You can buy it this weekend if you like.

The seventh edition of Frieze Masters, an annual art fair in London, opens to the public today. The fair features art exclusively by artists who are thought to have mastered their craft—hence the name.

The timeline at Masters is long; there are over 130 gallerists present, who will showcase a range of art from antiquity to the 20th century. One object is of particular intrigue: a 15th-century “book of hours,” created in Paris.

At Frieze, Dr. Jörn Günther Rare Books, an antiquarian dealer based in Basel (the city where the Swiss, French, and German borders meet), is selling one of these rare books (circa 1405) for a casual €1 million ($1.15 million). These books, so named because they were to be read at fixed times of day, are Christian devotional objects that reached their peak popularity during the Middle Ages in Western Europe.

“They consist, at their base, of sets of prayers to the Virgin Mary as well as additional series of prayers depending on the book,” says Erin Donovan, the antiquarian firm’s Deputy Director. “The prayers are to be said eight times per day, every three hours, as the prayer cycle follows that of monasteries.” These religious works were intended for lay people to use in their homes, as a way to specifically incorporate elements of monasticism into their daily, private lives.

Decorated margins were standard, but more heavily illustrated books of hours were created for wealthier families. Books of hours, says Donovan, were “extremely popular to collect for the most wealthy people of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and the artwork inside reflects the interest that was lavished upon them.”

The Parisian book of hours on offer at the Frieze was almost certainly commissioned by a wealthy man, judging by the artist credited with illustrating it. “The Mazarine Master was known to work for the highest French nobility,” says Donovan. “This book contains male prayer forms, so was likely made for a man.” (Texts were often adapted to suit the owner that commissioned them, so the inclusion of male names in prayers made them more personalized.)

The Mazarine Master, a founding figure of Parisian manuscript illumination, is known as one of the greatest Parisian artists of the early 15th century thanks to his unique style. “He was a genius with the use of color and patterns, creating avant-garde compositions of religious scenes for the nobility and royalty for whom he worked,” says Donovan. In the book of hours up for sale, the Master’s inventive use of surreal backdrops and rare colors like lime green add to the text’s rarity and value.

Early on, illuminated manuscripts (usually printed on vellum) were fairly exclusive objects, but by the late 15th century, book workshops in Paris began using templates and standard patterns to mass produce them, making them more accessible. The advent of print technology is responsible for the several thousand books of hours that still exist today. Parisian books of hours are more prevalent than German or English ones, but even still, the relative rarity of these devotionals means they require careful handling.

“Each book has a protective box that is made to the measurements of that individual book,” says Donovan, of the Frieze Masters manuscripts. “We keep them in a temperature controlled safe [and they] are transported by experienced art handlers. Any client could safely keep such a book in a family bookcase, as they require only stable temperature conditions, out of the way of humidity, too much light, or extreme heat or cold.”

Rare book dealers like Dr. Jörn Günther find that Books of Hours engage the crowd at art fairs like Frieze Masters because their “small, intimate size, beautiful illumination, and attractive gold—like jewels on velvet—invite close looking,” Donovan says. “The fair certainly builds awareness of medieval manuscripts as a high art form.”

Parisian waiters had to fight for the right to manly whiskers.

It's April 1907. You’re an American in Paris, searching for a taste of real culture—maybe in the form of some fine French cuisine. You settle down in a quaint café, but before you can choose between the pissaladière and the pâté en croûte, a police officer approaches and asks you—not exactly politely—to leave. As he tells you to “Sortez!” he gestures at his mustached upper lip. You, clean-shaven, stagger off, confused and hungry.

Around the city at that time, high-end waiters were on strike to demand better pay, more time off—and the right to grow mustaches. The bristly adornments had been virtually ubiquitous among French men for decades, though many waiters, domestic servants, and priests were not allowed to have them—“sentenced to forced shaving,” as the newspaper La Lanterne put it on April 27. Indignant waiters, finally fed up, walked out of their fancy restaurants en masse, along with, by one contemporary estimate, roughly 25,000 francs a day in revenue. “Women are quite determined to starve with their children rather than see the whiskers of their husbands still fall under the razor,” reported the Mémorial de la Loire newspaper.

Those who stayed were treated as those considered scabs often are—berated by strikers who wanted them to join the movement. The police responded to the vocal agitators. According to a Los Angeles Times dispatch from April 20, the gendarmes were so heavy-handed in clearing out the strikers that they “expelled every smooth-shaven man including a dozen innocent Americans who had just arrived in town, ignorant of the strike, and who were bewildered by their hostile reception.”

Where mustaches ranked among their demands likely varied from waiter to waiter, but the uprising captivated France, where the mustache had made the man for generations. The country had, at last, been forced to confront a classist injustice that had long been festering right under its nose.

As La Lanterne reported then, in a history of the mustache, this form of facial hair had been a mark of privilege and status in Europe even back in antiquity, when Tacitus wrote that the Germans had reserved hairy upper lips for soldiers who distinguished themselves in battle. By the 19th century, the military mustache was in vogue once more, as armies throughout the continent sought to emulate the elite Hungarian “Hussar” cavalry. The Hussars fought in style—plumed helmets, leopard-skin-covered saddles, and strong, pronounced mustaches. The look, says beard historian Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “was the original form of shock and awe,” and by the middle of the 19th century most French soldiers had to wear mustaches (though some in the lower ranks, to reinforce military hierarchy, weren't allowed to). The requirement was so strict that soldiers who couldn’t grow facial hair naturally had to stick on fakes. Eager to assert their own virility, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie embraced the style, turning the mustache into a marker of the well-to-do Frenchman. It wasn’t Louis XIV’s clean-shaven, obsequious France anymore.

Around the same time, the first modern restaurants were rising around Paris. These establishments, primarily for the wealthy, sought to recreate the experience of dining in an upscale home. The experience was about more than food. Waiters had to retain the appearance of domestic valets, who were forbidden to wear mustaches as a sign of their rank. Diners were “paying to humiliate people in an almost institutional way,” says historian Gil Mihaely, who has published extensively on the subject of French masculinity. The clientele had “paid for an experience. And the experience was to be the master.”

The desire to regulate facial hair in France, Mihaely contends, has its roots in the era of colonialist expansion and the Industrial Revolution. Less wealthy people had acquired more access to what had traditionally been luxury goods, so the elite turned to something money couldn’t buy for a new means of projecting their status—even among those one-percenters who had no claim to the masculine military image. “Every puny whipster,” mocked the The New York Times, “proclaimed himself with impunity a samurai by the hirsute adornments ... ”

“It was very painful” for those who were forced to shave, Mihaely says. The mustache bans were especially demoralizing for veterans, who had to abandon proud symbols of their service just to qualify for certain jobs. To be denied the mustache was to be demeaned, infantilized, emasculated, even depatriated in front of their families, neighbors, and friends. Nothing paints a clearer picture of this than Guy de Maupassant’s 1883 short story, The Mustache, in which a woman named Jeanne mourns the mustache her husband has shaved in order to take on a female role in a play. “[A] man without a mustache is no longer a man,” she laments. Perhaps worse, he lacks “the insignia of our national character.”

Though the Parisian waiters had a union, says Mihaely, we don’t know precisely how many went on strike or precisely when. Contemporary news reports cite numbers ranging from the hundreds to the thousands, and suggest that strikers joined and left the movement in waves. The restaurant community is “not a factory,” Mihaely points out, and particular employer-employee disputes may have been resolved in their own ways.

We do know, however, that the striking waiters had vocal detractors who valued the social order and were concerned about the precedent being set. A scathing essay in Le Gaulois—a newspaper run by Arthur Meyer, a man on the wrong side of the Dreyfus Affair, another test of French identity—imagined that 10 years on, the waiters would strike once more, demanding this time the right to be clean-shaven like the upper classes (if they were to decide that to be the latest trend). The taunting implication, says Mihaely, was that class differences would endure changes in fashion. An even harsher piece, in the form of a poem in Gil Blas, bemoaned the fact that the waiters would be able to “hide easily their professions” after hours. The piece goes on to envision beers getting more expensive to balance the waiters’ better pay, and waiters laughing under their mustaches at customers foolish enough to pay the higher prices. Finally, it imagines that the upper-class patrons might one day go on strike themselves.

Still others argued against the movement due to hygienic concerns, which, according to Oldstone-Moore, were beginning to appear more frequently. “Will they clean rather frequently their mustache?” asked Le Journal on April 22. “From their nostrils to our drinks,” the paper warned, bacteria won’t need to travel far to “our stomach, kidneys, and our most delicate organs.” Plus, the article argued, the “hair appendix is not so convenient. It complicates life.” Watching a mustached man eat—certainly a common sight in the day's restaurants, regardless of the appearance of the wait staff—“is repugnant to the viewer.”

But the waiters also had defenders, who joined them in challenging France to live up to its republican ideals. “These gentlemen will wear the mustache,” wrote an observer in L’Avenir. “I congratulate them and I find this conquest as fair as natural.” For La Presse, the movement was an expression of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and allowed the waiters “to finally show that they are men, free men, who have no more kings, who have no masters and who can wear at their ease this symbol of the all-powerful male, the mustache. Oh!” the paper proclaimed, “the beautiful independence!” The cause had even risen to Parliament, where Antide Boyer, the Socialist Deputy from Marseilles, proposed a bill making mustache bans illegal, on pain of up to three months’ imprisonment. (Boyer had actually introduced the bill before the strike began.)

Quoted in The New York Times, Boyer decried that “some misguided noblemen and presumptuous middle-class folk cling to the belief that they are honoring themselves by forbidding their servants, whom they treat as slaves, to wear mustaches.” Such a practice “under a democratic republic is grotesque and humiliating,” he said, a resurrection of “bygone tyranny contrary to the principles contained in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.”

The Boyer bill failed, but it ultimately wasn’t needed. By early May, waiters across the city had won the right to wear mustaches—some of them, says Mihaely, at the expense of their other demands. Those concessions, to some degree, invited the ire of left-wing activists, who had supported the strike but thought it absurd to prioritize a symbolic victory over material gain. Perhaps the waiters got hoodwinked, or perhaps, suggests Mihaely, their strike was only partly about labor, and as much about belonging, self-definition, and identity.

Tracking small creatures is frustrating, delicate, fascinating work.

If you spot a butterfly alighting on a twig, a beetle skittering around a tree trunk, or an ant marching along the ground, maybe you wonder what it’s doing when you’re not looking. Where did it come from, and where is it heading?

Scientists do all sorts of things to hack our way into understanding daily life for individuals and groups across the animal kingdoms—often by trying to tag along from a distance. They secure GPS collars to elephants, fasten accelerometers to moon jellies, and outfit birds with satellite transmitters or color-coded bands. These data can be a window into a species’ range, diet, and behavior—illuminating, for instance, whether feral cats in Australia decimate local wildlife or the degree to which melting ice is starving polar bears.

Among these animals, insects are not the most willing scientific collaborators. Small and short-lived, they’re not really built to carry tracking tools we might want to use (assuming, that is, we can find them at all). For entomologists, engineers, and other scientists, getting an insect-eye-view is worth the trouble. Tagging and tracking insects offers insights into everything from mass migrations to colony behavior to their destructive appetites for trees and crops. Here are three examples of how researchers have tried to hitch rides with insects, and what they learned along the way.

Monarch Butterflies

Monarch butterflies don’t abide being cold. As summer turns to autumn, the butterflies hit the road. In the United States and Canada, those west of the Rocky Mountains fly to California, to roost in coastal groves. East of the mountains, they head to Mexico. Some of these insects flutter more than 3,000 miles, and they return to the roosts of their ancestors. Upwards of a billion monarchs descend on Mexico’s montane forests each year. In the reserves of El Rosario and Sierra Chincua, in Michoacán, they blanket the branches of Abies religiosa, or sacred firs, like orange-and-black shag.

