The global design phenomenon left a unique and lasting legacy in the country.
Form rarely follows function as purely as it does in functionalist Czech architecture. The minimalist, utilitarian design ideology, which prioritizes functionality above aesthetic, became popular following World War I when the world was hungry for all things “modern.” The movement took hold of the former Czechoslovakia for much of the 20th century. Its straight lines and clean forms represented the country’s collective desire to create infrastructure that responded to how its citizens lived and navigated through their communities.
Given the tumultuous history of the Czech Republic during the 20th century, the style’s appeal is easy to identify. Both pragmatic and ambitious, functionalism reflected the people’s deep understanding of their present and future needs. Built to last, many of these structures are still standing and accessible to visit.
The move toward functionalism in the 1920s was a direct rejection of building styles—and societal structures—that had defined the Kingdom of Bohemia’s empire. No longer did the 14th-century gothic castles or the ornate details of the 19th century's Art Nouveau movement reflect the day-to-day realities of life in the Czech Republic. Instead, as the country progressed toward an industrial future, it needed buildings that represented its new cultural priorities. Functionalism rose alongside the country’s economic aspirations. During its heyday, the style elevated Czech architecture at home and abroad. Homegrown architects spread its influence across Eastern and Western Europe.
Much of this momentum was lost in the late 1940s and ‘50s, however, as Stalin’s influence spread across the country. Grandiose new buildings of that era, such as Prague’s Hotel International, imitated the Soviet leader’s personal preferences instead of focusing on the civic needs of the people. But as the austere realities of Communist rule set in, Czech architecture eventually lost much of its Soviet sentimentality. Almost by necessity, new buildings began to revert back to the more basic, purpose-driven designs that first defined functionalism.
Throughout the country functionalist architectural gems abound. Here are some of the best places you can explore them—notably, in the cities of Brno, Prague, and Zlín.
Villa Tugendhat
Brno’s most famous functionalist structure may be the Villa Tugendhat, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the country's loveliest examples of functionalist architecture. Even as the style disappeared from the global forefront, the Villa remains a key example of functionalism at its peak period. A three-story, stand-alone, reinforced concrete hilltop home with a conservatory, servants' quarters, and an onyx-walled living room, the Villa still has a futuristic feel almost a century after its construction. Designed by German pioneer of modern architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and built in 1930, the estate has been open to the public since 2012. In the intervening years, the Villa has had a range of uses, from Soviet horse stable to a dance academy.
Agudas Achim Synagogue
Another functionalist place of note in Brno is a synagogue dating to the mid-1930s. Designed by noted Czech architect Otto Eisler, the structure’s religious purpose informed its design. A large square window welcomes light from the heavens into the prayer room, but other conspicuous characteristics are sparse. Eisler adhered to a traditional synagogue layout with a platform in the middle and the Torah ark in the eastern wall. During World War II, the synagogue served an entirely separate “function” out of necessity: as a storage house. After the war, it was reconsecrated. As recently as 2016, it had undergone construction to restore its original appearance.
Hotel Avion
Designed by renowned architect Bohuslav Fuchs (also known for his work on the colorful Cafe Era), the slender Hotel Avion has a facade just under 23-feet wide, making it one of the narrowest hotels in Europe. Working with an extremely slim plot of land, the architect created a building that was unprecedented in design. Embracing the concept of continuous space, he created a a hotel with rooms that flowed into one another, centralized around a core spiral stairway.
Villa Müller
In Prague, the Villa Müller shares a birth year and many aesthetic features with the Villa Tugendhat in Brno. A white structure with prominent yellow windows, this Villa is also made of reinforced concrete and was created without a blueprint. "I do not draw plans, facades or sections," Adolf Loos, the home's architect, is famously quoted as saying, “I design spaces.” The home—both spatially and conceptually —offers its resident a key facet of functionalism: continual spaces which "relate to each other," in the words of Loos. The Villa today houses a gallery space within its historic walls.
Building No. 21
Zlín is a city practically built by functionalist principles, offering a unique perspective on the movement. The birthplace of the global shoe company Baťa, the city grew alongside the company in the years preceding and proceeding WWI. The city’s industrial past is reflected in countless structures in the city that were built in a style that reflected the Baťa's factories. But the city’s crowning functionalist achievement is indisputably the 16-story skyscraper Building No. 21, built to host the company’s booming business headquarters in 1938. Its elevator famously contains a private office, so the factory’s manager could easily visit all floors while keeping up with work.
Church of St. Wenceslas (Sazovice)
Post-Stalin, functionalism became the dominant style of building in the Czech Republic and continues to be an influence in the country's contemporary architecture. After the Velvet Revolution, designers have taken liberties in blending its sensible aesthetic with influences from other movements and eras from the country’s past.
An example of this can be seen in the recently-constructed Church of St Wenceslas in Sazovice, a village in the Zlín region. While the architects at Atelier Štěpán reference the St. Vitus cathedral in Prague as an inspiration point, the building’s cylindrical shape, use of cement as a primary building material, and prismatic windows pay homage to the utilitarian ideals of functionalism. The idea of building a church dates back to the interwar period, but it wasn’t until 2011 that the town finally revived the idea and laid plans to work. In execution, the cylindrical church serves as the town’s focal point and an apt metaphor for Czech architecture in the 20th century. Conceived during functionalism’s prime and built after its gradual decline, it relays a story of the birth, death, and rebirth of Czech functionalism.
It's hard to shock Roberto Battiston with a praying mantis photo. He's been studying the big-eyed, long-limbed insects for years. But in early 2017, his friend, the conservationist Nayak Manjunath, sent him the image above.
This mantis—a male Hierodula tenuidentata—had a scaly creature trapped between his front legs. Having tossed aside his prey's iridescent tail, he was gnawing enthusiastically on the rest of it. "I'd never seen something like this!" remembers Battiston. "The praying mantis was eating a fish."
Most mantids get their calories largely from other insects, such as flies and grasshoppers. If you give one a big snack, though, he's probably going to go for it. In captive settings, they've successfully munched on mice, frogs, newts, snakes, and turtles. Wild mantids have also been known to hunt birds. "They wait for them at the feeders, and sometimes they're able to catch them" says Battiston. "But these are mostly anecdotal reports."
Instead, this particular mantis gifted them a robust data set. He lived in the roof garden of Rajesh Puttaswamaiah, another conservationist from Karnataka, India, and the keeper of a small fish pool stocked with guppies and zebrafish. After the insect's first appearance, he just kept coming back to the pool.
"Not once, but twice—and then a third time, a fourth time," says Battiston, who was following raptly from his office in Italy. "This was very strange!" Battiston, Manjunath, and Puttaswamaiah kept apprised of his behavior, and the three recently published their findings in the Journal of Orthoptera Research.
Over the course of these five nights, the mantis caught and devoured nine guppies, averaging two per night. He would perch on top of the pool, on a lily pad or a water cabbage leaf, and grab them from beneath the surface. He usually preferred to eat them tail first.
Sometimes, he left their heads in the water while he chewed, effectively eating them alive. He only went fishing after 6:30 p.m.—during the day, he'd spend his time hanging around different plants, resting and catching the occasional bug.
"I was surely surprised to see the mantis eating the guppy," writes Puttaswamaiah in an email, adding that his five days of observations inspired a number of questions. For instance, why did he always catch guppies, when there were other types of fish available? And while fishing, how was he able to account for how light refracts through water, a difficult task even for experienced human spearfishers?
What's more, how did he successfully invent what seems to be a new mantis sport? While we're used to ascribing some form of intelligence to social insects, such as bees and ants, "mantids are solitary predators," Battiston says. "They only learn from experience."
This one's calculated pool-stalking, he continues, suggests that he was capable of surprisingly complex thinking: "Not just remembering a taste, or a stimulus, but a strategy." Battiston hopes to set up a laboratory experiment, to test whether other mantids can do the same.
For now, all we can do is speculate—after five days of fish feasts, the very hungry mantis disappeared, perhaps aiming to try his luck elsewhere. Look out, chicken coops.
Ricardo Porro had just two months to design five buildings for five different art schools—ballet, modern dance, visual arts, music, theater. It was 1961, and he had only recently come back to Cuba after a few years in Venezuela, where he had fled after his anti-Batista politics had become a problem back home. He knew he would need help to finish the schools, and he recruited two Italian architect friends to help him complete the task. Together, they would design Cuba’s National Art Schools.
The idea had been dreamed up on a golf course, at a once-luxurious and exclusive country club. In January 1961, two years after the success of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had gone there to play a round of golf. (It was meant, Castro said later, to be a farcical game, poking fun at President Eisenhower.) Looking over the rolling hills and green space, the two leaders resolved to transform the club into a campus open to arts students, tuition-free, from around the world. Porro, who had developed a reputation as a fiery young architect, was given the job of creating the schools.
Porro, along with Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardo, came up with a few principles that would unify the campus. The buildings would meld with the landscape, in a style of “organic architecture” that Porro favored. Limited in materials by the U.S. embargo on Cuba, they would use local resources—bricks and terracotta tiles. And the buildings would feature Catalan-style domes with soft, curving lines.
The timeline for building the schools was fast, but their designs fell out of favor nearly as quickly. Construction started almost immediately but by 1962 the designs were being called out as bourgeois, as Soviet-style architecture came into vogue in Cuba. Soon, Porro had left the country again, as did Garatti. Construction on the schools continued until 1965, when budget priorities shifted. The floors and windows of the ballet school were still unfinished; the theater school had only been about a third of the way completed.
Still, students used the partially completed campus for decades, even as the more incomplete corners fell into disrepair and were taken over by jungle. In the 1980s, architecture journals started reviving interest in the buildings, and in 1991 the architect John Loomis visited them in person. In 1999, he published a book called Revolution of Forms: Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools, which made the buildings famous. Even Castro took a renewed interest in preserving the buildings. In 2003, the site was being thought of as a possible World Heritage Site, and by 2011 Cuba had declared the schools a national monument. The schools may never be finished, but now they won’t be allowed to disappear.
On this stretch of coast, fish unpredictably flock ashore, providing a windfall of seafood.
The estuary, marshes, and swamps of Alabama’s Mobile-Tensaw Delta are full of wonders, including hundreds of bird, reptile, fish, and mammal species. Its natural beauty is a reliable source of pleasure and plenty for its residents and visitors. But on a few sultry mornings each summer, during a full moon, locals spring from their beds in response to news of a wondrous natural phenomenon occurring on a spot along a 15-mile stretch of coast. Catfish, shrimp, and flounder rise from Mobile Bay’s floor and swarm at the water’s edge, eels shimmy onto the sand, and crabs flee the water, scaling barnacled docks and tree trunks. This exodus of sea life provides residents with as much seafood as they can gig, net, or scoop. Inspired by the celebratory atmosphere it brings in its wake, they call it a jubilee.
