Cambodia's first LGBTQ dance company has big dreams.

Prumsodun Ok is a Khmer classical dancer, choreographer, and the founding artistic director behind Prumsodun Ok and Natyarasa, Cambodia's first LGBTQ dance company. The company began in Ok's living room in 2015, with the goal of not only preserving a 1,000-year-old art form, but also creating innovative works that reflect the LGBTQ experience in Cambodia.

Khmer classical dance has roots in animism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Ok describes it as entertainment, worship, and education all at once. In the 1970s, when the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime was targeting elites around the country, an estimated 90 percent of Khmer classical dancers were among those who were killed. As Ok puts it, “It was a real tragic loss because Khmer classical dance is not passed on in a book.”

In the video above, Ok says that reviving and preserving Khmer classical dance is both a protest against a history of violence and a gesture of resilience. He hopes Khmer classical dance will be preserved and used to create new works of art that would make his dancers' ancestors say, “Wow, I never would’ve imagined that.”

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Yo! The old tale of city-frog, country-frog now has a decisive winner.

It’s a hot, steamy night in Panama’s Soberanía National Park, and a male túngara frog is looking for a date. Under cover of darkness, he throws out his best croaks, hoping one will land like Cupid’s arrow in the ear of a potential mate. Just a few miles away, in the town of Gamboa, his (relatively) urban counterparts could be having better luck.

A new study, conducted by an international team of researchers and published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution, finds that urban túngara frogs issue more complex mating calls than do their cousins in the forest, and that those calls are markedly more attractive. Indeed, a full three-quarters of female túngara frogs observed in the study preferred the urban calls, which comprise not only “whines” but also sultry “chucks”—staccato, baritone growls that, like exclamation marks, add emphasis (and maybe feeling?). Michael J. Ryan, an integrative biologist at the University of Texas at Austin and an author on the study, said that each “chuck” makes a male túngara frog five times more attractive to mates.

The researchers were already aware that, even within the same species, different animals may make different mating calls based on their location. They wanted to assess whether these differences are adaptive responses, so they orchestrated a four-part experiment. They began by recording male túngara frogs in eleven urban and forest sites, and documenting the surrounding levels of noise and light. Next, they broadcast the calls in both urban and forest environments, where they also tallied the populations of female frogs, predators such as bats, and midges (which bite frogs) in both areas. They then studied female frogs’ reactions to a variety of calls inside an acoustic chamber. Finally, they got particularly ambitious, and transferred urban frogs to forests, and vice versa, to see how they adapted their "dating profiles."

The findings showed the female preference for huskier urban mating calls (observed in 30 of 40 female túngaras). The team also found that, after the transfer, urban frogs were able to tone down their croaking and mimic the forest frogs, while the relocated forest frogs were unable to work up the cosmopolitan chucks. Like a short, assertive "Yo!" explains Ryan, a chuck is simply more effective at grabbing attention—from mates and threats alike. This suggests that city frogs have been selected to chuck because they have fewer close-listening predators to contend with. It all makes for a complicated version of fatal attraction.

Meet the menagerie.

There’s a lot to look at in Abraham Ortelius’s map of Iceland. The Antwerp-born mapmaker, who compiled the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, regarded as the earliest modern atlas, was also among the first to annotate the country in considerable detail. Building upon the work of Andreas Velleius and Gudbrandur Thorláksson (Guðbrandur Þorláksson), an Icelandic mathematician and bishop, the geography of Islandia is vivid. Look for the vast network of settlements, fjords, and mountains. Wander toward the center of the engraving, then south, and you’ll find Hekla, the volcano; mid-eruption, it spews forth an angry torrent of red and orange.

Iceland being an island, much of the chart is made up of water. That’s where you’ll find pearlescent shards of ice on the top right, bobbing beneath packs of loafing and wrestling bears. Here also be fractured tree trunks and branches, bandied about by the waves, and blobs of spermaceti floating like oily icebergs.

And, of course, much of the water is home to a marvelously oddball menagerie. Many of these creatures are native to other maps. Ortelius explicitly invokes Olaus Magnus, who had, just a few decades earlier, drawn one of the earliest detailed maps of the Nordic world, with waters full of toothed, sharp-tailed creatures. (Another common go-to guide for sea-dwelling scaries was a chart by Sebastian Münster, whose bestiary evolved from Magnus’s.) The striped fish with a bulbous, fringed head, busily devouring a seal (labeled "E" on Ortelius's map), looks much like Ziphius, a creature on Magnus’s map, which was called the Carta Marina. Ortelius notes that he looked to Magnus for inspiration for the hyena (or sea-hog), too, borrowing its porcine snout and furry fin. A massive crustacean, with a flailing human in its clutches, apparently didn’t make the cut.

These sea beasts weren't only there to horrify or delight. "A lot of them were taken from what the cartographers viewed as scientific, authoritative books," Chet Van Duzer, author of Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, told Lapham's Quarterly. “Most of the sea monsters reflect an effort on the part of the cartographer to be accurate in the depiction of what lived in the sea.”

Islandia appeared in Ortelius’s atlas between 1590 and 1612. As the 17th century wore on and cartographers continued to chart the world, mythical map beasts eventually went extinct—and the waters grew much less whimsical.

A 1603 edition of Islandia is up for sale this week at Swann Auction Galleries, where dealers expect it to fetch between $3,500 and $5,500. Meet some of the creatures you’d adopt if you brought it home:

The Fatal Fish With Powers Like a Unicorn

The Nahval is no looker. (Look for it labeled "A" on the map up top.) Water pours out of two spots in the fish’s head, above a hard-set scowl. The creature isn’t easy on the eyes, and it’s not kind to the stomach, either. “If anyone eats of this fish, he will die immediately,” cautions the key (translated from Latin into English). Eating the fish’s body may be ill-advised, but nibbling on the massive tooth jutting out above its mouth? That might be a different story. The particularly pointy appendage was thought to be a “a good antidote and a powerful medicine against poison,” often sold as a unicorn’s horn, the key adds.

The Whale That’s a Lot Friendlier Than It Looks

Steipereidur has long fangs that overlap its lips, and a mouth that draws to a sharp beak. It’s a foreboding face, but might belie a cuddly personality. This giant is “a most gentle and tame kind of whale,” the key assures, one that fishermen will defend against wilier, more aggressive species.

The Fish That Looks Like a Furious Leaf

Skautuhvalur is “somewhat like a shark,” but “infinitely bigger,” and “fully covered with bristles or bones.” It has the visage of a squirrel with the body of a coiled fern frond. When it emerges, it’s the size of “an island,” and has no trouble overturning ships.

The Fish That Lurks With Its Head Above Water

The Staukul is in no hurry. Hungry for a hint of human flesh, it “has been observed to stand for a whole day long upright on its tail,” waiting for seamen to sail past.

The Creature With a Horse’s Mane and Dragon’s Tail

Hroshualur is a “seahorse,” but bears no resemblance to the translucent creatures floating in aquariums. The equine neck and tousled hair evoke something that gallops across land, while the scaly tail and webbed feet recalls something from the deepest recess of sea-sprayed caves.

Competitors are baking soul cakes, a bygone Halloween treat.

Those of us who have seen the Great British Bake Off know that competitive baking is no joke. But in Northern England, it’s a matter of the soul. Last month, a challenge from Durham University spurred bakers to whip up a soul cake, a bygone bun once integral to a medieval tradition of feeding the poor and honoring the dead. But, in the spirit of competitive baking reality shows, there was a catch: Nobody really knows how, traditionally, it was supposed to be baked.

We know generally what soul cakes looked like, and what was inside of them. We know that bakers crafted them into small, round, square, or oval buns—garnishing the top with currants in the shape of a cross. And we know its purpose: Giving a soul cake to someone in poverty allegedly freed a departed soul from Purgatory. But we’re still in the dark about its intended taste and texture, and exactly how to go about concocting a soul cake in true medieval fashion.

“We have a recipe from a household book from 1604 compiled by a certain Lady Elinor Fettiplace that includes a recipe for a soul cake,” says Dr. Barbara Ravelhofer, a professor of English literature at Durham University and facilitator of the soul cake challenge. “However, it doesn’t give us the quantities—nor does it tell us how long to bake it. So you have to work out for yourself what to do with the ingredients.” Spearheaded by Dr. Ravelhofer and the Records of Early English Drama North East team, the Great Northern Soul Cake Bake doubles as a competition and crowdsourcing project. By challenging the public to decode the bare-bones recipe, the research team hopes to understand and resurrect the original soul cake—as well as the tradition that surrounds it.

Soul cakes are connected to Britain's early Christian celebrations known as All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, Halloween-like festivities commemorating the recently departed. On November 2nd, beggars would weave their way through the chilly darkness, rapping on wealthy homeowners' doors in exchange for a soul cake. But obtaining it was no cake walk. To successfully soul, one had to sing for sweets.

Whether it be musical or theatrical, souling required performance in exchange for a cake—a tradition that looks a lot like modern-day trick-or-treating. And, though it’s impossible to definitively claim souling as the progenitor of tricking and treating, Dr. Ravelhofer says they’re certainly connected. However, she points out, there are key differences. “A soul-caker was somebody who did something to obtain something,” she says. “Whereas trick-or-treating strikes me as, 'Give me something or else I’ll do something.'”

Demanding candy door-to-door, she posits, is a “slightly degenerated, commercialized form” of the All Souls’ Day transactions of medieval Europe. Souling, Dr. Ravelhofer adds, also had a strong connection to charity and memoriam. The act of doling out freshly baked goods, while thinking of a “poor, departed soul,” filled two needs with one deed, giving to the hungry and freeing a soul in question from Purgatory in one fell swoop.

While vestigial remnants of this practice can still be found in some parts of England, the tradition of souling, and the cakes that came with it, have since disappeared—until now.

To more fully understand the history and tradition of All Souls Day, Dr. Ravelhofer and her team devised the bake off. The technical challenge (the first of a series of three) called for readers to recreate a successful iteration of the festive bun using only Elinor Fettiplace’s 17th-century recipe, which reads:

“Take flower & sugar & nutmeg & cloves & mace & sweet butter & sack & a little ale barm, beat your spice & put in your butter & your sack, cold, then work it well all together & make it in little cakes & so bake them, if you will you may put in some saffron into them or fruit.”

