As an aerial photographer, Tom Hegen is used to seeing the world from a different perspective. But even he was astonished at how salt ponds look from above. “When I started on doing research for this project, I had a certain look of the result in mind,” Hegen says, via email. “I was then really amazed by the vibrant hues, textures and abstract shapes I observed. The size and landscape of those salt gardens is just overwhelming.”

Hegen captured his unique take on a centuries-old process using a DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone camera. “The Salt Series explores artificial landscapes where nature is channelled, regulated, and controlled,” explains Hegen. “Salt is a raw material that is now part of our everyday lives, but we rarely ask where it actually comes from and how it is being produced."

Hegen’s series was shot around the Mediterranean, which is the ideal climate for salt production. Artificial pools, separated by sand or stone walls, are flooded with seawater. Slowly, the water evaporates, leaving behind brine, which is water with a very high salt concentration. “Each salt pond has a unique salt density,” explains Hegen. "Microorganisms change their hues as the salinity of the ponds increase."

These microorganisms, which fall under a class of organisms known as halophiles ("salt lovers"), dictate the colors and include different types of algae. Algae-loving brine shrimp also contribute to the process. "As the water becomes too salty, the shrimps disappear, causing the algae to proliferate and the color of the ponds to intensify. The colors can vary from lighter shades of green to vibrant red." At the end, “workers harvest the salt by delicately lifting it up from the floor,” says Hegen, noting that it is often done by hand.

From the ground, it’s difficult to assess the extent of a salt pond's colors and shapes. They often stretch across a wide expanse of area—one salt pond facility on France's west coast is nearly 5,000 acres. But as Hegen rightly guessed, from the air they are startlingly dynamic. He has a knack for reinterpreting landscapes: his aerial portfolio includes forests that, from above, look like polka dots and farms that appear like a patchwork of lines and squares.

In all of his aerial projects, Hegen highlights more than just unique angles or unseen patterns. He also uses aerial photography to investigate landscapes that have been changed by human activity. Several of Hegen’s projects relate to mining. One of the most startling is his Toxic Water Series, which shows pools of bright orange water against earth blackened by coal mining.

“I focus on landscapes that have been heavily transformed by human intervention and document the marks that we have left on the earth’s surface in order to meet our daily needs,” he says. “Aerial photography is a compelling way to document those interventions because it basically makes the dimensions of human force on earth visible.”

As part of his ongoing investigation into how humans have altered the natural world, some of Hegen’s work will soon be part of a book called Habitat. “I am fascinated by the abstraction that comes with the change of perspective; seeing something familiar from a new vantage point that you are not used to.” Atlas Obscura has a selection from Hegen’s Salt Series; you can find more of his work on Instagram.

These days, Craignethan Castle consists mostly of picturesque ruins. Located around 20 miles south of Glasgow, Scotland, it was built in the 16th century by the Scottish nobleman James Hamilton of Finneart, apparently to showcase his many architectural and military talents. In its current form, it remains an impressive structure, but one you probably wouldn't choose to live in.

But a very angry badger begs to differ. One such individual came shambling into the castle’s cellar tunnel last week, and decided he was going to make it his home. The castle is surrounded by woodland, a spokesperson at Historic Environment Scotland told the BBC, and staff believe that the badger may have accidentally lost his way. Whatever the case, he quickly began to "redecorate" the place with artfully chosen rubble by digging through loose soil into the stonework.

According to the HES spokesperson, staff at the castle spotted the loose earth on Wednesday of last week and attempted to lure the badger out with cat food and honey. Precisely what happened next is unclear, but the cellar tunnel was shut to the public, the badger described by staff as "very angry," and the matter left unresolved.

At some point late on Friday or early Saturday morning, however, the badger apparently decided that life in a castle tunnel wasn't for him, and headed out into the night. But his renovations have left a lasting impact: The tunnel remains closed, at least until the completion of repairs to the stonework.

Girdle books had to be small, and they had to be light. From the bottom edges of their bindings extended an length of leather, usually gathered into a knot at the end. This extension of the cover could be used to carry the book like a purse or could be tucked into a girdle or belt. To read, the owner wouldn’t even have to detach the book; when taken up, the book would be oriented correctly, just as if it had been pulled from a shelf.

Used from the 14th to 17th centuries, these books were texts that their owners needed to keep close at hand: prayer books used by monks and nuns, for example, or law books used by traveling judges. Though they were valuable objects—luxuries, even—these books were meant to be consulted and read.

“These are books that needed to be specially protected because of a lot of use, a lot of wear. Most of them were probably used daily,” says Margit J. Smith, author of The Medieval Girdle Book. “How many books do you have in your collection that you use every day?”

Girdle books were once common enough that they appear more than 800 times in paintings and other art of the period. But today there are just 26 girdle books known in the world. In her book, a catalogue of what she calls “relics of an age long gone by,” Smith has measured, photographed, and investigated the history of each one.

Smith, a bookbinder and retired librarian who was the head of cataloguing and preservation at the University of San Diego’s Copley Library, first became interested in girdle books 15 years ago, and she took a class in Montefiascone, Italy, to learn how to make one. In her preparations, she found that there was little scholarly work—little information at all, really—on these once relatively common objects.

The class took place in summer, and usually, after their work was over, the group would go for a dip in the nearby lake. On one of these excursions, Smith was asking an instructor, Jim Bloxam, where to find more research about the books; together, they decided to start collecting images of all known medieval girdle books—just 24 at that time. After some years of work, Bloxam, a conservator at Cambridge University, had to drop out of the project, but Smith, who says she’s interested in “odd things”—she likes to read words backwards and has written about the silverfish that threaten book bindings—continued visiting the world’s few remaining girdle books.

When libraries placed these objects, hundreds of years old, in front of her, she felt a sense of awe. “Then you start looking into it, and you see all the debris from 500 years ago. There is dust and hair and fingernail pairings and spots of wax from candles and erasures,” she says. “Some of the books are so fragile that you have to be very careful, especially when turning pages. But if you start measuring, once you get into that, you remember what you are there to do, and you’ve overcome the initial awe.” The books, while still treasures, became objects to be scrutinized.

The part of the book cover that distinguishes a girdle book often looks like a Wee Willie Winkie hat, flopped on top of the book, or a Gandalf-esque beard, stretching down into a neat triangle. Smith discovered that some girdle books have just one extended leather cover, while other have two nested covers, with the outer one designed for carrying. But it wasn't always easy to tell which category a girdle book fit into. One of the first things Smith learned as a bookbinder was how to tear a book down, to see how it worked. In modern books, it’s possible to tease back an endpaper and inspect a book’s secrets. In the case of the old, rare books, that wasn’t possible, so Smith had to run her fingers along the binding to feel for ridges and other hints to the book’s inner workings.

“You close your eyes,” she says. “As a bookbinder, I have learned to trust my fingers more than my eyes.”

In the course of her research, Smith discovered the existence of two additional girdle books. One is in Scotland, the psalter of Neal McBeath, the smallest of all the known girdle books. Just 2.5 inches by 1 7/8 inch, the book fit easily into the palm of her hand. It didn’t have a spine, just the leather wrapping, and it showed little sign of repair. In Vienna, she found another new girdle book, but this one refused to give up its secrets. Years of repair work on it had concealed most clues about its construction. The girdle cover, for instance, may have been a later addition. “There are unusual bumps and protrusions under there,” she says. “It’s sort of mystery. I’d like to be able to take it apart completely and see what went on before, before the binding was put on.”

Some of the books had surprises inside, as well. One belonged to a nun, Katharina Röder von Rodeck, who lived at the Frauenalb Convent near Karlsruhe, Germany. She filled the pages with her personal prayers and devotions, as well as notes about her life—when she took her vows, when German peasants rebelled in 1525. At the beginning of the book, she decorated five pages with the coats of arms of her parents’ families, a gray owl holding a red heart, a skeleton holding an hourglass, and motifs of flowers and vines that continued throughout the book. It gives, writes Smith, “a very cheerful and friendly impression.”

For at least 7,000 years, and very possibly longer, humans have been drilling holes in one another's skulls. Trepanning, as it's technically known, today appears mostly in treatment for intracranial diseases or to release pressured blood buildup from an injury. In its earlier forms, it was variously used to ease head injuries and mental disorders, or to release any backed-up evil spirits that might have collected there. (It's also occasionally been employed as a way to induce a constant, if mild, high.)

But around 5,000 years ago, in what is now France, humans drilled into a skull that belonged not to another person, but to a cow. Why they did it isn't clear—whether it was an attempt to save a sick animal, or an opportunity for a surgeon to hone their skills on domestic animals before moving on to human patients. These questions, and others, are considered in a new study published today in Scientific Reports.

First pulled from the ground in 1999, the skull was found at a Neolithic site called Champ-Durand, around 80 miles south-east of Nantes. At first, archaeologists thought little of the punctured skull, declaring it likely the product of a fight with another horned creature. But this reanalysis, by the paleontologists Alain Froment and Fernando Ramirez Rozzi from the French National Center for Scientific Research, comes to a more exciting conclusion: The skull may be the earliest known example of a surgical procedure performed on an animal.

That, the researchers say, is the story told by the hole. Puncture wounds from traumatic blows usually display signs of shock—splintered bone, for instance, or fracturing around the incision. Instead, this is clean-edged and sharp. Whoever made this hole did so with surgical precision. There's no evidence of healing, either, the report says. "The animal did not survive the injury or was killed shortly afterwards," the authors write, "or the trauma occurred once the animal was already dead."

