Nature is getting ready for an epic snowball fight, and it looks like they’re stocking up ammo in Arctic Russia. According to the Siberian Times, villagers near the Gulf of Ob seem to have started finding accumulations of perfectly rounded snowballs created by a rare coastal phenomenon.
Located above the Arctic Circle, the small village of Nyda, with a population of just over 2,000, sits on the Gulf of Ob, a freezing arm of the Kara Sea. Just over a week ago members of the village started noticing that at one spot on the coast, fields of giant snowballs had begun to spontaneously appear. Ranging from the size of a tennis ball to the size of volleyballs, the icy spheres came from seemingly nowhere, but have an uncanny uniformity.
Even the older generation in the village say they have never seen anything like it, but a village spokesperson quoted in the article seems to have found the answer. Apparently as the tide came in, it contacted a layer of frost, covering the beach in ice, and then as the water slowly receded, it left bits of ice that spun on the wet sand creating spheres. The odd phenomenon was confirmed by a representative of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, quoted in the Siberian Times story.
Whatever the cause, the citizens of Nyda look like they are set for the best snowball fight of all time.
Early Sunday morning on January 27, 2013, the band Gurizada Fandangueira was playing to a packed house at the Kiss nightclub in Santa Maria, Brazil. Hundreds of people, including many university students, were dancing to the group's upbeat country pop music on the last weekend of Brazil’s summer break. The band shot sparkler columns up into the air, a dazzling display that audiences expected at every Gurizada Fandangueira show. But as one of the guitarists was getting ready for the sixth song of the set, he saw embers float down.
Flames quickly engulfed the acoustic foam insulation on the ceiling. Hot ash fell over the band members and dancers and the venue filled with thick smoke. The approximately 2,000 people inside the Kiss nightclub (1,000 over the building’s capacity) fled towards the only windowless exit. At first security guards thought patrons were trying to leave without paying and blocked exits, trapping victims inside.
Many patrons ran towards the restrooms. Some were following the flow of people and mistook the restrooms as exits, while others went to the small space to hide. Black smoke impaired vision. The narrow hallway that led to the exit became clogged. Pushing and shoving ensued. One person fell, causing another, and another.
The tragic scene investigators and survivors described was nightmarish and chaotic. Two hundred and forty-two people perished in the tragic Kiss nightclub fire, and another 630 were injured. When emergency responders arrived at the scene at 3 a.m., people said the Kiss nightclub looked “like a war zone.”
“There were lots of casualties and a lot of people who ran to the restrooms,” says computer scientist Sharad Sharma, who has recreated a simulation of the Kiss nightclub fire at the Bowie State University Virtual Reality Laboratory in Maryland. “According to the data, there were 180 victims [in the restroom] and it’s really surprising how 180 people can fit in a small space.”
Researchers investigate these kinds of disasters to understand when crowded events turn dangerous and why they spread. When studying crowds, many different factors come into play, from the behaviors of individuals, the social group behaviors, the disaster (if there is one), to the design of the space. Computer scientists try to incorporate all these variables in models of the movement patterns that ripple through the masses. Taking the information from past events, they also create virtual simulations and technologies in the hope of preventing future disasters.
Defining crowd disasters is complex. In large mass gatherings, the mere shifting of hundreds and thousands of bodies filed in the confines of a space can lead to confusion, and sometimes a disastrous crowd collapse. Whereas, in the case of the Kiss nightclub tragedy, the fire initiated an evacuation which sent hundreds fleeing towards the exit. Many were crushed and trampled in the evacuation process.
Many media outlets referred to what happened as a “mass panic” or a “stampede.” But such terms are not appropriate to the situation, according to John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex.
“People follow others when they perceive these others as relevant, so it is not mindless,” Drury says. “The problems come when the others don’t take the danger seriously enough. People more often die in emergencies through not evacuating quickly rather than through haste.”
Stampeding is a primitive, instinctive behavior of herd animals, and panic implies a rashness or irrationality in response to a real or perceived danger, Drury writes on his academic blog. But crowds shouldn't be compared to unintentional, mindless mobs. Instead Drury refers to these events as progressive crowd collapses.
Cultural connections and social groups, such as being Chicago Cubs fans or sharing the same religion, can influence the behavior of a crowd, he explains. “Assuming that the crowd is simply made up of individuals who behave like particles or billiard balls in a mass doesn’t account for a number of features of crowds," Drury and his colleague wrote in The Conversation. “Some physical crowds could contain many different psychological crowds, or groups with different social identities.”
Computer scientists try to factor in the psychological variables. There are artificial intelligence and logic algorithms, such as the "fuzzy logic" model, that account for unpredictable factors and emotional behaviors, or “fuzzy” characteristics, such as stress, anger, and panic. Still, the variability of emotions remains a challenge to compute. In the Megacity collaborative virtual reality environment, Sharma was able to program different agents or roles with hostile, selfish, altruistic, and leadership behaviors. Users who participate in the scenarios can be assigned a behavior to help make the simulation more lifelike.
“Some researchers argue that there is no panic in models because it’s too difficult to quantify panic,” says Jian Ma, an evacuation dynamics and pedestrian traffic researcher at Southwest Jiaotong University in China. “Without a definition or a computation, you cannot say that panic induced this mass fleeing.”
Ma instead describes the “spread of panic” as a spread and flux in pressure. When crowds reach a critical density, a certain amount of force, push, or a fall can cause a domino effect, he says. This spread of movement causes different kinds of patterns within the crowd.
In 2014, hundreds of thousands of people were shuffling on a small ramp at Chen Yi Square on the Bund riverfront in Shanghai to get a good view of the New Year’s Eve light show. So many people were crammed on the narrow passageway that linked the upper and lower levels of the deck that they were at a standstill. Yet, those with obscured views continued to push forward, causing a problematic counter flow movement.
As the density of people continued to build, the counter flow behavior triggered the crowd collapse, says Ma. Thirty-six died and 50 were injured.
“This situation is quite common in other disasters,” Ma says. “It’s very important to control the flow direction and to avoid counter flow situations.”
The ramp in Chen Yi Square that was at the root of the New Year’s Eve disaster has since been remodeled, Ma says. The passage is much wider and slopes in a more optimal fashion.
Often times people cannot see how much congestion there is at the head of the crowd, Drury writes. People also commonly try to escape from the place in which they entered. This can cause clogging at the doors, a kind of heart pumping, push-and-pull behavior, Sharma explains. In the case of a fire, evacuees may not see through the smoke or be able to get to the exit closest to them.
In Germany, 21 people died of suffocation at the Love Parade musical festival in 2010. Ma obtained the video footage of the crowd mobbed inside a compact tunnel—the only passageway into the venue. The underpass had been closed by police who said there were already 1.4 million attendees inside, which left the people stuck in the tunnel with nowhere to turn. Over loudspeakers, people inside the festival were instructed to exit, which caused even more congestion.
There were as many as 11 people crammed into a square meter, unleashing a kind of “special earthquake” in the frozen crowd, Ma explains. The pressure release caused a "crowd turbulent flow movement", which is much like a stop-and-go traffic wave. There hasn’t been another Love Parade festival since the horrific event.
“There are some design features that make successful evacuation more likely,” says Drury. “Knowing the building layout and fire exits is also important.” However, this can be a challenge if those exits are obstructed from view. To help people in real-time, Sharma and his research lab have been working on an augmented reality phone app that pinpoints a person on a floor map of the building, guiding them to the best possible exit.
The team ran a test with the blueprint of Bowie State University’s library and used Wi-Fi bay stations to help triangulate a person’s location. The app is placed in front of a marker that projects the floorplan and visually shows the exits. Sharma hopes the lab can further develop the app so that they can find where everyone is in a building and provide escape routes. “If you have a known location of all the people, you can give users specific instructions on what exit to take, what exit not to take, and how to respond to the situation,” he says.
Other real-time crowd management tools have been deployed during mass religious gatherings. In response to the 2015 crush during the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, this year the Saudi Ministry of Hajj gave pilgrims electronic bracelets with individual tracking GPS and vibrating alert systems to inform when they should slow down. Additionally, Sharma’s Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR virtual reality simulations of subways, airplanes, college campuses, and urban environments are being further developed to serve as training grounds for emergency responders.
While they may be painful to relive, researchers take the data from these catastrophic events to try to prevent them from happening again—spinning alternate scenarios to be better prepared for the unexpected future. Simulating evacuation situations in a virtual space gives more flexibility, and provides more opportunities to grab better data.
“Humans and the factors of these events are so unpredictable,” says Sharma. In these studies “you can come up with these lessons from different behaviors and learn how to prevent chaos.”
In June of 1964, at a Hackensack, New Jersey courthouse, pediatrician Dr. William Reilly was called upon to give testimony regarding the dangers of reading about “abnormal” sexuality. In the course of questioning, Dr. Reilly was asked to expand upon his distinction between “abnormal sex” (an umbrella term under which he placed voyeurism, fetishism, homosexuality, and flagellation) and “normal sex.” It came down to, unsurprisingly, a question of pleasure; sex is “God-given act” but non-procreative sex ends with “anarchy.”
“Hedonism,” he opined, “is pure pleasure for pleasure’s sake. It offers nothing to a society.”
The book that threatened such anarchy? A porno rag? Some mid-century dime store smut? No, it was John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or, as it is more commonly known, Fanny Hill—a novel that is broadly considered the first example of English prose pornography, and which had been stoking the flames of the nation’s anxious Puritanism since it was published in England over 200 years ago.
Written while Cleland was in debtor’s prison and published in two installments in 1748 and 1749, the epistolary novel is told from the point of view of Fanny Hill, a girl who, after being orphaned at 15, runs away to London and makes a living at a brothel. A lot of sex ensues. (From New York counsel’s motion to halt sales during trial: “In its 298 pages, the book describes in detail instances of lesbianism, female masturbation, the deflowering of a virgin, the seduction of a male virgin, the flagellation of male by female and female by male, and other aberrant acts, as well as more than twenty acts of sexual intercourse between male and female.”) Within a year of publication, Cleland and his publishers were arrested, and the book banned.
Still, Fanny found a way to her audiences. The novel proliferated through underground distribution, widely enough so that one unofficial copy, complete with original, lewd illustrations, drew the attention and scorn of the Massachusetts court in 1821, in the nation’s first ruling to ban an obscene book. It wasn’t until after Roth v. United States in 1957—the landmark case which redefined the nation’s definition of obscenity to require an obscene work be “utterly without redeeming social importance”— that a mainstream publisher, Putnam, dared to release it.
The blowback was immediate, and within a year, defense attorney Charles Rembar was representing Putnam in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Consistent among the panic was a real and tangible fear about the effects of such explicit literature on youth, and a reliance on religious testimony. In New York City, a mother directed her teenage daughter to buy the book to prove the ease with which a minor could access it; she brought her complaint to the D.A. who then brought a case to Albany asking for the prohibition of sales to minors. (He didn’t win.) After discovering her 15-year-old son had purchased the book, a Massachusetts mom brought her concern to the Massachusetts Obscene Literature Control Commission (a governor-appointed decency committee comprising clergymen, an educator, and a law enforcement official) who then advised the attorney general to move to ban the book.
Outside of the legal world, interfaith community groups were banding together to fight what they saw as a plague of immorality; a New York Catholic priest and rabbi joined in on a hunger strike protested pornography in general and Fanny Hill in particular.
Once the book was brought to trial, all manner of personal considerations and hypotheticals were suddenly fair game. What was Cleland’s motivation in writing—informing the reader about 18th century London, or simply titillating them? If the latter, can the book still be saved by coincidental social worth? On the flip side, why are readers reading? To be informed, or to be titillated? And should those in the latter camp ruin it for those in the former? Regarding the actual sex described: was it hyperbolic, or realistic? “Normal” or not? So vague was the concept of pornography that more than once prosecutors had to abandon questions directly related to it.
