It’s a long way up to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Since 1889, a combination of staircases and elevators have lifted visitors 1,000 feet off the ground, all the way to the cozy private apartment that Gustave Eiffel installed at the wrought-iron peak. A few of those original elevator cabins remain today—but some of the spiral staircases are long gone. And some of the steps are for sale.
One 24-step portion of the staircase is sitting in the yard of the Paris auction house Artcurial, leading nowhere while it waits for its turn under the hammer. This portion, which measures more than 13 feet high, was removed in the early 1980s, which also saw the addition of emergency stairs and refurbished elevators. Parts of the staircase ended up scattered in various museums and private collections across the globe.
The auction house has peddled two smaller segments of the staircase in the past. One reached €220 000, and the other soared to €523,800. This 24-step segment will go on offer on November 27, and Artcurial expects it to fetch at least €40,000 (US $45,000).
As Feargus O’Sullivan noted in CityLab, the stairs don’t necessarily evoke the grandeur of the iconic structure they once wound around: To the eye unschooled in the subtleties of spiral staircases, they might look handsome, but somewhat unremarkable. Still, whether stricken with wanderlust or nostalgia or simply a case of sticky fingers, people have long tried to take history home with them. Visitors have sometimes scavenged for makeshift souvenirs by chipping pieces from historic gravestones, monuments, or markers; fragments of structures such as the Berlin Wall sometimes turn up for sale. These stairs are certainly more storied than the little replicas of la Tour Eiffel teetering on gift-shop shelves—though your best bet is probably to climb the real thing.
The garage is a symbol of suburbia, a site of rebellion, and a very strange room.
Frank Lloyd Wright started designing the Frederick C. Robie house in 1908, the same year that Ford’s Model T went into production, and he gave the home a three-car garage. The architect and his client were already aligned in their enthusiasm for a newly automotive society. “Robie had caught Wright’s attention because of his car, as they were two of the only men in the South Side of Chicago with a gasoline-powered machine,” write Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela in their new book, Garage, an intellectual history of an often overlooked space. The Robie house became an icon of modern architecture, but the automobile-centric spaces Wright added gave it an additional distinction. It was the first house to have an attached garage.
Unadorned and unheated, a garage might seem like a utilitarian place. But in the analysis of Erlanger, an artist, and Ortega, an architect, the garage is a central space of 20th-century America, where modernism and suburban values collide with unexpected power. “We think about it as this weird tumor that was attached to the house,” says Ortega. “It’s the first time the machine is given a room to sleep in.”
At its simplest, a garage is a room without windows, with one massive door that can either reveal the space to the street or keep the world out. It’s an entrance to the house and a “semi-domestic chamber” that’s empty much of the time, whenever the car is absent. Over the years, the garage has become linked closely with mainstream suburban life and the picture-perfect nuclear family. In the years after the Great Depression, the Federal Housing Authority considered a garage an important asset when evaluating a mortgage application.
But almost immediately the garage started becoming, as Erlanger and Ortega put it, “the Freudian id of the home.” In the Robie house, the attached garage quickly became a storage space. In California, where good weather and carports meant that cars could live outside, garages became blank spaces, adapted for all sorts of uses. Without a car, as a “deprogrammed space,” the garage became “a space where the inhabitant could set his own rules and ways of being.”
If Ortega were giving a world tour of important garages, he would begin with the Robie house, then jump to L’Attico, a garage in Rome that artist Fabio Sargentini transformed into an exhibition space in 1968. He would include the El Diablo house where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak invented the personal computer, and, as an example of the connection between garages and a certain creaky notion of American masculinity, the garage from the movie American Beauty, where Kevin Spacey works out and smokes weed in opposition to the limits of his suburban life.
Especially when empty of cars, garages become a perfect stage for rebellion. Erlanger’s version of this tour would visit a series of subculture garages: the one where Jeff Ho shaped surfboards and skateboards and, by extension, modern skate culture; the one where No Doubt practiced and had their first house show; the one where the Sisters of the Valley, an order of secular nuns, grew weed; the garage of dominatrix Selina Minx; and the home of Franklin Bell’s Blues Workshop, held on Sundays in a one-car garage in Los Angeles.
As unexceptional as garages might seem to many people today, they may soon be strange relics of the past. “The garage is already a vestigial space, an addendum, a ruin from a different era,” Erlanger and Ortega write. The values and the economy that create space for garages are disappearing. In some visions of the future, individuals won’t need to keep cars, at least not once vehicles drive themselves or are owned by fleet operators such as Uber. But in creating this book—as well as a related documentary set to premiere in 2019—Erlanger and Ortega found that people have surprisingly emotional memories of garages.
“Every single person has a relationship to that space even if they didn’t own one,” says Erlanger. “The image is so strong in our cultural imagination, but also our actual experience.” Hers: She stole her parent’s car when she was 13, but at the critical moment couldn't figure out how to end her joyride. “I drove straight through the garage door,” she says. “It had a charged memory in my mind.” Ortega doesn’t remember his most important experience of a garage, but he knows it happened. “My grandmother had these really nice garages that opened up into her garden,” he says. He was baptized in one of them.
Doggos, cat babies, and all creatures that just have a good spirit are welcome.
I recently went on an Atlas Obscura Trip to Budapest, Hungary, and got to explore a centuries-old castle, paddle an underground river, and float among lotus flowers in a lake heated by geothermal energy. But the part I’ll always remember is probably when I met a lazy cat. One of the best parts of travel (and life!) is running into random animals that turn otherwise mundane moments into something special. Also, they’re cute.
The funicular train on Buda Castle Hill in Budapest has been ferrying visitors to the hill’s summit for over 100 years. At the top, it opens onto a wide, cobbled square, which is often packed with tourists. When I visited, I was able to go early, and the square was nearly deserted, save for a single cat who seemed to just be waiting at the top for people to shower it with affection. Directly behind me was a stunning view of Budapest on a bright, beautiful morning.
But whatever. I couldn’t take myself away from this cat, just sunning itself, belly up on the cobblestones. It purred a little when I pet it, and soon a few other travelers had joined me in being obsessed with the little dude. All the while, it just seemed happy to be getting attention, as though it knew a bunch of people would exit the funicular and go nuts for it. I’m resoundingly more of a dog person, but this cat knew it was too cute to pass up, and I fell for it. Later on in the trip, I also met a smelly dog with a good soul who kept barging into the restaurant during dinner, but that’s a story for another time. And enough about me: we want to hear about the best animals you've met while traveling!
Fill out the form below to tell us about the most unforgettable animal encounter you’ve had on your travels, and most importantly, email any pictures you have of the animal to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, “Best Animal.” We’ll collect some of our favorite responses in an upcoming article. Meeting strangers on your travels is special; meeting animals is unforgettable.
Researchers at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area are trying to better understand animal survival tactics.
One of the first animals to perceive a quickly spreading California wildfire may well be the mountain lion, whose keen sense of smell recognizes danger before the smoke starts to spread. And, like humans, the decision of whether or not to flee is a difficult one, stuck between the fear of fire and the uncertainty of leaving one’s home.
“I try to put myself in the mind of a mountain lion,” says Korinna Domingo, conservation specialist at the Mountain Lion Foundation, a wildlife conservation organization based in California. “How close does the fire have to be, and how high does the risk have to be for that lion to step over that line and leave?”
Like the human communities escaping fire and destruction across California, the state’s wild animals also have the instinct to flee. The question is, in a landscape covered in development and populated by millions of people, where to go?
That’s one of the questions being asked by researchers and rangers at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, part of which is currently burning in the Woolsey Fire—a Southern California blaze which has torched around 100,000 acres of residential and protected areas as of this morning. The National Recreation Area, run by the National Park Service, has been tracking dozens of mountain lions in the area since 2002 using GPS collars. And now, by a twist of fate, they have the opportunity to better understand how large mammals respond to wildfire.
“It’s become this unplanned experiment about what happens when you have an isolated protected area, and half of the habitat is eliminated by a fire,” says Seth Riley, Chief of Wildlife for the Santa Monica National Recreation Area. “This fire will provide a huge opportunity to see what various wildlife communities do in these extreme conditions.”
Mountain lions are territorial animals, and researchers are interested to know whether they will form the same boundaries when they return to their habitats. “A lot of the lions’ home ranges are right on top of each other in such a confined space in Santa Monica,” says Domingo. “It’ll be really interesting to see how those lions re-establish territories. The social structures may be completely disrupted.”
While many animals are indeed displaced by wildfires, it’s important to note that fire is not wholly bad for landscapes in an ecological sense. In fact, many California ecosystems rely on fire to thrive. “Fire in the human sense can often be catastrophic, but it’s not necessarily the same for animals,” says Greg Giusti, a retired University of California researcher and an expert on the relationship between wildfires and wildlife. He says California wildlife have evolved to respond to fires, and can even sometimes benefit from the disruption. “It’s harsh out there, but you know these animals have evolved to survive in that hostile environment.”
There are a variety to survival tactics that California wildlife will use, says Giusti. For example, birds are easily able to fly away and are usually not impacted as long as fires don’t occur during the spring when they are nesting and raising their offspring.
And if you can’t fly away, why not hunker down? Giusti says while it may be 1,600 degree Fahrenheit above ground as a fire rages through a landscape, two inches below the surface, the temperature can be as mild as 70 degrees, and many species, such as lizards, chipmunks, ground squirrels, and mice, survive fires by sticking it out in underground burrows.
For the non-flying, non-burrowing animals, including deer, mountain lions, and coyotes, the only choice is to run. Giusti says usually animals are successful when they flee on foot, but fast-moving fires like the Camp Fire currently raging in Northern California may be too fast and destructive for many animals. “The Camp Fire is being driven by incredibly strong winds and it’s creating an actual firestorm,” he says. “If you're a two-legged animal like a human or a four-legged animal like a deer, these fires move so fast, sometimes you simply can't outrun them.”
For the animals that are able to escape, they usually do come back, says Giusti. “There is pretty good precedent for animals returning back to where they came from.” He says newly burned landscapes are often good for new plant growth and feeding opportunities. For example, woodpeckers can be found feasting on the bugs who feed on burnt wood. Mice and California quail feed on newly exposed seeds on the ashen ground, and they are hunted by owls and hawks.
In the chaparral landscape, deer feed on a high-protein plant species, known as chamise. “As time passes from a fire, and we get a bit of rain, it’s amazing how fast a landscape can recover,” says Giusti.
Giusti says while people may feel tempted to feed and interact with animals fleeing wildfires, it’s important that people keep a distance. “It's never good to invite wildlife to a property,” he says. “In the long run, it usually ends up in some kind of conflict and the animals are the ones that pay the price.”
While it’s a good thing to care deeply for our non-human neighbors, says Giusti, we must remember that they are resilient and have co-evolved with a harsh environment. In short: They got this.
“It's not necessarily easy for them, but nature is not easy,” he says. “This is a tough deal, but these animals are survivors. They're good at it.”
Koen Vanmechelen's Labiomista is part art, part science, and heavy on the chickens.
Tell someone you’re going to Genk, and the almost inevitable question in response is whether you’re visiting Ghent instead. One can be forgiven for not having heard of this sleepy industrial town in the Flemish region of Belgium, which doesn’t appear to have much to recommend itself other than an open-air museum featuring artifacts of rural life.
The neatly manicured lawns and immaculate new houses lining the streets of the town belie its scarred past: through the 20th century, Genk was home to three coal mines and a Ford plant which was at one point the largest in Europe, but when these were shut down in succession, the unemployment rate shot up to affect almost a fifth of the population. Now, however, an ambitious project by the artist Koen Vanmechelen and his team promises to transform the community, rehabilitate its damaged natural landscape, and kickstart economic growth in the area.
It’s tricky to describe Labiomista, but suffice it to say that it pulls together all the different strands of Vanmechelen’s practice, which focuses on biodiversity and what he calls a movement against “monoculture.” This large-scale project is at once Vanmechelen’s madcap playground, created in collaboration with the city of Genk, as well as a social enterprise. But to understand what it is about, one has to first delve into Vanmechelen’s obsession with chickens, which has brought him a fair amount of fame outside Belgium: for two decades now, he has been breeding chickens from all over the world with the aim of diversifying and strengthening their gene pool and aesthetic variety.