Which option is more likely is hard to say. Incredibly, people seem to have been quite good at trepanning even in a time before antibiotics or anesthetic, with a remarkable number of ancient skulls showing signs of partial or complete healing. The cow may have been a casualty of developing those skills, or a failed attempt to apply them to a whole other species, in which case it could be considered a very early predecessor to modern veterinary science.

In 2012, scientists in Moscow announced a surprising finding. Of the 76 peptides identified in secretions of common frogs (Rana temporaria), many have antibacterial properties. The announcement and the resulting media from the discovery was exultant. Any discovery of antibacterials is important, given the threat of drug-resistant bacteria. But the study sparked excitement for another reason: the finding propped up a venerable Russian folk belief that putting a frog in milk can keep it from spoiling. (That said, no one's recommending that you start throwing frogs in milk cartons.)

Preserving food in the pre-refrigeration era was tough. Cellars and salting helped, but even in Russia's cold climate, fresh milk proved tricky. The longer milk stays unrefrigerated, the more bacteria will grow, making milk sour and sometimes dangerous to drink.

Enter the common frog. In Ariel Golan’s Myth and Symbol: Symbolism in Prehistoric Religions, he notes in his section on frogs that “Russian peasants placed a frog in milk to keep the milk fresh (to no avail).” These days, the belief is well-known but discounted. (A Russian friend of mine, when I asked about the superstition, responded that he had heard of it and it sounded gross.) But where did the belief come from?

Frogs in milk appear more than once in Russian folk belief. One proverb tells of two frogs that fall into a milk can. One frog gives into despair and drowns. The other keeps afloat by swimming furiously. By the morning, the milk had been churned into solid butter and the frog escapes. Another story describes Babushka-Lyagushka-Shakusha, the magical, sentient “Grandmother Hopping Frog,” swimming around in a bath of milk. There could even be a more practical association. Frogs are cold and clammy to the touch, and people may have believed those characteristics could transfer to the milk.

Or the link between frogs and milk may simply come from the ability of frogs, Russian and otherwise, to frequently find their way into milk. In an 1854 letters-to-the editor exchange in the New York Times, a farmer described how submerging his milk cans in a spring to keep them cold inevitably resulted in froggy invasions. The farmer wrote that after fishing out the frog, the milk was still perfectly fine and sent along to customers. Five days later, an indignant reader wrote in that despite reading many accounts of frogs in milk, “the idea of drinking from a frog’s lactal bathing tub is not the most agreeable.” Perhaps the Russian peasant of yesteryear was just making the best of a froggy situation.

In October 1789, during a trip to Connecticut, U.S. President George Washington described some “exceeding good” silk lustring and “very fine” silk thread that were part of a growing domestic industry. In fact, by the time Washington wrote those words in his journal, the area that became the state of Connecticut in 1788 had been practicing raw silk production, known as sericulture, for over half a century—and silk was on the rise.

By 1826, three out of every four households in Mansfield, Connecticut, were raising silkworms, and by 1826, Congress commissioned a report on the potential for a U.S. silk industry. By 1840, Connecticut outpaced other states in raw silk production by a factor of three. Within the next two decades, however, the industry would collapse, leaving the country to wonder what went wrong.

The unlikely development of Connecticut’s silk industry came about thanks Ezra Stiles, the seventh president of Yale University. Stiles was a sericulture enthusiast who experimented with cultivating mulberry trees, silkworms’ primary food source, and even wore gowns made from Connecticut silk to ceremonies. He also sent mulberry seeds and silkworm eggs across the state, and advocated forstate-sponsored bounties to encourage farmers to plant mulberry trees.

One of the biggest triumphs for the early industry was figuring out how to adapt sericulture to cold weather, Such tactics included keeping silkworms warm by raising them in attics, and figuring out how to feed them in cold weather. Michael Cook, a modern sericulturist, describes the intense care and feeding schedule silkworms require.

"Rise early, feed the worms before work; feed them again at lunch, feed them again in the evening and clean a dozen or so big trays, feed them again before bed. I was feeding a garbage bag full of [mulberry] leaves and small branches daily. Cocooning was a nightmare,” says Cook. In Connecticut with deciduous mulberry trees, that intensive feeding schedule was a problem in years with early frost. One innovation to extend the feeding season was to dry mulberry leaves, then mix them with water and flour to feed to silkworms.

Inspired by Connecticut’s raw silk production, local entrepreneurs invested in machinery to manufacture silk thread and fabric from reeled silk filaments. In 1810, the Hanks brothers opened the United States’ first silk-mill in Mansfield, Connecticut, and in 1838, the Cheney brothers opened a mill which would eventually expand to 38,000 spindles, and become the largest silk manufacturer in the U.S. The future looked bright for silk.

The problems began with a new variety of mulberry and ended with lumpy thread. Beginning with Stiles, Connecticut sericulturists had always used an Italian variety of white mulberry, Morus alba, to feed their silkworms. However, in the 1830s, as the industry pushed to expand quickly, farmers and investors latched onto a Chinese variety, Morus multicaulis, a subspecies of black mulberry which produced larger leaves and more of them per tree (today M. multicaulis refers to a different plant, a subspecies of M. alba). It could also be harvested more often. The price of M. multicaulis skyrocketed as speculators sought to profit from selling cuttings from these fast-growing trees.

Samuel Whitmarsh, a “charismatic and unreliable businessman" who owned a silkworm cocoonery in Massachusetts, stoked the M. multicaulis craze with pamphlets trumpeting the benefits of this new type of tree, and letters to various silk trade publications. Daniel Stebbins, Whitmarsh’s business associate during the craze, later recounted the story of one tree that a speculator bought in Massachusetts for $25 and sold in Connecticut to a farmer named Elder Sharp for $50. Sharp then declined an offer for $450 for a quarter share of the tree; within a year the tree was worthless. The bubble had popped.

In the bubble’s aftermath in the early 1840s, companies along the East Coast went bankrupt, as did Whitmarsh, and angry farmers tore out their orchards. Joshua Grant, a silk producer in Baltimore, called the collapse a “dire disaster that has overspread the land like a funeral pall.” Then a series of harsh winters, followed by a blight in 1843-44, killed many of the remaining mulberry trees.

Despite everything, in 1847, Stebbins remained hopeful about the “sequel of the silk industry.” But the region’s sericulture had one insurmountable flaw that prevented this revival: Stiles’ gowns aside, Connecticut’s silk was not industrial grade, so silk-mills could not use it to manufacture fabric. According to cultural anthropologist Dr. Janice Stockard, who has interviewed silk reelers in South China, reeling—the practice of unwinding the filaments of silk from their cocoons—requires observation, training, and practice. In 19th-century Connecticut households, women were expected to learn the skill from pamphlets.

“In pamphlets, the term ‘spinning’ described the critical technique of reeling silk from cocoons,” Stockard says. “Women in farming households improvised, based on their experience spinning wool and using technology found in the home, including the wool wheel.”

The product they ended up with was adequate for sewing thread, but not strong enough for the industrial-silk-manufacturing infrastructure that Connecticut had begun to build. According to one scathing assessment,“Connecticut women in 70 years have not improved their knowledge of reeling.” Another issue, Stockard says, was the expectation that women could reel silk “whenever leisure from other duties permitted.” In other words, women were supposed to wedge a high-skill, time-intensive task into their already full workloads, and the result was sub-par silk.

“Simultaneously unwinding several cocoons from a basin of near-boiling water while twisting these filaments into one even thread and reeling it onto a wheel was hard,” Stockard says. “If reeling was interrupted to tend to a child or chore, the silk would gum up and lump.” Faced with this weak, lumpy thread, Connecticut manufacturers began to import raw silk from China, Japan, and Italy.

By 1881, sericulture in Connecticut had been entirely abandoned. The now much older Elder Sharp, who had valued his mulberry tree so highly, said, “Our silk was good, bright and strong, needing only patience to better understand the reeling… let us do what we can at this late day to repair our error.” Instead, silk-mills continued to import from Asia and continued to manufacture silk fabric through the mid-20th century. Today, the legacy of Connecticut’s silk industry can be seen in the white mulberry trees which have spread everywhere and are now considered an invasive species.

To a modern ear, cockle bread sounds… kind of funny. But as it turns out, the lore surrounding this bawdy baked good, which later morphed into a children’s nursery rhyme, was just as naughty in its day as it sounds today, just not for the reasons you might think.

The idea of cockle bread as a product of sexy baking stems almost entirely from the 17th-century writer John Aubrey’s Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, a text from the 1680s that collected a number of folk customs. In his collection, Aubrey describes a sort of performance where young women would hike up their skirts and pretend to knead bread with their butt cheeks, singing:

My granny is sick, and now is dead,
And we’ll go mould some cockle bread.
Up with my heels and down with my head,
And this is the way to mould cockle bread.

According to Aubrey’s account, making cockle bread was “a wanton sport” for “young wenches.” As to whether any actual bread was ever made this way, Aubrey mentions that the custom was based on an older tradition wherein a young lover would actually knead dough with her butt and then bake it up and serve it to the one she pined for, like a magic spell.

Still, historical cockle bread is more of a concept than an actual food, as there doesn’t seem to be any concrete recipe for it. An early mention of “cockle-bread,” in the late 16th-century George Peele play The Old Wive’s Tale, does give some indication as to what it might have been, and how it got its funny name. In the romantic satire, a man's head wearing ears of corn appears out of a well, while a voice flirts with a maiden, saying:

Comb me smooth, and stroke my head,
And thou shalt have some cockle-bread.

