Atlas Obscura staff make their expert predictions for what's around the corner.

Prognostication is a risky business, but it's also a ton of fun. Just ask that Nostradamus guy. Or us! After reflecting on the highs and lows of 2018, we've assembled some niche trend predictions for next year. Are they heavily dependent on our individual predilections? Of course. But see if any resonate with your obscurity-chasing heart and mind.

Fabulous Squirrels

I’m not mad, exactly, about 2018 having been the year of the hot duck and the large cow, but allow me to make the case that next year’s collective moment of shared animal appreciation has a clear contender: the Malabar giant squirrel. Ever since my colleagues first alerted me to the existence of this marvelous rodent, a native of India, I can’t stop thinking about it. Squirrels of all kinds are already adorable—some of them can even turn their bodies into airborne gliders, for Pete’s sake!—but this guy, with its exaggerated dimensions and literal technicolor dreamcoat, is entirely deserving of our devotion. I don’t care if I have to plant one in a major city park, or force one to pose next to an entire scurry of smaller, more drab squirrels. Let’s commit now to making oversized, multicolored squirrels happen in 2019, people. We can do this.

—Sommer Mathis, Editor-in-Chief

Sunsun, the New Moonmoon

2018 taught us that moons can have moons, but more importantly that people love naming these recursive places. The prospect of the Earth’s moon having a second, nested one—like a kangaroo and its joey—caused the internet universe to have a global brainstorm about what these baby moons should, theoretically, be called. Submoons, moonettes, and mini-moons are personal favorites, but in 2019, why stop there? I’m no astronomer, but it seems like next year we could be presented with a kindred discovery: the sunsun. Adults birth children, large bodies of water beget smaller bodies of water, and suns will probably spawn similar little stars. So there ya have it, sunsun is the new moonmoon and will be stealing all the shine.

—Evan Nicole Brown, Editorial Fellow

Bone Churches

I find human mortality to be deeply unjust, and plan to fight it as long and hard as possible. That said: if I must die, I want something very cool to happen to my skeleton.

Here is about the coolest thing that can happen to your skeleton: turning it into a chandelier. A chandelier that will swing in the mansion of your wealthiest enemy? Perhaps, but a better and less resentment-infested milieu would be a bone church.

Bone churches exist. There’s a particularly grand one called Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora, Czechia. It contains the bones of 40,000 departed humans, some of which are arranged into, oh yes, a magnificent chandelier. But are there enough bone churches? I think not.

In 2018 we received what felt like an endless procession of memento moris—aimed not only at our individual mortality but the collective existence of the human race. Climate change cannot be wished away. It seems we are doomed, and the doom will arrive sooner than we had scheduled.

So the time is now. We must build bone churches. They will serve as monuments to human hubris, if nothing else. And when the waters rise and our bone chandeliers sink to the ocean floor, then shall we start to fossilize, while a hidden aquatic cache of coelacanths tut-tuts and says “I told you so.”

—Ella Morton, Senior Editor

Pudding

I think puddin’ is the future.

—Samir S. Patel, Deputy Editor

Petting Zoos for Fatbergs

In theory, at least, I love the idea of petting zoos and touch pools. It’s thrilling to get up close to something you’d never thought you’d see, let alone touch. But there are prickly ethical issues that chafe a little: Is it fair to subject these creatures to our ignorant poking and prodding? Are we exposing them, with each grubby little touch, to diseases that will put them at risk?

Maybe 2019 is the time to sidestep these particular moral and microbial quandaries and embrace a more straightforward solution: Let’s build some petting zoos for fatbergs.

In 2018, we’ve seen these festering masses of saponified oils, fats, and trash (so, so, so many wipes) continue to choke sewer systems in cities around the world. Sanitation departments often have to descend into the depths, break them up, and haul them to the surface.

Liberated from the pipes they blocked, fatbergs have made their way into museum vitrines and the tables of forensic scientists. My coworker Lex Berko visited a putrid little chunk when she was in London earlier this year, and I’m still pretty jealous. They’re gross! They’re cool! They record the story of what, exactly, goes on above ground—what we eat, and what we flush.

Look, I’ll bring my own gloves and promise to wash my hands afterwards. All I want for Christmas is the chance to touch a fatberg.

—Jessica Leigh Hester, Staff Writer

Pudding Zoos

2019 will be the year we finally have zoos full of slowly melting pudding animals. That you can touch. And also eat, I guess. Commemorative spoons will be available at the gift shop. You can get a cheap plastic one for like, $5, but you should pony up for the Deluxe Pewter Tasting Chariot, which is the largest spoon on offer. It’s about the size of your average soup ladle and is inset with an enamel-sealed cameo of the New Dorp Pudding Zoo’s founder, Travis.

—Eric Grundhauser, Community Editor

Cheese in Unexpected Places

For me, 2018 was the year I learned that cheese can lurk in some surprising places. In northern Scandinavia, cubes of dried, rich juustoleipä bob in mugs of coffee to form kaffeost. Meanwhile, in Puebla, Mexico, a small cantina slings shots of raisin liqueur that come with a goat cheese chaser. From China’s cheese tea craze to Yorkshire’s holiday pairing of Christmas cake with a slice of Wensleydale, cheese sneaks into all kinds of dishes and drinks. While some of these pairings are polarizing, they also have extremely loyal fanbases. That’s why I think 2019 will be the year that will make you question everything you know about cheese and where to find it. Cheesy candy? Cheesy pudding to appease Samir? The options are endless. Bring it on.

—Sam O’Brien, Foods Editor

Bogs

The time of the bog is nigh, and this time, it shan't be defeated.

—Lex Berko, Associate Editor

Native fish sashimi and green papaya pickles provided a taste of home.

In the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of Japanese people sought opportunity abroad. Many ended up putting down roots in a tropical new home, and now, Brazil sports the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. By many estimates, the number of Brazilian citizens with Japanese ancestry currently clocks in at more than 1.5 million.

The highest concentration of nikkei, or people of Japanese ancestry, is in São Paulo. Many people of Japanese descent also live in Brazil’s south and southeast, where their forefathers came to work on coffee plantations more than a century ago. But a smaller number of Japanese immigrants also landed in Brazil’s north, settling in the state of Amazonas after the local government offered free land to those willing to farm it, starting in the 1930s. Surrounded by the Amazon rainforest and amidst temperatures that could reach highs of 95°F, Japanese immigrants needed to adapt to radically different surroundings. Part of that meant a new cuisine, featuring everything from bean sushi to sashimi made with native fish.

One researcher has taken it upon herself to research Amazonian-Japanese cuisine. Linda Midori Tsuji Nishikido, of the Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM), studied the eating habits of Japanese immigrants in the Amazon in the post-war period for her Master’s degree. Nishikido herself is nisei, or second-generation Japanese, and she interviewed her own parents, family members, and other Japanese immigrants for insight. Soon, she had reconstructed their adaptation process and documented their food creations.

The results were creative. Nishikido found that without the ingredients they had in their homeland, new immigrants ingeniously replicated traditional recipes from Japan’s rich gastronomic tradition, using local fish, native fruits, and even cassava, one of the starchy cornerstones of Brazilian cuisine. They couldn't have had a richer pantry: After all, the Amazon rainforest is a wonderland of biodiversity.

But while the forest offered variety, Japanese immigrants found many of their old staples unavailable. Finding equivalents for soy sauce, miso, and tsukemono pickles in their new home proved difficult. According to Nishikido, many Japanese in Amazonas had no choice but to use local produce in familiar recipes. In the absence of soybeans, they recreated soy sauce using tucupi: a liquid extracted from bitter cassava that Brazilians in the north traditionally use as a seasoning. Plus, they engineered a miso recipe from native asparagus beans, owing to their similarity to more-familiar soybeans.

Recreating tsukemono pickles took even more creative leaps. Lacking radishes, turnips, and cucumbers, they pickled green papayas and overripe bananas. One thing that they did have in abundance was fish from the Amazon river. With many different river fish, they made sashimi and kamaboko, a type of fish cake made of pureed fish, cooked in a loaf-like shape and sliced for serving.

The immigrants also foraged the rainforest, looking for familiar ingredients such as edible mushrooms, fern buds, and palm hearts. “Over time, the table of Japanese immigrants became richer, because they learned to appreciate both the adapted cuisine and the local cuisine” of Amazonas, Nishikido says. After all, says Nishikido, food is far more than just a biological necessity. It is also a mirror on culture and society. To Nishikido, this hybrid cuisine reflects the emotions of a community doing their best to adapt to new surroundings. Replete in Amazonian-Japanese cuisine are “human feelings, such as unfamiliarity, homesickness, hope, [and] perseverance,” she says.

This type of food isn’t just eaten at home, either. Hiroya Takano arrived in Brazil with his family when he was 8 years old. Today, at age 66, he runs Shin Suzuran, a restaurant opened by his father in 1978. His journey from Japan was rooted in both disaster and opportunity. Originally from Wakkanai in the province of Hokkaido, his father was a farmer and manufacturer of potato starch until a strong, early frost devastated the region, leaving the family with few future prospects. So, his father decided to immigrate to Brazil, lured by the land concessions granted by the Amazonas government for farmers.

But the new farm wasn’t very successful, and his father instead opened a trailblazing restaurant. Shin Suzuran was the first Japanese restaurant in Manaus, Amazonas’s capital, and one of a few to focus on bringing together Japanese culinary tradition and local ingredients. There, Takano serves unique creations, such as vinegary sunomono made with water lily stems instead of the typical cucumber, fried nettle tempura and a lightly seared tataki made with tucunaré, or the indigenous peacock bass.

While the rivers offer many fishy treasures, it was an adjustment for Takano to move from chilly Wakkanai to one of the wettest places on earth. "When I got here, I was struck by the vastness of the rivers,” Takano says. “I had only seen so much water like this in the ocean.” He recalls his father gathering him and his siblings together and saying, “To stay here, you'll need to learn how to swim.” Today, he has become familiar with the rivers, preferring to source local fish for the restaurant such as the peacock bass and pirarucu, an ancient, air-breathing, giant fish of the Amazon.

After the restaurant opened, the family recruited Japanese cooks from São Paulo to replicate traditional recipes. But one cook after another left Amazonas to return to the city. “Few adapted to life here, without other countrymen, without karaoke,” Takano says. In the 1980s, Takano started working as a kitchen assistant to learn the recipes himself and prepare them his own way: with lots of local ingredients. Today, his children also work in the restaurant. His eldest daughter, Adriana, studied nutrition and became a chef, responsible for the hot dishes. His son, Adriano, is in charge of sushi.

In a way, using local ingredients was a defense mechanism. “Japanese people have a great adaptive capacity. We are very determined,” says Takano. “When we arrived, Japan had lost the war, and the world was looking at us with different eyes. My dad then said we needed to learn to follow the laws and adapt to the country.”

Using local ingredients in recipes was his way of following his father’s advice. “We had to show that we valued and respected what the locals already had. The cuisine is Japanese, but the ingredients are Amazonian,” says Takano, who is now working on adding wild greens from the rainforest to the menu. One example of adaptation is his use of waterlily, a plant that has a huge cultural and symbolic value in the region but is not widely consumed as food in Brazil. However, water lily is an ingredient in cuisines across Asia.

Nikkei cuisine (often defined as Japanese-Peruvian food) is a current culinary trend around the world. But according to Nishikido, the cuisine developed by Japanese immigrants in the Amazon is unique, with its own ingredients and style. While much Amazonian-Japanese cuisine leans on Japanese technique, some old strictures have softened during the process of adaptation. For example, eating raw river fish such as jaraqui and tambaqui (ocean fish is the norm) has slowly become more accepted.

Nishikido believes that all the adaptations are highly innovative. New immigrants used local ingredients to mimic their original cuisine, and they succeeded in developing a distinctive new one. According to Nishikido, some ingredients are entirely intangible: the “emotions and longings,” of Japanese-Brazilians, she says, created a cuisine capable of helping them adapt to their new land.

Hiroya Takano couldn’t agree more.

Georgia Gilmore's cooking fueled the Montgomery bus boycott.

On December 5, 1955, four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated city bus, a community meeting was held at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Thousands of black citizens gathered to hear about the proposed bus boycott, filling every inch of the church’s sanctuary, balcony, and basement auditorium. Loudspeakers were set up to accommodate the overflow, which extended for three blocks in each direction.

