Fed up with sensationalized portrayals, the country's hikikomori are reclaiming their narrative.

A distraught mother gestures to the camera crew to tread softly as they approach her teenage son’s bedroom. A mound of moldy garbage lies at its entrance, which is barricaded with a screen. The interviewer asks whether her son washes himself, and the mother fights back tears. Once every six months, she answers.

In 2002, the BBC documentary “Mystery of the Missing Million” brought the plight of Japan’s social recluses, the hikikomori, to mainstream English-language media. Angry teens playing video games in isolation, ashamed parents speaking off-camera about physical abuse from their withdrawn offspring, and news reports of mentally ill hikikomori as kidnappers and murderers created a wildly imbalanced portrait of the million or more Japanese who live in self-confinement (a number that itself might be overblown).

These depictions continue today. In January, Korean pop star Bang Yong-guk released a hit single, “Hikikomori,” in which he sings with crescendoing anguish about darkness and loneliness in a room strewn with papers and broken furniture. Around the same time, BBC News released another documentary short about Japan’s rental sisters: an $8,000-per-year rehabilitation program that sends social workers to try to coax recluses out of their rooms. In the film, one such rental sister recounts a hikikomori trying to strangle her.

To many hikikomori, this dire image is misleading and self-defeating. “[BBC] have made a serious mistake by broadcasting a false message to the world,” a hikikomori (who did not want to be named) tells me over email. “This is very sinful.”

As a group of shut-ins, hikikomori face a unique challenge in trying to speak for themselves. But for more than two years now, current and former hikikomori have participated in a unique project to correct these perceived mischaracterizations: their very own newspaper. The endeavor may well be helping participants come out of eremitism.

Naohiro Kimura, a 34 year old from Tokyo, launched Hikikomori Shimbun (Hikikomori News) in November 2016, after emerging from a decade spent as hikikomori, when he couldn’t bring himself to take his law school entrance exams and instead shut himself in to study. Hikikomori Shimbun, which publishes every alternate month, profiles individual hikikomori and provides news and resources for recluses and their parents, such as a list of events and support groups focused on reintegrating this collective of outcasts.

Hikikomori, which means “withdrawal,” refers both to the condition of withdrawing from society, as well as to the group of people experiencing it. The term was coined by Tamaki Saitō, a Japanese psychologist who decided to write a book about the condition in 1998, after a decade of seeing lethargic teenagers, who refused to leave the house or go to school, brought into his office by bewildered parents. He applied the term to individuals who had withdrawn into the home for a period of six months or more, but the contours of the condition are debated, especially whether it should be seen as a psychological illness or a social disease.

“As hikikomori is deemed shameful, they do not want to talk about their experience,” writes Kimura, over email. “This allows those with no experience of hikikomori to freely accuse them. However, accusations only set prejudice in society against the hikikomori, and further prevent them from reconnecting with society.” With the publication of Hikikomori Shimbun, he hopes to improve understanding of this group, and to foster empathy between hikikomori, their caregivers, and Japanese society.

In the initial months after launch, Kimura traveled all over Japan to promote the paper, and sold 6,000 copies within six months. From an original team of 15 collaborators, it now has more than 100 volunteers contributing articles and editorial support. Nearly all of them are either current or former hikikomori, and one of the first volunteers was a man who had been hikikomori for 30 years. The paper, published digitally, also has a print version that sells for 500¥ ($4.50). Sales of the print version, supplemented with Kimura’s own savings, cover operating costs. Approximately once a month, he holds editorial meetings in his apartment to plan and discuss future issues.

“I think it’s great that the hikikomori themselves are trying to speak up, and I think it’s very important for them to do so,” says Sachiko Horiguchi, a professor at the Department of Anthropology at Temple University’s Japan campus, adding, “I’m not too sure about the actual impact they are having in mainstream society. I’m not sure how popular or widely read the paper is.”

The primary mission of Hikikomori Shimbun is to offer an alternative, insider’s perspective to sensationalized and sometimes inaccurate reporting. When media coverage widely implied that hikikomori is a uniquely male phenomenon, Hikikomori Shimbun subverted that narrative by bringing out a special issue on female hikikomori. When the government released a survey saying there were 540,000 hikikomori between the ages of 15 and 40, Hikikomori Shimbun did a series on middle-aged and aging recluses, a demographic ignored in the survey. Last August, the Japanese Cabinet Office announced they would conduct a survey of aging hikikomori.

A crucial conversation about hikikomori is the question of why so many Japanese isolate themselves and how to rehabilitate long-term recluses. Over email, Kimura writes that it was very important to him that his mother sought help from psychologist Tamaki Saitō, instead of ignoring his hikikomori symptoms like his father was doing. And yet, both Horiguchi and Kimura resist the excessive medicalization of hikikomori, which they say oversimplifies the problem and objectifies hikikomori as solely mentally-ill.

Instead, they argue for the importance of considering a variety of sociological factors, which include family pressure to succeed and labor market practices that are ageist or unaccommodating to hikikomori who have been out of the workforce. Bullying at school and pressure from parents to succeed are additional factors. While the internet affords hikikomori some semblance of social contact, it is also viewed as an enabler, allowing young adults an escape into the virtual world of video games.

“I think the argument suggesting that hikikomori are victims versus the argument that suggests they are lazy people who are not fulfilling their social responsibility, that society does not need to help them, are always competing with each other,” says Horiguchi. In her research, she has found that the majority of hikikomori are middle- to upper-middle class, who have the means to go without an income for years.

Anne Allison, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University, writes about the Japanese problem of muenshakai or “relationless society,” a word that encapsulates isolation and fraying social connectedness. Although the Japanese have a term for this, a disconnected society is not unique to Japan. Neither is the phenomenon of hikikomori, says Horiguchi. The anthropologist has been collaborating with French psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists to apply the experts’ understanding of hikikomori to similar cases in France. Studies have found cases of hikikomori in South Korea, Spain, and the U.S. as well. Moreover, Hikikomori Shimbun is translated into Italian, indicating interest and readership there.

The problem of hikikomori in Japan is pervasive enough that a robust rehabilitation industry has emerged. However, Kimura says, many organizations are mercenary institutes cashing in on this vulnerable group and their parents. NHK, Japan’s national public broadcast media organization, ran an investigative story in 2017 about agencies that charged the equivalent of over $51,000 for a three-month dormitory stay with other hikikomori. The report mentions hikikomori who ran away from such a facility after being physically abused and denied food. More than 400 rehabilitation facilities exist in Japan today.

For Shimbun’s editor-in-chief, a multi-pronged approach to rehabilitation, one that combines family group therapy with programs that offer strategic rehabilitation, such as employment, education, and vocational training, is necessary to bring these recluses back into the fold. But such a collaborative approach to hikikomori is sorely lacking, he writes. According to Horiguchi though, Japanese state-sanctioned guidelines offer an identical three-step rehabilitative model of h mon (visiting support), ibasho (“a place to be”/community space), and sh r (employment support).

Kimura’s labor of love is one of the few ways in which hikikomori themselves are proactively participating in connecting with the outside world, albeit through the medium of writing. By telling other hikikomori what they’re going through, Kimura hopes his writers will realize that they are helping hundreds of thousands of silent hikikomori, and that their work has value.

In an interview with NHK World, Kimura expressed joy that some of his staff members had used their work at the newspaper to gradually come out of withdrawal. Some leveraged their experience at Hikikomori Shimbun to seek further employment. “One of them even became a journalist!” said Kimura, beaming.

Atlas Obscura readers share their favorite spots to revel in isolation.

It's Breakup Week here at Atlas Obscura, our attempt at a multifaceted exploration of what happens when places, objects, and of course relationships, fall apart. One topic we wanted to make sure not to overlook is what comes after—the solitude that often follows a breakup can be one of its most devastating aspects. But there can also be beauty, peace, and wonder in being alone, if you know where to find it.

Over in our Community forums, we asked our readers about the concept of waldeinsamkeit, a German word that translates to something like "solitude of the forest." This word describes the quiet one feels when ensconced in nature, or as I described it there, "a singular type of loneliness that is at once isolating, peaceful, and reflective." While this concept generally applies to remote, woodland isolation, that feeling of contented solitude can be found in any place that suits you. We asked our readers to tell us about their favorite places to be alone, to find their bit of waldeinsamkeit. The responses we received were beautiful and lonely, but at the same time they also made the world feel a little less distant.

Check out some of our favorite responses below, and if you have a favorite place of your own to be alone, join the conversation in the Community forums and tell us about it. Say it with me now: "Sometimes it's OK to be alone."

Mount Monadnock

New Hampshire

"The Marian Trail at Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire, is tranquil and beautiful, with sudden views for miles, and mossy faerie glens. And I didn’t see another soul for the entire six hours I spent hiking and quietly sitting." — LeeLee

Thousand Islands

Jakarta, Indonesia

"There is a particular place that I strongly associate with the sense of solitude and peace, even though it’s not a dense, quiet wood. When I was 14, I went with my aunt’s family to a beach resort in one of the tiny islands from the clusters called 'Pulau Seribu' (literally, 'Thousand Islands'), a few hours ferry ride north of Jakarta. I was there to babysit my cousins. Our cabin was located not too far away from a tiny secluded part of the beach. I remember sitting there by myself a lot while my aunt’s family took a nap. Just sitting on the edge of the dock and watching the waves. As I became an adult, my mind would replay that memory whenever I try to calm my anxiety." — nagnabodha

Carl Schurz Park

Manhattan, New York

"I go to Carl Schurz Park on the East River. Right at the top of Roosevelt Island there is a tiny light house. I sit on a bench, block out all the noise around me and focus on the light. It also allows me to feel a part of the big NYC while removing myself from it for at least a little while. There is also a little known waterfall in the upper part of Central Park. It is rarely crowded and allows me to completely lose myself in nature for a bit." — janeelliot

The Pine Barrens

New Jersey

"I went hiking by myself in the New Jersey Pine Barrens this past November. I’ve never been so perfectly and absolutely alone. Even after hours of wandering, I could count the other hikers I saw on one hand. It was very cold and blindingly clear, and with the wind high, the only noise was the groaning and rushing of the pines. It was at once a lonely and ecstatic experience, and I spent the day feeling almost out of time, in a way that’s hard to describe. A friend of mine describes meditation as an 'emptying of the self' and that’s what it felt like, if you can be empty of yourself and at the same time very aware of how loudly you’re breathing amid all that quiet!" — americangirl8

The Adirondacks

New York

"My ultimate ‘waldeinsamkeit’ is in the Adirondacks of northern New York. I grew up visiting every summer as a kid to see family, since my dad grew up there. While there are plenty of bustling towns and lakefronts in the Adirondacks, we would go to a cabin tucked away on the western side. I loved walking through the woods, down to the lakefront at sunset. I’d just watch the sun set, and the water still. As an adult, I’ve tried to go back every year, and it’s my go-to daydream when life’s a little too stressful." — bcham61

Dukh Niwaran Gurudwara

Punjab, India

"The Dukh Niwaran Gurudwara in Patiala, Punjab, India, where my university is situated. I’m an atheist but the place really fills in me a sense of peace. Dukh Niwaran literally means ‘removal/deterrence of sadness.’ It’s a beautiful place that is open to people from all backgrounds, it has ‘langar’- free food for all. Peaceful music is playing in the background at all times." — sgfirebolt

Grand Falls

Arizona

"Grand Falls, Arizona, is maybe 30 miles outside Flagstaff (seen as the snowy peaks at the top center), on Navajo land. The range of colors, the directional influence of the river and canyon, and the horizon of varied possibilities combine with the anomaly of a tall waterfall in the desert to both stimulate and calm my mind." — Danny_Brew

Vollentine-Evergreen Greenline

Memphis, Tennessee

"In Memphis there are a lot of beautiful places for waldeinsamkeit. My current favorite is the Vollentine-Evergreen Greenline, a walking-biking trail in Midtown Memphis. On most weekday afternoons, it’s pretty much deserted. There is urban art, the bridge over Lick Creek, a butterfly garden, an old railroad station house, and a glorious arching tunnel of trees, and the occasional bench if you want to sit and and soak it all in." — korenni

The Brazilian Coast

Brazil

“I haven’t spent much time alone lately, but I’m thinking about it. I live with my mother and she is never away (I also love being with her). Our house is near Brazil’s east coast and I actually want to rent some place close to the beach for a few days to think about my life, do some walks on the beach, and listen only to the waves’ sound.” — katcheika

