They were the ancestors of the modern diner.

In 1893, Boston was bustling, especially after the sun went down. “Night owls of all classes” roamed the streets, wrote the Boston Daily Globe, including “workers, idlers, pleasure seekers, spendthrifts, tramps and bums.” At some point, all of these people would want something to eat. The wealthy could get their quail on toast at any hour, observed the writer. For everyone else, there were the night lunch wagons. While they served inexpensive eats, the wagons themselves could be as fancifully decorated as music boxes on wheels.

Though night lunch wagons would eventually be gilded, they had humble origins. According to Richard J.S. Gutman, a diner expert and author of the classic American Diner: Then and Now, it all started with a man with a basket. Walter Scott was a street vendor who sold sandwiches and coffee in Providence, Rhode Island, first from a basket and later from a pushcart. Business was good, so in 1872, he set up shop in a wagon outside a local newspaper office. Scott was a pressman himself, so he knew that journalists wanted quick meals at strange hours.

It wasn’t just journalists who stayed up late, though. Night shift workers wanted a meal when they punched out, and party-goers wanted grub when they emerged from the bar. But most restaurants closed at 8 p.m. Scott’s innovation—serving sandwiches, pie, and coffee from a horse-drawn wagon as a “night lunch”—soon spread. In 1884, Gutman says, a cousin of an imitator of Scott’s moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, and made the first lunch wagons that customers could sit inside.

Worcester soon became the nation’s lunch-wagon producing capital. Businessmen such as Charles H. Palmer and Thomas H. Buckley received patents and built factories to turn out lunch wagons, and shipped them across the country. While Scott’s original wagon was a renovated freight wagon, lunch-wagon makers began to design aesthetically pleasing vehicles. Etched-glass windows and colorful exteriors beckoned eaters inside, and the interiors were “painted up with fleur de lys and amazing murals” that echoed the work of old Dutch masters. Gutman, who studied architecture, notes that lunch wagon designs mirrored trends in commercial architecture at the time.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the first such-decorated wagon that rolled onto the streets of Worcester caused a sensation. When another debuted in Ogdensburg, New York, people gathered to stare open-mouthed at its “Aladdin-like” interior. The Enquirer described the popular wagon style as having elegant carvings, skilled paintwork, and amenities such as sinks for washing dishes. Proprietors typically stood behind small counters, heating food on grills and dispensing coffee from elaborate urns to patrons inside and out. The average size of the wagons was eight by 14 feet. Buckley’s wagons were particularly sensational. “They were described as perfect little palaces,” says Gutman.

Despite the needling of the Boston Daily Globe, night lunch was for everyone. A typical night would see “people in tuxedos, businessmen, along with the ordinary worker and the showgirl,” says Gutman. In the early days, menus were simple: sandwiches filled with ham, chicken, or cheese, apple and mince pies, and coffee. Adding a grill expanded some lunch wagons’ offerings, but the food remained hearty and simple: a contrast to the positively rococo interior design.

But according to Gutman, their elaborateness may have contributed to their downfall. “Certainly in the beginning, they looked fabulous,” he says. But the wear-and-tear of nightly traffic wore away the paintwork, and some business owners couldn’t afford upkeep. Many successful lunch wagon businesses eventually became stationary establishments, and former wagon manufacturers followed suit, resulting in what would eventually be known as diners. The remaining horse-drawn lunch wagons became increasingly shabby and downmarket, not to mention in the way of automobiles. Much like the food trucks of today, restaurants lobbied against them, and as early as 1909, lunch wagons began to be banned from city streets.

Still, one wagon managed to survive and remain in operation to this day.

Not everyone was ready to let go of the horse-drawn past. Namely, Henry Ford of automobile-producing fame had a soft spot for a particular lunch wagon. According to The Henry Ford curator Donna Braden, the Owl Night Lunch Wagon rolled the streets of Detroit when Ford was a young, hungry engineer. Years later, in 1926, Detroit banned night lunch wagons with a city ordinance. So Ford snatched it up and later installed it at Greenfield Village, an outdoor history complex that is part of The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

For many years, the Owl Night Lunch Wagon was the only spot to buy food in Greenfield Village’s sprawling grounds. Boxy and white, it was a pale shadow of lunch wagons past.

But in the 1980s, Gutman contacted The Henry Ford and told them that they had the last horse-drawn lunch wagon left. He also pitched them on restoring it to glory. “He showed us lots and lots of pictures of typical lunch wagons of that era,” says Braden. The Henry Ford ultimately brought Gutman on board for the renovation of the Owl Night Lunch Wagon.

From its stripped-down state, the Owl Night Lunch Wagon was transformed. Gigantic red-and-blue letters now decorate the sides, and etched-glass windows show owls perching atop of crescent moons, an ode to the night-time eateries of the past. While diners once sat and ate inside the Owl Night Lunch Wagon, these days servers hand period-appropriate frankfurters out the window. “This wagon is the real thing,” Gutman says of the rebuilt and renovated eatery.

Despite the restored pomp of the Owl Night Lunch Wagon, Gutman speaks longingly of even more lavish lunch wagons, whose glitter now exists only in photographs. Gutman hopes to one day unearth a better-preserved example, with its paintings relatively intact. “That is what I’m looking for, to find some buried lunch wagon,” he says. While diners are the direct descendants of lunch wagons, and food trucks still roam cities today, their designs speak more to Guy Fieri than the Gilded Age.

The Gray Man was a warning that it was time to leave.

Hurricane Florence is dangerously raging over the Carolinas, with winds over 80 miles per hour, massive flooding, and millions expected to lose power. Official warnings and evacuation orders came throughout the week.

Over the last week, some South Carolinians were talking about a different, folkloric warning sign, a ghost known as the Gray Man, believed to appear in the small town of Pawleys Island as a harbinger of hurricanes. While there is disagreement surrounding details (common to many ghost stories)—like who the Gray Man is supposed to have been and when he first appeared—the tale’s basic contours are generally accepted. In sum, a man was returning to his beloved on Pawleys Island after a long time away, but died in quicksand before arriving. Since then, he has been said to appear shortly before hurricanes, as a signal that it’s time to leave the island. He is also believed to preserve the homes of those he meets.

In her book South Carolina Ghosts, folklorist Nancy Roberts imagines the Gray Man on a “mission” to notify a passerby of the impending storm: “It was a magnet drawing him toward the houses and out of them he would choose just one. To him, it was as if that house belonged to his sweetheart of long ago although in a dim sort of way, he really knew it did not.”

A look at Twitter shows that coastal South Carolinians are still very much aware of him. Lee Brockington, a historian at the Hobcaw Barony (a research and education site maintained by the Belle W. Baruch Foundation) in Georgetown, South Carolina, and coauthor of the book Pawleys Island, believes the story is well known because the barrier island attracts vacationers from other parts of South Carolina, who then share the story upon returning home. But she’s careful to note that the Gray Man story—with its discrepancies and differing versions—may say more about the nature of storytelling than about natural disasters.

Some tellings, for instance, trace the Gray Man’s first appearance to 1822, but Brockington first heard the story as emerging from a later context, with the figure as a Confederate soldier returning home from the war in 1865—alongside his former slave. Brockington wonders whether that later version became more popular during the 1960s due to the civil rights movement and the Civil War centennial. She finds it a useful way to illustrate, through oral storytelling, that slaves had also been taken to war and had their own loved ones waiting at home. Brockington also suspects that the myth became better known after Hurricane Hazel in 1954, which devastated Pawleys Island. The resort town was appearing in the news, and wanted to lure back curious tourists and their dollars.

“I believe in the power of the story,” she says. It serves as a kind of awareness-raising weather advisory, and also does the important work of linking today’s Pawleys Island vacationers with old racial and environmental histories. Hopefully Pawleys Island's recovery from this storm will be swift.

In the past, the appearance of these rocks has portended bad famines, good wine, or nothing at all.

Bad news, everyone: The stones are talking again. As the Associated Press reported in late August, the "hunger stones" of Děčín, Czechia—riverside rocks carved with the dates of past droughts, as well as portentous inscriptions of doom and gloom—have surfaced in the Elbe River.

Hunger stones have been found as far afield as Pennsylvania, but they're most common in Czechia and Germany. They only come out when the water level is low, and this year's Central European heat wave has been enough to make over a dozen of them visible along the Elbe. Travelers on or around the river are now greeted by messages like "We cried—we cry—and you will cry" and "If you see me, weep."

Use of these stones dates back to at least the 1600s, if not earlier. They are conduits for messages from the past: warnings of the famine, heartache, and decreased mobility that droughts could bring. But every time they crop up, they're viewed through the lens of the present, too. Here are a few ways the international media has reacted to the appearance of hunger stones over the past hundred years.