Folks from across the globe responded, submitting recipes, photographs, and anecdotes via email, Facebook, and Twitter, with results ranging from wild successes to valiant flops.

“We had proper food archaeologists who really got into the spirit of things, and then we had candidates who tried to microwave it,” says Dr. Ravelhofer.

David Petts, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Durham University, posted about his soul cakes on his personal blog, likening them to “slightly dense hot-cross buns.” Another participant found that using a ruby or dark ale gave the cakes a soft, chewy texture. Yet another made a successful stoneground cake by adding rye, theorizing that medieval bakers may have used additional grains.

But cataloguing the failed cakes, Dr. Ravelhofer says, has been just as informative as admiring the more edible ones. Understanding what doesn’t work, and why, allows historians to do detective work when it comes to understanding what the recipe may or may not have looked like.

Dr. Kristi DiClemente, a professor of history at the Mississippi University for Women, created this kind of informative flop, which she's dubbed "condemned soul cakes."

“It was a disaster, a complete disaster,” she says of her not entirely edible creation. Dr. DiClemente, who hadn’t heard of the medieval cake before, spotted the challenge on Twitter and took it on for a fun weekend baking exercise.

“I was thinking that this was going to be like a bread, and so it would rise,” she says. She substituted a natural yeast starter for the ale barm, which she assumed to be a rising agent, and kneaded the dough. But to her surprise, what she pulled out of the oven was a far cry from the fluffy, roll-like treat she had anticipated.

“They looked like little, neat buns, and they were absolutely inedible and disgusting.” The condemned soul cakes were easy on the eyes, but apparently, quite tough on the teeth. Her theory: They’re not meant to be bread-like, but rather more the consistency of a scone or biscuit.

Dr. DiClemente hopes to try again next year. But in the meantime, she plans to bring her experience into the classroom. “When I teach my food class again, we can look at a recipe like this and say, 'What do you think this looks like, and what does this tell us about the society that made this?'”

According to Dr. Ravelhofer, studying soul cakes—as well as the performances put on to receive them—tells us a lot about community. The plays performed to receive soul cakes, she says, were often comedies that addressed death, mortality, and other serious issues. “These plays and soul-caking are communal practices that serve community-building, but they also harness the psyche individually and collectively to come to terms with coldness, darkness, and having to die,” she says. Soul cakes, carefully spiced, sweetened, baked, and garnished, were the currency connecting the living world to the dead.

And, Dr. Ravelhofer adds, it’s also about having a good time—something that still rings true of the Halloween season. “It’s dark, it’s cold, and people want to have a little bit of fun as well!”

The other challenges involved collecting soul cake memories, and creating a new and improved soul cake recipe with added regional flair. The "most interesting" submissions will be catalogued in a booklet and distributed around Durham, and the winner will receive a dinner for two at a local restaurant. And if you know a soul in need of saving—or are just hungry for historical fare—you, too, can try your hand at baking a soul cake.

Six courses, eight hours, and foods you won’t find anywhere else.

High above Lake Gruyère, I round rocky curves on the road to Vuisternens-en-Ogoz, a French-speaking village in Switzerland. Along with my translator, Eva Winters, I am headed to La Ferme du Biolley, one of several local farms with an adjoining restaurant. With the Jura mountains bordering France to our right and the Alps to our left, undulating farmland unfolds as we approach a large wooden sign reading, "C'est la Bénichon." The Bénichon, a harvest meal meaning "blessing," has just begun.

Similar to an American Thanksgiving, the Bénichon is a weekend of fanfare and family celebrations. For most residents, though, the gathering is a larger event than even Christmas. The festivities mark the end of désalpes, or the return of the cows from grazing in the high alpine meadows during summer months. The dairy farmers, who have been living in chalets, fill their blue wagons with cheese-making equipment and begin the eight-hour walk back to the village alongside their flower-adorned herd. This reunion of friends and family calls for a celebratory, six-course meal that can easily last eight hours: the Bénichon.

Though désalpes happen throughout the country among the Swiss Alps, the Bénichon is unique to the French-speaking villages within the canton of Fribourg. Because the tradition centers on family, the meal cannot be fully experienced as a visitor. But several farms with restaurants, including La Ferme du Biolley, serve the traditional meal so guests can taste the centuries-old menu.

Traditionally, families traveled village to village after désalpes for hours of eating, socializing, and dancing. A meal of peasants' food, the Bénichon coincided with the benediction of the church, which is why the feast still takes place on a Sunday. Each village chooses its own Bénichon weekend, which once allowed all the villages to attend each celebration. With so many mouths to feed, the menu developed to be locally sourced and cost-effective.

At the Biolley farm, I take a seat at the family table next to owner Michel Bapst. Bapst's wife, Brigitte, appears to say hello, but then returns to the kitchen to work on the six Bénichon courses we’re soon to enjoy. Over glasses of pinot noir, Michel explains that he was born on the farm, which has been in his family since the early 19th century. As more guests arrive, he reveals that the dining room was once a hay loft. This is still a working farmhouse, and I can hear cows just below our feet.

Following Bénichon tradition, we first sample cuchaule topped with butter and pear mustard. The bright-yellow brioche made with saffron was once eaten as a light breakfast, but is now served as a bite-sized first course. Although saffron is commonly associated with Iran, it enjoys perfect growing conditions in nearby valleys. Chachule was created in Fribourg in the 16th century, and recently achieved AOP certification from the Swiss government.

AOP, which stands for appellation d'origine protégée, indicates that the products are truly from the region, of traditional quality, and quintessentially Swiss. (Similar certifications exist across Europe and the world.) Every course of the Bénichon includes local foods, some of which are AOP certified, such as cuchaule, Botzi pears, and Gruyère double cream. Other ingredients, such as carrots and celery, simply come from local gardens.

For the second course, Brigitte serves broth and vegetables, or creamy, spiced pumpkin soup for the vegetarians. Once we empty our bowls, a large, porcelain tureen makes the rounds for a second serving. Next comes a course of ham, sausage, and potatoes. Each year, the Biolley farm prepares 50 Borne hams, a 10-week process hailing from the Middle Ages. "Even if you can eat it all year, the Bénichon meal tastes best in September and October," Winters jokes.

Because each course lasts roughly an hour, Winters and I lean back to watch the local guests smile and laugh over conversation with friends and family. The kids circle the tables to play before the next plate arrives. Taking another sip of wine, Winters and I talk with the farm's family about the evolution of the recipes' ingredients and Bénichon's traditions. While the eight-hour meal was once followed by dancing, most choose a night of good sleep instead these days.

After forks return to empty plates, we enjoy a fourth course: lamb, mashed potatoes, and caramelized Botzi pears in vin cuit, a sweet pear syrup. The pears are a variety that grows in clusters exclusively in Fribourg's Jura mountains, and they are unusually small, sweet, and rounded with long stems. Next comes a cheese plate of Gruyère, Vacherin, and brie with slices of pear and apple and salad. Workers at a small, nearby dairy cooperative make the Gruyère and Vacherin by hand, and except for a small percentage exported just over the border to specialty shops in France, it’s all sold locally. Many residents claim they can taste the different herbs and flowers that the cows grazed on.

The first round of desserts appear, and like the soft crunch of boots on snow, the tips of our spoons break the wavy tops of the long meringues, which allows thick Gruyère double cream to seep into the nooks and crannies. Later we enjoy coffee with star anise cookies and briclette, or thin, crisp, rolled waffles made with the same double cream.

Though the restaurant has a daily lunch menu in addition to serving the Bénichon meal during the second weekend of October, guests must make a reservation in advance. But it's possible to request the Bénichon menu for any time of year.

As the group pushes back from the table with a sigh of satisfaction, we notice a tall ladder hanging overhead. Decorated with vines, the fruit-tree ladder is now retired, but the farm has not given up its trees. Michel Bapst walks from an adjacent room with a tray of six types of homemade schnapps created from the farm's fruit trees. While many are a familiar cherry, plum, or quince, gentian is an herbal schnapps made from the roots of a yellow alpine flower. It is a digestif to sip and savor.

As we stand with full bellies and bodies warmed by the schnapps, Brigitte makes final rounds to say parting words to her guests. If at the end of the Bénichon you are too full—or inebriated—to drive home, the farmhouse keeps a double room prepared for overnight guests.

Seeing it for yourself will take some planning and effort.

The brightest comet to grace 2018 will curl over the sky this week as it inches closer to the Earth, leaving behind a barely perceptible tail. However, seeing it for yourself will take planning and effort, because although it’s the brightest, it’s still hard to see with the naked eye.

The Wirtanen Comet (or Comet 46P) may be the brightest comet of the year, but it’s still not all that bright. It looks like a “fuzzy blob in the sky,” according to Deborah Byrd, editor-in-chief of the EarthSky website. While it may not be as flashy as the gleaming planets or constellations in the December night sky, it is worth finding, says Byrd.

Comets are bits of space debris, flying time capsules of eons-old star stuff. Scientists believe they were formed at the birth of our solar system, over four billion years ago. They are sometimes referred to as “dirty snowballs,” because of their frozen centers and layers of dark organic material. They are some of the “small bodies” of our solar system, generally about the size of a small town. The Wirtanen Comet is 0.75 miles in diameter. “That's a tiny little speck,” says Byrd. “It’s a piece of dust compared to a planet like Earth.”

The remarkable thing about Wirtanen is that on its closest pass on December 16, it will be only seven million miles from Earth. That’s basically close enough for a high five, in space terms. “Wirtanen Comet’s closeness is what allows us to see it,” says Byrd. Her website has already received dozens of photos from amateur astronomers from around the world who have spied the comet through their telescopes. There are images from Hong Kong, Namibia, Chile, and Australia, among others.

To see it for yourself, Byrd recommends finding a local astronomy club in your area, ideally in a place with little light pollution and a great dark view of the night sky. If you live in a city, or can’t bear the winter temperatures, the Virtual Telescope Project will have a live showing of the comet on December 12 and 16 at 10 p.m. UTC when it's at its brightest.

If you do want to brave the cold, Byrd recommends trying to find the comet this week, with either a telescope or a pair of binoculars. A great time would be overnight, December 13 to 14, because then viewers can see the Geminid meteor shower along with the comet. Also, Byrd adds, the moon will be smaller this week, and less likely to outshine Wirtanen. If you stay out all night, you can admire Venus glowing in the predawn sky.

