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19 Perfect Stories About Meeting Animals While Traveling

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Fantastic beasts and where you found them.

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Earlier this year, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to send us stories about the most memorable strangers they've met while traveling. We received some truly magical tales of human connection, but immediately realized we'd neglected the similarly miraculous experience of spontaneous animal connection! In order to correct that gross oversight, we put out a call for stories about the greatest animals you've encountered on the road. Once again, the results were nothing less than... adorable.

Among the hundreds of responses we received, there were tales of sleepy cats, overly friendly boars, kissing primates, pretty ponies, and even one termite-hungry cobra. Oh, and lots and lots of VGBs (Very Good Boys). Each encounter you told us about spoke to the incredible ways animals can influence our personal adventures. Even better, you sent pics.

Take a look at some of our favorite submissions below, and head over to our new forums to share your own story of incredible animals met while traveling!

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Unnamed Bison

Yellowstone National Park

“We were on a motorcycle road trip a few years back, and went through parts of Yellowstone on the way home. We had several bison encounters over the course of the trip, but this was the most memorable. It had caused a large traffic jam (and not just because of the rubbernecking, for good chunks of time it was just blocking the entire road so no one could get by). You don't fully appreciate their size until you are just a few feet from one on the back of a motorcycle!” — Megan Riker


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'Bowser'

Mount Ida, Arkansas

“We were mountain biking on the Ouachita Trail, and Bowser was the resident dog at the cabin we stayed at. Each day he would run behind us on the trail, stop with us and always wait to be last in line. He would find water in puddles and creeks to drink, and we shared our trail snacks with him. He ran over 40 miles with us one day, never complaining. [...] What a great dog.” — Adam, Austin, Texas


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'Chieftain'

Waterford, Ireland

“Last October, I spent two weeks in Ireland and my group and I spent an afternoon at the Guillamene swimming cove in Co. Waterford. We encountered several dogs that day, running up and down the hill and wandering, but my favorite was Chieftain. A 7-year-old Irish Wolf Hound, he was absolutely majestic while we sat next to the sea. When you pet him he was oily and scruffy (in a nice way I assure you) and he seemed to enjoy the attention. A gruff Irish woman handed me his leash while she smoked a cigarette, and told us about how he had his own loveseat at home. It was absolutely perfect.” — Rachel Sandoffsky , Seattle, Washington


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'Gary'

Carsac-Aillac, France

“In 2012, I had the opportunity to participate in an archaeological excavation at the French Paleolithic site of La Ferrassie, as part of research being conducted regarding Neanderthal skeletons that had been discovered there during the early 20th century. The crew encamped on the grounds of a house in the nearby town of Carsac-Aillac. A local dog named Gary, who belonged to a person who lived in Carsac-Aillac, would visit us on a daily basis. He was very friendly and would often hang out with us after we returned from the excavations, and I always remembered him very fondly. I was very pleasantly surprised years later when I found out that Gary had been mentioned in a popular science book, Cafe Neandertal by Beebe Bahrami, that was published on the subject of the research done at that site.” — Pat, U.S.A.


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'Orvie'

Orvieto, Italy

"I went on a month-long study abroad trip to Italy last summer, and one of the places my group visited was Orvieto. It was a gorgeous town with loads of history and culture, but my favorite part of that day was the cat I met at a scenic view point on the edge of the town. Stray cats are everywhere in Italy (they have a great spay and neuter program) but this little tabby was exceptionally sweet. While sitting on a wall admiring the view, this little cat strolled right up to me and hopped into my lap and remained there for most of the next hour. By the time I had to (regrettably) leave, my legs had fallen asleep so badly that I couldn't walk right for a few minutes. Anyone who has a cat knows you don't move when they're comfy! I experienced and saw a lot of amazing things on that trip, but that little cat, whom I dubbed ‘Orvie,’ made a special memory for me that still makes me smile to think about." — Leah Bartlett, Kansas


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'Babi'

Bako National Park, Borneo

“I was walking along the beach in Bako after a day of hiking the trails. Very far down the other end of the beach I saw a shadow of an animal. I walked towards it, my curiosity piqued by all the wildlife I had seen that day. As I got closer, I saw it was a cute little bearded pig. I approached slowly from a distance. My only knowledge of wild pigs comes from Lord of the Flies. As I got closer, he didn’t run away (or towards me) but continued on his leisurely stroll. I finally got up to him and walked with him for awhile. He was digging for crabs and when he couldn’t find any he looked at me and wagged his tail, maybe hoping for a snack. I quietly pulled out my phone to take a few shots of this wild exotic animal who had the demeanor of a puppy. After a few pictures we continued strolling until my family who had been looking for me saw me but not my little friend, yelled in greeting. My little buddy, now named 'Babi,' gave me a little look and then disappeared into the brush at the sand’s edge.” — Debbey, New Hampshire


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Unnamed Lemur

Madagascar

“In the forest with a guide, a lemur or ‘indri indri’ came down from his tree to take some leaves we picked, he then slowly reached for them, gently touching my hand and took the leaves, my heart stopped beating. It’s something I will never forget, coming from a wild animal in the middle of a dense forest.” — Emma, France


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Unnamed Bonobo

Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, Democratic Republic of the Congo

“I was working as a contractor at the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa, DRC for about three weeks. The staff arranged for my team to visit the Lola Ya Bonobo reserve in the rainforest. We were given a tour and at the end, we entered a clearing where foster mothers, women from the local community, were watching baby bonobos play. After playing with a few of them, which was just like playing with my nephews when they were little (but without the tantrums and crying), I sat down next to one of the foster mothers to watch the play group. On her lap was a tiny, malnourished baby bonobo. After a few minutes, this baby reached out and gently tapped my arm. When I turned to look at him, he leaned in for a kiss! How could I say no? We played ‘kiss’ for several minutes. I still can't believe I got to experience this." — Dawn Lester, Washington, D.C.


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'Simon' the Pripyat Fox

Chernobyl, Ukraine

“We got to meet Simon, the fox who lives in the exclusion zone of Pripyat near Chernobyl. He came up to us and ate food we left out for him.” — Lauren Johnson, Albany, Western Australia


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Castle Pony

Dingle, Ireland

“We followed the signs to see a castle off the beaten path and when we pulled up, there was a pony just standing outside of it to the left. It was so majestic up there. We walked up to the castle and when we got to the top of the hill, we discovered it was actually perched on a cliff above the ocean! Pony, castle, and ocean, all in one spot. It was magical! Then as we came out of the castle to go back to the car, the pony walked up to us and let me pet him.” — Tawnya Carlson, Orlando, Florida


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Ireland Donkey

Glenbeigh, Ireland

"While visiting Ireland with friends in 2004, we stopped for lunch at a pub in Glenbeigh, on the Ring of Kerry. One of my friends went walking outside, and came back in to report a donkey outside. I've always been a huge donkey fan, so I asked if it was friendly and he said it was. It was in a neighbor's fenced-in yard. I immediately went out to see ‘him,’ and started petting him a little. He really responded, so I continued to pet him. He would bump my hand with his head like a dog when he wanted more attention. Soon, a donkey friend came up and he wanted attention too. Eventually, I had to tear myself away… but I could have stayed all day with those two sweet donkeys. It's a memory I'll always cherish!” — Kim E. Dolce, Florida


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'Nekko Cat'

Outside Nara, Japan

“While staying overnight at the Gyokuzoin temple near Nara, I wandered across a black cat while on my pre-onsen walk through the tori gates and shrines. When I stepped down to pet her, she hopped right onto my lap. It was late April, and the ground wasn't quite as warm as a human person, so she settled in for the duration. My boyfriend kept going on his walk through the extensive, meandering temple grounds and I stayed, hovering over my ankles with the cat on my lap, shifting every so often as my feet started to go numb and eventually sitting down entirely. Every shift I made, the cat would shift in turn to stay perched on my lap and in prime position for petting. The cat was temporarily christened, 'Nekko cat.'” — Nora Rawn, New York City, New York


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'Friend'

Kaymoor, West Virginia

"In March, 2008, my two children (ages 11 and 13) and I were exploring the area around the New River Gorge in West Virginia. We parked our car near a campground at the trailhead leading down into the Kaymoor coal mine. As we approached the trailhead, a small brown, black, and white beagle trotted over to meet us. She walked around us as if she knew us, not really interested in our direct attention, but ready to lead us on an adventure. As we headed down the trail into the mine, this small dog lead the way. When we stopped, she stopped, and when we got going again she was right there, leading the way. She took us all the way down into the mine area and down an extended walkway of stairs and stayed close by with us the entire time. When it was time to go, she lead us all the way back up to the top, then trotted away when we returned to our car. We enjoyed being this dog’s adopted owners for an afternoon.” — Pete Norloff, Oakton, Virginia


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'Pepe'

Island de la Juventud, Cuba

“This tame pelican is waiting for ships landing on the island. As soon as the passengers arrive, he arrives to greet them!” — Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Vitouch, Vienna, Austria


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'Just... Dog'

Romania

"I was trekking around Romania and found myself deep in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, and my mind had already conjured up all sorts of monsters. One day, walking down a mountain road, smothered thick in early morning fog, I saw a huge shadow materialize in front of me and my blood turned to ice. Even discounting the obvious possibility of werewolves, the thought ran through my mind of real-life wolves and I froze in place as the fog swirled in small, terrifying eddies. As the menacing figure drew closer I saw that it was a huge wolfhound, luckily wagging its tail as it approached. This boy simply wanted my company and he followed beside me for most of that morning. I suppose the bag of dog treats in my pack helped a little, and when I eventually stopped, we shared a small meal. Then he disappeared back into the woods. I will never forget that wandering Transylvanian spirit. He was a good boy." — Benjamin Thomas, New York


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Unnamed Sea Lion

Galápagos Islands

“While snorkeling near the island of Fernandina we were ‘punked’ by three teenage sea lions. We came to realize that they viewed us as their pool toys and they swam under and around us, jumped over us and bared their teeth, only to flip and swim away. They should be called sea dogs because all they wanted to do was play. We were not allowed to touch them, but they would nudge us in an effort to get us to respond. They seemed to get more excited if you got startled, laughed, or they could get you to surface.” — Nicole, New Orleans, Louisiana


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Unnamed Irish Pony

Connemara, Ireland

“While on a bus tour, I first met a grey Connemara pony, who wouldn’t let anyone pet him except me. Moments later, a Border Collie puppy appeared from a local’s home and jumped around me until I gave him tummy rubs. As I started walking back to the bus, I looked behind me to see the puppy and pony following me! The pony couldn’t proceed too far (stone fencing kept us apart), but the puppy wound up on the bus with me (the driver returned him to the field)! The whole experience was the closest I’ve had to feeling like a Disney Princess.” — Bridget, San Diego, California


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'Jimmy the Jungle Dog'

The Rajaji Jungle, India

"During a school trip to India, our group was scheduled to do home stays in an illegal jungle village at the edge of the Rajaji jungle. But the girls and I were mistakenly put in a separate village from the boys the first day. My host family had a young dog in training to be their guard dog. He was skinny and timid, chained up in the hot gravel yard without water, covered in dust and ticks, and no one was nice to him. I could tell he was going to have a terrible life, and my heart ached for him. Since I had lost my husband to cancer just three months prior, the sadness at seeing this dog attached to that greater sadness. When we left the village the next day, I could not stop thinking about Jimmy, the jungle dog. My heart ached for him, I just couldn't shake it. Upon arriving home, I decided I would try to get Jimmy to America. I asked one of the travel arrangers to call the family who owned him, and ask if I could buy their dog. They were happy to sell him. Next he needed a rabies shot, and 30 days, before being able to travel. Long story short, three months after I had met Jimmy, I returned to India to pick him up. When I was being driven to the village it struck me that I had only met him for a total of a couple of hours, and that was three months ago. Only now did it dawn on me that he might not remember me, or trust me. As we drove into the village and I walked into the yard, I saw him. His back was turned to me, and he had grown quite a bit since our last meeting. With some trepidation I called his name, ‘Jimmy?’ He spun around, and ears back, mouth smiling, tail wagging, he ran towards me and threw himself on the ground so that I could scratch his belly. He was overjoyed, and so was I. His new life was a big transition for both of us at first, since he had never been in a car, or a house, and was afraid of men, afraid of sticks (the men would beat him with sticks), afraid of dogs, and only ate Indian food. Jimmy has been my dog now for six years, and not a day goes by without me loving Jimmy." — Monika Andersson, Concord, Massachusetts


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Unnamed Forest Cobra

Janjanbureh, Gambia

“I saw something odd while out on a solo walk in the bush that kinda looked like a hose or a pipe. Going over to investigate, I saw that it had scales. It was a snake! I ducked under a thorny acacia tree to get closer to it; I closed to within 4 meters of it to watch and take photographs. It still looked odd, though; I soon realized its head was buried inside a termite mound! Eventually, it slowly pulled its head out of the mound. It didn’t seem alarmed or concerned in any way, as its movements were very slow. It looked around, it looked at me, it ‘tasted’ the air with its tongue. It put its head back into the mound to continue eating the termites. I waited for it to emerge again, which it did a few minutes later. It still was calm and relaxed but it did somewhat raise its head and expand its cowl into that famous cobra shape. When it put its head back into the mound a third time, I decided to leave it be and take my leave. As I was slowly backing out from under the acacia tree, my shirt got caught on a thorn. I had to turn my head to free my clothing from where it was caught. Doing so only took me 2 seconds, at most but when I turned my head back towards the snake, where I had left it with its head buried inside a hole in the ground, it was gone! I had a pretty good field field of vision all around the area where the snake was but there was no sign of it anywhere! How something that big—the snake had to have been close to 15’ long—could have completely disappeared in just a couple of seconds was remarkable! It also made me realize the 4 meters of buffer zone I left between it and myself wouldn’t have been anywhere near sufficient had it decided it didn’t like my being there photographing it. Lesson learned!” — Rob Gayman, Hood River, Oregon

If you've got another animal story you'd like to share, head over to our brand new forum space, and keep the conversation going!


