They reveal that ice was once speeding through southern Africa.
We may not think of Namibia, in southern Africa, as an icy place, but the dozens of drumlins stretching out in its Twyfelfontein region are only there because of the glaciers that preceded them.
Drumlins are hills formed by glacial activity. They’re typical, unsurprisingly, in places like upstate New York, Wisconsin, parts of Canada, and Scotland, says Graham Andrews, a geologist at West Virginia University and lead author of a new PLOS One study about the Namibian drumlins. Andrews didn’t arrive in Namibia with the intention of studying, or even finding drumlins—he was there to look into volcanic rocks—but he recognized them because, he says, he grew up on one in Northern Ireland. While it has long been known that southern Africa had once experienced its own icy age, Andrews discovered that no prior research on these drumlins had been conducted. He returned to West Virginia eager to fill that gap.
Andrews and one of his students used Google Earth and Google Maps to take the measurements of the desert drumlins—some 98 of them in all, clustered in groups of between 10 and 20 parallel hills, covering about 100 kilometers. On average, he says, the hills were about 500 meters long, several hundred meters wide, and 50 meters high—fairly consistent with the dimensions of other proven drumlins around the world. That there was consistency among nearly 100 samples further validated Andrews’s original hunch: that somehow, these desert hills in Namibia were just like those at home in Northern Ireland. “You could basically take these ones from Namibia,” he says, “drop them in Canada, and they wouldn’t look out of place.”
But these particular desert drumlins also have their own distinct features, which help to shed new light on the southern African Paleozoic Age of about 300 million years ago. These happen to be striped with large grooves, which must have been carved by rapidly moving ice. Many drumlins, says Andrews, consist of rock, sand, and mud deposited beneath a glacier that eventually melts. These, on the other hand, were sculpted by an “ice stream,” part of an ice sheet that moves 10 to 100 times faster than the rest of the ice. These streams—which Andrews likens to “super highways” of ice capable of carving out bedrock as they accelerate—are fairly common in contemporary Greenland and Antarctica, he says. But only now do we know that they were part of the infrastructure of southern Africa’s own ice age.
High fat, protein-rich dairy produces better foam and tastier coffee.
If the heart on your cappuccino foam looks extra-twirly, you might consider inquiring whether your favorite caffeine purveyor is using the newest tool in the coffee kit: barista milk. Specifically formulated for coffee shops, barista milk’s higher protein content helps create a more stable foam for latte art, and its creamy richness boosts the flavor of the roasted bean. For a global dairy industry that has seen dropping demand for conventional, liquid milk, this is a promising development.
“I think the specialty coffee industry has really upped the ante with the beans and roasting, and so the milk had to follow,” says Joanna Heart, an owner and barista at The Palm Coffee Bar in Burbank, California. “You’re working with this beautiful bean, it’s fair trade, it’s organic, and you’re putting all this effort into it, and then you’re just dumping whatever milk in it? I think baristas began to realize that milk is also something to be researched and played with as an artist.”
Don’t expect to find this milk for use at home. For now, barista milk, which is priced between 30 to 60 percent higher than conventional dairy milk, is exclusively sold to culinary professionals.
“Barista milk is crucial because of the way it behaves in tandem with good, flavorsome coffee to create an overall balance in the drink,” says Joe Towers, who handles the marketing and public relations for Brades Farm, his family’s dairy in Lancaster, England.
Barista milk is rich in butterfat, which takes the edge off the acidity of high quality coffee beans, explains Towers. Brades Farm barista milk contains 4.5 percent butterfat, made by mixing the milk from their Jersey cows (which has a fat content of more than six percent) with that of their black-and-white Holstein-Friesians.
Barista milk also contains more protein, the levels of which are regulated. Most dairies focus only on consistency in fat content (whole milk, one percent, two percent), rather than protein content. “Historically there has been no demand from the consumer for the protein to be standardized,” says Towers. “Well, the barista has become the exception to this rule … They don’t like to constantly adapt their technique to cope with the changes in the protein content of the milk.” Milk protein levels vary as cows’ diets change with the weather. At Brades, farmers mix the milks from their two cow breeds to ensure a standardized percentage of protein.
This combination of high protein and high fat is what makes for longer-lasting latte art. The aeration provided by the hissing steam wand of an espresso machine, followed by a quick swirl to break up large bubbles, creates microfoam. It’s this glistening froth that provides the best canvas for latte art. Barista milk can also be steamed at a higher temperature and still maintain its sweetness because of the extra butterfat and protein. “When the barista heats the milk to make it froth, the protein molecules expand, and they bind to the butterfat, instead of binding to air,” Towers explains. “That makes the pattern stay—instead of air bubbles forming on the surface of the coffee.”
For an industry facing a crisis due to falling demand, barista milk has been an important, if niche, innovation. Americans are consuming 37 percent less milk (in liquid form) today than they did in the 1970s, The Washington Post reports. Globally, too, the troubleddairy industry is only just beginning to adjust. In 2016, Brades Farm was among the first to introduce barista milk to the British specialty coffee market. The farm now focuses solely on producing barista milk, and Towers says the dairy is once again making a profit.
Joanna Heart of Palm Coffee swears by barista milk made by Straus Family Creamery, an industry pioneer from Marshall, California. That said, nearly 70 percent of her customers ask for alternative milks. While consumers may be drinking less cow’s milk, they are drinking more plant-based alternatives, as the Great Oat Milk Shortage of 2018 attests. There are now barista editions of almond, soy, rice, and coconut milk.
In an era of ethically sourced, single-origin coffee beans, there has curiously been little interest in knowing more about the milk poured into expensive lattes (the most popular drink ordered in American coffee shops). That may be changing. “Just the other day, a customer came in and asked if I’d heard about Jersey milk,” Heart says. “I’m like, what’s Jersey milk?”
A humorous dialogue between a cleaner and customer, useful to both ancient scribes and modern scholars.
If you had some threads that you wanted to spiff up for a special occasion in ancient Mesopotamia, what would you do? Take them to the cleaners, of course. While the cleaning agents may have been different—beer, clay, an eastern wind, and even urine—the overall process would have been remarkably similar to what happens today.
We know this thanks to an Akkadian cuneiform text from ancient Ur (a Sumerian city-state in present day Iraq), dubbed “At the Cleaners” by scholars, dating back to 1600 B.C. or so. The tablet, held by the British Museum, contains a humorous dialogue between a cleaner and his customer, in which the customer does most of the talking.
The text is a take on the classic, “the customer knows best” trope, says Martha Roth, editor in charge of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, except that in this case the client isn’t just making idle demands—he really does know how the task is done. But that doesn’t make him any less of a pest. He gives the cleaner excessively detailed instructions, down to the water that should be used to wash his clothes: “come upstream of the city, in the environs of the city—let me show you a washing-place,” and the wind he should use to dry them, specifically from the east, and the specific types of wood and stones that the cleaner should use to felt and flatten the clothes to restore them to their original fit. The text illustrates that a Mesopotamian cleaner’s tasks went beyond removing dirt, oil, and other detritus of everyday life. He was a full-service shop, charged with repairing clothing and restoring it to its original condition (size, shape, tightness of warp and weft). The process involved a variety of specialized implements, and a great deal of care was taken to ensure the job was done right.
The cleaner is frustrated by the customer’s haranguing and lowball offer for his services (a single measure of barley). “He says, 'No way! How do you have the nerve to talk like that, nobody could manage it—I’ll show you a washing place and you can do it yourself if you think you know the work so well,'” Roth says.
Why would these this comic, mundane episode even have been inscribed on a clay tablet, and what does it tell us about Mesopotamian life?
Roth says that the text was likely used to educate scribes. The text is modeled after dialogues and riddles that would have been classics at that time. The garment the cleaner is tasked with washing is a luxury item, with many features that require special treatment, such as fringes, complex weaving, and embroidered adornments. These details offer the opportunity to bring in a technical vocabulary, as well as grammatical quirks. Like the school exercise in which children have to instruct an alien in how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in excruciating detail, this basic task is used to illustrate a great deal about many aspects of the culture at once—and is entertaining to boot. Educational texts like these actually serve the same purpose for lexicographers such as Roth over 3,000 years later.
Any modern lessons in there for doing actual laundry? Don’t knock an east wind until you try it.
General Qi Jiguang's 500-year-old military tactic still makes a good breakfast.
The recipe for Guang Bing, a type of Chinese bagel, hasn’t changed for 500 years. General Qi Jiguang developed the bagel as a military tactic in the 16th century. While fending off Japanese pirates at China’s southern border, soldiers needed food that could be cooked discreetly and on-the-go. Once the bagels were ready, troops could march on with their meal strung around their necks before enemies reached them.
In the video above, Atlas Obscura meets with Lin Xiu, the last Guang Bing maker in his village of Fuqing, China, to learn how these centuries-old bagels are made.
But it didn’t go well for them when things got cold again.
The Vikings of popular lore and actual history line up in some ways, and not so much in others. They were indeed, for example, often blonde, since they used lye to lighten their hair. But a vast majority weren’t berserkers leaping from ships, salivating for a good sacking, but rather humble rye and oat farmers, traders, and craftspeople. And they probably weren’t particularly fond of the cold.
A study recently published in the journal Geology suggests that when Vikings settled in Greenland, between 985 and 1450, they benefited from an unusually warm spell. A team of scientists from Northwestern University reconstructed a climate record for southern Greenland for the past three millennia and found that the Viking period in Greenland was, climatically, unlike anything seen before or after. Vikings may have enjoyed balmy 50-degree-Fahrenheit) summers, similar to modern Greenland, which is thawing at an alarming pace.
“It’s long been speculated that climate changes help explain when the Norse settled in Greenland, and why their colonies died out,” says Yarrow Axford, senior author of the study, of Northwestern University, via email. “But data from the local area were rare, so a lot of this was based on assuming southern Greenland experienced temperature shifts that mirrored those in Europe.”
Axford explains that recent studies tend to support the idea that glaciers were growing in Greenland when Vikings settled, suggesting a cooling was underway. However, she believes the opposite took place: “We find evidence for warming around the time the Norse came to Greenland, and cooling and climate instability around the time their settlements collapsed.”
The analysis is based on the head capsules of a certain lake fly, called chironomids, or non-biting midges. When these mosquito-like insects die, they can be preserved in lake sediment layers. By pulling cores from Norse settlements outside the town of Narsaq, the team was able to examine the oxygen isotopes in chironomid remains, which they used to track climate fluctuations.
The team suspects the warming trend was related to ocean currents around southern Greenland, so the phenomenon may have been quite localized.
What makes this discovery even more intriguing is that it could provide evidence as to why the Vikings abandoned their Greenland settlements. After enjoying a relatively mild climate, things would become much tougher as temperatures began to plummet. While Yarrow did allude to other factors contributing to the decline of the settlements—conflict, diet, trade—her research brings a new dynamic to the table.
“What we’ve added to the story is direct evidence for warmer conditions at the eastern settlement while the Norse thrived there than before and after,” she says. “And our results also suggest cooling and an extremely variable climate at the time the settlements died out. It’s a really intriguing correlation, but it doesn’t pinpoint the cause. Archaeological evidence would have to do that.”
There are still chapters of the saga yet to be written.
Fire followed by rain is the recipe for colorful fields and canyons.
Late last year, California was ravaged by deadly wildfires. Upstate, the Camp Fire destroyed an estimated 18,804 buildings and incinerated the town of Paradise in particular. Down the coast, the Woolsey Fire burned 96,949 acres of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. It could take some areas years to recover, and others may never recover at all. It’s not exactly a silver lining, but some experts think that the extensive burning could result in a spring profusion of wildflowers, known as a "superbloom," in Southern California.
