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Why Were Medieval Europeans So Obsessed With Long, Pointy Shoes?

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Going to foolish lengths for fashion.

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In 1463, London outlawed the shoes of its fanciest men. These dapper lords had grown ridiculous in their dapperness, and had taken to ambling streets shod in long, carrot-shaped shoes that tapered to impish tips, some as long as five inches beyond the toe. These shoes were called “crakows” or “poulaines” (a term also used to refer to the tips alone), and the court of King Edward IV eventually found them offensive enough to pass a sumptuary law prohibiting shoe tips that extended over two inches beyond the toe.

Perhaps one of the silliest and most fascinating trends in medieval fashion, these shoes probably first emerged around 1340 in Krakow, Poland—both names refer to this origin—according to Rebecca Shawcross, the author of Shoes: An Illustrated History. Shawcross also serves as the shoe resources officer at Northampton Museum and Art Gallery in England, which claims to have the world’s largest collection of shoes (at 12,000 pairs, but alas, just one intact pair of poulaines).

Europe had flirted with long-toed footwear since the 1200s, but never to this length, or with this saturation. The lords and, to a lesser extent, ladies of 15th-century Europe wore these shoes almost exclusively for over a century. Every person who could afford shoes wore poulaines, though the longer tips were generally reserved for nobility who could afford to wander around in footwear seemingly designed for pratfalls.

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For the glitterati of medieval Europe, poulaines were less a fad than a symbol. “If you were a man of status and you had enough wealth, you wanted to show that off,” Shawcross says. “And to do that, you had to take the toe to the extreme.” Shoes with absurdly long toes were expensive and would clearly impair the wearer from efficiently partaking in any kind of physical labor. So they were also an indicator of leisure and luxury, free of extraneous effort or the tyranny of practicality.

Poulaines—like babies or uncorseted bosoms—could not support themselves. In order to keep the tips erect, medieval shoemakers stuffed them with soft organic material, often moss, hair, or wool. “Without a stuffed toe, it gets quite floppy,” Shawcross says. “It doesn’t look like it would have been worn by someone of status at all.” The material also helped prevent the tip of the poulaine from curling up in the rain, according to Jackie Keily, senior curator at the Museum of London, which boasts one of the most impressive collections of poulaines. One shoe in particular, recovered from an archaeological excavation on the waterfront, boasts a modest tip but a delicate leaf pattern.

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One surviving example includes an uncomfortable-looking hunk of whalebone used as a stiffener (also a feature of high-end corsetry). Poulaines also had a sort of sex appeal, being cut to show off the colored hose around a lord’s ankle—considered quite sexy at the time. “It’s a time when tunics are getting shorter and young men would have been showing off their legs,” Keily says. “So low-cut shoes would have accentuated and elongated the leg, all down to that long point.”

Most poulaines that survive today were made of leather, but medieval Europeans would have used every possible fabric, Keily says. The upper echelons of society, for example, used embroidered textiles, velvets, and silks. Such shoes might be hand-painted or etched with intricate patterns. Though these opulent poulaines appear in many medieval paintings, no actual examples survive. The Museum of London has some of the fanciest known poulaines in its collection, all remarkably preserved by the saturated mud of the River Thames.

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Poulaines stand out even more because medieval fashion was often governed by clean lines and a practical, chaste minimalism, Shawcross says. (Poulaines also marked a rare period in history when men’s fashion outshone women’s in terms of sheer frill, according to Keily.) Perhaps the best explanation for this confounding flamboyance is that the shoes emerged soon after the Black Death killed 30 to 60 percent of the population of Europe. “It may have been a reaction to a type of austerity,” Keily says. “The plague left a landscape with a lot of people who had lost close family members, a generation of mourning. Suddenly there were less people who had more money to spend on clothing.” So poulaines may have been a kind of retail therapy for coping with the surprise disappearance of 25 million people. Keily points to other fashion trends that followed widespread losses of life, such as the conspicuous designs that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, following World War II.

By today’s standards, poulaines were a long-lived fad. But Shawcross says medieval trends often lasted for a century or more, due to the slow, protracted passage of culture across towns and countries, in the absence of any widely distributed media. Until the 18th century, fashions emerged at the top of society and then slowly trickled down, class by class, often taking years to reach rural areas.

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Eventually, the English crown felt the need to intervene, in part because of the lascivious connotations that the increasingly extended toe-tips carried. “People thought the longer the toe, the more masculine the wearer,” Shawcross says. “But some people weren’t keen on that connotation.” Parliament equated wearing the shoes to public indecency, and stepped forward to put limits on a variety of racy fashions: “No person under the estate of lord, including knights, esquires, and gentlemen, to wear any gown, jacket, or coat which does not cover the genitals and buttocks. Also not to wear any shoes or boots with pikes longer than two inches. No tailor to make such a short garment, or stuffed doublet, and no shoemaker to make such pikes,” the 1463 law reads. The only other city known to have taken a stand against the shoes was Paris, which had banned them in 1368.

It was a fashion, and fashions come and go. By 1475, the poulaine had vanished, Shawcross says. Under the reign of King Henry VIII, European footwear made a hard pivot into the wide, box-toed shoes. In response, England later passed sumptuary laws restricting the width of these blocky shoes. “The king had men who would go around trying to catch people, measuring the width of their toes,” Shawcross says.

Pointy men’s shoes had a surprise reprise in England in the 1950s, with the nattily named winklepicker. Though far less extreme than the most dramatic poulaines, winklepicker wearers also stuffed the toes of their shoes with cotton or tissue paper to keep their tips aloft—like medieval lords. The style has had several revivals over the ensuing decades, and luckily for the British music scene, parliament has yet to make an official statement on winklepickers.


The Neon Motel Signs of Las Vegas Aren't Dead Yet

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A photographer captured their flickers of life.

If you had driven from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the middle of the 20th century, you would have spent several hours on some very dusty desert roads, past cacti and shaggy yucca trees, maybe a coyote howling beneath a sky pricked with stars.

Along that route, and inside the Vegas city limits, a motel sign had a tough job to do. It had to catch drivers’ eyes during the day, and be equally or even more inviting against an inky sky. In a flat, dry sea of boxy, nondescript buildings, signage was what differentiated one low-slung pitstop from another—and to make a sign pop, many mid-20th-century motels leaned on bright, buzzing neon. Those signs have since become as synonymous with the city as gambling, magic shows, and sin.

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In addition to drawing attention, the signs ticked off the creature comforts that visitors should expect inside—from carpet to coffee, warm showers to color TV. They were often modeled on flora and fauna drivers might have streaked past in the desert, or the dueling mythologies of the developing desert town. Cowboys smiled down from some, while others—Jackpot, Bonanza, Roulette—nodded to games and good luck charms that came along with (or prevented) a good night’s sleep in Vegas. A few also celebrated the bets that the whole country was placing at the time, particularly on the space race, making rockets, stars, and moons common roadside sights.

Photographer Fred Sigman has been mesmerized by these neon signs since his first visit to Las Vegas as a teenager in the summer of 1968, when he and his father drove in from Hollywood, crossing the Mojave Desert in a Ford Falcon. On that trip, a young Sigman captured beguiling casino facades and glittering signs with his Polaroid Swinger. By the mid-1990s, he had become a professional artist, and accepted a commission from dealer and gallerist Ivan Karp to go out and focus on the city’s motel signs.

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By then, the motel heyday was already over. “In the '90s, [Vegas was] already shifting to mega-resorts on the strip,” Sigman recalls. In contrast to that glitziness, motels were considered “low-life, crappy little places.” Many of them had shuttered and falling into disrepair. Others were gone, bulldozed into oblivion. Sigman’s photos, shot with a large-format film camera, froze the signs within a landscape that was changing, complete with busted bricks and sidewalks, brown-tipped plants, and concrete pools filled with nothing but shadows. Now, more than 20 years later, Sigman has compiled his trove of photos into a book, Motel Vegas.

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Sigman, who now lives mostly in Siem Reap, Cambodia, says he doesn’t pine for the “good old days” of Vegas. While the photos are saturated, bright, and graceful, he says they’re stripped of nostalgia. Traffic or trash appears at the edges of the frames, and “There’s nothing romantic about the lighting,” he says. “It’s not like a Turner painting or anything.” Sigman photographed some motels in harsh afternoon light, and others beneath skies smudged with pinks and blues, but not for the scenic qualities. He says he was just seizing opportunities to highlight the specific qualities of a certain sign. “I wasn’t there because, ‘Wow, sunset,’” he says.

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Many of the signs blinked out or disappeared since Sigman photographed them, but not all have been lost forever. Some were salvaged, shined up, and installed in areas such as East Fremont, a district once awash with motels and currently undergoing a revitalization project, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in 2018. There, a few old signs found new life as artworks. “You can see them from your car, the way it used to be,” Sigman says. More are on display at the Neon Museum, where several have been fully restored and relit, with many more heaped outside, in the Neon Boneyard, where visitors are free to wander among the pretty scraps of Vegas’s past.

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Meanwhile, the city’s Historic Preservation Commission is taking an inventory of motels past and present—reaching out to owners and sifting through archives of old advertising matchbooks and postcards—that once lined Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard. They’re also trying to drum up enthusiasm for adaptive reuse projects that would freshen up some old motels to appeal to a new wave of travelers. “There’s a whole world of cultural tourists out there who go to museums and stay in boutique motels and they’re not into luxury, resort-style traveling,” says Jack LeVine, a local real estate agent and a member of the commission. There’s a hope that renovated places, like the 53-room Sterling Gardens, will charm the tourists looking for a cool, kitschy place to crash.

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A few motels are still open for business, promising the same unfussy accommodations they’ve been offering for decades. And while Sigman, who rides a motorcycle and says he “spends more time in airports than anywhere else,” has an unvarnished view of these sometimes-seedy spots, he appreciates an invitation to stop and rest his bones for a few hours before moving on. When you’re tired enough, it doesn’t take a lot to make a roadside stop feel like home, if only for a night or two.

These Belgian Monks Are Reopening a Medieval Microbrewery

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The operation has been dormant for more than 220 years.

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Grimbergen Abbey, a monastery in central Belgium, has burned down three times since it was first built in 1128, hence its phoenix logo. Now, another aspect of the abbey’s history is rising from the ashes: its microbrewery.

The Grimbergen monks had been brewing beer in-house since the 12th century, but had to stop after the monastery burned down in 1798 during the French Revolution. (The area was under French control at the time.) The written recipes were lost, and the local, medieval techniques seemingly consigned to the unreliable realm of lore. It took more than 220 years for the Grimbergen monks to stumble upon the original recipes in the monastery’s archives, but there they were, heroically saved in 1798 by monks who had smuggled them out of the doomed abbey. This week, The Guardian reports, Subprior Karel Stautemas raised a glass of freshly brewed Grimbergen beer to more than 100 onlookers and announced that the brewery is back in business.

Finding the recipes didn’t clear up all of the lingering questions at once. First and foremost, there was a significant language barrier, as all of the recipes were written in unfamiliar strains of old Latin and old Dutch. The abbey had to bring in volunteers to decipher the writings, which ultimately revealed “the hops used, the types of barrels and bottles, and even a list of the actual beers produced centuries ago,” according to Stautemas. Even then, the monks had to consider whether to stay purely faithful to the medieval guidelines, which would have yielded beers rather difficult for our modern palettes to handle. The abbey’s new master brewer, Marc-Antoine Sochon, said that medieval beer “was a bit tasteless,” or comparable to “liquid bread,” so the monks decided to make some modifications. The purists, however, needn’t worry: The medieval monks “kept on innovating” and updated their recipes “every 10 years,” Stautemas said, so the 12 monks who live in the abbey today are well within their traditional rights even as they experiment.

