The night before the August 21 solar eclipse in Durkee, Oregon, the sky was clear, and so were the roads.
For days, all over the country, millions of people had been moving toward this one line of ground, stretching from Oregon, through Idaho and Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, all the way to South Carolina. Masses of human beings maneuvered themselves into place so that, on the same day, within the same short window of time, they could see the moon pass in front of the sun. In the dry mountains of Eastern Oregon, the squat tanks of the National Guard patrolled, but the night was calm.
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People traveled to Durkee, where Atlas Obscura hosted its Total Eclipse festival, because it was a "once in a lifetime event." Many people said the same thing to me this weekend. They wanted to experience it for themselves. Some had been waiting to see a total eclipse since childhood, when they first started wondering about the cosmos. Some had memories of partial eclipses from their younger days. "When I was in fifth grade, I remember seeing it, through a little pinhole, looking through the fifth grade window," says Christine Eister. She requested to take off of work this week a year and a half ago, to make sure she could experience being "in awe like I was in fifth grade" again.
"It's rare to see something so spectacular that you don't see every day or every year, and that is not created by people," Jess Beebe told me. Beebe had traveled from Northern California, and had been planning to see this eclipse since the time she witnessed an annular eclipse that ended with everyone saying "see you in 2017." At this farm in Eastern Oregon, many said they'd wanted to experience the eclipse with others, to feel a connection with fellow human beings. "There is joy... or awe... or optimism in the idea that all over the country everyone is turning their eyes up and looking at the sun to see this happen," says Beebe. "I feel some hope in that."
There aren't many times in our lives when we might feel awe, but a total solar eclipse is "pristine," in the words of Margaret Longstreth, who had seen one total eclipse prior to this year's, in Venezuela.
This day began like any other day: the sun came up, the cold of the night dispersed, and it was hot. Usually, the light of the sun blinds us to the endless everything that's out there beyond our own tiny ball of spinning rock. This morning, the moon blocked out that bright light.
The eclipse began here with a curve of moon moving onto the top right edge of the sun. Awe can make time seem to slow down, but it seemed like the moon was moving fast. Look away for a minute or two, and more of the sun disappeared, until it slimmed to a last sliver, a thin, crescent ember, and the air seemed thicker, like it would take effort to move. Then, in a moment, the world through the eclipse glasses went dark. The black moon hung in front of the sun. The mountains surrounded us, and above them hung a ring of dusky light, just as a ring of steaming sunlight hung around the moon.
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When the totality began, a cheer went up, then quieted. Above the murmur, there were a few drifting exclamations. A kid, in a child's high voice, said it simplest and clearest: "This is so awesome." That kid was seeing something he'd never seen before, and that was true of most of us there. We had never seen anything like this. Some had waited decades to see it.
It seemed impossible that anyone in the path of totality would not stop to look at the energy of the sun bursting out from behind the moon, to see the sky turn a purple, uncanny dark. But in every total eclipse there are stories of people driving through, turning on their lights, unmoved by what might be happening above. Not everyone who finds themselves in the path of a total solar eclipse sees it. The people who see the eclipse are the people who choose to look.
North Ronaldsay, the most northerly of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, shares several properties in common with the country’s other remote northern isles. There’s the Neolithic-era standing stone, for example, and the lighthouse built by members of the famed Stevenson engineering clan. But look out to the shoreline and you’ll spot something altogether more particular to this island. Small sheep—wrapped in thick fleeces of brown, black, white, and gray—nimbly pick their way across sand and wet rocks. As waves break close behind them, they pass basking seals and munch on seaweed, thick pieces of brown kelp trailing from their mouths.
A primitive breed, part of the North European short-tailed sheep group, and smaller than most modern breeds, North Ronaldsay sheep have evolved in isolation since their arrival on the island, possibly as far back as the Iron Age. There are currently around 3,000 on North Ronaldsay, grazing all along the coastline and eating seaweed at low tide. Aside from the Galapagos marine iguana, they are thought to be the only land animals able to survive solely on seaweed. This is not just a quirk, but the result of necessary evolution.
In 1832, the island’s laird, or landowner, cleared the land for more valuable cattle and crops. He banished the sheep to 271 acres of shoreline, encircled by a roughly 13-mile-long stone wall known as the sheepdyke. Left with no choice but to adapt to this new stark environment, the sheep survived by feeding on the abundant seaweed they found. They have remained on the sea-facing side of the dyke ever since, fattening up in winter when storms throw plentiful seaweed onto the shore.
Semi-feral, they roam freely but tend to keep to their own patch, or “clowjoung.” For a few days each summer, when the moon is full and high tides limit the space to which they can flee, the island’s sheep are rounded up to be shorn in an event called “punding.” Thought to be one of the last examples of community agriculture in the U.K., the punding sees the islanders help one another to chase their sheep off the shore and into the nine stone “punds,” or pens, dotted around the island.
Once thought to be a burden, the sheep are now crucial to all three main strands of North Ronaldsay’s economy: wool, meat, and tourism. Wool from their double-layered fleeces—coarse on the outside, fine and soft on the inside—is spun at the island’s mini mill and sold around the world as yarn or knitwear. Succulent North Ronaldsay mutton is considered a delicacy for its strong, gamey flavor, even making it onto the Queen’s plate at the start of her Diamond Jubilee tour. Tourism marketing for the island invariably mentions the "iconic seaweed-eating sheep." The animals are mutually dependent upon humans for their survival, as the U.K’s Rare Breeds Survival Trust lists them as “vulnerable.”
Sheep management is overseen by the Sheep Court. Established in 1839, the Sheep Court was made up of 11 elected crofters (small scale tenant farmers), known as “Sheepmen.” The Court is responsible for managing the grazing, deciding which bits of the dyke need to be rebuilt, and counting the sheep—every household on the island has a certain number they are allowed to keep.
Kevin Woodbridge, a crofter and councilor who arrived on North Ronaldsay in 1977 to work as the island’s doctor, says there is “a need for a revision of how the whole thing is managed.” The island’s dwindling human population—from 500 in the 19th century to around 50 today—means there aren’t enough people in each township to even nominate a Sheepman. In the early 2000s, the laird reconstituted the court so that simply everyone who kept sheep was a member. “But that’s dwindled and now less than 10 people actively keep sheep, and not all of them will come to the Sheep Court anyway.”
When he arrived, Woodbridge says, he was one of only three non-native islanders out of a total population of 160. Now native islanders are outnumbered by newcomers, some of whom have little interest in the sheep. Historically, says Woodbridge, the sheep “glue the island together” because people have to work communally during the punding. “Even though these sheep are individually owned, grazing and building the dyke has always been a communal activity.”
The dyke is critical to the survival of the breed. The sheep do eat some grass from time to time, but their bodies have so adapted to their seaweed diet that eating too much can cause copper poisoning (seaweed inhibits copper absorption). The dyke keeps them off the grassy fields inland and also prevents gene-pool pollution through crossbreeding with other types of sheep kept on the island. In-breeding, however, has not been a concern because fertile rams tend to cross the clowjoung boundaries to mate, according to Peter Titley, Secretary of the Orkney Sheep Foundation.