1. Hunger stones are celebrities.

"Famous 'Hunger Stone' Appears In Elbe River" (The Lincoln Star, 1918)

2. Hunger stones present an opportunity to reflect on the advantages of modern life.

"Because inhabiants of drought-stricken districts can in this age call upon the food supplies of more fortunate areas, the 'hunger stones' may be said to have lost most of their prophetic significance." (syndicated article in The Tyrone Daily Herald, 1932)

3. The appearance of hunger stones is connected to personal responsibility.

"Needless to say, there are innumerable legends woven about the rock, and all of them are sad… mothers frighten their children with 'If you don't eat the crust of your bread you'll someday see the Hunger Stone.'" (The Springfield News-Leader, 1915)

4. It's best to keep your hunger stones under wraps or risk a faux pas.

"'Hunger Stone' of Germany is Showing" (Jackson Daily News, 1918)

5. Hunger stones are metaphorically convenient.

"The legend runs that when the waters of the river fall away so as to bare the stone, calamity comes upon Germany… the truth of the prediction has been verified time and again, and now, once more has come true, for the water has reached the lowest level known for five centuries and so most certainly has Germany herself." (Albury Banner and Wodonga Express, 1919)

6. Hunger stones give us permission to panic.

• "Germany's 'Hunger Stone' Now Warns of Calamity" (The Fort Wayne Sentinel, 1918)
• "Sinister 'Hunger Stones' With Dire Warnings Have Been Surfacing In Europe" (ScienceAlert, 2018)
• "'Hunger Stones' With Ominous Messages Emerge in Drought-Parched Czech River" (Smithsonian Magazine, 2018)
• "Sinister Ancient 'Hunger Stones' Emerge Warning Of DISASTER Exposed By Drought" (Daily Star, 2018)

7. Hunger stones are a good thing, actually!

"The water in the Rhine is so low that the famous 'hunger stones' are visible in various places. This means, as the experience of centuries has proved, that the 1928 wines will be unusually good. One of these stones was last visible in 1911 and 1921, and both these years brought famous vintages." (syndicated article in The Daily Notes, 1928)

To understand what's happening with the beloved critters, first you have to find them.

In the British countryside, hedgehogs aren’t easy to find. That’s partly because the spiky little critters are most active at night, and prefer quiet, undisturbed corners of the landscape, such as hedgerows. They're also tough to track, since hedgehogs are pretty tidy travelers. They don’t leave prominent signs behind, such as notable piles of scat or scratches on trees. And they vanish for a solid chunk of the year, hibernating on and off from frost to thaw.

But they’re surely there, somewhere—though the latest theory is that there are fewer of them than ever. Lately, many of the hedgehogs that are seen have been mangled by car tires or mauled by badgers. The advocacy group Hedgehog Streets, which encourages people to bore through brick walls to make critter-friendly corridors, estimates that the decline has been steep. Over the past few decades, they say, the hedgehog population has decreased by half in the countryside, and by a third in urban areas. (According to a recent report from the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the People’s Trust for Endangered species, the rate of decline does seem to be slowing.)

Precision is as elusive as the hedgehogs themselves, explains Ben Williams, a graduate student in biology at the University of Reading. Some previous studies extrapolated from a fairly small sampling of sites to draw conclusions about the country as a whole, he says, but a few pastures aren’t going to tell you much about forests miles away.

To refine estimates and understand the distribution of Britain’s only prickly mammal, a team led by Williams recently conducted a major hedgehog census. Williams and his collaborators enlisted hundreds of citizen volunteers and university students to help survey 261 randomly selected rural sites across England and Wales. These one-kilometer squares were grouped by land class, such as grassland, arable, woodland, and built environments. The researchers describe the process in a new paper in Scientific Reports.

The team needed to use a combination of coaxing and patience to get the hedgehogs to reveal themselves. They set corrugated-plastic tunnels down parallel to the marginal spaces—fences, woodland edges, hedgerows—that hedgehogs are known to frequent. To entice them inside, the researchers and volunteers set out dishes of store-bought hedgehog food, which is usually high in protein and similar to kibble for cats (though some hedgehogs apparently enjoy meat-flavored baby food, too). The team lined each tunnel with paper and strategically placed a shallow dish containing a paint mixture made from oil and carbon powder at the end opposite the food. “Anything that goes through the tunnel is leaving a fingerprint, so to speak,” Williams says. Unlike water, the oil mixture stayed visible on the paper overnight, so team members could check in during daylight hours.

Judging by the smudges left behind on the paper, snakes, birds, and frogs passed through some of the tunnels. But the researchers had no problem cutting through this visual noise, because hedgehog paw prints are pretty unmistakable, Williams says: “I think they look a bit like small baby handprints.” Each print appears to have a fleshy little palm, surrounded by a "thumb" and four skinny fingers.

Hedgehogs were present in only 21 percent of the sites, particularly in arable, pastoral, and upland environments. The researchers suggest that badgers might be getting more than their fair share of blame for the hedgehogs’ woes: Predator and prey seemed to coexist at some of the sites, and 71 percent of the badger-free sites were also lacking hedgehogs. “The main finding is that we recognize that badgers are having a negative impact, but the habitat or something else in the landscape is likely to be having a more significant impact,” Williams says.

Though there’s not yet enough data, he suspects that extreme weather might play a role. Wet, flood-prone winters could drown hedgehogs hunkered down among tree roots, while parched summers mean fewer earthworms, beetles, and caterpillars for the mammals to eat.

It's also hard to say what impact land-use is having on them. The team sent questionnaires to farmers to learn more about their practices involving pesticides, for instance, or setting out traps for pests such as minks. Response rates weren’t great. “Landowners might not have wanted to tell us exactly what they were doing, thinking we might disapprove,” Williams says. Additional research may help identify whether doing away with monocultures, encouraging hedgerows, and increasing the field margins on farmed land can make Britain more friendly to hedgehogs, and to the many humans who adore them.

The snack wouldn’t exist without the help of one furry critter and its unusually sharp teeth.

Walnuts are grown in orchards and peanuts can be planted, but it takes a forest to raise a Brazil nut.

Though the crescent-shaped, creamy seeds have found their way into the hearts and mouths of humans around the world, they hail from a hardy, round seed pod found only in the treetops of the Amazon. The global Brazil nut industry is founded on a delicate equation of bees, trees, rainfall, and one particularly toothy rodent.

Scattered throughout the lowlands of the Amazon, the Brazil nut tree grows in remote parts of the rainforest in Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru. Towering above other fauna at a formidable height of 150 to 200 feet, they can live for hundreds of years. But to those unfamiliar with the forest, their survival as a species is perplexing. They only bear fruit in nearly pristine, undisturbed forest—and when they do, their seeds are trapped, encased in the ourico, a spherical, coconut-like shell so tough that it requires the force of a machete to break open. Seed dispersal seems impossible.

When an ourico falls, it falls fast. Shooting downwards at nearly 50 miles per hour, the five-pound shell rockets to the ground, hitting with such force that it embeds itself slightly into the soil. Brazil-nut foragers are mindful of this. They wear broad, wooden hats and stay home on windy days, as a blow to the head from an ourico is almost always fatal.

While humans have long harvested Brazil nuts, one mammal has been cracking the seed pod sans machete for much longer. A massive, squirrel-like burrowing rodent with beady eyes and incredibly sharp teeth, the industrious agouti is the Brazil nut tree’s secret weapon when it comes to seed dispersal. It responds to the sound of falling ouricos, and gnaws the shell open with its impressive incisors. But the agouti doesn’t typically eat all of the seeds at once—it takes some away from the tree and buries them for later. Inevitably, some of the buried Brazil nuts will be forgotten, giving way to new trees. In his 1948 book, Nuts, F.N. Howes writes, “It is thus that these small animals are of service in propagating and disseminating one of the largest and most useful trees of the forest.”

But the agouti isn’t the only creature that ensures the survival of the Brazil nut tree. In order to bear fruit, the tree’s flowers require pollination from the orchid bee—one of the few bees with a tongue long enough to stretch into the tree's long, lidded flowers. These bees, however, require a fragrance from a particular Amazonian orchid to attract mates. If the orchid disappears, the bees, as well as the seeds, along with a myriad of wildlife reliant on the Brazil nut, will likely vanish too.

It is due to this intricate ecosystem that Brazil nuts simply cannot be separated from the Amazon. In fact, no one has been able to grow the trees on a commercial scale aside from a few plantations in Brazil, according to the Oxford Companion to Food and Drink. This has at times formed a safeguard against imminent deforestation. As long as demand for Brazil nuts remains high, those in the business are incentivized to keep portions of the forest untouched.

Conservationists have tapped into this, claiming that supporting the industry might offer a way to slow deforestation. The Amazon Conservation Association even began using the slogan, "Save the Amazon, eat a Brazil nut!" But some researchers wondered if there was a catch: Harvesting too many Brazil nuts may make the agouti, in anticipation of fewer seeds, binge early on. According to one 2010 study, reduced seed availability due to over-harvesting or weather patterns leads the agouti to eat more Brazil nuts, and bury fewer.

This was particularly pertinent in 2017. Drought conditions caused the fruits to drop earlier, resulting in a seed shortage felt by agouti and humans alike. Prices surged over 60%, leading major muesli and cereal bar companies to change recipes to omit the seed. But demand remained high, as people sought out the seed for its recently-highlighted superfood qualities.

The fate of the seed not only dictates the contents of future mueslis, but also a myriad of Amazonian lives. According to the World Wide Fund For Nature, the empty seed pods fill with rainwater and provides breeding grounds for damselflies, toads, and even a species of poisonous frog. And though it’s now against the law to cut down a Brazil nut tree, illegal logging and burning still threatens the seeds, and the wildlife who depend upon them.

Though we have the agouti to thank for the creamy snacking seed we enjoy today, humans, too, now have a role to play in cracking the Brazil nut economy in a sustainable way.

It has had a second life as a photogenic, atmospheric ruin.

