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The Most Isolated War Grave of the British Commonwealth Is in the Namibian Desert

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In 1915, South African forces fought Germans for control of territory in southern Africa.

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Death is a lonely business, but often graveyards are crowded places. This week, we're remembering some of the loneliest graves in the universe—places of particular isolation, melancholy, and beauty.

Early in the morning on April 23, 1915, the 2nd Kimberly Regiment of the South African Army left Swakopmund, a city on the west coast of southern Africa. After stopping for breakfast, they reached their destination—Trekkopje, where a new railway was being built and needed protection. Earlier that year, South African forces, allied with the British, had invaded German South West Africa—now Namibia—and were fighting to control the territory.

On April 26, the German forces, determined to cut off their enemies' supplies, bombed the train tracks north of the camp and started shelling the Allied forces. The South African soldiers fired back from the trenches they’d dug, and swung at the Germans with a fleet of nine armored cars, equipped with machine guns.

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This was one of the most important battles of the South West Africa campaign, and after hours of fighting, the Germans retreated. The South African forces had numbered around 1,500, and 16 of them died. They were buried in a small cemetery just north of the railway line. The German forces never recovered from their defeat and kept giving up territory, until they surrendered later that summer.

Once, there was a railway station near the small military cemetery, created after the Trekkopje battle. That station has been abandoned and destroyed, but the cemetery still stands, cared for by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

The Trekkopje cemetery has been called the “most isolated cemetery in the Commission’s care” and is among the smallest Commonwealth war cemeteries anywhere in the world. It’s a small patch of land in the middle of the desert, miles from the nearest town. The sign for the Trekkopje station is weathered, but the graves are neat and well cared for. It’s a lonely reminder of a time when the colonial influence of countries in Europe spread throughout the world, leading people to live and die for struggles between powerful people in faraway places.


Ancient Greek Funerals Were Decked Out in Celery

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It was a powerful symbol of death—and victory.

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When it comes to leaving flowers on a grave, lilies or roses are a common choice. Sometimes, they’re fashioned into a hoop: a funeral wreath. Such wreaths date back thousands of years. Ancient Greeks used vegetation to honor both victories and the fallen dead. Today, their Olympic olive wreaths are still familiar. But we no longer see a once-common arrangement: In ancient Greece, the most potent way to show love for the fallen was with a wreath of celery.

Back then, it was a very different celery. Native to the Mediterranean and Middle East, wild celery has thin stalks and a bitter flavor. It was only later that farmers bred celery to have sturdy ribs and a sweeter profile. Its strong smell and dark color struck ancient Greeks as positively chthonic: that is, associated with the Underworld and death.

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As a result, celery became an essential part of burials. In ancient Greece, celery covered graves, and the dead were often crowned with it. We know this, writes classicist Robert Garland, because the first-century Greek writer Plutarch referred to celery as the most common plant used for the purpose. Historians have floated various theories as to why the dead needed to be garlanded. Perhaps they had faced life with courage, and deserved to be buried as heroes. Garland rejects this in favor of another theory: that the dead were given heroic crowns “to add dignity and lustre to the proceedings.” Other writers, such as the Roman Pliny the Elder, considered celery off-limits as an everyday food, since it was prominent at funeral banquets.

The association of celery with death even entered the lexicon. The phrase deisthai selinon, or "to need celery," didn’t mean that the subject needed to eat more vegetables. It meant someone was close to death. “The connection between celery and the dead is a recurrent one in Greek thought,” writes classicist Corinne Ondine Pach. At the Nemean and Isthmian games, both associated with death, winners were awarded crowns of celery.

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Celery, then, had a strange dual meaning. One plant encyclopedia calls it “a double symbolism of death and victory,” one that reverberated throughout the ages. Celery and parsley, both in the Apiaceae family, were often mistaken for each other in ancient writings, to the point of interchangeability. As a result, both plants were long considered able to ward off evil spirits in Europe, and parsley maintained a dark reputation. Once dedicated to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, grumpy farmers later claimed that slow-germinating parsley seeds needed to visit the devil nine times before they deigned to grow.

Found: A Photo of the Man Who Fired Van Gogh and Changed Art History

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A portrait of the artist as a bad salesman.

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Vincent van Gogh had a lifelong struggle with mental health issues, but he apparently rather enjoyed his first job, with the Goupil gallery. After his brother Theo was also hired there, Vincent gushed over the gig, assuring Theo in a letter that “it’s such a fine firm, the longer one is part of it the more enthusiastic one becomes.”

Unfortunately for young Vincent, he was fired from his position as an assistant in January 1876, after his boss gave him a harsh evaluation. That man was Charles Obach, manager of Goupil’s London branch. While we know Van Gogh's visage well from his many self-portraits, no one knew what this man Obach, who changed the course of Western art history, looked like—until now. The National Portrait Gallery in London has unearthed the first known photograph of him, confident, coiffed, and flanked by columns. It's easy to imagine him as an effete, indifferent overseer.

Not so fast. Obach might have been a kind boss to Van Gogh, who moved to London in 1873, at just 20, after several years at Goupil's branch in The Hague. The Art Newspaper reports that Obach and his wife Pauline socialized with Van Gogh on a Sunday shortly after his arrival in London. They hosted him for Christmas that first year. Obach even transferred him to Goupil’s Paris branch in hopes that it would help him hit his stride.

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Van Gogh was apparently not so adept at customer service. His dismissal left him largely dependent on Theo. He drifted through a series of jobs, and got rejected from the University of Amsterdam’s theology department, before finally moving to Brussels and enrolling in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The rest, as they say, is history.

Van Gogh biographer Martin Bailey writes in The Art Newspaper that Obach and Van Gogh managed to retain some warm relations, and even met again in The Hague in 1881. Before the emergence of this photo, perhaps the most enduring artifact of Obach had been the note he wrote to Theo on the occasion of Vincent’s untimely death in 1890, expressing “heartfelt condolences on this distressing occasion.”

How Do You Accidentally End up Running a Pet Cemetery?

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Shera Danese-Falk knows.

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Shera Danese-Falk, the glamorous 69-year-old who runs the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park, is running behind schedule. Pets don’t die on the hour, plus the office is closed on Sundays, so Mondays tend to be slammed. Two couples wait to speak with her in the small front office; the women wear large, dark sunglasses, the men are wan. The office is short-staffed and they only have a couple of employees to begin with, which means Danese-Falk is tasked with power-walking each set of these bereaved owners around the 10-acre property herself, even though she has a bad knee, which she let go untreated for too long because she was being optimistic.

Among the mourners is an older man wearing a waxed jacket and a flat cap. While his pet is being “processed” in the crematorium—the pet that was, just moments earlier, swaddled in a leopard-print blanket and placed gently in a wicker basket—he stands at the top of the hill and surveys the landscape of weeping willows, pepper trees, and tiny gravestones framed with fake flowers. A man in a uniform quietly digs little holes in the ground.

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The Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park is the country’s second-largest pet cemetery (after Hartsdale in New York) and its most glam, home to all manner of celebrity pet and show animal, from silent-film legend Rudolph Valentino’s beloved Doberman Pinscher, Kabar; to one of the MGM lions, buried alongside its best friend, a cat; to Hopalong Cassidy’s horse. Danese-Falk also hails from Hollywood; she’s a retired actress and the widow of Peter Falk, best known for his role as Lieutenant Columbo in the epic television series Columbo, to whom she was married for 33 years.

What’s a woman like that doing in a place like this, you might ask. Well, it all started two decades ago, when her dentist told her about the place—actually, he told her about a rival place, which she first toured and found wanting—and she bought enough plots to bury 22 dogs. “I’ll have them in my life,” she says of her mindset at the time. While that may sound a little over the top, she’s since buried 13, has two others that are cremated and ready to be interred, and has seven currently living at home. Do the math: 22 exactly.

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Danese-Falk decorated her pets’ plot with a big sun statue and little yellow rose trees. “My husband never went to the cemetery; he wouldn’t go,” she says. But one day, she made him drive over with her. He turned around, hugged her, and thanked her for bringing him there; finally, he understood. “They’re my kids,” she says, gesturing to the headstone of a dog named Petey Falk Jr. Each of the pets Danese-Falk owns now has special needs; one’s blind, one has congestive heart failure, one’s underbite is so severe it can barely eat. To hear her tell it, she didn’t go looking for her pets; each found her in a unique and fated way. As a child, before she knew how to express her love, she’d scoop her goldfish out of the tank and kiss it while it squirmed.

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All that to say, some time after buying 22 plots, she joined the board. About a year and a half ago, the park needed a manager. “The board just appointed me at a meeting I didn’t go to,” she says, laughing. “That’s what you get for not showing up.” It’s a bizarre story, but Danese-Falk is quirky and spirited—when we spoke on the phone before I visited, the first thing she said was, “You ever have someone make you laugh so hard you pee your pants?”—and, somehow, you can imagine her saying, “Okay, sure, I’ll run the pet cemetery.”

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Running the pet cemetery is a big operation. For one, her staff does pickups, 24-7, to Antelope Valley or the desert, as far as the client is willing to pay for them to go. And while that seems strange—if you live in the middle of nowhere, why not just bury your pet on your abundant land?—it makes some sense. “This park will be here for a long, long time,” she says. It was conceived of as a protected, permanent place where no new owner can dig up or destroy or pave over your pet’s remains. For another, there are about a hundred customized offerings; your bird can be cremated and placed in a three-inch metal urn ($25), your cat can be buried in a pink satin-lined casket with a pink satin pillow inside ($428), your hedgehog can get a dedicated bench ($5,000 donation to the park, plus materials). Plus, they operate a mausoleum, built in 1929, and the on-site crematorium. I imagined it’d all be darkly funny—wealthy Angelenos spoiling their pets, forever and ever—but there’s something terribly earnest, even moving about the whole operation. “Burying your pet is a luxury,” she admits. “We’re lucky to be able to do it.”

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As we sit on the couch in the viewing room, where pets are groomed and presented in open caskets, Danese-Falk tears up talking about a client who recently lost her dog in a terrible accident. I ask if she ever thinks that it’s too painful to lose her animals and bury others’, if she’s ever decided she can’t own any more. “I say it every day,” she says, offering a small smile. “But it doesn’t work.”

History's Best Strategies for Avoiding Being Buried Alive

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These ingenious 19th-century techniques aimed to make sure dead really meant dead.

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What if your last breath was only a poor assumption, a supposition? What if your family, the doctor, the coroner were all wrong, and you found yourself buried alive? You’d scratch and claw, scream and shout, and no one—no one—would hear you. There’s a name for this feeling: taphophobia, the overwhelming fear of being buried alive.

For centuries there have been stories, many of them myths, about people who met this panic-inducing fate. And real mistakes have indeed happened. According to Christine Quigley in her book The Corpse: A History, “in the early 1900s, a case of premature burial was discovered an average of once a week.” Once a week! That’s not just something to worry about—it’s something to get to work on preventing. So, how to make sure that the dead are really dead?

