Quantcast
Channel: Atlas Obscura: Articles
Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live

Remembering the ‘Knocker-Ups’ Hired to Wake Workers With Pea Shooters

0
0

Rise and shine!

article-image

The modern worker rolls out of bed, groans, and turns off an alarm clock. But industrial-era British and Irish workers relied on a different method for rising each morning. In the 19th century and well into the 20th, a human alarm clock known as a “knocker-up” (knocker-upper) would trawl the streets and wake paying customers in time for work. Armed with sticks—or, in the case of Mary Smith, a pea shooter—they tapped on windows or blasted them with dried peas.

During the Industrial Age, people toiled at unusual hours in mines or factories. They could have used alarm clocks—adjustable versions had been invented by the mid-19th century. But they were still relatively expensive items, and unreliable ones, at that.

Whether they wielded rods or pea shooters, knocker-ups became familiar presences throughout the United Kingdom. Many of them were older, and woke people up professionally for many years—they often wouldn’t leave people’s houses until they were sure they were awake.

One of these characters, Mary Anne Smith, became a beloved presence—along with her trusty pea shooter—around London’s East End in the 1930s. John Topham, who snapped photos of Smith in action, remembers “every morning but Sunday she would rise at three to ‘knock up’ local workers—using a pea shooter. She charged sixpence a week and her nearest competition was an old man three miles away who did the same job using a fishing rod to tap on upstairs windows.”

Smith was known for the rapping, clacking sound of her peas against windows and doors. In the children’s book Mary Smith, she’s depicted as waking up everyone from fishmongers to the mayor. She was often seen “beating her mats on the street, calling out greetings to her neighbours,” and offering people, Topham included, a cup of tea. Later on, Smith’s daughter, also named Mary, took up the pea-blasting practice in her stead.

Of course, the knocker-up line of work meant dealing with grumps who didn’t want to get up. In 1878, a Canadian journalist writing for The Huron Expositor interviewed a well-known knocker-up, Mrs. Waters. She recalls that “a surly or hot-tempered fellow would growl or knock things about as he came to the window to reply, and his responding rap would sound as peevish as possible.” By contrast, the good-tempered risers were cheery presences: “You could hear from his very tread that he was grateful even, and his reply tap sounded quite musical, and when he spoke and bade you good morning, it was really encouraging.”

While the practice continued in some parts of the United Kingdom until the 1970s, it waned as alarm clocks and electricity became more widespread and affordable. Sure, beeping alarm clocks and smartphones that play morning music are simpler and more convenient. But they can’t match being awoken by the soft, distinctive tap of Mary Smith’s pea shooter.


Early Hackers Used Whistles From Cap’n Crunch Cereal Boxes

0
0

You can draw a line from the tiny toys to Apple Inc.

article-image

Cereal companies have long used box prizes as an inducement for children to nag parents into buying sugary breakfast food. From movie tie-in toys to video games on CD-ROM (remember Chex Quest?), cereal box baubles tend to be momentarily thrilling and then quickly forgotten. Except when they're used for hacking.

Only one cereal box toy has that distinction: the Cap'n Crunch Bo'sun whistle. Meant to replicate the whistles used by sailing officials (boatswains) to signal mealtimes or commands, the multicolored whistles came along with boxes of Cap'n Crunch starting in the mid-1960s. One fell into the hands of John Draper, a former U.S. Air Force electronics technician. Draper was part of an underground culture that predated hacking as we know it: phone phreaks. These early hackers played certain tones through their telephones to bypass AT&T's analog system and get free long-distance phone calls.

Draper heard about the whistle from other phreakers. The whistle easily played at 2600Hz, the perfect tone to, in Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak's words, "seize a phone line." Though many phreakers used instruments for the same purpose, the mass-produced whistle became iconic. Draper became known for using it, and gave himself the nickname "Captain Crunch." He even built devices, called "blue boxes," to replicate that tone and other useful ones. After a story about blue boxes was published in Esquire in 1971, the then-college student Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs tracked Draper down to learn all they could. (Though Wozniak admired Draper, he was intimidated by his intense energy, disheveled state, and many missing teeth.) The boxes could also be used for mischief. Wozniak tried to prank-call the pope, while Draper boasted that he once got President Nixon on the horn.

article-image

Jobs and Wozniak's first joint-business venture was selling blue boxes to aspiring phreakers. "I don't think there would ever have been an Apple Computer had there not been blue-boxing," Jobs later commented in an interview. Captain Crunch himself has swung between fame and infamy—Draper spent time in jail for toll fraud, but later also wrote software used by IBM and Apple. While hailed as a hacking and software pioneer, Draper has also been accused of sexual harassment at conventions where he's been invited as a guest.

Today, both Cap'n Crunch whistles and blue boxes are historical objects. A collection of the whistles are displayed at the Telephone Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts, while the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, has one of Wozniak's handmade blue boxes. Though thousands of miles apart, both physically and technologically, they're reminders of the connections between hacking, computing, and cereal.

Does Anyone Know What These Knobbly Orbs Are For?

0
0

No one can figure out these Neolithic artifacts. We want your best guesses.

article-image

On first glance, these intricately carved knobbly orbs might appear to be ornaments, or perhaps ancient toys. It’s unclear, because little is known about these roughly 4,000- to 5,000-year-old artifacts, except for a few details.

Over 400 of the relics have been found in Aberdeenshire, from the 19th century to as recently as 2013. Aberdeenshire is located in northeastern Scotland, and a few were found scattered across northern Ireland and England. Measuring between 2.75 inches and 4.5 inches in diameter, these orbs are made from materials such as granite, serpentinite, and sandstone, and can fit in the palm of your hand. The number of knobs on each stone ranges from six to 160, and they are engraved with horizontal lines, spirals, or circles.

article-image

Since the 1800s, museums and historical societies have catalogued these stone balls. The more they gathered in their collections, the more questions and theories arose. The earliest theories argued the stones resembled geometric stone symbols of the Picts, a group of people who lived in northern Scotland during the late Iron Age of 800 B.C. to 43. However, most of the balls date back to well before this era.

One 1876 theory from the then Vice President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Dr. John Alexander Smith, posits that the balls served as weapons, possibly attached to wooden sticks and swung around. In a 1914 Society of Antiquaries of Scotland meeting, archaeologist Ludovic McLellan Mann alternatively proposed, “they were used as movable pieces of weights on weighing beams” that originated from Roman statera balances. Another theory cites that oracles rolled the balls to foresee the future or as though they were dice.

article-image

Archaeologist Dorothy Marshall disputed those theories in her 1976-77 Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland report, and surmised that the balls' use will likely remain unknown.

The seemingly unsolvable puzzle doesn’t deter the speculators. University of Oxford mathematician Professor Marcus Du Sautoy theorizes in a Ashmolean Museum video, that the people using the balls "were starting to be mathematicians" and the artifacts were early examples of abstract thought and humans exploring symmetry. In his article The Carved Stone Balls of Scotland: Who made them, and why?, amateur historian Jeff Nisbet proposed that the carved stones functioned like “the résumés and portfolios of today’s workforce,” and “verified a mason’s ability to work stone,” as they traveled from site to site.

Maybe the balls are indeed portfolios or weapons or nothing at all, but it’s always fun to guess. What do you think these balls represent? We want to hear your most creative ideas, so tell us, and we’ll share some of our favorites.

After 130 Years, the Spoils of a Grave-Plundering Explorer Are Returning to Alaska

0
0

Righting at least one wrong from centuries of colonialism.

article-image

One day in 2015, John Johnson stood in a storage room in Berlin’s quiet Dahlem neighborhood, a long way from home, searching for the remains of his ancestors. He was accompanied by a group of European museum curators and two elders from his community in the Chugach region of Alaska, southeast of Anchorage. To underscore the reason for their visit, Johnson read aloud from a 19th-century travelogue by Norwegian explorer Johan Adrian Jacobsen.

In the 1880s, the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin sent Jacobsen on a mission through the Pacific Northwest and Alaska to collect Native American artifacts. Jacobsen returned with more than 7,000 items. He had traded for garments, carvings, and other objects from the indigenous people he encountered—but he also dug up burials, without consent.

Jacobsen’s travelogue is littered with rather clinical accounts of cemetery-robbing and mummy-stealing in the name of science. Johnson read from one particular passage that stuck with him. In it, Jacobsen describes finding the grave of a mother and child. The bodies were disintegrating in his hands so he just took the mother’s skull and dumped out the contents the cradle.

article-image

“We knew the travelogue, but it was a different kind of atmosphere when [Johnson] read it to us and asked us, ‘What happened to our ancestors?’” says Ilja Labischinski, a curatorial assistant who was there that day in the storage room in 2015. “It was tense. You feel a responsibility for what the people who worked at the museum did at that time.”

The human remains that Jacobsen brought to Germany have yet to be found. But this week, Johnson returned to Berlin to formally accept the repatriation of nine objects—including the cradle—that were taken from graves in the Chugach region. It is the first time the Ethnological Museum is returning part of its extensive collection to an indigenous community.

Johnson is vice president of cultural resources for the Chugach Alaska Corporation, created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. He has become something of an explorer in his own right, and has traveled far in search of artifacts that were taken from his homeland—from wooden burial masks in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., to human remains at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

article-image

The Chugach Alaska Corporation covers the coastal lands around Prince William Sound, where native tribes have lived for centuries. During the colonial era, the area was visited—and claimed—by several waves of Europeans. In 1778, Captain James Cook’s crew landed on the Kenai Peninsula and buried a bottle full of English coins to assert ownership of the land, in front of dozens of Dena’ina people. The Russians buried a bronze plate with an insignia. The Spanish buried a cross.

“I always get a kick out of it,” Johnson says. “I always say, we have the earliest and most valid claim because our ancestors have been buried in the hills for last 1,000 years. It’s not a bottle, it’s not a plate.”

In the 19th century, explorers such as Jacobsen took part in a scientific land grab for “exotic” and “authentic” artifacts from the remote parts of south-central Alaska (as well as countless other places). This was, ostensibly, for the benefit of those indigenous cultures. Editor Adrian Woldt captured the spirit of the era in his 1884 forward to Jacobsen’s travelogue: “European culture is engulfing and destroying the native peoples left in the world. Their customs and habits, legends and memories, weapons and artifacts are disappearing.… Mankind must therefore make every effort to collect, as the most valuable knowledge of the ancient past, all the objects pertaining to the development of culture.”

In their quest to “rescue” cultural objects from encroaching European culture, those Westerners didn’t seem to recognize the damage—or irony—of their actions.

article-image

Jacobsen was not shy about explaining his worldview. In his journal, he describes coming across a memorial to a person who had been killed by a bear: “Since this monument would be admired by many more people in the newly completed Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin than here on the banks of the Yukon, and since it was made to be seen, I took it with me.”

Jacobsen was also aware that the indigenous people he met did not want him digging up graves, but this was little impediment to him. “He thought it was his duty to do it, in the name of science,” Labischinski says. In another episode, he describes taking three skulls from a burial ground near Vancouver Island, while pretending to be fishing and hunting. “In our haste I hurt my hand on the bone of a mummy and it bled profusely. We had scarcely stowed the skulls in the canoe when two Indians appeared who had followed us out of curiosity to see what we were doing,” he writes. “As soon as I saw them I shot at some sea gulls flying by, and this satisfied them. So we managed to get our booty on board unnoticed.”

It was Jacobsen’s own detailed descriptions, in English translation, that led Johnson to believe that some Chugach grave goods might still be in Berlin. He wrote to the museum in 2015 and was invited to visit. After the delegation helped locate nine objects—several masks, an idol, and a baby carrier—that had been clearly taken from graves on Chugach lands, the long legal process to get the artifacts home began.