Big Basin Redwoods State Park

Boulder Creek, California

"Nothing I’ve found anywhere in the world quite beats snuggling up to a giant redwood while listening to a stream gurgle close by. The smell of an ancient forest changes your brain chemistry. Big Basin Redwoods State Park is one of the lesser touristed spots to get your inner tree hugger on. And the place of many of my childhood, Alice in Wonderland–type adventures." — InterstitialWanderer

The Outer Cape

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

"I live on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the summertime, there are many tourists, but in the wintertime, it’s perhaps more beautiful. The sunrises are spectacular. My sacred alone time I find on the beaches in the winter on the Outer Cape. Many times there is no one but me, the wildlife and the waves." — Thislifeispoetry

Buzău Mountains

Romania

"I find loneliness in the villages of the Buzău Mountains in Romania. Of course there are other mountains too, but my native place is here. When you are in such a forest you get lost, you lose yourself entirely." — omastanescu

Rural Cameroon

Africa

"I lived in Cameroon for awhile. It was a wonderful experience but there were, of course, challenges. I started going on walks in the early morning (as soon as the sun rose, 5:30 a.m. or so) to clear my mind. There was a mountain road that went I-don’t-know-where. The longest walk I ever took may have been two and a half hours. The further I walked on the road, the longer my walks became, and still, I wanted to know always what was just around the next corner. It was one of the most peaceful times of my life. — jkcoleman72

Dixon’s Kingdom

Tasmania

"My favorite place to experience waldeinsamkeit, here in Tasmania, is on the Highland Plateau, in Dixon’s Kingdom, a beautiful native pine forest. On two consecutive trips to Walls of Jerusalem National Park with larger groups, I have stayed behind in the forest while they undertook the three-to-four hour return trip to the mountain. Being in that forest with the dappled light, the melancholy wail of the currawong, and the shivering sound of the wind in the pines (or was that a tiger snake) at Dixon’s was easily some of the best waldeinsamkeit I have experienced. And despite much of Tasmania being like that, it’s often risky to go too far on your own." — Persey

Wattamolla Beach

Sydney, Australia

"Having lived in the country for 25 years, I have been spoilt for choice of places to be alone and in nature. Now that I am living in a city, I too have discovered it’s possible to sit by the bay with joggers and walkers and dogs all whizzing past, yet be completely at peace and both within and connected without, to the beauty around me. My first years in the city saw me needing to find those rare places I could be alone in bushland or at night but there was also an element of danger with that. Now I can feel safe in the crowd but still at peace." — Historygirrl

The Island of Nevis

Caribbean

"My place is in a hammock on a hill on the Caribbean island of Nevis. I call it 'The Magical Hammock of Revelation' because I always discover something in myself while I’m lying there looking up at the clouds or the stars. The hammock is rocked by trade winds coming from the east and it’s bounced by a breeze coming off Saddle Mountain from the north. It can sometimes feel like a magic carpet ride. My favorite place in the world." — robinlatham

Joshua Tree National Park

California

"My waldeinsamkeit is found in areas with little light pollution, at night under the stars. I live just about an hour away from Joshua Tree National Park, which can be crowded during the day but wonderfully deserted at night. I’m often there on those nights when the Milky Way is a magnificent band across the sky from horizon to horizon. The darkness, the solitude, the silence, and the stars fill me with peace and wonder, and allow me to indulge my passion for photographing the night sky." — js2007

San Rafael Swell

Utah

"For serious inner work, I like an empty desert landscape where I am completely alone. I found my spot in the San Rafael Swell in southern Utah, where I have returned many times to sit in a sacred circle, and drum, and meditate, calming my mind and opening my creativity, surrounded by clean desert sands and a red and purple vista of mountains and canyons." — Jaguarfeather

Blue Hills Reservation

Massachussetts

"About 10 miles south of Boston is an area known as the Blue Hills Reservation. It’s a 6,000-acre state park in Norfolk County, Massachusetts. As a young man back in the '70s and '80s I would hike in an area known as Rattlesnake Hill for hours at a time, and sometimes not see another person. I did see a huge snake there once but I think the rattlesnakes have died out pretty much. I had one favorite rock where I would sit and contemplate life, with Boston off in the distance and just trees and birds around me. Sometimes it got so quiet, deep in the woods, I would be completely at peace." — allrickroad

Bokkom Ave.

Velddrif, South Africa

"There is a shabby little dirt road next to the lagoon in Velddrif, on the west coast of South Africa, called ‘Bokkomlaan,’ where the pelicans hang out. Not sure whether we watch them or they watch us… My favorite spot on Earth!" — Lili_S

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

30 acres of presidential memorabilia just went up for auction.

On this day 210 years ago, Abraham Lincoln was born to a modest family near Hodgenville, Kentucky. Though he eventually became the 16th President of the United States (and a fairly beloved one at that), he had a meandering path to his role as the leader of a divided nation. After a brief stint in school (one whole year!) and jobs as a postman and shopkeeper, he went into law and politics. At one point he ended up purchasing roughly 40 acres of farmland in Charleston, Illinois. Thirty of those historic acres just went up for sale.

Lincoln bought the land in 1841 for his cash-strapped father, Thomas, and had the elder Lincoln lease it from him, allegedly at a rate of one dollar per year. Much of the land was most recently owned by the Best family (also originally from Kentucky), who purchased a 30-acre tract of it, along with 95 more acres, at a foreclosure auction in 1989, for $98,500. The remaining 10 acres of Lincoln’s original purchase were split up over time: Four were put into a private trust, and six became part of the neighboring Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site. The site, an 86-acre “historic park” near Lerna, Illinois, is anchored by a replica of the log cabin Thomas Lincoln famously built and occupied there. In a statement to Successful Farming, auctioneer Michael Stanfield said that the land up for sale “lays almost totally adjacent to the Lincoln Log Cabin in Illinois State Park.”

Retired farmer Ron Best owns Best Farms, Inc., along with his four siblings. The family decided to sell their 590 total acres to liquidate the business. Over the years, the land has produced solid amounts of corn and soybeans—up to 238 bushels of corn per acre, and up to 77 bushels of beans, during the last three years.

Scott Wingert, who advertised the auction for Stanfield, didn’t have an estimate of how much money the land might go for, but claims that even though “its not particularly great land,” the fact that it was once owned by Lincoln should be enough to draw a large crowd. However, it’s hard to say it has any true historic value since, according to Wingert, Lincoln “just owned it, he didn't farm it himself.”

Fittingly, the auction is taking place at a hotel in downtown Charleston—on Lincoln Avenue.

Centuries after the Porcelain Tower was torn down, it was built up again—and this time, made of steel.

Long before it was toppled in a military skirmish, the octagonal pagoda was said to have caught travelers' eyes from miles away. It rose nine stories tall, and was crowned by a giant decoration shaped something like a pineapple. In engravings and other artistic interpretations, it seemed to rival nearby mountains, its top nearly level with a smattering of birds and almost piercing the clouds—taller than anything else in sight.

Built in the 15th century at the behest of the Yongle Emperor—who is said to have designed it as a tribute to his parents and the tradition of filial commitment—the so-called Porcelain Tower was part of a complex known as the "Bao'en Temple,” or “Temple of Gratitude.” The tower soared above the landscape around Nanjing. Visitors who scaled the 184 stairs all the way to the top would be treated to a view of the whole city, snaking rivers, and beyond, recalled Johannes Nieuhof, a Dutch traveler, when he stopped by in the mid-1600s.

However striking it appeared from a distance, up close, “it more than realized our expectations,” Granville Gower Loch, a captain of the United Kingdom's Royal Navy, wrote in 1844. The pagoda was made of creamy porcelain, interspersed with tiles covered with colorful glazes. The cumulative effect, when the sun glinted off of it, was “a glittering light like the reflected rays of gems,” Loch wrote. The tower was festooned with scores of lamps and bells, which “used to ring forth charming melodies,” Loch reported, but were now “tongueless, and all of them cracked.”

If any of the bells could still clang during Loch’s visit, they would all fall silent by the 1850s, when the structure is said to have been stripped of Buddhist imagery and eventually ripped down by rebels during the Taiping Rebellion—much to the dismay of those who considered it one of the architectural jewels of the medieval world. One explanation for the destruction is that the same height that once afforded visitors such a sweeping view of the landscape could also be used for tactical purposes, allowing other troops a useful vantage point across great distances.

Some of the bricks were salvaged from the rubble, and eventually entered museums. The former tower climbed into public consciousness again more than 150 years later, when archaeologists excavating its footprint claimed to have come across Buddhist relics in a crypt beneath the site.

The finds seemed to heighten the sense of loss surrounding the long-gone tower, and a real estate magnate reportedly ponied up one billion yuan (roughly $150 million) to fund the construction of the Porcelain Tower Heritage Park, which exhibits artifacts and a new version of the tower itself.

The slicker, sleeker version went up in 2015. This modern rendition was fashioned from glass and steel, echoing the skyscrapers off in the distance—all of which Loch, Nieuhof, and their contemporaries wouldn’t have seen. A lot has changed in nearly 600 years, but the new tower still cuts a striking silhouette.

A unique collection focused on what happens after love dies.

One of the most unusual museums in Croatia is the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb. The collection traces its origins to a real-life breakup, between that of its co-founders, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, in 2006. Unsure what to do with a special wind-up toy they'd acquired as a couple, the two searched for somewhere to store what they considered to be a symbol of their time together. When they realized that no such place existed, the Museum of Broken Relationships was born.

Today the museum accepts items from around the world. Since every artifact is crowdsourced, Dražen says they are often surprised by what shows up at their door. Among the collection are typical items—mobile phones, records, clothing—but they've also received dreadlocks, a toaster, a prosthetic, even a parachute rig. Each is accompanied with a description of the object and its meaning.

“Love and breaking up—it’s such an important part of our lives but you don’t know anything about it, you’re just left on your own to experience it,” says Dražen. The Museum of Broken Relationships aims to offer a space for individuals to share and treasure their sentimental artifacts of love lost. In the video above, Atlas Obscura takes a tour of some of the objects and stories inside the museum.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to explore more Atlas Obscura videos.

In 2011, after nearly a century together, Galápagos tortoises Bibi and Poldi called it quits. We still don’t know why.

Why do relationships end? The question plagues experts and laypeople alike. Circumstances change. The spark goes away. An attribute that once intrigued you is suddenly repellant.

Literary scholars comb through Gone With the Wind. Music fans analyze Roy Orbison. But animal lovers have their own rich and mysterious text: the story of Bibi and Poldi, the Galápagos tortoises that were together for 90-odd years and then, suddenly, weren't.

Bibi and Poldi, who live at the Reptilienzoo Happ in Klagenfurt, on the southern border of Austria, were a perfect match. Poldi is handsome and sociable, with bright eyes and a fondness for neck scratches. Bibi has a regal bearing and a dramatic streak—a human friend once compared her to Greta Garbo. They share hobbies: Both like loitering in sunny spots, as well as in shady spots. They have a mutual love of tomatoes. And they are both Galápagos tortoises.

They also have a common history: Although the early details of their lives are hazy, both hatched around 1897, grew up together at a zoo in Switzerland, and likely first hooked up in their second decade of life, during the Roaring Twenties. By the time they moved to Austria together in the late ‘70s, they had built a longstanding, comfortable relationship, with a healthy physical component.

But one day in November of 2011, something changed. A keeper approached their shared home, only to see Bibi rear forward and bite a large chunk off of Poldi’s shell. (She drew blood.) Galápagos tortosies lack teeth at any age, but they do have powerful, jagged-edged jaws. If the two kept fighting like this, the keepers were afraid they’d kill each other. And so the tortoises—who had spent nearly a century sleeping with their shells touching—were separated.

A split like this affects a whole community. Reptilienzoo Happ is “a family business,” says the zoo’s director, Helga Happ. It was founded by her husband, Friedrich Happ, in 1976; the two met there, and bonded over a shared “passionate interest for reptiles,” according to the zoo website’s history page. Although Friedrich passed away in 2000, the couple's daughter, son, and granddaughter all work there, caring for about 1,000 individual creatures, from puff adders to water dragons. “We are filled with love for our animals,” Happ says. “They too are part of our family.”

So it makes sense that, when Bibi and Poldi were on the outs, the Happs and their colleagues tried to patch things up. After all, this was a couple that—whether they knew it or not—had made it through the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the millennium. Surely one little spat wouldn’t do them in.

