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How One Woman Transforms Plants Into Pigment

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Kazumi Tanaka paints the natural world with the essence of flowers.

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It’s the patch of goldenrod that pulls us to the ground first. “I want to collect some of this,” Kazumi Tanaka says, crafting scissors in hand.

Tanaka is gathering richly colored flora native to Manitoga, a 75-acre woodland estate in Garrison, New York, for her most recent artistic pursuit: creating natural watercolor inks from plant specimens. Tanaka is Manitoga’s fifth and current artist-in-residence, and her project INK: The Color of Manitoga illustrates the scientific process behind her art making. Once the natural materials are chemically transformed into watercolors, the multidisciplinary artist paints botanical drawings with the ink derived from the plant specimens.

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The artist residency at Manitoga is a year long, so Tanaka began her search for naturally occuring hues in January 2018. “I came across the mountain laurel because it was red and green which I didn’t expect to see in the middle of winter,” Tanaka says. “And I managed to make three different colors out of that specimen.” Using a lab set-up she built herself (Tanaka is also a woodworker and antique furniture restorer), she crushes the specimens she’s collected until leaves become liquid, and petals become pigment. Left with a concentrated amount of vivid plant paste, Tanaka uses a high-school chemistry set to distill water from Manitoga’s Quarry Pool and mixes it in with the “paint,” along with gum arabic for preservation purposes. There are other bodies of water on the estate that Tanaka considered drawing water out of, like the silent and reflective “Lost Pond.” But based on her observations, the pond’s water had too much algae in it to be usable because, as Tanaka says, “it’s a still water, whereas the Quarry Pool is constantly moving.”

Following a half-hour process of letting all the ingredients settle, a natural ink emerges like a new crop bursting from the soil. The final step in this plant-to-paint transformation happens now. “As long as I transfer [the ink] to the paper right away, it remains quite a fresh color,” Tanaka says. Once the inks are ready for use, the artist creates a series of botanical drawings and paints each one with ink derived from the plant depicted. Think of a sustainable version of color-by-number, except Tanaka colors by species.

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Tanaka’s environmentally conscious art is rooted in her upbringing and culture. “I was thinking about how my parents used to go fishing and they used to just eat what they caught,” she says. “And how they used to say ‘it just tastes different.’ It’s a similar concept.” Though Tanaka celebrates the wide color spectrum of manufactured watercolor paints available in art stores, her interest in making her own comes from an innate curiosity about the world. “[I love] giving a challenge to myself and thinking, ‘What can I create?’ Everything in this room I made from out there!” she says, gesturing toward the wall-sized window that encloses her lab. “It just makes it worthwhile to do this effort.”

The grounds of Manitoga began as a rock quarry, purchased in 1942 by American industrial designer Russel Wright and his wife, Mary. The curation of the landscape started immediately, while construction of the buildings formally began in 1958; over the next three years the designer incorporated his heralded, revolutionary concept of easy, informal living into his development of the property. Found stones were rearranged theatrically, creating a natural amphitheater around the glass-walled house and design studio Wright built above Manitoga’s man-made swimming pond. In the creation of this Hudson Valley escape, no element was altered or spared—only moved. Verdant moss gardens decorate the roof, an example of design’s conscious pivot toward sustainable “organic architecture” at the turn of the 20th-century, and a subtle advertisement for Wright’s appreciation for hue. “The original idea for The Color of Manitoga came from Russel’s obsession with color,” Tanaka says. “He had a whole line of glazes for his pottery that are very specific.” Wright’s ceramic dinnerware line, marked by his trademarked signature on each individual piece, was the project that effectively made him a household name.

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Tanaka was born in Osaka, Japan, and her heritage is reflected in the clean lines and emphasis on curating the natural world seen in Wright’s home and studio at Manitoga. The designer was heavily influenced by his visits to Southeast Asia, and Manitoga serves as evidence of this. “Japanese gardens are very controlled [and carefully placed],” Tanaka says. The artist, careful to not situate Wright as an architectural mimic, adds: “But I also really admire his taste: he brought the feeling of [Japan] without copying anything. He brought his own sensitivity and love of those different cultures.” A subtle yet considered repurposing of nature into art is what unifies Wright’s and Tanaka’s visions for their projects—which both exist firmly in the embrace of their environment. “The program here and this project connects me to both Japanese and American history,” Tanaka says. “It’s a great marriage that I was given this opportunity. It makes sense.”

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In the lab, Tanaka points to a nearly pitch-black saucer of liquid, recently mixed. “The oak gall ink is very exciting to me right now,” she says. “The more iron I add and the longer I cook it, the more black it becomes.” Iron? Natural, yes, but I ask her to explain. When acorns are cooked they turn from brown to black, but what helps deepen that color is rust, Tanaka tells me. To achieve the darkest possible shade, the artist buries a rusty nail underneath the liquid, and lets it sit. “Tannic acid reacts to the vinegar and rust and turns it black,” she says. “That’s why it’s called iron gall ink, too.”

Found in the nutgalls of an oak tree’s branches, tannic acid has historically been used as a medicine, to pen the Declaration of Independence, and as a culinary assist. “I remember when my mother used to cook New Year celebratory food, one of [the dishes] was black beans, and I saw her pull out a nail!” Tanaka says. “She’d say, ‘This is what we do to make the beans blacker.’”

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The setting sun begins to cast a different light on each of the ink bottles, which are lined up in order of discovery. Naturally, the winter mountain laurel is first, now a faint beige. A couple of bottles down is the summer mountain laurel, which Tanaka collected in June. It’s a grey-tinted green. This seasonal contrast in colors makes the passage of time plain, and allows for a broader palette for Tanaka to paint from. Other inks include a striking purple derived from skunk cabbage in March, which Tanaka used to paint an indigo tree; when I visit in October, the tree is a softer green. Over time, the colors naturally distort the longer they are exposed to heat, like a mood ring. Tanaka doesn’t load her pigments with artificial chemicals like store-bought versions, so they adjust to their environment at will. As it turns out, the most plentiful color at Manitoga is the most difficult to preserve. “Green is very hard to keep, because its a chlorophyll and a chlorophyll is basically produced by the sun,” says Tanaka. “So when the sun is gone, it disappears.”

Though Tanaka’s project is rooted in improvisation, there is an equally important record-keeping procedure that allows the artist’s exchange with the landscape to flourish. Every time Tanaka collects a new specimen, she plots the place she finds it on a color-coded, large-scale map of Manitoga. She also logs the scientific names, dates, and times of her plant discoveries. Tanaka’s documentation of the collection, transformation, and creation of her art dovetails with Wright’s. “For him, design is not really about the product, its the process of getting there,” executive director of Manitoga Inc. Allison Cross says. “Manitoga was a process and continues to be [one].”


Rediscovering Mecca Flats, a Legendary Chicago Apartment Building

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It was destroyed in 1952, but this storied residence was once a gathering spot for the Chicago Black Renaissance.

In July 2018, when a maintenance crew uncovered artifacts from the often-mythologized Mecca Flats apartment building in Chicago, Rebecca S. Graft immediately knew she had to get involved. Graft, a historical archaeologist and Lake Forest College professor, became part of an interdisciplinary team tasked with examining the site. During the course of the dig, which lasted less than a week, she and her colleagues gathered seemingly mundane household items that will hopefully reveal details about the inhabitants of one of the city’s most storied residences.

Mecca once covered more than two acres of land in the South Side’s Bronzeville neighborhood. It was a state-of-the-art housing structure when it was completed in 1892, but initially, it allowed only white tenants. After becoming desegregated in the first half of the 20th century, it transformed into a gathering spot for the Chicago Black Renaissance. Over time, it fell into disrepair, and despite pushback from tenants, was destroyed in 1952 to accommodate the growing Illinois Institute of Technology. S. R. Crown Hall, the home of the IIT’s College of Architecture, now sits on Mecca Flat’s old grounds.

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The recovery effort created a unique collaboration between university, city, and nonprofit preservation partners. Now that the dig is over, Graft and her students are examining two large boxes of uncovered objects, which include clay marbles, a pill bottle, a silver fork, and parts of the building’s infrastructure. Graft says she plans to complete a report by the end of 2018 examining the date and usage of the artifacts. She hopes her findings will help people become more connected with those who lived in Mecca Flats. But Ward Miller, executive director of the non-profit Preservation Chicago, believes there’s a field of fragments around Crown Hall, so there will likely be more excavation efforts on the site in the future.

Construction of Mecca Flats began two years before the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition would bring around 27 million attendees—almost a quarter of the U.S. population at the time—to the Midwest. In a development wave following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Willoughby Edbrooke and Franklin Burnham designed a U-shaped structure with a courtyard, a feature that would come to define Chicago architecture. The two-wing building was notable for its proportions: Intended to house almost 500 residents, the Chicago Tribune in 1891 described it as “a fair-sized village.”

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Romanesque design elements included arched entrances, indoor and outdoor fountains, and ironwork. As the architectural historian and professor Daniel Bluestone wrote in his 1998 paper “Chicago's Mecca Flat Blues,” large atria—the first of their kind in a Chicago residential building—created communal places.

“I would imagine that brought people together as much as sitting on a front or back porch in an urban or even suburban environment where people are conversing and bringing ideas, conversations, and friendships all altogether,” says Miller.

“It was this new idea that instead of having a house, you could have a classy apartment building,” says Chicago’s official cultural historian Tim Samuelson. Highlighting the location as the dividing line between the black and white neighborhoods, Samuelson described Mecca as “gentrification, 1890s-style.”

Bronzeville during this time housed a wide variety of working-class residents, with a growing Black Belt developing on the railroad and industrial land west of Mecca. The building’s original owners hoped to attract more middle-class people to the area.

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Through the turn of the century, Mecca Flats only allowed white residents. But shifting demographics in the city also prompted shifting demographics within the apartments. More than half a million African Americans came to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and the city’s black population more than doubled during the 1910s. Located near the Illinois Central Railroad that brought migrants north, Mecca Flats became desegregated in 1912 and soon housed almost exclusively black tenants.

