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The Worst Bus Stop in North America Just Got a Makeover

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Better late than never.

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If you live on the edge of Vancouver, in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia, and want to head downtown on public transportation, you might head to TransLink bus stop 61452, on a desolate corner of the westbound Lougheed Highway. Until recently you had two options upon arrival: either stand on the accident-prone highway shoulder, or wait behind a concrete barrier and clamber over it when your bus arrives. Finally, things have gotten a little bit better.

Local resident Jason Lee submitted a detailed rundown of stop 61452’s faults to Streetsblog, a nonprofit transportation news site, for its second-annual Sorriest Bus Stop competition. "This bus stop is a disaster waiting to happen," he wrote. "In my three decades of riding transit, I have never seen a bus stop designed like this." Thanks to its combination of safety issues and discomfort, voters dubbed it the absolute worst in North America in September 2018.

Lee had questioned the priorities of the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation, which in recent years spent over $200 million dollars in updates to automobile infrastructure along the section of highway without making it any friendlier to pedestrians and people who rely on public transit.

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While TransLink, the local transportation authority, and the Ministry of Transportation passed the buck on the hazardous bus stop back and forth, the Pitt Meadows stop beat out other sad transit stops, from Cincinnati to Beverly Hills. No one will say whether the negative attention finally spurred action, but the concrete barriers are gone now. In their place is a new raised platform where riders can wait, separate from the highway. A metal railing “was installed at the back of the pad to provide a barrier between pedestrians and the ditch area behind,” according to Ministry spokesperson Danielle Pope. Crews will also be adding markings to better differentiate the waiting area, she adds.

It may not yet be the most pleasant place to catch a bus, but it’s better than what was there before, thanks to the voice of one frustrated straphanger.


24 Children's Stories That Still Give Us the Creeps

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Atlas Obscura readers wrote in about the classic tales that taught them one thing—unease.

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The stories and books we consume as children can stick with us our entire lives. Sometimes it's because they successfully impart important lessons, but often times it's because they scared the wits out of our childhood selves. Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about the kids' books and stories that still creep them out. The responses gave us chills.

You told us about classic fairy tales that left you feeling uneasy. There were folktales, too, such as the monster-under-the-bed known as "Soap Sally," who turns kids' fingers into soap. And many of you wrote to us about specific books that gave you nightmares, such as the eerie favorite The Water-Babies. All kid-friendly, all horrifying.

Take a look through some of our favorite submissions below, and try not to freak yourself out. If you have a children's story from your part of the world that still give you the creeps, head over to our new Community forums and tell us about it!

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"The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf"

“Hans Christian Andersen had a thing for writing stories about naughty girls and the punishments meted out to them. This one concerns a poor girl who was raised up to live in better surroundings and became very conceited. When sent to visit her poverty-stricken mother, she dropped the loaf of bread that she'd been given for her family into the mud so she could step on it instead of getting her shoes dirty. But she sticks to the loaf and sinks down below the mud, is taken into Hell, stiffens into a statue, and goes through all sorts of horrific torments (flies, slime, bugs crawling across her eyes, hunger) while listening to her mother's tears and people saying what a horrible person she was. At last she escapes her own disintegrating body in the shape of a bird, and spends a winter collecting and giving away to other birds enough crumbs to equal the weight of the loaf. And at last, she flies away (presumably to Heaven.)

I couldn't get past the idea of being stuck inside your own body, utterly helpless. It's an incredibly hopeless situation and she KNOWS it's all her fault, and there's such a slim chance that she can ever make things better. I guess it says something about me and my fear of being helpless. It's pretty strong.” — Suzanne Barnes, Tucson, Arizona


"The Tailypo"

“A hungry farmer and his three dogs eat the tail of a strange creature (it’s black with yellow eyes). The creature returns, demanding the return of its ‘tailypo.’ It kills the three dogs over the course of three nights and ends its reign of terror by killing the farmer.

This was read to my 1st or 2nd grade class in the library and haunted me for years to come. Having looked into it as an adult, I have learned that it's Southern folklore. Some versions include evisceration of the farmer so the thing can get its tail back. Why would anyone read this to children?!” — Rebecca, Massachusetts


"Soap Sally"

“Soap sally lives under the bed and would turn your thumb into soap if you didn't go to sleep. My mom told me that she turned my aunt's thumb into soap.” — Dorothy E., U.S.A.


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"The Hobyahs"

“Brave little dog Turpie kept barking in the night because the Hobyahs came creeping around the forest hut of his owners, an elderly couple. The old man daily threatens the dog with dismemberment for barking. Every day, he cuts off another limb or tail and still the dog barks. Ultimately, his head is removed and the dog ceases barking.

The illustrations of dismembered dog body parts casually placed inside the hut on a shelf [scared me]. No blood! And all because the dog is trying to defend his owners. This story was in a primary school reader! Gave me nightmares.” — Jessie Shaw, Virginia


"Mr. Pop Corn"

“When I was young, my mother purchased several antique children's books from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. One of the books had very short stories, like poems, no longer than two-to-three pages. Mr. Pop Corn was illustrated as a dapper ear of corn with a top hat, like the famous Mr. Peanut. The neighborhood children snuck up and assaulted Mr. Pop Corn, and sheared off his kernels, then put the kernels in a big pot, and made popcorn. The children ate happily and had their fill. Poor Mr. Pop Corn. This was illustrated. Children giving chase, Mr. Pop Corn running, kernels popping, all around the text. As a child, I was horrified. Ripping the kernels off and popping them and eating them, that is a horror story.” — Linda, New Mexico


"The Little Sister Carries Her Doll"

"It is a ballad:

'The little sister carries the doll on her back

walking in the garden to see the blossom flower

the doll is crying out, "Mama (Mom)"

the bird on the tree is giggling.'

Although I depend on the functions of psychology and linguistic anthropomorphism to explain why the doll cries out ‘Mama’ and the bird giggles, I still feel scared of this ballad for children.” — Bin, Taiwan


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The Water-Babies

By Charles Kingsley

“It's about a little chimney sweep who was chased out of town, and he finds himself living underwater with a group of other children. I'm pretty sure all of the children in the story are dead, including the little boy.” — Courtney Downs, Denver, Colorado


The Tooth Fairy

By Anita Feagles

“The Tooth Fairy is this cute little twiggy waif girl who works harder than the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus because she has to work all year round. She loves teeth and has bucket loads of them that she sorts into boxes of girl’s teeth, boy’s teeth, top teeth, bottom teeth, EXTRAS, etc. She uses teeth to decorate her fish bowl, in a jar on the kitchen shelf, the path to her house is paved with teeth, she has garlands of teeth outside the house. She has a party for all the fairies once a year and they all get gifts of teeth. And play games with teeth. And the reason she loves teeth so much is because she doesn't have any of her own!

Although it's meant to be a sweet, goofy story describing The Tooth Fairy, I found it creepy as a kid because she doesn't have teeth in her mouth, and feels the need to hoard them, using them as decorations and giving them as gifts. Making jewelry out of teeth. Paving her walkway with teeth! It's just not right.” — Amanda Walz, Detroit, Michigan


Bony-Legs

By Joanna Cole

“It's a Baba Yaga story (house on chicken feet, razor sharp teeth, eating small children). She captures a girl and makes her get herself ready to be cooked/eaten. The girl is helped by various maltreated pets and gates. The pictures of Bony-Legs are… haunting. For some reason this was my favorite book when I was in kindergarten and I read it just about every day. Then out of nowhere, I became afraid of the pictures and hid them behind the other books so she didn't stare at me while I slept. Then for a stretch I became convinced that Bony-Legs lived underneath my bed with the villain from Superman II as her lackey.” — Marissa Miller, Minnesota


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Max and Moritz

By Wilhelm Busch

“Max and Moritz are two naughty little boys that like to play pranks on their neighbors. They play mean-spirited pranks, like causing local chickens to eat strings and die entangled together; removing planks from a bridge; almost killing a tailor; adding gunpowder to their teacher's pipe, and nearly blowing him away; that sort of thing. Eventually they slit open sacks of the farmers corn. They end up stuffed into the sacks, brought to the mill, and ground to pieces. They end up being fed to the local ducks. They are not missed. (In fact, the farmer sort of relishes in grinding them up...) The farmer knowingly (and happily!) feeds ground up children to the birds. And the whole town is okay with it. Also, once they've been ground, the illustration shows the ducks eating grain shaped like little boys.” — Sarah H., Florida (family is from Germany)


The Duchess Bakes a Cake

By Virginia Kahl

“The titular Duchess decides to take a break from duchessing and bake a cake. Things go horribly awry when the batter starts rising like bread dough, and simply doesn't stop. The Duchess climbs onto the concoction to try to stop it from rising higher. Instead, it rises with her on it, trapping her very high up on a tower made of cake. Her husband and children see what's happened and fear she's trapped forever. However, the Duchess comes up with a plan: everyone will eat the cake so that she can safely get down.

One line that has always stuck with me and upset me, even when I was very little, comes up when the Duke and the children see the Duchess stuck out of reach. The youngest child begins to cry and the Duke responds, ‘Don't cry, dear, about your poor mother. I'm sure, if you wish, I can find you another.’ The absolute callousness and willingness to replace his wife horrified me. It still does (even as an adult who knows that political marriages have existed for a very long time).” — Rose, New Jersey


Ozma of Oz

L. Frank Baum

“A sequel to Wizard of Oz, wherein Dorothy restores the rightful ruler to the throne of Ev with help from a variety of the odd characters Oz is famous for. [It is creepy for] so, so many reasons. Princess Langwidere and her collection of heads for every moment; The Nome King and the horror of being turned into decorative tchotchkes, unable to tell your friends who you are; and the Wheelers. The early 1900s moral code is very evident, and is fascinating to compare as an adult and parent nowadays.” — Moria Bergeron, Sunnyvale, California


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The Tale of Tom Kitten

By Beatrix Potter

“It’s a Beatrix Potter tale in which a kitten, exploring the space between the walls of his house, finds himself rolled in dough and nearly consumed by rats. This idea that there are little creatures lurking just out of sight that would kill and eat you if but given the opportunity, is startling to a child who has never had anything other than positive interactions with animals. It reframes the image of the home as a safe bulwark against raw nature.” — Ginger, Pennsylvania


"Little Orphant Annie"

By James Whitcomb Riley

"It's a poem about an orphan girl who's taken into a 19th-century household to do all the housework. But, after dinner, she tells the kids of the house horrible stories about what goblins do to you if you act up. 'The goblins'll get you if you don't watch out!' The first cautionary tale in the poem has a boy who, because he wouldn't say his prayers, was snatched out of his bed in the night by goblins, and all his parents find left behind are his pajama bottoms. The idea of a boy taken away, naked from the waist down, almost made me sick." — Julie Huffman, Los Angeles, California


"Rubber Bum"

"My English aunt always told us this story. A young lad was sent to market to buy bacon. Instead of buying it, he slices off a part of his buttocks and pockets the money. Mom says how delicious it is. This happens day after day until he runs out of buttocks. The aghast parents have him fitted with a rubber prosthesis. He falls down one day, bounces, and is never seen again. I’ve asked many people if they know the story, no one has. Now I understand why my aunt didn’t have children.” — Beverly Demko, Reynoldsburg, Ohio


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"The Tinderbox"

“A soldier meets a witch who sends him down into a tree where he finds money guarded by dogs with giant eyes. He then goes broke and the dogs return to give him more money. He then gets the dogs to steal a princess and rip everyone else to shreds.

[Creepy things:] The witch who wants the mysterious tinderbox but not the fortune; the tree with underground rooms; the dogs with hideously large eyes (the illustrations still haunt me) that he has to gingerly pick up and move; the dark attic the broke soldier lived in; the striking of the match and the scary dogs appearing; the marking of the town's doors to find out where the princess goes at night; and the end note of the beautiful wedding feast with the hideous dogs enjoying.” — SW, U.S.A.


