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What Harmless Lies Did Your Mother Convince You to Believe?

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In honor of Mother's Day, we're collecting the best false wisdom of moms everywhere.

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Did your mother ever tell you that your tongue would turn purple if you lied? Maybe she convinced you beyond a shadow of a doubt that carrots are candy, or spent years replacing your favorite stuffed animal so it seemed like it never got dirty or damaged. All of these are real examples of charming lies told by the moms of Atlas Obscura staffers, and in anticipation of Mother's Day next Sunday, we're collecting the false wisdom of moms all over the world.

Submit your own mom's best white lie (and, if applicable, what happened when you found out the truth) via the form below and we’ll share our favorites in a special Mother’s Day round-up. Like your mother always told you, sharing a personal story with Atlas Obscura is good for your soul (no actual mothers were polled to verify this statement).


The Geekiest Cuff Links of 1900 Featured Little Images of Plague Bacteria

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No one knows who made them or why.

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Encircled by gold frames, the cuff links hold images that look a bit like watercolor paintings of splashing raindrops. They’re blue—one pale shade and another a little inkier—against a creamy background. In fact, they’re not watery at all. The shapes are bacilli—rod-shaped bacteria—and the image depicts strains thought to have caused the bubonic plague.

The cuff links were fashioned around 1900, and entered the collection of the Science Museum in London in the late 1980s. They drifted in as part of a larger bequest of medals and other objects with a link to medicine, writes Stewart Emmens, curator of community health, in an email. Decades later, the little curios evoke an era of rapid and profound change in the medical realm.

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The Black Death, generally considered to have been the bubonic plague, devastated Europe during the Middle Ages. It wiped out millions of people—by some estimates, as much as half of the population. Many sufferers saw their skin pocked with buboes, swollen lymph nodes that looked something like blisters. Sometimes, dying tissues appeared black. Filthy air, nibbling vermin, and bad luck were cast as culprits of the outbreak; at that point, no one thought much about bacteria.

As the 19th century drew to a close, though, plague was back. This time, it was tearing through China and India. And this time around, scientists suspected that bacteria might be to blame.

The 19th century was a fascinating one for the fledgling fields of microbiology and bacteriology. In the early 1800s, most microscopes were luxuries peddled for fun and wonder, writes medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris in The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. English gentlemen snapped up velvet cases stocked with prepared slides, and peered at dainty flowers or thinly sliced fish scales. Any additional attachments—more sophisticated lenses, for instance—largely ended up gathering dust, Fitzharris writes. “Very few people who purchased a microscope during this period did so for serious scientific purposes,” she notes.

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When researchers did turn their gaze toward the minuscule, they were met with cocked eyebrows. By the middle of the century, Louis Pasteur was busy with microbiology, which he poetically dubbed “the world of the infinitely small.” Still, the researcher was summarily criticized by his peers. Fitzharris quotes one skeptical slap from the scientific journal La Presse, which sniffed, “The world into which you wish to take us is really too fantastic.”

He did attract acolytes, though, including Alexandre Yersin. As the plague continued to claim lives, the French-Swiss doctor arrived in Hong Kong in June 1894, with a microscope in hand.

The streets were quiet and littered with the bodies of dead rats. When the local hospital didn’t open its doors to him, he improvised, setting up a laboratory on a porch. Yersin wanted to take samples from recently deceased corpses—and when the hospital didn’t agree, he cajoled the sailors carting the dead to burial grounds into giving him a few minutes to pry open the coffins and remove the buboes.

He prepared films and wiggled them under the microscope. “At the first glance I see a real mass of bacilli, all identical,” he wrote in his diary. “They are very small rods, thick with rounded ends and lightly coloured (Löffler blue).” Yersin eventually set up a laboratory closer to the hospital and was able to draw samples from living patients. Once Yersin documented similar bacilli in rats marked with buboes akin to the ones he’d seen on humans, he was confident that he’d found the microbe responsible for the plague.

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Yersin and another researcher, Shibasaburo Kitasato, are thought to have identified the plague bacillus nearly simultaneously. (Today, the bacteria is known as Yersinia pestis, after Yersin.) The first vaccine to treat the disease emerged soon after.

“We have no information to link the cuff links to either men, but they date from a similar period and therefore may have been made to mark the discovery,” Emmens writes in an email.

Somewhere over the years, the objects’ backstory got lost in the shuffle. Emmens isn’t sure who wore them, or whether they were a commission or part of a larger fad for accessories that celebrated microbes. When the cuff links arrived at the museum, someone suggested that they may have been made by Fabergé, the Russian luxury jewelry outfit that manufactured jewel-encrusted Easter eggs and other glitzy decorations for European royalty, such as Tsar Alexander III. That hasn't been confirmed. (Atlas Obscura has reached out to the jewelry house, and we'll update if we learn more.)

Though the cuff links’ origin is unclear, this much is certain: Pasteur’s tiny world was real, wondrous, and life-saving.

Do you know more about these cuff links? We want to hear it. Email jessica.hester@atlasobscura.com

Greenland’s Hand-Sized Wooden Maps Were Used for Storytelling, Not Navigation

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These distinctive artifacts are clues to how the Tunumiit people saw the world.

On September 1, 1884, Danish explorer Gustav Holm and his men set ashore at the small settlement of Ammassalik (“the place with capelin”), on the eastern coast of Greenland. They had traveled for four months, from the trading post of Nanortalik in the south, in a small armada of seal-skin boats and kayaks. Johannes Hansen, a translator on the expedition, recalled that day’s first meeting with the local Tunumiit people in his diary, “… sometimes they lined up quite far away from us and stared at us, and yelled îh and âh; and then someone said, ‘We are sorry for you poor things, for having come this long way up to our dismal land; but to us you are incredibly funny, and pleasing to look at!’”

The Tunumiit knew of the Danish missionaries and traders to the south, but very few had actually seen a European before. These East Greenlanders didn’t know it, but Holm’s arrival heralded the eventual end of a way of life going back a millennium. The meeting also generated some of the most well-known, unusual, and misunderstood artifacts from the Inuit world.

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Accounts describe Holm as a quiet, reserved, inquisitive man with a steadfastness hardened by years of naval service. His mission was exploratory, backed by the Danish Commission for the Direction of Geological and Geographical Investigations in Greenland, to gather as much information as possible about this unforgiving stretch of coastline, known for violent storms and impenetrable ice fields. There also appears to have been some interest among the Danish colonial administration at the time to see if any long-lost Norse colonies had somehow survived the centuries, hidden away along the northern reaches of the eastern coast.

Holm had a keen appreciation for Inuit boat design—a good instinct in an environment only the locals understood well—and was using the traditional Inuit seal-skin umiaq, which allowed him and his crew to move safely and swiftly through dangerous fog and brash ice. In addition to three Europeans tasked with charting the terrain and making scientific observations of weather and geology, the crew was made up of about 30 Greenlanders from the south, who navigated, rowed, did the heavy lifting, and provided a steady diet of seal meat. A few were on hand to act as translators and missionaries as well.

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After Holm arrived in Ammassalik, today a town known as Tasiilaq, it was clear that the coming winter would prohibit safe passage back south, so the expedition decided to settle in for the next few months. This layover gave Holm the time he wanted to build relationships, as well as document the customs, language, and stories of the Tunumiit. Trade of goods is the currency of goodwill in many of these cultural exchanges, so Holm had brought European ironware, fabric, tobacco, and beads, which he bartered for anything and everything he could get his hands on. By the end of the winter, he had collected about 500 objects, from traditional clothing, hunting and fishing gear, and furnishings, to toys, magical talismans, masks, and ritual objects. To this day, much of the knowledge of traditional East Greenlandic art and handicrafts is informed by this collection.

At the same time, Holm was focused on mapping the coast and filling huge gaps in knowledge of the coastline’s geography. This was a foreign practice to the Tunumiit, who had a different way of seeing the world. For these seafaring people, geographic knowledge was something remembered and shared through stories and conversations of travels and hunting. "The drawing of charts and maps,” Holm wrote, “was of course quite unknown to the people of [Ammassalik], but I have often seen how clever they were as soon as they grasped the idea of our charts. A native from Sermelik, called Angmagainak, who had never had a pencil in his hand and had only once visited the East coast, drew a fine chart for me covering the whole distance from Tingmiarniut to Sermiligak, about 280 miles.” They also provided him with incredibly detailed descriptions of terrain, flora and fauna, and, in some cases, local weather patterns and lunar and solar cycles. To pass some of this knowledge on to the curious, acquisitive Holm, one hunter presented him with a set of unusual maps that have been, by turns, overlooked, discounted, misunderstood, and, eventually, admired.

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On February 8, 1885, a hunter named Kunit approached Holm with a driftwood carving he had made—a representation of unbroken coastline that could be flipped around as one followed the contours of the coast. “[Kunit] had carved the chart himself and declared that it was not unusual to make such charts when one wanted to tell others about regions they did not know,” Holm wrote. The hunter produced three maps in total, now collectively referred to as the "Ammassalik maps."

One carving, 5.5 inches in length, is highly detailed, embedded with all sorts of information and place names for the fjords above and beyond the 65th parallel. It even indicates locations where a traveler would need to carry his kayak overland to get to the next fjord. Another carving measures a little over 8.5 inches long and depicts a specific chain of islands along the coast, connected by narrow stems. These two maps could be placed next to one another to demonstrate the relative positions of the islands along the coast. A third, smaller map was also commissioned by Holm and shows the fjords stretching from Sermiligaaq to Kangerlussuatsiaq and includes valleys, shores, and inlets farther inland. Holm never actually traveled through the regions represented by the maps, but they helped him get a larger understanding of the local geography.

Remarkable though the maps are in both craft and the information they carry, they didn’t garner much attention when they were first brought back to Denmark. They were seen as just curiosities in his collection—but that quickly changed and they became a source of controversy. Some contemporaries of Holm doubted that Inuit people were capable of producing these types of maps, and that they were just the result of mimicry—classic Eurocentrism. In 1886, one Mr. Hansen-Blangsted argued in the French Minutes of the Meetings of the Geographical Society and the Central Commission that it was highly improbable that an “Eskimo” could possess the mental faculties to “invent” a three-dimensional wooden map. It was much more logical, he posited, that some shipwrecked European sailor taught the practice to the Tunumiit hunter—conveniently ignoring, of course, that no Western seafaring tradition had ever produced maps like this. Holm disputed Hansen-Blangsted’s racist claims and jumped in to defend the skill, memory, and intellectual capacity of the East Greenlanders he had gotten to know.


A century later, the carvings have proven to be remarkable time capsules that capture the perception of the land and sea—alive and with depth—through the eyes of an East Greenlander at the moment of first contact with the Western world. The maps show how the Tunumiit cognitively organized their world, and have captured the imaginations of map enthusiasts around the world for over half a century. But as time passes the maps have acquired a new mythology that doesn’t quite suit them. Anecdotal descriptions of the maps online today compare them to some sort of archaic, ruggedized handheld GPS device: waterproof, small enough to fit inside a mitten, and naturally buoyant. It’s easy to picture a lonely seal hunter in his kayak using the map to navigate through an archipelago by the light of the moon. But this is how we use modern maps, as roadside companions, and suggesting that the Tunumiit used them the same way is nearly as Eurocentric as Hansen-Blangsted’s dismissal. There is, in fact, no ethnographic or historical evidence that carved wooden maps were ever used by any Inuit peoples for navigation in open water, and there are no other similar wooden maps like these found in any collection of Inuit material anywhere else in the world.

But woodcarving was a common activity among the Tunumiit and Holm mentions that carving maps was not out of the ordinary. The Inuit people have used carvings in a certain way—to accompany stories and illustrate important information about people, places, and things. A wooden relief map, would have functioned as a storytelling device, like a drawing in the sand or snow, that could be discarded after the story was told. As geographer Robert Rundstum has noted, in Inuit tradition, the act of making a map was frequently much more important than the finished map itself. The real map always exists in one’s head. Though the maps themselves are unique, the sentiments and view of the world they represent were universal to the culture that made them.