In May 2018, in the foyer of the now-closed Ethnological Museum, Johnson put on a pair of white gloves and posed for a photo with Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. They held between them one of the larger-than-life Chugach wooden masks. Johnson explained that the arrowhead-like shape of it symbolizes the belief that an individual’s head would turn into a point during the passage to the spirit world.

article-image

The Ethnological Museum is closed because next year its collection will move to the Humboldt Forum museum complex, a controversial €600-million project that has been criticized for its “colonial amnesia.” Art historian Bénédicte Savoy, who stepped down from the advisory board of the Humboldt Forum last year and has been a vocal critic, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that no ethnological museum should open today without properly investigating the origins of the objects it’s putting on display. "I want to know how much blood is dripping from each artwork,” Savoy said.

Though Germany has procedures for dealing with Nazi-looted art, cultural officials have been slow to investigate the provenance of objects collected during the colonial era. The country’s culture minister has just issued new guidelines on the restitution of objects from “colonial contexts.” But critics of the Humboldt Forum were disappointed that the guidelines imply that restitution will only take place if there is a legal basis for it, that is, only if legal and ethical standards were violated at the time of the acquisition.

article-image

What were the standards Jacobsen was working under? Johnson tries to put himself in the explorer’s shoes. “I’m sure it wouldn't have been ethical if someone came to his hometown and looked around for that stuff and brought it back to Alaska,” he says. “It’s a touchy thing. If they were your relatives how would you react? But at that time so many collectors were doing it.” In the passage where Jacobsen describes finding the cradle, in fact, he laments that a researcher from the Smithsonian got to the burial ground first.

Ideally, the repatriated masks and other grave goods would go back to the pillow-lava caves and rock shelters where they had been laid to rest alongside the dead, Johnson says. But such a move would be too risky today, so the objects will go to a community cultural center. “To me repatriation is not the end, it’s just the beginning,” he says. And Johnson hasn’t given up on the idea that the mummies and other human remains collected by Jacobsen might still be somewhere in a Berlin storage room, far from home.

This Indian Winery Wants You to Try Kiwi Wine

0
0

A wife-and-husband team hopes the unusual drink will benefit a remote and rugged region.

article-image

It might be one of the world’s least likely locations for a cutting-edge winery. Amid plump yipping puppies, rice farmers amble home from a day in the surrounding paddies. Mist-shrouded hills loom nearby. And down a row of A-shaped bamboo houses, a wide bucolic road veers off toward a hidden hive of industry. Here, in Hong Village—a tiny tribal community in Northeast India—a sleek new boutique workshop is bottling up an unusual concoction: kiwi wine.

“When you say wine, people think about grapes,” says 37-year-old Tage Rita Takhe, the company’s founder, who has earned an entrepreneurship award for her efforts. Naara-Aaba—named after Takhe’s father-in-law—is India’s first and only organic kiwi wine factory, and remains one of only a handful of companies throughout the world to bottle the tangy, yellowy brew.

article-image

Takhe created the winery in response to a local dilemma. Kiwis grow plentifully in Arunachal Pradesh, a remote and rugged state that is connected to the rest of India by only a narrow land corridor. They are especially bountiful in Ziro Valley, the scenic, UNESCO-shortlisted district that is home to Hong Village. The fruit is popular in India, where it is thought to boost immunity against dengue fever. However, local farmers struggle to compete with imported fruits, which are considered tastier. Domestic kiwis also grow in mountainous areas, making delivery a challenge. Millions of kiwis are shipped to India from New Zealand, Italy, and Chile each year—anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 tons.

Takhe doesn’t see Ziro’s kiwis this way. “The taste and aroma of kiwi fruit from Ziro Valley is superior to any other kiwi in the world,” she says. They are also lower priced than multinational imports, by as much as a third. But with no buyers interested in the local crop, entire harvests went to waste. Before she set up her factory, Takhe would visit nearby farms. One scene was particularly haunting. In a kiwi orchard sprawled around the babbling waters of a small brook, the farm manager showed her heaps and heaps of rotting fruit. “I felt sad seeing the exotic fruit in such a condition,” she says.

A trained agricultural engineer, Takhe left a prestigious government position to launch her winery, which officially opened—amid local fanfare—in the fall of 2017. The daughter of local farmers herself, Takhe wanted to support organic, small-scale cultivation while ensuring that kiwi farmers in the valley would be able to live off the profits—no small feat, given the state of agriculture throughout most of India, where drought, debt, and poor harvests have led tens of thousands of farmers to commit suicide in recent years. Arunachal Pradesh has been spared the rash of suicides, but households still rely on subsistence agriculture, mostly rice cultivation and fishing.

article-image

It took Takhe and her husband, Takhe Tamo, six years of careful research and planning to get the boutique factory off the ground. The couple had no savings and were on the verge of bankruptcy, but they managed to bring a few banks on board, who offered them loans. “Wine was in our dreams and nothing else,” Takhe says. Today, she works with kiwi farmers from all over the state and supports a community collective known as the Kiwi Growers Cooperative Society. One of Takhe’s main suppliers is now the farm manager of the orchard by the brook, whose kiwi crops are thankfully no longer left to rot.

In many parts of India, and certainly overseas, Arunachal Pradesh is better known for its traditions than its innovations. The remote, mountainous state, which borders Bhutan, Tibet, and Myanmar, is proudly home to 26 indigenous tribes and dozens more sub-tribes, each with their own unique councils and customs. The region has long been posited as a bastion of anthropological discovery for intrepid visitors, with travel outlets marketing it as “a land that time forgot.”

It’s true that traditions are alive and well. Many villagers still call upon shamans, animist mediums who perform complex rituals involving bamboo twine and cracked egg yolk to connect believers to the spirit realms of their ancestors. In villages, clothes are still an important identity-marker, especially among older generations. Regional dress spans traditional Nyishi headdresses—fashioned from hornbill beaks and feathers—to the much-photographed, nose-plugged women of the Apatani tribe, also known for their distinctive facial tattoos.

article-image

But the state is more than an open-air museum. The excessive focus on surviving rites ignores Arunachalis like Takhe, who have chosen to put a determined new spin on local traditions. They are attempting to safeguard their culture and boost their economy through homegrown ingenuity, without comprising sustainability ideals. As the Naara-Aaba website puts it, “For the hardworking and fun loving people of Ziro valley, it’s a gentle wake up call to learn new and modern ways to utilize their vast lands.”

In Arunachal Pradesh,the kiwi is a symbol of local horticulture—many households have kiwi trees in their backyards. For Takhe, the pairing seemed logical. It also gave her a chance to return to a more rural lifestyle, resisting the mass urbanization that has claimed many of India’s aspirational youth, as job-seekers are drawn away from their home villages. “My husband and I were always interested in the country life,” Takhe says. “We wanted our children to grow up in nature and stay connected to our roots.”

article-image

This love of nature is reflected in the product, which—Takhe touts—is good for you, too. Unlike grape-derived wines, the golden kiwi brew has conserved the same health-giving properties as the fruit. “All the vitamins and minerals that the kiwi has when it’s raw, we got that in the wine itself,” Takhe says. The fruits are processed unpeeled so that the nutrients pass into the organic wine, which has been lab-tested to silence potential naysayers. (That said, fruit juice never matches raw fruit in health terms.) The benefits are helpfully printed on the retail label, listing everything from Vitamin C to Magnesium and Iron. So drink up.

But how does it taste?

article-image

For starters, the tart sweetness of the fruit carries over to the drink. Fans of crisp, high-acid wines will probably find it similar to a drier Riesling—a suitable accompaniment for Arunachali cuisine. Anyone eager for a sample can try a glass with a home-cooked plate of local staples, such as fried bamboo shoots, fire-roasted chicken, and jungle-foraged greens. The only trouble is that, for now, Naara-Aaba is only available in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, where bottles retail for 1,200 Indian Rupees ($18.00). The state doesn’t yet have an airport, and ground travel involves contending with a perilous tangle of landslide-prone roads—an even bigger gamble for a delivery truck.

But the family-run winery has already attracted a local following. Takhe hopes that the momentum will propel sales to other states, introducing consumers who buy imports to the natural bounties ripening in their own backyards. For now, Takhe and her husband are still dreaming big. With 25 full-time factory employees and a roomfull of hulking steel fermentation tanks, Naara-Aaba is poised to manufacture a maximum of 40,000 liters—enough to find a use for every kiwi grown in the state, and to turn that waste into wine.

The World's Best Violins Sing Like Humans

0
0

Some are baritones, some are tenors.

article-image

In 1751, the renowned Italian violinist Francesco Geminiani took a break from bowing and set pen to paper. He aimed to distill his decades of experience into a treatise on how best to approach his preferred instrument. As he explained, he looked down on those violinists who spent their time "imitating the Cock, Cuckoo, Owl, and other Birds." He also lacked patience for "Contortions of the Head and Body," "sudden Shifts of the Hand," and "all other such Tricks." Instead, he wrote, a great violinist had one job: to achieve "a Tone that shall in a Manner rival the most perfect human Voice."

A tall order; those Contortions seem much easier. But as recent research has shown, the instruments themselves may help players accomplish Geminiani’s directive. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that not only do great violins sing like humans, those built by different makers may remind us of different types of human voices.

Since the 16th century, a disproportionate amount of the world's great violins have come from Cremona, a city in northern Italy. The luthier Andrea Amati, who had a workshop in Cremona, is widely credited with inventing the violin in the mid-1500s. About a century later, Antonio Stradivari began making his own instruments, also in Cremona.

article-image

These instruments—along with those of another luthier, Giuseppe Guarneri—have inspired almost every contemporary take on violin design, but the originals are still considered peerless. "I have heard Stradivari violins in concerts and at close range," writes the new study's lead author, Bruce Hwan-Ching Tai. "They sound very unique to my ears." Tai is both a chemical biologist and a classical music buff, and over the past few years, he and his colleagues have set out to "find an objective explanation" for this stirring sound, he writes. In 2016, for instance, his research group chemically analyzed wood shavings from four Stradivari violins alongside similar bits of modern maples.

They found that, compared to its contemporary analogues, the violin wood had been through a lot. It had been treated with chemicals, possibly to ward off bugs and fungus—a hypothesis originally suggested by Joseph Nagyvary, a biochemist and luthier who has dedicated his life to recreating old violins. It had dried out; and it had vibrated so much from centuries of playing that its very fibers had begun to separate. These centuries of experience, the researchers postulate, helped to give the instruments their particular tone.

article-image

For this most recent study, Tai took the opposite tack, focusing on the sound itself. Other researchers, including Nagyvary, had already found sonic similarities between Stradivari notes and particular vowel sounds as sung by humans. Tai and his colleagues undertook a broader investigation, recording a violinist, Chu-Hsuan Feng, playing 15 different violins: five made by the Stradivari family, three made by the Amati family, four made by other Cremonese luthiers, and two made by Brescian luthiers (including Gasparo da Salo, who some consider to have "coinvented" the instrument with Amati). The violins were from the Chimei Museum in Taiwan, and are played "only a few times a year," Tai writes.

They then had 16 choir members, eight male and eight female, sing the same scale eight times, once for each of the following vowel sounds: “had, head, heard, heed, hod, hoed, hud, who’d." When the researchers had all of the recordings, they put them through sonic analysis, seeing how different aspects of the violin and human sounds matched up.

Because the researchers were comparing violin sounds with vowel sounds, they focused largely on formants: particular frequency sets that make up vowel vocalizations. When a person says or sings an "I" sound, for example, different parts of his larynx, pharynx, and oral cavity each produce sounds corresponding to a particular set of frequencies, which come together to make up the vowel. The researchers found that, despite lacking this human vocal architecture, the violins, too, produce formants with "vowel-like qualities."

article-image

Another finding suggests that Geminiani was onto something. All of the violins included in the study displayed some sonic overlap with the sung vowels. But in the 1570 Amati and the 1560 da Salo, "every violin note appears to carry some degree of human vowel character," Tai et. al. write in the paper. "This may have been one of the … goals implemented by Amati" when he was inventing and perfecting his design: to make the violin literally sing.

Finally, while Amati and da Salo violins had formants that resembled those of bass and baritone singers, Stradivari violins' formants were more similar to tenors and altos. This suggests that Stradivari took the basic idea of a singing instrument and made it his own by changing the type of singer to imitate. "In the future, someone may try to produce violins that mimic mezzo-sopranos or sopranos," writes Tai. "Whether it can be done or whether it will sound good remain to be seen."