A superbloom is an exceptionally productive season of wildflowers, and they generally occur as a result of an environmental one-two punch: intense fire followed by consistent rain. The fire primes seed banks in the soil, which are then nourished by rain, resulting in blooms in dozens of wildflower species.
Mark Mendelsohn, a biologist with the National Park Service in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, works in the field and was directly affected by November’s Woolsey Fire. “Either the heat or the smoke physically causes the seed to germinate,” he says via email. “Steady, but not necessarily heavy, rains throughout our normal wet season of November through March … encourage most of our species to bloom in a given year.” When the wet season yields more than average rainfall totals, that’s when the flowers can alter the landscape. In the region surrounding the Santa Monica Mountains, he says, “We are at ~100 to 150 percent (maybe even 200 percent) our normal rainfall up to this point.” This increase in rain can also result in blooms in desert regions that did not burn, such as Joshua Tree, which experienced a superbloom in 2017.
The possibility of a Los Angeles–area superbloom will become more evident in the coming months, but scientists see signs of a strong one this year. “With the well-timed, substantial rains we have received thus far this season, there has been a tremendous green-up on the slopes and fields the Santa Monica Mountains,” Mendelsohn says. It’s suspected that trees and larger animals in the area will recover from the Woolsey Fire slowly, but signs of revival are already appearing.
Species that commonly bloom following a fire are in the poppy, popcorn-flower, lily, lupine, snapdragon, and sunflower groups. Mendelsohn expects to see all of these before the close of April, along with “virtual carpets” of morning glory and wild cucumber. The superblooms will be most prominent in the steep-sided canyons where the fire burned most intensely (88 percent of National Park Service lands in the Santa Monica Mountains, to be exact).
If all goes according to nature’s plan, balance will be restored soon and springtime will bloom, though concerns about wildfires will rise again.
They haven’t lost their taste for Cold War-era comfort food.
On a recent afternoon in Moscow, a line of hungry people stretched across the third floor of GUM, a stately 19th-century shopping arcade turned modern luxury mall overlooking Red Square. As the crowd waited to get into Stolovaya 57, a self-service cafe modeled on a Soviet workers’ canteen, a young woman snapped photos of the faux propaganda posters in the entryway. Inside, customers loaded their trays with fruity kissel, fuschia "fur coat" salad, and jellied pork. On the hot food line, a woman in a white uniform dished out mashed potatoes, Chicken Kiev, and stuffed cabbage and curtly called out, “Next order, please!” Murky jars of canned vegetables sat on shelves overhead. An abacus, like the kind used by Soviet shopkeepers, stood next to one of the cash registers. (Most diners paid by credit card.)
As I stood in line with Pavel Syutkin, a culinary historian who co-authored CCCP COOK BOOK: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine with his wife, Olga Syutkin, he told me the long wait was just another period touch. "When you go step by step, 20 minutes, half an hour, you really get an effect of being inside the Soviet past,” he said, recalling the anticipation that made the food taste better when he lived in Cold War-era Russia.
I asked Syutkin why, in 2019, a mostly Russian crowd would wait this long for a bowl of borscht served with a heavy dollop of Soviet kitsch. He explained that Stolovaya 57 is one of the cheapest places to eat near Red Square, and it was the Russian New Year holidays, a week when domestic tourists descend on Moscow. Still, there wasn’t much of a line outside the mall’s neighboring Cafe Festivalnoye, a food court-style spot serving baked potatoes and bliny, Russian crepes with sweet and savory fillings.
Aside from the prime location, Stolovaya 57’s popularity may have something to do with its name. Whether they’re from Moscow or a remote part of Siberia, Russians have a shared understanding of the word stolovaya, which means “dining hall” or “cafeteria.” Due to the Soviet legacy of public canteens, it’s shorthand for an affordable, filling, and predictable meal.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, food became a public matter instead of a private one. Preparing meals at home, the new Communist authorities argued, was an inefficient use of resources. State-run cafeterias were established to liberate women from “kitchen slavery,” improve nutrition, and exert control over the food supply.
According to Anya Von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, while a handful of these early canteens had genteel touches such as fresh flowers and live music, many were plagued by rats and served awful food. The cafeteria in the Kremlin was so bad that Lenin ordered multiple investigations. As it turned out, in addition to struggling with food shortages, the nascent Soviet state had replaced many professional chefs with ideologically pure but untrained ones. Still, nobody had promised the revolution would taste good. In the famine-stricken early 1920s, Von Bremzen writes, “food was fuel for survival and socialist labor.”
At Stolovaya 57, after Syutkin and I finally made it through the line and found a table, he explained that the quality of food and hygiene in the cafeterias improved in the 1930s. Regulators developed a set of standard recipes and policies as precise as how many grams of meat had to be in a serving of soup. These guidelines also formalized a culinary hierarchy in contrast to the vision of a classless society. Each recipe had three columns stating the requirements for different kinds of public dining facilities: more beef for bureaucrats, less for university students.
While the dishes in any Soviet cafeteria were supposed to be identical, in practice the quality varied widely. A large stolovaya in Moscow or Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) typically served far better food than the canteens in smaller towns.
Syutkin dined in one of these provincial cafeterias while working at a small-town newspaper in the Kaliningrad region, on the Baltic Sea coast. “It was really terrible,” he recalled, describing a particular meal of pork and squid cutlets as “the worst culinary memory in my life." But the canteen also served the standard assortment of familiar dishes, and the solyanka, a hearty meat soup with pickles and lemon, wasn’t bad at all. (“It's difficult to prepare solyanka [that’s not] tasty,” Syutkin added.) After he got a job in Moscow at TASS, the state news agency, he ate at a bigger cafeteria that offered five or six soups daily and a variety of salads, main dishes, and desserts at affordable prices.
Lackluster food wasn’t necessarily the fault of individual chefs, who had to make do with whatever ingredients the state provided. The Soviet food supply system routed the best stuff to high-level officials and larger state enterprises. “Access to good products was a symbol of your place in the social hierarchy,” Syutkin said. “Everybody could understand at what factory, at what ministry you work, [just by] looking inside your refrigerator."
In 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev signed a resolution to make the system of public food service “more massive, comfortable, and favorable.” Among other things, it called upon canteens to engage in “socialist competition” to improve conditions. A publication called The Female Workerdocumented cafeterias with great interest, lauding a particular dining hall in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Belarus) for its ingenuity in using kitchen scraps to raise its own pigs. Workers’ commissions conducted inspections and pressed facilities to improve.
The need to account for how ingredients were used actually created some enduring favorites. At Stolovaya 57, I enjoyed kartoshka, a chocolate snack cake that became part of the Soviet canon in part because it handily used up leftovers.
While the relative bounty of the 1960s provided a reprieve after the lean years of World War II, in the 1970s and 80s, food shortages made life difficult for most Soviet citizens. “Those who could get a job at the canteen of a large enterprise were considered extremely lucky, since they often managed to take some food home,” notes Russia Beyond. That privilege didn’t come without risk, of course. Staff caught stealing could face harsh penalties, including imprisonment.
Despite the system’s flaws, Syutkin and most other Russians I spoke to have fairly positive, or at least neutral, feelings about Soviet cafeteria food. As Von Bremzen writes in Foreign Policy, “the truth about Soviet cuisine, of course, is that it was neither the rotten-potato hell of its bashers nor the cheery, comforting idyll of consumerist memory-mongers.”
Stolovaya 57, which opened in 2007, falls into the latter category. The brainchild of Bosco di Ciliegi, a Russian group with an Italian-inspired name that specializes in luxury shopping, it bills itself as an upgrade on the humble workers’ cafeteria. As the cafe’s website puts it: “They dreamt about good food, but cooked rather bad in Soviet canteens.”
It fits right in at GUM, which channels an idealized version of the Soviet Union alongside shops stocked with Agent Provocateur lingerie, Coach bags, and Bose speakers. On the first floor of the complex, a throwback grocery store called Gastronom №1 displays artfully assembled pyramids of sgushyonka, or sweetened condensed milk, in the iconic blue-and-white Soviet cans. It also carries sushi and Belgian beer.
“[Stolovaya 57] is a kind of a nostalgic note for those people who would like to remember the old-style canteen and good times and to have a really tasty meal,” GUM spokesperson Daria Ageeva said in an email.
It’s not the only modern eatery cashing in on Soviet nostalgia. Varenichnaya No. 1, a chain that serves varenyky (Ukrainian dumplings) and other classic comfort food, has 19 locations around Moscow. They’re wallpapered with pages from Pravda, which was once the official Communist Party paper, and staffed by waitresses wearing retro floral frocks with Peter Pan collars and ruffled white aprons. Down the street from one of the Varenichnayas, a cafe called Cheburechnaya USSR, which specializes in chebureky, a kind of meat pie, greets customers with a giant image of beaming, overall-clad Soviet workers.
According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, half of Russians 18-34 believe the breakup of the Soviet Union was a bad thing. Russians today also view Stalin more positively than Gorbachev. “A new generation of people in Russia have no knowledge of Communist Party meetings or long queues for basic foods,” the Syutkins write in their book. “They view the era as enigmatic and appealing.”
However, nostalgia isn’t the only thing motivating people to wait half an hour for plates of pickled herring. My 31-year-old friend Victor, who typically cooks at home and visits a mall food court for the occasional Vietnamese pho, points out that many of his peers are on tight budgets. Russia's economy has been sluggish in recent years, and paychecks still don’t go as far as they used to.
According to a report by the Russian newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta, the role of dining out in Russian culture is also changing. Restaurants used to be viewed as places where you dropped a lot of cash to celebrate a special evening, but increasingly they’re seen as spots to grab a quick bite.
“Why overpay?” Stolovaya 57’s deputy director Boris Soldatov told BFM.ru. “You can come to our canteen and have lunch or dinner with alcoholic beverages for 600 rubles [roughly $9].”
While you can no longer get a bowl of soup and a stack of meat and cabbage-filled piroshki for a mere ruble, cafeterias haven’t lost their appeal as a cheap, filling place to eat out.
There's the account that collects intricately patterned floors from around the globe, and one particularly creative Instagrammer who's chronicling the forgotten boot-cleaning stations of Dublin, just to name two. Travel-focused feeds on Instagram might be a hot (and controversial) trend right now, but these Instagrammers truly provide a unique window to the world.
Check out some of our favorite suggestions in the collection below, and if you have a favorite Atlas Obscura-esque Instagram account that you'd like to share, head over to our forums and tell us about it!
"Literally just pictures of bootscrapers as features built into the exteriors of Dublin buildings. I love the idea that someone is walking eagle-eyed through Dublin on the lookout for these things. Its bio is 'Looking out for the Overlooked.' Could that not be more perfect?" — Allisonkc
"[It] is dedicated to Pittsburgh’s city steps. There are 739 public staircases in town, there’s a book chronicling them, and Laura’s project is to visit each and write a piece on each one. She’s an awesome writer and breaks my heart regularly." — Anodyne33
"The manager of this account visits the remnants of Eastern European Jewish communities. It’s clearly a passion project, and the captions to each picture are highly informative and thoroughly researched." — Allisonkc
The common fundraising events known as walkathons started as an exploitative entertainment craze.
Callum DeVillier, a hairdresser from Lanesboro, Minnesota, designed his own headstone before his death in 1973. His head-turning epitaph contains his greatest accomplishment, engraved for posterity. “DeVillier,” the red granite marker reads. “World Champion Marathon Dancer. 3780 Continuous Hours.”
