An abstract view of a changing world.

From 2,000 feet up, the watery depressions between rust-colored surfaces look like something else entirely—agate maybe, or abstract paintings, or scaly skin, or sugar cookies flooded with royal icing. In actuality, they're geological features known as kettles, proof of vanishing glaciers, and the focus of a new series, "Glacier Pools," by photographer Tom Hegen.

To capture these aerial views, Hegen trained his camera out the open window of a small, circling plane, again and again, above Iceland’s Southern Region. (He's not disclosing the specific location, in an effort to keep the area from becoming crowded.) The photographer, who is based in Germany, was captivated by the landscape, stippled with a smattering of glacial kettles ranging in color from muddy to milky to turquoise.

These shallow ponds form in outwash plains, or sandurs, at a glacier’s toe. As glaciers recede, they leave sediment embedded with chunks of ice, and as these buried blocks melt, they form divots, which then fill with water.

Kettles can stretch a few feet, or several miles. While they’re easily visible on the ground—Hegen has seen them up close, on foot—they can be especially astonishing from the sky. The vantage “is rather spectacular,” he says. “I was absolutely amazed by the shape, color, and rhythm.” Those varied hues correspond to the amount of sediment and the depth of the water, he adds: "The deeper or clearer the water, the bluer the pond."

Iceland’s glaciers are undoubtedly shrinking. In the new book The Secret Lives of Glaciers, glaciologist M Jackson reports that the country’s frozen giants will lose at least a quarter of their current volume over the next five decades. “How Icelandic glaciers appear today is likely to be unrecognizable to you and me in a few decades, and simply incomprehensible to ensuing generations looking through your old vacation photographs,” she writes in an excerpt published in National Geographic.

Long after the glaciers are gone, the land will still hold proof that they had been there. Valleys, lakes, and other features will remind future people that these masses once moved over the Earth. (North America's Great Lakes are a prominent example.) Atlas Obscura has a selection of Hegen's photos below. The images are reminders that a changing world can be stunningly, somberly, starkly beautiful.

Wes Modes is documenting life along America's waterways.

The rivers of the United States have a certain lore and mystique within American culture. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these roaring waterways were home to thousands. Entire communities existed on or near the water in self-made houseboats. The history of these communities has been explored briefly in river memoirs such as Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat Journal, but hasn’t been thoroughly examined in a present-day context. That is, until a modern shantyboat came bobbing down the Mississippi in the summer of 2014.

Wes Modes was at the helm of that vessel. Modes is a lecturer at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is also the primary force behind “A Secret History of American River People,” a project aimed at capturing “the lost narratives of river people, river communities, and the river itself.” Modes, an artist by trade, has spent the last six years traveling the Mississippi, Hudson, Tennessee, and Sacramento Rivers during the summers, creating a moving museum/work of art, while also documenting the oral history of American river culture and people’s connection to the water.

Modes has always had an affinity for exploring America’s transportation arteries. During the 1990s, his primary interest was train-hopping. “I really enjoyed going through and seeing the unvarnished backyards of America,” says Modes. It was the sight of rusty worn cars and tumbled fences that intrigued him the most—not for what they presented to the world on the surface, but for the story behind these places and objects. When he heard about some friends floating down the Mississippi in homemade boats in 2004, he loved the idea and stewed over the concept, until “punk rafting” was born.

On nothing more than a piece of plywood atop of inner tubes purchased at a tire store, Modes and a few companions floated along the Missouri River in 2005. “It seemed like a natural transition from train hopping to river rafting,” says Modes. He grew up on the tales of Huckleberry Finn and wanted to mirror the classic journey, drifting down an American river on a makeshift raft.

Modes made punk rafting a summertime staple. But these trips were much more than mere excursions. They were the foundation of something much larger.

One evening after a rafting excursion in 2012, the team was at their camp—affectionately named “Camp Tipsy”—when Modes and his comrades began discussing how to build a floating cabin, something that they could escape to while out on the water. Thus the idea to build a shantyboat was born.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, shantyboats were a common sight along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Collectively, those two rivers were home to 50,000 people living on such boats. These floating homes were often homemade and crude in nature, fashioned from recycled materials. For around $30 to $40, wealthier individuals could also purchase a houseboat that was less crude, resembling a shotgun house with up to two to three rooms. In Louisville, Kentucky, between 1870 and 1910, buying and living on a houseboat was a better option than paying $5 a day to rent a room in a crowded tenement.

Modes wanted his shantyboat to replicate those historical models, so in 2012, he began erecting a vessel with salvageable materials. While the hull of the ship was made from new wood, the framing and siding for the cabin were fashioned out of reclaimed lumber from the local dump or from scavenging through sheds and tearing down chicken coops. Modes documented the entire process of the build on his Shantyboat build blog.

After two years of labor, in 2014, Modes was ready for his biggest river voyage to date, a summer on the Mississippi River, except this time, he also wanted to document the oral and living history of river communities and to shed light on a forgotten thread of American history. “I found that there’s very little written about the social ecology of river communities,” he says of his motivation. Modes didn’t just want to be a floating historian but also wanted to know if this type of culture and connection to the river still exist today. If so, he wondered, how has this lifestyle changed over the decades?

Through interviewing members of contemporary river communities, Modes says he has been able to compile a “complementary and contradictory collage of unexpected stories that people tell." For example, he has spoken to people whose homes have been pushed off a river by shifting socioeconomic conditions. But he has also chatted with a family who owns a very expensive home near the same river, and that family was unaware they were doing the pushing.

In previous centuries, most of these communities largely consisted of women, children, itinerant workers, displaced farmers, or factory workers trying to make the best life for themselves during the Great Panic of 1893 and then the Great Depression, says Modes. That’s one of the primary reasons these communities were established along the backdrop of industrial towns. Residents also worked in various cottage industries, such as sewing or raising pigs along the river.

Shantyboats also made it possible for many immigrant families to establish foundations in the United States. “It was a place where if you needed work and you’re a new immigrant and nobody would rent to you or you didn’t have any money... well, maybe for a couple hundred bucks you could buy or rent a shantyboat and be able to live and work,” says Modes.

Unfortunately, these communities were frequently shunned by those who lived farther inland. Shantyboat residents were regularly painted in a negative light, maligned as vagrants, drunks, and thieves. In 1895, The Cincinnati Enquirer referred to shantyboaters as “River Tramps,” and classified them as a “strange floating population.” The article discusses with disdain the tax-free lifestyles of the men, while their wives and children engage in “petty thievery.”

They were also the victims of various campaigns to have them banned from waterfronts. In 1901, Jeremiah Rainy Esq. led a month-long campaign in Ohio against these communities, vowing to “drive them from the sacred soil of Scioto County,” as reported by the Portsmouth Times.

“A lot of the townies were really dead set against shantyboats and squatters,” says Modes. While these communities certainly had their rough edges, as they were frequent haunts for bootleggers and rum-runners, Modes says it's hard to know how much truth those unfavorable depictions actually held.

"We need to understand that this was a complicated life, on the margins of nature and industrial America," says Mark Wetherington, former director of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, via email. "Because they have mostly disappeared, that does not mean their story is not worth telling."

While traversing his very own river journeys, Modes has sought to illuminate these sometimes misunderstood communities. “I wanted to float rivers but, I wanted to do it in a way where I wasn’t a tourist sucking up the vibe,” says Modes. “I wanted to give something back to those communities and what I hoped to give back was the gift of listening, hearing their stories and saving them for the future.”

To accomplish this goal, Modes wanted to document every leg of his journey, the people he spoke with, their stories and lives. He also wanted to record the things he saw and develop an interactive web documentary and archive, so people could follow the journey and learn about this hidden culture. The boat itself would become a touring art installation, displaying the photos, artifacts, and folk art collected and created along the trek.

In 2014, the adventure began on the river Modes felt loomed the largest in American history and literature: the Big Muddy, the mighty Mississippi River. During that summer, Modes began bobbing down the Mississippi with his shanty-mate Jeremiah Daniels, a network engineer and former soldier whose tours stationed him between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. “I was compelled to know more about the latent substructures that had shaped our nation,” says Daniels, via email. “I think it’s really important for people to examine their connections and impact with their communities and their environments.”

For the last six years, the two have been riding the currents, along with a rotating cast of volunteers and students from UC Santa Cruz. They have completed 125 interviews with everyone from museum coordinators, artists, marina owners, commercial fishermen, and those that grew up on or near the water. They also have collected hundreds of hours of video footage from their excursions along 1,200 miles of rivers. Those clips live on the project's website.

Several years into the undertaking, Modes’s shantyboat itself has been transformed into a living art project, traveling to museum exhibits and various pop-ups. Modes says visitors to his boat initially come for the romance and intrigue of river life, but stay for the stories and history.

In the summer of 2019, the boat will take on another iconic waterway, the Ohio River. The vessel will launch from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in late June and travel through Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky. It should be an interesting voyage, according to Modes, because of the river’s World War II history of shipbuilding. It’s also a route with a strong Native American heritage. “Part of my mission is to collect stories that don't make the dominant historical narrative,” says Modes. Until that trip begins, the shantyboat is enjoying a stay at The Portland Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.

Modes isn’t stopping anytime soon. He has future river trips planned up until 2020. And while he still has many U.S. rivers to float down, he hopes to take the shantyboat down the English Channel one day and explore a different waterway's culture.

“I just continue to be fascinated by people’s stories. It provides me artistically with adventure and inspiration,” says Modes. When asked when the project might end, Modes always answers the same way and with a chuckle: “when I run out of rivers.”

Tracking these insects takes a little adhesive and a lot of luck.

In the montane forest of central Mexico, the butterflies are everywhere. At the right time of year, they twirl in the air like scraps of confetti. The sound of millions of pairs of wings reminds some listeners of the patter of rain. They come to roost on the feathery oyamel or sacred fir trees, turning green boughs black and orange, and making them sag toward the ground. Sometimes the butterflies cluster on the floor of the forest, where they nectar on colorful flowers. They gather there in death, too.

By the time the monarch butterflies have completed their continent-spanning migration at El Rosario butterfly sanctuary, part of Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, the weary travelers have often journeyed several thousand miles, from the Eastern United States and Canada. Each autumn, the reserve welcomes hundreds of millions of them, plus the human visitors who come to marvel at the spectacle. The butterflies will spend the winter there before returning north. It takes several generations for them to make the round trip: Their great-great-grandchildren are the ones who will make it back to this same spot the following year, sometimes even settling in the same trees.

