Paris’s ambitious “urban forest” plan includes tree-planting near iconic landmarks.

The Paris Agreement made a lot of headlines when it was adopted in December 2015. Drafted in the French capital in cooperation with the United Nations, the global accord calls on every country in the world to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and give infrastructure an environmentally conscious upgrade.

In the three-plus years since the compact was signed, France has announced a handful of policies that will be applied within its borders: banning petrol and diesel vehicles, eliminating coal-fueled electricity, and investing billions of dollars in sustainable-energy methods, among other things.

Now, the city where the namesake agreement was signed is going one step further. Mayor Anne Hidalgo recently announced an ambitious plan to make Paris greener—literally.

If all goes according to plan, "urban forests" will soon sprout near many of Paris's historic landmarks, including the Gare de Lyon railway station and the Hôtel de Ville (city hall). These pockets of trees—which will spring up in both hidden and heavily foot-trafficked areas—are intended to simultaneously beautify and cool the increasingly hot city (which reached record high temperatures of 100-plus degrees Fahrenheit in June).

Paris is what’s called an “urban heat island.” When there’s a heatwave, the city is typically much hotter than its suburban surroundings, or the French countryside. The mayor's plan to plant "isles of coolness" will create natural shade over or around many of Paris's iconic architectural sites, including the Eiffel Tower.

The first urban grove will be installed as early as next year. In all, the city intends to plant 20,000 new trees by 2020. The ultimate goal is to cover half of Paris's acreage with fully planted areas by 2030.

That is if all goes well. The urban greening project will mean sacrificing public spaces and parking lots in order to plant vegetation—moves that could frustrate (or displace) some Parisians. There's also the issue of cost: The mayor’s office has yet to announce an overall price tag for this project, so securing and allocating funding is another potential concern. Lastly, there are those who worry that views of some popular landmarks will be compromised by an influx of trees.

For now, though, the plan is a pretty one. Renderings of the proposed urban forests show Paris’ city hall surrounded by a pine grove, while the concrete area encircling the Palais Garnier opera house will be enlivened by fresh cherry blossoms. Eventually, the banks of the Seine River will be flanked by grass, and the forecourt of the Gare de Lyon will be graced by elegantly spaced trees.

Beyond this ambitious urban greening, the city aims to be completely carbon-neutral in 30 years—a cleaner, greener Paris for all the world to see.

Once gardens, then a garbage dump, then back to gardens.

The city of Hamilton, on New Zealand's North Island, is cradled by the long Waikato River. For centuries, the Tainui tribes of the Māori cultivated massive gardens here. Even after European contact, they grew crops for themselves and to sell to new settlers. But by the mid-19th century, the gardens were gone.

At the Hamilton Gardens, one has returned. The complex is something of a garden paradise. Many botanical gardens feature Japanese gardens and kitchen gardens. Hamilton has those. Not too many gardens have a Modernist garden and a steampunk blimp. But Hamilton also has something unique: Te Parapara, a recreated, pre-European Māori garden.

The Hamilton Gardens got off to a humble start, says director Dr. Peter Sergel. Not long ago, the site of the gardens "was the rubbish dump for the whole city." As a child, he remembers the site swarming with seagulls and rats. While it was an interesting romping ground, Sergel grew up and became a landscape architect. Forty years ago, he drew up the plans for a facility that would take visitors through thousands of years of garden history. According to him, a Māori garden was always on the menu. "It's part of our tradition, and culture, and heritage," he says.

Wiremu Puke, an ethnographic researcher from the Ngāti Wairere clan, helped design the garden. One early missionary account, he says, described "a near-continuous, unbroken line of cultivation along the banks of the Waikato." When European contact introduced new vegetables, gardeners adapted and adopted, shipping their produce to Auckland and even Sydney, Sergel explains. Puke goes even further, noting that the produce made it as far England and the California gold fields. Unfortunately, this success contributed to the confiscation of Waikato lands by the British crown in the mid-19th century.

More than a century later, work on Te Parapara began in 2003. "Really, this garden had to be designed by local Māori experts," says Sergel. Puke agrees. "Te Parapara offered an opportunity to revive many of the aspects of traditional Māori material culture that had been extinct for over 200 years." Namely, the elaborate ochre-painted carvings, many designed by Puke (who also trained extensively as a carver). Each element of the garden, Puke says, is modeled on "very solid empirical research from all sorts of multidisciplines," along with traditional Māori oral knowledge. The result, he says, is a garden that tells the story of the Ngāti Wairere, the first inhabitants of what is now the city of Hamilton.

Recreating what was lost ended up being a race against time. "There were very few Māori elders surviving," Puke says. "This garden had to be done very quickly, in order to capture that knowledge before they passed away." In particular, he points to the astrological knowledge shared by his late uncle, who was raised by grandparents born in the mid-19th century. Puke was then able to interpret that knowledge into the garden's carvings.

At the moment, the garden grows five rare types of kūmara, or sweet potatoes. In Puke's opinion, the smaller traditional kūmara are sweeter and tastier than the huge varieties available in stores. But kūmara, Sergel notes, are still a bit of a mystery. While extremely important to Māori culture, sweet potatoes are South American. It's unknown when⁠—or how⁠—they arrived in Oceania.

"The story is that the Polynesian voyages went over and introduced chickens to South America and brought back the kūmara, but I'm not sure it's ever been proved," says Sergel. Like in traditional Māori farms of the past, they're the main feature of the garden, grown in regular mounds, or puke. To grow kūmara in cool, rainy New Zealand, Puke notes, the gardeners of yore mixed the soil with pumice and charcoal to keep them warm and encourage drainage. At one point, in the Waikato area, there were 2,000 hectares of this modified soil. Kūmara, taro, paper mulberry, and other traditionally cultivated plants of the Polynesians grow in the garden. But "they probably bought other plants that have been lost," Sergel says, since New Zealand isn't exactly a tropical paradise. (Irrigation keeps frost from nipping too badly at the taro.)

The centrality of the kūmara is reflected in the garden's largest storehouse, or pātaka, whose design depicts the genealogy of the Ngāti Wairere. These buildings were considered semi-sacred, and while their height was meant to protect the kūmara inside from hungry rats, they also stored valuables such as weapons and cloaks.

At Hamilton Gardens, the staff is building and planning new gardens, including one from ancient Egypt as well as a greenhouse-sheltered Pacific garden that will grow Polynesian vegetables and fruit. But Te Parapara, which is now finished, remains unique. Reminiscing about the project, Puke remembers his initial pitch: that "no other city in New Zealand would have a garden like this."

Step into Heinrich Berann's sweeping portraits of America's national parks.

With the alarming exception of rapidly receding glaciers, most eye-popping features of America’s national parks don’t change too often—grand chasms and clusters of giant sequoias don’t usually appear or vanish overnight. Still, maps of these landscapes are updated fairly frequently—every year or so for heavily trafficked places, or every couple of decades for remote ones. The tweaks might be minor (a new campground here, a fresh parking lot there) or a lot more substantive.

Over the last quarter century, the National Park Service (NPS) has used new data, including satellite imagery and land cover information compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and the Department of Agriculture, to produce engaging maps that help visitors picture a landscape’s features. Sometimes this involves shifting perspectives. Other times it might call for natural color, from the dark, blueish green of a coniferous forest to the warmer, lighter tones of a deciduous one. That’s “essentially painting by the numbers,” says Tom Patterson, a retired NPS cartographer—in service of helping visitors better understand a sprawling environment. The NPS has a classic example of how such flat representations can accentuate the majesty of its holdings: Heinrich Berann’s impossibly detailed, slightly fantastical painted panoramas.

Berann, an Austrian artist known for his sweeping, often snow-cloaked landscapes, made four grand paintings of American national parks between 1987 and 1994. (The paintings, each a little more than three feet wide, have recently been digitized in high resolution, available on the NPS website, with and without labels, to show every tree, snowdrift, and brushstroke.) Berann began with North Cascades National Park in Washington State, “the closest landscape in the lower 48 to his native Alps,” says Patterson. The artist then worked his way through Yosemite and Yellowstone before wrapping up in Denali, in Alaska.

The paintings are astonishing—at once rugged, creamy, and saturated—and even after thinking about them for decades, Patterson is still slack-jawed that Berann pulled them off. (He even has a reproduction of one of Berann’s European landscapes in his living room.) “I know all the steps this guy took to make those things, but I’m still astounded that he was able to do it,” Patterson says. Without the digital elevation models and 3D rendering tools that aid cartographers today, he adds, Berann “was relying on topographic maps, aerial photographs, and, if he was lucky, a scenic flight over the park.”

Before Berann began each painting, the NPS communicated a few instructions. At Denali, for instance, they requested that the panorama include Mount McKinley (now called Denali) and several other peaks in the Alaska Range, plus the roads and railways leading to attractions that guests might want to seek out, including the visitors’ center and nearby hotels. Otherwise, Berann “more or less had free hand in what he did,” Patterson says. The NPS team seemed to trust him and respect his vision. According to Patterson, Vincent Gleason, the former NPS publications director who commissioned the panoramas, was enamored with work like Berann’s, which reflected a mastery of finicky, fastidious, careful craft. Berann’s paintings had been printed in National Geographic and elsewhere—he was “a well-known, famous guy who was out there,” Patterson says, so recruiting him for NPS projects probably felt like “a feather in Gleason’s cap.” That respect for Berann’s work comes through in letters between him and Herwig Schutzler, a commercial contractor with R.R. Donnelley Cartographic Services, who mediated Berann’s relationship with the NPS. “They had a long and detailed and often very flowery correspondence, often in German and very formal,” Patterson says. “Very old world. It seemed like it was almost from the 19th century.” Berann submitted sketches to the NPS for sign-off. Once he made any requested tweaks, he got down to painting.

That’s where the panoramas came alive. Color, as Patterson put it, “metamorphosed Denali from a mechanical drawing into a beautiful landscape.” The artist washed gouache and tempera over light pencil sketches drawn on heavy, coarse white paper, and filled in the landscapes from there, working on one swath of terrain at a time. First, he laid down the background, then he built up dark pools of shadows, which emphasize the peaks. He added clouds—wispy or foreboding—and water—stagnant or rushing, and often glittering, speckled with white. Skinny details, such as rivers and roads, came last. Between research and painting, Berann spent months, even years, on each panorama.

The paintings have a dizzying, dreamy quality, but they’re light on geographical rigor. Because Berann “took liberties” with details, Patterson explains, the panoramas “have almost zero scientific value.” (In a paper published in the journal Cartographic Perspectives in 2000, Patterson affectionately describes their air of “relaxed accuracy.”)

No matter: Fidelity wasn’t really the point. Usefulness and wonder were. Across his panoramas, Berann tinkered with scale and grade. He widened Yosemite Valley so viewers could appreciate Yosemite Falls, Illilouette Falls, Vernal Falls, Half Dome, and more, all in one view. He also radically exaggerated some peaks and enlarged human-made features such as Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn, which would otherwise be lost in the landscape. As Betsy Mason reported in National Geographic in 2018, Berann also sometimes repositioned mountains to show off their best angle, such as when he “swung [Wyoming’s Grand Tetons] to the east to reveal the most iconic view of the range, rather than the end-on view that would exist from the viewer’s vantage point in real life.”

Berann’s panoramas afforded viewers “an airplane-window view,” Patterson explains. The artist’s vista encompassed more than one person would ever actually be able to take in. “With a Berann landscape, you can see it all,” Patterson says. “Kind of.” The perspective doesn’t show the backsides of mountains or canyons, but it crams a lot of visual information into a fairly small space and, for all its invention and creative liberties, feels natural and real. The result, Patterson suggests, is easier to understand than an even a fully accurate aerial photograph. “If you look at a place like the North Cascades, it’s mountain peak after mountain peak,” he says. The panorama of the park, on the other hand, makes sense of a chaotic landscape of massive, similar-looking features.

Berann's colors aren't exactly natural. "They're gaudy," says Patterson, "but all come together in a magnificent way in the end." His approach has gone on to inform some of the NPS’s other recent mapping techniques, though, including the move to 3D oblique views, which Patterson calls “a rather big change partially attributable to Berann.” Take Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska—roughly the size of six Yellowstones and home to more than half of the tallest peaks in the United States, including Mount St. Elias, which reaches more than 18,000 feet. Maps of the park now offer more detail about what those vertiginous heights look like. For visitors, these peaks often out of view in the distance, swallowed by vegetation on the shoulders of the main park road.

This tactic follows Berann’s lead of capturing the spirit of a place—grabbing the viewer’s hand and saying, “Hey, come look at this, and prepare to be amazed.” They bottle the magic that keeps people coming back to these special places, year after year, in perpetual awe.

House-hunting rail enthusiasts, rejoice.

On sweltering summer days about a century ago, New Yorkers with the means to flee the sticky city would bolt for resorts beyond the heat's reach. If you'd been one of them, you might have itched to cool off in a Borscht Belt camp or a hotel in Sullivan County. The region is ribboned with streams and tucked into the Catskills, and to get there, you might have boarded the New York, Ontario and Western Railway, also known as the O&W.

The trains stopped chugging by the middle of the 20th century. But now, one rail-lover with $522,000 to burn can live in one of the O&W's old depots.

New York Upstate reports that a married couple—interior designer Maureen Darmetko and her contractor husband, Tom—purchased the tumbledown structure in the 1980s and gave the depot a second life as a five-bedroom, two-bathroom home in Bloomingburg, New York.

According to the real-estate listing, the property still retains some of its throwback charm. You might not notice at first, but the great room was where passengers once clustered to wait for their trains, and one of the bedrooms used to be the station-master’s quarters.

Make an appointment to take a look, and just think: You could spend the rest of the summer sitting out on the patio, dreaming about the lost sounds of far-off whistles.

Sometimes the little things matter.