To map the butterflies’ routes—and determine how many make it to the finish line—naturalists often tag them soon after they emerge from their chrysalides. Rondeau Provincial Park, in southwestern Ontario, Canada, hosts an annual tagging festival. Countless monarchs lay eggs there each summer, on milkweed plants close to the shore of Lake Erie. Every fall, naturalists and volunteers do their best to intercept close to 1,000 of them, press a sticker on each one, and send it on its way.

Tagging occurs in sand dunes, marsh, and scattered gardens, where butterflies land on rosy Joe-Pye weed or bushy blazing star. “Since [monarchs] don’t travel together in flocks like birds do, the migration is more of a constant flow through our park over the span of two or three months,” says Caitlin Sparks, a senior interpreter there. They may not reach the densities they do in Mexico, but, Sparks says, “they roost together in groups at night in the branches of trees, which is a magical sight.”

The park participates in a program spearheaded by Monarch Watch, a project out of the University of Kansas. The program’s tags are tiny—about the diameter of the eraser on a pencil—and lightweight. When the monarchs are nectaring on flowers, volunteers cover them with conical mesh nets. The insects instinctively fly up toward the tip. Monarch Watch recommends that the human tagger then gingerly use her thumb and forefinger to press a tag onto the mitten-shaped discal cell of the butterflies’ wing. This is close to the insect’s center of gravity, so it doesn’t throw them off. Each tag is marked with an email address, a phone number, and a unique code of three letters and three numbers. Taggers use a spreadsheet to log the butterflies they encounter. The hope is that someone else will use this code to identify the butterfly on the other side of the journey.

It took years to arrive at the tag’s simplicity and placement. At first, Monarch Watch emulated a strategy from the 1970s, in which researchers rubbed scales off the wings to make a space for rectangular labels to adhere. When Chip Taylor, the program’s director and a professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Kansas, tried this approach in 1992, he found that monarchs were getting mangled. “Too many wings were broken in the process of rubbing the scales, and then your butterflies are dead, right?” Then, he tried a little tag on the underside of the hindwing. Those came with little bottles of adhesive, but volunteers couldn’t figure out exactly how much to use. (There were reports of butterflies getting glued to the grass, sidewalk, or fingers.) The team settled on the current approach in 1997.

Monarch Watch collaborates with local experts in Mexico, but the data they acquire together doesn’t paint a complete picture. The goal is that local farmers will collect the tags from butterflies moving through the mountains, and save them until Monarch Watch teams arrive to collect them. (Monarch Watch pays a $5 finders’ fee for each recovered tag.) The ratio of tags recovered to those affixed is still low. Of 1.4 million that have been affixed to monarchs over the last two decades, the team only has data from roughly 14,000.

But the work continues. “We want to learn something about migration, the entire flow, and how it varies from year to year,” Taylor says. Monitoring these dynamics could help researchers understand where the butterflies are hatching and inform conservation efforts in those habitats, which are vanishing across the American Midwest. It could also elucidate the relationship between climate and migration. This year, which has seen a rash of warm weather across the Midwest, Taylor says, “migration is way behind schedule.”

Emerald Ash Borers

These iridescent beetles, native to Asia and otherwise known as Agrilus planipennis, were first detected in America in 2002, when they turned up in Michigan. Researchers suspect that they’d been hanging around for a while before anyone noticed—but when we did, things began to deteriorate quickly. The beetles have a taste for 16 species of ash trees, and have been blamed for destroying millions of them across 30 states. Signs of an infestation include denuded limbs, unusual branching from the trunk, and deep splits in the bark. Researchers know that, in early summer, the beetles push their way out of holes that look a bit like cat eyes.

What they do next is what Deborah McCullough wanted to figure out. A forest entomologist at Michigan State University’s College of Natural Resources, McCullough once reared loads of these beetles and marked them with tiny dabs of non-toxic paint. (One related approach, which gained some traction in the 1960s, involved marking millions of notorious crop pests with traces of fluorescent dust.)

McCullough’s work hit one big snag. “Once we released them, we never saw them again,” she says. “Those beetles are really good fliers and there are no good attractants or methods to trap them.” The result? “Lots of time and effort—no data.” McCullough knows of another project that tried a similar approach with tiny transmitter wires. That one stalled out, too, she says, without ever making it to the wild. “Beetles are just way too small to carry something around,” McCullough says, “even if it’s just a tiny piece of wire.”

There’s much more to learn about where the beetles go, and when, and why. So far, at least, tracking doesn’t seem to be the answer. In an effort to hem the beetles in, at least, the U.S. Department of Agriculture emphasizes limiting the movement of firewood, since they often infest the bundles. The agency recommends buying local firewood and burning the whole pile.

Termites

Kirstin Petersen, now an engineer at Cornell University, works in the field of collective embodied intelligence. The idea is that actors—in her case, small robots—can plow through tasks really efficiently as a group when they collaborate and respond to sensory information. In the insect world, there’s a species that has this whole thing down already. So, a few years ago, she figured she better take a closer look at termites.

Petersen had already gone deep into the existing literature on termite behavior, but she hadn’t seen a colony in action, up close. So, back when she was a graduate student, she and her collaborators trailed an entomologist to Namibia, where they gawked at the towering, Seussian mounds that termite colonies build, and then had to decide how best to figure out what was going on inside.

The team set out some traps, and then relocated the insects to a petri dish. In the lab, the termites were easy enough to see, but marking them was a slog. And the termites, which are used to being busy, seemed to be lethargic, something that the long time needed to mark them made even worse. “Their behavior deteriorates the longer they’re away from the mound,” Petersen says.

So the team came up with a way to track the termites using marks they already have. With semi-automated software, they focused on the brightest spot on an insect’s abdomen, and then used that to follow the individual’s behavior. They rigged up an overhead camera and measured each termite’s movement from one frame to another (with later verification by humans). This approach slashed the hands-on time. Marking them manually would have taken weeks, Petersen says. The software worked it out in hours. Also, “we wouldn’t be dealing with tired termites,” she adds.

Petersen saw that there is a lot of variety in how specific termites went about their days. “Some were explorers, and some were home-based, taking care of maintenance,” she says. That kind of variation can be engineered into robot colonies, too. Say the robots are constructing a building. Maybe they’d benefit from having a bit of latitude to do their thing, and executing different tasks in different ways. “Instead of asking them to build according to a blueprint, we can do it like the termites,” Petersen says, by giving them broad parameters, such as specifying that a kitchen should be close to a bathroom, for instance, or that stairs belong near an elevator.

With collaborators at Cornell, Petersen is now looking skyward, and developing a method of tagging honeybees with thermal sensors in order to map their foraging tactics. “Engineers have a lot to learn from behavioral biologists,” she says. “And what they learn from nature.”

From stomach melons to the five-second rule, let's talk about food fables.

Look. Rationally, I understand that if I swallow a watermelon seed, a full-size watermelon is not going to grow inside of me. And yet, it’s still something I think about every time I accidentally swallow one. Myths about food (probably because consuming it is an unavoidable necessity of, you know, staying alive) seem to have a way of rooting themselves deep in our subconscious, staying there no matter how silly they are. What are the food myths you just can’t let go of?

Whether you still suspect that swallowed gum stays in your body for seven years, or that the five-second rule is proven to be superior to the six-second rule (spoiler: both myths!), we want to hear about it. Tell us about your favorite food myth via the form below. We're especially interested in hearing about food myths that might be specific to certain regions or cultures.

We’ll select some of our favorite responses and share them in an upcoming article. Also, I'm serious about those watermelon seeds. Don’t eat them. Just in case.

A new study suggests they're learning to live in the urban sprawl.

Early one April morning, a coyote crosses a suburban backyard. For some reason, she stops to take a look at the house beyond. It's spacious, with two floors and a separate garage. There's even a trampoline. Her ears prick up as she gazes. She seems to be considering a move.

Such scenes go against our sense of things: two-legged creatures belong on lawns, four-legged ones in the untrammeled woods. But they aren't as rare as you might expect. Recently, a group of researchers used camera traps to survey mammals in and around Raleigh, North Carolina and Washington, D.C., trying to get a sense of where they spend their time.

As it turns out, the comforts of the suburbs aren't lost on non-human creatures. "Indeed," the researchers write, "most species appear to use suburban areas at least as much as wild land."

As human habitation takes up more and more space, ecologists strive to understand which creatures are able to adapt to our strange infrastructural habits, and which get displaced. "There have been a number of studies relatively recently on mammals in more suburban areas, and they show conflicting results," says Arielle Parsons, a doctoral student at North Carolina State University and the lead author of the paper. "Because of all these conflicting smaller-scale studies, we wanted to get a look over multiple cities."

They were also inspired by increasing accounts from the western United States of large carnivores moving closer to cities: bears relocating to Boulder, for example, and mountain lions trying their luck in Vegas. "We wanted to look at that here in the East," Parsons says.

To achieve this larger scale, Parsons and her colleagues asked for the help of citizen scientists. Over 500 volunteers manned a network of 1,427 motion-triggered cameras. They placed them in areas ranging from "urban" to "wild," with categories determined by the relative density of houses. (To be truly "wild," for example, a space had to have fewer than one house for every two square kilometers of land.) Then they sat back and waited for the surveillance footage to roll in.

Parsons, who lives in Raleigh herself, has overseen a number of camera trap studies, and runs an ongoing survey called North Carolina's Candid Critters. (She was happy to have such broad participation in this project: She and her colleagues have put so many traps out in their own backyards at this point, "we're kind of bored with the same possum that comes by," she says). But when she crunched the data, and saw the number and types of species that have been hanging out in her neighborhood, even she was surprised.

"We've known for a long time that there are lots of certain mammals in suburbs," she says. "Your raccoons, your white-tailed deer, your eastern gray squirrels." But the photos showed both high species diversity and high abundance from wildest places all the way to the suburbs. There were bobcats near the bushes. There were cottontails in the cul-de-sacs. (The one exception was urban D.C., which registered only six species and, excitement-wise, topped out at woodchucks.)

"This is good news, really," says Parsons. At the same time, she cautions against overinterpreting the results. "The study was just on mammals chipmunk-sized and up," she points out. Just because bobcats and deer can hack it in the 'burbs doesn't mean bats or birds or bugs are doing as well—and indeed, plenty of studies suggest they're not. "By no means do our results indicate that we don't need to keep moving forward with conservation of green spaces in cities, and wild areas outside of cities," she says.

In other words, let's not rush to rezone the wilderness. But if you happen to be putting your house up for sale, consider leaving some pamphlets in the shrubs. You never know who might want to get a little closer.

Butchers, drag queens, and Club Kids broke bread together at Florent.

In the 1980s, lower Manhattan’s Meatpacking District began moving from its industrial slaughterhouse roots. The advent of mass refrigeration and affordable transportation now allowed restaurants and markets to order meat from all around the country. Though meat butchers, packers, and distributors still worked in the area, many abattoirs were disappearing.

As the neighborhood transformed, its cobblestoned streets began to see fresh faces. Drowsy butchers weren't the only people out on Gansevoort Street—the Meatpacking District's main artery—during the wee morning hours. Partygoers, revelers, and sex workers, many of whom were gay or transgender, joined them.