“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called out from the podium. “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being flung across the abyss of humiliation.” Dr. King’s speech—his first as a civil rights leader—electrified the crowd. The proposition to hold a bus boycott was met with thunderous applause and cheers of support.

Georgia Teresa Gilmore, a cafeteria cook, midwife, and single mother of six, was one of the thousands of people crammed into the church that night. “I never cared too much for preachers,” Gilmore later recalled, “but I listened to him preach that night. And the things he said were things I believed in.”

Gilmore was a large, gutsy woman who had little tolerance for racial bigotry. “Everybody could tell you Georgia Gilmore didn’t take no junk,” said Reverend Al Dixon. “If you pushed her too far, she’d say a few bad words, and if you pushed her any further, she would hit you.”

At the time, Gilmore was already in the midst of her own personal bus boycott. Two months before Parks’s arrest, a white bus driver had accepted Gilmore’s fare and then berated her for entering through the front door. He forced her off the bus and drove away, leaving her stranded. “I decided right then and there I wasn’t going to ride the busses anymore,” Gilmore said.

Gilmore played a pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. In between parenting her six children and juggling two jobs, she single-handedly operated a grassroots fundraising campaign to support the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization coordinating the protest. “Georgia is an unsung heroine of the Civil Rights Movement,” says Thomas E. Jordan, pastor of the Lilly Baptist Church in Montgomery. “She worked behind the scenes to support, and see the reality of, desegregation in Montgomery.”

In order to raise money for the MIA, Gilmore organized an underground network of black women who sold pound cakes, sweet potato pies, and plates of fried fish and stewed greens door-to-door. More than half of the city’s black female workers were employed by white families, so Gilmore’s group provided an opportunity for them to contribute without jeopardizing their jobs. “Some colored folks or Negroes could afford to stick out their necks more than others because they had independent incomes,” Gilmore told the Chicago Tribune in 1975, “but some just couldn’t afford to be called ‘ring leaders’ and have the white folks fire them.”

To protect the participants from any backlash, Gilmore named the group the Club from Nowhere. That way, if the MIA was ever asked where their money came from, they could honestly say “nowhere.” Only Gilmore knew who cooked and purchased the food.

To sustain the community’s enthusiasm, the MIA held biweekly rallies on Monday and Thursday nights. Gilmore’s fundraising updates were one of the highlights. Twice a week for over a year, the tall, voluptuous woman sauntered down the aisle singing “Shine on Me” or “I Dreamt of a City Called Heaven.” Gilmore emptied hundreds of dollars worth of coins and small bills into the collection plate and then announced how much money the club had collected that week. In response, the crowded church erupted into a jubilant din of applause, stomping feet, and a chorus of voices shouting “Amen” and “That’s right.”

The MIA organized a massive carpool network to put pressure on the city bus company. For 381 straight days, hundreds of cars, trucks, and wagons transported protestors between 42 pick-up and drop-off locations across the city. Even though all the vehicles were donated, the carpool was still expensive to run and maintain. The money Gilmore’s club raised helped pay for the gas, insurance, and repairs that kept the alternative transportation system running.

“Martin Luther King often talked about the ground crew, the unknown people who work to keep the plane in the air,” Pastor Jordan reflected in an oral history. “She was not really recognized for who she was, but had it not for been people like Georgia Gilmore, Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn't have been who he was.” The Club from Nowhere typically raised $125 to $200 each week (the equivalent of $1,100 to $1,800 today), and Georgia Gilmore is believed to have raised more money for the boycott than any other person in Montgomery.

Gilmore’s role in the movement came at a personal cost—she lost her cafeteria job. But she rebounded quickly. Dr. King lived a couple of blocks away from Gilmore and was a fan of her fortitude and fried chicken. When Gilmore was fired, Dr. King encouraged her to open her own business. With his financial backing, Gilmore transformed her dining room into an unofficial restaurant, which served as a clubhouse for civil rights leaders.

Every morning, Gilmore woke up around 3 or 4 a.m. to prepare lunch. Her menu changed day-to-day, but always included an assortment of ham hocks, stuffed pork chops, potato salad, collard greens, candied yams, bread pudding, and black eye peas. By noon, her house was crowded with customers, who often waited an hour or more for their turn to order. About a dozen people could squeeze around her dining room table, so everyone else ate standing up in her living room or kitchen.

Dr. King was a regular customer at Gilmore’s house, which doubled as his office and social club. Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King held clandestine meetings around her dining room table, fueled by fried fish and butter beans. “Her home was a haven for Dr. King and other civil rights leaders,” says Pastor Jordan. “It was a safe place to meet and discuss strategies.” Even after the white-owned restaurants were desegregated, Dr. King always headed straight to Gilmore’s place whenever he was back in town. According to Reverend Al Dixon, “Dr. Martin Luther King, he needed a place where he could go, where he could not only trust the people around him but trust the food.”

For many diners, Gilmore was as much of an attraction as her food. She had a no-nonsense attitude and a feisty sense of humor. Gilmore often greeted her guests with a “call from the kitchen,” John T. Edge writes in The Pottliker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South. In a growling voice, she’d say, “Come here you little whore and get your food! I don’t want to hear any of your mess. I got a big bowl of buttermilk and some corn bread for you to crumble in it, just like you want.”

No one was protected from Gilmore’s signature sass. In her house, Reverend Al Dixon was a “whore” and Dr. King a “heifer.” In response, Dr. King affectionately called the large woman “Tiny.”

Gilmore was also known for being a warm and welcoming host. “She was sort of seen as a mother figure,” recalls Pastor Jordan, who ate at Gilmore’s house regularly. “She had a concern and maternal care for the individuals coming in and out of her home. The atmosphere of her home allowed people to come in and relax, even if they were strangers.”

Everyone was welcome at Gilmore’s table. “Her living room and kitchen were a microcosm of what integration should look like,” explains Pastor Jordan. “It was crowded all the time with college students, government workers, military, professionals, and non-professionals.” Even Governor Wallace, the man who had previously proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” later ate at Gilmore’s. She called him “Guvs.”

Gilmore remained active in the Civil Rights Movement for the rest of her life, using her food to fuel social change. She died on March 7, 1990, the 25th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March. Despite being advised by her doctor to stop cooking, she woke up early to prepare chicken and potato salad for the people marching in commemoration. Instead, her family served the food to people who came to mourn her. Years later, Gilmore’s sister Betty told Edge that, “Lots of people brought food to the house, too, but everybody ate Georgia’s chicken and potato salad first. Nobody could fix it better.”

They're using the growing popularity of astrotourism to protect the night sky.

On a crisp September night, the rocky coastline around Sand Beach in Acadia National Park feels like the edge of the world. A rapt audience is gathered in the darkness, huddled together on blankets for one of the park’s most popular ranger-led programs: “Stars Over Sand Beach.” The Milky Way arcs high overhead, spilling stars in every direction in a sparkling spectrum of color—white, yellow, orange, and blue—and the dome of the sky is inky black.

The only artificial light comes from the occasional sweep of a flashlight and the faint glow on the horizon from the town of Bar Harbor just a few miles north. With a green laser, a park ranger points out constellations to the crowd: the W-shaped Cassiopeia, the bright star Arcturus in the Boötes constellation, and the cluster stars of the Pleiades.

More than 175 miles away from Sand Beach by car is downtown Portland, Maine. There, like in most urban centers, the muddy bluish-gray or orange glow of the night sky comes not from distant stars, but from light pollution—artificial light that blazes throughout the night on streets, sidewalks, basketball courts, and shopping centers.

In 2017, a multinational research team found that the Earth had gotten brighter at a rate of about two percent each year between 2012 and 2016. Increasingly, denizens of the developed world do not know what Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, calls “a wild sky”—the brilliant stars seen over Zion National Park in Utah, or Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia, or Death Valley, California. In addition to obscuring an essential aspect of the natural world, light pollution has been shown to disrupt normal sleep-wake cycles in humans and animals alike and to disorient wildlife in detrimental ways.

To raise awareness about light pollution and create support for conserving natural darkness, public land managers are relying on the growing popularity of astronomy tourism, or “astrotourism” for short. Astrotourism, a term once used to describe tourism in space that now encompasses night sky viewing, is on the rise. The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) reports that the number of worldwide parks applying to be on the list of certified “International Dark Sky Places” is five times higher than it was eight years ago—with 15 to 20 parks applying for the certification per year now versus just three or four in 2010 and 2011.

In 2017, Condé Nast Traveler declared astrotourism “now a thing” and a joint University of Michigan/NASA study posited that some 215 million Americans watched that year’s total solar eclipse, nearly double the number who had watched the 2017 Super Bowl.

“There’s a growing awareness of light pollution and of environmental issues in general,” says John Barentine, IDA’s director of public policy. “Some of this is a reaction to our increasingly frenetic existence and how we’re tied to our devices and feel increasingly disconnected from nature.”

As stewards of some of the wildest natural areas remaining in the country, the U.S. National Park Service has taken a leading role in promoting the value of the night skies. This is despite the fact that the federal government, which oversees the NPS, has never mandated protection for night skies like it has for water and other natural resources. This contributes to the land managers’ key challenges: limited budgets, a nearly $11 billion maintenance backlog, increased visitation, and development that is pushing ever closer to park boundaries, threatening them with encroaching light pollution.

As a rare bastion of natural darkness on the East Coast, but one whose popularity is booming, Acadia National Park is wrestling with these same issues and offers a good example of what the national parks are doing to preserve their dark nights.

Light pollution has been a fruitful field of study for researchers in recent years, one that the Loss of the Night Network (LoNNe), a multi-national research consortium based in Berlin, Germany, says is growing. In 2015, LoNNe and IDA began tallying relevant journal articles in their Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) research database.

Today, the database has more than 900 published research papers about worldwide light pollution and its impacts on all creatures, including humans. In 2016, for example, the American Medical Association reported that blue-toned LED street lighting was five times more disruptive to the internal biological clock that governs our sleep-wake cycles—our circadian rhythms—than conventional street lighting.

Disrupting the natural light-dark cycle can also have devastating effects on animals that are nocturnal and crepuscular (active in twilight), which rely on the dark for their most essential activities: hunting, eating, and mating. In a study published in early 2018, researchers at the University of South Florida found that house sparrows infected by West Nile virus remained infectious longer when they were exposed to artificial lighting. In 2014, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute issued a report describing how artificial light can disorient turtle species, citing an incident that year in which a car at Gulf Islands National Seashore hit and killed a female loggerhead turtle that was moving towards land-based lights. And in a paper published in 2016, which examined the lighting of under-road wildlife passageways, researchers from Portland State University found that artificial light prevented deer mice, Columbia black-tailed deer, and opossums from crossing.

Because of such threats, since 1999 the National Park Service’s Night Skies Team—now the Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division—has been monitoring the quality of darkness in the national parks. “In recent years, we also have begun addressing not just the condition of the resource, but also addressing major threats—in this case, light pollution,” says Karen Treviño, chief of the division.

In 2006, the NPS issued a management policy document that included a section on lightscape management, which stated in part that the Service will preserve “the natural resources and values that exist in the absence of human-caused light.” Techniques include restricting the use of artificial light except where it’s needed most for human safety, using minimal-impact lighting such as lamps that shine only downward or that can be dimmed when not in use, and shielding artificial light from dark-dependent habitats, such as caves. And Treviño estimates that up to 100 parks now have some form of astronomy-based evening program, with more in development. Her team also routinely holds training programs that will help park managers, interpreters, and rangers to make good lighting choices and also sell their value to the public.

One of the Park Service’s partners in this effort is Tyler Nordgren, an astronomer, physics professor, and author of the book Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks. Nordgren is also an artist in high demand, the creator of a popular series of posters that celebrate the night sky in the national parks. Cast in a range of blue tones, Nordgren’s posters depict a particular park’s key features against the backdrop of the Milky Way. (His Acadia poster shows tall pine trees along a rocky coast.) The images include the slogan, “Half the Park is After Dark,” a phrase that came to Nordgren after he spent some time alone under the wild sky at Yosemite National Park.