The hidden springsnail is one of the most felicitously named freshwater mollusks because it is a snail, it lives in springs, and it is notoriously difficult to find. At less than a tenth of an inch in length, the hidden springsnail is barely larger than the average flea. And it certainly doesn’t help that it’s almost invisible, with a translucent white shell that resembles speckled, milky glass. It’s a snail that hardly anyone would ever even think to notice or look for, but Lori Schroeder will stop at nothing to find it. After all, the fate of a forest might depend on this snail.

On some days, Schroeder manages her husband’s dental practice in Bardstown, a half-hour drive from Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Clermont, Kentucky. On other days, she is one of Kentucky’s most dedicated amateur malacologists (someone who studies mollusks). Schroeder’s specialty is land snails, humble gastropods that ooze around dirt and mud, feeding on algae and inseminating each other. It took Schroeder six years of unflagging effort to find a living hidden springsnail in Bernheim, but she managed to pull it off. Bernheim, which is held in a trust, is the largest privately owned nature reserve in the state and hosts various research efforts and 250,000 visitors a year. Schroeder's discovery there could help protect the forest from the looming threat of a gas pipeline and road that could slice up the 16,137 acres of its ecosystem. But first, the snail.

Schroeder’s love of mollusks sparked when she was 16. She had just stopped in a rock and fossil shop in Columbus, Ohio, which got her hooked on seashells. “But it's a long way from Kentucky to the nearest beach,” she writes in an email. “So I gradually shifted my interest to land snails.” In 2008, she started a one-year survey of Bernheim for land snails and soon created the Bernheim Land Snail Inventory, which now includes 80 species. In May 2019, the hidden springsnail became the latest to join the list.

Before this discovery, the hidden springsnail, or Fontigens cryptica, had only been found in five other places in the world. It’s what’s known as a micromollusk, the blanket term for any incredibly small adult shelled mollusk. Micromollusks such as the springsnail have the unique blessing (or curse) or living their whole lives entirely unnoticed by the naked human eye. They’re too small be spotted easily even by dedicated beachcombers and conchologists—people who spend their lives in pursuit of shells.

In the 20th century, there was only one expert on the springsnail’s genus Fontigens: computer repairman Leslie Hubricht. Like Schroeder, Hubricht had no formal training in malacology but had carved out an avocation devoted to snails. Armed with just a high school degree, Hubricht, who died in 2005, published more than 150 papers on land snails. Just one of these, in 1963, mentioned the snail he named F. cryptica, in a single concluding paragraph. It was the taxonomic equivalent of a shrug, describing the snail as “translucent, whitish, blind” and of “verge unknown.”

As one might imagine, it’s no easy feat to spot a nearly invisible snail smaller than a grain of rice in a wriggling handful of loam. So Schroeder refined a strategy that is perhaps best described as sorting through trash. She gathers enormous bags of leaf litter, soil, and silt after spring floods and dries it out over the course of several weeks. She then shakes the dry material through a series of increasingly fine sieves before finally sorting through it with tweezers under a microscope. “The whole process can take many months,” she says. “I don't know of a lot of people who have that sort of patience.”

Schroeder found her first springsnail shell in 2013 during one of her routine surveys of the Bernheim forest. She’d just excavated storm debris from Harrison Creek, which runs through Bernheim, and sifted a whole heap to isolate a handful of itty-bitty, empty shells that she couldn’t identify. She then emailed a photo to Rob Dillon—formerly of the College of Charleston and head of the Freshwater Gastropods of North America project.

Dillon immediately recognized them as Fontigens, but they seemed to be unusual. They could be from the most common species, F. nickliniana, he surmised, but the shells had a distinctively flat nuclear whorl. It didn’t look quite right. To make a correct identification, he told her, he’d need a living specimen.

Dillon instructed Schroeder to examine one of the coldwater springs near where she found the shells. A spring like that would likely be teeming with watercress, with springsnails on every leaf. He also advised Schroeder to bring a large water bottle for the copious collecting she was about to do. But Schroeder soon discovered that the spring held no watercress and, more importantly, no springsnails.

Schroeder was undeterred. She surveyed every single spring, cave, and hole in the ground near where she had found Fontigens shells. She skimmed the offshoots of culverts draining into creeks. No one had ever identified Fontigens of any species in Kentucky, but she soon uncovered more empty Fontigens shells, a sign that live springsnails were around somewhere. “I cannot remember ever witnessing, firsthand or second, a more earnest or comprehensive survey of any patch of the Earth for any mollusk population, of land or sea,” Dillon wrote in a post on Freshwater Gastropods of North America.

Rather fittingly for a snail too small for a human to see, F. cryptica only lives in caves too small for a human to notice, much less explore. In 1963, Hubricht had first located the snail in a spring in southern Indiana, in a cavity no larger than a fist. And despite her many searches, Schroeder found no trace of Fontigens in the larger caves that speckle Bernheim. Unlike most other species in the genus, F. cryptica appears to prefer the most liminal of spaces, “not surface springs, nor caves, but subterranean interstitial spaces,” Dillon writes in an email. It’s not a scale that’s friendly to human examination. So if a person does ever spot a springsnail, it’s most likely because it wandered off and got lost, according to Bernheim director of conservation Andrew Berry. “It’s a perfect storm of finding one that’s gotten so close to the edge,” he says.

Finally, on May 24, 2019, Schroeder’s luck changed. Along with her husband and Berry, she had trekked out to a spring in a previously unexamined valley in Bernheim, the Cedar Grove Tract. The tract contains Cedar Creek, a clear, ice-cold stream. There, she followed Dillon’s advice: find a decent-sized rock at the springhead and look underneath. Lo—there, under a decent-sized rock, Schroeder found a single, living, breathing specimen of F. cryptica. The tiny snail was just as ghostly white as Hubricht had described it in 1963.

“It’s what we would call one of the biggest biological finds in the history of Bernheim,” Berry says.

Though the hidden springsnail is not technically endangered, it’s uncommon enough that Berry plans to count it among other rare species found in Bernheim—such as the endangered bluff vertigo snail (also found by Schroeder) and the endangered Indiana bat—to make the argument that the forest is unique and worthy of further protections. The area is, Berry argues, part of the fabric and identity of the state. It was founded 90 years ago, when German immigrant and local distiller Isaac W. Bernheim purchased land that had been decimated by the iron ore industry. Following a plan created by the firm of famed park designer Frederick Law Olmsted, the forest was rehabilitated to realize Bernheim's vision as a gift to the people of the state. That Bernheim has its roots in the distilling industry is fitting. “Kentucky is known really for the bourbon industry and traditionally the bourbon industry used these clean springs for production of their product,” Berry says. “So we want to protect the springs like the one at Cedar Creek.”

But it will be an uphill battle. The utility company Louisville Gas & Electric (LG&E) is forging ahead plans for a 12-mile natural gas pipeline that would run three-quarters of a mile through Bernheim’s forest. It would slice through streams, wetlands, and the coldwater springs and potentially contaminate the aquifer that supplies the springs. To date, LG&E has secured 85 percent of the easements required for the pipeline, though several landowners refuse to sell, including Bernheim forest.

Because of the terms of its purchase, Bernheim is legally prohibited from transferring its land for any purpose other than conservation. But LG&E, seemingly unbothered by this , plans to sue all reluctant landowners in the way of the pipeline. But LG&E still needs approval from government agencies, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to local radio station WFPL. The Corps will conduct an environmental study to ascertain if the pipeline’s proposed pathway would threaten any rare, threatened, or federally endangered species in Bernheim. And that is where the hidden springsnail might come in.

But Berry doesn’t have high hopes for this survey. Instead, he’s asking for a full environmental and cultural study to give everyone a clearer picture of just how much is at stake. “They’re at least a year out from trying to roll bulldozers out and knocking down trees, but Bernheim’s not going to roll over on this,” he says. “This land is too much of a treasure.”

Meanwhile, the indefatigable Schroeder continues to sift through big bags of dirt and debris for Kentucky’s most mysterious little snails. She hopes to find more living specimens of F. cryptica to aid Dillon’s research on the evolution of cave animals, and to advocate for Bernheim’s future as a nature reserve riddled with tiny springs and tiny snails. “The night before our successful expedition, in late May, I said to my husband, ‘Tomorrow, we're going to change the world,’” Schroeder says. “And maybe, in just a tiny little way, we did.”

But it's hard to break old habits.

When someone on the phone—the doctor’s office, the bank, the credit card company—asks for my name, I always offer to spell it out—it’s a pretty uncommon surname. So far as I know, there are somewhere between 10 and 20 Nosowitzes in the world, and they’re all closely related to me. Because it’s uncommon, and because it would be a problem if my bank writes my name down as “Moskowitz,” I err on the side of caution. “N as in Nancy, O, S as in Samuel, O, W, I, T as in Thomas, Z as in Zebra,” I chant.

This uses what is what’s called a “spelling alphabet,” or, confusingly, a "phonetic alphabet." (The latter is confusing because it has little to do with phonemes, or a unit of sound in a language. Plus there’s the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is something else entirely.) The history of spelling alphabets is fascinating and winding, but it’s notable that there hasn’t been an official update to the most commonly used English version in about half a century. We might be in need of one. As mobile phones have replaced landlines, call quality has, strangely, gone down. The general connectivity of the world—including the ease of international video calls and the use of foreign call centers—means that spelling out a name or word is an increasingly common practice. A modern, updated, globally friendly English spelling alphabet would be pretty useful right now, but getting people to use one might be harder than you’d think.

All alphabets that use letters to represent sounds have names for their letters, to refer to them for things like spelling. English letters fall into rough groups for these purposes. Vowels are usually pronounced with their long sound. Stopped consonants—those that force you to halt the flow of air from your mouth, like B, D, and T—are named as if you wrote “ee” after the letter: “bee,” “dee,” and “tee.” Nasals (sounds made through the nose, like M and N) and fricatives (sounds made by forcing air through a narrow space in your mouth, like S and F) are named by putting the letter “e” before them: “emm” and “ess.” Then there are the weirdos with their own histories, like J, Y, and Q.

This is why the names of most letters sound an awful lot like some other letter. Taking the Nosowitz example, it’s easy to confuse “zee” with “cee,” or “ess” with “eff." This wasn’t a huge problem for most of history, when humans who needed to spell things out were generally standing pretty close to one another. But when people began to gain the ability to communicate over long distances, problems arose.

“The story goes that it started with semaphore relay stations,” says Brian Kelk, a computer scientist who’s worked at Cambridge University and who maintains an exhaustive page about spelling alphabets. He’s not a linguist or anything; he just says he happens to be fascinated by this stuff. “Someone would be watching incoming signals and shouting out letters to someone sending outgoing. They invented phonetics for some troublesome letters,” he says. The British military came up with the first few examples, just for letters they found the most difficult: “P as in pip,” “B as in beer.” Those were set down in regulations in 1904. Between then and the end of World War II, the British, the Americans, and various telecommunications companies kept working on these alphabets, producing dozens of standards.

Just as the names of letters are in groups, spelling alphabets also might have some sense of thematic organization. “We remember better things which are linked in terms of their meaning,” says Valerie Hazan, a professor of speech sciences at University College London. (We’ll be hearing a lot more from her.) Geographic place names are one group. From the 1912 Western Union Spelling Alphabet, just for example, we have “B as in Boston,” “N as in Newark,” and “T as in Texas.”

First names are another group. From the 1917 Royal Navy telephonic alphabet: “G as in George,” “W as in Willie,” “E as in Edward.” And, bizarrely, dances show up as a group: “F as in Foxtrot,” “T as in Tango,” “J as in Jig.”

For about 80 years, governments and corporations futzed with these spelling alphabets, and learned that some stuff didn’t work—it turns out, for example, that “Lima” is also the Malay word for the number five. A tremendous amount of research, time, and money was invested into figuring out the optimal spelling alphabet—at least for the three languages that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, the United Nations agency that handles air transportation) felt significant enough to have one (English, French, and Spanish). The ICAO scrambled, using researchers across the globe on the problem, and by 1959 had finalized what is today probably the best-known spelling alphabet: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and so on. (As a side note: “Alfa” is not a typo. The whole “ph equals f” thing is confusing, and reasonably so, for non-English speakers. The same goes for the alphabet’s J—Juliett with a doubled final letter so the French won’t say “Juliay.”)

That is the now the standard alphabet for organizations including NATO (which often lends its name to the alphabet), the Federal Aviation Administration of the United States, the International Amateur Radio Union, and pretty much any international group that wants or needs a standard. It’s certainly the most commonly used spelling alphabet in the world, but it is, as most of these alphabets are, exceedingly Anglocentric.

Other languages have come up with their own spelling alphabets. Some needed wholly new ones, such as Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. "Г as in Григо́рий" is the Russian version of “G as in Gregory.” Japanese and Mandarin Chinese both have their own letter-based alphabets (Kana and Pinyin, respectively) in addition to their traditional logographic alphabets (in which symbols stand in for whole words or phrases, rather than just sounds). Those letter-based alphabets, in turn, have their own spelling alphabets.

Some languages that use the Roman alphabet, as English does, have letters of their own. Take Æ in Danish and Norwegian, which is usually given “Æ as in Ægir,” a figure from Norse mythology. Spanish has the Ñ, though precious few words start with it. Despite that, most people go with “Ñ as in Ñoño,” which means “dull.”

English was the first language to have these spelling alphabets, so perhaps that’s why other languages follow its general outline and themes. Most spelling alphabets around the world are still based on place names and given names: (the equivalent of) “と as in Tokyo,” “Δ as in Demetrios,” or “И as in Ivan.”

But by around the late 1960s, things had calcified. The official or widely accepted spelling alphabets were set. Yet here we are, in 2019, with an actual need for a new one.

Voice call quality has gone down over the past two decades. Mobile phones have added convenience and a million other things, but they have done away with a wired network dedicated solely to voice communication, as well as the large microphones and speakers of old landlines, which featured decades of refinements to improve call quality. Cell phones, on the other hand, rely on tiny, awful microphones, and tiny, awful speakers for calls, and tiny, awful allocations of bandwidth. Mobile networks can be compromised by everything from streaming video, to the presence of a tree or wall, to the weather. Most importantly, they’ve dropped the emphasis on voice quality. Nobody seems to care any more whether they can hear a pin drop.