When the Massachusetts judge asked English professor Ira Konigsberg if the book was pornographic, Konigsberg responded, unsatisfactorily, “I know what I mean by pornographic. I don’t know what you mean.” (A precursor to the Supreme Court quote.) This scattered anxiety was unified on a holdover concept from a late-19th century British statute on obscenity: that the key trait of the obscene has the tendency to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.”
It is difficult, of course, to prove the effect of all of this immorality. In New Jersey, Dr. Reilly repeatedly referred to the unsubstantiated claim that reading pornography had “definitive” links to increased vandalism, juvenile delinquency, and promiscuity. For the average person, he said, a “constant perusal of this kind of material would definitely stimulate them to acts of sexual activity”—the obvious implication being that this wouldn’t be the good kind of sexual activity.
Still, the question wasn’t whether or not the book was erotic or pornographic—certainly it was. (Even Massachusett’s Assistant Attorney General John Sullivan admitted, “It did arouse prurient interest and impure thoughts in me. Fortunately I am well adjusted enough so it did not affect my daily life.”) The question was, does it have social value? Fanny Hill was an especially vexing book in this case. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer had both been brought to trial (and both defended by Charles Rembar) and deemed protected by the First Amendment. But Fanny Hill was written by a poor prisoner who could by no stretch of the imagination be called a great writer. Fanny herself didn’t help matters. In his ruling against Fanny Hill, Massachusetts Justice Tom Clark described the woman as “nothing but a harlot.” In his review of the book, John Hutchens condemned Putnam for their scheme to “cloak Fanny in an unfamiliar respectability.” Here was a young woman who shed patriarchal expectations and used her body to earn, in her own words, “if not happiness, then at least affluence, or independence.” It was nearly impossible to separate disgust with the book from disgust with her.
In New York, though the book was briefly banned for the duration of the trial, the judge ultimately decided Fanny Hill had enough literary merit to not be obscene, but the book did not fare so well elsewhere. In December of 1964, New Jersey justice Morris Pashman ruled Fanny Hill obscene enough to “forfeit protection of the First Amendment.” In Massachusetts, both the lower and state Supreme Court ruled the book obscene. Putnam powered on.
In 1965, two years after Fanny Hill’s publication and over 200 years after it was written, Memoirs v. Massachusetts made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6 to 3 that the book was not obscene. Those who dissented were horrified—now, would any pornographic material be safe as long as it had the remotest social value? The answer, of course, was yes, which is why the sort of censorship preceding the case is now mostly unheard of. Today, Fanny Hill is published as a classic, studied in college, and celebrated as the still-revolutionary story of a woman who sought pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and got it.
You might have seen what today's electoral map would look like if only women voted. Well, here’s another version of that map—a “suffrage map” from early 20th century America. Suffrage maps played an influential role in the fight for women’s suffrage, and “The Awakening,” above, is one of the most striking examples.
Published in Puck Magazine in 1915 and illustrated by German-born artist Henry Mayer, the map depicts women with faces turned to the light that Lady Liberty is bringing east. Her flowing robes are emblazoned with the words, “VOTES FOR WOMEN.”
By 1915, the Western states marked in white had already given women the vote; another suffrage map of the time was labeled“9 States of Light Among 39 of Darkness.” In this map, you can see the desperation on the women’s faces and in their movements, as they stretch themselves towards the votes that ought to be theirs.
It’s a case of women using cartography—a field long controlled by elite Western men for imperialist purposes—for their own purposes: equality and social justice.
The map appeared during the Empire State Campaign, which was fighting to amend New York’s gender-based voting restrictions, which it accomplished in 1917.
“Are political rights to be a question of geography?” one campaign committee flier asked. “The women of New York will be eligible to vote for the next President if the men of the Empire State are as generous-minded as the men of the West have been.”
Maps like this one were printed on posters, pamphlets, paper fans, banners, and broadsides to be handed out across cities and communities, snowballing into powerful movements that broke free of family parlors and spread to the streets.
Suffrage maps were painted on walls and positioned in prominent public places, such as state buildings, banks, and businesses. They showed up on drinking glasses, baseball programs, parade floats, and sandwich boards.
In a 1913 essay called ‘‘Walks and Wins with Two-Ft. Map,” one suffragist noted that “Men are much impressed by the ocular proof of our advance”:
I wear it [the suffrage map] sandwich fashion, and walk about my crowded streets. It attracts everyone’s eye, and an explanation of the colors excites deep interest and makes a great impression.
Impressed, perhaps, but not always convinced by the actions of other states—a man from Massachusetts wrote to the New York Times in 1913, after it published an earlier suffrage map, “…not a single State east of the Mississippi River had adopted woman suffrage: every ‘white’ State on the suffrage map is in the weird and woolly West.”
Additionally, the coloration of the map is problematic in its treatment of race, with its focus on white women only. (Black women did not get the vote until 1920, no matter which coast they lived on). The women pictured in “The Awakening” belonged to an upper middle class movement—if you peer closely, you’ll see their hairstyles and headpieces are finely fashioned.
Yet maps like this one were a shared anchor between women across the country, as well as a powerful form of media and advertising. The suffrage maps were soon pervasive, broadly referenced, and cited in publications across the country.
If you look closely under the map itself, you’ll see a poem echoing many of the thoughts and fears women voters still experience today. It is a work by Alice Duer Miller, a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and feminist whose work includes Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times.
With election day looming over us tomorrow, we leave you with this powerful map and the final verses of Miller’s poem:
The came from toll and want, from leisure and ease, Those who knew only life, and learned women of fame, Girls and the mothers of girls, and the mothers of these No one knew whence or how, but they came, they came.
The faces of some were stern, and some were gay, And some were pale with the terror of unreal dangers; But their hearts knew this: hereafter come what may, Women to women would never again be strangers.
Whatever your politics, the fact that a 102-year-old woman, born before women could vote, just cast her ballot for the country’s first female presidential candidate is monumental.
Watch any modern depiction of the Greeks and Romans on TV and you’ll see an endless montage of exciting sex, often involving scores of topless women and writhing orgies. Fun as these exaggerated portraits are, they tend to leave out the less glamorous aspects of consensual sex in the ancient world.
In an era lacking in scientific knowledge, the ancients were on their own when it came to addressing sexual predicaments and unwanted pregnancies. Many methods were effective, some were not. Others were downright dangerous. What was it like to have sex in antiquity?
For some people it meant dealing with sexually transmitted infections and the mockery they could evoke. Ancient authors didn’t write about them often, but when they did, the context was often malicious humor. Take anogenital warts, which Roman poets called “figs.” In one poem, Martial describes a man named Labienus who became the unlucky possessor of an entire “orchard of fig trees.” Their association with promiscuity led Martial to label S.T.I.s under the umbrella category of indecens morbus, or “unseemly disease.”
Although ancient Romans knew little about infectious diseases, Martial’s poem about Labienus suggests they saw a connection between sex and illness. According to the Roman poet Catullus, even body odor could be transmitted sexually. He informs a man named Rufus that women refuse to have sex with him for fear of catching his vile scent, which Catullus calls a “plague” (pestis in Latin). This wasn’t entirely a joke, since the Romans believed smells could be vectors for infectious disease. In his history of Rome, the writer Livy describes a plague spreading to the living through the smell of the decomposing bodies of its victims.
Gonorrhea, or at least a disease with that name, shows up in antiquity, too. The Greek physician Galen was the first to coin the word using the Greek terms for “seed” and “run.” Writing in the second century C.E., he describes the condition as an “unwanted” and “involuntary” secretion of semen that occurred when the patient didn’t have an erection. A similar description comes from Galen’s contemporary Aretaeus, a Greek physician from Cappadocia. That runoff, he says, is “thin, icy, pale, and sterile.”
Modern physicians doubt this condition was what we now call gonorrhea—still, it seems clear that regardless of how it was contracted, it would hinder future attempts at sex. Nor, says Aretaeus, was the problem limited to men. Women could contract it too—and if they did, they suffered from what he called “an indecent desire for intercourse with men.”
For most people in the ancient world, having children was a major reason to have sex, since children provided status in Greek and Roman society and heirs to personal assets. For some adults, pregnancy was also an opportunity for fun on the side. The Roman author Macrobius claims that Julia, the daughter of the emperor Augustus, used to joke that pregnancy was what allowed her not only to sleep with men other than her husband, but lots of them.
Of course, bearing children could be deadly to women in antiquity, given the state of medicine at that time. Pliny the Elder’s descriptions of care for women giving birth does not inspire confidence in ancient obstetrics. He claims that girls are more difficult to deliver than boys. To speed up a delivery, he suggests placing the right foot of a hyena on the woman, or having her drink a mixture of goose semen and water. As a painkiller, he recommends drinking a concoction of sow’s dung mixed with honey wine.
As desirable as children were, they were also expensive. So while most people wanted children, many would have used contraceptives to avoid having too many. Women engaged in sex work likely would have tried to avoid having children altogether. Many of their methods are lost to us now, as they were likely transmitted orally, but ancient medical treatises devote a lot of space to birth control and abortion, so we know that women had options to choose from.
Some of these methods may have been more effective than others. In his treatise On the Nature of Women, famed Greek physician Hippocrates suggests an oral contraceptive containing “moistened copper ore.” Consuming copper would not have been an effective abortifacient, but his advice does suggest that the Greeks were vaguely aware of the link between copper and contraception that the modern hormone-free IUD relies on.
Additional helpful advice comes from Soranus, a Greek author from southwestern Turkey who lived under the Roman Empire in the second century. Soranus was so interested in women’s health that he wrote a treatise called Gynaecology, which covers matters like who makes the best midwife (quiet women with extensive medical knowledge) and whether lifelong virginity is healthy (it isn’t). His recipes for oral contraceptives include ingredients like rue and pomegranate peel, which are verified abortifacients.
Modern historian John Riddle suggests that the ancients learned about plants that could be used to prevent pregnancy by observing how animals, in addition to human beings, reacted to them. Theophrastus, a Greek writer who studied under Plato, writes that a plant called the death carrot (Thapsia garganica), which was used a few centuries later as an effective abortifacient, could kill cattle that ingested it. Observations like this may have led people to experiment with the plant as a contraceptive and encouraged them to pass on this knowledge. As a result, rue, copper, and many of the other substances that Greeks and Romans used to prevent pregnancy emerge in medieval antifertility advice, too.
Unfortunately for the ancients, many of their ideas about contraception and abortion were ineffective and even perilous. In the second century, the Roman author Pliny stated in his Natural History that stepping over a viper could induce a miscarriage and should be avoided by women who wanted to keep their babies. Soranus, in addition to dispensing advice that would have worked, suggests a vaginal suppository of lead and old olive oil, presumably to clog the vaginal canal and keep semen out. It’s possible that this method would have prevented pregnancy, but the toxicity of the lead would have been extremely dangerous to any woman who used it.
Soranus is also the author of some of the funniest contraception advice to survive from antiquity. Indeed, he seems to have added his own twist to the pull-out method. Oswei Temkin’s translation of Soranus’ advice reads, “During the sexual act, at the critical moment of coitus when the man is about to discharge the seed, the woman must hold her breath and draw herself away a little, so that the seed may not be hurled too deep into the cavity of the uterus.” Soranus adds, “And, getting up immediately and squatting down, she should induce sneezing... She might even drink something cold.”
As strange and funny as many of these recommendations seem, they reveal how little the ancients had to go on when it came to finding ways to enjoy sex and how surprisingly successful they were. Overall, though, sex in the present seems much safer and more enjoyable than it was 2,000 years ago.
In the middle to late 1990s, the frenzy for neuroscientific explanations for everything from why we laugh to how we fall in love was only just gaining a toehold in the popular science. And word was there was some interesting data coming out of a small lab in a Canadian hinterland. Really interesting: Dr. Michael Persinger, an American ex-pat and cognitive neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, had found God.
In the brain. Your brain, my brain, the brain.
