Allow yourself to be captivated by the ever-changing circular patterns of a psychedelic sand pizza.
The dextrous pair of hands in the video belongs to Russian potter and former mathematician Mikhail Sadovnikov, who creates ephemeral art using his fingers, a potter's wheel, and a pile of sand or blob of wet clay. The patterns, which are complex and ever-changing, are nearly impossible to take your eyes off.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
A member of the tiger trio hangs out with a human performer. (Screenshot: AFP/Youtube)
An exiled circus in Nicaragua recently celebrated the birth of three Bengal tiger cubs: one white, one yellow, and one golden.
"A birth like this is very unusual because tigers with three different colors were born at the same time," said Renato Fuentes, the circus's owner. The trio makes up the circus's eighth generation of captive tigers, he added.
Last July, Mexico forbade its circuses from owning animals. Rather than relocate their menageries to zoos and conservation centers, some, like the Renato Circus, fled the country. According to AgenciaEFE, the circus is now in Nicaragua, and the cubs were born in the city of Camoapa.
So far, they have been kept close to their mom, and out of the public eye—but Agence France-Presse managed to get a video, in which they tumble, wrestle, and stretch, occasionally next to someone wearing circus pants.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
A Quaker wedding in Philadelphia, 1947. (Photo: Leonard Mccombe/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)
Ryan Boswell was running out of time.
He and his fiance, Briana, who grew up in the western suburbs of Philadelphia and now live in the city, were casually planning their wedding. But Boswell’s father, though he’d been ill for a few years, began deteriorating quickly, and suddenly the wedding preparations took on a more manic tone. “We need to do this now,” Boswell says he felt at the time. “I really want him to see this.”
Planning a wedding is a brutal slog that takes months of work: booking venues, figuring out everything from officiants to clothing to invite lists to hotels to staff to food. Ryan and Briana didn’t have that kind of time, so Briana went looking for something quicker. “She went on the Philly [county] website and it says on there, marriage certificate, 80 dollars, Quaker certificate, 90 dollars, and she was like, well, what does that mean?” says Boswell.
It turns out that Pennsylvania is not just home to its own all-purpose noun and its own ancient tiny house design: it’s also the only statethat allows all of its residents to become married via what’s legally called a self-uniting marriage, or informally a Quaker marriage (or, depending how you look at it, one of two states). It’s a centuries-old tradition that’s found a place in modern Pennsylvania law, and it is, weirdly enough, one of the most progressive marriage laws in the country.
The state’s laws have long been an improbable mix of conservatism and liberalism, much of which can be traced back to its Quaker heritage. Quakers were so vital to early Pennsylvania that they managed to get some laws passed that wouldn’t fly elsewhere in the colonies (or, later, the States).
In 1681, King Charles II of England gave the colony of Pennsylvania to William Penn, a British Quaker, to repay a debt. King Charles named it Pennsylvania, and by all accounts Penn, who wanted to name it New Wales, was embarrassed at having a whole colony named after himself. With Quaker teachings in mind, Penn made his new domain a place open to any religion, and his fellow Quakers settled in the eastern part of the state, helping to construct Philadelphia.
Then as now, Quakers are tolerant by doctrine of all other religions, and opposed to violence of any kind. Women are encouraged to be as central in the religion as men. More conservative Quakers are also well-known for “plain dress,” use of the word “thee,” teetotalism, opposition to abortion, and, sometimes, opposition to same-sex marriage.
Though in some ways the Quaker religion, referred to by Quakers as the Religious Society of Friends, is a cousin of Protestantism, it differs in quite a few pretty major ways. One of those is that the Quaker services can vary from a a congregation led in prayer by one person, to what’s called an unprogrammed meeting. (“Meeting” is the Quaker term for a religious service.) Unprogrammed meetings are a representation of the church’s classless dictum; sometimes conducted in silence, the town hall-like events see congregation members speaking to the rest of the group as they feel the urge, allowing the voice of God to channel through them.
Because of the disdain for ministers or priests, the idea of an approved member of the clergy serving as an officiant for a marriage is pretty much a no-go. So Quakers have for centuries conducted a different kind of marriage ceremony: the two people getting married give a short pledge to each other, then their marriage document is signed by witnesses.
Since Quakers were so influential in the state, Pennsylvania created a loophole for non-officiated marriages, sometimes either called Quaker marriages or self-uniting marriages, which has existed in the state as long as there were marriage laws. More than 330 years later, Quakers are still major parts of the population and culture of Philadelphia and its surrounding areas, but in 2007, a federal lawsuit opened up the self-uniting marriage to all Pennsylvanians.
Back in 2007, a couple in Allegheny County, an area which includes Pittsburgh and is about a five-hour drive from the more Quaker eastern part of the state, ran into a problem. They applied for a self-uniting license, but were denied because they identified as non-Quaker.
Shortly after, the couple, with the help of the ACLU, filed a discrimination lawsuit against the county, and won: it is now decreed that in the state of Pennsylvania, a county may not deny Pennsylvania marriage rights to a Pennsylvanian, or Quaker marriages to a non-Quaker. (This doesn’t stop some of the western counties from giving those seeking self-uniting marriages a hard time, according to some messageboards.)
Pennsylvania is not completely alone; Colorado, a state with basically no Quaker influence, allows self-uniting marriages and makes no reference to religion whatsoever. Wisconsin makes allowances for self-uniting marriages to those whose religions use it, but it’s unclear how this plays out in practice. Many states, including conservative states like Alabama and Florida, already have laws on the books stating that, even though they may not issue self-uniting marriages, they’ll respect them.
Despite being a transplant from a religious law in the 17th century, self-uniting marriage is right at the forefront of one of the many marriage debates going on in this country. The biggest of those is, of course, gay marriage, but it’s far from the only one. Indeed, the self-uniting marriage is a weapon against the existence of religion in marriage altogether.
Even for couples who decide on an elopement at City Hall, the process is still imbued with religion. In New York City, for example, City Hall marriages are performed by a certified officiant in one of two chapels on premises. Even if all you want to do is put ink on paper, there has to be some kind of religion involved.
“Why, and for what purpose, do we still require that parties solemnize—at all?” wonders family law professor Erez Aloni, of Whittier Law School.“That is, why isn’t a marriage license enough? I believe there is no reason today to require parties to go through this ceremony.”
Most states require that an officiant represent some sort of church or congregation. This is even a requirement for civilians who get their officiant’s license online to officiate their friends’ weddings (for this, many people opt for the Universal Life Church, a vaguely Christian organization that grants licenses to “ministers”). This isn’t like becoming a notary, though, where you just get a license from the government. Marriage in America, though it is a legal condition, almost always requires religion of some sort. It is, frankly, kind of bizarre.
The self-uniting marriage has thus become a very narrow option for atheists as well as people who don’t want to spend a few hundred dollars on an officiant, or those like Ryan and Briana who are rushed for time. It is a way to get religion out of your marriage. There are many long threads about self-uniting marriage on the atheist sub-forums of Reddit, probably the internet’s most vocal group of atheists.
At a Quaker wedding. all those who have witnessed the ceremony sign the wedding certificate. (Photo: Mike Goren/CC BY 2.0)
That’s not really why Ryan and Briana opted for it. They needed something fast, and wanted something small, quiet, comfortable, and intimate. Instead of a sterile City Hall experience, they brought both families over for dinner. Briana made a short speech to their slightly confused families. Finally Briana’s mother asked when the ceremony would be, and whether they were heading down to City Hall to sign the papers. “Nope! This is it,” the couple told her. “This is the ceremony.”
Both the bride’s and groom’s fathers signed their self-uniting marriage license as witnesses. Dick Boswell, Ryan’s father, passed away shortly after the ceremony, but he was able to see his son get married. “I got to see my dad tear up a little bit, and God, I never saw that before,” says Boswell. “It seemed to really touch him, and that was really worth something to me.”
The fact that he and Briana grew up in Pennsylvania wasn’t really a factor in his deciding to opt for such a Pennsylvanian marriage. It just felt right. “Now we're putting together this reception, for all the family and friends, and it's such a big ordeal, and it's all about showing off and consumption and stuff,” says Boswell. “And, I don't know. What we did, I just couldn't imagine anything more meaningful than that.”