“The global can only exist at the generosity of the local,” he says, while showing visitors the coop where he is breeding his “22nd generation” of chickens. “The chicken is a metaphor for that—it is a very versatile animal and you can find unique species of it in every country, but it has been over-bred in insular communities to the point where it has become weak or even infertile. When you encourage cross-breeding, you get stronger chickens. It’s a similar logic to the history of humanity. The more you cling only to the familiar, the less healthy you are. That’s what I call monoculture.”
Jean-Jacques Cassiman, a professor of human genetics at the Catholic University of Leuven, has worked with Vanmechelen for years to considerable success on his breeding schemes, and can testify to the scientific soundness of what seems like a rather odd undertaking. “I was intrigued by his ideas because nobody else was doing the same thing,” he says.
The chicken and all the sociopolitical questions it embodies form the starting point of Labiomista. There are three main elements to it: firstly, it includes an art studio designed by the celebrated Swiss architect and Vanmechelen’s friend, Mario Botta, which features a conjoining greenhouse. “It’s like stepping into the Garden of Eden,” Vanmechelen muses of the aviary, which houses tropical plants and pairs of birds from around the world that have been classified as vulnerable or “near threatened”, including turacos, hornbills, toucans and Victoria crowned pigeons.
Step outside the studio and you find yourself in what Vanmechelen and his team call the Cosmopolitan Culture Park, a disused slice of grassland that stretches over 60 acres. It sits atop what used to be a coal mine, which was then converted to a zoo that had an exceptionally colorful past. At one time, the BBC called the Limburg Zoo the “worst zoo in the world” and for good reason—tales from its tragicomic past include that of an employee that was torn apart by bears, widespread accusations of animals being slaughtered to feed other animals, and runaway goats that never returned.
The grounds are still barren in many parts, but Vanmechelen intends to introduce animals that “sit in the space between the domestic and the wild,” including ostriches, llamas, camels, and alpacas. These animals are currently being bred by Vanmechelen and his wife on a sprawling menagerie in their home, which is a 10-minute drive from the complex. They will be allowed to roam free in the park when it opens to the public in May 2019. “I want people to know that they can feel free to engage with their surroundings and that this is the norm, not the sort of life we’re used to where we’re alienated from nature,” Vanmechelen says. Lastly, the historic 1920s villa where the director of the coal mine used to live will be converted to a study and research forum where scientists, curators and public visitors can discuss and learn more about topics relating to sustainable living.
And what of the economic element of the project, which has drawn a lot of attention from the townsfolk? Only around 65,000 people call Genk home, but it is unusually diverse for a small European town, with families from a whopping 85 different nationalities that settled over the last century, enticed by the mining boom. With the mines shuttered, residents have been forced to look further afield for jobs. Hoping to boost employment and social cohesion, Vanmechelen has parceled out a space within the Cosmopolitan Culture Park for local traders and agriculturalists to grow and sell food, while mingling with one another.
Efgenia Karampatakis, who runs a Greek restaurant in the vicinity around Labiomista, has already submitted a proposal to run a picnic-style stall in the park. “Koen Vanmechelen is an artist, but he is first a person with his heart in the right place,” she says. She makes mention of analogous art projects that Vanmechelen is running in Detroit and Ethiopia, which similarly draw attention to how troubled communities can be healed through sustainable farming. Vanmechelen believes that his projects create jobs for the disenfranchised, especially women who have traditionally only been confined to domestic work.
Naturally, there will always be a place for Vanmechelen’s beloved chickens in the Labiomista project. The park includes a breeding station for chickens, and there is a public area beneath his studio that boasts an enclosure for the red jungle fowl, which he calls the “ancestor of the modern domestic chicken.” The main entrance of La Biomista is a dramatic passage of steel, bricks and concrete that Vanmechelen calls “The Ark.” It is hard to miss the Biblical grandeur of his vision, and one cannot help but hope that the eccentricity of this entire endeavour will offer, if not at least a spark of curiosity, then a sense of positive change and renewal within this wounded town.
Feast your peepers on these artistic interpretations of a colonized cosmos.
Earlier this year, California-based aerospace startup company Orion Span announced its plans to launch a “luxury space hotel” in 2021. Aurora Station, the commercial space getaway orbiting 200 miles above Earth, will accommodate four guests and two crew members at a time. For $9.5 million, you too can stay there for 12 nights.
Though the possibility of future housing in space is a shiny idea, it’s hardly novel. Scientists and engineers have been exploring how humans might permanently colonize space for decades. Rick Guidice, a NASA-affiliated artist during the 1970s, generated visuals of what space accommodation might look like.
In the summer of 1975, at NASA’s Ames Research Center located in Mountain View, California, a team of NASA and Stanford University researchers led by physicist Dr. Gerard O’Neill imagined a future world with space colonies. Could human beings survive living in permanent, free-floating structures away from Earth? O’Neill and his team could theorize about it, and calculate a cost-benefit analysis of leaving Earth for another fold in the universe, but they’d need to call on illustrators to truly see the possibilities.
NASA was a longtime commissioner of Guidice’s work, and during the 10-week summer study where participants worked on this space settlement project, Guidice was tapped to render images that would illustrate the feasibility of living in space. O’Neill had been studying space colonization for the past six years at Princeton, and according to Guidice, had “pretty much defined systems for how to build habitats in space on a large scale.” In response to this research, NASA provided Guidice with technical information and simple diagrams of what these possible future settlements might look like, and then he interpreted the data into detailed pencil sketches.
“Of course I realized this was a very important opportunity to really do something special,” he says. After several hours of research and revision, Guidice ended up with his first—and favorite—painting: the double cylinder space colony.
The team of scientists devised multiple approaches to space habitation, so Guidice (along with fellow illustrator Don Davis) dreamt up several illustrations as a way to visualize them. “Gerard O’Neill wanted [the habitats] to look like an English countryside,” Guidice remembers. “Not very dense.” Full-color renderings, drawn and hand-painted with acrylics, were presented to the scientists on large-scale illustration boards, but were initially thought of as purely auxiliary material rather than art.
“What’s interesting is that the paintings at the time were just illustrations in support, and later on they’ve taken on a life of their own—they’re what most people recognize,” Guidice says. “It tells a story for them.”
As it turns out, 1975 was the perfect time for the space habitat study to gain traction. “The whole culture and philosophy of society [in the 1970s] was that the future has no bounds,” Guidice says. This decade, which started just one year after the moon landing, was ripe with possibilities for getting people into space—and finding sustainable ways to keep them there. “The government was willing to participate in exploratory missions such as going to the moon, and so space settlements seemed to just follow as a possibility,” says Guidice. “Everybody was very optimistic about that at the time.”
Beyond optimism, O’Neill’s system designs could, in theory, actually be built. There were three different types of colonies (with population capacities ranging from 10,000 to over one million) that Guidice was asked to artistically interpret: toroidal colonies, bernal spheres, and cylindrical colonies. Aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun had conceived of the toroid wheel concept in 1952 but O’Neill’s main contribution, the bernal sphere, expanded on this proposed habitat. Since high radiation exposure was a strong possibility with the double cylinder wheel, O’Neill devised a round habitat for greater human protection. “Their studies showed that the configuration would be more ideal in isolating the population from radiation,” Guidice says of the bernal sphere.
Despite the plausibility of O’Neill’s calculations, he imagined future governments might view space exploration as mere frivolity. “I remember [him] saying a large government who has money like the United States would be able to fund such an incredible effort … but he said we’ve got to do it in the next 20 years, and that was 20 years ago,” Guidice says. O’Neill suggested that government resources at the turn of the 21st century would be tapped taking care of social issues for a larger population which would result in a lack of funding for future space settlement projects. “It turned out to be true,” Guidice says.
For Guidice, however, there’s still hope for space colonies. “There’s been a real renaissance of space exploration that’s been picked up by the private industry, which has given new hopes to settlements on the Moon and settlements on Mars and larger space stations,” Guidice says. Though renderings of future space habitats are now computerized and no longer hand-drawn, the influence of hyper-modern illustrations like Guidice’s still exist as mainstream media’s idea of what the future looks like. From science-fiction movies to animated alternate universes, the same visual tropes of what space habitation looks like persist. “It’s kind of neat how its become common culture,” Guidice says. Forty-three years later, excitement over imagining a life in space still resonates.
Atlas Obscura and Chase Sapphire® took cardmembers on an exclusive trip aboard the MTA's historic trains.
It takes something special to get New Yorkers to look up from their phones while they're commuting. But on October 19, 2018, Atlas Obscura and Chase Sapphire® achieved the near-impossible by taking a vintage train for a ride through active transit stations.
On subway platforms, onlookers' jaws dropped before giving way to smiles and waves at the surreal vision. A vintage train car packed with partygoers jamming to sounds from big band to electronic music is not something you see often, even in New York.
As Dan Daly, a Chase Sapphire cardmember put it, "It's not just that we were part of a spectacle, we were creating one for New York City."
The night began at the New York City Transit Museum , where visitors can explore antique train cars during museum hours. On special occasions, the Transit Museum will take them for a ride, but "New York Through Time" represented the first time the museum partnered with outside organizations to create an unforgettable evening.
The event was exclusive to Chase cardmembers, who were greeted at the entrance with glasses of sparkling wine. A short reception gave them the rare opportunity to explore the current Navigating New York exhibit and permanent collection after-hours.
Then, it was time for the train to depart. Over the course of a little over an hour, it made its way from downtown Brooklyn and through East New York before traveling back to Manhattan.
In homage to New York's vibrant nightlife in the 20th century, each car reflected the entertainment of its time. An army green-hued, wicker-seated car with a 1940s aesthetic hosted George Gee, a swing bandleader with over 36 years' of experience, plus dancers who gracefully sidestepped the train's twists and turns.
Psychedelic projections inspired by Andy Warhol's Factory screen tests filled the next car, conceived and executed by artist Sean Dack. It was a fitting segue into the next, a 1970s inspired-scene filled with musicians led by trombone player Dave "Smoota" Smith, playing funky covers from the era. "If you're feeling groovy, shake your booty," a vocalist crooned as guests glided through the car.
The next train recreated one of the 1980s' most influential musical movements: vogueing. Bathed in sapphire lights, dancers led by Chauncey Dominique delighted guests with invigorating dance moves, infectious energy, and hilarious banter. (Dominique playfully referred to the car as the "House of Sapphire" throughout the evening.)
The last car called to mind a future redolent of the past. A collaborative installation by artist Coby Kennedy and Superchief Gallery played on Art Deco design motifs. Geometric patterns were laid onto the subways's glass dividing panels, and Chrysler Building-colored tin foil was shaped into angles on the floor. Meanwhile, Flex performers (a dance style born in NYC that straddles street performance with the avant-garde) injected some forward-thinking energy into the train.
The evening was not over once the train reached its final stop: 14th St. and 6th Ave. Gato Loco, a "psycho mambo" band, led guests through the streets to next destination, playing music in full swing with Chase Sapphire cardmembers and a sizable crowd that decided to join in on the jaunt. Passersby took pictures and hooted and hollered while cars joined in a chorus of honks.
The procession came to an end near Union Square in midcentury abstract expressionist artist Willem De Kooning's former loft. Inside, former subway performer-turned America's Got Talent star Mike Yung belted out tunes to a dancing crowd. Elsewhere, guests ate hors' d'oeuvres, drank cocktails (including a custom-concocted "Hidden Gem Gimlet"), took photos in a subway-themed photo booth, and reflected on the unforgettable evening.
Helene Flynn, dressed in a fascinator and luxurious fur coat, has lived in New York all of her life and has never experienced anything like "New York Through Time."
"Not on the subway, absolutely not!" she laughed.
The evening ended for many with another ride on the standard subway. "New York Through Time" ensured that they'd never look at the MTA the same way again.
Inside an annual contest of brains, brawn, and library logistics.