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For most of the 20th century, the Ammassalik maps were held in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. In the mid 1980s, two of the three were repatriated to Greenland, where they now generate more interest than any other artifacts at the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk. Recently graduate students from the University of Greenland have begun work on a digital, 3-D archiving plan, the Ersersaaneq Project, which will include an online catalog of many pieces from Holm’s expedition. “The goal here is to try and create a new way to for the public to view the Ammassalik maps that reflects their dynamic nature as three-dimensional objects,” says project member Malu Fleisher. “These maps were intended to be held and manipulated so capturing them in 3-D makes a lot of sense.”

The team hopes to model the third map, which is still in Denmark, and virtually reunite the set online. “We want to make these maps universally available online to anyone that is interested in their history, but not use it as a substitute for actual repatriation,” says project member Michael Nielsen. “We want to contextualize them in a way that elevates them beyond simple ethnographic curiosities.”

As storytelling devices, the Ammassalik maps now have a new chapter. In 2019, Carnegie Mellon University will send a laser-etched image of one of the maps to the Moon as part of the MoonArk project. Once assembled, the capsule will comprise a repository of art, science, and technology that weaves a narrative of human life on Earth. Kunit’s map will become part of a much larger story that immortalizes the creative genius and aspirations of mankind. The maps and the ark are serving the same purpose—to help us understand our own blind spots and reorient our understanding of the past and our relationships with one another.

The Artist Making Tapestries Out of Aquatic Trash

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Jo Atherton's colorful works turn our plastic crisis into a meditation on memory and time.

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Jo Atherton's tapestries can't be ignored. They're filled with texture, movement, and color. When placed on the blank walls of galleries, they're like fishing lures for the eye: visitors will spot them from across the room and hone on in.

"Often, people are drawn to them," says Atherton. "They don't quite know what they're looking at ... It's only when they get up close that they have that shock moment of, 'Oh my God, it's rubbish!'"

This is not a judgement. Atherton, a freelance artist based in Bedfordshire, England, literally makes art from garbage. Some of it is old garbage—pieces of pottery and glass from ancient Rome, lent gravitas by the passage of time. Some of it is slightly more recent, like the nests of rope, fishing net, and colorful plastic doo-dads that make up those sneaky tapestries, which she calls "Flotsam Weaving." She finds all of her materials herself, in the depths of the Thames and along the low-tide lines on Cornwall's beaches.

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Strange as it may sound, it's a good time to work in washed-up plastic. For one thing, there's a lot of it: floating plastic bits outnumbered marine plankton six to one way back in 1997, and things have gotten far worse in the two decades since. For another, the public-interest pendulum is swinging towards the issue: over the past few years, cities have done away with single-use bags, and supermarket chains have begun to phase out plastic packaging.

This is especially true in the U.K., Atherton says, where the recent premiere of the nature documentary series Blue Planet II has gotten all sorts of people talking about ocean plastic, even in her inland community of Bedfordshire. (Just yesterday, Wimbledon announced a ban on plastic straws.) And we'll be talking about it for a while: minus some kind of miraculous microbial intervention, even a thin plastic bag takes hundreds—or maybe thousands—of years to break down.

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It is this longevity that draws Atherton the most. "I've always been somebody that has collected," she says, "and I've always wondered about the history of objects that I've found." Her time-hopping tendency goes in both directions: "I look to the past, but also to the future," she explains. "How is my lifestyle going to be represented by the objects i'm leaving behind? The fact that plastic has this enduring legacy, and it is going to be around for hundreds of years—it kind of suits that interest."

Atherton prefers to beachcomb in Cornwall, on the U.K.'s southwest coast. "A lot of material washes up in the winter because of the Gulf Stream," she says, and she and other seekers pick up stuff from all corners of the Atlantic: the West Indies; the Eastern seaboard; Nova Scotia. Atherton describes the tideline as "a story," and scavenging along it as "an act of reading."

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Often, she must imagine the characters that populate the resulting tales: What kid played with this plastic soldier? Who disobeyed their parents and released this now-popped balloon? But sometimes, the real ones make themselves known—as when she found a fisherman's tag that had floated to Cornwall after detaching from a lobster buoy in Maine. "I thought, 'I'll type his name into Facebook and see if I can find him,'" she says. "And sure enough, I could." Later, they talked on the phone, and realized they share a birth year, 1979.

Experiences like this inspired her Flotsam Weaving series, which she says is about "the threads of stories … [and] the similarity between text and textile." More recently, she has been exploring other media, including printing and cyanotype. For these works, she arranges tiny bits of plastic in repeating, often circular patterns. Silhouetted and abstracted by ink or photochemicals, they look like plankton viewed through a microscope. "Prehistoric plankton settled onto the ocean floor and slowly turned into oil," she says. "That's now what we're making our plastic from … the prints are a way of getting people thinking about these deep-time connections."

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When she's looking to dive into an era that falls between prehistory and the 1970s, Atherton focuses her collecting on the River Thames, where searchers have found everything from medieval pewter toys to a 30,000-year-old wooly rhinoceros skull. She is a permit-carrying mudlarker, which means she is allowed to grab her Wellingtons and tromp through the muck in search of trash-turned-treasure.

There is plenty of this, too. The ancient Romans didn't have plastic to toss, but "it almost reveals the same aspects of human nature," she says. "We've been chucking stuff away for thousands of years." The best thing she's found, she says, is an intaglio from about 2000 years ago, depicting the head and shoulders of a woman bearing an elaborate hairdo and a serious expression. "It would have been used to impress wax" on the back of parchment, Atherton says. "It's almost like a selfie—reproducing her own image on the correspondence she was sending."

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Atherton is always seeking connections like this, which provide viewers with an entry point into topics that might otherwise seem overwhelming, or guilt-inducing. "People don't need to be spoon fed by [other people] saying 'Isn't plastic terrible'—we know all that," she says. "[I want them] to get up close to the work, and see for themselves the range and variety of objects that are out there that we're leaving behind … just to act as a trigger for people to think beyond their own timescale, their own lifetime."

After all, once everyone alive on Earth today is gone, our plastic junk will still be there—whether other humans are around to puzzle over it or not.

The Turkish Roots of Swedish Meatballs

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Thank the warlike King Charles XII for your IKEA lunch.

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Last week, Sweden's official Twitter account tweeted out a brief but momentous statement: “Swedish meatballs are actually based on a recipe King Charles XII brought home from Turkey in the early 18th century. Let’s stick to the facts!”

The revelation provoked strong reactions. Along with pop music and clean, minimalist design, tasty meatballs slathered in gravy and lingonberry jelly seem as Swedish as the blue-and-yellow flag. But there's a very strong case for this counterintuitive origin story: The Swedish dish now enjoyed worldwide likely traces back to the travails of Swedish King Charles XII, who spent years in the Ottoman Empire (which included modern-day Turkey).

Charles XII was an unlikely food ambassador, to say the least. After gaining the throne in 1705 at the age of 15, he cared little for the good things in life. Instead, he was laser-focused on defending the borders of his inherited empire. After defeating the joined kingdoms of Denmark-Norway and Saxony-Poland-Lithuania, he turned his attention toward Russia and achieving a decisive victory over his enemies. Voltaire dubbed him "the Lion of the North," and others called him "the Swedish Meteor" for his skillful warmongering. But how did the Swedish Meteor introduce the Swedish meatball?

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The meteor, as it happened, fizzled. In 1708, Charles XII decided to make what is now considered a military misstep: invading Russia. After Russian forces destroyed his troops at the battle of Poltava in 1709, Charles fled to the Ottoman Empire, another enemy of Russia. Settling with 1,000 men in what is now Moldova, he spent five years shuttling around the Empire, including Constantinople. In 1710, he convinced Sultan Ahmed III to declare war on Russia.

Though Charles was champing at the bit to get back to Sweden, it's said he and his men gained a taste for Ottoman Turk cuisine, such as sherbet and what's now known as Turkish coffee. Voltaire even wrote that a Russian-paid assassin tried to slip poison in Charles's coffee. While the Swedish government didn't specify which recipe Charles XII liked so much, the king and his followers likely encountered köfte, the spiced lamb and beef meatballs of Turkish cuisine.

Though the Ottoman Empire initially paid for all of Charles's expenses, he finally wore out his welcome and returned to Sweden in 1714. Four years later, he was shot through the head at age 36 after trying to invade Denmark once more. A recipe for kötbullar, or Swedish meatballs, first appeared in print a few decades later—in Guide to Housekeeping for Young Women by the cook Cajsa Warg. Warg worked for a family that had been close to the unlucky king, and her book also contained the first recipe for the dolma-like stuffed cabbage kåldolmar. Swedish historians are clear that kåldolmar, which is now a Swedish staple, derived from Ottoman cuisine, and generally believe the same is true of Swedish meatballs and the country's coffee obsession.

Though Sweden's coffee, kåldolmar, and kötbullar all have roots in warfare and foreign exile, they are now comforting touchstones of Swedish cuisine (and of trips to IKEA). Charles XII was even said to have enjoyed his meatballs with a cup of coffee. But most of us will stick with the lingonberries.

The Life and Times of Brighty, the Grand Canyon's Most Legendary Burro

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He was a muse, a good luck charm, and the center of a controversy over invasive species.

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For good luck, visitors to Grand Canyon National Park stroke the nose of a life-sized burro sculpture, its muzzle polished by thousands of hands. Like a dog on its haunches, the statue sits in the lobby of the Grand Canyon Lodge, built at the very edge of the Canyon’s 8,000-foot North Rim.

Few know the story of the real-life animal—Brighty—represented by the sculpture, much less that the burro inspired a 1950s children’s book, which was later adapted for the screen, with Jiggs the Donkey cast as Brighty the Burro (burro is the Spanish word for donkey).

Even fewer realize that the statue itself—commissioned by the film’s director and donated to the park—became the center of a bitter controversy over whether feral burros were a valuable part of Canyon history or invasive creatures who should be exterminated.

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Native to Africa, burros were brought to the Americas in the 1500s by the Spanish. By the late 1800s, prospectors in the Canyon used them as beasts of burden, companions, and good luck charms— according to the professor John Wills in The Journal of Arizona History, folklore had it that a wandering burro would lead you to gold. If a miner gave up on the search for gold, copper, lead, or asbestos, however, he would abandon his burros along with his picks and pans. The equipment corroded; the burros turned feral and thrived.

Brighty himself, who lived from about 1882 to 1922, was first seen in the Canyon near an abandoned miner’s tent, sitting vigil as if expecting the tent’s occupant to return. The burro appreciated occasional human companionship, especially when pancakes were involved. He spent summers on the cooler North Rim, hanging out with the game warden Jim Owens or the McKee family, who managed the first tourist facility on the North Rim, which opened in 1917. Brighty came and went as he pleased, toting water for the McKees’ young son, but scraping off any loads he deemed unworthy of his efforts. For instance, if a hunter caught Brighty and tried to make him pack his gear, Brighty would sneak away, rubbing the pack against trees until the lashing loosened and the load fell off.

It was along the North Rim that early Canyon tourists first met Brighty, probably between 1917 and 1922. Wills writes, “Vacationers struggling to interpret, or connect with, the immense scale of the Canyon (John Muir called it an ‘unearthly’ place), appreciated the presence of a familiar creature.”

But Brighty’s hybrid existence—not exactly wild, but not domesticated enough to be consistently useful—would count against him and his kind when the park service decided in the early 20th century that it should restore the Canyon to a pre-Columbian state of virgin splendor. Having arrived with the Spaniards, the burro was not native to Arizona.

Rather than relocating the animals, in 1924, shortly after Brighty’s death, rangers began hunting burros in earnest. According to Wills, between 1924 and 1931, they killed 1,467; records show that between 1932 and 1965, rangers shot 370 more.

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The hunts went on with little public knowledge, until a 1953 book—and a 1967 movie—helped mobilize a campaign to save the remaining Canyon burros.

In the early 1950s, Marguerite Henry, successful author of horse stories like Misty of Chincoteague, stumbled on a 1922 Sunset Magazine article written by Thomas McKee, entitled “Brighty, Free Citizen: How the Sagacious Hermit Donkey of the Grand Canyon Maintained His Liberty for Thirty Years.”

Henry wanted to know more about the scrappy little burro. Traveling from her home in Illinois to the Grand Canyon, she interviewed park rangers and wranglers about Brighty and his kin. She rode a mule down steep canyon trails, and drank from Bright Angel Creek (for which Brighty was named). As she wrote, “I wanted to know just how cold and delicious it was. And I sampled the burro browse [plants that burros graze on] that grew up in sprigs through the rock crevices; I had to know how it would taste. And I hiked part of the way, making believe I was Brighty.”