“As a neuroscientist, I realized that all experiences are determined by brain activity. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean causal, but it means it could be correlation, and the correlation could be so high that you could consider it causal,” Persinger explained on the phone from his lab. It was 8:30 am London time, 3:30 a.m. his time. He works better at night, he said. “That is, the brain is generating all experiences: The experience of love, the experience of knowing who you are, the sense of presence, the sense of yourself, the feeling that you’re real and that you’re important, these are all products of brain activity in terms of various configurations within different regions in the brain.”
But he wasn’t actually trying to find God in the brain or rather, the neural correlates of religious experience. “I could care less about God, I think it’s a useless and out of date concept,” Persinger said. “We were interested in something that I think is much more important, which is creativity.”
To put this in context, Persinger explained, neuroscience says that the “sense of self is primarily a language-based phenomena, primarily involving more left hemispheric activities.” The right hemisphere, by contrast, is the intuitive, emotional hemisphere; this is where inspiration strikes, if it strikes at all. He wanted to find out what would happen if you stimulated the right, creative hemisphere with electromagnetic fields; he’d written several papers in the past about the resonance that certain electromagnetic fields have with parts of the brain. To do this safely, he turned to his Laurentian colleague and technologist Professor Stanley Koren to help him design a helmet that would be able to apply magnetic fields to the temporal lobes, the parts of the brain associated with hearing, speech, processing sensory information. The first helmet was actually a snowmobiling helmet, bumble bee yellow with two black racing stripes down the top, with two solenoids—a coil of wire that acts as a magnetic when electricity is applied—affixed to either side, roughly above the ears. It looked like a prop from Ghostbusters.
He and his team designed their experiments to gently batter the right hemisphere with weak but “physiologically-patterned magnetic fields”.“Now that’s the critical key: If you apply a sine wave or a square wave, that doesn’t do anything, there’s no information in it.” The information in these magnetic fields employ the “electromagnetic signature of the key correlates of experience that the brain generates during various kinds of states”, he said—in other words, mimicking the kind of electromagnetic jig that your brain does during, for example, an epileptic seizure or a transcendental experience. Persinger hit upon one of these patterns, he said, in the 1980s, when he was watching the EEG of a woman meditating in his lab. “Basically, she was having what we call an absence seizure. It was localized, so it would be technically speaking a complex partial epileptic seizure. Right hemisphere. And I looked at her and she smiled… You’ve seen people have god experiences, their face has that glow about them, from the sebaceous secretion, their eyes may flutter, when they’re feeling that kind of euphoria that goes with an ecstatic state or rapture,” he recalled. “So I asked her, ‘What happened?’ She says, ‘God was here.’ I said, ‘Can you describe it?’ She said, ‘He was all in the laboratory, I felt his presence.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was having a seizure.”
Persinger used her brain pattern in trying to induce a similar state in other people; they called it “Burst X”. The other pattern he used, he said, is associated with the generation of fear. As to whether he was concerned that the patterns could have an adverse reaction on someone, he was not. “First of all, I try everything on myself at the beginning,” he said, adding that the fields are on the order of microtesla—very weak, not even as strong as putting your head near your computer.
Back to the helmet. “So when we stimulated the right hemisphere, we were surprised to find that many people reported a sensed presence, a feeling of a sentient being standing nearby,” he said. “And it suddenly struck us that what the right hemispheric experience is, the sensed presence is, is the right hemispheric equivalent to the left hemispheric sense of self. And the minute we knew that, everything fell into place.”
And Persinger does mean everything. “With respect to how to recreate it, what parts of the brain were involved, and why it’s a powerful phenomenon that drives the human species, often into killing each other to determine whose god that verifies that sensed presence is the strongest.”
Hundreds of people have since sat in the now well-worn armchair, in the darkened room with the blindfold over their eyes, and the helmet on their heads, while Persinger’s team monitors their EEG output, for 50 minutes; most, at least at the beginning, were told they were taking part in a relaxation study. “The technique is pretty simple,” Persinger explained. First, he applies a small amount of magnetic field strength to the right hemisphere. Then another field, which produces a more relaxed state. Simple, right? At least 80 percent of their subjects, Persinger says, have felt a “sensed presence”, someone else in the room with them. “People feel at least something, unless they fall asleep, which is why we run an EEG at the same time,” he said. It’s the “young males” who usually tend to fall asleep.
Some people are more likely to have an experience than others: “Females are very receptive, they’re used to introspection,” he said, but also people who are rated as more temporally sensitive than other on his Personal Philosophy Inventory, a questionnaire he designed to determine temporal lability. Some people do not do well with the experience when they have it; at least one subject tore the helmet from his head and ran from the room. Persinger says the individual’s interpretation of their experience comes down to their cultural circumstances and personal beliefs—they might call the presence they felt “God”, or the ghost of their recently departed grandmother, or they might believe it was an alien, or they might just feel like they were hanging out with a double of themselves. (The general trends in who or what people see have largely remained the same, he says, over the last 30 years of research.)
But what is actually going on here? In some ways, people who said they felt a ghost aren’t entirely wrong. It’s simply that the ghost is yourself. Persinger believes the effect is a kind of temporal lobe mismatch, a by-product of our bicameral brains. Though there is a good deal of overlapping between the two hemispheres of our brains, there isn’t a ton of sharing—only about 1 percent, Persinger said, of the neurons in our brains cross over from one hemisphere to the other. “The vast majority stay intra-hemispheric, they stay within their own hemisphere. So basically, we are two brains to begin with, it’s just that it’s our natural state that we don’t realize it.” But if we do realize it, if something happens to disrupt the normal coordinated, yet independent function of these hemispheres, it’s jarring.
“The basic mechanism by which sensed presence occurs is that there is an enhancement of right hemispheric activity and that ultimately ends up being represented within the left hemisphere and you become aware of it,” said Persinger. In other words, the sense of self that is generated in the left hemisphere might become aware of the experience of the right hemisphere, and interpret that as a self. Because we can’t have two selves, the information is re-understood to be coming from someone else entirely, a presence.
In the years that followed Persinger’s initial experiments and publications, the story of the helmet and its implications made the media rounds. By 1999, the helmet was being widely referred to as the “God Helmet”, although its given name was the Koren Helmet, after its co-creator. That year, Wired’s Jack Hitt wrote a fantastic piece about his pleasant but not exactly divine out-of-body experience in the helmet. Other articles and media attention followed, including a spot on BBC’s Horizon program in 2003, which seemed to cast Persinger as a kind of neuroscientific ghost hunter. One segment used dramatic re-enactment to show Persinger’s detective work in finding that a clock radio near a teenage girl’s bed was emitting electromagnetic fields and causing her nightly sensed presence episodes with particularly religious overtones; when the clock was removed, the visions stopped. Persinger talked about his work in terms of “neurotheology”.
But the flurry of attention was marred by the fact that other labs were unable to replicate Persinger’s results. In a study published in 2005, a Swedish research group, unable to produce the same effect with a similar helmet, concluded that Persinger’s results were down to “suggestibility”; Persinger rejects their study, claiming that they didn’t try to do a faithful replication of the experiment. Another team, lead by Dr. Chris French of Goldsmiths, University of London’s anomalistic psychology department, attempted to replicate the sensed presence, paranormal effects of the helmet using a “haunted” room conceit. In the experiment, subjects spent 50 minutes in a round, featureless room with temporally complex but weak electromagnetic fields, such as those in Persinger’s experiments; this was combined with infrasound, sub-audible sound that is purported to cause anomalous experiences consistent with hauntings. Participants did report strange experiences in the room, was no definable correlation between them and the electromagnetic fields or the infrasound; French and his team attributed the experiences to mild sensory deprivation and suggestibility. The results were published in 2009. It wasn’t until 2014 that an independent lab, in this case two Brazilian researchers at the Integrated Center for Experimental Research, Curitiba, Brazil, was able to replicate the original study’s results, albeit not as spectacularly or on as large a scale.
Laurentian University has been described as in a kind of Canadian hinterland; Persinger’s research might described as inhabiting a similar location in the scientific community. He’s not bothered. “I don’t pay much attention to the scientific community,” he said. He is the kind of person who says “sebaceous secretions” instead of “sweat”; he’s funny and personable, but there’s something Vulcan about his apparent love of logic. Emotions, and things like whether people like him or believe in his work, don’t seem to sway him – he clearly believes in the usefulness of his work. “I never label myself, because one thing that I’ve learned is that you can’t really monitor or describe your own behavior correctly,” he said, when asked if he is an outlier in neuroscience. “One thing I do know is that scientists, many of them, are interested in what we do, but they say, ‘If we did this we would lose our grants. If we do this kind of work, we would lose our credibility.’”
That’s an unverifiable statement, but it is true that funding is limited for research of this kind. Persinger says that he’s always paid for the helmet research out of his own pocket, from money made treating patients with head injuries and epilepsy using electromagnetic fields in his clinical practice (sensed presence, he says, is a common feature of the experience of his patients, in whom there is a breakdown of the inhibition of the function of the two hemispheres; Persinger also reports some success treating patients with, for example, depression using electromagnetic fields). And the university that he works for has, he says, tried to fire him twice. Early this year, he was forced to stop teaching a first-year psychology course he asked students to sign a “statement of understanding” that there might be offensive language used during class, as part of teaching exercise on how words impact thought processes. He attributes to the fact that the university is nominally Catholic and therefore not excited about the notion that God is diminishable to a network of excitable neurons or electromagnetic resonance in the brain. “They feel it is particularly offensive to even ask the question,” he said.
Does he worry that calling the device the God Helmet and his area of study with it “neurotheology” has problematically changed public and scientific perception of his work? “Insufficient data,” he responded.
***
It’s perhaps not surprising that in addition to media attention, Persinger’s work has also attracted the interest of notable skeptics. Famous atheist Richard Dawkins, for one, visited Persinger’s lab for the Horizon program. It didn’t go well, although there would seem to be some nominal sympathy between Dawkins’ militant anti-theism and Persinger’s belief that the inclination to religion is a neurological impulse. Dawkins reported some odd physical sensations, but was otherwise unimpressed.
Prominent American skeptic and atheist Michael Shermer has also spent time in the helmet. “[Persinger’s] a controversial figure in neuroscience. It’s not clear where he stands on the paranormal… He’s looking for the neural correlates of the paranormal. Where does that lead?… He’s always kind of walked that line that makes other neuroscientists kind of nervous,” he observed. He doesn’t seem to be an “out-and-out New Ager”, Shermer said, but neither is he completely free from those associations.
In 1999, Shermer visited Persinger’s lab; his experience was more in line with what Persinger reported others feeling—he felt himself rush by himself. But Shermer still has questions about the difficulties other research groups have had in replicating the experiment; about Persinger’s methodologies and controls; and the fact that the electromagnetic fields are incredibly weak, so weak that is might be impossible for the helmet to produce currents strong enough to depolarize neurons and have an effect. So his biggest question is the one that everyone thinking about this has: Is it actually the God Helmet—and therefore the electromagnetic fields—that’s inducing the experiences?
“The sensed presence effect is a much broader effect that might have multiple neural correlates, but basically, it is the sense that there is somebody else nearby by in your room, in your tent, in the dog sled, on your bike, running alongside you in your ultra-marathon,” Shemer explained. If you put someone in a darkened room and limit their sensory input, it’s not unlikely that they might start hallucinating, he said, and experiences of the kind that people in the God Helmet experiment report are not specific to the helmet alone. The features, he continued, seem to be some sort of extreme state—being hungry, alone, sleep deprived, extraordinarily anxious, or some combination of all of those. Shermer had his own weird hallucinatory, sensed presence-like experience during his attempt in 1983 to cycle from the Santa Monica Pier in California to New York City without stopping. He’d made it as far as Nebraska—83 hours, 1800 miles on a bike without sleep—when he became convinced that the motor home carrying his friends, family, and support crew was actually an alien ship and that they’d all been replaced by alien replicas. “I really, truly thought I was being abducted,” he recalled “My motor home pulled up, and I thought it was an alien space ship that was trying to abduct me. They looked just like my friends coming to take care of me… but they had stiff little fingers,” he continued. “That’s what I thought, and I was quite resistant to getting into the spaceship, the motor home. Then I slept for 90 minutes and I woke up and went, ‘That was weird.’”