How—and perhaps more importantly, why—did the son of small-town candy shop owners spend nearly half of 1932 on a Massachusetts dance floor? He was trying to set a record, but the events weren’t all for fun. In the thick of the Great Depression, the perverse entertainment racket of America’s dance marathon craze was, to some, a survival strategy. Because dancing in a marathon didn’t just mean the possibility of a cash prize. It meant being fed and sheltered for the duration of the contest.
The craze began in the relatively prosperous 1920s, a time of stable industrial jobs and postwar optimism, when new thrills enticed city dwellers on every corner. There were vaudeville theaters, roller coasters, and dance halls, where men and women alike boogied with abandon to big band music.
According to New York University drama scholar Carol Martin, author of Theatre of the Real and Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s, the onset of the modern Olympic Games a few decades earlier also meant that people at the time were obsessed with world records. Nonsensical feats of strength and “endurance contests”—from flagpole sitting to cross-country footraces—emerged as a popular entertainment option. In 1923, New York dance instructor and dance-a-thon patient-zero Alma Cummings exhausted an assortment of male partners as she waltzed around an Upper Manhattan ballroom for 27 hours straight. Her stunt was a tantalizing alchemy of the era’s fascinations, a test of the limits of both the human body and the nation’s new, liberalized sexuality. Within three weeks, her record was broken at least nine times across the country—from Baltimore to Cleveland to Houston. The age of the dance marathon jumped into full swing.
Enterprising promoters were quick to capitalize. If the industrial boom of the 1920s created a population of working urbanites hungry for entertainment, it also left rural Americans in increasingly dire circumstances, desperate and bored. For many, entertaining was a welcome diversion, especially if participating could mean a chance to save the farm.
Promoters took what started as a fun, voyeuristic, 1920s curiosity and turned it into a cottage industry for a country that was careening into hard times. They offered cash prizes that could be larger than a farmer’s yearly income, and formalized a system of live music (during peak hours, with phonograph records at other times), admission fees, and rules that kept marathons profitable for much longer than Cummings’s 27 hours. For a man like DeVillier, fame and fortune were only remote possibilities, but attention was guaranteed. Dance marathons were a thrilling alternative to the doldrums of country life.
Contest pamphlets spelled out the rules of the individual marathons, but a few things became pretty standard. Dancers at least had to be in motion to remain in the contest. They were typically given 15 minutes of rest each hour, during which nurses rubbed their feet and provided medical attention. Food was provided many times daily, and tasks such as eating, bathing, shaving, and reading the paper could be done while dancing. Dancers could often be seen dozing off while their partners held them up to keep their knees from hitting the ground (which would result in disqualification). The scene was heavily regulated and monitored, with some promoters accompanying dancers on brief outdoor walks for a breath of fresh air before returning for more dancing. Promoters even planted professional dancers among the contestants. The windfall came from the spectators, returning night after night, cash in hand, to follow the action.
When the stock market crashed in October 1929, the economic misery of rural America spread to the cities. Dance marathons exploded. They had a large pool of willing, desperate contestants, and they made everyone else feel a little better about themselves. According to Martin, the spectacles gave hard-up onlookers the rare opportunity to feel superior, which fueled the popularity of the contests as the Depression bore on. "For some audiences, seeing others who were worse off was a balm to their own precarious circumstances," Martin says. The conditions may have been rough and pitiful for the dancers, but the alternative—boredom, hunger, homelessness—was worse.
DeVillier had been making a name for himself in Minnesota’s dance marathon circuit even before the economic crisis spread nationwide. One 1928 marathon pamphlet noted that he “knocked the folks stiff at Brainerd (Minnesota) when he wobbled about the floor for 443 hours.” But desperate times called for more desperate dancing. Unemployed in 1932, DeVillier recruited his landlord’s daughter Vonnie Kuchinski to travel with him to the Boston suburb of Somerville for what turned out to be a historic event. (Boston proper could not host the contest, since the mayor had banned marathon dancing eight years earlier, after 27-year-old Homer Morehouse collapsed and died after an event.) In a theater-turned-dance-hall, DeVillier and Kuchinski performed a combination of glorified walking and intense bouts of spirited dancing every day, around the clock, from December until June. Rest time was cut from 15 minutes to three minutes per hour for the last two weeks of the contest. The unthinkably long marathon was a popular attraction, and late-night traffic from out-of-town spectators led local politicians to ban dance marathons—before the contest even ended. The final 52 hours of the marathon were danced nonstop. It’s not clear how long other competitors lasted, but on June 3, 1933, DeVillier and Kuchinski took home the $1,000 prize.
This prize money—and perhaps the glory of the record—seemed to satisfy DeVillier, as he doesn’t appear to have danced in any more contests. The partners were even briefly married, perhaps riding the high of the victory. But by that time, dance marathons were already beginning to fall out of favor. Fewer and fewer people could spare the entrance fee. As the novelty wore off, the prosperity and relative liberalism of the 1920s had given way to the austerity and moralizing of the Depression. Dancing was considered a corrupting influence by some, and lawmakers across the country moved to ban the events. Promoters tried taming the contests by calling them “walkathons” (an appellation that endures today) and pursued wholesome sponsorships, but the practice was more or less gone as World War II approached. “[W]ith another World War looming ... industry had revived and people were going back to work,” writes Martin. “Who had time to sit around for hours watching people move in a circle on a dance floor?”
In 1957, after a divorce, a second marriage, and stints working as a dance instructor, construction worker, and bartender, DeVillier opened a hair salon in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. His accomplishment was probably little-known, as dance marathons remained largely out of public consciousness until 1969, when the movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? chronicled the fad. Four years later, students at Penn State University held a “clean” version of a dance marathon: a contest capped at 30 hours that raised $2,000 for children with disabilities. By the 1990s, dance marathons and walkathons had become accepted as a common form of fundraiser.
DeVillier didn’t live to see the legacy of dance/walk marathon redeemed, and he barely got to see his accomplishment recognized. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? attributed the record he helped set to other dancers, so he wrote to the Guinness Book of World Records, which acknowledged his win shortly before his death in 1973. Even so, DeVillier used his headstone to make sure that no one forgot his 3,780-hour feat of weary staggering. (Kuchinski’s grave, in nearby New Brighton, makes no mention of it.) Since the 1970s, Guinness has revised their guidelines to define marathon dancing as being completely nonstop, which expunged the pair from their annals. That leaves the tombstone as the only testament to the record-breaking performance.
But a new circulation system is making things better.
When British archaeologist Howard Carter cracked into Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, he was dazzled by the contents—“Gem-Studded Relics in Egyptian Tomb Amaze Explorers,” The New York Times declared—but he wasn’t especially impressed by its walls. The resting place of the young ruler is humble compared to others in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings—four rooms occupying 9,762 cubic feet, less than a quarter of the size of the burial site of Ramesses V and VI. Conservators have remarked that the paintings on the thin clay plaster covering the rough-cut walls of the burial chamber show numerous drips and other signs of haste; the tomb was likely prepared quickly, since the ruler died young. Carter once characterized the scenes depicting Tut’s funeral procession and the journey of his successor, Ay, as “rough, conventional, and severely simple.”
Tourists haven’t seemed to mind the rush job on the walls—in fact, they have been utterly entranced. Just before the 2011 Egyptian revolution, several hundred people per day squeezed into the confined spaces. Each and every one of those visitors had inconvenient but unavoidable habits: namely, breathing and sweating. In those cramped subterranean quarters, moisture is the enemy.
Visitors can mean all sorts of trouble for historic sites. Footsteps can quake fragile, old structures, and people have a tendency to leave behind scribbled musings and wads of gum. Even the lightest-trodding, most respectful visitor presents passive problems. In Tut’s tomb, “visitors increase relative humidity, elevate carbon dioxide levels, and along with natural ventilation into the tomb, promote the entry of fine airborne particles,” wrote researchers, led by the Getty Conservation Institute’s Lori Wong, a wall paintings expert, in a 2018 paper in Studies in Conservation.
In partnership with Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities, Getty conservators just wrapped a nearly decade-long conservation project to guard the tomb against the impact of heavy-breathing, heavy-sweating visitors. (The tomb remained open to the sweaty masses nearly the whole time.) Before they began, the team had to quantify just how bad the problem was. The researchers installed a suite of monitors to track air temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, and other environmental factors. In 2009—the first year of data collection—relative humidity inside peaked at 70 percent in September, one of the desert’s most sweltering months. (Meanwhile, humidity averaged less than half of that just outside the tomb.) The mean temperature indoors hovered around 80 degrees Fahrenheit all year long; National Geographiconce described the environment inside as “almost tropical.” It was impossible to pin down the precise levels of carbon dioxide because the air in there routinely maxed out the sensor, which went up to 3,500 ppm—roughly ten times higher than the concentration outside, according to conservators.
It wasn’t a pretty picture. Visitors brought in dust that fell like snow on the glass case holding Tut’s sarcophagus. On the wall paintings, the dust made the humidity problem more troublesome, because it could “encourage moisture uptake, damaging paint layers, and can cement itself to the surfaces, making it difficult to remove,” the authors wrote. Fluctuating humidity levels—seasonally or over the course of a day—can cause the plaster beneath the paint to expand and contract, threatening the integrity of the painted scenes. Carbon dioxide wasn’t a concern for the wall paintings, but rather “a serious contributory factor to visitor health and comfort,” says Neville Agnew, a specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute and a project leader. Perspiration and respiration were among the main culprits.
Damp, musty humans have caused problems for painted surfaces around the world. Some 700 years ago, Giotto bedecked the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel, in Padua, Italy, with frescoes. “The frescoes’ chief enemies are the excessive number of visitors, which have averaged 350,000 annually in recent years, and the air from outside,” architect Gianfranco Martinoni, charged with restoring the works, told the International Herald Tribune in 2000. “The moisture emitted by human bodies and breathing combines with airborne dust and other pollutants to produce an acidic chemical reaction that is literally eating into the surface of the paintings.”
To protect them, the conservators installed a series of chambers that guests have to pass through before stepping into the chapel. These spaces filter the air and remove dust before it has a chance to blow around and land on the paintings. Conservators at the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City ran with a similar concept when stiff-necked visitors to Michelangelo’s 500-year-old paintings neared an astonishing six million a year. The crew did everything from lowering temperatures, to laying down debris-grabbing carpets, to installing vents to “suck dust from clothes and bodies” to keep the damage from human moisture to a minimum, the Vatican Museums’ director, Antonio Paolucci, said in 2012. By 2015, the filtration system also helped cut the carbon dioxide by half, Vatican conservator Vittoria Cimino told Reuters.
One tactic for protecting Tut's tomb was to redirect some of the bodies and mouths elsewhere—specifically, to a meticulously fashioned replica of the tomb, a bit more than a mile away. Every nook and cranny was photographed and scanned. "Every bit of micro bacteria is in its place, every crack, every flake of paint," artist Adam Lowe—whose company Factum Arte spent five years assembling the project—told National Geographic. "It's effectively like a portrait, or a performance, of the tomb from when we recorded it in 2009."
At the original tomb, to keep the paintings safe, the researchers set a goal to cap the maximum relative humidity at 60 percent, and to limit the daily fluctuation in relative humidity to no more than 20 percent. (A relative humidity range of 40 to 60 percent is often a target for museums, but “we have a different situation," in the desert environment, Wong says.) For visitors’ sake, the team aimed to cap carbon dioxide at 1,500 ppm. They were also happy to find that a smattering of potentially worrisome brown splotches turned out to be dead microbes, and weren’t a concern in the humid conditions.
