Sam Howe filled his books with newspaper clippings about crime in Denver.

At the turn of the 19th century, Denver, Colorado, was a burgeoning town that had slowly morphed from a small mining camp into a bustling settlement. As the population grew, so did the need for policing. One lawman recognized that while there was law, there wasn’t much order, because there was no formal way of tracking misconduct.

Dissatisfied with this disorganization, Detective Sam Howe developed a solution. He began creating scrapbooks filled with news clippings from the local papers, tracking the crime, criminals, and newsworthy happenings of the early days of Denver.

When Howe, born Simeon H. Hunt, moved to Denver, Colorado, after serving as a Union soldier in the Civil War, he became one of Denver’s first police officers. "He was a mysterious, quiet, shy, almost reclusive little man,” explains Clark Secrest, author of Hell's Belles: Prostitution, Vice, and Crime in Early Denver. “But he put in many years on the police department, and he was well regarded in the community.”

During the early years of the police force, officers kept handwritten journals, but there wasn’t a collective place for everyone to share information. Howe wanted to develop a way to keep track of the people he had apprehended and connect them with other transgressions they had committed throughout the years, so he began meticulously hunting for connections and documenting them in scrapbooks. He got the idea from the newspapermen of the time, many of whom he had developed strong relationships with. He noticed that they kept track of their stories by clipping related articles in case they needed to do a follow-up. He decided to give it a try.

From 1873 until 1921, Howe clipped almost every single crime-related news story from the local papers and filed them in either his general crime record books or his murder books. His more general books were filled with Tetris-style clippings of news stories in chronological order. Records in his murder books included descriptions of crimes, physical descriptions of criminals, case remarks, photographs, and newspaper clippings.

The general crime books offer a glimpse into the norms of life in early Denver. Headlines were often colorful and leaned into the drama of the crimes and other tragic incidents. The types of stories Howe saved ranged from accidents (“Message of Death for Happy Wife: Mrs. Henry J. Earthman Returns Home from Matinee to Learn Her Husband’s Mangled Remains Were in Morgue”) to suicides (“Mrs. Pearl Honegger, Young and Beautiful, Was Weary of Living and Swallowed Acid”) to assaults (“Striking a Woman Proves Expensive”). He also included stories about burglary, forgery and fraudulent checks, embezzlement, indecent exposure, disturbing the peace, drunkenness, poisonings, and more.

Howe’s murder books, unsurprisingly, feature stories that are exclusively about murder. They were often only added after a resolution had been met, serving as a complete, simplified record of the case.

The crimes and incidents in Howe’s books were each given a number. A connected story would be given another number associated with the original, allowing people to track developments from arrest to imprisonment to parole. Murders and major crimes were indexed by the names of the offenders so that readers, who were primarily law enforcement officers and reporters, could quickly and easily find out about prior offenses instead of having to sort through an unorganized mass of information.

During his research for Hell’s Belles, Secrest uncovered stories about officers in other cities relying on Howe’s books to help them find information about people from their areas. In 1903, the Chicago police department asked for help locating a missing man they believed had relocated to Colorado. Within 30 minutes, Howe’s books revealed that the man had drowned in nearby Pueblo, Colorado.

Not only did other officers use Howe’s books for background research or information, but so did the very newspapers that he clipped stories from. Howe was beloved by reporters and always gave them free and open access to study and borrow his books.

Howe only actively worked on the streets until 1883. After that time, he became a detective and eventually became chief of detectives twice—he was demoted once after an act of insubordination—during his 47-year-career.

In addition to his books, Howe also started Denver’s first “rogues gallery,” which was a collection of mugshots and physical descriptions that helped police with suspect identification. Howe’s gallery eventually grew to contain the photos of around 2,000 criminals. He also ran a museum filled with crime paraphernalia that showcased items including safecracking equipment, knives, guns, and a rope used to hang criminals sentenced to death. Officers traveled from all around the country to see Howe’s museum and to use his books for inspiration for starting criminal databases back in their own cities.

Howe stayed on the force until he retired on February 1, 1921, at age 81. He stopped scrapbooking when he retired, but according to the nonprofit organization History Colorado, members of the police department continued creating and cross-referencing the ledgers until 1934.

On April 4, 1930, Howe died at age 90. Nine years later, a century after his birth, his scrapbooks were donated to History Colorado. In total, the Sam Howe collection at the History Colorado Center in Denver contains 44 massive article ledgers (some nearly a foot in width), 25 indexes, and two murder case ledgers. It contains over 100,000 clippings.

The weathered and delicate condition of the books now requires them to be kept in a special temperature- and humidity-regulated room at the History Colorado Center. However, a few of the scrapbooks (both general and murder books) were put onto microfiche and are available to the public for easy viewing.

Secrest notes that in 1895, the Chicago Times described Detective Howe’s scrapbooks as “the most valuable as well as the most complete record of a city’s crime and criminals outside the department libraries of Chicago and New York.” Howe’s ideas to track everything in one place, collecting mugshots for easy identification, and setting up a museum for the education of other officers, led him to be considered one of the leading crime statisticians in the nation.

Eventually, Howe’s method became outdated, but his recognition of the need for a tracking system in Denver at a time when no other officers in the region were attempting to do that shows foresight. While larger cities such as Chicago and New York did have tracking in place, smaller locales including Denver did not. Howe’s innovative ideas served as inspiration for those officers who traveled to Denver to learn about his methods before utilizing them in their districts.

Howe might have faded into the past, his documentation of early Denver lives on in the archives of History Colorado.

Spirit trumpets helped the dead speak above a whisper.

One of the biggest issues with speaking to the dead in the Victorian era—beyond the whole “being dead” thing—was that ghosts could never seem to speak loud enough. Spirits only spoke in whispers, unintelligible spectral babblings that the living human ear could barely hear, let alone decipher. A medium’s solution to this ghostly conundrum? The spirit trumpet, a fancy name for a skinny cone that allegedly amplified the voices of the dead.

Before the spirit trumpet, conversations with ghosts were restricted to more primitive, nonverbal forms of communication, according to Collectors Weekly. Spirits were known to rap on the floor or spell out words in a painfully slow manner, and mediums would speak the entire alphabet out loud until the ghosts stopped them at a certain letter. The advent of the spirit trumpet broke down these linguistic barriers by allowing the dead to speak directly with the living, kind of like a mobile phone for beyond the grave.

The spirit trumpet barged into the séance scene in the late 19th century, popularized by the spiritualist medium Jonathan Koons. In a cabin by his farm in Athens County, Ohio, Koons built a fantastical spirit room wherein guests could witness free public séances conducted by Koons and his family. As Jonathan Hodge, a former magician and spirit-communication-device collector and blogger, told Collectors Weekly, Koons’s son Nahum probably invented the spirit trumpet.

According to the mediums who used these tools, the spirit could speak by possessing the vocal cords of the person speaking into the trumpet. Too soft-spoken to really project in a spirit room, the dead required all the sound-amplifying help they could get. While in use, these trumpets would supposedly float around the air, buoyed by the power of psychic energy, according to the psychic researcher William Jackson Crawford’s investigation in the 1919 collection Experiments in Physical Science.

The first spirit trumpets were homemade, either out of metal or cardboard, and resembled simple narrow cones. But as trumpets took off in popularity they became fancier, leading to steel trumpets that could extend or contract via sliding segments that slotted into each other like tubes in a jointed telescope. Some even sported glow-in-the-dark rings at the end. Everett Atwood Eckel, perhaps the best-known manufacturer of spirit trumpets, churned out the first commercialized versions from his tin shop in Anderson, Indiana.

Many Victorian séances shared a predictable itinerary, Crawford wrote. First, everyone would sit down around a circle, pray, and perhaps sing a hymn—all in absolute darkness. Then the summoned spirit would rap on the floor to announce their presence, ranging from slight knocks to thunderous blows that could shake participants’ chairs. Soon after, the table would levitate and, on occasion, spin around or turn sideways. Only after this fanfare would the medium trot out the spirit trumpets. As soon as the spirit left the room, the trumpet would come crashing down, Crawford wrote.

In one séance Crawford witnessed, two spirit trumpets swooped about the room and ushered in a range of nameless voices who ordered the living guests to “sing something” and to turn a gas lantern away from the psychic—the wish of a very private ghost, of course, and not a manipulative medium.

It's on public view for the first time since 1900.

In just over a week, Jews around the world will gather for the Seder, the ritual meal that marks the start of Passover. They will read from the Haggadah, a text that recounts the story of the Exodus from Egypt and guides readers through the Seder’s many ritual acts. While the story has stayed the same, the actual Haggadot have changed quite a bit. The so-called Lombard Haggadah, going on display at Les Enluminures in New York later this week, can attest to that.

The medieval manuscript dates back to the late 14th century, when it was made in Milan (in Italy’s Lombardy region). It comes from the workshop of the artist Giovannino de Grassi, who died in 1398, and it likely could not have been made prior to 1387. In that year, Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti extended new rights to the Jews of Lombardy, who, according to Israel’s Museum of the Jewish People, had been expelled from the region in 1320. Though it tells the same story as any other, this Haggadah takes on added significance as a tangible example of its themes—a document of a moment in time when Lombard’s Jews felt their persecution abating.

The Lombard Haggadah contains 75 illustrations—that’s nearly one per page, according to Les Enluminures—some of which are particularly packed with symbolism. One of those images depicts a servant delivering the bitter herbs, or maror, to the Passover table. Maror is eaten during the Seder as an allusion to the bitterness of slavery. The gallery suggests that the figure of the servant “ironically and self-consciously” contrasts with the Jews’ history of enslavement, and so represents the progress they’ve made towards freedom.

But perhaps the most interesting visual aspect of the Lombard Haggadah is its illustrations of the “Labors of the Month,” the different tasks associated with each month of the year. Drawings of the Labors were common in medieval Christian Books of Hours; their inclusion here testifies to the influence of the broader Christian culture on the Jewish minorities living within that landscape. (The Labors, of course, are described in Hebrew in the Haggadah.)

The 1900 World’s Fair in Paris marked the last time when the Lombard Haggadah was on public view. It has been privately owned since it was sold in London, in 1927. Up for sale once again, it is only “one of three illustrated medieval Haggadot still privately owned,” according to Les Enluminures. It’s anyone’s guess whether its price would rise or fall if its human characters had birds’ heads, like those in this Haggadah from medieval Germany.

They burned real fuel and caused real damage.

In Little Men, the sequel to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, the once-tomboyish Jo gives a miniature kitchen to her niece Daisy. The centerpiece was a real iron stove capable of cooking "for a large family of very hungry dolls." But the best of it, writes Alcott, "was that a real fire burned in it, real steam came out of the nose of the little tea-kettle, and the lid of the little boiler actually danced a jig, the water inside bubbled so hard.”

When I was ten, I read that chapter over and over. Fiercely envious of Daisy, I begged my parents for a kitchen like hers. Of course, they said no, and I had to content myself with an Easy-Bake Oven. But the idea of giving a 10-year-old their own wood-burning stove is not as fantastic as it may seem today. In 1871, when Little Men was published, such toy stoves actually existed. At the time, says Michelle Parnett-Dwyer, a curator at the Strong National Museum of Play, “a lot of little girls were being pushed into domestic play.” For young girls of relative means, a toy stove could accustom them to future responsibilities. Yet too often, such toys proved to be phenomenally dangerous.

In the 19th century, wood and coal cookstoves, as opposed to open-hearth cooking, spread across the United States, writes historian Priscilla J. Brewer. Toy stoves soon followed, many of them exact replicas of full-sized stoves. Some stove companies constructed them by simply minimizing the proportions. This resulted in some of the positively baroque miniature stoves housed in the Strong’s massive collection of children’s toys and games in Rochester, New York. Many were cast with elegant designs, just like their larger counterparts. Later, says Parnett-Dwyer, both large stoves and toy versions came in gleaming, expensive nickel-plating.

Many families who could afford an elegant toy stove likely hired a cook for their real kitchen. But cooking was considered a valuable skill for even adult women of means, who could then teach hired help to prepare household dishes. In Little Men, Jo pretends that Daisy is her new cook and playfully instructs her on how to do the shopping and prepare meals.

There were other reasons for parents to buy functional stoves for their daughters. As Parnett-Dwyer notes, not all families who could afford tiny stoves for their daughters had the money to hire domestic servants. Plus, the publication of Alcott’s book coincided with a movement for more women to cook for their families: the beginning of home economics. Unlike the ease of modern appliances, using coal and wood cookstoves was laborious, especially since they were difficult to clean, maintain, and operate. Thus, Brewer writes, it “was best to learn this process in childhood, since cooking proficiency came only with long experience.”

While the picture painted by Little Men enthralled me, the reality was more perilous. In September of 1890, Louisville’s Courier-Journal recorded that while several children were playing with a toy stove, one of them, Ellen Hanson, “caught fire and was almost burned to death before she was rescued and the burning clothes extinguished.” Ellen survived, but with severe burns and her hair singed away.

According to Parnett-Dwyer, “There's so many reports of children being injured,” or even dying, from playing with toy stoves. In a case reported in newspapers around the nation in December of 1909, six-year-old Minnie Comin from St. Louis poured a bottle of kerosene into her toy stove, then lit it with a match: “as she had often seen her mother do in a real stove.” The stove exploded, and the child ran to her mother in flames. Minnie perished, and her mother was fatally burned. Her father was injured trying to extinguish them both.