There’s always the ancient Roman method where mourners waited eight days to bury a body, giving the supposed deceased ample time to snap out of it. But maybe this seems far too passive. Enterprising taphophobes throughout history, and especially in the 19th century, have deployed a wide array of methods to ensure that dead means dead.

The Housecall

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Fearing a premature burial, Hannah Beswick, an 18th-century English woman, left her entire estate to her doctor, Charles White, with just one stipulation: Her body could never be buried. Never. Instead, White was required to check on her corpse every day until he could be sure, really sure, that she was dead. This was a lot to ask, and at some point, White embalmed her body. He kept her mummified remains in his collection of anatomical specimens, and every day, for several years, the good doctor and two witnesses unveiled Beswick and made sure she was still dead. He later moved her body into an old clock case, and as Jan Bondeson writes in his book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, the doctor opened the case “once a year to see how his favorite patient was doing.”

The Security Coffin

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U.S. patent number 81,437 was issued in 1868. This particular invention was for a security coffin, which came with all the bells and whistles the not-quite-dead-yet could ever need. The design includes a rope, ladder, and bell. Wake up in the coffin? Ring the bell that has helpfully been attached to the rope you’re holding. Nobody around to hear that bell? Try the ladder, which inventor Franz Vester imagined would allow a person to “ascend from the grave.”

The Grave Window

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Like Hannah Beswick, Timothy Clark Smith, a Vermont taphophobia sufferer, decided to rely on others to make sure his death wasn’t announced too early. Smith asked to have a window installed on his grave, “six feet above him and centered squarely on his face,” when he died. Today the glass has clouded with age and it’s impossible to get a look at Smith, but imagine a breathy fog covering the glass, and Smith waiting for someone to notice. Of course, by all accounts Smith never had to have the assistance of a helpful passerby, and he died without incident in 1893.

The Easy-Opener

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How, exactly, would the newly awakened lift those heavy coffin lids? Johan Jacob Toolen had it covered. His 1907 patent understood that the prematurely buried might be a little tired and incorporated easy-open lids so that the presumed dead wouldn’t have to struggle for freedom. His design was tailor-made for the self-reliant not-dead person. “With very slight exertion on his part,” Toolen explained, the apparently, but not really, dead “can immediately obtain a supply of fresh air and may afterwards leave the coffin.”

The Emergency Airway

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Forward-thinking safety-coffin designers thought of everything. Gael Bedl’s 1887 design came equipped with an air pipe that would be opened if there were movement in the coffin. It also featured an “electric alarm apparatus,” which emitted an audible sound when the air pipe engaged. Bedl’s patent application noted that the air pipe could be made of any decorative material. The day’s been tough enough, being buried alive and all, so no need to sacrifice style.

The Completist Approach

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William Tebb was a busy man in 1896. The businessman had devoted much of his life to his various pet causes (animal rights, anti-war, anti-vaccines), but one meeting in particular gave Tebb a chance to step into a role as advocate for the prematurely buried.

Tebb met Roger S. Chew, a doctor who, through the eagle-eyed observations of a family member, narrowly avoided an early grave himself, in the early 1890s. After surviving his brush with burial, Chew devoted himself to medicine and to saving others from his almost-fate. Meeting Chew sparked something in Tebb, and in 1896 he founded the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial. Tebb, along with Edward Vollman (himself a survivor of a near-burial), eventually published the book Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented in 1905.

The book outlined the various ways one might be mistaken for dead (trance, catatonic state, “human hibernation”), and provided case studies of humans and animals who, although thought dead, were revived. The book also included various techniques that had been used in the past (with varying success) to prevent this from happening. The authors explored every option, from using fire to blister the hand of the presumed dead person (which, they admitted, might not be effective because the person may be so out of it that they may not respond “even to the application of red hot irons”) to injecting the presumed dead with morphine or strychnine, which, well, if they weren’t dead before ...

Premature Burial also explored artificial respiration and electric shock, which were both new ideas at the time. Ultimately, the authors admitted that all of their work might not actually be that effective. Dead would always be dead to the unimaginative and, as they wrote, “the appearance of death is generally taken for its reality.” When Tebb died, he didn’t take any chances. He was cremated one week later.

Our fear of being trapped in an untimely burial plot isn’t just a lingering 19th-century fascination. As recently as 2013, designs for coffins and instruments that claim to prevent premature burial have been submitted. Somewhere deep inside all of us is a lingering worry that what was supposed to be a final resting place might actually be what kills you.

This story originally ran on October 10, 2017.

Why There's a Columbo Statue in the Middle of Budapest

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The American television character is memorialized in an unlikely locale.

In the center of Budapest, Hungary, there’s a life-size bronze sculpture of a not-so-obvious cultural icon: Lieutenant Columbo. Played by the late American actor Peter Falk, Columbo was the title character of an influential U.S. television show that debuted in 1968 and continued, in a variety of formats and with some gaps along the way, until 2003. The fictional Lieutenant Columbo was of course a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, known as much for his rumpled appearance as for his doggedness when it came to solving murders.

So why is his statue in Budapest? It turns out Falk was rumored to be related to the 19th-century Hungarian writer and political figure Miksa Falk. While it's clear the actor's family had Hungarian roots, his connection to Miksa Falk has never been entirely proven. Even so, the Columbo statue was installed on Falk Miksa Street in 2014. The statue, in the context of a city that takes its statuary quite seriously, reflects a desire to preserve and celebrate native Hungarian culture following decades of political turmoil and foreign influence.

In the above video, Atlas Obscura's Eric Grundhauser investigates the true meaning of Budapest's Columbo statue. Oh, and, just one more thing... you can find more on this subject in the Atlas.

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Squirrel Counting Is a Great Excuse to Explore Central Park

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A lesson in slowing down and looking close.

Just before nine on a drizzly, slate-colored Saturday morning, the grassy patches and paved paths around Central Park’s Turtle Pond were wild with activity. Runners tore around the track, breathing heavily in the newly chilled air. Dogs—some shaggy, some coiffed, all in various states of muddiness—seemed thrilled to be off the leash, though all, somehow, scampered back to their owners when called. Robins and sparrows and blue jays stayed just out of the melee.

The only thing missing, it seemed, were the squirrels. Maybe they were laying low. If I was going to find them that busy morning, I was going to have to learn to spy on them.

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For a few weeks of October—Squirrel Awareness Month, apparently—volunteers with the Central Park Squirrel Census had been systematically combing the park. (This project follows one that the same independent “science and storytelling” team has conducted in Atlanta’s Inman Park.) It’s not unusual to enlist citizen scientists for such efforts, and there’s often a strong ecological or epidemiological reason for monitoring the small creatures who share our environment. Pressing stickers onto the wings of migrating monarch butterflies, for instance, sheds light on whether conservation efforts are paying off. Mining date-stamped tweets for information about spiders or ants can help track the relationship between weather and population booms. The rationale for counting squirrels, though? Maybe a little wobbly. But here’s the thing: “They’re cute, and they’re everywhere, and pretty easy to observe,” said Sally Parham, the logistics chief of the census.

Not so long ago, someone who set out to tally all of the squirrels in New York wouldn’t have needed much time. Before eastern gray squirrels, Sciurus carolinensis, were our urban neighbors, they were considered pets, and we imagined them as something like defenseless kittens. In 1856, The New-York Daily Times reported a throng of rubberneckers watching police “rescue” a squirrel that had escaped up a tree. Then, between the 1840s and 1860s, officials introduced squirrels to urban areas as part of beautification efforts in America’s increasingly dense Northeast cities.

In Philadelphia, Boston, and New Haven, they were let loose in grassy squares, where they bedded down in nesting boxes and ate from visitors’ hands. In the Journal of American History, University of Pennsylvania historian Etienne Benson describes urban reformers’ belief that squirrels could help create bucolic oases in the midst of constant change. “The gray squirrel was seen as a particularly desirable park resident,” Benson notes, “since it was understood to be, as the naturalist John Burroughs would later write, an ‘elegant creature, so cleanly in its habits, so graceful in its carriage, so nimble and daring in its movements.’” As a proxy for wilderness, squirrels were ideal tenants for the designs championed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. In 1877, nearly two decades after the first portion of Central Park opened to the public, it opened to squirrels, too.

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At that time, the Central Park Menagerie turned a handful of gray squirrels loose in the thickly wooded Ramble. Within a few years, the population had boomed to perhaps as many as 1,500 individuals. It wasn’t long before they began to wear out their welcome. They were accused of stripping bark from cedars and pilfering too many leaves for their nests, leaving unsightly, naked branches in their wake. In 1883, Will Conklin, the director of the Menagerie, proposed culling, which was vigorously opposed by Henry Bergh of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Conklin and company argued that the squirrels were throwing the whole ecosystem out of whack. That year, an unnamed editorial writer took to The New York Times to argue that “nothing but Mr. Bergh prevents the policeman from exterminating the squirrels that exterminated the birds that exterminated the worms that threatened to exterminate the trees.”

Eventually, Conklin got his way. A spell of warm days in February 1886 invited squirrels out in droves, the Times reported—and the park and police force greeted them with a “fusillade.” Early one morning that month, the Times recounted, “sleepy housemaids along Fifth-ave. were awakened at daylight ... by the reports of firearms in Central Park,” where “expert riflemen” took down a few feral cats and “fully a hundred fine fat squirrels.” Even so, by the early 1900s, many of the city’s parks had pockets of introduced squirrels, and they were generally considered a welcome addition: The Sun referred to them, in 1900, as “an endless source of delight to visitors, young and old.”

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More than a century later, the chance to tally Central Park’s squirrel cohort is a hot ticket. The volunteer sessions fill up, and many of the sighters involved take part more than once.

Some of them are there because they just really, truly love squirrels. Stu Bowler, a five-time sighter, walked me through his favorite squirrel Instagram accounts, and described how, on Friday afternoons, he heads to the park’s wooded Ramble to kick off the weekend with his four-legged buddies. “I’ll sit there, and I may or may not have beers, I may or may not have nuts with me, and I may or may not feed them,” he said. Ten or 15 squirrels come by and sometimes clamber over him, as though his trunk and limbs were those of a tree. For the last five years, he’s also fed squirrels that come and go from the window of his East Village apartment. Just before dawn, and then again around dusk, “they come in for treats,” including avocado and “really expensive nuts.” Bowler and his bushy brethren sometimes hang out on the sofa. The T-shirt he’s wearing out on the census reads, “Squirrels Are My People,” and it has the paw prints and stains to prove it.

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Other volunteers were enticed by how kooky the project seems, the promise of free pins and pencils, and the chance to get to know the park a little better. “I honestly didn’t like Central Park that much until I did this,” explained Kelly Reidy, a repeat sighter sporting a bright yellow “Squirrel Census” button. Reidy works as a tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, which flank the park’s east and west sides. She’s constantly cutting through to get from one gig to the other, but is usually a little frazzled as she rushes across. “I always think of it as, ‘Ugh, that’s my commute, that’s terrible,’” she said. The census also, incidentally, provides a primer on the park’s geography and landmarks. The pursuit of bushy-tailed residents led Reidy to Summit Rock, one of the highest points in the park. Wandering around portions that were less familiar to her “helped me fall in love with it a little bit,” she said.