But because these experiences happen outside of the electromagnetic field disruption of the God Helmet, the cautious are skeptical that Persinger’s helmet works the way he says it does. Margee Kerr, an American sociologist who studies why people willingly engage with high arousal stimuli that are typically considered negative, such as fear or pain, agreed with Shermer that the helmet might not be the source of the experiences. She’s written about the God Helmet, as well as other potential environmental causes of haunting experiences in her book, Scream. Buddhist monks, people who practice meditation can induce this kind of euphoric, sensed presence state on their own without external influence, she pointed out. “It’s hard to know what the mechanism that is working in this situation, whether it’s the environment, whether we’re getting to this spot through meditation and focus, whether it’s external influence,” she said.
And even without wearing the helmet, undergoing an intense endurance challenge, or meditating, many people have a lot of weird experiences that defy ready explanation: A recent data analysis study by the World Health Organization showed that 6 percent of people had had a hallucination unrelated to drugs, alcohol, or psychiatric disruption.
The thing is, probing the validity of the God Helmet doesn’t have to be entirely up to science. Because for just a few hundred dollars, you can make your very own God Helmet.
In 2014, London-based experience design group Bompas & Parr did just that, using a custom-made God Helmet in their “Sensed Presence” event. Their helmet was in actual fact, a riding helmet painted silver, but it did use solenoids to emit weak, but complex electromagnetic fields in the same type of patterns that Persinger did. The event was held at the Kirkcaldy Testing and Experimenting Works, a former Victorian iron and steel testing facility that is precisely the kind of place you’d think was haunted; the 15-minute experience was intentionally theatrical, involving smoke machines, chanting music, candles, sinister scientific equipment—Bompas & Parr were trying to induce visions and weird feelings, after all. And they mostly succeeded. Visitors were asked to record their experiences in ledgers; most people reported feeling weird, seeing faces in some cases, or the feeling of someone standing near them or behind them. Others felt nothing more than a deep sense of relaxation; some said they regularly meditated and that this was similar to that.
Sam Bompas, co-founder of the group, explained that he learned about the helmet through an entry in the Dictionary of Hallucinations. “It’s such a provocative topic. It’s talking about not only your consciousness, but the nature of God and the divine and the supernatural, because you’ve got ghosts in there as well, and aliens,” said Bompas. “It can be used to explain all sorts of lurid complications, right on the border of legitimate science, what science is confident speaking about without being considered right outsiders.” Bompas is not convinced that it was the helmet that caused the experiences people reported; he thinks it’s more likely that it was that people were separated from their phones, and that the experience was heavily “choreographed”. “If you can’t have a profound experience sitting in the dark by yourself for 15 minutes in a building in that is redolent with history, being asked to think about your relationship with superstition and God, you’re probably brain dead,” he said.
But perhaps this is the real legacy of Persinger’s work, namely, pushing the neuroscience behind human experience, for sure, but also pushing the conversation about the nature of God and man in other areas. Like art. So whether or not the helmet is a reliable way to induce feelings of religious ecstasy is almost not the point; the helmet, as Bompas pointed out, raises some uncomfortable and important questions. If, in our quiet moments, we seek God, the divine, the mystical, and we find it, are we actually finding something outside ourselves?
Persinger’s remained interesting and important in part because it is trying to come up with plausible solutions to anomalous experiences, to figure out if it’s just us or something else. That’s an admirable, useful pursuit. “There’s no such thing as the paranormal or the supernatural, these are just words we use as linguistic fillers to explain things we don’t know yet,” noted Shermer. Persinger seems to be one of the people trying to explain those things we don’t know yet.
So Persinger is still pursuing the wilder frontiers of neuroscience; recently, he says, he fired the electromagnetic fields at dead brains to see what would happen. The results were surprising, although perhaps not if you’re Persinger. “We found that of all the various fields that we applied, the ones that showed the greatest changes in conductivity within in fixed tissue—when we say fixed tissue, remember, the neurons are still intact; it’s not alive, but the fibers are still there—those two patterns we used had the greatest effect in fixed human brains, suggesting that there is something intrinsic to the structure of the brain itself,” he said. The study is currently under review for publication.
“We know a great deal about the brain. There’s nothing mysterious about it,” Persinger said. “What’s unusual about it is that there are 7 billion of them and they have individual differences.”
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The '80s were by and large a time of peace for the United States. The Cold War was thawing, and most of the conflicts the U.S. did get in took place over secured phone lines, rather than on the battlefield.
Pop culture was far more likely to arm itself to the teeth during this era: Military-inspired cartoons like G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero ruled the after-school airwaves, while films like Rambo and stars like Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren were bringing explosive military action to the cineplex.
Not everyone was so happy about this state of affairs, however, and as I highlighted in this Worlds of Wonder piece back in September, toys were often the main targets of this disdain.
Not that it ever truly stopped their success. According to statistics from the National Coalition on Television Violence, sales of war toys increased by 350 percent between 1982 and 1985, accounting for $842 million in sales each year. Four of the five most popular kinds of toys released during the era portrayed some form of violence.
The largest of all? A little ditty called G.I. Joe, which became perhaps the biggest toy trend of the 1980s due to a combination of savvy marketing and loosened regulations.
It was great for the toymaker Hasbro, but not so great for anti-war activists.
For those that haven't followed the history of G.I. Joe, here's a two-second primer: In the 1960s, G.I. Joe looked a heck of a lot different from the Real American Hero that is popular today.
The toys of the early G.I. Joe era, in the mid-1960s, were 12 inches tall, and could be realistically posed any which way. But the Vietnam War happened, and suddenly, toys inspired by soldiers seemed like not such a great idea.
A 1970s version, which de-emphasized the war and military concepts, failed to catch fire. But eventually, a new approach, tied to a storyline straight out of the comic books, did the trick.
Working with Marvel Comics, Hasbro came up with an original storyline for the toy line, complete with new characters and a common enemy—one you might know as COBRA. It played more with the military elements, but it wasn't tied to actual U.S. battles. And instead of selling giant dolls, Hasbro could now sell toys that were just 3.75 inches high, thanks to the success of Star Wars. That meant the company could save money and focus on building accessories for this massive universe Marvel helped them create.
The partnership, at first, also allowed for a clever skirting of advertising rules. Animation couldn't be used to promote toys on television at the time—it could only be used partly, and the ads required pictures of actual kids playing with the toys. As Mental Floss notes, Hasbro and Marvel got around that rule by promoting the comic book on television, a comic book which just happened to use the toys that Hasbro was selling.
It was the first ad for a comic book ever aired on television, and it set the stage for a massive cartoon success, one that came about in 1985, after the Reagan administration deregulated the kinds of cartoons that could air on television.
It helped that the toymakers had someone in their corner at the Federal Communications Commission. Mark S. Fowler, the head of the FCC during most of the Reagan years, felt that television in general, and children’s television in particular, was controlled too tightly by federal regulations.
"I believe that for far too long the government, with its programming content guidelines, has indicated what is best for the public,” Fowler said in 1981 comments to the New York Times. “I’d rather eliminate those guidelines and let the marketplace decide more surely what the people want."
Fowler's let-the-market-decide approach to children's programming had significant effects on the kinds of programs that appeared during this era, which greatly benefited shows based on toys, but put a damper on the kind of educational programming that defined the '70s.
G.I. Joe, with its military themes and tightly integrated marketing strategy, won big. But it created a massive backlash of concerned parents and anti-war activists.
By 1985, G.I. Joe and other action-heavy toys were massively popular, but that success was raising some larger concerns for parents, educators, and peaceniks.
And during that holiday season, the movement against war toys started picking up steam in the U.S., through a variety of advocacy groups and other organizations. One such group, the International War Toys Boycott, held mock funerals for military toys, complete with eulogizers such as Vietnam vet Max Inglett, who became an anti-war protester after returning home, going so far as to hitchhike across the country in a wheelchair to draw attention to his crusade.
"Since childhood, we have been conditioned by being told it is fun to play war," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I had numerous conversations in Vietnam about the fact that we are conditioned by war toys to think it's OK to kill in battle. I think we need to learn at a very early age that war is not a game."
Author and peace activist Deb Ellis, in an article for Peace magazine, suggested that the Iran hostage crisis created the environment that allowed war-friendly toys to thrive once again.
"Something as ugly as war needs to be beautified before it hits the market. Memories of American boys being slaughtered on national TV fade into the background when Rambo is around," she wrote. "America is seen as taking control of violence again, rather than as being a victim of it. Being kicked in the head is not glamorous, but doing the kicking is glamorous—and even virtuous."
Even celebrities got in on the movement. Michelle Phillips, a vocalist for the Mamas and the Papas, was inspired to join the Ban War Toys movement after seeing that a friend's 6-year-old son had been given toy machine guns for his birthday.
Perhaps the most prominent voice throughout this whole movement might have been a psychiatrist named Thomas Radecki. Having chaired the National Coalition on Television Violence throughout the '80s, Radecki was often the key advocate against violent imagery in the media and a commonly quoted figure. His views could be a bit out there at times—specifically, when criticizing Dungeons & Dragons, a game he claimed was behind a number of deaths. (And just watch him tell Larry King, straight-faced, in this 1989 clip, that Archie Comics are just as good an option as anything in the Marvel Comics stead.)
But he nonetheless gave weight to advocates for banning war toys, at one point finding, through his own research, that playing with He-Man toys often created more antisocial behavior among preschoolers than playing with Cabbage Patch dolls. The study was criticized due to its small sample size, but Radecki's voice gave it weight.
"The evidence is quite strong that we are transmitting an unhealthy message encouraging children to have fun pretending to murder each other," Radecki said, according to the New York Times.
The toy industry, understandably, was skeptical of the criticism it was facing from some of these critics.
"Imaginary play in no way makes ax murderers," stated Donna Datre, a representative of the Toy Manufacturers of America, in comments to Mother Jones in 1986.
On that front, point to Datre. Lots of He-Man and G.I. Joe toys were sold throughout the '80s. Few of them created any ax murderers.
What's fascinating to me about the war on war toys that dotted the Reagan era is the fact that it appeared to come from a place of liberal conscience, unlike many movements of its type.
It makes sense, then, that the strategy saw the most success in culturally liberal Scandinavia. In fact, the most prominent regulation around this issue, which discouraged toy producers and retailers from producing war toys, was already implemented into law in Sweden in 1980, well before G.I. Joe had relaunched.
That means that in 1986, at the movement’s peak, there was an example to point to. That year, the academic journal Prospects - Quarterly Review of Education published a report by a Swedish National Board of Education official that highlighted the progress the nation had made with its restrictions. Other nearby countries, such as Finland, eventually followed suit.
More successful were efforts to do the same thing to video games in the early '90s. As Joe Lieberman will tell you, game companies eventually adopted a ratings system based on the former senator's pressure on the issue.
Every once in awhile, someone still makes the argument that war toys need to be thrown out. One such example of this comes from South Carolina politician Tom Turnipseed, who wrote in 2009 that Inez Tenenbaum, who served as head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission for much Barack Obama's presidency, should make it a priority to ban war toys, for safety reasons.
"Inez's top priority should be banning war toys," Turnipseed wrote on Common Dreams. "War toys are products threatening the safety of people everywhere with or without lead paint."
Such a ban, despite concerns about our country's mass shootings, seems unlikely. But if we ever did decide to do so, we'd have some interesting company on that front. Last year, Afghanistan—a country at the center of American wartime efforts for more than a decade—banned toy guns, with the goal of stemming violence.