When oil and gas stoves emerged in the early-20th century, children’s stoves mimicked the trend. One particularly spectacular stove in the Strong collection is a curlicued pillar from 1920, with the words “Superior Gas Range” displayed across the front. “It does work,” Parnett-Dwyer told me, when I expressed surprise. “It was really functioning as an oven, and it had a stove top that actually burned gas. So a kid could use it to cook over an open flame.”

Of course, non-functional stoves could also be a boon. One 1914 advertisement assured parents that a toy stove was “Harmless” and “not to be lighted.” According to Parnett-Dwyer, it was around this time when parents and toy companies caught on to how dangerous these playthings could be. “Then you start seeing the electric toy stove,” Parnett-Dwyer says. “Which is still dangerous, but not as bad.” A toy electric stove advertisement boasted in 1925 how it attached “to the house current” and possessed “two burners and a real oven.”

Today, the Easy-Bake Oven dominates. One name kicked around for the toy, released in 1963 by Kenner Products, was the “Safety-Bake,” which would have been a change from past toy stoves’ glamorous and evocative names such as the “Venus,” “Fairy Gift,” and “The Queen.” The Easy-Bake lacked a working stovetop, removing some of the risk factor, and, until 2011, it cooked food with much-safer light bulbs secreted deep inside their plastic chassis. (The phasing in of cooler fluorescents and LEDs prompted a redesign with an electric heating element.)

While it’s easy to be horrified at the parenting of the past, Parnett-Dwyer points out that toy stoves are representative of the times when they’re made. Childrearing has changed dramatically over the last century. “Back then we were still thinking of children as little adults,” she says. The mentality often was “you have to learn how to do this because this is part of our family work.”

Toy stoves could be both plaything and teaching tools. During much of their history, “the idea of play wasn't necessarily a central part of a lot of children's lives,” says Parnett-Dwyer. (While children still played regardless, “it's not necessarily something that a parent was consciously promoting.”) Instead, toy stoves were a practical purchase for parents seeking to acclimate their daughters to future roles as housekeepers and caretakers. Even today, there’s still a pernicious gender gap in the United States when it comes to household chores such as cooking, with both women and girls spending more time on such tasks each day than men and boys.

Despite the fact that it wasn’t the cast-iron coal stove of my dreams, I still loved my Easy-Bake Oven. Long before I was allowed to touch the stove in the kitchen, I plugged it into the front porch outlet and baked button-sized cookies on tiny round pans. “I was thrilled when I got [an Easy-Bake Oven], and I'm not necessarily a great cook and don't feel any sort of domestic obligation in the kitchen because of it,” says Parnett-Dwyer. For some children, cooking is simply interesting. “It's just a fun way to play,” says Parnett-Dwyer. “It's sort of like taking your mud pie to the next level.”

Victorian leech jars were beautiful—if somewhat ineffective—vessels for keeping the worms alive and out of sight.

Sometime around the turn of the 21st century, pharmaceutical historian W.A. Jackson was in need of a place to keep his leeches. Such is the life of a pharmaceutical historian. He settled on a toffee jar, covered with gauze held in place by a strong rubber band around the rim. Jackson, a former curator at the Manchester Medical School Museum, awoke the next morning to discover three of the leeches had wormed their way through the gauze and disappeared. He tracked down two in his dining room, but the final leech remained on the lam until Jackson stumbled upon it two weeks later, reclining on the turntable of his music console and still, strangely and miraculously, alive.

What Jackson needed, he realized, was a proper leech jar. Unlike other, more inanimate pharmaceutical goods, leeches are master escape artists. So enterprising 18th-century pharmacists devised a somewhat special contraption to keep them alive and in check, Jackson wrote in the 2004 issue of Pharmaceutical Historian. Though humans have used leeches for clinical bloodletting—dubiously and, in some cases, legitimately—for at least 2,500 years, the 19th century saw a “leech mania” invade Europe and America. The mania originated in France, where the military medical officer François Joseph Victor Broussais preached an almost vampiric enthusiasm for the therapeutic effects of bloodletting, and it quickly spread from there.

People believed leeches could cure everything from headaches to insanity, and demand became insatiable. In France alone, physicians used more than a billion medicinal leeches a year, and anywhere from 50 to 100 million more were carted across Europe via mule train each year. Wild populations of leeches in Europe nearly went extinct due to overzealous local harvesting. Across Europe and America, elaborate, eye-catching leech jars took over window displays of most respectable pharmacies. These ridiculously rococo ceramic jars sported gilt and hand-painted decorative flourishes, in sharp contrast to their monochromatic inhabitants.

From a modern perspective, in which we expect our pharmacies to be only clean, well-lit, and well-stocked, the existence of leech jars seems entirely unnecessary, for multiple reasons. But American pharmacies had always trailed behind their more chemically savvy and experimental European counterparts in expertise and technology, according to Gregory J. Higby in his article “Chemistry and the 19th-Century American Pharmacists.”

To catch up and earn Europe’s respect, American pharmacists leapt to distinguish themselves from traditional herbalists or lowly homeopaths, Higby writes. In 1852, the creation of the American Pharmaceutical Association established the idea of a professional pharmacy in America, setting certain expectations for aspiring practitioners. Pharmacies began posting their newly required licenses and purity standards. And they carefully cultivated storefronts designed to wow. “You have leech mania coinciding with the rise of the professional pharmacy and the rise of mass advertising, all forces working together to create this full-blown ornate leech jar,” says Diane Wendt, an associate curator of medicine and science at the Smithsonian Institution.

To convince passersby of the quality of their drugs and other treatments, pharmacists stocked their windows with beautiful matched sets of ceramic jars that held things such as tinctures, tamarind, and honey. Leeches—the ultimate jar—was most prominently placed, Jackson writes. The more respectable the pharmacy, the more ornate the leech jar.

From the outside, pharmaceutical leech jars looked just like any other decorative vase except for two distinct details. First: They have a constellation of perforations in the lid for air. Second: They carry the word “LEECHES” in all caps. The jars were generally mass produced by British manufacturers, according to Rachel Anderson, a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian. The most highly embellished jars came out of Staffordshire, England from Samuel Alcock & Co., whose elegantly filigreed jars are some of the most coveted by modern collectors. Alcock’s jars are also enormous, many exceeding two feet in height. These jars populated pharmacies on both sides of the Atlantic, but held more clout in America, where pharmacies still felt like they had something to prove.

But these fancy, public-facing jars only held a day’s supply of leeches, as Anderson speculates the containers could not have effectively contained the wily creatures for long. Pharmacists kept the rest of their stock out back in a larger holding tank or more utilitarian jars secured with metal clamps or padlocks, Jackson wrote. It’s easy to imagine a carefully curated window display beset by a vector field of escaped, dark brown leeches.

Within the aerated jar, leeches needed constant tending, Jackson wrote. You had to change the water every other day in summer and twice a week in winter, and store the jar away from light. You also had to whisk your leeches, either with a fine willow broom or, in more dire circumstances, your hand. Pharmacists also recommended keeping a layer of pebbles or moss at the bottom of the jar to aid the annelids in their weekly ritual of sloughing their slimy epidermis. Kept under ideal conditions, a two-gallon jar filled a third of the way with water could hold—brace yourself—up to 250 leeches. How pharmacists retrieved the leeches remains a mystery. “We have not come across by happenstance any instrument called a leech tong,” Anderson says.

Fancier jars also implied fancier leeches, which could be an important distinction for health-obsessed Victorians. Not all medicinal leeches were created equal. American leeches, such as specimens from Mississippi or Pennsylvania, were hardly ever used, as they would not latch on unless aroused by the scent of blood and could hold just an eighth of an ounce of blood, according to an 1881 dispatch on leech farming published in Scientific American. Rather, imported leeches from Sweden and Germany were considered the peak of luxury—capable of sucking out two full ounces and supposedly so voracious that they didn’t need bait to bite. In the late 1800s, 100 Swedish leeches sold for $5—the equivalent of nearly $100 today.

In spring and autumn (prime leech season), leech fishers would wade into pools and beat the surface of the water with poles to pull the bottom-dwellers up from the sludge, Jackson wrote. Moments later the worms would begin latching onto legs (or sometimes strips of animal flesh on a stick), to be peeled off for harvest. A good fisher could collect 10 or 12 dozen leeches in a couple of hours.

The process of leeching was rather simple, if time-consuming. The leecher would dry the worm with linen, shave the area that was to be leeched, place the leech in a wine glass, and invert it over the target area. When the creature had drunk its fill, it would simply drop off. Though leeches require several months to digest a proper blood meal, skyrocketing demand led certain pharmacists to reuse the creatures in times of scarcity. “You could get the leech to vomit up its blood dinner by applying salt,” Anderson says. As one might imagine, recycled leeches are a biohazard, and pharmacists recorded many incidents of accidental leech-borne transmission of syphilis and puerperal fever, an infection that follows childbirth.

In the mid-1800s, at the peak of leech mania, inventors sought to improve on the ornamental leech jar. “There were leech aquariums, leech conservatories, specialized larger leech jars that held hundreds and hundreds of leeches on perforated shelves so the leeches could wiggle around the holes and clean themselves,” Anderson says. People also debuted artificial leeches, metal instruments that mimicked a leech’s jaws with tiny blades and a vacuum. According to Anderson, these faux-leeches served one of the same purposes the decorative jars did—to alleviate the “ick factor.”

The Victorian obsession with leechcraft waned at the turn of the 20th century, in part due to unsustainable demand and the growing suspicion that draining vast quantities of a person’s blood wasn’t actually the best way to fix a migraine. Leeches have, of course, seen a therapeutic resurgence over the last few decades, less for the blood they take than for therapeutic compounds in their saliva. But proudly displayed ornate leech jars have yet to appear again in pharmacy windows.

Ketchup and mayo are just the beginning.

There is something about a french fry that begs to be dipped. Maybe it’s the fact that they’re shaped sort of like a finger, which is the ideal form for dipping. Maybe it’s that modern potatoes—at least those outside the Andes Mountains—are mostly neutral in flavor, and take to any combination of additions. Maybe it’s the external crispiness that cries out for a contrasting texture. There are dozens of well-known fry dips, all around the world, and they fall into several families—producing a web of unexpected global connections around the world. You never really know where you are in the world until you dip a fry and take a bite.

Before we get to that, let’s explore the much-disputed creation of this ubiquitous foodstuff. Potatoes come from the Andean region of South America, and Andean peoples have not only thousands of different varieties of potato, but also many, many ways of preparing them. In the pre-Columbian Andes, and even for awhile after European contact, the most common methods were boiling, roasting, and a freeze-dry method that produces a product called chuños. Deep-frying, and cooking in oil in general, is a relatively new thing for potatoes.

Cooking in oil has a long history in certain parts of the ancient world. There are mentions of frying in Apicius, a Roman cookbook with recipes that probably date back to the first century. Olive oil was the medium of choice in the Mediterranean, and was plentiful, but for most of the world, fat and oil were prized and expensive. Olives are unusual in that a simple press can extract their oil, whereas for most plants, you have to smash them, boil them, then quickly skim off the oil as it separates. It was expensive to render fat from animals, and both expensive and time-consuming to produce it from vegetables.

Outside the Mediterranean, up until the end of the Middle Ages or so, fat and oil were too important to be used simply to cook something else. They were treated more like meat: vital sources of calories, not something to be used to cook something else. Fat would be spread on starches like bread, or added to soups and stews. That started to change around the time of the Industrial Revolution, when new machines and methods for extracting oil emerged. Roll mills, in which two rotating cylinders press material between them, started to be used to efficiently squeeze oil from plant matter in 1750. The hydraulic press was created in the late 1700s, then solvents in the mid-1800s (though the first solvents were almost certainly not fit for human consumption).

This is all to say that deep-frying, which requires a great deal of oil, is a mostly modern method—so french fries are a mostly modern dish. A common legend states that french fries originated in the Namur region of Belgium, where locals usually fried fish. One particularly vicious winter, the legend goes, their river froze solid, and so desperate and hungry locals cut potatoes into small, fish-shaped pieces, and fried those. That story comes from a 1781 manuscript wherein the author states that “this practice goes back more than a hundred years already.” But it’s incredibly unlikely that anyone was even eating potatoes in Belgium in 1681, let alone using wildly expensive oils to cook them.

Culinary historian Pierre Leclerq instead suggests that french fries—which he clarifies as being deep-fried, and not shallow-fried in a pan like home fries—probably came around in the mid-1800s, following the widespread availability of plant-based oils around Europe. They likely were first sold as street food in Belgium, France, or both. It’s also likely that the concept of deep-frying potatoes evolved independently elsewhere, too. After all, once oil was more affordable, why use its browning and crisping abilities on just about everything?

From there, the deep-fried potato—usually, but not always, in stick form—spread around the world. And so did its dips. Each fry dip is reflective of both local tastes and colonial conquests, new technologies and old traditions. The french fry is the medium through which you can see the parts that make up a modern culture. How you choose to flavor that most fundamental of snacks—deep-fried starch—says an awful lot about who you are. And it also shows how strangely interrelated world cuisine has become.

The state of the french fry dip in 2019 is wild: globalization has brought ketchup to the entire world, sure, but it’s also led to an almost impossibly large array of regional sauces and combinations. With that in mind, it doesn’t really make sense to break up the fry dips along geographic lines; the United States, dip-wise, has more in common with the Philippines than it does with Canada, for example. The world’s fry dips are better sorted by family.

