Deep in Sumatra’s rainforests, a team of researchers has found two new frog species born with a peculiar characteristic. During their larval stage, most tadpoles have a small mouth, known as an oral disc, but these newly identified amphibians, called Sumateranamontana and Sumaterana dabulescens, bear a suction-like cup on their bellies below their mouths.

“This phenomenon where tadpoles display ‘belly suckers’ is known as gastromyzophory and, albeit not unheard of, is a rare adaptation that is only found in certain toads in the Americas and frogs in Asia,” said lead author Umilaela Arifin in a Pensoft Publishers press statement.

Arifin and her team are still learning about the abdominal suckers, but they presume this unique trait gives the tadpoles a special advantage. Sumateranamontana and Sumaterana dabulescens live near flowing streams. The suction allows young pollywogs to stick onto surfaces below fast rapids that would otherwise wash them away. There they can capture food, such as algae. They do not carry this suction-cup trait into adulthood, however.

The researchers also discovered through comparative molecular studies that a known Sumatran frog called Chalcorana crassiovis was misidentified in the wrong genus. Based on their analysis, they determined C. crassiovis is closely related to other Sumatran gastromyzophorous tadpoles and should instead belong to the new Sumaterana genus.

The research team admits more studies need to be conducted, but with logging and agribusiness having a destructive effect on Sumatra’s biodiversity, they are racing to uncover the rest.

A decade ago, the landlocked state of Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. In the years since, 113 UN states have come to recognize this diamond-shaped block, a little smaller than the state of Connecticut, as a country in its own right. Its neighbor Serbia, however, has not. Tensions between the two territories persist, particularly as many ethnic Serbs continue to live in a country they do not believe exists.

As an act of protest, many of these Serbs, based in northern Kosovo, have refused to pay their power bills to the country's utility department. And so, late last year, the Kosovan government announced that they would stop subsidizing that electricity—a decision which has plunged Europe's power grid into disarray, and sent electric clocks from Portugal to Denmark running on the wrong time. Because of this disagreement, since January, 113 gigawatt-hours of electricity has gone missing, reports John Hyphen, an employee at a European environmental NGO, on Twitter. "That's the annual consumption of about 10,000 homes," he writes.

Millions of European clocks run on mains electricity—blinking timepieces on microwaves, radios, cookers, DVD players, and games consoles alike. To keep time, they rely on the frequency of the electricity grid. The standard frequency in Europe is 50 hertz, or 50 oscillations per second. (In Canada and the United States, it's 60 hertz.) Almost all of Europe is on one tremendous grid, stretching from Turkey all the way to Portugal, and allowing these countries to "share" electricity, so electricity produced in Germany can be used in, say, Hungary, if that's where it's needed. (Only a few countries are "off the grid", including the United Kingdom and some of the Nordic countries.)

Over an area this large, the amount of electricity used must be carefully balanced with the amount produced. If the balance is off, the frequency dips below or shoots over 50 hertz. The 113 gigawatt-hours discrepancy between supply and demand has lowered the frequency for the entire European grid: At the time of writing, according to the Swiss grid website, there was a grid time deviation of 362 seconds, or just over six minutes. The situation is slowly being rectified—Kosovo's public energy firm agreed last week to start temporarily paying those bills—but it might take weeks to claw back those six minutes and get Europe's clocks back to normal once again.

The shop at the tannery sells bowties, change purses, cigarette cases, and jewelry crafted from scaly, supple leather. At first touch, these wares seem to be made from the reptilian skin of a snake or a crocodile.

They’re not. They’re made from fish.

This tannery, Sjávarleður, or Atlantic Leather, stands on a side street in Sauðárkrókur, a fishing town on a mountainous, damp fjord on Iceland’s northwest coast. It’s the only enterprise in Europe that transforms discarded fish skin into sleek leather products.

It’s also the last bastion of a once-robust Icelandic industry. Since the 12th century, Icelanders have practiced tanning, a chemical process that extracts all living matter from an animal’s skin, says Sigríður Sigurðardóttir, a historian and curator of the Skagafjörður Heritage Museum, also in northwest Iceland. Tanning was an important practical activity, but it was also part of the country’s culture: girls were told that the quality of the first pair of leather shoes they sewed would foretell the quality of their marriages, and children who were born on bearskins were said to never feel cold.

Then, in the 20th century, tanning became a small but brisk industry in Iceland, with approximately 10 operations employing hundreds throughout the country. These tanning factories pickled fox skins and tanned seal skins; they made leather liner for anoraks and sewed gloves.

But as the century died, so did demand for this labor-intensive product. Tanning, says Sigurðardóttir, involves breeding animals, waiting for them to mature, hunting them, slaughtering them, and then turning their skins into wearable clothing.

“It takes a lot of hands or machines or time, and it’s expensive,” says Sigurðardóttir. “They didn’t have any market for it. And today, we don’t have much market for it. So that’s it.”

In 1991, Steinunn Gunnsteindóttir and her family, the owners of Sjávarleður, found themselves confronting this uncomfortable reality. Gunnsteindóttir’s parents had purchased the tannery in the 1970s and started processing sheepskins, but the rise of cheap synthetic fleeces, as well as the newly unstable market in the collapsing Soviet Union, put the tannery in a precarious spot.

Then, the family heard about a Canadian company that made fish leather. The family thought that developing this innovative, unusual product just might save their tannery. They wanted to buy the technique from the Canadians, but they didn’t have the money, so they decided to develop it themselves.

“The first 200 tries were just fish soup. Mushy fish soup,” Gunnsteindóttir says.

Now, though, Sjávarleður’s products are sold to the high-fashion industry. Fish skin is a durable, sustainable substitute to snake skin and crocodile skin, says Gunnsteindóttir, and their leather was named best in the world at a Hong Kong exhibition in 2013.

“Their method for developing fish skins has been revolutionary,” says Tinna Björk Arnardóttir, project manager at Innovation Center Iceland, which sponsors entrepreneurial projects in the country. “For the town it was a bit of a boost as well.”

Under the business name Sauðskinn, the tannery also still processes sheep and animal hides, which it exports to shops around the island. All sheepskins stamped with an Icelandic seal come through this tannery, although some sheepskins sold in the country are actually imported from Eastern Europe.

Now, Gunnsteindóttir, who grew up riding her bicycle through the tannery, helps her parents run these two operations. The next generation also pitches in.

“I always tell my daughters, if they won’t comb their hair in the morning, fine, we’ll just go down to work,” says Gunnsteindóttir, pointing to piles of soft sheepskin, which must be combed many times before they’re ready to sell.

These sheepskins are processed in cavernous rooms, which smell of fat and chemicals. Here, workers wearing headphones to drown out the clatter of the machines pull skins off tables; others push lambskin through a sandpaper roll to remove the stain of yellow fat. Nearby hang rows of coffee-colored leather; once dry, it will go into tumbling machines, similar to clothes dryers, to soften. Whorls of fur lie on the ground.

These are old machines, says Gunnsteindóttir. She and her family tried out new, computer-operated equipment, but it kept breaking down.

Beyond the sheepskin-processing rooms are the cold rooms, smelling of the fjord, where the fish is processed. About a ton of fish skins come through this room every week. Many are purchased from a fish factory in Dalvik, a town an hour away, up the fjord. Here, a man turns a hose on a box of fish skins, defrosting them. Nearby, a jumble of luminous spotted-wolf fish skins lie on a blue tarp.

It takes three to four weeks for these skins to transform from food industry refuse into the colorful, shiny strips of leather in the shop. During that time, the skins pass through wooden barrels full of chemicals, then through tumblers. After they are tanned, the fish are stapled to drying cabinets, and finally treated and dyed in one of 4,000 colors.

These animal skin products make some visitors squeamish, but Gunnsteindóttir is adamant in her defense of tanning.

“I always think it’s funny when people come in and say, it’s so sad, poor animals. I say, are you wearing jeans? Those are seven times more toxic than our skins,” says Gunnsteindóttir. “Tanning is one of the oldest things to do.”

This argument revolves around the fact that tanners, or at least these tanners, don’t kill animals, but use waste by-products from the food industry—an argument that the historian Sigurðardóttir agrees with.

“What happens to fish skins if you don’t use them [in the tannery]?” she says. “We have a lot of all kinds of skins from all kinds of animals and fish that are thrown away. Why should we do that, if we can use them? You’re not killing animals to get them. They’re already dead.”

That’s part of the reason why the tannery now operates a Gestastofa, or visitor center, where visitors can learn about the traditional processes behind the shiny skins in the gift shop. Arnardóttir, from Iceland Innovation Center, helped the tannery set up this center in 2012. She relied on a Canadian model called Économusée, which promotes the idea that tourists and locals should learn about how traditional workspaces and artisans operate.

For Sigurðardóttir, a local historian who’s chronicled the rise and fall of industries in Iceland, the tannery’s model is one worth emulating.

“They built something new on old knowledge,” she says. “If you have to stop the old way of doing things, you have to open a new door and take a new turn. And that’s what they did.”

My first sighting of Garry Island came through wind and rain.

It was the summer of 2016, and my paddle-partner Senny and I had been winding our way through the river delta labyrinth for five days, when finally, in the distance, a black mound rose slowly out of the horizon. Our pace was labored, reduced to a crawl. The north wind off the Beaufort Sea blew rain into our faces, and invisible silt bars suctioned at our canoe. The delta was widening, the gaps between land growing, and as the view opened, as river became ocean, there it was, out in the bay, the tallest island in any direction.

No wonder Alexander Mackenzie halted his expedition here, at Garry Island, I thought. It’s the last dry landmark before the North Pole.

In the summer of 1789, Alexander Mackenzie and his companions—five hired voyageurs and two of their wives, plus the great Chipewyan chief Awgeenah, with his wives and hunters—embarked in a flotilla of three canoes, launching from modern-day northern Alberta. Mackenzie was a fur trader in search of a water route to Asia, and he carried a speculative map that showed a river connecting the heartland of North America to the Pacific Ocean. If he was able to confirm this interior Northwest Passage, and develop a new trade route to China, Mackenzie would be a mercantilist hero and rich beyond his dreams.

Mackenzie’s expedition was the first recorded descent of the massive river that now bears his name. In order to write a new book on Mackenzie, I retraced his route down that river, the second largest in North America, paddling my own canoe 1,125 miles from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic.

For me, reaching the northern ocean would indicate success. And yet for Mackenzie, always a practical businessman, it meant nothing but frustration. Mackenzie died thinking his quest ended in failure. It turns out he was wrong, though, and for reasons he couldn’t have imagined at the time.

After 39 days of toil, Garry Island and the open sea finally came into sight, stark against a threatening gray sky. From the moment I looked at a topo map during my trip planning, it was this very last section that had given me pause. Paddling the inland river was daunting, for sure, but feasible in a straightforward way. These final few miles, though, had the potential for disaster. An open water crossing, out into the Arctic Ocean, in a canoe.