The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily

By Dino Buzzati

“Facing famine, the bears come down from the mountains of Sicily, defeat the Grand Duke of Sicily in a bloody battle, and then take over the monarchy and live like humans, until the king is killed by a sea monster. The illustrations, the giant cat, Marmoset, the sea monster, and the battle scenes, were both creepy and compelling. Also, the English translation is in this cheerful doggerel that takes you bumping along from one horror to the next.” — Chris Hawthorne, Los Angeles, California


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"Hansel and Gretel"

“Honestly, there are quite a few kids stories, even Little Red Riding Hood, that trip me out now that I'm much older, but this one I find very disturbing. A story about two children who got lost in a forest and end up at a cottage made of candy, then have to fight a hostage situation, and end up defending themselves by killing someone. It's a luring, kidnapping, and murder story involving CHILDREN. Kids getting lost is scary enough (can you tell I'm a parent?), but being taken hostage with the intent of being eaten (cannibalism), then for a child having to make such as decision as ‘it's us or her’ — innocence lost!” — Faniso Zimunya, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe


"The Three Little Men in the Wood"

“Typical Cinderella-type story about a beautiful step-daughter and a wicked stepmother who plans to kill her. At the end, the heroine marries a king and he sentences the wicked stepmother and her awful daughter to be put into a cask, stuck round with nails, and rolled down a hill into the water. Pretty awful punishment, not to mention gruesome. And I have never forgotten it.” — Lauri Taylor, Salt Lake City, Utah


"The Strange Feast"

“A sausage became friends with a blood sausage. The blood sausage invited him over, then left the room. The sausage saw strange things, like a broom and dustpan arguing, and a monkey babbling to itself. Something or other warned him to run. He ran outside, and back through the window, he saw the blood sausage. It was holding a sharp knife, and said, ‘If I hadn't warned you, I'd have had you!’ What's creepier than a children's story about a serial killer? Somehow anthropomorphizing a blood sausage only makes it more disquieting.” — Perry Fergin, Baltimore, Maryland


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"Rumpelstiltskin"

"A mischievous little goblin man offers to help a girl who'll be either executed or imprisoned forever by a king if she isn't able to use a spinning wheel to turn ordinary straw into gold. The catch? She has to give up her first born child unless she can guess the imp's name within three days of him coming to collect the debt. When she has her first kid, Rumpelstiltskin returns, and the girl desperately tries to guess his name to no avail. But on the night before the third day, she sneaks into the woods to find him, and overhears him singing a song in which he reveals his name. The next day, she says his name and he loses his prize and they live happily ever after.

I think the idea of a baby-stealing imp is horrible enough, as well as the idea of trying to teach children about the dangers of incurring debt through the narrative of a virtually un-winnable magical wager. But there are plenty of extra-gruesome versions of the story that make it especially creepy. In one version written by the Brothers Grimm in 1857, Rumpelstiltskin becomes so enraged when the girl guesses his name that he lifts his foot and stomps it so far into the ground that it gets stuck there, then, he grabs his free leg and literally tears his own body in half." — Kristian, Las Vegas, Nevada


"The Teeny-Tiny Woman"

“The Teeny-Tiny Woman is a version of an old English ghost story where a small woman takes a walk and finds a bone in a graveyard, which she logically decides to take home and eat for dinner. When she takes a nap, a spirit arrives demanding the bone, and the woman responds, ‘Take it!’ The fact that cannibalizing comes across as totally normal while the ghost rescuing its body is supposed to be the frightening part [makes it creepy].” — Kelsey B., Seattle, Washington


"The Red Shoes"

“A spoiled little girl gets a special pair of red shoes that she wears everywhere. A man puts a curse on them that makes her unable to take them off, and continuously makes her dance. She winds up dancing herself to death.

My mother used to play records for me to help me go to sleep when I was a child, and some of them had stories on them. 'The Red Shoes' was on one of them. I can still hear the reader saying ‘she danced herself to death!’ I was WIDE AWAKE after that! I told my mother immediately, and she took the record out of the rotation, but I'm haunted by it into my 50s.” — Eric Johnston, South Carolina


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"The Bunyip"

“The Bunyip is a creature with an elongated body and an ugly head. It has long claws on its feet and hands and it makes horrible screeching noises. It lives in billabongs, ditches, and marshy bogs in the Australian outback. It survives by catching and eating children who are out camping, particularly children who are a bit naughty. It wanders around looking for these naughty children, who just disappear without a trace. Never to be seen again. Do they become another Bunyip? I was about 7 years old when I was given a book of short stories from other countries. This was one of the stories. Even though the Bunyip was in Australia and I lived in England, I had nightmares about it creeping into my bedroom whilst I was sleeping. I could be a bit of a naughty child, and I know I had the nightmares for a long time. I'm not sure for how long my behavior improved but it certainly made me think twice before getting up to mischief. I'm now almost 70 years old, but the Bunyip still makes me shudder when I think of it.” — Diane Hodgson, United Kingdom

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Neanderthals Had Advanced Hunting Technology

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Contrary to what popular opinion might assume.

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Forty thousand years after disappearing, the Neanderthals have stayed alive largely as the butts of our jokes. You know how it goes: They’re unintelligent, lethargic, incompetent—an embarrassing chapter in our evolutionary history. Right?

Not really. Research published today in Scientific Reports provides yet another indication that our ancestors were far more advanced than we had thought—even when it comes to violence, a realm in which humankind can claim some unequivocal, if unfortunate, authority.

Archaeologists from University College London (UCL) have demonstrated that the 300,000-year-old “Schöningen spears”—the oldest preserved hunting weapons ever found in Europe—could have been used to hunt prey from a distance, and not only at close range. When the spears were excavated between 1994 and 1999, in a lignite mine in Schöningen, Germany, they helped to “really push away” the perception that Neanderthals were scavengers instead of hunters, says Annemieke Milks, the lead author of the new study. Still, Milks noticed while conducting her graduate research that there was a lack of data on hand-thrown spears from the period. Researchers like her “needed to understand basic things about how” these weapons functioned. So she set out to do exactly that with the Schöningen spears.

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Using wood from Norwegian spruce trees grown in Kent, England, UCL Institute of Archaeology alum Owen O’Donnell built replicas of the spears by hand, weighing 760 and 800 grams, respectively. To ensure that the spears not only matched the historical specifications, but that they would also be handled with the proper technique, the team enlisted six javelin athletes to throw the spears at a hunter’s high velocity. The javelin throwers were able to hit targets up to 20 meters away, and with enough force to kill the would-be prey. Before the experiment, scientists had estimated that the spears could only be thrown half as far. They’re relatively hefty, after all—NFL footballs, by comparison, weigh around 400 grams.

The findings reveal the Neanderthals’ technological sophistication, and a major—if rather macabre—way in which they influenced human civilization. “Understanding when we first developed the capabilities to kill at distance,” said co-author Matt Pope in a press release, “is... a dark but important moment in our story.” Yet these capabilities represent just one piece of the rather complex Neanderthal puzzle. Between the last 10 and 15 years, says Milks, researchers have had to radically rethink the Neanderthals after evidence emerged that they explored underground, created art, thought symbolically, and made other advanced stone tools. But maybe it shouldn’t have been so surprising: The Neanderthals roamed for over 300,000 years. “Understanding them as a human-like species,” says Milks, “helps us understand their longevity.”

Going forward, Milks hopes that this study can lay a foundation for comparing early spears to later projectiles, and that a larger sample size of throwers can illustrate the importance of variables like skill and body size in handling them. Until then, let’s give the Neanderthals a break already.

The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Enslaved Muslim Man Is Now Online

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The Library of Congress has digitized the works of Omar ibn Said in both Arabic and English.

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Omar ibn Said was too old and frail to endure the backbreaking field labor his master forced upon him, so he escaped. He feebly made his way into a church where he could find shelter and a moment to pray about the plight of his situation. When he was arrested soon thereafter, it unexpectedly changed his life for the better.

We know these things because Said wrote about them in his 15-page autobiography, The Life of Omar Ibn Said, written in Arabic while he was enslaved in 1831. The text is considered the most well-known account of a Muslim slave living in America. Now the original manuscript, along with 41 other documents including personal writings and letters, have been restored, digitized, and made available online by the Library of Congress.

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In 1770, Said was born into an aristocratic Muslim family in a region known as Futa Toro, now modern-day Senegal. It wasn’t uncommon for someone in Said’s position to receive years of education. In fact, for 25 years, Said studied under the guidance of three teachers, including his brother. They taught him Arabic, math, and how to interpret the Quran according to schools from across Africa. He was known as a scholar for much of his life in Africa, where he taught and worked as a tradesman.

But at 37, his entire life changed. Various tribes and kingdoms throughout Africa were at war and Said fell victim to these quarrels. “Then there came to our place a large army, who killed many men, and took me, and brought me to the great sea, and sold me into the hands of the Christians, who bound me and sent me on board great ship and we sailed upon the great sea a month and a half,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Eventually, Said arrived in Charleston, South Carolina. There, just one year before the Atlantic Slave Trade would be made illegal, he was sold to an individual he described in his manuscript as a “wicked man” and “a complete infidel.”

The rest of Said’s writings are similarly forthright, and this approach may be one of the reasons why he chose to write in Arabic. “It is interesting to think about why he wrote this [autobiography] in Arabic and it may very well be because other biographies that we have that are in English were either dictated or edited or written by the slave owner,” says Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division at the library. She adds that other narratives may have been crafted with trepidation because writing in English meant their owners could read their works, garnering unwanted attention.

In the case of Said, nobody really had a clue what he was writing—most were just enamored with his ability to craft such beautiful calligraphy.

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While in jail for his escape in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Said wrote in Arabic on his cell wall. Said’s writing fascinated locals and eventually, he attracted the attention of John Owen, who would later become the governor of North Carolina. Owen recognized Said was an educated man, purchased him, and gave him to his brother James.

As noted by Neil Caudle in Glimpse, Said remained enslaved, but was no longer subject to physical abuse and general neglect.

At Owen’s estate, Said was allowed to write and teach Arabic to visitors. He even received a Bible, written in Arabic, from Francis Scott Key. “During the last 20 years, I have known no want in the hand of Jim Owen,” he wrote.

However, Said still understood the ills of slavery. His autobiography opens with a passage from the Quran, Surah 67, entitled Sūrat al-Mulk, which means “sovereignty.” The chapter focuses on God's control over all things and humanity’s attempts to control the world. The passage itself challenges the idea of ownership over another human being, a right that only exists within God, explains Deeb. “It is a fundamental criticism of the institution of slavery,” she says.

But Said’s writings weren’t solely about his life or Islam. He also discusses Christianity.

Said compared the different prayer styles of Islam and Christianity. He talks about how James Owen and his wife would read him the Gospel and even pleads with North Carolinians to find a family “having so much love to God” as the Owens. In 1821, he was baptized as a Christian at the local Presbyterian Church.

But there have been debates among researchers as to what this “conversion” meant. As noted by Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, some believe that although Southerners at the time were enamored with his writing, he may have been fearful to display his religious practices freely. Even his own minister suggested that while Said was displaying the Christian faith outwardly, he may feel otherwise internally. Said’s writings give us more of this nuanced story.

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Often hidden in his works and belongings were verses written in Arabic from the Quran. Inside his Bible was the holy phrase, “Praise be to Allah, or God” and “All good is from Allah.” Another writing from him, wrongly translated as a Bible verse, was actually a verse from the Quran about non-believers coming to Allah.

Although not fully fleshed out, you can see Said's examination of the theological frameworks around him in his works. His writings offer a portrait of a man who has not lost touch with his birth religion. This is evident not only in his words, but also in the materials he used.

While working to restore the collection, Sylvia Albro, Senior Paper Conservator at the Library of Congress, found that Said used different writing utensils when quoting the Quran in his opening passage. He utilized a pen with a reed-like flat tip, similar to one he used in Africa to write calligraphy. The rest of the autobiography was written with a traditional pen for the times. “From a material point of view, you can learn a lot about a person,” says Albro. That simple adjustment highlights a connection to faith and tradition that hadn’t wavered in spite of his enslavement.

Albro has been working hard to restore Said’s papers. The collection came to the library via the private trove of Derrick Beard, a collector of African-American memorabilia. According to the LOC, it was Beard’s desire for the library to display the materials for researchers to study. But prior to reaching Beard, the texts had gone on a long journey. The cache was originally assembled by the abolitionist Theodore Dwight in 1860. Dwight also commissioned scholars to translate some of Said’s letters. The collection changed hands over the decades and at one point was lost for nearly 50 years.

