Before the days of WikiHow articles that diligently teach you how to shower, there was this 1950s instructional video on proper care for your hair.
"Wash your hair frequently," the video instructs, "once every two weeks." Though the twice a month water-and-soap method might not line up with modern standards of shampooing, you can't deny the luster of the featured locks.
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.
Dan Brown, who gave us tomes like The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, and words like "symbologist," is donating €300,000, or around $337,500, to a Dutch library with a vast collection of books and other materials about ancient mysticism, according to the Guardian.
Brown says Amsterdam's Ritman Library was a big inspiration for him, especially when he was writing 2009's The Lost Symbol and 2013's Inferno. Both novels continue the story of Robert Langdon, a professor who discovers clues in symbols and cracks dangerous international mysteries; Indiana Jones, in other words, but less active.
All of those symbols and conspiracies, though, had some real-life inspiration, and Brown says that a large part of it came from the texts at the Ritman Library, which has around 25,000 manuscripts and books, nearly 5,000 of which are dated before 1900.
Brown said he has spent a lot of time in the library over the years doing research, and he announced the donation in a YouTube video last week.
“They are currently embarking on a bold quest to digitize and preserve an enormous part of their collection, and I feel very honored to play a small part in that process," Brown said, according to the Guardian. "I look forward with enormous anticipation to the day coming very soon when people around the world will be able to access these texts."
Plenty of people, of course, already have access to Dan Brown's texts, digital or not. Over 30 million copies of The Lost Symbol are in print across the world. There are 384 used copies available on Amazon, as of this writing, many for just a penny.
Beijing's Donghuamen Night Market has been selling bug delicacies for over three decades, but its time selling edible scorpions on a stick, among other items, is now drawing to a close. According to the Australian Associated Press, the market, usually teeming with customers, will close Friday.
The market is popular with tourists and locals alike, but after loud criticism from neighbors—it can get quite noisy and is said to smell like "stinky tofu"—authorities decided to shut it down, according to the AAP.
Opened in 1984, the market isn't all bugs: it also carries a wide variety of Chinese food items, from egg rolls to duck, even if bugs are what made it famous. Located in the center of Beijing on a street only around 1,000 feet long, the market has become a popular destination in recent years.
But officials recently became concerned over a lack of proper storage for the food, according to the AAP. That the market tended to leave its waste in the middle of the street also didn't help.
Which all means you have three days to witness the spectacle for yourself. And even though Donghuamen is closing, bug eating is far from done. It is, in fact, our future.
Adults and children gather in front of the man known as the Bug Whisperer. In a soft voice, he expounds on the virtues and idiosyncrasies of his live cockroach collection. Faces young and old fix their attention on the tiny, unusual pets and the magnetic charm of the man with a thick afro. Three different species of roach stand calmly on his left hand. Aaron Rodriques’ show is in full swing on a warm Brooklyn afternoon in June.
Rodriques has been raising insects for over 20 years. He knows what his pet bugs like to eat, their favorite types of shelter and what makes them nervous. It’s because of this that the creatures are more relaxed in his presence. His scent sends a positive message to the roaches, he says. And this connection extends to the other bugs he keeps as pets too.
A friend first suggested the "Bug Whisperer" moniker as a joke, he recalls. But the nickname stuck. “I believe I have a special understanding of their behavior and psyche,” says Rodriques, 26, who has an M.A. in biology, and starts his PhD in entomology this fall. “I've never had a general sense of fear regarding insects, and without this barrier it is much easier to try and make sense of their behaviors."
Rodriques shows the crowd his pet cockroach
At the talk in June he wore a bright green brooch in the shape of a housefly on the neckline of his sweater, and attempted to demonstrate how humans can forge connections with insects. The reaction in the crowd is visceral when he parades around a big hairy, yet harmless, tarantula. Many bugs and arachnids are misconstrued as aggressive, he says.
By acclimatizing different insect species with one another at his home, Rodriques says they become more accepting of interactions with different species. It all contributes to something vital: “they trust you.”
Aaron Rodriques, the bug whisperer.
This idea of human-insect habituation is rooted in academic research. “There is evidence that a variety of insect species can be “tamed” following prolonged contact with or handling by humans,” writes Hank Davis, an expert in evolutionary psychology, in an article about the Hissing Cockroach.
Davis wondered whether the cockroach might alter its habit of hissing when it became more accustomed to humans. “Yes, they can discriminate between humans,” Davis confirms in a phone interview from Guelph, Canada. “If the same person picked them up and engaged several times that hissing response would cease to occur,” he adds.
Insects are highly sensitive to different odors, the sense known as olfaction. This may help explain why Rodriques and other insect pet owners believe insects recognize them, writes Robert Matthews, a professor in entomology and an expert on insect behavior, in an email from Ecuador. “If repeated handling never gives the insect any negative reinforcement, it can learn not to worry when handled–i.e., it habituates to that odor."
Rodriques with his pet tarantula at the Brooklyn Makers Market.
At the event in Brooklyn, Rodriques is more than happy to explain to visitors to his stall what makes each insect special. He gives one woman a very detailed description about the particularities of the Carolina sphinx moth, also called the Tobacco Hornworm, a luminous blue creature that eats tobacco and uses the nicotine it consumes as a defense mechanism against predators.
Rodriques transports his bug zoo by train from his home in the Bronx–the pet bugs plus an eel, a few geckos, two toads and two crabs in a large suitcase, sports bag and plastic trash bag. He owns about 40 species in total. Many pets live in his bedroom but he is considering moving them all down to the basement when summer temperatures rise.
The petting zoo show is a fairly regular occurrence and it makes him a busy man. During the week he works at New York University, his alma mater, as a technical writer for the I.T. department. But, he says, the shows are worth it and have been since the first one he did at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn just over a year ago.
“One of the best experiences of my life," he says. "I felt like I had such a wealth of knowledge about these animals but I usually don’t share with people because they’re not interested or they’re afraid of insects. So I kind of kept it to myself."
Have you ever stroked a tarantula?
Rodriques admits that because his animals are known for their docility, it gives the audience the illusion of a special type of control befitting a bug whisperer. Far from being insignificant, quick-to-perish creatures, he explains that some insects can live for a number of years. These are some of the many reasons they are suitable as pets.
The Bug Whisperer was always captivated by creepy crawlies. By the age of three or four, he already had ants and beetles in his possession. “I loved their shiny exoskeletons, the way they eat and interact with one another, and their ease of care,” he says.
After a day at work he comes home to feed his pets; another bonding experience. “Not that they are affectionate to you," he admits. "But they become more accustomed to your handling."
A Deinacrida heteracantha, type of cricket found in New Zealand. (Photo: Dinobass/CC BY-SA 4.0)
In far north New Zealand, on the edge of the Pacific, lies Little Barrier Island. There, on 11 square miles of mountainous terrain, you might find the Godzillas of the cricket world: Deinacrida heteracantha, or Wetapunga. The giant weta can grow up to 4 inches long and the largest ever found weighed 2.5 ounces and happily snacked on a carrot.
Other bugs have their own goliath versions as well. The Lord Howe Island stick insect—also known as the ‘tree lobster’—can measure up to nearly 5inches in length. The wingspan of at Atlas Moth is between 10-12 inches. More terrifyingly, the 2-inch long Asian Giant Hornet has a quarter-inch stinger with which to dispense its venom.