An open job market during World War I allowed a growing class of black professionals to prosper, many of whom moved into Mecca Flats. Around the same time, jazz flourished in the city with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and King Oliver commanding local nightlife. Mecca was immortalized in “Mecca Flat Blues,” recorded in 1924 by the pianist and composer James “Jimmy” Blythe and the singer Priscilla Stewart. The jingly tune tells the story of a “Mecca Flat woman” who “stings like a stingaree” and is looking for her “Mecca Flat man.”

The song—which ended up with so many verses, a Tribune reporter in 1943 reflected it “would make a book”—captured the interpersonal drama of Mecca Flats. As Samuelson says, “the comings and goings of people in and out of their apartments and who they brought with them were no secret to everybody else.” He recalls one tale of a church pastor’s wife, who suspected her husband was having an affair with a chorus member: “She gets people to break the door down and they find the minister with no clothes on, hiding in the bathroom.”

While stories of domestic spats and petty crime often made the local news, including the landmark black newspaper the Chicago Defender, Samuelson also highlighted moments of connection and entrepreneurship, like a woman who turned her apartment into a restaurant because there were few options for the Southern food many residents favored.

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In the mid-1930s, a young Gwendolyn Brooks was desperate for work in the Depression-era marketplace. Jobs, especially for African-American women, were scarce. Through the Illinois State Employment Service, she became an assistant for E.N. French, a supposed East Indian prophet who hawked magic potions to his fellow residents in Mecca. Brooks bottled and delivered these love spells and other elixirs, but quit after the fraudster from Tennessee tried to convince her to join his church. The experience inspired Brooks’s 1968 National Book Award finalist “In the Mecca,” a narrative poem following a woman looking for her missing child. Brooks paints eccentric characters potentially based on real residents.

She later reflected on her time in the building, saying “In the Mecca were murders, lovers, loneliness, hates, jealousies. Hope occurred, and charity, sainthood, glory, shame, despair, fear, altruism.”

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This intermingling of life and loss in the Mecca is something 90-year-old Lillian Roberts remembers well. The daughter of Mississippi migrants, Roberts moved into the apartments around 1931. She recalls homeless people sleeping in stairwells and how work was so scarce, people would hope for snow so they could get paid to shovel. Her mother Lillian Davis brought residents together through the Mecca Prayer Band, a group that helped the sick.

“I have nice memories about them: honest, poor, religious people that really believed in something,” says Roberts. Through welfare, her family received food they shared with those who didn’t receive aid. In return, neighbors helped her pay for college.

An activist, Davis was a prominent voice in attempting to preserve Mecca. In 1941, the newly formed IIT took control of the building and planned to demolish it, a goal supported by federal legislation from the 1930s that allowed for mass slum clearance.

During a decade-long legal battle, Davis participated in sit-ins at city hall and was often quoted in local and national outlets. In August 1951, she told the Chicago Daily News, “It's a law of life that a person has to have a place to live."

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Supported by welfare and housing groups as well as local politicians, Mecca residents took the fight to the Illinois House and Senate. State Senator Christopher Wimbish helped delay the destruction of the Mecca until after World War II, arguing it was a case of “property rights versus human rights.”

According to both Samuelson and Miller, the campaign to save the Mecca is one of the first tenant-led movements, influencing future battles for civil rights in African-American communities. But following the war, IIT campus expansion began again. The school became a place where, as Bluestone described, “engineering students would be insulated from the very society they were being educated to serve.”

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In its final years, the Mecca bore little resemblance to its original grandeur. Features in Life, Newsweek, and Harper’s mythologized a building on the brink of physical and moral collapse. John Bartlow Martin in the December 1950 edition of Harper’s called it “one of the most remarkable Negro slum exhibits in the world.”

More poverty porn than thoughtful reporting, these articles often ignored the needs of Mecca’s over 1,000 working-class residents. By the end of World War II, it had become clear that Mecca would not survive and the goal of those residents shifted. They no longer sought to save their home, but rather to obtain government assistance in finding new housing. As Jesse Meals, a longtime resident, told Newsweek in 1952, “You watch. A lot of people who lived here, they gonna die from grief.”

Samuelson and others note that historic preservation was rarely considered during this time, when many significant structures were destroyed. “The idea of repairing a building that was considered a slum was probably not something people thought of,” says Miller.

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In the end, Mecca was replaced by a building rivaling it in aesthetics and significance. As the head of IIT’s College of Architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ushered in a new era of modern architecture featuring brick, steel, and glass.

Built atop the Mecca rubble, Crown Hall is a manifestation of van Der Rohe’s “less is more” philosophy. The box-like structure he once described as “almost nothing” lacks even interior columns dividing the open plan. Like the Mecca’s atria, Crown Hall encourages a universal and democratic use of space, as was apparent on a recent afternoon. Inside, students tinkered away at work benches, the vibrantly colored trees practically reaching in through the expansive windows.

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Reflecting on the recent architectural discoveries, Michelangelo Sabatino, IIT’s dean of architecture, says, “It's an opportunity not only for this institution but for a number of other institutions including the University of Illinois at Chicago (which also had a large scale development project) to think about how disruptive it is to displace people and adopt more conciliatory attitudes and more willingness to coexist.” Sabatino says local and national institutions are interested in acquiring some of the artifacts after they’re examined. He plans on building a display in Crown Hall so current students can learn about Mecca Flats.

At his office in the Chicago Cultural Center, Samuelson shares a collection of Mecca memorabilia, from pressings of “Mecca Flat Blues” to parts of the metal railing and a foundation brick. These items are now part of the Chicago Architectural Preservation Archive. In 2014, he put together an exhibit on the building, which he is considering remounting in light of the new finds.

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This recent dig not only reveals what objects Mecca residents kept in their homes and provides more examples of the materials used to construct the building, but it also highlights the care and dedication in preserving its legacy.

“This is not just the case of an architecturally interesting building,” says Samuelson. “It is a loaded story. It pushes every button of development, gentrification, injustice, and survival. The building had such a power that people remembered it, that someone who would write a song about it.”

Ancient Celts Embalmed the Severed Heads of Their Enemies

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New evidence backs up the stories that Greeks told about the fearsome Celtic tribes.

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For many years in the ancient history of Europe, back in the centuries when Greek and Roman civilizations were in their heydays, these southern powers did not always get along with the more northern Celtic people. Julius Caesar, for instance, was famous for his accounts of the Gallic Wars, when he led Roman soldiers in fights against Celtic tribes in what is now France.

You can’t always trust a story that someone tells about their enemy, so historians have been skeptical of Greek and Roman descriptions of the Celts' more grisly behaviors, including chopping off the heads of their enemies and posting them as trophies.

But a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science backs up these accounts. After testing skull fragments found at a Celtic site, researchers found clues that these severed heads had once been embalmed.

Archaeologists excavated the site, at Cailar, in southern France, from 2003 to 2013, uncovering fragments of 50 human skulls, as LiveScience reports. Found near weapons, these fragments had marks consistent with decapitation, and it looked as if they may had been displayed in a public area, near the settlement’s gate.

Researchers from two labs, one at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier and the other at the University of Avignon, analyzed the fragments of both human and animal bone samples. Some of the human samples had markers of pine tree resin, as well as molecules of aromatic compounds that would only be created if the resin had been heated to a high temperature. These signatures were consistent with the reported embalming practices of the ancient Celts.

According to Greek reports, head trophies would have been hung from the backs of Celtic horses or displayed in front of the houses of victorious warriors. Decor in this part of France has since changed, and today the winding streets of Le Cailar featured charming stone facades, with nary an embalmed head in sight.

In New York, People Can Be Landmarks, Too

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A conservancy organization names a new batch of "living landmarks" every year.

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Public garden designer Lynden B. Miller and industrial designer and Publicolor founder Ruth Lande Shuman never anticipated earning Living Landmark status—the designation from the New York Landmarks Conservancy is hardly something that fits among the usual taxonomy of career pipe dreams and red carpet related motivators—but on November 1, both women joined the ranks of nearly 200 luminaries past and present who’ve enhanced the city’s character and legacy in their respective fields.

“It’s wonderful and terribly exciting and rather frightening to be recognized in this way,” says Miller, the landscape designer and consultant responsible for the design, restoration, and improvement of over 40 gardens and parks within all five boroughs including the Conservatory Garden in Central Park, Madison Square Park, and Bryant Park. “I consider it an opportunity for people who’ve never thought about it before to realize that [the gardens] are the living landmarks and need to be supported.”

Prior to the first Living Landmarks celebration in 1994, the Landmarks Conservancy’s yearly fundraiser honored a specific building. However, when that year’s honoree backed out, Peg Breen, the then-recently appointed president, was in a bind. “I was left with coming up with an idea for a fundraiser and I ran into former governor Hugh Carey who kidded me and said ‘you have a great job, now make me a landmark so I can stay just the way I am,’” says Breen. “I realized that that was what I should be doing. So I asked him if he would be honored and we came up with a terrific first time out … the idea was to get more people talking about why we need to save our architectural legacy.”

Along with Miller and Shuman, this year’s recipients are Broadway and screen legend Chita Rivera, surgical pioneer Dr. Thomas Sculco of Weill Cornell, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law at Columbia Law School Michael I. Sovern, former Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Peter Stangl, Conservancy Trustee Stephen S. Lash, and philanthropists Liz and Jeff Peek.

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Previous recipients have include Joan Rivers, Liz Smith, Gloria Steinem, George C. Wolfe, and former New York City Mayor David Dinkins. “In the past we’ve had Walter Cronkite,” continues Breen. “If Walter Cronkite said it was important to save buildings, a lot of people would pay attention.”

Although New York isn’t exactly suffering from a dearth of potential honorees, the selection process is surprisingly uncomplicated; according to Breen, it’s primarily based on personal recommendations from the board, the public, and living landmark alumni, as well as the overall goal to represent a diverse selection of the city’s industries and demographics. Sometimes, it just comes down to logistics like whether or not a potential honoree is even available the day of the event. “It’s amazing how many people think about this over the course of the year,” she says. “It’s an interesting title,” albeit one without any associated responsibilities.

