Since time immemorial, winter holidays have been brightened by foliage. In many homes, evergreens, holly, or the Christmas-colored poinsettia give the cold months a little color. But once upon a time, another plant added some heat to the holidays: the Christmas pepper.
This wasn’t just any pepper, though. Fruiting in the winter months, it morphs from green to a festive red as it ripens. It’s also edible, with a fiery heat. But while I have just a single memory of a Christmas pepper, which belonged to my grandmother, poinsettias are everywhere. So how did they win over American hearts and minds, banishing pepper plants from our living rooms?
According to Dr. Paul Bosland, a premier pepper expert, the fruits (reminder: peppers are not vegetables!) have a long history as dazzling decor. In the 16th century, Europeans were delighted by colored peppers, and used them ornamentally long before they thought about eating them. In the early 20th century, Christmas peppers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a handful of other holiday plants: Jerusalem cherries, cyclamens, and, of course, the poinsettia.
The poinsettia’s subsequent rise to dominance in the United States is largely the work of one family: the Eckes of Los Angeles. At their massive poinsettia ranch, successive generations of Eckes bred poinsettias to be shippable potted plants, as opposed to cuttings for bouquets. Sometimes, breeding took too long, and the Eckes turned to X-rays to induce mutations. Often, new poinsettias were tested in the “torture chamber,” a room where they were deprived of light and water, with only the strongest strains making it to market. Paul Ecke Sr. developed long-lasting potted poinsettias, while his son Paul Jr. worked the marketing angles, getting poinsettias into ladies magazines and giving them to television studios to serve as festive backdrops.
Lacking similar hype men, the Christmas pepper fell by the wayside, says Bosland. But another characteristic contributed to its downfall, too. In a December 26, 1954, edition of the New York Times, writer Elizabeth Turner lambasted the pepper plant as “the Christmas plant with the least future.” While she admired its Christmas coloring, she complained that it had a “bad habit of dropping both leaves and foliage overnight.” She also lambasted the poinsettia, calling the fading of its red-and-green leaves “the biggest disappointment.” But the Eckes were busy in the torture chamber, breeding hardier varieties. Soon enough, a Times writer was describing Christmas peppers as “an old favorite,” while poinsettias were so “deeply ingrained in the public’s mind as a symbol of the season that it virtually sells itself.”
Poinsettias even have a pan-religious appeal, Bosland says, since its shape suggests (to some) the Star of David, while some Christians see the red color as symbolizing the spilled blood of Christ. “I almost hate to admit it, but a chili pepper can’t really compete with them,” Bosland says with a rueful chuckle.
Despite the poinsettia hegemony, Bosland hasn’t given up on the celebratory pepper. As the head of New Mexico State University’s Chile Pepper Institute, he works with breeders who have produced many holiday themed peppers. There’s the NuMex Christmas pepper, of course, plus the NuMex Easter (with pastel chilis), the NuMex St. Patrick’s Day (green and orange fruit, and white flowers, for the Irish flag), and the NuMex Halloween (black and orange). Not to mention, New Mexico's ristra wreaths, made of colorful dried chili peppers, can be a holiday tradition too.
Of course, while chili pepper plants aren’t as popular as they once were, there are still chili-shaped Christmas lights, beloved by dads everywhere.
The hills glow soft and gold, as though flecked with a thousand fireflies. Hollywood Boulevard is lit up by street lamps and blazing marquees, but all is quiet. Cars fling little cones of watery light in front of them, or sit silently near the curb.
The scene is familiar to anyone who has strolled Hollywood’s famous streets. But this one is a little uncanny. Windshields are covered by a blanket of dust. Palm trees, too, and the tiny figures in front of the gates of the Paramount Studio lot. Outside of the Warner Theatre, a cobweb arches over the street.
The streets are small enough to fit atop a cluster of tables that are together the size of a cramped studio apartment. The miniature cityscape depicts the neighborhood—the same neighborhood where it can now be found—as it appeared in the late 1930s, and slowly, surely, carefully, Donna Williams—a conservator who specializes in sculpture and architectural materials—is now cleaning each light, each car, and each building, iconic and otherwise.
In total, the diorama squeezes 450 scale buildings onto an accurate street grid measuring 11 feet by 12 feet. It was fashioned in the 1930s by Joe Pellkofer, a cabinetmaker, and his craftsmen, during periods when jobs were lean. This model once had five cousins that extended its boundaries, to include a model of the famous Brown Derby restaurant and the beach at Malibu, complete with crashing waves that moved with little steel rods. Pellkofer said that the models together cost $250,000 to build, and that a 25-person team labored over them for four years.
Once complete, the model hit the road—to Atlantic City, among other places. The touring life was hard on the miniature metropolis. Some buildings got smashed along the way, and others were stolen outright. So it was time to take the model home, where it languished in Pellkofer’s Pasadena barn for decades.
It returned to Los Angeles by the mid-1980s, when it was on view at an Art Deco–inspired soda fountain. Celebrities had asked about the model over the years, Pellkofer told the Los Angeles Times in 1986, but he was neither starstruck nor especially interested in what they had to say. “I didn’t build the damned thing to see a movie star,” he told the paper. “I built it just because I felt like it. And because Hollywood is Hollywood. It’s magic.”
In the mid-1980s, once the model made it back home, according to the Times, Pellkofer’s grandson, John Accornero, reached out to Hollywood Heritage, a museum and preservation organization, to see if it could give the dioramas a permanent space. The organization’s co-founder, Marian Gibbons, told the Times she was “kind of speechless” when she first saw the landscape. “They said ‘miniatures,’” Gibbons recalled to the paper. “I didn’t expect it to be 12 feet.”
Today, as cleaning, conservation, and restoration progress, the model lives in Hollywood Heritage’s storefront annex on Hollywood Boulevard. (While the annex isn’t typically open to the public, visitors can stop in as part of a periodic walking tour of the wonders of old Hollywood.) The pop-up space is just steps away from the vacant, brick-and-mortar Warner Theatre, the 2,700-seat venue and headquarters of the Warner Brothers’ radio station, KFWB, which changed hands multiple times before sustaining damage during an earthquake and construction projects. It was shuttered in the mid-1990s. There, the conservator Williams, who is a member of the museum’s board, has been chipping away at the clean-up effort since the spring of 2018.
Though the model received some “clumsy” or “heavy-handed” repairs over the decades, she says, “There’s nothing shoddy in the way it was made.” Hollywood was chock full of craftspeople—set-makers in particular—with a knack for verisimilitude, and many details are spot-on. The ground outside the Chinese Theatre, for instance, is speckled with itty bitty handprints. Across the model, “Everything was handmade; nothing was purchased from a train-model shop,” Williams says. The original craftspeople added details, such as golden beams from the cars' headlights and taillights, that only emerge under black light; electric lights were added later. Williams wonders if Hollywood set-makers moonlighted as model-builders, too, because some of the roofs made from scored wood, designed to mimic ceramic tiles, are extremely convincing. “Someone had to go in, take a thin layer of wood and score and cut it in such a way that it creates a corrugated look,” she says. “That’s not easy to do in a clean, precise way.” The reflections painted onto the buildings’ windows, she adds, display a keen sensitivity to light and color.
However careful they were with the details, the model-makers took some liberties with the big picture. “While the boulevards are in the places they should be, [some of the] buildings are not,” Williams says. A few iconic structures are a few blocks away from their actual locations, and others are omitted entirely. It’s not clear exactly why.
Williams’s first task has been to inventory the whole model, photographing and documenting places where things are broken or missing. Though the shrunken city wears its age gracefully, some of the buildings are missing the signs that once identified them, leaving nothing but time-worn glue dots to mark their absence. Getting the lay of the the land, Williams says, is “a little like assembling a 3-D puzzle.”
Cleaning begins by vacuuming the model with a nozzle the width of a dime, while using a dry brush to cough up little clouds of dust. Next, Williams wraps cotton around a skewer to make a swab, and spot-cleans stubborn areas.
Work is slow, partly because the task is considerable—the model is large and intricate by sculptural standards—and partly because Williams only has two hands and juggles many other projects. Hollywood Heritage is largely propelled by volunteers like her. “If I could get two or four conservation interns for three months,” she says, “we could be way ahead.”
The most finicky fix will likely be reviving a miniature version of one of the two steel towers that perch atop the Warner Theatre (more recently called the Hollywood Pacific Theatre). “One is in perfect condition, and the other looks like it was squashed and somewhat torqued,” Williams says. Maneuvering the thin wire they are made of is tricky. “If you try to move it at a point where it’s been creased, it wants to snap,” she says. It’s also hard to repair plastic signs. Conservation standards for newer materials like plastics are still emerging, and these old examples are prone to shattering.
Even as the diminutive buildings are dusted and patched up, some of their life-size counterparts face an uncertain future. It’s been like that for years. By the time a 12-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard was added to the National Register of Historic Places in the mid-1980s, the old, glamorous buildings had been vanishing. The listing was a tactic to “intervene and draw attention,” says Adrian Scott Fine, director of advocacy at the LA Conservancy. “They knew that it was a special place, but had already lost a lot.” At the time, the Warner Theatre was one of buildings singled out for its charm.
The theaters flanking Hollywood Boulevard—whether long-gone or hanging on—are notoriously grand, flamboyant, and a little kooky. The Egyptian Theatre, which opened at the height of American Egyptomania, just weeks before Howard Carter cracked open King Tut's tomb, is made of sand-colored blocks that evoke the pyramids and are adorned with hieroglyphs. The Warner was Hollywood's answer to the trend of atmospheric theaters, which are festooned with clouds and stars to conjure a sense of being outdoors. The Warner didn't go all in, but featured curtains and arches with elaborate scenes of greenery and fauna. “The programmatic architecture of the Chinese and the Egyptian, as well as the ornate Warner Theater [sic], Pantages, Palace, Hollywood, El Capitan, Iris, and others, created an aura of fantasy for the population of the area—and satisfied the tourists in search of ‘Hollywood’ as well,” wrote Christy Johnson McAvoy, from Hollywood Heritage, in the nomination form submitted to the National Park Service.
This tension over preservation is in the news once again, as the city council is expected to adopt a new community plan in 2019. This document will lay out a blueprint for future development and preservation, and Fine says it doesn’t go far enough. “It’s not as strong as we’d like to see yet,” he says. “We want to press a preservation-based solution, not demolition of any kind.”