"Although we did not perform any psychological experiments in this study, I speculate that the similarity between violins and voices can explain why violins are so popular," Tai concludes. In other words, we may not yet understand quite how these instruments do what they do. But maybe we like them because when they do it, they sound like us.

A Gel-Based Material That Can Do the Electric Slide

0
0

It's the invention of engineers at Rutgers University.

article-image

Engineers at Rutgers University have started 3D-printing a gel material that could one day give us softer, arguably less frightening robots. And to show off their so-called “smart gel,” they made it dance. It’s not just cute—the reactive synthetic might have far-reaching applications for the future of automation.

As explained in a study published last week in CS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the university team, based out of New Brunswick, New Jersey, have created the printable “smart gel” to move in response to electric stimuli. Made of a special polymer that reacts to electric impulses, the gel can be formed into a variety of shapes to perform tasks such as grabbing objects or moving them around. In the video below, you can see how the engineers managed to make a one-inch figure do a sort of walking-dance underwater by forcing it to contort and then return to its original shape.

The possibilities for the material are seemingly only limited to the imagination of the engineers. Since the team’s gel mimics other hydrogels, which Rutgers Today points out can be found everywhere from the human body to Jell-O, it could eventually be used to make artificial organs or octopus-like soft bots. “We are planning to find some useful application in the biomedical field. Drug delivery, artificial muscle,” says one of the study’s authors, Howon Lee, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

The resulting video is a lot of fun, though Lee says the smart gel won't likely be used to make any further movers and shakers. “Our interest is not in creating dancing figures, we are just demonstrating how we can accurately control motion. We’re not particularly interested in creating anything dancing,” he says. Still, this smart gel really seems to know how to groove (with a little stimulation of course).

Was the Long Island Iced Tea Invented in ... Tennessee?

0
0

"Not since the 'Battle of Long Island' has Long Island's honor been so challenged."

article-image

Tennesse's Long Island, which sits in the middle of the Holston River, has been many things. Originally a sacred Cherokee site, the island was known for bootlegging during Prohibition. But locals in nearby Kingsport are now claiming those tumultuous days produced something very special: the Long Island Iced Tea cocktail. The assertion that the drink—which packs a punch by combining liquors including vodka, rum, and gin—originated in Tennessee is causing a tempest in a teapot. After all, New York's Long Islanders proudly claim the drink as their own.

According to Visit Kingsport, a bootlegger named Charlie "Old Man" Bishop got creative with his liquors one day on the island, mixing them together with maple syrup. In the 1940s, his son Ransom Bishop added citrus juice and cola, creating a drink that might be familiar to bar-goers today.

Kingsport's new marketing campaign, which features this origin story, has not been well received in Long Island, New York. Their Iced Tea is the standard, and uses sour mix and Triple Sec instead of maple syrup. It's also younger, created at the Oak Beach Inn in 1972 as part of a mixology contest. Visit Kingsport and Discover Long Island, the tourism boards for the two regions, faced off on May 10, exchanging letters establishing their Iced Tea sovereignty. "Not since the 'Battle of Long Island' in the Revolutionary War has Long Island's honor been so challenged," wrote bar owner Butch Yamali on behalf of Long Island, New York, comparing the tea tizzy (jokingly) to the Civil War. Yamali then challenged Kingsport to a "Battle for the Tea," where blindfolded patrons could sample Teas from both regions to decide which reigns supreme.

Jud Teague, the Executive Director for Visit Kingsport, responded, "You're laying claim to what's ours—and them's fighting words." He accepted the challenge, before signing off with a defiant "Bless Y'alls Hearts." The date of the showdown has yet to be set, and there's no word on which Long Island will host. So if Long Island, Kansas, or Long Island, Maine, wants to create their own version of the cocktail, there's still time.


Cold, Damp 'Sky Islands' Are Hotspots for Unusual Plants and Animals

0
0

Exploring an ecological oasis high up on the Philippines' Palawan Island.

article-image

On a clear day, when Mount Mantalingahan isn’t cloaked by rain or fog, it provides a commanding view of the Philippine lowlands and ocean far below. Rising 6,841 feet above Palawan Island, the mountain is steep and isolated. Anyone who makes the climb up will notice that the summit, almost always cold, foggy, and wet, bears little resemblance to the tropical setting below. And that’s exactly why scientists are attracted to it.

Mount Mantalingahan is what is called a “sky island.” Unlike Palawan Island itself, the peak is not physically surrounded by water, but it falls under a broader definition of “island”—any place that is somehow sequestered from its neighbors, and develops an ecosystem all its own.

For researchers, the multi-day hike to the summit is worth it because of the unique environment that has evolved there. Sky islands are known for being hotspots of biodiversity. Larry Heaney, a curator of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago, learned that years ago, after many seasons of field work in the Philippines. Conventional wisdom holds that tropical lowland rain forests are the best engines of terrestrial biodiversity. That’s true for ants and termites, and for birds and bats, Heaney says. But “it’s not true for earthworms, not true for small mammals, not true for oak trees, not true for orchids, all sorts of things.” For many different groups of plants and animals, he says, peak biological diversity occurs “well up into the mountains.”

The top layers of the Philippine mountains—above hot, muggy rain forest—dip down to around 40 degrees, too warm for for snow or frost, but sufficiently uncomfortable with the constant damp. “We’re talking 12 to 15 feet of rain per year,” Heaney says. “You smell the kind of aroma you have when you’re working in the garden and soil is wet.”

High atop sky islands, he says, the “character in the forest changes completely.” Unlike the volcanic, nutrient-rich earth across much of the country, that mountain soil can be thick with nickel and other metals that discourage plant growth. It’s not uncommon for mountain trees in the Philippines to be just waist-high, even when fully grown.

article-image

When he first started working in the higher-elevation forests, Heaney was surprised to encounter stubby oaks and other trees often associated with northern forests. “‘I thought, ‘There’s acorns everywhere!’” he says. “‘What’s the deal with that?’” The slopes include mountain species such as relatives of laurels and myrtles, and carnivorous, insect-eating pitcher plants—shaped like water jugs—that don’t live anywhere else. One of these, the speckled Nepenthes palawanensis, documented in 2010, was named after the mountain itself.

Different plants mean different animals. Just before and after sunset, frogs chirp from pools in the hollow spots of trees. Sometimes leeches drop from branches and squirm toward your eyes. Scores of small mammals paw around tree roots, trying to turn up insects. At lower elevations, termites are everywhere, swarming felled trees. Up there, they’ve all but vanished. “Termites don’t like to be cold and wet,” Heaney says.

Getting to such sky islands isn’t particularly easy for researchers. In the case of Philippine mountains, it involves multiple airports, lots of luggage-toting, a bus, a four-wheeler, and then a serious trek. The reward is a flimsy camp made from tarps draped between bamboo and squat trees. “For people who want to be there, and are really fully engaged in learning about the animals and the places where they live, it’s an awful of fun,” Heaney says. “For people who aren’t motivated similarly, it would be absolutely miserable.”

Heaney is a member of the minority that loves it up there. He leapt at the chance to study the summit ecosystem of Mount Mantalingahan, in part because because there was a lot there for him to like: a high, large peak that hadn’t been studied much before. Among many other finds, his team recently described the Palawanosorex muscorum, or Palawan moss shrew, a portly, long-clawed little mammal with long claws that eats the earthworms in the soil.

article-image

The unusual ecosystems of sky islands take shape in a few ways. Sometimes, they are the last refuges for species that once had a wider range, but dwindled due to disease, predation, or a changing climate. In other cases, species might migrate there when their former ranges become inhospitable—too hot, for instance, or depleted of food. Heaney and his collaborators speculate that the moss shrew’s relatives may have scampered over a landbridge from Borneo millions of years ago. While they’re not sure exactly how it arrived, its diet and physiology—it helps to be warm-blooded on a chilly mountain—have evolved to help it flourish on Mount Mantalingahan. If a species adapts to a particular mountaintop, the lowlands could be, by comparison, as inhospitable and unwelcoming as the ocean around a traditional island.

All the interesting ecology up there (and the fact that its slopes and soil aren't much good for farming) helped get portions of Mount Mantalingahan designated as part of a protected landscape in 2009.

Sky islands top mountains all over the world. More super-sized pitcher plants—including one named for David Attenborough—are endemic to other Philippine peaks. Dozens of birds, amphibians, and mammals can only be found in sky-high archipelagos in the Cameroon Highlands in Africa. Isolated ecosystems rise above North American deserts, too, where a plant such as Pringle’s fleabane—a daisy relative—branched out into three distinct species on separate sky islands. There’s no end of ecological secrets out there. Or, more accurately, up there.

This French Family Wants Their Kids to Know How the Sausage Is Made

0
0

An old agricultural tradition now reunites modern families.

The sky was still dark when we arrived at the Bibal family’s ancestral home, a large farm house surrounded by pasture in Sainte-Gemme, France. The day began—as it always does during their annual February visits—with a large family breakfast. We had visited the pig the evening before, when she was delivered by a local farmer. She slept on a thick bed of hay in a pen formerly used by the family patriarch, Fernand Bibal, to house animals. The large country house was equipped with all the accoutrements of subsistence farming: pens for livestock, chicken coops, and a granary. Normally, all that lies empty, except for once a year, when the large family convenes to keep the tradition of the tue-cochon alive.

The wintertime custom, which literally translates to “pig slaughter,” was once a matter of survival. When food was scarce and snow covered fields and gardens, families needed preserved foods. In France, pork provided the necessary base for rural families’ meals, and the process of salting and drying pork remained crucial for survival until only a few generations ago. Pork achieved such high regard that pigs were featured in famous French Belle Epoque postcards, and quintessential foods such as confit, pâté, boudin, and all manner of sausages can be traced to this need to preserve meat before the advent of refrigeration.

article-image

The Bibals no longer live in the country. Like many families, they left the fields for office jobs and city life: Frédéric practices law, Cécile is a physician, and they live just outside Paris with their four children, Noé, Joseph, Madeleine, and Suzanne. But each year, the Bibals’ extended family convenes to continue the tue-cochon tradition.

“We [still] do it because in our family, we have always done it,” says Marc Bibal, Frédéric’s brother. “In our region, everyone did it. There is not a family that has not participated in the tue-cochon.”

article-image

Families like the Bibals have another motivation for keeping up the tradition. While many French regions have historically participated in the tue-cochon, their recipes, which families hand down, are distinguished by local tastes and how preservation requirements differ by climate. “The sausage we love can’t be found easily. Or if we find it, it’s now too expensive to buy in stores,” says Marc. “We’ve been eating it this way for so long, we want to keep eating it.”

What sets the Bibal family apart is that their great-grandfather, Fernand, was himself a Saigneur, a respected post occupied by one who holds the knowledge of how to properly kill and butcher the pig. Fernand’s son, Guy, described his father in a book he wrote on his life in the countryside:

I can still remember Papa leaving early in the morning on his bicycle, his canvas bag full of tools, coming home late in the evening with just enough time to take care of the cows. How busy were his days then.

article-image

What was once a hard, long day of life-sustaining labor is now more relaxed, happening over two days and punctuated by large meals and conversation. While a Saigneur hired by the Bibals quickly slaughtered, cleaned, and prepared the pig for butchering, the children ran around in brightly-colored galoshes. Next, the family boiled water over an open fire and placed portions of the meat in a large iron cauldron to be slow-cooked. The eldest sibling, Noé, helped his father stir the meat for hours, ensuring it did not stick to the cauldron. Nine-year-old Suzanne spent most of her time in the kitchen preparing the pâté tins with her grandmother, but eventually ventured out to the garage to help prepare the meat for the saucisse, mixing just the right amount of salt, pepper, and fat in her tiny hands. A tue-cochon uses almost every part of the pig.

article-image

At end of two very long days, the family and a few neighbors convened for dinner and “judged” the finished products. As they passed wine, inevitably, they shared stories of previous tue-cochons and compared the meat to previous years’ efforts. After the meal, a handful of family members played a card game called le bourro and drank wine and tea until it was time to say goodnight.