Rain forced us to shore, and we made a cold and hungry camp. The storm beating against the outer skin of the tent, I checked the weather forecast off the satellite. It was still there, as it had been all week: a three-hour window of calm seas predicted for the next morning, our best shot to cross to Garry Island. But as I lay huddled in my sleeping bag that night, I thought of the cautionary tale I heard from a man named Shawn Patterson, whom I had met two months before.

Patterson is the collections manager at Fort William in Thunder Bay, Ontario—he described the site as a sort-of Colonial Williamsburg for fur-trading history nerds—and a recognized Mackenzie expert. In 1989, he was on the official Canadian expedition recreating the bicentennial journey, so I asked Patterson for advice, about the trip generally, but especially the last bit to Garry Island.

“Oh, we didn’t get to Garry Island,” Patterson had told me.

“What do you mean?” I was incredulous. “How could you go all that way and just stop before the end?”

“The weather stopped us,” he said. “The hail was coming in sideways, and I looked out my tent flap and saw a red tail hawk completely motionless in the air, unable to fly against the wind. It was a mutual decision, we all agreed. We knew we couldn’t make it.”

The official Canadian bicentennial expedition didn’t reach Garry Island. What made me think I could?

Among Americans today, Alexander Mackenzie is all but forgotten. Even in Canada, he is a figure a little like Daniel Boone, a famous historical name though many would be hard-pressed to say exactly why.

The bicentennial voyage, of which Shawn Patterson took part, was more than an anniversary paddle. It was a full historic recreation, with period costumes and birchbark canoes, each role faithfully reprised. Patterson looks the part of an 18th-century voyageur—a beard and compact build help—and played Joseph Landry, the gouvernail, or rear steersman, for Mackenzie’s 25-foot canoe.

At community centers across Canada, Patterson and his crew stopped and set up small educational performances for school children. The actor playing Mackenzie would come out first in his big wool coat, and Patterson would ask, “Who is this?”

“The number one answer, every time, was Abraham Lincoln,” Patterson says, “Blond hair, no beard, but he had the big top hat. So we’d say, ‘No, look, he has his First Nations partners with him.’ And the kids would think, and then the second guess was always the same too. Lewis and Clark.”

Ironic, as it is actually Mackenzie who holds the distinction of leading the first recorded crossing of North America, not Lewis and Clark. In 1793, Mackenzie made a second attempt to cross the continent, over an extremely rugged section of modern-day British Columbia. He reached the Pacific north of Vancouver, and in so doing, beat Lewis and Clark by a dozen years. Mackenzie’s published memoir of the trip inspired Thomas Jefferson to send Lewis and Clark at all, and they carried a copy of the best-selling book in their canoe.

Alexander Mackenzie was born in 1762 in the small town of Stornoway, on the island of Lewis in far northern Scotland. His family emigrated to New York City in 1775, and became refugees during the American Revolution, fleeing to Montreal, where young Alexander apprenticed as an accounting clerk at a fur-trading firm. The business went like this: French voyageurs carried English guns, ammunition, wool, and rum up the Saint Lawrence and then fanned out across the pays d’en haut, the Upper Country, returning months later with thousands of beaver pelts bound for fashionable hat makers in Paris. From his book-keeper’s desk, Mackenzie saw fortunes made, as hardy traders pushed ever further into the vast northern wilderness; the longer and harsher the winter, the more luxurious the furs. Mackenzie was tough and smart, volunteered for “adventure,” as he would write in his journal, and was quickly promoted to run his own post in the boreal forest of America’s unclaimed inlands.

Honest maps of that time show a massive blank space in the northwest quadrant of North America. Very little had been explored by trained cartographers, and even less surveyed with any sort of accuracy. This map, from 1754, is typical:

Speculative geographers, an established and respected scientific class at the time, drew maps that filled in the gaps. Many sought to accommodate a Northwest Passage, a waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific. And so all manner of geographic features were invented. There was the Mer De l’Ouest, an inland sea of the western continent, and the Strait of Anian, which was drawn variously, sometimes separating North America from Asia, sometimes as a channel connecting Hudson’s Bay and the Pacific. Even as late as 1780, popular maps were full of the stuff:

That such a Northwest Passage should exist at all was considered a piece of inescapable logic. Since Aristotle, geographers subscribed to a philosophy of a balanced earth: that the same amount of land must appear in the northern hemisphere as the southern, that features present in one area would be mirrored in all others. This theory had already produced results. The long-sought terra australis, a large continent in the south required to balance Europe and Asia in the north, was found by Dutch sailors in the South Pacific in the 17th century; thus would Australia get its name. So too, if a southern passage existed around South America at Tierra del Fuego, naturally a corresponding waterway must exist in the north.

By the 1780s, sailors had probed all the crannies of Hudson’s Bay and the many straits around Greenland, and found every way blocked by ice. Thus, many geographers believed that the Northwest Passage must be a river through the continent, rather than a strait around it. One theory held that the Saint Lawrence River must be one end of this inland passage, and Cook's Inlet at Alaska the other. Voyageurs and fur traders had uncovered the eastern portion of the route, from Quebec to Great Slave Lake, but it was up to Mackenzie to find the rest. This imagined waterway was called the River of the West, or sometimes the River Ouregan. And in 1787, Alexander Mackenzie met a man who thought he had found it.

Mackenzie spent that long winter with a haggard fur-trader named Peter Pond. While they were snowed-in together at a remote fort, Pond spun tales of a potential Northwest Passage. He was an amateur mapmaker, and constantly sought to fill the blank spaces in his own charts by quizzing his indigenous trading partners. One such chief, Awgeenah, told him an incredible story of a wide river that flowed into the setting sun.

Awgeenah often worked along Great Slave Lake, trading with the Yellowknife tribes that lived on the north shore. They told him that a mighty river flowed out of that lake to the west, directly to the sea. When Pond heard this, he drew a new map of the area. Captain James Cook had just surveyed the western coast of North America, and at the point where Anchorage, Alaska, now sits, reported a large inlet of unusually fresh water, choked with riverine driftwood. Pond put two and two together: Awgeenah’s river flowed to the Pacific, Cook had found its mouth. After centuries of searching and speculation, Pond believed the Northwest Passage was finally within reach.

By the time Mackenzie heard this story, Pond was past his prime, almost fifty years old. Mackenzie was the young up-and-comer. The North West Company, the Montreal business cabal that employed both men, picked Mackenzie to lead the expedition to verify the river’s route, and Awgeenah would act as his partner and translator.

English fur traders and French missionaries had been searching for this river for hundreds of years. The last best hope to find a Northwest Passage through North America lay in Mackenzie’s and Awgeenah’s expedition.

On June 3, 1789, the party of 13 left Lake Athabasca. They began at a latitude roughly equal to Stockholm, Sweden, and would ultimately travel hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle. One hundred and two days later, they returned exhausted and so demoralized that Mackenzie would call his route “the River Disappointment.”

A combination of ice, fog, and tempest slowed their passage down the Slave River and across Great Slave Lake. For several days, the shore froze so tight they couldn’t break the boats through, and yet “our old Companions, the Muskettoes,” as Mackenzie wrote, tormented them in camp. Across the lake, thunderstorms lashed their canoes even as they dodged ice floes. A deep fog obscured their way, and they spent a full week searching bays for the mouth of the river.

Finally, on June 29, they detected current, and knew they were on the great river that Awgeenah had reported. For a while, it did go west and they made good time. But then the river hit the Rocky Mountains and made a hard right turn, at a place now known as the Camsell Bend. Mackenzie did not notice the severity of the turn, and mistook his direction and distance of travel for days afterwards. Storms kept him from taking noon-time navigational readings to determine his latitude, and his compass pulled easterly far more than he realized. Unknown to Mackenzie, magnetic north in Arctic Canada can deviate by as much as 45 degrees.

Mackenzie thought he was heading west, when in reality his travel was mostly north. He did not admit to himself, in his journal, that he was going the wrong way until the channel began to divide into the many-tined fork of a river delta. The weather broke, and finally able to use his sextant, Mackenzie discovered they were north of the Arctic Circle.

“I am much at a loss here how to act,” he wrote, “being certain that my going further in this Direction will not answer the Purpose of which the Voyage was intended, as it is evident these Waters must empty themselves into the Hyperborean Sea,” using the ancient Greek term for the Arctic Ocean.

Mackenzie surveyed his men, and they agreed that they might as well keep going. “I determined to go to the discharge of those Waters, as it would satisfy Peoples Curiosity tho’ not their Intentions.”

That night, the sky was finally clear after days of rain.

“I sat up last Night to observe at what time the Sun would set,” Mackenzie wrote, “but found that he did not set at all.”

On the maps, this great river is now labeled “Mackenzie,” though it had a name long before he arrived. The First Nations, the Dene and Gwitch’in and Inuvialuit, have used it as a highway for thousands of years. In their own languages, they all know it—as the Deh Cho, Nagwichoonjik, and Kuukpak, respectively—by a variation of this name: The Big River.

Based on my trip, I can corroborate that description. The fundamental emptiness of its broad valley smothers comprehension, a perpetual funnel of cliffs and black spruce marred by only the occasional traces of humans. In some places, it takes an hour to paddle across the river. In others, you can’t see the other side at all.

The night before our crossing to Garry Island, we were too cold and wet to cook so we crawled right in our bags, our only dry piece of gear. I wore every layer of clothing I had and still barely slept, shivering until our window of clearer weather and calmer seas arrived the next day.

In the morning, a dry gray sky spoke hope. But it started drizzling as soon as we pushed off, and then a wave front hit, surprising in the low wind; an ugly disorganized chop left over from the storm the night before, I figured. We trusted the surf would fade per the weather report, and so began the crossing.

I thought of Mackenzie and Patterson and their armadas of birchbark canoes. The challenge of reaching Garry Island had not changed significantly in 230 years. True, we had a fancy GPS and life vests, but also a much smaller boat and were all by ourselves, and in that moment, I felt both acutely.

After deciding to continue, Mackenzie directed his voyageurs to “the most Western land,” the place now known as Garry Island, that he approximated to be 15 miles away. I knew it to be only five miles, but as we got out into the bay, the north wind grew until it was screaming in my ears. The whitecaps came in at 45 degrees, as I angled the nose of the canoe so they couldn’t snatch our gunnel, and the rain began to stick, like sleet. The weather report proved wrong at exactly the wrong moment, and we didn’t speak a single word on the crossing, not a peep, until almost an hour later, when we made it to the far shore.

We ground the canoe on a gravel beach. “From here we could see the Lake covered with Ice at about 2 Leagues distance and no land ahead, so that we stopped….at the limits of our Travels,” Mackenzie wrote. The island stretched on and on in a wedge, a carpet of orange moss and pale green lichen, small bushes that dug themselves holes to escape the wind. “I went with [Awgeenah] to the highest part of the Island,” Mackenzie wrote, and we followed their route up the hill, to get a better view of the ocean. The whole thing smelled unexpectedly rich and earthy, as we balanced on unsure footing, tussock to tussock.

