To save birds such as the cackling goose, first the foxes had to go.

Steve Ebbert was at least a mile off Little Sitkin Island in the Bering Sea when the boat’s engine failed. Faced with the impossible task of paddling a 750-pound inflatable loaded with engines and gear in 15-knot winds, he grabbed the anchor and hurled it shoreward, aiming for a giant kelp bed. Usually he would have fought like hell to avoid propeller-clogging kelp, but in this case he was praying the anchor would get stuck in it so he could pull the boat toward shore. Luckily, the anchor snagged. He tugged the boat to that point, then frantically hoisted the anchor and chucked it again. And again. And again. Finally, he reached the beach. “In the Aleutians, if your outboard stops and you’re offshore and the wind is blowing, your next stop could be Australia or the Arctic ice cap,” Ebbert says, remembering how happy he was to reach land. “It’s not a good feeling when you pull that cord and the engine doesn’t start.”

That was one of Ebbert’s early near-disasters after he arrived at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge in spring 1995 as a young, sharpshooting biologist on a grisly, seemingly impossible mission: to kill every single fox on more than 40 islands. He would be carrying on a decades-long endeavor to restore some kind of natural balance to this otherworldly archipelago marred by more than 200 years of human meddling. Ebbert and a cadre of intrepid biologists braved high seas, gale-force winds, and even erupting volcanoes at the edge of the world to write one of the greatest conservation success stories in U.S. history.

The Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge is a rugged landscape comprised of 3.4 million acres across 2,500 volcanic islands—so remote most people have never heard of them—arcing from the end of the Alaskan Peninsula to just short of Kamchatka in the Russian Far East. Treeless tundra, snow-covered peaks, rocky coastlines, black sand beaches, muskeg ponds, kelp beds, and coral reefs there provide literal refuge to a profusion of life, including 450 types of fish, 26 species of marine mammal, and 40 million individual birds, from 30 species—including 80 percent of North America’s nesting seabirds.

The Aleutians at the heart of the refuge were a particularly blissful place for a bird to raise a family until Russian fur trappers arrived in the mid-1700s. “They came to hunt the sea otters and fur seals, but they saw an opportunity to put foxes on the islands,” says Ebbert. “There was a ready supply of food: birds, eggs, and chicks. As a result, almost every island where you could land a boat was stocked with foxes that would reproduce.”

Within a few years of releasing a couple pairs of foxes on a given island, the trappers could return to collect pelts—red, silver, white, the coveted “blue” (actually blackish)—by the shipload. As the canines flourished, the raucous sound of millions of birds jostling on the shores and cliffs hushed. By 1811, birds were becoming so scarce that native Aleuts living on Attu, the site of the first known fox introduction, at the distant western end of the chain, could no longer make traditional clothing from bird feathers and skins. They turned to fish scales. Meanwhile, fine ladies in the United States and Europe were draping themselves in luxury coats and stoles made from island-grown foxes, and pairing them with ornate feathered hats of such outrageous proportions that some women had to kneel to climb inside their carriages.

“That continued until the stock market crashed,” Ebbert says. “Fur fell out of favor. People didn’t want to trap anymore. When World War II came, many of the Aleutian Islands evacuated, most people never returned. And then the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally wised up—realizing you can’t have a wildlife refuge if you’re farming foxes.

By 1940, when fox harvesting officially ended and the Aleutian Islands became part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, some feared it was already too late for birds such as the Aleutian cackling goose. It was widely thought that the migratory birds were already extinct, but a World War II veteran named Bob Jones, who in 1947 became the first manager of the refuge, saw hope in faint skeins of geese winging west. Confident the geese that he saw weren’t the common Canada variety, he launched an epic goose chase to find a remnant breeding population, which he thought must be hiding somewhere among islands so remote they were never stocked with foxes.

Navigating crashing waves, fierce winds, and blinding fog, Jones sailed the isles in a shallow, 20-foot dory, occasionally hitching rides on larger vessels to reach the most distant islands. He searched in vain for 15 years, but refused to give up. Then, in 1962, he traveled aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Winoa to reach Buldir Island in the far west of the Aleutians. There, he looked up in the sky and saw 56 Aleutian cackling geese, “flying off the high steep cliffs,” he wrote in his field notes that day. At last, he’d found a surviving flock. It contained about 300 birds, and he eventually found two additional populations on similarly remote isles. “It turned out the foxes had eliminated all the geese except for on those three islands,” Ebbert says. “The solution for bringing back the goose was clear—kill the foxes.”

Upon the signing of the 1966 Endangered Species Preservation Act (the precursor to the Endangered Species Act), the Aleutian cackling goose was among the first 80 animals on the Endangered Species List. Jones continued his campaign to systematically exterminate the foxes. In the early days, he used mostly poisoned baits, but when they were banned in the 1970s, he started looking for biologists who were also good marksmen and trappers. As he gained notoriety for his efforts to save Aleutian wildlife, including sea otters and many other species, he became known as “Sea Otter” Jones. In his 33-year tenure as refuge manager he overcame many unique challenges, not least of which was how to manage caged wild geese as they coped with seasickness.

Jones learned that lesson while helping to round up geese for a captive-breeding and reintroduction program. Some of those captive-raised animals started breeding on the islands in 1984. By the time the Aleutian cackling goose was removed from the Endangered Species List in 2001, the population had grown to 37,000.

Steve Ebbert was hired in 1995 to continue the efforts to eradicate foxes that began with Jones. Ebbert had grown up on a farm in Indiana, trapping raccoons and muskrats. Trained in forestry and wildlife biology, he had experience with computer mapping, remote sensing, and predator (coyote) control. As much as it was his dream job, he was a dream candidate for leading the efforts to exterminate the refuge’s foxes.

Ebbert stationed field crews throughout the islands most summers and routinely helped run the trap lines himself. He loved the work, but it’s not for everyone, he admits. “The ship drops you off in May and comes back in early September. You’re on your own, and you have to do without. If you have a problem with your roommate, you can’t walk away. You have to figure it out. It’s like being on a spacecraft.”

Each crew of between two and 10 was furnished with everything they needed to make shelter, a kerosene heater, and enough food in a cardboard box to hopefully last until the ship returned at the end of summer. Drinking water was in the creek; bathrooms were on the beaches (flushed twice daily at high tide). Free time was often spent trading novels and playing checkers. The rest of the time was spent setting and checking traps.

Before departing for the Aleutians, the crews received special training—not just for trapping, but to prepare for the gale-force winds that could flatten their tents and steal their boats. “The tents are built on plywood floors with canvas over steel pipe frames staked to the ground with cables,” Ebbert says. “But a storm can rip your tent and bend the poles. It’s better to collapse your gear, put heavy rocks on it, and find cover.”

Keeping a boat safe and operational under those conditions was particularly tricky and risky. They could tear and deflate, run out of gas, wash away, break down. Every boat had two engines in case one fails—though in rare cases, they both did, as Ebbert learned early on.

As if blustering winds, fierce seas, and extreme isolation aren’t enough, certain Aleutian Islands sometimes hurtle boulders and lava. In August 2008, a group of seabird biologists living on Kasatochi Island out in the middle of the chain had to be rescued when the Alaska Volcano Observatory reported an earthquake that lasted for 20 minutes. The island’s long dormant volcano was about to blow. “Our ship was far out in the chain,” Ebbert remembers. “It would take days to get to them.” Fortunately there was a spare boat, aptly named Homeward Bound, nearby in Adak. Through 30-knot winds and high seas, the boat reached the island and the biologists scrambled aboard, taking with them only what they could carry. They were heading west, engine roaring, when the volcano erupted, carpeting the entire island with ash and lava.

Island life was, in some ways, like living in a giant museum. Trappers searching foxholes found Native American artifacts and caves where ancient Aleuts had buried their dead. Relics from World War II——shipwrecks, downed planes, twisted metal, and even ammunition—littered the beaches. In 1998, Ebbert was helping set up a trapper cabin on Attu Island when he came across at least a dozen sticks of dynamite in a crate buried in the sand. Another time, he discovered a stack of Japanese hand grenades. In 1999, a field crew stumbled across an unexploded naval mine that had washed ashore and settled in a creek channel. “Round with metal spikes, the mine looked like it came out of a cartoon,” Ebbert says. “Experts from Fort Richardson/Elmendorf base flew out and blew it up.”

Despite so many near catastrophes, the fox-eradication program was an incredible success. As of 2017, more than 40 islands—1.4 million acres in total—were scrubbed fox-free. “All the ‘gettable’ islands had been gotten,” Ebbert says, so they turned more attention to removing other invasive mammals—rats, livestock, rabbits, marmots—that can make life difficult for nesting seabirds.

Rats, for example, are notorious interlopers on many of the world’s islands—remote and otherwise. Known for their ability to thrive just about everywhere, from sewers to penthouses, rats found the big chunks of volcanic rock out in the middle of the ocean a chain of utopias overflowing with abundant birds for food. The first rats to invade the Aleutians likely arrived as stowaways in the 1780s on a Japanese fishing vessel that sunk in the western part of the chain. From that time on, many islands in the chain have been infested from “rat spills,” or by rodents that swam or drifted to new territory. If the foxes weren’t bad enough for them, the evolutionarily defenseless seabirds were decimated by rats scurrying into their nesting borrows.

The problem got so bad that in the early 1990s, refuge managers developed a rat-spill program, similar to oil-spill response teams, to provide emergency responders equipped to speedily target and contain new invasions.

In 2008, biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the non-profit Island Conservation and Nature Conservancy boldly launched a controversial poison campaign on an island so heavily infested it had had been renamed Rat Island. Helicopters broadcasted poisonous payloads—small cakes laced with rodenticide thought to be safe for the native birdlife.

Indeed, the project got rid of all the rats and in time, many of the nesting birds returned. However, it had an unintended consequence of killing dozens of bald eagles and hundreds of glaucous-winged gulls. Biologists theorized that the gulls ate the poison, and the eagles ate the gulls. So plans to poison rats on any other islands were abandoned.

Unlike the rats, which arrived by (predictable) accident, every other type of nonnative mammal found on the Aleutians was put there deliberately. “People think of these islands as remote and seldom visited, but they didn’t escape this instinct of humans to place animals on islands where they don’t belong,” Ebbert says. Hoofed animals—from cattle, sheep, and hogs to caribou and horses—have altered the native plant communities, caused erosion, and trampled shorebird nests. Removing livestock, however, is a hot-button issue, especially on a small number of refuge islands that contain privately owned land. Cattle and caribou have been eliminated on only a few islands, but none recently.

In his last years working on the refuge, Ebbert and his crews focused heavily on European rabbits. “In a lot of ways, the rabbits were the hardest,” Ebbert says. “They can get to places where we can’t. They’re small enough that they can have burrows on the side of a cliff and never come within rifle range. Probably to avoid eagles, some don’t even come out in daylight.” They also breed like, well, rabbits—often faster than even the most sharpshooting biologists could target them. They succeeded in exterminating bunnies on Poa Island, one of five islands with rabbits, and that took dangling from cliffs and crawling in the darkness, using infrared night vision and silenced rifles with ballistic scopes.

In 2017, Ebbert took stock of the invasive species removal program. All of the fox eradications that were practical to complete were complete. Politicians had no appetite for further efforts to eradicate cattle and caribou. The rat-spill prevention and shipwreck response was shifting out of the refuge staff’s responsibilities. Ebbert figured he’d made his mark. He was 58 and wanted to retire so he could visit family back in Indiana and travel the country in his camper trailer.

After Ebbert put down his rifle and hung up his life vest, on Halloween of that year, the refuge did not fill his position, amid nationwide staff cuts in national wildlife refuges. There are no current eradication plans, and none planned for the near future, just some remaining efforts to prevent more invasions and respond to them should an intruder turn up.

“There will always be threats of new invasions,” Ebbert says. But the lack of foxes will stand as his legacy. With the islands’ remote location and protected status, it’s unlikely they will get reintroduced. “Many years from now, each trapper that participated in the eradication effort can point to an island on an Alaska map and say, ‘I know I made an enduring difference there that summer, and the island and seabirds that nest there are better for it.’” By the end of those summers, he says, “our beards were longer, we were leaner, and we were stronger. But we turned back the clock—this was very rewarding.”

One archaeologist describes the spicy, musky scent as "the Chanel No. 5 of ancient Egypt."

If Cleopatra wanted to woo you, you’d smell her before you ever saw her. Legend has it that when she first visited Marc Antony in Tarsus, she coated the purple sails of her golden boat in a fragrance so pungent that it wafted all the way to shore. As Shakespeare wrote, Cleopatra’s sails were “so perfumèd that the winds were lovesick with them.” It does sound a bit extra, but, honestly, who wouldn’t want to catch a whiff of Egypt’s most famous queen?

Now, a team of four researchers have recreated a perfume they believe Cleopatra might have worn, based on residue found in an ancient amphora. “This was the Chanel No. 5 of ancient Egypt,” says Robert Littman, an archaeologist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. “It was the most prized perfume of the ancient world.”

Littman and his colleague Jay Silverstein came up with the idea during their ongoing excavation of the ancient Egyptian city Thmuis, located north of Cairo in the Nile Delta and founded around 4500 BC. The region was home to two of the most famous perfumes in the ancient world: Mendesian and Metopian. So when the researchers uncovered what seemed to be an ancient fragrance factory—a 300 BC site riddled with tiny glass perfume jars and imported clay amphoras—they knew they had to try to recover any scent that had survived.

