But Colombia’s outbreak of lethal banana fungus is still bad news.

Let’s cut to the chase: it is highly unlikely that the banana will go extinct, despite what you might have read elsewhere. The feared fungus Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 (TR4) has officially breached Colombia’s banana plantations, according to an August 12 report in Science. There is no known way to cure the fungus, which kills banana plants by choking their vascular systems. This is definitely very bad—Colombia is the fourth-largest exporter of bananas in the world, according to Reuters—but it’s not the banana apocalypse, bananapocalypse, or even Bananageddon that has been predicted by a new crop of yellow journalism.

On August 8, the Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA) in Bogotá confirmed that the fungus had been spotted in the La Guajira region of the country and declared a national emergency. But to those in the know, the banana rumor mill was buzzing even before the ICA made an official announcement, according to Charles Staver, a banana production research coordinator at Biodiversity International. “Until it’s announced everyone can know it,” he says. “But it’s not official until it’s announced.”

The deadly fungus was found in the northern La Guajira region in an area of around 432 acres, 416 of which have been stripped of all banana plants. For an area this large to have been infected, Staver says, the fungus must have been in the country for quite some time before detection. Science first reported that the fungus might have reached Colombia in mid-July, as four plantations were quarantined with a suspected infection. “The normal procedure for a first outbreak would ideally be spotting one suspicious plant and going ‘Holy hell, this looks like Fusarium,’ and calling the authorities,” Staver says. “But in this business of these early warnings, individual farmers lose for acting quickly and efficiently. That’s the dilemma.”

Meanwhile, the ICA has cracked down on quarantine procedures and plans to increase their biosecurity efforts at ports, airports, and border points. Fusarium spreads fast and lives long. Once it’s taken root in a plantation, it’s extremely hard to eradicate. No fungicides work to save infected plants, and the spores sit around in the soil for decades, Staver says. Though he says there’s no way to tell, Staver speculates the spores could have entered the country via farm machinery or workers travelling from abroad, or even tourists. “With these measures, it certainly will not move freely out of the area,” Staver says. “I guess the question is whether it’s already moved and we just don’t know it yet.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve been here. In the 20th century, the United States and Europe lived in the era of the Gros Michel cultivar banana. In the 1950s, the Gros Michel met its swift downfall when the first race of Fusarium wiped out plantations in Central America. Manufacturers like Dole and Chiquita soon switched production to the Cavendish, which was resistant to that Fusarium strain. (Many of those who have tried the Gros Michel, which is still grown in Central America and Africa, still wax poetic about its vivaciously sweet flavor, a shade more complex than the Cavendish.)

This time around, there is no suitable breed immediately available to replace the Cavendish. However, scientists are experimenting with a genetically modified, disease-resistant Canvendish that is tolerant of Fusarium, according to National Geographic.

Though the first strain of Fusarium nearly exterminated the Gros Michel, Staver says farmers are now much more equipped to contain an outbreak. "I don’t think you’ll ever lack for bananas in your lifetime,” he says. What’s more, Staver says the banana market has always been on the verge of oversupply, resulting in a tropical fruit that costs less in the U.S. than fruits that are grown locally, like apples.

So when asked if this news marked a bananapocalypse, Staver laughed. “It’s not an apocalypse, but it is not something to be taken lightly.”

An "Arctic mystery" may lead to a future of food under the permafrost.

In 1886, the renowned geologist, zoologist, and explorer Baron Eduard von Toll stood on the coast of the largest of the New Siberian Islands, gazing north into the Russian Arctic Ocean. He was sure he saw it in the distance: Sannikov Land, a mythic island that had bewitched and eluded explorers for a century. To his guide, he wondered aloud if he’d ever make it there. His guide’s response matched Toll’s own determination: “Once I set foot there, I can die.”

In 1900, after years of persuasion, the Russian Academy of Sciences finally agreed to sponsor Toll’s expedition to find Sannikov. Aboard the ship Zarya, Toll set sail into the Arctic. But from the start, the expedition was buffeted by trouble: navigational confusion, coal shortages, scurvy, a power struggle between Toll and the captain, the death of the doctor, erratic winds, flooded decks, brutal snowstorms, starving sled dogs, and a raging polar bear. Worst of all was the constant threat of encroaching ice, which could entrap the ship and constrict around its wooden hull like a vise.

Nonetheless, Toll and his team of scientists kept busy. They mapped uncharted rivers and islands, analyzed glaciers, gathered fossils and fauna, and studied their findings in the ship’s onboard labs. During overland forays, they relied on stores of canned and dried foods, buried and preserved in the permafrost of the Taimyr Peninsula. All the while, Sannikov Land remained a phantom out of reach, beckoning Toll to the northern horizon.

19 months into the trip, the RAS ordered Toll by telegram to wrap it up. He had one final summer to find his island. In May 1902, with the Zarya’s path frozen in every direction, Toll, his navigator, and two Yakut crewmen set out by dogsled and kayak to the far-north Bennett Island. Here, they hoped to establish a base from which to venture even further north, to Sannikov.

Over three months on Bennett, the team ate their way through three bears, countless seabirds, and the island’s small herd of reindeer. Out of optimism that the Zarya would soon retrieve them, they failed to keep anything for the winter. But the Zarya remained stymied by ice for months, and by October, the window for rescue was closed. Toll realized that if they stayed on the island, they wouldn’t survive. And so, he and his team ventured south, back towards the New Siberian Islands, paddling thin-hulled kayaks into a deadly mass of rapidly freezing, razor-sharp ice. They were never seen again.

Toll’s death cemented his legendary status in Russia, which continued to sponsor searches for Sannikov into the 1930s. Toll’s widow published his diaries, and in 1959, a Russian translation meant they were devoured by a new generation of Arctic adventure-lovers.

One page detailed a food store that Toll had buried on the Taimyr Peninsula in September 1900, early in his voyage. First, he described its location: a spot five meters above sea level, marked with a wooden cross. Then he described the hole itself, dug deep through thawed clay, peat, and ice. And finally, the contents: "a box with 48 cans of cabbage soup, a sealed tin box with 15 pounds of rye rusks [dry biscuits], a sealed tin box with 15 pounds of oatmeal, a soldered box containing about four pounds of sugar, 10 pounds of chocolate, seven plates and one brick of tea.”

After the diary’s Russian publication, explorers rushed north to find Toll’s depot. But his description of the store’s geographic location proved impossibly vague. What’s more, every expedition searched during the spring, when the snow was still heavy. Inevitably, they all came home empty-handed. It seemed as if the Toll food cache might remain as elusive as Sannikov Land itself, were it not for a geopolitical tangle in 1973.