For Bug Week, Atlas Obscura has rounded up some of the world’s largest insects. From the goliath beetle to the Amazonian giant centipede, they all have one thing in common: they are the behemoths of their species.
An Asian Giant Hornet (Vespa mandarinia), found in East Asia. (Photo: Justin/CC BY 2.0)
The elephant beetle (Megasoma elephas), most commonly found in Mexico, Central and South America. (Photo: Bonita R. Cheshier/shutterstock.com)
Researchers from the University of Iowa have begun mapping the extensive network of abandoned “beer caves” that run beneath Iowa City using state-of-the-art lasers in an archeological project that sounds like a beer commercial.
The old Union Brewery, which was originally founded in 1856, produced Graf's Golden Brew and became one of three breweries in the city. The Union Brewery is particularly memorable for its brewmaster having in part led the Iowa City beer riots during the state's first stab at prohibition. But before the teetotalers drove the industry out of the city, the breweries created beer caves dozens of feet below street level that would used for storage, fermentation, and transport of their product. Once the breweries went out of business, the old caves were left abandoned.
Today, the beer caves are a well known, if little-visited, facet of the city, and still hold a wealth of untouched historic knowledge. As reported in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, a group of students, faculty, and state archaeologists have set about mining the caves for their secrets using a system of lasers that will create a 3-D image of the caves. They are using a so-called Light Detection And Ranging system, which scans the entire space with pulses of reflected laser light.
Eventually the collected data is hoped to be used to create a fully-explorable virtual version. Which sounds like the perfect promotional event for a beer company.
Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita, was an avid collector of butterflies. Obsessed with their beauty, he would often spend more time working on his butterflies than on his novels. The world over is filled with people who study, collect, obsess and generally find insects to be creatures of beauty, fascination, and wonder. The most serious among them become professionals, entomologists who devote their lives to the study of the world's smaller citizens.
In honor of Bug Week, we attempt to honor the world's entomologists by pulling from our compendium of over 9,000 curious places around the world, to create this, our essential guide to an entomologist’s dream vacation.
Vladimir Nabokov's butterfly collection in the Nabokov Museum. (Photo: Wikimedia)
Best known for the literary masterpieces he authored, Vladmimir Nabokov was also a self-taught lepidopterist, utterly fascinated by butterflies. Today, entomologists and literature fans alike can learn from his extensive research of the winged insect, on display at his childhood home in Russia. [Read more]
Palaeovespa florissantia, a fossil wasp, forms the logo for Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. (Photo: Wikimedia)
As the largest source of fossilized insects anywhere in the world, the Florissant Fossil Beds are a rare opportunity to travel back in time to examine prehistoric insects. These fossils date back nearly 35 million years ago, to when volcanic eruptions buried the area, a treasure trove of insight into prehistoric insect life. [Read more]
Tennessee synchronous fireflies light show (Screenshot via YouTube)
One firefly illuminating the night sky is a enchanting sight, but a whole group of them blinking in unison is an incredible, and quite mysterious, phenomenon, one that scientists have only recently began to understand. The fireflies of the Great Smoky Mountains provide a perfect place to both study a fascinating phenomena and see insects at their most magical. [Read more]
Glowworms in the Caves of Waitomo. (Photo: Atlas Obscura User)
Bioluminescence is one of the most fascinating and beautiful phenomena to observe in living creatures, and in few places is it more striking than in the Waitomo cave system, where thousands of bioluminescent fungus gnats—better known as glowworms—hang like shimmering lights from above. [Read more]
For any entomologist the chance to see an unusual specimen is a delightful one. Ball’s Pyramid is the chance to see a specimen that is not only rare, but returned alive from 70 years of extinction. [Read more]
This little-known repository is a lepidopterist's dream: The collection contains many unique and rare insect specimens, including over 10,000 different kinds of butterflies. [Read more]
US National Tick Collection. (Photo: Georgia Southern University)
For the admirable entomologists that specialize in these blood-suckers, this skin-crawling collection more than a million tick specimens is an invaluable resource. And because these tiny insects are carriers of various diseases, the U.S.'s national repository of ticks is not just one of the world’s largest curated displays, it’s also a crucial research center for public health—a worthy stop on an entomology world tour. [Read more]
For lepidopterists who wish to see the monarch butterfly in its natural habitat, there may be no better place than the mountains of Mexico, where thousands of monarchs migrate for the winter months, blanketing the forest in a sea of orange. [Read more]
Many bugs have sacrificed their lives so that humans might study them. In a remarkable show of gratitude, a Japanese aristocrat who commissioned a 19th century scientific text of anatomical renderings of insects, erected a memorial monument to honor those bugs that gave their lives for science. A perfect place for an entomologist to end their trip, and honor the tiny creatures who they have studied. [Read more]
Scientists in Japan have recently created a drone to target insects eating and destroying crops.
Meet the Agri Drone.
The team, made up of researchers and I.T. specialists based out of Saga University in southern Japan, wanted to cut down on the use of pesticides and tap into the ever-expanding drone marketplace.
The farmer-friendly robot has already completed successful test runs over soy and sweet potato fields, taking out 50 different crop eating pests including moths, midges and white-backed planthoppers, according to Rocket News 24.
In the video you can see the Agri Drone out on patrol. It uses an ominously-named pesticide canon with infrared technology to root out areas rampant with bugs. The patrols often take place in the early hours when farmers are not working the fields.
And if the farmer wants to completely rid his land of pesticides, the Agri Drone has that covered too. The robot has a "bug zapper" fixed to the bottom, which, according to Rocket News 24, enables the drone to engage in the bug equivalent of hand to hand combat.
The technology is still in the test phase, however. But with more successful missions out in the fields of Japan, bugs better beware: Agri Drone is coming.
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.
If, in the 1950s, you were a Seattle mom skeptical of newly government-run ferries, Reg Miller and Ann Green had some very compelling reasons for you to try them out, reports a local Washington historian.
Let’s hear it, Reg:
“For the child, there’s the exciting maritime activity of Seattle’s harbor, busy with ships of every size and kind, the thrill of passing over the smooth surface of Elliott Bay aboard a powerful ferryboat in the midst of all this aquatic hustle and bustle.”
What do you have to say, Ann?
“How pleasant the coolness of Puget Sound breezes to mother! She can relax, do a bit of knitting of sewing, read a story in her latest woman’s magazine, or just take it easy and enjoy herself."
Reg Miller was a real person, a radio announcer at KJR. Ann Green was not—she was a character dreamed up to convince the public to take the Washington State Ferries. Recently, a staff member of the Washington State Archives turned up the scripts written for the two of them to plug the ferry system. Before the 1950s, the harbor was navigated by private ferries; now they government was taking over.
The PR person in charge of the campaign, a “former New York publicity woman” who also designed stained glass windows, wasn’t a fan of Ann or the style of the scripts. “Regarding any plugs for the ferry system — they should be extremely subtle," she wrote.