Since the 1990s, researchers at Monarch Watch, a project out of the University of Kansas, have doled out tiny stickers—each marked with an email address, phone number, and unique identification code—and asked citizen scientists and other volunteers to adhere them to the discal cell on butterflies’ wings. When they apply these lightweight additions, the volunteers record the code and the location. If the tags are ever spotted again, the data help the researchers figure out where the butterflies had been.

Travelers on a recent Atlas Obscura trip to El Rosario improbably came across one of these stickers, and helped reconstruct a journey of hundreds and hundreds of miles. The group had ventured into the mountain forest, some on foot and others on horseback. When the weather turned dodgy, they waited out the rain as the butterflies hunkered down in the trees. The group even saw some die as they were struck by hailstones. The weather cleared, the butterflies began moving again, and the travelers continued on. Amid the millions of butterflies—millions alive, millions dead—a local guide spotted one sporting a white dot.

This, of course, is exactly how the program was designed to work. But there’s something that feels almost miraculous about it all—that some of the butterflies make it south, through wind and rain and birds, to gather in such a dazzling, dizzying fashion, and that a tag peeks out at someone scanning the riot of ochre and green and black. “Blows my mind that we saw one,” says Jason Goldman, a science journalist and one of the leaders of the trip.

Goldman and his fellow trip leader, biologist Phil Torres, reached out to Monarch Watch and the University of Kansas to report the find. Based on the code on the sticker, Monarch Watch determined that the butterfly had been tagged in Northfield, Minnesota—roughly 1,800 miles away.

That’s where a local woman named Julianne Moore last saw it in September 2018, her second year of tagging butterflies in her backyard. Growing up as a city kid in Minneapolis, “worms were icky,” she says. “I hated bugs.” But her mother was a gardener, and Moore began sinking her hands into the soil, too.

Several years ago, she saw a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis while she was hosting a garage sale. Soon after, she moved the daylilies she’d salvaged from her mother’s garden to make room for a patch of milkweed. Before long, she was even ushering caterpillars into little screened habitats, where they could safely complete their metamorphosis and emerge from a chrysalis, wet and vulnerable. Once they’re dry, she takes them out, holds them gently by the wings, and applies a sticker. (Her grandson gifted her a magnifying glass to assist in the delicate work.) “Then I set them on some flowers around the deck,” she says. “They sit out there for a while, and off they go.”

Moore spotted a picture of the recovered butterfly when Torres shared it on Twitter. She was excited to see that the creature had finished its trek. It was the second she reared that she knows made it to El Rosario, but there's been no sign of the other 99 she tagged in 2018. “I’m greedy enough that I’m hoping that when the rest of the reports come out, [there] may be more,” she says. The list of recovered tags will soon be published on the Monarch Watch website—around the same time that Moore completes the second leg of her own annual migration, returning north from Florida, where she spends the winter and hands out milkweed seeds to her neighbors. She hopes to visit the Mexico reserves in the winter of 2020.

The fact that this migration exists at all is incredible, and finding a single butterfly carrying proof that it made the journey from one end to the other, even more so. Over the past two decades, Monarch Watch tags have been affixed to roughly 1.4 million butterflies, just a sliver of the overall cohort that makes the trip. Many don't get tags, and many with them die along the way. Even among those tags carried all the way to Mexico, the odds of a visitor observing one are vanishingly small. “You have to spot one with a tag out of the millions of living and dead butterflies in visual range, which of course doesn't include those that are too high, or buried beneath other dead ones, or perhaps dead but with the tag on the face-down side, or clustered on a tree not in visual range of the trails you're allowed to be on,” says Goldman. Of the 1.4 million tags, only around 14,000 tags have ever been seen again—just one-tenth of one percent. Spotting one is like finding a needle in a haystack the size of a forest.

Doctors wrote recipes to cure patients' ailments and determine the sex of their children.

Greek women had it tough. At any moment, their wombs could dislodge and wander through their bodies, strangling them—or so said Hippocratic doctors. Their medical texts, which emerged in the fifth century B.C. and were attributed to the physician Hippocrates and his followers, changed Greek science by suggesting that illness had natural, rather than exclusively divine, causes. While wandering womb syndrome, which has been thoroughly discredited, is largely forgotten, one Hippocratic idea is likely familiar to modern parents: that what you eat can determine the sex of your child.

We don't know much about Hippocrates's life or contribution to the texts of the Hippocratic corpus, says Dr. Rebecca Fallas, a visiting research fellow in classical studies at the U.K.’s Open University who specializes in fertility in Ancient Greece. We do know, however, that Hippocratic texts were widely read in the centuries after they were written, and were compiled in the Great Library of Alexandria. Surviving texts show that Hippocratic doctors were, to put it lightly, very concerned with women’s reproductive health. In fact, the majority of the 1,500 existing Hippocratic recipes come from gynecological treatises. Of these, the dietary prescriptions for choosing the sex of one's children reveal a complex set of beliefs around food, gender, and the human body.

Hippocratic doctors believed the body was ruled by four, or sometimes three, humors, classified according to heat and moisture. Phlegm was cold and wet. Blood was hot and wet. Yellow and black bile were dry and hot or cold, depending on the text. This system of heat and moisture underlied all aspects of patients’ health, including fertility.

Quick quiz: According to Hippocratic medicine, is coriander hot and dry, or cold and wet? What about lettuce? If you said coriander is hot and dry, and lettuce cold and wet, you’re right. But these classifications weren’t descriptions of foods’ literal moisture content and temperature. They were instead rooted in beliefs about how foods interact with bodily humors. Red wine, for example, was believed to heat and dry out the body, while white wine cooled and moistened it.

This delicate balance of humors was particularly important for women trying to conceive. With ancient couples facing high rates of infant mortality, producing healthy, viable children was a high-stakes affair. Boys and girls benefitted families in different ways: Boys promised future economic and political power, while girls offered the possibility of marriage alliances. While many scholars argue that Ancient Greeks valued boys over girls, there is evidence of women in holy shrines petitioning the gods for daughters.

As this system of medicine developed, Greek women had the option of skipping shrines and heading straight to a Hippocratic doctor. In the Hippocratic world, women were naturally weak, damp, and cold, while men were strong, dry, and hot. Doctors believed that conception resulted from a fight between “strong” male seed and “weak” female seed, with the winner determining the child’s sex. Hippocratic doctors advised parents hoping for boys to consume hot, dry, and strong foods, such as red wine sprinkled with black cumin. To conceive a girl, Hippocratic doctors prescribed wet, cool, feminine foods, such as lettuce and white wine.

But if couples were really serious about sex selection, diet alone wouldn’t cut it. Hippocratic doctors believed that the left side of the womb nourished female children, and the right nourished males. To choose a child’s sex, women had to conceive on the side of the womb corresponding to their preferred gender. So Hippocratic doctors advised couples who wanted girls to tie the male partner’s right testicle with string, thus hopefully directing sperm toward the left side of the womb. The opposite was true for conceiving a boy. Scholars have no evidence of this method delivering anything besides sore nether regions.

While modern-day dads have left the testicle-tying behind, some Hippocratic beliefs do persist. Thanks to first-century Roman physician Galen and the work of Arab and Renaissance translators, says Fallas, “Hippocratic and Galenic medicine became the cornerstone of Western European medicine.” This includes the Hippocratic oath, the ethical pledge that doctors do no harm. And just like their ancient counterparts, contemporary parents continue looking for dietary prescriptions, be they from scientific studies or friends, to determine their children’s sex.

While Fallas says scholars can’t know for sure if this contemporary dietary advice descends directly from Hippocratic medicine, some folk wisdom, such as the belief that eating veggies will help couples conceive girls, resembles ancient beliefs. Modern doctors say most of this advice is quack. But for Fallas, the enduring appeal of diet-based interventions stems not from their efficacy, but from women’s desire to control their own health, at home, with ingredients they have on hand. As for the methods’ effectiveness? “Well,” says Fallas, “You’ve got a 50/50 chance of getting it right.”

Literary history is up for grabs, if you have the means.

Emily Brontë’s sole novel, published in 1847, largely takes place in two homes in the English countryside: Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. For centuries, literary enthusiasts around the world have speculated on the inspiration for the titular setting for this gothic-inspired tale, the remote farmhouse of the brooding Healthcliff. The architecture is described so precisely, the thinking goes, that it seems to be based more in reality than imagination. Ponden Hall, a farmhouse in West Yorkshire, England, bears a plaque above its front door that commemorates a grand renovation of the property in 1801—the same year in which Brontë’s novel begins. Given the fact that Brontë and her sisters (Charlotte and Anne, both beloved writers as well) are known to have visited the home’s library—it was then the largest private one in 19th-century Yorkshire—it has long been thought that Ponden Hall was a model for Emily’s tale. Now, nearly 500 years after it was first built, the historic house is up for sale.

The family selling the property has owned it since June 1998, and has operated it as an award-winning bed-and-breakfast since then. Steve Brown, the homeowner, says that he and his wife came across Ponden Hall by chance, and didn’t know it was for sale, or anything about its history until they saw the plaque. “We were immediately struck by the scale and its imposing presence,” he says. “[And] we bemoaned the fact that houses such as these never seem to come on to the market and continued our walk.”

A mere three days later, a friend called to tell Brown and his wife, Julie Akhurst, that there was a brief, three-line advertisement in the newspaper giving notice that a house with deep connections to the Brontë sisters was for sale. “We made an appointment to view the house with no intent of buying it but were incredulous when we arrived at the front door, to find the house we had been admiring a few days earlier,” Brown says. “The minute we crossed the threshold and walked down the long hallway, we were bowled over by the sheer substance of the house.” The couple’s predecessor had occupied Ponden Hall since 1975, and ran it as a hostel/bed-and-breakfast. Nine months later, Brown and Akhurst moved in.

Ponden Hall originally belonged to the wealthy Heaton family, along with a huge swath of land with several tenant farms, a corn mill, a brewery, two quarries, and a textile mill. The east end of the house dates back to 1541, and was incorporated into a larger structure in 1634. The 1801 renovation effectively combined all of the family’s separate buildings into a “manorial, gentleman’s residence befitting their status,” Brown explains. That iteration of the house is the one that stands today.

The manor library that Brontë frequented had an impressive collection of books, including an edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio—the first publication of his plays, in 1623—of which only 228 copies are known to exist. Scholars have used a catalogue of the other books on the shelves to make suppositions about what might have influenced Emily’s magnum opus. “It’s incredible to think Emily would have sat here reading,” Ackhurst told Jezebel. “There were gothic novels and books on necromancy and dark magic.” The library held texts on law and local history, too.