If you go out every night, you can track Wirtanen’s slow passage. “It doesn't just whoosh across the sky,” says Byrd, “but from one night to the next, if you track it carefully, you will notice that it's moving.” She says it will pass between the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters, which can be found on most maps of the night sky.

Comets have always been a wonder to humans. “They used to be considered omens of doom,” Byrd says. “Comets carry with them this sense of mystery at this sense of the unknown. They come and go. The fun thing about them is that they're not here for very long. It's an opportunity to go see something that maybe you've never seen before.”

Byrd wishes comet chasers well, but notes the most important thing to do is temper your expectations. “You're not going to see this super bright, spectacular thing. It's not like that,” she says. “You're going to look up in this dark sky, and you're going to spot it and you're going to be really proud of yourself for seeing it. It’s a quiet beauty.”

Tell us about how you find wonder in spots you encounter all the time.

In 2011, Matt Green set out to walk every block in New York City—each named street and humble path, from bustling strips to sleepy routes through parks and cemeteries. When he told people about his plan, they jumped to a few conclusions.

Listeners assumed that he had some larger goal in mind—collecting data, logging observations, bringing attention to a cause, maybe?

Not really. The walk was the thing, the beginning and the end, reason enough for him to jump from apartment to apartment wherever there was a bed or a couch and a cat to be fed. (He quit his desk job in engineering, and tries to live as frugally as he can.) Moving through the city, block after block after block—that was it.

Green is no stranger to long days on his feet. He had walked clear across the country in 2010, when he was 30, from Rockaway Beach, Queens, to Rockaway Beach, Oregon, while pushing a tent, rain gear, food, and other sundries in front of him in a cart. But that was different. The route was long, more or less straight, following Google Maps directions he copied out by hand. Even if he wasn’t beelining for something novel, even if the stops were unremarkable, at least the landscape was always changing. "When you're walking at three miles an hour, you're able to see all those little things you don't see in a car because they go by in a blur,” he told the Daily News at the time.

Now, more than seven years into his wandering of New York’s rigid grid and twisting corners, the city doesn’t have that sheen of newness. But as he says in The World Before Your Feet, a documentary about his project made by his friend Jeremy Workman, living in a place doesn’t necessarily mean you notice things. Sometimes, the longer you live somewhere, the bigger your blinders become. It’s easy to say you know a block, for instance, by virtue of trudging along it on your daily commute, but do you really? If anything, that intimacy might make you more immune to its wonders.

Even if Green didn’t set out to see the city in a new way, his pavement-pounding (more than 8,000 miles and counting) has revealed some of the city’s more covert charms. He has become, quite incidentally, “an extraordinary micro-historian of the city,” The New York Times wrote, and a “connoisseur” of the particular targets of his attention—among them, scores of churches in former synagogues, still carrying stars of David, and slews of barbershop signs that swap “z” in for “s” (step inside for some “cool cutz”). He also catalogues legacies hiding in plain sight. In the documentary, Green narrates some of the histories of places he passes. In Brownsville, he points to the boarded-up building that sits on the site of New York’s first family-planning clinic (since demolished), where Margaret Sanger doled out information about contraception for a few days in 1916 before being hauled off to jail for violating obscenity laws. In Lower Manhattan, he lingers at the discreet placard memorializing the city’s slave market, a few blocks away. Someone walking past the site today would miss it entirely.

You don’t need to drop everything and brave snowstorms and heat waves, as Green does, to engage with your city in a close way. In an interview with Atlas Obscura, Green shared a few observations from years of active ambling.

Zero in on little mysteries

Over the years, Green has started noticing standpipes—those little two-headed nozzles that poke out of a building’s facade and enable firefighters to pump water to higher floors. “If you saw one, it would look familiar, but it’s the kind of thing you pass all the time but you don’t really think about,” he says. “Once you know what something is, of course you start noticing it more and paying more attention to it.” Once he learned about them, he started keeping a lookout for how they are used in the urban landscape. He’s observed people using them as benches or a perch for a coffee cup, and has noticed some businesses taking pains to make them less inviting: “a simple bar that would go right in your buttcrack, physically blocking you from sitting down, or sharp, jagged spikes,” he says. “Now, if I see one that looks different, it’s really exciting to me.” Looking for these infrastructural Easter eggs has become a bit of a game, and the exercise is more fun when the item is more obscure. “If it’s not something you find in a book, you feel more ownership of it,” Green says.

Don’t think about the destination

It’s easiest to focus on the journey when there is no particular destination to begin with. “Randomizing a route so you’re not anticipating something up ahead would be a way to accomplish that,” Green says. When he strolls, it’s not with the intention of passing something especially exciting, or detouring somewhere interesting on his way somewhere else. “It sounds simple, but it’s something you almost never have in normal life,” he says. “All that I’m doing is trying to see where I am. I truly have nothing to do other than look around.”

Bring a camera

Green snaps photos as he walks and uploads them, along with some historic context, on his blog, I’m Just Walkin’. They pile up and he’s working through a years-long backlog. Still, “I know that it’s helped me,” Green says. Before he started indexing his sightings, he found that whatever caught his eye would slip out of mind soon after he moved along. Taking photos allows him to create a record.

Now we want to hear from you! What are your tips for seeing a familiar place from a fresh perspective? Tell us below, and we’ll include some responses in an upcoming post.

How will you ring in 2019?

The New Year is almost here, bringing with it a wide variety of global traditions. In general, this is a time of renewal, reflection, and remembrance, but the changing of the year can also be celebrated quite differently depending on where you live. We want to hear about what you do (or avoid doing) in your area to ring in the new year.

In many parts of the world, it's traditional to stay up late and count down the turning of the year, perhaps sealing the moment with champagne and a kiss. But then what? Some people make a wish, while others decide on their resolutions. In Spain, it's tradition to stuff your mouth with grapes. In Scotland, you might celebrate Hogmanay by swinging fire in the streets. And in the Bahamas, you could be planning to break out your best technicolor costume for the annual Junkanoo parade.

Fill out the form below to tell us about your own New Year's tradition, how you came to practice it, and what it means to you. We’ll share some of our favorite submissions in an upcoming article. Let us know exactly how you wish for a happy new year!

Once a favorite of the ruling class, this flower is now endangered.

Sometimes, it seems like orchids are the snowflakes of the botany world. Though these flowers bear some similarities—all of them poised in their fragility and charmingly irregular—no two are quite alike. They exist as limited-edition masterpieces, whose beauty is largely inaccessible due to their cost.

For hundreds of years, orchid breeders have been dedicated curators: They cultivate their crops in nurseries under near-neonatal care. One orchid species, the Neofinetia falcata, has a particularly distinguished history as the first orchid to be grown as a houseplant in Japan, marking the birth of a new art form. But today, Japan’s Ministry of Environment considers the jasmine-smelling Neofinetia falcata (along with over 70 percent of the country's other native orchid species) critically endangered, making its value even greater.

In the 17th century, Japan’s Edo period, Shogun Tokugawa Ienari became smitten with the Neofinetia falcata. This delicate orchid, endemic to the high mountains of Japan, was celebrated for its strong fragrance, activated at dusk. When found in the wild, these flowers were called “furan,” meaning “wind orchid.” Ienari was the eleventh and longest-serving shogun (or military dictator) of Japan, so his obsession quickly became a marker of cultural cachet. As a result, the wild furan became the upscale “fuukiran” meaning “orchid of wealth and nobility.” In line with the elitism of the fine-art world, the prestige of particularly outstanding orchids became a symbol of class. For a time, samurai were the only people permitted to grow the Neofinetia falcata (which spurred the nickname “samurai orchid”). Feudal lords seeking to impress the shogun would gift him the powerful plant and usually get their own estate in return.

The preciousness of the Neofinetia falcata was further cemented by aesthetically focused cultivation techniques, which gave way to a new era in Japanese cultural arts. In the homes of the ruling class, these orchids were displayed behind protective nets of gold thread and visitors had to cover their mouths with calligraphy paper to shield the flowers from their germs. Mounting and planting these epiphytes (organisms that grow on top of other plants) in traditional hand-painted, clay-fired pots became an art form unto itself. But beyond the overall aesthetic of the orchid’s composition, their flowers brought beauty to a space, too: The color of these orchids varies from linen white to raspberry, and their flowers reportedly smell of vanilla and coconut.

Several hundred years after the shogun’s Neofinetia falcata campaign, the French botanist Achille Finet, who specialized in studying native Japanese and Chinese orchids, discovered this orchid was distinct from another plant genus found earlier. In 1925, Hu Xiansu, a pioneering Chinese botanist and plant taxonomer, named the orchid genus “Neofinetia” in Finet’s honor.

The scalloped, variegated edges of orchids post-bloom illustrate their differences, yet the process of growing them is meticulously standardized. Joan Didion memorialized the artistic attention paid to the orchid life cycle in her 1979 essay “Quiet Days in Malibu” writing: “The silence in the greenhouse would again be total. The temperature was always 72 degrees. The humidity was always 60 percent.” This process of pursuing environmental perfection not only grows the plant, but grows the orchid breeder’s appreciation of the plant in kind. The Japanese viewed the Neofinetia falcata as living pieces of fine art, and so their cultivation of them was artistry.

Today, Neofinetia falcata are found most commonly across southeastern China, South Korea, Japan, and the Ryukyu Islands. Breeders keep these orchids damp to mirror the flowers’ natural environment from spring until fall (their growing season), as they like to soak up the stretching sunlight and thrive atop a throne of sphagnum moss which looks like a velvet green anemone. In Japan, the warm, wet monsoon season during June and July encourages the bulbs to bloom, and is promptly followed by a cool and icy winter when the orchids lie dormant.

At a Japanese auction in 2005, bidders paid up to $70,000 for a rare Neofinetia falcata variety, cementing the plant’s status as a work of art for the home akin to a famous painting or first edition manuscript. Registering and ranking fuukiran is handled by the official Japanese Fuukiran Society and permission to grow this exclusive orchid is by invitation only. Considered the “perfect orchid” thanks to its history as a Japanese shogun’s prized plant, these flowers occupy homes as living botanical paintings.

Miami blues have returned from the dead. Twice.

A tiny, crumpled-up butterfly clings to the right index finger of graduate student Sarah Steele Cabrera. It’s brand new to the world, so new that it can’t yet fly.

