Fish and dairy can make for a delicious mix, despite popular belief.

In a recent episode of Top Chef, a team of contestants puts forth a dish featuring lightly smoked trout and a grated hard, salty cheese. The reaction from the judges is as predictable as it is—to me, at least—completely confounding. “Considering I really hate any mixture of seafood and cheese, I didn’t mind this dish,” says judge Padma Lakshmi. Nodding vigorously, head judge Tom Colicchio says, “I’m with you.”

On a show where experimentation is often rewarded, where the judges delight in being presented with combinations of ingredients that don’t seem as if they’d work, there is a moment on almost every season when a contestant attempts to combine seafood and cheese. This season’s grudging non-hatred is about as high a praise as such a dish has ever gotten.

The prohibition on combining seafood and cheese is ancient and strong, but localized. The Top Chef judges state this prohibition as if it is a universal rule, but of course there are dozens of centuries-old dishes combining seafood and cheese that are beloved outside the United States—in Greece, Mexico, France, and even in specific pockets of the U.S. itself. To assume that the combination of seafood and cheese is inherently wrong is bizarre, and yet common. So where did it come from?

“It definitely originated in Italy, there’s no doubt about that,” says Julia della Croce, a cookbook author, teacher, writer, and one of America’s foremost experts on Italian cuisine. “Italians are very religious about mixing cheese and fish or seafood, it just isn't done.” I spoke with several food historians and nobody seems to disagree on this point: The prohibition, and its aggressiveness, come from Italy.

Internationally, there are many, many examples of dishes combining seafood and cheese, some of which are significantly older than the nation of Italy. There’s garides saganaki, a Grecian dish of broiled shrimp, tomatoes, and feta. There’s moules au Roquefort, mussels in white wine with a strong blue cheese, from France. Fish tacos and quesadillas throughout the beach towns of Mexico are often served with melted chihuahua cheese. There’s the classic bagel with cream cheese and lox from New York, or the legendary white clam pizza with pecorino romano from New Haven, Connecticut.

Exactly why the prohibition exists in Italy, what the reasoning is, that’s less clear. A common explanation is that seafood is very delicate and cheese very strong, and that cheese can overpower the flavor of seafood. This is, of course, ridiculous: plenty of seafood items, like clams, mackerel, oysters, and sardines, are very strong in flavor, and plenty of cheeses, like ricotta, mozzarella, queso fresco, and paneer, are very mild.

Della Croce says that the Italian objection to seafood and cheese is more based on preference. “The reason it isn't done is, as the Italians will say if you ask them, they'll just tell you that it really muddles the flavor of seafood,” she says. “Seafood is just not meant to be served with cheese, the flavors just don't work together.”

The sweeping, confident belief that cheese overpowers seafood, or that there’s something inherently disqualifying about the combination, is flat-out wrong. The prohibition comes from somewhere else; there must be a reason beyond simple taste preference. After all, I don’t love the combination of orange and chocolate, but I don’t walk around telling anyone eating one of those fun chocolate spheres that breaks into clementine-patterned slices that combining chocolate and orange must not be done.

Before I get into this section, there’s some stuff to clear up. Italian cuisine is not monolithic, and regional Italian cooking carries clear influences from whatever other country is nearby or once conquered it—Austria, France, Tunisia, for example. And della Croce notes that in the past decade or so, younger chefs in Italy have shown more willingness to experiment with what previously had been a fiercely defended cuisine.

Della Croce, like many food writers, used the word “traditional” to describe certain dishes and ways of eating. I find this a very tricky concept to nail down; tomatoes, for example, are not native to Italy, and many of the best-known Italian dishes (as with all cuisines) are clearly products of cultural interchange. To declare something “traditional” suggests that it is static and unchanging, when of course it must have changed many times before becoming what it is.

In order to create something that can be referred to as “traditional,” a large group of people must decide all at once to dig in their heels and defend against any changes. It naturally follows that there must be some kind of large event to trigger this; otherwise why would everyone simultaneously decide that the way their grandmother made polpetti is the only way?

This conception of “traditional” food is not one that everyone shares; I get the sense that della Croce thought I was being sort of extremist in insisting that all cuisine is fluid chaos, a snowglobe in the grip of a manic six-year-old. But she did note that one of these large events did happen recently: World War II. “Italy changed enormously after World War II, so people became very protective of their local traditions, because they were eroding away,” she says. “The war ruined Italy. Everything became modernized and Americanized.”

After a globe-shaking event like a world war, and with globalization threatening to change a weakened country with fierce regional and national pride, it is wholly reasonable that Italians would want or need to hang onto traditions. All of a sudden, everything was uncertain. Who even are we? How do we maintain our identity?

Food is Italy’s greatest cultural export. Easily. Everyone freakin’ loves Italian food. But with increased globalization comes a struggle. Italian food, like widely dispersed cuisines from China and Mexico, would be changed upon landing on other shores. And change, at that time, was something that scared the hell out of Italy, because it seemed inevitable and oppressive and overwhelming. So—and this is obviously a generalization, but one that the data backs up—Italians locked in on what they grew up with. The way their grandmothers did it, that was the only way to do it. Any other way was wrong, and to do it wrong was potentially disastrous.

The food thought of as “traditional” Italian food is often, though of course not entirely, from the late 19th century. Pizza margherita, bolognese, risotto, osso buco (in its current form), and many more, can be dated to that era, and no earlier. These were the dishes of the grandmothers of those who survived World War II. They became tradition, even though they are not, objectively speaking, all that old; there are many cookbooks and written descriptions of Italian food from the 18th century and earlier, and they do not mention these dishes. Instead they were the green bean casserole of their time, albeit much tastier.

Another element: Italy has always had fierce regional pride. The country itself has only been unified since 1861, and had prior to that been an area of competitive and sometimes hostile individual nations and city-states. “God forbid you should ask a taxi driver the way to make a Roman dish,” laughs della Croce. “It's only done this way, in Rome we do it this way and in Naples, forget it, they don't know how to do it.” That regional competitiveness still exists, but there’s also a bigger competition: Italy versus the world.

It’s worth mentioning here that pretty much everyone can get touchy about the right way to prepare and eat their food. But usually the things people get touchy about are specific dishes, not basic rules like the combination of two widely eaten categories (at least in the West). Me getting irrationally angry about a cinnamon-raisin bagel is not the same thing as an Italian person saying that seafood and cheese should never be combined.

The prohibition against combining seafood and cheese was one of the things 1940s Italian grandmothers said, which, I think, got caught up in Italian panic and pride and competitiveness and all that other stuff. It became a fundamental part of Italian cuisine. And because Italian cuisine is, along with French, such a dominant force on American cuisine, some of those traditions made it over the Atlantic. An American chef who has trained in Italy, or under an Italian instructor, might subsume some of these rules. The authentic, traditional way to serve seafood in Italy? Never with cheese.

So I think that’s why the prohibition is powerful in both Italy and the U.S. But it doesn’t really explain where it came from. One historian I spoke to suggested that the great cheese-making areas of Italy were usually inland, and so cheese and seafood would not normally have been combined just due to geographic separation. This is sort of true; much of Italy’s best cheese comes from mountainous inland areas. But cheese is made throughout Italy, and some of the most famous cheeses—mozzarella di bufala, pecorino romano—come from provinces with substantial coastlines.

Ken Albala, a food historian and professor at the University of the Pacific, suggested something else: This was originally a medical prohibition. From the time of Hippocrates, in the fourth and third centuries B.C., humorism was the dominant medical theory throughout what is now Italy. The theory relies on balancing of the four humors (humors in this case meaning bodily fluids): black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Good health was considered to be a result of proper balancing of the humors. One thing that could throw the humors out of whack, or be used to re-balance them, was food, and types of food were considered to have different effects on the humors.

“Cheese digests very slowly and would hamper the transformation of the fish, which very easily corrupts,” writes Albala in an email. “That is, it would go bad long before it could be fully broken down. And then that corrupt fish would be forced into the liver, be transformed into corrupt blood and ruin the entire digestive process.” Some of this can be traced back to actual health concerns in the same way the Jewish rules of Kashrut (or Kosher) can be: fish certainly can spoil, and many people are lactose intolerant. Ancient physicians and philosophers, including Aristotle and Galen, warned of the combination. “By the late middle ages and Renaissance it’s common wisdom in the dietary literature,” writes Albala. “Still ingrained in most Italian people’s minds as unthinkable.”

This one makes the most sense to me: a strange ancient tradition, the actual meaning of which was lost centuries ago, caught up in a tide of preservation following a war, and simultaneously exported via chefs and foodies eager to show familiarity with tradition. It’s crazy, but then, so is proclaiming that shrimp and feta don’t taste good together. (They really do.)

That forgotten game hidden in the back of your closet is also a time capsule.

In addition to being a lot of fun, board games can end up becoming terrific time capsules, since people tend to hang on to them for years, or even generations. Picture that old version of Monopoly that your family played so often, half the pieces have been replaced with random bits and bobs. Or that bizarre game you inherited from your parents that you don’t really intend on playing, but you still can't bear to throw away. Over time, old games like these, with their stained boards and lost pieces, tell a story about the people who've played them.

We want to collect the personal stories behind amazing old board games, and we need your help to do it! Is your oldest game missing crucial pieces? Do you have specific memories about playing it? Strange, arbitrary house rules? Tell us about the oldest board game in your collection via the form below, and email a picture or two to eric@atlasobscura.com. We'll share our favorite responses in an upcoming article.

We can’t wait to see what you’ve got in your closets, and remember, no cheating.

Vintage recipes include flaming peacocks and kangaroo brains.

For as long as libraries have been repositories of wisdom and knowledge, there has been a place on the shelf for cookbooks. In fact, many early cookbooks were more than just recipe collections—instructions for concocting medicine often jostled with dinner ideas for page space. Atlas Obscura has previously displayed ancient recipe collections, such as the Yale Peabody Museum's Babylonian tablets, which contain the oldest known recorded recipes, and the New York Academy of Medicine's 9th-century De re culinaria, the oldest surviving cookbook in the West.

Cookbooks were once intended mainly for upper-class households. Only relatively recently did printing and educational advances make them more democratic. Today's versions tend to hold well-lit photographs and elegant prose. But humanity has long turned to cookbooks for inspiration and entertainment, and whether sauce-stained or Gothic-lettered, cookbooks offer glimpses of humanity's food history. Here is a collection of some of the oldest cookbooks from libraries around the world.

The Library of Congress

Libro de arte coquinaria

This 15th-century Italian manuscript was authored by one Maestro Martino of Como, chef to a famous cardinal. Martino was known for cooking lavish banquets for his employer. Along the way, he achieved fame as "the prince of cooks." Martino likely deserves the title, according to Brett Zongker from the Library of Congress, since his Libro "is the first known book to specify ingredients, cooking times, techniques, utensils, and amounts." As a late medieval chef cooking on the cusp of the Renaissance, Martino includes a recipe for everything from almond-rice pudding to "How to Dress a Peacock With All Its Feathers, So That When Cooked, It Appears to Be Alive and Spews Fire From Its Beak." He also recommends that chefs boil eggs for the amount of time needed to recite the Lord's Prayer: around two minutes. Martino's work is momentous for another reason too: In the 15th century, his recipes made up a major part of the world's first printed cookbook, Platina's De honesta voluptate et valetudine. A scribe practiced calligraphy on one of the last pages of this particular volume.

The Beinecke Library

Untitled manuscript

Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library contains this handwritten manuscript from the 1750s. According to the library, the recipes include everything from medicinal "plague water" to chocolate puffs. The manuscript has 14 sections and 502 recipes for various meats, sweets, and preserves. Its endpapers were recycled from a 16th-century bible. Little is known about the provenance of the manuscript, which the library purchased in 2007. According to archivist Diane Ducharme, a bookplate in the front of the book bears the symbol of the Martin family, who lived at the appropriately-named Ham Court in the 18th century. "It would have been originally used in a family of similar or superior status," she writes, "as the sample bills of fare are for the ambitious multi-course meals served at dinner parties and entertainments."