In the 1960s and 1970s, nuclear power seemed like the next great frontier in electricity generation, and after seven years of planning, construction on a major nuclear reactor in Crimea, intended to supply power across the peninsula, began in 1975. It was a big enough project that a new town, Shcholkine, sprung up to house the workers. The Soviet Union was in the middle of a push to increase nuclear power generation, particularly in more western areas, far from other fuel resources.

By 1986, most of the first reactor had been built, and a second was starting to come together. Then, in April, the Chernobyl nuclear accident happened.

All of a sudden, nuclear energy projects were subject to greater scrutiny, and officials started to worry about the location of the Crimean nuclear power plant, which was on a geologically unstable area. Economic strain in the Soviet Union didn’t help the case. In 1987, the project was shut down, and the station unfinished.

Crimea’s power plant is far from the only nuclear project to stall out. Across the world, it’s possible to find half-finished nuclear projects that lost their funding, were built in locations later deemed too dangerous, or raised so much opposition that their builders backed down.

The plant in Crimea, though, had a second life as a photogenic, atmospheric ruin. Since the plant was never finished, no nuclear materials were ever brought to the site, and if it became dangerous, it was only dangerous in the way any deteriorating hulk might be. The plant became a popular place for people who are drawn to abandoned buildings to poke around, and in the 1990s, a music festival spent four years hosting parties in the empty engine room. The plant’s also been a set for sci-fi movies.

Once the project was over, the town of Shcholkine had little reason to exist. Some people stuck around, but work was hard to come by. Over time, the plant has been gradually stripped of metal and other scrap, and the site’s now owned by a private entity, which could harvest the remaining material. There’s been talk from time to time of reviving the idea of building a nuclear plant here, but there’s little hope of that happening. Instead, the power plant will always be unfinished, until it’s pulled down entirely.

Zlín is revitalizing its history on the heels of Communist rule.

When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, the Czech city of Zlín found itself searching for an identity that many felt had been lost during the Communist regime, and before that, the German occupation. For many in the Czech Republic today, Zlín is synonymous with shoe-making, but for decades, this wasn’t the case.

The modern city developed alongside and because of the Baťa shoe brand. After the Velvet Revolution, citizens of Zlín galvanized around the idea that their city should be built on shoes. In doing so, they kick-started a renewed interest in their town’s unique history, industry, and architecture.

In 1990, The New York Times summed it up: “Czechoslovaks want Thomas Bata, head of the world's largest footwear company, to come home and help revive the shoe industry that his father created in the Moravian village of Zlín earlier in the century.”

Two notable results of Zlín’s efforts are its Museum of Shoemaking, which boasts a comprehensive collection of Baťa artifacts, and the Baťa Institute, which is housed in two converted factory buildings. The museum showcases both local heritage and influential designers from around the world, while the institute offers an educational experience and immersion in the town's history.

The modern era of that history began in 1894, when Tomáš Baťa, along with his brother and sister, Antonín and Anna, launched the T. & A. Baťa Shoe Company, a small startup in a town of what was then 3,000 people. The company strengthened as a result of Tomáš’s study and implementation of mechanization techniques from around the world. And the timing was fortuitous: the T. & A. Baťa Shoe Company (also known as the Baťa Shoe Company or simply, Baťa) supplied the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. Business boomed.

By 1922, Baťa had become the leading manufacturer and marketer of footwear in Czechoslovakia. During the time Tomáš Baťa served as Zlín’s mayor, from 1923 to 1932, the number of Baťa employees in Zlín grew from 1,800 to 17,000. The city’s population swelled right alongside the company, growing from 5,300 residents to 26,400. As the worker base grew, so did the need for housing and other facilities in close proximity to Baťa’s factories.

The architectural style that developed in Zlín was influenced by those factories as well. The same construction materials were used for both public and private spaces, blurring the lines between work and home. At the same time, the garden city movement (an urban planning philosophy in which self-contained communities are surrounded by “greenbelts”) played a role in the town’s layout. The hope was that those green spaces would help residents feel less penned in by the brick structures in which they worked and lived.

This era also saw the addition of a number of ambitious new structures in Zlín, built by Baťa architects., They include Baťa's Hospital, (among the most modern ever constructed when it was completed in 1927), a sprawling movie theater with seats for 2,580, and Baťa's Skyscraper, which served as the company’s global headquarters. For himself, Baťa commissioned the influential Czech architect Jan Kotěra to design a lavish villa. Today, it’s the headquarters of the community-oriented Thomas Bata Foundation.

In addition to bringing the world quality footwear, Baťa brought its employees excellent perks, introducing in 1923 what is believed to be the first employee profit-sharing program. Employees were thus not just workers, but individual entrepreneurs with a significant stake in the business beyond their own employment.

The company continued to grow after Baťa’s death in 1932. By 1939, when the German occupation began, Baťa had stores and factories in 38 countries and over 65,000 employees. The war itself hit Zlín in 1944, and nearly all industry was halted as infrastructure was destroyed. When Zlín was liberated by Soviet and Romanian armies in 1945, its future was uncertain. Baťa’s surviving relatives (and co-founders) had relocated to North America, leaving the town that Baťa built without a Baťa.

The new Communist regime took over management of Zlín and Baťa factories, nationalizing the company and even changing the name of the city to Gottwaldov, after the first communist president of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald.

As the company continued to grow on a global scale, (at this point led by Thomas J. Bata, the elder’s son), headquarters moved to England and later, Toronto, Canada. The city of Zlín was in effect abandoned by the industry that had given birth to it.

It wasn’t until many decades later, after the Velvet Revolution, that Thomas J. Bata returned to Zlín to do his part to help the city reclaim its legacy. Though his return did not ultimately kick-start the shoe industry in the city, it did energize its citizens to revitalize their history.

"The shoe factory, with its brick buildings, still exists,” says Silvie Lečíková, the marketing manager for Zlín's Museum of Southeast Moravia, which is part of the Baťa Institute. “Most of the buildings raised before World War II, including the houses for employees of the Baťa company, still exist, and some still serve their purpose."

In addition to the notable structures that survived the war (including the aforementioned hospital, cinema, and Baťa's Skyscraper), today Zlín’s museums and educational institutions are focused on telling the city’s own fascinating story, the influence of which remains palpable in the spirit of its people. "One simply cannot live in Zlín and not feel its history," Lečíková says.

The tony elixir killed elites looking for youthful complexions.

As long as humans have been alive, they’ve been concerned with the inevitabilities of aging. Today, there’s a universe of razor-specific creams and serums tailor-made for your skin. But back in 16th-century France, people, especially members of the nobility, tried to assuage wrinkles and age spots with a significantly deadlier substance: gold. One such member of the French court, Diane de Poitiers, drank a daily tonic of gold chloride mixed with diethyl ether. It likely killed her.

While de Poitiers never wore the crown, she wielded substantial political and artistic influence within the court of King Henry II, who was her lover. Often described as a whip-smart Renaissance woman, de Poitiers was a patron of the arts and managed the education of the royal family’s children.

She also seemed ageless. Brantôme, the French historian, once wrote about meeting de Poitiers six months before she passed away at the age of 66. Though he admitted to not knowing much about the “potable gold and other drugs” she took daily, which contributed to her “fine appearance,” he quickly added: “I believe that if this lady had lived another hundred years she would not have aged … in her face, so well-composed it was.”

The anti-aging trend was of its time, when apothecaries hawked wares ranging from scorpion oil to spiderweb elixirs. The gold-drinking practice goes back even further, though. Pliny the Elder suggested it as a salve for warts and ulcers. Wei Boyang, a Chinese alchemist from the second and third century CE, wrote of gold as being “immortal,” and how those who drank it “enjoy longevity.” The ancient Egyptians swore by “gold-water” as an anti-aging remedy, too. The idea stemmed from the fact that gold did not corrode, which suggested longevity.

According to Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen’s book Quackery, gold-drinking evolved from curiosity to downright fervor during the medieval era, when an alchemist figured out how to dissolve solid gold into a liquid. Aurum potabile (sometimes known as aurum potable), as drinkable gold was known around the 16th century, was advertised as a cure-all for everything from epilepsy to mania.

Gold-imbued recipes made their way into chemistry manuals by the likes of French medical professionals Jean Beguin and Christophe Glaser, and even the short-lived Portuguese Pope John XXI. In 1578, he wrote a laborious recipe for a gold-laced, youth-preserving water. It involved taking gold, silver, iron, copper, iron, steel, and lead filings, then placing that mixture “in the urine of a virgin child on the first day,” then white wine, fennel juice, egg whites, in a nursing woman’s milk, in red wine, then again in egg whites, in that order, for the following six days.

Drinking gold (of the molten variety) had been used to deliberately kill people during the Spanish Inquisition. But it wasn’t until many centuries later that people realized that their golden anti-aging routine could be fatal, as seems to have been the case for de Poitiers. She died in Anet, France, in 1566, but her remains turned up during an excavation of a mass grave in the area. It's thought that her body was exhumed, and her grave destroyed, during the French Revolution. In analyzing de Poitiers’ hair, researchers writing in the The BMJ concluded that she likely died of chronic intoxication due to her long habit of drinking gold.

That’s not to say drinking gold has died out entirely: One liqueur on the market, Goldschläger, comes complete with thin gold flakes inside of it. Luckily, we can all agree that drinking this gold won’t give you eternal youth.

The true purpose of these objects remains something of a mystery.

The New York Academy of Medicine maintains a collection of extremely rare ivory anatomical manikins from the 17th century. The term “manikin,” we should note, denotes a human figure designed for medical simulation, whereas a “mannequin” is normally relegated to matters of fashion.