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Among the medieval elements remaining in place are the prohibition of artificial additives and the required use of wooden barrels and some specifically local ingredients. Whatever the monks are doing, it’s bound to pack a punch. Their new beer has an alcohol by volume content of 10.8 percent—that’s more than double what you’ll find in a Budweiser, for reference. In The Guardian, Grimbergen’s mayor, Chris Selleslagh, recommended stopping after one or two beverages.

Carlsberg and Heineken’s Alken-Maes brewery have been brewing beer using the Grimbergen name since the 1950s—and while the abbey received some of those profits, it was not actually involved with production. Though the two larger companies will continue to distribute the abbey’s beer and provide professional assistance, the Grimbergen label now refers to more than just a name. As the operation moves back home, NPR reports that Stautemas will receive formal training in the brewing arts so he can do his part. It’s safe to assume that wasn’t covered when he was getting his theology degree.

18 of the World's Most Wondrous Public Transportation Options

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Atlas Obscura readers recommend their favorite mass transit experiences.

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One of the greatest ways to experience a new place is also one of the simplest: take public transportation. Riding a bus or subway is a wonderful way to explore a destination both inexpensively, and like a local. But as terrific as first-rate mass transit can be, all over the world you can also find public transport options that are experiences in and of themselves. We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community Forums to tell us about their favorite examples of unforgettable public transit, and they recommended everything from giant elevators to bamboo rail cars (plus plenty of funiculars... so many funiculars!).

See some of our favorite responses below, and if there's an incredible mode of public transportation that didn't make it into our list, head over to the Forums and keep the conversation going! If you truly want to travel in style, remember this one simple rule: always ride the funicular.


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Elevador de Santa Justa

Lisbon, Portugal

“Lisbon, Portugal, has its fair share of fun public transport, including an elevator (Elevador de Santa Justa), three funiculars (Ascensor do Lavra, da Bica, and da Glória), and trams, with several lines operated by old small trams, simply because anything bigger wouldn’t fit.” fotomiep


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Docklands Light Railway

London, England

“London’s DLR line has driver-free trains, which means you can sit at the very front of the train and pretend to be the driver yourself!” longdenbethany


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Fenelon Place Elevator

Dubuque, Iowa

“Two places I have been that have funiculars are Dubuque, Iowa, and Old Quebec City in Canada. They are a fun way to get from the lower part of the cities to the top of the bluffs.” darbyfish50


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Morgantown PRT

Morgantown, West Virginia

“I have had the opportunity to travel on a lot of cool systems like the Eurotrain, but the most unique was the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) installed at West Virginia University in 1975. I used it during my time as a student and then some. It consisted of a small driverless vehicles zooming around on semi-enclosed concrete tracks. A really forward-looking system considering the date. What’s more amazing is that it is still in use to this day.” thinhtien


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Ascensore Castello d'Albertis-Montegalletto

Genoa, Italy

“A multi mode underground lift in which a cart enters the steep hillside horizontally and then comes to a halt deep underground. A jolting chorus of whirring gears and cables heralds the transition to vertical movement and the cart ascends the last leg à la Willy Wonka.” petenuttall


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Trampe Bicycle Lift

Trondheim, Norway

“On a visit to Trondheim, Norway, we encountered the Trampe Bicycle Lift. Basically it’s a steam-driven (I believe) chain that runs underground on a steep hill. Attached to the chain and sticking up out of the ground are multiple ‘pedals.’ You would ride your bike up to one of these pedals, place your foot on it while remaining seated on your bike, and it would then propel you and your bike up the hill. Ingenious!” enospork


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Monongahela Incline

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“When I was a student at Pittsburgh’s Art Institute (1973-1975), I rose on the Monongahela Incline, one of TWO funiculars to get up to the top of Mount Washington. It’s a great place to view Pittsburgh’s wonderful downtown.” alanrogers250


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Roosevelt Island Tramway

New York City, New York

“Commuted on it for three years and never got bored.” diannleesmith


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Como–Brunate Funicular

Lombardy, Italy

“Several years ago we were visiting Lake Como, and had done the tour boat. Walking away from the lake we saw the funicular, Como to Brunate. A straight up trip to a beautiful little village. As we exited, the small local church organist was practicing for the weekend. The music was beautiful, but the view of the alps was spectacular!” CAwinediva


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'The Dinky'

Princeton, New Jersey

“It’s 2.7 miles long, with one car on standard gauge track and one stop. Supposedly the shortest rail line in the U.S.A.” thuds36


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Metrocable

Medellín, Colombia

“The gondolas of Medellín, Colombia, which enable residents of poor, steep neighborhoods to get downtown lickety-split. Also, they have amazing views.”davidplotz


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St. Charles Streetcar Line

New Orleans, Louisiana

“The New Orleans streetcar! The St. Charles Ave. line is on the National Register of Historic Places. The cars are still the original green, and are utterly lacking in air conditioning, but that’s how it should be. For $1.25, you can ride from Riverbend (where the Mississippi bends to form the bottom of the crescent of New Orleans) all the way to Canal Street right next to the French Quarter, and pass through all the Uptown and Garden District mansions along the way. The newer lines have red cars (and air conditioning).” telfb


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Fløibanen Funicular

Bergen, Norway

“The funicular in Bergen, Norway, takes you to a fabulous view of the fjord below, ‘Norwegian Woods,’ and a collection of carved trolls that are scattered through the wooded area. I also loved the funicular in Llandudno, Wales, the Great Orme Tramway that takes folks to the top of the Great Orme, a limestone headland in the north of Wales.” robertasheahan


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Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway

Devon, England

“In continuous operation since 1890, and water powered. How environmentally friendly is that?”rwhiting123


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Glasgow Subway

Glasgow, Scotland

“Glasgow’s subway opened on December 14, 1896 (the third oldest in the world after London and Budapest)—known by Glaswegians as the ‘Clockwork Orange’ due to its dinky scale (4 foot x 1,219 mm gauge) and its single circular route. It is a very different travel experience. As a student in Glasgow, a pub crawl stopping for a drink at each of the 15 stations was a challenge of a Saturday night.” Kenneth_Wardrop


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Tees Transporter Bridge

Middlesbrough, England

“Try the transporter bridge between Middlesbrough and Port Clarence in north east England. Is it a bridge, cable car, or ferry?! Cables guided by the bridge above pull a gondola across the River Tees in about three minutes.” kevanbrianhubbard


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Funivia di San Marino

San Marino, Republic of San Marino

“Here’s the funivia, or aerial cable car, in San Marino. It runs between the city of San Marino up at the top of the country down to the lower city of Borgo Maggiore. It’s just a quick little ride, but it’s an easy way to get between the two places.” SaintUrsula


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Norry Trains

Cambodia

“The Battambang bamboo railway in Cambodia is a lot of fun. I have been on the old one—lots of fun, especially when the opposing ‘cars’ meet on the single track :)” fbgcai

The Glamorous Australian Guide to Eating Invasive Species

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An edgy new cookbook has recipes for camel, cane toad, and feral cat.

When my high-school biology teacher rolled in a TV trolley one afternoon, we had no idea that instead of an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, we were about to watch Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, a surprisingly well known documentary about invasive cane toads in Australia. Imported from Hawaii to curb a beetle devouring sugar cane in Queensland, the toads procreated furiously, polished off native bugs, and poisoned other animals that tried to eat them. After all, cane toads are toxic.

Nevertheless, a new Tasmanian cookbook contains a recipe for sweet-and-sour cane toad legs. Its name, Eat the Problem, announces its straightforward solution to invasive species, and the cookbook consists of 500-plus pages of essays, art, and recipes whose star ingredient is a plant or animal overtaking ecosystems in Australia and around the world.

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The project is a brainchild of Kirsha Kaechele, an American artist and curator. Kaechele was inspired by the enormous nutria rodents laying waste to New Orleans, which locals have tried to hunt and eat into submission. The volume was released in March by Tasmania's edgy Museum of Old and New Art. (The owner, David Walsh, is Kaechele's husband.) On its rainbow-hued pages, chefs apply their talents to invasive plants and animals. Chef Dominique Crenn takes on wakame, a type of invasive seaweed, by applying it to root vegetables, and Philippe Parola of New Orleans contributes a recipe for Asian carp amandine. Along with lustrous photography and recipes, the pages are filled with art and offbeat musings from a host of contributors on food, history, and the natural world.

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The point of the book, writes Kaechele in a foreword interview, is to glamorize the devouring of invasive animals and plants—she also describes an earlier attempt to pitch nutria fur to fashion houses. Many recipes are accordingly glam both in ingredients and technique. Not all of the recipes in Eat the Problem, which is as much art book as cookbook, are advisable to make, such as whole roasted camel (Australia has a feral camel problem) and hemlock cocktail. While the recipe for cane toad uses only the legs, which lack toxic glands, it also comes with a note from a chemistry professor warning against eating "any amount." Recipes for feral cat ("Tasmanian-style," and in tamales) push the envelope of social acceptability, although it's undeniable that cats threaten Australian wildlife and have hunted many native species to extinction. Since people cause so much destruction worldwide, a recipe for human, cooked with garlic cloves and bay leaves, is also included.

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Human is not on the menu at upcoming Eat the Problem events at MONA, which range from Sunday lunches to smaller tastings. With monochromatic, invasive-species courses served atop the world's largest glockenspiel, the meals do not come cheap. Neither does the book itself, which lists at a luxe $277.77. Proceeds from book sales, though, help fund Kaechele's kitchen-garden program for schools in Tasmania and New Orleans, appropriately called 24 Carrot.

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In Ontario, A Quest to Rediscover the Work of a Groundbreaking 19th-Century Botanist

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Who is Catharine McGill Crooks, and what happened to her specimen collection?

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In the spring of 1860, Catharine McGill Crooks paused on the banks of Mill Creek, in what is now Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. Pulling a narrow tool from her belt, Crooks lifted several stems of watercress (Nasturtium officinale) from the silty creek bed, before slipping them into a vasculum—a slim box outfitted with leather straps like a backpack. Later, she pressed these few, wet strands between sheets of heavy paper, before carefully mounting the dried plants with a solution of gum arabic and water.

Crooks repeated this process hundreds of times, preparing a sizable collection of award-winning specimens which were exhibited at home and abroad. Collecting rare native plants and introduced species alike, Crooks captured a valuable record of southwestern Ontario’s flora before industrialization, large-scale agriculture, and urban sprawl erased much of the region’s wild spaces forever. Yet despite her dedication and skill, these treasures have all but vanished.

Who is Catharine McGill Crooks, and what happened to her collection?

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Traveling between the Canadian cities of London, St. Thomas, Hamilton, and Galt (now Cambridge), Crooks prepared roughly 500 sheets of dried botanical specimens, including plants collected in Hamilton by her brother-in-law Alexander Logie. Talented and ambitious, Crooks’s observations were cited in numerous publications, including the Geological Survey of Canada’s Catalogue of Canadian Plantsnow considered the “ultimate in historic Canadian floras.” Posthumously described as “a most enthusiastic botanist,” Catharine Crooks—also known as Kate—fell into obscurity in the years following her death, leaving just a few tantalizing traces of her life and work.

Kate Crooks never achieved the reputation of the iconic Canadian author Catharine Parr Traill, whose 1885 book Studies of Plant Life in Canada was once called a triumph of nature writing. Nor is she as celebrated as Mary Delany, Beatrix Potter, and Anna Atkins, 18th- and 19th-century naturalists who skillfully merged their passions for art and science. Nonetheless, in the last years of pre-confederation Canada, Crooks’s work contributed to a burgeoning understanding of the Canadian flora.