At the time, 31-year-old Dmitry Shparo, a Russian math professor and part-time tundra explorer, was organizing a group to attempt the first-ever journey to the North Pole by ski. His team belonged to the Scientific-Sport Expedition, sponsored by the official newspaper of the Young Communist League. To prepare for the journey, they trained not just in skiing, but in biomedicine, electronics, and food science (hence the “scientific” part of their name.) But at the last minute, the YCL squelched the plan. “The conception of the Iron Curtain was actually almost tangible,” Shparo explains today. To travel beyond it, into the neutral waters of the North Pole, “was impossible.”

But the eager adventurers were undeterred. They relocated to the coast of the Taimyr Peninsula (safely within Soviet territory) and reconceived their expedition entirely. Instead, they divided into three teams, each of which set out to uncover an unsolved “Arctic mystery.” One of these mysteries was the Toll food cache.

As Shparo recalls, Toll’s food depot “did not seem so significant to us at that time.” Indeed, a more pressing task for the Toll team was laying advance food stores for the other two missions. En route to their expedition, the food-searchers endured ribbing from every quarter. Was it true, they were asked, that Toll had buried 17 bottles of French cognac, too?

On a late July afternoon, a helicopter deposited the team on a point of grassy coastal tundra that previous searchers had pinpointed as the likeliest location of the cache. Within hours of their arrival, they were standing over a moss-covered pile of rocks, inspecting a stub of wood protruding from the center. It appeared to be the remains of a post, with a metal nail and an inscription: “1900.” Together, they wondered: could it really have been this easy?

In the light of morning, they bolted awake and returned to the spot. A pencil rubbing of the post revealed further confirmation: “Zarya Cache: 1900.” They cleared the stones, and, with a metal probe and a pick, ripped into the ground below, spraying black earth, then tiny chunks of permafrost with each blow. At last, the pick hit a large flat stone, which was agony to remove. Underneath was a layer of ice. One crew member tapped it with his probe and easily pierced not just the ice, but something metal underneath. And then, up through the pit, mingling with the sweet scent of permafrost, came the unmistakable smell of rye.

After hugging and handshaking, the team extracted an unmarked metal cube and left behind a wooden box, marked “Cabbage soup, 48 cans.” Then, they refilled the hole, marked its spot, and as soon as they could, returned to base camp with a surprise treat for the other two teams: Toll’s 73-year-old rye biscuits. “They were very tasty!” Shparo recalls, 46 years later.

When the metal cube reached Moscow, the Canning Research Institute opened and tested its contents, which included oats, tea, matches, and chocolate. The oats were perfectly preserved and made a delectable porridge. Experts across the field of food preservation were astonished, and intensely curious. So was Shparo, whose eyes were now open to what this could mean. As he and Alexander Shumilov explain in Three Mysteries of the Arctic: “Nature had set up a unique experiment and it was up to man to take advantage of it and carry it further.”

The next summer, the state media and the Soviet Ministry of the Food Industry sponsored a larger expedition to return to the site of the cache. There, they retrieved 34 cans of cabbage soup and left 14 behind. They slated three to be retrieved for research in 1980, 2020, and 2050, respectively, and the remainder to stay buried indefinitely. What’s more, the team buried several containers of modern food for study by future generations.

A few days later in Moscow, in front of countless food-related agencies and institutes, state media, and Shparo, the first can of cabbage soup was opened with dramatic flair, using Toll’s own knife. Despite a rapid darkening of the meat on exposure to the air, attendees sampled small teaspoons of the soup. The master of ceremonies deemed it “pleasant and characteristic of cabbage soup with buckwheat.” Meat, cabbage and buckwheat, he joked: all three essential Russian foods at once.

Inspired by the Toll depot discovery, permafrost food-storage experiments continued on the Taimyr Peninsula for the next 45 years. According to Vladimir Ledenev, head of the All-Russian Research Institute of Food Biotechnology, the point of the research is not to observe what stays the same during long-term permafrost storage, but to understand what changes. And the findings have been surprising. Prolonged freezing causes black and green tea leaves to form tiny cracks, improving its flavor. Over time, frozen vodka becomes “soft,” and tastes better as well. A vast array of foods, as well as seeds and fuel ingredients, have been subject to long-term study in the permafrost, with researchers exhaustively documenting changes in chemistry, physical properties, and quality.

But it’s not just about flavor. Increasingly, Russia’s military is building bases above the Arctic Circle. With air and land delivery often complicated by weather, the permafrost could be a lifesaver. “If we store this food inside natural permafrost refrigerators, people would be able to stay there for any time period, and they would not starve,” says Sergei Ulanin, director of the Research Institute for Storage Issues, which is planning at least one other permafrost storage facility besides Taimyr. And since 65 percent of Russian territory is currently covered by permafrost, the technique also has potential as a low-cost emergency storage system for the whole country.

It is ironic that such practical and concrete solutions stemmed from an unfulfilled dream. In May 1974, Shparo stood on the same spot in the New Siberian Islands where Toll thought he spotted Sannikov Land in 1886. By the 1970s, there were three hypotheses for Toll’s sighting. It may have been a splinter of a glacier, a land mass that eroded away, or even a mirage. But for Shparo, who had long considered Toll a hero and would soon join the second food retrieval expedition, this place and this moment were charged with significance. Here began an obsession that led to a great scientist’s death. But what Toll left behind would lead to discoveries that only his disappearance made possible.

The treatments are no longer mandatory, but they're still available.

In 2015, writer Maryam Omidi found herself in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, during a trip across Central Asia. She was only a short distance from Khoja Obi Garm, a Soviet-era sanatorium that specializes in radon water treatments. She found herself strangely smitten, “in awe of the architecture, the treatments and the hospitality … The more I read about sanatoriums, the more fascinated I was by them.”

Two years later, after visiting 39 sanatoriums across 11 former Eastern Bloc countries, and after a successful crowdfunding campaign, Omidi and London-based publisher Fuel released Holidays in Soviet Sanatoriums. Omidi worked with eight different photographers who specialize in the region to capture both the architecture and the people who still visit these once-popular—once-state-mandated—vacation destinations.

In 1920, Lenin issued the decree “On utilizing the Crimea for the medical treatment of working people.” The Labor Code of 1922 formalized mandatory vacations, and throughout the Soviet years, sanatoriums were built on the Crimean Peninsula and around the USSR. “Sanatoriums were a mix between medical institution and spa,” explains Omidi, in an e-mail. “Soviet citizens stayed at sanatoriums for at least two weeks a year, courtesy of a state-funded voucher, as part of the 'work hard, rest hard' ideology of the time.”

On first arriving at a sanatorium, a guest would consult with a doctor, who would then prescribe a series of treatments. In the early years of the sanatoriums, everything was rigidly scheduled—even time spent sunbathing. “Rest and recuperation at sanatoriums did not involve idly lolling about, but instead consisted of a schedule of different treatments and exercises that in the early days was quite rigidly upheld,” says Omidi. “Although sanatorium culture relaxed over time, in the 1920s and 1930s, visitors went without their families, and weren't allowed to drink, dance, or make too much noise. The idea was that it was a time for contemplative reflection on socialist ideals and an opportunity to reenergize before returning to work.”