According to Anne Garner, curator of rare books and manuscripts at the academy, there are about 100 of these ivory manikins left in the world. Male physicians of the era likely collected them as status symbols, Garner says. Once you lift up the torso of the manikin, you can see the inner organs, as well as a fetus. To see these intricate models for yourself, make an appointment through the New York Academy of Medicine’s website.

In the above video, Atlas Obscura gets a close-up look at these rare models.

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Think of it as the first Tudor mansion.

Henry VII gave birth to England’s Tudor dynasty—and now archaeologists think they might have found where his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, gave birth to him. On the grounds of Pembroke Castle in Wales, excavators have begun uncovering what look like the remains of a large medieval house, and they have reason to believe that England’s lone Welsh king was born in it, The Guardian reports.

While historians have known that Henry VII was born in 1457 on the castle’s grounds, they don’t know precisely where. The working theory has held that the auspicious birth took place in a guard tower along the outer walls. This new find, James Meek of the Dyfed Archaeological Trust, who is heading the dig, told The Guardian, provides a more plausible site. The remains bear telltale signs of being a rather “showy” house, more befitting a noble birth.

Architectural features of the newly discovered site include a three-foot-thick wall, a trove of slates, tiles still coated in green glaze, and even a curving portion of a spiral staircase. In all, the site is about the size of two tennis courts. A 2016 geophysical survey of Pembroke Castle provided the first hints that there might be a building there, and further evidence of the building’s footprint came with what are called parch marks, or areas of thinner plant growth over buried masonry. Such marks have been appearing throughout the United Kingdom this summer due to dry conditions.

The finding also challenges conventional wisdom regarding how castle grounds functioned during the late medieval period. Buildings within a castle’s outer walls, Meek said, are generally believed to have been smaller and made of wood, suggesting a lower status when compared with the pomp and intrigue of the inner sanctum. A large stone building there, as the new find suggests, might have seemed out of place. Mark Merrony, an archaeologist and fellow at the University of Oxford, who has visited the excavation site, suspects that stones from the building were repurposed for later construction, causing it to disappear.

Henry VII reigned for 23 years, beginning 118 years of Tudor rule, with his defeat of Richard III during the Wars of the Roses. Thanks to Shakespeare, Richard is probably better known (if also more maligned, perhaps unfairly). And he was also the subject of an unexpected bit of royal archaeology—his remains were discovered in 2012 under a Leicester parking lot.

The dwarf planet Ceres is studded with cryovolcanoes.

Ahuna Mons is a large, large volcano. Its base is 12 miles across; its peak rises three miles from the surrounding landscape. But that doesn't mean that it is capable of similarly big eruptions. When it last blew, sometime in the last 240 million years, it didn’t explode so much as ooze.

Ahuna Mons is what is known as a cryovolcano, and sits on Ceres, the dwarf planet that’s the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Its eruptions never produced plumes of ash or streams of lava, but rather an icy excretion made of gases such as ammonia, water, and methane. When exposed to the cold expanse of space, the mixture flash freezes to form a kind of carapace, while the interior remains stay liquid and gas escapes or leaks through fractures.

Ahuna Mons was first identified in 2015 by NASA’s Dawn mission. At the time, it was the only known volcano—ice or otherwise—on Ceres. In a new paper published in Nature Astronomy, researchers argue that it’s not alone.

A team led by Michael Sori, of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, studied topographic maps captured by Dawn, and found 32 large domes measuring more than 6.2 miles in diameter, which were deemed large enough to be potential volcanoes. Ten of them were left out of the analysis because impact craters made them hard to measure reliably. (Such is life in an asteroid belt!) The remaining 22 mounds, though, are likely to be cryovolcanoes, many of them long-dormant and somewhat collapsed into the flatter landscape around them.

The researchers suggest that these volcanoes have been erupting for more than a billion years, and some of them may be repeat erupters. The asymmetry and fractures on Ahuna Mons, for instance, are “consistent with multiple episodes, rather than the whole mountain being built in one go,” Sori says.

On Earth, volcanic activity often generates new land, but not on Ceres. The researchers estimate that the icy eruptions have spewed 100,000 times less volume across Ceres than the hotter eruptions on Earth.

Researchers aren’t sure what, exactly, causes this phenomenon, or whether similar eruptions are happening on other asteroids or planetary bodies, such as moons. On Ceres, “we’ve never seen these eruptions happen in real time,” Sori says. "There's no substitute for seeing things happen in real time, but we can speculate intelligently based on our knowledge of regular lava flows." There's much more to learn about what cryovolcanoes are and how they behave. But we're sure they're like nothing on Earth.

A select group of individuals took a voyage to the often-seen but seldom-visited ruins of Bannerman Castle.

Riders of the Metro-North in the Hudson Valley are likely familiar with the surreal sight of Bannerman Castle. Chase Sapphire® provided cardmembers and Atlas Obscura readers with the rare opportunity to visit Pollepel Island, where they scouted Bannerman Castle's grounds and learned about the mysterious place's past. The ruins perched on the picturesque river are a romantic and remote hidden gem, enticing to even the most well-traveled individuals.

Frances Bannerman built Bannerman Castle almost entirely by himself, without the help of engineers or architects. A self-made ammunitions dealer, he began selling scrap metal as a child and by the age of 14, had already founded his own military surplus company.

Once his accumulates of wares grew too large (he eventually graduated to selling full-size Navy ships), Bannerman was forced to move beyond city limits. He chose Bannerman Castle's current site on Pollepel Island: a small slice of land his son had discovered while canoeing.

Though it may appear ancient, the Castle has only been abandoned since 1957. Guests on the tour learned about the place's recent history, along with many other fascinating facts that enriched the overall experience.

It's packed full of big adventures for small explorers.

I remember the feeling clearly. I was 10 years old, sitting in the Minneapolis public library, and paging through a book about the wonders of the world. I remember one wonder in particular, the Hanging Temple near Datong, China, perched ever so delicately on the side of a cliff. I couldn’t get enough.

This feeling obviously stayed with me, and it’s at the heart of Atlas Obscura. So it is a great joy, alongside my incredible co-author Rosemary Mosco and our talented illustrator Joy Ang, to announce the official release of the Atlas Obscura Explorer's Guide for the World's Most Adventurous Kid. It's a book for any young person who loves adventure, exploring, or just daydreaming about the world and wondering, what's out there?

Like Atlas Obscura's first book, this one is big and beautiful—the main difference being that it's written specifically for 8-12 year-olds. That said, anyone who loves beautiful illustrations and the world's hidden wonders will like it. (Don't be ashamed to buy it for yourself, I wrote it just so I could have it!)

Inspired by our growing Atlas of almost 15,000 unique places around the world, the kids' book includes places such as Blood Falls in Antarctica, the Crystal Caves in Naica, Mexico, and the Root Bridges of Cherrapunji, India.

Shortly I'll be heading out on a book tour, with visits planned at dozens of schools across the country. I will also be speaking at bookstores and libraries in Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Washington, D.C., Denver, and Salt Lake City, among others. If I'll be in your city, I wholeheartedly invite you to come out and see me—kids and adults alike.

We're also giving away copies of the book through our Instagram and Youtube channels, so be on the lookout for a chance to win! I couldn't be prouder or more excited to share this book with all the young adventurers out there who are ready to start exploring our incredible world. You can buy the book here through Indiebound, Amazon, or your preferred bookseller.

Ultimately, things didn't go as he had planned.

The tower went 187 feet up into the sky. The base was framed with wood, but the giant ball on top, 68 feet in diameter, was made of steel. In the ground below, there were said to be tunnels and an “iron root system” that went deep into earth. Nikola Tesla, the inventor and engineer who helped electrify America, believed the tower was the start of a system that could deliver electricity, without wires, to the whole world.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Tesla had become famous for his work on AC power. But he had other big ideas. At his laboratory in Colorado, he had conducted experiments with wireless transmission, trying to send electricity through the ground. His notes on this work are hard to draw conclusions from. But it seems that in at least one instance he had some success. At the very least, he came back east convinced that he could make this idea a reality, on a much larger scale.

After shopping his idea around to the some of the richest men in the world, Tesla secured backing—a solid $150,000—from J.P. Morgan. The investor was most interested in the idea of wireless communication: Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, had recently been demonstrating his system for wireless telegraphy, sending messages from ships back to land. But Tesla had bigger ideas.

Construction began in 1901 in Long Island on what would become known as Wardenclyffe Tower. Tesla imagined that it would be the beginning of a network of towers, 30 at least, around the world. He believed that these towers would allow him to send electricity through the atmosphere, which anyone with the correct equipment could tap into. Electric power would be ubiquitous. He would make “the whole of this globe...quiver."

This idea was never going to work: The scientific theories that underlay Tesla’s dream would later be pulled apart. Electricity can be transmitted through the air, but the amount of power needed to send any substantial amount makes this an extremely impractical system. But even to try it, Tesla needed more money, which Morgan was unwilling to provide. There were reports of sparks flying from the tower once or twice, but for the most part it remained a hulking metal orb of mysterious purpose.

After financing dried up, Tesla mortgaged the property and eventually, as his financial troubles grew deeper, he lost it altogether. In 1917, the new owner, trying to recoup some value, had the tower dynamited down and converted into scrap metal. After the first blast, the tower listed to the side and remained tilting towards the ground, a failed experiment, until the workers pulled it down.

A journey from Jamaica to California, via England.