The keepers tried everything they could think of. After they moved Poldi into a temporary bachelor’s apartment, they tried arranging a date for the pair. “We were hoping that they would make up during their first spring outing,” Happ told local paper Kleine Zeitung at the time. They did not. Bonding games also failed, as did romantic tomato meals. "They tolerate each other's presence just as long as it's not too cold, not too hot, and there's plenty of food," Happ’s son Johannes told British magazine The Lady. But there was no love there.

They tried counseling, too. “We have keepers talking to them and trying to engage the two in interacting,” Happ told the Independent in June of 2012. When an outside expert suggested Bibi might have had some kind of breakdown, they gave her an intensive check-up. She was of sound mind and shell.

They even attempted a romantic comedy-style gambit: An artist made a model tortoise out of plastic, and it did shifts in each enclosure, with the idea that a low-risk “newcomer” might comfort Poldi and soften Bibi. Poldi fell for it for a few days, but Bibi went straight for the cold shoulder—in photos, she steadfastly ignores her fake husband while munching on a branch. “We get the feeling they can't stand the sight of each other anymore,” Helga Happ told the Austrian Times, defeated.

Humans root for love to last. We’re not picky about the species involved. Thousands of people have signed petitions to keep animal mates together, whether they’re polar bears slated for different zoos or overly amorous children’s zoo donkeys. When the world’s most famous same-sex penguin couple, Roy and Silo of New York’s Central Park Zoo, called it quits in 2004, Andrew Sullivan wrote that “it rocked the gay scene.”

The end of Bibi and Poldi was particularly affecting because the two had already overcome so many odds. In the wild, Galápagos tortoises generally don’t go for monogamy at all, let alone lifelong togetherness. Many captive ones are enrolled in extensive breeding programs, to help ensure the various species’ survival after decades of devastation by introduced animals, hungry whalers, and, increasingly, climate change. One of the best-known Galápagos tortoises, Lonesome George, is famous for not mating much at all, despite prolonged and creative effort from everyone around him. He was the last Pinta Island tortoise in the world, and when he died, his species went with him.

Anthropomorphic concerns were also at play. Publications worldwide took the opportunity to put their own spin on the gossip. The New York Daily News published what they called “a newly surfaced photo” of the tortoises yelling at each other. Jezebel accused Poldi of mouth-breathing. But beneath much of the coverage ran an undercurrent of despair. As TIME put it, “If [they] can’t make it work, what hope do the rest of us have?”

Although the tortoise breakup news cycle is long over, Reptilienzoo Happ is still living with the actual event, and its aftermath. Seven years after the split, “Bibi [still] does not want to have anything to do with Poldi,” Happ says. About two years ago, she and the keepers reluctantly stopped trying to reconcile the two tortoises, and began some construction projects. “We have built two houses, created two outdoor facilities, and made two baths,” Happ says.

Bibi and Poldi now live in matching condos, like divorcees who each made out well in the split. Although Happ says her own thinking about long-term relationships hasn’t changed, “the separation makes me and the zookeepers and my family a little sad,” she admits, “because each of the [tortoises] lives alone.”

The zoo employees couldn’t bring themselves to give up entirely. A wall separates Bibi’s enclosure from Poldi’s. In one section of it—the part that divides the two halves of the garden—the keepers installed a glass window. If they want to, either tortoise can gaze through at their former paramour, and think about old times.

So far, it hasn’t been enough. Bibi likes to hang out in the garden and eat the grass. But when she looks up and sees Poldi, “she hisses like a snake,” says Happ. This message, at least, is clear: “She does not want to live with him.”

The practice of "wife-selling" wasn't legal, but a drink signaled freedom from a relationship that had soured.

On June 2, 1828, inside the George and Dragon pub in Tonbridge, England, John Savage paid George Skinner one shilling and a pot of beer for his wife, Mary. George ordered his beer, and John left with Mary. The pair held hands as they went to start their new life together.

This wasn't an unusual scene. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, English wives were “sold” for a variety of payments. Prices varied—“as low as a bullpup and a quarter of rum” all the way to “forty [British] pounds and a supper,” the North-Eastern Daily Gazette reported in 1887.

Half a gallon was the total sale price for a 26-year-old known as Mrs. Wells, purchased by a Mr. Clayton in 1876, as reported by The Sheffield Daily Telegraph. Clayton approached Mr. Wells, professed his love for the man’s wife, and asked if he could marry her. Wells shrugged—for the last two years, his wife had lived with Clayton, and he didn’t care what she did anymore. He told Clayton he could have her “for nowt” (or “nothing”), but Clayton insisted he name his price—he did not want her “so cheaply.” Wells countered with a half-gallon (four pints) of beer, and the three of them went off to the pub. After buying Wells his beer, Clayton also offered to adopt the Wells’s daughter—Mrs. Wells was rather attached to her—and when Mr. Wells accepted, Clayton bought him another pint. Mrs. Wells was so pleased with the arrangement that she purchased an additional half gallon of beer, which the three drank together.

“[Wife] sales were located at inns, ratifying pledge cups were quaffed and purchase prices were often in alcohol,” wrote historian Samuel Pyeatt Menefee, in his 1981 book Wives for Sale. “In several cases liquor appears to have played an inordinately large role, often serving as the total purchase price.” In 1832, a sand-carrier named Walter sold his wife at Cranbook Market in Kent for one glass of gin, one pint of beer, and his eight-year-old son; other sales are known to have been brokered with rum, brandy, whisky, cider, a home-cooked dinner, and a Newfoundland dog. When money was involved, it tended not to be very much, even by the standards of the day. In 1825, for instance, a wife in Yorkshire was sold for one pound and one shilling, and one in Somerset for two pounds and five shillings, while a corpse sold to a medical school went for the much higher sum of four pounds and four shillings. (This isn’t to say that the wife was a valueless commodity to be traded, but that the sale was more a formality than a business venture.) Despite these other tenders, beer—by the pint, quart, and gallon—was the most-common currency.

These drink sales had more to do with the lack of divorce options than a bottomless love of booze. In 1857, the U.K. Parliament created the Matrimonial Causes Act, which allowed divorces in certain circumstances. Husbands could be granted a divorce if they had proof of their wife’s infidelity; wives had the added burden of proving incestuous or abusive behavior. Prior to this act, limited as it was, there were even fewer options for ending a marriage in England. You could petition the church or government for a decree, or desert your spouse. Middle-class couples might opt for private separation, which often included a deed stipulating that the ex-husband continue to funnel money to his former wife. Otherwise, desertion often left women impoverished.

Ostensibly, the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act addressed this problem, but it was still too expensive for the majority of working-class folks. For many unhappy couples, wife-selling was viewed as an easy pathway to divorce, at a time when legally separating was often out of reach. “The practice in England was not really a sale, but rather a sort of customary divorce plus remarriage in which a woman who had committed adultery was divorced by her husband and given to her partner in adultery,” says Matthew H. Sommer, a Department of History Chair at Stanford University and author of Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China. Officially divorcing would have cost around £40-60 in an era when nursemaids earned £17 pounds a year. This arrangement benefited all parties—the wife got out of a miserable marriage, her new husband got a partner, and her ex got his buzz on.

At the time, alcohol authorized all kinds of deals. People across many fields—laborers, farmers, agriculture workers, and more—would seal contracts with a handshake and a pint of beer, “to wet the sickle and drink success to the harvest,” Menefee wrote. “In such ritual carousels, the connection of drinks with a change of state and especially with a contract is emphasized.”

Indeed, the process was generally viewed as binding. “The great majority of those who took part in wife-selling seem to have had no doubt that what they did was lawful, and even conferred legal rights and exemptions,” The Law Quarterly Review reported in 1929. “They were far from realizing that their transaction was an utter nullity; still less that it was an actual crime and made them indictable for a conspiracy to bring about an adultery.” (A murky understanding of the rules surrounding wife-selling is a plot point in Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character.)

Twenty-five-year-old Betsy Wardle learned that lesson the hard way. In 1882, her husband sold her to her lover, George Chisnall, for a pint of beer. The pair married, but Betsy was soon charged with bigamy, arrested, and brought to Liverpool Crown Court to stand trial. When Betsy’s landlady, Alice Rosely, took the stand as a witness, she told the judge that she knew of the ale sale, but believed it was legal to house the couple. “Don’t do this again,” Justice Denman warned her. “Men have no right to sell their wives for a quart of beer or for anything else.” He sentenced Betsy to a week of hard labor.

In 2019, it all looks terribly misogynistic. Menefee reported that some sales hinged on complaints about a woman’s barrenness or her “nagging”—suggesting that a man wanted a younger or more submissive partner. Some of the visuals are also especially hard to stomach: In satirical cartoons of the era, husbands were shown to peddle their wives at busy Smithfield Market in London wearing halters—the same way they'd transport livestock—or ribbons that would tie them to their new 'owner.' Some of these cartoons were based on real events.

But despite the sexist overtones, women were often on board with the process. In his 1993 book, Customs in Common, historian Edward Thompson indicates that the sales were often approved by the women, reporting that out of 218 wife sales he had analyzed between 1760 and 1880, 40 were cases where women were “sold” to their existing lovers, and only four “sales” were recorded as being non-consensual. He did note that consent was sometimes forced, or the best of a number of unappealing options, as was the case in 1820, when one wife stated that her husband had “ill-treated her so frequently that she was induced to submit to the exposure [of the ritual] to get rid of him.” (However, Thompson added, the wife had lived with the purchaser for two years before the sale.) Writing in the Review of Behavioral Economics in 2014, economics scholar Peter Leeson noted that wives could also veto the buyer. Menefee also notes that many of the purchasers had “more remunerative, socially prestigious positions,” than the sellers, suggesting that upward social mobility may have played a part.

Though many accounts seem to indicate that wife-selling usually worked out fairly well for the women, wives’ voices are rarely heard in the historical accounts, which end around 1905. Most of the narratives are told from men’s perspectives. Of course, it wasn’t a panacea for all of the problems faced by women of the era, married or not—they still faced high-rates of mortality in childbirth, had limited educational offerings, and were expected to defer to men. For those who willingly entered into the sale, though, it may have been a start.

Yep.

Everyone has a price, so they say—and as it turns out, so does everything. A taxidermied sperm whale penis from the late 19th century? That’ll set you back nearly $6,000, according to the precedent set by yesterday’s second annual “Out of the Ordinary” auction at Sworders in the United Kingdom.

Mark Wilkinson, a specialist at Sworders, says he was very excited when this item was consigned to the auction house by a private collector, who had it for about 20 years. “It’s basically the height of myself,” Wilkinson says. At 167 centimeters, it’s nearly five-and-a-half feet long, and nearly one foot wide at its thickest part. Luckily, it’s not so heavy—just 18 pounds—allowing Wilkinson to pose comfortably for a once-in-a-lifetime photo op. “You can see that I’m not struggling with the weight,” he says, relieved.

That’s probably because the phallus is stuffed with hair—likely horse hair, according to Wilkinson—and not something heftier. The vendor informed him that, in days of yore, sailors were said to store tobacco in whale penises like this one, to keep the tobacco moist and fresh over the duration of a long journey.

Pricing the penis was a challenge, says Wilkinson, as there was simply “nothing to go on”—no previously auctioned analogs. “I did look,” he insists. The only similar items he was able to find, at the Icelandic Phallological Museum, were not for sale. One could easily think that Sworders wasn’t even selling a penis at all: “The word carrot has come up,” along with “parsnip,” says Wilkinson, describing what some thought the item looked like. Sworders ultimately set the estimate around the donor’s suggestion, at between $4,500 and $5,800; the penis sold yesterday for just over $5,900.

Wilkinson’s other favorite items from yesterday’s Out of the Ordinary sale include a stage outfit from Michael Jackson’s 1992-1993 Dangerous tour, vintage French postcards depicting a Witches’ Sabbath, wing tips from a Cathay Pacific 747, an Ice Age cave bear skeleton from Romania or Austria, and a Victorian watercolor of two men dressed in drag. Perhaps next year’s installment will break still newer ground in the clearly fruitful penile taxidermy market.

Bear in mind, it's not actually edible.