A German engraving c. 1830, showing Anne Boleyn's execution. (Photo: Lisby/Public Domain)
“I have not come here to preach a sermon; I have come here to die.”
Facing imminent execution, Anne Boleyn began her last speech with those words. Possibly. Maybe not. It depends who's telling the story.
In the early morning hours of Friday, May 19, 1536, a Scottish theologian named Alexander Ales could not sleep. Sick and housebound, he claimed to have had a fearful nightmare in which he was presented with the head of the then-imprisoned Queen of England, Anne Boleyn.
Walking fretfully in the garden of Lambeth Palace after many days of isolation, he came across Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer, Anne’s ally in the Protestant revolution, was distraught, and confirmed that Ales’ dream had been prophetic. The Queen had been found guilty of adultery, incest and conspiring against her husband, King Henry VIII, and sentenced to death.
Within hours the deed was done. “The execution of the concubine took place at nine o’clock this morning in the tower,” the very hostile and very Catholic Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote to his boss, Emperor Charles V, later that day. “The thing was not done secretly, for there were more than two thousand persons present.”
A photochrom from 1890, showing The Tower of London, where Anne Boleyn was kept prisoner before being executed. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-ppmsc-08566)
Many of those who witnessed the execution of the Queen would leave detailed reports, either directly or indirectly, of what they saw that legendary day. But their accounts were radically different—shaped by personal prejudices, their nationalities, and their intended audience.
In The Lady in the Tower, historian and author Alison Weir’s nuanced account of the fall of Anne Boleyn, the author lays out the different reported versions of Anne’s final moments in eye-opening detail. Although some (including Chapuys, who was not allowed in) reported that no foreigners were permitted to witness the spectacle, it seems that at least four—Frenchman Lancelot de Carle, an anonymous Spaniard, a Portuguese subject, and an “Imperialist”—managed (or claimed to have managed) to get into the Tower of London, or knew someone who had. Numerous English citizens, from tower workers to agents of the crown to ordinary citizens, also came to the Tower on the late spring morning to watch Anne die.
From the start, accounts differed on where the execution took place, though historians now agree it was probably on the large green which today is a graveled parade ground between the White Tower and the Waterloo Block. Weir writes that Anne was led up to the scaffold that had been erected for her execution, wearing either a grey or black “night robe” with a red under-skirt and white ermine cape, she was followed by “four young ladies” whose names no one present bothered to record. While the Imperialist source claimed she looked “feeble and stupefied” as she ascended the scaffold, most agreed with the Englishman Crispin, Lord Milherve, who said that “when she was brought to the place of her execution her looks were cheerful.”
Tower of London's "Traitor's Gate", where Anne Boleyn entered the tower. (Photo: Char/CC BY-SA 2.0)
All agreed that she asked for a moment to address the crowd. Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, was a woman who had always evoked strong feelings in people. To the supporters of Henry’s first wife, the saintly, recently-deceased former Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon, she was a scheming “goggle-eyed whore” who had bewitched Henry VIII away from his true wife and the true religion of Catholicism. To her supporters, she was an intelligent, cultured and graceful lady with great drive and ambition. Whatever her talents, her life had been dictated by men’s whims and men’s opinions. On this day, only men would record their versions of her final words.
Anne began to speak. One of her most hostile critics was the anonymous writer of the Spanish Chronicle, a narrative of Henry VIII that may have been authored by a servant to the Spanish ambassador or a Spanish merchant. In the Chronicle, the author hints broadly at having sneaked in the night before to watch the execution, or having had an intimate friend who did. According to him, Anne, given one last chance to admit her guilt, “would not confess, but showed a devilish spirit, and was as if she were not going to die.”
The Chronicle author claimed that Anne gave a speech including the words “everything they have accused me of is false, and the principle reason I am to die is Jane Seymour, as I was the cause of the ill that befell my mistress.”At the mention of Jane Seymour, the King’s new mistress and soon-to-be wife, the Chronicle says Anne was silenced by the men on the scaffold. She looked around her as if for a reprieve and continued to obstinately deny her guilt.
In all of the eye-witness accounts of the execution but one, Anne is adamant in refusing to admit that she was guilty of adultery or treason. Only in the Imperialist account, “raising her eyes to heaven,” does Anne “beg God and the king to forgive her offenses.”
While the Spanish and Imperialists were unsurprisingly biased against Anne, the French were naturally inclined towards her. Anne had spent her formative years in France, in the train of Henry’s sister Mary, who had married the French King. She spoke French fluently, dressed in the French fashion and was often accused of being culturally more French than English.
Lancelot de Carle, secretary to the French ambassador, was so moved by what he saw during Anne’s trial and execution that he wrote a poem, A Letter Containing the Criminal Charges Laid Against Queen Anne Boleyn of England, dated June 2, 1536. In the poem, he recounts how Anne “went to the place of execution with an untroubled countenance. Her face and complexion never were so beautiful. She gracefully addressed the people from the scaffold with a voice somewhat overcome by weakness, but which gathered strength as she went on.” As she begged those present for compassion toward those who had condemned her, “spectators could not refrain from tears.”
The most accepted version of Anne’s final speech was recorded by Edward Hall, a member of Parliament, official of the City of London, and the author of the Chronicle of England:
Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, according to law, for by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I come here only to die, and thus to yield myself humbly to the will of the King, my lord. And if in my life, I did ever offend the King’s Grace, surely with my death I do now atone. I come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of what whereof I am accused, as I know full well that aught I say in my defense doth not appertain to you. I pray and beseech you all, good friends, to pray for the life of the King, my sovereign lord and yours, who is one of the best princes on the face of the earth, who has always treated me so well that better could not be, wherefore I submit to death with good will, humbly asking pardon of all the world. If any person will meddle with my cause, I require them to judge the best. Thus I take leave of the world, and of you, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. Oh Lord, have mercy on me! To God I commend my soul!
The essence of this feisty version of her speech, politically correct in its praise of the King but “bold” in her refusal to admit her guilt, is found in several eyewitness accounts. These witnesses include the unknown Portuguese subject and Englishman Anthony Anthony, surveyor of the ordnance of the Tower, although the verbiage used varies wildly from version to version. The similarities have led Weir to believe this speech is substantially what was said, while historians like Eric Ives have settled on a similar, slightly simpler version. In this version Anne begins, “I have not come here to preach a sermon; I have come here to die.”
Another depiction of the execution, where the executioner holds an axe. (Photo: Lisby/Public Domain)
Another apparent observer, the lord of Miherve—perhaps getting one in for the patriarchy—attested that she added, “be not sorry to see me die thus, but pardon me from your hearts that I have not expressed to all about me that mildness that became me.” The Portuguese subject amazingly claims to have heard her murmur: “Alas, poor head. In a very brief space, thou will roll in the dust on the scaffold, and as in life you did not merit the crown of a queen, so in death you deserve no better doom than this.”
In Anne’s last moments, she knelt down, prepared to meet the executioner’s blow. To one chronicler “she appeared dazed” while “fastening her clothes about her feet.” But to another she was strong and serene while she “prepared to receive the stroke of death with resolution, so sedately as to cover her feet with her nether garments.” Even the simple act of whether her eyes were covered is a contested point. According to Weir:
The Spanish Chronicle asserts that Anne refused to have her eyes bandaged, and that her gaze disturbed the executioner, but three other witnesses state that one of her ladies, weeping, “came forward to do the last office” and blindfolded her with a “linen cloth.” Ales, whose landlord related the details, says that Anne herself “covered her eyes.”
Anne began to pray loudly, begging God to receive her soul. Soon it was over, her head cleanly sliced off by the executioner in one fell swoop. As her body was carried away by her maids, a handful of witnesses to her demise streamed off the green, some to their desks to write what they had seen, others to recount the event to record-minded friends.
Remembering an event is “more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording,” psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus has said. In Anne’s case, her true words may well have been lost the moment she said them. They were reshaped—at turns romantically, vindictively, politically—or perhaps somewhere they were recounted verbatim. Some eyewitnesses reported that Anne’s lips continued to move for several seconds after her head had been sliced from her body. Perhaps, she was attempting to get across one last time what she actually had to say.
La Siesta, Ramon Martí Alsina, 1884. (Photo: Public Domain)
You should probably take an afternoon nap today. Or at least think about it.