But this important piece of livestock infrastructure needs constant care. Winter storms batter the dyke yearly and so, historically, the islanders worked together to rebuild the parts that had been blown down. Now, as with the Sheep Court, depopulation is forcing a change to the system.
The island once had a pool of able-bodied people capable of undertaking the hard physical labor of rebuilding the dyke, but now there are only about half a dozen fit enough people left, “and some of them are in their eighties,” says Woodbridge. “The numbers are now so few that it’s difficult to maintain the old system. We need to find a new way of keeping it going forward.”
A solution of sorts has been found in the two-week-long North Ronaldsay Sheep Festival, which brings volunteers to the island to rebuild the dyke. The festival was launched in 2016 and, over the past two iterations, “more than half a mile has been re-built, from scratch, by the festival volunteers,” writes Kate Traill Price, one of the organizers and a descendant of the original laird who banished the sheep, in an email.
Some come for as little as a few hours or as long as both weeks, some with dyke-building experience but many with only an affection for the sheep. The festival coincides with punding so visitors have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the community by helping chase the sheep and clip them before enjoying more relaxed island activities, including traditional dancing.
“The festival is about celebrating the past and looking to the future,” writes Traill Price. But that future remains unclear. This summer, the island’s school lost its only student. Twelve year-old Teigan Scott is moving to secondary school on Orkney’s main island and so, with no other school-age children left, the school has been put on “standby.” Scott told the BBC she felt “sadness because the school will be closing and the island might fall apart" as it becomes more difficult to attract the young families the island needs.
If the island were to depopulate completely, a plan would need to be put in place to maintain the sheep. The island would become “some sort of reserve,” says Woodbridge, “where you have to employ people just to make sure the breed is maintained.” But, he says, “I can’t see that happening. There’s been people living on this island since prehistoric times and things have always gone up and down. It’s going to go up again.”
Regardless, if the festival, held in early August this year, is any indication, the future of the sheep is in committed hands. Volunteers from as far away as Vancouver made the long trip to spend up to six hours a day rebuilding the dyke in ever-changing weather patterns of rain, wind, and sun, their only reward the satisfaction of helping to conserve this very special breed.
In his time on “The Loneliest Road in America,” the artist Paul Johnson, winner of Atlas Obscura’s and TravelNevada’s The Fellowship of the Loneliest Road, was drawn to locations where pre-history isn’t just a chapter in textbooks: it’s alive in the desert peaks and plains that have resisted industrialization.
“Where I live now [in Minneapolis], everything is farmed or it’s city,” Johnson says. Nevada, by contrast, holds a primordial appeal because its vistas have remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years. "You can imagine people carving away [on petrogylyphs] and almost looking at the exact same scene,” he says.
“I like to imagine how amazing it would be to be able to run the clock of geologic time backwards or forwards,” Johnson says. “Rewind fast enough and you could watch mountains grow, canyons form, deltas fan out. Fast forward and watch Central Nevada being pulled apart by the tectonic forces that are responsible for the Basin and Range landscape.”
More than history or even a human conception of chronology, Johnson’s work entertains geological measures of time. Fittingly, he shoots hundreds of frames over several hours to create his compositions. In the studio, he then compresses their movements into animations that clock in at around 30 seconds. The manipulation of time is at the core of Johnson’s practice. The principle actors in his animations—rocks or branches that have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to form—seem to engage in a playful mockery of human time scales.
On a small scale, Johnson’s work mimics the earth’s gradual movements. “The process is time consuming but taking the time to create something out in the elements forces me to closely examine and appreciate the incredible patterns and systems of the natural world,” he writes in his artist statement.
Ephemerality is a felt presence in each of Johnson’s artworks. One never knows when the wind will pick up or an errant cloud will drift into frame. For this reason, he most often chooses to work with sturdy materials such as rocks, branches, and dirt chunks.
But on the last day of his five-day journey, Johnson chose to work with a material that's even more inpermanent. At Wheeler Peak glacier in Great Basin National Park, he worked with snow.
Thanks to the effects of climate change, the glacier is endangered. It’s predicted that within 20 years, the formation will be completely thawed. Arranging handfuls of snow into formations that imitate the switchbacks Johnson encountered on his way to the site, the scene he created mimics its environs in more ways than one.
The day’s work done, Johnson spent the rest of his evening fulfilling a lifelong dream: seeing the Great Basin bristlecone pines.
“Ever since reading about these ancient trees years ago, I’ve wanted to see them,” he wrote in the day’s travelogue.
Known for their ability to thrive in harsh environments and reach astronomical ages (at over 5,000 years old, a specimen in California is one of the oldest living organisms on earth), these trees have long held a mythical allure for Johnson, he says. By the moon’s light on the last night of his journey, he carefully wound through mountain trails to photograph the pines.
“It was completely still and there was no sound whatsoever,” he wrote in the day’s travelogue. “I’ve had a number of these quiet moments of reveling in Nevada's vastness on this trip and they’ve all been incredible, but this one, at nearly 12,000 feet, among these ancient trees who’ve been quietly pushing out needles and a few pine cones up here for millennia, was probably the highlight.”
Johnson headed back onto Highway 50 one last time, en route to Salt Lake City to catch a flight back home.
“I love the alternating landscape of Highway 50,” Johnson writes. “There is a rhythm to it, you climb a pass, crest the top, and see the road stretching out for miles through the next wide open basin before climbing the next pass on the horizon.
Johnson’s art explores the subjectivity of time. The time it takes for a tree to grow may seem interminable to a person, but compared to how long it takes for a mountain to form, it’s the duration of a blink. In his work, Johnson abbreviates hour-long processes into half-minute animations. Conversely, on Highway 50, he lengthened a day’s trip into a week-long adventure.
Johnson flew halfway across the country just to arrive at Highway 50. Once one of America’s most attractive means of arriving at one’s destination, Highway 50 has become an attraction in-and-of-itself.
Traveling at around 70 mph without stopping, the Nevada portion of Highway 50 takes about five hours to complete. But as Johnson’s journey demonstrates, cruising Highway 50 without pausing to absorb its wondrous history, geography, people, and profound ambience would be a shame.
At Queensland's Australia Zoo, "joey season" is always full of surprises. One by one, the baby koalas that were born six months earlier emerge from their mother's pouches for the first time, introducing themselves to the rest of the world. This year was kicked off by a wide-eyed little guy named Macadamia, and the fuzzy exodus has continued, each joey cuter than the last.
But the season's biggest reveal came on August 22nd, when a baby poked her head out and it was not koala-gray, but... white!
As news.com.au reports, the "extremely pale youngster" is the zoo's first-ever white joey (although her mom, Tia, has given birth to others at other zoos). She does not have albinism, but rather a rare, recessive "silvering gene" that causes whiter-than-usual fur, zoo director Rosie Booth told the outlet.
The zoo is currently soliciting names for her on Facebook, where entrants include "Blanca," "Matilda," "Sheila," and, somewhat inexplicably, "Bluebell."
2017 has been full of white animals cashing in their 15 minutes of fame. Back in May, a ghostly piebald moose captured the world's imagination after haunting a dirt road in Newfoundland. In July, Australian rangers found a slate-grey snake who happens to be paper white instead, and put it on display. More recently, a rare white elk in Sweden has become so popular that tourists have been invading the backyard apple garden where it likes to snack.
