There are those who impersonate other people for money and fame, and then there are people like Stanley Clifford Weyman (not his real name), Brooklyn’s greatest imposter, who did it for the love of living in the skin of others. Throughout his life, Weyman impersonated military officials, political figures, and even the personal doctor of Rudolph Valentino’s widow—all just because he wanted to.

Stanley Jacob Weinberg was born in 1890 in Brooklyn, New York, to a working-class family. Early in life, Weinberg had wanted to be a doctor, but his parents couldn’t afford the tuition, so he quickly started down the track toward a life as a file-clerking drudge. (He’d get around to being a "doctor" in due time.) But that life was never going to be enough for Weinberg. Around the age of 20, Weinberg began to live other lives.

Weinberg’s first documented case of impersonation hit the newsstands when he was outed while impersonating a U.S. consul representative. Weinberg claimed that he had been positioned as a diplomatic agent for a place called Port du Aubres (no such place), near Morocco, and he used the prestige from this fake position to dine out in some of New York’s fanciest restaurants. According to a later story in The Brooklyn Eagle, he was exposed when the press, which he had contacted about his appointment, discovered that he had never offered the position—and also that the position didn’t exist. This not-so-clever scheme was just the first in a long career of almost hilariously brash, and seemingly compulsive, imposture.

Shortly after his first foray into posing as a fake official, Weinberg claimed to be an investigator for New York's Mayor William Gaynor—until Gaynor wrote to him to knock it off. Then he moved on to saying he was a bomber pilot who flew in the Balkan War, supposedly given a medal by the very Turkish sultan he claimed to have bombed. And on and on.

Weinberg never impersonated specific people, but rather invented figures with variations of his name, such as “Rodney S. Wyman” and “Allen Stanley Weyman.” A couple of his recurring favorites were “Ethan Allen Weinberg” and "Royal St. Cyr,” but according to a 1968 story about him in The New Yorker, he settled on Stanley Clifford Weyman, as his more or less permanent name, around middle age.

Weyman was clearly not some hi-tech master of disguise out of a spy movie. He relied less on false faces than on bluster and the deferential assumptions that populate the structures of power. He invented positions and names that sounded official and well above the pay grade of those he was trying to fool, and most people didn’t ask questions. Weyman never bothered to obscure his features, but he was fond of elaborate military costumes, which were close approximations more than historic replicas.

One of Weyman’s most public masquerades occurred in 1915 when, under the guise of Ethan Allen Weinberg, a consul general for Romania acting on a request from the Queen, Weyman conducted an inspection of USS Wyoming. After setting up the visit with the Navy over the phone, Weyman showed up in “a stunning light-blue uniform dripping with gold braid and wearing an admiral’s hat,” according to the Montreal Gazette. They gave him a 21-gun salute when he got to New York Harbor, and he performed what the captain of the ship eventually called“one hell of a tour of inspection.” Weyman went a step further and tried to set up a lavish feast for the officers at the Astor Hotel, billed to the Romanian consulate. However, publicity for the soiree caught the eye of detectives, who crashed the dinner and scooped up Weyman—still clad in his blue uniform.

Weyman went to jail for the incident with USS Wyoming. It wasn’t the first or last time he wound up behind bars. Records show at least 13 spells in the clink after the age of 21, almost half of those owing to minor parole violations (such as missing appointments with his parole officer while he was acting as someone else).

Despite this, the majority of his impostures actually managed to succeed, at least in the short term, and money seemed to be only a minor incentive for his actions. Weyman only rarely sought to actively defraud people for material reward. More often he was in pursuit of novel experiences. He is quoted as saying, “One man’s life is a boring thing. I lived many lives; I’m never bored.” This attitude was perhaps most evident in his resistance to the reformative charms of incarceration.

Weyman’s most high-profile caper went down in 1921, just a year removed from jail. That summer, Princess Fatima of Afghanistan was visiting New York with her three sons, and had expressed interest in meeting President Warren G. Harding. For political reasons, Harding didn’t respond to her interest, but State Department Naval Liaison Officer Rodney Sterling Wyman did. Amazingly, Wyman (Weyman) managed to arrange a meeting between Harding and Fatima. Weyman even took pictures with the foreign dignitaries on the White House lawn.

The whole thing only took Weyman around a month to execute, and it didn’t take that long for the State Department to realize that they’d been had. Once again Weyman was arrested. After another release, Weyman popped up again a few years later as the personal physician to Pola Negri, recent widow of silent film megastar Rudolph Valentino. Once he was exposed, Negri refused to press charges.

By the 1930s, his incredible history of faking was becoming so well known that it made it hard for him to operate. Police and newspeople knew him by face and reputation, and his days of being a high-profile imposter were essentially over.

When World War II struck, Weyman made the bizarre choice to start a school for draft dodgers, where he taught them to act mentally disabled or deaf to avoid enlistment. According to Michael Farquhar’s book, A Treasury of Deception, if he couldn’t teach them to act convincingly, he would just puncture an eardrum. This grim scheme was uncovered in 1943, and Weyman headed back to jail until 1948. He attempted a few more failed deceptions, but his heyday was over.

In 1960, Weyman was working as a night manager at a Yonkers motel when he was shot during a robbery. It was a sadly pedestrian end for a man who spent a decades trying to avoid a pedestrian life.

According to The New Yorker profile, his years of faking included time as “several doctors of medicine, and two psychiatrists, he was a number of officers in the United States Navy—ranging in rank from lieutenant to admiral—five or six United States Army officers, a couple of lawyers, the State Department Naval Liaison Officer, an aviator, a sanitation expert, many consuls-general, and a United Nations expert on Balkan and Asian affairs.” Weyman was no hero, but his ambition and dedication to craft are, perhaps, admirable.

Very few images of Weyman exist, so his face isn't so recognizable today, but that’s probably exactly as he would have had it.

ATTN New Yorkers! If you liked this story, don't miss Atlas Obscura LIVE!: IMPOSTERS on Sept. 14th, w/ special guests Aparna Nancherla (Master of None, CONAN), Todd Robbins (Host of True Nightmares), Jonathan Soma (Brooklyn Brainery), Shalewa Sharpe (Sirius XM), Joey Skaggs (The Art of the Prank) and the writers and editors of Atlas Obscura! Get tickets here!

In the list of rarely-used punctuation marks—amid the interrobang (‽), hedera (❧), lozenge (◊), and asterism (⁂)—the manicule is a pointedly unique symbol. Quite literally: it takes the form of a hand with an outstretched index figure, gesturing towards a particularly pertinent piece of text.

Although manicules are still visible today in old signage and retro décor, their heyday was in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Despite its centuries-long popularity, the first-ever use of a manicule is surprisingly difficult to pinpoint. They were reportedly used in the Domesday Book of 1066, a record of land ownership in England and Wales, but widespread use began around the 12th century. The name comes from the latin word manicula—little hand—but the punctuation mark has had other synonyms, including bishop’s fist, pointing hand, digit, and fist.

As far as punctuation marks go, the manicule’s function was fairly self-explanatory. Usually drawn in the margin of a page (and sometimes between columns of text or sentences), it was a way for the reader to note a particularly significant paragraph of text. They were essentially the medieval version of a highlighter. Although mainly used by readers, occasionally a scribe or a printer would draw a manicule to indicate a new section in a book.

The use and dynamic of manicules changed once books began to be printed. This new technology allowed writers and publishers to highlight what they believed to be significant. As Keith Houston notes in his book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols and Other Typographical Marks, “the margin, once the reader’s workspace and sketchbook, was gradually colonized by writers seeking to provide their own explanatory notes or commentaries.”

Despite its simplicity, the style of the manicule could vary. Some had elaborate sleeves, some were strangely proportioned with extra-long fingers, as the one leading this article, and some were otherwise anatomically incorrect. The Italian Renaissance scholar Petrarch drew manicules that consisted of five fingers and no thumb, which is surprising, seeing as he would have been looking at the very thing he was drawing. (A five-fingered hand, it's worth noting, would not have been the strangest thing to adorn the margins of a Medieval manuscript).

In the 19th century, manicules had moved beyond books and into signage, advertisements, and posters as a way of directing the eye. They pointed the way to trains and pubs. In the "Wanted" poster for John Wilkes Booth following his assassination of President Lincoln, a manicule gestured towards the reward announcement. Manicules were even used on gravestones (pointing up toward heaven, of course).