“We could see the Ice in a whole Body extending from S.W. by Compass to the Eastward as far as we could see,” Mackenzie wrote, and despaired. There would be no trip to China, no opening of trade, no fortune to be found or hero’s welcome upon return. I attained the same ridge, and looked out, my face to the north wind, and saw open water. Not a sliver of ice anywhere. Mackenzie thought he was a failure, but he was wrong. He was just too early.

Today, we think of the Northwest Passage as the commercial shipping route through the islands off the coast of Arctic Canada. But two hundred years after Mackenzie’s trip, climate change has now opened his passage as well.

Travel support for this story was provided by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

On the map of Australia's indigenous language types, Pama-Nyungan languages stretch expansively across the country, dipping down into the hollows of Western Australia and Victoria, and reaching high up into the furthest cranny of Queensland, to the north-east. In the remaining 10 percent of the country, languages based on Australia's other 26 Aboriginal language families jostle for space in a cluster around the Northern Territory.

It's extraordinary that there are 27 different Aboriginal language families at all—in Europe, by contrast, there are just four—but still more incredible that Pama-Nyungan should have such dominion across so much of Australia. For decades, linguists have puzzled over this problem: Where did the ancestral Pama–Nyungan language originate, and when? And why did it make its way across 90 percent of the country? Researchers at Yale University now believe they may have the answer, with their results published this week in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Researchers compared changes in 200 words from 306 different Pama-Nyungan languages, allowing them to build a "tree" of languages. (The computer model they used, co-author Claire Bowern wrote in an article on The Conversation, is "adapted from those used originally to trace virus outbreaks.") The models don't just show how words are related to one another, but how long they might have taken to change. This, in turn, helps to reveal an estimated age of the language family. The models pointed researchers to what is now the tiny, isolated settlement of Burketown, Queensland. It has a population of just over 200 people, and a turbulent history of disease, storm devastation, and the massacre of many Aboriginal residents in 1868.

According to the model, the proto-Pama-Nyungan language likely appeared just under 6,000 years ago. But why did the language family travel thousands of miles south, from Queensland down to Western Australia and Victoria? Bowern cited a theory which posits that around the same time, "increasingly unstable conditions caused groups of people to fragment and spread." The model supports that theory: In short, changes in climate affected food and water sources. When there was plenty, people stayed, and populations increased. But when there was a shortage, they moved, taking their languages with them.

"Because languages change regularly, we can use information in them to work out who groups were talking to in the past, where they lived, who they are related to, and where they’ve moved," Bowern wrote. Though there is little written record of Aboriginal history, there is history hidden in the words of these languages themselves, revealing the stories of their original speakers.

The designer Louise Harpman and the architect Scott Specht are both coffee connoisseurs, but not in the way you might expect. They’re not as much enamored by the beverage as they are by what prevents it from spilling: the coffee cup lid. Together, they own the world's largest collection of disposable coffee lids.

The coffee cup lid is one of those seemingly mundane inventions that are so fully integrated into modern life, they're easy to overlook. But as Harpman details in the introduction to the new book she co-wrote with Specht, Coffee Lids: Peel, Pinch, Pucker, Puncture, there is a fascinating design history behind the objects.

In the mid-20th century, as the popularity of drive-ins and fast food restaurants increased, customers with a hot to-go beverage had a problem: they couldn’t access their drink through the lid. And so, Harpman writes, these coffee lovers became “accidental DIY designers: they created the first drink-through coffee lids by peeling way small sections of the flat polystyrene, thermoformed lids.”

Since then, designers have created a wide array of coffee lid styles to address this one simple problem. For their collection, Harpman and Specht put together a taxonomy of the lids, which is based on how the liquid is accessed by the drinker—peel, pinch, pucker, and puncture. These features, Specht writes in a chapter titled "A Brief Field Guide to the Coffee Lid," can be appreciated in the book and “when observing lids in the wild.”

Atlas Obscura caught up with Harpman and Spect about their new book, the evolution of lid designs, and what the future holds for the coffee cup lid.

Why did you start collecting coffee cup lids?

Louise Harpman: Drink-through plastic coffee lids began to populate the urban landscape in North America in the early 1980s when I was in college. Taking coffee "to go" became a common activity, and that's when I began noticing that different coffee shops used different lids. When I noticed a new lid, I would get one, whether or not I was buying a coffee from that particular shop. The fascination was—and still is—watching how behavior and design were so intimately linked.

Scott Specht: I never initially saw myself a collector—I did love to accumulate random, often ephemeral items that I found to be beautiful (and that were literally found—in dumpsters, old factories, etc.) I did begin to notice, however, that I was accumulating more coffee lids than other items, and began to appreciate the often over-the-top attempts to engineer a solution to the problem of “coffee slosh.” This led to a curiosity about why there is such a profusion of lid types. This also led to many acid-free portfolio boxes full of lids stashed under the bed.

I’ve also always been fascinated with “design bubbles”—brief periods of time in which an object or product undergoes a rapid evolutionary profusion. Toothbrushes followed a similar arc, from simple commodity that was formally the same despite manufacturer, to today’s range of endless variations with different grips, bristle types, degrees of mechanization, etc. As our collection increased, I could see the evidence of a similar phenomenon taking place with coffee lids.

Tell me a little bit about the taxonomy you've used to categorize the lids, and how it originated.

LH: If a group of things aspires to be a collection, there has to be some kind of legible ordering principle...to make sense of them, to group "like with like."

SS: The categories (roughly) follow the chronological development of the lids. The first drink lids were homemade hacks made to simple, flat lids—people would just tear a ragged wedge from the side and hope for the best. This led to the first “peel” lids, in which the tearing process was aided by perforations as well as indentations to lock the resultant tab in place. Then, in the 1980s a profusion of specifically designed “drink lids” attempted to improve the experience. This “golden age” produced some often ungainly solutions such as the “pinch” and “puncture” variants that are now rare. Currently, the “pucker” lid—in which a higher dome, ergonomic lip, oval slot, and inexpensive one-piece design has become the standard.

What do you think is the next evolutionary step for the coffee cup lid?

LH: Lid design has certainly changed with the introduction of so many foamy drinks. The lids with additional "loft space" are meant to accommodate the latte lovers and whipped cream connoisseurs of the world. The other trend focuses on the introduction of new materials. We start to see more compostable plastics (which should be the norm, not the exception), and thermochromic plastic which changes color relative to the heat of the drink.

SS: Of course, the lid of the future will incorporate web connectivity and photovoltaic power sources… We are now seeing the arrival of many lids that are sculpted into decorative forms such as faces, lids that can change color as with the thermochromic lids, and lids that “plus” the drinking experience with enhanced aroma concentration.

What are your hopes in sharing this collection with the world?

LH: I want people to experience the fundamental and deeply satisfying pleasure of looking. Just looking at the things that surround us. Coffee lids are modest modern marvels, but we rarely slow down and take the time to consider, admire, or even wonder about these humble masterpieces.

SS: There is a basic aesthetic pleasure in simply seeing a presentation of similar, but not identical objects. It can also inspire deep curiosity—trying to figure out why the objects differ, and what forces produced those differences. Our collection started with a shared interest in one common, overlooked object. It led into a fascinating subculture of designers trying to solve a problem, often in bizarre and seemingly counterintuitive ways. There is a story in these lids, and I think it is a narrative worth sharing.

Do you have a favorite from the collection?

LH: Just one favorite? Impossible! They all have their own personalities.

SS: My favorites always exhibit some element of overwrought madness. The Philip Lid is a great example. It not only has a complicated design with a system of internal vents and reinforcement channels, but it could only be used with the accompanying patented Philip Cup (styrofoam only!). Needless to say, this evolutionary dead-end didn’t entice too many coffee shop owners to buy.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

In 1936, a manuscript sale changed how scholars and fans thought of Isaac Newton. The English scientist, who was born in 1642 and lived into his 80s, had long been famous for his work in physics and mathematics. But Newton’s interests ranged much wider than that, and the papers sold in 1936 offered a look at his thinking about theology and alchemy, the chemistry-adjacent investigation of matter and its properties.

Among the documents auctioned off in 1936 was a manuscript in Newton’s hand, titled Opus Galli Anonymi (Work of an Anonymous Frenchman). Over eight pages, Newton copied out the instructions, with his own edits and additions, for making the famous, elusive philosopher’s stone.

Last week, that Opus went to auction again, this time at Bonhams. In 1936, it sold for a bit more than £13—more than £800 (or $1,000) in today’s currency. In this most recent sale, the document, which Bonhams described as “the largest and most substantial scientific manuscript by Newton in private hands,” sold for $275,000.

The document details a months-long procedure of distillations and additions, heating and coolings, that end with the creation of “the Secret of Secrets,” the philosopher’s stone, which could transform lead into gold. According to Bonhams, there’s no other known copy of the text Newton was transcribing.

But Newton was not just copying out the instructions. He may have been translating the work from French; along the way, he crossed out words and lines to substitute others and added his own interpretations.

After he published his foundational works on physics, Newton spent years focusing on the study of chemistry. He believed that chemistry would help him understand the same phenomena he'd been studying in his other work, including gravity. In the 17th and 18th century, chemistry and alchemy were part of the same body of knowledge, and researching alchemical works would have been an obvious part of his work.

By the late 19th century, though, alchemy was considered a sham. A collection of Newton’s papers, handed down through his family, had ended up in hands of the 5th Earl of Portsmouth, who donated his scientific papers to Cambridge University. While sorting through them, the university professors distinguished between Newton’s chemistry papers and alchemy papers, and this one went back to the earl, until the 1936 sale.

The anonymous French recipe for the philosopher’s stone was not the only one Newton collected. In 2016, Bonhams sold a version that Newton had obtained from an American chemist, George Starkey. No scientist ever did succeed in turning lead into gold. But this alchemical work is still foundational to science as we know it today.

Mundane Madness is a monthlong quest to anoint the most overlooked everyday objects. Here's where we started.

We asked you to tell us about the most wondrous workaday inventions and you delivered, big time. We received close to 300 submissions celebrating the world's most quietly amazing gadgets, implements, tools and more, and the nominations encapsulated thousands of years of human imagination and tinkering.

From way back in the day, there is paper and glass. More recent wonders include spring-loaded kitchen tongs, detergent sticks, LED lightbulbs, lint rollers, and spell-checker. Nominees came from just about every room in the house—bobby pins in the bathroom, pockets in the closet, ratchet screwdrivers in the basement—and beyond.

A lot of you vouched for zip ties and binder clips—which both made the cut—as endlessly useful multitaskers. "As a mechanic, I’ve seen thousands of complicated apparatuses that manufacturers use to secure wires and hoses," wrote David Mullenax. "They can almost always be eliminated with a simple zip tie in the right place." Likewise, the binder clip "doesn't just hold a stack of paper together," noted Jill Miles. "It also works as a bread clip, it corrals unruly cords, and can serve as a clamp for small woodworking projects. There is one attached to every key ring in my house for holding notes to self, outgoing mail, or whatever I don't want to forget."