According to Agence France-Presse, Interior Minister Noor-ul Haq Uloomi cited "physical and psychological damage" as a reason for such a ban.
John Rambo might not know how to compute that news.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
When you hear the name “Product 19,” you’ll either flash on an experimental invention from some corporate R&D department, or, if you're one of its fans, you might think of the health cereal, rare in the aisles of American supermarkets yet loved all the same.
But earlier this month, Kellogg's announced that it had officially discontinued the cereal. While most people these days seemed to barely know of its existence, Product 19 died a slow, oaty, fade to black, leaving devoted fans desperate.
What was Product 19, though? For nearly 50 years, it was simply an answer to a business problem, first released in 1967 as Kellogg's answer to General Mills’ Total, which had hit the market six years prior. As the current slogan still contends, Total aimed to provide 100% of the daily amounts of nutrients like vitamin E, calcium, iron, and more. Kellogg’s needed something to compete with this healthy new blockbuster, so they began attempting to develop a vitamin cereal of their own, eventually settling on Product 19.
The name, immediately, was a bit curious, and its origins, perhaps fittingly, remain apocryphal. According to one story, it was so named because the end product was the 19th iteration of the cereal they were developing. Others say it was simply the 19th product Kellogg's developed that year. Either way, Product 19 stuck, a workmanlike name that echoed what the cereal promised to do: provide a base of nutrition, nothing more or less.
The cereal was made up of flakes made from a combination of lightly sweetened corn, wheat, oats, and rice, and promoted itself as providing the full daily amounts of “Multivitamins and Iron.” On the more modern boxes, this would be specified as, “Vitamin E, Folic Acid, Iron, and Zinc.” The original box was so covered in charts and blocks of text, it truly looked more like some experimental substance than a breakfast cereal.
Product 19 sold itself as a cereal for health-minded adults and older people, barking about how the cereal would make you feel young again. According to MrBreakfast.com, the cereal’s original slogan was, “Instant Nutrition - New cereal food created especially for working mothers, otherwise busy mothers and everybody in a hurry.” However the focus of their marketing quickly shifted. In the early 1970s, Product 19 used former Heisman trophy winner, Tom “Old 98” Harmon, then in his 50s, as its spokesman in a series of television commercials. He presented the cereal as a part of the wellness routine he used to stay active. At the same time, Total was rolling out its now iconic commercials featuring a comparison of how many bowls of a competing cereal it would take to get the same vitamins.
And whether it was due to marketing or flavor, Product 19 never gained the household name recognition of competitors like Total, or even Special K, but the cereal did manage to hold on to a devoted fan base. Updating its brand throughout the years to sell itself to younger consumers (the most modern package featured the image of someone doing yoga), the cereal maintained a presence on store shelves through the 2000s, sticking with its simple red and white motif and industrial name. But as sales of Product 19 began to slump, it began slowly disappearing from stores. In a thread from 2014 on Kellogg’s official product forums, a Product 19 fanatic pleaded that the cereal not be taken from shelves, but an official rep responded that Product 19 had gone into limited distribution.
Facebook groups like “Bring Back Kellogg’s Product 19” began popping up around the same time, with people posting images of the final remaining boxes of the cereal they found on store shelves. Then it stopped.
Without much action on social media in the two years since Product 19 went into decline, Kellogg's released a statement officially declaring that Product 19 had been discontinued. The statement reads in part, “We are sorry to announce that Kellogg’s Product 19 cereal has been discontinued. Unfortunately, sales of this cereal were not strong enough to support continued production, so we had to make the difficult decision to discontinue it.”
Despite a nearly 50 year history as an underdog of the healthy cereal market, Product 19 has gone the way of so many other beloved breakfasts, passing into the Great Lunchtime. But to its diehard fans, no substitution will ever taste the same.
You’re craving a soda and have just spent the last five minutes scouring through every pocket of your backpack and looking around on the floor for any lost nickels you can find. Finally, you manage to collect $1.25 and with exhausted joy you place the coins into the vending machine one by one. You press the magic combination that will finally quench your thirst, you see the swirl of the machine twist to release the can, and...the can gets stuck.
This horrible yet universal feeling of disappointment is ever-present in Unsatisfying, a short film by Parallel Studio. The video has no storyline, no plot, no meaning, nothing except an excellently animated compilation dedicated to capturing that feeling we all dread so. The subtle disappointment, frustration, and utter sense of futility you feel when you aren’t able to grab the teddy bear with the claw, or a file won’t finish downloading, or a nail bends as you hit it with a hammer.
Faithful to the quest of encapsulating this particular feeling, Parallel Studio is having an animation contest that is open to the public. The call is for animations of the moments that, as the studio explains, are “so painful to live and even to watch.”
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.
Although blue is the color most often associated with the world’s oceans, black is a far more apt descriptor for nearly 90 percent of our planet’s waters. Descending beneath the surface, the seemingly endless, light-flooded blue quickly fades, leaving nothing but utter darkness by a depth of roughly 200 meters (650 feet). Here, the largely unexplored and perpetually dark deep sea begins—a hidden, dreamlike world filled with fantastically weird creatures: gliding glass squid, flitting sea butterflies, and lurking viperfish.
Last winter, photographer and marine biologist Solvin Zankl joined a scientific expedition led by the GEOMAR research center in Germany to conduct deep sea biodiversity assessments around the islands of Cape Verde. The team explored the depths with cameras and lights, and used nets to bring an array of strange deep sea creatures to the surface. In his shipboard photography studio—outfitted with special aquariums and a powerful microscope—Zankl set out to capture the unique features and behaviors of these otherworldly organisms. This photo series offers rare glimpses of some of those creatures and the adaptations that enable them to survive and thrive in one of the planet’s most challenging environments.
Like many other deep-sea fishes, the Sloan’s viperfish (Chauliodus sloani) uses light-producing cells called photophores to lure unsuspecting prey toward its mouth. Once it catches its victim, the viperfish’s hinged teeth rotate inward to trap the animal and force it inescapably down the predator’s gullet.
The boxer snipe eel (Nemichthys curvirostris) belongs to a family of eels whose slender bodies taper nearly five feet, ending in threadlike tails. This body shape has earned the species the scientific name Nemichthys, or “filament fish.” The eel’s large eyes are adapted to capture every possible ray of light as they plumb the dinghy depths with curved, bill-like jaws. An exceedingly narrow body plan has resulted in a surprising location for the snipe eel’s anus: just behind the animal’s head.
Ghoulish in appearance, creatures like this ostracod have thrived for millennia as little more than floating heads. Lacking segmentation, their bodies and heads are merged, tucked away into a globular shell along with the creature’s appendages. This particular ostracod species (Gigantocypris muelleri) has mirror-like reflectors for eyes that it uses to locate tiny, floating creatures of the deep.
The triplewart sea devil (Cryptopsaras couesi), a species of anglerfish, uses a modified portion of its dorsal fin like a fishing pole to lure would-be prey toward its mouth. Only females are equipped with this bioluminescent, prey-baiting adaptation. The much smaller males, in contrast, are parasitic mates, holding on to females with a mouthful of spiny teeth. The tissues and circulatory systems of both fish eventually fuse together until the male has lost all internal organ function except sperm production.
The thieving pram bug (genus Phronima) parades through the sea in a stolen, translucent mobile home. Females devour the gelatinous innards of a jelly-like sea creature known as a salp before crawling inside the salp’s exoskeleton to lay eggs. The female hangs on to the hollowed nursery with hooked claws, and propels it through the water to provide her larvae with a constant flow of water and food.
Bacteria fluoresce like a beacon at the end of this anglerfish’s bioluminescent lure. It’s an elegant display of symbiosis—a mutually beneficial relationship between two species. Unsuspecting fish mistake the glowing tip for prey and find themselves quickly inside the oversized jaws and elastic stomach of the anglerfish (Cryptopsaras couesi).
This is no friendly embrace: A deep-sea squid (Chiroteuthis mega) wraps its tentacles around its prey. Light-producing cells called photophores likely lured this unfortunate fish into close proximity, allowing the soft-bodied squid to strike.
Bumping into a common fangtooth can be a deadly mistake for squid and smaller fish. Because the predator has poor eyesight, it relies on the motion-sensing cells along its lateral line—an enlarged sensory strip that runs the length of the fish’s body—to detect prey. Juveniles lose the bright, plankton-filtering gills seen on this individual when they mature and descend into some of the deepest depths of any known fish, often more than 5,000 meters (16,000 feet) beneath the ocean surface.
This larval longarm octopus (Macrotritopus defilippi) will ultimately live up to its name by developing long, thin arms that stretch up to seven times the length of the octopus’s body. Scientists have reported instances in which this species has avoided predation by mimicking the shape, color, and behavior of a flounder fish while moving across the sea floor.
Given its transparent body, the glass octopus (Vitreledonella richardi) remains one of the most elusive creatures of the deep sea. Rare photographs such as this reveal an array of opaque organs and a glimpse of its unusually shaped eyes. Scientists think the upward tilt and elongation of its rectangular eyes are adaptations to help the glass octopus avoid predation.
Trailing a barb from its lower jaw, the scaleless dragonfish (Bathophilus nigerrimus) bares spikey teeth to snatch prey, including crustaceans and small fish. Despite their menacing appearance, dragonfish actually have weak jaws. Ensuring that prey are well skewered is the key to this fish successfully bagging a meal.
The marine snail Atlanta inclinata undulates its fin-like foot to propel itself forward and keep from sinking into the dark depths. At night, the snail secretes long strands of floating mucus to help it stay buoyant. The whorl of its translucent shell offers a safe haven for retreat when the mollusk is threatened by a predator.
True to its name, the sea butterfly (Clio chaptali)—a member of a family of marine snails—seems to fly through water. Two fleshy “wings” have evolved from the snail’s foot, which allow it to flutter through the water column and passively feed on plankton while remaining protected inside its translucent shell.
Despite its small size, the eye-flash squid (Abralia veranyi) migrates great vertical distances through the water column. During the day, it remains at depth shrouded in darkness to avoid predation. At night, the tiny squid ascends to feed on shallow-dwelling invertebrates. Scientists believe the speckling of light-producing cells known as photophores on the underside of the body help break up the squid’s distinct silhouette and allow it blend in with the light-filled water above.
Deep sea eels endure such radical metamorphoses during their life cycle that at first scientists confused their various developmental forms for different species. While in its larval stage, this eel will spend significant time floating in the open ocean feeding only on tiny plankton and relying on its translucency to hide from predators.
Male copepods—tiny aquatic crustaceans—of the genus Sapphirina glint like colorful jewels one moment and are nearly invisible the next. Scientists only learned the details of this sea sapphire’s vanishing act a year ago. Cellular material measuring just nanometers in thickness separate the crystal plates of the copepod’s exoskeleton. The varying thickness of this material is what determines which wavelengths of light reflect back, and therefore which colors we see—if we see any at all.
This little larval prawn (Plesiopenaeus armatus) is rarely spotted in the wild—except in the gut contents of other species—and for centuries, scientists failed to recognize the larvae’s connection to its adult form. Genetic analysis has since solved the mystery, proving that a species formerly known as the “monster larvae,” with external armor and devilish horns, transforms into a ruby-red, shrimp-like creature as an adult.
This juvenile glass squid (Bathothauma lyromma) haunts the waters with stalked, bulbous eyes and two short arms. Like many glass squids, members of this species contain light-emitting organs on their lower surfaces, which are used to fool predators and obscure the silhouette of their eyes.
The most stunning feature of this deep-sea threadtail (Stylephorus chordatus) is undoubtedly its pair of green, telescopic eyes modified to capture the slightest traces of light. The threadtail creates negative pressure by ballooning its mouth cavity and sucking up unsuspecting prey. Despite its vacuum-like feeding habits, this only known member of the Steylphorus genus is named for the whip-like extension of its filamentous tail.