For me, the park has never been a tough sell. I’ve been enamored since the week I moved to New York, and discovered a place along the Lake where the traffic sounds are muffled almost beyond recognition. Still, armed with my clipboard and a pen, I saw my old love through the dreamy, fugue-like light of a new crush.

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The census organizers gridded the park and its borders into 378 hectares, 349 of which were included in the count (the others are in water). "We created our own planning map to overlay the hectare grid onto the park," explained Nat Slaughter, the project's chief cartographer. Each of the countable hectares was scouted by a sighter twice to measure squirrel activity at different times of day. During each shift, every participant was assigned a hectare or two, and instructed to scour it for squirrels, who may be foraging in the dirt, racing up a tree trunk, or nesting in their shaggy dreys made from leaves and sticks. I made my way from the King Jagiełło monument next to the 79th Street Traverse, down to the bronze statue of Alice in Wonderland, just north of the pond where visitors can helm remote-controlled model sailboats.

There, in hectare 14-I, with my ears alert and pen poised, I searched. Parham, the logistics chief, had reminded me to walk slowly, look closely, and be fastidious with my notes on physical appearance, behavior, and location. I needed to record whether a squirrel was gray, black, or cinnamon-colored, and what it seemed to make of me (did it approach, ignore, or flee?). I needed to indicate whether an individual was an adult or a juvenile—a tough distinction because they look pretty similar, though juveniles tend to look more “perfect,” while the adults “look like they’ve lived a little,” Parham said. I also had to take stock of how the squirrel was communicating. Did it flick its tail or let loose any barking kuks, bleating quaas, or moans?

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In a given shift, which lasted around two hours, a Central Park sighter may see no squirrels or a whole slew of them—23 is the max so far. I saw seven, pawing through crunchy leaves, roughhousing in branches, and leaping around, seemingly oblivious to bicycle traffic and the march of carriage horses. My sightings will be collated, and the organizers intend to release their total count in the spring.

As I flitted my eyes around my hectare, I found myself becoming attuned to the minor excitements of the natural world. I homed in on quick, quiet movements, from hopping birds to breeze-tangled leaves. I observed a lot of other activity I might not have otherwise noted: a cluster of people doing tai-chi in the grass, a hawk arcing low above the canopy, friends sharing a bagel on a bench, toddlers’ shoes squeaking as they scaled a bronze sculpture.

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Reidy told me that one unexpected wonder of the census has been passing by the same people each time she went out, just going about their business, such as the woman she saw every day, tossing a ball for her pint-sized dog while chattering away on her phone. “That’s their thing,” Reidy said. In pursuit of squirrels, I think I learned a little bit about our own species, too, and the little joys of a public space that becomes a shared backyard.

A Mormon Pioneer's Grave, Marked Only With a Wagon Wheel Rim

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Rebecca Winters's grave is one of the few that were marked at all.

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Death is a lonely business, but often graveyards are crowded places. This week, we’re remembering some of the loneliest graves in the universe—places of particular isolation, melancholy, and beauty. Previously: the most isolated war grave of the British Commonwealth.

Rebecca Winters was born in 1802 and baptized into the Mormon church in 1833. The Church of Latter-day Saints had been founded only a few years before, and as an early convert, Winters and her family faced harassment and discrimination. By the 1850s, they were on the move west, as part of the Mormon migration to Utah, led by Brigham Young.

Traveling west was a dangerous endeavor, and in August 1852, cholera started to spread among the people Winters was traveling with. She caught the deadly disease and quickly passed away.

Many people died on the these trails, but few of their graves can be found. Often, people were buried directly beneath the road, where wagon wheels would run over their graves, hardening the ground and keeping their bodies protected from animals. But Winters’s grave was different.

Her family buried her beside the road, in a particularly deep grave. They laid planks from a broken-down wagon on the bottom, wrapped her body in sheets, and covered it with more planks—a makeshift coffin. A family friend, William Reynolds, bent a wagon wheel into the shape of a headstone and etched in her name: "Rebecca Winters - Age 50.”

Decades later, when the railroad was running through this part of Nebraska, surveyors discovered the grave marker. The tracks of the railroad ran right by the grave, which was soon marked with a stone monument. Later, a fence was built around it, too.

By the 1990s, almost a century after it was rediscovered, Winters’s grave had so many visitors that the railroad started to worry about their proximity to the train tracks. With the permission of her descendants, Winters’s grave was moved to a spot nearby, closer to the highway. It’s now in a small memorial park, hidden among fields and nearby industrial buildings.


Medieval Jews Celebrated Passover With Bird-Human Hybrids

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An illuminated manuscript interpreted the prohibition on graven images in a creative way.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the second commandment, God lays down a law: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image," that is, don't make any images or idols to worship. The fifth book of the Old Testament, Deuteronomy, which is thought to have been written later than the other books, gets more specific, by warning against making an image that looks like a man, woman, beast, bird, fish, or “any thing that creeps upon the ground.”

As in many, maybe all, matters of Jewish law, the exact meaning of this rule has been debated for centuries. At times, Jewish leaders (and leaders of other religions) have advised artists to avoid any representation of human figures. At other times this scriptural stricture is interpreted more loosely. But in the early 14th century, it resulted in a remarkable illuminated manuscript that illustrates the story of Exodus without ever showing a human face.

Some of the figures simply have empty circles where their faces would be. But others, the ones representing Jewish characters in particular, have bird-like heads and human bodies. It is “the earliest surviving example of the phenomenon of the obfuscation of the human face,” scholar Marc Michael Epstein writes in his book Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts, and it’s a mystery. Why did the artist choose these avian heads? And what do they mean?

"It's so gloriously weird, and yet it goes so much to the depth of what people thought and felt," Epstein says in an interview. "The people who created this manuscript were interested in thinking about a metaphor that encompassed the way they expressed themselves as Jews in that time and place."

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Based on the style and other clues, the manuscript can be dated to the early 14th century, from the upper Rhine region of southern Germany. Today it's held by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, but little is known about its creation or the patron who commissioned it.

Before the medieval period, the text of the Haggadah, recited on Passover as a retelling of Jewish exodus from Egypt, was often included in larger texts. This is one of the earliest extant examples of a stand-alone Haggadah. Originally 50 pages (47 of which survive), it’s signed by a scribe named Menahem. The beginning and the end of the text feature full-page illustrations, showing a family at a seder table and the rebuilt city of Jerusalem, a reference to the end of the seder, which imagines that it will be celebrated "next year in Jerusalem." Throughout the text, marginalia show the events of the Exodus story and families observing Passover traditions—following Moses through the Red Sea, performing a hand-washing ritual, making matzo.

None of these figures have human faces. The Egyptian figures, along with the celestial ones, such as angels, the sun, and the moon—have blanks where they’d normally have ears, eyes, noses, and mouths. The Jewish figures all have facial features and large, pointed beaks. Some have pointed ears.

For many years, the manuscript has been called the "Birds' Head Haggadah," for obvious reasons. But the ears stand out as even more unusual, and have been a point of contention among scholars. Ruth Mellinkoff, who studied medieval art, identified them as pigs’ ears and argued that the Haggadah’s figures are anti-Semitic representations. (In Jewish tradition, pigs are unclean animals.) But Epstein has a different theory: The ears indicate that the figures are griffins, mythical lion-eagle-human hybrids associated with holiness. The lion had long been a symbol of Jewish strength, and the eagle was a symbol of German imperial power, going back to the reign of Charlemagne. The figures in the Haggadah showed both Jewish identity and their affiliation with local rulership, Epstein posits.

"It would be great if someone was brave enough to refer to it as the 'Griffins' Head Haggadah,'" he says.

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Although the Haggadah contains the most famous example of these sorts of half-human figures, scholars believe it just happens to be the longest-surviving text of its kind. Most likely there were manuscripts in the 13th century that used this work-around, and the style continued to show up throughout the 14th century in European Jewish art. Around this time, some rabbis advised Jewish people to avoid creating any images of humans or animals. Others suggested that only human faces were out of line. The Haggadah was, in this context, a document that tended toward a freer, more liberal view of religious practice.

But the law against graven images was not always interpreted so strictly. “Jewish avoidance or neglect of visual art has usually been more historically contingent than theologically necessary,” writes Melissa Raphael, a religious scholar at the University of Gloucester. When Jewish communities were thriving in the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age or in the Byzantine Empire, it was the tastes and ideas of the dominant religions that pushed Jewish artists to avoid depicting people. Before the Middle Ages, Jewish art of certain eras readily depicted people.

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The figures of the "Birds’ Head Haggadah," then, can be seen as a product of the time, place, and culture in which it was made. Many of the Jewish bird-figures wear pointed hats, required by German law as a way to distinguish adult Jewish men from Christians. Faced with this sort of discrimination, perhaps the artist created the Haggadah as a way to show the power and unity of the Jewish people.

“The non-Jews, by contrast, are literally blanks—nothings,” writes Epstein. “[They] have become faceless and powerless—erased like the objects of their idolatry.”

How Does Your Tsundoku Stack Up?

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Atlas Obscura readers share their personal piles of unread books.

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Tsundoku, the Japanese word defined as the habit of collecting stacks of books that you haven't read and might never get to, feels like it's everywhere right now. It's getting talked about in The New York Times, on the BBC, and in plenty of other corners of the internet that may well remain, well, unread. Last week we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about their own tsundoku habits, and the results were as varied, wonderful, and above all, relatable, as tsundoku itself.

You shared some amazing details about your book-collecting habits. Some of you have split your "to read" piles into multiple stacks. Others are constantly moving the books around, as if the very act of placing your hands on them carries meaning. And a number of you (only somewhat) jokingly mentioned that your growing piles of unread books are a source of shame. But there's no shame in tsundoku! Only more books to explore.

Check out a collection of some of our favorite submissions below. We hope seeing these unread book piles help you better appreciate your own.

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Simon Litton, Brussels, Belgium

How big is your unread collection?

"If you mean my 'to read' pile, hundreds."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“New purchases go on the shelf, but the 'to read' pile evolves depending on a variety of factors including: is a movie or TV version coming out soon? Is it related to my upcoming travels (I like to read books about or from my holiday destinations)? I like to alternate fiction and non-fiction, fun and serious. Apart from that it's an organic, flexible process.”

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John Maher, Brooklyn, New York

How big is your unread collection?

"Upwards of 300, between my apartment and my parents' attic."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“Love them. Fear them. Occasionally leave them a small sacrifice to ensure their favor in the coming months.”

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Ed Rorie, Washington, D.C.

How big is your unread collection?

"17."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“I reshuffle them from time to time to put something on top that is a change from what I am reading now.” — Ed Rorie, Washington, D.C.

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Elizabeth Paliga, Boston, Massachusetts

How big is your unread collection?