“Skankin' to the beat is an alright feelin' / Skankin' to the beat got my toe jams peelin' / Skankin' to the beat got the rude girls squeelin' / I'm just skankin' to the beat!” So goes the refrain of “Skankin’ to the Beat,” the 1989 hit song by Fishbone, a California ska band with a sizeable cult following. This song (and the “skankin’” dance style) would’ve been familiar to members of ska’s subculture in Los Angeles and Orange County in the 1990s, but the story of ska goes back much further.

“There’s a street in Jamaica, you all should know,” says Prince Buster in a YouTube video, introducing his 1967 ode to the birthplace of ska music, “Shaking Up Orange Street.” “The Prince,” born Cecil Bustamente Campbell on the song’s namesake street in Kingston, Jamaica, is widely regarded as the father of ska music. Orange Street was known as Jamaica’s premier musical avenue; it was once a hub for recording studios and various record stores, Prince Buster’s Record Shack among them. The concentration of music and members of the Kingston community on Orange Street created a culture of local fun, and it is ultimately that feeling of shared celebration and struggle that made ska music accessible worldwide.

Dr. Nina Cole, a scholar of Jamaican popular music, emphasizes the importance local DJs and their parties had in the genre’s development. “The rise of sound systems led to the creation of ska,” she says. Sound systems, which refer to both the musical equipment and the street parties they encouraged, were pillars of Jamaican musical culture, and are associated most closely with the rise of ska on Orange Street in particular. A group of mobile disc jockeys who traveled with towering subwoofers, turntables, and amplifiers, sound system operators were highly visible members of the Kingston neighborhood. They provided the streets with music, at first, as a way to make money by charging modest admission and selling food and alcohol.

Fostering an active dance scene was a priority, so the operators of these portable music stations struck up relationships with U.S. music executives in order to get the best American rhythm and blues records, particularly before another sound system operator could. This created friendly competition between Kingston’s several sound systems, who threw distinct yet somewhat similarly run street parties; who all shared the common goal of satisfying the masses through sound. Selectors, the men in charge of curating and selecting the music played, were very much aware of the impact their taste had on the Jamaican people.

Toward the end of the 1950s, “there was quite a bit of rural to urban migration … and as more people transitioned to the city there were some shifts [away from mento and calypso music, the more folk styles in Jamaica],” says Cole. Local musicians married the African rhythms of Caribbean mento, a genre all Jamaicans would have been familiar with, with the popular beats of R&B and jazz music: sounds more closely linked to the black American experience. Though sound systems were getting these American records shipped to the island, they were generally limited and severely delayed (sometimes arriving up to three years after they had peaked in the States). The working-class people of Kingston could not afford radios, which effectively cut off their access to non-local music, and the prices American record manufacturers demanded from DJs to import R&B records to Kingston grew increasingly steep. Sound system operators like Clement “Coxsone” Dodd and Duke Reid recognized this gulf, and filled it by using nearby music studios to record a new sound that blended elements from both local and imported music to create ska—an undeniably new sound with familiar enough influences to make it an instant success.

Ska music, a genre commonly known as “the music of the people,” was formally birthed in 1959, and is a hybrid sound that owes much of its success to the popularity of its influences. On the weekends, native Kingstonians would gather on “lawns” (open neighborhood spaces) to dance at the parties sound systems created. As a result, ska music was quickly associated with the joie de vivre of the working-class downtown locals who championed it.

Heather Augustyn, a journalist and author of two books on ska, notes that shop owners on Orange Street capitalized on the rise in foot traffic these public parties created, by using sound systems to entice party-goers into their shops, thus bolstering the economy in working-class Kingston. Speakers positioned high in trees peppered the scene on Orange Street, with the idea being “that if you heard the music a mile away, you would come over, pay to get in, and get curry goat and a Red Stripe.” Locals were able to participate in dance culture and be exposed to new musical styles, with the familiar beat of their neighborhood guiding them all the while. Once walked on as a Mom ‘n’ Pop shop thoroughfare, Orange Street was becoming ska’s de facto boulevard.

Though the ska genre started as a localized sound, its lyrical content is what gave it the wingspan to reach places beyond Jamaica. The “lyrics gave social commentary,” says Cole. “Things like unemployment, lack of social services. [Themes] which I think in [ska’s] later travels people grasped onto like, ‘Wait, this is happening where I live, too.’” Granted, most people tend to associate ska with upbeat, animated melodies, but the heaviness of reality found in many of the lyrics offered a somber contrast to the sweetness of the sound. Perhaps unsurprisingly, during ska’s ascent, it was met with “outright rejection” from the middle and upper classes, says Cole, “because there was this association with Black Jamaicans and African aesthetics and ideals.” While the island’s motto is famously “Out of Many One People,” there was “this homogenized civility, European ideals, and very stratified race and class prejudice that persisted,” which explains ska’s lack of radio airplay early on.

Ska was difficult to access outside of the yard-based sound system culture—“you really had to go to these places to hear it,” says Cole. Because of the close proximity between these Kingston-based parties, sound systems and their operators were fiercely competitive, and the battles between who could attract the most people with the newest music came to be known as “sound clashes.” These rivalries raised the stakes surrounding ska, which resulted in towering 12-foot-tall speaker stacks, and informal rankings of who played the most danceable music within earshot. Prince Buster’s fame was born from his reputation as a frequent sound clash winner, a local title that grew to have international clout.

In 1948, the United Kingdom opened its doors to citizens of British territories, because it needed a larger labor force to help rebuild its economy after World War II. As a result, West Indian immigrants traveled in great numbers to London, specifically neighborhoods like Brixton and Peckham. By the time ska was born on Orange Street these families were firmly settled in their new place across the pond, so, when the time came, ska music found a home in London, too. Around the early 1960s, the first British-Jamaican sound system was up and running, and British youths started to become exposed to ska music through their proximity to these Jamaican enclaves, which were working-class areas similar to Kingston back home. “They gathered together at house parties because that was their culture, and they missed home,” Augustyn says of the immigrant community.

It wasn’t long before their English neighbors developed a taste for the sound and ethos of ska music, played from the classic Jamaican vinyls booming through the sound systems, and with the growing presence of bands like The Specials, The Selecter, and Bad Manners, ska’s second wave, Two-Tone, was born. “[The British] loved [ska], and then they blended it with what they knew, which was early punk rock,” says Augustyn. This European twist on ska didn’t forget its roots. In fact, Two-Tone bands were known for being diverse, as most usually had one or more Jamaican members. A popular band of this era, Madness, got its name from a Prince Buster song of the same title.

Though ska had been played locally in Jamaica and England for years, it wasn’t until 1962 that it started to pick up global steam. On August 6 of that year, Jamaica won its independence. Augustyn, the ska scholar (skalor?), notes: “They were looking for a way to market Jamaica, literally. So the Jamaican tourist board and the Ministry of Culture and Welfare got together and decided to help [popularize] ska.” Convincing Jamaicans to fall in love with ska was not the battle; national pride as a newly “free” island was now understandably at the forefront, so homegrown Jamaican things like ska were embraced wholeheartedly. Ska music was simply part of the Jamaican identity, not unlike the green, yellow, and black of the flag.

In 1964, the Jamaican government focused its attention on promoting ska to U.S. audiences and flew several ska musicians to perform at the World’s Fair held that year in New York City. Ska performances and dance classes were held to pimp the sound to new ears, but the genre didn’t quite stick on the east coast—perhaps, in part, due to a lack of authenticity. In Augustyn’s book, Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation, she explains how the version of ska brought to American audiences wasn’t totally true to the ska of Jamaica: “Not only were the downtown musicians blatantly overlooked in representing Jamaica at the fair, but the World’s Fair events at which ska was unveiled were far from the sound system yards. Instead, these events were sophisticated, stylish, and socially exclusive.” The strategy of “targeting the proper upper-class crowds, the ones who had money and could afford to travel to Jamaica to hear the island’s music,” was in opposition to the communities that ska was designed to uplift.

In the 1970s, reggae-devoted radio shows promoting Jamaican artists started to make their way to Southern California airwaves, and record stores owned by British and Jamaican expatriates stocked Caribbean music loyally. Early Two-Tone bands in the coastal state started getting booked at clubs, and ska soon became a noticeable mix of reggae and angsty punk, with a dash of California’s breezy frivolity. In keeping with the history of sound systems, whose operators verbally advertised the music as it played, the hosts of these clubs not only introduced the ska songs, but narrated the night as a way to keep the crowd involved. As time went on, radio DJs played a similar role, when ska took flight from its beginnings as a terrestrial sound and expanded to the airwaves.

Jimmy Alvarez is a radio DJ located in Southern California, and for nearly 25 years has brought music to stations like KROQ and TNN Radio. As someone who was responsible for exposing Orange County audiences to ska music during its third wave in the late 1980s and 1990s, Alvarez believes its later-stage popularity in America had less to do with the music itself and more to do with the ideology behind it.

“The thing about ska is that it has one common theme: unity and family,” he says. “Yes, the music was good, but that was only part of the glue. The unity among races, and teens that had issues with the status quo, is what bound them.” I ask Alvarez about the meteoric rise of ska-influenced Orange County bands like Sublime and No Doubt during this era. “The OC,” as it is affectionately known, is decidedly not a West Indian immigrant community, and I’m curious about how a place with such a vastly different demographic than Jamaica birthed bands that did justice to the ska genre. “The OC community is true to its origins,” says Alvarez. “If you're good, the locals will let you know. If you're not, or if you’re disingenuous in any way, the locals will let you know. And you have to pay homage to the genre's roots to get to the next level. Most of the successful bands that came out of OC didn't forget their history, and often credited their predecessors with acknowledgment or covers.” Again, ska found its way to a community heavy on the promotion and advancement of local acts.