Part of the thrill of making art with gummy bears is wresting them out of the hands of viewers who try to take a nibble. Or so artist Kevin Champeny found when he was finishing his piece, “Gummy Bear Obsession,” in front of several thousand people at the 2018 Adobe MAX show in Los Angeles. “Gummy Bear Obsession” is made of 15,000 sculpted and hand-cast tiny urethane gummy bears, glued to the fiberglass shell of a four-and-a-half foot tall mama bear that is mounted on a base. Light emanates from its center, shining through the individual bears to create one majestic, radiant gummy bear. Champeny laughs as he recalls begging people not to eat the gummies. “The fact that [the gummies] weren’t real, it forced people to challenge their senses, to really challenge what they were seeing,” he says.

Two years ago, Champeny, 44, was working for an aerospace company in Long Island, New York. “One day I walked in and I had to remove 20,000 square feet of concrete out of an airplane hangar,” he says. “The next day I walked in to see a $100,000 scanning electron microscope on my desk, and I had five hours to learn how to use it.” When a co-worker asked where he’d learned his high-level mechanical skills, Champeny explained he was an artist by trade. After seeing some of his artwork, the same co-worker encouraged Champeny to transition to a full-time career as an artist, and even became a business partner at his studio in Long Island.

Champeny was born and raised in Beloit, Wisconsin, and attended Beloit College, where he graduated with a B.A. in Studio Art. He moved to New York City soon after, and worked at Utley’s Incorporated, a prototyping shop in Queens that has been a major industry player in the packaging and model-making industry for over 70 years. It was here that Champeny sculpted the master prototypes for products as varied as the Patrón tequila bottle, Barack Obama’s presidential china, and the Imodium A-D pill.

The unique shape of the iconic gummy bear inspired several of Champeny’s works, which include mosaics, sculpture pieces, and even a commissioned chandelier made of multi-colored, hanging gummy bears.

Champeny’s art offers a counterpoint to social media culture, to the carefully curated version of reality offered up by Insta-stories and Facebook posts. His pieces, which blur the line between painting, sculpture, and photography, invite viewers to engage from a variety of angles, to move around, to interact with the pieces. They also offer a study in contrast: gummy bears that are hard to the touch and inedible, but look exactly like the familiar, chewy sweet; a mosaic skeleton on a large-format canvas that reveals thousands of sculpted flowers upon closer look (“What Remains”); a rendition of the Baroque Italian painter Guido Reni’s “Ecce Homo,” only this time with the portrait of Jesus Christ made of hand-cast urethane painkillers in a piece titled “Healer.” According to Champeny, he wants “to challenge [viewers] to stop for a second and question, ‘Is what I’m seeing real?’”

Champeny offers the example of his son, whose first introduction to candy was the inedible kind his father was making at his studio. Now, the young boy never eats a piece of candy without first asking if it’s “real,” to the bewilderment of his friends’ parents. “But that was his introduction to the world,” says Champeny. “It was to question everything, to challenge what you think is real, what you think is right and wrong.”

From afar, “An Apple a Day,” made of 10,000 hand-cast pieces of urethane candy, looks almost like a hypermodern, 3-D, pointillist painting. Up close, though, viewers notice the candy detail: color-coordinated Swedish fish, licorice, and jujubes hot-glued together on a canvas. Champeny’s goal was to create a sculpted approximation of a photograph of an apple that he’d taken, one that evoked its glistening, rubious beauty. While he is careful to note that he never wants to impose meaning upon viewers, the title of the work, which harkens to healthful eating, juxtaposed with the use of candy, is an invitation to a contrarianism that pervades his art.

Champeny starts all his pieces by hand-sculpting a master model in clay of the individual components of his mosaic. He then makes a silicone mold of the clay model, into which he casts his urethane pieces. The molds are cooked in a pressure pot quite similar to a pressure cooker. The artist then hand-dyes the colors of his urethane pieces and places them on canvas to make his mosaics.

Champeny has showcased his work at several American galleries, and been an exhibitor at Art Basel, in addition to private showings. But his most memorable exhibit was when “A Rose By Any Other Name” was shown at the top of the World Trade Center last year. Two months before 9/11, Champeny had celebrated his first wedding anniversary at Windows on the World, the restaurant in the North Tower of the original World Trade Center complex. His family lost friends in the attack. “To have a piece 1,250 feet in the air, overlooking Manhattan, in quite possibly the most iconic building in the country,” was a fascinating, moving experience, he says.

“Food in general transcends culture, transcends socioeconomic differences,” says Champeny of his impetus to work with gummy and other candy replicas. “With candy, it brings up a lot of nostalgia, a lot of childhood memories.” The artist clearly has a lot of fun with his candy art mosaics. Just please don’t eat his pieces.

They made great last-minute gifts after months at sea.

Beaches and shorelines around the world are scattered with all manner of art supplies, from cockle to clam and conch shells. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, seashells like these were intricately arranged into geometric mosaics known as “sailors’ valentines.” They were—and still are—made by gluing hundreds of shells onto cotton batting, and framing the work with octagonal cases of wood and glass. Either as single panels or hinged pairs, they’re usually no larger than 18 inches across, and less than two inches deep. The designs incorporated hearts, flowers, and nautical symbols such as anchors or compass roses. They might also bear a message—“Home Again” or “Forget Me Not”—spelled out in tiny shells. They were given by whalers and merchant seamen to loved ones when the men safely returned home from what could have been months or even years at sea.

For many decades it was thought—rather romantically—that the sailors themselves had made these mementos, when their ships were stuck in the doldrums or during shore leave, from shells they collected with their own tattooed hands, on beaches halfway around the world. They were considered maritime crafts, like scrimshaw—scenes etched with sail needles on whale teeth and other forms of marine ivory. The valentines’ popularity was fed by the Victorian shell collection craze known as “conchylomania” (a relative of “tulipmania”), which filled curiosity cabinets across England, the Netherlands, and the United States with as many unusual specimens as one could find or purchase. Ladies also worked on shellcraft beside their needlecraft.

It wasn’t until the publication of a February 1961 article in the magazine Antiques, by Judith Coolidge Hughes, that the myth of the lonely, artistic sailor began to come undone. Hughes discovered that a woman restoring an antique sailor’s valentine in a Massachusetts collection found an early 1800s clipping from the newspaper The Barbadian in the backing. The clipping mentioned that these “fancy work” items were for sale at Belgrave’s Curiosity Shop in Bridgetown, Barbados. Another clue to their true origin was that most antique examples incorporate similar designs and are created from similar shells, mainly from the West Indies, including Barbados keyhole limpets, janthinas, and King Venus clams. And as early as 1750, in his A Natural History of Barbados, English missionary Reverend Griffith Hughes wrote about women on the island creating beautiful designs from seashells: “With what truly romantic ideas must it inspire one, to sit in a room furnished with riches of the most distant shores and oceans!”

It’s now believed that the curiosity shop’s owner, Benjamin Hinds Belgrave, organized women on the island into a cottage industry to produce the valentines for sale. Barbados was a frequent port of call for North Atlantic–based ships, often the very last stop before home. While provisions were gathered for the last leg of a journey and vessel repairs were made, sailors naturally strolled the streets and shopped for souvenirs to give to loved ones. So the valentines were less labors of love and more like last-minute purchases at airport gift shops. But their beauty and craftsmanship endure, and so does the tradition.

Whether 19th-century original or contemporary descendant, a sailor’s valentine is all about painstaking perfection. Pamela Boynton, an award-winning valentine artist and author of Contemporary Sailor’s Valentines: Romance Revisited, designs and produces hers using traditional techniques, including creating a template, gluing a colorful array of shells onto cotton batting, and encasing the delicate display in octagonal boxes (a requirement for the artistic competitions she competes in). Little in the conceptualization and construction processes has changed in nearly 200 years, but some artists now rely on more modern materials. Synthetic adhesives, acid-free mounting board, and birdseye maple may take the place of the hide glue, cotton batting, and Spanish cedar or mahogany most often used in Victorian times.

While the size (but not the shape) of the boxes varies, an artist needs on average dozens of different types of shells, and at least a couple hundred of each, to make a substantial design. Boynton, a resident of Sanibel Island, Florida (home of the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum), uses both shells she collects locally and those she imports for specific colors—primarily from the Philippines—including green and white tusk shells and colorful urchin spines. The “brick and mortar” shells commonly used to make up the bulk of the designs include apple blossoms, rosecups, white nassa, and green limpets. Sometimes fish scales, seaweed, seeds, or seahorse bones make their way in as well.

A typical valentine takes hundreds of hours to complete, but as the fitting and gluing process proceeds, the puzzle solving can become meditative. It probably would have been a nice way to pass the hours on a long sea voyage.

In the 1960s, a conflict between Dutch-speaking and French-speaking students divided a historic collection.

In the mid-1960s, there were no Belgians attending Belgium’s oldest university. Founded in 1425, the institution—known in French as the Université catholique de Louvain and in Dutch as the Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven—was no longer viable despite its rich legacy, and its national symbolic value. As in many places in the country, French speakers, known as Walloons, had long enjoyed special status at the institution, controlling its administration despite Leuven’s location in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders. Fed up, the Flemish students demanded that the university rectify historic inequities and finally prioritize its Dutch-speaking majority.

The institution had torn apart at its factional seams, and nothing less than a split down the middle would suffice. This division would ultimately require the construction of a new town, Louvain-la-Neuve (literally “New Leuven” in French) and a new campus just across the border, only about 40 minutes’ drive away. But dividing the library’s collection—splitting an expression of a unified culture, a shared history—may have been harder than building a new city.

And so, in the 1970s, as Wallonia’s new Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) was under construction, Leuven’s library was a house divided. While the Walloons waited for their new library to be completed, this historic building near the center of Belgium—about 18 miles from the border separating Flanders and Wallonia—now temporarily housed two distinct libraries serving two distinct institutions, one for each linguistic community. Students, faculty, and staff were “working in the same place, but not working together,” says Charles-Henri Nyns, now UCLouvain’s Chief Librarian, and a student in Leuven during the 1970s, when the split was underway. Staff members were instructed, he says, to assist students in one language only and not the other—to not answer students who approached them in the wrong language.

All that determined which language you used was whether fortune had named you a Fleming or a Walloon; accordingly, books were split between the two institutions based not on their language, or their subject matter, but largely on their own labels—their shelfmarks.

How else to split a collection that held more than just books, but the weight of the past itself? Some of that history was proud: Erasmus had found an intellectual home in the city during the 16th century, and the library held his letters. The building catalogued the Low Countries’ contributions to the arts and sciences, documenting intellectual movements, such as Dutch Humanism and Jansenism. In a country known for its lack of a cohesive national identity, the library seemed as close to a symbol of unity—of Belgian-ness—as could be found.

Its tragic, brutal sacking in the First World War only reaffirmed that symbolism. On August 25, 1914, the German military set the library ablaze as part of its collective punishment of Leuven in retaliation for an alleged sniper attack. According to research by Mark Derez, archivist for the Flemish institution (KU Leuven), more than 2,000 houses burned down, 248 people died, and there “rained fragments of charred paper as far as the surrounding countryside.”

The town became a convenient piece of propaganda for the forces unified against Germany. In England, Derez writes, some ships and even baby girls born in 1914 were named after the town, as “Louvain! shall be our Battle Cry” became the name of a military march. The burnt library in particular was so poignant, writes Derez, because no one could have justified its military value. Its image helped recast the war from “a political-military conflict” into “a clash of civilizations,” in which one side would destroy cultural relics in fits of wanton, nihilistic aggression.

Derez relays an anecdote, possibly apocryphal, in which someone whose family’s home burned down during the German attack tried to describe the carnage to an American diplomat. He got through his family’s story but kept stumbling over the word “bibliothèque,” before bursting into tears. Even if the story is not actually true, its telling illustrates Derez’s key observation. “Attacks on cultural goods,” he writes, “continue to burn in people’s minds and to precipitate into the collective memory. The symbolic order ultimately outweighs individual tragedy.”

Not everyone, however, was ready to rally around the library to help Belgium heal the wounds of the war. Some Flemish students who had fought for Belgium on the battlefield boycotted the newly built library’s dedication ceremony in 1928, as the Institut de France’s involvement in the project signaled to them a pro-Francophone bias. “French was seen as a language of social pressure and a language of arrogance,” says Derez in an interview, and not even the Germans’ flames could erase that impression. (The German military attacked the library yet again in 1940, during World War II.)

