One photographer's four-year project to document the country's aging cinemas.

The photographer Carolina Sandretto spent the past four years tackling what turned out to be a massive undertaking: documenting 398 of Cuba’s remaining cinemas. It was an experience that, she says, was a source of near constant surprise. “As I never had a precise map of where the cinemas were located or even if they were still existing, each one was a discovery and an achievement on its own,” she says. For this project, now a book called Cines de Cuba, Sandretto scoured the country for remaining movies houses—some of which are still operational, some repurposed, others left to decay.

“Between the 1900s and the 1950s, Cuba was a prosperous island living under the influence of the United States,” says Sandretto. By 1955, there were 600 movie theaters on the island and 147 in Havana alone—more, by her estimate, than Paris and New York City combined. Some of these cinemas were funded by American film companies, such as the Warner (now Yara), which Warner Bros. opened in 1947.

The Yara is one of the few Cuban cinemas that remain operational today. “During the years of the Cuban Revolution the cinemas have been taken away from their owners and remained since in the hands of the government,” says Sandretto. “Unfortunately, the funds have been quite scarce and to maintain such a huge number of cinemas has been impossible for the state. In the last 50 years, almost 80 percent of the cinemas have been closed.”

Today, only 19 of these movie theaters are equipped to show digital film. Though since she started her project, Sandretto has seen changes. “In Havana, some cinemas have reopened their doors as cinemas, and artists are now using the cinemas for dance companies, like the Arenal and the Mara. In the rest of the country the population is slowly taking advantage of these huge spaces and creating dance schools, senior and junior centers, and reusing the cinemas in various ways,” she says. “It’s going to be a slow process but I personally think that the cinemas will have a new life in the next years.”

Her photographs frame the architectural style of each building with some of the surroundings. At the Fenix in Havana, there’s laundry hanging out front for the families who now live inside; at the Apolo, men sit on the step, waiting for a bus. As for the Yara, lit up by night in orange neon, it has hosted shows, sports screenings, and also films. It’s also one of the major venues for the annual International Festival of the New Latin American Cinema. This festival, says Sandretto, “is considered the ‘Festival de Cannes’ of the Americas. During those two weeks, all the cinemas are full of professionals and movie goers.”

In addition to the book, Sandretto set up a website with an interactive map showing the cinemas she visited across the country, with some notes note about the history and condition of each one. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Sandretto’s book, along with excerpts from her map.

The answer was hidden in the shadows.

When you look at the image above, what do you think of? Most will probably take in the beauty of its subjects, the mountain Denali and nearby Wonder Lake. A photographer might admire the skill of its creator, Ansel Adams. Adventurers may feel the urge to climb.

Donald Olson sees all that and something else: a mystery. He wants to know the moment it was taken. An astrophysicist and forensic astronomer, Olson uses quantitative methods to answer questions raised by artwork, literature, and historical accounts—not the heady ones, but the basic, surprisingly slippery who, what, when, and where.

In the past, he and his team at Texas State University have figured out where Julius Caesar landed when he invaded Britain in 55 B.C. (northeast of Dover), why the British didn't spot Paul Revere as he made his Midnight Ride (the moon was in a weird spot), and the identity of at least two mysterious yellow orbs floating in paintings: the one in Vincent Van Gogh's White House at Night (it's Venus) and the one in Edvard Munch's The Girls on the Pier (it's the moon).

More recently, they tackled two of Ansel Adams's images of Alaska—Moon and Denali and Denali and Wonder Lake—using topographic maps, astronomical software, and webcam archives to figure out exactly when and where the photos were snapped.

Adams is a frequent target for Olson's group. Over half a century after they were taken, his black-and-white landscape photographs continue to define the American wilderness. But as Olson writes in a new book, Further Adventures of the Celestial Sleuth, Adams's own selective record-keeping means some of his images are literally timeless: No one knows when they were taken. He often didn't date his negatives, and described himself as "rarely to be able to recall a date," as Olson quotes from an exhibition catalog.

When it came to Denali and Wonder Lake, no one could even agree on the year: Olson found interviews, autobiographies, collections, and studies that claimed the photo was taken in 1947, and folios, letters, and exhibition catalogs that said 1948 instead.

But as Olson's team has found previously, the sky itself is a peerless record. In the past, the team had used the moon's shape and position to figure out exactly when and where another famous Adams photo, Autumn Moon, was taken. While Denali and Wonder Lake lacks any celestial objects to hang an investigation on, Moon and Denali, below, features a waxing gibbous moon glowing through the clouds.

"We realized that we could use the lunar phase and position of the sky of Moon and Denali to calculate the date of that evening scene," Olson writes. A look at field notes from Adams, as well as from his son and travel companion, Michael, revealed that Denali and Wonder Lake had been taken the next morning.

To determine these two "whens," they first had to figure out each "where": the exact location of Adams's tripod when he released the shutter. The rippled landscape of Moon and Denali provided clues. "The foreground of [the photograph] includes geological features known as 'cirques,' semi-circular steep-sided hollows shaped like amphitheaters," Olson writes.

"If the image has foreground objects that we can see aligned with distant background objects, then we can use the alignments to figure out exactly where the artist was located," Olson says, in an email. So he and a student, Ava Pope, got some detailed topographic maps of Denali National Park. By comparing the shapes of the cirques in the photograph with the contours on the maps, they were able to identify the locations of several landmarks in the photograph, and measure how far they were from each other.

Using this information, he writes "we wrote a computer program that could calculate the view from any possible spot for Ansel Adams's tripod," correcting for refraction and the Earth's curvature. "Our computer program eventually produced a camera position where the calculated view appeared to match the photograph." They then called up their man on the ground, Jon Paynter, a GIS specialist who works at the park. He traveled to the potential location—a spot on the road about eight miles from the nearest ranger station—and tweaked his positioning until he could reproduce the view himself.

The team now had the precise location of Adams's camera when it captured Moon and Denali. Using planetarium software, which simulates the organization of the sky at particular moments in time, they asked when during the summers in question the moon's positioning lined up with the photograph. As Olson writes, they found "one possible result: Moon and Denali was captured on July 14, 1948, at 8:28 p.m."

Next, the team went after Denali and Wonder Lake. They calculated the relevant tripod position in the same manner. Since there was no celestial object to investigate, they decided to focus on an astronomical trace instead: the photograph's deep shadows, which could be used to determine the sun's position in the sky, and therefore the time of day. Their first round of calculations indicated that the photograph was taken early the next morning, between 3:40 and 3:50 a.m.

This was not quite exact enough for Olson's team. So they sent Paynter on a different kind of chase: into the archives of the Denali National Park webcam, which has streamed a view of the mountain for years. They found a different July 15, and checked the shadows at a few different timestamps. As Olson writes, "interpolation allowed us to determine that Ansel Adams tripped the shutter for Denali and Wonder Lake on July 15, 1948, at 3:42 a.m." The two classic photographs were taken fewer than eight hours apart.

"As a scientist, it makes my life richer to consider great works of art, important historical events, or classic literature," Olson says, in an email. A little bit of scientific detective work can make the art richer as well. After all, if a photograph makes a moment immortal, it's nice to know exactly which moment that was.

A new standard of beauty led to today’s weight-loss regimens.

In the early 20th century, Americans endlessly discussed and debated flappers. The Flapper, a magazine devoted to this new image of womanhood, used this description in 1922: “Bobbed hair, powder and rouge on the face; use of lipstick; ‘plucked’ eyebrows, low cut sleeveless bodice, [and] absence of corset.” All these elements were in their own way revolutionary—in earlier eras, heavy cosmetics were taboo, and clothing covered rather than revealed. But one aspect was left out: The flapper look was lean and androgynous, and maintaining that ideal often required a special “flapper diet.”

Over the centuries and across cultures, the ideal female body type has fluctuated. In many Western cultures, the pre-flapper generation considered a certain plumpness a sign of health, and fashion called for full skirts. But social reformers and women’s rights advocates had long been wary of abundant cloth, which could easily catch fire, and tight corsets, which could compress and deform women’s torsos. Lighter, shorter dresses became ever more fashionable after World War I, as did comfortable clothing and relaxed social mores. Restrictions on dating, dancing, and sex loosened. The cosmetic changes reflected changing opinions on femininity, and the person who most epitomized the new era was the corsetless, cosmetic-wearing, free-spirited flapper.

Yet other restrictions surfaced. Designers such as Coco Chanel popularized a slim silhouette. The bathroom scale (patented in 1916) became a household staple. Books, magazines, and the media began depicting fat as the result of insufficient willpower. While people have always dieted to fit their era’s beauty standards, the new female silhouette was a departure from previous buxom ideals. “Though the flapper image minimized breasts and hips, it radiated sensuality,” writes historian Margaret A. Lowe. The slender silhouette seemed modern. Female curves seemed old-fashioned.

Suddenly, raw vegetables were in vogue. In Lowe’s study of the diet of Smith College students in the 1920s, she quoted a campus warden who noticed that consumption of potatoes had diminished, while students were eating more celery, tomatoes, and lettuce. Outside of Smith, people followed the Hollywood 18-Day Diet—a prototype of modern fads. Inspired by the burgeoning film industry, they ate only oranges, grapefruit, toast, and eggs.

But strict diets were no easier to follow back then than they are now. Yvonne Blue was a Chicago teenager who came of age in the 1920s. Her parents described her as “the personification of wild modern youth”—in other words, a flapper. In her diary, she recorded days of fasting and longing descriptions of the buttery grilled cheese and lemonade she denied herself. According to historian Joshua Zeitz, “the expectation that they starve themselves in pursuit of flapperdom [was] a very real dilemma for many young women in the 1920s.” It didn't help that the decade introduced new processed treats like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Good Humor ice cream, and Velveeta cheese.