To reach these goals, they installed a ventilation system. The machine “supplies filtered ‘clean’ air at the south end of the visitor platform and then extracts the ‘dirty’ air at the north end, thus enveloping the visitors in the antechamber and limiting spread of the dirty air into the burial chamber,” the authors wrote in the 2018 paper. The team saw promising results shortly after it was installed in 2015. By 2016, they were recording relative humidity of 25 percent in the winter and spring, and 29 percent in the summer/autumn—a massive improvement. Daily humidity swings were also less marked.
But, because of the revolution and safety concerns, visitorship was way down, too—from 14.7 million visitors to Egypt in 2009 to 5.4 million in 2016—and this complicated the picture. Tourism appears to be rebounding, though it’s still below previous levels. The ventilation system is designed to handle a steady stream of visitors, but its current successes are products of “a current environment in which reduced visitation has already decreased the moisture and carbon dioxide in the tomb,” the authors wrote.
So what happens as foot traffic picks up? A new viewing platform keeps visitors farther from the wall paintings, and new floors limit the dust people track in. And, if conservators get their way, fewer people will cram into the space at once. In the 2018 paper, Wong and her team recommend no more than 20 visitors at a time, staying for roughly 10 minutes each. (The recommendation “will be refined as data are accumulated,” Agnew says, and the Ministry of Antiquities staff is tasked with managing visitor numbers and monitoring the condition of the tomb.)
In any case, the Getty team doesn’t anticipate an outcry from visitors. A new sign outside describes the impact guests can have on the tomb, and Agnew says that people are sympathetic to its fragility. “Our experience at other sites indicates that there is acceptance if the reasons for restrictions are made apparent,” Agnew says. Plus, when visitors do get in, they’ll have a good view because the viewing platform “was actually extended further into the burial chamber than previously to provide a better vantage of the wall paintings” while keeping people away from direct contact, Wong says. If you do go, try to play it cool—and maybe let the place take your breath away, at least for a moment or two.
Nothing like getting surprise hate mail from a would-be lover on February 14.
In the 1840s, hopeful American and British lovers sent lacy valentines with cursive flourishes and lofty poems by the thousands. But what to do if you didn’t love the person who had set their eyes on you?
In the Victorian era, there was no better way to let someone know they were unwanted than with the ultimate insult: the vinegar valentine. Also called penny dreadfuls or “comic valentines,” these unwelcome notes were sometimes crass and always a bit emotionally damaging in the anti-spirit of Valentine’s Day.
Vinegar valentines were commercially bought postcards that were less beautiful than their love-filled counterparts, and contained an insulting poem and illustration. They were sent anonymously, so the receiver had to guess who hated him or her; as if this weren’t bruising enough, the recipient paid the postage on delivery. In Civil WarHumor, Cameron C. Nickels wrote that vinegar valentines were “tasteless, even vulgar,” and were sent to “drunks, shrews, bachelors, old maids, dandies, flirts, and penny pinchers, and the like.” He added that in 1847, sales between love-minded valentines and these sour notes were split at a major New York valentine publisher.
Some vinegar valentines were playful or sarcastic, and sold as comic valentines to soldiers—but many could really sting. “Lady Shoppers” and salesmen were sent or handed vinegar valentines admonishing their values; some vinegar valentines called physicians names like “Doctor Sure-Death” (a character who ran expensive bills), and others chided the “stupid postman” who was sending the note. One vinegar valentine titled “Old Maid” and reprinted by Orange Coast magazine in 1984, is more than a little harsh:
“’Tis all in vain your simpering looks, You never can incline, With all your bustles, stays and curls, To find a Valentine.”
The women's suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th century brought another class of vinegar valentines, targeting women who fought for the right to vote. While only a small percentage of mean-spirited cards were devoted to suffragists, Kenneth Florey argues in American Woman Suffrage Postcards that “it is clear from their context that an interest in women’s rights was an inherent part of one’s distorted personality.” These cards depicted such women as ugly abusers. It isn’t known whether these were sent directly to troll women’s rights activists or if they were sent to like-minded friends who disagreed with the movement.
Suffragists did have their own pro-women’s rights valentines to pass around on February 14. Florey wrote that one threw shade on anti-suffragists with the phrase “no vote, no kiss.” But, in light of the supposed unattractiveness of suffragists (according to men), many 19th-century women enticed their would-be lovers by sending cards that denied support of the women’s rights cause. One of these cards, quoted by Florey, depicted a pretty woman surrounded by hearts, with a plain appeal: “In these wild days of suffragette drays, I’m sure you’d ne’er overlook a girl who can’t be militant, but simply loves to cook.”
Many vinegar valentines from the late 19th century were drawn by Charles Howard, who put ridiculous caricatures of the sorry recipient in full color. An issue of Kindergarten Primary Magazine from 1895 worried about the moral implications of these cards for children; a teacher from Iowa wrote that she staved off the “desire to send vulgar valentines” by telling students stories from St. Valentine’s treacherous life. The magazine said that teachers must do what they could to help “make it a day for kind remembrance than a day for wrecking revenge.”
Valentines and vinegar valentines alike were once a booming business; in 1905 San Francisco, 25,000 valentines were delayed because of overworked clerks. The more surly cards weren’t always welcomed by postmasters, however—another 25,000 valentines were held in a Chicago post office for being unfit to send, due to the many rude and vinegar valentines in the haul.
As valentines declined in lieu of expensive dinners or gifts, the vinegar valentine became less popular, though in some locations in the 1970s, they were still selling well. While some might mourn the romantic February 14 of the past with its long poems and declarations of love, it’s also much less likely we’ll get a nasty note in the mail as a Valentine’s surprise.
Pine Island Glacier calved icebergs in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018—and now, another one is getting ready to break free.
Down in the notoriously vulnerable ice sheet of West Antarctica, Pine Island Glacier seems to be breaking up faster than ever, and it’s looking like 2019 might be another busy year. The ice shelf calved major icebergs in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018—and now, another one is getting ready to break free.
The instability of this glacier is not just bad for the southernmost continent. It is bad for the globe. This glacier is contributing more to sea level rise than any other in Antarctica. New research has shown that since 1979, Pine Island Glacier has lost 58 billion tons of ice per year, which makes it the biggest loser of the continent. Combined with its unstable neighbor, Thwaites Glacier, these glaciers are contributing one millimeter per decade to global sea level rise.
While large ice masses can appear solid, they are actually complicated, dynamically flowing systems. Miles-thick glaciers sit on the Antarctic continent as their ice slowly flows out to sea, creating a floating ice shelf that can calve icebergs. While this movement is a normal process, the frequent calving of icebergs and glacial landward retreat can indicate something out of the ordinary is happening. As the floating ice shelves retreat and shrink, the pressure on the land-based glacier gets relieved, allowing it to flow faster towards the ocean where it can then melt and cause sea level rise.
Thanks to satellite data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite network, NASA’s Landsat satellite network, and NASA IceBridge reconnaissance flights, the acceleration of Pine Island Glacier has been monitored for decades from the sky. As far as the recent history of this glacier goes, in 2016, a rift started forming across the 22-mile-wide main trunk of the Pine Island ice shelf and eventually calved an iceberg called B-44 a year later in September 2017. Another rift appeared in September 2018, and only one month later, iceberg B-46 was calved from the glacier.
These icebergs may look small on the satellite images, but they are tens to hundreds of square miles in size. The most recent B-46 iceberg was over 70 square miles in area (by comparison, Manhattan is just over 22 square miles). This iceberg was seen by human eyes for the first time during a NASA IceBridge flight on November 7, 2018.
In December 2018, Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist from the British Antarctic Survey, pointed out on Twitter that the Sentinel-1 satellite clearly captured an actively forming rift only weeks after B-46 calved. “There is a fair chance we will see another calving event this year,” says Larter in early 2019. “You can see the fragments [in the satellite images] of the previous icebergs haven’t gone very far, so now there are a lot of icebergs stored up to come out of Pine Island Bay.”
Stef Lhermitte, an assistant professor of geoscience and remote sensing at Delft University of Technology, agrees: “We expect this new rift to result in a major calving event in weeks, months, or in maximum one-and-a-half years.”
Before this marathon of iceberg calving since 2013, Pine Island only calved one iceberg every six years. This animation made by Lhermitte shows that the calving front, the line where the icebergs break off the ice shelf, has moved drastically landward. “In 2015, the calving event took the front 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) further back then it had ever been before,” notes Larter.
An ice shelf can be like a slow car in traffic, says Lhermitte, because all the cars (or ice) behind it get stuck and have to slow down, too. Once the slow car gets out of the way, the cars behind it can accelerate again. But in the case of a glacier flowing out to sea, moving slowly isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“The ice shelf additionally slows down the ice movement because it is connected to the ocean floor,” Lhermitte explains. “In 2015, we saw that the ice shelf lost connection with one of these pinning points on the ocean floor.” The ice shelf had been losing contact with this pinning point for years, but it was completely lost after the 2015 calving event. Even though this seems alarming, the observational data need to be looked at as a whole, says Lhermitte: “An individual calving event does not mean anything, but over time we can see the front is receding. I don’t think we have any observational records of the ice front being that far back.”
Why all the sudden breakups? A 2016 study showed that the rifts from where these recent icebergs began to crack were relatively far inland, which is not a great sign, as it means the ice is being warmed by ocean water. In general, glacial ice gets thinner when more of the ice melts during the summer than gets replaced by snowfall in the winter. For decades, Pine Island Glacier has been thinning drastically, at some points up to 16 feet per year, because of warm water that resides deep in the Amundsen Sea near the glacier. This warm, salty water is part of the Circumpolar Deep Water, a water mass that brings heat, salt, and nutrients to the continental shelves of Antarctica. This water mass is flowing along the continental shelf and directly contacting the glacier.
The direct contact between this warm water mass and the glacier doesn’t occur in most places in Antarctica, Larter says, but he notes that something different is happening near Pine Island Glacier. “The warm water is flowing along the deep troughs that have been eroded out of the sea floor by glaciers themselves when the ice sheet used to extend out further,” he says. “It’s no surprise when you put warm water in contact with the base of an ice shelf you get melt.”
The dynamics of the glacier and ice mass loss are complex, Lhermitte says, and it is difficult to expressly attribute any specific event to climate change—but what is happening is exceptional for this area. “There is something going on in this area of Antarctica,” says Lhermitte. “This is the hotspot where Antarctica is losing most of its ice. The question that still remains is: How fast will it go and how much ice will it lose?”
On Valentine’s Day 1994, protestors in Hollywood turned out to eulogize the Brown Derby.
When buildings are knocked down, people often don’t let them go without a fight. This week, we’re remembering some particularly contentious demolitions.
The pallbearers gathered on the sidewalk, their hands gripping the flower-strewn casket and their heads capped with bowler hats. One man hoisted a sign in the air. It was shaped like a tombstone, but read a bit like a death certificate. It diagnosed the building’s cause of death as heartsickness, compounded by years of neglect.
It was February 14, 1994—“a Valentine's Day heartbreak,” the Los Angeles Times reported, for Hollywood preservationists watching a beloved outpost of a restaurant chain tumble down before their eyes. The crowd, donning jaunty chapeaus, had assembled amid the rattling chorus of tractors, bulldozers, and drills to mourn the loss of the Brown Derby restaurant on Vine Street.