The Creamy Family

This family of fry dips includes mayonnaise and its related sauces. Mayonnaise is, probably, an early-19th-century French version of aioli, which in its traditional egg-free form was found around the Southwestern Mediterranean and probably has its roots in ancient Rome.

Straight-up mayo is common as a fry dip in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands—perhaps suggesting it is a mother dip of sorts, though only one of several—and is widely used today all by itself. But there are dozens of varieties in this family, often much more exotic than a simple whipped white emulsion. Aioli or allioli—now often used as a shorthand for a garlic-heavy mayo sauce, though don’t tell that to the Spanish—is common on patatas bravas in certain parts of Spain. The Dutch make something called patatje oorlog, a dish of fries with, weirdly, both mayo and a peanut-y satay sauce. (It translates to “war fries.”) Remoulade, a mayo heavily seasoned with spices and often pickles, is common in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

Then there are the spiked mayos: curry mayo (again, Belgium and the Netherlands), fritten sauce (heavily mustard-spiked mayo, from Germany), and, well, many other Belgian creations. Here’s one called “Brasil sauce” which has mayo, pureed pineapple, and curry powder. Koen Smets, a behavioral economist who was born and raised in Belgium and replied to a very vague tweet on the subject, says, “Most chip shops have an array of sauces, rarely less than a dozen, and often more than 25.”

This particular family is rich, mild, and lightly acidic. These creamy sauces are a foil for salt—fatty, with an excellent consistency for dipping, but no overpowering flavor. Devotees might say that it accents, rather than muscles out, the flavor of the fry itself. Those devotees might also scorn lovers of the next major family, and vice versa.*

The Ketchup Family

“Ketchup” is a Malay word to describe a Chinese sauce consisting mostly of pickled fish. The word and vague concept of a sweet-and-sour sauce made it to the United Kingdom, where it was made with mushrooms, and then to the United States, where it was made with that most glorious of New World fruits, the tomato.

Where the primary attribute of the Creamy Family is its fat content, the Ketchup Family is sweet, sour, and sweet again. Standard tomato ketchup is ubiquitous in the United States but pretty widely available elsewhere, with minor variations in sweetness, sourness, and acidity.

Like mayo, ketchup has a curry-spiked variety, most associated with Germany, and particularly with Berlin street food, though it’s also popular in Denmark, the Netherlands, and, yet again, Belgium. But ketchup doesn’t have to be made with tomatoes. Modern ketchup, really, is a fruit puree kicked up with vinegar, sugar, and spices. In the Philippines, banana ketchup (often dyed red) is a common dip. In Belgium, a version of a South Asian pickle is also common—something like a very sweet relish. It’s not pureed, like tomato ketchup, but given its status as a sweet-sour vegetable, it’s at least a ketchup cousin, maybe.

Throughout Southeast Asia there are chili ketchups, to be enjoyed blended or separately, depending on the diner’s taste. McDonald’s in Thailand, for example, has “American ketchup” and “chili sauce,” the latter of which is described as orange and tangy.

Brown sauce, a United Kingdom favorite, is a little trickier to parse. It looks like gravy (more on that family later), but is fundamentally a ketchup: tomato base, with vinegar and sugar. What separates it from standard ketchup is the additions: dates, raisins, tamarind, or any combination thereof, along with spices, a bit like what Americans consider steak sauce.

The key attribute of ketchup and its relatives, I think, is sugar. Ketchup has about four grams per tablespoon—more than vanilla ice cream (also a pretty good dip for fries). Ketchup, like mayo, has some acidity and an excellent viscosity for clinging to fries, but no other sauce on this list is anywhere near as sweet.

The Vinegar Family

This one usually comes back to the United Kingdom and places where its influence is felt. Probably the most iconic, though by no means the only, accompaniment to fries (chips) in the British Empire is malt vinegar, made from fermented beer, which also tastes good on the fried fish that often accompany them.

Vinegar fries are also fairly common in Anglophone Canada, as one might expect, as well as South Africa, where the British colonial influence is also felt. But they have a rather unusual way to do it: the South African slap chip, or slaptjip. This dish consists of a fry that’s been slathered in vinegar and salt and then, bizarrely, covered and allowed it to steam—softening the fry and essentially taking away one of the key attributes of a proper fry, its crispy exterior.

The vinegar family is a curious one, as vinegar is, technically, a lousy condiment. The vinegar gets swiftly absorbed by the fry, meaning it can be difficult to taste if it rests for even a moment, and, of course, it tends to make a fry very soggy. The upside is a clean, crisp flavor, with no need to add fat or sugar, like the other families; just straight-up acid to counterbalance the oil.

The Gravy Family

Obviously the most famous member of the Gravy Family is the Quebec favorite, poutine, a mess of fries topped with cheese curds and brown gravy, usually a poultry stock thickened with flour or cornstarch. It’s salty, savory, and a little peppery. The American version of this is disco fries, most often associated with New Jersey, which replaces the cheese curds with shredded mozzarella. Gravies are essentially thick meat sauces, and in practice resemble a coating more than a dip.

There are other meaty sauces for fries, too, such as chili cheese fries in the United States, or poutine italienne in Quebec, which is basically bolognese sauce. These are all really more dishes than dips, as a proper dip should be served alongside the fries, rather than on top. But these variations are saucy and vital to understanding how fries are eaten. You might notice that these meaty fry dish–sauces are most common in cold regions. Surely there is a connection between the brutally cold Montreal winter and the desire to eat something truly decadent and ridiculous like poutine.

Interestingly, these are the only sauces served warm or hot; all the others are either room temperature or cold. This is mostly a technical issue; gravy congeals as it cools, which is pretty gross. Poutine cannot be eaten the following morning. (Trust me, I’ve tried.)

The Powder Family

Here’s where things get interesting. Heavily flavored powders that function like flavor-enhancing dips are common in Japan, India, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Sometimes fries are pre-spiced, like American “curly fries,” which are both curly and distinguished by a slightly spicy, paprika-tinted spice blend. Masala fries, from India, are like this, too.

In Japan, furaido potato are served with various powder seasonings and a bag; you add the fries and powder to a bag and shake the whole thing. Together they’re called furu pote, and common flavors include seaweed, butter soy, sesame, and more. Even McDonald’s sells them in Japan, as “Shake Shake Fries,” though a Japanese contact says that Wendy’s First Kitchen, previously known as First Kitchen prior to its acquisition by the American chain, is best known for its powdered fries.

The powder method is a highly efficient way to get bonus flavor onto a french fry. The powder is highly concentrated, so you don’t need much; it’s dehydrated, so it lasts forever; and because it’s dry, you don’t have to worry about soggification. On the other hand, you also don’t get any texture or temperature difference from a powder, but there’s no reason you can’t also dip a powdered fry.

It’s no particular surprise that the best-known powders come from Japan and India. Japanese cuisine is full of flavor-adding powders, including furikake (sesame seeds, seaweed, sugar, salt, sometimes other stuff) and shichimi togarashi (chili flakes, dried orange peel, sesame seed, ginger, seaweed, sometimes other stuff). Both of those, come to think of it, would be great on fries. India, too, is big on adding powders, in the form of spice blends, to pretty much any dish, from salads and popcorn to fried snacks and sandwiches.

The Outlier Family

There are various deep-fried potato-stick dishes around the world that don’t fit cleanly into these categories. The Bulgarian kartofi sus sirene is fries topped with shredded sirene cheese, similar to feta. In Peru, fries are sauteed with meats; lomo saltado is with strips of beef, salchipapas with, usually, slices of hot dog. Neither choice is really a dip, but both impart a great deal of flavor.

Then there’s the matter of reverse-colonial curry sauce, popular in the United Kingdom. It is made by frying garlic, ginger, onion, tomato paste, and spices before pureeing—like a Ketchup by definition, but it is not as sweet and is served hot, so it eats more like a Gravy. It offers something of both.

Deserving of special notice is Romanian mujdei, a garlic sauce that can be in either the Creamy Family or the Vinegar Family. The primary ingredient of this sauce is garlic, smashed in a mortar and pestle and mixed with oil (usually sunflower), sometimes with lemon juice or vinegar, and sometimes with sour cream. It’s simple, but still defies categorization.

Similar to mujdei is the Cuban mojo, made with crushed garlic, olive oil, maybe oregano, and citrus juice, most often bitter orange. But it is more likely to be eaten with a different fried starch, like yucca or plantain.

And finally, perhaps the greatest outlier of all. In Vietnam, french fries are often served with a side of butter and some white sugar. This is not so strange when you consider that fatiness is a defining trait of mayo and sweetness a defining trait of ketchup, and that just about every other staple food around the world can be eaten either savory, sweet, or both. Rice can be made into mochi or rice pudding; corn features in puddings and corn cakes; wheat can, obviously, be made into cake and about a million other treats. But the potato is hardly ever served sweet (Ed: A salty, crispy fry dunked in a cold, creamy milkshake is “chef’s kiss.”), though there’s no particular reason why. Hat’s off to Vietnam for just going for it.

* Update: It should be noted that Utahns prefer to mix the two.

The competition took place on April 30, 1828.

Thirteen years ago, a historian and a photographer working in Manitou Cave, on the side of Lookout Mountain in present-day northern Alabama, recognized a set of Cherokee inscriptions on the cave walls. This week, translations of those inscriptions appear in the archaeology journal Antiquity. According to those translations, the inscriptions are a unique record by the Cherokee of a ceremonial stickball game that took place in and near the site.

“When I went in this cave it kind of got me—it didn’t feel like the people who were writing on the wall were from hundreds of years before us,” says Beau Carroll, who translated the inscriptions, with the help of Cherokee scholars, for his master’s thesis in anthropology at the University of Tennessee. “It felt like it moved from their hands to my eyes,” he says.

A Cherokee himself, Carroll grew up playing stickball—a ceremonial game resembling lacrosse whose indigenous name roughly translates to “the little brother of war,” according to Julie Reed, a Cherokee historian at the University of Tennessee. Some of the inscriptions inside the cave commemorate a stickball game played on April 30, 1828.

More than a game, stickball is a ceremony of cosmological import, requiring intense preparation and attention from the players under the supervision of a Cherokee doctor. Preparation includes ritual scratching, during which small incisions are made all over the body and herbs applied. It also involves meditation and ritual cleansing before and after the game in a water source.

During the game, players use arm’s-length sticks with a hand-sized cup on the end to run balls to goalposts, usually marked by a pair of trees or branches. Stickball could be used to prepare for skirmishes, to settle conflict in place of battle, or simply as an excuse to have a good time and gamble a little. Whatever the purpose, it tends to be bloody. In stickball, there are few formal rules, and no boundaries.

Growing up, “we usually played at an annual fair,” recalls Carroll. “Once we ended up in somebody’s food stand—there were 10 people in this woman’s food stand rolling around and fighting.”

Manitou Cave was once a tourist attraction, but was abandoned in 1979. It is now in private hands and closed to the public. The writing stands somehow untouched by the later graffiti crowding around it. Nearly a mile into the wet darkness of the stalactite-and-stalagmite-filled cave, above the origin point of an underwater stream, the date of the stickball game is inscribed along with the words, “We are those that have blood come out of their nose and mouth,” and, “I am a respectable man of authority,” below which is the signature of Richard Guess, one of Sequoyah’s sons.

Sequoyah, a Cherokee scholar, developed the Cherokee syllabary, a writing system comprised of 85 distinct syllables, in Willstown after moving there with his family from Eastern Tennessee in the early 19th century. Willstown is located near Manitou Cave and is known as Fort Payne today.

The syllabary was introduced to the Cherokee community in 1821 and formally adopted in 1825. By 1828, it had even been adapted for letterpress printing and was used to publish a newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, which later became The Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate, to reflect its concern with tribes beyond the Cherokee.

The syllabary was created at a critical juncture in U.S. government policy towards indigenous Americans. Fearing reprisal after siding with the British during the American Revolution, many Cherokees had moved westward to Willstown in the early 19th century, but they couldn't escape encroachment. At that moment, there was “this promise that, if you become civilized enough you can be part of who we are,” says Reed. This "civilization process" included adopting Christianity, learning to read and write in English, changing traditional farming practices, and even shifting the roles of men and women. “On the one hand, Sequoyah’s process is in line with that idea, that intellectual capacity is supposedly what sets apart savages from the civilized,” says Reed. “On the other, doing it in the Cherokee language allows old practices to continue.”

Even in 1828, Manitou Cave was remote, making it an ideal place to practice traditions that were inconsistent with the demands of missionaries and governmental authorities. Carroll surmises that Guess was a doctor who led the ceremonial rights for the game that day, including the ritual cleansing, which would have used the underwater stream in the cave. Like his father, Guess was a community leader; when forced relocation began along the Trail of Tears in 1838, he was hired by the federal government to help ease the process for other Cherokees as they were moved to concentration camps.

For Carroll, studying the inscriptions has been a way to learn more about historic practices, and forge connections to this past. “When I practice my religion,” he says, “I’m doing it the same way as the person who was writing on the wall.”

Which are best suited for a life among the stars?

LaShelle Spencer knew that she was supposed to kill Alfred, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Technically his job was done, and Spencer had been instructed to dispose of him and get on with her work. But he was just so small, so fragile—a spindly little lima bean sprouting in a plastic baggie.