Born in February 1833, Crooks was raised in Newark, Upper Canada (now Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario). Part of a large extended family of Scottish immigrants to Canada, Crooks was brought up by her mother and sisters after her father John, a postmaster and church elder, died of scarlet fever in March 1833.

As their mother’s health, too, began to fail, Crooks’s sisters turned the family home into a private school, educating local girls from prominent families. Margaret Crooks was just 16 when she formed the school with her younger sisters Mary and Susan. Having watched their late father teach a lively Sunday school, the girls were primed to follow in his footsteps. Kate and another sister, Augusta, were likely among their first pupils.

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Little is known about the years that followed, until 1861, when Kate Crooks, then 28, joined the Botanical Society of Canada. Crooks identified over two dozen plants for her brother-in-law’s flora of Hamilton, including rare species such as Canada lily (Lilium canadense) and smooth false foxglove (Aureolaria flava). In the 1950s, Dr. Leslie Laking, then Director of Canada’s Royal Botanical Gardens at Burlington, Ontario, described the paper as “one of a few standard references for Ontario flora” at the time of its publication.

Crooks’s career reached new heights in 1862, when her collection of dried botanical specimens was displayed at the International Exhibition in London, England. She received an Honorable Mention for her work, which was exhibited alongside samples of Canadian wheat, wine, and forestry products.

Following the International Exhibition, several items from the Canadian display were donated to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in London, England—but contemporary records indicate that Crooks’s work was not among these gifts.

So where are these specimens today?

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I began my search with several databases specializing in biodiversity data—GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), the Mid-Atlantic Herbaria Consortium, and Canadensys among them—but as a librarian, I know these tools have limits.

Every cataloguer has a to-do pile of items waiting to be catalogued. With this in mind, I also emailed herbarium curators in Canada and abroad, hoping I might uncover a lead. What followed was a litany of responses familiar to anyone working in memory institutions.

“Unfortunately, a very small percentage of the specimens in our collection have been catalogued,” replied one curator.

“None of Crooks’s specimens are in our database—of course, that doesn't mean we don't have any, but does make them very hard to find,” added another.

“Sorry I haven’t replied sooner. Lots going on and not enough people.”

Finally, I received an email from Dr. Frieda Beauregard, curator of the McGill University Herbarium in Montreal, Quebec. Earlier, I had located a promising specimen held at McGill’s herbarium. Collected in 1865 by an M. Crooks, the date and surname matched. But who was M. Crooks? Dr. Beauregard’s email confirmed: The collector was not M. Crooks, but Miss Crooks.

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Commonly known as rose pink, Sabatia angularis is an appealing wildflower native to North America. Rising to a height of one-and-a-half to two feet, on subtly angled stems, its star-shaped, pink blossoms carry five yellow stamens apiece. Its overall conservation status is considered secure, but rose pink is now endangered in the state of New York, and is considered locally extinct in Ontario.

In July 1865, a Miss Crooks—likely Kate Crooks—cut a single stem of rose pink in the city of Hamilton, roughly 40 miles west of Toronto. Today, this specimen is still the only documented collection of rose pink from the province of Ontario. Fixed to the page in a spray of pink-rimmed blossoms, it is likely the last botanical specimen Crooks prepared as Miss Crooks. The 32-year-old married William Lynn Smart, a British-born barrister, on July 3, 1865.

Crooks continued to work after her wedding, and in the autumn of 1866, she participated in the Provincial Agricultural Fair at Toronto’s Crystal Palace. As Mrs. Smart, her work was noted in the trade publication The Canada Farmer. “Mrs. Smart, of Yorkville, displayed... a very good collection of dried native plants. It was, of course, impossible to look through the whole of it, but in our brief examination we discovered some rare varieties which would gladden the heart of a botanist.”

Three weeks later, Crooks gave birth to her first child.

Crooks and her husband had three children in all, but like her father before her, she did not live to see them grow. In 1871, eight days after the birth of her son William Catharinus Gregory Smart, Crooks died in Toronto at the age of 38.

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Forgotten as a botanist, Crooks left her mark on history in other ways. Shortly after her death, Crooks’s husband and young children were sued by three of her four sisters. All widows, they contested the terms of their sister’s will based on her status as a married woman. Crooks’s cousin Adam—a provincial legislator and Ontario’s Attorney General—leapt into action, drafting the Married Women’s Real Estate Act. Passed into Ontario law two years after his cousin’s death, the Act gave married women the right to open their own bank accounts, apply for life insurance, and dispose of their own property without a husband’s permission.

The Toronto Daily Mail mocked Adam Crooks, writing, “…for these, the first principles of revolution, the ‘strong-minded’ matron of a future day may teach her infants to lisp the name of Crooks.” While the historian Dr. Lori Chambers has observed that the Act was “a remedial measure intended for women’s protection, not their emancipation,” it is Kate Crooks, not Adam, who can be given full credit for these “first principles of revolution”.

There is one known photograph of Catharine McGill Crooks. Shot in Hamilton by the daguerreotypist Robert Milne, Crooks stands tall against a brightly-lit backdrop. Her dress is voluminous—dark and bustled—while her hair tumbles in tight, shiny curls. Serene and self-possessed, she resembles a Victorian Mona Lisa.

Had she survived the birth of her third child, it’s not hard to imagine Crooks continuing her work once her children had grown. Inspired by Catharine Parr Traill, she might have written memoirs of life in the field. She might have explored photography or botanical illustration. Or she might have returned to the woods and meadows of her youth, building a new body of work in the process. While Crooks’s botanical observations offer a glimpse of the landscape around her, finding any more of her lost specimens would offer new opportunities for scientific and historical research. As Dr. Beauregard told me, plant specimens provide much stronger evidence than records based on observation alone. For now, a dormant legacy rests like seeds in the earth, waiting for the first days of spring.

Bangladesh’s Tigers Bounce Back After a Poaching Crackdown

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This mangrove forest holds one of the world’s largest remaining wild populations of tigers.

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Deep in the Sundarbans in southwestern Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest mangrove forests saw its tigers disappear at an alarming rate. The population of big cats had begun to disappear at the turn of the 21st century, snatched by poachers and pirates who snuck their way into the wildlife sanctuary in search of tiger skin. But a recent effort to double down on illegal poaching has allowed the population of Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans to increase for the first time in 15 years, according to a new tiger census released on May 21, 2019, the Dhaka Tribune reports.

Split between Bangladesh and India, the Sundarbans mangroves spread their roots throughout 4,000 square miles in the Bay of Bengal, according to National Geographic. It is the largest mangrove forest in the world, and the only one occupied by tigers. In its prime, the forest was a labyrinthine, waterlogged jungle, almost impenetrable to humans—in other words, the perfect place to be an endangered animal. The forest’s entwined roots, brackish water channels, and mosaicked chain of islands protected the endangered Bengal tiger and other rare species, such as the Irrawaddy dolphin, until poachers found a way in and reduced the wild population of big cats to a fraction of what it once was. In 2015, only 106 bengal tigers remained in the Sundarbans—less than a quarter of the 440 counted in 2004.

But the most recent census, taken in 2018, counted 114 tigers in the Bangladeshi Sundarban forest, according to the Dhaka Tribune. This averages out to 2.55 tigers per 100 square kilometers, as opposed to 2015’s average of 2.17. Bangladesh’s minister of forestry, Shahab Uddin, considers this eight percent increase a “great success,” according to Phys.com.

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Counting tigers in a remote, relatively untouched wildlife sanctuary is no easy feat. Researchers relied on camera traps, strategically deployed at 536 locations in the Sundarbans over 640 square miles of land. The cameras documented 63 adult tigers, four juveniles, and five cubs over the course of 249 days. Researchers extrapolated from this number to arrive at the 114 tiger estimate.

This resurgence didn’t happen out of nowhere. Since the alarming report in 2015, Bangladeshi authorities have adopted a conservation program for the big cats, including doubling the size of the wildlife sanctuary in the forest and also commissioning a security force. One strategy in the program offered a gun buyback scheme, which resulted in 200 pirates trading in their weapons and ammunition to the police for legal aid, mobile phones, and cash. The program also launched a patrolling program to catch future poachers in the act.

But still, Bangladesh’s Bengal tigers face an even greater threat in the form of climate change, according to a story in The New York Times. Around 70 percent of Sundarban land lies just a few feet above sea level, and a new report predicts tigers will have entirely vanished from the Sundarban by 2070.

How Do You Move a 320-Year-Old House Across an Ocean?

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A historic structure in Japan is making its way to California.

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In the Japanese city of Marugame, the home of a former village administrator still stands where it did more than 300 years ago. The wooden structure survived the firebombing campaigns of Japanese cities during World War II and will soon be leaving its longtime home to become part of the famed Japanese Garden at California’s Huntington Library. But how exactly do you move a centuries-old home from Japan to the Golden State?

Between 1603 and 1867, Japan existed in a state of harmony and economic growth. Prior to this stretch, the country was marred by centuries of civil war known as the Sengoku Period. At the turn of the 17th century, the three unifiers—Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu—were able to restore order to the country. The country was now under a single government and feudal system that would last for two centuries. This turn of events ushered in the Tokugawa or Edo Period.

Under this new united way of life, Japan became a much more urban environment, with the city of Edo—now known as Tokyo—boasting around a million residents. Samurai began relocating to cities including Edo and Osaka, leaving villages behind. Responsibilities for governing over village life were now in the hands of shōya, or village headman, chosen by feudal lords or the shogunate government to act as village administrator.

The shōya documented life in their town. They were required to keep logs and diaries to ensure the village maintained continuity when it came to farming. The types of crops grown, seasonal yields, and the amount of fertilizer used were all recorded. Village headmen also chronicled local history, which involved keeping track of a wide range of events, from archiving official letters to recording pregnancies and births. These records were often kept inside the home of the shōya, which acted as an archive of sorts and was a crucial centerpiece to village life.

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The 3,000-square-foot wooden residence on its way to the Huntington once belonged to a line of shōyas. The home is intricately crafted through a series of interlocking beams, posts, and sliding wood panels. Over the last three centuries, it has remained relatively the same outside of its ceramic roofing, which may once have been thatched with straw. Family records relating to the home indicate that it was built by a seventh-generation head of the Yokoi family, who died at the site in 1713. The structure has remained in this one family's possession ever since. The home is said to have more than 13,000 records associated with its time as a shōya residence, all of which are now on display at the Kagawa Prefectural Archives.

The residence was donated to the Huntington in 2016 by Yohko and Akira Yokoi, whose lineage can be traced back to their samurai ancestors who battled through the Sengoku Period. It is believed they fought under Hideyoshi, although it is unclear to what clan they belonged, says Robert Hori, Gardens Cultural Curator and Program Director at the Huntington. It’s likely that the Yokoi family came out on the wrong side of the Sengoku. This would have resulted in the family losing or abandoning their samurai status, according to David Howell, professor of Japanese history at Harvard University. Howell adds that this act would have relegated the status of the family to that of commoner. However, because of their previous classification as samurai, they existed in a liminal category, above other commoners but below the samurai class.

Being former samurai also meant the Yokois were better educated than most other people, who struggled to read and write. Research focused on the end of 17th-century Japan found that out of 30 million people, around 0.1 percent had a strong understanding of numbers and literacy. This made the Yokoi ancestors ideal for a role that required diligent record keeping. Their home became the legislative hub of the village and will now become a portal for Huntington visitors to see what life was like centuries ago in Japan.

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As you might imagine, it’s not terribly easy to move a house with this much history attached to it across an ocean. Before anything could be finalized, the Huntington had to be certain that a project of this nature and magnitude was even possible, both logistically and politically. As a first step, the institution enlisted the aid of architectural firms in both Japan and the United States to assess whether the house was in any shape to leave Marugame.