Her resulting children’s book Brighty of the Grand Canyon won the William Allen White Children's Book Award, and sold like the hot cakes her four-legged protagonist craved. Readers fell hard for the tough, free-spirited little burro.

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But that didn’t improve the fate of the Canyon’s real-life burros. Rangers were still hunting them, even, in the 1960s, hanging out of military helicopters to get a better shot.

Meanwhile, Brighty was morphing from book character to movie star. In the early 1960s, Betty Booth bought a book for her kids, but it was her husband, Steve Booth, a newspaperman and TV producer, who fell hardest for Brighty of the Grand Canyon.

Fighting industry assumptions that Disney had a monopoly on animal stories, Booth raised money to produce the feature independently, hiring the director Norman Foster (of Davy Crockett fame) and casting Joseph Cotten, who appeared in Citizen Kane, as the game warden Jim Owens. Jiggs played Brighty, and there was even a stunt double donkey, unnamed in the credits.

In 1966, Booth had the sculptor Peter Jensen create a life-size, 600-pound statue of Brighty to help promote the movie. In late 1967, Booth gave the statue to the park, braving a snowstorm to make sure Brighty arrived safely at his new home.

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The Brighty statue was on display at the South Rim Visitor Center for a decade before controversy compelled park officials to hide it away.

From 1968 to 1977, as rangers continued to shoot burros, the Brighty statue became a visitor favorite. The problem? The statue’s presence at the Visitor Center implied that burros were an integral and beloved part of the Canyon—a blatant contradiction of the park’s beliefs and practices.

People soon sniffed out the inconsistency, both in the Canyon and beyond. Feral equines were raising dust all over the West. The Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, which Congress passed unanimously in 1971, called the animals “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West,” to be protected from “capture, branding, harassment, or death.” However, the National Park Service’s mandate to protect native ecosystems from invasive species trumped the Act, at least until an outraged public started weighing in.

In 1976, the park service came out with another removal plan, as always favoring elimination over relocation, which would cost over $1,000 per animal. This time, the public pushed back, with town meetings, newspaper editorials, and save-the-burros letter-writing campaigns. The Brighty statue, which had come to represent all imperiled burros, became a flashpoint in the conflict. In April 1978, park officials put Brighty away in storage, hoping the burro hubbub would soon die down.

The plan backfired. Those protesting the park’s burro removal policies now also bemoaned removal of the statue. Their “Bring Brighty Back” campaign got a boost when Marguerite Henry herself began urging her readers to protest both the burro killing and the statue’s disappearance.

Brighty and his brethren had allies far beyond Henry. The Fund for Animals, an animal protection organization formed in 1967, raised $500,000 to helicopter 577 Canyon burros to safety in the early 1980s. They were moved to the FFA’s Texas ranch; many burros were adopted by individual animal lovers.

After the airlift rescue, rangers killed the few remaining burros, and built a fence along the park’s western boundary to keep other burros out. Today, there are few, if any, burros left in the park, though mules—the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse—still reign supreme in the Canyon, not as feral creatures but as beasts of burden.

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Responding to public outcry, park officials brought Brighty out of storage in 1980, this time finding him a home on the North Rim, where he’d spent his summer months. The Grand Canyon Lodge, the statue’s current residence, was built on the site of the original tent cabins that the McKees, Brighty’s adopted family, rented out to early tourists.

“When you first walk into the Lodge, what jumps out are the giant picture windows and the sweeping views of the Canyon,” says Emily Davis, Public Affairs Specialist for the park. “Then you turn around, and there’s Brighty, his nose shiny from the thousands of hands rubbing him over the years. Aside from the view, he’s one of the most photographed things in the Lodge.”

If the statue saga has a happy ending, the real-life demise of Brighty does not. In 1922, Brighty was snowed in with two desperados. Trapped in a cabin for three months, the men survived but Brighty didn’t—one night, he was made into burro steaks. When the meat ran out, the men boiled Brighty’s bones for soup.

Not surprisingly, Henry’s book skirts the truth of Brighty’s last days. Both the book and the movie avoid portraying how the beloved burro died. Instead, Henry emphasizes that Brighty lives on, a shaggy little form still seen on moonlit nights, “the roving spirit of the Grand Canyon—forever wild, forever free.”

Florida's Mangroves Face Death by Rising Sea Level

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The Everglades and coastal communities are in peril.

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This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Florida’s mangroves have been forced into a hasty retreat by sea level rise and now face being drowned, imperiling coastal communities and the prized Everglades wetlands, researchers have found.

Mangroves in south-east Florida in an area studied by the researchers have been on a “death march” inland as they edge away from the swelling ocean, but have now hit a manmade levee and are likely to be submerged by water within 30 years, according to the Florida International University analysis.

“There’s nowhere left for them to go,” said Dr. Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist at FIU. “They are done. The sea will continue to rise and the question now is whether they will be replaced by open water. I think they will.

“The outlook is pretty grim. What’s mind boggling is that we are facing the inundation of south Florida this century.”

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Mangroves are made up of coastal vegetation that grows in salty or brackish water. They are considered crucial buffers to storms and salt water intrusion, as well as key habitats for certain marine creatures.

Using aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and sediment cores, FIU researchers found that mangroves just south of Miami were migrating westwards over marshland at a rate of about 100 feet a year until they were halted by the L-31E levee, a flood barrier in Miami-Dade county, where they are now making their last stand.

Previous research has suggested the same phenomenon has happened in other parts of south Florida, making the region more vulnerable to storms, such as Hurricane Irma, which swept up Florida last year, and land loss as the sea rises further.

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How the Manhattan Project's Nuclear Suburb Stayed Secret

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Oak Ridge, Tennessee, once home to 75,000, went up fast and under the radar. But it was built to last, too.

Bill Wilcox was proud of his town. He’d been there since the beginning—before farmland gave way to dormitories and houses and lawns, before the ribbons of roads and sidewalks were laid down, before a single ball had rolled down a lane at the bowling alley. Before it even had a name.

When Wilcox arrived in this part of East Tennessee in 1943, soon after graduating from college with a degree in chemistry, he was among the first residents of the place that would eventually be called Oak Ridge. Wilcox lived and worked there for decades, and he later became the town’s historian. “Can’t image a better place to live,” he told an interviewer in 2013.

But Oak Ridge isn’t like most of the country’s other suburbs. The town was conceived and built by the United States government in the early 1940s as base for uranium and plutonium work, as part of the Manhattan Project. As the nuclear effort marched along, the town grew, too. By 1945, a dense suburb had taken shape, home to roughly 75,000 people. At war’s end, Oak Ridge was the fifth-largest city in the state—and all along, it was supposed to be a secret.


A government in search of a site for a secret enclave could do worse than Oak Ridge. The Clinch River ran nearby, local topography provided a natural buffer, and East Tennessee offered an abundance of electrical power for engineers, since it had just been electrified by the New Deal. The location, roughly 20 miles from Knoxville, was relatively remote, and close to train lines without being right on top of them. Before the federal government acquired 59,000 acres, the existing town, such as it was, consisted mostly of a patchwork of farmland nestled in valleys. By scattering work sites, the engineers reasoned, they could hedge their bets against catastrophe. If something went terribly wrong at one site, perhaps the hills could contain a fire or explosion.

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In 1942, under the instructions of Leslie R. Groves, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officer directing the Manhattan Project, the government approached the families that lived there—some of whom had owned their farmsteads for generations—and “summarily evicted” them, says Martin Moeller Jr., senior curator at the National Building Museum and organizer of the new exhibition Secret Cities: The Architecture and Planning of the Manhattan Project. A few people filed lawsuits, but by and large, Moeller says, the plan worked. Moeller chalks this up to one of the ruses the organizers devised: They described the project as a “demolition range,” so any possible holdouts could be scared off with the threat of near-constant explosions. The lie was “a relatively successful one that people didn’t question,” Moeller says—after all, how could they have even imagined what the government had in mind? “That generally got people the hell out.”

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By the time Wilcox arrived, in October 1943, things were humming along. “It was farmland, you could tell that, but there was construction going on everywhere you looked,” he recalled. His first day left a crick in his neck, he remembered, “from shaking my head all day long.” Streams of trucks and people, the clanging and banging of tools, a smattering of signs that looked, to the uninitiated, like cryptograms. The roads weren’t yet paved, and plank boardwalks stood in for sidewalks. For a little while at least.

The town scaled up fast. The laboratories took up most of the space, but rather than constructing basic dormitories for employees, the architects and designers settled on a suburban vision, a cluster of single family homes on a part of the property about one mile wide and six miles long. “It was considered vital that these very sophisticated scientists and engineers should feel very comfortable right way,” Moeller says. Their work—including producing enriched uranium—was difficult, he adds, and it was determined that “they should have all of the comforts of a real town in order to work as effectively as possible.”

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To pull this off quickly and without attracting too much attention, the architects relied on prefabricated and semi-prefabricated housing. In some cases, a house might come in two halves, on the back of a truck, to be assembled on-site. Oak Ridge also included many “cemesto houses,” made from panels of cement and asbestos. These were also called “alphabet houses,” because of the way their various iterations were named. (“A” houses were fairly modest, for instance, while “D” houses included dining rooms.) Housing choice was generally associated with seniority, though allowances were sometimes made for large families. None of these dwellings were exactly luxurious, but—even at the height of anxiety about the demise of Western civilization, Moeller says—architects were prioritizing “nice, basic, comfortable American suburban houses.”

At least for some. While white employees lived in relatively cushy digs, their black counterparts were more likely to be placed in structures known as “hutments,” little more than plywood frames without indoor plumbing. “Segregation was actually designed in from the start,” Moeller says.

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The demand for new homes continued to boom, and people were temporarily housed in apartments, dorms, and trailers. At the height of the building frenzy, a contractor turned over the keys to a new home every 30 minutes.


The pace of building there was stunning enough, but doing it all under the radar required a little willful blindness. The town didn’t appear on any official maps, and visitors were screened by guards posted at the entrances. Still, at that scale, it couldn’t be truly clandestine. “People saw stuff, certainly,” Moeller says, but probably chose not to wonder too deeply about what was happening there out of a combination of patriotism and ignorance. Moeller speculates that those who saw workers and supplies streaming into the site may have sensed that asking too many questions would have been un-American. The idea was, “it’s not my business; it’s for the war effort,” he says. “There was a much greater spirit of national unity than we could even fathom now.”

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Billboards were installed all over town to remind workers to keep their mouths shut about their work, even though most workers knew very little about the project’s true scope. Even if a loose-lipped employee had divulged minor things, Moeller adds, “it would really take a lot of details to add up to the full picture.” The general public was familiar with the concepts of X-rays and radioactivity, but the bomb and its potential would have been mind-boggling. “No one could imagine that you could make this superbomb using these tiny amounts of material,” Moeller says.

Similar “secret cities” were built in other parts of the country, such as Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington, home to 125,000. Designers of these towns had additional tactics to obscure specifics. In Los Alamos and Hanford, sometimes everyone was given the same mailing address. At Oak Ridge, street addresses were designed to be confusing to outsiders. Bus routes might be called X-10 or K-25 or Y-12, in reference to the factories they led to, while dorms had simple names such as M1, M2, and M3. If you didn’t already know where you were trying to go, none of it would make sense. “There weren’t any signs on buildings, just numbers, codes names, and numbers,” Wilcox recalled. The town was full of such ciphers, and even employees didn’t know how to decode them all.

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Oak Ridge is no secret anymore. Its streets opened to the public in 1949. The Atomic Energy Commission helped get a city council off the ground, and the town incorporated a decade later. Now, it shows up on maps and census records (29,000 people) just like any other American town. But even today, with no secrecy at all, the Department of Energy remains the main employer, and in 2012, a gaggle of peace activists—including an elderly nun—breached and vandalized a facility there that stores some of the most dangerous nuclear material in the world.