Her advice was ignored. But the ferries caught on anyway. And why wouldn’t they? With“snacks for hungry young appetites, as well, quickened by the fresh air and walks along the promenade deck” (thanks, Reg) and “the view of surrounding foothills and mountains,” (thanks, Ann) they sound like a very pleasant mode of transportation.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
The famed picture of Pizza Café owner Joe Carrazza with his locust pizza. (Photo: Courtesy of Glenn Milne)
A swarm of locusts, a mayor with an idea, and photograph of a pizza—it was the recipe for a global sensation.
In April 2010, the southeast Australian country town of Mildura, population 35,000, was plagued with the biggest swarm of locusts the area had seen in decades.
Seeking a creative way to cover this unprecedented invasion, the Herald Sun newspaper approached Mildura mayor Glenn Milne, who is also a freelance photographer. Milne initially wanted to take a photo of a local chef using the locusts in a chocolate dish, but after that chef rejected his idea, the mayor turned to one of his favorite local eateries—the Pizza Café, owned by Joe Carrazza.
Milne had Carrazza pose for a “quirky photograph” in which he held up a pizza topped with locusts. “He was happy to do that,” Milne said. The photo appeared alongside a tongue-in-cheek Herald Sunstory that presented several ways to serve up locusts in a meal.
A swarm of locusts interrupting a rugby game. (Photo: Courtesy of Glenn Milne)
When the Herald Sun approached Milne, he said, they wanted a photo that was all in good fun. They never expected anyone to actually eat the pizzas, for Carrazza to put locust pizza on his menu, or for anyone to be convinced that the locals were chowing down on this dish. But that’s not what happened. What started out as a joke turned into a worldwide phenomenon.
According to Milne, after Australia’s public broadcaster put the story on its website, the internet couldn’t get enough of it. The story spread faster and farther than the swarm of locusts it chronicled.
“The web picked it up around the world, and it just went crazy. Everybody was ringing us up asking us if we’re eating locust pizza. It just went viral,” he says.
Two days after the initial story by the Herald Sun, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation wrote a piece about it, followed by the website DNA India. Next came a piece in the New York Daily News and features on the websites Metro, Serious Eats, and Trend Hunter.
Headlines from (top) NY Daily News; Serious Eats; Trend Hunter; ABC News; DNA India
Soon, a Korean TV station had taken notice of the story, Milne said, and some producers flew down to film a feature story to broadcast all over their country. And within a couple of days, the story had been picked up by a newspaper in the U.K. Milne found out when his sister texted him from London, having seen the locust pizza photograph on the front page.
In his home country, the joke photograph landed Milne in some hot water—his status as mayor at the time led some to question his intentions.
“The Drive Time [radio] program [in Sydney] is the most popular, and they sort of said, ‘Well, what’s this all about?’ and I said ‘You know, it’s a bit of a joke.’ And so they said to me, ‘What? You’re the mayor. You’re a politician. And you lied basically.’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah, if you like to put it that way.’”
Mayor Glenn Milne of Mildura holding a locust pizza. (Photo: Courtesy of Glenn Milne)
Despite the international recognition, Milne never once tried a slice of locust pizza. “I’m not really big into eating insects,” he says.
But that doesn’t mean others around the world haven’t tried them. In fact, they’re considered quite delicious in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
The protein content in locusts varies from around 50 to 60 percent, according to the books Insects by Steven Parker. This means their protein content is comparable to that of raw beef. They’re also known to have around a 12 percent fat content and many nutrients like calcium, magnesium, iodine, phosphorus, and riboflavin.
The mayor says he never intended to deceive anyone but that he didn’t regret the effects his little joke had.
“Look, I don’t apologize,” he told the hosts of Drive Time, “because we got fantastic publicity out of it, and it’s been good fun.”
Let's "settle this dispute with a dance-off" is popular retort from pacifists the world over. A reasonable method to resolve longstanding grudges or incidents of dishonor.
But as you can see in this video, these dancers appear to take their duel a step further. The video begins as the female protagonist angrily stomps her foot, which encourages the man, now in shot, to lock eyes on the dance floor. Onlookers in evening dress look puzzled. After a few moves, the man grabs the woman by the throat and seems to throw her across the room. This is the Apache Dance.
Don't worry! The violence between the two is fake, and a tribute to the original Apache Dance that was created in early 20th-century Paris. A Paris of cabaret dancers, knife-wielding criminals and plenty of vice.
Stanford University dance instructor Richard Powers has traced the genesis of the dance back to a woman called Mistinguette. Rather than representing violence towards the woman, the dance portrayed the female partner as making a statement: she would not be confined to the home and could stand up to a man in the domestic and public sphere.
As you can see from the video, the dance is fought on equal terms. Each partner is slapped, hurled and has their hair pulled. But there is only one winner: our woman protagonist leaves the man in a heap on the floor, face down. The video ends as she saunters off with the loot.
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.
“In many of those countries,” says Conrad Rogue, the founder of the House Alive workshops and author of earthen-construction guidebook House Of Earth, referring to some of the developing nations he’s visited, “building with earth has a stigma of poverty and the olden days.” In the developed world, most notably in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and in parts of the UK, the opposite reaction is growing. People worldwide are discovering, or rediscovering, a building material that’s cheap, strong, energy-efficient, and capable of producing dramatic, unique structures.
They were standing on it all along.
It’s likely that earthen homes were among the oldest structures ever built by humanity. There are a few different techniques and many names for a building made mostly of, well, dirt, but the one that’s caught on in this recent revival of the material comes from England: Cob.
The etymology of the word “cob” is not really known; it may come from an old word for “strike” or “beat,” which is not dissimilar from the way a cob structure is built, or it’s possible that it may come from a noun that meant something more like “lump.”
Regardless, the ground we stand on, provided it’s a dirt-type ground rather than, say, desert sand or stone, generally includes a topsoil, which is composed of (hopefully) fertile rotted dead things. This is what we think of as dirt. Under that is a layer of what’s called subsoil: denser, darker, older, wetter materials consisting of, usually, sand, silt, and clay. It has the ability to be sculpted when mixed with water and then dries hard, just like cement, but even better—and an estimated third of humanity lives in homes made of subsoil.
There are a few different strategies for constructing homes out of subsoil. Rammed earth, for instance, usually requires that a frame is constructed and a subsoil-water mix poured inside before being very tightly compressed, ideally to about half its original volume. When it dries, the frame is removed. But rammed earth is a very labor-intensive process, requiring brute human strength.
Enter cob. It’s constructed of some kind of subsoil, which must include clay—the percentage doesn’t really matter—sand, water, and fiber. Fiber is the big world-shaking addition. “It has the same function as rebar for concrete,” says Rogue (not his given name, but after 30 years in the U.S., he was tired of Americans mispronouncing his Dutch last name), “but instead of using a few strong strands, like in rebar, you use thousands of weaker strands."
What makes cob amazing is that you can use, says Rogue, basically anything as a fiber. “In the United States that's often straw,” he says, “In other countries I've seen pine needles or shredded coconut husks or corn husks.” These fibers, whatever you choose, are mixed into the slurry of clay, sand, and water, which can be done fairly easily by hand with a tool like a pitchfork.