Spencer, a food production horticulturalist at NASA, was shut inside a hangar at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, in the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) Facility, an experimental setup that models, among other things, crew dynamics and the effects of long-term isolation associated with space travel. The quarters look a bit like a beige yurt set atop a few big septic tanks, and a four-person crew spends several weeks at a time inside the 636-square-foot space. During her "mission" to an asteroid, Spencer passed the time the way an astronaut would, maintaining experiments, working out, and performing drills in the three-story structure. Her tour of duty was 30 days—much less time than it would take a person to reach Mars—but it did not take long for the gray, white, and stainless steel interior to wear on her. “You do start to gravitate toward that green color of home,” she says.

So when the lima bean project—part of an outreach effort with a school—was complete, instead of offing Alfred, Spencer squirreled the sprout away in a spot where cameras wouldn’t catch the crew tending to him. “We loved him,” she says. “We made him a mascot.”

Ever since Soviet cosmonauts germinated seeds on the space station Salyut 1 in the 1970s, space agencies have worked on ways to grow plants off-world. Today, several live aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Interplanetary horticulture is mainly pragmatic, focusing on leafy greens and other vegetables that could eventually sustain crews on long missions. These grow under white, far-red, red, blue, and green LEDs—some of which, to our eyes, appear a cheerful, trippy fuchsia—in carefully calibrated little chambers, some of which are nearly fully automated. Yes, Alfred was technically food, but that’s not why Spencer and her crew spared him.

Tending to plants has psychological benefits, too. NASA describes the veggies aboard the ISS as both a “palatable, nutritious, and safe source of fresh food and a tool to support relaxation and recreation.” Humans who find themselves floating above our world have long felt tenderness toward the plants that are up there with them. The cosmonauts referred to their flax seedlings as their “pets,” American astronaut Scott Kelly carried zinnias with him around the ISS in 2016, and fellow American Donald Pettit—who grew a scrappy sunflower and more—blogged about his off-world botany in 2012 from the perspective of his little zucchini plant. Just before Pettit returned to Earth in a capsule he called his “seed pod,” the astronaut wrote about saying goodbye to the zucchini, taking a final sniff, and blinking back tears. In an unfamiliar place, the plants represent comfort and company.

In a future that might involve extraterrestrial colonization and long, long spaceflight, a new generation of pioneers will probably need to seek creature comforts—things that recall home without compromising too much on the necessary and practical strictures of life beyond our atmosphere. It’s just hard to imagine leaving everything behind. Given that at-home horticulture is booming at the moment, what about houseplants? Keeping crops alive in space is one thing, but the same research could be applied to plants that would do little more than keep people’s spirits aloft.

So which houseplants are best suited to coming along for the ride?

An ideal candidate, first of all, would be a plant that isn’t too thirsty. Of the many factors that frustrate horticulture in microgravity, “The biggest problem we’ve had is water,” says Matt Romeyn, a biologist working on NASA’s vegetable production team at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Water doesn’t behave in microgravity the way it does on Earth, where gravity helps it move along to hydrate soil particles and root hairs before excess flows away. On the ISS, it both sticks everywhere and seeps out of containers built to hold it. In microgravity, water forms spheres, which can hang around as “big globs around roots, depriving them of oxygen,” says Chris Wolverton, a plant physiologist at Ohio Wesleyan University whose NASA-funded research focuses on the effects of gravity on plants. Water has slaughtered many green things trying to make a go of it in space. “If you don’t kill the plant by the water glomming onto it and forming a big, wet pocket,” Wolverton says, “you also provide this great environment for fungi, which are notorious for inhabiting space vehicles, and could infest the plant and kill it.”

So the less water to wrangle, the better, both because it must be administered so precisely and because it is such a precious resource to begin with. On the ISS, for instance, much of the water for the plants is repurposed from astronauts’ urine, sweat, and breath. “Then, as the plants give off water vapor through the process of transpiration through their leaves, that water is recondensed in the environment and put back through the system,” says Gioia Massa, a NASA scientist studying plants in microgravity. Thus, Wolverton recommends some kind of succulent, which wouldn’t have major water demands.

The next precious resource in space is attention. How much of it can astronauts afford to spare on shoots and leaves when they’ve got life-or-death stuff to attend to? “If they forget to water it a couple days in a row, we’d want a houseplant to be able to be okay with that,” Spencer says. On that score, she suggests a philodendron. “I have one at home, and it’s neglected often, but it’s still alive.”

A strong contender would also be one that is able to flourish without a light array. The scientists working on crops are currently investigating which wavelengths and ratios of light are ideal for yielding the most nutritious and delicious, or fastest-growing plants, which involves tinkering with arrays of red, blue, green, white, and far-red LEDs. For houseplants, spacefarers would want a less-fussy setup. “Optimally, if you were going to bring a houseplant, something that you’re not going to eat and just serves a purpose for enriching the environment, you would want something that would only be reliant on the ambient environment,” Spencer says. That might mean a simple white LED, or regular cabin lighting, or, if the spacecraft has steady exposure to the Sun, Romeyn says, a plant could be fastened near a window and be nourished by the light that streams in. (Consistent light would not be a possibility on the Moon, however, where 14 bright days are followed by just as many of total darkness.)

In general, houseplants “can tolerate much lower light than what we use for crop production because we’re trying to get plants to grow quickly and be productive and big and make a lot of food,” Massa says. “Houseplants, you kind of want the opposite. You just want it to sort of stay there and look nice, right? You don’t really need it to be big and productive—you just don’t want it to die.” The sweet spot, Massa says, is what’s known as the light compensation point: “Just enough light to keep the plant alive through photosynthesis, but not so much that it just grows like crazy, because then you’re having to repot it or trim it back.”

Pollen and shed petals are no-nos, too, because in microgravity any kind or size of debris can be dangerous, Massa says. These run the risk of clogging filters or getting lodged in someone’s eye. “If it’s fine enough, it could become a respiratory hazard,” Romeyn says, and a forgotten chunk could become a hotspot for microbial growth. Massa says that’s why the NASA horticulture team prefers zinnias, which don’t drop their petals, over petunias, which do.

Extraterrestrial abodes aren’t known for being roomy, and physical space is yet another precious resource in off-world living environments. “The very first thing we look at when we’re looking at new crops is, ‘Does it have a compact growth morphology?’” Romeyn says. The veggie team opts for dwarf varietals, which better fit the habitat (think of pots on a balcony, not beds sprawling across a backyard). Their garden tops out at not much more than a foot, at which point the plants would be butting up against the lights. Massa says that a space houseplant should have a similarly compact profile, which means that popular picks such as peace lilies and dracaena aren’t great options. Spencer suggests aloe vera, a low-maintenance succulent that can stay small for a while. And, in addition to making the cabin feel a little cozier, it can be a salve, soothing skin that is cracking or peeling in the low-humidity environment.

Even after Spencer spared his life, the end was near for Alfred the sprout. His baggie and wet paper towel couldn’t nourish him indefinitely. Despite Spencer’s efforts, he grew too tall and just broke apart. “It was very sad to be the plant person that killed the plant,” she says. But the brief adventure in surreptitious gardening did spark joy in the sterile, cramped environment. Wolverton suspects that a growth chamber plunked down on the Moon could do the same for the first generation of lunar pioneers. He likens it to “visiting a conservatory in the middle of winter”—a warm, welcoming space, and a respite from the cold, dark world outside.

A themed version of the board game, to help stave off wartime boredom.

Admit it, you’ve always wondered what it would feel like to do a double jump over Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont and General Henry “Old Brains” Halleck, or holler “King me!” while stacking two pieces on the mug of explorer-turned-general John C. Frémont. If that’s your scene, we have the checkerboard for you.

American Heritage Auction House is offering an 1862 checkerboard featuring the faces of Union military leaders from the Civil War. Each white square on the board features a different person, including famed commanders such as Ulysses S. Grant and Ambrose Burnside (with his signature facial hair). Records show the board was created by Walter S. Hill and Samuel T. Reed of New York City, and their patent wasn’t just for Civil War-themed gaming, but for any design of a checker or chess board, “having its squares provided with portraits.”

According to Steve Lansdale, Public Relations Specialist at Heritage, experts at the auction house believe the board was likely created to be sold to soldiers. The life of a soldier on either side of the bloody conflict was pretty regimented and destitute. Days without fighting began at dawn and were filled with variations of combat training, mustering formations, cleaning the camp and weapons, guard duties, and, for Union soldiers, usually a dress parade to cap off the evening. There was also a hands-on education in fighting off disease and learning to boil clothes to rid them of lice and other parasites.

Games did play a role in maintaining a sense of normalcy amid the violence and boredom of wartime camp life, but there wasn’t much time for them. When not working or trying to survive dysentery, both Union and Confederate soldiers spent a majority of their downtime foraging for food. Rations grew slimmer as the war went on and supply lines were twisted into logistical nightmares. In whatever sliver of time soldiers had left, they might repair uniforms, write letters, read, gamble, sing, or, finally, play board games. Most soldiers only spent one out of every 30 days engaged in combat, and even then only when weather conditions were favorable. Games and songs were vital for passing the time. All the better, one supposes, if you could also see the faces of the men who were ordering you to fight.

Bidding for the historic checkerboard is open and runs through May 4. Your move.

But you only have a month to pick up your order.

Throughout the 20th century, the Kullman Dining Car Company manufactured scores of prefabricated diners, all to serve Americans jonesing for affordable, tasty meals (ideally). Though the corporation folded in 2011, several examples of its trademark formica countertops and stainless steel facades still exist in places such as New Jersey, Rhode Island, and North Carolina. In Rego Park, Queens, one of the survivors—the Shalimar Diner—closed its doors in November 2018 after being priced out of its home of 45 years. The 14,000-square-foot corner lot it sits on (prime Queens real estate) was snapped up for $6.55 million, but the new owners don’t plan to keep the diner there. Now local preservationists are fighting to save it from going to the trash heap at the end of this month.

The diners of this era were designed to be easily moved, and that’s why the Rego-Forest Preservation Council, founded and run by Michael Perlman, is offering the fully intact Shalimar Diner for free to anyone who is willing to pay to bring it to a new location. “It would be a shame to demolish the Shalimar Diner, based on its history, architectural style, and technical aspects,” Perlman says. “This is an initiative for ‘Diner Man,’ along the lines of Spider-Man flying in from Forest Hills in the movie and landing at SoHo's Moondance Diner.” He's serious: Perlman earned his “Diner Man” nickname after successfully relocating Manhattan’s Moondance Diner to Wyoming in 2007, and Queens’ Cheyenne Diner to Alabama two years later.

Perlman founded the preservation council in 2006, on the 100th anniversary of the naming of the residential Queens neighborhood Forest Hills, and the 83rd anniversary of Rego Park, the western section, getting its own name. After meeting with the commercial developer who purchased the lot, Perlman was able to secure a 30-day window in which an interested party could come forward to claim this “diner to go.” This period is up sometime between late April and early May, so time is of the essence. Perlman believes the price tag (free) should be a nice incentive for a heroic preservationist committed to saving a piece of cultural history (and breakfast all day).

From the time it opened in 1974, the Shalimar Diner was the only freestanding diner of its kind in Rego Park. Owned and operated by the Karayiannis family, the eclectic eatery was known as an “ultimate public institution,” Perlman says, with popularity and longevity spanning generations, traditions, and tastes. “The experience was very personalized and it felt like a small town within its walls, despite being situated on the busy intersection of 63rd Drive,” he adds. The diner counted many members of the community loyal patrons (including to the hidden dining room in the back). Architecturally, the building is a unique blend of styles. The sleek, teal and steel roof molding is a nod to Art Deco, while the contrasting stonework speaks to a Mediterranean influence. Historically, it has been common for Greek immigrant families to run diners in Queens—including the Karayiannis family.

The Shalimar’s comfortable ambience, familiar decor, and convenient location meant that it was tapped by Hollywood to represent a quintessential New York diner, such as in the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street. Local residents and loyal patrons are reportedly disturbed by an uptick in the demolishing of classic neighborhood landmarks in favor of new development. “Especially on the Shalimar's final day of operation, lines were out the door and patrons shed tears and exchanged many memories with community friends and the owners and staff who became an extended family,” Perlman says. “Patrons provided notes of gratitude, and at least one community resident wrote a poem and displayed it on a decorative poster, which was displayed near the register. People were in mourning, and that was a sad day in Rego Park history.”

The developer has not yet announced plans for the lot, and locals speculate that it will sit vacant for a few years, and then become a multistory commercial space or condominium or something. The Shalimar is dead (for now). Long live the Shalimar.

The last wild lady's slipper in the U.K. is a target for thieves.

For a few weeks each spring, a lone guard monitors the moors of northern England. This warden pitches a tent in a remote field to watch over a prize so rare that collectors have been known to break laws, trek into deep jungles, and risk capture by guerillas in its pursuit. The object? A single lady’s slipper orchid, Cypripedium calceolus—the last wild plant of its kind left in the United Kingdom.

If you saw the lady’s slipper’s delicate crimson-and-yellow petals tremble in a spring breeze, you too may understand the allure that has gripped collectors for generations. The love of orchids, labelled “orchidelirium” by the Victorians, erupted in the 19th century, as the reach of the British Empire enabled the import of a few of these delicate flowers to the U.K. While supermarkets now sell inexpensive orchids, the flowers' finicky reproductive process—most of them are slow-growing, with seeds that depend on a symbiotic relationship with a naturally occurring fungus—means that scientists have only managed to adapt a relative few species for mass greenhouse cultivation. The vast majority of the world’s more than 28,000 orchid species remain elusive to most purchasers, and that, says Richard Thomas, Communications Coordinator at TRAFFIC, an NGO monitoring wildlife trade, only amplifies their appeal.