Before anyone tries to untangle the suffocating layers of sexual innuendo and historical context in this scene, in the notes of the 1996 edition of the play, editor Charles Whitworth pours some cold water over the passage with his reading. According to Whitworth, cockle bread was likely a type of peasant cornbread that was made with cockle weed, a toxic plant that can grow in corn fields. Any raunchy connotation in the reference isn’t elaborated on.

We contacted some food historians to find out what they know about cockle bread, but none of them had much to go on. "Sounds like fakelore to me," says Ken Albala, a food historian at the University of the Pacific and author of the blog Ken Albala's Food Rant. Although as the scholar Rachel Lauden, author of a blog about food and world history, says, “Bread and sexuality is absolutely everywhere once you start looking.”

References to cockle bread in the historical record go relatively quiet until a version of the verse reported by Aubrey pops up in the Victorian era as a nursery rhyme. By the time the cockle-bread rhyme reappeared in the 19th and 20th centuries, it seems to have lost its steamier subtext and ended up as a simple rhyming game for children.

So cockle bread as an actual food is essentially lost to history, if it ever existed at all. Considering that it's bread someone made with their butt cheeks, maybe that's for the best.

Help us investigate a popular ordering strategy.

What’s both a punch line and a wine-ordering strategy? The second-cheapest wine.

If you enjoy wine but don’t know too much about vintages and varieties, you may have fallen into the following logic: You’re not sure whether you want wine with “hints of cherry”; you don’t know whether 2015 was a good year for Argentinian wine; and you think Pinot Noir is the type of wine you like, but you don’t quite remember. Honestly, apart from red vs. white and sparkling vs. not, you don't think wines taste terribly different. So why not just order the cheapest wine? Or, if that feels a little cheap and too obvious, how about the second-cheapest one?

People often joke about ordering wine this way, usually while making self-deprecating jokes about knowing nothing about wine. But is ordering the second-cheapest wine just a joke? Or is everyone ordering it all the time? Do restaurant managers and bartenders all know this, and think carefully about which wine should be the second cheapest on the menu?

We’ve been investigating these questions, and we want to hear from you. How do you pick wine? Is it ever by choosing the second-cheapest bottle? Would learning that everyone else orders the second-cheapest option change your strategy? Has your approach changed as you learned more about wine? If you work in wine or at a restaurant, is this an ordering strategy you think about?

Let us know by filling out the below form. We’ll publish what we learn—including some of our favorite stories that you send in—in a future article. This is going to be fun.

In 1880, Frank Hart wowed audiences at New York's Madison Square Garden by walking 565 miles in six days.

On April 10, 1880, New York’s original Madison Square Garden was packed with sports fans. Men in the arena roared. Ladies waved their handkerchiefs. A band struck up “Home Sweet Home,” the classic 1823 American folk ballad. They had come to see Frank Hart, one of the best “pedestrians” of his day.

“I’ll break those white fellows’ hearts!” Hart, an immigrant from Haiti, vowed before the race. “I will—you hear me!”

Eighteen men competed in the race. Three of them were African Americans, including Hart. After Hart crossed the victory line, fans showered him with bouquets of flowers. His trainer handed him a broomstick to hold the American flag aloft during his victory laps.

Hart had won a “six-day go-as-you-please” endurance race. “The rules were simple,” explained Mile High Card Company, a sports auction house, in 2010. “Participants, called ‘pedestrians’ were free to run, walk, crawl, and scratch their way around an oval track as many times as possible in the course of six days, sleeping on cots within the oval, and usually for less than four hours per day.” Hart set a new world record by walking 565 miles, or 94 miles per day. His prize was $21,567, including $3,600 he legally betted on himself. It was the equivalent of almost a half million dollars today.

Hart broke racial barriers in sports just 12 years after African-Americans achieved full citizenship with the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And yet, in the 21st century, he has been largely forgotten. However, the recent discovery of a Frank Hart trading card, now for sale through Heritage Auctions, the nation’s largest collectibles auction house, has illuminated his legacy once more.

For a brief period from the late-1870s through the 1880s—at the dawn of professional baseball in the United States—pedestrianism was the national pastime. And Hart was one of its leading names.

After emigrating to the United States from Haiti sometime in the 1870s when he was in his teens, Hart worked in a grocery store in Boston. There, he began competing in local races to make extra money. Daniel O’Leary, a savvy Irish immigrant and sports promoter, who had previously held the record for six-day racing, spotted Hart’s talent and decided to finance his career.

Hart’s given name was actually Fred Hichborn. But when he became a professional athlete, he figured “Frank Hart” had more of a commercial ring. The press soon nicknamed O’Leary’s client “Black Dan” because the two men shared similar racing styles. Newspapers also referred to him as the “Negro Wonder.”

While the national press was adulatory, it nevertheless wrestled with stereotypes. As documented in the book Pedestrianism by Matthew Algeo, a Brooklyn Daily Eagle editor saluted “Our Friend Mr. Hart,” whose exploits proved that “there’s nothing in a black skin or wooly hair that is incompatible with fortitude.” The Salt Lake Daily Herald headlined its laudatory story, “The Colored Boy Gets Away with the [Championship] Belt.”

Hart endured his share of racial abuse and violent threats from hostile spectators. Competitors refused to shake his hand at the starting line. An Irish rival with a brogue dismissed him as “the nagur.”

“[During a Boston competition,] a spectator tried to throw pepper in Hart’s face, though for reasons unclear,” writes Algeo. “The attack may have been racially motivated, though it may have been just as well motivated by gambling.”

There is some controversy among historians surrounding an attempted poisoning during a race in 1879 at Madison Square Garden. O’Leary firmly denied it, but in an academic paper titled “Old Time Walk and Run,” the historian Kelly Collins concludes otherwise: “After a spectator gave him some soda water he became severely ill and it was determined that he was poisoned.” Hart won the race anyway.

But the heyday of pedestrianism in America was short-lived. In the late 1880s, the craze gave way to baseball as the number one sport. A handful of black ballplayers appeared in the major leagues in the mid-1880s before they were systematically banned by an unwritten Jim Crow system known as the “color-line” in 1887. By then, Hart’s best option to eke out a living as an athlete was to play professional baseball in the Negro Leagues.

During the 19th century, white baseball kept incomplete records, and the Negro Leagues kept virtually none. Hart thus suffers from the historical indignity of being unattached to a specific team. Most accounts simply link him to the nameless Negro League baseball team in Chicago. In May 1884, The Washington Bee reported that the “colored pedestrian plays shortstop for a colored baseball club known as the St. Louis Black Stockings.”

Hart should have been able to retire. “Keep in mind, in 1880 a good weekly wage in the U.S. was approximately $11, or less than $600 a year,” the journalist Kevin Paul Dupont wrote in The Boston Globe. “Hart’s take for that one [1880] event approached nearly 30 years’ worth of wages.”

Alas, he burned through his fortune. “Like many other sporting men, he was a big liver and a good spender,’’ reported the Cleveland Gazette in Hart’s obituary, as noted on Track and Field News. The Gazette revealed that Hart lived the last 20 years of his life off “the charity of friends.” Playing big league baseball surely didn’t help. Most white professionals played for very little money, and black players for even less.

Hart died young, like other legendary African-American athletes, including Josh Gibson (known as “the black Babe Ruth”) who died at 36 and Jackie Robinson, who broke the color-line in 1947 by becoming the first African-American player in Major League Baseball in the 20th century. Robinson died at 53. The famed pedestrian took his final step at age in 1908 at 50 years old in relative obscurity. The cause of death was listed as tuberculosis.

In the collecting community, cards featuring Gibson and Robinson are highly collectible, but Hart’s are not, despite their extreme rarity. Heritage Auctions is selling what is believed to be only the third Hart trading card ever found. (The sale ends April 18, 2018.) Both were issued in packages to stimulate sales of cigarettes. Hart was certainly one of the first black superstars featured on his own trading card. But while photo cards of Hart were in great demand in his heyday, very few of them have survived. In contrast to cards of baseball players, those of pedestrians were not keepsakes after the sport fizzled.

A contractor uncovered the latest Hart card, and 286 other sports and non-sports cards, while cleaning out an attic in an old house in Hartford, Connecticut. It is part of a rare sports set produced in Rochester, New York, by a company promoting a brand of cigarettes.

“Frank Hart should be remembered as a pioneer ultramarathoner who pushed the limits of human endurance,” notes Black Past, a digital reference guide to African-American history. “He offered hope that blacks and whites could compete against each other as equals. He was also wildly popular with thousands of spectators of all races who followed the sport.”

A floating menace in a lake needs your attention.

Minnesota has a bog problem. After we ran writer Andrea Appleton’s story about “The wild beast of North Long Lake,” a four-acre, floating peat bog that has been causing havoc recently, our readers were eager to offer some ad hoc solutions for how to deal with the troublesome natural phenomenon. And we want to hear more!

The giant roving island naturally detached from its former home, bound to the shore near a summer camp, and has bounced around the lake. At nearly 30 feet thick in places, it destroyed residential docks and boat lifts. Though it has come to rest back at the summer camp’s swimming beach, the bog requires a more permanent solution, before it drifts off to cause more damage.