This voyage caused the items to garner their fair share of damage. Tears had begun to develop because of the constant handling of the manuscript.

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Restoring the cover of the autobiography was a task in itself. A cover was attached around 20 years after the text was written. Albro likened it to brown wrapping paper in feel and functionality. To preserve it, she treated the material with an alkaline bath to remove some of the acids before it could be placed back on the manuscript. Had that not been done, the other pages would slowly turn brown from the acidity.

What was fascinating about the cover, according to Albro, was that the original thread holding everything together is the same type found in other West African Arabic manuscripts collected by Dwight. Like his choice of writing implement, it’s another material connection between Said and Africa.

The story of Omar ibn Said ends with him living out his last days in Bladen County, North Carolina, with the Owens. He died at 94, a year before slavery was abolished in the U.S.

No one is sure why Said wrote his autobiography or for whom. But those questions aside, it is a fascinating journey into the mind of a complex man living during tumultuous times. Said's tale forces historians to dig deeper into the past to further understand a period in American where the histories of thousands were ignored.

Your Hot Water Heater Is an Extreme Environment

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Microbes that thrive under the harshest conditions are making themselves right at home—in our homes.

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Extremophiles aren’t easily deterred. These microorganisms live their best lives in places that are hot, acidic, salty, dark, or oxygen-starved, places that most other forms of life can’t begin to handle. Members of the heat-loving genus Thermus, for instance, are right at home in environments that would scald human skin—from hydrothermal vents to industrial composting systems and the boreholes of gold mines. Temperatures reaching 160 degrees Fahrenheit? Not a problem for them.

But a team from Penn State University recently found that Thermus scotoductus—a species that flourishes in hot springs, specifically—is also getting cozy right in our own homes. These microbes have become our roommates, inside our household water heaters.

The researchers tapped citizen scientists in all 50 U.S. states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, to sample hot water from their homes. The recruits each filtered half a liter of water, which “just barely gave us enough DNA to identify microbes,” says Gina Wilpiszeski, who worked on the project as part of her doctoral research. Samples from 101 homes went back to the lab, and cultured cells grew in 36 of them.

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When the researchers took a look at the results, reported in a new issue of the journal Extremophiles, they were surprised: T. scotoductus was the dominant heat-living microbe they encountered, and it was more widespread than they’d suspected. “Many different thermophiles live in hot springs and other hot environments around the globe, but just this one particular species turned up again and again in water heaters, even near places with hot springs where other Thermus species have been isolated from,” says Wilpiszeski, the paper’s lead author.

The microbes didn’t appear in every sample, but they did pop up in various longitudes and latitudes, through different types of pipes, and in hot water collected from kitchens, bathrooms, and laundry rooms. They were correlated with colder outside temperatures, probably because that’s when and where water heaters really get going, and the microbes “want it hotter,” says Christopher House, a geoscientist at Penn State and Wilpiszeski’s advisor. T. scotoductus grows best in a temperature range that aligns pretty neatly with recommended water heater settings, the authors write. Right tenant, right dwelling, House says: “This is a particular strain that seems to be really, really happy in the heaters."

It’s not clear exactly how the harmless little creatures wind up in our homes—this study focused only on their presence, not their paths—but House suspects they could move through pipes and potentially through the air. That remains to be seen, but know this: You have a lot of tiny, tiny roommates hanging around, and some of them are pretty extreme.

Why China and America Fight Over Chicken Feet

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International squabbles have stopped a once-mighty chicken foot trade.

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Americans eat a lot of chicken, clocking in at almost 100 pounds per person per year. However, there’s one part of the bird many overlook: the chewy, clawed feet.

Chicken feet are a favorite treat around the world. Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and many other countries all have their own classic preparations of chicken feet. If there’s one place where they’re most popular, it’s China. Across the country, chicken feet are eaten everywhere from formal banquet halls to hole-in-the-wall lunch counters.

Paul Aho, a poultry economist and consultant, estimates that up to 75 percent of China’s annual chicken imports are made up solely of feet (or paws, as they’re known in the poultry industry). Most of those chicken feet once came from the world’s biggest chicken producer: the United States. But despite the massive demand, fraught international trade politics means that the epic flow of chicken feet to China has slowed to a trickle.

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The sinewy, meatless appendages of skin and tendon are known by a more flattering name in Chinese: “phoenix talons,” or fèng zhǎo (凤爪). Different regions of China all have their own local spin. One popular dish is a Cantonese dim sum standard in both China and the States. The feet are fried to make the skins puffy, then simmered for several hours. Finally, they’re slathered with a sauce made from fermented red bean paste and steamed. Most recipes combine two or more cooking methods to fully tenderize the tough skin and tendons. Chicken feet can be served hot or cold, spicy or mild, in soups and stews or on their own. They’re sold as snacks in corner stores, often shrink-wrapped in plastic for convenience.

In addition to their tastiness, Chinese people are also fans of chicken feet for their health benefits. The collagen-rich snack is said to be good for the skin. Since they’re often served cold, the demand rises sharply in the warmer months of the year, between April and October. Chicken feet are eaten so frequently that they’re often more expensive than actual chicken meat. In fact, the domestic poultry industry can’t keep up with demand.

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China imports nearly a billion dollars worth of poultry every year. A significant amount of that once came from the United States. “We sent a lot of paws to China, about 400,000 metric tons per year,” Aho says. American paws were particularly popular for their large size. Economists love to point to this as a classic example of gains from trade: What would otherwise be a useless leftover is a billion-dollar product in another market. American companies get extra profit from each chicken, and Chinese consumers get more of a prized delicacy.

The chicken paw case is an interesting example of how international trade affects prices. While China does produce lots of poultry, many of their chicken paws are exported to richer East Asian countries such as Korea and Japan. This lets them command higher prices, writes researcher Xiaosi Yang. Meanwhile, billions of American chicken paws are worth next to nothing in their country of origin. Yet they can be sold in China, where even a low price means the seller can extract profit from an otherwise worthless byproduct.

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While it might seem like a home run for free trade, the United States and China have turned the international chicken paw trade into a subject of diplomatic wrangling, retaliatory tariffs, and even formal complaints to the World Trade Organization. Years before trade wars were the talk of Twitter, chicken feet were stirring up talk of unfair trade practices and reciprocity.

The United States and China have traditionally kept their poultry and other meat markets closed to each other. Reasons range from protectionism to food safety scares. For example, the Chinese beef market was closed to the United States after a single instance of mad cow disease was reported in Washington state in 2003. The Chinese didn’t reopen their beef market to American imports until 2017.

When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, however, they began importing American chicken feet rapidly. Chicken paw imports from the States grew more than 50 percent each year, even after America banned Chinese chicken in 2004 after a bird flu scare. By 2009, almost 80 percent of imported chicken feet in China came from the United States.

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That year, Beijing decided enough was enough. Chinese authorities filed a complaint with the WTO, hoping to force the States to reopen their market to Chinese chicken. They also slapped chicken feet from the States with high tariffs, on the grounds that Americans were flooding the country with below-market-rate paws, and local suppliers couldn’t compete. Chicken paw imports dropped by 80 percent, and the American government in turn initiated a trade dispute at the WTO. (Chicken foot imports to Hong Kong shot up simultaneously, as smuggled goods still frequently make their way through the territory into the mainland Chinese food system.)

By 2013, the WTO had ruled in favor of the United States. But China didn’t immediately drop their tariffs, and the United States renewed their complaint in 2016. Tentatively, the two countries began working on an agreement that would allow for reciprocal market access. One potential solution was that China would drop its poultry tariffs, and the States would allow some importation of Chinese chicken products.

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But in 2015, bird flu struck again. A massive outbreak in the United States led dozens of countries, including China, to close their borders to American chicken imports. While most have reopened their markets to American chicken, the Chinese have yet to do so. According to Aho, China is expected to import only 375,000 metric tons of all chicken products in 2019, a number far lower than the 400,000 tons of paws alone that they imported before the ban. As a result, America is awash with chicken feet. Most American chicken paws are now rendered for animal feed, Aho says, adding that “the value of paws for rendering is just a fraction of the value” of a paw sold in China.

Today, the Chinese market is still shut to American chicken imports. But that may change soon. In the flurry of negotiations surrounding the current trade war, the poultry industry has been pushing hard for Beijing to lift the current ban. Industry experts are confident American’s extra-large chicken feet can edge out the competitors. But for the time being, the United States has few million pounds of extra chicken feet laying around. The next time you’re ordering takeout or enjoying a dim sum brunch, consider trying some phoenix talons.

The Most Magical 'Little Free Library' Is Built Right Into a Tree Stump

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A rotting 110-year-old black cottonwood gets a second life.

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In the city of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, known to many as a sleepy lakefront resort town, a woman named Sharalee Armitage Howard has turned a dying 110-year-old black cottonwood tree into a magical library.

Stone steps lead up the sloped front yard to what remains of the tree. The 10-foot-tall trunk has a shingled roof that extends a little over the edges. A lantern-style lamp lights a row of tiny faux wooden books that make up the library’s decorative dentil molding. The real books, however, are visible through a vintage window-turned-door. The door itself features hardware that looks like it would have been at home in Middle Earth.

Although the tree needed to come down, likely since her family had bought the house 15 years ago, Howard says that she had a hard time letting go. In November 2018, after a branch dropped onto her son's car, the end finally arrived. Once Howard saw inside the tree, it was clear that the inner wood had rotted.

But even then, Howard hoped to give the stump another life. “I thought: What if I kept the trunk part of it? What if we make it into one of those Little Free Libraries?” she says. “Immediately I could envision the little steps going up to it. I knew I’d do a lot of features to make it match the house. You just have these ‘what if’ moments and then your brain starts figuring out how to make it work.”

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The Little Free Library movement, which was founded in 2009 by the late Todd H. Bol in Wisconsin, was intended to promote literacy and community with the “take a book, share a book” concept. With over 75,000 Little Free Libraries in 88 countries, the idea has taken off, though it’s not without its critics.

Howard, who works for the Coeur d’Alene Public Library, has been interested in Little Free Libraries for a long time, even creating a freestanding one a few years ago as an auction item for her children’s school. Like the tree version, that library included tiny decorative books (she had the school kids select their favorites). “I bid on it until I couldn’t afford it anymore because I really wanted it,” she says.

For her tree library, Howard created an insert—essentially a box—which would fit inside the hole in the stump. That box became the functional part of the library, into which shelving and books were ultimately placed.

Meanwhile, her husband and four children selected the titles for the row of ornamental books. There are classics including Call of the Wild, Nancy Drew, and The Grapes of Wrath, along with contemporary favorites such as Hush Little Alien, Harry Potter, and Percy Jackson. Each faux book was limited to three lines with seven letters per line.

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Although she still planned to add some finishing touches, Howard shared her creation on Facebook on December 10, 2018. Local media outlets quickly picked up the story, and over the next month, national publications followed. Since then, Howard’s library has been busy. “There’s been a steady stream of cars,” she says. “There’s literally been people waiting for other people to take their turn.”

Though this is Howard’s best known project, the library is only one of her book- and community-related artistic endeavors.

Years ago, in a quest to create a children’s book to connect far-away relatives, Howard became interested in bookbinding. Unsatisfied with the options available at office supply stores, she began looking into techniques for doing it herself. That passion eventually led to a low-residency degree program in fine binding at the American Academy of Bookbinding in Telluride, Colorado. Currently, she’s binding a copy of Call of the Wild and she’s almost done with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which includes grass-shaped insets.

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In the fall of 2018, Howard created a dress and hat (a birdcage with a bird inside) entirely out of unsalvageable books as part of local non-profit Kootenai Environmental Alliance’s annual “Junk to Funk” fundraiser. Each year, they ask different artists to create garments out of recycled materials. Howard frequently makes items for fundraisers in the community, many of them book-themed.