“Hello there,” she says. She gently places the Miami blue butterfly on a flower and walks back to the beach, where volunteers are sorting pupae into protective tubes. She hopes that after these critically endangered flutterers hatch, they will reproduce enough to establish a wild colony.

This one in particular will not. Before it’s able to spread its wings, it staggers off its perch and hits the ground. In less than a second, a lizard darts in and swallows it. Predators are one of the blues’ hurdles for survival. But these tiny fliers, which are about the size of a scrawny blueberry, and weigh no more than a dandelion puff, have faced bigger predicaments.

Miami blues once fluttered along 700 miles of Florida coastlines. They were common until the 1980s, when their numbers crashed, mostly because their preferred beach-berm habitat is also a favorite of humans (beach berms are the area between the beach bums lounging on towels and the thicker inland vegetation). As developers remodeled natural seashore into resorts and houses, a barrage of mosquito-control sprays and other pesticides followed. Miami blues were unofficially declared extinct after Hurricane Andrew wiped out their last-known colony in 1992.

Seven years later, a citizen-scientist found a small population in Bahia Honda State Park in the Florida Keys. Suddenly, the blues were un-extincted. The news was so exciting that scientists and butterfly admirers crossed the country to see for themselves. A breeding program and reintroduction attempts ensued. But they didn’t work, and the population eventually died out, partly because of a cold snap coupled with invasive iguanas eating their host plants. The last Bahia Honda blue was spotted in 2010.

All seemed lost, but wildlife biologists had kept some good news on the down low— they had found a couple of isolated populations on some remote, ecologically sensitive islands west of Key West. These colonies offered the genetic infusion needed to restart captive breeding efforts. After a year of preparation, Cabrera and her colleagues at the University of Florida triumphantly scheduled their first reintroduction for early September 2017. They would start at Bahia Honda, with plans to work their efforts north onto the mainland.

They missed that date. It wasn’t their fault. That week, authorities called for a mandatory evacuation of the Keys. As hurricane Irma bore down, Cabrera watched with dread as the storm-prediction tracks narrowed in over the Miami blues’ islands. An hour before the most destructive bands would have hit those keys, the category-4 storm made a sudden jog, sparing the last-known wild populations, and instead destroying Cabrera’s house 70 miles to the east. A day later and 400 miles north, the same storm nearly knocked out the power to the breeding lab.

The storm decimated Bahia Honda, along with most every other other beach-berm area in the Keys. It took a year for any Miami blue habitat to heal enough to be suitable for a release (and a little shy of that for Cabrera to find a new home for herself as well), but by the end of 2018, the program was kind of working. Cabrera began releasing blues at Long Beach State Park. So far, they have been breeding, though the second generations have yet to take hold. It doesn’t mean they’re out of the woods, but it is a glimmer of hope.

“I feel pretty good we’re doing everything we can,” Cabrera says. It’s all a numbers game for how many eggs they can lay versus the weather and predators. “When you’re a teeny little butterfly, and it’s windy and rainy, you kind of have a tough time, especially when you only live a few days.”

Miami blues might be short-lived, but they are the stars of one of the longest-running insect conservation programs in the world, going on 25 years now. They also have a pretty large fan-base, including a cavalry of volunteers, a slew of ant species that protect their larvae, their own T-shirt merchandise, and brand of beer (it’s a bock). Many people ask Cabrera what is the point in saving them. Her answer: besides their inherent ecological value, they are the poster child for what happens next. They live at ground zero for sea-level rise, and are always one hurricane away from oblivion.

“In truth, they are just one piddly little butterfly,” she says. “But when one bug goes, more are likely to follow. We are losing massive number of insect species, in terms of both biomass and biodiversity. It is really scary.”

Studies from around the world are beginning to bring to light the seriousness of the insect crash, and what that means to the ecosystems on which people depend. Since humans don’t generally feel an affinity with insects, charismatic ones like the Miami blues are also ambassadors.

“Butterflies are a gateway bug,” Cabrera says. “Most folks aren’t really big fans of insects, but it’s hard not to like a butterfly.”

The city's food delivery people run an impressive relay race, which relies heavily on the local railway network.

At 9:10 a.m., Nilesh Shankar Bachche picks up the dabba (lunchbox) labeled “B 5 W 6N2” from an apartment building in Borivali West, a neighborhood in Mumbai, India. Inside the dabba, or tiffin, lies three to four stackable cylindrical compartments. One compartment will typically contain rice or rotis. Another might hold dal or a curry, then vegetables, yogurt, or dessert. In this one, there are four compartments: one with a yellow dal, one with long-grain Basmati rice, another with bhindi masala (Indian spiced okra), and the last with fluffy rotis and a tiny box of jaggery—an unprocessed precipitate from sugar cane juice—for dessert.

Bachche is a dabbawala, a term meaning “lunchbox person,” and has been collecting meals since 8:30 a.m. this morning. On average, he collects 20 to 25 such dabbas in a day. He and an army of close to 5,000 others are employed by the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Trust, a cooperative ensuring that 200,000 office workers and college students receive hot meals—each typically cooked at the recipient’s home—to their doorstep, five to six days a week.

The dabba system, as we know it today, officially started in 1890, when Mumbai was still known as Bombay, and India was a part of the British Raj. The British built extensive railway and road networks over the archipelago of Bombay for the purposes of streamlining exports out of India. Back then, Bombay thrived as the country’s trade hub, and Indians from each corner of the country flocked there to work. With the opening of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway in 1853 as well as the establishment of Bombay’s first cotton mill in 1854 and the University of Bombay in 1857, jobs were plenty and Bombay was more than just a big city; it was on its way to becoming a metropolis.

By 1891, Bombay’s population had reached nearly 820,000 people. Parsis, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Jains worked side by side as merchants, lawyers, engineers, doctors, railway construction and dock workers. Each community developed their own distinctive cuisine, informed by both their heritage and this cultural exchange. Hindu fare from Gujarat, for example, was starkly different from the local Maharashtrian Hindu fare. Gujarati fare is always sweet and largely vegetarian, but Bombay, being a port, is hugely partial to seafood.

Legend has it that the system has its roots in the late 1800s when a Parsi banker hired a Maratha worker to pick up the banker’s homemade lunch from his house, then deliver it to his office four miles away. Mahadeo Havaji Bacche, the delivery man, was one of many men parked at a nearby intersection wearing topis, or caps, and ready to work odd jobs. But Bacche saw this one-off as an untapped opportunity to provide home-cooked meals for office workers around Bombay; in 1890, he hired 100 Maratha workers to join him in making it a reality.

While in those days, dabbas were made at home, by either a wife or a housekeeper, today dabbas are sourced from a multitude of places. In addition to foods cooked at home typically by a mother, grandmother, aunt, or wife, dabbawalas also have connections with several kitchens that specialize in home cooking, many employing a woman-driven workforce, including widows and underprivileged women, in an effort to encourage them to support themselves independently.

Present-day Mumbai has a population of 18.4 million people. But gridlock traffic—with roughly 265 cars per mile—doesn’t get in the way of dabbawalas, who deliver 200,000 lunches per day with near-perfect accuracy. Instead, they rely on the world’s busiest railway network to pick-up and deliver lunch to their intended eaters.

The individual label on each dabba is crucial to ensuring it gets to where it needs to go. Since dabbas change hands multiple times, with different people picking up, sorting, transporting, and delivering them, each one is assigned a string of numbers and letters, not unlike a postcode. According to Bachche, in the case of B 5 W 6N2, the “B” and the “W” stand for Borivali West, its origin. The 6N2 denotes the destination: The “6” refers to the locality for delivery, “N” represents the building where it’s to be delivered, and “2” is for the floor number. The “5” refers to the destination station, in this case Churchgate Station. This code works to streamline this daily relay race, and ensures a startlingly consistent and on-time delivery rate. The system is so reliable, it bears a 99.9999 percent accuracy rate. That’s one goof for every 16 million deliveries.

Bachche, like most dabbawalas, got into the dabba system through a friend. Bachche hails from near Pune, a city southeast of Mumbai, which is where the majority of dabbawalas come from. In the past, most dabbawalas came from farming communities and entered the city and the dabba system out of economic necessity. Today, however, it isn’t the pay that attracts men like Bachche, who makes 15,000 rupees per month (a little over 200 U.S. dollars), but the work itself. “We get to feed people food on a daily basis,” he says in a mixture of Marathi and Hindi. “There’s no other job like this one—people need their food to live and to work, and work well.”

The recipient of this particular dabba, “B 5 W 6N2,” works in the stock market. He’s left home by 7:15 a.m. to reach his job in Fort, a neighborhood 25 miles away from his house in Borivali, by 9:00 a.m. Like most office workers in Mumbai, he too takes the train, but can’t carry his dabba with him because of the crowds. At 10:15 a.m., the dabba arrives by bicycle at Borivali Station. From there, it moves on to Andheri Station, a pivotal hub in the locality of West Mumbai. At Andheri, it gets placed in one of several batches, depending on where the dabbas’ destination stations are.

After being placed into the appropriate groupings, the dabbas are loaded onto crates, which are each balanced on a dabbawala’s head (sometimes it’s a two-person job) and raced to the platform. Each crate contains around 40 dabbas and weighs roughly 130 pounds. Then, in less than 40 seconds, the crates are loaded into the luggage compartment of the destination train, and off they go.

Once the crates reach their respective stations, another set of dabbawalas takes over their transport and delivery. By 12:15 p.m., the crates traveling to Fort are offloaded at Churchgate Station, and dabba “B 5 W 6N2” is among them. It makes off with other dabbas headed for the Fort area by bicycle, though some dabba deliveries happen by foot, and others by cart. In midday traffic in this part of the city, cycle is the most efficient way to get around because standard traffic laws, including stopping at lights, don’t apply to cyclists.

At 12:50 p.m. sharp, “B 5 W 6N2” reaches the stock market and the hands of its hungry recipient.

While the dabba system might seem antiquated, it’s arguably much more effective, in terms of accuracy and on-time delivery, than its modern-day counterparts. Despite the ongoing popularity of delivery apps, such as Swiggy and Scootsy, Bachche gets a handful of new customers every month or two. The distinguishing feature with dabbas, he notes, is the fact that he delivers home-cooked food, for which there is no compromise.