“One of the things that we wanted to verify is, can the house be moved? Is it in good enough physical condition?” says Hori. The house is made entirely from wood and issues such as dry rot and termite damage could’ve halted the project.

Besides concerns with the physical condition of the structure, the move also had bureaucratic obstacles. The Huntington had to receive approval from relevant local and prefectural officials as well as the national government of Japan. Additionally, Hori says the Huntington had to determine if the house, once transported to California, could be rebuilt in accordance with U.S. building codes. This entire process took two continuous years of negotiating and study.

As of early 2019, the process of moving the house is already underway. The first step? Tear the entire building down.

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Every beam, post, and wooden structure had to be carefully disassembled and labeled, explains Hori. The team in Japan responsible for the deconstruction then inspected the pieces for structural soundness, marking any damages for repair. Large-scale drawings were also created to make sure the house could be put back together properly.

According to Hori, the assortment of posts and beams are now in a workshop in Matsuyama, the capital of Ehime Prefecture on Japan’s Shikoku Island. There, all the parts are being cleaned by hand and repaired. If a piece of the structure is unsalvageable, Hori says, a replica will be created using similar materials. The cleaning process, as he explains, is very similar to how a classic painting would be cleaned and treated. Careful attention is paid to preserving its antique quality. “You want the patina of age,” says Hori. The entire restoration process is expected to be completed by the end of 2019.

Once this process is complete, Hori says the house will be rebuilt once more in Japan to ensure the wooden joints are properly fitted. Then it will be meticulously torn down again.

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At that point, the various wooden slabs, posts, and beams will be packed and shipped by boat to the Huntington. Hori likened it to receiving a model plane kit, where all the necessary parts and materials will be there for the team to rebuild in California.

Along with the house, the Huntington will also receive the home’s kura, a storehouse for the village’s rice and grain. The kura will undergo a similar process of deconstruction and restoration. The library will also be reconstructing the historical garden that surrounded the original shōya residence. The original gatehouse, which could have been used as living quarters for servants, is no longer standing, so the Huntington will build a replica.

The Huntington plans to open the structure to the public sometime around the fall of 2020, or early 2021.

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The Huntington is of the most well-known independent research libraries in the United States, filled with rare books, ancient manuscripts, artwork from across the Americas and Europe, and the 120-acre botanical garden. Henry Huntington, a railroad tycoon, collected books and had them stored in a library he had built in San Marino. Huntington’s decision to create a Japanese garden to complement his collection was a response to a growing fascination in the United States with Asian culture. Some believe it was also created to impress his future wife, Arabella.

The garden is teeming with examples of traditional Japanese horticulture and even has a few other Japanese buildings. A ceremonial teahouse known as Seifu-an (the Arbor of Pure Breeze) was donated to the library by a Pasadena Buddhist temple in 2010 and a five-room Japanese house was acquired by Huntington himself in 1911. However, the house was created as a model for another garden and wasn’t designed to be livable. Now, a true historic Japanese residence will grace the garden.

When the house eventually makes its way to its new California home, visitors will be able to walk across the same floor panels as the shōyas who called the residence home for more than 100 years.


How Civil War Plant Remedies Could Improve Modern Medicine

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An old medical botanical guide offers new avenues for research.

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An 1863 text called Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests by Francis Porcher, a botanist and surgeon from South Carolina, was a compendium of plants known to have medicinal properties, and a guide to how they should be applied. Much of Porcher’s research was culled from longstanding healing traditions used by Native American and enslaved African communities, so it is perhaps ironic that his book was commissioned by the Confederacy and used to treat wounds during the Civil War. Recently, scientists at Emory University have studied three of the species—widely found across the South— described in the book to assess whether they would have been successful in the treatment of wounded soldiers, and how they might be incorporated in modern medicine.

During the Civil War, soldiers suffered from fever, blood poisoning, and “mortification of the flesh,” a poetic way of describing infected, necrotic wounds. At the time, amputation was the obvious (and most advanced) solution to prevent death from a battle wound. Samuel Moore, the Confederate Surgeon General, created a document called "Standard supply table of the indigenous remedies for field service and the sick in general hospitals” to cut down on the rate of amputations and draw upon the natural healing properties of plants. Moore's 10-page document drew heavily upon Porcher’s more exhaustive work.

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“They would use these plants to create tinctures and syrups that would be taken orally or used as topical therapies,” says Cassandra Quave, senior author of the paper, from Emory's Center for the Study of Human Health. The most compelling part of Porcher’s compendium, she says, is that “it provided a great case study [for what] people do when they’re cut off from other sources of medicine … how do we move forward when we don’t have access to medicine or [it] no longer functions?” Quave is an ethnobotanist who studies the ways people use plants—particularly historical use as remedies. “We rely on historical texts and we also look at traditions of people practicing herbal medicine,” she says. For this study, Quave’s lab focused on three plants—white oak, the tulip poplar, and the devil's walking stick, all found growing in Lullwater Preserve on the Emory campus in Atlanta. Turns out there was something to the traditional wisdom, after all.

“The first thing that we did after creating these extracts and turning them into tonics was we tested them to see if they inhibited the growth of these wound-associated bacteria,” Quave explains, and in particular, multi-drug-resistant strains of the bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii, Staphylococcus aureus, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. Researchers discovered that these three plant varieties prevented the process that allows the bacteria to stick to wound tissue, and disrupted the chemical signaling that results in the release of toxins. Though the three species have different chemical makeups and are not botanically related, they all had the same effect on wound-hungry bacteria.

Though white oak, tulip poplar, and devil's walking stick are all found in abundance in Southern forests, they can be found up and down the East Coast, from Florida to Maine and even into Canada. “This idea that plants can serve as a resource for the discovery of drugs really isn’t a new concept,” Quave says. “It’s something that’s led to the development of many of our modern medicines.” The team is now thinking about how these natural remedies might become part of a modern medical arsenal: hydragels, ointments, rinses, or medicated bandages, maybe. Says Quave, “We’re taking another look at nature and at human traditions of using plants as medicine in our search for novel compounds.”

Walk Through the Halls of Scotland's Lords of the Isles (Virtually)

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A digital reconstruction revives a medieval seat of power.

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Some historical sites have been fully restored and renovated, while others are little more than foundations, sparks for the imagination. But it can be a challenge to picture a grand structure when all you see is a somewhat organized pile of stones that used to be a home or a shop or a castle. Now visitors to Finlaggan, the former seat of power for the Lords of the Isles, rulers of Hebrides and parts of mainland Scotland from the 13th to 15th centuries, will have more to see. Modern tech has given the historical imagination a boost.

Today the site of Finlaggan includes a few standing walls and a scatter of what were once building materials. Archaeological discoveries at the site made by the Finlaggan Archaeological Project have provided enough information for the University of St. Andrews's Open Virtual Worlds Team and Smarthistory to digitally recreate medieval Finlaggan. Visitors can now enter the virtual model and travel through the great hall, where the council held inaugurations and feasts, and other structures. Can’t make it to the islands of Eilean Mor and Eilean na Comhairle, or the surrounding loch, where the Lords of the Isles once ruled? No worries, the entire experience can be viewed through a virtual reality app or online videos.

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“Finlaggan was an amazing place to recreate digitally,” says Bess Rhodes, a researcher from the University of St. Andrews, via press release. “Even today the islands of Eilean Mor and Eilean na Comhairle are beautiful places, and in the Middle Ages they were the site of a remarkable complex of buildings which blended local traditions with wider European trends.”

The Lords of the Isles were said to be descendants of Somerled, a 12th-century prince. The lordship there traditionally belonged to members of Clan Donald. Despite the remote location, 126 miles from Scotland, the lords wielded tremendous influence. When a new lord was chosen, the Bishop of Argyle and several other priests would attend the ceremony, along with the heads of various clans. After the coronation, a giant feast went on for seven days.

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When the Stewarts rose to power in 1371, they sought to curtail this influence—James IV, in particular, who in 1490 ordered a good sacking of Finlaggan. The Lords of the Isles were so confident in their power and natural defenses that Finlaggan lacked any other fortifications. James’s army destroyed just about everything, reducing the settlement to rubble and ruins, and left it almost entirely out of historical memory.

Archaeological excavations have brought some of that memory back. The hope of those involved with the virtual walkthrough is that it will help viewers understand the importance of Finlaggan and the Lords of the Isles for Scottish heritage and culture. Says Ray Lafferty, secretary of the Finlaggan Trust, in a statement: “With this virtual reality reconstruction, we hope to give some sense of the site at the zenith of its power.”

Can Nigerian Drumming Teach You to Pick the Perfect Watermelon?

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Acoustics is here to help you find ripe produce.

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For Ogbodo Nkiruka, the slap of a hand hitting a watermelon is a welcome melody. A fruit vendor who’s been selling watermelons from a roadside stand in the Nigerian city of Enugu for 15 years, she identifies the ripeness of her wares by ear. Each melon has its own music, a deep, hollow thump—ba ba, ba, ba— indicating a fruit that’s perfectly ripe.

When Stephen Gbakobachukwu Onwubiko, an independent acoustics researcher based in Nigeria, first stumbled across Nkiruka’s stand, the thwack of hand on watermelon struck him like a drum—literally. “Those pitches can be correlated with the Nigerian drum,” Onwubiko says. The sounds were so similar, in fact, he wondered whether Nigerian fruit sellers might be uniquely equipped to detect watermelon ripeness due to their familiarity with traditional drumming.

Onwubiko is specifically referring to the igba, a cylindrical drum played across Nigeria and particularly among Igbo people. Igbas are played at occasions ranging from festivals to funerals, and they come in many varieties. “There’s the male drum, the female drum,” says Onwubiko. “There are drums played for spirits, there are drums played for kings.” But the drums share a special attribute: They “talk.”

Skilled players can make the drum beats mimic the tones of spoken words, and before telecommunication, drum patterns were used to send messages across long distances. Today, many urban Nigerians, who didn’t grow up using drums this way, may not have as developed an ability to interpret the rhythms as their rural counterparts, says Onwubiko. Still, igba drumming remains a ubiquitous cultural form. So Onwubiko wondered: Could familiarity with igba drumming train fruit sellers’ ears to more easily detect the sound of a ripe watermelon?

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To test the hypothesis, Onwubiko conducted a study with collaborators Traci Neilsen, associate professor of physics at Brigham Young University, and Andrea Calilhanna, a music researcher from the University of Sydney in Australia. Onwubiko interviewed fruit sellers in Nigeria, then recorded both the sound of an igba drum and the slap of a ripe watermelon. Neilsen translated that audio into a spectrogram, a visualization of the frequencies of the sound waves over time. By comparing the spectrograms of the ripe watermelon and the igba drum, the researchers found that the two sounds had a similar duration and initial frequencies, giving them a similar timbre or tone quality. The researchers theorize that the similarity between the drum sound and the watermelon slap may prime fruit sellers to more easily detect watermelon ripeness. “They have subconsciously or subliminally received ear training that makes it easier,” Neilsen says.

Of course, Nkiruka, the Enugu watermelon seller, didn’t have to conduct a formal acoustical study to understand the similarity between Igba drumming and the hollow echo of a ripe watermelon. Instead, watermelon vendors’ knowledge is a form of “internalized, embodied acoustics,” Onwubiko says. This more subtle influence of sound on everything from our mood to our decision-making falls under the field of psychoacoustics, Onwubiko’s research specialty.

The technical definition of psychoacoustics labels it the study of the interplay between the physics of sound—the movement of sound waves through space—and its psychology, or how we perceive and understand it. For Onwubiko, however, the best definition of psychoacoustics is visceral. “There is a drum slapping that will give me goosebumps,” he says, whereas it may not affect a listener unaccustomed to Nigerian music. This difference in reactions is the domain of psychoacoustics, and it’s this deeper, more subliminal relationship between culture, psychology, and sound that may make Nigerian fruit sellers experts at detecting ripe watermelons.