Other connections between Ponden Hall and Wuthering Heights include the room called the Earnshaw Room (named later for a family in the story), which features a small window, much like one in the book (perhaps scratched at by a ghost). Also, William Davies, a man who had once been given a tour of Ponden Hall by Patrick Brontë (Emily’s father), wrote: "On leaving the house we were taken across the moors to visit a waterfall which was a favourite haunt of the sisters … We then went on to an old manorial farm called 'Heaton's of Ponden,' which we were told was the original model of Wuthering Heights, which indeed corresponded in some measure to the description given in Emily Brontë's romance."

Over the 21 years Brown and Akhurst have operated the property, they have worked to honor its literary history. “We have always given free access to Brontë pilgrims from the day we moved in, allowing the Parsonage and Brontë Society to bring tours ‘round,” Brown says. “Julie also offered Cream Teas and Tours of Ponden Hall, aimed at local people who would have no need to stay, so that they, too, could enjoy the rich history on their doorsteps.” The asking price for this historic, 5,000-square-foot home is £1,250,000.

Over the last 30 years, Karl-Ludwig Lange has amassed more than 1,800 unique chunks of clay.

Karl-Ludwig Lange is a German photographer known for his black-and-white photos of Berlin. Starting in the late 1960s, he made a name for himself as a restless flaneur with a camera, capturing the architecture and street life of Germany’s capital. Over the decades, he has documented the city’s political and cultural shifts. But Lange is more than a prominent photographer—he is also one of the biggest brick collectors in the world.

Sixty-nine-year-old Lange has been stockpiling bricks for almost 30 years now. He says he owns more than 1,800 unique bricks, weighing a good 14,000 pounds. Each one of the artifacts in Lange’s mammoth collection bears its own design and stamp and resides on specially constructed, floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves in his apartment in Wedding, a district in Northwest Berlin.

The humble chunk of baked clay first captured his attention after a chance encounter in 1990, when he got an assignment with the architectural magazine Bauwelt to photograph an old brick furnace, built in 1868, which sat 22 miles west of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg.

“It's the only faithfully preserved ring furnace in Europe, built after plans by the great inventor Friedrich Eduard Hoffmann,” says Lange. “The German government had decided to save it and to use it to make facade bricks for reconstruction of churches and other public buildings in Berlin.”

The magazine published Lange's photos in early 1991. Soon after, he learned that in Freiwalde, another town in Brandenburg, about 41 miles south of Berlin, there was another working brick factory. "That’s what really got me started,” says Lange.

Lange became so obsessed with the history of bricks and brick-making around Berlin that in the years that followed, he managed to locate the ruins of hundreds of factories. He did so using more than 250 Prussian military maps from the mid-19th century, essentially turning himself into an industrial archaeologist.

The trigonometric maps Lange used are amazingly accurate. They were prepared with the use of the triangulation method, which utilizes three points to determine a desired location. A lot of churches and brick factories were used as “trig points,” as often these were the only solid buildings in an otherwise predominantly agricultural region. Lange likens the Prussian military maps, with their vast amount of detail, to the Domesday Book, a comprehensive record of landholding from 11th-century England.

“I found 150-year old trees marked on the maps that were still there—we’re talking about that level of detail!” remembers Lange.

All in all, over three decades, Lange says he has visited more than 1,300 brick factories in around 350 towns and villages in the vicinity of Berlin. Only eight of the brick factories were still working when he arrived.

Lange took photos and collected brick samples at every site. Some of the artifacts in his massive collection date from as early as the 11th century. In addition to this, Lange produced an extensive library-like catalog for each item in his collection. Each brick is described on a single card, with a photograph and information about its age and maker, as well as the place and date it was found. Lange has also amassed a library of rare books about bricks and brick-making, some of which date back to 1765.

But why bricks? According to Lange, this is the best way to understand how cities, and Berlin, in particular, developed. Like most medieval European cities, the early secular buildings in the German capital were crudely built, often using flammable materials including wood and straw. This changed around 1820 when the brick industry started flourishing.

“Due to the large clay deposits in the Brandenburg area, a vibrant brick industry emerged in the early 19th century,” says Lange, adding that “the history of brick-making around Brandenburg is essentially the story of people who built Berlin.” And this story is rarely a happy one. For example, a male worker in the late 19th century would produce up to 8,000 bricks a day, working for 16 exhausting hours. Women and children were also employed in the industry, but unlike men, female workers would produce about 250 bricks in an eight-hour workday.

“Naturally, most of the brickmakers died pretty young, around 45 years of age, due to the hard work and bad living conditions,” says Lange.

By 1900, Berlin used about three billion bricks per year, which were transported to the city via its 120 miles of waterways. Most of those blocks were made by hand in more than 1,500 brickyards within a radius of 55 miles around the city. Larger buildings, such as the former railway terminus Anhalter Bahnhof, needed 16 million bricks, and the Reichstag required 30 million. According to the German historian Matthias Roch, between 12 and 15 billion bricks were delivered to Berlin between 1850 and the First World War, a time in which Berlin grew rapidly.

Today only a few brickyards can be found in the Brandenburg area. After the First World War, concrete from Upper Silesia (in today’s Poland and Czechia) and Westphalia (in Northwestern Germany) became more commonly used than bricks because of its lower price. Concrete has a larger compressive strength than bricks and could also be reinforced with steel, giving it higher tensile strength as well. Concrete could be poured into large molds on site, making construction faster, while brick structures could only be built one row at a time. Eventually, the nearby brickyards lost their economic base and the concrete won.

Lange’s obsession has connected him with other like-minded people across Germany. In fact, he’s the leader of an exclusive club of about one dozen self-described brick addicts known as the Brick Hunters. The group formed 15 years ago and its members meet two times a year at Lange’s apartment, where they talk about bricks, architecture, city planning, and more over a cup of coffee and some German cake called kuchen. Sometimes the Brick Hunters organize exhibitions, hold talks, and publish books on their favorite topic.

Lange’s unusual collection currently fills two rooms in his modest apartment, which had miraculously survived the Second World War air raids. The space has wooden floor beams, so the bricks are placed around its load-bearing walls. Just walking into the rooms with walls covered in bricks is overwhelming. Sadly, his collection remains largely unseen by the wider public. Lange’s efforts to obtain funding from the German state and find a permanent place for it have so far been unsuccessful.

“I wanted to have a private museum and I got one. But I’m nearly 70 years old, so what should I do with my brick collection?” Lange asks rhetorically.

According to Lange, the answer to this question might come from Carl Andre, an American minimalist artist known for his artworks involving bricks. Lange says Andre had previously expressed interest in buying the collection and moving it to the U.S. However, Andre himself says that he has no recollection of this. So while it remains a necessarily private affair, Lange—a self-described "crazy man collecting bricks”—continues his tireless efforts to promote his unusual collection.

Researchers believe the sailors were commemorating their voyages.

The Dampier Archipelago is a collection of 42 islands off the northwestern coast of Australia. Across these land masses, there are around 500,000 to one million petroglyphs, carved into various boulders and caves by Indigenous Australians. The ancient carvings depict birds, disembodied heads, and extinct animals. Recently, a team of archaeologists from the University of Western Australia also discovered another set of inscriptions on top of those made by the Indigenous artists. These were made by American sailors who had made their way to Australia aboard the 19th-century whaling ships, Connecticut and Delta.

The archaeologists found evidence of two separate sets of engravings by these whalers. Inscriptions from the Connecticut were found on Rosemary Island, while the markings from the Delta were found on West Lewis Island. Both were written on top of Aboriginal petroglyphs. These findings were described and analyzed in the journal Antiquity.

The inscriptions left by the crew of the Connecticut described their voyage. One of these carvings read, “Sailed August 12th 1841.” The writings also reveal the captain’s name, “CAPT D CROCKER”, as well as the name of the man presumed to be the artist, “JACOB ANDERSON.” Anderson was described in the ship’s logbook as an “18-year-old seaman from New London, of black complexion.”

What made the inscriptions on Rosemary Island even more intriguing is that whoever wrote them had plenty of space to do so on the rock surface and didn’t have to write over the Indigenous inscriptions. According to the study, these carvings could have been “an act of trespass” by the sailors against the Indigenous Australians. The team believes they are likely celebratory in nature, comparing them to similar inscriptions found at the North Head Quarantine Station in Sydney, where travelers to Australia’s colonies were held from the 1830s until late in the 20th century. The Sydney markings were labeled by a previous study as “private declarations of presence, remembering, and commemorating.”

Eventually, the Indigenous Australians superimposed their own artwork over the whalers’ inscriptions, perhaps as an act of resistance, according to the researchers.

The team made similar conclusions in regard to the Delta engravings. The etchings give the name of the ship, date, and an anchor/rope symbol, along with the name “J. Leek,” who may have been a crew member. The study suggests these carvings could be viewed as an act of “usurpation,” but due to their location high in the headland, the researchers believe they were meant to celebrate the rarity of surviving a trip around the globe.

“The inscriptions left by the whalers provide new insight into early, previously unrecorded cross-cultural encounters in North-west Australia," says Jo McDonald, the project leader, via email. “[The carvings] are the earliest such evidence known in Australia, and they provide the only known archaeological insights into colonial-Indigenous encounters prior to the better documented and more violent history.”

But can it be grown anywhere else?

Nearly 300,000 pilgrims travel annually to Chimayó—a rural community nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, about 40 minutes north of Santa Fe—to visit the town’s famed Santuario de Chimayó. They come to worship at the early-19th century, adobe church complex and perhaps take home a handful of tierra bendita (“holy earth”) from el pocito, a sacred pit adjacent to the altar. Dirt from the pit is said to have performed miracles and cured cancer, among other illnesses.

Having gratified their spiritual needs, many visitors also make a culinary pilgrimage to the El Potrero Trading Post just around the corner, where they purchase a satchel of the somewhat equally renowned, blood-red chimayó chile powder. While it may not cure cancer, it is revered by many as one of the best, if not the best, chile powders in the state.

“We sell a lot of it. It’s our biggest seller,” says El Potrero Trading Post manager, Nicolas Madrid. Madrid’s customers are willing to pay a hefty $45 per pound for the richly aromatic, respectably hot chile powder, made from ground, sun-dried chimayó peppers, just one of about two dozen or so “native” or “New Mexican landrace” chile peppers endemic to northern New Mexico. That’s roughly six times the cost of your average, mass-produced New Mexican red chile powder. The reason, say locals, has a lot to do with that same, sacred dirt in the neighboring church.

“It’s the soil,” says local farmer Crescencio “Chencho” Ochoa, owner of El Jardín de Chile de Chimayó, who supplies El Potrero with much of its chimayó chile powder. “It’s the rich soil here that gives chimayó chiles their special flavor.”