Biblioteca Nacional de España

Libro de cozina cōpuesto por maestre Ruberto de Nola

The National Library of Spain's oldest cookbook is a copy of De re coquinaria from the 15th century. But we've included here the 16th-century Libro de cozina cōpuesto por maestre Ruberto de Nola, which is the first cookbook ever published in Castilian Spanish. According to the library, the "recipes are based on Llibre de Sent Soví, a medieval cookbook, although it adds some recipes of Occitan, French, Italian, and Arab origin." The book was a translation of the work of Catalan chef Ruberto de Nola, chef to King Ferrante of Naples. Both the De re coquinaria and the Libro de cozina were featured in a recent project where chefs cooked 12 recipes from the library's oldest and most important cookbooks, including a recipe for Moorish-style eggplant from Ruberto de Nola's cookbook.

The Wellcome Library

Anglo-Saxon medicinal formulas

The oldest item with a reference to cooking in the Wellcome Library collection isn't a cookbook. Instead, it is a single page of Anglo-Saxon medicinal formulas written down in the 11th century, a fragment from a dismantled volume. Around the year 1000, the five recipes on the page, which treat maladies such as liver disease and heartache, were scribbled down by three different people. Clues about the foods of the period pop up on the document. A remedy for lung disease consists of an herbal ale washed down with an eggshell full of butter. An ointment for tumors has "honey, such as is used to lighten porridge," boiled with herbs, garlic, and pepper. According to the library, it may have been part of an informal recipe book kept by monks. Its survival is something of a miracle, since it was extracted from the original manuscript and turned into the cover of a Latin schoolbook in 1558. The schoolbook survived a fire in 1881 by being thrown out a window.

The Oslo Public Library

Complete Kitchen and Cellar Dictionary

The Oslo Public Library, known as the Deichman Library, has a 1716 copy of the Complete Kitchen and Cellar Dictionary, written by the prolific German writer Paul Jacob Marperger. Lavishly printed and more than a thousand pages long, the title page promises a book "in which all sorts of food and drinks, known and unknown, are described." It belonged to a Norwegian lawyer named Johan Fredrik Bartholin, who donated it to the city of Christiania (the former name for Oslo) in 1784. The book has been in the Deichman collection since it opened in 1785.

The Free Library of Philadelphia

The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy

Hannah Glasse's compendium of culinary and household recipes, including one "to make a Currey the India Way," made it a favorite in British kitchens and in colonies abroad. Many American founding fathers had a copy, and the Free Library of Philadelphia owns a sixth edition, published in 1758. The volume proved so successful that authorship was ascribed for centuries to a man, since, according to the famed English writer Dr. Samuel Johnson, “Women can spin very well; but they cannot make a good book of cookery.” But though Glasse borrowed many of her 972 recipes from other authors, as was the custom of the time, she undoubtedly was the compiler of the 18th century's most popular cookbook, which Google honored with a Doodle on the anniversary of her 310th birthday.

Cardiff University

The secrets of the reverend Maister Alexis of Piedmont

When thinking about a book full of "secrets," a diary might come to mind. But in the Special Collections and Archives at Cardiff University, one book contains "secrets" that include an excellent marmalade recipe. The secrets of the reverend Maister Alexis of Piedmont, translated into English, was published in London in 1595. Librarian Lisa Tallis tells says that, like many early cookbooks, it contains "various medicinal, domestic, and culinary recipes." Alexis of Piedmont was thought to be the pen name of Girolamo Ruscelli, an Italian mapmaker and alchemist. His popular book started a centuries-long trend of publications filled with "secretive," often-alchemical recipes.

National Library of Australia

The English and Australian Cookery Book

While the National Library of Australia has a number of older English cookbooks in its collection, they also own a copy of what is considered Australia's first cookbook, The English and Australian Cookery Book (1864). The book is attributed to Edward Abbott, a Tasmanian "aristologist" who wrote the book anonymously. (An aristologist is an expert on the subject of eating and cooking.) A publisher and parliamentarian, Abbott was nevertheless an eccentric; he once attacked the Tasmanian premier with an umbrella. The English and Australian Cookery Book was Abbot's attempt to diversify the colonial Australian diet with local flora and fauna. Recipes include kangaroo brains fried in emu fat and a powerful cocktail called a "Blow My Skull," which is made of lime, sugar, rum, porter, and brandy.

As park and garden space expanded, middle-class fleuristes needed shears, watering cans, and umbrellas topped with pruning shears.

A middle-class woman tending her garden in 19th-century Paris had a lot working against her. Heavy, swirling skirts could catch on her ankles or, at the very least, drag in the dirt. Gloves might offer some protection from thorns, but they also made it easy to fumble pruning.

It certainly wouldn’t do to forgo the flowers. “Gardening had become all the craze for the middle class, bourgeois” residents, says Susan Alyson Stein, a curator of 19th-century European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and organizer of the new exhibition, Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence. In addition to canvases by Van Gogh, Matisse, and other painters enamored of flowers, the show tracks the social and political roots of the broader cultural obsession with gardening. “Maybe in the past, people didn’t think to spend whatever small amount of money they had to buy a flowerpot for the windowsill or set aside a piece of land to grow pretty flowers,” Stein says, but by the middle of the century, “that becomes more of the mindset.”

So gardeners in billowing dresses and slippery gloves reached for contraptions such as the Dubois Parasol Pruner. Mechanically, it was straightforward. “I close my umbrella to pick flowers and fruit,” reads an 1886 advertisement. The umbrella’s handle was an elegant extension for one’s reach—a dainty, fin de siècle version of the claw you might use to nab a roll of toilet paper perched high on a grocery shelf. A little pair of shears, affixed to the top of a silk or satin sunshade, could be used to snip anything the gardener’s hands couldn’t quite get to. Without straying from the path, where her shoes and hems were relatively safe, she could build her bouquet.

Floriculture wasn't new to France. The 17th century had given rise to the fleuriste, defined by one contemporary dictionary as “one who is curious about rare flowers, or those who traffic in them.” Cultivating or collecting blooms was proof of one’s sense of curiosity and taste, traits that were highly valued among the upper crust, according to historian Elizabeth Hyde. (This fascination and the repute it brought could be doubled for especially resplendent blossoms, such as anemones, irises, and ranunculi, that fed the national appetite for the exotic.) “Flowers, like medals, coins, books, specimens (preferably oddities) of natural history, and paintings, were collected by individuals who fashioned themselves as learned,” Hyde writes. But such a collection only served as a membership card if others could see it. For this reason, some gardeners catalogued their prized blooms—often in Latin—commissioned engravings, or wrote manuals.

Formal gardens such as on the palace grounds of Versailles, were grand, vast, and usually off-limits to the public. Then the French Revolution changed the way that people related to green spaces and the flowers that sprouted there.

Land that had previously been inaccessible to all but the elite of the elite reopened as leafy retreats for the masses. Under Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s city planning efforts, some pastoral parcels were divvied up, and others were planted. Paris’s green spaces grew from 47 acres to 4,500, and hundreds of thousands of newly planted trees took root. By the middle of the 19th century, artists were flocking to paint their landscapes and the people ambling in the scattered sunlight. Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte spent many an afternoon at their easels in Parc Monceau, and Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, and Auguste Renoir once converged in Monet’s garden at Giverny to paint among his famous water lilies.

Among the middle class, a mania for blossoms and leaves was growing. “In no other era,” one journalist observed at the time, “have flowers and plants been so widely appreciated; they preside at all our ceremonies, take part in all our festivities; their use has increased a hundredfold in 20 years.”

Seed catalogs, flower markets, and “a steady rollout of all kinds of new magazines, activities, [and] lectures really catered to this great interest on the part of Parisians to plant their own gardens,” Stein says. Families indulged the horticultural itch to different degrees, according to their means. Some focused on small window boxes, or planted a few beds near the door, so that the blooms’ smell would tangle in the breeze. Others sprung for large greenhouses. Gardeners bought watering cans, shears, and sheds’ worth of other tools to support their hobby.

Some critics chided the enthusiasts for taking things too far, or for being dabblers who hadn't thought things through. In his series of lithographs satirizing the overblown romance of country life, Honoré Daumier poked fun at the figure of a disheveled man glowering next to beds of drooping flowers as he mopped sweat from his brow. “I thought it would be more fun than this to water flowers during a heatwave,” it reads in French. The gardeners’ rosy view may have wilted, at times, but at least they had fancy, oddball parasols to give them a hand.

The chefs have amassed awards at an international competition with skills they honed on YouTube.

Crafting the perfect Cuban sandwich involves a near-sacred ritual, and rules that leave little wiggle room for variation. A proper Cuban requires ham, pork, Swiss cheese, pickles, and mustard, and—depending if you make them in the style of Miami or Tampa—Genoa salami. (In Miami, adding salami is considered blasphemous, while nearly 300 miles away in Tampa, it’s a marker of true authenticity.)

Some purists believe that even switching up the order of how ingredients are added can throw off a Cuban’s delicate balance. So when someone finds a recipe that works, it becomes religion. That’s especially true of Tampa’s legendary Columbia Restaurant, the country’s oldest Hispanic restaurant. There, chefs dole out over 600 Cubans daily using the same family recipe that's been a mainstay since 1915.

But for Hyunmin Cho and Geunmin Kang, the owners of the South Korean sandwich shop Tampa Sandwich Bar, in Seoul, the invitation to compete in Tampa against the storied Columbia Restaurant and dozens of other local and international vendors at the 2017 International Cuban Sandwich Festival “was a dream come true”. Some of their competitors had been churning out Cubans for over a century. Kang and Cho had started making them less than two years before the festival.

The festival, started in 2012 by the Cuban-American Tampa resident Victor Padilla, claims responsibility for heating up the rivalry between Tampa and Miami—particularly on where the sandwich was born. Fittingly, the three-day festival and competition takes place in historic Ybor City, the disputed (but never dethroned) birthplace of the Cuban sandwich. Unsurprisingly, it is the place to prove yourself—and your sandwich. After learning that Kang and Cho’s Seoul-based Tampa Sandwich Bar menu focused on Cuban sandwiches, Padilla knew he needed them at the festival.

During the first two days at the festival, he heard rumblings that attendees were “raving” about Tampa Sandwich Bar. “They barely lasted an hour—both days—before they were out of food.” On Friday and Saturday, lines were so long that even Padilla himself had a hard time getting his hands on a taste. Then on Sunday, the festival’s competition day, they won the popular vote, placing first in the Most Popular Sandwich category (a victory they repeated in 2018). Kang and Cho were so taken aback by the win that at first they stood cheering for themselves, not realizing they’d won.

The winning didn’t stop there. Tampa Sandwich Bar snagged third in the Tampa Historic Traditional category, where contenders must utilize the controversial Genoa salami. Not a bad haul for two newcomers who had taken their first bites of authentic Tampa Cubans mere days before the competition.

It was also a coup for two friends who met in night school, and who both dreamed of starting their own food businesses. After talking over beers, they decided to go into business together, though they had no clue what they might sell. One night, while watching the movie Chef, they were inspired by the main character’s courage in following his dream—opening a food truck that sold Miami-style Cuban sandwiches. But Kang and Cho still had zero experience in restaurants and minimal experience with the Cuban sandwich.

Kang mentions she had tried a Cuban sandwich once in Korea (one she now feels had been “slightly modified to suit the taste of Koreans”), and Cho remembers eating a Texan Cuban while on vacation in the United States. However, both sandwiches were far from the real deal, leaving the friends a bit stumped as to how exactly to make a Cuban sandwich.

So how did they go from novices to the proprietors of South Korea’s most famous Cuban sandwich shop in less than two years? They turned to the internet. “The only way to learn how to make the Cuban was to use YouTube,” Kang explains. “I was used to watching videos from all over the world on YouTube, so it was natural to [use it] to learn.” And since Korean menus tended to always feature Miami-style Cubans, the two decided to play it safe and do the same.

First, the pair spent countless hours poring over video tutorials. From there, they stocked up on the sandwich’s many expensive foreign ingredients, some of which are tough to come by in South Korea and only available at Costco. (Unfortunately, real Cuban bread is not available in Seoul, leaving Kang and Cho to press their sandwiches on ciabatta or baguette bread.) They spent weeks testing recipes, making dozens of sandwiches each day and gathering feedback from friends and family.