Sure, much communication has moved over to text, email, and social platforms, but everyone still needs to talk on the phone sometimes. English is such a widely spoken language that it comes in many different flavors, dialects, and accents, which further complicates understanding people clearly over a shoddy mobile connection. Independent of their use in military and aviation capacities, we sort of need spelling alphabets now more than ever. The problem is that what we’ve been given by the 50-year-old standard is deeply flawed for modern use.

“We know in speech perception that frequent words are much more easily heard in noise than infrequent words,” says Hazan. That why it is a pretty poor choice to use, say, “S as in Sierra” (the standard) instead of “S as in sugar.” And many of these alphabets were designed for international use. So why do some of them use hyper-local words like “Newark,” or strangely outdated, unfamiliar names like “Ida,” “Bertha,” or “Nelly”?

The options for certain letters—Q and X, we’re looking at you—are not great, but come on. “Q as in Québec” is a truly awful choice, with multiple pronunciations (“keh-beck,” “kweh-beck,” and I even heard a Brit in a radio interview say “kyoo-beck”). And the emphasis is on the second syllable, not even on the syllable with the most important letter! Early common choices for X included “Xanthippe” (the wife of Socrates or some figure in Greek mythology?), “Xaintrie” (a town of 300 in central France), and “Xerxes” (a couple of Persian kings). Eventually everyone settled on “X-ray,” which is fine, but basically the equivalent of saying “X as in X.”

Despite the alphabet needing to have global use, some of the words are incredibly difficult to pronounce for some people. Think about the word “foxtrot.” “That’s virtually impossible to say,” says Hazan. Right in the middle is a traffic pileup of consonant sounds: K, S, T, and R, with no vowel break. For speakers of Spanish, which does not allow so many consonants to be grouped together without a vowel, it is an insanely difficult word to say, not to mention about as outdated as the name “Bertha.”

Hazan, in 2006, was asked for a BBC Radio story to see if she could come up with a better spelling alphabet. “We chose 12 words to be replaced, the ones we felt the most problematic,” she says. “Alfa” became “apple,” “Québec” became “queen,” and “Zulu” became “zebra,” to name a few. These selections were informed by common, easy-to-pronounce words that can carry through noisy connections. (Soft sounds, such as the “th” in “thought,” are much lower in volume and harder to hear than, say, a vowel.)

To test her plan, Hazan set up noisy phone calls, and tried to convey four-letter nonsense combinations (like, say, “Apple Zebra Queen Lemon”) to both native and non-native speakers of English, in both her new alphabet and the old ICAO standard. “We put quite a lot of work into this, and were quite certain that our new words were going to be the ones to win out,” she says.

So, these words corrected for all of these problems of localization and soft sounds and outdated terminology. They must have been much more effective, right?

“No, they were not,” says Hazan, with some dry amusement.

Turns out there was effectively no difference between the new, improved spelling alphabet and the old standard. If certain letters were in certain places in the nonsense combination, the new version might be more effective; in other places, the old version was. No difference! After all that!

This can be partly explained because people have just grown familiar with the whole “alfa-bravo-charlie” thing. It’s in books and movies, it’s just one of those things we absorb without thinking about it. The other possible explanation is that these are equally effective or ineffective because people tend to make up their own spelling alphabets and pass them down. Anything beyond what you’re used to is the same as anything else, more or less.

The way I spell my name is one of these personal versions. “N as in Nancy” appears in a 1947 ICAO attempt (though today it is “November”), but “S as in Samuel” is nowhere. My version is cobbled together. “Nancy” comes from my dad, I think. I have a vague recollection of coming up with Samuel on my own—though I’m sure I must have heard it somewhere. It seems to work, so I’ve stuck with it.

The ICAO or NATO spelling alphabet might be by far the most common one of its type, but I’d bet it’s nowhere near as popular as the millions of individual spelling alphabets we all devise and pretty unknowingly pass to our children. And here’s the real problem of coming up with a new standard: Everyone who needs one already has one, and it’s whichever of the millions of variations is most comfortable. It’s absolutely possible that “Sierra” or “Susan” or “Susquehanna” would be a better choice than “Samuel,” on the scientific basis of difference from other words or frequency of phonemes best suited to a noisy cell phone connection. But I’m sticking with "Samuel."

Guaraní have long cultivated the plant, which they introduced to a world hungry for natural sweeteners.

Luis Arce steps into the center of a sacred grove of trees on a high hilltop in Paraguay’s Amambay highlands. Wearing black cowboy boots, a faded baseball cap, and an off-white polo shirt tucked into navy-blue khakis, the 67 year old greets a crowd of more than 100 fellow Paî Tavyter’a and Kaiowá. He is the leader of the region’s 15,000 indigenous Guaraní.

“We have gathered here at the Yasuká Vendá—the sacred spot where our great eternal grandfather, Ñane Ramõi Jusu Papa, laid his footsteps and created the Earth—to talk about the corporate usurpation of our traditional knowledge of the ka’a he’e,” says Arce. He’s using the Guaraní name for a sweet wild herb that’s known around the world as an ingredient in reduced-sugar teas, candies, and soft drinks: stevia.

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and other companies have used the sugar alternative—which came from Guaraní lands, where it’s been used as a ceremonial medicine and sweetening agent for centuries—to build an estimated $492 million a year industry. Despite this provenance, acknowledged in marketing materials by images and descriptions of Guaraní traditions, the Guaraní have never been consulted or compensated in any way.

“These companies took our [traditional knowledge] and are using it to make vast profits,” continues Arce. He outlines the case for a lawsuit and demands restitution. The crowd responds with a standing ovation. The year is 2015.

Over the next three days, the group drafts an international declaration. They are aided by lawyers and advisors from universities and nonprofits, including Miguel Lovera. A scientific advisor to the Center for Research on Rural Law and Agrarian Reform of the Catholic University of Asuncion (CEIDRA), Lovera has spent more than 20 years advocating for indigenous rights in Paraguay.

“What needs to be understood is that we are talking about a small, obscure herb with a very limited natural range,” says Lovera. Wild stevia grows in remote northeastern highlands along the border of Paraguay and Brazil. While not exactly unpleasant, the plant’s aroma is often referred to as “goat’s scent” by indigenous populations. The pungency does not suggest sweetness. “Western scientists did not ‘discover’ the usefulness of this plant—they were introduced to it by the Guaraní.”

What’s more, ka’a he’e is an anomaly. Though more than 230 species of stevia have been identified, says Lovera, “this variety alone possesses such sweetness. It has served as the basis for all subsequent research.”

Put another way: Without the help of the Guaraní, there would be no stevia industry. But the plant is now critically endangered in the wild. Arce and the Guarani hope a lawsuit will help them save stevia’s native habitat and rescue the wild plant from extinction.

For the Guaraní to make their case against Coca-Cola and other companies, they must argue that stevia is, effectively, their intellectual property. Laying claim to a wild herb may sound odd, but, Lovera says, the group’s centuries-old relationship with ka’a he’e makes it clear that all modern stevia usage derives from their traditional knowledge.

“If you ask a member of the Paî Tavyter’a about the origins of their relationship to stevia, probably they will shrug and tell you, ‘It has always been that way,’” he says. The group believes plant usages were revealed to spiritual leaders in the time immemorial.

Lovera explains the origins of the relationship from an evolutionary perspective. Historically, the group was semi-nomadic. They relied on remote forests for foraging, building materials, protection, and game. Wild foodstuffs supplemented crops such as maize, cassava, and sweet potatoes. Seeking to minimize labor and ecological impact, Guaraní settled in mountain grasslands abutting dense subtropical forests, which supported their mix of agriculture and foraging.

“And this is precisely the habitat of the ka’a he’e,” says Lovera. The spindly herb grows one to two feet in height and thrives at high elevations in sunny transitional zones along forest edges. For groups such as the Paî Tavyter’a, its abundance signified a blessed location. According to Arce, the plants marked “the place we were intended to be.” Stevia’s sweetness came to be associated with divine beneficence, and it took a central role in rites of passage.

“We use the ka’a he’e in our initiation ceremonies,” says Arce. “When a boy grows into a young man, he washes his hands and arms in a cold infusion [prepared with its leaves], guaranteeing his crops will always be sweet and abundant. Young women use it for purifying themselves when they become adolescents. They have sessions that include drinking water infused [with ka’a he’e] and washing their bodies with it.”

Other uses are more utilitarian. The Guaraní employ stevia medicinally as an antiseptic, digestive aid, astringent, and antiparasitic. Recreationally, Guaraní chew leaves as a treat and use them to sweeten traditional yerba mate tea—a bitter, highly caffeinated herbal drink of their invention.

“Tasting ka’a he’e for the first time is something I remember very well,” says Arce. Given the plant’s religious status, and its 200-times-sweeter-than-sugar leaves, the experience made an impression. “The taste was like no other,” laughs Arce. Stevia’s sweetness comes on slow; has a longer duration and later peak than sugar; and provokes a slightly bitter, licorice-like aftertaste. “I know that I am taking something into my body that [is holy],” he says. “That too was a very special feeling.”

For centuries, the Guaraní cultivated stevia and used its leaves as a sweetener. But if you peruse global patent registries, you’ll find people and groups credited for inventing the extract now used around the world, and it’s never Arce, his people, or his ancestors. Instead you’ll find names such as Coca-Cola, PureCircle USA, and HYET Sweet.

“PureCircle alone has more than 400 proprietary stevia-related patents and patents pending,” says sociologist and Paraguayan intellectual property lawyer Silvia Gonzalez. As CEIDRA’s lead legal advisor, she helped Arce and the Guaraní draft their declaration, and is now working to lay the groundwork for international lawsuits. This failure to recognize the Guaraní, Gonzalez says, is rooted in colonialism and the Eurocentric patent system.

According to University of Illinois professor of pharmacology Djaja Djendoel Soejarto, ka’a he’e probably entered the written record around 1570, as Spain established a capital in Paraguay. In a book titled Natural History of New Spain, physician Francisco Hernández noted a wild herb that, when chewed, exhibited an uncanny sweetness. This was likely stevia.

Further interest and investigation by outsiders stalled, though, due to the introduction of sugarcane. It took another 300 years for westerners to recognize ka’a he’e’ as a potential sugar substitute.

“In 1887, during my explorations of the extensive forests of eastern Paraguay,” wrote Swiss-Italian botanist Moisés Santiago Bertoni in 1918, “I heard references about this plant [and its characteristic sweetness] from herbalists (yerbateros) from the northeast, and Indians from the Mondaíh.”

Bertoni quickly mounted an expedition. His enthusiasm derived from timeliness: The first artificial sweetener, saccharin, had been synthesized from coal-tar derivatives in 1879. But much like today’s leading artificial sweeteners—namely, sucralose (Splenda) and aspartame (NutraSweet)—its artificiality raised safety concerns. (American President Theodore Roosevelt, prescribed a sugar-free diet, was a fan, and clashed with a government chemist who condemned saccharin as "injurious to health.") Then as now, interest in natural alternatives was high.

Two World Wars and a (temporary) exoneration of health concerns about saccharin stymied progress, but by the early 1930s, chemists had isolated ka’a he’e’s sweetening compounds. Commercialization of extracts began in 1977, with Japanese scientists leading the way.

“In the early ‘70s, two visits alone resulted in the extraction of at least 500,000 wild plants,” says Lovera. With stevia next to impossible to grow from seed, the Japanese “dug up whatever they could find and took it with them.”

Arce remembers the arrivals bitterly. At that time, infringement upon Guaraní territory was a relatively new development. Visitors were rare. The Paî Tavyter’a greeted scientists warmly and freely shared their knowledge of the ka’a he’e.

“That was a big mistake,” says Arce. “We showed them the plants and they started digging without so much as asking permission. The corrupt government allowed them to dig on our land, and they did so time and again.”

In Japan, usage skyrocketed—and soon accounted for an estimated 40 percent of the sweetener market. Stevia spread globally throughout the 1980s. Following a four-year ban citing poor toxicological information, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it as a dietary supplement in 1995. Similar conditions prevailed there and in Europe until the mid-2000s, when global concerns about rising rates of diabetes and obesity spurred further research. In 2008, the FDA authorized stevia as a sweetener. The European Union followed suit in 2011.

By 2012, stevia-based products ranked second among the world’s sugar substitutes. Hoping to combat steep drops in soda consumption, beverage titans including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo raced to offer diet products sweetened with 100 percent stevia. The first—known as Coke Zero Stevia—launched in limited-release last year. This push made stevia a household name and fueled an economic boom. Industry reports project stevia revenues will grow to $801.7 million by 2026.

Lovera says the Paraguayan government aided and abetted the foreign plundering. Worse, in turning a blind eye to the Guaraní’s intellectual rights, it failed to capitalize on a growing industry.

Though stevia originated in territories traditionally belonging to the Guaraní, they are in no way involved in the commercial cultivation of the plant. As a whole, Paraguayan farmers grow fewer than 6,000 acres a year. China, meanwhile, furnishes around 80 percent of the world’s crop.

“As the center of origin, it’s tragic to see how our country has squandered this opportunity,” says Lovera. Serving as an advisor for the Paraguayan Ministry of Agriculture from 2008 to 2012, he pushed for stevia patents, protections, and investment. Mostly, he says, his suggestions were unheeded. Without governmental support, small farmers cannot effectively transition to growing and selling stevia.

“It is too labor intensive and not profitable enough to grab the attention of plantation owners, but, for our peasant farmers, it could be very helpful,” explains Lovera. The problem is, growing at scale requires about $10,000 of investment. “You need special irrigation,” he continues. “Stevia prefers well-drained soils, but you cannot allow one bit of sun-stress. Therefore, irrigation must be extremely precise.”

With growers in the U.S., Korea, Kenya, India, and elsewhere entering the market, competition is fierce.

“Creating a geographical indication could help Paraguayan farmers stand out,” says Lovera. But with little government interest, “We are left with a humiliating failure: Our nation introduced stevia to the world and has nothing to show for it.”