If you have a job, of course, this might take some doing, unless you live in Spain, where siestas are a long, famous tradition, enabled in part by federal law.
The Spanish workday generally starts at 10 a.m., takes a lengthy break at 3 p.m., and then ends around 8 p.m., with dinner often not until 10 p.m.
The origins of this arrangement are a little mysterious, though most seem to agree that farm workers took up that schedule decades ago, mostly to escape the searing summer heat.
But for years now, siestas have been on the decline. In 2006, government employees started working 9-to-5, while most other workers kept to the old schedule.
And now Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy wants to formally bring everyone into the fold, in part to be more economically competitive with the rest of Europe.
Rajoy said last week that he would move forward with a law ending the Spanish workday at 6 p.m. if he can form another government, following Spanish elections in December that did not decide a clear winner. That may still be an open question, though opposition parties have also said they would go forward with similar proposals.
Which means that you should get your naps in now. It's always three o'clock somewhere.
In the Civic Ballroom of Hamilton Lodge of 1920s Harlem, satin heels beneath delicate gowns and feathers swept across smooth dance floors. Men who waited to take the stage adjusted their stockings, touched up their rouge. At tables nearby, women sitting together loosened their ties, drawing their hands and foreheads close. “Wigs, where necessary, were in evidence,” says The New York Age in March 1927. “From the garb of a biblical virgin...down to the very sparse attire only seen on burlesque stage of today, accentuated with feminine gesture and lingo, to say nothing of contortions of the hip, formed the make-up of these male masqueraders.”
It was only the last line that pointed at the radical nature of the event. “All’s well that ends well,” noted the Age, “The police did not find it necessary to raid.”
During the “Pansy Craze” from the 1920s until 1933, people in the lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer (LGBTQ) community were performing on stages in cities around the world, and New York City’s Greenwich Village, Times Square and Harlem held some of the most world-renowned drag performances of the time. While dominant American society disapproved of LGBTQ people, they were very fond of their parties. “It’s pretty amazing just how widespread these balls were,” says Chad Heap, a professor at George Washington University and author of Slumming, about the era. “Almost every newspaper article about them has a list of 20 to 30 well known people of the day who were in attendance as spectators. It was just a widely integrated part of life in the 1920s and 30s.”
All of this activity existed during cultural time that, as historian George Chauncey writes in his bookGay New York,many people believe “is not supposed to have existed.” Popular belief often holds that LGBTQ rights and acceptance was a forward-moving machine beginning with the Stonewall Riots in the 1960s, but when comparing Prohibition Era acceptance versus that of the 1950s, it isn’t so. “It’s not just that they were visible, but that popular culture and newspapers at the time remarked on their visibility—everyone knew that they were visible,” says Heap.
Even smaller towns included news stories about female impersonators and drag entertainment. Many African American newspapers, from Harlem, the Pittsburg Courier, and the Baltimore African American had news about drag events on the front page.
Some of the most iconic venues in New York City—like the Savoy, the Rockland Palace in Harlem, the Astor Hotel, and Madison Square Garden—held glamorous beauty contests and performances by drag kings and queens. Thousands of men and women met at these clubs and theaters as a safe space to dress how they wanted, and find friends, lovers and partners.
Drag queens danced, musicians sang songs like “Masculine Women, Feminine Men” in clubs, and lesbians went out to dances dressed to the nines—be it in dresses or tuxes, with many famous blues songs with lyrics talking about female relationships sung by queer women of the time. A popular song called “Boy in the Boat” (a euphemism for a clitoris) says:
“When you see two women walking hand in hand. Just look 'em over and try to understand. They'll go to these parties have their lights down low. Only those parties where women can go.”
Men who dressed as women were often called “pansies”, while women who dressed as men were “bull-daggers” or “bull-dikers.” Chauncey notes in his book that drag performers were “likely to be presented to thousands of spectators, many of whom traveled from other cities, in some of the best-known ballrooms of the city.” Coming out was an initiation into the world of men in sequined dresses and women in white tuxes for drag performers.
In the early 1930s drag king Gladys "Fatso" Bentley played piano and sang amazingly lewd songs and parodies using blues music and popular showtunes. Openly bisexual, Bentley often wore a white tux, a hat, and played up a “bull-diker” image with male impersonation during her act. Garber writes that Harry Hansberry's Clam House “featured Gladys Bentley, a 250-pound, masculine, dark skinned lesbian, who performed all night long in a white tuxedo and top hat. Bentley, a talented pianist with a magnificent, growling voice.” Famous blues singers Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey and Lucille Bogan were also lesbian or bi performers at the time; Bogan’s song B.D. (Bull Dagger) Women Blues sings:
“B.D. women, they all done learnt their plan
They can lay their jive just like a natural man
B.D. women, B.D. women, you know they sure is rough
They all drink up plenty whiskey and they sure will strut their stuff”
Drag queen Francis Renault, who got his start on the Vaudeville circuit, tended to impersonate high-society women and famous historic figures, and eventually opened a club after his own name in Atlantic City. Phil Black often passed as female while dressed in drag, pulling a more conventional female look. Harry S. Franklin wore cloche hats and fur capes over his beaded dresses, with the typical thin brows and dark lips that were in vogue. At one point, drag queen Gene Malin was the highest-paid nightclub entertainer in New York.
Rather than curtail the supposed moral decay of the American people, Prohibition played a huge part in making all these fantastic parties happen. Alcohol brought people together, but Prohibition gathered them in new combinations. The Harlem Renaissance was in full effect, and white LGBTQ people found out about the clubs and societies among Harlem’s black LGBTQ performers, frequented these parties, and often became part of them. Suddenly, when everyone was on the search for newly illegal alcohol, black and white gay and lesbian life came into contact with one another and dominant society.
And for a while, dominant society loved it.
The Rockland Palace’s Hamilton Lodge could hold up to 6,000 people—and it was often packed for its annual Masquerade ball and frequent drag shows. With probably the best tabloid headline ever written, “FAG BALLS EXPOSED. 6,000 CROWD HUGE HALL AS QUEER MEN AND WOMEN DANCE.” The Vanderbilts, the Astors, and others from high society often came to watch.
These drag balls, in some form, may have come from masquerade balls combined with gay nightlife of the late 1800s. “By the 1890s there were a number of dance halls and entertainment venues in the Bowery area that had what we would now call drag entertainment,” Heap explains. While the Hamilton Lodge Ball may have begun in the 1860s or ‘70s, it probably didn’t gain a predominantly gay and lesbian presence until the 1920s. By the mid-30s, it was the largest annual ball held in New York, attracting spectators who were gay, lesbian, straight, black and white all at once.
In the clubs of Greenwich Village, the bohemian, artistic stereotype often gave cover for LGBTQ people, as did the theater district of Times Square; as outsiders, artists and theater-workers were a little more open-minded to what the dominant society believed were “deviants.” Chauncey writes that even “the most “obvious” gay men stood out less in Times Square.”
An advertisement for Francis Renault at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (Photo: Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives)
During the Pansy Craze, the phrase “coming out”, when someone in the LGBTQ community tells larger society of their gender or sexual identity, had a different use than it does today. In the ‘20s and early ‘30s, coming out had to do with making a debut into the gay and lesbian world, and was derived from when wealthy women would “come out” formally into high society. Steven Watson in his book The Harlem Renaissance quotes Richard Bruce Nugent saying, ”You didn't get on the rooftop and shout, 'I fucked my wife last night.' So why would you get on the roof and say 'I loved prick.' You didn't. You just did what you wanted to do. Nobody was in the closet. There wasn't any closet."
Still, LGBTQ men and women were sometimes living double lives, hiding their identities from their coworkers or engaging in “lavender marriages”; legal marriages for the purpose of a "cover" (though some may have also been marriages of bisexual couples). Queer men and women who didn’t live publicly as a pansy or a bulldagger didn’t necessarily “identify” as anything in particular, even if they acted on their desires and had same-sex partners.
“They didn’t see a conflict between not being openly gay at work and sort of only being gay during their leisure time,” says Heap, adding that a person’s class was likely indicative of how you might participate in gay and lesbian culture at the time. “These were moments when working class gay men and women could more freely explore their sexuality, desires, and interests in cross dressing, but probably no doctor or lawyer is going to dress up in drag at these events, out of risk of being exposed.” Most middle and upper class gay men and lesbians sat in the upper booths at drag events among straight people, using the popularity as a cover.