George H.W. Bush’s Funeral Train Revives a Lost Tradition

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For presidents past, special rail cars provided a final journey home.

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When the body of President George H.W. Bush arrives in Texas this week, a 150-year tradition will be briefly revived: the funeral train.

Bush, who passed away on November 30 at the age of 94, will be taken on a special passenger train from Houston to College Station, Texas on Thursday, where he will be buried alongside his wife Barbara. The event will represent the first time a president’s body has been moved aboard a funeral train since the death of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1969.

The first presidential funeral train ran in 1865 when Abraham Lincoln’s body was taken on a 1,654-mile journey through seven states from Washington D.C. to Springfield, Illinois. The trip, which lasted two weeks, closely followed the route Lincoln had taken to Washington D.C. five years earlier, at the beginning of his presidency.

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Lincoln’s casket was loaded onto a private rail car built specifically for the president to travel the country—the 1860s version of Air Force One. Since it was completed only two months before he died, he was never able to use it. Alongside Lincoln’s casket was the casket of his 11-year-old son Willie, who had died of typhoid fever three years earlier. (Willie’s casket had been temporarily placed in a vault at Oak Hill Cemetery in D.C.) The funeral train was led by a steam locomotive shrouded in black drapes with a massive painting of Lincoln above the cowcatcher, a metal frame on the front of the train used to push livestock off the right-of-way.

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Thousands of people came to see the train depart Washington D.C. on April 21, 1865, just a week after Lincoln had been taken down by an assassin's bullet. At every major city, the train would stop and Lincoln’s casket would be taken off for a public memorial. In Philadelphia alone, an estimated 300,000 people came to pay their respects to the 16th president. But the trip was not without its hiccups. When it arrived in Michigan City, Indiana, Major General Joseph Hooker, the man tasked with organizing Lincoln’s funeral, briefly got off the train to get some breakfast. But Hooker took too long eating and the train left town without him. Hooker tracked down a railroader who found a locomotive and chased the funeral train so that the general could get back on.

In April 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s body was taken from Warm Springs, Georgia, where the president had been prior to his death, back to Washington D.C. for his state funeral. Afterwards, Roosevelt’s body was moved by rail to Hyde Park, New York for his burial. Joining the former president were numerous government officials, including the new president, Harry S. Truman, and all nine Supreme Court Justices. Because World War II was still raging, railroaders had to inspect hundreds of miles of track to ensure that no one had sabotaged the route. In New York City, when the train switched locomotives, hundreds of armed soldiers and policemen stood guard along the tracks.

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Other statesman have also taken trains to their final resting place. In June 1968, the body of Robert F. Kennedy—who had been assassinated while campaigning for president — was moved from New York City to Washington D.C. Along the way, more than 1 million people lined the tracks to pay their respects. So many people stood along the tracks that the 226-mile journey took twice as long as normal, because the train had to slow down at every station to safely pass. The locomotive engineer later told the New York Times that thousands of people had put pennies on the track ahead of the funeral train so that they could have a souvenir of the event; so many that he could actually feel the coins crunch underneath the train.

On the afternoon of December 6, Bush’s funeral train will travel approximately 70 miles to College Station, home of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. The train will be led by a special locomotive numbered 4141 that was painted by the Union Pacific Railroad to look like Air Force One in honor of the 41st president. The locomotive was unveiled in 2005 during a ceremony at the Bush library and has been in storage the last few years awaiting its solemn duty.

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Scott Moore, senior vice president of corporate affairs for Union Pacific, said the railroad is honored to play a part in this week’s remembrance of Bush and to give people a chance to bid the former president farewell.

“[The funeral train] is an opportunity for a large swath of the population to pay their final respects to someone who has done so much for our country,” he said.

The Mysterious Phenomenon of Seals With Eels in Their Noses

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The Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program found yet another pinniped with an unusual nasal inhabitant.

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How does a seal get an eel stuck up its nose?

Earlier this week, the Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program posted the picture above, depicting an unfortunate young seal with an eel in its nose. Surprisingly, this is not the first time the researchers have encountered a pinniped in such a predicament.

Hawaiian monk seals are an endangered species. The research program, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, follows six main monk seal subpopulations, studying their health, diet, population demographics, and ecology, with the aim of minimizing threats and helping these small populations survive and thrive. The researchers pay close enough attention to the animals that they notice when something strange, such as a nose eel, occurs.

About two years ago, for example, another seal was found with about four inches of eel hanging out of its nostril. The team was worried about the potential danger to the seal: It was wheezing a bit, and if it dove deep or tried to swim, the nose eel might have created a passageway for water to enter the seal’s lungs. The research team decided it was worth capturing the seal—for no more than 60 seconds—to try to remove the nasal invader.

In practice, the removal took no more than 45 seconds, even though that eel turned out to be almost two feet long. We are pretty sure the complete animal was removed, as the skull was found, but some fins or spines may have come off the eel during the removal,” the researchers wrote on Facebook. “The seal did not struggle very much, and no blood came out when the eel was being removed.”

This latest nose eel was also removed, with a “slow, steady pull.” The seal was unharmed; the eel, however, perished.

The researchers aren’t quite sure why this keeps happening, Charles Littnan, the program's lead scientist, explains in an email. It seems to be a new trend: The researchers have only observed the nose-eel phenomenon in the past few years, after decades of monitoring monk seals.

One theory is that the eels may end up in the seals’ nostrils when the seals are nosing around crevices and rocks in coral reefs for food, Littnan writes. A bothered eel could be trying to defend itself or run from the inquisitive seal, only to end up lodged inside the nasal cavity. Or, perhaps, the seal was swallowing the eel and had to regurgitate it—the monk seal version of snorting milk up your nose. For now, the mechanism that leads to seals with eels up their noses is a mystery.

The Most Amazing, Smelly, Deadly Fungi in North America

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Handing out superlatives to some overlooked species.

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Some fungi glow an eerie green. Some just reek to high heaven. Some are deadly, others save lives. (Consider, for instance, Penicillium chrysogenum, the golden fuzz that lab assistant Mary Hunt, nicknamed “Moldy Mary,” saw growing on a canteloupe in Peoria, Illinois, in 1943—and which could produce penicillin in far greater quantities than the species famously grown in Alexander Fleming’s lab.)

Despite their variety and range of uses, fungi get neglected, says Andrew Miller. A mycologist and director of the herbarium and fungarium at the Illinois Natural History Survey, Miller spends his whole life around spores, rhizomorphs, and sporocarps, so maybe it’s no surprise that he thinks they don’t get the love they deserve.

This is partly a numbers problem. “For every plant species, [it is said that] there are 30 botanists,” Miller says. “I would estimate that for every single mycologist, there are probably 100,000 species. The ratios are completely off the chart.” As a result, researchers haven’t always known exactly what lives where. Until mycologists recently began digitizing their collections, Miller says—long after botanists and other specialists had done so—specimens were gathering dust in cabinets, with handwritten or typed labels that were largely hidden from the rest of the world. It’s hard to spot an new species, emerging pathogen, or invasive pest if you don’t know what is there to begin with.

To help researchers get a handle on which fungi live where, Miller recently helped spearhead an effort to catalog them in a single, sprawling checklist. With collaborator Scott Bates, from Purdue University Northwest, and assistance from the Macrofungi and Microfungi Collections Consortia, Miller wrangled information about 44,488 species found across North America. The team published this who’s who in the journal Mycologia.

The 127-page paper is a behemoth, and Miller says it’s just the beginning. Earth is home to probably millions of fungal species, he says, and researchers are still in the kiddie pool. The list “is not the be-all, end-all, but it’s a good start,” he adds.

It’s also a good chance to get acquainted with all the kinds of fungus among us. The most common are Lycoperdon perlatum (or common puffball) and Schizophyllum commune (the split gill mushroom). Atlas Obscura asked Miller to introduce some of the other stand-out, superlative specimens.

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Most stinky

When asked about the continent’s smelliest fungi, Miller offered an instant answer: It’s Mutinus caninus, known as the “dog stinkhorn” on account of its resemblance to a canine penis. “It’s nature, and I didn’t name it or invent it,” Miller says. “It just is.”

The mushroom lives primarily underground until it erupts, often from piles of wood chips or mulch, to expose its foul-smelling fruiting body. When it does, Miller says, “You might smell it before you find it.” The stink is, shall we say, lewd. “To be completely honest, it has a spermatic odor.”

It gets worse. The spores are contained in a slimy mass on the mushroom’s tip, or gleba. Flies land there and pick them up, dispersing them as they buzz along. The odor vanishes once the spores are spread.

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Most sprawling

The so-called “Humongous Fungus” lives up to its name. Stretching across 2,200 acres in Oregon, an interlocked network of Armillaria solidipes (also known as Armillaria ostoyae) is possibly the largest living thing on Earth. It’s been growing in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest for at least 2,400 years, and with all of its fine underground filaments, it weighs considerably more than a blue whale (or three). “It’s by far the winner for oldest, largest, and heaviest,” Miller says. Even its smaller, younger cousin, a specimen in Crystal Falls, Michigan, is a whopper that covers 90 acres.

In terms of mass and footprint, Calvatia gigantea is not close to those leviathans, but it has the outward appearance of something particularly oversized. The giant puffballs, which are found in temperate forests and meadows, can grow to the size of a human head and hold a trillion spores, Miller says. If every puffball's spores germinated and grew, he estimates, combined they could weigh more than the Earth itself.

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Most minute

It’s tricky to pinpoint the very smallest of the small, since there are various species of unicellular fungi, but a strong contender is the members of the group Chytridiomycota. These aquatic fungi, also known as chytrids, are “the poster child for really small, tiny fungi,” Miller says. “I work on microfungi, but these are too small even for me.”

One chytrid, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, is known for having decimated amphibian populations in Central America and Australia beginning in the late 1980s. (It’s also been present in North America for decades.) The species' zoospores, which measure around 3 to 5 micrometers in size, use a much longer flagellum to wiggle into amphibians’ skin. Once lodged there, they can induce skin diseases, ulcers, and even cardiac arrest.

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Most lethal

It’s always good practice to avoid nibbling on mushrooms that you can’t identify with absolute confidence. But whatever you do, don’t eat Amanita phalloides. It’s commonly called a “death cap,” and the name is well-earned.

These commonly sprout up and down the West Coast of the United States, often from live oaks and other hardwood trees. Eating just one could do a number on your liver and kidneys and ultimately lead to death, Miller says. “Other mushrooms can make you sick—vomiting and diarrhea—but this one kills you,” he adds. “It’s not good stuff.” The death cap contains alpha-Amanitin, one of the toxins most associated with deaths from mushroom poisoning, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The toxins aren’t tamed when the mushroom is cooked, dehydrated, or frozen, and three of the 14 people sickened by foraged death caps in Northern California in 2016 needed liver transplants. Stay away, Miller cautions. “It just takes a few bites.”