It is a bitterness Arce knows well.

What Japanese scientists began intensive logging has continued. Forests have been cleared to make way for large-scale cattle ranches, sugarcane plantations, and soybean production. Formerly abundant, ka’a he’e is now critically endangered in the wild.

“When I was a boy, the Yasuká Vendá, [our sacred center of origin], stood at the heart of a vast wilderness,” says Arce. “Now, it is like a tiny island floating in a sea of decimation.”

Arce calls the declaration issued by the Guaraní a last-ditch effort to save what’s left of the ka’a he’e. He hoped consumer attention would pressure corporations to pursue a benefit-sharing agreement, but invitations for discussions have largely been ignored. Now, he’s working with Gonzalez and others to pursue international lawsuits.

Michael F. Brown is the president of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and one of the world’s leading experts on cultural appropriation. He describes the Guaraní’s situation as a classic case of biopiracy, which, at its most basic level, is “when knowledge from indigenous communities is taken by an outside individual or group who then claim to ‘own’ that knowledge and are able to then sell it for a profit.”

Though biopiracy dates to the colonial era, instances rose dramatically throughout the 20th century, as U.S. law changed to allow new plant varieties to be patented (the first time in history a living organism could be patented) and extended these protections to genetically modified organisms, with other legal systems following suit. (For Coca-Cola, PureCircle, and others, their patents are for stevia extracts they developed from ka’a he’e.) The end result is wealthy companies profiting from and taking credit for the knowledge of indigenous communities of the global south.

Brown describes the stevia case as egregious biopiracy. And it is the establishment, over the past several decades, of biopiracy in legal codes that has given the Guaraní and advocates such as Gonzalez hope that a lawsuit could work.

“We have an excellent precedent where indigenous people from Peru won back the rights to their traditional knowledge concerning Lepidium meyenii from a U.S. company in 2007,” Gonzalez explains. Similar to stevia, the case involved extracts taken from the maca plant. “Lawyers were able to use the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity, and [pertinent U.S. legislation] to argue the patent derived from biopiracy and have it revoked.”

But in that case, indigenous populations had government support. Peru had passed laws suggested by the UN that lent validity to complaints voiced with the World Trade Organization and made international lawsuits possible. Paraguay hasn’t acted. Barring new legislation, the Guaraní are powerless.

“The next step is for the government to ratify the UN’s Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing and pass all recommended legislation,” says Gonzalez. The Protocol has been ratified by 104 nations and the European Union—though the U.S. has yet to sign. “We could then pursue legal action against companies profiting from the use of stevia patents.”

Lovera has his hopes, but remains skeptical.

“In practice, the Paraguayan government does not care about the rights of its indigenous people,” he says. Corruption has allowed agricultural bosses to usurp more than half the lands constitutionally recognized as belonging to the Guaraní. Falsified titles and deeds of sale are routine. “Of course, we have fought this tooth and nail,” says Lovera. “But judges and officials, they turn a blind eye.”

For his part, Arce chooses to believe the wrongs will be righted: A benefit-sharing agreement would protect the ka’a he’e and ensure the survival of his people.

“Today, we are both in danger of disappearing,” he says. “What is crucial is for us to recover our territory, which is the territory of the ka’a he’e. Though the land is rightfully ours, we would gladly pay the ransom and set it free from those that have done it nothing but harm. To live off the land and see it restored, that is our dream.”

If that happened, Arce says the Guaraní could delight in the world’s enthusiasm for stevia. For now, its adoption is a worldwide emblem of their dispossession.

3D models of sunken boats mean there's lots to explore—even for those who want to stay dry.

When she parks at Emerald Bay, on the western shore of Lake Tahoe, in California, and cracks open her car door, Lynn Dodd is floored by the scent of pine.

The trees stipple the land around the glassy green water, and on a weekday, when the bay isn’t bustling with visitors and their boats, it’s quiet—quiet enough to hear water lapping against docks and birds twittering in the canopy. Dodd isn’t immune to these charms. But as an archaeologist at the University of Southern California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, she is drawn here by something else, something hidden and preserved under that cold, clear water.

Emerald Bay has long been a sacred and practical site for Native American communities, particularly the Washoe people. It went on to become a flourishing weekend retreat in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The San Francisco Chronicle noted the allure of the “sheltered inlet cut deep into the granite wall of Lake Tahoe” in the summer of 1919, while swooning over the water—“unbelievably deep and indescribable in color”—and the “pleasant cottages” and tents. These accommodations sprung up to serve people who were serious about recreation. At the Emerald Bay Resort, reported Sacramento’s Record-Union, “boats and fishing tackle are free to guests, and these with swings, hammocks, croquet, and climbing, furnish an abundance of out-of-door exercise.” For $2.50 a day or $15 a week, the San Francisco Examiner reported in 1914, the camp “caters especially to those who enjoy an outing in the mountains without the restraint of formality.”

When the resort closed up shop in the mid-20th century, Dodd says, the owners figured that the best way to offload the pleasure crafts and other small boats they had acquired over the years was to scuttle them. It’s unclear exactly how many boats were laid to rest at the bottom of the bay, but it was a lot. “We’re still finding them—it’s an ongoing search,” Dodd says. She suspects that there are more out there, maybe at depths below 60 feet, or nestled into crannies that might require remotely operated vehicles to explore.

Today Emerald Bay is a state park, and a few of the known vessels have been documented, interpreted, and united in California’s first underwater maritime heritage trail, which opened in 2018. Divers are invited to explore five boats resting on the lakebed, including the remains of massive barges fashioned from ponderosa pine, a skiff, a fishing boat with a live bait well, and a painted, canopied passenger boat that ferried cruisers around the lake with a 20-horsepower engine.

These sunken boats are marked with signs, and landlubbers can read up on what’s down there. But Dodd thinks that there’s much more to share with people who aren’t fitted with flippers, goggles, and regulators. So she has recruited her students to help image the sites and create detailed 3D models.

This fall, Dodd, who previously conducted underwater archaeology work off the coast of Oman, and her university students will glide over the wrecks, armed with mounted sport cameras. As they slowly kick along—so as not to stir up sediment—the cameras will capture still images at one-second intervals. Back on land, they’ll use photogrammetry software to stitch them together, with depth information, into 3D models.

It doesn’t take long to pull this off—anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, depending on the size of the boat—but the divers have to be especially calm and precise. They’ll propel themselves at a very slow, deliberate pace, while maintaining their depth. Fluttering legs, moments of inattention, or jerky movements can lead to blurry, unusable images, Dodd says; she recommend a frog kick as the smoothest technique. When it comes to these detailed photomosaics, “It’s garbage in, garbage out,” she says. “The better diver you are, the less work you have later.”

The images can be captured by snorkeling, too, at least for a massive barge that is visible from the surface. This involves gulping air, swimming along a fixed line for 30 seconds or so, and then resurfacing for another gulp of air. The barge that can be photographed this way, she says, is more than 100 feet long, and was used to haul lumber across the bay.

The goal, Dodd says, is to capture “a complete picture of what’s down there—basically scanning the bottom.” There are more sophisticated ways to image something, she adds, from expensive sonar systems to super high-resolution cameras, but she says that the results from simple, readily available underwater cameras are surprisingly impressive. Dodd hopes that other divers will follow suit—both in Emerald Bay and in the other bodies of water that harbor unseen history—by capturing some quick footage and sharing it with local archaeologists. “If you just stick a GoPro in your pocket every time you dive,” she says, “you can make a real difference in cultural heritage documentation in the state of California.” The models that Dodd and her team will make will end up on the 3D model hub Sketchfab, university websites, and possibly in resources maintained by the state parks. Several 3D models of some of Emerald Bay’s boats, created in a 2016 collaboration between Indiana University Center for Underwater Science and the California State Parks, are already available online.

The more information Dodd and her students gather, the more they can learn about the people who used these boats in Emerald Bay’s recreation heyday. Land-based sites, archives, newspapers, and interviews with longtime locals are helping the researchers assemble an even more detailed picture of how people lived and played decades ago. The work will fill out our understanding of how people spent their sun-dappled vacations in a period when leisure time was just beginning to become accessible to a wider range of Americans.

Plus, Dodd says, figuring out what’s resting on the lakebed is the right thing for divers and archaeologists to do—and to collaborate on. There’s occasional tension between these groups, with archaeologists accusing recreational divers of damaging wrecks, and divers charging that archaeologists act as arbitrary gatekeepers of the underwater world, keeping interesting sites secret from the public. It doesn’t have to be that way, of course, and the recruiting of sport divers for work such as monitoring wrecks for signs of change can play an important role in stewardship and preservation of historical resources.

Sharing finds with interested, enthusiastic people is part of why archaeologists do what they do. “In the bottom of our hearts, archaeologists understand that if you don’t document things, and if you don’t make the documents available to people for posterity, you’re not really any different from a looter or treasure hunter,” Dodd says. “Everyone who is trained as an archaeologist knows that. It’s in our bones.”

They could help piece together his life and work.

Picture Paul Cézanne—the 19th-century French painter whom Picasso called “the father of us all”—completing two tranquil, scenic watercolor paintings on the same long sheet ... and then just tearing it down the middle, leaving only the sparest clue that the images were once bound together. That seems to be precisely what happened at some point in the 1880s, according to new research that looked closely at the paper on which Cézanne painted.

Fabienne Ruppen, who recently completed her PhD at the University of Zürich, spent seven years studying 1,400 of Cézanne’s works on paper, according to artnet News. So attentive was her analysis that she was able to notice similarities along the torn edges of two paintings in different collections, and then determine that they had once been on the same sheet of paper. The two landscapes—one depicts the southern French mountain ridge Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the other a nearby Provençal village—will be displayed side by side for the first time this fall, as part of the upcoming Reconstructing Cézanne exhibit at London’s Luxembourg & Dayan gallery.

Ruppen didn’t rely on the tear marks alone to come to her conclusion, however “astonishing” she says the tear patterns are. She also took note of the watermarks the original paper held—the so-called “main mark” and corresponding “countermark.” These indicated to her that both pieces of paper had been produced by the Canson et Mongolfier firm (which still exists today), in its Vidalon-lès-Annonay mill in southern France. Ruppen then visited the mill’s archives to confirm that it had, in fact, printed this specific main mark–countermark combination. Ruppen wouldn't have made it so far if the galleries didn't allow her to take the paintings out of their frames—which she says can take quite a bit of convincing.

There are several reasons Ruppen looked so closely at the paper. First, she says, usually the artist’s works are categorized by style or genre—watercolors, drawings, landscapes—rather than the underlying material, such as paper or canvas. Understanding this can help settle matters of chronology. “Unfortunately,” Ruppen told artnet, “almost no Cézanne drawing or watermark has a precise date.” Identifying two works of the same style and on the same medium (and on the same sheet of paper) can help establish these undated works as contemporaneous, perhaps providing insight into Cézanne’s life and career. Ruppen’s goal, she says, was to “creep into his brain.”

The implications of Ruppen’s research extend beyond these two bucolic watercolors. Clarifying the chronology, however imperfectly, also links these two works to studies Cézanne was preparing around the same time for his forthcoming "Card Players" series. It is, she says, a potential insight into what he was thinking about at the time. The artist’s paintings and drawings weren’t isolated from each other, Ruppen says, but were instead in “a very intense dialogue” and distinguished by “fluid boundaries.” Ruppen will continue her research, which she hopes will ultimately attribute each of Cézanne’s paper works to a specific sketchbook or watermark pairing, bringing yet more order to his oeuvre.

The "waiterless" restaurants were once iconic symbols of the Big Apple.

When envisioning culturally authentic food experiences, fast food chains don’t typically come to mind. But FEBO (pronounced fay-boh) is a must-see in the Netherlands. Finding one of the restaurants is easy, given their ubiquity throughout the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. Rather than a counter and cashiers waiting to take orders, walls of glass and steel contain little compartments filled with items from the menu. Customers simply come in, drop coins in a neighboring slot, and press a button to remove their dish of choice. Seamless and efficient, I couldn’t help but wonder why such a practical concept never caught on in the United States. As it turns out, it had—over 100 years ago.

The world’s first “automatic” restaurant—or Automat—was actually a German innovation, introduced in 1896. According to Automat chroniclers Laura Shapiro and Rebecca Federman, the interior of the Berlin restaurant was “a splendid dining room in the Art Nouveau style, lavishly appointed with mirrors, marble, and stained glass.” Yet customers selected their own meals from walls of glass containers: the Automat machines themselves. The novel technology gained traction across European cities over the subsequent years. Soon, the fad piqued the interest of American business partners Joseph V. Horn and Frank Joseph Hardart. In 1902, the two opened their first Automat, Horn & Hardart, in Philadelphia.

Customers swarmed to the restaurant to try this new method of dining. A testament to efficiency and convenience, diners selected their desired dish from the Automat, fed it a coin, and retrieved their meal. Workers beyond the wall then hastily replaced it with a fresh plate.

From its humble beginnings in Philadelphia, the Automat only grew. It should come as no surprise that a diner centered around efficiency, minimized human interaction, and an endless supply of freshly brewed coffee would find a steady foothold in New York City. On July 2, 1912, Horn & Hardart opened their first New York City location in Times Square, while inundating newspapers with advertisements heralding “The New Method of Lunching,” with an additional promise of “Try it! You’ll like it!”

Fortunately for Horn & Hardart, their advertisements proved prophetic. The chain’s popularity exploded over the next 40 years, at its peak serving roughly 800,000 customers a day. By the middle of the century, Horn & Hardart had over 50 locations in Philadelphia, and over 100 in New York City. Of course, sheer efficiency wouldn’t have been enough to keep customers coming back again and again—the food had to be worthwhile, too.

The menu of the standard Horn & Hardart revolved around home-style comfort food, with staples such as macaroni and cheese and baked beans. Another specialty was pies of all kinds, from savory chicken pot pie to decadent pumpkin pie topped with cream. Though a streamlined operation, the company baked all its pies the same day and offered fresh-squeezed juice. The coffee—Horn & Hardart’s most popular item—was brewed promptly every 20 minutes.