"I come right out and admit, I am not an engineer," says Randy Tesdahl, the head of the American Legion in Minnesota, who helped devise the current plan for dealing with the bog, and who spoke with us for an update. Tesdahl and company's current plan is to lasso the whole thing with chains, swing it towards a less intrusive part of the lake, and stake it in place. It's an ambitious plan, but the whole community is pitching in. Along with the North Long Lake Association and the Department of Natural Resources, Tesdahl and other members of the Legion plan to complete the operation in a single day. If he gets his way, there will even be a volunteer breakfast in the morning and a celebratory barbecue at night. "I'm a retired marine, and I know that if everybody pulls together, humanity can do some pretty cool things."

If this bog were in your backyard, how would you deal with it? Would you try to blow it up? Let it wander the lake as a floating reserve? Scoop it up with a giant plane? Give us your ideas of how to deal with such a unique problem below, no matter how silly or strange. We’ll collect the best and post them in a later article!

Michael Candy's Synthetic Pollenizer is "a sculpture for a different species."

When humans want to grab a bite to eat, they can raid the pantry, hop down to the corner store, or make a reservation at an expensive restaurant. When pollinating insects want a snack, they, too, choose among local plants. But for a few years, bees in Dookie, Victoria also had a fast-casual option: the Synthetic Pollenizer, a mechanical canola flower that serves up real nectar and pollen. The machine, made by artist Michael Candy, stood in a field in Dookie for part of last year. It's designed to give bees an experience usually confined to the human realm, while letting humans in on a slightly more bee-like one.

Candy, who lives in Brisbane, specializes in creations that interact with their environments at various scales: his other works include a chair that "walks" with the help of the person sitting in it, and a public statue that weeps whenever a bombing occurs anywhere in the world. After spending time with field biologists at a conference a few years ago, he was inspired to make "a sculpture for a different species," he explains. He began collaborating with some experts, including a beekeeper and a resource ecologist.

Scientists have long created artificial pollination devices to help them study bees. But, Candy explains, these tend to be "really boring flowers—just jars with holes with them." The Synthetic Pollenizer is more of a multisensory bee experience, providing decor as well as nutrition. Canola pollen, which Candy purchases in bulk, courses from a repository up through a hose and ends up at a brass flower, where it is extruded by a "mechanical anther." Meanwhile, nectar moves through a similar system and squirts out of the center of the flower. There's even a surveillance element: When a bee visits, a small, motion-activated camera clicks on, and streams footage of the customer to YouTube.

When it's placed in a field of natural canola, the Pollenizer is clearly an imposter. It looks like a "real" plant the same way that a fast food joint looks like a "real" restaurant: it's got smoother surfaces, brighter colors, and more visible automation. While other flowers sway organically in the breeze, it stands stiff and still. And rather than being tucked demurely into stems and roots, its plumbing is clearly visible: gears twist, pistons fire, and pollen and nectar chug through tubes.

Still, it didn't take too long for bees to get used to the new establishment. According to Candy's rough estimate, they patronized the Pollenizer at about the same rate that they supped at real flowers. At times, Candy used peer pressure to give them a push: "With some of the prototypes, I'd even put a dead bee [on the fake flower] so that other bees could see how to land," he says. "Once they know how to do it, they visit a lot more."

Honeybees are facing a number of high-profile problems right now, including nutritional deficiencies, mites, and habitat loss. But Candy is quick to point out that the Pollenizer is not really meant to solve any of them: "Bees are very topical," he says, "but that was never my focus." Indeed, many advocates argue that the public focus on honeybee preservation actually distracts from more important conversations regarding native pollinator species.)

Instead, he's just trying to see if it's possible to slot a machine into an existing biological process without causing too much harm. He cites a Richard Brautigan poem that reads, in part, "I like to think.../ of a cybernetic forest/ filled with pines and electronics / where deer stroll peacefully / past computers / as if they were flowers." "Agriculture is somewhere where technology is usually totally invasive," he says. "[Pollination] works fine already, but I’m seeing if technology could actually be a part of this, non-invasively."

Indeed, it's bee-oriented to the degree that human viewers sometimes feel alienated. During a recent exhibition, a display Synthetic Pollenizer was shown alongside a livestream from the working one, which was positioned in a nearby field. "The curator sent me a message two days into the show and was like, 'This [livestream] is really boring,'" Candy says. "And I was like, 'Yeah!'... It's not really catered for humans. It's an interactive artwork for bees."

As a human viewing the artwork, its power comes from realizing how many of the machines we've built don't just affect our interactions with other species, but eliminate them entirely. "Beekeeping is so much fun," Candy says, near the end of our conversation. "I really want to get a hive, but I live in a warehouse." The robotic flower, too, is living in a box right now, he adds: "I don't have a garden. I don't know where I'd put it."

The street-based document writers for hire have been a fixture since the days of the Ottoman Empire.

On a side street near Istanbul's Çağlayan Courthouse, an electric sign reading “Petition Writer” points to the open door of 67-year-old Hayrettin Talih's tiny, one-room office. A casual passerby might think it a typical Turkish workplace, unadorned except for the obligatory photograph of Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and a framed verse of the Quran.

While those pillars of Turkish society never change, it appears that little else changes in the office either: Talih sits in front of a manual typewriter, in the same pose as a black-and-white photograph of himself, from 40 years earlier, which is tacked on the wall beside him.

Occupying the chairs opposite his desk are a couple of older citizens who are explaining a property dispute with a relative. Talih listens, demands clarification where necessary, and finally applies his fingers to the chattering typewriter, producing an affídavit that the couple will use to start proceedings at the courthouse, and hopefully get their rightful dues.

Although he is not a lawyer, Talih has clients who clearly trust him to translate their experiences into Turkish legalese, which is replete with archaic Ottoman words—much like the Latin phrases beloved of English-speaking lawyers. An understanding of this obscure language is vital to Talih's work as a public scribe or arzuhalci, a profession he entered almost 50 years ago. Now, he is one of the last of his kind.

When asked why he has kept using his old typewriter, Talih replies that computers are merely another way of writing, not a source of reliable information. “There's a form used in the courthouse,” he says. “Do you know what it says on it? 'Do not put all your trust in the information you read on the computer.'” Talih cautions against referring to legal advice found on the internet. “The computer can only give the form, but people don't know what to write. That's the basis of our job: what do you want and how are you going to say it?” he says.

Public scribes were a necessity in the Ottoman era, when the language used in state documents was even farther removed from ordinary speech and a large percentage of the population was illiterate. On top of legal work, the scribes also made a living by writing love notes and letters for soldiers who travelled to fight in the wars that consumed the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the earliest accounts of the profession is from 17th-century traveller Evliya Çelebi, who wrote that there were around 500 scribes in Istanbul at the time. An imperial decree of 1764 noted that the scribes had been a regulated guild since the early years of the empire, with their own licenses and entrance exams. Iconic author Yaşar Kemal spent some years working as a scribe and wrote several novels that include scribes as characters.

When asked how many of his colleagues remain in Istanbul, Talih says, “They're so few that I could count them on my fingers.”

Meanwhile, scribe Adnan Gültek sits with his typewriter outside the Social Security Center in the old city's Unkapanı neighborhood. The image of the scribe consulting with clients on the street has inspired paintings by Fausto Zonaro and Osman Hamdi Bey, as well as photographs by Marc Riboud and Ara Güler. These artworks depict the scribe as an archetypal part of Istanbul's street culture, which is now set to vanish.

“It won't be long before people stop coming to us. Some of our work has already gone to the internet, and once the rest goes there'll be nothing left to do,” Gültek says, in reference to an online system that allows citizens to file court cases via the internet, unveiled by the Department of Justice in 2015.

While Talih spent 40 years outside the old Sultanahmet courthouse with his typewriter, things changed when the Çağlayan courthouse opened in 2012. “A big group of us worked on the street for one month,” he says. “There was a complaint made against us and so the municipality took all our typewriters. They said that working on the street was absolutely forbidden there, and if they saw us they'd take our equipment again. So I was forced to find this shop.”

Gültek would prefer to work in an office but says he cannot afford the rent. “I'm tired of working on the street. It isn't easy talking and listening with all this noise,” he says. “If it rains we're here with our umbrellas, and in the mud and the snow. If stones fall from the sky we'll still be here.”

Turkish bar associations have created difficulties for the remaining scribes. In 2012, an Istanbul court sentenced eight scribes to one year in prison and a fine of 7,300 lira ($1780) for composing legal documents for clients, an activity that the court considered to be “using authorities that belong to a lawyer.” A similar case in Niğde this year ended in acquittal, suggesting that there is some inconsistency in the application of the law.

Meanwhile, the scribes say that they do not claim to be lawyers, as they merely help clients to express themselves on paper. “Let's say I wrote something I don't know about, and the person lost all his expenses and lost the case. Won't he turn around and complain about me for putting him in that loss? It's better not to write something you don't know,” Talih says.

Both scribes defend their profession as the only option for those who cannot afford a lawyer. “Never mind the work that we do here, just consulting a lawyer costs 250 or 300 lira [$73]. We give the information they need, we write what needs to be written, and we take 15 lira [$4],” says Gültek.

But according to İmmihan Sadioğlu, a lawyer at the Istanbul Bar Association, the scribes' work is not as harmless as it might appear. “Their legal knowledge is made up of hearsay or things that they've heard without receiving a school education. The laws change every day and there's a very complicated set of procedures,” she says. According to Sadioğlu, the legal labyrinth cannot be navigated by an amateur, and the specific wording that the scribes use in the initial documents can be crucial. “The documents that arzuhalcis write are very important, and they open the way to a loss of time and rights that can't be regained afterwards,” she says.