Alabama authors including Winston Groom (Forrest Gump) and Daniel Wallace (Big Fish) create characters and scenes that leave readers wondering where truth alchemizes into fantasy. Listening to recollections of jubilees feels like sitting at an uncle’s feet, listening to a tale being spun as lightning bugs spark the night. Locals including Jimbo Meador, a delta guide who’s benefited from jubilees for almost 80 years (knowing about one before him is considered bragging rights) recently lured me in with tales that seemed apocryphal. Skiffs full of flounder? Shrimp scooped out of the water by the bushel basket?
“It’s like people who say they saw Bigfoot,” says bayfront resident Watt Key, author of Alabama Moon, “you don’t talk about jubilees that much to outsiders—they don’t believe you.”
I first heard about jubilees in 2014 when I stopped in Point Clear, on the eastern coast of Mobile Bay, while researching a book on recipes and tales from the Southern coasts. Back then, Texas Sea Grant marine biologist Tony Reisinger, whose mother hailed from Mobile, explained the science of jubilees to me.
“Estuaries have a dense saltwater wedge that slips like a long tongue reaching from the ocean’s side underneath fresher, less dense bay water,” he said. “Sometimes that dense, deeper water, which is oxygen deprived from decaying organic matter, is pushed onto the shallow eastern shelf of the bay by tide-driven water. That can force bottom-dwelling marine life to seek refuge along the eastern shallows—they scramble for air at the surface and as close to land as possible, causing a jubilee.”
But jubilees can’t be predicted, Reisinger added. The weather, tide, and moon cycle can all be right, but no jubilee appears. Folks in Point Clear chuckle about film crews from Time Magazine, CNN, National Geographic, and other outlets coming to town over the years, trying but failing to document it.
Jubilees may seem seasoned by legend, but they’re as real as the bay water they’re borne from, occurring multiple times every summer between June and mid September. Residents say they feel them coming, like northerners can tell when snow will fall. They tailgate after midnight at the dock when signs suggest one might manifest. Jubilees are part of Point Clear’s DNA.
The accounts I heard went something like this: You look for the signs and symptoms. Jubilees roll in after a full-moon midnight on hot summer evenings following a day with light showers. When both an easterly wind and rising tide push at the shore (but no boat or ship wakes disturb the water), bottom dwellers rise up in the small hours and head to the beach, gasping for air. The procession begins with eels slithering onto, then burrowing down into, the sand, writhing like a giant Medusa head. Hogchokers float to the surface, and catfish gather at the bay’s edge. Next, groups of fish poke above the surface to gulp air. Crabs claw their way up pylons, and shrimp crowd the brackish water in a tangle of antennae and legs, followed by flounder and stingrays, all slowed by a lack of oxygen. Soon birds start squawking and feasting on the buffet. Next comes the bell ringing along bayfront lawns to alert neighbors, who groggily spill out of their screened doorways, hair askew, armed with “go kits” of gigs, nets, and baskets. Boys get the thrill of spying what the girls sleep in—no one bothers to change from their pajamas to gig fish.
The jubilee rush begins—a quietly competitive event. It can deliver such a wealth of free food that men head to the hospital later than they should when their wives are in labor. The scaling, shelling, and steaming of the fish, shrimp, and crabs goes on toward noon. Local schools and businesses forgive jubilee delays, and everyone prays a thunderstorm won’t knock out the electricity and spoil the spoils in their freezers. Some grill crab-stuffed flounder for breakfast; others feast on a fresh pot of gumbo that evening.
Back in the ‘50s, Meador’s parents moved their kids, chickens, and milking cow to the shore each summer. A few times during those months, Meador would hear scratching on the screen door of the sleeping porch where he and his sisters camped out. That was his friend Duke’s signal that a jubilee was happening; he’d leap out of bed, and they’d head to the beach to fill wooden skiffs with as much as their four hands could haul in. Since they sold their catch for pocket money, they worked silently to avoid alerting any competition.
During lean years, when residents are too focused on feeding their families to lose precious time, they might act like Duke and Meador. But it’s more common to spread the word. Early in Point Clear’s history, people rang house bells posted along the shore and hollered to their neighbors. This was before homes were shut up tight with air conditioning. In more recent decades, Watt Key says, “Families had a call list … a piece of scratch paper next to the phone with names to contact if there was a jubilee.” Feelings got hurt if you didn’t call—Key’s dad was once called a “one-flounder friend” because he didn’t call a neighbor quickly enough and the man only caught one fish. Today, people text or call from their cell phones right from the beach.
In August, I decided to try my luck and drove from the Georgia coast to Point Clear when I saw that the last full moon of the summer coincided with a rising, post-midnight tide. I knew the chances of catching a jubilee were infinitesimal, but it’s a lovely place, and I thought the anticipation alone might be fun.
On the evening of the full moon, I stayed up all night, leaving my bayfront room at the Grand Hotel every couple hours to look at the moonlight on the water, trying to divine what was happening below. A promising easterly wind rustled Spanish moss on a craggy live oak. A lone heron stared into the shallows, searching for signs of life along with me. A little after 5 a.m., I got the calls from Key and Meador: “It’s happening.” I grabbed my camera and drove to Key’s house—they’d warned me jubilees can be fickle about where they stay, and for how long.
It felt like a paper-bound fable was blossoming into life. Each of the harbingers appeared: Key pointed out small eels moving toward shore and floating hogchokers with his flounder light. With a big yellow moon painting the water, groups of gasping fish appeared, with just the tips of their mouths breaking the surface in a posture locals call “smoking.” A crab sought refuge on a felled tree. Then, flounder appeared, and a young family friend, also new to jubilees, climbed down the bulkhead, gig in hand, and speared her first fish.
Key urged me to hustle down the bay a few miles to a tried-and-true jubilee spot. Three pickup trucks were already parked; lone fishermen peered into the water, dripping nets and gigs in hands, with floating plastic tubs trailing them for the shrimp and crabs they’d caught. Hundreds of catfish swarmed in the gently lapping water, just as I’d heard they would. But I had no idea they’d be bitty, only three inches or so, and would undulate back and forth with the swishing water, their thousands of white whiskers against their blue-gray bodies making them appear more like spiders with linked legs. Spade fish, mullet, and stingrays joined the party too.
As the sun came up, pelicans and gulls swooped in for their breakfasts. Hearing that they’d do so is nothing like seeing the rising sun light up their white feathers, and the splashes from their dive bombing for fish. One man sneaked up on and victoriously gigged a flounder that had eluded him several times. There are catch limits on flounder and shrimp, but during jubilees, no one polices the numbers or minds private property lines.
Over my travels to more than 100 islands in the United States, I’ve seen or heard about many strange things on beaches, including Ice Age arrowheads revealed by the Chesapeake Bay’s waters on Smith Island, voodoo dolls with spells sewn inside their bellies floating ashore at Deerfield Beach, North Carolina, and “square grouper” (jettisoned bales of marijuana) landing on the Florida Keys. They all pale in comparison to what I experienced at Point Clear. Witnessing the jubilee felt like winning the lottery—there are plenty of people who’ve lived on the bay for decades without seeing one. A local asked if I’d accompany him to a casino, given that I had the power to “summon a jubilee on a whim.” The luck might have come courtesy of my rental car’s license plate, which started with the letters “GIG.”
I wonder, in the days before scientists helped explain them, what people thought caused jubilees—how they believed they’d pleased their deity enough to deserve the providence. Long ago, the bay communities in the area couldn’t have known that this doesn’t happen anywhere else in the western hemisphere, and nowhere else as often. I reckon they simply thought, as Jimbo Meador said about my miraculous experience, that they were blessed.
A king died after being served up a murderous fish in present-day Suzhou.
In Suzhou, China, hundreds of ancient canals run parallel to the city’s streets, intersecting them beneath arched stone bridges. It’s what’s earned the city the nickname “Venice of the East.” But Suzhou is also part of a larger area south of the Yangtze River, and is known by another moniker: “The Land of Fish and Rice.” “Neither fish nor rice can live without water,” says “Cathy” Chen, a Suzhou tour guide who was born and raised in the Yangtze River Region. “So Suzhou is a water city.”
Suzhou owes its existence to these waterways, and particularly to the availability of fish. While fish gave life to Suzhou’s cuisine, it was also responsible for the death of the former king more than 2,500 years ago.
Back during ancient China’s Spring and Autumn Period (approximately 771 to 476 B.C.), Prince Guang of Wu wanted to usurp the throne of his uncle, King Liao. So he recruited an assassin named Zhuan Zhu for assistance. Knowing that his uncle was both a fan of seafood and not an easy target, Guang decided to disguise Zhuan Zhu as a chef. “Guang first sent the assassin to nearby Lake Taihu, where he spent three full months learning the art of cooking and dressing large lake fish,” says Chen. “The fish he prepared would then conceal a tiny sword in its innards.” That culinary process involved learning techniques such as smoking and roasting, as well as cleaning and filleting fish properly—which also gave the assassin the perfect opportunity to hide a weapon inside.
After King Liao won a skirmish against a neighboring state, Prince Guang offered to host a celebratory banquet for him. Liao accepted. “With appropriate fanfare, Zhuan Zhu brought the meal’s pièce de résistance to the table,” Chen says. By some accounts, a thick sauce covered the boned fish. It disguised the dagger that Zhu slipped inside, and instead called Liao’s attention to the fine dish's presentation. “The assassin-chef quickly withdrew its hidden sword and stabbed Liao twice, fatally, before himself being killed by the king’s bodyguard," Chen says. "Prince Guang’s own soldiers, hidden nearby, made quick work of Liao’s loyal guard.”
Following the assassination, Prince Guang seized the throne and became known as King Helü. “It was Helü who ordered that a new capital city be built for the Wu State,” says Stephen L. Koss, the author of Beautiful Su: A Social and Cultural History of Suzhou, China. “And thus in 514 B.C., the city of Suzhou was born.”
From there Suzhou developed as a cultural center, with cuisine as one of its main pillars (the others being Suzhou silk, gardens, and handicrafts). Lake Taihu—an 869-square-mile freshwater lake (China's third-largest) that sits on the outskirts of Suzhou—has been feeding local residents for millennia. Everything from silver fish to shrimp, eels, and plants such as chestnuts and lotus roots stem from its waters. It's also played a large role in the development of Suzhou-style cuisine, a local variation of Jiangsu or “Su,” one of China's Eight Culinary Traditions.
Over the years, Suzhou dishes have become known for their subtle flavors and an emphasis on ingredients including braised pork, bamboo shoots, and a paste made from broiled and stir-fried eels. Entrées are highly flavorful and typically sweeter than other regional Chinese cuisines, with a stylized look that at once embodies visual storytelling and distinct culinary craftsmanship.
One of these dishes is song shu gui yu. The “squirrel-shaped mandarin fish” is boned, and then its flesh is cut with a diamond-shaped knife pattern. It’s then seasoned, battered, and deep-fried. Crispy on the outside and soft and tender on the inside, it gets its name both from its elaborate appearance and for the squealing sound it makes when covered in hot sweet-and-sour sauce. “It's a fish that looks like a squirrel,” says Jerry Gao, a chef at the InterContinental Suzhou. “The fish meat is spread out like gold fur, and its head and tail are both turned up.”