The actresses that young women imitated were thin—or else. Slender stars such as Colleen Moore ate no potatoes, sweets, or butter. Though film was a newer medium, magazines extensively covered actresses’ diets and struggles with weight. Clara Bow was scrutinized every time she put on weight, and Barbara La Marr, who epitomized flapperdom's wild side, died at age 29 from a combination of drug addiction and extreme dieting.

Many stars and their fans depended on diets drawn up by strong personalities. The Medical Millenium Diet, pioneered by William B. Hayes, called for patients to chew slowly, eat one dish per meal, and endure regular enemas. But far more influential was doctor Lulu Hunt Peters. Her 1918 book Diet & Health: With Key to the Calories was the first weight-loss best-seller, and the first book to advocate calorie-counting to achieve a “modern” look.

With a chatty style and goofy illustrations, Peters told readers to ignore the unhelpful advice of friends and family about the dangers of reducing. Food as fuel was the mantra. “Any food eaten beyond what your system requires for its energy, growth, and repair, is fattening, or is an irritant, or both,” she wrote. A sample lunch consisted of cottage cheese and a French roll (unbuttered). To resist the lure of eating, Peters urged her audience to regard all food as potential calories. The responsibility of watching one’s weight, she wrote, was a worthwhile but lifelong struggle. Diet & Health became the bestselling nonfiction book of 1922. Peters, who was a newspaper columnist as well as a doctor, became “the best known and loved physician in America.”

Much flapper diet advice sounds familiar. Healthy food and exercise are touted as the best ways to slim down, then as now. But this was still relatively novel during the 1920s. “For a nation unaccustomed to a new ideal of slenderness, this was a tough ideal to achieve,” Zeitz writes. So women turned to laxative-laced weight-loss gums, slimming girdles, and cigarettes. Smoking distinguished flappers from their mothers and grandmothers, and cigarettes' appetite-suppressing qualities were considered an asset.

That resulted in one of the biggest ad campaigns of the late 1920s. In 1928, the cigarette company Lucky Strike plastered colorful ads in magazines. In one, a pursed-lip flapper looks at the viewer. “To keep a slender figure no one can deny,” the ad trumpets, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” The ads featured illustrations of women in long elegant dresses, and major film stars and Amelia Earhart endorsed the slogan. Marketing cigarettes as slimming agents for young women remained standard for years.

Soon enough, though, the flapper era was over. In 1931, the New York Times ran a story marveling at her disappearance, hastened by the collapse of the economy. She “is only a memory, as antique and romantic … as the Gibson girl,” the author wrote. She mused that the Depression-caused struggle of wheat farmers could be solved if former flappers went back to the bread-eating habits of their Victorian predecessors. But that never happened, and the slender flapper figure remains problematically glamorous today.

The Fellowship of Highway 95 sent two artists up Nevada's eclectic "Free-Range Art Highway."

Sprouting from the desert brush, dinosaurs nudge post-modern pyramids. The Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building topple. A cowboy waves and the Statue of Liberty salutes her torch. Neon signs overshadow world-famous works of art, and kitschy stars circle the scene like party decorations hung from the ceiling.

No single component of the scene is artificial, but none of them are quite real, either. The image above, titled Vacation Delirium, was assembled using photographs of sculptures and landmarks in Las Vegas, many of which themselves are recreations of natural phenomena, prehistoric beasts, and iconic monuments. Together, the elements combine to create, as the collage artist Francesca Berrini and the photographer Lindsey Rickert describe it, “an impossible postcard.”

Assembled by Berrini using original photography shot by Rickert and found ephemera, Vacation Delirium depicts the beginning of their journey on “The Fellowship of Highway 95.” Developed with TravelNevada, the state’s tourism board, the Fellowship offered two artists the chance to collaborate and create a body of work on a week-long trip up what's known as Nevada’s "Free-Range Art Highway." Over 400 teams applied, and Berrini and Rickert were chosen as our winners.

Beginning in Las Vegas, Highway 95 runs 400 miles north to Fernley. The highway's nickname refers to the open-air artworks that dot its course, but "free-range" could just as easily refer to Nevada’s stance on its cultural treasures.

Las Vegas was the perfect muse for the first day of Berrini and Rickert’s journey. They describe their “impossible postcards” as a compression of time and memory that combine "photography, collage, and illustration into phantasmal dreamscapes." The sentiment, if not its application, could just as easily apply to Las Vegas’ development since the 1940s.

When it opened in 1941, El Rancho Vegas was the first casino on what is now known as the Las Vegas Strip. Western-themed, it reflected America’s infatuation with gun-slinging paperbacks and movies. Plus, cowboys gambled. The casino cast the pastime as rugged, romantic.

El Rancho Vegas set a precedent. Ever since, entrepreneurs and industrialists have designed Las Vegas resorts and casinos to appeal to popular tastes of the time. For example, the now-demolished Stardust Resort and Casino was built at the dawn of the Space Race, and its eye-catching marquee ushered in an era of massive neon signs designed to appeal to the drivers who were busy embracing America’s growing car culture.

“If you do want to observe the changing, ever-shifting state of the American landscape, there’s still no better place to see it than the Las Vegas Strip,” as host Roman Mars put it on a recent episode of 99% Invisible, the acclaimed podcast focused on design and architecture. Berrini and Rickert’s Vacation Delirium captures the freewheeling, shape-shifting essence of Las Vegas better than any straightforward photograph could.

Humor is intrinsic to collage, as it is to Berrini’s work. In addition to creating fine art, Berrini also sells droll, old-fashioned postcards that ask us to consider questions such as, “What if early frontiersman had to face off against dinosaurs?”

Rickert tackles related themes in her photography. Staging scenes in her brain, she uses props, lighting, and elaborate analog camerawork to bring her tableaus to life.

Both women’s work straddles fantasy and reality. For the "Fellowship of Highway 95," they chose to explore the postcard because of its relationship to authenticity.

“We’ve always thought that the humble postcard is the true analog mirror of the modern social media travel experience, with its idealistic, self-directed framing of a single moment in a journey,” Berrini and Rickert wrote in their proposal. “Postcard images invite you to suspend your disbelief and imagine yourself transported to a better, more interesting locale.”

The women began the first day of their trip collecting their own postcards at Container Park, a vibrant destination for shopping, dining, and entertainment constructed using sustainable modular cubes and actual shipping containers. Later on, they made their way to Seven Magic Mountains and the Neon Museum.

Ugo Rondidone’s Seven Magic Mountains is located about 10 miles south of Las Vegas. The Swiss artist’s vibrant artwork is made of candy-colored boulders stacked 30-feet-high. Upon arriving, Berrini was struck by the installation’s mass. Because they’re pastel-colored, she explains, they appear lighter in photographs.

First opened in 2016, the installation was originally slated to reside at its current site for just two years. But the artwork’s immense popularity has led organizers and the artist to consider extending Seven Magic Mountains’ stay.

The last stop of the day was the Neon Museum: a destination wholly dedicated to preservation. The facility includes a Neon Boneyard that stores retired Las Vegas signs. Rickert was similarly stunned by the size of these larger-than-life marquees. Single letters, once part of massive signs, towered over her.

Snippets of both of these places appear in Vacation Delirium, the assiduous assembly of which can be seen in a time-lapse video.

Leaving Las Vegas, en route to Beatty, their perspectives continued to shift.

“The hustle and bustle opened into the vast Mojave Desert landscape,” Berrini wrote in the first day’s travel journal. “The mountains were no longer glimpses peeking out between buildings, they were surrounding us.”

Read on about Day 2 of Berrini and Rickert's journey along Highway 95 here.

On the final days of "The Fellowship of Highway 95," Lindsey Rickert and Francesca Berrini process what they experienced in Nevada.

Time was top of mind as Francesca Berrini and Lindsey Rickert began the final days of their journey on “The Fellowship of Highway 95,” a week-long artistic adventure from Las Vegas to Reno up Nevada's "Free-Range Art Highway" organized by Atlas Obscura and TravelNevada. They were looking ahead to the second phase of their project, which would take place entirely within a studio. But before the trip was done, they had several more stops to make.

In continuation of the previous days’ journey into the mythical “unknown,” the women headed to Walker Lake to catch a glimpse of Cecil the Serpent, the elusive sea monster said to reside in the lake.

It's clear that Cecil holds a privileged place in the town of Hawthorne's lore. Chatting with locals, the artists learned that it's a tradition to take marshmallows down to Walker Lake's shores with the hopes of coaxing the creature from the waters' depths. Hawthorne's unofficial mascot also makes appearances several times per year during parades, when he slithers through town blowing smoke through his nose.

In town, they stumbled upon the very float itself, stored in an open-air garage and visible from the road.

“We may not have spotted Cecil...but he has definitely still inspired our work,” Rickert wrote in day five’s travel journal.

Contemplating Cecil and the dwindling time left on their trip, Berrini and Rickert mused on Nevada’s cosmic scale. Observing the mountains that surrounded them, they thought of Lake Lahontan, the Pleistocene body of water that once covered a good portion of the state. Sea monsters did, in fact, once swim through this desert.

Nevada’s official state fossil is the ichthyosaur, and it holds the largest concentration of these creatures ever discovered. Growing up to 50 feet long, the massive marine reptiles swam through the Great Nevada Basin 250 million years ago.

Using day-for-night lighting, Rickert took a photograph of the ruins of Fort Churchill, a state park housing the remains of a U.S. Army fort and a Pony Express station. Berrini then hand-drew the ichthyosaur on Rickert’s royal blue sky like a constellation, hovering above and beyond Nevada’s past, present, and future.

“At times it feels like we have been on the road for a month and others, it seems like just yesterday,” Rickert wrote the same day.

Arriving in Fernley near the end of the trip, Rickert snapped a picture of a fiery sunset.

"The sky was so captivating when we arrived at the hotel that we stopped unloading our luggage from the van, left most of the doors open and sprinted to the side of the hotel to take some photographs and marvel in its beauty," Rickert wrote. "I later asked the front desk employee [if] this was a common sunset and she laughed and told me yes.”