Many locations of the iconic California chain were known for a kooky architectural conceit: restaurants in the shape of brown hats. The Vine Street eatery looked bland by comparison—though a hat-shaped sign did glow atop the roof—but it was particularly famous for what happened inside the wood-paneled dining room. There, gossip flowed like water. Agents and reporters had hobnobbed over cocktails; Marlene Dietrich once strolled through the restaurant in deliciously scandalizing slacks; Clark Gable wooed Carole Lombard in a cozy booth, over brimming drinks and hearty meat swimming in sauce.
Demolition had been progressing for the past few weeks. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. A lease dispute had prompted the restaurant to stop serving nearly a decade earlier. While it sat shuttered, the building was badly damaged by a series of fires; then, when it was shaken by the Northridge earthquake—which splintered freeways, exploded gas mains, and killed dozens of people in January 1994— local officials deemed it beyond repair. “We tried to save the building, but the Building and Safety Department declared in an imminent hazard, and a threat to public safety,” Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg told the L.A. Times.
They chose Valentine’s Day as a poignant moment to mourn, but their lovesick laments were too late. The building kept coming down. “It's ironic that Disney World just contacted us about building a replica,” Christine O’Brien, a member of the Hollywood Heritage organization, told the L.A. Timesa few days before the theatrical funeral. Once this restaurant was ripped down, the L.A. version would “exist only in fantasy,” O’Brien continued. “And isn't that Hollywood?"
A "plant explorer" helped establish the crop in California.
In 1979, a group of Iranian college students stormed the American Embassy in Tehran, where they took dozens of hostages. The resulting crisis dominated relations between the two countries, influencing politics for generations. But the tensions proved a boon for American pistachio production. When the American government slapped a retaliatory embargo on Iranian pistachios, California’s nascent pistachio industry exploded, to the point that Iran and the U.S. now are neck and neck for the accolade of the world's top producer.
From a botanical perspective, this was a remarkable turnaround. Because only half a century earlier, a “plant explorer” named William E. Whitehouse had seeded the entire industry. In what is now considered “the single most successful plant introduction to the United States in the 20th century,” he traveled to Iran and brought back one very important seed.
While areas in Syria, Turkey, and Sicily have long produced pistachios, Iran’s climate is uniquely suited to the finicky crop. That’s because pistachio trees like extreme conditions—many varieties have deep roots and thick leaves that allow them to grow in hot, drought-prone areas, but they simultaneously require cold winters to fruit. According to Louise Ferguson, a pomologist and pistachio expert at UC Davis, the trees can survive in saline soils that other fruit trees would find insupportable.
The Iranian town of Rafsanjan, in the province of Kerman, is a pistachio-producing powerhouse. It’s desert-like climate and high, chill-inducing altitude make it ideal for pistachios. Most Iranian pistachio farmers hail from Rafsanjan, says Leili Afsah Hejri, a food scientist who specializes in pistachio machinery at the University of Merced. She herself is the fifth generation of a pistachio-producing family from the town.
This concentration of nut knowledge points to another difficulty. Pistachio trees take about a decade to mature, and after they do, many pistachios only produce their trailing bundles of fruit in alternate years. Growing this nut is an investment. (Also, the pistachios we eat aren’t true nuts; they’re seeds.)
These unique requirements are what make pistachios more expensive than most other “nuts.” In fact, they only came to the United States in the late-19th century with Middle Eastern immigrants to New York. But they were imported as “edible nuts,” says Ferguson, “so those were processed and non-fertile.” For decades, imported pistachios were dyed red, as part of an effort to hide blotches. Companies loaded them into train and bus station vending machines, where snackers paid a nickel for a dozen. For years, these vending machines accounted for the vast majority of pistachios sold in the United States.
The botanically inclined experimented with planting the precious trees in the American South and California. But the true start to pistachio domination came with the founding of the Chico New Plant Introduction Station in the early 20th century. Paraphrasing a favorite sci-fi quote, Ferguson says that part of the USDA’s goal is to explore “new worlds” of plants. In 1929, the station sent William E. Whitehouse, a deciduous tree researcher, to Iran. His mission: to collect pistachio seeds for planting.
For six months, Whitehouse searched, gradually collecting 20 pounds of different pistachios. Some came from the Agah family in Rafsanjan, who, Hejri notes, is still the main producer of pistachios in the area. After Whitehouse’s return to Chico, the station planted and evaluated 3,000 trees. Only one pistachio rose above the others. Sourced from the Agah orchard, it was given the name “Kerman.”
“That became the basis of our industry,” says Ferguson. Its virtues are many. “They’re round in shape, they’re unstained and clean-shelled, firm, crispy, purple and yellowish-green kerneled … ” Hejri rhapsodises. Provided with a nearby male “Peters” tree for fertilization, the Kerman would become the American pistachio. A female mother tree at the Chico research station, planted around 1931, became the source of “all commercial pistachio trees in California,” writes journalist Eric Hansen. In Iran, more than 50 varieties are cultivated, not counting the great number of wild pistachios. But even today, the vast majority of California’s pistachio trees are Kerman.
Eventually, California’s San Joaquin Valley would become the Rafsanjan of America. Summer temperatures in the national breadbasket can be roasting, but the “winter fogs serve the same purpose that chill from altitude served in Iran,” Ferguson notes.
But progress was slow, and pistachio planting stayed small-scale for decades. Whitehouse kept his eye on the pistachio as a potential money crop for California, publishing a paper on the subject in 1957. He noted that while the Iranian pistachio had been an important local crop for hundreds of years, its value as an export was recognized only in the first half of the 20th century, “with new plantings keeping pace with the rapid increase in American consumption.” But despite the demand, it took two more decades for the first commercial crop of American pistachios to be harvested in 1976.
Yet the true reason for the success of the American pistachio was political, rather than botanical. In the early ‘70s, California growers turned to pistachio plantings when citrus and almond groves were increasingly taxed—an effort aided by the Central Valley Project bringing needed water. Then, a decade later, the friction with Iran resulted in sanctions on Iranian pistachios. “This California pistachio is brought to you courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service and the Shah of Iran,” the New York Timesnoted in 1979. Even after sanctions were lifted, Ferguson adds, the pistachio industry “organized very quickly and got a 300 percent tariff against the Iranian product.”
Whitehouse died in 1982, less than a decade after pistachios became a commercial crop. Though considered the father of the American pistachio industry, he’s never received much renown for his accomplishments. He did, however, have a pear (of all things) named in his honor, and received the first very-new Pistachio Association's Annual Achievement to Industry Award in 1977. That year, only 1,700 acres were planted with producing trees. By 2012, that number had ballooned to 178,000 acres. It seems like small pistachios in light of his accomplishment: laying the groundwork for an industry worth $1.6 billion in California alone, and finding a new home for an in-demand tree.
Imagine a situation in which an American defendant hires a British lawyer for a trial in an American courtroom. The accused then demands that a British interpreter be found. British-American legal interpreters are hard to find, so the demand could delay the case for years, possibly even long enough that the case has to be simply thrown out due to the statute of limitations—despite the fact that, obviously, a British lawyer is perfectly capable of being understood in an American courtroom.
This actually happens on a regular basis in the countries that once made up Yugoslavia. The language situation in the Balkans is so unusual that there is no consensus, either among native speakers or linguistic researchers, about what to even call the … thing people speak in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Outside the region, it’s usually referred to as “Serbo-Croatian,” but neither linguists nor the people who actually speak it like to call it that. When asked what language they speak as part of a census, some people in the Balkans simply mocked the question, writing “our language” or, its insensitivity probably owing to distance, “Eskimo.”
For 1,500 years, language in the Balkans has been a galvanizing force, a source of political identification, a blunt tool, a rallying cry. There are languages like it, but no language is treated in quite the same way.
The Balkan region is a peninsula stretching, roughly—depending on your definition—from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, south of Austria, Hungary, and Romania. The South Slavic region is merely a chunk of that, not including Greece and Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia left out Bulgaria and Albania. It’s a beautiful area, located right at the borders of many different empires throughout history. It was the meeting point for the Greeks and Romans, for the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians, for the Soviets and Western Europeans.
In the sixth century, the Slavs, who had probably originally lived in present-day Poland or Ukraine, began migrating both east and south, likely because of the infringing movements of competing Germanic groups. The Slavs ended up in three basic branches: West (Czech, Polish, Slovakian), East (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian), and South, into the Balkans. The South Slavs settled down and broke into many different groups—much like people all over Europe during the the medieval period—with a bunch of kingdoms and fiefdoms, all very fluid and subject to change by invasion or marriage or war. “Serbs like to look back on the medieval kingdom of Serbia, which got pretty big, way down into Greece and Macedonia,” says Wayles Browne, a linguistics professor at Cornell University who specializes in the language of the Balkans.
At this point, being separate from the other two main Slavic groups, you’d expect the language spoken by the South Slavs to start differentiating itself. It did, but it was hardly left alone to evolve naturally. Two branches of Christianity ended up basically dividing up the region: Catholic to the west, Orthodox to the east. Religion wielded huge power over language and literature at the time. The Catholic parts generally used Latin letters, while the Orthodox parts at first used various alphabets, often one for each region, to match local dialects; these were often created by church officials, either based on historical lettering or invented out of whole cloth. The Greeks ended up with their own alphabet, as did the Armenians and the Georgians.
But in church services, which were incredibly influential on most aspects of culture, the language used was what’s now called Old Church Slavonic, developed in Bulgaria and probably based on a Slavic dialect spoken at the time in modern-day Greece. An alphabet for this language was created in a Bulgarian literary school, and based sort of on the Greek letters. That alphabet was Cyrillic, which today is used for Russian, Mongolian, Ukrainian, and various other languages. If you think you’re confused now …
Old Church Slavonic spread throughout the Balkans before making its way north and east to other Slavic lands, but it was definitely a Balkan language first, and served to bring the South Slavs together. Prior to this, there wasn’t much to connect a Croat and a Serb; they lived in different kingdoms, had different lives. But Old Church Slavonic, even though it was not spoken on the street, was a unifying force, a source of shared words and experiences.
You can think of Old Church Slavonic, and later Church Slavonic, as serving the same purpose as Latin in the Catholic Church, or Hebrew in Judaism. Church languages unite different communities, sometimes very disparate ones, even without being a native language for members. Old Church Slavonic differs in that it actually developed out of the languages people spoke in the Balkans, making it both easier to learn and allowing it to serve as more of a connective tissue for the region. It wasn’t a precursor of Serbo-Croatian, exactly, but it was a factor that allowed Serbo-Croatian to be born.
Starting in the 14th century, huge neighboring empires moved into the Balkans to annex it, piece by piece. The Byzantines, and later the Ottomans, controlled most of Serbia and Bosnia from their base in what is now Turkey. The Austro-Hungarian Empire took Croatia and Slovenia. The Ottomans promoted a multiethnic society (albeit with bonuses for anyone who converted to Islam; many, especially in Bosnia, did), leading to the flourishing of various minority groups, including Sephardic Jews.
It’s worth mentioning that the Balkan states have always been diverse. The division of ethnicities among the countries is not now and never has been clear. There are minority Serbian populations in Croatia, Hungarians in northern Serbia, Albanians in Macedonia, and many, many more. Some of these groups speak minority languages and some don’t. It’s far too complex to fully get into every one of these, so this article focuses on what is commonly called Serbo-Croatian, which in some form or another is the official language of most of the Balkan states.
Anyway! Back to the 14th century. You might expect the languages spoken in these various empires to be different, and they were, but it wasn’t as cleanly split along geographic lines as one might think. Turkish and Hungarian loanwords are very common in the modern Balkan language. Because the Ottomans were essentially hands-off in terms of language, and because the empires themselves were constantly changing borders, the entire region essentially evolved together. People in different parts of the Balkans wouldn’t necessarily have been able to communicate perfectly, but there were enough commonalities among the dialects that most would have been able to interact in basic ways. Some parts were more homogenous linguistically than others; Bosnia was fairly consistent throughout, while Croatia had larger differences between its coastal, inland, and island populations.