While the popularity of manicules faded before the arrival of the 20th century, they aren't completely extinct. A mutated version existed in early versions of the cursor, in the form of an upwards-pointing clenched fist. There are manicule emojis that point left, right, up and down. If you look hard enough, you can even find one in the Wingdings font. ☞ Scroll on for more manicules.

On a recent gray August Monday at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, illustrator Jane Rosenberg found herself craning her neck and scrabbling for her pastels. The infamous Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was making his first public appearance in months, and it was Rosenberg’s job to capture the scene for Reuters. Seated next to her, with a brush pen and colored pencils, fellow courtroom artist Elizabeth Williams was also trying to capture his likeness, for the Wall Street Journal.

The artists had been waiting outside the door of the courtroom since 7:30 a.m., long before it opened, to get the best possible seats. When they finally made it inside, El Chapo was present for just 15 minutes. Williams finished one drawing; Rosenberg “very loosely” started two.

“He walked in the courtroom and looked over at his wife and children, and waved,” Rosenberg says. “Then he sat down in the chair by his lawyer, and stood up, started making arguments.” She sketched furiously to complete the drawings later, without any visual reference. “I couldn’t remember if he had on the same color bottoms as his top,” she says. Someone else in the courtroom later confirmed that he had.

Rosenberg is a self-proclaimed “dinosaur,” one of the last courtroom artists working today. Both she and Williams began working in the profession in 1980. Over nearly 40 years, Rosenberg has sketched a veritable who’s-who of celebrity courtroom drama: Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Martha Stewart, Tom Brady.

Courtroom art has been a feature of the American media landscape since just after the high-profile Charles Lindbergh case in 1935. The famous aviator’s infant son was kidnapped and murdered, and news audiences were insatiable in their demand for more coverage. The media, in turn, went from reportage to circus to full-on hullabaloo. Newsreels of courtroom action, filmed from secret cameras in the New Jersey courtroom, were sent to movie theaters across the country. And so, when the trial was over, the American Bar Association banned cameras from courtrooms altogether. (To this day, they’re not allowed in federal court, though that may soon change.)

Illustrators stepped in to fill the gap, but, by 1980, many states had lifted the photography ban in their courts. A total of 47 states today now allow broadcast coverage of some, if not all, judicial proceedings. “The proliferation of cable television, the advent of the Internet, and the waning economy have combined to greatly shrink the market for courtroom art,” writes Phoebe Hoban in ARTnews.

Detailed, illustrative drawings of courtrooms date back at least as far as the 17th century. Each often serves as a guide to the court standards and mores of the place and time in which it was made. Honoré Daumier, a French caricaturist and artist working in the 19th century, is known for his own courtroom images, which depict nameless lawyers and other judicial workers deep in conversation, peaky faces looming out over dark robes.

At some point in the 19th century, illustrations started to depict particular court cases. Some were imagined rather than observed. There are, for example, a wealth of dramatic illustrations from this period of the Salem witch trials (around 180 years in the past, by then), showing young women writhing on the floor as townspeople in the background huff and simmer. Others were more journalistic. The Victorian weekly tabloid Illustrated Police News made heavy use of illustrations of definitive moments in contemporary trials, though journalistic conventions of the time meant that these were usually not credited to any one artist.

For Oscar Wilde’s famous 1895 trial for “gross indecency,” for instance, the paper ran a series of illustrations of Wilde and other key players in the courtroom. This practice, however, came to a stop in Britain in 1925, with the Criminal Justice Act, which is still in effect. Among other things, it prohibits taking photographs or sketching anyone in the room, whether “a judge of the court or a juror or a witness in or a party to any proceedings before the court.”

There was concern at the time that photographers or artists might wig out lawyers or defendants, and therefore obstruct the path of justice. Unobtrusive fixed cameras have since been installed, but there’s still a demand for further depictions of certain cases. So British court artists circumvent the law by taking feverish notes about everything they observe—from posture to personal grooming to the color of someone’s tie—and then prepare their sketches outside of the courtroom. Court artist Priscilla Coleman became the first person to be given permission to draw in a courtroom in the United Kingdom in nearly 90 years, at an appeal hearing at the Supreme Court in 2013. At the time, a spokesperson from the court told the Evening Standard that while ordinarily photographers still weren’t permitted in the court, Coleman had been as noninvasive as the fixed cameras.

The golden age of real-time courtroom art in the United States began with Leo Hershfield, hired by NBC to sketch the congressional censure of Joseph McCarthy in 1954. He was rapidly ejected, allegedly, for “behaving like a camera.” After that, illustrators were obliged to work from the same kind of fastidious notes as their British counterparts, until 1963 protests, led by courtroom art “grande dame” Ida Libby Dengrove, “freed them to work on the spot.” That same year, TV news expanded from 15 minutes to a full half-hour, sending demand for courtroom sketches sky-high, as news editors struggled to fill the extra time. One high-profile case followed another: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lennon, for example. Illustrations were more in demand than ever before, and a new vanguard of illustrators, including former war artist Howard Brodie, went marching into the country’s courts.

The cases from these years that the artists love best are not always those that the public remembers. Rosenberg fondly recalls the trial of the wine counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan. “I loved drawing all those bottles of wine, because they laid them out as evidence,” she says. “It was so much fun—like being back at art school.” And for Williams, a particular favorite was the cocaine-trafficking trial of automaker John DeLorean trial in 1984. She had a fantastic vantage point, she says, loved drawing former model Cristina Ferrare’s “fabulous clothes,” and enjoyed the support of encouraging, more seasoned colleagues. At that time, court illustrators were commonly sent along with reporters, who would tell them what to look out for. These days, they mostly work alone and hope they manage to capture what their client news organizations want.

Photographs might seem a better method for capturing an accurate likeness, but courtroom sketches provide something extra, something about the emotional resonance of what happened, Rosenberg says. “It can provide more of an essence.” Williams remembers seeing a heavily cropped photograph from a trial that failed to show how a 6-foot-5-inch, 300-pound defendant dwarfed his attorney. “And that’s a very important part of what that scene was,” she adds. On top of that, a photograph might capture someone between expressions, or with a fleeting grimace that doesn’t necessarily characterize the overall emotional tenor of a courtroom situation or moment.

All courtroom illustrations are necessarily impressionistic in this way, writes Katherine Krubb, who curated the 1995 exhibition Witness of the People: Courtroom Art in the Electronic Age at what was then called the Museum of Television and Radio in New York (now the Paley Center for Media). “[They] seek to capture scenes from everyday modern life in flickering, fleeting images,” she writes, comparing them to the work of 19th-century artists Edgar Degas or Édouard Manet. “The pursuit of verisimilitude leads to exaggerations and distortions.” There tends not to be much physical action in a courtroom: Instead, artists must rely on minute changes of facial expression to communicate the drama of the proceedings.

Rare moments of action often reap some of the most famous courtroom images: Bill Robles’s 1970 drawing of Charles Manson leaping from the defense table, intent on stabbing Justice Charles H. Older with a pencil, for instance. (Manson is mostly a frenzied scribble, his pencil soaring toward the judge.) “That was my first trial,” Robles recollects. “I’d never set foot in a courtroom before.” Williams remembers catching what she later described as“a great moment,” rather than “a great drawing,” when she drew notorious fraudster Bernard Madoff cuffed and being led away by officers.

Increasingly, the few remaining court artists are expected to do this thoroughly analog job in a digital world, where technology affects everything—from the challenges of creating these images to their public reception. In court, Rosenberg “wriggles around” to get the best view she can amid a forest of computer screens. Immediately afterward, she must photograph and email her work to a television studio, where it features on news broadcasts.

On top of that, illustrators are at the mercy of thousands, if not millions, of internet hot takes on their work. Rosenberg, for example, went viral after one of her sketches of Brady, quarterback on the New England Patriots, caught the world’s attention in August 2015. It was variously labeled “troll-faced,”“haunting,” and like it was “put in one of those machines that crushes cars.” Rosenberg found herself the victim of the opprobrium of vicious football superfans. “I got a lot of negative bullying on the internet,” she recalls. “A lot of that was from rabid Patriots fans. I didn’t know about that world, but I’m learning about it.” More recently, Taylor Swift’s sexual assault case made headlines not just for its outcome, but for sketch artist Jeff Kandyba’s perceived failure to capture the pop star’s likeness.