Where it’s feasible, the Conservancy pushes for theaters to return to their original use. If that’s not possible, the organization encourages developers to retain and showcase features that contribute to the historic character. And in some of those cases, the Conservancy nudges developers to commit to make only reversible changes, so the potentiality for a cinema palace remains. One recent precedent is the Tower Theatre, which—under the close watch of preservationists—reopened in August 2018 as an Apple Store that highlights original architectural details.
The miniature version of the Warner Theatre will be mended by Williams, eventually, but the real thing, just outside, is stuck in its own kind of limbo. It’s empty, its marquee dimmed, its fate unknown. The decades-old miniature, so close to being lost, may outlive its inspiration.
The 67-million-year-old T. rex has been tweeting all about it.
The Internet’s favorite dinosaur, Sue the T. rex, is now the proud resident of a shiny new private suite after nearly a year off display at the Field Museum in Chicago. Not one to shy away from publicity, Sue is definitely ready for their closeup.
All right, we had some laughs and fun on this site. But playtime is over... I’M BACK ON DISPLAY THIS WEEK AND EVERYTHING ELSE PALES IN COMPARISON RIGHT NOW.
— 🦖 SUE the NEW SUITE HAVER (12/21!) 🦖 (@SUEtheTrex) December 17, 2018
Sue’s major upgrade in the Field Museum comes after being on display in the main hall for nearly 20 years. “Now, we are telling the story of Sue as an individual dinosaur,” says Pete Makovicky, the curator of dinosaurs at the museum, “and the smaller room gives a much better idea of the size of this enormous dinosaur.” Makovicky also notes that Sue is finally getting all of their bones displayed in the same place: “We made a number of changes, and the biggest one is that we mounted the gastralia [belly ribs], helping convey how massive this animal was.”
They are not only the most expensive dinosaur ever purchased at auction at a cool $8.4 million in 1997, but also the largest and most complete T. rex skeleton ever discovered. These aren’t the only reasons Sue the T. rex is pretty frickin’ famous. Despite being dead for 67 million years, this 40-foot-long apex predator is hilarious on Twitter. Sue (whose current Twitter display name proudly announces they are a “NEW SUITE HAVER” as of December 21) has over 48,000 followers on Twitter and is consistently dishing out sassy dinosaur facts and strong feelings about Jeff Goldblum and Chicago sports.
Sue is named after Sue Hendrickson, one of the original discoverers of the self-described “murderbird” while they were still in the ground in South Dakota, but T. rex Sue’s pronouns are singular “they/them.”. One reason for that is because paleontologists don’t know the sex of the fossil. Kate Golembiewski, the Field Museum’s PR and science communications manager, points out that Sue has been using “they/them” pronouns for a while on Twitter, but the exhibit redesign was a great time to update the signage in their new suite. “One of our goals as a museum is to make science something that is accessible and welcoming for everybody,” Golembiewski says, mentioning they have received a lot of public support for a non-binary Sue the dinosaur.
Sue originally stalked onto the Twitter scene in 2009, but in the very beginning their tone was a bit more traditional, as they are an institutional account. Over the past few years as their following grew, so did their sassy personality. In a Twitterverse containing characters like Gritty and sentient desserts, Sue’s outlandish persona doesn’t seem out of place—but they were actually early to the “not-humans dishing out fire tweets” game, notes Katharine Uhrich, the Field Museum’s social media manager. Wondering who the real human person behind Sue is though? That’s a closely guarded secret, says Uhrich, but consider that not thinking about who it is might be more fun. “It is kind of magical to believe there is a T. rex that has a phone and they’re going crazy on Twitter.”
🦖🦕🦖🦕🦖🦕🦖🦕🦖🦕🦖🦕 🦖 Now that we have dino 🦖 🦕 emojis, stop all software 🦕 🦕 development forever. 🦖 🦖🦕🦖🦕🦖🦕🦖🦕🦖🦕🦖🦕
— 🦖 SUE the NEW SUITE HAVER (12/21!) 🦖 (@SUEtheTrex) October 31, 2017
For the Field Museum, Sue’s following on Twitter has opened up a whole new world of communication—so much so that Twitter is actually mentioned in the signage for the new suite. As Uhrich points out, “only 17 percent of Sue’s followers actually live in Chicago, so for us as a museum it is a great way to reach a new audience we might not reach otherwise.”
But what do actual paleontologists think about the huge dinosaur with the huge personality? Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and Chicago-area native is a big fan: “I've taken my family and friends to visit Sue. And I've had so many discussions with Sue on Twitter. We banter sometimes like old friends. And Sue is a big Chicago Bears fan, so that is most important of all.”
Of course, the final comment about getting back on public display comes from the national treasure themself: “I’m just so proud of all the work the team has done to give folks the greatest holiday gift of all: Me.”
Re-supplying White Mountains huts requires serious stamina.
My husband and I had just departed the windy Mount Washington summit, the highest point in the Northeast and the fourth of seven peaks in the Presidential Traverse hike through New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Suddenly, a shirtless, shaggy-haired twentysomething sidestepped us. Not only was he shouldering a crammed packboard—an almost-primitive contraption made of wood, canvas, and leather stacked with food and supplies—but he was practically running, sure-footed on the rocky trail down to the Lakes of the Clouds Hut. Minutes later, a young woman carrying an equally hulking load hurried by in the opposite direction.
Meet the croo, a merry band of mostly college-age staffers who feed and entertain overnight guests at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s (AMC’s) eight backcountry huts from late May through mid-fall. All told, the croo prepares almost 2,300 family-style breakfasts and dinners each year. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, they lug trash and recycling out of the shelters, each one returning the same day with 40 to 80 pounds of vegetables, frozen meat, butter, and lots of cheese—ingredients destined for memorable meals that bushed hikers savor in a breathtaking setting.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a job where you could make a little bit of money and have that much fun—it was wild, really,” says Ethan Hipple, deputy director of the Parks, Recreation and Facilities Department of Portland, Maine. “There’s a totally unique culture among the 50 or so people who work in the huts each summer.” Hipple was on the croo in the mid-nineties, where he also met his wife, Sarah.
The White Mountains, a segment of the Appalachian Mountains that extends for 85 miles across New Hampshire and into Maine, have beckoned adventurers for centuries. Founded in 1876, the AMC opened its first shelter for hikers and researchers 13 years later: the Madison Spring Hut, perched at 4,800 feet in the col between Mount Adams and Mount Madison.
In 1906, the AMC hired a “care-keeper” for the hut, a role that evolved into hutmaster and, eventually, multi-person crews (or croos, in AMC parlance). During the first half of the 20th century, the club built five additional lodges—Carter Notch, Lakes of the Clouds, Greenleaf, Zealand Falls, and Galehead—and acquired Lonesome Lake Hut.
“It is always a joy to me to watch the hungry eyes of a camp group ... following the motions of a hutman carving a turkey,” wrote Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas in his article, “The Friendly Huts of the White Mountains,” for the August 1961 issue of National Geographic. “The aroma of a crisp brown bird, bubbling soup, and hot biscuits seems magically to take the ache out of tired feet.”
Douglas’ splashy feature was a boon for the region and led to the construction of the eighth and final hut three years later: Mizpah Spring Hut. By then, women had joined the croos, and in 1979, Lonesome Lake Hut saw its first all-female squad.
Today, the huts host 36 to 90 guests at capacity and are run by five to 11 croo members. (Lakes of the Clouds, dubbed “Lakes of the Crowds,” sleeps the most people.) Home-cooked meals are the main attraction, of course, and hut binders display well-loved recipes—think lentil soup, dijon mustard chicken, lasagna, garlic-cheddar bread, and vegan chocolate cake. To ensure hut-hopping backpackers enjoy variety evening after evening, each hut makes a variation on the same entree on the same night of the week—stuffed shells on Sunday, beef on Monday, and so on.
Before the season starts, croos attend a five-day training, including six or so hours on cooking and baking. “Still, a lot of learning happens on the job,” says AMC Huts Manager James Wrigley, who gleaned tips, such as browning meat to boost flavor, from veteran staffers during his hut stints in the mid-2000s. All this advice and oral tradition comes in handy as croo members take turns manning the kitchen.
Days start early, at 5 a.m., when the cook on duty fires up the griddle. “It’s dark and you’re in your headlamp, and it’s just you smelling the coffee,” recalls Hipple. “The sun is rising, and the valley is filled with fog, and you see the mountains sticking up above the clouds—you’re just in this other world above everything.”
Remaining staffers rise, ready the tables, and rouse the guests. A breakfast (perhaps pancakes, also known as “cakers,” plus sausage or bacon, fruit, eggs, and hot cereal) is ready at 7 a.m. After clean-up and the croo-led BFD—a blanket-folding demo instructing guests how to, ahem, fold their linens, as well as reminding them to leave no trace, stay on the trail, and tip the staff—the cook preps dinner throughout the day, all the while acting as a concierge for arriving lodgers. At 5 p.m., it’s go-time: The croo reconvenes, and the cook delegates salad-making and table-setting duties, while putting finishing touches on the four-course meal, served at 6 p.m. Coffee caps off the evening.
Hut visitors are a “self-selecting group,” says Wrigley. “They got to the backcountry, and then to have someone serve them food, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is wonderful.’” So while Hipple remembers that his grandmother’s beet borscht received mixed reviews, most dishes are hits.
Once the lights are out, the croo heads for bed, or to the trails for a nocturnal raid. Leaving a couple croo members with sleeping guests, the others hike along the ridge to deliver treats and pilfer garden gnomes, rocking chairs, and other prizes from nearby huts. Hijinks are part of the culture, which calls for wearing costumes to presentations, using hut-specific slang, and sending lodgers off to bed with impromptu concerts.
These after-dark blitzes have been going on for decades, par for the course in a summer job so steeped in tradition that it’s even impervious to social media. “It’s a lot of fun—and these days, unfortunately, rare—to spend a night playing games, watching the sunset, or looking through a telescope instead of using screens,” says Whitney Brown, AMC Huts Field Supervisor and a 2013-2015 croo alum. “It is rewarding that the huts facilitate … these types of experiences.”
Another time-honored practice: While helicopters supplanted donkeys and manpower for hauling dry goods to high summits in the 1960s—in May, they airlift an average of 16,000 pounds of supplies including propane, flour, and tomato puree to each AMC Hut—croo members still schlepp broken-in packboards of fresh, increasingly local produce twice a week.