"130, and that’s just the ones at school. I have at least that many on a bookcase at home in Lakewood, Colorado."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“My tsundoku is an aesthetic addition to my room. I find that organizing the books in a mosaic of stacks as a centerpiece creates the opportunity for a more animated dialogue between myself and my books, rather than shelving them. During the day I will glance at them and rediscover a title I had forgotten I had, so the marvelous feeling of a potential adventure is always at my fingertips.”

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Angela Consani, Basehor, Kansas

How big is your unread collection?

"101."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“They have their own shelves. They cannot be touching the other books that I have finished. Though one shelf shares space with some notebooks and they are allowed to touch those. And I am out of room so I have started to stack them on top of the others.”

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Heather Hoffart, Phoenix, Arizona

How big is your unread collection?

"80."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“Having them stacked about stressed me so I made room for them on a couple of bookshelves in different rooms (I gathered them in one spot for the photo and it was time for a dusting). They're divided into cerebral and, um, less cerebral shelves. We don't interact very often, but I'm always inspired, overwhelmed, guilty, excited when we do. Then the feelings ebb away until the next time.”

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Elizabeth Vander Esch, Poulsbo, Washington

How big is your unread collection?

"Eight in this pile. There are many piles."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“I stack and pull and then rearrange and often just gaze wistfully at the titles I so earnestly thought I would get to. Often I walk by ashamed.”

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Keith Olson, Corvallis, Oregon

How big is your unread collection?

"> 100."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

My unread shelf sits at the end of the bed making me feel guilty to be sleeping and not reading a book.”

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Colleen Lacy, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

How big is your unread collection?

"272."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“My tsundoku has been refined over more than a decade of slow accumulation. Short stacks grew taller and taller, morphed into a long shelf wrapping around the room, and was eventually sculpted into a small, bespoke library categorized around my personal interests: philosophy, anthropology, sci-fi, horror, mycology, geology, mythology, painting, photography, graphic novels, antique books, cinema, theatre production, and textile design. It has lived through three houses and I even moved across the country from Arizona to Florida with this substantial collection. I will usually only purchase a book if I want to keep it in my permanent collection. I don't usually keep books that I've read unless they're excellent or rare, so I think I've only read about 7% of what I have right now. The rest is pure tsundoku! It serves as a room divider and slowly gets funneled into the mini-stack of books to read on my nightstand.”

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Luke Phillips, Northern Virginia

How big is your unread collection?

"165+ gallons' worth (the last time I 'counted' was when I stuffed my personal library into seven, 23.5-gallon tubs for safekeeping while I was away for a summer.) I haven't actually done a headcount since then, but I'd estimate somewhere between 120 and 150 books."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“I keep them all on some shelves across from my bed so they can haunt me while I sleep. They are organized thematically: American history, American literature, modern political theory, classical political theory, world history, American biography, world biography, religious texts, glorified self-help books, etc... Generally while I'm working at my desk, if something interesting pops up in my head, I'll pull one of my relevant books off the shelf and read passages from it. Sometimes I'll pull multiple books off and stack them on my desk, intending to read the passages immediately. Inevitably I'll get distracted or busy, and not get to the passages, so I'll have new mini-tsudokus pile up, ever reminding me of my intellectual inadequacies.”

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Tristan Janeiro, Oakland, California

How big is your unread collection?

"16."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“I just keep stashing them on my bedside table. I dust them occasionally, and shuffle them in order I would like to read, but then they don't stack neatly and I can't handle it, so I shuffle then back into two piles, organized by size.”

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Cheryl DeFranceschi, Chicago, Illinois

How big is your unread collection?

"Uncountable!"

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“I stack the stacks until they teeter, totter, and threaten to collapse. I have four different areas where the unread await their destiny. When starting a new book, I’ll cruise through one of the areas and pull a half dozen books. I’ll then read the first 5-10 pages and choose the one I’ve engaged with most. There are also the hundreds of ebooks languishing on my e-reader. Le sigh!”

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Misa Nakamura, Seattle, Washington

How big is your unread collection?

"5-7."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“I organize my bookshelf by color so I add my unread gems to each shelf and just watch it grow. When I can’t fit any more into the space above my books, I know I have a serious problem and start to buckle down.”

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Lynn Fiorentino, Ann Arbor, Michigan

How big is your unread collection?

"27 (that I remember)."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“Well… first I promise myself that I'm not going to buy any more books until I've read the ones I have, and then I just ‘pop in’ to my local bookstore and I come out with three more books. I keep a book in active reading status in each room, and when the new books come home, sometimes I start them and push the other ones aside ‘just for now.’ I also tell myself to check books out from the library instead, but the book shops are closer to home and sometimes they have shop dogs, as well, so how could I not indulge? Next year I only want to read fiction, so I have to finish reading most of the books in my piles in like the next ten weeks.”

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Michael LaMattina, Lindenhurst, Illinois

How big is your unread collection?

"At any given time my tsundoku stack consists of about 10 books."

Tell us about your tsundoku.

“Organization is loose, if at all. Like introducing a new rescue animal into the established fold of household pets, I’ll often just let it loose in the pack and see what comes. I enjoy finding interesting relationships later on between books resting haphazardly in the piles.”

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Remembering When Americans Picnicked in Cemeteries

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For a time, eating and relaxing among the dead was a national pastime.

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Within the iron-wrought walls of American cemeteries—beneath the shade of oak trees and tombs’ stoic penumbras—you could say many people “rest in peace.” However, not so long ago, people of the still-breathing sort gathered in graveyards to rest, and dine, in peace.

During the 19th century, and especially in its later years, snacking in cemeteries happened across the United States. It wasn’t just apple-munching alongside the winding avenues of graveyards. Since many municipalities still lacked proper recreational areas, many people had full-blown picnics in their local cemeteries. The tombstone-laden fields were the closest things, then, to modern-day public parks.

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In Dayton, Ohio, for instance, Victorian-era women wielded parasols as they promenaded through mass assemblages at Woodland Cemetery, en route to luncheon on their family lots. Meanwhile, New Yorkers strolled through Saint Paul’s Churchyard in Lower Manhattan, bearing baskets filled with fruits, ginger snaps, and beef sandwiches.

One of the reasons why eating in cemeteries become a “fad,” as some reporters called it, was that epidemics were raging across the country: Yellow fever and cholera flourished, children passed away before turning 10, women died during childbirth. Death was a constant visitor for many families, and in cemeteries, people could “talk” and break bread with family and friends, both living and deceased.

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“We are going to keep Thanksgivin' with our father as [though he] was as live and hearty this day [as] last year,” explained a young man, in 1884, on why his family—mother, brothers, sisters—chose to eat in the cemetery. “We've brought somethin' to eat and a spirit-lamp to boil coffee.”

The picnic-and-relaxation trend can also be understood as the flowering of the rural cemetery movement. Whereas American and European graveyards had long been austere places on Church grounds, full of memento mori and reminders not to sin, the new cemeteries were located outside of city centers and designed like gardens for relaxation and beauty. Flower motifs replaced skulls and crossbones, and the public was welcomed to enjoy the grounds.

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Eating in graveyards had, and still has, historical precedent. People picnic among the dead from Guatemala to parts of Greece, and similar traditions involving meals with ancestors are common throughout Asia. But plenty of Americans believed that picnics in local cemeteries were a “gruesome festivity.” This critique, notably from older generations, didn’t stop young adults from meeting up in graveyards. Instead it led to debate over proper conduct.

In some parts of the country, such as Denver, the congregations of grave picnickers grew to such numbers that police intervention was even considered. The cemeteries were becoming littered with garbage, which was seen as an affront to their sanctity. In one report about these messy gatherings, the author wrote, “thousands strew the grounds with sardine cans, beer bottles, and lunch boxes."

Though the macabre picnics were considered “nuisances” in some communities, they did give participants a sort of admired air. One reporter lauded the fact that the picnickers looked “happy under discouraging circumstances,” and even said it was a trait “worthy of cultivation.” The fad of casual en plein air dining among the crypts would soon come to an end, though.

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Cemetery picnics remained peripheral cultural staples in the early 20th century; however, they began to wane in popularity by the 1920s. Medical advancements made early deaths less common, and public parks were sprouting across the nation. It was a recipe for less interesting dining venues.

Today, more than 100 years since Americans debated the trend, you’d be hard-pressed to find many cemeteries—especially those in big cities—with policies or available land that allow for picnics. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, for example, has a no picnic rule.

But the fad isn’t entirely dead in the United States. The country’s immigrant population includes families carrying on traditions that call for meals with departed loved ones, and cemeteries will hold occasional public events in the spirit of this era. There are still scattered graveyards where you can picnic among tombstones, too, particularly if you know someone with a sizable family lot. In those cases, all you need is a picnic basket filled with treats, and you and your undaunted party can partake in an old American tradition. Just remember to clean up after yourselves. The penalties for doing otherwise may be grave.

This story originally ran on April 20, 2018.

The Parasite That Forces Bees to Dig Their Own Graves

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It's a growing threat to our food supply.

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Rosemary Malfi first encountered conopids while she was dissecting bees, early in her graduate career. She was looking for the type of parasite you can only see with a microscope. But it was difficult to look past the parasites that filled the bee’s entire abdomen.

The parasitic conopid fly is the Mafioso of the bumblebee world: It forces bees to dig their own graves. The saga begins when a worker bee innocently approaches a flower where an adult, female conopid fly lies in wait. After identifying its target, the fly dive-bombs the bee in mid-air, tackling it to the ground. The bee is stunned, but quickly reorients itself and flies off. Nothing seems wrong, but it’s been implanted with an egg, which will soon hatch and eat its body from the inside.

The egg’s new home is the bee’s fat stores. What was meant to be a source of energy for the bee becomes a source of nutrition for the fly larva. After devouring the fat stores, the growing larva continues to hollow out the bee’s body. It consumes internal tissues as if clearing furniture from someone’s apartment. The bee’s body is both the fly’s food and its home.

This micro-nightmare remains private for around 10 days, until the bee succumbs to its fate. It lands on the ground and digs itself into the soil. In a zombie-like motion, it uses its little bee legs to tunnel into its own grave, and die.

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But the fly is very much alive, hibernating inside the closed coffin of the bee’s body. In the spring, the adult fly squirms out of the bee’s carcass like it’s shedding a false skin, ready to begin the cycle again.

This is not a singular nightmare for an unlucky specimen. Malfi’s collection of dissected bees had been gathered from 12 different sites, and each group was beset by conopids. “We were surprised by just how many of them there were,” she says. “A third of the bees had parasitoid fly larvae living inside of them.” Malfi isn’t sure how exactly the larvae force bees to dig their own graves. But she speculates that the fly somehow flips a switch in the worker bee’s brain to make it act like a queen bee preparing to hibernate for the winter.

Malfi, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California-Davis, is now a leading expert on the relationship between conopids and bumble bees. “Conopid flies are fascinating, and we don’t have a great grasp of how natural enemies influence [bumble bee] populations generally,” she says.

Now is a critical time to figure it out, because many wild bumble bee species are at risk. Among the most threatened species, scientists have documented sharp population declines. The rusty patched bumble bee is the most extreme example: Its population has shrunk 91 percent over the past two decades, making it the first endangered bee species in America. Scientists are now working to untangle a complex web of stresses, including habitat loss, pesticide exposure, and agricultural practices.