This artist's rendition of Taylor Swift is a very good sketch of Rolf from The Sound of Music. pic.twitter.com/Qf37v3J8vC

— Anne T. Donahue (@annetdonahue) August 9, 2017

And now the days of courtroom illustration may be numbered. “It’s a matter of time,” says Williams. “I always thought it was.” In March of this year, senators Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley introduced bipartisan legislation that would finally allow cameras back in federal courtrooms. If it passes, this could be the final nail in a coffin that’s already almost sealed. “That’s pretty much going to do it in,” Williams says, a little wistfully.

Robles is more circumspect. “They’ve had cameras for years, but a lot of the judges—the TV stations petition the court to allow a camera in, and they deny them that right. So that’s where we come in.” Judges famously banned cameras at Lindsay Lohan’s 2011 trial, for instance. Robles is currently preparing for the forthcoming murder trial of real estate scion Robert A. Durst. Though they may be a costlier option for media companies than using photographers, “we’re a necessary evil,” he says. “When there’s no cameras permitted, we’re king.”

Today, illustrators might work just 100 days in a good year, says Robles, and usually only for extremely high-profile cases. “People probably think it’s a piece of cake,” he adds. But key players are moving around the courtroom all the time, refusing to pose, and sometimes hiding their faces between newspapers or their hands. “But sooner or later, the judge will make them uncover their face,” he says. “So you get them one way or another. They never escape.”

It’s a hard, insecure job, Williams says. “Sometimes you can sit there and struggle. You can never, ever sit back and say, ‘Oh, this is going to be a breeze.’” She adds, more seriously, “This business will destroy you, if you think that. It will chew you up and spit you out. It is a tough business, and it takes nerves of steel to do it. I’ve seen artists just fold up and—‘Forget it, no,’” she says. Robles too has observed fellow illustrators running out of the courtroom when confronted with “death pictures and mutilations and so forth.” Today there’s barely enough available work for experienced artists, and no space for new ones.

On top of that, it can be very stressful. “But I’ve been doing it so long, it’s routine. A novice, I think, would be paralyzed.” It’s occasionally a struggle not to take the emotions of the trials home with her, says Rosenberg. “Sometimes it affects me, sometimes I cover horrific trials which make me cry.” But, somehow, this, and the punishingly early starts, don’t diminish her enthusiasm for the job. “I love it still,” she says. “I was telling my husband the other day, if I won the lottery, I would still do it—but I’d pay a sherpa to carry all my supplies for me, so I just had to show up.”

On dusty backroads at American military bases, men dressed in robes sometimes emerge suddenly from between cinderblock buildings, brandishing AK-47s and rocket launchers. Protests break out at town squares, lined in walls scrawled with graffiti. Women wearing headscarves tuck baby carriers under their arms and scuttle past watchtowers to avoid sniper fire. Yellow and orange flames from explosions course through the streets.

But nobody really gets hurt, at least not yet.

These alarming scenarios are playing out at American training facilities in the U.S. and Europe, designed to resemble urban centers and villages in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and to prepare soldiers with believable immersive experiences. Sprawling for miles, they have been given fictitious place names like Braggistan, Talatha, Atropia, and Dara Lam. They are populated with mostly amateur actors, happy to have work in rather remote parts of the country. The ranks of paid players include immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan; spouses of American soldiers; and amputees, some of them wounded veterans from wars in Korea and Vietnam.

The photographer Christopher Sims has been documenting the installations for more than a decade, for exhibitions and a book due out in two years or so, Theater of War: The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan. Each of these sites, he says, “is like a fully fledged universe.”

Sims, who serves as the undergraduate education director for Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, has photographed training grounds at Fort Polk, Louisiana; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Irwin, California; and the Hohenfels base in Germany. Escorted by public affairs staffers, he sometimes spends days in a row roaming the pretend streets.

He has become, he says, “weirdly appreciative of the slight variations between villages.” In his desire to visit as much as the military will allow, he feels a “collector-type impulse” toward comprehensiveness of these imaginary worlds.

Some of the buildings look makeshift, cobbled together from shipping containers and prefabs, while others have culturally appropriate details, like foam cladding that imitates stucco. Sims has watched particular enclaves evolve during his repeat visits over the years: propaganda murals have faded, and signs in Spanish—left over from the days of practice for Latin American military threats—have given way to Arabic counterparts.

Simulated newspapers are published in the villages, and there are performances of radio and TV shows. Military personnel and civilian experts supervise the trainees as they go about their partly scripted daily encounters, practicing to invade airfields or to hold introductory meetings with wary local dignitaries. The trainees wear halters with electronic sensors, which record simulated hits from snipers’ bullets, explosions or friendly fire.

Sims has photographed the actors dressed as café owners, young mothers, doctors, politicians, aid workers and policemen. He has documented how they sometimes spend their downtime on the bases, knitting, weaving, planting and harvesting crops or painting murals. Occasionally they walk around with gruesome fake wounds, even organs spilling out. In 2006, at Fort Irwin, Sims was given his very own role to play, as a video cameraman for the fictitious International News Network.

Fort Irwin also gave him some sense of what war zones smell like. Equipment there can generate realistic aromas, whether gunpowder and scorched flesh or freshly baked bread and other “pleasant ones that could be used to entice soldiers around the corner,” Sims says.

The staff members and actors have been grateful for his interest in their work creating a realistic illusion and valuable teaching tool. “They appreciate that somebody appreciates it as much as they do,” he says. He has faced only a few restrictions on the road: some Iraqi-born actors have asked him not to show their faces, to protect their relatives back home.

He has researched the historical precedents for the installations, including Tigerland at Fort Polk, set up in the 1960s to represent Vietnam, and Krasnovia at Fort Irwin, where tanks in the 1980s were modified to look like Soviet equipment and Soviet uniforms were handed out for training exercises.

Among Sims’ previous major works was a study of Guantanamo Bay, another artificial walled-off and armed world unto itself. His images are full of ironies and jarring contrasts. A buffet table is laden with fresh fruit, although most Cubans can barely afford farm produce. Sports stadium bleachers and children’s playground equipment sit eerily unused, baking in the Cuban sun. A portrait of Martin Luther King hangs in a cafeteria where perhaps hardly anyone has much left in the way of dreams and hopes for reaching promised lands.

Within the next year or so, Sims says, he hopes to revisit the pretend villages in the U.S. and Germany. Although they can change with every generation of leadership and shift in foreign policy, he says, “the dream would be to have unlimited access and map it all to the nth degree.”

What’s the hottest new trend in robotics? It might be religion. Hot on the heels of Germany’s Protestant-inspired automated blessing machine, BlessU-2, a Japanese company has unveiled a smiling automaton programmed to conduct Buddhist funerals.

In Japan, robot-for-hire programed to perform Buddhist funeral rites https://t.co/dTp8DKQCphpic.twitter.com/6q8q93qppk

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) August 23, 2017

Unveiled during the annual Life Ending Industry Expo in Tokyo, a funeral industry trade show, the little robot was presented by Nissei Eco Co. as an inexpensive alternative to hiring a flesh-and-blood monk. According to Reuters, the robot, a reprogrammed version of SoftBank Robotics’ “Pepper” model of interactive humanoid automaton, can chant Buddhist sutras and beat a little drum to honor the dead. It can even livestream the service if needed.

As funeral costs rise, Nissei Eco says, it can offer the robot, which was decked out in a little robe at the show, for just around $450 per service. Of course this would come at a steep initial cost. According to the SoftBank website, Pepper robots, which are generically built to work as hosts and promotional tools, cost upwards of $25,000. For that and perhaps a host of other reasons, it’s unlikely that funereal Peppers are going to change the end-of-life industry overnight.

More and more, however, it's starting to seem like religion truly is the opiate of the mechas.

Fishermen and women are often inadvertently saving the day—usually by being in the right place at the right time—whether they're freeing whales from nets, untangling seal pups from rope, or rescuing variouslandanimals(including people) from drowning.

Right now, though, a massive Atlantic salmon spill off of Washington's San Juan Islands is giving anglers the opportunity to be heroes by doing what they do best: catching actual fish.

The errant fish escaped from a net pen owned by Cooke Aquaculture Pacific, according to the Seattle Times. The pen "imploded" around 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 19, possibly due to extra-high tides from the solar eclipse.

Solar eclipse’s high tides break net, dumping up to 305,000 Atlantic salmon into waters near San Juan Islands: https://t.co/ik1imRXU3Upic.twitter.com/a2xq0FP9sQ

— The Seattle Times (@seattletimes) August 22, 2017

Native American fishers from the Lummi Nation discovered the breach over the weekend when they went out looking for chinook salmon and instead pulled up net after net of the farmed Atlantic variety—a decidedly foreign fish, and one that could harm native species.