Brian Mashburn, a musician and former member of the bands Save Ferris and Starpool, remembers the energy ska’s sound brought to Orange County fondly, and how what was once a subculture snowballed into a real scene. “Ska was cool because it was for people who kinda had all the energy to go to a punk rock show but didn't necessarily want to beat the crap out of each other,” he says. ”It really appealed to people who couldn't go to bars yet, so I think it was a youth thing as well.” Mashburn emphasizes the organic growth of ska in California, noting that he and his bandmates were just “trying to be a part of our local scene.” At the time, there weren’t many venues to play music in Orange County, so local promoters found random spots to throw shows, operating similarly to Orange Street’s sound system operators. As the bridge between the people and the music, promoters (and operators) were able to pin the ska sound to familiar, convenient public spaces. Mashburn reflects on one of Save Ferris’ early shows in the ‘90s, and a moment that cemented his love for the genre. “We started playing and there were like 50 people in this tiny little dance studio, and everybody’s dancing, everybody's having a great time. I looked up and thought, ‘This is the best thing ever.’”

While ska music, the forefather to reggae and rocksteady, has always been intertwined with Jamaican identity, it has also been able to find local footing in places that became aware of it decades after it first exploded from sound systems on Orange Street. The current ska revival, which some affectionately refer to as its fourth wave, is picking up speed, says Cole, because ska’s pioneers “have passed away in recent years, so there's this realization that this is the last chance that [bands] get to hear or learn from the people who were creating this music.”

Mashburn’s continued interest in the sound, even though he’s now transitioned into different styles of music, is a testament to how ska was able to nestle itself in the hearts of its audiences no matter where it was: “I've played in a lot of different groups now over the years and done a lot of different styles, but one of the reasons why I still keep a foot in the ska world is because those shows are a lot of fun,” he says “You see people dancing and really going at it, and that feeds back to the band and then we start going crazy on stage, and that feeds back to the audience, which creates this really cool, positive feedback loop. I honestly haven't really felt that with any other scene or any other type of style I've played.”

The spans just stop, mid-air.

Back in the 1940s, Cape Town, South Africa, built the city’s waterfront out into the bay. From the beginning, this plan was meant to improve transportation in the city: South African Railways, which had a major station there, pushed for the expansion and an initial plan for the new land included more railway offices, as well as a 500-bedroom hotel for passengers. But as the vision for the new “Foreshore” area developed, city planners started imagining that the newly created land would include sweeping highways that would lift off over traffic in the central business district and make Cape Town a “modern city,” by mid-century standards.

By the 1960s, the city had approved a design for a new highway, and construction started on the Foreshore Freeway. By 1977, parts of the elevated highway had gone up and been paved. Then, without explanation, construction stopped. The freeway bridges were incomplete, and the spans simply... ended. Different sections in the eastern, western, and central parts of the proposed system remain disconnected from each other. And that’s been the case ever since.

In the four decades that Cape Town’s “unfinished highway” has stood downtown, locals have imagined all sorts of reasons why the bridges were never finished—hold-out landowners, engineering mishaps. But the official explanation is a simple one: Funding ran out, and it never seemed like a priority to finish the bridges. Over the years, the stubby bridges became a shelter for homeless people, until in 2013 the city cleared out the area under the bridges, built bus parking, and installed sharp stones to keep people from sleeping there.

The unfinished bridges have occasionally been put to use. They’ve been utilized as a set for TV and movie shoots, including for Fear Factor and Black Mirror, and they’ve been used for parking. During the 2010 World Cup, one unfinished bridge span became a stage for a giant vuvuzela. But for the most part they’ve just been sitting there, becoming unintentional landmarks.

In the past couple of years, the city of Cape Town has toyed with the idea of completing the bridges and sent out a request for proposals to redevelop the area, including the roadways. At the beginning of 2018, the project was moving forward, with a winning bid selection. But by the summer, those plans had fallen apart, due to concerns about the contracting process. For now, Cape Town’s unfinished bridges will remain incomplete.

Even Magic Kingdoms need urban planners.

The Disney theme parks are chock full of amusements, rides, and restaurants, but they’re also small cities that must contend with deliveries, trash, and a steady stream of both employees and visitors. No kingdom, however magic, is exempt from all sorts of pesky needs and demands. People need to be able to move from one place to another, they have to refuel, and, every so often, they'll need to relieve themselves. Ideally, they'll accomplish all of this efficiently, and without getting frustrated or dizzyingly lost.

To cater to these less-than-wondrous requirements, the parks are, in reality, self-contained marvels of metropolis-building. Disneyland Park in California has a reliable transit system—the first monorail in the Western Hemisphere, which debuted just as many cities were expressing their love of cars and traffic by laying down ribbons of highway. Walt Disney World Resort, in Florida, innovated with trash: Cans are spaced precisely 30 feet apart, and all of them empty via underground tubes so that family vacations aren't interrupted by vehicles hauling sun-baked garbage juice.

None of this happened by accident. Long before the parks were magic, they were conceived as two-dimensional representations, or as miniatures. Like many city planners, Disney’s chief urban brainstormers and engineers first imagined the parks' shapes, structures, and logistics, on a small scale.

In the new book Walt Disney’s Disneyland, architecture historian Chris Nichols retraces the long road from idea to the media empire's first park. To hear one animator tell it, Disney first hatched his idea for a play land while plugging away on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. At the film’s premiere, Disney himself made it a kind of reality superimposed atop Los Angeles. Guests strolled along the median of Crescent Heights Boulevard, which had been reimagined as “Dwarfland” and crowned with a charmingly ramshackle cottage and a cast of costumed characters.

Disney spent years collecting ideas and measuring other places against the one he was building in his mind. He scrutinized Beverly Park in Los Angeles, as well as lavishly ornate miniature rooms and reconstituted historic villages. He combed Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, near Detroit, and Madurodam, a tourist attraction of miniatures in the Netherlands. He visited Colonial Williamsburg, where costumed reenactors roamed. Then he dabbled. Disney assembled a team of engineers and designers to plan and build a miniature world he dubbed Disneylandia. He imagined diorama scenes built inside train cars, chugging along and showcasing slices of Americana. He brought a prototype—an eight-foot-long hearth scene he called "Granny Kincaid's Cabin"—to the Festival of California Living in 1952. Visitors crowded around to peek inside, but Disney's enthusiasm for a full 21-car caravan ultimately evaporated. He thought the project lacked pizazz, so he cast it aside.

Still, Nichols writes, Disney was consumed by the prospect of his own park. Radio and television host Art Linkletter, who traveled with Disney to Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens amusement park in 1951, recalled that Disney viewed the trip as reconnaissance. “He was making notes all the time about the lights, the chairs, the seats, and the food. I asked him what he was doing, and he replied, ‘I’m just making notes about something that I’ve always dreamed of, a great, great playground,’” Linkletter remembered. Nichols reports that Disney had blueprints drawn up, and began appealing to local officials for the green light to break ground in California.

In 1952, he made his case to the Burbank City Council, for a 16-acre site between Griffith Park and his studio in Burbank. They didn’t go for it. “We don’t want the carny atmosphere in Burbank,” Nichols recounts one lawmaker saying. “We don’t want people falling in the river, or merry-go-rounds squawking all day long.” The setback got Disney thinking even bigger.

In 1953, he closed a deal to buy a swath of land in Anaheim, speckled with orange groves and walnut trees, for $4,500 per acre. Linkletter thought it was too remote to draw a crowd, but Disney forged ahead.

It was like building a new city from the ground up. The site had to be graded. Pipes had to be installed. Clay had to be packed tight over the porous ground, and railroad track had to be laid around the perimeter. When it came to the layout of the park itself, Disney envisioned the hub-and-spoke street grid that underpinned major cities such as Detroit and Washington, D.C. “I want a hub at the end of the Main Street,” he said. “The other lands will radiate, like the spokes of a wheel … Disneyland is going to be a place where you can’t get lost or tired unless you want to.”

Designers and landscape architects their hands full with models and maps. They diagrammed rides’ interiors and made small models, while Disney recruited artists who had worked on films to paint backdrops. The company retained Renié Conley, who had received an Academy Award for her costume design for Cleopatra, to outfit 10,000 employees. Disney is rumored to have spent more than $500,000—an eye-popping figure at the time—on trees and shrubbery alone.

Then, finally, in July 1955, the visitors came. As many as 15,000 people were invited to opening day, Nichols reports, but roughly twice as many showed up—and a record-breaking 90 million people tuned into a television special about the opening festivities.

If visitors picked up maps to help them navigate the new park, they could see at a glance the payoff of years of planning: the shops and restaurants lining Main Street, the plazas, the wide avenues. Once a few opening day kinks were worked out, the park became the destination it is today. The magic city had finally sprung off the drawing board and into real life.

The salt-loving, tourist-stalking goats of Olympic National Park are moving out.

On a recent Tuesday in Olympic National Park, the clear blue skies of Washington State were interrupted by a series of white, fluffy objects. Some of them were clouds, yes. But three of them were mountain goats, flying through the air. The huge, shaggy creatures were suspended in orange slings, wearing blindfolds that fit snugly beneath their horns. They were dangling vertically from a helicopter, like a string of peppers hung out to cure.