Celebrity aside, being an unusual color—especially a bright one—is often bad luck for animals, as it makes it easier for predators to spot them, Booth said.
But babies with the silvering gene often outgrow their unusual hue, Booth said. And even if this one doesn't, she'll be safe in the zoo, and in her fame.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
On a stretch of Nevada’s Highway 50 just outside of Fallon, an enormous salt plain intersects with the asphalt. Just over 600 feet tall, Sand Mountain is one of only 30 or so desert locations worldwide classified as a “singing sand dune.” These natural phenomena occur as a result of the sand’s composition, moisture level, and kernel size, and they produce a low-pitched, ambient roar.
Paul Johnson set forth on the second day of his five-day journey across Nevada's Highway 50, thanks to Atlas Obscura's and TravelNevada's The Fellowship of the Loneliest Road, intending to create an earthwork at Sand Mountain. On his way out of Fallon, he caught his first sight of the sand heaps that tower over Highway 50 like a massive roadblock funneled from the sky.
“I pulled off and walked a ways onto it and imagined being under 300 feet of water a few thousand short years ago during the last ice age,” he recounted in his travelogue from the day (the sand comes from Lake Lahontan, an ancient body of water that dried up nearly 9,000 years ago). “I’d learned the massive lake left visible shorelines on the mountainsides. I turned around and sure enough, there they were, like rings on a bathtub.”
When Johnson arrived at Sand Mountain, the usually sonorous sand dunes were relatively quiet. It was a windless day, and the temperature crept over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. As with every composition Johnson creates, the day’s conditions influenced its making and, ultimately, its final form.
As anyone who’s ever watched the making-of featurette of a stop-motion animation film knows, this particular type of photography demands a meticulously controlled environment. An unsteady hand can render dozens of frames unusable with the slightest brush. Unsurprisingly, Johnson has seen plenty of projects fall victim to wind, rain, or even an errant cloud suddenly blocking the sun.
Undisturbed by breeze, the sands seemed to be an opportune canvas for the day’s work. But as Johnson began work on an arrangement of large sticks, he found that the stillness of the salt plains was also a curse: the midday sun was creating a griddle of the earth, and Johnson was becoming overheated. Defeated by the temperature, he was forced to abandon the project.
Taking a much-needed break, he hiked to the nearby ruins of the Sand Springs Pony Express station.
In the mid-19th century, prospectors flocked west in search of precious metals and California was a brand new state with a rapidly growing population. The Civil War nearing, the United States was in dire need of a faster way to communicate with its westernmost territories.
The Pony Express was founded to address the need, promising the delivery of mail from Missouri to Sacramento in as few as ten days. Mounted horseman riding at a gallop replaced cumbersome stage coaches and, crucially, the 2000-mile route was served by 184 stations, each positioned less than 20 miles apart.
Hailed as a marvel, the Pony Express was ultimately short-lived. Only 19 months after it launched, the telegraph rendered it obsolete. Johnson could relate.
“The failed attempts are pretty frustrating,” he acknowledges.
But the day’s initial failure laid the foundation for a second work. After a restorative burger and beer at Middlegate Station (itself a former Pony Express stop), Johnson headed back to the salt plains. With daylight waning, he chose to use sturdy, basalt boulders: the same type of cobblestones he’d seen at the Pony Express station earlier that day.
Worried that footprints would betray his presence in the final animation, Johnson chose to create a shape that could also function as a platform where he could perch as he composed the scene. After assembling the circle, he stood in its center and pushed the boulders away, using them as literal stepping stones when he needed to exit to trip the shutter.
In the finished work, Johnson describes the cobblestones as “sort of bumbl[ing] together haphazardly and playfully.” The formation may look like a happy accident, but its creation wasn’t easy. Complications from the elements forced him to continuously reassess his work, eventually yielding a piece influenced by factors as diverse as the temperature of the sand and the history of the Pony Express.
Before he left the dunes, Johnson spotted another lone traveler walking along the sand’s ridges. Using a telephoto lens, he captured a surreal moment of a fellow explorer taking in the vastness of the surroundings.
Paul’s own work for the day finished, he threw a fistful of sand onto the rocks to cover his tracks.
At first glance, Stokes Castle evokes the ruins of a Roman villa. Located on the outskirts of Austin, Nevada, a town with a population of just under 200, the structure appears wildly out of place, like a mirage at the base of the Toiyabe Mountain Range. But thanks to its construction from native granite by a wealthy prospector at the height of the state’s mining boom, the “castle” is actually as endemic to its environment as it could possibly be.
Austin boasts several structures whose design boggles the brain’s sense of time and geography. When silver was discovered there under a single stone in 1862 (allegedly unearthed by the galloping hooves of a Pony Express horse), the population exploded. Development descended on the newly minted city, and examples of Gothic and Greek revival can still be seen in the town’s well-preserved historic district, a time-capsule of Austin’s cosmopolitan ambitions.
The artist Paul Johnson spent the morning of his third day on Nevada's Highway 50, as the winner of Atlas Obscura’s and TravelNevada’s The Fellowship of the Loneliest Road, exploring Austin. “I love these old mining towns,” he wrote in his travelogue that evening.
Johnson’s work generally tends to eschew impressions of humanity. “I try as hard as possible to keep any of my presence out of the scene,” he writes. “I really want it to look like these works are assembling themselves.” But midway through his journey, he chose to deviate from this pattern.
Despite its designation as "The Loneliest Road in America," humans have left an indelible mark on Highway 50. Johnson’s work on the third day of his trip explores the relationship between Highway 50 and its denizens.
“Stokes Castle" is Johnson’s only work to date to feature a manmade structure as its backdrop. It’s easy to imagine Johnson’s reasons for choosing the site. Built at the peak of Austin’s bustle, it’s emblematic of the town’s erstwhile grandeur.
At a nearby hillside, Johnson spotted a dead branch hanging from a tree. After adjusting his tripod to capture Stokes Castle on the horizon, he set to work pruning the tree. In the finished video, the decrepit branch is brought back to life as its shearing is set in reverse. Growth returns to an Austin landmark, just as the town has found new life as a road trip destination.
While photographing “Stokes Castle" Johnson spoke with an Australian motorcyclist also traveling Highway 50. Earlier that day, he’d conversed with some mountain bikers exploring the region.
“I’ve found that people approach you a lot more when you’re traveling by yourself,” Johnson says. Ironically, it’s one of the things that appeals to him about solo journeys. He counts a long conversation with the elderly proprietor of Kingston’s General Store among the trip’s highlights.
Another highlight was the Stargazer Inn, a motel outside of Baker where he spent his fourth night on Highway 50.
More than a century and a half after the Gold Rush, people are still coming to Nevada in search of opportunity.
Against a backdrop of pastel mountain peaks and the setting sun, dirt chunks circle one another to form a shape. Their quick, coordinated movements form a spiral, a monument to an ancient symbol that can be found carved into millennia-old petroglyphs at nearby Grimes Point. Then, as quickly as they’ve come together, the rocky sentinels disperse, settling back into the stationary shapes that existed long before the artist Paul Johnson arrived to film them.
