One of the last pieces of the chunk known as B-15 is cracking up.

This story starts more than 18 years ago, in March 2000, when a piece of the Ross Ice Shelf broke off and floated free on Antarctic waters. The crack of that iceberg forming filled the ocean with noise. Since scientists started documenting the size of icebergs, they had never seen one larger.

They named it, according to the conventions that govern iceberg identification: B-15.

Soon enough, B-15 started to break up, as icebergs do. But this iceberg was so large that even smaller chunks of it were behemoths in their own right. By 2014, the largest remnant was B-15T, which was so thick that it kept running aground. Sometimes, other icebergs would bump into it, and finally one or two hit hard enough to make a mark. In September 2014, B-15T broke up into still smaller icebergs, increasing the count of icebergs birthed from the original B-15 to 28.

One of those last-made icebergs, B-15Z, pictured above, may now be nearing the end of its life. At the end of May 2018, the International Space Station crew captured an image of B-15Z that showed a crack running right down its middle.

Right now, B-15Z is 10 nautical miles long and five nautical miles wide. One person who encountered it recently noticed its “steep, dirty grey walls” as they spent an hour sailing past. But B-15Z is drifting north, towards the warmer waters that often spell the end of iceberg life. If it were to split up, those smaller pieces could quickly melt away.

That wouldn't quite be the end of B-15, but only three other pieces are still large enough for the National Ice Center to track. Soon enough, the remainders of the largest iceberg we've ever seen will disappear.

Questionable dental hygiene in a man from the 8th millennium B.C. unveils early omnivore tendencies.

A team of researchers found something rather peculiar tucked in the dental tartar of a Mesolithic forager from the 8th millennium B.C., who was excavated from Vlakno Cave on the Croatian island of Dugi Otok. Using carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis, the researchers uncovered several microfossils of plants, fish scales, and fish muscle fibers. This is a find never seen in the human remains of Mediterranean people from this age.

There’s substantial archaeological evidence demonstrating that people in the Central Mediterranean caught and ate fish, but this is “the first time we have direct evidence that humans consumed these resources, or used their teeth for de-scaling activities, which is very unique,” University of York archaeologist Dr. Harry Robson said in a press statement.

Finding skeletal remains with both plant and fish microfossils gives researchers greater clues into how Adriatic and Mediterranean foragers lived, and the similarities between their diet and that of modern humans.

Seems like "the healthy 'Mediterranean' diet with starchy grasses and fish has very ancient roots indeed," wrote Sapienza University of Rome archaeologist Emanuela Cristiani. Call it the Meso Diet and you have a potential new fad.

Burn, broadleaf weeds, burn!

Carolyn Olson has a row-crop farm in southwest Minnesota. There, she grows organic corn, soybeans, and alfalfa, among other crops. As with most farmers, organic and otherwise, she constantly fights against weeds. In Minnesota, lamb's quarter, Canada thistle, and water hemp can threaten crops, she says. But for the last 15 years, Olson has had a weapon in her arsenal: a flame weeder, a contraption that combines farm machinery with firepower worthy of a heavy metal show.

Over the last 15 years, she's had two flame-weeding rigs. Her current flame weeder is built on the frame of a farm sprayer. But instead of pesticides or fertilizer, it sprays flames out of 36 burners. Meeting the requirements of organic farming often calls for manual weeding, either by hand or with cultivator machines. For crops that can beat the heat, though, flame weeding is an option. This video shows Olson's prior flame weeder in action.

Olson uses her flame weeder on corn. Since the corn's growing point, where the leaves and tassels grow, is protected, it can withstand the flames. Other crops have a harder time. "It is risky to flame weed soybeans, but some farmers do," Olson says. The broadleaf weeds that Olson targets, though, can't resist the flames. "The heat from the flame causes the moisture in cells of the leaves to expand, and burst the cell walls," she explains. This kills the weeds. The flames are powered by propane, and an angled heat shield mounted on the sprayer helps focus the heat on the base of the corn.

Flame weeding has been hot before. Fighting weeds with fire was common in the '40s and '50s, before chemical weedkillers took over. Now, in response to the rise of organic farming and videos of flame weeding, more people are asking where to buy equipment and how the process works. Olson herself says that interest among organic farmers is growing, as "another tool in our weed control toolbox." It helps that flame weeders look pretty awesome. "It is the scariest, yet coolest piece of equipment we own," she says.

Unfortunately, it won't make the salmon taste like scotch.

Every year, Scottish salmon farms produce over 160,000 tons of wriggly silver-skinned salmon. The fish, with their characteristic rosy flesh, are fed on pellets made of fishmeal, fish oil, and a heady combination of grains, soy, vitamins, and "poultry byproducts." It's not the healthiest of diets, nor the most efficient—at the moment, more small fish, per pound, are used to feed farmed salmon than the weight of fish the farms actually produce. But a Scottish firm has an innovative idea that they say will solve the problem—using the waste products of Scotland's whisky industry.

Every Scottish whisky distillery makes the spirit slightly differently, though there are two consistent components— water and malted barley. The mixture generates a variety of byproducts. Some are used to make high-protein livestock feed. Others, like wastewater, have historically been simply discharged into the environment, where they sometimes result in harmful algal blooms. A new start-up called MiAlgae, which is based in Edinburgh, has another alternative: They plan to turn these waste derivatives into an Omega 3-rich microalgae that can, in turn, be fed to farmed salmon.

Speaking to the BBC, the founder Douglas Martin explained how he hoped the microalgae would "revolutionalize" the animal and fish feed industries—especially in the wake of a recent boost of $670,000 from investors. The money will be spent growing their team from two to five, he said, and increasing the production of microalgae. They plan to build a new plant for its technology at an as-yet-undisclosed distillery.

The feed is economical, he said, and environmentally friendly, but most of all, it's a really healthy way to feed the fish. “Our microalgae replaces the practice of mincing up other small fish to put into animal and fish feed," he told The Scotsman. "It is naturally rich in Omegas so it brings the levels back up [to where they should be].”

Runner-up name choices included Gadflies, Noisy Birdwomen, and Homing Pigeons.

In 1929, two years after pilot licensing began in the United States, there were 9,098 men licensed to fly, and just 117 women. Women who flew were often characterized as “girl pilots,” while newspaper reports focused on the color of their hair, or how they balanced aviation with housekeeping.

Across nine days of August of that year, 20 women competed in the first ever Women’s Air Derby, starting in Santa Monica, California. Despite being a treacherous race across the continent, in which only 15 participants made it to the finish line, press coverage and even the regulations tended toward sexism. Pilots were not permitted to use any aircraft deemed too powerful for a woman: Opal Kunz was barred from flying her own plane, a 300 HP Travel Air, and had to find one with less horsepower to race. After the humorist Will Rogers noticed pilots adjusting their make-up before take-off, he observed: “It looks like a Powder Puff Derby to me!” To the irritation of Amelia Earhart and other competitors, that name appeared time and time again in newspaper reports—even after both female and male pilots (one was flying with Earhart) died over the course of the event.

The race had not gone to plan. There were whispers of sabotage, attempts to shorten or cancel the race, and consistent claims that women should either not fly at all, or limit themselves to short-haul flights in less powerful aircrafts. And so, beneath the grandstand at the finish line in Ohio, six women expressed an interest in forming some kind of club for female aviators: Amelia Earhart, Gladys O’Donnell, Ruth Nichols, Blanche Noyes, Phoebe Omlie, and Louise Thaden. Eventually, this club would be known as the Ninety-Nines.

Since there were so few female pilots at the time, most knew, or were aware, of one another. Many of those in the Derby had met before, and were friends as much as they were competitors. “They felt their camaraderie called for a more formalized bond,” writes the author and pilot Gene Nora Jessen—an organization where they might support one another, lend a helping hand with professional opportunities, and record their achievements as female pilots.

A letter was duly sent out to all 117 licensed female pilots—86 responded. “It need not be a tremendously official sort of an organization,” the letter stated, “just a way to get acquainted, to discuss the prospects for women pilots from both a sports and breadwinning point of view, and to tip each other off on what's going on in the industry.” They would have a constitution, a name, and a pin to wear on their jackets. In early November, 26 of these women met over tea at Curtiss Airport in New York state. Against the roars of aircraft, they elected a temporary chairperson, gave chrysanthemums to a pilot recovering from a crash, and determined membership criteria. (Any woman with a license was welcome to join.)