Olympic National Park—a 1442-square-mile expanse of mountains, meadows, and old-growth forest—is the rightful home of dozens of creatures. Spotted owls nest in its trees. Black bears trundle through its fields. Mazama pocket gophers burrow into its soils, and Roosevelt elk munch on its shrubs.

But it is not the rightful home of the mountain goat. At least, so say park officials, who have been trying to get rid of the goats—an introduced species—for decades. Last week, in collaboration with the USDA Forest Service and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, they began their latest, and most ambitious, removal effort.

If all goes well, over the next couple of years, hundreds of mountain goats will travel by helicopter and truck from Olympic National Park to the North Cascade Mountains, about 150 miles east. (There's a naturally occurring goat population in the Cascades, and the hope is that these newcomers will bolster it.) Eventually, goats that are too hard to capture will be killed. "The goal is to get to a zero population level," says park spokesperson Penny Wagner.

Until about 1925, there were zero mountain goats on the Olympic Peninsula. The first four came to the area in 1925, brought over from British Columbia as game for local hunters. Over the next few years, these were joined by seven or eight more, this time shipped in from Alaska. While hunters did kill a fair number, the frisky goats outpaced them. By the early 1980s, this herd of a dozen had grown to 1,175.

Goats will be goats, wherever they are, and these ones have caused some trouble. They've trampled plants, including imperiled species like the cotton's milkvetch, a flowering legume found only in Washington State. While wallowing—a common mammalian pastime that involves rolling around in the dirt—they've disturbed archaeological sites. (Once, according to a National Park Services report, these goaty gyrations "resulted in previously unknown archaeological resources being unearthed.")

Not least, they tend to stalk tourists. Sodium and similar minerals make up a vital part of the ungulate diet, but Olympic National Park lacks natural salt licks. Though goats have been known to travel many miles for a fix, it's much easier to just follow humans, who, thanks to our constant production of sweat and urine, are practically saltshakers.

After years of coexisting with people, the park's goats have no qualms about interrupting a bathroom break, or chewing the armpits of exercise clothes left to air out near a campsite. "They've lost that normal wariness," says Wagner. Legend has it that, while resting during a long hike, former superintendent Bob Chandler opened his eyes to find his scalp being tongued by a brazen billy.

Such close encounters can be dangerous. In 1999, a group of picnickers on top of Mount Ellinor caught the attention of a salt-hungry goat, who stabbed one of them in the leg with his horn. And in 2010, a hiker was fatally gored after a goat followed him for about a mile. (Soon after, park officials asked visitors to stop peeing alongside trails "in areas of high goat use," and there is also an extensive "Goats And Your Safety" section on the park website.)

The tourists certainly aren't going to leave the park. Neither are the plants or the archaeological treasures. And so for years, officials have focused on getting out the goats. The 1980s and '90s saw several different attempts: From 1988 to 1989, "goats were darted, sling-loaded and packed in snow and cocktail ice for road trips to areas where they would not be considered an “unwelcome addition,'" writes Helen Carolyn Wagenvoord in a 1995 report. (Because they're mountain goats, they prefer refrigerated transport.)

But some goats were very difficult to capture—after all, they can scale cliffs—and the attempts proved dangerous for everyone. Officials ended up abandoning the efforts before they were complete. Thanks to pushback from the public, and from animal rights groups, they decided not to move on to lethal removal.

By the time summer 2018 came around, the tide had shifted. The Final Mountain Goat Management Plan privileges relocation until "a point of diminishing returns" is reached. After that, lethal removal will begin. Although civilians expressed some concerns, "public meetings were hardly boisterous affairs, and major conservation organizations, biologists and other government agencies have supported the park’s efforts," writes Evan Bush, who covers the mountain goat beat for the Seattle Times. (Wagner chalks this up to inter-agency collaboration, as well as the 2010 goring, which she says may have driven home "the reality of the situation.")

The translocation stage started on Monday, September 10. As Bush reports, teams in helicopters track down goats in the park and shoot them with sedative-loaded darts or net guns. Next, "a handler known as a mugger jump[s] from the helicopter, calm[s] the animals and attache[s] them to a sling," Bush writes.

The blindfolded, dangling goats are flown to a clearing and lowered into a flatbed truck. While the use of helicopters may seem overly dramatic, they're actually a common wildlife transport tool: Over the past few years, copters have relocated bighorn sheep to their native ranges in Oregon, brought rehabilitated grizzly cubs back into the wild, and ferried endangered black rhinos in South Africa from a poaching-heavy area to a protected reserve.

By this past Monday, September 17, 62 goats had been captured, despite weekend rains that hampered the operation, says Wagner. After their helicopter trip, they get driven to a staging area, where they're checked out by a team of veterinarians.

They take a six-hour truck ride to the North Cascades, and stay overnight in another staging area. After that, they're set free, guided through a corral of temporary fencing into the wilderness beyond. "The goal is to have them released within 24 hours," she says. "As quickly and efficiently as possible, to minimize the impact of the whole deal." Translocation will stop this coming Friday, and start again sometime in 2019.

In videos, the released goats stumble a bit. Some get stuck on shrubs. A few are reluctant to leave their crates. (Fish and Wildlife workers encourage them, saying "c'mon, boy.") They now have a new job: helping to increase the population in the Cascades, where they actually are native. This will bring with it new challenges, including natural predators like cougars and golden eagles, not to mention those old nemeses, human hunters. But for now, they're probably just happy to be back on the ground.

These traveling historians are hungry for your life story.

It’s not often a food truck requires its customers to do the cooking. But this summer, a former FedEx truck outfitted with burners, deep-fryers, and a few friendly historians has been opening its doors to the public and asking its guests to dictate what’s on the menu. Led by Dr. Janis Thiessen, professor and Associate Chair of the Oral History Centre at the University of Winnipeg, the Food History Truck is not just a food truck, but an unconventional vehicle for research and community engagement. With the help of the Oral History Centre, Diversity Food Services, and collaborators Kimberley Moore, Kent Davies, and Sarah Story, Thiessen is circulating Manitoba to collect recipes and stories of how food has been produced, sold, and consumed throughout the Canadian province.

From the outside, the automobile looks a lot like any other food truck parked on the block. “We’ve had a few 12-year-old boys approach the truck and be completely devastated that we’re not selling hot dogs,” says Thiessen, “and to them I apologize.”

But what the Food History Truck lacks in frankfurters, it makes up for in function. In her previous research, Thiessen conducted interviews in factories, farms, and restaurants. But a lot of food production happens in the home, she says. In order to capture these stories without invading someone’s personal space, Thiessen and her team created a “public kitchen” in which diverse, safe, and often satiating interviews can be conducted and recorded.

Community members are invited to climb inside the truck and cook a small sample of a specific dish that’s meaningful to them. It doesn’t have to be complicated, or even particularly palatable, says Thiessen. It simply has to have a story.

One man, she recalls, boarded the truck to share his recipe for puffed wheat squares, a sweet cereal bar somewhat akin to a Rice Krispy Treat. The snack, he went on to explain, was a small part of a struggle to reconcile his masculine identity with his role as the primary food provider for his children in a rural community that viewed his behavior as unmanly.

“What I love about oral history interviews is that it doesn’t matter how much you’ve read, or studied—or even lived through yourself,” says Thiessen. “They’re always surprising. And we have the opportunity to share these stories with others, and have them appreciate that life is a lot more complicated, and humanity is a lot more diverse, than any of us anticipate.”

Though these stories are rooted in Manitoba, they branch far beyond the province’s borders. While recreating three types of salsas on the truck, one community member recounted his migration story of fleeing as a young boy from El Salvador during the country's Civil War. After settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he was forced to navigate the pressures of integrating into society while trying to preserve his Salvadoran identity. Food, he remarked, is one of the ways in which he manages to do this.

With the permission of the chefs, Thiessen and her team will compile these stories and recipes in a myriad of storytelling mediums—including a podcast, arcGIS story maps, and, eventually, a “history cookbook.”

“Our hope is that someone who would never pick up a book about migration history or questions of masculinity might get to learn about those things,” says Thiessen, “because they’re happy to listen to a podcast about salsa or read about puffed wheat squares.”

In the future, the team hopes to serve the dishes they've recorded community cooks making in the truck. Eventually Thiessen plans to offer up foods packaged with a QR code which, when scanned, might take you to a podcast episode featuring the story behind the snack. She also hopes to offer a course in which students will be trained to conduct interviews on the truck.

In the meantime, the Food History Truck’s journey can be tracked online—where you can find photos, posts, podcast episodes, and more, from a story map tracing the history of the province’s Icelandic food to an audio story about Winnipeg’s iconic Greek chili burgers. And while these narratives might whet the appetite for Manitoban cuisine, they perhaps more importantly stir up the more complex, personal histories that are often overlooked.

“Those are the stories that we’re really interested in telling,” says Thiessen. “Food is just a way of getting to them.”

Farmers growing the smoky pepper had no idea chefs were paying top dollar for it.

In 1933, riding on the back of a second-rate horse, it took the late anthropologist Ralph L. Beals two full days to reach the Mixe town of Ayutla from the Central Valleys of Oaxaca in Mexico—a distance of approximately 90 miles. As he twisted his way up the precipitous hills, Beals found towns clinging to the mountains, sitting among the clouds. At the time, he was among a handful of outsiders allowed within Mixe territory, located on the northeastern highlands of the Sierra Norte.