"Coiled" above, is the first stop-motion animation in a series of works created for Atlas Obscura as part of The Fellowship of the Loneliest Road. The fellowship, created in partnership with TravelNevada, sent a single artist on a five-day journey across Nevada’s Highway 50.
Stretching coast-to-coast in a line that neatly crosses 12 states and divides the country in two, Highway 50 was once a major thoroughfare that served America’s burgeoning car culture. But when the interstate system was established in the 1950s, many Americans chose multi-lane efficiency over the sights and romanticism of the older routes. In Nevada, Highway 50 fell out of use as drivers rerouted to nearby I-80.
By 1986, the sight of travelers had become rare on Highway 50. One exception was a photographer from Life Magazine, who snapped a picture of the road that year and captioned it "America’s Loneliest Road." Sensing an opportunity, Nevada officials embraced the name. Since then, Highway 50 has evolved into a pilgrimage site for adventurers looking for quiet, solitude, and a feeling of traveling back in time.
“I’ve always enjoyed solo travel and the unique opportunities it presents for discovery, exploration, and creative output,” Johnson wrote in his application for the Fellowship of the Loneliest Road. “I generally feel the most creatively inspired when I’m doing things solo.”
In his submission, Johnson proposed to use the fellowship to expand an ongoing series of stop-motion animations he'd been developing, loosely titled Landthropologic. The natural world has captivated Johnson since he was a child growing up on a wheat farm in rural North Dakota.
“When I was 9 years old I picked up a stick and started drawing in the sand on a family camping trip,” he writes in his artist statement. “I spent hours on it. Something about the deliberate movements, repetition of shapes and the feel of the sand was meditative.”
He began to experiment with art-making using natural materials, unaware that his practice was part of a school that had first come to prominence in the 1960s. During an art class in college, he watched “Rivers and Tides,” a documentary on the contemporary land artist Andy Goldsworthy.
“I just loved it because I thought, ‘This guy is doing this work as a career artist,’ and I was just messing around with it.’” Goldsworthy uses sticks, stones, and other natural materials to create intricately balanced sculptures. Once completed, he leaves them to the elements to be blown or washed away, restoring the environment to its natural state.
Though Johnson counts Goldsworthy as an influence, his first work on Highway 50 owes a greater debt to another land artist: Robert Smithson. Smithson’s "Spiral Jetty," a 1,500-foot long, 15-foot wide coil built of mud, basalt rocks, and salt crystals situated on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, is one of the best-known works of land art in the U.S.
When Johnson arrived in Carson City, Nevada, on July 9, he had several spirals on his mind. In his research on Highway 50, he'd come across photographs of petroglyphs at the Grimes Point archaeological site. On one of the boulders, he spotted a spiral.
Johnson left Carson City to begin his journey on Highway 50 the next morning. “As the outskirts gave way to sagebrush desert, I got my first taste of the expansiveness of the Great Basin,” he wrote in the trip’s travelogue.
By the time Johnson set to work on "Coiled" an earlier attempt to create a piece with sticks had been foiled by the wind, and the sun was beginning to set. One reason he chose to create a spiral was practical: the animation would be simple to execute. Forming the shape with dirt chunks, he stepped into the frame between each shutter and simply threw a chunk out of the frame. The finished composition is a reversal of this process.
He also chose the spiral shape for its connection to both the land art movement and local prehistory.
After the sun had set, Johnson drove to Grimes Point to see the petroglyphs in person. The headlights of his vehicle cast a modern light on the millennia-old carvings. His day came to a close with one last spiral: the ancient symbol he’d seen in the photographs that inspired his first piece.
One might be forgiven for imagining that a fly crawled across the lens NASA used to capture this image of yesterday's eclipse near Banner, Wyoming, but that's no fly. It's the International Space Station (ISS), more than 30,000 cubic feet of pressurized habitat, with six people aboard, traveling at 17,200 miles per hour more than 250 miles above Earth. This composite combines seven images of the station making its way across the solar disk, as millions watched the celestial show from below—a transit it made three times during the eclipse.
The six crew members currently on the ISS—Randy Bresnik, Jack Fischer, Peggy Whitson, Paolo Nespoli, Fyodor Yurchikhin, and Sergey Ryazanskiy—were the only people to see the eclipse from space. Here is what they saw when they looked "up" ...
... and when they looked down:
They have seen and will see any number of wonders during their time in orbit, but the eclipse that entranced the United States has to be a highlight.
A creature so fearless it sends lions running for their lives: the cow. On a quiet Tuesday evening, a pride of rare Asiatic lions strolled through the village of Rampar, in the Indian state of Gujarat. They were likely looking for cattle to munch on, NDTV reported, but seem to have bitten off more than they could chew.
In CCTV footage, the lions prowl carefully around the lane, until a lone cow wanders meditatively into the frame. The lions take a single look at the approaching bovine, it seems, and scram! Rampar is 10 miles from the Gir Forest National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary, home to the world's last remaining population of Asiatic lions. The big cats are an occasional sight in Rampar and other local villages, where they’ve been known to attack humans and cows.
In Gir's 545 square miles, there are 650 Asiatic lions, according to a census taken this month. Though populations are increasing—in 2015, there were 523—the predator, which once prowled from central India all the way to the Middle East, is still extremely rare. They are slightly smaller than their African cousins, with more of a ruff than a mane, and a more tufted tail tassel. But the differences may run deeper than that: Attempts to crossbreed the subspecies in zoos the 1980s were unsuccessful, with many of the resulting offspring sickly and susceptible to disease.
As a total population, 650 lions is vanishingly small, but for Gir, it’s proving rather a lot. As the park has succeeded in boosting their numbers, humans living on the fringes of it are coming into contact with the lions more and more. Some think relocation of some of the big cats might be the answer. Since 2004, Gujarat and neighboring state Madhya Pradesh have been fighting a bitter battle over the idea. The Palpur-Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh has been approved as a potential new home for about 40 lions to ease overcrowding and inbreeding, but Gujarat has been fighting the relocation. The state government has said that it will only permit the relocation if they receive 33 studies, as mandated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, that all agree that Palpur-Kuno is a suitable new home.
This is as much a political and economic issue as a conservation one, however. Many Gujarati people think of the lions as a key part of their heritage (and tourism economy). Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is from the state, referred to them as the unshareable “pride of Gujarat.” But the relocation project seems to be inching forward. The cows of Madhya Pradesh had better ready themselves.
Opononi is a tiny New Zealand fishing town nestled just inside the mouth of the Hokianga Harbour, in the country's Northland Region. With a permanent population of fewer than 500 people, it’s hardly Daytona Beach, but during the southern-hemisphere summer of 1955-56, Opononi attracted thousands of visitors from across the country. They came because they wanted to catch a glimpse of a visitor who'd appeared on the beach: a playful dolphin who came to be known as Opo.
Opo the Gay Dolphin (gay as in happily excited, nothing to do with sexual orientation) was a lone female bottlenose dolphin who began frequenting the Opononi beach around June of 1955. The fishermen found that she liked being scratched and rubbed with an oar or deck mop, in between rolling around under their boats. As the fishermen became more comfortable interacting with the dolphin, she in turn seemed to seek them out more regularly. Soon, she would almost always come swimming at the sound of an outboard motor.