Cob was used to make many European structures, none the least the hobbit-looking houses especially popular in the Celtic countries—Wales, Cornwall, Brittany. By around 1900, though, cob had gone out of fashion in Great Britain and the other countries where it was once dominant, replaced by more modern materials like drywall, plastic siding, treated wood, concrete. But starting in the 1980s, and rapidly accelerating in the past decade, cob has made a comeback, one tied to the sustainability and tiny house movements. Builder Kevin McCabe ushered in the newest cob craze in 1994 when he built a two-story cob house in England, thought to be the first cob house built in that country in 70 years.
An 18th century home in Northamptonshire, in the UK, made from cob. (Photo: Elliott Brown/CC BY 2.0)
Cob has a few major advantages that make it hugely appealing to those movements. For one thing, it’s basically free, and can be harvested with minimal impact on the environment. Subsoil is not much use for farming, and fiber can often be snagged as a waste product. But the material itself is also pretty advanced: cob house walls are built generally to around two feet thick, and due to their density, tensile strength (a construction measurement of the force required to pull it apart), and weight are fantastically strong. It’s often said that if you were to drive a truck into a cob house, you’d find yourself with a totaled truck, but an unscathed house. Centuries-old cob houses survive cheerfully; termites find no appeal in it, and it’s even been found to be more earthquake resistant than almost any other material.
Its density also makes it excellent for heat absorption. In very hot weather, cob houses are cool on the inside, but in cold weather, they retain heat, requiring much less energy to heat or cool than houses made of other materials. Cob houses can be made very large—the Yemeni city of Shibam is known for its ancient cob “skyscrapers,” which rise from three-foot-thick floors to walls about 11 stories tall—but as most cob houses are built by the poor, they tend to be no larger than necessary. Many are very small and very cute, which endears them to the tiny house movement.
Architects, artists, and tinkerers also love cob, because cob buildings do not require straight lines, unlike those made of, say, wood or concrete blocks or tin. Cob can be shaped in whatever way the builder wishes, and in fact, rounded cob houses are much more common than right-angled cob houses.
The uniform strength of the material means that the designer is free of many of the restrictions that other buildings have. A door and window can go anywhere and be of any shape. You can carve bookshelves right into the wall. Many modern cob houses have furniture flowing seamlessly out of the walls, from seating to counters to even sinks. Cob houses are not so much built as sculpted. And there’s nothing stopping any modern conveniences; electrical, gas, and water lines can be run just as easily through cob as any other material.
The techniques and materials, amazingly, have hardly changed at all from ancient times. “In terms of the technicality of it, it’s surprisingly similar,” says Rogue. The biggest advancements are not composition meters attached to iPhones or anything like that; Rogue says he sometimes passes the fiber-less cob through a window screen to create a finer texture, but that the best technological advance he’s found has been the lowly, simple tarp. “I always tell people to bring one to the workshop with them,” he says. “And that adds triple the speed, basically,” over simply mixing on the ground.
But cob, it seems, doesn’t need much improvement. It’s already beautiful, efficient, cheap, and fantastically strong. What more could a house need?
Staten Island is often seen as the forgotten borough of New York, but as the Staten Island Advance is reporting, thanks to Pokémon Go, their museums are getting a much needed surge of interest.
The ubiquitous cell phone game is driving people not just out of the house, but to locations they might never normally travel to, including many of Staten Island’s museums. SI attractions like Historic Richmond Town, a mock historic town and museum, and the Staten Island Museum itself have seen a surge in attendance since the game launched. People seem to be showing up to try and catch them all, but then find themselves in a location they likely never knew existed. Other locations that have seen a rush of activity include the Alice Austen House Museum and Conference House Park.
For the museums’ part, they seem happy to have the newfound attention. The Staten Island Museum is even offering admission deals to Pokémon trainers who show up to battle, perhaps trying to attract the attention of players who do their Poké-business without ever even going inside. To many of the museums, though, simply making people aware of their existence is a boon.
It’s not always easy to get people to travel to the island and see what they have to offer, but catching little monsters is as good a reason as any to finally get there.
Tucked into a nondescript road verge in Asheville, North Carolina, halfway between a vintage shop and the Moog Synthesizer Factory, stands a roped-off patch of long grass and wildflowers. In it, hibiscus trees drowse in the sun. Clusters of white milkweed bob over the sidewalk. “POLLINATORS AT WORK,” a yellow sign proclaims. A clip art bumblebee hovers alongside the words, wearing a hard hat and kerchief. Under the main slogan, smaller letters: “Let ‘em work. Let ‘em live.” It’s a strange place for a garden, but if you tune out the cars whipping down the I-240 overpass, you can hear it faintly humming.
Walk a little further, and you end up in downtown Asheville—which, on this particular week in late June, is all abuzz for the Pollination Celebration, a bug-based extravaganza put on by local nonprofit Bee City USA. Restaurant tables sport pamphlets telling you whom to thank for what’s on your plate. Shoppers can flit from store to store and, like pollinators, pick up a small reward—a honeybee decal, a spoonful of royal jelly, a honey-whiskey cocktail. There are craft honey tastings, planting parties, and educational talks, and in the window of one clothing store, the mannequins are dressed like moths and monarchs.
Want your own pro-honeybee tour any day of the week? Head to your local grocery store in America, and you’ll see something similar. Emblazoned on tubes of Burt’s Bees chapstick: “Bring Back the Bees.” On boxes of Cheerios: “We Need The Bees.” On bottles of Honeywater: “Why Bees Matter.”
Who could object to such wide-ranging enthusiasm—as American as honey-baked ham?
The pollinator garden in Asheville. (Photo: Cara Giaimo)
A woman named Sarah Bergmann, for one. She doesn’t want to save the honeybee, and she knows how this sounds. “I don’t mean that to be an asshole,” she says apologetically, over the phone from her home in Seattle. Then, she doubles down. “The entire basis of my work is basically: don’t save anything, and certainly don’t save the honeybee.”
A designer by training, Bergmann has spent the past eight years working on something she calls the Pollinator Pathway. As it currently exists, this project is a mile-long swath of connected gardens running through the heart of Seattle. Chock full of native plants, it allows local bugs to travel throughout the city, rather than being islanded off in small wildflower patches.
In Bergmann’s mind, the pathway stretches far further. In a world almost completely bent to the will of humans, redesigning even one mile in service of other living things is an act, for her, with profound implications. “My own individual project is just a vehicle to understand how we might look at larger problems,” she explains—land use, climate change, the biodiversity crisis. If we’re going to mess with landscapes anyway, why not be more intentional about it?
A rendering of the pollinator pathway in Seattle. (Photo: Courtesy Mithun)
That’s why Bergmann started this project, and it’s what she wants to talk about. In most cases, though, she can’t: the honeybee gets in the way. She says, “pollinators,” and they hear, “why bees matter.” She says, “we need change,” and they hear, “we need the bees.” “I can’t separate from that story,” she says, the frustration palpable in her voice. Before she says or does anything, she has to bat the darned thing away.
When she was named one of Seattle Magazine’s Most Influential People, in 2013, the photographers asked her to pose in a beekeeping outfit. (She refused.) Enthused community members send her honeybee drawings. Would-be grantees, mistaking her for a honeybee evangelist, pull their funds. After seeing one too many articles with her name in them and a big honeybee picture splashed over the top, she stopped giving interviews. “I was flummoxed trying to explain myself,” she says. “I just felt like I couldn’t get there from here.”