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Most deceptive

This one is open to interpretation, but a number of fungi species have surprising lookalikes. The pink, fleshy Rhodotus palmatus looks a bit like a brain, or a wrinkled peach long past its prime. Fittingly, it’s also known as the “rosy veincap.” Species in the genus Hercium, on the other hand, recall the depths of the sea. Found in shaded deciduous or alpine forests, the branching spines look like terrestrial coral or anemones.

Our Favorite Stories From Gastro Obscura's First Year

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Read about otherworldly apples, champagne-chugging marathoners, and fishy acts of God.

A bar on a tiny Wisconsin island is the world's biggest consumer of bitters. Absinthe enthusiasts have been hiding bottles in the Swiss woods since the country banned the drink in 1910. Iran does not have any Pizza Huts, but you can dine at Pizza Hat.

This is just a sampling of what I have learned as the editor of Gastro Obscura (Atlas Obscura's food section) since its launch one year ago. During our first year, we added more than 1,000 entries to our database of unique and wondrous food and drink, published 450 articles (including the above), and created our first itinerary: a Gastro Obscura guide to Mexico City's Centro Histórico.

To celebrate Gastro Obscura's birthday, our writers and editors each chose a favorite article from our first year. We hope you savor them.

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Harnessing the Power of the Sun to Turn Apples Into Art

I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on an article as fast as I did for this story on “apple stenciling.” An age-old Japanese practice, it relies on orchardists carefully wrapping apples during their growing process, which dictates which parts of the apple redden and which remain a ghostly white. With stencils, the orchardists can emblazon apples with kanji or even the faces of celebrities. Abbey Perrault elegantly describes the painstaking, but increasingly rare practice, and the photos by Jane Alden Stevens are otherworldly: The white apples, especially, seem like something out of a fairy tale. —Anne Ewbank, Associate Editor of Gastro Obscura

The Mysterious Bounty of Mobile Bay's Midnight Jubilees

Though "real as the Alabama bay it's borne from," this tale of the rare natural phenomenon known as a jubilee reads like fantasy. Anna Marlis Burgard takes us into the heart of Mobile Bay, Alabama, where residents wax poetic about the waves coughing up sea critters by the hundreds. Jubilees are nearly impossible to predict, but somehow—almost miraculously—Burgard witnessed one. Her vivid account is downright whimsical, and reminds us the natural world can be even more remarkable than legend. —Abbey Perreault, Gastro Obscura Fellow

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The Forgotten Drink That Caffeinated North America for Centuries

I’ve been obsessed with pre-Columbian history since I read 1491, Charles C. Mann’s book on “New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.” Even now, more than a decade after its publication, the book offers revelations on every page. Ben Richmond’s story on yaupon tea, a tasty cousin of yerba mate that American Indians across North America sipped for centuries, has that same feel: a call to explore an entire continent’s history, one that most of us have ignored, forgotten, or misunderstood. —Alex Mayyasi, Editor of Gastro Obscura

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Remembering When Runners Drank Champagne as an Energy Drink

Of all the absurd roles alcohol has played throughout history, the use of brandy and champagne as an energy drink for marathoners may top the list. Katherine Alex Beaven tells the incredible, blitzed-out tale of the 1908 London Olympic Marathon, where only half the runners finished, largely thanks to too much “energy drink.” The unlikely winner was not a professional runner but an Italian pastry chef who, to the applause of 80,000 spectators, ran the wrong direction before crossing the finish line with the support of a doctor. —Cecily Wong, Gastro Obscura Writer

Revelations From a Wine Barrel Filled With Renaissance Poo

Rarely will I pass up the opportunity to read about treasures unearthed in ancient poo, but Jessica Leigh Hester’s descriptions of the “fine-grained and moist, almost buttery” contents within Denmark’s 17th-century, stench-filled wine barrels had me giggling out loud. Her vivid and revealing reporting recounts how researchers cross-checked 17th-century recipes with these painstakingly sifted archeological remains and how “feces can map historic trade routes.” Foul odor notwithstanding, I’m happy to have been a passenger on this gastrointestinal journey. —Leigh Chavez Bush, Gastro Obscura Fellow

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Remembering the Astronaut Who Smuggled a Sandwich Into Space

When astronaut John Young died in early 2018, Gastro Obscura Associate Editor Anne Ewbank wrote a eulogy focused on a very specific slice of his career: the time it was nearly derailed by corned beef. In 1965, in the middle of the Gemini 3 mission, Young pulled a two-day-old sandwich out of his pocket. Since food particles can float into expensive machinery, it was a dangerous stunt, and members of Congress were enraged. As the most-read article published on Gastro Obscura, it receives our People's Choice award.

What’s Inside This Enormous Canadian Cave?

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It's deep, wide, and named after a "Star Wars" character.

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In the spring of 2018, a team of researchers soared above the rugged, northeastern portion of British Columbia’s Wells Gray Provincial Park in a helicopter. Below them, the ground was a patchwork of green, brown, and white—clusters of trees, expanses of rock, and swaths of snow. They were looking for caribou, but they found something else.

At first, they weren’t exactly sure what. It was definitely a divot in the earth, but from a distance, it was hard to tell whether it was a hole stuffed with ice and snow, or a crater—some dent from a long-ago volcanic eruption.

Whatever it was, the team dubbed it “Sarlacc Pit,” in homage to the Star Wars creature who hunkered down in the ground of Tatooine. To learn more about this earthly feature, they needed eyes on the ground—and beneath it.

The researchers recruited Catherine Hickson, a volcanologist well-versed in the park’s geology. After studying photographs and satellite images of the feature, a group consisting of Hickson, a caver, a parks official, and the helicopter pilot who spotted the cave from the air got up close in September, the Canadian Press reported this week. When Hickson and her team arrived, their attempts to take precise measurements were stymied by a thick mist rising up from swift-moving waters.

“We just stood there in awe of this immense, gaping hole,” Hickson says. “All we could see was a black void.” It was essentially a vertical drop.

But, farther from the edge, they also found a spring on the side of the valley. “One of the ways we trace caves is by finding springs that suddenly appear out of nowhere,” Hickson says. The team proposed that the deep, dark hole was a cave, and that the spring was one of its possible outlets.

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Based on their preliminary assessment, the researchers believe the cave may be among Canada’s largest. The cave’s wide mouth spans some 328 feet. In the soupy mist, they could only measure 442 feet down, but the spring is 1.2 miles away and 1,640 feet below the opening. “We’re guessing that’s the minimum total length and depth, but it could be much deeper than that, and there could be alternative pathways,” Hickson adds.

That’s still far shallower than the country’s deepest cave, Bisaro Anima, which plunges more than 2,100 feet down. To measure Bisaro Anima, a team had to descend into the water-filled channel, or sump, wearing scuba gear. Rappelling into Sarlacc’s depths will also require a lot of equipment, and there is only a narrow window of the year when it’s possible to get down there—most months, snow and ice could block the way, or quick-moving water could be dangerous or hard to pass through.

Hickson and company hope to send another envoy in 2020—and when they do, the cave will likely shed its extraterrestrial name. British Columbia parks officials will consult with local First Nations groups to inquire about existing names for the cave, according to Canadian Geographic, which first reported the story in November—but there don’t appear to be any in journals, and the team that made the recent journey wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the steep, slippery interior hadn’t seen much foot traffic in the past. Located in a valley with several glaciers, the cave is far from the tourist circuit, and likely too remote to appeal even to hikers or hunters, Hickson says.

Researchers probably flew above it for years, Hickson adds—but probably didn’t notice it because the caribou counts are usually conducted earlier in the winter, when there’s a thicker blanket of snow. The cave may have gone overlooked on days with sharp shadows, too, when its opening could have seemed like a trick of the light.

The team will know more when they finally reach the bottom. And whatever they find there, it will be something very much of this world.

A New Mobile App Allows Tourists to Explore the Effects of Atomic War in Hiroshima

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Some say it tells an incomplete story.

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At 8:15 in the morning on August 9, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped by the U.S. military on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, instantly killing tens of thousands of people. Many people became sick due to radiation, and the final death toll rose to 135,000—although some estimate it much higher.

More than 70 years later, the city has mostly recovered from the blast, but its legacy remains. The Genbaku Dome, now called the “A-bomb dome,” is a skeleton in the middle of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, a constant reminder of the day war laid the city to waste.

The city of Hiroshima wants tourists who visit the city to see for themselves the consequences of atomic war. In October, they released Hiroshima Peace Tourism, an interactive map that allows visitors to see specific sites affected by the bomb. The mobile app has four walking and bus tours of the city, ranging in length from three to eight hours, with routes that stop by memorials, cultural centers, museums, and wrecked buildings. For each site, the app provides the story of the place as well as pre- and post-bomb photos.

The app lists how far each site was from the hypocenter of the bomb. For example, Fukuro-machi Elementary School was 1,500 feet away. After impact, the gutted school became an evacuation shelter and first-aid station. The site is now a Peace Museum, and visitors can see scrawled messages on the walls of the stairways, where survivors kept track of who was alive and who was missing.

Visiting Hiroshima to witness the impact of the war is an example of “dark tourism,” a historical reminder of devastation and suffering, in the same vein as visiting Auschwitz or the 9/11 Memorial. However, Hiroshima hopes to promote itself as a symbol of peace, not war.

“We want visitors to understand and appreciate the city’s commitment to peace,” a city official told The Japan Times. Hiroshima has been a vocal proponent of nuclear disarmament, and has formally protested hundreds of cases of nuclear testing.

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But visitors to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and other stops along the interactive tour, might find part of the story missing, says the museologist Chia-Li Chen at Taipei National University of the Arts, who studies the intersection between museums and human rights education. She says the museums in the city are not forthcoming about Japan’s own role in the war.

“I think, at least in the beginning, they were trying to make meaning for themselves, meaning from their suffering, so that’s why they positioned themselves as an anti-nuclear city in search of peace,” she says. But, Chen says, many believe that Japan has not sufficiently acknowledged their own wrong-doings during the war. “I think there is a tendency that they want to educate their people and their children in certain ways that identifies themselves as a victim.” (It should be noted that the Japanese government has criticized the U.S. for not apologizing for dropping the bombs.)

For example, none of the four walking routes include any of the military history of Hiroshima, which contained an army base. Japan has been often criticized for not acknowledging or educating their children about the violence and horrors inflicted by Imperial Army of Japan during the war, such as the Nanjing Massacre in China and the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of “comfort women,” mostly from China and Korea.

In a 2010 study in the peer-reviewed journal Museum Management and Curatorship, Chen examined the comments left by visitors at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. She says some foreigners as well as some Japanese tourists were critical of the lack of context about Japan’s role in the war.

Chen, who visits post-war human rights museums all over the world, says Hiroshima’s Peace Tourism campaign would be stronger if their museums were more rigorous in examining their own history and open about Japan’s role in perpetuating suffering in World War II. Neither the city nor the Peace Memorial replied to a request for comment.

“You can’t just say, ‘I want to pursue peace,’ and then peace will come to you,” Chen adds. “You have to analyze the causes of a war and really think deeply about what happened. It’s not an easy task.”

A New Mobile App Allows Tourists to Explore the Effects of Atomic War in Hiroshima

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0

Some say it tells an incomplete story.

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At 8:15 in the morning on August 9, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped by the U.S. military on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, instantly killing tens of thousands of people. Many people became sick due to radiation, and the final death toll rose to 135,000—although some estimate it much higher.

More than 70 years later, the city has mostly recovered from the blast, but its legacy remains. The Genbaku Dome, now called the “A-bomb dome,” is a skeleton in the middle of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, a constant reminder of the day war laid the city to waste.

The city of Hiroshima wants tourists who visit the city to see for themselves the consequences of atomic war. In October, they released Hiroshima Peace Tourism, an interactive map that allows visitors to see specific sites affected by the bomb. The mobile app has four walking and bus tours of the city, ranging in length from three to eight hours, with routes that stop by memorials, cultural centers, museums, and wrecked buildings. For each site, the app provides the story of the place as well as pre- and post-bomb photos.

The app lists how far each site was from the hypocenter of the bomb. For example, Fukuro-machi Elementary School was 1,500 feet away. After impact, the gutted school became an evacuation shelter and first-aid station. The site is now a Peace Museum, and visitors can see scrawled messages on the walls of the stairways, where survivors kept track of who was alive and who was missing.

Visiting Hiroshima to witness the impact of the war is an example of “dark tourism,” a historical reminder of devastation and suffering, in the same vein as visiting Auschwitz or the 9/11 Memorial. However, Hiroshima hopes to promote itself as a symbol of peace, not war.