Nordgren reports that in the last few years, he has seen a 50 percent annual growth in the number of his posters sold in national park gift shops. “What this is showing me is that the night sky is capturing the public’s interest,” he says, adding that the night sky programs like Acadia’s “Stars Over Sand Beach” are the most popular evening activities in the parks. “The sky, the stars, darkness—they all impact our lives, but we’ve done a really good job of ignoring them,” he adds. “That’s hopefully changing. These programs are a way of turning us back towards nature, and the parks are the place to do it.”

IDA has also promoted the value of night skies to the general public through its International Dark Sky Place designations. This is a rigorous certification process for communities, parks, reserves, sanctuaries, and even certain urban areas that requires that they demonstrate, among other criteria, the existence of natural darkness and observable celestial phenomena, a commitment to public education about the value of natural darkness, a lightscape management plan and, perhaps most importantly, an annual review process to ensure that the darkness hasn’t degraded.

Since the program began in 2001, about 60 International Dark Sky Parks have been certified worldwide, including Bassegoda Park in Spain, Eifel National Park in Germany, Iriomote-Ishigaki National Park in Japan, and Warrumbungle National Park in Australia. U.S. national parks on the list include Big Bend in Texas, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef in Utah, Grand Canyon in Arizona, Joshua Tree in California, and Obed Wild and Scenic River in Tennessee, and more parks are applying for designation all the time.

Despite these certification trends, most other parks, including Acadia, aren’t able to go through the requirements for the label, mostly due to a lack of funding, staffing, and a legislative mandate to conserve darkness. Although Acadia has some of the qualifying elements for Dark Sky Park designation, it hasn’t yet completed the application and met all the criteria.

“One thing that hinders the progress of protecting dark skies is that the Congress has never identified it as a conservation priority, like they did with the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act,” says IDA’s Barentine. “I give the Park Service tremendous credit for encouraging the pursuit of natural darkness when they’re not required to do so. What we try to do is smooth the path in front of them as much as possible, to make it more achievable.”

Even without the IDA certification, Acadia has been a forerunner in astrotourism and night sky preservation. Most of the park is on Mount Desert Island, with smaller slices on the Schoodic Peninsula and Isle au Haut, a rustic island accessible only by boat. Although Acadia is within fairly easy reach of visitors from Boston, New York, and other points south, its location along the rocky coast of central Maine has largely protected it from the worst light pollution that plagues the rest of the Eastern Seaboard. Yet even in this place where the Milky Way is so readily visible, it’s important to stay abreast of light encroachment, says John Kelly, the park’s management assistant.

In the last decade, the park has partnered with researchers at the Park Service’s Night Skies team, the College of the Atlantic, and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute to track and map light pollution levels in the park, Kelly says. Yet such efforts have been inconsistent and depend on the availability of researchers or funding, which is hard to come by when the park has a nearly $60 million maintenance backlog. At the same time, the park faces a mounting challenge in remaining a dark park as more tourists pour in. In 2017 alone, Acadia had about 3.5 million visitors, up from 2.2 million only 10 years earlier.

More tourists mean more glare coming from vehicles, safety lighting, and accommodations. Because of this, promoting astrotourism is necessary both to combat the lighting pressure that comes with more people and to build a broader constituency for dark-sky policies and programs. In 2009, the park began its annual Night Sky Festival, a celebration of its dark skies that includes lectures, performances, and “star parties” in iconic locations such as the summit of Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain. Held over a long weekend in September or October, the festival was designed to extend the summer tourist season as a boon to local businesses, while promoting the need to protect natural darkness, says Michael Marion, a longtime interpretive park ranger at Acadia.

“We make it very clear that our event is not an astronomy festival,” Marion says. “It’s a night sky festival.” The festival is not just about a scientific understanding of the stars, he explains, but also a celebration, through art and storytelling, of the beauty and mystery of the night sky and the role we all play in protecting it. Over its first decade, the festival has grown its attendance from less than 2,000 visitors in its first year to 5,122 in 2018.

The popularity of astrotourism in Acadia paved the way for the park to work with officials in Bar Harbor—the largest town on Mount Desert Island—to craft an ordinance that directs landowners to make energy-efficient and nature-friendly lighting choices, Kelly says, including guidance on the strategic placement, shielding, and tone of outdoor lighting. Since Bar Harbor adopted its ordinance in 2009, two other nearby towns, Mount Desert and Ellsworth, have codified similar dark sky policies.

As an example of how easy such changes can be, during an October meeting about light pollution Marion pulled out a nest of LED rope lights that would be used to light walkways at Katahdin Woods and Waters, a newly designated national monument farther north in Maine’s interior for which Marion was offering some assistance in their own dark-sky programming. Instead of the blue light commonly associated with LEDs, these lighting strips glowed red, reflecting scientific research that has shown that warm-spectrum lighting is far less disruptive to nocturnal wildlife and our own internal rhythms.

At Acadia, true night still reigns. After the “Stars Over Sand Beach” program, their eyes thoroughly adjusted to the darkness, people walked up the short trail to the parking lot on a night lit by thousands of stars. Some looked up one last time before opening their car doors. Then, the spell was broken. Car headlights turned on in succession, slicing through the night one by one as they left the parking lot, heading back into the brightness of their daily lives.

Test your knowledge of the world's wonders with this challenging puzzle.

It’s been a big year for wonder! Taking glamour shots of reptiles, spelunking for enormous fat globules, and analyzing cemetery soils are just a few of the enlightening topics we’ve covered in 2018. In honor of 2019’s imminent arrival, we’ve created this interactive crossword puzzle, looking back to the stories, places, and foods we were fascinated by this year. (In a handful of clues, you’ll even find wonders from years prior!) Need a hint? Tap the link.

Happy new year, dear readers!

Atlas Obscura readers share their tried-and-true favorites.

Happy New Year, dear readers! The penultimate year of the decade is upon us, and for many, 2019 will start with a customary hangover. Luckily, we recently asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about the greatest hangover foods they've encountered on their travels, and we received a whole slew of potential remedies from across the globe.

Before you wake to a rough morning, check out some of our favorite submissions below. While we can't guarantee that any of these "cures" will work, why not start the new year off right by trying something new? The only thing you have to lose is that pounding headache.

The Brine of Canned Dill Pickles

How did you discover it?

“Studying in Poland, my flatmates recommended it to me.”

Does it work?

“Rather not. It serves more as a test of courage than a cure.” — Alexandra, Switzerland

Earl Grey Tea and a Slice of Buttered, Toasted Baguette With Jam

How did you discover it?

“In France, you can’t have a cheese tasting party without wine, and after so many glasses, my French boyfriend and I clung to each other for dear life as we stumbled home. I woke up with the spins, and he made this for breakfast. I felt so much more balanced after this, and have relied on it since.”

Does it work?

“Yes!” — Lindsay Fortier, Madison, Wisconsin

Menudo (Mexican Hangover Soup Made with Tripe)

How did you discover it?

“[I learned of it] when I lived in California.”

Does it work?

“Absolutely if you can ‘stomach’ it. Haha!” — Patrick Berger, Durham, North Carolina

Rasol (Cabbage Brine)

How did you discover it?

“It's a widely known folk hangover 'medicine' in the Balkans.”

Does it work?

“Absolutely.” — Natasha, New Orleans, Louisiana

King Coconut Water

How did you discover it?

“As told by the elders…”

Does it work?

“Yes of course!” — Achala, Sri Lanka

Anything With a Sour Taste

How did you discover it?

“I usually go with apple or orange juice. I find that the taste in my mouth the next day bothers me far more than the headache, and when I drink orange or apple juice I can't taste it for a while.”

Does it work?

“Yes, for me.” — Bas D., The Netherlands

Bacon, Egg, and Cheese on a Roll

How did you discover it?

“Most popular order at the local deli on the weekends.”

Does it work?

“Always makes me feel better.” — Douglas Rooney, New York City, New York

Salt and Vinegar Potato Chips/Crisps

How did you discover it?

“It’s actually my remedy for seasickness, but it also works for hangovers.”

Does it work?

“Yes. Plus I get to eat chips. Win:Win.” — Katherine Rose, Cape Town, South Africa

Irn Bru and a Greasy Breakfast

How did you discover it?

“[It's a] traditional Scottish remedy.”

Does it work?

“Definitely. There’s a reason why Scotland is the only country in the world where Coca-Cola isn’t the best selling soft drink.” — Phil R., Edinburgh, Scotland

Club Soda With Bitters and Fresh-Squeezed Lime Juice

How did you discover it?

“As a bartender in Texas decades ago.”

Does it work?

“I'm a non-drinker, but it seemed to work for my customers. The secret is not to wait until the morning after, but to consume it before leaving the bar.” — Lis, Crescent City, California

Miso Soup With Kimchi and Ginger

How did you discover it?

“Broth sounds good when hungover. While eating sushi out, I saw the health benefits of miso displayed on the table, so I tried it the next time I was hungover.”

Does it work?

“Ginger soothes the stomach. Electrolytes and sodium replenish your body's system. And the kimchi has probiotics. It's the best breakfast after a hangover. You can even add a soft-boiled egg if you can motivate yourself to cook the egg while hungover.” — Sarah, West Virginia

Barbacoa

How did you discover it?

“A nice, big, spicy, hot, acid consommé made of the lamb cooked overnight, and tacos of barbacoa, made of stomach lamb and spices. It’s sold in the tianguis (road markets), and you can see others victims of a hangover asking for their own cure.”

Does it work?

“Sure! Even if you only have a long night without sleeping, it wakes you up.” — Juan Alcantara, Mexico City

Tinned Pickled Mackerel

How did you discover it?

“[I discovered it after] years of experimentation.”

Does it work?

“Yes, if you eat them before you go to bed!” — Marco, Siegen, Germany

Ito En Oi Ocha Unsweetened Dark Green Tea

How did you discover it?

"[I learned this from] years of practice in Japan.”

Does it work?

“I do [think so]. As we know, it’s all about hydration. The high, but gentle release of caffeine and the potent antioxidants found in green tea don't hurt as well.” — Prem Joshi, Los Angeles, California

Chocolate Milk and Sauerkraut

How did you discover it?

“Purely, and obviously, by accident.”

Does it work?

“Oh yes, it calms down the stomach immediately and rehydrates.” — Cookie F., Wyoming

Whether roast pork or marzipan, a pig is a symbol of good fortune.

Around the world, lucky foods for the new year range from collard greens (representing green cash) to long noodles (representing a lengthy lifespan.) But for many cultures, pork is the pièce de résistance for welcoming the New Year. From Cuban roast pig to Okinawan sparerib or pig's feet soup, the luxurious richness of pork starts the year on a high note, and in several cases, pigs or pork serve as annual good luck charms.

In Lancaster County, a node of the Pennsylvania Dutch, locals spend New Year's Day feasting on roast pork and sauerkraut. While ham and turkey are common holiday fare, the pork serves a potent symbolic purpose, according to local lore. Turkeys scratch dirt backwards while foraging, yet pigs do the opposite: rooting forwards towards the future. That said, the tradition's origins are likely more pragmatic. In Germany, the ancestral home of the Pennsylvania Dutch, pigs were slaughtered in the winter. This provided a brief window when fresh meat was available, some of which could be saved for celebratory holiday meals.

This isn't the sole German association between pigs and good luck, though. During Christmas and New Years's, marzipan pigs are a beloved treat and popular gift. Sculpted from almond paste and colored bright pink, the pigs do double duty as charms. One phrase for lucky is even schwein haben ("got pig"), since any farmer wealthy enough to own a plethora of pigs was surely fortunate. Sweet piggy marzipan is also a custom in Norway and Denmark.

But last year, some people began celebrating the pig in a less meaty way—a tradition recurring currently. On Twitter, people are displaying lemons carved and decorated to resemble pigs, inspired by a craft project unearthed from a 70's cookbook. With pennies in their mouths and a curly tinfoil tails, the pigs are intended to bring luck (and presumably wealth) to 2019, which, appropriately, is the Year of the Pig.

Adding sound flourishes to films in post-production remains low-tech.

In one of the final scenes of James Cameron’s Titanic, Rose (played by Kate Winslet) clings to a floating headboard, a piece of debris from the shipwreck that claimed over 1500 lives. While delirious and adrift in the freezing ocean, she sees a rescue team in the distance and, in that moment, moves her head. As she lifts her frozen hair off the wood, it crackles audibly.