When they felt that they were close to the real thing, they went public, setting up a one-time booth inside of a flea market in Sangnam-dong. After the sandwiches sold out and received rave reviews from foreigners familiar with the Cuban, they were convinced they had a winner.

Even then, perfecting their Miami-style Cuban took three more months. Eventually, when they first opened in Seoul’s Yeonnam-dong neighborhood in October 2015, it was the only item on their menu (at the time, they didn't realize that they should have more than one offering.) They placed their in-house marinated mojo pork on the bottom piece of bread, followed by a slice of sweet baked ham, then Swiss cheese. Next up, the sliced pickles clung to a generous slathering of yellow mustard lining the top piece of bread. And finally, they buttered the outside of the bread and then gave sandwich a well-timed press on the plancha.

Right away, expats praised its authenticity, though Kang notes that their Korean customers weren’t sure what to make of the new food. Even with a stellar product, being celebrated outside of the expat community proved to be challenging. “Part of the problem [of trying to sell American-style sandwiches],” they explain, “is Koreans tend to view sandwiches as picnic or snack food rather than a whole meal.” For many Koreans, consuming a large sandwich stuffed with a variety of fillings, and served piping hot, was, well, a foreign concept.

Although the Cuban sandwich wasn’t new to Korea at the time, it didn’t have the best track record. The spot where Kang ate her first “Korean-friendly” Cuban is now closed. Out of the three restaurants in Seoul that feature Cuban sandwiches on their menus (including the city’s first and only Cuban restaurant), the only one still open is an Irish pub in the foreigner-saturated neighborhood of Itaewon.

Historically, Koreans have deftly co-opted specific foods into their existing culinary culture. This has often been the result of military or political occupation. Take budae jiigae, or army base stew. An amalgamation of Korean, American, and sometimes Japanese foods, this 1950s post-war hot pot dish combines Korean staples such as spicy kimchi and gochujang with processed U.S. army rations including Spam, hot dogs, baked beans, and cheese slices. Later iterations also included ramyeon, Japanese-style ramen noodles introduced to Korea in the 1960s.

Joshua Leiner, an American expat who lived and taught in Seoul from 2011 to 2016, notes that several popular American-style restaurants and chains feature menu modifications to complement traditional Korean tastes. Savory pasta sauces are sweetened, pizzas are adorned with snails or cream cheese, and some types of garlic bread are often dusted with sugar. The western sandwich chain Subway aside, American-style sandwiches are usually offered as part of a larger menu.

A month after opening, Tampa Sandwich Bar beefed up their menu, adding a rotation of other American favorites, such as the Tampa-style Cuban, shrimp po’ boys, sandwiches stuffed with warm comforts such as mac ‘n’ cheese or pulled pork, and sides including fried Oreos—all with recipes sourced from YouTube tutorials.

Thanks to the success of two festival wins and a third-place nod to their authentic Tampa-style Cuban sandwich, plus local and international TV appearances and press, pilgrimages to Tampa Sandwich Bar are often met with lines and waits for tables. They have also inspired several new Cuban sandwich shops to open around the country, even some as far south as Jeju Island.

Kang now estimates that nearly half of their shop’s customers are Korean. And even though they’ve added two Korean-style Cubans to their menu (a Spicy Chicken Cuban and a Seoul Cuban), the traditional-style Tampa Cuban is now, improbably and in a delicious twist of irony, Tampa Sandwich Bar’s top-seller.

How an international birdwatching competition draws attention to the country's at-risk natural bounty.

Three hefty duffel bags packed with boots, waterproof clothing, and binoculars are slung into the back of a 4x4. Although it’s a hot, humid day in Valledupar, a small city in the Cesar municipality of northeastern Colombia, the temperature can drop to 30 degrees Fahrenheit in the mountains.

The group, consisting of two Colombians and an American, is headed for Serranía del Perijá, the mountain range that looms over the city, and separates the country from Venezuela. They’re making the nearly three-hour pilgrimage in preparation for the following day: May 5, 2018, or Global Big Day, the Olympics of birdwatching.

The Serranía del Perijá is home to three species of birds that do not live anywhere else in the world: the Perijá metaltail, Perijá thistletail, and the Perijá tapaculo. But it’s only recently that birders have been able to access the mountain range, a side effect of Colombia’s 2016 peace deal, which was signed between the Colombian government and the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), following a 50-year-long conflict.

But these previously inaccessible outlying regions now face an uncertain future. In 2016, as The Guardian reports, deforestation increased by 44 percent, as illegal logging and mining took their toll. The publication also notes that farmers, known as campesinos, were once required by the FARC to keep 20 percent of their land forested, but no longer abide by that policy. Nearly 98 percent of Colombia’s tropical mountain forests have been destroyed, meaning all three of the aforementioned birds are considered endangered species, making them even harder to spot.

An international birding competition, Global Big Day was started in 2015 by Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab in a two-pronged attempt to gather data on bird species across the globe and boost the profile of birdwatching. Anyone can participate in the event and upload their lists of the birds they’ve spotted onto an international database called e-bird. Birdwatchers have 24 hours to tick off as many species as possible, either by eye or by ear. Then they have a few days—this year, until May 8—to upload their lists.

Peru won the title of most species sighted for the first two years, but last year, Colombia toppled the reigning champions to take the crown. And rightly so.

The South American country has more than 1,900 species of birds, around 20 percent of the bird species in the world, with 10 percent native to Northern Colombia. The exact number is still contested, partially because more studies are required on subspecies to decide whether they should be counted as individual species, and also because the conflict affected scientists’ ability to study birds in remote areas. In 2016, Colombia’s birders registered 949 species and placed third, while in 2017, the country spotted 1,486 species, beating Peru’s 1,331 total.

“Colombia should have won the first two years, considering the country has the most species of bird in the world,” explains John Myers, an American living in the country and working with Conservation International. Myers organized this expedition to Serranía del Perijá in a bid to ensure Colombia retained its title this year. “It was only last year that the country could mobilize and fully participate in the day, not to mention that we can now access places previously out of bounds which contain rare and endemic species of birds.”

For Myers and his group, spotting the Perijá metaltail, Perijá thistletail, and the Perijá tapaculo in the 24-hour window will not only help the tally climb, but holds added significance, as the birds cannot be found anywhere else in Colombia.

“So no pressure then,” jokes Myers.

The mountain range, which rises above 11,910 feet, marks the northern end of South America’s Andes, the longest continental mountain range in the world. Recent studies in the region discovered the Perijá tapaculo, as well as registering four hundred bird species and finding three endemic bird species that are endangered due to a loss of habitat.

The range is one of the least explored regions in the Northern Andes, and for visiting scientists and ornithologists, the excitement of discovering a new species is very real. “It’s a really exciting time for researchers, as we can now access these areas that we haven’t been able to study for decades,” Myers says. “Thanks to the peace deal, these remote areas are finally opening up to birders and environmentalists.”

Myers has assembled a small but skilled team for the task. Jose Luis Ropero, a 32-year-old former student of Myers’s, has lived in Valledupar all his life and taken numerous trips to Serranía del Perijá.* Likened to characters on The Big Bang Theory, he’s soft-spoken and has an extensive knowledge of ornithology, despite only picking up binoculars in 2015. A well-thumbed Field Guide to the Birds of Colombia (2nd Edition) never leaves his side, permanently nestled in the knapsack slung across his shoulder. “It’s like my Bible,” he says, patting the 380-page book proudly. Ropero says he learned English so he could read it.

On Global Big Day, Ropero hopes to catch sight of the swallow tanager, his favorite bird and the mascot of the ecological foundation he set up in 2012. Dazzling blue in color, it sports a white underbelly and a black mask across its eyes.

Jorge Arango, nicknamed “Jota,” which is the Spanish pronunciation of the letter “J,” is the last member of the triumvirate. He’s a skilled nature photographer from Medellín and is accompanying the group with his Nikon and 600mm lens.

“Most people in this town probably don’t even know why you’re all here,” sighs Don Thomas Guttiérez, a Valledupar resident who dropped by to speak to the trio before they left on their birding journey. Although there is a devout network of birders in country, Guttiérez explains there is still an ignorance when it comes to biodiversity and environment in Colombia.

It’s perhaps unsurprising. Colombia, home to more than 48 million people, is only just emerging from a 50-year-long civil war, which saw the FARC and National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and the government army pitted against each other, plus the added interventions from narco traffickers, who had their own agenda.

The internationally lauded, but internally divisive, peace agreement was finally signed in 2016, and saw the FARC demobilize, moving out of vast swathes of the country, particularly mountainous regions such as the Serranía del Perijá.

“Older generations can’t fathom why anyone would want to run around in the mountains looking for birds,” says Myers. “For them, the mountains are synonymous with danger.”

But it is to the mountains the group is headed, loading up a 4x4 and waving farewell to Guttiérez.

The road to Manaure, a small town located at the base of the Perijá mountains, is surprisingly smooth. The flat, humid plains of Valledupar soon give way to the thick, cool shrubs of the foothills. But soon, the smooth road turns to no road at all, just a single-track lane zig-zagging through the mountainside. It’s a bone-rattling, nearly three-hour journey to the Chamicero del Perijá reserve, owned by conservation charity Fundación ProAves, where the trio will bunk down for the night in order to be in position for the competition.

Halfway up the mountain, the 4x4 meets a small truck, loaded with timber. It’s an uncomfortably tight squeeze and the 4x4 gets stuck, its wheels spinning furiously, churning up dark red mud and belching a cloud of exhaust fumes. Arango jumps out to push and after a few minutes of engine revving, the car skids out of the ditch, sliding heart-stoppingly close to the edge of the mountain, where a sheer drop awaits. The driver wrenches the steering wheel to the right and cruises back to the middle of the road, where Arango hops in.

In the car, Myers announced that the group will be joined by Oswaldo Cortes, who he describes as “one of Colombia’s best birders,” and it’s clear it’s an honor to have him along for the trip.

It’s another hour before Myers spots the reserve, perched precariously on the mountain opposite, a splash of white amongst the dense green. By the time the group arrives, the sun is going down over the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in the distance, setting the sky aglow in a fiery orange, bathing the valley below in a warm red. Hummingbirds zip around the trees in front of the reserve, feasting on nectar. The reserve’s visitors watch the scene in muted awe as the sun finally sets and the call for dinner is sounded.

Over their meal, the group, now joined by Cortes and two American tourists, Jim Sandor and Toni Kimple, discusses the plan for Global Big Day. It’s too early to get excited: Weather could severely dampen the chances of sighting the three birds on the hit list.

Sandor, from California, is on a mission to see 120 new species during his three-week trip along the Northern Colombia Birding Trail, which, coincidentally, Myers had a hand in designing while he worked for Audubon Society. Sandor, who’s already clocked up more than 1,700, wants to hit 2,400 bird species in his lifetime, and Kimple jokes he doesn’t have long left. It’s the second time the pair, both in their late 70s, has visited Colombia.

It’s now nearly 9 p.m., and the generators are due to turn off, leaving the reserve in complete darkness. The residents turn in, ready for an early morning start.

The next morning, over a breakfast of arepa, huevos pericos, chocolate caliente, and a lashing of coffee, the excitement is palpable. Cortes, who sighted 241 birds on last year’s Global Big Day, has already been up since 3 a.m., and clocked 25 birds. The weather is good and the group is in high spirits.

The first stop of the day is nearly 10,000 feet up on the mountain known as Cerro Pintado, home to one of Colombia’s páramos—a unique treeless ecosystem found high up in the country’s mountains—and the three birds the team needs to spot. “It won’t be easy, but we’re with the best person we can be with to make this happen,” says Myers. “Oswaldo knows every spot, every hiding place.”

It’s the first time Myers has spent the Global Big Day in Serranía del Perijá, and he’s aiming to spot 75 birds, despite racking up 131 sightings last year during a visit to Los Llanos, an area to the east of the Andes.

“It’s harder to spot birds up here—the higher you climb, the more scarce they get,” Myers explains. “But the ones you do see are very special. The tapaculo will be a pain in the rear to find, as it skulks around in coarse shrubbery.” Nevertheless, he’s pumped and positive for the day. “It’s really important we spot these birds, because no other group is up here. If we don’t catch sight of them, no one else will.”