That’s bad news for orchids, which are exquisitely adapted to their environments. Some species grow only within highly localized microclimates, on a single mountaintop or a specific rainforest tree. Even orchids with wider ranges are highly sensitive to environmental changes caused by development, climate change, or over-collection. Of the 98,500 species included on the Red List of Threatened Species produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 1,360 listings are orchids.

Britain’s Cypripedium calceolus faces a unique dilemma. Compared to other species, this lady’s slipper has a wide range, growing from the U.K. to Russia, and in some parts of Asia. Because it remains relatively abundant in the wilderness of countries such as Sweden, the Red List considers Cypripedium calceolus a species of least concern for conservation in Europe. Zoom into the U.K., though, and the picture changes. Thanks to Victorian orchidelirium, Britain’s lady’s slipper population was decimated by ruthless collection. By the early-20 century, it was believed to be extinct. That is, until 1930, when a lone, nature-loving wanderer stumbled upon one in Yorkshire. Typical of orchids’ very long lifespans, the plant grows to this day.

Ask Mike Fay, Senior Research Leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, about this Cypripedium calceolus and he will happily tell you about its rediscovery, the kind of soil it prefers, and his lab’s effort to propagate it. He will not, however, tell you its location. “That isn’t in the public domain,” he says.

Originally, the flower’s location was known only to a few botanists, who were more committed to restoring the species than to acquiring it. As with all things forbidden, however, word of the flower spread. Eventually, government conservationists became so worried about orchid poachers that they swore to keep its location a strict secret—not even all the orchid experts at Kew Gardens knows where it is. The plant itself is zealously protected as well. For a few weeks each spring, the flower’s delicate blooms receive round-the-clock guard. Tasked with the job of collecting data on the flower’s soil conditions, the weather, and the progress of its blossoming, the guard is the first line of defense between the lady’s slipper and its would-be captors.

Orchid thieves have targeted British lady’s slippers before. Cypripedium calceolus is protected under the U.K.’s Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, and stealing or trading it is punishable by fines and prison time. As part of a program to restore the species, researchers at Kew Gardens, including Fay, have been propagating the lady’s slipper from greenhouse specimens with known wild origins. They’ve managed to successfully reintroduce plants in up to a dozen sites across Britain. In 2018, the reintroduced plants produced a total of 700 shoots and 200 blooms.

Yet they, too, are under threat. Besides metal cages and copper rings installed to ward off grazing deer and hungry slugs, the reintroduced flowers have periodically been granted police protection. In 2004, a thief attempted to pull one of these reintroduced plants up by the root; it was found mangled, though it survived. In 2009, the same plant, located on a golf course in Lancashire, survived a knife attack by a poacher looking to collect a slice. In 2010, public officials were so worried about this oft-attacked specimen that they granted it temporary police protection. Another reintroduced lady’s slipper was accompanied to the 2013 Chelsea Flower Show by its own personal phalanx of guards.

To quench the lust for lady’s slippers, conservationists have resorted to an age-old plot: a honey trap. “These are what we call honeypot sites,” Fay says. “We want people to see the species in the wild and enjoy it.” Conservationists have opened two honeypot locations with reintroduced lady’s slippers: Kilnsey Park Estate in Yorkshire and Gait Barrows in Lancashire. In spring, says Thomas, the line to see rare orchids can be hundreds deep.

Still, some obsessives aren’t satisfied with just a taste of orchid honey—they want to own the whole jar. That’s why conservationists insist on safeguards like the last wild lady’s slipper’s warden. Despite the extensive protections afforded to the plants worldwide, orchidelirium continues to drives collectors to extremes. A few years ago, says Fay, a newly discovered Vietnamese orchid species was available on the illicit U.S. market before any trade permits were legally given in Vietnam. Scientists are already concerned about the species’ survival.

How to understand a passion that kills what it loves? For Thomas of TRAFFIC, the lust is mysterious. We may as well ask about the meaning of life, he says. But Fay has a simple explanation. “They lose the sense of how important it is for these things to continue existing,” he says of collectors. “They just want to have it.”

Ancient Rome never had an "Aedicula Ridiculi," but plenty of people thought it did.

In his 1698 Dictionary of the Greek and Roman Antiquities, translated into English in 1700, the French abbot-scholar Pierre Danet dedicated an entire entry to an Aedicula Ridiculi—in English, Little Temple of Ridicule—in Rome. This chapel, he tells readers, was built on the spot where bad weather had forced the Carthaginian general Hannibal to give up on besieging the capital in 216 BC. “The Romans, upon this occasion, raised a very loud laughter,” Danet wrote, “and therefore they built a little oratory under the name of the God of Joy and Laughter.”

Danet gave the temple’s precise location (along the Appian Way, at the second milestone outside the Porta Capena), but trying to find it in a guidebook today would be an exercise in frustration. There’s a simple reason for this: It never existed. A rather beautiful Roman structure does stand on the site he described, but it’s not a temple—instead, it’s now widely believed to be the tomb of a woman named Annia Regilla, who died nearly 400 years after Hannibal’s invasion of Italy. To give Danet some credit, he was far from alone in making this mistake.

Despite being fake, the Aedicula Ridiculi was commonly treated as fact in the early encyclopedias of Roman ruins put together by pioneering Italian and French antiquarians of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Bartolomeo Marliani, Onofrio Panvinio, and Jean-Jacques Boissard. Even after being debunked by archaeologists, the Temple of Ridicule would continue to pop up for centuries in texts written for general audiences as a fun factoid: As late as 1852, an essay on the history of wit in Dolman’s Magazine notes, as evidence that humans have always valued humor, that “the ancient Romans went so far as to erect a ridiculi aedicula, or chapel of laughter.”

It’s simple enough to understand how rumors of the temple took hold. Only two ancient texts are ever cited as evidence for its existence. The first is Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which mentions in a section on birds that a shoemaker once buried his beloved pet raven “on the right-hand side of the Appian Way, at the second milestone from the City, in the field generally known as the ‘field of Rediculus'” (in Latin, campus Rediculi). The second is a fragment written by the second-century grammarian Festus: “The temple of Rediculus [fanum Rediculi] was outside the Porta Capena; it was so called because Hannibal, when on the march from Capua, turned back at that spot, being alarmed at certain portentous visions.”

It isn’t necessary to understand Latin to pick up on a big clue here: Instead of Ridiculi with an “i,” both ancient sources say Rediculi with an “e.” That one-letter difference is important. While Ridiculi is indeed a form of the Latin verb ridere, to ridicule, Rediculi comes from the totally unrelated redere, to turn back or retreat. In this light, the Temple of Ridicule starts to look like a typo that took on a life of its own.

Small spelling mistakes that radically change the meaning of words are extremely common in medieval copies of ancient texts. As a result, classicists practice textual criticism, the meticulous and sometimes contentious comparison of differences in all known manuscript copies of a certain text. Once all variants have been catalogued, scholars cobble together an authoritative edition that approximates the original text as closely as possible. This process was only completed for the notoriously long and thorny Natural History over the course of the 19th century. Tellingly, at the spot in the text where most copies have the correct rediculi, the French monk who, shortly before the year 900, transcribed one of the oldest relatively complete manuscripts of the Natural History wrote ridiculi, “of ridicule.”

As classical scholars became more aware that medieval copies of ancient texts were often riddled with spelling errors, the reading Rediculi, “Retreat,” became preferred in learned circles. Aside from being better attested in the scattered manuscripts, it made more sense in context: Neither of the ancient sources mentions laughter, but Festus at least includes the story of Hannibal’s retreat.

While the popular Italian name for the building remains the Temple of Rediculus (with an e)—the official website of the Caffarella Park, within which the ruin sits, describes it as “the traditional name”—both spellings ultimately became moot. Improvements in archaeological science led to greater accuracy in the dating and identification of ruins, including the brick structure at the second milestone on the Appian Way. “The pretended aedicula ridiculi,” the architectural historian Robert Stuart confidently (and correctly) wrote in 1830, “is nothing more than a tomb of the lower ages.”

The myth of the Temple of Ridicule was not yet totally vanquished. Its most persistent defenders were the semi-professional tour guides called ciceroni (an ironic reference to the learnedness of the Roman orator Cicero), who had a stranglehold on the Italian tourism industry well into the 19th century despite a reputation for dubious accuracy. The American novelist James Fenimore Cooper complained about the “ignorance and knavery” of these ciceroni, but still hired one when he toured Rome in 1838. The tour guide’s influence is obvious in Cooper’s account of visiting a temple commemorating Hannibal’s retreat. “The term ridiculous,” he wrote, “is universally applied to the building.”

Another reluctant employer of ciceroni was the American magazine editor and poet Nathaniel Parker Willis, who echoes the legend in his 1835 travelogue Pencillings by the Way. “The dedication of a temple to ridicule is far from amiss,” he wrote after visiting the site, considering how powerful a force ridicule can be. “In our age particularly,” he quipped, “the lamp should be relit.” Willis’s reverie offers a glimpse into why the false identification endured long after it went out of fashion among academics: It was accessible to tourists with little knowledge of or interest in the details of Roman history, and, maybe more importantly, it gave them the opportunity to make their own jokes with other tourists, with ciceroni, and among friends (or in travelogues) back at home.

In the end, the Temple of Ridicule crumbled under the weight of historical evidence even in the travel genre. “We cannot avoid pointing out,” wrote the author of a review of Willis’s book in the London and Westminster Review, that the temple “has nothing to do with ridicule.” This harbinger of higher standards in tourism literature is laudable, but has its own subtle irony. “The common guidebook,” the reviewer smugly went on to add, “would have enabled Mr. Willis to avoid this error.”

On different sides of border checkpoints, different views of a sweet treat.

The prickly cactus fruit has intrigued chef Fadi Qattan since childhood. He and his grandmother would sit on her porch in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem peeling off the thick, spiky skin of the seedy yet sweet fruit that she bought by the bucket from nearby villages. Then they’d eat the colorful fruit as it came: juicy and chunky and quick to lose its ovular shape after the first bite or slice of a knife.

At his restaurant, Fadwa Café and Restaurant, in Bethlehem, Qattan incorporates the cactus fruit into his cooking—though it’s a struggle. The fruit “has a very delicate flavor,” says Qattan, so when cooked with other produce, the taste often gets lost. It’s also very acidic, further limiting its culinary utility. Qattan has perfected a cactus fruit jam and dessert based on its juice. But his favorite use is pairing cactus fruit sauce with shrimp from the Jaffa seaport along the Mediterranean Sea.

For Qattan, cooking with cactus fruit isn’t just about eating local—it’s also political. Qattan lives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Palestinians like him need an Israeli-issued permit to travel to Jaffa, a historically Arab city located at least one checkpoint and fewer than 50 miles away in Israel. For him, this cactus fruit dish is a symbol of Palestinian dispossession.

That’s a lot of politics for one fruit, but that’s the prickly cactus fruit’s nature in the region. Like with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, very different stories are told about the cactus fruit depending on whom you ask. Called sabr in Arabic and sabra in Hebrew, the fruit has become a core but disputed symbol of Israeli and Palestinian national identities.

After a century of conflict, the sabr-sabra divide still infuses everyday art and language. Surprisingly, though, its core use in the kitchen hasn’t really changed. People still buy it in the market, now often already peeled or with the thorns removed, ready to eat just as it is.

“It’s not a beautiful fruit,” says Qattan, comparing the texture and qualities to passion fruit. “When you chop it up, it breaks. It’s very fragile. It doesn’t look nice once its peeled and worked with.”

Like many Palestinians, when Qattan sees cactus fruit, he sees remnants of the Palestinian villages that were destroyed or conquered in what is now Israel during the 1948 war for Israel’s independence, called the nakba, or the catastrophe, by Palestinians. (Today there are around five million United Nations-recognized Palestinian refugees, the descendants of those who fled or were expelled from their homes.) For generations, Palestinians had used the hardy plants to form fences around their land. As a result, the only sign of some villages’ one-time existence is lines of cacti.

“If you look at most Palestinian villages demolished in Israel, what’s left is cactus fruit and olive trees,” says Qattan. Since 1948, he adds, this has imbued the cactus plant with a “mythical symbolism.”

About 65 miles and a disputed border away, Israeli Shachar Blum views cactus fruit, which he calls sabra, very differently. Blum owns Orly Cactus Farm in southern Israel, the largest producer of the prickly plant in the Middle East, and he insists it’s the next big, antioxidant-packed super fruit. He’s even developed a powder to use in shakes, along with cactus-based jams and spicy sauces.

Blum’s father built the farm in the 1970s, and Blum describes his obsession with cactus fruit as rooted in Zionist nationalism. Since the early days of Jewish immigration to then-Mandate Palestine, Israelis have called the ideal Israeli, who is born in the country, a sabra: tough on the outside like the thorny fruit, soft on the inside like its sweet flesh, and native to the soil like the plant. (Although like many Israelis, sabra is actually an immigrant, having arrived from the Americas via Spain several centuries ago.)