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Bumble bees’ sufferings trickle down into our own food supply. Only wild bumble bees know how to perform the subtle, buzzing dance that’s essential to pollinating some of our most valued crops. “It’s something that honey bees literally cannot do,” Malfi says. Without bumble bees, the production of crops such as tomatoes, eggplants, and blueberries would be much less effective.

Conopid flies have always been a threat to bumble bees, but they’re not a death knell for a hive. As parasites, conopids need enough bumble bees to survive to become hosts for their children. In the big picture of bumble bee stress, humans are responsible for the most significant threats, such as habitat loss, chemical and pesticide exposure, and climate change. But Malfi wanted to figure out if conopids have a bigger impact on hives when bees are already dealing with these other problems.

To find out, Malfi conducted a multi-year experiment at the bucolic Blandy Experimental Farm, a 700-acre property about an hour and a half from Washington D.C. While it’s operated by the University of Virginia, traces of its antebellum roots remain evident in its student housing, which formerly served as plantation slave quarters. In the mid-1980s, the university transitioned Blandy from a teaching farm into a research field station. Rows of crops and cow pastures returned to a more natural state, devoted to ecological experiments.

Each summer during grad school, Malfi settled into a small cottage at Blandy for what amounted to a 24/7 bee monitor job. She had a two-part strategy. First, she would figure out how resource availability—meaning, how many flowering plants were around—affected bee hives’ general success. In general, more pollen brought back to the hive equals more baby bees and population success. Then, she’d determine what percentage of the bees were parasitized by conopids.

For the experiment, Malfi and her field crew hand-built sheltered structures for 24 imported Eastern bumble bee hives on the edge of a wooded area. Nature played right into her hands. The first year of the study, Blandy was hit by a mid-summer drought. Resources were hard to come by, making it hard for bees to find food. But the next year was a wet one. Flowers bloomed in abundance, making for happy hives.

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As expected, colonies fared worse in the drought year than the wet year. But how did conopids factor into their fate? “Under most scenarios, [the conopids’] impact was pretty modest, meaning they weren’t having a huge influence on colony productivity,” explains Malfi. “But when resources in the environment were limiting—meaning they were limiting the growth of the colony—we saw the influence of conopids rise pretty dramatically.”

Malfi discovered that conopids reduce hive productivity by about 10 percent under normal conditions. But during the drought, they hampered hives by 30 percent. “And then when we accounted for something called sub-lethal effects, which is reduction in individual worker productivity as a result of being infected, those percentages grew even higher,” Malfi says. “So it could be reducing productivity by 50 percent.”

Meaning, conopids are really kicking bees while they’re down. “The takeaway message is it’s important to consider these natural enemies and how they influence populations in the context of all of the other stressors that bee populations experience,” says Malfi.

Being eaten from the inside and forced to dig its own grave is a terrible fate for a single bee, but a small threat for wild bee populations. “It seems very gruesome and like this terrible thing is happening, but [conopids] are a natural enemy,” says Malfi. “It’s a natural part of their life.”

It’s the human threat that looms larger. According to Malfi’s research, our own impact on bumble bees’ environment could amplify the impact of conopids. In other words, humans may be unintentionally preparing a mass grave for bees, and endangering our own food supply at the same time.

The Grave Farthest From Earth Is on a Spacecraft Headed Out of Our Solar System

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Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, and then hitched a ride toward it.

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Death is a lonely business, but often graveyards are crowded places. This week, we’re remembering some of the loneliest graves in the universe—places of particular isolation, melancholy, and beauty. Previously: the most isolated war grave of the British Commonwealth and a Mormon pioneer's grave.

No human has ever flown closer to Pluto than Clyde Tombaugh did in 2015, 18 years after his death. That’s fitting, because he was also the first person to lay eyes on it.

When he first glimpsed Planet X, which would go on to be christened Pluto, Tombaugh was just barely 24 and largely self-taught. A farm kid from Streator, Illinois, Tombaugh had once rigged up a backyard telescope made out of parts from a cream separator and a 1910 Buick. He’d earned a gig at the Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, Arizona, on the strength of his independent studies. That’s where he spent months sifting through images of the night sky, looking for changes in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune that could potentially be chalked up to the presence of a planet that hadn’t yet been identified.

Speaking to the Associated Press, in 1990, Tombaugh admitted that the task was “tedious.” But, he added, “it was much more interesting work than farming, as far as I was concerned.” Anyway, he wasn’t one to be deterred—a biographer would later call him “one of the last old-style, freeze-your-tail-off observers.” And his steady scanning paid off. His discovery of Pluto reshuffled our understanding of the solar system, and earned him a scholarship to the University of Kansas, which led to an academic post in New Mexico.

Tombaugh died in 1997. Nearly two decades later, one ounce of his cremated remains journeyed to the outer edge of our solar system inside an aluminum capsule aboard the New Horizons spacecraft. The capsule’s inscription eulogizes Tombaugh as a husband, father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend.

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Since Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s memorial spaceflight in 1992, roughly 450 people have been “buried” in space—though this often means that only a gram or so of their cremated remains took a brief journey to the stars before either returning to Earth on the same craft, or burning up during reentry. A number of space-burial companies, including Elysium and Celestis, are banking on big growth in the sector, where prices have fallen to be just a few thousand dollars more than the average terrestrial entombment in North America.

Still, no one has gone farther out into the lonely reaches than Tombaugh has. New Horizons—itself only the size, Wired reported, of a baby grand piano—zoomed within 7,800 miles of Pluto in July 2015, whizzing by at a speed exceeding 30,000 miles per hour. The spacecraft is still hurtling through space, on its way out of our solar system. It’s currently more than four billion miles from Earth.

“I think my dad would be thrilled,” his daughter, Annette Tombaugh-Sitze, then in her 70s, told NASA, when her father’s remains were placed on board. “When he looked at Pluto, it was just a speck of light.”

When Cactus Destruction Is Imminent, These Rescuers Come Running

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The Tucson Cactus and Succulent Society is closing in on 100,000 salvaged plants.

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Dick Wiedhopf, a 78-year-old resident of Tucson, Arizona, and former university pharmacist, orders 144 pairs of welding gloves at a time. He’s the manufacturer’s biggest customer, but the gloves aren’t all for him—actually, they’re not for any welders.

The gloves are for the Tucson Cactus and Succulent Society, which Wiedhopf has been president of for the past 17 years. The 1,300-plus member club needs these gloves when they venture into the Sonoran Desert to rescue cacti and succulents from construction. Their collective, enthusiastic experience is summed up best by Jessie Byrd, the Pima County native plant nursery manager and society member. “It’s dumbfounding how much cool shit we’ve dug out of deserts,” she says.

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In 2019, the club will likely celebrate its 100,00th rescued plant. This accomplishment is especially meaningful in Tucson, a city that has been split for decades over how to best preserve the desert. As urban development encroaches on an adored ecosystem, the cactus society mediates conflicting Arizonian desires: to see the economy and the desert thrive. Given the local enthusiasm for succulents, though, the only surprise about the club’s rescue efforts is that they didn’t start sooner.

The society began in 1960, but it wasn’t until 1999 that Wiedhopf and a few of his fellow members began rescuing cacti. Around that time, Tucson’s development boom was turning the plants into mulch piles, and Wiedhopf and his friends figured the destruction could be avoided. This was Arizona after all, the state that banned harming native plants back in 1929. After one trial rescue on a school construction site, the project took off. “People heard about it and thought it was better than white sliced bread,” says Wiedhopf. Since then, the society has completed over 400 salvages.

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Part of the program’s success is likely because the work diffuses tension over current development laws. Pima County, which governs Tucson, has some of the most progressive native plant protection requirements in the nation. Still, developers bulldoze a lot of cacti—so much so that city expansion remains the primary threat to the Sonoran Desert.

This destruction ticks off Tucsonans. They already contend with the illegal cactus trade, a booming business with shocking per plant prices—saguaros go for between $75 and $100 per foot. And since cacti grow slowly, replacing them is difficult. Byrd’s nursery fosters saguaros, but the species needs 70 years to reach reproductive age. Even species that grow more quickly, such as prickly pear, take three to four years to fruit. So when cacti are permissibly gutted by development, it doesn’t go over well. “People here are very sensitive about plants like saguaros—when they see an old saguaro being knocked down, they get really mad,” says Wiedhopf. Egregious removals end up in the local news and create negative attention developers would rather avoid.

That’s why builders, mining operations, and engineering firms call the volunteer salvage crew. The society rescues native plants for free and lets developers say they saved as many cacti as possible. “And we have more fun than anybody should have,” says Wiedhopf.

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For each request, a delegation treks to the site and inventories what’s there. Native plants need permits and tags authorizing removal from the Arizona Department of Agriculture. Fees are between 50 cents and eight dollars a plant, and the group shells out between $2,000 and $4,000 per project, says Wiedhopf. Approvals in hand, a subset of the 400 dedicated cactus rescuers meet up, review safety procedures (no snake bites or scorpion stings yet!), and start to dig.

Getting poked is part of the process, says Byrd who, 10 years deep into volunteering, still gets whapped by errant branches. Yet despite the spines, most cacti are easy to move, says Wiedhopf. A majority ease out of the ground in under a minute, including heavy specimens, like 300- to 400-pound barrel cacti, which volunteers hoist onto a specially-designed sling to carry around. For the truly unwieldy beasts, it depends on the gumption of the crew. Rescuers recently confronted two six-foot-by-six-foot crested chollas. One was salvaged in its entirety, while another was young enough to have its arms lopped off to replant as independent chollas.

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This regenerative ability of cacti makes relocating the plants easy. Many are plopped into gravel and left for months to regrow roots, which the plant takes to its permanent home. In fact, most plants dug up by the society find a new home in the society’s gravel field, also called Pima Prickly Park. For some, this is a permanent resting spot, while others leave when the club holds a sale. One in particular, the August Blooming Barrel Sale, is so popular, buyers show up at 5:30 a.m. to get first pick at 8:00 a.m.. To ensure a successful transplant into their yard, customers look for the dot of white correction fluid on each plant that rescuers painted there just before digging. This indicates where the plant faced south in its natural habitat. If it’s not replanted with the same orientation, the cactus sunburns and scars.

Unfortunately, the society can’t save every cactus. Some, such as 15- or 20-foot saguaros that are 400 years old, wouldn’t survive a move, says Wiedhopf. When people get too angry about these ancient plants coming down, he says that he finds himself wondering: “What do you think was on your property before they built your house?”

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These passionate debates are expected when it comes to “charismatic megaflora.” That’s the term Ben Wilder, a desert ecologist with the University of Arizona, uses to describe the Sonoran Desert’s prized specimens. To him, the society’s work carries many ecological benefits: Saguaros are keystone species that woodpeckers nest in, owls perch on, and doves and bats drink nectar from. Transplanting them into urban settings means the plant fosters biodiversity in a new area.

