For centuries, bookbinders commonly used whatever materials they could get—including entire manuscript pages.

Last year, Megan Heffernan, an English professor at DePaul University, was at the Folger Shakespeare Library and studying a folio of John Donne's sermons printed in 1640. When she opened it up, she was surprised to find that the inside of the front and back covers were plastered with sheets taken from a book of English psalms. "I just thought, ‘How amazing is it to think about sermons sort of spending eternity rubbing up against a totally different kind of liturgical writing?’" she says. The texts' creators didn't intend for them to live together, but when the psalms became "book waste”—essentially, printed garbage—they could end up anywhere.

Suzanne Karr Schmidt, a curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Newberry Library in Chicago, jokingly describes these as "turducken books"—a book (or manuscript) within a book within a book. Repurposed scraps like these show up in several dozen places in the library's collection, either as bindings, mends, or pieces used to reinforce spines.

From the earliest days of bookmaking, binders made use of scraps. Sometimes, it was just mundane material: leases or contracts that had expired or been rendered moot by a scribe’s mistake. In other cases, the bindings illustrate some seismic cultural shift. In these instances, the materials indicate to modern scholars what was important to the people assembling books—or, conversely, what had little or no value to them.

After the Reformation, for example, when Catholicism gave way to Protestantism in Britain, monastic libraries were dissolved and centuries' worth of manuscripts were suddenly homeless and largely unwanted. This made them "available to a burgeoning print trade," Heffernan says, "and they could be torn up into strips, or wrapped whole around books." The change of faith sapped the Catholic materials’ “value as documents to be read,” she says. But their value as raw material—such as vellum, made from animal skin—remained.

Stumbling across one of these hybrid items now feels kind of magical—as if geography and time have collapsed into your hands. But repurposing scraps in this way wasn’t at all unusual at the time, and Heffernan suspects that it wouldn’t have made much of a difference to readers. “To us, the manuscripts that have been wrapped around books are signs of destruction,” Heffernan says. But to early modern readers, slicing and dicing a text was just a strategy for taking care of other, more coveted objects—like wrapping a textbook in brown paper today. Oversized choir books, which could be twice as tall as a folio, went a long way: “Not quite half a cow,” Schmidt says, “but still a substantial piece of leather.” It was simple practicality. “It’s a moment of typical practice for 16th- and 17th-century bookbinders that seems utterly, delightfully weird to us," Heffernan says.

Some of this printed waste can end up inside a book’s spine or some other hidden spot, but the rest of the material is not especially hard to spot. It can be unsubtle, pasted in haphazardly or upside down in a newer volume. “The hard part,” Heffernan says, “is figuring out where it comes from.”

To solve that puzzle, scholars run any legible writing through databases such as Fragmentarium or Early English Books Online, a searchable collection of 125,000 titles printed between the late 1400s and early 1700s. “That gets tricky, because you’re working with part of a page, maybe,” Heffernan says, and it doesn’t necessarily indicate which edition you’re looking at. By studying the letters themselves, paleographers looking at medieval manuscripts can guess about time period, and maybe even identify scribes by style or their initials. In some cases they can learn even more from a sister leaf in another collection. In books that were printed instead of written, the printing itself can be a clue. Many of Gutenberg’s printings, for instance, can be distinguished by layout or type.

With two collaborators—Anna Reynolds from the University of York and Adam Smyth of the University of Oxford—Heffernan is in the early stages of building a database for the express purpose of triangulating these relationships. They're also planning a conference for next summer. "We want it to be multidisciplinary," Heffernan says. "That's what this work is." The three collaborators are literary studies scholars, but the work could also be interesting to book historians, those in the library sciences, and people from natural history archives and museums, where book waste was also used to line boxes or seed packets.

Generally speaking, waste material doesn’t add or detract from a book’s value, says Sunday Steinkirchner, a rare book dealer in New York. The practice was common until bookbinding became standardized in the 19th century, she says, and publishing houses often grabbed whatever they had on hand. She has a copy of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House lined with contemporary advertisements. Other books from the period may have been made with older maps or printing errors. For waste material to bump up the appraisal, she says, “it would have to be really exceptional material … something really unusual or atypical, or something perhaps linked to a well-known author.”

In these rare cases, where the "waste" material outclasses the text it was used to sheathe, it may be carefully disbound. That was the case with a book that a trustee gifted to the Newberry in 2003. A 15th-century volume by Sebastião Barradas, a Portuguese preacher, had caught his eye on eBay, and he decided to buy it—partly because no other American library had one, and partly because he glimpsed another manuscript beneath the binding, and wanted a closer look.

When the library’s conservators carefully separated the binding, they looked for evidence in the alignment and content of the words. “Because the script was aerated—i.e, the individual words were not fully separated—the volume it came from surely dated from before the end of the 10th century, after which spaces between words were introduced,” the library noted in a catalog. After collaborating with paleographers to date the script and decipher the text, the staff concluded that the binding consisted of fragments of sermons attributed to Saint Augustine, printed in 10th-century Switzerland. The binding and the “host” text continue to be stored separately. "Clearly, a 10th-century folio text manuscript fragment, almost a full sheet, is of more interest, being a greater rarity, than a printed book,” Schmidt says.

Disbinding printed materials to study their composite parts is a relatively new pursuit, but people have been carving these kinds of books up for years, with other motives. "Across the 19th and 20th century, these hybrids—manuscript and print, or different kinds of print—were disbound not to study the waste, but to make early modern books look like what Victorians expected," Heffernan says. That's why so many shelves in rare book rooms have books that seem to look more or less the same. "Everything is bound in a shiny red cover with gold pages, but that's a 19th-century reimagining of what 16th- and 17th-century books looked like." Marbled endpapers and gilded edges are additional tells that a book was rebound in the 19th century, she says.

These days, the goal is to protect and preserve everything—both the binding and the book around which it's wrapped, Heffernan says. "It's possible that they could be wearing each other out as these different materials rub against each other across centuries." Over time, the brilliant colors from reused illuminated manuscripts might bleed onto the printed books or the wooden book board—which is what happened with a Carolingian text from the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible approved by the Council of Trent. Understanding the materials that go into bindings help conservators and librarians be dutiful custodians.

For researchers, thinking about the content book waste—as an archaeological material—is a way to reconstruct the routes that objects and ideas traced from place to place. "If sheet A is wrapped around book X, and sheet B around book Y, you could assume that at some point, they had been close to each other," Heffernan says. It’s a path from shelf to shelf, city to city, century to century, that’s been largely unwalked. Printed waste, Schmidt says, “seems like a frontier, where there’s still discoveries to be made.”

Hold onto your engineer caps, railroad history lovers.

Seventy years after the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, the steep Rocky Mountains of Wyoming and Utah were still giving the Union Pacific Railroad trouble.

Despite having massive steam engines, the Union Pacific, one of the biggest railroads in America, still struggled to move heavy freight trains over the mountains and would often have to use multiple locomotives to get trains to their destination. This practice required more workers and more fuel. In 1940, the Union Pacific’s mechanical engineers teamed up with the American Locomotive Company to build one of the world’s largest steam locomotives, a class of engine simply known as “Big Boy.”

Now, six decades after the last Big Boy was taken off the rails, the Union Pacific is rebuilding one of the famous locomotives in honor of the upcoming sesquicentennial celebration of the first Transcontinental Railroad. It’s a project so ambitious that Ed Dickens Jr, a Union Pacific steam locomotive engineer and the man leading the rebuild, has likened it to resurrecting a Tyrannosaurus rex.

The Big Boy locomotives weighed more than one million pounds and were 132 feet, 9 inches long. Stood on its end, one would be the equivalent of a 13-story building. Each one cost approximately $265,000 to build, or about $4.4 million in today’s money. In the railroad world, the Big Boys were known as 4-8-8-4 articulated type locomotives. That designation meant the locomotive had four wheels in front, two sets of eight driving wheels (the large wheels connected to the pistons that make the locomotive move) in the middle, and four trailing wheels, all underneath one enormous boiler.

Union Pacific purchased 25 of the Big Boys between 1941 and 1944. According to Trains Magazine, the steam engines were originally going to be named “Wasatch,” after the mountains they were built to carry freight over, but in 1941, an American Locomotive Company shop worker wrote “Big Boy” in chalk on the front of the locomotive and the name stuck. Below the steam engine’s new name, the unknown laborer also scratched a “V,” a popular symbol for victory during World War II, a conflict in which the Big Boy locomotives would soon play a pivotal role.

Locomotive No. 4000, the first Big Boy, left the American Locomotive Company factory in Schenectady, New York, in the summer of 1941 bound for its new owner. The enormous steam engine garnered attention wherever it went and by one count, more than 500 newspaper stories were written about it before it arrived on the Union Pacific’s tracks in Omaha, Nebraska, on Sept. 4, 1941. Locomotive No. 4000 and the other Big Boys were quickly put into service just as the Allied war effort was heating up. Between 1941 and 1945, the steam engines helped move millions of tons of war supplies and other materials, according to the historian John E. Bush, a self-described “Union Pacific steam locomotive nut” and author of numerous train books and a Trains Magazine blog about the locomotives. “Without the Big Boys, the Union Pacific could never have moved all that material for the war effort,” Bush says.

The Union Pacific used the Big Boys until 1959, when they were replaced with diesel-electric locomotives, which were easier and cheaper to maintain, although arguably less impressive than a noisy, smoke-belching steam engine with its symphony of moving parts. Most of the Big Boys were scrapped, but eight were put on display around the country.

Although some steam engines still operate at museums and heritage railroads, for decades railroad enthusiasts believed the Big Boys were simply too big to ever run again. For one, the infrastructure needed to maintain such a massive locomotive had been torn down at the end of the steam era, and even if someone did rebuild one, there were few rail lines that could handle a machine of that size. But in 2013, Union Pacific announced that it was reacquiring a Big Boy in hopes of restoring it for the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. In spring 2014, Big Boy No. 4014 was moved from Ponoma, California, where it was on display at the RailGiants Trains Museum, to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where Union Pacific keeps and maintains two other historic steam locomotives for special events and excursions.

Bush, the railroad historian, was lucky enough to ride the Big Boy No. 4014 when it was hauled back to Wyoming by a pair of diesel-electric locomotives. He says highways along the rail line were packed with onlookers watching the unrestored steam engine roll down the tracks. “It was awe-inspiring,” he says. “It was a dream come true for many.”

Since the locomotive’s arrival at Union Pacific’s shop in Wyoming, mechanics have been slowly rebuilding it, which requires the disassembly, inspection, and repair of every single part of the locomotive. The steam engine will also be altered so that it can burn oil which is easier to acquire than the coal it once burned back in the 1940s and 1950s. “This is a massive ground-up restoration,” Dickens says.

Dickens hopes to have No. 4014 completed and operating on its own power before May 10, 2019, the 150th anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad. The first trip is expected to take the locomotive to Ogden, Utah, not far from where the Golden Spike was driven at Promontory Point in 1869. The ceremonial spike joined the rails of the Union Pacific from Omaha with the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento, connecting the the East Coast with the West Coast by rail for the first time in American history. Today, Promontory Point is a national historic site.

Bush expects train enthusiasts and history buffs from around the world to line the tracks from Wyoming to Utah when the Big Boy makes its first run in 60 years.

“I cannot think of a bigger way to celebrate this anniversary than restoring a Big Boy locomotive,” Bush says. “This is something railroad enthusiasts have dreamed about for more than a half-century.”

The rodent map marks reports of animals both dead and alive.

One Paris politician is fed up with the city’s rats. Geoffroy Boulard, who represents the 17th arrondissement, which starts just north of the Arc de Triomphe, has created a real-time map on which constituents can report rat sightings.

In theory, the map is meant to bring the district’s rat problem to the attention of Anne Hidalgo, the city's mayor. Hidalgo, however, is well aware that Parisians are feeling overrun by rats; last year, the city pledged 1.5 million Euros—more than $1.7 million—to rat eradication.

According to Boulard’s map, it’s not working very well. The map displays reports of “Rat vivant” (a live rat) and “Rat mort” (a dead rat). The distict's residents have reported rats day and night, gathering by dozens around the garbage under a wall, in front of a creche, in a nest of near the mouth of a sewer (naturally), in the buildings and in the streets, walking in plain sight, and running across the tennis court while people are playing. They have seen dead rats in cellars, lying in the sidewalks, and in the streets, smushed by a car. The map says only one of these rats has been dealt with by authorities.

Like many big cities, Paris has long been home to rats that live aside humans. In the 14th century, rats brought plague from further south, and Parisians have never forgiven them. In the siege of 1870 to 1871, hungry Parisians resorted to eating rats as part of their limited diet. A couple years later, Paris’s most famous exterminator shop—featured in the movie Ratatouille—opened downtown. In 1912, the rats were numerous enough to merit mention in Rowland Strong’s Sensations of Paris. He wrote:

“To-day the rats are still very numerous. Their presence in this neighborhood is another cause of attraction to all the homeless cats of Paris,… At midnight the Boulevard Saint Germain, the Boulevard Montparnasse, the Boulevard Saint-Michel, are alive with rats, gamboling round the trees which line the side-walks —rats of the big brown species, which years ago exterminated the old ingenious grey rat of Pairs, fearless and familiar almost to the point of being tame.”