Bergmann isn’t the only one stuck in this story. Ever since it accompanied the first settlers from Europe, the honeybee has embedded itself in America—not only in our landscape, but also in our food system, our values, and our sense of identity. For Bergmann and others imagining a more sustainable future, its takeover of our conservation discourse isn’t just distracting. It might even be dangerous.
Unless you’ve been hibernating for the last decade, you probably know that honeybees are in trouble. Just in case, though, here’s a refresher: in 2006, huge swaths of worker bees suddenly abandoned their homes, flying off into the woods to die. Apiarists would lift the lids of their hives and find honeycombed ghost towns. “We have one beekeeper in Pennsylvania who had 1200 colonies early in the year and now has 200,” a Penn State bee specialist stated in an early report. “[The disappearances] are dramatic.”
In the years since, this eerie phenomenon, initially dubbed “colony collapse disorder,” continued to decimate hives. Although various fingers have been pointed—at pesticides, parasites, and habitat loss, among other ills—until recently, no one was sure exactly what was to blame. The catastrophe and mystery combined have fueled worldwide concern and awareness. Everyone and their grandfather knows the bees are disappearing.
In some ways, it’s surprising that so many flocked to the honeybee’s cause. The world is a mess. There are plenty of environmental issues currently duking it out for attention, research dollars, and heartstring-tugs. Your average conservation mascot tends to be a charismatic megafauna—large, fuzzy and tailed by adorable, big-eyed young that bear some resemblance to human babies. Honeybees are tiny, stinging, and lay whole duplexes of wriggly larvae, and the factors playing into their disappearance are a shade too complex to argue about at summer barbecues. How did this issue grab so much of the conversation? Where is the J. Crew line for the emerald dragonfly, or the Buzzfeed listicle about noise pollution?
Before and after photos of the pollinator pathway. (Photo: Sarah Bergmann)
One hint lies in an oft-cited statistic. Greenpeace, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post will each tell you that a bee is responsible for one out of every three bites of food eaten by humans. Depending on who you ask, this figure is either slightly misleading—all are quoting a statistic that applies to pollinators generally, not just bees—or off by a factor of about nine. But read between the numbers, and a pattern of values emerges.
As Bergmann explains, honeybees these days aren’t just mascots. They’re not really even wild animals anymore. About half a century ago, she says, “we started to use the honeybee for a different purpose”—pollinating American crops. These days, they’re flown, shipped and trucked from their homes to stateside fields, stacked in boxes and given “pollen patties” for the road. They hit up different regions like a rock band on the road: February in Sacramento for almond season, Texas in May to fix up the cantaloupe crop, summer in Illinois for pumpkins. (Monsanto calls this the “Pollination USA Tour.”) They are now a bonafide ecosystem service, less like “the polar bear” or “the whales” and more like California’s dwindling water supply.
When honeybees vanish, then, they’re not just disappearing; they’re abandoning their posts. The real victim is us.
All but five to ten percent of American honeybees work for the man in this way. Honeybee pollination is a $15 billion industry, and in the words of one USDA report, honeybees succor flora “from alfalfa to zucchini.” Now that they’re in trouble, this market share has helped them corner the conversation, too. “A lot of this narrative is quite aggressive,” says Bergmann. “In many ways, this conversation is being shaped as much as it's being explored.”
The narrow dialogue that results, Bergmann argues, obscures the real root of the issue: America’s farmlands are much simpler than they once were. This is, as we are discovering, a problem. Because so much of the world is already in the early stages of a similar species downsizing, it’s also a useful harbinger. “What we’re seeing with the honeybee is an endpoint of complete lack of biodiversity,” says Bergmann. “It’s like a future but now.”
The Long History of Worker Bees
To understand how we ended up in this future, we have to look to the past. For pretty much all of human history, honeybees have gotten a really good rap. Ancient Egyptians believed that “working bees” were born from the tears of the Sun God Ra, and granted their pharaohs an additional honorary title, “The Beekeeper.” Honeybees appear in the Quran, during which Allah inspires them to land lightly and labor tirelessly. In book IV of his Georgics, the epic Roman poet Virgil spends scores of lines rhapsodizing over bees, in which he sees many of the best qualities of civilization: foresight; hard work; governance; loyalty. “They alone hold children in common: own the roofs of their cities as one, and pass their life under the might of the law,” he writes. “They alone know a country, and a settled home.”
The British, too, found honeybee hives to be full of useful metaphors. In 1609, Charles Butler, apiarist to Queen Elizabeth I, published the first ever English-language beekeeping book, The Feminine Monarchie. As the title suggests, this work was about more than frame assembly and swarm prediction. In it, Butler popularized the knowledge that the queen bee is female, and he wasn’t shy about hammering home the “natural” societal order suggested by this fact. “The Queene is a faire and stately Bee,” he writes—and who better to surround such a queen than a posse of devoted workers? Bees “may well be said to have a Commonwealth… They work for all, they watch for all, they fight for all,” he continues. “And all this under the government of one Monarch, of whom above all things they have a principal care and respect, loving, reverencing, and obeying her in all things.” A lesson clearly meant for people as well as bugs.
Butler also introduced England to the idea of “drones”—those bees that don’t sting, pollinate, or gather nectar, and exist solely to mate with the queen. In Butler’s reading, these bees are nothing but “idle companions, living by the sweat of others’ brows.” In the years after Elizabeth I’s death, Britain suffered extensive crop failures, and thousands of peasants and migrant workers lost their livelihoods. Suddenly they, too, were idle, though not by choice.
The opening pages of Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie or The Historie of Bees. (Photo: Hathi Trust/Public Domain)
As historian Tammy Horn details in her 2005 book, Bees in America, by defining the drone, Butler “inadvertently provided a convenient analogy for seventeenth-century English writers, clerics, and politicians.” England was getting overcrowded. These human drones, massing threateningly, had to go—but where? The answer, of course, was the New World, where proper use of nature’s bounty would turn the idle, stingless masses into workers. As clergyman Robert Grey put it in an exodus-exhorting sermon, those suffering at home would do well to “fly abroad like the bee to gather the pleasures and riches of the earth.”
So, like many before them, the American colonists began thinking of themselves as bee-like. But as Americans tend to do, they took the metaphor even further. With no actual honeybees waiting for them overseas, the settlers sent for whole hives of them, which they then raised for wax and honey (“As soon as colonists imagined that America could be a ‘land of milk and honey,’ they set in motion the events to make [it] so,” writes Horn). Their new companions reminded them to work hard and stick together. Even Captain John Smith used drone-based name calling to motivate his fellow Jamestown settlers.
Hives are loaded onto a tractor-trailer where they will be transported from South Carolina to Maine to pollinate blueberries. (Photo: Pollinator/CC BY-SA 3.0)
According to Horn, this bee-based rhetoric inspired many of the British settlers’ most emblematic attributes—their habit of grabbing up “unused” land; their tendency to downplay “less organized” civilizations. During the American Revolution, newly minted Patriots put beehives on the short-lived $45 bill, and started calling British officials “drones.” There was even a popular story in which bees saved a young female war messenger by attacking the Redcoats. By this time, the two groups were linked in a different way: “The bees have generally extended themselves into the country, a little in advance of the white settlers,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia. “The Indians therefore call them the ‘white man’s fly.’” (The sight of these harbingers became its own kind of sting: "As they discover the bees," reported St. Jean de Crévecoeur, "the news of this event spreads sadness and consternation in all minds.")