“We want visitors to understand and appreciate the city’s commitment to peace,” a city official told The Japan Times. Hiroshima has been a vocal proponent of nuclear disarmament, and has formally protested hundreds of cases of nuclear testing.

article-image

But visitors to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and other stops along the interactive tour, might find part of the story missing, says the museologist Chia-Li Chen at Taipei National University of the Arts, who studies the intersection between museums and human rights education. She says the museums in the city are not forthcoming about Japan’s own role in the war.

“I think, at least in the beginning, they were trying to make meaning for themselves, meaning from their suffering, so that’s why they positioned themselves as an anti-nuclear city in search of peace,” she says. But, Chen says, many believe that Japan has not sufficiently acknowledged their own wrong-doings during the war. “I think there is a tendency that they want to educate their people and their children in certain ways that identifies themselves as a victim.” (It should be noted that the Japanese government has criticized the U.S. for not apologizing for dropping the bombs.)

For example, none of the four walking routes include any of the military history of Hiroshima, which contained an army base. Japan has been often criticized for not acknowledging or educating their children about the violence and horrors inflicted by Imperial Army of Japan during the war, such as the Nanjing Massacre in China and the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of “comfort women,” mostly from China and Korea.

In a 2010 study in the peer-reviewed journal Museum Management and Curatorship, Chen examined the comments left by visitors at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. She says some foreigners as well as some Japanese tourists were critical of the lack of context about Japan’s role in the war.

Chen, who visits post-war human rights museums all over the world, says Hiroshima’s Peace Tourism campaign would be stronger if their museums were more rigorous in examining their own history and open about Japan’s role in perpetuating suffering in World War II. Neither the city nor the Peace Memorial replied to a request for comment.

“You can’t just say, ‘I want to pursue peace,’ and then peace will come to you,” Chen adds. “You have to analyze the causes of a war and really think deeply about what happened. It’s not an easy task.”


Tell Us About Your Ideal Comfort Food

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What dish wraps you up like a cozy blanket?

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In the Northern Hemisphere at least, 'tis the time of the year to wrap yourself up in a thick layer of your favorite foods and get cozy. Of course, the ultimate comfort food is different for everyone, and often has a lot to do with where someone is from, or the food traditions that surround them. In the spirit of this season of food and family, we want to hear about the kinds of comfort foods that fuel your holiday naps!

Ask anyone at my family dinner table and they’ll tell you, my ideal (and typically American) comfort food is definitely mashed potatoes. If I’m not careful, l'll eat mashed potatoes until I'm sick... then go in for more. In addition to the warm, filling, and generally indulgent feeling that well-made mashed potatoes give me, I also associate them with memories of my mother, who used to cook them all the time for family gatherings. Inside and out, emotionally and physically, mashed potatoes make me feel content. But that's just me. What specific comfort food are you looking forward to this holiday season? Is it a hearty regional dish? Maybe a special recipe that's been passed down through the family? What does comfort food look like in your part of the world?

Fill out the form below to tell us about your favorite comfort food, and where that love came from. We’ll share some of our favorite responses in an upcoming article. Comfort food can be like a fresh, warm blanket coating your insides—let us know what your blanket is made of.

A Rare and Striking Butterfly Is Named for a Pioneering Female Naturalist

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Maria Sibylla Merian watched these beautiful insects more closely than anyone else of her time.

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Maria Sibylla Merian watched butterflies more closely than anyone else of her time. Born in 1647, the self-taught naturalist made beautiful illustrations of the insects and flowers she observed. Back then, many people believed that insects generated spontaneously from decaying matter, but Merian knew otherwise.

She watched caterpillars closely, documenting their transformation into butterflies, and watched as new eggs developed into caterpillars. Her books illustrating the metamorphoses of butterflies and moths were both artistic treasures and groundbreaking scientific works.

Centuries after her death, she now has a striking butterfly named after her.

Catasticta sibyllae has unusual coloring for a butterfly of its kind—its wings are black, with rows of white dots, and a flash of red at the bug’s body line. The first specimen known to science was found in Panama and kept at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum since 1981; the second specimen was collected recently.

The Smithsonian specimen had sat unnoticed in a drawer for years, when a fellow scientist sent a picture of it Shinichi Nakahara, a lepidopterist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. By chance, another colleague found the second specimen just a couple of months later. By then, Nakahara suspected it could be a previously undescribed species and asked his colleague if he might have a leg from the new specimen. Using that piece of butterfly, he was able to sample the DNA and confirm his hunch.

It felt appropriate to name such an unusual butterfly for a uniquely adventurous naturalist. Later in her life, Merian divorced her husband, moved to Amsterdam, and lived in a commune, selling art to support herself. One of her greatest adventures was a five-year trip to Suriname, a Dutch colony in South America; she funded the trip by selling 255 works of art.

“Merian was centuries ahead of her time, and her discoveries changed the course of entomology,” Nakahara said in a statement. Other plants and animals have been named after her, including a cane toad, a lizard, and a bird lily. She’s also the namesake of a couple of butterfly subspecies. But this is the first butterfly species to be named after her, a fitting honor for a remarkable woman.

Found: Unfortunate 'Booted Man,' Who Met a Muddy End 500 Years Ago

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The footwear would have been well-suited to tromping through the London mud that preserved it.

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Beneath London is a layer cake—thousands of years of civilization, stacked atop one another—on the shores of the Thames. Whenever an excavator hits the soil, which happens a lot, there is always the possibility of a chance encounter with old bits of leather, pieces of shipwrecks, or the bones of a long-forgotten urban resident, preserved by the muddy shore.

A recent discovery has London archaeologists scratching their heads. It is the skeleton of a man, lying face down with an arm splayed dramatically over his head. His most distinguishing feature? His footwear. The skeletal remains are clad in a remarkably intact pair of thigh-high leather boots, resulting in his nickname: “Booted Man.”

“We find a lot of skeletons, but you don’t often find a skeleton lying on his belly with his boots on,” says Lucie Altenburg, conservator at Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) Headland. “It's quite unusual to find that much leather on a person lying flat on the shore of the river. It’s a bit mysterious.”

Luckily, there are some clues.

Historians specializing in leather believe the man’s boots date to the late 15th century. Leather was an expensive and prized material at the time, and specialists at MOLA think the boots would have been ideal for the sticky mud along the shore of the river. This particular pair was reinforced with extra soles.

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“By studying the boots we’ve been able to gain a fascinating glimpse into the daily life of a man who lived as many as 500 years ago,” said Beth Richardson, a finds specialist at MOLA, in a statement. “They have helped us to better understand how he may have made his living in hazardous and difficult conditions, but also how he may have died.”

Analysis into the bones reveals a harrowing life and death. His final position suggests the Booted Man died after falling in the mud, after which his remains were covered by sediment. An osteological examination shows that the fatal fall wasn’t his only misfortune. His bones indicate multiple healed breaks, as well as evidence of osteoarthritis, a painful degenerative joint disease. Researchers also discovered deep grooves along his teeth, suggesting that he spent much of his life using them to hold something, possibly a fishing rope.

“I would love to know, what he was doing and how did he end up there? That’s the question we’ll never really have an answer to,” says Altenburg. “His boots are probably an indicator of his job, mudlarking or fishing. But there’s so much we don’t know.”

Altenburg says the wet alluvial soil where the booted man was found provides the perfect conditions to preserve leather and human remains. “This kind of clay is really dense and it dries rock hard,” she says. “You’ve got a layer of organics degraded in it, so it smells fishy and you can really tell you're by the river.”

The man was found 20 feet down, during excavations for the Thames Tideway Tunnel, a massive sewer project. The site of the discovery location was a bend in the river close to where the medieval Bermondsey Wall once stood.

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Altenburg says MOLA will continue to analyze the Booted Man, and hopefully dig up some further answers. A moss-like substance was found in his boots, which will go to their archaeological botanist for analysis. They suspect that it was used as insulation.

While the Booted Man may have met an unfortunate end, the final and (most likely) worst day of his life is a gift to archaeologists and historians who want to understand London life was like hundreds of years ago.

“London's history never stops giving,” Altenburg says. “We’re literally living on layers from prehistoric times to Roman times, medieval, postmedieval, and then somewhere in between all of that you've got the man who's just kind of dropped dead with his boots on.”

Why a Minnesota Pastor Wrote an Obituary for a Lutefisk Dinner

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RIP Faith Lutheran Scandinavian Dinner, 1947-2017.

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Few obituaries are written for laughs. Yet a recent obituary penned by Reverend John Klawiter of Forest Lake, Minnesota's Faith Lutheran Church was intended to evoke giggles as well as grief. The obituary wasn't for a person, but for a dinner the Church had held for the last 70 years.

This wasn't any old dinner. The church's annual function featured Scandinavian specialties, such as lefse, a potato flatbread, and lutefisk, a notorious treat of dried cod or other whitefish reconstituted in a lye bath. As a result of heavy immigration from Norway, Sweden, and Finland in the early 20th century, many Minnesotans celebrate the holidays with Scandinavian cuisine. In fact, more of the ammonia-scented specialty is eaten in the Midwest than in its ancestral home. Faith Lutheran church was no different. For 70 years, on the second Tuesday of December, hundreds of volunteers prepared lutefisk, lefse, boiled potatoes, and meatballs for still-more hundreds of diners. After all, Klawiter says, Faith Lutheran was once known as the Swedish Lutheran church.

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This year, however, there will be no lutefisk. "Faith Lutheran Scandinavian Dinner, also known as 'The Lutefisk Dinner' or 'Holy Tuesday,' has peacefully died at the age of 70," Klawiter wrote in the Forest Lake Times obituary. Last year's event, he says, was the last straw for many volunteers, especially those getting too old to prepare several hundred pounds of fish. "They made it through last year ... and the next day they were just exhausted." Even after outsourcing the lutefisk preparation to the company that sells the fish, the event was a lot of work.

While the dinner once served 800 diners, attendance had dwindled to around 500. Part of the drop can likely be attributed to fewer Minnesotans growing up on lutefisk: Its gelatinous texture and pungent odor prove steep barriers to those unfamiliar with it. "You put a plate of lutefisk in front of the average person on the street, you probably wouldn't get too many takers," says Klawiter.

Klawiter wrote an obituary, he says, because he needed to do something attention-grabbing. For many parishioners, the church dinner on the second Tuesday of the month was a given. ("That's the day that they come get the lutefisk.") Klawiter feared they'd all still show up if he just issued a press release, so he opted for a half-somber eulogy to the fish-filled event.

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But for those still hankering for a lutefisk fix, there's hope. While Klawiter's obituary notes that Faith Lutheran's Scandinavian Dinner was "preceded in death by numerous cousins," it's "survived by a few remaining siblings." These siblings and cousins are, of course, other church dinners serving lutefisk. While Klawiter says the local love for lutefisk endures, it's almost a cautionary tale. "If you really value this tradition," Klawiter says, "help out in another church. Help them put their meal on."

While Klawiter knows people will miss the Scandinavian Dinner, he thinks it was the right decision. He also emphasizes that it presents new opportunities for other church projects and events. In a pulpit-ready voice, he tells me: "There's death, and new life comes out of that."

The Humble Brilliance of Italy's Moka Coffee Pot

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In the era of pods, the iconic item has become an endangered species.

Bialetti, the Italian maker of the moka pot, a stovetop coffee machine and one of the most iconic kitchen appliances ever created, announced recently that the company is in major trouble—tens of millions of Euros in debt, unpaid salaries and taxes, revenues that are way down and look to be staying that way. In a press release, the company said there are “doubts over its continuity."

The moka pot is a symbol of Italy: of postwar ingenuity and global culinary dominance. It is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and other temples to design. It is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most popular coffee maker, and was for decades commonplace to the point of ubiquity not only in Italy but in Cuba, Argentina, Australia, and the United States. It’s also widely misunderstood and maligned, with approval in the modern coffee world coming perhaps a bit too late, in only the past few years. Get one while you can.


Italy’s place in the history of global coffee culture is substantial, but for different reasons and in different ways than most people probably think. The various species of Coffea, the seeds of which are dried, roasted, and ground to make coffee, are native to east Africa, particularly Ethiopia. Coffee as a beverage first shows up in the historical record—which is not necessarily to say that it wasn’t consumed in its native Ethiopia first—in what is now Yemen. It spread quickly throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and firmly established itself as part of the culture in what are now Turkey and Iran.

