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What an Enormous Fatberg Can Tell Us About How Londoners Live

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An "autopsy" on the congealed behemoth illuminates what people flush down the drain.

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This much is obvious: The South Bank fatberg is gnarly. Like its many cousins clogging other sewer pipes around London, this lumpy, goopy plug formed glob by glob—an accretion of the oils and odds and ends that residents flushed down the drain. Fatbergs are stomach roiling, nose-prickling reminders that our habits have consequences, and that “out of sight, out of mind” is a hollow promise, financially and otherwise. (Across the U.K., the cost to extract fatbergs exceeds £80 million a year.)

Taking a closer look at these festering beasts is a putrid business, but it offers clues about the private lives of people above ground. In collaboration with the local water company tasked with removing the sludgy behemoth, the British TV station Channel 4 is doing just that, with a new special called Fatberg Autopsy: Secrets of the Sewers.

Fatbergs are occasionally speckled with pieces of discernible trash—the serrated, purple-and-orange wrapper of a Double Decker candy bar peeks out from a chunk of the Whitechapel fatberg, which is currently on display at the Museum of London—but they mostly look like grayish blobs. To understand the composition, researchers have to go more granular.

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In front of Fatberg Autopsy’s cameras, teams dissected segments of the South Bank fatberg as if it were a subterranean owl pellet. In a damp-looking warehouse, they put it through the forensic paces, sorting syringes and mangled bits of plastic into trays illuminated by harsh lights. Scientists at Cambridge and the University of York also conducted mass spectrometry analysis on a wedge weighing five metric tons. Most of the fatberg’s heft came from cooking oil and grit, but the researchers detected traces of cocaine, MDMA, and salicylic acid, found in many anti-acne creams. They also found ostarine, a muscle-promoting drug banned by anti-doping agencies.

This sample doesn’t tell the whole story, cautioned John Wilkinson, a researcher at the University of York’s environment department and one of the scientists in the special. “When you put a bucket down into the sewer and bring a few milliliters of water back up, what’s in those few milliliters is not necessarily representative of what’s underneath the whole of London,” he told The Guardian. “Because you get a peak for a couple of compounds, I think it’s a bit dangerous if you use that data to draw conclusions on the whole city.” It’s also impossible to tell whether the chemicals entered the sewer through bodily excretions, or if someone dumped a bottle and flushed its contents.

The sewer may not be an entirely reliable narrator, but it does tell the story of how people live now. The special is unabashedly, gleefully dramatic, but it’s a reminder that above-ground actions have downstream consequences. Please only flush the three Ps (pee, poo, and toilet paper),” said Thames Water waste networks manager Alex Saunders, in a news release. “Don’t feed the fatberg.”


Who Keeps Track of All the Craters on the Moon?

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For generations, women have been critical to bringing order to the chaos of the solar system.

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As lunar craters go, it is a small one—a ding from some long-ago collision. At 3,000 feet deep and roughly three miles across, it sits on the Sinus Medii, from the Latin for “Central Bay,” a holdover from when early astronomers mistook the Moon’s dark volcanic plains for bodies of water. The crater itself is named Blagg, after amateur astronomer Mary Blagg. Though her work is largely forgotten today, Blagg was a pioneer in the ever-expanding field of naming every little thing in the solar system.

Women have worked in astronomy for centuries, often without recognition, as observers, number-crunchers, and innovators. In the 19th century, American Maria Mitchell studied sunspots, discovered a comet, and was appointed professor of astronomy at Vassar College. Around the same time, Williamina Fleming waxed poetic about female astronomers at the 1893 World’s Fair and recruited roughly 20 female assistants to help her analyze photographs of stars at the Harvard College Observatory. More recently, Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, was dubbed the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in helping create the groundbreaking space telescope. It is hard enough for women in the male-dominated field to gain recognition for their contributions, and even harder for people like Blagg, in a support field such as planetary naming.

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“I don’t think anybody is really going to get famous being involved in nomenclature,” says Tenille Gaither, a geologist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the assistant database manager for the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, which is today the final word on the names and coordinates of all sorts of features, from mountains and plateaus to valleys and dark spots, in our solar neighborhood. “It’s not a field in which people get renown for any kind of discoveries.”

Gaither is a current steward of a particular tradition. From the 1880s to the present, women have helped define, describe, and organize the our solar system, from long-visible features on Mars to topographical features that have only recently come into view on a Jovian satellite.


Mary Adela Blagg was born in 1858 in the English town of Cheadle, near Staffordshire. The daughter of a lawyer, her formal education ended after boarding school in London, where she studied German and algebra. When her mother died in 1896, Blagg took over the household and management of the family estate, Greenhill.

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She rarely ventured far from home, but Blagg’s mind wandered. She was good at chess, and she enjoyed solving the puzzles printed in the weekend paper. She poured over her brothers’ schoolbooks to nurture her interest in math. She also threw herself into charity work, such as tending to refugee children evacuated from Belgium during World War I.

Blagg didn’t arrive at astronomy until she was nearly 50, when she attended a lecture by astronomer J.A. Hardcastle. He was working with mathematician and stargazer Samuel Arthur Saunder to deduce the positions of lunar craters from a series of photographs captured in Paris. The researchers had grown frustrated, in part because the craters they were interested in—and other features on the Moon’s surface—went by a slew of different names.

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The solar system is vast, and the universe that provides its backdrop in the sky much more so. People have long named stars and constellations and tracked the movements of the planets, but if they wanted to look at anything in greater detail, there was, for much of human history, just one obvious target—the Moon.

Selenography—the study of the surface of the Moon—boomed around the early 1600s, when people first started seeing our natural satellite through telescopes and describing what they saw. Before powerful telescopes and spacecraft (and, eventually, visits) brought us close views, most early selenographers made their own maps, and chose their own names for the features they observed. A particular crater, for example, might have three names, and this was no help at all if one wanted to compare observations. So, in 1905, Saunder pitched the British astronomy community on a novel concept: standardization.

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As the researchers set out on the task, they thought of Blagg. She had stayed in touch after the lecture, and demonstrated herself to be meticulous and indefatigable. (She had, for instance, compiled more than 4,000 observations of scintillating stars she could see from her hometown.) Saunder asked if she would help coax the chaos into order. She happily joined the effort.

The Committee on Lunar Nomenclature first convened in 1907. Over the next few years, Saunder and Blagg studied previous maps of the Moon to create a master list of names, noting overlaps and divergences.

Widely described as something of a recluse—she rarely showed up to meetings and preferred to correspond via letter—Blagg could be quite candid. This streak was especially noticeable when she decried the casual haphazardness of her predecessors, notes historian Will C. van den Hoonaard in Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography. Her objective, he writes, “was to disentangle earlier errors and create order out of that chaos,” and she “spoke straightforwardly and did not refrain from criticizing earlier astronomers.”

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Though progress was slowed by Saunder’s death in 1912, Blagg’s collated list was published the following year. Her contribution was listed, big and bold, on the cover, and echoed in the introduction by H.H. Turner, the eminent astronomer chairing the effort. “This list is throughout the work of Miss Blagg,” he wrote. “Of her great care and thoroughness I had often heard Saunder speak, and I have had some opportunity of appreciating them at first hand during the passing of these sheets through the press.”

Since Blagg’s initial work on the features of the Moon, knowledge of the solar system and the planets, planetoids, moons, asteroids, and more that inhabit it has grown incredibly in both scope and detail. Keeping all of the significant features straight is a substantial task that now falls to Blagg’s heirs—two women, in an office in Flagstaff, Arizona.

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Given the opportunity, Gaither, one of those two women, would love to visit space. “Oh, in a heartbeat, are you kidding?” she says. “Yes. You’re talking to someone who watched Star Trek since she was eight years old and dreamed of going on the Enterprise and visiting other planets.” For now, though, her work with the Gazetteer is digital and earthbound. The spirit of space, however, is front and center in the office, says Rosalyn Hayward, the manager of the database and the other woman responsible for making sure that each facula (a bright spot) on Mercury has a name of its own. A prototype planetary rover sits in the lobby, and the place “feels like being at a science fair, because everyone has posters about their work, and there are planets hanging from the ceiling.”

As the custodians of this database—a task they must balance with their own research interests—Gaither and Hayward work with the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to triage name requests and make sure that the names given to 15,433 craters, chasmas, valleys, and other features across 42 planetary bodies (so far) are approved, unique, and organized. (The Gazetteer doesn’t name stars or asteroids. That goes on elsewhere.)

Say a researcher somewhere in the world has just spotted a previously unknown or unnamed crater on Mars and thinks it ought to have a name. She initiates the process by sending a description and image to the Gazetteer, and making a case for its scientific importance. Gaither and Hayward check to see whether it already has a name and, if the researchers proposed a name, that it’s not already taken. They then prepare a proposal and pass it to the appropriate IAU task group, made up of experts in the field—specialists on Martian cartography, for example. The task group has 10 days to review and discuss the proposal via email, and then it’s off to the working group, made up of the chairs of all of the task groups. They get another 10 days to deliberate. Then Gaither and Hayward tally the votes and, if all goes to plan, log its name and details in their big book of planetary names.

Not everything makes it through the process to earn a name. “We need them to really need one,” Hayward says. About 130 things get this distinction each year, and roughly 10 requests are denied.

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Naming keeps pace with discovery, and speeds up with each new mission and camera, probe, rover and analysis. Gaither expects another boom as study focuses on significant moons, such as Saturn’s Titan or Jupiter’s Io, which could hold more mountains or craters or crevasses. As for our Moon? “We pretty much have that well covered—humans have been looking at the Moon for centuries,” Gaither says. “As we get back more higher-resolution image data that reveal more distinct features on [other] planets, that’s when it’s going to get really fun and exciting.”

Finding names for all these features isn’t always easy. The names of towns on Earth, Hayward says, are a useful resource. Craters on Mars, for example, share their names with villages here: Aki (Japan), Alamos (Mexico), and Alga (Kazakhstan). This strategy also promotes the idea that space doesn’t belong to any one nation. By working through a name bank with options from all over the world, the IAU tries to ensure that each country has an equal chunk of (admittedly symbolic) interplanetary real estate. Researchers are sometimes disappointed to hear that they can’t name their discovery for their hometowns because other countries are due for a turn, Hayward says. “It’s hard to say, ‘Ghana is underrepresented and we need to go with that,’” she says, “but we will give [researchers] the list of underrepresented countries and let them choose something if they’d like to be involved in the naming process.”

These names aren’t necessarily permanent. A name might be stripped, for instance, when more sophisticated imagery reveals that a feature is a chasma instead of a crater—or maybe nothing at all. That was the case with Gatico. The Martian crater got its name in 1976 but lost it in 2011, when higher-resolution images revealed that it simply doesn’t exist.

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Blagg didn’t have the advantage of a digital database and analysis, but her meticulous indexes attest to her dedication and attention to detail. Her work also didn’t stop with the Moon. She studied variable stars—ones whose brightness seems to waver. With Turner, she analyzed the data on them left by late astronomer Joseph Baxendell. Their results were published in a series of papers in which Turner again wrote that Blagg deserved the lion’s share of the credit: “The great part of the work is due to her.”

She was among the first five women elected as fellows in the Royal Astronomical Society, in 1916. The IAU appointed her, Turner, and others to its lunar nomenclature committee as soon as it formed in 1919. In 1935, Blagg and amateur Czech astronomer Karl Müller published the two-volume Named Lunar Formations. It was the foundation of lunar nomenclature for three decades.

After Blagg’s death in 1944, amaetur astronomer Percy Mayow Ryves wrote of her “skill and judgement, but also originality and courage … [she] was far more than a mere amanuensis or compiler of facts.”

Blagg’s native Cheadle is trying to honor her legacy. A local society is installing a plaque dedicated to her this Sunday, on a small stone pillar near a car park—with an image of the Moon, flanked by a smattering of stars. But her most lasting memorial is a crater that will be around long after we’re all gone.

Celebrating Berlin's Typography, Before It Vanishes

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A tour of the city's most striking signs.

Jesse Simon was walking around Berlin’s Lichtenrade district one summer evening in 2016 when he had a epiphany. He’d done a lot of exploring since he'd arrived in the city four years earlier. He’d wandered through different neighborhoods and, as a former graphic designer, had noticed signs across the city: street signs, signs for public transport, storefronts. He'd even been thinking about writing a book on how Berlin's typography contributed to its visual identity. And then he strolled past a seemingly innocuous brick-fronted store.

“I came across a sign for a shop called Betten-König, an exquisite, yellow, cursive neon sign attached to the façade of what otherwise looked to be a fairly modest shop,” Simon recalls. “Something snapped into focus.” He realized that he’d been thinking about Berlin's civic and commercial signs only in terms of their function. And yet, “this Betten-König sign, which seemed somehow too grand and too glorious for its purpose, was doing something entirely different. It brought a kind of joyous irreverence to the street,” he says.

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This realization led Simon to launch Berlin Typography, a project that documents his city's typographic glories. “There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of similarly wonderful signs—highly individual, sometimes deeply quirky, often strikingly beautiful—scattered throughout the city. I had walked past them countless times, but had never registered quite how much they contributed to the character of the street and the city.”

There was another motivation for the project, too. Berlin currently has the fastest-growing property market in the world. Its economy is thriving, and as a city rapidly changes, so too do its signs. To Simon, Berlin's signs “offered a direct line to a different city, a version of Berlin that had once existed but had now almost completely vanished. I felt the need to start documenting these artifacts before it was too late.”

He began to explore Berlin anew, this time armed with a camera. “Since then I’ve been trying to cover as much of the city as possible, and the more places I visit, the more I begin to understand the patterns and themes that give Berlin’s typography its own particular character.”

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Simon now has, he estimates, around 3,500 photos of Berlin’s civic and commercial signs, and there is still much to document. “Instead of writing a book I ended up taking a bunch of pictures, which, in terms of writing, is an impressive feat of procrastination," he says. “But the text will come eventually. In the meantime, there are the images, which I hope convey something of the joys and delights of Berlin’s typographic legacy.”

Atlas Obscura spoke to Simon about typographic patterns, the difference in sign styles between the former East Berlin and the former West Berlin, and how the city’s booming property market is altering its visual landscape. You can see more of Berlin Typography on Twitter or Instagram.

What patterns do you notice in terms of typography in Berlin? For example, do certain businesses use similar styles or color schemes?