Song shu gui yu has become so popular that it appears on menus countrywide, served from Beijing to Guangzhou with all the aplomb of royalty. “When guests from other areas of China [visit], the first thing they want to try is song shu gui yu,” says Pan Xiaomin, head chef of Suzhou's SCHotel Group. Within Suzhou, it's gradually becoming more than an occasional splurge, too. "Squirrel-shaped mandarin fish is an expensive dish, because mandarin fish is expensive and the way to make song shu gui yu is not easy, therefore only on special occasions, we eat it," says Chen. "Since our living conditions are becoming better and better, many people [are now able to] afford to pay for this dish and enjoy it."
Both Xiaomin and Gao describe song shu gui yu as the epitome of Suzhou cuisine. It’s a dish, as Goa describes, that utilizes “fresh ingredients and fine-cutting skill.” It’s so masterfully diced and unusual in appearance that some people hold that it could be a well-refined version of Zhuan Zhu's famous dagger fish, over 2,500 years on.
The story of Zhuan Zhu and his “sword of bravery”—known as yú cháng jiàn (meaning “fish-belly sword” or “fish-intestine sword”)—became legendary, and its authenticity is recorded in Chinese historian Sima Qian's ancient text, Records of the Grand Historian. Yet the famed assassin's exact fish recipe has been lost to time, though variations persist.
“I’ve seen one story that says Zhuan Zhu had sliced the fish and covered it in a brown sauce to help hide the sword,” says Koss. “But it's not generally connected by most Suzhou people to song shu gui yu.” According to Chen, “One paper did write that roast Taihu mei qi yu (“anchovy from Lake Taihu”) is the prototype of song shu gui yu, but can you see song shu gui yu hiding a tiny yú cháng jiàn? I think only roast fish could [conceal a dagger].” There's also the Shanghai Daily, which briefly notes that the baked and sauce-covered Zhuan zhu yu zhi (“fish swallowing a sword”) is today's version of Zhuan Zhu's murderous masterpiece.
While people dispute whether song shu gui yu has any relation at all to Zhuan Zhu's killer fish, it’s well-accepted that The Qianlong Emperor popularized the squirrel-inspired delicacy in the 18th century. Each time Qianlong traveled to Suzhou from Beijing on one of his “Southern Inspection Tours,” which oversaw the area’s Imperial progress, he stopped by the Songhelou restaurant to order it, often in disguise. “Qianlong really enjoyed it,” says Xiaomin. “His endorsement is why this dish is so beloved.”
Endorsement isn’t exactly something that the fallen King Liao was in a position to provide. That's why Zhuan Zhu's “assassin fish” has been surpassed by more favored dishes such as song shu gui yu. It's only speculation that one spawned the other, but the two do share an undeniable connection: That Suzhou chefs sure know their way around knives.
When the woman died, the police took away her husband. Her parents claimed he had driven her mad, harassing her for dowry payments. True enough, the clinical history that arrived at the mortuary along with her body listed what appeared to be psychiatric symptoms: manic behavior, auditory hallucinations, strange, distorted visions.
It was only once her skull was broken open, her brain removed and segmented, that the truth was revealed: her injury was physical, and inflicted not by her husband, but by a tapeworm.
Visitors to India's only Brain Museum, in the southern city of Bengaluru, know the woman only as "neurocysticercosis - cerebral." That's how a small, typed label identifies the slice of her brain that lives here, pickled in formalin and encased in hard clear plastic, like a macabre paperweight or a uniquely unwhimsical snow-globe.
There are hundreds of specimens, all similarly preserved and mounted, arrayed on LED-backlit shelves that stripe three walls of the single, largish room. Among them are cross-sections of brains marred by aneurysm, fungus, bacterial infection, and trauma. Some are warped by tumors, dense and distinct, like thick fleshy mushroom-stems pushing out through the softer, crumpled brain tissue. Others are partially shrunken by birth defects or Alzheimer’s. Cuboid specimen cases contain entire brain hemispheres, spidered with thickened dark veins.
“Neurocysticercosis - cerebral” is a sliver about half an inch thick, strafed through-and-through with holes approximately the size of pepper-corns—evidence of an infestation of larval pork tapeworms. “The importance,” explains Dr. S.K. Shankar, “is that this was a misdiagnosis.” He goes on, “we make mistakes in clinical medicine. But this”—he gestures at the wall of brains—“tells you the final diagnosis.”
Dr. Shankar, a neuropathologist, has been a part of the museum’s story from the beginning. Now in his early 70s, he is a man of a compact stature and brisk manner; he wears a clipped white mustache and a reputation for exacting standards. He retired in 2012, and has shown up to work every day since. “He makes us tick, I think—as a team,” says Dr. Anita Mahadevan, who has worked alongside him since 1998. His colleagues say that the museum was his idea, but when I ask him about that, he shrugs off the credit: everything, he insists, has been a team effort.
The team in question is a group of scientists and technicians at India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, or NIMHANS, which houses both the museum and its twin project, the Brain Bank. Shankar joined NIMHANS as a young researcher in 1979. That same year, he and other pathologists began to establish the permanent collection: brains with interesting, plainly visible pathologies, were gathered at autopsy, and if the family members of the dead person consented, the brains were bathed in a formalin solution for a minimum of three weeks until they grew firm enough to slice, and durable enough to survive on display.
For years, the growing exhibit made its home in a small room, accessible only to medical professionals, researchers and students. “The students rarely get to see specimens like this. They see a patient. The patient dies, and they assume what has happened,” Shankar says. “But here there are no assumptions.”
In 2010, a new building, the blue-glazed Neurobiology Research Centre, opened up on NIMHANS campus, and the museum was shifted into this larger space. Dr. Shankar and his colleague, Dr. Anita Mahadevan, spotted an opportunity to open the exhibit to the public. By 2014 thousands of visitors had toured the exhibit. It had a new objective: “neuroscience literacy” for the curious masses.
“This museum is about the brain, and the stories of the brain,” says Shankar. Here among all his “stories,” he reminds me of a librarian, interrupting himself mid-anecdote to run a finger along a shelf and pull down another title for me to peruse: “atherosclerotic cerebral atrophy,” perhaps, or “Japanese encephalitis.” He presses them into my hands mumbling, “hold this,” and “put these on the table, there.”
Formalin is such an effective preservative that it is difficult to visually distinguish, among the examples Shankar has culled from the shelves, decades-old brains from recently mounted ones, but Shankar remembers which sample arrived when. “All are my babies,” he jokes, when I ask if he has a favorite.
The woman who became “neurocysticericosis – cerebral” arrived on the NIMHANS mortuary slab early on in the museum’s history. As a matter of procedure, her identity has been “de-linked” from her tissue contribution. If anybody still knows her real name, it’s Shankar. But he’d never say: doctor-patient privilege applies even when all your patients are dead.
Their anonymized tales, however, are there for the telling. Some of them even have a moral.
When Shankar’s team discovered the worm-tunnels in the woman’s cerebrum, her husband was released from police custody. Her parents abandoned their accusation. The family, I presume, got on with the unspectacular labor of grief. The pathologists’ “final diagnosis”—beyond clinical error, beyond assumption—had, in other words, a cooling effect. The inflaming forces of mystery and suspicion were dampened by straightforward encounter with the actual substance of her brain.
Perhaps this—a belief in the power of a direct experience—is why the Brain Museum’s staff encourage visitors to reach out and hold real human brains, slick from their pickling baths, in their untrained and ungloved hands.
Unlike the brains in plastic, these specimens are “normal” - healthy, that is, though it’s a strange word to use for a piece of a dead person. Really, it means that the brain’s owner died of something else, an affliction elsewhere in the body. It’s possible that they were a donor who pledged their organs before their death, but usually, the source was an unwitting victim of a fatal traffic accident; road deaths are wildly common in Bengaluru. In these cases, it’s a city police officer, rather than a treating clinician, who calls up the NIMHANS pathologists to ask for a “cause of death” pronouncement. Autopsies are the only opportunity for the scientists to directly ask families to consign their loved ones’ earthly remains to this peculiar afterlife.
On my first trip to the museum, there are two whole brains and several other organs—lungs, livers, a heart, the vermicelli mess of spinal nerves, spilling from a split sac—paddling an inch or two deep in a white enamel basin on a table in the center of the room. Bundled in knotted cheesecloth, there is a third brain, this one segmented. The scientist leading the public tour I’ve joined walks her fingers over the slices, as if she’s flicking through a rolodex, to find the cut that will best reveal the seahorse-shape of the hippocampus. She palms the pickled body parts carefully into our cupped hands. I feel, suddenly, like I’m in some kind of eccentric petting zoo.
The intact, formalin-fixed brain is weighty, unitary, stable even at the join of its two halves, and in texture, like an elastic paté. The school-kids who visit the Museum on field trips tend to compare it to tough paneer. Fresh brain is more jelly-like, I’m told. But even in its hardened state, the fleshy, ordinary realness of the organ—the theater of all thought and all emotion—lands a little bit like an epiphany; like the curious inverse of a paranormal experience.
Shankar and Mahadevan use the word “demystification” to describe what they hope the museum will achieve. In India, where illnesses of the brain are often met with stigma and superstition, it’s a word that has a particular, practical resonance. “People think these neurological diseases are something like an evil spirit. We want to remove that idea,” Shankar tells me. Posters on the museum’s walls target epilepsy in particular: “continuous treatment effective,” declares one. “Active life possible!”
Dr. Vijaya Nath Mishra, a neurologist at Banaras Hindu University in the ancient northern city of Varanasi, has spent 20 years working on epilepsy and its stigma. “Epilepsy is considered as a curse of bad evils, and thus, the epileptic patients are abandoned and discriminated from society,” reads a research paper he co-authored this year. A 2012 study published in the Lancet found that only 60 percent of urban epileptics and 10 percent of rural sufferers in India approached clinicians for treatment. The remainder, according to Mishra and his colleagues, rely on “spiritual and witchcraft practices.”
“I feel often helpless when we see the suffering of these patients,” Mishra wrote to me in an email. He has seen an 18-year-old girl brought to hospital in chains. Countless epileptics are abandoned by their spouses, or rejected as prospective marriage partners. On WhatsApp, he sends me videos shot during field research in remote parts of Uttar Pradesh. In one, a man Mishra describes as “learned” insists that the best treatment is to give a baby monkey to the patient. As it grows up, it will lure the disease into its own body, like an animate portrait of Dorian Grey. Another man prescribes the swallowing of bed bugs.
“These superstitions are nothing but the thought processes of human beings about an organ they have never seen,” Mishra tells me over the phone. The brain is hidden, he explains: the heart beats, the stomach growls or aches, but the brain is imperceptible—“always a mystery in life.”
In death, however, lies an opportunity for a course-correct. Mishra visited the Brain Museum in Bangalore in 2003, for a 15-day graduate course in neuropathology. “I was thrilled,” he remembers. “I was very happy to hold a full brain in my hand.” It was a first for him, and it made an impact. Now he carries photos of brains with him when he travels, and dried apricots as small, tactile stand-ins—antidotes to abstraction. “This is your brain. It is soft. It doesn’t break like a bone,” he tells epileptics he meets. “Then they know they can treat it.”