Europeans were late to the coffee party, but Italy, sharing the Mediterranean with the Arab and Greek worlds and not really very far from North Africa, was probably the gateway for coffee to spread westward. But for centuries after its introduction to Venice in the early 17th century, coffee was seen as an Arab affectation, something foreign and alternately exotic and threatening. “It was thought of as an Eastern thing, in that Orientalist way of thinking,” says Peter Giuliano, the chief research officer for the Specialty Coffee Association and a co-owner of the influential Counter Culture coffee company.

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Until the late 19th century, Italians drank coffee in pretty much the same way as the Turks. Coffee and water are combined in a long-handled metal pot called a cezve and held over a heat source; the mixture combines as it boils, and is poured into small cups, where the grounds settle to the bottom. Italy never really left behind the idea of small amounts of very strong coffee. The thinner, lighter, larger mugfuls of coffee were more a northern European, and North American, thing.

Italians began coming up with their own gadgets for brewing coffee in the 19th century, but the biggest by far was the idea of applying pressure to coffee in order to create a strong, and more importantly fast, drink. This is the age of steam, a miraculous source of power that can unlock the world, and though it’s not entirely clear who originated the idea of using steam to brew coffee, certainly it was in Italy that it was popularized. The first known patent for a machine we might now recognize as an espresso machine was registered by Angelo Moriondo, who created a giant complicated steam-driven machine in 1884, but who never bothered to manufacture it. Luigi Bezzera, from Milan, modified the Moriondo patent, and his design was further modified (though less so than Bezzera’s) by Desidiero Pavoni, whose La Pavoni introduced the world to espresso in 1906, at a world’s fair held in Milan.

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Pavoni’s device was a large complex metal contraption that worked, roughly, like this. A compartment of water on the bottom of the device is heated by placing the entire thing on a flame. A tube leads up to a circular puck of ground coffee; because the entire device is sealed, as the water boils, pressure forces steam and hot water up through the tube and through the coffee grounds. That pressure brews coffee much more quickly than without the pressure, and the fast-brewed, strong coffee flows into a chamber, to be poured into cups.

This is, not coincidentally, the exact same way the moka pot works, though on a much smaller scale.

Pavoni’s device was a huge hit, but it was incredibly expensive and cumbersome. It wasn’t at all suitable for use at home, which was fine for a few decades because coffee had never been a beverage consumed at home anyway. It was, as in the Arab world, a communal activity. (As a side note, the fact that it was a communal and foreign-seeming ritual seems to have scared those in power in the Catholic world quite a bit at first; it took an official approval from Pope Clement VIII in 1600 to clear coffee’s dangerous connotations.) Coffee was too expensive, and the newly popular Pavoni brewing devices unsuited, to be making coffee at home.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp outlines the history of the moka pot in a 2001 paper called The Romance of Caffeine and Aluminum. In 1918, he writes, a Piedmontese metalworker named Alfonso Bialetti returned home after a decade spent working with aluminum in France. Industrial production of aluminum was new, then; methods for working with it at any real scale had only been developed in 1886. He opened a shop, crafting strong, lightweight aluminum versions of pots and pans that had previously been only available in iron.

Legend has it that the idea for the moka pot came from a laundry boiler, though that’s not confirmed. What is known is that the La Pavoni device was very trendy, and there was also a precedent for a smaller coffee machine: the napoletana. The napoletana is a small metal device with three sections: a chamber of water, a small puck of coffee in the middle, and a chamber on the other end for brewed coffee. Water is heated up with the water chamber on the bottom, and then the entire device is flipped upside-down, allowing the hot water to drip through the coffee beans and gather as coffee in the previously empty chamber. No pressure is involved.

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Bialetti worked on some combination of the La Pavoni and the napoletana for a few years and in 1933 patented his Bialetti Moka Express. It’s three-chambered, like the napoletana, but uses steam power to force hot water through the coffee, like the La Pavoni. The characteristic hourglass shape, with the eight-sided chambers, was there from the beginning.

But the Moka Express design—today, “Bialetti Moka Express” is the specific product, while “moka pot” is the general term for this type of coffee maker—took a while to catch on. Italy still had to lose a couple of wars, and then recover. By the 1950s, Italian design had some amazing advantages. All of the factories set up to create war materials were at a loss for products to make, as were a generation of skilled manufacturers. Vespa, Fiat, and Alfa Romeo designed incredible vehicles. And Bialetti’s Moka Express, which still boasted a futuristic and clever design, suddenly took off.

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Post-war Italy had a surging economy, a growing middle class, and the same access to the world’s products that the rest of Europe boasted. Alfonso Bialetti’s son, Renato, came back to Piedmont in 1946 to take over his father’s shop, and decided to stop making everything except one product: the Moka Express. The newly low price of aluminum and coffee, and a growing middle class of people who could buy products like this, made the moka pot a perfect device for the time. Renato was also a pretty shrewd businessman; in 1953, he commissioned the drawing of the company’s logo, L'omino con i baffi, “the little man with the mustache,” which has since been inseparable from the Moka Express. The Moka Express was “the first way that Italians could realistically make coffee at home that was some approximation of what they could get outside,” says Giuliano.

Over the next 60 years, the moka pot would conquer the world. As of 2016, the New York Times notes that over 90 percent of Italian homes had one. It became so iconic that Renato Bialetti, when he died in early 2016, was actually buried in a large replica of the moka pot. It spread to some countries with large Italian immigrant populations, becoming common in the Italian-American communities in and around Philadelphia, New York City, and Chicago. Argentina and Australia, both of which received large waves of Italian immigration in the 20th century, are also home to plenty of moka pots. The Argentinian company Volturno has been so successful that the moka pot in Argentina is sometimes called a Volturno.

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Cuba is a more interesting one. Coffee has a long history in Cuba; the climate, hot and wet with plenty of elevation, is ideal for growing coffee, and the crop has been grown there since the mid-1700s. Up until the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuba was one of the world’s great coffee producers, and also one of the world’s great coffee cultures. Coffee preparation varied; in the cities, espresso was common, and on coffee plantations, it was more typical to grind beans in a mortar called a pilone and steep with hot water before straining out the grounds with cloth.

After the 1959 revolution, food rations came for coffee as well. Coffee is currently rationed to four ounces per person per month, coming in two packets. But these rations aren’t pure coffee; they are mixed with fillers, sometimes toasted chickpeas (cafe con chicharo) to make the small amounts go further.

Because the amounts of coffee are so low, and efficiency so important, Cubans began tinkering to come up with ways to create the best possible coffee with the materials they have. Cuban coffee in a Cuban or Cuban-American home is almost always made with a moka pot; the Cuban concoction cafecito is made by quickly whipping the first few drops of moka pot coffee with sugar, creating a paste that both flavors the coffee and simulates a classic espresso foam. Even outside of Cuba, where the coffee is not likely to be mixed with toasted beans, Cuban coffee is typically very sweet and very strong, almost always made with a pump machine in coffee shops and a moka pot at home.


The moka pot’s struggles began in the 1990s, and came in two forms. One, I think, is very interesting, but is not as large a factor in the demise of the moka pot as some might believe. The other is very boring and very obvious and is almost certainly the big problem. The latter is that people, in Italy and elsewhere, love coffee pods. Coffee pods, especially Nespresso, are wildly popular in Italy, because they are easy. I have very little else to say about coffee pods.

The former problem, the more interesting one, took place within the coffee-nerd world.

Inspired by Italian espresso bar culture, Starbucks almost single-handedly changed the entire concept of coffee in America. And the moka pot was not part of that. The espresso machine, which uses mechanical pressure (via pumps and/or levers), was the device used to make coffee in Italian coffee shops; the moka was strictly for the home. “In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, having some sort of ‘authentic’ Italian coffee chops were part of what was exciting and interesting about coffee,” says Giuliano, who lived through this phase at Counter Culture. In the 1990s, coffee shops, which greatly informed coffee consumption in the U.S. in general, looked to Italian coffee bars.

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This ignored that Italians never really made espresso at home. They used the moka pot. Espresso machines, then and now, are gigantic, expensive, difficult to use, and incredibly inefficient from an energy perspective. They do not really make sense for the home. But Americans tried anyway, replacing their Mr. Coffees and French presses with underpowered home espresso machines, ignoring the entire time that there was another option, the one Italians used all along.

After the Starbucks boom, American coffee culture changed rapidly, eventually coming to embrace drip coffee, especially a lighter, more acidic style common in Scandinavia and Japan. Espresso stayed, of course—with the glaring exception of the moka pot, Americans never really stopped looking to Italy for coffee, and even today most of the “serious” espresso machines come from Italian companies.

The moka pot, which in the U.S. had previously had a light following, especially for Italian-Americans, became an object of extreme derision. Coffee purists cried that it couldn’t possibly produce espresso; the moka pot, like the La Pavoni, uses about 1.5 bars of pressure, while a pump espresso machine ideally hits about nine bars. This is, of course, a ridiculous argument; there is no actual definition of espresso, and in any case, the moka pot is at most a second cousin to the espresso machine. There’s no particular reason to compare a steam-driven stovetop machine to a pump-driven electrical device, but coffee people did.

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The past few years have changed that, a little bit. Coffee people have softened their stance, and recognized the moka pot for what it is: an entirely different branch of the coffee machine tree, a very old, very clever, and very economical way to make coffee. The previous complaints about the moka pot fell away, and it is increasingly, in coffee circles, given credit for all its strengths.

The nice thing about the moka pot is that it can create a very nice cup of strong coffee, and that the equipment you need is wholly affordable. Moka pots cost about 20 bucks, and by using good coffee and a bit of technique, you can make as good an example of moka pot coffee as anyone in the world.

The rediscovery of that fact by coffee nerds bodes well for the future of the moka pot, despite the troubles of Bialetti, the company. It remains a cool, inexpensive, highly functional example of mid-century modern design. In the same way that the single-cup pour-over cone was rediscovered and prized, sparking a whole new round of sales, maybe the moka pot is due for some revitalization and new trendiness. It seems impossible, or at least undesirable, for such a cool gadget to die.

The 1945 'Liberation Concert' Played by an Orchestra of Holocaust Survivors

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The performance took place at St. Ottilien Archabbey, a Benedictine monastery that became a hospital for Jewish displaced persons.

On May 27, 1945, U.S. Army Private Robert Hilliard set off from his base near Munich into the Bavarian countryside. Nearly one month had passed since Allied Forces liberated Nazi Germany and the 19-year-old soldier was heading to a concert organized by and for Holocaust survivors. Billed as a “liberation concert,” such an event so soon after the war’s end seemed almost frivolous to him. But he thought it would make a fine feature story for the Army newspaper he edited. And, he would quickly learn it was anything but frivolous.

Hilliard’s destination was St. Ottilien Archabbey, a Benedictine monastery that was home to a new hospital for Jewish Holocaust survivors. The German military had ousted the monks during the war and turned St. Ottilien into a hospital for German troops. When the U.S. Army took over supervision of the monastery in early May 1945, it became a camp for displaced persons, or DPs, as the survivors were known to those overseeing their resettlement.

The walled monastic complex rose from rolling green farmland. Hilliard drove through a stone-walled entrance and parked on the edge of a wide green lawn. A stage of mismatched wooden boards was covered in a patchwork quilt of bedsheets and parachute cloth. The survivors in the audience resembled stick figures—emaciated, pale, expressionless. Some were so weak they had to be carried from their hospital beds. Off to the side, Hilliard observed a mix of civilians and soldiers—most likely, Germans and Americans—casually talking and smoking cigarettes.

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The juxtaposition of captors, captives, and liberators was jarring to Hilliard. In the camps, Jewish musicians played for Nazi soldiers in mess halls and on train platforms as fellow prisoners of war arrived. Now, still dressed in their striped uniforms, the musicians played anthems of the Allied Nations and Jewish folks songs for an estimated audience of 400 people.

Hilliard described it as, “a concert of life and a concert of death,” one in which “most of the liberated people were too weak to stand; a liberation concert in which most of the people could not believe that they were free.” Eventually, the group of musicians would come to be known by various names, including the St. Ottilien Orchestra, the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra, and the Representative Orchestra of the She’erit Hapletah, a Hebrew phrase translating to "surviving remnant."

Hilliard’s recollections from his memoir, Surviving the Americans, turned over in my mind when I visited St. Ottilien in September 2018 for a concert commemorating the 1945 event. Today, as in 1945, the concert was intended to convey sentiments of remembrance and reconciliation in turbulent times, organizers said. The musicians were from Tel Aviv University’s Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, Israel’s leading classical music academy, and many were descendants of Holocaust survivors. Accompanied by the world-renowned German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, they played for an audience of Germans, Americans, and Israelis, some with a direct connection to St. Ottilien.