The dolphin eventually started following familiar boats as they returned home, drawing her closer to shore, and soon she was interacting with local beach-goers almost daily. At first the locals gave her the nickname “Opononi Jack,” as a reference to another famous New Zealand dolphin, Pelorus Jack, who'd became famous around the turn-of-the-century for supposedly guiding boats through the treacherous waters of the Cook Strait. However, since the Opononi visitor was female, the nickname eventually got truncated down to Opo.
Opo began visiting the beach daily throughout the summer of 1955, and seemed to especially like interacting with children. The dolphin would swim around kids, and even allow some of them to be pulled along through the water on her back. Opo formed a particularly strong bond with a young girl named Jill Baker. When Baker, who swam almost every day, entered the water, Opo would usually dart over to her to play, sometimes swimming under her legs and picking her up for a short ride.
As the crowds continued to grow on the small beach, Opo’s arsenal of tricks grew as well. The creature became known for playing with a beach ball, bouncing it off her nose, or rolling it down her belly and balancing it on her chin. Opo also got used to performing similar tricks with a beer bottle.
During the months that Opo was a recurring attraction at Opononi beach, she never bit or otherwise injured anyone—no small feat considering the pokes, prods, and manhandling she no doubt endured. Stories of Opo hit the national newspapers and beyond, attracting thousands of curious visitors to the tiny town. The nearby roads were often crammed with cars stuck in traffic trying to get to the beach. By the beginning of 1956, Opo fever was in full swing.
Eventually, locals began taking measures to try to keep her safe. The Opononi Gay Dolphin Protection Committee organized the installation of a sign that read, “Don’t Try to Shoot Our Gay Dolphin,” possibly another reference to Pelorus Jack, who was once shot at by some sailors. But in the end, such efforts tragically proved to be too little, too late.
In early 1956, the Protection Committee successfully lobbied the government council to create a new law protecting dolphins in the Hokianga Harbour. This new regulation, which made it illegal to “take or molest” dolphins in the harbor, carried a fine of £50, and went into effect at midnight on March 8. On March 9, Opo was found dead among some sharp rocks.
The exact cause of Opo’s death quickly became a matter of debate. Some suggested that she had become confused while hunting some fish and ended up among the sharp rocks, while another popular theory was that she had been scared into the rocks by some fishermen using explosives. Either way, Opononi’s gay dolphin days were at an end.
People throughout the country observed the beloved dolphin’s passing. In Opononi, businesses were shuttered for a day of mourning. A hockey team on the other side of the island wore black armbands during one of its games. Letters and condolences poured into the town from across the country. Opo was ceremoniously buried in a flower-covered grave next to the local veterans' hall.
While Opo did not live to see the law or legacy she inspired, the gay dolphin is still well-remembered among New Zealanders. There is a stone monument to Opo in Opononi, and her story has been immortalized in songs and children’s books. As one of the songs about Opo (hastily and inaccurately written just before, and released just after, her death) says,
There never was such a dolphin in the whole of the Tasman Sea Across the waves he likes to shoot you never saw a fish that looked so cute
Four years ago, the musician Helado Negro started performing with "beings" that he now refers to as “tinsel mammals.” Initially they were a practical creation, meant to make it feel as though stage was being fully occupied by Helado Negro’s music, which Pitchforkhas described both as “melodic and beautifully produced meditation” and “abstract sound sculptures.” These days the mammals are an integral part of his performances—a unique set of back-up dancers, of a species not quite our own.
“I treat them as sacred beings,” says Roberto Carlos Lange, the man behind Helado Negro.
When he came out on stage this weekend at Atlas Obscura’s Total Eclipse festival, Lange brought with him two of these creatures. They have shaggy heads and arms, and dark, stick-like legs and feet. They are somewhat helpless, and after he guides them to their places, Lange whispers to them. Helado Negro’s music can feel quite intimate, and the tinsel mammals come across like manifestations of thoughts taking shape—they are big and neither sharply defined nor formless; they attract your attention, and if it drifts away, they might have slowly shifted into a new shape by the time you look again.
The tinsel mammals are a collaboration between the musician and the visual artist Kristi Sword, who has created eight of the costumes in total. Each one begins with boxes of tinsel, at least $500 worth. Sword deconstructs the original tinsel and reconstructs them onto a poncho. Though there is a person inside the costume, on stage, the tinsel gives the mammals a presence of their own, as their silver fur shimmers and waves.
In the first year of performing with the tinsel mammals, Helado Negro found volunteers to wear the costumes. He had a rough idea of what the mammals should do one stage, and as he toured from city to city, he would find people via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, email, text messages, however he could, who were willing to “wear these crazy-ass costumes, on stage.” Sword would perform inside them, too. For more than 80 shows, the tinsel mammals were portrayed by people who were excited to get inside the costumes. “It became really powerful for people,” says Lange. “A lot of people want to perform but they don’t want people to see them. It was exciting because of the anonymity.”
In 2015, Helado Negro had a commission from the PAMM Museum in Miami that allowed Lange and Sword to develop the mammals further. Professional dancers began occupying the costumes and using their experience with movement to develop a choreography and visual vocabulary. It was the curator of that show, Emily Mello, who first wrote that the costumes were “mammalian tinsel beings.”
“I remember thinking, ‘That’s so cool, they are like mammals, because they have people in them, but they’re not supposed to symbolize or represent humans,’” says Lange.
Being inside the costumes can feel claustrophobic, says Sword; from inside, you can’t see. But Lange and Sword have found that people have meditative, even cathartic experiences when wearing them. “They’re sweating, it’s hypnotic,” says Lange. “They feel like, this is crazy, I’ve needed this in my life.”
Like all beings, the tinsel mammals have evolved. The first one was held together with hot glue. Now, they’re more efficiently crafted. When the first batch started wearing out, they tried to mend them. But eventually the costumes started to fall apart for good. “We made new ones, but he still has the old ones,” Kristi says. Lange and Sword have been talking about the possibility of a residency where they could work together to explore other ideas and futures for the mammals. The next generation of mammals may evolve again, with the shimmery tinsel changing from silver to a many-colored coat.
Start like this. You need five people, arranged in a pentagon, and a roll of string or color tape. Take the tape, and pass it two people to your right, unrolling as you go, until you reach the person at the beginning.
This creates a simple star.
Now try scaling up. Instead of five people, try seven. With seven people, you can make two different types of seven-pointed stars. Pass the tape two people the right, and you get one type of star. Pass the tape three people to the right, and you create another.
But try an even number of people, and something different happens. You get back to the person you started with before reaching everyone in the circle.
In one of her videos, Vi Hart, a "mathemusician and virtual reality philosopher," explains the mathematics that underlies these stars.
What if you tried to make a star with 17, even 19 people, at the vertices? At Atlas Obscura’s Total Eclipse festival in Eastern Oregon this past weekend, we tried. “Both of these are the largest I’ve ever done,” Hart told the audience.
Years ago, Jon and Susan Brewster built a house, complete with a home observatory, on a hilltop in Oregon. They chose the site for its dark skies and view of the horizon—and because it was right in the path of totality for the August 21, 2017 eclipse.