Later that year, Kunz explained in a letter to a fellow female aviator why such a group was so critical. It wasn’t, she wrote, that there was any conflict with male pilots. “This is exactly the opposite to the facts. We want no militant girl pilots. We are not fighting for anything.” Instead, the Ninety-Nines wanted women in aviation to be treated as equals, “rather than spoiled as something rare and very precious.” Instead of overblown headlines about minor female achievements, they wanted women to be treated as peers and given identical opportunities to the men who did, as she wrote, such “marvelous things in the air … We believe that our girls can and will learn to fly as well as the average man, better than many, but it does not seem likely that we will ever equal the remarkable skill of countless men fliers both in our own country and abroad.” That same year, Earhart is said to have proclaimed: "If enough of us keep trying, we'll get someplace."

Over the next two years, the group elected Earhart as president and finally landed on a name. Gadflies, Noisy Birdwomen, and Homing Pigeons were all discussed and discarded; instead, they decided to take the name from the number of founding charter numbers. As this number grew, they were first the Eighty-Sixes, then the Ninety-Sevens, and finally the Ninety-Nines. (Women who joined after this point were not considered founding members.)

Cooperation within the group was not always easy to come by. Many of these women were iconoclastic and fiercely independent: It took many months before formal leadership was put in place, delayed further by the death of Neva Paris, the group’s election organizer, in a crash in Georgia. Even then, some were unhappy about the direction the group had taken. Kunz founded a parallel group with more of a focus on military defense, devoted to training female pilots to replace men killed at war. The short-lived Skylarks, whose purpose has since been lost to time, was another competitor, founded by five of the original 26 pilots.

The late 1920s, Jessen wrote in a 1979 history of the group, were “aviation’s adolescence: a time to prove oneself and shout to the world, ‘Here I am!’” Women aviators had even more to prove. The Ninety Nines were there to support one another, but they were also codified evidence that female aviators had every reason to exist and would continue to do so, whatever the cost.

For these women, even tremendous success did not necessarily equate to being taken seriously in a professional context. Early female pilots sometimes received inflated salaries for the publicity they brought in—but after their star dimmed, that experience seemed to count for very little. Ruth Elder was nicknamed the “Miss America of Aviation” and set a record in 1927 for the longest flight ever made by a woman. But despite this fame, her career eventually led her to a desk job as the secretary to an aviation executive in Culver City, California.

In July 1941, a year before many American women began to contribute to the war effort, the Ninety-Nines held a critical meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A letter to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt promising “to serve individually and collectively” was drafted up and sent. Earhart had disappeared some four years earlier: That year, they chose the first recipient of a scholarship in her name, set up to support an aspiring female pilot’s advanced flight training. This once-informal group now had the resources to train up-and-coming pilots, a temporary national headquarters alongside the National Aeronautics Association, and their own song. (Its rousing chorus ends: “Keep that formation over the nation/with the song of The Ninety-Nines.”)

The same meeting resulted in women pilots being welcomed to the volunteer Civil Air Patrol, where they were able to make a substantial contribution as aviators, flight instructors, and at air warning posts. The Ninety-Nines began to train more and more women to fly, with the launch of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, a civilian women pilots' organization that at its height had 1,074 members. (It was dissolved after the end of the war.)

“Paradoxical as it may be,” Nessen writes, “during the darkest hours of war, some of the brightest pages in the history of women in aviation were written.” Women pilots had more opportunities than ever before to fly powerful aircrafts, lay smoke screens, and take part in photographic and radio-controlled missions. All of this they did exceptionally well, setting a new safety record in military aviation. In short, your plane was less likely to crash if it had a woman at the helm.

The helmets and goggles of the founders are a distant memory, but the Ninety-Nines still exists, and thrives, today. It has well over 5,000 members from around the world, including students on their way to the skies, and provides scholarship and training opportunities for young women who hope to be pilots. It still has good cause to do so: Women are still a rare sight in cockpits, making up about three percent of commercial pilots. From 1975, its permanent headquarters have been in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, with the second floor museum dedicated to founding and historic members. In that early letter, Kunz wrote: “It should be an inspiration to all American girls to learn to fly, to develop skill, and fit ourselves for the splendid work ahead in aviation.” The same spirit applies today.

Delicious, and helpful.

The worldwide beacon for piping hot flapjacks—International House of Pancakes, colloquially known by its acronym IHOP—revealed this week that it would change its name to IHOB. The company won't explain what the “b” signifies until later this month, and speculation has ranged from “bacon” to “breakbeats.” (This isn’t the first time there’s been confusion over the chain’s name: Back in 2010, the restaurant sued the International House of Prayer, which, yes, called itself IHOP for short, for trademark infringement. The issue was eventually settled out of court.)

Regardless of what the “b” stands for, there’s no disputing that the restaurant’s main draw is pancakes—which is something researchers from Texas State University and Arizona State University knew back in 2003, when they playfully tried to prove the long-standing claim that Kansas is “flatter than a pancake” by visiting IHOP.

It’s unclear where the saying comes from, though some people believe it’s from out-of-towners who reach the plains after driving through long stretches of woods. Naturally, Kansas residents aren’t thrilled about it, especially since there are hills in the state. But the saying has stuck, and it also intrigued researchers.

“To the authors, this adage seems to qualitatively capture some characteristic of a topographic geodetic survey,” the Texas and Arizona researchers wrote in the Annals of Improbable Research. “This obvious question ‘how flat is a pancake’ [spurred] our analytical interest, and we set out to find the ‘flatness’ of both a pancake and one particular state: Kansas.”

To do this, the study’s authors “purchased a well-cooked pancake from a local restaurant, the International House of Pancakes.” Next, they made a topographic profile of the pancake by cutting out a two centimeter-wide strip of pancake, then using a confocal laser microscope. They used data from the U.S. Geological Survey, namely a measured, west-east profile across Kansas culled from a digital elevation model of the state, and calculated both the pancake’s and the state’s flatness from there.

In this case, a value of 1.000 denoted “perfect, platonic flatness.” Their results demonstrated that an IHOP pancake came out to about 0.957, which they deemed “pretty flat, but far from perfectly flat.” Kansas’s flatness, on the other hand, was estimated to be about 0.9997. “That degree of flatness might be described, mathematically, as ‘damn flat,’” they wrote.

Since then, a different study from the American Geographical Society entitled “The Flatness of U.S. States” has determined that Kansas isn’t the flattest state, after all. By analyzing a larger range of topography, researchers made an algorithm to determine how much of a state seemed geographically flat to humans. Florida led the list, followed by Illinois and North Dakota. While Kansas came at number seven in that study, it does still hold the distinction of being the first state to be scientifically compared to an IHOP pancake.

The Obsidian Collection and Google are bringing historic African-American media outlets online.

In 1983, Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, spotted Congressional candidate Charles Hayes at a city event. When the two sat down to talk political strategy, a photographer from the Chicago Defender was on hand to capture the moment.

Later, when an editor cropped the photo for the paper, they cut out a smiling young woman sitting to Washington's right. About 16 years later, the editor probably regretted it: That woman was Carol Moseley Braun, who in 1992 became the first African-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate.

This is just one of the many surprising stories hidden in the photo archives of the Defender, the pioneering newspaper that has been covering black life in America since 1905. Thanks to a new collaboration between the Obsidian Collection and Google Arts & Culture, you can now get an inside look at everything from the heavyweight champ Joe Louis's signature milk brand to the Defender's own printing presses—and, in certain cases, their editing processes, too.

The Obsidian Collection is an archival project focused on digitizing African-American newspapers. Angela Ford, the Collection's founder and director, originally started it for personal reasons. Her grandmother moved to Chicago from Oklahoma during the Great Migration. "She had a charm school and a line of cosmetics in the '50s," Ford says, and was often written about in the Defender.

When her grandmother passed away, Ford started looking for copies of some of those articles, and learned that the paper's archives were in bad shape. To make matters worse, when she told her son about newsworthy things that had happened when she was growing up, he often found there was no record of those, either. "He'd go to Google it, and it wasn't there," she says. "I thought, 'Wait, what?... My past was disintegrating. That's how I got involved: to save black history and to save myself."