Once lunch is over, the same relay is carried out—this time in reverse. The now-empty “B 5 W 6N2” dabba is picked up, sorted at Churchgate station, transported, and dropped back home again in Borivali. All this happens for a price of a mere 1,200 rupees (around 15 U.S. dollars) per month.

While there have been attempts to recreate the dabba delivery system elsewhere in India, notably Bengaluru and New Delhi, the need and the scale of these other systems is in no way comparable to the original. Moreover, since these are comparatively less congested cities, the use of the rail network isn’t a necessity, since most office workers in New Delhi and Bengaluru travel by auto-rickshaws, buses, metros, and car, over shorter distances.

By the time dabba “B 5 W 6N2” is delivered home, then washed, dried, and ready for another pick-up the following morning, it’s nearing six in the evening. With his shift over, Bachche goes straight home and, in his own words, is "in bed by ten to do another rewarding day’s work the next morning.” It’s a work-heavy life, but, Bachche says, excitedly, “[I] wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Metallic gravestones, as it turns out, don't age well.

Atlas Obscura recently collaborated with Caitlin Doughty, the mortician and activist behind Ask a Mortician, to explore the Most Holy Trinity Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The cemetery is unique because of its metal headstones, originally installed as an attempt to blur class distinctions. Painted grey to resemble traditional granite grave markers, these monuments were deceptive for a time. Over the past 165 years though, the materials have fallen victim to the elements. In the video above, Atlas Obscura Senior Editor Ella Morton joins Doughty at the cemetery for a discussion of the origins and consequences of this unusual headstone technique.

The story then continues below, as Doughty goes into more detail about the decay and corrosion that have shaped the cemetery's metallic headstones. The surviving monuments are twisted and discolored, each metal reacting in its own way to produce a different weathered appearance. While the effects of time have warped these grave markers, as Doughty puts it, "there is a beauty in the idea that the elements decay, the same way that a human body, or a community, eventually decays."

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If it hadn't been somehow considered unacceptable.

History’s most famous footstep may well be Neil Armstrong’s, from the Eagle module to the surface of the Moon. “One small step,” to be sure, but it was the result of big engineering from countless dedicated people—including the ones who designed the historic shoe on his foot, one more precise in its specifications than Cinderella’s slipper.

This need for the boots, and indeed all parts of the spacesuits, to be perfect means that there were rejects, models deemed unfit, even for the smallest reasons. RR Auction in Boston has one such prototype up for sale. (At press time, the bid is about $8,000.)

The boot, fitted specifically for Armstrong, measures 8 inches tall, 12.75 inches long, and 5.5 inches wide. It was produced by the International Latex Corporation (ILC) in Dover, Delaware, in either late 1968 or early 1969, not long before the Apollo 11 mission took flight, in July 1969. It’s insulated with radiation-deflecting aluminized mylar, padded with baby blue silicon, and studded with golden Kapton tape, which is particularly good for space travel, since it can handle temperatures ranging from -452 degrees to +500 degrees Fahrenheit. Most striking, however, is the name stitched in Beta cloth along the top of the boot’s interior—“Armstrong,” unadorned and declarative, like a football player’s name on a jersey.

The name is the strongest indication that the boot was designed for the Apollo 11 mission. We don't know why it never made it to space, and we can only speculate as to whether Armstrong wore it in training, says William Ayrey, ILC’s company historian. Ultimately, he says, there could be any number of reasons why it wasn’t used. A sewing error within 1/32 of an inch, for example, would have been considered too risky. RR previously auctioned an X-ray of one of Armstrong's boots, taken barely a week before launch, that was conducted to catch even the tiniest imperfection or foreign object that might have slipped into Armstrong’s boot and created havoc.

The prototype is missing two key ingredients: the outer Beta cloth layer and Chromel-R fabrics that adorn the boots Armstrong actually wore. The Beta cloth is fire-resistant, and addressed pressing concerns following the Apollo 1 fire that killed its three-member crew. The Chromel-R, meanwhile, was used with the Moon in mind. No one had ever walked there before, so the Chromel-R, “woven chromium steel” in fabric form, a Kevlar-like material, was added to protect against sharp rocks, Ayrey says. At roughly $3,000 per yard, it makes sense that the prototype would go without it.

As for the real boots, don’t expect them to hit the block any time soon. They’re still up there, says Ayrey, where Armstrong had to abandon them to offset the weight from the moon rocks he and his crewmates brought back to Earth.

Does anyone have a tissue?

I'm not crying—it's raining. Or... uh... I've got something in my eye. Yeah! Sure! It's definitely not from reading hundreds of amazing stories about real-world places that are so astonishing they've actually made people weep.

Okay, fine. So a few weeks back, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about the last place they visited that brought them to tears. We received stories of wild elephants, a military battlefield, a tower, an eclipse, and so many more moments of happiness and overwhelming emotion. Many of them are touching, some are a little sad, but all of them will transport you.

We've compiled some of our favorite responses below—fair warning as you read them, it may be difficult to avoid a tear or two coming to your eye. And if you've got more crying places you'd like to share, head over to our brand new community forum and add your own!

La Recoleta Cemetery

Buenos Aires, Argentina

“A cemetery may seem a rather obvious place to cry, however it is the longevity of life that brought me to tears among the rows of ancient tombs at the striking Recoleta cemetery. I studied in Buenos Aires, and lived a few blocks from the notably beautiful cemetery. In a failing relationship and struggling with loneliness and confusion I often went for long walks in the neighborhood. I initially avoided the cemetery, however one day, for no reason in particular I ended up wandering the monuments for hours. The sheer age of the tombs was incomprehensible, as I myself felt restless at 21 years. Ultimately the sprouting of a green plant on a mausoleum from 1785 moved me to tears. Something about the life among death struck a chord in me. I went back many times that semester and could easily get lost in the contradiction, a gentle reminder that ephemera and permanence can coexist.” — Ariella Levitch, Rome, Italy

Chobe National Park

Serondela, Botswana

“As we were driving very slowly around near the Chobe River, we spotted a few elephants drinking and some throwing dust over themselves. Out of the bushes on the left, more elephants came walking in, then more on the right and then behind us! We were surrounded by about 300 elephants of all ages! Even our guide took out his camera and started to shoot. It was such an incredible situation with absolutely no danger and nothing but beautiful elephants everywhere!” — B.J. Mikkelsen, Hudson River Valley, New York

Avachinsky Bay

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia

“I've crossed the whole country to see Kamchatka. To be honest, I still can't believe that I've seen this land of volcanoes, black sand, and dark water with my own eyes. Well, here is the story. I have a fear of deep water. So, what do you think I did first? Took a six-hour boat trip to the Pacific Ocean. When we were floating around Avachinsky Bay, I found myself in a state so emotional that I couldn't help crying. Peering at the milky volcano tops through the mist and drizzling rain, watching huge bold waves coming by, a bit freezing, and breathing in fresh salty air, I finally felt so calm. I admired the wild nature. I was so far away from the routine that it made me the happiest girl ever.” — Anna Barabanowa, Moscow

Ansel Adams Wilderness

Sierra Nevadas, California

“While hiking the John Muir Trail in 2016, I made it over Donohue Pass out of Yosemite and into the beauty and majesty of the Ansel Adams Wilderness. It was beyond stunning and majestic. It took my breath away and I just stood there with tears in my eyes. There are many gorgeous places along this trail, but this one really brought home the extreme privilege I had to have the time and ability (and permits!) to be out there immersed in this stunning landscape for an entire month.” — Michele Maynard, North Carolina

South Island

New Zealand

“There were countless exhilarating and emotional sights on the South Island of New Zealand. Taking refuge from the downpour of this temperate rainforest in a 150-year-old miner’s tunnel. Chinese immigrants desperately searching these foothills for gold, fought their way through this rocky cliff face. That was a moment. Then there was the Tasman Sea. I stood on the famed Pancake Rocks of Punakaiki at sunset and thought no sight could ever be more beautiful. But only a few hours later, I was awakened by a full moon lighting the Tasman Sea. And finally, near the Canterbury Plain, with Lyttelton Harbor to my left, and the Bridle Path to my right, I stood on the rim of the volcano in the brilliant sunshine. I thought of all the English settlers arriving in this harbour, and the difficult climb over the Bridle Path and on to Christchurch. This was the place I’d read about in histories and novels. In those quiet moments, the landscape changed, and I was reminded of a more ancient time and more ancient people: the Maori. They called this island Aotearoa. It was a name I had never truly understood, until this moment. It literally became the Land of the Long White Cloud in front of my eyes.” — Brooke Maner, Knoxville, Tennessee

Indian Beach

Oregon

“[I was] hiking the trail, and it opens up to a view of the Pacific. The forest itself was the most beautiful, surreal place I had ever experienced. Very rarely have I found myself in a place that can only truly be described as magical. It's that extra aspect of it that's inexplicable, just out of reach. The type of experience that you could never fully explain to someone who has never seen it in person.” — Cameron Jay, Indianapolis

Crater Lake

Oregon

“The beauty took me so by surprise that I had to sit down and just let the tears run down my cheeks. A small group of people walked by me, and a woman asked if I was okay. I said that I was, but she said she’d sit with me a few moments to take it all in. She did! I will always remember that trusting lady.” — Char Young, Arizona

Duomo di Milano

Milan, Italy

“The last place that made me cry was Milan’s Duomo. My husband and I were on a three-week tour of Europe, but I found myself alone that day. I entered the cathedral at 9 a.m. with almost no one in sight. I stared at the stained glass windows and the tall columns, looking at the biggest church I’ve ever seen. It felt like being physically there was a marker of achieving my dreams, backpacking through Europe and seeing ancient things. The cathedral was built in the 1200s and houses a nail from Jesus’s cross, but it was so well-preserved. It’s true that the people of Milan treated it like a treasure, tied to their identity. When I was standing there, my tears would not stop at all. Since I’ve never felt this way before, I was confused. Was it possible to be touched by a single place’s beauty? Now I can say, the answer is yes.” — Crystal Faith Neri, Cebu, Philippines

Little Bighorn Battlefield Memorial

Crow Agency, Montana

“It was so quiet, despite all the tourists, and so many gravestones where the soldiers and Native Americans fell.” — David Ryan McAnally, Lubbock, Texas