The amphoras did not contain any noticeable smell—but they did contain an ancient sludge. After conducting a residue analysis, Littman took it to two experts on ancient Egyptian perfumes, Dora Goldsmith and Sean Coughlin, who tried to replicate the Thmuis scent using formulas found in ancient Greek materia medica texts.

Both Mendesian and Metopian perfumes contain myrrh, a natural resin extracted from a thorny tree. The experts also added cardamom, green olive oil, and a little cinnamon—all according to the ancient recipe. The reproduced scent smells strong, spicy, and faintly of musk, Littman says. “I find it very pleasant, though it probably lingers a little longer than modern perfume.”

In ancient Egypt, people used fragrance in rituals and wore scents in unguent cones, which were like wax hats that dripped oil into one’s hair over the course of the day. “Ancient perfumes were much thicker than what we use now, almost like an olive oil consistency,” Littman says.

Though the modern-day Mendesian offers an intriguing approximation of an ancient Egyptian perfume, the jury’s out on whether Cleopatra would have worn it. “Cleopatra made perfume herself in a personal workshop,” says Mandy Aftel, a natural perfumer who runs a museum of curious scents in Berkeley, California. “People have tried to recreate her perfume, but I don’t think anybody knows for sure what she used.”

Aftel is no stranger to the concocted scents of ancient Egypt. In 2005, she reproduced the burial fragrance of a 2,000-year-old mummified Egyptian child, a girl dubbed Sherit. Since her mummification, the perfume had shriveled into a thick black tar around Sherit’s face and neck, according to a Stanford press release. Aftel identified frankincense and myrrh as the primary ingredients in the perfume and reconstructed a copy. “I smelled the mummy,” Aftel says. “As a natural perfumer, it’s a very beautiful way to connect to the past.”

If you’re in D.C., you can smell this most recent recreation yourself: the scent is on display at the National Geographic Museum’s exhibition “Queens of Egypt” until September 15. There’s not enough perfume to coat an entire sail, but you can dab a little on your arm.

Once-popular Gravensteins are available for just two weeks each August.

Each year in August, Gravenstein apples—a crisp and tart variety grown in Northern California—reach their ripest state. Their season comes earlier than most other apples', and it lasts only a brief couple of weeks.

In the early 20th century, Gravenstein apples—identified by their skin’s rosy red-and-green gradient—were a popular, versatile breed that helped feed U.S. soldiers at war. But over the years, they became increasingly difficult to come by—and to learn about, as knowledge of their utilitarian nourishment faded.

Now, Gravenstein apple advocates in Sonoma County, inspired by the Slow Food movement, are working to resurrect the fruit’s unique cultural cachet and unmistakable flavor.

Gravensteins were first brought to America in the early 19th century by Russian immigrants trading fur at Fort Ross in Northern California. Over time, the west Sonoma County region—bifurcated by the aptly named Russian River—became known as a Gravenstein Eden. The climate there is a natural fit for apple orchards (and vineyards too). The local agricultural community, capitalizing on the ripeness of its land, soon made a business out of growing and selling the heirloom apple.

“During World War II, we had an industry here,” says Paula Shatkin, coordinator of Slow Food USA’s Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Presidium. “[The Gravenstein] is a very versatile apple … people used to drive up here from all over the Bay Area during the summer season and take them home to can them for the winter. [They are] really good for making applesauce and juice, as well as baking.”

Thanks to that versatility, the Gravenstein became a popular and convenient snack for troops. In the 1940s, Sonoma County boasted 10,000 acres of Gravenstein trees, which kept the local farming community afloat. Today, only 960 of those acres remain, producing all 15,000 tons of crisp Gravensteins that appear in the U.S. each summer.

“The Gravenstein apple is an early apple—it’s the first apple [of the season to ripen],” says Shatkin. “And it doesn’t store well. More and more people, as the decades go by, buy apples like Red Delicious in the store … the Red Delicious has 41 percent of the American apple crop, [in part because] it stores well.”

Climate change has also played a role in the Gravenstein’s waning popularity. Since they reach peak ripeness earlier and earlier each year, Gravensteins “are competing with stone fruit, and they aren’t as sweet as a peach or a plum,” says Shatkin. Plus, consumers don’t eat as seasonally as they used to, and often buy the fruits in stores that have the most impressive shelf life.

Gravensteins are also up against neighboring Napa Valley grapes. Several Gravenstein orchards have been overtaken by vineyards backed by lucrative wine-production businesses. Slow Food USA’s Presidia—a global network of food-preservation campaigns, of which Sebastopol’s is just one—is working to protect the Gravenstein apple against this encroachment, in the name of biodiversity.

The Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Presidium was successfully approved in 2003 by the Italian-based organization Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity. It's a campaign that local farmers and the Slow Food Russian River (the national organization’s local branch) have embarked on as a way to save the apples and preserve their rich cultural history in Sonoma County. (The first Gravenstein apple tree was planted here in 1811.)

With a Gravenstein Elementary School and a “Gravenstein Highway” (a stretch of California State Route 116), it’s safe to say that Western Sonoma County, at least, recognizes the Gravenstein’s history (and the significance of the area’s apple industry generally).

The team at Slow Food Russian River continues to keep the Gravenstein apple alive by collaborating with cider-makers who use the local apples in their recipes. Says Shatskin: “It’s another way to increase the market, and their viability.”

The Sebastopol community celebrates the Gravenstein’s cherished crispness every year by hosting the Gravenstein Apple Fair—a mecca for juices, pies, and sauces made from the apple. This year it’s happening on August 17 and 18.

Kate MacDonald wants to restore Cincinnati's place as the birthplace of American wine.

In 2013, Kate MacDonald was working in Napa Valley when she made a pair of discoveries that upended the traditional winemaking career plan she had so carefully plotted. First, as she read Thomas Pinney’s A History of Wine in America, she learned that her hometown of Cincinnati was, in fact, the birthplace of America’s commercial wine industry. In the 1850s, the city was the country’s largest grape-growing and winemaking region, thanks to the efforts of a wealthy businessman, Nicholas Longworth, who shipped his critically acclaimed wines across the country and overseas.

Equally surprising, Longworth found worldwide success using the lowly Catawba grape, an American native variety deemed unappealing and inferior by the wine establishment of the 1800s—and of today, too.

Inspired by her city’s lost wine heritage and Longworth’s unconventional choice of American grapes, MacDonald decided to gamble on bringing winemaking back to Cincinnati and proving—as Longworth had—that American grapes, especially the hearty Catawba, could produce high-quality wines. Today, she’s serving those wines at her Cincinnati winery, The Skeleton Root.

“When I was starting my journey with The Skeleton Root, I think most winemakers and growers thought I was nuts,” she recalls. “But once I became aware of the legacy and read about the classical style of wines Longworth produced from American grapes, I was hooked. It became a calling of sorts to try to resurrect them.”

To know MacDonald is to know she thrives on trailblazing. She began her professional career as one of few female engineers in supply chain management for the aviation manufacturing industry. As her engineering work took her to wine capitals, she became obsessed with wine and, while living in the wine-rich Finger Lakes region of New York, began experimenting with home winemaking. She decided to leave the status and security of her engineering position for the unpredictability and satisfaction of winemaking. Now she’s going against the grain again by championing American heritage grapes.

“It’s actually been motivating to me to know there’s a bias against American grapes,” she says confidently. “I love a challenge. I wouldn’t be in this business if I didn’t.”

MacDonald believes one source of the longstanding bias against American wine grapes is unfamiliarity with their flavors. America’s wine pioneers—mostly European immigrants—brought cuttings of European noble grapes (think Pinot Noir and Bordeaux) to establish vineyards in the United States. This was what they knew, and wines made of native grapes tasted different and were deemed of lesser quality. As early as the 1600s, wine experts criticized American-native grapes for their “foxy” or “musky” smell—an assertion that is still made today and makes MacDonald indignant.

“I’m very put off by this term and have found few people who know what it means, although it’s thrown around commonly with these wines,” she says. “There can be a unique smell to wines produced from these grapes; however, I don’t find them musky or anything negative, for that matter. They are unique in their own right and are aromatic and beautiful, if produced well.”

Despite the bias against them, American grapes were grown and made into wine in the U.S. and even in Europe around the mid-1800s. In Cincinnati, Longworth replanted his vineyards with Catawba grapes, after finding his European vines did not grow well. Around the same time, Europe suffered the Great French Wine Blight, as an insect accidentally harbored on steamships across the Atlantic wreaked havoc on vineyards. When vintners realized that American grape vines were immune, they were able to save Europe’s faltering vineyards by grafting them onto American rootstocks—but not before experimenting with American-European hybrids. Unfortunately, only a few remain today, largely due to the opposition of the French government, which banned the hybrids and American grapes to protect the country’s vaunted wine industry. In the U.S., the Civil War disrupted Cincinnati’s thriving wine scene, and the temperance movement and Prohibition stymied American vineyards generally. When it ended, vintners, concentrated in California, planted Cabernet, Chardonnay, and other European grapes.

To change the wine establishment’s view of American heritage grapes, MacDonald believes her advocacy must begin with high-quality products. So, in 2014, she set out to replicate Longworth’s popular dry Catawba wines, which he had spent decades perfecting. Since his varieties disappeared after his death in 1863, MacDonald faced the hurdle of producing a wine she had never tasted.

She started by studying his meticulous notes, vintage reports, theories, and documentation in old books and articles from the Cincinnati Historical Society’s archives. Then MacDonald crushed a batch of regionally sourced Catawba grapes and aged them in neutral French oak barrels. When she tasted the wine after two years, she was concerned about its aggressive acidity and wondered if it would ever mellow. But Longworth’s records indicated that he favored extended cellar aging, which is counter to common practice in modern white wine production. To MacDonald’s delight, it turned out he was right: After the third year, the wine took on a refined quality, which only improved after the fourth year, when she began serving it at The Skeleton Root.

The process resulted in still Catawba wine: low in alcohol, aromatic, light in body with prevalent acidity and many botanical notes, especially citrus fruits. Since then, the winery has produced a Pét-Nat sparkling Catawba, which is a crisp and fresh younger-release wine, using the Ancestral Méthode. Due to their natural acidity, both wines pair well with foods that coat the mouth, such as creamy or fried dishes. They’ve also been well received in The Skeleton Root tasting room and around Cincinnati.

For MacDonald, producing high-quality wines starts with ensuring the quality of the grape. She sourced the 2014 vintage from northeast Ohio since the Catawba, which grows well across the midwestern and southern U.S., is now minimally cultivated in Cincinnati. Meanwhile, she’s evaluating her own Ohio River Valley vineyard, just over the state line in Indiana, for its fitness to support Catawba vines and her strong commitment to natural, low-intervention winemaking. She also works closely with the growers in five different vineyards to source grapes for her other wine varieties.

“The vines are wise enough to give balanced fruit if they’re given the right site, the right soils, and the right pruning methods,” she said. “I believe, as farmers, producers, and land stewards, we have an obligation to focus on raising plants that are the most sustainable. If we are working against Mother Nature, the excessive input required to keep up with those demands will be our demise.”

This is another reason MacDonald champions native grapes: She believes they may be the wine industry’s salvation in the face of ever-worsening threats from climate change. As conditions and seasons in established growing regions change, so will the viability of existing vines. Already, growing the most-popular European grapes far from their continental home typically requires a lot of irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticide. In contrast, native grapes are adapted to their environment, and MacDonald notes that American native grapes are particularly hardy, as they tend to adapt to changing weather patterns and climate extremes.

Ultimately, changing hearts, minds, and attitudes toward wines produced from American native grapes depends on market awareness. Although breaking through the barriers of the wine establishment may not come for many years, winemakers such as MacDonald are hopeful that Millennials are more curious and open than older drinkers, and have yet to fully develop their palate and commit to specific varieties.

“Millennials are an important customer group for us,” MacDonald says. “They’ve been avid supporters of the wines we produce from American grapes.”

MacDonald is also hopeful about the wine industry’s gradual evolution, marked by an acceptance of and appreciation for lower-input wines through the natural-wine movement, which promotes minimal use of chemicals and additives.

“There are beautiful wines coming from all corners of our country,” she says. “I’m starting to see an embrace of new wine regions producing wines from lesser known and appreciated grape varieties. It’s turning out to be an exciting time.”

Turns out massive flood control projects are a great way to find dinosaurs.

In 1993, the sea seemed to return to Coralville, Iowa. Over 28 days of rain, 17,000 cubic feet of water flowed over the spillway of the dam there, obliterating roads and effectively wiping out the state’s yearly crop of corn and soybeans. The Coralville Dam, built in the 1950s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to provide flood protection for the Iowa River Valley to the south, was named after the city, which had gotten its oddly maritime moniker from the ancient fossilized reefs that stud the river’s limestone. Once the rains had stopped, the Corps returned to the site to discover that the floods had eroded around five feet of limestone from the edge of the spillway, cleaving the gorge into a succession of 375-million-year-old fossil beds teeming with marine creatures that had once made their home in the sea that became Iowa. All of those creatures, legally, belong to the U.S. military.

Rather unintentionally, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers owns an enormous collection of fossils that would turn any paleontologist green with envy. “The U.S. Army Corps has collections that span the paleontological record,” says Nancy Brighton, a supervisory archaeologist for the Corps. “Basically anything related to animals and the natural world before humans came onto the scene.” The Corps never set out to amass this prehistoric tome. Rather, the fossils—from trilobites to dinosaurs, and everything in between—came as a kind of byproduct of the Corps’ actual, more logistical purpose: flood control (among other large-scale civil engineering projects).