The Lyngsoe Systems Compact Cross Belt Sorter hogs most of a drab, boxy basement under an unremarkable office building in Queens—238 feet of fast-flying conveyor belt, like a cross between a baggage carousel and a racetrack. The machine scans the barcodes on thousands of library books an hour, and shoves them quickly, efficiently into bins so they can make their way between branches of the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries. Requested books are dropped off here every day by the truckload and, once processed, are promptly shuffled off to eager readers all over the city. A day’s work is typically about 40,000 requests, and each one of those books needs to be placed—by hand—onto an empty space on the relentless sorter, with the barcode facing the right way. But November 9, 2018, is no ordinary day. For the sixth time, an elite squad of 12 professional New York sorters—the fleet-fingered men and women who feed books into the machine—will compete with their counterparts from Washington State’s King County Library System to see who can process the most books in an hour. Losing to King County, which serves the Seattle suburbs and was the first library in the United States to get a Lyngsoe sorter, is not an option.
Enter Sal Magaddino, Deputy Director of Logistics for BookOps, the collaboration between the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries that operates this facility. Formerly the NYPD captain in charge of Brooklyn’s major crimes investigations, Magaddino glides around the machine, with one hand gesturing to its component parts and the other clutching a styrofoam cup of coffee. Wearing a checked suit, he gloats in consummate Brooklynese about the remarkable operation this beast enables. Sorting items that move every day from the tip of the Bronx to the lip of Staten Island, his team tallied nearly 7.5 million successful deliveries last year. It seems like an odd gig for a former major crimes investigator, but to him it brings to mind the challenges of the 2000 World Series, when the Yankees played the Mets and Magaddino helped secure the airspace for the NYPD. “You have to have a logistic component” when dealing with homicides and robberies, he says. You have to know “how to use resources.” It is the same here, and the whirring giant in the room is only one of his resources; another is the team being put to the test today. A perfect score for them—not a book slot missed—would be an astonishing 12,800, the most the machine can handle in an hour. And that’s his goal. A perfect game in the World Series.
That number may be virtually unachievable, but there was a time not so long ago when it was beyond imagination. Before the Lyngsoe was introduced in 2010, library logistics were “a dismal failure,” says Magaddino. The sorters couldn’t crack 12,000 on their best full day, though it was no fault of their own. The process for sorting book requests consisted of dumping crates of books out onto a giant table, rummaging through them, and dealing with each book individually. First, they had to examine the slip rubber banded to each book, and then walk it over to the assigned point of departure for its destination.
“We weren’t able to keep up,” says George Rodriguez, who has been sorting for the New York Public Library (NYPL) for 17 years. Getting books out to patrons used to take up to six weeks, “if they ever got it at all,” says Magaddino. Tens of thousands of books in the red, he insisted on making a major change as the new BookOps building was being designed. Washington’s busy King County Library System (not to be confused with Brooklyn’s Kings County) was a guiding light, having had great success with a Lyngsoe sorting machine, so Magaddino fought for the $2 million dollars needed to bring one to New York. Once it was finally installed, the backlog disappeared. But there was still unfinished business: Could BookOps now best its northwestern nemesis, King County, which had heralded the dawn of this book-delivery golden age? So the battle of high-speed logistics and library pride was set. Each library would get an hour to sort as many books as they could with the Lyngsoe—King County on their machine in Preston, Washington, and BookOps on this one. Five annual competitions have come and gone, and so far, the Pacific Northwest is up 3–2. Last year, technical difficulties led to a cancellation of the contest. So this is the long-awaited Game 6, and BookOps wants to make a statement.
With minutes to go until game time, the 12 elite sorters have emerged, wearing matching BookOps T-shirts. They march toward the machine as if boarding Apollo 11. The offices upstairs have emptied into the basement, and a wide variety of library personnel fill every available space in the room to cheer the sorters on. “We’re gonna take ‘em down, it’s not gonna be an issue,” says Michael Genao, a 22-year-old sophomore sorter with a linebacker’s build. “I guarantee it,” he adds, as he paces between his teammates, the last few bites of a chocolate donut in his hand.
“You guys are the best in the world,” Magaddino assures his team. “I know you’re gonna prove it today. So the only thing I ask is that you give it 100 percent, and when your hands start cramping, just move on, get through it. It’s only an hour.”
The sorters take their places, two to a station. Miguel Roman, Manager of Automatic Distribution, reminds them, “We have no malice, they just have what we deserve.” As observers are escorted to a safe viewing distance, away from where new batches of books arrive by motorized cart, Kanye starts booming, red lights start spinning, gears start churning, and books start flying.
The belt on the machine goes by at 1.5 meters per second, which looks faster than it sounds. It’s covered with square pads, and the idea is to get one book, properly oriented, onto each, which carries it under a bright red barcode scanner. Then, after a quick hairpin turn, they head down a long straightaway lined with bins, each marked for a different branch. The system is smart enough to know just where to deposit each item without slowing.
In each sorting team, one member stacks arriving books, while the other deftly shuttles them onto the pads. It’s a simple proposition but a complicated task, requiring the nimble dexterity and improvisational flair of a jazz drummer. The sorting teams are in sequence along the belt, so not every pad is unoccupied as it passes by—the pattern is always changing. Sometimes, five open pads roll by in a row, allowing Angel Cortez to lay books down at evenly timed intervals, gently flicking them so that each one lands with an audible “thwack.” But just as his wrist locks into rhythm, it’s now every other pad that’s open, so he adjusts. Then it devolves into a random free-for-all, and it becomes far easier to miss one—or several. Missed pads are inevitable, sure, but each one chips away at that goal of 12,800.
The pads’ unpredictable patterns, however, are just the beginning of the sorters’ problems. Then there’s the books themselves, encompassing a remarkable range of sizes, weights, shapes, and textures. There goes a thick, weathered copy of The Odyssey, curling at the edges. Here comes a flimsy Japanese manga comic, and then a hardcover, slick under library laminate. Each of these requires a different scoop, a different toss. And then there are the devious DVDs. At one point one of these thin, bouncy interlopers trips Cortez up, and a copy of Black Panther hits the floor. The book sorter is not an assembly line worker. He is more like a juggler who cannot choose his pins. Cortez’s face trembles with sweat and concentration.
Roman, the distribution manager, assures the spectators that none of this is for show—every book here, and that Black Panther DVD, will be dropped off in Brooklyn later this afternoon. On the other side of the barcode scanner, books are automatically directed neatly off the conveyor belt and into bins labeled for Windsor Terrace, Sheepshead Bay, Ulmer Park. Full bins are carried outside to a truck, the next axon in New York City’s knowledge distribution system. And for all of the knowledge about to be acquired, most readers will never have any idea how it works. Akkim Thomas, a 24-year-old sorter, says he discovered a new favorite book on the belt: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
As they stream by, the books are a reflection of the city itself. There’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, for a child just learning to read. Then there’s a slew of how-to and self-help, from SAT prep to Economics for Dummies to a five-copy stack of Easy Vegan Baking. To Kill a Mockingbird, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and As I Lay Dying are there for the literary types, alongside biographies of Richard Nixon, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Frida Kahlo. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Barack Obama’s Change We Can Believe In, and a book of essays on race called We Can’t Breathe join the “Twilight” series, a chunky Ayn Rand opus, and lots and lots of Lee Child thrillers. It’s like a look into New York City’s mind, through the 8.6 million minds that compose it.
Then, as sudden as the “thwack” of a perfectly placed book, the machine halts. The sorters can’t even raise their exhausted arms to celebrate. Their total is 12,330 books in one hour—that’s, astonishingly, over 96 percent of the machine’s capability. As someone calls for tequila, Cortez just tries to catch his breath. “I wish I could clap,” he says, hunched and panting, “but my arms are gone.” King County isn’t due to compete for a few hours, and the specter of their last-ups looms over every recited statistic and sweaty bro-hug. As if preparing for the worst, Magaddino surprises the team by announcing that the NYPL has selected them for a leadership award. It’s nice, but not what they came for. They want to be champions. No one knows it yet, but the outcome will be decisive, a blowout, even—12,330 to King County’s 10,007. The series is locked up at three apiece. That makes next year Game 7.
Only now do scientists fully understand just how strong a 1972 solar storm was.
On August 4, 1972, near the North Vietnamese port of Hai Phong, dozens of mines hiding in the waters exploded in little more than an instant. American troops had laced the seas bordering North Vietnam with thousands of mines, lying in wait for ships to pass by. But in this case, no ships had set them off.
Up and down the coast, in the first few weeks of that August, this mysterious phenomenon repeated itself, until, according to one estimate, 4,000 destructor mines had detonated, as if ghost ships had been trawling the waters and sweeping them for danger.
There was an invisible force that was setting off the mines, though, and it had originated close to 93 million miles away. Early that month, the sun had produced a series of fierce flares, close to four orders of magnitude more powerful than a typical solar flare. During the peak of a solar cycle, the concentrations of magnetic energy will erupt from the sun and wash towards Earth. These were so strong that they saturated particle detectors used to measure such events and sent magnetometers off the scale. Bright auroras appeared over the United States and Europe, as far south as Spain. Had this solar storm coincided with a NASA mission to the moon, the particles colliding with a spaceship would have created nuclear effects strong enough to incapacitate and possibly kill the astronauts inside.
The mines that United States forces had dropped outside of the Vietnamese ports had magnetic triggers—sensors would measure the amplitude, polarity, or gradient of magnetic fields, waiting for an iron-heavy ship to pass by, tweaking the field and triggering the bomb. When the solar flares distorted the magnetic field of the Earth, the mines reacted. They blew.
To some extent, scientists always knew this solar storm was a notable event. One way to characterize flares is by measuring the level of solar energetic particles emitted, and on that count, this rated as the most extreme such event of the space age. But on the index most often used to categorize and compare solar storms, this one rated as "intense"—notable, but something that might happen a few times each year.
The mine explosions hinted, though, that this was an even more remarkable phenomenon. Described in a new paper published in Space Weather, the details of the mine explosions, “long buried in the Vietnam War archives," along with data collected at the time, help show that the storm was much more severe than previously understood. Delores Knipp, a research professor of aerospace engineering at University of Colorado at Boulder and the lead author of the paper, now believes that 1972 event was in the same class as the strongest solar storm on record, the Carrington Event of 1859.
“I was completely taken aback,” she says. She knew that the 1972 event was a big radiation storm, and that the magnetic cloud released by the sun had made it to Earth in record time, under 15 hours. But the index used to categorize occurrences like this one had missed some of the features that made this storm so extreme.
Knipp’s curiosity began during an exchange with Brian Fraser, a co-author on the paper, who in the early 1970s was working at what would become Boulder’s Space Weather Prediction Center. He remembered Navy men coming in to talk to his boss at the time; all he knew was that the conversation involved the solar storm, military interests, and perhaps an explosive event. One Sunday, Knipp started searching online for any information about a naval explosion in that time period. Soon she found accounts by Navy men and one woman, describing sea mines and their use in naval warfare. The fragmentary information Fraser had passed along started to make sense.
Searching for more details, Knipp and her colleagues discovered long-forgotten scientific reports from the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Along with reports from engineering journals about the storm’s effects on power grids, they described an event of unusual power and impact. The United States had been on the night side of the planet when the flare hit Earth, but Japan was facing the sun and recorded data about the x-ray impact. That data was also used to reconstruct the event, but those reports received little attention from scientists outside Japan. Solar flares can also be classed by their x-ray emissions, and on this measure, the 1972 storm registered as an incredibly large flare.
“Two nights ago, I got an email from a now-retired Navy commander, who said he was a radio man at the time, and his ship was in the Gulf of Tonkin,” Knipp says. “He had just come on shift, and to quote him, ‘All hell broke loose.’ They spent the next 12 to 18 hours trying to establish radio contact with their group and headquarters. That’s exactly what I would expect for the level of event described by the Japanese reconstruction.”
Part of the reason scientists like Knipp are interested in these extreme solar events is because of the effect they can have on human technology, as the retired commander experienced. Federal officials have asked scientists to help establish what one-in-10-years, one-in-100-years, and one-in-500-years solar storms look like. A very bad one can damage space assets, which we’ve come to rely on for day-to-day activities. The 1972 storm, for instance, hit one spacecraft hard enough that in a few days it lost five percent of its capacity to generate power, a decline that usually occurs over five years.