Like most of the other postcards in their series, Thanks for Visiting (featured at the top of this page) combines elements from different days of their journey. The background horizon is a photograph of the sunset in Fernley. The polaroid was a blank one Berrini found in the desert on the very first day, near Seven Magic Mountains. The text came from pictures of a sign outside Rhyolite.

“This one felt like a perfect way to close out the trip,” Rickert wrote of Thanks for Visiting. More than any other work in the series, it resembles a traditional postcard.

Mentally and physically exhausted upon returning home, the two artists' days on Highway 95 swirled in their brains. Rickert’s photographs were indispensable in helping Berrini sort her memories into a loose narrative.

“Collage is a way to revisit and process,” Berrini says. “It made [the trip] more linear in my memory because we were going through the images day by day.”

Created in the trip’s aftermath using materials collected from each day of the journey, the body of work doesn’t follow a linear trajectory. Instead, it offers a holistic reflection upon the Fellowship as a whole, its aftermath, and its lingering effects.

In what is perhaps the most ambitious artwork to come out of their endeavor, Berrini juxtaposes a photo of herself, shot by Rickert from a distance, with what appears to be a map of Nevada and Highway 95's route through the state.

Upon closer inspection, it's clear that this was once a map of the area, but now it’s something new: fiction that is factual in the sense that it’s true to Berrini and Rickert’s experience. Beginning with a map of Nevada and Highway 95, Berrini disassembled the piece and rearranged it into a semi-fanciful landscape. Its mind-boggling detail both engages and disorients, capturing the delirium that always seems to come after a transformative journey.

On a grander level, this artwork is an uncanny portrayal of Nevada, a state where time, terrain, history, and myth co-exist harmoniously.

Francesca Berrini and Lindsey Rickert were inspired by Nevada's "unknown" on days three and four of "The Fellowship of Highway 95."

You’d be hard-pressed to find a community in Nevada that doesn’t possess a local legend or two. This is especially true of the state’s many ghost towns, nearly all of which are said to be haunted by former residents. With Goldfield, Tonopah, and Fish Lake Valley on the itinerary for days three and four of their journey from Las Vegas to Reno on “The Fellowship of Highway 95”—a week-long artistic collaboration on Nevada's "Free-Range Art Highway", organized by Atlas Obscura and TravelNevada—the collage artist Francesca Berrini and the photographer Lindsey Rickert were heading deep into “ghost country,” as Berinni described it in the day’s travel journal.

En route to Goldfield, the first stop was the International Car Forest of the Last Church. Covered in a thin blanket of snow, the sight was both serene and spooky. Rickert snapped an off-kilter photograph and collected a handful of snow from the ground. Later processing the film with this water, she produced an image that captures the eerie essence of the place. How many times have ghost-hunters presented photographs with similar imperfections as photographic “proof” of a ghostly presence?

“I’ve always thought believing in ghosts is something I’d like to take up, like wearing lots of crystal jewelry or keeping a dream journal to predict the future, but somehow my inner skeptic always undermines my excitement of unexplained phenomena,” Berinni wrote.

Goldfield's unique history provides plenty of fodder for stories. Wyatt and Virgil Earp lived here for a year in the early 1900s, until the latter brother died of pneumonia. In 1907, the town's mine owners convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to send in 300 federal troops to help manage a bitter labor dispute. And in 1923, the explosion of a moonshine distillery destroyed most of the town’s wooden structures.

For Berrini and Rickert, a pleasant chat with the owner of a local antique shop soon slid into sordid tales from the town’s past. “Yet the conversation was never melancholy," Berrini noted. “The town and the folks we talked with were all optimistic about the possibilities of sharing the past with future visitors.”

After stopping by the cemetery in Tonopah just before nightfall, the two artists settled in at the Mizpah Hotel. Built in 1905 and shuttered in 1999, the Mizpah represents the oldest permanent structure ever built here. The hotel was finally restored to its literal purple glory in 2011. Solarized glass bathes the dark interior in lavender light. Elegantly carved velvet furniture transports visitors back in time.

It's said that not even the renovations could exorcise “The Lady in Red.” The alleged ghost of a prostitute murdered by a jealous lover, the Lady in Red is purported to haunt the hotel's fifth floor. Though she’s been known to coo “Hey You…” into men’s ears in the elevator, she’s harmless. The Mizpah has embraced its wandering soul and proudly advertises room 502 as its “Lady in Red” suite.

Berinni and Rickert pay homage to the lady in their collage titled Protection From the Unknown, which depicts her as an angelic benefactor. The illustrations were found in a book purchased just down the street from the hotel in downtown Tonopah, and the frame resembles the decor of the hotel. The letters were clipped from a local newspaper.

After a luxurious evening at the Mizpah, the duo woke up refreshed and ready for an adventure out to Fish Lake Valley Hot Springs, a large open-air bath fed by a thermal spring and surrounded by mountainous scenery. But fate had a more banal adventure in store for them.

“Day four brought a lesson I have learned time and time again: it’s never a good road trip without some sort of car problem,” Rickert wrote in the day’s travel journal. Their car keys’ fob had stopped working, meaning they couldn’t lock their equipment-filled van.

Determined, the women headed to the hot springs anyway, getting lost on a dirt road along the way. A friendly local flagged them down and pointed them in the right direction.

By the time they arrived, the warm water and tranquil ambience was a welcome relief.

To top it off, having spent the previous day keeping their eyes and ears peeled for ghosts, they experienced something if not supernatural, at least hard to explain at Fish Lake Valley. The living organisms they encountered in the area were stranger than anything they'd seen the previous day.

Amid flocks of predatory birds, the women saw unusually large, brightly-colored fish swimming in the ponds near the bath. Colorful fish are difficult to raise even in suburban environments because their appearance make them vulnerable prey. How they could survive in a hot spot for migratory birds is a mystery.

Rickert snapped a photograph of her friend basking in the placid waters, and Berrini embellished it with hand-drawn fish in their photo collage titled Oasis (displayed at the top of this article) to portray the serene, surreal experience.

Read about the final days of Berrini and Rickert’s journey along Highway 95 here.

On day two of "The Fellowship of Highway 95," Lindsey Rickert and Francesca Berrini hit their stride as collaborators.

Inside jokes can be like mementos among friends. They can last a lifetime, or, in the case of Francesca Berrini and Lindsey Rickert—the recipients of “The Fellowship of Highway 95”—they can elevate a donkey to mythical status.

The second day of the Fellowship, a week-long artistic journey from Las Vegas to Reno up Nevada’s "Free-Range Art Highway" organized by Atlas Obscura and TravelNevada, began at the Atomic Inn in Beatty with a top-of-the-morning bray. Hearing a suspicious rustle outside of their hotel room, Berrini and Rickert clambered outside to check on their camper van. They were greeted by “a sweet-faced burro from the hills,” as Berrini wrote in her travel journal that evening.

Breaking the golden rule of inside jokes, the two immortalized the donkey in the photo collage above, titled My New Friend, which introduces the unofficial mascot of their trip to the world.

The mysterious purple splotches that lend the image its aged look were the result of an experimental development process. Days after she met the donkey, Rickert dipped a film strip featuring Walker Lake into its own waters and stored the specimen for weeks. The snippets of text appeared in a book purchased the next day in Tonopah. Overall, the piece incorporates elements that span the entire course of the artists' journey.

Having bonded over their new friend, Berrini and Rickert set forth on the day’s expedition to Rhyolite and the Goldwell Open Air Museum. Exploring the ghost town and the contemporary artworks interspersed throughout, Berrini and Rickert fell into sync as companions and collaborators, ultimately producing two stunning works.

Rickert shot one of Rhyolite’s best-known sites and lightened it to serve as a background to Solarized Rhyolite (pictured at the top of this page). Crumbling but comely and open to explore, the former Cook Bank Building epitomizes the romance of a ruin. Needless to say, it also photographs well—the building was featured in the 1964 film The Reward and again in the 2004 dystopian action-thriller The Island.

Though it appears ancient, the structure was built in 1905. Rich in high-quality iron ore at the turn of the century, Rhyolite struck another type of fortune when Charles M. Schwab took more than a charitable interest in the town. At the height of its boom, up to 5,000 residents were estimated to have lived there.

But cosmopolitan Rhyolite’s resources were already draining by the time the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco splintered the town’s railway access, effectively cutting it off from commerce. Its residents fled, and by 1920, only 14 people lived there. The gems that surround the ruins in Berrini and Rickert's second photo collage of the day, titled Solarized Rhyolite, reference the bygone majesty of boomtowns.

You won’t find these perfectly cut stones in the sand at Rhyolite, but you’re likely to find another type of treasure. Antique glass exposed to the sun eventually assumes a lavender color. This “solarized” glass is ubiquitous in Nevada (in Rhyolite’s heyday, it was estimated that around 50 saloons operated in the area). The disembodied gemstones in Solarized Rhyolite are themselves each tiny collages assembled from photographs of the glass’s prismatic hues.

Exploring the Goldwell Museum, Berrini writes: “Many of [the artworks] feature an interactive component that depends on the possibility that a traveler will wander in and make the work complete.” Looked upon this way, these artists’ installations exist as, among other things, a perpetual invitation to collaborate.

Rickert chose Charles Albert Szukalski’s The Last Supper as the model for an elaborate photo shoot. Its likely been photographed more than any other work in the museum, but it’s doubtful that anyone’s ever captured it like Rickert.

At first glance, Rickert’s photograph appears to be a moonlit shot. But looking closer, one notices impossible shadows and reflections. The photograph was taken in broad daylight.

Strategically staging lights and adjusting the color temperature and shutter speed, Rickert was able to achieve photographic alchemy, sans photoshop.