The agency was created during the Revolutionary War, according to the Corps’ site. General George Washington had just ordered one of his colonels to build fortifications at Bunker Hill when the Continental Congress realized the task was impossible, as they did not actually employ any engineers trained in military fortifications. So they hired several former French officers, with the appropriate experience, to serve in the Continental Army. In 1802, the Corps of Engineers became a permanent branch of the U.S. Army, and since then has handled many not-so-flashy public engineering and construction management projects. In their portfolio is a lot of dams.

The Corps’ accidental fossil collecting began in earnest during the Great Depression, after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the Flood Control Act of 1936. This monumental civil engineering project led to the construction of countless dams, levees, and dikes. The scale of the work required the Corps to conduct surveys of the designated land to ensure no archaeological or paleontological resources would be destroyed or disturbed. The Corps manages some 8,000,000 acres of land, which shakes out to a whole lot of artifacts and fossils.

“I would say the majority of our archaeological [and paleontological] collections have come from the construction of the hydropower and flood control projects that happened in the 50s, 60s, and 70s,” says Jen Reardon, an archaeologist with the Corps. In the 70s, for example, the Corps blasted through earth and rock to build an emergency spillway for the Caesar Creek Lake dam in Ohio. The work shattered layers of shale and limestone to expose an ancient seabed approximately 438 million years old, studded with brachiopods, bryozoa, and crinoids.

While many of these fossils are left in situ, like in Coralville, the Corps has taken pains to excavate certain superstar specimens. In 1988 in the Fort Peck Reservoir in Montana, amateur fossil hunter Kathy Wankel saw something sticking out of a slope in the Hell Creek Formation, a spectacularly rich fossil site. Wankel remembers the fortuitous way the light fell on the cornice of stone, illuminating a webby pattern of bone marrow, she told The Washington Post. It was Corps land, so in the years that followed, the Army brushed away the dirt to reveal a 38-foot-long Tyrannosaurs rex skeleton, almost 90 percent intact. Known scientifically as MOR555 and casually as “Wankel’s T. Rex,” the skeleton was a paleontological gold mine—the first tyrannosaurus found with a complete, laughably tiny arm.

Wankel’s T. Rex, also known as the “Nation’s T. Rex,” was on display in its home state of Montana at the Museum of the Rockies until 2014, when it was shipped in 16 crates in a custom FedEx truck to its new home at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History—after the museum had arranged a 50-year-loan with the Corps. In Montana, Wankel’s T. Rex was displayed in a death pose, its bones arranged to show visitors what actually emerged from the dirt. But at the Smithsonian, the tyrannosaurus will stand up for the first time, craned over a fossilized triceratops.

Like Wankel’s T. Rex, most of the Corps’ collection that is no longer in the ground is not actually housed in a military building. Most pieces reside in local museums or universities. Reardon says a minority of items are actually on display, such as the collection of fossilized dinosaur tracks at the University of Colorado in Denver. The Corps encourages any institution that meets certain holding standards to put their specimens on display, but there are just too many to display all at once, she adds. Currently, the Corps is working to photograph and digitize its paleontological and archaeological collections so that people who can’t travel can still see them. But celebrity specimens such as Wankel’s T. Rex and “Peck’s Rex”—another one found in Fort Peck that will take Wankel’s place at the Museum of the Rockies—have never not been on display. They’re just too spectacular, and too scientifically important.

When asked if she has a favorite specimen owned by the Corps, Brighton laughs. She says the collection is too sprawling for any one person to understand it all. Reardon noted a partial triceratops and a hadrosaur, as well as an ancient lobster found in the Bear Paw Shale in Fort Peck—its shrimpy shell still red in the rock. Of all the lands controlled by the Corps, at least as far as fossils are concerned, “Fort Peck really seems to be the star,” Brighton says.

The Corps’ days of large-scale dam construction are largely gone, in part due to the rising costs required for the massive required surveys that would no doubt uncover historically and scientifically significant remains. Now, the agency’s main projects consist of providing disaster relief, constructing military fortifications, and the occasional, minimally invasive construction of a recreation area for the public to enjoy. As such, they come across fewer fossils today. Now, the Corps also must consult several archaeologists for substantial works, as well as with any federally recognized tribes and local communities in the area.

After all, the Corps’ collection isn’t limited to the Jurassic. Much of the archive is actually archaeological, pertaining to human history in America, both prehistoric and fairly recent. “There is a very informal rule of thumb that specifies 50 years, around a generation ago,” Brighton says, in reference to how old an object must be to be considered archaeological in nature. “The idea is that you as a researcher are distanced enough from the event and the object to objectively look at it.” But many of the human-related items the Corps holds are still pretty old, such as a serrated bread knife made by a Native American tribe, which Brighton remembers as looking particularly modern. “The person who made [the knife] was extremely skilled,” she says. “Like you could go out and skin a deer with it right now.”

All artifacts pertaining to federally recognized tribes go through a consultation process with tribal leaders, but many stay in the Corps’ collections for preservation. Objects that fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, including cultural items excavated or discovered on tribal land after 1990, are returned. “That protects funerary objects, sacred objects, and human remains,” Reardon says. “And we work with the tribes to identify which items in our collection fit the bill to make sure we return them.” Dinosaurs, however, have no such questions.

Though it owns all traces of ancient life that fall within its lands, the Corps really has no need for more fossils. But in some places, the properly permitted can go collect them. At Caesar Creek State Park, with a permit, and after listening to a short spiel on collecting rules, you can head off to the spillway for a peek at the ancient world. Early spring is prime fossil hunting season, right after the winter freeze and thaw cycle breaks up the rocks and exposes more fossils. No tools are allowed, but you’re allowed to take home any specimen that fits in a rock smaller than your palm, so keep an eye out for small fossils (or bring someone with big palms).

Researchers spent 6,000 hours documenting their diet.

In Loango National Forest of Gabon, a group of western lowland gorillas sit down to dine. The gorilla diet is not exactly eclectic. It is mostly leaves, but this group does indulge in a fair bit of fruit. Not far from the feeding gorillas is a group of scientists, watching and documenting every bite of every ape. Over the course of 6,300 hours, those researchers, from the United States and Germany, painstakingly recorded the gorillas’ meals, and announced earlier this month in a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology a truly unexpected finding: The gorillas eat nuts.

Nuts are a staple of trail mix and human diets around the world, but no one expected them to make it into gorilla cuisine. The massive primates aren’t known to eat hard objects at all, but these gorillas seasonally and regularly dined on the endosperm of Coula edulis, the African walnut. The nut is good eating—Adam van Casteren of Washington University in St. Louis, one of the study’s authors, says its kernel is “a little bundle of nutrients,” high in protein and fat compared to the gorillas’ typical diet—but the researchers are not quite sure how this gastronomic trend started.

“It could be that a curious gorilla in Loango tried eating the nuts, realized they could eat them, and they are good and then everyone else started eating them,” says van Casteren.

Eating nuts with hard outer casings (including African walnuts) has been seen in other apes, such as some chimpanzee and monkey populations that access the insides with makeshift tools. The gorillas, unlike the other primates, used their teeth to crack into the nuts—a feat previously thought to be too taxing for the apes’ dentition. Though gorillas’ teeth are built for leaves, their ability to eat hard food might provide clues about how our own built-in nutcrackers evolved.

“Currently when anthropologists find the fossil teeth of early hominins, they use the relationship between tooth shape and diet to predict what that species may have eaten,” says van Casteren. “The fact that gorillas with teeth seemingly adapted to foliage feeding can also eat hard objects could indicate that fossil hominoids with certain tooth shapes may have broader diets than previously thought.”

Though just a small population in Gabon, the Loango gorillas are a reminder of how much of what we know about early human history and evolution is the product of educated, informed guesswork. Truly understanding how we got to be who we are is a tough nut to crack.

It dangled over church pews and disco dancers in Dorset.

In July 2019, as we Earthlings commemorated the 50th anniversary of our maiden moonwalk, we craned our heads back to greet our luminous, mottled satellite satellite 239,000 miles away. The Moon is our constant companion, but decades after the Eagle lander touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, and long after NASA shared images of those crisp, furrowed bootprints in the lunar soil, it’s still sometimes hard to look up at our bright neighbor—so close, and so far—and imagine being there.

In the last few weeks, people in Dorset, England, didn’t have to picture going to the Moon: It came to them—huge, bright, nearly close enough to touch.

Since 2016, this moon—an art installation by British artist Luke Jerram titled Museum of the Moon—has traveled the world. Denmark, France, Belgium, Beijing, Ireland, Latvia, Spain, Austria—they’ve all gotten a glimpse. Our planet has a single moon, but Jerram has several installations in circulation. Sometimes they’re suspended over pools or other water, so that the glow spills across the surface. When they hang indoors, venues often dim the lights, conjuring a night sky. Visitors sometimes lie on their backs, as if they’re sprawling on the grass or night-cooled sand, gazing up.

In June and July, one of Jerram’s moons hung below stained glass at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, soared above pews in Sherborne Abbey, and floated over the neon-lit bodies of dancers at a silent disco inside the Nothe Fort, a 19th-century military structure in Weymouth—all part of the Dorset Moon extravaganza.

At each stop on the Museum of the Moon’s tour, musicians and visual artists performed or installed work beneath the moon—from a “starlit” walk through a dome designed to look like the Apollo 11 lunar module to an audience-assisted performance, where people stomped charcoal into a fine dust, leaped across a canvas, and pledged to reduce their carbon footprints here on Earth.

Jerram began dreaming of an exhibition like this more than 15 years ago, when he was biking to and from work in Bristol. Whenever his route sent him whizzing across bridges, Jerram took notice of the shoreline, swallowed and revealed by high and low tides. The nearby Bristol Channel has one of the largest tidal ranges in the world, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with several spots where the difference between high tide and low tide is close to 30 feet, or more.

As he passed the rising and falling water, Jerram found himself thinking about the Moon’s gravitational pull—literally, on the water, but also more symbolically, as a force tugging our eyes, imaginations, and ambitions skyward.

The project finally took root in 2016, when Jerram drew on high-resolution NASA imagery of the Moon’s surface, captured by instruments aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Jerram's versions are on a 1:500,000 scale. His moons measure 22 feet in diameter, with each centimeter corresponding to a little more than three miles of the lunar surface.

Still, the project takes some artistic liberties: Unlike our Moon—which appears to glow only because it reflects sunlight—these moons are illuminated from the inside. It’s also accompanied by an atmospheric soundtrack by composer and sound designer Dan Jones (though actual lunar residents wouldn’t hear much of anything).

After Dorset, Jerram’s moon hopped across the Atlantic, stopping in Providence and San Francisco, where it’s on view at the Exploratorium through September 2, 2019. It’s landing in Milwaukee from August 9-11, 2019.

It certainly draws crowds: Some 41,000 visitors turned out on the moon’s jaunt across Dorset. That might be because, while we can press our eyes to telescopes or zoom in on our computers to hover over craters or long-dormant volcanoes, most of us will never get close to the real thing—so familiar and still utterly alien. Jerram envisions his creation as “the most intimate, personal, and closest encounter” most visitors will ever have with our cosmic neighbor.

Meanwhile, his artwork’s rocky kin is up there in the sky, night after night, full of familiar pockmarks to revisit—or features to notice for the very first time.

The King kind of had a thing for cars.

When he wasn’t strutting his stuff behind a microphone stand, there’s a good chance Elvis Presley was buying a new car. The "King of Rock and Roll" was an avowed car connoisseur who owned more than 100 automobiles over the course of his life—some of which are even on display in an Automobile Museum at his Graceland home in Memphis. The last known photo of Elvis, in fact, shows him driving home from the dentist in his 1973 Stutz Blackhawk III.

But not all of Elvis’s cars have been so carefully looked after since the singer’s death in 1977. His 1967 Lincoln Continenal limousine, which once served as something of a royal carriage for the Presley family, has fallen into a state of dusty disrepair. It goes up for auction next week, dust and all, at Mecum Auctions in Monterey, California. The winning bidder will have the chance to return it to a state fit for a king, or else allow the car to recede further behind its veil of muck.

The Lincoln Continental limousine first hit the road in 1959, after Elvis became rich and famous—let's be real—by appropriating black music. At the time, the limos were among the best of the best on the automobile market. Elvis’s manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, gave him the Lincoln as a wedding gift when he married Priscilla Beaulieu in 1967. In Los Angeles, where the couple had a second home, it soon became the primary mode of transport for the Presleys and their young daughter, Lisa Marie.

So integral was the limo to the Presleys’ lives that Elvis’s close circle—the so-called “Memphis Mafia”—referred to it as the “Elvis Presley Family Car,” according to Mecum. The car includes a Tennessee license plate that beams, in big red letters, “1-ELVIS.” It also comes with a copy of the car’s original title application, which registered the vehicle under the name E.A. Presley.

In the 1980s, after Elvis died, the Chicago businessman James Petrozzini acquired the limo and had some fun with it. Petrozzini was known to impress unsuspecting clients by picking them up from the airport in the Presley limo, a stunt he’d sometimes replicate while picking his son up from school. Over time, however, the car’s sheen began to fade, even as its kin at the Graceland Museum were carefully preserved by the Presley estate. Petrozzini left it behind in his own car collection when he passed away in 2014. (Unfortunately for the eventual winning bidder, the auction lot does not include a courtesy car wash.)

Elvis's cars are no strangers to the auction market: His 1971 Mercedes-Benz sold just last year for over $100,000, and his two-bedroom mobile home fetched $55,000. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a younger and goofier piece of pop car-culture, Mecum has got you covered. JustCollecting News reports that next week, the Ferrari replica driven by Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off will also hit the block at the auction house. It's expected to sell for at least $300,000.