Since then, the makers of spacecraft have built machines that can handle more intense solar activity, but they may not be prepared for the worst disasters. Out in the orbit of GPS satellites, for instance, “We’ve hardened those to the best of our ability, but they’ve never seen an event like 1972,” says Knipp.
“The fear and hatred of insects is just the fear of the unknown,” says Aaron Rodriques.
Crowded on every surface with glass tanks and plastic containers, Aaron Rodriques’s bedroom is kept at a “cozy” 80 degrees Fahrenheit, to make sure his pets are comfortable. Rodriques has hundreds of animals, most of them insects. Infatuated by bugs since a young age, he finally began showing them off at live events in recent years. Among his collection are twig mantises, baby rose-haired tarantulas, and green caterpillars.
As a child, Rodriques says he often found himself reading about bugs rather than socializing with classmates or making friends. He brought beetle larvae to show and tell once, but his classmates were disinterested.
Today however, Rodriques hosts events at which he teaches others how to forge connections with insects. Attendees can hold the creatures and experience them in a way perhaps they never have before. For Rodriques, the shows have allowed him to open up about what he is most passionate about: tiny, curious creatures who are often misunderstood.
In the video above, Atlas Obscura gets a close-up look at Rodriques’s infatuation with insects. For more about Aaron and his pets, read our recent article.
We received dozens of fantasy adventure maps illustrating the amazing worlds in our readers' imaginations. From a hand-drawn city nestled inside a giant turtle shell, to a computer-illustrated continent, to a "Paraelemental Plane of Ooze" that's honestly a little too real, your D&D maps are more incredible than we could have imagined. Every single one calls out for exploration.
We've collected a number of our favorite submissions below. So tighten your sword belts! Shine your pauldrons! Ready your wards and enchantments! The adventure begins below!
Troll Cistern
"A troll and its wererat cronies have taken renowned author Winston Jonrosh captive, forcing him to write their version of his next great novel. This map was heavily inspired by the 1990 film, Misery. At the bottom of the map, you'll see Jonrosh tied to a bed, ankles destroyed so he remains focused on writing for the perverted troll holding him captive." — Robin Johnson, St. Louis, Missouri
New Asgard
"In my modern urban fantasy campaign I decided to strand my players for quite some time on an alternate Asgard, one in which all the realms were on one landmass. This version of Asgard exists after Ragnarok destroyed their original cosmology. The refugees from that set of planes came to Earth's cosmology and settled on this plane on which which they divided the single continent up, and now live in relative peace. It took my players almost a year (four months in-game) to walk from the tip of Svartalfheim through Nebengard, to Asgard, then through Niflheim and Jotunheim to get all the materials necessary to repair their damaged Bifrost key so they could activate the Bifrost to head back to Chicago." — Matthew Currey, Illinois
Mollusca Tullie
"Mollusca Tullie (to the East, in the Unfathomed Fens) is actually a small settlement of nomadic halflings—built on the back of a giant snail. They defend the snail with their mastiff cavalry and in exchange, the snail provides its shell as a shelter." — Jared Evans, Wichita, Kansas
The Brineshell
"The Brineshell is a high-fantasy medieval city built within and atop the shell of a colossal sea turtle; washed ashore and half submerged in the coast. The dichotomy of wealth and class is starkly illustrated here, with only aristocracy and royals gracing the perfect cobblestone streets of the Topside, while the poor and working class carve out a hard life in The Belly, a driftwood city built on rotting piers and ruled by rival crime syndicates.
My favorite feature of the map is the isometric style that allowed me to capture the cavern-like quality of The Belly. Turning the map 180 degrees, the perspective flips to display the sea-side of the giant turtle shell. The shell itself was modeled after a real turtle shell that lives on the bookshelf above my D&D books." — Josh Unruh, Nashville, Tennessee
Djallvis
"Inspired by wanting to use the themes and races of the D&D 5th edition world, but put my own spin on it. I created Djallvis, which I imagine to be in the same world, but in a different hemisphere. The major differences tend to be in the creatures, which can be as different from the 5th edition creatures as Australian kangaroos are from America buffalo. There are many more cities and locations in my world than appear on the map, simply because I didn't want to give too many spoilers to my players when they started." — Bella, U.S.
The Secret of Ozikanoba
"I wondered how baby Earth Elementals were born. Players are held captive by slavers living on the island, but one of the slaves can read the ancient writings. Soon after, this slave is taken away by the Slave Lords, secretly she interprets the writings, but in doing so, slowly finishes a ritual that hastens the birth of the elemental. Volcanic amniotic lava fluids and mayhem result. The players have to escape from the island as it blows apart." — Keith Armour, London, Ontario
The Lich Brothers' Tomb
"The adventurers think they are searching an old tomb for info they need, but the two Lich Brothers (who hate each other even though they share this dungeon) try to use the party to kill each other." — Dan Roy, Maine
Trials of Tascori'
"It's a series of small stories that got built into a larger world from when I started DMing my own campaign in high school. It started on sheets of paper, but soon graduated to queen-sized bedsheets, a globe, and pillowcases that denoted the floating, underwater, and planet's core continents. The whole planet itself is a 'dragon egg,' which is really just a curled up, ossified, gigantic being in space, of indeterminate features and origin, and it had 'Sentinels' all over it that acted as stewards for 'artifacts' that ended up being its organs. The Sentinels themselves didn't even know the true nature of the artifacts, just knowing they were put there to protect them at all costs. Weird, super sentient centipede dudes with manticore faces, dragon critters with translucent tube skin, behemoth psionic sauropodians from the dawn of time. Very Lovecraftian. The idea was that when the space-fetus awoke, it would act as a kind of organic mechanism with which to start a chain of events that led to the formation of a new universe. Thereby collapsing our own.
I thought it was GENIUS when I was 16." — Mike Michalski, Chicago
Seb DeLarge's Thieves' Guild Hideout
"It's a small setting, but useful in that it can either serve as a mini-dungeon if the players try to storm it to stage a rescue or robbery, or explore it as a potential base or safe house if they gain the Guild's trust." — Patsy, Berlin
The Infinite Library of Zuul
"This is 'The Infinite Library of Zuul,' a dungeon that has quite a surprise. In the room marked 9, the library proper where the librarian hangs out, there are four doors that cross through the dimensions to six possible different locations that determine the creatures that inhabit the earlier parts of this dungeon. They range from a necromancer's troupe of skeletons to vicious plants that will eat an unassuming rogue alive. The system I'm developing it for is Labyrinth Lord, a replica of the Basic and Expert books of Dungeons & Dragons." — Pete Segreti, New York
The Black Crow Inn
Submitted by Robert Matthews
Wizard's Tower
"This map was something I did for Inktober and definitely plan on including in a future adventure. My favorite thing about it is the front-view, I think it adds a lot to it to be able to visualize it in that way. Floating landmasses are also always cool, right?" — Patrick McGill, Lexington, Kentucky
Middle Map of Toriel
"I'm my Dungeon Master's 'Assistant,' so I take the sketches of his world and turn them into maps. We spend a lot of time talking about the weather patterns his world might have, as well as the aesthetic he wants. I'm a college student with a math major, so sometimes I model the maps off of graphs I've created in class. By far my favorite features are the mountains and coastlines, naturally, these take me the longest to make." — Tia Barnes, Westcliffe, Colorado
The Chain Cult
"This is a very simple map that was inspired by 'The Chain,' the fourth in the prompt list for this year's Mapvember challenge." — Luis Gimeno, Valencia, Spain
Map of Anaevin
"This is a geographic map of an area my players are wandering through for my homebrew setting. A few of my favorite places are Fitzgerald's Wreck (a nod to Canadian Balladeer Gordon Lightfoot's 'Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald'), and Olah, a semi-sentient island that is thought by the locals to be the resting place of those they've lost at sea. The Ean Lair is also fun, being a submerged amphitheater for a cephalopod race that lives in the area. Thanks for the opportunity to share." — Shea Manweiler, Wainwright, Alberta
Westpeak
"This map was used for the setting of my 14-month-long campaign full of intrigue and deceptions. Westpeak was a kingless city of crime and corruption. Each of its noble houses wanting to exert their own influence over the city in an effort to claim the throne. One of its more notable locations was island on the west side of the city, the Mage's 'Academy' where those showing signs of magical talent were sent to receive training, under careful watch. It was also the location of the campaign's final encounter against a necromancer who had used the city's turmoil as a cover for his nefarious deeds." — Jeffry Gabert, Edmonton, Alberta
The Paraelemental Plane of Ooze
"I’m running a Planescape game right now, and the party ended up taking a garbage chute portal to the Paraelemental Plane of Ooze. The map itself is jello, as are the gelatinous cubes trying to digest the party. I drew the grid on parchment paper and then flipped a cookie sheet of jello onto it. If I did this again in the future I might try using pectin for jam making. It resulted in a firmer game mat during my test the night before but it does take much more time to set. The jello map and cubes were made the day of. The players loved it. There was a dragon and two kobold minis encased in the ooze, along with the the treasures that the party was after. The party freed the dragon (by literally reaching in and digging it out with their fingers) and it fought with them. Moving their minis around the table made a satisfying squish and pop every time." — Autumn Nicole Bradley, Wisconsin
The Tomb of the Feathered Elves
"I love collaborative map-making, one-page dungeons, and maps that aren't strictly representational. I hope that some of my maps evoke feelings alongside conveying information. My favorite inspiration is The Quiet Year by Avery Alder, a map-making RPG." — Aaron King, Minneapolis, Minnesota
The Wimplewood
"The inspiration for this map actually came from some Halloween Where's Waldo-style books I had growing up. This campaign we called "Inawoods" was played in the autumn of 2016, and featured some boy scouts trying to solve mysteries stemming from an abandoned Colonial-era town. The Wimplewood map is meant to be meandering, letting players encounter enemies and hazards in no particular order. Each time we played (ten sessions) the map would be updated to their discoveries, which were randomly determined as we went, and they would learn the rules to navigating the forest over time (i.e. 'If you see the chapel, don't go in; if you hear laughter, don't look up; if you see a well, don't look down.')" — Benjamin Bagenski, Albany, New York
Forn-Dum
"Played D&D and always loved what is now called dungeon crawling so wanted to make a dungeon that would take players months to explore." — Gene Merideth, Weston-super-Mare, England
The Maze of the Blue Medusa
"I drew/painted The Maze of the Blue Medusa when I was stuck in Montreal for the winter. It was too cold to go out for a lot of reasons, and things were very tough at the time. I spent months on it. It's a piece of art that I sold but also a fully-functional map. The little red and blue circles indicate secret and locked doors." — Zak Smith, Los Angeles, California
Genial Jack
"I wanted a variant of the 'dungeon inside a monster' scenario and a unique town all at once." — Jonathan Newell, Vancouver, British Columbia
Baerstun City
"The name is a shortening of 'Barrows-stone,' the name for the enormous brown rock in the Stone Quarter (lower left) that marks the grave of a dead demigod. The other city quarters are, clockwise, the Ocean Quarter, the Artisans' Quarter, and the Noble Quarter (with keep, at center, and castle at top, in all white).
A few features worth noting are the temple to the Dwarven god of creation (hammer shape in the Artisans' Quarter) and the gates that separate the quarters, which can be closed to complicate an invading army's ability to advance, while guards in the keep and castle can move around quickly and directly atop the walls. Baerstun sits on a cliff overlooking the bay, and so a long shallow ramp with a switchback leads to the docks.
Baerstun was the center of a D&D adventure I started with friends when 4th Edition came out, and we've since transitioned to 5th edition but continue to play characters who live in that story-world. I do most of the DM'ing and spend nearly as much time world-building as my players do playing." — J.R. Parsons
Laureth Ruined
"This is for a homebrew based on 5e. Laureth is a world broken after a celestial war. My inspiration is loosely Zelda: BOTW–based. There's an overarching main quest and a ton of side quests for my troublemakers to get into. Under the main city, The Citadel, there is a rougeish network of catacombs that will work as a homebase." — Travis Ash, Illinois
Expect sequins, aerialists, and LGBTQ love triangles.