There may not have been an official closet, but as indicated by the famous Stonewall riots of the ‘60s just a few decades later, the toleration of the community didn't continue forever. Sodomy laws that had been updated in 1923 were enforced heartily, and in the ‘30s the cultural reactionary force against visible LGBTQ identities was strong. Sex-crime panic grew, and gay men and lesbians were seen as dangerous to society. Prohibition was repealed, and the New York State Liquor laws were updated to serve alcohol only in places that were “orderly”, which didn’t apparently include gay and lesbian nightclubs.
Women dressed for a drag ball at Webster Ball. (Photo: Public Domain)
“To use the modern idiom,” Chauncey writes, “the state built a closet in the 1930s and forced gay people to hide in it.” In the mid ‘30s, production codes were put into effect that restricted and prevented performances of openly gay characters in film or in theater, and in the following decades, thousands of LGBTQ people were arrested post WWII for frequenting their own clubs. Drag balls continued, with each new generation of drag performers seemingly picking up the torch as needed. Often in a smaller, more segregated form, the impetus for large groups of people to flock to one location to watch drag performances disappeared, taking much of the history of the pansy and lesbian craze performances with it.
The Pansy and Lesbian craze of the 1920s was influential, and almost surprisingly open to LGBTQ activities to the modern eye, but when presented with the information about the popularity of drag balls of the time, it’s unbelievable that knowledge of them had almost been forgotten completely. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 80s that historians examined this part of gay and lesbian life.
Now, among drag queens and kings around the country, and the roaring popularity of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, the seeds of costume and performance and identity and oppression and celebration seem more rooted than ever in the pansies and bull daggers of the early ‘20s and ‘30s. “It’s not just that there’s the moment in time that’s been forgotten, but how visible, how integrated into American nightlife, and how popular this form of entertainment was,” says Heap. “There was this new moment of possibility and flowering of nightlife that had been spectacularly forgotten.”
Six sniffer dogs that were terrible at their jobs failed to find any cocaine or heroin after six months of work at Manchester Airport in England, authorities said in a report on Thursday.
One of them, who maybe likes jokes, persistently turned up a lot of cheeses and sausages, though.
The British government spent £1.25 million, or around $1.7 million, on the animals, which were supposed to be highly trained to sniff out banned substances.
A few things that the dogs did turn up, after months of futilely nosing around carry-on bags and checked luggage: 46,000 cigarettes, $28,000 in cash, and around 400 pounds of illegal meat, according to the Guardian.
“A senior manager agreed that there was a lack of innovation in the use of the dogs and told us that a new management structure was being put into place to take a fresh look at their deployment,” the report said, according to the Guardian.
Here's some "innovation": Not all dogs are good. Some, especially the gluttonous, might even be bad. Consider this before you spend your next $1.7 million.
Straka Academy, the seat of the Czech government. (Photo: Packa/CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Czech Republic is expected to change its English name to one-word: Czechia, part simplification, part marketing move for a country currently saddled with a 14-character moniker.
The move, which is expected to be officially cemented Thursday by the country's leadership, is a push to make it easier for companies and sports teams, among others, to represent the country internationally (and, possibly, for fans to tweet about it).
The old name will formally stick around, however, in the same way that The French Republic goes by France.
The country was created in 1993 after the breakup of Czechoslovakia. Some had been using "Czech" for short since then, but, as the BBC points out, Czech is an adjective.
Generally speaking, like most people in the FOIA community, my interest in public records stems from a desire to know what and why my government is doing, and the always pleasant surprise that I am legally owed an answer. Specifically speaking, I wanted to know who at the National Security Agency signed off on making a saxophone-playing squirrel in safety goggles their kid-friendly mascot.
The CryptoKids, if you're not aware, was a mid-2000s attempt by the NSA to appeal to the youth of today by creating a crazy cartoon cadre of codebreakers that's one pair of rollerblades away from a cease and desist from Burger King. It was generally considered a terrible idea, and then after news broke about the whole "spying on citizens" thing, an absolutely terrible idea.
The more I thought about CryptoKids, the more questions I had about the program - from little things, such as "how much does it cost to make bad propaganda," to larger ethical considerations, like "how can Joules have a pet dog that acts like a dog when one of her friends is ananthropomorphized dog whose literal last name is 'Dog'?"
So one of the very first FOIAs I filed when I started at MuckRock was a request to the NSA for the development docs related to the program.
To my shock, but not quite awe, I received a response within a matter ofdays, which included my "first initial release" of pre-processed documents. Granted, those documents were not really what I was looking for - just internal NSA newsletters patting themselves on the back for such a totally KEWL idea ...
But hey, I got something out of the NSA, and on my first try at that! This FOIA thing is pretty great. Don't know what those folks on #FOIA are complaining about. So I set my request status as "Partially Completed" and eagerly prepared myself for my next installment, which I was sure was in final stages of review, if not in the mail already.
That was almost two years ago, and since then I have not received a single update on the status of my request.
Sadly, knowing what I know now about the NSA's FOIA policies, it's entirely possibly that the request doesn't even have a case officer assigned it as yet. That alone can take over a year and a half, and once they've begun processing, the CryptoKids could be out of college by the time they're done.
But to be fair, knowing that this is, as of publication, the actualCryptoKids homepage and not an Internet Archive screengrab ...
Does dull the sting a little.
And so, that is how the CryptoKids stole my FOIA innocence. I still have questions about the government, and I do expect answers ... I just learned not to hold my breath waiting for one specific question and one specific answer.
Laredo, England's only Wild West town. (Photo: Courtesy Laredo Western Club)
It started with a cabin. A small, wood cabin with a pot-bellied stove and enough room for a few friends to have a drink after a day’s riding. Then another wood building, grafted it on to it like a tree branch. One by one, other buildings, weather-beaten clapboard painted sober colors, joined it—the bank, the apothecary, the Lonesome Dove Mining Co., the blacksmith’s, a printer’s shop called Epitaph, the dry goods store, the jail, the two-storey saloon and hotel.
Now, 40 years later, Laredo, a border town in the American West from back when it was wild, rises improbably out of a wet, green field in the English countryside.
“The original building was what we are standing in front of now, but it wasn’t a photographers’, it was just a shack,” explains Colin “Cole” Winter. Winter, 71, has been a member of the Laredo Western Club, the group responsible for the replica American Wild West town we’re standing in, for more than 30 years. In that time, the town has grown “like a town would grow,” says Winter. The single “shack” is now a sturdy photographer’s studio with a plate glass window, sharing a wall with the Wells Fargo and Co.; every one of the 24 buildings in the town, flanking a muddy central boulevard, was raised and built by members of the club, signs painted by hand.
Laredo, rising out of a field on a farm in Kent. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
There is no running water or electricity, but there are gaslights and woodstoves (practically, bright red, hand-painted “Fire” buckets are everywhere). We are still in England, just a 35-minute train ride through unlovely suburbs and lovely countryside from London to a Kentish village, and there are some giveaways; the weather, for example, is damp and chilly in a way England excels at. But members have worked hard to create the illusion that we’re standing on the main drag of a hardscrabble town in the barely settled American West, sometime between the 1860s and the 1890s. And weirdly, wonderfully, it succeeds.
People everywhere love the mythos of the American Wild West—the rugged individualism, glorification of freedom and honor and true grit, when the good guys carried rifles and themselves with integrity and the bad guys were easy to spot—and Laredo is not the only replica Western town in the world. Predictably, a number of fake Wild West towns are scattered across the actual American West, places where tumbleweeds, dust, and endless blue skies are naturally occurring. In 2015, a one-acre fake Wild West town in Valley Centre, California went on sale for $950,000, the price of a one-bed flat in London; the town, complete with a train station and jailhouse, had previously been used for filming. In 2012, billionaire Bill Koch—the younger brother of conservative string-pullers David and Charles Koch—made headlines with his plans to build his own Western town of some 50 buildings in Colorado. Koch, known to his friends as “Wild Bill”, told planning officials that the 420-acre plot, in the middle of his massive 6,400-acre Bear Ranch, would be a living repository for all his Western memorabilia, open only to select guests, family and friends.