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Neilsen, who presented the preliminary findings at a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, says the group needs to conduct more research before they can precisely quantify the perfect ripe watermelon sound. Even at a preliminary stage, however, the group’s research suggests one answer to the age-old question facing anyone who taps on a watermelon at a supermarket or roadside stand.

“Everybody’s thumped a watermelon and wondered what they’re supposed to be listening for,” says Neilsen. It turns out we’ve been listening for the sweet beat of an igba drum all along.

These Are the Most Realistic Fish Ever Carved From Wood

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The National Fish Decoy Association contest celebrates the best of the best.

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Rod Osvold carved his first fish decoy when he was a just a "knee-high" child spearfishing for pike in the frozen waters of the Minnesota winter. These decoys—first employed by Native Americans—serve as a crafty means to lure real fish. With his decoy dangling in the water, young Osvold attracted meandering pike toward his spear.

For certain types of fishing, these decoys can be even more effective than live bait: Not only can they be brighter, but they can be tailored to mimic the fish most appetizing to pike. But Osvold and others spend more time carving and painting than strictly necessary. “It becomes fun, and you kinda get addicted,” he says.

Osvold knew that he was far from the only one obsessing over decoys, which have long been sold to people looking for a mantelpiece item rather than a fishing tool. So about 20 years ago, he started the National Fish Decoy Association (NFDA). His goal? To help this community of heritage artists find its footing on the Internet, or at least find each other. Now, each April, the NFDA’s carving contest showcases the creative spirit that drives these artists to keep working at a much higher level than hungry pike require.

According to the NFDA’s website, the contest—held annually in Perham, Minnesota—typically receives about 400 entries. An elite few take home prizes across a variety of categories, which have expanded over the years to include birds and some other animals. (Duck decoys have long been popular with hunters hoping to draw ducks to seemingly safe areas.)

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The award-winning works are so painstaking in their details, says Osvold, that this class of carvers can only realistically produce between 10 and 20 pieces per year. First, of course, there’s the actual carving—usually from cedar, tupelo, or white pine—that requires attention to every last scale, to the curves in each gill. Next comes the painting, which requires a small airbrush to tickle each of those tiny speckles and which takes, according to Osvold, 10 times as long as the carving. These high-end works are so refined that contest judging often comes down to the most minute considerations: The difference between first and second place, says Osvold, can be “just a little more dent in the cheek of a trout.”

Such hard work is, of course, a hard sell to the uninitiated, and Osvold concedes that the craft is losing traction with younger generations. He worries about the NFDA’s long-term prospects, but not about the current state of the art. Troy Helget’s Siamese fighting fish, pictured in this article, demonstrates the precision of these carvings. Helget’s fish won a first-place prize this year, and Osvold calls it the most impressive piece he’s ever seen.

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A Trio of Fluffy Detectives Is on a Quest to Save the Endangered Alpine Stonefly

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Australia's best insect trackers are very, very good boys.

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Early this spring, three highly trained detectives trekked out to the Victorian Alps in southeastern Australia in pursuit of elusive quarry. Bayar, Sasha, and Judd were hot on the trail of a bug—the endangered alpine stonefly, which lives along the streams that cut across the Bogong High Plains. Armed with an incredible sense of smell and agile feet to navigate the rocky bushland, the trio were the perfect agents for the mission—as long as they didn’t accidentally step on or eat their targets.

Bayar, Sasha, and Judd are the first canine graduates of a unique pilot program. In traditional conservation work, detection dogs like these three are used to sniff out the traces of animals, such as nests or scat, but are rarely trusted to seek the animals themselves (especially small ones that are easily squished). And dogs that are trained to find live bugs generally do so for the eventual purpose of extermination, as in the case of bed bugs or termites. So the stonefly trial is one of the first of its kind, according to Julia Mynott, a researcher from LaTrobe University in Melbourne, who leads the project.

Researchers know a few things about the alpine stonefly. It cannot fly, despite its wings and name. It is the largest stonefly in Australia. The larvae hatch in the streams of the Bogong High Plains, and adults live just two years and only emerge between January and April to reproduce. Those adults are one of the primary predators in alpine aquatic streams, and are much more colorful than most stoneflies, with an enormous orange spot on the back. But researchers have no idea about the species’ population size, which makes it near-impossible to draft a conservation plan, Mynott says.

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Mynott has studied the alpine stonefly for several years, usually by wandering the brushland and hoping to spot some. “They’re quite hard to detect or find, and they have cryptic behavior,” she says. “They don’t fly. They burrow.” They’re big for bugs—an inch or so long—but that doesn’t make them much easier to spot, especially once they’ve dug in under debris or stones. The human eye is so inadequate for this task that Mynott realized she needed to rely on another sense and, for that matter, another species entirely.

There’s a delicacy to this work, so it’s not for every dog. Mynott knows flies better than dogs, so she deferred to the university’s Anthrozoology Research Group Dog Lab for training and selection. The lab works with around 20 canines and their owners, who volunteer themselves and their companions to help carry out conservation work. The dogs spend most of their days as pets. In the past, the labs’ dogs have been trained to find turtle nests, as well as the scat of koalas, quolls, and greater gliders. For the pilot insect program, the lab chose five dogs with gentle dispositions and, after a few training exercises, winnowed it down to three.

Bayar (a samoyed), Sasha (a border collie), and Judd (a labrador) were all selected for their calmness, since stoneflies have a scare response, Mynott says. The bugs often spend their days clinging to vegetation, but drop to the ground when startled, so Mynott needed dogs so imperturbable that their presence, even up close, wouldn’t harm a fly.

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The trio went into a seven-week training program. It started in a controlled setting, where researchers presented each with a scent board with multiple different scent containers attached to it, including one for the bugs. Each time the dogs correctly identified it, they were rewarded with food and ball games. Their practice then moved to nearby bushland, where trainers offered them more games and treats for detecting the scent in the wild. One of the biggest precautions, the researchers realized, was training the dogs to point at the insects with their snouts, not their paws—to avoid a fatal accident. “They make a motion with their nose and then look at their handlers,” Mynott says. “They eventually should lie down, but they weren’t always doing that.”

The first trial run at Falls Creek, one of the stonefly’s natural habitats, was a success. “Initially we didn’t even know if they had a scent,” she admits. “So to have the dogs find them was amazing.” Bayar, Sasha, and Judd all located clusters of wild alpine stoneflies—and no one got squished. Though each dog could detect capably enough, they all had distinct personalities and approaches to their designated patches of land. “Some are more strategic and orderly than others,” Mynott says. “But the main thing is that they do cover the area, however long it takes.” After a pup found a bug, Mynott would note the insect's size and sex, and then add it to the population count. She also collected several specimens for DNA.

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Following the first trial, Mynott took the trio out again to see if they could identify a close relative of the alpine stonefly, the stirling stonefly, which lives on a separate mountain. To her surprise, the doggy detectives identified these close cousins without hesitation. Mynott hopes this success will justify expanding the program to train many other dogs to target all of Australia’s stoneflies.

There are four of those species in Australia, all of which are considered threatened, Mynott says. The alpine and stirling are the best understood, which isn’t saying much considering how little scientists know about their range and population size. “The other two species haven’t been recorded since the 1970s and don’t have common names,” Mynott says. “People think they’ve seen them, or one of them at least. But no one’s actively looking.”

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Australia’s alpine ranges are quite small and diminishing with climate change. Reduced rainfall and warming temperatures will reduce the alpine stonefly’s preferred habitat of cool mountain streams, Mynott says. That’s just one of the threats they’re facing. Alpine stoneflies often live in areas so hilly and picturesque that they attract development from ski resorts. People also introduced trout to their streams, a fish that’s much more voracious than Victoria’s native fish, Mynott says. The insects are also both flightless and quite big and colorful, which make them easy targets for predators.

The stoneflies won’t emerge again until next January, which gives Mynott and the trainers at the lab plenty of time to vet additional pups for the program. So it seems Australia’s top-tier canine-arthropod detective squad is actively looking for new recruits, and all chill, good dogs in the area are encouraged to apply.

Oh, The Places You'll Go, When You Love to Climb Volcanoes

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A photographer who can't get enough of them set out to summit the tallest one on each continent.

The best day in elementary school was the one when we made volcanoes. We mounded clay into the shape of a conical mountain and carved out a little hole on top. In it, we nestled a little cup, where we mingled baking soda and dish soap plus a couple drops of red and yellow food coloring. Then we added some vinegar, and stood back with grins on our faces. The little mountain hissed, and the bubbly liquid streamed down the sides.

It was fun, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the real thing. Volcanoes can snuff out entire towns with rivers of lava, or blanket landscapes with ash. But that experiment shows why bigger active volcanoes are mesmerizing—awful and awesome in equal measure. When they loom over towns, volcanoes are existential threats, often quite beautiful before they become lethal; reminders that a placid surface can conceal churning and gurgling with the potential to literally change the face of the Earth.

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Adrian Rohnfelder knows this fascination well. A photographer based in Germany, he has a virulent, incurable strain of a disease he calls the “firework virus.” Symptoms include a mix of wanderlust and keen curiosity that compels him to visit the tallest, farthest, most spectacular dormant or active volcanic peaks around the world—sometimes in the hope that he will be there when they spew.

Rohnfelder has spent several years photographing these giants and chronicling the bumpy, chilly journeys to the top. His images are compiled in the new book Volcanic 7 Summits, published by teNeues.

Volcanoes do a lot more than blast plumes of gas into the sky or gush fountains of lava onto the landscape. Part monograph, part travelogue, Rohnfelder’s book takes readers to the icy swaths of Mount Sidley in Antarctica, and among the baobabs, deserts, and rainforests surrounding Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. From the salt lakes speckling the landscape around Ojos del Salado, in the Andes, to the snowy slopes of Mount Elbrus, in Russia’s Caucasus Mountains, to Mount Damavand in Iran, this book has a fair chance of infecting you with the “firework virus,” too.

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Before you can photograph volcanoes, you have to climb them. All of Rohnfelder’s ascents were arduous, but some were particularly tough. “I really can't stand cold and snow at all,” Rohnfelder says. “I prefer to be on the road where it is hot and dusty, and that will always remain my comfort zone.” While he used various modes of transit—cycling up Mount Kilimanjaro on an e-bike, for instance—he found that slow, steady steps were often best. Walking, he says, gives “the most time and peace for experiencing and photography.”

It’s not possible to visit every volcano on Earth—many are deep in the ocean—and depending on your appetite for frozen fingers and scorched lungs, you probably don’t want to visit all the ones on land, either. But Rohnfelder’s book taps into that elementary school fascination, and transports readers to stunning vantage points around the world where we can all appreciate the power below.

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After Decades of Being Ignored, a Nut From 20-Pound Pine Cones Is Back on Australian Menus

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Aboriginal groups once traveled long distances to celebrate its harvest.

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Aboriginal artist Leeton Lee grew up honing his survival skills in the Australian bush, crafting shelters from the bark of fallen logs, carving spears out of tree branches, and snacking on the tart berries of lilly pilly bushes. But it wasn't until he spent time, as an adult, with one of the elders of Cherbourg, an Aboriginal community in Queensland, that he had his first bunya nut.

“I couldn't believe it's something I sort of missed along the way,” he says, “and that a lot of other people had missed, too.”

Bunya trees are the stuff of legend. Roaming dinosaurs likely snacked on their flowering pines, and their harvest has been an Aboriginal food source for centuries. Native to Queensland—where they thrive in the state's wet, tropical soils—the bunya pine can grow to more than 150 feet with a trunk more than four feet in diameter. The tree's immense dome-shaped crown is decidedly impressive, and every three to four years, this towering evergreen produces pine cones the shape of an egg and the size of a football that can weigh as much as 22 pounds. When a bunya pine barrels off a tree, it typically drops intact: a spiky pod filled with anywhere from 30 to 100 husk-covered nuts.