The Automat became such an integral part of New York dining that it seeped into the pop culture of the era. The 1962 Doris Day film That Touch of Mink, for instance, features a scene set in a New York Horn & Hardart. Not only that, writes Shapiro and Federman, but “when those glowing letters spelling 'Automat' appeared on a movie screen, everyone in the audience recognized a scene set in New York.” For a brief spell, Horn & Hardart was even the largest restaurant chain in the United States. The Automat’s place as a fixture of American life seemed secure.

But today, the classic Automat is a distant memory. According to Paula Johnson, food curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, a number of factors led to the institution's long, painful decline. For one thing, American cities changed after World War II. People living in the suburbs didn’t frequent Automats for their evening meal, and the “new, high-rise office buildings that were constructed in cities often included a subsidized cafeteria,” Johnson says. Plus, by the second half of the 20th century, the hefty meals Automats offered fell out of favor. Instead, consumers opted for “the type of fare that fast food chains began featuring in the 1950s and ‘60s,” explains Johnson: less chicken pot pies, more burgers and fries.

Another unexpected culprit was a new tax on prepared food in New York. The Automat’s coin slots weren’t designed to accept the pennies necessary to make up the difference. Horn & Hardart began converting more of its locations to standard cafeterias, without the chrome and glass Automat machines. To combat the decline in sales, Horn & Hardart raised prices and lowered the quality of its food—a death blow to its inexpensive-yet-good reputation.

The very last Horn & Hardart in New York shut its doors for good in 1991. Those hoping to see the famous chrome-and-glass wall of pies and puddings would be disappointed to learn that one of the few remaining relics of the American Automat, a 35-foot long section of food compartments from the first Horn & Hardart, lies in storage at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Though the American Automat went from revolution to museum relic, there have been a few attempts at reviving the model. In 2015, San Francisco-based company eatsa launched an automatic restaurant, serving food from a wall of compartments just like the Horn & Hardarts of old. Unfortunately, New Yorkers seemed less enamored with the idea this time around, with the Manhattan locations shutting down soon after opening.

With its decline in the United States, one can’t help but wonder why Automat-style restaurants managed to thrive in the Netherlands, of all places. Though the first FEBO restaurant was founded in Amsterdam by Johan Izaäk De Borst in 1941, the first FEBO Automat didn’t open until the 1960s. Why is it that, at the same time New York’s Automats faded, FEBO opened more and more locations?

There are a few notable differences from the modern FEBO and the Horn & Hardarts of old. Far from the Art Deco stylings of the luxurious New York Automats, FEBO leans more into the slimmed-down aesthetic of a typical fast food restaurant, smaller in scale with bright white-and-red signage. Along with the decor, FEBO’s menu is more helpfully “on the go” than the hearty pies and burgundy-sauced beef of Horn & Hardart. FEBO sticks to burgers and fries, while the undisputed king of the menu, the Dutch Croquette, is a crispy veal dumpling similar to a hush puppy.

According to Dennis de Borst, current director of the company and the grandson of FEBO’s founder, the Dutch sense of urgency is another explanation for the restaurant’s enduring popularity. “The Dutch snack culture has been characterized in the past century by three basic elements: fast, accessible, and affordable,” de Borst says. “The Dutch are always on the move and often in a hurry.” To take advantage, FEBOs are often situated near major walkways and tram lines, anywhere “where many people work, seek entertainment, or pass,” he says.

In the end, though, it’s no Horn & Hardart. Perhaps with the advent of high-tech systems such as eatsa’s, Automat-style dining has new potential in the United States. But for those still inclined towards popping a coin in a slot and taking out a piping hot snack, a trip to the Netherlands is all it takes.

Now gourmet, lardo di Colonnata once fed miners in Michelangelo's favorite quarries.

At first glance, the Apuan Alps of northwest Tuscany’s Carrara region are pure white. Alison Leitch first saw them from a train window when traveling through Italy in the early 1980s. From a distance, she writes, their dazzling tops looked like snow. Her seatmate told her otherwise: The blinding whiteness was actually marble dust, a powdery byproduct of the famous quarries that gash through the mountains. Then Leitch’s seatmate explained that the Apuan quarries were the source of another legendary tradition. “That’s where the anarchists live,” she said.

Most travel guides to Carrara will tell you the town is famous for three things: marble, anarchism, and pig fat. This unlikely trio is intertwined as deeply as the mineral veins striating the mountains. Since ancient Roman times, Carrara’s Apuan Alps have supplied marble for some of the world’s most prized sculptures. Carrara is the marble of Michelangelo's Pietà, of Jean-Antoin Houdin’s George Washington, and New Delhi’s vast Akshardham Temple. The stone, writes Leitch, is prized for its luminosity, its networks of blue veins, and its Rorschach blots of greyish-purple. In solid blocks, it can support monoliths; in thin slabs, it can be winnowed down to translucence.

But quarrying it is dangerous business. Extracting ancient, fossilized bones from vast mountains is body-breaking work, ruining laborers’ backs and filling their lungs with powdery calcium carbonate. Accidents are common and often fatal. Since 2016, at least three workers have been crushed to death. When Leitch, now a lecturer in sociology at Macquarie University in Australia, interviewed workers in the region in the 1980s, they detailed a dangerous history. “The marble of Carrara is not white: it is red, tinged with the color of human blood,” a quarry worker told her. These harsh conditions have long bred working-class activism, including one of Italy’s most enduring anarchist traditions.

Harsh conditions also bred the region’s most famous delicacy. Now considered gourmet, lardo di Colonnata—named after the Carrara village where the salumi is most famously produced—began its life as a calorie-rich food for quarry workers. Traditionally made from the back fat of local pigs, lardo is cured in caskets of marble, called conche. Like the marble, lardo is pearly white veined with pink, the color not of human blood but pork flesh. This resonance between lard and marble is more than visual: It is a living connection, forged by the labor of quarrying and imbued into the lardo through its method of curing. “Lardo breathes marble,” says Simone Cinotto, Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo.

In Carrara today, these intertwined histories are immediately apparent. Marble monuments to fallen quarry workers and anarchist struggles intermix with local shops selling lardo. On the first of May, a historically leftist holiday, Carrara celebrates an annual anarchist festival; every summer, locals feast during an annual festival of lardo. Today’s Carrara, however, hosts something you’d be unlikely to see in decades past: tourism.

There’s still less tourism in Carrara than in the rest of Tuscany, says Marco Manfredi, a historian of Italian anarchism who grew up in Carrara and is now based at L’Istituto Storico della Resistenza e della Società Contemporanea nella Provincia di Livorno. Yet driven partly by the region’s connection to art history, and partly by the newfound gourmet status of lardo di colonnata, the past decades have witnessed increasing international interest in Carrara, and in the salume endemic to it. A working-class food from a region characterized by harsh labor and anarchism seems an unlikely candidate for global gourmet fame. But like most other aspects of the region’s history, lardo’s journey from workman’s lunch to coveted artisanal product is intimately tied to marble.

Working-class foods leave light traces on the historical record, so it’s hard to know exactly how long Carrara residents have been eating lardo. Cinotto guesses at least five centuries. Until recently, the salume was not sold in stores, but made by local families, most of whom could afford to keep a pig and a vegetable garden. The pigs were fed scraps and slaughtered before Christmas, their fat cut into slabs, salted, spiced, and cured in marble conche. As the fat aged for at least six months, it sweat out its own brine. Finally, it emerged unctuous-sweet, musky, and ready to be shaved into slabs and eaten with rough bread, raw onions, and sliced tomatoes for quarry workers’ lunches. For locals, lardo di colonnata is associated with memories of poverty and pride. “Your lardo embodied your persona, because that was the pig you fed for an entire year,” says Cinotto. “It was, in a way, your fat.”

Carrara’s workers needed more than just pig fat to keep them going. They turned to radical politics. At the end of the 19th century, Italian anarchism was on the rise. In dialogue with a wave of mid-century radical thinking by the likes of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, charismatic Italian anarchists such as Errico Malatesta and Pietro Gori rejected the party-orientedness of Italian communism and channeled popular peasant culture to appeal directly to workers. They found politically fertile ground in the rugged peaks of Carrara. “A Stronghold of Anarchists,” blared one New York Times headline from January 1894. “Thousands of desperate men, engaged in the marble industry, ready for revolution.”

On January 13, 1894, in response to a socialist uprising in Sicily and simmering tensions within marble worksites, Carrara’s quarry workers revolted. “Two companies of soldiers were called out and a mob of workingmen gathered to resist them,” the Times reported. “The prevalence of Anarchism in the marble district near the towns excites much apprehension. A violent outbreak may come at any time.”

The rebellion was crushed by the Italian government, but that repression only helped cement the town’s reputation as an anarchist hotbed. “People who had an indistinct sentiment and attitude of rebellion started to define themselves as anarchists,” says Manfredi. He attributes the success of anarchist ideology in the quarries to a general mistrust of power, fueled by the region’s isolation and harsh conditions in the quarrying industry. Carrara wasn’t the only mining district that proved amenable to anarchist ideas. By World War I, anarchist workers from industrial centers across Italy were united in a national union. While the cultural legacy of this period has lingered, its political success was short-lived: Anarchism’s influence in Italian politics faded during fascism, never again reaching its early 20th-century peak.

Today, some food and tourism writers refer to lardo as “the food of anarchists,” in reference to this history. Leitch has never heard it described this way by quarry workers, not all of whom had libertarian leanings. “Some quarry workers were communists, republicans, Christian democrats, and, unfortunately, some were also fascists,” writes Leitch in an email. But Carrara’s quarry workers and radical politics are so deeply connected that lard and anarchism have become entwined in popular imagination.

Ironically, these traditions only came to the notice of tourists when the marble industry that inspired them was already in decline. When Alison Leitch returned to Carrara in the late 1990s, she found the region starkly transformed. The price of marble was low and unemployment was high, part of a wave of deindustrialization that had been sweeping Italy since the late 1980s. With the decline of the marble industry came a crisis of local culture. “An entire civilization was basically gone in a matter of a few years,” says Cinotto.

Along with deindustrialization, Italy’s traditional food cultures faced new challenges. When the country joined the European Union, many Italians experienced a crisis of culinary identity. Right-wing E.U. skeptics pointed to the standardization of agriculture coming from Brussels, including the much-parodied (and much-exaggerated) “banana curvature laws,” as the harbinger of a new era of bureaucratic excess. At the same time, the Italian left objected to the homogenizing force of globalization, signified by the increasing popularity of American-style fast food. In 1989, a group of activists, led by Italian leftist Carlo Petrini, founded Slow Food, a non-profit organization dedicated to the pleasure and politics of non-corporate, non-industrialized, local food.

When local police, in accordance with new European Union food safety standards, quarantined the lardo stores of an acclaimed local maker in 1996, Slow Food sprang into action. Declaring lardo di Colonnata endangered, the organization partnered with locals to save the salume’s traditional mode of preparation. In the process, their campaign made the once-obscure local food—whose unctuousness had historically elicited disgust among the upper classes—famous. Ironically, in the course of spreading the gospel of lardo, Slow Food’s campaign also spawned imitators: large charcuterie shops in big Italian cities and other global centers who gave their cured meats the lardo di Colonnata name. To combat this, local producers vied for, and eventually won, Protected Geographical Indication (IGP) designation from the European Union, which stipulates that at least one step in lardo’s production must take place in Carrara.

Today, visitors to Carrara can find an anarchist organization, monuments to quarry workers’ political struggles, and, of course, lardo. Lardo’s popularity, and the tourism industry it helped encourage, is a mixed blessing: Saved from death by overregulation, lardo’s production has nevertheless been taken out of the hands of local households, says Manfredi. At the same time, the shift toward tourism embodied in lardo’s newfound fame represents Italy’s broader transition away from industrial economies—a transition Manfredi feels has left some working-class locals in the lurch. As for the region’s connection to radical politics, it’s only now, when the violent repression of workers’ revolts is a distant memory, that this history, too, can become a tourist attraction. “There’s kind of an oblivion of memory that makes even the story very paradoxically consumable,” Cinotto says.

Still, protected by its IGP status, lardo di Colonnata remains rooted in the land of its birth. Melting in lush slivers on toasted Italian bread, or eaten with the classic raw onion and tomato, genuine lardo remains white and pink as the conche it is cured in. Some of Carrara’s miners, Leitch writes, believe the stone they quarry has an anima, a living spirit. Michelangelo's Pietà may be the most celebrated work of art to come from Carrara’s marble, but it is, perhaps, pork fat that best embodies the marble’s soul.

The auction commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

July 20, 2019 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, when Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon’s surface. To commemorate the historic occasion, Christie’s New York will auction off a remarkable array of spaceflight paraphernalia in its One Giant Leap sale, coming up this week on July 18.

The One Giant Leap auction—named after those iconic first words Armstrong uttered after stepping onto the moon—features 195 lots. But Christina Geiger, who oversees books and manuscripts at Christie’s New York, says there's one clear “far-and-away highlight." That would be the "Timeline Book" annotated aboard Apollo 11’s Eagle module by Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the module’s pilot and the second person to walk on the moon.

The book sat between the two men as the Eagle descended for landing, the spacecraft's alarms warning that the module had 20 seconds’ worth of fuel remaining. The book serves as a kind of play-by-play chronicle of the voyage, and, according to Geiger, was a way for Aldrin to debrief NASA after the mission returned to Earth. It remained in Aldrin’s possession until 2007, when he sold it to a private collector, and is now expected to sell for between $7 million and $9 million.

The Timeline Book is hardly the only auction item that speaks to the technical complexity of spaceflight. This blueprint of a control panel, for instance, details 200 switches and 48 emergency signals that Apollo astronauts had to decipher.