The tides also damaged anchor lines and service walkways, so it has been impossible for employees to even figure out the extent of the damage. No one is sure how many of the 305,000 fish originally in the pen made it out, although experts estimate between 4,000 and 5,000 fugitives.

The only thing certain is that it's too many, which is where the fishers come in. "The department is urging recreational fishers to get as many of the Atlantic salmon as possible," the Times writes. While you still need a license to go out there, there's no limit on how many salmon you can take, and you don't even need to record your catch. Sometimes doing the right thing can be delicious.

Jing Lee was born in 1580, during Korea’s long-lasting Joseon dynasty, and died in 1642, at the age of 63. At some point in his long life, he ate a raw, freshwater crustacean, in one form or another. Most likely, he was indulging in a fresh, seasonal treat—raw crabs with soy sauces—or was trying to rid himself of disease, with a dose of crayfish juice, thought to help treat the measles. (Joseon food culture was not to be trifled with.) However, as it happened, his crustacean meal left a lasting legacy in his body: a sac of liver fluke eggs growing happily in his liver, as Haaretz reports.

Four hundred years later, as part of a parasitology study of pre-modern Korean societies, a team of scientists found that egg sac mummified on Jing Lee’s liver. They report their findings in a new study in the Journal of Parasitology.

Researchers from the Seoul National University College of Medicine have been studying Joseon mummies, unusually well preserved by a combination of burial customs and the environment of their tombs, with the aim of understanding how parasites affected the health of people hundreds of years ago. This mummy was first discovered in October 2014, in a 17th-century tomb in the southeastern part of South Korea. With permission from Jing Lee’s clan, the scientists removed the mummy from the tomb and started studying these remains.

In their work, these scientists have already found evidence of a handful of parasites in Korean mummies. (Coprolites, a.k.a. fossilized feces, are a major source of information about parasites from the past.) But what they saw when they scanned this mummy was unique. There was an abscess on the man’s liver, and after the team autopsied the liver and analyzed the contents of the abscess, they were able to identify the lump as a growth of Paragonimus eggs.

Before making their home in human bodies, these parasites like to live in aquatic snails, from which they pass into crustaceans. When humans eat those crustaceans, the parasites enter the body along with them. These tiny creatures are still a threat to people today: 293.8 million people are at risk of infection, according to a recent study. Once the parasites infect the human body, they can cause stomach pains, fever, and other unpleasant symptoms. Jing Lee was lucky, in some way, that the parasites settled in on his liver. It’s much more unpleasant if they make their home in a person’s lungs or brain.

For the third time this summer, the bodies of long-lost hikers in the Alps have been discovered as the mountains' icy peaks melt. In July, a worker discovered the remains of a Swiss couple who had been missing since 1942; earlier this month, two hikers climbing a Swiss peak came across a hand and a pair of shoes that turned out to belong to a hiker who went missing in 1987.

Now, a French climber has found the bodies of three climbers on Mont Blanc, the Alps’s highest mountain. Local police believe that the three climbers died in the mid-90s, AFP reports.

For the past few years, the remains of missing people have been appearing with some regularity in the Alpine region. In 2015, a climber on the Matterhorn glacier found the bodies of two Japanese climbers missing since 1970; the remains of a Czech man missing since 1974 were also discovered. In 2014, a helicopter pilot spotted the bones of a 27-year-old British hiker who disappeared in 1979. In the Andes, too, retreating glaciers have revealed the remains of long-lost pilots and other unfortunates.

The local police have been keeping a list of missing hikers in the region since 1925, the year after George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared while attempting to summit Mt. Everest, in the Himalayas. During the time that Alpine police have kept their list, 280 people have gone missing in the area, National Geographic reports.

More of these bodies are being discovered as the glaciers start to melt faster than ever. As Deutsche Welle reports, the Alpine glaciers of Europe are half the size they were in 1900, and the rate at which they have been disappearing has been accelerating since the 1980s. In the course of just a few decades, Mont Blanc has lost about a quarter of its glacial ice. The ice is melting more quickly in the southern parts of the Alpine range, but it's possible the glaciers in this part of the world will have disappeared almost entirely by mid-century.

As the glaciers disappear, more of those missing people's remains will almost certainly appear; the glaciers may also contain traces of human life that date back far further than 1925. It was in the Alps, after all, that Ötzi the Iceman was discovered in 1991.

The crew of the Confederate combat submarine H.L. Hunley often referred to it as the “porpoise,” for its ability to dive down into the waves and then rise back up to the surface. And this it did, but not always in the way it was intended. It sank three times (and was recovered twice)—on August 29, 1863, killing five crew members; on October 15, 1863, killing all eight, and then, finally, on February 17, 1864, after making history. After sinking USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor—the first submarine to actually take out an enemy vessel—the craft slipped beneath the surface for the last time. All eight of her third crew perished again, and the ground-breaking submarine was lost.

Maritime and military historians have long been perplexed by what actually caused those casualties. Researchers at Duke University now believe they may have a solution. When the submarine was finally raised from the seabed in 2000, five years after it was found, the remains of all eight crew members remained eerily at their stations. This was a clue. The crew were likely killed instantly, by the blast from the submarine’s own spar torpedo, Rachel Lance, a graduate student in biomechanics, said. “The pressure wave from the explosion was transmitted into the submarine,” she told Nature. “It was sufficiently large that the crew were killed.” The researchers came to their conclusion after blowing up a scale model of the submarine in a pond and measuring the forces—providing data to back up a long-held suspicion.

Nearly 40 feet long and made of high-tensile boiler iron, Hunley was a sophisticated piece of 19th-century nautical engineering. Hand cranks powered the craft, while a 22-foot pole mounted on the bow supported its only weapon, a single copper cylinder (“about the size of a beer keg,” said Lance), filled with gunpowder. In 2013, researchers realized the submarine was still attached to its explosive charge. The torpedo, it appeared, had not been designed to be detached from the submarine but rather to be plunged into the side of an enemy craft. So, when it worked as intended, a significant explosion rocked the water in close proximity to the crew.

Lance estimates that the crew had a 16 percent chance of survival, based on the lung trauma the explosion probably would have inflicted. But Robert Salzar, a blast injury expert from the University of Virginia, said that they might not have died right away, but succumbed to the water and trauma after being knocked unconscious by the blast. Only the wreck and those skeletons, in position for well over a century, are left to tell the tale.

Daniel Webster, U.S. senator for the state of Massachusetts, showed a pair of Java chickens, a wild goose and some goslings at America’s first poultry show in November 1849. Held at Boston’s Public Garden, it allowed breeders to show off over 1,000 birds for the fame and awards that increased their flocks' value. Gentlemen kept flocks of the latest and most beautiful breeds for bragging rights.

Only those who entered birds in the exhibition were allowed to give speeches, which the assembled crowd called upon Webster to do. As he began "Ladies and Gentlemen," a Cochin rooster crowed with such determination that Webster gave up and sat down.

More than 10,000 spectators attended. The New England Historical Society called it“a red-letter day in the history of poultry breeding.”

During the next few decades, breeders got more organized, and in 1873 formed the American Poultry Association. In 1874, they produced the first Standard of Excellence, the bible of poultry exhibition. Each breed is precisely described, so that judges can compare birds for awards. But a picture is always worth a thousand words. Photographs in those early days were possible, but chickens are notoriously active and unwilling to pose. Besides, the Perfect Chicken doesn’t exist. Artists specializing in poultry filled the role of portraying, usually in oils, the Ideal Chicken of each breed.

Poultry keepers advertised their flocks, and awards, in poultry magazines such as the Poultry Tribune, which circulated to as many as 550,000 at its height. From 1926 onward, Publisher J. W. Watt and his partner Adon Yoder hired the top poultry artists of the 20th century—Arthur O. Schilling, Franklane L. Sewell, and Louis A. Stahmer—to create paintings of popular breeds, which were then featured in his monthly magazine. The artistic styles were different, each unique, but they captured the beauty and perfection of each breed. The paintings are so good that many are still used in the APA Standard of Perfection.

“Throughout the 1920s and ‘30s they were like pinups each month,” says Greg Watt, president and CEO of WATT Global Media, the company into which Watt Publishing Company has evolved.

The paintings, created between 1926-1950, were all displayed throughout the company corporate office buildings in Mt. Morris, Illinois until 2007. The company relocated to Rockford, Illinois that year. A few were displayed in the entrance lobby of the new headquarters. The rest of the collection was crated and placed in storage.