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For all the speed with which they went up, many of Oak Ridge’s homes turned out to be built to last. Drive around the east end of town today and you’ll see many cemesto houses still standing, says Ray Smith, who became the town historian around three years ago, after Wilcox passed away. When the town was incorporated, he says, many of the homes were sold to the people who had, up to that point, been renting them from the government. They may have been transformed with a little new brickwork or siding, but the old alphabet system is alive and well. “Oak Ridgers can say, ‘Oh, that’s a ‘B’ house. My grandmother lives in a ‘D’ house,’” Moeller says. “They don’t think anything is unusual about that.”

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Those intimidating billboards about betraying your country with loose lips are long gone, and the town now proudly broadcasts its past. One of its major summer events is the Secret City Festival—a weekend of parades, concerts, and tours of the federal facilities. “It’s the only time during the year that the public can gain access,” Smith says. Some secrets continue to fascinate, even when they're out in the open.


Does Everyone Really Order the Second-Cheapest Wine?

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An investigation into happy-hour folklore.

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It takes a village to sell a glass of wine. A winemaker carefully monitors weather patterns and directs the harvest, a designer creates an avant-garde pattern for the label, and a restaurateur writes tasting notes on a tasteful menu. But, in the end, the wine that someone chooses with dinner may be influenced most by a single factor: price.

In April, we wrote about the second-cheapest wine phenomenon. The idea is that many diners—feeling unsure about the difference between wines, or skeptical that they’d really notice the difference—want to just order the cheapest one. But since that seems stingy, they choose the second-cheapest choice instead. It’s not a universally known idea, but plenty of people joke about choosing wine this way.

We recently asked Gastro Obscura readers for help investigating this phenomenon. We wanted to know how many people actually order wine this way, and whether it leads bar and restaurant managers to choose their second-cheapest wine with extra care. And the results are in: Over half of the 304 readers we heard from have ordered wine by choosing the second cheapest. It’s definitely a thing.

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During this investigation, we heard about many rules of thumb for choosing a wine. Plenty of people look for a favorite variety (pick the Riesling!) or ask the waitstaff for suggestions. Some strategies are more unorthodox. “If there's a horsie guy (rider on a horse) on the wine label, then I get it,” writes Jackie Benton of Austin, Texas. “If there are no riders on horseback, no horses, and no ladies to be found on any of the wine labels, then I embrace being my father's daughter and switch to whiskey.”

Despite wine’s romantic image, though, price proved to be a bigger priority for many readers. "I go for cheap, thinking that any decent restaurant would not serve up a truly bad wine,” writes David from Milwaukee. Others committed to a price point that feels right. “I love Malbecs,” writes Cecilia from Los Angeles. “I wouldn’t want to pay $18 a glass, and $9 feels too cheap. But $11 somehow feels right.”

In an example of how much we can psych ourselves out over wine, Jennifer Tharp, of San Francisco, writes about why she picks higher-priced wines recommended by the sommelier or waitstaff:

I usually want to convince myself that I have ordered the best wine I could. I know I probably would like the second-cheapest wine just fine. But if I order a cheaper wine and hate it, I would blame myself for being cheap. If I order an expensive wine and hate it, then it feels like it wasn't my fault.

And then, of course, there’s the classic second-cheapest wine approach:

I have to admit that the rationale you mapped out is correct. I am self-shamed into getting one a step above the cheapest. And yes, I know absolutely nothing about wine. Except that I tried a good Pinot noir once and am very fond of it. —Mark Strouthes, Arnold, Maryland

I order the second cheapest because I secretly want the cheapest, but then I decide to treat myself and splurge the one dollar. —Hannah, Denver, Colorado

I like wine, but I'm thrifty. I have found many "second-cheapest" brands and vintages I thoroughly enjoy. This way of selecting wines works for me while shopping and at restaurants. I have drunk some very expensive wines that were a real treat, but I would never buy them myself. Second-cheapest is a lifestyle I embrace enthusiastically! —Caren Helms, Raleigh, North Carolina

I didn’t even know I did it until this article! I do it so I look like I put some thought into the decision and avoid looking cheap. —Kristen, Detroit, Michigan

So just how often do diners pick a wine by choosing the second-cheapest? According to our reader poll, just over 20 percent of people say it’s their go-to strategy:

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The second-cheapest wine approach doesn’t stand out here—it’s less commonly used than asking the waitstaff for recommendations. (For the survey, we asked people how they chose after deciding on a variety or whether to pick red or white.) But over 50 percent of our respondents have used it before, and over 20 percent use it regularly. So while it may be hard to notice among the general trend of diners choosing cheap wines, bottles of the second-cheapest wine should go dry faster than chance would predict. Especially if the wine list is long.

Bar and restaurant managers have noticed. “I’m a sommelier now, but back when I didn’t know much about wine, I [bought the second-cheapest wine] all the time!” writes Kirsten Vicenza from Veneto, Italy. “I can confirm that restaurants will occasionally reprice a wine that they need to move to make it the second-cheapest spot on the menu. It sells!”

“Every beverage manager worth their salt knows” about it, adds Kyle from San Francisco, a former wine industry professional.

Knowing this, some readers now purposefully avoid the second-cheapest option. “I used to often order the second-cheapest bottle of wine,” writes Ellen from Brooklyn. “Then I read that because so many people use this strategy, restaurants and bars usually give the highest mark-up to the second-cheapest bottle. Now I order the cheapest and feel smug.” Magazines and other publications have printed similar warnings, too.

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But before you avoid the second-cheapest bottles, you should know this kind of price manipulation seems to be uncommon. Mainly because this phenomenon is so subtle that many industry insiders don’t notice it. Or they reject the whole notion.

George Barton of Synergy Restaurant Consultants previously worked as vice president of Beverage and Bar Innovation at TGI Friday’s. We called Barton, and since Barton had access to sales data from a large restaurant chain, we expected it to show the second-cheapest bottles selling quickly, which would inform how the company priced and developed menus. Not so. Barton does not agree with the idea that diners order that way. In choosing wines, his team tended to look at which wines had name recognition and were selling well nationwide. (They also opened and sampled bottles on occasion.) He didn’t strategize about the second-cheapest option. Given that a majority of respondents in our poll pick wine on the basis of other approaches (such as name recognition or server recommendations), it makes sense that professionals may not worry much about which wine they list as second cheapest.

Speaking about the second-cheapest wine is complicated, too, since restaurants and bars can differ drastically from one another. “I’ve heard of it,” says Paul Einbund, who owns The Morris Restaurant in San Francisco. “But in my experience, it’s a myth at sommelier-driven restaurants.” Einbund is a celebrated sommelier who assembled his 60-odd pages wine list after traveling for five years and picking out favorites. At restaurants like his, diners often come specifically for recommendations, and price no longer dictates which wines sell best. Einbund even advises choosing the budget option at upscale restaurants. “At a high-end restaurant, you just don’t sell the low-end wines,” he says. “So whenever I list a very affordable wine, it’s because that wine really blew me away!”

In response to our article, Sam from Colorado pointed out that ordering the second-cheapest wine is an example of a common principle: People usually pick the middle option. This tendency is so strong that companies will offer a third option just so a non-free version feels more like a reasonable compromise. (Think of Pandora Radio, which offers Pandora Free, Plus, or Premium.)

“If there is no sommelier, I do order the second cheapest, and I know what is happening,” writes Sam, of choosing the middle option. “But as long as the second-cheapest wine is still a good wine, what's the harm?"

New England Is Crisscrossed With Thousands of Miles of Stone Walls

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That's enough to circle the globe—four times.

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Walk into a patch of forest in New England, and chances are you will—almost literally—stumble across a stone wall. Thigh-high, perhaps, it is cobbled together with stones of various shapes and sizes, with splotches of lichen and spongy moss instead of mortar. Most of the stones are what are called “two-handers”—light enough to lift, but not with just one hand. The wall winds down a hill and out of sight. According to Robert Thorson, a landscape geologist at University of Connecticut, these walls are “damn near everywhere” in the forests of rural New England.

He estimates that there are more than 100,000 miles of old, disused stone walls out there, or enough to circle the globe four times.

Who would build a stone wall, let alone hundreds of thousands of miles of them, in the middle of the forest? No one. The walls weren’t built in the forest but in and around farms. By the middle of the 19th century, New England was over 70 percent deforested by settlers, a rolling landscape of smallholdings as far as the eye could see. But by the end of the century, industrialization and large-scale farms led to thousands of fields being abandoned, to begin a slow process of reforestation.

“New England had great pastures,” says Thorson. “It was a beef-butter-bacon economy.”

As farmers cleared those New England forests, they found rocks—lots and lots of them. The glaciers that receded at the end of the last Ice Age left behind millions of tons of stone in a range of sizes. New England soils remain notoriously stony today.

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When life gives you stones? Build a wall. Farmers pulled these plow-impeding stones from their fields and piled them on the edges. “The farmer’s main interest was his fields,” says Thorson. “The walls are simply a disposal pile. It was routine farm work.” This process was replicated at thousands of farms across the region—a collective act of labor on a glacial scale.

The supply of stone seemed endless. A field would be cleared in the autumn, and there would be a whole new crop of stones in the spring. This is due to a process known as “frost heave.” As deforested soils freeze and thaw, stones shift and migrate to the surface. “People in the Northeast thought that the devil had put them there,” says Susan Allport, author of the book Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York. “They just kept coming.”

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Wall-building peaked in the mid-1800s when, Thorson estimates, there were around 240,000 miles of them in New England. That amounts to roughly 400 million tons of stone, or enough to build the Great Pyramid of Giza—more than 60 times over.

No one dedicates more time to thinking about these walls than Thorson, who has written a children’s book, a field guide, and countless articles about them since he first moved to New England in 1984. Thorson, bald and bearded, a mossy stone himself, is a landscape geologist, and he distinctly remembers his first walks in the New England woods—and coming across one stone wall after another. His mind was full of questions about what they were and who built them, “it was a phenomenon that was extraordinary,” he says. “One thing led to another, and I got obsessed on the topic”.

Thorson started the Stone Wall Initiative in 2002, aimed at educating the public about this distinctive feature of their forests, in addition to conserving the walls and studying how they impact the landscape around them. Thorson has built a reputation as the ultimate expert on this phenomenon. “You know how a natural history museum would have a person who identifies stuff for you? I’m kind of that guy for stone walls,” he says.

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Every year he takes his students to a maple-beech forest stand in Storrs, Connecticut, which he calls “The Glen,” to look at a classic farmstead stone wall. This wall is thigh-high, and mostly built of gneiss and schist, metamorphic rocks common in the valley flanks of central New England. With Thorson’s help, one begins to see a little structure in how the stones were stacked—in messy tiers, by a farmer who added one load at a time.

Thorson may be particularly obsessed with the walls, but he’s not alone in the interest. He is constantly invited to speak at garden clubs, historical societies, public libraries, and more. “The interest doesn’t die down,” he says. “Twenty years later, it’s still going on”

His field guide, Exploring Stone Walls, is a directory of some of the most unusual, interesting, or distinctive walls in the region. The tallest example is a mortared sea wall beneath the Cliff Walk in Newport, Rhode Island, measuring over 100 feet. The oldest wall, in Popham Point, Maine, dates to 1607. Thorson’s favorite historically significant wall is at the Old Manse, a historic home in Concord, Massachusetts. It provided cover for minutemen firing on the British during the Revolutionary War. Thorson also highlights Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” located on his farm in Derry, New Hampshire, the inspiration for the famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

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Thorson knows about as much as one can know about the world-wonder- scale web of walls across the Northeast, but there remains much to learn, particularly in terms of how they mean for ecosystems, such as their role as both habitat and impediment to wildlife, and their effect on erosion and sedimentation. “It sounds silly,” he says, “but we almost know nothing about them.”

Geographer and landscape archaeologist Katharine Johnson earned her doctorate mapping stone walls from above, using lidar (light detection and ranging) technology. Lidar is similar to radar, only instead of using radio waves to detect objects, it uses light. Laser pulses—thousands per second—are emitted from a specially equipped plane. There are so many of these pulses, that some are able to hit the small spaces between leaves and penetrate all the way to the forest floor, even through thick tree cover. Johnson’s lidar images reveal the exent of those crisscrossing stone walls in a way nothing else can.

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Her research shows that, stripped of the region’s resurgent forests, the walls provide a snapshot of 19th-century history—a map of what land was cleared and farmed at the time. Combined with other data on the forests themselves, this can help specialists model historic forest cover and, in turn, help ecologists understand how forests grow back after they have been disturbed or cleared entirely. The walls can hold the key to New England’s social history, including settlement patterns and farming styles. They provide a static backdrop against which change can be measured.