After another jolting journey to the top of the mountain, the group disembarks from the vehicle. There’s a lengthy period of hushed silence, as the members of the group peer expectantly through binoculars and creep around the undergrowth. Cortes plays the call of the pygmy owl, a predator, in order to coax the birds out of hiding.

“We don’t think it’s good to play it too many times though,” he adds. “We don’t want to scare off the birds. So we also play their call to them to see if they will answer.”

And sure enough, after almost an hour of patiently scanning the trees, the group has ticked off both the Perijá metaltail, a beautiful species of hummingbird with a long beak, startlingly-bright green plume, orange and olive-speckled breast, and garnet red tail; and the Perijá thistletail, a brown bird with a long, ragged tail, grey breast, and flecks of ochre under its chin.

Now the one bird left on the must-see list is the tapaculo, and so the group hits the single-track lane again to head further down the mountain. It’s a couple of hours until Cortes signals for the 4x4 to stop and leaps out. He strides ahead and crouches down, peering into a dense bush. The group crowds around as he plays the call of the tapaculo. Minutes pass. Finally, someone points excitedly and six pairs of binoculars train their sights onto the coarse shrub. There’s a small, almost unnoticeable movement. It’s the tapaculo, a peculiar looking egg-shaped bird, reddish brown in color with spindly legs.

Myers double fist-pumps in jubilation. Now the group can relax, and take their time tallying up other species. For the rest of the day, the count slowly rises: 31 after spotting the Perijá brush finch, another rare bird; 36 after spotting the black-crested warbler, a “lifer” (the term for the first time an individual sees a bird species) for Myers; and 38 after Ropero spots a lifer of his own, the rufous antpitta.

A little after 5 p.m., there's one last coup. Ropero spots the swallow tanager. He smiles and studiously takes out his notebook from his back pocket, scribbling the name down on his list, taking the total count to 46.

Of the 1,900-odd species Colombia boasts, to date more than 75 percent were spotted on May 5, providing scientists with data that would otherwise have taken months, if not years, to collect. In total, 1,548 species were spotted, meaning that Colombia is once again the world leader for Global Big Day.

“This is a poster child of the potential of citizen science,” says Myers. “But there’s still one question remaining: Where is the other 25 percent? Is it just a logistical issue of getting out and registering these birds? If we submitted 30,000 lists, like the U.S. does, would we register all the birds? Or are the birds even still alive?”

Due to the inaccessibility and remoteness of vast areas in Colombia, including the Serranía del Perijá, events such as the Global Big Day are invaluable to scientists. Not only does registering bird species provide scientists with valuable data, it acts as ammunition in the argument to protect Colombia’s ecosystems from further deforestation and destruction.

*Correction: This article originally stated that Jose Luis Ropero's last name was "Rospero."

Turns out mothers all over the world are telling a lot of the same outrageous fibs.

Being a mom is a tough job, in large part because you just can't reason with small children. What you can do, however, is lie to them. In honor of Mother's Day, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to send us the most outlandish white lies their mothers ever told them. As it turns out, moms all over the world are telling some wonderfully inventive lies.

We received over 500 responses, and as uniquely crazy as many of them were, there was also plenty of common ground. Many mothers still tell variations on the classics: If you make a funny face, it will stay that way; if you eat before you swim, you'll get cramps (or die); moms have eyes in the backs of their heads, and so on.

But then there were the more esoteric fibs, such as the dangers of dragonflies sewing your lips together, that playing in puddles will give you polio, or that a little man lives in your eyes and signals your mom when you aren't telling the truth.

We couldn't include all of the fantastic entries we received, but we've collected over 100 of our favorites below. Check and see how many of your own mom's fantastic tales you recognize. Oh, and watch out for the "Lie Man" ...

Lies and Cheats

“If you lie to me, I will know because when I ask you to look into a bowl of water, I will be able to see your reflection.” —Patricia Petersen, Vancouver, British Columbia

“In order to keep us kids from stealing pennies from water fountains, my mother told us the water was electrified and we would die.” —G. Johnson, Georgia

“That a little birdie followed me around and flew back and told my mother when I was doing something that wasn't allowed, like cycling down 11th Avenue, or stealing more than my share of cookies.” —Sherrie, Fredericton, Canada

“Mom always knew when I was fibbing. She said she could tell because I had a black mark on my forehead. My grandma used to say the same thing. I would run to the mirror to see it, but it was never there. They said I couldn't see it because fibbers eventually go blind! I was scared to death.” —Batzion, Chicago, Illinois

“That she could tell I was lying by looking at my tongue. I lived in fear of her telling me to stick out my tongue.” —Ann Chafin, Oak Hill, West Virginia

“That my eyes would turn yellow if I lied.” —Terry Burd, San Juan Capistrano, California

“I asked my mom about little bumps I would get on my tongue. She told me they were liars bumps.” —Donna, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Bread (Hair-Related)

“That eating bread crusts would make my hair curly. It never worked on me, because I didn't want curly hair!” —Emma, Oxford, United Kingdom

“If I ate the crusts of my bread, my hair would get curly (I wanted curly hair)!” —Kate, Des Moines, Iowa

“You won't have curly hair if you don't eat your crusts. I'm not sure I wanted curly hair but I must have eaten a lot of crusts.” —Martin, Stourbridge, United Kingdom

“Eating burnt toast at breakfast would take the curls (very unmanly) out of my hair.” —Brent Parks, Radford, Virginia

“When I was very tiny, my mother always told me my pin-straight hair would grow in curly if I ate my all bread crusts.” —Emily, Iowa

“My mother told me that if I ate my sandwich crusts all the time, my hair would curl. I had very straight long black hair as a youth.” —Margie, Oregon

“Eating the crusts of your bread will give you curly hair.” —Rosie, Farnham, United Kingdom

“As a little boy, my husband hated his white blond hair, and although he also didn't like bread crust, his mother said if he ate it he would get the brown hair he so wanted.” —Jeannie Havnen, Clive, Iowa

“The claim was that my very straight hair would become lovely and curly if l ate all the crusts on bread, instead of just the soft middles. I ate mountains of crusty bread, and my hair is still as straight as a yard of pump water!” —Pam Rankin, Boise, Idaho

“She told me I would get curly hair if I ate the burnt toast. I don't think I ever really believed her. I'm 81 years old now.” —Patricia King, Ocala, Florida

Bread (Other)

“You had to eat your bread crusts if you wanted to learn how to whistle.” —Rose Bork, Appleton, Wisconsin

“Mom convinced me to eat the crusts of bread by telling me that ‘that's where all the vitamins are,’ as though vitamins could somehow migrate outward during the baking process. I'm not entirely sure why she imagined that, at age 5 or 6, I'd even care about consuming vitamin-rich foods, but it worked.” —Nicole, Rochester, New York

“Eating end of a bread loaf will help to grow breasts.” —Elina, Latvia

“We were told as children that eating the crust on bread makes your teeth whiter.” —Scott Cooper, North Tazewell, Virginia

“So she wouldn't have to cut the edges off of my sandwiches, when I was 8, my mom told me eating the bread crusts would make my boobs grow big.” —Sakana, Santa Fe, New Mexico

“Growing up we always had a toaster that made the bread a little ‘toastier’ than would be desired. Mom told her three daughters that if we all ate burnt toast, we would become opera singers. As you would guess, none of us went into show business.” —Del, South Carolina

“White bread is only for white people. We buy wheat bread, because we’re brown.” —Isa Flores, Austin, Texas

Catching Birds

"If you sprinkle salt on a bird's tail, it will sit still and you can catch it." —Frank Hartigan, Springfield, Oregon

“I wanted a pet very badly and my mother told me that if I could put salt on the tail of a bird, I'd be able to catch it. Hours were spent outside with the salt shaker and various homemade traps.” —Anne Falbowski, Colchester, Connecticut

“To catch a bird, sprinkle salt on its tail, and it can't fly away.” —Pat Benard, Spruce Pine, North Carolina

“She would bring salt shakers to the beach and told us if we were able to get salt on a seagull's tail feathers it would become our pet. Her way of keeping four kids occupied.” —Charlie, Florida

“If you put salt on a bird's tail, it will freeze and you can catch it. She would send me out to the backyard with a salt shaker. I would spend hours ‘catching birds.’” —Sharon Arthur, New York City, New York

Body Horror

“My mother and my friend's mother told us that the the inside of our ears would turn black if we were naughty.” —Úlfhildur, Iceland

“If I didn't stop crying my head would fall off and laugh at me.” —Amy Garnet, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

“You would get spots like a rotting banana if you didn't go outside.” —Jay, Newfoundland

“My intestines would rupture if I continued to use my belly as a bongo drum.” —Jen, Colorado

“If you play with fire, you will pee in the bed.” —Sara Klinglesmith, Louisville, Kentucky

“That if you play with fire, you will pee the bed. She also said that if you get a stye in your eye, you had taken a pee along the road. Obviously a urine-centric theme.” —Thomas Lhamon, Traverse City, Michigan

“That when you drive by a field and smell the fertilizer/manure, you should breathe in deeply, that it is good for your lungs.” —Katerina, Czech Republic

“Not to play in rain puddles. Will get polio.” —Maryann Kelly, Boston, Massachusetts

“My mom told my sister this, but she said that if you keep scratching your booboos and drink water that all the water would start pouring out of your cuts and scrapes.” —Carrie Engerrand, Texas

“She told me that my head would turn around if I would leave the house with my hair wet.” —Luka Bak, Croatia

“Potty training: Mom always reminded my sister and I that if we didn’t wipe front to back we wouldn’t have friends.” —Christy, Georgia

“My mother used to convince me that I was tired by telling me that I had 'twirlies' in my eyes that she could see. The more twirlies you had, the sleepier you were. Always sent me running straight to bed.” —Sarah Khalil, Beirut, Lebanon

“Freckles are erased by rubbing cucumbers on them.” —Caitrin McCormick, Minnesota

“My mom told me that if I didn't wear socks with my tennis shoes, my toes would rot off.” —Taryn Sparacio, Bellevue, Washington

“If you water houseplants while you are menstruating the plants will die.” —Susan, Mesa, Arizona

“I'm gonna unscrew your belly button and your legs will fall off!” —Deborah Riehl, North Creek, Washington

“When you lose a baby tooth, if you don't put your tongue in the hole where the tooth was, you'll grow a new gold tooth in that spot. Our mom HAD a gold crown on a molar, so we really believed that we, too, could grow a gold tooth.” —Tracy Monroe, Indiana

“You get canker sores if you pee off a bridge.” —Stacey Henrikson, Rochester Hills, Michigan

“Never cover your belly button when pregnant or your baby can't breath.” —Linda Lightner, Indiana

“My mother told me if I bit my nails, a hand would grow in my stomach.” —Mary Pagone, Los Angeles, California

Technology

“If you looked at the microwave while it was in use, you'd go blind.” —Sean, Memphis, Tennessee

“Don't let your umbrella open inside the house or your mommy is going to die.” —Norton McColl, Sao Paulo, Brazil

“If I touched the basement freezer, I would be sucked inside and no one would be able to hear me scream.” —Niki Cotton, Virginia

“My mom told me that jet streams coming from airplanes were actually toilet paper and that if I fell into the airplane toilet I could get sucked out along with it.” —Keilah Keiser, San Diego, California

“That if I sat too close to the TV my eyes would become square.” —Hayley, California

“She said that if I wore my watch to bed, lint would jam up the gears and break it.” —Molly Pohlig, Brooklyn, New York

Sewing

“She said I should never sew on Sunday, because the Devil would make me rip it out with my nose. I was never a seamstress of any kind, but saw no reason to tempt fate, even when I took up embroidery.” —Kathleen, Indianapolis, Indiana

“If you have your clothes sewn while wearing them, to suck on a piece of thread to avoid losing your mind.” —Eny Steinberg, Mexico City, Mexico

“If you sew on a Sunday, you'll spend eternity in hell picking out the stitches with your nose.” —Cara, Washington D.C.