Beyond making books and other art, Howard is passionate about teaching local children about the process as well. She’s been an artist-in-residence at her children’s K-6 school for the arts and humanities several times, often leading the kids through the process of writing, illustrating, and assembling books before selling them at the Farmer’s Market to benefit humanitarian causes that they have decided on in advance. In the past, the kids have chosen to build wells in Ethiopia, send school supplies and desks to Tanzania, and buy bikes for a local organization who uses them to harvest food from community gardens. “I wanted to show them that at any age you can do something that solves a problem and you can use the arts to do that,” says Howard.

For Howard, the Little Free Library’s purpose is primarily to delight. “Some people think it’s just for kids, but I think adults are just as excited to stumble across a Little Free Library and find something that they want to read. It lets you be a kid,” she says. “It didn’t need to be done. The tree didn’t need to be repurposed, but it’s magic.”

This Dinosaur's Feathers Are an Evolutionary Mystery

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They offer conflicting clues as to whether or not it could fly.

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Meet Anchiornis. A one-foot-tall, four-winged, 160-million-year-old redhead from present-day China, this dinosaur was a close precursor to modern birds, down to its chicken-like feet. Like many other dinosaurs found in China, it also had “boatloads of feathers,” says Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University. The first bird, Archaeopteryx, emerged almost 10 million years later, but Anchiornis’s wealth of feathers made researchers wonder whether it could fly anyway. (Pterosaurs, for what it's worth, weren't actually dinosaurs.)

Flight is an “expensive” capability, says Schweitzer. There has to be a lot of “evolutionary reason” to justify it, so the discovery of feathered dinosaurs did not automatically indicate that these species could fly. New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences set out to determine whether Anchiornis could. The answer is complicated.

High-resolution electron microscopy of fossilized Anchiornis feathers revealed the presence of both beta-keratin (β-keratin) and alpha-keratin (ɑ-keratin) within these dinosaurs’ plumages. This co-expression showed what a difference 10 million years can make: Modern bird feathers contain only small amounts of ɑ-keratin, and for good reason. Its filaments are about 10 nanometers in diameter, says Schweitzer, a co-author of the new study, while β-keratin’s filaments are only about three nanometers across. It’s not hard to see why birds, as they evolved toward flight, ended up carrying proteins one third as large as those that make up our hair, skin, and nails.

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But it’s not that simple. The particular kind of β-keratin found in Anchiornis’s feathers, says Schweitzer, is consistent with that found in modern, flying feathers. One β-keratin is not necessarily like another: At some point, she says, a “deletion event” took place in which the protein had a chunk cut off from it, losing amino acids that made it more brittle. The keratin became more flexible, and thus more conducive to flight. Somehow, Anchiornis sports both the post-deletion β-keratins of its flying descendants along with the ɑ-keratins reserved for those of us stranded on land and in water.

So could Anchiornis fly? It’s not really clear, and if so, it’s also not really clear what that would have looked like. What the study does tell us, explains a press release, is that β-keratin’s pro-flight deletion event took place earlier than previously estimated. Molecular fossil data, says Schweitzer in the release, can help “root molecular clocks and improve their accuracy,” and can help us get a more complete, if more complicated, sense of how feathers evolved to fly.

From healthy hair, to majestic flight, to defensive slime, it really is all in the keratin.


When Snakes and Scientists Battled to Predict the Coldest Chicago Winter on Record

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In the early 20th century, meteorologists squared off with "weather sharps."

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An incoming cold spell is sending shivers across the American Midwest. Over the next few days, temperatures across the plains and Great Lakes region are forecast to plunge to -30 and -40 degrees Fahrenheit. In Chicago, the high temperature may barely crack double digits. Factoring in the windchill, Minneapolis will feel like a rattling -62 degrees Fahrenheit.

Today, the National Weather Service arrives at these forecasts in a number of ways, including by drawing on satellite imagery to track the movement of polar air. It was a different story in 1903 and 1904, of course, long before satellites beamed images of our planet back down to Earth, and before apps made it easy to call up a weather forecast on your phone. The winter spanning those years was one of the coldest to ever hold Chicago in its grip. Far from the Windy City, and without any sophisticated instruments, a man named “Joe” Harris claimed to see it coming.

Harris was sure that folks were in for a chill. At the end of November 1903, The Inter-Ocean, a Chicago newspaper, rounded up some prognostications from assorted “weather sharps.” To estimate the coming winter’s bite, these men didn’t look to the sky—they looked around them. Harris saw signs of a future freeze in top-heavy turkeys, whose “breast bones of double strength” were “always a sign of cold weather,” the paper reported. Another man saw proof of the coming chill in evergreen trees heavy with extra foliage; others pointed to fish with extra scales, flag stones that “sweat frost every morning,” squirrels stockpiling every nut in sight, and snakes that slithered particularly deep to brumate (a seasonal sluggishness, and their alternative to hibernation). “Turkey bones, rabbit teeth, etc., portend Arctic weather,” the newspaper declared.

It did turn out to be a cold winter, but at least one meteorologist was mighty peeved by the strategy for predicting it. The following December, C. F. von Herrmann, of Raleigh, North Carolina, had had it with the group he dismissed as assorted “groundhog experts, weather sharps, and long range forecasters.” In a report for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, which was then the parent organization of the Weather Bureau, von Herrmann—a section director of the Weather Bureau’s Climate and Crop Service—laid out a plea for people to abandon the “charlatans” who “pretend to believe that they have an infallible system of predicting the weather, storms, floods, or droughts for months or even years ahead, and who foist their predictions upon the public for the benefit of their own pockets.”

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The Weather Bureau was still young—the military had been collecting meteorological measurements since 1870, but forecasting only became the duty of a civilian agency in 1890, when Congress shifted the work of gathering meteorological data from the Army’s Signal Service Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce over to the Department of Agriculture. Soon, telegrams were conveying flood warnings, and wireless messages were arriving to ships at sea. Three-day forecasts for the North Atlantic began in 1901, and postal workers delivered day-old forecasts with the mail. The Weather Bureau was trying to build a reputation for getting things right. Accurate, short-term forecasts were one way to build authority; another was taking aim at other types of forecasts and wisdom.

In his report, von Herrmann saw an opportunity to sound a rallying cry for the agency and the field, asking readers to “place their faith in the Weather Bureau, the operation of which cannot fail to be of greater and greater benefit to the people as the science of meteorology advances.”

Harris and von Herrmann may have had different methods, but they’d probably have arrived at the same conclusion: When the mercury drops as low as it will this week, better to make like a snake and hunker down.

The Curious Case of the Last 'Wild' Monkeys in Europe

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Barbary macaques remain in Gibraltar thanks to a quirk of empire.

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Gibraltar has no particular business belonging to Great Britain. The small peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean is extremely obviously part of Spain, geographically. But it was ceded to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, at the end of the War of Spanish Succession, and despite fairly consistent attempts, Spain never managed to get it back. During World War II, it served as a valuable military fort that gave Britain access to the Mediterranean and North Africa. In recent decades, the Gibraltarians have rejected attempts to make it either part of Spain or to share sovereignty between the two countries. They seem to like being a British Overseas Territory.

The peninsula is just 2.6 square miles, and consists mostly of sand, rock, and scrub. It is not an especially hospitable place, with little fresh water and few natural resources beyond sunshine and beaches. The plant and animal life is also fairly limited, with a few foxes and rabbits and a decent selection of frogs and lizards. It is a migratory stop for many birds, but they don’t breed or spend much time there. Gibraltar has few trees, just some hardy, shrunken wild olive trees and a bunch of imported palms, shrubs, and succulents from elsewhere in the British Empire, past and present.

And yet there are also roughly 200 Barbary macaques, tailless monkeys native to Morocco and Algeria. On this small, dry peninsula, largely dedicated to tourism and the military, with barely any fresh water and few other mammals, are monkeys.

Why, I wondered, is a tiny, rocky peninsula attached to Spain the only place in Europe with wild monkeys? Why aren’t there monkeys all over the continent, stealing baguettes and cigarettes in Paris, bothering currywurst cart operators in Berlin, snacking on olives in Calabria? What’s special about Gibraltar?

Nothing, it turns out, except for one of the best examples of British eccentricity the world has ever seen.

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There are no wild, native primates, besides people, in Europe. There are many—monkeys, apes, lemurs—in Africa, and plenty in Asia, and in Central and South America. But none in Europe. “The thing is that primates are tropical and subtropical creatures; they don’t really go too far north, these days,” says Robert Martin, the director of the Anthropological Institute at the University of Zurich, who also worked on Gibraltar, specifically with the monkeys, for about a decade. Monkeys prefer warm temperatures and high levels of precipitation, in general. Most can’t survive in a place that’s too cold or too dry.

There is evidence in the fossil record of macaques and other monkeys all over Western Europe, as far east as Greece and even in Britain. Before the most recent Ice Age, which began about 110,000 years ago, Europe was a much warmer and wetter place, and monkeys thrived. But as the planet cooled, primate distribution contracted around the equator, and the European monkeys either moved out or died out.

Martin says he believes that macaques were probably the last primates to hang on in Europe. The macaque family, which today comprises 23 species, is one of the most adaptable, and macaques have proven capable of thriving in cities and a wide variety of climates and ecosystems. Today, most species live in Asia, including the famous snow monkeys of Japan, which like to hang out in hot springs during the winter.

The Barbary macaque, sometimes incorrectly called a “Barbary ape,” maybe because it is essentially tailless (monkeys have tails, apes don’t), lives primarily in a few scattered cedar forests in Algeria and Morocco, where, due to habitat destruction and the pet trade, its numbers are decreasing. The IUCN Red List declared the species endangered back in 2009. The only place, in fact, where the Barbary macaque population is not declining is in Gibraltar.

The history of the Gibraltar macaques is mysterious and draped in weird myths, unreliable sources, and military secrecy. One of Martin’s goals, when he first began to work in Gibraltar, was to see if he could figure out where the macaques came from, and what they were doing on this strange British Mediterranean rock.

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In the early 17th century, a Spanish historian from Gibraltar named Alonso Hernandez de Portillo wrote what might be the first history of the place, and he noted that there were monkeys there, and that they had been there “from time immemorial.” There are mentions of the monkeys of Gibraltar from then to now, although until just a few decades ago, they didn’t offer much useful information. What did they eat? How did they live? How many were there? These questions were not really addressed.

When Martin got to Gibraltar, he found precious little data on the macaques and their history. “The received wisdom was that the population was virtually extinct during World War II, maybe two left, and that they were too old to breed,” he says.

Here’s where we get to the British eccentricity. There is a long-standing legend that states that as long as there are macaques in Gibraltar, the peninsula will remain under British control. It’s not clear where or when this legend came from, but it was well known during the political career of Winston Churchill. During World War II, Churchill somehow became aware that the macaque population had dramatically declined in Gibraltar and, not wanting to give the appearance of British territorial weakness, decided to import a whole bunch of Barbary macaques from North Africa. “I searched as hard as I could to find any documentation, but the thing is,” Martin says, “it was done under considerable secrecy, because the British didn't want to let on to the Germans that the colony was dying out.”

Martin and his team were very interested in the genetics of these monkeys. With the Gibraltar population commonly thought of as the only wild monkey population in Europe, is it possible that they are the last gasp of Europe’s native non-human primates? Did these monkeys somehow escape the last Ice Age, move as far south as they could, and cling to life on a Spanish-English rock?

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The DNA testing showed some very curious things. The researchers had been told that the imported monkeys had come specifically from Morocco. The testing, on the other hand, showed mitochondrial DNA markers from both Moroccan and Algerian monkey populations, which do not mix in the wild, even though they are perfectly capable of it. Further, the mitochondrial DNA showed that all possible ancestors of the Gibraltar population were to be found in Morocco and Algeria. In other words, these monkeys are wholly descended from imported African monkeys, and extremely unlikely to represent any hypothetical surviving European population.

Whether this was the case prior to World War II, nobody knows; there was no old monkey DNA for Martin and his team to test, and records are very spotty. But Martin thinks it’s pretty unlikely that there ever was what he calls a “relic population” in Gibraltar. “My guess is that they were introduced,” he says. “I don't think there was ever a relic population from the Pleistocene in Gibraltar. I think the natural macaques of Europe died out and some bright spark decided to bring a few Moroccan or Algerian macaques to Gibraltar and it grew from there.”