“Stone walls are the most important artifacts in rural New England,” Thorson says. “They’re a visceral connection to the past. They are just as surely a remnant of a former civilization as a ruin in the Amazon rain forest.”

Each of the millions of stones that make up New England stone walls was held by a person, usually a subsistence farmer, or perhaps a hired Native American or a slave. What remains is a trace of countless individual acts etched on the landscape. “Those labors,” says Allport, “hundreds of years later, they endure.”

Freddy, Manitoba's Beloved Rogue Bison, Has Been Immortalized in Song

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"Run, Freddy, Run!" features Renaissance-style singing, Metís fiddle, and electronically distorted bison noises.

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The most famous bison in Manitoba is named Freddy. He lives in Lorette, a small city southeast of Winnipeg, and he likes to hop his fence and explore the neighborhood. He escapes often enough that he's gained a dedicated following, a line of rebellious sweatshirts featuring the slogan "Run Freddy Run," and fawning press coverage everywhere from the CBC to Maclean's Magazine.

"We don’t even know if it’s the same bison or a different bison each time," explains Kevin Patton, who first gave Freddy his name, and created the Facebook group dedicated to his exploits. "We just named the escapee Freddy, and he's become our town mascot."

Now, he's also a muse. Freddy's story and a parallel one—about some American bison who refused to be shipped to Canada in the early 1900s—were recently herded together in an unexpected form: a choral piece. Written by the composer Eliot Britton and commissioned and performed by the Manitoban vocal ensemble Camerata Nova, "Run, Freddy, Run!" premiered on Saturday, April 28, 2018. It was part of the group's Red River Song concert, a celebration of the area's Metís culture.

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As Britton explains, Manitoba's love for bison goes back centuries. Starting in the 1600s, French Canadian and Scottish fur trappers came to modern-day Manitoba, which was then known as the Red River Valley, to hunt bison. Many of them married First Nations or Inuit women, and started families. Their descendants call themselves Metís. "They created these mixed communities who developed their own distinct culture," says Britton, who is Metís himself. "They founded the province of Manitoba the way we know it now… [and] bison were their primary food source, [as well as] a cultural symbol."

In the 21st century, this attachment manifests in different ways. The University of Manitoba's mascot is a perpetually charging bison. A gentler cartoon one, named Morty, shills for a wireless company. "There's so much bison branding that you don't realize until you leave and come back," Britton says. Meanwhile, the descendants of Pablo's particular herd have been returned to Montana, in acknowledgment of indigenous Americans' ties to the animals.

Britton loves bison, too—for all these reasons, and for the contradictions they contain. He has laughed at the logo for a local sanitation company called Bison Janitorial Services: "It's this cartoon bison looking excited about his mop and his bucket," he says. But he has also found himself fearing for his life during a backcountry camping trip when a herd moseyed on by. (He hid under a picnic table.) "Manitobans have this funny, strange way of projecting whatever they need onto this animal," he says. "They're tragic and terrifying at the same time. Heroic and tough."

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Britton's first bison-related piece of music, "Heirloom Bison Culture," debuted at the Winnipeg New Music Festival in January 2017. For the piece, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra played melancholy chord progressions, meant to sound like themes from sad movies. Meanwhile, Britton took recorded bison sounds, electronically manipulated them, and pumped them through the building's massive sub-bass system. "I made the whole concert hall sound like it was a breathing bison," he says. "It worked really well... People were terrified."

After that, he explains, he was basically the bison guy. Friends sent him photos and news stories. Also, thanks to his online activity, "the internet knew that I really liked bison imagery," he says. When stories about Freddy started going viral, "within milliseconds, there were English and French versions creeping into my [social media] feed."

The text of "Run, Freddy, Run!" comes from this experience. "It was an aggregate of all the stuff people sent me," Britton says. "I started collecting it and cobbling it all together." The piece opens with a quote from a CBC headline: "Brazen bison won't stay home on the range." Later, it takes from the Facebook group—"Freddy is out. He is just outside his yard on River Road." It has snippets from the New York Times article about Pablo's last herd. And there is a repeated incantation: "Run! Run! Run!"

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Musically, the piece combines "a contrapuntal Renaissance choral style" with "a largely improvised Metís fiddle part," a robotic choir, and more bison-sampling electronics, writes Mel Braun, a conductor at Camerata Nova, in an email. "The Renaissance vocal parts were a nod to Camerata Nova’s love of this style, the Metís fiddle parts connected to the Metís story at the root of Red River Song, and the electronics brought all kinds of color to the true-life Freddy story."

A recording of the entire concert is viewable on the Camerata Nova Facebook page—"Run, Freddy, Run!" begins about 80 minutes in. Britton introduces the piece in his Freddy hoodie. "The premiere was wonderful," he says, later adding that the concert brought to mind a famous quote by Metís leader Louis Riel: "My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back."

So what's next for Manitoba's bison music scene? A performance out on the range? A herd-powered synthesizer? Britton laughs, then sighs: "That would be a real trick, to get a bison to behave at all, or to do anything other than what they want."

The Submerged History Surrounding Turkey’s Black Rose

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Visitors flock to Halfeti for its unusually dark flowers, but there's much more beneath the surface of the half-drowned town.

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The roses are a deep, rich, wine-colored red when in full bloom, but as buds they look black. Alaattin Aydın smiles and summons his grandchildren over to take pictures among them in his garden. He keeps the roses in large tin cans that used to contain tomato paste. He, like many old men in Halfeti, makes much of his living cultivating roses and selling them to visitors who have come seeking the black rose.

Tourists flock to buy these roses, which are called kara gül in Turkish. They have an almost mythic quality, particularly within Turkey, and particularly within the last decade. A Turkish TV show was named after them; a novel and a perfume are produced in their names. According to locals, they only grow in the small southern town of Halfeti. As knowledge about them has spread, more and more tourists have made their way to the town to see the roses for themselves. In the springtime as the weather warms, Halfeti transforms from a sleepy town into a bustling hotspot, with vendors hawking black rose magnets, keychains, and spritzers.

Perched on the edge of the Euphrates river, Halfeti looks like something out of a film; the blue of the water is hyper-real in its intensity, the picturesque stone buildings seem timeless and perfectly at ease on the steep hills surrounding the river.

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But under the shining turquoise water lies another version of the town. Farther into the valley a minaret rises out of the water like a ghost. The rest of the mosque ripples beneath feet of water. Closer to the main town, other roofs and walls glimmer under the waves.

The majority of Halfeti was flooded in 2001 in the aftermath of a massive state project to dam the Euphrates. The dam cost thousands their homes and their livelihoods. It changed the shape of the town, dividing it into “New” and “Old” Halfeti. New Halfeti lies on the hill above the Euphrates and its houses are all recently built; it does not have a view of the water.

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For the older inhabitants like Aydın the memory of the village prior to the dam stays as strong as if the flood was yesterday. He and four of his friends gather at his balcony at night, drinking endless glasses of tea and speaking of the years prior to the dam.

“In the winter times, the Euphrates would rise with the rain and snow, and would withdraw in the spring little by little...We would plant watermelons and cucumbers in our kitchen gardens,” says Salih Aybek, a grey-haired man wearing a blue-checked shirt, his tone wistful. “In springtime, when the rain would start, the Euphrates would start to rise again without fail. We would have these beautiful, golden views. Now, these views are gone and everything is concrete. All that is under the water.”

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In the last few years, as tourism has boomed, Turkish news outlets have largely painted Halfeti as a hidden paradise. Articles and social media posts from visitors highlight the unique beauty of the black rose and the sunken mosque, without delving into the town’s deeper histories.

The older men’s oral histories show how state decisions have fundamentally reshaped Halfeti for generations. After a few hours slide by on his balcony, Alaattin brings out some home-brewed wine and words flow more loosely. The old friends become comfortable and start telling stories about the Armenians who helped shape their town. The village mosque was built by an Armenian architect in the 1800s, the old men say. They remember stories their fathers would tell about him: “He was a man who drank alcohol,” they say. “One night he even climbed up to the top of the minaret.”

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The pale-stone mosque is a reminder of a different, much uglier history that points to why Armenians do not openly live in the town anymore. From 1915 to 1917, the Ottoman state massacred millions of Armenians. Many were systematically taken from their homes, and those who did not flee often faced death marches.. Reports from that time say that for 25 days, corpses of Armenians killed further up the Euphrates floated past what is today Halfeti. The modern Turkish government vociferously denies that this was a genocide—though scholars and historians label it as such.

In Halfeti, the old men concede that Armenians lived there prior to 1915, and point out the markers of their long history in the area. But they say that the Armenians “left” or “migrated,” leaving the details vague. According to the official Turkish narrative, Armenians were casualties of a violent conflict and not targets of extermination. Over a hundred years later, the villagers are careful about what they say.

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Halfeti is marked by the physical traces of state decisions. Many of its buildings were shaped by Armenian hands, although the town’s Armenian community no longer exists to take credit for them. Eight decades after the genocide, the flood took the homes that families had lived in for generations, leaving the half-submerged minaret as one of the few indications that the ruins of a town lie under the waters.

Today, the old men of the town take pride in Halfeti’s beauty and popularity, but the glossy image that tourists see is at a dissonance with their own memories of town’s past. “Tourists come here and spend three hours, eight hours, but you can't learn the history in that time,” says Adnan Aydin, Alaattin’s brother—a cantankerous old-timer with an encyclopedic knowledge of Halfeti.

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Like Alaattin, Adnan loves the roses, but he takes a more leery view of the tourism that they attract. He willingly points out sites where Armenians used to live, as well as the places flooded by the damming. He sits on an armchair on the front of a barge making its way through the gorge as he talks, gesturing at the ruins of the village. He angrily snaps that while tourism can support around 50 families, thousands of people in Halfeti used to be able to support themselves off what grew in their orchards.

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“Everyone was able to sustain themselves through raising animals and agriculture. Everyone had their own orchards and they earned their income from this.” He points to the dry, brown walls of the valley. “Do you see any animals there? There aren’t any left. There should be sheep, goats, and cattle. There aren't even any birds.”

Adnan says that Turkish documentaries about Halfeti only show positive views of Halfeti and wilfully ignore the negative sides of the dam. “If there is a good side, they should also show the bad side. They should show the level of happiness of the people here, that is what we want,” he explains.

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Each day boats take crowds of tourists on a tour of the drowned city. They sail down the valley from the remnants of Old Halfeti to the sunken mosque, which is only a few kilometers away and only reachable by boat. Next to the underwater mosque an old man runs a tea-house in a cave that gives a clear view of the minaret emerging from the water. Adnan points to him as an example of both the benefits and drawbacks of tourism. The reason the tea-man, who is in his late seventies and goes back and forth with a bent back, has to work at his age is because the property that sustained his family was destroyed with the dam, he says.

Adnan leaves the tea shop to sail back to Halfeti and is greeted by a town that glitters in the sunlight. It is spring and the black rose is in full bloom. Small pots of them line the pier, their dark petals framed by the aqua-marine of the river behind them. Tourists buy potted versions of the flower, children spritz the perfume on passers by in return for a few lira.

Their beauty and the town’s beauty is all tourists see, Adnan says, which is far from his memories of the place. “The events that we lived were different [than what tourists see] from an economic and political perspective. A generation was punished. They finished everything.”

This Old Coast Guard Tower Could Be the Ocean Hideout of Your Dreams

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North Carolina's Frying Pan Tower is for sale.

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Bone-tired travelers might consider a stay-over in a bed-and-breakfast. These accommodations tend to be cozy, sometimes tilting towards twee and verging on pastoral—maybe some birds tittering on a porch, stately trees shading paths or flower beds, or wind rippling branches.

But the Frying Pan Tower isn't your typical B&B. What this unusual structure lacks in graceful trees and rambling paths, it makes up for in storied weirdness and blue views: It’s on a platform above the choppy Atlantic Ocean, more than 32 miles off North Carolina’s coast. And if you’re looking for a vacation as endless as water lapping toward the horizon, you can bid to buy the place. It’s up for grabs now, with a starting price of $10,000.