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Before Europeans arrived, Aboriginal Australians met every three years for a massive celebration when bunya nuts were at their ripest. “Once bunya cones would start to show, Aboriginals in the Bunya Mountains would send out word that this was the year of the festival,” says Lee. “Then Indigenous peoples from all different tribes would travel from as far as western Queensland and Victoria to come.” For centuries, during these festivals, tribes put aside differences to trade, arrange marriages, and feast on the bunya nut: raw, roasted, boiled, and sometimes ground into flour and baked. “Bunya pines are a food source that people can carry with them,” Lee says, noting that people could simply gather and eat from these massive natural “lunch-boxes” while traveling to and from the event.

Southern Queensland's Bunya Mountains—an isolated section of Australia's Great Dividing Range, about 124 miles northwest of Brisbane—are still home to the country’s largest stand of ancient bunya trees, and rogue bunyas tower beside residences and along former Aboriginal trading routes statewide. But a Bonye Bonye Festival has not been held since the early-20th century, when the relocation of Aboriginals to government settlements, coupled with Europeans' logging of bunya pine timber, brought these events to an abrupt end.

This colonization curtailed bunya-nut food culture, and resulted in widespread ignorance of their potential as a food source. “A lot of people have them on their property and don't realize it,” says Lee. “They just chuck the fallen pines in their trailer and take them to the dump. They don't know that they've got food there.”

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In 2018, Lee decided to hold a free bunya workshop introducing the tree and its benefits. “One of the big things for me,” he says, “is that we've got a lot of kids that are going to school hungry, and they're walking past these food sources on the way to and from class. I also thought this would be a good opportunity to share a bit about our Aboriginal history and the stories that go with it.” A quick Facebook post gauging local interest told him all he needed to know. “I was only expecting a few people to respond,” he says, “but instead I heard from more than 100.” The majority were non-Aboriginal Australians.

Several participants drove hours for Lee’s May 2018 event. Here, at his own “bunya gathering,” Lee cooked up nuts for guests, offered culinary tips on incorporating them into everything from stir-frys, which bring out their chestnut-like flavor, to sweets such as chocolate, which gain added texture and earthiness, and gave out gift bags of nuts.

“One of the good things with bunya nuts,” says Lee, “is that while traditionally they'd be stored or buried for preservation or fermenting, nowadays we can freeze them.” He taught his audience, too, the importance of sustainability—not just in looking after the trees, but in not overharvesting them. When collecting bunya pines, he advises, leave some behind for other people to enjoy—and some for the wallabies too.

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Lee’s evangelizing of bunya nuts fits into a larger Indigenous food movement gaining culinary traction countrywide. Top restaurants such as the French-inspired Vue de Monde, on the 55th floor of Melbourne's iconic Rialto Towers, and Adelaide's native-food restaurant Orana are incorporating Indigenous ingredients from bunya nuts to crocodile, sprinkling them on sea urchin and serving them up as soup. While Lee appreciates seeing Aboriginal foods in restaurants, he also sees this culinary trend as a prime opportunity to involve and highlight Australia's Indigenous population.

“Think about things like boomerangs and artwork,” he says, “intellectual property that's been reappropriated and mass produced in places like China and Indonesia. This is a chance for Aboriginal people to showcase our own culture.”

One such example is Something Wild, an Indigenous foods purveyor housed in South Australia's Adelaide Central Market. As both an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (two distinct Indigenous peoples), owner and manager Daniel Motlop grew up munching on kakadu plums and green ants in the country's Northern Territory. With Something Wild, he aimed to bring these lesser-known foods to the masses.

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“From a sustainability point of view, there's so much of this native food, or 'bush tucker' as we call it,” he says. “Why not showcase what Australia has to offer?” Motlop sells bunya nuts alongside marine veggies such as samphire and sea blight, and meats such as emu, kangaroo, and crocodile. “This stuff has been a part of Indigenous communities for years—in our songs and our Dreamtime and in everything we do in life,” he says, referring to a spiritual concept at the heart of Aboriginal religion and culture.

Both Moltop and Lee hope that Australia’s growing interest in Aboriginal foods can bring a better understanding of Aboriginal history as well. “It's a great thing to have the stories that accompany a plum, berry, or green once it's been harvested,” says Motlop. “I think it showcases Australia's Aboriginal culture, and in a good light that really hasn't been documented well in the past.” A Queensland horticulturalist named Bruce Thompson has even pushed to make Bunya Mountains National Park a UNESCO World Heritage site, in part because of its sacredness to Aboriginal communities and the ancient stand of bunya pines the park contains. Lee is also considering ways to re-establish the Bonye Bonye Festival, as a way for Aboriginal people to reconnect and introduce their beloved bunya nut to a much wider audience.

“We are Australia’s minority population now,” Lee says. “So it’s really important that others who live here understand what they have and how best to care for it.”


Why All of Upstate New York Grew Up Eating the Same Barbecue Chicken

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The true legacy of the Cornell professor who invented the chicken nugget.

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In 1950, Robert C. Baker, a professor at Cornell University, published Cornell Cooperative Extension Information Bulletin 862, which changed summer in upstate New York forever. Entitled “Barbecued Chicken and Other Meats,” the bulletin describes a simple vinegar-based sauce that can be used to turn broilers—chickens raised for their meat rather than their eggs—into juicy, delicious barbecue heaven.

At the time, this was an innovation. When Americans ate meat, they preferred beef and pork, and the poultry industry was just beginning to increase production. As an agricultural extension specialist, part of Baker’s job was to convince Americans to eat chicken. Before he passed away in 2006, he invented chicken bologna, chicken hot dogs, chicken salami, and, most famously, a prototype chicken nugget.

Cornell Chicken Barbecue Sauce, though, was his first great triumph, and what he is best known for in upstate New York. All summer, every summer, Cornell Barbecue Chicken features at backyard parties and family get-togethers. Younger generations of Finger Lake residents don’t even recognize this as a regional specialty so much as the default way to cook chicken outdoors. “Every fund-raising event, every fire department cookout, every little league barbecue, must serve this recipe or nobody would come,” writes barbecue expert Meathead Goldwyn.

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Baker’s recipe is simple enough—oil, cider vinegar, poultry seasoning, salt, pepper, and egg—and delicious. Goldwyn “fell in love with this recipe in a hurry,” and Saveur called the result “one of the juiciest, most complex barbecued chickens we've ever tasted.” Gary Jacobson, of the Texas BBQ Posse, writes that “the sauce has been a barbecue mainstay for me” for 40 years.

The egg is a key ingredient. It helps the sauce stick to the chicken, as the albumin denatures and binds to the chicken skin, and it keeps the oil and vinegar emulsified together. The version of the recipe Cornell keeps online adds a caution about egg safety and suggests that anyone making a large batch of sauce “can use pasteurized eggs for an extra margin of safety.”

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In the 1950s, this wasn’t a concern. The original bulletin notes that leftover sauce can be stored, refrigerated, for several weeks. But locals took that even further. A family friend of mine, Julie Carpenter, recalls her first encounter with the chicken, as a senior at Cornell, with a boyfriend who grew up in the area. “It was the best chicken I ever had,” she writes. When she heard about the recipe from her boyfriend’s dad, she worried about the raw egg but figured the vinegar would kill off any microbes. “I then watched him strain the used marinade, boil it, put it into a jar, add a bit more vinegar and seasoning, and put it back into the fridge,” she writes. “I almost puked. When I mentioned my concern, he said, ‘Oh no. That's the beauty of this marinade—the vinegar kills everything.’ This didn't stop me from eating it again in the future. And I met many other folks who did the same thing.”

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The way Baker told the story, he first came up with the idea of the chicken barbecue when he worked at Penn State and the governor came to visit. When he went to Cornell a short while later, he started putting on barbecues regularly, enlisting his family and the young men who worked with him at Cornell as basters and turners.

“My father was quite a promoter,” says Dale Baker, the eldest of Baker’s six children. “He would have me and others go out in high school and cook for groups.” Roy Curtiss, who worked with Baker as a Cornell undergraduate, remembers killing and butchering chickens in the basement of Rice Hall, on campus, freezing them, and using them all summer long to create barbecues for 50 to 100 people.

“We’d charge them a buck and half, for a roll, an ear of corn, and half a chicken,” Curtiss says. All summer, they set up for church groups and farm bureaus, toting collapsible grates in the back of a pickup truck, all around the Ithaca area. “It was very popular,” he says. “People would hear about this, and think it was a great alternative to hamburgers and hot dogs.”

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One of the key features of Baker’s published strategy was that it scaled. These big barbecues required batches of sauce held in 12-quart pans, and the helpers used wallpaper brushes to baste the chicken. “We had these arrangements—a person on either side. You had grates that you could put one on top of the other and flip them all at one time,” says Curtiss. “It was a real production. You would have people going down the line basting, and you would have guys turning, and you would repeat the process. The pits were sometimes 50, 60 feet long.” Curtiss once worked a barbecue for 5,000 people. He also helped create the chart in Bulletin 862 that shows how to scale up an entire chicken dinner, including suggested sides of coleslaw, scalloped potatoes, coffee, and ice cream from 5 to 300 people.

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Perhaps the most ambitious use of the sauce, though, has been at Baker’s Chicken Coop, the barbecue stand Baker started in the 1950s at the New York State Fair. (His daughter still operates it today.) “We would cook, when I was younger, 22, 23,000 half-chickens in 10 or 11 days. It was a pretty big thing,” says Dale Baker. When he finished college, he and his dad estimated how many half-chickens they had cooked up until that point in time. It was more than a million.

Later in his career, Baker created products that were mass-produced and sold at grocery stores around the country. Cornell Chicken Barbecue Sauce never made it that big, though. “At one point in life, he put it in aerosol spray cans and tried to sell the spray cans,” says Dale. “They had to do a fair amount of research to get it so it wouldn’t clog up .... That was not a money maker.” Still, for Baker, creating the sauce and the chicken barbecue tradition of upstate New York was one of his greatest accomplishments. “I think for him this was the thing he probably took the greatest pride in,” says Dale. “It went way back to the start of his career. For whatever reason, if you asked him, I think chicken barbecue would have been top of his list.”

This story originally ran on June 9, 2017.

How to Decode the Shells You Find Washed Up on the Beach

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A beginner's guide to identifying conchs, chitons, and more.

No matter where you are in the world, any beach you poke along is likely to be littered with serendipitous finds. Earth's waters regularly spit out weird trash that we humans have dumped in there, along with natural treasures, such as shells, that have become dislodged from the depths.

If one of these shells catches your eye, you might want to pluck it from the waves—and if you do, you’ll probably want to know just what it is you’re looking at. When you do, you stand to learn a lot about life beneath the water.

We asked invertebrate experts for advice on how to suss out the shells you find on the beach—and if you’re sold on beachcombing, how best to set yourself up for successful shell-sleuthing.

Get your geographic bearings

Are you gazing out over saltwater, or freshwater? Contending with a gnarly current, or a glassine, placid surface? When you’re trying to decipher a find, consider what’s most likely to live where you are. “Sandy beaches often have bivalves burrowed under the sand in very shallow water; rocky shores often have chitons, top shells, periwinkles, and limpets attached to the rocks in rock pools,” says Suzanne Williams, head of the invertebrate division at the Natural History Museum in London.

Count the valves

Physical features are full of clues. Start by tallying up the number of valves and shell parts. “Of the most common groups, gastropods, have one shell, bivalves have two, and chitons have shells made up of eight interlocking parts,” Williams says.