But salvages also encourage succulent enthusiasm to grow in a sustainable direction. Legally sourced specimens likely limit the illegal trade demand, Wilder says, which means less poaching from wild patches. At the same time, the society’s work reinforces the idea that native plants hold more than monetary value. “People are building their homes and taking in those [cacti] because they want to live immersed within them. We need to value and respect [plants] as individuals, and the people who do this work, that’s the approach they’re taking,” Wilder says.

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It’s hard not to take this perspective when seeing how dedicated the society is to salvaging. The eclectic team of scientists, government officials, university presidents, and straight-up “cactus nerds” give up their weekends to do this labor, and even come running if Byrd needs help moving plants for county construction work. A recent mission of this sort saved 280 plants that will go back on the perimeter of the project when it’s done. “We just enjoy digging plants,” says Wiedhopf. “We’re just helping them out because we’re nutty.”

Once, the society heard from an elementary school student who declared he was moving to Arizona to help rescue cacti when he was a grown-up. The members were touched, but Wiedhopf points out you probably don’t have to leave your home state to join a plant rescue effort. “We need to think broadly about all the interesting plants that need to survive,” he says. “And I’m not even getting into animals. I only can handle one life form at a time.”

The Library of Congress Has an Incredible Collection of Early Baseball Cards

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There's a lot of history in these collectibles.

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By any objective standard, Mike Mattimore was a middling professional baseball player. Born three years before the American Civil War, the pitcher-turned-outfielder played parts of four major league seasons between 1887 and 1890. After his final two campaigns with the Kansas City Cowboys and the Brooklyn Gladiators, he finished his career with 26 wins and 27 losses—a respectable but eminently forgettable record.

And yet, Mattimore isn’t forgotten. In 1887, Old Judge, one of the era’s most popular cigarette brands, included the pitcher in its extensive set of insert cards. As such, nearly 90 years after his death, Mattimore remains forever young, captured on one of thousands of similar tobacco cards held in the Library of Congress’s Benjamin K. Edwards collection.

According to Peter Devereaux, author of Game Faces: Early Baseball Cards from the Library of Congress, the presence of men like Mattimore is what makes the Edwards collection “a true photographic document of 19th-century baseball.” The Old Judge cards, he says, along with thousands of others produced by competing cigarette brands, are “a prism through which we can glimpse the conflict, progress, and change that occurred in [baseball] as it made the transition from an amateur pursuit to the nation’s pastime.”

This transition, of course, was not without its ugliness. Like so many 19th-century relics, first-generation baseball cards tell a dichotomous story, one that pits the romantic rediscovery of long-forgotten ballplayers against the legacy of morally-bankrupt monopolies. “While they have an aura of pastoral charm,” Devereaux says, “they also belie the sport’s seedy urban underbelly of gambling, drinking, and violence, as well as James Buchanan Duke’s ruthless tobacco empire [which] explicitly directed its advertising to children.”

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Indeed, the story of how ballplayers like Mattimore came to pose for tobacco cards provides rare insight into the early marriage of pop culture and mass consumerism. In 1881, James Bonsack, an American inventor, patented the first commercial cigarette roller. Duke, then head of W. Duke Sons & Company, embraced the machine, which instantly transformed the tobacco industry. Within a few years, competition intensified between his company and old rivals, most notably Allen & Ginter and Goodwin & Company.

“When the competition really got going,” Devereaux says, these companies looked to Europe, where tobacconists had already begun inserting cards into cigarette packs. “People would collect them, and this was a way to maintain brand loyalty.”

Most early tobacco cards depicted scantily clad women and prominent vaudeville actresses. Temperance advocates took aim at these cards, leaving Duke and his competitors in search of other options. Initially, they settled on categories ranging from Civil War generals to Native Americans to more innocuous subjects like flags, birds, and bridges. By 1886, they’d added baseball to their ever-expanding list.

According to Devereaux, this decision paid immediate dividends not only for tobacco companies and the nascent major leagues, but also for the sport’s earliest fans. “You’re talking about a time when most newspapers and even periodicals didn’t really have photographs or illustrations,” he says. “For a lot of these people who were starting to follow the game, they didn’t know what King Kelly looked like, or Cap Anson, or any of the other early stars. I think the tobacco companies knew that.”

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While most smokers took only a fleeting glance at these cards before throwing them away, contemporary magazine and newspaper articles do suggest a vibrant collecting culture existed. This included children. Indeed, in his award-winning monograph, The Cigarette Century, the historian Alan Brandt wrote that even at this early stage, tobacco companies understood what “would appeal to boys.” Card collecting, he wrote, “tapped into a powerful dynamic in the initiation of new smokers.”

“For years,” the Philadelphia Record reported in June 1890, “the small boy has been begging ‘won’t yer give me the picter!’" Illustrating this phenomenon with racist language common to the period, the anonymous author added that children of the day had assembled vast collections "of Indians painted in their most villainous dye, of sturdy athletes, base-ball players and what not—enough to set up a Louvre gallery of art in Smallboytown.”

Even here, however, the bottom line eventually took its toll. According to the same June 1890 article, the tobacco companies themselves had grown to lament cigarette cards. “The great question that agitated them,” the paper reported, “was how to stop this picture-giving business. As long as one gave, the rest had to do it too, in order to keep in the tide of popularity.”

Devereaux explains that there was a simple reason for this: Cigarette cards were expensive to produce. The Record estimated that major tobacco firms, combined, spent over two million dollars on them between 1885 and 1890. It isn’t surprising, then, that as soon as Duke enveloped his chief competitors within his newly formed American Tobacco Company, the cards disappeared. “He was able to corner the market,” Devereaux says. “And just like what was happening with Standard Oil and other big companies, he created a monopoly. The first thing he cut were these very expensive cards.”

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Baseball cards would not rebound until the Taft administration busted up Duke’s monopoly in the early 20th century. As for the thousands of cards released between 1887 and 1890, it’s a miracle so many survived. Those found in the Edwards collection are no exception.

Edwards, a Midwestern lumber mill owner, collected the cards throughout his youth. When he died in 1943, he bequeathed a collection of over 10,000 tobacco inserts, including over 2,100 baseball cards, to his daughter, who then regifted them to the poet Carl Sandburg in 1948. Sandburg in turn donated the cards to the Library of Congress in 1954.

The LOC has made all of Edwards’s baseball cards available online. By authoring Game Faces, Devereaux, who also writes for the LOC’s Publishing Office, says that he hopes to inspire those in possession of similar collections to follow suit. If so, the legacies of men like Mattimore, as well as the warts-and-all history of early baseball, might finally find new life online. “I’m hoping that this book will help start a digitization initiative,” he says. “Hopefully, we’ll get all the other cards from the other sports online, too.”


Why England Once Forced Everyone to Be Buried in Wool

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Transgressors had to pay a heavy fine.

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I solemnly swear that this dead person was not wrapped in anything “made or mingled with Flax Hempe Silke Haire Gold or Silver,” but rather in a shroud “made of Sheeps Wooll onely …” This strange and specific oath was taken by witnesses to English burials for more than a century, by order of Parliament. As of March 25, 1667, everyone in the country had to be buried in woolen (rather than linen) shrouds—on pain of a hefty £5 fine taken from the deceased’s estate or his or her associates.

Here's what Parliament saw in 1665: lots of sheep, lots of imported linen, and lots of death. Lots and lots of death, actually, as it had been a particularly bad time for bubonic plague, which contributed to 219,601 registered deaths by year's end. Most of those corpses, by custom, would have been buried in linen shrouds. This was of great benefit to England's cross-Channel rival, France, which provided a third of all the country's linen. It was England’s second-biggest import, after groceries.

There were five fibers in use at the time—silk, wool, linen, hemp, and cotton—and according to Alice Dolan, a scholar of linen’s history in England, linen has certain advantages over the others. In particular, the laundry process of the time consisted of boiling textiles with lye or soap and then beating them with a battledore, a rustic version of a cricket bat. Keeping one's clothes clean was an ongoing battle. Linen, which came in a range of qualities that made it accessible to both rich and poor, was valued because it bleached well and easily.

Linen was also part of religious tradition. All four Gospels testify that Jesus was wrapped in linen before he was buried, with Luke and John even describing how the cloth lingered in the tomb after the Resurrection—material proof of a miracle. So linen, which is woven from the fibers of the flax plant, became the norm for burials across much of the Christian world, but this also effectively buried England’s domestic wool industry. To stymie French linen imports, encourage people to buy new wool, and preserve local linen for other uses, Parliament developed "An Act for Burying in Woollen onely."

As Dolan lays out in her doctoral thesis on the use of linen in the period, a switch to wool burial shrouds could have preserved over 1.9 million yards of linen in 1665. But it was not an easy transition after the act passed the next year. “At first nothing could be more shocking,” wrote philosopher Bernard Mandeville, “to Thousands of People than that they were to be Buried in Woollen.” It’s not clear how well people complied, but Parliament clearly wasn’t satisfied because it introduced more stringent legislation in 1677. It wasn't a slam dunk. “Our Savior was buried in Linnen,” protested Edward Waller, the representative for Hastings. “‘Tis a thing against the Customs of Nations and I am against it.” Henry Coventry, Secretary of State for the Southern Department, was harsher, suggesting that “men of the Romish Religion” prefer woolen burials to linen. “I fear this Bill may taste of Popery,” he sneered.

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But it did pass the next year, and the revamped act had teeth. Burials required written affidavits, from two witnesses, within eight days, affirming that a wool shroud had been used. Clergy were told to document burial fiber in a registry. Anything short of strict adherence brought that crippling fine. It worked. Between 1682 and 1755, just 18 of 505 graves in St. Lawrence’s Church, Cucklington, were buried in linen, according to Dolan's research. Mandeville suggested that only the older generation—which had been raised to respect the sanctity of a linen burial—was ruffled by the requirement. Maybe wool was worth it to stick it to the French. Or maybe at the end of the day, £5 was just a lot of money—so much, in fact, that informants ratted out linen burials for a cut of the fine.

Mandeville saw an unqualified success: “nothing ever could be said in reason to condemn it,” he wrote. Poet Nicholas Amhurst was even more emphatic, declaring the act, “on all hands, to be the greatest support of the wealth of this kingdom.” There's no documentation of how much it benefited the wool industry, but Dolan estimates that England could have stopped the import of over 23 million yards of linen between 1679 and 1695, to the tune of some £2.5 million.

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There's some circumstantial evidence to suggest that wealthy people flouted the law and paid the fine to ensure they were buried in flaxen shrouds. A study of St. Nicholas Church in Henstridge, Dolan reports, found that between 1678 and 1707, less than one percent of burials in the churchyard were in linen, but that rose to between nine and 13 percent of burials inside—surely important or wealthy people. A 1678 satirical pamphlet called The Good-Wives Lamentation, or, the Womens Complaint on the Account of Their Being to Be Buried in Woollen, mocked a haughty, fictional woman who paid the fine for her husband’s linen burial, “rather than he shall travel so long a Journey as into the other World like a Beggar, without a Shirt to his back.”