On July 5th, 1945, a young British woman named Dorothy penned a letter to her sweetheart, Harry Hughes, a Royal Air Force pilot posted overseas in India. She told him about her day—she had voted in the General Election with her father, who, she said, was "rather proud on the occasion of having a daughter old enough to vote." She wrote of her hopes for the future—marriage, and a happy life together.
In 2016, someone—Dorothy? Harry? A younger Hughes?—mistakenly dropped the letter in an Asda Supercentre in Greater Manchester, England. Cashier Stacie Adamson was going through the store's Lost and Found when she spotted it, tucked among the junk mail and coupon packets. "I was going through all the letters, which we shred," she told the Manchester Evening News. "I saw it was from the war and saved it from being shredded."
Touched by the letter's message, Adamson has dedicated herself to finding its owner. So far, her search has turned up a video clip from Calling Blighty, a series of films shot in India and Southeast Asia for the benefit of folks back home. In the segment, Harry, smiling alongside a couple of his comrades, greets his parents and Dorothy. "I'm fine, there's nothing to worry about," he reassures them, before joking about sending some sunshine home to rainy Britain.
Adamson's next move, of course, is Facebook. An Asda post about the search has already garnered thousands of shares, along with helpful suggestions from invested readers: try to get on local TV! Post a copy of the letter near the cash registers!
"If the owner does turn up and claim it please let us romantics know," the top comment on the post pleads. The medium may change, but the message stays the same—we all just want the comfort of a response.
On November 4, 1980, President Jimmy Carter went on television to concede to Ronald Reagan. The polls hadn't closed in California yet, but it was obvious Reagan had won. Before his speech, Carter sent Reagan a telegram. “It's now apparent that the American people have chosen you as the next president,” it read. “I congratulate you and pledge to you our fullest support and cooperation...”
Concession telegrams had been de rigueur for decades, but Carter added an additional flourish. He gave Reagan an unexpected call. The president-elect had just gotten out of the shower, and he picked up the phone in the bathroom, “with a wrapped towel around me, my hair dripping with water,” to accept Carter's congratulations.
Thus, in his eagerness to show himself a graceful loser, Carter enshrined the awkward concession phone call in American election tradition.
In these final weeks of the 2016 election, reporters have asked if Donald Trump if he’ll concede, in the event of a Republican loss, and the answer hasn’t been exactly clear. But if the loser of tonight's election doesn't pick up the phone to congratulate the winner, it'll be seen as a dramatic, petty snub. “The loser alone can truly congratulate the winner,” writes historian Paul E. Corcoran.
Nobody likes making the concession phone call: in the last election, President Obama, “unsmiling...and slightly irritated when it was over,” reportedly didn't even enjoy receiving the call from Mitt Romney. But since Carter, it's been unavoidable.
Presidential candidates didn't always concede elections: the practice only goes back to the late 1800s. Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan was the first candidate to send his opponent a concession telegram, and by 1916 it was expected that the election's loser would write to the winner. Timeliness was expected as well: Woodrow Wilson was miffed that his opponent that year, Charles E. Hughes, didn't send him a note until weeks after the election.
Four-time New York Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith is sometimes given credit for the modern routine: In 1928 he sent Herbert Hoover a congratulatory message but also gave a public concession speech on the radio. In 1940 Republican nominee Wendell Willkie's concession speech was the first to be televised; in 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt was insulted when Thomas Dewey never sent him a telegram congratulating him on his victory.
The defeated candidates would often read the telegrams they sent as part of their concession speeches, and sometimes those missives were used to make a political point. Goldwater wrote to Lyndon B. Johnson that the Republican Party “remains the party of opposition when opposition is called for. There is much to be done with Vietnam, Cuba, the problem of law and order in this country, and a productive economy.”
Usually the messages struck a note of reconciliation, like Ford's to Carter, in 1976:
By contrast, the concession phone call happens in private; the candidate rarely reports what happened verbatim. Carter didn’t inaugurate the practice; after losing to Nixon in 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey both sent a telegram and picked up the phone. Nixon was known for being a sore loser, but he was a gracious enough winner. “I know how it feels to lose a close one,” he told Humphrey.
In 1972, though, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern couldn’t bring himself to actually talk to the hated Nixon when he lost. He only sent a telegram. (Humphrey actually called Nixon again, to congratulate him on his re-election.)
Since Carter, though, the call has been expected. When former Democratic Vice President and nominee Walter Mondale called Ronald Reagan, the sitting president was fully dressed. Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis called George H.W. Bush to “congratulate him on his victory.” George Bush, Sr., gave Bill Clinton “a generous and forthcoming telephone call, of real congratulations.” Four years later, Bob Dole called Clinton, and he reported in true Southern fashion that, “We had a good visit.”
Al Gore infamously called George W. Bush to concede—then called back to rescind. Democratic nominee John Kerry waited until the day after the election, after a long night of vote-counting in Ohio, to call Bush and congratulate him. Republican John McCain said calling Barack Obama to congratulate him on his victory was “a honor.” (Classy!) Mitt Romney called the president and told him he had done a good job at turning out his voters. (Less classy.)
This cycle, even the day before the election, reporters were hearing that Donald Trump hasn’t decided what tone a concession might take, if he has to concede. It’s hard to imagine how painful it would be for Hillary Clinton to make that phone call, too. Perhaps this cycle, the candidates will update the form of the election concession once again. Telegrams are too old-fashioned to make a come-back, so instead of a concession phone call, should we expect a concession tweet?
You never know when disaster might strike. Amidst mass panic, fear, and chaos it’s understandably difficult to keep logic and reason in check. The last thing you’d want to do when it’s time to flee your home is frantically pack random items you think you’ll need to keep you alive while trekking to what you hope will be a safer location with greater resources and protection.
Whether a brewing hurricane, an unexpected tsunami, or the ultimate doomsday scenario, survivalists and emergency preparedness experts have come up with various guides to creating your ultimate bug out bag, a portable pack stocked up with the absolute necessities to help you stay alive for three days in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.
“Disaster can strike at any time and knowing what to do and how to respond in that time of emergency could mean the difference between life and death,” says Andrew, who declined to give his last name, co-founder of Bug Out Bag Academy, a website dedicated to the bug out bag. “I wish that didn’t sound so gloomy, but the flipside of that coin is having preparations like bug out bags can give us much needed hope and assurance in a time of chaos.”
In the face of a disaster, every minute counts. Being prepared with an up-to-date list of core items to quickly pack into a bug out bag could save crucial time. Andrew suggests reviewing the contents of a bug out bag at least every six months to make sure you’re adequately prepared.
The origin of the bug out bag is said to derive from military pilot “bail-out-bags” that contained several critical survival items in the event that the plane went down, Andrew explains. Today, these bags are meant to assist you when the environment you are in is no longer safe and hunkering down isn't an option. In these life-threatening scenarios, you are forced to move to a relative’s home or designated emergency shelter, such as a hospital, hotel, or church—a bug out site. However, bug out bags and survival kits are a widely debated topic. Some bug out bag items are obvious and ubiquitous (water and medical supplies), while others may rile up criticism. For instance, Bug Out Academy’s guide of 75 essential items differs from the Survivalist Blog’s list and the Navy SEALs’ survival bag. Some experts question the value of even having a bug out bag.
“Unfortunately, compiling a bug out bag isn’t as easy as pushing a button and ‘poof,’ there it is. We wish it was, but that’s just not practical given all the unique variables to an individual’s situation,” says Andrew.
While the contents of a bug out bag may vary based on numerous factors (personal needs, location, mode of transportation, the state of the disaster), there are some items and tips that many agree you may want to consider.
“One of the key points is that you want to go basic and you want to go simple,” advises Robert Kauffman, a parks and recreations professor at Frostburg State University in Maryland who teaches an emergency preparedness and doomsday preppers class. “Don’t assume that you’re going to have all this high-tech stuff with you. Don’t assume that cell phone towers are going to be working.”
Cellphone towers might be down or overloaded, rendering mobile devices useless. Richard Mitchell a wilderness survival instructor at Oregon State University recommends throwing out the cellphone completely, and instead learn how to read a topographic map and standard magnetic compass.
“One the biggest, most recurring problems is navigation,” says Mitchell. “It’s the thing that’s most opaque these days because people have electronic instruments that they wave around in hopes that it’ll tell you where to go.”
After navigation, you should think about the basics of survival, maintaining fundamental body functions, such as core temperature and blood temperature, says Mitchell. He follows the “old rule of three”: you cannot survive three minutes without air, three hours without shelter (in most environments in the United States), three days without water, three weeks without food, and three months without human contact.
Guides almost all include first aid items in the bag, like antibiotics, disinfectant bandages, and small surgical tools. A simple bar of soap to wash your clothes, clean your skin or an injury, can be a critical item, says Mitchell. Something that can’t be included in a first aid kit, but is essential are immunizations. “Diphtheria, tetanus, typhoid. Those in major disasters do become relevant,” he says.
Exposure, especially being wet, kills. To protect yourself from the elements, Bug Out Bag Academy and Mitchell recommend water proof clothing (from top to bottom) as well as multiple pairs of socks, underwear, a hat, gloves, and sunscreen. It’s useful to have tools to start a fire, such as a butane lighter, and flashlight or headlight for a light source.
There are other items to include in a bug out bag that don’t directly contribute to basic survival, but are staple necessities such as money in the form of cash—particularly small bills. During disasters, “cash is king,” says Kauffman. You may not be able to withdrawal cash or use credit or debit cards if electronic systems are down, he says. “If all you have are fifties and hundreds, you might go to a grocery store to find that they don’t give change.”
There are several recommended bug out bag items that have stirred heated discussion, such as cooking utensils which people argue add unnecessary weight. Bug Out Bag Academy’s guide mentions non-lubricated condoms in the miscellaneous section, earning some vocal feedback from community members. “You wouldn’t believe some of the comments we didn’t approve for viewing by the general public,” says Andrew, who explains that they are actually quite durable and can serve as a water container or keep fire tinder dry. “Items like this that can serve multiple purposes in your bug out bag are a great help to reduce weight and bulk.”
But perhaps the most controversial are self-defense tools. Some may choose to pack firearms to help with defense or with hunting. Others may opt for pepper spray or choose not to carry any weapon at all. “While we think a critical element to any bug out bag is the personal ability to defend yourself and hunt for food if need be, we leave that up to the individual to decide,” says Andrew. “We say this because not everyone is sufficiently trained to properly handle and use a firearm, nor defend themselves. Just like a bug out bag, a weapon will not protect you, unless you know how to properly use it.”
Nifty tools and weapons aside, one of the most powerful objects in a bug out bag is a trinket, good luck charm, or picture of a loved one, says Mitchell. “It’s worth all the ammunition in your 9-millimeter [handgun],” he says. “Something that reminds you of hope is a very powerful tool.”
Mitchell and other experts argue that a bug out bag is seemingly inconsequential if you do not have the necessary skills to survive in an extreme disaster scenario. People are much more tool oriented than skill oriented, leaving many unprepared when encountered with uncertain conditions and events, he says.
“The biggest misconception is that bug out bags has to be that the bag and its contents will, in and of themselves, keep you alive. Nothing can be further from the truth,” says Andrew of Bug Out Bag Academy. Andrew, Mitchell, and Kauffman advise familiarizing yourself with your personalized bug out bag and the items within. You’ll be happy knowing basic survival and navigational skills when others scramble in panic during zombie apocalypse or alien invasion, or any cataclysmic event.
“If you don’t see why knowing about emergency preparedness is a good idea, just turn on the TV and watch the nightly news,” says Andrew. “Level heads prevail in times of calamity.”
Last week, we asked you to send us your election panic dreams. Many, many of you complied. But then dozens more came in, and we're now up to 139 panic dreams and counting.
A panic dream can be defined pretty broadly, from a specific nightmare to "the last year and a half of our lives." But most of you responded with simple, terrifying, dreams, of Trump, of Hillary, of nukes, egg babies, and post-apocalyptic scenarios. Below are more of them for your reading pleasure and also, possibly, as one last reminder to go vote.