There are definitely trends visible throughout the city. Perhaps the most obvious is color: Apothekes [pharmacists] tend to have red signs (which, itself, differs from much of the rest of Western Europe, which favors green), as do butcher shops. Florists tend to be green and bakeries will often be yellow. But these are just rough guidelines, and there are always exceptions.

Something else one finds in Berlin (and in most larger German cities) is a kind of creative tension between Western European and traditional German approaches to typography. Although German uses the Latin alphabet now almost exclusively, blackletter or Fraktur scripts were dominant in the previous centuries, and the influence is still present today. German also has its own orthographic traditions and its particular variations on the Latin alphabet, specifically the umlauted letters and the Eszett (ß). Again, this is not unique to Berlin, but is definitely a part of what makes its urban typography so distinctive.

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There is also a set of typographic styles and approaches that, if not necessarily unique to Berlin, have been adopted here in a fairly idiomatic way. Cursive scripts, especially, seem to be a recurring element of Berlin’s typographic spirit. They appear painted onto glass, bent from neon tubes, and printed onto light boxes. They come in and out of fashion, but never quite disappear.

It should also be mentioned that, while Berlin has been a unified city for more than a quarter-century now, there is still a pronounced difference in typography between the former East and the former West. Probably about 90 percent of the signs in the Berlin Typography archive are from the former West. Of course the East, when it existed, had elaborate cursive neon to rival the best in the world, but after reunification it vanished quickly. Today, if you walk through the neighborhoods of the former East, it’s astonishing how little DDR-era typography remains. It would appear that, in the aftermath of what was essentially a regime change, the East was keen to divest itself of all obvious visual connections to the past.

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What do you know about the materials used for signs in Berlin, and do certain styles lend themselves to particular materials?

Pretty much any material that can be turned into letters has been turned into letters in Berlin. Carved stone, sometimes with gilded letters, was common in commercial buildings at the end of the 19th century. Painted glass was everywhere for a few decades during the first half of the 20th. Stylish neon was common throughout Europe from the '50s onward. Right now, people are busy testing the boundaries of the LED, which is bound to result in some aesthetic disasters as well as some interesting new directions.

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With Berlin's current property market, is the city's historical typography under threat, from construction or renovation?

Absolutely. The old Berlin typography is disappearing at an alarming rate. To give you an example, this very afternoon I walked past a building in my neighborhood that used to have an old insurance company sign… today there was nothing but new stucco and fresh grey paint. It’s amazing how many signs have disappeared even in the two years since the Berlin Typography project started. And the pace seems to be increasing. There have been moments when this project feels like a race against time.

Certainly the economic changes in the city are partially responsible. When old buildings are refurbished, outmoded signs are usually the first thing to go. But sadly, I think a lot of it is simply a matter of taste. If you’re a hair salon or a cafe, you probably want to look up-to-the-minute, which might mean replacing the old broken hulk of a neon sign with something more modern (if typographically less interesting). The fortunate signs find their way into the collection of the Buchstabenmuseum, a museum in Berlin dedicated to the preservation of old urban typography, and sometimes individual letters will show up for sale at flea markets and vintage furniture shops, but a lot simply disappear.

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Again, I don’t want to fetishize the past. If cities didn’t change they’d be terribly boring. On the one hand, it’s easy to get dispirited by what’s happening in Berlin. Blocks of luxury flats are sprouting in vacant lots, crumbling old buildings are being spruced up and rent-controlled tenants ushered out, scary smoke-filled pubs are being turned into indie cupcake shops, indie cupcake shops are closing due to an unsustainable business model, working-class and immigrant populations are being pushed out as neighborhoods become filled with a newer, younger middle-class, and the florists, chemists, butchers, and bakers with the grand old neon signs are retiring and taking their shops with them. As the traces of the past city disappear, the ‘soul’ of the city begins to change.

But to put a positive spin on it, what’s happening here is exactly what’s been happening in New York or London or Paris for the past 20 years. In those cities the process is already far more advanced. Because of Berlin’s unique history in the 20th century, it’s still lagging behind the other capitals, and the pace of change is perhaps that much slower. In a way it is sad that the old typography is disappearing, but it’s also inevitable. The goal of the Berlin Typography project is not to lament a vanishing city, but to celebrate the ways that good typography can make our experience of a city that much more inspiring.

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Can you share with us a couple of your favorite examples of typography in Berlin?

Betten-König. This is, in some ways, the sign that started the project and still one of my favorites. I have no idea if the neon still works, but even unlit it is completely magnificent, with its elaborate B and its squiggle of an umlaut. The name Betten-König, translated literally, means ‘King of Beds’ or ‘Bed King,’ which is a great (if somewhat boastful) name for a shop… however I later discovered that König is actually the surname of the shop-owner. Believe it or not, this image has never been posted to the Twitter account or in the blog, but the capital B has been the Berlin Typography project avatar from day one.

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Bücher. One of the incidental pleasures of this project has been discovering the extraordinary variety of approaches to the umlaut. The three umlauted letters in the German alphabet–Ä, Ö, and Ü–each offer unique challenges to the type designer, and the number of solutions on display throughout the city is a source of inexhaustible delight. The lightning-stroke umlaut here is wonderful in its own right, and also seems the perfect complement to an example of Berlin cursive at its most elegant.

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Alt-Berliner Wirtshaus. Sütterlin is a form of handwriting that was prevalent in Germany during the first half of the 20th century; it fell out of common use in the second half of the century but, as with Blackletter, is still used in signage to evoke the values of a previous age. The sign here reads ‘Alt-Berliner Wirtshaus’ although this is not immediately apparent. If you stare at it for long enough (or go to the Sütterlin Wikipedia page) it begins to make sense.

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Friseur. I’m trying to put together a selection that reflects the material and typographic diversity of Berlin, but the temptation to send nothing but cursive neon is pretty strong. Cursive neon was everywhere from Los Angeles to Moscow in the '50s, but it seems to have reached its limit of perfection in Berlin. I’ve included this one mostly because of the swoosh over the U, which is not an umlaut, but a typographical device designed to differentiate the lower-case ‘u’ from the ‘n’ which would otherwise be close to indistinguishable. As far as I’m aware, the convention was a holdover from Sütterlin, and while it seems unlikely that anyone would have accidentally misread such an obvious word, the swoosh is one of the orthographic conventions that gives German typography its distinctive character.

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Jungfernheide. Typography, like music or clothing, looks amazingly cool when it’s new. Then it goes through a period of being less cool, followed by a period of being irredeemably uncool. The cooler it looked initially, the harder it tends to fall. Yet if it can survive this last, most brutal judgmental period, it often becomes cool again. Berlin’s public transit authority, BVG, is busy replacing the iconic typography of its '70s and '80s U-Bahn stations with something closer to corporate style. We can only hope that they come to their senses before they get to the Western end of the U7, which has come through to the other side of its uncool stage brilliantly intact.

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Haus Gottes. This quietly austere, post-war church somehow managed to hit the typography jackpot. The letters are formed of iron rods, and have a formal, geometric perfection that’s hard to miss. I was, indeed, so taken with this sign that I digitized the letters and used them as the typeface for the Berlin Typography logo.

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Papier. Four or five years ago this sign still lit up, casting a green glow onto the street at night. I haven’t seen it lit up for a while now, but the stationery shop just below it still exists. Presumably when it goes out of business or the owner retires the sign will disappear. It’s an elegant sign and I’ve included it here because it is one of my favorites, but the photo doesn’t really convey what makes it great. What makes it great–and this is almost impossible to photograph–is coming out of Mehringdamm U-Bahn station and this being the first thing you see. For a brief moment, it’s like you’ve come above ground into the past. Then you look around and there is nothing else on the street even remotely like it. Everything else is new, clean, and slightly bland, which somehow makes the sign seem even more magical and otherworldly.

The Bygone Baguette Mailboxes of French Polynesia

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Like birdhouses, but for bread and pastries.

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All around the world, millions of people wake up every morning, pour themselves a cup of coffee or tea, and go fetch the newspaper. Residents on the many islands that comprise French Polynesia, though, retrieve something much more exciting. Until recently, many locals grabbed their daily baguettes, or pastries of choice, from a special mailbox.

Traditionally perched on roadsides, they aren’t like ordinary mailboxes. The bread boxes are homemade, often repurposed from metallic containers or wooden structures. Teremoana Pomare, who works with his wife at the bakery Pâtisserie Hilaire in Pape’ete, says they resemble large birdhouses. Some are short and squat, perfect to house smaller breads or pastries. Others are long enough to shield a baguette from the elements.

While fresh fruit and seafood both comprise a core part of Polynesian cuisine, baguettes have a particular place in French Polynesia due to colonialism. It’s unclear when the bread mailboxes became ubiquitous, though.

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Jean-Louis Delezenne, who previously lived on Moorea, says that he used to go out to his mailbox and pick up his baguette and coconut croissant daily—which was delivered rain or shine. If someone wanted to get their actual mail, they had to go to a P.O. box in town. The bakery where Pomare works doesn't deliver to people's homes, yet Teremoana remembers this system well from his childhood. "When I was young and spent my holidays with my cousins in the countryside, my aunt would leave the exact amount of money in the 'box' the day before delivery," he says. In the morning, the grocery car would drive by, and the baker would honk the horn to signal that the delivery had been made.

The baguette delivery system has all but disappeared throughout the countryside in French Polynesia’s larger islands, such as Tahiti—though empty bread mailboxes still fleck the roads. Some rural parts of smaller islands still use the delivery system, notes Tahiti Tourisme, as they may not have a bakery close by. Pomare likens it to the milk delivery of yesteryear, but isn't sure why it stopped. "Maybe because the speed of life changes," he speculates. "People are now always in a hurry!"

Investigating the Cold-Blooded Murder of a Long-Dead Dodo

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Who killed the flightless bird at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History?

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If you want to see a dodo, your best bet is over 6,000 miles from the source. The best-preserved specimen of this flightless bird, once native to the island of Mauritius, is found in the United Kingdom, at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. But new research from the University of Warwick tells a troubling story about the bird's demise, revealing a "violent death," likely caused by gunshots to the head and neck.

The bird was believed to have arrived in London sometime in the mid-17th century, when it was trotted out for curiosity shows of rare and unusual creatures. Eventually, the story goes, it died of natural causes, and found its way into the personal collection of John Tradescant the Elder. The bird's remains eventually wound up in Oxford.

But analysis of the head and neck by scientists showed mysterious flecks of what eventually turned out to be lead shot pellets, used in fowl hunting at that time. “When we were first asked to scan the [Oxford] Dodo, we were hoping to study its anatomy and shed some new light on how it existed," researcher Mark Williams said in a release. "In our wildest dreams, we never expected to find what we did."

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The discovery calls into question the entire history of the animal and how it made it to the museum. Either the great performing dodo of yore was shot, and the story covered up, or the bird on display, which inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland character, is another creature altogether. "There is now a mystery regarding how the specimen came to be in Tradescant's collection," Paul Smith, the director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, told LiveScience. "The even greater mystery is, 'Who killed the dodo?'"

As the only known specimen with soft tissue from which DNA can be extracted, this bird has proven a crucial object for study—to find it out how it lived, what it ate, who its closest living relatives are. This was what Williams and his team were hoping to investigate, when they micro-CT scanned the bird in Warwick, north of Oxford. But their scan told them more about its death than its life, Williams said. "This is a flightless bird, so obviously, somebody snuck up behind the poor thing and just shot it in the head," he told LiveScience. It's hoped that further analysis of the lead pellet may reveal whether it died in Mauritius, on the journey, or in the United Kingdom—a sad end for one of the last of its kind.

The Quiet Glory of Chronicling America’s Champion Trees

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One man's quest to document a nation's arboreal heritage.

Not every National Champion tree is an exhibitionist. Awarded by the nonprofit conservation organization American Forests, the accolade goes to the biggest and most majestic specimen (or specimens) belonging to each of more than 700 tree species in the United States, based on criteria such as height, “crown spread,” and trunk girth. But for every imposing oak or towering redwood, there are just as many entrants that don’t seem to merit a second glance.

Take the National Champion Florida Boxwood, for instance. It's slender, unprepossessing and, at 16 feet, barely taller than the whitewashed bungalow it overhangs in Monroe, Florida. “You would have no idea,” says the photographer Brian Kelley. “It could just be a tree.” But when you mention the tree’s secret, people suddenly begin to see its hidden wonder. “The instant that you tell them that it’s the largest of its species, people are like…” He adopts an excited whisper: “What!”

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Kelley is a commercial photographer based in Brooklyn, New York, but this summer, he is embarking on a mission: to chronicle and archive each of these Champions. He’s bought a transit van and has begun converting it, “so I can live out of it,” he says. “I’ll just be traveling around the U.S. photographing trees for the next year.” So far, Kelley has snapped around 14—less than two percent of the estimated total. Finishing this archive in even the next decade is ambitious. “If I start right now…” He does some calculations aloud. “I have to find a tree every four and a half days for the next ten years.”

Each National Champion is recorded on a sweeping register, updated every few years by volunteers around the country who keep tabs on the trees in their city parks, college campuses, and backyards. Working out exactly which one to crown king is a finicky task: Trees are each awarded points for their various size markers, leading to some co-Champions, and others in close second place. The register is specific, but deliberately vague about the trees' locations, to protect them from on an onslaught of people who want to love them a little too much.

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Now in his early 30s, Kelley is mild-mannered and smiley, with sand-colored hair and a quiet East Coast American accent. At a presentation at the City Reliquary’s idiosyncratic Collectors Night, held at the New York City Fire Museum, his final slide, in black text on white background, said simply: “thank you :)” But a gentle exterior belies an almost monastic focus and patience: Kelley is a collector, who spent six years amassing and archiving more than nearly 3,000 New York City Subway artifacts. It’s not a childhood passion, he says—he wasn’t a kid with a fastidious rock collection or a laminated catalogue of baseball cards—but with the MTA paraphernalia came what he calls “more like an obsession” with archiving. His collections include National Parks Service brochures and patches; Smokey Bear ephemera; and, now, the country’s most magnificent trees.

It all started two and a half years ago, when Kelley traveled across the United States with friends. “We ended up in the Pacific Northwest, around Seattle, Olympic National Park, and Northern California,” he says, at the opposite side of the country to where he grew up. With most East Coast big trees having been logged hundreds of years ago, to see trees that were “3,000 years old, 24 feet in diameter, you know, 300 feet tall” was a revelation. “It was just mind-blowing,” he says. “And once I find something I really like, I just kind of go all in on it.”