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It was my second visit to St. Ottilien in three months after learning about it in 2017. My grandparents and the uncle for whom I am named reunited there after the Holocaust, and my grandfather was the first chief doctor of the DP hospital. But I didn’t know any of this family trivia until the fall of last year, when I decided to start searching for the grandparents I never knew. In my first visit to the monastery, I felt an instant connection to the place that offered my family refuge after a harrowing period in their lives. I could imagine them walking the same cobblestone paths, minding the ever-present church bells—or possibly cursing them just as I did in the early morning.

At the 2018 concert, I came to understand the 1945 liberation concert as an expression of a particular kind of beauty that comes from overcoming immense pain and sorrow. My heart ached for my grandparents and other survivors as I tried to comprehend their state of mind in this transitional period. Although they were no longer prisoners of war, they nevertheless faced an uncertain future. Anti-semitism in Europe did not end with the defeat of the Third Reich, and some Allies maintained the strict immigration quotas that prevented Europe’s Jews from fleeing Nazi persecution. As such, historians see parallels between the plight of the Jewish DPs and today’s global refugee crisis.

For these survivors, it was a period of renewal, but also an era of continued struggle and conflicting visions for the future. In a speech at the 1945 concert, my grandfather described the surviving remnant’s tenuous state.

“We are free now, but we do not know how, or with what to begin our free yet unfortunate lives,” he said in German, a language he picked up from his captors. “It seems to us that for the present mankind does not understand what we have gone through and experienced during this period. And it seems to us that we shall neither be understood in the future.”

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My visits to St. Ottilien to confront the past coincided with the monastery’s own historic reckoning for the first time since the DP camp closed 70 years ago. Throughout 2018, St. Ottilien partnered with Bavarian heritage groups and cultural institutions on memorial events, including an academic symposium and two memorial concerts. With the rise of anti-Semitism and extremist ideologies in the United States and Europe, organizers of the events said it’s more important than ever to remind people of the effects of hatred, especially as the collective memory of the Holocaust fades with the last generation of survivors. The responsibility of preserving those memories from St. Ottilien is passing on to the next generation, many of whom were born at the monastery. A handful attended the 2018 memorial concert, eager as I was to connect with their history.

St. Ottilien today is a different place from when Hilliard first encountered it. Recent additions include a beer garden and a gift shop. But to newcomers, walking along its shaded paths past religious shrines and monks in black robes can feel like stepping back in time, even if the idols have fresh coats of paint and the monks are carrying smartphones.

The grassy site of the liberation concert has been carved into a thin sliver to accommodate new paths. But the two-story building next to it that was a hospital for Jewish patients, with a kosher kitchen in the basement, still stands. Today, it’s a middle school with a sign in front explaining its history—one of several on the grounds marking points of significance from the DP camp era.

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From 1945 to 1948, some 5,000 survivors passed through St. Ottilien and more than 400 children were born there as families reunited and new ones began. My grandfather was among the first group to arrive. In late April, with the help of an American soldier, he and fellow survivors obtained permission to turn several buildings in the Benedictine monastery into a temporary hospital.

The monastery was one of many DP camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy. They were conceived as temporary centers while the Allies and aid groups worked to repatriate Jews to the countries where they lived before the war. But many refugees refused or felt unable to return to the places where they had lost everything. And so the camps evolved as Jews began to rebuild their lives within their confines.

Few of the DP camps were like St. Ottilien, however. Most were housed in former military installations, labor camps, and even repurposed concentration camps. Situated in the lush Bavarian countryside, with modern amenities including a hospital, a gymnasium, and a printing press, St. Ottilien offered a comparatively comfortable setting.

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Many survivors arrived with overlapping conditions, such as tuberculosis, starvation, and infectious skin diseases, and some would succumb would to them. Less than a week after their arrival, the first burial was held in a cemetery created for the Jewish survivors on the monastery’s periphery. Despite these cruel twists of fate, the conferral of a proper Jewish burial, presided over by a rabbi, offered an early sign of the restoration of dignity and community to the surviving remnant. An elementary school and a maternity ward came next.

As word spread of the material comforts St. Ottilien offered, the renowned Lithuanian violinist Michael Hofmekler was one of many refugees to seek it out. Also known as Misha, Moishe, and Michel, he was born in Vilna in 1905 to a family deeply involved in music. His career took off in the 1920s and 1930s in Kovno, earning the recognition of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas in 1932. After the German occupation of Lithuania in the summer of 1941, Hofmekler was forced into the Kovno ghetto with his parents and sister. Only he would live to see the war’s end.

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After surviving several massacres that wiped out most of Kovno’s Jews within six months of the German occupation, Hofmekler obtained permission from the ghetto’s Jewish council to start an orchestra. When the Nazis evacuated the ghetto in 1944, he and others were sent to a forced labor camps across Bavaria, where they built bunkers and supplies for Hitler’s army. After liberation, he made his way to St. Ottilien and helped form the orchestra that performed at the liberation concert.

Unexpectedly, Hofmekler also reunited with family at St. Ottilien. His brother Robert had left Europe for the United States in 1938. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and in June 1945, Robert Hofmekler found his brother at St. Ottilien. And 73 years later, a Hofmekler descendant would find his long-lost relative there, too.

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Daniel Hofmekler was another brother who left Lithuania before the war. He carried on the family’s musical legacy as a music teacher in Palestine’s growing Jewish community and later, a cellist in the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. His son, Eyal Hofmekler, was born in Israel and he, too, inherited the family passion for music. Today, he restores musical instruments and accessories. When concert organizers asked him to build an instrument for the program, he was honored, even though he knew little about St. Ottilien’s significance at the time.

Eyal says this year’s concert is a “continuation of the family music tradition,” a legacy that lives on through the student musicians from Tel Aviv University who performed at the concert.

One of those students, the violinist Vicky Gelman, has no connection to St. Ottilien, like most of the musicians. But as an Israeli and a Jew, the memory of the Holocaust looms large in her life. She’s heard the stories from her grandparents and she participates in memorial events each year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is a national holiday in Israel. Being in St. Ottilien for the concert brought a new dimension to her experience of the Holocaust.

“We come to the place where everything happened and it’s real, we feel it, we stand on the land,” she says. “It’s not just a regular stage at school or a concert hall.”

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The 2018 memorial concert took place inside the monastery’s Gothic church instead of on the grassy plot. On the afternoon of concert, sun streamed through the church’s stained glass windows, brightening its vaulted stone interiors. Purple stage lights transformed the altar into a dramatic backdrop for the makeshift orchestra near the pulpit crammed with music stands and chairs.

German classical music fans filed into the pews, taking seats alongside descendants of survivors. Eli Ipp was an infant when his parents brought him to St. Ottilien. His father was a doctor in the monastery’s hospital. As the young musicians dressed in black took their seats to thundering applause, “my heart burst with pride and tears flowed, to feel and see how history had reversed itself,” says Ipp.

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The program began with the same bellow of horns that opened the 1945 concert in Edvard Grieg’s “Triumphal March.” It was the only song from the original program. The orchestra manager Bilha Rubenstein says she and others worked hard to find pieces that brought a modern feel to the hopeful, yet elegiac tone of the 1945 program. Instead of performing popular Jewish folk songs, the orchestra performed arrangements of poems by Aharan Harlap and Yaakov Barzilai, two Holocaust survivors. Singing in Hebrew, the soloist Hila Baggio brought some in the audience to tears as she conveyed the poets’ haunting depictions of the camps.

For many in the church, the real draw was the legendary violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. She proposed playing Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A-Major as an expression of “beauty that nearly hurts,” Doris Popischil, the concert organizer, says. At Mutter’s request, the program was not broadcast, in order to preserve its intimacy. Just as in 1945, this year’s concert represented a collective pledge for a better future—“a promise that this will, under our watch, never happen again,” Mutter said after the concert.

For the encore, monks joined the orchestra onstage. Their voices united with Baggio’s in Avinu malkeinu, the Hebrew prayer of repentance that Jews in the audience had likely heard days earlier during Yom Kippur.

Church bells sounded as the song drew to a close. The audience sat in silence, contemplating how horrendous acts of inhumanity had created such beauty. Again, I thought of my grandfather’s 1945 speech.

“We unlearned to laugh; we cannot cry anymore; we do not understand our freedom: probably because we are still among our dead comrades! Let us rise and stand in silence to commemorate our dead!”

Found: A Slew of Cannonballs Below a Stockholm Street

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They'd been there for centuries.

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Construction projects are ostensibly all about the future, paving the way for smoother commutes, more housing, or maybe denser shopping districts. During the building process, though, crews often encounter the long-buried past. That’s what happened in Stockholm, Sweden, last month, when crews came upon a trove of centuries-old cannonballs.

The Slussen area of the city has had a number of past lives. It has been a lock connecting waterways, and then a clover-shaped traffic junction and a broader transit hub. In the future, it’s also slated to be a pedestrian paradise, with outdoor eateries and plenty of space to wander. At the moment, it’s a dig site—and that’s where, The Local reported, a crew recently uncovered some 200 cannonballs, plus a couple of grenades and cannons, strewn in an old moat.

Iron was a big business in Stockholm throughout the centuries. By the 1650s, exported bar iron topped 17,300 tons. Speaking to The Local, archaeologists from Arkeologikonsult surmised that the balls—which weigh as much as 18 pounds—may have been dumped on the site in the mid-1600s, deliberately left behind when fortifications moved elsewhere.

But why were they buried, instead of melted and reworked? That’s a puzzle that archaeologists have yet to solve.


Explore the Geologic History of D.C. Through This Walking Tour

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“These sites are reminders of American history, but they’re also part of the Earth's history."

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While using the bathroom in one of Washington, D.C.’s congressional office buildings, if you let your eyes wander to the stall dividers, you might notice something that transcends the political moment by a couple million years: fossils engraved on the glossy limestone, ancient shells and exoskeletons left behind by animals of a prehistoric Earth.

When the writer Lily Strelich was a congressional intern, she spent a lot of time admiring the hidden-in-plain-sight fossils that speckle the buildings. This week, she wrote a Self-Guided Tour of the Geology of D.C. Buildings for Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. The tour provides a 2.5-mile walking tour around the National Mall, with 11 stops highlighting a small piece of the geologic story of America’s capital city.

Strelich, who studied geology in college, wanted to spread her love of rocks to people who aren’t used to noticing them. “The idea that there's a sort of geologic landscape in this urban environment is really wonderful to me,” she says.

One of Strelich’s favorite stops on the tour is the Smithsonian Castle, built from Seneca red sandstone, quarried 20 miles north of the city. Its rusty red color comes from oxidized iron mixed into the rock—it’s literally rusty.

A lot of the geologic materials which make up and adorn the city are brought in from elsewhere, making for a rich mix of local and imported specimens. Strelich says she may have creeped out a guard or two while crawling around looking for nautiloid fossils on the floor of the National Gallery of Art, which is made of Tennessee limestone. “I've been to that museum so many times, but I've had never paid attention to the fossils,” she says. “It's almost like there are two museums for you: the art and the rocks.”

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The geologic tour includes the old Lockkeeper’s House, which was once at the end of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal system, instrumental to moving heavy rocks up the Potomac River in order to build the capital. Bentley says the Potomac bluestone rocks on this building are ancient. They pre-exist the supercontinent Pangea and got metamorphosed in the early days of the Appalachian Mountains.

Stop four on the tour are the Capitol Gatehouses and Gateposts. These historic buildings are comprised of Aquia Creek sandstone, made by sand carried by rivers pouring into the young Atlantic Ocean after the breakup of Pangea.

Callan Bentley, a geology teacher at Northern Virginia Community College, helped Strelich develop the tour and has experience creating local field trips to sites of geological interest. When he looks at the D.C.-area landscape, he’s most interested in what’s underneath the trees and buildings. “We've got a lot of plants and buildings on top of our rocks, but where the rocks are exposed, they tell a pretty extraordinary tale,” he says.

Bentley says D.C. is at the epicenter of the diverse Atlantic geological area, containing pieces of two former supercontinents, and a variety of metamorphic and sedimentary rocks of different sizes, ages, and characteristics. “Each of these tells its own story and when you put them all together, you get this epic tale that spans a little over a billion years of geologic time,” he says. He adds that D.C. geology is defined by something called the Wilson Cycle, a model which says that geologic processes repeat themselves indefinitely.