The Coast Guard installed the Frying Pan Tower in the 1960s as a light station, a more permanent structure to replace a ship and buoy that reminded boaters to tread carefully through the hazardous shoals of Cape Fear. (Many ran aground and sank: The area is rife with shipwrecks.)

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It was retired in 2004, and the current owner, Richard Neal, bought the property from the U.S. government in 2010 and transformed it into a bed-and-breakfast. Now, he’s trying to offload the eight-room structure to another crew.

The digs aren’t especially luxurious, and getting to the site involves a bit of trekking: Travelers either have to reserve a seat on a helicopter, or charter a boat. (You can tie up to a mooring buoy nearby.) But maybe that’s all part of the charm for some weary mariner looking for a place to drop anchor.

How to Reconstruct an Ancient Meal From Dirty Dishes Alone

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Archaeologists and chefs used chemical analysis—and their taste buds—to solve a culinary puzzle from China.

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At a recent tasting in New York City, diners could sample food spanning continents and millennia. There was Babylonian lamb-and-beet stew, a jiggling almond-milk custard that riffed on medieval blancmage, and for dessert, honey-flavored mochi inspired by a book of vegetarian recipes dating to China’s Song Dynasty.

All the dishes were reconstructions—with greater or lesser fidelity—of ancient ones. The recipes, prepared as part of a scholarly symposium, "Appetite for the Past," hosted by New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, cobbled together molecular evidence, archaeological analysis, and culinary instinct. Among the diners were archaeologists, chefs, other researchers, and members of the public hungry for a taste of history.

Sometimes ancient recipes get committed to paper or a tablet—though they’re often still frustratingly vague—but in most cases the task of understanding what people in the past ate, and how they prepared and consumed it is an exercise in scientific inference and creativity. And, in many cases, it all starts with crud on a pot.

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That’s what Yitzchak Jaffe had, but his evidence was puzzling. When Jaffe, an anthropological archaeologist specializing in ancient China, laid eyes on the residue and soot on an ancient ceramic cooking pot found in a Chinese cemetery, he was confused by what he saw.

Under close examination, ancient objects can become narrators, telling the stories of their use. But in the case of this vessel, excavated in 2013 in the Gansu Province, Jaffe couldn’t tell where the story was leading. It had been used for cooking, judging by the soot and oxidation (from exposure to heat), by members of the Siwa culture, who lived in the region between 1400 and 500 B.C. A typical pot placed on a flame would often have oxidation on the bottom and soot crawling up the sides, but in this case there was oxidation on opposite flanks, and a buildup of soot near the mouth. Inside, the bottom was free of carbonized crumbs—those were smeared, surprisingly, near the top. How, Jaffe wondered, did they use this pot, and what were they cooking in it?

To solve this millennia-old culinary puzzle, Jaffe joined forces with Karine Taché, an anthropologist at Queens College, of the City University of New York. Using a scalpel, Taché scraped off a sample of the residue for analysis. This was subjected to the daylong process of lipid extraction, which involves applying heat and organic solvents. Using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, Taché separated out the organic material in the sample, which provided some hints about potential ingredients. She didn’t find any evidence of cholesterol, which would have suggested animal protein. Instead, the analysis pointed to plant ingredients, and one in particular. “I identified millet because it has a biomarker,” she says, “a molecule that is unique.”

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It is no surprise that millet would be the foundation of the dish, Jaffe says, as the grain was a staple of the ancient Chinese diet. Next the researchers recruited Raymond Childs, a chef at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, to experiment with a few different ways of preparing it that might result in the unusual soot and oxidation pattern they observed.

They first thought about experimenting with standard modern cooking vessels, but “stainless steel pots didn’t yield anything close to what we were looking for,” Childs says. So they turned to a clay La Chamba pot, made in Colombia. It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was what they could get their hands on, Jaffe says. At least it was the right material.

At the beginning of the experiment, “I was making big millet cakes in my hand and dropping them into boiling water,” Childs says. “We didn’t know if it was going to create enough starch to leave any carbonization whatsoever.” The team experimented with recipe after recipe, with a variety of cooking styles. They landed on the idea that the vessel had been used to cook some kind of stew, and that it was probably simmered with the pot tipped on its side. Oriented that way, the cooking surface was more like a skillet than a stockpot.

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There are still a number of unanswered questions. The team hasn’t excavated any hearth sites, so they don’t know just how the vessel was exposed to heat. Did the pot come from a domestic kitchen, or was it made and used for a single funerary feast? Did the food inside feed mourners, or was it meant for the afterlife? They also still don’t know what else was in the pot beside millet, since many other grains and vegetables don’t have easily detectable, unique biomarkers. Lipid analysis is a useful tool, but it’s not the only one. Microfossils, phytoliths (small silicon grains in plant matter), and DNA have all been used to identify ancient ingredients. “We should actually combine these lines of evidence,” Taché says. Microfossil analysis of the residue, with a specialist at the University of York, is coming next.

Even so, these questions may never be fully resolved. Getting to what Jaffe calls “a better guesstimate” would require lots of time and dozens, if not hundreds, of vessels for analysis of both scorch patterns and food residue. “As archaeologists,” Jaffe says, “we’re able to narrow down possibilities, as opposed to saying, ‘This is exactly the definitive way in which this vessel was used.’”

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Meanwhile, Jaffe and his collaborators began to think about their contribution to the taste-test event. They found themselves a bit stumped. They didn’t have much else to go on beside millet, but that alone would be a bitter bite to swallow. So, Jaffe joked, “to take pity on people at the event,” they needed more flavors.

Jaffe’s team took some liberties, and turned to ingredients known to have been available in the region at the time. Pig bones turned up in the cemetery where the pot was found, so they added some pork. Eggplant made the cut, too, since archaeobotanical research at a nearby site points to its relatives in the nightshade family. Childs spiced the dice with dashes of cumin, cloves, and star anise.

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Picking these flavors obviously has a huge impact on the finished product. In this case, Childs was trying to make something palatable, even delicious, with ingredients that weren’t totally implausible. In other cases, researchers have used the limits of palatability as a guide. "Human palates have outer bounds," says Pia Sörensen, of Harvard University, who worked on the Babylonian dishes. Even if recipes and preferences change over time, there's a threshold at which a dish might be too much—too hot, too bitter, too sour. A boundary like that, says Sörensen, is “very comforting,” and at least helps show us what ancient people weren’t eating.

The resulting millet-pork stew was served in little paper cups and topped with a millet crisp, shredded carrot, and herbs. One taster gulped it back like a shot. Another chewed slowly, thought for a moment, and declared the result earthy and aromatic. Many did a lap around the room, tasting as they went, and then came back to Childs’ Siwa-inspired stew for seconds.

For a Man With 57,000 Scratch-Off Lotto Tickets, It's Not About the Money

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A peek inside the world of a passionate lotologist.

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To a lotologist—a person who collects lottery tickets—the thrill of a scratch-off ticket isn’t in the chance to hit the jackpot. Instead, what's important is to get your hands on the card itself. But if that's the case, what makes one ticket more valuable than another? The answer, according to one collector, is quality, rarity, and latex.

“I started collecting in 1989. At that time, my father and I had a small grocery store,” says Arthur Rein, a longtime lotologist. At some point, Rein began saving one card from each new scratch-off game that would arrive at his family's New York-based store. In the early days of his collection, he was only getting a new game ticket every few months. But as his fascination with scratch cards grew, he began traveling to nearby states such as Vermont and New Hampshire to expand his collection. “It wasn’t to win. What I was saving was the tickets that were being redeemed by the customers that had already won,” he says. “It’s not really a gambling hobby. It’s just a collecting hobby.”

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At first, Rein's hobby was a solitary pursuit. “I thought I was the only one collecting these tickets,” he says. But eventually, he discovered he wasn’t alone. He joined the Global Lottery Collector’s Society, a loosely organized group of fans and collectors who trade and catalog scratch-off games released in most of the states across the U.S. According to Rein, the society has seen a decline in membership over the years, but currently there are a couple hundred collectors active in the community.

The scratch-off lottery industry has only increased in the years since Rein started collecting. And by trading cards with members of the society from around the United States, the scope of his collecting has also expanded. Today, Rein says his collection contains roughly 57,000 individual scratch-off cards, kept in stacks of binders at his home. That includes every scratch-off card the state of New Jersey has ever released. “How many people can say that? The director of the New Jersey Lottery can’t say that,” says Rein. By his own estimate, his collection is the second or third largest in the society.

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Each collector tends to have different goals and standards when it comes to the lotto cards they want. “There are some who’ll collect just from their state. Some will collect themes, or different famous people who’ve been on tickets. My collection, it’s mostly the instant scratch-off lottery tickets,” says Rein.

Like baseball cards, comic books, or other paper collectibles, the condition of a lotto card is also important, not only to its value, but to its desirability. “Everything has to be pristine. The corners have to be sharp, much of the latex has to be on the ticket," says Rein. Creases, holes, tears and the like are usually not tolerated.

Another major element of lotto card condition is how much of the latex film that covers the printed numbers is still intact. Since the opaque material usually has graphics printed on it and is important to the look of the card, some collectors only want tickets that are unscratched or “collector scratched,” where as little has been scratched off as possible to reveal the winning numbers. Still others, like Rein, are mostly interested in obtaining the lotto cards they need to complete their collections. “I try to collect every single scratch-off ticket that’s out there. It’s the hunt that’s important. It’s not so much whether it’s a good looking ticket, or a bad looking ticket, it’s the fact that I get the ticket that’s exciting.”

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According to Rein, the most sought-after card among U.S. collectors is a themed Illinois scratcher from 1976. “The game was called Presidents, and each ticket pictured a different president. The Illinois lottery told the people who purchased tickets to hold on to all their losing tickets,” he says. “Then when the game was over they would pick one president and you could submit that ticket to the lottery and they’d randomly draw winners from people who submitted that particular ticket." The ticket was Herbert Hoover, and many players did mail them in, which is why so few of the Herbert Hoover tickets remained in circulation for collectors to snap up later.

Rein acquired his Herbert Hoover card as part of a larger lot that he received from a club member who was giving away his collection before he died. The special scratcher hangs on his wall encased in plastic. “Sometime people will come over and say, 'What is this? Why you got Herbert Hoover hanging on your wall?,'" he says. “That ticket is considered the holy grail. If you have that ticket you’re considered the best.” Rein has only ever heard of three or four other examples of the card in circulation. He says he saw one sell on eBay for around $500 a few years back.

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While that may seem like a small amount compared to the thousands of dollars in potential winnings offered on any one of Rein’s scratch cards, his hobby isn’t likely to make him wealthy any time soon. “The most I’ve ever won is $1,000 on a scratch-off in Maryland,” he says. “When you think of how many thousands of tickets I’ve purchased over the years, it’s so disappointing. I don’t like to think about it.”

Rein isn’t planning to give up buying lotto tickets any time soon. His love of collecting runs much deeper than a layer of scratch-off latex. “People ask me why I collect," he says. "It brings back memories of the business that my father and I had. It also reminds me of the camaraderie that we have in the club.”

And even if he isn't about to strike it rich in the lottery, Rein counts himself lucky that his spouse puts up with his hobby. “I gotta beg my wife every day not to throw me out of the house.”


Found in the Garbage: A Supposed Bone of a First-Century Pope

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Behold this holy trash.

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When people toss away trinkets like doll heads or little skeletons, it makes for some interesting conversations among garbage collectors, but about a year ago a rubbish service company in London found trash of holier proportions. And they're still not quite sure what to do with it.

Enviro Waste found a red-wax-sealed box bound with equally red cords while picking out recycled materials from waste collections, The Guardian reported. Within this box was an oval with a mysterious sponge-like bone in it, and a weathered beige slip of paper with the Latin words “Ex Oss. S. Clementis PM.” Roughly translated into English, the label reads, “From the bone of the Saint Clement.”

Before Saint Clement was canonized, he succeeded St. Peter as Pope Clement I from 88 to 97 or from 92 to 101. It’s unclear because there are scant details of his life, but the few tales people shared over the years certainly seem to have elevated him beyond pontiff status. Allegedly, and for reasons unknown, the Roman emperor Trajan exiled him to Greece for a life sentence of hard labor.