He also carries his donor card. Before his fortnight in Bangalore was up, 15 years ago, Mishra pledged his own brain to the pathologists at NIMHANS.
Dr. Anita Mahadevan, who, since Dr. Shankar’s retirement, runs both the Brain Museum and the Brain Bank, has been delayed. A man has died, and autopsy can’t wait long. When she arrives, she fills me in: the patient’s tuberculosis had spread to his brain, causing vomiting and seizures in his final hours. His referral to NIMHANS came too late to save his life.
Mahadevan has a good teacher’s attitude of focused, benign attention when she speaks. Her enthusiasm for her work is magnetic: “I want to make people realize that it’s such a beautiful organ,” she says. She has always wanted to be a pathologist. “Surgeons are doers. They want to set things right,” she explains. “Pathology is like solving puzzles. Pathologists are detectives.”
The good news, from a sleuth’s perspective, is that the man’s family has consented to donate his brain for research. In fact, refusals are rare. “Mostly the attitude is: my family member has died. Let someone else’s live,” Mahadevan says. “There’s a lot of altruism.” So half of the man’s brain will be kept frozen at -80 degrees C (-112F) in the NIMHANS Brain Bank, an archive of tissue kept by for future research.
The other half—the domain of the museum—will be fixed in formalin, making it useless for biochemical testing but stable enough for analysis under the microscope. This particular brain will likely not be mounted for display. That’s a distinction typically reserved, in the words of Shwetha Durgad, a PhD student who works on the museum team, for “picture perfect” specimens: the ones with obvious, dramatic lesions.
But despite the altruism of the bereaved, Mahadevan is facing a supply problem. This is only her fourteenth specimen of the year. “World-over, the rate of autopsies has declined. We used to reach almost 300 per year—that was before the MRI,” she says.
Modern brain imaging allows doctors to spot problems sooner, and save more lives. But when patients die, the shadow-pictures generated by the huge, looping MRI rig have often already produced a reliable-enough diagnosis: doctors have little incentive to ask for an autopsy, and family members little reason to agree to one.
Had the woman called “neurocysticercosis – cerebral” fallen ill in the years after NIMHANS acquired an MRI machine, even a CT scanner, she might never have been misdiagnosed as psychotic: the tapeworm pits would have been clear in the ante-mortem images. But had she died anyway, her physicians might have declined to call a pathologist. Her specimen might never have wound up on the museum shelf.
That’s a problem for scientists like Mahadevan, because while an MRI might tell you what’s going on, there are further questions that need to be asked. “Why is the nerve cell dying? What can we do to prevent it? Can we find a treatment? All this requires brain tissue, on which you can do a biochemistry, look at electron microscopy, use omics technologies,” Mahadevan explains. The investigative tools are improving, even as the stocks of diseased brain tissue are in decline.
And the NIMHANS pathologists only have the capacity to perform autopsies within a limited geographical radius. While Mahadevan gets to work trying to kick-start satellite brain banks across the country, living, local organ donors are growing ever more important.
Which means that the Brain Museum’s hoard of unchangeable, picture-perfect specimens are stepping with fresh urgency into their ambassadorial role: advocates for science. A stack of cards with information about the organ donor scheme sit on a table by the door. “First we give the museum visit, then we tell about donation. If people are interested, we give them a card,” Shwetha Durgad tells me. The pledge numbers are slowly ticking upwards.
A teenager will become the country's first tribal queen in almost 50 years.
Masalanabo Modjadji was three months old when her mother died. In that moment, she ascended to the throne of the Balobedu, a tribe in South Africa's northern Limpopo province that is the country’s only queendom. Modjadji currently lives near Johannesburg as a (relatively) normal 13-year-old. When she turns 18, however, she will officially be crowned Queen Modjadji VII, the "Rain Queen," the latest in a line that's believed to bring rain to a parched country.
Modjadji’s reign will be different than those of her three immediate predecessors, who were queens in name only after the apartheid regime demoted them to chieftain status in 1972. Two years ago, former President Jacob Zuma changed things back, and made the Balobedu one of the handful of tribal monarchies officially recognized by the South African state. When she comes of age, Modjadji will rule at the same level as the powerful Zulu and Xhosa kings. Though they oversee much larger kingdoms, she will still hold influence over more than 100 villages, and receive a healthy government paycheck.
In April, Zuma and his successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, traveled north for a celebration of Modjadji’s restoration. They sat on either side of the male regent who currently rules in her stead and the queen-in-waiting herself—slightly hunched, with her arms folded across a bright yellow dress and a beaded band ringing her head.
“They gave her title back because she is the one who makes it rain,” says local resident Alpheus Ranatapa on a hot, dry morning in early September. “We were happy. Ramaphosa came here to restore our tradition.”
Sehlakong, the administrative capital and principal village of Modjadji’s realm, is perched on the north-facing slope of the Modjadji Nature Reserve, a mountain forest known internationally for its population of rare cycad trees. Shorter ones resemble giant, top-heavy pineapples, while taller, thinner ones look more like squat palms. Clumps of these old, hardy trees sprout vertiginously off the ridge that forms the spine of the reserve. A valley studded with settlements rolls away from the mountain to the south, while to the east, mountains stack one behind the other until they gently fade to blue.
The landscape, extending through Kruger National Park and Mozambique to the east, is just emerging from a dry winter, and bushfires recently scorched the scrub. Many of the cycad trunks are covered in a sooty deposit that comes off on your clothes as you brush past. According to locals, helicopters had to douse the mountain with water a few weeks back. It is a place where rain is life, and remains the source of Modjadji’s ancestral power.
A common origin story holds that the Balobedu settled in the area about 400 years ago, after migrating south from present-day Zimbabwe. The tribe was ruled then by men, and competition for succession was fierce and fratricidal. Claiming prophetic guidance, the last Balobedu king, it is said, impregnated his daughter to start a line of female leaders.
In the years after Modjadji I’s inauguration, around 1800, the Balobedu were a small and largely peaceful tribe. Lacking military power, Modjadji I governed instead through the politics of mystique. “All over southern Africa, chiefs had official rainmakers. The power of the chief and the power of the rainmaker were separate. But in Modjadji, they were combined,” says Isak Niehaus, a social anthropologist from the Western Cape who is now at Brunel University in London. Powerful rivals, such as the Zulu king, Shaka, didn’t attack the Balobedu. Instead, their emissaries went before Modjadji to ask for rain.
Modjadji I and II ruled unimpeded through most of the 19th century. Each October, the queen asked for rain through traditional rituals. She took “wives” from surrounding tribes, who were then paired off with royal men, which helped build alliances, Niehaus says. According to Balobedu tradition, each holder of the title was fated to commit suicide by poison at the end of her reign—but the Rain Queen herself was held to be immortal.
The Rain Queen also was not to show her face in public, even to her subjects, which led to a great deal of speculation when Europeans colonists began to arrive. In the 1880s, H. Rider Haggard, the British author of King Solomon’s Mines, brought the notion of an African queendom to an international audience with the novel She: A History of Adventure—with, in classic Victorian fashion, a white sorceress ruling over a “Lost World.” Historical records suggest at least one of the early Rain Queens may indeed have been light-skinned, but such accounts should be taken with a healthy pinch of salt: European settlers probably met with surrogates instead, and perhaps for good reason.
“There was some defiance from our people [to] paying tax. Our people became afraid that if we present the queen to them they may kill her, because that was the time when [neighboring ruler] King Makgoba was beheaded,” says Moshakge Molokwane, the royal council secretary and a cousin of Modjadji. “So they presented an old woman and said it was the queen.”
Northern Limpopo was among the last places in modern-day South Africa to be occupied by Boer settlers coming up from the Cape. Although missionaries and a handful of settlers arrived in the region earlier, things came to a head in the 1890s, when Boer authorities started to parcel tribal land into farms. Uncharacteristically, the Balobedu were among the first tribes to fight back, but the resistance was swiftly and harshly put down by the white authorities. Modjadji II followed custom and committed ritual suicide. She was the last Rain Queen to do so.
Modjadji’s political power continued to derive from the rain she was associated with, which fell on her neighbors’ soil as much as her own, even as successive colonial administrators stripped land from tribes, and regulated the use of their remaining forests and fields. Although groups such as the Balobedu are ethnically diverse, settler administrators—followed, from 1948, by the apartheid regime—aimed to lump them into homogenous, self-governing areas. In 1972, the Balobedu were folded into the Lebowa “homeland,” and Modjadji IV was officially relegated from queen to chief.
After apartheid ended in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) took power at the head of a new constitutional democracy. The ANC saw traditional tribal leaders as repositories of votes and legitimacy—local power-brokers with influence and tangible roots in the precolonial past—according to a report from the Centre for Civil Society, University of KwaZulu Natal. President Mandela personally courted Modjadji V and other tribal leaders. When Modjadji VI died in 2005, after serving for just two years, Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, called her “a symbol of hope and unity,” according to The New York Times. (Modjadji VI, who doctors say died of chronic meningitis at just 27, was a figure both beloved and divisive, and she bucked many of the traditions associated with her position. One branch of the royal family still insists that her daughter, Modjadji VII, should not be permitted to take the throne.)
In 2004, the government launched a commission to attempt to unwind the tangle of competing leadership claims left by colonial and apartheid-era policies, and determine which leaders should have what status. Progress was slow and hotly contested, including in court, but the restoration of Modjadji’s queenship was one outcome. Although she has not yet taken power, the judgment is already steering over five million South African rands (about $330,000) a year through the coffers of the regent and royal council, as well as paying Modjadji’s way through school.
In a parking lot in Sehlakong, the royal council secretary Molokwane—who is known as “Ball Pen,” a moniker dating to his days as a schoolteacher—expresses hope that the restoration of the crown will reinforce Modjadji’s dominion over neighboring tribal chiefs. These leaders, he says, had been installed by white administrators on land that Modjadji traditionally oversaw. “We’re not going to threaten their status as senior traditional leaders,” he says. “They should just know that they are the subjects of Queen Modjadji.”
Separately, Molokwane says the restoration has given the Balobedu the ear of the government in South Africa’s bitter, complex debate over expropriating land from white farmers and giving it to black owners as a form of restitution and to address racial disparities that have persisted since apartheid. Local leaders pressed their claims on President Ramaphosa during his April visit, and have listed nearly 250 local farms that they see as their rightful property. No one knows if these wishes will be granted, but controversy is sure to continue.
The fate of the land may not be determined by the time Modjadji VII officially takes her crown, but the restoration of the Rain Queen has been significant for the Balobedu—both financially and symbolically. “The prestige was always there,” Molokwane says. “But we can now say we’re at an equal footing with the king of the Zulus.”
It was supposed to be the largest stadium ever built. And the Deutsches Stadium would have been a behemoth—almost 875 yards long, almost 500 yards wide and 100 yards tall. It was meant to be hold more than 400,000 people. By capacity, the largest football stadium in the United States today is Michigan Stadium, in Ann Arbor, which can fit around 107,000 spectators.