“As we enter our second day of our Fellowship, the combination of our processes and how we work together seems to be falling into place,” Rickert wrote in the day’s travel journal, pointing out that collaboration and, for that matter, friendship, extends to practical needs. Berrini helped Rickert lug her heavy camera equipment around; Rickert brought Berrini coffee every morning.

Rickert further writes about the selflessness that’s crucial to a successful collaboration. “I’m no longer just thinking about images that please my eye but have to consider how they will work for her,” she writes.

Read about Days 3 and 4 of Berrini and Rickert’s journey along Highway 95 here.

Up in the Scottish Highlands, you can stand inside two seasons at once.

When Iain Cameron, a snow-obsessed Scot, picks his way across the Highlands in July or August, he’s often wearing shorts and a t-shirt. That’s all well and good when he’s tromping through emerald mosses, sprawling lichens, and stubby grasses. It starts to feel a little strange when he approaches patches of lingering snow, and stranger still when he strolls right into a snow tunnel and finds himself standing beneath scalloped ceilings about 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding landscape.

Compared to some of the world's soaring mountain ranges, Cameron says, Scotland's are "no more than bumps, really." The highest peak, on Ben Nevis, tops out around 4,400 feet—just high enough for semi-perennial patches of snow to persist from one year to the next. When enough snow has collected during the winter—and especially if it gathers high on Ben Nevis or in the Cairngorms range, and near water—conditions can be ideal for this fleeting frozen topography.

“As spring gets warmer and the ground starts to thaw, the water will move, and a trickle will burrow a hole through the snow,” Cameron says. As the warm air blows through this channel, also called a randkluft, it bores a tunnel that sometimes grows wider and wider until it’s large enough to walk through. Depending on how deep the snow cover was, the tunnel might be 15-20 feet high and traversable for a couple hundred feet.

From a distance, these tessellated snow forts “are really innocent-looking,” Cameron says. A mile away, they might not invite a second glance. The geometric patterns, known as ablation hollows, don’t come into view until you’re up close.

Cameron knows to look carefully. He works at an engineering firm, but has been keeping tabs on the snow for decades. He became fascinated by lingering snow as a kid, when he could see a straggling patch on Ben Lomond from the window of his parents’ house. Each year, he watched to see when it melted, and jotted it down in his diary. When he earned his driver’s license, he drove up into the hills. Now, he writes an annual report about snow-patch survival for the Royal Meteorological Society. It’s "just one of those things that I found strangely appealing," he says.

His years of studying snow patches have also made him wary of encouraging other people to step inside the tunnels. If they collapse, tons of snow could come tumbling down. If that does happen, Cameron says, “You’re not looking at a sore head—you’re looking at a squashed body.”

Last year was a poor one for snow tunnels, but Cameron is optimistic about this year’s outlook. It was a snowy winter across Scotland—and while the deluge was a headache for commuters and travelers whose trips were snarled, it’s tantalizing for the snow hunters who will hit the hills this summer, looking to savor the incongruity of straddling two seasons at once. “It’s quite odd,” Cameron says, “to be standing close to snow that might have fallen nine or 10 months ago and is still there."

Don't worry if you missed it—the entire performance is available on Facebook.

On April 22, 2018, the Sistine Chapel streamed a concert online for the first time in history.

The Sistine Chapel is most famous as a visual experience. Visitors crane their necks to see Michelangelo's frescoes, which depict various biblical scenes and and cascade over the walls and ceiling. But over the years, the chapel has also hosted a variety of musical acts, from the in-house Sistine Chapel Choir to U2's guitarist The Edge.

For this milestone—which was arranged by the digital radio station Classic FM—the choral group The Sixteen and the string section of the Britten Sinfonia performed an hour-long work called "Stabat Mater," by Sir James MacMillan. (The work is, fittingly, an old piece made new: It's based on a 13th-century hymn, and MacMillan's version premiered in 2015.)

"These great sacred places always have something special about the acoustics," the conductor Harry Christophers told Agence France-Presse. While some of this specialness may have rubbed off during the various conversions and compressions inherent in the streaming process, this did not deter far-off audiences, who flocked to the stream by the tens of thousands.

Indeed, so many people tried to tune in that many were greeted by an unholy site—an endless buffering wheel. During the first few minutes of the show, the comment section was a cascade of check-ins: "Not working in Derry, Ireland." "Not loading in Maine, USA." "Here [in] Canada just fine. Beautiful concert!"

ClassicFM is not despairing, as well they shouldn't: After all, Michelangelo didn't even want to paint that ceiling. "It looks like we had huge demand and not everyone could view it," they wrote in a comment. "However, now that the stream has ended, the video should be about to be seen by everyone."

After World War II ended, physicists kept pushing a plutonium core to its edge.

The war was over—Japan had surrendered. The third plutonium core created by the United States, which scientists at Los Alamos National Lab had been preparing for another attack, was no longer needed as a weapon. For the moment, the lab’s nuclear scientists were allowed to keep the sphere, an alloy of plutonium and gallium that would become known as the demon core.

In a nuclear explosion, a bomb’s radioactive core goes critical: A nuclear chain reaction starts and continues with no additional intervention. When nuclear material goes supercritical, that reaction speeds up. American scientists knew enough about the radioactive materials they were working with to be able to set off these reactions in a bomb, but they wanted a better understanding of the edge where subcritical material tipped into the dangerous, intensely radioactive critical state.

One way to push the core towards criticality involved turning the neutrons it shed back onto the core, to destabilize it further. The “Critical Assembly Group” at Los Alamos was working on a series of experiments in which they surrounded the core with materials that reflected neutrons and monitored the core’s state.

The first time someone died performing one of these experiments, Japan had yet to formally sign the terms of surrender. On the evening of August 21, 1945, the physicist Harry Daghlian was alone in the lab, building a shield of tungsten carbide bricks around the core. Ping-ponging neutrons back the core, the bricks had brought the plutonium close to the threshold of criticality, when Daghlian dropped a brick on top. Instantly, the core reacted, going supercritical and Daghlian was doused in a lethal dose of radiation. He died 25 days later.

His death did not dissuade his colleagues, though. Nine months later, they had developed another way to bring the core close to that critical edge, by lowering a dome of beryllium over the core. Louis Slotin, another physicist, had performed this move in many previous experiments: He would hold the dome with one hand, and with the other use a screwdriver to keep a small gap open, just barely limiting the flow of neutrons back to the bomb. On a May day in 1946, his hand slipped, and the gap closed. Again, the core went supercritical and dosed Slotin, along with seven other scientists in the room, with gamma radiation.

In each instance, when the core slipped over that threshold and started spewing radiation, a bright blue light flashed in the room—the result of highly energized particles hitting air molecules, which released that bolt of energy as streams of light.

The other scientists survived their radiation bath, but Slotin, closest to the core, died of radiation sickness nine days later. The experiments stopped. After a cooling-off period, the demon core was recast into a different weapon, eventually destroyed in a nuclear test.

While on the job, anatomist Dr. Joy Reidenberg has been escorted by police and scrutinized by nude sunbathers.

About 31 years ago, when Dr. Joy Reidenberg was a graduate student at Mount Sinai Graduate School of Biological Sciences, she climbed into a trailer, then on top of a stranded 11-foot-long pygmy sperm whale lying on its back, and “cut the midline of its throat to get past the blubber.” She parted the blubber and muscles of the 1,000-pound whale to the sides and located the hyoid bone, “which is a free-floating bone in the neck,” she says. Underneath this bone was the trophy she came to claim, the larynx, “which is a cartilaginous structure at the top of the trachea.”

She then “freed up the muscle connections that attach the larynx to the sternum and the hyoid bone.” She did the same to the tongue and walls of the pharynx. Reidenberg then cut the trachea a few inches below the larynx to release its link to the lungs. Lastly, she removed the larynx, with some attached trachea, and placed it into a plastic bag.

The night before, she had received a call from the Marine Mammal Stranding Network, now known as the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries’ Office of Protected Resources leads this effort to coordinate emergency responses to sick, injured, or dead marine mammals.

The network informed her about a stranded whale in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The specimen was headed to the Smithsonian at 9 a.m., where it would be defleshed in preparation for its bones to be added to the institution’s skeleton collection. But in the meantime it was hers to dissect. She’d just have to get to New Jersey—and quickly. Rental car agencies in New York City opened around 8 a.m. So, as soon as she got one, she drove 55 miles per hour down the highway. Time doesn’t stop for dead whales.

The Marine Mammal Stranding Network called Reidenberg because she was doing “a research project in comparative anatomy and had made an official request for anatomical specimens from dead stranded whales,” she says. In other words, she operated as an on-call dissector, ready to mobilize to the relevant beach.

There are many factors to consider once Reidenberg receives permission to dissect. Enough daylight to examine the specimen is one. Whale dissection is not an ideal night-time activity, but it can be done in the dark, with guts and all. Low tide and a potential storm are two other factors. It’s quite difficult working on a beached whale in knee-deep water while it’s raining. Will the whale lie belly up or down? Will there be construction equipment to move the heavy parts? Will it explode when opened due to gas build-up? These are the questions she grapples with. She could face all of these obstacles, some, or none at all. In the case of the Atlantic City sperm whale, there was one obstacle she didn’t factor in.

A police officer stopped her for speeding. Flustered, she stepped out of the vehicle in her white medical coat and complied with his instructions. He checked the back seat. “His face just turned ashen white, it was really weird,” says Reidenberg. A few moments before, she had heard on the radio that a body chopped to smithereens was discovered in plastic bags. Her rental car was filled with scalpels, hand knives, gloves, wood saws, and an array of gardening tools—equipment one would need to commit such butchery. The plastic bags in the back seat certainly did not help. She explained her situation and he decided to escort her to the stranded whale. Partly, just in case he was wrong.