But in the past few years, perhaps due to overpopulation underground, rats have been appearing on the streets in greater numbers than Parisians are comfortable with. Even after a promised anti-rat campaign in 2014, “Paris is facing its worst rat crisis in decades,” the New York Times reported in 2016. One possible explanation is new regulations on rat poisoning, which limit the use of poisons that can get into the water supply and encourage the use of bait stations, instead.

Whatever the cause, nothing Paris has done so far has helped: The city’s rat population has stayed stable at around 1.75 rats per person, or approximately 3.8 million rats in the 20 inner arrondissements. Last year, overworked rat catchers went on strike for a day; earlier this year sanitation workers posted a video of dozens of rat squirming in a trash bin, a sight that could impress even a rat-hardened New Yorker.

The 17th arrondissement may be seeing a particular influx of rats, as there’s ongoing construction on a metro line extension in the area. Boulard’s rat-map stunt is unlikely to change this situation in any way. Rats aside, the reports make life in Paris seem pretty pleasant, with all the tennis and creches. Perhaps the rats are just trying to enjoy Paris’ charms.

Her work is now available as part of a project to digitize home movies made by women.

It was the second week of May, and when they arrived at Banff, in Alberta, Canada, Christine L. Reid and Benno Rybizka feared that the snow might already have melted, foiling their plan.

Two ski seasons had already passed since they had decided to make a ski film—a novelty in the 1930s, when skiing was still a relatively new sport. Rybizka, a renowned ski instructor from Austria, would provide the demonstration, and Reid, an avid amateur skier and filmmaker, would shoot and direct the film. They had along with them two locals—the Edwards brothers, known as Chess and Rupe—to guide and cook for them, plus another local skier and a former member of the University of Zurich ski team. The team had just two weeks to pull it off.

At their destination, they got good news: Up at the Sunshine Ski Lodge, seven feet of snow still blanketed the ground. The next day, they started up the mountain, with a state-of-the-art camera—the “most completely waterproof model on the present day market,” Reid wrote—along with tripods, lenses, and about 2,000 feet of film. As their horses ambled up the slope, toward the snowline, one of their companions started to sing: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to film we go …”

It was the Golden Age of Hollywood, and home movies and the work of amateur filmmakers was just starting to gain a place in American life—at least among those who could afford the gear, and Reid could. She was raised in a well-off family, and for a woman of her time, Reid had an exceptional life. When she married at the relatively late age of 35, even her bouquet—of edelweiss, bouvardia, and white sweetheart roses—was deemed “unusual” by The Boston Globe.

But her first love was mountaineering. She spent her 20s climbing rock faces and in 1938 became the first woman to climb Mount Columbia, the second highest peak in the Canadian Rockies. Later, her passion grew to include skiing and, though there were few women in the 1920s and 30s making films of their own, she dedicated herself to promoting and documenting with her camera the outdoor activities that she'd fallen so hard for.

Today, Reid’s films are part of a project, The Woman Behind the Camera, that’s digitizing home movies and amateur films made by women in the 20th century. Funded by a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, the project is a collaboration between Northeast Historic Film, the Chicago Film Archives, and the Lesbian Home Movie Project. The Reid footage comes from Northeast Historic Film’s collection, which also includes pieces made by Dorothy Stebbins Bowles, the globe-trotting wife of a U.S. ambassador; Anna B. Harris, an African-American woman who captured the daily lives of people of color in 1950s Vermont; Mary Dewson, a well-known suffragette; Marguerite Larock, one of the few female lawyers in Maine in the 1930s; and more.

The films provide a glimpse of women’s perspectives in the early 20th century—more directly, perhaps, than any other historical documents from the period. “These films are very intimate,” says Karin Carlson-Snider, the vault manager at Northeast Historic Film and project director for The Woman Behind the Camera. The women were filming what they found important. Then, people often filmed the same subjects they do now—their cats, kids on sleds, family parties, vacations. The Reid collection—hours of film that can been found on Northeast Historic Film's website—has all of that along with dramatic footage of people climbing some of the world’s tallest mountains.

Reid grew up athletic, with sailing a family pastime, and in 1929, when she was in her early 20s, she climbed her first major mountain, Canada's Assiniboine, the “Matterhorn of the Rockies,” which reaches 11,870 feet. She was hooked. Soon she began spending her time in the Pennine Alps in Switzerland and Italy, where she climbed every major peak, and the Dolomites in Italy, where a new route on the mountain Piz Popena was named for her. While she climbed with guides and other mountaineers, she also pushed for women to find their own way in the sport, and once led a “manless party” up Mount Confederation in Canada.

Her interest in mountaineering led to skiing—naturally, as what goes up must come down. After landing a gig with the Boston Tribune (and later the Globe) as a ski correspondent, she reported on the comings and goings of ski instructors, ski store openings, “ski wedding bells,” and other stories of the ski season, such as “the mystery of the mussed-up bunk room.” Her writing was jovial and upbeat, and invited her readers to share “a world of outdoor fun.”

The films in the archive look into this world, which was privileged enough to keep the stresses of the Great Depression at bay. In the footage, Reid and her family are sailing, horseback riding through the Grand Tetons, and laughing at garden parties. She also approached films with education in mind. One ski film, made in Europe, shows the very basic techniques of the sport, and in a longer film made in the Dolomites, she had guides demonstrate how mountain climbing works.

Because of their alpine settings, some of Reid’s home movies can be dramatic, and capture moments of elegance and drama. When she and Rybizka reached the Sunshine Ski Lodge in Banff, they spent busy days filming on the slopes. One day, she wrote, they came upon “a magnificent windblown formation, with a long curving crest that reminded one of an ocean wave about to break into foam on the beach.”

With the camera rolling, Rybizka sailed over its brim. “Benno was poised for an instant like some strange seabird hovering in search of its prey,” Reid wrote. She could forget the foggy lenses, the overexposures, the difficulty of fumbling to change reels while wearing mittens. “It is such moments as these which make ski filming worthwhile.”

The cash, discovered under an English retail store, is a priceless find.

The Cotsworld Outdoor store in Brighton, England, stocks tents, sleeping bags, and an assortment of gear in its inventory, but last month, it acquired a rather unexpected item.

The store was in need of shape-up, so during renovation, shopfitter Russ Davis ripped up rotten carpeting, flooring, and tiles. As he pulled away the wilted floorboards, he stumbled on a thick stump coated in dirt and grime.

"I just thought it was a block of wood, so I snapped it in half and then found a £1 note. All the notes were stuck together, you couldn't separate them, and they were caked in dirt. Some of them were really bad where you could see the metal water marks that run through the notes," Davis told the BBC.

There were roughly 30 wads of £5 and £1 notes for a total of £130,000, or over $2 million in today's U.S. dollars—enough to buy you a New York City two-bedroom condo (with maybe one roommate) or a 18,000-square-foot, six-bedroom home in Fargo, North Dakota. The distinct cerulean color of the notes indicated that these clumpy pieces of paper were currency issued by the Bank of England during World War II.

The store handed over the notes to the Sussex police, but the discovery left the store and Davis with more questions than answers. Davis speculated that the bills "could have come from a bank robbery, or been stashed during the war by someone who died," but the truth might be contained within of the walls of the shop.

According to CNN, from 1936 to 1973, before Cotsworld Outdoor occupied its current space, the location was a Bradleys Gowns shop, which was a high-end fur and couture designer store with multiple outlets in and outside London. Notable figures like Clementine and Winston Churchill and the royal family frequented the shop for its customized tailor services.

It's therefore likely, the last Bradleys Gowns heir Howard Bradley speculates, that someone left the money hidden during the war.

"We can trace our British family history back to the 1300s and we had Jewish roots as well. Obviously during the Second World War, during the '30s, with what was happening in Germany, they would have been concerned," Bradley told CNN.

Maybe his father Eric and uncle Victor, who both fought in the war, needed to keep some cash stored away, in case their family needed to flee from the Nazis.

For now, the police are holding onto the stack of bills. Cotsworld Outdoor won't be able to cash in on their find, but they'll have a great story to sell to customers.

It all goes back to 17th-century England and a fusspot named John Dryden.

There are thousands of individual rules for proper grammatical use of any given language; mostly, these are created, and then taught, in order to maximize understanding and minimize confusion. But the English language prohibition against “preposition stranding”—ending a sentence with a preposition like with, at, or of—is not like this. It is a fantastically stupid rule that when followed often has the effect of mangling a sentence. And yet for hundreds of years, schoolchildren have been taught to create disastrously awkward sentences like “With whom did you go?”

The origins of this rule date back to one guy you may have heard of. Of whom you may have heard. Whatever. His name was John Dryden.

Born in 1631, John Dryden was the most important figure throughout the entire Restoration period of the late 17th century. He was more prolific, more popular, more successful, and more ambitious than any of the other writers of his era, and his era included John Milton. He was England’s first official poet laureate. He wrote dozens of plays, poems, works of satire, literary prose, and criticism. The best modern edition of the collected works of John Dryden took the University of California Press about 50 years to create, and runs to 20 gigantic volumes. He invented the heroic couplet. He was the most important translator of classics into English for hundreds of years, possibly ever. He was, without a doubt, the guy in the London literary scene of the late 17th century, and that was a very important scene.

That said, Dryden was roundly mocked by his contemporaries. He does not seem to have been particularly well-liked. “There is more hostile response to Dryden than there is to any other early modern writer—I think than any other writer, period,” says Steven Zwicker, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who is one of the premiere Dryden scholars in the world.

Dryden twice stated an opposition to preposition stranding. In an afterword for one of his own plays, he criticized Ben Jonson for doing this, saying: “The preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observed in my own writing.” Later, in a letter to a young writer who had asked for advice, he wrote: “In the correctness of the English I remember I hinted somewhat of concludding [sic] your sentences with prepositions or conjunctions sometimes, which is not elegant, as in your first sentence.”

Dryden does not state why he finds this to be “not elegant.” And yet somehow this completely unexplained, tiny criticism, buried in his mountain of works, lodged itself in the grammarian mind, and continued to be taught for hundreds of years later. This casual little comment would arguably be Dryden’s most enduring creation. It’s a little bit sad.

Following the death of Oliver Cromwell, England was in a pretty weird place, and the English language was in a weirder one. The monarchy had been restored, but during Cromwell’s reign an awful lot of English writing had been stunted; for a time, plays were even banned, for fear of public political criticism. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds, because during the latter half of the 17th century, literacy rates in London—by far the highest in the country—were only around 20 percent. The language evolved on the stage, and that development was paused for a few decades.

At the time, there were at most a handful of what are called English grammars: basically, books instructing the proper way to use the English language. In the Restoration period, when Dryden was a star, the discussion of exactly what the English language was (and, in turn, who the English people were, and what England was) began to really rapidly evolve. Dryden is not very well-known today, but at the time he was the leading literary rockstar, and his words carried a huge amount of weight. He wasn’t really one of the leading grammarians of his time, being focused more on his plays and criticism, but he did, says Zwicker, have very firm opinions about what he considered good writing and what he considered bad writing.

Other writers of the time were hostile to Dryden, attacking him for changing his religion from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism, his political affiliation, for his ambition, and, it seems, because he was sort of a boring and witless conversationalist. You might expect that the guy to ban preposition stranding would be a pithy Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde type, full of great barbed quotes. But Dryden wasn’t that at all. “No one admired him for his verbal wit,” says Zwicker. “Certainly his writing is wonderful and clever, but he had practically no verbal presence at all.”

It is actually a bit of a mystery why he was so loathed at the time; Zwicker suggests some of it was probably envy at Dryden’s success, some was legitimate criticism of his style, and some was vague personality stuff. But a lot of this stuff seems like subtext, as if Dryden was attacked because he was Dryden and the reasons given might not have been telling the full story.

Dryden loved the classics; he was easily the most prominent translator and critic of Ovid, Horace, and Virgil, although his translations (like a lot of his own writing) were sort of bombastic and larger-than-life. He was fluent in Latin and worshipped the classics. And English was in a place where it was about to accelerate; it had been paused and now it was un-paused. Dryden’s ideas about what English should be were heavily motivated by Latin and Latinate ideas. It’s believed this is where his preposition thing comes from; in Latin, the preposition, as indicated by the first three letters of the word “preposition,” always comes before the noun. It is assumed that this is what motivated Dryden to make this case.

This is kind of a paradox as well; Dryden worshipped the classics, and was motivated by classical Latin, but was a defiant modernist, maybe even a progressive. He critiqued Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, applauded the newer writers of his own era, invented new forms which he then sought to popularize. But that’s the hold that the classics have: even when you’re trying to push things forward, the classics are always there.

What’s so frustrating about this whole preposition thing is that there doesn’t appear to be an easy answer as to how it became so completely lodged in formal English grammar. There are all these little hints as to why it might have taken hold—it is an easy-to-understand grammarian rule that came about at a time and place when English grammar was rapidly taking form, and it came from the mouth of the biggest literary figure of the time. But like Dryden himself, it’s a hard rule to get ahold of. Of which to get ahold.