From poaching and dams and climate, sturgeon in Georgia are facing extinction.

Consider the sturgeon. It’s a robust, odd fish that has seen little reason to change its evolutionary course since the Triassic, over 200 million years ago. Perhaps that’s because, for most of its time on Earth, the sturgeon didn’t have to deal with us.

Armor-plated and occasionally massive, sturgeon make up a family of more than two dozen species, nearly all of which are now staring down extinction. The demise of the sturgeon accelerated in the early 19th century, when countries such as the United States developed a taste for caviar, made from their roe. In the 20th century, major sturgeon populations were down by as much as 70 percent, according to World Wildlife Fund estimates. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, sturgeon remain the most endangered species group on Earth overall. Significant environmental regulation has provided hope for recovery for American sturgeon populations, but it’s not the same everywhere.

The Republic of Georgia abuts the Black Sea and stretches deep into the Caucasus Mountains to the east. In those mountains are the headwaters of the Rioni River, a vital corridor and last refuge for the country’s sturgeon, of which there are six varieties: Russian, stellate, ship, European/Atlantic, Colchic, and the humongous beluga. The Colchic sturgeon no longer exists anywhere else in the world. Despite the river’s remarkable biodiversity, all the species are critically endangered—the most endangered fauna in Georgia. In May 2018, John Madsen, a sturgeon specialist at the University of Delaware, went to Georgia to help assess their populations. He uses side-scan sonar to penetrate the water and image the sturgeons’ muddy habitat. This time, however, Madsen’s work was interrupted by a sediment release from a dam, which creates visual “noise” that obscures the fish. It’s not the only thing that makes the sturgeons’ future cloudy.

“In western European nations, they have regulations in place that are enforced as well as the United States’, and they have top-quality scientists working on that data,” he says. “In the Republic of Georgia it’s a different situation. In that economy, caviar sold on the black market can become a livelihood for fishermen.”

This combination of lower regulation enforcement and greater public demand has put Georgian sturgeon in the middle of a continent-wide battle. In November 2018, a European committee published a 10-year action plan to address the threats facing sturgeon in Europe. “This plan is most probably the last chance to save Europe’s sturgeon species from extinction,” it read.

“The conservation activities of sturgeons in the United States have been much more efficient than similar initiatives in Europe and Asia,” says Paolo Bronzi, of the World Sturgeon Conservation Society. He adds that fishing pressure in the United States has historically been lower, and that European efforts are hampered by the number of countries involved.

In addition to the illegal sturgeon trade, hydroelectric dams and gravel mining operations can obstruct the sturgeon’s migratory paths and complicate surveys. Climate change is bearing down on them, too.

“Changes in temperature and rainfall can influence water temperatures, levels, and flows, which can influence whether a species might persist in a given freshwater ecosystem, be able to migrate to historic spawning grounds, or have their offspring persist,” says Stephanie Januchowski-Hartley, of Swansea University in Wales, an expert in fish migration.

Only 16 percent of the river’s waters remain viable spawning grounds for sturgeon, according to Georgian sturgeon conservationist Maka Bitsadze. Sturgeon reach sexual maturity relatively late, too, which makes it difficult for the fish to reproduce before they’re poached.

And even if other environmental threats are addressed, poaching still stands in the way of recovery. “Everyone knows everything, but unfortunately the problem remains a problem,” says Archil Guchmanidze, an officer with Georgia’s Natural Environment Agency. Guchmanidze estimates that four or five tons of sturgeon have been illegally fished from the Rioni over the past few years. These sturgeon end up gutted for their roe, and their meat is also sold at pop-up roadside markets around the country. Beluga, which can grow to nearly 20 feet long and weigh well over a ton, might be taken when they are a mere three feet long.

Guchmanidze adds that Georgian resources for the enforcement of regulations are stretched thin, and officials need better technical equipment and monitoring before they can engage in further outreach or public education. He adds that many people just don’t realize how precarious the sturgeon situation is. “They think that sturgeon are just common fish, and that is not a priority for them,” he says.

“The sturgeon fishing traditions are deeply rooted in the culture of several European and Asian countries and this means that poaching is a very difficult phenomenon to be eradicated,” says Bronzi, “particularly in areas where fishermen have not been provided with an alternative means for livelihood.”

The issue is as economic as it is ecological. Guchmanidze and Bitsadze are seeking to establish a new protected area along the Rioni to protect spawning grounds and migration corridors. Bitsadze hopes the areas will be officially created by the end of the year.

Madsen says he hopes to return to the Rioni soon to attempt more surveys. “It’s a fascinating opportunity,” he says, “because where else can you find so many sturgeon?”

The Nobel Prize–winning novelist never lost touch with her hometown.

In fall 1993, the city of Lorain, Ohio, was in a frenzy. Toni Morrison had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and her hometown couldn’t decide how to celebrate. Officials and citizens held countless meetings and discussions, speaking over each other in excitement. One proposed to rename Broadway Avenue after her. Others wanted to put her name on a school or the local library. “When Toni heard about this, she contacted us,” says Cheri Campbell, the adult services librarian at the main branch of Lorain Public Library. “She said ‘I want a reading room where people can sit and read and just think.’ And that’s what we gave her.”

Morrison, who was born in Lorain in 1931 and died on August 6, 2019, at 88, got her first job at the public library. She worked as a part-time shelver, returning books to their rightful places, until the librarians noticed that Morrison spent more time reading than shelving, Campbell says. Morrison was let go from that position, but soon rehired in the library’s administrative office. Though Morrison spent many years of her life on the East Coast—either at her offices at Princeton University or in her converted boathouse on the Hudson River—she maintained ties with Lorain and its library.

The library officially opened the Toni Morrison Reading Room on January 22, 1995. The writer of Beloved and The Bluest Eye came to the ribbon-cutting ceremony, along with members of her family and poet Sonia Sanchez. Morrison had not prepared remarks, but Sanchez read an original poem for the occasion that moved the author to words. “I remember working at the library, making a little change,” Morrison said, according to the Lorain Public Library's site. “I spent long, long hours reading there, so I wanted one place available in the neighborhood with a quiet room and comfortable chairs.”

In the years after the dedication, books and memorabilia trickled into the library from Morrison’s office in Princeton, eventually taking the form of a small but formidable altar. Morrison sent copies of her books that had been translated into many different languages, including Japanese, Polish, and Slovakian, as well as pieces of art she thought could hang on the walls. The Lorain librarians assiduously saved nearly every clipping of stories about Morrison in local and national papers and stowed them in a dedicated file. While Morrison donated the bulk of her personal papers, including notes, corrected proofs, and early manuscripts, to Princeton, the Lorain Public Library had, over the years, built up its own record of how dearly the author was cherished in Ohio and the world.

The walls of the Toni Morrison Reading Room are covered in this gratitude. Morrison’s face smiles out from covers on Time and Newsweek. Letters she wrote are kept safe in picture frames, around an enormous painted quilt square depicting Morrison at work. Her friends and family appear in a picture album of the writer’s 70th birthday at the New York Public Library. And at the heart of the room is an original portrait of Morrison by Ohio artist John Sokol. From a distance, the portrait looks jagged, almost like a dot matrix. But up close, one can see that Morrison’s face is rendered not in lines but in letters, specifically the opening lines of Song of Solomon.

The glass wall that frames Morrison’s room is engraved with a portion of her Nobel acceptance speech: “I will leave this hall with a new and much more delightful haunting than the one I felt upon entering: that is the company of the laureates yet to come. Those who, even as I speak, are mining, sifting and polishing languages for illuminations none of us has dreamed of.”

While the Lorain Public Library’s first duty is to serve the residents of the small city less than an hour west of Cleveland, it has also become a meaningful destination for Morrison devotees. “We get people from out of town, people who are scholars. Hilton Als came by,” Campbell says. “Some people even make a pilgrimage from out of state, just to visit us.” When out-of-towners come, quite frequently, Campbell is asked where Morrison used to live. Only one of Morrison’s old residences in the area is still standing—2245 Elyria Avenue—the house she was born in. So Campbell directs people to the Lorain Historical Society instead, another of Morrison’s former workplaces. “Lots of times we just stand there and have a conversation about Toni,” she says. “It’s always very reverent.”

Elsewhere in Lorain, the city has begun to mourn their hometown hero. The city council will soon declare February 18 “Toni Morrison Day” in Lorain County. In Cleveland Heights, the Cedar Lee Theater is screening Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, a documentary released earlier in 2019. And the library will host an evening remembering Morrison on August 14, in the reading room, of course. Attendees are invited to read Morrison's work or share memories of her long, rich life.

Since the author's death was announced, Campbell says the library has been doing its best to stay on top of the mountain of requests from media, fans, and locals—just another testament to Morrison’s towering impact and legacy. “We knew how much the world loves her, but it’s been kind of overwhelming,” she says. “I guess we just kind of thought she would go on forever.”

A bookmaking collective in San Cristobal de las Casas is helping keep the Tzotzil language alive.

I'd stumbled upon Taller Leñateros—the “Woodlanders Workshop”—completely by chance.

I was walking aimlessly through the pastel-hued streets of San Cristobal de las Casas, trying to get a feel for what my guidebook had described as southern Mexico’s “most beautiful colonial city.” One particular street was quiet, dusty, and less colorful than the rest. But there was something about it—perhaps the faint sound of a Mexican ballad escaping from a rusted window, or maybe the beat-up aquamarine VW Beetle at the end of the road—that invited me to turn down it.

I hadn’t been walking long before I spotted an unusual sign outside a sad-looking, graffitied colonial house: a black-and-white etching of an ancient Maya riding a bicycle, wearing an enormous feathered headdress that fluttered in the wind behind him. Next to it, a handwritten note pleaded “Save our workshop!”

Intrigued, I pushed open the unlocked wooden gate and stepped inside. The walls of the courtyard, though peeling and rotten with damp, popped with floor-to-ceiling splashes of orange, green, and yellow block prints. The dusty adobe brick floor was covered with discarded books, posters, cardboard, and plastic, leaving barely enough room to stand.

Rising proudly from the sea of paper that sprawled across the courtyard, a handmade tree cobbled together from sun-bleached driftwood held three thick, heavy books on its leafless branches. Careful not to trample the paper debris that now covered my feet, I leaned forward to get a closer look. As I did, I heard a low, shy voice behind me.

“Ah,” said a woman standing there, wearing a thick wool skirt and a hand-stitched, fuschia-pink blouse. “You’re here to see the books? Come with me.”

As she led me from the paper-strewn courtyard into a small gift shop filled with handmade books, posters, and notebooks, I learned where I was.

Taller Leñateros is Mexico’s first and only Tzotzil Maya book- and papermaking collective. Founded in 1975 by the Mexican-American poet Ambar Past, the workshop is dedicated to documenting and disseminating the endangered Tzotzil language, culture, and oral history. And it does so environmentally, using only recycled materials (leñateros alludes to those who get their firewood from deadwood, rather than felled trees).

The project began when Past, escaping an unhappy marriage, traveled to the rural highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. She wound up staying, and for the next 30 years lived among the indigenous women of San Cristobal’s surrounding villages. As she learned their language, she noticed that they spoke in couplets similar to those found in the Popul Vuh—the most famous and informative ancient Maya book yet discovered.

But none of these women could actually read or write Tzotzil. They used the historic, metaphor-riddled tongue in everyday conversation, but had never put their own words on paper. Inspired, Past got to work recording and translating their ancient Tzotzil poetry. Her hope was that, one day, they would publish the world’s first modern Maya book by the female indigenous community of Chiapas—and, in the process, grant us insight into both an ancient language and an ancient way of looking at the world.

Once 150 women agreed to let her record their poetry, Past bought property in San Cristobal. She set up a modest workshop there so that she and the women could collaborate. Past would transcribe and translate the recordings, and the women would produce the book using ancient Maya bookbinding techniques.

“It took over [20] years to make,” says Petra, the woman who had welcomed me to the workshop (and the daughter of one of the original 150 women). “Past had to first record hundreds of hours of poetry and then carefully transcribe it, not to mention the work that goes into handmaking a book from natural materials.”

As Petra spoke, she turned the thick, grainy pages of Incantations: Songs, Spells, and Images by Mayan Women—the first book in over 400 years to be written, produced, and published by indigenous Mayas.

The book that had caught my eye on the leafless tree featured the face of Kaxail, whom some call the Maya goddess of the wilderness, made from recycled cardboard, corn silk, and coffee. Inside the book, 295 handmade pages and silkscreen illustrations tell Tzotzil women’s stories of love, death, birth, marriage, sex, and survival, deploying an elaborate syntax that’s changed little since the Mayas’ rule here in the year 600. (Various attempts to kill that syntax, first by Spanish conquistadors and then by Mexico’s government, have proved fruitless.)

“We want to show the world that the Spanish conquistadors all those years ago did not destroy our culture,” Petra says as she traces the outline of Kaxail’s somber face. “We may have changed and adapted to modern times, but our language, traditions, and way of life essentially remain the same. Recording our Tzotzil language, and bookbinding itself, is the only way we know how to protect that heritage.”

Before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World, the ancient Tzotzil Maya from the Chiapas region—the Woodlanders' ancestors—were revered as the empire’s most talented bookmakers. Using plant dyes as ink and tree bark for paper, they created the Maya codices—sacred, hand-painted books that document celestial movements, spells, divinations, and ceremonial sacrifices to gods.

In the 16th century, the Spanish burned every Maya library across Mexico, calling the codices “nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil." Today, only four original codices remain (three of them are stored in museum vaults in Europe). That has left this precious bookbinding tradition—not to mention the stories and histories between codice covers—forgotten by much of the Mexican population.