After World War II, under the control of the British military and, later, a nongovernmental organization, the population of Gibraltar macaques has stayed relatively stable. Sometimes too stable, at least for the government’s liking. The macaques are seasonal breeders, and their population can double every five years or so without controls. The government typically either shoots excess monkeys or exports them to zoos. When the population gets above around 200, says Martin, they start heading into town and stealing cameras and food from tourists, which the tourists (and thus the government) don’t much like.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the Gibraltar macaques is that Gibraltar is an awful place for a macaque to live. “The reason they can survive on Gibraltar is that they’ve been provisioned right from the outset,” says Martin. There is simply not enough naturally occuring food there to support a population of monkeys in any sustainable way. Instead, they are fed by tourists and the Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History Society (GONHS), the group that took over management of the monkeys in the 1990s. The GONHS gives the monkeys a delivery of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and water each morning, and tourists—both intentionally and otherwise, because the monkeys are nothing if not opportunistic—provide less-healthy snacks. There are signs all over Gibraltar pleading with tourists not to feed or touch the monkeys, but they don’t appear to work.

Interestingly, this makes it not unlike a place in Germany called Affenberg, otherwise known as Monkey Mountain. Affenberg also hosts about 200 Barbary macaques, which are fed by tourists and managers. (Affenberg tourists feed monkeys popcorn, which is healthier than the candy bars and sodas the Gibraltar macaques score from tourists.) It’s basically a safari-like tourist attraction. Perhaps that’s the correct way to think of Gibraltar’s monkeys.

Then there are the many places, in Europe and elsewhere, where escaped primates have made a life for themselves. Until 2001, there were wild olive baboons in Spain (they have since been captured and moved to zoos). Early last year, 52 Guinea baboons escaped from a Paris zoo. Perhaps most famous of these unmanaged non-native monkey populations is the feral rhesus macaques in South Florida, some of which survive perfectly well in the suburbs and were the subject of an excellent article by Jon Mooallem. South Florida is a far better environment for a monkey than Paris or Spain. There is plenty of fruit (and, well, garbage) for them to eat, and the climate is much more hospitable—humid and subtropical.

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For now, the Gibraltar monkeys aren’t likely to spread beyond the peninsula and into Spain, says Martin, for a few reasons. One is that the north of the peninsula, an area the monkeys would have to migrate through, is extremely arid and barren, and home to Gibraltar’s airport. Besides, why would they want to leave? They’re getting everything they need in Gibraltar.

But management of the Gibraltar monkeys has not been stellar. Martin says that he proposed a catch-and-release contraception program to control the population, which the government of Gibraltar flatly ignored. (The governmental department in charge of the monkeys did not respond to requests for an interview.) Martin heard that the monkeys bring in about two million pounds a year in tourist revenue, from fees on the tourist vans that take tourists up onto the rock to meet the monkeys; hundreds of thousands of tourists visit each year. “They had the funds to institute a program and did nothing,” he says. So they continue to have to shoot them or ship them away.

And though their origins in Algeria and Morocco mean they have a fair amount of genetic diversity, Martin has begun to observe signs of inbreeding, such as ptosis, a droopy eyelid, which has been associated with inbreeding in various studies.

In any case, the mystique of the last wild monkeys in Europe is not nearly as exciting under scrutiny. The word “wild” is debatable, given that they have to be provisioned to survive, and “last” is almost certainly not true. They are monkeys in Europe, yes, but the reasons why they’re interesting are not exactly what you might think.

13 of the World's Most Magical Winter Wonderlands

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Atlas Obscura readers weigh in on which places look best covered in snow.

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The U.S. Midwest is currently staring down a cold front of epic proportions. It can be tough to find the charm in such extremes, but winter does have a way of visually transforming places into incredible new landscapes. Recently, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about the world's best winter wonderlands—the individual places on Earth that are at their best when they're covered in ice and snow. Your responses were varied and heartfelt, and left us pondering the fleeting magic that cold weather can bring.

We received a large number of submissions about the Rocky Mountain region, unsurprisingly including Utah, which once boasted the "Greatest Snow on Earth" on its license plates. But you also wrote to us about snowy destinations farther afield, including Mongolia and Sweden.

You'll find a selection of our favorite submissions below, and if you have a snowed-over place of your own that you'd like to share, head over to our new Community forums and let us know all about it! As this polar vortex takes hold, let's take some time out to marvel at the awesome power of winter.


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Letchworth State Park

Castile, New York

"The Grand Canyon of the East is a stunning gorge in all seasons, but the quiet beauty of winter is stunning in its starkness." — Lauren Adasiak Cocilova, Rochester, New York


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Forests Near the Danube

Steyregg, Austria

"Emitted vapors from the nearby industrial area of Linz, capital of Upper Austria, occasionally turn the riverside forests of the Danube near Steyregg into a mythical winter scene." — Florian Landertshammer, Austria


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Northern Finland

Finland

"The tall trees, just a dusting of snow, the dim light, and reindeer. And silence." — Tanya Mysko


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Ulaanbaatar

Mongolia

"Heavy pollution makes the sea of cement that is Ulaanbaatar barely visible in winter. Cover it in snow, and get to the top of a nearby mountain by sunrise, and the place turns into something else." — Max Cortesi, Doha, Qatar


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Four Corners

Moab, Utah

"Hands down the most beautiful place on Earth in the snow." — Tod Higman


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Harpers Ferry National Historical Park

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia

"Nestled right where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet, this place is magical when covered in snow." — Brett Jones, Boonsboro, Maryland


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The Rocky Mountains

Western U.S.

"The Rocky Mountains are really at a grand scale, but in the winter when they are completely covered in snow, the views are amazing. If you are observing from your plane window or from the base of the mountains, there is something magnificent about them." — Aubree Duncan, Atlanta, Georgia


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Holy Hill

Hubertus, Wisconsin

"Reminds me of many of the buildings in Germany! Just beautiful.🙏🏻🙏🏻" — Maria Zoske, Milwaukee, Wisconsin


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Mt. Hood

Oregon

"Transformed from dusty gray to gleaming white." — Mike Little, Oregon


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Lake Erie

Luna Pier, Michigan

"Because of its shallow depth, Lake Erie's waters are usually brownish-clear as opposed to the clear blue of the four deeper Great Lakes. However, this shallowness allows Erie to freeze over large distances. After a snow, Erie is a peaceful white as far as we can see from our second-story windows." — Ernest DuBrul, Luna Pier, Michigan


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Stockholm

Sweden

"The harbors freeze and the entire city is covered in a white blanket." — Annee Elliot, Los Angeles, California


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Bryce Canyon

Utah

"The snow against the red rock, with greens, yellows, and the blue sky. It's like a rainbow of color." — Joe Gallegos, Salt Lake City, Utah


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Telluride

Colorado

"A true winter wonderland with scenery as beautiful as any place on Earth, and skiing that is second to none. It is the perfect mountain town. " — Michael Hyman, Telluride, Colorado

For Sale: Letters and Illustrations From Dr. Seuss

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The collection comes from a time when the author was just becoming a household name.

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Many of us grew up on stories crafted by Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. While his books left an impression on every imagination they’ve crossed, what did Seuss himself think about his celebrated stories? An upcoming auction has a collection for sale that allows us to better understand the man behind our childhood memories.

Three letters from the famed author and cartoonist will go on auction on January 31, 2019, at Nate D. Sanders Auctions in Los Angeles, California. The lot also includes two pages of Seuss’s illustrations, and an additional four pages of illustrations by the animator and cartoonist Walt Kelly, who created the comic strip Pogo. The materials came from the estate of Seuss’s friend and fellow author Mike McClintock. The letters from Seuss are dated 1957, the same year Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas hit shelves.

In the first letter of the batch, Seuss wrote that he was excited by the reception both books received. He had already begun to think about the vast opportunities for the characters, such as toys and games, but he didn’t want to lose support from teachers and librarians in the process. Even in 1957, Seuss saw the potential for his characters to have lasting appeal. “In another year, I believe that the GRINCH and the WHOS will outdo even the cat and Horton,” he wrote.

Another letter provides insights into Seuss the editor. He offers McClintock advice, along with notes and annotations, on what would make McClintock’s manuscript, A Fly Went By, a good children’s book. Again Seuss seems to predict the future when he writes, “You've hit something there that has more terrific chances of becoming a classic than anything I've seen in a hell of a long time. The title is perfect.” The book, which was published in 1958, continues to sell, more than six decades after its release.

One of the most revealing aspects of this collection is when Seuss credits McClintock for his success when he was struggling. He writes to McClintock, “you picked me off Madison Ave. with a manuscript that I was about to burn in my incinerator, because nobody would buy it.” That manuscript was And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was famously rejected 27 times before going on to become Seuss’s first children’s book. He credits McClintock with showing him how to properly put together a draft for this new “mysterious market” of children’s trade books, a format which Seuss himself would ultimately master.

The collection is a fascinating exploration into the mind of one of America’s most celebrated authors during a time where he was just beginning to understand the potential of his unique stories, style, and characters. Bidding on the lot starts at $3,500.

This Artist Makes Mesmerizing Collages From Produce You Can't Find in Supermarkets

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Celebrating the diversity of tomatoes, corn, and other crops.

“Those were just drops of honey, they were so incredibly sweet,” says German artist Uli Westphal. “Those were really magnificent. And they were tiny, like the red currant berry.”

The tiny fruit in question isn’t a ripe raspberry or cranberry. It’s a tomato. The red currant tomato, to be precise, a wild counterpart of the larger, more commonly cultivated Roma and beefsteak varieties sold in supermarkets. The dainty red currant is one of the many unique cultivars featured in the Lycopersicum series, Westphal’s sequence of collages of tomatoes arranged from bright-green to red-black, from multi-lobed to currant-tiny, all photographed against a stark white background.

Tiny tomatoes aren’t the only unique produce Westphal has photographed over the years. A Berlin-based artist dedicated to using his camera to document agricultural biodiversity, Westphal has been discovering, photographing, and tasting unique produce since 2006. In 2010, he began The Cultivar Series, a constantly-expanding collection of collages featuring stunning rainbows of produce, from pears to corn, arranged painstakingly according to species.

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Almost taxonomic in their precision, Westphal’s images aren’t just beautiful. They’re also documentation of the vast diversity of cultivated crops that critics of industrial agriculture feel monoculture, or the standardized cultivation of one variety of a plant, has left behind. Some scientists worry that the growing standardization of the global food supply, evident in the increasing cultivation of a limited number of crops, could have a negative effect on food security and human health.

Concern about food security is a central motivation of Westphal’s work. He also worries that declining biodiversity limits people’s visual and taste experiences of food, and threatens valuable cultural knowledge. Developed over millennia of careful breeding, cultivars are a living record of human beings’ relationship with the environment.

“Especially in agriculture, there has been some sort of coevolution between humans, plants, and animals that has happened over thousands of years,” says Westphal. “Everything we eat, it’s still a biological organism, but it’s also something that we have cared for and that we have shaped.”

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This passion for produce inspired Westphal to begin photographing fruits and vegetables in 2006. Intended to document the unique, sometimes otherworldly diversity of produce shapes, Westphal’s Mutatoes series celebrated the “ugly” fruits and vegetables unlikely to be sold at supermarkets. Soon, Westphal became interested not just in unusually shaped produce, but in the vast diversity of cultivars that yield it.

Now, Westphal scours seed banks and farmers’ markets in search of unique cultivars. When he spots a new specimen, he photographs it at precisely the same angle, with exactly the same lighting and white background, as the others in his collection. He then digitally adds the image to a collage of similar fruits or vegetables in a hypnotic and ever-expanding visual record of human agricultural achievement. His collection thus far includes corn, tomatoes, beans, cabbage, sweet potatoes, and peppers, among others.

Westphal doesn’t just photograph this produce. When he can, he takes a sample and cooks with it, or collects and plants its seeds. At one point, his greenhouse held over 60 distinct varieties of cucumber.