The idea was also that everyone would derive the benefits of the sanatoriums, and that this would create a healthier and more productive workforce. With vouchers, called putevki, guests could stay either for free or at a subsidized rate, at a predetermined destination. However, these ideals didn’t always live up to the reality. “In practice,” writes Omidi in the book’s introduction, “the best accommodation usually went to those with money and connections.” Some sanatoriums, such as at Kyrgyzstan’s Aurora, took this preferential treatment a step further. Aurora was built in 1979 specifically for the Soviet elite, and had more than 350 staff for 200 guests.

Sanatoriums were constructed throughout the Soviet Union right up until its collapse in 1991, which explains the wild range of architectural styles among them. Khoja Obi Garm, the site that first intrigued Omidi, is a tiered, brutalist slab of concrete hewn into Gissar Mountain Range. Ordzhonikidze, in Sochi, Russia, is neoclassical in style and palatial in proportions, with a fountain, pool, and outdoor cinema. It was built in 1936, in the era of Stalin's purges, and is named after an associate of Stalin's who later died under mysterious circumstances. Reshma, which opened in 1987, is a red-brick monolith near the Volga River, about 300 miles northeast of Moscow. Its guests included cosmonauts and those impacted by radiation exposure at Chernobyl.

Nearly all of the sanatoriums featured in the book still offer a range of treatments—some more unusual than others. One particularly startling entry is the National Speleotherapy Clinic just outside Minsk, Belarus. Speleotherapy is a form of respiratory treatment that involves breathing inside a cave. In this case, that cave is a salt mine nearly 1,400 feet underground. While it does offer some facilities on the surface, the consultation rooms, activity areas, and dormitories are all situated in tunnels. According to the book, more than 7,000 children and adults visit each year.

Omidi was most surprised by the crude oil treatment at Naftalan, in Azerbaijan, a “petroleum spa town.” The oil found at Naftalan has specific properties that are supposedly beneficial, though some experts argue they’re more likely carcinogenic. “Crude oil of differing levels of purity is used for everything from bathing to gargling with,” Omidi explains. “Although it feels pretty luxurious to be in a bathtub full of crude oil, the whole experience is quite slippery so not the most graceful.”

Today, a night’s stay at the Soviet-era Chinar sanatorium in Naftalan costs about $112. (There are 11 sanatoriums in Naftalan, but only one that predates 1991.) Other sanatoriums, like the exclusive Aurora in Kyrgyzstan, can reach $200 per night during the summer. According to Omidi, some of the visitors today treat the sanatoriums more like hotels, to take advantage of their proximity to beaches, for example. “Others take them much more seriously, returning annually to treat certain ailments or to undergo treatments as a prophylactic measure.”

Regardless of the reasons for a visit to a sanatorium, "vacation" is a different concept today than it was in Soviet Russia. As metal fitter S. Antonov wrote in a newspaper column in 1966, “I receive my vacation once a year and I try not to waste a single day of it in idleness.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Omidi's book below.

This story originally ran on October 5, 2017.

Doctors sent "Devonshire colic" patients to soak in the town of Bath.

In 1724, the English doctor John Huxham encountered a swath of patients suffering from stomach pain, cold sweats, and copious vomiting of blood-tinged, “exceeding Green bile,” often followed by painful paralysis. He immediately identified it as an outbreak of Devonshire colic, a disease that no longer exists but once proliferated in the English county of Devon.

The colic was unusual in that doctors knew what caused it nearly from the start. In the first written record of the disease, a doctor named William Musgrave wrote in 1703 that the cause was “rough and acid cyder, drunk in too great quantities.” Devonshire, after all, remains to this day a prime apple-growing and cider-making area.

Musgrave had identified the cause. Devon’s cider was indeed the source of the disease. But he had misidentified the the reason. The roughness and acidity of the cider had nothing to do with it. The nauseous taste in the mouth, frequent vomiting, agonizing stomach pains, bright-red urine, pallid complexion, and fever he described are exactly the symptoms of lead poisoning, which, in later stages, can lead to severe paralysis and even death.

Since Roman times, lead had often made its way into alcohol, whether due to its makers using lead acetate to sweeten wine or storing it in containers glazed with lead. After centuries of neglect, writes doctor and medical historian H. A. Waldron, Devon’s orchards had been revived. And in Devon, cidermakers tended to process apples in lead-lined pounds and presses. Huxham blamed their flourishing for the 1724 epidemic. That year, he wrote, Devonshire produced more apples “than was known in the Memory of Man,” and the poor lived entirely off cider and apples.

Physicians of the time were familiar with lead poisoning, but it took several decades for another doctor, George Baker, to diagnose the true cause of the Devonshire colic. Skeptical of the acidity explanation, he pointed, in 1767, to the similarity of the symptoms between lead poisoning and the colic. In a series of experiments, he compared the lead content of Devonshire cider (high) to Hereford cider (none).

Well before Baker's discovery, though, doctors who diagnosed patients with the Devonshire colic had to figure out how to treat it. Many of them sent the afflicted to the ancient town of Bath in the Avon Valley. The town's name refers to the local springs, where mineral water burbles out of the ground at 120°F. Visitors flocked to the area to bathe in elaborate pools of healing waters, seeking cures for everything from leprosy to infertility.

While hot springs are undeniably relaxing, for the most part, that’s all they are. As Audrey Heywood wrote in a 1990 edition of the Medical History journal, “It is commonly assumed that spa therapy has only a placebo effect; that the pleasurable activity of immersion in warm mineral water has social and psychological effects, but no physiological value.”

Yet, as it happens, taking a long dip did have a marked effect on one ailment, Heywood wrote: “the paralysis that occurs as the result of chronic lead intoxication.” Even in the Middle Ages, physicians knew that sitting in the waters of Bath could occasionally cure some types of paralysis. The water's reputation for curing the malady became so notable that the town proudly displayed a collection of discarded crutches. One victim, a reverend from Lincolnshire, came to Bath in 1666 unable to lift his arms. After bathing in Bath's waters every day for almost two months, his doctor noted that the reverend was able to doff his hat in greeting once more.

The explanation for the cure is disarmingly simple. After consuming lead, the human body mistakes it for calcium and uses it to build bone. Over time, the accumulated poison causes violent symptoms. Weightlessness, as it happens, increases calcium loss from bones (a hazard for astronauts). Floating for hours gradually strips both calcium and lead from the skeleton, which is then urinated away.

Those “taking the waters” followed a certain system. Patients trooped into the pools in the morning, as early as 5 a.m. (The water was cleanest in the morning.) The King’s and Queen’s Baths were often filled with invalids, and the nearby Pump Room doled out glasses of warm, mineral-rich water. Other baths included the glamorous Cross Bath and the straightforwardly named Hot Bath and Leper’s Bath. Bathers submerged up to their necks, layered in thick clothing for modesty (for many years, the baths were mixed-gender). To amuse bored bathers, Heywood writes, musicians played instruments and sang.