Despite the hard conditions, Saint Clement continued to preach the gospel, and through his teachings, converted many of his prisoners to Christianity, which did not please emperor Trajan one bit. Trajan ordered him to be tied to an anchor and vaulted into the Crimean Sea. For this martyrdom and other virtuous acts, Clement became a highly regarded figure.

Over the years Enviro Waste has come across a nude painting of Albert Einstein, a stuffed cat dressed in a baby’s onesie, and sealed five pound note with Prince Charles’ signature, but a real Pope bone took the company's owner, James Rubin by surprise.

“You can imagine our amazement when we realized our clearance teams had found bone belonging to a pope—it’s not something you expect to see, even in our line of work,” Rubin told The Guardian.

The Smithsonian Magazine has raised significant doubt as to the bone’s authenticity. Though legend posits Saint Clement’s remains were found and later kept in Rome’s Basilica di San Clemente, it's highly unlikely the bone is a direct piece of Saint Clement.

Holding onto relics of saints has been an important part of religious identity and culture for some Catholics, particularly in the Middle Ages. It was thought heavenly exposure to such relics could heal wounds, cure diseases, or grant them a safe passage, for example. Often the relic's power was only regarded as effective in one locality, so people from one town would steal another town's relic to harness its power. Sometimes, people created fraudulent relics of Jesus and other saints.

Whether the bone is a fake or not, it's still a significant find for Enviro Waste. So much so, that they are not sure what to do with it. They've asked the public to nominate a few appropriate locations for the bone to live out its dead days. If you feel so inclined, you can submit your case on their blog.

This 11-Foot 'Ribbon Map' Puts the Whole Mississippi River in Your Pocket

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Steamboat tourists of the late 1860s wrapped it around a spool.

Imagine: it's 1866, and you've just hopped on a steamboat heading up the Mississippi River. Excited, you pull out your newest souvenir, a small spool with a strip of linen-backed parchment twisted around it. You begin unwinding, and see a near-future destination: Memphis, marked by a smart bullseye, and the site of a major railroad junction. You twirl it up again and travel back in time: There's the Mississippi-Louisiana border, which you crossed just yesterday.

Suddenly, a stiff river breeze churns up, and you lose control of your map, which quickly unspools. The end of it gets caught by the wind and floats across the deck. Before you can say anything, whap!—it hits another eager tourist right in the face.

Such were the delights potentially provided by the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters. A depiction of the entire Mississippi, from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to northern Minnesota, the map stretched 11 feet long and just under three inches wide, and was meant to be wrapped around a spool and carried in a pocket. Although it never really caught on, it stands as a testament to the many forms maps can take, and as a precursor of how we treat traveling today.

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As Jim Akerman, the Curator of Maps at Chicago's Newberry Library, points out, the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters belongs to a class of map with a deep history: the "itinerary" or "strip" map. Unlike network maps, which are designed to show all journeying possibilities—think of a road atlas, or a big fold-out trail guide—strip maps "are organized around a specific route of travel," he explains. "It's meant to give you very close guidance."

Strip maps arose from oral or written itineraries, and were used by ancient Romans who wanted to plan trips to nearby towns, and medieval Europeans who hoped to make pilgrimages from London to Jerusalem. Reading one is like getting directions from a friend: left at this landmark, right at that fork.

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This form lent itself quite well to rivers, which make up a route all on their own. "In late medieval China, people made beautiful panoramas of the course of the Yangtze River that are basically strip maps," Akerman says. Fast forward to the early 1800s, and throngs of opportunity-seekers were heading for the American West, often via the Ohio River or the Mississippi. A mapmaker named Zadoc Kramer began publishing pocket guidebooks that essentially chopped the rivers into chunks, and laid the strips next to each other for easy viewing. "If they were strung together [instead] they'd be 15 feet or so," says Akerman.

By the 1860s, a pair of St. Louis-based entrepreneurs had decided there was a market for a river map that embraced its true length. In 1866, Myron Coloney and Sidney B. Fairchild, a.k.a. Coloney and Fairchild, unfurled their first Ribbon Map, a long, blue-inked facsimile of the Mississippi. "Coloney and Fairchild’s patented apparatus required that the single sheet be cut into strips, attached end-to-end, mounted on linen, and then rolled inside a wooden, metal, or paper spool," writes art historian Nenette Luarca-Shoaf in an article in Common-place. ("This patent is for the 'IDEA,'" the pair specified when filing it.)

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This map would not have been useful to steamboat captains: "Because the river channel changed so often, the captains actually had to know the river in intuitive ways … informed by their extensive travel and understanding," Luarca-Shoaf says. It wouldn't have been too handy for people moving West, either. Instead, it was marketed toward tourists, who were flocking to the Mississippi to see the sights and ride the steamboats.

"The river was a source of great awe," she says. "That kind of length, that kind of spaciousness was incomprehensible to a lot of folks who were coming from the East Coast." An advertisement for the ribbon map suggests that people needed an outlet for that awe: having your own chart to unroll, it promised, would stop you from "constant[ly] questioning… the officers of the boat," and causing "an immensity of annoyance" to them.

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It wasn't just a marketing gimmick, though. By choosing this particular form, Coloney and Fairchild leaned into a particular depiction of the Mississippi that took shape during the Civil War. "There was this idea that because the river went from north to south, it was a great unifier for the country," Luarca-Shoaf says—that it tied the divided North and South together like, well, a ribbon. At the same time, they took pains to include important battle sites, like Vicksburg. That these sites made it onto the map just a year after the war ended "shows that the war had marked the landscape in more than physical ways," she says. "It had become part of the history of the place."

According to Akerman, Coloney and Fairchild had planned to produce a whole series of ribbon maps for other popular, linear destinations, like retail-heavy streets and railway lines. (They may have made one other, of Broadway in New York City.) But despite the apparent success of this original effort—a September 1866 article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune indicates that the entire first run of 1,000 sold out quickly, making room for a more detailed second edition, which is the one pictured throughout this article—the company seems to have given up.

Today, the remaining copies of the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters sit spooled up in map libraries and local history museums, testaments to the idiosyncrasies of their particular users. One, at the Missouri Historical Society, is from the collection of a riverboat pilot, suggesting a moment of either aspiration (if he bought it before he got into the profession) or nostalgia (if he snapped it up after). The Denver Public Library has one with a patterned red case and a tiny hand crank.

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Luarca-Shoaf has stretched out and wound up a number of these, and tried to puzzle out how well they'd work in context. She says it's not too hard to see why the idea didn't succeed. "[Imagine] the thing gets all wet, and it's kind of just hanging out," she describes. "I've never found any definitive evidence that anybody actually ever used this." It's certainly hard to imagine carrying them around today.

But as she and Akerman both point out, in the years since the Ribbon Map’s demise, the genre it belonged to—the pocket-sized itinerary map—has snapped up a massive market share. Now, every time we take out our phones to try to get somewhere, we can choose to be led carefully along, step by step, by Google Maps or Waze. The only real difference is that the scrolling stays onscreen: safer for our fellow travelers, but a whole lot less exciting.

How the USSR Turned Houses of Worship Into Museums of Atheism

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In these Soviet churches, religion was banned.

You can almost see the devotion worked into the stones of the Kazan Cathedral of St. Petersburg. It’s stately and imposing, with a colonnade made up of dozens of red granite columns, stretching along one magnificent semicircle. Completed in 1811, the church was inspired by St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and consecrated to one of the most important figures of the Russian Orthodox church: Our Lady of Kazan, the venerated icon representing the Virgin Mary.

But 15 years after the Russian Revolution, in January 1932, the cathedral was closed. When it reopened in November, it had a wholly different icon at its helm. This giant edifice was now a temple of atheism, one of hundreds of anti-religious museums in the Soviet Union’s former churches, synagogues, and mosques.

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In the decades after the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks struggled to find the best way to establish a climate of atheism across the Soviet Union. At first, many hoped and believed that religion would naturally disappear once the social change they hoped to bring about came into effect. But though church jewels and other valuables had been plundered and nationalized, members of the clergy arrested, and saints’ relics exhumed and put on show to disprove their apparent incorruptibility, people continued to believe.

As time went on, Leninists in the party realized they would have to take active steps to stamp out religion for good. At the 15th party conference in late 1927, Joseph Stalin criticized what he perceived to be a “slackening in the struggle against religion,” and pushed for more stringent anti-religious policies. At the highest level, this ranged from forbidding educated believers from becoming Communist party members to the mass slaughter of thousands of Russian Orthodox priests and bishops.

But on the ground, the party wanted to encourage ordinary workers to renounce their faith. The outcome was a boom in anti-religious, pro-scientific propaganda: posters, booklets, films, radio programs, public lectures, city tours, and scientific observatories. In the late 1920s, the government agency tasked with this challenge, the Commissariat of Enlightenment, landed upon a new tactic. These were the museums of atheism.

Initially, there were just 30 anti-religious museums across the great expanse of the Soviet Union. But within four decades, there were hundreds of them, housed in the country’s most significant former monasteries and places of worship. Some of the most famous were in Moscow and St. Petersburg’s majestic former Orthodox cathedrals—more accessible to foreign tourists than those in more distant cities. But the museums existed throughout the country and across houses of worship from all religions, including Ukrainian mosques and Siberian Buddhist temples.

The key, according to the historian Victoria Smolkin, was to transform a sacred place into a sanitized place of learning. “They were considered most effective,” she writes in A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, “when they occupied religious spaces that had been repurposed for atheist use.”

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In the early days of the Soviet Union, government officials began to conceive of museums in an entirely different way. They were not simply a way to put objects on display, but tangible, even enjoyable, ways to educate the public, help peasants understand their history, and fill their visitors with enthusiasm for the glorious communist future that lay ahead. Consequently, all kinds of museums underwent a tremendous overhaul, with ancient works swapped out for modern ones. To this end, nearly 250 new museums were opened between 1918 and 1923. The anti-religious museums were one small part of a grand educational plan, with what the curator and historian Crispin Paine describes as a clear ideological purpose: “the inculcation of a Marxist interpretation of history."

Anti-religious museums adopted a three-prong line of attack. According to Paine, they would expose “the crimes and tricks of the clergy”; promote science as a modern analog to religion; and demonstrate how religion had been the “handmaiden of bourgeois capitalism.” It would have no place in the glorious future of the Soviet Union. More than that, Paine writes, “they adopted a deliberate policy of sacrilege,” where icons and relics were stripped of their mystique and treated as ordinary objects.

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One particularly detailed account, from an American visitor in the late 1930s, vividly describes one of Moscow’s anti-religious museums. Charles Seely, a former naval officer, decided to pay a visit to the museum housed in the vast former Strasnoi Monastery. In these glorious surroundings, his Bolshevik tour guide promised him a miracle. “I, naturally, was interested, but I seriously doubted his ability to perform one,” he wrote, in a 1942 book that included his recollections of the USSR.

The guide showed him a large painting of the Virgin Mary. As Seely watched, her eyes began to grow damp and misty. Then, “the tears then ran down her cheeks in such a perfectly natural manner that any unsuspecting person would have readily believed that he was actually witnessing a miracle,” Seely wrote. “The tears were real enough to satisfy all but the most incredulous.”

Quickly, however, the illusion was ruined: “The demonstration was positively uncanny, but finally the guide spoilt everything by taking me around the painting and showing me how the priests formerly performed the ‘miracle’ by using an eyedropper.” These tears had previously spilled out on occasions where the church's collection plate looked worryingly empty, he explained.

Other miracles were similarly exposed. The body of a high church dignitary, exhumed annually by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and proclaimed to be exactly as it had been “when it died several hundred years ago,” was shown to be simply a bag of bones. In other cases, “incorruptible” bodies had been mummified by the cool, dry conditions of underground crypts. “The object of this colossal deception was to convince the people that miracles were still being performed,” Seely wrote. “Nobody doubted the Czar, of course, as he was the head of the Russian church.”

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Throughout the museums, sacred icons from the Orthodox church were placed alongside so-called “primitive” statues and objects from around the world. They might include amulets, voodoo figures, or even the trappings of so-called "witch doctors" from faraway cultures. “If you grow up in an Orthodox society,” says Paine, “you are conditioned from childhood to revere icons and the other sort of material expressions of the Orthodox faith. And you are also brought up, often subconsciously, to feel a degree of contempt for so-called 'tribal' societies.” Putting the two together made an important, if racist, point: These familiar manifestations of belief are no more sophisticated than those from elsewhere in the world.