Without further delay, here is the top 16 from your submissions:

Even among items that didn't make the Sweet 16, you often made very persuasive cases. One reader, B.J. Price, wrote an ode to the five-gallon bucket. It "usually starts life by safely transporting paint, oil, drywall mud, food products, and much more," Price wrote. "But this is only the beginning. Once washed out, it quickly transforms into a feed bucket, toolbox, or rain gauge. Upside down it is a step ladder or a ready-made stool. I could go on ..." On Twitter, Jeremy Davies made a case for the tiny metal balls inside ball bearings: “Perfectly round, no seam—literally, they are amazeballs.” Other respondents highlighted useful inventions with additional social and health benefits, such as condoms and tampons. And a few readers pointed out that window screens can make summer evenings more pleasant—while also slashing the transmission of insect-borne diseases.

Many of these objects we did choose to include are small and handheld, but a number of readers reminded us to think bigger. City-scale inventions, such as sewage systems and traffic-calming roundabouts, were popular options, too. (In the next round, one of them will face off against either zip ties or string.) Making a final bracket for all of these worthy choices was no easy task. We winnowed the pool to suggestions that cropped up again and again, and then paired up ones that had the most in common—at least for the first round. We recognize that it's an imperfect science, but can't wait to see how it develops.

Cast your first round votes below. The top eight move on to the next round on Tuesday, March 20!

Over the last two centuries, the U.S. Capitol Building, with its underground passages and echoing side chambers, has amassed its fair share of ghost stories. Whether it's the specter of a lost Civil War soldier from the building's brief stint as a wartime hospital, or the ghost of John Quincy Adams shouting his final words in the Speaker's Lobby, the Capitol Building is a ghost hunter’s dream. But few such stories have captured the public’s imagination like that of the Demon Cat.

“It’s probably the most common of all the ghost stories in the capitol. Partly because of the physical evidence,” says Steve Livengood, the chief tour guide of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.

Tales of a spectral feline known as the “Demon Cat” (initials “D.C.,” get it?!) date back to at least the 19th century. Since joining the USCHS in 1973, Livengood has become an expert on the tale.

“The story probably goes back to the post–Civil War era. The main thing is that the people who would see it particularly were the night watchmen,” says Livengood. The most common version of the legend goes that a guard was on patrol one night when he saw a black cat approaching. In those days, cats were not an uncommon sight in the building, introduced to control the rodent population. However as the cat came closer, it grew in size until it was as large as a tiger. The monster cat pounced on the guard, who fell down and tried to protect himself, but the creature vanished in mid-air.

Like most ghost stories, tales of the Demon Cat have a number of variations. Later sightings are said to have scared people to death. The cat's appearances have also been linked to national tragedies and presidential transitions.

What's kept the legend alive all this time? A couple of features in the Capitol Building are said to be evidence of the Demon Cat’s existence. The most famous of these is a group of shallow paw prints in the concrete of the Small Senate Rotunda. In 1898, the Capitol Building was damaged by a gas explosion, and according to Livengood, in some spots the original stone was replaced by concrete. “It’s quite possible that a cat walked across the wet concrete,” he says. “Just enough to leave some impressions. It’s as you come out of the Old Supreme Court Chamber. There may be six or eight pretty clear ones.” In another part of the building, Livengood also notes that the letters “DC” have been scratched into the concrete. “Everyone says, ‘That’s the Demon Cat putting its initials there!’”

As much fun as it is to believe that there's a monster cat prowling the midnight halls of the U.S. Capitol, Livengood isn’t having it. “I can put enough pieces together to know where the legend came from,” he says. “The night watchmen were not professionals. They would often be some senator’s ne’er-do-well brother-in-law that had a drinking problem.”

Livengood’s theory is these early Capitol guards would often get so drunk they’d fall down, so when one of the building's cats came and licked their face, they assumed it must have been monster-sized. But when the guard in question reported their ravings to a superior, the boss couldn't really discipline him for drinking because of his high-powered connections, so the guard would simply have been sent home to recover. “Then the other guards realize that if they see the cat and get attacked, then they get a day off. And that’s how history gets written,” says Livengood.

Livengood says that while he regularly gets asked about the Demon Cat, or sees visitors using their cell phones to illuminate the faint paw prints in the Small Senate Rotunda, he’s never heard of a modern sighting of the creature. “I’ve never had anyone who felt they had an experience like that,” he says.

Still, Livengood sees ghost stories as an important part of the building’s history. “They humanize the building,” he says. “One of the things I try to get across to people as I’m giving a tour is that the spirit of the people who built the building and the people who have acted out history in it are still there. And you can feel it.”

Nestled in the White Mountains of New Hampshire is a forest. It sits in its own little valley, full of wispy birch trees, beeches, and grand sugar maples. The skies are a cobalt blue and cold, clear streams run down into a small, mirror-like lake. It might seem like a great place for a hike.

But if you do go there one day, you might notice a few mysterious things out in those New Hampshire woods—trees dotted with tiny metal tags that jingle like the collars of a pack of dogs; someone off in the distance, shovelling snow from a seemingly nondescript patch of forest floor; a handful of trees coated in ice, as if just hit by the world’s most specific blizzard.

All of these seemingly mysterious goings-on have a purpose. Because this isn’t just a patch of woods. It’s the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest—a 63-year-old, 7,800-acre living laboratory that’s helping scientists understand the world around us.

“We currently have about 60 different collaborators at Hubbard Brook,” says site manager Ian Halm. The collaborators are working on a wide variety of projects, from learning and monitoring how nutrients move through an ecosystem, to tracking animal populations over time, to learning how northern forests might respond to events like drought or climate change.

A forester by training, Halm’s been working here since 1990. His office is full of moose antlers he’s picked up while hiking or snowmobiling through the forest.

“Moose drop their antlers once a year,” says Halm, joking the animals always seem to drop them right in his path. “I have to pick them up, otherwise I’d trip on them.”

When he’s not picking up antlers, you might find Halm clearing away a fallen tree, plowing snow away from the roads, or helping set up and maintain the various data collectors, remote cameras, and wireless equipment the scientists depend upon.

“When I started it was all pretty manual, with strip charts and charts on drums,” says Halm. “Now it's all electronic.” Every hour data is wirelessly uploaded to headquarters. And if something goes wrong, Halm knows almost immediately. Before, if something broke you might not know until you hiked up to check on it. “Now every morning we look at a computer screen.”

Not that that stops him from getting out into the forest. Halm’s favorite place, he says, is a gorge the brook runs through, with a good swimming hole at the bottom.

Though Hubbard Brook is open to the public (it’s technically part of the White Mountain National Forest), for more than 60 years, it’s primarily been a place of learning. In 1955, the U.S. Forest Service set it aside to study hydrology, ecology, and forest management and almost immediately, the site began to reveal surprises.

In 1963, a handful of scientists began to look at rain samples collected in the forest. It was immediately obvious something was wrong. The rain was incredibly acidic. One sample came back with a pH level roughly the same as vinegar. Eventually, the scientists were able to trace the cause back to industrial air pollution, and in 1972, they published their results in a scientific paper—the first official documentation of acid rain in North America. Their work would go on to spark public discussion and influence decision-makers and in 1990 President George H. W. Bush would amend the Clean Air Act to specifically address the dangers of acid rain.

Since then, scientists have continued to monitor water quality, air pollution, and a host of other variables in Hubbard Brook, accumulating decades of continuous data. A data set this old and complete makes Hubbard Brook extremely valuable from a scientific perspective.

“You really need to have places where you can look at long-term trends,” says Halm. A single year or two worth of data might be valuable, but if you want a complete picture of what’s been happening over the decades, you need decades worth of data. “It really helps us gauge what we're doing to the environment.”

About 60 scientists, researchers, and students currently work at Hubbard Brook—including Boston University’s Dr. Pamela Templer.

Templer has her own set of experiments at Hubbard Brook. In one spot of the woods, not too far away from the red wooden headquarters, Templer and her team are using snow shovels and heating cables to study not acid rain, but another important long-term trend that may be affecting our forests: climate change.

“The idea was to create conditions that the forests are likely to experience in the coming century,” says Templer. Studies have predicted the Northeast may warm by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2080, which could result in warmer growing seasons and less winter snow cover. By using the buried cables like underground space heaters to warm the soil and by manually clearing away the snow, Templer is simulating that warmer future world.

In previous experiments at Hubbard Brook, Templer found a potentially surprising nugget of information—less snow might actually make frosts worse. It turns out, the blanket of snow can act like an igloo, protecting the soil (and tree roots) from the freezing air.

“So in a world where you have less snow, you might actually end up with colder winter soils,” says Templer. Her team’s work, combined with monitoring the trees health and productivity, make up an experiment known as CCASE, which stands for Climate Change Across Seasons Experiment.

Many of the experiments, like Templer’s, purposefully manipulate aspects of the forest in order to learn more information, but there are also more observational studies, such as water quality sampling and the monitoring animal populations.

“Forests provide a whole suite of wonderful resources for us, including clean water, clean air, habitat for animals and plants,” says Templer. We need to know how they might change in the future if we want to preserve and manage them. Whether through logging, urbanization, or climate change, humans have been making an impact. Now we need to understand the true extent of it, and the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest is one place to find out.

Asian carp are big fish: big in size, and big in numbers. Originally imported to the American south in the 1970s as cleaners of ponds and wastewater facilities, they escaped into the Mississippi River and now clog waterways across the United States. Easily startled by motors, they have been known to jump into boats, causing broken noses and black eyes for unwary fishermen. Some carp can weigh a hundred pounds.

Fast-multiplying and with few predators, these fish aren’t just dangerous for humans. They have big appetites for plankton, plants, and even snails, the food sources of native species. The Great Lakes are especially imperiled, and millions of dollars have been poured into research and underwater barriers to keep them away. News reports treat carp sightings near Lake Michigan like hurricanes threatening a city.

But for chef Philippe Parola, Asian carp are an opportunity, because, by all accounts, the fish is a delicious invader. After being bled, carp meat is firm and white, and they are ridiculously plentiful: By one estimate, 70% of the biomass in the Illinois River is Asian carp. Plus, Parola suspects that environmentally conscious fish lovers might like to eat for a cause. That's why Parola runs Silverfin Group, Inc., which last month started selling fish cakes made from Asian carp: the first time an invasive species has been mass marketed as food in the United States.

It’s a project several decades in the making. Parola was born in France during its lean, post-war years. "Grocery stores were not all over the place in France," Parola notes. Fishing and hunting wild game was still a way for his community, in the countryside around Paris, to put food on the table. He even remembers eating common carp, a bottom-feeding fish notorious for tasting something like mud.

When he arrived in New Orleans, in 1981, it was the last few years when French food—and chefs—still dominated the American food scene. "Today, American chefs are doing very well on their own," he says, in his booming French-Southern accent. Parola worked as a chef and restaurant consultant in Louisiana for decades, before he became interested in Asian carp in 2009. (During a taping of an episode of Jeff Corwin's Extreme Cuisine, two carp jumped into his boat.) Parola’s passion for Asian carp seems fueled by disdain for wasting this teeming mass of tasty fish. The idea of expensive electric barriers particularly disgusts him. “Fish is food,” Parola insists. His other catchy slogan, which he repeats often, is: “Can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em.”