The French Revolution kicked off a trend of European nationalism, and formerly separate kingdoms came together to create nations. A national language became a major part of what this idea of a “nation” even was. In France, Germany, and elsewhere, academies and agencies were formed to iron out what the national language should be, and ensure that it was taught in schools, that books were written in it, and that local dialects would fade away.
Over in the Balkans, nation-fever hit just as hard. A Serbian revolution kicked off in 1804, and while rebels were trying to overthrow the Ottomans in Belgrade, a Serbian named Vuk Karadžić went to Vienna. Vuk, as he’s usually called, is probably the most important linguist in Serbia’s history. He began collecting folk songs and epic poems, and used what he learned of the way “common people” spoke to craft an entirely new version of standardized Serbian. He changed the Cyrillic alphabet and spelling to be more accommodating to the way Serbs actually conversed, wrote the first modern Serbian dictionary in 1818 under his new rules, and translated the Bible. His work was based on one dialect, called Štokavian, which was spoken in most of Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and northeastern Croatia.
When the Serbs finally declared independence (Serbia had been largely independent since 1835, but wasn’t officially recognized until in 1878), the country finally got the ability to do all that fun nationalism stuff, and there was external pressure to do so. Hungary was just to the north and wanted to push its newly standardized language to other regions, putting linguistic pressure on Serbia. The national language was a top priority, and Vuk’s dictionary was basically the best option. So the country adopted it.
In 1830, Croatia was under the control of the Habsburgs in Austria, and not happy about the Germanization of the region. A writer, editor, and linguist named Ljudevit Gaj created a Latin alphabet designed to help Croats write the way they actually spoke, as well. There are sounds in the Balkan language that needed addressing: accents, standardized spelling, decisions on which letter would represent which sound. Gaj, in 1835, did something very bold: He began printing one of his newspapers in his own Latin alphabet, using a language based heavily on Štokavian—Vuk’s Serbian language. Gaj was a proponent of the Illyrian movement, aiming to unify the South Slavs against the Habsburgs. He was incredibly influential, and this one decision was momentous in terms of uniting the South Slavs: Their languages had never been closer together.
Before Vuk and Gaj, the populations of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia spoke a variety of dialects, generally related but certainly not standardized. Those two linguists had modernized and standardized a single one of those dialects. But the east-west divide, and the reason the language is now sometimes known as Serbo-Croatian, had less to do with minor differences in idiom, pronunciation, and vocabulary, and more with the chosen alphabet. Vuk did most of the pioneering work in creating the Cyrillic Serbian alphabet, but Croatia, being Catholic and Austrian rather than Orthodox and recently freed from the Ottomans, didn’t use Cyrillic. Instead, Gaj did a one-to-one mapping of his new Latin alphabet with Vuk’s Cyrillic. Educated youngsters ended up having to learn two alphabets for essentially one language; in fact, they still do.
We’re concerned with language, so we’ll skip through the part where the Balkan countries literally started World War I, created a short-lived Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (now sometimes called “the first Yugoslavia”), and then barely survived World War II. Not a whole lot changed linguistically during this period. The fact that the Serbs and Croats were finally joined together in a kingdom did further cement the Vuk/Gaj language as, if not an official language, the most commonly spoken. (Slovenia has always had a separate language. Theirs evolved from a different South Slavic dialect than the one Vuk and Gaj used. It’s in the same family, sort of like Spanish and Portuguese.)
In 1945, Josip Broz Tito succeeded in creating Yugoslavia, a federation of six states: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Later, two semi-autonomous parts of Serbia—Kosovo and the Vojvodina—would get state-like voting rights, for a total of eight.
“Under Tito, Yugoslavia started out with a fairly liberal language policy,” says Browne. “Slovenians can use Slovenian, Macedonians can use Macedonian.” Macedonian, like Slovenian, is in the same general family of South Slavic languages as Serbo-Croatian, but isn’t the same, it’s actually closely related to Buglarian. There was, in short, no national language at the beginning of Tito’s Yugoslavia.
But over the decades of Yugoslavia’s existence, divisions began to widen, and soon Tito cracked down on the use of any language that promoted nationalism of any of the individual Yugoslav states. “You'd see things in certain newspapers for or against certain words—is it okay to use this word, yes it is or no it isn't,” says Browne. Browne says that local linguists even became celebrities, of a sort, for their writing and thinking about language. Sometimes censorship was clear-cut. The word časnik, for example, simply means “officer,” but that was the word used in Croatia prior to the creation of Yugoslavia. The approved word is oficir, and people actually went to jail for using the wrong word. Other banned terms were more nebulous. Perhaps a noted Serbian nationalist liked one word, and therefore that word could not be used by anyone.
Upon the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1992, the newly independent countries declared their own national languages. For some, like Slovenia and Macedonia, this made sense. They really did speak a different language than the other countries. But Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Croatia all declared their own separate national languages. “There is no doubt that Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, and Montenegrins have a common language, but in all four countries, the laws are framed as if they speak four different languages,” said Snježana Kordić, a prominent Croatian linguist, in a talk on the subject she gave last year.
There is a peculiar form of theater going on in the Balkans today, this suggests, where the governments pretend that the language spoken by their immediate neighbors (and former fellow Yugoslavs) is completely different from their own. Criminals frequently demand interpreters in court, and a lack of interpreters has led to a huge backlog of criminal cases. Bosnia, being sort of in the middle of the peninsula and always having been pretty diverse, has three official languages: Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. To this day, children in school are put in different, language-specific classrooms, theoretically because of what they speak, but really for ethnic reasons. The children are sometimes separated by chain-link fence. They speak through it, and while one might theoretically be speaking in Bosnian and the other in Serbian, understand each other perfectly well.
In Croatia, censors have since the 1990s monitored the language used in textbooks and the media, ostensibly for language that opposes the purity of the Croatian language. In practice, this tends to be arbitrary; the language spoken in these Balkan states is so intertwined that it can be very difficult to distinguish between “Croatian” and “Serbian” words.
Some word differences are very obvious. In Serbia, the word for bread is hleb, compared with kruh Croatia. But those are exceptions; hleb is to kruh as truck is to lorry (in American and British English). In general, the languages look like this, a translation of the phrase “universal declaration of human rights,” from Quartz:
Croatian: Opća deklaracija o pravima čovjeka Bosnian: Opća deklaracija o pravima čovjeka Serbian: Opšta deklaracija o pravima čov(j)eka Montenegrin: Univerzalna deklaracija o ljudskim pravima
Montenegrin looks pretty different there, but it’s not as drastic as it seems. In both Serbian and Croatian, there’s a synonym for “universal” that looks quite a bit like the Montenegrin univerzalna (it’s univerzalan in Croatian). Same with ljudskim and čovjeka; the former is understood by all languages to mean “human,” while the latter is more like “mankind.”
By virtue of very recent conflicts, there is perhaps more animosity among these four countries than between, say, Australia and the United States. So using a word, intonation, or phrase that highlights these national differences could, depending on the situation, result in a raised eyebrow, a fistfight, or nothing at all.
Does it make sense for those of us outside the region to think of them as one language—Serbo-Croatian—or four different ones, or a series of dialects, or something else entirely?
In 2017, a group of linguists in Sarajevo signed what they called a “Declaration of Common Language,” insisting that all four languages are actually one. Sort of. What the declaration actually says is that the language spoken by these four countries is a polycentric or pluricentric (the terms mean the same thing) language.
A pluricentric language is a single language with different standardized variations, usually codified in different countries. English is one—Americans, Brits, and Australians, among others, have all declared that we speak English, because we can all basically understand each other. If pressed, we might say we speak “American English,” and each country has its own language rules, which vary slightly. There are different dictionaries; Brits do not use Merriam-Webster, for example, because those dictionaries are specifically for American English. But if the definition of a language is a system that allows people to communicate, well, we all clearly speak the same language.
The language of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro is, these linguists declared, simply a pluricentric language. Normally such a position wouldn’t be that big of a deal. After all, who really cares what a bunch of linguists think?
But forcefully demarcating the way people in these countries speak as four different languages has serious social effects. From the declaration: “These include using language as an argument justifying the segregation of schoolchildren in some multiethnic environments, unnecessary ‘translation’ in administration or the media, inventing differences where they do not exist, bureaucratic coercion, as well as censorship (and necessarily also self-censorship), where linguistic expression is imposed as a criterion of ethnonational affiliation and a means of affirming political loyalty.”
The linguists have been fighting for years to end this language segregation, and the declaration is their latest, and most collaborative, effort. Their basic point—the presence of a pluricentric language in the Balkans—is not controversial to international linguists. The international community has even given awards to students who protested Bosnian school segregation. But within these four countries, opposition could be fierce and passionate.
Nationalists in Croatia and Serbia saw the declaration as a treasonous affront. Accusations of “Yugonostalgia”—a longing for the days of Yugoslavia, today something no politician wants to be accused of—were launched. A prominent Croatian linguist called it a “deliberate provocation” (in Croatian, of course, so possibly this is an inexact translation).
You might have noticed the struggle throughout this article to talk about this pluricentric language, and that’s because there is absolutely no consensus on what to call it. The name “Serbo-Croatian” is considered outdated, maybe even offensive, in the Balkans. Browne renamed his language course at Cornell in 2009 from “Serbo-Croatian” to “BCS,” for Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. Polls in each of the countries reveal no consensus, either. In Montenegro, about 40 percent of the population says they speak Serbian, and another 40 percent say Montenegrin, and a big chunk of the remainder say it’s the same freaking language.
There’s no easy solution here. If all the countries agreed that they spoke one language with some regional differences, perhaps practices such as school segregation would end—or maybe they would just find another excuse to continue the practice. I suggested to Browne that maybe the language should just be called “South Slavic.” A good suggestion, except for one serious problem: In these languages, that would translate as “Yugoslavic."
But a new demographic is keeping America's largest lutefisk company afloat.
Visit Olsen Fish Company in North Minneapolis, and Don Sobasky from marketing will offer you a heavy flannel shirt before you’ve even taken off your coat. Not because the heater’s broken, but because of the smell, he’ll explain, while gazing around the 119-year-old seafood processor’s headquarters.
The fish factory itself is inside a separate building on the other side of a parking lot. But the pungent scent of its cod and herring products has seeped over into the main office’s furniture and walls. If guests aren’t careful, their clothes catch the wharfside aroma. Ask Sobasky if his clothes reek after a long day on the job, and he’ll reply, “Well, they smell like money to me.”
Founded in 1910, Olsen Fish Company is the type of niche business that could only exist in the Upper Midwest, where millions of Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians forged new lives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For decades, the company has served as a cultural heritage lifeline, selling Scandinavian foods such as pickled herring, lingonberries, salt cod, and lefse, a thin potato bread. But Olsen’s most famous—or perhaps infamous—offering has always been lutefisk.
First described by Swedish scholar and archbishop Olaus Magnus in 1555, people have eaten lutefisk in Norway, Sweden, and parts of Finland for centuries, although its popularity has waxed and waned. Lutefisk, when translated from its original Norwegian, is self-explanatory: Lut means lye, and fisk is fish. To make it, dried cod is soaked in caustic lye solution for days, transforming it into quivering fillets.