Come for the giant lute. Stay for the bare-chested merman in sequins.
Such might read an ad for the San Francisco-based opera company Ars Minerva. It’s too bad that this upstart troupe, which performs forgotten opera from the Baroque period (1600 - 1750) and is now entering its fourth season, can’t afford much by way of advertising. Tag lines would abound: Come for the freshly exhumed music from the 1600s. Stay for the surtitles that use words like “Dude.” Or the prop Polaroid camera. Or the—is that an aerialist?
(Yes.)
Colorful, sprightly, youthful, sexy, these operas are confections. They were dead and buried; now they are alive.
“I say very often that it’s a human adventure,” says Céline Ricci about reviving these 17th-century works that were themselves revivals of Greek myths. Before founding and becoming and Executive and Artistic Director of Ars Minerva, Ricci had an active career as a mezzo-soprano. For a brief time before that, she was an archaeology student at the Sorbonne—fitting, given her current fascination with operatic remains. “The plots of these operas are very often from 2,000 years ago or 2,500 years ago. Then they are seen through the eyes of the 17th century. Then there is this silence of some 300 years. And then there’s us.”
The adventure isn’t just historical; it’s happening present-tense. Ars Minerva, whose name honors the Etruscan goddess of wisdom, labor, and art, can rent only one week of rehearsals in its performance venue before a production. Singers sometimes arrive not quite knowing their music. Technical support is sometimes not as experienced as it purports to be. Holes in preparedness have been discovered far too close to curtain-up time.
Take costumes. Ars Minerva’s third-season production Circe, last performed in 1665, was two weeks from its “modern-world premiere” when a 30-year veteran of the San Francisco Opera’s costume shop stumbled across an ad for volunteers that Ricci had placed on Craigslist. Matthew Nash was short on gigs and looking to network. He responded.
“This was amazing,” Ricci remembers. “I thought that he wasn’t a human being. He was sent by some forces of the universe to help us.”
“I went to meet with Céline at her apartment with the costume designer,” Nash says. “I was supposed to help finish the clothes. Well, nothing had been started at all. It was two weeks before dress rehearsal.”
In a week, Nash, who specializes in men’s costuming, patterned, cut, and made clothes for Circe’s five male characters. He also rebuilt the dress that Ricci, singing the title role, was to wear: the previous effort had been sewn into a Mobius strip. Says the draper who spent three decades making $10,000 costumes at one of the biggest opera houses in this country, “I’ve never slammed stuff out like that in my life.”
For Ifigenia in Aulis, Ars Minerva’s fourth-season production that will premiere on November 30, Nash has been promoted from Godsend to costume designer. Every room in his home-studio is currently strewn with jewel-toned fabric bolts. The costumes will pay homage to the opera’s three temporal roots. There will be Grecian masks, Baroque frocks, and a velvet drop-crotch tracksuit that summons the recent comeback of the Hammer pant.
“Like any company, there’ve been a lot of growing pains,” says conductor and harpsichordist Derek Tam with a diplomatic smile. Tam has been part of Ars Minerva since its inception, conducting the singers and a small orchestra of violins, cello, and theorbo (that aforementioned giant lute) from his keyboard. “I think that a lot of the excitement”—Ricci’s adventure is Tam’s excitement—“is just because it’s so new. We’re creating our own scripts.”
And their own musical scores. When it comes to mounting forgotten opera, the first challenge lies in the source material. The Biblioteca Marciana in Venice houses hundreds of manuscripts of forgotten opera. They are difficult to read, notated in bygone clefs and according to arcane performance practices. Complicating matters, they were hastily jotted down. Tam says you can sometimes find entire sections written in the wrong key.
To select Ars Minerva’s repertoire, Ricci pores over the library’s microfilm stacks and makes her best guess about which score will combine beautiful music with powerful story. Then they are transposed—put into contemporary musical nomenclature. Tam recently spent 100-odd hours preparing Ifigenia’s score for its re-debut.
There’s no guarantee that all that time with the fossil brush will uncover any treasure. But so far, Ars Minerva has been lucky. In Cleopatra, the company’s first production, Ricci unearthed a Cleopatra who, counter to her usual story, is given a new lease on life plus a new lover at the end. The titular Circe has a sexual appetite so ravenous and so satisfied she could make even a progressive San Franciscan blush. Then there’s the full-blown LGBTQ love triangle Ricci uncovered in The Amazons in the Fortunate Isles. The “feminine” male Numidio and the “masculine” female Auralba both lust after Florinda, who is bisexual.
“A plot in 1680 dealing with lesbians and it’s okay—that’s pretty awesome,” says Tam.
Ars Minerva’s staging was steamy. And not just for steaminess’s sake, it turns out. The romance scenes defibrillate what was until then a dusty musical score decaying on a shelf.
“Maybe I have something about death,” Ricci wonders with a laugh.
Maybe she does. For Ricci, Ars Minerva is about giving time and breath to music still worthy. It’s about standing on stage and singing an aria last sung centuries ago. It’s about connecting to that earlier singer across time and place, and connecting to that even-earlier Greek goddess whose story they now all share.
“This thread that we have between all of us human beings in the past, across millennia, I’m very attached to that,” says Ricci. “That’s the thing—nothing and no one ever dies.”
Though a tranquil place, Buckfast Abbey, in Devon, England, buzzes with activities. Along with an active monastery, the grounds sport a restaurant, a conference center, and a “bee department,” complete with a community apiary. Buckfast Abbey is also known as the producer of Buckfast Tonic Wine, an infamously strong and caffeinated beverage, some of which is made at an onsite facility. But in addition to wine, the Abbey is the original home of a special bee, bred by one of the brothers to be a world-renowned honey producer.
This seminal achievement was incited by a tragedy. Even in medieval times, Buckfast Abbey monks had raised bees, but in 1916, Isle of Wight disease decimated its apiaries. Experts still debate the nature of the malady, with most suggesting it was caused by parasitic mites. But it soon killed off nearly all of Great Britain’s native bees, including 30 of the Abbey’s 46 colonies.
This was the situation facing Karl Kehrle, a young beekeeper. Better known as Brother Adam, he’d arrived at Buckfast Abbey as an 11-year-old. Lay brothers typically learned practical skills, which was especially important, since the Abbey was restored almost entirely by the monks starting in the late 19th century. But “Adam wasn’t robust enough to be a stonemason,” says Clare Densley, the bee department manager of Buckfast Abbey. So instead, Brother Adam began caring for the Abbey’s bees.
The bees’ plight proved an inspiration. Brother Adam started breeding bees that could resist Isle of Wight disease, but according to Densley, he soon slipped over into “trying to make the perfect bee.” What followed was decades of passionate bee breeding.
Traditionally, bee breeding requires isolation. That’s according to Dr. Elina Niño. An assistant cooperative specialist for the University of California Cooperative Extension at University of Davis, California, she researches honeybee health and queen bee reproduction, while promoting measures to help bees in agricultural and urban areas. Unlike breeding other animals, bee crosses can be hard to predict and control. Queen bees mate on the wing (that is, while flying), and can venture more than 100 feet into the air or two miles away. This meant bee breeders like Brother Adam used distant locales (“Like an island,” says Niño). In addition, since only the queen bee lays eggs in a hive, Densley explains that they can mate with dozens of drones from another hive on a single flight, for “as much diversity as possible.” This makes patience and time commitment all the more important.
But monks are well suited for isolation and time-consuming tasks. Brother Adam travelled the world looking for bees with positive qualities, crossing Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Once he had specimens in hand, he worked a few miles from the abbey at a remote location on Dartmoor. (“Dartmoor for us is a very wild place,” says Densley, meaning there were few other apiaries about.) Brother Adam eventually bred a bee with a varied heritage and excellent resistance: the Buckfast bee.
It was a sensational accomplishment. As a foremost honeybee expert, Brother Adam wrote myriad books and articles about bee keeping and breeding during his efforts. In 1973, Queen Elizabeth awarded him an Order of the British Empire for his work. Today, the Buckfast bee is considered a prime choice for commercial beekeepers, and it’s popular in Germany, Holland, and Denmark. When Brother Adam died in 1996, his obituary in the Washington Post reverently called his creation “the legendary ‘Buckfast Superbee.’” The New York Times did the same, adding that the Buckfast bee was “regarded by many apiarists as the healthiest and most prolific honey producer ever bred.” According to Densley, some of its magic is tied up in the romantic figure of Brother Adam himself. “There were people doing what Adam did 20 years before, and even before that. But they didn't wear a black frock,” says Densley.
Yet the Abbey itself no longer breeds Buckfast bees. It doesn’t commercially produce honey anymore either, since the monks decided to stop for financial reasons in 2010. These days, “you can’t make money with honey,” says Densely. The Abbey apiary downsized from 400 to 30 colonies and mainly runs educational and therapeutic programs. The bees at Buckfast are now what Densley calls locally adapted “Devon mongrels,” and she thinks that’s a good thing. “Research is showing that bees are better if they’re outbred, instead of inbred,” she says.
What with drought, disease, and pests such as Varroa mites, bees are in trouble. Contemporary bee breeding is often undertaken to develop hardier bees. The result is insects such as the Minnesota Hygienic Bee, developed by entomologist Marla Spivak. Minnesota Hygienic bees are bred to detect and remove ill or infected pupae. Yet crossing bees for specific traits takes years, and unselected control populations are often needed for comparison. “It’s somebody’s full-time job to keep some of these lines going,” says Niño.
As for who’s breeding for favorable bee traits, it’s being undertaken by the USDA, as well as researchers at universities. These days, queen bees can be instrumentally inseminated, a much more controllable process. Outside of a lab, breeding bees can take a village. In order for communities to do selective breeding, local beekeepers have to cooperate to avoid surprise crosses. This can be difficult, with the rise of backyard beekeeping: “You might think you’re alone, but usually there’s someone around who has bees,” says Niño. Associations and clubs also exist that collectively select colonies for locally desired bee traits, she says.
It’s tempting, then, to imagine breeding a new superbee, one that could resist more diseases and stressors while producing ever-more honey. It might even seem imperative, given human love for honey and the agricultural need for pollinators. “It almost sounds like playing God, right? But we’ve been doing it forever, especially with plants,” Niño says, pointing to the success of breeders such as Susan Cobey and her New World Carniolan bees. She adds that breeding an ideal bee is a great goal, yet reiterates the difficulty, “especially when it comes to dealing with the biotic challenges that bees have,” such as pests and disease.
On the other hand, Densley doesn’t think it’s feasible. “When you're trying to select characteristics to make the bees better for us, you're kind of upsetting what the bees are trying to do to keep healthy,” she says. At Buckfast Abbey, Densley does what she calls “gentle” selection for traits such as good temperament, but in the end, she’s of the opinion that humanity has done enough to bees. “We've changed the world, really. We should be putting things back to make it easier for them, instead of trying to change them to cope with all the mess we’re making.”
That’s actually part of of Niño’s work in California: encouraging people to plant forage for bees, meaning different varieties of plants to provide pollen and nectar. California’s enduring drought, she says, is affecting the plants that provide food for bees, and there’s no way to breed around that. Bees can be bred for resistance, she says. However, “you can’t breed a bee that would be okay without eating.”
Some blueberries are sweet, some delightfully tart, and then, there are some that taste like rotting corpses. Dr. Sarah Taber, now a contract knowledge worker in agriculture and host of the podcast Farm to Taber, has sampled thousands of berries that most of us will never taste. While doing postdoctoral work at the University of Florida’s blueberry breeding program, she got a memorable taste of the at-times frustrating quest to build a better berry.
For most of us, our experience with funky fruit stops at bruised bananas, sour grapes, and moldy strawberries. And that’s largely thanks to breeding programs like the University of Florida’s, where scientists and graduate students weed out stomach-turning breeds in order to find the toothsome varieties that eventually make it to our grocery stores. But, according to Dr. Taber, those folks have gotten a bit of a bad rap.