Cold Concrete

“If you sat on the cement, you would catch a cold.” —Maria Martinez, Napa, California

“Going out with wet hair, wearing fashionable cropped clothing that didn’t come right down to your bum and sitting down on cold concrete all cause a mysterious illness known as ‘a chill on your kidneys.’ When questioned on the symptoms when I was an adult, mum still said ‘well you’ll know all about it when you catch one.’ It seems to also be caused by inadequate vegetable consumption and staying out late without your good coat.” —Sarah, Manchester, United Kingdom

“If you sit on a cold, concrete wall you'll get a urinary tract infection.” —Anne, Maryland

Strange Men

“That there was a man that traveled around town and he would chop off your middle finger if you used it to make crude hand gestures.” —G. Johnson, Georgia

“If I don't behave the chimney sweep will come and take me away.” —Bernie Harshman, Arizona

“It is something that I used to tell my boys when they were little: I used to tell them that there was a tiny Lie Man that lived in their eyes, and if they ever told a lie, that little man would show up in their eyes, and I would see him. From that time on, if they ever tried to tell a lie, they would close their eyes, so I couldn’t see ‘The Lie Man.’” —Heidi Harrison, Beacon, New York

“In the pre-internet era, she told me that the mailman could read everything I mailed, and that I should never write anything that I wouldn't want him to read.” —CLK, Vero Beach, Florida

“If my brother and I didn't behave, she was going to call Joe Schmoe, the baby cop, who would take us to baby jail.” —Bruce S. Bevitz, Orlando, Florida

“She said that the dust under my bed (if not kept clean) would turn into a man. And I thought about that every night before turning off the light.” —Betty Skalski, Winnetka, Illinois

Fairies, Etc.

“House elves exist and that if I follow them to the fairy ring in the yard then I have to stay with them forever.” —Alexandra Green, Ashland City, Tennessee

“This story isn't about my mother but rather my grandmother who used to watch my sister and I during the summer time when my parents had to work. She had a pocket door off of her kitchen, and for some reason, I was always playing with the brass latch, probably because of the sound it made. That used to annoy her, so she used to tell me that an evil fairy lived within the latch and if I kept playing with her home, she'd come take me in my sleep.” —Owen McCafferty, Cleveland, Ohio

“If I wore my clothes backwards, the fairies would take me away.” —Beth, Ottawa, Canada

“She told me that my freckles were 'fairy kisses' from fairies kissing me while I was asleep. Fortunately, I didn't think it was a scary thing to have happen.” —Kathryn Adams, Toronto, Canada

“My mom would always tell me that under the little silver drain covers in bathrooms, lived a small city of tiny people. She would mention how they survived by drinking the drain water, and would wait for humans who knew to feed them. I would often feed them my leftover bread, tear my food into small pieces to give to them, and put pennies or dimes down the drains where they would fit.” —Elise B., Pico Rivera, California

“She told me that the sudden appearance of dandelions in the yard was because when a leprechaun drops gold coins they turn into flowers in the sunlight.” —James Mitcham, Baltimore, Maryland

Holidays

“Every Easter my mom would take me to a quiet room away from the kitchen. She would sit me down on a comfortable cushion and very seriously tell me that if I sat quietly and concentrated very hard that I could lay an egg. I would sit there, checking behind me occasionally. Sure enough, after close to an hour, an egg would magically appear. Elated, I would run to my mom and triumphantly hand her my magic egg!” —S.Lan123, California

“The brand names on Christmas toys were the names of the elf who made it.” —Thipu, New York

Eating

“If I swallowed orange seeds, trees would grow out of my ears.” —Sharon O'Connor, Texas

“To deter my brother and me from eating my mom's delicious homemade chocolate chip cookies she told us the extra crunch to them were frog legs. Really they were walnuts.” —Jen, California

“If you don't eat your green vegetables, you will get yellow jaundice.” —Joel H., New York City, New York

“My eyes would turn blue if I ate lots of carrots!” —Dominique, Mexico City

“If you don't eat beans you will suffer from something she called, 'Lack-a-Beany.'" —Joyce Ford, Seattle, Washington

“Never go swimming in the pool/ocean after eating watermelon (common parental lie in Israel).” —Sharon, Israel

“You will grow horns when you have a snack while lying in bed. I was quite intrigued as to where the horns will grow and what they will look like (like a cow or like a reindeer or like a wild buck) so I kept on asking irritating questions, until mom gave up and tried to explain the crumbs will change into rocks, which led to more questions...” —Tessa De Villiers, South Africa

“That the peach pits I found outside were ‘hoppy toad’ eggs.” —Kristine, California

“My mom told me that sugary foods had little bugs on them, and the bugs liked to eat teeth, but if I brushed, then it would take them off.” —Adam Drew, Calgary, Canada

“Rich people eat shrimp for breakfast.” —Teresa, Chicago, Illinois

“Eating any seeds (watermelon and apple) would cause that fruit to grow in my belly.” —Andrea, Massachusetts

“That if I stretch my arms above my head when I’m eating, the food goes to a ‘donkey stomach’ instead of my own.” —Pia, Houston, Texas

“If you leave your glass of orange juice sitting out too long, all of the vitamins will evaporate from it.” —Mark Schaeffer, Oakland, California

Coffee

“Coffee turns your knees black.” —Ryan Maloney, San Diego, California

“Drinking coffee will make hair grow on your toes.” —Lesley, North Carolina

“As a small child I always wanted to drink coffee like the adults. In order to deter this urge, mother told me that if I drank coffee I would break out in freckles the color of coffee. Not wanting freckles of any kind, I believed her, neglecting to question why none of the adults in the family that drank coffee had freckles!” —Debbie Bruce King, Franklin, Tennessee

“That if I drank coffee I would grow hair on my chest!” —Terra Salazar, California

“My hair would turn red if I would drink coffee (hers was red).” —Suzanne, Netherlands

Dead Pets

“For our first pet, my mom agreed to let my brother and I get a parakeet. Though I have no recollection of it, we picked out a green-and-yellow one. The next morning, my mom found the bird lying dead on the bottom of the cage, so she brought it back to the store to get another one. But there were no more green-and-yellow birds left—only blue ones. My mom begrudgingly exchanged our now-deceased choice for a light blue bird, and when she got home, she told her three- and five-year-olds that the parakeet had simply taken a bath. We must have accepted it right away, because I can't ever remember a time when our parakeet was yellow and green.” —Madeline Bilis, Boston, Massachusetts

“I was a pre-schooler when my pet turtle died. Mom had been sick and the turtle was neglected. When mom was better, she told me the turtle was hibernating. I was unaware she replaced the turtle, but one day she had me come to see how my turtle had resumed an active life. She told me the truth when I was an adult in my 40s. Not only had the turtle been replaced once, but many times.” —Janet, Ontario, Canada

“When I was three years old I was told the family dog, Inky, died because he fell in the soap bubbles.” —Joe Milici, Mount Joy, Pennsylvania

“My pet chickens and rabbits had gone 'to the farm' when in fact my former farmer Dad had turned them into dinner.” — Pat, Arlington Heights, Illinois

Kissing Elbows

“She told us that if you kissed your elbow you would turn into a boy.” —Tara Bryan, Flatrock, Newfoundland

“Because of something my younger sister got to do that I was not allowed to do I told my mother I wanted to be a girl. So she told me if I could kiss the tip of my elbow I would turn into a girl.” —Mark Moore, Knoxville, Tennessee

“If you kiss your elbow, you’ll turn into a princess.” —Peggy Sanchez, St. Paul, Minnesota

“That if I could put my elbow in my ear, I would turn into a boy. I thought that changing sexes could be a super power disguise, so I spent hours trying.” —Jill, Seattle, Washington

Animals

“If a snapping turtle bit you, it would not let loose until it heard thunder.” —J. Bonamour, Louisiana

“For as long as I can remember when we would drive to Rhode Island, she would tell me that the forest rangers used giraffes to prune the trees. I would always be looking in just the wrong direction and miss seeing one as we went by.” —Edward P. Steele, Connecticut

“If you continue to stare into a mirror, a monkey will pop out.” —Joan Henehan, Los Angeles, California

“If you whistle at night, snakes will hear it and come into your bed.” —Vito Delsante, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“My mother told me the winter sand barrels at the sides of steep parts of mountain highways were for the convenience of traveling cats. I was mad and sad for the cats.” —Thomas Tigaboj, Denver, Colorado

Dragonflies

“I was told that dragonflies will sew your eyelids shut if you were not careful.” — Joe Becker, San Francisco, California

“Playing with my belly button would make my butt fall off. And dragonflies (called darning needles then) would sew the lips together of children who misbehaved.” — Michael Hewins, Washington D.C.

“Dragonflies would sew my mouth shut.” —Meredith Roy, New Jersey

Worms

“Eating chocolate chip cookie dough would give you worms.” —John, Assonet, Massachusetts

“The bubbles in the icicles hanging from the roof were worm eggs.” —Pete Haerden, Carver, Minnesota

“My mother used to tell us not to eat paper, crayons, or glue, because if we did, it would give us worms, and then worms would grow in our bellies. That was enough to deter me from ever eating any of that stuff.” —Amanda Stanley, Oregon

“If you eat raw cookie dough you’ll get worms.” —Gwen Demombynes, Seattle, Washington

What Happened to the Other Kids

“Sometimes when our house settled it would make little creaking noises that seemed to come from under our home, only accessible by a hatch into the crawl space. When my brother and I asked her what was making the noises under the house she told us that's where our misbehaving siblings lived and if we didn't behave that's where he and I would end up.” — Jen, California

“There was a gravel factory near the town where we lived and my mother told us it was ‘Kids Jail’ and that if we were naughty we would have to go there and bust rocks all day and only eat bread and water. Every time we drove past that place my sisters and I would be absolutely silent in the car so she wouldn't have a reason to drop us off at the kids jail.” —Whittney Bishop, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

“She told me that the grease spots in the street in front of our house were stains that were left from children being hit by cars who had ventured out into the street.” —Jerrilee, Poseyville, Indiana

“My mom told me that the gum spots on the sidewalk were actually blood from the kids who didn’t look before crossing the road.” —Ava Moody, Fort Worth, Texas

Reckoning with a dark legacy at a time of great change.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the world’s busiest air route is a nonstop to paradise. Nearly 90 flights a day leave Seoul for Jeju, a semitropical island 60 miles off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. With citrus groves, dramatic black-rock beaches, and waterfalls spilling into the sea, Jeju has earned the nickname “Honeymoon Island” for a reason. But many vacationers today may not remember the time when it had a very different reputation.

On April 3, 1948, an uprising pitted Jeju islanders against police, the U.S. military, and the newly formed South Korean government. In the ensuing conflict, up to 30,000 civilians lost their lives, and those who survived were branded traitors and communists. The history of the insurrection, now known as Jeju 4·3, was officially suppressed and then forgotten, before finally reappearing in the national consciousness.

There are, amid the island’s unusual theme parks and beautiful vistas, nearly 800 historical sites related to that period. Most are unmarked, untended, and virtually unknown, and one of the most significant is right where thousands of visitors arrive on the island—a mass grave under a runway of Jeju International Airport.

“As long as you land at Jeju Airport, you land on April 3rd,” says Gayoon Baek, cofounder of Jeju Dark Tours, an NGO that documents and maps these sites. As a human rights activist, she feels that telling the story of Jeju 4·3 is an important step toward resolving the island’s troubled past—especially given the current climate of reconciliation between North and South.

“People were silent for a very, very long time,” Baek says. “I think it is our responsibility to document these places.”

The events of Jeju 4·3 began, ironically enough, with a call for unity. Following the Japanese withdrawal from Korea after World War II, everything south of the 38th parallel, including Jeju Island, fell under the stewardship of the United States, while the Soviet Union maintained influence over the north.

Discouraged by the painful partition, in 1947 the left-wing South Korean Labor Party encouraged nationwide demonstrations for unification. On Jeju, the march dissolved into chaos when police opened fire on a crowd, killing six. Korean police officers then detained, questioned, and tortured Jeju citizens connected to the demonstration. According to the official report of the Truth Commission (formally known as the National Committee for Investigation of the Truth About the Jeju 4·3 Incident), the anger over these heavy-handed tactics transcended political divides, especially after a student died in custody.