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime started working on this extravagant plan in 1937; a cornerstone was laid in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1938. Before the actual stadium was built, though, the Nazi Party’s engineers created a test model, about 25 miles outside of the city, near a small Bavarian village, on a hillside that had the same grade as the planned stadium. Over the course of 18 months, German workers built a stretch of stadium seating that could hold 40,000 people, a tenth of the stadium’s planned capacity.
The giant wall of seating stretched so high up the hillside that a block of people sitting at the top looked like a fuzzy black patch. (The view from the bad seats would not have been much of a view at all, though Albert Speer, the project’s designer, reportedly said that it wasn’t as bad as he imagined.) The workers had poured concrete foundations into the hillside and built the seats out of wood from the surrounding Bavarian forest.
When Hitler came to visit in March 1938, he was happy with results of the test. He imagined that after 1940, every future round of Olympic games would be held in the giant stadium he was building—even though its dimensions didn’t conform to Olympic standards. "That's totally unimportant," he said. “It is we who will determine how the sporting field is measured."
But after the start of World War II, work on the grand stadium and the test model stopped. During the war, Allied troops destroyed much of a nearby village, and the wood from the stadium seating was salvaged to rebuild the town. But the concrete foundations remain, overgrown and ignored, if not forgotten.
In the past couple decades, though, some of the forest that grew over the test model of the unfinished stadium has been cleared away. In 2002, the site was protected as a historic monument. The foundations remain in the ground, concrete reminders of the hubris of Hitler and of his downfall.
They've been trying to stop coal mining in Germany's Hambach Forest.
In early September, police in Germany began evicting and dismantling a treehouse protest camp in what remains of Hambach Forest, an ancient forest in the country's west. Protestors have occupied the site continuously since 2014, when they moved in to protest clearcutting and mining in the woods. Since then, they've built dozens of connected "treehouse villages" there, accessible by rope and ladder, to prevent said trees from being cut down. The eviction was halted this past Wednesday, September 19, following the death of a journalist, Steffen Meyn, who fell from a suspension bridge. It is unclear whether the camp will survive.
Hambach Forest is located near Germany's Belgian border, approximately 23 miles west of Cologne. It's about 12,000 years old, and once covered 13,590 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan. Most of the trees are oak and hornbeam. While we've learned a certain amount about the animals who live there—for example, it is home to the endangered Bechstein's bat, known for its long, curl-tipped ears—very little research has been done on the forest as a whole. As National Geographic put it earlier this year, "Hambach itself seems to have never been the focus of its own bottom-up ecological assessment."
Whatever else this ecosystem contains, we do know that it sits on top of a huge deposit of lignite, a low-grade coal usually used to generate electricity. In the late 1970s, the German energy company RWE bought the forest, and began chopping down trees and digging an open-pit lignite mine. In the years since, about 90 percent of the forest has been cleared in order to expand the mine, which is the largest in Germany.
RWE has undertaken measures to mitigate the mining's impact—as a representative detailed to National Geographic, they build bat houses, relocate endangered species, and replant a nearby area with seeds and shoots sourced from Hambach. When mining is finished in a few years, the pit will become a recreational lake, a strategy often used at former extraction sites in Germany.
Critics think this is too little, too late, and that the forest should not be cut and dug up in the first place. They cite the climate impact of lignite—which, when burned, releases more carbon dioxide per ton than any other fuel source—as well as the history, scientific knowledge, and wildlife that are being lost along with the land. When protestors first moved into the forest in 2012, they began building platforms in some of the largest trees. That first year, they stayed the length of the cutting season, which runs from October through March. Some returned in 2014, and the community has maintained a steady presence since then. "The tree houses were built as living barricades," activist Pello explained to DW in 2017. "As long as somebody is up there, they cannot cut the tree."
At this point, according to the community's official website, there are dozens of treehouses in the forest, which have names like "Bolo," "Schwaukel," and "Lollipop." Many are connected with walkways to form villages, also with cute names: "Lazytown," "Cozytown," "Beechtown." They're accessible by ropes and ladders, and some are equipped with solar electricity and internet. Their occupants include students, part-time residents, and committed off-the-gridders. "Everyone has different reasons, motivations, and action methods," the website explains. "What connects us is the wish to overcome exploitation of people and nature."
The website, as well as interviews occupants have granted to local and international outlets, give an idea of daily life at the site. They cook communally, eating donated and dumpster-dived vegan food, and washing dishes with recycled rainwater. Nights often end with bonfire singalongs. Through last year, they gave monthly public tours of the forest, which often drew hundreds of people.
They also plan actions, and put time into "develop[ing] infrastructure … physically, but also mentally and emotionally," as one occupant told Democracy Now!. For instance, many of the treehouses are equipped with lock-ons, devices that allow activists to attach themselves to infrastructural elements, like treehouses or the trees themselves. Over the past few weeks of strife, the community has put out public calls for mental health workers to visit the site.
Clashes between protestors and RWE representatives are frequent. In 2015, activists chained themselves to the tracks of a private train line used for moving lignite, which stopped traffic. The next year, RWE workers crossed what occupiers had previously designated as a "red line" between the logged areas and and the camp, spurring a large-scale police intervention. The year after that, activists won a temporary victory when a court order halted the expansion of the mine for four months, but soon after, RWE successfully appealed. Each side has accused the other of violence on multiple occasions, and there have been several other eviction attempts.
The latest began last Thursday, September 11, in the morning. "The state's Construction Ministry said the structures occupied by anti-coal activists are a fire hazard and do not conform to building regulations," DW reported. Police came to the camp, gave the activists 30 minutes to vacate, and then began evicting them, using cranes to reach those in tree platforms.
Although it is unclear what will happen next, everyone seems to agree on the overall likely outcome. "One day this forest will be completely bulldozed to the ground and our camp will be cleared, we are aware of that," an activist calling himself Joe told DW in 2016. "But for us, it's about making a statement."
For more than half a century, it was just a rumor. As London’s river boat pilots passed by Waterloo Bridge (“The Ladies’ Bridge,” as some of them called it) they’d tell a story about the women who had built the bridge during World War II. But the idea that women had been largely involved in building Waterloo Bridge wasn’t included in any official history of the structure, or detailed in any records. During the new bridge’s opening ceremony, on December 10, 1945, then-Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison had declared that “the men that built Waterloo Bridge are fortunate men.” It wasn’t until 2015 that the hard work of these women could be confirmed, by the historian Christine Wall, thanks to a series of photographs she found.
Eight years prior to her discovery, Wall had collaborated with the filmmaker Karen Livesey on a documentary called The Ladies Bridge. It explores the stories of women working on Waterloo Bridge and records first-hand the experiences of a variety of wartime workers who were women. “There was jobs galore. There was absolutely jobs galore. You could go anywhere,” recounts one woman in the film.
But as Wall notes in the film, despite well-documented accounts of women working in munitions factories, or on the railway, stories of women who worked in construction during the war are quite rare. According to Wall, nearly 25,000 women were working in the British construction industry by 1944. (Some things don’t change: she also notes that wartime women construction workers were paid far less money than their male counterparts). Wall did manage to find photographs in the Imperial War Museum's archive of women construction workers during the war —but nothing relating to the bridge.
Rebuilding Waterloo Bridge was a crucial project. The first Waterloo Bridge opened in 1817, but in 1923, London County Council realized the bridge had structural problems and, two years later, added a temporary framework. Eventually, the government decided it was best to tear the whole thing down and replace it, a process that began in 1934. By the time war broke out in 1939, 500 men were reportedly working on the bridge; by 1941, that number had dropped to 50. And so, as with other wartime labor shortages, the contractor, Peter Lind & Company, drafted in women to do the work. According to the U.K.-based Women's Engineering Society, around 350 women worked on Waterloo Bridge.
Peter Lind & Company was liquidated in the 1980s, and the firm's employment records have long since vanished. But Betty Lind Jaeger, the daughter of Peter Lind, did emerge during Wall’s research. In the documentary, she recounts visiting the bridge and seeing women construction workers. Still, Wall needed irrefutable evidence.
And in 2015, she finally found it, while searching online in the Bradford Museum of Film and Television archives. It was a series of photographs, taken in 1944 by a photographer for The Daily Herald newspaper, that show women welders dismantling the old Waterloo Bridge. Because of Wall's discovery, Historic England, the British government's official historic preservation body, finally incorporated this history into its record of the bridge as a heritage site.
A fresh perspective on the fragility and resilience or our world.
From the window of her office in New Haven, Connecticut, Karen Seto sees a sea of green. A professor of geography and urbanization science at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Seto can observe in that scene seemingly countless different shades, shapes of leaves, and natural textures. It's familiar and pretty, but there’s only so much that our eyes can wring from a view like that. There’s a lot that we can't see.
If Seto could see in the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum—outside of the range of human vision—a glance would reveal a wealth of other information. She could ascertain which leaves are overheated, or parched. In the adjacent buildings, she could peer beyond brick, glass, or steel, to the materials that comprise them. And if she could take this all in from space, she could see how her view fits in among the university's Gothic roofs, sports fields, and criss-crossing walking paths.
But we can see like that, with the right technology. “Just as dogs can hear sounds inaudible to humans, sensors aboard satellites are able to ‘see’ what our eyes cannot,” write Seto and her coauthor Meredith Reba, a research associate, in their new book, City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet. Seto and Reba dove into a trove of largely open-access satellite images of cities, then used image processing tools to adjust them, and highlight hidden dynamics or patterns that emerge over time. They can show the way heat bakes different parts of an urban area, how much sediment is building up in stagnant water, or how a landscape sprouts back to life in the aftermath of a disaster.
The massive quantities of raw data produced by these sensors can be overwhelming, so Seto and Reba began fiddling to home in on specific spectral combinations. Their tinkered-with images are thrillingly uncommon ways to see a place—familiar or otherwise—and document what happened there or what could lie ahead. Some of their formulas put the spotlight on environmental challenges—from melting ice to standing water to the long tail of nuclear fallout. The images they produced can be stark and startling.
In Seto and Reba's images, a tornado’s path through Joplin, Missouri, is visible as a purple gash. The flanks of the Niger River, in Timbuktu, Mali, are a scalding red. Stagnant silt in Chittagong, Bangladesh—from landslides, floods, and insufficient infrastructure—is a diffuse turquoise. The land around McMurdo Station in Antarctica is a rich, velvety brown against the white-blue ice surrounding it.
There's a lot that can be learned from seeing the world this way, at a distance, with different eyes. “The aim was to use these images to draw the reader in,” Seto says. “To show, ‘Hey, we’re living on this incredibly beautiful planet, but it’s incredibly vulnerable, as well.’” If the ice around McMurdo melts, for example, it could flood the instruments and grind research to a halt—and be a harbinger of widespread climatic changes that would impact cities all over the world.