Gokyo Lake

Nepal

"It was the last place on the list of our Everest Base Camp trek. It was day 18 and we were tired after all the hiking, passes and glaciers crossed. So when I finally took the last step over that hill and the lake unraveled before my eyes... I had to stop. It was breathtaking and not just because of the altitude. The sun was just right, already up in the sky, shining over the most amazing blue that I will ever see in my entire life. The image of those houses on the lake shore and the gigantic mountains in the background... While waiting for my friend to catch up, I just let all the tears fall. And it felt like all the days of walking and all the last painful years were just a trip to that place, to that serenity of blue lakes and mountains." — Irina Crismaru, Bucharest, Romania

The Serengeti

Africa

“My breath was taken away, the beauty of the Serengeti was more than I could have ever imagined.” — Jill Mistretta, San Francisco, California

The Summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro

Tanzania

“After five days of grueling hikes, fighting altitude sickness, and months of planning, to summit, and see the sun rise from the highest point in Africa with three good friends was the most emotional adventure I’ve been on.” — Joel Bryant, Los Angeles, California

The 2017 Solar Eclipse

Greenville, South Carolina

“I will tell you I shed a few tears last summer in Greenville, South Carolina, during the total solar eclipse.” — John Moran, Gainesville, Florida

Artist Point

Wyoming

“To see one of the major contributing places that led to the birth of the National Park System, was a very emotional moment.” — Kelli Kennedy, Colorado Springs, Colorado

El Morro

Ramah, New Mexico

“Chaco culture, the outlier sites, the enormity of human presence and history. El Morro is only one tiny site amid countless. The sacred carvings of the Ancestral Puebloans always catch my breath, usually accompanied with misty eyes. As if those ancients are reaching into the present with a secret whispered message…” — Kim McKee, Colorado

Punjab

India

"My mum is Indian, and my dad English. I grew up in Ireland but my parents made sure to take us to spend time in India every year to make sure my brother and I kept up with our heritage. India is a glorious country, and I knew that from an early age. It’s full of life and color and the people are some of the most hospitable and outgoing I’ve met. Over the years I got busy with college and other responsibilities, and the journey from our home in Ireland to my mum’s hometown in the far north meant I wasn’t able to visit as often as I could, I got caught up in life in Ireland and every now and then I would feel that part of me slipping away. At one point I visited India again after almost two years, and I could only stay for two weeks. I realized how much I missed everyone there, my friends, my family, the many animals one finds there. The sky, the stars, the ground, the fields. I knew I wouldn’t feel that again for a long time, and that part of me longed to stay. As my plane took off from Delhi airport back to London, I looked out at the saffron sky, shed some tears and thought about just how much I would miss India." — Lara Garnermann, Ireland

Smailholm Tower

The Scottish Borders

“There is a wild beauty in the Scottish Borderlands that moves me to the core of my being. I could not get enough of the landscape as we wound our way through the countryside in search of one of the few remaining restored tower homes from the 15th century. The low-grade buzz of anxiety that is always with me melted away as I stood on the raw, windswept land beneath Smailholm Tower. I had a feeling that I had come home, maybe for the first time. I could not stop the tears, it was as if a long held grief was released as I made my way up the craggy path to the entrance of what remains of a complex that was built to withstand the English raids of the time. How could I know a place so well, where I had never been before? How could rocks and sky speak my secret name and know me? I do not have answers to these questions, but I am somehow more complete for having been to this land. A place that now holds my tears and my heart.” — Lea Goode-Harris, Santa Rosa, California

Sainte-Chapelle

Paris, France

“My wife had been to Paris before and visited Sainte-Chapelle, and said it was incredible. Not knowing much about it, I gladly went with her and entered into a dark, low-ceilinged room, with a tiny gift shop in the corner and a few items from the church scattered around. Thinking this was the whole thing, I was less than impressed. We walked up a winding staircase to what I assumed would be another, similar room. As we reached the next level, I turned the corner into a tall, thin room filled with bright light and an incredible amount color as the sun beamed through huge stained glass windows. I was so unprepared and overwhelmed by how beautiful it all was, that I broke down and stood in the middle of the room just staring at everything. Eventually I pulled myself together and unintentionally eavesdropped on a tour and learned so much about the meaning and history of the church.” — Matt Scribner, Salt Lake City, Utah

Salvation Mountain

Calipatria, California

"Some friends and I went day-tripping to the Salton Sea and made a side-trip to Salvation Mountain: that glorious, gaudy technicolor monument to God out in the middle of nowhere. Leonard Knight, the creator of Salvation Mountain, was still alive at the time, though quite old and frail. He happily took us on a tour of his creation, hobbling around on arthritis-stiff legs, all the while chattering about this next big project. As he spoke he drew his plans in the air, his eyes, ice blue and nearly blind, shining with excitement. When we returned to the car, I broke down and cried. That one man alone could literally move a mountain out of sheer passion, and then continue to dream and believe even when his body was beyond creation… Well, I wanted to feel that kind of passion in me. His beautiful vision made my life seem small, and it moved me to tears." — Naomi Alper, Los Angeles, California

Wadi Rum

Jordan

“I was on an tour of the Wadi Rum desert, and as we left the village and started to make our way across the massive desert, I was so overwhelmed by the beauty before me that I started to cry. I have been to a lot of deserts in my lifetime, but I have never really seen one that rivals the immense beauty of the Wadi Rum!” — Rob Coons, San Francisco, California

The Zugspitze

Germany

“I love mountains. I've visited lots of beautiful places, but they're the only ones that affect me so. My husband, children and I had taken a ski trip to Germany's highest peak, the Zugspitze, several years ago. The view from the top was overwhelming! I felt as though I could see the whole world. I was filled with awe, and got a little emotional. It is now my favorite place.” — Sheryl Donley, Charlottesville, Virginia

Desert Mountain

Montana

“A narrow road leads to the top of this mountain, which is rather scary in a car. You crest the top, full of adrenaline, and step out to overlook the valley. As you take in the view, the grandeur of the mountains, the beauty of the valley brings tears to your eyes.” — Tina Bowen, Kalispell, Montana

In Indiana, a restaurant and grocery store offers refugees a taste of home.

In the cities of food-obsessed Myanmar, ethnic minority cuisine is easier to find than ever before. But while diners in the capital feast on dishes from the states of Kachin, Rakhine, and Shan, food from the state of Chin is still a rarity. Formerly known as Burma, Myanmar has seven major recognized ethnic groups, besides the Bamar majority: the Chin are one. Given that Chin cuisine is elusive even within Burmese cities, it might be a surprise to find chefs cooking authentic Chin sabuti in America’s heartland.

Sabuti is something of a hybrid dish, and one that exemplifies Chin cuisine. “If you don’t know sabuti, you’re not Chin,” says Than Hre, owner of the Chin Brothers Restaurant and Grocery in Indianapolis, Indiana. While the diet of Myanmar’s Bamar majority is based around rice, easily grown in the central lowlands, the use of corn typifies food from mountainous Chin country. Sabuti is a meat and white corn soup, with the corn ground according to an Indian method, Hre says. The ground corn is then stewed with beef or pork bones, offal, and split peas. In Myanmar, sabuti is served alongside bottles of salt and MSG powder. Atop each table at Chin Brothers, there are also small containers of salt, chili, and MSG.

Even off the menu, sabuti remains a firm favourite of Hre and his family. “We grew up on it,” Hre says. It’s not the only Chin offering at this Burmese restaurant. They also serve vok ril, a Chin pork blood sausage. While Hre recreates flavors from the tiny village in the state of Chin where he spent his childhood, other Burmese minority foods may prove equally intriguing to Burmese and non-Burmese alike. Shan and Rakhinese noodles both feature on the menu, and popular dishes from across Myanmar are available on request.

To many, the restaurant provides a taste of home. When Chin Brothers offers breakfast on Saturdays, the restaurant bustles with customers. Many come for the breakfast dish of pe pyot, sprouted yellow beans boiled with turmeric and fried onions. According to Hre, Chin Brothers “also serves as a meeting place for the Chin community.” In Myanmar, most socializing takes place in tea shops, but there were no Burmese tea shops in Indiana when Hre arrived in 2002.

Hre was among the first group of Chin in Indianapolis. Hre, his wife, and his young son came to the United States from Myanmar via Guam, clutching only a single bag of belongings. Chin migrants were fleeing persecution by the military government, including human rights abuses: from forced labor to arbitrary killings. In Myanmar, ethnic minorities suffer under programs to create a single Burmese national identity. One notorious example, the government maltreatment of the unrecognized Rohingya minority, is widely considered ethnic cleansing. Chin people are especially targeted for their religion: Chins are 85% Christian in a country that’s nearly 90% Buddhist. As a Bible student at Chin Christian College, Hre was involved in actions against the government and began to attract attention. He fled to Guam in 2000, and hasn’t visited his homeland since. “I'm scared to go back.”

Though only three percent of Myanmar’s population are Chin, they comprise more than 80% of all Burmese migrants in Indiana. While Christian crosses were destroyed in Chin State, in Indiana Chin people have established more than 40 churches. Once some Chin had arrived in Indianapolis, the community attracted others: currently, around 17,000 live in the Hoosier State, earning its capital the playful moniker “Chindianapolis.” Hre says Indiana’s appeal lies in its warehouses and factories, where jobs are plentiful. “Most Chin refugees have only finished high school,” Hre says. “But here, the pay is good, you can work overtime, and they have good benefits and a decent salary. Here we can have a house and a car and a job. If we work hard, we can have the American dream.”

Work hard Hre did, juggling two jobs: one in a Best Buy warehouse in the day, while cleaning offices on nights and weekends. After five years, he purchased a former Indian grocery store. But when he went to officially register the change of ownership, he hadn’t even chosen a name. “I didn’t have any business experience,” he says. “I hadn’t thought about it.” He settled on “Chin Brothers.” The term Chin covers a number of different tribes and sub-tribes (exactly how many is contested) who speak more than 20 languages, not all of whom even accept the term Chin. But according to Hre, “We all are brothers and sisters. We are all Chin.”

But thanks to politics, business wasn’t always easy. When Hre opened the grocery store in 2007, the United States had comprehensive sanctions on Myanmar, deeming its military government a threat to national security. “We couldn’t import any products from Myanmar, so we got everything packaged in Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Once the products had been packaged elsewhere, they could be exported to the US,” says Hre. “It was a lot of trouble and very expensive.” However, after democratic elections resulted in a landslide victory for the National League for Democracy in 2016, the United States government lifted its sanctions. Then, Hre could import products directly from Myanmar.