“We want to encourage our people to reconnect with their own culture, and to be proud of it,” Petra says. ”That’s why, every time we make a new book, we try to donate some copies to the indigenous communities. This way they can be proud of their heritage, and they can teach their children and grandchildren to be proud of their culture too ... because it is they who now have the responsibility of keeping it alive.”

As Petra finishes her sentence, we step out of the gift shop and into a large, sunny outdoor courtyard, perhaps even more chaotic than the paper-strewn entrance. Here, corn husks, palm leaves, and agave boil over open wood fires, while a pair of young women, two of the newest Woodlanders, detangle and trim the thick, freshly boiled fibers ready to be spun in a bicycle-powered mill. My mind flashes to the image of the Maya man on the bicycle I’d seen at the entrance—clearly a logo that represents a fusion of ancient traditions and more recent technologies.

“Writing down Tzotzil poems [isn’t] enough,” says Petra. “We [also] want to resurrect the dying art of Maya bookbinding —the extraction of natural dyes and fibers and the use of our hands from start to finish. But it hasn’t been easy.”

Today, there are far fewer Woodlanders than in years past. Higher prices for materials, such as paintbrushes and glue, and fewer visitors have only compounded the problem.

“When my mother joined the collective, there were 150 women,” Petra says. “Now, we are just seven here full-time. We used to get lots of tourists pass[ing] through to buy our books and posters—we even held bookbinding workshops ... But now we’re lucky if one person comes a day.”

The collective faces other challenges as well. When I ask about the sign I’d seen outside, Petra replies, “Some people are trying to take our workshop away from us.”

Taller Leñateros is in the midst of a legal battle to hold on to the property it has owned since the early 1980s. If the Woodcutters lose it, rising property prices in San Cristobal could make it difficult for the collective to get back on its feet.

“We’ve had to invest many of our profits into legal fees, which is hurting us a lot—as you can see from our leaky roof,” Petra says with a rueful chuckle. “But we are trying to stay positive and carry on as normal. We even have a new book coming out soon!”

That book is Mamá Luna Nene Sol, the third volume produced by the collective. The first was the groundbreaking Incantations, published in 1998. After that came the critically acclaimed Mayan Hearts, in addition to thousands of handmade posters, notebooks, and postcards. Petra says that Mamá Luna Nene Sol will be released just in time for the International Anthropology Book Fair’s 30th anniversary, this September.

When Past and her team of 150 Tzotzil women first came together over 40 years ago, their biggest challenge was reviving a lost literary tradition. Today, the few women who remain are striving, against long odds, to maintain their predecessors’ legacy. Whether they're fighting legal battles, finding cheaper ways of getting the books to market, or persuading backpackers to stop by for a bookbinding workshop, the women here have made one thing very clear—their fight to keep the ancient Maya culture alive endures.

A family-owned market in California is now selling robot-reared leafy greens.

In San Carlos, California, under LED lighting in a controlled, 8,000-square-foot environment, a team of autonomous robots is whirring night and day between rows of leafy greens. There is no dirt, there are no pesticides, and on this indoor farm, the only humans work behind screens. This is one of the world’s first autonomously operated commercial farms, and their produce is now flying off the shelves.

As a child, roboticist Brandon Alexander spent summers in Oklahoma helping his grandfather grow potatoes, peanuts, and cotton on a 6,000-acre farm. But as CEO of Iron Ox, the start-up company behind the automated farm, he says traditional farming is now his biggest competition—and granddad understands. “He knows that for farming to survive, this is almost inevitable,” says Alexander.

At Bianchini’s Market, a family-owned grocery in the San Francisco Bay Area, the two worlds are competing for the first time. As it stands, the robots are holding their own: Between retail buyers and several local restaurants, including San Francisco's Trace, Iron Ox saw sales more than double last quarter.

The San Carlos operation is not completely automated just yet. Human staff still plant the initial seed and handle post-harvest packaging. But the rest is left to robots.

Angus, a half-ton aluminum porter, roams the “field” of trays, or pallets, 24/7 with an overhead camera. On traditional farms, plants need space for their roots to absorb nutrients; on hydroponic farms, however, seeds can be planted in their trays mere inches apart. As they grow and begin crowding each other, though, this does require more attention from, say, a sleepless robot. Angus carries the 800-pound pallets in need of rearranging to a separate, industrial robotic arm that gently re-shuffles the growing pods into new compact rows. Angus is also responsible for IPM (integrated pest management) and scanning for aphids, mildew, and browning. The robotic arm’s stereo-camera (“two cameras that kind of mimic your eyes,” Alexander casually explains) creates a 3-D model of at-risk produce that’s run through a machine algorithm to diagnose the issue and quarantine or prune accordingly. “The Brain,” a cloud-based AI software, coordinates all these autonomous functions while monitoring light, nitrogen, and water levels. “It’s a neighborhood farm,” says Alexander.

He's not wrong. Produce from Iron Ox travels less than a mile to reach Bianchini’s—itself a mere 25 miles from downtown San Francisco. In fact, evening shoppers at Bianchini can buy produce robo-picked that morning, and at price points that compete with outdoor farms: A bunch of basil sells for $2.99; four heads of baby lettuce for $4.99; and a bunch of red-veined sorrel for $2.99.

Typically, the cost of human labor required for indoor hydroponic farms has made their produce inaccessibly expensive. Jake Counne of Backyard Fresh Farms, a similarly autonomously assisted farm in Chicago, told the Chicago Tribune that employing robotics reduced his labor costs by 80 percent. For this reason, building a farm around robotics and A.I. could crack the code of making indoor farms feasible. And while Alexander’s leafy greens remain local, the consequences of Iron Ox’s success may not.

Using robotics to make indoor hydroponic farms practical could alleviate a host of agricultural problems. In 2016, World Water Forum cited farming as a major contributor to global water scarcity. But farms like Iron Ox use 90 percent less water than outdoor farms. In a 2019 report on the challenges of feeding 10 billion people by 2050, The World Resources Institute cites concern over “the difference between global agricultural land area in 2010 and the area required in 2050 … if crop yields continue to grow at past rates.” According to Alexander, Iron Ox yields 30 times more produce per acre over the course of a year than conventional farms, and without using any arable land. A 2016 report from the National Center for Biotechnology on Chemical Pesticides urged a “drastic reduction in the use of agrochemicals,” and indoor farms alleviate the need for herbicides and pesticides.

For now, Iron Ox’s goals are more pointed. “How can we make your salad pop? We try to prioritize that,” Alexander says. Following the success of the San Carlos location, he does plan to set up robotic farms near other U.S. cities, though he’s not announcing anything yet. Iron Ox is, however, hiring humans for plant science and growing teams.

A close look at a strangely global idiom about how little we understand each other.

It’s a curious thing when there is an idiom—structured roughly the same way and meaning essentially the same thing—that exists in a large number of languages. It’s even more curious when that idiom, having emerged in dozens of different languages, is actually … about language. That’s the case with “It’s Greek to me.”

In a wide-ranging number of languages, major and minor, from all different branches of the language family tree, there is some version of “It’s Greek to me.” These idioms all seek to describe one person’s failure to understand what the other is trying to say, but in a particular, dismissive way. It’s not just, “Sorry, I can’t understand you.” It’s saying, “The way you’re speaking right now is incomprehensible.” And it specifically compares that incomprehensibility to a particular language, a language agreed upon in that culture to be particularly impenetrable.

Sometimes that original cultural peg has been lost. In English, the phrase doesn’t really indicate anything about the way modern English-speakers feel about the Greek language or Greece in general. It’s just an old, tired idiom. In fact, polls show that native English speakers don’t even think about Greek when asked to name the hardest language to learn. So where did the phrase come from, and why is its sentiment so universal?

As with far too many linguistic questions like this, there is no definitive answer. One theory ties it to medieval monks. In Western Europe at this time, the predominant written language was Latin, but much of the writing that survived from antiquity was in Greek. The theory holds that these monks, in transcribing and copying their texts, were not necessarily able to read Greek, and would write a phrase next to any Greek text they found: “Graecum est; non legitur.” Translated: “It is Greek; it cannot be read.”

This phrase seems to have been embedded in parts of Western Europe, and examples appear in plays starting in the 16th century. William Shakespeare, in his 1599 Julius Caesar, used it, and he is widely credited with bringing a long-latent phrase into the mainstream. Interestingly, Shakespeare’s version is a lot more literal than most of the uses of this idiom. In Julius Caesar, the Roman character Casca describes a speech made by Cicero, a Greek scholar. Casca, one of the conspirators who assassinates Caesar, does not speak Greek. So he says, “Those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.”

Though Greece is nominally part of Europe, its deep ties with the Middle East, North Africa, and the Slavic countries have meant that Greek culture has never really been fully of a part with Western Europe. The alphabet used there today, called the Euclidean alphabet, was ironed out just after the Peloponnesian War, in around 400 B.C. But there were several versions of the Greek alphabet and language before then, and one of those, it’s generally believed, was used by a Greek colony in southern Italy. That one was adopted by people who inhabited early Rome, and steadily evolved on its own into Latin. By Shakespeare’s time, the Greek alphabet looked like a weird fifth cousin to the Latin alphabet. That continues today. Some letters look similar and have similar sounds, such as “A.” “B,” on the other hand, is the second letter both alphabets, but in modern Greek sounds like the English letter “V.” Then there are “Φ” and “Λ,” which don’t particularly resemble any letter used to convey Latin or English. (These are all upper case; the lower-case ones look even more different.)

English is not the only language to rely on Greek as a shorthand for gobbledygook. Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Afrikaans do as well. You’ll notice those are all European languages except for Afrikaans, and Afrikaans is Germanic in origin.

Harry Foundalis, a cognitive scientist who studies Greek linguistics, says many Greek people know that in English and other languages, Greek serves as an indecipherable tongue, and many Greek people, especially young ones, speak English anyway, so they’ve encountered it before. “How do we feel about it? We find it funny,” says Foundalis. “Those of us who know it make jokes with it. For example, I’ve noticed that every time I talk to an English-speaking audience and I use the phrase ‘That’s all Greek to me,’ and the audience knows I’m Greek, I get a thunderous laughter as a response. So, the phrase works well for me.”

There are, however, an awful lot of other languages that have some version of this phrase that doesn’t use Greek. Some of these are weird in their own right. What’s up with the Baltic countries, which think Spanish is so impenetrable? Why do the Danish use Volapük, a short-lived Esperanto-type constructed language created by a German in 1880? When a Bulgarian says “Все едно ми говориш на патагонски,” which uses “Patagonian” instead of Greek, what the hell are they talking about? Do they mean some extinct indigenous Chonan language, or Spanish, which is the dominant language there, or Patagonian Welsh, which also apparently exists?

And what, you might ask, do the Greeks say?

“Εμένα, αυτά μου φαίνονται Κινέζικα.”

“To me, this appears like Chinese.”

Chinese happens to be the most common replacement for Greek in the idiom around the world—and the language that tops polls as the most difficult natural language to learn.

“Chinese is considered a level-four foreign language—the most difficult—for native English learners in the field of second-language acquisition,” says Janet Xing, a professor of Chinese and linguistics at Western Washington University. Different organizations have different rankings for the difficulty of learning languages; the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the U.S. government’s department for training foreign diplomats, has five levels, based on roughly how long it will take a native English speaker to learn a given language.

The Romance languages are rated level one, the easiest, along with Dutch and Afrikaans, both Germanic, like English. (Strangely, German itself is a level two.) Level one languages take, according to the FSI, 23 to 24 weeks of study before a student attains general proficiency.

China has hundreds of languages, but both of its two most widely spoken languages—Mandarin and Cantonese—are rated level five (specifically on the FSI scale, which differs from the one Xing describes). To attain general proficiency, the FSI says it’ll take 88 weeks of study. The only language considered more difficult is Japanese.

Most of the variations on “It's Greek to me” use “Chinese,” though they don’t specify which Chinese language. In the Philippines, in Poland, in France, in Albania, and in many, many other places, people say some variation on, “That’s Chinese to me.”

There are many reasons why Chinese has this reputation, some of which are based on cultural conceptions, and some of which are based on the structural differences between Chinese and Western languages. For the former, China is the most dominant Asian culture in the minds of most Westerners, and that tends to make it an emblem of foreignness. In a way that is either ignorant (a generous view) or racist (a harsh one), China is too incomprehensible to be understood in any capacity.

On the linguistic side, Chinese is legitimately very, very different from Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages. The FSI doesn’t declare Mandarin wildly difficult because its language experts are racist; they rank it a level five language because they have taught thousands of English-speaking diplomats to speak Mandarin, and it is very, very difficult.

David Moser, a linguist currently at Yenching Academy of Peking University, wrote a book about the development of standard Chinese. He’s lived in China for years, teaches at a university there. And he also wrote a truly excellent article about why Chinese is, in his words, “so damn hard.”

For one thing, he explains, Mandarin is a tonal language, meaning that changes in pitch can totally change the meanings of words. “How is it possible that shùxué means ‘mathematics’ while shūxuě means ‘blood transfusion,’ or that guòjiǎng means ‘you flatter me’ while guǒjiàng means ’fruit paste’?” he writes. Tonal languages are not really that uncommon, especially in Asia and Africa, and among North America’s indigenous languages. But European languages and those based on them, very rarely have any tonal qualities. (Some, like Swedish and Serbo-Croatian, are considered “pitch-accent” languages, which is an ill-defined term basically meaning “a few very small tonal elements of some sort.”)