Natural history curators and fishers have a deep relationship.

Mark Sabaj’s Subaru had broken down on the way to the mechanic. So as he and his girlfriend, Shinobu Habauchi, waited for AAA on the shoulder of I-76 West, she pulled out her phone. In what had become something of a habit in their relationship, she started showing him photos of fish. The couple had met on Valentine’s Day 2016, on an online dating site, and bonded immediately over their occupations. Habauchi is a fish wholesaler with Samuels & Son Seafood in Philadelphia, and Sabaj manages the fish collection at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences.

Habauchi swiped through photos of fish that recently arrived at the market, until one caught Sabaj’s eye. A worker at Samuels & Son was holding a tire-sized, spotted, iridescent fish with small, fiery orange fins.

“Wow, that’s fantastic!” Sabaj said. “I really want one of those.”

Sabaj is responsible for about 1.6 million fish specimens—from giant sea bass to a tiny minnow that is among the smallest fish in the world—floating in jars on shelves in the academy’s basement. But the collection of the oldest continually operating natural history museum in the country was missing the fish from the photo. Sabaj wanted to get his hands on an opah.

Just three years ago it was found that the opah, or moonfish, is the first known warm-blooded fish, meaning that it can keep its body temperature higher than the surrounding water. They can reach up to 6 feet in length, usually reside in the depths of temperate and tropical oceans, and are reportedly good raw, cured, or sautéed.

The academy once had an opah to call its own, acquired in 1849 from the collection of Charles Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew. “While his uncle was trying to conquer Europe,” Sabaj says, Charles “was studying the fishes of Europe.”

But that opah went missing decades ago—either forgotten on an indefinite loan to another museum, or destroyed in a flood, or simply thrown away. The fish from Habauchi’s photo had already been sold, so Sabaj decided to write to the fishers in Hawaii who had caught it, to ask them to send the next opah they came across to Samuels & Son, which could pass it on to the academy’s collection.

It was the first time Sabaj had written directly to fishers, but it’s just a recent iteration in a longstanding relationship—fish collectors often befriend their local fishers to obtain specimens for their collections, and curators around the country say this is a relatively common practice with deep historical roots.

Perhaps one of the most famous fishermen who contributed to a natural history museum was the author of The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway. “Hemingway was a very avid amateur fisherman, but a very good one,” says Bob Peck, a fellow and historian at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

In 1934, the president of the academy, Charles Cadwalader, wrote to Hemingway (sound familiar?) to say he was working on a book about the fish of the Atlantic. After an exchange, Hemingway went to Philadelphia to talk it over, and eventually extended an offer to Cadwalader and ichthyologist Henry Fowler to join him in Cuba on his boat Pilar. “This was not a casual weekend getaway,” Peck says. “They ended up spending six weeks with him, fishing every day.”

The relationship continued long after the trip, and Hemingway sent photographs of himself with his recent catches. On occasion, he even sent specimens for the collection.

“Am sending by the ferry this morning to be re-iced in Key West and shipped to you at the museum, one of the small tuna-shaped fish that looks from length of fin to be possibly an albacore,” Hemingway wrote. At the end, he adds “If you don’t want him as a specimen and he gets there in good shape, wash the salt out, cut the meat off both sides of the back bone and broil it.” It wasn't eaten; the fish is still in the collection today.

Only a few days after Sabaj sent his request to Hawaii, word came that another opah was caught, and it was on its way to Samuels & Son’s warehouse in Philadelphia. When it arrived, Sabaj hopped into the academy’s truck to pick up his prize.

He turned the key and the truck shuddered to life, with country music filling the car. “An entomologist had this car before me,” Sabaj said, turning off the radio. “And he’s got poor taste in music.”

As he drove, Sabaj recalled the time a colleague in the England sent him a catfish on ice via airplane, but by the time it had arrived in Philadelphia, the ice had melted and the fish had started to smell. “Customs snagged it. And they didn’t want to give it to me at first,” he said, laughing. “Maybe they wondered why I had so much interest in this dead, smelly fish. I guess it was a little suspicious.”

Samuels & Son, a family business that has been selling fish for about a century, is in a desolate part of town, all warehouses and parking lots, with Philadelphia’s sports stadiums looming over everything.

“I’m excited,” Sabaj said as he pulled onto the loading dock. “I’ve never seen an opah in the flesh.” He popped the “P” with the same flair that they use at Greek restaurants when they light cheese on fire.

The industrial air conditioners in the storeroom hummed loudly, and dead fish on ice lined the walls. Joe Lasprogata, Samuels & Son’s biologist, wheeled out a box. They lifted the lid and there it was in all its glory—72 pounds of ectothermic lamprid.

“Wow, fantastic! Look at the size of that eye!” Sabaj said, smiling down at the dead fish as if it were a newborn. “Holy cow, it’s beautiful. I mean, look at it!” He pulled at its fiery orange fins, which looked translucent, like stained glass with yellow trim.

As Sabaj examined the opah, Lasprogata told him that the fish was caught off the coast of Hawaii by fishers with Garden & Valley Isle Seafood. “I’ve known them for 25 years,” Lasprogata said. Garden & Valley also provided the name of the boat captain and the vessel, as well as coordinates of where the fish was brought on board. Sabaj will record those details alongside the specimen for scientific purposes.

Missing that level of detail, about when, where, and how a specimen was collected, can be one of the downsides of this relationship with fishers, says Ben Frable, collection manager of marine vertebrates at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “These things get pretty important, especially nowadays, when collections are coming into the 21st century. You have people that are doing these much larger analyses,” he says, “and they’re using this additional data in really interesting ways that we didn’t really think about before.”

Despite possible shortcomings in data, the long history of cooperation between curators and fishers is going to continue. “The fishermen are out there on the water effectively collecting objects of natural history,” says Eric Hilton, the curator of the fish collection at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “And if those specimens that they’ve caught can help contribute to the scientific knowledge of those species, that’s a great thing.”

Back in the basement of the academy, Sabaj laid the opah down in a large wooden box. “You’re almost home, buddy,” he said, gesturing around at the shelves of fish in jars. Using a syringe, he injected formaldehyde. “Fish morticians,” he said, stabbing. “That’s what this part feels like.”

He poured more formaldehyde and water over the fish and then covered it in a gauzy cloth, a little like he was tucking it in for bed, and nearly as gently. The lid of the box fell with a dull thud. That, for the foreseeable future, will be where the opah resides, in a sea of fellow specimens.

Barbara Kafka bucked assumptions about kitchen appliances.

Earlier this month, Barbara Kafka—the contrarian cookbook author, chef, and former ballerina—passed away at her home in Manhattan. She was 84 years old. Her husband, Ernest Kafka, told The Washington Post that she’d wrestled with Parkinson’s disease, among other health complications. Kafka, who hailed from a well-to-do New York City family, was an accomplished cook who wrote about an unlikely kitchen tool—microwaves—and made seriously good food in them.

Kafka was born on August 6, 1933. Her mother was a labor attorney, and the first woman to litigate a Supreme Court Case, and her father was an executive with Parfums D’Orsay, a fragrance company. As a young woman, she often accompanied her father to dinner, which is how she got a taste of fine cuisine. She briefly danced in a company as a child and as a teenager, but suddenly stopped and rarely spoke about it. Later on, she edited copy for medical journals, which she once said was excellent cookbook training “because you have to be very exact or somebody’s going to die.”

She wrote many cookbooks, including one informed by her celiac disease and lactose intolerance known as The Intolerant Gourmet. Yet it was her 1987 cookbook, The Microwave Gourmet, that became her most well-known contribution to the culinary canon. At first, she admitted that she was a “microwave snob, as most of my chef and food-writing friends still are.” She turned a corner thanks to her daughter, Nicole, who let her know that she could heat water quickly in a microwave. Kafka made an artichoke, and was shocked at how good it was.

“The microwave oven makes it possible for all of us to cook and eat good homemade food again,” she wrote in the book’s introduction. In characteristic, straightforward style, she added: “If the microwave oven cooks something badly, I will be the first to tell you; but you will find that it cooks some things better than any other kind of cooking.” In particular, Kafka swore by the microwave to cook time-consuming fare such as risotto. “I feel I must defend making risotto in the microwave oven as so many of my readers have done this,” she once wrote to fellow cookbook author Mark Bittman. “There is really not a lot of stirring. I don’t know about your shoulders, but mine are grateful.”

As someone who had bucked the conventions of her upbringing, Kafka was no stranger to bold statements. She spoke of the microwave as vital to enhancing certain foods and flavors. “Once you have tried microwave-cooking fish, you may never cook it any other way unless you grill it outdoors,” she wrote, much to the chagrin of office workers everywhere. She swore that you get “addicted” to the speed of a microwave. The Microwave Gourmet’s hundreds of thousands of readers could likely attest to that.

She also stirred up culinary controversies by advocating against conventional wisdom: Namely, that a microwave could act as a deep-fat fryer, and that ovens could be heated to 500 degrees to roast poultry, vegetables, and meat. But Kafka was not someone who was easily dissuaded, even though Julia Child and James Beard balked at her techniques (despite her long friendship and collaborations with Beard). “Tell Barbara Kafka that a recipe wouldn’t work or a combination was against the rules, and when you looked up she wouldn’t be there—she’d be in the kitchen,” the food journalist Corby Kummer told The New York Times.

Kafka is remembered as a prolific writer and a celebrated cook, one who was honored with a James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. But more than anything, she was immensely curious, had a knack for challenging conventions, and was a voracious reader. “I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel,” she once said. “There are cultures that are not mine. And in order to learn about them, I read.”

She baked thousands of pot brownies for AIDS patients.

Baked goods are often seen as comforting. The brownies made by Mary Jane Rathbun definitely fit that description. In 1996, the New York Times compared Rathbun to the domestic goddesses of American pop culture: Betty Crocker, Mrs. Field, Sara Lee. But Rathbun's secret ingredient was cannabis. And instead of selling baking mix, Rathbun spent years campaigning for the legalization of medical marijuana, helping establish San Francisco at the forefront. It wasn't long before she was known as "Brownie Mary," a foul-mouthed friend to those affected by AIDS.

Rathbun was born in 1922, far from countercultural San Francisco, a city that would eventually hold a municipal holiday in her honor. Ironically, Mary Jane was her given name. As a child in Minnesota, she defied authority early, hitting a nun who tried to cane her and dropping out of school to become a waitress, her career for the next 50 years. While later in life she benefited from her unwitting, little-old-lady appearance, she was always an activist, campaigning for labor and abortion rights in her youth. Like many young Americans, she moved to the West Coast during World War II, settling in San Francisco.

She soon married, to a man she met at a USO dance. The marriage wasn't successful, and the couple divorced. Rathbun had a daughter, named Peggy, but she was killed in a car accident in the early 1970s, when she was only 22. Later, friends would speculate the early death of her daughter inspired Rathbun's extraordinary acts of charity.

In the early '70s, she started selling brownies augmented with marijuana to make extra money. Though Rathbun was an early adopter of the edible, chocolate and marijuana have a long history together, going back to the notorious "hashish fudge" of writer Alice B. Toklas. But Rathbun took her brownie baking public, advertising for customers with printed flyers. Eventually she attracted law enforcement’s notice.

Her first arrest made national headlines. At 57, Rathbun already had a grandmotherly appearance, and reporters thrilled at the juxtaposition between her looks and her illegal activities (Rathbun liked to smoke marijuana as well as bake it). On January 17, 1981, The Guardian reported that Rathbun was wearing a flowered apron when she opened her apartment door to Detective Sergeant Robert Bullard, who was undercover as a customer. Accounts vary as to what Bullard saw in the apartment, but there were definitely dozens of brownies. Rathbun was famously unfiltered, and her response to being arrested was a resigned, "Oh, shit." According to The Guardian, the police had come across one of Rathbun's flyers advertising “magically delicious” brownies, and the squiggles and stars printed on the page were a sure-fire "drug-culture clue to their real nature."

The police booked Rathbun on charges of possession and sale of illegal drugs. Her punishment was hundreds of hours of community service. While she’d been selling edibles to make money, her long community service stint made her a fixture on the volunteer scene.

In 1982, the Centers for Disease Control described a mysterious disease with the name Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. The slow response to what was already an epidemic is generally blamed on politicians and officials ignoring it due to its prevalence among gay communities. San Francisco was especially hard hit. In 1987, a New York Times reporter interviewed residents of the Castro District, a historically gay neighborhood. Many had lost most of their friends, and city officials feared that the death toll would pass 10,000 by 1991.

The same year that the CDC first used the term AIDS, Rathbun was arrested for bringing brownies to a cancer patient. She’d become a regular volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital, and she noticed that her treats had a mysterious effect. For AIDS and cancer patients wracked by nausea, her brownies could ease discomfort and induce hunger, well-known attributes of marijuana. She began baking pot brownies by the score in 1984—at her peak, one fellow cannabis activist estimated she made more than 1600 a month. Volunteering to work with AIDS patients from the very beginning of the epidemic, Rathbun turned out industrial quantities of brownies with donated cannabis for "my gay friends" and her "kids," as she called them. In a Chicago Tribune story, a fellow nurse called her a "shining beacon," while patients swore that the brownies brought them back from the brink. In 1986, the hospital awarded her with a "Volunteer of the Year" award.