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He became fixated on the trees, he says, “doing research, finding photos of these big trees, looking up photos of logging, reading as many books as I could. I went down that rabbit hole.” Frantic googling eventually delivered him to American Forests, and in turn to private funding for the first year of the project. Incredibly, though the Champion Tree register has been around since 1940, there’s no photographic record to accompany these 700-odd trees. “They had all these numbers, they had all these locations, and all they had were cell phone photos, at best,” he says. “They just didn’t have anything that was a really meaningful or beautiful image, at the highest resolution possible, to represent what a species of tree can live to be.”

So Kelley is stepping into the fray. It’s a personal project, but he’d like it to one day be part of the Library of Congress, as a record of the country’s arboreal heritage. A model for Kelley is the work of Edward Curtis, an American photographer who spent decades documenting Native American people and their ways of life. In the introduction to one 1907 volume, Curtis described the reasoning behind his project: "The information that is to be gathered ... respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost."

“That’s kind of what I would love to be able to do with this project,” Kelley says. “In a way, dedicate my life to it.”

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To shoot the trees, Kelley eschews digital, instead using four-by-five film for the highest quality images possible. “So I have the tripod, I have the thing over my head, I’m shooting it,” he says. “Maybe it’s going to take me three hours to shoot one photo, because I’m waiting for the light.” It’s slow, meticulous work, with the average photo costing anywhere from $25 to $50, “which is a lot, once you multiply that times 800.” But a systematic slowness is necessary, he says, and gives the trees the respect they deserve. “If you’re standing next to a tree that’s 2,000 years old, and you go there, and you snap a couple of photos and leave… That’s, like, disrespectful. You have to give this thing time.”

He’s comfortable, too, with the idea that his archive may be out of date within days, or even hours, of shooting, with storms knocking down branches or other trees usurping the Champion title. “I think that’s kind of the beauty with archives. I don’t think you’re ever fully done,” says Kelley. This archive, he adds, is not supposed to be a finished work—but “mostly just to represent that tree at that moment in time and space.” (The work in progress is currently hosted on Instagram.)

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Sadly, it’s not clear how many of these trees will exist in the centuries to come. “Species are dropping out left and right,” Kelley says. “And that’s another reason why I’m doing the project—to show people that these are here and to inspire the youth and general public to pay attention and realize the importance of forestry, and forest conservation.” He mentions the ecologist Aldo Leopold’s concept of “land ethic,” and the complicated relationship between being a consumer and being a destroyer. In essence, he says, he’d like the project to remind people that they should think of themselves as guardians, and of “the respect between man and land—that you are not the owner of the land, you're merely part of it.”

Kelley hopes to start his journey sometime in the middle of June 2018—six months driving through California, Oregon and Washington, and then the winter in Arizona. Mostly, he says, he expects to be alone on the road. “I’m trying to figure that out with my girlfriend right now,” he says, laughing a little. “It’s not the funnest conversation. But it is something I think is very important. Everyone should have a thing that they want to do. The day I met her, I told her I wanted to do that project. So, for it to actually come to fruition... You know, I can't not.”

The Puzzles and Pitfalls of Reconstructing the Largest Ever Land Mammal

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Piecing together a giant prehistoric rhinoceros is as hard as it looks.

Around 35 million years ago, long after the last dinosaur had laid its final egg, the world began a period of sudden cooling. Forests and grasslands variously shrunk and swelled; marine life spread out into more distant seas. The outlines of the world’s present-day continents were already in place. And mammals, at once alien and familiar, ruled the world.

Though by this point, mammals had been on earth for well over 150 million years, many still appeared decidedly primitive, as though whatever made them was still figuring out precisely how to do it. Gloriously wonky carnivores with mouths full of snaggle-teeth shared a planet with giant three-toed herbivores, who had horse heads, sloth bodies, and the knuckle-walking gait of modern gorillas. But the largest of these peculiar beasts dwarfed them all, and perhaps every other land mammal that has ever lived.

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These are the things we know for sure: Paraceratherium was an early rhinoceros, at a time when there were many. It was large, even enormous. It had four legs and one head, bore live young, and ate plants. But trying to create a more detailed picture of this long-extinct animal means venturing into contentious territory. Paraceratherium was big, certainly, but how big—the size of five modern rhinos, or 15? Was it gracile and equine, or built like a stonking, herbivorous tank? Did it have the stubby ears of modern-day rhinoceroses or an elephant’s billowing lugs? Paleontologists do have answers to these questions, but they don’t always agree with one another on exactly what they are.

When it comes to dinosaurs, says the paleoartist and paleontologist Mark Witton, scientists are fascinated by proportions and “life appearance” and will regularly critique one another’s reconstructions. But the same doesn’t always apply for prehistoric mammals. “You get away from dinosaurs and there's just not the same zeal for understanding what these things looked like,” he says. “People just haven't done that work for Paraceratherium—so there's about six different competing hypotheses about what this thing looks like."

Precisely why these questions remain so contentious is complicated and multifaceted, involving detailed scientific arguments, office politics, and national identity. Paleontologists have studied this animal for over a century, yet questions still permeate, for reasons nearly as complicated as the puzzle of reconstructing an entire extinct rhino from a few bones.


In 1922, the American Museum of Natural History sponsored the naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews to make the first of a few grand, fossil-hunting tours of China and Mongolia. Andrews was a swashbuckling, Wisconsin-born explorer, who got his start at the museum as a janitor in the taxidermy department. He then travelled the world as a naturalist, hunting for beasts both recently and anciently deceased. (He may or may not have been the inspiration for Indiana Jones.) This trip, writes the paleontologist and author Don Prothero, was the “biggest scientific expedition ever to leave the United States.” Andrews, fellow fossil-hunting veteran Walter Granger, and their team hit the road with 75 camels, three cars, and two trucks, determined to find some of the most important fossils the world had ever seen.

That determination paid off. The trip reaped “a litany of important finds,” writes the science reporter Joseph Wallace in A Gathering of Wonders: Behind the Scenes at The American Museum of Natural History. These included “the theropod dinosaurs Velociraptor and Saurornithoides; the bizarre, beaked Oviraptor; the early horned dinosaur Protoceratops; armored Pinacosaurus, and others.” They found the fossils of mammals small and large, and “dozens of dinosaur eggs, many neatly arranged in nests.” But the first great find, and “the one that proved that the Gobi was more than a bowl of sand,” was Paraceratherium, which the museum’s president would later dub Baluchitherium grangeri, after Granger. “It was fossil hunting de luxe,” Andrews wrote in his diary on the day of the discovery, “and we laughed & sang for our hearts were light.”

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At the time, America was experiencing a kind of paleontology madness for all things prehistoric. Andrews’s many expeditions were breathlessly chronicled in the New York Times, with one 1922 headline promising a story in which: “Cameras Amazed Natives; Motor Outran a Wild Ass; Sandstorm Brought Peril; Priceless Bones Found.”

There are a few reasons for this American enthusiasm, says the historian Chris Manias, and why more money was being funneled into paleontology in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Americans didn’t have the galleries, monuments, and architectural heritage of the Old World, and seem to have suffered a kind of inferiority complex as a result. Instead, Manias says, they turned to nature, and to the glory of the American environment, with its “greater wonders and​ more impressive things than​ in the Old World,” to make their mark on the world stage. National parks were created; American nature was celebrated. In turn, American scientists began to take an interest in paleontology.

With more funds, Manias says, American paleontologists could unearth “very, very impressive dinosaurs”—far more impressive than the shrimpy specimens found by their European colleagues. “It became this science where Americans were really making a contribution and an impact, over and above what's being done in Europe." And it didn’t matter that these dinosaurs were being found far away from American soil. “In terms of their pronouncements, they do actually literally say, 'Right, we're​ taking the Stars and Stripes to Mongolia and​ taking that material back,’” Manias explains. These were American discoveries abroad, to be brought home and celebrated by fellow patriots.

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Where American explorers weren’t the first to uncover a species, their discoveries were often the most impressive. British and Russian geologists and paleontologists had been finding scatterings of Paraceratherium bones across Kazakhstan and Pakistan for more than 50 years before Andrews and his team arrived. But their discoveries were often poorly preserved, badly excavated, and incomplete.

The upshot? No one was quite sure what the bits they had found were, or how they fit into the landscape of earlier discoveries. A slew of names, and presumed species, ensued—Aceratherium; Paraceratherium; Indricotherium; Baluchitherium; Dzungariotherium. These days, paleontologists mostly agree that all of these mammals should share one name—Paraceratherium—though both Indricotherium and Baluchitherium are still used with confusing regularity, and there are many who contest that Dzungariotherium, whose teeth were first found in China in the 1970s, is an altogether separate genus.

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In 1923, the American Museum of Natural History’s president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, attempted the museum’s first reconstruction of Paraceratherium. On their travels through Mongolia, Granger and Andrews had recouped a huge, near-complete skull, with molars the size of a human fist, and leg bones “like the trunk of a fossil tree,” Andrews wrote in The New Conquest of Central Asia. But that was all they had: The rest of the body had been weathered away over tens of millions of years, “and now lay scatted on the valley floor in a thousand useless fragments.”

From these broken bits, Osborn assembled a recognizably rhinoceroid rhino: large, stumpy and heavyset, with a hump on its back and a bloated behind. Later that year, as more fossil material became available, he revised it: The caboose remained the same, but the front end now had the long neck and pouting lips of a present-day camel.

As paleontologists acquired still more material, the reconstructions required refinement—so, in the mid-1930s, Granger and fellow paleontologist W. K. Gregory produced two more. By this point, it was near-certain that Paraceratherium and Baluchitherium were one and the same, yet the AMNH continued to refer to it as they had in extensive publicity following Andrews’ return: Baluchitherium, or the Beast of Balochistan. “From what we know of the politics at the American Museum in the 1930s,” Prothero notes, in his book, “their boss, Henry Fairfield Osborn … would probably not have been happy to see a genus he’d discussed frequently and heavily publicized disappear into synonymy.”

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Granger and Gregory’s Beast, drawn by the museum’s department artist, Helen Ziska, was somewhere between Osborn’s two iterations. It had the same chunky torso, but on longer, more powerful legs, more suited to running across a domain likely up to 400 square miles in size. Unlike Osborn’s second drawing, its neck was thick and unwieldy. These drawings have often been cited as the starting point to estimate the mammal’s mass and size, with some scientists suggesting it may have weighed as much as 34 tons, and been over 25 feet from nose to tail.

There are many problems with this appealingly monstrous mammal. With only six neck bones at their disposal, and no particular knowledge of the structure of the ribs, Granger and Gregory based their ribs off the modern-day Indian rhino, and then scaled them up to fit. In fact, this technique seems to have filtered out to their approach more generally: Faced with a dearth of complete skeletons, Granger and Gregory took different-sized Paraceratherium bones from collections around the world and then scaled them up to fit their design.

Nowadays, it seems unlikely that Paraceratherium could have been as large as Granger and Gregory hoped. “It’s a very peculiar monster,” says the paleontologist Mikael Fortelius, who published an influential paper debunking the reconstruction in 1993, in which he decried this reconstruction as “a highly speculative creation indeed,” and claimed the animal was probably around half the mass originally thought. Most scientific evidence seems to suggest that there’s a maximum size of about 20 tons that mammals can reach before they collapse under their own weight, Fortelius says. But it’s not clear why the same doesn’t apply to dinosaurs, the largest of which weighed as much as 70 tons, suggesting that their skeletons may have been subtly, but crucially, different to our own mammalian bones.

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There are other downsides to being exceptionally large. Very big mammals, like elephants, have an achingly long gestational time—breeding, when it happens, is slow and high-risk. On top of that, Fortelius says, “mammals get into trouble when they are large because they can't cool down very easily and they generate a lot of heat from fermentation of food in the stomach.” The sheer scale of dinosaurs beggars belief for that reason too, though Fortelius wonders whether they staved off overheating with “bird-like lungs, with a much more efficient flow of air, for example, and maybe they had other tricks as well that we don't know about."

Of course, little of this would have been known to these early paleontologists. Without soft tissue or even a complete skeleton, guessing the animal’s mass and makeup was a well-intentioned stab in the dark. It’s not surprising that so many of the reconstructions that emerged over the following century are quite different, says Manias. “The way that you put the creature together can be very, very different depending on your basic assumptions of what this thing is”—and whether that thing most resembled a giraffe, horse, rhinoceros, or okapi.

But there may have been other factors that contributed to the series of supersized monsters that trotted out of the AMNH. "In the early reconstructions, and particularly the ones which are coming out of New York, there is very much a desire to make sure that this is the largest land mammal that ever lived,” says Manias. The expeditions were, after all, “about aiming to get the most dramatic and the most exciting specimens,” with funding often tied to equivalently sensational discoveries. “Making sure that this is the largest thing ever is really, really significant for their research and for their entire fundraising activities."


In the decades since, around half a dozen different designs for Paraceratherium have emerged from the paleontological woodwork. Some are slender and languid, and resemble horses. Others, like the 1959 reconstruction by the Soviet paleontologist Vera Gromova, have a long neck almost like a brontosaurus. These days, most paleontologists seem relatively comfortable with the idea that Paraceratherium was much smaller than original iterations of the early 20th century, with a long neck and powerful legs. It was large, certainly, and may have averaged between 10 and 15 tons, but a far cry from the 60,000 pounds that Osborn, Granger, and Gregory had in mind all those years ago.

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By the 2000s, the world had become accustomed to a fairly standard depiction of Paraceratherium (big boned, short-lipped, small-eared) immortalized in the BBC miniseries Walking With Beasts. But in 2013, the paleontologist Don Prothero published the book Rhinoceros Giants: The Paleobiology of Indricotheres with a striking illustration on the cover. This animal had a familiarly sinuous neck, with a torso and legs to match—but its head was entirely different. Instead of the camel-like head, Prothero posited, Paraceratherium’s face was more like an elephant, with lips that flared into a short trunk and big ears that were frilled like a scallop shell.

At a first glance, Prothero’s reasoning for the ears seems sound: Big mammals get hot, big ears help big mammals cool down. That, at least, is why elephants have them. But as a paleoartist also trying to figure out what Paraceratherium might have looked like, Mark Witton isn’t convinced that elephants are the best model for paleontologists. “The punchline there is, is that elephants are actually really terrible at keeping cool,” he says. “Their thermoregulation really stinks." If you’re going to take any living animal as your exemplar, he says, rhinos are are a more obvious bet—and they simply haven’t developed ears of that size. “I think that's that's quite telling."