The supply sojourns vary from one-and-a-half to over five miles one way, depending on the hut. “I was in the best shape of my life,” Hipple says about the summer he worked at Madison Spring Hut. On his first day, however, he hauled his clothing, a guitar, and a 60-pound packboard up the steep-in-parts 3.8 miles, and “by the time I got to the top, I was grasping at saplings.” But over the season, it becomes a manageable, even enjoyable, task. “When you’re doing it twice a week, you get pretty strong,” Brown says. “It’s an empowering feeling.”
But all the work is worth it to witness hut guests break bread at communal tables.
“It’s building a community in a way that we don't see a lot of anymore,” Wrigley says. “There are all these folks from across the country and the globe, from different walks of life, who are talking about their hikes and sharing food.”
The long, dark, painful history of an everyday emotion.
The French conquest of Algeria in the mid-19th century killed up to a third of the native population in three short decades—between 500,000 and 1 million people, according to Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. The European settlers—who included Italians, Spaniards, and Maltese—at times had a similarly high mortality rate in what had devolved into a pestilential war zone. French settlers who arrived between 1848 and 1851 saw their numbers halved, for example, in part by vicious flare-ups of cholera and dysentery. In addition to dealing with disease and conflict, these settlers were almost uniquely ill-equipped for their task.
Though they were supposed to be tilling a new frontier—with little regard for the people who had already been living there—the colonists were disproportionately urban artisans with no experience handling plows. In many cases they were sent not for their skills, but to reduce unemployment rates back home. Some 14,000 Parisians went to rural Algeria in 1848 to face disease, miserable living conditions in barracks, and unfamiliar field work. These factors conspired to bring about another obstacle to the establishment of a French North Africa: clinical nostalgia, a diagnosable and dangerous longing for home that put colonists in hospital beds or sent them packing. It had become clear that if the French were going to conquer, exploit, and occupy Algeria, they were going to have to conquer a plague of homesickness first. The atrocities of the French colonial project, in the end, may have been intertwined with how a debilitating medical condition came to be seen as an emotion, so common and relatively harmless today.
The term “nostalgia” was coined in 1688 by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, in his dissertation, to diagnose the suffering of Swiss mercenaries abroad. It comes from the Greek nostos, for “homecoming,” and algos, for “pain”—literally, a painful desire for home. The idea existed long before Hofer: Nostos is commonly invoked in reference to The Odyssey, Homer’s tale of Odysseus’s by-any-means-necessary journey home from the Trojan War, but “the ‘algia’ part of it, the suffering part of it, was not yet something that people could conceive of,” says Thomas Dodman, a historian of France at Columbia University.
In Dodman's analysis, this change has something to do with the evolution of European militaries in the 17th and 18th centuries. Smaller, more localized bands of soldiers were giving way to larger, consolidated, bureaucratic structures. With the professionalization of warfare came a new layer of alienation. Campaigns grew longer, conditions harsher, terms of service more indefinite. For centuries, says Dodman, European armies had consisted largely of contracted mercenaries recruited by feudal lords “for specific terms of service, for a duration, and then they go back home …” These armies, moreover, were “microsocieties,” often traveling with the soldiers’ spouses and children. “These are wars of kings instead of wars of nations,” says Dodman, and the pivot to the nation-state meant a pivot within the traditional military structure.
Though nostalgia first emerged as a Swiss idea—some doctors blamed it on brain damage from the clanging of Swiss cowbells—it gradually came to be seen as a French phenomenon. Dodman attributes this to several factors. Paris had grown into the hub of European medical science by the early 19th century, and a culture of diagnosis flourished. At the same time, the French military had developed into a more repressive, disciplinarian institution than its European counterparts, with a lottery draft system. These soldiers, says Dodman, were “reproducing with their own hands a world that then dominates them.” What doctors were diagnosing as nostalgia may have been closer to a kind of Marxian alienation than what we think of as homesickness today, but the soldiers still yearned for the lives they had left behind.
The world was changing, quickly and dramatically—a truth made clear by the massive, rapid cultural shifts of the French Revolution. Time itself seemed to be accelerating. In his 1991 paper Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century France, Michael S. Roth summarizes the deadly despair of a man whose house was going to be demolished. “His disease,” writes Roth, “is caused by progress.”
The nostalgic, as described by 19th-century doctors, was a morose and cryptic patient, seemingly beyond reach. “Everything one tells him to do he does mechanically,” wrote one doctor quoted in Roth’s article; the patient “obeys without murmuring, without complaining; he is the most docile of all creatures, but it is a docility with indolence …” As the doctor saw it, nostalgia presented itself as an abdication of the will. The patient “proffers not a single word of reproach against those who make his life miserable,” he continues, “everything is indifferent to him …” (One can perhaps see a continuity with this condition and both depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.)
Nostalgia was not seen then as a mere state of mind, however, but as a dangerous, contagious, “affective disorder that destroyed the body,” Roth writes. Indeed, according to the doctor, the patient’s “features become drawn, his face is creased with wrinkles, his hair falls out, his body is emaciated, his legs tremble under him; a slow fever saps his strength; his stomach refuses nourishment; a dry cough fatigues him; soon the decline of energy does not permit him to leave his bed.” Eventually, “the fever becomes even greater, and soon he succumbs.” Symptoms, Dodman writes in his book What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion, included tachycardia, rashes, hyperhidrosis, trouble hearing, convulsions, heartburn, vomiting, diarrhea, rales, and wheezing. For all the suffering, the nostalgic did not even necessarily want to get better. “True nostalgics,” wrote Roth, “derived their only satisfaction from the symptoms of their disease and therefore strove to protect their longing, to concentrate all their energies on it.” One 19th-century medical journal, quoted by Roth, noted that the nostalgic “seeks solitude, during which he can caress his favorite chimera without any obstacle and feed his pain …”
Given the severity of the disease, nostalgia was considered a military threat of the highest order. According to Dodman’s book, epidemics had “allegedly decimated entire companies of conscripts at the outbreak of the revolutionary wars in the 1790s.” Decades later in Algeria, the mal du pays (“homesickness”) was rumored to have thwarted entire units. A military doctor there wrote in 1836 that he was losing as many as five men a day to the malady.
To some, this affliction seemed to be distinctively French, and stymied the country's ability to compete with other European powers, particularly the United Kingdom. “Why don’t the French have good colonies?” asked political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville in 1833, quoted in Jennifer Sessions’s By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. In his assessment, it was because “the Frenchman loves the domestic hearth … rejoices at the sight of his native parish, [and] cares about family joys like no other man in the world.” To be French, some insisted, was to know the pain of nostalgia as no other.
No one knows that exact pain today. Now, nostalgia is something very different, a kind of warm sustenance, a wistful appreciation for the past. It’s actually healthy: Clay Routledge, a psychologist at North Dakota State University who has published extensively on the emotion, says that nostalgia has been shown to raise self-esteem by making people feel like their lives are more meaningful. Nostalgia can bring sadness, but in a nourishing way.
Auguste Bourel-Roncière must have somehow seen into this future. In 1851, with the nostalgia outbreaks and other mishaps of 1848 still raw, he proposed to Napoleon III a solution to nostalgia that seemed to steer into it. His suggestion was the wholesale transfer of entire communities of Bretons—people from France’s rural northwest, where Bourel-Roncière was a notable local leader—to planned communities in Algeria. A joint-stock company would front two million francs so the state could build replica French villages to remake this colonial frontier into something familiar. Bourel-Roncière wasn’t alone. As Dodman explains in What Nostalgia Was, published earlier this year, similar proposals involving “Normands, Corréziens, Limousins, Savoyards”—other French rural communities—were brought forward as potential strategic solutions to France’s colonial quagmire. But people from remote areas had, since the days of the Swiss cowbells, been considered particularly susceptible to nostalgia, yearning for the familiar monotony of village life. If gritty Parisians had failed as settlers, what chance would naïve Bretons stand?
Bourel-Roncière thought they had everything the artisans of 1848 lacked—agricultural savoir-faire, an appreciation for the demands of rural living. And they would have their intact communities. Bourel-Roncière’s plan, writes Dodman, reimagined nostalgia as something “homeopathic”—the constant, drip-like exposure to home would anchor the settlers in their identity rather than estrange them from it, to promote a gentle pining rather than an aching need. The settlements also addressed burgeoning, sinister, racist fears, that French people in this hot climate might assimilate into the native population, and lose their inherent Frenchness. The transplanted French villages, it was thought, could protect the purity of French identity.
Ultimately, says Sessions, a historian at the University of Virginia, the policy was carried out on a relatively small scale and was short-lived. Its significance lies less in colonial history than in medical history, as the settlements acknowledged the need to treat nostalgia systemically, and documented real-time changes in how it was perceived.
The long process of nostalgia’s demedicalization is probably not fully knowable. Medicine itself was rapidly evolving then, as it is now, and even greater cultural changes were on the horizon. Dodman’s new book makes the case that French colonial policies and racism were, at least, integral pieces of the puzzle. The timing lines up: The French military’s last recorded case of nostalgia was in 1884, and by that time the diagnosis was exceedingly rare. It’s jarring to think that the nurturing, pleasurable sentimentality of today’s nostalgia might have such painful roots, but perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising. More modern far-right politics—the Nazis are a prime example, and there are more contemporary analogues—has made dangerous and profitable use of nostalgia, to rally people around the defense of an allegedly threatened, so-called traditional identity.
Nostalgia, of course, is not the only condition to transform from a medical phenomenon into a more normalized experience. Hysteria is another prominent example, along with homosexuality. Surely there’s something we treat today which, one day, people will ignore, or even desire. “I’m absolutely convinced,” says Dodman, “that all disorders are historically specific and will come and go.” Some diseases, in other words, are not carried by pathogens, but by cultures.
Maybe your first kiss with a person you truly love happened just like in the movies, say at a school dance, or outside an elegant restaurant after a near-perfect first date. But I suspect that for most of us, the locations of our most meaningful first kisses were probably far less picturesque—one Atlas Obscura staffer's first kiss with her partner, for example, occurred quite close to a smelly Dumpster. Wherever you experienced that moment of unforgettable romance, we’d like to hear about it.
Fill out the form below to tell us about the location where you first kissed the person you love, and we’ll gather some of our favorite submissions into a collection in the new year. The world can seem pretty grim some days, but it’s comforting to think that you’re never far from a spot where love once came to life.
Above a busy highway, a safe new wildlife crossing in an area that will soon see many more.
On December 6, 2018, a lone coyote darted across Interstate 90, near Snoqualmie Pass in central Washington. The highway delivers motorists through the Cascade Mountains, and it can be a bumpy and dicey ride. The route is often hazardous and slick with snowfall—an average of around 330 inches a year. Collisions are common.