In light of the horrific AIDS epidemic, gay communities in and around Manhattan found camaraderie wherever they could throughout the 1980s. Drag balls dominated scenes in Harlem. Around Chelsea, the likes of Michael Alig and the Club Kids hosted decadent themed parties. And in the Meatpacking District, members of counterculture communities, as well as people who worked in the area, gathered at Florent Morellet’s eponymously-named diner. Stepping inside Florent’s plastic strip curtains, patrons could often hear tinkling piano, French chansons, and laughter. People sat in snug vinyl banquettes, digging into soupe l'oignon, moules marinières, and tripe.

Morellet, a Frenchman who’d come to New York in the late 1970s, opened Florent in 1985. His new brasserie replaced an old-fashioned diner named the R&L, complete with a wraparound Formica counter and chrome siding. Morellet did little to change those original details. He added framed maps, strung up fairy lights, and tinted the overhead fluorescent lights pink. Despite the physical resemblance to its predecessor, Florent’s menu was far different from the R&L's, which had mainly been a spot for longshoremen to grab a quick sandwich or coffee. 69 Gansevoort Street became a place to taste traditional French foods and eat a classic American breakfast, with a bevy of people noshing in neighboring booths.

Florent didn’t initially open a restaurant with the intention of becoming “the patron saint of the meatpacking district,” as New York Magazine put it. After unsuccessfully opening a restaurant in Paris, followed by years of managing one in SoHo, Morellet gave the business another shot with Florent. The denizens of late-night Gansevoort began to stream in, and word spread quickly. “I used to go there in between bars, when I was out with my friends, doing drugs and cruising,” longtime regular and renowned fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi said. “Then I’d end up at Florent the next day for a serious lunch meeting and all the same people were there, kind of smiling in secret.” By early 1986, The New York Times had dubbed it “one of the hottest spots in town.”

Florent was never exclusive. From the jump, the locale welcomed everybody: Local butchers, sex workers, drag queens, and clubgoers broke bread together there throughout the night. Even as the restaurant became more popular, Florent and his staff ensured that their regulars were taken care of. He even opened a secret phone line so locals could make reservations.

In 1987, life changed for Morellet: He was diagnosed with HIV. As the disease ravaged gay communities, many friends urged him to stay quiet about his status, thinking it would ruin his business. Instead, he began to put his daily T-cell count on the bottom of his specials menu, a radical act that both fostered openness and created a sense of community for others facing the same diagnosis. He also became deeply invested in other causes, including the “right to die” movement, along with gay rights issues, and organized bus trips to national protests in Washington, D.C.

As a part of the “right to die” movement, Morellet also began passing living wills out to his customers. In an uncertain time of grief and terror, he helped others grapple with it, even when he was dealing with his own fears. Shortly after his diagnosis, he became sick with hepatitis and was told he had two years to live.

31 years later, he's living in Brooklyn. Over that time, he’s lost many loved ones, including his husband, Daniel Platten, to AIDS. Throughout this time, Morellet remained an activist for others. POZ Magazine, a publication geared towards people living with HIV and AIDS, invited New Yorkers with HIV and AIDS to Florent in 2004. Its 10th anniversary cover featured 100 people, all naked, embracing in the restaurant. Morellet is among the group, with his specials board in view.

Over time, Florent became a sanctuary for those who were different, for transplants, and people who had been cast out by their families. Sean Strub, the editor of POZ and longtime friend of Morellet’s, once told The New York Times about his first visit to Florent. “The restaurant was lit up and … it looked almost like a mirage,” he said. “It felt magical. I remember the tables were very, very close together, so you were sort of seated automatically with strangers. There was a sense of discovery. I was there with three friends. They are all since deceased.”

Florent Morellet wasn’t the only queer pioneer on Gansevoort Street in the 1980s. A droll, curious man named Nelson Sullivan lived nearby, on the corner of 9th Street with his dog, Blackout. Nelson, a expat from South Carolina, knew practically everybody in New York nightlife and devoted his time to recording their lives on his video camera. Throughout the 1980s, he amassed thousands of hours of footage, most of which are available to view on YouTube. His videos include dozens of familiar faces: His closest friend is a young RuPaul. In one video, he visits Keith Haring’s apartment, and in another, he brings homemade prune cake to Michael Alig’s birthday. Before the 1987 Gay Pride Parade, he documented eating dollar slices with Michael Musto.

Aside from being an early vlogger, Nelson became an important chronicler of gay and alternative communities during a turbulent and terrifying time. Many of the subjects of his films, and Nelson himself, didn’t live to see the 1990s. He immortalized people during quiet moments, sometimes eating together at the likes of Florent. In one of Nelson’s videos, we see a 10-minute peek into a night at Florent with Christina Superstar, a frequent subject of his films. (Some may remember Marilyn Manson’s portrayal of her in the 2003 cult film Party Monster). Nelson’s evocative filming style transports viewers directly from a cold, dark Manhattan street into Florent. There, Nelson and Christina order oatmeal, a cheddar omelette, and French fries. The smoke from Christina’s cigarette swirls around the counter. She smiles and laughs, clearly comfortable in this space.

Before coming to New York, Christina lived in Pittsburgh and worked as an English teacher. When she came out as transgender, her family paid her to stay far away. She relocated to Manhattan, where she met Michael Alig and became a part of his Club Kid crew. She became notorious for her fake German accent, flash of bleach blonde hair, and red lipstick. She was often treated poorly by other people in the scene, but Nelson seemed to really care about her. Christina passed away in 1989. That same year, Nelson died of a heart attack.

Ten days after Nelson’s passing, Florent threw a party to lift local spirits. He threw a Bastille Day celebration, in time for the 1989 French bicentennial. He urged partygoers to attend in costume pour la révolution, and he came decked out in full Marie Antoinette garb. The soirée soon ballooned into a yearly street party, and every July 14th, hundreds of revelers squeezed onto Gansevoort.

As the years went by, Florent’s following grew, and the restaurant developed different traditions and quirks. The daily specials board began displaying jokes, puns, and witty observations above his ever-present T-cell count. Celebrities including Julianne Moore, Amy Winehouse, Johnny Depp, and Diane Von Furstenberg streamed through on a regular basis, and Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, famously dined there on Sex and The City. Throughout it all, Florent never ceased to be a haven for gay communities.

By 2008, the Meatpacking District had completely transformed, with old slaughterhouses becoming expensive boutiques. Faced with increasingly unaffordable rent, Morellet made the difficult decision to close after a brief dispute with his landlord.

As the end of the restaurant loomed, Morellet threw a series of parties themed around the five stages of grief. Each stage was marked with a week-long event that featured performances, a packed restaurant, and plenty of reminiscing. “New York is about change,” Morellet told his patrons during the “Denial” party. “Sometimes it’s good in life to be kicked out,” as he said in the 2008 documentary Florent: Queen of The Meat Market. “... A better word is ‘I’m being kicked forward.’” It’s a touching sentiment coming from somebody who created a home for so many people who had lost their own.

Since closing his restaurant, Morellet has urged his loyal customers to not cling to the “terrible disease known as nostalgia.” He doesn’t have plans to open a new restaurant, and is happy to let Florent remain a beloved memory. Now, he’s focusing on other passions, including his work in activism, artwork, and cartography.

Florent officially closed over Pride weekend in 2008. Longtime locals and artists performed, gave speeches, and sang the praises of a man who fostered communities during a time when people struggled to survive. There, he was presented with a cake (fittingly decorated as Marie Antoinette), which he cut and served through laughter and tears.

Also, remember BOOK IT?

While stopping for gas in Wyoming during a recent trip, I glanced at a Pizza Hut across the parking lot and saw something surprising. Pizza Huts tend to be topped with the geometric red roof that’s become the pizza chain’s logo—it’s plastered on restaurants from Riverton, Wyoming, to Rio de Janeiro. This Pizza Hut had the iconic roof. But so did another, tiny Pizza Hut placed in front of the restaurant. Set atop a wooden post, the crate-sized structure was actually a Little Free Library, filled with books that passersby could pick up and exchange.

Little Free Libraries often come in interesting shapes. The first one ever built, by Todd Bol in 2009, was shaped like a one-room schoolhouse, complete with a bell-tower. According to Margret Aldrich, media and program manager at Little Free Library, as well as the author of The Little Free Library Book, “When his mother passed away, he really wanted to figure out a way to honor her memory.” (She was a schoolteacher and avid reader.) That single book-exchange box in Bol’s yard in Hudson, Minnesota, grew into a non-profit organization. It has registered 75,000 Little Free Libraries in 88 countries, all of which are organized and kept in working order by volunteers.

While the Little Free Library website offers blueprints to create basic book-exchange boxes, many builders get creative. Volunteers make Little Free Libraries shaped like birdhouses, castles, and spaceships, or themed after Doctor Who and Harry Potter. Others are made with attached benches or added greenery, and reams of Pinterest boards depict interesting designs. Contests celebrate the most creative takes.

Still, a Pizza Hut-themed Little Free Library was new to me. A few days later, in Montana, I plotted a course for a random Pizza Hut. Sure enough, there was a Little Free Library out front. Topped with the signature red roof, it was filled with magazines and classic young adult books, such as Johnny Tremain and Catherine, Called Birdy.

When I called Pizza Hut, I was informed that this was a franchisee project, rather than a national endeavor. “We were looking at ways to become involved in our markets locally,” says Lynda Carrier-Metz, the chief marketing manager of Restaurant Management Company of Wichita. In 2016, Carrier-Metz won a $10,000 volunteer grant from Pizza Hut parent Yum! Brands to construct 20 book-exchange boxes in front of restaurants. According to Carrier-Metz, it came down to combining community involvement with “what people were doing already”: that is, going to Pizza Hut. “In many towns, the libraries aren’t open after 5 or 6 p.m.,” she adds. “We wanted them to come to Pizza Hut and bring their books, and get other books.”

Carrier-Metz had seen Little Free Libraries around town, but hadn’t realized there was an organization behind them. She first turned to her father, a woodworker, to build Pizza Hut-themed Little Free Libraries. But after she learned about the official non-profit, she teamed up with Branden Pedersen of Little Free Library. With the Yum! funding, they whipped up a design. “It's kind of the iconic Pizza Hut look,” says Pedersen. Then, an Amish woodworker, Daniel Bontrager, built them.

In December of 2016, Pedersen drove to Wyoming and Montana to deliver the goods: 20 Little Free Libraries. He installed most of them at Pizza Huts across the two states, and the remainder he handed over to be installed at Pizza Hut locations in Texas and Kansas. A staff member at each restaurant, Pedersen says, became the steward of each, responsible to “keep it in good repair, fill it with books, tell people how it works, and encourage them to use it.”

Both Carrier-Metz and Little Free Library consider the team-up a matter of course. “Pizza Hut has a long legacy of supporting literacy, which you really wouldn’t think about,” says Aldrich. The front of the Pizza Hut Little Free Libraries feature a “BOOK IT!” logo, which refers to a program started by Pizza Hut in 1984 to promote reading. Then-President of Pizza Hut Inc., Art Gunther, had a son with severe reading difficulties. That led to the creation of BOOK IT! in 1984, which Gunter later called “the most important thing I have ever done in my working life." As of 2017, 14 million children in America had participated, earning personal-pizza rewards for reading.

While still active today, BOOK IT! has a special nostalgia for bookworms of a certain age. It’s inspired love letters, apparel, and, in 2014, free pizza for alumni of the program in celebration of its 30th anniversary. Even Aldrich tells me she participated in BOOK IT! The program also served as a tentpole for Pizza Hut’s The Literary Project, which promotes reading and distributes books around the world.

A collaboration between a bookish nonprofit and pizza megalith might seem strange. But Aldrich calls it “kind of a natural connection.” For one thing, it puts books in accessible locations, making even a trip to the pizza parlor an opportunity to grab a book. Pedersen also notes that in small, remote communities, a Little Free Library can have a significant impact. Local economic need was also taken into account when choosing locations for the book-exchange boxes. Especially in communities with small libraries and few bookstores, the prospect of free, available books can be a boon.