Ford managed to stabilize the Defender's archives, which contained 250,000 photos—more than twice as many as anyone expected. After that, she says, "I learned a lot of the black newspapers were in a similar position." Encouraged by her son, she started to digitize them, too. Last year, she started speaking with Google Arts & Culture, and the platform posted eight sets of Obsidian Collection Archives photographs earlier this week. Many more will follow, Ford says, from all different newspapers and regions.

The current sets run the gamut, from a photoessay about the pioneeering aviator Fred Hutcherson, Jr. to an inside look at the Chicago Housewares Show of 1959, hosted by the Defender. One of Ford's favorites is "Outdoors in Chicago," a set of photographs from the late 1970s and early 1980s that she says remind her of summer days with her son and his friends.

"It really does speak to the black boy joy that I see every day," she says. "That narrative has not been illustrated in today's mainstream media at all… The mainstream narrative is that we're either victims, or we're violent. So we're not doing that. We're doing everything else."

Ford hopes that digitizing these images will encourage people to make the stories a part of their everyday lives. "It's the new way to visit a museum," she says. "You will visit the Google Arts & Culture Obsidian Collection when you're waiting for the doctor's office or in line at the grocery store. It can take the edge off."

"If it does just that—and expands your mind past what you thought you knew—I consider that a victory."

To see more photos from the Defender's archive, visit the Google Arts & Culture Obsidian Collection homepage.

The ancient textile has survived wars, colonialism, and global trade.

It takes strength, stamina, and practice to make traditional Ugandan barkcloth. The producers of this surprisingly soft and supple material first scrape away the outer bark of fig trees called mutuba (usually Ficus natalensis), then slit inner bark with a knife and peel it upward off the tree. They boil the bark in great pans of water to soften it, and then pound it for several hours with heavy wooden mallets until it is much, much thinner, wider, and softer. The cloth is dried in the sun, where it darkens to a ruddy brown, while the exposed trunk is wrapped in banana leaves for a few days to protect it as new bark grows, for another harvest.

Across the tropics, people worked out long ago how to transform fig tree bark into comfortable cloth—the practice could even predate weaving. In Uganda, barkcloth has served as a symbol of protest, a form of money, and the exclusive raiment of kings and queens. It has been suppressed by religion, colonialism, and war, yet the tradition has persisted, and now barkcloth has found a new life as a source of local pride, as well as in international markets for home furnishings, high fashion, and even aerospace materials. It is creating jobs, and is entirely sustainable.

In her doctoral thesis on the history of the textile, Venny Nakazibwe of Makerere University says the material has served as “a connecting thread” between past and present generations, but that its role and meaning has been in flux, based on the “dynamics of the social, economic, cultural and political structures at a given historical moment.”

While myths and legends surround the origin of the craft, historians date it back to the reign of Kimera, who ruled Uganda’s Buganda Kingdom from around 1374 to 1404. Then, only royalty wore barkcloth, but as news of the product spread, demand—and prices—grew. In the late 18th century, King Ssemakookiro ruled that all his subjects must produce it. Trade flowed and the Buganda Kingdom grew rich. The felt-like fabric became more common, as an everyday cloth, worn as a wrap or toga-style, and for use in religious ceremonies and as burial shrouds. Farmers used it to pay land taxes.

The emissaries King Muteesa I sent to London in 1879 presented gifts of barkcloth to Queen Victoria. But within fifteen years, Victoria’s empire had absorbed the land of barkcloth and folded it into the newly formed British Protectorate of Uganda. The colonial rulers had little use for the industry. They compelled farmers to produce cotton for English mills instead, stopped the practice of paying taxes in barkcloth, and banned traditional religion. Missionaries even called the fabric “satanic” and handed out imported textiles to discourage its use.

During World War I, the British felled more than 115,000 barkcloth trees to secure the border with German East Africa. Many skilled barkcloth producers had to emigrate. Nakazibwe says that those who stayed were compensated—but only after three years and what she terms a “painful process.” After the war, farmers began planting more barkcloth trees to boost yields of coffee plants with their shade, but when the British conscripted all local men under 45 to serve in the military during World War II, barkcloth production ground to a near halt.

Woven textiles had come to dominate the market, but a new role awaited barkcloth—it became a symbol. In 1953, when the British arrested King Muteesa II and sent him to England, many people began wearing the cloth again to express loyalty to the king and anger at the colonial administration. When he was finally allowed back in 1955, his supporters erected barkcloth-covered arches emblazoned with triumphal messages, and waved barkcloth banners along the 19-mile route from the airport to his palace.

Seven years later, Uganda gained its independence. In the following decades, the barkcloth industry rode waves of political crisis, dictatorship, civil war, and the end of the institution to which barkcloth was most closely tied—the subnational Buganda monarchy, its original patron. When it was restored in 1993, the new King Ronald Mutebi II wore ceremonial barkcloth at his coronation. The festivities entailed widespread use of barkcloth throughout the kingdom, sparking renewed interest in the material.

“Today, barkcloth has potential both for artistic expressions and industrial mass production of items for economic ventures, not only in Uganda but globally,” says barkcloth scholar Catherine Gombe. “The knowledge and skill of barkcloth production continues to be handed down to the younger generation through the informal education of apprentices.”

A new wave of artisans now fashion barkcloth into clothes, shoes, and bags. Designers have turned it into wallpaper, lampshades, and furniture. Zandra Rhodes shaped it into haute couture. Architect Zaha Hadid called it an “exceptional material.” And when the leaders of the G7 nations met in Germany in 2015, they did so in a room with walls covered in decorative barkcloth.

That barkcloth was supplied by Ugandan-German couple Mary Barongo-Heintz and Oliver Heintz, who have been in the business since 1999. They found early in their enterprise that the cloth itself is just the start—it can be dyed, rubberized, bleached, or hardened. By blending it with other materials, they could make it water repellent, fire retardant, or abrasion resistant—presenting a range of alternatives to leather or synthetic, petroleum-based materials.

“Money really does grow on trees,” says Heintz. His company BarkTex now sources barkcloth from 600 small-scale farmers in Uganda, and employs 50 more local people to upgrade the barkcloth, with priority given to women. “Many of our women workers earn an income far higher than their husbands,” says Heintz.

But under some traditional rules, women can be frozen out of the industry. In Baganda culture, the barkcloth tree symbolizes male power and ownership of land, and it is taboo for women to plant the trees. The Center for International Forestry Research and the Association of Uganda Professional Women in Agriculture and the Environment have now helped 50 women negotiate with their husbands to allow them to plant barkcloth trees. It’s a small move, but a start.

Heintz estimates that at least 500,000 farmers in Uganda could provide bark, with their income benefiting roughly 4,000,000 people. There are broader benefits. The trees store carbon. Their leaves provide fodder for livestock, their figs help sustain wildlife. Barkcloth production requires little energy or water and is carbon neutral.

In 2007, Gombe and her fellow researcher Celia Nyamweru reported that concerned Baganda elders feared their fig trees would outlive the knowledge of how to make barkcloth. Today, Gombe says, barkcloth’s “future is bright.”

The Madansky-Shubik experiment settled one beef and started many more.

In the summer of 1972, a stretch of sidewalk on New York’s 54th Street, near 7th Avenue, was bustling. The landlocked patch of cement in front of the Stage Deli earned the nickname “Bagel Beach,” because diners gathered there to hang out and chow down at all hours.

As New York institutions, delis reigned supreme, and the Stage reigned among them. That August, the city presented the restaurant with a key to the city for, as New York Times “Saloon Editor” Earl Wilson put it, serving “the city heartburn for 35 years.” Local gossip columnists noted its comings and goings; it’s where Goldie Hawn, over a bowl of piping-hot matzo ball soup, told Wilson that she was expecting a baby, and where another reporter observed that Frank Sinatra’s late-night order was five sandwiches, picked up at 3:30 a.m., wrapped to go.

For all its notoriety, the Stage was far from the only joint in town. By one estimate, the city boasted as many as 1,500 delis by the 1930s, most of them opened by European Jews, and everyone had a favorite. So, in the mid-1970s, two university professors set out to chew over a tough question: Which deli was truly the best?