The idea that the tone of your voice can totally alter the meaning of a word is a wrinkle for English speakers trying to learn Mandarin (four tones) or Cantonese (between six and nine tones, depending on how you count). Add to that the writing system in Mandarin, which Moser characterizes as truly nuts, at least to Western eyes. Mandarin as it’s typically written does not use an alphabet, but rather logograms: symbols, sometimes very detailed and elaborate, that represent a word or even a whole phrase. Western-style alphabets—in which symbols correspond, more or less, to sounds—exist, but they’re aftermarket solutions. Pinyin, one of the most used Mandarin alphabets, has only been around since 1958.

To learn Mandarin you have to learn thousands of individual characters, and those characters, writes Moser, are only barely phonetic. In English, if you generally understand the alphabet, you can get often get pretty close to being able to spell a word you’ve only heard before. In Spanish, which is a completely phonetic language, it’s even easier. Mandarin? Good luck. Some elements of an individual symbol may show up in the symbol of a similar-sounding word—say, “president” and “present”—but that’s about as helpful as it gets. And Chinese logograms could have a dozen or more such elements in each one.

“I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like ‘tin can,’ ‘knee,’ ‘screwdriver,’ ‘snap’ (as in ‘to snap one's fingers’), ‘elbow,’ ‘ginger,’ ‘cushion,’ ‘firecracker,’ and so on. And when I say ‘forget,’ I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper,” he writes. This doesn’t happen in languages that rely on alphabets, no matter how bad your spelling might be.

In Chinese, for what it’s worth, there are a couple of different sayings in the “It's Greek to me” family. A Mandarin speaker might describe incomprehensible speech as Martian, or being like the sound of birds. The way you can tell you’ve reached the peak of language difficulty is when you don’t even bother with a human language in your version of the phrase.

Photos testify to the Rama’s journey from Battambang to Shreveport.

Though 10-year-old Vira Rama didn’t understand what his family’s secrets were, he knew that they had to be kept hidden. At first glance, they seemed innocuous enough: a stash of family photos of trips to the beach and Siem Reap, a photo of Rama in a youth scout uniform, all wrapped up in a bag made of cut tarp.

When the Khmer Rouge seized control of the country in April 1975, Rama’s mother, Kim Pean Ky, had insisted on taking this bundle of photos with her as her family was forcibly relocated from their home in the northwestern city of Battambang. She kept them concealed as soldiers marched them into the country on dusty roads congested with people fleeing in three-wheeled tuk-tuks, on ox-driven carts, and even on foot. As soon as the family was resettled in a village called O’ Srarlao, located in what the military regime called Zone 4, Rama watched as his mother dug a hole under their small wooden hut just large enough for the bag of photos. He didn’t ask questions as she hid the traces of their middle-class life under a pile of banana leaves. Though the family would travel to several other zones during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, from 1975 to 1979, Rama’s mother never forgot about the photos. Each time they moved, she quietly and dutifully excavated the bag and then buried again, and again, and again. If the severe, unpredictable, paranoid Khmer Rouge had found it, their lives would be forfeit.

Now, 44 years later, the archive Rama’s mother risked her life to preserve has been published in a book, aptly named Buried. The book is a collaboration between the family and British photographer Charles Fox, who has worked in Cambodia since 2005 running Found Cambodia, an archive of photos of life before, during, and after the reign of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. Of all the photos Fox has encountered in Found Cambodia, he says the Rama’s archive is by far the most complete. “Their story is one of thousands of stories,” he says. “But their collection is unique. Vira tried to record as much of his family history as possible.”

“I feel lucky to have these photos,” says Rama, who held on to Ky’s archive long after the family relocated to the United States (both now live in Southern California). “It gives me something to go back to. Many people who survive the Khmer Rouge have nothing at all.”

Rama was born in 1965 in Battambang. The second-eldest of seven siblings, he lived a charmed early life that was assiduously documented by his father. “I liked being photographed. I was always the goofy one,” he says, adding that many of his childhood photobombs did not make the cut for Buried. In Battambang, before their forced relocation, the photos lay behind plastic in albums and hung on the walls in frames. The tarp bag provided less protection, and many of the photos were damaged. Rama’s mother also altered some of the photos that would have been impossible to explain her way out of, had they been found. For example, she cut King Norodom Sihanouk—who had a complicated and fraught relationship with the Khmer Rouge—out of a photo of her husband.

In the camps, the photos had to be buried because Khmer Rouge soldiers conducted random searches of people’s huts to purge any evidence of city life. Other families also concealed treasures that could get them killed, such as jewelry or medicine, which indicated you were wealthy enough to have seen a doctor. O’ Srarlao’s Zone 4 became one of the most brutal areas controlled by the Khmer Rouge. In addition to executions, the villages were rife with starvation and disease made worse by forced labor.

At O’ Srarlao, the family slowly splintered as children were sent to perform forced labor at different camps, some planting rice and others constructing irrigation systems. Despite the family’s best efforts to conceal their history, Rama’s father stood out as a target for the Khmer Rouge, which actively persecuted and murdered intellectuals. A former math and French language teacher who worked as a banker for the Banque Khmere Pour Le Commerce, he was a member the class that the new regime saw as an existential threat. In 1977, he was executed.

Shortly after, the Ramas knew they had to leave the country. The family members remaining at Zone 4 split into three groups, Ky dug up the photos and fled with some of her seven children to the less violent Zone 3, reburying the photos in each village they stayed in. “My mom valued these photos even though it was risky evidence,” Rama says. “If they searched us, they would kill us.”

When Vietnamese forces liberated the country in 1979, the Ramas reunited in Battambang. But Khmer Rouge soldiers still lurked, and so they fled once more through jungles and minefields to the Thai border. They arrived in 1980 and settled in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp. After 18 months there, they found a sponsor in the United States. After a few months in the Philippines to learn English, the Ramas moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1981. Rama had just turned 16. Buried contains photos of these unsettled but peaceful times, both at the refugee camp and during the family’s first few years in America.

In Louisiana, Ky worked various jobs—as a seamstress, in a spice factory, at restaurants. Her seven children went to school. Rama attended Warren Easton High School, the first time he’d been in school for six years, and graduated in 1985. With the help of his math and science teacher Mr. Blanchard, Rama became a civil engineer.

Around a year after Rama’s family arrived, his sponsor gave him a cheap camera. It was the first time Rama had held a one since before the Khmer Rouge took over. Later in life, he upgraded to a series of fancy digital cameras, including a Nikon DSLR he used to snap photos of his children in soccer and basketball games. Taking photos had become an everyday luxury, and Rama errs on the side of over-documentation.

Rama’s love of photography made him the family’s photokeeper. He kept all his family’s photos in a safety deposit box and scanned many to upload to Flickr—glimpses of life before and after the Khmer Rouge. He also kept artifacts of his family’s immigration, such as the Pan Am tickets they used to fly to America. In 2015, he stumbled upon Found Cambodia, Fox’s project. “I sent Charles an email with a link to my Flickr, saying he was more than welcome to take any photos to add to his collection,” Rama says. “The very next day he emailed me back.”

Fox had dozens of questions. Who were the people in the photos? Where were they taken? Who did the photos belong to? Fox recognized that Rama possessed an incredible document of a time mostly lost to history. “Other family’s photos are so fragmented, which have their own importance,” Fox says. “But what the Ramas managed to save and how they managed to survive is quite remarkable.”

The horrors of the Khmer Rouge are hard to imagine, in part because there are almost no surviving photos of what life was like under the military regime due to the regime’s eschewal of modern life. The most known pictures of that period consist of 7,000 portraits taken by Nhem Ein, a young photographer working in the Tuol Sleng prison, according to The New York Times. It is a grim collection, as every portrait is of a person about to be executed.

When Fox saw all of Rama’s archive, he was struck by its narrative cohesion—a family’s story. He proposed the photos be arranged in a simple booklet, and all members of the Rama family were game. “He consulted with me every step, from the color to the title,” Rama says. The book’s design is intentional: The inside covers are decorated with rumdul flowers, the national flower of Cambodia, and pages that separate life before and after the Khmer Rouge are blank and red.

When Fox sent Rama the first draft of the book, the photos were arranged without any identifying details. Fox asked if Rama’s family could jot down quick captions noting who was in each photo and what occasion, if any, it captured. Rama passed the manuscript to his relatives, who each wrote a few lines in blue pen under the photos that were most meaningful to them. Those handwritten captions appear in the final book—occasionally illegible and deeply human. “That’s how close the family is,” Fox says. “And that’s one of the things that made the book possible.”

Now, each year, the family—Ky, Vira Rama, his six siblings and their families—go camping. Sometimes it’s Mammoth Lakes, sometimes it’s Yosemite. Rama says his relatives often jokingly complain. “They say, ‘We escaped all this hardship, why are we going to spend a week in a tent?’ But maybe that’s part of the healing.” On these trips, the family cooks what Rama calls their native food: cajun and creole cuisine—gumbo, jambalaya, red beans and rice. Unsurprisingly, Rama takes photos of everything. Now that he’s older, he’s traded his fancy DSLR for a lighter antique Fujifilm.

In Rama’s eyes, Buried is a historical document with very modern echoes. Over the past year, he can’t help but spot the parallels between his own family’s harrowing escape and the current situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. He says images of caravans attempting to cross into America bring flashbacks to the fear and violence he experienced as a child. “These people just want a better life for themselves and their children,” he says. “Here in America we’re supposed to be the most generous country but we treat refugees like criminals.”

Cambodia is struggling as well, in particular with its history, according to The Nation. “A lot of millennials in Cambodia don’t know what happened under the Khmer Rouge,” Rama says. “They think it’s fake news.” He hopes Buried will continue to open up new conversations both in the United States and Cambodia about this violent chapter of history. He understands that his family’s journey is not unique, but their records are, and he hopes other Cambodian families will continue to learn their history and break cycles of trauma that afflict generations.

Rama has worked for the city of Los Angeles for 29 years now, and he says he’s five years away from retirement. Recently, he’s noticed more and more people telling him to go back where he came from. “I ask them, which way should I take?” Rama says. “The road I just built, or the other road I built?”

Earthquakes and rebels haven't stopped high-altitude yak cheese artisans.

After three days of uphill trekking through Nepal’s Langtang Valley, Prem Bhattarai, my hiking companion from Kathmandu, was enthusiastically animated by the prospect of cheese. “Now we’re here, this cheese must be taken at any cost!” he exclaims as we reach the village of Kyanjin Gompa.

Kyanjin Gompa sits mere miles from the Tibetan border, at an oxygen-starved altitude of 3,800 meters. Yet in this remote Himalayan village, perpetually enveloped by mist and fog, there’s a factory specializing in the production of Swiss-style cheese made with local yak milk. These days, it’s in high demand across Nepal. But such cheese was nonexistent until the arrival of a Swiss development worker in 1952, who would become known as “the Milkman.”

As we arrive at the Organic Yak Cheese Production Centre in Kyanjin Gompa, Nima Tamang is using a heavy wooden press to mold mounds of curd into thick wheels of cheese. “This is our best yak cheese,” Tamang announces proudly, as he offers me a small chunk to try. I take a bite. It’s strong in flavor, with a hard, salty rind: not too different from a classic, hard Swiss cheese.

The factory is packed to the rafters with cheese wheels weighing 20 pounds or more. Each is worth up to 20,000 rupees, or around $200. The wheels are soaked in saltwater for at least 48 hours. This forms a rind, and adds to the distinctive flavor. The cheese is then left to mature for a minimum of 15 days and a maximum of six months. “The techniques we use, they are all of Swiss origin,” explains Tamang, who has worked at the center as a production manager for the last four years. “The Swiss gifted us most of the tools we use to make the cheese, and they helped pay for this building too.”

Alpine-style cheese made with Himalayan yak milk got its start long ago with the work of Swiss dairy specialist Werner Schulthess. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization sent Schulthess to Nepal in the early 1950s. As journalist Prateek Pradhan writes, his task was to find a profitable solution to the excess milk produced in remote mountain areas.

His work began in the Kathmandu Valley. Eva Manandhar, writing for ECS Nepal, described how with “dedication and persistence,” he persuaded farmers to provide him with milk to be pasteurized. He was so successful that expatriates living in the valley gave him a nickname: “the Milkman.”’

After this initial venture into the Kathmandu Valley, Schulthess journeyed higher into the Himalayas. At altitude, he would find a huge surplus of yak milk. And unlike the valley, it was too far away from Kathmandu to ship milk without spoiling. “That was when the bright idea of transporting milk in the form of cheese struck him,” writes Manandhar.

In 1953, Schulthess wrote in a report, he decided to make “alpine-type hard cheese” in the valley of Langtang, seven days walking distance from Kathmandu. At first, Schulthess financed the operation himself, commissioning a cheese vat, a press, and other tools from a local craftsman. “Upon my arrival in the Langtang,” he writes, “I bought milk–again with my own money–and started my trials to manufacture matured cheese.” By the summer, he notes, the project had already produced a ton of cheese.

But he soon realized that he had a problem. Pradhan sums it up succinctly. While pastoralists have long used yak milk to make cheese-like chhurpi, Schulthess’ cheese was different enough to many Nepalis that “it took significant time for their taste buds to accept it.” Schulthess ended up distributing lots of free cheese to locals.

Much has changed since the 1950s, though. Now, supply of the tasty cheese can’t keep up with demand. “In Kathmandu,” says Bhattarai, “the yak cheese costs much more than in the mountains and often there’s very little for sale. That’s why I must buy it here!”