Despite the best efforts of Little Free Libraries staff, though, corporate sponsorships are still fairly rare. “We were hoping it would catch on and go national,” says Pedersen. For the benefit of other fast food chains, he adds that they’re happy to customize designs for interested brands “in a tasteful way.” But Pizza Hut’s participation is still a drop of marinara compared to the enormous number of independent Little Free Libraries. “The vast, vast, vast majority behind Little Free Library is a volunteer,” says Aldrich. “Just an individual who's making it happen in their community.”

The data they're collecting is helping researchers evaluate how ecosystems change.

Most hikers on the Reflection Lakes trail have their cameras pointed at Mount Rainier; Karen Sy, however, had her back to the imposing mountain. Instead, she examined a patch of spindly, tufted plants that look like Dr. Seuss’s truffula trees. In any case, Rainier looked hazy; choking wildfire smoke had pushed air quality readings into the “unhealthy” range for days. Luckily, Sy had come prepared with an N-95 respirator mask, so she could concentrate on writing down her observations: Western anemones, in their fruiting stage—typical for mid-August.

She’d braved the smoky weather for MeadoWatch, a program that enlists volunteers to collect wildflower data on hikes at Mount Rainier National Park. Three volunteers at a different plot told me that they find the program rewarding, in part because it provides an opportunity to inject much-needed scientific data into political discussions about climate change. Rather than agonizing over struggling animal species and changing ecosystems, recording observations feels like a proactive step to stave off climate dread.

The program also has the power to expand volunteers’ ideas of who can be a scientist. Joshua Jenkins, MeadoWatch’s program management intern, is a prime example: When the lead researcher Janneke Hille Ris Lambers hired him, he was the first intern on the project who didn’t have a science background. “Janneke talks about reimagining who can be a scientist, and I think that message is really powerful,” he said.

Hille Ris Lambers, who studies the effects of climate change on plants at the University of Washington, launched the program in 2013. She initially turned to citizen science as a means of maximizing data collection; this year, she estimated that the program’s 142 volunteers will make around 10,000 observations. “As a scientist, I love nothing more than data,” she said. But perhaps the most rewarding part has been getting to know the volunteers. “We don’t keep official numbers on it, but I know of at least a couple volunteers who have gone back to school to get a degree in science.”

To entice volunteers and collect quality samples, Hille Ris Lambers selected hikes the way Goldilocks picked her porridge: She chose two trails that were known for their wildflower blooms but were not too popular, and that span a range of elevations but are not too steep. Hikers stop at predetermined plots, marked by neon orange tokens, and jot down the flower species they see, as well as the plant’s life cycle stage—whether it is budding, flowering, fruiting, or seeding.

In aggregate, these observations will give researchers a clearer picture of how plants’ life cycles will change in response to climate shifts. “If snow melts earlier, on average, wildflowers are going to bloom earlier,” Hille Ris Lambers explained. That will have cascading effects for the surrounding ecosystem; for instance, if some flowers bloom earlier, the animals that eat those plants may need to adjust their behavior accordingly—or develop a different diet.

Hille Ris Lambers was hesitant to report any definitive conclusions based on the project’s six years of data, but hikers on the trail had their own anecdotes about how the plants’ environment is changing. On the way back down to the trailhead, I ran into two of Sy’s friends, who had decided to take it slow on account of the wildfire smoke. One of them, Dan Paquette, who has hiked around Rainier as a volunteer for MeadoWatch and other programs for 20 years, told me that he’d never seen it so dry and hot. According to a National Park Service report on Mount Rainier’s climate, that trend will continue; the average temperature is projected to increase by another three to seven degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century, causing drier summers and wetter winters.

Paquette also noted that the area where we stood was usually filled with lupines, as far as the eye can see. He was not the only one who noticed; all six volunteers on the trail that day asked Jenkins about it. The lupines we did see were struggling; at one plot, Jenkins pointed out some yellowing leaves, crisp and withered as a neglected houseplant. “This stuff is definitely dying,” he said.

While the lupines felt like a gloomy presage, the joy of the volunteers was apparent. Despite the smoky haze visible on the trail and palpable in the lungs, the atmosphere was less suffocating than it was in Seattle. After the volunteers Pat Cirone, Elly Adelman, and Dana Davoli identified a north microseris seedpod, they cheered and laughed. “It’s the excitement of the chase,” joked Adelman. Plus, Davoli said, the trail provided a welcome reprieve from the dismal headlines the volunteers encounter in everyday life. “Everything is so negative right now politically, and to do something positive is so nice.”

A scavenger hunt shined a spotlight on Chicago's role in film history.

It might not be known as a movie-making town, but plenty of famous productions have been shot in Chicago. The city serves as more than a backdrop in a few: in classic films like Ferris Beuller's Day Off, The Blues Brothers, and The Untouchables, Chicago itself serves as a character by proxy.

Recently, Chase Sapphire® and Atlas Obscura partnered to send film buffs and amateur sleuths on a scavenger hunt to places near, far and in between, in pursuit of some of the city's most iconic filming locations. Meeting at the Art Institute of Chicago, guests visited places like Daley Plaza and Union Station, plus plenty more cinematic hidden gems. As guests toured the streets of Chicago, they were reminded that you don't have to leave your city to see something new -- all it takes is changing how you look at it. Can you guess which films some of these iconic locations have been featured in?

The evening was capped off with a toast and, no doubt, plenty of chatter around the locations visited and their silver screen influence at a well-known downtown pub. See some of the sites visited below.

They pay tribute to those lost during a period of state terrorism.

On August 25, 1978, the soldiers came for Emilio de Lorenzo. It wasn’t entirely a surprise: two years earlier a military dictatorship had staged a coup and taken control of Argentina. As a social activist, and a member of the leftist groups Juventud Peronista and the Montoneros, De Lorenzo knew his politics put him at odds with the dictatorship. He and his wife Eva, then seven months pregnant, had moved into a different house to avoid detection. Only their mothers knew where they were.

But on August 25, the military found them and took them to the Olimpo, a clandestine detention center. Emiliano, their two-year-old son, had to be left behind. “His grandparents will raise him well,” said the military.

Eva was released a few days later. She spoke with Emilio one more time in detention. His face was uncovered, a sign that the military wasn’t afraid of what he would witness. He wouldn’t be going anywhere to tell tales. After that, he was never seen again.

Exactly 40 years later, de Lorenzo is returning to Parque Chacabuco, the neighborhood in Buenos Aires where he was born—in a way. On a bright, windy winter day, his friends, family and fellow social activists have gathered together to place a tile in his memory in the sidewalk outside the house where he was born, nearly 71 years before.

The tile stands out against the grey sidewalk. It has white letters on a brick-red background, embedded with a few colorful pieces of ceramic and a small token with the logo of San Lorenzo, Emilio’s favorite football team. It is one of around 1,700 tiles that have been embedded around the city, each commemorating one of the up to 30,000 people who were “disappeared” by the military dictatorship that controlled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.

The tiles are created by Barrios X (para) la Memoria y Justicia, or Neighborhoods for Memory and Justice, a grassroots collection of neighborhood organizations dedicated to the memory of the disappeared. They placed the first sidewalk tiles in 2006, the 30th anniversary of the start of the military dictatorship. “For us the tiles were the symbol that this is where they walked … they left their footprints on the city streets,” says Pablo Salazar, a member of Pompeya no Olvida (Pompeya doesn’t forget), one of the neighborhood organizations that together form Neighborhoods for Justice and Memory.

Each tile follows the same format. De Lorenzo’s tile, white letters on a reddish background, reads:

Here was born and lived
Emilio J. de Lorenzo
Social Activist
Detained Disappeared
25 - 08 - 78
By State Terrorism
Neighborhoods for Memory and Justice

“The tiles are personalized to move away from talking about ‘30,000 people,’ so that they don’t remain anonymous,” says Luz Marina Martinez, another member of Neighborhoods for Memory and Justice. “The idea is that here is where this person lived, here is where they worked, here is where they studied. We want each neighborhood to learn about the compañeros that were detained, disappeared or assassinated by state terrorism.”

Between 1976 and 1983, thousands of people in Argentina were kidnapped by the military government, locked in secret detention centers, and tortured. The dictatorship targeted anyone it believed posed a threat to it or disagreed with its political ideology, including guerrillas and political activists, student activists, union leaders, teachers, socialists, communists, and journalists. Ex-military officer Adolfo Scilingo has described “death flights” in which he and others flew with victims over the La Plata River or Atlantic Ocean and “disappeared” them into the water, making their deaths untraceable. Like De Lorenzo’s family, most of the disappeareds’ loved ones will never be certain what had happened to the sons, the mothers, the friends who never came out from clandestine detention.

De Lorenzo’s sons—Emiliano, who was 2 years old when his dad disappeared, and Leo, who was still in his mother’s womb and never got to meet his father—are both political and social activists. His nephew Javier Andrade is currently a Deputy for the City of Buenos Aires.

At his memorial service, they talk about his love of Coca-Cola and San Lorenzo, the local football team. How he loved to drive, how much he loved his mother’s tortilla de papas. But most of all they talk about his idealism, his political activism, his belief in creating a better world.

“Emilio was so good. Too good,” Nora de Lorenzo, his sister, tells me. “He was very loved.” She wishes her mother could have seen his memorial tile. “At least this way you have something you can come and look at. Otherwise you don’t have anywhere to go. He’s not there! He’s disappeared. He’s not there.”

The tiles started in the city of Buenos Aires, but over the last few years, volunteers have been traveling all over Argentina to teach organizations how to create memorial tiles in their own cities. Tiles now appear in the Argentine provinces of Catamarca, La Rioja, Córdoba, Santa Fe, Jujuy, and beyond.

In addition to the sidewalk tiles embedded around the city, the Neighborhoods for Justice and Memory have also published three books about the disappeared. Unlike the tiles, the books dive deeper into who each of these people were and tries to give a bigger picture of their short lives. Their third book, Baldosas Sin Fronteras (Tiles Without Borders) was published earlier this year.

The Neighborhoods for Memory and Justice avoid working with the government and prefer to keep their organization grassroots. “We prefer to continue this way, from the bottom up, without ties to the government. Because working with the government forces you to be represented by it, to identify with it,” says Salazar.

Critics have accused the current president, Mauricio Macri, of not doing enough to honor the legacy of the disappeared. In interviews, Macri has insinuated that there were fewer than 30,000 disappeared people (something many Argentines find egregious, given how the dictatorship tried to erase its victims). “They don’t want to work on this topic,” says Salazar, referring to the current administration. “And we are convinced that we have to keep working. We have to keep the memory alive, we have to bring these compañeros out of the past, into the present.”

Of the estimated 30,000 disappeared, only 1,700 tiles have been laid down so far. The Neighborhoods for Memory still has much left to do.

Atlas Obscura readers share their best tales of chance encounters.

Visiting someplace new is an inherent thrill, but very often, the strongest memories we take away from our travels are the people we meet along the way. A chance encounter while far from home can result in an unforgettable night, or even an unexpected friendship.

Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about the most memorable people they'd ever met while traveling. In response, we received an incredible number of tales, each one making a convincing case for talking to strangers. You told us about everything from touching encounters at museums to aimless nights with dentists and dogs alike. Throughout these recollections, you made it clear how a sense of openness and adventure have helped turn your travels into something much more human, and frankly, more exciting.

Below, we've collected a selection of our favorite reader responses. Sit back and enjoy these amazing tales from strangers about meeting strangers—perhaps you'll make a surprising connection of your own.