Sadistic Trump
Dinner with Donald
Trump was my dinner date for some crazy reason. He kept scratching my arm with his fingernails and asking (hopefully) if it hurt.
"Wrong"
I'm diagnosed with PTSD. My dream was about an actual time when a man held a gun in my face, and when I escaped being held hostage, I was fired at and hunted. That part of the dream ended, and the rest was fictional but relevant to this survey. In flight, the police apprehended me and forced me to confess to raping a minor. Donald Trump interrupted me saying, "wrong," every time I tried to explain myself.
Murder
My dream was similar to It Follows, with a twist. I was in a group and a naked woman figure, not Clinton, but clearly demonic, was stalking us. Among the group was Trump who offered us safety in a secured penthouse. Once he realized that his act of kindness threatened his cache of food and supplies, he began to brutally murder members of the group, one by one. I don't remember my fate, but I probably opted for diving off the roof.
Metaphors
The Couple
I am with a couple, like my parents. It's a terrible situation - the man is an alcoholic, mean, has outbursts, threatens. I am an adult and I am trying to escape the horrible situation. I keep telling myself that either I'm leaving at nightfall when I can sneak out, or that if it happens one more time I'm leaving. I have to carefully plan my escape because he controls the money, and threatens me if I do anything against his ways. I'm determined to leave, and believe I'm smart enough and strong enough - but there are so many obstacles! The woman is trying to convince me that it's not so bad, we have to do what he says because he's right. I wake up feeling trapped, hopeless. The man represents Trump and the woman represents Republicans.
Puppets
It was like the tv show the walking dead except they were puppets and Donald Trump was pulling their strings
The Dog
I was sleeping on my living room couch due to back issues, and I dreamed that a big dog was behind a neighbor's fence-- really huge, sort of dark gray and white, built like a bulldog but as big as a real bull. It was growling and barking very loudly; there was a large poster of Trump's face on the fence it was behind, and I could see the dog's face every time it shoved at the gate-- the fence would wobble and the gate would shudder, and I was afraid the gate would break and the dog would come out.
Every time the dog made the fence move, the poster looked more and more like the dog (or vice versa, I don't know.) I jerked awake with a yelp, and it turned out that the "barking" was the sound of my apartment complex's maintenance guys working on my gas-meter right outside my front door-- they were digging, and the sounds of the shovel sounded like barking (I guess.) But man, I was sweating and my heart was beating hard!
The Hunt
I have been having recurring nightmares for the last three months about Donald Trump. In my dreams, I am in possession of information that will completely disqualify Donald Trump for becoming president. Somehow, he and his minions have learned I have this information and are pursuing me. Though the locations vary, I am always being chased, having to hide, trying to get away, etc.
I'm not sure why I'm having these nightmares other than the fact that the prospect of his presidency scares the absolute crap out of me. … Some days the nightmares haunt me all day long. Other days my unease passes before the morning, but I still dread the dreams and hope they cease after November 8th.
Trump in Cuffs
The other week, I had a dream where I was backstage watching Donald Trump deliver a speech on stage to his supporters. In the middle of the speech, a group of elite policemen (dressed in all black, face masks, no identification) rushed the stage to arrest Trump. He started yelling and cursing as they handcuffed him, his face getting orangier, and his supporters started rioting. A few people in the audience, including myself, started to laugh hysterically. When I woke up, I started checking the news to see if he had actually been arrested, and was deeply disappointed to find out he had not.
Double Trouble
Judgment
I had only one "election" dream of late, and both Clinton and Trump were in it. Clinton was chastising me for not being honest (not sure regarding what) and Trump look disapprovingly at me for listening to her berate me. All in all, this is one of my more tame dreams of recent weeks!
Family Vacation
First my mom's boss invited Donald Trump to stay with my family for a week to see how regular people lived. He insulted my mom's cooking so my dad decided we were going to be the grossest most unclean people ever. The more grossed out trump became the orange he turned until he finally blew up like the aunt in harry potter. Later I had to go to a banquet with hillary Clinton for extra credit but all she wanted to do was talk about her ugly grandson who was a stereotypical gray alien and also her new cape cod vacation home
Peeing and Farting
In real life I am an older woman with all the physical "frailties" that entails. My daughter teases me about my farting and having to wear "pee pads" for incontinence. I have been having a recurring dream that I can't decide who to vote for as all the candidates are dreadful. In my dream, I am in line at the polling station and have a brilliant idea. I decide that when I get to the booth that if I pee I will vote for Trump and if I fart I will vote for Clinton. I always wake up before finding out what my decision is.
Bernie!
The dream was candidates around a roasting pig, and Bernie was running through the woods.
Sad Hillary
It was very simple but very upsetting. It was Hillary Clinton in a room that looked like a library, and she was crying. There was nobody else there, not Bill, not Donald, not even me, it was just Hillary, crying alone in a library. I can see it very clearly still, her on a chair, at a table, wiping away the tears on her sleeve. She's always so composed, so to see her broken down, sobbing, it was so disturbing to see that it woke me up. And when I woke up I was crying, too.
Scary Hillary
Hillary KILLED everyone who didn't vote for her.
Hanging with Bill
I was hanging out in a small theater with the Clintons and an animal trainer was showing us all some large cats (small tiger, jaguars, leopards, etc). I enjoyed my time with Bill and the event died down and only Hillary and I were left. I thanked Hillary for the invite, and she told me I could stay over if I wanted, and that my wife said it was okay. I woke up and took a valium.
JFK
I had a dream that JFK was sitting on a couch in a cheap hotel room watching the election coverage. He looked tired... I think there was a dog there too.
Just Strange
I discovered a secret bank in the basement of my mother's old house. A teller (a man) informed me it was time to claim the inheritance my Arab ancestors left here for me ages ago. The teller lead me through a quaint wood-paneled room to a window. On the other side was a quaint Mediterranean oasis with a glistening pond and a litter of Swedish kittens romping around in verdant tufts of grass. The Swedish kittens, the teller told me, were my inheritance, and their names were Nelse, Else, Alfred and Gary.
I decided to just take Nelse and hand off the rest of the litter to family. Almost immediately after making the decision, Nelse started acting out of pocket pretending to drown in the pond. The basement oasis was quickly becoming a hellscape. Then, as I turned to the teller (now a woman) to ask her why sweet white Swedish kitten Nelse was being real extra, the teller pulled some deep shit from the darkest corners of my subconscious and laid it on me real thick: "Because she knows that now, she'll never have the perfect white life she was promised."
Egg Babies
I had a dream that the debate process in elections had been replaced with a sort of egg baby challenge, in which both candidates had to prove that they were responsible by caring for a weird, tiny, alien baby for a month. In the dream, I was an investigative reporter, and I published an article proving that Trump had eaten his original weird tiny baby, and that the baby he was carrying around at rallies was actually a replacement. In response, Trump gave a press conference, admitting to having eaten the original baby and saying he didn't care. He then ate his replacement baby live, on camera, while his supporters cheered.
Riots
The Bonfire
My family and I were waiting in line to at our polling location. There were large groups of white men and women standing around looking at the people in line to vote with suspicion clear on their faces. My husband whispered to me not to tell them who I was voting for. And to be as nice as possible to them.
Suddenly, in line ahead of us, I saw one of the women from the group grab an African American women that I know from the local YMCA and violently pull her out of line. I ran up to them and pulled the women off of my acquaintance and told her to leave in a very teacher-like way. But, that's when things went really bad and weird. Men from the group dragged the woman I know away into the crowd, which appeared to have gained a giant bonfire in the middle.
When I turned around, the mob had my husband on the ground and they were grabbing at my children. They knocked the stroller over with my baby still in it while they pulled my kicking preschooler out of his seat. I tried to run to them, but my whole body felt like it was being held back by a force, like running through a strong current in water. Over a blaring radio in the parking lot, I heard Hillary making her acceptance speech, she was cut off by the radio announcer, who immediately called for those listening to riot.
Then, everything went dark , but I knew the mob was still there. Out of the darkness around the mob, the face of an old friend leered at me and lunged toward my face. He appeared lit in a dark orange light. I woke up with a start and couldn't get back to sleep for a long time.
Polls on Fire
I was waiting in line to vote, and militia men set poll booths on fire, which then escalated to self immolation.
The Reaper
Everything is chaotic people everywhere are trying to leave or hide and Trump ambles among people cutting them down like blades of high grass destroying everything in his path... never actually seeing the visual destruction but knowing it is happening . Just knowing creepy…
Nukes
World War III
He wins. WWIII begins. Mushroom Clouds everywhere.
It all ends with the bomb
My panic dreams are usually about personal problems, but now every one of them ends with nuclear war. I had nuke nightmares for a couple of years after 9/11 and now they're back.
Demons
I dreamed Donald Trump won and it tore a hole in the fabric of the universe, and terrible evil demons came pouring out. They looked like a Breughel painting.
Post-apocalyptic
The Face on the Poster
Another dream: I live in a small state near the American border, so we have BP all over the place. In my dream, the agents take over the state and my neighbors and family become pawns of the state. The dream is vague, but there is a strong feeling of dystopia. We begin to rebel, and just as we start to fight I wake up. …. . In the background of the dream, I saw abstract posters of a man whose face resembled Donald Trump.
"Everything's fine"
I have been having absolutely non-stop apocalypse dreams. I tend to have nightmares most of the time (overactive imagination and I'm really into horror, so, y'know)—but these have been much more persistent, and marked by something different: everybody in these dreams is denying society is ending and trying to pretend like everything is normal. I'm pleading with people to notice what's happening, but everybody thinks it's not as big of a deal as I do, until it's too late.
Mad Max
I was scavenging a landfill in what appeared to be a post-apocalyptic scenario. My companions and I were ambushed by horribly rusted military robots, like Mad Max versions of the Boston Dynamics Big Dog, and it became apparent we'd been betrayed by one of our own. I confronted the traitor as we fled, and realized that he had Donald Trump's face. Infuriated, I pushed him to the ground and beat his clay-red face with my bare fists until it was unrecognizable, while the face jeered and laughed at me. What woke me up was the horror of hearing my grandfather's voice from behind me, crying and begging me to stop.
Real Consequences
Persecution
I had a dream where essentially gay rights were set back to the way they were pre-stonewall and that my husband and I were actually persecuted to the point we were having to defend our house against home invaders trying to hurt us.
Stay Out
I was trying to return to the US, Trump is president and there are photos of him everywhere. A white male border patrol agent is looking at my passport and back at me. I keep think he probably voted for Trump. He asks me why I left the US? I race through responses angry I've been asked this question. He keeps tapping on his computer and then tells me I can not enter the country because I could be threat. I'm desperate and panicked-- I don't belong anywhere.
As anxiety runs high during these tense times it may be difficult to keep your wits in check. But regardless of the problems and fears that have you panicked (and even sleep deprived), it's important to pause and reflect on the amazing wonders our world has to offer. The video above compiles extravagant, soothing shots of a stellar view of Earth that will leave you mesmerized and inspired.
The time lapse was captured by NASA’s four special low-light, high-definition cameras on the International Space Station as it makes its orbit around the planet. Accompanied by calming instrumental music, it features some of the best shots from the Image Science and Analysis Laboratory at NASA Johnson Space Center.
Incredible views of natural phenomena from 2011 expeditions show the expansive Sahara Desert, the gentle green shimmer of Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis, and flickering storms over oceans from space. At the 40-second mark you can see the fiery orange glow of city lights shining through dense swirling clouds. The whole experience makes you feel infinitesimally small.
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.
The year is 2091, and women are in charge of the United States. According to a missive describing their rise, they occupy 80 percent of top governmental, academic, and corporate positions. The cultural canon has shifted, moving works by women to the forefront. And thanks to technology that allows mothers to choose their children's gender, the sex ratios are skewed in favor of the new powerful class: ten women are born for every three men.