Other items are notable for highlighting the more human—even mundane—aspects of making history. Take, for example, this photograph of Armstrong and his crewmate Michael Collins eating a pre-flight steak-and-egg breakfast just before they shot to the moon. It’s a reminder that even as these astronauts were bravely exploring uncharted territory, they were human beings who, as Geiger put it, “had to eat breakfast and comb their hair.”

Another food-related highlight from the auction is astronaut Gordon Cooper’s annotated meal schedule from the Gemini 5 mission, which predated Apollo 11 by four years. Cooper lets us know that the peanut cubes on board were “good,” the tuna salad was “so so,” and the date fruit cake was unspeakably bad—noted here as a simple “ugh!”

Other lots, however, attest to the very real dangers these astronauts embraced when they committed to these missions. One haunting lot displays an envelope signed by Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins in the event that they did not return home alive. Aldrin's accompanying text explains that the astronauts had been “unable to obtain adequate life insurance,” so they left these autographs with their family members, knowing that the signatures would accrue substantial financial value, and that their sale could help sustain the families through a time of need.

A complete transcript of the failed 1970 Apollo 13 mission, meanwhile, contains the line “Houston, we’ve had a problem”—famously (mis)quoted in the 1995 film Apollo 13.

For Geiger, the sale’s timeliness has to do with more than just the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. It also coincides with renewed public interest in space travel, from interstellar tourism to the dream of one day inhabiting Mars (experts have their doubts about that plan).

Indeed, other recent sales have confirmed that it's a boom time for lunar auctions. Last year, Sotheby’s sold moon rocks collected in 1970 by Soviet cosmonauts for $855,000.

Ella White's battery-powered crutch guided her lifeboat to safety in 1912—and is now at the center of a family feud.

One dark night on the cold open ocean, Ella White steered 25 people to safety using only the light of her cane.

It was April 14, 1912, and as the Titanic began to fill with seawater, the wealthy widow paddled away on Lifeboat No. 8—the second boat to leave the sinking ship—along with 25 other passengers. White held her battery-operated cane aloft to illuminate the pitch-black, turning the lifeboat into a kind of floating lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. Eventually the group was rescued by a nearby ship called the Carpathia.

This week, the electric beacon that lit the frigid North Atlantic on that fateful night will be up for sale at Guernsey’s Auction. But it’s a contested auction, to say the least.

Like many other survivors, White, then 55, boarded the Titanic as a first-class passenger. She was traveling with her companion, a 36-year-old piano teacher named Marie Grice Young, along with several exotic chickens from France that they planned to breed in their Westchester mansion. They’d been on vacation in Europe and had chosen to return to America on a ship called the RMS Titanic, which was about to make its maiden voyage, according to Guernsey’s listing.

White had injured her foot during her travels, but she’d acquired a rather snazzy cane to help her keep her balance. The enameled black cane looks pretty simple at first glance, but its amber-colored bakelite head—made from the world’s first synthetic plastic—held a tiny, battery-powered light. This technology may seem kitschy by today’s standards, but it was cutting-edge technology in 1912, a mere 33 years after Thomas Edison had invented the electric light bulb.

White was lying in bed on the Titanic that night when she felt an odd sensation, “as though we went over about a thousand marbles,” she later said in her Senate testimony. When she managed to reach Lifeboat No. 8, she found 22 women and four men—nowhere near the lifeboat’s capacity—already on board.

As the group began oaring toward a light in the distance, which likely indicated another ship, it soon became tragically clear that none of the men on the lifeboat knew how to row. These were dining-room stewards, not seamen. According to White, they’d “escaped under the pretense of being oarsmen.” White and the other women soon took over the task.

After about 45 minutes, the Lifeboat No. 8 crew turned back to see if they could rescue other survivors. The night was impossibly dark, and the passengers realized that they would have no way of spotting other lifeboats. “The lamp on the boat was absolutely worth nothing,” White said in her Senate testimony. “I had an electric cane—a cane with an electric light in it—and that was the only light we had.”

White’s cane shone far brighter than any of the lifeboats’ lamps, and she waved it around as Lifeboat No. 8 headed back toward the Titanic’s sinking hull, in search of survivors. Though the cane’s light may have caused more confusion than assistance for nearby boats, it helped White and her crewmates navigate safely back to the ship—just in time to watch it sink. “We sat there for a long time, and we saw the ship go down, distinctly,” White said.

All 26 people on Lifeboat No. 8 survived. After the disaster, White and Young moved in together and shared a home in Westchester County for the next 30 years. When White died, she left Young the bulk of her estate, including the cane. Historians believe White and Holmes likely had a queer relationship, according to OutSmart Magazine.

“I don’t think my father understood that Ella and Marie Grice Young had a relationship that was more than just friends,” says White’s great-grandnephew John Hoving. “I didn’t put two and two together about their relationship until later in my life.”

After White’s death, her cane changed hands several times. Its recent emergence on the Guernsey block has stoked a feud between two cousins, each of whom claims ownership. It was put up for auction by its current owner, Brad Williams, a great-grandnephew of White’s who says he inherited it from his mother, who in turn got it from her mother, White’s niece Mildred Holmes.

But on July 4, Hoving challenged the auction, alleging that the cane was stolen nearly 50 years ago from his family’s umbrella stand in an Upper East Side apartment. He contends that Holmes gave the cane to his father, not his aunt.

“This cane was part of our family folklore,” Hoving says, “No one had flashlights back then, and my great-great aunt was is in this lifeboat with a bunch of guys who didn't know how to row.”

Hoving remembers his father parading the cane around for family and friends, telling the epic story of how White managed to survive the Titanic’s sinking. By the early 1970s, the light had nearly stopped working, but the amber head of the cane still emitted a dim sort of glow.

Luckily for would-be bidders, Hoving, Williams, and Guernsey reached a preliminary agreement on July 15. White’s cane will proceed to auction on July 20 as a part of the lot “A Century at Sea.” It is expected to fetch as much as $500,000.

“The fact that this cane still exists is extraordinary,” Hoving says. “I hope it gets displayed somewhere so people can continue to hear the story behind it.”

A bakery is churning out profane, popular protest pastries.

Mooncakes are edible works of art. Traditionally, the top crust of the dense Chinese pastries are decorated with geometric patterns or auspicious messages, such as the characters for “harmony” or “longevity.” Usually baked during the Mid-Autumn Festival, people send the sweet cakes to relatives and friends as a gesture of respect. So to find one that declares “Fuck you!” is, well, unheard of.

One bakery in Hong Kong, however, is selling expletive-covered mooncakes like hotcakes. Wah Yee Tang Cake Shop, a family business that turns 35 this year, recently put them on its menu, along with several other fiery options. Patrons can pick up handmade treats stamped with messages such as “No withdrawal, no dismissal" (不撤不散), “Hongkonger” (香港人), and “Freedom hi” (自由西). Aside from being beautiful (and no doubt, tasty), they are meant to inspire protestors fighting a controversial extradition bill.

While Hong Kong is semi-autonomous, the bill would allow for the transfer of suspected criminals there to face trial in mainland China. Not only would this undermine Hong Kong’s legal independence, but it could also lead to a surge in politically motivated prosecutions. Although Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lam announced the bill dead as of last week, it has not yet been formally withdrawn. Massive demonstrations have drawn millions to Hong Kong’s streets, even as clashes with police turned violent.

Wah Yee Tang hadn’t originally set out to participate in the ongoing protests, explains marketing director Naomi Suen. But the mooncakes became an enticing way to contribute to the political discourse.

“We didn’t make these mooncakes on purpose to join the fight,” says the 33-year-old, who runs the store with her mother. “We made them for fun to share with friends.” But then pictures of the mooncakes made the rounds on Facebook. Now, Suen says, they’ve “become a hit.”

Last Monday, Suen decided to add the anti-extradition mooncakes to the bakery’s regular offerings of traditional buns, sugarless cookies, and chiffon cakes. They have sold out every day of the week, and Wah Yee Tang is working to fulfill thousands of orders. A portion of the proceeds go to a fund that supports protestors.

So far, the “No withdrawal, no dismissal” mooncake, made with red bean paste with egg yolk, is the bestseller, with its message that if the bill is not withdrawn, then the protestors will not disperse. Patrons can also choose from 11 other messages available in six flavors. “We are together and support each other” (一齊撐) is for those craving a paste of green tea and red bean. “Filibuster” (鬥長命) offers a taste of the traditional five-nuts Chinese filling. Other phrases are more tongue-in-cheek, such as “Totally irrelevant, totally insane” (九唔搭八), which is how Hong Kong singer Kenny Bee described protestors. When a policeman yelled “Reporter, my ass” (記你老母) at a reporter covering the demonstrations, the phrase became a rallying cry (especially since journalists have faced violence from the Hong Kong police). Now, it decorates a white lotus seed paste cake. “We want to make this design to show our respect to journalists,” Suen says.

The spunky mooncakes shouldn’t surprise Wah Yee Tang’s regulars. When the bakery isn’t putting out traditional Cantonese pastries, it’s making special occasion cookies, from bunny-shaped treats to Hello Kitty-inspired ones. The more adult-oriented desserts actually debuted last year as playful novelties, when Suen sold cookies of impudent cats pointing their middle fingers, adorned with notes such as “Fuck you, HAHA.”

“We noticed many Hongkongese are very stressed and disappointed with the overall situation of the city,” Suen says of that initial batch—amuse-bouches for the later protest cakes. She now offers mooncakes decorated with the same cat, accompanied with the character 屌, or “fuck.”

With these candid cakes, Wah Yee Tang joins a small history of activists who use the mooncake as a medium. In 2012, the artist Wilson Shieh designed mooncakes to raise legal funds for protestors convicted of unlawful assembly after a vigil marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre turned violent. Sold at a Shanghai art gallery, the cakes read, “Anti-rent increase” and “Fight the landlords.” Two years later, participants of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong made mooncakes that read “Occupy Central” (佔領中環), the name of the pro-democracy campaign that launched four months of street sit-ins in pursuit of free elections.

Perhaps these activists were paying homage to an ancient folktale. One story goes that mooncakes helped the Chinese overthrow the ruling Mongols during the Yuan Dynasty. A military counsel known as Liu Bowen rallied men to use mooncakes to hide slips of paper calling for rebellion. The organization led to a successful uprising, resulting in the establishment of the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century.

Being less covert, Wah Yee Tang’s bold mooncakes have already drawn criticism. As the South China Morning Post reports, pro-police Hongkongers have called for a boycott of the bakery, arguing that “the products here will lead youngsters astray.”

But Suen isn’t backing down. The bakery will only stop producing protest pastries when mooncake season is over—that is, when the Mid-Autumn Festival ends in September. Until then, churlish cats and encouraging cakes will fly off the shelves—fuel, in a way, for a still-burning fire.

Embedded inside it is a 3 billion year-old moon rock.

Fifty years ago this month, Apollo 11 left Earth, traveled through space and landed on the moon. A souvenir from that mission is embedded in a stained glass window at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

The Scientists and Technicians Window—better known as the Space Window—was installed in 1974 and is located about halfway through the cathedral’s nave. It exists in large part due to Francis B. Sayre Jr., who served as the cathedral’s dean in the early 1970s. He had already made a reputation for himself as a progressive-minded clergyman by loudly opposing Joseph McCarthy and marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., at Selma. His hope was to give the cathedral a uniquely American work of art that would separate it from other great churches around the world. Sayre teamed up with former NASA administrator Thomas O. Paine, who largely financed the window, to commission the St. Louis-based artist Rodney Winfield to commemorate the United States’s greatest scientific achievement: Apollo 11’s mission to the moon.

Winfield, who had created works for churches and synagogues across the country, was well-versed in creating religious-inspired stained glass, but this was a collaboration of art, science, and religion. The project wasn’t without its hurdles. In his journals, the artist described the process as arduous. NASA had its requirements, providing Winfield with detailed instructions and unclassified photos of space and rocketships. The cathedral also had specific “dos” and “don’ts” to ensure the window fit into the architecture as a whole. And, of course, the artist had his own vision. Winfield proposed 11 different designs, but all were rejected.

Winfield wrote in his journal that he got discouraged and was close to giving up. But he kept working. Winfield died in December 2017, but his daughter Robin Winfield, an artist herself, says her dad was one of those who never settled.

“My dad constantly kept working until he got it to that right moment,” says Winfield. “He always reworked, no matter what he was being paid or how much time it took him. He was really a perfectionist.”

It was when he threw out the rulebook that he had his breakthrough. In his journal, Winfield describes the artistic process that lead him to create the design that ultimately was accepted.

“That was when I decided to forget all the limitations of the visual elements provided me by NASA,” he wrote, “And simply do a window that would show the immensity of the universe.” His 12th, and final, proposal was a boldly-colored, geometric design with dark spheres and tiny stars. It’s what we see today at the National Cathedral.

On July 21, 1974, on the fifth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the window was officially dedicated in a ceremony at the cathedral. Sayre, Paine, Winfield, and all three Apollo 11 astronauts were attendance (in 2011, Winfield said getting the astronaut’s autographs was like “getting Columbus’s autograph”). Of the astronauts, it was Michael Collins who had the most personal connection to the setting. Collins spent part of his childhood in D.C. and had graduated from St. Albans School, located next door to the cathedral.

Decades later, from his home in South Florida, Collins said that what he loves most about the window is how it fits in.“Everything else at the cathedral commemorates the old. Here’s something that commemorates the new,” says Collins. “I like that juxtaposition of the incongruous. The old and the new side-by-side.” He calls Winfield’s work of art a “masterpiece.”

When the window was unveiled in 1974, it was missing an important component: the moon rock. It actually wasn’t installed until 1977, due to a fear of vandals. So, for three years, in its stead was a black paper circle. When the moon rock was finally embedded, it was a silver-dollar-sized sliver of a 3.5 billion-year-old-basalt rock that was picked up by Neil Armstrong at the Sea of Tranquility. It’s the only moon rock that was given to a non-governmental agency. Winfield said the first time he got to handle it, he noticed how slim it was. “It was very, very thin. You could see through it,” said Winfield in 2011. “It was translucent.”