Down in Kathmandu, yak cheese is hardly a necessity, but it is very much a delicacy. Schulthess’ efforts in the 1950s proved a success in Langtang, and more dairies and cheese factories sprang up in rural areas across Nepal. When Schulthess returned to Nepal in 1986, he noted that there was a “summer production of 80 tons of cheese from mountain dairies.”

But over the years, insurgencies and natural disasters shrank the supply. Pradhan writes that raids by communist rebels during Nepal’s decade-long civil war had a “serious impact on the cheese production” at the turn of the 20th century. Remote dairies filled with cheese were prime targets as a source of free food.

More recently, the devastating 2015 earthquakes caused widespread destruction. The Langtang Valley was one of the hardest-hit regions in the country. Hundreds died, and entire villages were buried. Outside the cheese factory, pieces of mangled metal still lie on the ground. “That was some of the old equipment,” Tamang says. “It was destroyed in the earthquake. In the pastures, many of the herders and their yaks were killed by avalanches.”

With the factory buildings damaged and unstable, Kyanjin Gompa’s yak cheese production halted. The Swiss would return to help, though. A plaque in the Cheese Production Centre, dated November 2018, commemorates the support of the government of Switzerland in rebuilding.

That morning, Tamang had received a fresh consignment of yak curd and whey. Herders in the Langtang Valley separate the milk themselves, he explains, by heating it in metal vats in the villages before bringing it in an arduous trek into Kyanjin Gompa. Then, it’s purchased by the cheese production center at set rates.

But to collect their money, yak herders must then walk all the way to the village of Syabru-Besi, where it’s deposited directly into bank accounts by Nepal’s Dairy Development Corporation. The steep downhill journey takes three days.

As the cold mist moves down to the village, we retire to the warmth of a teahouse. Porters play cards around a table, while Bhattarai cuts up yak cheese into cubes and passes them around. The winners of the card game brave the cold to go purchase more cheese with their winnings.

In remote villages, locals benefit from this new source of income. Pradhan comments that cheese has helped people in the industry improve their standard of living. “The cash provided them an opportunity to invest in schooling of their kids, and improve their diet,” he writes. The popularity of cheese has only increased, and in the Kathmandu Valley, entrepreneurs are now crafting French-inspired yak cheese and strong Italian blue cheeses for a ready Nepali palate.

This cheese revolution is undoubtedly indebted to the efforts of Werner Schulthess. Before his death in 2011, he went on to help establish dairy industries in Madagascar, Kenya, and South America. But yak cheese continues to be produced in the Himalayas due to the hard work and determination of herders and workers such as Nima Tamang. Even in the aftermath of devastating earthquakes and the daily challenges of living at altitude, the cheesemaking goes on.

On Thursday, it catapulted a communications satellite into space from Cape Canaveral.

At 6:13 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, August 8, a bright trail of purple, blue, and white leaped across the Florida sky. The arc was as sweeping as a rainbow, but this wasn’t just a trick of the light. It was the result of a van-sized rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41.

Unlike NASA launches of old, this rocket was engineered by a private company, Lockheed Martin, and launched by a private entity, the United Launch Alliance, on behalf of the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center. “ULA is a launch service provider, and contracts with customers such as NASA and the U.S. Air Force to launch satellites,” says Heather McFarland, a communications representative at ULA. The United Launch Alliance was founded in 2005 as a collaboration between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Private spaceflight contractors like ULA, Blue Origin, and SpaceX adjust their yearly launches depending on their customers’ needs. “In preparation for a busy 2020 manifest, our factory in Decatur, Alabama will set a record-setting manufacturing pace with 30 boosters in production during 2019 and 2020,” McFarland says.

This particular rocket, which held a secure communications satellite, was visible in and around Tampa Bay. According to a mission overview from ULA, the AELF-5 (Advanced Extremely High Frequency) is designed to aid communication between military forces, and “features encryption, low probability of intercept and detection, jammer resistance and the ability to penetrate the electro-magnetic interference caused by nuclear weapons.”

Those who slept through the early-morning launch could still witness its bright burst, which lingered in the sky for hours and was made more visible by the rising sun. A press release said that the engine and five solid rocket boosters produced 2.5 million pounds of thrust. The spacecraft is approximately 197 feet tall, and boasts a 17-foot diameter sandwich composite structure “made with a vented aluminum-honeycomb core and graphite-epoxy face sheets,” according to the briefing.

Since 2002, the year this style of spacecraft-cradling rocket was first launched, the Atlas V has assisted in critical space exploration missions: New Horizons, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and the first journey to Pluto. Along the way, it has also provided Florida residents with a delightful, albeit temporary, change in celestial scenery.

Atlas Obscura readers recommend their favorite rare games from around the world.

From the hockey variant known as Broomball to the wild and often difficult-to-comprehend sport of Kabbadi, the world has no shortage of lesser-known yet entirely worthy athletic pursuits. Plus, such sports can offer a key window into the culture of the people who play them. We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers over in our Community Forums to tell us about their favorite esoteric sports, and we got some winning responses.

Check out a selection of some of the best submissions below. If you know about a fascinating sport that didn't make the list, tell us about it over in the forums and keep the conversation going. GOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLL!!!

Sipà

Popular in: Philippines

“Sipà is a game played with the foot—kicking a ball made from a variety of many different possible materials: a ball made with rubber bands, a bean bag, a rattan ball, a ball with feathers, or a washer with a plastic pom-pom. It takes a lot of coordination and a good sense of balance. It is also related to Sepak Takraw.” — AnyaPH

Sepak Takraw

Popular in: Southeast Asia

“Have to agree that takraw as one of the most intense, amazing games I have ever seen. I was traveling on business in Bangkok and saw a few neighborhood guys playing on a rooftop court. The agility and athleticism they displayed was unbelievable. Like watching volleyball being played with only your feet. Must see!” — marcdshapiro

Broomball

Popular in: Canada, United States

“Hockey wasn’t awkward enough, so some (Canadian?) genius invented Broomball. It’s essentially hockey. But instead of a puck, it’s a ball. And instead of a hockey stick, you use a broom. And instead of wearing skates, you run around on ice in street shoes. I used to know people who played it wearing clown outfits, but can’t find a picture. So instead, here’s a team of firefighters playing against a team of roller derbyers.” — tralfamadore

Ice Yachting

Popular in: Europe, United States, Canada

“Although I’ve never tried it, I’ve always wanted to go ice yachting.” — bwoodz

Gaffelhangen

Popular in: Netherlands

“A friend from Limburg told me about the sport of ‘Gaffelhangen,’ which is a very local rural sport that is only done in a small part of the province. It is basically a competition to see which can hang on a pitchfork for the longest. They call the competition a European championship, even if it’s just locals.” — CoolCrab

Crud

Popular in: United States, Canada

“Crud—invented in Canada, played in Air Force messes around the world. All you need is an old pool table, two teams and lots of beer!” — domalley

Underwater Rugby

Popular in: Europe, Australia, United States

“How about Underwater Rugby. I played for several years.” — Beta

Carrera de Cintas

Popular in: Costa Rica

"While semi-lost in the Guanacaste Mountains somewhere between Montenegro and Herradura, Costa Rica, the bus my friends and I were on made an unscheduled stop at a plaza the size of half a football field, where five or six small houses faced each other in a semi-circle.

Soon after we arrived some of the guests mounted horses. A ladder was brought to the middle of the plaza. On what I assumed had been a communal clothesline that stretched the width of the plaza, people climbed the ladder and hung small steel rings from ribbons. I can’t remember the exact process, but I believe there were three rings hung for each rider with smaller and smaller circumferences, the largest being no more than a half an inch or so.

Each rider had a small, carved lance that they would hold palm up and charge at the ring. I remember being astounded at the skill and accuracy required to snatch a ring, like the Tico version of catching a housefly midair with chopsticks. I also remember, being a North American kid from a working class family, just out of high school, the whole otherworldyness of it all. Being there through pure chance and experiencing what to me was an absolute spectacle encapsulated everything I imagined travel could be. I had walked out of the everyday and in to one of the National Geographics I had poured over month after month for time immemorial.

It was the first time I had left my country and visited another." — SluggoSmith

Pallone col Bracciale

Popular in: Italy

“Pallone col bracciale has been played in Northwestern Italy since the Renaissance. The rules are basically similar to tennis but played over much longer distances, with the players using spiked wooden gauntlet/clubs to hit a heavy ball back and forth.” — tony_wolf

Dragon Boating

Popular in: Canada, China

“Well, it’s obscure in the U.S., but very popular in Asia—dragon boating! It’s a 2,000 year-old Chinese sport. I’ve been part of a team for around five years. It’s more popular on the West Coast of the U.S. and in Canada.” — bumblebarb

One-Foot High Kick

Popular in: Canada and North America

“The Inuit One-Foot High Kick requires incredible strength, control, and precision. The goal is to kick a suspended ball with one foot while in the air and then land on that same foot. It’s considered the most difficult of the Inuit games.” — Tboullard

Pack Burro Racing

Popular in: United States

“Colorado’s State Summer Heritage Sport: Pack burro racing. The burros aren’t ridden. They are carrying some equipment, but racers run next to the burro for the entire distance. We even have a triple crown which includes the 29-mile race from Fairplay to the top of Mosquito Pass (13,190 feet) from the east side. The Fairplay race is followed the next week by the 22-mile Leadville race which races to the top of the same pass from the west side. The third leg of the triple crown is the short 12-mile Buena Vista race.” — cyccommute

AUSTUS

Popular in: Australia

“AUSTUS was a hybrid form of football taking in elements of both American football and Australian-rules football, and was created during World War II so that Australian and American servicemen in Australia could play the same sport. It was similar to Australian rules football, but as well as kicking the ball, players were allowed to throw the ball forward as in American football, although goals had to be kicked within 20 meters of the goalposts.” — Graham_Clayton

Kabbadi

Popular in: Southern Asia

“Kabbadi! I invite you to watch a game with the sound off, and try to figure out what the rules are.” — Josh

Pesäpallo

Popular in: Finland

“Also… Pesäpallo, Finnish baseball.” — Josh

Flaming Puck Unicycle Hockey

Popular in: Canada

“Invented in Toronto, Canada (of course!) by Darrin Bedford, it’s a summer hockey game played on unicycles on pavement with a special puck that’s dunked in a flammable fluid and set on fire just before play (the flame makes a nice blue flame line as you hit it to start the game). Regular ice hockey rules apply—sticks down, etc. We played this game at NAUCC some years ago, and it’s crazy fun on a unicycle!” — sinclairpam

Jukskei

Popular in: South Africa

“In South Africa they play a sport called Jukskei. Jukskei is a 270-year-old folk sport, believed to have originated around 1743 in the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. It was developed by ‘transport riders’ who traveled with ox-drawn wagons. They used the wooden pins of the yokes (Afrikaans: skei) of the oxen to throw at a stick that was planted into the ground. The game was also played during the Great Trek. It was also played by the farmers from the Boland on beaches. Jukskei became an organized sport around the year 1939, when the first unions were established and rules were formalized.” — laura10

Southern Vermont Primitive Biathlon

Popular in: United States

“Up here in Vermont (and more recently in New Hampshire and upstate New York) a few of us compete in primitive biathlon. You might know about Olympic biathlon—people in spandex on skinny skis with precision .22 rifles skiing and shooting. Like that, only with wooden snowshoes and muzzleloading rifles, 18th/19th century style. There are three events in Vermont and a couple each in upstate New York and New Hampshire. The courses are generally one-and-a-half to two miles, with nine steel gong targets of all sizes and shapes spread out along the course. Each hit takes five minutes off your running time. The challenges are that 1) moving at any decent speed on snowshoes makes your pulse and breathing skyrocket, so holding still is hard, and 2) keeping an old style firearm working in sub-freezing temperatures is an issue. Some people dress the part, and others for cold weather survival. There’s a festive atmosphere; very few people are deadly serious about it. People encourage each other and help each other out.” — hiltonian

Though John Evelyn wasn't a vegetarian, he did appear to be ahead of his time.

Though John Evelyn cautioned that he was “not ambitious of being thought an excellent Cook,” he had no reservations about authoring a volume on the art of the salad. In his 1699 Acetaria, or A Discourse of Sallets (read: "salads"), Evelyn provides a most thorough guide to the joys of vegetarian living—complete with preparation instructions, a seasonal calendar for herbs and vegetables, and pithy, philosophical asides. A first edition of the book is now up for auction at Addison & Sarova, where it is expected to sell for at least $1,000.

Evelyn was not a chef by trade, but clearly knew his way around a garden and a kitchen, and understood just “how necessary it is, that in the Composure of a Sallet, every Plant should come to bear its part, without being over-power’d by some Herb of a stronger Taste.” With great patience and detail, he advocates for the careful handling of vegetables so that each might play its part most effectively. Heed, for example, his advice to “let your Herby Ingredients be exquisitely cull’d, and cleans’d of all worm-eaten, slimy, canker’d, dry, spotted, or any ways vitiated Leaves,” along with his precaution to render ingredients “discreetly sprinkl’d” rather “than over much sob’d with Spring-Water”—especially in the case “of the Cabbage-kind, whose heads are sufficiently protected by the outer leaves which cover it.” Once these measures have been carefully taken, don’t forget the Oxoleon, a dressing of “oyl,” vinegar, and salt by whose addition “the Composition is perfect … ”

Perhaps the most striking parts of the book are its tables detailing the different times of year suited to different plants. January, February, and March, for example, mark high times for endive, “Sellery,” and mint, among many others, while the next three months open the doors to young onions and “Persley.” Evelyn doesn’t stop there—the tables also include instructions regarding “proportion” (for endive: “Two if large, four if small”) and “culture” (“blanch’d,” “unblanch’d,” or “mingl’d with the Blanch’d”). One can picture Evelyn ordering at Sweetgreen, questioning whether certain items ought to be on the summer menu.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Evelyn published 30 books on a diverse range of topics over the course of his life. He is most famous for his Diary, which he began at age 11 and continued for the rest of his life, and which has provided historians with a detailed look into 17th-century England’s high society. His other books deal with subjects including forestry, numismatics, and engraving—a variety that led friend and fellow diarist Samuel Pepys to playfully call Evelyn out “a little for conceitedness,” according to the British Library.