In the cellar of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, an entire exhibition was dedicated to the cruelty of religion, and the violent horrors of its history. Later, the historian Igor Polianksi writes, it would be copied in other anti-religious museums across the USSR. In one diorama, a torture chamber depicting the Spanish Inquisition showed a heretic bound on a rack. He awaits his punishment, as a hooded executioner presents him with an array of torture instruments: a thumbscrew; a two-headed heretic’s fork, which needles simultaneously into the chin and breastbone; a branding iron; and an agonizing Judas chair.

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The museums systematically depicted religion of all kinds as a historical force for ignorance, racism and anti-semitism, and cruelty. Its only worthy replacement, they argued, was science.

Polianski describes how “panels, diagrams, dioramas, and models explaining comparative anatomy and embryology” were displayed alongside “fossils from dinosaurs and hominids, portraits of socialist ‘miracle doctors,’ and meteoric stones.” Man was connected not to God, but to nature: “Paradise apples,” bred by the famous Russian horticulturist Ivan Michurin, and statues of Ivan Pavlov and his Pavlovian dogs, were included to help make this point. As one interpreter remarked to two visiting French scientists, “We, gentlemen, prefer to put our trust in Science. You can see what the new Russia has achieved in Science: medicine, chemistry, physics, biology, stratosphere, aviation, industry. We don’t need religion to accomplish miracles.”


Foreign visitors seem divided on how to take these iconoclastic museums. Seely, for his part, left brimming with enthusiasm, and declared that “society would be measurably benefited if all ministers of the gospel, and all divinity students” could visit such a museum. Others were less delighted. Many of their accounts, Paine observes, seem to conclude that they museums were “naïve and embarrassing.” The apparently sad displays appeared even more mediocre set against their opulent holy surroundings.

But they were tremendously popular with Soviet visitors—though whether this was genuine interest in the future of atheism or simply a welcome break from the production line is unclear. Between 1956 and 1963, hundreds of thousands of people visited the former Kazan Cathedral—soaring from 257,000 visitors, in 1956, to 700,000 in 1963. Other museums around the country boasted similarly impressive attendance numbers. Often, people came on structured group tours, in which workers from factories or offices would come all at once for a guided visit: Some museums might have as many as 17 group tours in a day. By the late 1980s, the New York Times reported, the Sunday afternoon wait to enter the Kazan museum might be as much as two hours.

But despite it all, militant atheistic fervor failed to take hold. In some parts of the country, religious practices continued, gently humming away in the background. Though places of worship had theoretically been confiscated and closed, groups were still able to rent them from the government for religious services, paying a larger fee for a more extravagant setting. Other people simply lapsed into a kind of religious apathy. Scientific atheism was taught in schools, alongside history and geography, but in a 1975 survey, many people still professed to find atheistic dogma boring.

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By 1987, the Times reported, “Soviet officials have begun to admit that they may be losing the battle against religion.” For decades, Bibles had been forbidden, and religious education virtually non-existent—but militant atheism does not appear to have been a sufficiently captivating force to take its place. From the late 1970s, the paper reported, with the 1917 revolution a distant memory, a burgeoning “religious revival … [had] grown up to fill the ideological void.” A poll of young people showed “a growing fascination, especially among the well-educated, with religious literature and services.”

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, most of its anti-religious museums went with it. A few still exist, rebranded as Museums of Religion, but they have either been moved to new settings or relegated to a single wing of the religious institutions they once inhabited. Almost every closed church and temple in the Soviet Union has since been returned to its original purpose.

The museums didn’t just attempt to bring down religion, Polianski writes, but to portray atheism as a source of joy—"not only a negation of religion, but a positive creative force bringing happiness.” In the end, however, people failed to believe in the power of the cult of disbelief.

Years Before Stonewall, a Chef Published the First Gay Cookbook

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It was the first to be marketed to gay men.

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On January 21, 1966, Time magazine ran a story entitled “The Homosexual in America.” The anonymous author criticized the growing activism and visibility of gay people in America, noting that many of them “apparently do not desire a cure” for their sexualities. As an example, the author referenced advertisements for a new publication: The Gay Cookbook by Lou Rand Hogan, a book that made no apologies in presenting an image of happy men cooking elaborate meals for their lovers.

It was published on the cusp of a historic turning point, and copies of the book can still be found online and at many used bookstores. The bold cover has a colorful illustration of a blonde man in a flower-covered apron, grilling steaks, while the back features a hirsute person in a red cocktail dress. It was published years before the Stonewall riots ignited the gay rights movement in America, and at the time, widely advertising a cookbook for gay men was fairly edgy. But the author of The Gay Cookbook was no stranger to the gay publishing scene. In fact, five years before, he had published what is now believed to be the first detective novel with a gay protagonist, titled The Gay Detective.

Who was Lou Rand Hogan? One of the few things known about him is that his name was a nom de plume, says Stephen Vider, assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and author of an academic paper on The Gay Cookbook. Most of our limited information about Hogan—such as that his name was actually Louis Randall, and he was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1910—comes from his own writing. He was the son of an oil driller who spent years abroad and eventually divorced his mother to live in Southeast Asia.

As a young man, Hogan became interested in theater, performing in chorus lines up and down the coast. In the riotous theater scene of the 1920s, he took on one of his first alternate identities, the stage name Sonia Pavlijej. But his theater career was unsuccessful, Vider says, and in 1936, he began working as a steward and cook on the new luxury Matson cruise ship line. “That's really where he learns to cook,” Vider says.

The career move was opportune: In a short memoir, Hogan estimated that the vast majority of the stewards employed by Matson were gay. Not only was Hogan learning about the high-class continental cuisine that he would later describe in The Gay Cookbook, he also was immersed in “camp” culture—what Vider describes in his paper as “adopting or accentuating mannerisms and linguistic styles coded as ‘feminine.’”

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Vider doesn’t know how Hogan became a writer: Although Hogan claimed later in life to have written on food for Gourmet and Sunset magazines, Vider wasn’t able to find any articles definitively written by him. However, the loosening of censorship laws in the 1950s meant that publishing gay and lesbian literature became more common. Hogan’s The Gay Detective was meant to capitalize on this newly available consumer market. The Gay Detective was republished in 2003, in response to growing interest in its thinly-veiled depiction of gay life in midcentury San Francisco. But the foreword to the new edition of The Gay Detective notes that Hogan’s real claim to fame would be The Gay Cookbook.

The 280 pages of The Gay Cookbook are filled with the jokes and innuendo of the time. Even on the frontispiece, in the book’s first pages, a line reads “All rights reserved, Mary.” (An essential part of mid-century campy dialogue, Vider says, was the use of female nicknames among gay men: Hogan addresses the reader by many, including Myrtle, Mabel, and Mame. “Mary” also served as a sometimes-derogatory term for a gay man.) The recipes are lengthy and chatty. But while written humorously, the recipes often are complex and cosmopolitan.

Hogan, after all, had sailed all over the world. While his repertoire includes French and American classics, it also features Mexican, Southeast Asian, and Hawaiian recipes. For a guacamole recipe, Hogan gives the basics as avocado, tomatoes, fresh lime, and salt. Those wanting to mix it up can add onion and spices, he writes, but he forbids more variation. “This is an ‘original’ Mexican recipe,” he writes, “before it’s been crapped up by some Hollywood or Brooklyn chef.”

But guacamole is on the easier end of the scale. Hogan also explains how to prepare an elaborate rijsttafel buffet, a many-coursed Indonesian banquet with roots in Dutch colonialism. A chili recipe spans several pages and requires hours of cooking.

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Much of the book, though, is concerned with economical cooking, suitable for gay men living and entertaining solo. While Logan explains the basics of Spanish paella, he doesn’t give a recipe, noting the price tag of both seafood and saffron. He also instructs readers to learn to cook with cheaper cuts of meat, and to make friends with the local butcher. “Don’t swish into his market,” Hogan orders. Instead, he suggests, “Smile at the S.O.B. as you gayly ask, ‘How’s ya meat today, Butch?’”

Hogan turned out to be a culinary trailblazer. “In terms of his public role, I think that he imagines himself as kind of a gay Julia Child,” Vider says. In the introduction to The Gay Cookbook, Hogan describes a perhaps-fictional conversation with an editor eager to hop on the cookbook publishing wagon. The editor states that he's heard one in six people are gay, so there’s the potential to sell a lot of books. Vider also points out that while there were other LGBT cookbook writers before Hogan, such as Alice B. Toklas, James Beard, and Craig Claiborne, The Gay Cookbook was the first “targeted to to gay men, [while] presenting an image of what gay life might look like to a larger audience.”

Despite Hogan’s humor and the advertising strategy, which presented the book as a curiosity, Vider says The Gay Cookbook promoted an image of gay domesticity. Vider, who is working on a book called Queer Belongings: Gender, Sexuality and the American Home after World War II, notes that gay men were often depicted as isolated and unhappy, with life “really centered on bars.” By depicting gay men cooking and entertaining for lovers and friends, Hogan presented an alternative image of gay domestic life as “a vibrant space of connection and community.”

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In 1970, Hogan became a food columnist for The Advocate, a gay publication based in California. Hogan wrote a column, Auntie Lou Cooks, for nearly the rest of his life (he died in 1976), and Vider describes Hogan’s style as that of “a gay elder” reflecting on a campier past. Even in The Gay Cookbook, Hogan semi-jokingly, semi-wistfully describes the “seriously-formal dinners, soirees, grand drags, etc” of the 1920s, while noting that the 1960s were more casual, both sex- and food-wise.

For a younger generation of LGBT people, aspects of Hogan’s gleeful camp were outmoded. By the 1970s, “gay liberation activists really derided this kind of gay culture for indulging in regressive gender norms,” Vider says. For them, Hogan's domestic vision would have seemed too consumerist and even "effeminate." Plus, The Gay Cookbook targeted white men, and the illustrations by David Costain depicted minorities as racial caricatures. “It's a very white book in terms of how he's presenting gay culture,” Vider notes.

In other ways, The Gay Cookbook was ahead of its time—especially in its depiction of gay men living joyful lives in an era of repression. In his books and his column, “there's not only a celebration of gay sociality, or gay social life, but also a celebration of gay sexuality,” Vider says. For Hogan, even one-night stands could be capped off with a homemade omelet. Though it’s hard to say what kind of person Hogan was, outside of what he wrote about himself, Vider likes to think he was gregarious and cheerful. Only someone “excited to be a part of a gay world,” as Vider describes Hogan, could have written The Gay Cookbook.

A Massive Sinkhole in New Zealand Exposed Traces of an Ancient Volcano

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The canyon's walls tell the story of long-ego eruptions.

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One morning last week, when dairy farm workers in Rotoura, New Zealand, made their early-morning lap to check in on the cows, they saw something much more startling than a lounging ruminant.

A jagged hole had opened up overnight. It cut a scar across the verdant landscape, dropping 66 feet deep and yawning 656 feet long. Anyone who stood at the edge of the grass and looked down into the crevice would be peering into thousands of years of geological history.

These types of collapse holes are common in the region, notes GeoNet, a project of New Zealand’s Earthquake Commission. The area sits near volcanic faults, and on the crater of a volcano that erupted some 60,000 years ago. Soft, pumice-strewn soils are one lingering consequence of this long-ago explosion. When rain pelts the area, as it did last week, it can burrow cavities into the soil. These may be subtle, at first; “many are discovered by tractors or fertilizer trucks driving across what appears to be solid ground,” according to GeoNet. But if enough water seeps in, these weak points can collapse in on themselves, forming canyons that double as time capsules.

On their rocky walls, volcanologists can glimpse the history of those local eruptions. Layers of lake sediment are sandwiched between the ash and pumice that spewed from active volcanoes. Bradley Scott, a volcanologist with the geology organization GNS, told TVNZ that the debris at the bottom of the canyon dated to the long-ago eruption. While collapse holes, or “tomos,” aren’t uncommon in the area, he added, this one was bigger than most.

The farmer, Colin Tremain, isn’t planning to bother shoveling earth back on top of the fissure. “(I'll) put a fence around it and forget about it,” he told Radio NZ. “Waste of time filling it in." And as long as it does gape open, the rocky crevice offers a portal straight into the past.

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