That flavor, like most, begins in the nose. A face-first inspection of a bag of chimayó chile powder summons aromas that are earthy, deep, and historic, like the smell of an old saddle. Then come flowery top notes that sing to and lightly singe the nostrils. (The pepper’s burn is caused by capsaicinoids, chemical compounds that scorch the mouth, triggering pleasure-inducing endorphins to come to the rescue—a pain-for-pleasure trade off that only humans seek out, since most mammals avoid eating chiles.)

Chimayó chile powder’s unique flavor—sweet and hot, in roughly equal measures, like a piece of Fireball candy—is why local cooks buy as much as they can get their hands on when it is available.

“Chimayó chile is one of the hardest to get,” says Florence Jaramillo, owner of Rancho de Chimayó, a widely acclaimed restaurant located in a 19th-century hacienda, where ristras—ruby red strings of dried chimayó chile peppers—hang from the roof rakes like icicles. Having grown them herself in the past, Jaramillo says that chimayós are delicate plants that require a lot of water. Like her agrarian neighbors, she looks to the amount of snow in the snow-capped Sangre de Cristos to gauge how much melt there will be in the spring to water this year’s crop of chimayós. The availability of the treasured chile means a significant difference in the flavor of her signature carne adovada, pork shoulder marinated overnight and then slow-baked for hours in a red chile sauce, made from roasted chunks of chimayó chile pepper.

Chimayo and other New Mexican landrace chiles have attracted out-of-state admirers, some of whom are growing the esteemed pepper in fertile areas—far from Chimayó’s sacred soil—to feed the hunger of chefs and chile pepper aficionados. Conservationists, too, who worry about the survival of this small, site-specific chile culture, are spreading the seeds. What’s up for debate, though, is whether landrace varieties that spread beyond New Mexico will remain the same, beloved chile.

Today, New Mexico is America’s second largest producer of chile peppers, after California. What wine is to France, so chiles are to New Mexico. The chile pepper is the official state vegetable (a lawmaker’s blunder, as chiles are actually a fruit), while New Mexico is the only state with an official question: “Red or green?” (As in which kind of chile sauce do you prefer. The diplomatic answer is “Christmas,” meaning both.) Each fall, in Santa Fe and other cities and towns across the state, the redolent smell of chiles being roasted by street vendors hangs in the air like incense.

Millions of grocery shoppers are familiar with “New Mexican chiles,” which were developed by horticulturist Fabián Garciá in the early 1900s to be less spicy for non-Hispanic tastes. He also bred the pepper for uniformity. No matter where you plant it, it remains pretty much the same chile. These mass-market chiles come from the southern half of New Mexico.

Landrace chiles such as the chimayó come from the more rugged, less-populated north, where small-scale chile farming has gone more or less unchanged for centuries. Most historians believe the Spanish introduced chiles to the region from Mexico during the late-16th century, scattering them across remote hilltop pueblos. After generations of planting and seed-saving, they adapted to the climate and geography, and eventually became a dietary staple in local Hispanic communities. Native Americans also developed a fondness for chiles, adding them to their traditional staple diet of the “three sisters” crops of beans, corn, and squash.

“I learned how to grow food, and preserve food, and save seeds from my grandfather,” says Margaret Campos, who traces her ancestry back to Picuris pueblo dwellers and a 16th-century Spanish adventurer from Seville. She grows landrace chiles—chimayós and gnarled, fruity velardes—on her ten and a half acre farm in Embudo. A farmer and a cook, she plans to offer classes in roasting chiles and cooking in a horno, a traditional beehive-shaped adobe oven—another import, like her ancestor, from southern Spain. The tendency to save chile seeds in jars and coffee cans, in the deep, cool recesses of north-facing rooms of adobe farm houses, and to pass them on from grandfather to father to son, was just something everybody did, says Loretta Sandoval, an organic farmer and analytical chemist who grows landrace Cañoncito chiles at Zuzu’s Petals, her seven acre farm three miles east of Dixon, New Mexico, home to the state’s largest population of organic farmers.

“These chiles retain genetics that go back thousands of years, to South America. Their genetic mapping doesn’t really resemble anything from North America,” says Sandoval who, along with Campos, Ochoa, and others, is among northern New Mexico’s dedicated growers of landrace chiles.

The genetic purity of landrace chiles, Sandoval says, is what has helped them adapt and survive in the extreme weather conditions of the region, where elevations of five to six thousand feet or more make for short and precious growing seasons.

“These chiles are very cold-tolerant and bug-resistant, and come up fast to compete against fungi and bacteria in the ground. They also have long tap roots, like carrots,” says Sandoval. “I can go two to three weeks without watering them in the middle of a crazy 100-degree summer,” she adds, with no small measure of awe.

Yet for every grower like Sandoval, there are those who are abandoning the old ways of farming, potentially endangering the survival of landrace chiles in their native habitat.

“They’re declining more rapidly among the Hispanic villages up north,” says Chuck Havlik, a researcher at New Mexico State University (NMSU) who has studied the agriculture of the northern New Mexican pueblos. “A lot of the younger generation are not interested in farming. They’d rather move to the city and do something different.”

But that doesn’t mean landrace chiles have not caught on beyond the state’s borders. Since 1983, the mission of Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson, Arizona, has been to preserve the seeds of foods “our grandparents used to grow,” according to the organization’s mission statement. New Mexican landrace chile seeds are among the nearly 2,000 varieties of seeds in the organization’s seed bank. It further distributes up to 10 packets of free seeds annually to any tribal peoples from the Southwest, with discounts for Native Americans living outside the region.

And from California to Oregon, North Carolina to New Jersey, many green houses and mail-order outfits sell heirloom seeds, including chimayós, not to mention their powder. Aficionados warn that landrace chiles grown outside the pueblos won’t taste quite the same, as each landrace chile environment has unique soil and climatic properties that impact its flavor profile. Yet that hasn’t stopped vendors besotted with landrace chiles, such as Jim Duffy of Refining Fire Chiles in Lakeside, California, from attempting to expose landrace chiles to a wider market. Since 2017, Duffy has assiduously tracked down and curated many of New Mexico’s rarest landrace chiles, including chimayós, to offer his customers. He understands that landrace chiles have a provenance, but argues that, from a historical perspective, that can be up for grabs.

“Remember, chiles did not originate here. They all can be traced back to South America,” he says, rationalizing that if grocery stores only stocked items from one particular source, there would be little left to buy. With proper care, he says, it is possible for gardeners in all growing regions to produce landrace chiles close in flavor to those grown in their native habitats.

NMSU Vegetable Specialist Stephanie Walker sees the issue from both sides of the garden fence.

“The whole thing about landrace chiles is that they’ve become adapted to the local environment after years and years of growing in that particular environment and saving seed,” says Walker. Growing these unique chiles in different soil, she notes, will eventually cause them to “drift from generation to generation from what they originally were.” But if forced to choose between their disappearance or preservation, albeit as some slightly modified version, she welcomes the latter. “Maybe a new type will emerge that works very well as the generations go,” she says. “That [will be] a great thing.”

It may not be long before the country has to import some of its supply.

Olive oil’s history in Italy goes back over 4,000 years. Now, olive groves across the country are threatened—perhaps catastrophically—by a combination of unfortunate weather, a bacterial blight, and the uprooting of thousands of olive trees to make way for the Trans-Adriatic pipeline being constructed in Puglia, Italy’s main olive-producing region.

A cold snap in February 2018 kicked off the crisis, followed by intense summer heat, and ruinous rains that flooded groves in the fall. The usual resilience of the trees was compromised by these climate shocks, which left them more susceptible to infection by Xylella fastidiosa, a bacteria carried by the spittlebug, according to Riccardo Valentini, senior researcher at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change. Intense weather has also been pummeling olive groves in Portugal and Greece, but Italy seems to have gotten the worst of it, with annual olive production reduced by over 50 percent, according to Valentini. Things shook out differently in Spain, which has a bumper crop this year.

Spain appears to be ahead in modernizing olive cultivation, with high-density plantations to increase yields. While Italy has begun adopting similar planting techniques, Valentini is cautious about overgeneralizing either problems or solutions. “While we’re experiencing global climate change, the manifestations ... are very much regional,” he says.

The other end of the one-two punch is the X. fastidosa pathogen, which releases harmful toxins and clogs up the xylem, the tissue that transports water and nutrients up from the roots. The spittlebugs who tap leaves for water end up transporting the bacteria from plant to plant, which allows it to spread across acres rapidly. The disease first appeared in Italy in 2013, and likely arrived with ornamental plants from Costa Rica, says Rodrigo Krugner, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture who has been studying xylella in California, where it has infected grapevines and almond trees. Krugner is teaming up with Europeans to deal with the disease, and so far they have created a six-mile buffer zone around infected areas. While it continues to spread, xylella is still mainly confined to the tip of Italy’s bootheel in Puglia, though another strain of the disease has been observed in Tuscany.

The crisis has pushed Italian olive oil prices up more than 30 percent, and protests have ensued as farmers urge the government to respond. If the trend continues, Italy may have to start importing olive oil in the coming years, Valentini says. He has been urging investment in finding hardier cultivars among Italy’s olive groves, as well as studying the factors that contribute to climate change resistance—all while preserving what makes Italian olive production so unique. “For us, olive trees are important also for the landscape, not only for olive oil.” he says. “Personally, I think we should not change our cultural heritage and landscape too much.”

Hunting season starts with a mass migration to the woods.

It’s the first Friday of October in Evangeline Parish, Louisiana, and on KVPI’s morning French radio program, Charlie Manuel is reminding listeners, “La saison des ecureuils va commencer officialment demain matin.” Tomorrow is the first day of Squirrel Season.

Ville Platte, my hometown, is situated in the center of Louisiana, four square miles of city surrounded by farmland and forest. The population of just more than 7,000 is a mélange of Creole, European-French, and Acadian-French ancestry, evident in the distinct accents and Franglais woven into daily conversations.

The language goes hand in hand with a generations-old culinary tradition. This isn’t the Instagrammable, well-plated Cajun fare of New Orleans or even Lafayette, the nearby Acadian epicenter. A Ville Platte plate of rice’n gravy ain’t nothin’ purty, but as anyone who’s had the fortune to partake will attest, nothing quite measures up. It’s a tradition marked by the heat of cayenne, the thick scent of roux, medium-grain rice, and lots of fresh game. And here, the calendar revolves around the hunting seasons.