Even as people drank more and more cider throughout England, Bath grew in popularity. By the early-18th century, it was de rigueur for the fashionable elite make the trip to Bath, not only to seek healing for high-end illnesses such as gout, but also to enjoy the pleasures of a resort town, which consisted of “dances, balls, gambling sessions, concerts, and theatrical performances in the evening,” writes academic Ian C. Bradley.

At the same time, doctors at the Bath General Hospital were conducting the “trial of the waters.” In what Heywood considers one of the first long-term medical therapy trials in history, doctors at the hospital treated poor paralysis victims with a regimen of fresh food and daily soaks. Those afflicted with paralysis from lead intoxication often recovered, not only from the weightless treatment, but from drinking large amounts of Bath spa water, which was rich in calcium and iron. It couldn’t have been very pleasant, though, to drink pints of the warm, sulfuric, eggy-flavored liquid.

When Baker published his findings, he knew both the treatment and cause of the Devonshire colic, and he felt sure they would be widely accepted. He was “well aware that it might cause some ill-feeling amongst the cider manufacturers,” Waldron writes. Yet, having only recently campaigned to repeal a tax on cider, “the Devonians were in a fighting mood.” Locals argued that Devon’s cider didn’t contain that much lead, and many cited the earlier theory that acidity was to blame. The lead Baker found in the cider, some even suggested, was caused by farmers shooting at birds in their orchards, which left bullets behind inside the apples.

Yet Baker’s thesis went relatively unscathed. It helped that lead-lined machines were slowly replaced by more modern ones, so by the end of the century, cases of the Devonshire colic became rare. After hearing about its deleterious effects, cidermakers may have quietly removed the lead from their presses, writes the doctor and medical historian R.M.S. McConaghey. “Had Baker achieved his object and eliminated the cider colic from the land of his birth?” muses McConaghey. “We do not know.”

Today, sipping a Devon cider and taking the waters at Bath aren’t hazardous or healing, respectively. But if you feel like it, you can still sip a cup of the the famous Bath water in the Pump Room to the sound of musicians playing, much as they did hundreds of years ago.

Like humans, the notoriously nervous cats can use a surrogate best friend.

Cheetahs and dogs weren’t always friends. And at first glance, the feline-and-canine couple seems an odd pairing—one that turns heads for its cuteness, if not its unconventionality.

But the practice of rearing young cheetahs with a canine companion has become a major means of relaxing the notoriously nervous cats at U.S. zoos from New York to San Diego.

The relationship didn’t begin there, however. Nor, for that matter, did it start on an African wildlife reserve. Captive cheetahs and dogs first became friends in a small town in Oregon.

In 1976, research scientist and conservation biologist Laurie Marker was living in Winston, a town of about 3,000 people. As the curator of a cheetah-breeding program at Wildlife Safari, she found herself hand-rearing a lonely cheetah cub named Khayam.

Cheetahs are companionable litter-mates, but Marker had no other cats to put with Khayam. So she decided to try pairing the fastest land mammal on the planet with the animal typically thought of as a human’s best friend.

And it worked: Khayam and a Lab-mix named Shesho became fast friends.

Raising Khayam with a dog “provided friendship, security, and [helped keep the cheetah] calm," Marker says in an email. "Companion dogs act as a surrogate for cheetah siblings ... It is the friendship between the two individuals that creates a strong bond, and this is what makes for a successful pairing."

In other words, it chills the cheetah out. Now, when a cub that’s abandoned or orphaned ends up in human care, many zoos pair the cat with a dog as a substitute sibling.

“When I provided the San Diego Zoo with a cheetah named Arusha five years later, I recommended placing a puppy with him,” Marker says. “They did, and the publicity around the cheetah-dog duo made the popularity of companion animals soar.”

There’s no doubt that cheetahs lead stressful lives. Hunted to extinction in India, Israel, and Egypt, there are now fewer than 7,000 of them left worldwide. That’s a drop of more than 90 percent since 1900. And in the wild, only 5 percent of cheetah cubs make it to adulthood, due to lurking lions, hyenas, and poachers, plus the constant threat of not getting another meal.

“The cheetah would rather flee than fight,” says Suzi Rapp, vice president of animal programs at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, which has 16 cheetahs and four companion dogs. “Even though the cheetah has this [incredible] speed, there are predators that are bigger and badder than they are.”

All of which makes the animals nervous, even in captivity.

Dogs, on the other hand, are often mellow. Thousands of years of instinct have been subdued and replaced by thousands of years of domestication. From the historical use of hunting dogs and sled dogs to today’s show dogs and Internet dogs, canines occupy a special place in the human heart. We’ve also taught them to provide furry, drooling therapy for everyone from babies to college students to, evidently, Africa’s rarest big cat.

Captive cheetahs form singular bonds with their companion dogs, which are usually easygoing breeds eager to make new friends. But cheetahs are as fickle as they are fast. “I can always introduce an older dog to a new cheetah, but I can’t introduce an old cheetah to a new dog,” says Rapp.

In the wild, male cheetahs often form “coalitions”—tight-knit groups—to get this companionship. But female cheetahs are solitary and rear cubs on their own. Even in captivity they’ve been known to occasionally forsake single cubs.

“Cheetah moms don’t raise single cubs,” says Sarah Roy, a carnivore supervisor at Wildlife Safari.

Some zoos keep their dogs with their cheetahs at practically all times. Other zoos, such as the one in Columbus, have their dogs behave more like service animals, and only accompany their cheetahs while they’re on the clock.

Some of these relationships are famous in their communities. There’s Winspear (cheetah) and Amani (dog) at the Dallas Zoo. Emmett (cheetah) and Cullen (dog) in Columbus. Kumbali (cheetah) and Kago (dog) at the Metro Richmond Zoo.

The original Khayam became such a celebrity that she has a statue in downtown Winston, and was named a “Notable Oregonian” by the state legislature.

The relationship, an adorable example of mutualism, has captivated zoo visitors and clearly benefited the jumpy felines. The cheetahs get a sense of security, and the dogs get a new best friend.

“[Cheetahs are] extremely high-stress animals," says Roy. "Dogs are everyone’s best friend. Cheetahs soak that in." So much so, she says, that some are called "the dog of the cat family."

Roy now looks after Rhino, a five-breed mix, and Khayam Jr.—a “packaged little duo.” The two reside at the same safari park where Marker hand-raised her cheetah, the new cub’s namesake, over 40 years ago.

Though there’s no one dog breed built especially for cheetah therapy, zoos use individual ones that are confident and roughly same size as the big cats. (Best to keep the chihuahuas at home.)

This practice also derives from Marker’s work. Now living in Namibia, where she founded and runs the Cheetah Conservation Fund, Marker uses Anatolian shepherds to guard cheetahs from predators and poachers alike. But for companionship purposes, she has a different choice.