As far as traditional landmarks go, New York City has no shortage of those either. The New York Landmarks Preservation Commission, the mayoral agency in charge of landmark preservation, has awarded over 36,000 individual buildings and sites with that designation. “A landmark is something outstanding, something important,” says Shuman, the award-winning industrial designer whose research on the psychological effects of color combined with her passion for improving public education and job preparedness among low-income students led her to found Publicolor in 1996. “When I think of a landmark, I think of the Chrysler building. It’s just a building that never ceases to inspire awe in me. When you see it lit up at night time in the night sky, it’s just stunning and so different from its neighbors and I love that. That it didn’t mind being different.”

And the same could be said of the honorees themselves, a parallel that Shuman acknowledged after some gentle prodding. “Look, if you want to make a difference, you have to be prepared to think differently, to talk differently, to act differently and to be criticized,” she says. “You have to be prepared for that. Conformists don’t make a difference. I mean look at the Guggenheim for god’s sake. It’s another incredible building which I’m sure offended many of its neighbors. But look at it. It’s magnificent. And Frank Lloyd Wright did something utterly extraordinary with that building.”

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Philosophical and metaphorical similarities aside, there is one stark difference that made its way into multiple interviews. Unlike landmark sites, these living landmarks can alter their appearance without administrative approval—”People usually joke, ‘Do I have to get your permission to get a haircut or change my style,’” says Breen. You also won’t ever see Miller or Shuman walking around with a bronze plaque around their necks and pigeons parked on their heads. But you can revere these two women—and their celebrated peers—all the same.

Found: Vulgar Mosaics in a Roman Latrine

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They offered bathroom-goers some raunchy entertainment.

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It’s the year 200, you’re in southern Anatolia, and you’ve gotta go to the bathroom. If you happen upon the right latrine, you're in for relief—of the comic kind.

Researchers from the Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Research Project were surprised this summer to find crude, comic mosaics adorning one Roman latrine, satirizing figures from Greek and Roman mythology by depicting their nether regions. The vibrant, incidental find now lies carefully covered in Turkey, awaiting future study—but honestly, first glance kind of tells you everything you need to know.

One section of the mosaic depicts Narcissus, ostensibly admiring his own reflection like he does in the myth (just what he’s looking at is, unfortunately, obscured by dirt). But in this Anatolian take, Narcissus is admiring more than his face: In his left hand he proudly holds his penis, clearly impressed with himself and trying to impress us. But the artist won’t let him get away with it. Narcissus’ nose is exaggerated in the mosaic, contrary to the contemporary beauty standards he thinks he defines.

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The other section is rather more subtle (and harder to discern), but just as bawdy. Some mythological context—supplied by the University of Nebraska's Michael Hoff, one of the researchers—might help: Legend has it that Ganymede, another famously beautiful young man, was abducted by a smitten Zeus, who transformed into an eagle to swoop down to earth and carry the boy back to Olympus. To emphasize his boyish innocence, artists often depict Ganymede holding a hoop and a stick so he can enjoy some carefree hoop rolling, a common Greco-Roman game involving, well, spinning a hoop with a stick. Here, Ganymede is indeed holding a stick—but with a sponge at its end, so he can clean himself off like everyone else after using the facilities. It doesn’t seem like he needs it. Instead, an avian Zeus is cleaning Ganymede’s genitals—bent behind his back—with a sponge held in his beak.

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Hoff rejects that the scene is meant to suggest sexual activity between Zeus and Ganymede. Instead, he says, it’s a sendup of iconic tropes that has few archaeological peers. (He estimates that the mosaic dates to the 2nd or 3rd century.) Excavated latrines rarely reveal hidden mosaics, says Hoff, let alone works with such risqué imagery. These artworks are the products of “pretty specialized labor” more befitting, say, a temple. So, depending on the results of future research at this and other sites, the effort expended on decorating the latrine could say a lot about Antiochia ad Cragum’s culture and priorities. Hoff, who has been researching the site for 13 years with the Research Project, says he became interested in the ancient city because it wasn’t a major, influential hub—“pretty small potatoes,” actually. It offers, he says, a sense of “what the regular people were like in Asia Minor.”

Rather irreverent, apparently.

Help Us Identify the World's Best Theme Restaurants

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We want to hear about the high-concept eateries you truly love.

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Theme restaurants are a special breed. The food itself isn't often the main draw—instead it's all about the incredible lengths these establishments go to create a truly wondrous atmosphere. Some go all in on the fantasy, such as New York’s Ninja, an underground restaurant where you dine in a replica of a feudal Japanese village. While you eat, masked ninjas pop out of the walls, and the cocktails come with dry ice and rubber throwing stars. Others embrace concepts that are more generalized, such as San Antonio’s Magic Time Machine Restaurant—packed with wall-to-wall bric-a-brac, the overarching vibe is pop culture nostalgia. And then there’s the world-famous Casa Bonita in Denver, Colorado, where the theme seems to be… theme restaurants.

Whether it's dishes with names so goofy you can barely tell what’s in them, or animatronic parrots interrupting with jokes while you’re trying to eat, we want to hear about what makes your favorite high-concept eatery a winner.

Fill out the form below and tell us about your favorite theme restaurant. And if you have any terrific, original photos of your nominee, please email them to eric@atlasobscura.com with the subject line, “Great Theme Restaurants.” Some people pick restaurants based on the quality of their food, but true explorers also occasionally dine out based on the number of mid-meal performances.

The Absinthe Enthusiasts Hiding Bottles in the Swiss Woods

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In the Val-de-Travers valley, people never stopped distilling the spirit.

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Within the Val-de-Travers, a lush valley in western Switzerland next to the French border, lies a forest straight out of the Grimm brothers’ tales. Replete with gnarled pine trees, whimsical rock formations, and cushioned moss, this area is the birthplace of absinthe, the spirit made from regional herbs such as wormwood. Nicknamed "the green fairy," it was banned for a century because of fears about its potency.

Absinthe reemerged in 2005, yet these woods still hold its secrets. Here bottles of the spirit are hidden away, tucked into the likes of babbling brooks. Thirsty hikers are then invited to take a swig.

At a time when distillers around the world have increasingly started producing the spirit, these hiding places, called fontaines froides (or cold fountains) recall the cloak of mystery that once surrounded absinthe. The tradition was borne from the valley’s water and its flora, as well as its residents' love of walking and ingenuity. The absinthe enthusiasts that continue to maintain these secret stashes are carrying over their dedication to the spirit into a brand new era. With it, they hope to strike a balance between local lore and a modern revival story.

“Sometimes we’re the ones to replace an empty bottle, sometimes it’s the green fairy herself,” says Yann Klauser with a laugh. Klauser is the director of the Maison de l’Absinthe, a museum that opened its doors in 2014 in Môtiers. “It’s one of the last remnants from the time when absinthe was clandestine, because it’s still sort of illegal to do this, but it’s just something we keep up for ourselves,” he says.

Absinthe first emerged in Couvet, a town nestled the Val-de-Travers, in the late 18th century. The drink, made of wormwood, anise, fennel and other local plants, had an alcohol by volume level that sometimes reached 70 percent. In the 19th century, distillers in Switzerland and nearby France, most notably the town of Pontarlier, began to commercialize the green fairy.

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While it took off in Parisian clubs, its popularity came with rumors that the spirit caused people to hallucinate or become violent. In 1910, the Swiss authorities officially banned the sale and production of absinthe. That made it even more popular among the Parisian elite of the time, and the fact that it found fans in the likes of Ernest Hemingway only further contributed to its mythic status.

The Val-de-Travers fountains have an even longer lineage. Historians have found 19th-century letters referencing bottles of absinthe stored along walking trails in the valley's woods. But during the clandestine period, these fountains acquired their aura of resistance. After the 1910 ban (most valley residents can cite the date from memory with a little shudder) absinthe distillers went underground for more than a century. Despite the ban, people never stopped making and drinking absinthe in the Val-de-Travers.

The region's isolation partially helped protect it from federal oversight, and local authorities mostly looked the other way. According to an oral history recorded by Nicolas Giger—who has long promoted absinthe as the president of the Pays de l'Absinthe association—one local judge would even send his son to pick up bottles from a distiller. Another once told a distiller who'd received a fine that the charge was more of a business card than a punishment. The spirit was so prevalent a local Swiss chef served French president François Mitterand a soufflé with absinthe in 1983, an infraction the authorities only investigated after pressure from the French media.

That's not to say that absinthe lovers were completely immune to scrutiny, as Giger recalls. When the federal authorities cracked down hard in the 1960s, they fined dozens of distillers into or near bankruptcy. Distillers and restauranteurs were known to quickly hide their stock in bathrooms, or even in the woods, if an unknown person came traveling by. One particularly clever distiller stored his equipment behind a hidden door in a bookcase.

“You had to know the distiller, and you had to go drink it in his or her kitchen,” says Giger, who grows the herbs used in absinthe and signs his emails “absinthe-ally yours," among other puns. “Now, going to the supermarket and putting a bottle in your shopping bag doesn’t have the same charm.”

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Lifting the ban in 2005 ushered in a new era, and people no longer had to whisper when they talked about absinthe. Residents have also seized it as an the opportunity to promote their valley. In 2009, a joint Swiss and French commission co-led by Giger inaugurated the Absinthe Trail, a route that takes tourists past distilleries, charming villages, and inns in the valleys where absinthe is made. The route guides people to a handful of the historic fountains, too.

For the most part, the exact location of the fountains in the valley remains somewhat hidden, even amongst locals. It’s part of the tradition and part of the allure. I’m from a nearby region in Switzerland, and I had to learn the locations from my grandparents. They told me where to start hiking, and I knew I had made it when I encountered a little clearing. Clear spring water trickled out of the rock. Nearby, I found the shelf that held a glass bottle of absinthe. I poured myself a little taster, and mixed in some fresh water—this gave the drink its famous cloudiness. The liquid was strong and sweet, with the pungent anise taste that's distinctive to absinthe.