Nobody quite knows who invented it; tales range from someone accidentally dropping a fish into a bowl of lye to “the Swedes trying to poison the Norwegians,” jokes Travis Dahl, a meat salesman at Ingebretsen's Nordic Marketplace in Minneapolis. Once rinsed, the mild-flavored meat is either baked or boiled, then smothered with everything from melted butter to sautéed onions and bacon bits. The smell can linger long after people clean their plates—an odor that’s the butt of many a Minnesotan grandpa joke.
While fragrant, lutefisk was practical. Early Scandinavians needed protein during their long, cold winters, and lye baths softened dried cod to a chewable consistency. When their descendants—including Olaf Olsen and John Norberg, the Norwegian founders of Olsen Fish Company—came to America, they brought lutefisk with them.
Some Midwestern lutefisk fans chow down on the food year-round. But more commonly, it’s eaten during the midwinter, particularly at Nordic fraternal lodges and Lutheran church suppers. Much of it is sourced from the Olsen Fish Company, which is North America’s largest lutefisk factory. Yet Olsen is one of just a handful of companies still making it: a sign of the delicacy’s decline in popularity.
Olsen president Chris Dorff says the factory produces approximately 400,000 pounds of lutefisk per year. This might sound like a lot, but it’s not for Olsen. “In the late ‘90s, we were probably [selling] half a million pounds,” Dorff says. 30 years ago, Sobasky adds, that number was closer to 800,000.
Olsen’s lutefisk sales are currently slipping at an annual rate of roughly six percent per year. On the whole, Scandinavian-Americans are gradually eating less lutefisk. Lutefisk’s wane can be chalked up to the old guard dying out as younger generations eschew it for tastier alternatives. Other factors include marriage to spouses not reared on lutefisk, and a decline in church attendance (meaning fewer Lutheran lutefisk suppers).
Though the future of its signature staple is unclear, Olsen Fish Company’s bottom line is still strong. As of November 2018, the 18-person business was raking in millions of dollars annually, with lutefisk comprising only 10 to 15 percent of the pie. Most of these sales are herring, which Dorff says appeals to a wide range of buyers. But he chalks up Olsen’s current success to Nigerian-Americans and other West African newcomers. These customers are swiftly supplanting Scandinavians as Olsen’s core customer base, guaranteeing as much as 25 percent of their income. Yet Olsen’s Nigerian clientele aren’t buying lutefisk or herring. Instead, they prefer the dried fish used to make lutefisk.
The reason for why goes back centuries. On northern Norway’s Lofoten Islands, fisheries have long dried fresh cod on wooden racks in the Arctic wind. This desiccation process takes several months, and results in preserved cod, or stockfish. Stockfish can be bathed in lye, becoming lutefisk, but Norwegians also export it sans chemical soak.
Stockfish was nutritious and hardy. It would “remain viable for years and when soaked in water would be reconstituted basically to its original state when caught,” explains Terje Leiren, professor emeritus of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington. This made it ideal for long sea voyages, thus indelibly tying it to the transatlantic slave trade—and to Norway, which was once part of a dual monarchy with Denmark. During voyages to the Danish West Indies, today’s United States Virgin Islands, stockfish-laden ships would stop in Nigeria.
Many centuries would pass, though, before stockfish became a West African mainstay. The turning point was the Nigerian Civil War, a bloody conflict in the late 1960s that triggered a humanitarian crisis. Norway shipped “many tons” of stockfish to the eastern secessionist state of Biafra to ease malnutrition, says Moses Ochonu, a professor of African history at Vanderbilt University.
Famine or no famine, stockfish fit into the preexisting culinary tradition. “This kind of intense, slightly fermented flavor was already part of traditional Nigerian cuisine,” Ochonu says. While fermented beans and nuts are used in dishes across the country to supply the desired taste, stockfish’s unique, pungent flavor can’t be provided by locally caught fish. Even better, it’s a protein source that keeps without refrigeration. (That said, Ochonu specifies, stockfish is still more common in eastern Nigerian food than in western and northern Nigeria.)
Today, stockfish is an essential ingredient in Nigerian cuisine, although for some it conjures painful wartime memories. Still imported from northern Norway, it’s cut into chunks, softened in boiling water, and used as a base for Nigerian soups and sauces such as efo riro, spinach soup, edikang ikong, a vegetable soup, and egusi, a soup made with melon seeds.
The Norwegian fish has caught on in other West African countries, too—and when chefs from the region move to the United States, they naturally want to recreate their favorite stockfish dishes. Some buy their fish from African grocery stores. Others rely on purveyors such as Olsen, which first began carrying stockfish nearly 20 years ago after a Nigerian local expressed interest. The gamble ended up paying in the long run. “Stockfish sales are going up quicker than the lutefisk sales are going down,” Dorff says. “It’s becoming a big part of what we do.”
Twin Cities resident Precious Ojika, who left Nigeria in 1989, had been ordering stockfish from Houston, Texas. Then, she discovered a purveyor in her own backyard. Hip to their shifting base, Olsen Fish Company had secured a booth at the Minnesota IgboFest, an annual Nigerian cultural event. Ojika spotted them there, and realized she “only had to drive 10 miles and pick it up. It was a dream come true.” Even though demand for Olsen’s premier product is on the wane, the company’s spirit is still alive and well. As always, it continues to serve immigrants homesick for familiar foods.
But while the future looks bright for the Olsen Fish Company, what’s the forecast looking like for lutefisk? It might not be selling much, yet its timeless quirk factor may ensure it sticks around among Scandinavian-Americans. “Lutefisk is the weird uncle in the room,” says Gary Legwold, author of The Last Word on Lutefisk: True Tales of Cod and Tradition. Scandinavians are stereotyped as stoic, he says “but just drop the word lutefisk—all you have to do is say the word—and suddenly the room perks up.” Though the jokes may start flying, Legwold concludes they will always lead to reactions of “Oh, I gotta try that.”
Researchers are using conflicting pieces to puzzle out what happened in 241 BC.
Just because a battle took place over 2,000 years ago doesn’t mean we can’t uncover what happened. A team of archaeologists exploring a Mediterranean site near Sicily is using their findings to piece together a narrative of the Battle of the Aegates Islands, a naval conflict between ancient Rome and Carthage.
According to Live Science, the team has been surveying the site for years, recovering six bronze ship rams, along with some helmets and pottery, in 2018 alone. As the findings have accumulated, they have both raised new questions and suggested new answers as to how the events of March 10, 241 BC played out.
It was already known, for example, that the Romans won the battle decisively, forcing the Carthaginians to evacuate Sicily, and collecting a Carthaginian payment of 2,200 talents to compensate for the Romans’ lost ships. The resounding Roman victory would suggest that most of the site’s shipwrecks would have belonged to Carthage—but so far, that has not been the case. In fact, 11 of the 19 rams identified at the site appear to have been Roman, according to William Murray, an historian of ancient Greece at the University of South Florida and a member of the research team. In addition, many of the helmets recovered at the site are in the “Montefortino” style associated with the Romans.
One way to explain this seeming contradiction is to propose, as Murray has, that the Carthaginian navy was using many Roman ships in this battle, as it had taken some 93 of them from a prior battle. The Montefortino helmets, meanwhile, may have belonged to mercenaries from Gaul and Iberia, who fought for Carthage and were known to sometimes wear Montefortinos.
Equally curious is the scattering of amphorae—liquid-holding pots—around the ships’ wreckage. These kinds of pots, Murray explained to Live Science, would have been packed together in clusters on each ship, so something seems amiss in finding them just lying about, apart from one another. They may well have been thrown overboard by Carthaginian sailors who, knowing that they were losing the battle, wanted to make their ships lighter and faster, and give themselves a better chance of escaping the Romans.
The amphorae also, however, present another question that lacks such a likely answer. These pots were not tarred with the material that would have prevented liquids from evaporating inside them, leading the researchers to wonder what their use would have been. The amphorae are undergoing chemical tests in an attempt to trace their contents, and the researchers are gearing up to return to the Mediterranean and piece together more of the battle this year.
For a time, wealthy divorce seekers headed to the frontier.
In October 1901, Manhattan playboy Freddie Gebhardt celebrated his divorce decree with a lavish dinner at the Cataract House Hotel in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He treated guests to a four-course wine supper (each course paired with a complementing wine), and his menu included “delicate viands from the Atlantic Coast,” French wines, oysters, and a large array of imported coffee and fruit, all served by waiters in black tie. “No guest was allowed to retire until he committed the unpardonable offense of rolling from his chair jag shot,” the gossip column, Rum-inations reported.
There was a reason Gebhardt picked The Cataract to hold his celebration. From 1891 to 1908, the frontier town of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, became a haven for women—and some men—escaping bad marriages. They arrived by train, fleeing states whose laws only granted divorces for “proven” adultery or physical abuse. Many fled their families as well as their spouses; the church line was that divorce was immoral, and wives were often counseled to stay with their partners, no matter how abusive.
Due to its frontier status, South Dakota had some of the most relaxed grounds for divorce in America, available to all of its residents. Becoming a resident required living in the state for only three to six months, so wealthy divorce seekers made short-term moves to Sioux Falls. Enterprising lawyers and hoteliers capitalized on the lax laws by advertising their services in different states. The options for the unhappily married among the working class, who could not afford a months-long relocation, were essentially limited to separation or desertion. But many who had the means sought out Sioux Falls’ notoriously soft-hearted judge.
This moneyed migration put Sioux Falls on the map. In 1903, Lewis Oren Harris arrived in Sioux Falls after being shot by in the arm and chest by his father-in-law, who was furious his daughter had wed without his say-so. Nonetheless, the family refused to consent to a divorce, saying it would reflect poorly on them. His trigger happy father-in-law threatened to fill him “full of lead” if a decree was granted. Harris’s story was breathlessly reported in newspapers, along with many others at the divorce colony, and the coverage helped turn the town into a divorce mecca, an unexpected side effect of the state’s lax laws.
Critics took notice, and Sioux Falls became a nationwide point of contention for those for and against the relaxation of divorce laws. As April White writes in The Atavist Magazine, South Dakota’s own senator proposed that the federal government regulate divorce laws to end situations like Sioux Falls’ and “preserve the family and the home.” He was not the only anti-divorce crusader, and this jeopardy hung over every divorce proceeding.
While uncontested divorces could be resolved in 15 minutes, many cases dragged on for months, and accordingly, the Cataract House Hotel became known for its divorcees—and the lavish dinners they threw when their divorce was granted. “The law of the colony was that following the granting of the divorce decree the one so favored would give a divorce dinner,” John Emmke, former hotel manager of The Cataract House Hotel, told the Sioux City Journal in 1909. He noted that Gebhardt’s event was the most lavish dinner, costing around $50 a head, or approximately $1,470 per person in today’s money. Bankrolled by a $100,000 a year inheritance, Gebhardt’s excesses were famous in and out of Sioux Falls. “It’s still a subject of reminiscence in Sioux Falls,” Emmke said eight full years later.
The Cataract House Hotel was an anomaly when it was built in 1871, a luxury hotel with 14 beds and two parlors in a still-developing town. The developers predicted demand would grow, and they were right; the confluence of six rail lines and their daily imports proved irresistible to guests heading west who sought the comforts of home. Visitors found the city picturesque and the local Sioux history fascinating. “All these were attractive to the set that has little to do but search for new sensations,” reported The Oakland Tribune in 1906. To cater to more guests, the hotel went through two more builds by 1884, before it burned to the ground in a firework accident in 1900. Quickly rebuilt, its final iteration was five stories tall, with 175 bedrooms (including 50 en-suites) and a high-class restaurant, bar, and grill room. “Absolutely fireproof,” they advertised.