The ensuing 30-minute whale dissection was one of the most important she’s ever conducted. “Before this, it was assumed that whales did not have vocal folds (the scientific name for vocal ‘cords’),” says Reidenberg. “After observing this whale, and also comparing with dissections of other specimens, we made a discovery: Whales did indeed have vocal folds after all. What had been written in the literature was simply wrong.”

The journey to this breakthrough whale dissection was a long and winding one. “When I was very young, I really enjoyed trying to figure out how things work and that includes living things,” she says. Her father took her fishing. While he read the newspaper, she fished. He agreed to drive her to the pier as long as she gutted all the fish—he was a bit squeamish. She spent hours looking at the gills and the innards. “I was just fascinated by what was on the inside. The big problem for my parents was keeping me away from death you’d find on the beach.”

During Reidenberg’s senior year in high school, she interned at a veterinarian office on weekends and she enjoyed the surgical work. It wasn’t until when she attended Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences that she grew disillusioned with the veterinary field. “The veterinarians were telling me that, well, you'll learn all these wonderful fancy surgical procedures but you're never going to get to use them because most people will just euthanize the animal,” she says. Reidenberg toyed with the idea of being a medical illustrator, but someone in the field told her there wasn’t much work in it. What field could marry art and surgery together?

When she met Dr. Howard Evans one summer, she found her answer. Then the Anatomy Department chairman at Cornell’s New York State College of Veterinary Medicine, Evans educated her about research in the anatomy field. “I’m a comparative anatomist,” he told her, which was the first time Reidenberg had heard of such a thing. He assigned her a research project over the summer to dissect toadfish and draw their anatomy for a fish dissection manual. After she graduated from Cornell University, she obtained her Ph.D. from Mount Sinai Graduate School of Biological Sciences and researched the comparative anatomy of the upper respiratory tract in mammals. Yet, what fascinated her throughout her evolutionary biology and anatomy studies were whales.

They had “completely different anatomy from anything else from land and they were stuck with evolutionary baggage of having to make sounds with air.” Whales breathe with their blowholes and hold that air in by closing their nostrils. Even with their nostrils closed, they can emit sound waves. It’s a pretty effective system that functions both for respiration and sound production, and to Reidenberg, that was simply incredible. There was much to learn about this evolutionary adaptation and what humans could learn by copying it.

Maybe we could have better underwater communications systems if we understand better how these animals communicate underwater,” she says. For example: “new protective devices that can be developed to prevent people from getting decompression sickness from diving,” or cure lung diseases.

Such research requires a deep dive into these giant beasts. The exact dissection process depends on the stranded whale, and can involve unexpected complications. She once dissected a whale on the nudity-friendly Cherry Grove beach of Fire Island, New York, a summer hotspot known for its LGBTQ nightlife, in front of over 5,000 people and the media. Dressed in a flowy dress and high heels, one news reporter “didn’t want to get near the whale because of course it smells terrible and the ground is full of blood and blubber and organs,” says Reidenberg. The cameraman and news reporter backed up to get a wider angle, but naked people filled the background. They argued over how close to get to the whale while avoiding showing bare bottoms in the shot. Eventually, they agreed the reporter would stand two feet from the whale carcass and put paper bags over her high heels so they could zoom in close on the whale. “I kept shaking my head and laughing,” says Reidenberg.

Even after she wrapped up for the night and drove back, “we had to navigate certain obstacles on the way out because some people had to decided they wanted to make love in the tire tracks we made coming to the whale dissection.”

In 2009, Reidenberg dissected a fin whale off the southern coast of Ireland. According to the The New York Times, she had already dissected over 400 whales when she received a call to get on the next plane to Ireland. By the time she arrived, the whale was seriously bloated with bacterial gas. “It was inflating like the Hindenburg,” she told The New York Times. “If you cut in too deep, you end up with a million sausage links all over the place.”

She and the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group suited up in their protective gear and prepared their tool arsenal for the mission. She cut some holes into the whale’s throat to release the gas, which according to The New York Times produced “a symphony of flatulence” that took an hour to dissipate. Then, she took a meat hook to climb 10 feet on top of the fin whale and spliced rows of long cuts into its side. A hydraulic excavator from a local construction company unraveled the blubber strips. Reidenberg then started to pull out the whale’s intestines, dive into its cavernous abdominal cavity to extract more organs and bones, such as a pelvis and the sacred voice box, and placed these vestiges into a container. All of this carving took two days, lots of disinfection, approximately 15 showers, and a priceless amount of research.

At, 57, she’s still learning about these animals, but she wants to impart this knowledge to generations both old and young. “Science has to spend a certain amount of their time educating the public doing outreach education because otherwise the field is not appreciated by the public and it will die out if the public doesn't down to it,” says Reidenberg. “I find that if I want to reach the public best ways to do it is with the medium of television.” In addition to TV and TED Talks, she talks about science with classes of all ages and teaches at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the New York College of Podiatric Medicine. Through this outreach, she’s cultivated an avid following of budding scientists.

She can never predict when the next call for a stranded whale will come. It might come at 3 a.m. while she’s fast asleep or in the afternoon, in the middle of her Mount Sinai lectures. The “artist of anatomy,” as Reidenberg calls herself, is always prepared for a dissection.

Did Big Gelato try to wipe out artisanal shops in the 1950s?

The signature chocolate sour cherry gelato at Vivoli, the oldest gelato shop in Florence, Italy, is made with an abbondanza of fruit, declares Silvana Vivoli. As the institution’s third-generation gelato maker, Vivoli specializes in making a distinctive stracciatella (whose secret, she reveals, is a hint of added cream) and the mandarino, which delivers a tang of citrus to the tongue. Every morning, Vivoli whips up the desserts in her shop’s kitchen, all the while remembering her father Piero’s lessons: That good gelato requires time, effort, quality ingredients, and a personal touch.

But what if gelato came in the same flavors, and without an abbondanza of anything? That almost happened just after the Second World War, when a new product, Mottarello, arrived. As the very first industrial ice cream in Italy, Mottarello wasn’t there to coexist with artisanal gelato. It attempted to replace gelato altogether—and almost succeeded. “The idea,” Vivoli says, “was to kill artisanal gelato.” As Luciana Polliotti, curator of the Carpigiani Gelato Museum in Bologna, Italy, puts it: “These were important years because it was like David versus Goliath, and David won.”

Although gelato had been invented several hundred years before the 1950s, it was originally just served for wealthy folks at banquets. Gelato didn’t become widely available to the public until the end of the 19th century. Most of these gelato shops operated as small family businesses well into the 20th century, but it became tougher to make a living hawking the dessert during the Second World War. (Once, the Vivoli family had to buy sugar on the black market, and ended up with a very expensive barrel of sand instead.) Post-war conditions for gelato shops weren’t much better, Polliotti explains, because Italians were so strapped for cash.

Throughout the 1950s, industrial ice cream—already all the rage in the U.S.—also had ambitious plans to corner the market in Italy. Polliotti says that during this tense time, sales reps approached artisanal gelato makers with a proposition: We’ll pay you to stop producing gelato and become our retailers. When they refused, non-industrial gelato suddenly—and suspiciously—began generating bad press.

By the summer of 1953, widespread claims that artisanal gelato was hazardous to one’s health were impossible to miss. According to a compilation from the historical archive of Gelato Artigianale Magazine/Levati Editori, a bevy of articles from the time emphasized that people kept getting food poisoning from gelato. “41 intoxicated near Siena by spoiled gelato,” blared one headline in Corriere della Sera (though the story notes that it just “seems” as though gelato was the cause). The same paper soon reported on a grandmother and granddaughter who both became ill after eating gelato, though they were expected to recover quickly. The very next day, Corriere della Serra broke news that 500 people had contracted food poisoning in Tivoli—an event that was blamed not on the food, but rather on the people who had handled it.

There must have been some bad gelato out there at the time—especially as this happened before many food safety innovations and regulations were ubiquitous. Yet what stood out was the singular focus on a specific food, says Polliotti. “Any kind of sanitary problem that burst out was attributed to artisanal gelato,” she explains. (That didn’t stop Audrey Hepburn from enjoying a gelato cone in 1953’s Roman Holiday, which Polliotti says “contradicted dozens of articles with one scene.”)

She also notes that the majority of damning articles appeared in Corriere della Sera and Il Sole 24 Ore, two papers from Milan. It's worth noting that the city is also the birthplace of Motta, the company behind Mottarello.

The Motta ice cream brand has since changed hands multiple times, so it’s hard to know if executives had a hand in perpetuating this negative coverage. But there’s no doubt that they took advantage of it. “As you can imagine, there will always be a friction between artisanal and industrial gelato,” says Gustavo Stante, the Italian marketing manager for Froneri (which took over the brand in 2016). What Motta realized at the time, he explains, is that there was a need for something “more innovative and interesting” for customers, and designed its ads to convey how different these products were.

One way Motta did that was by featuring doctors, clad in white coats and stethoscopes, in their advertisements. Historian Maria Chiara Liguori, who analyzed this imagery for a 2015 article in the Advertising & Society Review, noted that “instead of focusing on the taste, they kept repeating how healthy it was. One such advertisement depicts a young girl getting a check-up. Her mouth is open, with her tongue out, and a pediatrician is offering her a gelato on a stick. The accompanying text invites all doctors to visit Motta’s ice cream production plants in Milan and Naples, and take samples with them to study. The not-so-subtle message? Industrial gelato is hygienic, even healthy—unlike what artisans produce.

Another advertisement even boasted that Motta gelato is more nutritious than chicken, fish, or eggs. In that case, Liguori believes it wasn’t a slight against artisanal gelato, but rather an appeal to poorer families. “It’s a comparison I saw in many products of the time: Don’t worry if you can’t buy meat. This is the same thing,” she says. Italians are well known for being unreceptive to change, particularly when it comes to food traditions, Liguori notes. But these techniques did the trick. Artisanal gelato sales plummeted, forcing many shops to close. Several generations of families lost their livelihood, too. “It was a national tragedy,” Polliotti says.