But he is more accepting of the idea that Paraceratherium may have had a short trunk, or a long proboscis, like a tapir’s. Even when the soft tissue is long since perished, you can often tell when an animal has had a trunk or a proboscis by the shape of its skull, Witton says—how the bones above the nasal incision are shaped, for instance, or how far back into the skull it goes. “What we see in the big skulls of Paraceratherium is a lot more like that of a tapir than it is, say, like an elephant,” he says. With its big feet planted firmly on the ground, this enormous, hornless rhinoceros may have used its proboscis almost like hands, holding the branches of long-extinct trees still as it stripped the leaves off with its teeth. But plausible as it seems, Witton wrote in a blog post, it remains to be seen whether these proboscis will catch on in future reconstructions: “The reality of giant indricotheres [another term for Paraceratherium] with dangly noses may seem hard to swallow for those of us used to shorter lipped versions.”

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Witton’s own reconstruction, from 2016, does incorporate this dangly nose. His creature is lean and muscular, with pointed ears and a long, tapering proboscis. But even with the wealth of information we now have about Paraceratherium, how much it could have weighed, and what it might have looked like, he says, it’s still quite hypothetical: “In science,​ it's acceptable to say, 'We don't know, this is a grey area.’ But as an artist,​ if you're commissioned to reconstruct something, you can't leave anything out. You can't leave a question mark where the neck is. You've just got to do your best." Two years on, he says, it’s a little out of date, and there may be other reconstructions around that take into account more recent work on the animal.

But the puzzle remains a challenging one. The animals are huge and the fossils are fragmentary. “You're talking about​ building composite skeletons,” he says, where bits of one animal are applied to bits from another specimen. You might marry half the front of one animal to the back end of another, for instance, and scale them according to the upper limb bones. “But then you've got things like the neck, and how long was the neck and how big is the skull compared to the rest of it. It all starts to get quite complicated, really," Witton adds. And for non-paleontologist artists, a wealth of misinformation around the animal does little to help researchers. To this day, the AMNH’s enormous exhibit uses the 1935 reconstruction many have decried as impossible. (The AMNH, when asked for comment, said they had a more up-to-date model of the animal, most recently exhibited in 2009.) And much of the most important scholarship is still locked away in hard-to-access journals.

Witton would like to see a rounded analysis of the reconstructions that have come before, and perhaps even an attempt at a definitive Paraceratherium. “This is a pretty popular fossil, mammal,” he says. “Lots of people are interested in this thing, it gets a lot of publicity, when people are talking about the extinct mammals, because it's the biggest land mammal we've ever had.” And while museum exhibits may be expensive to alter, he says, “it’s not difficult to change things on paper. But for Indricotherium, that just hasn't happened." Until it does, many conflicting Paraceratheriums, with as many different names, faces and shapes, continue to coexist, stomping around in the hypothetical Oligocene landscape.

The U.S. Once Dropped Two Nuclear Bombs on North Carolina by Accident

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By sheer luck, neither detonated.

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This week we’re telling the stories of five nuclear accidents that burst into public view. Previously: The “demon core” that killed two scientists, missing nuclear warheads, what happens when a missile falls back into its silo

In 1961, as John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, Cold War tensions were running high, and the military had planes armed with nuclear weapons in the air constantly. These planes were supposed to be ready to respond to a nuclear attack at any moment. If the planes were already in the air, the thinking went, they would survive a nuclear bomb hitting the United States.

But one of the closest calls came when an America B-52 bomber dropped two nuclear bombs on North Carolina.

In January, a jet carrying two 12-foot-long Mark 39 hydrogen bombs met up with a refueling plane, whose pilot noticed a problem. Fuel was leaking from the plane’s right wing. The wing was failing and the plane needed to make an emergency landing, soon. But before it could, its wing broke off, followed by part of the tail. The plane crash-landed, killing three of its crew. (Five other men made it safely out.)

In the plane’s flailing descent, the bomb bays opened, and the two bombs it was carrying fell to the ground.

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As it fell, one bomb deployed its parachute: a bad sign, as it meant the bomb was acting as if it had been deployed deliberately. It started flying through the seven-step sequence that would end in detonation. The last step involved a simple safety switch. When a military crew found the bomb, it was nose-up in the dirt, with its parachute caught in the tree, still whole. As the Orange County Register writes, that last switch was still turned to SAFE.

The second bomb had disappeared into a tobacco field. Only “a small dent in the earth,” the Register reports, revealed its location.

It took a week for a crew to dig out the bomb; soon they had to start pumping water out of the site. Though the bomb had not exploded, it had broken up on impact, and the clean-up crew had to search the muddy ground for its parts. When they found that key switch, it had been turned to ARM. To this day, it’s unclear why the bomb did not go off.

The crew didn’t find every part of the bomb, though. The secondary core, made of uranium, never turned up. Today, the site where the bomb fell is safe enough to farm—but the military has made sure, using an easement, that no one will dig or erect a building on that site.


This Scientist Explains Complex Concepts With Sushi

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Sashimi meets science.

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By day, Janelle Letzen is a postdoctoral research fellow in clinical psychology at Johns Hopkins University. There, she researches the sobering subject of chronic pain. But in January of this year, Letzen decided to combine science with her hobby: sushi art. Using brightly colored tuna, avocado, and "krab" meat, her Instagram account the_sushi_scientist visually explains topics ranging from neuroscience to geology.

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Her sushi-making habit began in 2017 as a New Year's resolution to learn a new skill. She settled on sushi, but as an edible medium for art. It wasn't long before she fell in love with it. She recalls thinking that her two passions, science and sushi, could be combined. On Instagram, she began explaining neuroscience topics with fish and rice. Cucumber rolls stand in as synaptic terminals, and short videos of sushi rolls darting around a plate explain subjects such as how neurons chemically communicate.

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Her work is part of a larger movement, Letzen explains. Researchers and teachers are using what she calls "scienstagrams" to inform audiences visually. Letzen and other "science communicators" make science approachable and understandable. In this day and age, Letzen says, that's especially important in a world of abundant information and misinformation. She believes that her followers are mostly medical professionals and students interested in biopsychology and neuroscience, her own fields of study. "But I'm also trying to target more informal learners as well, by making science more tangible," she says. Professors have been using her work to explain concepts to their students, "which has been great."

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Recently, Letzen began inviting other scientific contributors to express their work through sushi. For "Brain Awareness Week" in March, neuropsychology post-doctoral fellow Aliyah Snyder shared her knowledge on concussions on the_sushi_scientist, and Letzen constructed a video of a sashimi brain getting a concussion. Last week, cave scientist and PhD student Gabi Serrato Marks captioned a post about cave stones (made of sushi, of course). The study of cave rocks formed by dripping water, Marks explained, can provide clues about ancient climate change.

My name is Aliyah Snyder (@clarissa_cheddarbiscuits), and I'm a neuropsychology post-doctoral fellow where I see patients and do research as part of the UCLA Steve Tisch BrainSPORT Program. My research focuses on how to improve concussion recovery through exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy. https://www.uclahealth.org/brainsport/ * A concussion is a type of mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) that occurs when the brain is jostled in the skull as a result of a biomechanical force (e.g., hit from another person/object). There are 2 stages of injury, the primary impact and a secondary injury from the stretching and shearing of neural tissue. Energy is needed to repair the stressed brain cells, which diverts resources away from supporting normal brain function. This results in the signs and symptoms of a concussion, including cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physical changes.. * Contrary to what many people think, a concussion is not a "brain bruise" because the brain is not bleeding. If clinical scans do detect blood, then the injury is generally considered to be a moderate or severe TBI. Like a bruise though, a concussion will normally get better on its own without lasting damage. * Finding a balance between physical/cognitive rest and returning to normal life after a concussion is tricky. Research shows that playing sports through a concussion may prolong your recovery. But remaining inactive and avoiding cognitive/physical activities after a brief period of rest can also contribute to persistent symptoms. * One of the biggest concussion myths is that you shouldn't sleep after the injury. While it is important to be immediately evaluated by a medical professional, avoiding sleep will only worsen concussion symptoms. * There is very little agreement in the scientific community about the role of concussions in disorders like chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). While some studies show increased risk of CTE in football players, others demonstrate that rates of dementia in players are not significantly higher than the general population. * Learn more about concussions and mTBI from an excellent explanation on the @cdcgov website!

A post shared by The Sushi Scientist (@the_sushi_scientist) on

Questions and even debate flourish in the comments section. On a post about hallucinogenics, accompanied by brightly-colored sushi rolls on a holographic plate, a commenter asked Letzen to acknowledge the efficacy of psychedelics such as MDMA for therapeutic reasons. So Letzen reached out to an expert on the topic, and then updated the text "to improve that post."

There is one question, however, that Letzen receives over and over: What happens to the sushi after it's photographed? The answer is simple. "I'll eat it," Letzen says.

Your Best Ideas for Dealing With Minnesota's Rogue Bog

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Atlas Obscura readers offer creative solutions to a floating menace.

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In May, Randy Tesdahl, of the American Legion in Minnesota, is hoping to chain and tow a massive floating bog. The bog in question has been moving around North Long Lake for months now, creating all sorts of havoc for local residents. The four-acre tonnage of plants and peat has crashed through residential docks and destroyed boat lifts during its travels, and at this point, something needs to be done.

Tesdahl's plan (read all about it here) to relocate what's been dubbed the "Great Beast of North Long Lake" to a more permanent, safer home is as ambitious as it is homegrown. Will it ultimately work? Minnesotans will have to wait a bit longer before they find out. In the meantime, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to send us their ideas for how to deal with the rogue bog, no matter how outlandish.

Our readers suggested a wide and wild variety of solutions to the problem of a dangerously floating bog. Some dreamed up complex plans to move it to a different location; others were in favor of destroying it. An overwhelming number of respondents want to use it to create whiskey. Oh, and then there were those who want to worship it.

We received hundreds of responses and can't share them all, but we've compiled our favorites below.

Science It

"Use a tug boat or motorized craft to pull the bog into a particularly polluted waterway or body of water, to use for heavy metal or pollutant remediation. The plant life (rhizomes are adept at metal uptake) of the bog can be used to filter shorelines and the peat can then be processed and recycled or burned/contained. The floating bog can be replicated and used for wetland remediation."—N.M. Bulger, Buffalo, New York

"Take it apart with a dredge. You could also winch/anchor it to the shore, and take it apart using an excavator."—Erik Lindroth, Brainerd, Minnesota

"Anchor it in shallow water and attach it to natural barriers (natural ports) that are heavy in vegetation so that they can act as a natural anchors. The introduction of trees (non-invasive and indigenous) with deep roots could be implemented on the island so that they can anchor their roots in the shallow waters and the island will gradually secure itself there. Another option would be identifying the wetland areas, in the high rain season when the wetlands are flooded the floating island can be transported (floated) high inland and anchored there. When the water is low, the island will settle down on the ground where it can be permanently secured away from the main river stream."—Bernard Carabott, Malta

"I'm not an engineer, nor an environmental specialist. I wonder about the feasibility of breaking it up, grinding it down and composting it over time? The compost could then be sold for local benefits, and shoreline improvement projects? Of course I'm not sure what removing it altogether would do to the lake’s ecosystem either."—Shane Spencer, Carmichael, California

"Can't destroy it. Find a bay if possible, find out prevailing wind direction, put in a spot where it’ll likely stay. Anchor it in place with concrete pylons/telephone poles on the edge of the bog, 15 feet apart. If engineers can sink concrete pylons for a megabridge in a river, they can anchor a floating bog raft in place."—Dan, Minneapolis, Minnesota

"Surround and or cover the bog with a net which is tethered in multiple places to the lakeshore and poles can be driven through the bog into the lake bed. The live elements of the bog will grow through the net, maybe even reintegrating with the shore in time. The spacing of the mesh and the type and shape of the material used would have to be researched to avoid creating a trap for wildlife and lake users. Reintegration with the shore could be assisted by the planting of selected deep root vegetation."—Ian Mann, Australia

"Concrete blocks and long cables to anchor it in a desired location to create waterfowl nesting habitat."—Vincent Butrock, Seattle, Washington

"Dump tons of lime on it to increase the pH drastically, and it will die."—Bill Cabrera, Pennsylvania

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Use It

"Getting the community together to help take care of this thing is the way to go. Maybe make an event out of it. People cooped up all winter long are itching for something fun to do. Have bounce houses, food, games, etc. and invite anyone and everyone to come out and hack it up into smaller pieces. Have prizes even for biggest piece removed, most creative way to remove it, the most weight, etc. A lot of smaller pieces are easier to deal with than one giant one. Once removed from the water, you can haul it away some place it will no longer cause a threat."— Janine Caswell, Syracuse, New York

"Attach some anchors to it and plant it in the middle of the lake because it seems like there are no islands there. Build a small house and turn it into a state park or nature reserve. Maybe just have one anchor so it's just spinning on an axis slowly and peacefully. I'm thinking of those rotating houses. Having an entire island that rotates could be really peaceful and cool."—Daniel Cerrato, Peekskill, New York

"Declare it a micronation: Bogland. Anchor it to the center of the lake, issue visas to visitors/tourists. Sell souvenirs and donate money to the local people affected by the bog."—Mehdi Rizvi, Italy

"You know how music festivals always leave the land they're on totally destroyed at the end of the weekend? It gets so bad at Glastonbury that they have to take an off year every now and then to let the land recover. Minnesota should arrange a super exclusive, luxury music festival to take place on the floating bog. Invite a bunch of wealthy tech bros and Instagram beauty bloggers and charge $10,000 a head! Give the money to the community to repair the damage that the bog created, then once all the rich boring people are done listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers or whatever, the bog will naturally dissolve from the havoc wreaked by the festival-goers. Still better than Fyre Fest, probably."—Suze, New York City, New York

"Many goats with water wings so they can concentrate energy on eating. Recorded dog barking on shore to keep the goats in the bog."—Daryl Hallquist, Montana

"It sounds like the bog is large enough that it would support human activity on top of it. My idea? Attach a floating dock to it and build temporary structures on it as a showcase for housing and buildings in flood-prone areas, or where building conditions are unstable. Have a "pop-up" food stand there and let people wander the island and look at different sustainable temporary building solutions, and run a ferry service from Brainerd (a summertime tourism destination in MN) up to see it. Use this unique situation to showcase building solutions for more common problems."—Moshe Baruch, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Fertilize It