At noon on a January day in 1975, Albert Madansky, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, and Martin Shubik, an economist from Yale University, sat down in a nondescript office building in midtown Manhattan in front of a specially curated buffet: a blind taste-test of sandwiches from four of the city’s preeminent delis: Stage, Carnegie, Gaiety-East, and Deli-East. The subjects of their analysis were corned beef and pastrami, and their tools included pickles, mustard, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda, and stomachs of steel.

The eight sandwiches were placed on numbered plates, and the researchers took notes as they noshed. They then ranked them, over wedges of cheesecake, cups of coffee, and cigars.

“The Deli-East came out a clear first, and the Stage came out a clear fourth,” the authors wrote in an amiable paper that they published—abstract, tables, and all—in The University of Chicago Magazine in spring 1976. Deli-East won on price, too: $1.10 per sandwich, to Stage’s $1.20.

As is customary in many peer-reviewed journals, the authors appended letters from outside readers who raised methodological quibbles. “The cold, precise Madansky-Shubik experiment is almost irrelevant,” wrote Irving Roshwalb, a senior vice president at Audits and Surveys, a market research firm. Roshwalb argued that the pair had missed a critical point: that sandwiches eaten outside of the deli environment will never taste as good, as the experience omits the tantalizing sight of salted, cured meat being speared, sliced, and heaped onto bread, and the “seductive aroma of the pastrami preceding you.”

“All the rest—the quality of the bread, the tenderness and thinness of the slices of meat, the pickles, mustard, coleslaw, the Dr. Brown’s—are certainly necessary conditions for the power of the sandwich to satisfy,” he continued. “But these are hardly sufficient conditions.” The true test, he wrote, “would be one requiring a measurement of the quantity of saliva induced in each of these men by the mere mention of the names of each of the delicatessens.”

The writeup generated a bit of attention, including in the Los Angeles Times, where columnist Jack Smith agreed with Roshwalb. Smith’s first column about the deli paper spawned two more, in which he excerpted letters from readers. (“Rarely have so many readers agreed with me,” he wrote, with the glee of a columnist vindicated.)

Shubik responded to Smith, in a letter that sprawled across more than three single-spaced pages. Some of these he devoted to shuddering at readers’ suggestions for alternate deli pairings. Black cherry soda and sauerkraut must be a cruel joke, he wrote—“Like champagne to caviar or Petrus to a filet mignon so is Celray [sic] unto Pastrami.” Shubik spent the rest of the letter defending his sociological project, “a modest attempt to preserve for the annals before it became too late, a record of the Great American Vanishing Species known as the Pastrami and the Corned Beef Sannawiches.”

Shubik feared for the future of the classic New York deli in a world turning its appetite to health food. Pastrami maestros had dwindled to “a precious few,” and the “sound of fresh rye, warm from a morning delivery, being sliced on the spot has vanished as surely as the cries of ‘fresh lavender’ or ‘mutton pies’ have vanished from modern London.” His recommendation was to savor the last moments of a culinary art form. “Run, my friend—do not walk, for time is short and the world is about to be buried in bran flakes.”

Indeed, today New York does not have quite so many places to get proper deli, but the city isn’t exactly buried in bran, either. There’s limitless choice (healthful and otherwise). Still, while some delis hang on—Katz’s remains a landmark, and the Second Avenue Deli is holding strong in new digs—their share of New York’s heartburn is shrinking. Stage shuttered in 2012, age 75, unable to keep up with rising rent. Of the four delis in the study, Carnegie is the only one left, but without its flagship location, which last bussed its tables in 2016. As its manager, Jose Robles, told the New York Daily News when Stage closed, "There's not a lot of delis like this left.” But debates about who has the best pastrami—those aren’t going to end.

Scientists still haven’t figured out why or how the symptoms started.

An unsolved health mystery has haunted American diplomats for more than a year and half now. Starting in 2016, U.S. representatives in Cuba experienced hearing loss and and other cognitive problems usually associated with concussions and other trauma to the head.

Scientists still haven’t figured out why or how the symptoms started and what caused them. But the problem is spreading. Now, reports the New York Times, American employees of the consulate in Guangzhou, in southern China, are reporting the same symptoms.

In China, one diplomat who experienced the symptoms left in April; this week, another American and his family left to return to the United States for treatment and testing. The diplomats who reported problems with hearing loss, balance, vision, sleep, and headaches in Cuba were living in hotels and other dense dwellings—places where a listening device or other unknown technology could have easily been planted nearby. The Americans in China were living in similar situations—high-rise apartment buildings occupied by other foreign workers and wealthy locals.

Over the past several months, experts have floated many explanations for the symptoms the diplomats experienced. One leading theory has been that an eavesdropping device was to blame, but no one has been able to come up with a definitive answer. The people suffering from these symptoms have been treated by brain injury specialists at the University of Pennsylvania, who reported in the medical journal JAMA that they found cognitive, balance, and oculomotor abnormalities in most of the group from Cuba.

As a result of these strange occurrences, the U.S. and Canada have both pulled diplomats out of Cuba. But now it seems like this attack (or hysteria), whatever is causing it, may be much larger a problem than it originally seemed.

They are tiny but mightily impactful.

Roughly 551 to 540 million years ago, a tiny critter wriggled around the ocean floor in what is now the area near the Yangtze Gorges in southern China. As it went about its day, the arthropod or annelid (or perhaps its ancestor) left behind two parallel rows of itty-bitty footprints in the sediment.

Millennia upon millennia later, a team of scientists uncovered a slab of limestone with markings that puzzled them. They tilted the rock in various directions towards the sun, and when the light hit the stone just right, they uncovered little trackways engraved in the limestone. On further analysis, they discovered the footprints were beyond pre-historic—they surpassed the oldest fossilized footprints ever found by 10 million years.

The longest trackway is 4.3 inches long, so the researchers estimate the animals that made it were around 0.47 inches in length. It's unclear how many legs it had, what type of arthropod or annelid it was, or how it died.

While there are few facts about the creature itself, the find is a surprising discovery for many reasons. During the Ediacaran period, which spanned 635 million years ago to 541 million years ago, "sediments were not strongly disturbed (animals were few; many animals were immobile; the mobile ones did not significantly churn the sediment)," wrote Virginia Tech University geobiologist Shuhai Xiao in an email.

So, even though the fossil record for tiny invertebrates of this sort is sparse, these prints were preserved nicely because there was minimal foot traffic.

The major clues from the research lie in the animal's appendages and movement. The scattering of these animals would shake the sediment in the ocean floor. "Doing so, they bring oxygen to the sediment and oxidize organic carbon and other chemicals that would otherwise be buried in the sediment," wrote Xiao. This may have greatly affected the way the Earth's climate and geochemical cycles function today.

"This is just one example of how legged creatures can change the world," wrote Xiao.

A new map of Civil War-related landmarks is only the beginning.

Earlier this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a map of Confederate symbols—including monuments, roads, flags, and school names—on public land across the United States. The map is sprawling, showing Confederate commemorations as far from the South as Washington State and Maine.

It's growing, too. The map's first edition, which includes 1,503 such symbols, was released in 2016—about a year after the 2015 Charleston church shooting, during which includes nine black congregants were murdered by a white supremacist. After it was reported that the shooting's racist perpetrator had posed with the Confederate flag, community discussions around whether or not to continue to publicly display the flag, and other Confederate symbols, became more numerous and more urgent.

Two years later, further events—including a white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, itself motivated by the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, and during which three people were killed—have inspired further action and conversations. During that time, the SPLC reports, at least 110 symbols have been removed from public places. But the overall number of known symbols has increased. Due to list additions and new constructions, the SPLC now counts 1,728.

What can we learn from this enormous clump of dots? In a time when communities across the United States are discussing what exactly they want to memorialize—and how exactly they want to do it—"I think maps like this are wonderful," says W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. But if we're aiming at a complete understanding of how segregation and racism have influenced the nation's memory, he says, it's necessary to go even further.

Brundage serves as the scholarly advisor for a UNC project called "Commemorative Landscapes," which catalogs memorials in North Carolina. Taking stock of memorials and other symbols, the project's website explains, can help researchers and other interested parties understand "how various communities … use the past to define themselves."

Maps like the SPLC's are vital for understanding this commemorative landscape on a national scale, says Brundage. While individuals may be familiar with one or two Confederate monuments, especially if they're nearby or particularly contentions, "most people don't have a sense of the number," he says. "They don't know where they're located, when they were put up, or who put them up." The SPLC map, and its associated database, help add a narrative to what might otherwise seem like a pell-mell assortment of street names and statues.