Happily, the coyote fared just fine. “This coyote safely crossed the highway,” the Washington State DOT tweeted, “avoiding traffic, anvils, ACME rockets & roadrunners!” In fact, the animal didn't have to dodge speeding cars and trucks. In the video tweeted out by the DOT, there’s no trace of asphalt or cars—just dirt, trees, and mountains, and the edge of a bridge on the far right of the frame.
The coyote was the first confirmed user of the state’s newest and largest wildlife bridge, which caters to furry quadrupeds, instead of the quad-wheeled bipeds who cross their paths.
Highways make it easy for humans to cover long distances through varied terrain, but they really muck things up for wildlife. When speeding hunks of metal and rivers of asphalt and concrete bisect formerly peaceful environs, animals might get stuck on one side. They're either stranded over there, or have to risk crossing to find food or a more suitable habitat. (The Washington overpass will help preserve a migration route that elk follow, the Associated Press reported.) They also might need to cross for mates, and mixing the pool of parents ultimately means a healthier, more genetically diverse and secure population.
That’s where animal infrastructure comes in. But how, exactly, to get animals to buy in is a puzzle. Some animals prefer open-air crossings, while others are comfortable with tunnels, and preferences vary within a species. Researchers studying grizzlies in Banff National Park, for instance, found that bachelor bears were good to amble through culverts under roads, while families were more likely to use an overpass.
This part of Washington is expanding its highway system—and the number of potential animal crossings—as surrounding areas attract new human residents. The $6 million bridge, which arches 33 feet above the road, is 66 feet wide, and flanked by fencing to dampen noise from cars below. The DOT reports that there are several other overpasses planned or in the works, and that they will also be planted with trees and shrubs to emulate the natural environments on either side. That’s good news for the coyotes, and any other animals that have somewhere to be or just want to stroll safely.
Fascinating ghouls of another era, gargoyles emerged around the 13th century in European architecture with a vast array of form and function. At first, they were designed as an indispensable engineering trick. Projected from roofs at parapet level, the strange leaning creatures created a siphon for rainwater to protect the walls of the edifice. They evolved to become "grotesques, " ornamental elements with a specific symbolic charge. With their demonic grins and anthropomorphic shapes, gargoyles and grotesques were used to visually exemplify the concept of evil and virtue at a time when a large part of the population was illiterate. Beyond their moral function, gargoyles also had an “apotropaic” value: their grimacing faces were believed to avert the evil eye and keep it from the sacred space.
Gothic architecture was later revived in the 18th and 19th century in England and the United States. Naturally, gargoyles became one of the stylish signatures of this new Neo Gothic architectural type. But centuries of capricious weather and a lack of care had disfigured the legions of statues that were still silently guarding the old gothic monuments. A large amount of stunning chimeras were actually falling to the ground like a plague rainfall. In order to remedy to this situation, conservation programs were started for some of them, and 20th and 21st century stone carvers were asked to replace as many destroyed gargoyles as possible. If some of them copied meticulously the medieval form of the past, others had another vision of what gargoyles could be.
Many of these examples are unfortunately high on the façades out of sight, but a pair of binoculars might help you out. In the 1980s, Washington National Cathedral became one of the first to experiment with of gargoyle reinterpretation. Some of you might have heard the story of the most famous one: the Darth Vader gargoyle, who was the winning proposal in a children's contest organized by National Geographic. Christopher Rader, a 13-year-old kid from Nebraska, created its design, envisioning the Star Wars villain as a modern incarnation of supreme evil. Sculpted by Jay Hall Carpenter and carved by Patrick J. Plunkett, our dark-sided Anakin is today on the Washington Cathedral, wearing his iconic helmet on the first tiny peaked roof from the center pinnacle, on the right hand side.
If you’re curious enough for a gargoyle safari, stay around the edifice! You will not be disappointed, as Darth Vader is just one of many pretty unusual creations conceived to adorn the National Cathedral. The 112 sculpted gargoyles include those by Walter S. Arnold, who envisioned gargoyles as portraying the specific hopes and fears of their era. Arnold's sculptures have name like “The Crooked Politician,” “The Fly holding Raid Spray,” or the “High Tech Pair,” representing a stylized robot and surveillance camera.
As representations of our contemporary life, it's now not uncommon practice for stone carvers to integrate, here and there, images of our present. The mysterious astronaut, tangled in floral motifs, is not a visionary medieval anticipation of our space travels, as one rumor said. It was created on the façade of the Salamanca Cathedral in Spain in 1992, during a renovation.
Another story of delightfully iconoclast restoration took place in France, a few miles away from Nantes, in one of the major historic cities of Brittany. In 1993, in Saint Jean-Boisseau, the late Middle Ages chapel of Bethlehem was subject to a renovation. Since almost none of its pinnacles had survived, a decision was made to replace them one by one, while keeping the traditional symbolism attached to each of them. With this in mind, stone carver Jean-Louis Boistel, proposed to restore the traditional archetypes with more modern ones, directly drawn from pop culture.
Thereby, the anime robot Grendizer became the image of a modern knight’s righteousness, Gizmo the standard for our “good” inner self, while his alter egos the Gremlins, for the bad. However, Boistel's boldest choice may be the representation of the “Leviathan,” a figure of the uttermost chaos, represented by a Giger-inspired Alien. Boistel’s "geek chapel" wasn't initially popular with the villagers, but the local enthusiastic youth helped make it a reality.
Just as Catholic sacred architecture used to be like a historical picture book, describing Middle Ages ways of life, so is adding a modern motif of modern monsters like the "ear mouse" grotesque of Saint George's Chapel (inspired by Dr. Charles Vacanti's experiments) reactivating the traditional function of Gothic Architecture.
Talking about polemics, our last example probably spilled more ink than rainwater, and occurred a couple of years ago in the French city of Lyon. The Cathedrale Saint Jean, already in the Atlas for its incredible Astronomical Clock, now has another wonder. During the renovation of the cathedral, stonemason Emmanuel Fourchet created a gargoyle figure after his construction manager, Ahmed Benzizine, as a token of their friendship and appreciation for his dedicated work. Ahmed is a veteran in historical renovation and has spent more than 30 years of his life restoring religious structures in France. He’s also a Muslim.
Conservative groups furiously criticized the act, calling it blasphemy. While the Archbishop saluted this gesture as an meaningful act, he also underlined the fact that the extreme reaction was due to a lack of understanding of the history and culture concerning the sculpted art of the cathedral itself. The Church Rector Chanoine Michel Cacaud reminded the public that the elements adorning the outside of the cathedral are meant to represent the profane world in its complexity. And now they can reflect those same complexities of our contemporary world.
The story originally ran on June 10, 2013, and has been updated with new images.
March 14, 2018, was a Wednesday, Pi Day, 139 years after the birth of Albert Einstein. One-hundred-thirty-nine is a happy prime number. On that day, legendary Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking passed away.
June 29, 2009, was a Sunday, one day before pyramid schemer Bernie Madoff would get sentenced to 150 years in prison. Hawking sat in his wheelchair at a cocktail party at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, beneath a banner reading, “Welcome Time Travellers.” Invitations were only revealed after the party, so only the host showed up, though he did not provide any specific evidence that he was not himself a time traveler. It was at least partly a stunt for a television show, the sort of combination of serious and silly that Hawking was known for.
July 15, 1992, was another Wednesday, the day that Bill Clinton became a presidential nominee. Also, a new issue of the journal Physical Review D was released, with a paper called “Chronology Protection Conjecture,” by Hawking. In it, he posits that the laws of physics may actually prevent the possibility of time travel, something he would believe—with the occasional caveat or soft spot for M-theory—throughout his life. “It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians,” he wrote. He builds his argument carefully across nine pages, with lines like, “As one approaches a closed null geodesic γ in the Cauchy horizon, the propagator will acquire extra singularities from null geodesics close to γ that almost return to the original point.” Clearly. The paper closes with his clearest evidence that time travel is not possible: “the fact that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."
December 24, 2018, was a Monday, Christmas Eve, and we still don't have any probable routes back in time, at least in this universe. It's still not possible to travel faster than the speed of light (we haven't even gotten close), wormholes remain theoretical, and and we don't know of any exotic matter with a negative energy density that would keep one open long enough for a person to pass through. So for now (and then and a thousand years from now), the universe remains safe for historians, and we will not have been able to attend Hawking's party. But we still have all the history he made.
Sometimes it’s not pretty when we have to undo our ecological mistakes.
Reindeer and penguins are both at home in snowy expanses, but they’re not supposed to be together. After all, reindeer live in the Northern Hemisphere, penguins in the Southern. Yet for some 100 years, a split second in their natural histories, they shared an island. Their unlikely coexistence seemed “quite peaceful,” says Carl Erik Kilander, who first saw them together in 2004. “They did not seem to pay much attention to each other.” It didn’t end quite so peacefully.
Far out in the South Atlantic Ocean, more than 1,000 miles east of Cape Horn, Argentina, the island of South Georgia is an unforgiving place. Glaciers cover much of the land, and gales pound the jagged coast. This was the place where north and south ended up together.
For decades, no one knew how many reindeer roamed on South Georgia. In 2012, when Kilander, a Norwegian naturalist with experience in reindeer management, trekked through the island’s steep terrain to find out, he and his colleagues counted around 2,000, and guessed there was another 1,000 they missed. Later, they found out that the island had harbored more than twice that number. But by then, almost all of them were dead.
South Georgia—slightly larger than New York’s Long Island—is home to tens of millions of birds, including albatrosses, petrels, and penguins. For millennia, the island’s isolation kept them safe from human interference. But the 18th and 19th centuries brought intrepid seafarers, and in 1904, Carl Anton Larsen, an Antarctic explorer from Norway, set up a commercial whaling operation on South Georgia. Soon, the place bustled with even more life—and death.
When Ernest Shackleton, the British polar explorer, visited in 1914, it wasn’t pretty: “There were great carcasses being flayed, while around the bleeding mass of blubber and flesh, pigs were rooting,” Shackleton wrote of the Grytviken whaling station. The whalers, Shackleton recorded in his diary, had brought pigs, sheep, goats, reindeer, two ponies, cattle, a bull, ducks, hens, and even a monkey. Half a century later, the whalers were gone, along with most of the introduced animals. But the reindeer remained.