After all, there is a government system in Turkey that covers the costs of those who cannot afford to pay a lawyer. The bar association's concern is that the scribes, while offering an inferior service, take advantage of people who are not aware of this system. As this government support becomes better known, Sadioğlu and her fellow lawyers believe that the last scribes will see the writing on the wall.

“If a disadvantaged person can access justice easily, then he won't look for other solutions. As for the state, it should increase the level of funding for legal aid,” Sadioğlu says. “Someone who can receive a better and higher quality service from a free lawyer will not consider risking his rights by using a scribe.”

The Spamettes sang and danced and glamorized canned meat.

In 1945, the war that wracked the world was finally over. American women who had served as military translators, typists and, even pilots suddenly found themselves out of a job. At the same time, the SPAM Man was trying to sell tinned pork.

Jay C. Hormel was the SPAM Man. Head of Hormel Foods, he was the canny heir to his father’s canned-meat business. Under him, the company introduced the smooth, spiced pork product known as SPAM right on the cusp of the Second World War. But there was a problem. By wartime’s end, 90 percent of Hormel’s inventory was shipped overseas, as food for American troops and allies. The company now needed to market wartime, tinned food to a peacetime audience.

So, in 1946, the Hormel Company started hiring for the Hormel Girls, a drum and bugle corps of female musicians who had served in the war. As a veteran himself of World War One, Hormel was concerned for his employees who served. During the war, according to authors Jill M. Sullivan and Danelle D. Keck in their paper The Hormel Girls, he had sent letters to enlisted male employees assuring them that their jobs were waiting. When two managers devised a marketing strategy of an all-female, military-style band to promote Hormel products, Jay Hormel was quick to support it. As Sullivan and Keck point out, it was designed to push a “quasi-patriotic” button for consumers, who associated Hormel with the American military.

The requirements to be a Hormel Girl reflected the times. Most of the performers were white, and all were unmarried. They also had to play instruments. Ladies’ bands weren’t unusual. Even in the late 19th century, all-female troupes promoted American music and American brands. Hormel had even established a touring group of musicians to promote Hormel’s chili con carne with Mexican music in the 1930s.

On August 29, the Hormel Girls completed their first month of training. Their test was the 29th American Legion National Drum and Bugle Corps Championship, held in New York. In neat uniforms, they played hits such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.” As the competition’s first female team, they finished 13th. There was avid media interest, both positive and negative. The New York Times reported on an injunction brought by noise-sensitive neighbors near the Corps’s Connecticut training grounds, but that was outweighed by the spectacle of the musicians performing and on parade. Hormel soon realized that the group was an advertising powerhouse.

Twenty girls from the original 48 agreed to stay on, and those numbers soon grew. They marched in parades, played in shows, and sold Hormel products (especially SPAM) door-to-door. Advertisements proclaimed that when “talented ex-G.I. Drum and Bugle Girls” came to town, they distributed free SPAM or chili in stores. Driving 35 matching white Chevrolets, the performers proceeded like a caravan, drawing attention wherever they went.

In 1948, the Hormel Girls went to Hollywood and took to the airwaves. According to Sullivan and Keck, they changed their style for radio. While before they had played a mix of military and popular music, the Music with the Hormel Girls show featured big-band music, punctuated by regular reminders that Hormel’s chili and ham was the best. It proved a good combination. By 1953, the show was “number four in the yearly [Nielsen] rankings.”

The Hormel Girls were famous. Soon, they stopped going door-to-door, and only pitched Hormel products to stores. The Girls earned bonuses for selling lots of meat, with a premium for SPAM sales. But selling wasn’t the main requirement: It was still all about performing. “I didn’t want to sell anything,” former Hormel Girl Martha Awkerman told Sullivan and Keck. “I was there to play my horn.”

In the early 1950s, the show expanded to include dance. The Hormel Girls wore elaborate costumes and performed for locals and grocers. Jay Hormel, channeling his inner bandleader, decided who would sing and play which instrument. (Some of the musicians considered him nitpicky, but he may have just been passionate about music. Several of his children and grandchildren became performers.) As the group reached its peak, many newer Hormel Girls were photogenic professional musicians, instead of G.I.’s.

It was an in-demand job. The weekly salary of $50 was better than other wages for women at the time. It was glamorous, too. The women were known as “the Darlings of the Airwaves,” or, more often, “the Spamettes.” Motorcades of police cars escorted their Chevrolets into town. It was an unprecedented opportunity for young women to travel while earning good money. Despite the double-duty of performances and sales (and the possible indignity of being called a Spamette), most Hormel Girls described the experience fondly.

But in 1953, the show came to an end. The caravan was costing the Hormel Company $1.3 million dollars a year, and Jay Hormel was sick and would die in 1954. As television proved to be cheaper advertising, the last performance was held on December 13, 1953. Laverne Wollerman, one of the final performers, told Sullivan and Keck that the curtain was quickly pulled to hide that many of them were crying.

Hormel Girls went on to other jobs at the company, or in music. But there was no denying their effectiveness. In the years that the Hormel Girls performed, Hormel’s sales doubled, and SPAM successfully made its transition from food of necessity to classic Americana. Still, in a 2010 interview, Hormel Girl’s announcer Marilyn Wilson Ritter noted that SPAM wasn’t even her favorite. “I liked the chili con carne,” she said.

Grandiosa has dominated both the country’s pizza sales and music charts.

The Nordic countries are often name-checked for their progressive politics, an enviable education system, and for exceptional Eurovision skills. But one of their great culinary contributions to society is often overlooked: Scandinavian nations—specifically Norway—are leading the rest of the world when it comes to eating pizza.

Norway is only a fraction of the size of the United States, in terms of both landmass and population. Yet every year, the country’s 5.3 million inhabitants consume 47 million frozen pizzas. And what’s even more remarkable is that nearly 50% of those pizzas are Grandiosa frozen pizzas. In fact, Grandiosa is a brand so synonymous with Norwegian culture that in 2004, 20 percent of the population surveyed considered Grandiosa an unofficial national dish. But how did a humble frozen pizza brand come to dominate a country whose cuisine has historically been defined by the likes of meat, fish, and potatoes?

Italian immigrants began opening up pizza shops around the United States soon after the turn of the 20th century. One of those entrepreneurs included Frank Pepe, an illiterate Italian teenager who immigrated to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1909, only to return home a few years later to fight for his country in the First World War. After returning to the U.S., Frank and his new wife Filomena opened Pepe’s Pizzeria in 1925, serving up an unassuming dish from their beloved home on the Amalfi Coast.

At this pizzeria, an employee named Louis Jordan honed his pizza-making craft by working with Pepe’s wood-fired ovens. Jordan and his wife, Anne, eventually decided to move to Norway, where Anne's ancestors were from. And in May of 1970, they opened their own pizzeria in Oslo named Peppes.

The Jordans’ decision to launch Peppes in Norway couldn't have happened at a better time. For years, Norway’s food culture had stagnated, and seemed impervious to global food trends. Norwegians growing up during the 1970s and 1980s describe the food during those years as “somewhat depressing.” So when Peppes arrived in Norway, boasting nine varieties of Italian and American-style pizza, their unique menu soon attracted a following. The couple swiftly opened additional restaurants across Norway to accommodate the growing demand. Today, Peppes is considered one of the most popular pizza chains in Norway, with 70 restaurants scattered around the nation.

“Pizza is incredibly popular in Norway,” says Erlend Brandshaug Horvei, who lives in Askøy, an island located northwest of the Bergen Peninsula. “Every little town or village has a pizza restaurant of some sort, usually a combined pizza and kebab shop. With a kebab shop within 20 minutes of almost every house, getting a pizza is never really an issue.”

Pairing a kebab shop with a pizza parlor is a partnership that extends beyond convenience. In recent years, Nordic countries—especially Sweden—have seen an influx of Middle Eastern immigrants, which has made several dishes, including kebabs, more ubiquitous. Norwegian pizza restaurants such as Peppes and its competitor Dolly Dimple's are known for their distinctive array of pizza toppings, which fuse the traditional elements of an Italian pizza with additions such as corn, cashews, pineapple, spinach, and eggplant.

Serving pizzas adorned with kebabs, topped with French fries, and drizzled with Béarnaise sauce is common in Norway, as are white pizzas, where the tomato sauce is swapped out in favor of crème fraîche or sour cream. Regional Norwegian cuisine relies heavily on animal proteins, and restaurants eagerly supplement pies with everything from mincemeat to reindeer. Reluctant to simply lay the toppings above the cheese, one particularly Norwegian innovation involves combining and pre-cooking the sauce and toppings, before constructing and baking the pizza.

For Norwegians, eating tacos is a regimented affair, too. A 2012 study showed that 8.2 percent of Norwegians enjoy tacos for dinner every Friday night (known as “fredagstaco” or taco night). This affinity for the Mexican staple extends to pizza, as well: To make taco pizza, many Norwegians position nachos under the pizza’s cheese, adding mincemeat seasoned with spices such as cumin, paprika, or Piffi, a Scandinavian salt-based spice medley.

Grandiosa’s own meteoric rise from little-known frozen fare to national institution is a journey that happened swiftly and largely by accident. Even with the success of chains like Peppes, many Norwegians in the 1970s hadn't been exposed to pizza yet. According to Norwegian pizza lore, the factory manager at Stabburet (Grandiosa’s parent company) agreed to manufacture frozen pizzas without actually knowing what a pizza was. This small detail aside, Grandiosa began production in February of 1980 with the goal of creating a pie large enough for families to enjoy at home together. By the time the 1990s rolled around, sales had doubled and Grandiosa had cemented its place in Norwegian food history.