In the early ‘90s, Brownie Mary became a political powerhouse. Teaming up with marijuana activist Dennis Peron, she lobbied for the legalization of medical marijuana. She prominently contributed to the passing of San Francisco's Proposition P in 1991, which freed physicians from the consequences of prescribing medical marijuana. Her third arrest in July 1992 received massive coverage, and headlines no longer portrayed her as a naughty grandmother. Now, she was an AIDS activist, one who not only baked weed brownies, but normal cookies as well: Someone who held the hands of patients when they received their diagnoses and encouraged them to keep living and hoping for a cure.

Rathbun ultimately was acquitted of the charges. The next month, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors declared August 25, 1992, to be "Brownie Mary Day." Together with Peron, Rathbun assisted with opening America's first medical marijuana dispensary and with passing Proposition 215 in 1996, which made California the first state to legalize medical marijuana. Her work also inspired research into the effectiveness of medical marijuana on those with HIV and AIDS.

Even though she wrote a cookbook with Peron in 1993, Brownie Mary's recipe remains a secret to this day. In 1996, when she was 73, ailing, and, according to Peron, considering contacting Doctor Jack Kevorkian, who was famous for facilitating assisted suicide, she still refused to give it up. "When and if they legalize it, I'll sell my brownie recipe to Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines," she told a reporter, "and take the profits and buy an old Victorian for my kids with AIDS."

She rallied, though, and together with Peron served as a grand marshal of the San Francisco Pride parade in 1997. When she died in 1999 of a heart attack, hundreds of people showed up to a vigil in her honor. The foul-mouthed "angel of mercy" was no more. Despite all of her legal troubles and arrests, she was hailed as a hero in many obituaries. But even at her lowest in 1996, she showed the same rebellious streak she’d shown as a child quarreling with nuns. She was glad to have bedeviled the authorities for so long, she told a reporter. "They wish they never heard the name 'Brownie Mary.'"

As Hitler rose to power, the city welcomed refugees.

It’s common knowledge that as Hitler’s bid to rid the world of Jews escalated, so did the world’s refusal to let them in. What’s not well known is that when those borders, ports, doors, windows, and boundaries began shutting Jews out, in part by refusing to issue them visas, Shanghai, though already swollen with people and poverty, was the only place on earth willing to accept them with or without papers. It was an exception that, for thousands, meant the difference between life and death.

To understand the significance of this gesture, it’s important to understand the widely held but mistaken belief that Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were never, at any point, permitted to leave. Henny Wenkart, a Holocaust survivor featured in the documentary, 50 Children: Mr. and Mrs. Kraus, explained this misconception: “What people don’t understand is that at the beginning, you could get out. Everybody could get out. Nobody would let us in!”

In fact, until 1941 when the routes immigrants used to get to Shanghai were closed off by the war and the Germans decreed that Jews could no longer emigrate from the Reich, Jews in occupied Europe were not only allowed to leave, but were pressured to do so through a system of intimidation and force. Although they didn’t make it easy, the Nazi party, eager to implement their plan to rid Europe of its Jewish population—to make it judenrein or “cleansed” of Jews—did allow Jews to leave under certain conditions.

“Potential refugees needed to get a variety of papers approved by governmental authorities, including the Gestapo, before they could leave,” writes Steve Hochstadt in an email. Hochstadt is Professor Emeritus of History at Illinois College and author of the book Exodus to Shanghai. “One document was the Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung, literally a ‘certificate of harmlessness,’ showing that there were no problems with this person, such as owing taxes. Jews needed to prove that they had registered their valuables with the authorities so they could be properly confiscated. . .”

Though difficult to obtain, those documents, along with proof of passage to another country and/or a visa for permission to enter another country, were enough to get one out of Europe. Surprisingly, even for those already detained in concentration camps, the door, metaphorically speaking, was open, provided they could prove they would leave Germany once released.

But of course, to walk through the door, one had to have some place to walk to, and that, for most Jews, was their biggest obstacle. Most countries made it either virtually impossible to enter (such as Switzerland, which insisted all German Jews have a red “J” stamped in their passports), imposed untenable conditions on refugees, or just simply wouldn’t issue visas.

Shanghai—already home to a few thousand Jewish immigrants who started slowly arriving as early as the mid-19th century for business or later to escape the Russian Revolution—not only did not require visas for entry, but issued them with alacrity to those seeking asylum. In many cases, newly arrived immigrants were not even asked to show passports. It was not until 1939 that restrictions were placed on Jewish immigrants coming into Shanghai and even then these limitations were decided not by the Chinese, but by the amalgam of foreign powers that controlled the city at the time. This body, made up both of Westerners and Japanese who wanted to restrict the influx of Jews, decided that anyone with a “J” on their passport would now have to apply in advance for landing permission.

A plaque at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in Hongkou explains the situation perfectly:

“No consulate or embassy in Vienna was prepared to grant us immigration visas until, by luck and perseverance I went to the Chinese consulate where, wonder of wonders, I was granted visas for me and my extended family. On the basis of these visas, we were able to obtain shipping accommodation on the Bianco Mano from an Italian Shipping Line [sic] expected to leave in early December 1938 from Genoa, Italy to Shanghai, China – a journey of approximately 30 days.”—Eric Goldstaub, Jewish refugee to Shanghai

And so, without the luxury of options, and desperate to evade the tightening grip of the Nazis, Jewish refugees by the thousands, as well as a small minority of non-Jews, set sail from Germany and parts of Central and Eastern Europe, settling primarily in the Hongkou neighborhood of Shanghai. Having been stripped of most of their assets upon their departure from Europe, the virtually penniless arrivals found Hongkou much more affordable than the city’s more developed districts.

Although they came in a slow but steady stream from the beginning of Hitler’s rise, it was Kristallnacht in 1938 that catapulted the Jewish population in Shanghai from a few thousand to upwards of 20,000. Over the course of two days, Jewish businesses in Germany, annexed Austria, and what was then known as the Sudetenland (a region in what was then Czechoslovakia with a large German population) were looted, Jewish homes were destroyed, and Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps. The migration that arose out of this traumatic event “ . . . lasted only until August 1939, when all the foreign powers in Shanghai decided to implement restrictions, which severely cut down the number who could enter,” writes Hochstadt.

The Shanghai of the early 20th century was in many ways an energetic, challenging city that attracted the driven and ambitious. Shopping, theater, education, music, publishing, architecture, and even film production flourished, but as Harriet Sargeant, author of the book Shanghai explains, the assault on the city by the Japanese proved too much: “Between 1937 and 1941 the Japanese oversaw the destruction of Shanghai. One by one they stripped away the attributes which had made it great. When they finally seized Shanghai itself in 1941, they found the longed-for city no longer existed. The Shanghai of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties had gone forever.

Troubled from the crushing Second Sino-Japanese War, Shanghai was a raw place. The refugee Ursula Bacon in her book, Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl’s Journey from Hitler’s Hate to War-Torn China, describes the scene she discovered upon arrival in Shanghai: “Boiling under the hot sun and steamed by the humidity in the air was the combination of rotting fruit peelings, spoiled leftovers, raw bones, dead cats, drowned puppies, carcasses of rats, and the lifeless body of a newborn baby . . .”

Nevertheless, many of the Shanghai locals, in spite of their own hardships, welcomed their new neighbors and shared what little they had, whether that meant housing, medical care, or just simple kindness. Gradually, with that support, Jewish refugees began, little by little, to create lives in their new country, and before long, the proliferation of Jewish-owned businesses was such that the Hongkou area became known as “Little Vienna.” Like their Chinese neighbors, they did their best to survive in difficult circumstances. They established newspapers, synagogues, retail businesses, restaurants, schools, cemeteries, guilds, social clubs, and even beauty pageants. They practiced medicine, started hospitals, got married, had babies, and held bar and bat mitzvahs. They learned to cook in coal-burning ovens and to haggle with street vendors.

One Hongkou resident remembers the time and place with great fondness. The artist Peter Max, who would later become known for his signature “psychedelic” works of art, came to Shanghai with his parents after fleeing Berlin. Like many of the Jewish families who immigrated to the city, Max’s father started a business, in this case, a store that sold Western-style suits. It was, Max recalls, an auspicious choice, as Chinese men were just beginning to favor them over their traditional Mandarin clothing.

“On the ground floor of our building was a Viennese garden-café,” Max recalls, “where my father and mother met their friends in the early evenings for coffee and pastries while listening to a violinist play romantic songs from the land they had left behind. The community of Europeans that gathered and grew below our house kept me connected to our roots."

The people of that community lived their lives as normally as possible until 1942, when the history they came so far to escape came dangerously close to repeating itself. Shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Colonel Josef Meisinger, Chief Representative of Nazi Germany Gestapo to Japan, approached the Japanese authorities in Shanghai with “The Meisinger Plan,” a scheme to rid the city of its Jewish population by starvation, overwork, or medical experiments. Although the Japanese ultimately rejected that plan, starting in February 1943, they did require that every Jewish person who came to Shanghai after 1937 relocate to Hongkou, a relatively small area that already had an existing population in the hundreds of thousands.

Although much of the city’s Jewish population was already living there, the crush of one population on another also dealt a brutal blow, with both disease and lack of food becoming even more critical concerns. Suddenly, curfews were imposed. Passes to exit and enter the ghetto were required. Food rations were implemented. It was not uncommon for 30 to 40 people to sleep in the same room (reports of up to 200 people in one room exist) and “bathroom” facilities in general consisted of little else than literal pots emptied by local laborers each morning. Still, refugees bolstered themselves by remembering that, in spite of these conditions, in Shanghai, they were the one thing they could not be in Europe: safe.

Between the dismal state of the still-impoverished city and the beginning of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, the city’s post-war Jewish population eventually dwindled to just a few hundred people, although there are said to be a few thousand Jews living there today. Eager to return to Europe or start new lives on other continents, most Jewish refugees left Shanghai at the end of WWII and with their departure began the dismantling of the culture and lives they established in China.

Although the nearby apartment buildings that once housed both European Jews and Chinese alike are still in use, given Shanghai’s current construction boom, it’s not unthinkable that these monuments, too, could soon meet the wrecking ball. The White Horse Inn, a Hongkou café opened by Viennese refugees in 1939 that became not just a meeting place but something of a symbol of normalcy for the displaced Europeans, was demolished almost ten years ago for a road widening project. Other businesses of the era, once so crucial to the Jewish experience in Shanghai, are now represented only by rescued signage that hangs in the courtyard of the neighborhood’s Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum.

The museum, which includes the Ohel Moishe Synagogue, a center of Jewish life and worship for the Hongkou refugees, has become something of a touchstone of this extraordinary circumstance of history but between the exodus of the original Jewish population after the war and the city’s lack of interest in preserving this chapter of its past, one has to wonder if it will soon be the last monument to it standing.

Geothermal energy keeps the crop warm even during deep snows.

Tomatoes are probably not the first thing one associates with Iceland, the land of fire and ice. But that’s exactly what Knútur Rafn Ármann and Helena Hermundardóttir, husband and wife owners of Fridheimar, specialize in growing. Along with their five children, Knútur and Helena have developed a family business devoted totally to tomatoes.

Through the use of geothermal technology, the greenhouses of Fridheimar, located one hour east of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, produce 370 tons of tomatoes throughout the year. That’s roughly a ton per day—even in the coldest of Iceland’s winter months—and over 15% of Iceland’s tomato market.

Imagine entering a large, glass-paneled greenhouse from the harsh cold outside, and finding yourself in the warm humidity and orange-tinted lighting of an inviting atrium. Rows upon rows of ripening tomatoes stand just a few feet away and buzzing bees can be heard throughout the enclosed space. It’s almost like stepping into another world.

Knútur and Helena purchased Fridheimar in 1995. According to the couple, the farm already used geothermal energy, but had been left derelict. Knútur is an agronomist with a passion for horses. Helena is a horticulturalist. Helena explains that “we wanted to find a place of our own to tend to our interests, and found Friðheimar.” They spent the next 23 years building up the greenhouses and surrounding farm to the working farm and sustainable tourism facility it is today.

So how exactly does one grow tomatoes amidst Iceland’s harsh lava fields and subarctic weather? It turns out that the island’s stores of geothermal energy make it the perfect environment for greenhouses. Helena describes that “geothermal energy is the very reason why there are greenhouses in Iceland.”At Fridheimar, a borehole allows water to be drawn from geothermal sources generated by the island’s volcanic activity right beneath the farm—a mere 200 meters from the greenhouse. This pure water is both heat and irrigation. Another benefit to the farm’s location is a lack of invaders. “We are isolated from many pests and diseases,” Helena says, “so it is easy to use biological pest control to keep the plants healthy.” This biological pest control includes helpful plant bugs.