For example, about 25 percent of the memorials on the SPLC map were sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. "Between the 1890s and 1930, they went on a monument-building spree," Brundage says. "Their goal was to provide a counterpoint to any Union commemoration." This helps to explain why monuments ended up in states that weren't part of the Confederacy, including Ohio and Massachusetts.

Other trends are similarly thought-provoking. Brundage points out that, along with commanders Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, one of the most popular Confederate memorial honorees is Nathan Bedford Forrest, who has around 50 entries on the SPLC map. "During the Civil War, [Forrest] was one of the most capable Confederate commanders," Brundage says. Afterwards, during Reconstruction, he became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

"What is it about this man that we want to commemorate?" Brundage asks. "He was a good soldier. But there is nothing else about his life that one would think would make him a model of what we would like our children to be, or what we would like American society to be."

As they explain in an accompanying report, the SPLC gathered their data from various governmental surveys, news accounts, and public and private databases. They excluded symbols located in historic contexts like museums or battlefields. Still, the map is "not close to being complete," says Brundage. He doubts that a truly comprehensive one is possible: "There are so many road names in the South named after Confederates, I think it would take years to identify all of them," he says. "That's not to detract from what the SPLC is doing. But it's the tip of the iceberg."

A more complete picture would make historical patterns even clearer, and could bring up additional ones as well. Brundage says it's a fine idea to submit corrections and additions to the SPLC, which is accepting them through June 15.

But he encourages those interested in commemorative landscapes to think bigger, too. "The larger map, if you will, is not just of Confederate symbols," he says. "It's the exclusion of African Americans from the historical landscape in general." Once again, the numbers show how stark this is: Of the 1100 or so monuments in North Carolina, Brundage says, "There are 34 that depict African Americans … as historical agents." That's about 3 percent.

There are other kinds of exclusion as well. For instance, in addition to cataloguing the state's Confederate monuments, the Commemorative Landscape project keeps track of veterans' memorials. "While World War I-era monuments in the memorial South sometimes include the names of those African-Americans in the communities who served, many don't," he says. Others separate names by race. While these are not explicitly Confederate symbols, "[they are] monuments of segregation," Brundage points out. "They're visible reminders of [it], if you know what to look for."

As communities find out about these omissions, some are taking it upon themselves to update their memorials. And of course, certain places are choosing to take down their Confederate statues as well.

But while these get a lion's share of news attention, they're a small segment of the overall situation—something else the SPLC map shows quite viscerally, adds Brundage. "The map does drive home the fact that if we want to have a conversation about changing this landscape, it's going to take years," he says. "It's going to be a long, long march."

What people eat in space depends a lot on where they’re from on earth.

The 1969 Apollo 11 mission was powered by more than fuel cells: Up in space, astronauts kept themselves going with Kellogg’s supplied-Frosted Flakes and fruit-flavored Corn Flakes cereal cubes.

The breakfast brand is not the only legacy American company whose products made it into orbit. On other occasions, NASA has sent astronauts into space with Kraft pudding (butterscotch, “Banana Split,” and vanilla); Del Monte peaches, pears and pineapple; and Tabasco sauce, which they added liberally to almost everything. (Things taste less strong in space.) Americans’ international colleagues enjoy their own tastes of home. Each national space organization runs its own kitchen—and feeds its astronauts space versions of their national cuisine.

The International Space Station is perhaps the world’s most ambitious project of international cooperation. Astronauts from all over the world live side by side, often working on similar or shared projects. But what’s in their larders is far more diverse. Russians, for instance, pride themselves on great fish options—unsurprising for a country whose most prized dishes include a selection of smoked fish, caviar, and “herring under a fur coat.” For cosmonauts, the day begins with cottage cheese and porridge, and might end with a lightly spiced perch. On other days, they’ll squeeze dinner out of a blue toothpaste-like tube labeled борщ, or Borsch, in bold, beetroot-pink letters down the side.

At home, these astronauts would add fresh minced garlic as a condiment. After repeated pleading, mission control gave Russian astronauts on the International Space Station more than they knew what to do with. “They sent us so much that even if you eat one for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we still had plenty left to oil ourselves all over our bodies for a nice sleep,” cosmonaut Maksim Suraev joked on his blog.

While most astronauts resort to instant coffee, Italians drink coffee made with beans from Lavazza and their very own in-space espresso machine. Italian space food is produced by the Turin-based Agrotec; the company sends up packages of quinoa salad with mackerel and vegetables, brown rice with chicken and vegetables, and even traditional lasagna. Many thousands of miles from Rome, there’s a clear focus on gastronomy: Shrimp is served with barley and flavored with zucchini pesto and lime, while the Italian grain farro forms the backbone of a salmon and asparagus dish. Dessert is tiramisu. It all started, co-founder David Avino told the Italian news agency Dire, with Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano. “We wanted to make his stay aboard the ISS a bit more like being on Earth,” he said. “So we tried to approximate the kind of food your mother might make you for Sunday lunch.”

This is the crux of why space food is so unstandardized, even within the confines of the International Space Station. Astronauts get homesick, and familiar fare helps alleviate those pangs of loneliness.

In 2008, when South Korea’s first astronaut made his way into space on a Russian mission, he had kimchi to keep him going. Korean scientists spent millions of dollars, and many years, engineering “space kimchi” and a variety of other Korean dishes for astronaut Ko San to eat aboard the shuttle. "If a Korean goes to space, kimchi must go there, too," Kim Sung Soo, a Korea Food Research Institute scientist, told the New York Times.

This was no ordinary kimchi: The strong smell had been reduced between a third and half, the scientists said, and the bacteria that gives the dish its unique acidic tang was killed with radiation, due to safety concerns. "Imagine if a bag of kimchi starts fermenting and bubbling out of control and bursts all over the sensitive equipment of the spaceship," fellow scientist Lee Ju Woon told the paper. (He practised the radiation technique on samples provided by his mother.)

Each country’s food scientists do something similar. In 2005, Momofuku Ando, the Japanese creator of instant ramen, developed a version called “Space Ram” for astronaut Soichi Noguchi to eat aboard the Discovery space shuttle. Even at zero gravity, it’s allegedly quite delicious—or as delicious as instant ramen can be—with a thick broth that clings to the bowl and thinner noodles that don’t require boiled water for cooking. On their first mission, Chinese astronauts feasted on sweet rice dumplings, lotus seeds, and fried rice to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival taking place on earth. French chefs haven’t yet worked out how to make a croissant space-appropriate—crumbly food is dangerous to have aboard—but they have made galactic versions of lobster, scallops, and even stuffed quail for very special occasions.

During missions, these comforts from home play an important role in international cooperation. Astronauts from different countries will trade lunchboxes: Americans are said to enjoy Russian breakfast porridge, while Russian cosmonauts have spoken about their fondness for American space pastries and Japanese seafood options. On that first Russian-Korean mission, to celebrate the 47th anniversary of the day that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, Ko served his Russian colleagues a Korean meal, which concluded with Korean ginseng and green tea.

Yet despite this bounty of international fare, certain patriotic urges still apply. “Our food is better than the Americans’,” Russian astronaut Sergei Ryazansky told the Moscow-based magazine Novosti Kosmonatik in 2015. “Despite the variety, everything is already spiced. But in ours, if you wish you can make it spicy; if you want, you can make it sour.”

These world-class scientists are working on potentially world-changing projects, but despite it all, astronauts aren't so different from us: They still trade packed lunches at the cafeteria and brag about what they brought from home.

A small press is reviving forgotten—but newly relevant—writing about a complex region and its people.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio is a classic of American literature for its evocation of small-town life. But few people have heard of Anderson's Poor White, published just a year later.

The release of Winesburg, Ohio’s spare short stories in 1919 made Anderson famous, while the sprawling novel Poor White has been mostly overlooked. Now, though, it’s coming back into print, as one of the first books in a new series, Belt Revivals, that aims to resurrect “classic, unjustly forgotten Midwestern titles" and introduce them to new readers.

Anderson’s novel is an “odd book but a great one,” says writer John Lingan in the new edition’s introduction. Reading Poor White after Winesburg, Ohio “feels like leaving a one-room log cabin for a taxidermy-festooned hunting lodge; there’s a shared sensibility, a familiar woodsy style, but the scope and intention aren’t even comparable.”