The grocery store could almost double as an exhibition on Chin identity. For sale are Chin bibles, English/Chin dictionaries, and traditional costumes featuring the famed Chin weaving, alongside Burmese staples such as lahpet, fermented tea leaves, Rakhine noodles, and dried shrimp powder. Despite having no experience as a chef, Hre recognized the need for a community hub. After about a year and a half of running the grocery store, he opened the adjoining Chin Brothers restaurant.

Hre made the decision not to sell alcohol at Chin Brothers. “I’m not opposed to alcohol, but it’s not part of our culture and I don’t want to prioritize it just to increase profits,” he says. Instead, Chin Brothers offers a wide range of beverages reflecting Burmese tea shop culture. The drinks include an array of indulgent options, perhaps closer to desserts: Din chin, drinking yogurt served with jaggery syrup, and moh let saung, tapioca balls or sticky rice in coconut milk, sweetened with palm sugar. For those without a sweet tooth, Burmese green tea is a revelation: it has a milder, more rounded flavor than Chinese green tea, with hints of caramel, grass, and smoke.

Hre estimates a fifth of his customers are non-Chin Indiana locals. Hre’s wife, who manages the restaurant, often talks curious American customers through their first sampling of Chin food. “She’s good at talking to people. I’m too blunt,” Hre laughs. Chicken fried rice is a popular introductory dish at the restaurant, as is the Burmese take on Chinese hot pot, since it can be enjoyed by a group.

Hre is deeply committed to his community, but he’s still keen to adapt. “If you want to do business, you have to have an open heart for change,” he says. He’s a board member of the Chin Community of Indiana, an organization that helps new migrants find work opportunities and prepares them for interviews. He is also a proud member of the Indiana Chin Baptist Church. When the first Chin police officer was inducted earlier this year, Hre and other community leaders attended his graduation from the academy.

Just as Hre described the Indian influence on sabuti, the influx of the Chin and Chin cuisine into Indiana illustrates how lived cultures aren't sealed or static. Chin identity is flourishing in this unlikely haven. “We remember our motherland, but when we became citizens we promised to support and defend the nation,” says Hre. Initially, Indianapolis locals “had a little bit of concern” about Chin migrants, says Hre. But “now they accept us: we cooperate and work together.”

Back then, it was used as adhesive for tools and weapons.

For ancient Scandinavians, chewing gum was not about passing the time or freshening breath. It was an essential tool. Archaeologists believe that chewed-up pieces of birch bark, the ancient equivalent of gum, were used by people as an adhesive, to hold together tools and weapons. Now, a team of researchers want to know more about the people who chewed on this bark millennia ago.

The researchers focused on three specimens, which were found at an archaeological site in Sweden. The trio look like masticated lumps with imprints of teeth or fingers. Preserved in these lumps are microscopic strands of human DNA, most likely from saliva. These strands tell a story about how Mesolithic people interacted with their environment.

“I think the most interesting part is that we’re actually capturing a moment,” says Natalija Kashuba, a Ph.D. student at Uppsala University in Sweden. Kashuba is the lead author on a study, pre-printed on bioRxiv, that presents an analysis of these bits of bark. “This isn’t DNA from deceased ancient individuals—we’re actually catching DNA from a person while they’re alive and doing something. I think that’s kind of fun and remarkable.”

Using state-of-the-art genetic technology, Kashuba and her collaborators were able to analyze pieces of human DNA encased in the gum’s resin. “These were processed by humans somehow,” says Kashuba. “Either they were chewed or held by hand for long enough for DNA to get capsuled within this material. Then we got to extract it.”

By comparing the DNA sequences to genetic libraries of ancient human populations, the team found that the people who had munched on these bits of bark were from the earliest known group of Scandinavian hunter-gatherers. These individuals lived before Sweden was covered in glaciers in the latest ice age, over 9,500 years ago.

The findings also provide some insight into the social dynamics of these ancient people. For example, each piece of gum was only chewed by a single person, and both women and men partook, giving some insight into the community’s social structure—creating these sticky lumps wasn’t the domain of a single gender.

The gum comes from an archaeological site known as Huseby Klev near the southwestern coast of Sweden. The site now sits inland, but thousands of years ago, when sea level was 80 feet higher than today’s levels, it was a beach on an island at the end of a narrow fjord.

Huseby Klev was originally excavated in the 1980s and has provided a wealth of archaeological materials from thousands of years of civilization, which remained well-preserved under layers of marine clay and sand. Archaeologists have found scores of animal bones at the site, mostly fish, but also including whale and dolphin remains. Many of the bones had been sharpened to form tools, like arrowheads and fishhooks.

The chewed-up wads of birch bark have been of interest to archaeologists since they were originally found in 1980s, but this research is the first look into the genetic imprint left behind by the chewers. This study adds a new layer to archaeologists’ understanding of one of the oldest human societies in Scandinavia.

“This research can increase the size of the window,” says Kashuba. “We already have the possibility of extracting DNA from ancient human remains, like bones and hair. This is another way, something completely new.”

Outside the big top, this artist did a lot of sightseeing.

As the 19th century melted into the 20th, a young man named Frank Crowe worked his way across America and Europe, playing music for the circus.

The roving musician chronicled his travels, often by pasting his transportation tickets into a huge, handsome folio. That’s how we know, for instance, that Barnum and Bailey secured him passage from Dunkirk to New York on the SS Minneapolis. That same volume also holds some 2,500 postcards that suggest, wherever the caravan stopped, Crowe stole away from the Big Top to see the sights.

We don’t know much about Crowe’s life in the tent, but his sprawling collection reveals what he got up to in his off-hours in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Texas, Arizona, and many more locales. Some captions read like entries in a journal about a whimsically itinerant life. How did he spend the morning of March 19, 1902? Look to the postcard of Lake Geneva, where, he wrote, “I made the trip shown by the dotted line.”

Other postcards are speckled with historical tidbits he picked up along the way. On a page devoted to Northern Catalonia, he scribbled notes about local attractions. Sandwiched between images of people drinking from a porron, tipping a stream of red wine into their mouths from the spout’s great heights, is a note about the ancient thermal baths of Amélie-les-Bains-Palada. There, he wrote, the waters neared 145 degrees Fahrenheit (and still do).

Some of the postcards depicting locals in "traditional" costume topple into the sort of queasy, pseudo-anthropology that doesn't sit well today. Still, there are historical nuggets to be gleaned from Crowe’s scrapbook. A page devoted to his rambles through Hungary juxtaposes two views of the same city, hundreds of years apart. In 1601, the city of Székesfehérvár appears as a cluster of spindly spires (that year, the army of the Holy Roman Emperor wrested short-lived control of the city from the Ottoman Empire, which would ultimately retain it for decades more). The more recent postcard shows a handsome, tree-lined boulevard.

Beyond those before-and-afters, the album also scratches the wanderlust itch. This week, it’s up for grabs at Swann Auction Galleries, where dealers expect it to fetch upwards of $1,000—a whole lot cheaper than an around-the-world airfare.

How a frozen festival helped Brussels survive the "Winter of Death."

Three big balls of snow, some lumps of coal, a couple of sticks, and a carrot. Today’s typical snowman is minimalist, almost abstract. It is an artistic devolution from what they once were—markedly more advanced and artistically challenging. Even Michelangelo dabbled in the medium. Centuries ago, snowman-makers, many of whom were themselves artists and craftsmen, put considerable time and effort into their snowmanship.

One particular fluorescence in the canon of snow art was during the Middle Ages, when things were made with snow to make a statement. In some places there was a tradition among artists to populate cities with snowmen after a heavy snowfall. In a time when famine, plague, sickness, and conflict were not uncommon, snow often brought winter festivals and other officially endorsed morale boosters, which provided some moments of relief and levity to people who might otherwise be surviving on grass or dropping dead. The thinking was that the public could blow off steam for a week or two—with erotic dancing, excessive drinking, political jokes, and public art displays—but in a somewhat supervised way. That is exactly what took place in Brussels, then an important city in the Duchy of Brabant, during the particularly brutal winter of 1511. It was called the “Winter of Death,” and the city was covered with snowmen.

For six straight weeks, beginning January 1, temperatures stayed below freezing. A winter festival was declared, a much-needed distraction from the cold, the class strife, and the Guelders, another duchy to the north that made a practice of attacking Brussels.

From the colorful surviving accounts, including from the town poet and various diaries, we know that these were not your simple, three-ball snowmen. Every corner of Brussels was occupied with white figures pantomiming the local news or classical folklore. There were snow biblical figures, snow sea knights, snow unicorns, snow wildmen, snow mermaids, and snow village idiots. Some of them were juxtaposed together to create clever interplay and contrast. Some snowmen were based on the icons of the calendar, such as Janus (January) and Pluto (February), or the signs of the zodiac. A snow scene of Christ with the Woman of Samaria. A preaching friar with a dripping nose. A tooth-puller. The man in the moon. Roland blowing his horn. Cupid atop a pillar with a drawn bow. St. George rescuing the princess from a dragon. Adam and Eve. Among the snow-sculpture garden the city had become were 50 elaborately executed scenes with a total population of 110 snowmen. The vigor and ubiquity of the displays earned the festival the title of the “Miracle of 1511.”

Outside the home of Philip of Burgundy, son of Philip the Good and commander-in-chief of the Netherlands, stood a Hercules figure. The miraculously beautiful, perfect proportions of the snowman suggest that Philip was helped in the construction by court painter Jan Gossaert, a leader in Italian architecture and Renaissance art who had just rendered several nude paintings of the Greek hero for Philip.

There were works by artists and craftspeople, but this festival was about the regular Brusselaars. Many of the snow sculptures represented the public’s fears, frustrations, and desires. There were politically charged and sexually obscene tableaux in the streets for all to see—a form of visual satire and social commentary. Current events, complaints, local problems—if it was a nuisance, it was sculpted. Snow gentlemen gambled near the houtmarkt (wood market). Nearby was a urinating “fountain-boy,” today a symbol of the city of Brussels. A snow cow fertilized the ground. All told, according to historical sources, more than half the scenes were sexual or scatological in nature. Numerous snow figures were sculpted in erotic embrace. A snow couple made love in front of the town fountain. In the red light district, prostitutes stood on corners. In another scene, a snow nun seduced a man. It was an open forum to indulge hidden desires and stir the nether regions.