When the episcopate had taken control of the university in 1834, following the establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium, instruction and administration were made almost exclusively French, despite the university’s location in Dutch-speaking Flanders. (The one exception was a course in Flemish literature.) Feeling as though they were invisible, the Flemings “perceived their French-speaking colleagues as aristocratic, snobbish, patronizing, and condescending bourgeois, who remained convinced of the superiority of the French language and therefore refused to learn Dutch,” writes Louis Vos, an historian at KU Leuven. The institution did not begin to add more Dutch courses until 1911, following decades of Flemish nationalist activism.

By 1936, the university had expanded to include a fully Dutch track for students, but the expansion only segregated the two language groups—rendering them separate, and decidedly unequal. When Vos was attending the university in the 1960s, he says the same lecture hall would host the same course two periods in a row: one session for each language. Students would ignore each other completely as they shuffled in and out. As the split was underway during the 1970s, says Nyns, the Walloon community was “like a ghetto”; he was able to make some Flemish friends, but only through proactive effort. Vos, meanwhile, says he never once conversed directly with a French speaker during his time as a student in Leuven.

“The idea that Belgium is a bilingual state is not completely correct,” Vos says. The situation is closer to one of “self-chosen apartheid” based on “real hostility”—and carried out, of course, unequally. He recalls Francophone students getting to use nice laboratories while Flemish students were relegated to the basement, studying the sciences on a smaller budget despite making up more of the student body.

And so, the Flemish protests persisted throughout the 1960s (some of them violently). The students sang “We Shall Overcome” and chanted “Walen buiten!”—“Walloons out!”—until it ultimately came to pass that each group would have to be served by its own distinct institution. Though much of the collection—which had twice been violently attacked—was necessarily new, the battle for the library’s holdings was still the sticking point; the library still embodied a long and vibrant history. In addition to the letters of Erasmus, the collection boasted writings by Thomas More, as well as the oldest manuscript written in the Hungarian language—part of Germany’s reparations for World War I, as mandated by the Treaty of Versailles. Derez recalls a colleague hiding a rare, 15th-century prayer book (shelfmark A12) in his own bathroom in order to hide it from the Walloons, so that they might not take it with them to their new town.

The administrators eventually settled on some arbitrary ground rules, which seemed fairest under the circumstances. If a work’s donor could be contacted, the donor could choose where it would go—and if there was more than one version of the same work, each institution would be guaranteed at least one copy. But the majority of works were just divided by shelfmark: Odds stayed in Leuven, evens left for Louvain-la-Neuve. It was an oddly prosaic solution to a fundamentally emotional conflict. Along with Walloon students and faculty—who, Nyns remembers, “lost their homes”—the books moved across the border, populating this new prop college town that was then, according to Vos, nothing but open fields.

Today, the two institutions enjoy a peaceful relationship, occasionally convening for ceremonies, and routinely collaborating on research. Law students, adds Nyns, often spend six months at the other school, as many Belgian lawyers are expected to be bilingual. But it’s a cold peace. The current students on either side of the border rarely speak one another’s language, and Walloons and Flemings often have to communicate with each other in English, says Derez. (He adds that Belgium’s German-speaking minority—less than one percent of the population—are known as “the last Belgians,” caught between the country’s two distinct factions.) He wonders if the partnership between the two institutions will evaporate within the next few generations, when there will be no one left to link the two groups.

Perhaps then—in the absence of a unified Belgium—the split will seem even more, as Derez insists, like “a typical Belgian solution” after all.

The running sap is like a local version of Groundhog day.

In Alaska, “breakup” is the season that quickly sneaks in between winter and summer. Packed, pristine-white snow loosens and turns into brown slush. Mounds of snow melt until parking lots, over just a few days, turn into lakes. It’s not warm spring weather—it’s just warm enough for the ground to unfreeze and the ice to breakup and melt. Depending on whether you live on the coast or interior, more to the south or more to the north, breakup season can last from ten days to several weeks.

Alaskans feel strongly about breakup. It’s too warm to ski, but too early to fish. Yet, this inter-season limbo of dreary weather accompanies lengthening days, and signals that something better is coming.

One of those signs is a bucket on a birch tree, which collects sap that only begins to run during breakup. Alaskans turn that sap into birch syrup. Less sweet than maple syrup, its flavor notes include coffee and cherry, and it’s used to make chocolate or beer, to marinade fish, and to pour on pancakes. In highly weather-aware Alaska, the appearance of buckets on birch trees functions a bit like Groundhog Day, alerting Alaskans that the fishing and hunting season are not so far off.

In Alaska, foraging isn’t just for foodies. Outside of major cities, the nearest grocery store may be a two-hour plane ride or three-hour drive away, and even big-city grocers struggle to stock produce during the winter, so living off the land is part of everyday conversation. (When I joined the faculty of an Alaskan university, I learned to accept that half of a meeting might be spent discussing our weekend hauls.) The arrival of breakup is an opportunity to fill larders that emptied over the winter, so despite the mud and muck, people pull on their Xtratuf waterproof boots—a staple of commercial fishermen’s uniforms that become ubiquitous during breakup—and gather spruce tips (good for beer, ice cream, and pickling) and nettles (often used similarly to basil, in lasagna and pesto).

While a number of forager favorites can be gathered during breakup, I consider birch sap special because it signals the start of breakup and warmer, longer days. While melting snow can be caused by a quick warm-up, running sap only occurs as breakup starts. As noted by Dr. Janice Dawe, a biologist and founder of OneTree, a forest education and research program in Fairbanks, that’s because “the way plants and animals tell time is temperature and light … That’s also why birch trees know how to start their activities for spring.”

Since birch sap starts flowing through the tree almost exactly when breakup begins, the weather that tappers face is terrible. “It’s the worst possible conditions … it’s really hard,” says Dulce Ben-East, owner and general manager of Alaska Wild Harvest. After a tree has been tapped, by the time a sap-filled bucket needs to be picked up the next day, the ground may have already become hard-to-traverse mush overnight.

At Alaska Wild Harvest, they start looking for signs in their 11,000 trees in March or April, tapping several dozen in different areas in search of running sap. The actual tapping—placing a spigot and bucket—isn’t complicated or expensive, but timing is key. If the trees are tapped too early, they can dry-up and not run at all. If temperatures rise into the 50s before the sap run is over, the sap can spoil before it’s processed. For Ben-East, knowing when to tap is instinctual now. “It’s in the air; it’s breakup. The snow is rotting, the ground is yuck, and we have to transition from snow machines to four-wheelers to get to the fields.”

Processing the sap is tricky and time consuming too. The reverse-osmosis process of removing excess water takes several hours, and making one gallon of syrup requires boiling down nearly 100 gallons of raw, easily scorched birch sap (compared to only 40 gallons of maple sap).

As a result, only a modest number of individuals tap their own trees. Tom Barrett, a resident of Anchorage, began tapping three years ago after visiting a booth from Alaska Wild Harvest at a market north of Anchorage. Barrett, who is an avid skier, talks about break-up as a bittersweet time of year and even has a mantra: "When skiing going mushy, it's time to make the slushy." Birch slushy, that is. "It fills a void in my life … the afternoons are warm and the ground is mush. It's a great time to just hang out inside and process some syrup." Working with three taps in his own backyard, Barrett collects enough sap for about three small containers of syrup.

While not every Alaskan forages for birch sap, awareness of sap starting to run is still high. Personally, I always see the buckets out, or hear within a day or so from a coworker or the radio. This is just one example of residents’ awareness of weather and seasons: Local public radio often announces how many minutes of daylight we gained or lost each day, and an annual competition called the Nenana Ice Classic offers hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money to whoever best guesses the exact second when the Tanana River’s ice breaks up.

And, of course, Alaskans who don’t tap birch trees can still get syrup from a store or a friend’s homemade haul. While home cooks have long slathered birch syrup on pan-fried cod and dressed salads with it, birch tapping is also a growing practice, both commercially and among foragers. Ben-East says she started tapping trees 30 years ago to address food insecurity by “utilizing an abundant resource that [we] could produce in Alaska, and not import from out of state.” Similarly, Dr. Dawe’s OneTree program runs a cooperative that encourages people to bring birch sap from their trees to be processed into syrup. “There is nothing like the gratitude you get when you are tapping a tree and you get something so delicious,” she says. “You can just tap one tree and get excited about it.”

India and Pakistan's volatile relationship keeps their citizens apart. Cricket brings them together.

“You haven’t been born until you’ve seen Lahore,” says Kanwaljeet Singh. A resident of the city of Mohali in Punjab, India, Singh is quoting a regional saying. Yet Singh has never seen Lahore. While he’s lived all his life less than 150 miles from the Punjabi cultural and literary center, he’s never been able to cross the India-Pakistan border to go there.

He’s far from the only one. Since the 1947 Partition of British India into India and Pakistan, Punjab has been bifurcated by a heavily militarized national border—and a daunting visa application. With relations between the two countries in constant turbulence, getting a visa to visit either side “is really damn difficult,” says Kausik Bandyopadhyay, Associate Professor of History at West Bengal State University. There are few exceptions, mainly for religious pilgrims, students, and artists. Even these visas are often limited to a handful of cities, and visitors are required to register with police. There’s another route, though, through which Indian and Pakistani citizens can visit each other’s countries: for a cricket match.

It’s hard to overstate the sport’s influence. The British brought the ball game to the region, but Indians in the 19th century embraced it. Post-independence, South Asian countries used the sport to assert national pride. The Indian Premier League is currently valued at over $6.3 billion, and over a billion people tuned into the India-Pakistan match during the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup. But cricket is more than a sport: it’s a geopolitical force. The term “cricket diplomacy” as a tool of statecraft originated with Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq’s 1987 visit to Delhi, according to Bandyopadhyay. Ostensibly there to see a test match between India and Pakistan, ul-Haq used the event to negotiate with Indian officials in an increasingly hostile diplomatic climate.

This hostility has its roots in the brutal 1947 Partition of British India. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the first Pakistani head of state, and his Muslim League had promoted the creation of a separate country to give the subcontinent’s minority Muslim population their own homeland. With the British in favor of the Partition, millions of Indian Muslims travelled to the newly created country of Pakistan, and millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed to India.

But when the migrations began, religiously charged rhetoric exploded into unthinkable violence. In the ensuing riots, countless women were raped, and up to two million people were killed. It also was the single largest mass migration in human history, with an estimated 16.7 million people displaced. This traumatic legacy has contributed to an uneasy rivalry between the two countries ever since.

Yet in April of 1999, it was cricket that brought a piece of Lahore to Kanwaljeet Singh. With India and Pakistan slated to play each other on Indian soil for the first time since 1987, the excitement in Chandigarh’s well-manicured streets was palpable. Fans from India and Pakistan came to watch the game: so many, that local hotels ran out of rooms. The city administration printed an appeal in the local newspaper, asking residents to host Pakistani guests in their homes.

Singh, a high school student at the time, had grown up listening to his grandmother reminisce about her childhood on the Pakistani side of the border. Fascinated by these stories, and by the literary legacy of Lahore, Singh was curious about his neighbors to the west. When he and his classmates heard that the Pakistani fans had arrived, they dashed to greet the crowds at a nearby plaza. He remembers asking: “Are you from Lahore? Are you from Lahore?” His family volunteered to host two families from Pakistani Punjab. “There was an air of excitement and curiosity,” Singh says. “It was like a festival.” Singh remembers an entire village near his home turning out to welcome his family’s Pakistani guests with flowers. One restaurant was so crowded with Chandigarh residents and their Pakistani guests that diners spilled out onto the surrounding plaza. The restaurant owner called for a dhol, a drum common to both sides of the border, and the crowd danced in the hot April air.

1999 wasn’t the only year Chandigarh residents hosted Pakistani cricket fans. It also happened in 2011, when fervor over the India-Pakistan World Cup semi-final in Mohali led to such severe overcrowding that the city government called for everyday residents to turn their homes into hotels.

Before that match, Pramod Sharma and Diep Saeeda joined the frantic queue outside Mohali Cricket Association Stadium to greet Pakistani fans. Sharma is president of Yuvsatta, “Youth for Peace,” and Saeeda is a Pakistani peace activist and the founder of the Institute for Peace and Secular Studies, a Lahore-based grassroots organization that has led an ongoing campaign to decrease visa barriers between Indians and Pakistanis. Saeeda and Yuvsatta members handed out 10,000 Indian and Pakistani flags, each pair tied together with string. “Some threw the Pakistani flag away and took just the Indian flag,” says Saeeda. “But most people were friendly.”