The company’s original product—a standard pizza topped with mild tomato sauce, Jarlsberg cheese, and paprika—is still its most beloved offering, and sells over 9 million pies annually. Locals have been known to hack the pizza by adding additional cheese before drowning the pie in ketchup and serving it on the famed, vibrant Grandiosa cardboard packaging. Some Grandiosa fans are so devoted that they’ve incorporated the pizza into their traditional Christmas Eve dinner, serving it in in place of more conventional holiday dishes such as pinnekjøtt (cured lamb ribs) or svineribbe (pork ribs).

While some local food snobs quibble over the quality of Grandiosa pizza, everyone can agree that the brand’s marketing team has been instrumental in establishing it in the cultural conversation. In 2006, Stabburet even dropped a pizza-themed single called "Respekt for Grandiosa," which topped the country’s music charts for eight straight weeks.

So what is it about Grandiosa that has made the dish such a phenomenon? Some suggest the pizza’s popularity owes more to laziness and loyalty instead of quality ingredients. Others, like Erlend, take a more pragmatic approach. “It’s the perfect hangover meal,” he says. “It has just enough food in it to make up for one of the five dinners you need the day after a big night out and it doesn’t take forever to make.”

Giardini Panteschi are found only on the windswept island of Pantelleria.

A windswept speck of land in the Mediterranean boasts a unique innovation found nowhere else on earth: a circular garden wall that creates its own nano-climate. But this invention isn't new: It dates back over a thousand years.

The remote Italian island of Pantelleria is so far from the rest of Italy that it's actually closer to Africa. On a clear day, you can even see the coast of Tunisia from the island's lofty volcanic peak.

Pantelleria has a hypnotic beauty that entrances the few travelers who reach its shores: Ancient mule tracks wend through patchwork vineyards dotted with crumbling ruins, while passing cars are so rare that hard-working farmers wave at every one. In all directions, wherever you look, the denim-blue sea sparkles.

The main challenge faced by Pantelleria’s 7,000 inhabitants, aside from the isolation that sequesters them from the outside world, is the weather: The island is constantly battered by winds, but rarely sees any rain. The soil is dry and full of volcanic rock.

How to eke out a living in such a place? For thousands of years, different groups have done so during different periods. But at some much-debated point, Pantellerians devised an ingenious garden design now known as the giardino Pantesco: Italian for "Pantellerian garden." What makes these enclosures extraordinary is that each giardino Pantesco was built, with months of backbreaking labor, not to nourish rows of vegetables, but instead to protect a single sprout: the sapling of a lone lemon or orange tree.

"Of all agricultural systems, no other architecture involves so much work to grow a single tree," notes Giuseppe Barbera, Professor of Arboriculture at the University of Palermo and one of the world's few experts on Pantellerian gardens.

"The enclosed tree is a citrus—usually an orange or a lemon—that otherwise couldn't grow on the island without the protecting wall," Barbera adds. "Pantelleria’s windy, arid climate and the total absence of fresh groundwater wouldn’t otherwise allow trees like these to live."

Giardini Panteschi are almost always circular, and are precisely calibrated to have walls of a specific height: tall enough to block the wind, but short enough to allow in as much sun as possible. For as long as anyone can remember, farmers have expertly employed an age-old construction technique called muro a secco. Without using any mortar, they stack basketball-sized boulders freehand to form five-foot-thick walls that curve to encircle an enclosure 30 feet in diameter. They leave a single small opening through which the builder can crawl.

"The Pantescan farmer tore the stones from the ground with his bare hands, and used them to construct garden walls," says local vintner and retired politician Calogero Mannino.

The top of the circular wall always slopes inward, so the crevices of the volcanic rock catch morning dew and atmospheric condensation, which then drips onto the soil—even on otherwise dry days.

At the center of all this, the farmer plants just one seed in hopes of eventually growing a full-size citrus tree, which he then allows to branch outward in all directions and fill the whole space with several trunks (unlike the more familiar practice in modern citrus orchards of pruning away all side-shoots to produce a tree with a single central trunk).

The end result of all this labor is a new ecosystem within the wall's embrace, where the tree experiences temperatures measurably cooler on hot days and warmer on cold nights, an effect confirmed by ongoing studies. "The research has shown the importance of dew condensation on the garden walls, which reaches considerable quantities because of the atmospheric humidity and the porosity of the rocks that increases the surface area,” says Barbera, who is monitoring climatic data being collected at the best-preserved giardino. “This contribution of water is so important that it allows citruses to be cultivated in the total absence of irrigation."

Giardini Panteschi have been described as self-sufficient agronomic systems, because they create a nano-climate that simultaneously waters the tree, protects it from relentless wind, retains any rainwater channeled into the garden under the access door during rare rainstorms, allows in sunlight, and radiates stored solar warmth on cold nights. Once built, it "operates" without any need for further human intervention.

Pantellerians were pioneers in sustainability before there was even a word for it. They did not get stones from some far-off quarry, but instead used rocks dug from the enclosed garden area itself. As Pantelleria sits atop a dormant volcano, the terrain comprises basically nothing but fractured volcanic rock, without much topsoil. Every square inch of vineyard and farmland on the island had to be hand-cleared of countless stones; on the island, people joke and conjecture that the garden walls probably evolved as the answer to the conundrum, What do we do with all these rocks we just dug up?

A giardino Pantesco—also known as a "jardinu" in local dialect—is only one component of a traditional Pantellerian homestead, each element of which has an immediately recognizable vernacular architecture. At the center is the dammuso, or living quarters, with massively thick walls and a distinctive domed roof. The unforgettable, undulating shape is also unique to Pantelleria, and designed to collect rainwater and channel it down to a subterranean cisterna. A hardened pathway from the dammuso downhill to the jardinu also serves as a rainwater conduit, funneling runoff under the small garden gate. Farmers thresh grain in a nearby aira (another perfectly circular area but with lower walls) and sun-dry grapes and figs in the stinnituri, a south-facing wall with angled buttresses.

All these architectural features developed to deal with the constant hot winds known as sirocco that blow in from the Sahara and the Levante winds that blow in from the Near East. These winds dominate Pantelleria's weather as many as 300 days per year.

No one knows for certain who built the first giardino Pantesco: Some attribute it to the Phoenicians, who colonized the island 3,000 years ago. Others cite the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, or one of the many other civilizations that occupied Pantelleria over the millennia. Most often credit is given to the Arabic-speaking settlers who invaded in 700 A.D. and stayed for centuries; many of the island place names—such as Gadir and Bugeber, which belong to an ancient Arabic dialect similar to Maltese—date to this period.

"The surviving gardens were mostly built between the 18th and 19th centuries," Barbera points out, "but it is probable that they have been present on the island since ancient times."

Despite the relatively arid climate and chronic shortage of fresh water, the slopes of Pantelleria now appear surprisingly verdant. Vineyards dot the island, a situation made possible because the local grape variety, Zibibbo di Pantelleria, has evolved to survive with minimal irrigation. The centuries-old technique for keeping grape vines alive on Pantelleria—extensive pruning so that they hug the ground, behind yet more hand-built stone walls—is the only farming practice UNESCO deems "An Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity."

About 400 giardini Panteschi survive today, in various states of disrepair. Of these, 300 are precisely circular, while others are rectangular, pentagonal, or even teardrop-shaped due to the nearby terrain.

Whatever its shape, there's something almost mystical about entering a jardinu, as if you're entering a temple to the tree itself. The space inside feels set apart from the real world outside. "One enters them bowing, the shade and the coolness immediately felt, the imposing walls giving the feeling of entering a sacred place," Barbera ruminates.

Why citrus, and not some other tree? As far back as the Middle Ages, it was known that fresh fruit, especially citrus, prevented scurvy. Giardini Panteschi may have provided the only source of vitamin C on the island.

The only giardino Pantesco officially open to the public is managed by the Fondo Ambiente Italiano in the vineyards of the Donnafugata winery near the village of Khamma. But some of the dammusi rented to vacationers have their own giardini, and any leisurely drive around the island will reveal a few of the unmistakable circular walls (but always ask permission before entering).

Famed architectural philosopher Bernard Rudofsky visited Pantelleria and became fascinated by the unique design of its gardens, marveling about them in his book The Prodigious Builders. "The Pantellerian giardino represents an unheard-of extravaganza,” he writes. “It embodies the archetype of 'paradise' (originally a Persian word meaning 'circular enclosure'), complete with the tree of sour knowledge."

On April 18, 1930, the BBC made a surprising announcement.

Imagine you had a very special time machine: one that could take you back to any April 18 in all of history. When and where would you travel to? You could go to Boston in 1775, and watch Paul Revere take his famous midnight ride. You could head to Zimbabwe in 1980, and experience the birth of a country.

These are good and fine choices. Some of us, though, are tired. We might choose instead to jaunt back 88 years, to a British living room—any British living room. On Friday, April 18, 1930, at 8:45 p.m., people all over Britain settled in to catch the BBC News evening bulletin. But when they flipped on their radios, they heard a soothing announcement instead: "Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news." For the rest of the 15-minute time slot, the station played only piano music.