Over the next two centuries, the white man and his fly took over the whole continent. Explorers carted them across the Rocky Mountains, sent them ahead over the open prairie, and shipped them by water to the West Coast. Throughout, honeybees remained a rhetorical tool, even as this century’s agricultural shifts made them an economic necessity, too. “No two values have been so highly regarded since colonial days than industry and thrift,” sums up Horn, “[and] no better symbol represents these values than the honeybee.”
'The Honeybee Industrial Complex'
You don't have to be a 17th-century British settler to admire honeybees. When it comes to thrift and industry, they are, indeed, relentlessly creative. Those hexagonal combs aren't just cool-looking: by building in that shape, they achieve the largest possible area using the least possible wax. When they switch societal roles—say, from worker bee to larva nurse—their brains literally change.
However, honeybees aren't only critters that can pollinate. In most individual cases, they aren't even the best bugs for the job. Studies show that, compared to other pollinator species, honeybees are downright inefficient. They can't pull off fancy moves—like buzz pollination, in which a particular wing vibration releases a pollen payload, a strategy employed by tomatoes, potatoes, and blueberries. As a result, plenty of plants, from carrots to coconuts, can’t use honeybees at all, and rely instead on helpers that evolved alongside them—flies, moths, or one of the 4,000 types of bees actually native to the United States.
But those creatures don’t tend to hang out on modern farms, which are designed for efficiency, not naturalism. “Domesticated landscapes bloom all at once, and die all at once. If you’re a pollinator, that means that you’ve got a ton of food, and then you have no food”—not a sustainable living situation, explains Bergmann. “We’ve created a system where we need to bring in an outside pollinator. And the honeybee, being stackable, is what we selected.” Basically, they’re just ok, but portable, and like McDonalds, this has been enough to let them corner the market.
As a result, honeybees are spread so thin that scientists think they're working themselves to death. After years of ecological head-scratching, a 2014 paper pinned the honeybee crisis on what the authors described as "chronic exposure to multiple interacting stressors"—parasites, diseases, pesticide exposure, constant touring. Colonies could handle one of these at a time, but all together, it's just too much. When we turned the honeybee's industriousness into industry, we failed to build in a sufficient health care plan.
In the meantime, the same things that are traumatizing the bees are also messing with those native pollinators that might otherwise take the pressure off. Scores of species of native bees, moths, butterflies, and flies are struggling, mowed out of their homes, poisoned by chemicals, and felled by introduced pests and diseases. "For a larger and larger part of our country, it is hard to access anything resembling a functioning ecosystem," says Aaron Hirsh, a hobbyist beekeeper and a biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. This fact is well-illustrated by one of the newest troubling honeybee facts—it is essentially impossible to produce organic honey in the United States, because the bees can't go anywhere without running into pesticides.
Looked at head-on, these problems are not so much a result of the honeybees' decline as a symptom of their ascendance. Without a stackable, shippable, one-size-fits-all pollinator, we would need to work around native bugs' needs. We would have had to leave them some diverse, livable habitat, in and among the identical rows of crops. The honeybee has lent us "the unfortunate capacity—in the short term—to do without little fringes of nature," says Hirsh. "Without the honeybee industrial complex, you would have to keep those bits around." We used the bees to build a flawed system, and now that they're collapsing, it is, too. We don't have to save the honeybee—we have to save our land from honeybee dependence.
Those who could do this at a large scale are catching on somewhat. Last year, for example, the White House released a health-promotion plan aimed at "Honey Bees and Other Pollinators", promising to look into the pesticide problem and to encourage the planting of "pollinator-friendly seed mixes" within croplands. But, Hirsh says, such efforts aren't enough. "Imagine what the landscape would look like if [corn and soybean] subsidies went instead to pay for a national network of natural refugia," he says—in other words, a pollinator pathway.
In the meantime, a plan like Bergmann's allows for regular citizens to pick up the slack. "To care about nature, people need a way in," says Hirsh. "Here I don’t mean only a path that takes them into the woods. I mean a mental way in, something to pay attention to. Birdwatching does this. Fishing does it. So does the Pollinator Pathway." If the current model of industriousness and thrift requires honeybees for hire and government-subsidized monocrops, a newer one might make more room for two layers of activity—on the one hand, high-level planning and intention, and on the other, communities, shovels, and sweat. People could turn, once more, from drones to workers. And all pollinators—not just honeybees—would be able to do their jobs again, too.
Bee City USA’s tagline is “Making the World Safer for Pollinators.” It is one of a growing number of national and local groups dedicated to helping these useful insects thrive. Over its four-year tenure, the organization has recruited two dozen “bee cities,” from Fort Bragg, California to Washington D.C., that have promised to hold educational events and encourage native planting. Like Asheville’s window stickers and upbeat garden signs, most of Bee City’s press materials are sunny, even in the face of impending doom. “Each city is really celebrating pollinators,” says Phyllis Stiles, the organization’s founder and director. “We try to make it a happy thing.” And honeybees make her happy: “how they function as a superorganism, and how altruistic they are… from the beginning, I was just smitten,” she says. “It’s like Jerry Maguire. They had me at hello.”
Now though, a few years into the relationship, even Stiles thinks honeybees are a bit overrated. “[Native pollinators] are not allowed to shine like they should be shining," she says. "There is a whole industry out there devoted to agriculture as it's run in America, and they want you to just think about the honeybee. There's a machine out there that's promoting that idea.”
But Bee City’s goal isn’t to fight machines—it’s to get people interested. Thus the honeybee decals, honey-whiskey cocktails and pro-honeybee rhetoric common to so many endeavors that purport to be more generally pollinator-focused. Honeybees, Stiles says, are a “gateway pollinator.” “We’re using her star power to draw people into our mission,” she says. In her view, you can hit 'em with the complicated stuff after they've already been stung.
Avoiding the Honey Pots
The Ancient Greeks, who made nectar the official drink of Mt. Olympus, have a particular myth about Aristaeus, a god-shepherd who was the first to tame the honeybee. In the Bulfinch's Mythology version of this tale, Aristaeus inadvertently kills the nymph Eurydice, and returns to his hives to find that her vengeful sisters have murdered all of his bees. On the advice of another nymph, Aristaeus sacrifices four bulls and four cows; when he returns to their bodies nine days later, a brand new swarm has arisen from their carcasses.
This story likely sprouted from some nearsighted Greek bard making assumptions about a bunch of flies. But after listening to Bergmann, it seems allegorical, even prescient—the long-lost honeybees, killed by lack of foresight, only rising again from the ashes of agriculture.
Brueghel the Elder's The Beekeepers and the Birdnester, c. 1568. (Photo: Public Domain)
To Bergmann, the honeybee is less mascot than distraction. Sure, with every themed week and community workday, sponsored by honeybee-happy causes, a few more patches of native plants are added to America's landscape. But Bergmann's Pollinator Pathway is still only a mile long. "I'm not moving forward with the project until it can be taken care of forever," she says. She might be able to drum up more immediate support by giving into some of the honeybee narratives, but history makes her wary of this, too: "Right now honeybees are the flavor of the day," she says. "What’s going to happen in two years when we’re not so interested in them anymore?"