On April 3, furious civilians stormed police stations across the island. According to the Truth Commission’s report, U.S. military governor Major General William F. Dean declared—without evidence—that the resulting insurrection and rebel force was led not by islanders, but by North Korean communists. He advocated a scorched-earth policy, which included the involvement of a particularly brutal right-wing paramilitary force, and within months the island was aflame.

Per the commission’s report, entire villages, including women and children, were massacred in surprise raids. More than 2,500 were forced through illegitimate military trials. Those who received a death sentence were shot en masse and buried beneath what would one day become the airport.

Scholar Jong-min Kim, who coauthored the report, states that the United States bears some responsibility for what happened. He points out the August 1948 accord under which the United States retained control over the Korean military and police until their withdrawal from the peninsula in June 1949. “U.S. culpability cannot be avoided because it took place during that time,” says Kim, who has spent decades collecting first-hand testimony from survivors.

The Jeju 4·3 insurrection and crackdown stretched through the Korean War. By 1954, a tenth of the population had died, and roughly a third had been displaced. Five rebel fighters remained at large; throughout the entire seven-year conflict their numbers had never exceeded 500.

Today many people visit Jeju to tackle all or part of the Olle hiking trail, a 262-mile trek that circumnavigates the island. Halfway along the north coast, it meanders through the tumbledown ruins of Gonul-dong, one of 109 villages that were destroyed between 1948 and 1949 alone. From there, a hiker can see the shore, the distant lighthouse, and the odd ferry on its way to the port. It was said that villages within three miles of the coast were in the military’s safe zone, but many burned anyway. Most maps make no mention of Gonul-dong, and few people today know the story behind it. Still, there’s more left of it than there is of many other lost villages, which are often nothing more than a memorial tombstone on a lonely road.

According to a 2015 analysis of Jeju 4·3’s historical remains by Professor Tae-il Kim, there are at least 154 known massacre sites scattered across the island. A few have been preserved as memorials and historical sites. In the southwest, sculptures and signboards mark the path to Seodal Mountain, where 149 detained civilians were secretly executed in 1950. A walkway follows the low curve of Seodal’s ridge, and overlooks the natural bowl beneath, where the victims died. Six years passed before the bodies were returned to their families—as little more than a jumble of mismatched bones. Their remains were interred at Baekjoilsonjiji, the “graveyard of the 100 ancestors.”

The volcanic stone of Jeju is pocked with caves and lava tubes—some of the best in the world, according to UNESCO. During Jeju 4·3, villagers used them to hide from soldiers, sometimes for weeks or even months at a time. More than a hundred people hid in Keunneolgwe Cave, for example, and their experience became the subject of the 2012 movie Jinseul. Looking for the cave today, it’s easy to understand how they managed to keep it secret. Two maps, three navigation apps, and a smattering of local advice weren’t enough to reveal it.

On the opposite side of the island, broken and rusted signs point the way to Darangshi Cave, where 11 people, including women and children, fled when their village was destroyed. The soldiers who found them lit a fire at the cave mouth, suffocating the people inside. Their bodies weren’t discovered for 44 years. Today the entrance is buried under a pile of stone and surrounded by fields.

To Baek, of Jeju Dark Tours, the sites, though so different, tell a single story. “You can go to this massacre site or that massacre site,” she says. “It’s actually the same massacre site.”

The stigma of Jeju 4·3 haunted the island for decades. The National Security Act of 1948 made it illegal to praise or support North Korea and enemies of the state, so even discussing the incident was considered a crime. Islanders swallowed their stories to avoid persecution.

Meanwhile, Jeju’s reputation began to evolve. South Korea’s dramatic economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s gave Koreans the means to travel. Jeju became a favorite honeymoon destination, and the island was reimagined through the photos in countless wedding albums.

The stories of Jeju 4·3 remained suppressed until the late 1980s. In 1988, the scholar and report author Kim, then a cub reporter for the Jeju Shinmun newspaper, began interviewing survivors and printing their stories in a series called “Jeju 4·3 Speaks.” The next year saw the foundation of the Jeju 4·3 Research Institute. When the remains of the Darangshi Cave victims were discovered in 1992, a public outcry irreparably broke the silence. This, along with an easing of North-South tensions in the late 1990s, finally led to an open discussion.

In 2000, President Kim Dae-jung commissioned an investigation, which led to the Truth Commission’s 2003 report. This, in turn, led to a blanket governmental apology for the massacres, as well as the creation of a peace park where a memorial wall bears the name, age, and village of each known victim.

On April 3, 2018, the 70th anniversary of the inciting event, President Moon Jae-in renewed the official apology and pledged to continue peeling back the secrecy on that chapter of history. An amendment to compensate the survivors is currently being considered in the National Assembly. Excavations have reopened at the airport to recover the remains of missing victims from the mass grave and return them to their families if possible.

And as Jeju islanders finally gain some measure of closure, the last chapter of the Korean War may be closing as well. With unprecedented peace talks under way between the North, South, and United States, the legacy of Jeju 4·3 could conclude, as it began, with a call for unity.

To bring attention to their cause, these pioneering women had to get physical.

In the 1910s, a revolution in swimming was underway. By custom and often by law, women in America and England weren’t allowed in the water without covering their limbs in a heavy “bathing costume” that weighed them down. Competing in swim races, especially in public, was also frowned upon. But some women wanted to jump into the water unencumbered, and even to race. At the time, swimming meant fighting for new freedom for women’s bodies.

Female swimming pioneers are sometimes called “swimming suffragists,” since their presence in the pool was analogous to their presence at the polls. But many were straight-up suffragists as well. “The physical freedom of women’s bodies in swimming went together with the political freedom of seeking the vote for women in the 1910s,” writes Linda Borish, an associate professor of history at Western Michigan University.

Women's fight for access to the water was itself a type of implicit political action. But sometimes swimming became explicitly political, tied directly to supporting the right for women to vote.

In the 1910s, women swimmers began creating leagues of their own—the National Women’s Life-Saving League and later the Women’s Swimming Association (WSA) in the United States—and these groups pushed for new freedom for swimmers. One of their first fights was to earn the right to wear bathing suits that wouldn't weigh them down. In the early 1900s, Annette Kellerman, the “Australian Mermaid,” had pioneered a new style of swim costume: Instead of wearing stockings, a skirt, and shoes into the water, she swam in a one-piece that exposed the lower half of her legs. Only a few years after she brought this style to America, it had become standard. But there were limits. Officials of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) still wanted women to be covered from “shoulder to toe” when they raced in public.

Charlotte Epstein, one of the League’s most active members and founder of the WSA, became one of the most vocal advocates for women's rights in the water. “What Susan B. Anthony and her followers were to women’s suffrage, this woman is to women’s swimming,” one WSA member said at a 1927 event. Epstein pushed the AAU to create championship races for women and to let them wear suits that would allow them to move more swiftly through the water. She argued that women could compete in distance races, not just short sprints, and play water polo. She created the WSA as a national organization that could give women control over their water sports, and help fight for women to swim in the Olympics.

“There is a direct link between suffrage and other rights for women, a correlation between our participation in voting and our fight for swimming equality,” writes the author Jenny Landreth in Swell: A Waterbiography. “Women needed to combat the same conventions in order to get access to sports, the same issues around social class and imposed cultural roles."

In 1914, the connection between swimming and voting became direct. English suffragettes wanted to create a floating procession of boats on The Serpentine, a lake in London's Hyde Park, in support of their cause. Denied permission, they turned to protest. A group of women arrived there in dark robes, with letters on their chests. Together, they spelled out S-U-F-F-R-A-G-E. At a designated moment, they threw off their robes to reveal their bathing suits underneath. A set of swimmers raced to the boats they had planned to use in the procession and started to cut them loose. When the police apprehended the swimmers, another jumped out of a car and into the water, straight toward the boats.

The protesters did not succeed in freeing the boats, but they had created a spectacle of suffragette swimming. In 1917, the League showed its support for the suffrage movement by holding a “suffrage rescue race” as part of a competition in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. (The League, as its name suggests, emphasized that women should become strong swimmers to be able to save drowning people.) The swimmers were to race to rescue a dummy—named Jerushy Ann Maria Jane Tompkins or “Aunty Anti-Suffrage”—from the water.

Mrs. Anti-Suffrage, as the papers called her, wore a cumbersome outfit—a white dress, white shoes, stockings, silk gloves, white cap, and a red sash that read “Anti-Suffrage.” The New York Times described her as “an old-fashioned woman who does not believe it is ladylike to swim.” The swimmers, her would-be rescuers, wore yellow sashes with their own message: "Votes for Women." After the signal to start, they sped towards Mrs. Anti-Suffrage and Rita Greenfield, one of the league’s strongest swimmers, brought her to safety.

“We want to save the anti-suffragists from political voicelessness and we will help them along in any way we can,” a spokesperson told the paper. But Greenfield admitted to the Tribune that “she would much rather have drowned” the dummy, the paper wrote.

These actions were part of a trend of advocating for voting rights through physical feats. Women rode horseback and raced cars to promote suffrage, and even climbed mountains and left behind a "Votes for Women" banner. "These women in the early 20th century were seeking new opportunities," says Borish. "They realized their physical abilities were being limited by not being able to vote." Real progress would require both physical and political freedom.

"As they were seeking to increase their power in society," Borish says, "they saw they needed both."

It was a ridge of water the height of an eight-story building.

Greater than the length of a bowling lane. Twice the height of a telephone pole. More than ten times the height of an average Christmas tree. At 78 feet, or the height of an eight-story building, the wave that came crashing down off the coast of New Zealand on May 8, 2018, wasn't just a titan: It was the largest wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.

As a ferocious storm raged near Campbell Island, about 430 miles south of New Zealand, a buoy recorded the wave—but, according to a MetOcean Solutions statement, may have missed even larger ones over the course of the squall. Installed in March to measure the Southern Ocean's extreme conditions, the buoy only records once every three hours, in a single 20-minute burst. Either way, the wave blows the previous southern-hemisphere record, of 72 feet, out of the water.

To put that in context, some tidal waves are only three feet in height. The tsunami that struck Chile in 2010 was around six feet high. At the other extreme, waves can very occasionally be much, much taller: The biggest ever recorded, which struck Alaska in 1958, was 1,720 feet. That's just a little shorter than New York's 1,776-feet-tall One World Trade Center building.

The wild Southern Ocean, the senior oceanographer Tom Durrant said in the statement, often serves as the world's "engine room," generating swell waves that make their way across the world's seas. "Indeed, surfers in California can expect energy from this storm to arrive at their shores in about a week's time," he said. It remains to be seen how big the waves will be once they arrive—though surfers hoping to break a record may be disappointed. The wave is two feet smaller than the largest ever surfed, an 80-foot monster off the coast of Portugal, with the record confirmed last month by the World Surf League.

A pair of artists spent years recreating these iconic images in three dimensions.

The auction of Andreas Gursky’s photograph Rhine II for a record-breaking $4.3 million in 2011 had an unintended artistic consequence: it inspired two Swiss photographers, Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger, to try to recreate the image as a three-dimensional, miniature model. The original, which depicts a strip of the Rhine under a gray, low-hanging sky, was recreated using transparent paper and cotton wool for the clouds and plastic foil for the water. Now, six years and some 40 models later, they've released a collection of their recreations titled Double Take: The World’s Most Iconic Photographs Meticulously Re-created in Miniature.

Since the project began in 2012, Cortis and Sonderegger have built miniature models for some of history’s most recognizable photographs, from Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s 1826 image View from the Window at Le Gras, to the iconic photo of the Hindenberg disaster, to Pennie Smith's shot of The Clash's Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar in London. Along the way, they had to find creative ways to replicate everything from billowing clouds to moon dust.

“When we start, we discuss the materials, but it’s always trial and error,” says Sonderegger in an interview included in the book. One particularly tricky reconstruction was of Buzz Aldrin’s photograph of his footprint during the 1969 moon landing. The team tried several different substances to mimic the surface of the moon, including sand and flour, before settling on concrete powder. The footprint was fashioned from a piece of wood, which had to be pressed with just the right intensity for an accurate outline.