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Next to the bottle lay a little tin box for coin donations. If the bottle is empty, there's a phone number to call, a direct line that reaches the network of local absinthe enthusiasts.

Those who maintain the fountains are a small group that includes distillers, those employed by the museum, trail staff, and other volunteers. They’ve even built a new, modern fountain since the ban was lifted in order to breathe new life into this homegrown spirit. Klauser says that building further on absinthe's story in the modern world is a challenge facing the valley now. “There’s a lot to say about absinthe, for it has a storied past, of course, but also an entire new future ahead of it,” he says. “We’ve had to build a whole new clientele.”

The current temporary exhibits at the museum, which lies on the Absinthe Trail and often puts on workshops for locals and tourists alike, are telling. There’s a nearly 200-year-old bottle from absinthe’s early commercial days, recently unearthed in a French basement. The other exhibit attempts to both establish and teach universal standards for tasting and judging absinthe. It’s a collaboration with local researchers and, Klauser says, a rite of passage for the spirit to access the world stage.

Harnessing the Power of the Sun to Turn Apples Into Art

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In Japan, the labor-intensive practice of apple stenciling is slowly fading.

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Across a small number of orchards in northern Japan, apples grow in cocoons. For a few months during the summer and early fall, the squat, fruit-bearing trees dotting the landscape dangle small, waxy pouches from their branches. But a closer peek would reveal that these little chambers are carefully tailored bags, each one enshrouding a tiny, cream-colored globe. These are mojie apples in their infancy, and they’re quietly growing into canvases. Harnessing the power of the sun—and a sticky stencil to block it—orchardists can turn these pieces of fruit into pieces of art.

Mojie apples can depict just about everything, from the Japanese kanji for good health to the face of a particularly beloved pop star, who allegedly handed them out to his entourage. But according to Chisato Iwasaki, who has been in the business of cultivating mojie apples for more than 20 years, these apples share a common message. “Most of the stencil designs symbolize luck,” he says. “They are often gifted to wish good fortune and prosperity, whether for business or celebratory occasions.”

In Japan, orchards that produce mojie apples are found mostly in Aomori prefecture, the northernmost prefecture on Honshu, known for its apples. Here, orchardists have been growing gourmet, hand-bagged apples for nearly 200 years. Iwasaki, who grows mojie apples at Iwasaki Farms, learned the process from his father, who began stenciling apples nearly 50 years ago. “He started because he wanted to add value to apples,” he says. “I began working with him to help him achieve that vision.”

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Not just any old apple can become a lucky mojie. Iwasaki says that Mutsu and Stark Jumbo are the best varietals for the job. Not only are they larger and more accommodating for stenciling sprawling images, he explains, but they have smooth skins, facilitating an easy application and removal of the stencils.

But, aside from that, there’s nothing easy about the process. Cultivating mojie apples is a high-maintenance labor of love, and it takes nearly an entire year to perfect. Unlike apples grown in the United States, which are typically touched once (around harvest time), mojie apples are handled 10 to 12 times, by multiple farmers, before they make it off the tree. The process begins before the apples are even in existence. Beginning as early as January, orchard workers prune the trees, cutting excess branches to protect against overcrowding and ensure that each fruit will receive ample sunlight.

As May approaches, the pale pink apple blossoms begin to open. But the flowers are fleeting: Farmers cull the blossoms on each tree from about 4,000 to 200–400, which gives the apples room to grow as large as possible. The final fruit is 30 percent larger than most American apples. The remaining blossoms are pollinated, often by hand, using a fluffy powder puff wand.

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In the summer, workers return to the orchards to weed out wonky apples. Deformed and bruised fruits are plucked away, making room for the more promising apples. The bagging process typically begins in June, when multilayered bags are wrapped and folded cautiously over each maturing apple, shielding it from pests, the elements, and the sun. Keeping the apple out of direct sunlight keeps it a creamy white color, and increases the photosensitivity of the fruit’s skin. According to Ringo Daigaku, an online apple education center, this months-long period of light deprivation means that, once exposed to the sun, the skin will rapidly produce anthocyanin, a pigment that turns the apple a vibrant red.

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Throughout the summer and into early fall, the bags are removed one layer at a time. The outer bags are removed first, revealing translucent inner bags, which are often stripped four to five days later. Dealing with sudden sun is a delicate dance, as apples, too, get sunburns. If the temperature of the skin gets too hot, it will crack, and the inside may become brown. For this reason, some sensitive varietals require three layers of bags, which are removed gradually so as to avoid burning.

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Once the innermost bag is removed, and the pale, light-deprived fruit gets its first peek at the sun, it’s time to stick the stencil onto the skin. While simple designs, such as single characters, can be applied by hand, tweezers are used to apply and remove more complex stencils to each individual fruit.

The stencils used today are stretchy, plastic adhesives, but that wasn't always the case. At first, Iwasaki notes, growers used charcoal to draw characters onto the apple, washing off the design before harvesting. Since then, the stencils have gone through a few iterations, including designs made from Scotch tape and packing tape. The adhesive sheets currently used provide the most flexibility, as they can bend and stretch with the apple as it grows.

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Once the newly-naked, stencil-adorned apples are exposed to the sun, farmers place reflective sheets below the trees to ensure light touches the bottom of the fruits. Growers return to the trees frequently to rotate the apples and ensure they’re getting even sunlight.

The successful mojie apples are nothing short of perfect. The stencil is carefully peeled away, revealing a design in the shape of the sun-shielding seal. Sold in decorative boxes, wrapped in plastic along with a cushion, or stacked in four rows on “treasure ships,” (small, wooden boats meant to hold piles of mojie apples), they're most often presented as exquisite gifts rather than casual snacks. Only after the artwork has been sufficiently admired should the recipient slice into the fruit.

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But sadly, Iwasaki says, these tantalizing treasures may slowly be disappearing. “It is very labor-intensive, so we are slowly decreasing production volume each year,” he says. Between the natural disasters Japan has faced in the past decade, and the shrinking number of young people interested in continuing the work, many orchardists have struggled to get by. Even the traditional bagging process, applied to stenciled and non-stenciled apples alike, is slowly dying out. “I feel like it will disappear in the near future,” Iwasaki says.

But he isn’t stopping anytime soon. After 21 years in the business, Iwasaki still finds the fruits of his labor rewarding, despite the tribulations. “I sometimes receive unusual design requests, but I’m happy to receive them,” he says. “It makes me proud that our apples bring happiness to people.”


Before Envelopes, People Protected Messages With Letterlocking

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For centuries, senders used folds, slits, and wax seals to guard correspondence from prying eyes.

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Around 2 a.m. on February 8, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots penned a letter to her brother-in-law, King Henri III of France. It would be her last. Six hours later, she was beheaded for treason by order of her cousin, Elizabeth I of England. The letter has since become one of Scotland’s most beloved artifacts, the handwritten pages offering a poignant glimpse of a monarch grappling with her impending execution.

But it’s not the words that fascinate Jana Dambrogio, the Thomas F. Peterson conservator at MIT Libraries. For more than a decade, Dambrogio has been studying “letterlocking,” the various systems of folds, slits, and wax seals that protected written communication before the invention of the mass-produced envelope. To guard her final missive from prying eyes, the queen used a “butterfly lock”—one of hundreds of techniques catalogued by Dambrogio, collaborator Daniel Starza Smith, and their research team in a fast-growing dictionary of letterlocking.

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Mary was not the only person of note to lock her letters: Fellow practitioners include Galileo, Machiavelli, Marie Antoinette, the Boston philanthropist Isabella Gardner, and the artist Albrecht Dürer. “Everyone was doing it,” notes Smith, a lecturer in the department of English at King's College London. “It is something that underlies the history of communication for hundreds of years, and it’s kind of mind-blowing.”

To seal a modern-day envelope (on the off chance you’re sealing an envelope at all), it takes a lick or two, at most. Not so for Mary or for Machiavelli. In those days, letters were folded in such a way that they served as their own envelope. Depending on your desired level of security, you might opt for the simple, triangular fold and tuck; if you were particularly ambitious, you might attempt the dagger-trap, a heavily booby-trapped technique disguised as another, less secure, type of lock.

The practice of letterlocking in the Western world is roughly bookended by the spread of flexible, foldable paper in the 13th century and the invention of the mass-produced envelope in the 19th century. But it also fits into a 10,000-year history of document security—one that begins with clay tablets in Mesopotamia and extends all the way to today’s passwords and two-step authentication. “We see letterlocking as part of a much broader historical study,” Smith says.

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Dambrogio first encountered locked letters in 2000, in the conservation lab of the Vatican Secret Archives. Her fellowship project involved a careful study of legal and accounting records spanning the 10th to 17th centuries, all of which had survived virtually untouched. By the end of the first week, she says, “I had already started to see slits and authentication marks and really beautiful wax seals and cut-off corners and folds—folds in books, folds in books of papers, folds everywhere.”

But, fresh out of graduate school, Dambrogio didn’t immediately grasp the significance of these discoveries. “It took a long time for me to realize, actually, what I’m doing is new,” she says. “It's not just new to me.”

Over the next several years, working at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. and again at the Vatican Secret Archives, Dambrogio continued to collect evidence of security built into archival correspondence. She started writing a book that explored how 250 archival records were made; her first chapter would focus on letters (“the most fundamental, most simple structure,” she reasoned) and take no more than four months to finish.

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Ten years and a quarter-million letters later, that “first chapter” has taken on a life of its own. Initially, there wasn’t even a word for what Dambrogio was studying—her term “letterlocking” was adopted by other researchers beginning in 2009. Today, Dambrogio focuses on the engineering of the letterlocks; Smith, who joined her in 2013, provides historical context. She describes their work as “evangelical”: Together, they’ve handed out more than 10,000 replica locked letters, spreading the gospel to elementary schoolers and academics alike.