Poor White follows Hugh McVey, who begins life as an oafish layabout, to the industrializing Midwest of the late 19th century. He’s a country boy in search of a tidy town to host his growing ambitions, and he's the sort who takes notice of the roar of the Mississippi River and the rolling landscape. “One of the greatest pleasures of Poor White is Anderson’s crystallization of his native Midwest at the very moment of its romantic enshrining,” Lingan writes.

Though the book doesn’t reify either the region’s rural roots or its industrial future, its portrayal of the Midwest still has the power to shape a reader’s ideas about the region. That’s a primary aim of this new series, which is kicking off with Poor White and Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads, a collection of short stories about the rural Midwest in the 1890s. Three more lost classics will follow.

A Belt Revival book, says Anne Trubek, the founder of Belt Publishing, “has some contemporary resonance. There are some themes that are newly interesting to people or eerily familiar.” Though written in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, these titles should have relevance in 2018. Another criteria: “It’s a work that deserves another chance at an audience,” she adds.

Belt, a small press with a regional focus, was founded in 2013, after Trubek began to understand the need for more stories about the Midwest. With Richey Piiparinen, an urban researcher, she put out a call for essays about Cleveland. “It was a really simple idea,” she says. “We asked a bunch of people if they had a story to tell about Cleveland. We were overwhelmed with submissions. There are interesting things happening in this place now and in the past, and there hasn’t been as much written about it.”

Trubek had been teaching at Oberlin College but had started writing for a wider audience, outside of academia. “There’s so little publishing or media from the Rust Belt,” she says, “and there’s so much pent-up desire, not only to tell stories but to hear stories and read stories about these places.” Belt Publishing’s city anthologies now include Detroit, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Flint, Akron, and Buffalo, in addition to the inaugural volume on Cleveland. The press followed this series with neighborhood guidebooks to select cities, as well as nonfiction works on Appalachia, Midwest folktales, “how to speak Midwestern,” and more—all Midwestern in focus but broad in potential appeal. In 2013, Trubek also created Belt Magazine as forum for beautifully crafted stories about politics and culture from the region.

As an academic, though, Trubek always had a soft spot in her heart for American novels of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. She had read them for her dissertation in American literature, and had long thought that some of the more overlooked titles were due to be republished. After the 2016 election, political thinkers, commentators, and reporters turned a close eye to the Midwest, and these books, she hoped, might help expose the roots of issues that have resurfaced today—and introduce outsiders to the complexities of the region and its people.

Ultimately, though, the main reason to republish these books is that they’re worth reading. Poor White might be thought of as a “flawed masterpiece,” Trubek says—the plot gets weird—but the writing is vivid, compelling, and revealing. “We are really interested in fabulous writing," Trubek says. "People think a regional press has to be booster-ish or sentimental or not that sophisticated. There’s no reason for that to be the case.”

Poor White’s thoughts on wealth and fortune might feel contemporary, but that alone wouldn’t be enough if a reader wasn’t compelled to find out what happened to Hugh McVey, “born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri.” It's a foreboding beginning for a story that pays careful attention to what it meant (and means) to live in the Midwest, open to both its charms and its challenges.

They've all been officially recognized on the English National Heritage List.

The Grade II National Heritage building on Hampstead High Street, in North London, is exceptionally easy to miss. In part, that's because it isn't a building at all: It's a postbox. Sat outside 23 Hampstead High Street, a mock Tudor building currently playing host to an upmarket French clothing store, this mailbox is like so many others across London. It's hexagonal and lipstick red, under a conical roof almost like a sunhat. A small plaque on the side ("This Penfold pillar box ... is preserved as an historical monument") gives a few clues about why you can't use it to post a letter.

In 1914, militant suffragettes from Emmeline Pankhurst's Women’s Social and Political Union set fire to the box, by pouring tar and oil inside and setting it alight. A message referring to suffragettes who had been arrested was found nearby. (Mail tampering was a common form of protest in the British women's suffrage movement: "Pillar boxes" across the country were set on fire and the windows of the Newcastle post office smashed with stones.)

Historic England, which runs the country's Heritage List, has recently recognized 41 such sites of protest—tiny historic sparks of resistance that range from places where key meetings took place to spots of skirmish, sabotage, or arrest. The important thing, the organization said in a statement, was making sure women's history was adequately recognized in national records. "Through its HerStories project, Historic England has been working with researchers from the University of Lincoln to address this imbalance and officially recognize suffragette stories that are told in bricks and mortar on The List," they added. “Each site has an important story to tell in the fight for women’s rights.”

Among those sites are postboxes such as this one; London's Westminster Abbey, where "prayers for prisoners" were used to disrupt services; and Bristol's Victoria Rooms, where the Union employed professional boxers to keep medical students from interrupting a public speech by Pankhurst. (They've all been mapped, in staggering detail, here.)

Others have quirkier stories: the Royal Court Theatre, in London's Sloane Square, staged the first ever suffragette-themed play in April 1907. (Unsurprisingly, it was called Votes for Women!) A Birmingham school narrowly avoided being burned to cinders by two suffragettes, who were instead so charmed by it, Historic England reports, that they left a note on a blackboard saying they couldn’t bear to set it on fire. In Liverpool, a suffragette hid in the organ loft of St George's Hall for 24 hours in order to sabotage the speech of a local MP the next day. Each one is a testament to the suffragette's policy of "deeds, not words."

The places were already listed buildings, the organization said in a statement, "but until now there has been no record of their suffragette history on the National Heritage List for England." These additions are an attempt to rectify that, and to celebrate the centenary of women first being allowed to vote. (It's worth acknowledging, however, that suffrage was not universal: Only women over the age of 30 who were householders, the wives of householders, occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5, or graduates of British universities were permitted to vote until 1928. In practice, that excluded most, if not all, working-class women or women of color.) Pankhurst's grave has also received an upgraded heritage classification by the United Kingdom's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

So, if you find yourself in the United Kingdom, look carefully next time you walk past a postbox. A site of militant resistance may be closer than you think.

Capturing lightning on a canvas is just as hard as it sounds.

William Nicholson Jennings, of Philadelphia, spent most of his days photographing wrecked or damaged infrastructure for the Pennsylvania Railroad. When it got dark and stormy, though, he pointed his camera up and tried to record bolts of lightning as they crackled across the sky.

What the 19th-century commercial photographer saw up there didn’t look like what he remembered from paintings or stage sets, where lightning was usually depicted as a series of a few sharp, jagged spears. Up there, on the bigger canvas of the sky, Jennings saw something much more complicated, and he wanted to capture it.

More than a century after Jennings raised questions about the fidelity of artistic depictions of lightning, a team of researchers from the Environmental Optics Laboratory at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest set out to answer it.

The researchers used software to compare 400 photographs of lightning storms to 100 paintings with lightning in them, made between 1500 and 2015. They found some consistent differences, which they describe in a new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Compared to real bolts, painted lightning tends to have fewer branches—no more than 11, the authors found, while the photographs depict as many as 51.

To venture a guess about why these differences might have emerged, the researchers also brought some humans into the lab and flashed images of lightning in front of them for a second or less. The subjects had to guess how many branches the lightning had, and the researchers found that they were only able to reliably do so when there were no more than 11 branches. It seems painters were representing what they had the capacity to perceive with the naked eye.

It is easy to paint lightning, it is just hard to paint it right. Photographing it would provide an accurate representation, but it was difficult to do—especially in the days of bulky cameras and long, long exposures. Jennings was determined to do it. He clambered up to his roof whenever a storm blew in, and in 1882, he finally got it: a photograph of lightning tracing a ragged path across the sky, branching like a root system. (In an even earlier daguerrotype, taken by Thomas Martin Easterly in St. Louis in 1847, the bolt looks like a river winding across a map.) Jennings’s work was later published in Scientific American and in the U.S. Weather Bureau’s monthly bulletin. And in the years since—and especially since 2000, the Eötvös Loránd team found—artists have been depicting lightning with more faithfulness to the real, wondrous thing. Because, it stands to reason, they'd seen it frozen in a photograph.

Struggling restaurateurs happened upon the feminist hero's culinary manifesto at a flea market.