But Rose’s hair never actually crackled, and the sound wasn’t made by hair at all: It was the sound of frozen lettuce being peeled by Foley artists in a studio. While subtle to the ear, and almost unnoticeable amidst the dialogue, score, and other sound effects, the crackle is critical to amplifying the scene’s drama. And it’s the responsibility of Foley artists to forge these unique sounds in post-production, often from lettuce heads, coconuts, and other foods.

It's an uncharacteristically overcast day in Culver City, California—an enclave within Los Angeles where many production studios are found. I'm at Sony Pictures, where two of the studio's resident Foley artists, Robin Harlan and Sarah Monat-Jacobs, recount the struggle to make Rose’s frozen hair sound like frozen hair. First they tried freezing a wig, but that didn’t work. Velcro didn't do the trick, either. Later, Harlan was at home and, while making herself a sandwich, found that a head of lettuce’s crackle worked perfectly. “They really wanted to hear the sound of frozen hair pulling off of this wood bedstead, but I mean, you can’t really freeze your own head,” says Harlan.

Monat-Jacobs and Harlan have been partners for over 30 years and have worked on hundreds of films together, including There Will Be Blood, Best In Show, and several Star Trek films. They work along with a Foley sound mixer on one of three soundstages nestled within Sony’s sprawling campus. This particular Foley soundstage is replete with props and ephemera that provide films with the kind of emotional texture that words often can’t. Here, palm fronds coexist with vintage telephones, window panes that rattle during storm scenes, and a small water tank where they record clothes swishing in the deep, as they did for The Shallows. Small patches of sand and dirt line the floor, close to wooden boards that can give a Western flick an extra creak. And the co-stars of many horror, science fiction, and action films, namely celery and cabbage, sit in the fridge.

Foley, named after the industry veteran Jack Donovan Foley, has its roots in the heyday of silent films and broadcast radio shows. Organists, pianists, and sometimes entire orchestras soundtracked silent films live, and radio programs sought out sound effects that would correspond with broadcasts. “But they also, at one point, brought in sound effects guys who were really Foley guys,” says David Macmillan, a multiple Academy Award-winning sound mixer and lecturer for UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television. “And they would put the horse clomps in, or the crash of the dish falling. Or footsteps on every kind of surface you can imagine.” These early Foley artists not only added texture to radio and film, they also became part of the performance. “They were, in a sense, live Foley artists,” he adds.

Foley became especially pivotal during an era of moral panic when Hollywood cracked down on what could and couldn’t be shown on-screen. “A lot of directors and writers know that sound has a really powerful potential to ignite the imagination in people, even more so than visuals sometimes,” Harlan says, citing Alfred Hitchcock as an example. “A lot of the classic directors knew that. They weren’t allowed to show a lot of graphic stuff, so a lot of things that they would drop in had to do with sound effects. They would cut away, and you would hear it.”

Now, Foley is an integral part of the sound department, and often rounds out big effects (such as explosions) with the details that make it feel colossal to watch. “[The effects team] will do a big crash, but the shards falling down? That’s us,” explains Monat-Jacobs. But something curious also happened as film, and Foley, continued evolving: Creating “authentic” sounds took a backseat to ones that evoked a visceral reaction in audiences (something that Monty Python famously parodied with coconut shells acting as horses’ hooves). “Guns don’t really make noise, but in the Foley world they make a lot of noise,” Monat-Jacobs says, mentioning “the gun rattle” central to wartime films.

That’s how celery became a staple of summer blockbusters, and especially horror films. On its own, celery sounds like, well, celery. But when recorded well and mixed correctly, the fibrous vegetable can sound like an elbow giving way to bone. “Part of the talent is performing it and recording it in a way that’s kind of hidden, with celery not recognizable as celery,” says Monat-Jacobs. With good Foley, gourds become cracked skulls, and ice cream cones double as hatching dinosaur eggs a là Jurassic Park. And jello is a must for science fiction pictures: “You may want that for someone if they’re morphing, or for lizard skins or something like that,” Harlan says.

In a brief scene that we watch in the control room, a certain star is caught in a brutal fight sequence. I find myself wincing at the sound of every punch, although Monat-Jacobs had just extolled the virtues of working with a rubbery material such as cabbage, and the many things one can do with a chamois cloth. “One of the ways you know it works is you play it back from the production and if it just fits right in, and if everyone is like ‘whoa,’” Harlan says. “Or it causes an emotional response in you, you know it’s right.”

While film (and the industry itself) has changed dramatically in the last century, Foley hasn’t budged all that much. “I think it’s interesting that Foley, in this increasingly high tech world, is … still low-tech,” says Monat-Jacobs. “We’re doing it the same way it was always done. It’s just become more complex.” That means that with the advent of recording technology, they, along with their Foley mixers, are able to layer more sounds to build bigger soundtracks. But just as in the old days, Foley artists still perform along with a film, though it’s not in front of an audience now. Only the mixer behind the soundboard—in this case, Nerses Gezalyan—gets to see Harlan (who was an actress) and Monat-Jacobs (who comes from a radio background) in action.

That’s also why the two believe that Foley prevails in a rapidly-shifting world where even traditional headphone jacks are becoming obsolete. “People have been saying to me since I’ve been doing this, ‘One day it’s not going to be relevant,’” Monat-Jacobs says. “But you don’t get the performance when you do that.” Harlan adds: “There’s a difference between every footfall, depending on if you’re on your heel or toe. Or walking through the forest, or walking on your toes because you don’t want to be heard. It’s still more cost-effective and time-effective for someone to perform those footsteps than an editor to be hired to pull all of that out of a library.” Many editors do have a library of Foley sounds, but in addition to not being any more efficient, according to the duo, using libraries produces sound with less character, especially if it’s done electronically.

The low-tech stylings of Foley artists remain in demand, and it’s a competitive field. The two are quick to say that there’s a lack of education about it in film school (“It’s 15 minutes over four years,” Harlan quips), and apprenticeships don’t crop up too often. But people with performance backgrounds in dance, acting, and music often become Foley artists. “There’s a technical aspect of doing it in sync, but then you have to bring whatever emotion to it, too,” says Monat-Jacobs.

For many people, the process of making and sharing food has an emotional weight to it. But it takes on a completely different meaning in Foley, where, even in a blockbuster that grossed over $1.8 billion and used CGI, a cup of pudding or a head of lettuce can become the sound of a character in flux or distress. “Sometimes certain things don’t make a sound, but in movie world, it needs to have a little magic,” Monat-Jacobs says. “You will make a sound of something and you know it’s not real, but it helps sort of enhance it a bit.” Harlan adds: “And we’re not going to break our bones. I like my job, but not that much.”

This story originally ran on June 5, 2018.

Kilwa Kisiwani ("Isle of the Fish") was once the heart of Swahili culture and commerce.

Off the coast of Tanzania sit the ruins of the hub of a little-known medieval empire, Kilwa Kisiwani. Travelers to the site first have to go to the small town of Kilwa Masoko, get a permit, and then convince someone at the docks to take them by boat to the island and its stunning ruins.

The origins of Kilwa Kisiwani date back to the 10th century, when wealthy sultanates arose along the East African coast. Among the stone ruins at Kilwa Kisiwani are the Great Mosque, a later fort, and a grand palace. The palace, called Husuni Kubwa, was built in the 14th century by Sultan al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman. Expansive and luxurious, Husuni Kubwa had 100 rooms, a stepped greeting court, and a cliffside octagonal bath—but, for reasons unknown, was left unfinished.

Early 20th-century scholars debated who created this empire, and legend had it that a Persian prince purchased the island from a local king for cloth. However, later discoveries at a similar stone town in Shanga, Kenya, revealed that the Swahili empire originated in Africa. The culture chose Islam and its architectural motifs to better appeal to Arab traders. At its peak, these cultural centers traded gold, ivory, timber, spices, and even slaves to the Middle East and India, and then on to Europe and China. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 16th century disrupted this network of global trade, and soon after many of the towns were abandoned.

Kilwa Kisiwani may be a crumbling physical reminder of a long-gone medieval empire, but Swahili culture continues today. There are more than two million people living on Africa’s coast who identify as Swahili, and millions more speak the language.

In the above video, Deputy Editor Samir S. Patel explains the history of Kilwa Kisiwani and what remains on the island.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to explore more Atlas Obscura videos.

A new digital tour helps visitors jump back in time.

In September 2018, a fire ripped through the Museu Nacional in Brazil, destroying many of the world-class objects in the 200-year-old collection, which held millions of treasures. Video footage captured in the aftermath showed blackened walls and a floor littered with a jumble of ash-colored fragments. The Bendegó meteorite—a five-ton behemoth discovered by a boy in Bahia in 1784—continued to crown its pedestal, less susceptible to flames than the materials scattered below it, many of which were crushed and charred beyond recognition.

While the full portrait of the losses is still coming into focus, some treasures have been recovered. In October, researchers sifting through the wreckage found portions of the bones belonging to the 11,500-year-old skeleton known as “Luzia,” one of the oldest known human fossils in the Americas, which was unearthed in the 1970s. In December, museum researchers said that they had salvaged over 1,500 objects, including indigenous arrows, a Peruvian vase, and a pre-Columbian funeral urn, the Associated Press reported. “The work must be done very carefully and patiently,” Alexander Kellner, the museum director, told the AP.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government has earmarked R$10 million (roughly US $2.6 million) to rebuild. “We can only hope to recover our history from the ashes,” Maurilio Oliveira, a paleoartist at the museum, told The New York Times, discussing the Luzia fragments. “Now, we cry and get to work.”

It’s sure to be a long process. But while researchers continue to comb through the rubble and take stock of the toll, a newly released digital tour of the museum—undertaken by Google Arts & Culture beginning in 2016—invites visitors to poke around the collection in its former glory.

Digital visitors can enter the museum, which was housed in a former palace, and spin around to take in 360-degree views. Because the tour uses Street View imagery, it evokes the experience of seeing the objects at eye-level—almost as though you were wandering the airy hallways, passing through the arched doorways, and stooping to peer at vases held behind glass. The Google project also includes some digital exhibitions, such as a roundup of artifacts found in the sambaquis, the heaping mounds of shells, waste, tools, weapons, and more from fisher-gatherer cultures that lived along Brazil’s coast thousands of years ago.

Here are a few of the artifacts you can appreciate online, no matter what turns up in the ashes:

Handsome handiwork

This vase was made by artisans of the Marajoara culture, whose members lived near the shore of the Amazon River in Brazil between roughly 400 and 1400 A.D. The vase’s spiraling, coursing pattern evokes waves and ripples, and the artifact once sat in a room with many other examples of pre-Columbian ceramics.

A coffin with a story to tell

This plaster-and-wood sarcophagus was made in Egypt for Sha-Amun-en-su, likely around 750 B.C. Researchers have puzzled out a bit about her biography by studying the hieroglyphics on the sarcophagus. Based on those, they’ve concluded that she was a Heset, or singer in a temple to the god Amun in Thebes, where she would have participated in rituals.

Seat of power

This 19th-century wooden seat, featuring elaborately carved sides, was known as zingpogandeme, and was replica of the throne occupied by King Kpengla, who ruled Dahomey, in present-day Benin, in the 1770s and 1780s. At the Museu Nacional, it shared a room with other arts of Africa.

The more obscure, the better.

In Japan, costumed mascots are serious business. Big corporations have them, but so do small towns, local tourism boards, individual political parties, and mass transit systems. Across Japan, there are thousands of these cuddly creatures (known collectively as yuru-kyara) and each one aims to symbolize unique characteristics of the places they represent. For just one example, take Mizumaro, mascot of the town of Mizumaki, who has a garlic bulb for a head.

On the heels of a year that saw a googly-eyed new NHL mascot capture the world's imagination, maybe we've just got mascots on the brain. But we have a sneaking suspicion that there are obscure costumed characters all over the world that deserve more attention—and we need your help to find them!

We want to hear about your favorite local mascot. Whether it’s the symbol of a high school sports team or the embodiment of a beloved local pizzeria, tell us about the unforgettable characters in your area. Fill out the form below to nominate your favorite local mascot, and if you have any original pictures of the character, email them to eric@atlasobscura.com with the subject line, “Greatest Mascots.” We’ll collect some of our favorite responses in an upcoming article.