Reindeer are native to many northern areas: Norway, Finland, Russia, the northern reaches of Mongolia, and North America, from Alaska to Greenland. Many populations have shrunk rapidly in recent decades, and globally, reindeer are a threatened species, according to a 2016 assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
It was in the austral spring of 1911 that three bulls and seven cows arrived on South Georgia. Larsen’s brother had bought the reindeer in Norway and shipped them to the South Atlantic. Upon arrival, they were set free. The herd wasn’t spotted again until over a year later, a local pastor on South Georgia was quoted as saying at the time. By then, it had swelled to 16.
There were several small reindeer introductions to South Georgia in the early 20th century, and despite the harsh conditions, they thrived. “As a species, they’re really adaptable,” says Anne Gunn, the wildlife biologist who authored the IUCN’s reindeer assessment. And on South Georgia, “there was lots of food and there were no enemies,” she says. (Reindeer were also introduced in the Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, where they coexist with penguins, and in Iceland, where penguins have never set foot.)
The South Georgia herds were confined to two distinct areas on the island’s northern coast. There, over decades, they feasted on plants such as tussac, a native grass that grows tall and dense, and is important for white-chinned petrels that burrow underground. Eventually, as the tussac was overgrazed and the soil trampled, some of the petrels couldn’t nest anymore. Authorities on the British-controlled island pondered what to do.
The glaciers that drop from the mountains into the South Georgian fjords had served as a natural fence and kept the reindeer from colonizing new areas. But with climate change, that ice barrier has been rapidly retreating. The reindeer would inevitably have moved into new territory, says Martin Collins, the former chief executive of the South Georgian government. That could have put even more stress on the island’s native plants and wildlife.
“Introduced species are always going to be problematic,” says Gunn, the wildlife biologist. “We introduce them because it suits us at the time,” but later “we decide they’re doing something we don’t like ecologically,” she says. “So we tend to come up with a fairly radical solution.” The government of South Georgia reached that decision in 2010: The reindeer were to be eradicated.
“It was quite a challenge, logistically,” says Collins, who supervised the operation. That’s when Kilander and a Norwegian colleague were brought in from Norway for a month-long reconnaissance mission, which included estimating how many reindeer there were. The next year, the program commenced. (Earlier, some of the reindeer had been relocated to the Falklands, where they live on.)
First, fences were erected in one of the two areas to be cleared. Then a team of indigenous Sami reindeer herders from Norway and Sweden spent around two weeks corralling the reindeer. Many of the animals were weak after the South Atlantic winter, as detailed in a government report, and some died during the operation. Kilander says that these were exceptions.
Once confined, the reindeer were dispatched, one by one, and their remains taken to a nearby fishing vessel rented from Spain. Marksmen from the Norwegian Nature Inspectorate pursued stragglers. That summer, more than 1,900 reindeer were culled in the first of the two reindeer areas. Then the marksmen moved on to the second area and removed some 1,500 more. The following summer, six Norwegian hunters came to finish the job—3,140 additional reindeer in six weeks. In places where reindeer intermixed with penguins, the reindeer were driven away from the colonies to make sure birds wouldn’t be hit by stray shots, says Kilander. “We never hit a single penguin,” he says. The marksmen had to come back for a third year, and as late as December 2017, three reindeer were seen alive—briefly.
“I would be very surprised if anyone would see any more live reindeer [on the island],” says Kilander, who says he never doubted that eradicating the reindeer was the right thing to do. For the birdlife and vegetation, he says, he realized it was “necessary to get rid of these animals.” The final tally was around 6,750. The island now mostly belongs to the penguins once again.
The year 2018, on its own, left a lot to be desired. The apocalypse was proclaimed, romaine lettuce was sullied, Cardi B and Offset broke up—wherever you stand, it seems, it’s high time to wave in 2019. Hell, scientists even published a study positioning the mid-6th century as the worst time to be alive, as if to distract us from our own reality. But in these waning days, there’s one thing we can do to reclaim the year, and preserve whatever good it had to offer: We can focus on the litany of wacky, random, and overlooked anniversaries that can’t be credibly observed for another five years.
1518: The Dancing Plague of Strasbourg
First, let’s moonwalk back 500 years to the town of Strasbourg, now in northeastern France, where in July 1518 a most bizarre plague took hold. It all started when one Frau Troffea, a 16th-century precursor to Martha and the Vandellas, started dancing in the street. On she went, alone, until she collapsed—after which she simply resumed, and with company. Within the space of a week, more than 30 people had joined Troffea in her public grooving, and by the end of September, some 400 locals were participating. Clueless of how they could control this unprovoked outburst, local authorities decided to assist the dancers, hoping that they’d get their fill and give it up. The city organized designated dancing spaces, and even hired professional musicians and dancers to guide the masses’ steps. They had to do something, after all: According to the BBC, when the dancing plague was at its most intense, as many as 15 people were dying per day due to “strokes, heart attacks, and sheer exhaustion.”
No one will ever know for sure what prompted the dancing plague. Guesses from 1518—that the dancers had “hot blood,” or else were possessed by demons—don’t really hold up. A more credible explanation comes from the historian John Waller. He suggests that the dancers may have believed themselves to be compelled by Saint Vitus—the patron saint of dancers, who was thought to curse people into forced dancing. The perception of a curse could have marked some kind of stressed-out reaction to recent famines in the area, and outbreaks of other diseases.
1618: The Second Defenestration of Prague
Defenestration, n.: “a throwing of a person or thing out of a window.” This word (defined here by Merriam-Webster) looms largely in one of the more destructive chapters of European history.
The defenestration itself, thankfully, didn’t do too much harm (there were no casualties). Four hundred years ago, two Protestants from Bohemia (the Western half of modern-day Czechia) took it upon themselves to chuck three regents of the Catholic Habsburg authorities from the windows of the Prague Castle. It was punishment for a wave of closures of Protestant chapels, said (rightly) to violate the 1609 Letter of Majesty, which guaranteed religious freedom within Bohemia (for Protestants and Catholics, anyway). The defenestration was an electrifying act of protest that raised the temperature even higher, before tensions boiled over into the Thirty Years’ War. During that conflict, which took place between 1618 and 1648, different religious and political groups vied for control of central Europe, killing more than eight million people in the process.
There’s something about Prague that just drives dissidents towards defenestration. The city’s first defenestration had taken place in 1419, when religious protesters threw city councillors out of the windows of the New Town Hall, killing seven of them. The event was significantly deadlier, if much less historic.
1768: The Chinese Sorcery Scare
And now for some 250-year-old magic. In 1768, China was overtaken by fear of jiao hun, or “soul stealing.” As Philip A. Kuhn explains in his book Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, it all started with a crew of workers repairing a gate outside Deqing, in the east. Rumor had it that the workers were attaching small sheets of paper, inscribed with people’s names, to the tops of the wooden piles they hammered into the river. The act was said to endow the workers with control over those individuals—and before long, other means of thievery had come into use.
One involved mi yao, “stupefying powder” thrown into people’s faces to distract them as the soul thieves cut off their queues, the long braids commonly worn by men at the time. The right incantations, it was feared, could turn a queue into a remote control for someone’s soul, and men all over the place were finding theirs abruptly severed: People were waking up without them, and having them snitched from behind while urinating. Some feared that, if a sorcerer wrapped a severed queue around a human-shaped cutout, the tiny piece of paper could come to life and be deployed for evil deeds. It was not only an issue of security, but also of politics: The queue represented a sign of deference to the Emperor (forgoing the braid could end in decapitation), who was naturally compelled to respond strongly to this mysterious outbreak of dark and rebellious activity.
1818: The Dandy Horse Gallops Onto the Scene
By which, of course, we mean the first bicycle. The dandy horse was the first human-powered, two-wheeled vehicle, and at first glance, it looks an awful lot like the modern bike—just more wooden, and rickety, and unbearably uncomfortable. But it’s missing a rather significant component: There are no pedals, and riders had to operate the dandy horse by walking it along, gathering speed until they could coast for a while. We’re not entirely sure where the name comes from, but there’s no doubting that it beats the other monikers: Laufmaschine (German for “running machine”) and draisine (for Karl Drais, the German inventor who created the dandy horse in Mannheim).
Drais’ invention, patented in 1818, was quickly supplanted by more advanced takes on his concept, though the modern balance bikes on which many children learn to ride are essentially the same thing. Rudimentary though it may have been, the dandy horse fomented a revolution in transportation, and marked a high point in the history of naming inventions.
Well, 2018, you did good, as far as your arbitrary connection to esoteric history goes. One day, we’ll be able to look back on some of your own stuff and laugh.
Happy New Year! It's time again to break out the champagne and funny hats, because we made it through another 12 months (and given how this year has gone, that's no small miracle). While in the United States, a dropping ball and the kiss of a loved one mark the passing of the year for most, there are all sorts of other traditions that are both festive and fascinating. To find out more, we asked our readers to tell us about their local rituals, and our excitement for the holiday has come back anew.
People told us about small rituals of domestic cleansing, ushering out the old year and welcoming in the new; various symbolic wishes for prosperity, like jumping over their wallet or getting their hair cut; and a whole slew of food-related traditions that sound both delicious and pretty lucky.
Check out a selection of some of our favorite submissions below, and if you have a unique New Year tradition you'd like to share, head over to our new Community forums and tell us about it! They all sound a lot more interesting than making another resolution!
Jump! Jump!