The Bathhouse—also the ladies' and gents' toilets, with cold running water and drinking water. Sanitation might not be period correct, but it's definitely necessary. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
Even outside of America, the draw of the Wild West is strong. Pullman City in Eging Am See in the Bavarian Forest is the life’s work of a group of Wild West enthusiasts who transformed a former fairytale theme park into a Western town. Germans seem to have a particular thing for the Wild West: In a suburb of Berlin sits the Cowboy Club Old Texas, a collection of 21 Western-themed buildings built up by the club members since the 1970s; once a month, the club throws western-themed parties there. There are three wild West theme parks in Almeria, Spain, whose geography more readily evokes the American west and where several 1960s and ‘70s Hollywood Westerns were filmed. (Not that people always stay interested: Western Village, a Wild West theme park north of Japan, was built for $27 million in 1975 that featured animatronic gunslingers and dentists, a model Mount Rushmore, and mechanical panda cars but closed in 2007 after years of foundering public interest. The site has been left to creepily, quietly molder away.)
But Laredo is the only Western town in the UK. It was not, like the towns in California or Almeria, built for filming; it’s not a theme park, and it’s not the private playground of a billionaire. For the people who built for themselves and who love it, Laredo is a living, breathing Western town. Even if it only really comes to life every other weekend.
View of the blacksmith’s from the balcony of the Silver Palace Hotel and Saloon. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
Jolene Truder inherited Laredo from her father, John “JT” Truder, when he died three years ago at the age of 84; she lives in a house on the property. She met us on the front porch of the hotel, wearing practical mud boots and a warm rain jacket. In her life outside of Laredo, she works at a nearby grocery store, and has two children, an 11-year-old about to leave primary school and 18-year-old university student.
John Truder, she says, was a pig farmer who fell in love with the mythos of the American West watching westerns at Saturday matinees. “He, as a child, was into the Saturday morning, go to the pictures with his shilling or whatever it was” – “It was a shilling,” Winter interjected – “go and watch a western,” Jolene Truder explains. John Truder certainly wasn’t the only kid in the 1960s and ‘70s who fell in love with Hollywood’s version of the West, and he wasn’t only one to stay in love into adulthood. A number of western clubs, dedicated to a mythical Wild West lifestyle, sprang up across the UK through the ‘80s, right around the apex of the western’s popularity in film. John Truder taught himself to ride Western style, grew his hair long and sported a big handlebar mustache, named his daughter after a country song, and, with the help of likeminded friends, built Laredo. “My dad always looked like a cowboy, there was nothing you could do about it,” Truder remembers with a smile.
Inside Laredo’s general store, with replica canned goods. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
Jolene Truder grew up with Laredo. The first building went up in 1970, before she was born, and the latest, the saddlers at the end of the street promising “good rates and value”, in the last five years. From a child, she spent virtually every weekend in 19th century clothing: When the Western re-enactment club scene was bigger, she said, there were shows, usually gunfights and bank robberies, nearly all the time, either at Laredo or elsewhere, on another club’s patch. As a teenager, it was embarrassing. “I just didn’t tell people,” she says, laughing. “I didn’t tell people at school. But it was really hard for people not to know… When we did French and Saunders and Red Dwarf and things like that, I was still at school, so all of this is on the telly. People are seeing it and I couldn’t get away with it for too long.
“I did get loads and loads of grief. Yeah, loads,” she continued. “I got loads of grief until I’d go, ‘Why don’t you come over?’ and they’d come up and they’d be like, their jaws would drop and that was it. Once a few people had been and seen, their opinions changed dramatically.”
The Livery, a saddlers and the last building built in Laredo, and the Lonesome Dove Mining Co., responsible for the mining camp just beyond the livery. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
It makes sense when you see Laredo. The buildings, even if they were built with the help of power tools, are persuasively period correct. They even have a particular smell: “It’s the lamps and the wood burning and the coal burning, it gives it a sort of smell, if you know what I mean,” said Truder. “It’s an old smell.” Old, not in the sense of something that’s been left to founder, but more in the sense of something transplanted from the past.
One of the things that makes Laredo convincing is that it feels lived in. That’s because at least some of the time, it is. The town is open to club members every other weekend; when they arrive, usually on a Saturday, they have about an hour to get themselves into their period correct clothing, holster their weapons (no live ammunition allowed), and to stash their modern gadgets and gear. Those who have specific roles in the town—Marshal, shopkeeper, bartender—stay in the town Saturday nights, in their part-time homes at the backs of or above their storefronts (these areas are off-limits to visitors without express invitation by their residents). Guests without residences can pay to stay in the hotel, in rooms decorated with antique bedsteads, washbasins, and floral wallpaper, or in the mining camp’s cabins. The hotel, which also houses the bar, is the physical and emotional center of the town, functioning in the same way a real saloon might in a real western town. Some nights, they can pack more than 50 people in there: “We clear the tables and we can have dancing. It’s really nice, you have all the men stood at the bar, it’s lovely,” said Truder.
Inside Laredo’s jail – wanted posters and a gas lamp. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
The general store, stocked with provisions, many of them fake or replica, but some of them not. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
All of this was too magical—and too useful—for location scouts not to eventually notice. On the day I visit, a film crew is clearing up after having spent several days shooting an advertisement (“After me saying how authentic we are, when you walk in here, it’s full of camera gear,” said Winter, opening the door to the hotel). Episodes from popular British televisions shows such as Midsomer Murders and Red Dwarf and more recently, low-budget films like Blood Moon were filmed here, as well as advertisements and photo spreads, and a clutch of pop videos. “Our most famous guest was Johnny Depp. Remember a film called FindingNeverland?” says Winter. The crew spent three days at Laredo, one full day of filming. “We got about 20 seconds in the film. But we also did make a little bit of money, which is why we built the hotel.” Charging production companies to use the place—£1,400 for an eight-hour day—also goes towards the roughly £7,000 in annual building maintenance. “The wooden buildings are lovely, but this climate and wooden buildings? They take constant, constant upkeep,” says Truder.
That work is done by the 50 or so members, who also pay dues; that money also goes towards things like liability insurance. Of those members, the majority are in their 50s and 60s, and there are fewer families than there used to be—the kids have grown up and are too busy with their own children to come out.
But Laredo isn’t actively seeking new membership. If anything, it’s becoming more closed; allowing filming is a necessary financial compromise, but one that both Winter and Truder agree feels invasive. “These are our homes,” she says. Visiting the town is by appointment only, its location given out at members’ discretion. It no longer does the bank robbery or gunfight shows there and stopped holding open days for the public, when, three days after the last open day in August 2014, the town was burglarized. (The thieves stole lamps, stoves, knickknacks; Truder and Winter suspect that someone was trying to outfit their own Laredo knockoff.) They’ve also avoided the press since the last few articles, she said, made them “look like a load of nutcases, eccentric nutcases living in sheds.”
Bar at the Silver Palace, hand built by the members of Laredo and stocked with beer and spirits. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
However, the primary reason Truder says that she doesn’t encourage new members is because this lifestyle is a commitment that she’s not sure many people are prepared for. “I don’t want people to join and then they have to be here and it’s a chore," she says, "You want people who really want to be here.” Members do, of course, have lives outside of re-enacting—Winter, for example, sells items he collects through house clearances on eBay; he also takes care of his grandkids, rides motorbikes, is into ceroc dancing and rock music.
Last year, he saw Iron Maiden at Brixton Academy in London. But Laredo, just as it is for other Laredo members, is a significant part of his identity: “It’s 40 years of my life. I’m 71 and more than half my life, I’ve been playing cowboys,” he said, adding quickly, “Oh, I get told off for saying ‘playing cowboys’—re-enacting.”
Inside Room #6 of the Silver Palace Hotel. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
While the initial draw was perhaps the version of the Wild West offered up by black-and-white TV shows and spaghetti westerns—flashier gunplay, big personalities, bank robberies—current members are much more invested in the quiet details of life in the American west. Club members do extensive research into diaries and photograph archives to figure out what kind of collars men would have actually worn in the 1870s, for example. And they feel an obligation to get it right: Says Truder, “You’re representing a generation that are dead. So do it respectfully.”