It’s not yet lunchtime, but the tables at Barbarestan, in Tbilisi, Georgia, are rapidly filling up. There, a waiter leads me down a small spiral staircase to the bottom floor. Above my head is a round, hand-built stone ceiling, and fresh flowers rest at the center of every table. When I’m seated, I ask to see “the book.” The waiter looks at me and smiles.

Two years ago, this restaurant—which is often lauded as one of the city’s best eateries—wasn’t just empty. It was on the verge of shuttering for good. For years, the Kurasbediani family ran this same space as a typical Georgian restaurant, serving up local staples such as khachapuri (cheese bread) and khinkali (Georgian dumplings). While they found success for a while, the reality was that it was one of many restaurants of its kind. Then, the business started struggling. The Kurasbediani family was forced to make a decision: Change things up and become profitable, or close it down.

“The restaurant was boring and business was going down,” says Andria, one of eleven children who helps run Barbarestan today. “So we decided to rebrand and renovate.” What that rebranding meant was the big question, especially since a few obstacles stood in the way. The culinary scene in Georgia was (and still is) very young, and couldn’t support an upscale restaurant. The market for no-frills local fare, as they had already found out the hard way, was at capacity. They considered connecting with a famous chef, or asking a professional consultant for advice, but neither idea panned out.

One day, while contemplating their next move, the family took a walk to an antique market. They strolled past the tables of old accessories—cutlery, stationary, furniture—until they came to a stack of books. Suddenly, Andria’s father, Zviadi, stopped in his tracks and lowered his stare at one title. He knew immediately that this was no ordinary book, and the price tag echoed that reality: 150 Georgian Lari, or about $61.

The book, entitled Georgian Cuisine and Tried Housekeeping Notes, was published in 1874 by a Georgian princess named Barbare Jorjadze. Today, Princess Jorjadze is a national hero: She is considered the first feminist of the country, and is famous for her advocacy of women’s rights in Georgia. In her decree, she wrote about the damning expectations placed on women: "From a very young age, we are told, 'since god made you a woman, you must sit silently, look at nobody, go nowhere, shut your ears and your eyes, and just sit there. Education and learning of languages is none of your concern." Now, the Georgian National Library has dedicated a full room to her, in honor of her advocacy efforts. A copy of Georgian Cuisine and Tried Housekeeping Notes is on display at the Georgian Literature Museum and the Georgian National Library, too.

She also holds the distinction of being one of the country’s most famous authors. Princess Jorjadze wrote the book while traveling throughout Georgia as part of the royal family, compiling recipes from the different regions she visited. The book was intended as a guide for women of her era, with tips on dining etiquette and other 19th-century realities, such as housekeeping and cleaning advice.

But the bulk of the book—and what caught the eye of the family—was its extensive collection of recipes, close to 900 in total, that capture the spirit and evolution of Georgia’s cuisine over the centuries. By including recipes for foreign dishes, such as blancmange (a French milk pudding), it also documented the outside influences of the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Middle East. “[Princess Jorjadze] could not visit the different countries, but she could collect recipes from all over the world,” Andria says. “At that time, [Georgia] was a crossroads between Europe and Asia.”

Though the recipes existed in print, and anyone could see them, they were mostly enjoyed by the elite as years went on. It didn’t help that the ingredients used in some recipes—such as cloves and saffron—were exorbitantly expensive, or could only be procured from afar. Recipes that featured meats such as pork or chicken also proved impractical for the average person to eat on a daily basis (according to Andria, beans were the staple of family diets back then). But close to 150 years later, the Kurasbediani family saw a chance to change that, and make these recipes more accessible to everyone.

With the cookbook in tow, it took the family five months to renovate the restaurant and reimagine its first menu. The first thing was to find a chef willing to breathe life into the book, which turned out to be a tall order. “Everything changed,” Andria says. “We changed our environment, and we got a new team. We approached more than five chefs in Georgia before we found one willing to join us.”

In the two and a half years since its reopening in December 2016, Barbarestan has, so far, recreated 125 of the recipes in Jorjadze’s book. Some of the most popular dishes include Shila Plavi, a creamy, spiced rice dish with meat or mushrooms, and Dambal Khacho, a traditional Georgian cheese that the restaurant cures underground for six months.

The restaurant has since implemented a rotating seasonal menu, which features a fresh crop of recipes that are chosen based on the time of year and which ingredients are available. This summer, for instance, approximately 45 new recipes will appear on the menu, and include traditional fare such as Pelamushi, a sweet grape pudding. Other recipes are intended to introduce and reinforce progressive influences on Georgian cuisine. For example, Andria says the new asparagus cream soup recipe will be a way for Georgians to become more familiar with asparagus: one of those aforementioned, previously hard-to-get ingredients.

Still, the family wanted to maintain the down-to-earth, family-run appeal of the old restaurant, too. Originally built in 1866 as a butcher shop, the space oozes character, and meat hooks still hang above the tables. During the redesign, the family added aspects of old-world elegance to its place settings, lighting, and ambiance in order to strike a balance—and bridge the gap—between the past and the present, the young and the old, and, of course, the princess and the public. “The concept is to make our guests feel that they are at home,” Andria says. “That was the most important idea.”

But what makes Barbarestan special isn’t just that they are reviving recipes from this historic book. It’s how they are reviving them, too. The restaurant has worked with several of the country’s top chefs, including Giorgi Sarajishvili, but the family wants the cookbook to be the head honcho in the kitchen. This means that instead of signing chefs to long-term contracts, they have instead made a deliberate commitment to continuously rotating chefs through the kitchen. This, Andria says, will allow for new perspectives and new interpretations of the recipes found in the book. “Our grand chef will be our cookbook, and we will change our cooks every year or two,” he explains.

The waiter returns to my table with the book. I’m not allowed to touch it—I can only look. He carefully flips through its pages to show me the recipes inside. So far, the evolution of Barbarestan has reflected the progression of the Georgian culinary scene, which includes shaking off its Soviet roots and exploring its immense potential. Barbarestan’s revival of the old recipes has put a global, progressive spin on the country’s traditional ways, too. In 2017, it was recognized and awarded “Best Service in Georgia” by the French restaurant guide, Gault et Millau.“The cookbook gave us the inspiration about how to change gastronomy [here in Georgia],” Andria says. “We discovered a new world of how to create Georgian dishes.”

It's from sessions at New Jersey's Van Gelder Studio, the same place Coltrane made A Love Supreme.

On March 6, 1963, after a long day of recording, John Coltrane packed away his saxophones. Nearby, Jimmy Garrison put away his bass, Elvin Jones left his drum set, and McCoy Tyner closed the piano. The quartet had spent hours at Van Gelder Studios, a cathedral-like studio space run by legendary sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder. As they left, Van Gelder handed them a session tape—a seven-inch mono reel of everything that had gone down that day.

Fifty-five years later, the rest of us can finally hear it, too. On June 29, Impulse! will release Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, which is made up of takes from that day, The New York Times reports. There are seven tracks, two of which are previously unheard compositions.

As Downbeat reports, we almost never heard them at all. The masters from that day of recording likely languished on Impulse! Records' shelves until 1970, when they were probably destroyed as part of a larger cost-cutting measure. Luckily, Coltrane held onto his copy of the session tapes. His wife from 1955-1966, Juanita Naima Coltrane, recently found them again.

It wasn't the first time Van Gelder's fastidiousness saved the day. The engineer, who died in 2016, was known for his meticulous methods, which allowed him to capture the warmth and intimacy of live jazz performances. He was also quite secretive: according to historian David Simons, if someone took a photograph in his studio, he'd move the microphones around first so that no one could steal his secrets.

His studio, which had high cathedral ceilings and was located inside his house, was "a home away from home," for Coltrane, biographer Lewis Porter told NJ.com in 2014. "He felt comfortable in it." Indeed, the day after they recorded Both Directions At Once, the quartet returned to make another album, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Two years later, they came back again to make A Love Supreme, widely considered one of the best jazz records of all time.

According to music critic Giovanni Russonello, the newly discovered record showcases "an epochal band in its prime," and captures the breadth and energy of their live performances. All in a day's work, plus half a century of waiting.

On the 150th birthday of its designer, a famed tea establishment reopens.