“When we do these workshops at Oxford or at King’s Shakespeare Centre,” Smith says, “what we’re trying to do is show people who work in rare books and manuscripts how to read and understand the materials that are passing through their hands in ways that maybe they haven’t seen before.” But for their younger audiences, says Dambrogio, “it’s just a really fresh way of teaching history and conservation.”

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Although evidence of letterlocking is abundant in archives, it’s still a challenge to accurately recreate these three-dimensional objects. Some of Dambrogio and Smith’s detective work is small-scale, focusing on the structure of an individual letter. Even if the folds have been erased after years of flat storage, patterns of dirt and discoloration on the paper can offer clues to which portion of the folded letter would have been the outside. To better understand the breakage of the original wax seals, their research team has experimented with historic formulas for sealing wax.

At other times, their research looks more like a massive, multi-year treasure hunt. There have been cases, says Smith, where they have nine damaged examples, “and then find the tenth one that’s damaged, but in a different way, so it supplies the evidence that's missing in the others. It becomes this kind of jigsaw effect.”

Piecing together these clues is a time-consuming process that requires a massive number of data points. “It's looking of thousands of artifacts and having the ability to remember them” in order to spot trends, Dambrogio says. It also takes patience, she adds, noting that some structures have taken her as long as a decade to reverse engineer.

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Sometimes, however, the evidence is delivered in one fell swoop. In 2012, Yale researcher Rebekah Ahrendt tracked down a trunk of undelivered letters in the Netherlands—including 600 that had never been opened. Preserved by The Hague’s postmasters in hopes that someone might eventually claim their letter (and, thus, pay postage), the collection immortalizes the final decades of the 17th century through the words of musicians, merchants, aristocrats, and spies. Smith and Dambrogio are part of the team analyzing this historical correspondence.

Although the trunk will take years to examine fully, the duo has already noticed links between these letters and those of other figures they’ve studied. “If you compare Queen Elizabeth's letters and [English poet] John Donne's letters and then you went and looked in this trunk, you'd start to see the evolution of a technology,” Smith says. “What you start to see is something that starts to look more like a modern envelope. This is part of a story we can tell.”

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Both researchers are adamant, however, that there is still so much left to uncover. Many questions remain: How, for instance, did John Donne and Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster know the same letterlocking techniques? Were they passed down from a parent or from a colleague? Did certain locks imply something about the content of the letter?

There is evidence that suggests letterlocking might have been seen as a reflection of personality and taste. Smith points to Donne as a particularly telling example. “He's using five different letterlocking styles, and one of them—despite the fact that we've looked at nearly a million letters, a quarter of a million in detail—we've never seen anyone else use it,” Smith says. “So we've got this guy who's known as the most inventive and witty poet of his generation, and he's doing one of the most inventive and witty and brilliant letterlocking methods you could imagine. That is the kind of evidence you can use to say ‘Ah, so, you can actually see something of people's personalities in the way they fold letters.’”

In the same way, Mary Queen of Scots’s locked letter offers new insight into her final hours. “It's extraordinary that, at a certain point of time, someone is writing a letter and it's considered their last act,” Dambrogio says. “But, actually, their last act is choosing what letterlocking technique they're going to use to communicate with the people they love.”

The Strange Allure of Hundreds of Samples of Hair

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Naturalist Peter A. Browne's collection of strands, tufts, and swatches—from animals and presidents alike—was almost lost.

Robert McCracken Peck was looking for a free way to furnish his largely empty apartment. Instead, he ended up saving one of the world’s preeminent collections of hair from tumbling into obscurity.

It was 1976, and Peck was newly installed as an assistant to the director of the museum at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, in Philadelphia. He happened to start his new position on the cusp of an office move. As he fumbled his way through confusing corridors, crowded with things to haul or toss, Peck passed a few tin boxes full of cast-off papers waiting to go to the dump. Stacked, he thought, the containers might make a nice bedside table.

When he cracked the boxes open, though, he discovered scrapbooks full of hair—from famous people, from animals, from everyday folks from all walks of life. The samples were covered with tissue paper; flanked by correspondence, sketches, and detailed handwritten annotations; and encased by ornate endpapers. Their contents were “a little bit brittle, had yellowed a little bit, and oils from hair had transferred over to opposing pages,” says Peck, who is now a senior fellow at the Academy. “Otherwise, not much deterioration had occurred—it had not been exposed to light.”

At the time he thought there had to have been some mistake. Surely this unusual collection wasn’t intended for the trash. But other staffers were much less enthused about the find than he was, and were eager to get the curiosity off their hands. One told Peck that the albums were a little icky and lacking in scientific value—but Peck found them meticulous and compelling. He asked to become their custodian. “I returned to the hallway discards and with a large black marker boldly added NOT above the word TRASH scrawled at the top of the scraps of paper taped to each box,” he recounts in Specimens of Hair: The Curious Collection of Peter A. Browne, a new book about the collection.

Peck then spent years unraveling the history of this hirsute hodgepodge.

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For a guy who didn’t breed or keep sheep, Peter A. Browne sure knew a lot about them—especially their wool. From the 1840s to the 1860s, he studied one strand after another in near-forensic detail. He built a contraption to test their elasticity, and measured them against hairs from a sloth, elk, grizzly, and “elephant’s beard.” He enumerated the differences between “hairy” and “wooly” sheep so convincingly that agricultural societies considered his insights essential, and he traveled from America to England to lecture on textile manufacturing.

A naturalist with a roving, rambling curiosity, he studied geology and botany before beginning the last chapter of his life’s work: a tremendous archive of hair from all sorts of creatures in most every corner of the world.

He solicited strands, tufts, and skin-backed samples from agriculturalists, curators, collectors, and even well-known humans and the occasional tree. He sometimes requested these himself. Other times, museum staff, such as Joseph Henry, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, reached out on his behalf.

That’s how he came to have a swatch of sea otter skin, the color of a rain cloud, and 49 samples of wool that look a bit like excised molars. On a single sheet, labeled “whiskers,” are samples from terriers, raccoons, bats, and horses, all mingled together. A blue ribbon encircles a few scraggly strands of George Washington’s hair, and a considerably bushier cluster of John Adams’s. (Browne received samples from 13 of America’s first 14 presidents. He and Millard Fillmore had a misunderstanding.)

“You could almost say that he was the world’s authority on hair, only because he didn’t have much competition,” says Peck. “Browne was something of a loner in that regard.”

With the field wide open in front of him, Browne invented his own lexicon. He dubbed his collection “pile,” from the Latin pilus (“hair”), and coined the term “trichology,” from the Greek trikhos, to describe the study of hair and fleece. He viewed the undertaking as a scientific project and a nationalistic endeavor. Across the bottom of his scrapbook ran the phrase, ducit amor patriae (“Love of country leads me”).

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When samples arrived, Browne had little reason to doubt their provenance, Peck says. “No one would have thought to fake it or send something that wasn’t real because they knew this was for a scientific purpose and national collection, and there was no value to it in monetary terms.” (More recently, locks from Elvis Presley, John Lennon, John F. Kennedy, and Ludwig van Beethoven have all supposedly hit the market, fetching as much as $115,000, and follicular forgeries have become more common.)

But that doesn’t mean that Browne's samples were all obtained or studied in a way that would pass scientific muster in the 21st century. In his analysis, “he was trying to apply some of the same principles that were being applied to other scientific disciplines that were also new,” Peck says. That entailed leaning on some of the racist biases that underpinned phrenology, including the belief that intellectual and cultural superiority manifested in physical ways. “Ornithologists were looking at birds and classifying them by the color of their feathers and shapes of their heads,” Peck says. “He was trying to look for something tangible that would separate or unite people, and hair seemed to him a good way to do it.” Browne compared the hair of people from around the world, and categorized the different shapes he saw. He summarized these—the cylindrical, oval, and elliptical—in an 1852 publication called Classification of Mankind by the Hair and Wool of Their Heads. That’s when things “went off the rails,” Peck says. “He made the mistake of trying to give them a hierarchy, which is ridiculous.”

This unsavory sociological history isn’t the reason that the collection languished, though. Browne deeded the archive to the museum in 1860, but it mostly sat in storage. Peck speculates that the reason it became “one of the Academy’s least-known holdings” was that the practice of collecting hair probably seemed, to many scholars, commonplace and unworthy of their time. In the Victorian era, hair was often fashioned into keepsake trinkets and memento mori. Past curators may have considered the collection “a sentimental fetish more than a legitimate scientific discipline,” Peck says.

On those rare occasions when the collection has become a topic of any public discussion, it’s been in conjunction with politics—including the party convention in 2016 in which many people were buzzing about a certain future president’s improbable yellowed locks.

The scrapbooks will be on view at the academy for a three-month run beginning November 14. Every few weeks, the staff will flip the pages to protect the samples from light and give repeat visitors something new to see. “We want to show people as much of it as we can,” Peck says.

Meanwhile, Peck has taken up Browne’s work himself—at least the famous hair collection part. A few years ago he queried the White House for a bit of Barack Obama’s hair, and when Bill Clinton accompanied Hillary to the Democratic National Convention in 2016, Peck joked in a news release that “my shears are ready, if our former president is willing.” If he has his way, the collection will keep growing.

What in the World Was a Key-Footed Glyptodon?

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It had a shell as big as a car.

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Back in 1834, in southern Patagonia, Charles Darwin found a set of fossils that he just couldn’t explain. He thought that the bones might have belonged to a mastodon. Richard Owen, a contemporary of Darwin’s and an anatomist, had a different idea. In his view, the creature, now extinct, was about the size of a horse… or a camel… or a llama? He suggested the name Macrauchenia, the “long llama."

The story of Macrauchenia only became more complicated as more fossils were found. Its skull indicated that it had a proboscis of unknown size, like a tapir’s or maybe an elephant’s. This creature had lived in South America, which was isolated enough to make fitting native fauna into the larger family tree of life difficult at time. It wasn’t until 2017 that DNA tests revealed that Macrauchenia's ancestors had been related to the branch with rhinos, tapirs, and horses.