The collection includes those 58 paintings, of chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks, chicks and ducklings and guineafowl. For its centennial celebration, the company has arranged to exhibit the entire collection, August 11-26 at the Old Sandstone Art Gallery in Mt. Morris, Illinois. The building was Watt Publishing’s first home.

Andrea Gantz, associate editor for WATT Global Media, worked on an exhibit of 17 of the paintings in 2011 at Rockford Art Museum in Rockford, the current corporate headquarters. She keeps 12 hens in her yard.

“When we were opening the paintings, we could tell who painted what by looking at styles,” she says.

Rhode Island Reds, the state bird of Rhode Island, are still popular among backyard small flock keepers. The industrial Rhode Island Red is the breed used for commercial brown egg production. The birds in this painting by Schilling are quite different from the industrial strain that lays commercial brown eggs for the supermarket. They are bigger, fuller, with brighter, more consistent color.

Barred Plymouth Rocks, a color variety of the first breed listed in that original Standard in 1874, are often included in backyard flocks. Their portrait is painted by Schilling in the exhibit. Black Langshans, one of only three recognized Asiatic breeds, are now on the Livestock Conservancy’s Conservation Priority Watch list. That means there are fewer than 5,000 breeding birds in the United States, with 10 or fewer primary breeding flocks, and estimated global population of fewer than 10,000.

“These old breeds represent genetic diversity not found in today’s commercial and industrial brids,” says Jeannette Beranger, Senior Program Manager for the Livestock Conservancy. “With global warming and climate change, these are the breeds that can adapt. They are hardy, tough birds.”

Black and Single Comb Brown Leghorns are among Franklane Sewell’s portraits on exhibit. Robert Frost acknowledged Sewell’s artistry in his poem to his favorite hen, “A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury”: “In her we make ourselves acquainted/ With one a Sewell might have painted.”

Frost’s Mother Eve of chickens was a White Wyandotte, an American breed, shown in the exhibit in a painting by Schilling.

“Basically, the poultry industry up through the 1940s, when the paintings were first done, was more of a backyard enterprise,” says Charlie Olentine, former publisher, 1987-2004. “Back then, magazines meant going out to the farm level. Poultry Tribune was the main magazine. Now Watt’s magazines and audience served are all business to business.”

“He had a commitment to the poultry industry,” Jim Watt says of his grandfather. “Watt Publishing had its own poultry research farm. The National Turkey Federation arose out of the brainchild of one of the editors of Turkey World back then.”

Poultry producers sold birds with reputations as good egg layers, hefty meat producers, or as dual-purpose birds: good layers that were also big enough to put on the table. Hens were prized for their egg-laying ability. Young roosters, called cockerels, became fried chicken in the summer. Nothing went to waste.

Those concerns evaporated as the poultry industry turned to scientific and financial bottom-line management in the 1950s. The vertically integrated business model didn’t need artists and poultry shows to advance their products.

The Chicken of Tomorrow contest, started in 1945, was an indicator of that industry direction. The first recipient of the award was the Dark Cornish/New Hampshire cross, painted here by Schilling in 1950.

Several of the breeds pictured in the exhibit are no longer kept, and may be gone for good. Lamonas, a modern breed created for the market, are gone but dedicated breeders are attempting to re-create them. That’s possible, since they are a result of modern cross-breeding and their creators left records of what they did.

Hobby breeding can save rare breeds from extinction, but finding or creating a market for traditional breed poultry will generate economic conditions that give them a more secure future. If breeders can sell their birds and earn income, they will raise more of them. Having an economic purpose fulfills one of the original purposes of domestic poultry. The Standard of Perfection specifies Economic Value for most breeds.

“My barred rocks are marketable,” says Frank Reese of Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch in Lindsborg, Kansas, who won the American Treasures Award in 2012 for his work with heritage breed poultry. “They look like Barred Rocks were 70 years ago, when they were the meat bird … The old guys who wrote the standards didn’t write them to win shows. They wrote them so their birds would be productive.”

Current and former WATT employees attended the opening night reception to admire the paintings. Greg Watt said he had learned a lot about the breeds, and acquired a new appreciation for them.

“It was a magical evening,” he said. “I think we are looking at the tip of the iceberg.”

The next time you’re in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, and you fancy hearing a story about the dramatic life of a famed 19th-century businesswoman, or a Spaniard whose taste in design has become a classic for all the wrong reasons, all you need to do is look up: the Vieux Carré’s iron balconies are plenty talkative.

Walking through the French Quarter, the overhanging balconies soften Louisiana’s heat, their railings woven together like vines frozen in time. Cast iron balconies are at once bulky and intricate, their patterns tangled with flowers, leaves, and other motifs from nature. Wrought iron balconies tend to be simpler, but they make up in artistry what they lack in complexity—shaped by hand, they seem slender and full of movement.

As with Dixieland, gumbo, and Louisiana Voodoo, the style of wrought and cast iron in New Orleans is the product of a unique blend of cultural influences. Although undoubtedly inspired by the aesthetic of the French and Spanish colonizers, historian Marcus Christian traced most of the city’s early ironwork back to enslaved people from West Africa. These men first apprenticed under French blacksmiths in the early 18th century, then under Spaniards and Americans as the colony changed hands. Some were even able to buy their freedom, according to Christian, continuing the trade as free men until they were driven away by the Civil War and competition from Irish and German immigrants.

Take in the cast iron balconies of the Pontalba Buildings, and you can witness this multi-cultural synthesis for yourself. Here, Micaela Almonester y Rojas, Baroness de Pontalba, immortalized her story in the heart of the French Quarter. The only child to a powerful Spanish civil servant who died when she was a toddler, Micaela began construction of the Pontalba Buildings in 1849 on land inherited from her father. The buildings, which flank Jackson Square on the northeast and southwest sides, each take up a block and are girdled on the second and third floors by an endless web of filigree and flourishes.

Within the whorls of the balcony’s pattern are the initials “AP,” or “Almonester” and “Pontalba,” the two families that were joined together by the marriage that nearly cost Micaela’s life. In 1811, she was married off to her milquetoast cousin, Joseph-Xavier Célestin Delfau de Pontalba, and dragged from New Orleans to his family’s estate in France. Her father-in-law, the Baron de Pontalba, was desperate to get his hands on her inheritance, which he could legally claim if she left her husband. For years he tried to make her marriage miserable, but his attempts to chase her off were unsuccessful. Unstable and enraged, he shot her four times at point-blank range. When his murder attempt failed, he retired to his study and turned the pistol on himself.

The newly appointed Baroness de Pontalba was granted separation from her husband and returned to New Orleans. She spent the next few years converting Jackson Square from a military parade ground into a garden and designing the architecture for her eponymous buildings.

Some historians argue that it is not just the story of the Baroness that appears in the decorative ironwork of her buildings. Enslaved people from West Africa, who had by then been working in the blacksmithing industry for over a century, also left signs of their presence in the balconies. Tucked between each set of “AP” initials, in the bottom center of the balcony railing, is a design resembling two interlocked Gs that some claim is an Adinkra symbol. Adinkra symbols are a tradition from West Africa that represent different values and proverbs. The symbol featured here is likely “hye won hye,” which stands for endurance, imperishability, or “that which does not burn,” and may be in reference to the fires of 1788 and 1794 that razed great swaths of the city.

The Pontalba balconies fall in the shadow of more ironwork with something to say. St. Louis Cathedral rises from the northern edge of Jackson Square, its central bell tower attended by two shorter steeples. Though difficult to see from the street, each of these otherwise silent sentinels bears a message. The supple loops of wrought iron on top are thought to be a combination of two more Adinkra symbols.

The first, “asase ye duru,” resembles a heart mirrored vertically. Its translation, “the Earth has weight,” asserts that Mother Nature is to thank for all abundance and life, and should be taken care of accordingly. The second and most prominent symbol is a stylized heart known as “sankofa.” Its literal translation is, “return and get it,” but it is also associated with the proverb, “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” Although the proverb has a multifaceted significance in West African philosophy, in simplest terms it means that success in the future is dependent upon reclaiming wisdom from the past. Both are no doubt at home on top of the cathedral, as repentance and stewardship are both important concepts in the Catholic tradition, but they also feature elsewhere around the Quarter on many other balconies, gates, and doors.