Even today, when it’s only a four-hour drive from Oaxaca City, visiting this land proves nearly as difficult. But these remote towns are the birthplace of—and one of the only places that grow—a prized culinary product: the chile pasilla Mixe.

While the pasilla has been a staple of Oaxacan gastronomy for at least a century, it’s appeared in the menus of high-end restaurants in New York City, Los Angeles, and Mexico City only in the past decade. Several types of pasillas grow throughout Mexico, but they vary in fragrance, flavor, and purpose. The Oaxacan pasilla is regarded as very high quality, a fact reflected by its price tag: around 300 pesos ($16) in Oaxaca City, and $40 to $60 for a pound in the United States. In her book, Peppers of the Americas, chef and food historian Maricel Presilla describes it as “one of the finest smoke-dried Mexican peppers.” But even motivated chefs with deep pockets can struggle to get their hands on one. The area is simply too remote and production is low and dwindling.

In 2011, that fact was on the mind of Julián Mateo Isidro as he returned home after five years of studying to become an agricultural engineer. As he made the long trip back home to the Mixe region, he felt eager to share agricultural innovations. “While I was away, I saw how people in other states establish profitable crops and make business,” Isidro says, “and it made me wonder why the people in my town didn’t.”

Isidro’s main concern was the chile pasilla, which is endemic to the Sierra Mixe. His neighbors were ditching the labor-intensive chile in favor of crops such as coffee, and he worried that their tradition of growing it was slowly dying out.

As is the case with many past anthropologists, Beals was interested in the exotic—the rituals, the sacrifices—and sought a culture untainted by colonization and other foreign influences. With Mixes, he got close. Their chosen name (rather than the ones imposed by Spanish conquistadors or the Aztec Empire) is Ayüükjä’äy, or “people who speak the mountain language.” Their name is as poetic as it is descriptive of their geographical location and spiritual beliefs, and their culture bears a striking resemblance to their secluded surroundings. They are reserved, and outsiders who enter their land are subject to extensive interrogation and may not be allowed to stay.

During their long isolation, the chile pasilla has been an essential part of their culture. Isidro’s family—and a significant portion of his town’s approximately 3,000 inhabitants—have harvested and cooked with it for generations. “It’s what gives our food its traditional flavor,” he says. “It cannot be substituted with other chiles, because the pasilla flavor is incomparable.”

Fresh, pasillas are generally known as chilacas but, in the Sierra Mixe, no matter the stage, they are simply called pasillas. As they mature, the chiles change from bright green to burnt orange and, lastly, to an almost black, deep red. Once they reach the final stage of maturity, they are harvested and smoke-dried with oak, which adds a deep, meaty taste and results in wrinkly, burgundy chiles that are smoky and spicy, and whose heat is felt at the throat. While the chiles are grown in various towns throughout the region, its birthplace and original producers are found in two of the 19 Mixe towns: Santa María Alotepec and Santiago Atitlán, which is Isidro’s hometown.

Since it would be impossible for a few small towns to supply the whole market demand, people outside of the Sierra Mixe have started growing it and lying about its origins. Because of this, locals preciously guard fresh pasillas, which cannot be found outside of Mixe territory, as they fear others will plant the seeds. Even if you were to visit, no Mixe would sell a fresh pasilla to an outsider. As you walk the roads and streets, and browse the market aisles, they will stop you abruptly and ask what you are doing there.

Getting a university degree is an extremely rare achievement in Atlitán. According to census information from the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography, 18% of Atitlán’s population has no education at all, while 72% receives only a sixth grade education. Isidro says few Mixe farmers think about market demands and production methods, so they have to sell their crops for cheap. To do more than just subsist—and avoid being one of the young people leaving for better jobs elsewhere—he felt he needed academic training.

Once back in Atlitán, Isidro returned to his family home and their fields, but he also wanted his town to prosper. He went house to house and field to field, asking pasilla producers to join him in using techniques he’d learned. He knew most farmers wouldn’t be able to pay him for his help, at least at first, but he says he wanted to help his people, whom he describes as “so kind and noble that even when they don’t have food for themselves they’ll offer a handmade tortilla.”

One of his first suggestions was to use an organic treatment on the seeds. The farmers didn’t make any investments, Isidro says, beyond giving the crops “their blessing,” as they would joke. At a cost of 600 pesos ($32) for a 2.5-acre farm, Isidro told farmers, the treatment could reduce the amount of the chile crop lost to disease (an endemic problem due to the area’s engulfing rains) from 50 percent to 10 percent.

But the producers, most of whom are in their forties and fifties, distrusted this foreign information and dismissed Isidro as young and naive. “I found a lot of resistance to change and innovation,” Isidro says. Only a few farmers joined him.

Faced with what seemed like puzzling resistance, Isidro called a meeting, which he announced through a megaphone in the town square. (Residents then spread the word.) He showed up early and waited until around 20 producers gathered in a public courtyard outside of the local school. He spoke first and made his case for using new methods. But a respected farmer named Marciano, who was particularly skeptical, said he didn’t see the point of investing in the production of a difficult crop that was only marginally profitable. (The pasilla fields are on steep slopes two hours outside of town, and they require 120 full working days plus another three of tending a fire day and night while smoking the chiles in caves.) Others left without saying a word.

After the meeting, Isidro realized the farmers were unaware of the chile’s value. Most Ayüükjä’äys had never been beyond the Sierra Mixe, and they sold their chiles for only two pesos (less than 25 cents) per pound. When he told them that two pounds of large pasillas went for 250 pesos ($13) at the main market in Oaxaca City, they didn’t believe it. Impossible! they responded. Who would pay that much for it?

Isidro had worked the pasilla fields his whole life, but he had little experience selling chiles. He soon learned that intermediaries—from Oaxaca City, neighboring Mitla (an indigenous Zapotec village), and larger, wealthier Mixe towns such as Tlahuitoltepec and Tamazulapam—had taken over Atitlán’s economic system. Known as “coyotes,” these intermediaries pay pasilla growers a pittance and re-sold their products for as much as a 600% increase. He knew about coyotes, but hadn’t realized their pervasiveness.

Beals and anthropologist Etsuko Kuroda, who visited the region in the early 1980s, both documented intermediary intervention. “Some buyers of fruits and flowers pay less than they have to, taking advantage of the ignorance of the Mixe vendors who cannot count well in the national currency,” wrote Kuroda in Under Mt. Zempoaltépetl: Highland Mixe Society and Ritual.

This exploitation continues today. Some coyotes drive into town, take the pasillas, and promise to return with the farmer’s share of the profits. “Since the producers are desperate for some money, any money, they agree,” says Isidro. Then the coyotes never return. Even though the chiles are valuable, there are still few enough coyotes that they don’t outbid each other, and the Ayüükjä’äy, who are often desperate for cash, accept very low prices.

Once Isidro understood the coyote economy, he realized that changing how his town sold chiles was more important than changing how they were grown. “I came up with an idea of selling the pasilla in an organized manner,” he says. But it took a chance encounter, plus a natural disaster, to bring his plan to fruition.

In 2011, Iliana de la Vega, an American chef of Oaxacan heritage, was researching and documenting local ingredients and food. From her years in Oaxaca, she knew a Mixe woman, Lolita, who took her to the Sierra Mixe and acted as her guide and character reference. After the routine interrogation, she met Macedonio López, one of the few pasilla producers who had agreed to work with Isidro. He showed her around the fields, the smoking caves, and the small greenhouse he had put up with Isidro’s help.

Soon enough, Isidro, López, and de la Vega were discussing how farmers were giving up on chiles in favor of crops like coffee—and how they needed to get around the coyotes. De la Vega wanted to help preserve the chile pasilla, and as a chef, she knew people who she believed would like to buy the chile directly.

Months later, Isidro received an email: De la Vega had found several chefs willing to buy the chiles at a fair price. At another meeting in the courtyard outside the school house, more farmers, heartened by the prices the chefs offered, were ready to give pasillas another chance. But they wouldn’t invest in treatments until the pay materialized. That year, the crops were riddled with plagues, and a severe drought destroyed almost 90 percent of production.

López and Isidro, however, had their greenhouses and preventative treatments, and word spread that their families had sold all of their pasillas for 250 pesos a kilogram ($13). This time, it was the pasilla farmers who sought Isidro to ask if he would still teach them about treatments.

In 2017, de la Vega introduced Isidro and the pasilla farmers to the team of Masienda, a company best known for selling heirloom Mexican corn tortillas, which then bought the whole town’s production of pasillas.

By then, Isidro had formed a cooperative of around 20 producers. They pitched in to buy a communal greenhouse and install an irrigation system, and Isidro shared more advanced techniques, such as seed selection, to ensure that only the best quality chiles made it to the fields. Several farmers even got more land to plant more pasillas. With a smile, Isidro explains that Marciano, who was once his greatest skeptic, now works with the group. He feels confident that his town is now motivated to keep planting pasillas.

Isidro continues to live in Santiago Atitlán with his wife, two children, and parents. He is entrepreneurial, and his agricultural projects have grown to include avocado trees and 200 bee hives. Yet his love for pasillas continues. “This year, we’re going to cultivate pasillas at another three acres of land,” he says. “My family is happy, and when the producers get the earnings they deserve, [that] makes me happy too.”

For a fair price, the farmers of Santiago Atitlán are going back to their roots.