When Blum’s father started the farm, he knew that many parts of the world have cactus fruit plants, so he wanted to make theirs the best. They chose Dimona, in southern Israel, because of its intense sun and “the Zionist dream of making the desert bloom.” Now the farm is completely organic and uses recycled water from Dimona. In the 1990s, Blum started experimenting with different species to make the fruit bigger with fewer seeds and spines (and less likely to induce constipation, according to Blum). While the farm previously produced only orange fruits, now they grow in six colors, including yellow, purple, and red. Blum has also been able to extend the notoriously short cactus fruit season from just the summer to more like June to October.

Blum doesn’t want to get into politics, though, in Israel, it’s often unavoidable.

“A lot of people in Israel say the Arabs and Jews can’t work together,” he says. “In our farm, we have Bedouin, Jewish, Sudanese, Thai, and Sri Lankan employees … We believe that whoever you are, if you want to work, you can come here.”

As one example, Blum explains that the farm’s manager is from a nearby Arab-Bedouin community. The manager started working at the farm at age 14 (today this would be a violation of Israeli labor law, which stipulates that 14 year olds can only be employed for light summer work) and is “like my father’s third son.”

With his cactus fruit farm blooming, Blum says he’s not focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I don't think I need to think about the past. I think about the future … The problem is with the leaders and not the people. I don’t have much time to do politics. I have too much work.”

Another 120 more miles and part of the disputed border away, Palestinian artist Ahmed Yasin, age 25, has never spoken with an Israeli who is not in military uniform. Yasin lives in a small village outside of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, where the past often appears more stable than the future. But like Blum, Yasin is obsessed with the cactus plant, which he uses as the canvas for his artwork.

Yasin comes from a line of artists, and his parents had him decorate their ornate and colorful family home. The cactus plants in their rocky backyard caught his eye in 2015 when he was looking for a new canvas. Facing limited work opportunities and hemmed in by permits and checkpoints in the West Bank, Yasin found something fruitful at home.

“[The cactus plant] lives in the hardest environmental conditions,” says Yasin. “It lives in the desert. It resists drought. It endures the weather conditions. In the end, the product is the fruit.” In Arabic, sabr also means patience, and Yasin’s words echo a well-known mantra of Palestinian resistance: sabr wa samud, or patience and steadfastness.

Yasin became something of a local celebrity for his handful of haunting cactus-based images, which are all located in his backyard. One shows an old Palestinian woman with a key to her pre-1948 home; another depicts a baby breastfeeding from the cactus through a bullet hole. He describes his work with the sabr as a kind of “cultural resistance,” inspired by other Palestinian artists and writers who’ve turned to cactus imagery.

It’s illegal for Israeli food entrepreneur Naama Eliyahu, 33, to travel into the Palestinian Territories and see Yasin’s artwork. But while she was raised with the sabra narrative in school, she can’t recall the last time she’s seen or tasted the fruit.

“When was the last time I saw sabra anywhere?” Eliyahu rhetorically asks. “I really can’t remember.”

Eliyahu is the founder and CEO of the Tel Aviv World Food Market, a monthly event showcasing different cuisines and chefs in Israel and abroad. The cactus fruit hasn’t made it there. "Not yet,” Eliyahu adds.

Fifty to 60 years ago, Eliyahu says, the cactus fruit symbolized the new, Israeli-born Jew laying down roots. “[But] nowadays, it’s obvious. We’re Israeli. There’s no doubt about it … We don’t use the term and symbol today.”

As Israel has shifted from a more socialist to now capitalist country, people’s relationship with the land has also changed: In Tel Aviv, it’s the technology sector, not farming in communal communities, that’s the ideal.

“It’s a sad story,” Eliyahu says. “No one cares about the farmers today.”

Despite this disconnect, discussion in Israel about the disparate histories of the sabra, and who and what came before it, is still muted amid an increasingly nationalist political climate.

Yassan, meanwhile, had never heard the Israeli narrative around the prickly cactus fruit. Qattan has, but he won’t work with Israeli chefs, as part of his personal boycott of Israel’s ongoing occupation and what he calls “food appropriation.”

“We have to remember that the conflict is about land and occupation, not about faith,” he says.

In the meantime, the cactus plant keeps bearing fruit.

For generations, the document was in the possession of a Union general's family.

“Abraham Lincoln died this morning at 22 minutes after seven,” reads the telegram from April 15, 1865, that announced the U.S. president’s death to the outside world. After being held by the family of a Union general for generations, the original text of the telegram is now being offered for sale by the historic memorabilia specialists at the Raab Collection.

Lincoln lived out his final moments in a crowded boardinghouse room across the street from Ford’s Theater, where he had been shot in the head the night before. Accompanying him was Dr. Charles Leale, a Union army surgeon who had come to the president’s aid in the theater, personally sticking his pinky finger into the hole in Lincoln’s skull to identify where the bullet had struck. The president was also joined by the U.S. Surgeon General, his personal doctor, and a Colonel. They kept track of the president’s pulse with bated breath through the night.

As Lincoln’s health declined, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Major Thomas Eckert, the head of the War Department’s telegraph office, relayed updates to other government officials and, finally, the public through a series of messages handed to telegraph operators who had been assembled and were on alert for news.

The final telegraph, announcing the president’s early-morning death, was written by Eckert for Stanton. A messenger ran it to the War Department in the Winder Building in downtown Washington, D.C., where an old library had been converted into a telegraph office. As JustCollecting News notes, the document subsequently disappeared.

When it goes on sale next week, on the anniversary of Lincoln's death, the price set for this important artifact will be $500,000. A spokesperson for the Raab Collection says that they have already received some offers for the piece.

But to get a sharper look, we’ll have to journey to space.

If you’re attempting to peer deep into space, Chile is a great place to try. Roughly 16,000 feet up on the sprawling, beige Chajnantor Plateau—where the high elevation and low humidity make for good visibility—more than five dozen antennae stare skyward. These clustered radio telescopes comprise the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA. They are powerful instruments—but, on their own, even these aren’t able to capture a clear image of the black hole in the galaxy known as Messier 87.

This insatiable, inscrutable portal is 55 million light-years from Earth, and 6.5 billion times more massive than our Sun. This week, the international consortium of researchers working on the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first image of the black hole—or actually, of its shadow, which is 2.5 times larger than the boundary of the hole itself. Producing the image required the assistance of more than a half-dozen telescopes across the world, from Chile to Mexico to Hawaii, and the efforts of more than 200 scientists. The project is so complex that collaborators “must all be a piece of a well-oiled mega machine,” says Sara Issaoun, a graduate student in astrophysics at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, and an observational astronomer on the EHT team.

The notion of the "planet-sized" telescope "is not just a turn of phrase," says Joseph Farah, an undergraduate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics working on the EHT imaging. Observations poured in from radio telescopes at “high and dry sites at the most extreme locations in the world,” Issaoun says—essentially creating one huge, virtual telescope encompassing much of the globe.

When that data arrived, it was kind of a mess. “The raw data from the telescopes are a collection of radio signals with lots of noise, including a tiny, tiny signal from the black hole—not the beautiful image,” says Junhan Kim, a doctoral student in astronomy at the University of Arizona, who contributed to the research. The telescopes collected several hard drives’ worth of data, which were precisely time-stamped, then cleaned up and synthesized using supercomputers in Massachusetts and Bonn, Germany, Kim says. To arrive at this striking image, Kim adds, “the entire Earth-sized array has to behave as if we have a single telescope, collecting the signal simultaneously.”

The more telescopes, the better and more complete the image will be, says Farah. “If we could, we’d fill the entire world with telescopes,” Farah jokes. (“We’d leave at least a little bit for houses,” adds Dominic Pesce, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative, where he works on modeling on the EHT team.)

Filling in the array with more telescopes in between the existing ones could help researchers learn more about the structures around the black hole, says Andrew Chael, a graduate student in astrophysics at Harvard who works on the imaging aspects of the EHT project. Chael says that telescopes near Baja, California, for instance, would be well positioned to augment observations from existing ones in Arizona and Mexico. Issaoun points to the Greenland Telescope, Arizona’s Kitt Peak Telescope, and one in the French Alps as ones coming on board to help observe M87. The Africa Millimetre Telescope, which is proposed for Gamsberg, a mountain in Namibia, “will also provide additional coverage and new orientations,” Issaoun says, “filling up the southeast portion of our array and bringing African partners to the EHT.”

To get the clearest images of this black hole and others, we’ll have to go at least a little bit closer to them. “The ‘dream array’ of the future, in my opinion, would involve several strong sites on the ground operating in tandem with an extensive array of telescopes in space dedicated to black hole imaging,” says Daniel Palumbo, a graduate student in astronomy at Harvard and a member of the EHT team. “Since space dishes don't need good weather, this array could observe for most of the year without issue.” Low Earth orbits (where satellites and the International Space Station live) would be ideal for capturing moving images, while dishes farther out into the reaches of space would give better resolution of slower-moving sources, Palumbo says.

For now, we’ve got this image—searing, blurry, nearly miraculous, and a reminder of all the wonders we have yet to see.

How do you make your travel tangible?

There is something undeniably appealing about amassing a collection of items to represent your travels and adventures. And the best part about souvenir collections is they can take just about any form, from one-of-a-kind postcards to literal bags of sand. Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers over in our Community forums to show us their collections of travel souvenirs, and the responses we got back were as singular and wonderful as the journeys that inspired them.

Check out a collection of some of our favorite... collections below, and if you've got a souvenir collection of your own that you'd like to share, head over to our forums and keep the conversation going. There's no better time than now to get inspired.

Lapel Pins

“Much smaller and more easily transportable than magnets (which I’m not that fond of anyway), plus they look cool adorning my usual travel backpack. Although after 47 countries in the past 10 years or so, each with multiple cities represented, I had to take them down due to sheer weight.” — Mojave

Refrigerator Magnets

“My husband came up with the idea to buy magnet boards and hang them to display above our counter seats. We’ve gotten a lot of compliments on them.” — mowsquaz

Tea Towels

“They’re not too expensive, won’t break, have multiple uses, and make me smile when I pull them out of a drawer. And there’s a certain charm to when they start to get worn a bit.” — bumblebarb

Rocks

“I brought one the size of an ostrich egg home from Iceland. Customs guy commented that my luggage was so heavy, it felt like rocks were inside. I replied, 'There are.’” — LislausOhio

Spoon Rests

“Tacky spoon rests. They are displayed in my kitchen as the International Tacky Spoon Rest Museum.” — laurabroberts

Floridiana

“I collect Floridiana, both physical and photographic. There’s something irresistible and utterly nostalgic about traveling up and down the East Coast to Florida. Ever since I was small I’ve loved the deliciously indescribable feeling of stopping at kitschy roadside truck stop souvenir shops, especially those located south of the border. I mean, who can resist bubblegum ‘oranges,’ praline candy, and shell jewelry?” — jenniferrfields

Patches

“I try to always get a patch from the country and city. We were putting them on our bags, but I think we will be replacing them in the not-too-distant future so I have been holding off until we figure that out. My husband likes the city ones, I like the country ones.” — SaintUrsula

Sand

“I’ve always loved the ocean and the beaches that come with them. Forty years ago my career allowed me to travel extensively and I began to collect a few ounces of beach sand from shorelines in North and South America, the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, Europe, etc. Each is kept in carefully labeled small bottles with the name and location of each beach. Last count there are 264. From the black of Martinique and the Azores to the pink of Bermuda, and the white of the Seychelles, they never fail to bring back fond memories. The whitest is technically not sand, but fine powdery coral dust from the Bahamas. I must confess that the rarest is likely from the Galapagos Islands where your forbidden to touch or take anything. I couldn’t resist pushing some of the beach into my boat shoes and retrieving it when I was ashore back in Chile.” — wilkeskennedy

Wine and Beer

“We used to travel for business and trade shows for the wine industry. Now retired, we travel for wine and beer. The collection started as giveaways from vendors. Now we buy meaningful ones for ourselves. Each brings back memories. A small mom and pop winery in Tuscany, or old caves in France. The board they are attached to came from an Oregon scrap pile. Some are unique, but many are average. We’re off to Eastern Europe this year for more.” — CAwinediva

Ghost Stories

“I like to pick up books of local ghost stories. I usually luck out and find a copy signed by the author, since they often live in the area.” — Ssshannon

Plates

“I have a collection of about 40 blue and white plates that I’ve accumulated during my travels. They are from Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, and England. Obviously, there are a few duplicates. They are hanging on my dining room wall, which is red, and make a striking display.” — sangazure1

More Patches

“We collect patches, as well. Years ago I found some very large, velvet, decorative pillow shams (with pillows) in the ‘scratch and dent’ section at IKEA. They had a few dings, but those were quickly hidden. Once I had enough patches to arrange, I sewed them to one side. I hand-stitched them using matching floss. Now I’m working on the other side. As we collect them, the patches-in-waiting are stashed in a baggie inside the case.” — Liza_D

Postcards

“I have been collecting postcards for 55 years. My collection began with postcards that friends and family picked up as souvenirs, and I started to add cards from my own travels as I grew up. Now my vacation is not complete unless I come back with at least 100 postcards!” — jbenefraim

Seriously, Patches

“I collect hiking and camping related patches and have been sewing them on a custom Etsy quilt I designed, for about six years.” — kelstew