And then, without much fuss, the acts were repealed in 1814. By 1792, says Dolan, authorities had eased up on enforcement, in part because the English economy had diversified beyond its dependence on wool. Cotton burials came also into vogue, and any budding wool shroud tradition never really took hold. But those plague victims—part of the reason behind the period of wool burials—they got to stick to tradition all along. It was feared in the 17th century and for some time after, incorrectly, that wool retained contagions longer than linen would.

A Year Gardening the Grave of a Stranger

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At Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia, green-thumbed volunteers participate in a unique program.

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Angelina Jones filled up her jug with water from the pump and walked with Rocky, her dog, over to her graves.

Her family, the Keens, have massive, stone “cradle graves”—a fad back when they were buried, in the mid-19th century. Towering, stately headstones are attached to bathtub-like extensions. The Keens’ graves are full of soil and all manner of flowers and greenery, which Jones sprinkled with water. She comes to the Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia regularly to tend to the Keens’ graves, despite having no connection to them, familial or otherwise. She and her husband were randomly assigned the Keens when they became grave gardeners.

Originally a botanist’s estate in the 18th century, the Woodlands was converted into a rural cemetery in the 1840s. People still get buried at the cemetery today, but less frequently than in its heyday 150 years ago. The grave gardener program here is only in its third year. Accepted gardeners—150 out of 250 applicants in 2017—are assigned a cradle grave or two to tend as if it were a dear relative’s final resting place. It’s a creative outlet for city dwellers who may not have space for a garden at home, and it brightens up the cemetery.

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“There’s two groups of people,” said Jessica Baumert, the executive director of the cemetery. “There are the ones that think this is the coolest thing ever, like when you tell them you do this, and there’s the ones that think it’s the weirdest thing ever.” Everyone who signs up automatically falls in the former camp, she says, so naturally they all become friends.

Accepted gardeners must attend workshops on novice gardening, the history of rural landscape cemeteries such as the Woodlands, and 19th-century plants. Last year they also started a workshop at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania so gardeners could find information about the people buried in the graves they were assigned.

“It really helps it fit into our interpretation, but it also makes gardeners feel more connected to the site and they end up being really good liaisons for us to the community,” Baumert said.

Maya Arthur, a recent graduate of University of Pennsylvania, said she found a community among the other gardeners through the planting advice they gave one another in-person and on their Facebook group. Gardening her graves allowed her to escape the stressful atmosphere at college.

A common refrain from people who frequent the Woodlands is that if you walk far enough in among the trees and the tombs, you can’t even hear the city.

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Arthur described gardening her graves as “really f**king weird and really nice,” and hoped she has respected her residents, Harry and Elizabeth Straw, who are buried beside their five-year-old son, also named Harry. Back in April 2017, before school was over and she left for an internship in California (a friend who is also a grave gardener watered and maintained her graves while she was away), she had poppies and Johnny jump-ups sprouting in the cradle graves, and she had just planted some bee balm, snapdragons, and creeping phlox.

Many of the other graves have similar plants, and they aren’t arbitrary choices. All of the plants in the graves are historically accurate, and come from a list that Baumert created.

For Elizabeth Womack, being limited to popular 19th-century flowers and plants was the most exciting part of becoming a grave gardener. She is a scholar of the Victorian era, and teaches at Penn State Brandywine.

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Womack has studied the types of plants people grew in 19th-century London, in parks and window boxes.

“When I saw the kind of plants that they were ordering for this project, there’s a lot of overlap, the same plants that people were growing in 19th-century London—lady slippers, geraniums," she said. "It was kind of fun to do that work and then see what it was like to plant them in a Victorian context.”

Gardening her grave—of a 20-year-old bride who died from consumption—has been like watching her research come to life. Cemeteries also don’t creep her out. She calls them “parks with reading material.” But she hasn’t been able to approach every aspect of grave gardening with scholarly distance. Womack said she thought it “almost impossible to look at” the graves of children when she first started.

“It made those deaths feel so real and so immediate and I found that very painful when I was thinking about my own son,” she said. But soon it became impossible for her to avoid looking at them, because two children’s cradle graves are near her own grave garden.

“I finally had to start planting something there because the neglect felt painful,” she said. “What I found is gardening those spaces was kind of healing. Ever since my son was born I felt this really acute pain when I contemplate the deaths of children. There was something about tending to those graves that helped me acknowledge that possibility in a compassionate way.”

This story originally ran on July 6, 2017, and has been updated with minor edits.

The Hidden History of African-American Burial Sites in the Antebellum South

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Enslaved people used codes to mark graves on plantation grounds.

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In modern-day Altavista, Virginia, a town that covers 5 square miles of what was the first English colony in North America, sits the Avoca Museum. The former residence of Colonel Charles Lynch, a politician and American Revolutionary Patriot, it was built in 1901 and is now a Virginia Historic Landmark. Beyond the stately home, whose porch and eaves are marked by flourishes derived from the British-born Queen Anne style, is a dirt clearing within a patch of aged oak trees. Upon closer look, there’s a constellation of irregularly shaped rocks placed with curious precision—some squat, some narrow.

The history of this terra firma is largely hidden, both because of its obscured distance from the main home and the largely subterranean information it holds. This patch of land is a graveyard of the enslaved African-Americans who lived on the Lynch’s property. The rocks—which serve as headstones—reveal a secret yet conscious coding system that the living slave community designed for their deceased. And on former plantations across the country, similar grave markers have been discovered over time, offering clues to what life (and death) was like for black Americans in the Antebellum period.

When discussing slavery in the United States, people are often preoccupied with how the enslaved lived: What crops did they labor over? How brutally were they punished? How did they survive through their conditions? The truth is, a lot of them didn’t survive for long. Death was a hyper-present reality for enslaved children and adults alike, whether by illness or at the hands of their owner. And when the enslaved died in the Antebellum South, African-Americans were forced to find creative ways to honor them. This was partially due to widespread white fear that any black collective coming together could be an opportunity for the group to devise an exit strategy from the plantation. Funerals necessitate that people gather for a final goodbye, so these mortuary traditions were commonly monitored and squelched by overseers. Unsurprisingly, slaveholders didn’t bother to honor those who died--a direct reflection of the lack of respectful treatment they granted the enslaved while they were alive. Through the use of non-traditional grave markers in community run cemeteries throughout the slave holding states, often obscured as a form of protection, black Americans found a way to take ownership over the final resting places of their kin.

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Avoca’s Enslaved Persons Cemetery was once overgrown and easily missed. It was re-discovered in 2005 by the museum’s former director after a Lynch descendant casually mentioned the cemetery’s existence about a quarter mile from the main house. Avoca’s executive director, Michael Hudson, has been committed to remembering and honoring the property’s deceased ever since.

“We found out there were 32 burials, and 30 of them turned out to be adult-sized,” Hudson says. “And two of them are kind of small.” These burials don’t stretch back as far as the estate does, however. After having a “crisis of conscience” toward the end of his life, Colonel Lynch freed most of his enslaved people in the 18th century, citing Christianity as the main source of his empathetic epiphany. But his son, Anselm Lynch, was more firmly a product of his time. When his father died, Anselm spent his inheritance on scores of slaves. These are likely the bodies buried on the grounds.

Since enlisting the help of local anthropologists and geophysicists, assisted by a grant from the Greater Lynchburg Community Foundation, Hudson and others involved in the Avoca community have discovered a pattern of “disturbed soil” that points, with strong evidence, to the presence of a cemetery. “They did find some stones that were anthropomorphical—that is that they had been acted on by human hands, [and] shaped with rudimentary tools,” he says. “Many of them were not in situ, they were just sort of piled up at the bottom of a tree.” Given the passage of time, it’s unsurprising that both humans and earth would shift these natural stones—which served as tombstones, though unmarked.

“None of them bear an inscription,” Hudson says. On the heels of a slave rebellion in 1831, an insurrection led by the highly literate Virginia slave Nat Turner, the state’s laws changed. As a direct response to Turner’s largely successful uprising, legislation passed deeming it illegal to teach black Americans—enslaved, free, or mixed race—to read and write. The logic was that knowledge is power and could help organize future rebellions, so it must be limited. “You wouldn’t tell on yourself, so to speak, by inscribing a tombstone,” Hudson says.

In order to find the exact location of the bodies beneath Avoca’s grounds, to illuminate the past for the broader Lynchburg community, a geolocation radar tool was used to detect the depth of compromised soil (unsurprisingly, usually six to seven feet under). This meant the graves didn’t have to be dug up, an option Hudson says was out of the question. Other general clues that it was a cemetery included the irregularly shaped rocks, a trend found in slave cemeteries across several states, which tended to be naturally occurring field stones like marble and granite found in the vicinity of the slave holder’s house.

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At Avoca, Hudson says, “Some of them are in the shape of a human eye, kind of like an oval with points on the end.” According to local African-American families, growing up they were told that the purpose of this rock shape was to symbolize that the eyes of the dead watch over the living. The deliberate patterns in these rocks was a black mortuary tradition usually marking adult graves. Children’s graves were demarcated by a stone even more cherished; in some family circles, pink quartz indicated a child’s grave. At Avoca in particular, two quartz markers were uncovered, visibly unchanged from their natural state. “The graves we have that are covered with pink quartz, two of those graves are short. [They’re] tiny and little graves,” Hudson says.

Dr. Lynn Rainville, the dean of Sweet Briar College in Virginia and an anthropological archaeologist who has mapped over three dozen African-American graveyards in the state, was heavily involved in the decoding of Avoca’s Enslaved Persons Cemetery, which is a small-scale one, with probably two to three families interred. The trends she’s noticed throughout her career are likely applicable across several states with a heavy history of slavery—and hidden slave cemeteries—within their borders. Among the tombstones of enslaved African-Americans Rainville has researched, only about 5 percent have been inscribed--and not always with the typical epitaphs we might expect. “Very often there are symbols or initials, almost like a form of code,” she says. “[Headstones] sometimes have names, sometimes dates—but not very often—and sometimes symbols like reversing letters in ways that are very hard to interpret today.” Though literacy was illegal in the Antebellum period, Rainville believes this intentional secrecy was not born out of a lack of language, but instead “a cultural adaptation to the institution of slavery and a deliberate choice by the enslaved individuals.”

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Avoca is a classic example of a slave cemetery hidden in relatively plain sight; out of the many trends Rainville has observed studying graveyards in Virginia, the burial site at Avoca has a lot of them. The area around the cemetery has been plowed but the area within the trees, where the gravestones sit, has not been. The lack of respect for the plots, as evidenced by the removal of the carefully situated stones, is another indication. And finally, Rainville says, “it may not hold in the rest of the South, but periwinkle in Virginia very often co-occurs with cemeteries.” Though it’s nothing more than speculation (but based on strong evidence from the field), Rainville has been told that the plant thrives in soil whose pH is altered by decaying bodies, and thus is unbothered by highly acidic or basic soil. “But certainly for me, when I’m walking through the woods in Virginia looking for a cemetery and I don’t have a good idea of where it is, paying attention to the distribution of periwinkle can be useful,” she says.