According to the Iceland National Energy Authority, the country began using geothermal energy to heat greenhouses in 1924. Geothermal energy produces a quarter of the country’s electricity, and the greenhouses are so important to the Icelandic economy that they have been supported by government subsidies for electricity and lighting. Icelandic greenhouses grow bananas, cucumbers, roses, and more.

While Fridheimar’s rustic exterior, complete with farmhouse and stables, might look like something from a bygone era, its greenhouses are thoroughly modern. The computer system allows growers to control everything from temperature to humidity and lighting, and Knútur spends a great deal of time explaining this piece of technology to visitors. Knútur and Helena have also introduced new tomatoes to the Icelandic market: The greenhouse at Fridheimar was the first to grow plum tomatoes and Flavorino cocktail tomatoes year-round in Iceland, and the farm recently introduced the enjoyable Piccolo tomato.

Knútur and Helena run Fridheimar as both a working farm and a destination. The grounds include stables where Icelandic horses are kept and performances are held. (Icelandic horses are a point of national pride.) And after touring the greenhouse, visitors can enjoy a meal at the Fridheimar restaurant. The dishes and drinks served right inside the greenhouse include tomato soup served with freshly baked bread, homemade tomato ice cream, Bloody Mary’s, and tomato schnapps. “Our chef [does] a lot of crazy dreaming over the night,” says Marketing and Community Manager, Rakel Theodórsdóttir, “and then the fantastic ideas for a new recipe come to life.” The newest addition is tomato beer.

There are many concept restaurants in the world, but eating in a greenhouse regularly surrounded by snow adds to the appeal of Fridheimar’s tomato-based menu. The tomatoes were grown amidst a cold climate and on one of the most tectonically active land masses on earth, in a country of over 200 volcanoes that has harnessed that energy in truly amazing ways.

In capturing images of doomed buildings, they documented the city they thought they were losing.

In 1875, Alfred Marks learned he was about to lose an old friend. The Oxford Arms, north of St. Paul's Cathedral, had spent centuries as a coaching inn, a place for travelers to stay while heading into or out of London. Then it had become a tenement house. It was, as Marks later wrote, "an excellent example of the galleried Inns"—rooming houses with interior balconies, so that visitors could take in stage shows and other entertainment—"now becoming every year more scarce." Now, it was to be knocked down in order to make room for the expanding grounds of the Old Bailey courts next door.

It's a feeling familiar to contemporary city-dwellers: a beloved building bites the dust. Who hasn't walked past a nearby edifice, learned that it's doomed by construction, and mourned their changing environs? The next step is often to snap a photo, for whenever that shiny new condo takes its place.

Back in the 1870s, Marks had a similar instinct. He lacked an iPhone, but his era provided its own resources: commercial photographers, long-lasting carbon-based ink, and—most importantly—a city full of potential subjects, structures that might soon suffer the same fate as the Oxford Arms.

Over the next 11 years, as the founder and secretary of the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London, Marks orchestrated the photographic preservation of dozens of buildings, including churches, inns, schools, hospitals, and houses. The choices he made help tell the story of preservation in London, and throw our own practices into relief.

Everything sped up in the Victorian era, including the pace of change. The Industrial Revolution brought new technologies and transportation, along with new philosophies, priorities, and even new ways of thinking about time and space. As the geographer Kenneth Foote writes in a paper about the Society, many Londoners at the time "were held in tension between excitement about progress, and alarm over change at the expense of long-lived traditions."

Foote started writing about SPROL in the early 1980s, when he was living in Austin, Texas. He noticed that when his neighbors bemoaned changes happening in their own city, their wistfulness tended to lodge itself in particular buildings. "Every time I talked with people who had been there for a long time, they'd say, 'Austin isn't what it used to be! Since they closed the Armadillo World Headquarters, it just hasn't been the same.'" Foote says. "There was a sense of nostalgia for this great past that was getting lost from the cityscape." The same was true in Victorian London, Foote explains: People may have loved the new locomotives, but some—like Marks—also missed the coaches, and the coaching inns.

Marks was well-positioned for such nostalgia. He was an antiquarian scholar, and his father had been a coach builder, which may explain his particular attachment to the Oxford Arms. When he heard the building was to be demolished, Marks raised money from a few friends. He hired Alfred and John Bool, a father-son photography team best known for their landscapes, to take photos of the Arms. He then started looking for others who felt the same way he did, and might want to buy the work. "Should any readers … interested in London antiquities desire to join the subscription, I shall be happy to hear from them," he announced in the London Times.

The Society launched "one of the first efforts" to use photography to document endangered buildings, says Foote. It was also special in that its photos were meant to be collected, like fine art. All were printed in carbon—an expensive process—to ensure they wouldn't fade.

The first photograph set, released in 1875, consisted of six different views of the Oxford Arms, including the entrance, the yard, and the galleries. The second, which came a year later, focused on old houses and inns near Wynch Street and Drury Lane. In 1878, Marks doubled his production speed, going from six photos per year to 12. Three years later, he began writing up short texts about the buildings, printing them out, and issuing them to subscribers along with the photographs.

"The project became much bigger than he originally intended," says Chitra Ramalingam, the Assistant Curator of Photography at the Yale Center for British Art, which exhibited SPROL's photographs in 2016. Still, Marks ran the show, choosing which buildings to focus on, and particular details to highlight. (Despite its name, there's no evidence the Society ever met up in real life, or had any true members besides Marks.)

While later historic preservation projects were more encyclopedic, Marks put his energy specifically towards buildings that he thought "served as important records of [England's] national character," Ramalingam says. His texts are filled with references to royalty and famous people, along with literature, legends, and nursery rhymes. The poet Ben Jonson, he writes, may have laid some of the bricks at Lincoln's Inn—the subject of photo 12. A mansion on Leadenhall Street, depicted in photo 20, once had "a grand staircase," cedar-paneled floors, and "decorations … of a very sumptuous character."

Marks gave such scrupulous instructions to the Bools—as well as to Henry and Thomas James Dixon, who he hired to replace them in 1879— that each photograph was effectively "a collaboration between Marks and the photographer," says Ramalingam. Some of his priorities led to unorthodox images. One of Ramalingam's favorites from the series is Number 17, which depicts a church called St. Bartholomew the Great.

"It's actually of an alley behind the church," she says. "The photographer has climbed up to what must have been a really awkward perch, and is taking [the photo] looking down. You see this view of intersecting planes—this series of angles that slices through the alley. It looks incredibly modern."

Equally important, Ramalingam points out, is what Marks chose not to highlight. The Society called these buildings "relics," and the photographs treat them as such. Humans are rarely present, and those that are there were almost certainly posed, to provide scale. (The photographs' long exposures meant that "you wouldn't be able to get a candid shot of someone, a kid outside a doorway, if you didn't say, 'Hey kid, stand still,'" Ramalingam says.)

This choice foregrounds certain aspects of history while eliding others. The Oxford Arms, for example, had been a tenement for about seven years when it was slated for demolition. Even as the Society came to photograph the building, its inhabitants were being moved out. Marks may have been losing a favorite structure, but they were losing a home.

Although there was a growing tradition of documentary photography in the country at the time—including whole books focused on the lives of impoverished Londoners—"that is definitely not what is happening in this series," says Ramalingam. "[Marks] doesn't want these buildings photographed as slums." In the text he later wrote about the Arms, he barely mentioned this stage of its life. Instead, he focused on a particular Earl that used to visit, and how difficult it would have been to get a nine-horse coach around the narrow street corner.

Still, look closely at the photographs, and you see hints of life: laundry hanging from the banisters of the Arms, empty plant pots on a windowsill. "For a viewer now, those are some of the most interesting details in the picture," Ramalingam says. "But Marks seems to want you to look right past them."

Marks disbanded his Society in 1886, 11 years after he'd started it. By this point, he had released 120 photographs, in 12 sets, and had enjoyed a certain amount of commercial success, selling over 100 subscriptions. "It is not suggested that the subject has been exhausted," he wrote at the time, "but it is hoped that the work may be regarded as fairly complete within the lines at first marked out."

Although many of his subjects were gone, some had gained more permanent protection. "From the 1870s onward, [preservation] laws became tighter and tighter," says Foote. In 1894, the reformer Charles Robert Ashbee embarked on the first Survey of London, aiming to achieve a comprehensive architectural account of the city. By the turn of the century, Foote writes, "it was clear that the principles of conservation were well formed."

In 1985, while working on his own article, Foote walked around checking on the buildings in the photo series. "Around half of them were gone," he says, but several dozen remained—and remain still—including Lincoln's Inn, St. Bartholomew the Great, and Great St. Helens, pictured above.

"Some of the sites were very striking," he says. "It's almost as though a person could step into that same scene and take a photograph today." Just as Marks would have liked it.

A team of artists create horror out of fungi.

Photographer Henry Hargreaves plays with food often, especially the intersection of food and war. Previously, he transformed military rations into gourmet dishes—a project meant to accentuate the contrast between war fare and haute cuisine. But his current project has an even grimmer tone. Hargreaves is photographing delicate mushrooms as the ultimate symbols of destruction: mushroom clouds.

The roots of the project go back a few years to when Hargreaves collaborated with food stylist Caitlin Levin on a project for Forbes magazine. For an article on food systems, they built a mushroom cloud out of mushrooms. But the specter of nuclear war, Hargreaves says, is "more relevant now," especially given the current chaotic state of global affairs. So they decided to make a series of apocalyptic mushroom photos.

If a nuclear war breaks out, the effects will be manifold. Constructing their mushroom clouds out of actual edible fungi reflects that. A nuclear attack would not only kill, it would affect both the ecosystem and local food sources for generations. Hargreaves imagines that the result could mirror the Fukushima disaster in Japan, where a tsunami caused meltdowns at a nuclear power plant. The radiation impacted local agricultural and food systems abroad. Hargreaves, a native New Zealander, is particularly aware of the anxieties around Pacific seafood that arose after the disaster. If a nuclear weapon was deliberately dropped on land, he says, it would be many times worse. "You'd have parts of a continent that couldn't create food for a long time," he says.

The project took around six months and 15 varieties of mushroom. One reason for the long time frame was that many mushrooms were only available during certain times of the year, and they needed different mushrooms for different effects. Wide, flat oyster mushrooms make up smooth cloud columns, while spindly enoki mushrooms form the frilly undersides. Hargreaves and Levin attached the mushrooms to styrofoam forms with glue or pins, and dramatically lit the clouds for apocalyptic effect before photographing them.

Each photograph portrays the different stages of a mushroom cloud. Starting with a wide ring of vapor, the cloud balloons up until the cap almost breaks away entirely. "A mushroom is often thought of as something that's kind of quite cute," Hargreaves says. "But here it is as probably the most evil device humankind has ever created."

Find Reagan side-by-side with pagan holidays.

In the first week of March 1981, here’s what a mid-level government employee working in Leavenworth, Kansas, for the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Combat Development Activities division, noticed about the world. The U.S. embassy in El Salvador was attacked (again). Lent began. It was Sonny Park’s last day in the U.S. Army, and Walter Cronkite’s last day at CBS. Kansas won the Big 8 Tournament. He had a “nice day with Liz.” All of these details, along with many more, were recorded in brightly colored notes and illustrations in a government-issued calendar.

Over the course of the 1980s, most days, the calendar artist recorded details of his personal life and public affairs. He chronicled truckers, terrorism, snow at home and in Lebanon, the death of a Nazi collaborator, Reagan’s 72nd birthday, Israeli politics, football results, the first female Supreme Court justice swearing in the first female Secretary of Transportation, overlong budget meetings, full moons, vernal equinoxes, Beltane, International Women’s Day, a killer tornado, Tunisian riots, trade deficits, and much more.

“It all seems to be here: the end of the Iran hostage crisis, the invasion of Afghanistan, Poland’s Solidarity movement, supply-side economics, and the Space Shuttle, to name just a few, along with hundreds of lesser-known events all but forgotten today except by scholars,” writes Boston Rare Maps, which is offering eight of the "massively illustrated" calendars for sale. The artist seemed to have an unusual interest in pagan holidays, and the calendars come with pamphlets dating the 1990s for a "Pagan Network" in Oregon.

The dealer, which specializes in antique maps, acquired the calendars from a book dealer, who said they had acquired them from another book dealer. They’re an unusual window into one person’s life and the world as he saw it—a unique history of the 1980s, captured in pen, pencil, and felt-tip pen. Looking through the months is a bit like looking through a Where's Waldo? book, chock full of worldly details and small surprises. Go ahead—get lost in his world.

Before the Civil War, free black settlements grew in the Northwest Territory.

The image of the American pioneer, as painted by books, games, movies, and even history, rarely changes. Bonneted women and stalwart men traveled to the edges of United States territory with their few possession to break the land and start new lives. In these stories, the pioneers may come from different places or backgrounds—but they all seem to be white.

But in the decades before the Civil War, free black people migrating from the South and East lived the same story. In a new book, The Bone and Sinew of the Land, historian Anna-Lisa Cox documents the homesteading activities of thousands of “forgotten black pioneers” in the Northwest Territory—the area stretching from what’s now Ohio to Illinois and north into Wisconsin and Michigan.