Miniature Buildings

“Since I was 5, I’ve collected souvenir buildings from every place I’ve been. Getting a model of the buildings or monuments I’ve visited helps me remember what I did on that vacation or even exploring that certain place. Over the years, it has grown into quite a large city, and sometimes family or friends have gotten me buildings from their travels as well” — smcmahon303

Christmas Ornaments

“We collect Christmas ornaments. The kitschier and more representative of the place the better. We have one from everywhere we have gone and every year at Christmas it’s fun to remember our trips while decorating the tree.” — hzav

Masks

“I’ve been collecting masks for some time, from all over the planet. They reveal so much about a culture, either by what they try to hide, what the wearer attempts to be seen as, or accomplish. I have around 50 so far.” — eugeneevon

Mint Tins

“It’s a new thing I’ve started (and I’m in the process of moving, so a few more are already packed away), but I love that it’s a small, practical, and reusable option to remember a vacation! Also, I’m a sucker for miniature things!” — mmstrick

Honey

“I collect honey from places I’ve been. I have 30+ jars from Delaware to Hawaii to Kilimanjaro. As you might expect, the more far-flung honeys last a long time.” — alexnova

Charms

“Wow this was fun reading what others collect in their travels… I love that I am not alone! Zip forward in time into the 2000s and I am divorced, kids grown up, and traveling again, and I thought I wanted to bring something home from trips that was not too hard to find, not heavy (weight is always a consideration). Silver charms were the answer, so I continued to buy them but an intervention was required as the collection outgrew my bracelet. I moved all my charms over to a silver necklace that I place each charm on a link. I love it and when I wear it, it’s always a conversation starter. They are all so unique and create a vivid memory of all the places I have been and I love it.” — deniseishere

Bits of Nature

“Depending on the journey: I like to collect natural items from the shoreline vs. manufactured items. The latest additions were smooth river stones from a lake in the Otago region of the South Island of New Zealand, an abalone shell from a river running through a coastal winery in the Marlborough region, and smaller clam and mussel shells from the North Island, with a sprinkle of black iron sand from the beach where The Piano was filmed. They keep me connected to the place as well as the memories of the hiking, wine tasting, birdwatching, and other activities from those areas.” — SanDiegObscura

Tickets and Maps

“I try and save admission tickets and maps, especially for museums and attractions. I’ve been setting up my home office and can finally pull everything out of the boxes and Ziploc bags, some are memories from 20 years ago. So great to see them again.” — Fly_Ted

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

And nobody is quite sure why.

It’s a frigid winter morning in the remote mountain village of Piornal, Spain, and there is mischief afoot. The main road is eerily empty of cars. And everywhere—piled in the front of shops, rolling down gutters, floating in fountains—are turnips. The air is earthy, peppery.

Then the screaming begins. A mob shoves its way down a chute-like street into the main plaza. Close behind is the monster, clad in a suit of colorful rags, almost cute—except for the grin full of fangs and giant devil horns curving skyward. It swaggers forward, banging a drum. More people, by the thousands, pursue, chucking turnips at the monster for all they’re worth. The root vegetables ricochet off its body with astonishing velocity. The first half of the crowd, caught on the wrong side of the action, almost trample each other to avoid broken noses and black eyes. Then the monster stumbles toward a building and leans back against it. Their prey is now an easy target. Now the turnips really fly.

Finally, the monster throws down his drumsticks. The pelting stops. A group of men rush forward from the crowd and help lift off the heavy mask. Under the 110-pound costume, sweating and covered in turnip pulp, is a 19-year-old. His name is Adrián Moreno Serrano, but right now he is simply Jarramplas, the central figure in a unique festival of the same name that Piornalegos have celebrated every year for, well, nobody’s quite sure how long. Only one thing is certain: He has just taken the beating of his life, and he is the most important and beloved human being in Piornal.

Ask any Piornalego about the origins of Jarramplas, and the usual story involves a marauder who stole sheep and goats, and how the villagers drove him away with the only weapon on hand. But the truth, says Sebastián Díaz Iglesias, a Piornalego anthropologist who wrote his doctoral thesis on the ritual, is that nobody really knows where Jarramplas comes from. According to one hypothesis, the pre-Christian Celts who populated these mountains—due west of Madrid—thousands of years ago used Jarramplas to ritually drive out the nastiness of winter and usher in a fertile spring. (As you’re likely to be told if you attend the festivities, nabo, Spanish for “turnip,” is a common euphemism for penis.) According to another theory, Jarramplas derives from the Roman festival of Lupercalia, a fertility rite in February that had to do with protecting flocks of livestock from wolves. In the Lupercalian festival, a dog was sacrificed, and Jarramplas’s drum was traditionally made of dogskin.

At some point, as is the case with pagan festivals around the world, the ritual was Christianized, and subsumed in the feast day celebrations of San Sebastián, the third-century Roman captain who was martyred—though he was killed in a shower of arrows, not turnips. And there are other theories, too: that the ritual originated with Native Americans and was brought back to Spain by a returning conquistador, that the monster represents the “sinful” Christians who succumbed to conversion during the Muslim conquest, that Jarramplas was a ceremony to drive out the Black Plague.

But Díaz can poke a hole in every story. For instance, Piornal wasn’t founded until the 13th century, throwing the Roman and Celtic theories on shaky ground. And according to town elders, turnips are used not because of their phallic associations, but because they are still abundant in winter (and used as livestock feed, unlike the more coveted potato). In the end, Díaz doubts the festival has a single origin. He calls it a “syncretism” of pagan and Christian traditions, with, perhaps, some borrowed ones mixed in.

In any case, the mystery is unlikely ever to be solved. The municipal archives were burned during the Spanish Civil War, and the precious few documents from the 18th and 19th centuries that mention Piornal lack information about Jarramplas. Díaz only knows for certain that the festival existed as early as 1898. He has documented the accounts of elders who remember that their own grandfathers, sent away to fight in the Spanish-American War of 1898, frequently made “promises” to be Jarramplas if San Sebastián brought them home safely.

In the mid-20th century, when Spain’s pagan festivals began to be seen as old-fashioned barriers to modernization, Jarramplas almost died out. In the 1970s, there was a year when the festival was a week away and no one had signed up to play the monster. (Luckily, the previous year’s star volunteered to undergo a second beating.)

With the fall of fascism in Spain in 1978, the festival began to gain popularity again. It got modernized along the way. Originally, Jarramplas was only protected by layers of clothes. But in the 1990s, tired of seeing volunteers emerge black and blue every year, Díaz says, Piornalegos commissioned a nearby factory to make a fiberglass suit of armor. (Ironically, because the armor weighs so much, Jarramplas now can’t run away from his pursuers very well, and still gets a pretty serious beating.) The original dogskin drum has been replaced with plastic and canvas, and the traditional mask—cardboard decorated with animal blood, charcoal, and olive juice—is now just painted fiberglass topped with horsehair. Instead of gathering leftover turnips, the town council now buys them in mass quantities—this year it was almost 30 tons—from a farmer in a nearby town.

The meaning of Jarramplas to Piornalegos also seems to have changed, Díaz says. Originally, Jarramplas may have served as a scapegoat figure. In a small community, if a crime was committed and no culprit was found, “you have to look for someone [to blame] in order to calm the people down,” he says. The nonsense name “Jarramplas” might come from arramplar, which means “to make off with everything.” Jarramplas may be the one who carries away “everything we want to expel from our society.”

Today, however, scapegoats and fertility rituals don’t mean much to most Piornalegos. But Jarramplas is more popular than ever. According to town officials, around 14,000 people attended the festival in 2019; Piornal’s population is only 1,600. Meanwhile, the waiting list to be pelted with root vegetables extends to 2046. But these days, Jarramplas serves more as a way to “generate a certain unity, a certain village consciousness,” Díaz says. Beset on all sides by homogenization and globalization, Piornalegos “have something that makes us different,” he adds. “We’re not anonymous.”

For young Adrián Moreno Serrano, the beating was a long time coming. His father, Miguel Ángel Moreno Iglesias, a 42-year-old cherry and chestnut farmer, signed the pair up for this when Adrián was only seven years old. Three months before the festival, Adrián’s mother, Sandra Serrano Calle, with the other mayordomos, Jarramplas’s family and friends, began to sew the costume, make the mask, and plan her husband and son’s route through town.

The activities begin on Friday, when volunteers dress up as Jarramplas for children up to age 14. On Saturday, several of the mayordomos warm up the crowd by dressing up as Jarramplas and getting pelted as they run from house to house for five-to-15-minute bursts.

In 2021, these Saturday activities could witness yet another change. There has never been a female Jarramplas. Traditionally women have been restricted to sewing the costume, singing, and cooking. A few years ago, a local woman caused a scandal when she donned the costume for the kids’ version. But in 2021, María Hernando Serrano, a 24-year-old journalist, will be mayordomo for a male friend. She plans to put on the costume for the Saturday volleys and actually have turnips thrown at her by adults. It will make her the first woman to do this, and “there’s going to be controversy,” says Hernando, who so far has only told her parents and close friends. “It does not make me hesitate one bit to know that people will criticize me.” She thinks her participation could pave the way for a female main Jarramplas in the future: “Traditions are there to be changed.”

Saturday’s festivities are just the lead-up to the main event. In the afternoon, family and friends fete the father and son Jarramplas from pub to pub, where female mayordomos sing traditional songs. That night, under a fine, freezing mist, the entire town and many more crowd into the main plaza. As the church clock strikes midnight, Jarramplas father and son, sans masks, beat their drums and walk backwards. They process slowly through the streets while a group of women sing the eerie alborás (alba means “dawn”), traditional hymns that weave the story of San Sebastián with that of another, local Sebastián, a Piornalego sent to fight in the Italian wars of the 16th century. Given the pageantry, it’s a strikingly serious moment. But when asked if he considers playing Jarramplas a kind of sacrifice, Miguel Ángel disagrees: “It was a joyful thing for me.”

When the alborás ends, everyone feasts on migas, day-old bread fried with chorizo, onions, and spices, before hitting the pubs to dance until the wee hours. After too few hours of sleep, everyone gathers again at the church. On Sunday, Jarramplas makes two outings, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Miguel Ángel, the elder Moreno, takes the first shift. Jarramplas is supposed to endure as long as he physically can before ending his route, usually at the house of a family member. To keep trudging for a solid half-hour while being walloped constantly by vegetables as hard as baseballs, Miguel Ángel says he kept his mind on both San Sebastián and “the people helping out all night …That gave me strength.” He adds gamely, “The idea is for people to enjoy it. With Jarramplas, the more they throw, the better.” (While Miguel Ángel says he spared his son, Adrián confesses to throwing a few turnips at his dad.)

On Sunday afternoon, before Jarramplas’s final run, the energy in Piornal is electric. Inside the church, the priest is saying a mass for San Sebastián. Outside, a horde is waiting in the square, turnips aloft. A few people brandish cauliflowers, for extra fun. When mass ends, many of the worshippers are in tears, but outside the crowd’s excitement is rising to a fever pitch.

From inside the church, Adrián Moreno makes his way to the open door. His male mayordomos place the mask over his head, draw the straps tight, and push him forward. In an hour’s time, after a grueling march through Piornal’s narrow, crooked streets that will leave both him and the town out of breath and covered in turnip pulp, Adrián will be just another Piornalego again. But for now, he stands in the doorway as if on a precipice, his costumed bulk framed by the blinding winter light, demigod and demon and teenager in one. The crowd roars. And then the heavy doors swing shut, and all you can hear is the clamor of hundreds of turnips finding or missing their mark.

New research examines the connections between people buried at mysterious megaliths.

About 6,500 years ago, as they were busy bringing agriculture to northwestern Europe, Stone Age migrants spent their downtime exactly as you might expect: by building massive, mysterious monuments that have perplexed researchers ever since. While many of these megalithic structures have long been associated with mortuary rituals, more specific details have remained unclear. Which communities used these sites as burial places? Were they reserved for specific people? Was this really the most efficient use of all that excess stone?

We may never crack that last question, but a new study out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes some headway on the others. Analysis of the human remains of 24 individuals—spread across five megaliths in present-day Ireland, Scotland, and Sweden—has found that these structures served as family-specific tombs with particular cultural resonance within certain communities. The burials were neither arbitrary nor universal, in other words, but a Stone Age-expression of identity and heritage.

Researchers from a pair of Swedish universities extracted DNA from bones and teeth found at these sites, and carbon-dated the lot to between 3,800 and 2,600 BC. The researchers then compared the genomic data to that of other groups from around Europe, finding that the individuals were related to other Stone Age farmers from northern and western Europe (and, strangely, some from Iberia), while they were more genetically removed from groups in central Europe. Among the 24 individuals studied, the researchers identified six kinship relationships, illustrated by genes passed down through matching Y, or male, chromosome haplotypes. (Women were also identified in some relationships, but the sample tilted male.)

Another striking pattern, identified in the remains found at Ansarve on the Swedish island of Gotland, illustrates how entire communities—and not only families—chose to stick together even in death. The farmers buried at Ansarve were living primarily among hunter-gatherers whose remains have also been dug up and examined—but the two groups do not share genetic roots, as the farmers had their own origins as migrants. The farmers, in other words, maintained for 700 years a burial practice distinct from those of their neighbors, as the two groups had met with distinct traditions already in place.

In a press release, the researchers acknowledged their relatively small sample and called for further studies to examine how extensive these patterns really are. What’s clear, however, is that archaeogenetics can tell us more than where someone came from: They can give us some sense of the heritage that informed someone’s behavior, beliefs, and relationships with big chunks of stone.