"Scoop it up. Compost it. Donate the compost to community gardens."—Pat, West Virginia

"If I understand correctly it is a peat bog. Peat is a much sought after gardening material. Harvest it, bag it and sell it. If that's not practical, contact a company that does retail peat and offer it to them."—Earle W., Southern New Hampshire

"Bag it. Sell it. 'Own a Piece of the Rogue Bog!'"—Bradley Norris, Texas

Drink It

"Harvest peat. Malt barley using dried peat smoke. Start an American whiskey distillery. Name it “Rogue Bog.” Give me 10 percent ownership stake as a thank you."—Dan, Seattle, Washington

"Having lived for 17 years in Minnesota, I'm very familiar with the beauty of the land, and the plentiful excellent fresh water. But the state (as well as the rest of the U.S.A.) is without a quality U.S. produced single malt scotch. That's right, this is where the peat comes in. Some enterprising individual should seize the opportunity to build a distillery for the purpose of producing a fine Minnesota single malt. The bog should be contained, preferably by means of a collar, similar to those containing oil spills. Once harnessed and secured, the peat can be harvested, and combined with the excellent local water. World-class malt can be found literally next door in Canada. The result would be Glen North Long Lake Single Malt Whiskey."—Larry Snider, Melbourne, Florida

"Tow it to the top of an out-flowing stream and wedge it there. Build a distillery downstream and use the peaty water to make whiskey. Sláinte!"—Jim Wright, Toronto, Canada

"Cut it up—ask the peat cutters of Ireland and Scotland for advice—then use the peat to improve gardens, dry it out and chuck it into the locals' log burners for free fuel. But most importantly make sure they keep a good bit back to make a fine smokey whiskey called 'Wild Beast.' Sell the whiskey to cover the costs of getting rid of the bog!"—Anjuli Atterby, London, England

"If the bog is truly peat, use a group of boats and cut the bog into narrow strips that can be pulled out of the lake onto the shoreline. Let these strips dry then load them onto trucks. These trucks can transport the peat to Lake Superior where they can be loaded onto ships and sent to Scotland. Auction the peat to Scotch distillers who could distill a batch of American Peat Scotch! It will take a few years, but the distillery will have a unique product, sure to sell in Minnesota!"—Kurt Morine, Wisconsin

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Don’t Touch It

"To destroy it would be an absolute sin against the planet we live on! Move it to an uninhabited part of the lake and away from shore then anchor it. We can build bridges, skyscrapers, etc. but I am sure someone can come up with an inexpensive way to anchor this natural wonder. If I owned one of the docks it ate, I would sit out with a glass of wine, watch the scene, smile, and say go for it. Who knows what life and secrets it holds?"—Scott Farmer, Portland, Maine

"As funny as this problem seems, the bog is, after all, a floating habitat. There are all sorts of critters living in the peat, from bacteria and other microscopic biota to insects and rodents, on up to birch trees and grasses. Peat is a living organism in itself and not much new peat is being created in the modern world. I think that Randy Tesdahl has the right idea: pull the bog/raft away from habitated shoreline and stake it down. Sure blowing things up is fun, but helping to create and maintain a living entity is better than destroying something. Right?"—Cindy Rose, Wyoming

Destroy It

"Peat burns. There have been fires in Georgia and Florida for as long as I've been reading newspapers (a pretty good while now). A controlled burn might break up this big clump of decaying organic matter, and release the dirt attached to it!"—Carol, South Carolina

"Bring it to a boat landing, start chopping it up and loading it onto a dump truck with some bobcats. Remove it in pieces. Minnesota people are great for helping and working together."—Jet Black, Minnesota

"Harness 10,000 mallards to the water side of the island, cover the island with a giant range hood, hook the range hood to a piece of flex hose, light the peat bog on fire, capture the heat and smoke produced under the range hood, turn the range hood fan on high and direct the end of the flex hose toward the ducks. The ducks will attempt to paddle away from island, towing it behind them. The island will eventually burn itself into oblivion. Apologize later for the smoke and CO2. Reward ducks with Minnesota's thoughts and prayers and a huge military parade (with flyover)."—Jay Hayden, Rube, Montana

"Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."—Michael, Toronto, Canada

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Worship It

"Clearly we should tie people up and deposit them in the bogs as offerings to the gods of fertility and good fortune."—Mason, St. Louis, Missouri

"Embrace The Bog."—Dee, Alberta, Canada

"Allow it to eat everything in its path and come to appreciate and worship its mysterious and destructive ways. It's 2018—why not let a naturally-occurring metaphor just work as God intended?"—Sarah, St. Louis, Missouri

"I would hug it, maybe it just wants a friend."—Ben Duursma, Bishop's Stortford, England

Um… Other?

"Attach an outboard motor."—Joe, Chicago, Illinois

"Everyone already suggested all the cool stuff like blowing it up, but did anyone stop and consider what the people of the bog want? Now I’m just a humble man who lives on the bog and relies on its movements for convening with lake spirits. A stationary bog makes this impossible because everyone knows the lake spirits can only do their dance macabre untethered from this world. Plus, every so often the floating peat releases gases that smell like human flatulence and the spirits are drawn to the smells. I'm inclined to just let floating bogs lie, docks be damned."—Bog Man, Floating Bog, North Long Lake, Minnesota

"Has anyone tried reasoning with the bog?"—Nick Leitzen, Maple Grove, Minnesota

"I'd live on it and become captain and protector of battleship bog."—Ian, Texas

"Move it to a place where it can be viewed and anchor it, then sprinkle by air, millions of flower seeds and allow it to become a beautiful floating 'Flower Island.' It will be seen by millions and people from all around the world will say, 'What a beautiful island.' Make it something to be proud of."—Jay Dunning, Perth, Western Australia

Responses have been edited for grammar and clarity.

The Brazen Heist of a Human Heart in a Solid Gold Casket

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Stolen from a French museum, the artifact was recovered by police a week later.

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In death as in life, Anne of Brittany's affairs of the heart are a saga for the ages. This 15th-century ruler—the only woman to marry two French kings, as well as a Holy Roman Emperor—died in 1514. After a funeral that lasted well over a month, she was buried in the royal necropolis of Saint Denis, north of Paris.

Well, almost all of her was: Detailed instructions in her will explained that her heart was to be cut out, placed in an intricate gold box, and then sent to Nantes, France, to be placed in her parents' tomb. In the years since, however, that organ has had a dramatic second life, culminating in its theft last week from a museum in Nantes.

In the late 18th century, the reliquary was wrested from its resting spot, after an order decreed that all church-owned precious metals were to be melted down. It went up to Paris, narrowly escaped destruction, and was stored in the National Library. A quarter-century later, it came back to Nantes, where it moved from one museum to the next. Finally, in 1896, it was put in the Thomas-Dobrée Archaeology Museum, where it has sat quietly on display for the past 126 years.

But under the cover of darkness, late on April 14, robbers broke into the museum through a window. Despite setting off an alarm, they plucked the heart from its spot in an exhibition, and disappeared into the night. (A Hindu statuette and some gold coins went with them.) A week of nail biting ensued—was the heart gone for good?

Thankfully, all was not lost. At a spot near the city of Saint-Nazaire, some 40 miles west of Nantes, police found the treasures. They had been buried in the ground, but were otherwise unharmed. (It's believed the thieves intended to melt them down, and sell the gold.) In the meantime, two men have been arrested, on charges of “association with criminals” and “theft of cultural assets," with two more at large.

Incredibly, this is not the only stolen heart to find its way home in the last week: Six years after its theft, the heart of Dublin's patron saint was recovered undamaged, from a local park.

The Depression-Era Glassware That Came in Boxes of Oatmeal

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These vibrant dishes helped cheer up Americans during a bleak time.

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Imagine wandering into the kitchen for breakfast, opening a package of Quaker Oats, and finding a glass teacup inside. That’s what happened during the 1920s and 1930s, when ubiquitous household goods, such as bags of flour and canisters of tea, included unusual trinkets.

During the Depression era, companies in the United States would tuck away beautifully-patterned dinnerware—including teacups, saucers, and bowls—into their products’ packages. Depression glass, as it was known, was so cheap to produce that heavy-hitting companies of the time, such as Phillips’ Toothpaste and Wheaties, gave them away in their products. It wasn't just relegated to home goods, either. Back then, moviegoers could take home glassware on “dish nights.” Folks received dinnerware pieces while getting their tanks topped off at the gas station, too.

More than a marketing gimmick, Depression glass brought much-needed joy into kitchens during a particularly bleak time in American history. In just the first year after the stock market crash of 1929, the number of unemployed adults in the U.S. doubled, from roughly 1.6 million to 3.2 million. By 1933, that number had climbed to 13 million. The staggering economic downturn took an emotional and psychological toll as well, with suicide rates and alcoholism levels rising astronomically. Millions of people had little hope for the future.

Prior to the crash, most glass dinnerware was often clear, and handmade from cut crystal. It cost too much, for even a typical middle class family budget. After Black Tuesday, such extravagances were all but forgotten, as scores of Americans stood in lines waiting for bread.

But a revolutionary machine that used new processes such as mold etching—a method that utilized acid to etch patterns into an iron mold rather than directly onto the glass—made manufacturing glassware quicker and cheaper. The molds themselves were costly, but each one could produce thousands of dishes. Thanks to mechanization, one Depression glass manufacturer, Anchor Hocking, increased glass production from one piece per minute to over 90 pieces per minute. This allowed companies to sell individual dishes, such as tumblers, for a nickel or less.

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"Depression glass was the first glassware in American history to be produced by a completely automated method without need for skilled glass blowers, so the major glass companies could sell complete 20‐piece dinner sets for as little as $1.99," wrote Diane Greenberg in The New York Times, years later. It also meant that many American families could afford to purchase beautiful glass cups, plates, bowls, and pitchers in brilliant shades for the first time.

As the glassware adorned tables and cupboards, it lifted families’ spirits. “They glimpsed an old, sweet dream shining in the darkness just ahead of them,” wrote Hazel Weatherman in Colored Glassware of the Depression Era. “For many, many families [the Depression glass] became something they could focus on, group around, work towards, in its own small way."

For less than the price of a box of cereal, this glassware represented a glimmer of optimism that could sit on a shelf. Even the most meager dishes, such as creamed chipped beef on toast, seemed more nourishing when served up on a pretty plate. Popular patterns included the Adam, from the Jeannette Glass Company, which came in translucent rose and green, with delicate feathered patterns etched onto the glass. The Cherry Blossom pattern dishes, etched with designs inspired by cherry trees, appeared in a pearly blue.

Today, Depression-era dinnerware has transformed into nostalgic kitsch for vintage lovers and glass collectors of the Instagram generation. Hungry thrifters scour antique booths and glass shows, hunting for their favorite colors and patterns. “I imagine my hardworking Southern grandmother anticipating the treasure that would arrive in the next box of oats,” writes Sharon L. Palmer, in Antiques & Collecting. “Perhaps it would be a perky little creamer to cheer her dim dining room at a time when putting food on the table was a small miracle... this was an era that saw half of the glass companies shut down for bankruptcy, merger, or fire, you name the catastrophe. Did my grandmother ever suppose that in another 75 years, I might be holding a little creamer identical to hers, wondering whether I should shell out $40 for it?”

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Depression glass clubs exist coast-to-coast throughout the United States, providing members the opportunity to display their collections and talk about their shared passion. The Kansas-based National Depression Glass Association hosts yearly conventions featuring guest speakers. Local clubs, such as the Peach State Depression Glass Club in Marietta, Georgia, exist to “promote interest in and spread knowledge about glassware of the Depression era.” They meet on the second Tuesday of every month to share their latest finds and view other members’ collections. Each spring, they also hold a member’s collectibles auction.

The irony of collecting this dinnerware isn't lost on people, either. “Take a look back and you will see cheap, glass-filled dime store shelves and Americans escaping the harshness of everyday life by going to the movies and stashing a much-needed cup and saucer away in a handbag as an extra bonus," writes Palmer. "Today's collectors stroll through giant shows held in lavish ballrooms and feverishly try to outbid each other on eBay for that elusive pitcher."

These pitchers may be hot ticket items now, but during one of the country’s most trying decades, dinnerware was more than just bric-a-brac for a china cabinet. During the Depression, someone could pull a teacup out of an oatmeal box and hold it up to catch the sunlight streaming in through a kitchen window. In that moment, things didn’t seem quite so dark.

Help Us Solve This Gefilte Fish Mystery

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Do you remember a spoof news segment about this traditional Jewish food?

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There are many, many jokes about gefilte fish. There are the ones about how to catch it and how to cook it. Jokes about it swimming through the sea; hanging out in lakes; and chatting to its carrot brethren. But gefilte fish does none of these things: It's a dish, not an animal. And therein lies much of the humor.

For the uninitiated, gefilte fish is sometimes described as the kosher equivalent of haggis or scrapple: bits of fish, minced with onions, matzoh, and eggs; cooked; and then served cold with horseradish and a slice of carrot. At its best, it's light and flavorful; at its worst, it's decidedly pungent. Either way, it's a Jewish cultural mainstay—and often the punchline of a joke.

But in the late 1960s, or perhaps the early 1970s, a local news television station in New York took the joke a little bit further. According to a spoof news report, gefilte fish had gone missing from the waters of New York, and no one knew what to do about it. "What I remember," Dough Fisher, a journalism instructor at the University of South Carolina, writes in an email, "was one of their younger male reporters standing in his overcoat looking very serious with the Hudson River in the background. He'd done a package on this supposed shortage, had 'experts' explaining how the fish somehow were not spawning in the lakes upstate and then swimming down the river—or something like that. It's been a long time, after all."

Fisher remembers it as an April Fool's prank, likely broadcast on WCBS-TV. As he recalls, the package ended and the camera cut back to then-anchor Jim Jensen, "who lost it as much as he ever did (which was not much)." Scores of people were allegedly fooled by the news segment. (They missed a well-placed reference to April 1st at the end of the report.)

The tale is briefly corroborated in the Oxford Companion to Food, which describes sorrowful fishermen "declaring they hadn't seen even one [gefilte fish] in a long while." But its editor and author, Alan Davidson, died in 2003, and fellow editors Tom Jaine and Helen Saberi don't have access to his notes. Other references to the prank are sparse, and we have yet to find someone who can tell the tale in full.

We want to know the story behind this spoof news report, so we're asking for your help. Where did it air? Whose idea was it? Who was the mysterious reporter? And how many people fell for it, hook, line, and sinker?