“I recommend using a Labrador or golden retriever,” she says. “Calmer breeds are better for cheetahs and easier for people to manage.”

Since Khayam got her doggy pal over 40 years ago, the canine-feline relationship has become a benchmark in captive-cheetah care. Relaxing the cats is also key to helping repopulate the species. After all, a relaxed cheetah is an eager cheetah.

“It’s a very beautiful relationship,” says Rapp. “Our cheetahs are so secure, because they have their dog.”

This summer, chill like an ancient hominin and make some art.

Life in the Stone Age wasn’t easy. Tens of thousands of years ago, during the most recent ice age, Neanderthals and humans shared a world chock full of dangers: lions, sabertooth tigers, mammoth hunts gone awry. But despite these threats, our ancestors found time to express themselves. In the secluded recesses of caves, communities would spend time working on the walls and ceilings, creating artworks—many depicting the deadly beasts they dealt with—that had no obvious practical purpose.

With modern humans currently spending their summer days strolling in the park or chilling at the beach, we got to wondering: were these early artworks a form of leisure? Were they a way of passing the time, of unwinding after a hard day’s hunt? Could they be the Stone Age equivalent of, say, kicking back and watching Netflix?

For early humans, survival was more than a full-time job, says Steven Kuhn, a paleontologist at the University of Arizona. It’s not like you got to take vacation. “If your life is just…keeping alive, it’s not like you say, ‘Okay, it’s 6:30, I’m going home,’” he says.

All the same, there was plenty of down time. Nightfall brought on new threats, and made foraging and hunting more difficult and more dangerous. To survive, ancient communities would withdraw into cave systems at night, where they were less exposed. “For most of the world, for most of history, when the sun went down you couldn’t really do much,” Kuhn says.

Different kinds of hominins seem to have spent those empty hours in intriguingly similar ways. Scientists used to think that early humans were the sole artists of their time, but research last year suggested that Neanderthals, too, did arts and crafts in cave systems. Though not as widespread or elaborate as human art, Neanderthals appear to have painted figures, handprints, and dots on walls, and may have even done some body painting.

Some art by early homo sapiens was remarkably complex: in the karst deposits of modern-day Spain and France, our hominin ancestors painted abstractions, geometries, animals, and handprints, the purposes of which are still hotly debated. Some say the depictions of animals were to commemorate past hunts, or to ensure successful hunts in the future. Some scholars have noted similarities between the geometric patterns and the patterns that materialize on hallucinogenic trips.

Whatever their function, Kuhn says that they took time. “It wasn’t like somebody was watercolor painting,” he says. “They were hard to do, and deeply meaningful and significant.” When asked whether he considers cave painting a form of leisure, Kuhn makes an analogy. In our own time, he points out, some hardworking artists are always busy creating. For them, art isn’t calming. It’s a calling. “An artist doesn’t consider making art a leisure activity,” he says.

It may have even helped bring on the bubonic plague.

The mid-sixth century inspires strong feelings, even today. Recent research has placed it among the very worst of times to have been alive in all of human history, partly because, in 536, the sun slid behind a haze that hovered over Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia—and stayed there for 18 grueling months. According to Byzantine historian Procopius, “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed."

A year and a half without sunlight, it turns out, is a lot worse than just gloomy. Temperatures dropped, crops refused to grow, and people couldn’t eat. Heck—some draw a connection between this event and the first pandemic of bubonic plague, which began to course through the Eastern Roman Empire in 541. All told, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained too cold for comfort until about 550; that first European summer of 536 was more than 30 degrees cooler than the average for the previous 30 years.

Scientists believe the chill was brought on by not one but two volcanic eruptions that sent ash and other particles flying into the atmosphere, where they deflected sunlight that could have otherwise nurtured crops. It is thought that the first eruption took place in 536, somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, maybe in Iceland. Now, researchers believe they have located the site of the second one, thought to have occurred in 539: Ilopango, just east of San Salvador, capital of El Salvador. They published their findings recently in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

Researchers have long known from volcanic deposits that Ilopango erupted furiously sometime between the third and sixth centuries. For Payson Sheets, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and a coauthor of the new paper, that window was far too wide to draw any conclusions. He has been studying volcanic ash in El Salvador since 1969, and he made himself a promise long ago: “Before I die,” he says he told himself, “I really want to get a good date on the Ilopango eruption.”

To do that, the team studied three tree trunks coated in ash from the eruption (known as Tierra Blanca Joven, or TBJ, which means “white young earth”). The trees’ rings, which record years of growth and can be correlated with other trees to provide a detailed, year-to-year climatic history, indicate that each tree had died between 500 and 545. That provides a far more precise timeframe than even radiocarbon dating can, and one that lines up directly with the global cooling period. Further supporting the notion that TBJ was one of the two eruptions responsible, the researchers studied the thickness of Ilopango’s deposits, as well as their distances from the volcano's actual caldera—now Lake Ilopango. Those measurements indicate that TBJ qualifies as a Volcanic Explosivity Index 7 event, and one of the 10 most powerful eruptions to take place on Earth in the past 7,000 years.

Today, Ilopango is no longer active, and it certainly doesn’t contribute to any kind of cooling. But according to Sheets, those who go scuba diving in the lake have to take care to avoid hot water vents spewing sulfurous residue from the volcano’s old magma chamber.

Mongolia's last reindeer riders don’t rely on their herd just for transportation.

It’s a sunny summer morning on the Mongolian taiga—a remote, high-altitude area bordering Siberia—but I’m wearing a winter coat. My host Otgontsetseg, though, doesn’t seem to mind the almost-freezing temperature. She’s wearing a winter deel, a traditional Mongolian garment that’s worn here year-round, and rises at 5:30 a.m. to do this every morning.

Otgontsetseg and her husband, father, and two children are one of 44 families left in the Tsaatan tribe, a nomadic group of herders in northern Mongolia whose name literally translates to “those who have reindeer.” And she’s up early to milk her herd.

Pail in hand, she heads straight for a young female that is staked furthest from her ger, an easily assembled and reassembled structure known elsewhere as a yurt, although up here they resemble teepees more than the traditional yurts found around Mongolia.

The herd is staked up for the night as protection from wolves—the family’s dog can guard them this way—and before letting the herd loose to graze in the surrounding mountains, Otgontsetseg needs to milk about eight to ten of the females so she has enough milk for the day. She crouches down and adjusts her deel, and the spray of milk against the pail rings loud in the morning silence.

Compared to cattle and other livestock, reindeer don’t produce much milk. So the jug that Otgontsetseg fills to the brim over the next hour is a precious commodity.

The Tsaatan rely on their reindeer for just about everything: food, fur, and even transportation. (Members of the tribe learn to ride reindeer as children.) But they never slaughter their reindeer, and they only eat the meat (and use the hide) if the reindeer has died from natural causes. Instead, they add their milk to their tea and use it to make cheese and bake bread—a deliciously moist and dense loaf that’s offered at just about every meal. While nomadic families across Mongolia make bread in their gers, this is the only place where it’s made with reindeer milk.