Consider the color

In general, tropical shells are more brilliantly hued than their freshwater counterparts, and cold-water shells—particularly those in intertidal zones along the coasts of Alaska, Siberia, Canada, or Greenland—would be dark or black as a way to conserve heat, says José H. Leal, science director and curator of the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Florida. “Deep sea shells also tend not to be very colorful,” Williams notes. The hue offers clues about how deep a shell might have lived, and where in the world it originated. All of this can make a shell more Googleable.

Be forewarned: You might spy different coloration on members of the same species. The Southern quahog, which washes ashore all across the Atlantic Coast, starts out spangled with white-and-brown zig-zags that look something like lightning, but these fade with age. Adults are duller, with more ho-hum patterns.

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Look for flourishes

Some shells are stunners that are hard to mistake for anything else. The queen conch (Strombus gigas), ubiquitous across the Caribbean, has a famously pearly lip and ruffled edges. The spider conch, meanwhile, is armed with spiky protrusions, “like good old Edward Scissorhands,” says Leal. In both cases, this flair is a barometer of age. The queen conch stops coiling when it reaches sexual maturity; afterwards, the lip gets thicker while the innards stay the same.

By the way, while it’s easy to assume that bigger shells have probably been lingering in the water the longest, size isn’t always a reliable proxy for lifespan, Williams says. The giant clam, Tridacna gigas, is hulking even when it’s pretty young. The largest of these shells weighs more than 500 pounds, and even shrimpier specimens can grow as much as one centimeter per month in aquaculture facilities, Williams notes. The oldest of the long-lived Arctica islandica clams, on the other hand, has lived for more than half a millennium, but isn’t much more than 50 millimeters tall.

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Consult a visual guide

If you’re still stumped, compare your find to a visual encyclopedia that rounds up photos of shells around the world. Local park rangers or fish and wildlife officers will also have some ideas.

Plan ahead for next time

If you liked decoding your previous find and want to level up to more deliberate sleuthing, it helps to strategize a bit. Here’s how to maximize your chances of finding something:

1. Pick your moment.

Low tide will give you the best shot at spotting things freshly emerged from the water; you’ll also have easier access to things you’d otherwise have to root around for amid frothing waves. Before you set out, check a tide chart to see what window looks most promising for a treasure-strewn shore. Storms, and the waves that accompany them, might throw more shells onto the beach during the winter months.

2. Gather your gear.

Some especially enthusiastic collectors scour the beach with magnifying goggles, or strap on elbow and knee pads so that they can more comfortably squat down to scrutinize knobby heaps. If you’re not scouting for the rarest or smallest varieties (the tiniest shells are a shade smaller than a pinhead), you won’t need all of this. Instead, your kit should include the basics: at minimum, a bucket or a bag. A metal scoop or mesh sieve may come in handy, and spare you some pinches from any nearby crabs, whose nips can be “unsavory,” says Leal. You may also want a phone to crowdsource information about your find by posting an image of it to iNaturalist, an ecology tracking and identification app.

3. Scan the area.

If you’re on the shore with a single-minded mission, it helps to break the terrain up into quadrants or focus on a specific section. On Sanibel Island, the shell wonderland where Leal works, piles can reach several feet high. You might up your odds of finding something if you tackle one small area and give it a close, careful look.

4. Take some home with you.

Of course, the lowest-hanging fruits de mer are the shells you can see with the naked eye. But it’s far from unusual to spot more after the fact, and with some assistance. Leal once returned home from a trip to Mexico, just south of Cancun, with two pounds of sand he’d collected from the bottom of a coral head. When he sifted these under a microscope, he discovered 120 shell species in the mix. You can approximate this at home: “I suggest that people take some shell-rich sand home and then go with a magnifying glass,” Leal says. (One caveat: Decamping with sand or specific shells might not be legal where you are—it's illegal to harvest the queen conch in some places, for instance, for either fun or profit. Don’t be a scofflaw in pursuit of shell glory.)

This story originally ran on August 27, 2018.

Why Does English Have More Words for Sports Officials Than Any Other Language?

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Arbitrating when to say ref, ump, or judge.

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When talking sports, using the wrong terms—referring to a basketball game as a “match,” say, or talking about “points” in baseball—will immediately give you away as a non-aficionado, a person who doesn’t even have a grasp of the basics. But one of the oddest sets of terminology is what to call the uniformed people who make the rule decisions in the course of a sporting event. “This realm of vocabulary is one of the things that can expose you as someone who doesn't know a ton about a sport, because it's so unpredictable and so uneven from sport to sport,” says Seth Rosenthal, a writer, producer, and host at the sports publication SB Nation.

Mention the referees at a baseball game or the umpire at a basketball game and it’s clear you know nothing. And that’s perhaps a little unfair because the terminology for sports officials in English makes no sense and has no pattern—or if it does, it’s so riddled with holes as to be pointless. This is not the case in other languages (with one pretty major exception). In English-speaking countries sports officials have a dizzying array of names, without any kind of unifying structure as to the role each plays.

How is it that the United States, England, Australia, and other Anglophone countries have so thoroughly stumbled over what to call our sports officials? Around the world, from France to Japan to Brazil, the naming of sports officials is clear, consistent, straightforward. But in English, it’s more like a trap.

Officials—let’s use this as an umbrella term for everyone involved in rule-enforcing decisions in sport—are not new, though they have evolved. The first Olympics, in 776 B.C., had a 10-man board of officials, the hellanodicae. They were chosen from different places, and it was a position of honor and respect, unlike modern officials, if postgame press conferences are any guide. (They could also whack competitors with sticks for stepping out of line, which is one way to command respect.)

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The precise number, configuration, and roles of officials changes depending on the sport and sometimes within a sport based on region and competitive level, but the idea of nonpartisan governing officials is about as old as organized sports themselves. This makes it even stranger that in modern English, there is no agreed-upon pan-sport terminology.

Let’s start with “umpire.” It comes from the Latin non-par, meaning “not equal,” which conveys two meanings. First, the official is not equal to the athlete. To the Greeks, the official ranked above the athlete, though you could argue that it often works the other way today. But it also suggests something like “tiebreaker,” the person who ensures that there is an unequal outcome to the contest—a winner and a loser. From the Latin, it mildly mutated through Old French and Old English before ending up as “umpire.”

On the other hand, “referee” is a term that … comes from Latin and was mildly mutated through Old French and Old English. It’s from the same root as the words “refer” and “reference,” meaning that it represents a person to whom questions are directed for a decision. “Judge” follows the same path, from Latin to Old French to Old English, and doesn’t really have a distinct original meaning; it’s pretty much always meant “to pass judgment.”

So the terms have slightly different base meanings and are not interchangeable, but their use in English does not follow any established pattern between sports. The lead official in a National Basketball Association game is a referee. In Major League Baseball, it’s an umpire. Tennis, American football, and lacrosse all have both referees and a variety of judges.

As a matter of fact, American football has a whopping seven officials: a referee (who’s in charge), an umpire, a down judge, a line judge, a side judge, a back judge, and a field judge. “There are so many cops on the field in a football game,” says Rosenthal. “The NFL [National Football League] is basically just enforcing rules and people happen to be playing a game in the meantime.”

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There’s also something in the different natures of these sports. Basketball and soccer, for example, are free-flowing, without, theoretically, the need for direct action or intervention from an official. They’re there to make sure that the game remains that way, by calling fouls and violations. Football, as it’s said, is a “game of inches,” and the variety of officials are needed to make sure progress of the ball is appropriately determined (and to call fouls and assess penalties). Baseball, on the other hand, is less a sport than a turn-based board game, in which almost no action can happen without the judgment of an official—balls and strikes, fair and foul, out and safe.

So yes, sports officials do have different roles on the field, but do they actually need different terms?

Not if you ask most of the rest of the world.

In French, the lead official—the referee, in English—in tennis is le juge-arbitre, while the chair umpire is the arbitre de chaise. In basketball, the role of referee is filled by the arbitre. In soccer? The referee is an arbitre. In baseball? The plate umpire is the arbitre de marbre; the other umpires, stationed at the bases, are, appropriately, all called arbitre de base.

In Japanese, a baseball umpire is (transliterated) a shinpan. In soccer, the referee is a shinpan. You get the idea. Japanese, like French, generally has a single word for a sports official, which can be added to with a descriptor. Head official, side official, chair official—but the word for official doesn’t change.

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All the major branches of Chinese languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka, have something similar to the Mandarin 裁判—cái pàn in Pinyin—for sports officials. The first character means “judge,” and the second means “to tell apart.” As with French, Mandarin will sometimes add in some descriptors to the basic name for official, as with the assistant referee in soccer: 助理裁判, or zhù lǐ cái pàn.

Arabic also uses one word for sports officials: حكم, or hakam. That’s constant through cricket, baseball, soccer, and tennis.

These are, to be blunt, the sensible languages. A basic pattern of one word for a sports official, perhaps modified to indicate their specific position—base official, head official, chair official—is a reasonable way to do this. English is ridiculous for having so many different ways to talk about sports officials, but it’s not the only language to do this.

Spanish, being a Romance language like French, looks at first like it’ll follow the French rule. In French, the word for official is arbitre; in Spanish, it’s árbitro. Except when it isn’t.

Baseball, which is a very big deal in many Spanish-speaking countries, has árbitro as an umbrella term, but like in English, “umpire” is also used—well, ampáyer, anyway. The home plate umpire is the ampáyer principal, the first and third base umpires are the ampáyeres lineales (line umpires), and the second-base umpire is the ampáyer central.

Soccer, also a big deal, sticks with árbitro. The head official is the árbitro principal, and there are a couple of árbitro asistentes.

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And in tennis, all of that is thrown out. No more árbitros, no more ampáyeres. Instead there’s an assortment of juezes: juez de línea, juez de silla, juez árbitro (the chair umpire), and the jefe de árbitros, the big boss, off-court, in charge of everything (the referee, if you’re keeping score in English). Juez means “judge” in Spanish, which means Spanish actually follows the English model: a complete jumble of terms.

Nobody I spoke to, including sports experts and linguists, has any idea why or how English and Spanish ended up so unpredictable and patternless. Most of the world has figured out that you really only need one term for sports officials.

I have a theory, one that can’t really be disproven, which makes it a pretty good theory, in my opinion. So many of the world’s most popular sports were invented, or at least codified, in the United States, Canada, and England—English-speaking countries. Baseball’s first official game was played in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1846. Basketball was invented by a Canadian, but he was living in Massachusetts, and the first basketball game was played in Albany, New York, in 1892. American football, though an offspring of the rugby family, is, of course, American (and rugby itself, English in origin). Hockey was developed ad-hoc in Canada and the northern United States. Despite its French name, lacrosse is a Native American game codified in Canada. Cricket was invented in England. Basic concepts of soccer have been around for about two thousand years, but the rules of the sport were first laid down in England, including the specific stricture that the ball cannot be touched with the hands by any player besides the goalkeeper.

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Because each of these sports was formalized in an English-speaking country, they were given a variety of names for their officials. But other countries, and thus other languages, had the benefit of seeing these popular team sports from the outside at first. They were introduced, not born—that’s my theory. It’s the gift of distance, which grants the ability to select the terminology that makes the most sense. You have a general name for official or judge, and you just apply that to whatever sport comes along.

This is an admittedly anglocentric view of things, and the major obstacle to the theory is Spanish, which simply doesn’t follow the pattern. But I think there’s something to this. Only in the place where the sport was invented does the specific, localized, kind of dumb terminology stick. Everywhere else? An umpire is a referee is a judge.

Explore the Magic of Oregon in This Interactive Map

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From glacier-topped mountains to a quirky cultural capital, illustrators bring Oregon to life with colorful effects.