For decades, 'pathological tourists' ended up in asylums or worse.

In the 1890s, France fell victim to a seemingly contagious epidemic. From 1886 to 1909, dozens of men found themselves ambling around Europe in dissociative fugue states, crossing borders and even continents with no apparent destination in mind. These men would inevitably find themselves locked up, either in police custody or a mental asylum. Physicians called it dromomania, according to Ian Hacking, a philosopher and author of Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses. They also referred to it as “pathological tourism.” Today we remember it as “wanderlust.”

This traveling disease terrorized France for nearly two decades, a sudden and new kind of madness. But in reality, as dromomania spread, it was less a true psychiatric condition than a convenient diagnosis—a catch-all term for behavior that strayed from social norms. Doctors might deem their patients dromomaniacs for leaving their families, deserting from the army, or experiencing a bout of amnesia (perhaps due to a head injury). This spree lasted just 23 years, its end brought on by stricter border control and changes in the psychiatric profession, among other causes. And today wanderlust is something entirely different—less pathological than aspirational. But France was once, briefly, a hotbed for pathological tourists. And it all started with one man.

Jean-Albert Dadas was born in 1860, the latest in a long line of men who worked for a gas company. His mother died when he was 17 and his father was a syphilitic hypochondriac who spent money as soon as he’d earned it. At age eight, Dadas had fallen out of a tree and suffered a concussion, with fits of vomiting and a migraine—a head injury that modern-day psychologists suggest may have instigated his distinctive penchant for travel, Hacking writes.

Apprenticed to a manufacturer at the gas company at age 12, Dadas disappeared one day, only to resurface in a nearby town. When his brother discovered and confronted him, the pre-teen, who had been assisting a traveling umbrella salesman, blinked as if awakening from a deep sleep, Hacking writes. He had no idea where he was, or why he happened to be carting umbrellas for a stranger.

The umbrella incident marked just the the first episode in a lifetime of the unexplainable. For much of his young adult life, Dadas blacked out and spontaneously traveled. He woke up on Parisian benches, in policy custody, and on trains headed to cities he’d never been to before. Often he would have wandered so far away that he had to work odd jobs to earn the money to get home. Dadas took a ship to Algeria, scrubbed pots in the galley of a ship bound back for France, and was eventually arrested in the city of Aix, where he was working as an undocumented agricultural laborer. Between these states of fugue, Dadas would return home and moonlight at the gas company. “How he kept this job was a mystery to me because he was always wandering off,” says Maud Casey, the author of a fictionalized version of Dadas’s life called The Man Who Walked Away. Over these many years, marked by short stints in prisons or asylums, Dadas began to make a name for himself as an accidental, entranced tourist.

Dadas’s most spectacular flight began in 1881, when he joined and deserted the French army near the city of Mons and headed east. He passed through Prague, Berlin, Posen, and Moscow—on foot. At one point in Prussia, a vicious dog bite landed him in the hospital, where he was recognized as the inveterate traveler. His timing, however, was dreadful, as the czar had just been assassinated and Dadas, known to have been a nihilist, was thrown in prison. Three months later, he and the remaining prisoners were marched by sword-toting guards to Constantinople, where the French consul gave him enough money for a fourth-class train ticket. Like clockwork, Dadas returned to the gas factory.

Finally in 1886, Dadas found himself in the Saint-André hospital in Bordeaux, France, where he fell into the care of young neuropsychiatrist Phillipe Auguste Tissié. Tissié grew obsessed with this strange patient, whom he diagnosed with dromomania, or the uncontrollable urge to wander or travel. The psychiatrist soon learned Dadas could only recall his mad travel under hypnosis, and used that to compile a massive tome of his experiences, though it is best not to take them too seriously, Hacking writes. But Dadas was patient zero, just the beginning.

After Tissié diagnosed Dadas, “there was a rash of diagnoses of this ilk,” Casey says. These people (always men) were not the vagrants or tramps that France saw as a rising threat to society. They tended to be sober, clean, and unassuming—not middle class, but working poor. “All these people managed to keep a job, but then they would just wander off,” she adds.

It was also remarkably easy to traverse Europe at the time. In whatever city he ended up in, Dadas had learned, even in a fugue state, to find the French consul, ask an official for just enough money for a train ticket home, and then use that money to travel to an entirely new city, Hacking writes. It was a clever, aimless scam. Unlike modern-day wanderers, Dadas’s dromomania was not a journey of self-discovery. Rather, Hacking writes, Dadas’ journeys were a “systematically pointless” series of attempts to eliminate the self. But that might not have been the case for all the men given the diagnosis.

Quite frankly, France in the 1890s was the perfect primordial soup for something like tourism, vagrancy, or simply walking away from expectations to be diagnosed as a disorder, according to Hacking. “Vagrancy was a big idea in France at the time because you were expected to be home and be a family man,” Casey says. And across Europe, military doctors, horrified by the harsh punishments levied on deserters during a time of peace, latched on to the idea of dromomania as a free pass for men who might otherwise face incarceration or even execution, writes Mark Micale in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe. It appears that dromomania was a convenient diagnosis for a kind of nonconformity.

Physicians characterized dromomania as an impulse control disorder, similar to kleptomania (the need to steal things), pyromania (the need to burn things), or dipsomania (the need to drink alcoholic things), according to a 1902 article in The British Medical Journal. In the United States, physician and noted racist Samuel A. Cartwright invented a related mental disorder called drapetomania, the urge that led slaves to run away. He claimed the only treatment was extreme whipping.

According to Benjamin Kahan, a professor of English and women’s and gender studies at Louisiana State University, and author of The Book of Minor Perverts, the dromomaniac was one of a “numberless family of perverts” that were highly specific and yet interconnected. “Dromomania really established stability as a key kind of condition for normalcy, or heterosexuality,” Kahan says.

Dromomania vanished almost as soon as it appeared. In 1909, at a conference in Nantes, leading psychiatrists entirely redefined the concept of a fugue state, writes Peter G. Toohey in Melancholy, Love, and Time: Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature. Instead of an independent disorder, it was now understood as a symptom of a deeper mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Furthermore, the encroaching tensions of World War I led European countries to seal their borders, prohibiting the easy train trips Dadas once relied on. Within 23 years, diagnoses trickled to a halt and dromomania had more or less disappeared.

Today, occasionally dromomania is mentioned in the context of homelessness, or to refer to the disorientation associated with dementia. And it has splintered—as wanderlust it has been completely depathologized, and has become something desirable and attractive, Kahan says. “Now it’s an erotic come-on that you write about in your OkCupid profile, like ‘Oh I love to travel.’”

Dadas’ wife—he managed to get and stay married through all of this—eventually died of tuberculosis. Their daughter, Marguerite-Gabrielle, was adopted by a local family of gardeners. Dadas visited her in between wanderings, until she was tragically abducted, according to his interviews with Tissié. Soon after, Dadas was found dead in a well, Casey says.

During her time researching Dadas, Casey traveled to Bordeaux to trace the famed dromomaniac’s path and see France from his point of view. When she walked to the church across from the Saint-André hospital where Dadas had his sessions with Tissié, she felt overwhelmed. “I’m not a religious person, but I did feel this debt of gratitude to this poor guy who ended up in a well,” Casey says, “and his curiosity for wonder and the capacity to be endlessly lost in this world, for better or worse.”

A South Dakota shop still builds the iconic wagons.

During the age of the cowboy, men drove vast herds of cattle across the American West from ranches to railheads, where they could be transported east to cities hungry for beef. The grasslands didn’t have many restaurants or pit stops, though, so to feed themselves, they traveled with chuck wagons—mobile kitchens loaded up with the necessary equipment to supply and shelter hungry cowboys. In a mere 20 years or so, they became iconic symbols.

Although their heyday ended more than a century ago, you can still get a chuck wagon, and you don’t need to build a time machine or rob a museum. Instead, there’s Hansen Wheel and Wagon Shop, in Davison County, South Dakota.

For 41 years, Doug Hansen and his family have sold new and reconstructed horse-drawn vehicles to museums, film companies, and Western fans. Hansen defines the chuck wagon comprehensively as a “factory made-vehicle that is retrofitted with the chuck wagon equipment, to support a cowboss and his dozen wranglers in a cross-country trek.”

While many suspect the chuck wagon’s origins reach back further, the generally recognized creator was Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight, who, in the 1860s, retrofitted a Studebaker wagon with everything his men needed to take a herd of cattle to New Mexico. Wagon manufacturers of the time included Bain, Newton, and Studebaker. While many know Studebaker as a type of car, Hansen scoffs. “They were a huge wagon maker. They were a small car maker.”

Several factors led to the end of cattle drives. In the 1880s, settlers and ranchers began enclosing their land with barbed wire, a relatively new invention, and a particularly cold winter devastated the cattle industry. Chuck wagons continued to appear at some roundups, says Hansen, where mixed cattle are sorted by owner before being taken to market. But with trails blocked and railroads expanding, most cowboys no longer needed chuck wagons.

Still, Hansen finds plenty of customers for his $20,000 to $30,000 replicas and restorations. (He also offers blueprints for $29.95.) He keeps an eye out for “barn finds,” which are vehicles unearthed from storage spaces, which he refurbishes and sells. These days, there are fewer and fewer barn finds. But 40 years of rebuilding wagons was good preparation for making wagons from scratch.

“We're kind of set up like a wagon shop, pre-Industrial Revolution,” Hansen says. He employs a wheelwright, a wainwright (who builds the chassis of the wagon), and a blacksmith, while Hansen acts as a researcher and historian. “It's a lifetime of uncovering lost knowledge,” he says. To build historically accurate wagons, he pores over old trade journals, diaries, and illustrations. He and his wife are constantly stopping at museums, mainly to examine their horse-drawn vehicle collections.

Hansen’s inspiration largely comes from his surroundings. “Out in front of our shop is a stagecoach trail that goes up into North Dakota,” he says. Literature motivated him as well, especially the writings of pioneer Laura Ingalls Wilder. “You know I read those books when I was a kid.” Since then, he’s been intrigued by the self-sufficiency and fortitude needed to travel long distances by wagon.

Building a chuck wagon from scratch, he says, usually takes around 750 hours. First, they build the wheels and the wagon body. Another step is steaming slats of wood to form wagon bows, which they do by putting them in a sealed vessel filled with steam until they’re soft enough to bend by hand. (“Kind of like when you put the noodles in the spaghetti pot.”) When attached to the body, the bows give many wagons their iconic rounded look.

On the back of the wagon, they bolt in the chuck box, which Hansen describes as a combined cupboard and workspace that folds down as a work table. It stores cooking utensils, spices, and essential ingredients, such as dried beans and coffee. The favored brand during cattle drives, Hansen notes, was Arbuckle’s Ariosa coffee, which came packaged with a peppermint stick. The cowboy who helped the cook grind the coffee got the candy.

Underneath the chuck box, they install a pan boot to hold heavy pots and pans, such as a Dutch oven, which could bake well when surrounded by coals. But much of a cowhand’s food supply was on the hoof. Along with salt pork, beef was a constant. One legendary meal was sonofabitch stew, made with the offal of a calf.

Many historical chuck wagons also featured an uncured rawhide tacked beneath the box. The stretchy hide, called the possum belly, served as a pouch for any fuel encountered along a journey across treeless prairie, whether that meant cowpats or driftwood in a stream. “It's what I would call the ultimate support vehicle,” says Hansen, carrying fuel, food, cooking implements, a water barrel, and bedding. This did not make for light wagons. Hansen notes that loaded chuck wagons could weigh several tons.

Hansen Wheel and Wagon Shop serves a surprisingly large and lively community of chuck wagon enthusiasts, and supplies a number of events where they play an integral role. Tens of thousands gather each Labor Day weekend to witness the National Championship Chuckwagon Race in Arkansas, the largest in the nation. However, the roots of chuck wagon racing lie north of the border—chuck wagon races have taken place at the Calgary Stampede since 1923. A racer, Hansen says, recently asked him to make his chuck wagon speedier. So they modified the wagon’s axles to reduce friction, adjusted the hitch so that it pulled at a better angle, and redid the wheels.

For those more interested in chuck wagons’ culinary possibilities, there’s the chuck wagon cookoff circuit, where teams travel and compete to produce award-winning fare from their chuck wagons. Hansen notes that his company is a member of the American Chuck Wagon Association, an organization formed in 1997, according to the website, to “preserve the heritage of the chuck wagon and its use in the short, but significant, era of the cattle drives.”

The ACWA keeps a comprehensive list of chuck wagon cookoffs and offers advice and guidelines on holding competitions. Judges typically weigh in on vehicle authenticity and the best food made wagon-side. For historical accuracy, most cookoff offerings are classics such as chicken-fried steak and cobbler. Hansen says his favorite cookoff takes place at the weeklong Cheyenne Frontier Days celebration in Wyoming, where, this year, attendees can sample chuck wagon cooking between rodeos and a Post Malone concert.

The ACWA website boasts of a successful campaign to have the chuck wagon declared Texas's state vehicle, but it also describes a worldwide membership of chuck wagon enthusiasts. Hansen himself says the appeal of the American West—and the chuck wagon—is universal. He’s shipped wagons to Germany and Japan. “The American West and the American cowboy is epitomized and lived around the chuck wagon,” says Hansen, and there’s no sign that their trail has ended yet.