The Friday before Squirrel Season starts, Ville Platte’s population migrates, en masse, out of the city. Businesses close, school is cancelled, and the high school football game rescheduled. All the ammo, camo, beer, and boudin in town has been wiped out. Looking for all the men? Try the camp.

“The Camp” can mean anything from mobile homes to a sleeping bag set in the bed of a pickup. For the past decade, my family’s camp, a comfortable cottage on our own little bit of forest, has served as Squirrel Day headquarters for a motley of family and friends. But of the 20 or so people who join over the weekend, I will be the only woman.

It’s not radical for a woman to wield a gun in Ville Platte. One of the deer skulls displayed on the camp wall—the one with the crooked nose––is mine. But check the local newspaper ads, and you’ll see a common slogan: “He’s hunt’n for a meal. She’s hunt’n for a bargain!” And this, for me, was true. Mom and I took advantage of the few days devoid of masculine energy. We’d shop, catch up, and revel in the girl-time that Squirrel Weekend provided. This year, though, she had prior obligations.

Having recently moved out of Louisiana for the first time, I felt, as October 5 approached, increasing homesickness and a craving for spicy food. I called my Dad and told him I wanted in.

On Friday, the first order of business is always skeet shooting, making sure everyone’s on target. A family friend, Garrett Mire, helps my dad set up the trap thrower, a device designed to shoot neon clay disks high and wide into the sky. Both guffaw over local politics while smoking cigars. It’s a beautiful day—the sky’s continuous blue broken only by the flying disks bursting into pieces at the air-splitting song of a shotgun. My brother Joshua arrives, in for the weekend from college, and he and my dad help our youngest brother Luke shoot. Butterflies flutter right through the mayhem, and the smell of wet forest mixes with smoke. There are eight firearms leaning against the tailgate, and the stories of last year’s hunts get more elaborate by the hour.

When our neighbor Mike Fontenot drives up, we can start thinking about supper; he’s brought 20 teal with him, fresh from last week’s duck hunt.

As the group disburses to store firearms, fix drinks, and prepare dinner, Dad invites me for a walk. We wander paths where I once ran wild, chasing brothers and fairies. The trees have grown thicker, and we dwell on all that’s changed. We visit the deer-feeders, noting the mosaic of tracks. He points out spots in the woods marked by hickory trees. “That’s where the squirrels’ll be tomorrow morning,” he says.

Back at the house, we join a lawn-chair circle of family and friends. Joshua is browning onions, and Mike’s brother is passing out shots of apple pie moonshine. My other brother, Ellis, brags that, over the past four years, he’s brought home the most squirrels, the biggest squirrel, and the damn tastiest squirrel.

He’s still talking big 10 hours later at 5 a.m. as we gulp down coffee, don our camo, and disperse into designated corners of the wood. I’m paired with my boyfriend, Julien, who has to repeatedly remind me not to drag my feet. In the thick of tightly clustered pines and pecans, the morning is shaded gray and blanketed in an eerie and wondrous silence. The first squirrel we see is out of range, and by the time we are below his tree, he has disappeared. We are too loud, too visible, too slow.

As I concentrate on becoming smaller, on disappearing, the world around me grows more vivid. I am enraptured by every falling leaf, every bird that opens its wings, every gust of wind nudging the branches above me. So when I see the furry-tailed silhouette leap through the branches, I freeze. Julien lifts his gun, waits a beat, and fires.

“Damnit,” he says. “I missed.”

When we run into Ellis a few hours later, he bashfully shows us his meager bounty: three squirrels. My third brother Jack’s count is one. The rest of us are empty handed. Just as we’re considering heading to town for chicken breasts, Mike and his crew arrive with 19 squirrels for the pot.

Back at camp, as the group naps and watches college football, Mike works on the gravy. “Some people do a gumbo with squirrels,” he says, “but man I just love me a brown gravy.” He drops chopped meat, soaked in a day’s worth of Cajun seasoning and mustard, into the black pot to brown. “You know, I put my heart and soul into it.”

Once the squirrels start to brown and stick to the pot, he takes them out and adds fresh-cut onions, bell peppers, and garlic. “This is what the whole weekend’s about. Getting together and just having good food.” Once the vegetables are cooked, the squirrels go back in, and he covers it all with water. “Once that boils down, we’ll just leave it! For two hours or so.” His son Wacen interjects, “Drink a couple beers while you wait. Makes it taste even better!”

Growing up in a small town like Ville Platte is to exist in an ever-growing world. During my first semester at college in Baton Rouge—a mere two hour drive away—I was shocked to learn that school would not be canceled for Squirrel Weekend. When I explained the holiday to new friends, they reacted with amusement, disbelief, and even horror. I was reminded, not for the last time, what a small, strange place I come from.

And yet, even as my world grows larger, and I travel further from my tiny, French-speaking, rodent-hunting town on the prairie, I’ll often, especially on that first October weekend, find myself craving a shopping trip with my mom, a walk through the forest with my dad, and a good old brown squirrel gravy.

Scientists have a new theory about why they sometimes look like frosty green gemstones.

Picture an iceberg, and you’ll probably envision something white as snow rising up out of a blue sea. But icebergs—and their diminutive counterparts, adorably known as bergy bits and growlers—can be all sorts of shades, from frosty blue to striped to a beguiling green.

Researchers and mariners have observed emerald icebergs for years—a chunk of ice “mast-high” and “green as emerald” even figures in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1834 poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” But they haven’t pinned down exactly why these icebergs look the way they do. In a new paper in the American Geophysical Union journal JGR Oceans, researchers led by Stephen Warren, a glaciologist and emeritus professor at the University of Washington, offer a new theory about exactly how these floating behemoths get their greenish hues.

It all has to do with what icebergs are made out of. Icebergs calve off glaciers or ice shelves, mainly around Antarctica and Greenland. Since they begin their lives as snowfall that accumulates over time, icebergs contain air pockets, in the form of bubbles that scatter light. With some exceptions and occasional stripes, glacier ice tends to look bluish white.

When icebergs are out in the ocean, though, their composition changes as seawater—and the minerals and organic bits inside it—freezes to the base. This is known as “marine ice,” and it’s sometimes exposed if an iceberg topples over. This newly formed stuff is often stunning—sometimes appearing marbled, shot through with glassy striations of blue or green.

Warren has been noodling over green icebergs since he spotted one on a trip to Mawson research station near Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf back in the 1980s. His first hunch was that the green was a product of dissolved carbon, from decaying plants or marine animals—but samples didn’t bear that out. Another idea started to take shape after researchers from the University of Tasmania published a paper, in 2016, reporting that they had found a high concentration of iron in a core sample marine ice from the Amery Ice Shelf. That got Warren thinking. “When I read their paper, it dawned on me that that could be the explanation for the green color of the icebergs,” he says.

When glaciers scrape across land, they produce what’s known as glacier flour—a product of bedrock being ground down by the moving mass. As glaciers retreat, this geologic debris is usually flushed out into water, in particles sometimes too small to be visible to the naked eye. But on land, soil and rocks contain iron oxides that often have ruddy hues, like reds, yellows, and browns—and since the Tasmanian team found that the marine ice contained 500 times more iron than the glacier ice, Warren wondered whether the ochre-y sediment was responsible for icebergs taking on a green appearance. Ice absorbs red light, while iron oxides absorb blue light. The hypothesis is that, when iron oxides appear in marine ice, “it will shift the color over to green,” Warren says.

He doesn’t know for sure. He’s hoping to secure funding so that he, along with Tasmanian collaborators, can return to the area around the Amery Ice Shelf and study the icebergs themselves. If he gets the chance, Warren plans to examine “blue, blueish green, green, and yellowish green” ‘bergs, measure the spectrum of reflected light at each, and take fresh samples. For now, the green icebergs remain a bit of a beautiful mystery.

A look inside the mind of a legendary plot.

The 75th anniversary of World War II’s most iconic prisoner-of-war escape is less than two weeks away, on March 24, 2019. Just in time, Hansons Auctioneers in England is offering a rare relic of the daring feat: a diary that takes us inside the mind of one of the prisoners who planned it.

In its “Medals & Militaria” auction on March 22, 2019, Hansons will sell the journal that belonged to the late Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant Vivian Phillips while he was held in the Nazis’ Stalag Luft III camp, in present-day Poland. According to the auction house, it is the only such diary believed to have survived not only the camp, “but also a forced march of hundreds of miles across Germany” later in the war. It is expected to sell, alongside Phillips’s medals, for around $20,000 (or, £15,000 to £18,000).

Phillips was captured by the Nazis in May 1943, when his plane was shot down over Amsterdam during a bombing raid on a power station. He joined prisoners from a variety of countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Norway, Latvia, and Belgium in Stalag Luft III, which the Nazis considered one of their more secure POW camps. That’s why Roger Bushell—a Royal Air Force pilot who had been shot down during the rescue at Dunkirk, and who had subsequently escaped from two German POW camps—was being held there when Phillips arrived. Undeterred, Bushell was planning another escape, despite the microphones that the Nazis had placed nine feet beneath the ground, and the sandy terrain that did not lend itself to tunnel construction.

As History details, the prisoners dug their tunnels—codenamed Tom, Dick, and Harry—via a trapdoor underneath a stove, which was kept lit in order to deter guards from approaching it. Slowly, they were able to dig beneath the range of the microphones, taking off their clothing so the guards wouldn’t notice any telltale sandy stains.

“All this was done under the very noses of the guards,” wrote Phillips in his journal, one of those distributed to POWs by the Canadian Red Cross. He himself was one of the diggers, which Hansons says would have suited him as he was “rather short of stature and from Welsh coal-mining stock.” Phillips wrote that, eventually, he “graduated to a kind of foreman” in “charge of a gang of eight fellows…” A model of classic British stoicism, Phillips nonchalantly noted that “the whole thing was most efficiently run…” The operation inspired the 1963 Hollywood classic, The Great Escape.

When the time came for the prisoners to put their tunnels to use, they had to draw names at random so as not to overwhelm the makeshift passageways. Phillips’s name was not drawn, but he was actually lucky: Only three of the 76 escapees ultimately eluded the Nazis. The rest were caught within two weeks, and 50 of the prisoners—including Bushell—were then (illegally) executed on Hitler’s personal orders. (A postwar military tribunal found 18 Nazis guilty of war crimes for the executions; 13 of them were executed in turn.)

And so, even with all of the writings and drawings depicting daily life in the POW camp, and describing plans for the escape plot, the most striking section of Phillips’s journal may be the “In Memoriam” list, which names the executed captured prisoners and their countries of origin. It cements the journal as more than a record of brilliant enterprise in the face of fierce adversity, but as a testament to enduring humanity in times of brutality.