Meanwhile, the internet’s growth has made getting it right all the easier; where, as Winter said, Laredo was once informed by Time Life books, re-enactors can now get real answers to questions like whether miners would have used white enamel plates or plain tin. “I think everyone now puts all their energy into getting the buildings correct, getting their selves correct. That’s where the energy is now going. So that we can be the best we can be,” Truder said. “And it’s for ourselves. It’s not about anything else, it’s for us.”
Main (and only) drag of Laredo Town. (Photo: Linda Rodriguez)
It takes a lot of effort to fully immerse yourself in the past every other weekend, to maintain the buildings and the look of the place and find the right clothing. What people get out of it, therefore, needs to be significant. One thing they get is a community of people interested in the same thing, necessarily engaging with one another in real time—the use of mobile phones is punishable by a £10 fine. “You have to actually have a conversation with people!” Truder said with mock shock. There’s also the pride and satisfaction in what they’ve built; said Winter, “When someone comes in and says, ‘That’s absolutely great’ and you think, ‘I was a part of that,’ you know?”
Yesterday morning I woke up, sat on my couch, set a $15 Google Cardboard on my nose—and "stood," for two hours, in a London operating room, as a dozen doctors carved a tumor out of a patient's colon.
This is not an intuitive way for me to start the day. If I ever end up in a real, physical operating room, I'll likely be wheeled in on a gurney. When I texted a second-year med student friend that I was spending my morning virtually scrubbing into a tumorectomy, she replied immediately: "Get ready to be bored." And for the next two hours, I got pretty bored—but I also got the inside scoop on the human body, grew soothed by the soft beeping of various machines, and kept tabs as a few dozen pairs of gloves got slowly bloodier. Along the way, I tapped into a couple of emotional currents I didn't know I would ever be able to access.
This was the first surgery ever broadcast over an immersive VR platform, and I was far from alone in my desire to participate in this small biopsy of history. Classrooms full of med students strapped on headsets to watch. Former hospital workers took a jaunt down memory lane ("my moms at 69 who used to be a candy striper in the 60s is LOVING being back in an OR," tweeted one fan).
Doctors posted pictures of their begoggled faces with notes of encouragement. "Thinking back to my time as a medical student and junior doctor, the only thing that was missing was an anesthetist quietly completing a the Telegraph crossword, while the lead surgeon screamed at me for not knowing the branches of the Mesenteric artery," wrote Dr. Keith Grimes in an after-the-fact blog post. "Oh, and that smell."
To put it in public broadcasting terms, this program was made possible by Dr. Shafi Ahmed, a 44-year-old surgeon and cancer specialist at The Royal London Hospital, and the co-founder of Medical Realities, a company that seeks to broaden the surgical training space by bringing in "virtual reality, augmented reality, and serious games."
Ahmed thinks such immersive tools are the future of surgery, and has spent the past few years suturing these two areas of interest together. In 2014, he removed a liver tumor while wearing Google Glass, streaming the surgeon's-eye-view experience live to 13,000 medical students, and answering their questions aloud as they popped up on his headset. Last year, his company began developing The Virtual Surgeon—a VR game that, he hopes, will eventually let players do the cutting themselves.
For now, the OR's digital interlopers can only watch—an experience which, without Grey's Anatomy-style soundtrack cues and camera angles, turns out to be surprisingly opaque. Doctors and nurses are covered nose-to-toes in almost-identical scrubs, and the gowned patient—in this case, a 70-year-old Londoner—becomes an anonymous square of whatever flesh requires intervention. There isn't a lot for the less educated viewer to grasp onto.
Lacking these dramatic television standbys, I found myself relying on Ahmed as an emotional barometer. He started out downright jovial as he maneuvered the laproscope, talking about what everyone was seeing ("That's the heart, just above the diaphragm… there's the spleen!") and the incredible fact that we were all seeing it.
"This will allow people on a very cheap scale to get access to teaching and training wherever they are," he said, as he excised some scar tissue. I felt my own heart swell. One small snip for man, one giant (budget) cut for mankind.
Immersive, 360-degree livestreaming joins a long legacy of techniques designed to allow interested parties to witness the miracles of modern medicine up close. The early 1800s saw the separation of surgery from other hospital activities; soon after, surgeons began performing for rows upon rows of students and observers in operating theaters, designed less for patient hygiene or comfort than for the spectators' efficient viewing.
In 1947, doctors at New York Hospital sent a live OR broadcast to the American College of Surgeon's conference a few miles away. Surgery today already relies on screens—laproscopies, colonoscopies and other procedures depend on tiny cameras threaded through the bowels, and companies are working on enhancing the associated screens with IMAX-level definition and streaming the footage to educational theaters. Last October, National Geographic showed brain surgery on live TV for the first time, using both handheld and internal cameras.
On paper, going from a theater seat or a screening room to a set of goggles doesn't sound like a big leap. In practice, though, it adds something like an extra sense. "I could choose to watch the anaesthetist if I wanted to, or the scrub nurse," says Flora Malein, who watched the surgery along with the rest of her class at Barts and the London School of Medicine in Whitechapel. Someday, "we could have a 3-D camera attached to the scope in the bowel so that you could look around the inside of the bowel," she predicts. "Now that would be something special!"
Half an hour into the surgery, looking for something special, I found myself "wandering" around the OR, seeing what I could see within the 360 available degrees. One minute, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with one of the surgeons, watching the slight shifts of his elbow as he maneuvered his long-handled scissors deep within the patient's body. The next, I was zoomed in on the laproscopy screen, trying to figure out exactly where we "were" in the tissue. When I got squeamish, I turned my head and examine the shiny tools; when I got bored, I looked up at the skylight.
If you get bored, just go for weird angles. (Screenshot: Medical Realities)
At one point, Ahmed asked a trainee named Katherine to put on a headset and see how things were going for his wider audience. "It feels very real," she reported. "It feels like I'm standing next to you." ("Well, you are, really," Ahmed responded.)
Because so many people can fit into a virtual room, such experiences also enable new conversations. Lydia Nicholas, an anthropologist who studies how medicine and technology interact, has watched a number of live surgeries in plain old 2-D, and says yesterday's broadcast was an entirely different experience. "Livestreaming a surgery over my laptop… I know in my gut that it’s taking place far away," she wrote in an email. "With the VR headset on, we are in the room."
After passing some goggles around her office, she and her colleagues spoke about what they had seen as though they had been more than observers. "It feels like a real experience," she writes. "I think we all learned a little about the physical feeling of surgery—the expert’s technical skill of moving around, interacting between body, equipment and senses."
VR proponents are hoping that, for medical students, this type of viewing experience might translate into increased skill with a real-life scalpel. For me, it was the opposite. About an hour into things, what had been a mostly bloodless jaunt through the digestive system via internal camera suddenly got gory. The doctors opened the patient up and began working directly with the tissue, pulling and snipping much more quickly than before.
Ahmed stopped talking, save for the occasional clipped demand for implements, or for more light. The quiet, two-toned beeps of the machines sped up—or at least they seemed to. A friend who was also watching emailed me: "The doctors are stressed!" I suddenly felt the limits of my "presence" in the room. I was both doubly useless, and doubly aware of my uselessness—even if I had known how to help, I couldn't have. I wasn't really there.
But as things calmed down—and it became more clear that the situation was, and had been, under control—I began to see things in a different way. For those of us who aren't doctors, being thrown into the middle of a surgery is the 21st-century version of bearing witness to a healing ritual—sometimes confusing, sometimes scary, and sometimes downright counterintuitive (isn't anyone else nervous about all that blood?).
As Dr. Ahmed put in the final stitches, I felt both relieved and privileged. This strange confluence of blood and bloodlessness brings together medicine and space-and-time-shifting technology, two of the closest things to magic we've got. In the know or not, why wouldn't we want to hang out in the middle?
John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, is one of the most powerful people in the American political establishment today. He's also the one most likely to talk about UFOs, or as advocates prefer to say these days, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.”
Podesta's credentials as both a political insider and a UFO advocate are sterling. He was White House chief of staff at the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term and, more recently, a counselor to President Barack Obama. Since 2002, Podesta has openly advocated for the public release of documents concerning UAPs and Area 51. Since he’s 67 and presumably will retire sometime, a Hillary Clinton presidency could be his last chance to succeed.