It could have been permanent, if it weren’t for the efforts of a few key defenders. One of those people was Angelo Grasso, the owner of a big gelato shop in the heart of Milan; Polliotti describes him as a visionary. After Grasso meet Carlo Alberto Ragazzi, Milan’s chief medical officer and an internationally renowned hygienist, at a seminar in 1953, the pair teamed up to save artisanal gelato. According to Polliotti, Ragazzi was persuaded to join the effort because “he realized that an entire economic category would have been unjustly swept away.”

Gelato makers soon convened in local, regional, and—eventually—national meetings, developing a united strategy to fight back. If the concern was that gelato wasn’t hygienic, they would make sure it was as safe as possible. So they launched professional courses for gelato-makers, in an effort to ensure that best practices were in place. They encouraged meetings with health officials, and demanded testing to prove that the public had nothing to fear from eating their gelato. As Polliotti notes, they even targeted the source of the bad press directly by creating a competition for journalists writing about the nutritional aspects of artisanal gelato. Gelato makers also wore lapel pins declaring their membership in the Committee for the Defense and Promotion of Artisan Gelato. To this day, the Carpigiani Gelato Museum has a display case filled with the 1950s- and 1960s-era pins, which depict images of cones and desserts.

The industry got a boost from rapidly-improving technology, too. Companies such as Carpigiani made machines that made it not only easier and faster to produce gelato, but also possible to introduce more safety controls. Their efforts not only resulted in recovering sales, but better gelato, too. Donata Panciera, a third-generation gelato maker whose family has operated shops in Italy and abroad, remembers just how important a reputation for cleanliness meant for their business. Her family installed the most up-to-date equipment available, and communicated that to customers. They kept busy, even during gelato’s darkest days. “We worked all the time,” says Panciera, reflecting on her childhood during the 1950s.

Although Vivoli wasn’t born until after the crisis had passed, it’s something she takes lessons from even today. She says her father told her all about collaborating with colleagues from other cities to explain to the public what artisanal gelato is, and what makes it special. This has remained all too relevant lately, because so many shops that claim to be serving the real deal are just churning out pre-prepared mixes. So it’s still up to her—and other gelato makers of her generation—to keep the abbondanza alive. “A fight once in a while,” Vivoli says, “It’s good.”

In the 1950s, military accidents meant that nuclear warheads went missing.

There are objects that will inevitably get lost: socks, hats, cheap headphones, attachments to households appliances. But some things you try harder to keep hold of: your wallet, your keys, America’s nuclear warheads.

It doesn’t always work out.

In 1956, for instance, a B-47 bomber was flying from Florida to an overseas base, with two nuclear cores on board. After meeting up with another plane to refuel, it disappeared. The U.S. military never found any trace of the plane, its crew, or the nuclear materials.

When the military does lose nuclear weapons, it’s rare that their location is so mysterious. More often, planes have jettisoned weapons during in-flight emergencies, for the safety of the crew, and the high explosives built into the bombs have gone off. (Conventional explosives set off a bomb's nuclear reaction; in early designs, the radioactive cores of nuclear bombs were often kept separate, as a safety measure.) But on occasion the weapons do disappear.

Two years after the bomber went missing over the ocean, another B-47 was flying a simulated combat mission on the coast of Georgia, when a fighter plane collided with it. Both planes were damaged; the fighter pilot bailed out of his plane and landed in a nearby swamp. Before landing their busted plane, the crew of the B-47 dropped the nuclear weapon they were carrying into the water.

There was no explosion. But when the military searched the three-mile area around where the bomb was thought to land, they could find no trace of it. It’s thought that the weapon dove through about 15 or 20 feet of water and landed, nose-first, in the sandy bottom of the Wassaw Sound, near Georgia’s Tybee Island, a popular vacation spot.

It’s presumed to be there still, buried in the silt and sand. While a Congressional document from the 1960s indicates that the lost weapon had its plutonium core with it, the military says that it’s only a partial weapon. Even in that case, though, the lost warhead contains radioactive material: By the late 1950s, some weapons included a "secondary stage" of highly enriched uranium, meant to be set off by the initial reaction in the bomb's core. The amount of uranium in this type of bomb isn't publicly known.

Early in the 2000s, in response to local interest and Congressional prodding, a group of military agencies looked again for the bomb’s remains and considered what to do if they found it. The conclusion: Best to leave it in place. Unmoved, it should remain harmless; an attempt to remove it would put the clean-up crew in danger. If it did happen to go off by accident, “Even boats going over it would not even notice. They might see some bubbles coming out around them,” an Air Force representation told the Los Angeles Times.

Three new books for bibliophiles dig into the hidden human side of book collections.

A library is, at its most essential, a space that holds a collection of books. A dedicated room or building is not technically necessary. In his Book of Book Lists, recently released in the United States, author Alex Johnson offers examples of portable libraries—“sturdy wooden cases" of books and magazines that "were passed between lighthouses around the United States," for instance. He includes the library Robert Falcon Scott took on board the Discovery in 1901, when the ship left for Antarctica, with a catalogue that specified which cabin a volume could be found in. Napoleon, he writes, had a traveling collection of French classics that was ported with him to war. It included five volumes of Voltaire's plays and Montesquieu's work on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline.

But whatever form a library takes, someone had to have chosen the books in it, which reveal the secrets of heart and mind—their cares, their greeds, their enthusiasms, their obsessions.

Libraries, writes Stuart Kells, a historian of the book trade, are “human places ... full of stories.” Kells’s new book, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, offers a history that begins before the written word and follows the development of book collections through the digital age. At times, he takes a lofty view. “What exactly are libraries for?” he asks, after touching on the Library of Alexandria, medieval monasteries, erotic collections, the Vatican’s closed stacks, private collections, and university libraries, along with writers’ libraries, library fauna, and other curiosities. He takes a few stabs the answer. “Libraries are an attempt to impose order in a world of chaos,” he writes. “They are places of redemption.”

One of the institutions he features, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., provides a more concrete example of some of the many things a library can be. This one, at least, can be seen as a research center, a work of art in its own right, a mausoleum, or a bomb shelter. Starting in 1889, Henry Clay Folger, who made his fortune in the oil business, started buying up early Shakespeare folios until he had amassed one of the world’s most valuable collections of the bard's work. But when scholars asked permission to study one of his prized possessions, he had to tell them it was impossible to know which bank vault he’d stashed it in.

Before his death, Folger built a proper library to house the collection, and architecture critics marveled. The ashes of Folger and his wife, Emily, are interred in the building, and underneath is a network of tunnels that, according to Kells, the staff planned to use for shelter during the Cold War. Today, it’s not only possible to study the folios Folger collected, but to compare them side by side. The library is a monument to both to Shakespeare and the man driven to collect his works.

But if Kells wants to show that libraries are human places, he has also chosen stories that reveal their venal side. His librarians can be thieves, hoarders, or shameful caretakers. Even when they love books, they can't be trusted with them. In its ideal form, a library protects books, celebrates them, and also makes them available to a wide group of readers. In this history, any single library rarely achieves all of these goals at once. Kells tells of libraries where valuable old manuscripts are left in piles on the floor, and others that exchange old treasures for new editions. Some libraries have ornate spaces that honor the idea of books but have very little on their shelves. Other libraries and book lovers have built amazing collections but zealously keep them from outsiders. What use is a library if no one is around to read its books?

In Packing My Library, Alberto Manguel faces down that question. At his home in France, Manguel kept 35,000 books in a tower library attached to a 15th-century barn and surrounded by a walled garden. Though he says he has only a few books that a serious bibliophile would find worthy, Manguel’s collection is as large as the best private libraries mentioned in Kells's book and includes an illuminated Bible, a Spanish inquisitor’s manual, and rare first editions. For reasons never entirely explained, Manguel and his partner have to leave France, and the books in the library go into boxes. He laments its deconstruction.

Manguel’s is a personal history, and it is carefully curated. Like Kells, he offers digressions, because, he writes, when he was in the library he became “distracted by questions that are alien to my purpose.” That's part of the charm of a library—it “orders the joyful chaos of the world”—and Manguel is a charming person to explore this chaos with. His world has an air of gentility; even as he insists his library isn’t so impressive, he mentions “the copy of Kipling’s Stalky & Co. that Borges had read in his adolescence in Switzerland and which he gave to me as a parting gift when I left for Europe in 1969.” Yes, he is talking about Jorge Luis Borges, whom he met as a young man. "I used to meet Borges after school, and walk him back to his flat, where I would read for him stories by Kipling, Henry James, Stevenson," Manguel writes. He eventually took Borges's old job as Director of the National Library in Buenos Aires.

The title of Manguel’s book comes from philosopher Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library,” which was written at a disorderly moment in his life. Benjamin and his wife had split up, and at close to 40 years old he was living alone for the first time. His books had been packed away for two years. As he unboxes them, he finds himself caught in “the spring tide of memories,” which reveals to him moments of his past. For Manguel, a library has a similar purpose. “I’ve often felt that my library explained who I was,” he writes.

In Benjamin's view, a real library is always “somewhat impenetrable and at the same time uniquely itself,” as intriguing, loved, and yet unknowable as a close friend. Borges, in his famous story “The Library of Babel,” imagined a library that could hold every possible book, which the narrator calls, simply, “the universe.” The endless rooms of books drive the librarians wandering inside them to question the nature of knowledge and existence, and because the Library is infinite it is a place of possibilities. Though there is an order to it, it's impossible for any one person to comprehend.

Similarly, any good library is too large for its owner to experience whole in a lifetime. Manguel’s book is about mortality. He is getting older, and his library may never be unpacked. If a collection is boxed away, it's impossible for people to have relationships with the books, the act that endows them with meaning. But an imagined library has a life of its own. Manguel quotes his Latin teacher when he writes, “We must be grateful that we don't know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were we'd be inconsolable.” The memories of a library can be almost as powerful as the real thing. As Borges understood, imagining the true, unknowable depths of libraries' secrets is the key to their attraction.