A Sculpture Comes to Life

“My husband and I were on a bicycle tour across the Kibi Plain near Okayama, Japan, which is studded with prehistoric tombs and other historical features. We stopped at Tsukuriyama Kofun, which is an enormous 5th-century keyhole tomb mound (the fourth biggest in Japan). Before the climb, we noticed a striking modern sculpture called the King of Kibi, an imagining of the ruler buried in the mound. As we were wandering around on top, we ran into an older Japanese couple and started chatting with them—only to discover that the gentleman was the sculptor! He was happy to run into two Americans interested in ancient Japanese history and showed us all over the mound, including the tomb chamber itself. Then when we descended, he invited us around the corner to his workshop, where he gave us each a copy of a hand-drawn map of the mound and the village as he imagined it looked in the 5th century.” — Ellen, Centreville, Virginia

Witness to History

“Striking up a conversation in Tibetan with an older Tibetan man sitting near me, he noticed that I was obviously a foreigner and asked me where I was from. When I told him I was an American, he immediately launched into a story from his childhood in a remote village outside Lhasa, where an American airplane crashed and his family took in the U.S. pilots who were stranded there. Teahouses in Lhasa are places where folks sit all day and drink tea and noodle soup and tell (sometimes tall) tales. Since his story seemed so far-fetched, I listened with interest but discounted it as a completely made-up tale meant to entertain, make a connection with, or even tease me as a foreigner. Years later, after returning home from years living in Asia, I came across the book, Lost in Tibet: The Untold Story of Five American Airmen, A Doomed Plane, and the Will to Survive, and as I read, the memory of this gentleman and all the matching details returned to my mind, and I realized he had been telling the absolute truth! The time period, his age, the village, the descriptions all matched. I was amazed that I had met this person who had experienced this historical event in a remote location on the roof of the world first hand.” — Erin O'Neill, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Who Says There's No Crying at a Viking Museum?

"In June 2016, my husband and I visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark. It is the national museum for ships, seafaring, and boatbuilding in the prehistoric and medieval periods. The museum is spread across several buildings, harbors, and fields. My husband and I were fortunate to be able to row a Viking boat from a small harbor into a fjord, where the wind was really whipping. It was an awesome experience! However, I was most touched that day when I met Bjorn. He was demonstrating how to make sailing rope from lime tree raffia. I asked Bjorn if he had been making rope for a long time and why he started doing it. Before he answered, he looked at the ground, thought for several minutes and then told me the most lovely story about how he never really learned to make rope but occasionally helped a friend—who often crafted large sailing rope—bind his completed projects. Bjorn said he and his friend met more than 30 years ago and had a connection. They traveled together. Raised their families together. They shared a long, happy friendship, he said. Sadly, Bjorn's friend was diagnosed with leukemia and died. Although Bjorn never truly learned how to make rope, he was asked by the Viking Ship Museum if he would give it a try and take over demonstrations for his friend. 'I never knew how to do this but when I sat down here, my hands just knew what to do,' he said. It's not cool to cry at a Viking museum, but I almost did that day." — Kelley King, Superior, Colorado

A Sense of Adventure Is Contagious

“Her name is Keira and she is from Australia. We were both traveling alone and a couch-surfer agreed to pick me up from the airport in Menorca. She happened to be in the car. We decided to meet up every day to explore together. We were about the same age (28) at the time and she was already retired. I was in awe! She had worked very hard as a young adult and was able to save up enough to own some properties in Melbourne. She used the money that her renters paid to travel the world. She told me a story about riding a moped through Asia and how after an accident, some locals stuffed tobacco leaves into her wound. Once she finally got to a doctor, they were upset that she had allowed anyone to do that to her. She had a gnarly scar from the experience, but embraced it from beginning to end. She was the kind of person who could talk to anyone and was so easy to get along with. She made me realize how short life is, and why not spend it doing what you love?” — Allie, Lexington, Kentucky

The Monk Who Clocked In

“I was at a large Buddhist temple and began chatting with one of the monks. He introduced himself as Mister Hiska. The conversation turned to religion and he told me Buddhism was his job, not his religion. He said his mother had brought him to the temple when he was 2 years old. He was in his 60s at the time and told me his high status at the temple allowed him to choose to live in his own apartment in the city. Every day he puts on his suit and tie, takes the train to work, changes into his robes and performs his duties. At the end of the day he changes back into his suit and returns home. That was the first time I considered that someone entering the temple so young may choose to remain employed there while their heart seeks something else.” — Annie Lou von Mizener, Indiana

A Dentist, a Garbageman, and a Dog Walk Into a Bar

“While hitchhiking in Sligo, Ireland, my companion and I were picked up by a dentist and a garbageman heading off to their favorite pub near Yeats's 'furthest Rosses.' They sang loudly as we traveled. We arrived at the pub, drank for a while and mentioned that we needed a place to stay overnight. We couldn't afford to stay at the pub. They suggested the nearby golf course, but we nixed that. Then, after demanding that we sing 'Yankee Doodle,' they sent us to camp on the beach guarded by their dog, Watchman. He stayed with us until the morning and trotted off home. I am still looking for a dog to name 'Watchman.'” — Linda, Sequim, Washington

The Secret House

"Many years ago I was on a small cruise ship in Costa Rica, and somehow conned the crew into giving me a kayak to explore a deserted cove that we'd anchored in. I was 13, I think. I took it a short distance to a beach, and walked around a bit. I suddenly heard a voice say, ‘Hi, I'm Jeff, from Indiana!’ I turned around and sure enough, there was a kid my own age standing there. I have no idea how he got there without me seeing him. Anyways, he says, ‘follow me,’ and bounds off through this thick jungle foliage. We quickly came to this absolutely wild looking house; to this day I've never seen anything like it. It had no walls, only a frame, but was three stories tall and surrounded by terraced gardens. It looked like the tropical paradise of one’s dreams, like it was as pretty as the Alhambra. His story was simply that his parents were from Indiana, as if that explained the house in the jungle. We talked about American girls. I recently tried to find the spot, but came up empty. My mom kept a brochure from the cruise company and I tried to identify likely spots, thinking that it might be some sort of nature resort, but came up empty. When I got back to the ship I remember not telling anyone. It felt good." — Reggie, Vancouver, Canada

A Small World, Indeed

“While backpacking with my brother in Morocco in 1994, I met a young man named Mohammed in a cafe. We were in a town called Zagora at the north edge of the Sahara Desert. Mohammed's business was leading trade caravans on camels across the vast desert between Zagora and Timbuktu in Mali, a journey that took 52 days to complete. He was very quiet and shy. Zagora was the big city to him, and too noisy for his tastes, even though it was only a mid-sized town. We shared a couple of Cokes and chatted about the world. A couple of years later I was in a doctor's office and reading a National Geographic article on Morocco—and there he was again.” — David van Belle, Edmonton, Alberta

An Ordinary Kindness

“When our three children were young, a friend offered us their holiday cottage for a week as we couldn’t afford a holiday that year. We did a lot of cycling along quiet country lanes and villages. One very hot day we arrived at a tiny village square and discovered that the village store had closed. Hot and bothered, we shared our last bottle of water between us. A very elderly man emerged from a small cottage nearby carrying a bag. To our surprise he offered us refreshments: small bottles of lemonade, crisps, chocolate bars, and even sweets. We explained that we had nothing other than small change on us to repay him but he said he’d be offended if we didn’t take it. He sat chatting with us for a while and reminisced about having young children and family life. It was a humbling encounter and one that reminded us of the nobility and kindness of ordinary people.” — Maureen Dew, Near Birmingham, United Kingdom

'Nuff Said

“The Naked Guy.” —Mindy Cole, Albuquerque, New Mexico

When the Spirit of Adventure Offers You Vodka, You Take It

“Our bus driver was speeding down through the mountains from Quetzaltenango to Guatemala City with the enthusiasm of an F1 racer, all in the heaviest rainstorm I've ever seen. I was starting to feel genuine fear, and glanced across the aisle at the only other person who didn't look like a local. I made a feeble joke about us going over the side of the mountain, and the young woman calmly legitimized my fear. ‘Yeah, I stayed in the spare room of a woman who was taking boarders after her husband accidentally went over the side of a mountain with his bus full of people.’ Um, thanks for that. She offered me a sip out of her vodka bottle to calm my nerves. She introduced herself as Sullivan Oakley. Have you heard a cooler name? (Hint: no you have not.) An American in Guatemala teaching English, she was traveling on her own to her next teaching gig in San Salvador. We made it out of the mountains alive, only to pass block after block of seedy characters as we neared the bus station in Guatemala City. We joined forces for the next segments of our journeys. Sullivan's ability to negotiate a cab ride in Spanish along with my additional presence made us both safer as we went to our locations for the night. I'll never see her again, but I often think of her as the spirit of adventure itself.” — Amy Cecil, Kansas City, Missouri

Language Is No Barrier

"When my daughter and I were attempting the Annapurna Circuit trek, we soon discovered that we were carrying more weight than we could handle. We had planned this trip for months, but were physically challenged to return to the town from which we had started our trip. We tried removing and donating extra nuts/protein bars and the like, but still had too much weight. Another trekker suggested that we hire a local man from the village to be our porter, which would mean carrying all our extra weight. We thought that to be impossible since all the village men were quite small and had never walked the Circuit, which summited nearly 18,000 feet. Tagu, a local villager (and very small man), decided to take the job. We carried as much as we could in our day packs. Tagu carried the remaining weight in one backpack and, ten days later, safely delivered us to our last destination. Tagu always waited at strategic forks in the path to make sure we were on target (he was always ahead). He found us walking sticks, guided us over landslides with unfailing good cheer, constantly smiled because he was having his own adventure while guiding us. He did not speak English. We did not speak Nepali. Tagu helped us achieve a monumental adventure." — Karen Custer Thurston, Flagstaff, Arizona

First Kiss

“In 2015 I took a trip with my local chamber of commerce to do a bus tour of Ireland. It was my second time to the country, but oddly enough, my first real ‘tourist’ trip. After a long drive from Dublin and some stops along the way, we arrived in Killarney for the evening. We settled into our hotel and had a fabulous dinner. I joined a few of our group for drinks at the bar after and we wandered outside. It was quite a scene; there was a wedding party going on inside. There were a few folks from the party taking a break outside as well and I fell in with talking to a guy who turned out to be the brother of the bride. He was a fisherman who had grown up on a farm in the area. We talked for hours, he bought me a drink, flirted hard, and ended up being my first kiss. Three years later, we still keep in touch.” — Mallory, Maryland

Stranger Than Fiction

“I was traveling through Pakistan using couch-surfing to find places to stay. I messaged one guy who had the most outrageous profile I've ever seen in my life: he said he had been given a private performance by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan; published two medical papers; written three books; and modeled for Calvin Klein at the ripe old age of 23. I assumed this was him having a laugh but when we met up I discovered that he was legitimate. He was the grandson of a famous Pakistani poet and possibly the smartest person I have ever met in my life. He knew more about Scottish politics than I did! He brewed his own Ayahuasca, made millions on Bitcoin and had three professionally made music videos. Unfortunately, he experimented a bit too much with substances and died of a suspected overdose this year. I don't think I'll ever meet another character like him. RIP, mate.” — Jack Campbell, Scotland

Why are these devices so important to spacecraft?

Yesterday, NASA reported that the Hubble telescope had been put in “safe mode.” One of the gyroscopes, which are key to keeping the telescope oriented and stabilized, wasn’t working. Which means that, for the moment at least, Hubble isn’t pointing its lens out to the stars, taking astounding pictures of the universe.