How did Podesta become the highest-powered UFO guy in the country? As he might say, “the truth is out there”—it’s just a matter of looking.
Podesta’s interest in UFO disclosure is usually tied to his X-Files fandom, which appears in the public record in June 1998. Podesta, then deputy chief of staff at the White House, gave a commencement address at Knox College, his alma mater, in which he mentioned the “biggest event of the year...the opening of X-Files: The Movie” and revealed that, in his White House office, he kept “an X-Files shrine, with copies of books, fan magazines, CD-Roms, photos of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.” His advice to graduates? “Summed up in the words of Agent Dana Scully and Agent Fox Mulder," he said, "The truth is out there. Go find it."
Later that month, Podesta was testifying before a grand jury looking for its own truth, about various Clinton-era scandals (real estate deals, Monica Lewinsky, plus all those other conspiracy theories Ken Starr spent years digging into). After being asked to confirm, on his third day before the jury, that he was the same John David Podesta who had appeared before, he noted, “I saw the X-Files over the weekend. I don’t know.” Later in his testimony, he noted that since Air Force 1 and Air Force 2 had “gone off the radar screen coming into LaGuardia recently,” usually a sign of a visit by extraterrestrial intelligence, a colleague had concocted a “new defense that this whole matter is somehow linked to alien abductions.” People laughed. Podesta allowed that it was probably a joke. “When Agents Scully and Mulder are out in those green chairs I’ll really worry,” he said.
That fall, speaking to the White House press corps, Podesta referred to “my well-known fascination with The X-Files, which most of you know about.” (Probably many of them had even seen the desk shrine.) When he was about to be promoted to chief of staff, the beat-sweetening profiles of him that appeared in papers like the New York Timesand Washington Post noted his fandom. “He's been known to pick up the phone to call the Air Force and ask them what's going on in Area 51,” a colleague told the Post. (The Times identified him first as a “roller-coaster enthusiast.”)
So, that part of the truth was out in public: there was an X-Files fan in the White House. Behind the scenes, though, the Clinton administration did consider the question of Area 51, unidentified flying objects, and disclosure. Former President Clinton had aides check out the files on Area 51 and Roswell, most famously.
But advocates for disclosure are more interested in contact between Laurance Rockefeller and the Clinton White House.
Rockefeller was once described to me as “the mystic Rockefeller,” because, alongside more traditional philanthropy, he funded efforts like the Esalen Institute’s exploration of the Soviet Union, including work being done there on parapsychology, and research into remote viewing and psychic communication with machines. In the early 1990s, Rockefeller and colleagues made a concerted push to interest Clinton and his staff in releasing documents about UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. This group did meet with White House staff and was in communication with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and her office about their project.
Podesta’s usually linked to this initiative by inference. He had long advocated opening up government: as a Senate staffer, he worked on the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy and as White House chief of staff promoted the administration’s efforts to declassify previously secret documents. As an X-Files fan, he naturally would have been interested in releasing any secret documents on UFOs, too.
Now, fast-forward to 2002. George W. Bush has become president. September 11th had changed the tenor of American politics. Podesta was doing some work for PodestaMattoon, the lobbying firm that his brother ran: His disclosure forms list as clients, in 2001, the Nevada Resort Association and, in 2002, an insurance association and the private corporation of a Nevada-based developer. (To keep on theme, Nevada is where Area 51 is located.) He had not yet created the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning D.C. think tank that, starting in 2003, would snipe at conservatives, create progressive policy, and ultimately provide a farm team for the Obama White House. He was writing about civil rights in the Bush administration, the Patriot Act, and government secrecy. He was teaching law at Georgetown.
In other words, he was in a bit of a lull, at least by elite D.C. standards.
Around that same time, the SciFi Channel (now SyFy) was working on a mini-series called Taken, a fictional account of three families caught up with the Roswell crash aliens. In connection with the show, the channel launched an effort to release, through Freedom of Information Act requests, government documents related to a couple of particular UFO incidents. They commissioned journalist Leslie Kean to write a report on the government’s failure to investigate UFOs, and they hired PodestaMattoon. (Disclosure reports have the channel paying the lobbying firm $140,000 in 2002.) SciFi, along with Kean, formed the Coalition for Freedom of Information, to organize the FOIA effort, and PodestaMattoon partner Ed Rothschild served as the director.
In October, the SciFi channel also put on an press conference at the National Press Club (one of the main functions of which is hosting sideshow press conferences). Although John Podesta wasn’t on the SciFi account, officially, he appeared at the press conference to advocate for releasing UFO-related documents. “I think it’s time to open the book on questions that have remained in the dark; on questions of government investigations of UFOs,” he said.
Naturally, the SciFi channel got a lot of coverage for the press conference and its push for transparency. As a publicity stunt, it worked beautifully.
That one press conference is the main piece of public evidence of John Podesta’s much-touted UFO obsession. In the years that followed, it became part of the mythology of Podesta, along with his less cuddly alter ego, Skippy, and his annual dance at the CAP Christmas party. It featured, for instance, in this CAP holiday video, made after Obama took office, that joked about mysterious “disappearances” of CAP staff to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Podesta himself spoke only intermittently about the issue. At a conference in 2007, he said again that the government should open the book on UFO investigations. In 2009, he confirmed his previous statements to CNN. In 2010, Leslie Kean published a book on UFOs with a short forward by Podesta. “The time to pull the curtain back on this subject is long overdue,” he wrote. It included the same line as the 2002 press conference. “It’s time to find out what the truth really is that’s out there.” (He has, more or less, used the same exact talking points whenever he speaks about UFO disclosure, for more than a decade.)
Basically, most of what John Podesta has said about UFOs is either a) an X-Files reference or b) about open government, not exactly the kind of issue that normally grabs headline writers.
But in this case, the latter can be tied to aliens. So whenever Podesta does say anything connected to UFOs, even if it’s about disclosing documents, he gets an outsized amount of attention for it. Surely he realized this when in February of 2015, he tweeted that one of his major regrets from 2014 was “once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files. #thetruthisstilloutthere."
Podesta has been advocating outside of public view, too, for UFO disclosure. It first became a topic of conversation in this campaign cycle back in January, when Clinton told a New Hampshire reporter that Podesta had been noodging her about it. “He has made me personally pledge we are going to get the information out,” Clinton said.“One way or another. Maybe we could have, like, a task force to go to Area 51.” And Leslie Kean recently wrote on her Facebook page that “All of us should be grateful to the work of John Podesta behind the scenes.” If Hillary Clinton does get elected, perhaps Americans will learn what truth is really out there.
By now, photographer Elena Chernyshova is used to shooting in cold climates. She spent 10 days at the Kupol Gold Mine in Siberia, which is accessible in winter only via an ice road. She’s documented reindeer hunters in the Arctic Circle. And she has traveled to Russia's Far East Kamchatka Peninsulato photograph the Mutnovskaya Geothermal Power Plant.
The Kamchatka Peninsula is part of the belt of volcanoes around the Pacific Ocean known as the “ring of fire,” which stretches from Chile to New Zealand. Kamchatka has 29 active volcanoes. Four of them erupted on the same day in 2013. It’s an ideal place for Mutnovskaya’s geothermal activity—converting energy from the earth into electricity—despite the hostile winters. In fact, Mutnovskaya generates 30 percent of the energy used by the region.
In 2014, Chernyshova created a photo series documenting the lives of Mutnovskaya's geothermal plant workers. “My story was about energy from hot springs and about workers who are maintaining the plant in mountains in 200 km [124 miles] away from the city,” she says. “I was looking for different kind of scenes that represents people daily life.” Chernyshova photographed the workers watching TV, playing checkers—and enjoying the freezing temperatures.
“After work some men go to relax in the pool of hot water,” says Chernyshova. The temperature in the tub is about 104°F (40°C), compared to the air temperature of 1°F (-17°C). “After staying in the hot water they jumped in the snow to refresh themselves. That was logical, it is what people are used to do, but quite spontaneous at the same time.”
It’s a startling juxtaposition, the bare skin in the piles of snow. But, says, Chernyshova, “Russians who live in the Northern region have very particular, tender relations with snow and ice-water. I was really happy to capture this joy.”