“It’s an essential principle of geology. We're constantly changing, but we're basically playing by the same rules,” says Bentley. “We don't have to make up brand new rules for every single moment in geologic time. We can look at the present and apply it to our understanding of the past and to predict the future.”

Whatever one’s political inclination, Strelich thinks this tour will enhance the experience of visiting the city. “These sites are reminders of American history, but they’re also part of the Earth's history,” she says, “our larger shared history.”

Geckos Can Run on Water

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Faster than ducks can swim in it.

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Geckos bathe with tiny drops, use their tails as optional legs, and can alter the stickiness of their feet as needed. They come in brilliant colors, and make charismatic mascots. And now we know that they can run on water, Inside Science reports.

Ardian Jusufi, a biophysicist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, was observing flat-tailed house geckos in a Singapore rainforest when he noticed their ability to evade predators by scampering over puddles. Not through them, he observed, but “on the water’s surface,” as Jusufi and his coauthors write in a Current Biology study published yesterday. It was an impressive sight, but it wasn't until they conducted lab experiments that the true extent of the lizards’ aquatic dexterity was revealed.

The researchers found that the geckos could run at the speed of nearly three feet per second. That’s faster than ducks, mink, muskrats, marine iguanas, and juvenile alligators can swim, the researchers write. Predators, in other words, can eat their wakes.

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But just how do the geckos do it? They’re not the only species that can walk on water—the basilisk lizard is famous for it, the insects called water striders, too—but the geckos don't do it in quite the same way. They're not heavy enough to create enough force just by slapping the water like the larger lizards, and they're too heavy to sit on water's surface tension like a bug.

Experiments revealed that the geckos combine four distinct techniques. First, they actually do utilize surface tension. When the team added surfactant to the water, the geckos’ velocity was cut in half. Second, the geckos also slap the water with all four legs, which creates air cavities like basilisks do. Third, they benefit from their water-repellent skin. And finally, the geckos undulate their bodies—even their submerged trunks and tails—to propel themselves forward, a little like a butterfly stroke.

There’s more at stake in these findings than geckos’ ability to outrun predators. Coauthor Robert J. Full, of the University of California, Berkeley, tells Inside Science that the geckos may provide a model for robots that could gracefully “run and climb and race across the water” to conduct rescue missions.

27 Fascinating Collections From Atlas Obscura Readers Around the World

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A lot of this stuff is museum-worthy.

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Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about their unusual collections, and much to our delight, they showed us some truly incredible (and incredibly surprising) personal exhibits.

You told us about your beloved collections of everyday objects like dice and cocktail stirrers; ultra-specific collections such as a set of factory employee badges or Alka-Seltzer ads from the early 20th century; and even slightly eerie collections of bodily bits like eyelashes and kitty whiskers. More than anything, it's your enthusiasm for your unusual personal collections that makes each one intriguing.

Take a look at some of our favorite submissions below, and head over to our new forums to share pictures of your own incredible collection!


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Historical Employee Badges From Detroit

Collection Size: "700+ badges"

“About 20 years ago, I saw an employee badge that had particularly interesting Art Deco lettering. I bought it and then did a little research into its origins, and discovered that it was from a defunct company that had existed in my area of the city. I looked for others and found that there were many Detroit-related employee badges available. They embody the vitality, ambition, creativity, and muscularity that represented the city both as the Motor City and the Arsenal of Democracy.” — Robert McBroom, Detroit, Michigan


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Vintage Found Photographs of People Kissing

Collection Size: “I've collected anonymous found photos for over 30 years, so I've got a lot!”

“I am obsessed with vintage photos and they are all around us. I unearth photos from flea markets, garage sales, eBay, and dusty attics to understand their artifact nature and to hopefully reveal something not seen at first glance. With kissing photos we immediately start creating a story: Who are they? What do they see in each other? Is it mutual? Are they kissing the way I kiss, or want to be kissed? Who was the invisible photographer who had access to the intimate moment? I began and will continue to collect because the best found photographs transcend time and place to speak to contemporary questions and sensibilities.” — Barbara Levine, Houston, Texas, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico


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Dice

Collection Size: "636"

“I saw a set of dice that was really cool and then another and then another. The nice thing is that dice are relatively cheap and easy to acquire, unlike some collectibles.” — Kevin McCarthy, Central Texas


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Juggling Props, Photos, and Posters

Collection Size: “It fills five rooms in one of my homes.”

“I'm the world's leading juggling historian and wanted to save historically important juggling props and images.” — David Cain, Middletown, Ohio


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Cocktail Sticks and Stirrers

Collection Size: “Over 1,000 glass cocktail sticks, hundreds of cocktail items.”

“I like old cocktails and forgotten drinking items. I found some old glass cocktail umbrellas and became obsessed with finding out where they came from, and travelled to Germany to find more, so my collection of cocktail shakers grew to include glass cocktail umbrellas, and cocktail sticks in mechanical glass carousel holders, and other wacky forms from the '30s and '40s.” — Dominic Pennock, Yorkshire


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Vintage Medicine Bottles and Glass Eye Wash Cups

Collection Size: "150+"

“[Originally] I was looking for some pretty old bottles to decorate a bathroom with.” — Liz, Boston, Massachusetts


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National Park Service Visitor Pamphlets

Collection Size: "43 pamphlets and counting."

“Visitor pamphlets are an affordable, informational, and easily stored way of commemorating visits to our U.S. public lands.” — Brett Iredell, Flagstaff, Arizona


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Headstone Rubbings of Deceased Prime Ministers of Canada (and One Governor General)

Collection Size: “35 to 40 rubbings of various sizes.”

“Some of the rubbings are normal headstone size. Some, like Laurier and Thompson, are much bigger. I require two more headstones to complete the collection, keeping in mind that Canada currently has eight living Prime Ministers. When l started, pre-Google, the grave sites were poorly marked and rather hard to find. I wanted a tangible memory of my visits and stumbled across the idea of doing headstone rubbings. I've drove/flown thousands of kilometers and have visited 14 grave sites in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and England.” — Travis Shalla, Eastern Ontario


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Antique Sample and Medicinal Tins

Collection Size: "Over 400, after weeding out about 100 that were duplicates."

"I began my collection when I was 8 years old, when a neighbor gave me a small tin egg filled with tiny little hard candies. Since then, I have spent nearly 50 years adding to my collection, but due to space constraints, I now limit myself to collecting only small sample and medicinal tins. Many of my tins still contain the original contents, such as pills, typewriter ribbons, and cosmetics. My most valuable tin is an old 'Three Merry Widows' tin which still contains an old (unused!) condom from the late 1800s, back when they were made of sheep intestines. I also have quite a few interesting tobacco tins, including several of the pre-World War II Lucky Strike tins that are green, instead of the red and white, which Lucky Strike is now famous for. The green paint was needed to paint military vehicles so 'Lucky Strike' went to war and have been red and white ever since." — Susan Purdue, Fairview, North Carolina


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Vintage Potato Mashers

Collection Size: "15"

“There are so many different kinds of metal mashers and the handles are lovely!” — Ruth, Victoria, British Columbia


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Paper Clips Found On the Ground

Collection Size: "300 to 400"

“It started while living in Spain and I was pregnant. On my first visit to the doctor I found a paper clip on the doorstep. It's said that the paper clip is a Norwegian innovation, so I picked it up an put a lot of luck into it. Ever since, I always pick up paper clips found on the streets or ground and the paper clips give me luck or I can wish for something. Been doing this since I was pregnant and my daughter is now 14 years old.” — Rikke Sanni, Norway


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Gospel Records With Cringe-Worthy Covers

Collection Size: “Only about a dozen records at the moment”

“I’ve always been a record collector and in the search for more listenable material, I started to notice the incredible graphics, the over-the-top images and the not-so-subtle attempts to prey on people’s fears, which are used on the covers of these records. Plus, how can you pass on a gospel record with a small piece of paper attached to the back, stating: ‘This cover fails to give the much due credit to my talented wife, Joy. She has helped compose all our music and is a great source of inspiration. God bless.’” — Michael Fahey, Savannah, Georgia


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Fortune Cookie Fortunes

Collection Size: “Over 1,000... maybe more”

“Who doesn't love a cheeky little saying or wise words to pick you up? I wasn't always an avid collector, until one fortune really hit home. I was feeling down about my situation in life and prayed to God that I would find love. A couple days later while eating at a Chinese restaurant I opened a cookie and the only word on that little paper was ‘Love.’ I laughed out loud… all by myself. It was the reminder I needed that I am loved. That fortune is currently the only one that I've laminated and will probably keep forever. My collection will continue to grow (with the help of friends and family who know my obsession) until who knows when! The upside is they're so small, my large collection hardly takes up any space.” — Francesca, New Jersey


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My Eyebrows

Collection Size: “I started collecting them in 1983 and they are stored in 10 glass contact lens vials.”

“They kept falling out on my sketchbook (I'm a sculptor), so I decided to start collecting them.” — Mary Bailey, Connecticut


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Analog Computers

Collection Size: “About 150 square meters”

“Analog computers shaped our modern world and yet are nearly forgotten.” — Bernd Ulmann, Germany


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Steel Dip Pens

Collection Size: “Over 800 different types. Over 25,000 individual nibs.”

“I began with wanting to learn old styles of penmanship. Then I became interested in the history of this lost industry. The more pens (nibs) I have, the better I understand what people used to know about pens.” — Andrew Midkiff, Durham, North Carolina


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Vintage Postcards of Early 20th-Century Asylums

Collection Size: “Upwards of 80.”

“I like the brevity of the medium, the surprising ways in which text and image can converge, and the unexpected subject matter. So many of the images would never be replicated on modern cards.” — Devon W. Thompson, Ohio


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Corn-Themed Objects

Collection Size: “50+ items, including my current license plate, my email address since 1999, and artwork.”

“My dad was a corn farmer and a top seed corn salesman the year I was born. I inherited the land, so I am now a corn farm manager.” — Margaret Berry, Lincoln, Nebraska


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Vintage Paperbacks With 'Shame' in the Title

Collection Size: "40 books"

“A thrift shop book, Baptism in Shame, with a great cover and terrible story [inspired my collection].” — Seth Berg, Telluride, Colorado


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Vintage Souvenir Buildings

Collection Size: "200+ pieces"

”I have always loved old architecture.” — Lily Witham, Portland, Oregon


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Tobacco Tins

Collection Size: "60 items"

“They’re colorful, historic, and most of all, don’t take up too much space.” — Steve Wehr, Saugerties, New York


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1930s Alka-Seltzer Advertising Fans

Collection Size: “Roughly 50+ fans.”

“As a graphic designer, I was drawn to the wonderful color cartoon illustrations of George W. French. Each fan features one of his cartoons and humorous copy that French himself wrote. French died in Chicago in 1955 at the age of 71.” — Steve Williams


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Children's Watercolor Sets

Collection Size: “Somewhere around 150 pieces, probably a bit more.”

“I have collected tins of all sorts for about 40 years. In 1973 I found my first children's watercolor set at a yard sale. About two weeks later I found another similar one in an antique store. It was then that I realized I might be on to something. Most are from the '40s, '50s, and '60s, however some earlier schoolhouse sets are much older, '20s and '30s. They can be cartoon-related, nursery rhymes, or fairy tales. Many different themes, from manufacturers such as Binny & Smith and Milton Bradley. I like them because they're colorful windows to the past. A reminder of a gentler time gone by.” — Rick Davis, Starksboro, Vermont


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Recordings of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'

Collection Size: "342 different versions"

“It was my first favorite song. When I heard it on the radio in the early 1970s, I needed to know more about it. I had never felt that way about a song before.” — Linda Simensky, Alexandria, Virginia


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Typewriter Ribbon Tins

Collection Size: “I have just about 20 tins.”

“My mom typed address labels to earn extra money when I was little. She had an old typewriter ribbon tin that she used for paper clips, Carter’s Midnight, and I was entranced by the graphics on the lid. I set out to find my own Carter’s Midnight tin and discovered a world of colorful tins with a wide range of themes. Who knew‽” — Laurie McCabe, Orange County, California


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Cat Whiskers

Collection Size: “I have hundreds!”

“As a kid, when I found my first one, I wanted to glue it back on! I keep them just in case my kitties need spares!” — Terri Brink, Mayview, Missouri


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Egg Scales

Collection Size: “About 30.”