If you know anything about this mysterious prank, or know how we can get hold of the story, please get in touch by emailing natasha.frost@atlasobscura.com.

Galapagos Tomatoes Are Surprisingly Pest-Resistant

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New research reveals that they can protect themselves from a number of common bugs.

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The Galapagos archipelago is famous for its diversity of creatures. The "little world within itself," as Charles Darwin once put it, is home to everything from giant tortoises to pale pink iguanas.

As new research reveals, even the humble tomatoes are cool. According to a paper in the plant breeding journal Euphytica, one species of wild Galapagos tomato, Solanum galapagense, shows resistance to a broad swath of common insects, from whiteflies to certain aphids and caterpillars.

Bugs make life hard for plants. They nibble on leaves, sip sap from stems, and burrow through the skins of vegetables and fruits. They also spread viruses, which are often more devastating than the injuries themselves. Over millennia, many plant species have evolved pest resistance mechanisms, from defensive proteins (called metabolites) that fight pathogens to waxy coatings that are hard for mandibles to pierce.

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Farmers use a number of strategies to further protect their crops. But some of these, like pesticides, come with their own problems. There's yet another approach: finding wild plant species that have developed natural resistance methods, and breeding them with more conventional varieties. The idea is to come out with a kind of ultrafruit or superveggie that is bug-resistant, tasty, and easy to grow.

This has worked with certain plants: There are now aphid-resistant lettuce varieties, for example. But tomatoes have, thus far, been left out in the cold. "Research on insect resistance in tomatoes has been going on for more than 50 years, and has never resulted in a resistant variety entering the market," writes this study's lead researcher, Ben Vosman, in an email.

In the past, Vosman explains, researchers focused on wild tomato types that were highly insect-resistant, but not very closely related to the most commonly cultivated tomato species, Solanum lycopersicum. For this study, he and his colleagues at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands took the opposite approach: They "started all over again by focusing on the close relatives" of S. lycopersicum, he writes.

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One of these was S. galapagense, which Vosman describes as "a small, berry-like tomato, less than one centimeter" in diameter. In the researchers' tests—which involved exposing different insects to the plants' leaves—it performed quite impressively: Certain samples killed almost all of the whiteflies, aphids, caterpillars, and thrips. It also did long-lasting damage, reducing the number of whitefly eggs and next-generation aphids. "We were surprised to find that Galapagense was resistant to so many insects," writes Vosman.

Why is S. galapagense so good at protecting itself? According to Vosman, it has at least two things going for it. One is its particular makeup of defensive metabolites. Another is its glandular trichomes, tiny hairs that secrete a sticky, insect-snaring substance. S. galapagense has a lot of type IV glandular trichomes, which previous research has suggested are particularly effective insect traps. As the authors detail in the paper, they "observed dead insects 'glued' onto the leaves" of plants with type IV trichomes.

Their work is far from over. "We are busy identifying the gene responsible for the resistance," writes Vosman. After that, they will try to introduce this gene into S. lycopersicum, in the hopes that it will beef up its defenses. In the meantime, the tiny yet powerful S. galapagense continues to live its island life relatively pest-free.

A 212-Year-Old Ship Biscuit Is Selling for Only $3,580

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This sailor's snack is well past its expiration date.

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Some biscuits and crackers taste fairly decent months after their expiry date, but imagine eating a biscuit nearly 212 years past its prime. For an estimated auction price of $3,580 and a trip to the bathroom, you could try one of the oldest known biscuits in the world.

According to the Daily Express, the hardened biscuit, also known as hardtack, was once owned by Thomas Fletcher, a gunner on the HMS Defence from 1804 to 1807. A part of naval rations, hardtack kept many British sailors' bellies full as they battled against the French and Spanish during the War of the Third Coalition. In order to bite into the rock-like biscuit, sailors added water to get it to the perfect, chewable mix of soggy and stale. Stored hardtack occasionally got infested—the more unfortunate sailors would end up munching on maggots.

Somehow, Fletcher’s five-inch-wide hardtack survived the pivotal Battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805, and journeyed back to England unscathed. It's likely Fletcher kept the stale biscuit as a memento after he returned home from war. Less clear is how the biscuit blackened. It’s possible, says Dix Noonan Webb auctioneer Oliver Pepys, that it happened due to aging or carbonization.

Fletcher's descendants kept the biscuit in the family for generations until a private collector bought it at a 2005 Sotheby’s public auction. The auction commemorated the Battle of Trafalgar's 200th anniversary with the sale of items from that time period. Now, 13 years later, the collector has decided to put the biscuit back on the market.

“These biscuits were famously tough but this one must be even harder than most to have survived for over two centuries,” Oliver Pepys told the Daily Express.

If you're a lover of dusty old biscuits but can’t make Dix Noonan Webb's online auction on May 9, 2018, you can always visit the Maritime Museum of Denmark, which holds a ship biscuit dating back to 1852—or eat your expired ones at home.


The Underground Nuclear Test That Didn't Stay Underground

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The fallout cloud from the Baneberry test was never supposed to exist.

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This week we’re telling the stories of five nuclear accidents that burst into public view. Previously: The “demon core” that killed two scientists, missing nuclear warheads, what happens when a missile falls back into its silo, the bombs that fell on North Carolina

Three and half minutes into the test, it was clear that something had gone wrong.

At 7:30 a.m. on December 18, 1970, the Baneberry test began at the Nevada Test Site. A nuclear bomb had been lowered into a hole a little more than seven feet in diameter. More than 900 feet underground, the bomb—relatively small for a nuclear bomb—was detonated.

Less than a decade before, after the U.S. signed onto the Partial Test Ban Treaty, nuclear testing had gone underground. The treaty was meant to stop the venting of nuclear materials into the atmosphere and limit human exposure to radioactive fallout. But the Baneberry test, named for a desert shrub, did not go as planned.

About 300 feet from the hole where the bomb had been planted, a fissure opened in the ground, and a cloud of radioactive dust and vapor began pouring skyward. It would rise 8,000 feet into the atmosphere; the fallout would spread over Nevada and into California and other neighboring states. For a bomb of its size, Baneberry had an unexpectedly large impact.

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While government workers were evacuated from the test site, hundreds of them were exposed to radiation. In an official report, the Atomic Energy Commission noted that more than 400 cars were contaminated; most were sprayed down and vacuumed out before being returned to their owners. About 100 more need extra cleaning.

As for the workers, the exposures they received, according the report, were within established safety limits. But after two of the men with the highest levels exposure contracted leukemia and died, their widows spent years fighting for compensation. The courts eventually found the government negligent—but not liable—in the incident. There would be no damages awarded.

Why did this test—which released the most radioactive material of any underground test—go wrong? The U.S. government paused underground testing for six months to investigate, eventually concluding that the geology of the site and its high water content had magnified the bomb’s impact. The geology of future test sites would need to be investigated more thoroughly; new rules were put in place for workers, as well, limiting their potential exposure.

Why Can’t We Figure Out How the Vikings Crossed the Atlantic?

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Crystals might have helped them navigate—or maybe not.

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Here is what we know: In the 10th century, some Vikings piled into boats and shoved off the shore of what is now Norway. They eventually ended up in Greenland, more than 1,000 miles away. How they found their way there? No one is exactly sure.

It was a long voyage through the dicey water of the North Atlantic—three weeks if all went well—with land rarely in sight. Their boats were sturdy, made from planks called strakes held together with iron rivets, but a swift and steady vessel was no guarantee of safe passage. “The Vikings were superb boatbuilders, but that great skill would count for nothing if they could not navigate properly,” says Stephen Harding, a biochemistry professor at the University of Nottingham and author of Science and the Vikings. “If a boat got lost at sea, that would almost certainly prove fatal.”

Navigation, however, was no easy task. There was no map or chart to rely on, no sextant for celestial navigation, and no magnetic compass to help with dead reckoning. (That was how Columbus did it 500 years later.) The Norse sagas offer a few hints about how Vikings rowed and sailed along—but they are vague and incomplete. Close to shore, Viking mariners relied on coastal landmarks, such as how the sun seemed to hang between two particular mountains. Out at sea, when they were lucky, they had the sun and the predictable movements of migratory birds. But the sagas shed little light on how they managed during cloudy or stormy days, common occurrences in the North Atlantic.

A 1942 translation of the sagas tells of choppy seas, and sailors “beset by fogs and north winds until they lost all track of their course.” When the weather soured, crews described the feeling of hafvilla, or “bewilderment." If clouds and fog veiled their usual visual referents, they could only drift and wait until the sun returned to restore their bearings.

But some modern researchers think that Vikings actually did have rainy-day navigation options. And they think it may have had something to do with crystals.

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Fifty years ago, late Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou proposed that Vikings may have navigated with the help of what are called sunstones—probably chunks of calcite crystal, also called Iceland spar, that might be able to reveal the position of the sun even when it is behind clouds or has slunk below the horizon.

How this works isn’t entirely understood, but a number of research groups have tried to figure it out. Ramskou pointed to how calcite treats polarized light—that is, waves of light vibrating in a single plane, instead of in all directions—in a way that creates patterns observers can see. In 2011, a research group from the University of Rennes reported success pinpointing the sun by putting a dot on top of a calcite crystal and observing it from below. Ramskou proposed that the sailors could have used the crystal to keep track of the sun’s position, and then nudge the ship in the general direction they wanted to go. Assuming this actually works, which is itself no certainty, would it have been enough to get them from one shore to another?

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Earlier this month, Dénes Szás and Gábor Horváth, physicists at Budapest’s Eotvos University, published a report in Royal Society Open Science describing how they modeled 36,000 voyages during various seasons. Based on their calculations, the researchers report that if a Viking crew had calibrated a sunstone and checked it every three hours, there was more than a 90 percent chance they’d get close enough to see the shore of Greenland. (A smattering of caveats, though: The researchers didn’t account for squalls blowing through, and assumed that the ships didn’t drift too far off course at night, when the crews stopped rowing.)

Harding, who was not involved in the work, thinks it holds water. “Szás’s and Horváth’s study is, in my opinion, the most exciting study on Viking sunstones since the original suggestion by Thorkild Ramskou in the 1960s,” he says.

But it’s not a conclusion, and this question of how the Vikings got where they ended up is still cloudy. “The latest study seems to prove that, if the Viking seafarers had a calibrated instrument based on such sunstones, then this would have helped them in their long journeys when landmarks or other signs such as migrating birds were not visible due to clouds,” Harding says.

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The Vikings themselves haven’t proven to be much help in solving the puzzle. The stones are indeed mentioned in the sagas, which refer to them as sólarstein, but they’re not cast as tools. There’s also the question of how much stock to put in the sagas as historical sources, rather than the hybrids of fact and folklore they appear to be. “Even if [a sunstone was] found on a ship, there would be no proof it had been used as a navigational aid unless it was attached to a dial of some sort,” Harding says, to convert its optical properties into something actionable.

Viking archaeological sites haven't offered evidence of their use, either, but crystals have turned up in suggestive places. In 2013, a chunk of calcite was found in the wreckage of a 16th-century British warship near the Channel Islands—only a few feet from known navigation tools. If the crystal had been used for wayfinding, “it’s not unreasonable to suppose that these skills may have been passed down from the Vikings who controlled the seas around the British Isles centuries earlier,” Harding says. But arriving at that conclusion requires quite a bit of mental hopscotch.

“The only proof would be the finding of a few sunstone crystals, or a detailed description of a sunstone and its use in a Viking saga,” Horváth says.

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Harding also thinks it wouldn’t hurt to get out on the water. Since “modeling and computer simulations are most powerful when backed up by experimental data,” he suggests setting out on a modern recreation of those voyages. (Harding helped crew the 100-rower-strong Draken Harald Hårfagre, a recreated Viking ship, on a trip across the Atlantic in 2013.)

For now, sunstones “will remain a hypothesis at least for the foreseeable future,” Harding says. They continue to exist in that fuzzy, out-of-focus area between myth and history.

How 'Ennobling' Helped Italian Aristocrats Solve the Problem of Garlic

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The ingredient would have otherwise been too cheap to grace noble tables.

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For the 16th-century Italian noble, garlic posed a unique, culinary dilemma. To demonstrate status, a person of taste and means served food prepared with the finest, rarest spices, such as saffron, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. Common ingredients were to be avoided, and garlic was neither rare nor fine. But it was delicious. So what was a noble lord or lady to do?

In order to have their garlic and eat it too, aristocrats’ chefs devised a loophole: ingredient “ennobling.” To make garlic and other stigmatized ingredients socially acceptable, they paired garlic with richer, more patrician foodstuffs: meats, expensive spices, and aged cheeses. These, through mere proximity, performed a sort of gastronomic alchemy that enabled garlic to shed the stench of poverty and appear on nobles’ tables.

In Renaissance-era Italian society, what you ate was intimately linked to social status. This is evident in the gratuitous use of saffron, the most expensive spice in the world, in the cookbooks of the wealthy. This link is also illustrated in literature from the period, which uses nicknames rooted in aromatic vegetables to refer to the lower classes, conflating the people with what they ate: “onion eaters” and “fava bean eaters” and “garlic eaters.

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In his collection of short stories from the late 15th century, Novelle Porretane, Renaissance man Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti includes the story of a valet, who, unhappy with his social position, asks his lord to knight him. The lord, a man of breeding who understands the unchangeable, cosmic nature of social hierarchy, tries to explain the impossibility of his request. But the valet persists. So, the lord proves his point with garlic. In what turns out to be a farcical knighting ceremony, the lord presents the valet with a crest that has:

...an azure background [with] a hand sprinkling salt on a head of garlic … in the place of the crested helm, there was a very beautiful woman, representing Virtue, holding her nose and covering her mouth to show that she was disgusted by the smell of garlic.

Just in case anyone missed the moral, the narrator explains that “[garlic is] always a rustic food, although it is sometimes artificially ennobled, as when it is inserted into the meat of roast goslings." Here is where the similarity to the valet diverges—when paired with choice cuts of meat, garlic, at least, has the possibility for transcendence.

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This was no mere snobbery—garlic’s link to the peasantry was backed up by extensive pseudoscience. High society believed that the lower classes ate garlic and onions not because they were plentiful and cheap, but because those foods were proper and necessary for their health. By this logic, the same hierarchy created by God for humans was represented in the natural world. Fruits of the earth (vegetables) were best suited to those who existed closest to the earth on the great, divine chain of being: peasants. Fruits of the air, however, were most salubrious to the upper classes, and they were thought to be medically degenerative for peasants. This was even represented in semi-parodic stories about peasants coming to court and dying because they had to subsist on upper class foods. If only they’d only had some fava beans cooked with turnips and onions, they might have survived.