Evelyn’s taste for recognition is on view in the Acetaria (from the Latin acetarious, for “used in salads”), in which he derided meat-eaters’ “cruel Butcheries of so many harmless Creatures; some of which we put to merciless and needless Torment, to accommodat them for exquisite and uncommon Epicurism,” or pleasure-seeking. Evelyn was not a vegetarian.

Perhaps that’s why he quickly pivoted, acknowledging that condemning meat “is not my Business.” He only wanted to show “how possible it is by so many Instances and Examples, to live on wholesome Vegetables, both long and happily … ” It was a tall order at a time before vegetarianism had gone mainstream, one Evelyn met with characteristic flair.

At Colonial Williamsburg, creating historic food scenes is a team sport.

The morning daylight streams in through a wavy glass windowpane to illuminate a table full of food: There is a platter of grilled fish surrounded by lemons, little meat pies arranged on a plate, a bowl of fruit, and even a small pitcher full of frothy punch. Laid out with cutlery and dinnerware, it looks ready to welcome guests, or perhaps a family that is about to gather at the table.

Except that it’s not. Each of these pieces of food is fake. The fake fish, the fake meat pies, and even the fake fruit were carefully placed by curators at Colonial Williamsburg who, like their peers at other historic houses turned museums, aim to present a lifelike and historically accurate experience. The painstaking research, cooking, and molding behind each “faux food” is a little-known industry within the museum world.

“Food brings the room to life, helps make the house a home,” says Amanda Keller, Associate Curator of Historic Interiors and Household Accessories at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF).

For most of American house museum history, staff cooked or gathered real food to lay out on tables and hearths. In England and Australia, this is still common, but in the United States, especially in warm, humid areas, spoilage and pests have always been a problem. Additionally, in the U.S., conservation concerns raised in the 1980s led curators to shy away from placing foods that can rot or spill on or around what are often period antiques, original flooring, or brick work. (Cooking was often done right on the historic hearth.)

Similar concerns keep curators from buying faux food from the most famous purveyors: Japan’s fake-food manufacturers. The $90 million industry rose in popularity after World War II as a way to help Americans identify and choose dishes on Japanese restaurant menus. While these pieces are beautiful and life-like, Keller explains that “we really have to take into consideration ‘off-gassing’ from objects, something which can degrade our artifacts. In fact, even bringing fresh flowers into an 18th-century dwelling can really affect it. There is a lot to consider when staging a historic structure.”

As a result, museums began constructing their own historically accurate faux food creations. And as is the case in many aspects of American historical conservation, reconstruction, and research, Colonial Williamsburg has led the way. Colonial Williamsburg is a living-history museum and private foundation in Virginia. Once the state capital, the historic district was founded in 1699, and the historical faux food work at the attraction—a site that encompasses multiple buildings in a historic, 173-acre area—is a collaboration between chefs, craftspeople, and curators.

Each project is a new challenge, and Keller’s current project is a cake for an 18th-century wedding scene. Today’s tiered, white-on-white cakes were a later invention, so Keller looked to historic cookbooks (her favorites include The Art Of Cookery by John Thacker and The British Housewife Companion by Mrs. Martha Bradley), engravings and drawings from the time, and even historic letters, which is where she discovered a detailed description of a wedding cake written by a wedding guest to a friend. She cross-referenced all these findings with a drawing of Twelfth Night cakes from the period.

“From there, I rely heavily on the Historic Foodways department,” Keller explains. The department uses 18th-century equipment and methods to interpret and replicate foods, which in this case includes historic cake pans and baking the cake over a wood fire.

The next step is for Jennifer Thorton, Senior Conservation Technician, to actually recreate the cake. She’ll begin by taking photos of the cake created by the cooking team, which will look much simpler than modern cakes, but involve royal icing, a frosting still in use, but usually not for wedding cakes. “If I can mold it, I will,” Thorton says. “Every material we use goes through a testing process, and to really adhere to preventative conservation—avoiding problems before they start—we have to make stuff on our own.”

“She never gets intimidated by any new project,” Keller says admiringly. If molding won’t work, or if something is too big or too bulky, then Thorton might build an item out of plaster and use non-toxic paint to creatively recreate patina, such as the colors of a grilled fish versus a fresh caught one, or in the cake project, the texture and crumb of a cake that was baked in a lidded mold nestled among the coals of a wood fire. Once the cake is ready, Keller and the curators will design the table settings.

CWF constructs around 200 faux food objects a year, and staff draw from their faux food “prop closet” to switch out food displays to match the season (apples in the fall versus berry tarts in summer) and keep them “fresh” for interpreters and visitors, even though fresh means completely fake.

Not every museum and historic site has the resources to make their own faux food, and CWF is not permitted to sell their creations, so other craftspeople feed the need. Sandy Levins, of Historic Faux Foods in New Jersey, creates items ranging from raw calf tongue to Stargazy Pie (a pie with whole fish heads and tails sticking out of it that fascinated her so much she made one “for fun”).

Levins has recreated dishes from bygone eras for historic sites that include Monticello, Mount Vernon, and New York City’s Tenement Museum. She got her start while part of a historical society that wanted to use faux foods to take an 18th-century house from “stale and sterile” to more lively. Her mentor was Jane Ann Hornberger of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, and once Levins created a “platter of raw oysters that actually looked juicy enough to slurp,” she remembers, she began her new work in earnest, collecting historic foodways reference material, using her home kitchen as a creation lab, and slowly building a reputation in the museum world for her accuracy and ability to provide full table and room settings.

Teresa Teixeira, current Curator of Historic Textiles at The Charleston Museum in South Carolina, is a newer player on the faux food scene. She got her start at CWF in the textiles department, and often spent time in the historic buildings when visitors weren’t there. “Audiences are really drawn in by clothing displays and food, and the faux foods at Colonial Williamsburg really drew me in, too,” she says.

When she began working at Montpelier, the historic site didn’t have a large budget for faux food or a staff to make it, so the team ordered a couple pieces from Levins. “We ordered the most difficult things, in this case two roasted chickens and some meat-stuffed cabbages, and I volunteered to try my hand at making the rest,” she says. Teixeira individually molded and painted a bowl full of peas and made a savory, herb-filled tansy cake. “[The peas] looked great, but I won’t do that again,” she says. “It took forever.”

These days, she runs a side faux food hustle out of her home garage. She always turns in a report of the research she does, as a way to help these smaller museums’ volunteer staffs. “It’s fun and rewarding,” she says, despite the fact that food occasionally rots in her garage as she waits for the mold to set.

These recreations of historic recipes—into non-edible objects—can often teach us about seasonality and regionality in foodways. As faux food creators delve deep into what would have been available and local, they can discover forgotten ingredients and recipes that speak to the place, when people had to make do with what they could forage, grow, hunt, or catch. Through that research, these craftspeople bring to life overlooked elements, in a way that doesn’t attract rats into the Monticello kitchen or harm the objects they’re showcasing. And their creations, which bring to life the past, can become works of contemporary art on their own.

Come to this Beirut poster shop for the lurid stereotypes, stay for the giant killer crab.

Bold, bright, breathtaking colors paired with sensational, spectacular images of magical creatures, romance, and adventure burst out of Abboudi Abou Joudé’s posters. Every surface of his shop, hidden in a back alley in Beirut, is covered in vintage movie posters that plastered the streets of Beirut from the 1920s to the 1970s. Now a white-haired man, neatly dressed in a striped shirt, he has been collecting for over 40 years, compiling thousands and thousands of posters.

Born in 1952, Abou Joudé grew up at a time when Lebanon overflowed with cinemas. He says there were over 50 cinemas in Beirut alone. Joudé would attend the movies three to four times a week, watching everything from Aladdin to Kubrick. He loved the splashy, thrilling posters, depicting electrifying romps and grandiose fantasies, but over time he noticed that certain images would repeat again and again. “I discovered that those films, or the posters of those films about Arabs, continued the imagined picture of what was thought about Arabs in the 18th and 19th centuries,” he says. “The desert, the tent, the belly-dancing, the haram, the sultan, the king. Stereotyped images continued through the posters.”

The posters pair beauty with blatant Orientalism. The films they advertise would almost universally star white actors in Arab roles, and would be produced by American directors. The headlines on the posters range from salacious Babes of Bag[h]dad to the bizarre Gigantic Killer Crab! The plots of the films feature classic Orientalist myths about passionate, savage Arab men enslaving hyper-sexualized women. These women wore skimpy belly-dancing outfits, and the action always took place in a desert, regardless of the setting.

The fantasy they presented was powerful and dangerous, says Omar Thawabeh, the communications officer at Dar el-Nimer, a Beirut arts center that recently hosted an exhibition of Abou Joudé’s posters. “Image as a tool or as a weapon is probably underrated in how powerful it is. I think what the rest of the world thinks of us is majorly based on images,” he explains. “Although we might take some of these posters with a pinch of salt and say, ‘Well, it's just a film,’ when this becomes one film after another and generations after generations, and the images, the representation doesn't change, it becomes more problematic.”

Thawabeh says Dar el-Nimer launched the exhibition to provoke questions around these posters and what role their fantasies play in shaping reality. He says that Orientalist tropes went beyond cinematic depictions, pointing to the infamous quote by Winston Churchill where he allegedly said, “Arabs are a backward people who eat nothing but camel dung,” according to a New York Times report in 1979.

The movie posters promote the image of Arabs as “savages, they're backwards, they live in tents and they ride camels,” Thawabeh says. The implication, he explains, was that while Arab nations were uncivilized, Western countries were advanced: a belief that could justify the invasion and colonization of the Arab world. “We [Westerners] are civilized and we're powerful, we have armies and developed weapons and we can conquer them, we can use them. So it starts off with dumbing down the Arab world, then it turns into this invitation to abuse the resources of the Arab world and create these power dynamics.”

The posters show how popular culture reflected the politics of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Abou Joudé says that prior to World War II most films shown in Beirut came from Egypt or Europe, but post-war, American films took over the market as American power and hegemony grew.

The American films initially showed a fascination and exotification of the Arab World replete with tents, belly dancers, deserts, and rich sultans. But after the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Joudé says images of Arabs began to shift, and he noticed that instead of being portrayed as heroes, they became terrorists. “The [Arab] characters became very evil or sick after the 1967 war,” he says. “It began at that time and has grown since then, especially after 2011 honestly.”

Films today reflect a new type of Orientalism, says Thawabeh. “Now there is less of a fetishization, there is still some, but now there is this dehumanization that can be very effective and that can contribute to this momentum that the extreme right wing is gaining.”

He points to the 2018 film Beirut as an example: the trailer depicts a city of smoking debris where the only Arab character is a terrorist who kidnaps the protagonist's friend. It’s far from the everyday of Beirut with its endless hipster coffee shops, malls and restaurants.

“If you're regular European citizen who takes all his knowledge of the Arab world from films like Beirut and series like Homeland, of course I would understand their fear of Arabs and what Arabs are going to do with Western civilization,” Thawabeh says with frustration. “So now there is less fetishization … but there is this dehumanization that can be very effective and that can contribute to this momentum that the extreme right wing is gaining.”

He says Dar el-Nimer’s exhibition aimed to invite questions about the narratives of both the past and present. “We did not feed this information to the audience. Our goal was to take a few steps away from these posters, try to look at the bigger picture and see how Arabs were represented ... and see what questions you have.”

Part of the reason Abou Joudé loves the posters is that he likes to observe the changing tides of politics and beliefs through the lens of cinema. “These posters from the 1960s and '70s show what society liked to see—adventure, war, love, and sex. Through them you can also see the development of society,” he says. He explains that today he sees less dancing, drinking, and relationships between men and women on screen, which he says reflects societal norms becoming more conservative since the '60s and '70s in Arab cinema. Increasing state censorship paired with rising religious sentiment in the '80s and '90s led to fewer risqué scenes making their way on to the big screen, a change reflected within Abou Joudé’s posters.

Abou Joudésays that when he would attend the cinema he understood that American films were portraying him as an other, but he also observed that all American “enemies” received the same cinematic treatment. “If we take American cinema for example, it's not just Arabs. Jews were given a bad image, the Red Panic, the Germans, the Russians, the Mexicans—every 'other' personality in American films was seen through a racist lens ... We as people sadly, show the ‘other’ in a different way ... the problem exists for people in general.”

But despite seeing these tropes, Abou Joudé can’t help but remember the films with nostalgia. He remains fond of Sinbad, 1,001 Arabian Nights, and the Thief of Baghdad, even though he recognizes the stereotypes. “When I was young I loved them, I loved to save them so the people in the future would be able to know and discover this type of work that has now finished,” he says.

The posters remind him of the Beirut of his youth in the 1960s and ‘70s, of the old cinemas, and a time when posters were the only way to know which movie was on. In the back office he saves the ticket stubs of the films—keeping alive memories of long-shuttered cinemas through posters of whirling, vibrant, dangerous fantasies.