“When I met my wife's family, I learned that their tradition is to jump over their wallets on New Year's Eve for good luck.” —Billy, Southern California
“Jump seven ocean waves!” —Monique, Salvador, Brazil
“My sisters and I used to stand on the coffee table or a chair and jump into the New Year when the clock hit midnight. I no longer stand on an item, and am not sure if my sisters still partake, but I still like to hop at midnight and then immediately curl up in bed. Although for Y2K we did have a sip of Korbel before jumping, just in case the world ended first. At least I know the new year started with some form of exercise, haha!” —Brandi, Leona Valley, California
Lucky Delicious
“Eat 12 raisins all together at the same time and make a wish that becomes a resolution for the new year. [I’ve done this] at home with my family, since I was little. Fancy dinner with friends or family, champagne, raisins, and someone special to kiss and hug. I feel like a refreshment to start something, like a new opportunity to make things right and be happier.” —Joana, Portugal
“Food! Black-eyed peas and hog jowls and corned beef and cabbage for good luck.” —Buddy Oakes, Columbia, Tennessee
“On December 31st, at midnight, everyone in Spain has a grape with every one of the 12 bell strikes. Every TV network connects with the clock tower in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, where thousands of people gather to welcome the New Year. Although it is a relatively young tradition (it started in 1895), it has become a must for everyone in the country. Eating the 12 grapes at the same pace means you will have prosperity in the upcoming year. That is, if you don't choke, of course. The bells strike slow enough to eat, but fast enough to swallow. Give it a try!” —Jorge Santo Tomás, Madrid, Spain
“On New Year's Day, we always eat roast pork and sauerkraut for good luck in the new year. This is an old 'PA Dutch' (German) tradition. Usually it's served with mashed potatoes and applesauce and horseradish for the pork. It's supposed to ensure good luck in the new year.” —Wendy J. Diffendall, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
“In our household, it is thought to bring good luck for the coming year if the first male to enter the house eats some herring. I am the only one who likes herring so I get to uphold the tradition. Two years ago I did not do it for the first time in many years, and our barn burned down later that year” —Dan Schonberg,Lake Odessa, Michigan
“I eat black-eyed peas and greens. I've done it all my life. It ensures prosperity.” —Robert, Memphis, Tennessee
“Growing up, we had corned beef and cabbage on New Year's Day every year. I still observe the tradition. My family background is Welsh. It’s a nice meal to start off the new year right and less cliche than having it on St. Patrick's Day.” —Bethany, Kansas
“Keep bread and money on the table on New Year’s Eve. It ensures that you have enough food and money for the new year.” —Jennifer, Southern California
Marx Brothers, New Year's Babies
“I make a big bowl of popcorn, a glass of wine, gather the cats and watch Marx Brothers' movies. I invented it. It keeps me from thinking what an awful year the past year has been.” —SJ Wolfe, Worcester, Massachusetts
“Watching Marx Brothers movies. As a kid growing up in Chicago, my parents would host a poker party and I was banished to my bedroom with a little black-and-white TV. One of the TV stations would show a Marx Brothers marathon on New Years Eve for years, and it just stuck. Who doesn't want to enter the new year watching a Marx Brothers movie?” —Jeff Smith, Houston, Texas
Out With the Old
“At the stroke of midnight I throw a glass of water out the front door of my house while taking 10 sips of champagne. It takes all the bad out of the house and one's life.” —Jan, Woodbury, New Jersey
“Wear yellow underwear, or make a dummy out of cloth, dress it with old clothes and burn it at the turn of the new year. The first one brings good luck. For the second tradition, the dummy is supposed to represent the old year, and by burning it, you welcome the new year with a clean slate, so to speak.” —Berta Isabel Cortes, New York
“We fill a pot with water and dump it on the street at the stroke of midnight. It's a Cuban family tradition. It cleans your house of negative energy.” —Gema Valdes, Miami, Florida
“Gather up all your loose change, and at midnight, make a wish for prosperity and throw the money out of the front door as fast as you can. I remember doing it when I was little, so I can't say how long we had practiced it. Every year that you do this ritual, you may come into some draining events, but you will always have enough money to get by. But in the year that it was not done (I had three), you go way past your last dime and it is frightful.” —Sheryl May, Rochester, New York
“We don't wash clothes on New Year's Day. If you wash clothes, you will wash for a funeral in the new year.” —Carma Burke, Birmingham, Alabama
“At midnight, I open the back door to let the old year out and the front door to let the new year in. If there's only one door, a window will suffice. My mom learned it from her mom, so this tradition is at least 60 years old. Clean slate!” —Kim, Michigan
Get Loud
“I learned the lyrics of Auld Lang Syne and I sing it for real! It's a lovely tune. I took it more seriously when I learned it was written by Robert Burns. It quickly makes me stand out as a weirdo once everyone trails off after the first phrase. Alone, tipsy, and fixated on finishing a task that no one else cares about; it's a good way to start the year.” —Luke, Brooklyn, New York
“Going outside at midnight and banging on pots and pans with a spoon. It’s just general noise-making, but it’s also supposed to have something to do with luck/scaring away bad spirits. Also, the person with the darkest hair has to go out the back door and enter the front door carrying a loaf of bread for good luck in the next year. They're celebratory rituals of luck.” —Kelly Delaney, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Keep it Clean
“The house must be cleaned top to bottom. Shower and put clean clothes on close to midnight. Leave a piece of cake by the front door for the first footer (they must be a tall, dark-haired person) to cross the threshold. Sit by an open window at midnight and listen for the bells (the town hall clock rings in the new year). This is tradition all over Scotland. By doing these things, it will mean you and your home will be clean all year, and the first footer brings luck to the home. Listening to the bells brings all of the family together at the start of the new year.” — Brian McMillan, Paisley, Scotland
“There is a southern Italian tradition where we have to be wearing a pair of new, red underwear. This is for both men and women. It’s always nice to have a pair of new underwear on.” —Laura Burson, Texas
Baby Powder and a Haircut
“In Fiji it is tradition to throw water balloons and cover your friends with baby powder on New Year's Day. Water balloons are just fun, and baby powder, I suppose, is symbolic of being a newborn.” — Ed Edwards, Sigatoka, Fiji
“In Chinese tradition, you would want to cut your hair before the turning of the year. Hair in Cantonese or Mandarin is a homonym with the word ‘wealth,’ so if you cut your hair during the new year period, you're essentially parting ways with your wealth. You also never gift people shoes for new years. ‘Shoes’ is a homonym with the sound of sighing in Chinese, so if you gift someone shoes for New Year's, they'll be sighing all year. I’m getting my hair cut next week, and also trying to get my parents to get me new shoes for Christmas instead of New Year’s.” —Jessi N. Hong Kong
Get to know some cuddly roaches and dramatic beetles.
With the New Year upon us, many of us will resolve to tend to existing relationships and forge new, meaningful ones. But for most, befriending a bug won’t make the resolutions list. And according to the beloved Bug Whisperer, Aaron Rodriques, it should.
An entomologist and longtime rearer of many insects, Rodriques knows what it means to feel love for bugs. They can be cuddly, functional, fabulous, and downright freaky. Let humans carry on with meet-ups and digital dating—bugs have bigger things to do, like eat human hair and jingle their genitals.
Not all bugs are for everyone. Even within a single species, Rodriques says, they can have vastly different personalities. So to make the selection slightly easier, we’ve put together a list of just a few A-List bugs worth befriending, or at the least, admiring, in 2019.
Bug Most Likely to Have Its Own Reality TV Show: The Blue Death-Feigning Beetle
“I know a few bugs that are drama queens, for sure,” says Rodriques. “But when I think of drama I really do think of the blue death-feigning beetle.” Brilliantly blue and bumpy-backed, this bombshell of a beetle’s waxy turquoise sheen comes from an exoskeletal coating that protects it from the hot Sonoran Desert sun.
But it’s got a lot more going for it than mere good looks. According to Rodriques, when it senses some kind of threat, it pulls a rather dramatic stunt. Rolling onto its back, its legs splayed in the air, it fakes its own death—sometimes for hours at a time. “It’s always playing dead,” says Rodriques. “It’s a big faker. It’s a liar.”
If you don’t mind the drama, however, this might be the best bug bud for you. Though it feigns death constantly, it actually lives for a very long time, sometimes over 10 years. Rodriques is the proud owner of two at the moment, and says they’re great pets to give as gifts to friends, even if they’re not big bug people. “They’re just too interesting of a spectacle to not enjoy.”
Best Bug to Bring to Brunch:* Bagheera kiplingi
One arena in which we might not expect insects to excel is fine dining. This is a fair assumption. Cockroaches eat human hair. Dung beetles eat literal shit. But if you’re planning on taking a bug to a bougie brunch without worrying about what kind of crazy thing it might try to order, consider linking up with the Bagheera kiplingi, a jumping spider that happens to be vegan.
While most jumping spiders prefer meatier menus, this guy sticks to a plant-based diet. It hangs out on acacia trees in Central America and Mexico, zigzagging through armies of territorial ants to snag the highly coveted tips of the leaves. Though there’s nothing wrong with more murderous spideys (they’re a huge help when it comes to pest management), Rodriques points out that vegan spiders help dismantle some major spider stigma. “They really remove the idea that we typically project onto spiders that they’re all mindless killing machines.”
Best Bug to Help You Sort Out the Skeletons in Your Closet: The Dermestid Beetle
Some friends can help you unpack your dark past, but beetles can help you clean up your literal collection of bones. Dermestid beetles, sometimes called “museum bugs,” are fast-moving flesh-eating powerhouses. Often kept on staff at osteological departments of museums, they remove meat and other organic matter from skeletons without damaging the bones themselves. Dermestids are adept, hungry workers, taking a mere few hours for a colony to bring a small rodent from carcass to gleaming skeleton.
But they’re probably not proper pets for the novice. If they escape, dermestid beetles can chew through carpets, wood, and entire book collections. Plus, Rodriques says, they’re too small to be all that much fun to handle. But for museum workers who really need to spiff up a skeleton, these bugs will do the job.
Bug With a Freaky Party Trick: The Water Boatman
Just like any friend you like to bring along to parties, the water boatman isn’t an insect you’d want to spend any real quality time with, but might be fun to have around for the night. Heard near ponds throughout several countries in Europe, the water boatman is undeniably loud. In fact, it’s one of the loudest animals on the planet relative to its body size, emitting a 99-decibel call to attract mates. More than that, it makes noise in a truly gnarly way.
To produce its ear-splitting song, it scrapes its “genitalia appendage” against its ribbed abdomen, playing itself with its penis like a built-in güiro. The resulting noise is so boisterous that it projects from the bottom of the pond where the boatmen are located all the way to the water’s surface.
If you’re looking for objectively loud acoustics, Rodriques says, cicadas are your best bet, but the water boatman is certainly more of an entertainer.
Unexpected Cuddlebug: The Wide Horn Hissing Cockroach
If your intention is to spend time with an insect that will show you a little TLC, Rodriques suggests hanging out with the wide horn hissing cockroach. Native to Madagascar, the hisser can grow up to 4 inches long.
Though you may not associate giant roaches with affection, the wide horn hisser isn’t terribly afraid of humans, and will actually want to hang out with you. According to Rodriques, they may be able to identify their owners by touch and smell, so you can train them to become familiar with you. “People really never think about insects as creatures you can bond with,” he says. “But this is an insect that’s okay with human touch, and may even gravitate towards you if you take care of it."
During the holidays, we often try to capture the feeling of celebrations past. Usually, that means making traditional foods, whether it’s our great-aunt’s fruitcake or the family eggnog. Holidays have a way of preserving vintage recipes that we’d never normally consider. But one custom has truly died out: the centuries-old tradition of toasting with actual toast.