Is this Hillary's America? I mean, let's hope so. But it's also a very particular imagining of a possible future—government-sponsored, and dreamed up by the "Boston Team," a group hired by the Department of Energy in 1991 to imagine potential breaches of a nuclear waste site. Besides feminists, this panel warned of humanoid robots, a new Wild West, bad lawn decorations, and space warriors. Their fears show how far we've come in only 25 years—and how far we still have to go.
Political rhetoric is always future-focused, and governments have long tried to plan for eventualities.But with the advent of nuclear technology, the people in charge began thinking even further ahead. As historian Peter Galison explains in "The Future of Scenarios: State Science Fiction," starting in the 1950s, intellectuals built whole careers out of forecasting future wars, disasters, and energy depletion scenarios. So when the government faced a very real, present challenge—figuring out where and how to store the nuclear waste produced by the development of these weapons—they knew who to call.
"Before the waste site could open," Galison writes, "Congress demanded, and the Environmental Protection Agency specified, that the DOE had to have a plan that would keep humans from inadvertently stumbling into the waste." Nuclear as it was, said waste would be sticking around for millennia. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, was set to be built in New Mexico, just 26 miles east of Carlsbad. It was time for some pretty juiced-up futurism.
So in 1991, the Department of Energy tapped 16 people—physicists, lawyers, political scientists, and other lauded experts. This group, called the Futures Panel, was tasked with figuring out the many ways impending generations might get into the repository, and how to best keep them out of it.
To pull this off most efficiently, the 16 experts divided into four teams, sorted by geography. The Washington A and B teams, both made up of DC wonks, tried to build a logical vision of the future. They built complex flow charts, tracing the potential effects of natural resource depletion, government unrest, and other large-scale changes.
The third team, known as the "Southwest Team," got a little more loosey-goosey, naming their chunk of the report "Ten Thousand Years of Solitude?" and indulging a few out-there possibilities: What if the Southwest U.S. and northern Mexico join to form the "Free State of Chihuahua," and citizens begin scavenging the site for materials? What if we invent mechanical "smart moles," which end up digging through the bedrock of the repository?
And then there was the so-called "Boston Team." Made up of futurist Theodore J. Gordon, lawyer Michael Baram, physicist Bernard Cohen, and sociologist Wendell Bell, the Boston team traded general predictions and what-ifs for meticulously detailed scenarios, each purposefully absurd. Their driving question, as they wrote in the introduction to their section of the report, was: "What if phenomena that are deviant or only a mere idea today become dominant, the norm, the realities of tomorrow?" In their imaginings, they said, they privileged the "outlandish, irrational, perverse, and repugnant… Thinking the unthinkable is part of our task."
The Boston Team thought carefully through ten unthinkables. In that first scenario—titled "A Feminist World"—an future energy company, the Feminist Alternative Potash Corporation, wishes to mine for salts in the WIPP site. Although the team comes across the warning signs, once it becomes clear that they were written by a group consisting of mostly older white men, they dismiss them. "On the grounds of the obvious male (and class and race) biases that must have gone into the original thinking, they decided that the warnings were simply another example of inferior, inadequate, and muddled thinking," the scenario concludes. "Thus, they proceed to mine for the potash… inadvertently penetrating a disposal room and releasing radionuclides."
In another scenario, also slated for 2091, the U.S. is a second-rate world power, taken down by corruption, economic decline, and "racial and ethnic conflict." In response, New Mexico has seceded and joined up with Mexico, along with Texas and parts of Arizona and California. The area, now called Nuevo Mejico, becomes a sort of new Wild West, full of prospectors and con artists. An international group of treasure hunters, funded by capitalist speculators, sets out to find what they've heard is a wealth of material buried in the desert. When they come across the WIPP's warning signs, they take its as a sign that they're on the right track, and start digging. Soon, irradiated salt water is spewing up out of the ground.
The futures continue in this vein. There's one where a religious cult that dismisses all knowledge as subjective and penetrates the site while looking for mystical scrolls. There's another where people begin living in underground cities, and dig a deep-down train tunnel from Houston to Los Angeles (these people end up using the warning markers as decoration, "just as artificial pink flamingos used to be placed on some suburban lawns in the 20th century"). In yet another, the "humanoid computer-robots" that have replaced the labor force are infected with a virus that makes them "drill and construct shafts compulsively." They are all great reading, and can be found from pages C-39 through C-66 in this document.
The last scenario in the report attempts to imagine America in the year 11991. If we got that far, the writers apparently thought, it must be because we did something right. Instead of militant feminists, zealots, and malfunctioning robots, this future New Mexico is apple-pie American: it has an enormous museum and theme park, all focused on WIPP.
"People came from all over the Earth to visit WIPP Worlds and the WIPP Museum," built in 2016, the report explains. "No child's education was considered complete without at least a week there." Its mascot, Nickey Nuke, becomes the star of hundreds of children's books, theatrical productions, and animated films—a kind of Mickey Mouse for the nuclear age. In this way, the story of the buried waste remains fresh. "Long after metal had disintegrated and granite worn smooth of markings, the legends of Nickey Nuke remained in people's minds everywhere on Earth," they write. "No inadvertent intrusion into the nuclear waste repository occurred."
In real-life 2016, there is no WIPP Museum, and no Nickey Nuke. After many more reports and explorations, the DOE is still settling on an effective stay-out system, but it will likely hinge on landscape changes, and more formal knowledge dissemination—huge granite pillars etched with warnings, blueprints sprinkled throughout the archives of the world.
We can only hope they heed at least one suggestion of the Boston Team, worried about those future feminists: "Why not survey a sample of women, and members of ethnic minorities, about plans for WIPP?" the team wrote. Why not, indeed.
Voter fraud has been a contentious issue during the 2016 presidential election campaign, despite there being scant evidence that it actually occurs. But the methods being employed to combat it—such as the recruiting of volunteer "election observers" and ID requirements in 34 states—are nowhere near as creative, or as allegorical, as one of the most popular methods of the 1850s: the glass ballot box.
This invention was born as a response to the collective voice of enraged voters in San Francisco in 1856. It was in this year that the city's Committee of Vigilance uncovered a ballot box designed to commit voter fraud. This “stuffer’s ballot box” was equipped with a false bottom and a small panel on the side that allowed officials to stuff fake ballots in without anyone noticing.
Anger and panic followed the discovery. Voters all over the nation worried about the legitimacy of the electoral process, and how much their vote actually counted. After all, the ballot box is the symbolic and literal keeper of votes, the place where the voices of the people are supposed to be safe. Without a reliable ballot box—the logic went—there could be no reliable democracy.
In the midst of this crisis in which people’s confidence in the system wavered, one New Yorker named Samuel C. Jollie sought to correct all issues of corruption with a simple solution. If the opposite of corruption is transparency, he seemed to think, then there could be no better way to ensure a rightful process than with a glass ballot box. By making a design that was inherently apparent, he could do away with all the suspicious elements of stuffer boxers. If everything was in sight, there could be no way to rig an election.
Ellery Foutch, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College has conducted extensive research on Jollie’s invention. In her paper, "The Glass Ballot Box and Political Transparency," she details how the box became patented, reproduced, and widely used after 1857. According to her, Americans at this time were obsessed with ideas of transparency, fairness, and virtue. Glass, which was just becoming easily accessible and cheap to produce, seemed to be the embodiment of the ideals that were thought essential to democracy.
As such, in the eyes of the public, the glass ballot box was corruption-proof. The clear sphere, held between an iron cast, only had a small hole through which rolled up ballots could be inserted. No secret compartments were possible, and taking ballots out required effort, so corrupt officials could not—at least in theory—take advantage of the democratic process.
What’s more, every citizen could become a vigilante of democracy, simply by paying attention to the contents of the box. As Foutch explained in an interview, at this time, political parties would often print out their own ballots in newspapers for people to bring to the voting booth. Therefore, a person’s vote could easily be identified by the color of the paper they were carrying. This had been the case before the glass ballot box appeared, but the new invention added the dimension of being able to keep tally of how the election was going simply by looking at the box.
Of course, not everyone believed in the infallibility of the new ballot box. Its critics declared that since officials would still be counting the ballots, fraud continued to be possible and probable. These fears carried over through the years and into the Reconstruction Era, where active measures of voter intimidation were employed to keep black voters from casting their votes.
To make matters worse, many latched onto the fact that the invention had been tied to corruption scandals in the year it was unveiled. These scandals were caused by speculation more than any solid proof, but saw Jollie accused of being in cahoots with the mayor of New York City. The purpose of the scheme was twofold: to somehow rig the elections in favor of the mayor, and to make a large profit by inflating the price of the boxes. Nothing really came out of the trials, but skeptics held onto the scandal as proof that their concerns were legitimate.
However, despite the early scandal that surrounded it, and the cries of the skeptics, the glass ballot box was adopted throughout the country. More importantly, it became an intricate symbol of the electoral process, used both to champion transparency in democracy, and to mock its processes. This is most clearly illustrated in political cartoons, where black and female suffragists and their opponents mold the symbol to their purposes as if it were made from glass in representation as well as form. In Foutch’s words:
The way in which people latched onto it as an emblem that could be used in whatever way they wanted, whether it was advocating for female suffrage or black suffrage or whether they were caricaturing women or people of color who were trying to vote. It’s this object that becomes a kind of locus for all of these concerns and hopes and fears.
The box was therefore much more important for its symbolic power than for the effectiveness of its use. Though it is hard to trace exactly when the object fell out of favor, it all but disappeared into antiquity rather unexpectedly in the beginning of the 20th century. By then, the ideas of transparent elections were being replaced with concerns about anonymity, and the argument that voters couldn’t be influenced or intimidated to vote for a certain candidate if nobody knew who they voted for. The opaque boxes came back to the booths, along with other more technologically advanced designs, while glass boxes were donated to museums and antique shops, or repurposed as fish bowls.
But while it was no longer present in voting booths, the glass ballot box continued to be around in political cartoons and allegorical images of justice. Its image of transparency and fairness, so important to the electoral process, was not easily discerned in the collective imagination. As Foutch describes it, “it had become a living memory.”
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com
Maybe you voted early or by absentee ballot. Maybe you went this morning, or at lunchtime. But doesn't scrolling past all those "I Voted" stickers on your social media feeds make you want to vote for more things today?
This is the post for you. In honor of today's Big Decision, we've put together a series of Small Decisions: we've trawled the Atlas for our favorite swing-state destinations, and pitted them against each other. Who should take Ohio—Helltown, with its haunted, abandoned homes, or Crystal Cave, the world's largest geode?
Bright red Dictograph alarms, like the one above, may be the Platonic ideal of alarms—you can just picture that light flashing while the machine screeches its warning. The company that made them shuttered years ago, but they can still be found adorning buildings from New York to Kansas City to Alexandria, Va.
The one above was found in a back alley in Baltimore's Hampden neighborhood, on a parking garage, says photographer Teresa Duggan. "This was on the back of an abandoned garage about 10 years ago, near its roof, and the cool vintage red light caught my eye," she writes. The building's since been renovated, she says, and the alarm is long gone.
The Dictograph Products Company's first success was for a different sort of auditory device: the firm began as Turner's General Acoustic Company and purchased the technology for the first electrical hearing aid. But the most useful application of the technology, it turned out, was in a recording device that could take dictation from executives—or eavesdrop on anyone who wandered too near it. The company changed its names and coasted through World War II selling these subversive spy devices.
In the 1950s, though, Dictograph Products was looking for new markets. In 1951 the company applied for a patent on a new fire alarm—temperatures rising to a dangerous degree would trigger its circuit and sound a warning.
The timing was bad. It was becoming clear that alarms that sensed smoke were superior to those that sensed temperature, and with no new hit products, the company shuttered a few decade later. Today, the only reminders of its existence are the occasional ancient alarms hanging on the side of a building—and a fairly robust market for its charming old dictographs.