The images also draw attention to the resilience of both cities and nature. In the satellite images of Joplin, Seto and Reba made the vegetation appear spectacular green, and the structures and bare soil a deep purple. The tornado—one of the costliest and deadliest twisters in U.S. history—churned up both of these land covers, and its path mutes both into a light-purple smear. (The near-infrared data, with false colors, shows these differences more starkly than visible light would.) In another image, taken four years later, the gash has faded. Vegetation sprouted back to life, houses were rebuilt, and the city restored its street grid. "Using remote sensing imagery accentuates the difference between the two land covers," Reba writes in an email. In the later image, "We are starting to see the clear distinction between urban structures and vegetation again."
The same goes for the area around Pripyat, Ukraine, but in the opposite direction. Before the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the area was tidy, gridded cropland. Decades later, without people and their efforts to tame the landscape, wild vegetation reclaimed those areas and the straight lines began to fade. A fresh perspective can make the world seem like an entirely new place.
Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Seto and Reba's City Unseen.
But the famous lava lake atop Kīlauea has disappeared.
For the first time in more than four months, visitors can enter Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park and get a little bit closer to Kīlauea, the volcano that erupted in May, spilling massive amounts of lava across the island and into the ocean.
In the past, one of the park’s main attractions was the red-hot lake of lava atop the volcano’s summit. But now, after months of volcanic activity, the lake is gone. "There is no glow at all," Shanelle Saunders, a park spokesperson, told the Associated Press. Another park employee described the summit as “a massive, colossal hole."
Scientists are still trying to understand why the lava lake has disappeared (it’s more complicated than “it all flowed away”) and whether it will return at some point in the future. For now, though, the park has another attraction. Without the glow of lava, “The stars right now are incredible,” Saunders said.
It's filled with funny accounts from Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod expedition.
On January 29, 1908, the crew of the Nimrod landed at Antarctica's McMurdo Sound. Led by Ernest Shackleton—the first of three trips he commanded—the small team of explorers would spend the next two years ranging over the continent. Although they never achieved their chief objective of reaching the geographic South Pole, they did bring the first motorcar to Antarctica and summit Mount Erebus for the first time.
To while away the lonely hours when they couldn't be outside, they also wrote, illustrated, and printed a book—the first one ever made on that continent. Called the Aurora Australis, one copy of the book is up for auction tomorrow, September 25, 2018, at Bonham's, part of a larger sale focused on exploration and travel.
Winter in Antarctica is long and dark, and the crew had to spend much of it in a small hut on the west side of the Ross Archipelago. In addition to the many materials necessary for survival and science, Shackleton made sure to bring along some fun activities to stave off what he called "polar ennui." As he details in The Heart of the Antarctic, these included hockey sticks, a football, a gramophone and records, and "a printing press with type, rollers, paper and other necessities, for the production of a book during the winter night."
When winter came, he continues, several of the men "spent much time in the production of the 'Aurora Australis,' the first book ever written, printed, illustrated and bound in the Antarctic." For the rest of the materials, they reused whatever they had handy, including old crates of food, cleaned and planed down by Bernard Day, normally the expedition's mechanic. (The particular copy up for sale says "OATMEAL" on the inside front cover, and is "backed in leather from a horse harness," according to Bonham's.)
The expedition artist George Marston illustrated the book. It was typeset and printed by Ernest Joyce, normally in charge of dogs and sledges, and Frank Wild, who handled provisions. This was a laborious process that involved heating the inking plate with a candle, "so that the ink would keep reasonably thin in consistency," and waiting until everyone was asleep to do the actual printing, so their movements wouldn't vibrate all the lines into squiggles.
Shackleton served as editor, and solicited submissions from the crew. He chose to include everything from an interview with an Emperor Penguin to a tongue-in-cheek, faux-Biblical account of the expedition. In one chapter, an anonymous messman details the trials and tribulations of his job. In another, the geologist Douglas Mawson describes an journey to an imaginary place called Bathybia, hidden inside an Antarctic volcano, where fungi grow and temperatures reach a balmy 70 degrees. (You can read the entire digitized book over at archive.org.)
They printed about 100 copies, which they later distributed to friends and benefactors. Just under 70 are currently accounted for. (Occasionally a new one is found—as when, in 2006, someone located the MARMALADE edition in a stable in Northumberland, England.) If nothing else, Shackleton writes, the book "at least assisted materially to guard us from the danger of lack of occupation during the polar night."
The book is Lot 55 at the auction, which also includes a number of other Antarctic travelogues, maps, and paintings. It is expected to fetch between $70,000 and $100,000. Not bad for something made out of an old oatmeal crate.
But they quickly forget the smells of their own nests.
For many people, smell of food and smell of home are one and the same. Not so for desert ants, which, according to new research, are far more likely to hold on to olfactory memories of a meal than a nest.
Scientists from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology have been studying how Cataglyphis fortis—desert ants that live in saltpans of North Africa—navigate home to their respective nests. It's been documented that they, amazingly, can use polarized light and footstep-counts to get close to their nests, but then they must rely on smell to get them back to these tiny holes in the ground. The ants use smell to find food, too, and the researchers observed that their food-memory was particularly strong. This led to the question of whether the two categories of memory—though both are related to smell—might be managed by distinct processes in the brain.
So the team devised an experiment, in a saltpan close to the Tunisian village of Menzel Chaker that hosts some 900 nests. Using crumbs of locally made biscuits and tiny tubes containing a variety of food scents, they tested just what these ants remember. The results, discussed in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were stark. After a single encounter with food, the ants could remember its scent, retain that memory for their entire lives, and distinguish among 14 different food odors. They had a harder time with the nest odor, requiring between five and 10 encounters with the scent before it was able to guide them home. What’s more, the ants showed no sign of remembering that nest odor following an interval between the smell being removed and then reintroduced.
In a release, coauthor Markus Knaden explains the logic behind this cognitive gap. Because ants encounter such a wide variety of foods while foraging and can rely on little but smell to locate those foods, they have a critical incentive to sharpen their ability to sniff out the good stuff and squirrel that memory away. When trying to find its nest, however, all an ant needs to retain is the smell of home from the moment it left, and that smell is unlikely to change much during the tenant’s short life.
The scientists hope to move their experiments out of the ants’ natural habitat and into the lab, where cell imaging techniques can show what’s actually going on in those teeny, tiny brains.
The New Jersey institution is home to a collection of more than 2,000 of these often overlooked items.
The Newark Public Library in Newark, New Jersey, has an unusual collection that can’t be found in its stacks. Stored in the library’s Special Collections department, in one filing cabinet and 61 archival Solander boxes—some of which are so full their latches barely close—are over 2,000 shopping bags. Meticulously cataloged by geographic location, size, and theme, the collection records the history of graphics, culture, and everyday life from the mid-20th century to the current day.
Like most great collections, it owes its existence to the foresight and enthusiasm of its initial curator, the former librarian, William J. Dane. Dane, who referred to himself as the library’s “Keeper of the Prints,” started the bag collection in 1976. Dane was also responsible for the institution’s other paper collections, a mesmerizing trove of ephemera including travel posters, greeting cards, wallpaper, menus, autographs, pop-up books, and more.
According to Nadine Sergejeff, current Special Collections and Digital Initiatives Librarian, Dane was a great admirer of graphic design who “loved ‘fun’ collections and he greatly enjoyed selecting and showing these bags for others to appreciate.” Sergejeff says the collection was acquired and grows through a somewhat informal, grassroots effort: “Most were donated by staffers, patrons, and collectors throughout the country. We continue to receive gifts to this day.”
The bags are as much a record of what is no longer here as what is, and they tell some especially poignant stories about the history of New York and New Jersey in particular.
One of the most iconic bags is from Bonwit Teller, a now-defunct department store that was a glamorous anchor of the 20th-century Fifth Avenue retail scene. Its signature bouquets of violets were a common sight to anyone who lived on the East Coast, appearing on everything from the store’s hat boxes to its charge cards. Also familiar to New Yorkers of a certain era is the story of how the company’s Art Deco Manhattan location was demolished by Donald Trump in 1980 to make way for Trump Tower. Although Trump promised to preserve a pair of the building’s Deco female reliefs for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the panels were destroyed, the developer notoriously claiming them to be “without artistic merit” and ultimately too costly and time consuming to save.
Of a similar time and place is a bag from restaurant La Côte Basque, a legendary Manhattan eatery known less for its food than for its immortalization by the author Truman Capote in his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers. The restaurant, a clubhouse of sorts for the city’s most prominent society ladies, served as the setting for “La Côte Basque,” a chapter of the book in which Capote betrayed the confidences of the women with whom he routinely dined. Excerpted by Esquire magazine in November 1975 under the title “La Côte Basque, 1965,” the short piece ended most of the friendships Capote so professed to enjoy and was thought by many to have directly contributed to his personal and professional demise.
A brightly colored Christmas bag featuring a partridge in a vibrant pink-and-green pear tree from the once-thriving Arnold Constable department store tells the story of a golden age in New York’s retail history. At the time of its closing in March of 1975, it was considered New York’s oldest department store, having opened in 1825. Although it would occupy space in several locations over its run, in the late 1800s it was located in the heart of what was then known as “Ladies’ Mile,” a shopping district that catered to the “carriage trade” (basically, wealthy consumers brought to the area by carriage). The building occupied by the Constable store still stands, its imposing mansard roofs a favorite among Instagrammers.
Also under the category of local history is a bag from Bamberger’s, a department store that opened in Newark in the 1890s, barely a mile from the library. Known for dramatic publicity stunts, the company purchased a plane in 1919 to make deliveries, a wildly unusual service at the time. The first shipment was a bag of silverware delivered via parachute. Later the plane would be used to drop off an actual passenger from New York for a shopping day at the Newark store.
As remarkable as the store itself was its founder, Louis Bamberger. According to Michael J. Lisicky, author of Bamberger’s: New Jersey’s Greatest Store, Bamberger sold the business to R.H. Macy & Co. on June 29, 1929, four months before the stock market crash. Although the exact amount of the sale is still unknown (figures range from $25 million to $50 million), what is known is that Bamberger was paid in cash. In September of that same year, on Bamberger’s last day of work, he called in 235 of his longest-serving employees (minus any executives) and distributed $1 million among them.
Also a notable item in the collection is a 1986 Bloomingdale’s bag with a graphic by Mark Kostabi, a painter and sculptor with a somewhat controversial place in the history of art. Known for openly lauding his assembly line method of painting—his staff created the work, and he signed each piece at the end—Kostabi marketed himself as much a branding genius as an artistic one, making him a perfect fit for a store known for its branding (the library has no less than five full Solander boxes of “Bloomies” bags). He incorporated many of his trademark, surrealist designs in the bag’s design: faceless hat-wearing figures, everyday objects, and, of course, his signature on the bottom.