Cortis and Sonderegger try not to rely on Photoshop and can spend weeks getting a recreation right. They photograph their models surrounded by their studio tools, sometimes with a printed-out version of the original. But the scale of their models can still be surprising: their version of an aerial photograph of the Exxon Valdez tanker leaking 11 million gallons of crude oil is 7 meters deep, and about 1.5 meters wide at the front.

The pair have chosen images that depict tragedies, momentous historical events, and even a faked photograph (the famous 1934 Loch Ness monster image Nessie, by Marmaduke Wetherell). The book also summarizes the history of the photo they've recreated which, as Sonderegger notes, makes for some mind-bending realizations: “someone took an image, it became two-dimensional, then we make it three-dimensional again, and then we make an image also, so it’s back again to two dimensions!”

But historical photographs aren’t always immune to manipulation. Gursky altered his Rhine II image, and historians have investigated the authenticity of Robert Capa's Spanish Civil War photograph The Falling Soldier, a recreation of which appears on the cover of Double Take. For Cortis and Sonderegger, creating models of these images is a form of visual examination. Says Sonderegger, “We want to activate the viewer; to push them to think about our photographs, and think about the original.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Double Take.

Evidence of the extinct.

In an image captured by Cassini, the gas giant's rings look like razor-thin blades.

We're used to seeing Saturn's rings at an oblique angle, as concentric circles around a hazy sphere, but in this image, released by NASA last week, they look more like the angular arms of one of artist Alexander Calder’s kinetic sculptures. From this angle, the rings are collapsed into one razor-thin blade, flanked by the moons Mimas, Janus, and Tethys, and the gentle curve of the planet that holds them all together.

This surprising view was captured from the Cassini spacecraft. It combines images taken with red, green, and blue spectral filters, all gathered at distance of 1.7 million miles from the solar system's second-largest planet, according to NASA's release. The sleek geometry is a bit of a optical trick, since the moons and rings all orbit in about the same plane.

Galileo first documented Saturn's rings in 1610, but the Cassini craft studied them more closely than any mission had before, including an analysis of the particles that compose them—from individual grains of sand to monumental mountains. When Saturn was at its equinox, Cassini monitored the rings' temperature, which, according to an infrared spectrometer, dipped down to a frigid -382 degrees Fahrenheit. The craft also decoded "spokes," of mysterious shapes that had registered on Voyager images as radial smudges. Cassini's data suggests that these are made up of ice particles, held just above the rings by electrostatic charge. These phenomena can be vast—longer than 10,000 miles—but fleeting, gone in just a few hours.

The Cassini mission wrapped last fall, after two decades in space, when the craft burned up Saturn's atmosphere. Scientists are still sifting through the vast trove of data Cassini collected. But in the meantime, armchair astronomers can peruse the whole collection of images from the mission, which portray our solar neighborhood as familiar, thrillingly alien, and full of splendid visual surprises.

The punkahs of the Antebellum era served many purposes.

In the mid 19th century, slaves throughout the American South pulled at ropes and chains nonstop during summer mealtimes, to make plantation dining rooms bearable in beastly humid heat. The slaves would swing wooden panels or fringed fabric rectangles that were mounted on the dining room ceilings. The arduous labor created breezes and flicked insects away from the food and the guests’ flesh. The fans were called punkahs—the same name was applied to their counterparts in India, which servants waved above British colonists.

For American slaveholders, assigning people (usually boys and men dressed in brown and red livery) to work the punkah cords during parties was a way to flaunt wealth. Dana E. Byrd, a Bowdoin College scholar who has studied plantation life, said that the public display “would have undoubtedly been regarded as an extravagant use of labor.” She also notes that there were some benefits to the work. The fanners could listen to party conversations, which sometimes revealed useful or important news, about owners who might soon auction their enslaved families, abolitionists growing active in the region, and slaves managing to revolt or escape.

Dr. Byrd’s website, The Punkah Project, describes about 40 examples of the fans that have been mentioned in documents or surfaced at institutions, homes, auction houses, hotels, and events spaces. The website maps their locations, from Connecticut to Florida. They can be as humble as an unpainted plank, at Kent Plantation House in Alexandria, Louisiana, and as intricately patterned as a triangular board covered with wallpaper depicting European colonnades, at Tallwood plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Many of them, including a scrollwork mahogany slab at Melrose mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, seem to have been designed to look particularly weighty, so that visitors understood the effort required of the operators. Dr. Byrd occasionally learns about a previously unknown example; a rough wooden triangle is set on the dining room ceiling of Kleinpeter House in Baton Rouge, a newly restored structure built in 1820 for Alsatian-American farmers.

At least one famous antebellum homeowner, Thomas Jefferson, did tinker around with concepts for equipment that would have spared his workers from punkah duty. Around 1804, he filled a notebook page with proposed ideas for gears and pendulums that could power a ceiling fan in the dining room at Monticello. He predicted that it would “run an hour” before it required rewinding. Dr. Byrd has found no evidence that the machine was ever prototyped or installed.

After the Civil War, freed slaves recorded what they had endured during fanning duty, in autobiographies and interviews with historians. Booker T. Washington’s 1901 memoir describes how much he had learned in the 1860s by eavesdropping about “the subject of freedom and the war,” while he was a child enslaved in Virginia and powering his owners’ punkahs. Neal Upson, a former slave who lived in Athens, Georgia, recalled in the 1930s that his owner had whipped him when he faltered during a fanning stint. Henry Coleman, who had been born into slavery on a South Carolina plantation, had been hoisted into an overhead swing to operate the dining room’s fanning mechanism. In the 1930s, Mr. Coleman told an interviewer that when he fell asleep on the swing, his master would wake him, and the dinner guests teased him for being “so lazy.”

Dr. Byrd says that Mr. Coleman’s experience can nonetheless be interpreted somewhat poetically. “Though still at his owner’s beck and call, he was positioned above the fray,” she writes in a 2016 essay. The swing allowed him a little power, “something close to flight and a fleeting feeling of freedom.”

In the early 20th century, as plantations were adapted into house museums, scholars began documenting the punkahs. Their writings scarcely mentioned the objects’ underlying cruelty. Dr. Byrd points out that the authors sometimes even used passive language to describe how the devices functioned—as if no humans were at the controls. Mary Willis Shuey, a writer in Shreveport, Louisiana, told The Magazine Antiques in 1935 that punkahs amounted to “an ingenious arrangement by which the air was kept in motion and the impertinent advances of flies and mosquitoes were discouraged.”

Antique punkahs occasionally appear on the market, and they can sell for thousands of dollars each. One frequent buyer is John Cummings, the founder of the Whitney Plantation, a museum and memorial to slaves near New Orleans. He has acquired five punkahs so far, and he has pored over interviews with the slaves who pulled the ropes and longed for the dinner parties to end. He will not be installing the fans in his property’s main house. The ceilings are too low, he says—the rooms probably did not have punkahs originally. He is more interested, he adds, in documenting slaves’ meager possessions rather than displaying slaveholders’ elaborate furnishings.

Findowrie, a plantation house that a Revolutionary War soldier built in 1782 near Charlottesville, retains ghosts of its original punkah; the dining room ceiling has wrought iron hooks a few feet apart. The property was recently sold to Tim Mullins, a bank executive who plans to research and restore it. The antebellum owners prospered by quarrying stone, running a steam-powered sawmill that supplied railroad ties, and making hard cider (Thomas Jefferson was a repeat customer). Mr. Mullins has found two names so far of the dozens of people enslaved there: Grace and Sara. The site contains ruins and foundations of outbuildings, including a blacksmithing workshop, a corn crib and slave quarters. There is a family cemetery for the owners; slaves likely had a separate graveyard nearby, with markers made of plain fieldstones.

Findowrie’s punkah was probably a fan-shaped panel, made of southern yellow pine that was milled onsite. Mr. Mullins plans to commission a replica. It will serve as a kind of shrine to the plantation’s enslaved people. It will be operable, as befits a historically accurate restoration, but not needed. The house, Mr. Mullins says, “will hopefully have air conditioning.”

Only wealthy landowners were allowed to feast on these royal fowl.

Swans, according to those who have eaten them, are tasty birds. The meat is “more like duck than it is like goose,” one hunter reports; it’s “lean, lightly gamey, moist, and succulent,” in the words of a chef.

Today, it’s rare for swan to be served, but for hundreds of years in England, eating swan was a mark of status. No one could own or eat one without paying the monarchy for the privilege, and an elaborate system of marks developed to track swan rights. By default, though, the king or queen owned the country’s swans, and that’s still true: Any unmarked swans swimming in the open waters of England belong to the Queen.

Rules governing swan ownership in England date back before the mid-13th century, as Arthur MacGregor of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum explains in a 1995 issue of Anthropozoologica. By 1361, the crown had an official Royal Swan-herd, and by 1463 there was a “Swan-mote” with commissioners appointed to hear swan disputes.

Swans were considered royal fowl, but by the beginning of 15th century, wealthy people could buy the right to own, sell, and eat them. If you wanted to keep swans on your property (a right reserved for those who had property to begin with), you had to buy an expensive “swan mark” from the king, which you’d carve or brand into the beaks of your swans.

These marks, one of the oldest propriety marks in England, might have started as simple lines and shapes, but eventually there were hundreds of swan marks in England and whole books dedicated to keeping track of them. They were designed to look like swords or crossbows, heraldic symbols, and eventually letters. Every year swan-masters would row through open waters, determining the ownership of cygnets and marking them. Any unmarked birds belonged to the crown.

This “highly structured system of ownership,” writes MacGregor, seems to be “an English peculiarity.” (It didn’t even extend to Scotland.) It lasted for centuries, though, and put in place measures that protected the swan population. It was illegal, for instance, to steal swan eggs or to cut the grass or reads within 40 feet of a swan’s nest.

By the 18th century, swan had fallen out of a favor as a status meat. Some people continued to mark their swan’s beaks, until in the late 19th century, animal cruelty activists argued it constituted “unnecessary suffering” and Queen Alexandra, the wife of King Edward VII, stopped the royal birds from being marked.

This tradition of royal swan ownership carries on today, though: The Queen still owns every unmarked Mute Swan—the white-feathered bird with a knob on its orange beak, the bird that you most likely think of when you think “swan”—on England’s open waters. Every year in the summer, a group of “swan uppers” perform a ritualized swan census, during which they salute the Queen as the “Seigneur of Swans.”

Killing the swans was outlawed in the 1980s, when the population in England was shrinking, and many people now believe that only the Queen is allowed to eat Mute swans. That’s not exactly correct, but since she’s considered immune from prosecution, if she had a hankering for swan at Christmas, a traditional dish, no one could stop her from acting on it.

We're heading up the West Coast with NPR's All Things Considered. Leave us a voicemail to tell us where you think we should go!

This summer, Atlas Obscura and All Things Considered are embarking on a road trip up the West Coast to bring stories of wonder and surprise to NPR listeners. And we need your help!

Our team is going to be traveling along the Pacific Coast from Los Angeles to Seattle, telling stories and visiting hidden and wondrous places. See the map above for a preview of the route we have in mind (though it's not set in stone). Here’s where you come in! Tell us about your favorite fascinating places near our route, and why you love them. Maybe it’s a roadside dinosaur park, a stunning natural wonder, or a place that means something profound to you, but doesn’t appear in any guidebook. If it’s hidden, wondrous, and surprising, we want to know about it.

We’ve set up a call-in line (347-746-2679) where you can leave a message to tell us all about your favorite place near the trip route that you think we should visit. In your message, please tell us as much as you can about the location, your experience, and what makes it so memorable. And don’t forget to tell us who you are and how we can reach you. We may try to visit your recommendation during the trip, or feature your tale of wonder and discovery on the radio.

We’re looking for your local knowledge, and can’t wait to hear from you!

This tradition includes a "pricking ceremony."

In England and in Wales, a high sheriff is supposed to represent the interests of the king or queen in their local district. This job, England's longest-running secular office, has existed for more than a millennium, going back to the 10th century, and for the past five hundred years or so, high sheriffs have been chosen using an unusual tool—a silver bodkin, a large, blunt needle used for hemming or, historically, as a hair pin.