People have been drinking to each other’s health since time immemorial. The origins of the term “toast” for a drinking ritual is perhaps related to these boozy blessings. Sixteenth-century German students often shouted the Latin word Prosit, meaning “May it do you good!” during drinking sessions. “Prosit” eventually morphed into the German toast “Prost!” (Or so many scholars believe.) It’s not hard to imagine the leap from “prost” to “toast.”
But another theory that's gained credence among food historians is that the term originates from the surprisingly frequent practice of mixing toast and alcohol. For a time, proposing a toast called for wine or beer, garnished with a slice of bread.
Although it now seems strange, for the privileged in medieval Europe, no day was complete without a bowl of warm wine and “sop,” sodden, toasted bread. Even Joan of Arc was known to enjoy it. For everyone else, warm, ale-soaked bread was an inexpensive, calorie-filled meal. But sops were added to soup and milk as well. Toasted bread was a potent symbol of plenty. The English even covered apple trees in cider-dipped toast, as part of an ancient ritual for a good harvest. (The custom is still ongoing.)
Recipes for the toasts called for fine white bread, cut and toasted on a fire. Then, they were flavored with sugar, ginger, or green herbs such as borage and sorrel. These dishes was so essential to the British diet that the words “soup” and “supper” are both derived from sop. They snuck into slang, too: "Milksop” was an old-fashioned insult that implied weakness and flabbiness. But toasted bread in wine could pack a punch. The politician and philosopher Francis Bacon observed that “sops in wine, quantity for quantity, inebriate more than wine of itself.”
Even as sops became less central to the European diet (bread-filled French onion soup is a survivor of the custom), it hung around in drinks. The Elizabethans ladled out wassail, an ancient drink of ale and cider with floating toast, to carolers going door to door. Around the same time, Shakespeare’s heavy-drinking character Falstaff called for a “toast.” But what he wanted was bread along with his fortified wine.
Drinking to each other’s health became more popular than ever in the early 1700s, according to linguist Dan Jurafsky. With cups filled with hot wine and ale, topped with soggy bread, drinkers toasted each other with elaborate, clever speeches. It was a type of drinking game that usually ended with everyone getting extremely drunk. Around this time, “toast” began referring to the practice rather than the food.
Most of all, drinkers wanted to toast beautiful women. If a lady was considered particularly beautiful, she could even become the “toast of the town.” One writer in 1712 gave the definition of a town “toast” as simply “the lady we mention in our Liquors.” Another writer attributed the term to a much more disgusting origin. A generation before, he writes, an extremely beautiful lady was bathing in one of the hot springs in the town of Bath. A crowd of her fans stood outside the building, and one drank a cup of her bathwater as a sign of his devotion. Another admirer declared he didn’t like the idea of drinking such a thing—he’d rather have the toast. (In other words: the lady.)
So if you’re looking for a traditional alternative to eggnog during the holidays, you can make a wassail bowl and cover it with toast. (It’s both a drink and a snack!) Or feel free to update the tradition by cramming toast into your Champagne flute.
If there’s one thing you should probably do before 2018 ends, it’s follow @notatlasobscura on Twitter. It's a fake Atlas Obscura Twitter account, equal parts parody and creative gold mine, that makes for a perfect pairing with the official one.
This mysterious profile, supposedly operated by “a secret society founded by Millard Fillmore,” has been generating clever, untrue tweets since January 2017. Apparently, Mexico City’s surreal, almost unbelievable Island of the Dolls is the place entry on our site that got Millard, as we'll call him, thinking: “it wouldn’t be too hard to make something like that up.” So, he started making stuff like that up.
Though @notatlasobscura replicates much of the tone of our content, none of the things Millard posts are real. While we write about the obscure, yet accessible wonders of our world, Fake Atlas Obscura makes the unreal seem true. Somehow, he’s figured out how to straddle sensationalism and authenticity just so, and our timelines are all the better for it. “I want to make it clear that I’m coming up with the stuff myself,” Millard tells me. In fact, he’s so cautious about not stepping on our toes, that he combs through the site daily to make sure he’s not tweeting anything similar to what we’ve published recently.
Millard is such a convincing Atlas Obscura tweeter that the team here at real @atlasobscura has lost sleep over his identity. Is he one of us? Or an ex-employee? Or someone’s spouse?! (Surprisingly, he tells me that only one person has ever DM’d him asking who he is.) Via direct messages, I tried to break him down: Have you ever been on an Atlas Obscura trip? “No.” What’s your favorite place in the Atlas? “The isolated, abandoned ones.” I got nothing. Luckily, though, he agreed to a more formal Q&A, and his answers felt convincing, though said with a wink—much like his tweets. But don’t take my word for it! Keep reading and follow @notatlasobscura to see for yourself.
AO: Do you run an empire of @fakemediacompanies of which we are only a small slice?
Nope. The only other fake account I run is a parody of a certain high-profile business magnate/television personality. That one got wildly out of control. I’m so sorry.
AO: Ghosts or UFOs?
UFOs. I’m more interested in new stuff from somewhere else than reconstituted stuff from here. Sorry, I do realize that sounded pretty cold.
AO: Who’s your favorite Beatle?
I lived a largely Beatle-less existence until after college. I was educated at home, didn’t have a TV growing up, and was mostly insulated from popular culture, so I never developed a preference. I’d have to say the white one parked on the left curb of Abbey Road. I’ve always been a fan of Volkswagen design.
AO: If you could pick anywhere in the Atlas to go on vacation where would it be?
That is a difficult question. I’ve always been curious about Pripyat and Duga-3. The place I really want to visit is here, though. I don’t think it’s in the Atlas, for obvious reasons, but oh boy it deserves to be.
AO: Salty, sweet, or sour?
Depends on whether we’re talking food or personalities. I’d say salty for the first and sweet for the second.
AO: How long does it take you to craft a Fake AO Tweet?
Longer than you might think. I need to make sure I’m not re-using material, themes, or wording—I don’t want to look unimaginative. I also don’t want to come up with something that’s cartoonishly strange, or just weird for the sake of being weird. My goal is something that sounds bizarre enough to be believable. That’s not always easy.
AO: Favorite Atlas Obscura place?
I don’t even know where to begin with that—honestly, it’s usually whatever one I just read. The places that stand out in my mind right now are the Detective Bar Progress in Tokyo, and the Oise Aisne American Cemetery. That was haunting. So dark and sad.
AO: Most obscure food you enjoy eating?
Yebeg Alitcha. It’s an Ethiopian lamb dish. I wish I could say I first experienced it in a shepherd’s hut at the foot of Mt. Entoto, but I’ve actually only ever eaten it in Harlem, at a restaurant named Zoma, because I’m not nearly as worldly as my culinary tastes imply. It’s good, though.
AO: Preferred method of transportation?
Walking, kayaking, driving, and flying, in that order. I don’t like flying, honestly. It’s odd—up until the time I was 15, I spent more time on planes than most kids spend in cars, and I always looked forward to it. I think air travel has gotten meaner these days, and now that I personally have to deal with the chaos, I’m less of a fan.
AO: If you had to collect one thing, what would it be?
Old Apple hardware. The obscurer, the better. Someday I will possess a barn that will be the absolute bane of my heirs.
AO: How should we describe your identity in the article?
As the clock strikes midnight, ushering in January 1, the crowds packed into New York City’s Times Square are covered with a blizzard of confetti. Around one ton of the stuff dances toward the street, and many of the scraps are unique: In the month leading up to the revelry, passersby have been invited to scrawl wishes on the fluttering fragments, either in person or online. The festive flurries will twirl through the air and then gather on the street, like neon snowdrifts.
Shivering merrymakers wait hours for the big moment. Jennifer Rice isn’t among them.
Rice usually spends New Year’s Eve warm and cozy at home, she says—but surrounded by her collection of vintage confetti. Some highlights are now on view at the City Reliquary museum in Brooklyn.
Rice’s passion for the little specks was kindled when she read an article about restoring the Rainbow Room, a venue on the 65th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in the heart of midtown Manhattan. The landmarked space first opened to upper-class tipplers in 1934, and ran on and off until 2009. After a five-year closure, it reopened in 2014, with a new look. Many accounts of the renovation mentioned that crews had excavated decades-old confetti from beneath the dance floor.
Rice wasn’t sure whether the story was true, but she found it charming. How had something so flimsy, predestined to be swept into a dustbin and unceremoniously heaped into the trash, managed to survive under there? “I thought that was so exciting,” she says, “that something meant to be thrown away escaped.”
Confetti has a long history stretching back centuries in France and Italy, where well-wishers pelted each other with fistfuls of colorful, candy-coated almonds. By the late 1800s, handfuls of tossed candy and plaster gave way to bits of paper, which were less likely to stab someone in the eye.
Rice’s collection is more recent, spanning 1920 to 1970. So far, she has about 50 objects, which she finds on eBay, Etsy, and vintage sales, including the sprawling Brimfield flea market in Texas.
Her haul ranges from a roll of paper confetti to mod plastic shoes sprinkled with a confetti pattern. Many items are some version of little circles and squares in their original cardboard packaging.
At home, Rice keeps much of her collection on a shelf in her kitchen. To keep it safe from her three cats, who could knock it into the sink, she stores some in jars, and also buys multiples of the same packs if she can. Multiples also allow her to crack some of the packages open to reveal the contents. “I definitely don’t want to empty them completely,” she says.
Rice knows that it takes a whole crew to make it rain confetti in Times Square. In recent years, more than 100 people have worked in tandem to fling bits of paper down from rooftops, tossing it in unison when they hear the phrase, “Go confetti.” The crew members are dubbed “confetti dispersal engineers,” and their ringleader is Treb Heining, who has been helming the drop for more than 25 years and has also masterminded paper blizzards at the Super Bowl, Olympics, and Academy Awards. The positions are coveted gigs, and Rice hasn’t been able to score one. She’ll toast the New Year surrounded by confetti, but would jump at the chance to be one of Heining’s elves. “It would be a dream if he was like, ‘Want to join me?’” she says. For someone so charmed by festive scraps, there’s maybe no place more magical than a cold, windy rooftop overlooking the crowd waiting below.
From bioluminescent fungus to random bone houses, here's what we talk about at the office.
Look, we're pretty strange around here. But this is to be celebrated. At Atlas Obscura, strange and wondrous is what we're all about. This place is a welcoming hub for those of us who grew up feeling as though some of our hobbies and daydreams ought not to be talked about in the schoolyard.
As grown-up people of Atlas Obscura, we encourage and delight in each other's passions, whether the passion be blimps, taxidermy, or edible insects. We have so much to learn from one another. And so much to talk about.