In America, à la Nesselrode and à la Maryland are à la gone.

You don’t have to be French to know what à la mode means. Even at the humble American diner, where Gallic influence is usually limited to French fries and French dips, desserts are tagged with the term. Pies, cakes, and even pancakes and waffles can come crowned with a scoop of ice cream: in other words, à la mode.

American menus were once replete with such wording. Meaning in the fashion in French, à la mode is a relic of a time when elite diners worldwide used coded terms from classical French cuisine. Today, that system of naming has all but vanished outside of France and French restaurants.

In the 19th century, high-end restaurants in America didn’t lengthily describe their menu offerings. Instead, brief, meaningful wording indicated to diners the sauce and cooking style of their meal. According to Henry Voigt, one of America’s foremost menu collectors and scholars, people who encountered these terms on their menus quickly understood what they meant.

The terminology was vast. Meat à la Bordelaise was served with a red wine and beef broth sauce, originating from the French region of Bordeaux. As for à la Milanaise, that referred to the people of Milan’s custom of breading and frying meat. While geography was a common reference—à la Maryland meant cream and sherry sauce, often applied liberally to Maryland’s former delicacy and current state reptile, the terrapin turtle—it was not a constant. Karl Nesselrode, a Russian politician and military man, inspired an icy dessert made with chestnuts. By the end of the 19th century, chestnut-filled dishes were called à la Nesselrode.

Sometimes the meaning was obvious, as in the cases of tomatoes à la mayonnaise and thé à la Camomille, or chamomile tea. But for dishes such as salad à la Dreamland and croquettes à la Nimrod, the meaning must have been a mystery to everyone but the chef.

In the United States, this culinary code was meant for a privileged few. “Rarely were these terms self-explanatory,” writes Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food. Often, they were downright opaque. Alexandre Dumas the elder satirized the concept in 1873, compiling a list of the most unusual terms, such as soup à la William Tell, which possibly contained apples. Dictionaries existed just to explain the difference between à la D’Artois and à la Dumas. To those wealthy enough to frequent fine French restaurants, the code was handy. Davidson points out that there was no need for lengthy menu descriptions when a single word could convey if a dish was fried or served with tomato sauce.

By 1900, however, the rule of à la was in decline. Wealthy Americans didn’t necessarily know French, and restaurateurs found it necessary to print translations in English on the reverse side of menus. “By the advent of modernism in about 1910, [à la] usage was a thing of the past in the United States,” Voigt says. It was no longer the mode. When fine restaurants gained steam again after the end of Prohibition, the terminology made a limited comeback in two types of restaurants: high-end venues and expensive yet mediocre establishments. (for "a bit of class,” says Voigt.) Today, Americans are likely more familiar with the similar Italian term alla.

Ordering à la carte and chicken à la King are two more holdouts of this linguistic die-off. As for desserts à la mode, Voigt says he has no explanation for the term's hardiness, or even its origin. But, curiously, a key to its survival seems to be a transformation in its meaning: In the 1800s, “à la mode” was typically applied to beef with wine sauce (not ice cream).

Two American cities claim to be the origin of à la mode as ice cream atop dessert: Duluth, Minnesota, and Cambridge, New York. The Associated Press obituary of a Cambridge concert pianist in 1936 credited him as the dish’s inventor and popularizer. But the Minnesota press soon responded with their own claim. Perhaps the linguistic wrangling kept the name around after others fell by the wayside. Or perhaps dessert with ice cream will always be in fashion.

Local librarian Tim Devin has found hundreds of buildings that once housed utopian groups.

The building at 16 Lexington Ave looks like a lot of other Cambridge, Massachusetts houses. It's a two-unit home, with a peaked roof and a wide front porch. In the early 1970s, though, the building served a different purpose: It was the headquarters for a militant feminist group called Cell 16. Issues of their journal, No More Fun and Games, poured out of the front door and into mailboxes nationwide. The house even hosted the group's martial arts studio.

It wasn't just them. In the 1970s, Cambridge, Boston, and their environs were filled with countercultural hotspots. Wander a few blocks from Cell 16's former home base, and you'll find a whole cluster of former utopian hubs: a youth counseling center, a draft information office, the home base of a commune that wanted to buy out the whole neighborhood, and the headquarters of the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom.

All these radical places—and many more—live again in a series of zines called Mapping Out Utopia. Created by Somerville librarian Tim Devin, the series catalogs and situates hundreds of alternative schools, clinics, businesses, and organizations in the Boston area. Some, like all of the ones mentioned above, are long defunct. Others are still thriving. All fall under the umbrella of what Devin sums up as "counterculture:" groups that were trying to change the world by changing their own daily lives.

Devin came to this project because he was trying to make a small change in his own life. "I wanted to share things with some of my neighbors—tools and things like that," he says. "I started wondering how you actually do that. So I started reading about the '60s and '70s." Research led him to a national magazine, Communities, that started in 1972. "It's all about hippies, sharing, communes—stuff like that," Devin says. "They wanted people involved, so they listed all these different organizations. A lot of them were in the Boston area, which I thought was kind of interesting."

Further digging revealed similar compendiums: Alternative America; the New Woman's Survival Catalog. Some had blurbs and information; others, just names and addresses. "Being a dork," Devin says, "I started mapping them out."

Ask for the golden age of American counterculture, and most people will name the 1960s. But if that decade was all about experimentation, the '70s were the equivalent of clinical trials—"a time for the grassroots to build on what had gone before by forming more organizations, nonprofits, and businesses," as Devin writes in the zine's introduction, even if the decade formed "a bleak backdrop for all of these utopian impulses." The U.S. was in the midst of a recession and still embroiled in the Vietnam War, two events with local repercussions in Massachusetts. Unemployment in the state reached 7.3 percent in 1973, much higher than the national average. In 1970, anti-war protesters were tear-gassed by police in Harvard Square.

The area also had its own unique problems to deal with. Massachusetts was suffering from an opioid epidemic, and Boston was roiling with racist violence in response to the desegregation of the city's public schools. As Devin writes, these events inspired people to think outside the box. They also created conditions where it was possible for them to come together to do so: "All of this is why apartments and storefronts were cheap and readily available to idealistic, countercultural people and groups that didn't have much in the way of bank accounts," he writes.

Collectivity begat collectivity. "Some organizations bunked together," says Devin. "Or they had extra space, so they sublet." He points to 188 Prospect Street, an apartment building on a main thoroughfare that once hosted three different groups: a cooperative photography studio, an organic bulk food store, and an alternative school called Trout Fishing in America, after a book by Richard Brautigan. "It became this countercultural headquarters—a command center kind of place," he says.

The organizations in Mapping Out Utopia run the gamut. Some—such the Women's Research Center of Boston, which published research on equality in the workplace— took on broad issues. Others, like the Boycott Gulf Coalition, which was run out of a small room at Harvard University, were more niche. Many served particular marginalized communities, like the Fag Rag Collective, which was headquartered in Central Square and had to fight with the postal service to send out their newsletter, the Fag Rag. Some now seem ahead of their time; a few, like Clivus-Multrum USA, still seem ahead of ours. "They investigated recycling toilet water and human waste," says Devin. "That's just so forward-thinking." (Though they're no longer headquartered in Cambridge, Clivus-Multrum still sells composting toilets.)

And then there were organizations that existed mostly to help other organizations—"what I think of as 'countercultural support,'" Devin says. Some managed fundraising for their fellow groups. Others provided communal childcare, or legal advice for people trying to do things like co-own cars. "It makes sense—if you're trying to explore a different way of doing basic everyday things, then the basic everyday support mechanisms might not work for you," Devin says. "You need somebody else to back you up." (One countercultural support group, Hacker's Heaven—a do-it-yourself auto garage, where patrons rented space and tools by the hour—is perhaps the book's most famous spot. It was founded by brothers Ray and Tom Magliozzi, aka Click and Clack of Car Talk.)

There are 91 entries in the Cambridge issue, and dozens more in the Boston one. ("And that's not even all of them," Devin says. "I've since found a whole bunch more.") He's in the midst of a follow-up work focused on Somerville, Brookline, and the surrounding suburbs. Each entry contains the address, the organization's name, how long it spent at the location, and a short blurb.

It also names the space's current fate: what's there now, and the property's market value. "The punchline is, not much of that stuff would be able to be there now," Devin says. There are some holdouts—Broadway Bicycle School, a collectively owned bike shop, is still around, as is the Fayerweather School, an alternative school that was once linked to the Fayerweather Community. The Cambridge Cooperative Club, a co-op house for "people in transition," has even expanded.

But many more have moved or folded. The large building at 56 JFK Street in Harvard Square once housed a church-sponsored social justice initiative, a sustainable agriculture group called Massachusetts Tomorrow, and the group of transportation activists that defeated a massive highway project. Now, as Devin writes, it's home to "Shay's Bar; a liquor store; a restaurant named Orinoco; a lingerie store; [and] offices."

Cell 16 moved twice before closing up shop—their original space is now a two-unit house, worth nearly $3 million. It's hard to imagine paying that rent by running a feminist group and martial arts school. Greenhouse, a holistic counseling and therapy center, was paved over in favor of a parking lot, a conclusion straight out of a Joni Mitchell song. "And what does that mean, right?" Devin continues. "If you need gathering space, if you need meeting space, if you need a professional office, what happens when you can't afford to be in a city? Does the city suffer?"

Devin himself feels motivated by these erstwhile radical spaces, some of which he walks by every day. His neighborhood-level sharing system didn't quite happen. "But just looking at this stuff, it sort of normalizes the idea that you can experiment with your life," he says. "I've taken that to heart."

The same term describes two wildly different cherries.