When the Bibals arrived at the house, the first order of business was to set up the wifi. But soon enough, this light, convivial atmosphere prevailed. The kids took long walks, venturing into nearby fields and hopping onto neighbors’ hay bales. Back in the house, Noé spent hours rummaging through drawers and bringing out old photo albums, asking his parents who was who. All was stripped away except the communion of family, and a reverence for the past pervaded even the youngest.

article-image

Since the passing of Fernand in 2010, the family has hired a local man, Gilbert Moulin, to perform the tue-cochon. He talks fast and laughs often; his quick nature belies his age and ill health. We sat in his kitchen, where family photos line a wooden curio cabinet.

“I was born right here. Right here in this house,” Gilbert Moulin says.

article-image

Gilbert learned to be a Saigneur at the age of 17, from a local man who invited him one day to help perform a tue-cochon. During the busiest times, Gilbert performed 90 between November and February. Now he does around 12, due to his age and the drop in interest from other villagers.

The practice started to decline in the 1990s, when many farmers switched to wheat and stopped raising livestock. Eventually, many children moved away and pursued jobs outside of agriculture. Fernand’s son Guy was encouraged by a teacher to go to school in Paris, where he studied engineering. He and his son, Frédéric, both still live in Bry Sur Marne, just outside the capital. This process has led shops and schools to shut their doors in what has been called the “desertification of rural France.” In some places, baguette vending machines have replaced long-revered bakeries. Local traditions are in danger of disappearing.

article-image

Marc Bibal, a veterinarian now living in a small town in the Savoie region, who is Fernand’s grandson, wants him and his son to learn how to slaughter a pig properly. “It’s a great responsibility to be the Saigneur,” he says. “If you mess up, it’s a huge deal.” He doesn’t intend to become a Saigneur himself, but hopes to keep the tradition alive for future generations of Bibals. Luckily, Gilbert, the elderly Saigneur of the village, recently took on a teenage apprentice.

article-image

The tue-cochon and the coming together of relatives brings cohesion and joy to the Bibal clan. The meat they prepare is a link to the past and a physical result of time spent together. Over the spring, the pâté tins will disappear from the pantry, and the sausages will be eaten over many dinners. Next winter, though, everyone will convene again to start the process anew.

article-image

In Istanbul, Drinking Coffee in Public Was Once Punishable by Death

0
0

Rulers throughout Europe and the Middle East once tried to ban the black brew.

article-image

In 1633, the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV cracked down on a practice he believed was provoking social decay and disunity in his capital of Istanbul. The risk of disorder associated with this practice were so dire, he apparently thought, that he declared transgressors should be immediately put to death. By some accounts, Murad IV stalked the streets of Istanbul in disguise, whipping out a 100-pound broadsword to decapitate whomever he found engaged in this illicit activity.

So what did Murad IV find so objectionable? Public coffee consumption.

Odd though it may sound, Murad IV was neither the first nor last person to crack down on coffee drinking; he was just arguably the most brutal and successful in his efforts. Between the early 16th and late 18th centuries, a host of religious influencers and secular leaders, many but hardly all in the Ottoman Empire, took a crack at suppressing the black brew.

Few of them did so because they thought coffee’s mild mind-altering effects meant it was an objectionable narcotic (a common assumption). Instead most, including Murad IV, seemed to believe that coffee shops could erode social norms, encourage dangerous thoughts or speech, and even directly foment seditious plots. In the modern world, where Starbucks is ubiquitous and innocuous, this sounds absurd. But Murad IV did have reason to fear coffee culture.

article-image

These crackdowns touched off in the 16th century because that’s when coffee reached much of the world. Coffee beans were likely known and used for centuries beforehand in Ethiopia, their point of origin. But the first clear historical evidence of grinding coffee beans and brewing them into a cup of joe dates—as the historian Ralph Hattox established in his definitive tome Coffee and Coffeehouses—to 15th century Yemen. There, local Sufi Muslim orders used the brew in mystical ceremonies, whether as a social act to foster brotherhood, a narcotic to produce spiritual intoxication, or a pragmatic concentration booster. The drink soon spread up the Red Sea, reaching Istanbul in the early 1500s and Christian Europe over the following century.

In response, reactionaries cited religious reasons to outlaw coffee. “There’s always an undercurrent of” conservative Muslims “who think that any innovation … that is distinct from the time of the prophet Muhammad should be quashed,” says Ottoman social historian Madeline Zilfi. (Reactionary tendencies are not unique to Islam; later, in Europe, religious leaders asked the Pope to ban coffee as a satanic novelty.) Justifications included that coffee intoxicated drinkers (forbidden), that it was bad for the human body (forbidden), and that roasting made it the equivalent of charcoal (forbidden for consumption). Other religious figures charged (maybe legitimately, maybe dubiously) that coffeehouses were natural magnets for licentious behaviors such as gambling, prostitution, and drug usage. Others just thought the fact that it was new was reason enough to condemn it.

article-image

But reactionary religious arguments cannot explain most of the coffee crackdowns in the Ottoman Empire. As Hattox notes, the religious establishment was hardly uniform in its opposition to coffee. Bostanzade Mehmet Efendi, the highest ranking cleric in the Ottoman world in the 1590s, even issued a poetic defense of coffee.

More often, secular authorities opposed coffee for political reasons. Before coffeehouses, Zilfi points out, there weren’t many spaces in the Ottoman Empire for people to gather, especially across social lines, and talk secular matters. Mosques offered a gathering place, but rarely accommodated long, worldly chit chat. Taverns weren’t for good Muslims, and patrons usually got ripped with people they knew, had fun, then passed out.

Coffeehouses, though, were considered acceptable for Muslims. They were cheap and lacked social restrictions, so they were accessible to everyone. The way they made coffee—slowly brewed in a special pot for almost 20 minutes, then served in a cup filled to the brim, so bitter and scalding hot that it could only be consumed in tiny sips—encouraged patrons to sit, watch whatever entertainment came through, and talk. They were a new social space that encouraged class mixing and energetic conversation about cities and governments.

That spooked the bajeezus out of elites concerned with ossifying social order in the name of stability. Which often meant their own elevated place in Ottoman society. They made it clear that they didn't like coffee shops’ public gatherings, or even the fact that the poor could suddenly patronize art, once the sole pursuit of the upper class. Authors such as 17th-century Ottoman scholar Kâtip Çelebi, a state bureaucrat from a well-to-do family, disparaged cafés as places that “diverted the people from their employments, and [where] working for one’s living fell into disfavor. Moreover, the people, from prince to beggar, amused themselves with knifing one another.”

article-image

The first recorded coffee crackdown occurred in Mecca in 1511, when Kha‘ir Beg al-Mi‘mar, a prominent secular official in a pre-Ottoman regime, caught men drinking coffee outside of a mosque and thought they looked suspicious. The details of the crackdown are disputed, but he used religious justifications to order an end to all coffee sales and consumption. Later coffee crackdowns occured in Mecca (again), Cairo (multiple times), and Istanbul and other Ottoman areas.

These early suppression efforts were motivated by politics, religion, or a mix of the two, but they were sporadic and short-lived. The 1511 Mecca crackdown, for instance, ended within weeks, when a higher political authority told al-Ma‘mir to continue suppressing questionable meetings but let people have their coffee already. The Ottomans were reportedly sporadic in their bans as well; coffee was just too popular and profitable. By the end of the 16th century, the Ottoman court had an official coffee maker, hundreds of coffeehouses dotted Istanbul, and the government officially declared coffee and coffeehouses writ large licit.

Murad IV, though, had particular reason to hate coffee culture. In his childhood, explains Ottoman political historian Baki Tezcan, his brother Osman II was deposed and brutally murdered by the janissaries, a military group that had grown increasingly autonomous and discontented. A year later, they deposed his uncle. Thereafter, they installed Murad IV as a child ruler. He lived in fear of janissary rebellions—and suffered several minor uprisings in his early reign. During one rebellion, says Tezcan, “they hung people close to him. One was his close personal companion, Musa … somebody with whom he used to drink. He might even have been an erotic male friend.”

article-image

This, says Tezcan, “left Murad IV really angry. He gradually, slowly took power into his own hands in a very draconian manner. That really pushed him to become the person remembered as Murad IV,” a notoriously power- and order-obsessed absolutist, quick to resort to lethal force.

Murad IV knew that demobilized or under-employed janissaries frequented coffee shops—and used them to plot coups. Some coffeehouses eventually used janissary troupe insignia as their signage. Murad IV was also likely aware, argues Ottoman historian Emingül Karababa, that a conservative religious movement, which opposed Sufis and social innovations connected to them, including coffeehouses, was rising in his empire. “He did not want to have tension and uprisings in the society under his rule,” as he sought to wrest control from the janissaries, argues Karababa. So it was doubly in his interest to oppose coffeehouses.

The Sultan’s decision to impose the death penalty for all public coffee drinking, though, was all about his own cruel streak. Murad IV also imposed the death penalty on public tobacco and opium consumption and closed taverns, other sources of supposed vice and disorder. He killed soldiers for minor infractions, and in the worst stories about him, he flew into blind, middle-of-the-night rages and ran into the streets half naked to murder anyone he came across. Given all the grim stories, Tezcan suspects there could be a grain of truth to tales of him stalking Istanbul in disguise with a broadsword. After all, chroniclers of the time wrote approvingly of his brutality—these tales weren’t meant as slander.

article-image

Murad IV never banned coffee wholesale. He just went after coffeehouses, and only in the capital, where a janissary uprising would pose the most risk to his rule. Murad IV kept on drinking coffee—and liquor—himself, and tolerated consumption so long as it occurred in socially homogeneous households.

The Sultan’s successors continued his policies, to greater or lesser degrees. By the mid-1650s, over a decade after Murad IV’s death, Çelebi wrote that Istanbul’s coffeehouses were still “as desolate as the heart of the ignorant.” Although by that time a first coffee drinking offense resulted in just a beating; only a second offense would get a coffee drinker sewn into a bag and thrown into the Bosporus. But coffee culture survived in the background, and popped right back under more lax or unconcerned rulers later in the century.

Yet even after seeing the resilience of coffee culture at home, and likely knowing about the failure of 17th-century coffeehouse bans in Europe (documented by coffee historian Markman Ellis), Ottoman sultans sporadically issued and abandoned new bans well into the 18th century. This may seem quixotic, but, Zilfi points out, the goal wasn’t really to eliminate the drink, or even coffeehouses. Crackdowns were likely considered successful, she notes, as long as they made it harder for the janissaries or other dissidents to mobilize, and unnecessary if a ruler felt secure in his power.

article-image

By the late 18th century, though, more secular meeting places had emerged, and dissident groups were more entrenched. Shuttering coffeehouses was no longer a go-to dissent crusher, so the bans stopped—although rulers still posted spies in them to monitor anti-regime chatter, a practice some autocrats maintain to this day.

Murad IV, then, was an exceptionally brutal man. But he was not some insane reactionary. Instead, he and his peers speak to the power that a new commodity, such as coffee or tobacco, can have: Something as simple as creating a new culinary venue can wash away old mores and open up new spaces for engagement and thought. They speak to the horror and reactionary politics such innovations, such critical thoughts and challenges to accepted norms, can provoke.

Coffee culture won out against religious and political conservatism, though, and now we live in the world of Starbucks. And won’t it be surprising to see which social innovations stirring up apocalyptic prophecies today become as ubiquitous and uninteresting as the green mermaid logo a century or two down the road?

The Caribbean-Americans Searching for Their Chinese Roots

0
0

Hakka Conferences are allowing distant relatives to meet and untangle their complex genealogy.

article-image

Ricardo Hoyen likes to joke that he was kidnapped. He was born in Jamaica, where he grew up in Kingston, but was sent to New York City to live with an aunt when he was 15, in 1964. “I thought I was coming to visit the World’s Fair,” he says. “I didn’t know it was to stay.”