After the morning’s milking, Otgontsetseg makes tea, prepares breakfast, and gets her kids dressed. Once that’s done, she’s excited to show me how she makes the bread she’s seen me enjoy so much. She knows I can’t resist it, and smiles each time I go for a second or third piece.

The ingredients are a touch of reindeer milk with flour, salt, yeast, and water. The water came from a small river not far from the ger, but Otgontsetseg rode for a full day (on reindeer) to buy the other ingredients in the nearest soum (village). So they have to be carefully rationed.

The family’s situation is unusual, but it’s not exceptional for Mongolia, a country where 25 percent of the population still lives a traditional, nomadic lifestyle. Historically, the country has been sparsely populated by nomads who move to avoid overtaxing the grasslands—a result of Mongolia’s unique geography, which cannot support much agriculture and farming. In recent years, modern conveniences, as well as droughts, have drawn or pushed nomads, including reindeer herders, to towns and cities. But families like Otgontsetseg’s can’t imagine any other way of life.

Otgontsetseg switches into an automatic rhythm of motions, straining the reindeer milk through a sieve before adding water, carefully measuring everything by sight. Following the recipe she learned, like every woman in the tribe, from her mother, she adds flour, yeast, and salt into a pot that’s been in her family for more than 20 years.

Now that I’m a more familiar presence in her home, Otgontsetseg is opening up. She gestures as she bakes, motioning across the language barrier, and explains through an interpreter how she’ll start teaching her daughter (now six) these baking techniques once she turns nine.

While Otgontsetseg mixes the dough by hand, using the ground as her makeshift table, she explains the importance of the size of the dough. If it’s too large, it has to be baked differently, using the embers of the fire to cover the top of the dough and cook it all the way through. But luckily for us, today’s loaves—she’s made enough dough to bake two of them—are perfectly proportioned. We let the dough sit and rise before moving it to the stovetop to bake for 15 minutes on each side.

It’s a simple process, but Otgontsetseg stays busy. While she bakes, she manages the children, chats with neighbors, and boils reindeer milk to make cheese. For the reindeer-milk cheese, she reduces the milk for 30 minutes, until it starts to form clumps and harden, and sets aside the reduced milk to cool before transferring it to a cheesecloth and straining out the remaining liquid. From there, she and her husband, Ganbat, press it into its final shape.

The cheese has to dry and harden for a day (the almost-parmesan-like cheese is absolutely worth the wait), but once the bread cools, it is ready to eat. On the same board that she just used to mince mutton for a noodle soup, Otgontsetseg cuts the bread and passes it around for everyone to taste. Otgontsetseg and Ganbat cover their pieces in a layer of sugar, which is common here. But I eat mine plain, because I want to taste this bread for exactly what it is: the only bread in the world made with reindeer milk.

The aloha shirt has many possible inventors and a long, fraught cultural history.

On the cover of his 1961 album Blue Hawaii, Elvis Presley can’t help but look impossibly cool. It’s not just the bouffant or half-smirk, or the plumeria lei draped ever-so-effortlessly around his neck, or the ukelele dwarfed in his large hands. No, it’s the shirt—a red zinger of a Hawaiian shirt, also known as an aloha shirt, with white tendriled flowers scattered over a woodblock print.

The chillest shirt style in the world has a murky, hotly contested provenance. No one can agree who invented the aloha shirt, according to Dale Hope, the owner of the Kahala shirt company (“The Original Aloha Shirt since 1936”) and author of The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands. But many have tried to own the shirt as a claim to fame.

First and perhaps most notable is Ellery J. Chun. The son of Chinese immigrants, Chun returned to Hawaiʻi after graduating from Yale University in 1931 to manage his family’s dry goods store in Honolulu, according to his 2000 obituary in The New York Times. He saw local Japanese teens wearing shirts made from rayon, and local Filipino boys wearing colorful barong shirts. When the Great Depression hit, Chun changed the store’s name to King-Smith Clothiers (to attract non-Chinese customers) and began selling shirts cut from flashy Japanese kimono material.

As Chun told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1976, “[T]here was no authentic Hawaiian material in those days so I bought the most brilliant and gaudy Japanese kimono material, designed the shirts, and had a tailor make a few dozen colorful short-sleeved shirts, which I displayed in the store window with the sign ‘Hawaiian shirts.’” As he remembered it, this happened sometime around 1932 or 1933, before he patented the term “Aloha Shirt” in 1937. Key words: "as Chun remembered it."

Elsewhere in downtown Honolulu, Koichiro Miyamoto took out an ad advertising “aloha” shirts in the Honolulu Advertiser, starting on June 28, 1935. It was the first documented use of the term. Miyamoto had been running his late father’s dry goods shop, called Musa-Shiya Shoten, for over a decade, a storefront almost hidden in an obscure part of town near the river and the local fish market.

Miyamoto had been in the shirt-making business ever since 1920, when he received five years’ worth of English textile orders (that he’d placed annually but were delivered en masse), according to an article published in Printer’s Ink in 1922. He later learned this delay was caused, rather inconveniently, by World War I. To get rid of this stockpile of fabric, Miyamoto began advertising custom-cut shirts in local Honolulu papers as early as 1922.

According to Dolores Miyamoto, the tailor’s wife, the actor John Barrymore came into the couple’s store in the early 1930s and pointed to a bolt of yukata cloth, a lightweight fabric used in some kimonos, and asked if they could turn it into a shirt. In the years following, Miyamoto began advertising these yukata shirts as “aloha” shirts. In every ad, Miyamoto included the logo of his store: a racist caricature of a smiling Japanese man clad in a kimono, known as Musa-Shiya the shirtmaker.

The dueling origin stories have not become more settled over time. After the Honolulu Star Bulletin ran an article on September 16, 1984, attributing the first commercially produced aloha shirt to Chun in 1936, the contrarians came out. Robert C. Schmitt, Hawaiʻi’s first state statistician, pointed out Musa-Shiya Shoten's advertising history, citing his own work on the subject, published in the 1980 edition of the Hawaiian Journal of History.

One Margaret S. Young also wrote in to the Star Bulletin to say she remembered things a little differently. She mentioned a classmate, Gordon S. Young (no relation), who developed a pre-aloha shirt in the early 1920s, which his mother’s dressmaker had fashioned out of yukata cloth. Young said Gordon took a supply of these shirts to the University of Washington in 1926 and made a tropical stir the Pacific Northwest.

There are, of course, many other origin stories. Rube Hauseman claimed to have made the shirts for the original Waikiki beach boys, Hawaiians who worked for beach clubs on the waterfront and taught tourists how to surf and canoe. Hauseman said he used fabric purchased from Musa-Shiya, though he called them "rathskeller shirts," after a celebrity-studded bar that they all hung out in, Hope writes. Ti How Ho, the owner of Surfriders Sportswears Manufacturing, claimed to have made and sold his first Hawaiian shirts, in his retail store in the heart of Waikiki in 1934. Other claims notwithstanding, Chun’s name seems to have stuck around the longest. Maybe he really was the first, or maybe he was a businessman savvy enough to jump on a patent and manage the narrative.