On Monday, Jon set his computer-controlled telescope and cameras to document the eclipse while they hosted a party outside. Everything worked just as he planned, and shots like this one are the result. Taken during totality, the image clearly shows the Sun's corona—the outer layer of the star—and several massive solar prominences arcing through it. The gauntlet has been thrown down on home eclipse photographs with this beauty. You have seven years (before the next total eclipse rolls through the United States) to come up with a plan to beat this one. Good luck.
In May of 2012, as they do every spring, thousands of people flocked to the village of Tissington, to ooh and aah what is widely considered to be the best set of well-dressings that Central England has to offer. The craft, which is unique to the Derbyshire region, sees artists spending weeks pressing flower petals, leaves, and other natural materials onto boards that have been caked with clay, forming intricate illustrations that are then propped up on top of the village's water sources. The creations only last about a week before they fall apart.
That year, tourists walked between Hands Well—an illustration of the Old Testament verse in which the prophet Samuel anoints King Saul with a flask of olive oil—and Yew Tree Well, which showed Jesus, clothed in purple robes, cradling a lamb. Then they headed over to Town Well, where some of them were in for a surprise. Instead of a Biblical figure, Town Well's artwork centered on the Gruffalo, the fuzzy, toothy star of the popular children's book of the same name. Where other well-dressings were captioned with "The Lord's My Shepherd" or "Samuel Anoints Saul," the legend arcing over this one read "Oh help! Oh no! It's a Gruffalo!"
"There was some controversy" over this particular well-dressing, says Rosemary Shirley, a senior lecturer in art theory and practice at Manchester Metropolitan University. "It was done by a young designer, and there was a certain amount of hemming and hawing. But it was also this amazing moment—a bit of a break with the past."
Shirley has been fascinated by well-dressing for most of her life, ever since she first encountered it on a primary school trip, where it struck her as surreal and somewhat outside of time. "It always felt as if it was something strange that I had imagined—like, 'What was that? Did I make it up?'" she says. As this initial fascination has grown into a more scholarly interest, she has watched the art form change in turn, its traditional themes making room for more modern concerns, even as much of the methodology stays the same.
No one is quite sure when well-dressing began. As Shirley writes in a recent article, the first recorded mention of it comes from 1818, when a scenery enthusiast named Ebeneezer Rhodes wrote of "an ancient custom" in Tissington involving "boards… covered in moist clay into which the stems of flowers are inserted… to form a beautiful mosaic work, often tasteful in design, and vivid in colouring." The village itself cites two possible years of origin: 1348, when an outbreak of plague skipped the village due to their pristine water supply, and 1615, when that same water supply saved everyone from a drought.
Over the intervening centuries, the custom has spread to villages across Derbyshire. According to welldressing.com, which features an exhaustive calendar, there's a display going on at one village or another from early May straight through until the end of August. But most people agree that Tissington still sets the gold standard. "They've always been very elaborate, and very detailed," says Shirley.
To uphold this reputation, designers in Tissington plan their well-dressings all year. "If someone buys [a designer] a bunch of flowers, she's thinking 'Ooh, could I dry these? What color would they turn?'" Shirley says.
The process begins in earnest in late April or early May, a week before Ascension Day, when the artworks first go on display. The artists start by floating large, variously shaped timber boards in the village pond until the wood swells with water. They then dig up clay from a seam under a nearby field, stomp on it until it's pliable, and then spread it over each board "until it resembles a wax tablet," writes Shirley.
Then comes three days of pedal-to-the-metal, petal-to-the-board decorating. Teams of villagers crowd around the boards, "painting" their designated picture with materials they've gathered and prepared over the course of the year. First come either coffee beans or alder cones, to form solid black outlines that correspond to a drawing the designer has made.
These are then filled in by flower petals, leaves, catkins, and other bits from nature, all chosen for their color and texture. (Over the years, Shirley writes, some more traditional elements have been swapped out for less natural ones: where well-dressers once made clouds out of a shiny white local stone called fluorspar, it has become expensive and hard to find, and they now often substitute white fishtank gravel from China.) The petals are overlapped like roof tiles, so that if rainstorms come, the water slides right off.
Throughout, the decorators share news and gossip, breaking occasionally for homemade tea and cakes. "It's a really addictive process," says Shirley, who helped build a well-dressing in 2016, as part of her research. "It's slighty meditative—there's a rhythm to it. And when you've finished, it's very satisfying." Perhaps because of this, Tissington's well-dressers tend to take up the task again and again, passing on knowledge and techniques to their children and other newcomers. "The format they use has not changed for about 200 years," says Shirley.
Their subject matter, however, is slowly shifting. "Traditionally in Tissington, there's a Biblical centerpiece," says Shirley, but over the past couple of decades, the designs have begun branching out. In the year 2000, every well in Tissington was dressed religiously: wishing Jesus a happy second millennium, or celebrating St. Francis's "Circle of Days." Fast forward 12 years, and you've got details themed around the Olympics and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, not to mention that full-sized ode to the Gruffalo.
Often, designers will meet in the middle, as with one beloved 2016 specimen that combined Adam's Naming of the Animals with illustrations of Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck, to honor the 150th anniversary of Beatrice Potter's birth. (This year, there were dressings themed around zoo animals, World War I, and another popular children's book, A Squash and a Squeeze.)
Though they may stray from strict tradition, most of these more modern themes don't lose sight of a broader goal: to "project the idea of an English village," says Shirley. War history, royalty, and even children's book monsters are, within this framework, "safe and cozy things that people want to see when they're engaging in a day out in the countryside." This bounded flexibility is helping the art form thrive: about 35,000 tourists visited Tissington this past well-dressing season. "There's more well-dressing in 2017 than there was in 1950," says Shirley.
At least a little of that burgeoning interest might be attributed to the Gruffalo. "It turned out to be the most popular [that year]," says Shirley. "It has gone down in well-dressing myth."
While researching the weird world of demonyms—words used to describe a person from or property of a place, like New Yorker or Indonesian—I came across one that was so weird, so baffling, that I kept it out of the original piece. The word “Hoosier,” which today is the demonym used to describe people from the state of Indiana, is a mystery nearing its second century. It is one of the best-known irregular demonyms for American states, along with “Yankee,” referring to someone from New York (and sometimes expanded from that into the entire Northeast), and “Buckeye,” which refers to someone from Ohio. But if you ask a Hoosier where that word comes from, you’re likely to come away with any number of apocryphal stories. Ask an expert, and they’ll tell you the truth: nobody knows what the word means, or where it came from.
Most irregular demonyms—that is, words that aren’t derived from the actual place name, adding a suffix to turn, say, California into Californian—started out as insults. A scornful name for the residents of a place will often be reclaimed by those people as a source of pride. “Yankee,” for example, comes, most linguists agree, from New York’s Dutch roots; while New York was called New Amsterdam, many residents had names like Jan and Kees. After repeatedly being called a bunch of JanKees, New Yorkers eventually took ownership over the word. Today “Yankee” is hardly a negative term—at least, not in New York.
Hoosier followed a similar path, with the added twist that nobody quite knows where it came from. “It definitely is not settled,” says Kristi Palmer. Along with her colleagues at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Ted Polley and Caitlin Pollock, Palmer used text analysis on hundreds of years of newspapers to create Chronicling Hoosier, a project aimed at documenting and investigating the word.