Virginia or not, cemeteries created for the formerly enslaved provide important cultural data about daily life in the 18th and 19th centuries in the slaveholding South. “Mortuary practices in almost any culture around the world are an important window into the values of the living culture,” Rainville says. From gravestone design to the broader mortuary landscape, cemeteries offer strong local history wherever they are, and serve as lasting pieces of biographical information, especially from a time when the average person didn’t leave many clues surrounding their life behind. Dr. Rainville’s work, which reconstructs communities based on signs left upon death, brings history to present-day. “Gravestones can sometimes serve as silent witnesses, a physical reminder of a tragic event, that otherwise can be, as it were, whitewashed from the landscape.”

In the same vein, the team at the Avoca Museum finds the resurrection of its on-site African-American cemetery important, says Hudson, because “it helps to give a voice to people who no longer have one.”

How Curry Became a Japanese Naval Tradition

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Ships and submarines have their own unique recipes.

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An army marches on its stomach—or so goes a common saying. Something similar could be said for sailors, and for more than a century, Japanese naval forces have been kept afloat with curry.

Nevertheless, karē, or curry, is a relative newcomer to Japanese shores. The word “curry” originated in India, although it did not have a long history there. Instead, it derived from a Portuguese mispronunciation of a term meaning “spices,” which British colonizers applied to a wide swath of Indian dishes. It became a catch-all, writes historian Dr. Lizzie Collingham: “a generic term for any spicy dish with a thick sauce or gravy.” British traders and travelers wanted an easy way to recreate Indian-style dishes, resulting in the popularity of mulligatawny and country captain, as well as a booming industry in pre-made, all-purpose curry powder.

This was the curry powder that 19th-century British sailors took with them to Japan. The timing was serendipitous. The Meiji era, starting in 1868, was a time of both increasing foreign influence and domestic militarization. The Japanese government needed to feed its soldiers and sailors healthily and in bulk. One major issue was beriberi, a vitamin deficiency that killed Japanese royals and commoners alike. Beriberi stems from a lack of thiamine, an essential nutrient, and eating polished, thiamine-free white rice was a sign of refinement and wealth. The Imperial Navy and Army offered unlimited white rice to attract recruits, and many ate little else. The deficiency soon became a drastic problem, laying low thousands of soldiers during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War.

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While the true cause of beriberi stayed mysterious for decades, navy officials pinpointed diet as the cause. To save their sailors, they examined the food provided in other navies, particularly Britain’s. Many British ships served curry at the turn of the century, though it was leagues away from Indian curry. Instead, the British version was a mix of tinned curry powder, butter, meat (typically beef), root vegetables, and a sauce thickened with flour. Since both meat and flour contain thiamine, curry was practically a silver bullet against beriberi. Served over a heaping portion of rice, it could also feed an entire mess hall.

Soon, Anglo-Indian curry became a standard meal in the Japanese navy. (Navy officials were more inclined to accept dietary innovation than the army, which suffered beriberi long into the 20th century.) Civilians couldn’t resist either. According to Japanese food writer Makiko Itoh, the first Japanese recipe for curry was published in 1872, and restaurants began serving it in 1877. In 1908, the official navy cookbook, the Navy Cooking Reference Book, was issued with a recipe for curry made with meat, flour, and butter. Even the army got into the curry game eventually: According to Collingham, the army advertised that recruits could expect meals of glamorous curry.

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After World War II, former servicemen returned home with a taste for curry. By then, variations abounded in Japan. The only commonality was the sweet, gravy-like sauce, which is draped over fried pork cutlets, omelets, or rice, or served with noodles or even secreted inside savory donuts. Heat levels range from none at all to fiery-hot. By the 1950s, curry sauce could be easily made at home from prepackaged roux cubes. Popular brands, such as Vermont Curry, are flavored with honey and apples.

While Japan dissolved its military after World War II, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, established later in 1954, continued the naval curry tradition. JMSDF ships serve curry every Friday, supposedly to help sailors mark the passage of time. According to Itoh, “each JMSDF ship prides itself on having its own unique curry recipe.” Different ship's recipes can contrast starkly due to unusual ingredients—the curry served on the Hachijo patrol ship, for example, includes ketchup, coffee, and two kinds of cheese.

To the delight of military buffs and curry fans, some vessels have granted select restaurants permission to reproduce them on shore. At these establishments, cooks dish up navy curry with mess-hall flair in gleaming metal dishes. They may mold the rice into the shape of a ship or submarine, surrounded by a lake of curry, and the finishing touch is a little paper flag with the emblem of the rising sun (the official symbol of the JMSDF).

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The navy curry scene centers around two traditionally seafaring Japanese cities. The appropriately-named city of Kure boasts many options for “Marine Self-Defense Force Curry.” Near the Kure Maritime Museum, which commemorates the famed World War II Yamato battleship, the Seaside Café Beacon serves the curry from the JS Samidare, which includes beef, pork, and chicken, served with nan. An online list points out where to try the corresponding curry of nearly two-dozen more transport vessels, minesweepers, and submarines.

In contrast, the city of Yokosuka, the home of the U.S. Yokosuka Naval Base, tends toward tradition: Many restaurants serve a version of the original Navy recipe from 1908. A typical example can be found at Yokosuka Kaigun Curry, where set meals come with the traditional navy accompaniment of a glass of milk and a salad, for maximum nutrition. Yokosuka’s official curry mascot, the Donald Duck look-alike Sucurry, is often depicted carrying a plate of curry. At this year’s Yokosuka Curry Festival, which the town holds in May, 50,000 visitors came to sample 89 different curries, in the shadow of the decommissioned Mikasa battleship.

Union Soldiers Buried Their Dead in Robert E. Lee’s Garden

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Before Arlington was a national cemetery, it was the Lee homestead, and then a tent city for occupying troops.

On a hot afternoon in September 2018, 16 American soldiers buried two members of the Union Army in Arlington National Cemetery.

Those two Union soldiers, who are unidentified, lost their lives in the Battle of Second Manassas, in 1862. Their skeletons were unearthed in 2014, during archaeological work in a pit that mostly held amputated limbs of the injured who survived the skirmish. Following taps and a rifle salute, the Washington Post reported, the remains were lowered into the earth in simple wooden coffins, made from a felled battlefield tree, nested within modern caskets.

These are the most recent Union additions to the vast military cemetery in Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital. The earliest date to the Civil War itself, when Arlington wasn’t a cemetery at all, but rather a homestead squatted on by Union soldiers set on undermining its owner—Robert E. Lee.

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From his wife’s late father—George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of the first president—Lee had inherited Arlington House, a hillside manse overlooking 1,100 beautiful, frustrating acres. Beyond the windows, the old oaks and elms offered generous shade, but the fields were soggy and useless. When Lee came into possession of it, the house had gone to seed. Beginning in 1857, recounts the historian Robert M. Poole in On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery, Lee (and the dozens of enslaved people that Custis willed to his family) worked to revive the property by fertilizing the fields, repairing the roof and gristmill, and installing a toilet and a wood-burning furnace.

Lee left Arlington in April 1861, after resigning from the Union Army and accepting the rank of major general of the Confederacy. Almost immediately, Union soldiers set out to take over the plantation—a move both strategic and symbolic. It did not take a tactical genius, Poole writes, to appreciate the value in setting up a stronghold on a hill 200 feet above the rest of the landscape. “Any artillerist occupying that position could easily harass troopships plying the Potomac River, blow up the capital’s bridge crossings, and lob shells at the most tempting target of all—the White House, its roof peeking from the green fringes of trees just across the river.”

Local papers reported that Union troops were preparing to claim the estate almost as soon as Lee left. “Today it is expected that 10,000 of our soldiers will cross the Potomac and encamp on Arlington Heights,” the Adams Sentinel wrote on May 21, “their tents whitening the very ground on which is located the residence of Gen. Lee, the commander of the Virginia forces.”

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Lee’s wife, Mary, fled after instructing servants to put away the carpets and curtains, and to find a new home for the cat, Tom Tita. The troops arrived by the thousands, and before they were called to the battlefield, Poole writes, they “acted as if they were on holiday.” They promenaded between the portico’s Doric columns, stuccoed and artfully painted to resemble marble. They got up to a little mischief: marking a few walls with triumphant graffiti, pilfering china made in Mount Vernon, and rooting through the possessions the Lee family left behind.

The family had some inkling of what was happening to their estate, thanks to a letter from Mary Lee’s cousin, Letitia Corbin Jones, who stole in for a look around. Poole excerpts her impressions: “The thefts & depredations there have been going on from the beginning,” Jones wrote. “I suppose there was not a paper or a letter, that had not been pried into.” Compared to other properties that had been ransacked, though, Arlington was largely spared, with the furniture, garden, and fences left intact.

Then war began. The death toll was enormous, and there was little infrastructure to deal with the relentless tide of bodies ravaged by bullets, bayonets, or disease. Soldiers who died on battlefields were often buried hastily, close to where they fell—sometimes beneath a makeshift marker, sometimes with nothing at all. In Washington, D.C., contractors did brisk business hauling, preparing, and burying bodies for $4.49 each. Fourteen newly established military graveyards, from Kansas to New York, began accepting caskets in 1862, but even these weren’t enough. By the following year, the capital’s primary military graveyard, known as Soldiers’ Home, reached capacity. Yet men kept falling.

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Arlington started to seem like the right place to put a graveyard. Thanks to a statute that taxed real estate in Confederate territory, and sent property to auction when the landowners didn’t show up to settle their debts, the government acquired the estate in 1864, for $26,800.

The first man in the ground was Private William Christman. The 21-year-old enlisted with the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, but died far from the battlefield after succumbing to peritonitis. He was interred beneath a pine marker, painted white, on May 13, 1864, a month before the land was formally designated a military cemetery. Christman was buried in a faraway corner of the estate, which would come to be known as the Lower Cemetery, and that’s exactly how the Union officers wanted it. “Not wishing to have the view marred by new graves,” Poole writes, “they directed the first burials well away from the house.”

That proscription didn’t last long. Officers were soon buried within view of the home, beginning with Captain Albert H. Packard, from the 31st Maine Infantry. He was laid to rest “about a hundred paces from the mansion,” Poole writes, at the edge of the garden where Mary Lee had once tended to jasmine, honeysuckle, and roses.

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The burials that continued in the Lower Cemetery reveal the ways that racism and classism carried on after death. That area, which a War Department report described as falling on the border of “a little swale and marsh,” wasn’t well suited for graves, but, as of 1865, the report noted, was “still being used for the internment of colored soldiers.”

The designation of the site as a military cemetery came through in June 1864, when the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, approved a plan to set aside 200 acres, which wouldn’t interfere with the area settled by recently freed slaves.

Today, Lee’s former estate is the final resting place for more than 420,000 people. Though space is limited, funeral services continue six days a week, with in the neighborhood of several dozen a day. The two Civil War soldiers recently interred have joined many others, named and forgotten alike. “We have thousands of Civil War unknowns here already,” cemetery superintendent Katharine Kelley told the Washington Post in September. “These two, you could argue, are coming home to join those that are already here.”

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