In San Pedro La Laguna, single-use items made from plastic and styrofoam are banned.

At dawn, the market is bustling with all the usual suspects. A vendor prepares tostadas with an array of colorful toppings from sautéed beetroot to homemade guacamole. In the next stall, a woman is pounding out blue corn tortillas by hand—the rhythm of her labor echoes throughout the market, setting a lively tempo. Nearby a farmer is selling fresh produce from wicker baskets.

Inhabitants of San Pedro La Laguna are primarily Tz'utujil Maya. Local ladies don colorful textiles, carrying the history of their ancestors in the threads. They carry equally bright woven rubber basket bags that they fill to the brim with goods. The baker and pharmacist are busy handcrafting paper packaging for their products. Men wearing traditional woven hats sit on the shallow steps of the town’s Catholic church as children play in the stark white courtyard.

Something is missing from this commerce scene: single-use plastic and styrofoam.

Before 2016, San Pedro La Laguna was drowning in plastic pollution that was threatening the fragile ecosystem of Lake Atitlán. The dire need for change crystallized when a solid waste disposal processing plant that was expected to manage a decade of waste was halfway full within six months, mostly with single-use plastics. Rather than build a larger plant—which would’ve been an enormous financial burden on the town and further polluted the lake with debris—Mayor Mauricio Méndez decided to implement a stringent municipal law to encourage lasting, sustainable change.

Méndez took unprecedented measures and established a zero-tolerance policy, banning single-use items made of plastic or styrofoam including bags, straws, and containers. San Pedro La Laguna was the first town in Guatemala to enact such a drastic ordinance against waste.

Villagers initially resisted, as they’d become accustomed to using materials that were now outlawed. To get rid of the single-use plastics already in circulation, leaders of the 13,000-person town went from house to house to talk with villagers about waste management. Residents were wary because they couldn’t afford to purchase biodegradable replacements. The government relieved the community members’ financial burden by collecting all plastic and styrofoam items and trading them for reusable or biodegradable alternatives, completely free-of-charge.

Victor Tuch Gonzáles, the municipal planning director, says eliminating the use of plastic bags was the biggest hurdle. To alleviate this issue, the municipality purchased 2,000 handmade rubber basket bags from artisans in Totonicapán to distribute among families. Gonzáles says the switch to reusable items, including the bags, cost the municipality 90,000 GTQ ($11,632).

Economic sanctions punish anyone who breaks the law. Individuals must pay 300 GTQ ($40)—a hefty amount considering Guatemala’s average lower-middle-class annual income is $1,619. Companies that use the banned materials face a fine of 15,000 GTQ ($1,940).

The town also needed a better system to process waste. According to Gonzáles, Cementos Progreso and the Pro Verde NGO process the town’s trash into fuel or other derivatives. Local fisherman joined the sustainable efforts and created their own initiative to remove garbage from Lake Atitlán. Several projects have launched to transform trash into decorations which encourages the mentality of reducing, recycling, reusing, and regenerating.

Gonzáles says that the ideology has “returned to what was used ancestrally.” The community has returned using hoja del maxán (large leaves) to package meat from the butcher and cloth napkins to carry tortillas. Vendors wrap items in paper as if plastic had never tormented the town. Once the reusable rubber bags have been filled to the brim, ladies stash dry goods in their aprons.

Some businesses are starting to use paper straws. Gonzáles prefers to avoid any single-use items, as he sees no reason not to drink straight from the can, bottle, or glass. Gonzáles jokes that “you don’t need a straw for beer, so why use one for soda?”

By restoring and preserving the natural beauty of the lake, San Pedro La Laguna has attracted more tourists. Tourism is the largest economy in San Pedro La Laguna—visits to the town increased by 40 percent in 2018. Travelers are also prohibited from using plastic bags, straws, and styrofoam containers in the town.

Méndez and Gonzáles hope their efforts will be replicated by other townships on Lake Atitlán in order to align preservation efforts and honor Mother Earth—a significant figure of Mayan spirituality. The ecological municipality is developing additional environmental conservation projects including residual wastewater treatment plants, switching to LED lights, prohibiting sand extraction from the lake, and using waste as building materials to build tables and chairs for local schools. Gonzáles believes that these efforts will “have a positive impact not only on the environment but also the economy of local people.”

As Méndez says, “tu basura es mi fortuna”—your trash is my fortune.

Philadelphia residents came out for a cinematic celebration of their community.

Spending a weeknight stuck in school might not sound like everyone's idea of fun, but those caught wandering the halls of the Edward W. Bok Technical High School building on November 29 certainly weren't there for detention. Instead, guests of Atlas Obscura and Chase Sapphire were there for Assembly: Underground Films and Philly Legends, a one-of-a-kind screening event that celebrated Philadelphia’s underground art and unsung heroes.

The Bok building, a towering, Art Deco gem, was originally built by the WPA in 1935 as a vocational high school. Closed by the School District of Philadelphia in 2013, Bok is now a 350,000 square foot community space, whose goal is to provide creative facilities, learning opportunities, and career tools to residents of the neighborhood and beyond. Its classrooms have been revitalized and reimagined into art studios, boxing gyms, and fabrication shops, as well as a hidden restaurant with gorgeous city views on the top floor.

On November 29, the building's historic gymnasium and massive 700-seat auditorium were transformed into immersive event spaces, where guests were treated to an evening of programming inspired by the building's mission and the neighborhood's story.

Before the programming even got started, press, local influencers, and Chase Sapphire cardmembers mingled with the presenters in the pre-event lounge. The space, formerly the boy's gymnasium, was transformed into a glowing, reactive light installation by building residents Klip Collective. DJ Skeme Richards complemented the light show with an eclectic playlist of 7-inches, mixing hip hop, funk and soul. Plush furniture, glimmering streamers, and a premium open bar evoked a moody, filmic prom night and further reinforced the feeling that school really was out forever.

Guests made their way from the gym, into the auditorium, and past blue velvet ropes for a full program of fascinating, Philly-centric presentations. Speakers were given the mic throughout the evening, and the opportunity to talk about topics dear to them.

Film Location Scout Nick Carr could be considered the ultimate explorer. Every day, he searches for places near, far, and in between to stage the perfect scene. He talked about the city's starring role in films such as Rocky and Twelve Monkeys. Veering more toward the avant-garde, Secret Cinema founder Jay Schwartz projected a surrealist 1960s film from the auditorium's second story balcony.

Brendan Lowry, the creator of the popular Instagram account Peopledelphia, spoke about the power of emerging media to shift perspectives on a place. Program Director of Girls Rock Philly Samantha Rise's jubilant keynote celebrated the mother of rock 'n' roll–and daughter of Philadelphia–Sister Rosetta Tharpe. "We tried to think of different ways to represent the past, the present, and the future... all engaging with the space and the city as a whole," said John Pettit, Head of Atlas Obscura Society Philadelphia.

Schools are structures designed to transform those who pass through their doors, and film is a medium designed to catch and preserve transformational moments. It's fitting then, that the Bok building, a neighborhood space in the process of transition, acted as a venue for this kind of event experience. Just by their attendance, guests helped to redefine the purpose of the space, all the while opening their minds to stories captured from their community. Get a glimpse of more of these moments below:

A peanut? Or maybe a bowling pin?

Faced with something alien, humans tend to grasp for something familiar. Ever since we started looking at the sky, we’ve seen our own image up there. Early moon-gazers mistook hardened lava for seas, because the dark ribbons reminded them of churning waves. Even now, science educators often compare distant features on other planets or moons to the peaks and valleys that Earthlings have seen up close. “The trouble we normally have with space is, if we try to understand something, we only have one example—our own planet,” Colin Stuart, a fellow at the Royal Astronomical Society and author of the book How to Live in Space: Everything You Need to Know for the Not-So-Distant Future, told me last year. “We always try to compare things to Earth when we can. If you’re starting with something they know about, you’re not starting from the beginning.”

All of which is to say that it was no surprise that, when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hurtled by the distant minor planet known as Ultima Thule and 2014 MU69 on New Year’s, people following along on Earth reached for descriptions that felt relatable.

The whole scenario was anything but. To approach the far-off object, New Horizons trekked deep into the cold, rocky Kuiper Belt, which is freckled with asteroids and other fragments left over from the birth of our solar system billions of years ago. Scientists hope that by getting close—or at least close-ish—to this “pristine specimen,” which they suspect remains fairly unchanged since it formed, they can gain new insight into the origins of the planets. This flyby brought the spacecraft within 2,200 miles of 2014 MU69, whose name is a reference to the date when it was first recorded by scientists. The craft sped four billion miles from Earth, and far beyond Pluto.

Since the time-stamped name is a mouthful, the New Horizons team nicknamed the target “Ultima Thule,” borrowing from ancient shorthand for a beguiling, far-off realm. The moniker is possibly temporary, because the team will prepare a formal submission to the International Astronomical Union, which oversees the names of celestial bodies. But its long history stretches back to Greek and Roman cartography, in which “Thule” referred to the northernmost location. By the medieval period, it conjured anything at the fringe of the known world. In 1539, the cartographer Olaus Magnus labeled it on his Carta marina, the first detailed map of the Nordic lands. (Here, it’s an island flanked by fabulous, sea-faring beasts.) The name was variously used to refer to places including Iceland, Greenland, and Norway, and it’s also the current name of the U.S. Air Force’s northernmost base, in Greenland, several hundred miles above the Arctic Circle.

Though Virgil coined the poetic variation “Ultima Thule” thousands of years ago, as Meghan Bartels reported for Newsweek, the phrase was eventually commandeered by the Nazis. More recently, it has been used to describe everything from remote reaches of caves to scattered lands that are far-away and freezing, including Siberia and an Alaskan lodge that is “a hundred miles from paved roads.”

This cosmic Ultima Thule is actually two objects, fused together—one lobe slightly larger than the other. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory reports that the formation may have happened when the two bodies collided fairly gently, “no faster than two cars in a fender-bender.” The mission team dubbed the larger portion, which measures roughly 12 miles across, “Ultima,” and its smaller twin “Thule.” Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute and a principal investigator for the recent mission, defended the nickname at a recent press conference. “I think New Horizons is an example—one of the best examples in our time—of raw exploration,” he told reporters. “The term Ultima Thule, which is very old, many centuries old, possibly over a thousand years old, is a wonderful meme for exploration.”

The newly imaged object is certainly a frontier, one that’s frigid and mind-bogglingly far away. It's the most distant place NASA has studied from relatively close up, and when the first batch of images from this New Horizons mission was released (the closest of which was taken from 17,000 miles away), many scientists and reporters reached for tropes that are instantly recognizable here on Earth.

Many have described its cinched, bottom-heavy shape as a snowman, while NASA suggested something like “a bowling pin, spinning end over end.” Marina Koren, at The Atlantic, likened the reddish, ruddy color to an iced coffee, swirled with half-and-half.

Something so remote and desolate stretches the limits of the imagination, but my Atlas Obscura colleagues have plenty of that. We spitballed some other suggestions for familiar things this alien body evokes. Consider, if you will:

• A peanut
• Cellular mitosis
• A cairn
• Someone blowing a bubble
• Nerds (the candy)
• A Death Star spawning a little baby Death Star

As higher-resolution images from the close-up flyby start to trickle in, we’ll get a clearer picture of the object’s features. That might make the distant world a little more intimate—but no less wondrous.

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater has been serving up laughs and ice cream since 1963.

Los Angeles’ Bob Baker Marionette Theater claims to be the longest running puppetry theater in the United States. After seeing his first puppet show at the age of six, Bob Baker became enamored with puppetry and later dedicated himself to its craft and artistry. He co-founded his theater with Alton Wood in 1963, amassing a collection of more than 2,000 handmade marionettes over the decades.

Baker died in 2014, but the theater's work continues. Creative Director Alex Evans says that Baker's "soul and heart is alive and well" through their ongoing live performances. Evans describes the shows as “free of cynicism or messaging... it’s just watch your beautiful puppet dance.” Ice cream is handed out after each performance, a tradition since the theater's earliest days.