Aside from life stories and religious teachings, the practice of incorporating symbolism into ironwork was also a popular way of advertising business or personal interests, such as grape vines on the house of a wine seller. There are even some stories of people using it to declare marital status. Vance Muse, author of New Orleans Decorative Ironwork, notes, “One apparently eager father chose the medium of cast iron to announce his daughter’s availability to suitors, for he filled the balcony railing outside her bedroom with cupids and arrows.”

Jean Baptiste LeBranche may not have been so inventive, although his home at the corner of St. Peter and Royal, a block northwest of the cathedral, is now one of the most photographed buildings in town. Erected by the sugar planter in the early 1800s, the rounded cast iron balconies feature a popular design of oak leaves and acorns. The pattern frames the space from above, giving off the impression of a tree’s canopy, and is divided by columns that resemble snaking trunks. According to author Cara Chastang Barnett, the oak leaf and acorn stood for food and shelter, or health and hospitality, but LeBranche also picked the design to honor his name, which means “the branch.”

Along Chartres Street, within eyesight of the cathedral, is the home of a Spaniard whose taste in wrought iron design hasn’t aged so gracefully. Bartholeme Bosque built his home in 1795, its wrought iron railings highlighted in New Orleans Decorative Ironwork for the delicate, baroque scrollwork that make up the homeowner’s initials. The blacksmith, Marcellino Hernandez, was also the artisan responsible for the balconies of Le Petit Théâtre Du Vieux Carré and the Cabildo, both found on the block between Bosque's house and the cathedral. His handiwork on the Cabildo was noted by historian Samuel Wilson to be “perhaps the finest of the Spanish period.”

Hernandez’s mastery over hand-wrought scrollwork, however, is not what catches the attention of present-day admirers. Instead, tour guides have been known to point out the motif surrounding Bartholeme Bosque’s initials, jokingly referring to it as the “cannon with two shots” design. What may have once been an innocent pattern of the 1700s has grown to suggest something entirely different to the modern eye.

Ironwork isn’t only a privilege of the living. The cemeteries of New Orleans, known as “cities of the dead,” are just as well-appointed. Tombs are often fenced off with custom gates featuring the interred family’s name. In her book Cast Iron and the Crescent City, historian Ann Masson notes that angels, weeping willows, inverted torches, and lambs have all been popular designs for the departed.

An example of this is in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, at the tomb of the Battalion of Artillery. There rests a number of soldiers who served under Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812. One of the final major battles was fought in New Orleans, and, although outnumbered by the British, the Americans won with a punishing blow of musket fire and cannons. It comes as no surprise that the artillery battalion’s tomb is adorned with wreaths for victory and inverted torches for death, but it is also surrounded by a fence embellished with, among other things, cannons and cannon balls with flames.

New Orleans’s history is sometimes as hidden as the courtyards of the French Quarter’s townhomes: strolling in the shade of their balconies, you might never guess that a lush garden exists on the other side of the wall—or that insights and histories from 200 years ago are preserved in the wrought iron fences. If what’s already been written about the city fails to answer a question, maybe it’s time to consult the annals of the deliberate tracery that linger just overhead.

It’s not quite bringing the wooly mammoth back from extinction, but a large rodent thought to have been driven out of Western Australia’s Kimberley region decades ago has recently reared its furry little head again.

Tree-mendous news! Black-footed tree-rat rediscovered in the Kimberley after 30 years https://t.co/NgioVrzftFhttps://t.co/3oLq6cLOROpic.twitter.com/XQomH2qDpY

— Gregory Andrews (@TSCommissioner) August 24, 2017

As the BBC reports, a black-footed tree rat, which can still be found in other parts of Australia, was first spotted in the region around a year ago. Months of camera monitoring finally concretely confirmed the creature as living in Kimberley. Its nocturnal nature made it even more difficult to spot.

The rodent is a large, arboreal critter, weighing up to almost two pounds, and it's pretty damn cute.

The last time a BFTR (as they should be known) was spotted in Kimberley was back in 1987, leading researchers to think that it might have gone extinct in the region. They believed it had been wiped out or run off by those old saws of species die-out: humans, fires, and predatory cats.

The BFTRs reappearance may have to do with recent efforts to combat fires in the region, but whatever the cause, members of Western Australia’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions admit to cracking some champagne to celebrate the little guy’s comeback.

One day in 1941, Lee Ng Shee went for a stroll in Bradley Beach, New Jersey. She was the wife of a prominent merchant in New York City Chinatown named Lee B. Lok, who in 1891 had established Quong Yuen Shing & Company, a general store on Mott Street. The family liked to spend their summers on the Jersey Shore, though it was a challenge to find landlords who would rent to nonwhites. Lee Ng Shee was passing a house on Newark Avenue, stepping carefully on her bound feet, when a woman came out on the porch. “Are you looking for a house?” the woman called out. “Would you like to buy this one?”

Lee knew a deal when she heard one. “Two thousand dollars later, Lee B. Lok and family were ensconced in a summer bungalow of their very own in the village where twenty years before they would have been lucky to be able to rent some rooms over a store,” wrote Bruce Edward Hall in his Chinatown memoir Tea That Burns.

Lee’s lucky break paved the way for more Chinatown families. Others bought along the same street, and soon, Newark Avenue became an equivalent to Mott Street in Manhattan; a mini, parallel Chinatown on the Jersey Shore. Jokingly, they dubbed the area Chinatown-by-the-Sea. Other old-timers call it “the Chinese Riviera.”

While the Lees blazed the path of home ownership, the story of how Chinatown families started renting in Bradley goes much farther back. In 1877, the minister of a rural parish in Sherman, Pennsylvania asked his congregation to open their homes to poor children from New York City. Tuberculosis was endemic in the city’s overcrowded tenements, and fresh air was believed to help with respiratory ailments.

The initiative was a hit, and churches throughout New York City began sending parishioners to country and seaside locales during the summer. “The three principal groups into which the guests were divided were the Hebrews, the Italians and the Chinese; of these probably the most interesting were the Chinese women and children,” reported one Lower East Side church in a 1909 edition of The Christian Advocate. “For al! [sic] these people, boys and girls, mothers and babies, a vacation from the almost intolerable conditions of the lower East Side, and, worse yet, of Chinatown in summer is a very gift of God.”

Those efforts grew into what is known today as the Fresh Air Fund, a nonprofit organization that continues to send children from low-income communities on summer vacations in the country. And, it introduced Lower Manhattanites to Bradley Beach. The connection was forged by the Church of All Nations, a Methodist settlement house that opened at 9 Second Avenue, near Houston Street, in 1923. The church’s name reflected a credo of acceptance and inclusiveness; consequently, services were given in Polish, Chinese, Russian, and English. There were activities too for Italians and Germans; and use of the church’s gym, assembly hall, classrooms, swimming pool, and rooftop sports field were open to all. It even let a nearby synagogue use its chapel for Passover celebrations.

The church owned a summer home named Cliff Villa in Bradley Beach, a tiny, mile-long town on the New Jersey shore. Each summer, the church sent different ethnic groups to vacation there for two or three weeks at a time: one time slot for Chinese, another for Italians, and more for other groups, including Armenians, Slovaks, Poles, and Japanese.

“It was a time for beach, games, outdoor showers, nights at Asbury Park, Sundays at the Ocean Grove Auditorium and happy memories of new and old friends,” recalls former attendee Tim Tsang in an oral history he contributed to the book Bradley Beach Treasures: Reflections of the Jersey Shore by Bette Blum. Tsang (who died earlier this year) first visited Cliff Villa with his uncle in 1939, when Tim was 11. He even met his future wife, Margaret Chin Tsang, at Bradley Beach a few years later.

Other visitors recall buying penny candy and one-cent fish hooks at Virgil’s on Newark Ave, fishing at Fletcher Lake, and the clanging of the bell that Cliff Villa’s manager Joe Giglia rang at mealtimes, to call in children playing nearby.

Fresh Air families from Chinatown loved the experience so much—especially in the years before air conditioning—that they began to rent there on their own. By the late 1930s, they had become a common sight in town. However, they were not always welcomed. Sometimes neighbors complained, and the families would move to a less conspicuous location, according to Hall. For that reason, it was a watershed moment when the Lees bought that first home on Newark Ave.