From our current point in time—April 18, 2018—it is hard to imagine a day with no news. Writing this in New York City, at barely noon, we have already learned today about peace talks between North and South Korea, a blackout in Puerto Rico, and the death of the last royal Corgi. The BBC, which had a head start, has also reported on a nurse’s strike unfolding in Zimbabwe, a pet raccoon that overdosed on marijuana, and the escape of a Bitcoin heister from custody in Iceland. We hear the news on the radio and from wide-eyed friends and colleagues, and see it on Twitter and Facebook and via alerts beamed to our phones. Constant news consumption is such a part of contemporary life that when people actively eschew it, we put them in the papers.

In this context, "the Day with No News is a wonderful historical reminder," writes Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, in an email. "I think it's a great way to think about what the BBC was supposed to be, and how that differs from what news as a category is today."

In 1930, the BBC was only about a decade old, and had very specific goals. "The BBC's approach was directly counter to what the U.S. was doing with radio, [which was] opening licensing and allowing competition between a wide variety of commercial approaches," writes Zuckerman. Instead, they were the only game in town, chartered by the crown with a monopoly over the airwaves. This model came with a very specific mandate: "Rather than opening things up and appealing to everyone, the BBC aimed on raising the moral character of [Britain]," he writes. "It took on a mission that feels pretty elitist today." (It was a spirit that suffused the endeavor: When the announcer decreed that there was no news, he almost certainly did so in a dinner jacket, even though no listeners could see him.)

In other words, the BBC decided what was worth reporting on, and according to them, it was better to stay silent than to fail to clear this bar. Radio announcers got their stories from Reuters, the Press Association, the Central News, and the Exchange Telegraph Company, "whose 'tape' machines disgorge their varied treasure into the News Room all day," as the outlet's 1931 Review of the Year explains. They'd then pick and choose from this disgorgement. As the 1930 Review put it, "A very definite standard of quality was aimed at, and ... when there was not sufficient news judged worthy of being broadcast, no attempt was made to fill the gap."

Even so, it’s not like there wasn’t anything major happening in and around Britain* that day. In fact, as Zuckerman points out, other historical news sources tell us that there were at least two important things going on. For one, the British government was apparently trying to respond to some allegations that had been printed in a newspaper the day before—and since the papers were taking the Good Friday holiday off, they might have tried to go on the radio. “It's possible that Day of No News was a form of asserting press independence,” Zuckerman writes: “[They may have been saying] ‘We won't be the mouthpiece for the government, and so no news for anyone.’”

For another, Surya Sen, a Bengali independence fighter, had successfully led a raid against a colonial police outpost in Chittangong. This time, technology foiled the story: Even if they had decided to report on this, “they couldn't have gotten the news, as Sen's forces cut the rail and telegraph lines,” Zuckerman points out.

There were surely plenty of other things afoot as well. But at that time, "the news wasn't reporting on the vast majority of people's experiences and events," Zuckerman says. "On a day where nothing happened to world leaders and elites, the affairs of the hoi polloi weren't newsworthy." As he puts it, according to the BBC’s judgment, “Nothing happened on April 18, 1930 that a well-to-do, properly cultured British man needed to know about … And if there's nothing worth learning about, some pleasant music will be at least as good for your moral character."

Today, of course, things are different. Our sense of what is newsworthy is vastly different than the BBC’s in 1930, in a variety of ways: “If we had a day where Trump did nothing absurd … we’d happily fill the newshole with reports that don’t get enough attention,” such as the opioid epidemic and the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Zuckerman says. Or we’d fill it with a highway pickle mystery. Plus, while newsrooms are often out to change minds, they’re also generally trying to make money. “The notion of a day without news is inconceivable in a commercial context—it’s a bakery without bread,” Zuckerman says. And so there is never no news.

This year, in particular, it's hard not to look back on the days of empty newscasts with nostalgia. Oh, to open Twitter and be greeted with a blank space and a softly tinkling piano! But as Zuckerman writes, imagining the gatekeeping that led to such silence can also serve as “a reminder of just how political [news-related] decision-making can be.” In that spirit, I would like to wish readers everywhere a happy anniversary of the Day Without News. I wonder what else will happen today?

*Update: We originally said "England." Apologies to the people of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

For centuries, Russians have celebrated their Slavic roots with kvass.

A Russian domestic scene: A mother of two serves her children dinner around a table set for four. Everything is well-lit, pine-paneled, idyllic. Daddy’s arrival seems imminent. The door swings open—and a man who may or may not be Gene Simmons saunters in. (He’s in full Kiss regalia, and clutching a plastic bag of groceries and a bottle of cola, with a star-spangled label.) His wife is stricken; his children equally fraught. “Simmons” holds up the bottle, narrows his eyes, and begins to ululate. The little girl bursts into tears.

In 10 seconds, the scene has descended into kitchen sink absurdism. The culprit is the brown liquid in the bottle—an American invasion into a Russian home. But there’s a solution. Simmons begins to drink a tall glass of a different brown drink, labelled with the Russian brand name Nikola. (If you say it aloud in Russian, it sounds like: “not cola.”) Immediately, his get-up falls away, and the make-up disappears. Our hero is just another Russian dad, home from work, and his daughter throws herself into his arms. Order is restored. Cyrillic text appears on the screen: “"No to cola-nization. Kvass. To the health of the nation.”

This is a 2007 television advertisement for kvass, a brewed Russian drink traditionally made from a heady combination of fermented rye bread, yeast, malt, sugar, and water. The result has a tart, fizzy sweetness not unlike kombucha and sits stickily on the tongue. It’s slightly alcoholic—around 0.5 percent—though historically drunk somewhat like a soda. (Commercial brands such as Nikola are sweeter and mostly malt-based.) Kvass fell out of favor as the Iron Curtain came tumbling down, but, in recent years, it’s been marketed as a patriotic alternative to “cola-nizing” American sodas. This approach ties into a rich history of kvass-centered patriotism that dates back to the early-19th century.

By that time, kvass of one form or another had been drunk in Russia for close to a thousand years—the earliest known reference dates back to 989 A.D. At the baptism of one Prince Vladimir, guests apparently enjoyed “food, honey in barrels, and bread-kvass.” It was the drink of choice of monks (its antibacterial properties made it safer than water), and has a well-established literary pedigree that includes appearances in the writing of both Tolstoy and Pushkin. (The latter describes one character who “has never drunk anything except kvas since the day she was born,” while in his Eugene Onegin, the Russian people “needed kvas no less than air.”) It is, in short, an exceptionally Russian drink—perhaps even more so than vodka.

For a long time, kvass seems to have had no particular political inflection. But from the 16th century onwards, foreigners often spoke of the drink in fairly sniffy tones—Medieval Swedes compared their well-to-do compatriots’ wine-drinking habits to the less refined “Russian Voivods [who] sit in their smokehouses and drink kvass and water.” This may have fed into Russia’s Western-oriented intellectuals choosing to snub the drunk, which they viewed as a symbol of Russia’s backwardness, in the mid-19th century. But this anti-Russia, anti-kvass position only increased the drink’s popularity: Russians drank it because they had always done so, but also because it became a declaration of Slavic pride and love for the motherland.

In the 1820s, under the threat of the rising West, people began making an observable and special point of being “Russian,” which involved drinking a lot of kvass, and wearing what they perceived to be quintessentially Russian garb. This backlash prompted the Russian aristocrat Pyotr Vyazemsky to coin the term “kvass patriotism.” For the past 200 years, it’s been used by scholars and critics to describe a particular kind of Russian “jingoism”—what the Russian economist Anna Sanina describes as a sort of “wrong love to the motherland, when people praise their ‘own’ just because it is their own and reject all the ‘strange’ things just because they are ‘foreign.’”

In the 1960s, kvass entered a new era of mass production—and Soviet leaders even hoped it might conquer the world. In 1964, the New York Times reported that then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced his plans to launch kvass internationally. “Kvass is to com­pete with Coca‐Cola and the rest of the imperialist brews and is to be pushed by advertising methods barely distin­guishable from those of the hated capi­talists. A campaign slogan has not yet been chosen but, on the home front at least, is likely to be something on the lines of ‘It's fun reaching your production norm with Kvass.’”

In actual fact, marketing generally centered upon kvass’s apparently beneficial effects on the digestive organs, the cardiovascular system, and “the breathing of the life cells.” Coca-Cola executives were correctly “unconcerned” by this show of Soviet neo-colonialism, the paper reported, and the drink did not take off worldwide.

Within the Soviet Union, however, where neither Coke nor Pepsi could be bought or sold, kvass had never been more popular. From 1967, vendors sold the drink on street corners out of iconic yellow barrels, labeled квас. Before Pepsi’s three billion dollar deal with the Soviet Union, 240-gallon “tanker-cistern trailers”, originally designed for transporting milk, were filled with the drink and wheeled through Russian cities and towns. The drink was sold out of communal glass mugs, given a quick rinse between customers, and came with horror stories about floating insects and other nasties in the liquid. But that did little to dampen the enthusiasm of drinkers: “Like beer, kvass is drunk chilled, so the appearance of carts with kvass barrels on the streets meant that summer was nigh,” remembers Sergey Grechishkin in his memoir Everything is Normal: The Life and Times of a Soviet Kid. “Kvass was one of the great pleasures of a Soviet kid’s life, alongside ice cream and elusive bananas.”