“One of the things that I love, when I was performing, the little child will look up at you and laugh,” said Baker in a recording. “It’s a wonderful sound. I wish I could go all over the world doing that.”

In the video above, Atlas Obscura takes a behind-the-scenes look at the history behind the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, which soon plans to relocate to a new space in Los Angeles.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to explore more Atlas Obscura videos.

The case of the Muscovy duck cannot be settled because the rules themselves are not really known.

The basics of Jewish dietary law—the laws of kashrut—are fairly well-known: no pork, no shellfish, no milk and meat together. But there are many, many more laws than that, some of which are unclear, some of which are localized and don’t necessarily apply to all countries, and many of which have never really been settled. The case of the Muscovy duck is one of the most fun.

The rules of kashrut have a couple of issues that destabilize the entire process of figuring out what Jews can and cannot eat. One of these fundamental issues is that the laws don’t necessarily follow any larger philosophy. Jewish scholars have long divided the laws of Judaism into a couple of different categories. Mishpatim—the -im and -ot endings of words signify plurals in Hebrew—are laws that are self-evident to the survival of a society, like “don’t murder” or “don’t steal.” The edot are laws usually surrounding holidays, symbolic rules designed to memorialize events or bring a community together, like wearing a yarmulke or not eating bread on Passover. And then there are the chukim.

The chukim are laws that make no sense. They are sometimes phrased in ways to make following them more palatable; for example, that these are laws passed down directly from God, and it is not necessary that we understand them. The rules of kashrut are sometimes, but not always, placed in this category.

Another fundamental issue with the laws of kashrut is the lack of a Jewish governing body. Judaism has no centralized force, as Catholicism does with the Vatican. Instead, there are simply a bunch of extremely learned dudes, throughout thousands of years of history, who are considered very smart and knowledgeable and whose arguments about the various laws are widely read and sometimes adopted. But these dudes—usually but not always given the title of Rabbi—have disagreements, and their own followings.

Because Jews are scattered all over the globe, there is a great diversity in thinking. Different environments call for different rules. And the rules in the Torah are not always clear-cut, so different communities will follow the suggestions of different learned dudes.

The laws of kashrut are a big grab-bag of different types of rulings. Sometimes they’re clear prohibitions on categories, like a general ban on consuming blood. Sometimes they’re specific in giving guidelines: You can only eat fish that have both fins and scales, which disqualifies, say, sharks. Here’s the exact line, translated, from Leviticus: “These you may eat of all that live in water; anything in water, whether in the seas or in the streams, that has fins and scales—these you may eat.”

But even those guidelines can be troublesome. Like, here’s a question: Do sharks have fins and scales? Fins, obviously, yes. Scales? Well, haha, sort of. Turns out sharks are actually covered completely in placoid scales, microscopic spine-like scales. This wasn’t discovered for a couple of thousand years after Jews had already declared shark forbidden. So can Jews eat shark now? Generally, no: A bunch of those learned dudes decided that the reference to “scales” must have meant scales you can actually see and remove. What about, say, swordfish, which has scales when young but sheds them when mature? Responses vary: Generally, Orthodox Jews won’t eat them, but Conservative Jews (at least, those who keep Kosher, or who care about these intricacies) will.

The rules for birds are, if anything, even worse than the ones for fish, which makes it even more difficult to ascertain where the Muscovy duck falls in all of this. The Torah doesn’t even bother setting out guidelines; it simply lists a bunch of birds that are forbidden, and says you can eat any other bird. Because the Torah was written thousands of years ago in an archaic form of Hebrew, we can’t necessarily translate and identify all these species definitively. One of the forbidden species would transliterate as atalef. In modern Hebrew, that’s… a bat. Which is not a bird. Most people interpret it that way, assuming that the bat was thought to be some kind of bizarre bird at the time, but not everybody does. Nobody is quite sure if atalef had the same meaning then as it does now, and some early Rabbinic discussion of the Torah described the atalef as laying eggs, but also raising its young. This has led some scholars to believe that the atalef is actually some variety of screech owl, or even—this is a serious argument that was seriously made—a platypus.

There are two separate lists of birds that are forbidden, one in Leviticus and one in Deuteronomy. There are some overlaps, but there are 24 different Hebrew names for birds in these lists. Those are confidently translated by various sources into modern English and typically include the following species: Eagle, vulture (the bearded vulture, white vulture, and black vulture are listed individually), kite, osprey, kestrel, raven, ostrich, jay, sparrowhawk, goshawk, owl, gull, little owl, starling, magpie, heron, cormorant, pelican, stork, hoopoe, and atalef. Sometimes you’ll see discrepancies, like one species listed in Leviticus as “heron” and in Deuteronomy as “ibis,” despite being the same Hebrew word. Sometimes you’ll see archaic English terms, like “sea-mew” for gull and “ossifrage” for bearded vulture.

I left one out of that list, because it’s very fun. One, in the Leviticus list, would transliterate to tinshemet. What, you might ask, is a tinshemet? Nobody knows. Sometimes it’s translated as a swan, some other type of owl, or (again!) as a bat. The same word shows up again a little bit later, under a list of forbidden animals that move along the ground, grouped in with lizards and weasels. There is a minor conspiracy theory that because it referred to both a bird and a lizard, that this word was the name of a flying dinosaur that never went extinct.

Anyway, that list of birds is, obviously, total trash if you’re trying to expand it outwards and figure out what you can and cannot eat. We don’t know whether those words were referring to specific species or whole categories of birds, and certainly many more species have been discovered since the Torah was set down. Scholars, to make up for this, have tried to see the patterns in the banned birds, and then use those patterns to create rules that could apply to species new to Jews, like, say, an unusual duck native to the Americas. This is obviously a fraught endeavor if you subscribe to the belief that the laws of kashrut are chukim—totally senseless.

Over the past 2,000 years, Jewish scholars have arrived at a couple of broad conclusions about what was meant by these particular 24 species. Or, well, 22 species and whatever tinshemet and atalef are supposed to be. In general everyone pretty much agrees that there is a strong bent towards banning raptors, or birds of prey. Even those birds that are not really considered birds of prey, such as the heron and stork, are hunters. Predators. In Hebrew, the word for predator is dores, and this is a very good start. Lots of birds that are not specifically listed can be assumed to be banned, because they are very similar to the ones on the list. The red-tailed hawk, say. Shrikes. Penguins. All birds perceived as predators.

Around the year 200, somewhere between 100 and 200 rabbis crafted the Mishnah, the first major work of rabbinic criticism and a compendium of Jewish oral history. These rabbis, in part, attempted to explain some of the stuff in the Torah that didn’t make sense, including the laws of kashrut. They ended up with a couple of bonus guidelines to define a dores. For example: A dores eats its prey while still alive. A dores holds prey down with its claws and rips off pieces to eat, or uses its talons to lift food to its mouth. When a dores bird stands on a rope, it splits its toes, meaning two lie in front and two in back.

These guidelines are sort of arbitrary and mostly based on the (very limited) understanding of natural science at the time. For example, chickens eat plenty of animals while still alive: worms, grubs, flies. Invertebrates, apparently, were not really considered “animals” at the time.

The Mishnah also provided, helpfully, some rules as to what an acceptable bird might look like. A non-dores bird has an extra toe, on the back of its ankle, like a spur. A non-dores bird has a crop, which is an anatomical structure in some birds used to store food before digestion. A non-dores bird has a peelable gizzard. This is actually a rule! If you find a new bird and you’re not sure if you can eat it, you have to murder it, dissect it, find the gizzard, and attempt to peel off some membrane.

Just in case these rules weren’t unhelpful enough, there’s another wrinkle. In general, birds of prey are off-limits, no matter what. But for all the other birds, when there is debate over whether you can or cannot eat it, you rely on mesorah.

Mesorah is sort of the oral tradition of Judaism. In this case, it means that if the ruling is unclear, but there is a history of Jews eating this particular species, then that species will be permitted. It’s circular, yes: To be considered Kosher, you have to have already been eating it, but how can you eat it if you’re not sure it’s considered Kosher? Regardless! Mesorah is commonly called upon in the case of the Muscovy duck.

Basically the entire world’s population of domesticated ducks all descend from the mallard, which probably originated in Eastern Europe. The major exception is the Muscovy duck, which, despite its Russian-sounding name, is native to the New World, from Mexico and farther south. It’s not particularly closely related to the mallard, though it too has been domesticated for thousands of years. The Muscovy duck is larger than a mallard, usually black and white, and with characteristic caruncles on its face—you know, those knobbly fleshy things more associated with turkeys.

The Muscovy duck was, upon its discovery by Europeans, pretty much immediately sent to the Old World, where it was raised like other ducks. It can actually breed with mallards; the offspring are called mulards, or mules, and are common in foie gras production. Jews in Russia started eating it pretty much immediately, seeing it as, well, a duck. Jews in the Southern U.S., as well as those in Central and South America, ate it, too—at least, until 1861.

Ari Z. Zivotofsky and Zohar Amar, professors at Bar Ilan University, have written two extensive histories of the Muscovy duck’s place in Jewish law. They write that, in 1861, a rabbi who had just moved to New Orleans found his new Jewish community was eating a weird duck he’d never seen before. He wrote to some other rabbis back in Europe, who said that there was no mesorah on the Muscovy duck, and further that the eggs looked sort of odd, and so it should be banned. Those rabbis seem to have been given some incorrect information, including that the Muscovy duck grabs prey out of the air with its claws (it doesn’t), lays greenish, spherical eggs (it doesn’t; the eggs look like any other duck egg), and that it mates with snakes (lol).

Rabbis in Argentina actually sent back two live Muscovy ducks to Europe—only one survived—for some other European rabbis to examine. Those other rabbis wrote back saying that the bird was perfectly fine to eat, and that in fact they had eaten the surviving duck. With those rulings, the Muscovy gained in popularity among Jewish farmers in the Old World, especially in France and Israel, as well as in South America. But not in the U.S.

In 2010, the debate was reignited when a supplier shipped a bunch of Muscovy ducks instead of mallards to kosher slaughterhouses in Pennsylvania and Kiryas Joel, a Satmar Hasidic community in New York. The two slaughterhouses asked local rabbinic authorities what was up with this duck shipment, and an entire new chapter of the Muscovy debate began.

According to Zivotofsky and Amar, a fundamental problem lay in the research done by these American communities. Apparently they just Googled “Muscovy duck” and landed on an enthusiast website called Muscovy Duck Central. That site has a section describing some violent behavior by Muscovy ducks, saying that these ducks are aggressive and will kill other animals, even ducklings. The American Jewish communities read this and decided that the Muscovy is actually a dores, a predator, and thus should be banned.

Zivotofsky and Amar spent a while talking to duck experts and observing Muscovy ducks in person, studying them to look for signs of dores behavior. They declare that Muscovy ducks are maybe slightly more aggressive than mallards, but that the reports on their violent nature are wildly overstated, and that, basically, domesticated Muscovy ducks are just… ducks. “Those seeking to prohibit the bird mobilized all tactics including utilized rumors, hearsay, suppression of facts, and simple lies,” they write in one of their papers.

The Muscovy duck is not the only New World poultry subject to this kind of debate. One rabbi, Rabbi Shlomo Kluger (1785-1869), wrote that literally every bird in the New World is forbidden, because there were no Jews there until recently and thus no mesorah. It is still not really settled whether turkey is Kosher; most Kosher Jews will eat it, citing that it is largely similar to a big chicken, that it has a peelable gizzard and a crop, that it is not a bird of prey. But there are still some Jewish families who will not eat turkey (which, incidentally, is called tarnegol hodu in Hebrew—literally, India chicken, because it came from the West Indies, sort of). Their reasoning is sort of a personal mesorah: Their families did not eat turkey, therefore they do not.

The case of the Muscovy duck cannot be settled because the rules themselves are not really known. It’s like introducing basketball to people who had never played basketball before, but had sort of heard about it. Should you dribble the ball? Well, I heard some other people did, so, yeah, I guess so. Can you kick the ball? I haven’t heard anything about that, so, sure, you can kick the ball. You can imagine the arguments that might ensue. Is the Muscovy duck kosher? Sure. And no. I don’t know.

Thespians, writers, and princes all dined on Baddeley cake.