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These are the mysteries of megafauna, animals that lived not so long ago in geologic time, but far enough in the past that we don’t know too much about them today. In a new book, End of the Megafauna, the paleomammalogist Ross D.E. MacPhee, who works at the American Museum of Natural History, explains the going theories about what these creatures were like and how they disappeared. Many scientists believe hunting pressure from migrating humans and other hominins may have done these creatures in; others believe ecological and climate change wiped them out. (Less popular theories include food web problems, disease, and a giant fireball.)

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These animals have an uncanny familiarity—they resemble animals that we know from our own time, but also they’re different. The bibymalagasy, for instance, may have been something like an aardvark, although it’s hard to know. The mihirung was a giant bird related to ducks and sand geese. The giant diprotodont, though, was a large marsupial that might have looked sort of like a rhino with no horn. And what in the world was a glyptodon?

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The End of Megafauna features more than one glyptodon, illustrated by Peter Schouten. There's a morning-star tailed glyptodon and a key-foot glyptodon. These guys were “the last of the giant armadillos,” MacPhee writes—they weighed anywhere from 4,400 to 5,275 pounds. (Today’s armadillos, he notes, weigh in at 55 pounds.) They’re known in part from the armored carapaces found in the fossil records—shells so big that they could be cars. Their tails, paleobiologists think, were used to fight each other: Some of the carapaces have serious dents in them.

Some scientists think that if human hunting drove all these guys to extinction, we'd have found more bodies, MacPhee explains—more sites showing evidence of that hunting on a dramatic scale. As it is, the evidence of this not-so-distant past allows us to imagine a world filled with unfamiliar creatures, still clearly connected to our own. In the top illustration, the two birds perched on the glyptodon are species that are extant. The biology of Earth can change quickly, with some survivors and some creatures—even giants—never seen again.

All U.S. National Parks Are Free to Enter on Sunday

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Access is in honor of Veterans Day.

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On Sunday, access to all 490 National Parks in the United States is free in honor of Veteran’s Day. This year, the federal holiday marks 100 years since the end of World War I was officially declared on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Several national park locations have strong ties to the holiday thanks to their American military history, from the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana.

Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, was established in 1872, and called upon the U.S. Calvary to serve as the location’s first park rangers. Located in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, the 3,468.4 square miles that make up the wilderness recreation area boast a geothermal geyser that recently spewed decades-old trash and the remarkably colorful Grand Prismatic Spring.

Multiple parks have served as training grounds for troops over the years, so locations have both birthed and commemorated the ends of American military careers. World War I created a need to use open space in this way: African-American Buffalo Soldiers trained at Hopewell Culture National Park in Ohio, and future president Dwight D. Eisenhower led a tank school on the grounds of the Gettysburg Battlefield in preparation. On November 13, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a design featuring two black granite walls that originally listed 57,939 names of servicemen, was dedicated in Washington D.C.

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With all of the varied national park options across the country, tracking visits to them can be difficult. National Park passports, designed specifically for domestic travel and first introduced in 1986, can make marking off these historic sites more satisfying. For some folks, acquiring stamps in these passport-lites is almost an obsessive fixation; the National Park Travelers Club, founded in 2004, has more than 2,000 members. Organized by geographic region, the passports are filled with maps and park information, making America’s database of parks and historic sites highly accessible. Free park days, like Sunday’s, work to lower the barrier of entry for people to enjoy the nation’s beauty, too.

Special World War I events this weekend include the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in Georgia and Tennessee hosting a caravan tour that explores the fort’s military relationship to the First World War, and a park ranger at the Second Bank of the U.S. leading a discussion on how the war affected Philadelphia.

A Close-Up Look at the Most Influential Medical Book of the 16th Century

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Andreas Vesalius dissected the bodies of executed prisoners to better understand human anatomy.

Andreas Vesalius was one of the earliest scholars to write about anatomy, based on his first-hand dissections of human bodies. His 1543 anatomical text, De humani corporis fabrica, is arguably the most influential medical book of the 16th century. The volume's anatomical illustrations—depicted at various stages of dissection—are incredibly accurate for the time.

In the video above, Atlas Obscura visits the New York Academy of Medicine to get a closer look at this important medical text.

Moth Fur Is the Ultimate Acoustic Armor

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It muffles the clicks of ravenous, echolocating bats.

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For hungry bats, maybe it’s not all about how the moths actually taste. When you hunt by echolocation—sending out clicks and following the echoes—it helps to have prey who can’t hear you, like the many earless moths hugging our lightbulbs around the world.

New research, however, explains how these moths still manage to elude their predators without hearing: with minuscule, muffling fur that locks the clicks in and prevents them from echoing back to their hungry sonars. Thomas Neil, of the University of Bristol, calls the system “acoustic camouflage” in a forthcoming study, presented this week at a conference of the Acoustical Society of America.

To measure the fur’s sonic absorption capabilities, Neil and his team sent pulses of ultrasonic frequencies—sounds too high for human ears to hear—out to target moths through a loudspeaker. A microphone next to the speaker captured the resulting echoes and measured their strength. The team repeated this process from hundreds of angles for 10 moths across two species, measuring how different parts of the body absorbed sound to different degrees. The thorax wound up being the MVP, its fur absorbing up to 85 percent of the sound thrown at it. The team calculates that, without that thoracic fur, moths would have a nearly 40 percent higher risk of being found out. It has evolved to be strikingly more effective than butterfly fur, which can capture at most 20 percent of the sound that hits it (butterflies and moths don’t often cross paths).

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It’s not clear, writes Neil in an email, why only some moths have evolved to be earless, nor is there a clear geographic split between them and their eared cousins. Neil and his team are currently attempting to profile the furriness levels of a variety of moth species (there are some 160,000 species altogether), and they have so far made a pair of telling discoveries. First, diurnal moths who don’t have to worry about bats tend to have less fur than their nocturnal counterparts—but among them, even some of those who can hear have grown thick coats of defensive fur, underscoring its crucial survival value.

We have much to learn from these moths for our own sonic purposes. Absorptive moth fur could provide a useful model for developing “sound insulating technology,” as Neil puts it. Their fur, he says, at least matches the capabilities of many existing technical sound absorbers, testifying to nature’s ability to build technological marvels on its own. Don’t expect mothscaping to take off any time soon.

Allow These 32 Slumping Pumpkins to Ease Your November Blues

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Gravity and entropy are cruel, but sometimes hilarious, sculptors.

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Cinderella was worried that her carriage would turn into a pumpkin, but what are pumpkins afraid of turning into? The answer, as it turns out, is much sadder pumpkins.

To celebrate the beautiful loneliness of the November jack o' lantern, last week we asked Atlas Obscura readers to send us pictures of their moldy, sagging, aging Halloween pumpkins. You sent us a delightful array of slumped pumpkins (also referred to as "dumpkins" or "bumbos"), capturing a wide range of emotions. Some of your prumpkys look like they're painfully sobering up from a night of hard partying. Many of them managed to develop the sunken-lipped grimace of someone missing their dentures. And others just look like they are crying out, fighting against the dying of the Halloween light. Like fingerprints, every sad pumpkin is unique, and they are delightful and haunting, each and every one.

Check out a selection of some of our very favorite submissions below. And be on the lookout for wonderfully sad pumpkins in your area. 'Tis the season of the dumpkin.


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Slumpin' Smile

"Unfortunately, our pumpkin began to slump and rot within days of taking post in our front garden. His jaw slacked to one side, and his innards began to liquify into a black goo that resembled chewing tobacco."

— Dusty Dean, Topeka, Kansas



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The Ghost's Gone Out of It

Submitted by Syd Rein


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Funeral For a Friend

Submitted by Sandra, Tacoma, Washington


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Bleary-Eyed Bumbos

Submitted by Dustin Martin


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Lost the Will to Grin

Submitted by Dawn, Saint Augustine, Florida


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Pac-O'-Lantern

Submitted by Rita Thurman, Kansas City, Missouri


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Pumpkins on the Edge

"One was a bat, the other a spooky face with a creepy smile. [It looks] like it’s eating the ledge it was left on."

— JP, Duluth, Minnesota


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Oh Honey...

Submitted by Bob Brandon, Moberly, Missouri


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Party Boyz

"One was cute and sweet, the middle was scarred and scary, and the third looked like Mike from Monsters Inc. [Now they're] world weary and ravaged by the changing seasons."

— Cass, Middle of Nowhere, Southwest Ontario


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Jack & Jack

"I have been chronicling the decay of my jack o' lanterns for many years now. My dude and I carve our pumpkins the day before Halloween and keep them on the front porch as long as humanly possible. I refer to this annual tradition in my Facebook photo albums as 'Rot On,' and it is always immensely popular with my eff-bee friends. When they are fresh, they are spooky and/or fun.

Jack and Jack, as they are known, always end up infinitely more creepy and dejected as time goes on. Sometimes they look like silly old drunks; sometimes they become grumpy old men; sometimes they are puddles of goo. However they turn out, we love them more the moldier they become."

— Holly Engel, London, Ontario


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King Underbite

Submitted by Angela Clatworthy, London, Ontario


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You're Only As Old As You Feel

Submitted by Catherine Hammond, Cambridge, Massachusetts


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Moldy, Mad, and Ready to Sag

Submitted by Sage Billig, Arkansas


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A Cry for Help

Submitted by Rob, Missouri


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One Guilty-Looking Gourd

Submitted by Wayne Kew, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania


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Red-Eyed and Rotten

Submitted by Maddie K., San Diego, California


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Smiling Too Hard

Submitted by Tif Slama


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The Devil's Dumpkin

Submitted by Jenn Ciccarelli


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Bluuuuuugggggghhhh...

Submitted by Bert E. Shetler, Tucson, Arizona


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'Dead.'

Submitted by Dawn Terrizzi, Texas


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Go Home, Bumbos. You're Drunk.