But as the Soviet Union came to an end, Russians were enchanted by all the possibilities the end of isolationism presented—many of which were gastronomic. From the early 1990s, Pepsi and Coca-Cola became readily available. Kvass was left by the wayside—a boring relic of a now irrelevant age. Unlike kvass and its communal barrels, Pepsi was sold from kiosks with free disposable plastic cups, which Russians reused and repurposed variously as drinking vessels, ashtrays, seed pots, or thingummy containers. That “explosion of entirely unknown flavors,” Grechishkin remembers, was a fascinating “first gulp of a faraway world.” The Iron Curtain was on its way down, and cola drinks tasted like the future.

In the early 2000s, as Russians’ initial enchantment with all things Western began to fade, kvass returned to Russian streets. The barrels were repaired, repainted, and rolled out once again, to explosive effect: Between 2001 and 2009, according to one report, sales of kvass grew by 1520 percent yearly. It was around this time that Nikola first began to air its patriotic, anti-Western ads, variously featuring Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan, and other “problematic” American figures. Labels often featured bucolic scenes of wheatfields—a promise of the bottled essence of the Russian countryside in each drink.

In 2014, Vladimir Putin fanned the fire. In a nationally televised interview, he joked that a journalist was drunk on kvass: In the months that followed, sales climbed once again. Even Heineken announced that it would produce its own version of the drink, keen to capitalize on a domestic market hungry for more Russian goods. “Loving kvass became a way of reclaiming a sense of national pride,” writes Bela Shayevich in Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design. Nearly 200 years after Vyazemsky coined the phrase “kvass patriotism,” the drink has come to stand for precisely the same pro-Russian fervor he first had in mind in 1827.

Masterpieces from above.

As an aerial photographer, Tom Hegen is used to seeing the world from a different perspective. But even he was astonished at how salt ponds look from above. “When I started on doing research for this project, I had a certain look of the result in mind,” Hegen says, via email. “I was then really amazed by the vibrant hues, textures and abstract shapes I observed. The size and landscape of those salt gardens is just overwhelming.”

Hegen captured his unique take on a centuries-old process using a DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone camera. “The Salt Series explores artificial landscapes where nature is channelled, regulated, and controlled,” explains Hegen. “Salt is a raw material that is now part of our everyday lives, but we rarely ask where it actually comes from and how it is being produced."

Hegen’s series was shot around the Mediterranean, which is the ideal climate for salt production. Artificial pools, separated by sand or stone walls, are flooded with seawater. Slowly, the water evaporates, leaving behind brine, which is water with a very high salt concentration. “Each salt pond has a unique salt density,” explains Hegen. "Microorganisms change their hues as the salinity of the ponds increase."

These microorganisms, which fall under a class of organisms known as halophiles ("salt lovers"), dictate the colors and include different types of algae. Algae-loving brine shrimp also contribute to the process. "As the water becomes too salty, the shrimps disappear, causing the algae to proliferate and the color of the ponds to intensify. The colors can vary from lighter shades of green to vibrant red." At the end, “workers harvest the salt by delicately lifting it up from the floor,” says Hegen, noting that it is often done by hand.

From the ground, it’s difficult to assess the extent of a salt pond's colors and shapes. They often stretch across a wide expanse of area—one salt pond facility on France's west coast is nearly 5,000 acres. But as Hegen rightly guessed, from the air they are startlingly dynamic. He has a knack for reinterpreting landscapes: his aerial portfolio includes forests that, from above, look like polka dots and farms that appear like a patchwork of lines and squares.

In all of his aerial projects, Hegen highlights more than just unique angles or unseen patterns. He also uses aerial photography to investigate landscapes that have been changed by human activity. Several of Hegen’s projects relate to mining. One of the most startling is his Toxic Water Series, which shows pools of bright orange water against earth blackened by coal mining.

“I focus on landscapes that have been heavily transformed by human intervention and document the marks that we have left on the earth’s surface in order to meet our daily needs,” he says. “Aerial photography is a compelling way to document those interventions because it basically makes the dimensions of human force on earth visible.”

As part of his ongoing investigation into how humans have altered the natural world, some of Hegen’s work will soon be part of a book called Habitat. “I am fascinated by the abstraction that comes with the change of perspective; seeing something familiar from a new vantage point that you are not used to.” Atlas Obscura has a selection from Hegen’s Salt Series; you can find more of his work on Instagram.

He's since calmed down and headed home.

These days, Craignethan Castle consists mostly of picturesque ruins. Located around 20 miles south of Glasgow, Scotland, it was built in the 16th century by the Scottish nobleman James Hamilton of Finneart, reportedly to showcase his many architectural and military talents. In its current form, it remains an impressive structure, but one you probably wouldn't choose to live in.

But a very angry badger begs to differ. One such individual came shambling into the castle’s cellar tunnel last week, and decided he was going to make it his home. The castle is surrounded by woodland, a spokesperson at Historic Environment Scotland told the BBC, and staff believe that the badger may have accidentally lost his way. Whatever the case, he quickly began to "redecorate" the place with artfully chosen rubble by digging through loose soil into the stonework.

According to the HES spokesperson, staff at the castle spotted the loose earth on Wednesday of last week and attempted to lure the badger out with cat food and honey. Precisely what happened next is unclear, but the cellar tunnel was shut to the public, the badger described by staff as "very angry," and the matter left unresolved.

At some point late on Friday or early Saturday morning, however, the badger apparently decided that life in a castle tunnel wasn't for him, and headed out into the night. But his renovations have left a lasting impact: The tunnel remains closed, at least until the completion of repairs to the stonework.

They're incredibly rare today, but portable girdle books were once very handy.

Girdle books had to be small, and they had to be light. From the bottom edges of their bindings extended an length of leather, usually gathered into a knot at the end. This extension of the cover could be used to carry the book like a purse or could be tucked into a girdle or belt. To read, the owner wouldn’t even have to detach the book; when taken up, the book would be oriented correctly, just as if it had been pulled from a shelf.

Used from the 14th to 17th centuries, these books were texts that their owners needed to keep close at hand: prayer books used by monks and nuns, for example, or law books used by traveling judges. Though they were valuable objects—luxuries, even—these books were meant to be consulted and read.

“These are books that needed to be specially protected because of a lot of use, a lot of wear. Most of them were probably used daily,” says Margit J. Smith, author of The Medieval Girdle Book. “How many books do you have in your collection that you use every day?”

Girdle books were once common enough that they appear more than 800 times in paintings and other art of the period. But today there are just 26 girdle books known in the world. In her book, a catalogue of what she calls “relics of an age long gone by,” Smith has measured, photographed, and investigated the history of each one.

Smith, a bookbinder and retired librarian who was the head of cataloguing and preservation at the University of San Diego’s Copley Library, first became interested in girdle books 15 years ago, and she took a class in Montefiascone, Italy, to learn how to make one. In her preparations, she found that there was little scholarly work—little information at all, really—on these once relatively common objects.

The class took place in summer, and usually, after their work was over, the group would go for a dip in the nearby lake. On one of these excursions, Smith was asking an instructor, Jim Bloxam, where to find more research about the books; together, they decided to start collecting images of all known medieval girdle books—just 24 at that time. After some years of work, Bloxam, a conservator at Cambridge University, had to drop out of the project, but Smith, who says she’s interested in “odd things”—she likes to read words backwards and has written about the silverfish that threaten book bindings—continued visiting the world’s few remaining girdle books.

When libraries placed these objects, hundreds of years old, in front of her, she felt a sense of awe. “Then you start looking into it, and you see all the debris from 500 years ago. There is dust and hair and fingernail pairings and spots of wax from candles and erasures,” she says. “Some of the books are so fragile that you have to be very careful, especially when turning pages. But if you start measuring, once you get into that, you remember what you are there to do, and you’ve overcome the initial awe.” The books, while still treasures, became objects to be scrutinized.

The part of the book cover that distinguishes a girdle book often looks like a Wee Willie Winkie hat, flopped on top of the book, or a Gandalf-esque beard, stretching down into a neat triangle. Smith discovered that some girdle books have just one extended leather cover, while other have two nested covers, with the outer one designed for carrying. But it wasn't always easy to tell which category a girdle book fit into. One of the first things Smith learned as a bookbinder was how to tear a book down, to see how it worked. In modern books, it’s possible to tease back an endpaper and inspect a book’s secrets. In the case of the old, rare books, that wasn’t possible, so Smith had to run her fingers along the binding to feel for ridges and other hints to the book’s inner workings.

“You close your eyes,” she says. “As a bookbinder, I have learned to trust my fingers more than my eyes.”

In the course of her research, Smith discovered the existence of two additional girdle books. One is in Scotland, the psalter of Neal McBeath, the smallest of all the known girdle books. Just 2.5 inches by 1 7/8 inch, the book fit easily into the palm of her hand. It didn’t have a spine, just the leather wrapping, and it showed little sign of repair. In Vienna, she found another new girdle book, but this one refused to give up its secrets. Years of repair work on it had concealed most clues about its construction. The girdle cover, for instance, may have been a later addition. “There are unusual bumps and protrusions under there,” she says. “It’s sort of mystery. I’d like to be able to take it apart completely and see what went on before, before the binding was put on.”

Some of the books had surprises inside, as well. One belonged to a nun, Katharina Röder von Rodeck, who lived at the Frauenalb Convent near Karlsruhe, Germany. She filled the pages with her personal prayers and devotions, as well as notes about her life—when she took her vows, when German peasants rebelled in 1525. At the beginning of the book, she decorated five pages with the coats of arms of her parents’ families, a gray owl holding a red heart, a skeleton holding an hourglass, and motifs of flowers and vines that continued throughout the book. It gives, writes Smith, “a very cheerful and friendly impression.”