Because the aristocracy served as the judge and jury of social position and taste, they allowed themselves greater leeway. Recipe collections from the period describe various strategies for transmuting the provincial essence of peasant fare to make it noble. According to Italian food historian Massimo Montanari, there were two main methods: augmenting peasant ingredients with noble ingredients, and serving peasant ingredients as a side to a more socially appropriate food.

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Recipes for agliata, a roasted-garlic sauce that made its way into the cookbooks of the elite for the first time in this period, show ennobling in action. The dish appears in the earliest recipe collections of the period, Liber de coquina and Libero della cocina. Both include agliata recipes that call for crushing roasted garlic and fresh garlic in a mortar and pestle, adding broth and bread crumbs, and reducing the mixture to the cook’s satisfaction. Although the recipes are legendarily spartan in their preparation instructions, the first lines instruct that the dish is best served “with all meats.” The recipes also end with the suggestion that the chef add sweet spices of his choosing.

As someone who has made agliata from the medieval source texts, I’ll say this: Adding the preferred, expensive “sweet” spices from the period—saffron, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, or ginger—does nothing for the flavor. If anything, it detracts from and confuses it. Including a spice was simple ennobling in action, not flavor enhancement.

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Ennobling may seem like a quirk from a bygone age, a silly product of an all-too-rigid social structure that we’ve transcended. But it’s worth thinking about the way ennobling functions today. After all, is ennobling garlic with fancy ingredients all that different from placing a locally grown carrot on a rough-hewn wooden board at an elite restaurant? Or deconstructing a taco and filling it with wagyu beef and heirloom tomato pico de gallo? Or sprinkling gold leaf atop, well, anything? When it comes to food and social status, context is everything.

The Cartoon Goat From Poland Who Wandered the World in Search of Shoes

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Koziołek Matołek resonated with generations of Polish children.

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In Pacanów, Poland, Koziołek Matołek—the Silly Billy-Goat, or the Dopey Goat—is famous. There’s a statue of him in the park at the center of town, and his image appears all over. Through all his wanderings, this town was Koziołek Matołek’s destination: He had heard it was possible to find shoes for goats here.

Created in the 1930s, Koziołek Matołek was the star of perhaps the most popular Polish kids’ books before World War II. Today, he is a considered classic character of Polish children’s literature, but is mostly unknown outside the country.

Kornel Makuszyński, the author of the Koziołek Matołek books—four in all—was a poet, journalist, and critic before he wrote children’s books. Born in 1884, he started writing poems when he was young, and in the goat books each illustration came with sing-song verses. The illustrator, Marian Walentynowicz, drew caricatures for newspapers and had traveled around the world. In the 1930s, foreign comics—Prince Valiant, most notably—were becoming popular in Poland, and publishers were interested in homegrown illustrated stories. In the origin myth of Koziołek Matołek, the two men decided to send their goat on a pilgrimage to Pacanów after meeting a man in a café who came from the tiny town.

But his adventures weren't just about making it to Pacanów to find those shoes. Instead, Koziołek Matołek wanders the world with a naive, happy-go-lucky attitude that gets him into and out sometimes surreal scrapes. He meets bears and bunnies, squirrels and scarecrows, is chased up a tree and sent to jail. He tries to butt a car, meets a king, gets shot out of a cannon and lands on a whale, slides down a rainbow and ends up in China, and never quite gets what he's looking for.

As a white goat in red pants (the colors of Poland), he’s a symbol of patriotism. His adventures are “perhaps the best Polish example of the traditions of ‘Jack tales,’” in which a foolish hero uses clever tricks to save himself from whatever situation he’s bumbled into, write scholars Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marek Oziewicz, in a monograph on Polish fairy-tale films.

Koziołek Matołek “was very Polish,” says Oziewicz, a professor of children's literature at the University of Minnesota. In these simple stories, it’s possible to find the markers of classic Polish literature, “including the idea that you’re exiled from your land and you have to travel to those faraway places, hoping to get back home, but always frustrated with all kinds of difficulties.”

Koziołek Matołek was more a popular hit than a critical one. After the war, though, with Poland under the control of the Soviet Union, both author and goat suffered. Makuszyński was banned from publishing, and his most beloved creation began to change.

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Under communism, the world Koziołek Matołek lived in began to change. Before the war, when the goat looked out over Warsaw, he spotted the royal castle and church spire. After, it was a Palace of Culture dedicated to Joseph Stalin. The police were no longer enemies but friends. There were no more poor children, only “dear” children. and when he visited the Moon, the star that brings him back no longer has six points, like a Christmas star, but five, like the ones on the Soviet flag.

But Koziołek Matołek survived, like always. His stories have become classics, as has the television show he starred in for a few years in the 1970s. Pacanów now has a “fairy tale centre” celebrating children’s stories on the strength of its association with him.

62 of the World's Best Independent Bookstores

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As recommended by Atlas Obscura readers.

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Saturday, April 28 is Independent Bookstore Day, the day each year when we celebrate the importance of small book shops around the world. To mark the occasion, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about their favorite local book sellers, and the response was overwhelming. From small towns to big cities, hundreds of readers wrote in to explain exactly why they love their favorite independent bookstore, in words and in photos.

Many of you raved about selection, great prices, and beloved store pets, but more than anything it was the people, and the sense of community that your favorite bookstores help foster, that you said make these shops special. So before you head out to visit your local independent bookstore this Saturday (or any other day!), read some of these hearty recommendations from the Atlas Obscura community. And next time you're out on the road, maybe you'll be lucky enough to visit one of these shops for yourself.

A Children's Place

Portland, Oregon

"This shop has been a neighborhood jewel for decades. The staff is so knowledgeable and caring, and they all have black belts in finding that perfect book." —Bart King

Murder on the Beach

Delray Beach, Florida

"Murder on the Beach is an active member of the mystery community with book club meetings, frequent readings by nationally-known authors, and writing workshops taught by published writers. Best of all, the store (meaning the staff) has a playful sense of humor--a skeleton reads a novel on top of one bookcase, the Christmas tree uses yellow police warning tape as garland, and the annual Halloween party for authors and readers sees Poirot, Miss Marple, and Sherlock Holmes (among other famous sleuths), enjoying eyeball cupcakes and finger sandwiches while a dozen local authors read from their latest mysteries. Customers come to Murder on the Beach from all over the state of Florida. As a mystery author myself, I feel very lucky to live close by." — Susan Cox

Book Soup

Los Angeles, California

"An oasis of intellect, in a sea of shallow ego. From what's hip and new to all the classics. Book Soup is a West Coast icon." —Jesse Stirling

Women & Children First

Chicago, Illinois

"Women & Children First is one of the largest feminist bookstores in the country, stocking more than 30,000 books by and about women, children's books for all ages, and the best LGBTQ fiction and non-fiction. Their mission is to promote the writing of women and other marginalized voices, and they strive to offer a place where everyone can find books reflecting their lives and interests! Every time I walk in, I feel like I'm home."— Jillian Harmon

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Writer’s Block

Las Vegas, Nevada

"Writer's Block is an oasis in the cultural desert of Las Vegas. It's not just an independent bookstore, it has a flavor and warmth that surpasses the sum of its parts." —Lizzy Newsome

Twice Sold Tales

Seattle, Washington

"Twice Sold Tales has shelves overfull with used books that give off a wave of musty old book smell depending on the room you find yourself in. The bookstore is full of cats and an endearing curmudgeon of an old man who is holding on to the past by strictly enforcing his 'don't look up book prices online' policy." —Joey Murphy

Mutiny Information Cafe

Denver, Colorado

"Diverse selection, coffee shop, music venue, knowledgeable staff." — Rachael Weiss

UC San Diego Bookstore

San Diego, California

"Amazing and excellent booksellers who make super entertaining displays. And of course Watson the Wonder Corgi as the bookstore mascot!" — Teri Den Herder

Aesop's Treasury

Farmington, Missouri

"It's a truly a hidden treasure trove. Located in the basement of an old factory, along with a quaint diner, in the heart of downtown. Aesop's is the perfect place to go escape for a while. Not only do they have shelves and shelves of books, they also sell tons of board and role playing games, new and old. Everything is at a fantastic price and they'll even buy your used books for cash or store credit. Aesop's Treasury is on of the best things about this little town. Not to mention the owner is the nicest person you'll meet, and you can really tell opening up this shop was his passion project." —Trista

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Deb’s Bookstore

Cullman, Alabama

"Deb always knows what book you need to get you through hard times. Even when a tornado swept the whole mystery section away, she was always there with a smile and a suggestion." —Elizabeth Martin

Dead Souls Bookshop

Dunedin, New Zealand

"So, it’s not local to me, but I found this shop while on vacation in New Zealand and I fell in love. It’s packed wall to wall with used books of all variety and age. There are rare books and newer books. The ceilings and walls are powered with the covers of noir and pulps. There’s a statue of Jesus Christ. The keeper repairs books and also does letterpress right there at the counter. It’s the sort of place you kind of expect to not exist any more, so once you find it you know exactly how special it is." —Corinne Keener

Changing Hands

Phoenix, Arizona

"This bookstore is the JAM. New and used. Kids play area and story time. Best of all, a bar called First Draft inside the bookstore where you can work, drink, read, etc. Changing Hands is a huge part of our neighborhood and we would be lost without them." —Jen

Dragonfly Books

Decorah, Iowa

"This is a small book shop in a small town, and they have more events than many bigger bookshops. They are always working hard to get authors (often local ones) into the shop for talks. I have found more signed books here for that reason than any other place I have ever been. They try extremely hard and it pays off. Additionally, the staff are all extremely friendly. They make sure to supply editions of classic books with beautiful covers (some that I haven’t found in other places). Once I had one of these get damaged but I had moved away from Iowa at that time. I sent them a Facebook message and they pulled another copy of that book off the shelf to hold for me without me having to pay online. They work extremely hard to put customers first. This book shop will always be my home away from home." —Anna Wehde

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Let’s Play Books

Emmaus, Pennsylvania

"There are so many things! A huge part of what makes Let’s Play Books special are the owners, the Hess family. We feel like members of the family whenever we visit and it feels like a home away from home. It also feels like it holds magic within its walls. I could spend hours discovering books I would not have found anywhere else and having that magical feeling you have when you’re lost in a book. Plus, it’s a place that my kids beg to go to! They feel just as at home as I do. Beyond my own family though, it is an amazing gift to our community. Let’s Play Books hosts author visits, discussions, and community events that push ourselves and our community to be better than they were before. They are welcoming and inclusive to all and we are lucky to have them!" —Sandra Lau

Prospero's Books

Kansas City, Missouri

"Not the place you go to find that one book you need. You go to Prospero’s to get lost in the rows, exploring the nooks and crannies of the basement, stopping to laugh at some decade old graffiti, or admire the jackalope-duck on display on the front counter. It's amazing how much the owners manage to fit into their tiny, three-floor book labyrinth." —Sam Klinkenborg

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe

New York City, New York

"We had our wedding reception at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. It was perfect! We were surrounded by books, our family and friends and we are supporters of their mission. The bookstore holds a very special place in our hearts." —April Somboun

All Books

Ottawa, Ontario

"Walking into All Books is like a maze. The whole store is the size of a closet and books pile up on the floor and on top of shelves, up to the ceiling! It's pretty hard to find things, but no matter what, you can always ask the owner and he'll know exactly what you're talking about and where to find it. I'm often pretty shy, and this method of book finding has made me engage in some interesting discussions with the owner, sometimes another customer chimes in. Also, time skimming the shelves makes my mind wander and I always go outside my usual genre. I love it." Paige Inglis

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Barter Books

Alnwick, United Kingdom

"It is a beautiful secondhand book shop with a wood fire and beautiful sofas. As you enter in the front section, with mainly children books, there is a mini railway going around above your head. The main section, a converted train shed, goes on and on with wooden shelves of books just wanting to be read. My family could spend days and days just finding all the books I want to read, let alone read them." —Sarah Robinson

The Strand

New York City, New York

"It's a space where I feel a community and I know that I can trust their selection of books." —Paola

BookBar

Denver, Colorado

"I'm a huge fan of BookBar because of the quirky and fun staff. BookBar is a local bookstore / wine bar / coffee shop but the 10 or so folks who staff it are incredible. They're all a bit eccentric and incredibly friendly. [...] It's the best bookstore!" — Kate Cygan

Lily Bookshop x Flowbooks

Hong Kong

"A unique vibe of antique books dating back to more than a century old and current but usual titles that are seldom seen in Hong Kong. Compounded with the fact that the location is sitting on the second floor corner unit of an old building, overlooking the bustling traffic right at the crossroad of the financial and entertainment districts." — Léonard Lin

Borderlands Books

San Francisco, California

"Borderlands is specifically a Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror/Mystery bookstore. They have been around for decades, and recently, pulled themselves back from the brink with the help of a community of sponsors. Their current space has a Santa Rita altar in the basement (previous tenant), and sometimes, the long-buried Mission Creek trickles in. They managed to purchase a new building in the Haight, which survived the 1906 quake and survived an explosion while incarnated as an incense store during the heady hippy days. Borderlands is also home to a derpy bald sphinx cat." —Laurel Karr

Readings

Melbourne, Australia

"It's what a good bookshop should be: lots of books, floor to ceiling shelves, bookshop ladders, lots of local events, and helpful staff who obviously love reading (a lot of them are also published authors). The business also gives back to the community—donating 10 percent of its profit every year to literacy and arts programs in Melbourne." —Lian Hingee

Dog-Eared Books

Pennant Hills, Australia

"Kate knows every book and can make recommendations for each individual—she never gets it wrong!" —Cassandra

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Books on Broad

Camden, South Carolina

"Books on Broad in Camden, South Carolina, would rival a huge international corporation if financial success was based on contributing to a happy community. [...] This past year, a Starbucks moved into one of the nearby strip malls, and sales are down. I worry about my local bookstore—about what it will mean if it is to leave us. When a place dies, the body stays, and I'll have to drive by the corpse (as it were) daily, reminded that something which connected us is now gone. This is my worry, but I have hope too, that Books on Broad will survive: a testimony to the proprietors, staff, and town that wants it to continue, and sees the value it brings to those who have a space to be more human together." —Amy Schofield

