled through Russian cities and towns. The drink was sold out of communal glass mugs, given a quick rinse between customers, and came with horror stories about floating insects and other nasties in the liquid. But that did little to dampen the enthusiasm of drinkers: “Like beer, kvass is drunk chilled, so the appearance of carts with kvass barrels on the streets meant that summer was nigh,” remembers Sergey Grechishkin in his memoir Everything is Normal: The Life and Times of a Soviet Kid. “Kvass was one of the great pleasures of a Soviet kid’s life, alongside ice cream and elusive bananas.”

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But as the Soviet Union came to an end, Russians were enchanted by all the possibilities the end of isolationism presented—many of which were gastronomic. From the early 1990s, Pepsi and Coca-Cola became readily available. Kvass was left by the wayside—a boring relic of a now irrelevant age. Unlike kvass and its communal barrels, Pepsi was sold from kiosks with free disposable plastic cups, which Russians reused and repurposed variously as drinking vessels, ashtrays, seed pots, or thingummy containers. That “explosion of entirely unknown flavors,” Grechishkin remembers, was a fascinating “first gulp of a faraway world.” The Iron Curtain was on its way down, and cola drinks tasted like the future.

In the early 2000s, as Russians’ initial enchantment with all things Western began to fade, kvass returned to Russian streets. The barrels were repaired, repainted, and rolled out once again, to explosive effect: Between 2001 and 2009, according to one report, sales of kvass grew by 1520 percent yearly. It was around this time that Nikola first began to air its patriotic, anti-Western ads, variously featuring Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan, and other “problematic” American figures. Labels often featured bucolic scenes of wheatfields—a promise of the bottled essence of the Russian countryside in each drink.

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In 2014, Vladimir Putin fanned the fire. In a nationally televised interview, he joked that a journalist was drunk on kvass: In the months that followed, sales climbed once again. Even Heineken announced that it would produce its own version of the drink, keen to capitalize on a domestic market hungry for more Russian goods. “Loving kvass became a way of reclaiming a sense of national pride,” writes Bela Shayevich in Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design. Nearly 200 years after Vyazemsky coined the phrase “kvass patriotism,” the drink has come to stand for precisely the same pro-Russian fervor he first had in mind in 1827.

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