The long-languishing ships of Mallows Bay are getting a second life as a National Marine Sanctuary.

If you were to circle Mallows Bay from the air and capture a view of the water at low tide, you would see a battalion of almond-shaped silhouettes. Some sit just below the surface, a little darker than the murky water above them. Others look more like waterlogged traffic medians—long, skinny, and stippled with vegetation.

You would be gazing down at a sodden, sprawling graveyard—the final resting place of roughly 200 boats, including about 100 wooden steamships known as the Ghost Fleet. The custodians of these wrecked, rotten, and rusty ships just got some peace of mind, even as their charges fall to pieces: This nook of the Potomac River—some 40 miles south of Washington, D.C., and close to Nanjemoy, Maryland—was recently designated a National Marine Sanctuary.

The ships weren’t designed to end up there, moldering near the shore. The wooden vessels were built about a century ago, as a part of America’s preparations for World War I.

In 1917 the U.S. Shipping Board needed more boats—fast. America was at war, and waters were prowled by dangerous German U-boats. To square off against them, the board wanted to produce 1,000 new vessels over 18 months. But building a fleet was expensive—each ship cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million to make—and there were relatively few skilled laborers to take up the task.

Then again, this was an emergency—so things moved full steam ahead. Working across more than three dozen shipyards in 17 states, civilian laborers soon fashioned an armada made of wood.

The Emergency Fleet Corporation (as that arm of the Shipping Board was known) fell several hundred ships shy of its 1,000-ship goal, but still wound up fabricating a fleet. Unfortunately, the fleet was obsolete almost as soon as it was finished. The war wound down, and few of the expensive boats had seen any action out on the water (a few did haul supplies). When World War II officially ended, “these ships were veritable ‘white elephants’ on the hands of the government,” the Atlanta Constitution reported at the time.

In the early 1920s, a salvage company snapped many of the boats up for a few thousand bucks apiece. To access the valuable metal components, scrappers first had to get rid of the wood that was blocking their path. This often involved torching the boats until they burned down to the waterline. In 1925, the San Francisco Examiner reported that 200 “doomed ships” from several shipyards were dragged to the shore of the Potomac and destined to be set alight, 35 at a time, in “the world’s most expensive bonfire.”

The boats were never fully ravaged—not by flames, not by salvage expeditions, not by the water itself. In the shallows, the wooden hulls languished, like the sun-bleached bones of a washed-up cetacean. And, in death, they found a new kind of quiet fame.

Over the decades, they’ve become nesting grounds for osprey and red-winged blackbirds, and an appealing attraction for kayakers with a hankering for maritime history. The wrecks’ educational and ecological value factor prominently in the sanctuary nomination that then-Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley submitted to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2014. (That proposal stalled out at the time, partly because some locals who make their living on the water pushed back, citing fears about restrictions on fishing and other industries.)

It’s not quite a done deal yet. Though the designation was announced and entered into the federal register on July 8, 2019, it won’t take effect until a 45-day congressional review period expires. Barring a government shutdown, or the designation being attached to an unpopular bill, “we don’t anticipate problems,” says Susan Langley, the state underwater archaeologist with the Maryland Historical Trust, who advocated for the designation. Still, she’s “not popping any corks until November 22.”

Assuming all goes according to plan, the site will be jointly managed by NOAA, the state of Maryland, and Charles County. There are more than a dozen Marine Sanctuaries in the U.S., and regulations vary from one to another. At Mallows Bay, the designation won’t affect visitor access, says Paul Orlando, NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay regional coordinator. People will still be able to fish and kayak, and to appreciate the skeletal shapes in the wind-whipped winter, the young animals that emerge in the spring, and the riotous foliage come fall.

Advocates say that the designation is a way of boosting historical, educational, and scientific awareness about the site, and could potentially lead to numerous economic gains—an influx of students, buy-in from adventure companies, and jobs that could be a boon to the local economy.

Another big goal of the designation, Langley says, is managing the safety of both the visitors and the wrecks they trek to see. She wants to curb the chance of people “loving [the wrecks] to death,” clambering on top of the slick, fragile wood, or shoving against it with their paddles. The hope is that the Marine Sanctuary recognition will infuse the site with the “don’t break it, don’t take it” ethos, further discouraging divers or paddlers from nabbing parts of the hulls as souvenirs.

Whatever the designation will come to mean for the nearby communities, it will mean something for the dead boats too: a peaceful and protected slumber in their watery graves.

Some think these towering shell piles preserve healthy populations of the coveted sea snails.

Two fishermen from the coral island of Anegada sit in a metal boat. They divest conch of their shells, limb by limb, tentacle by tentacle, until at last each holds a smooth, white mass of meat. When they finish, they toss the shells—shiny and polished pink by the sand—behind them, to join thousands of their departed brothers and sisters in a series of jagged dunes, towering a dozen feet above their heads.

In the British Virgin Islands, the humble conch, a type of sea snail, is rivaled only by lobster as the seafood of choice. Conch fritters—the rubbery, almost gamey-tasting meat chopped fine, breaded and deep-fried, and doused in a ketchup-mayo sauce—appear on the menu of virtually every restaurant serving up local cuisine, and in the galley kitchens of the hundreds of charter boats cruising the waters. The creature is a staple elsewhere in the Caribbean, too. But in the BVI, every conch on every dinner plate is harvested locally, mostly in the waters surrounding Anegada. Some say the piles of discarded conch shells reaching up from the seafloor and looming high out of the water could be one reason why the mollusks remain so plentiful here, after being overfished to the point of extinction elsewhere. But the shells don’t attract the living conch—they actually repel them.

For generations, explains local fisherman Kelwyn “Kelly” Faulkner Lindsay, locals—first, indigenous peoples on seasonal hunts, then British settlers—would dive the seabeds, sawing off the tops of the shells and drawing out the creatures’ innards like beads on a string. As far back as the 13th century, fishermen would toss the empty shells down into the seabed, around 30 to 40 feet below. As the older shells sank into the sand, newer shells were tossed on top, keeping the height level. Over the next 800 years, the piles gradually evolved into one of the world’s most serene and beautiful garbage dumps.

This massive buildup of conch, according to Faulkner Lindsay, influenced the movements of the living conch. “The ones that are alive will start to move away from the empty shells,” he says. “So...we put all the shells in one place.” With the empty shells piled in one small area instead of scattered throughout the larger fishing grounds, the conch will think there’s no danger and remain comfortably dwelling in Anegada, instead of fleeing the island’s waters forever.

The theory is unproven, but some scientists think it has merit. “There is some indication, mostly anecdotal I think, that dead conch will repel live ones,” says Clive Petrovic, a biology professor at Tortola’s H. Lavity Stoutt Community College. Possibly because in nature live conch are usually killed by predators. Thus, it would confer survival advantage to live conch to leave an area that may contain a predator.” All the while, schools of nurse sharks, stingrays and turtles dart around the shells, hatching their young in the shadow of the dead.

“It acts as a nursery and a reef,” Faulkner Lindsay says.

The conch-shell piles may have existed for centuries, but a decade ago they were little-known, and inaccessible to all but local fishermen, who saw no good reason to tell anyone they were there. In 2012, Faulkner Lindsay, fisherman-turned-tour guide, saw an untapped business opportunity that would allow him to show visitors the mounds in one of the least invasive ways possible. He bought a small boat to send tourists skimming over the almost eerily empty turquoise expanse of water leading to the mounds.

The big charter catamarans that dominate the VI tourism industry don’t come here—in fact, they can’t come here. Local law forbids it, mostly because navigating over the BVI’s largest reef would be too dangerous for many of the amateur “credit card captains” who rent out the cats. It’s only here that visitors glimpse what the BVI looked like before Christopher Columbus arrived on his second voyage to the Americas, according to BVI-based historian Mitch Kent, and it’s only the vast piles of shells that prove that people called the Virgin Islands home long before him.

“These dates suggest that the middens were formed during the last stages of the Amerindian occupation of the Leeward Islands, which for the Virgin Islands ended in the mid-16th century when a concerted effort was made to clear the region of its indigenous inhabitants,” Kent wrote in his environmental profile of the island for the Island Resources Foundation. One early speculation, put forth by 19th-century German explorer Robert Hermann Schomburgk, was that the mounds were monuments to the dead. Anegadeans do still make references to the “Indian burial grounds” on their island, but Schomburgk also noted that locals regularly burned the shells for lime, and no bones were uncovered in the piles.

Though a few old-school islanders are still suspicious of visitors, tourism is undoubtedly king now on Anegada (population 300). Most fishermen now have part-time jobs as cooks or handymen at the handful of boutique resorts on Anegada, says Faulkner Lindsay. As a result, the mounds have evolved to not only serve as a place to dispose of the shells, but a temporary spot for fishermen to store the live conch they catch. Drifting toward one micro-pile, Faulkner Lindsay explained that it belongs to the fisherman who supplies Neptune’s Treasure, one of the restaurants near the ferry dock. Other piles belong to different fishermen and restaurants. They dump off their fresh catches in individual hoards until they have time to come back and clean them. The piles work on a sort of honor system. “You know that that’s not yours,” Lindsay says.

Fishing remains knitted into the landscape of Anegada the way it isn’t in the rest of the BVI. Anegada fishermen provide most of the territory’s lobster, according to Faulkner Lindsay, and charter guests radio hours ahead to the island’s few restaurants and hotels to request conch fritters, conch chowder, or cracked conch dredged in flour and fried golden-brown. The animal’s small numbers, and the careful approach they take to fishing, insure the populations remain stable, he says. “We can still sustain the restaurants and keep the conch alive.”

Even just a few more boats out trolling could upset the ecosystem. Other Caribbean destinations offer case studies for what not to do with conch. Although Key West bills itself as the “Conch Republic,” conch harvesting has been illegal there since 1975. A recent report from the Bahamas said the population there could collapse in 15 years if current fishing practices continue.

“Conch are widespread in the BVI,” says Petrovic. “In the past, part of the challenge for fishers [has been] getting the conch to market. Since much of the market was local, and the human population was generally small, there was less incentive to overfish.”

Here, some of the catch gets exported abroad in small quantities. On Anegada, buyers tend to form closer connections with their suppliers. One restaurateur from Miami has been buying Anegada conch for decades, explains Faulkner Lindsay.

“He owned two restaurants and he came here for vacation,” he says. “He lined up with a fisherman to buy 500 pounds.”

Petrovic, though, can see trouble ahead. Anegada’s big sisters have seen conch steadily declining due to overfishing. “While conch still exist, and in good numbers in a few places, overall the populations are not near historical levels,” he says. This could be due to overharvesting of juvenile breeding conch—which, providentially, can be identified by their shells. “The shell size and shape provides clues to the age of the conch,” says Petrovic, and could help reconstruct the condition of ancient populations.

Scientific research could crack open more mysteries. According to Gore, due to ocean acidification resulting from climate change, conch are suspected not to be growing as large as they used to. An 800-year-old conch pile could prove invaluable in determining just how much they’re shrinking, serving as “a key concept to natural resource management—using scientific fact, not opinions, to make decisions to better protect any such resources. In some ways, unravelling some of the history...would actually help us understand the past to better prepare for the future.” In other words, we may not know how best to save the conch—which have been historically been nearly as inaccessible to scientists as they have been to tourists—until their graveyard gives up more of its secrets.

Wait, what the heck is a lake, anyway?

Deep within what is arguably the kindest region of America, a very polite rivalry between neighbors has reached a boiling point. But this is no suburban conflict over pooping pups or obstructed views. This is a battle on a geographical scale. The two dueling parties? Minnesota and Wisconsin. The conflict? Which state has more lakes. The verdict? It’s complicated.

Though the regional rivalry has been around for quite some time, this time around, Wisconsin threw the first stone. It all started in May when Sara Meany, secretary-designate of the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, went on the Milwaukee radio show, Wisconsin’s Afternoon News With John Mercure.

Meaney made a simple but bold claim—that Wisconsin has 15,000 freshwater lakes. Mercure, realizing the import of the statement, sought clarification: “More than Minnesota?” Meaney responded decisively. “More than Minnesota,” she said. “Absolutely. We win. We win.” So sure was she that she said it twice.

Needless to say, Meaney ruffled the feathers of Minnesotans and limnologists alike, many of whom disagree—rather politely. “Not so fast,” countered the Minneapolis Star Tribune. On May 23, national fact-checking site Politifact entered the fray, citing each state’s official tallies. According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, an impressive 15,074. According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, a paltry 11,842. Could Meaney have been right, could this central aspect of Minnesotan identity be built on soggy ground?

Not so fast. If you look closer, you’ll see that Wisconsin plays a little fast and a little loose with the definition of a lake. Minnesota defines a lake as a body of water greater than 10 acres in area. Wisconsin is far less circumspect. Thousands of the lakes in its tally are far smaller than that, and 60 percent don’t even have names. After a flash flood, Wisconsin might consider itself brimming with new lakes. By Minnesota’s standard, it’s neighboring state would have just 5,898 lakes, according to Politifact’s calculations. Ultimately, the site rated Meaney’s statement “False.”

“Wisconsin, the land of 5,898 lakes and a smattering of ponds,” a Wisconsinite with the handle @JasonSullivan tweeted at Politifact. But the Badger State, if the bold Meaney can be said to stand in for her constituents, refuses to budge. “I stand by the fact that Wisconsin has 15,000 lakes,” Meaney says.

But what makes Minnesota or anyone else the arbiter of what is and isn’t a lake? Who says it has to be greater than 10 acres in this, a federalist representative democracy? This further investigation opens up a taxonomic wormhole, one so lacking in real stakes that it may never be thoroughly resolved. As it turns out, there is no tangible, measurable difference between a lake and a pond.

One of the first standardized definitions of “lake” is still referenced today, and was coined by Paul S. Welch, the man who literally wrote the book on them. In his foundational 1935 tome Limnology, he defines a lake, rather eloquently, as "a body of standing water completely isolated from the sea and having an area of open, relatively deep water sufficiently large to produce somewhere on its periphery a barren, wave-swept shore." By contrast, ponds are "very small, very shallow bodies of standing water in which quiet water and extensive occupancy by higher aquatic plants are common."