Robert Baddeley was never a leading man. Outshone by his wife—a famous actress of tremendous beauty, who eventually left him—he usually played the comic relief. And yet, since 1795, actors at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane have toasted him every Twelfth Night with punch and a massive “Baddeley cake.”

How did this loveable lightweight achieve lasting fame? He paid for the privilege.

Not much is known about Baddeley’s early life, but legend holds that he was a pastry chef before he became an actor. In a spectacularly long will written shortly before his death, says Jennie Walton, the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund’s archivist, Baddeley instructed his executors to take £100 of his estate and invest it. Once a year, £3 would go to the purchase of wine, punch, and a Twelfth Night cake for the ladies and gentlemen of Drury Lane to enjoy in the green room forever after.

Twelfth Night is little-celebrated these days, but in Baddeley’s time, it was bigger than Christmas. Falling on January 5 or 6, it was reserved for revelry, games, and Twelfth cakes: fruitcakes covered in marzipan and topped with crowns. Each cake’s batter contained a dried pea and a bean, and finding one earned lucky eaters a coronation as King or Queen for the day.

The first Twelfth Night after Baddeley’s death was a bit somber. Walton recently received a newspaper clipping that recounts the evening. Over the phone, Walton reads from the January 8, 1795 issue of the Oracle and Public Advertiser: “Baddeley’s whimsical legacy was properly fulfilled on Twelfth Night, by the executors in the great green room after the first gloom from the mournful cause of the meeting had subsided.” (“In other words they were all thinking about poor old Baddeley,” says Walton.)

Spectacularly, Baddeley’s tradition has endured with little interruption, preserving a bit of Georgian-era London life in amber. The venue is still Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which is also the oldest theater building in London, having been rebuilt after a fire in 1812. Over the years, Walton says, the ceremony has only been missed 13 times: during wartime, theater closures, and once when the performers were visiting from France. (“They wouldn't give the cake to the French company.”)

While Baddeley’s will specified the cake be served in the green room on Twelfth Night, the presentation and ambience has varied. At times, actors devoured the cake on stage, or even between acts, snatching at the cake as they hurried by. On other occasions, illustrious guests attended. As Walton notes, the autobiography of Joseph Grimaldi, a wildly popular entertainer and the patron saint of modern clowning, describes his experience on Twelfth Night. Backstage, he saw Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a statesman, playwright, and longtime owner of the theater, jokingly peel the crown off the cake and offer it to the Prince Regent, the future King George IV. His Highness’s response was that he would prefer some cake.

The cake itself, Walton says, was often enormous, capable of feeding an entire theater company. One of the first pastry cooks to bake the cake was Samuel Birch, an actor and, later, Lord Mayor of London. Cakes were decorated lavishly with impressions of Shakespeare’s head or painted panels with scenes from the show. Periodically, actors toasted to the “skull” of Baddeley, for dreaming up such an exquisite affair. When Drury Lane was helmed by Augustus Harris in the late 19th century, people clamored for invitations to what was essentially a ball, with a supper, cake, and dancing. At one Baddeley cake ceremony in 1888, reported the New York Times, both Oscar Wilde and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, attended. The press covered the ceremony well into the 20th century.

These days, the events are smaller and rarely covered by the press, but the cakes remain glorious. Walton calls them “Disney-esque,” due to the show references baked in. Typically, the cakes are fruitcake, though a recent performance of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory called for a chocolate cake.

The 2019 celebration, however, will be the last Baddeley cake celebration for several years, and the earliest ever. On January 6, Twelfth Night, the theater will close for renovation. So on January 3, performers had their cake, themed around the current show, 42nd Street, in the theater’s Grand Saloon. There was also hot punch, made with a recipe Walton says is secret, passed down from theater manager to theater manager, and served in a silver punchbowl gifted by the original Drury Lane company of My Fair Lady. Walton doesn’t know what’s in it, but with the addition of several liquors, it’s certainly punchy. Until the theater re-opens, it will be the last punch toasted in honor of Baddeley’s skull.

From the Mariana Trench to the Moon, we don't have to be in a place very much to muck it up.

This planet existed for billions of years before we showed up. Earth froze and thawed; it was gashed by glaciers; it was trod by some giant, pretty ridiculous-looking creatures. Since we got here and began tilling the soil and razing forests, building cities and homes and highways, and pushing ourselves out into the vast ocean and up into the endless sky, it’s never been the same. Our fingerprints are just about everywhere on Earth—and even places beyond.

These traces aren’t just the deep, lasting scars or massive, nature-defying infrastructure projects, but also subtle impacts in places we almost never actually visit—ocean crevices, less-trammeled terrain, or even other worlds. Here are three recently uncovered examples of the human knack for disrupting the status quo with even the slightest contact.

Visitors introduced tiny interlopers to Antarctica

Antarctica is a hard place to be a plant. Only around 1 percent of the land is hospitable to plant life, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Mosses and lichens cluster near the shores like emerald blankets, but few flowering plants can make a go of it. Those that can—namely, hair grass and pearlwort—are found far from the frozen interior, in places such as Signy Island, one of the South Orkney group at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Those few flowering plants now have new, more mobile neighbors: Eretmoptera murphyi, a flightless midge. The insect isn’t native to the peninsula, but it’s suddenly flourishing there, significantly outweighing the biomass of the other arthropods there combined (there are a few tiny examples who are native to the continent). Researchers suspect that E. murphyi arrived from South Georgia island by hitching a ride with unwitting humans. "Midge larvae … are tiny and cannot be seen easily with the naked eye,” said Peter Convey of the BAS, in a statement. “Tourists and researchers may be bringing them in from their stopovers in the sub-Antarctic and moving them around the continent in the mud on their boots." Thousands of scientists and tourists visit Antarctica each year—a drop in the bucket of global travel, but enough to offer plenty of opportunities for tiny insects to thumb a ride. Elsewhere on the continent, scientists and tourists also appear to be tracking in pathogens that are sickening local seabirds.

Does a little midge here or there really matter? At the British Ecological Society conference in December 2018, researchers from the BAS and University of Birmingham suggested that the midges, which have an appetite for peat in moss banks, are increasing the amount of nitrogen in the soil, which isn't good for those native mosses. Broadly speaking, “mosses don't like fertilized ground, and those found on Signy Island—as for all Antarctic moss species—will have adapted to a low-nutrient environment,” says Jesamine Bartlett, a polar biologist at the University of Birmingham who presented the work at the conference. The midges, Bartlett said in a news release, are “basically doing the job of an earthworm, but in an ecosystem that has never had earthworms.” Changing the composition of soil nutrients could have rippling impacts. Flowering plants, for example, might flourish under these new conditions, but it's too soon to tell for sure.

But because researchers know that the midge is tough enough to weather the colder reaches of the peninsula, they are investigating ways to curb its spread. Insecticides are prohibited, Bartlett says, but researchers have been scrubbing shoes and equipment with warm water to keep insect larvae in check.

Plastics have reached the deepest crannies of the ocean

Millions of tons of plastics enter the seas each year, and pretty much get everywhere—into sediments, into the bellies of sea creatures, and likely into our own stomachs, too.

The largest of these can choke animals, or cause them to starve. The smaller fibers and pellets are ubiquitous, but exactly how dangerous they are remains an open question as evidence mounts about microplastics’ reach.

In November 2018, a Chinese research team reported in Geochemical Perspectives Letters that the concentration of microplastics in samples of water and sediment of the Mariana Trench, up to 35,787 feet below the surface (the deepest spot in the ocean, where a plastic bag has been spotted), rivaled or exceeded the concentration in shallower waters of the open oceans across the world. By their count, the sediment of the Mariana Trench is flecked with 20 times more microplastics than sediments sampled in the Southwest Indian Ocean and the Southern Atlantic, and twice as many as the samples from the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.

Humans rarely get down to the trench—the most recent was filmmaker James Cameron, who descended there in 2012, and another wealthy adventurer is planning to go next—but we’ve altered its ecology anyway. The researchers suggest that earthquakes and ocean currents can carry these sediments to the depths, meaning that we’re “contaminat[ing] one of the most remote and deepest places on the planet” from a distance.

Astronauts warmed the Moon

The Moon is no stranger to extremes. The surface temperature swings wildly from more than 250 degrees Fahrenheit when the sun strikes with full force, to a miserable -387 degrees Fahrenheit when darkness reigns.

The Moon is close, cosmically, but it is still 239,000 miles away from Earth, and only 12 humans have ever been there. But we’ve definitely left deep, lingering marks, in addition to the tons of historic space junk on the surface.

In the 1970s, when NASA placed temperature sensors on the Moon, research teams back on Earth began to notice a puzzling pattern. The lunar surface seemed to be slowly warming in a way unrelated to its regular temperature fluctuations. At the time, they weren’t quite sure why, but scientists recently did some detective work in tapes from the mission that had been gathering dust for decades. The team, led by Seiichi Nagihara, a geophysicist at Texas Tech University, found that the subsurface temperature on the Moon inched up by several degrees over the years that measurements were collected. When these researchers consulted high-resolution photographs and zeroed in on astronauts’ tracks, they noticed that the footprints and wheel marks had disturbed the light-colored regolith soil, revealing darker material underneath, which is less reflective and absorbs more heat.

"You can actually see the astronauts’ tracks, where they walked," Walter Kiefer, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, and coauthor of the team’s paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, told the CBC in June 2018. "And we can see … where they scuffed dirt up—and what it leaves behind is a darker path. In other words, the astronauts walking on the moon changed the structure of the regolith … in such a way that made it a little bit darker."

The study authors told the CBC that the few-degree warming isn’t a huge deal—and might even have been a temporary blip—but others have pointed out that the disruption raises some moral quandaries. "Even on Earth, it's this balance of making progress with science and technology but respecting the system that we were given as human beings," Western University planetary scientist Catherine Neish explained to the CBC.

The question of our impact off-world is timely at the beginning of 2019, as China has landed the Chang’e-4 probe and rover on the far side of the Moon—the first spacecraft to land softly on the side we don’t see from here. Its targets, according to Scientific American, include impact craters and mares, comprised of ribbons of hardened, ancient lava that Earthlings once mistook for seas on the visible side. There’s plenty to learn about the terrain, and the rover has already begun leaving tracks in the lunar soil as it rolls along. Meanwhile, there’s also more to understand about what our presence means for these places that stir our imaginations.

FBI agents, Prohibition, and beer made American cider sweet and sober.

25 years ago, Barry Topp, owner of the New Forest Cider Company, drove trucks filled with apple cider to sell at festivals all over the United Kingdom. There’s one festival in particular he reminisces about with great fondness: at the Royal Air Force Lakenheath base, which hosts American military personnel. Everyone was excited to see him arrive with his truck full of cider. “You weren’t meant to take alcohol onto the army bases,” Todd says, but the American airmen told Topp to sneak it through simply by calling the contents of his truck “apple cider.” This made Topp realize: “In America, apple cider is like our apple juice!” Using the linguistic confusion to dodge detection, Topp and his truck full of boozy British apple cider made their way into the base, much to the delight of all.

These days, the public is no longer allowed on military bases for security reasons. However, the confusion between American and British apple cider has continued. In fact, if you were to try the same trick today, chances are you’d get away with it. Today, the United Kingdom and United States are the biggest producers of cider in the world. Yet, at some point in the last few hundred years, the words “apple cider” have evolved to mean different things in these two nations.

In the American state of New Hampshire, the state beverage of apple cider is like unfiltered apple juice. Usually, mulled spices are added, turning it into a spiced, piping hot drink. But in the famed cider-growing region of Britain’s West Country, cider is a fermented, alcoholic beverage. Look further across Europe and you’ll find that America’s version of apple cider is the outlier—cidre in France and sidra in Spain are both akin to British hard cider, rather than the American mulled beverage. So, how did Americans end up with such a unique form of apple cider?

People have been making cider for thousands of years. Wild apples, Malus sylvestris, grew naturally in the ancient British Isles. The Romans encouraged apple cultivation for cider, and when Christian monks established monasteries, they also made the beverage. When European settlers traveled to North America, they took cider with them.