The farewell receptions of successful plaintiffs varied in extravagance, but it was common for celebrants to request The Cataract’s imported “high roller” champagnes. Most divorcees were happy for the hotel to cater their end-of events; on February 1, 1891, the hotel menu included boiled Kennebec trout, smoked tongue in jelly sauce, sirloin beef with dish gravy, turkey, saddle of fall lamb, chicken fricassee, and scalloped oysters. The menu got more exorbitant every year, and by June 2, 1900, dinners included Russian Caviar, salted peanuts, saratoga wafers, roast ribs of prime beef, new potatoes in cream, chicken potted Maryland style, new German waxed beans, and calves brains, larded.
Some divorcees looked for catering further afield. When Pauline Pearsall’s divorce was finalized in 1892, she celebrated with a large order from her favorite steakhouse, Delmonico’s in New York. Servers shipped the food 1,350 miles to the Cataract House Hotel, where she’d resided for the last five months. For extra dazzle, she wore a wedding dress to the event, and distributed $1,000 in party favors. Other hotels might have looked askance at outside food, but The Cataract’s motto was “we strive to please.”
It’s no wonder the Cataract House tried so hard to please—their guests were a cash cow.
“A restaurant and grill room were fitted up the likes of which did not exist west of New York,” commented George Fitch in a 1908 issue of The American Magazine. “The manufacture of divorces … has made wealthy men out of [Sioux Falls] hotel keepers.” To keep their guests entertained, every four months the Cataract House threw a ball “given with all the eclat of Fifth Avenue in New York,” Emmke said.
Other Sioux Falls divorcees held multiple parties; first at The Cataract House, and then when they returned home ring-less. In 1906, Sophia Florence Diesenger, a Cataract House divorcee, threw a themed divorce dinner in New York. “Like Sioux Falls at Home!” proclaimed The Baltimore Sun. The menu was folded like a court document, and each dish was cunningly related to her divorce. There was Lobster a la South Dakota, Frizzled Terrapin, Alimony Sauce, Beef Cold shoulder a la Counsel fees, Shrimp Salad with lawyer’s dressing, and lemon cakes with interlocutory cakes.
Celebratory divorce dinners were not unique to South Dakota. Men and women freed from bad marriages thanks to progressive laws often held banquets—reported celebrations date from 1890, in London, France, and Boston. A three-act comedic French play, Divorçons, which debuted in 1880, focused on the dissolution of a marriage and ended with a “divorce dinner” in a popular restaurant. It became a movie in 1915.
In Sioux Falls, divorce and its associated industries added an estimated $250,000 a year to the local economy. But despite the revenue the divorcees brought in, much of Sioux Falls religious community was unhappy with their hometown profiting from the dissolution of marriage. They petitioned for a change in the state’s laws.
On January 1, 1909, the residency requirement was raised to 12 months, effectively closing down the colony. Future divorce seekers headed to Reno, which had a six-month residency requirement. The Cataract House Hotel stayed open, but its best days were behind it, and it finally shuttered in 1970. However, for those who had the chance to stay at its peak, it was a life-changing experience. “It was a six months’ sentence for the divorce seeker, with no time off for good behavior,” noted former hotel manager John Emmke. “In a measure, it was a gay life.”
In letters to his accidental fiancée, the future president painted Springfield, Illinois, as a bummer.
It’s not that you should never hop from one state to another for a relationship. But if you happen to fall hard for someone in Illinois while visiting from Kentucky, you probably want to be very sure that the object of your affection reciprocates your feelings before you uproot your life. That’s how things got messy for Abraham Lincoln’s ex-girlfriend, Mary Owens.
Born in 1808, the daughter of a successful planter from Kentucky, Owens was 24 when she first met Lincoln in 1833. (Abe, still nearly 30 years away from the presidency, was 24, too.) Owens had traveled from Green County, Kentucky, to visit her married sister Elizabeth Abell in New Salem, Illinois, where Lincoln was living at the time and employed as a postmaster. Lincoln was a friend of Abell’s, and she introduced him to her sister. Lincoln later remarked to Abell that, if Mary Owens ever returned to Illinois, he’d wed her. It seems Elizabeth told her sister as much.
If Lincoln did not fully expect to get hitched, he at least wrote to his friend Mrs. Eliza Browning that, if he and Mary did link up again, he “saw no good objection to plodding life through hand in hand with her.” (How romantic?) Lincoln didn’t have a reputation as a ladies’ man: His New Salem neighbors recalled that “Lincoln didn’t go see girls much…seemed as if he cared but little for them.” So he was fairly surprised when Mary returned to town in 1836, seemingly at her sister’s behest, fully prepared to marry him.
It’s unclear whether Lincoln truly intended to make good on his promise. But if he ever did, he had certainly changed his mind when he and Mary Owens met again. After seeing her for the second time, he sent a scathing appraisal to Browning:
“I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff. I knew she was called an ‘old maid,’ and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the appellation. But now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother. And this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat to permit its contracting in to wrinkles; but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head, that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirty-five or forty years; and, in short, I was not all pleased with her.”
The anecdote about Lincoln writing to his female friend to talk trash—at length—about a woman he intended to marry gets left out of a lot of biographies.
Rather than fessing up to his feelings and having a frank conversation with Mary, Lincoln fled New Salem altogether. He moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1837 to work as a lawyer. From there, he proceeded to write Mary Owens a series of letters trying to convince her that, while he was perfectly happy to marry her, it would definitely be no fun to be married to him.
Lincoln often tried to couch his arguments in terms of Mary’s own joy or misery. (He certainly didn’t mention his syphilis, which he contracted “during a devilish passion,” if one of his friends is to be believed.) “I am willing and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will, in any considerable degree, add to your happiness,” he wrote to Mary.
But he went to great lengths to paint Springfield as a bummer of a place, where he was lonely, scorned by his neighbors, and reluctant to even attend church as he “should not know how to behave myself.” Though Springfield’s population was still only around 1,500—Lincoln called it a “busy wilderness”—many of the citizens appeared better educated and more cultured than those in New Salem. Soon after he settled there, he wrote Mary a letter in which he noted that she’d be destined to look in on other people’s exciting lives, without living one herself. “There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without sharing it,” he wrote. “You would have to be poor, without means of hiding your poverty. Do you think you could bear that patiently?"
Lincoln wasn’t flat-out lying—he was in a financially precarious position when he first moved to Springfield. This is supposedly the reason that he shared a room with his “intimate friend,” Joshua Speed, who owned a general store, during that time. When they first met, Lincoln talked about renting a room from Speed, who replied, “I think I can suggest a plan by which you will be able to attain your end, without incurring any debt. I have a very large room, and a very large double-bed in it; which you are perfectly welcome to share with me if you choose.” (Eventually, Speed sold the store and moved to Kentucky the day Lincoln married a different woman.) Whether Lincoln’s relationship with Speed might have also factored into his hesitation about Mary is a fun topic for historians to come to absolute blows over.
Finally, Lincoln sent Mary a letter in which he claimed, “I want at this particular time, more than anything else, to do right with you; and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather suspect it would, to let you alone, I would do it.” He was willing to marry her if she wanted—but he seemed to think it was a terrible idea. Apparently, Mary thought so, too.
In the end, Mary ghosted him. Lincoln concluded his last letter to her stating, “If it suits you best to not answer this, farewell. A long life and a merry one attend you.” She never replied. This left Lincoln smarting. He later claimed, “My vanity was deeply wounded... that she whom I had taught myself to believe no body else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness.”
Mary returned to Kentucky, where she wed a man named Jesse Vineyard in 1841, when she was 33. The couple had two children. When the Civil War came, Kentucky initially declared itself a neutral territory—backing neither the Union nor the Confederacy. Owens’s two sons enlisted, and didn’t fight for Lincoln’s side. There are likely all sorts of reasons for this—Owens, at least had grown up on a plantation—but you’ve got to imagine that her personal history didn’t help, either. Mary would later claim that Lincoln “was deficient in those little links which make up the great chain of a woman’s happiness.”
Lincoln didn’t recall the episode fondly, either, and his self-esteem seems to have taken a nosedive. In a letter to Browning, he moped, “Others have been made fools of by the girls; but this can never be with truth said of me. I most emphatically, in this instance, made a fool of myself. I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying; and for this reason; I can never be satisfied with any one who would be block-head enough to have me.”
He would meet Mary Todd a few years after, and marry her in 1842—but not before trying to break off that engagement, too. Turns out he was more skilled at navigating national unions than personal ones.
The town sat atop a trove of rock that was irresistible to fuel companies.
When buildings are knocked down, people often don’t let them go without a fight. This week, we’re remembering some particularly contentious demolitions. Previously: a Hollywood funeral for a restaurant named for a hat.
The church fell to pieces on a Monday in January 2018. Little light cracked across the gray morning, and environmental activists were already stationed along the metal fence ringing the two-spired structure in the German town of Immerath, a small village southwest of Düsseldorf.
St. Lambertus went up in the 19th century, and was known among locals as Immerather Dom. That morning, people had laid roses and wreaths on the ground in front of the fence, and strung tulips to it, next to banners that read, in German, “Thank you for always being there for us.” A guitar-strumming crooner and his keyboardist set up nearby. Bundled in caps and scarves, they played a love song they’d written for the building. Some Greenpeace activists had chained their bodies to rusting construction equipment, kneeling on the pavement as hard-hatted workers milled behind them. Others had bested the fence somehow, and appeared to rappel from the church’s busted windows to hang a banner protesting the reason for its demise.
The protestors delayed the wrecking crew by a few hours, but were well aware that their stunts wouldn’t halt the building’s death. “Today is a day of mourning and disappointment,” one man told a local German-language news station. Perhaps it was a day of anger, too, he added—the church had become the latest, and most visible, symbol of an entire town being razed to accommodate the coal industry.
The community of Immerath once had around 1,200 inhabitants, who lived above a type of buried treasure. By digging, the energy giant RWE was sure that they could extract lignite—a soft, brown coal that comprises a key part of Germany’s energy landscape. The lowest grade of coal, lignite is relatively cheap and mined in fairly shallow pits, the Washington Post reported. These may not be deep, but they're sprawling: Garzweiler, the mine that would be expanded and displace Immerath, was expected to take up a field of roughly 44 square miles, with 12 of those being actively worked, Reuters reported. (In total, the project would level 20 villages, according to Reuters.)
Germany is one of the world's major lignite producers, and—like other types of coal—brown coal burns dirty. In 2016, the last year for which data is available through the International Energy Agency, Germany’s CO2 emissions from burning coal were among the highest in Europe—roughly 331 tons (301 metric tonnes). (In the same year, the United States' emissions from coal were more than four-and-half times that, according to the IEA.)
A spokesperson for the energy company RWE told the German news cameras that he empathized with the people who were losing a pillar of their community (church services had stopped a few years prior), but he said that lignite helped meet much of Germany’s electrical demands in the previous year, and that renewable sources couldn’t yet fuel the country on their own.
News of the buried trove wasn’t especially welcome among the residents of Immerath, which had slowly become “a ghost town,” Huff Post reported. Over a few years, homes, graves, and landmarks were razed or moved a few miles away, to a new village—Immerath-Neu—built by the energy company. The two villages were kindred in name only, the Post reported: “The new one is tidy and austere, with suburban-style housing and a central plaza anchored by a squat, beige, nearly windowless chapel.” There was a miniature replica of Immerather Dom, too.
Back in old Immerath, the old building came down. As the equipment gripped and yanked one bell tower, then the other, the demolition looked effortless, as though the structure had been no sturdier than a sandcastle.