But the Chronicling Hoosier team concluded that the use of the word Hoosier lies in oral tradition, which means it’s unlikely to show up in print around the time of its conception. (Anyone trying to study profanity runs into the same problem.) “If anybody was to find it, I think it’d be buried in a diary somewhere,” says Palmer.
The earliest confirmed printing of the word was in a column in the Indianapolis Journal, published on January 1, 1833, but that wasn’t the first time the word was used. Both in that article and in other uses around that time, writers did not explain the word, which implies that it was a term that would be understood by the majority of readers. But it gets even weirder: “Really early on, even into the 1840s, you're already seeing people writing in newspapers trying to track down the origin of Hoosier,” says Palmer.
Even earlier than that, in October of 1833, an article originally published by the Cincinnati Republican posed the question. As dug up by Jeffrey Graf at Indiana University:
The appellation of Hooshier has been used in many of the Western States, for several years, to designate, in a good natural way, an inhabitant of our sister state of Indiana. Ex- Governor Ray has lately started a newspaper in Indiana, which he names "The Hoshier". Many of our ingenious native philologists have attempted, though very unsatisfactorily, to explain this somewhat singular term.
At that point, the spelling hadn’t been nailed down (sometimes changing even in the span of two sentences!) As far back as we can see evidence of the word, the question remained: Where does it come from? What is this word?
Indiana bills itself as the “Crossroads of America,” thanks to its junction of several major highways. It’s also one of the 13 states to fall within multiple time zones, and maintains several distinct regions. You can see this pretty easily in its linguistics, which are surprisingly split. Its central and northern reaches boast a typical Great Lakes accent, not dissimilar from neighboring Illinois or Ohio, but in its southern stretches, near the Kentucky border, you’re more likely to find a Southern accent.
In comparison to its Midwestern neighbors, Indiana maintained a frontier attitude even after becoming a state in 1816. Indianapolis, the capital and largest city, was essentially bare land into the 1820s. But by the 1830s, the state’s strategic trade location began to attract attention. Thanks to its extensive border with the Ohio River, Indiana easily connects to the Mississippi River and down through to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico; a series of canals and, later, railroads connected it through the Great Lakes to the East Coast.
The word Hoosier is connected around this time to riverboat culture, men working on boats to move products and equipment around the country. “We absolutely saw this in the data visualization,” says Palmer. “You can see along the rivers the use of the word Hoosier is pretty heavy.” The riverboat men, says Palmer, “were rough, they were uncouth.” Many of the folk tales of the origin of Hoosier come back to a sort of rural toughness and grit—at least, that’s the positive view. The more negative view would be that Hoosier is often explained as coming from some scornful cousin of words like redneck or hillbilly.
The Dictionary of American Regionalism, in 1965, said that Hoosier is regularly used to mean “a countryfied person.” Around this time, the word sometimes referred specifically to those from Indiana, but not always; often, especially for Southerners, it was simply a derogatory word for someone from the country. A hick.
Most of the stories proposing to explain the origin of Hoosier make sense from this point of view. One story, which Palmer, a Hoosier herself, said she heard growing up, was about backwoodsmen squatting in cabins in the country. When surveyors came around, the person in the cabin, not wanting to explain the illegal living situation, would shout out the front door: “Who’s ‘ere?”
Another, similar one: A group of riverboat men are out at a bar. There’s a fight, and somebody bites someone else’s ear off. This was such a common occurrence that the next day, someone might walk into the bar, nudge the ear with a toe, and casually inquire: “Whose ear?”
Or there’s the one that says Indiana men were so tough that if there was a bar fight, they’d be the ones to call to “hush” the problem. They were the “hushers.” Hoosier was often spelled “hoosher” in the early days, to add some verisimilitude.
Other explanations are more etymological in nature. Perhaps it comes from the Cumbrian word “hoozer,” meaning something unusually large (and often a hill). The fact that Indiana’s average elevation is 760 feet above sea level, and that its tallest peak is 1,257 feet above sea level, makes it seem unlikely that anyone would think of hills in Indiana.
One columnist recently proposed that the word is a mangled form of the French word “rougeur.” It does sound sort of similar! That proposal suggested that the word, which signifies redness, might be some sort of sister word to “redneck.” The French were the first European settlers in what would become Indiana, though by 1763, when France handed over Indiana to the British in the Treaty of Paris, few French settlers remained, and the French presence in Indiana is not especially strong.
In 1995, history professor William Piersen suggested that the name might come from the Reverend Harry Hosier, alternately spelled as Hossier or Hoosier. The Reverend was a traveling preacher, praised as one of the great orators of the late 1700s, and moved throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Piersen suggests that Harry Hosier’s influence on the word Hoosier is largely unknown and undocumented as the Reverend was black, and thus his history on the 90 percent white state of Indiana hushed. The Chronicling Hoosier researchers say there’s not much evidence for this theory, but that the lack of evidence also sort of reinforces the entire theory. If evidence was swept under the rug, the fact that you can’t find it is hardly surprising.
By the mid-19th century, there’s evidence that the word was already being reclaimed by Hoosiers. Local politicians would identify as “proud Hoosiers.” Around the turn of the century, an Indiana furniture maker began marketing “Hoosier cabinets,” a distinctive three-part cabinet with a table surface and a hutch. They were extremely popular all around the country, which probably helped remove the earlier, negative connotations of the word to people who knew it. For people who’d never heard the word, in the major cities of the East and West, it might have been their first introduction to Hoosier culture: a handsome, sturdy, useful piece of furniture.
The Indiana University sports teams named themselves the Hoosiers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and went on to become some of the most successful college sports franchises nationwide. Basketball, in particular, has become the state’s calling card; despite the fact that cities disproportionately produce basketball players, when adjusted for population, Indiana has one of the highest rates of NBA players per million of any state, and all without a city ranking in the top 10 in population. That brings us to 1986, and the movieHoosiers. The story of a small-town Indiana high school basketball team was a huge hit, regularly ranked among the best sports movies ever made. It was even selected for preservation, as an essential American movie, by the Library of Congress.
That movie, and the success of proud Hoosier Larry Bird around the same time, gave the U.S. yet another association for the word Hoosier. Small town, sure. Rural, white, with everything that came with it. But proud, too, and tough. And weirdly good at basketball.
When beachgoers at Hartland Abbey in Devon, England, recently discovered a huge, fleshy, tubular mass washed up on the rocks, their first reaction, understandably, was to imagine they had stumbled on some kind of mysterious creature, perhaps unknown to science. But the truth—as usual—is both more mundane and more interesting. The clumps are just some adorably named barnacles that arrived on some driftwood.
Also called gooseneck barnacles, they attach themselves to hard objects—as many other barnacles do. But, as their name implies, these crustaceans are distinguished by thick, fleshy, neck-like stalks. (At one point in the Middle Ages, it was thought that certain geese actually developed from these barnacles—hence the name.) When they amass in large groups, they create a shaggy, alien mass that certainly looks like it shouldn’t exist.
The barnacles that washed up on the Hartland Abbey beach had almost completely encrusted a long piece of driftwood. Lára Clarke-Wardle, who first discovered the barnacle bunch, thought for a moment that she had found a new species. What she really found is a just another reminder that our world has always been much stranger than we give it credit for.