Either way, the aloha shirt kept growing in popularity, particularly among tourists. After World War II, U.S. servicemen returned to the mainland wearing aloha shirts, Linda Arthur, a textile and clothing expert from Washington State University, told Collector’s Weekly. Clothiers devoted exclusively to the aloha shirt had begun churning them out, among them Alfred Shaheen, often credited with turning the shirts into art.

Though the very first aloha shirts depicted traditionally Japanese themes, designers began incorporating imagery from Hawaiʻi in what was called a “hash print”—a nod to food made by throwing whatever was left over into a pot: beaches, palm trees, surfboards. The most obvious prints were emblazoned with repeating ribbons of “Aloha” or “Hawaii.” They may not have been elegant, but they were certainly on brand.

Beginning in the 1950s, Shaheen hired actual artists to design his shirts. He sent the designers on trips throughout Asia and the Pacific. The result was elegant, splashy shirts that incorporate motifs from around the Pacific. Shaheen went on to design the iconic “Tiare Tapa” shirt form that Elvis wore on the Blue Hawaii cover. An artist named Elsie Das also helped pioneer these shifting motifs, first designing prints for Watumull’s East India Store and eventually opening her own sportswear store, Hope writes. “Das converted them into locally appropriate designs,” he says. “Instead of Mt. Fuji, she used Diamond Head. Instead of cherry blossoms, she used ginger, plumeria, bird of paradise, hibiscus, anthurium.”

It would be remiss not to mention that the cultural rise of the aloha shirt was helped a great deal by bureaucrats and businessmen who really, really hated sweating. The city of Honolulu passed a resolution in 1946 that allowed civic employees to wear sport shirts from June through October. But that was just the first domino in making the aloha shirt acceptable business attire. In an effort to preserve and celebrate Hawaiian culture, the city also established Aloha Week in 1947, which soon expanded across the islands and swelled to a month. These festivals increased tourism and, subsequently, demand for aloha shirts.

In 1962, a professional manufacturing association called the Hawaiian Fashion Guild launched the ambitiously named “Operation Liberation,” which sent two aloha shirts to every member of the Hawaiʻi House of Representatives and Senate, Hope writes. The Senate later passed a resolution recommending aloha attire be worn throughout the summer. Though there was initial outrage, relaxation won out. “I think most employers, bosses, and business owners thought that would be too casual and their customers wouldn’t treat them seriously,” Hope says. “But then they really embraced it.”

The guild later lobbied for “Aloha Friday,” a proposal asking employers to allow male workers to wear aloha shirts in particular on the last business day of the week during summer months. The tradition began in 1966 and morphed into what is now more widely known around the world as “Casual Friday.” In 2016, Democratic congressman Mark Takai asked House Speaker Paul Ryan to allow aloha shirts on Fridays in Congress, according to the Honolulu Civil Beat. Ryan declined.

Many of the iconic motifs of the shirts—hula girls, palm trees, outrigger canoes—aren’t exactly proper representations of the richness of Hawaiian culture. Perhaps the most authentically Hawaiian shirt is the palaka, a shirt printed with a distinctive woven pattern of blue and white checks, according to the paper “Some Notes on the Origin of Certain Hawaiian Shirts” Alfons J. Korn of the University of Hawaiʻi. Naturally, that has a history, too: The fabric was first imported for plantation workers at the turn of the 20th century.

On the other hand, many scholars see the aloha shirt as a symbol of Hawaiʻi’s putative multicultural harmony, according to cultural theorist Sämi Ludwig in American Multiculturalism in Context: Views From at Home and Abroad. And in her book The Art of the Aloha Shirt, textile historian Arthur wrote, “to those who live in Hawaii, it is a visible symbol of their multi-ethnic heritage,” made as it is with a Western shape, Japanese fabric, Chinese tailors, and Filipino style—and in Hawaiʻi. Hope agrees. “There’s a little feeling you have when you’re wearing an aloha shirt,” he says. “You have a skip in your step and a little smile. One guy said if everyone wore an aloha shirt there would be no wars, and I think it’s really true.”

Ludwig notes that some native Hawaiians disagree. Haunani-Kay Trask, activist and former director of the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, has condemned them as “the grotesque commercialization of everything Hawaiian.”

Now, some Hawaiian designers, such as Kūha‘o Zane of the company Sig Zane Designs, have reclaimed the aloha shirt with designs imbued with traditional Hawaiian themes. Zane’s shirts have become favorites of Hawaiian politicians, who are frequently seen wearing the sleek and subtle prints. "I feel that Haunani-Kay Trask’s opinion is directed toward companies that have borrowed the images and inspiration by the islands for their own profits without participating in reciprocity toward the community that created or make up the environment of the imagery," Zane writes in an email. As a Hawaiian designer, Zane says he sees the aloha shirt as a platform to share his culture with a global audience.

Just as the aloha shirt may not have had a single inventor, it doesn’t represent any single idea, and can range from elegant and respectful to silly and incredibly tacky. It turns out that your aloha shirt could be saying more than you thought it did.

Our recommendation? What about this shirt, decorated with an image of one of the famous aloha shirts? It’s just so bad it might be good.

Fleeing conflict in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, they've created a rare melting pot in India.

When food became scarce under Taliban rule, Hoor got creative. Since the Mujahideen conflict, trade between neighbors had been periodically forbidden, rations were portioned out to the privileged, and even growing garden plots could be risky. But years of war had taught her how to find food for her family in a pinch. Hoor snuck groceries under her chadari, or veil, stretched poor-quality rice imported from Bangladesh into filling meals, and turned to the black market for meat.

Now relocated to New Delhi, Hoor is part of a small collective of migrant and refugee women from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and other conflict-stricken countries who have created a growing tiffin, or lunch delivery, business. (Hoor’s name, and the names of all the refugee women in this article, has been changed to protect her visa status in India.) Calling themselves the Khanapados ("food and neighborhood") collective, these women—many of whom were professionals in their home countries, but don’t have the visa status to take on paid work in India—have transformed culinary skills developed in times of scarcity into an artistic collaboration and growing business.

To understand the contradictions of their lives in New Delhi, you have only to stand in the busy road in the middle of South Delhi’s Saket neighborhood, between Khirki Extension and Select City Walk Mall. The mall is a behemoth of glass and marble, frosty with air conditioning and gaudy with advertisements. It’s home to the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, a sleek gallery that has showcased Khanapados’s artistic work. Khirki Extension is a sprawling neighborhood, whose potholed streets overflow with motorbikes and errant cows. The mall’s clothing displays and global food chains boast a consumerist cosmopolitanism. But Khirki is cosmopolitan in a different way: It is home to many of Delhi's Middle Eastern and African migrant families, many of whom have fled war and economic crisis.