Submitted by Joyce Remy


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Put Your Dentures Back In, Grandpa

Submitted by Morgan Caubarreaux, Firestone, Colorado


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Sag With a Smirk

Submitted by Diane Lieu, Los Angeles, California


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One Dopey Dumpkin

Submitted by Kathryn Biallas, Phoenix, Arizona


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'Edvard Munch's The Scream'

Submitted by Linda Colsh, Maryland


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Harumph

Submitted by Malcolm Clark, San Francisco, California


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Nom Nom Naw

Submitted by Eliza Abbey, Virginia


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Skull Rot

"I think even the skull is sad we haven't put him out of his misery."

— Rebekah Rivera, Douglas, Wyoming



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A Fire Inside

"Pathetic, in a really awesome way."

— Tim, St. Louis, Missouri


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'A Drunk Witch.'

Submitted by Shawn Hendrix, Las Vegas, Nevada


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'Squirrel Food'

Submitted by Ed Adrian, Burlington, Vermont


In This Mexican Town, One in 5 People Is a Glassmaker

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Chignahuapan is famous for its handmade ornaments.

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In October every year, a 213-foot synthetic Christmas tree is raised in the small pueblo of Chignahuapan, Puebla, about three hours east of Mexico City. The tree, adorned with lights and esferas—what all of the nearby shops call ornaments—is so grand that the tip-top of it disappears into the blanket of fog hovering over the town.

While the fog is what gives Chignahuapan the nickname “Pequeño Londres,” or "Little London," the town is well-known throughout Mexico for its powerhouse production of esferas, and for the skilled families of sopladores de vidrios, the glassmakers who make them. A sign hanging proudly near the town’s open-air bus terminal declares Chignahuapan as “EL MUNDO DE LA ESFERA.” This claim is borne out by the numbers: More than 400 artisans and workshops have taken up shop around the pueblo in the last 45 years, and that number, along with the volume of visiting tourists, is growing. Together, these craftspeople make a collective 70 million glass items per year.

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“Every business has their own workshop,” Fernando Muñoz says in Spanish, as he pulls into a car-packed driveway on the outskirts of the city. Nearby, cows graze freely in backyards, and hens run through rain puddles in clay-colored roads. “Every single one of us has our own style.” He walks past a wall of canaries for sale, pushes aside two big blankets, and the factory of Casa Muñoz appears: a miniature warehouse with hundreds of glass bulbs at different stages of production lying around. There’s an AutoCAD machine, too. Muñoz has a storefront downtown, but the factory is all but hidden to the public.

Started by Juan Manuel Muñoz, Fernando’s father, in the mid-1990s, Casa Muñoz is a typical representation of the glass factories in Chignahuapan, which generally operate 365 days per year in mostly the same manner. For one, all of the employees are family—Juan’s wife Christina Reyes is the production manager and his sister Carmen runs the storefront. “All my sons know how to do this,” Juan says in Spanish, as he runs a long glass tube over a blowtorch fixed to a long, assembly-line table.

Above him on a drying table sit chocolate-hued globes drying in a row like lollipops. Others sit in packaging filled with agave leaves. Not all of his products are spherical: Some resting nearby are shaped like bells or mushrooms. “It all depends on the ability and the quality one has to make things by hand,” Juan says. “The techniques that one has. The creativity one has. And the difference between other globeadores.”

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Juan never intended to become a successful globeador, another name for glassblower. He studied heavy machinery in his 20s, and worked as a mechanic for decades until a friend of his instructed him how to blow glass. That friend learned from a man named José Rafael Mendez Muñoz (the men have no relation), who brought the art and profit of glassmaking from the state of Michoacán to Puebla sometime in 1970.

Though Juan says José had others to assist him, José quickly became an emblem in his adopted pueblo through his talleres, or workshops, in the town’s zócalo, or square. “He went from not knowing anything,” Juan says, “to creating other factories. He learned well, and he taught well.” José died in 2017 at the age of 76. (His family declined to be interviewed for this story.)

José’s art awoke Chignahuapan’s economy. Soon, one out of every five citizens became a soplador de vidrio. The government named the town one of Mexico’s “Pueblos Mágicos” in 2012, and a tourist spike followed, along with buyers in bulk. In a region that is one of the most difficult for farmers in all of Mexico, glasswork gave townsfolk an industry with which to support their families.

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Josefa Reyes has been working for the Muñoz family as a soplador for the past seven years. Her daily quota is 400 bulbs. She makes enough money to send her two boys—both know how to blow glass—to a nearby university. “You need patience,” Reyes says in Spanish. “You need to learn how to focus. You need time. You need to practice.”

In 2010, Chignahuapan went global. That November, President Felipe Calderón selected a handful of sopladores, including Juan and his wife, to design and create esferas for St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The Muñoz family created several hundred miniature silver orbs for the Christmas tree in the Chapel of Guadalupe. Mario Toso, the secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the time, was so impressed by the work that he requested esferas for decorating his office in Europe. That season, Reyes recalls, reporters from TV Azteca and Televisa flooded Chignahuapan, seeking out secrets to the artisans’ process. She was in awe. “The feeling was just beautiful,” she says. “I felt so proud of my pueblo. To think that it all starts right here.”

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Like many artisanal goods in Puebla, shipping the esferas across continents poses profit risks (“They’ll break,” Reyes notes). Juan and his family do most of the cross-state deliveries themselves, packing dozens of transparent cylinders full of esferas into his minivan to drive to Mexico City or Toluca. They’ll sell their wares for around 100 to 200 pesos—nearly twice as much as the cheap imitations spreading around the country. Juan is unfazed by these inexpensive mimics. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years now,” he says, proudly. He walks over to a drying rack, and picks up a globe bearing the Three Magi, all of which he hand-painted.

“Don’t forget,” he says, holding one up. “No globe is the same. Every single one of these are different.”

This Century-Old Wartime Crater Is Still Visible From Space

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The massive Lochnagar Crater, as seen from a satellite.

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One hundred years after the end of World War I, the effects of the war are still visible on the landscape of the Western Front, like a stubborn scar.

They’re evident on the ground: In Vimy Ridge, France, for instance, what first appear as grassy patches of gently rolling hills are actually the divots blasted by explosions; unexploded munitions, along with shards of shrapnel still turn up in fields and waters, and are collected so-called “iron harvests.” (Portions of Belgium are so littered with this explosive debris, The New York Times reported in 2014, that “almost every construction project poses a danger.”) The effects are also evident a bit higher up—the squiggly trenches of Beaumont-Hamel, France, are still etched into the earth and have been photographed by drones.

A recent satellite image collected aboard the Landsat 8 proves that some of the damage from the Battle of the Somme is also visible from space.

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In an attempt to attack and neutralize nearby German forces, British teams dug a mine under enemy strongholds and packed the tunnels with 60,000 pounds of explosives. When these detonated, on July 1, 1916, debris shot 4,000 feet up into the air—more than twice the height of One World Trade Center. Cecil Lewis, an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, recalled that “the whole earth heaved and flared.”

When things settled, the explosion left behind the Lochnagar Crater, an impression 70 feet deep and 330 feet wide. It was a bloody day. Though British troops gained control of the crater, surviving German troops fired at the soldiers who advanced toward them.

A century on, the crater is visible from high in the sky. It appears as a black dot close to the town of Albert in this image, created by NASA’s Earth Observatory in October using the Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. It’s a testament to the long life of war—in memory, and the land itself.

Glimpses of Lost Railway Journeys of the Past

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A new book collects 33 routes that went off the rails.

They called it “The Big Hill”—4.1 miles of railroad so steep that every mile of track had an inclined spur installed to catch runaway trains. They were staffed 24 hours a day. When a train approached, the conductor would have to go through a series of whistles so complicated that they would assure the spur operator the train was under control. Only then would he flip the switch that allowed the train to continue.

The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had promised a route through the Rockies, at least 100 miles north of the border, but the mountains at Kicking Horse Pass were so steep that it was impossible to build a track there that met government standards for railway grade. But as CPR began work on a tunnel through one of the mountains, the Big Hill line was used a temporary fix, designed to “break the government prescribed limit in spectacular fashion,” as Anthony Lambert writes in his new book Lost Railway Journeys from Around the World.

Like the other 32 journeys featured in the book, the Big Hill line is long gone. But the tales and photographs of these defunct routes evoke a time when trains still represented the cutting edge of travel technology. Across the world, Lambert resurrects a bygone world of steam engines, narrow-gauge tracks, and custom monorails that carried cows 10 miles to the seaside.

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These trains passed through spectacular landscapes and required feats of engineering. There’s the famous Orient Express and the charming Somerset & Dorset Railway, which chugged through the British countryside. There’s the dramatic route that was supposed to cross the Pyrenees, but that never quite lived up to its planners’ ambitions, and the tiny train that used to loop inside the inner walls of Paris. There are trains built to transport gold and trains built to transport pilgrims. Lambert tells of the Bostan-Fort Sandeman line in colonial India, built during World War I to carry chrome ore from a mine in Hindubagh to a British munitions factory. It went through Zhob Valley (now in Pakistan), where the locals would be able to board, and was “one of the few narrow-gauge railways in the world with sleeping cars.” It took 19 hours to travel the line's 175 miles, at an average speed of just 9 miles per hour. Passenger service continued until 1985.

The lost railways in the book disappeared for all sorts of reasons. They were outcompeted by airlines, better roads, bigger railroads, or speedier subways. Or they were brought down by wars. Or they simply grew old. Sometimes, they were flawed from the beginning.

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The Listowel & Ballybunion Railways in Ireland, for instance, were always impractical. The cars were partially bisected by the A-frame monorail track they ran on, which created problems of balance, especially when shipping large items, such as a piano or livestock. The line only made money during the summer, when passengers used it to travel the last 10 miles to the seashore. But it was such an incredible, unusual piece of infrastructure that it became, Lambert writes, “one of the most visited and photographed of Irish railways.”