But there have been some challenges to “eating ‘em.” For one thing, the term “Asian carp” carries bad connotations. Carp’s reputation as an ugly, throwaway fish isn’t exactly endearing. Though Asian carp tastes better than the common type, the association with the mud-tasting fish Parola ate as a child still exists. They are also very bony, and Americans tend to enjoy their fish, not to mention chicken and other meats, completely boneless. (In the carp’s original swimming grounds, across Asia, fish are often served bones and all.)

It’s a problem that other advocates of eating invasive species have run up against time and again: Many have bad qualities that outweigh their tastiness. For example, the beautiful lionfish, native to the Indo-Pacific, are overwhelming the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Lionfish are fierce predators of native fish, which would be enough reason to try and remove them. But they are also covered in venomous spines and can only be caught with a handheld net or a spear, by scuba-gear wearing hunters.

Yet after removing the venomous spines, lionfish meat is safe and tasty. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2010 “Eat Lionfish” campaign aimed at halting the fish’s inroads into coral reefs. Whole Foods joined in by selling lionfish in stores and sponsoring spear-hunting derbies in Florida. Though scientists say the lionfish problem is too big to be truly eradicated, their numbers have shrunk around some Florida reefs. Plus, the efforts of environmentalist chefs are making lionfish sought-after seafood, all the more so because they’re tricky to catch.

But some efforts are less successful. The state of Louisiana has a longstanding vendetta against nutrias, aquatic rodents imported in the 1930s for their fur. Nutrias breed quickly and grow up to 20 pounds in size, and wild nutria have overrun Louisiana’s waterways. Nutria pose a particularly pernicious threat: They’ve been known to dig holes in levees. In 1963, the state of Louisiana released a pamphlet called “Nutria For Home Use,” an early attempt to get ahead of furry devastation. The pamphlet described when, where, and how to hunt nutria (dusk, in a canal, and with a .22 rifle).

By 1998, the recipes in “Nutria for Home Use,” such as Sour Cream Nutria, were outdated. So the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries recruited Parola, then a chef at the Bear Corners restaurant in Jackson, Louisiana, to help re-market nutria to consumers. Parola describes nutria as having a taste like dark turkey meat. His recipes gave nutria the French treatment, with dishes including Culotte de Nutria à la Moutarde.

Unfortunately, Parola says, the nutria industry was nipped in the bud. To be sold across state lines, the FDA requires that mammals be caught alive and killed in slaughterhouses as opposed to being hunted, a much more difficult task. The nutria’s faint similarity to rats didn’t help, either: Few people want to eat what they consider vermin.

But there aren’t such limits on the shipping of fish, and while the name “carp” is unsexy, it lacks the same connotations as “rat.” A name change helps. Parola trademarked “silverfin” in 2012 as an alternative to carp. It’s a first step, but Parola thinks the nutria experience will help him succeed. “Now with Asian carp, I have some guidelines I can use,” he says.

So far, it seems to be going well. The carp Parola uses is caught from waterways in Mississippi, Illinois, and Louisiana, and the latter two states have supported his efforts. Two facilities in Louisiana process the fish; then, it's shipped to Vietnam, where it’s made into crabcake-like patties, sidestepping carp’s bony problem, and shipped back. Including fishermen, Silverfin Group, Inc. currently employs around 100 people, Parola says. They’ve already netted a big customer: SYSCO, America’s largest food distributor. Silverfin cakes will be served at restaurants, and they already debuted at a University of Illinois luncheon.

Though Illinois is currently the focus of Parola’s fish operation, he still lives in Baton Rouge. He often rhapsodizes about Louisiana, his adopted home. “Produce, herbs, fruits, vegetables, seafood, game, you name it, we got it all,” he says. There's something personal, then, to his efforts to protect the state's waterways. After Asian carp, Parola says, he has his eye on the fist-sized apple snail, which invaded Louisiana waterways 10 years ago. “You know, escargot?” he asks.

Experimental Baltimore musician Dan Deacon thrives on audience participation: at live shows, he plays right down on the floor with his listeners. So when the filmmaker Theo Anthony asked Deacon to get even closer to the ground, he didn't really have to think twice. "[Theo] posed the question: Can you make music with rats?" Deacon recalls. "I had never made music with any other species. It was an interesting question. And I didn't want to say no, because it seemed cool."

Anthony was working on what would become Rat Film, a feature-length meditation on the history of racial segregation in Baltimore. In the movie, rats provide a lens through which to see the city, inspiring conversations about everything from zoning to pest control. We watch them leap out of trash cans, scuttle across streets, and (largely) avoid death by poison, pellet gun, and fishing rod. We hear about the things they've chewed through, and see the spaces where they've made their homes.

On the soundtrack, though, rats express themselves in a different way: they play the theremin.

The history of experimental music is filled with animal participants. Throughout the 1950s, the French composer Olivier Messiaen recorded prairie chickens and woodthrushes, transcribed their songs, and incorporated them into his pieces. A couple of years ago, artist Wolfgang Buttress had a band perform alongside 40,000 live bees at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

As Deacon first weighed Anthony's request, he thought back to a bug-based performance he had learned about from one of his college professors, the composer Joel Thome. For this piece, four insects of different sizes were released on an overhead projector. "As the bugs moved from one corner to the next, the players played along," explains Deacon. "The bugs became the score."

This type of collaboration—in which the movements of an animal inspired the movement of a melody—"seemed like a good starting point," he says. But he wondered if he could manage an even closer collaboration. "How can the rats actually make the sound?" he remembers thinking. "What kind of sensors can we put around them?"

That's where the theremins came in. Deacon happened to have three lying around. Theremins are unusual in that you can play them without touching them—instead, two antennae poking out of a central console detect changes in the magnetic fields surrounding them, and transform these changes into a kind of eerie, keening sound. One rod protrudes vertically from the instrument and controls the pitch, while a metal loop on the side governs the volume. Although they're easy to make noise with, theremins are notoriously difficult to master. But the rats didn't have to know that.

When it came time to record, the group set up in a warehouse space inside a local church. Anthony and his father had built a large plexiglass enclosure in the shape of a triangular prism—because, as Deacon explains, "rodents like to move against walls." They installed one theremin along each edge, with the vertical antennae sticking up into the enclosure, and tuned them so that they would harmonize. Then they released the players: a trio of pet rats belonging to Louis Eagle Warrior, a local musician who specializes in the Native American flute.

Eagle Warrior's pets are music lovers: in one scene in the film, they perch happily on his shoulders as he plays a somber melody. But they weren't quite sure how to play this new creative role. "For a lot of it, the rats just sat in the corner," says Deacon. "I think they were like, 'What is this? Why am I here?' But after a while, they would move around. Even their microgestures would create a huge amount of [data], and these really odd swells."

Deacon recorded audio from the theremins. But he also used them to transmit raw information about how voltage was fluctuating within the enclosure—in other words, an exact account of how the rats were moving around. He then took this data and began messing with it. He used it to "play" a number of software instruments, tweaking the melodies to achieve emotional tones that went with the film. "The rats' movements aren't music," Deacon explains. "It's data that could be applied … My job was to edit [this data] in ways that I thought were musical."

Eventually, he plugged it into a Disklavier player piano, which uses electronic data to physically press the keys on an acoustic instrument. This led to the score's first track, "Redlining," named for the racist zoning practices that keep certain neighborhoods from receiving proportionate city support. The song sounds like human music—there are recognizable tones and harmonies. It even sounds like Dan Deacon: it has some of his work's trademark combination of energy and yearning. But the rats' contributions are evident, too. Long periods of stillness alternate with scurrying arpeggios, as though the musicians were being chased up and down a keyboard. It doesn't easily map to a recognizable rhythmic grid.

The score as a whole uses the rat theremin data in several songs, including "Rat Poison" and "Calhoun," where it's played by a synthetic instruments. It also features other elements, including improvisations by local (human) musicians. But, Deacon says, "there are very few tracks that don't have the rats' signature on them."

At this point, the rat theremin has been dissembled, and the rodent performers have gone back to their normal routines. As for Deacon, he is ready to find some new partners. "I would definitely do it again with whatever species wanted to collaborate," he says. "[The rats] were great to work with, but I don't want to become the rat music guy."

But co-creating the score has reminded him of the ways in which humans limit ourselves by counting rats out. "If we're going to assume we're the smarter of the two species, you'd think we'd come up with a way where we could actually coexist with them," he says. Maybe making music together is a start.

Corned beef has been around for centuries, and it will be on the tables of Irish-Americans this St. Patrick’s Day. But in and around Boston, corned beef looks a little different. Instead of its familiar pink-red color, it’s gray-brown. And no one quite knows why New Englanders do corned beef differently.

The color difference is due to one ingredient: nitrates, either in the form of sodium nitrate or saltpeter, added into the salty brine that gives brisket its corned taste and flavor. Nitrates preserve meat and give it a reddish color, two compelling qualities that make red corned beef much more popular than gray. Nitrates, which are potentially carcinogenic, have long been controversial. But in an age before refrigeration, they were a blessing. In the 17th century, even saltpeter-containing gunpowder was rubbed on meat.

Without added nitrates, corned beef is a dull gray. It's uncommon to find, except in certain regions. “[Gray] corned beef is eaten within a fifty-mile radius of Boston, including a few towns in New Hampshire,” writes Joan Nathan, author of An American Folklife Cookbook.

The usefulness of nitrates have made red corned beef the norm for hundreds of years. One of America's most influential early cookbooks, The Virginia Housewife, calls for tablespoons of saltpeter to be rubbed over brisket. But it’s unknown why exactly Boston residents opted not to put saltpeter on their beef. Robert S. Cox, author of books on New England specialties such as chowder, cranberries, and pie, says it's a mystery to him too. "It's gray, like the New England skies in late winter," he says, "but I don't get a sense that corned beef is that poetic."

The gray/pink dichotomy is especially visible this time of year, as people prepare corned beef and cabbage. But according to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink, not only is the beef not naturally pink, corned beef with cabbage isn't really an Irish specialty. On the Emerald Isle, a festive St. Paddy's Day meal would include lamb or bacon. Instead, Irish-American corned beef and cabbage is a mash-up of different food traditions, one of which may hold the answer to the origin of gray corned beef.

Irish immigrants coming to the United States in the 19th century had extensive experience raising, curing, and exporting beef for the English. Beef was much cheaper in the United States, and many communities embraced it as a staple, such as the preserved meats of Jewish delicatessens. Irish immigrants who lived in New England, especially around Boston, were quickly introduced to another tradition: New England’s boiled dinner. Consisting of corned beef and vegetables, boiled for hours, it soon became an Irish-American specialty. In Boston, at least, it’s often made with the mysterious gray corned beef.