As part of her research, Cox attempted to locate as many settlements as she could that consisted of at least one African American–owned farm in the years between 1800 and 1860, using census records, deeds, and other documents. The map she assembled shows 338 in all, with the greatest number, as well as the largest and wealthiest, concentrated in Ohio and Indiana.

“Every single time I thought I’d found them all, I was wrong,” Cox says. “I just kept on finding more.” The settlements represent people who thought their best opportunity to find success in the United States was at its edge, where the laws gave them more freedom and rights than elsewhere. “They understood that by colonizing the newest portion of the nation, they were laying claim to citizenship in powerful ways,” she writes in her book.

Though the stories of these communities are often overlooked, a few other historians have studied them. Cox cites Stephen Vincent’s Southern Seed, Northern Soil, a history that focuses on the Beech and Roberts settlements, two rural African-American and mixed-race communities that thrived in Indiana during the 1830s. The Indiana Historical Society has worked to document the state’s early black settlements, county by county. In Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, a historian and archaeologist, mapped free black communities across the same area.

“East of the Mississippi, along with Iowa and Kansas, along the border of the river, these places are very poorly understood,” says LaRoche. Her archaeological work focused on communities that happened to be on Forest Service land, because, she says, “They were intact and not disturbed. Many have been bulldozed and paved over.”

The map in Cox’s book is a synthesis of rural settlement in the region, so it excludes urban black communities. She takes an upbeat view of the history that the map represents. “These pioneers really had the best ideals of the revolution at heart,” she says. The ordinance that created the territory outlawed slavery there, and did not put racial restrictions on the right to vote. “That’s how this region was originally envisioned, and free African-Americans were moving onto that frontier with that vision,” she says. “They were integrating the frontier. They were integrating the Northwest Territory.”

In some cases, free black people who moved to the Northwest Territory were able to accumulate wealth and build lasting communities. The founders of the Roberts settlement, for instance, came to the Midwest in the early 1830s and obtained some of the best land in the area. “They were really well positioned,” says Vincent, a historian and independent researcher. “They had lived in the South and lived near Quakers, so they had established relationships. They were well accepted by their neighbors.”

In other places, some of the settlers, especially newly free people who lacked resources, struggled with poorer land and more hostile surroundings. As Cox acknowledges, whatever ideals were written into the original laws of the territory, they were weakened as white settlers poured in and formed states that restricted the rights of black people and created added financial barriers, such as the requirement that they pay bonds of hundreds of dollars just to live there.

The history of both enslaved and free people of African descent in the region goes back before the 1800s. In the previous century, French colonists had brought captive people upriver, and The Bone and Sinew of the Land details the legal battles of people who were still treated as slaves—in a place where the practice was not supposed to take place. Free black traders had also settled in the region in the 1700s, and they made alliances or intermarried with Native American tribes. After the French and Indian War, the British government adopted a policy that would have restricted settlement of European colonists so far west, and the hunger to claim this land for the colonists was one reason behind the American Revolution. Pioneers, black and white alike, contributed to the seizure of land from the native people as part of westward expansion.

“The frontier is not a place of heroism and sweetness and light. It’s a place of violence, injustice, and devastation,” says Cox. “But the term 'pioneer' and the term 'frontier,' however difficult, are still totemic and highly potent terms in our sense of ourselves as a nation. If we forget that free African Americans were part of the earliest settlement movement of our first frontier, then we have lost an important aspect of our American past.”

Among the settlements of black pioneers, there were radical integration projects, including the Union Literary Institute, an Indiana school established with a biracial board in 1846. It was one of the first schools in the country to offer education to anyone, regardless of their race or sex. But such institutions, and the wealth of some black pioneers, began to draw the ire of white settlers and neighbors. In the area along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, where land was both more marginal and more likely to have been purchased by recently freed people, black settlements would have been surrounded by white neighbors with pro-slavery views. “Not surprisingly, there was a large exodus of blacks from these areas during the 1850s,” says Vincent, the author of Southern Seed. “Very few blacks lived in these areas by the late 19th century, so these settlements were largely ephemeral and short-lasting.”

But if these communities are often left out of national histories, the people who live there today, many descended from these original settlers, do remember this past. Some hold yearly gatherings to reunite the descendants, and a local group is working to preserve what’s left of the Union Literary Institute and other buildings that survive from the community’s early period.

This region isn’t the only one where free black communities have been overlooked, either. Identifying the locations of these historic places “needs to be done in every state from Maine to Iowa,” says LaRoche. “Because there were, at some point or another, small pockets of black communities in these spaces that haven’t been recognized, discussed, or analyzed. There’s a lot of work to be done.”

Snacking on specimens from raw monkey to bee vomit can help scientists figure stuff out.

In 1972, the primatologist Richard Wrangham was in Tanzania, doing research on chimpanzees. Surrounded by their sounds and smells and living in their habitat, he found he hungered for an even deeper knowledge of their lives. So he asked his project director, Jane Goodall: Could he try eating like a chimp, just for a little while?

With Goodall's blessing, Wrangham went on a chimp-like diet. For the most part, this involved chowing down on “plant foods that tasted so poor that I could not fill my stomach with them,” Wrangham writes in an email. But one day he came upon another favorite snack a chimp had left behind: raw colobus monkey meat.

Chimps eat two species of colobus—black-and-white and red—but they appear to prefer red, and hunt it more often. Wrangham wanted to know why. So when he came across the leftovers, he took a bite of each type.

"Their meat tasted the same to me," he writes. But between the raw monkey and the bad-tasting plants, he adds, "the lesson got through to me that there is something special about the human diet." This eventually inspired a book about the role of cooking in human evolution.

We tend to think of biology as a visual discipline. Researchers count populations and observe behaviors. They trace anatomical structures and track physiological responses. If they want a close-up understanding of something, they may pull out a microscope.

But as Wrangham discovered, there are other forms of knowledge to be had. In some cases, tasting study subjects (or eating what they eat) helps researchers identify species and solve logistical puzzles. Other times, it lets them uphold their principles, or sink their teeth into a variety of other mysteries. Sometimes you just have to bite the proverbial apple—or mushroom, tadpole, aphid, or tunicate.

Identification

If you don't know exactly what something is, tasting it can help. In mycology—the study of fungi—taste is "an integral part of the taxonomic process," says Kabir Gabriel Peay, who studies communal fungal ecology and is a professor at Stanford University. Taste and smell characteristics are often included on the keys that help field researchers tell species apart.

For example, in California, Peay says, there are two species of Lactarius, or milk-cap fungus, that look very similar. Both are small and ruddy-colored, and exude a milky white latex when broken. "But one of them, if you dry it, it smells and tastes like maple syrup," Peay says. "People put it in ice cream and cookies." The other one has more of a peppery taste. "In the field—knowing that—you could pick up a small red milkcap and take a bite of it, and know which one it was," he says. (Public service announcement: If you’re going to go around tasting mystery mushrooms, make sure you spit them out afterwards.)

Often, the same goes for plants. "I eat leaves all the time for ID and for fun even if I already know the plant," says Kevin Vega, who studies urban ecology at the STEM-focused university ETH Zurich. Scientists in farther-out fields have their own versions of these tests: At least one geomorphology textbook recommends "gently passing ... soil between your teeth" to differentiate silt from sand and clay. And paleontologists know that if something is actually a chip of bone, it will likely stick to your tongue, whereas if it's a chip of rock, it won't.

Solving mysteries

Other biologists, like Wrangham, find themselves faced with more complicated mysteries that their tongues might help them solve. In 1971, the zoologist Richard Wassersug convinced some grad students to eat eight different species of tadpole, in order to test whether slower-swimming tadpoles had evolved a bad taste in order to repel predators. "None of them tasted sweet and delicious," Wassersug told NPR reporter Jessie Rack in 2015. But the slowest, showiest ones were indeed the gnarliest.

Similarly, the herpetologist Chris Austin has been trying to figure out for years why some types of skink have green blood, while others have red. Once, he told NPR, he ate some raw skink, to see if one type might taste better or worse. Both were awful—"like bad sushi," he told the outlet. He's still working on the problem, but at least he's got one more data point.

Karl Magnacca, a conservation biologist, spent his PhD surveying Hawaiian yellow-faced bees, which are among the very few endangered bee species in the United States. While many bees use the hairs on their legs to carry pollen, yellow-faced bees swallow it, fly to the nest, and then vomit it back up. "If you catch a female bringing pollen back to the nest … they'll regurgitate it back onto your fingers, to serve as a defensive mechanism," says Magnacca.

At that point, you can put the puke under a microscope and learn what kinds of flowers the bees prefer to visit. Or, if you just can't wait, you can eat it, and try to tell by taste—at least, that's what Magnacca tried a few times. Unfortunately, much of the bee vomit tasted the same, like lemony honey, and the microscopes proved more helpful. "The bees almost exclusively visit native plants," Magnacca learned. "That seems to be a big limiting factor on where they can live here."

Sometimes, taste itself inspires curiosity. When Stephanie Guertin was getting her PhD in neuroscience at the University of Rhode Island, she worked in a lab that studied lobster aggression. Experiments involved stressing out certain lobsters by putting them into tanks in pairs, and exposing one of them to chemicals that made them think their companion was much bigger than it actually was. Due to a policy preventing experimental animals from being released into the wild, lab members ate them instead.

"After eating a lot of lobsters, I noticed that sometimes they tasted different," Guertin says. "I started paying attention to whether any given lobster had been the one frightened off or not. Completely anecdotally, lobsters that had been stressed … tasted kind of sour." Friends who she subjected to blind taste tests agreed. Although she did not study this more rigorously, tests on pigs, cattle, sheep, and turkeys have shown that stress produces chemicals that affect how the animals taste.

Logistics

In some situations, eating (or imbibing) a specimen is a purely logistical decision. One aphid researcher wrote that eating his subjects makes it easier to count them correctly. (Plus, if they've been munching on brassicaceae leaves, they taste like mustard.) Another person relayed the legend of a pioneer parasite scientist "who discovered a new species of enteric worm in Africa, knew the approvals to import it would take too long… [and] swallowed it, trusting he could get it out back in the States." (Atlas Obscura was not able to confirm this story, but it seemed too good not to share.)

Leslie Ordal offered a story about a field research trip to Siberia, during which she and her colleagues were studying a gelatinous, bottom-feeding fish from Lake Baikal called the golomyanka. People don't really eat it, and there were a lot of myths about it in the Western scientific literature: "It used to be described as transparent and quickly dissolving in sunlight," she writes in an email. The team wasn't able to bring formalin from the U.S. to keep specimens in, so when they got to Russia, "we bought a case of cheap vodka to use as a preservative," she continues. They bought some better vodka, too, for drinking.

One night, she continues, they ran out of the good vodka. "A few of my hardier colleagues were determined not to let this stop them, and they snuck into the field lab and went right for the bottles of dead fish," she writes. "They drank a few sips from one bottle, then in their drunken logic realized it would be obvious that one bottle contained less vodka than all the others. So they went around and drank approximately the same amount out of all the other bottles."

The fact that the fish specimens survived all that sloshing around helped the team disprove some of the misconceptions about their fragility, Ordal says. (It taught them something about themselves, too: "They had one hell of a hangover.")

Pedagogy

These stories may inspire a wide variety of facial expressions, but none are too surprising. Biologists spend so much time thinking about their subjects, it makes a certain amount of sense that they'd want to eat them—or eat like them—too. Occasionally, this curiosity becomes more calcified. "Not all invertebrate biology labs have it as a tradition, but a lot of them do—you eat your study organism if it's feasible," says Lindsay Waldrop, an assistant professor of invertebrate biology at New Mexico Tech. Waldrop fried up some tunicate—specifically Styela plicata, or pleated sea squirt—for one of her undergraduates just last week.

While sea squirt is a delicacy in some places, including Chile and South Korea, Waldrop and her student were more used to coming across it on the dissecting table. "It tasted very bad," Waldrop says. "Very leathery." Her own career has been full of variously appetizing rites of passage: While at a field station on San Juan Island in Washington, she and her colleagues munched on everything from shrimp to worms to uni straight out of the sea urchin. "We ate a bunch of different stuff—as long it wouldn’t sting you or make you sick," she recalls fondly. "I guess that's probably not 100 percent safety protocol, but it’s a good tradition."

Meanwhile, at the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), eating specimens is a vital part of the scientific process. Much of CLEAR's research focuses on how plastic pollution affects food species in and around Newfoundland. They get a lot of their specimens from local hunters and fishers. "It seems a little backwards to do food justice research, take the animals, and not [eat them]," says the lab's director, Max Liboiron. "Then you're just studying species, not food."

In order to make specimen-eating a part of protocol, the lab had to get certain rules changed. "Under most university animal care protocols, animal tissues themselves are called hazardous waste," says Liboiron. "The first thing we did as part of our animal respect guidelines was to get that overturned." Now, after they've run their tests on cod, hake, duck, or geese, they eat as much of what's left as they can. If something can't be eaten, they take it back out into its environment in order to return it to its food web. "We're an explicitly feminist and anticolonial lab," says Liboiron. "When we say ethics in the lab, we mean good relations. Eating the animal means we're in good relations with the animal."