Last weekend, a cat climbed up a pole in Princeton, British Columbia and couldn't get down.
Then things got weird. What started as a classic cat scenario stretched into a days-long saga that involved bureaucratic stalemates, a social media campaign, government intervention, and a lot of poletop overnights for the cat.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Miss Kitty, an orange and white tabby, most likely climbed the sixty-foot pole while fleeing another neighborhood cat. Her owner, Bill Backhall, spotted her up there on Monday morning. Even beyond the height—the cat was six stories in the air—it was "a desperate situation," he said. Nearby birds of prey were eyeing her as you might a skewered morsel. Video footage shows Miss Kitty meowing in distress while perched on the pole's crossbeam. She needed to get down quick.
But when Backhall called the city for help, this average pet disaster turned into a full-scale bureaucratic nightmare. The pole was the property of private electric company BC Hydro, and it was supporting lines that carried 138,000 volts of electricity into a nearby mine. Taking an average cat rescue team up near such high-voltage wires wasn't an option, but neither was switching off the power. Backhall and BC Hydro were at an impasse.
That's when the public came to the rescue. After local cat lover Natalia Bosley learned of the situation, she took to social media, mobilizing backers under the hashtag #savethePrincetonBCcat. Worried neighbors surrounded the pole's base with mattresses. Cats countrywide posted selfies in support. Even BC parliament member Dan Albas Tweeted his attendant anxiety.
As tensions heightened along with the cat, Bosley posted updates on Facebook. "Tonight will be its fourth night up there and it's very scared," she wrote on Wednesday. "It keeps climbing higher up the pole."
The outcry worked. Last night, BC Hydro sent a crew from three hours away to bring down Miss Kitty in a special cherrypicker. "After" photos show her posing contentedly in a carrier, safe in the arms of a reflective-vested crew member.
As for Miss Kitty, hopefully four high-altitude nights were enough for a lifetime. According to Backhall, she will be staying inside from now on.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
When the slow dreariness of long Friday afternoon sets in, a pick-me-up is just what is needed to get the weekend finally started. In place of a coffee (or for those more zealous, a beer) comes this video, which shows a GoPro being launched off of a Navy aircraft carrier, using the Navy's new electromagnetic catapult.
There is something very cathartic in watching the sled pick up great speed as the catapult propels it down the deck of the carrier. The moment of release comes when the sled soars off the deck and into the ocean, making contact with the water with a tremendously satisfying plop.
As you watch the GoPro come undone from the sled and bob up to the surface of the water, picture yourself, too, releasing the weight of the week and floating away your worries. Now if only you had a catapult to play with.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Historians claimed this week to have found the living descendants of Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, after tracing the famous artist's genealogy through the centuries.
There are nearly three dozen, the historians say, including an architect and Oscar-nominated director Franco Zeffirelli.
The descendants will likely never be positively confirmed because da Vinci's body was lost in the years after he died (there's a tomb for him in France, but it has never been confirmed that the remains inside are his). The historians, instead, used documents like estate papers to connect the dots of da Vinci's family, according to the Guardian.
Zeffirelli's 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet netted him his only Oscar nomination. He later claimed that he was a descendant of da Vinci while receiving an award in Italy in 2007. Many people, the Guardian says, thought it was a joke.
For a magical time in the 1960s and '70s, your wood-paneled basement hideaway wasn’t worth its weight in cheap weed and questionable acid without a collection of psychedelic blacklight posters. Combining Art Nouveau, Surrealism, Pop Art, and countless other artistic styles with the relatively new (commercially anyway) phenomenon of fluorescence, these glow-in-the-dark posters became an icon of the Summer of Love and its youth culture. Here’s where they came from and how they worked.
The blacklight poster trend has its roots in the 1950s with the introduction of fluorescent paint to the mass market. Invented by brothers Joseph and Bob Switzer in the 1930s, fluorescent paint combined naturally fluorescing minerals and compounds with shellac to create pigments that would take on an eye-searing glow under ultraviolet black lights. They founded the Day-Glo Color Corporation in 1946, giving fluorescent effects their popular nickname, and bringing the effect to the general public.
“[The first hit fluorescent product was] the Hula-Hoop in 1958 made with 'Day-Glo' fluorescent pigments,” says Nick Padalino, owner and operator of Amsterdam’s Electric Ladyland, the first museum devoted to fluorescent art. A year later, Tide released a laundry soap in a plastic bottle made with Day-Glo fluorescent red pigment.
While it wasn’t until the early 20th century that fluorescence began to be used as a common decoration, the effect is a naturally occurring trick of the light. “Fluorescence works through electron displacement—all fluorescence, from synthetic blacklight posters to natural fluorescent minerals around the world,” says Padalino. Fluorescent materials (phosphors) impurities called “activators” that react to normally invisible ultraviolet energy. The ultraviolet energy causes the electrons of the atoms in these activators to move out of balance, expending a small amount of energy that is then released as visible light.
In the case of something like a blacklight poster, this ends up appearing as mind-blowing colors. Unlike standard white light, which is only visible as it is reflected, the light—and therefore colors—coming from blacklight posters (or any fluorescent substance for that matter) is emitted from the atoms that have absorbed the ultraviolet radiation. Far out, man.
By the mid-1960s, fluorescent paints, and products that incorporated them, were not only easy to come by, but found a massive audience in the psychedelic music scene growing out of the counterculture movement, especially in San Francisco. Surreal, psychedelic design began to take over the youth scene thanks to glowing concert posters for bands like the Grateful Dead and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, comic books by the likes of Robert Crumb and Kim Deitch, and underground newspapers like the San Francisco Oracle.
This florescent trend soon incorporated art, quickly making the UV glow a popular motif symbolic of the counterculture. In an essay on psychedelic '60s posters, Sally Tomlinson describes how, in the beginning, the posters were meant “to target a small community assumed to be LSD-savvy.”
Popularized in the youth music scene, blacklight posters began being sold in record stores and head shops. Many of these businesses even built special blacklight rooms where the walls were covered in posters to buy, all illuminated under a UV bulb. In addition to band posters, common subjects for blacklight posters included fantasy tableaus of warriors and scantily-clad women, trippy designs, and really anything one might hope to get lost in while under the influence.
Blacklight posters remained a decorative fixture well into the 1970s, becoming almost synonymous with velvet paintings, another kitsch art form that often incorporated fluorescent paints. Eventually psychedelia began to fall out of popular fashion, and blacklight posters with it, although they never truly disappeared. While the blacklight rooms began to disappear, blacklight posters continue to be sold in head shops and mall novelty stores. There, no matter the temperature or the time of year, the Summer of Love lives on.
The Jamaican government is considering ousting Queen Elizabeth II as their official head of state, in addition to legalizing marijuana, the government revealed Thursday.
The country was ruled by the British for over 300 years, until peacefully gaining their independence in 1962, even as Queen Elizabeth officially remained at top, as she does in other remnants of the British Commonwealth, like Australia and Canada.
The Jamaican proposal, to be decided upon in the next year, would replace her with a Non-Executive President, according to Bloomberg.
A separate proposal would fully legalize marijuana in the country for "specified purposes," though it's unclear what that exactly means.
Awkwardly, the person making both proposals is the Queen's appointed representative in Jamaica, its Governor-General, Sir Patrick Allen. It's also worth noting that despite its cultural reputation, the UN estimated that only around 7 percent of Jamaicans used cannabis in 2014, or less than half the rate of the United States.
Scientists said recently that the universe is getting bigger so quickly that it's starting to clash with the laws of physics, according to Nature.
The expansion of the universe can be measured directly with the Hubble Space Telescope, which looks at how fast galaxies are moving away from the Milky Way galaxy.
Powered by dark matter and dark energy, studies looking at the expansion have tried to describe how exactly the two forces interact to make the universe bigger.
The biggest study came up with a model for predicting the universe's size at any given age, from hundreds of thousands of years ago to present day. But the present day findings usually conflicted with Hubble's direct measurements, though often within the margin of error.
But more recent measurements from the Hubble have made that yawning gap harder to ignore, and in the new study, released last week, scientists said that the universe was expanding a full eight percent faster than the model.
If the findings are confirmed, scientists said, it might be time to revisit the model, and potentially rewrite the laws of physics.