Land, sea, and sky have long been an inspiration for the world’s great works of art. It’s less common that nature is the muse for great ad campaigns. But the creative team at Wieden+Kennedy agency found wonder and majesty in their home state of Oregon when they started brainstorming their award-winning campaign for the state's tourism board, “Only Slightly Exaggerated.”

W+K creators were challenged to capture the pure awe they were struck with when gazing upon Oregon’s peaks and canyons. To convey whimsy and grandeur where ordinary photos fell short, illustrators set out on the lofty undertaking to animate Oregon.

In their new book Only Slightly Exaggerated: The Art of Travel Oregon, W+K takes us behind the scenes to see the vistas that inspired the vision. Click through the map above to discover Oregon's seven regions and W+K's award-winning illustrations, then scroll further to see the real places that spawned their fanciful interpretations.

Neskowin Ghost Forest, Oregon Dunes, Heceta Head Lighthouse, and Haystack Rock

Oregon Coast

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Standing on the fog-shrouded headlands of the Oregon Coast, gazing out at the tumultuous Pacific Ocean, it’s easy to feel that you are at the edge of the known world. But this mysterious paradise is very accessible, and the state’s coastline has something to offer every kind of traveler. The Neskowin Ghost Forest, a beach where ancient sitka spruce stumps rise eerily from the sand, is perfect for contemplation, while more action-oriented visitors can ride off-highway vehicles over the white sand at the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. Take in the view of Heceta Head Lighthouse, on a craggy 200-foot bluff near the charming coastal town of Florence, or marvel at the mysterious shape of Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, home to puffins, cormorants, and gulls.

Back to the map

Portland

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Eating in Portland is an adventure in its own right, one in which the state’s bounty comes to you on a silver platter (or a paper plate!). You’ve probably already heard about the city’s farm-to-table tradition of fine dining, with its emphasis on fresh local ingredients and innovative, sometimes idiosyncratic flavors. You may not have heard about the outdoor Portland Mercado, where you can find varied Latino cuisine; or the hot pot, dim sum, and banh mi you might enjoy in the city’s Jade District. Thirsty? Portland has an overflowing craft beer scene, and a remarkable 15 urban wineries within city limits. And don’t forget the seafood: the freshest offerings pulled straight from the Pacific can be found on menus all over town, including salmon, Dungeness crab, and oysters with a briny kick.

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Ramona Falls and Trillium Lake

Mt. Hood & The Columbia River Gorge

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The snowy summit of Mount Hood rises 11,239 feet above sea level, an immense and powerful presence with moods that change depending on the season, the light, and the clouds that materialize around its lofty peak. You can explore its slopes on foot—there are many routes to the top, with varying degrees of difficulty—but take care, as changeable weather and snow conditions can make this dormant volcano perilous for climbers. The slopes are also a major draw for skiers, mountain bikers, and hikers who seek out wonders such as the 120-foot-high Ramona Falls, a wall of delicate cascades deep in the forest. For a more sedate perspective on the mountain, have a swim or a float down Trillium Lake on a canoe ride, or take a trip on the historic railroad at Mount Hood, which leaves from Hood River in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area and provides stellar view along its entire route.

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Hot air balloons, wine country, and tulip fields

Willamette Valley

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Floating through the air above the Willamette Valley is a dreamy way to take in an overview of its gently rolling hills, fertile fields, verdant forests, and lazy rivers. There are several hot-air balloon companies that will take you aloft so that you can take in the peaceful vistas. Back on the ground, you’ll be able to explore some of the the vineyards that make this one of the most productive wine countries in the Pacific Northwest, winning international recognition for its superior vintages, especially its pinot noirs. If you’re lucky enough to visit in springtime, you can immerse yourself in the riotously colorful blooms of the tulip fields at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm, where sighting a giant white rabbit is highly unlikely, but kaleidoscopic views are part of the gorgeous package.

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Crater Lake, Oregon Caves National Monument, and Lithia Park

Southern Oregon

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The geologic attractions of Southern Oregon are a reminder that we live on a planet that is constantly transforming. The sparkling waters of Crater Lake are the deepest of any lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world, the legacy of a massive volcanic eruption 7,700 years ago that triggered the implosion of a 12,000-foot mountain. Today, the pristine lake, surrounded by 2,000-foot-high cliffs and old-growth forests, draws hikers, bikers, and boaters to its shores. If underground exploration is your thing, you can go deep beneath the Siskiyou Mountains at Oregon Caves National Monument, where rangers will guide you through some of the 15,000 feet of marble passageways. Feeling brave? You can follow up by searching for Sasquatch in the nearby Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, where past sightings led to the construction of the nation’s only Bigfoot trap. And if you're here for the scenery, visit during autumn to experience Lithia Park's spectacular foliage first-hand.

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Three Sisters and Steelhead Falls

Central Oregon

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The glacier-covered mountains known as the Three Sisters are an emblem of Central Oregon, a trio of volcanic peaks that define the state’s wild and unpredictable heart. Part of the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a major seismic feature, the Sisters (known as North Sister, Middle Sister, and South Sister) anchor a vast wilderness area filled with opportunities for hiking, climbing, and camping. They are visible for many miles around, and while they are dormant, geologists are keeping a close eye on South Sister in particular, in case she awakens one day. Not far away is Steelhead Falls, a picturesque cascade just a short walk from the trailhead. On a hot summer’s day, a quick plunge in one of the swimming holes here is sure to cool you down.

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The Wallowas, Alvord Desert, Steens Mountains, and Snake River

Eastern Oregon

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Eastern Oregon is one of the wildest parts of the state, where the intrepid traveler can find deep solitude and dramatic natural adventures. Visit the Wallowas, a spectacular mountain range dotted with Gold Rush-era ghost towns; the ruts left by 19th-century settlers’ wagon trains are still visible in places. Or venture to the Alvord Desert, where wild horses roam the austere playa in the shadow of Steens Mountain and hot springs bubble from deep in the earth. Eastern Oregon is also where you’ll find the Snake River, an officially designated Wild and Scenic waterway and historically one of the most important spawning grounds for Pacific salmon. Raft trips can take you out onto the Snake as it winds its way through remote natural areas including the thrilling rapids of Hells Canyon, the deepest river gorge in North America.

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Curious to know more about the colorful creatures that W+K created for Travel Oregon? Read more about the project here.

Animating Oregon

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An ad campaign from Travel Oregon takes you on a fantastic voyage through the state.

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Full disclosure: You are not going to ride a giant white rabbit if you go to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Nor will you stand in the shadow of an enormous rock monster when you visit the Neskowin Ghost Forest, a spectacular beach on the state’s northern coast studded with ancient sitka spruce stumps. And you almost certainly will not encounter a bearded tree-man while soaking in one of Oregon’s many volcanic hot springs.

You will be able to meet these charming characters, and many more, in Travel Oregon’s “Only Slightly Exaggerated” ad campaign for tourism in the state, and in Only Slightly Exaggerated: The Art of Travel Oregon: a newly released book that gives readers an inside look at agency Wieden+Kennedy's creative process. The animated ads, co-created by Nick Stokes and Ansel Wallenfang of W+K (in collaboration with Psyop and Sun Creature), take a fanciful approach to promoting travel. Instead of using film footage of the state’s attractions—from hot-air balloons in the Willamette Valley to the crystalline waters of Crater Lake—Stokes and Wallenfang took a chance by animating Oregon’s wonders instead, and adding a touch of the fantastical.

“We had an insight that I think is pretty true to everyone who has a phone with a camera on it,” says Stokes. “You go places like Mount Hood or Trillium Lake or the Coast, and they all look so great when you're looking at them with your eyes. But when you take a picture, it never quite captures the magnificence.”

They realized that animation could add a dimension of wonder that is paradoxically more true-to-life than even the most high-definition photograph. “To really capture the feeling of actually being in Oregon, we needed to exaggerate things a bit,” says Wallenfang. “These were all real locations, so that was our starting place. Then we imagined characters to augment the scenes and bring a little bit more magic.”

Hence the campaign’s tagline, “Only Slightly Exaggerated,” and its cast of wild, majestic, and whimsical creatures who lead you on a journey from the state’s mountains to its deserts, and to the Pacific shore. There’s a frog who eats roast bug in a Portland restaurant; a cloud mechanic who makes it rain on the grapes that become Oregon’s fine wines; a mountain-biking caterpillar; and that white rabbit in the tulip fields, perhaps the campaign’s most iconic image.

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“I love the rabbit,” says Stokes. “It was the first character, and I think it’s still my favorite. When we were first concepting this, we were being a little too responsible, and we weren't putting enough magic into the spot. We almost wanted to just do a travel ad that was animated beautifully. And then we were like, why don't we just make a humongous rabbit? That was when it really kicked in, we can do whatever we want here.

The campaign launched in the spring of 2018, and its success meant that Stokes and Wallenfang were tasked with creating another iteration for 2019. This one is slightly longer, and builds on the delightful imagery that distinguished the first spot. Opening with whales soaring through the clouds, the 2019 spot is peppered with callbacks to the first iteration (watch out for the postcards on the wall in the restaurant scene), while introducing new characters such as the Neskowin Rock Spirit, a benevolent giant who is awakened every morning by a seagull so that he can make the sun rise.

The animation style was itself the product of an intense search. “We looked into animation throughout the ages, and lots of different companies,” says Stokes. “We found that things like Disney or Saturday-morning cartoons were too clunky and goofy. The story we’re telling isn't supposed to be cute or funny or slapstick. We wanted to showcase the fact that Oregon is a beautiful place, and use sophisticated animation to bring that to life.” At the last minute, the Copenhagen-based company Sun Creature put in a proposal nailing the look that Stokes and Wallenfang had been seeking.

As the campaign developed, the creative team stayed focused not on the characters for their own sake, but on how they could bring the state’s diverse geography and recreational offerings to life. Oregon has seven distinct regions with wildly divergent landscapes and attractions, from the fertile Willamette Valley to the starkly beautiful Eastern Oregon deserts. That diversity makes the state a compelling character in its own right.

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“We always wanted Oregon to be the hero,” says Wallenfang. “The state is unique geographically, in that we can show off this crazy diversity. But we also have this reputation as a maker culture, with these more quirky personality traits.”

That quirkiness comes through in a scene set in the Oregon Caves National Monument, where busy workers are harvesting sunstones, the official state gem. “These little creatures are the ones tasked with running nature, kind of like we run factories and run streets and drive cars and things like that,” says Stokes. “It’s kind of like Oregon's steam room.”

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A more urban quirkiness is on display in a Portland restaurant scene in the 2019 spot. A cute little girl, the same one we saw fishing off a bridge at Ramona Falls in the 2018 ad, is sharing a booth with a shaggy white monster. A waiter appears at their table to serve them, and he’s like a wacky, personified lazy Susan, with arms that rotate to display delicacies in rapid succession: salmon, steak, asparagus, donuts. The monster stuffs his face with every delicacy on offer as the girl corrects his manners, laughing with glee.

As fully realized as the characters are, you might wonder if some of them are based on real people. They aren’t, except for the sweet, floppy-eared dogs running through the dog park. Those are modeled on actual canines belonging to members of the team.

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Stokes, who grew up in Oregon, says that working on the campaign has changed the way he sees his home state. “Being on this account opened my eyes to how many cool things there are to do here that I didn't even know about,” he says. “It's like the thinking cap is always on now, every time I travel around Oregon. What kind of cool artifact is here? What kind of cool structure? What kind of magic could bring out these elements?”

This being Oregon, the opportunities for magic are everywhere, and they don't end with the places mentioned here. See our interactive map to explore all seven of Oregon's regions and W+ K's illustrations.

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