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While the sheer beauty of vibrant pink corn and bulbous green tomatoes is entrancing enough, each of Westphal’s collages also reveals stories of the farmers who developed the cultivars and the communities who enjoy them. For Westphal’s 2018 series, Zea mays, he visited two seed banks, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico and Native Seeds in Arizona. The banks preserve tens of thousands of unique cultivars in cold storage, conduct workshops with growers, and provide seeds to help farmers across the world grow more diverse and sustainable crops.

Westphal photographed the banks’ stunning collections of corn, including many cultivars that were developed by people indigenous to the North American deserts. He recalls Hopi blue corn, whose indigo ears were bred to thrive despite the parched climate of the American southwest. Planted more than a foot beneath the ground, the seeds soak in existing groundwater before pushing up through half a meter of soil to the sun.

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This aura of perseverance animates Westphal’s work. His two-headed tomatoes and gnarled ears of corn reveal that even those plants that differ from our preconceived notions of beauty are works of art. When talking about the most wondrous fruits he’s ever seen, Westphal mentions the Buddha’s hand citron, a yellow-green citrus fruit whose tentacle-like strands curve creepily from the branch. But he also mentions the lowly citrus bud mite, a parasite that causes lemons to grow in lumpy, twisted shapes. While farmers may call the mite a pest, Westphal calls it an artist.

“The parasite is really working as a sculptor,” Westphal says. In other words, it makes beauty out of the quirks of agriculture, just like Westphal himself.

Blue-Eyed Coyotes Have Been Spotted on the California Coast

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The striking mutation is a bit of a mystery.

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Daniel Dietrich was having a typical day at Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California, where he works as a photographer and guide, when he photographed a coyote that had just traipsed down a hillside for a drink of water.

“I didn’t think anything of it until I noticed at my computer that her eye color was blue,” Dietrich says of the January 2018 day. “I’ve taken thousands of photographs of hundreds of coyotes and have never seen that before.”

Dietrich showed the images to some biologist friends, and they were surprised, too. After all, coyotes almost always have golden-brown eyes. Since that first photograph was taken, five blue-eyed coyotes have been documented in Northern California—two in Point Reyes, and the others in Santa Cruz and Sacramento—so the trait appears to be becoming more common in the area.

Though wild canids sometimes acquire new traits from interbreeding with dogs, that does not appear to be the case here. “It's a very interesting phenomenon and there needs to be much more research before people make wide-ranging pronouncements about what's happening,” says University of Colorado ecologist and evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff. The consensus so far is that the blue eyes are likely the result of a natural, if rare, genetic mutation.

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How and why the trait appears to be becoming a little more common—in an admittedly small sample size—also isn’t clear. Typically, a dominant male and female coyote don’t let subordinates in the pack bear children, which prevents inbreeding and pushes younger members out into the world. Transient younger males forced out must establish their own packs, or find another that will accept them. This process could lead to the spread of certain traits, as coyotes might travel 70 miles or more, even in urban areas, according to David Drake, director of the Urban Canid Project at the University of Wisconsin.

Although the striking trait remains a mystery for now, Dave Press, a wildlife ecologist at the Point Reyes National Seashore, sees the discovery as an example of the evolutionary possibilities offered by preserved landscapes. “The National Parks are like living laboratories,” he says, “and you never know what you might find if you look closely enough.”

A New, Up-Close Look at an Old, Near-Earth Asteroid

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The spacecraft OSIRIS-REx gives us a startlingly clear view of space rock that probably won't hit us.

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Every six years, a carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu comes alarmingly close to Earth. So close, in fact, that researchers have concluded that it has a 1-in-2,700 chance of hitting us somewhere between the years 2175 and 2199. This remote but catastrophic possibility helped make Bennu the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which was designed to visit the asteroid, pick up a 60-gram sample and bring it back to Earth in 2023 for research.

This mission, which will be the first ever to return a sample of an asteroid to Earth, is led by Dante Lauretta, of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The aim is to use the Bennu sample to look back at the formation of our solar system, since the primitive asteroid is roughly 4.5 billion years old. OSIRIS-REx was launched on September 8, 2016, and reached Bennu on December 3, 2018, as predicted. Now, NASA has released the first high-resolution photographs of the asteroid, in various stages of its rotation.

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The photos are part of OSIRIS-REx’s duty to intimately survey the asteroid to identify the best possible area to sample. Before the spacecraft’s arm gets close enough to snatch a piece of Bennu’s oddly familiar-looking terrain, it will spend over a year observing from a distance of about 12 miles, and send photographs back to Earth (approximately 13.4 million miles away). Erin Morton, communications lead for the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission, says these images have already given Lauretta and his team key insights into the asteroid’s face. “The one big surprise for the OSIRIS-REx science team was that the number of boulders on the surface of Bennu is much higher than had been predicted from Earth-based observations,” she says.

OSIRIS-REx has settled into its orbit, and is calculating the mass of its target. Morton says that “the spacecraft is about the size of a large van,” and Bennu is around 1,600 feet in diameter—about 200 feet more than the height of the Empire State Building—and is shaped a little like a spinning top.

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The strikingly clear close-up images of Bennu confirm much of what Lauretta’s team predicted about the rocky asteroid. It has a tacky, clay-like surface, which may indicate the previous presence of water. In a statement from NASA, Amy Simon, OVIRS deputy instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said, “The presence of hydrated minerals across the asteroid confirms that Bennu, a remnant from early in the formation of the solar system, is an excellent specimen for the OSIRIS-REx mission to study the composition of primitive volatiles and organics.” That means that the sample might provide some insight into how life arose on Earth.

In advance of launching OSIRIS-REx, the University of Arizona, the Planetary Society, and the LINEAR Project held a global contest to “Name That Asteroid!” A nine-year-old from North Carolina landed on “Bennu” in honor of the mythical Egyptian bird diety of the same name, since the spacecraft's extending arm reminded him of a heron. This bird will only touch ground again when the sample returns to us in a few years.


Why So Many Bars Are Named After Cocks

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Londoners once loved an ale whose key ingredient was a rooster.

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On February 2, 1663, after a long day of business meetings, the celebrated diarist Samuel Pepys and his colleague and friend John Creed “turned into a house and drank a cup of Cock ale.” If the scenario of two coworkers sharing a drink at the end of the day seems familiar, the beverage Pepys and Creed enjoyed does not. The key ingredient in cock ale, which was popular in 17th- and 18th-century England, was a rooster.

Pepys was a great fan of the stuff and frequented several “cock ale houses” in London, including ones on Fleet Street, Bow Street and Threadneedle Street. Cock ale, like other kinds of ale and beer in this period, was also prepared at home by women, and contemporary cookbooks include numerous recipes. Hannah Woolley’s The Accomplish'd Lady's Delight (1670) called for placing a boiled cock in eight gallons of ale, along with raisins, dates, nutmeg, mace, and sack (fortified wine).

While people seem to have genuinely liked the taste of cock ale, it was particularly valued for more medicinal qualities. Depending on who made it and where, cock ale was seen as a warm and nourishing elixir that could alleviate tuberculosis, or a “provocative” drink, a kind of early Viagra. The drink was so renowned for these properties that the modern popularity of bar and tavern names such as The Cock Tavern, The Cock and Bottle, and The Famous Cock can be traced back to cock ale.

The perceived healing powers of cock ale are part of a long history of using chicken as medicine. In Ornithology, a massive work published in 1600, the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi declared that “there is almost no internal or external disease that is not remedied” by chicken. Many chicken medicines—such as dissolving chicken dung in vinegar or wine for stomach pains, or placing the plucked anus of a live chicken on plague buboes—seem bizarre to modern readers. But one is very familiar: chicken soup. For more than a thousand years, physicians have touted the healing properties of chicken soup. Chicken broth was believed to be easily digestible. It heated and fortified the body.

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Cock ale that was produced at home by women was lauded for these nourishing and healing qualities. English men and women thought it ideal for invalids, especially those suffering from consumption (tuberculosis), while recipe books described cock ale as a “restorative Drink, which contributes much to the Invigorating of Nature” and “very pleasant.”

But when Samuel Pepys and his peers visited cock ale houses, they were generally not trying to cure tuberculosis. In commercial establishments, the invigorating properties of cock ale took on sexual connotations.

In Richard Ames’s ribald poem The Bacchanalian Sessions (1693), the god Bacchus stages a disputation between drinks—including various wines, beers, and ales, as well as coffee, tea, and chocolate. Each beverage explains why it’s best. Cock Ale’s argument is that it is the drink of choice for lovers. It claims to be:

. . . belov'd by the Sparks of the Town,

And their Mistresses too, who 'fore Wine me prefer,

When they meet at a House very near Temple bar

The “House very near Temple bar” was Samuel Pepys’ favorite Cock Ale House on Fleet Street, and according to Ames, it was also a popular site for assignations.

An anonymous satirical pamphlet from 1674, The Women's Petition Against Coffee, also portrays cock ale as an aphrodisiac. In the petition, “several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women” complain that drinking coffee makes men impotent (they “fall down flat before us”) and call for a return to “Lusty nappy Beer, Cock-Ale, Cordial Canaries, Restoring Malago's, and Back-recruiting Chocholet.”

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The notion that cock ale was sexually stimulating is linked to its healing reputation, since both relied on cock ale as a “Restorer of decay’d Nature.” But it also comes from cocks’ reputation as hyper-masculine birds. In his Ornithology of 1678, Francis Willughby describes the cock as “a most salacious bird” prone to “the immoderate use of Venery,” and also notes that cocks are “very couragious and high spirited birds, that will rather die than yield.” This latter quality made cock fighting a popular sport, and taverns were common venues. Cocks were renowned for their sexual and fighting prowess; the qualities that made drinking their flesh an aphrodisiac also made them great sporting animals.

The Cock Ale House on Fleet Street where Samuel Pepys spent so many happy hours still exists. The current pub, Ye Olde Cock Tavern, is across the street from the original building, and a golden cock hangs over the door. Cock ale is no longer on the menu. Neither is it served at The Cock Tavern, The Cock and Bottle, or The Famous Cock. But the large number of pubs with cock in their names and roosters on their signs demonstrate that this long-forgotten beverage has left its mark on London.

Time Is Running Out for a Beloved Mechanical Horse-Race Game in Vegas

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There's only one Sigma Derby machine left.

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When you arrive on the second floor of The D Las Vegas casino on Fremont Street, you’re greeted by the tinny, rhythmic thumping of 20 artificial hooves galloping in unison. It’s more persistent and more infectious than the trademark Wheel of Fortune tones that you hear emanating from branded slots almost everywhere you go in town. It’s louder than the classic pop hits blaring through the casino speakers. The only thing that comes close to drowning it out are the crowds of people who gather around its source, trading memories and gossip about the wood-panelled machine, and cheering on their picks in the hopes of winning somewhere between two and 4,000 coins.

The hammering sound belongs to Sigma Derby, a mechanical casino game that allows gamblers to bet quarters on toy horses that race around a bucolic miniature race track. Over three decades after its debut, the Derby machine has become a beloved cult icon—no easy task in an industry as fickle as gambling, or a place as ever-changing as Las Vegas. But nothing can last forever, and that’s particularly true of elaborate vintage racing pony contraptions that have long since gone out of production. As far as Derby fans know, the Sigma Derby at The D recently became the last operating machine of its kind anywhere in the world.


Sigma Game Inc.’s Derby machines started appearing on casino floors in 1985. The rules were simple enough for anyone who had already enjoyed a number of complimentary drinks to follow, and the display compelling enough to hook even the soberest of minds: A series of odds ranging from 2-1 to a maximum of 200-1 are displayed before each race. You have 30 seconds to insert your quarters and place your bets on one of 10 possible quinella combinations—which two horses will place first and second—at one of the 10 stations surrounding the toy track. Then you cheer on your chosen ponies as an elaborate series of gears hurtles them around the track for 60 seconds. If your chosen horses come in first and second, you win the corresponding odds.

(For example, if you bet on the combination with 2-1 odds, you’ll get two quarters for every one that you bet. If you have money on the 200-1 and it happens to come in, you’ll win 200 quarters per quarter bet, and the infectious communal joy of winning the big one with your fellow players.)

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Sigma Derby was instantly appealing to patrons looking for an alternative to the potential monotony of three reel slots or the competition of table games.