In New York, Hoyen (who goes by the nickname Ricky) attended the High School of Commerce, located where Lincoln Center now stands. “I was accused of not speaking English because they couldn’t understand my accent,” he recalls. ”And when I said I was from Jamaica one of my teachers called me a liar.” (Hoyen also has black and European ancestry, through a French-Cuban grandmother, but is usually perceived as Chinese.) The fervor of the sixties was in full swing, and Hoyen plunged in: protesting the Vietnam War, frequenting jazz clubs, traveling south to march against the KKK, and dabbling in Harlem’s black nationalist scene, among the followers of Marcus Garvey.

Through it all, he pined for Jamaica. He often made an effort to seek out other Chinese Caribbeans, many of whom who worked in restaurants and bakeries throughout Harlem, Crown Heights in Brooklyn, and Chinatown. Like Hoyen, those people were part of a larger wave of diaspora who left the Caribbean throughout the 1960s,‘70s, and ‘80s, and now live elsewhere around the world. “I say I was kidnapped because life was wonderful in Jamaica,” Hoyen says. “If you had ever lived there, you would never want to leave.”

Lately, the search for connection to his past has taken Hoyen to a new semi-annual gathering called the New York Hakka Conference, the local version of many such conferences around the world. Most Chinese who, like both of Hoyen’s grandfathers, migrated from Southern China to Jamaica throughout the 19th or early 20th century were Hakka, a group of people originating in China with a distinct set of customs and a language also called Hakka. Because of that, and because the New York Hakka Conference is organized by a woman with ties to Jamaica, the event has become a magnet for not only the usual dispersed Chinese Hakka who attend such events , but in particular for Afro-Chinese-Caribbean people who wish to learn more about their roots. The vagaries of personal relationships, the great geographic distances that members of the Chinese and Afro-Caribbean diaspora have traversed, and the twists and turns of history have meant that many such families have become separated. But some of them are looking to reconnect.

article-image

Paula Madison, the 65-year-old organizer of the New York Hakka Conference, grew up in Harlem always wondering about her Chinese grandfather, Samuel Lowe. All she knew was that he had migrated to Jamaica in 1905, established several general stores, and had Madison’s mother, Nell Vera Lowe, with a local Afro-Jamaican woman named Albertha Campbell in 1918. The couple split up when Nell was three, after Samuel Lowe said he was betrothed to a Chinese woman who was coming to Jamaica, and that he wanted to raise the child with his Chinese wife. Albertha refused, and Nell never saw her father again. When Nell was 15, she traveled to the town where his store was, and learned that he had moved back to China , after trying unsuccessfully to find her. Madison speculates he left due to a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment that flared up in Jamaica during the 1930s. His brothers, who were still in Jamaica, gave Nell a pair of pearl earrings he had left behind for her.

article-image

Nell eventually moved to the United States, where she died in 2006. But in 2012, Madison was able to track down her grandfather’s ancestral village and burial site in China, thanks to a Hakka conference she attended in Toronto. (A large proportion of Chinese Jamaicans who left the island during the 1960s and ‘70s resettled in Toronto.) During the conference, Paula approached the organizer, Jamaican-born Keith Lowe, because of his last name, and several cross-continental phone calls and emails later, the two figured out they were distant cousins from the same ancestral village in China. Madison has now gained 300 new Chinese relatives, whom she visits several times a year. She also boasts that she has successfully convinced her relatives to add her mother to the family’s 3,000-year-old jiapu, or genealogy record, which normally only includes men.

article-image

Madison has written a book and produced a documentary about her search, both called Finding Samuel Lowe. During speaking engagements about the book and film, Madison was frequently approached by people—many of them, like herself, mixed-race Americans with parents from the Caribbean and a Chinese grandfather—about how to track down their own Chinese relatives. In 2015, cousin Keith successfully convinced Madison—a retired NBC executive who gives off an immediate air of “gets things done”—to organize a New York Hakka conference. There, many people also asked for roots-seeking advice. For the second New York Hakka Conference in 2017, Madison booked representatives from several organizations in the Caribbean, the U.S., and China who help people trace their ancestry.

article-image

The Caribbean has a long history of Chinese (and Indian) migration—one intertwined with transatlantic slavery. The British first brought Chinese and Indian workers to the Islands to replace slave labor on sugar plantations after Britain abolished slavery in 1834. (Initially, they used indentured servants from Ireland and Germany, but quickly turned East.) From 1853–1884, a recorded 17,904 Chinese—mostly men from Guangdong Province in southeast China—migrated to the British West Indies as indentured laborers, according to scholar Walton Look Lai. Some 160,000 migrated to the Caribbean overall (including Cuba). They were a fraction of a much larger wave, driven by turmoil in China—political and social unrest, the Taiping Rebellion, and a population explosion—that sent some 7.5 million Chinese migrating all over the world throughout the 19th century, including 125,000 to Cuba, and 100,000 to Peru.

The experiences of indentured laborers varied. For some, it was a genuine opportunity to sail to the Caribbean, work three to five years, and return to China relatively well-off. There were also many, however, who were kidnapped or tricked into going, and died overseas under conditions not much better than slavery. Some men stayed on after their contracts ended, and through village networks, more kinsmen came to join them. In Jamaica, they rose over time to become a merchant class, heavily associated with grocery stores.

Through the decades, many Caribbeans have migrated onwards to still other countries, which has added to the difficulty families have in locating each other. Both the U.S. and the U.K. recruited workers from the Caribbean during WWI and WWII. After WWII, there was still more need for labor in Britain that the country largely filled with people from throughout its empire. The 1961 census in Great Britain showed roughly 200,000 West Indians in England, half of them from Jamaica. Many Caribbeans (as well as people from Asia) migrated to the U.S. after Congress passed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated national-origin quotas that had previously allocated the vast majority of immigration visas to people from northern and western Europe. During the 1970s, Jamaica’s growing closeness with Cuba spurred fears the island would turn communist, which caused many Jamaicans, especially Chinese Jamaicans, to leave. Many also left due to a wave of anti-Chinese violence on the island in 1965.

At a church community center in Manhattan’s Chinatown last fall, around 100 people from as far afield as Jamaica, Cuba, Mauritius, Miami, and Atlanta gathered for the second ever New York Hakka Conference. They took part in Hakka cooking demonstrations, watched a presentation about “tulou” architecture in Fujian, China, and learned about efforts to restore the Chinese cemetery in Havana.

article-image

Included among the speakers were representatives from several roots-seeking organizations. These included a Chinese Trinidadian named Felicia Chang, whose company Plantain helps people research and organize their family history into books and other story-friendly formats; a Brit named Clotilde Yap who works for a Beijing-based company called My China Roots; and Robert Hew, a member of the Chinese Benevolent Association of Jamaica, who has spent decades helping other people track down their roots in China, and only just located his own ancestral village a few months ago.

As audience members nodded and took notes, the speakers discussed the vagaries of Chinese name translation. (The surname pronounced “Qiu” in Mandarin, for example, was often rendered “Hew” or “Hugh” in Jamaica, a sort of British take on Hakka pronunciation, but might become “Yau” upon passing through Hong Kong due to Cantonese-speaking ship stewards. Still other dialects and romanization systems render it Chiu or Khoo or Khoe.) Speakers also rattled off the ins and outs of navigating records maintained by entities ranging from the Mormon Church to British shipping companies to Trinidadian newspapers. In between sessions, attendees approached them for more detailed advice.

article-image

For many Afro-Chinese-Caribbeans, tracking down the Chinese side of their family offers the best hope for learning anything about their ancestry. “I began researching the African side of my family long before the Chinese one,” Paula Madison said. “But I know much more about my Chinese grandfather than my African family. Why? Because of that ugly institution called slavery.”

Among the people taking notes at the conference was a woman in her 50s, wearing a red silk Chinese-style jacket. Later, over a lunch of oxtail stew in Chinatown, the woman, a psychiatric nurse practitioner named Carole Chin, said that like Ricky Hoyen, she had moved to the U.S. from Jamaica as a child, when her mother immigrated as a healthcare worker. She had visited China for the first time a few years earlier, and hoped to someday track down the village where her Chinese great-grandfather came from. She had a copy of his birth certificate, but felt stymied by the task of figuring out the characters of his Chinese name. She also mentioned that her desire to learn her family’s history was spurred in part by the death of her brother. Hoyen, too, had said that he felt compelled to attend the conference because his aunt—the person who had been the family historian, whom everyone went to with questions about the past—had died.

“I think to my relatives in Jamaica, it’s not interesting, because they’re used to it,” Chin said. “For them it’s like, yeah there are Chinese people here, we’re intermarried with Chinese—so what? It’s those of us who have left who are curious. Because we’re all in America and feeling different.” She also spoke glowingly about her experience at the Hakka Conference. “I’m a New Yorker, so I go to Chinatown all the time,” she said. But the conference activities had made her feel more connected to a neighborhood—and city—that for more than a century, has served as a crossroads of migration from around the world. “I feel like it’s my home now,” she said. “I really feel like: this is my place.”

The Lesbian Pulp Fiction That Saved Lives

0
0

How potboilers and pin-ups showed gay and bisexual women they were not alone.

When Reva Hutkin's friend from night school offered to lend her something to read, it must have seemed wholly innocent. It was the early 1960s, in Montreal, and Hutkin had recently married at 21. At the time, she says, marriage "was the only way a young woman could get out of her house."

Her friend presented her with one salacious-looking book, then another, and another—she had "millions" of the volumes, Hutkin remembers, with the same “wonderful” covers and suggestive taglines: "twilight women," "forbidden love," "illicit passion." Once Hutkin was hooked on the stories, her friend made a confession: "I think I'm like that."

At first, Hutkin says, she was horrified. Then, she was bewildered. Finally, she wondered whether she might, in fact, be "like that," too. Soon after, the two became lovers; Hutkin left her husband, and they began a new life together.

Not every first encounter with lesbian pulp fiction was so transformative. But for many women of the 1950s and 1960s, these slim paperbacks were pivotal, and sometimes even life-saving. Within their pages lay physical proof that they were not entirely alone in the world. "It was an era of just incredible isolation—a lot of us grew up thinking that we were the only ones," says the writer Katherine V. Forrest, who compiled the 2005 anthology Lesbian Pulp Fiction. "The books were like water in the desert."

article-image

In her introduction to the anthology, Forrest describes chancing upon Ann Bannon's Odd Girl Out for sale in Detroit, Michigan. The year was 1957, and she was 18. "I did not need to look at the title for clues; the cover leaped out at me from the drugstore rack: a young woman with sensuous intent on her face seated on a bed, leaning over a prone woman, her hands on the other woman's shoulders," she writes. "Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register. Fear so intense that I remember nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary to me as air."

Forrest's experience was not atypical. In a 1995 essay, Donna Allegra recounts grappling with feelings of embarrassment and shame on her way up to the front desk. But however hard she found it, she wrote, "It was absolutely necessary for me to have them. I needed them the way I needed food and shelter for survival."

Women like Allegra and Forrest didn't have to look far for their fix: America’s drug stores and airport bookstores sold lesbian pulp fiction quite openly. The novels were displayed cheek-to-jowl with stories of alien invasions and Nazi torture. Pulp novels had tawdry titles, conspicuous covers, and taglines that promised readers everything from “the sex traps of vacationing she-wolves” to a glimpse into "the intimate sex needs of America's 900,000 young widows."


Publishers likely never intended any of these books to tumble into the hands of impressionable young women, and certainly not those about lesbian love. A publishing revolution in the 1940s had put millions of inexpensive paperbacks in the pockets of soldiers—a democratic way to entertain troops that transformed the way people thought about paperback books. Pulp fiction was the end result. The books offered as many racy subgenres as there were sexual proclivities, all marketed to the men who had now come back from the war. They were cheap and disposable, designed to be read and tossed out. Yet the most successful among them sold in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions—and many of these were lesbian pulps.