Consider one headline from PBS: “In quest to grow a better tomato, breeders forgot about taste.” From selecting strawberries to be larger, redder, and flavorless, to breeding the tomato to be tougher and beefier (for shipping purposes) and bland, breeders are often charged with facing a tradeoff between taste, on one hand, and durability and cost, on the other—and consistently choosing the bland, economical option.
But as someone who has popped hundreds of foreign, often foul fruits into her mouth each day to find the best tasting ones, Dr. Taber urges folks to try to understand the industry before wholly blaming it for killing the flavor of fruit. In fact, the closest Dr. Taber came to witnessing dying flavor was encountering a blueberry that, quite literally, tasted like death.
“For some reason, one of these plants was making skatole, the molecule that gives poop its distinctive aroma, and putrescine,” she says, “which is a big part of what makes the characteristic petrifying flesh smell.”
“And cadaverine,” she adds, “which, well, you can guess what that is.”
Dr. Taber spent the majority of her time managing the crossbreeding of new bushes, from hand-pollinating parent flowers to plopping berries in a vintage blender to separate the seeds from the fruit. But every now and then, she was tasked with taste-testing: popping hundreds, sometimes over 1,000, newly bred blueberries into her mouth each day in order to find viable varieties and weed out the bad ones.
UF/IFAS’s breeding program was founded in the 1940s with the goal of developing varieties that could produce fruit in warmer environments. Most blueberry bushes thrive in northern climates with chilly winters, so creating new Florida-friendly, low-chill varieties requires crossing them with native Southern relatives of the bush, which produce berries Dr. Taber describes as “small and sour and seedy and horrible.” While a few varieties were successes, many came out just as sour as their Southern parent.
They were so sour, in fact, that testing called for several eating and spitting techniques in order to spare a taster's stomach and teeth. First, if anything was strangely shaped—not the ideal spherical blueberry shape—you’d avoid it altogether. Even if it ends up tasting fine, Dr. Taber says, fruits that deviate from the aesthetics of the platonic ideal of a blueberry probably won’t sell. So save your mouth and walk on by.
Second: spit. Folks who didn’t do this quickly learned, as the stuff was so sour it could incite vomiting. “You walk at a steady pace and grab a fruit, stick it in your mouth, and do two chews,” says Taber. “It takes a second for the flavor to hit, and if it makes you want to cry, you just spit it out.” She and her colleagues finessed the art of spitting without sticking out the tongue, rocketing the fruit out of their mouths, blowgun-style, to ensure the sour mush made minimal contact with teeth and tongue.
But even mastering the art of spitting can’t keep one’s teeth safe. “We started bringing fluoride mouth rinse to the field, taking swigs at the end of every row,” she says. Despite her efforts, Dr. Taber got the first cavities of her life after working in the program.
The berries that weren’t tooth-achingly acidic sometimes had a wet-paper-bag kind of taste—which, as unpleasant as it sounds, was more often a relief for testers with sore mouths. Other berries, Dr. Taber recounts, tasted “vaguely like bubblegum.” Only the rare berries that had a balance of sweet and sour, and a crisp, nearly grape-like texture, made it through to the next filter: field performance, or ensuring the plant is a hardy survivor. From this exhaustive process, only a few newly bred berries, out of tens of thousands, proceeded to the final round: the public taste panel.
But here—after all the heavy filtering and flavor scrutiny—is often where the best flavor dies. According to Dr. Taber, customers on the taste panel don’t always choose the most flavorful berries, and more mellow, delicate-flavored berries tend to outperform bolder ones. For instance, Dr. Taber described the Meadowlark as “Bless its heart, a great bush,” but its berries as "a bland-ass water bean.” In tests, though, it was well-received, and pushed to commercialization. While other blueberries in the running had strong blackberry and jammy flavors, they fell short against a berry with a taste, at best, of what Dr. Taber likens to “a faint whiff of violets.”
Having risked her dental health in the search for better berries, Dr. Taber can feel frustrated by the assumption that it's the scientists de-prioritizing flavor. “I feel like a lot of folks think we must just hang out in the lab all day doing Mr. Burns Fingers, like, ‘How can we make peaches even worse?’” she laughs. “I’m like, dude, I put my teeth on the line for you." At the end of the day, scientists and breeders aren’t really making the calls. “People tell us what they want, and we have to figure out how to do it.”
Consumer decisions within the grocery store can also contribute to the dampening of flavors. The best example is the tragic case of the Red Delicious. The apple once lived up to its name, but now tastes like slightly sweet styrofoam, due in part to years of prioritizing color over flavor. Dr. Taber speculates that we maintain a foraging mindset while shopping, using aesthetics as a proxy for fruit ripeness and quality, buying the brightest, most colorful produce. “You also have a preference for fruit that’s more consistent in shape, because if you’re out picking bushes, and the fruit is kind of wonky shaped, there’s probably a worm in it.” Thus, we can overlook delicious-tasting fruits that don’t match our mental prototypes, which are often reinforced by sales and marketing.
While discussion of modern produce at times assumes a simple tradeoff between durability or cost and flavor, Dr. Taber’s experience complicates this perspective. In fact, there’s a myriad of factors affecting how good a fruit tastes beyond mere varietal. Dr. Taber recalls giving friends and family Ziploc bags filled with extra berries from the program. People loved them, and asked if they were organic. “We’re like, no, they’re university test berries. We were literally injecting sulphuric acid into the irrigation system to keep them happy … that’s how organic it was,” she says. “It tasted really good because the bushes were spoiled, and they were fresh—that’s it.”
Before pointing fingers, Dr. Taber says, we should look at the micro-decisions we make as shoppers and tasters—and even the ways in which we’ve come to understand what flavor means in the world of produce. Creating new fruits that survive and sell is a complex process, involving a web of different agents making decisions with different incentives. Maybe breeders aren’t the dementors of agriculture, sucking the souls and flavors out of fruits in exchange for a longer shelf life. Unwittingly, we may all be complicit.
It ranks in the top 25 largest impact craters ever discovered.
There are still secrets hidden on the vast terrain of Earth.
Three years ago, a team of scientists discovered an unusual shape in a topography map of the land beneath Greenland's thick ice. Under the Hiawatha glacier, there was a circular depression. Kurt Kjær, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, wondered if, perhaps, it had been made by a meteorite.
Now, after collecting detailed scans and physical clues, an international team of researchers has evidence, published in Science Advances, that this unseen crater was made by a giant rock from space, more than half a mile wide. The resulting indentation is almost 20 miles wide, making it one of the 25 largest impact craters on Earth.
The crater originally showed up on radar scans made as part of ongoing efforts to map the terrain beneath Greenland's ice. But those scans weren't detailed enough to resolve the telltale features of impact craters, including peaks formed in the center of the ring. Kjær and his colleagues worked with the NASA glaciologist Joseph MacGregor to organize a survey with a more powerful ice-penetrating radar system, launched from the U.S. military base at Thule.
The picture that those scans produced revealed the exact features the researchers were looking for—a circular rim, the central peaks, and layers of ice roiled by past disturbances, deep under more recent, pristine ice layers. The depression was also massive, about twice the size of Washington, D.C.
An impact of this size, though, would leave behind evidence besides a crater. But collecting material directly from the crater is a major challenge: It's under half a mile of ice. The scientists located a channel of meltwater that carried with it debris from the depression. Analyzing those fragments, they found unusually high concentrations of nickel, cobalt, chromium, and gold, an indication that if a meteorite had created the crater, it was an iron meteorite. But the most exciting piece of evidence that flushed out of the channel were tiny grains of quartz that showed signs of an impact and included materials that could be made in the melting heat of the impact.
If a meteorite of this size hit the Earth, it would have had an enormous effect on the whole planet. In the immediate aftermath, shocks would have spread for hundreds of miles, and a huge fireball would have lit the sky. The debris could have reached North America. And the impact of the meteorite could have melted massive amounts of Greenland's ice, changing the dynamics of the ocean and, consequently, chilling temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere.
This is one of the most intriguing parts of this discovery, because it tracks with a contested theory about a thousand-year period of cooling around the end of the last Ice Age. Some researchers have suggested that a massive impact, like this one, could have set off this cooling period, known as the Younger Dryas, which occurred about 12,800 years ago.
There are indications that this crater is young, in geologic time. Ice erodes the land beneath it relatively quickly, so the bumpy peaks beneath the ice suggest that this one hasn't had time to wear down. But it's not possible to date the crater with exactitude without more evidence. It could be as young as the Younger Dryas period... or it could be three million years old. The scientists are now searching for the resources to drill down deep into the crater and extract evidence directly from its depths, in the hope of better understanding this new mystery.
Last year's celestial main event generated a lot of data.
When the moon got in the sun’s way last August, people were expecting it. Many of us humans snapped up hotel rooms years in advance and traveled great distances to stand together for a few minutes in darkness. Millions more North Americans just gazed up wherever they happened to be, equipped with flimsy solar glasses (for gawking at the celestial wonder) and phones (for documenting their own awe).
We knew it was coming, but other animals didn’t. They didn’t mark their calendars, or book beds or flights, or road-trip to Oregon. For almost all of them, complete darkness in the middle of the day was a foreign concept. Prior to August 2017, the contiguous United States hadn’t witnessed a total solar eclipse since 1979. “None of the birds had experienced anything like this,” says Cecilia Nilsson, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “It hadn’t happened within their lifetime.”
As Atlas Obscura reported just before the eclipse, many scientists planned to study what happened in the moments of darkness, and in particular how animals reacted to them. It’s not the first time researchers have done this: Reports from the 1850s and 1930s documented responses such as ants skidding to a stop and crickets chirping “as loud as on any summer’s night.” But in many respects, 2017 marked a new frontier of eclipse-animal data-gathering. This time around, scientists in the United States had cheap, reliable technology and an untold number of eyeballs paying attention. By some estimates, nine in 10 adults in the United States got a (hopefully protected) eyeful.
More than a year later, scientists are still sifting through their heaps of data. Here are three ways they tuned into how the celestial marvel affected animal behavior, and how they’re going to continue to dig into their data.
Weather radar
For a true bird’s-eye view, a team led by Nilsson collected data from 143 Doppler stations across the country.
These seemed to be ideal sources data about how animals reacted to the changing light, because those data were already being collected. These radar networks scan the sky every five or 10 minutes, Nilsson says. Meteorologists consult the images for information about clouds and rain, and usually filter out anything else. Nilsson and her team were interested in precisely that other stuff that would normally be tossed out as background noise. These data gave them a way to analyze “the entire assembly of birds in the air,” Nilsson says.
The radar data isn’t granular enough to tell a crow from an owl, but the researchers say they can consistently differentiate groups of birds or insects from rainclouds by analyzing the shape, movement, and altitude of things that appear on the scans.
The researchers wondered whether they’d find that birds had behaved during the eclipse the way they do at night. As Nilsson and her collaborators write in a new paper in Biology Letters, the data didn’t really bear that out. Instead, the researchers found that daytime routines, such as foraging for food, decreased, but weren’t replaced by nighttime habits. For the most part, everything simply quieted down.
There was an exception, however, in the zone of totality, the roughly 70-mile-wide swath of shadow that the eclipse cut across the heart of the country. At the eight stations there, the team detected a flurry of activity. Researchers observed a series of “blooms,” which look a bit like a jagged donut. These spikes seem to represent “really short bursts” of action among a large number of flying creatures, Nilsson says, generally lasting the length of a single scan cycle. They peaked during totality and were gone five or 10 minutes later.
It’s hard to say exactly what was taking to the air, or in what quantities. To distinguish between birds and insects on radar, Nilsson often looks at the speed at which the radar hit is moving—but in this case, the movements were “short and undirected,” so that was difficult to gauge. She suspects that the blooms may represent some form of discombobulation. “My guess would be birds just flushing into the air,” she says. “They don’t understand what’s happening, they’re trying to figure it out, and then they’re coming back down and waiting to see what happens.” The authors also suggest that flying insects might have been temporarily tricked into embarking on their usual nightly migrations.