The creatures people eat for science don't always taste delicious. But in each of the cases shared here, the level of understanding this particular relationship facilitates made the experience worth it it. In some cases, it's even worth repeating. Wrangham hasn't yet repeated his raw monkey-eating experiment, but if the opportunity presents itself, he may go back to the tasting board. "I suspect it is not the meat of black-and-white colobus that tastes bad, but the skin," Wrangham says. "I have to try again."

Grimod de La Reynière hosted his own funeral.

The invitations were almost as large as they were bleak. Printed on black-rimmed paper almost two feet in length, they bore troubling news: “Madame Grimod de La Reynière is humbled to inform you of the painful loss of her husband. The funeral will take place today, Tuesday July 7th. A convoy will depart for the mortuary from 8 rue des Champs-Élysées, at 4 p.m. precisely.” (The year was 1812.)

It must have seemed at first shocking, and then enormously odd. Parisian high society was aghast: The dead man, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, had not been ill, nor especially old. Announcing a funeral for the very same day was exceptionally unusual. And that 4 p.m. departure (at dinner time!) must also have seemed strange. Grimod was well known in Paris as the author of Almanach des Gourmands, an eight-volume series of the world’s first restaurant guides, and would have hated to deprive his friends of a hot evening meal.

In light of these sacrifices, the ranks of faithful friends who showed up to pay their respects were allegedly thin. Inside the house, which was draped with black, the coffin sat lugubriously, illuminated by two rows of torches. A hearse waited nearby. The guests stood around, and as they waited, described the many virtues of their departed friend. There was plenty to draw from: Grimod was perhaps the world’s first food critic, dedicated to the art of gastronomy. He was impossibly clever, with a wicked sense of humor, and had trained as a lawyer. But an unexpected noise silenced the party. Two doors flung open, revealing a long table laden with food and lit by hundreds of candles. At its head sat a smiling Grimod. He looked at the mourners and said: “Dinner is served.”

Astonished, they made their way to the table where, as the story goes, there was precisely the right number of places. Still recovering from their shock, the friends struggled to make headway on the dishes as they expressed their relief. These compliments were cut short by the host, who implored them to eat before the meal got cold.

Later in the night, Grimod revealed why he had gathered them in this way: “I wanted to know who my real friends were—there’s no better way to test that than to see who would come to my funeral, even if it meant missing dinner.”

Grimod grew up in lavish surroundings. The son of a wealthy Parisian tax collector, whom he despised, he had a rare condition that deformed his fingers and led his parents to keep him out of sight as a child. Perhaps fearing the implication it might have about their genetic diversity or the strength of their bloodline, they told their friends that he had fallen into a pigpen as a small child, and has his hands eaten by hogs. For the rest of his life, Grimod wore ingenious metal prostheses, concealed beneath white gloves.

Throughout his twenties, he studied to become a lawyer and dabbled in theater critique, swanning between salons and soirées. “His louche lifestyle and republican politics infuriated his parents,” writes the culinary historian Cathy Kaufman, “as did his refusal to conform to social expectations by surrendering his law practice for the higher status position of magistrate.” After he graduated, he refused to be a judge and instead did pro bono work for people struggling with tax law. “As a judge,” he is said to have to have remarked, “I could find myself in the position of having to hang my father, while as an advocate, I would always be able to defend him.”

Though he may have practiced as a solicitor, his heart lay in the theater. And so, in February 1783, when his parents were out of town, he hosted a first morbid dinner party at their home. The family was extremely wealthy and lived in a grand house overlooking the Champs-Elysées. “[It] was famous for its wall panels, executed by the painter Charles-Louis Clérisseau and inspired by frescoes from the recently discovered cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum,” writes Kaufman. “The house was excruciatingly chic.” It was to this address that 300 funerary-themed invitations directed Parisian high society.

But when they arrived, most were shunted to one side. Barely two dozen were allowed to progress through to a checkpoint: Were they there to see Monsieur de la Reynière, “the defender of the people,” or the other Monsieur de la Reynière, “the oppressor of the people”? (Grimod’s father, it was implied, was the latter.) Those who answered correctly were led into the banquet hall itself, lit as bright as daytime by 365 lamps. A decorative coffin was behind every seat; and a catafalque, or coffin stand, sat upon the table. “This funereal theme was designed to poke fun at Grimod’s mother,” writes Carolyn Purnell, in her history of the Enlightenment. (She had failed to mourn the death of a woman who was allegedly one of her best friends.)

The hundreds of guests who had not been permitted to approach the checkpoint, let alone the banquet hall, watched from a balcony as Grimod’s chosen few dined. They were not permitted to leave, nor served a proper meal, but instructed to stay on the balcony and observe, with only a few biscuits provided to sustain them. Meanwhile, down below, Grimod treated his guests to coffee, liqueurs, and a magic lantern show.

Understandably, people were livid. One is said to have shouted from the balcony: “They will send you to the madhouse, and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.” Grimod became the talk of the town, holding other such parties while his parents were away: At one, guests were served only black foods (truffles, chocolate, plums, caviar); at another, a live pig was positioned in Grimod’s father’s chair, dressed in his clothes. It’s not entirely clear how often these dinner parties were held, or whether it was over one sustained absence. Eventually, though, his parents had enough of their son’s antics. The young man—he was about 25 at the time—was banished to a monastery in the countryside for two years.

In the monastery, he learned to appreciate what was on the table almost as much as he’d enjoyed the presentation. According to Kaufman, “He dined well, if less colorfully, with the monks, and without an audience for his subversive games, Grimod began to study the arts of the table, rather than the table as art.” Later, he would travel around France, gaining an appreciation for the distinctions between Lyonnais, Provençal and Alsatian cuisines.

When Grimod returned to Paris after his father’s death, he found the family's finances in ruins. Eventually, he parlayed his enthusiasm for gastronomy into a living. Paris’s social ranks were shifting, and restaurants were full of upwardly ascendant people who—so far as he could tell—knew nothing about the art of fine dining. Capitalizing on what he perceived as a growing desire for an accessible, reliable guide to the gastronomic arts, he began his first book of restaurant reviews and culinary critique in 1803. Over the next nine years, he wrote seven more, which sold tens of thousands of copies apiece.

His glittering career as a food critic began with these inauspicious dinner parties. The one for his faked death, however, marked the end of a fabulous and extraordinary public life. In 1812, after hosting his own funeral, Grimod and his wife retired to the countryside, and from Parisian society, for good.

A deep dive into the "submarine landscapes" of Louis Boutan.

The greatest advances in underwater photography began with mollusks. A French biologist, Louis Boutan, wanted to study them in their natural environment, so he ended up pioneering techniques and technologies for taking photographs underwater that would be unmatched by anyone else for decades.

Not content with the lab, Boutan was an adventurous scientist. At 21, in 1880, a year after he received his doctorate of science from the University of Paris, he traveled to Australia to study marsupial embryology. A few years after that, he became a lecture master at the University of Lille. He studied marine life in southwestern France, and in the Red Sea.

It was in southwestern France that Boutan first began to imagine the possibilities of underwater photography. The Arago Laboratory is situated above the bay at Banyuls-sur-Mer, a small fishing village close to the Spanish border, which, for centuries, had a strong sideline in smuggling. Arago was opened in 1882 by Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers, a highly respected zoologist from the University of Paris, for the study of marine biology. (It still exists today, as the Observatorie océanologique de Banyuls sur Mer). Boutan’s first dive to examine the mollusks that so interested him took place there in 1886, but it was only after he joined Lacaze-Duthiers in Paris five years later that he began to refine his ideas about underwater photography.

The experience of diving appears to have been revelatory for Boutan. He later recounted, “It was all so beautiful and so strange that I often found myself longing to be able to sketch or paint the scene, so as to be able to bring up to the surface a souvenir of what I had seen below.” Boutan resolved to photograph these “submarine landscapes.”

By the early 1890s, photography had come a long way since Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre introduced his eponymous daguerrotype to the world in 1839. Despite the advances, the process still required glass or metal plates, chemicals, and carefully calculated exposure times. In his book on the subject, La Photographie Sous-marine et Les Progrés de la Photographie, Boutan recalled his own doubts: “Is an underwater environment unsuitable for taking good photographs?”

Boutan wasn’t the first to experiment with underwater photography. In 1856, English solicitor William Thompson rowed out into Weymouth Bay, Dorset, to see what he could achieve with a wet collodion glass plate camera housed inside a specially made wooden box. He lowered the box 18 feet into the water and, using a length of string, pulled the shutter. The result is regarded as the world’s first underwater image, though the resulting photograph depicts only murky grays.

Boutan knew that were two major issues to contend with in underwater photography: pressure and light. So, like any good scientist, he began to experiment.

The first apparatus he designed, with the help of his brother Auguste, an engineer, was a detective camera (a small inconspicuous style of camera for the time) in a waterproof copper box. A lever operated the shutter and plates, and a rubber balloon, linked to the the box via a tube, squeezed air into the box as it descended and the pressure of the water built up. Boutan first tried to use this device in 1893, but he found the results “uniformly beclouded.”

He continued to experiment, using a blue filter to offset the cloudiness, and moving to the neighboring bay of Troc for better visibility. Then, in 1896, he tried something completely new: a camera in which the plates were left unprotected from the water. He used specially varnished plates to counteract the effect of the salt water, but the results were, in Boutan’s words, “mediocre.”

So Boutan revisited his first apparatus, with improvements. He made the lens astigmatic to account for refraction. The box that held the camera was made of iron, not copper. These additions added some complications: It took three men to move the device. The new lens could not be focussed by pointing it down at the sea bed, so the camera had to be lowered just beneath the surface using a pulley. Boutan placed a slate containing writing at a fixed distance from the lens and adjusted the focus accordingly.

Whether Boutan was himself submerged to take the photograph (in a metal-helmed diving suit) or not depended entirely on depth. If he was diving he would get into position and signal, via a rope, for the captain to lower the apparatus, in three parts: the stand, followed by the box itself, then a weight to stabilize the whole thing. Once set up—Boutan described as a “leisurely process"—he signaled, via the rope, for the captain to start timing the exposure. The captain would then tug on the rope when the time was up, Boutan could close the shutter, and both he and his contraption could return to the surface.

On other occasions, Boutan simply lowered the camera from a boat and pulled the shutter with a cord, just as Thompson had done in Weymouth Bay decades before—but with a tweak. “When I began these experiments I found that fairly satisfactory pictures could be taken at a depth of four feet, at which depth it is unnecessary for the operator to submerge himself,” he wrote, in 1889. “By means of a metal tube rising from the sighting mirror, I was able to see from the surface the picture that I wanted to take.” He had crafted himself an underwater viewfinder.

Throughout his experiments, Boutan, like modern underwater photographers, was forced to address the critical problem of light. He tested different apertures and, along with electrical engineer M. Chaufour, created what was essentially an underwater flashbulb from a glass bottle containing oxygen and a magnesium wire that could be ignited with a current. But it was unpredictable. The bottle could explode or the light could be obscured with vapor or shine unevenly.

Boutan searched for another light source, and in the end, a light source found him. An optical manufacturer had produced two telescopes to photograph the stars for the 1900 Paris exposition, and wanted to include in his display images of the ocean. The president of the company wrote to Boutan and offered whatever he would need to create an underwater electric light source—with the proviso that any photographs Boutan took would be used in the exposition display.

With this much-needed round of funding, Boutan built two battery-powered underwater arc lamps that could burn, submerged, for half an hour, though it took 70 hours for a steam engine to charge them. Boutan tested them one moonless night in August 1899, and after another dissatisfying result, he repositioned the lamps on either side of the camera, and lowered the entire apparatus to 165 feet. His choice of subject was a submerged sign that read “Photographie Sous-Marine.” It took an hour to haul the equipment back on board, the total weight of which was between 1,100 and 1,320 pounds. But it had been worth it. Despite the depth, the image was sharp and clear.

Through his relentless experimentation, Boutan created photographs the world had never seen before. He took an underwater self-portrait, his cheeks comically puffed with air. And he took a portrait of a diver, his assistant, Joseph David, on an autumn morning in the bay of Troc, using his third and last underwater device. Boutan pulled the cord for the shutter from a boat 10 feet above.

The Frenchman was responsible for many firsts, including the first book on underwater photography, which was published at the time of the Paris Exposition in 1900. His students reportedly called him the “sea wolf.” But after those last experiments for the exposition, he didn’t take another underwater photograph. In 1929, he retired to Tigzirt-sur-Mer, on the Algerian coast and left his life underwater behind. Or did he? In his retirement he wrote—and painted undersea murals.

The world's most ancient winemaking culture almost disappeared.

When Illia Kiknavelidze made wine in the Republic of Georgia, he had to lower his entire body into human-sized clay pots, called qvevri, that were buried underground. Using the rough bark of a cherry tree, he would scrape the inside of each egg-shaped pot by hand, removing every bit of grape skin and bacteria from the previous batch. Every inch had to be immaculately scrubbed to keep the next round from spoiling. Then, he would fill his qvevri with juice from local grapes, cover it, and let nature do the rest, just like local winemakers had been doing for some 8,000 years.