Besides regularly traveling to India, Saeeda frequently hosts Indian guests. When she visits India, says Saeeda, some Indians are shocked that she is Pakistani, believing that Pakistani people must look or behave differently than themselves. This kind of belief is at the heart of the two countries’ enmity, says Aaliyah Tayyebi, senior project manager of the Oral History Project at the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, so face-to-face encounters can be transformative.

For the relatively few Pakistani and Indian people who have been granted visas to cross the border, the experience can feel like a family reunion. According to Sharma, one Pakistani family that stayed in Chandigarh during the 2011 match delayed their daughter’s wedding for a year so their Indian hosts could obtain a visa to attend it. When Singh’s family and their guests discovered the same surname in their family tree, Singh began calling his Pakistani elders maama, or maternal uncle. “They weren’t really our relatives,” says Singh. “But they became family.”

This aura of hospitality has had an enduring effect on the way Singh views his country’s neighbors. Since the 1999 match, says Singh, when he hears someone characterizing Pakistanis and Indians as natural enemies, he recalls his family’s guests and rejects the jingoism. For Bandyopadhyay, this is a testament to sports’ role in person-to-person diplomacy. “Cricket has the power to humanize the relations that had been dehumanized over the years due to the scars of Partition,” he says.

Still, Bandyopadhyay fears that without a political solution to the tensions between the two countries, cricket diplomacy can only go so far. Hopes were high that the 1999 India-Pakistan match, the first on Indian soil in almost a decade, would result in some reconciliation. But the bonhomie was cut short by the breakout of the Kargil War. In 2011, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari even attended the World Cup semi-final together in the Mohali cricket stadium. Yet the goodwill didn’t last long. In 2013, the countries faced off over the disputed area of Kashmir once more. Not even cricket can entirely escape the enmity: Indian officials once leveled sedition charges against citizens who supported the Pakistani team. “Whenever cricket was thought to be an instrument of peace, something untoward happened,” says Bandyopadhyay.

For Singh, however, cricket isn't the point. He vividly recalls the friendships he formed during the 1999 match, and doesn’t even remember who won. “Nobody went to see the match,” Singh laughs. “Nobody was interested in cricket at all."

They tore it down in the 1960s to solve the puzzle below.

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, a German church knocked down in the name of coal, and a towering pagoda that was eventually rebuilt.

The city flourished deep in the forest. In the ancient complex of Tikal, in northern Guatemala, the tops of the limestone temples poked out above the thick canopy, where toucans croak and howler monkeys scramble.

Modern-day visitors will see that some restored temples still rise up above the branches of mahoganies and cedars—but at least one has been reduced to its squat foundation. Researchers dubbed it Structure 5D-33, and suspected that its pyramid went up during the sixth or seventh century. On the stony surface where its sides used to reach skyward, there are now little blankets of grass, like patchy area rugs.

Its squashed dimensions aren’t simply the product of one millennium turning into another. Archaeologists deliberately dismantled the structure decades ago—and rattled the field in the process.

In the mid-1960s, American archaeologists were wrapping up an extensive excavation of the site. Over more than a decade, wrote William R. Coe, the project director and a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the crew had studied nearly 350 structures, and compiled “millions of facts and hundreds of thousands of objects” along the way. The haul was so vast that storage facilities “bulged” with figurines, pendants, and vessels, Coe wrote. By the time the crew packed out, leaving their vehicles rusting in the green tangles, they had shot tens of thousands of photographs and filled "stacks" of journals and "bales and rolls" of paper with architectural drawings and field notes.

They also left Structure 5D-33, in the North Acropolis, looking much different than they found it. For many archaeologists, the ground surrounding a site holds many clues to mine. But at the Maya site, some of the most beguiling clues were deeper below the surface, Coe wrote: The former residents habitually stripped structures and built overtop them, or else nested them within new ones. The past was locked away in a vertical puzzle, Coe suggested, and piecing it together would require some digging to get to the earlier structures in the same footprint. “This large Late Classic temple, if carefully taken down, could give us not only the evidence of how everything beneath it went together, but how the Maya, step by step, built on a grand vertical scale during Late Classic times,” Coe wrote. The hope was that they could reverse engineer the building by taking it apart.

The structure had once been “magnificent,” Coe reported, comprised of five stacked terraces and a two-room structure on top, soaring nearly 110 feet in all. The Guatemalan Instituto de Antropología e Historia, a cultural heritage body, signed off on the archaeologists' plan, Coe said, and the pyramid came down.

As work progressed, the crew discovered the layers that they had expected to find; the earliest version, it turned out, had been a funeral monument for Siyaj Chan K'awiil II, a fifth-century king. They also found striking, monumental masks. But as the excavators worked, they also ruffled some other researchers’ feathers.

Writing in American Antiquity, Heinrich Berlin, a German Mayanist, complained that his enthusiasm for the project “suddenly drop[ped] below freezing” when he learned that the temple had been intentionally dismantled. He railed against the “willful destruction” of the structure, and asked “whether it would not have been better if this project had never been carried out at all.” The archaeologists had overstepped their bounds, he argued, suggesting that curiosity doesn’t give anyone free license to dig until they satisfy their appetite. “The fact that an archaeologist does not understand something does by no means—generally speaking—entitle him to destroy this something in the hope that by doing so he will understand it,” Berlin wrote. “Pyramids are no guinea pigs which the archaeologist can produce at will.”

The project team swatted back, arguing that revealing the hidden structures beneath the slumping ruins was worth the trade-off. For one thing, it illuminated construction techniques, indicating that masons built the pyramid up in stages, scrambling up higher and higher on rough sets of stairs. The process also exposed interesting things below, and allowed them to skip the process of digging tunnels, which required no small amount of upkeep and are also, inconveniently, “plagued by bats.” Plus, they needed some debris to fill in a nearby trench “without exceedingly expensive hauling from a distant and low-lying dump.”

The spat didn’t resurrect the pyramid. By the time Berlin got huffy, it was already gone, and still is. But the tussle did revive sticky, still-pressing questions about how present-day researchers ought to cover their tracks, and when and where modern visitors should tread lightly or not at all.

The connection between New Orleans to Los Angeles can still be felt today.

In February 1883, the Southern Pacific Railroad created a new path for Americans who wanted to head out West. Its transcontinental “Sunset Route” was officially completed, connecting New Orleans directly to California. This innovative transit line, the second transcontinental connection, between the Southeast and the Pacific not only brought new commerce to the wild, wild West, but shifted migratory patterns in a way that changed the relatively new state of California. In particular, Los Angeles’s present-day black population has creole influences that are a direct result of the Sunset Route.

The four railroad barons responsible for this ambitious reach across the nation were Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, and Mark Hopkins. The ever-competitive Huntington sought to capitalize on his company’s 85 percent dominance over California’s tracks by laying down a railway through the South. Through his own capital and funds from the other three (targeted bribery, too), Huntington gained control of several smaller railroads, giving birth to the Sunset Route. (It should be noted that it was completed and connected thanks to the low-paid and dangerous labor of Chinese immigrants.)

The route covered a whopping 9,000 miles of track, by modest approximation. And just like that, the “Big Four” had achieved a stranglehold over the shipping industry on the Pacific seaboard, which ensured that their interests in the ports there would be taken seriously. As an added bonus, this railroad pushed commercial freight through Los Angeles, which fueled the subsequent “speculative land bubble” that took off later in the decade.

Faustina DuCros, a sociologist at San Jose State University, says that while “California has seen several phases of economic boom,” the financial gains the Sunset Route brought to the state were particularly pivotal to its economy. “The rail lines to the West were integral to its development ever since they were being constructed,” she says. Case in point: The four barons could charge high shipping rates to make back their considerable investment. For a city whose primary form of transit had historically been ox-carts and wagons, the Sunset Route helped open Los Angeles up to global economy for the first time.

As a result of the economic possibilities, California was then glittering with, the state began to attract people from other regions of the country. Specifically, black Americans from the South began migrating in large numbers to Los Angeles in the 19th and early 20th centuries. “Many of the black Southerners moving West were escaping racial inequality that came out of Jim Crow segregation,” DuCros says. “[They were] looking for better work and educational opportunities for their family.”

This straight shot to California—fair-weather, year-round—made starting a life there relatively painless, but really, anything was better than the alternative. The number of black Southerners and their descendants in California today reflect this common interest in leaving the shadow of slavery and segregation behind. “The growth of the black population in Los Angeles doubled from 1940 to 1950, and many new residents made their way via the rail lines,” DuCros says. Many of these migrants, who had traveled via the Sunset Route, settled in the central area of the city, which was close to the rail station and jobs. While some of these Southerners were seeking a new lifestyle and planned to find work once they arrived, some of them arrived in California through their work. “The Pullman porters were employed on the railroads and were often the Great Migration pioneers in the families moving westward because they had seen California on their routes,” DuCros notes.

Today, Los Angeles still reflects the Southern influences that were brought to California along the railroad. “Even now, there are remnants of what was once a bustling Louisiana community in South Los Angeles,” DuCros says. “You still see restaurants and businesses catering to Louisiana-inspired tastes. Some of the Catholic parishes in South Los Angeles had large population of parishioners from Louisiana, and clusters still remain to this day.”

The Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route is now known as Amtrak’s “Sunset Limited” train (making it the oldest named route in the country), and has been partially suspended since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina washed out part of the rail line. But its impact on Southern California is more durable.

King Henry VI's "Loveday" did little to stop the Wars of the Roses.

In late March 1458, hundreds of English lords and ladies gathered at Westminster Abbey and walked hand in hand through the streets of London, along the western banks of the Thames to St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a “loveday” procession, a form of reconciliation meant to put the Wars of the Roses to rest.

“It was a bit Hollywood,” says John Sadler, author of The Red Rose and the White, a history of the series of English civil wars in the mid-15th century. “There was a lot of pomp about it. Banners flying, drums beating, it was a show.”

A ballad composed to commemorate the event described the public display of political affection:

At Paul’s in London, with great renown,
On our Ladyday in Lent, this peace was wrought.
The King, the Queen, with Lords many one …
Went in procession …
In sight of all the commonality,
In token that love was in heart and thought

The women were “blinged up to the eyeballs—they’d have looked like the 15th-century equivalent of footballers’ wives,” says Sadler. But beneath the finery, tensions still ran high. Within two years of the Loveday procession, most of the men who had walked together in London would be dead, and the wars would rage on for nearly three more decades.

Three years before, concerns about King Henry VI’s ability to perform his royal duties—due to his infamously gentle nature and persistent illness, which many now believe to have been “catatonic schizophrenia”—reached a boiling point. Viewing him as weakly pious and more fit for a life of prayer, Richard Plantagenet, a Yorkist represented by a white rose, decided to act. The insurgency began with the Battle of St. Albans in 1455, when Richard—the Duke of York—staged a bloody surprise attack and captured King Henry VI, who belonged to the rival House of Lancaster, represented by a red rose.

Apparently restored to health, the king had the idea to stage a public ceremony in 1458 to reconcile the rival houses. As well as an attempt to bury the hatchet and avert an escalation, the Loveday was a public relations campaign meant to reassure Londoners that the war, which had disrupted trade and daily life in the capital, was over. The proceedings were rife with religious symbolism—such as the start point at Westminster Abbey—meant to pound an air of peace into the event. The parade was set for Lady’s Day, which memorializes the Virgin Mary’s receipt of the news that she would bear a child, and also doubled as the start of the new year at the time (January 1 wasn’t adopted as New Year’s Day in England until 1752). It was the right moment for a fresh start, Henry thought.

Lovedays were a common form of arbitration in medieval England, but were generally used to settle local matters. Scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1798 definition describes the practice as “a day appointed for the amicable settlement of differences.” Lovedays were employed to help resolve disagreements outside the law, in a friendly fashion, and usually culminated in a feast followed by a handshake to seal the accord. They could be pretty elaborate—one feast noted by late medieval scholar Josephine Waters Bennett required the provision of more than 500 gallons of Gascon wine (that’s a malbec), two fat oxen, and twelve fat sheep to be consumed “in a regular English jollification”—all to celebrate the settlement of a pasture dispute.

“These were civic performances and, as with many political performances, offer interesting indications of political symbolism and iconography rather than ... substantial or lasting evidence of the pursuits of political concord,” says Patricia Clare Ingham, a scholar of medieval studies at Indiana University. It was rare that a loveday would be used to settle something so fractious as a full-blown civil war. A symbolic gesture is little substitute for revenge after the deaths of friends and family members.