“I grew up on a small, family egg ranch in the 1950s and 60s. When I was real small, I remember using a primitive egg scale, such as one of these. At that time, most eggs came from small family farms like ours. Starting in the '60s, with rising feed costs and decreasing egg prices, egg producers either went out of business, or grew into large industrial operations. The scales graded the eggs by weight into jumbo, x-large, large, medium, small, & pee wee. Grading eggs by weight came into being during World War I, when the government paid more for eggs that were graded. “ — Kathy Smith, Goodyear, Arizona

How Myst Taught a Generation of Gamers to Explore New Worlds

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The creators revisit their hit game 25 years later.

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You are lost, but not worried. Your curiosity about the secrets of this new place propels you forward, though your direction remains unknown. The whimsical sound of seabreeze clues you in to the fact that you’ve landed on an island—a seemingly deserted one with no one to guide you. Though the environment is foreign, the thrill of exploration is familiar and fun.

Twenty-five years ago, two brothers—Rand and Robyn Miller—designed a new destination in the form of their wildly successful computer game Myst. The hybrid mystery-logic game, in which you, the anonymous explorer, solve a series of puzzles to gain access to alternate dimensions and uncover the sinister storyline, debuted on the then-novel CD-ROM format. Consumers soon discovered that the flatness of the disc belied the three-dimensional topography of the world within.

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In its first seven months on the global market, the game sold 200,000 copies and held its title as the top-selling game (to the tune of six million copies, and counting) until The Sims usurped it in 2002. Somehow, the brothers Miller had cracked the code behind what makes a game with little hype surrounding it a multimillion-dollar success. Part of that formula was how hard the Millers leaned in to innovation. But more centrally, what distinguished Myst was the concept that making moral choices is an advantage of adventure, and that exploration becomes more satisfying when one faces adversity followed by triumphant relief.

Myst created a new language in interactive media: one that depended less on violence and hemorrhaging “lives” and instead on our natural human interest in free choice and overcoming obstacles. Exploring Myst’s island was a first-person and non-linear experience. The narrative depended wholly on the player’s decisions for what to do next. The possibilities were seemingly endless, and were decidedly self-determined.

Though the 1980s produced text-based adventure games like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that used fiction as the game’s central vehicle, when Myst first hit shelves in 1993 it was still an underdog: There was no time limit, so where’s the urgency? There were no machine guns, so where’s the thrill? Scores of computer games rotate on the axis of adventure. But what Myst reinforced is that exploration—in both the virtual and the real world—has the potential to teach us a lot about ourselves.

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Robyn and Rand, who at the time of Myst’s development jointly operated under their game production company Cyan Inc., say that Myst (their first adult game) began as an experiment. “I’m not sure we knew exactly what we were doing, a lot of what we were putting into the game was instinctive,” Rand says. The brothers’ instincts had been formed by previous computer games they had made for children, like Cosmic Osmo. This game features a point-and-click interface and takes place on a friendly spaceship, giving players the ability to explore different planets through various animated shortcuts, like a miniature mouse hole.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Myst was the first-person point of view. It had worked well in the narrative of their kids games, so they maintained it for their adult one. The brothers also actively worked against the dominating computer game template at the time, which was predicated on competition and “being killed and starting over,” Rand says. “In reality you don’t die every five minutes. So we thought, why don’t we build something where it feels a little ominous, that feels interesting like it could be threatening … people might expect a jump scare, but it won’t come.”

The tension that mounts throughout the game is thanks to two feuding characters, brothers Sirrus and Achenar, and their mysterious, slowly unfolding backstory. Both have been imprisoned in books and it’s up to the player to choose which brother to free at the end. But things are not what they seem and betrayal is seemingly inevitable.

The parallels between Myst Island and reality multiply: two brothers were created by two brothers, and the quest for morality became a useful path to success both inside the computer and out. “In some ways, Myst became our adventure,” Rand says. “We were truly lucky to have had our adventurous life mimic the game and the surprises. We had friction in life and we overcame it, and now you look back 25 years later and you say: Wow. I guess we played the game well and got rewarded.”

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The mysterious environment of the island makes exploring it equal parts intimidating and exciting. And its elements, both surreal and slick, bear a strong resemblance to the environment of Cyan’s homebase: the Pacific Northwest. “People who visited our offices would remark about the similarity between the pine trees in the game and the piney woods of the Northwest,” Robyn says. “I'm sure the environment subconsciously found a place in our design.”

According to the game developer, operating from an office just outside of Spokane, Washington had its pros and cons. “We were unable to communicate with a broader community of game creators, or even technology enthusiasts. I remember the shock of first moving to Spokane and feeling like I was totally disconnected,” Robyn notes. But the silver lining of creating a cerebral computer game in Washington state? Silence. “In Spokane, we were the only company making games. In a way, this might have been a positive. Instead of looking at what everyone else was doing, we were forced to look inward and think only about what we wanted in a game.” The lush isolation of this region is mirrored in the feeling of playing Myst—picturesque and private. By isolating the player’s anonymous solo character on Myst Island, the two brothers were able to challenge users’ sense of self.

“We wanted the player to make some sort of ethical choice,” Robyn says. In the narrative, the main character is often tasked with making tough choices to drive their journey forward. During the design phase, Robyn says they asked themselves: “When people make the wrong decision [in the game], would they feel the same feelings that they’d feel if they made the wrong decision in real life?” Some might argue that the stakes are dramatically lower in a computer game—that without a society around you to judge your morality, those choices ultimately don’t matter. But Myst aimed for a greater moral resonance. “We just had this aspiration that a player will have legitimate emotion and that they’d examine themselves because of it,” Robyn says. “[We hoped they’d] ask: Wait, why am I feeling this if it’s just a game?”

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According to Rand, the answer is adversity. “The issue was just the friction,” he says. The friction he’s referring to is a synonym for the logic-driven puzzles included in the game, which serve to frustrate the player into a slower pace of play. “You get a little bit of tension and then you get the resolution, and it’s this great feeling. You’re a part of that resolution, you’re the one actually overcoming that frustration … it has a real profound, satisfying effect for somebody playing the game.”

Though the environment of Myst is dreamlike, the real-world relevance was no doubt instrumental in its success. Much like the joy we get as travelers to new places, which are steeped in unfamiliar symbols we must navigate based on some latent internal compass, Myst activated an adventure-based adrenaline. “The way Robyn and I looked at it was: The fiction and the fantasy worlds we enjoyed, whether that’s science fiction or Lord of the Rings, it felt like they had this really interesting balance between reality and dreamlike,” Rand says. “In other words, if you push too hard on the reality, it becomes a little mundane, or too normal … and if you push too hard in the dreamlike, it doesn’t feel relatable enough. Striking a balance between the two made it viable, like this could be a real thing.”

The books the brothers read when they were younger influenced their understanding of exploration and the atmosphere of their computer-generated island. “I was reading Mysterious Island [by Jules Verne] when we started designing Myst,” Robyn says. “It's about a group of people shipwrecked on a desert island. As they try to survive, they begin to encounter mysterious evidence of a dark presence.” Additionally, Robyn says that when he and Rand were thinking about portals and how to create ways for players to travel to different worlds (which are called “ages” in Myst), they were “really inspired by the sensibility in books like the Chronicles of Narnia” and tried to approximate its thick, heavy mood.

In 1993, when the game debuted, desktops operated as islands: totally isolated from the outside world, a digitized room of one’s own. Myst became an analog for the entire computer gaming experience. It provided players a chance to create their own identity and path, much like the internet and its social media offshoots allow us to do today.

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What is it about a self-determined experience that keeps the spirit of exploration alive? “We’re humans, we like to choose. It feels like that’s our superpower,” Rand says. “Animals don’t have that, they don’t get to choose, they kind of just run by the instincts. We get to override our instincts … that’s really powerful.” Other forms of entertainment, like movies, allow us to watch adventure performed by protagonists, but we don’t get the chance to truly experience it. “In computer games and active media, we have to make those choices, and that’s like life.”

The spirit of exploration, particularly one that leads you into the curious unknown, is the middle space in the Myst / Atlas Obscura Venn diagram. Of this, Rand says: “[Atlas Obscura] opens up the fiction of real life, and we kind of make the fiction feel like real life. It’s the same goal for both—it’s to pique someone’s sense of wonder and to play off their desire to see what’s around the next corner and intrigue them to go forward and to explore a little more.”

Much like discovering a new place somewhere in the world, the only prerequisite for playing Myst is a curious mind. And Rand and Robyn cultivated a fanbase of explorers by designing a world that was believable, albeit unreal. “I think the power of this game was not with the characters,” Robyn says. “It took me so many years to realize that the power of all games are not with the characters but instead the actual environment.”

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Twenty-five years after its release, Myst’s appeal endures. In May, fans aching for Cyan’s updated version of the game crowdfunded $247,500 in eight hours.

Those who love Myst have often complimented the brothers on the game’s ability to make them forget that they were in the real world. Both the graphics and the novel-like narrative were so convincing, that devotees began to feel truly transported—as if they were experiencing a new place based on coordinates they’d discovered.

“That felt like we had accomplished what we were going for,” Rand says. “Making people feel like this was an alternative world that they could explore.”

In Shakespeare, Food References Are a Window to the Soul

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Decoding a character's anger over roast mutton.

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In Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, the protagonist, Petruchio, attempts to tame the hot-headed “shrew” by unceremoniously disposing of her dinner. Plates clatter to the ground as he snatches a leg of roast mutton from her hand. “It engenders choler, planteth anger,” he cries, as he suggests “better ’twere both of us did fast.”

How could a leg of roast mutton fuel anger? For Elizabethans, food and drink was more than mere sustenance. Eating the right foods in the proper quantities, 16th-century Britons believed, balanced mind and soul. So in Shakespeare’s plays, roasts, ales, and pies are not props, but clues to characters’ souls, moods, and motivations.

The key to decoding these clues lies in understanding the medicine and science of the (pre-Scientific Revolution) era. Shakespeare’s peers still hewed to the 2nd-century theories of the Greek physician, Galen, who believed the balance of four humors (categories of fluid) corresponded to different temperaments. A surplus of blood meant a person was sanguine, too much black bile made someone melancholy, yellow bile meant you were choleric, and an oversupply of phlegm caused one to be, naturally, phlegmatic. Foods could sway this balance—roast mutton, for example, was considered hot and dry, spurring choleric (irritable) temperament. Which is why Petruchio deprived hot-tempered Katherine of her mutton.

Shakespeare’s characters often personified a specific temperament. Hamlet and Ophelia, who exude melancholy, should avoid tart or sour foods such as lemon and vinegar in favor of sanguine (moist and warm) foods such as basil, butter, and, apparently, peacock. Yet, in his grief over Ophelia’s death, Hamlet claims he will drink vinegar, though it will exacerbate his melancholy, to prove his love for her.

But in Shakespeare’s world, as in Elizabethan society, one culinary imbalance reigned above all others: gluttony. Beginning in the fourth century, gluttony topped the list of cardinal sins (the seven deadly sins). Early definitions even offered five different ways to commit the premier sin, including eating too soon, too much, too eagerly, too lavishly, or too daintily. As the “forechamber of lust,” gluttony could also lead one to committing the six other deadly sins: pride, lust, wrath, envy, greed, or sloth.

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Many Shakespeare characters were gluttonous, but few equalled the corpulent Sir John Oldcastle, known as Falstaff. A lover of anchovies, capons, and sak (a sherry-like sweetened wine), all foods to be avoided for his phlegmatic temperament, Falstaff epitomized both the humoral imbalance and sin of gluttony. According to Shakespearean scholar Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick, as a large man during a period of food scarcity, Falstaff’s indulgence in food, drink, and carousing signified selfishness that corresponded to his cowardly and irresponsible behavior. In fact, Shakespeare provides a lesson about moderation when the soon-to-be King Henry V must reject Falstaff to become a virtuous ruler.

However, Shakespearean society is equally suspicious of another form of gluttony: fasting. People who do not enjoy the pleasures of food and drink, especially those who refuse hospitality, were seen as flaunting the masochistic pleasure to be had in depriving the body. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Slender, a thin man characterized by his refusal to accept food or drink, is portrayed as dim-witted. In 15th- and 16th-century England, providing food, shelter, and entertainment to guests was a way to maintain neighborly relationships and make connections across social orders. Hospitality demonstrated generosity and virtue, so while feasting could be sinful, it had a positive side, too.

From Hamlet’s leftover “funeral baked meats” to Twelfth Night’s “cakes and ale,” Shakespeare mentions food in every one of his plays. Like the real-life experiences of his contemporary audience, these are not just dinner parties or polite conversation, but moments that reveal virtue and sin.

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