If anyone would know the origins of Boston’s gray corned beef, it would be 79-year-old Al Cohen, a butcher and grocer at Bell’s Market in South Boston since the 1960s. His family has run markets in Boston over four generations, making gray corned beef all the while. Cohen, who makes corned beef by the barrel from a family recipe, says he has no idea who started making the specialty. He prefers it, and he doesn't offer the red kind at Bell’s: Customers who ask for it are directed to the supermarket. But there is one thing he’s certain about: The 900 pounds of what he proudly calls “New England gray corned beef," which he’s made in the last week, will all be gone before St. Patrick’s Day.

The Sister Serpents used to wear security guard uniforms when they went out postering. Once or twice a week, they hit the nighttime streets of Chicago with a stack of posters and plastered them all over. This sort of guerrilla street art isn’t exactly legal, so the uniforms provided a measure of safety.

The feminist art collective started in 1989 with an ad placed in the paper, and every week a small group of radical women got together to make new, provocative posters. At first, they were simple enough—created on copy machines, the posters paired simple images with quotes. “The modern individual family is found on the open or concealed slavery of the wife,” one read, quoting Frederick Engels, coauthor of the Communist Manifesto.

But it was the fetus posters that launched the group to notoriety. In 1989, the Supreme Court had held up a Missouri state law that restricted the use of state resources for abortions, and the group’s members were angry about it. They wanted to do something that would make people sit up and take notice. One of them had captured haunting black-and-white photographs of a fetus preserved in a specimen jar, and they started there.

They hung up the photographs and threw out suggestions of what they might tell someone who considered a fetus “more valuable than a woman.” Have a fetus clean your house... Try to get a fetus to work for minimum wage... Cry on a fetal shoulder. The idea that made it to the center of the poster, though, was more direct and potentially offensive.

“'Fuck a fetus,'” said Jeramy Turner, a painter and one of the group’s founders, at a recent talk at the Interference Archive in Brooklyn. “That was what caused all the trouble.”

Suddenly, the mainstream American media began to pay attention to an anonymous group of artists. The right-leaning Heritage Foundation and right-wing radio hosts denounced them. Reporters wanted to interview them. At the same time, this group of a few women grew rapidly into an movement; their sense of outrage had found an eager audience of women.

“We were effective, vibrant, and, we thought, revolutionary,” Turner said. While mainstream 1990s feminism was about advocating for equal pay and equal rights, the Sister Serpents sought “the demise of oppression and patriarchal power.” For about a decade, the Sister Serpents created posters, put on exhibitions, and made many people very, very angry.

The Serpents had some sense that the fetus poster would unnerve people. Originally they had trouble finding anyone willing print it. When they finally found a printer to make 5,000 copies, they mailed copies of the poster to feminist writers and magazines, and put them up on the streets as they had their earlier works. Their other work was cheekier, not quite so dark. Around the same time, they were distributing bright orange stickers that could be plastered on women’s magazines or in public places, with slogans such as, “Tips for Men #1: Don’t Rape.” Soon they heard reports that their stickers were spotted as far away as India and, boosted by their newfound notoriety, they began planning their first major exhibition.

“We were kind of scared,” Turner said. “We didn’t know what to expect.” They had put out a call for “art against the oppressors” and collected pieces that dealt with “rage against sexism and the personal and societal oppression of women.” Rattle Your Rage opened at Filmmakers Gallery in Chicago in March 1990, on International Women’s Day, but before the show began someone smashed the venue window with an iron pipe (left behind at the scene) and the director of the space had a bomb set off at her house. One of the Sister Serpents wore a bulletproof vest to the event.

But the show went off without an incident and traveled to New York later that year. Within a year of its founding, Sister Serpents had women organizing demonstrations, creating reading groups, and doing all manner of other political work under the Sister Serpents banner. The idea was that everyone could work on whatever they wanted to. (The only requirement/gentle request: Help poster.) “This was a terrible plan,” Turner said. The group’s founding members feared their original message was being diluted. They didn’t just want to rage against men. “We wanted to be outrageous in order to be heard.”

For another few years, Sister Serpents continued to stage art exhibitions that pushed the boundaries of societal norms—with a sense of humor. At one show, they created carnival-like cutout boards: a dinosaur for males and a snake for females. They held a “used boyfriend auction,” where they had plenty of offerings and very few takers. They continued to make posters and T-shirts, in addition to more ambitious art on the same themes of oppression and power. One recurrent motif was household scenes turned macabre, such as a nursery strewn with dirty diapers or a kitchen with a man’s head in the oven. Some of their work—American flag penis piñatas, for instance—Turner now finds “embarrassing,” she said at the Interference Archive. But one of the group’s other leaders, Chicago-based artist Mary Ellen Croteau, disagreed. “I don’t find them embarrassing,” she said. “I love the ideas that came out this group.”

Over time, the women sustaining the group turned to other projects and the profile of the once-notorious group faded. The Interference Archive has collected images of some of their work, along with press clippings, but little of it is preserved online, or at all. “So much was not photographed,” Turner said. “No one had cameras, no one had phones with video cameras.”

This art was controversial in the 1990s. Turner and Croteau expect that it would still be controversial today, perhaps even more so. The issues they were trying to address, of oppression and male power, are as raw and relevant as ever. Today, controversial images tend to fly through social media quickly, though. "You don’t see them on walls," Turner said. "That’s different from when people walking the street would be confronted with our fetus poster."

When Alan Gross was 13 years old, a blimp followed him home. It was 1964, and Goodyear was sending a couple of airships up to Queens for the New York World's Fair. One arrived just as Gross was taking the bus from day camp back to his apartment in Flushing, and he watched, fascinated, as it nosed through the air above the street. When he got home, he ran up the stairs just in time to see it pass his living room window, engine roaring.

"I just thought, ''That's the coolest thing ever,'" Gross says. "When the second blimp showed up a few weeks later, that sealed the deal. I always knew that blimps were going to be a part of my life."

Now, 54 years later, Gross still lives in the same apartment. Blimps don't fly by his window anymore—there just aren't that many in the sky these days—but inside, the walls, shelves, cabinets, and closets are filled with tributes to them. Last week, Gross, who also goes by "Airship Al," announced that he was donating much of his collection to the University of Akron, where it will live alongside other materials documenting the history of lighter-than-air flight. This means that over the next few days, he'll watch much of his life's work lift off and drift away.

Gross attributes his collecting prowess to his status as a blimp insider. After spending much of his free teenaged time at Flushing Airport, Gross eventually got a job with Goodyear's ground crew as a "rope grabber": someone who helps the blimps prepare for take-off, and wrestles them down when they land. While he later pursued a career in broadcast journalism, he was able to stay airship-adjacent, developing marketing materials for various blimp operating companies.

As a result, he often had a camera in hand. In the 1980s—when, he says, "blimps were experiencing their renaissance"—he recorded the entire construction of the McDonalds airship, "Big Mac 1," from the envelope's initial layout to the final inflation. The next year, he participated in a six-blimp parade over New York City.

He'd find himself leaning out the window to film a blimp's-eye-view of an event, or up in a helicopter, shooting a blimp on its own turf. "I must have at least two or three thousand hours of airship-related videos," he says. "It got out of hand!"

Along the way, he collected a lot of other stuff, too. He has uniforms and patches. He has model blimps and inflatables. He has a blimp-shaped aftershave bottle, a 1970s collaboration between Avon and Goodyear. He has an Edison phonograph cylinder of a song called "Come Take a Trip in My Airship." He even has oil paintings by Burt Dodge, the artist who hand-painted a number of iconic airships, including Fujifilm's, Sea World's, and MetLife's. (The paintings are portraits of blimps, of course.)

"I've just got boxes and boxes," he says. "You name it, I've got it." A few dozen of these have already made their way to Akron. About 70 more will make the trip next week. (Some of Gross's favorite items, as well as things he has doubles of, will stay in his apartment—otherwise it would be far too empty.) Goodyear, which is headquartered in Akron, has also expressed interest in displaying some of the materials at their blimp bases.

But Gross isn't too sad to say goodbye. As he points out, much of the world's historical blimp materials are currently in the hands of private collectors like him. Although enthusiasts share their memories on internet forums and Facebook groups, more official repositories are few and far between.

"A lot of companies have folded," he says. Many former landing sites have also been shut down, or even destroyed—the Flushing Airport, for example, was bulldozed in 2008. "They had some beautiful pre-WWII hangars there," says Gross. "And then one day it was all gone."

He sees his donation as a way of preventing further disappearances. "This is what I always wanted," he says. "I saved a lot of airship history, and now I can share it. It's not going to just be sitting in boxes." Instead it will be flying free.

Stephen Hawking, who died last night at the age of 76, was a giant of theoretical physics, cosmology, and pop culture. Though affected by a degenerative disease that had doctors predicting an early death, Hawking instead lived to research the creation of the universe and its possible end, in the form of black holes. Also a popular writer, he published bestsellers including A Brief History of Time. Those who met him testified to his charisma and sense of humor.

So it was a little unusual that when he threw a party in 2009, not a single guest attended.

A film of the event depicts a dismal cocktail party. Three trays of canapes sit uneaten, and flutes filled with Krug champagne go untouched. Balloons decorate the walls, and a giant banner displays the words “Welcome, Time Travellers.”

Wait, what?

As it happened, Hawking’s party was actually an experiment on the possibility of time travel. (Invitations were sent only after the party was over.) Along with many physicists, Hawking had mused about whether going forward and back in time was possible. And what time traveler could resist sipping champagne with Stephen Hawking himself?

By publishing the party invitation in his mini-series Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking, Hawking hoped to lure futuristic time travelers. You are cordially invited to a reception for Time Travellers, the invitation read, along with the the date, time, and coordinates for the event. The theory, Hawking explained, was that only someone from the future would be able to attend.

Unfortunately, no one showed up.

“What a shame,” Hawking said. “I was hoping a future Ms. Universe was going to step through the door.” But Hawking himself later discussed the dangers of time travel. In an Ars Technica interview in 2012, he said that Einstein’s theory of relativity laid the groundwork for the possibility of time travel. But warping space and time could “trigger a bolt of radiation that would destroy the spaceship and maybe the space-time itself.” That might be enough to keep potential partiers away.

And that’s too bad, because Hawking, even as a full-time wheelchair user, loved parties and dancing. As for why he threw a time-traveler party, he explained: “I like simple experiments ... and champagne." By transmitting the invitation, Hawking thought it might catch the eye of a future time traveler—the brain-breaking paradox being that, if it eventually does, then wouldn’t we have seen one or two at the party?

“I’m hoping copies of [the invitation], in one form or another, will survive for many thousands of years,” Hawking said. In which case, the party is on June 28, 2009, and the coordinates are 52° 12’ 21” N, 0° 7’ 4.7" E. If you’re a time traveler and reading this, please don’t keep Mr. Hawking waiting.

Brightly colored Hawaiian bobtail squid live in the shallow coastal waters around Hawaii. Maxing out at about the size of a small lime, these spotted invertebrates are notable not just for being wholly adorable, but for the curious relationship they have with the bioluminescent bacterium Vibrio fischeri. V. fischeri live in the squid's light organ, and let off a furious glow. In the dark, the nocturnal squid use their light organs to help them camouflage—pretending to be moonlight.