In this spirit, here are a few of the more notable things overheard in the office this year.
“There’s an algae party at the library tomorrow night.”
“I’m sorry I wasn't able to dig up anyone who's an expert on beetle mummification! As a consolation prize, I do have a super weird discovery about sperm."
“Horse legs are fingers, that’s why they break so easily.”
“Can we finally build your pirate ship this holiday?"
“That saves us some money, and that extra money will go directly to booking snakes.”
"I would like every week to be Teeth Week."
"Did we miss a random bone house?"
"Okay I really need to get rid of this helium tank."
“He has a monkey automaton that actually smokes cigarettes.”
“May I trouble you to ask what species of cockroach you placed in my hand before dinner?”
“I’ve avoided getting into miniatures because I’m worried I’ll get too into miniatures.”
"I wanted to confirm that the hamburger-eating statue was real."
"Anyone know where I can get some tiny doll arms? Just arms, no bodies."
For centuries, farmers suspected their sick livestock had been "elf-shot."
In Scotland, a sick cow was a sign that something supernatural was afoot. Whether weak, milk-less, or just a little bloated, an unhealthy heifer in the Anglo-Saxon world was a big problem—and a fantastical one at that. According to many interpretations of medieval and modern-era Anglo-Saxon folklore, sick livestock were likely victims of hard-to-see, sharp-shooting elves. Their condition, referenced for nearly a millennium in charm books, folklore, and documentation of witchcraft, was known as, simply, “elf-shot.”
Throughout the early and medieval Anglo-Saxon world, elves occupied a shifting but ever-important role in the natural, supernatural, and mortal worlds. Early Anglo-Saxon conceptions of elves envisioned the other-worldly beings to be more similar to humans or gods than monsters or dwarves. Though distinct from demons and beasts, elves still had a slightly sinister side. A witch's orders, indignation at an unknowing step into elf territory, or a mere whim might prompt an elf to shoot dagger-like arrows at the unsuspecting cow.
The first mention of “elf-shot” appears in Anglo-Saxon Leechbooks, or healing books, as early as the mid-10th century, according to Jennifer Culver, professor of English at Texas University. Arrow-pierced cows showed symptoms ranging from loss of appetite to labored breathing. Often, they were reported to have grown thin and lost their ability to produce milk. In Ireland, one man wrote, “the animal’s hair stands up on her back, her ears lifeless and hanging.”
Perhaps because the symptoms were so varied, cures, too, ran the gamut. Most surefire antidotes included a charm or incantation, to be uttered alongside a slightly more physical ritual. According to one 20th-century text, a farmer in Selkirkshire might “take a blue bonnet that had been worn by the oldest member of the family, and with it ‘rub the cow all over, and the wound will make its appearance or the place will be seen where the wound has been.’” No bonnet? Another regional cure enlisted a local wise woman to jab the afflicted cow with a needle, fan it with a leaf from the bible, and mutter incantations. In Shetland, one might fold “a sewing-needle in leaf taken from a particular part of a psalm book” and secure it “in the hair of the cow.” In northern England, “elf-shotten” calves were given a particularly unsavory treatment in which farmers would rub their “mouths, lips, and nose with their own dung.”
According to Dr. Culver, one common cure came from the ocean. Historian and author Audrey Meaney has theorized that jagged fossils of belemnites, a squid-like mollusk that became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, were thought to be tiny daggers. The pointy specimen looks like a small, broken arrow, and, when discovered on the shore, was assumed to have a sort of sympathetic power to keep other supernatural darts at bay. “They could be draped on the livestock, or hung over barns or stables to protect the animals,” says Dr. Culver. “Or farmers would dip them into the water, and the cow would drink the water that they were dipped into.”
It wasn’t just cows who were believed to be afflicted. Humans, too, could be struck by an elf—particularly if they had wandered into territory controlled by elves. Though symptoms and treatments varied a little between species, what seemed to universally puzzle people about the affliction was the combination of sudden illness and lack of visible wound. “Imagine you’re walking next to someone who seems fine, but all of a sudden that person grabs his chest and starts to lean over, feeling as though he’s being stabbed,” says Dr. Culver. “There’s no way to describe how it happened, or where it came from, and there aren’t any outside marks.”
Because internal diseases, such as distemper for cows, or heart attacks for humans, weren’t visible, folks clung to what they could see. And there’s evidence that small, ancient arrowheads might have played a part in fleshing out the elf explanation. 20th-century scholars such as Thomas Davidson argue that neolithic flint might have been mistaken for small arrows. The consistency in shape and size of the archaeological finds, writes Davidson, made a compelling case for tiny beings creating tools. In the early 1700s, one Reverend wrote a letter proclaiming how strange it was "that these elf-stones ... fall from the aire. The commonality superstitiously imagines that the fairies hath made and gives them that shape, and that they doe hurt by them, which we call elf-shot."
According to Dr. Culver, elves made it into Scotland’s infamous witch trials, too. The shifting conception of what elves were, and what they were capable of, eventually morphed “from deities to less powerful ones that humans can command to do their bidding.” Women accused of being witches, such as Isobel Gowdie, were convicted for instructing devilish elves to sling magical darts at livestock with some kind of charm.
Not all scholars, however, agree that people seriously believed arrow-wielding elves brought on the bug. According to author and lecturer at the University of Leeds, Alaric Hall, no darts, arrows, or piercing instruments were involved in the process at all. Instead, he says, we’ve been misinterpreting “elf-shot” to mean, literally shot by an elf, when it was actually a more idiomatic way of talking about a sudden strike of pain. A series of mistranslations and misinterpretations of Old English words associated with medicine and pain have led to an overly elf-centric understanding of how people once viewed disease.
That people could have believed in tiny, dagger-slinging creatures capable of taking down herds of cattle might be hard to swallow, but the need to assign meaning to something seemingly inexplicable is universal. Whether we're musing on extraterrestrial life or self-diagnosing a strange bump, bruise, or unfamiliar illness, many of us still feel compelled to explain the unknown that exists in the natural world and inside our own bodies. Like those who claimed neolithic arrowheads must be elf-made tools, we, too, search for hard evidence to explain nebulous narratives. All elves aside, the unknown remains dark, deep, and, sometimes, a little whimsical.
What do we mean when we talk about “grossness”? Maybe an egregious oversight, a miscarriage of justice, or something that’s plainly, glaringly, indefensibly bad.
Sometimes, yes, we do mean those things. Other times, we mean something entirely different, and much simpler: "Grossness" as something to be celebrated or reveled in—something spectacularly crude, or joyously vulgar. Icky, in a fun way.
This year presented no shortage of moments of stomach-churning wonder. Here are some of the things that made us queasiest in 2018.
Behold, Latrines (and Coffins) Full of Ancient Poop
If you flush a toilet, you probably expect the foul stuff to snake its way through a labyrinth of pipes and eventually vanish during the wastewater treatment process. Folks who squatted at latrines made from barrels in Renaissance Denmark made no such assumptions—and their centuries-old poop is still hanging around. Archaeologists dug up a latrine in Copenhagen to learn more about local trade and eating habits. The poop held a surprising amount of wisdom—and, yes, it was still stinky.
In 2018, researchers also sifted through feces in pursuit of traces of parasites from the ancient city of Ephesus, in present-day Turkey, and studied long-dropped deuces in Bahrain, Jordan, Lithuania, and the Netherlands. Other teams came across sewage that had been leaking into a sealed sarcophagus buried beneath the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, for 2,000 years.
Fatbergs, Fatbergs, Everywhere
2018 was a big year for fatbergs. These sewer-clogging hunks of fats, oils, and pipe-mangled trash gained some measure of fame this year when one chunk of a behemoth recently hauled up from the streets beneath the Whitechapel neighborhood ended up on display at the Museum of London. Another gloopy monster, known as the South Bank fatberg, was the subject of a Channel 4 series, Fatberg Autopsy: Secrets of the Sewers. In 2019, cities around the world will continue to work to combat these big, festering problems.
Animals Stuck Inside Other Animals
It's no fun to have something stuck in your schnoz. Even boogers can be a bother, so it's likely that this Hawaiian monk seal was pretty uncomfortable when an eel dangled from his nose. The slippery creature had gotten wedged deep inside the seal’s nasal passage, and researchers yanked it out with a “slow, steady pull.”
Animals frequently end up inside other animals: Ones that feast on other creatures often die with parts of their meal still in their bellies, and fossilized remains in animals’ stomachs sometimes help researchers identify previously unknown species. But the dangling eels are a different situation. The scientists had seen these eel-afflicted seals before, and they’re not quite sure how the creatures get up there. Perhaps that’s a mystery to solve next year.
Some Mushrooms Look Like Dog Penises
When researchers recently set out to make an atlas of the fungi of North America, they had to include a few unsavory selections, including the Mutinus caninus, infamous for its pinkish, fleshy appearance and spermatic odor. Maybe there's something to be said for an apt descriptor, however off-putting.
A Naturalist Collected an Enormous Trove of Hair
Peter A. Browne wanted to get his hands on fur or whiskers, wherever they sprouted. In the mid-19th century, he sought whorls of wool, presidential tendrils, and more, from most any creature across the globe. He carefully fastened his hirsute haul into annotated scrapbooks. These were nearly lost to the garbage dump in the 1970s, when a last-minute save kept them at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, where they were on display in a hair-raising exhibition this fall.
People Pressed Boogers Between the Pages of Their Books
When we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about the treasures they found pressed inside books, we got some truly charming responses. One person stumbled across black-and-white photos, carefully affixed with yellowing tape; another person found a four-leaf clover, which luckily survived untold years intact. But readers came across gross stuff, too, including smeared boogers. If you absolutely must pick it and flick it, please leave the books out of it.
Cemetery Soil is Full of Gnarly Stuff
Cemeteries are a little like landfills, full of bodies instead of trash. Earlier this year, my former colleague Sarah Laskow wrote about cemetery soils, otherwise known as “necrosols,” which often contain all sorts of icky things, from pathogens such as drug-resistant E. coli to the chemicals used for embalming corpses. These and other contaminants can spread if cemeteries flood, but don’t let me be a huge humbug—though we’re running out space to bury people around the world, cemetery soil likely won’t be death of us.
Spicier alternative titles for some of our stories.
Often, before pressing the publish button on one of our stories, we'll do a quick headline brainstorm. Sometimes, said brainstorming yields phrases we wish we could share with you, dear reader. But there is only room for one headline atop every post, so we simply say goodbye to the excess words and move on.
Until now.
Here's a look at some of the headlines that weren't, but could have been.