High sheriffs were once powerful government officials, who could act as judges and marshall military forces. During the era of Norman kings, they were the primary representatives of the monarchy across the kingdom. The word "sheriff" comes from the words shire—a district—and reeve—peace: A shire reeve was meant keep the peace. But their powers have been waning for well on 700 years, ever since the 13th or 14th century. Today, being a high sheriff is a purely ceremonial role.

But the Queen still has to select people to fill these offices. There are more than 60 high sheriffs in all, and they must be nominated three years in advance of taking office. Each of those three years, the nominee's name is read out in a nomination hearing. Finally, the queen selects a new sheriff.

This is where the needle comes in. In order to designate a new High Sheriff, the Queen takes the bodkin and pricks a parchment where the sheriff's name is listed.

Why "hand prick" a sheriff instead of just picking a sheriff? One version of the origin story attributes the pricking practice to Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled from 1558 to 1603. According to this story, Queen Elizabeth was sewing when approached about the task of nominating sheriffs, and she used her needle to mark the document rather than hunt down a writing implement.

But, according to the High Sheriffs, that version of the story can't be true, since there's a pricked vellum of sheriff nominees that predates Elizabeth. That document dated to the reign of Henry VII, between 1485 and 1509.

In the sheriffs' version of the story, the nominating document was pricked with a needle to keep it from being tampered with. Being a sheriff wasn't a popular job, since it involved enforcing laws and collecting taxes. If the sheriff failed to collect the money he was supposed to, he was personally responsible for paying it. Naturally, a nominated sheriff might try to wiggle out of the demanding role by changing a mark written the page. A hole, though, was harder to fix.

Today, being a high sheriff is a purely ceremonial positions: Duties include taking care of visiting High Court judges and supporting royal visits to their county. It's supposed to be an honor and a way to contribute to one's community, but it still comes with some perhaps unwelcome burdens—it's an unpaid position.

The continent's winter months present one of the most challenging—and surprising—research environments on Earth.

The days in Antarctica are getting ever shorter; winter is settling in. On the world's southernmost continent, during May and June temperatures are supposed to drop far, far below 0 °C, and then stay particularly frigid until September. The record low, measured in July 1983 at Russia's Vostok research station, was −89.2 °C.

But two years ago, Peter Kuipers Munneke, a glaciologist at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, in the Netherlands, was looking at data that showed much higher winter temperatures than expected. He and his colleagues had set up a weather station there that streamed information to them via satellite, and the results coming in were well above freezing—6 °C, 7 °C, 8 °C. (For the Fahrenheit-minded among us, those temperatures are in the low- to mid-40s, rather balmy for a winter’s day in a lot of places.)

Kuipers Munneke and his colleagues were watching this particular weather station to better understand how and why meltwater pooled on the Larsen C ice shelf, which is in danger of collapsing. They had expected that most of this melting would take place in the summer. “But if there are positive temperatures, in Celsius, even far outside the summer months, even in the middle of winter, maybe there’s also melt happening in winter,” he says.

Even after the scientists corrected their raw data, the temperatures stayed positive. With this new information, they reevaluated their assumptions. In a paper published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, they report that 20 to 25 percent of the ice sheet melt could be happening in Antarctica's winter. The research team found these almost unbelievably high temperatures “just because we put the weather station in a place where a weather station had never been before,” he says.

Winter in Antarctica is a dark time, literally and metaphorically. Small groups of scientists do overwinter on the continent, gazing up at auroras, sprinting naked to the South Pole from a nearby sauna, and trying not to let the long nights get to them. But when the daylight hours begin to vanish and the ice sheets stretch out over the ocean, the difficulty of doing research mounts. Snow gauges used in alpine research don't work because the wind blows so much old snow into them, and automated sensors may have trouble surviving the harsh conditions. But when scientists do find ways to gather information about one of the most hostile environments on Earth, what they discover often surprises them.

The first team of people known to have stayed the winter in Antarctica—after European explorers first started arriving on the shores in the 19th century—had not planned on it. In February 1898, a crew of European and American scientists, sailors, and explorers led by a Belgian naval officer ventured into the Bellinghausen Sea, west of the Antarctic Peninsula. Their ship, Belgica, got trapped in the ice, where it stayed for a full year. They managed to free it only after blasting a channel through the ice, which was threatening to hold them fast for another winter. One of the scientists on board died, and others were stricken with mental illness.

Even under those adverse conditions, the crew of Belgica managed to make scientific discoveries. “The only notions we had about the climate of the Antarctic were based up on the very inadequate observations made during the three summer months,” wrote Emil Racoviță, the crew’s Romanian biologist, in 1900. But the expedition had "consecrated to the scientific implements an important portion of the feeble resources" available to launch and sustain the expedition. Through the long days trapped in ice, the crew measured temperature and barometric pressure, tracked the direction of the wind, noted the icebergs that floated past, and observed what life they could. For the first time, researchers had collected a year-long set of Antarctic meteorological and oceanographic data.

The danger that held Belgica for the winter—that creeping, crushing ice—is still a worry for researchers today, and in the past decades there have been only a handful of wintertime research cruises around Antarctica, compared to dozens in the summer months. Last year, though, Nathaniel B. Palmer, an icebreaker chartered by the National Science Foundation, took a team of scientists to the Ross Sea from April to June, as winter set in.

In that part of Antarctica, there are open water areas near the coast, where winds blow the ice cover away almost continuously, opening up spaces in the ocean that freeze over again. “These areas could be the ice factories of the Antarctic,” says Stephen Ackley, of the University of Texas at San Antonio, chief scientist on the winter cruise. “We could only really look at those in the wintertime.”

Each winter, Antarctic ice sheets extend anew out into the ocean. Unexpectedly, sea ice cover in the Antarctica has actually been growing, even as the Arctic ice cap shrinks on the other side of the world. In some years the sea ice cover in the Ross Sea has increased even more. By spending colder months on the ice, Ackley and his colleagues can gather data on its thickness, which satellites can't see, in order to better understand the process of sea ice formation. From Palmer, they could measure the heat balance at the water's surface and the effect of wind surges on ice growth, while using buoys and aircraft to measure changes in ice thickness and other ocean properties.

The scientists on the cruise are still analyzing the data they gathered, but being in the field in the winter has already changed how they think about this system. "We were really struck by the magnitude of waves we were seeing—six- to eight-foot waves a short distance from the shore," Ackley says. The effect of the wind and waves was to pile up ice crystals into round, pancake shapes. “We didn’t appreciate that that type of ice was so ubiquitous." It’s clear to him that one winter cruise is probably not enough.

In the continental United States, climate and weather monitors are all over the place, and collect data that can be knit together to form a detailed picture. In Antarctica, there are relatively few instruments, so there's a lot left to extrapolation, inference, and guesswork. Increasingly, however, scientists are filling in the gaps for the months they’re not in the field, often through satellite feeds or instruments they leave behind.

The University of Oregon’s Paul Cziko, for instance, studies polar fish and recently installed an underwater observatory in McMurdo Sound. Even though researchers have maintained a year-round presence here for decades, "no one has been measuring the temperature of the seawater right outside the station," Cziko says.

In the past, he's tried measuring the temperature of the sound's surface waters by throwing in stand-alone temperature loggers and coming back a year later, with the hope that the tool hadn't disappeared and still had data on it. To set up an underwater observatory that could log real-time data, he needed to find a way to run a cable out under the thick ice cover that, over the winter, might move up or down or crack along the shore.

Now, with a thick pipe anchored to the bottom, he's not only collecting long-term temperature data, but also photographs and video from 70 feet below the ice. Already, it's allowed him to observe the plankton bloom that usually rolls in mid-December. He thought that it lasts for months each year, until the sun went down, but the new observatory shows that it dissipates after only a few weeks. "It really limits the productivity down there," he says. "That changes my thoughts about where things are getting their food."

Another team, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, is interested in the risk acidifying ocean water poses to Antarctic shellfish. Only recently have they been able to deploy pH sensors that can survive months in the cold waters without failing. “We have found that the Antarctic exhibits some very unique changes in pH that we were not expecting,” says Umihiko Hoshijima, a doctoral student working on the project. In summer, plankton use up carbon dioxide, and the water became less acidic. In winter, when photosynthesis stops, the seawater acidifies. This cycle, the team has found, results in an unexpectedly large swing in acidity levels—about the twice the range of the total change scientists are anticipating for whole ocean over the next century.

Sensors like these are leading to new insights on features of the frozen continent that they've simply never had the chance to notice before. The temperature bump that Kuipers Munneke and his colleagues identified, for instance, is caused by a relatively warm “hairdryer wind” that sweeps down from the mountains.

“It’s very probable that the hairdryer winds have existed forever, since the Antarctic Peninsula has been there,” he says. But Kuipers Munneke only noticed the phenomenon because they happened to set up a weather station in the right place.

“There’s a lot of knowledge obscured from us because Antarctica is such a large place and we don’t have a lot of stations to measure what’s happening there,” he says. More than a century after scientists started studying the continent, all it takes is one new sensor to reveal whole new aspects of the Antarctic puzzle.

It’s all-consuming.

You can’t see it, but 12 billion light years away up among the billions of stars deep in the mysterious universe is a black hole that’s growing alarmingly quickly. Every two days or so, it devours matter the size of the Sun, with no signs of stopping.

A team of researchers recently discovered this supermassive black hole with the SkyMapper telescope at the Australian National University's Siding Spring Observatory, and in a new study, unveiled clues about its nature.

“We estimate that this black hole has a mass of at least 20 billion times the mass of the Sun,” Dr Christian Wolf of the ANU's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Every million years, it grows 1 percent in size. That may seem an extraordinarily long time to humans, but is minuscule in the time span of the universe. Fortunately, Earth won’t be consumed by the black hole, as it is way beyond the Milky Way galaxy— although there is one supermassive black hole in our galaxy “that is 40,000 times less mass than the one that we have now found," Wolf said. It co-exists in the Milky Way with between 10 million and a billion standard black holes, according to NASA. (But you don't need to worry about getting sucked into those, either.)

It's due to an unusual algal bloom known as a red tide.

A dense bloom of bioluminescent algae off the coast of Southern California has lit up the Pacific Ocean with an eerie and fantastical neon blue glow, sending photographers and spectators to the beach at night in hopes of witnessing the natural phenomenon.

The algal bloom, also known as a red tide, was observed this week lighting up the waves along a 15-mile stretch of coastline.

“Bioluminescence happens all the time, just not at that level,” said James M. Sullivan, a bioluminescence researcher at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. “This is an incredible one.”

It is not known how long the current display will last. In September 2013, the last time San Diego saw a red tide, the conditions lasted for a week. Other red tides have been known to last for a month or even longer.

According to Michael Latz of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, the current red tide is made up of dinoflagellates, including one—Lingulodinium polyedra—that is well known for bioluminescent displays. The sheer concentration of tiny organisms makes the water appear reddish during the daytime. But the real show occurs at night, when any physical disturbance, like the motion of a wave, causes the organisms to emit light.

Dinoflagellates are basically tiny plants that can swim, Sullivan explained. Like any plant, they require certain conditions (nutrients, light, heat) to thrive, and when the conditions are right, their population can explode, creating a massive bloom.

Sullivan compared the process by which the organisms create light to glow sticks, which contain two chemicals that create a fluorescent glow when mixed. Similarly, dinoflagellates contain an enzyme and a protein that, when disturbed, combine and release a quick flash of light. Each wave or passing fish, he said, is “just like breaking a light stick.”

Scientists do not know for sure why dinoflagellates evolved this ability to create light. One theory is that the light flash could startle the organisms’ main predator: microscopic crustaceans known as zooplankton. Another theory, which Sullivan called the “burglar alarm hypothesis” is that the light attracts fish who in turn prey on the zooplankton, protecting the algae from being eaten themselves.

Another thing dinoflagellates do is produce toxins, which is why red tides are often taken as a sign not to go in the water. But according to Latz, the species involved in the current red tide do not produce dangerous compounds.

Dangerous red tides can produce enough toxin to poison fish and other marine life. One such compound is saxitoxin, a neurotoxin that tends to affect humans when they consume contaminated shellfish. Another byproduct of harmful algae blooms is domoic acid, high concentrations of which have emerged as a serious threat to California sea lions and other marine mammals.