Tereska Torrès' 1950 novel, Women's Barracks, is often cited as the first example in the genre, and the one that launched hundreds more. Inspired by her own experiences of the war, the novel tells the tales of torrid affairs between butch officer types and their femme subordinates. It sold some 2.5 million copies, and was the 244th best-selling novel in the United States before 1975, despite being banned for obscenity in multiple states.

article-image

Marijane Meaker's Spring Fire, published two years later under her pseudonym Vin Packer, sold a similarly eye-watering 1.5 million copies, while the male novelist Jess Stearn's The Sixth Man spent 12 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The potential for huge sales shone a light on these books and earned the “frothy” novels places on the review pages of even quite serious newspapers. In 1952, a male reviewer at the Times called Claire Morgan's The Price of Salt "pretty unexciting"—though he was likely far from its intended readership. (It forms the inspiration for the British film Carol, released in 2015.)

Lesbianism was such a popular theme for pulp, one writer explained to the New York Times in September 1965, because the reader "gets two immoral women for the price of one." For many readers, this may have been the case—certainly, a significant portion of the books were as homophobic as their covers. Set in women's dorm rooms or prisons, a significant portion are seamy "true accounts," written by men with women's pseudonyms, and marketed as cheap thrills to male readers.

But perhaps 50 titles were written by women, for women. The scholar Yvonne Keller calls these "pro-lesbian," as opposed to the more common "virile adventure." The pro-lesbian novels are the ones that changed women's lives, and in so doing, passed the test of time—the books of Marijane Meaker, Valerie Taylor, Artemis Smith, and Ann Bannon. These authors wrote for women, and it showed. "I did hope women would find them and read them," says Bannon, a doyenne of the genre, now in her mid-eighties. "I wasn't quite sure enough of my skill or ability to reach them, or even how widely the books were distributed, to hope that they would do some good in the world. But I certainly had that in the back of my mind."

In fact, she says, she scarcely thought about her male audience, and so was blindsided by her publishers' choice of cover illustration. The characters within were complex and three-dimensional, but those on the covers were either waifish and gamine, or pneumatic and heavy-lidded with passion. "That artwork was meant to draw in men through prurient interest," she says—a far cry from her original intent. But if as many men had not bought them, she says, they might never have been so widely disseminated, or have fallen into the hands of the people who needed them the most.

article-image

In burgeoning lesbian communities, pulp novels were treasured and passed from person to person. The author Lee Lynch, now in her 70s, was part of a group of "gay kids" in New York, who met up and sat in Pam Pam's, a sticky ice-cream parlor on 6th Avenue. "I just remember the milling about that took place there, of kids, of gay kids," she says. "We were not ashamed, together. Maybe it was a folly of however many, of the multitudes, that when we were all together, even if we didn't know each other, we could talk about the books." They’d buy flimsy softcovers from a newspaper store and read the books until they were dog-eared and tatty—before secreting them away, far from their families' prying eyes.

Lynch describes herself as hugely fortunate to have had this kind of circle, including a first girlfriend, Susie. But for those who didn't, the books were perhaps even more valuable. In a 1983 essay in the lesbian magazine On Our Backs, Roberta Yusba writes: "The pulps also reached isolated small-town lesbians who could read them and see that they were not the only lesbians in the world."

In 1983, the lesbian publisher Naiad Press reprinted a selection of the best lesbian pulp novels. Bannon's were among them. These books were cherished not necessarily for their literary value, but as an early blueprint for lesbian life, all centered around a utopian Greenwich Village. Without older lesbians or bisexual women within their community, lesbian pulp fiction was often the only model women had. And while the books weren't perfect, they were significantly better than the vacuum that had preceded them.

In the 1950s, Bannon says, homosexuality was often spoken of as a kind of pathogen: You weren't just sick, you were contaminated and contagious—especially to the young and impressionable. "You didn't want to have, or to acknowledge having, gay friends, or to be consorting with gay people, or defending them," she says. "And I think at the root of that was a lot of anxiety about converting children to a gay life, because it seemed to be so seductive and fascinating that merely having contact with a gay person or reading a gay book would lead you down the wrong path."

Many of the women who read these books and came out to their peers in the 1960s and 1970s never told their families, dodging questions for decades about their apparent singledom and lack of children. Though Lynch remembers prevailing feminist wisdom that said that you had a responsibility to come out to your parents, she struggled to find a way to do so that wouldn't "basically ruin [her mother's] life." Her mother had, on one occasion, walked in on Lynch with Susie, that first girlfriend, but chose to ignore what she saw. "She would have thought I was going to burn in hell," she says.

article-image

Even though Bannon wrote lesbian pulp fiction for lesbian and bisexual women, coming out was impossible. She had married an engineer shortly after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, then written her first book, Odd Girl Out, in her home in suburban Pennsylvania at 22. It was published under a pseudonym. (Her birth name is Ann Weldy; she chose Bannon from a list of her husband's customers.)

At first, Bannon says, she hoped the books might be a launchpad into a career as a writer. "I did think I could write, and I did want to do it, and I did need to get started somewhere. I was about as ignorant as anybody could have been back then," she says, laughing. She had read Vin Packer's Spring Fire and wrote to its author, Marijane Meaker, who put her in touch with her editor at Gold Medal Books. Odd Girl Out would go on to be the publisher's second best-selling title of 1957. It launched a series of six books, later known as the Beebo Brinker Chronicles, after their charismatic heroine, who shows up in New York at 18 and finds her way there as a butch lesbian.

Throughout this time, Bannon was living a kind of double existence, split between married life in Pennsylvania, and occasional weeklong visits to see friends in Greenwich Village. Hearing her talk about these visits, you get the sense that they were as much to research the books, as she told her husband, as they were an exploration into what could be, what alternatives she might have had.

Bannon recalls walking through the Village alone late at night—"I mean, I must have been out of my mind, but I wasn't even afraid"—and staying in bars until two or three in the morning, talking to women for inspiration for the books. She was surrounded by people who were "young and adventurous and willing to try things" and, she says, "I was sort of pretending to be single. Those trips to the Village, I really was beginning to wonder if I'd done the right thing to get married, and trying to rethink my life a little bit."

article-image

Her husband never read the books, and only really reconciled himself to them when they began bringing in significant amounts of money. Bannon remembers tense evenings typing away with the children in bed, while her husband sat in the other room and watched television. Eventually, the marriage broke down, and Bannon abandoned her writing career for the good of her children, and a successful career in academia.

But this brief foray into fiction had helped lay the ground for decades of lesbian writing, as gay and bisexual women came to realize how much they needed to be represented in print. Lynch remembers going from one section to the next in libraries and bookstores, in pursuit of some kind of literary mirror. "I was driven," she wrote in an essay, "searching for my nourishment like a starveling, grabbing at any crumb that looked, tasted, or smelled digestible." She read the pulps and what few other early lesbian novels there were, such as Radclyffe Hall's 1928 The Well of Loneliness—but venturing deeper into the library yielded "crumbs" that were sometimes quite toxic. "I would go to the criminology section," she says, "in the sociology area, because there were lesbians in those books."

She remembers one rattling 45-minute subway ride back to Flushing, Queens, from the Village, with her then-girlfriend, Susie. "We were acting out, you know, being out lesbian kids in front of a carload of presumably straight people," she says. "All of a sudden, Susie said to me, ‘You know, we're actually juvenile delinquents. What we do is against the law.'" She pauses. "I hadn't thought of it like that before—I actually probably didn't even know that." By the age of 15, she says, "Our self-image was already, ‘You're a criminal, and sick, and rejects, you're societal rejects.' To find anything about ourselves was extremely exciting."

article-image

The pulps weren't like that. Their messages might have been mixed, but they acknowledged feelings these young women had without writing them off. In her introduction to Lesbian Pulp Fiction, Forrest describes the books as life-saving: In some cases, this was literally true. Bannon recalls a young woman who later became a good friend. She had reached a point of "absolute despair," she told Bannon, and planned to cast herself off the big bridge that ran through her city. Then, on the day she resolved to do it, she passed a drugstore and saw Odd Girl Out, Bannon's 1957 novella, on the shelves. She bought it, sat down, read the whole thing—and then went home for dinner.

"You hear things like that and it just turns your heart over. I don't know how many there were who went through that, but that anyone should have gone home for dinner, instead of jumping off the bridge…" says Bannon, her voice catching. "Oh, my goodness—I mean, you never get over that."

The impact of that representation was tremendous. Lesbian pulp novels appear again and again in lesbian memoirs and personal essays, always with the same mingling of pleasure and pain. In Kate Millett's 1974 autobiography, Flying, for instance, she describes herself hoarding them, "because they were the only books where one woman kissed another, touched her, transported to read finally in a book what had been the dearest part of my experience recognized at last in print." She hid them away in a drawer until she left the country for Japan. "Afraid the sublet might find them, I burned them before I set out."

article-image

In the best cases, the books weren't just proof that lesbians existed, but that they could be proud of who they were and what they wanted. Ten years before Stonewall, Artemis Smith's 1959 novel Odd Girl, shows this confrontation with the hero, Anne, and her father:

"No daughter of mine is going to be a—a lesbian!" He said the word with intense hate.
"I'm afraid you have nothing to say about that," Anne said quietly. "I am what I am."
"You're a victim of this—this awful woman," her father sputtered. "She has you hypnotized!"
"No, Dad," Anne continued, quietly, "I have always been this way. I won't be changed by you or anyone else. This is the first time my life has really felt right and happy."
"You are breaking the laws of nature—" her father said.
"The law I'm breaking is against nature," Anne returned, strongly. "The law will have to be changed."

But not every book was quite so affirming, nor quite so radical. The ones by men made no real effort to reach female readers, and even women writers were at the behest of their publishers, who forced them to introduce sad endings. Readers, they said, didn't want to see these women happy and fulfilled by their lesbian dalliances. So heroines threw themselves off high things, renounced their sexuality, or were abandoned by their lovers and went mad with grief. Even novelists with the very best intentions were not immune to these demands. By the time Bannon was writing, she says, the pressure had lessened only a little. She wasn't required to kill off her protagonists, at least, but giving them a happy ending was virtually unfathomable.

All of this, Lynch writes, had a somewhat ambivalent effect on both her incipient pride and her self-esteem. On the one hand, the books were validating, insofar as "they acknowledged the existence of lesbians." On the other, they left little room for hope. "The characters were more miserable than Sartre's, and despised as well."

For Hutkin, in Montreal, who had no lesbian community to speak of, the books provided a deeply depressing exemplar. They changed her life only by showing her that "another kind of me" was possible, she says. "Those books had terrible, awful endings. No lesbian ever should buy those books! They all had to be saved by some man, or some horrible tragedy befell them. I mean—they weren't happy books, or anything. They were awful." Even when she realized that she had feelings for her friend at night school, with whom she later spent almost a decade, "I fought with that all the way. I didn't want to be like that."

article-image

Characters' love lives mostly played out in bars, and particularly in Greenwich Village—and so, desperate to find their people like them, Hutkin and her girlfriend traveled from Canada to the Village in search of "the lesbians." In the books, she remembers, there was a clear binary between butches and femmes. "There seemed to be nothing in between, so we dressed appropriately." Her girlfriend put on a dress, and Hutkin selected the most masculine outfit she owned: pants, and a red blazer. The journey took all day, but when they arrived, the lesbians were nowhere to be found.

"We just looked around, and didn't see anything that looked like dykes," she says, laughing. "We were pretty innocent, we knew nothing. We were in our early 20s and had never encountered any of this stuff, except in these books, which obviously weren't really true to life." From the books, she says, they assumed it would be obvious, that you could walk down the street and see bars and restaurants with "Lesbians!" lit up in lights. Instead, despite asking passers-by and taxi drivers where they were, they didn't find the lesbians—so they spent the night in New York, and then went back to Canada.

Of course, there were lesbians in Greenwich Village, even if Hutkin and her partner didn't come across them. Much of Bannon's inspiration for the books came from little details she saw while visiting. It's hard to acknowledge now, she says, but these darker aspects of her characters' lives weren't necessarily unrepresentative: It was simply very hard to exist as a gay or lesbian person at that time. Knowing how to show that wasn't always easy.