It's not as delicious as you might expect.

Upside down and on the last page of one of his journals, George Washington wrote down a recipe for small beer. The beer had low alcohol content because it was meant for hydration, not getting drunk. In the 1700s, water carried many diseases such as cholera, so many people drank beer instead. Washington’s beer recipe is located in a journal he kept while serving as colonel of the Virginia Regiment in 1757, and he likely served this beer to his troops to keep them hydrated during laborious tasks.

“This document is important because it shows the personality of George Washington, which then becomes the personality of the United States of America,” says Thomas Lannon, assistant director of manuscripts, archives, and rare books at the New York Public Library. As Lannon notes, details from the journal help show who Washington was as a person. Washington was stringent and wanted to succeed. He crossed out most pages of the notebook to mark completed tasks. He lashed soldiers for desertion, and there are at least two accounts where Washington chose to hang deserters, says Lannon.

The placement of the beer recipe on the first folio of the reverse side suggests it was added later. This recipe is made from bran hops and molasses and bottled on the same day it’s brewed. In Lannon’s opinion, it’s not very appetizing. The beer recipe gets more attention than the rest of the journal perhaps because it's more interesting than a war notebook. Additionally, Washington "has this sort of dual personality of being a sort of militaristic person, but also a benevolent Founding Father and so the beer recipe, I think, can be used to show his human side,” says Lannon

In the video above, Atlas Obscura gets a closer look at the beer recipe and Washington's journal from his time as a colonel.

Atlas Obscura readers share their most memorable experiences in unfamiliar surroundings.

Getting lost in the age of the smartphone isn't just unlikely, it's actively difficult. To find yourself in a position where you truly don't know where you are is an experience that's becoming more and more rare—which might also be a shame, because getting lost can be a terrific opportunity for discovery. We recently asked the Atlas Obscura community to tell us about their strongest memories of getting lost, and the result was an incredible collection of stories about travelers turning mistakes into meaningful experiences.

Get lost in a selection of some of our favorite responses below. And if you have your own incredible tale of getting lost, head over to our Community forums and tell us about it. The best part of being lost isn't being found, it's that feeling of pleasant uncertainty you can't get any other way.

Following the Music in Portugal

“I get lost quite often, even with the help of Google Maps in my hand. My partner finds it exciting to explore without maps. One recent fond memory of getting lost in a new city was when we were trying to find our way back from the University of Coimbra (where we just toured the famed Biblioteca Joanina and the science museum with the taxidermy collection), to our hotel. There were many winding and narrow alleyways set on cobblestone paths. At some point, we heard the amazing sound of guitar playing and decided to check it out. We found ourselves at a pub and there was a guy playing guitar just outside the pub. The pub was almost empty that afternoon, so we decided to get some beer and just enjoyed the music for awhile. It’s become one of my favorite memories from that trip.” — nagnabodha

Beer, Soccer, and Unexpected Discovery

"It hardly feels like being lost because you’ve found something… amazing, exhilarating, that you weren’t looking for. I think this serendipitous way to travel is wonderful, though not for everyone (it can be very stressful). We had a similar experience in Munich where we ended up at a fabulous little Italian family cafe near St. Anne’s Church in Lehel, eating carpaccio on a pizza, having another great beer, and surreptitiously watching the World Cup on their TV one summer's evening. Bliss." — Persey

On an Island, You're Never Truly Lost

"Lost in Desroches, Seychelles. One of my most perfect travel days... No roads, only footpaths on this island. Thought I’d go for a walk. Sort of zoned out looking at giant spiders, birds, coconuts. Soon, I have no clue where I am! Well, it’s an island. If you go to the edge and circumambulate, you should get back to where you started, right? Not to worry, I have my backpack—water, camera, sunblock, a towel. Woman alone with nature. I play tag with sand crabs. Play tag with the ocean. Find red coral. Whew. Those sand vistas are deceptive. What looks like a short walk takes an hour, then another, and another. Soaked in sweat, covered with sand, exhausted, I found my way back. It was great." — penelopeashe

Waking Up With the Sheep

"We’re from the Antipodes and took a family holiday ‘across the ditch’ (pronounced ‘detch’ if you’re a kiwi) and got lost on the South Island. You’d think being from mainland Australia for the most part and island Tasmania more recently, we’d have distances worked out, like migratory birds… but no. We had a small campsite in mind on the coast also between Invercargill and Dunedin, and drove for hours in the dark, (pre-GPS, and maps prove useless between spouses) not knowing if we were even on the right road. Eventually we came to the end of a road, to a paddock, stopped and set up the tent, a bit worried we were on private land as we could hear sheep close by. Bailed the kids in and went to sleep. Woke at first light to see the sheep just on the other side of a fence only a meter away, everything else hidden in a bank of fog. Went back to the tent to snuggle, then after an hour got up to see the bay and amazing coastal cliffs which I drew in my sketchbook while everyone else slept. We discovered later that it is the setting for the castle used in first Narnia movie.” — Persey

Waiting For the Bus, Saved By a Taxi

“Lost in the Moroccan desert. We’d probably still be there if a goat herder hadn’t happened along. So, while the goats were nibbling at my skirt, we started a literal United Nations conversation. I asked the goat herder in French if there was going to be a bus coming by here. He answered to my boyfriend in Spanish (because I couldn’t understand his Moroccan French accent) who translated it to me in English. Get the picture? Turns out that there was a bus supposed to come by, so we waited. And waited. And waited. Just when we were about to despair, we saw a vehicle in the distance headed our way. Not a bus, but, amazingly enough, a taxi! It stopped, the driver stuck his head out the window and asked if we had called for a taxi. I looked at my boyfriend. He looked at me. We both looked at the driver and said, 'YES!'" — purplevette44

Getting Lost Was the Point

“One of my favorite things to do when I get to a new place is to get lost. This is how I learned my way around after moving both to New York City and San Francisco. There are still blocks in both cities that I remember solely because I got lost there. I would get off the bus/subway at a random stop, then walk in whichever direction I felt like going. Sometimes I had an end destination in mind and would try to make it there. When I visited Beijing, I did a modified version of this: I would get lost, then find my way back without looking at a map more than every 20 minutes. I had so much fun wandering like that and saw so many things I would not have seen if I had just stuck to the route. I met a nice security guard with a cat, saw some really interesting produce markets, wandered through alleys and hutongs, and more.” — jordankiley

Más Masa, Por Favor

“Many years ago, I was speaking at a conference in San Antonio, Texas. I arrived a few days early, alone, to explore the town. So enthralled with the sights and sounds that reminded me so much of Mexico, I became lost in an area far from the areas that tourists frequent. I suddenly noticed the familiar smell of fresh masa and followed my nose. There was a tortilleria filled with people, all of whom turned and stared as I walked in the door. I am quite fair, with blonde hair and green eyes, and I surely didn’t look like I belonged there. I decided to get more than directions. I stepped up to the counter and asked, in Spanish, for 10 pounds of the quebradita, the fresh masa for tamales, and another 10 pounds of the masa fina for tortillas. The man behind the counter said nothing, but looked at me and went into a back room. He emerged with an older woman. She asked me, in Spanish, what I was going to do with the masa. I told her I was going to take it back to Philadelphia and make tamales, tlacoyos, sopes, etc. Then came the test. Unsmiling, she asked if I knew the secret to making good tamales. Everyone stared. I looked her right in the eye and said that one must be in a good mood, or they would turn out sour. She grinned from ear to ear, came out from behind the counter and enveloped me in a huge hug. Everyone in the place laughed and cheered. She had her son drive me and my masa back to my hotel. I stayed in touch with my new friends for several years after that, and still get the warm fuzzies whenever I think of San Antonio.” — bjcohan

The Oldest Joke in the Book

“Many years ago I accompanied my husband to a conference held at Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was before cell phones and GPS were common (at least I didn’t have them) but I was driving our new Chevy Tahoe which had a magical feature called ‘OnStar.’ I had a grand time exploring the area. As usual, I was confident in my ability to retrace my route but I suppose I was more adventurous than usual because I had OnStar available if needed. When it was time to return and meet my husband, I found myself hopelessly lost. I pushed the OnStar button and was connected to a disembodied voice that promised to guide me back to Carnegie. Well, it didn’t work. I was met with one-way streets, construction, and every manner of obstacle as OnStar tried to assist me to my destination. The OnStar guy was on the verge of giving up when I saw a police car at a convenience store. I said goodbye to OnStar and approached the police officer. I asked him, 'How do you get to Carnegie Hall?' The officer gave me a big smile and responded, ‘Practice, practice, practice!’” — suzyshry

I Stole Your Dad

“Last summer, I went to Brussels, Belgium, with the travel club at my college. Our second full day there, our instructor decided to let us run loose as long as we met back up at the Grand Place in time for our walking tour. My friend and I immediately ran off from the hotel to the Royal Gallery of St. Hubert in search of fancy Belgian chocolate. After a few hours of binge-eating the best chocolate we had ever had, and walking around, we realized that we had no idea how to get back to the square. This lead us to wandering around aimlessly looking for other members of our group. We went around in a circle (that we later were told was the perimeter of the Grand Place.) Eventually we gave up and sat down at a nice coffee shop halfway between our hotel and the main part of the city. Then suddenly from the corner of my eye, I saw the familiar shape of a professor/father of one of my high school friends. We immediately ran to him and stayed glued to his side the rest of the night while he repeatedly quizzed us about where we were at. That night at the hotel I messaged my friend that I was stealing her dad.” — DellaRose

What Was the Deal With the Horse?

“I LOVE historic places. Inviting my friend to go to George Washington’s Mt. Vernon, it never occurred to me that not everyone LOVES historic places. Well, she agreed to go, and once we got there, she told me the truth: she HATES historic places. Wait, what? You work in a museum, how is this possible? It just is. Both she and I belonged to our community woodlands committee, so luckily for us, Mt. Vernon has vast woodlands (I did not know this!). We headed off and found beautiful wildflowers in abundance. Cool native trees and shrubs–witch hazel, wild rhododendron, incredibly tall American hollies. We wandered and wandered–how could the property be so vast–I thought it had been eaten up by suburbia. We had found a wild wonderland right outside D.C. and we were having a blast! But, alas, our blast didn’t last. We now realized we were completely lost. Pre-mobile, pre-GPS, even ‘HELLO! ANYBODY THERE?’ didn’t work. So we walked… Ah, civilization, there’s a horse. We headed in that direction. As we got closer, we saw that it was a very big horse, I mean huge. As we got closer, we realized it was not alive. It once was, but at some point a taxidermist had gotten ahold of it. Why was it there? Who had owned it? General Washington? I think not. But it was just standing there on its own, in a maze of trees and overgrowth. It was kind of scary looking, tattered and looking out of glass eyes. We knew this was not our ride home. The long and the short of it is that we continued on, and then, we saw a golf cart coming straight toward us. We were relieved that it had a real live person driving it! This was our ride home. We had been lost, but it was still a great experience.” — lisah03

Responses have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

First get lost in the pages, then get lost in the places.