At the University of Connecticut, scientists are studying how the squids' immune cells recognize these good bacteria from the thousands of species of other microbes floating around in the seawater. It's intricate work—lots of squinting through microscopes—and often requires using samples of blood, drawn from the squid who live in the lab. And for that, scientist Sarah McAnulty explains, the squids must be anesthetized for a minute or two. “It’s way less stressful for the animal to be knocked out," she says.

A number of people have asked me to show a full video of the squid resuscitation process after anesthetizing them in ethanol- here it is! It’s 2x speed here #SquidPRpic.twitter.com/e3yx1l2QXc

— Sarah McAnulty (@SarahMackAttack) March 14, 2018

To put a squid to sleep, you simply pop them in a seawater solution of three percent ethanol. Once you've taken their blood, they need to be woken up again. Under anesthetic, blood doesn't pump quite as well around their systems, so to get them going, first McAnulty will use a pipette to blow fresh seawater over their gills. This kickstarts their normal breathing, and begins to get their blood pumping once again, she says. "It’s sort of like the squid version of CPR—but they're so squishy I don’t want to hurt them by compressing their hearts.”

SJM530a, who appears in this video, is a very old squid. At five months old, this male squid, who was raised in a laboratory, is practically geriatric—so waking him up after he's been anesthetized takes a little bit longer. She'll give them a moment or two to breathe at their normal rate, then start tapping them with a pipette. "They wake up faster when you tap them," she says. Normally, it's two taps and presto! They're up. But SJM530a's old age means that he requires a bit more prodding.

In the lab, these squid seldom live longer than about five months; in the wild, they might make it to nine or 10 months. Because there are so many squid in the lab, they rarely get more romantic names than arcane strings of numbers and letters—unless, of course, they do something to endear themselves to the scientists. "If they do something really silly," McAnulty says, "we might give them a nickname.” While SJM530a may not have gotten a nickname in the lab, we in the newsroom think he looks a lot like a "Flappy."

Among the most hilarious words in the English language is “dagnabbit.” It’s full of very funny hard syllables and, for most Americans, it’s most often heard coming out of the cartoon mouth of Yosemite Sam, who has a funny voice and a big hat (big hats are also funny).

But the way the word evolved is not really funny. It is dark and ominous and paved with fear. “Dagnabbit,” along with the English words “bear” and “wolf,” are creations of a terrified populace, scared of beings visible and not.

These words are called, among linguists, taboo deformations. They are words we created because, in a very fantasy-novel sort of way, we are scared of the True Names of our enemies and overlords. Dagnabbit is an example of the perceived power of words to hurt us.

It’s easy to assume that language is, for all its variations and complexities, a shortcut, a way to convey meaning through sounds that represent concepts. But language itself has power. The word for a certain concept isn’t just a symbol; it is tied in some fundamental way to the concept itself. This pops up in humanity’s oldest stories: the idea is that each thing—person, god, object—has a true name, and that knowledge of that true name conveys power. There are stories about the true name of the Egyptian sun god Ra, of the Jewish monotheistic god, and later of various angels and demons and wizards in stories ranging from the Bible to, uh, the Earthsea fantasy novels written by Ursula K. Le Guin.

In stories like those above, one’s true name is a carefully guarded secret, and if someone finds out your true name, you’re sort of screwed; that person will have all sorts of power over you. But delightfully, this concept translates to everyday, non-fantasy-novel life as well. Except we don’t always know it.

The real-life version of this very fun idea is a bit different, partly because humans aren’t heroes on the scale of Odysseus or the Jewish god or Duny from A Wizard of Earthsea. Instead we are weak, fragile idiots who can’t really take advantage of the power of true names; instead, we’re terrified of them, and at risk of gruesome death if we use them.

“Taboo deformation is one possible way for a word to change its meaning,” says Andrew Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky who specializes in Indo-European languages. Basically, we are scared of the true names of certain beings or concepts, because to use them might mean we summon them, which we don’t want, or anger them, which we definitely don’t want, or simply make other humans mad at us, which is slightly less bad but still not ideal. The true name is powerful, and we normal humans can’t handle that power. So we avoid using the true name, but sometimes we still need to communicate with each other about those beings or concepts. That means we have to figure out a way to talk about something without using the actual word for it.

A great example of this is the word “bear,” in English. “Bear” is not the true name of the bear. That name, which I am free to use because the only bear near where I live is the decidedly unthreatening American black bear, is h₂ŕ̥tḱos. Or at least it was in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothesized base language for languages including English, French, Hindi, and Russian. The bear, along with the wolf, was the scariest and most dangerous animal in the northern areas where Proto-Indo-European was spoken. “Because bears were so bad, you didn’t want to talk about them directly, so you referred to them in an oblique way,” says Byrd.

H₂ŕ̥tḱos, which is pronounced with a lot of guttural noises, became the basis for a bunch of other words. “Arctic,” for example, which probably means something like “land of the bear.” Same with Arthur, a name probably constructed to snag some of the bear’s power. But in Germanic languages, the bear is called...bear. Or something similar. (In German, it’s bär.) The predominant theory is that this name came from a simple description, meaning “the brown one.”

In Slavic languages, the descriptions got even better: the Russian word for bear is medved, which means “honey eater.” These names weren’t done to be cute; they were created out of fear.

It’s worth noting that not everyone was that scared of bears. Some languages allowed the true name of the bear to evolve in a normal fashion with minor changes; the Greek name was arktos, the Latin ursos. Still the true name. Today in French, it’s ours, and in Spanish it’s oso. The bear simply wasn’t that big of a threat in the warmer climes of Romance language speakers, so they didn’t bother being scared of its true name.

Another example is the way Jews refuse to use the true name of God, which is made up of four Hebrew letters which roughly correspond to the Latin letters Y, H, V, and H. (Maybe. In Hebrew, the symbols that roughly correspond to Y and V can also be used as vowels.) Anyway, Jews traditionally do not speak this word, and when it’s written, there are specific rules about how to treat the paper it’s written on. Sometimes this has even been applied to translations; I was told in Hebrew school to write the word “God,” which is of Germanic origin and does not appear in any of the important Jewish holy books, as “G-d.” This was useful because nobody wanted to ritually bury our Mead Composition notebooks.

But YHVH appears throughout holy books, and so to talk about God, Jews have come up with dozens of options. Hashem means, literally, “the name.” Adonai means “lord,” Elohim means...well, nobody’s quite sure about that one. Maybe “the power,” or “the divine,” something like that. With some taboo deformations, like “bear,” we’ve basically replaced the true name with something else; not many people know that it’s even a replacement. The Jewish name of God is written down, and so remains known, but in other cases, the deformation can take over.

There are all kinds of things that we as humans are too scared of to use its real name. God, sure, always smiting people, very scary. Bears, same thing, although “smiting” may not be correct word for a bear attack. Some words, like ethnic slurs, are so repugnant that they can’t be used at all, or are restricted to in-group use.

There’s also something called “mother-in-law languages,” which aren’t exactly languages. In some languages—east-central Ethiopian languages like Kambaata, Australian Aboriginal languages like Dyirbal—there’s a taboo stopping newlyweds from communicating directly with in-laws. That comes out in various ways; you might have to address requests to an inanimate object or animal (“dog, I sure would like it if the salt was passed to me”) or might have to avoid using even the basic sounds in your in-law’s name.

Anyway, that’s one way a taboo deformation takes hold: just ignoring the true name and coming up with a description to refer indirectly to it. But that’s not what happened with dagnabbit.

A fundamental issue with changing a true name is that you can’t completely change it. You can describe it, as with “bear,” but if you decided that instead of h₂ŕ̥tḱos you’d just call the bear, I don’t know, bing-bong, nobody would know what you meant, and the whole exercise would be pointless. So one very sneaky way to avoid using a true name is to just tweak it a bit.

There are rules for how you can tweak a name. If you change it too much, nobody will know what you mean; if you don’t change it enough, people might assume you’re using the true name, which is what you’re trying to avoid in the first place.

So to find the right balance, you can only change certain sounds for certain other sounds, in a strategy called dissimilation. Individual sounds that make up words are called phonemes, and they come in groups. There are the nasal phonemes, which are sounds that are made by releasing air through your nose, like “m” and “n.” The consonants “k” and “g,” and “b” and “p,” are pairs: they’re produced very, very similarly in the mouth. Vowels like “oh” and “oo” are similar, too; just minor adjustments to the position of your tongue. Try making those sounds right now. Almost identical, right?

But if you just swap out one sound for a very similar other sound, that might be a little too close. In the case of a word like “fuck,” which we fear because it refers to sex and also because social pressure indicates it is a word we should not say very often, just changing the vowel sound from, say, “uh” to “ah,” which are similar sounds, might not really have the result we want. If you yell “fahk!” someone might just think you’re cursing but with an accent. So we alter the first “f” consonant very slightly, from “f” to “fr,” keep the final “k,” and change the vowel more significantly. That’s how we get “freak” and “frick,” which are similar enough to the original word that everyone knows what you mean, but different enough that nobody thinks you’re cursing. Another way would be to come up with words that sound really similar, but are words in their own right: that’s how Christians who want to avoid saying “Jesus Christ” end up with “cheese and rice.”

The strategies get more in-depth than that, and we have to venture further to decode “dagnabbit,” which is, of course, a taboo deformation of the word “goddammit.” To do that, let’s break down “goddammit” into two parts: “god” and “dammit.”

One strategy is called metathesis, which is pronounced with an emphasis on the second syllable, like “meh-TAGH-thuh-sis.” (“Agh” is the way I’m typing the vowel sound in “cat.”) Metathesis is a switch of sounds within a word. Pretty simple: instead of “god,” you’d say “dog.” Use some dissimilation for the vowel—change “ah” to “agh”—and you end up with “dag.” Excellent! Halfway done!

“Nabbit” as a switch for “dammit” is more fun, because we get to use both dissimilation and metathesis. “M” and “n,” remember, are paired together, very similar sounds. So swap out one for another. “D” and “b” are also pairs: they’re called stops, which means that you halt the movement of air from your mouth. (That’s as opposed to a sound like “s,” which could theoretically go on for as long as you have air in your lungs. But you can’t make the “d” or “b” sounds without stopping air from flowing.)

So using dissimilation, we get to “bannit.” Pretty good, but not great. What if we use metathesis to swap the position of our new consonants within that word? Ah ha! Nabbit. Put them together and we’ve figured out dagnabbit. This also gives us a key to making our own taboo deformations, if we want. For example! I am sick of winter. Winter should be a bad word. Please always refer to winter as “millder.” With any luck, by avoiding the Dark Season’s True Name, we can avoid summoning it back next year.

Since the Middle Ages, France’s “compagnons” have lived idiosyncratic existences, steeped in mystery, ritual, and a devotion to their trades. Even today, these master craftsmen have certain quirks: As young people, they live in boarding houses together in towns across France, where they spend their days learning and training to become the country’s greatest tradespeople. After six months in one place, each tradesman will pack up and move on to another French town, and a new hostel, to learn more skills under a new master.