The members of the Houses of York and Lancaster did not take the hand-holding to heart. Queen Margaret of Anjou, who had already begun ruling indirectly during the king's catatonic episodes, took a prime position in the procession, holding hands with her sworn enemy, Richard of York. Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick (who had already switched his allegiance from Lancaster to York), held hands with the Duke of Somerset, Henry Beaufort, whose father had been killed at St. Albans three years prior. There’s probably nothing quite like gripping your enemy’s clammy palm for a two-mile walk to remind you of your total revulsion at his existence.

With all having gone through the motions of this grand gesture, Henry VI retreated politically and Queen Margaret again took the helm. The Loveday peace accord would be short-lived.

“It’s like a soap opera,” Sadler says of the Wars of the Roses. A cast of strident characters—with the addition of their armed retinues—turned small misunderstandings and loads of historical baggage into an ongoing, disastrous drama.

In May 1458, less than two months after the Loveday, the Earl of Warwick directly flouted the law by engaging in some casual piracy along the coast of Calais, where he had been virtually exiled by the queen. When she summoned him to London to answer for his actions, a scuffle broke out. Margaret used the ensuing bedlam to make a decisive move: She officially accused the Earl of Warwick, the Duke of York, and other Yorkist nobility of treason in October 1459, decrying the duke’s “most diabolical unkindness and wretched envy.” The Loveday procession had curdled into a “parliament of devils,” she said, and the roses were at it again, and would be for another generation.

Some still reign today.

Sweet, fizzy Coca-Cola, notes writer Tom Standage, is practically “capitalism in a bottle.” In societies where capitalism loses favor, the symbolic American drink is often replaced with a palatable local alternative. Yet when the Berlin Wall fell, East Germans ditched their Vita-Cola for Coca-Cola. Poland’s Polo-Cockta and the Czech Kofola both faded away, only to be later revived out of nostalgia. But in India, two underdog sodas that flourished during the country’s stint of economic isolation have remained solidly shelved next to Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Even after India's pivot from socialism to a largely free market, Thums Up and Limca have thrived.

But they weren’t always at the top of the fizzy hierarchy. After India gained independence from Britain in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ushered in a political dynasty that would oversee moderate socialist economic reforms. Pure Drinks Group introduced Coca-Cola to the newly-formed republic two years later. Pepsi followed, only to exit in 1962 due to lagging sales. Coca-Cola—and other multinational corporations—kept growing despite the Nehruvian government’s extensive regulations. Politicians were dismayed by Coca-Cola’s omnipresence from India’s bustling metropolitan centers to its rural villages.

The end of Coke’s reign was sparked by political upheaval. By 1977, India was fresh off two years of the “Emergency.” Spurred by a wobbly economy and unrest, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government suspended civil liberties, jailed rivals, and broke up protests. In early 1977, Gandhi was unseated in favor of the Janata Party, an alliance of different political groups. One member, the future industry minister George Fernandes, wanted to eject Coca-Cola from the country. He went into his reasoning later. “When I chucked out Coca-Cola in 1977, I made the point that 90 percent of India's villages did not have safe drinking water, whereas Coke had reached every village," the late Fernandes said in a 1992 New York Times article, adding "Do we really need Coke? Do we need Pepsi?"

During Gandhi’s tenure as prime minister, Parliament passed a set of regulations that would trigger the chucking. The Foreign Exchange Regulation Act of 1973 required many multinationals to hand over 60% of the equity in their local subsidiaries to Indian partners. Coca-Cola would have had to release its top-secret syrup recipe and IBM its computer codes in order to comply. Faced with an ultimatum from Fernandes, Coca-Cola—along with Mobil, Kodak, and 54 other companies—left.

India was left with a huge void in the carbonated beverage aisle. Out of the mess sprang a cohort of local sodas to fill the Coke-shaped hole. The Mumbai-based Parle Group introduced Thums Up and RimZim, two Coca-Cola replacements, while their lemonade-like Limca and newly created Citra filled in for Sprite. Pure Drinks used its expansive distribution network to disseminate a new product, Campa Cola, which it deemed “The Great Indian Taste.” Double Seven, named after that volatile year of 1977, was the government-sanctioned substitute for Coke.

The local brands met varied success. According to Samit Sinha, brand expert and managing partner at Alchemist Consulting, the already dominant lemon-lime flavor category blew up following Coke’s departure, which was good news for Limca. Limca’s success even contributed to that of Thums Up, since the Parle Group insisted that stores stock the cola if they wanted its citrus sibling. “Thums Up was the most distinct, being fizzier, spicier, and less sweet than the others,” says Sinha. Unlucky Double Seven fell out of favor two years later, along with the Janata Party government that devised it.

But the days of only “Great Indian Taste” started to taper off. In the late 1980s, India began chipping away at its armor of economic isolation. After years of political rigmarole, Pepsi was let back in—with a few conditions. One was that it “Indianize” its name. The newly branded Lehar Pepsi (Lehar means “wave” in Hindi) hit the market in 1990. The Soviet Union—socialist India’s primary sponsor—collapsed a year later. Lacking support and seriously in debt, India was forced to fully embrace the free market. According to historian of South Asia and professor Benjamin Siegel, it’s not an exaggeration to say that liberalization transformed the country practically overnight. “It was a moment when you went from one state-run television channel to lots of television channels,” he explains. “You went from having very few consumer goods, including these sodas, to lots of things coming in.”

Amidst the commercial deluge, Pepsi and hometown champion Thums Up duked it out in a legendary brand war. Pepsi bashed Thums Up as tasting like medicine in its advertisements. Meanwhile, Thums Up’s new slogan “Taste the Thunder” cemented its identity as the edgier, more masculine soda choice. Thums Up’s thrill-seeking branding (complete with commercials featuring cool bungee-jumping actors) resonated with the main soda-drinking demographic: teenage boys. But it also appealed to consumers at large in a re-energized, post-liberalization India fizzing with possibility. It didn’t hurt that Thums Up and Old Monk whiskey, another beloved local brand, incidentally became the “Indian version of Jack Daniels and Coke,” Sinha adds.

Thums Up’s timely, evocative marketing not only allowed it to beat Pepsi, Sinha says, but also its local cola competition. “Thums Up’s local origins certainly did stir up some national pride against the foreign Pepsi,” Sinha says. “The opening up to the world helped Indians become more aware of their own culture, and thus arose an emotional urge to support deserving Indian brands.”

Still, it seemed as though the daredevil soda might meet its end when Coca-Cola re-entered India in 1993 and bought Thums Up from Parle. The foreign giant quickly killed Citra, Gold Spot, and RimZim to make room for its own Sprite, Fanta and Coke. But the local sodas wouldn’t die. Even with an influx of new options, Indians kept drinking Thums Up and Limca. Their sustained popularity can be put down to specific regional tastes—the former’s pungent tingle is meant to pair well with spicy food, and the latter’s taste and distinctive cloudy look appeals to the national love for nimbu paani, or lemonade. Coca-Cola, caught between competition with Pepsi on one side and Indian consumers on the other, decided to spare both local brands.

Despite a strong conviction by many that Coca-Cola neglects its desi, or domestic, brands, today Thums Up rules the cola scene in India, only topped in the carbonated beverage arena by Sprite. Unlike most of the world, Pepsi comes in at third and Coke trails at fourth. They are followed closely by Limca, which is most popular with older demographics. Perhaps that last statistic best explains how these homegrown sodas have survived over 40 years of political and economic turbulence. It may not be so much the flavor of Thums Up or Limca that keeps them in demand, but what they evoke: comforting familiarity in the midst of an ever-changing nation.

In October 2018, the Japanese city of Osaka broke off its 60-year relationship with San Francisco, California.

For 60 years, the cities of San Francisco, California, and Osaka, Japan, enjoyed a robust cultural partnership. The two port enclaves were “sister cities,” a designation that illustrates one of several post-World War II attempts to embrace ethnic diversity and multiculturalism.

Like all sister cities, Osaka and San Francisco’s bond was built around the sharing of ideas and heritage. In the past, this has taken many forms, from student exchanges and remote learning programs to ambassadorial delegations, all of which have been used over the course of the six-decade relationship to foster cultural understanding. But this sororal connection became strained in the fall of 2017, when a statue honoring “comfort women,” who were enslaved in Japanese brothels during World War II, was constructed in San Francisco. After a year of repeated threats, Osaka mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura sent a 10-page letter to San Francisco mayor London Breed in October 2018 in which he wrote, “I am afraid to announce that the City of Osaka must hereby terminate its sister city relationship with the City and County of San Francisco.”

But what does it mean for sister cities to breakup? And what does it mean, more specifically, for Osaka and San Francisco?

While the concept of “sister cities” predates World War II—with Toledo, Spain, and Toledo, Ohio, signing a twinning agreement in 1931—these relationships have flourished in the decades since the conflict. In 1956, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower created the Sister Cities International program to improve relationships between countries around the globe. The nonprofit is the national membership organization for all sister cities, counties, and states that exist in the United States with ties to 140 countries across the planet. The U.S. president is considered the honorary chairman of the organization, even though it is not officially part of the federal government.

(A note about the lexicon here: The term “sister city” is usually utilized in reference to a relationship involving a city in the Americas, whereas elsewhere, other terms, including “twin towns,” are used.)

Individual sister-city relationships are orchestrated by smaller associations across various U.S. cities under the support and guidance of SCI. The sister-city relationship is usually one that has taken a few years to put together and organize, from establishing lines of communication to agreeing on what the actual partnership will entail. During this period the two cities are known as friendship cities, which is considered the first step to sisterhood. SCI also has a cities-seeking-cities personals page where lonely cities can find partners. Once the relevant representatives sign a memorandum outlining the relationship, it becomes official.

Some of the earliest sister-city relationships were formed out of humanitarian efforts. When American towns began noticing how British people sent relief packages to European countries recovering from the war, they decided to do the same. In 1955, one year before the formation of SCI, the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, became the first American city to establish a relationship with an Asian city by entering a sister-city agreement with Nagasaki, Japan. Minnesotans immediately began sending medical supplies to Nagasaki, which was still suffering a decade after the atomic bombing.

Today, these relationships take on many forms. While they can spawn from superficial similarities, such as two cities sharing a name, they can be mutually beneficial for both cities’ economies and their diaspora communities. In Charleston, South Carolina, the Spoleto Festival USA brings performers, opera singers, and other artists from its sister city of Spoleto, Italy, every year, generating millions of dollars in tourism. The relationship between San Antonio, Texas, and Kumamoto, Japan, led to the creation of a Toyota manufacturing factory in the Lone Star city in 2003.

One of the core principles of the SCI program, as Eisenhower envisioned it, was to create a program where politics could not interfere. “As far as we are concerned, and obviously as far as President Eisenhower’s thoughts were, in establishing sister-city relationships, these relationships would be above politics,” says Kathleen Kimura, co-chair of the SF-Osaka Sister City Association.

However, it’s not always possible for these exchanges to remain apolitical. When the city of Lansing, Michigan, learned about the discrimination against LGBTQ individuals taking place in St. Petersburg, Russia, the city council voted to sever the sisterly relationship (though some said it had already been defunct). In the city of Laguna Niguel in Orange County, California, the mayor was forced to put their relationship with Al Qa’im, an Iraqi town, on hiatus in 2014 after learning the latter city had been taken over by ISIS.

But the question still remains: What does it actually mean for two sister cities to split? The answer is, frankly, not a whole lot.

According to SCI’s Partnership Agreement Toolkit, for a U.S. city wishing to end a relationship, letters must first be sent from the highest ranking official in that city to the mayor of their international sister informing them of the decision. Next, SCI must be notified by that U.S. city’s mayor in writing. The relationship is then removed from all directories and listings. If a foreign city has no desire to maintain a sister-city relationship, SCI again must be notified by the U.S. city’s mayor so the partnership can be removed. In similar fashion, a hiatus can be applied, if two cities wish to remain sisters, but maintain an inactive relationship.

But even after going down that formal path to termination, it’s extremely difficult to end a genuine decades-long bond with the swoop of a pen. While Kimura says the Osaka-San Francisco decision is disappointing, her organization will continue to work with Osaka and so will the city of San Francisco.

“Typically the relationships become personal relationships between dozens and sometimes hundreds and thousands of people within the cities,” says Anthony Al-Jamie, President of SoCal Sister Cities Organization, a group that connects cities in Southern California with international siblings. “Those can't come to an end when one mayor says he wants to cancel something.” Mayors aren’t permanent political figures, Al-Jamie also notes, and often these bonds outlast those elected to office.