Visitors to Jane Austen’s House Museum, in Chawton, England, always seem to have a strong reaction to her writing table.

The table is no particularly dazzling feat of construction or design. It’s walnut, with three legs and 12 sides—solid, humble, and right at home in an 18th-century cottage or manse. But visitors who see it are visibly moved. Sometimes the table even becomes the site of something like a seance, as if guests can feel Austen there with them, glasses sliding down her nose as her quill skitters out characters, foibles, and scenes of tangles and triumphs. Visitors aren’t allowed to touch the surface, but they seem to ache to do so, “as if the wood itself contains something of Jane,” Madelaine Smith, the museum’s former marketing and events manager, has written. “Some visitors hold their breath. Others cry.”

Those visitors vastly outnumber Chawton’s 445 residents. Despite just one school and a single church, it has become, as The New York Times put it, “a mecca for Janeites.” Pilgrims come from near and far to sit in the pews where Austen would have heard sermons, sit in the shade of an oak tree said to be descended from one the writer planted, or wander the brick house where she spent the most of the last eight years of her life in a period of dizzying literary productivity, completing Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and more.

Literary pilgrims may set out to pay homage to an author, or to retrace the routes of their favorite characters. The new book Literary Places, by Sarah Baxter, celebrates the second approach, with a focus on streets, shops, and boulevards that exist in the real world. Janeites will find a guide to Bath, England, as trod by Austen’s heroine Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Charming illustrations by Amy Grimes preview what awaits readers near the shops on Milsom Street or the leafy Gravel Walk. As in Chawton, part of the appeal is that it can seem as though little there has changed. To stroll the town’s “golden streets now is to almost step straight back into Austen’s pages, minus the bonnets and breeches,” Baxter writes.

Readers of the book can drop in to visit the Saint Petersburg where Raskolnikov stalked around in moral agony in Crime and Punishment, or the courthouse in Monroeville, Alabama, where Nelle Harper Lee watched her lawyer father at work long before she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. (Each spring, visitors can watch a performance of the play based on the novel, from the seats where Lee once sat.) A trek to the windy, wild moors conjured in Wuthering Heights might involve a stop at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and a visit to Top Withens and Ponden Hall, two homes thought to be the likely candidates for Thrushcross Grange and the novel’s namesake manor, respectively. (And if you happen to have £1,250,000 to spare, you can buy Ponden Hall yourself.) A visit to the Paris of Les Misérables may include a ramble through the Jardin du Luxembourg, full of pear trees and chirping birds. Happily, the rank, hellish sewers through which Jean Valjean hauls a wounded Marius have been cleaned up, but are sealed to roving bibliophiles. (A museum about the smelly, slimy tunnels is currently closed.)

When literary attractions don’t have specific real-world corollaries, Baxter gives a best guess or alternate suggestion. The setting of Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera is unknown—somewhere, we're told, near the Caribbean Sea—but Baxter finds a kinship with Cartagena, where the Plaza Fernandez de Madrid is just as dreamy and dappled as the Parquecito de los Evangelios. Fans of Ulysses who travel to Dublin won't find The Burton, Leopold Bloom’s favored haunt, but Baxter suggests tucking into the character’s preferred Gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Byrnes pub, nearby.

Literary pilgrimages can take many shapes: a tour of an author's historic home, a day hike to a stirring site, a road trip to relive a beloved story. Love of literary places can also lead to changes in the real world, such as the establishment of museums or organized tours in otherwise sleepy neighborhoods that find themselves with the economic boon of an attraction. Fans might also be inspired to create places that don't otherwise exist, or transform historic literary places into inspirations for new generations of writers.

A few years ago, as home prices climbed in Harlem, some residents worried that Langston Hughes’s former brownstone on 127th Street would be lost—subsumed by condos and coffee shops. Hughes’s poems had inspired author Renée Watson to pursue her literary career, so when she moved to New York, she made a beeline for Harlem, eager to visit where he lived and the places he described. Everything, she said, felt so familiar. “I saw myself and my neighborhood and the people in my family in the stanzas of his poems,” Watson told CBS News. “It was like the first time when I really saw my reflection in a piece of writing.” When she found that Hughes’s home was sitting vacant—privately owned and closed to the public—she saw an opportunity. In 2016, Watson launched a campaign to raise money to lease the home and use it as a hub for arts and activism. Now, the I, Too Arts Collective—which takes its name from a Hughes poem—hosts dance classes, creative drop-ins and workshops, book release parties, and salon-style readings, and collects supplies for local shelters. It's what happens when a place of literary history looks to the future.

The old adage is that books can be transportive—that readers can get lost in the world of sentences and paragraphs, scenes and ideas. This can be literally true when readers retrace the steps of an author or character in a three-dimensional place they’ve only seen in either their mind’s eye or in small, black font. And that experience can be transformative, too.

For 144 years, it lived at El Pueblo de Los Angeles, the site where the city was founded in the 18th century.

Since 1875, the four Moreton Bay fig trees at El Pueblo de Los Angeles—the site where the Spanish pueblo that became Los Angeles was founded in the 18th century—have been providing residents of the California city with shade and horticultural beauty.

Planted by Elijah Hook Workman after arriving from Australia 144 years ago, the trees were initially part of a project to beautify the plaza, reported KCET. In addition, the Los Angeles Times notes that planting the trees helped foster the 19th-century narrative that anything could grow in the agricultural oasis of Southern California.

And for almost a century and a half, the four trees endured, until March 2, 2019. During a Chinese lantern festival in the plaza, guests heard the thundering snap of one of the trees careening to the ground. The once magnificent tree was now making a slow descent to the earth, with Chinese lanterns dangling from its branches.

The trees aren’t in the best of locations. The botanist Frank McDonough told the Los Angeles Times that Moreton Bay figs can become unhealthy when surrounded by concrete, as this one was, because fallen leaves are not able to decompose, enriching the surrounding soil in the process.

After its decline, the monumental fig tree was sawed into pieces and hauled away from its roots. All that remains is an empty plot and soft soil where the fig once stood. The city hasn’t decided what to plant as its replacement, but it has been open to community suggestions about the horticultural future of El Pueblo de Los Angeles.

And adding grass.

Blueberries, bite-sized and brilliantly colored, have been lauded for their health-enhancing antioxidant properties. Antioxidants are compounds that prevent or delay cell damage, and while they naturally occur in the popular berries, how the bushes are grown can impact their production levels. In a new study, researchers have found that the best way to maximize the healthiness of blueberries is to add a little grass.

Intercropping, the system of growing different crops in close proximity, allows for different plants to benefit from each other, and presents a sustainable alternative to chemical fertilizers. Researchers from the University of Chile have now determined a simple, ideal growing partner for blueberries, and reported their findings in the journal Frontiers.

Blueberries grow best in wet, acidic soils. In drier and more alkaline soils, the bushes are unable to pull essential iron from the soil. José Covarrubias, senior author of the study and an agricultural scientist at the University of Chile, said in a statement that blueberries "lack these adaptations because they evolved in uncommonly wet, acid conditions, which dissolve the iron for them.”

"Iron is essential for the formation and function of plant molecules like chlorophyll that allow them to use energy," Covarrubias said, and in blueberry bushes, that deficiency starves the enzymes they need to produce those coveted “superfruit” antioxidants.

Industrial farms without the right soil usually correct this by artificially acidifying the soil or applying synthetic, iron-rich fertilizer. Both approaches are expensive, and not any good for the environment. Grasses, however, naturally grow just fine in poor soils—and their roots provide an organic source of iron for fruiting plants growing among them. “Intercropping with grass species has been shown to improve plant growth and fruit yield in olives, grapes, citrus varieties—and most recently, in blueberries," Covarrubias said.

Though this study offers a safe, cheap alternative to fertilizers, there are drawbacks. Intercropping requires more water than the old way, and the researchers found that the grasses caused blueberries to lose some of their firmness. And that is a bummer, because there’s nothing like that classic blueberry POP! when you bite into a juicy one.

The French literary icon thought this 1,150-page compendium on cookery would be his masterpiece.

Born in 1802, Alexandre Dumas would write some of the most popular books of 19th-century literature. His works, such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, are still cultural touchstones today. The grandson of a French aristocrat and a slave of African descent, Dumas climbed the steep ladder of French society through the power of his pen. But in Dumas’s own estimation, his masterwork was to be a massive undertaking on culinary history, one he called Le Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine. Sadly, he never saw it published. The writer’s pet project, which he referred to as “the pillow of my old age,” was released posthumously in 1873, three years after his death.

That he was an accomplished cook and gastronome was evident during Dumas’s lifetime. As a journalist, Dumas published a conversational piece, “Causerie Culinaire,” in 1858. Roughly translated as “A Chat About Cooking,” it was a contemplation of Dumas’s gastronomic life, covering everything from his childhood to a recipe for Neapolitan macaroni. Dumas would follow with other columns on cooking, published in various French daily and weekly papers. The diaries of his contemporaries, such as George Sand, also record the suppers given by la famille Dumas, where Dumas père was occasionally to be found toiling in the kitchen.

In 1869, Dumas gathered his cookbooks and research and moved to the western coast of France to his seaside retreat in Roscoff on Cape Finisterre. There, he set upon the task of writing his gastronomic magnum opus. Early the next year, he sent the manuscript, an 1,150-page tour de force with hand-drawn illustrations, to his friend, the publisher Alphonse Lemerre. But the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870. As a result, the book was set aside by Lemerre, who, mainly a publisher of poetry, was probably utterly confounded by the prospect of editing Le Grand Dictionnaire. Dumas died on December 5, 1870. While Lemerre did publish Le Grand Dictionnaire three years later, he never released a second edition. However, he published an abridged Petit Dictionnaire later.

Dumas dedicated Le Grand Dictionnaire to his dear friend Jules Janin, a novelist, journalist, and theater critic. In the form of a letter, Dumas takes his friend through the history of French cuisine, recounting the offerings at various royal tables and including tidbits of culinary trivia. For example, Dumas claims that bayonnaise—later called mayonnaise—was invented in the kitchens of the Duke of Richelieu (a legend that is as often repeated as it is disputed). He writes of holding suppers in the 1840s, where he served a particularly delicious salad. The salad was so well-regarded that one of his regular guests, unable to attend a dinner, had it brought to him under the protection of an umbrella.