“In our section of Bradley, we—not just us but other groups—were people that couldn’t fit in everywhere else. We couldn’t go to Spring Lake; that was the Irish Riviera. [The borough of] Deal was all the very wealthy homes. Ocean Grove was strictly white Methodist. And the section we’re in is the north section of town, which was not as desirable as the south end,” recalls 75-year-old John Mok, grandson of Lee Ng Shee and Lee B. Lok, who today lives on the very same block where his grandparents first bought in 1941. (Mok, it seems, is destined to live in the heart of Chinatowns—he grew up at 34 Mott Street, in the same building where, more than half a century earlier in 1873, a man named Wah Kee opened a store selling Chinese goods, and established Manhattan Chinatown as we know it.)

In his book, Hall (now deceased) evokes the summertime scene among his grandfather and other family members during the 1950s: “[O]n Memorial Day weekend the exodus begins. Hock Shop in his Buick, Dr. Liu in his Chrysler, Pee Wee Wong in whatever old jalopy he has cobbled together in front of his apartment on Mott Street join the caravan of cars trundling through the Holland Tunnel and down old Route 9 to their sunny summer enclave. It seems as if everyone is there, in little pockets just like the family compounds in their ancestral villages. The Hor family is on the fourth block, the Lees in the first, the rest elsewhere on Newark Avenue.”

The men would drop the women and children off for the summer, then head back to their jobs in the city. On Mondays, after the Sunday rush in Chinatown had ended, they would commute down again. The women would sew and play mahjong, while the men played cards or piled off to nearby Monmouth Park Race Track, “probably spending more time with the ponies than they ever do by the ocean,” wrote Hall. The children would get pizza and ice cream at Virgil’s, or tromp over to Asbury Park for arcade games and carnival rides.

Other ethnic groups have formed similar communities in Bradley. From the 1940s onward, the area was dubbed “Bagel Beach” for its popularity among Jews from New York and New Jersey. During the 1950s, Park Place Avenue, just one street over from Newark Ave, became an Italian area, attracting residents of Little Italy in Manhattan. In a quirk of serendipity, Little Italy is adjacent to Manhattan Chinatown, and thus Bradley Beach’s Italian and Chinese sections mirror the ethnic geography of New York.

“My mother loved it,” said John Mok of his own family’s experience in Bradley. “She was a schoolteacher later on in life, so she got the summers off, and she just liked being here because she [had] always lived in an apartment. [Growing up,] we were in a tenement with an outside bathroom.”

Mok’s grandfather had six daughters and one son, making for quite a tight fit at that original home on Newark Ave. Eventually, one of his aunts bought across the street. Another aunt, with his mother Grace, bought down the block, where John lives today.

The store Lee B. Lok founded closed down in 2003. The old Church of All Nations building on 2nd Avenue was demolished in 2005, and now, a 12-story apartment complex stands at its old address. In Bradley, Cliff Villa burned down in 1965, and a roadway now cuts through what used to be an open expanse from the house to Fletcher Lake. The original Lee home on Newark has passed out of family hands. And these days, it’s mostly people of a certain age who remember nicknames like Bagel Beach or Chinatown-by-the-Sea. But Bradley Beach remains beloved, with a year-round population of 5,000 that swells to 30,000 in summertime.

John Mok estimates that there are perhaps 15 to 20 families with roots in Chinatown who still own homes in Bradley Beach, a town just 11 by 7 blocks wide. Mok’s sister is next door. His wife Luella, who went on those church trips to Cliff Villa as a child, is related to five families in Bradley Beach. Two of Mok’s childhood friends from Chinatown, whom he has known since kindergarten, have bought homes in the community too.

Then again, Mok says, his count could be off. “There are some I don’t know. Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of young Chinese I don’t know walking by my house to go to the beach. So there are a lot of generations behind me still coming.”

Bears Ears National Monument may be just shy of eight months old, but the treasures located within its boundaries have been around for thousands, even millions, of years. There are countless unique geologic formations, ancient dwellings, and petroglyphs scattered across its 1.35 million acres in southeastern Utah. But the national monument, created by President Obama in December 2016, is one of 27 recently reviewed by the current Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke. Zinke sent his report to President Trump on Thursday, but hasn't yet made it public. However, The Washington Post reports that "multiple individuals briefed on the decision" say that Zinke recommends decreasing the size of Bears Ears, along with Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.

Native American tribes, environmental organizations, and recreation groups will likely challenge the changes in court, but there's no guarantee the wonders within the monument's boundaries will remain protected. Here are just some of the incredible places at risk.

The Ruins of Cedar Mesa

Humans have inhabited the Bears Ears region for about 13,000 years, and artifacts from Ancient Puebloan, Clovis, Navajo, Paiute, and Ute peoples have been found throughout the region. Impressive dwellings can be found in cliff sides, and petroglyphs adorn rocks, offering a depiction of life long ago. Ruins include Moon House, House on Fire, and the Citadel.

Valley of the Gods

Valley of the Gods offers visitors a chance to explore a landscape of monoliths and pinnacles carved by wind from 250-million-year-old sandstone. Nearby Monument Valley, on the Utah-Arizona border, may be more popular, but Valley of the Gods has its own film history and fewer visitors.

Indian Creek Fossils

The Chinle Formation in Indian Creek contains Triassic fossils of fish and aquatic reptiles. Fossilized tracks of tetrapods can also be found in the northeastern area of the monument. As the Presidential Proclamation that established Bears Ears as a national monument states, "The Chinle Formation and the Wingate, Kayenta, and Navajo Formations above it provide one of the best continuous rock records of the Triassic-Jurassic transition in the world, crucial to understanding how dinosaurs dominated terrestrial ecosystems and how our mammalian ancestors evolved."

Petroglyphs of Grand Gulch and Indian Creek

Rock art dating back 5,000 years can be found throughout the park, but some of the most stunning examples can be found in Grand Gulch and Indian Creek. People, animals, and mysterious symbols decorate rock faces and provide a record of human activities and the animals that once roamed what is now Bears Ears, including bison and bighorn sheep.

In Lima, Peru, at the top of a pyramid built thousands of years ago, archaeologists found the remains of 16 Chinese laborers who died here around the late 19th century.

Eleven of the bodies were wrapped in simple cloth shrouds; the remaining five were laid to rest in wooden coffins and wore blue-green jackets, Reuters reports.

During Europe’s “Age of Exploration,” small numbers of people from Asia came to this part of the world on ships that stopped in Macau and other Asian cities. But the largest migration of Chinese people to Peru began in the late 1840s, with the decline of slave labor.

Earlier in the century, England had stopped its slave shipments to this part of the Americas, and Peru had freed itself from Spanish colonial rule in the 1820s. Though the slave trade began to shrink, it wasn’t abolished in Peru until 1854.

The landowners of Peru, though, still wanted cheap labor for their sugar and cotton plantations, for rich guano mines, and for the expansion of the railroad. The government eased the way for former slaveholders with financial grants and subsidies for bringing new indentured laborers to the country. Many of those new contracted workers came from China, where political unrest had created a population of displaced people in need of work. Between 1849 and 1874 around 100,000 Chinese contract laborers, mostly from the province of Guangdong, sailed to Peru under restrictive labor contracts that tied them to landowners from years.

The work conditions for Chinese indentured laborers were harsh, and they were often treated little better than slaves had been. Many indentured laborers died under these conditions. Some managed to fulfill their contracts, though, and many came to settle in Lima. By 1876, the Chinese community in the city had grown so much that it accounted for about 10 percent of total population. In the city, they worked as servants, artisans, or small business people, running stores and restaurants in what would become Lima’s Chinatown. A select few Chinese immigrants became planters and merchants themselves.

But even as labor conditions improved for Chinese people in Peru, they were still marginalized. Even as free laborers, Chinese people were required to keep papers proving they were free and to register with the government. In the 1880s, the terms of labor contracts improved, with clauses that allowed the workers to break their contracts and required them to receive wages. But even then, writes historian Michael J. Gonzales, “planters continued to subject Chinese workers to a harsh system of social control, regardless of their contractual status.”

The remains discovered on the Lima pyramid reflect both the improving conditions for Chinese laborers and their exclusion from parts of Peruvian society. As their economic conditions improved, Chinese families were able to afford more than simple shrouds for their dead. But authorities would not have Chinese people buried in Catholic graveyards, and the ancient pyramids “had a sacred association that might have made them attractive places for burial by Chinese laborers,” Roxana Gomez, who led the archaeological team, told Reuters.

The wave of Chinese immigration to Peru started to slow around the 1880s, as the Chinese government started to restrict the flow of indentured labor out of the country and conditions in China improved. The influence of those migrants has shaped Peru, though; today 15 percent of people in the country can trace their ancestry back to Chinese and other Asian migrants from the 19th century.