"I remember learning that high school kids, for example, would come down to Greenwich Village on the weekends," she says. "They walked around where they knew lesbians were living, and terrorized them, and threatened to come back in the night, and kill them, or kill their pets." This discovery made its way into one of her books—in a fashion. In a perverse, alcohol-fueled attempt to win back a lover, her heroine, Beebo Brinker, brutally kills her own dog. "I have been sorry ever since," Bannon says, "because it wouldn't have been the woman herself. It would have been one of these gangster kids egging each other on. And even the kids would have grown up and been scandalized that they did such an ugly thing."

The books, she says, are a product of their environment, and of a time when people were under colossal stress from constant marginalization—a cultural context in which straight people genuinely believed that their LGBT peers had "perversely chosen and pursued their lives" to defy the norms of those around them. "That these people were deliberately attracting attention to themselves and that whatever punishment they received they deserved." It's hard for the books not to reflect that context, Bannon says. "It takes a while to step out of that mindset—to get away from it." She pictures herself looking back at the time as from the summit of some imaginary hill. "You begin to realize that you were being fed a line of nonsense because people didn't know any better."

Their re-release in the 1980s, and Bannon's subsequent "outing" to the general public as Ann Weldy brought that tension to the fore. Some 1980s readers thought of them with tremendous affection, certainly—but others saw them as a vestige of a more unhappy time, with a roaring undercurrent of homophobia just barely out of sight. The journalist Joy Parks, in one 1980s review, describes her teeth being "set on edge" by their apoliticism, and the way these women are consistently referred to as "girls." "These romances have a genuine, down to earth, life-in-the-raw quality, plus love scenes that appear very fresh and (I hate to say it) rather sweet in their innocence and lack of graphic detail," she writes. "But the fringe life of the lesbian of the ‘50s and ‘60s lacks something vital: self-love, pride, dignity."

Around the same time, the writer Andrea Loewenstein, who had loved the books in her youth, struggled to respond to friends who found them "boring and badly written." Other acquaintances, she wrote, were angered and upset by them and the bitter past they represented. But ignoring that challenging recent history, she writes, borders on revisionism. "It is important for us, as readers, to remember that other lesbian writers were drawing different conclusions from the same … life evidence," Loewenstein concludes. "But it is also important to understand and to bear witness to the kind of pain which is behind the clichéd writing in these "pulp" novels. This pain and self-hatred is not our only past. But it is a part of it."

article-image

The novels have two important legacies: First, they showed lesbians that hope and community were possible. And second, they helped to kick-start a rich tradition of lesbian writing. As a teenager, Lynch loved these books, writing down cherished passages on yellow note cards. (She still has them today.) As an adult, she says, they instilled in her a commitment to writing books that could inspire lesbians, in a way that she had never had. "The books were bombarding you with negative stereotypes," she says, "but inside, I was in love with my girlfriend. We were really proud of being gay." Today, she says, she identifies as a lesbian writer "who only wants to make lesbians happier, by reading my books. The positives came out of the negative, I think."

Though it may have started with Beebo, Laura, Stephen, Carol, and so many other troubled heroines who were doomed to suicide, misery, the loss of a child, or marriage, the same was not true for many of their readers. Instead, these sad stories were simply a prologue to their own happy ones.

It was a "rocky beginning" in Detroit in the 1950s, Forrest says, but it had a happy ending. "I've met some wonderful women along the way, and have been very lucky to have been loved by a few of them. It's been a good life." Hutkin never did find the legendary lesbians of Greenwich Village, but eventually found a community of people like herself through the women's movement. She has a daughter and a grandchild and lives with her partner of over a decade in Victoria, Canada. Lynch had a successful career as a writer and novelist and eventually married. She lives with her wife in the Pacific Northwest.

After Bannon's divorce, she did not remarry and instead threw herself into her academic work. She thinks of the books almost as an alternate life she constructed for herself on the page, "bits and pieces of which I would have liked to have lived. It became sort of a satisfying outlet, where perhaps, looking back, it should have been a lived experience instead of an imagined experience. It was to some degree," she says, "in those brief little vacations when I was up there and was fully into it. But it was also—it seemed just beyond my reach, something you could see through a window, but you couldn't pass through. You could visit, but you couldn't live there."

Remembering One of the Most Violent Days in the History of the U.S. Senate

0
0

On May 22, 1856, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives caned a Senator into unconsciousness.

article-image

In late May of 1856, Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, stood up in front of his colleagues and employed a prescient metaphor. He was speaking on what was then known as the "Kansas Question:" whether new United States territories, such as Kansas, should be allowed to legalize slavery through a popular vote. While the Senate's many pro-slavery members supported such an option, Sumner and his abolitionist colleagues did not. Congress had been arguing about it for years.

In his speech, Sumner aligned his fellow abolitionists with the Declaration of Independence, and his opponents with an opposite doctrine, one that let the powerful make decisions on behalf of the many. "Now these two principles... must grapple on this floor," he said. These words were both powerful and prophetic. Just a few days later, Sumner would find himself bleeding in the Senate chambers, the victim of a literal political attack.

Sumner's speech was long and impassioned. It started on May 19, and ended up spilling over into following day, lasting five hours in total. "Compelling [Kansas] to the hateful embrace of Slavery," he said, would be an "uncommon tragedy"—one that would give a victory to those who would "disregard the Constitution, the laws, and all the great examples of our history," and would push the country even further toward civil war.

article-image

Over the course of the speech, Sumner called out a number of his colleagues, but two senators in particular bore the brunt of his ire: Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Together, they had authored the Kansas-Nebraska act, which held that the question of slavery in each territory should be decided by popular sovereignty, rather than kept off the table entirely.

Sumner compared Douglas and Butler to two literary buffoons, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In the speech itself, he called Butler an "incoherent" rambler who "cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder." He had committed himself to "the harlot Slavery,"—a mistress who was "ugly to others" and "polluted in the sight of the world," but was "lovely to him" and "chaste in his sight." He even offered Butler sarcastic praise, calling him "Heroic knight! Exalted senator!" and "A second Moses come for a second exodus." At one point, Douglas directly challenged him, and he pulled no punches, comparing him to a "noisome, nameless animal," who "fills the Senate with offensive odor."

article-image

Sumner thought the speech went well—well enough that a few days later, on May 22, he sat down at his desk in the Senate chamber with a stack of printed copies, preparing to mail them to fans and constituents. It was then that Representative Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina entered the chamber. In a later statement to a Senate investigatory committee, a witness named Joseph Nicholson recalled watching Brooks approach Sumner with surprise, and described what followed:

"I saw Colonel Brooks lean on and over the desk of Senator Sumner, and seemingly say something to him, and instantly, while Senator Sumner was in the act of rising, Colonel Brooks struck him over the head with a dark-colored walking cane, which blow he repeated twice or three times, and with rapidity. I think several blows had been inflicted before Senator Sumner was fully in possession of his locomotion, and extricated from his desk, which was thrown over or broken from its fastenings…

As soon as Senator Sumner was free from the desk he moved down the narrow passage way under the impetuous drive of his adversary, with his hands up as though to ward off the blows which were rained on his head with as much quickness as was possible for any man to use a cane on another whom he was intent on chastising."

article-image

Sumner was eventually carried out, unconscious and bleeding, while Brooks left the chambers unscathed. He later told two colleagues that he had meant to punish Sumner for what he considered to be "an atrocious libel on South Carolina." He added that no one had interrupted him—possibly because another South Carolina representative, Laurence Keitt, was apparently backing him up with a brandished pistol—and that he only stopped at all "because I had punished [Sumner] to my satisfaction."

An investigation and criminal trial failed to punish Brooks in turn, and although he eventually resigned, it was a token gesture: He was quickly re-elected, and happily took back his seat. (He died early the next year, at the age of 37, after a bout of croup.) Meanwhile, it took Sumner three years to recover from his injuries and return to the Senate.

This wasn't the last Congressional fight: Two years later, Keitt would start a full-on brawl on the House floor. But it was a particularly loaded one. "These two men, in many important ways, personified the clash between North and South," writes historian Williamjames Hull Hoffer in his account of the attack. "In the caning one can see, as if in a perfect mirror, the sectional differences... that split the nation and brought the war." The winner, of course, would be different.

How to See Lava Most Clearly

0
0

You'd think it would be simple enough to see bright-red molten rock.

article-image

You’d think it wouldn’t be hard to see lava: If there’s a red hot stream of molten rock in the vicinity, you'd definitely know, right? But one of the best ways to visualize lava flows is by capturing their heat, using thermal imaging cameras.

In the image above, the United States Geological Survey has mapped the fissure systems and lava flows of the eruption at Kīlauea in Hawaii, by flying over the area with handheld thermal cameras and knitting the images together into one map. The brightest areas—the white lines—represent the hottest parts of the lava field.

article-image

Sometimes, lava flows actually can be hard to track visually, if they sneak down into cracks or, for smaller flows, are shielded by forest cover. Thermal imaging can reveal volcanic activity under these conditions, and even help monitor lava conditions under the ground, before an eruption. The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory also uses thermal images gathered by satellites to track volcanic activity during periods when there’s not a destructive lava flow coursing across the land.

As the USGS notes, as of May 21, 2018, when this image was captured, the primary lava flows were coming from the area between Fissure 20 and 22 (F20 and F22 on the map). But what the thermal cameras don’t capture is how dramatic that can flow is up close. Here are some additional photos the USGS captured at fissure 22.

article-image
article-image

Found in the Trash: A Rare World War I Artillery Shell

0
0

Nothing like an explosive discovery on garbage day.

article-image

One Ontarian has gotten away with life and limb after stumbling upon a live artillery shell in the most unexpected place.

Last Tuesday, on garbage day, Danny Vellow was heading to a doctor’s appointment in the southwestern city of London. He hopped the fence in his backyard, and landed on what looked like a giant bullet, next to a full trash bag.

"Lo and behold, I almost stepped on the bomb. I was like, 'Holy heck, eh?" Vellow told CBC.

He dialed 911, reported the discovery, and a police officer arrived at the scene. When Vellow pointed out that the explosive was a mere three feet away from the vehicle, the police office slowly backed "way down on the other side of the street,"and called for the bomb squad. Just as a precaution.

The Canadian Forces Explosive Ordnance Disposal determined the shell was indeed live, filled with 20 to 30 pounds of explosives, and dated back to the first World War. Shells from this era are quite common in Europe, where much of the two major wars were fought, how did a shell turn up oceans away in London, Ontario?

"There are old military ordnances and firearms out there. Some people collect them, have them, they've been passed down from generation to generation and you don't know if it's live," said police constable Sandasha Bough.

Vellow suspects some evicted renters may have forgotten a few things when the landlord kicked them out.

"They were only there for four months," he said. "Those idiots had that in their house."

The Incredibly Tricky Task of Measuring All Life on Earth

0
0

Humans make up just 0.01 percent of the biomass on the planet—the same as termites.

article-image

It’s hard to conduct a census of all of the living stuff scattered across Earth. The planet’s citizens—in the forms of tiny ocean bacteria, galloping mammals, or tangles of terrestrial plants—are found all over the place, from submarine fissures to craggy mountaintops. Many of these residents don’t answer their doorbells or respond to surveys, and they can be difficult to track down: Some spend their lives in realms most humans don’t see up close, and others are far too minuscule to be seen with the naked eye. You’ve got scores of prokaryotic neighbors you’ve never met.

Gauging exactly how much living stuff there is across the planet, and where, is an even trickier business. Most previous work in this vein has been limited to a single taxon—say, for instance, the distribution of microbes in ocean sediment. But researchers from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and the California Institute of Technology recently took a stab at it. Their goal was to calculate the mass and broad-strokes distribution of every living thing across plants, animals, bacteria, and archaea.

To do it, they measured each taxon’s biomass—that is, the weight of all the carbon they contain. Getting there required a bit of contortion. First, they collated hundreds of studies, ranging from field observations to remote data collected by sensors or satellites. (Speaking to The Guardian, the lead author Ron Milo described the process as a “meta-meta-analysis.”) Where this wasn’t available, they estimated—first puzzling out the general population estimate, average weight, and then converting that into suspected biomass.