A display of frozen politicians became the town’s de facto op-ed page. The most feared characters, from the devil to the enemy ruler from Poederijen, were crafted in uncompromising poses. A sculpture of Redbad, last king of Frisia (“Freeze Land”) represented Satan, and was symbolically responsible for the deep winter frosts that threatened lives and livelihoods each year.

History has long since forgotten the Miracle of 1511, as well as the ballad that describes the event by official town poet Jan Smekens, “Dwonder van claren ijse en snee: een verloren en teruggevonden gedicht” (“The Miracle of Real or Imaginary Ice and Snow: A Lost and Then Refound Poem”). Maybe a shorter title could’ve helped, but really it was the ballad’s and the snow sculptures’ status as “low art” that left them neglected all these centuries. Despite a reprint of the poem in 1946, literary historians still considered it amateur in style and written in a vulgar, rhetorician tongue instead of Latin or French.

The Miracle of 1511 was not the first snow festival, and its denizens were not the first snowmen. There was a smaller scale one in 1481, and nearby cities hosted similar events: Mechelen (1571), Rijssel (1600 and 1603), and Antwerp (throughout the 17th and 18th centuries). But the Miracle of 1511 was the one to rule them all. It actually changed the society of Brussels by giving the public a voice, and helping affect a shift in the balance of power. This was the snowman’s defining moment, the moment it rose beyond winter distraction to political force. Those snowmen provoked thought, anger, and joy, and even forced people to reassess their places in the world. These snowmen were rock stars, and the Miracle of 1511 was Woodstock.

Bob Eckstein is a New Yorker cartoonist and author of The Illustrated History of the Snowman.

Extraordinary survival stories of ordinary objects.

How many of your most treasured possessions are built to last? Would they make it through a fire? How about a flood?

There are a few rare items in history that have proved capable of making it through the incredible trials the world has thrown at them. The fact that the circumstances of their survival are often tragic only makes their seeming indestructibility more poignant. Whether they’ve withstood the trials of time, trouble, or both, the artifacts below are striking reminders of the lives their owners lived, as well as of the incredible craftsmanship and engineering that built them.

The Titanic Violin

If you’ve seen Titanic, you know the story of Wallace Hartley, the violinist who famously urged the band to keep playing even as the ship began to sink. While many might imagine this story to involve a bit of artistic license on the part of the screenwriters, it’s actually fairly accurate to the historical record. And we still have the violin to prove it. Amazingly, Hartley’s actual instrument is one of the most notable items to survive the disaster with little damage, both because of the uncanny strength of the glue holding its pieces together as well as the leather valise that was able to protect it from many of the ravages of the undersea. The violin was sold at auction for a whopping $1.7 million in 2013.

Mary Latrobe’s Tea Box

These days, if you ask an elementary school kid to tell you about the War of 1812, the most you’ll probably get out of them is that it…happened in 1812. But although it’s a war that has receded in many ways into the dusty annals of history, it’s also one that saw some serious damage–for instance, the total destruction of the White House after British soldiers marched into Washington in 1814 and burned the place to the ground. The destruction wrought by the fire was severe enough that we now have very little evidence as to what the interior of the original first abode may have looked like, but one rare clue lies in a Chinese lacquer tea box. The box, which was a gift from First Lady Dolley Madison to her friend Mary Latrobe, was lined with a swatch of the same French wallpaper that hung inside the residence, making it one of the few surviving artifacts from the historic building.

Ilan Ramon’s Diary

The crash of the Columbia space shuttle in 2003 stunned the world. While all seven crew members aboard the shuttle were tragically killed when it disintegrated upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, one unlikely item managed to make it through both the explosion and a 37-mile free fall to Palestine, Texas. This item was the diary of Ilan Ramon, an Israeli-born fighter pilot and NASA astronaut who was a payload specialist aboard the spacecraft. While the curator at the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem, where a portion of the diary is on display, describes the item’s survival as “almost a miracle,” others have chalked its unlikely survival up to a combination of aerodynamics, the book’s location in the cabin, and the slow process by which the shuttle disintegrated. Either way, its serves as a moving reminder of an extraordinary life.

The Lewis Chessmen

That dusty old Scrabble set in your closet may be 20 years old at this point, but what are the odds of it hanging on for another 900-plus years? We’re guessing pretty low. The Vikings, on the other hand, crafted their games with an eye toward longevity—at least in the case of the Lewis Chessmen, a collection of chess pieces carved from walrus ivory that are believed to have originated in Trondheim, Norway, in the 12th century. The iconic, and slightly silly-looking figures were discovered on the island of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and are now on display in the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland. How did they manage to survive for over 900 years?

The Ocean of Lost Toys

In 1997, a ship containing more than 5 million Legos was struck by a freak wave, causing it to accidentally drop its precious plastic cargo off the coast of Land’s End at the westernmost edge of England. Now, more than twenty years later, the nearby beaches of Devon and Cornwall are still bejeweled with thousands of the distinctive, yellow-headed figures and their related doodads, all of which are avidly collected by visitors (not to mention cursed by local conservationists). If you plan to go beach-combing, make sure to wear shoes. Indestructibility comes with a price: those things hurt.

Most items manufactured today won't still be ticking when the archaeologists of the future dig them up. That's why Citizen Promaster is the wristwatch of choice for people who brave the elements every day in their careers. View the video below to see how a forger harnesses earth, wind, fire, and water to create a blade–all while wearing a Citizen Promaster Tough watch.

A botanist made fantastical sketches of the rain forests' natural wonders.

Researchers who work in tropical rain forests often speak of the hassles of it all: Whacking through dense vegetation is tricky, especially when you’re lugging gear and need a free hand to swat, with utmost futility, at the swarm of insects buzzing around your head. And then there’s the rain, which soaks through clothes and patience alike.

But they also talk about how it’s all worth it. These places are precious and shrinking and so little understood. Even researchers who regularly embark on collecting trips to rain forests find, time and again, species that are new to science, from plants to carnivorous insects and more.

Scientific discovery is important, but wonder fuels these adventures, too. At least, that’s the case for Francis Hallé, a French botanist who has spent decades exploring the world’s rain forests. A professor emeritus from the University of Montpellier, Hallé knows that a forest is not just data. He reflects on his time below the branches with great affection, even awe. In a short film from the “Worlds in Transformation” series by the storytelling collective La Foresta, he grows wistful when he recalls drifting off to sleep in the forest, to the symphony of insects and birds around him. He likens the canopy, one of his areas of professional interest, to a sea—only green, and airborne.

Much like the sea, rain forests hold natural wonders that aren’t visible until you’re right up close. Equatorial forests are “a universe of magical allure,” full of “little marvels,” Hallé writes in The Atlas of Poetic Botany, a volume of his Seussian botanical sketches and informed musings, produced in collaboration with Éliane Patriarca and newly translated into English by Erik Butler. In damp, sticky forests from Sumatra to Robinson Crusoe Island, he writes, “there is an abundance of aesthetic satisfaction, wonder, and poetry to be found.”

Each entry in the Atlas drops readers into a scene of Hallé’s fieldwork. On Robinson Crusoe Island, part of an archipelago off the coast of Chile, he found Gunnera peltata, which looks like a rhubarb plant so enormous that it dwarfs whoever stands below its wide, veined leaves. Analyzing it was a thrilling challenge. “Normally, a scalpel is used for dissecting plants,” Hallé writes. “This time, I had to wield a meat cleaver!” A photo would convey the size and the “nest of ruby-red fibers,” but the author eschews snapshots. “I cannot think of a better way to present it than with a drawing,” he says.

There’s a long history of sensitive, precise, and scientific botanical illustration, and more recently scientists turned to stunningly detailed photographs of their subjects, in which, say, an insect’s bristles or compound eyes are presented for close-up study. Hallé prefers to take it slower and simpler. Drawing invites lingering, he writes, which in turn invites people to look closely, carefully, hungrily. To understand a plant, “it is best not to rush.” The time it takes to complete a sketch “amounts to a dialogue with the plant,” and each pencil stroke helps imprint the scene in your mind.

In the sketch accompanying the G. peltata, green and blue-gray stalks stretch above a dusty-rose flower. The coiled trunk is surrounded by others, whose canopies vanish into the margins. In the corner, someone reclines against a trunk that seems to follow the curve of his spine. He’s looking at the plant, admiring it, maybe drawing it, a grin sweeping across his face. The image seems to freeze a moment—perhaps Hallé’s own encounter with the plant, which his drawing helped sear into his memory. “I will never forget my strolls through the Gunnera forest,” he writes, “beneath a roof of gigantic leaves.”

Almost every illustration in the book is infused with this sense of delight in the pleasant strangeness of the natural world. Yes, that includes the sketch of Rafflesia arnoldii, the corpse lily, the largest and possibly foulest-smelling flower on the planet. Its petals are pink (“the color of rotten meat,” Hallé writes), and its scent is rank—a “pestilential odor” that evokes “clogged toilets, or a garbage collector strike in the middle of August.” The two kids in the drawing don’t seem fazed. They’re grinning. One even wraps his hand around the branch, like he’s patting a buddy on the shoulder. In another image, a woman cuddles the gargantuan seed pod of Entada gigas, a Central African vine that might be the world's longest plant. The pods grow to about 6.5 feet, but no one has been able to measure the vines, Hallé writes, because they're hard to reach. Nature is stinky, mysterious, and elusive, and the figures in his drawings are totally into it.

These figures do offer a sense of scale, probably, but also seem to remind readers that sights such as the great African tree fern (Cyathea manniana) are worth reveling in. Anyone who encounters one would be well-served to do as Hallé’s little character does: Stare up, up, up at the palm-like plants that have sprouted in thick clusters for hundreds of millions of years, and saw the dinosaurs come and go.

The book is not an exhaustive checklist of any region’s flora or fauna, nor does it gather everything scientists know about a particular plant. Instead, it’s a tenderly illustrated love letter to specimens that most people will never see outside a conservatory’s glass walls—and to the sights, smells, and sounds that flank the trunks, stems, and petals. If there’s a thesis, it’s that nature is wondrous and bizarre, and we’re extremely lucky to live alongside it.