“The one thing I really liked about it was the ability to sit around the table, have a communal-type setting, and interact with other people,” says Ski Wagasky, a craps and blackjack player who’s pretty sure that he placed his first Derby bets at The Frontier in 1986. “It was a game where everybody’s playing against the house and it didn’t matter if you beat the house as long as somebody beat the house.”

Or at least you get to enjoy the illusion of beating the house. With a house edge between 10 and 20 percent depending on how the machine was set, Derby was just as profitable for casinos as it was amusing for gamblers. When Vegas started to shift toward massive, over-the-top resorts in 1990s, the Derby format also provided a unique design and marketing opportunity for casinos looking to go all-in on their themes. Caesars’s machines featured racing chariots. The Egyptian-themed Luxor had camels instead of horses. Excalibur replaced the jockeys with knights. For all of the above reasons, Sigma Derby became a fixture on casino floors across the city—and the occasional outside location, such as Lake Tahoe.

“You saw them all over town,” Wagasky recalls. “They were everywhere. They were like dirt. There wasn’t a casino that didn’t have them.”

But as the ‘90s came to a close, a number of factors conspired to end the Derby’s ubiquity. Although it’s difficult to pin down the exact dates, anecdotally, fans noticed that new machines stopped appearing on casino floors around the turn of the century. Sigma Game Inc. ceased to be a company in 2010. This put the game out of production and limited the parts available for repair jobs just as the original machines were beginning to reach the end of their natural lifespans. With the value of a quarter decreasing due to inflation and minimum bets rising on newer, flashier slots, the cost of maintaining the existing Sigma Derby machines started to outweigh the profits for many casinos. They started breaking down. Then they started disappearing.

While they became more costly to run, though, they also became relatively cheaper to play. The decreasing value of a quarter and the increasing minimum bets on other slot machines made Derby an appealing option for gamblers on a budget. The increasing affordability of the surviving Derby machines brought a whole new audience to the game. In the early 2000s, the game began enjoying a second act.

“On my very first trip to Las Vegas, we were strolling through the Excalibur and found the Sigma Derby machine,” Kristine Kulage, who has been a faithful player since 1997, says of her first time. “I had a very small budget and my dad, mom, and I sat down to play when we realized it was betting on horses and it only cost 25 cents. We had been betting on horses for many years and were also drawn to it for that reason. Then, when the free drinks started coming and the hours went by, we were hooked for life.”

The looming scarcity of these old-school machines only heightened the fervor of Sigma Derby’s growing cult fanbase. People with a fondness for kitsch, nostalgia, extremely low-level gambling, and free drinks started talking to other people who loved betting quarters on toy racing horses. They filled each other in on the latest gossip about the machines, their history, and where you could still find them. They created a Facebook group where over 1,500 fans from across the world could congregate, discuss their love for the game, and celebrate whenever the elusive 200-1 odds finally hit. Pilgrimages to working Derbys became an increasingly popular activity among the faithful as the supply dwindled down to a single machine at the MGM Grand and a pair at MontBleu in Lake Tahoe in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

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In recent years one early fan went so far as to invest in a model for his own casino. Sourcing and refurbishing a machine was one of the first actions that Derek Stevens took as the owner of The D Las Vegas, which opened on Fremont Street in 2012.

“Sigma Derby was the very first casino game that I ever played when I came to Las Vegas,” Stevens says. “It was in the 1980s. I played it at the Dunes Hotel.”

The decision to try to track down a machine and then to put in the time, money, and effort required to get it running again wasn’t just a sentimental one, though. Stevens is a firm believer in Derby’s ongoing appeal.

“I think there’s something beautiful about its simplicity. The fact that you’ve got five horses and you’ve got to pick the first two and you’ve got that rhythmic beat associated with it, there’s just something that’s kind of nice,” he explains. Stevens also notes that the fact that the machine still runs on coins, as opposed to the paper-based “Ticket In Ticket Out” system found on most other slots today, appeals to people. “You’re playing real money, as much as you’re playing quarters so there’s an element of authenticity about the game that is pretty special,” he says. “I always loved it, I always thought it was going to work.”

Stevens is also aware of just how passionate its fanbase is. “I don’t think there’s many slot machines or many games that people talk about more than Sigma,” he says.

The process of bringing a good-as-new Sigma Derby to Las Vegas—and keeping it there as long as possible—has been far from easy. Stevens and company eventually tracked down a machine in “either in northern Nevada or northern California,” although he no longer recalls the specifics. It had been out of commission for a while and required a complete refurbishment. Getting the game approved by the gaming control Nevada Gaming Control Board also took time and effort. Finding technicians who have the skills and training to take care of a largely analog 30-year-old machine is almost impossible. Locating parts, usually extracted from the remains of other Derbys, is rapidly becoming even more difficult.

“It’s a lot harder today even than it was five years ago when we got Sigma,” Stevens admits. “We’ve bought a lot of parts off of eBay over the years to keep the horses running. But now some of that supply has dried up.”

Sigma Derby machines have miraculously weathered over three decades’ worth of trends in a gambling culture fueled by constant change and rapid innovation, but the one thing the Derby can’t survive is time. There’s a point at which the cost of keeping a Sigma Derby alive far outweighs the financial and sentimental benefits. The MontBleu reached it a few years ago when their machines quietly disappeared. Now it’s looking highly likely that MGM Grand Derby has run its final race. It broke down in the fall of 2017 and was eventually removed from the floor. Wagasky, who says he has logged over 35,000 races on that particular machine, is currently leading a fan campaign to try to convince MGM to reconsider. MGM says that the machine is still in storage. Stevens, who has expressed interest in purchasing it, says they’re not currently interested in selling. But its future doesn’t look promising.

“[MGM has] done everything possible to prolong its active lifespan but that’s simply no longer possible,” a source told the gossip blog Vital Vegas in November 2018.

“We can’t thank Sigma Derby fans enough for their patronage and loyalty to MGM Grand,” Callie Driehorst, the Manager of Corporate Media Relations for MGM Resorts International, says on behalf of the Grand. “Our team made every effort to keep this 30-year-old game operational and on the casino floor for our loyal fan base. In recent years, it has become more and more difficult to maintain due to lack of available parts and required maintenance. Sigma Derby is an iconic classic and we have been proud to play a role in its history.”


The end of Sigma Derby won’t necessarily mean the end of toy horse-based gambling. Alfastreet, a gaming company that specializes in electronic roulette and dice machines, currently produces a Derby-esque game called Royal Derby, which promises to “conjure up some memories for experienced players and raise the excitement level for ones that have never tried something like this.” Konami’s Fortune Cup, a large, flashy, and expensive update on the Derby concept debuted to great interest at G2E 2016, an international gaming trade show held in Las Vegas every year, and can currently be found at a number of Vegas casinos on the strip and downtown. There’s even one at The D that sits directly opposite the Sigma Derby, looking like a metaphor for the battle between Vegas’s cheap, campy past and its fancier, pricier future.

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Fortune Cup might offer articulated ponies, elaborate graphics, and the promise of higher payouts, but it lacks whatever charm it is that draws people to the original game. Common complaints among Derby fans are that it’s too expensive, too confusing, and too isolating.

“Honestly, you do get to know each other, make small talk, and then sometimes not-so-small talk,” Kulage says of the communal Derby experience. Fortune Cup’s odds—and the giant dome that covers the racing surface—gives you neither the time nor space to interact with your fellow players. “I would not use a dollar of your money for Fortune Cup,” Wagasky says.

Luckily, the Sigma Derby faithful still have at least some time before they’ll have to determine whether comparatively impersonal high-tech casino ponies are better than no casino ponies at all. Stevens and his team are determined to keep those hooves pounding for as long as is physically possible.

“We’re going to do everything that we possibly can to keep going,” he promises. “I love the fact that so many people want to come to the second floor of The D just because they want to get their Sigma Derby fix in. It’s a great attraction to us, so that’s why the game for us is a little bit more than a game.”

In Medieval Baghdad, Rulers Held Elite Cook-Offs

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The "Iron Chef of medieval times" could have serious consequences.

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We tend to think of cooking contests as a modern institution, whether featuring Alton Brown or nail-biting comparisons of British cakes. Yet cooking competitions actually have a much longer history. In the food-obsessed culture of ninth-century Baghdad, being a foodie was essential to getting ahead. Stories abound of the caliphs', or rulers', passion for cooking, eating, and talking about good food. They even participated in cooking contests, including one that ended in near-execution and exile.

According to Iraqi food historian and scholar Nawal Nasrallah, Baghdad at this time was considered the “navel of the nations”: the center of the world. “They had contacts with the four corners of the world,” says Nasrallah, which meant the wealthy had access to spices from across Asia, citrus from China, and sugar from India. The city had the ingredients for a world-class food culture, and the wealth to enjoy it, as it was the Islamic Golden Age. And while Christianity had strict mores against gluttony, Nasrallah points out that Islam didn't prohibit the enjoyment of food. “So the whole atmosphere was conducive to creating this kind of activity.”

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This obsession with food went straight to the top. One popular dish, judhaba, consisted of a sweet, layered bread pudding cooked in a tannour oven, with a chunk of meat roasted above it. The pudding would catch any drippings, creating a sweet and savory melange. One recipe, made with bananas, sugar, and rose water, was a specialty of Ibrāhīm bin al-Mahdī, who Nasrallah evocatively describes as “the Abbasid gourmet prince.” (The Abbasids were the ruling dynasty.) Vendors sold judhaba in the marketplace, and some caliphs were known to commandeer especially tasty dishes cooked by commoners.

Caliphs may have even cooked competitively. According to one story, the caliph al-Maʾmūn, who reigned in the early ninth century, once faced off against his brother and boon companions. It was an "Iron Chef of medieval times," laughs Nasrallah. In her description of the event, a cook named ‘Ibāda was present. Described as having a “delightful and mischievous sense of humor,” he was nonetheless jealous when al-Muʿtaṣim, al-Maʾmūn’s brother, cooked a dish that smelled quite good. He coaxed al-Muʿtaṣim into adding a bowl of fermented sauce to his dish, which then gave off a nasty odor. In true sibling fashion, al-Maʾmūn roasted his brother mercilessly. Unfortunately for ‘Ibāda, al-Muʿtaṣim became caliph in 833 and exiled him in revenge, claiming “he was not worth killing,” writes Nasrallah. (‘Ibāda made troublemaking a habit, but must have been a superlative cook. Another caliph brought him back, only for him to be banished again for another prank.)

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Though Nasrallah notes that there are only a handful of similar stories, the fact that writers inscribed them into chronicles typically devoted to battles and successions means they were considered important social activity. Poets wrote elaborate food poems, and manuals describing how to be an ideal “boon companion” for a ruler emphasized the importance of cooking. One recommended that these men learn a repertoire of at least 10 exotic dishes. It was this gourmand culture that produced the first medieval cookbooks, containing the favored dishes of the elite. Nasrallah herself translated the earliest-known: a 10th-century cookbook called the Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchen. So now we all can face off in the kitchen with our boon companions, Abbasid-style.

How Will Chicago's Birds Weather the Polar Vortex?

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Here's how the region's avian residents will survive the cold snap.

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Chicago is shuddering. With temperatures dropping down to -20 degrees Fahrenheit (colder, with the windchill), school is canceled, museums are closed, and transit agencies are relying on flaming, kerosene-soaked ropes to warm up steel tracks. The temperatures are life-threatening, and several 24-hour warming shelters are open. Humans are trying their best to hunker down, but what are the region's birds supposed to do?

Though the city’s feathered denizens can die in the subzero temperatures—from hypothermia or starvation, if their food sources are locked up in frozen bodies of water—many are generally equipped to handle at least a short burst of bracing cold.