This biomass tactic, the researchers explain, allows them to compare taxa whose members are vastly different sizes (making it possible, for instance, to pit termites against elephants). It doesn’t account for numbers of members, or for the quantity of species within a particular taxon.

article-image

In the researchers’ accounting, newly published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, all of this adds up to 550 gigatons of carbon. Plants are particular heavy-hitters, contributing about 80 percent of that biomass. Bacteria comprises a little less than 15 percent, and the remainder is shared among fungi, archaea, protists, animals, and viruses.

In terms of biomass, humans make up roughly 0.01 percent of everything. We stack up similarly to the Antarctic krill, highly fertile little crustaceans that cluster in the Southern Ocean. Termites fare about the same. Meanwhile, nematodes crush birds and bacteria have 35 times more mass than every animal on Earth.

article-image

A fair degree of uncertainty is built into the model. There are lots of unknowns, and plenty of wackiness could be introduced in the process of extrapolating from existing population estimates. Those figures could be skewed if the initial estimates were far off base. Entire ecosystems, such as inland lakes and rivers, are also given short shrift, though the authors write that these environments’ biomass is negligible compared to the others’. “I am all for integrative biosphere-scale studies,” Vaclav Smil, author of Harvesting the Biosphere, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist, “but we have to be always honest about the limits of our knowledge.” The study, is at best, a deep dive studded with best guesses.

But it's a stark reminder of how human influence has sprawled across the planet: We might make up a small fraction of the biomass, but we’ve shaped much of the rest of it to meet our demands. Domesticated poultry, for instance, outweighs wild birds threefold, and the biomass of domesticated livestock squashes that of wild mammals. “When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino,” Milo told The Guardian. “But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken.”

Remembering the 'Saurian Monster' That Terrorized 1880s New Zealand

0
0

How hysteria bred a mystery.

article-image

It must have been a ghoulish sight. At the slaughter yards of Frankton Junction, near Hamilton, New Zealand, in October 1886, workers found a sheep picked clean to the bones. Some creature, they reported, had taken the carcass from the hook where it hung, eaten its flesh, and then departed, leaving only a strange trail of footprints unlike any other they had seen. Men gathered their guns and revolvers and kept watch for its return.

These, New Zealand's Daily Telegraph reported, were the "undoubted traces of a saurian monster." The word "saurian" means lizard-like—other papers concluded that this monster must be an alligator or crocodile, despite New Zealand's smattering of living reptiles being, without exception, only a few inches long.

For two months, throughout October and November, the people of the Waikato region kept up a near-constant watch for their worrying new neighbor. Farmboys reported seeing it in the river, with its head poking up from the creek; indigenous Maori told settlers that they had known of it for some time and called it a taniwha. "Stories are extant among them of a very large animal, like an eel, which has come out of the water at times and chased them, even seizing their legs in its teeth," reported the New Zealand Herald. A year earlier, a Maori girl had allegedly been found dead in the same river, with the flesh stripped from her arm.

Gradually, a picture of the creature began to emerge—not an alligator, but something still more fearsome. Two men crossing the Waikato river in canoes were almost capsized by the creature, which chased them all the way to the shore. They described it as "of immense size with large jaws showing jagged teeth. The body was covered with long shaggy black hair."

Then, a breakthrough. In Raglan, on the coast, the monster was found napping on the beach, captured, and shot twice in the head. "It is 12 feet long, and 6 feet in girth, with two large screw-like propellers in lieu of a tail," the papers reported. "Its head is like that of a leopard, with two rows of formidable teeth, 12 in each row." Its skin was silver, and its stomach found to be full of the bodies of birds.

An enterprising settler had plans for this beast. He bought the carcass and intended to exhibit it across the world, taking it first through New Zealand and Australia, and then all the way to the United States and Europe. But his grand plans were scuppered when the beast was finally unmasked, on November 26.

The United Press Association published their big reveal with the headline: "The 'Saurian Monster' Proves To Be A Grey Seal." It's unlikely this was an actual grey seal, since they don't live in New Zealand, but rather a seal who was gray. That leopard-like head not so inexplicable after all—though one wonders which one of the many hundreds of thousands of New Zealand fur seals was, as they wrote, "believed to be still at large."

The Ephemeral Butter Art of Tibetan Buddhism

0
0

The artists need cold fingers and plenty of patience.

article-image

In many cultures, sculpted butter is an artistic medium, whether as a banquet-hall spectacle or an exhibit at the county fair. But for Tibetan Buddhist monks and laity, artistic butter designs, known as torma or tsepdro, take on a spiritual role.

Traditionally made using yak butter mixed with barley flour and coloring, the symbols are either formed on flat boards or made into freestanding sculptures. Since butter is both soft and meltable, makers need delicate hands and cold rooms. They also soak their hands in icy water to keep meltage to a minimum.

article-image

Often, the sculptures are made for Losar, the Tibetan New Year's festival, as well as prayer festivals. The custom may date back to the life of the Buddha himself, says Yeshe Wangmo, writer and producer of the film Torma: The Ancient Art of Tibetan Butter Sculpture. "The word tor means to throw or to scatter," she says. "The suffix -ma means mother in Tibetan, which means love."

Different lineages of Tibetan Buddhism have different styles of tormas, but many use similar symbolism. Images of the Eight Auspicious Symbols, such as a white conch shell and the dharma wheel, are common. So are flowers and animals. The animals tend to be birds, rabbits, monkeys, or elephants, or the Four Harmonious Friends, the characters of a legend emphasizing cooperation and respect for one's elders.

article-image

Monks often offer completed tormas to deities and spirits. “You want make offerings of the things that appeal to the senses,” Yeshe says. Many of the stories detailing the origins of tormas state that they were developed as a way to offer flowers in the middle of winter, when there was no vegetation but plenty of butter. Other times, tormas can represent deities themselves. The art form is a serious business—it's important to make the works as beautiful as possible.

If it's not too hot or humid, even butter tormas can last for several weeks. But eventually the edible creations are left for birds, animals, and even sometimes people. (Yeshe says they can be quite delicious.) The painstaking act of making these temporary creations is meant to develop generosity in the makers.

article-image

While butter sculpture has been practiced for centuries, the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950 meant an end to many monastic practices: Residents fled the country, and the Cultural Revolution closed monasteries and prohibited religious activities. But "under the watchful eye of the government," Yeshe says, Buddhist practice is once again permitted in parts of the country. Butter art has “developed outside of Tibet,” Yeshe says, and “even in Tibet, there are monasteries allowed to teach these arts again.”

article-image

Different lineages and communities in the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora use different coloring agents, ingredients, and designs, which are set down in illustrated manuals. In India, wax and pastry margarine help tormas hold up in hotter weather, whereas at Yeshe's Buddhist retreat center in upstate New York, they incorporate easier-to-find oatmeal instead of barley flour. Yeshe says that the definition of tormas is malleable, and that they can be made of different materials or to serve different purposes. Sometimes, they're made of clay, or even gold.

When the ingredients are melting butter, though, cold rooms and ice water are necessary. Some makers of tormas can even get frostbite. That discomfort, along with the long, laborious process of shaping something so temporary, can be painful. Yet part of seeking enlightenment means developing wisdom and accumulating merits through good actions. "You're experiencing discomfort and difficulty in making this offering," says Yeshe. "And there's merit that comes from that."

Unearthing Portugal's Wine of the Dead, a Relic From the Napoleonic Wars

0
0

The invasions led to an unexpected discovery.

article-image

In the small town of Boticas, Portugal, a centuries-old tradition of making "wine of the dead" lives on. Despite its macabre name, this libation has less to do with death than it does with burial. In 19th-century Portugal, during a time of French invasions, people interred scores of bottles. The move, done out of fear that the wine would fall into enemy hands, led to an extraordinary discovery once the dust had settled.

In 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army first started the march towards Lisbon. It was an attempt to force Portugal to join the Continental System—essentially a large-scale embargo against British trade. Despite Portugal's precarious isolation, and its place on the edge of a continent that bowed to Napoleon’s rule, it had refused to join. They would refuse again, choosing instead to honor a long-lasting alliance with the United Kingdom.

The French took Lisbon in November, but by then the Portuguese royal family had sailed off to Brazil, hoping to establish the capital across the Atlantic and maintain a bureaucratic semblance of independence. Unimpressed by this abandonment, and exhausted by the French's freshly minted taxes and old-school plundering (this was an army that marched on its stomach, and favored stolen local wine to wash it all down), people grew restless under occupation. Movements of popular resistance popped up all over the country, but when the United Kingdom intervened a year later, the French went away.

article-image

Napoleon wasn’t keen on the news. As long as Portugal remained aligned with the United Kingdom, the latter would have a point of entry into what he believed was his continent. By March 1809, the second invasion was underway, and the French army entered Portugal from the north, hoping to secure the country’s second largest city, Porto. Again they left behind an unrivaled trail of sacked and ruined communities, but not everyone was caught unaware: Boticas, a town of a few hundred inhabitants, had plans for a passive-aggressive mutiny up its collective sleeve.

Well aware of the French’s fondness for pillaging wine, the population rushed to the cellars and buried every last bottle in the gravel underneath the barrels, far from the greedy hands of the invading army. It’s likely the French felt parched when marching through Boticas afterwards, but the forced sobriety did little to change the outcome of the invasion. The French would go on to conquer Porto, yes—but thanks again to the British, they wouldn’t stay long.

But Napoleon wasn’t done with Portugal yet. The final invasion that began in 1810, through the eastern border, was arguably the most disastrous of the three: The French were up against an organized Luso-British defense, and although they managed a significant advance towards Lisbon, they couldn’t get past the newly fortified surroundings.

Meanwhile, those proverbial Napoleonic stomachs were battling the discouraging reality of a scorched-earth policy. The British had ordered a full evacuation along the route of invasion, complete with the destruction of any food supplies that couldn’t be carried away, and the Portuguese population had been all too happy to comply with the adage “if you can’t beat them, starve them.” By March 1811, the exhausted French and their imperial dreams had given up and retreated to Salamanca, Spain, never to be seen again.

Yet several years of consecutive invasions had left Portugal in a dire condition. In the aftermath, they coped with a tremendous loss of lives and monumental damages to agriculture, industry, and commerce throughout the nation.

Things were looking up in the small northern town of Boticas, though. Initially fearing their buried wine had spoiled after its impromptu underground stint, the locals dug up the bottles around March or April 1811. They were astonished to discover that low temperatures and darkness had, incredibly, improved its taste instead. The resulting wine was lighter, fruitier, and just a little fizzy, due to an accumulation of carbon dioxide. It didn’t take long for this happy accident to turn into a tradition, though it’s hard to pinpoint when it found its popular name, “wine of the dead,” as a nod to all those months spent in darkness.

article-image

Winemakers around the world have reached similar conclusions regarding the benefits of wine burial. In Georgia, wine is aged in buried, amphorae-like vessels called qvevri. And in France, wine tastings can come with a side of spelunking, down into caves where a handful of winemakers have taken to aging their wares. Wine cellars are damp and dark, it would seem, for a good reason.

In Boticas, much of this tradition was lost over time. Were it not for a concerted local effort to protect and promote the wine of the dead, this tale of anti-Napoleonic resistance could very well have stayed underground. A protected designation of origin was created in 2006 for wines produced in the Trás-os-Montes region, where Boticas is located. Soon afterwards, in 2008, the town built a museum to showcase the history of this seemingly macabre wine.

article-image

As for the name itself, the trademark “Vinho dos Mortos” (wine of the dead) is currently owned by the local farmers’ co-op, and only one winemaker is allowed to use it. Armindo de Sousa Pereira, whose parents and grandparents previously produced and sold wine of the dead, is the lucky holder of said permit. He says there’s been a recent and renewed interest in his wares, and although he’s happy with the growing demand from foreign connoisseurs, he’s in no rush to start exporting.

He’d rather foreigners came to him—and they’ll surely find a better reception than Napoleon’s soldiers did when they first tried to set foot in Boticas more than 200 years ago.

Viewing all 11432 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images