The honeybees, in the short term, would be fine—thanks to their agricultural importance, they’re in no real danger of leaving us for good. But the support they’ve drummed up—all those humans willing to plant and picket for them—might move onto the next thing, trapping us all in a landscape that looks very similar to the one that got us into this mess.
In a world where our interest can make or break the survival of a species, Bergmann says, it no longer makes sense to work at the species level—to choose what to save based on whether or not we have trained it to feed us. Instead, she says, we have to understand the extent of our own power, and use it for good. Humans took a bug across the ocean and used it to reshape an entire continent. "We need to recognize we are a major ecosystem," she says. If we wanted to, we, too, could become an ecosystem service, rather than perpetual, ever-needy clients. Think of it: she says. "Humanity could become a host that supports a diversity of life."
If history is any guide, America will always be fascinated by honeybees. But by trying to save them, we’ve really been harping on that old question—what they can do for us. Maybe it's time, finally, to ask what we can do for them.
The hole is known as a coronal hole, and despite being described as a "hole," isn't much to get spooked by. That's because coronal holes, which occur when the sun's magnetic field opens and spews material from the corona, are a fairly regular appearance.
They're not really holes, in fact, just patches of the sun that are burning less plasma, and thus appear darker.
The hole was seen on Monday by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, and looked pretty similar to one spotted a few months ago. (That hole was strangely elongated.)
Other coronal holes have been even more dramatic, like one NASA saw a few years ago that stretched across nearly half the width of the Sun.
There are only so many times in a person’s lifetime that a volcano collapses into itself, creating a giant bowl in the earth. Since 1900, only seven of these bowls—called calderas—are known to have formed. When the earth gives way, it's a violent, lava-filled event. It's not the easiest of geological events to observe directly.
In August 2014, though, scientists were watching when the ground around Bárdarbunga, a volcano near the center of Iceland, hidden underneath the island’s largest glacier, began to move.
Those first seismic shivers were the beginning of a rifting event that would last for six months and leave behind a giant indentation in the earth—the largest caldera ever to develop while scientists were monitoring its formation. The plains of lava expelled from beneath the volcano covered an area larger than the whole of Manhattan. There was so much lava that the resulting explosion connected to the caldera's formation rated as the largest since 1783, not just in Iceland, but in all of Europe.
Throughout the six months of the caldera’s formation, four dozen scientists were working to understand exactly what was happening to the volcano. They watched it from space and from the sky, and they used GPS, sensors, and geobarometers to observe movements underground. They wanted to know what had set off the collapse and how it would develop.
What they found, as they report in a new Science paper, was in some ways quite tidy, and helps answer fundamental questions about how these dramatic events unfold.
“That’s the beauty of how nature operates,” says Magnus Gudmundsson, the study’s lead author and a professor of geophysics at the University of Iceland. “Sometimes very complicated events can be imagined in a simple way.”
The team of scientists was able to determine that, essentially, the caldera formed after a magma reservoir deep under the surface started extruding lava through a pipe-like exit. As that lava burst through the surface of the earth, after traveling about 28 miles, pressure on the roof of the magma chamber increased until the roof broke.
At the beginning of the event, though, none of this was obvious—not even that a caldera would form. When Bárdarbunga first started changing, on August 16, 2014, it was clear something unusual was happening.But it wasn’t until two or three weeks later that the scientists even noticed the caldera collapse.
Lava! (Photo: GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences)
Volcanoes are often imagined in tropical locales, but this is a story of fire and ice. The mouth of Bárdarbunga is filled with ice; its sides covered by a glacier. When scientists fly over the volcano to measure the elevation of its surface, they go low, less than a tenth of a mile over the ice surface. “You’re not quite on the glacier, but you see small things very well,” says Gudmundsson. For months, the glacial ice covering the volcano looked unchanged. But even on the first flight, the sensitive altimeters the scientists carried showed what was happening beneath—the earth was sinking.
Around the same time that the scientists first observed that the caldera beginning to collapse, lava started pouring out of the earth. That eruption was at the Holuhraun lava field, miles from Bárdarbunga. Soon, it became clear that the two events were connected—the magma from underneath Bárdarbunga was traveling to Holuhraun and spilling out of the earth.
Even once they were able to connect the two events, though, the scientists weren’t sure what would happen next. Would the magma flow decline? Would it continue for a long time? Or—an outside possibility, but one they couldn’t discount—would the caldera itself erupt with magma?
As the event unfolded, smaller groups of scientists started monitoring and studying different aspects of the collapse and eruption, like teams of medical specialists trying to treat a critical patient. Seismologists looked at the earthquakes. Geochemists measured the pressure of the magma and the depth of the chamber where it had been contained. Experts in GPS were able to say how the crust of the earth was being split apart and how wide the gap was. Others used satellite data to map the formation from high above. Glaciologists modeled the ice flow above the volcano.
Eventually, by pulling all these different models and data sets together, the scientists were able to piece together the story. The magma reservoir had been about 7.5 miles beneath the surface—so deep that it was unlikely the magma ever would have exploded out of the caldera. Once the magma began leaving that reservoir, the pressure on the roof increased until it collapsed. The area of the caldera that resulted was the largest ever observed; in volume it was the fourth largest caldera collapse on record. The event as a whole took 190 days—the second largest recorded. (The record-holder took longer than a year.)
To observe the formation of a caldera as it happened was an unique experience for these scientists: it’s unlikely that they’ll have the chance more than once or twice—if ever again—in the course of their careers. The purpose of this research is not just to understand this one collapse, though: the better researchers understand how this type of explosion—among the most dangerous of volcanic eruptions—happens, the more prepared they can be for the next one.
Some of the largest eruptions ever, Gundersson says, look a lot like this one, where the eruption of lava happened far from the main volcano. “I think this is showing us how these eruptions in most likelihood took place,” he says. Magma had accumulated under a large volcano, at a considerable depth. When the rifting event began, tectonic forces opened the reservoir and, as the magma flowed out, the roof of the reservoir collapsed.
“It’s not a new idea, but we understand much better how that may have happened,” he says. Which means that next time the earth starts rumbling in this way, volcano experts will have a better idea what comes next—and can warn people to get out of the way.
Akihito on his wedding day in 1959. (Photo: Public domain)
The Chrysanthemum Throne is not often vacated. Japan's current emperor, Akihito, has sat on it for over 27 years, having inherited it from his father Emperor Shōwa—better known as Hirohito—who ruled for nearly 63 years before dying in January 1989.
These days, the throne is largely a ceremonial position, if still widely respected among the Japanese people.
Still, it was a mild surprise when word recently leaked out that Akihito was considering abdicating his rule as monarch, according to the BBC, mostly because, at 82, he was starting to feel less than up for the job.
That abdication could happen in the "next few years," according to the Japanese broadcaster NHK, after Akihito has suffered various health problems in recent times.
So, who's next? That would be Naruhito, Akihito's oldest son and currently the Crown Prince of Japan. The 56-year-old has a small amount of experience that might help him should he get the gig. In 2012, during his father's heart surgery, Naruhito temporarily took charge.