Some of Chicago's wintertime residents have popped down from their breeding grounds in the Arctic—snowy owls, common redpolls, and snow buntings are known to drop by the Windy City in the cold months, says Alexandra Anderson, a graduate student in environmental and life sciences at Trent University, who studies Arctic birds. "These species may be able to tolerate colder temperatures than other species," Anderson says. The current temperatures are the harshest that many of the city's other avian urbanites have seen in their lifetimes—but even so, any bird that winters in Chicago is accustomed to heavy snow and fierce wind. “Species that spend the winter regularly in the region have evolved lots of different ways to deal with these cold snaps,” says John Bates, associate curator of birds at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

They’ve already got cozy coats, for one thing. “Every bird is walking around wearing a down sleeping bag,” says Kevin McGowan, a behavioral ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. When temperatures plummet, birds will “stay the heck out of the wind,” McGowan says, and fluff up their feathers to trap air inside. Their body heat keeps the air pocket warm, and the birds carry their insulation with them like a little portable space heater. “I guarantee you every bird you see in Chicago is going to look fat,” McGowan says. “But they’re not—they’re just cold.” They’ll probably also find the warmest crannies they can—up in the the cavities or branches of a tree, close to puffing chimneys, or on window ledges, away from the strongest gusts.

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They’ll also be strategic about when and where they leave their redoubts to feed. To limit their time out in the elements, geese, gulls, and ducks may just hold off on eating until the weather eases up (like, “‘To heck with it, I’m not moving until this is done,’” McGowan says). Chickadees and other species that need to eat more often may flock to feeders, where they don’t have to work very hard to rustle up sustenance. These guaranteed food sources will be “inundated,” McGowan says, with birds that might otherwise take or leave the seeds. Jays and crows may head to their own caches, where they previously squirreled away snacks for later.

"Birds, like humans, have a range of temperatures that the body is comfortable in," says Anderson. This band, known as the thermoneutral zone, varies by species. Arctic seabirds such as eider ducks and thick-billed murres are quite comfortable in cold temperatures, and goldfinches, for instance, have been known to survive temperatures of -140 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours, Anderson says. When temperatures slip below a given bird's thermoneutral zone, that creature needs to bump up its metabolism to generate heat. "This uses much more energy than normal, which will mean the bird will need to eat more to stay alive," Anderson says. "Eventually, if the body cannot generate enough heat, the birds will become hypothermic and likely die."

When birds are exposed to the whipping wind, their extremities can handle the cold a bit better than, say, human fingers or toes. "Unlike humans, they have counter-current blood circulation in their legs, which allows heat to be transferred from warm arteries to cool veins and keep their legs from freezing," Anderson says. Even when “their toes get pretty darn close to freezing, that’s okay because there’s not a lot of tissue to be damaged in there,” McGowan says. Chickens—with their wattle and comb—are more vulnerable to nippy temperatures, but, as a rule, he adds, “you don’t see fleshy ornaments on [birds] that have to survive the winter.” Many birds, including geese, will also tuck their bills under their feathers to stay warm “while also increasing breathing efficiency by utilizing warmer air,” according to a statement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Midwest Region.

Birds don’t have to hang in there much longer in order to survive this particular freeze. The icy fist should loosen its grip in a couple of days, when temperatures will inch—barely—into the single digits. Though some birds won't make it through, the short duration “hopefully means most individuals will be able to ride it out,” Bates says. In the meantime, birds will do “all the stuff your mom would tell you to do” on cold day, McGowan says. “Don’t go anywhere, and stay wrapped up.”

The Many, Many Layers of a Totem Pole Restoration Project

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The American Museum of Natural History is conserving—and reconsidering—these monumental carvings.

Four red cedar Tsimshian house posts have stood in the hall since the windows opened up onto fields and rail tracks, since the gallery was illuminated by gaslight, since the museum was heated by coal. The painted, carved stacks of creatures—eagles, bears, humans, and more, with faces much wider than visitors’—arrived at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in the waning days of the 19th century, when guests swanned about wearing corsets or double-breasted tailcoats.

The world has changed before the totem poles’ painted eyes, and the years have taken their toll. The conservation crew now tasked with freshening up these 15-foot-tall fixtures of the Northwest Coast Hall has had a big job, says conservator Samantha Alderson: “a hundred-plus years of heavy soiling and dust.”

The hall, which encompasses the arts of Native communities across the northwestern edge of the United States and Canada, was never supposed to look as it does now. Originally, light streamed in through large, arched windows, bathing the totem poles in sunshine. But slowly the museum was built up around this gallery, and it was boxed in by other rooms; the institution is now a complex of 25 interconnected buildings jammed together. In the Northwest Coast Hall, the light disappeared. The place had grown so dark, curator Peter Whiteley recalls, that people used to jest that visitors needed to “bring your own flashlight to enjoy the collection.”

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It was a joke, but just barely. The room was dim, and over the years the posts darkened, too. Because they sat exposed, instead of behind glass, staff members had tried to clean them over the decades using whatever they thought they ought to. “Well-meaning, all of it, I’m sure,” Alderson says, “but the approaches have changed.” Damage collected in layers—dirt sandwiched between swaths of uneven cleaning and resin that turned the wood dark brown and gummy, and concealed, dulled, or muddled the bright original colors. Dust blew in through open windows, and settled. The massive poles were also easily within visitors’ reach, and not everyone kept their hands to themselves. Some scratched their initials into the wood; others popped their chewed gum into the the figures’ mouths.

The museum is now in the process of a major overhaul of the section, which will close to the public this winter and reopen in 2020. The $14.5-million project will brighten the place up, and “honor [anthropologist Franz] Boas’s vision,” Whiteley says. Boas was an early curator of the gallery, and his plan involved a radical departure from the mishmash of objects that had been common in museum displays at the time. At the turn of the 20th century, many encyclopedic collections grouped objects by type—all the boats in one room, all the masks in another—and imposed a value judgement on the arrangement. (Newer, slicker objects were considered more advanced, and older ones were framed as evolutionary stages on the way to something better.) Boas imagined something else entirely, and organized displays by cultures instead of the size, shape, and material of the stuff they made.

Besides some minor cosmetic tinkering in the 1960s, Whiteley says, the current iteration of the hall is largely unchanged from 1910. But to restore a little of the luster to Boas’s mission, he adds, they must walk back some of the more recent additions. The murals depicting the imagined “noble savage” will be painted over, Whiteley says, and “the alcoves dedicated to individual nations will remain that way, but with more emphasis on exchange and interchange of ideas.”

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This may also involve contextualizing the collection in a new way, one that encourages visitors to reconsider the objects and the people who made them. Museumgoers may recognize a totem pole as a pile of creatures, without appreciating that they’re also storytelling tools that stand in front of the homes of village leaders as heralds and protectors, or that rise up to the beams of a clan house ceiling, narrating a family history. The renovation is bringing Native artists and historians to the museum for the first time in a formal capacity to provide more of this context and help grapple with stereotypes about Native communities and their ongoing political entanglements, over land, representation, schools, and more, says Haa’yuups/Ron Hamilton. Haa’yuups is a Nuu-chah-nulth artist and historian and head of the House of Takiishtakamlthat-h in western Canada, and is working alongside Whiteley as cocurator on the project.

Haa’yuups—who first visited the museum in 1967, at age 19, and has returned “every chance I get”—calls the hall “one of the greatest exhibits in the world that’s ever been put together about other people.” But, he says, it seems “frozen in time,” and doesn’t fully account for the fact that Native communities are still vibrant and, in many cases, still pushing for rights. (It wasn’t until 1960, for instance, that First Nations people in Canada could vote in federal elections without jeopardizing their treaty status.) “The fact that we don’t live in tepees, we don’t carry tomahawks, we don’t all have totem poles on our front porches—that needs to be said,” Haa’yuups says.

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That ongoing conversation could also shed more light on these specific objects. Though these posts have lived in the museum for more than a century, there’s still uncertainty about their life before they arrived. As a rule, the items that arrived at the museum a little later have a better-preserved provenance. For later expeditions, “We have a village name, sometimes know it’s from this specific house, from this guy whose son is this, we’ll have a lot of information and sometimes a photograph of it before it was moved,” Alderson says. But for these posts, it’s been a question of “piecing things together over the years.” The staff knows that the posts shipped out of Port Simpson, a village in British Columbia now known as Lax-Kw'alaams, but for years, there wasn’t a firm consensus about which culture created them. Now, on the basis of curatorial research and input from Native advisors, the team is confident that the posts are Tsimshian.

Though some details of gallery plans are still being hashed out, Haa’yuups hopes that they will include new digital stations featuring Native people speaking for and about themselves, without an anthropologist as a middleman, and maybe a compilation of photographs by local artists, or newspapers written by and for the communities, emphasizing the beliefs and perspectives of people he says are often misrepresented.

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Before the gallery reopens, it first has to be emptied, and each and every object will get fresh attention. The hall has held roughly 1,800 items, from the monumental to the miniature. The Haida canoe, 63 feet long, once hung from the ceiling, and then sat on the floor, while display cases held smaller tools. While some items are getting little more than a condition check or minor intervention—a bit of fresh paint, or a nearly invisible net to corral and smooth bits of fraying cedar bark—the totem poles require careful, intensive cleaning, “an inch-by-inch process,” Alderson says. “And going over areas not just once, but many times. You take off one layer of stuff, and then you go back in to do others.” And these giants also have to be cleaned exactly where they stand.

“Conservators are fairly used to working in open exhibition spaces, particularly if you’re working on large objects,” says Madeleine Neiman, the assistant conservator heading up the totem-cleaning team. “You go to the object—the object doesn’t come to you.”

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The conservation staff was busy in the gallery one recent winter afternoon. Behind screens that cordoned her off from the few visitors who popped in to the gallery during the overhaul, Neiman stuck little rectangles of hydrogels to the posts and let them sit for 15 minutes or so. These work by "dewetting," or coaxing the coating on the surface of the wood to release, Alderson says. Once that happens, it becomes easier to remove with a gentle rub with dry cotton. The team has also relied heavily on aqueous gels, which are microemulsions of solvents, chelators, and other components in a water base. These suspend tiny droplets of solvents at the surface, limiting what penetrates down into the paint or wood below.

Some of the visitors who did wander through stopped to toy with a kiosk that plays various sounds of the coast—a whistling wind, an eagle’s call, a spitting fire—on demand. Conservators raised and lowered themselves on a narrow lift, which beeped and bleated as though backing up in a warehouse. An announcement blared over a loudspeaker about an alarm ringing somewhere else in the building. “See how relaxing it is in here?” Alderson said. “That’s why they [the conservators] wear earphones all the time, so they can concentrate.”

The team works on the posts for six or seven hours at a stretch. It’s slow labor, and the effects are clear. Before Neiman tackled a crane, it was hard to see the feathers and eyebrows that have now emerged. Across the gallery, high up on a lift, assistant conservator Amanda Chau worked on another post. Back on the ground she recounted removing wads of brittle, decades-old gum from the surfaces with a silicone solvent and “a lot of different spatulas.”

“It’s gross,” Alderson added. “Satisfying, though!”

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Though the work is wrapping up, “we haven’t removed all of the dirt and coating,” Alderson says. “Because we can’t.” In some areas, “the original paint, coating, and dirt are just one now.” A figure of an eagle was once soaked by a sprinkler that went off nearby, and the wood still shows signs of blanching, like a hazy, white-ish water ring on a coffee table. A bear’s belly looks like mottled fur, an accident of the interaction between between paint, old cleaning campaigns, and grime. “You can’t take one off without damaging what’s below,” Alderson says. The goal, where possible, is to celebrate the artistry by revealing obscured patterns, and then to stabilize the surfaces so that “little splintery bits” don’t snag vacuum brushes during future cleanings. When the team has done all they can, the poles will be wrapped and boxed, and work on the rest of the galleries will charge ahead. (For now, the old display cases, stripped bare of all but their headers—“Wood, Bone, and Stone”—look like presentation boards left over from an old science fair that was never fully cleaned up.)

When all is reassembled, Haa’yuups says, the posts will help tell the nuanced stories he wants visitors to know. “They’re among my favorite things,” he says. He loves the “chubby cheeks,” and the way the unknown carver captured the character of each creature. “They’re absolutely masterfully designed and carved—they’re the work of a genius,” he says. He also thinks the posts exemplify the qualities he wishes viewers would notice more often in Native American art. The way the figures are interlinked shows “great problem-solving ability,” he says. “I think you’d have to be a fool to look at that and not see that they’re a work of great intelligence.”

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