But it wasn’t just Kostabi: The history of pop culture is represented here in so many ways. One stand out is a bag that refers to John Lennon’s “Bag One Portfolio,” a series of provocative lithographs Lennon created in 1969 for his then-new bride, Yoko Ono. Illustrating the famous couple’s wedding and honeymoon as well as their legendary “Bed-In,” the collection of sketches caused a controversy when first exhibited at the London Arts Gallery in January 1970. Considered indecent, eight of the 14 doodles were confiscated by Scotland Yard on the second day of the exhibit. Originally packaged as a set in a plastic valise-type bag (which the library does not have in its holdings), today the lithographs are coveted by serious art collectors and are part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Just across the river from the library, Henri Bendel and Lord & Taylor, two of the last surviving grande dames of American department store history, have announced the eminent shuttering of their Fifth Avenue flagships, ending a combined 315 years in trade. Like so many other dozens of establishments represented in the library’s boxes, their bags will soon become part of the past rather than the present. And once they do, these seemingly mundane objects will leave us to find clues about the tastes and standards of the eras in which they were used. While they may not unlock the key to language like the Rosetta Stone or the mysteries of an ancient world like the pyramids, they certainly teach us to see history in the ordinary.
Movie theaters may have changed, but there's still something about those big, classic signs.
Classic movie palace marquees once jutted out over sidewalks in virtually every city or town across the U.S., grabbing the attention of passersby with giant letters and architectural filigree. Movies theaters have of course changed drastically since the golden age of matinees, but many beautiful marquees remain. Some are still in use at surviving theaters, or have been repurposed for new tenants. Others sit abandoned or ignored, hinting at a faded grandeur. To celebrate the vintage marquees that are still hanging on—whether they're in use or not—we're collecting photos of them!
We want to see pictures of the incredible vintage marquees in your area. Fill out the form below to tell us a little about your favorite local marquee and why you think it’s special. Then email your best, Instagram-ready picture of the sign to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line “Marvelous Marquees.” We’ll choose a selection of our favorites and share them in an upcoming article.
With the right training, feral donkeys go from zero to hero.
A NASA facility in California has been dealing with odd interference. The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, one of three worldwide facilities of the Deep Space Network that tracks and communicates with far-off spacecrafts, lies in the dry, often scorching heart of the Mojave Desert. But when it gets particularly hot, something strange happens. The office foyer fills with donkeys, preventing scientists from entering or leaving the building.
Despite several large removal efforts, “wild” donkeys, or burros, are abundant in the Mojave Desert. Seeking shade, they crowd beneath trees, buildings, and, on occasion, incredibly important NASA satellites. But donkey interference, as silly as it sounds, extends far beyond the day-to-day disruption of space scientists. According to Mark Meyers, executive director of Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue (PVDR), there are too many donkeys in America, and we simply don’t know what to do with them.
“Places like Death Valley, the Mojave National Preserve, Fort Irwin, and the Naval Air Weapons Station [China Lake] all have giant donkey populations,” says Meyers. “There’s just no burro money to manage them.”
That’s where Meyers comes in. Peaceful Valley, the largest rescue organization of its kind, has recently been tasked with removing thousands of donkeys from national parks across the country. Meyers spends his days venturing into these donkey hot zones, catching them using humane water traps (an enclosed space with water, food, and no exit), and bringing them to his Texas headquarters. But what does one do with tens of thousands of formerly feral donkeys? Historically, not too much. But Meyers and his team are working to change that. At PVDR, donkeys are sorted, taken to donkey school, and given a new life, often as companion donkeys or pets. But burros with a wild side, it turns out, are huge boons for ranchers across the U.S. seeking effective, humane ways to protect their herds. With the help of PVDR, unwanted “wild” donkeys are becoming guardians, set out to pasture with goats, sheep, and even cattle, to keep them safe from predators.
The plight of the American donkey is a strange one—the animal has been simultaneously federally protected and completely overlooked. But the U.S. didn’t always have a donkey problem. In fact, for a long time, it didn’t have donkeys at all. Brought into the country by the Spanish and Portuguese, donkeys and mules were used on farms for a variety of agricultural work, and as pack animals on the Oregon Trail. During the Gold Rush, they toted water, ore, and supplies to camps—and were often taken into mines. But with the development of industrial and agricultural technology, and the end of the Gold Rush, owners left their animals behind.
That wasn’t the end of the rope for the American donkey, though. With few natural predators and an impressive reproduction rate, herds of burros can double in four to five years. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the Department of the Interior began taking issue with the “veritable pests,” who destroyed trails and forced out the antelope, in the 1920s. Over the next few decades, thousands of burros were rounded up and shot in Death Valley and the Grand Canyon.
At the same time, wild horses (which tend to garner a bit more public sympathy) were caught up in a similar situation. But “mustanging,” or shooting wild mustangs, angered activists and those who viewed them as equine embodiments of the “Spirit of the West.” Congress, agreeing to preserve these eminent equine relics of the Wild West, grouped the two species together, unanimously passing the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which effectively protected wild horses and burros on any land belonging to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Services.
Since then, the government has struggled to control populations in national parks, reservations, and natural preserves. The government spent over one million dollars in the 1980s capturing and retaining around 6,000 burros from Death Valley National Monument. Meyers witnessed the change firsthand. “We went from seeing donkeys all the time to seeing none,” he says. But after federal funding ran out, the donkey population once again skyrocketed. Meyers estimates there are nearly 3,000 donkeys in Death Valley National Park today.
And no matter how adorable they may be, donkey takeovers pose a big problem. Technically an invasive species, the donkey can quickly wreak havoc on ecosystems. When water and food are scarce, donkeys outcompete native species with similar diets such as bighorn sheep and desert tortoises. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, Death Valley burros “ate a disproportionate amount of native perennial grasses,” claiming “grasses were up to 10 times more abundant in areas protected from burros.”
However, Meyers notes that the impact of burros on desert ecosystems isn’t always negative. Springs in Death Valley are often surrounded by dense vegetation, thick reeds, and trees that can obscure the path to the water. According to Meyers, burros will barrel into that vegetation, creating access to that water. “Donkeys will also dig a hole four feet deep just to find water, making it available for other animals as well,” he notes. “So if you remove the burros, you’re removing access to water for deer, bighorns, and everything else.”
But when donkeys in search of water have to get creative, they can cause big problems in the human world. Thirsty donkeys venture into towns, crossing busy streets and even causing car accidents. At Fort Irwin, a major military training base in the Mojave Desert, donkeys congregate beneath the only source of shade they can find, large targets set up throughout the base. When the soldiers in training hit their targets, Meyers says, they blow up the creatures standing beneath them, too.
The government has attempted to use various tactics, from sterilization to, as a last resort, shooting them. More recently, burros have been rounded up en masse by helicopter and placed in government holdings. But there are simply too many of them, and they don’t get adopted fast enough. Meyers says there are currently around 43,000 horses and donkeys in holding, which costs the government (and taxpayers) somewhere around $49 million per year. Once a donkey turns 10, though, it’s considered unadoptable and can be sold—which, technically, makes it available for slaughter.
Meyers’s love affair with donkeys began when his wife bought a donkey as a companion for her horse. “It was just like a big dog,” he says. He noticed other donkeys in the area, too, that were without homes, often victims of abuse or neglect. “She’d buy them, and I’d spend all my evenings just talking to donkeys, fixing whatever ailed them.” Once the couple had acquired a small herd of 25 donkeys, they decided it was time to turn this backyard hobby into something bigger.
Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue, Meyers’s brainchild, is the largest rescue of its kind. Recently, it’s been tasked with removing thousands of donkeys from various national parks, which have a zero burro tolerance policy. “Because we’re so big, we’re able to do this. Nobody else can sign on the dotted line and say, ‘However many burros you have, we’ll take them.’”
But his organization isn’t just focused on safely removing donkeys. It’s also about humanely repurposing them. Burros that enter Peaceful Valley are given a microchip for tracking, proper vaccinations and hoof care, and, through PVDR's adoption training program, a second chance.
On Peaceful Valley’s sprawling, 172-acre ranch in San Angelo, Texas, Zac Williams, Vice President of Off-site Operations at PVDR, walks his dogs through an open field of jennies, or female donkeys. He watches the equines closely, looking for burros with a maternal instinct that kick and bray, while taking note of the ones who seem a little too down to cuddle.
Williams isn’t an animal psychologist, but he just as well could be. As one of the leaders of PVDR’s Texas Guardian Donkey Program, he has a keen eye for which jennies hold the potential to become livestock protectors.
“I watch to see which ones come after the dogs,” says Williams. “I’m looking for a little bit of crazy, but not batshit crazy.” Those donkeys, he explains, are sent to one of PVDR’s many vast sanctuaries, where they can exist in peace (and, after they’ve been gelded, even more peacefully) for around $200 per animal per year—a fraction of the annual cost of keeping a donkey in federally-run holdings.
Once he’s weeded out the batshit burros, along with nuzzle-happy donkeys that will make great cuddly companions, Williams sends his group of promising talent into the first trial: forced bonding. He places them in a pen with a few older goats and watches to see if they’ll become aggressive over food or pick on them “just because they can.” Only the non-bullying burros move onto phase two, where they’re placed in larger pens with goats, kids (babies of the goat variety), and miniature cows. “At this point … we’re also watching to see how they interact with the kid goats,” says Williams. About three weeks into their training, if all is well, the donkeys enter the final phase. At this point, he lets them loose in big, open pasture environments and watches to see if they stick with the livestock like a watchful guardian or abandon the herd to do their own thing.
Training a guardian donkey is no small task. According to Williams, it takes between 30 and 40 days to train a single donkey, but it’s ultimately worth it, with 95 percent of the donkeys adopted out as guardians doing their job successfully. The growing guardian-donkey market seems to have picked up on this. As of now, the waiting list to adopt one from Peaceful Valley’s training program extends until the end of 2019.
Perhaps it’s difficult to imagine placing the lives of one’s sheep or cattle in the hooves of a donkey. But according to Janet Dohner, author of Livestock Guardians, donkeys often don’t need the same extent of training and specialized care as a guardian dog. More importantly, they’re effective. “We’ve discovered [that] they’re aggressive to canines and coyotes and naturally very protective.”
The donkey may not seem like fearsome fauna, but they’ve been known to take on coyotes, foxes, and bobcats. While other animals, such as horses, more frequently flee from predators, donkeys stand their ground. A 1989 University of Nebraska report describes a guard donkey “fending off three coyotes trying to attack a group of sheep bunched up behind the donkey at a fence comer.” The report states, rather triumphantly, that “the donkey was successful in this effort.”
But Dohner is just as quick to point out that guardian donkeys aren’t right for everyone. For people who are dealing with bigger predators such as wolves, bears, or mountain lions, a donkey itself could be prey.
The use of donkeys as livestock protection animals is a fairly recent development in the United States, but donkeys have taken on similar roles around the world for years. Amy McLean, an equine scientist and lecturer at UC Davis, has studied the use of donkeys in over 20 countries. She’s witnessed the informal use of guardian donkeys throughout Europe, Central and South America, and parts of Africa. For farmers on the move, donkeys serve a dual purpose as both pack animal and guardian. “You tend to see this, particularly in pastoral communities in Europe where there’s a lot of sheep production. Often they’ll even place the small lambs in carriers on the donkeys.”