The line chugging up and down Canada's Big Hill lasted for 23 years, from 1886 to 1909. Traveling it became a popular adventure in its own right, and when a party of British royals, including the future George V and Queen Mary, took the line in 1909, they rode on the buffer bar at the front of the train while it worked up the hill. Eventually, the CPR finished the tunnel that allowed the railway to carry passengers on a less teeth-clenching ride, and the four miles of what was now called the “old line” were left to history, as so many others have been.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of photographs from Lost Railway Journeys from Around the World.

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You Can Now Eavesdrop on Orcas on Your Computer

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Listen to the peaceful, and sometimes not-so-peaceful, sounds of the sea for the sake of science.

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Somewhere in the Haro Strait, where Washington State trickles into British Columbia, a whale poops. That waste is a scientific goldmine, but not if scientists don't know it's there. But if you listen close, you might be able to help them find it.

An internet app called OrcaSound allows citizen scientists to livestream the ocean sounds of the Pacific Northwest from anywhere in the world, to help gather data about the resident killer whales and their environs. Scott Veirs, the project’s lead researcher, said that hydrophones (underwater microphones) have been in place off Washington’s San Juan Island since the mid-2000s, capturing the submarine goings-on and bringing them to listeners in a rudimentary form. The app relaunched recently, and now offers real-time streaming, as well as sounds from an all-new hydrophone station off Whidbey Island, just to the southeast of the the older ones.

Veirs developed OrcaSound because he saw an opportunity for engaged citizens to help fill gaps in the study of orcas. The whales have long been well-observed in the summertime, when the weather cooperates and the cetaceans are more accessible to scientists and the Coast Guard, who observe them by boat. But questions have lingered about their lives during other times of the year. Now, in any season, listeners can notify scientific authorities to alert them to the presence of whales, so they can rush out like first responders to collect important data. The orcas have been facing a food crisis in recent years, so their fecal matter can help scientists get a sense of what they’re managing to eat, and what their stress levels are like. Having citizens on the line is also an exercise in preparing for the worst, like an oil spill. In such a case, there will be multiple (ear) witnesses to attest to where the whales were at the time.

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But whales and waves are not the only things listeners will hear. “I want people to be able to listen to the ocean easily so they understand that it’s full of wonderful sounds,” says Veirs, “but it’s also full of noise pollution.” Ships make whales’ lives much harder, not only because they take up space and pollute the water and have giant rotating blades underneath them, but also because they can effectively blind whales with noise. Like bats, whales hunt with echolocation. Noisy ships create an effect known as “masking,” which dulls the whales' critical vocalizations. Ty Crisafulli, who also does research for OrcaSound, likens masking to someone constantly flicking the lights on and off as you try to cook a meal. Not only is it dangerous, but “it would kind of stress you out,” he says.

The hope is to make sure that whales are getting the nutrition they need, and provide scientists with data to help them push for restrictions on noise pollution. But Crisafulli says that, over time, the project could help answer more “visionary” questions about the very nature of orca life. If they are producing the same patterns of clicks over and over again, for example, does that count as language? Do certain kinds of calls correspond with certain weather conditions, or with a particular whale’s company?

Any answers are probably a long way off, but in the meantime, Veirs hopes that people will heed OrcaSound’s motto: to listen not just to whales, but for whales.

Reviving the Lost Tradition of Cooking Flowers

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It was once common across rural Italy.

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Picking, cooking, and eating flowers and wild herbs was once a common practice across rural Italy. From Naples’ sciurilli (deep fried courgette flowers) to Veneto’s frittelle di fiori de gazia (acacia flowers doughnuts), most regions have a dish whose key ingredient is flowers. But after World War II, industrialization and urbanization led to the abandonment of this ancient tradition. Now, one woman is trying to bring it back.

Elena Rosa, whose last name literally means “Rose,” is growing flowers, wild herbs, and rare vegetables in a four-hectare farm nestled between the wheat fields of rural Piedmont, about 30 miles from the snowcapped peaks of the Cottian Alps. Rosa grew up in Turin, Piedmont’s main city, but spent summers with her grandparents in Ceresole Reale, a mountain village inside Gran Paradiso National Park. That’s where she first learned about foraging.

“As a kid, I loved helping my grandma picking vegetables,” she says. “I used to go out into the woods to look for wild caraway to make grappa.” Now, some 30 years later, she’s delivering flowers to the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant.

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“Foraging for flowers and herbs was a widely diffused practice across the Alpine area of northwest Italy,” says Giulia Mattalia, a doctoral student in Ethnobotany at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, who has studied folk plant knowledge in Piedmont. “Cooking with flowers was a daily practice for most families.”

Common recipes included soups and frittatas made with luppolo (hop flower), jams and infusions made with rosa canina (dog rose), and dumplings filled with tarassaco (dandelion). Flowers were also a key ingredient in popular herb digestifs such as Serpui, a grappa seasoned with wild thyme, and Genepy, a spirit made with eponymous genepy herbs.

“Wild flowers and herbs are rich in vitamins and minerals, and they were especially important during time of famine, disease, or war to provide sufficient nutrition to the population,” says Alessandro Di Tizio, a graduate of the University of Gastronomic Science in Pollenzo who works as a professional ethnobotanist.

Indeed, one of the few texts dedicated to foraging in Italy was published by Florentine doctor and naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, who survived the brutal famine that hit central Italy in 1764 thanks to his knowledge of wild plants. Tozzetti’s 1767 treaty titled De alimenti urgentia, which literally means “Of urgent aliments,” was written to record life-saving knowledge about gastronomic and medical uses of wild pants for future generations.But Tozzetti’s work is an exception. Academics rarely studied or recorded traditional knowledge about wild plants. Instead, women transmitted the information in an oral tradition—an informal process halted by the onset of industrialization in the 1950s.

“After World War II, many young people left rural areas to look for work in cities, and were no longer interested in foraging,” De Tizio explains. “And those who stayed could often do without foraging thanks to newly available industrial products.”

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Italy’s post-war industrialization affected farming practices, too. Many farmers switched to lucrative monocrops to meet market demand. In the span of a generation, traditional folk knowledge of wild plants was lost. The only keepers of such ancient notions are elderly people living in rural areas.

When Elena Rosa left Turin to move to the Alpine area of Val Pellice in 2009, she accidentally stumbled upon one such guardian of folk knowledge, an 86-year-old woman named Iride. “She was living in a house not too far from the one I moved into,” Rosa explains. “But she would only speak in Angrognino, a local dialect, so I tried learning it.”

Thanks to Rosa’s rudimentary dialect skills, Iride was able to share her vast knowledge of wild herbs and flowers. During long walks in the woods of Val Pellice, she showed Rosa how to recognize, pick, and cook wild flowers and herbs. “Iride would tell me plants’ names in Angrognino,” Rosa explains. “So after each walk, I would do more research to find out their official botanical names.”

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Two years ago, Rosa purchased abandoned farmland in Gemerello, a rural area at the foot of the Cottian Alps. After years of job-hopping, from sous-chef in a top restaurant to manager in a construction business, she was looking to start her own organic farm. The initial plan was to grow to grow regular crops, but her foraging sessions with “grandma Iride” inspired her to start what she calls an “ancient seed farm.”

She now grows roughly 200 different seeds, ranging from rare vegetables to wild plants and flowers including nasturtium, cornflower, and dahlias. “I have learned that flowers are very nutritious and can be used for a vast range of recipes,” Rosa says. “Take bright-orange Nasturtium flowers. They are rich with Vitamin C and each of their components can be [used in different food preparations].” Nasturtium seeds, for example, can be ground to make pepper, blossoms marinated to make vinegar, and petals eaten raw or sautéed with butter. The velvety white leaves of begonia semperflorens are particularly interesting: They taste just like citrus fruit and can be used to season seafood dishes instead of lemon.

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But starting an ancient seed farm was not easy. Italy’s byzantine bureaucracy was in the way. “Local health authorities don’t know how to rate flowers,” Rosa explains. “I got a mix of surprised and skeptical reactions when I explained you can actually eat them.”

Rosa grows all of her crops according to synergistic agriculture, an organic practice based on the teachings of Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka that was popularized by Spanish gardener Emilia Hazelip. Synergistic farmers do not use chemicals or fertilizers, but rather focus on the natural attributes of plants to prevent disease. “If you plant basil next to tomatoes, it drives insects away,” Rosa explains. But despite her commitment to synergistic principles, she can’t get organic certification because most of her crops are not listed in official organic guidelines.

Italy’s foraging regulations were equally daunting. The relevant national legislation was from 1931, and it required that professional foragers get a permit from officials of the fascist government that dissolved in 1943. To get around this, Rosa applied for a permit from a municipality in the Alps, which allows her to forage in Piedmont, but not in other regions. (A senate committee is now working on a new national law.)

But despite bureaucratic obstacles, her products are slowly taking off. Last spring, Rosa brought a sample of her produce to Michelin star chef Christian Milone, who runs the family-owned restaurant Trattoria Zappatori in the nearby town of Pinerolo.

When Milone was a kid, wild flowers and herbs were a staple ingredient in his parents’ kitchen. “Frittatas with luppolo (hop flowers) were one of my favorite dishes,” he says. Tasting Rosa’s sample was like re-discovering long-lost flavors.

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A month later, Milone was serving dishes prepared with Rosa’s herbs and flowers. One such floral creation is crostino con erba ostrica, a bread crouton topped with Mertensia maritima, a wild herb known as oyster leaf due to its oyster-like taste, and garnished with violets, daisies, and cornflower petals. “It’s like an oyster for vegans,” Rosa says.

And Rosa’s products are behind Trattoria Zappatori’s signature dish: raw shrimp and green walnut covered with 70 different varieties of wildflowers including agastache, dahlia, and nasturtium, and finished with a splash of melon juice.

People often associate Piedmontese cuisine with meat-heavy dishes such as beef dumplings or veal, but as Milone explains, there is another side to it. “People like Elena Rosa are helping bring back a core aspect of our cuisine that has been forgotten,” he says. “I know that farm to table is trending now, but we were doing woods to table for a long time.”

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