In the classic tune "Charlie on the MTA," the eponymous Charlie, a Bostonian, gets stuck on the city's subway system forever when he can't pay the whole fare.* "Did he ever return?" asks the song's chorus, before answering its own question: "No, he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned."

The Twitter user @CharlieOnMTA, however, did return from his own subway adventure. In fact, he returned as quickly as anyone ever has. On August 18th, he and a friend, @transitalex, rode every MBTA line in its entirety in 7 hours, 29 minutes, and 46 seconds, setting a new world record for “Fastest time to travel to all Boston subway stations.”

These two guys are trying to set a record on the MBTA. Story at 5:30 on #WBZpic.twitter.com/4uPrIeReMt

— Liam Martin (@LiamWBZ) August 18, 2017

@CharlieOnMTA's real name is Dominic DiLuzio, and @transitalex is Alex Cox. Both are transportation buffs from Beantown, and as the Boston Globe reports, they planned their record-setting ride for months before they got started, at 5:24 a.m. on the 18th, at Alewife Station at the end of the Red Line.

As per Guinness World Records' rules, they stationed two witnesses at the route's start and end, and brought along two timekeepers and two video cameras. As per modernity's, they tweeted the whole thing in real time.

6:57am - made it to Ashmont #MBTA! Finished the Red Line in 90 minutes. On to the Mattapan Line! #MBTAWorldRecord@MBTA@JoePesaturopic.twitter.com/hidbecORnS

— Alex Cox (@transitalex) August 18, 2017

Reading the tweets is a pleasant experience, much better than actually commuting. By 6:57 a.m., they'd completed the whole Red Line, including both tails. Then, fueled by Dunkin Donuts bagels, they took a trolley to a bus to the Orange Line, followed by the Green, a bit more Orange, and the Blue. (Locals to the end, they skipped the Silver, which only goes to the airport.)

#MBTAWorldRecord Red, Green & Orange lines complete!! Now we head back downtown for the final leg of the trip to Wonderland! #Boston#MBTApic.twitter.com/SN7e82J9nE

— Charlie (@CharlieOnMTA) August 18, 2017

There were some surprises: "We actually GAINED back time on the B Line!" Cox tweeted mid-morning, referring to the section of the street-level Green Line most famous for getting stuck at red lights. Later, they picked a dud train, which was taken out of service at one of the busier stops, Government Center.

But all in all, things went smoothly. Just before 1:00 p.m., after 155 stations, they were pulling into their last stop: the fittingly named Wonderland.

12:32pm - this is it, our last train! Wonderland, here we come!! #MBTAWorldRecordpic.twitter.com/VmKCVqE32F

— Alex Cox (@transitalex) August 18, 2017

This meant victory for the pair, who celebrated briefly with their fellow commuters. Officials gave them both a prize—personalized fare cards, or CharlieCards, each featuring their name and the legend "The MBTA Speed Challenge World Record."

Then they both happily took the subway back home.

*As Jonathan Reed details in an exhaustive investigation, what is now the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority (MBTA) was called the MTA until 1964. In 1949, when the song was written, the fee system was extremely complex and included an "exit fare," which is what Charlie couldn't pay.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

A familiar face is returning to Leicester, England. The suffragette Alice Hawkins, who died in 1946 and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, will be honored with a statue, reports the BBC. The monument depicts Hawkins wearing her "Votes for Women" sash. Around the world, contentious statues, and their removal, are making headlines. But, in the meantime, new monuments are going up—Emmeline Pankhurst, Millicent Fawcett, and now, Hawkins.

After leaving school at 13 in 1876, Hawkins found work in a shoe factory. Quickly, she learned that her male colleagues were not only being paid more, but receiving better working conditions. Her activism began here: first, in the local "boot and shoe" trade union, then at the Equity shoe factory, which was a worker’s co-operative that encouraged its staff to participate in politics.

But Hawkins grew disappointed with these organizations, which she felt prioritized the desires of male workers over better rights for all. She began attending meetings at the Women’s Social and Political Union. After her first meeting in February 1907, she was arrested at a march for women's suffrage. She was jailed five times in total over the subsequent seven years.

“Many people today believe that the suffragette movement was largely comprised of well-to-do ladies with time on their hands,” said her great-grandson Peter Barrett in a 2013 press release. Instead, Hawkins was a “working class lady and mother of six,” who balanced long hours in the factory with her political activism.

The memorial was made possible by a local businessman, who chose to remain anonymous. After watching the 2015 film Suffragette, he was moved to donate over $100,000 towards the statue.

But even history’s heroes and heroines have their demons. That same film came under fire for glossing over the way white suffragettes excluded their black peers from the fight for voting and equality rights. Moreover, Susan B. Anthony and many other women’s rights heroes, whom we continue to laud, are on the record making racist statements. Pankhurst’s own forthcoming memorial, in Manchester, has itself met criticism.

In East Harlem, New York, residents have long campaigned for the removal of the statue of J. Marion Sims, often described as the father of modern gynecology. While he made tremendous strides in women’s healthcare, Sims did so through his grisly experiments on enslaved black women. A local city council member, Bill Perkins, said at a rally this week that the statue came “from a mentality and an era that are quite inconsistent with today and the future,” and called for its removal.

Following the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a 90-day review on “symbols of hate” that are public memorials on city property. J. Marion Sims’s statue is just one of the icons under review, alongside street names and plaques. These memorials may have been designed to withstand the ages and the elements—but sometimes, the age moves on, and the subject of the statue is deemed no longer worth commemorating.

Pioneering codebreaker and father of modern computing Alan Turing was a complicated, inscrutable, and, in many ways, mysterious man. But recently discovered letters reflect very clearly his opinion of the United States of America: He wasn’t a fan.

According to a press release from the University of Manchester (where he did much of his ground-breaking work), computer science professor Jim Miles was reorganizing a storeroom back in May when he came across a folder containing almost 150 previously unseen letters and other pieces of Turing’s writings. “When I first found it I initially thought, ‘That can’t be what I think it is,’ but a quick inspection showed it was, a file of old letters and correspondence, by Alan Turing,” Miles said.

While not as illuminating as the personal letters that were discovered in 2015, which shed light on Turing’s tragic struggles with his sexuality, the new finds do offer some insight into the genius thinker’s twilight. Dating to the last six years of his life, 1949 to 1954, the writings are rather banal pieces of ephemera, such as offers to lecture at American universities and a handwritten radio program about artificial intelligence for the BBC. As the University of Manchester points out, though the artifacts are fairly business focused, they do reveal some small glimpses into Turing’s opinions.

Maybe the most sensational example is contained in a response to a 1953 conference invitation from the United States. Turing simply replied, “I would not like the journey, and I detest America.” Fair enough. Turing had spent four months in America in 1942 a liaison between U.S. and British cryptanalysts. Unsurprisingly, his opinion of Americans and their work wasn't glowing then either.

Sadly, Turing died in 1954 of an apparent suicide—an apple laced with cyanide—just a year after expressing that opinion about America. As the one university archivist said, “The letters mostly confirm what is already known about Turing’s work at Manchester, but they do add an extra dimension to our understanding of the man himself and his research.”

New frog species is purple, pig-nosed, & almost entirely subterranean. Bonus: Blue eye shadow. https://t.co/NbkbsJFbS9 feat @jodirowley! pic.twitter.com/Hfh1yUo9VO

— Jason Bittel (@bittelmethis) August 24, 2017

If you go trekking through the Western Ghats mountains of India, you probably won't see one of the region's most charming residents. That's because they're frogs that live underground, only emerging to mate when it's raining. The frogs, called Bhupathy's purple frogs, have pig-like snouts, blue rings around their eyes, and glistening purple skin. They were unknown to science until recently, reports National Geographic, when a team of researchers noticed some strange tadpoles swimming in a stream.

Bhupathy's purple frog tadpoles aren't like most frog tadpoles. Most tadpoles grow tails and dart around ponds—purple frog tadpoles have mouths that allow them to attach to rocky cliffs behind waterfalls created by monsoon rains, where they hang out and eat algae for about four months. As adults, they live entirely underground, where they eat termites and ants with their long tongues.

The purple frogs are unique, but they do have a cousin, sometimes called the purple frog, discovered in 2003. The species found in 2003 lives on the western flank of the mountain range and comes out to mate during monsoons from May to August, while the new purple frog lives on the east side and emerges during monsoons between October and December. The two species are closely related, but they're the only two members of their purple, pig-nosed family.