The name “compagnon” translates to “companion,” relating to the brotherhood between members and the shared identity of a movement that, today, encompasses around 12,000 permanent, active members. Professions usually fall into one of five “groups,” depending on their principal material: stone; wood; metal; leather and textiles; and food. Within these groups are bakers, clog-makers, carpenters, masons, glaziers, and many more. In the past century, new trades have been added and old ones have fallen away. But whatever the craft, the journey from apprentice to “compagnon” is long and highly specific, and culminates in the completion of a “masterwork”: an item that showcases the skills acquired over at least five years of sustained study.

Historically, woodworkers have often chosen to produce a tiny, intricate staircase as their “masterwork.” Over 30 years, the art dealer and collector Eugene V. Thaw, who died at 90 in January 2018, amassed an incredible collection of these staircase models, dating from between the 18th and 20th centuries. Measuring only a few inches in height, they are self-supporting, graceful, and impossibly delicate. Since 2007, they have been part of the permanent collection of New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and are currently on display alongside craftsmen’s working drawings.

To make these models, craftsmen draw on a variety of different kinds of wood, including pear, ebony, walnut, and mahogany, with extra twiddly bits, like banisters and infinitesimal hand-railings, made of anything from brass to bone. Every minute piece of wood—and there are hundreds in each model—has been painstakingly hand-cut, carved, planed, joined, and inlaid to produce a staggeringly detailed staircase, in miniature. These were sometimes produced for competitions, writes Sarah D. Coffin, author of Made to Scale: Staircase Masterpieces, The Eugene & Clare Thaw Gift, where apprentices vied to be named the master carpenter of a city. “Other times, they might be group works for parade.” In these instances, slightly larger models would be carried through the city by their makers for all to admire.

After going from apprentice to “compagnon,” craftsmen undergo an initiation rite, which, according to UNESCO documents, remains “shrouded in secrecy to preserve its magic and effectiveness.” Depending on the trade, this ritual may include additional elements, like a two-day “symbolic journey.” A constant, however, is the adoption of a symbolic name that indicates where they have come from and something about their character: Prudence of Draguignan, Flower of Bagnolet, Liberty of Chateauneuf. The organization’s other particularities beyond the “secret” nickname include the wearing of a colored sash and carrying of a tall, ornamental wooden cane, given to them after initiation. For the rest of their lives, compagnons are part of a close knit brotherhood, with its own patron saint, feasts, and even funerary traditions. But in the past, these secretive ways caused outsiders—or “lay people,” as the compagnons call them—to regard them with suspicion and sometimes misgivings, Coffin writes.

Perhaps to dispel these ill-feelings, in 1839, compagnon Agricole Perdiguier wrote The Book of Compagnonnage. This multi-volume series revealed some of the movement’s customs, secrets, and obligations. “I do not pretend to map out its history here,” he wrote, in French, “but I will give a few details which should give enough of an understanding of it. … It should be remembered that I am writing here for the public, and most of all, for Compagnons, who largely possess very few books.” In recording many of their customs, Coffin writes, Perdiguier inspired a novel by George Sand, which “drew attention to some of the great works being produced by compagnonnage members and resulted in a revival of interest in their work.”

Today, the compagnons continue much as they have for centuries—though these days, the specialist knowledge once put to work on France’s medieval cathedrals has led them to travel all over the world. In 1990, in the wake of Hurricane Hugo, they were flown in to Charleston, South Carolina, to help repair antique furniture and the damaged roofs of stately homes. Nine years later, a team of compagnon metalworkers were brought over from Reims to help to refurbish the Statue of Liberty’s flame. In France, they’ve recently received an uptick in public attention due to French president Emmanuel Macron’s interest in them and their work.

Now comprised of thousands of young French people, there are some small signs of change in this little-understood group of craftspeople. Once made up exclusively of men, since 2005, the compagnons have accepted women, and are now an international organization, with the option to train overseas at sister organizations in countries including Germany and Poland. In the past century, craftspeople from newer trades, like bakers and electricians, have joined traditional woodworkers and masons. What has not changed, however, is the spirit of commitment to their work. In the 19th century, graduating compagnons’ diplomas read: “Glory be to Work and Scorn upon Idleness—Work and Honour, this is our wealth.” Two hundred years on, the same sentiment applies.

On the main exhibition floor of the 58th Annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, sprawled across the 60,000-square-foot drill hall of New York City’s Park Avenue Armory last weekend, a buzzing grid of vendors peddled books and ephemera. The oldest item was an illuminated scroll dating to the 13th century, and the priciest—a first edition of Copernicus’s study of the heavens—held an astonishing $2 million price tag. All of the thousands of items for sale were guaranteed by the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, meaning that buyers could return their purchases for a full refund within 30 days if they spot unexpected defects or feel like they were misled.

In the hallway outside the entrance to the fair, there was a table full of appraisers, there to help put a value on any book brought to them. Dozens of bibliophiles queued up over the course of a two-hour appraisal blitz, bearing books and magazines with uncertain pasts and unknown values. These weren’t necessarily big-ticket antiquarians—rather, many were folks who hoped that they had chanced into a lucky find in grandma’s attic or a yard sale.

Sunday Steinkirchner, one of the experts on appraisal duty, knows how easy it is for people to get their hopes up. She has been selling rare books and manuscripts since 2003, and incorporated her business, B & B Rare Books, in 2005. People often call her for appraisals, either because they’re preparing to sell something or planning to insure it. She’s no stranger to working carefully but quickly, and either making someone’s afternoon or dampening their dreams of a quick payday.

Alex Artaud was in line, holding items he hoped to have appraised. Some people lumped their books into totes and others packed them into rolling suitcases, but Artaud had his tucked inside a plastic sleeve. In particular he wanted to get a pair of trained eyes on his copy of a Weimar-era journal called Die Schönheit,a publication (the name translates to "The Beauty") celebrating “free expression, and that includes not wearing any clothing, I guess,” he said. “But I wouldn’t call it a nudist journal.”

The 1926 issue is a tribute to Rudolf Laban, an important figure in the history of dance, and features exuberant spreads of his outdoor pageants, with dancers crouching or leaping across meadows like stags. Artaud nabbed it for a dollar at a flea market in Berkeley, California. “It was just there on the pavement, it wasn’t even protected—it wasn’t in a sleeve or anything,” he said. “I just think it was something in the house and they took it out because nobody knew what to do with it, and they figured, ‘Well, it looks old and interesting.’”

Artaud, who works as a theatrical technician, knew that Laban had worked on a robust system of dance notation, an important codification of a language often communicated through show-and-tell. He had a hunch that the periodical might be worth something when he couldn’t find any other copies online. “This one is somewhat distressed,” he said, gesturing to its distressed cover and binding, flaking like the layers of a croissant.

When his turn arrived, Artaud splayed the magazine out in front of Steinkirchner. “Right off the bat, I deal in mostly modern, first-edition English and American, so this is not my speciality,” she said. She nodded toward a colleague, who was busy with another appraisal. “I might ask Adam to help with this one, especially if it’s in German.”

The line was sizable, the time pressure pronounced, but Steinkirchner said later that it’s pretty standard to make swift work of an appraisal. “We’ve had years and years, some of us decades, of practice,” she said. “You can usually tell right away what type of book is valuable, and what is just an old, used book.” She estimated that it takes about 30 seconds to take stock of the cover, condition, publisher, date, binding, and signature, and then hazard an educated guess about the value. (Magazines, in general, tend to be worth much less than books, with a lot depending on condition.)

A book is more likely to be valuable if it retains its original binding and dust jacket—that flimsy cover can contribute as much as 90 percent of a book’s worth, Steinkirchner explained. “People sometimes say, ‘Oh, why do you get so excited about a little piece of paper,’” she said, but “collectors want to compile objects the way the publisher issued them.” At the event, she was especially excited about a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 novel, Look Homeward, Angel, with its original dust jacket. Given its condition, with minor chips and creases, but no repairs, she appraised the volume at $2,500.

Casual collectors don’t always know exactly what to look for, she pointed out. They might dismiss inscriptions that are made out to someone specific, for example, because they’re under the impression that a note—“To Jim, thanks for reading”—detracts from the value. Quite the opposite. Inscriptions are often preferable to a pristine leaf, especially if they’re made out to somebody significant, because that makes provenance easier to track. But even an anonymous recipient is better than none at all, because the additional lettering gives appraisers evidence for establishing authenticity and sniffing out forgeries. Signature, letters, and the way the ink is pressed—all factor into to the process. “The more the author wrote, the better,” Steinkirchner said.

As Artaud launched into his practiced description of his magazine, there was a lot of nodding. “Okay, great, mmmhmm, absolutely,” Steinkirchner said. “I tried finding another copy of this, and wasn’t able to,” he explained. “I found a reference to it in a library, but that was about it.”

As he spoke, Steinkirchner quickly searched databases on her phone. “There’s two places we can look, generally, to find value,” she said. “One is the current market—what’s available now—and then we also check the auction record of what books have historically sold for.” (Rarebookhub.com is accessible via subscription, and Abebooks.com is open to the public.) Being old, or even rare, isn’t enough to make something worth a lot or money, she added. Nothing has value without a market. In general, magazines were designed to be ephemeral and in wide circulation, and that puts a cap on their value, Steinkirchner warned. “The only reason I’m checking is because it could be something I just know nothing about, and all of a sudden, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s the one that is.’”

At events like this one, hope and reality don’t always find common ground. Rapid-fire appraisal events are needle-in-a-haystack scenarios, Steinkirchner said. “One out of every 10 or 15 things has any value whatsoever, and maybe throughout the entire day we’ll see a couple things that have value in the four or five figures,” she said. That means that appraisers are most often in the business of bearing bad news.

Steinkirchner appraised Artaud’s find at a little less than $150, because it hasn’t weathered the years as well as some other copies in Germany, which are finely bound or in perfect condition.

He didn’t seem disappointed. He hadn’t been hoping for anything specific—he just liked the magazine, and paid almost nothing for it. As an antidote to the things he scrolls by on his phone and the beautiful stage sets he strikes, physical objects with at least a little sense of permanence feel nourishing, he says. “When there’s something right there that has beauty,” he stretched out the words, “like handmade beauty, just one-of-a-kind things that have the care and love, that restores your faith in things.”

Even when the hopefuls handle a letdown gracefully, appraisers don't take any pleasure conveying the news. “Most of the time, we’re saying, ‘I’m so sorry, this doesn’t really have any value—it might look old, it might look important, but, you know, really it’s this,” Steinkirchner said. She thinks accurate information is the best someone can ask for, even when it's anticlimactic.

And then there are those rare occasions when something turns out to be as special as the owner hopes, or even rarer and more valuable. Rapid-fire appraisals are a good way to remind people that, while it's not a good way to get rich, sifting through stuff can be rewarding for any number of reasons. “People sometimes bring stuff in and say, ‘I got rid of a house full of books, and this is what I have left,’” Steinkirchner said. “And I’m like, 'Why did you get rid of them if you didn’t know what they were worth?'”