Two things separated Art Nouveau pioneer Charles Rennie Mackintosh from other Scottish artists, wrote fellow architect Hermann Muthesius in 1905. One, he was the best Scottish artist of them all. Two, “[most] Scottish artists, if they are wise, early leave their homeland to seek fortune in London.” But Mackintosh had stayed and made Glasgow “one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” He earned that high praise by designing the Glasgow School of Art, the Hill House home, and, perhaps more importantly, several of Glasgow’s famed tea rooms, one of which is now being fully restored and reopened.

The Willow Tea Rooms have always stood out. In 1903, Mackintosh was commissioned to design nearly every component of the establishment on Sauchiehall Street. The tea rooms belonged to quirky entrepreneur Catherine Cranston, who was better known as Kate or “Miss Cranston.” Her tea rooms were temperate gathering places, an alternative to the pub. At the same time, Glasgow had become a seething artistic hub, and Cranston was a patron to artists.

While Mackintosh had designed Cranston’s tea rooms before, the Willow Tea Rooms were different. Mackintosh designed the building, the fixtures, the furniture, and even the waitresses’ uniforms. Past the building’s undulating facade, a gallery, a billiards room, and three salons, including the famed Salon de Luxe, spread across three floors. Customers could choose where to take their tea.

The Salon de Luxe stood out most. Intended as a space for ladies to dine on their own, it cost an extra penny. But diners could walk through opal-inlaid doors carved with roses, sit upon silver chairs, tall in Mackintosh’s signature style, and gaze on elegant glass chandeliers. The gesso print on one wall, titled “Oh ye, oh ye, who walk in Willow-wood,” was the work of Margaret Macdonald, Mackintosh’s frequent collaborator and wife. The rest of the tea rooms were nothing to sneeze at, either. Sauchiehall means “willow meadow,” and Mackintosh incorporated willow motifs throughout the building with his typical attention to detail—something that may have contributed to his eventual architectural burnout.

Nevertheless, Mackintosh was an artist his entire life. He was a member of the Glasgow Four, an iconic artistic group consisting of sisters Margaret and Frances Macdonald, as well as James Herbert Macnair. The four met at evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art in the mid-1890s and formed creative and romantic partnerships: Frances married Macnair, and Margaret married Mackintosh. (Margaret collaborated with Mackintosh on many tea room designs.) Through their often-combined efforts in architecture, design, glasswork, metalwork, and drawing, the Four formed a cornerstone of Art Nouveau, or “new art.” Their “Glasgow Style” of muted colors, motifs from nature and ancient art, and geometric designs was influential, if often misunderstood. Their eerie designs inspired the group’s alternative name: “the Spook School.”

The Willow Tea Rooms became a destination, a place to see and be seen, and Cranston’s business helped foster both artists and a thriving tea room culture in Glasgow. But after a brief window of fame in the British Isles, the Glasgow Four’s star faded. According to an essay on Margaret and Frances Macdonald, appreciation of Mackintosh’s work coalesced in Germany and Austria, not in Glasgow. Though Muthesius lauded him for his connection to the city, Britain made life difficult. While living in Suffolk during World War I, he was even accused of spying for Germany. Mercurial, a hard drinker, and obsessive, Mackintosh stopped getting architecture commissions and turned to painting and watercolors. When he died in 1928, his collected sketches and drawings were only valued at £88.

Cranston, on the other hand, sold off her tea rooms when her beloved husband died in 1917. The Willow Tea Rooms site housed other tea rooms, a department store, and a jewelry store over the years. It was a Mackintosh-themed tea room in 2014 when the landlord went into receivership. As a result, the building was purchased by businesswoman Celia Sinclair. Under the newly formed Willow Tea Rooms Trust, the building was renovated, undoing changes made over the years, while preserving the original elements that still exist. Even the vintage paint on the walls and the finishes on chairs were analyzed so they could be reproduced. According to Trust representative Maggie Maguire, the Tea Rooms have been restored as close as possible to their 1903 state. The cost was 10 million pounds, a sum indicative of how much appreciation of Mackintosh’s work has increased since his death.

June 7, 2018, would have been Mackintosh’s 150th birthday. The Trust held a gala event, showcasing the 420 pieces of commissioned Mackintosh-style furniture, the restored bay window, and the resplendent Salon de Luxe, with its recreated blown glass chandeliers. The event, though, was merely a preview. In fact, Maguire and other staff moved in all the furniture early in the morning. The actual soft opening is scheduled for July 2.

The space has been renamed “Mackintosh at the Willow” (the former occupant won a trademark for “the Willow Tea Rooms”). In its restored state, it will serve a number of purposes. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society will run tours out of the new visitor center next door. An educational center will detail the rise of Glasgow’s tea rooms, and the Trust is planning artistic classes in the style of Mackintosh. But most importantly, tea will be served. Not only afternoon tea and high tea, but meals, snacks, and (somewhat ironically given Miss Cranston’s temperance ideals) drinks.

The Willow Tea Rooms are a vital example of an influential architect and artistic movement. Many of the other Cranston establishments have disappeared, and Mackintosh’s other masterpiece, the Glasgow School of Art, suffered a devastating fire in 2014. While fame proved ephemeral for the Glasgow Four, the Mackintosh at the Willow will hopefully showcase Glasgow Style for years to come.

Walking the trails to prayer on Japan’s Nozaki Island, once home to persecuted Christians.

One day in October 2016, a small boat approached the dock at Nozaki Island, Japan. Among its passengers was a photographer, Makiko. She had traveled from Fukuoka, via neighboring Ojika Island, with her Leica M Monochrom camera and enough packed in her luggage for a two-day stay. She had one purpose in mind: to walk the trails that the island’s persecuted Christians had walked, in secret, centuries before.

Nozaki Island, off the country’s southwest coast, consists of 2.8 square miles of mountainous terrain and forest. Today it is home to wild boar, deer, and Japanese wood pigeons, but early in the 19th century, it was a safe haven for Japan’s kakure kirishitan—“Hidden Christians”—who could not practice their faith openly.

“Christianity was introduced in mid-16th century in Japan, but between the 17th and late 19th centuries, it was banned by the government,” says Makiko, who goes only by a single name. Basque missionary Francis Xavier brought the religion to Japan in 1549, but as it grew, so did Japanese fears of influence from external powers. In the late 1500s, ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi expelled all missionaries, and between 1612 and 1614, the Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity outright. Christians were forced to practice their faith in secret. If discovered, they faced torture or death. Some fled for more remote locations, such as Nozaki Island.

“For centuries, there was a Shintoist community having self-sufficient lifestyle with agriculture and fishing” on the island, says Makiko. “The first two hidden Christian families arrived from Omura early 19th century.” These two families are believed to have founded the Nokubi settlement, one of two Christian communities on the island. Following this, the photographer says, “three hidden Christians hid themselves under the commercial goods in the bottom of the merchant’s boat, escaping from execution, and settled in the Funamori community." The Nokubi and Funamori residents used a mountain trail, called Satomichi, to reach mass.

On the day when she arrived on the island, Makiko noticed the remnants of the Shinto community right away—“ghosty-looking houses”—and began her trek on the island's trails. During one walk, she realized she wasn’t alone. One of the island’s deer saw her approach and, “after walking for a long time through tunnels of camellia trees, when I reached the ground covered with wild ferns, it emerged in the wild forest.” The island has approximately 400 wild deer. “I felt constantly watched by them,” she recalls.

The ban on Christianity was lifted not long after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. “Within 10 years after the Japanese government abolished the law to ban Christianity, they [the hidden Christians] managed to build their own churches in Funamori and Nokubi communities,” says Makiko. “In its peak years—the mid 1950s to 1960s—there were about 680 inhabitants living on the island in these three communities. The island was gradually abandoned due to rapid economic growth on the mainland, and both communities moved out for modernized life.” According to the photographer, the island’s last inhabitant was a Shinto priest, who left in 2001.

The Nokubi Church is no longer operational, but can be visited by appointment. The Shinto shrine, dating from 704, is still standing, and there are remains of a terraced field and a school at Funamori, as well as a prehistoric stone structure some 80 feet high. Makiko describes her visit as a “spiritual experience,” which comes through in her black-and-white photographs. The island appears almost otherworldly. Shadowy tunnels of trees wrap around a worn pathway, an exposed, windswept coastline crumbles into the water, a deer watches thoughtfully through a veil of dense forest.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Makiko’s series, called Trails to Prayer.