The original Ghostbusters is the quintessential New York movie. The slimy ghouls and occult demons are backdropped by an impressive sampling of classic Manhattan landmarks, replete with gothic architecture and that uniquely New York mix of elegance and aging decay.
There’s the turn-of-the-century firehouse that served as the Ghostbusters' headquarters, the historic New York Public Library where the first ghost is sighted, the Tavern on the Green restaurant where Louis Tully goes full keymaster, plus Lincoln Center, City Hall, Rockefeller Center, the Manhattan Bridge, Columbia University and of course the gargoyle-adorned majestic high rise at 55 Central Park West, aka "Spook Central."
But curiously, the Ghostbusters reboot, which released nationwide today, wasn’t actually filmed in New York. Despite again being set in the city, the movie was largely shot in Boston and other parts of Massachusetts. Which is a shame, because Gotham is littered with places that could use a visit from a team of parapsychologists, however motley.
The Morris-Jumel Mansion. (Photo: Luke J Spencer/Atlas Obscura)
On a hill overlooking the Harlem River, the stately Morris-Jumel mansion is not only Manhattan's oldest home but supposedly one of its most haunted. Its macabre history started after owner Stephen Jumel died in 1832. His wife Eliza was rumored to have had a hand in the death—there was some suspicion afoot that she orchestrated the carriage accident that killed him.
Twice widowed, Eliza lived on in the giant house as a recluse. She was said to have walked the hallways and chambers of the mansion, her hair unkempt and her clothes soiled, haunted by the tortured souls of her past lovers before dying alone in the house. Today the house is a museum open to the public, and believers in the paranormal claim to have seen at least five ghosts inside.
Pier 54 on the Hudson River has an eerie history of tragedy. First, in 1912 it was the final docking place of the RMS Carpathia, the ship carrying the few survivors of the sunken Titanic as anxious crowds gathered at the pier. Then three years later the doomed RMS Lusitania left from this very pier before being torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland, sinking the ship and killing 2,000 passengers.
Today the pier remains a blank, empty strip of metal and concrete stretching out into the Hudson River, remarkable mostly for its emptiness. Despite several plans to restore it, it’s been left untouched, perhaps in part out of respect for the many ghosts of its past.
The remains of Riverside Hospital at North Brother Island. (Photo: reivax/CC BY-SA 2.0.)
Situated on the East River between the Bronx and Riker's Island, this small island has the dark distinction of being home to the worst loss of life in New York's history up until the 9/11 attacks. In 1905, over 1,000 people died here when a steamship caught fire near the island. For years the island was home to the Roosevelt Hospital for patients with contagious diseases; the hospital closed its doors in 1963 and has been left to decay since, making North Brother undoubtably one of the most ghostly places in the city's five boroughs.
Deep under Manhattan is a massive construction project that’s been underway since 1970s. The state of New York started digging this tunnel to channel water to the city from upstate, and 40 long years later the tunnel has been costly in dollars and lives: So far, the project has taken the lives of 23 workers—about one death per each mile dug.
This ornate gothic Victorian house is said to be one of the most haunted places in all of New York. It's one of two twin mansions built in the 1800s by a wealthy brick worker for his sons. When the family fortune fell, one of the boys committed a violent suicide in the mansion that remains today. The untimely death sparked superstitions and tales of haunting. Adding credence to this creepiness, the manse was also the site of a gruesome mafia murder in 2005. The ghost stories surrounding the vacant house persist to this day.
Original iron gate to the hospital. (Photo: Luke J Spencer/Atlas Obscura)
Even today the name Bellevue sends a chill down the spine. Established in 1736, Bellevue has a past filled with scares and suffering. During New York City's gaslight era it was overrun by the poorest of the poor, a refuge for the mentally ill, alcoholics, victims of epidemics, the homeless, and patients ranging from the suicidal to the homicidal, living in horrific conditions. It was later rebuilt as the infamous Bellevue psychiatric hospital, a dark building long associated with neglect and dubious, disturbing psychiatric practices.
The haunting-looking structure, still surrounded by a rusting iron spiked fence and covered in ivy as it was in the 1930s, has inspired horror films, nightmares, and comic books. Today the foreboding building lies mostly empty and abandoned.
The paranormal is tangible at this abandoned Staten Island farm colony, the crumbling remains of buildings where the destitute would work in exchange for food and a place to live. Left vacant since 1975, the ruins have an ominous look, despite being covered in graffiti and littered with beer cans. But even more disturbing is the colony’s sinister history. These walls have seen the burial of local missing children as well as evidence suggesting the grounds were used for Satanic worship. Over the years former patients were supposedly spotted haunting the grounds, walking the decaying tunnels and hallways under the buildings they once worked to maintain.
This beautiful arched subway station was one of the first terminal stations of the New York City Subway, opened in 1904. Designed to show off the new subway system, it was lavished with architectural details including glass tiles, large chandeliers, vaulted ceilings and skylights. However beautiful, it couldn't sustain demand as ridership grew, and was closed in 1945. Today the station sits abandoned, open to the public by select tours only and unused by passengers for decades—perhaps the ideal congregation place for an ancient Sumerian supernatural cult.
The invention of farming stands as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. But as the Los Angeles Times reports, thanks to some recently discovered human remains, it seems that farming was actually invented more than once.
Views differ on where and how farming and agriculture first arose exactly, but most everyone agrees that it happened in the Fertile Crescent, an arcing region of land that falls mostly in what is today called the Middle East. The oldest farming villages discovered in the Crescent date back to around 10,000 years ago and were chiefly located near the western horn of the region, near the Mediterranean Sea.
But after a quartet of ancient skeletons were recently unearthed in the eastern portion of the Crescent, in what is modern day Iran, it appears that farming was actually invented at least twice and possibly a whole bunch of times in the Crescent. Study of the teeth and bones of the ancient inhabitants has shown that they were not only genetically differentiated from the peoples to the west, but that they also subsisted on a diet made up mainly of grains, and very little meat. This has led researchers to theorize that the eastern-dwelling people must have developed their own farming techniques independently.
It’s also possible that this sort of development occurred a number of times in the past, and the remnants of other types of early farming has simply been lost. Human history, in other words, is a history of our relationship with the literal earth.
Our culture is full of conflicting instructions. "Always follow directions," we say. "Don't draw on art that is clearly on display in a museum," we say, directly after that.
But what happens when those two edicts don't match? Earlier this week, at the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, a 91-year-old woman on a senior citizen excursion came across one of Arthur Koepcke's "Reading-Work-Pieces"—collages that feature, in the words of one gallery, "picture puzzles, tests... and instructions for perfectly simple everyday actions." This particular piece had a section that looked like a crossword puzzle, and the written command "Insert Words." So she took out a ballpoint pen and went for it, the BBC reports.
The woman, whose identity has not been released, joins a rich lineage of well-meaning art "improvers"—most notably Cecilia Giménez, the 85-year-old who, in 2012, turned a fresco of Jesus into a hedgehog man via a botched restoration attempt.
As this newest accidental avant-gardeist pointed out to the police, the museum "had not put up a notice instructing visitors not to write on the piece," the BBC writes. Which begs the question: how would we know whether or not that was art?
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.