These observations are less dramatic than those made by German scientist Christopher Clavius in 1593, when he recalled birds falling “down from the sky to the ground in terror of such horrid darkness,” during an eclipse in Portugal some 30 years earlier. Nilsson’s team posited that, to the birds of 2017 at least, the cooler, darker air might have seemed similar to a storm. In the future, they hope to compare their existing radar data to scans taken before, during, and after inclement weather.
Sound recordings
The flat, otherworldly landscape of Craters of the Moon, Idaho, doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the glassy water and snow-capped peaks of Grand Teton, Wyoming. But a few days before the eclipse, staff at these and other National Park Service (NPS) sites strapped audio recorders to trees, poles, or stakes—anything that would let them mount the receivers at about the height of a human ear. (In a few other parks, the team plunged the recorders underwater instead.) The team at the NPS’s Natural Sounds & Night Skies division wanted to know what the eclipse was going to sound like.
“We knew it would be really hard to compare across sites because the habitats and species were so different,” says Megan McKenna, an acoustic biologist at the NPS who spearheaded the recording. So, instead of trying to design a rigorous study with strict parameters, McKenna and her collaborators opted for what she calls “an opportunistic survey of the parks that were interested in participating.” It might be thought of as a fishing expedition. She trawled for as much information as she could get her ears on.
The recorders—generally one per park—captured sound before, during, and after the eclipse, for a total of two terabytes of data. Audio files arrived from 14 parks across the country, most of which fell within the path of totality.
McKenna enlisted NPS colleagues to help log the clips, but listeners didn’t know which park they were listening to, or when the file was recorded. Each recruit tallied bird calls, evidence of human chattering or other activity, and the sounds of mammals, insects, and weather—plus wildcards. (In some places, it was so silent that the recorders only captured the noise floor of the instrument itself.)
They found different things in different sites—and often found that human animals were plenty noisy. The instruments in Great Smoky Mountains National Park picked up the sounds of honking car horns. In the the backcountry of Grand Teton it was quiet, and then, as the eclipse approached, the recorders captured far-off cheers. “You knew it when the eclipse happened,” McKenna says. “You hear this distant human howl.”
McKenna and her team prepared short internal NPS reports about their findings, and shared their audio recordings with the Eclipse Soundscapes project at Harvard, which aimed to translate the visual wonder into an accessible, tactile experience for people with visual impairments and then, later, compile audio recordings of the event into a sound library. Other researchers have analyzed the sounds of the eclipse, too. That’s how a team at the University of Missouri found that some bees fell still and silent. “There’s more information there,” McKenna says. “We just tapped the surface of this.”
Crowdsourcing
When the California Academy of Sciences partnered with the crowdsource app iNaturalist to solicit observations about how nature responded to the eclipse, they found themselves inundated with dispatches.
In all, 645 users uploaded 2,795 observations to the Life Responds project. Their notes and pictures spanned 437 species in 40 states, plus Puerto Rico, Canada, and Mexico. Participants could document anything that struck their fancy, but they had to look at whatever it was three times: 30 minutes before the eclipse, once during totality, and then a final time 30 minutes later. Beyond those instructions, participants had little guidance and a lot of leeway. “We really just wanted people to pay attention and see what they might see, knowing that we haven’t ever had an opportunity to connect people at such a broad geographic scale to observe and report what they found,” says Rebecca Johnson, codirector of citizen science at the academy. “By keeping it broad, we thought we might catch things they didn’t expect.”
According to an in-press paper the team wrote for a forthcoming volume to be published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a number of patterns emerged. Frogs began to call, flowers closed up, and cicadas stopped singing as totality began. At the same time, crickets struck up their chorus and hummingbirds stopped going to feeders until the sun shone through again.
But there are some caveats. Only a third of participants made all three observations. (Those along totality might have spent those precious couple of minutes in slack-jawed awe.) Some participants only noted behavior afterward, when something struck them as interesting—but it’s also possible that they were in an unfamiliar place or simply hadn’t looked as closely before at a phenomenon that isn’t particularly unusual. Also, data from generally sleepy areas could be a bit skewed by the unusual influx of people flocking to totality. And the observations were skewed by species, of course. Dogs were disproportionately represented, probably because people brought them along. Still, “despite the complications of uneven geographic spread and not all participants following the exact protocols of Life Responds,” the authors write, “the project overall met the goal of gathering and formalizing anecdotal observations of organismal responses to solar eclipses.”
It seems that the eclipse likely left animals a bit puzzled, but ultimately unperturbed, regardless of the more hyperbolic historical accounts. Though it happened during birds’ active migration season, Nilsson doesn’t think it’s likely to have made a difference over the long haul. The United States will next be plunged into daytime darkness during April 2024. And that time around, totality will be up to twice as long. But first, researchers have seven years to get through these observations, even as they make plans for the next set.
The showman's personal train car was full of stained glass, chandeliers, lavish furniture, and elaborate moldings.
John Ringling, the showman, had a flair for flashy extravagance, and his private train car was no exception.
As one of the founders of the Ringling Brothers circus empire, Ringling spent much of his adult life living on a personal train car, accompanying his traveling show from city to city, awing everyday Americans with trick horses and elephants. Ringling was also one of the richest Americans at the time, so his train car was no ordinary mobile home. Now, with virtual reality, anyone can see it.
“Back in those days, John Ringling was one of 11 individuals in the U.S. who owned a private train car,” says Davide Tanasi, an archaeologist and self-described “digital humanist” at the University of South Florida. “It was an old-fashioned equivalent of owning a private jet.”
The stained glass, chandeliers, lavish furniture, and elaborate moldings are a testament to the design style of America’s rich and famous during the early 1900s, especially in Sarasota, Florida, where the Ringlings lived and built their famous Ca’ d’Zan mansion. “It’s an art history treasure and a crown jewel of Florida cultural heritage,” Tanasi says. “The train is the only example of a mobile mansion of the Gilded Age.”
Tanasi and his collaborators have spent much of the past year digitizing every inch of the eight-room train car, including every table and chair, and every nut and bolt. They used high-definition cameras and lasers to create 3D-renderings of the car, utilizing a technique known as digital photogrammetry.
The train car now exists in two places at once: physically on a platform at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, and digitally as a 15-terabyte collection of data files on a server at the University of Southern Florida in Tampa. With just one click, the fragile artifact can now seamlessly travel the world. “Anyone with a digital reality headset can explore or visit the train from your living room couch,” Tanasi says.
The project shines a light on a new form of digital conservation, where a rendering of any cultural artifact can be saved on a computer, halting the gradual processes of deterioration or neglect. “This is the best application of this kind of cutting-edge technology,” says Tanasi, “to extend and expand the lifetime of these old artifacts.”
One of the motivations of the project was to gain the ability to 3D-print replacements for parts of the train that are falling apart, such as a rusty bolt or a table leg. In theory, the files created by Tanasi and his team could be used to print an exact replica of the train car, down to the most minute detail. “With the 3D model, we could print it out piece by piece,” says Tanasi. “It would take forever, but we could do it.”
If a fire or a Florida hurricane were to tragically destroy a priceless object like Ringling’s gilded train car, every line, scratch, and detail would be able to live on. “The train car will be preserved for as long as computers will continue to exist,” says Tanasi. “With this technology, we guarantee digital immortality.”
How James Joyce, Madonna, and Monty Python ended up on the same restricted shelf.
For more than a hundred years, deep in a dusty enclave of the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, there sat a restricted collection—2,100 books deemed too subversive, too toxic, too scandalous for eager minds. These books, principally concerned with sex, made up the “Phi” collection, bearing the Greek “Φ” on their spines like a mark of sin. But things are different now, and these books are proudly on display at the Bodleian, in the Story of Phi: Restricted Books exhibit that opened on November 15, 2018.
Built in 1602 and home to more than 13 million items, the Bodleian is the second-largest among British libraries behind only, well, the British Library. It’s a point of pride for the university, but keeping it all running smoothly can be “a bit of a 'mare,” says Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston, an Oxford graduate student who published a 2015 history of the Phi collection in the Bodleian Library Record. In 1882, head librarian E.W.B. Nicholson set out to make things more orderly, by schematizing some 7,000 different classifications. One stood out among the traditional numbers and letters used in the classification system: a lone Greek symbol chosen, most likely, as a pun on “Fie!” (As in, “Fie on you for such prurient proclivities!”).
By 1892, it had been loaded with centuries’ worth of older works that met its salacious criteria, outlined in 1937 as vivid depictions/discussions of sex, "Obscene literature in general," and "Drawings and photographs of nudes and similar subjects." New titles continued to be added until the dissolution of the Phi collection in—wait for it—2010. While the restrictions on the collection were enforced, enterprising students could only access Phi materials if faculty submitted requests on their behalf, and even that didn't mean the librarians would allow it.
The collection ranged from classics to kitsch: a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses and a lecherously illustrated version of The Love Books of Ovid sat alongside a volume from Monty Python—banished for including an illustration of a “naked posterior." There was a book called Phallic Objects & Remains that features an erect lighthouse on its cover, and 25 volumes of a magazine called Bananas, a British literary magazine from the 1970s. Sex wasn’t the only concern—the collection contained a book that instructs readers on how to grow marijuana—but it was clearly the focus. Even Madonna’s Sex, the singer’s 1992 bestseller, was sent to languish in what Houston calls the “literary Gulag.”
Jennifer Ingleheart, a scholar of classics and ancient history at Durham University who is curating the exhibit, says her favorite work in the display is the Satyra sotadica, which the Bodleian calls the “first modern work of European pornography.” The 17th-century book depicts, in a Latin dialogue, a woman seducing her female cousin under the pretense of preparing her for the marriage bed. “Its entire setup is quite ... 'porny,'” says Ingleheart, with refined British emphasis. But the book is more than just a surprising relic. For scholars and artists, it helped establish Latin as the “language of pornography,” Ingleheart adds, casting Rome as the lustful foil to a more pure Greece.
According to Houston, Nicholson and the Bodleian created the restricted collection in response to legislation such as 1857’s Obscene Publications Act and the subsequent establishment of the “Hicklin test,” which became the legal test for obscenity, despite obvious imprecision. The Hicklin test defined as obscene any work likely “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences,” leaving libraries at risk of legal liability for distributing those works. In practice, the test often gave more latitude to works of the old Western canon rather than rising literary stars. That’s how Oscar Wilde got thrown into the Phi, while Shakespeare’s no-less-explicit sonnets got a pass.
But it’s important to acknowledge, Houston points out, that the Phi also served the purpose of preserving vulnerable texts. It housed a signed first edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover—banned in its original form in the United Kingdom for three decades after its publication in 1928. This was possible only because government officials, upon request, delivered the copy to the library so it could be shelved in the restricted section—a display of what Houston calls “the quiet heroism of librarians.” There were at least some in the government who thought the edicts had gone too far, and were willing to quietly help librarians subvert the strictures.
Librarians also had to fight to keep the books safe from physical abuse. Everyone from a disgruntled puritan to an aroused reader might deface one of the volumes. Those concerns, says Houston, led the British Library to require browsers of its Phi-like "Private Case" to read the materials with a librarian watching, at what came to be known as “the wanker’s desk.” A Cambridge University librarian wrote in 1937 that obscene titles were returned to its similar “Arcana” collection with what he termed “phallic additions.”
No further detail necessary. Let’s just be glad that our most ribald scholarly pursuits are no longer demeaned by shaming shelfmarks, even if “Fie!” is among the best of those obsolete insults.
Show us the surprising items you've been keeping to yourself.
I’ve accrued and disposed of a number of personal collections over the years. Action figures, comic books, book-books, trading cards. These days, my most idiosyncratic collection is probably my run of Vintage edition paperbacks of Philip K. Dick novels. The covers of those specific editions, with their garish early computer graphics and screaming neon palettes, perfectly suit Dick's retro-dystopian sci-fi. I’m trying to assemble the complete collection by hunting through used books stores, though I’ll usually pick up any older copy of Dick’s novels when I get the chance.