By now, your timeline is probably full of images of people peering through darkened glasses towards the shadowed sun.
Regardless of whether they were in the direct path of totality, Americans from all walks of life stopped what they were doing for a few minutes Monday and came together to watch (and like, and heart, and tweet) a truly astounding celestial occurrence. In fact, some experts have suggested it was the most-viewed eclipse of all time.
Totality seekers from across the country joined Atlas Obscura for a three-day festival of science and music, far from the crowds and traffic, in the high deserts of Eastern Oregon.
Guests spent the weekend participating in hands-on workshops led by NPR’s Science Friday, learning about the geometry of stars from the “mathmusician” Vi Hart, and lounging in the beachside Elysian Fields beer garden amid scientists, musicians, photographers, and YouTube celebrities including Michael Stevens of VSauce.
On Monday morning, after a closing presentation from The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen, guests turned their backs to the stage, and waited for the main show.
At exactly 10:26 a.m. PST, the sun went dark. While the dusty horizon stayed glowing, the sky turned a blueish, violet hue, that was neither like sunset or daybreak. The audience collectively gasped as they lowered their viewing glasses and stared directly into the totality. Everywhere there was a feeling of palpable, anxious, euphoria—a sense that maybe, just maybe, the universe would freeze, and the sky would stay like this forever.
But, as with all dawns, the sun stubbornly returned. As its brilliance shone through once again, the legendary galactic jazz band Sun Ra Arkestra, lead by 93-year-old Marshall Allen, took to the stage. Their horn section cut through the air with ecstatic screeches, and guests spun around, dancing in the returning rays of sunshine.
A very special thanks to all of our guests and presenters for contributing to a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience, and to Elysian Brewing for making the whole festival possible. Without them, we never could have dreamed up a place where the scientific and creative communities could come together in such an inspiring collision of wondrous energy. The world is a marvelous, knowable place, and, with the help of partners like Elysian Brewing, we look forward to bringing you more moments that celebrate its radiance.
The Vanzolini’s bald-faced saki was last observed in the wild by scientists in the 1930s, and it was a very different kind of monkey. Distinguished by its fluffy tail, golden arm fur, and Beatles bowl-cut, the bald-face saki was thought to be a subspecies of related monkey. But in 2014, ecologist Laura K. Marsh argued that the Vanzolini’s bald-faced saki monkey was its own species and earlier this year set out to find one in the Amazon.
Traveling along Brazil’s Juruá river in a two-story houseboat, the team kept a watch for the unique monkey. After the monkey was first identified by an Ecuadorian naturalist in 1936, no scientist had observed a live specimen of the monkey. (Two dead specimens were recorded in 1956, and one killed for bush meat was found more recently.)
On the fourth day of the expedition, the team’s field guide spotted a dark monkey moving through the trees. Its fluffy tail gave it away—it was a Vanzolini’s bald-faced saki.
As DW.com reports, invasive American cray/craw/fish/daddies have been creating a "crayfish panic" in one of Berlin's largest public parks, Tiergarten, this summer, "scuttling around the paths" and "even parading outside the neighboring Spanish Embassy."
The species in question—the Louisiana crawfish, or Procambarus clakrii—isn't supposed to be in Germany at all: the country has its own native types, which can be displaced or sickened by these newcomers. But they're a popular home aquarium pet, and Germany's Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) suspects that they arrive in the park when people tip their tanks out into the ponds there, writes DW.com. (In 2014, they showed up in a swimming pool in Frankfurt, likely for a similar reason.)
The crayfish have thrived in their new home, and are now likely "trying to expand their territory," the outlet writes. As the Local reports, recent heavy rains are also driving them out of their streambank holes.
Now that they're there, there's no easy way to get rid of them: poaching laws forbid people from catching them, which nixes the potential for a nice German crawfish boil.
So NABU finds itself a bit stuck. The organization is currently fielding daily calls about the crustaceans. Pedestrian and joggers are also reporting sightings in a more public way, on Twitter.
"Just stumbled upon a whole bunch of crayfish sneaking around #Berlin in the middle of the night," one posted in late June. Just two weeks later, they'd grown bolder: "Ambushed by a gang of crayfish," another park-goer wrote on July 10th. That's crawfish to you, bucko.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Every single day for the last several years, dozens of people have arrived in new places, looked around, pulled out their phones and tweeted something rather specific. “[City’s name]!” they all begin. “I am in you!” (Those cities vary from the enviable to the thoroughly avoidable—from San Diego to Hull.) Though the phrase is sometimes traced back to comedian Kevin Smith’s 2009 tweet (“GLASGOW! I am in you (and not just the tip)”), the true origins remain murky, but people have been calling for the practice to stop for at least half a decade.
But these vaguely smutty tweets are just a recent form of a long tradition of personifying places. One Bible verse describes Jerusalem as a woman—variously a widow, a queen, and a slave. Isabella Whitney's 1573 poem "Will and Testament" is structured as a letter to London ("The time is come I must depart/from thee, ah, famous city ... Yet to the last, I shall not cease/to wish much good to thee"). Jack Kerouac, too, picked up on the trope: "Paris is a woman," he wrote in Lonesome Traveler, "but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub." These are just a few points of interest in a vast literary map that includes Raymond Chandler (Los Angeles), James Joyce (Dublin, obviously), and Honoré de Balzac (Paris, again).
We seem to love to think of places as people, so much so, in fact, that it can even affect whether we visit a place. New research from Queensland University of Technology, in Australia, shows that people who think of animals as people and personify things (quite a lot of us) are far more likely to visit cities that are branded as people. A paper, published in Tourism Management, described a study in which participants were shown an ad for either Paris or Rome. Half of these ads referred to the city as "she," the other half as "it." "We found people higher in anthropomorphic traits were more likely to respond with feel-good emotions and have a positive view of the destination after reading the personified ad," researcher Kate Letheren said in a release.
Personification, in which inanimate objects, abstractions, and institutions are given human qualities, is far and away the most commonly used figure of speech, among children and adults alike. "Death, desire, justice, freedom, inflation, sin, the seasons and so forth can be—and are—seen as living things," write researchers Stephen Brown and Adriana Campelo, in the Journal of Macromarketing. "We resist temptation, the little devil on our shoulder. We fight against cancer and keep the Grim Reaper at bay. We make snowmen in winter while Jack Frost nips at our extremities." Personifying places also works to build national identity and spur patriotism, often through the emblem of a powerful woman, who protects and must be protected: Lady Liberty, Britannia, Marianna, Mama Africa, Mother Russia.
Brown and Campelo argue that as more and more people choose to, or are obliged to, live in cities, we've come to celebrate conurbations and think of them as sheltering organisms. Marketers are taking note and branding cities accordingly, creating a feedback loop of mutual reinforcement. One of the best-known and most successful urban brands explicitly personifies the city: "I amsterdam," an award-winning 2004 Dutch campaign. Travel advertisements—in the past as today—have done this in a slightly different way that is more obviously gendered: A marketing campaign for a city or place might show an image of a woman who at once sums up and represents that destination.
So when you tweet "Dubai, I am in you," you're being vulgar. But you're also tapping into millennia of describing cities as people (and often as women). The tweets will hopefully stop, but the literary, and now marketing, trope seems endless.