The preface to the Dictionnaire also includes a “Letter to Readers.” Dumas recommends the “gluttony of delicate souls,” his jovial euphemism for a dinner party. The exemplary host, he advises, gathers together three to nine guests: “never less numerous than the Graces, never more than the Muses.” Along with advice, Dumas regales his readers with descriptions of epic Roman banquets, where guests brought their own golden napkins and feasted on hundreds of tiny birds, such as ortolans. He proceeds to draw elaborate epicurean fantasies of the culinary exploits of the Western world. The United States gets a fleeting mention. “After Paris, the city with the most restaurants is San Francisco,” Dumas writes. “It has restaurants from every country, even China.”

The entries in the Dictionnaire read like a culinary encyclopedia, beginning with “Absinthe” and ending with “Zest.” There’s a recipe to cook elephant, and the entry on celery contains the tenuous claim that people in classical times wore it in garlands during meals to minimize the effects of wine. The book contains a variety of recipes, from the mundane and doable apricot cream cheese to gourmand adventures such as a dish made with sixty rabbit tongues.

But Le Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine is more than a cookbook. Dumas meant it to be a formidable inquiry into both gustation and gastronomy, utilized by enthusiasts and culinary professionals alike. The entries cover ingredients, cooking tools, and cooking techniques. In an early instance of product placement, there are several pages dedicated to the history of mustard as a condiment. At the end, Dumas thoroughly endorses the mustard-maker Bornibus.

Alan and Jane Davidson, translators and editors of Dumas on Food, a 1978 English abridged edition of Le Grand Dictionnaire, wrote that the French received the Dictionnaire with kindness, but little critical interest. Dumas’s declining fame might have been to blame. The work also had factual errors and an inconsistent format. The Davidsons note that Dumas wrote only half a page on the subject of milk, while the South American wild bird hocco received two. Cheese has two pages, but ambergris, a whale secretion used as flavoring, has five: a curious imbalance for a culinary work aimed at the French public.

Dumas’s historical novels, featuring swashbuckling musketeers and aristocratic scandals, brought him lasting fame. But he had hoped Le Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine would be the crowning jewel in his literary oeuvre. In a twist worthy of a novel, the gastronomic swan song of this 19th century literary maverick is almost constantly overlooked today.

We know they're smart, but there's still a lot we don't know.

Though the octopus in the video below may appear deep in sleep, its skin is wide awake. In a matter of seconds, it pulses from coconut white to muted gray to speckled brown, all while the cephalopod clings to a rock, its eyes shut tight. LiveScience recently shared this dramatic video, originally taken by Rachel Otey in 2017, of a Caribbean two-spot octopus slumbering in a tank in the Butterfly Pavilion, a nonprofit invertebrate zoo in Colorado. The cephalopods are widely admired these days for their intelligence, but is this one … dreaming?

A conscious octopus changes its color and patterning on a dime to fool prey or escape danger. According to Jennifer Mather, a psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, the color changes originate from a spontaneous, unconscious firing in the octopus’s optic lobe. A 2011 study suggests that many sleeping octopuses typically display a “half-and-half” skin pattern, with light areas and dark splotches, regardless of the color of their environment. While this seems like it could betray the animal’s presence in its stomping grounds off the coast of Haiti, Mather says wild octopuses keep themselves safe by sleeping in hidden dens.

According to Mather, one of the theories behind sleep is for an organism to rehearse and solidify traces in the brain from experiences of the previous day. Octopus brains do the same kind of thing. “If this central experience is ‘dreaming,’ and our dreaming is often linked to what has happened before, then octopuses might dream,” she says.

The only cephalopod with a proven penchant for dreaming is probably the cutest. A 2012 study led by Marcos G. Frank, now a neuroscientist at Washington State University Health Sciences Spokane, discovered that sleeping cuttlefish demonstrate a form of rapid eye movement (REM), the same stage of sleep that gives us our dreams, distinguished by the spontaneous activation of brain cells, going off like fireflies in a forest. For a cephalopod, this manifests in frantic eye movements under closed lids (octopuses: they’re just like us) or erratic shifts in skin coloration (or not). In Frank’s study, the sleeping cuttlefish’s chromatophores recombined into recognizable patterns, just like ones they displayed while awake. He believes this might be analogous to the weirdly familiar patchwork of human dreams. “This video is the best evidence I have ever seen that this particular cephalopod has a sleep-state similar to what we saw in cuttlefish,” Frank says of the Caribbean two-spot octopus.

While Otey’s video may be strong evidence, REM sleep hasn’t been confirmed in octopuses. That would require a neurobiological investigation in which scientists measure the electrical activity in a snoozing cephalopod. But if octopuses do indeed dream, we hope it’s of electric-green sea sheep.

Café Ohlone features traditional recipes and foraged ingredients.

When Europeans first arrived in California, they met Native Americans who enjoyed one of the most varied diets in the Americas. The staples of corn, beans, and squash had never crossed the deserts from Mexico and the inland Southwest, but other edible plants flourished in the mild coastal climate. A dense network of tribes lived on acorns, piñon nuts, wild vegetables, seafood, and game.

The Spanish almost immediately set out to destroy this way of life. They forced the Native Americans of California to labor on missions, farms, and ranches, and made them dependent on European crops. Thanks to superior weaponry and the diseases that ravaged the indigenous population, they were successful in eroding the connection of native peoples to their lands and foods. This created a bitter legacy, one where even recently, native Californians who practiced their old traditions and religions were labeled as backward.

Today, there is only one place in California serving the cuisine of these peoples, and it’s not in a national park café or a tribal casino restaurant. Behind a bookstore in Berkeley, surrounded by the city that covered their forest and grasslands, members of the Ohlone people offer a taste of an enduring culture.

This culinary project has two names: Café Ohlone in English, and mak-’amham, which means “The food is good” in Chochenyo Ohlone. It’s the brainchild of partners Vincent Medina, a member of the Muwekma band of the Ohlone, whose historic lands spanned the south San Francisco Bay Area, and Louis Trevino of the Rumsen Ohlone from the Carmel Valley. The two met in 2014 at a conference on native languages and bonded while listening to old oral histories of their people recorded by anthropologists. Many of the narratives were reminiscences of traditional gathering and cooking practices.

As they listened, the two men became curious about Ohlone food. “In the 1920s and 1930s, our ancestors talked about where to gather these foods, the recipes for them, how much they loved them and missed eating them,” says Medina. They started going to wild spaces to gather the ingredients described on the century-old recordings in order to recreate the old recipes. The results were successful: enough so that they decided to make Ohlone food the centerpiece of a project combining education with dining. In September 2018, Medina and Trevino held Café Ohlone’s first lunch in a space behind Berkeley’s University Press Books, an academic bookstore. Now, it’s a weekly event.

Medina starts every lunch with a welcome and a prayer in his people’s Chochenyo language. Trevino adds commentary and anecdotes over the course of the meal. Before anything is served, the two introduce the day’s ingredients and their origins. The introduction combines grim history, gentle humor, and solemn ritual, including setting aside a plate for the ancestors. “We want our ancestors to be at the table with us, because we believe that they are guiding our work,” Medina says.

One recent meal included a salad of watercress mixed with sorrel leaves, blackberries, gooseberries, and popped amaranth seeds, all gathered from nature around the Bay Area. The cress has a mildly peppery herbal flavor that mixes well with the citrusy sorrel and tart berries, and the amaranth adds a satisfying crunch and slight nuttiness. The salad was topped with roasted hazelnuts finished with salt gathered from tidal pools, along with a subtle walnut oil and bay laurel dressing.

Ohlone cuisine uses berries and sumac for tart and sour flavors, along with a variety of savory vegetables, seeds, and herbs. Their seasonings don’t include anything like the fiery chili sauces of the desert Southwest. Instead, their traditional culinary aesthetic accents natural flavors. This was evident in the salmon, flavored only with salt and an agave rub before being smoked and baked. Maidu tribe members caught the meal’s fish north of the Bay Area. While the same species once teemed in Bay Area waters, now most are too polluted by shipping, industrial activity, and street runoff. Traditionally, Ohlone cooks staked the fish next to smoky fires or slow-cooked them in underground ovens, but Café Ohlone uses modern techniques to create the same rich flavor.

The chia chocolate pudding was a blend of flavors from Central and North America. Chia seeds are high in protein and were a traditional snack for Ohlone message runners who needed a lot of energy. Their crunch added texture to the chocolate pudding lightly sweetened with agave. All of the dishes are offered on one plate, as dividing meals into courses is not a native concept. A blackberry and bay laurel sauce that was served as a complement to the dessert had tart herbal notes that were also a fine counterpoint to the oily, smoky fish.

To drink, diners were offered stinging nettle tea, with lemon added to balance the earthy, grassy flavor of the herb. Raw nettles cause blisters on skin contact, but heat neutralizes the irritants, leaving behind a mild tea with anti-inflammatory and diuretic properties. Like many other items served at the meal, it put an unfamiliar ingredient into an approachable context. Meals at Café Ohlone don’t involve flashy innovations or novelties. Instead, Medina and Trevino want to honor the ingredients and techniques of their ancestors, while introducing them to a wider audience. “Twenty years ago, only a handful of these foods were eaten by our tribal members, but today they are on our dinner tables on a regular basis,” says Medina.

While the food is the focal point, after the meal guests are invited to hear songs in Ohlone languages and learn a traditional game of chance played with shells, using sticks as counters. The two-hour window allotted for the event passes quickly. A visit to Café Ohlone is a cultural introduction to the original denizens of the Bay Area, and one that’s been a long time coming. As Medina noted in closing remarks, “We hope that through eating our food, hearing our language, playing our games, you will be motivated to stand up for our community away from this table.”

Café Ohlone is also experimenting with their outreach. They host lunches every Thursday and dinners most Saturdays, along with a Sunday brunch featuring acorn flour pancakes and duck-egg frittatas. The duo recently hired a tribal member to assist with events, but they don’t plan to make the café a daily operation because both are deeply involved in other projects. These include teaching both language skills and cooking to other tribal members, as well as campaigning for state recognition of Ohlone historical sites. Instead, the cafe’s schedule is on their website, and they prefer that guests make reservations in advance.

The few dozen people a week who go to Café Ohlone both sample local flavors while learning about the people who quietly kept their traditions alive for centuries. As they leave, they might momentarily imagine what this landscape was like when the bay could be seen through the trees, and when more deer roamed than students and commuters.