It’s not a catastrophe. NASA assures everyone that Hubble only needs one gyroscope to operate, and it has two left with enhanced capabilities that should keep everything running for awhile yet. (Or at least until Hubble’s replacement goes into space, which is supposed to happen in 2020.)

Why are gyroscopes so important to spacecraft? Well, why not let a couple of astronauts from the 1970s explain? (And if, for some reason, you’re not interested in gyroscopes in space, may we recommend you watch this video for the ‘70s-era facial hair alone?)

The Skylab mission had its own problems with gyroscopes, in the end. Of the three “big” gyroscopes that controlled the movement of the space station, one failed early on; a second had intermittent problems. Toward the end of a planned mission, it started to fail, too, which would have restricted the experiments the astronauts are able to complete. Still, it’s pretty incredible that technology dating back two centuries is crucial to our ability to live in space and take pictures of the stars.

Whooping cranes are on the move, because of budget cuts.

At five feet tall and a whopping 17 pounds, whooping cranes are one of North America’s biggest, heftiest birds. They have their majestic moments, but they’re also rather gangly and awkward. Their spindly legs trail after them in flight, their call sounds like a mangled bugle, and their black wingtips appear to splay out, like a gloved dancer’s spirit fingers.

This week, 33 of the rare birds are migrating, but they’re not using those wingtips. They’re flying with the U.S. Coast Guard from Maryland to Louisiana, where they will settle into a new home at the Freeport-McMoRan Audubon Species Survival Center. (A handful of them will eventually reside at some Texas zoos.)

Over the past two centuries, the cranes have had a rough go of it. Their range once stretched from Alberta, Canada, to the southern shore of Lake Michigan, with winter colonies in Mexico and on Texas’s Gulf coast, and scattered clusters elsewhere. They breed in the shallows of grassy wetlands, and as those landscapes shrank, so did the flocks. In the mid-20th century, when there were fewer than two dozen of these birds left in the wild, the species came vanishingly close to oblivion.

To keep the population aloft, teams at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland have spent the last five decades breeding and rearing the birds. They began with eggs collected in Canada's Wood Buffalo National Park. Ever since, the goal has been to stabilize the population and prepare their feathered charges to leave the nest without too much human-ness rubbing off on them. The surrogates raised roughly 30 chicks a year with the help of some unorthodox tactics, including donning crane costumes, using bird puppets, and teaching fledglings to fly behind an ultralight aircraft. The project’s $1.5 million budget was a casualty of federal cuts last year, and now the remaining birds are en route to new homes.

Getting these birds to their new home calls for some intricate choreography—and protective gear. Teams of three or four people will corral the each bird into its own wooden crate, about the size of a wardrobe box. These have air holes, but the birds won’t be able to see much. “There’s not a whole lot to stimulate them, you might say,” says John French, the zoologist in charge of the Patuxent center.

That’s for the best: A chilled-out bird is a safer bird, because a struggling one could hurt itself or its human handlers. Because of their six-inch beaks, for example, the humans will wear safety goggles and stick the birds’ long necks under their arms when transporting them. The team has tried sedatives over the years, “but we generally don’t use them,” says French. The birds have to travel standing up, and the handlers don’t want them to be too loopy.

Vans will then shuttle the birds to C-130 cargo planes operated by the U.S. Coast Guard. Since whooping cranes have a reputation for aggression, especially when ruffled, “the goal is to get them to their destination and out of the crates as soon as possible,” French says.

Their new homes will look pretty similar to their old ones, French says—large pens, where they’ll be encouraged to breed. Most of the ones making the move are breeding pairs that have lived their whole lives in captivity. The birds that are alive today all descend from a flock of just 16 individuals wintering at the Aranas Refuge in Texas in 1941. “It’s an incredibly narrow bottleneck,” French says. “It’s almost miraculous that they pulled through, but they did.” Since the late 1980s, a coalition of scientists in the United States and Canada have worked together to write and update a recovery plan, which involves maintaining breeding pairs and nurturing self-sustaining, resilient populations in the wild. The population has now rebounded to some 600 birds, between the wild flocks and the captive ones. Nudging the species off of the endangered species list is the ultimate goal, but it’s still far off.

Meanwhile, French says, the numbers are improving, and saying goodbye to the these long-necked creatures “feels like a great success story.” Even if he’ll be sad to see them go.

This is no trick, we're collecting recommendations and need your help!

Need a deck of trick cards? Looking for a new set of cup and balls to impress your family with over the holidays? Hoping to pick up a cursed monkey’s paw? Magic stores were once one of the very few places you could turn to for arcane materials, or to discuss tips and tricks with fellow magic fans, often becoming little clubhouses unto themselves. There are still places like Tannen's in New York, but as with many formerly physical gathering places, much of the magic scene has migrated online. And yet! There are still magic stores all over the world keeping the flash paper burning, and we want to know about your favorites.

Fill out the survey below to tell us all about your favorite local magic shop, and why you love it. If you happen to have a great, original, Instagram-ready photo, send us that, too: email those to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, “Magic Shop.” We’ll collect our favorite responses in an upcoming article. Pick a magic store, your favorite magic store, and let’s give it the prestige it deserves!

No one was really eating "quintessence of Toes" back then.

It's hard enough to choose what to eat at a restaurant without the entire menu being in code. In the 1750s, though, a jokester in England penned two riddle menus meant to be more clever than appetizing. Dishes included "the Conveyors of Venus roasted" and "the Divine part of Mortals fry’d," along with a side of "two Quakers hashed." Dessert featured "a plate of Oxford scholars" washed down with "Counterfeit Agony."

What could these riddles mean? In 2011, historian and writer India Mandelkern posited this question when she posted the two menus on her blog. While researching her food history dissertation at the British Library, she came across the striking, odd riddles in an anonymous manuscript. Though amusing, the menus offer a distinctive look into British culture and cuisine of the era. She also notes that while the menus refer to King George II, they never made it to the king's table. They might have even been intended as political statements.

When Mandelkern posted the menus online, commenters immediately started to weigh in on what they might be referring to. The answers hinged on Biblical, political, and cultural references, as well as simple wordplay. One user noted that "Counterfeit agony" becomes a lot more palatable as Champagne. Another commenter, "OE," made several excellent guesses: For instance, they suggested that "Dutch princesses pudding" could be referring to orange pudding, not unlike the royal House of Orange. Yet most of the decoded dishes "are not remarkable," says Mandelkern. "They're things that wealthy British people were eating during that time."

One illustrious commenter was the food scholar Ivan Day, who said that the "riddle menus" likely originated from a 1751 edition of The Lady's Companion, a cookbook and entertaining guide. (In the 18th century, Mandelkern says, cookbook authors always copied from each other.) Interestingly, variations on those riddle menus continued to be printed over the centuries in magazines and newspapers (even in Good Housekeeping, circa 1890), as puzzles for readers to solve.

In that same spirit, below is Mandelkern's transcription of one of these riddle menus. Can you uncover the answers? Send us your thoughts below, and we'll publish your answers in an upcoming feature.

His Majesty’s Dinner on the Following Day

First Course

A Fool’s head with a Lilliputian Sauce, garnish’d with Oaths.

A roasted Turnspit

The revenue of being proud in a pye

The Grand Seignour’s Dominions roasted

Side Dishes

An unruly Member

The best part of an Office

The inside of a Snuff Box roasted

A Maid with Jump Sauce, surrounded with Beaus fool’s Coats

A Dutch princesses pudding

Second Course

The Conveyors of Venus roasted

A couple of Threshing poets

The Divine part of Mortals fry’d

The Supposters of a Squeaker Stew’d

Third Course

Three Dragons swimming in Cows blood and Indian powder

Quagmires, quintessence of Toes, sweet Turds and a transparent Cock standing in the middle

Three fiery Devils smother’d in their own Dung

Side Dishes

Two Quakers hashed

A Sign in the Zodiack butter’d

The Desert (Dessert)

A plate of Oxford scholars

A plate of Couplers

A plate of prize Fighters

A plate of Mischief Makers

A plate of Two hundred thousand pounds

Liquors

The Joke of a puppet Shew

Counterfeit Agony

The twelfth part of a Chaldron of Coales

A Soliders Habitation, with a pretty Lady in it

These hybrid productions are unique in mapmaking.

Late in the 16th century, mapmakers in Spanish Empire, working on continents across the ocean from Europe, didn't have access to the age's best technology. Though the first printed maps in Europe had been made a century before, map printing had yet to make it to the Spanish American colonies. When they needed to make maps, they still made them by hand.

This was at the height of Spain’s global influence, what’s sometimes called the Siglo de Oro, the country’s golden age. To better understand and control the vast areas the Spanish Crown had claimed around the world, King Philip II ordered a survey. Each local administrator had to send back a map detailing the land he oversaw.

The dozens of maps were sent back to Spain. But among these, Manuel Morato-Moreno, of the University of Seville’s Department of Graphic Engineering, discovered a small set unlike the rest. Drawing from ways of mapmaking old and new, influences from Europe and from Central America, these maps adopted and imitated techniques specific to printed maps—but were all hand-drawn.

It’s as if a magazine designer in the 1990s tried to imitate the style of a early website. (And surely that must have happened? Clue us in if you know the perfect example.) Only, these maps had other unique characteristics, too, drawn from the place they were made. They mixed the conventions of the time’s European cartography with indigenous influences and earlier European map and illustration tropes.

These maps—seven in all, made in 1579 and 1580—“present a peculiar style,” says Morato-Moreno, with a “dose of ingenuity” unparalleled in the whole, extensive corpus of maps made of Spanish America in the 16th century.

Morato-Moreno describes the maps in a paper for the journal Cartographica. Two describe the settlement of Ixcatlán, in an area that today is the province of Oaxaca. The other five are of towns in the Temascaltepec region, where the Spanish opened silver mines, not far from Mexico City. It's not known for sure who made these maps, though scholars think a chief magistrate, responsible for the survey, may have been responsible for the first two, and that a traveling Spanish scribe may have drawn the other five.

The Ixcatlán maps adopted a technique popular in printed maps, in which a black-and-white, inked map is later colored with paint. All of them use a hatching technique to create depth that is distinctive of etched, printed maps. The maps also repeat the same symbols to signify small towns, larger settlements, trees, and other features, another technique that would have been common on printed maps. Barbara Mundy, a scholar who previously analyzed a subset of these maps, wrote that they resemble landscape prints more than maps. The Temascaltepec maps go even further toward imitating printed products—they are bound together like a book.

The map of Texcaltitlán, with an oversized deer and tiny figures of indigenous people, is trying to do more than document practical geography. The figures are as much artistic flourishes as pieces of important information. They’re meant to create depth and possibly to “enliven the middle distance and foreground,” Morato-Moreno writes. In the bottom left corner of the map, the artist has added Mexico City. If the map were drawn to scale, or with an eye towards geographic accuracy (as some of the maps were), Mexico City would never have been included. But the poetic and political aims of the mapmaker extended beyond navigation. The map tries to show the importance of Texcaltitlán by emphasizing its economic connection with the most important city in this part of the world, from Spain’s perspective, at least.

The map of Tuzantla is notable for a different reason. It communicates economic information through the images of leafy trees: Bananas were an important resources in the area. The river that flows through the map has unusual details, too. The water flows with eddies and squiggles. This way of representing water wasn’t a convention of European printed maps, but rather of indigenous cartography.

“These indigenous conventions in coexistence with European cartographic practices suggest an effort at accommodation between the two cartographic modes,” writes Morato-Moreno. “The authors of these maps may have unconsciously mixed European and native conventions.”