Qvevri are cultural metaphors, writes Keto Ninidze, Kiknavelidze’s great-granddaughter and a Georgian winemaker, in an email. Much like how someone might give birth to a child, she says, qvevri give birth to wine. And after many years of giving life, the qvevri were used as a burial place. “So in Georgian cultural perception, [qvevri are] regarded as the cycle of life and death," she says.

Georgia has the oldest wine culture in the world, and little changed from the earliest qvevri to Ninidze’s qvevri. Everything—down to the shape of the clay pots, the method of burying the qvevri, and letting crushed grapes ferment naturally inside—is passed down from generation to generation. When the Soviet Union took control of the country in 1921, this ancient winemaking tradition was pushed underground, where it almost disappeared. During these years, Georgian winemakers lost their land or had to give over all of their grapes every harvest. If they wanted to make their own wine, they’d have to forage grapes from wild vines on hillsides, in forests, and sometimes on the sides of village streets.

Before the Soviet Union imposed their rule on Georgia, though, more than 500 different grape varieties flourished in the country’s moderate climate, tempered by its proximity to the Black Sea. Thanks to the environment, wine grapes grow without much intervention. Back then, most grapes were picked by hand and crushed by foot. The juice, skins and stems and all, were then put into qvevri.

Emily Railsback, the filmmaker behind the Georgian wine documentary Our Blood is Wine, saw qvevri sizes ranging wildly: Some pots were too small to scrub inside, while others could fit several people (a capacity of 10,000 liters). The size of qvevri depended primarily on the region; western Georgia traditionally has smaller pots than eastern Georgia. Either way, all of them are buried at least partially underground, where the temperature is consistent year-round. Once a qvevri is put underground and buried, it is never moved.

For around six months, natural yeasts ferment the juice inside the pots. The solid parts of the grapes filter the liquid, which funnels naturally towards the bottom. Once fermentation is over, the wine is suctioned or scooped out and bottled. Or, more likely, it’s stored in smaller pots. Then the cleaning process begins. The tools of the trade have upgraded, Ninidze says, and winemakers now wash qvevri with high pressure water, ash, and citric acid, then disinfect the vessels with sulphur smoke. What hasn’t changed is the immovability. Qvevri is “something you can’t take from one place to another,” Ninidze says, adding that once a winemaker chooses a spot for their qvevri, they’re rooted there until they pass it on or buy new qvevri.

This process didn’t budge for years. Then, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed Georgia in 1921. The slow, natural qvevri cycle—an extension of the Georgian lifestyle—didn’t fit Joseph Stalin’s five-year economic plans. These plans set economic goals and called for industrializing industries, including wine. Rural winemaking would need to be mechanized, and the wild-looking vines would need to be tamed. In the region of Kakheti, officials uprooted more than 500 native varieties. Steel tanks replaced the storied underground clay pots, too.

The government then redistributed and repurposed the annexed land previously used for wine, and built sterile buildings on top of them. “You see these Soviet buildings everywhere that are sturdy cement and nothing beautiful about them, but very practical,” Railsback says. “And then the Georgian [buildings] are more beautiful, and the architecture is really unique with hand-carved woodworking on the front of houses. There’s the Georgian look, and there’s the Soviet [look] that tried to demolish the culture and vibe—you feel that literally everywhere.”

During that time, families were given a single acre of land compared to the full vineyards they once tended to alongside their homes. Vines were ripped out and replaced with tidy rows of hardy, high-yielding varieties such as Saperavi and Rkatskeli. While they were plentiful and certainly sweet, they were bland and lacked the character of traditional Georgian vines. “There was one or two state factories that [processed] the whole yield of the country,” Ninidze says. “The production policy was of course industrial (especially after Stalin’s period), based on the five-year plans and neither the factories nor the farmers cared [about] the quality of the grape.”

Any sort of scale in qvevri wine-making was gone, too. Home winemakers grew vines around their home and foraged from vines that were available. While it wasn’t illegal to make qvevri wine during this time, it had to be done during people’s spare time. There was no money in qvevri wine, so there was no a financial incentive to make new qvevri, either.

By the 1980s, more than 440,000 tons of commercial wine was made in Georgia every year, most of which went to Russia and Georgian cities. Virtually none of it was made in qvevri. But in the countryside, qvevri survived in people’s basements.

Ramaz Nikoladze’s family are some of these industrious winemakers. His earliest memories are of helping his father crush grapes and clean clay, and making wine under the Georgian sun with decades-old qvevri. His great-grandfather, Mina Nikoladze, purchased a winery and made wine before the Soviet era. That land was taken from him, but he continued to make wine at home with his sons. Those sons did the same with their sons, a practice that eventually trickled down to Ramaz. These days, the 44-year-old is an influential Georgian winemaker.

“From childhood, my father had the qvevri, and he always made the wine in qvevri,” Nikoladze says. “We never stopped making wine in qvevri.” Nikoladze estimates that there are qvevri at least 100 years old in perfect condition on his father’s property—meaning they date back even before the Soviet era. The infrastructure to keep qvevri tradition alive was always there, passed down through families just like winemaking knowledge.

It’s hard to know exactly how many people passed on winemaking traditions like Nikoladze’s family did, partially because domestic production wasn’t recorded. Nikoladze says that his family was one of a few making wine in his village of Imereti when he was growing up, and the others also used their father’s or grandfather’s equipment. Nevertheless, when Railsback traveled to Georgia for her film, she found that nearly everyone that she and her crew met knew about someone crafting qvevri in their basement. Everyone knew someone who knew someone, and qvevri wine managed to get around. That’s because, Ninidze says, “society trusted homemade wines much more than the wines made in a factory.”

But without any means of serious production, you could hardly say that qvevri wine was thriving under Soviet rule. The first major change to the wine dynamic happened when the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991. Civil unrest hit Georgia soon after, as the country adjusted to being an independent state. Wine production decreased tenfold, according to Al Jazeera. Still, around 80 percent of Georgian wine went to Russia, simply because there was no demand for the wine made in the Soviet style elsewhere. Then, Russia dealt another blow to Georgia’s wine producers in 2006 when President Vladimir Putin’s government banned Georgian wine imports. The ban was allegedly enacted for safety concerns, but the timing lined up with a Georgian push for the pro-Western policies of then-president Mikheil Saakashvili.

With the Russian market gone, Georgian winemakers needed to appeal to Western consumers, and industrial wine wasn’t going to cut it. But qvevri, with its history and its natural, small batch production, could. Producers were no longer so commercially restricted, and there was opportunity for a new business. That’s how, in 2004, Nikoladze was able to purchase his grandfather’s farm, which had been taken by the Soviets, and start bottling qvevri wine there. While the ban was economically devastating, it provided a catalyst for new winemakers to thrive, too.

Then in 2013, UNESCO designated Georgian qvevri winemaking as an intangible cultural heritage. Russia lifted the Georgian wine embargo that same year. Qvevri wine today is only around one percent of the total Georgian export market, but interest, particularly from the West, is growing by the day.

“For people who grew up drinking conventional wines, it may take some convincing,” says Amanda Bowman from Chambers Street Wine in New York. “Qvevri wines aren’t always polished. And some people are still skeptical about the merit of wines made without modern technology and wines without score points. But qvevri wines are already in demand.”

Most of the qvevri wine coming out of Georgia these days is white. Since it’s aged on the grape skins, it takes on a slightly more orange hue and has more body than a typical white wine, with high acidity and a tanginess. It helps that the natural wine movement is on the rise, and as people start to gravitate toward more tart wine, those made in qvevri have been a welcome addition to wine rotations.

In Georgia, Railsback sees more economic opportunity to make qvevri wine for the local market as well. Qvevri bested the Soviet Union's collectivization plans. With that kind of survival story, the world’s oldest winemaking method merits protection and preservation alike. “This is my wine,” Nikoladze says. “This is my blood, this is my all that I have because [I spend] every day, every time, every minute working in my vineyard.”

Dishes cost a cent, or even came free.

New York's 107 West 44th Street had been home to Bill Duffy's Olde English Tavern. But with the Great Depression emptying wallets and Prohibition yet to be repealed, it was difficult for upscale establishments to stay open. In place of the old restaurant's "merriment," the New York Herald Tribune reported, a new restaurant was opening at the same address. It could accommodate crowds that would have swamped Duffy's: 9,000 customers a day. The cuisine was humble: Pea soup and whole-wheat bread featured prominently on the menu. But it was dirt cheap, an aspect reflected by the establishments's name. The Penny Restaurant was a place for the downtrodden and not-quite penniless to have a bite to eat.

The establishment was not without precedent. So-called "penny restaurants" were in operation in the late 19th century in cities across the United States. Though popular with teenagers hankering to eat on a shoestring, the restaurants were usually run as charitable projects. T.M. Finney, who managed a St. Louis penny restaurant run by the local Provident Association, laid out the enduring modus operandi of charitable restaurants. "The aim of the scheme is to afford poor people to maintain their self-respect and reduce the number of beggars," Finney stated.

At his establishment, every item cost a penny: A meal of half a pound of bread, soup, potatoes, pork and beans, and coffee only cost hungry customers five cents. Breadlines, where miserable hundreds waited hours for free food, were an all-too-common sight during the Depression. Penny restaurants were the dignified alternative.

Penny restaurants always appeared during times of financial trouble, but they reached their greatest prominence during the Great Depression. In 1933, unemployment was at 25 percent nationwide. A whole new cuisine of make-do was developing across the country, from starchy slugburgers to pork masquerading as higher-end chicken. At penny restaurants, food was simple and often meatless.

In New York, the best known penny restaurants were run by Bernarr (yes, Bernarr) MacFadden, an unlikely charitable pioneer. Most people knew MacFadden for his muscles. One of the founding fathers of American fitness culture, MacFadden lifted weights and was vegetarian. He'd run penny restaurants at the turn of the century.

His 1933 restaurant on West 44th Street had four stories, one for fine dining, two where customers could sit at shining white tables, and one floor for eaters to stand and eat simple food. MacFadden ran a massive publishing empire, and many of his magazines raised eyebrows for their radical diet ideas, out-there moralizing, and numerous photos of fit young people. But he also used the proceeds to open several more penny restaurants, where customers paid a pittance for prunes, soup, and healthful whole-wheat bread (MacFadden considered white flour poison). Even presidential daughter Anna Roosevelt dined at his establishment.

But the eccentric MacFadden was outdone by a Californian restaurateur. Most penny restaurants were ephemeral, lasting a few months or a few years. But one Depression-era eating establishment still exists and is still churning out jello: Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles.

Started during the Depression, the Cafeteria was part of an 11-restaurant chain that spanned California. They were launched in 1931 by Clifford Clinton, the scion of a successful restaurant family. But the Clintons were also pious: Clifford and his parents spent years in China feeding the hungry with the Salvation Army. With this eponymous chain of cafeterias, named by combining his first and last names, Clinton hoped to attract the masses with his massive, wildly decorated eateries. But he and his wife, Nelda, also wanted to feed those who couldn't pay. His eateries boasted the slogan "Dine free unless delighted."

In the original restaurant's first three months of business, ten thousand customers took him up on the offer. But the Clifton's cafeterias were some of the largest in the world, and enough customers paid their bills to make them a success. The eat-free policy, Nelda later said, was meant to lend dignity to hungry people in precarious positions.

The same year that Clinton opened his first cafeteria on South Olive Street, the soon-to-be-named Clifton's Pacific Seas, he also opened a penny cafeteria serving soup and bread. It made him unpopular with some locals, who believed Clinton was feeding the lazy and "undeserving." (Clinton rebutted this with a printed pamphlet that asked why the deserving should also go hungry.) His most famous and still-existing cafeteria, in Brookdale, opened in 1935, under the same "Golden Rule" policy as the first. Four years later, it got a makeover with flowing streams, redwood trees, and grottoes.

With its rustic woodland surroundings, it became a popular dining spot for rich and poor alike. Later cafeterias around the state had their own themes: The Olive Street establishment gained a South Seas veneer, with a "Rain Hut" where guests could experience a tropical shower every 20 minutes. Later cafeterias featured decor riffing on Mediterranean design and Charles Dickens. While running his restaurants, Clinton kept busy. When he started a citizen campaign to investigate corruption in the city, his house was bombed and his cafeterias targeted. Suspecting that the graft went all the way to the top, Clinton waged a successful campaign to recall the mayor.

During the depths of the depression, penny restaurants were lauded for giving Americans the strength to keep searching for jobs. But by 1935, the economic clouds were lifting. Daniel W. Delano, the proprietor of one penny cafe in Washington D.C., told a reporter that the number of customers both paying and eating gratis had plummeted, and those that did come seeking meals were mostly children.

When the Depression ended and the post-war American economy boomed, many penny restaurants shut down. But Clifton's fate was entirely different. The restaurants entered their glory days, and lines to enter the Brookdale location stretched down the block. That cafeteria remains open today: The Brookdale location was expensively renovated to much fanfare in 2015. Though customers can no longer dine free, it's a relic of a time when a free restaurant meal was an alternative to a night in the breadline.