Clearly, I tend to collect books, but we're curious about Atlas Obscura readers' collecting habits. You might collect antique kitchen equipment, or signed photos of Paul Reiser, or... the sky's the limit, really, knowing what a diverse and passionate group you all are. Whatever it is that you collect, we want to hear about it.
Fill out the form below to tell us what you collect, why you think your unusual subject is so special, and whether you think your collection will ever be finished. Then email your best, original image of your collection to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, “Greatest Collections.” We’ll showcase some of our favorites in an upcoming article. Let the unusual collection of obscure collections begin!
Seventy-year-old John Stewart was the first guest to feel it. Awoken by nausea at 3 a.m. on August 15, 1922, he lurched to the bathroom and vomited violently. Some time later, the hotel’s servant found him back in bed, able to open his eyelids only by using his fingers.
Unmarried and an avid angler, Stewart had made the remote Loch Maree Hotel his summer getaway for the past 40 years, leaving management of his Glasgow cloth and yarn business to his partners. Nearly every day, he was out on the loch in pursuit of trout, his quiet ghillie oaring him in and out of tiny wooded isles, cradled by the ancient peaks of the northwest Scottish Highlands. This place, Stewart often remarked, was where he wished to die.
At 7 a.m., the hotel’s proprietor, Alex Robertson, a seasoned and respected innkeeper, checked on his infirm guest, who was apparently feeling better. “I asked Mr. Stewart if we would send for the doctor,” Robertson recalled later, “but he thought not.”
Awakening in another room, an elderly Dublin couple complained to each other of dizziness and double vision. Reluctantly, she remained in bed while he mustered strength to go out fishing. Down the hall, a retired London barrister pushed through the same symptoms, bathing, dressing, and staggering down to breakfast. He joked to Mr. Robertson that he felt drunk, but yes, perhaps it might be wise to wire a doctor.
When Dr. Knox arrived by car from nearby Gairloch, the barrister apologized for making a fuss, chuckling that he saw two doctors instead of one. But upstairs, Mr. Stewart had worsened and the Dublin woman was slurring, prompting the doctor to return speedily to Gairloch for backup.
Out on the lake, the Dublin man saw two trout jump when his ghillie saw one. Fishing nearby, Major Fearnley Anderson, a Seaforth Highlander on leave from his post in India, ignored his own ghillie’s growing signs of illness all afternoon, as effortlessly as he had ignored his wife Rosamund’s symptoms in the hotel room that morning.
At 9 p.m., Dr. Knox returned to the hotel with a professor of medicine who was in Gairloch on holiday. The news from Mr. Robertson was grim. An hour earlier, Mr. Stewart had died, the other three guests were worsening by the minute, and now there were two more sick guests: neglected Mrs. Anderson and a 22-year-old Oxford graduate, the beloved scion of an elite English family, who, despite scrambling a nearby mountain the day before, could move neither eyeballs nor tongue.
Before the doctors could do anything other than prescribe brandy and champagne, Knox was called to a cluster of huts nearby, the seasonal homes of the ghillies and other local workers. Here, Major Anderson’s ghillie, Kenneth MacLennan, complained of acute abdominal pain. Knox quickly prescribed a laxative, then rushed back to the hotel, where the Dublin woman expired just before midnight.
All night and over the next several days, they continued to suffer and die. Darting impotently from room to room, doctors bore witness to a near-uniform story of unstoppable decline: double vision, dizziness, droopy eyes and thick tongues, then a cascade of paralyses, from eyes and lips to larynx and diaphragm. Once they lost their speech, the patients communicated by writing, and when their fingers failed, by crude flailing. Their limbs jerked wildly, and they clutched at their throats, unable to breathe, conscious to the end.
Midday on Wednesday, another ghillie announced himself sick, bringing the total afflicted to eight. With the arrival of police, newspaper reporters, four more doctors and several coffins, a shell-shocked Mr. Robertson watched most of his 30-odd healthy guests speedily check out. The stately Loch Maree Hotel, formerly renowned for a brief visit by Queen Victoria in 1877, now faced infamy.
“The spirit of tragedy broods in the glens and haunts the hills,” reported one paper as word spread. Within a day, headlines of the incident were sowing panic across Britain. As the Scotsman delicately put it, “Scotland so rarely experiences so painful a sensation.” Shuddering over the running tally of deaths, near-recoveries, and relapses, readers everywhere agonized over one central question: What or who was responsible?
The medical team on site quickly ruled out encephalitis and poisoning by belladonna (known to affect the eyes), and they threw cold water on the media’s rushed diagnosis of “ptomaine poisoning” (common food poisoning): The symptoms at Loch Maree were far more severe. They agreed that the illness was likely food-borne, but what had these six guests and two ghillies eaten that the others had not?
Crowding into the hotel’s kitchen, the doctors immediately excluded dinner and breakfast, whose menus were uniform for all guests, leaving lunch the likely culprit. What, they asked the terrified cook, had she prepared for Monday’s lunch? Just what she made every day, she explained: sandwiches, wrapped neatly in paper packets for guests to take on their fishing, hiking, or driving jaunts, or departures by train. On Monday, they contained jam, cheese, leftover roast beef from Saturday’s dinner, and ham and tongue from Sunday, which Mr. Robertson had carved himself. And, of course, potted meat.
What sort of potted meat? On this point, the cook was unsure. In late June, the hotel had purchased two-dozen jars of four different varieties from Lazenby’s of London: chicken, ham, and turkey, all mixed with tongue; and wild duck. That morning, the cook and her helper opened two jars from the kitchen store and spread their contents on fresh bread with butter. They noticed no loose lids or odd smells.
Suspicions aroused, the doctors interrogated the last surviving patients. Via weak nods and gestures, along with elaboration from their loved ones, the dying victims confirmed the doctors’ hunch. Over the next several hours, a vivid picture of Monday’s deadly lunch emerged.
Gobbling down his potted meat sandwiches atop a bare peak, the young Oxford graduate gazed down the length of the loch at the tiny rowboats meandering around the islands. In one of these boats, Major Anderson took beef sandwiches for himself, handing those with potted paste to his wife Rosamund. (She preferred these, he would later insist.) As was custom, they passed their leftovers over to Kenneth McLennan, their ghillie at the oars. On a rocky north shore beach alongside Mr. Stewart, another guest named Andrew Buchanan bit into one paste sandwich, decided he wasn’t hungry and tossed it to a bird, and then handed the remaining sandwiches to his ghillie, who wolfed them down graciously. And on it went: the same lunch for all eight victims.
On Wednesday afternoon, when innkeeper Robertson learned that the potted meats were the doctors’ prime suspect, a troubling memory emerged that he would confess to only later in a written statement. On Tuesday morning, upon hearing of Mr. Stewart’s illness, the very first case:
“My mind went to the potted meats, and I gave instructions for them not to be used for sandwiches that morning. My mind went to the potted meats not because I had any reason to think anything was wrong with them, but because I could think of nothing else that would be likely to give trouble.”
For centuries, Brits had potted and preserved everything from ox-cheeks to oysters to woodcocks. As factory-potting supplanted home-potting, taste and quality may have suffered, but popularity did not. At the news from Loch Maree, one editorial voiced shock that “persons staying at a fashionable Highlands resort” would stoop to potted meats over “wholesome cuts of joint or tongue.” But for the rest of the citizenry, whose cupboards were stocked with potted meat in tins and jars, whose summer picnic tables and beach baskets overflowed with paste sandwiches, this was a moment of reckoning.
To reassure the paralyzed public, the hotel staff, and the guests’ grieving families, investigators needed a more specific culprit: the particular type of potted meat and the reason it was so deadly. For the next several days, as the patients died off, doctors, police, and hotel staff ransacked trash barrels, ash-pits, and roadside ditches for empty Lazenby’s pots. Of 14 recovered, two were deemed likeliest to be from Monday, both of which contained residue of their contents.
Meanwhile, just before being driven home to die, Kenneth McLennan recalled to his sister that he’d saved one of Monday’s paste sandwiches. She instructed his herd-boy hut-mate to retrieve it, but apparently not what to do next. So the herd-boy simply left the wrapped sandwich on the kitchen table. Later, another ghillie spotted the poisonous sandwich and buried it in the garden so the free-roaming hens wouldn’t eat it. Hearing this story two days later, Mr. Robertson sent another ghillie to exhume the sandwich.
The sandwich, the jars, the Oxford grad’s urine, a ghillie’s blood, the Dublin man’s feces, and half of his brain were shipped off to a bacteriologist in Bristol, along with a small dead bird recovered from the loch’s north shore beach. As the bacteriologist examined the evidence, the second ghillie and last surviving victim rallied briefly and then followed the others, leaving behind a young widow and two children. In response, an unimaginative tabloid christened Mr. Robertson’s inn “The Hotel of Death.”
Clostridium botulinum, reported the bacteriologist, had been identified in the sandwich and a single container of wild duck paste. Although the germ is found everywhere in soil and dust, under low-oxygen conditions like a sealed jar, its spores produce one of the deadliest toxins on the planet. When ingested, it attacks the nervous system with speed and ferocity, causing the illness known as botulism. First identified in Belgium in 1895, when three funeral musicians died from ham, botulism had never before been reported in Britain. These particular spores made quite a first: A pin’s head worth of the duck paste could kill 2,000 mice.
Public panic did not abate. Sales of potted meat and other preserved foods plummeted. As one paper put it, “there may lurk a deadly danger” not just to picnickers “but to the whole body of the community.” To quell hysteria, the Scottish Board of Health stepped in with a statement: “When it is remembered that hundreds of thousands, even millions, of jars of prepared food have been consumed without casualty, the public will tend to agree … that the disease has recently caused a concern and alarm out of all proportion to its prevalence.”
Meanwhile, a team of scientists descended on Lazenby's processing plant, scrutinizing every phase of a dead animal’s transformation—being boned, cooked, pulverized, seasoned, steamed, squirted through a nozzle into jars, lidded, and sealed—into potted paste. Particular attention was paid to the tricky process of sterilization: heating both meat and glass jar high and long enough to kill bacteria, without ruining the meat or breaking the glass.
In early September, with the entire nation watching, the government held an unprecedented juried public inquiry, at which, as one reporter put it, “every atom of evidence” was presented. Questioners grilled doctors and experts, Mr. Robertson and his cook, mourning guests, the confused herd-boy, and one dead ghillie’s old landlady, who spoke only Gaelic. In the end, nothing and no one were found to blame. The Loch Maree kitchen was immaculate, its record and standards beyond reproach. And out of 700 glass jars of Lazenby’s potted duck per batch, produced for the past 35 years, only this one had been tainted. When, how, and where the deadly spores had overtaken the meat would remain a mystery.
And, to Mr. Robertson’s great relief, experts testified that while an antitoxin for botulism did exist, it was only effective when administered immediately after ingestion of the spores. By the time Mr. Stewart couldn’t open his eyes at 3 a.m., it was too late for all of them.
The inquiry did spark some change. Anti-toxins were made more immediately available across the country. And packaging of preserved meat, fish, fruit, or vegetables, upon the jury’s recommendation, would hereafter include “a distinct mark by which the details of its manufacture can be traced.” Specific expiration dates would come three decades later, but this was enough for at least some Brits, over time, to shed their fears and re-embrace their cherished potted meats.
Eight months after burying his wife Rosamund, Major Anderson was shot to death near the Khyber Pass by anti-British “tribesmen.” Andrew Buchanan saw his own survival by sandwich-forfeiture as “divine intervention,” dedicating himself to civic charity and lifelong support for his dead ghillie’s two sisters.
Though the hotel remained open (and is still open today), innkeeper Alex Robertson never recovered. Even after the inquiry, doubts were whispered, and he must have felt them. Less than three years later, at age 48, he died at the hotel, his beloved home. His official cause of death was stomach cancer, though locals called it a broken heart.
Mourners arrived—hunters and fishers, estate owners, a shepherd and his dogs—in boats and cars, on foot and horseback. From the hotel, the oak coffin was carried down to the shore, onto the water, two miles across the loch, accompanied by a flotilla of slow-moving motorboats and rowboats, to an ancient burial ground in the thick woods of Isle Maree.