These striking maps are a product of a specific time and place, in which old and new influences, technologies, and techniques muddled together into unique representations of geography. Funnily enough, as Morato-Moreno points out, the first printed maps tried to imitate hand-drawn maps. These 16th century maps flipped this influence, drawing on the conventions of European printed maps and indigenous methods of representing geography. “They are a hybrid product,” says Morato-Moreno. There’s been nothing exactly like them before or since.

Hives have never been more valuable.

The crime scene was a mess of boxes, some half-assembled, others scattered across patches of dried grass and partially gouged to raw wood. The victims scrambled about looking for food and water. There were thousands of them. Maybe millions.

Detective Isaac Torres watched the action from the air-conditioned safety of his unmarked truck. In five years investigating rural farm crime, he’s seen a lot: stolen construction equipment and copper wire, hay thieves, cargo heists.

“You name it, we pretty much cover it, if there’s any type of ag nexus to it,” he said.

But what he was looking at now, in this scrubby field 10 miles southeast of downtown Fresno, California, was something else entirely.

“What we had here was a chop shop, but of beehives,” Torres said. “You had some beehives that were alive, and you had some hives that were dead. You had hives that were basically cut up: Tops of boxes were over here on this side of the field, and the other parts of the box are on the other side.”

As a member of the Agricultural Crimes Task Force for the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office, Torres knew that bees have become big business in California—that they are an essential ingredient in the state’s yearly almond harvest; that three-quarters of America’s domesticated supply is trucked into the state each winter and rented out. He knew how valuable the insects have become—to farmers, yes, but especially to thieves, who in recent years have grown bolder, greedier.

On this hot afternoon in April 2017, he also knew to keep his distance. It’s one thing to inspect stolen property; it’s quite another to get mobbed by it and pumped with venom. And this property was zipping chaotically through the cloudless sky, unhealthy and irate. Even cracking a window surely would have spelled disaster, he said—“like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.”

Torres had been summoned here by Alexa Pavlov, a Missouri-based beekeeper who sat in her own rental car nearby. Two days earlier, she’d learned that a $50,000 cluster of her hives, recently stolen from a neighboring county, might well be sitting in this very field. She’d dropped everything, boarded a red-eye to California and driven straight from the airport into the state’s agricultural epicenter. She couldn’t afford not to.

Groggy and impatient, she stepped out of her car and set off toward the boxes. Torres watched in horror as she marched into a haze of bees, poking through hives and snapping photos. Before long, she returned with shots of her initials etched onto the bottom of a pallet—proof that her property was here.

Nearby, Pavel Tveretinov, a thin 51-year-old Sacramento man, was moving through the field, tending to hives in a protective suit. Pavlov confronted him, she later said, and he denied stealing anything. Before long, deputies from Madera County, where Pavlov’s bees had first gone missing, arrived on the scene. They doubted Tveretinov’s account and put him in jail that evening.

Word of the discovery, and the arrest, spread quickly through America’s small commercial beekeeping community. In the days that followed, Torres’s department received dozens of calls from across the country. Beekeepers wanted to know whether their hives were among those recovered—at this chop shop or at three others authorities found later, connected to Tveretinov and alleged accomplice Vitaliy Yeroshenko.

“Some of them were like, ‘Well, I had beehives that were stolen three years ago,’” Torres said. “Some five years ago.”

By the time Torres and his team got a handle on the totals, they were dealing with 2,500 hives, worth nearly one million dollars, some stolen from orchards hundreds of miles apart. This was much more than an impulsive theft: It was the largest bee heist any of them had ever heard of. Perhaps the largest in U.S. history.

Leave any city in the Central Valley, heading in essentially any direction, and it won’t be long before you hit the almond orchards. They stretch for miles, in neat rows of alien emerald, butting up against dust-beaten truck stops and boxy McMansions. Some host campaign signs for local politicians; others are cross-hatched by roads whose names are simply letters because no one, evidently, had the time to get fancy.

California’s total almond acreage has nearly tripled in the past 20 years, a spike due in large part to foreign demand. At the moment, there are about one million acres of nut-bearing trees in the state, with an additional 330,000 on track to start producing over the next four years. The trees produce well over two billion pounds of nuts per year, and they’re sucking down the valley’s aquifers at a rapid pace.

Such growth has driven a near-manic demand for honeybees, which are crucial for what has become the largest managed annual pollination event in the world.

Hives have never been more valuable. Every almond farmer needs two healthy colonies per acre of trees at an average seasonal rental price of around $185 per colony, and that number is expected to climb in the coming years. When everything goes right for a beekeeper, especially one with thousands of well-maintained hives, winter in California presents an enormous money-making opportunity.

The rental process works like this: Toward the end of January, millions of hives arrive in California from all over the country. The bees live in boxes, which themselves are stored in stacks and covered with finely woven mesh during transit. By the time they reach a staging area—sometimes a large field not far from where the bees will be put to work—they’ve been bumping around on the back of a flatbed for several days. Almond farmers inspect the hives, which are then moved into orchards by beekeepers and “brokers” who help manage the transaction.

There are inherent perils to hanging a business on the collective health of a fragile and disease-prone insect. Bee populations are notoriously unstable, and the animals’ health and population strength are constantly under threat. Even though the total population of domesticated honeybees has increased around 45 percent worldwide since 1961, the proportion of agricultural crops that depend on pollinators is growing at a rate closer to 300 percent, stoking fears in certain scientific circles of a global pollination crisis. Wild bee populations, too, are facing steep declines.

In California, “we’ve had a sufficient supply” of bees thus far for each almond harvest, said Bob Curtis, the Almond Board of California’s associate director of agricultural affairs. “But every year before the bloom, I am personally concerned. Are we walking a fine line here?”

Beekeepers certainly do. On top of larger environmental concerns, the price of maintaining healthy hives can fluctuate wildly, depending on a host of risks, including pesticide exposure, mites, drought, and colony collapse disorder, a mysterious epidemic in which worker bees suddenly abandon their queen, leaving her to die. Dealing with these issues means incurring unexpected, sometimes astronomical costs. During a drought year, when pollen and nectar are in short supply and must be artificially supplemented, it’s possible to spend $200,000 more than anticipated just to keep the bees alive.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” said David Bradshaw, a lifelong beekeeper in the San Joaquin Valley. His base of operations, in a lot behind his home in Visalia, is typical for a commercial apiarist: There’s a small fleet of trucks, tankers of man-made sugar mixtures, and dozens of bee boxes stacked under a patch of sparse shade. Hundreds more, he said, are deposited across the state.

“My wife comes from a background of a CFO of a school district,” he said. “They have budgets, and they have things that tell where you’re supposed to end up at the end of the year. She asked me, ‘So what’s your budget?’ Like I have one!”

Many of the beekeepers who bring hives to California from Louisiana, Florida, and elsewhere live nomadic lives. Their entire year is spent preparing hundreds of thousands of delicate insects for a nonstop, cross-country trek, followed by a monthlong bonanza of hard labor in an unfamiliar environment. The trips are difficult on the animals, which are especially susceptible to heat and sickness during transit. An unexpected fire or truck tipover (of which there are surprisingly many) can wipe out millions of them—along with a beekeeper’s entire livelihood.

The one certainty: “You can’t just leave your bees in one place anymore,” said Denise Qualls, a bee broker who connects apiarists and almond farmers. “The bees come to California for the almonds. They stay for a month or two, then they go to Oregon and Washington for apples. They’ll go to Texas for whatever honey flow is there. They’ll go to Louisiana. They’ll go up to Maine. They’ll end up in North or South Dakota.”

The whole process can be exhausting, repetitive, and expensive.

“You get out of almond pollination, then your major goal for the next 11 and a half months is making sure your bees are healthy enough to go into almond pollination again,” said Charley Nye, manager of U.C. Davis’ Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility.

The almond harvest, he added, is “a weird driver” of market forces—one “that’s kind of pushing everything in one direction. We’re trying to bend the honeybees around it.”

The economics of stealing beehives is a lot like the economics of stealing any high-value item, such as jewelry or electronics, with the main difference being accessibility. During the almond harvest, hives in California’s orchards rarely are protected by alarms or even fences, and equipping individual boxes with GPS trackers is prohibitively expensive for most. To ensure the best pollination results, beekeepers usually place their boxes just off remote roads, hidden by trees, miles from so much as a streetlight. It’s perfectly common for thousands of dollars’ worth of bees to sit largely unattended for weeks at a time.

The theft itself requires a peculiar combination of nihilism and finicky care. You must be the sort of person who’s willing to disregard a generations-old edict, invoked ceaselessly by lifelong apiarists, that “you don’t steal another man’s bees.” Yet pulling it off perfectly is also a dainty affair. You work quietly, gently, usually at night. You cannot jostle the hives too much, lest you damage the queen, which can cause the bees to lose interest in pollination. And it’s not enough to place the bees in a warehouse somewhere; they need access to a water source and all the typical treatments and feedings (sugar water, pollen patties) a doting keeper would provide.

Their value, after all, lies in their apparent health at the point of delivery to a farmer. Sick bees don’t sell.

It’s for these reasons that many of California’s most lurid and notorious bee heists have been perpetrated by apiarists gone rogue. In 1977, the beekeeper David Allred was sentenced to a minimum of three years in prison for lifting $10,000 worth of hives from another keeper in Tracy, California—and using stolen trucks to move them. A deputy district attorney told the presiding judge that Allred “wanted to be known as the Jesse James of the beehive industry,” according to The Press-Enterprise in Riverside.

It wasn’t Allred’s first brush with the law. The year before, he’d gone to jail for helping another beekeeper, David Graves, poison 15 million bees that belonged to a man who’d recently married Graves’s ex-wife and subsequently kicked Graves’s ass after an escalating series of vandalisms. And a few years ago, Allred was sued for taking $30,000 worth of bees that weren’t his—and tricking local sheriff’s deputies into helping him pull off the score.

In 2012, the owner of Tauzer Apiaries, not far from Sacramento, noticed that about 80 of his hives were missing. He pulled together a search party, which soon found parts of the bee boxes scattered along a nearby highway; they also found a bucket of green paint. The clues eventually led them to the beekeeper Viktor Zhdamirov, who had mixed the stolen bees in with his own—and painted the boxes the same shade of green that had stained the bucket. He got three years in prison and was forced to pay more than $60,000.

And in early 2014, the Bakersfield-area beekeeper Joe Romance hatched a plan to recover nearly 200 hives that recently had been taken from him. Shortly after his property went missing, an unknown beekeeper arrived in town and began conducting business from Starbucks, a location most locals agreed was profoundly weird and suspicious. Romance asked a friend to pose as an almond farmer interested in leasing bees. Sure enough, his property was found sitting in a chop shop surrounded by razor wire.

This sort of theft has been an intermittent phenomenon across California for years. But recently, the numbers have started to climb. More than 2,700 hives were reported stolen from 2016 to 2017, according to an analysis of police records by Rowdy Jay Freeman, a sheriff’s deputy in Butte County and a beekeeper himself. In the three years before that, the average number of annual reported thefts was closer to 100.

“It’s very lucrative business,” said Isaac Torres, the agriculture detective. Yet at the same time, “it’s not just some guys who are breaking into cars, or deciding, ‘I’m going to go steal some bees!’ ”

The thieves were cautious and methodical. They likely skipped from orchard to orchard, stacking boxes quickly onto a truck at night. They were familiar with the ins and outs of transporting bees—and keeping them healthy enough to rent out later.

Little else is known about how the thefts were conducted. The 2017 Fresno County case is still working its way through the court system, and officials are limited in how much they can discuss it. Alexa Pavlov, the beekeeper who confronted Pavel Tveretinov last year, has stopped answering calls.