In the case of Osaka and San Francisco, the break-up stems from the construction of what is known as the “Column of Strength” statue. It depicts three young women standing atop a pedestal holding hands in a circle facing outward. The trio represents the thousands of women from China, Korea, and the Philippines who were forced into sexual slavery at brothels known as “comfort stations.” On the ground, gazing up at them, is a statue of Kim Hak-Sun, the first woman to go public about her life in those comfort stations.

Brothels were a staple of the Japanese military between 1932 and 1945. Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Chinese women and children were kidnapped, coerced, tricked, or sold by their families into sexual enslavement. They made up a majority of the enslaved individuals, but women and girls were also taken from Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaya, Taiwan, Portuguese Timor, the Dutch East Indies, and many other Japanese-occupied territories. It’s estimated that less than 10 percent of women relegated to comfort stations survived the war.

It wasn't until 1993 when the Japanese government formally acknowledged the operation of comfort stations during the war. However, there have still been ongoing denials. In 2007, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated that women were not forced to work in the stations.

This is also not the first time that a statue dedicated to comfort women has angered Japan. In 2011, one was erected in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea, then another outside the country's consulate in Busan in 2017. The latter incident angered the Japanese government so much that they removed two diplomats from South Korea and threatened the validity of a compensation package to the victims which consisted of one billion yen (around $9 million). When Taiwan unveiled its own statue in 2018, the government issued several statements again calling for it to be taken down and lambasting it as "one-sided history."

Although Kimura says she understands the political pressure Yoshimura is under, she adds that she did express to him during a visit that these links were supposed to be above political discord. Going forward, Kimura says that the SF-Osaka Sister City Association will continue with student ambassador programs and people-to-people exchanges.

“I think that there is great hope that the relationship,” she says. “The official relationship will be repaired ultimately. “

The Whitman Sampler Collection is pretty sweet.

While most Valentine's Day chocolate comes in a red- and white-trimmed heart, your sweetheart may have recently handed you a golden box: a Whitman’s Sampler. With its packaging reminiscent of old-fashioned cross-stitch, Whitman's Samplers seem demonstrably vintage, evoking another era.

But when the already venerable Whitman's candy company unveiled the Sampler in 1912, the patterns on its box were meant to remind customers of an even earlier, homier era. As legend has it, Whitman’s president Walter Sharp used a piece of embroidery, or “sampler,” made by his great-aunt as inspiration for his new line of fancy boxed chocolates. Consumers seemed to enjoy the vintage look and crafty appeal of the packaging (one billion Whitman’s Samplers have been sold since 1912) as well as the implicit invitation to “sample” the different chocolates from Whitman’s most popular boxes.

As the popularity of the Sampler grew, Whitman's collected actual samplers. Between 1926 and 1964, the Philadelphia-based company sought embroidery from local dealers. With examples spanning from the 17th to 20th centuries, the company even put the vintage samplers on display to draw customers to their stores and showrooms. Geographically, the samplers in the collection were diverse: Along with a significant number of early American samplers, the collection included Russian, Spanish, Mexican, and Dutch work.

The term for such panels of embroidery comes from the French term essamplaire, since they were meant as a way for girls and women to practice, showcase, and record their embroidery skills. Samplers were often embroidered with letters, numbers, or even bucolic scenes, and families kept them as decor and heirlooms.

While sewing and embroidery were long considered essential life skills, samplers that have survived to today are now considered folk art. Notably, many young women stitched their name and age onto their work, giving them a lasting voice that otherwise may have been denied them. While women often stitched them as memory aids for different stitches, or even to demonstrate their suitability as a wife and homemaker, samplers also reveal creativity and craftsmanship.

That's why Pet, Inc, the company that owned Whitman’s, donated the collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969. The eclectic mix includes renderings in thread of everything from the Liberty Bell to towering skyscrapers to perky-tailed dogs. In 1833, Janet Tomson Ash, an English 10-year-old, made a sampler with stunning expertise, stitching out a neat house in a design reminiscent of modern pixel art. Sometimes, the skills are seem elegant and in progress: One sampler declares, “Kind Friend, behold for it is Truth, This is the Practice of My Youth.” One sampler, made by an 11-year-old in 1829, contrasts flowers with a kneeling, chained man: a common anti-slavery motif.

By the time of the donation, making samplers was more of a hobby than a necessity for women. (Though, recently, they’ve had a feminist revival.) Yet the museum continues, on occasion, to display selections from the Whitman Sampler Collection: a sweet reminder of countless women's craftsmanship.

Pottery is fixed for practical purposes—and aesthetic ones as well.

Throughout time and across cultures, ceramics have been both functional and decorative. A few years ago, archaeologists discovered 20,000-year-old pottery fragments in a cave in southern China, evidence of an ancient, nomadic kitchen. Just last year, four canopic jars were found in a newly unearthed ancient Egyptian cemetery—there, and in many other such tombs, they held mummified organs. And in 19th-century America, porcelain dinnerware served as a not-so-subtle status symbol. Porcelain, a high-fired clay with a fine surface texture, was so delicate and valuable that it was often given as a diplomatic gift.

Ceramic vessels are useful and ubiquitous, but can also be fragile, so it is inevitable that they might chip, crack, or break. This damage can happen at any point in the life of a pot, vase, or krater: fresh from the kiln, on board a ship in transit, or after a tumble from a shelf. Fractured pottery has a long, globe-spanning history, too. In Rome, the sherds of seemingly countless amphorae form Monte Testaccio, a giant hill composed entirely of the remains of oil jars broken in transit. George Washington knew this problem well, too. In a 1758 letter to British merchant Thomas Knox, he claimed his “Crate of Stoneware dont contain a third of the Pieces I am chargd with, and only two things broke.” And during the World War II era, as Japanese-Americans faced the imminent risk of being taken away to concentration camps, some broke their prized, authentic Japanese porcelain heirlooms in protest.

Just as there are many ways to mend a broken heart, cultures around the world have used different approaches to repairing broken ceramics as well. The tradition of repairing these items goes back to antiquity. “We think of recycling as a modern-day practice, but really the mentality of throwing things away when they break is the more modern phenomenon,” says Angelika Kuettner, Associate Curator of Ceramics at Colonial Williamsburg, in an email. “History is filled with accounts of objects of many types (of value to the owners) being mended or repurposed.” But this practice wasn’t always for practical, utilitarian purposes. Pottery’s dual role as both objects of utility and markers of wealth has made repairing broken vessels doubly important. “There are quite a few period accounts of mended ceramics, perhaps no longer fit for use on the table, being used to dress a bowfat (china closet or cupboard),” Kuettner says. “In other words, although broken, they could continue to be used to show status as display pieces.”

Two curators and a conservator have helped us break down the ways busted up ceramics have been put back together—often to quite beautiful effect—for thousands of years.

Staples

The story goes that a prominent military ruler in 15th-century Japan had an even older Chinese celadon-glazed bowl that broke. It was so precious, and he loved it so much, that he sent it to China to be replaced. Unfortunately, such was its rarity that replacement was impossible, so the Chinese repaired it instead. It came back to the ruler with holes drilled through each side of every break, and metal staples put through those holes, thus holding the fragments together. This mechanical Chinese technique for mending pottery, also known as “rivet repair,” ultimately ended up spreading west to the rest of Asia via the Silk Road.

Sarah Barack, Head of Conservation and Senior Objects Conservator at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, categorizes ceramic repairs into two main approaches: external and internal. Staples were external, highly visible, as they did not lay flush with the rest of the surface. Because ceramics have often been on display, whether they were in use or not, this seemingly crude fix could have been considered an eyesore. But according to Barack, it depends on how the mended pottery was displayed. “The rivets that I’ve seen, for instance, are generally on the outside—the underside—of a plate. So those staples weren’t visible from the front side,” she says. “If you weren’t showing the object all around you wouldn’t really see [them] on the back side.”

Kintsugi

Up until about the 12th century, Japan imported ceramics from China, but it wasn’t until the 14th century that these objects became important in society. Louise Cort, Curator Emerita for Ceramics at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, says that this is when they started being linked to the custom of tea drinking among elite society. “In the 16th century tea drinking evolved into an aesthetic practice that focused on individual ceramics displayed and used in the tea room,” she says. “Kintsugi repairs appear to be closely associated with tea.”

Kintsugi, the art of mending breaks and losses in ceramics with lacquer and gold powder, developed sometime by the 17th century. Lacquer (known as urushi, and made from tree sap) has been used in Japan as an adhesive since antiquity, but the sprinkling of powdered gold onto the wet binding agent shows how this repair technique came to involve aesthetics as well as function. Simply put, gold is expensive, so a kintsugi-repaired vessel was a clear, yet subtle, symbol of wealth. Unlike rivet repairs, kintsugi both fixed broken ceramics, and beautified them into distinct works of art.

Due to the frequency with which tea bowls were dropped, kintsugi’s “golden seams” eventually became a fairly standard attribute of traditional Japanese tea ceramics. These repairs were performed by lacquer specialists, who generally trained in the technique for at least a decade. Because of this long road to becoming a master, Gen Saratani, a third-generation Japanese lacquer restorer who works and teaches kintsugi in New York, says there are few masters of the craft still working today.

Adhesives

Adhesives are a more internal style of repair than staples, and more subtle than kintsugi (which is itself an adhesive technique). They come in many forms—from putty to paint to “china pastes”—and interlock the micropores exposed by a break. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this method has always been more accessible for people to perform themselves, without having to outsource the work to a specialist.

“There are many 18th-century recipes (which were often referred to as ‘receipts’ in the period) for ‘china glues’ that individuals could make at home to repair their ceramics,” Kuettner says. In colonial America, these recipes were printed in housewifery journals and other publications. Hutchin’s Improved Almanac, published in New York, issued a recipe for “an Exceeding fine Cement to mend broken China or Glasses.” Alternatively, premade adhesives were available for sale. One man, Anthony Lamb, advertised his “Putty for mending China” in the Connecticut Journal in 1779.

For porcelain repair in particular, Barack says that a mixture of linseed oil and white lead paint was often used. “[It] replicates the fineness of the surface of porcelain and gives it sort of a polish,” she says. “And on the inside it might [have been] filled with plaster to sort of hold it all together.” Ancient ceramics, on the other hand, were likely patched up with naturally available substances. “Bitumen, a natural resin, was an ancient adhesive that was known,” Barack adds. Today, on the other hand, professional conservators use modern materials such as epoxies and reversible adhesives.

Mounts

In early prints and paintings depicting domestic American life, there are several instances of ceramics (teapots, especially) with spouts and handles that had been replaced with tin or silver. As an expert on the pottery of Colonial Williamsburg, Kuettner says that “many metalsmiths supplemented their businesses by also offering to repair ceramics.”

In her article, titled “Simply Riveting: Broken and Mended Ceramics,” she recounts one instance in which a certain James Rutherford of Charleston, South Carolina, advertised himself as a “regular-bred gold and silver smith ... who ... likewise works in jewelry, and clasps broken china in the neatest manner.” Silversmiths not only repaired broken ceramics, but added on to them as well. Thomas Shields, of Philadelphia, was known to add a chain from a teapot’s cover to its spout, likely to prevent further breakage when handling.

These shiny additions were often simply for aesthetic purposes. “Sometimes silver mounts weren’t [used] because something was damaged, but very often a piece of porcelain would be sent to Europe and then it would be fitted with a silver mount for the market,” Barack says. “And it wasn’t a repair, it was just an aesthetic decision to allow [the piece] to be part of a decorative arts scheme in a room.” Pottery owners concerned with how their vessels matched their decor treated ceramics from a decidedly privileged position—after all, there was wealth to be flaunted. Silversmiths and metalworkers were called in to perform this specialized decorative, repair, or replacement work to increase the value of a given item. “Silver is a very valuable metal,” Barack says. “So like kintsugi, you’re using a medium that’s valuable, that has specialized knowledge behind it, and has a crafts practice and tradition.”

The repair of damaged ceramics has a long history, patched together from pieces scattered all over the world. It is a form of historic conservation that is not only site-specific, but culturally specific, too. The tendency to want to fix an imperfection is a human one—and then there is the desire for survival, such as when fixing and reusing a pot, bowl, or plate, is the only option you have left. Regardless of how or why the repairs are done, their combination of beauty and function shouldn’t be allowed to slip through the cracks.