The mention of a maraschino cherry usually conjures up one of two images: Either a bright red bead atop a scoop of ice cream, or a dark, liqueur-preserved globule submerged in a cocktail. There’s no confusing one of these cherries for the other, though. Each represents a distinctive food culture, a unique preservation method, and even a different plant species. Yet consumers and manufacturers alike refer to them both as maraschino cherries.

The story of how two wildly different fruits became known by the same name begins with the maraschino cherry’s Croatian roots. The craftspeople in Croatia’s Dalmatia region first began preserving their cherries in liqueur roughly two or three centuries ago. According to Christopher J. Jolly’s Science, Service, and Specialized Agriculture: The Re-Invention of the Maraschino Cherry, major historical sources agree that its birthplace was the town of Zadar. Here, in this ancient city on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, locals enjoyed access to traditional maraschino cherries’ key ingredients: The dark cherry Prunus cerasus var. marasca—which they brined in seawater—and the clear maraschino liqueur derived from its fermentation.

The Girolamo Luxardo company, founded in Zadar in 1821, is the best-known maker of both maraschino liqueur and maraschino cherries. The First and Second World Wars forced many Croatian farmers to relocate to Italy—so Luxardo has operated as an Italian company since 1945. There, those with a sweet tooth can still find jars of their maraschino cherries in liquor stores, with their dark contents immersed in a thick, sweet crimson syrup.

Still, these original maraschino cherries aren’t what many people, especially in the United States, have come to expect atop a banana split, or speared through with a plastic sword. So where did the contemporary maraschino cherry arise?

Cherry liqueur and preserved cherries already had a place in American cuisine as far back as 1742. That’s when The Compleat Housewife cookbook, replete with recipes for sugar-preserved cherries, cherry wine, and cherry brandy, first made its way across the pond. So when maraschino liqueur and cherries made the voyage across the Atlantic, palates were ready. As Jolly points out, confectionary stores likely peddled these imports alongside their various sweets, nuts, and liquors. Maraschino ice cream popped up in 19th-century American restaurants and, by the early 20th century, had solidified their place as a cocktail favorite. They were also ingredients in popular candies, such as the chocolate-covered cherry.

Growers and food industrialists soon wanted a piece of the action. Cherry growers in the United States favored the plumper, sweeter variety Prunus avium, and found the most suitable growing climate in Oregon. In the 1920s, Oregon State Agricultural College professor Ernest H. Wiegand developed a modern brining system for cherries that would lead to the red (and sometimes green!) hued beauties found on grocery store shelves. In her book The Drunken Botanist, author Amy Stewart describes that a key part of Wiegand’s method entailed using sulfur dioxide—which also bleached the cherries and tended to turn them into mush. Manufactures also had to harden the cherry’s skin with calcium carbonate and dye them, hence the bright colors.

That’s how one cherry splintered into two entirely different foods: The true maraschino cherries, and an industrial food product that didn’t involve the titular maraschino liqueur (due in part to Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933). Wiegand had engineered a successful product for American cherry growers, but at the time, the Italian import still commanded the market—a market that now benefited from an American fascination with fruit cocktails and fruit salads. What’s more, a 1912 ruling by the pre-FDA Board of Food and Drug Inspection decreed that only marasca cherries preserved in maraschino could carry the name “maraschino cherries.”

It’s curious, then, that the upstart cherry came to claim such a massive share of the market and usurped the very name “maraschino cherry.” But as Jolly emphasizes, the American cherry industry took advantage of protectionist political and economic trends to lobby for hefty tariffs on imported cherry products. The influence of the temperance movement, which “campaigned against the evils of European cherries soaked in liquor,” as Stewart writes, can’t be discounted, either. The true maraschino cherry lost sovereignty of its name in 1940, when the FDA ruled that any cherries “dyed red, impregnated with sugar and flavored with oil of bitter almonds or a similar flavor” were maraschino cherries.

In the decades to follow, the new maraschino cherry came to dominate the market—often serving as an effective garnish to brighten increasingly preserved and prepackaged meals on dinner tables. Yet the original maraschino cherry never went away. Luxardo and other brands of traditional maraschino cherries in liqueur exist in specialty shops, as well as craft cocktail-focused bars. For many people, however, Ernest H. Wiegand’s vibrant offering is still the only cherry in town.

We need your stories about the city's hidden corners and unusual places.

At Atlas Obscura, we're always trying to fill our growing database of hidden wonders with surprising, fascinating, and amazing places from all over the globe, and there are certain destinations where we especially need the help of our explorer community. One of the locations we want to know more about is Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Once known as the “Oil Capital of the World” thanks to its historical role in the oil industry, Tulsa is also filled with undiscovered corners and local wonders. For instance, the city is home to a pair of giant praying hands, courtesy of Oral Roberts University. There’s also the “Center of the Universe” in downtown Tulsa, a strange acoustic anomaly that acts as a public echo chamber. We're certain there are many more incredible places and experiences to be had in Tulsa, and we need your help to tell their stories!

Are you a Tulsa local, or a frequent visitor? Do you know of a little-known museum, an odd monument, or an amazing, hidden place in Tulsa that's not already included in our Atlas? Have you had an incredible or unusual experience in Tulsa that more people should know about? Fill out the form below, and thanks in advance for helping us explore Tulsa.

In 1960, a test of a Titan I missile went smoothly until the very end.

After the accident, the area around the missile silo was littered with debris—boulders of concrete, giant springs, pieces of navigation systems. The silo’s cover, made of hundreds of tons of concrete, was half destroyed. The remaining half, the author David K. Stumpf writes in Titan II: A History of the Cold War Missile Program, had launched into the air and spun 180 degrees before landing back on the ground.

One moment, the team at the new operational test facility had been on the verge of celebrating, finally, a successful trial run of the launch sequence for the powerful Titan I missile. The next, they were bracing against an explosion that destroyed the facility beyond repair.

At the end of the 1950s, the United States military began developing the Titans as part of its growing supply of intercontinental ballistic missiles. These were giant rockets, designed to fly long distances while carrying nuclear weapons. By 1960, teams at Cape Canaveral had run several successful tests of the new missiles, and a new facility, located at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, was ready to start testing out the missile under operational conditions.

By the evening of December 3, 1960, eight tests had already failed because of "minor equipment malfunctions," Stumpf writes. The team started running the procedure for readying the missile for liftoff. The aim was to bring the weapon right up to the point where it could be launched, without actually sending it off: They needed to know the missile would be ready to use in attack, if needed.

Inside the super-hardened silo, meant to be protected from nuclear attacks, the team loaded the rocket with oxidizer, a key ingredient for blast-off, and sent it up to the surface. The countdown to launch started and then—right before the signal to ignite the rocket would have been given—it was stopped. The team had met its goal. All that was left to do was return the missile back to its silo and remove the dangerous oxidizer.

But something—later determined to be an elevator malfunction—went wrong. Robert Rhodus, the test conductor for the company that had built the missile, “watched in fascination as the elevator, carrying a missile fully loaded with propellants, plummeted to the bottom of the silo,” Stumpf writes. The tanks that held the rocket’s fuel and oxidizers broke open, mixed, and exploded. The elevator structure and the launcher—tons and tons of steel that one witness later likened to “red spaghetti"—came flying from the silo as the test team ran for cover.

Despite the size of the explosion, no one was hurt in the accident: The second-set of recently reinforced blast doors held. But the newly constructed test facility was so badly damaged it wasn’t worth salvaging. Today, there’s still a giant hole in the ground, now overgrown and given over to wild animals.

The military continued to use Titan rockets as part of its intercontinental ballistic missile program through the 1980s, and this was not the only dramatic incident involving them. In 1965, dozens of people died after a fire started in a Titan II silo in Arkansas. Perhaps most famously, as the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser recounts in his book Command and Control, in 1980, a Titan II missile exploded in its silo in Damascus, Arkansas, while carrying a nuclear warhead. While the warhead inside the rocket remained in one piece, preventing a nuclear disaster, the crew working on the site did not escape without harm: One man died and more than 20 others were injured.

Competitors create a universe where everything is bright and round.

If you're really, really interested in something, there's probably a space where you can gather with like-minded people in order to do it. The Association of Lincoln Presenters just had their annual conference. The World Toilet Summit should be coming up this fall.

For the literal blowhards among us, there is the World Balloon Convention. It's been going on since 2010, and it's hosted by Pioneer Balloon Company. It's aimed at anyone who wants to up their inflatable game, including twisters, decorators, and retail party stores who want to go "beyond the 'three balloons on a string concept," as the WBC FAQ puts it.

This year's WBC was held in mid-March, in San Diego, California. According to the official website, close to 900 people attended, from 52 countries. The best of the best participated in the Convention's nine separate competitions, battling to take home titles in everything from "Large Sculpture" to "Balloon Hat."

The competitors are incredibly skilled. (Most are "Certified Balloon Artists," which means they have passed a qualifying exam.) Several categories require creating entire landscapes out of gas and latex. Incredible details are achieved with a limited palette of shapes. Sometimes the juxtapositions are funny: The winner of the "Fashion & Costume" category has reimagined a lightsaber as a long, floppy balloon. In the "Large Sculpture" winner, a tiger sports armor that, if you zoom in, looks like sausage links.

Viewing the sculptures—especially as they are presented here, on white or gray backgrounds, as if suspended in midair—you get the feeling you have entered a different universe, brightly colored and entirely free of corners. Expansiveness proliferates. Familiar characters, like Mickey Mouse, take on unfamiliar contours and textures.

It's a quiet appreciation—your heart doesn't necessarily race. But it may bounce, like a balloon touching down on a table and then lifting off again. Above all, it's a reminder that the materiality of our daily lives is not a given. The World Balloon Convention only lasts a few days. But maybe, somewhere, there's an entire Balloon World.

More photos from the 2018 World Balloon Convention are below.