So why is the donkey often seen as little more than the butt of jokes, an invasive species, or a nuisance for NASA? Perhaps its stubbornness has been mistaken for stupidity. “They’re actually highly intelligent,” says Meyers, “way smarter than a horse—and I’m not just saying that because I’m a donkey guy.” He notes that while other animals have historically been trained through systems of reward and punishment, donkeys are a little different. “He has to do it through trust, and [wanting] to do it.”
And, once you have a donkey's trust, you’re likely dealing with a surprisingly sweet animal. On a recent recon trip into Death Valley, Meyers spotted a wild jack munching on some grass against the backdrop of a magnificent California sky. Bewildered by the sight, he crouched down with his camera to get both the donkey and the rising sun stretching behind it. Startled by the noise, the jack charged full-force at him.
Of course, this wasn’t Meyers’s first rodeo with rattled burros. “I waited until he got right up on me, and I just stood up, and kind of picked his front hooves off the ground with my shoulder,” he recalls. “He just froze, and after a few minutes he slid down and stood there, looking at me. Then we were best friends.” Meyers slung his arm around the burro, and the two embraced like old pals for long enough to snap an even better picture. Just a quick glance at the photograph of Meyers and his furry friend is evidence enough that, at the end of the day, these creatures are indeed kind of like big dogs—just a bit more complex, a bit more invasive, potentially combative, and, until now, not nearly as adoptable.
“My goal isn’t to completely eradicate wild burros,” says Meyers. “I do this for a living, and I still get goosebumps when I see one. But when they’re not managed, and they become a nuisance—that’s when rash decisions are made and bad things happen.”
To save these equine “big dogs,” they don’t necessarily have to become man’s best friend. But at least, with a little management, and a lot of training, they can be more widely seen as something beyond mere interference.
The term for splitting the bill has its roots in a bitter international rivalry.
At the end of a restaurant meal, deciding who pays and how much can be fraught. Societal norms tend to dictate if one person whips out their credit card, or if everyone should "go Dutch": that is, pay their own share.
"Going Dutch" can quickly get complicated, with adding up tax, tip, and separate bills. But the origin of the term is even more complex: It likely stems from a centuries-old dispute between England and the Netherlands that left behind a slew of uncomplimentary phrases in English, all rooted in the word "Dutch."
In the 17th century, the Dutch Republic and the English competed over international trade, colonies, and domination of the seas. Starting in 1652, the Dutch and English fought three wars over the next 22 years, battling over everything from herring to current-day New York. Propaganda meant that relations soured quickly, and both the English and the Dutch considered plagues and fires in the other country to be a punishment from God.
Name-calling became common in pamphlets and woodcuts. The Dutch claimed that the English were descended from the Devil himself, and therefore had tails. The English retaliated by calling the Dutch "butterboxes" and drunkards. The enmity lingered, even as the wars became less frequent. In the following centuries, the word "Dutch" in the English language eventually came to describe anything sub-par.
The insults came fast and thick. Dutch soldiers, according to the English, needed "Dutch courage," or alcohol-fueled bravado, to fight. A "Dutch uncle" was a stern and authoritative figure, not a kindly uncle. "Dutch feasts" were parties where the host got drunk first, while a "Dutch reckoning" was an unitemized bill with unexpected charges. "Dutch comfort" was the small consolation that a bad situation wasn't worse.
In essence, writes Peter Douglas of the New Netherland Institute, "Dutch" implied anything opposite or inferior to the way it should have been, and often the term was used for everything from crude insults to possibly even cookware. The Dutch oven, a lidded pot that can be used for baking, may or may not be part of this trend: It's not truly an oven, but the Dutch may have simply been good at producing them.
"To go Dutch," though, is an all-American term. As Jonathan Milder writes in Entertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl, one of the first scornful references to a "Dutch treat"—that is, not really treating someone else at all—appears in a New York Times article from 1877. The term coincides with what Milder calls "the centuries-old British sport of mocking the Dutch," but can also be a reference to the contemporary German-American habit of everyone buying their own drink (Dutch being a confused reference to Deutsch, or "German").
Naturally, the disparaging use of the word "Dutch" had consequences. As recently as 1934, writes Milder, the Dutch government issued orders for officials to avoid using the term "Dutch" to dodge the stigma. However, most "Dutch" terminology seems fairly old-fashioned today. It's a fitting fate for a linguistic practice based on centuries-old hatred.
It is well-established and widely accepted that Leos are vivacious, fiery additions to any room, and Libras are balanced and diplomatic, sometimes to a fault. Sun signs like these are understood as being representative of one’s core personality and most basic preferences, but astrology goes beyond assigning traits to people as predictions of how they might behave. Believe it or not, cities have zodiac signs, too. Denver is a Scorpio and Atlanta is a Capricorn, but what do these sun signs mean when applied to geographic coordinates?
Mundane astrology, which got its name from the Latin mundus, meaning “world,” is a branch of astrology that uses charts to read places, rather than people. It has reportedly been used since the 2nd century, when the Babylonians birthed the first organized system of astrology, mostly as a way of divining information about political events in particular locations. Historically, kings and emperors were known to call upon designated court astrologers before going into war, and throughout his presidency, Ronald Reagan consulted astrologer Joan Quigley for the most opportune timing of his press conferences, debates, and the takeoffs and landings of Air Force One. Today, mundane astrology is not only reserved for the elite, it’s a widely accessible way for people to plot their next moves—with targeted celestial input.
Mark Dodich is a locational astrologist based in Portland, Oregon, a city he says has “two charts.” This is because, he explains, the founding location of Portland (or its birthplace) is different than where Portland now sits. “Quite often with some of these places you can end up with multiple charts,” he says.
Locational astrology operates by assigning cities birthdates—that is, the day and time they were legally incorporated as cities. Much like with human birth charts, precision is key. But, Dodich admits, that isn’t always easy to achieve. “When you get into mundane astrology, you end up with a little bit more imperfection dealing with cities and countries … where you can be precise is with individuals.” Unsurprisingly, knowing the exact time a city is “born” is tricky; after all, there are no nurses present to note it on a birth certificate. But mundane astrologers claim to get close enough with the day alone: “in many cases you can get what day [a city’s official legal incorporation] was done, and so in astrology we use a default of noon,” says Dodich. By casting a chart based on a city’s official legal incorporation date, astrologers aim to determine the future events of a place—like possible natural disasters or successful agricultural seasons—in the same way people use popular astrology apps like Co-Star or magazine zodiac columns for insight into their personal future.
The notion of using planetary movement to determine the personality of a place is understandably polarizing: assigning importance to the way planets “rule” the Earth during certain times of year seems fairly arbitrary, but astrologers like Dodich are often asked to help answer serious life questions for clients using “relocation astrology,” an area he specializes in.
People generally seek out relocation astrologers for guidance about where their career or personal relationships will best thrive, with the idea being that there might be a better place for them to live or produce work than where they are now. For instance, Dodich advises “an inventor in upstate New York who’s trying to decide where to manufacture his product. So we use [place charts] to look at places like China, Vietnam, and Indonesia to see where would be his best place for manufacturing his invention.” Though a city’s birth charts are self-contained, they are also used to compare against people’s personal birth charts in order to see if the relationship is a fit.
“You could take, for example, your personal astrology [birth] chart and could compare it to a city’s,” says Dodich. “The term we use is synastry, which means that we can plug you into the state. It’s kind of like relationship compatibility for marriage or a partnership … how do I fit in with the energies of this other person, or this city, or this state?”
While energies are subjective and decidedly abstract, the planets are less so. Unlike astronomers, astrologists view the solar system as having 10 planets: all eight (yes, Pluto included), plus the sun and the moon. “The moon of a city or a state is how the state relates to the people. It represents emotions and nurturing, so it relates to human resources,” says Dodich. Apparently, Saturn has to do with laws, and Mercury with communication. As a native Californian and fairly obvious Virgo, I was interested to learn that my home state has its sun in Virgo too. (Should I move back? Could this be a sign?) Musing on the importance of a place’s sun sign, Dodich says that “a Virgo is a being of service, but on the other hand it can be bogged down in the details. If you’ve ever paid attention to California law, like with their health codes ... They have a lot of little details and laws that make people crazy, and yet they’re being of service to the people.”
Because of the emphasis locational astrology puts on the charting of place, mundane astrologists need a concrete way to illustrate these “planetary action zones.” In the 1970s, American astrologer Jim Lewis developed Astro*Carto*Graphy, “a printed-out diagram where curved and straight lines represented the planets and you got to see the influences of all of them,” says Steven Cozzi, a locational astrologer who specializes in astrolocality, a guide to travel and relocation based on one’s birth chart. Lewis’ computer software, which generates these planetary land maps, was a huge leap forward in locational astrology. Astro*Carto*Graphy has significantly lowered the barrier of entry for lay-people interested in learning about mundane astrology, specifically where their personal power lines (the places where the planets ruling their birth chart are most present) intersect with those of the world.
The American Astronomical Society website defines astrology as “the belief that the positioning of the stars and planets affect the way events occur on earth.” Though it is an ancient science, and a polarizing one at that, there has always been an ebb and flow to the level of public interest in it. In Dodich’s professional star-reading experience, people’s willingness to subscribe to the guidance of the planets is conditional: “When the world tends to go a little topsy turvy, people start to really get more involved in ‘who am I and what am I doing?’” The American Psychological Association’s 2017 survey data reported that 63 percent of Americans said they were significantly stressed about their country’s future—compared to 52 percent in 2016—which might explain the 2 percent growth in the psychic services industry (which includes astrology, among other metaphysical services) over the past five years.
Dodich acknowledges that relocation astrology is “a niche market as a branch of astrology,” but did become “very popular in the mass marketing [of Astro*Carto*Graphy].” For those that subscribe to the teachings of astrology, and are planning to move, travel, or do business in different places, “locational astrology is the best tool available for finding a place that matches your goals,” Dodich adds.
There have been no demonstrative studies proving that the planets at the time of our birth actually determine how we communicate, or where in the world we will experience great career fortune. Over time, astrology has gone from being a more religious and scientific pursuit to a novelty one, but Dodich assures me that “in an astrologer’s mind, science and astrology go hand in hand.” The lines that run through an Astro*Carto*Graphy map, like a TI-85 graphing calculator superimposed over a city grid, may be imperfect, as the world is. But at the very least, knowing that New York City is a Leo sun, Taurus moon, is thought-provoking, if not cause to uproot your life and buy a one-way plane ticket.
Meet the Kleemans and their vast collection of space-age toys and ephemera.
How does a father-son hobby grow to become a massive collection of space-age toys and memorabilia? Today the private Space Age Museum is a sprawling archive that pervades the Kleeman family’s home and converted hay barn in Litchfield, Connecticut. A key aspect of their collection is interactivity—a sense of active participation reflected shifting attitudes about space exploration over the decades, says John Kleeman.
In the video above, Atlas Obscura goes deep inside the Space Age Museum, and discovers how the Kleeman family's passion project changed their lives. For more on the Space Age Museum, you can also read our recent feature story.