For all their poetry, these definitions are turbid, according to Jake Vander Zanden, the director of the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Perhaps a smaller body of water in which light could hit the bottom and ensure the growth of aquatic plants happens to be massive in area or so murky that light never makes it down there. Or perhaps there’s a smaller, human-made body of water such as a quarry that’s quite small in area but conceals hidden depths. These anomalies could technically, if somewhat illogically, be considered lakes.

While it’s outside of Welch’s base definition, ponds are often thought to be temporary bodies of water, while lakes are more permanent. But consider Australia’s Lake Eyre, which spends most of the year as a dry basin but occasionally fills, at which point it becomes the country’s largest lake. How are we supposed to come up with a clear taxonomy if nature can't seem to make up her mind?

To further complicate matters, Wisconsin happens to be overrun with lakes (by Minnesota standards) that have the word “pond” in their names and ponds that have the word “lake” in their names, Vander Zanden says. Sometimes ponds are just rebranded in the great, holy mission of marketing homes. In New Hampshire, both Mud Pond and Dishwater Pond were renamed Mirror Lake. Where would you want to live?

To avoid this confusion (rather than settle it), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has no official definition of a lake. Instead, it lists lakes and ponds in a single category in its National Hydrography Dataset. The same is true for other geographic imprecisions, such as mountains versus hills and rivers versus creeks. The agency admits these distinctions may be too large or too flimsy or too squishy to ever quantify. “Such definitions as exist derive from the particular needs and applications of organizations using them,” states the official USGS FAQ on the subject. “Broad agreement on such questions is essentially impossible.” And this is the loophole that Wisconsin, apparently hungry for officially counted lakes, stepped on through.

After all, this lacustrine rivalry isn’t always cordial. In fall 2017, a vigilante plot surfaced on Facebook, according to the Pioneer Press. The aim of “Go to Minnesota and Steal Their 11,842 Lakes” was rather clear. “Just tired of them being so smug with their 10,000 lakes,” Wisconsin-based organizer Marissa Stockman wrote on the Facebook event listing. Her plot inspired others, including “Weigh Down Minnesota’s Lakes with Rocks So People Can’t Steal Them,” “Steal All the Rocks From Minnesota So They Can’t Weigh Down the Lakes,” and “Combine All Cabins Into a Robot To Defend Minnesota’s Lakes.” This, folks, is how wars start.

Ultimately, none of this matters because Minnesota wins. When Politifact calculated the number of lakes in each using USGS’s federal data, Minnesota topped Wisconsin in each head-to-head. If you go by the USGS’s clumping definition of a lake-pond, Minnesota has 124,662 to Wisconsin’s 82,009. If you go by water bodies with official names, it is 8,784 to 5,481. If you define lakes as bodies of water of 10 acres or more, Minnesota wails on its neighbor: 14,444—even more than Minnesota’s own estimation of 11,842—to 6,176. All hail Minnesota, Land of Way More Than 10,000 Lakes. (“10,000 Lakes” is emblazoned on Minnesota's stock license plates. For what it’s worth, Minnesota offers a number of other plate designs, such as one for motorcycle-riding retired firefighters that’s used by a select 33 residents.)

“Wisconsin is known as ‘America’s Dairyland,’” Vander Zanden says. “Though I guess we could change it to ‘15,000 Lakes, More Than Minnesota.’” But he immediately backtracks. He is a limnologist, after all. “But seriously, Minnesota has more lakes,” he says. “Factually, they do.”

Vander Zanden suggests that Minnesota could quash this rivalry by ceasing to undercut its lake total. “I don’t know why they would underestimate the number of lakes on their license plate. Why would you do that?” he exclaims. “They could still round down, but start at a more realistic number. It’s like being six-foot-two but saying you’re only five feet tall.”

When asked if he would consider revising the state’s license plate slogan, John Edman, the director of the Minnesota Department of Tourism, answered with sound marketing logic. “‘10,000 Lakes’ just has a nice little ring to it,” he says. “Sounds a little better than 11,842.” According to Edman, Minnesota’s homespun modesty is as much a virtue as its abundant lakes. “We just measure our lakes a little bit differently here,” he adds. So for now, Minnesota’s underestimated motto will live on on car bumpers throughout the Midwest.

But if the neighboring states can agree on one thing, it’s that they love their lakes and want everyone to come see them. “We have large lakes, small lakes, and ponds, well-known lakes, lakes of all kind,” Edman says of Minnesota. Meaney shares the sentiment. “I would encourage anyone from Minnesota to join us in Wisconsin and count as many lakes as they possibly can and let us know what they find,” she says. “Maybe over a beer!”

Vander Zanden’s compromise is even more congenial, if unwieldy as a tourism come-on. “These two states both have an amazing abundance of natural resources,” he says. “Maybe we should band together and say that, together, ‘We have so many lakes.’”

But not enough, actually. Not enough for any kind of title or superlative, not even close. That distinction belongs to Alaska, the country’s lake king by any and every definition. The state’s Department of Mining, Land, and Water puts the total at three million. They can’t even count the ponds.

Regional Chinese-Canadian cuisine is flourishing in some unlikely places.

This article is adapted from Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurants by Ann Hui.

It was the early 1970s, and the board of directors of the Port Arthur Curling Club had a problem on their hands.

Business at the rink in Thunder Bay, Ontario, was going well. Despite competition from another curling club just a ten-minute drive away, Port Arthur had its own established group of regulars, thanks to its almost century-long history in this small city in Canada’s remote north. Plus, curling⁠—an ice sport that looks a little like lawn bowling, except that players use brooms to “sweep” a stone towards its target⁠—is arguably as central to Canadian identity as maple syrup or hockey.

But it was the Port Arthur’s dining room and restaurant business on the second floor that troubled the board. They had tried running the restaurant themselves, a large dining area with windows overlooking the ice below. But it wasn’t making money. Over time, running the restaurant had become more trouble than it was worth.

One day, some of the board members stopped in at the bar at the Dragon Room, then a popular local Chinese restaurant. As usual, the place was packed—customers flocking to the dining room for the dry spareribs (“served with spice salt and lemon wedges, $1.90”) and char suee bok toy (“an authentic favorite!”)

Chinese food, by then, had become one of the most popular cuisines not only in Thunder Bay, but across North America. For many of the city’s mostly blue-collar residents, going to a “Western” restaurant didn’t make sense. They could make meatloaf or turkey sandwiches themselves at home. But Chinese restaurants were exotic⁠—never mind whether the dishes on the menu, like sweet-and-sour chicken balls or chop suey, actually originated from China. The restaurants fit with the new, more cosmopolitan worldview Canadians were beginning to develop, helped along by Nixon’s visit to China (where he famously sampled from a platter of Peking duck) and the opening of Canada’s doors to immigration from China, Europe, and other parts of the world.

Seeing the success of the Dragon Room gave the board members an idea. They approached its manager, a young man named Ling Lee, with a proposition: Would he consider taking over the restaurant at the curling club?

Lee was hardly a stranger to bold moves, his daughter, Norina Karschti, told me. At 15, her father had followed his father from Guangdong to Saskatoon, despite not knowing any English. He slowly learned the language and, a few years later, moved to Ontario on a lark. He’d been shown a photograph of a pretty young Chinese woman and was told she lived in Kenora, Ontario. So he set out looking for her. By the time he turned 19, he and the woman in the picture, May Lee, were married.

The couple settled in Thunder Bay, where he found work in Chinese restaurants. By his early thirties, Lee was managing the Dragon Room. And by the time the Port Arthur club board approached him, he was ready for a place of his own. So he said yes. In 1973, Ling Lee’s in Port Arthur Curling Club opened.

Now Karschti runs the restaurant. As she came to a pause, I asked her a question I hadn’t yet dared ask other restaurant owners. Like me, Karschti was Chinese but born in Canada. Like me, she was married to a non-Chinese husband. She too spent the majority of her time around non-Chinese Canadians. She understood what it was like to navigate between the cultures.

“Is it strange to you, selling Chinese food that you know isn’t actually Chinese?”

She paused for a moment to chuckle before continuing.

The first Chinese restaurant owners had built their businesses by improvising. Many had arrived in Canada as railway workers, or as part of the Gold Rush. They weren’t trained cooks, for the most part. And even if they wanted to cook “authentic" Chinese, most of the ingredients they needed⁠—spices, sauces, fresh produce, or seafood⁠—couldn’t yet be found in North America. Nor could they expect Chinese customers. Based on the ingredients available to them, they concocted new dishes they thought might appeal to Western audiences. They borrowed from the ideas they remembered back home, but added healthy doses of soy sauce, ketchup, and sugar to appeal to Western tastes.

As these “chop suey” dishes spread across Canada, regional specialties began to develop. There was ginger beef back in the Prairies. In Quebec, I’d found fried macaroni, stir-fried pasta with soy sauce, meat, and veggies. I’d also come across Peterborough wontons (deep-fried wonton skins, without the meat fillings), and the Northern Ontario custom of serving Chinese food with a side of toast. Then, of course, there was the island province of Newfoundland, where even egg noodles couldn’t be reliably found until relatively recently. There, chow mein is made of thin strips of green cabbage instead.

Those regional specialties, I learned, didn’t always translate from one part of the country to to the next. After restaurant owner Richard Yu moved from Vancouver to Deer Lake, Newfoundland, he had to adjust his sparerib recipe. Back in Vancouver, his deep-fried, honey garlic ribs had been a hit. But when he made the same recipe in Canton, his Newfoundland restaurant, they were unimpressed. “They said, ‘Even a dog wouldn’t eat this,’” Yu says, chuckling.

It took him a while to figure out the difference: His new customers in Newfoundland were much, much older than those back in Vancouver. Newfoundland has the oldest median age in Canada. The deep-fried, crunchy ribs were hard on his new customers’ teeth. So he started braising his ribs, cooking them slowly under low heat until they were soft and tender, falling off the bone. This recipe was much more successful.

At Ling Lee’s, Karschti explains, the specialty was Bon Bon ribs⁠—a made-in-Thunder Bay invention. That dish comprised of spare-ribs coated in allspice and MSG, then deep-fried quickly and spritzed with lemon. It was one of the dishes that made her father so popular, he was eventually hired by the local cable TV station to host his own cooking show. Each week, he invited viewers into his kitchen to show them the secrets of cooking “Chinese food.”

Her father successfully became the face of chop suey cuisine in Thunder Bay. Years later, he would see the downside of that. When he decided to introduce Thunder Bay to authentic Chinese cuisine with a second restaurant, the response was lackluster.

“We tried,” Karschti said. “People just didn’t want to go for that.” Gradually, the authentic dishes dropped off the menu, and the second restaurant switched over to chop suey only.

It was nearing lunchtime, and we could hear the wok paddles banging against hot steel in the Ling Lee kitchen. The two cooks inside were busy getting the buffet ready for the lunch rush. A few regulars were already sitting at tables, watching for the lights above the buffet line to light up. Downstairs at the curling rinks, the lights came on with a sudden click. Two men in fleece vests and pants walked out onto the ice, lining up their rocks for a game.

While his dream of introducing authentic Chinese food to Thunder Bay didn't work out, Karschti's father left a different kind of legacy, instead. Today, all three of Thunder Bay's curling clubs have a Chinese restaurant on the premises. And each of them has Bon Bon ribs on the menu.

From the book Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurants, by Ann Hui. ©2019. Published by Douglas & McIntyre. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Their "mouth-fighting" produces one of the loudest underwater sounds ever recorded.

Somewhere off the coast of Japan, hundreds of feet underwater, a couple of flimsy, miniscule worms are butting heads and—somehow—making lots of noise. As much as 157 decibels’ worth, to be exact. That’s how loud the worms’ “mouth-fighting” can get when measured underwater, making it one of the most powerful sounds in the deep seas. (By comparison, container ships can generate noise levels of up to 190 underwater decibels.)

New research published in the journal Current Biology takes a close look at these worms, whose species—Leocratides kimuraorum—wasn’t discovered until 2017. That discovery, says A. Richard Palmer, a marine biologist at Canada’s University of Alberta and a co-author of the new study, was made entirely due to chance.

Palmer’s colleagues in Japan were collecting some routine samples from the water and couldn’t help but notice the unusual popping sounds emanating from their haul. When the researchers shared their findings with him, Palmer says he “was completely amazed to hear a sound that loud coming from a worm.” It was “very intense.”

The impact of the finding is amplified by the worms’ insubstantial frames, which at first glance seem incapable of producing the kinds of reverberating knocks you would get from, say, clanging two hard shells together. Take the snapping shrimp—some of which are named for the band Pink Floyd—for example. These shrimp have large, intimidating claws that, when snapped at high speed, create cavitation bubbles that burst and then boom with even more volume.

What do the Leocratides kimuraorum have? Not much: just 29 millimeters (max) of nearly translucent flesh—and a fighting spirit. Palmer says that when he first heard the worms, he couldn’t “even imagine how a soft-bodied animal could do something like that.” (Watch—and listen—to them go at it here.)

The study suggests that the worms may also be making their noise with cavitation bubbles, yielded by the rapid expansions of their pharynges upon collision. But Palmer says there’s more work to be done to confirm that that’s the case. These worms are particularly difficult to observe in their natural habitat, as they live inside sponges that can be as deep as 550 feet underwater.

For their next dredging trip, Palmer's colleagues in Japan may experiment with submerging bright lights to illuminate the worms’ activity, and with higher-speed videos of the worms that may reveal further subtleties in their movements.

That data could also help clarify why, exactly, the worms are mouth-fighting in the first place. Palmer suspects that they may be feuding over their respective territorial domains within the sponges, but admits that that’s “speculative.” He’d also like to know more about how and why this noise-making ability evolved, and says it could be useful to look at the pharynges of other species within the same genus as a first step.

No matter what comes of further research, this much is clear: Whether they’re mouth-fighters or wood-chippers, underwater worms are not to be messed with.