Books Are Magic

Brooklyn, New York

"This new neighborhood indie bookstore has offered everyone a welcome to a lovely, friendly, engaging world of books. I'm particularly fond of the children's room. It has pink bean bags, a secret octagonal reading cubby, children's sized chairs and an old leather sofa. And it's all in a soft PINK. And there are great selections and visits from excellent writer/illustrators." — Susan Straub

The Raven Book Store

Lawrence, Kansas

"I can always find what I want, but there are also pleasant surprises!" —Bethany

Ken Sanders Rare Books

Salt Lake City, Utah

"It is housed in an old building and is stacked floor to ceiling with used books. He specializes in books about the environmental movement and western issues. He's an expert in Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, etc. He has a huge beard and is a great guy." —Joel

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Attic Books

Ontario, Canada

"It’s beautiful and airy with creaky old hardwood floors. The books are in very good to excellent condition, well curated, and easy to find. They also have an antique section! The staff knows their store and are just the right amount of eccentric and surly. I love spending my lunch hours here finding books of short stories or novels I’ve never heard of." —Carly Griffith

Winding Way Books

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

"It's a one-woman show at Winding Way Books, and her name is Melody. She is what we call "Lancaster-famous." Some local characters are infamous here, and everyone knows them in this city of 60,000. She knows her customers very well, especially their taste in literature. She will walk right up to you and recommend a book, knowing your tastes. She even stocks based on it. I often walk in and she has a book she's held for me. I find her discussing books with other locals and find myself roped into discussions of Beatnik drug use, or sci-fi theology, local politics. It's a hub of a kind." —Jose Fritz

MacLeod's

Vancouver, Canada

"It looks like any other bookstore from the outside… until you enter it. Thousands of books stacked everywhere in every crevice, so much so that you have to weave in and out to get around the store. It’s so iconic, this chaotic, much loved institution that people from around the world come and visit it, just to soak up the atmosphere at MacLeod's. Think an absent-minded professor's library." —Brad

Print Bookstore

Portland, Maine

"Print is owned and staffed by book obsessives like me. Well, not entirely like me. Sufficiently different and diverse to make for fascinating discussions and recommendations. Print is a bibliophile's dream. And whether you're there to buy lots of books or there just to breathe in the smell of print, they're always happy to engage in great conversation about (you guessed it) writers and books. Special little note: The Maine Writers bookcase is awesome and local and wonderful." —Amy Selwyn

WORD Brooklyn

Greenpoint, New York

"WORD is a small bookstore in my neighborhood that has a great collection, and hosts excellent events. When Carrie Brownstein's book tour began for Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, it was such a huge event that WORD could not contain the people in their space, so they partnered with a local punk dive bar called St. Vitas to house us all! With special guest Q-Tip!" —Shelby Thompson

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Source Booksellers

Detroit, Michigan

"The recommendations and the atmosphere. Everyone that works there is absolutely wonderful. Not only do they remember me, but also my reading tastes; every time I walk in to buy a book, I end up leaving with three or four due to their recommendations. I usually spend a good hour in there every visit, either talking to the owner and staff or striking up a conversation with other people shopping. It's a great way to connect to people." —Brian Smith II

Left Bank Books

St. Louis, Missouri

"They have been there since 1969, surviving and thriving during the big box store wave and have always offered a great selection of books, speakers and author presentations, book groups, poetry readings and a used book selection downstairs. They've always had a counter-culture atmosphere, a wide variety of genres, and offer events and a foundation that promotes literacy in the St. Louis public schools. Visiting the store is a treat and worth my drive from nearby Illinois—staff are friendly and knowledgeable and provide their own annotated book recommendations, while message boards list events of cultural interest in the St. Louis area. It is situated in a great, diverse neighborhood with coffee shops and restaurants. Going to Left Bank Books is always a fun outing for the day and holds decades of memories for me, as well as the latest literary treats." —Sandy Crawford

Skylight Books

Los Angeles, California

"Skylight (and likewise its staff over the years) is no doubt responsible for making Los Feliz Village a destination in L.A., as with its continued presence on Vermont Avenue, it attracted many independent shops to the area that have made the neighborhood such a great place to live and visit." — Teena Apeles

Klindt's Bookstore

The Dalles, Oregon

"It is the oldest bookstore in the state of Oregon, has never been upgraded, has original wooden floors and the wonderful smell of old books. It has been around for over 140 years. What also makes it endearing to me is the former owners, the Weigelts. First their father and later the two sons and daughter, none of which married and lived well into their 90s. They had a large table with rolls of green and brown paper and would wrap your purchases and tie them up with string." —Anwen Dutson

Larry Edmunds Bookshop

Hollywood, California

"Larry Edmunds Bookstore is the only place left in Hollywood where you can still buy books about Hollywood. Jeff, the owner, is a great guy and a total movie fanboy. He has authors and old stars come in and speak. Old biographies, movie posters, film books. Classic used books. It's a joy to browse here and it's been in the area over 50 years on the Walk of Fame. Michael Jackson and Faye Dunaway have shopped there too." —Scott Michaels

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The Bookery

Placerville, California

"The quiet institution is a cavernous trove of used gems on historic Main Street in old Hangtown. Before Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, the store was called, "Rivendell." The popularity of the adaptation led to the name change. The charm remains." —Kyle

Children's Book World

Los Angeles, California

"Specializes in children's books, classics, picture books, author visits, readings for children! The store window often features art projects by children. Its an awesome place to browse, read, and introduce young minds to the magic of books." —Sonja Roth

Treasure House Books & Gifts

Albuquerque, New Mexico

"Treasure House Books & Gifts is a distinctive book shop in the center of Albuquerque's Old Town Plaza. Under carpet now, its original wood floors, now creak and groan with the movement of customers. Large glass windows set in thick adobe walls face the gazebo across the way in the Plaza’s square. The book shop is exactly the same as it was when it was opened it 44 years ago. The owner, John Hoffsis, a soft spoken gentleman with a kind face, is always generous in sharing his extensive knowledge of the books on his shelves. He is a true and steady supporter of local writers, knows most of them personally, and schedules author lectures and book signings at the little folding table in the middle of the shop." —Robin Gomez

Brattle Book Shop

Boston, Massachussets

"Old books, new books, used books, rare books. Book-loving, family run business for generations. Very helpful. Wheeled bookcases fill the courtyard. Borrow a book for a week—s'OK. Friendly to penny-less and powerful alike." —Paul Sullivan

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The Country Bookshelf

Bozeman, Montana

"In business for 60 years, started in a barn by the MUS President's wife, owned and run by three generations of Bozeman women, our Country Bookshelf is constantly packed for author readings and a wide variety of events. If their generously packed shelves don't hold a particular volume, they will always order anything they don't stock. Interlaced with the community, years ago when Barnes & Noble moved to town, Montana authors held a standing room-only reading, 'One Fine Page,' to show solidarity with our bookstore, which has thrived, despite B&N and Amazon. It is indeed a bright, well lit place for books, and a treasure in Bozeman." —Jennifer Woodcock-Medicine Horse

Wellington Square Bookstore

Exton, Pennsylvania

"It feels like an old-fashioned hideaway with a rolling ladder and delightful children's section. I love the variety of new and gently used books. It's a neighborhood treasure!" —Jenn Wagner

Chamblin’s Bookmine

Jacksonville, Florida

"Chamblin's is a local icon! If you live in Jacksonville and don't know about Chamblin's, then you are seriously missing out on the nirvana of all book stores. This place has more twists and turns, and covers more square feet than all the moving floors and shifting walls of Harry Potter's alma mater! A true book lover makes room on their calendar just to spend enough time in Chamblin's, and yet, it's still not enough! I'm proud to having bragging rights to this local gem." —Patty Potts

Forefathers Book Shop

Rebersburg, Pennsylvania

"This wonderful antiquarian and used book shop is in an old bank. Browse the shelves in the vault guarded by a life-size President James Madison or inside the basement's "strong room." Its collection is heavy into American History, but still great eclectic stacks to hunt through. Located in rural, Amish central Pennsylvania." —Mike Glazer

Francis & Finch Bookshop

Lincoln, Nebraska

"This bookshop opened in 2016 in a historic building near the Nebraska State Capitol and has quickly become a most dynamic community partner with special events galore. In addition to traditional book signings, there have been journaling workshops, art shows, music events, Lego displays and visitors like Paula Poundstone and Misty Copeland. The bookshop is full of energy and delight reflecting its owner Leslie Huerta." —Margaret Berry

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Shakespeare and Company

Paris, France

"The cozy little corners where you can read a book, the hidden quotes painted on the walls, the cute cats wandering around, and all the notes left on the wall by visitors to the bookshop." —Amy

Warwick’s Books

La Jolla, California

"Warwick’s is the oldest continuously family owned bookstore in the U.S. I love the feeling of excitement and joy when I walk into the store, as well as the feeling of community." —David Henry

The Spiral Bookcase

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

"The Spiral Bookcase is a magical and welcoming place—the quintessential book shop. You always walk out feeling warm and fuzzy inside. That might be thanks to the informed and amicable staff, or the late and great Amelia the cat who would summon you to the chair so she could curl up in your lap as you perused your book selection. The creative displays always catch your eye and, of course, the curated selection of new and used books! There's something for everyone, and I love the emphasis on the magical, witchy, and fantastical books you can find in the backroom. You can feel the love that goes into the store that makes it a home away from home. I love to seek out bookstores to visit but none have touched my heart quite like Spiral." —Julia

Liberty Bay Books

Poulsbo, Washington

"The owner, Suzanne Droppert, brought in a local espresso machine about 2 decades ago, and many of us followed it. It is the folksy stove and pickle barrel of Poulsbo. Groups of locals meet in the back to socialize, network and laugh. Conversations on divisive issues (and there have been many) are polite and friendly. Friends stay friends no matter how wrong headed they may be. [...] A Saturday morning means lefthsa making and knot tying—it is a historical fishing village after all—are apt to be discussed in simultaneous conversations while Batman and Harry Potter want-to-be's are reading and playing with many and various princesses. Liberty Bay Books [...] also has books, lots of books, but friends—the staff as well as clientele is what makes it so very special." —William Abbey

Star Cat Books

Bradford, Vermont

"The customers! We try to build community here -- our books speak for themselves, both old and new, but the customers that come and hold impromptu conversations and gatherings are what make the bookstore a home, a place of gathering, a safe space for everyone in the area and beyond. [...] My favorite part of the store, which was already here when I took over, are all the nooks and crannies, dead-ends, turns, and cubby holes where you can peruse the books for hours, sit in the chairs in the nooks, and hide from the world for a while, using your imagination. There's nothing like a little bookstore in a tiny town in Vermont!" —Nancy C. Hanger

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Green Apple Books

San Francisco, California

"It is the perfect place to get (sometimes literally) lost in literature. The dusty labyrinth is two stories of every genre imaginable, stacked haphazardly in the way you might imagine anyone who has not enough room, and too many books would do. Hand-written note cards from staff highlight their current picks, and you can almost always find a used version of what you are looking for (either in the main shop, or in the annex next door (which also sells music and magazines). The staff are friendly and knowledgeable, and the shop has a true community feel, no matter how crowded it gets." —Akemi Yamaguchi

Leakey's Bookshop

Inverness, Scotland

"It is crammed with so many different kinds of books and old prints, one could spend a day in there and not see everything. It made me think of what a library in the Harry Potter stories would look like. There is no bookstore in my town; however, I plan to visit Leakey's every time I'm in Inverness." —Alice Aubele

Bleak House Books

Hong Kong

"The bookshop is incredibly spacious and comfortable for Hong Kong standards. Books are neatly shelved and categorized. An interesting collection of old books as well as locally-themed books." —Rebecca

Malvern Books

Austin, Texas

"Malvern has the biggest indie poetry collection in Texas. More importantly, it's an incredible community space, offering a free venue for local and visiting writers to feel welcome and safe in sharing their work. The owner also regularly donates proceeds to incredibly worthy organizations and is a regular contributor to several non-profit radio stations/music organizations. Just another way Malvern helps keep Austin a special place." —Schandra Madha

Vroman’s

Pasadena, California

"Vroman’s has been around since 1894, and through all the disruption in publishing over the last two decades, it has never wavered and never compromised. It offers a huge selection of books and book-themed gifts, author talks and book signings, and writing workshops. It is simply everything a bookstore should be." —Cathy McCallum

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Book Club Bookstore

South Windsor, Connecticut

"The excellent service by the bookstore staff and owner (and their #1 intern); the number of events, author workshops, and open forums on topics important to our community. The store supports local programming (as host) and local community organizations in an effort to increase community involvement and awareness of community issues. The variety of books for adults, young adults and children with a chance to meet local and Connecticut authors at the store! The feeling of walking into your own home library when you enter the magical world of our local bookstore!" —Dr. Andrew Paterna

Blackwater Book Exchange

Milton, Florida

"Well it’s the only non-Christian bookstore in town and it’s still pretty new but it has a great homey feel, friendly staff, and well priced books. And if you look hard enough, you usually can find a couple rare prints too." —Nena

Wicker Park Secret Agent Supply Co.

Chicago, Illinois

"The book selection is hand-picked and super great plus the shop sells a huge range of goofy toys and useful tools for spying and exploration. The shop also serves as the storefront for 826Chicago, an education and creative writing nonprofit. All proceeds from the shop go towards the workshops and events 826Chicago hosts for Chicago Public School students." — Kate Kowalski

Word Up Community Bookshop

Washington Heights, New York

"It's not only independent but it's powered by a horizontal volunteer collective. It's a beautiful example of how strangers can work together toward a common goal—spreading literacy and the arts in low-income Latinx neighborhoods—and become a supportive community in the process!"— Cynthia

Red Rock Books

Ridgecrest, California

"Red Rock Books is in the middle of nowhere. Our city, Ridgecrest, is in the middle of the Mojave Desert about two hours from anywhere. Red Rock Books is kind of a heart for the city, a community hub where everyone can and usually does go. They do so much for the community at large—selling tickets for all the theatrical events in town as a free service, hosting a book club, selling handmade crafts from local artisans, featuring local authors, holding events for everyone from ages 8 to 80, and so on. They do events for kids, donate to charity events, do so much for our city that "Thank You" feels inadequate. I've been working with them to stage interactive murder mysteries at the store, and the staff makes me feel so welcome. It's the place I feel happiest and safest in the world. Red Rock Books is the heartbeat of Ridgecrest. We could not live without it." —Daniel Stallings

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