But some have expressed doubt that Tveretinov and alleged accomplice Vitaliy Yeroshenko will face penalties commensurate to the volume of bees stolen. Without an abundance of eyewitness accounts or physical evidence, the two are being charged with 10 counts of receiving stolen property exceeding $950. In July, the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office added two grand theft charges.

“They always say in law enforcement, ‘What you know is one thing; what you can prove is another,’” said Andres Solis, a Fresno County sheriff’s deputy who has worked on the case. The evening he first saw the field where Tveretinov was arrested, he’d been on the job roughly a month. Today, he has a deep understanding of what bees, and bee theft, mean to California.

“It’s not just the property itself that they’re out,” Solis said. “It’s also the man hours spent bringing these bees up and making the hive healthy. … You get your bees back and they’re nothing like they were before.”

One morning before leaving Fresno, I drove an hour east, to one of the sites where authorities discovered hundreds of boxes of stolen hives. I wanted to see firsthand what an illicit bee operation looks like and, a year after the arrest of Tveretinov and Yeroshenko, what had become of the insects they’re accused of stealing.

The field was so remote that it didn’t have a proper address. To point me there, Torres dropped a pin on Google Maps, then recited from memory a short soliloquy of landmarks. I left early in the morning, hoping to evade the heat. But by the time I arrived, it was close to 100 degrees.

The spot was perfect for keeping bees: an overgrown field, about an acre long, nestled between an orchard and a man-made canal. It was close to a main road, but completely hidden if you’re speeding by at 60 mph.

Inside a perimeter of rusty barbed wire, hundreds of bee boxes sat in squat stacks. Just like the ones Torres described, these were painted a variety of colors. I stood near the perimeter, watching as thousands of bees launched from their hives, cutting through the scorching air.

Near the boxes was an abandoned van, a couple of bicycles, a flatbed, and an old Coachmen RV. A year after Tveretinov’s arrest, some beekeepers still had not retrieved their hives. It is, after all, quite costly to ship bees across the country with no guarantee they’ll arrive in the condition you’d delivered them. For some, getting their property back wasn’t worth the gamble.

Up an embankment just yards away, cars roared past on a two-lane highway. A curious driver could easily have pulled over and peered into the field, spotted the makings of an alleged criminal enterprise whose size and peculiarity would be virtually unprecedented in California. One deputy said he’d sped past this field dozens of times on his way to headquarters. He’d never stopped.

“There’s bees there,” he said. “But you don’t think nothing of it. It’s bees. It’s pretty common to see beehives.”

I got as close as any bee novice probably should. Watched the stolen property zip through the air, folding in and out of kaleidoscopic clouds. Then I headed back to my rental car and began the long drive home, through miles and miles of almond trees.

This story was published in collaboration with The Journal of Alta California. Read more at altaonline.com.

In the 19th century, the romance of mountains met the desire to quantify the natural world.

The cooled lava, ash, and pumice of the Cotopaxi volcano climb to more than 19,300 feet. The volcano, part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, is near Quito, Ecuador—clear across the globe from 26,800-foot Dhaulagiri and its dozens of Himalayan cousins in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. But if you had only J. Andriveau-Goujon’s atlas from 1829 to go by, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. On a single plate, Cotopaxi and its billows of gray smoke sit right below Dhaulagiri’s snow-capped summit. This image, and many others like it, cast longitude and latitude to the wind. On it, altitude is king.

In the 19th century, cartographers had a penchant for plotting some of the world’s tallest peaks together on single charts. The results were imaginary landscapes; some placed all of the world’s mountains into a single, massive range, while others evoke cross-sections, with the mountains stacked inside one other like geological nesting dolls.

Matthew Edney, a geographer at the University of Southern Maine, attributes the style’s popularity to a few factors—particularly poets swooning over the natural world, and the dash to measure and document it.

Thanks in part to the Romantic writers, in the 19th century mountains were shifting in the cultural imagination, from places to be avoided to landscapes calling out to be traversed, even if they remained sources of fear. William Wordsworth was a bard of slopes and summits. He traipsed through the Alps, and in The Prelude, described scaling Snowdon, in Wales, through thick clouds:

I found myself of a huge sea of mist,
Which, meek and silent, rested at my feet:
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved

Meanwhile, scientists were doubling down on Humboldtian science, named for Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist who liked mountains and never met something he didn’t want to quantify. His principles involved “going out and measuring everything you can about the natural world, and then from there figuring out some rules of nature,” Edney says. Humboldt proposed spatial dynamics to natural laws—noting, for instance, that altitude, not just distance from the poles, affects the distribution of plants. In the Andes, he documented that the plants growing at various heights roughly matched the bands of plant life you’d encounter if you marched north from the equator. “This just blew everybody away,” Edney says.

Among the earliest visual comparisons of the world’s mountains is one engraved in 1817 by the Scottish firm W. and D. Lizars, for the new edition of Thomson’s New General Atlas. In it, the peaks are clustered by hemisphere. “That Lizars was directly influenced by Humboldt's work is evidenced by the presence of Humboldt himself, a duly noted speck on the left-hand face of Chimborazo,” writes Kevin Brown of Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, a dealer that sells some of these charts.

Tiny annotations are scattered across many of these diagrams. Squint at an 1823 one by William Darton, and you’ll see notes about the maximum elevations of banana trees and lichens, as well as the elevation of snow line, the line below which snowcaps don't persist. (Near the equator, Darton noted, this boundary is roughly 15,000 feet above sea level.)

These charts also reward close scrutiny with Easter eggs. Find the 23,000-foot mark on some of the charts to spy a tiny hot air balloon that represents the height of French chemist Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac’s 1804 ascent. Andriveau-Goujon’s 1829 version includes the silhouette of a condor soaring to 6,500 feet—the height of the Chimborazo volcano in the Andes. Other cartographers included mines and cities. Near the bottom of Darton chart, which ends at sea level, you’ll find Rome and a couple of pyramids. Alongside mountains, some of these plates also ranked waterfalls or the world’s longest rivers.

While these sprung from a desire to record and quantify everything in sight, they weren’t necessarily intended for the people doing the measuring. The landscapes would have been printed in atlases intended for a curious layperson’s library, Edney says. “Hardcore scientists would be using much more detailed tables and lists.”

Despite the annotations, these charts weren’t entirely reliable. Cartographers had to leave some things out to make them hang together. Though mountains come in various shapes—steeply sloped, jagged, or more gently rolling to a plateau—many of the charts depict most mountains the exact same way, often as a tepee shape or a sharp, snowcapped peak. Edney suspects that this was less an aesthetic choice than a product of a still-murky understanding of what mountains are, beneath the summits. (Unless a mountain rises above a relatively flat plain, like Fuji and Vesuvius, you might only glimpse a fraction of it at a time.)

Production of these comparative charts petered out by the middle of the century. Edney’s not quite sure why. Today they’re pretty but outdated—and the rankings are moot, because many of the most highest peaks, such as Everest, hadn’t even been surveyed yet. The charts are relics of an era when cartographers were infatuated with measurements and comparisons, and drew weird, wondrous worlds in the process.

Less sea ice and fewer whales mean a grim outlook.

Polar bears need ice, because ice leads them to seals, and seals are their favorite. But as soon as 2040, the warming Arctic is going to be ice-free for longer periods each year, and polar bears will have to turn to alternative sources of nourishment to survive. A new study, published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, suggests they won't be able to count on a food source that might have helped them get by in the past.

Polar bears have been around long enough to see other fluctuations in climate. Ice levels had been reduced during warmer interglacial periods, the most recent of which occurred roughly 115,000 years ago. Researchers suspect that seal-hungry bears turned to beached whale carcasses. After all, even well-fed polar bears today will dine on those, which pack a ton of fat and nutrition with little to no effort on the part of the bears. A single bowhead whale carcass is the equivalent of 1,300 ringed seals, can be shared by more than 180 polar bears simultaneously, and can remain edible for several years.

Some polar bears, for the time being, can still rely on this cetacean contingency. The international research team, led by Kristin Laidre of the University of Washington's Polar Science Center, found that enough whales wash up from Russia’s Chukchi Sea each year to sustain up to 1,000 polar bears through the spring and summer, when ice and access to seals are scarce.

But those are the lucky ones. Laidre points out that some polar bears live in places such as Greenland that don’t receive many whale carcasses to begin with. And, more generally, there are a lot fewer whales in the sea than there were last time around, thanks to us. As sea ice dwindles, Laidre says that the bears’ typical spring-summer fast of between two and three months could become an unsustainable ordeal of four months or more, with nary a whale carcass in sight for many of them. These and other environmental factors all point to a 30 percent plunge in global polar bear populations over the next three generations.

The new study comes, coincidentally, on the heels of the ominous United Nations climate change report, which warns that the globe could heat up to calamitous effect by 2040.

The inexplicable delight of moon-moons, sub-islands, and other recursive places.

Two astronomers have asked a question for the ages: Can moons have moons?

The delightful, if theoretical, answer is: Yes—yes, they can.

As Gizmodo reports, this particular scientific inquiry began with a question from Juna Kollmeier’s son. Kollemeier, who works at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, recruited Sean Raymond, of the University of Bordeaux, to help her answer the question.

In a paper posted on arXiv, they lay out their case that moons can have moons. The conditions have to be right—the primary moon has to be big enough and far away enough from the planet it’s orbiting for the smaller, secondary moon to survive. But, even given these caveats, they found that moons in our very own solar system could theoretically have their own smaller moons. Two of Saturn’s moons and one of Jupiter’s are candidates. So is our favorite moon—the Earth’s moon.

There’s a serious scientific reason to investigate the presence or absence of moon’s moons: As Kollmeier and Raymond write, it can help give us clues about how planets and their moons were formed. But, all justification aside, there’s something inexplicably pleasing about what Atlas Obscura has taken to calling “recursive places.”

Our favorites of these may be islands within islands, such as the sub-sub-sub-island on Victoria Island, or Vulcan Point, which is an “island in the middle of a lake, in the middle of a volcano, in the middle of a bigger lake, in the middle of a bigger island.” There are also countries-within-countries, such as many of the world’s micronations or Dahala Khagrabari, “a piece of India inside a piece of Bangladesh inside a piece of India inside a piece of Bangladesh.” Or how about a volcano in a volcano? There’s also something truly mind-boggling about bodies of water within other bodies of water. (What? How?) But they exist: Here’s a lake under a sea, an underwater river, or a sea surrounded by… more sea.

One of the great challenges of talking about recursive places is deciding what call them. The prefix “sub-” can do a lot of work here: We can islands within islands “subislands,” and in the arXiv paper, Kollmeier and Raymond call a moon’s moon a “submoon.”

But there are other options. New Scientist notes that “moonmoon” has been put forth as a name for a moon’s moon. For those of us who are less than fluent in meme culture: This is a reference to Moon Moon, sometimes described as the internet’s derpiest wolf. Moon Moon was born in 2013, from a werewolf name generator, and soon started frolicking across Tumblr and all other places memes can be found.

So, a moon’s moon might be called a submoon or a moon-moon. But why let it stop there? Other suggestions include mini-moon, second-order moon, binary moons, and nested moons. Atlas staffers’ contributions: Meta-moon? Moon squared? Moon2?

And is there a way to standardize how we talk about recursive places in general? Because if a moon's moon is a moon-moon, shouldn't an island in an island be an island-island? And a volcano in a volcano be a volcano-volcano? Personally, I am fan of adopting either the sub- convention or the meta- convention—submoons, subislands, subvolcanoes or metamoons, metaislands, metavolcanoes.

But as in all things linguistic, the majority will rule: Whatever the most people decide to call these fascinating places, that's what will stick.