In the American colonial era, there was only one form of apple cider: cyder. This type of beverage, a fermented product usually between 4-6% ABV, was brought onto the continent by colonists in the 17th century. Unlike barley and grapes, apples grew in New England with ease. New England residents in the 18th century consumed cider generously: an estimated 15 to 54 gallons per year.

Cyder was the most commonly produced drink in colonial America—the beverage of choice for most Americans at a time when imbibing water was questionable. Not only was it easy to obtain and affordable to produce, but the fermentation process guaranteed it would be free from disease-causing pathogens, writes Amy Stewart in The Drunken Botanist. Even as Puritans denounced distilled spirits, cider and other low-alcohol products remained in good repute.

As America expanded, apples remained a fundamental part of society and good health. When land companies offered plots throughout the newly acquired Northwest Territory, which spanned Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, settlers had to prove their commitment to their new homes by planting apple trees. Enter the legend of Johnny Appleseed. Actually named John Chapman, he made his living by planting apple seeds across the frontier for families planning to move out west—allowing them to make cider when they arrived. While apple trees grown from seed (rather than propagated through grafting) can produce unpredictable fruit, sour or bitter apples are perfectly fine for making cider. Even as settlers migrated into regions where it was easier to produce grain, cider remained a fundamental part of American life.

But soon, the opportunities of the Industrial Revolution beckoned to millions of immigrants—and a lot of them didn’t want to drink cider. Over 33 million people entered the United States between 1820 and 1920, revolutionizing many American industries. German immigrants became the leaders in brewing and malting, popularizing beer. Coupled with affordable grains grown from the Midwest, beer began to replace cider. By 1900, cider consumption had dropped to a total of 55 million gallons for a country that now had over 76 million people. (While cider was on the decline, beer-making gradually grew more difficult too. World War I diverted grain and altered factory production across the country, and beer producers faced boycotts due to anti-German sentiments.)

Then, on January 17, 1920, Prohibition came into effect, halting the production, importation, and sale of alcohol. Prohibition is widely considered an era when Americans were not allowed to drink alcohol. Yet while beer and spirits were banned, the Volstead Act allowed farmers to make limited quantities of naturally-fermenting products, such as cider and fruit juice, so long as they were not meant to intoxicate. There was even leeway should a farmer get in trouble for illicit cider-making: at trial, the definition of “intoxicating” was left up to a jury.

Perhaps cider could have found a foothold here and begun its ascent back into popularity—but exactly the opposite happened. Overzealous temperance supporters and FBI agents razed many apple orchards to the ground, destroying heirloom apple varieties that had grown since colonial times. The orchards that survived could only produce so many of the high-tannin, bitter apples usually grown for cider. Farmers began primarily cultivating sweeter apples for cooking and eating to ensure the survival of their farms.

Post-Prohibition, the cider industry never recovered, but it did evolve. Although Prohibitionists deemed fermented cider “the devil’s brew,” writes cider chronicler Ben Watson, “fresh apple juice was being recognized and marketed as a healthful drink.” This led to the development of "sweet cider"—a non-alcoholic beverage with connotations of a simple life on the farm.

Even as American apple cider was developed, much of the machinery and processes to create it remained the same. Both sweet and hard cider-makers mill and press apples to extract juice. The key difference between sweet American apple cider and hard cider comes down to fermentation and type of apples. Hard cider is fermented and often includes astringent, tannin-rich apples to create interesting, full-bodied, dry ciders. The hot, mulled beverage Americans know and love is made from culinary apples, such as Jonagold, Honeycrisp, and Gala. The final product for both sweet and hard ciders is usually pasteurized or UV-sterilized.

According to Joe Marini, a “cider master” at The Stable in London, culinary apples can be used for cider. But instead of tannins, “they possess much more acidity, which confers a crisper, more refreshing, light-bodied quality.” Many commercial cider makers, such as Strongbow, use sugary culinary apple concentrate mixed with water. However, tradition-honoring producers such as the New Forest Cider Company disapprove of such methods.

Recently, Americans have been going back to their hard cider-loving roots. Since 2009, hard cider has become the fastest growing product within the American alcohol industry. More homegrown hard cider will take time, though—few farms grow the wide variety of cider apples that are still common throughout Europe.

Back in Britain, there was no Prohibition. Cider production waxed and waned, but never ceased. Cider’s popularity has increased there as well, moving from the West Country all throughout the United Kingdom. These days, there are countless ciders in production across the country. Specialty bars, such as The Stable, specialize in cider—stocking over 100 varieties, including their own blend of mulled cider. But as of yet, they don’t have sweet, booze-free American apple cider.

The craft is hanging by a thread.

Deep inside Srinagar’s downtown, the narrow streets of this working-class neighborhood are flanked by houses with intricately designed wooden windows and rusty iron gates. The network of lanes twist and turn around the mud-colored waters of the Jhelum River. Across a small bridge, a modest house overlooks the river, and a worn-out signboard dangles from a window: Sultan Khan & Sons, Carpets and Shawls.

In a dimly lit room on the top floor of the house, Sultan Khan works on his wooden loom. On the day that I visit, he is making a carpet, his long fingers moving quickly across a thick strip of threads. He squints his eyes at the brown parchment hanging across the threads. Some signs and letters are scribbled across the parchment. Those are the design and color codes—the secret and confidential blueprint, known as talim, handed down from generation to generation—that Khan has to follow as he makes the carpet. He takes a long puff at the hookah placed beside him and quietly orders for namkeen chai, a quintessential Kashmiri way of greeting a guest.

“Twenty years ago, there were at least 100 families in this mahalla (locality) who had the loom. Now, only two have remained in the trade,” says Sultan’s son, Aslam Khan, in Hindi. “My father has been weaving on this loom for the last 50 years, a skill that he learnt from his father. He is an ustaad (master craftsman) of carpet weaving.”

Sultan and Aslam are two of the remaining band of practitioners of the ancient craft of Kashmiri weaving. With anywhere from 200 to 900 knots per square inch, it is one of the most intricate forms of weaving in the world. The retail price of an authentic hand-knotted carpet can be as high as $100 per square foot, depending upon the fineness of material and knot density.

“Kashmiri carpets are known for two things: They are always handmade and knotted, never tufted,” says Shaukat Hussain in Hindi. Hussain runs a workshop that his family has owned for five generations in the Idgah district in old Srinagar. “An artisan takes around six to eight months to complete a silk carpet, weaving about one million knots per square meter,” Hussain says.

It was Zain-ul-Abidin who introduced the art of weaving to Kashmir. The benevolent king, who had ruled the Kashmir Valley in the latter part of 15th century, had imported the art from Persia, which was Asia’s capital of high art at the time. The craft flourished during the time of the Mughals and continued even during the troubled times of the Afghan and Sikh rules.

The British arrived in the early part of the 19th century along with a certain utilitarianism and commercialization. Kashmiri shawls and carpets became known as cashmere in Britain. Easy to pack and transport, these luxurious squares of fabric were considered fashion statements as they were much more expensive than the regular silk and cotton fabrics. The British opened factories in Kashmir and production started commercially. For Kashmiri weavers, this meant turning their skills into generations of income. To this day, Kashmir carpets and shawls still follow the centuries-old tradition of intricate geometric and calligraphic motifs established by the earliest practitioners. The craft’s beauty lies in that detailed needlework.

But in more recent years, this longstanding industry has suffered a series of setbacks. In 1989, the valley was engulfed in turmoil. As Indian military forces and separatist forces were locked in a brutal and drawn-out conflict, export orders dried up and inbound tourism hit an all-time low. Many artisans fled the valley, creating a void.

Three decades later, the valley has entered another crucial juncture. The first few years of the present decade had been a period of relative calm and the weavers felt optimistic about the future of their craft. However, since 2016, their dreams of rebuilding their industry have faded away due to escalating violence.

In July 2016, Burhan Wani, a commander of the Kashmiri militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen, was killed in an encounter with Indian military forces. His death sparked several months of turmoil in Kashmir. More than 90 civilians died and approximately 15,000 were injured. Many economic activities, including the weaving industry, came almost to a standstill.

While that specific period of unrest ended in early 2017, sporadic violence still continues across the valley.

The industry is plagued by other obstacles as well. The cost of raw materials, namely the wool of the pashmina goats, has become prohibitively expensive. Unusually severe winters in the upper reaches of the Kashmir Valley have led to the death of thousands of goats, driving up the price of yarn to between $35 and $60 per kilogram. Additionally, the market is flooded with cheaper machine-made domestic substitutes. Most importantly, the younger generations living in Kashmir are not interested in mastering the skills of weaving, at least in part because of the low pay, which typically amounts to Rs. 150-225 per day (approximately $2.00-3.00).

“My son does not want to take up this profession. In fact, he often asks me why I am still in it,” says 41-year-old Faiyyaz, one of the youngest of the 15 weavers employed at Shaukat Hussain’s workshop, in Hindi. After learning the craft from his father, Faiyyaz started working at Hussain’s in his teens. Today he specializes in making silk carpets. “The average wage I get is Rs. 200 (a little less than $3.00) per day and we work on a ‘no work, no pay’ system. Lots of artisans have shifted to other jobs as contract laborers of construction companies. The pay is better there.” Faiyyaz adds that he doesn’t want his son, who is presently in college, to be a weaver either. “I want him to be in a proper job.”

Altaf Ahmed is a close friend of Aslam Khan. A member of the Carpet Workers’ Union in Srinagar, Ahmed hails from a weavers’ village in the Budgam district, around 18 miles from Srinagar. “We need to ensure a hassle-free credit system for the independent artisans and a strong wage policy for the craftsmen working in carpets and shawls factories,” he says in Hindi. There are loan schemes introduced by the banks, including the privately owned Jammu & Kashmir Bank, for the craftsmen in the valley, but the paperwork is too cumbersome for the weavers, who have little or no education. Additionally, the banks need substantial collaterals, which are impossible for an artisan to provide. As a consequence, an artisan who receives a loan can become trapped, borrowing huge sums from the wastas (contractors or employers) at high rates of interest to pay their debts.

Aslam Khan leads me to the Bund, a quiet avenue in Central Srinagar. The street is lined with sturdy chinars and weeping willows. Rows of elegant houses, with a distinct colonial influence, lie discreetly behind the trees. This downtown locality is a far cry from what we normally associate a shopping area with, but Aslam insists that it is the carpet hub of Srinagar.

Amid a mild snowfall, a white vintage building with red rooftop windows stands on the Bund, overlooking a small park. Built in 1840, it is the oldest trading house in Kashmiri carpets and woven textiles. Sadiq Mohammed Wani, whose forefathers came from Persia a few centuries ago, is a leading exporter of Kashmiri handicrafts. He operates his business out of this building.

Inside the trading house, Wani points to an embroidered shawl hanging on a wall with intricate floral motifs. “That was made exactly 105 years ago,” he says. “It is a Kani shawl and those detailed motifs cannot be found anymore.” A Kani shawl is a rarity that requires special wooden needles. Normally an artist takes six months to complete a two-meter long piece.

“I am getting less orders for Kani and Pashmina shawls these days,” Wani says. “Some of my outsourcing units in villages have closed down because there’s not much order for them.”

Winter, Wani says, has long been the most productive season for the industry. “As snow blanketed the valley for the long months of winter, villagers confined indoors wove shawls, embroidering colorful patterns by hand before selling them in the spring as the emerald slopes returned to life,” he adds. “The situation has changed a lot recently with most of our weaving families shifting to other professions.”

Wani knows that the artisans are getting underpaid, and that the Kashmiri youth is becoming increasingly disinterested in weaving. But the basic economics work against the factory owners and exporters, he says. The State Government of Jammu & Kashmir has obtained the Geographical Indication from the World Trade Organization for both Kani shawls and Pashmina products. It also introduced the RFIT (Radio Frequency Identification Tag), which uses stored electronic information to track an object, in order to stop the sale of fraudulent shawls. But these efforts have not quite reversed the market trends.

“If the labor cost is increased, it further increases the price, making it impossible to sell the products in the market,” Wani argues. “We have been asking for drawbacks and subsidies for the carpets and shawl industry. But since the sector is highly unorganized, it is difficult…” His voice trails off and he adds, “It will be hard to convince my grandson to continue the business that my family has owned for generations.”

*Correction: This article initially identified the material in the photograph as a skein of wool. It is not a skein.