Largely populated by North Indians, New Delhi can be a harsh city for migrants. Non-Indians often live in different neighborhoods, and racially mixed community spaces are rare. Migrants are often victims of harassment, and racist violence against Africans is a particularly brutal problem.

Walk through Khirki, however, and you can witness migrant communities living and thriving. Underground African hair salons are interspersed with Indian tailors who can’t make typical sari blouses, but specialize in Nigerian dresses. Shops selling North Indian chapati flatbread mingle with stores offering thick, nigella-seed-studded Afghani naan. Khirki’s diversity has attracted artists from around the country, and murals by local women and children reflect the neighborhood’s status as a rare racial melting pot.

Sreejata Roy is one of these artists. She and Mrityunjay Chatterjee, who comprise the artistic collective Revue, began the collaboration that would lead to Khanapados in 2017. At the time, Roy was working with local children and young women, encouraging them to draw maps of their own experiences of the neighborhood. Roy was intrigued by the prominence of Khirki’s diverse culinary landscape in these maps. When she invited older neighborhood women to map their culinary experiences, they responded with expansive creations that encompassed memories of home: Nepal, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Roy’s project soon pivoted: Instead of simply creating paper records of food, why not bring the archive to life?

The Khanapados “Living Lab” was born. At first glance, the Living Lab is indistinguishable from other apartments in the neighborhood: a one-room flat with a small gas stove. But for more than a year, it has been the site of a rare culinary experiment. While Indian cuisine is vast and diverse, incorporating historical influences from across the globe, Roy says that Delhi residents aren’t always welcoming to cuisines brought by new migrants. In this context, the Living Lab became a rare point of contact. “We thought we would meet and share recipes,” says Roy. Instead, the women cooked for each other, one woman preparing a meal for the group each week. They talked as they worked, chopping memories of home, family, and festivals with the onions and sizzling them with the meat. They communicated in a mix of English, Hindi, Persian, Arabic, and Google translate.

Many of them cooked recipes colored by war. The Afghani women shared the recipe for home-made Afghanistan Fried Chicken. A local version of the American classic—marinated in sour ghore angur (dry green grapes) and made crispy with a coating of roti bread crumbs or crushed masala potato chips—it was one of the few pleasures available to them during war. Ladan, from Somalia, shared her recipe for semolina porridge, which, requiring nothing but water and salt, was a staple food during lean times.

Their weekly cooking sessions evolved into monthly pop-up events, which culminated in a 2018 festival at the Kiran Nadar Museum. Throughout, they documented their culinary discoveries and memories in an online archive they dubbed the Museum of Food. For Roy, the project was a work of art, a way of capturing the complex and living relationship between food, memory, and neighborhood. As they cooked together, writes Roy, the women themselves became living museums documenting the cultures they’d left, and building a new culture together. These culinary jam sessions also provided the women with small incomes: Thanks to grant funding from the British Council and the Prince Claus Fund, the women received a small fee for each day of cooking, and they sold their food at the pop-up events.

Now, the collective is focusing more on livelihood by taking their collaboration out of the museum and into Delhiites’ lunchboxes. Neighborhood locals, university students, and organizations can order Afghani pulao (rice and meat) and other specialties from the Khanapados lunch delivery service for around a dollar a plate. That's about the same price as lunch in a working-class dhaba, or roadside cafe. (Roy says they set that price to make the food accessible to locals.) Like many Indian tiffin services, the food is home-cooked, delivered in reusable containers, and available for order on WhatsApp.

Local Delhiites haven’t taken to all of the Khanapados members’ dishes, says Roy. The women of the collective tend to use less spice than many North Indians prefer, and they sometimes add unfamiliar flavors. “One of our colleagues, she’s from Somalia, she put some perfume (attar) in the biryani and nobody liked it,” Roy says. Still, some dishes, such as the mantu dumplings and qabuli pulao, which are already familiar to Delhiites thanks to the city’s many Afghan restaurants, are consistent crowd pleasers.

For members of the collective, Khanapados has become an outlet for their creative and entrepreneurial energy, countering the monotony and instability of refugee life in India. “In Afghanistan, I was a teacher,” says Hoor. Unable to practice her profession due to visa restrictions, she says, “I came here and sat in the house.” Khanapados gave her a sense of community. Ladan, who fled conflict in Somalia before relocating with her family to India, feels the same way. “When the children went to school every day, I was alone,” she says in Hindi. “I was bored.” She came to the Living Lab with friends, and has been earning through the collective’s work.

Khanapados hasn’t just given the women a way to earn money. It has also, says Mari from Afghanistan, who translates for her friends from Persian and Arabic to Hindi and English, given them something people fleeing war too often lack: respect. Using skills they’ve developed through scarcity—the often-uncelebrated ability to nourish their families and communities in difficult circumstances—the women of Khanapados have carved out a space for themselves both in Khirki Extension and in the rarefied art gallery across the street. “Everyone knows that we’re the women who make food,” Mari says with a laugh. “We’ve become famous.”

This summer, chill like an ancient lady and sweat, recite poetry, and swig wine.

The maidens of Sparta spent long hours under the bright sun. They pumped their legs and swung their arms, they sprinted and grappled, they lifted their voices in choruses. One song likened a beautiful woman to a horse with strong haunches and clamorous hooves.

At least, that’s what scholars suspect. Piecing together what we know of the women of Sparta, the famously ferocious Greek city-state that flourished from the seventh to the fourth centuries BC, is a bit like reassembling the jumbled fragments of a mosaic. The ancient world exists only in pieces, literal and figurative—and that’s especially true for Sparta.

Classicists point out that Sparta’s oral traditions were less robust than, say, Athenian traditions, and the city-state hasn’t yielded as many archaeological clues. Spartan households were, after all, fairly spartan. (Elsewhere, scholars glean hints from female figures on funeral reliefs or locally minted currency; for a long time, Sparta had neither.) “Almost all of our major sources on Spartan women are the work of authors who were not Spartans, and who lived much later than the times they discuss,” writes Sarah B. Pomeroy, an emeritus professor of classics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, in her book Spartan Women. Many of those chroniclers were men, who chose to train their focus on other men. “Remarks about women usually constitute a small fraction of a text devoted to another subject.”

But Pomeroy and other scholars have now tried to flesh out what, exactly, Spartan women got up to. Despite the relatively sparse historical record, they have contemplated everything everything from sexuality to political participation and religion. Their accounts offer some hints about what relatively elite Spartan women might have done for kicks.

As girls, they grappled and grunted their way through physical training. They weren’t preparing for combat, but they still got swole. In Sparta, “physical fitness was considered to be as important for females as it was for males, and girls took part in races and trials of strength,” notes the historian Sue Blundell in her book, Women in Ancient Greece. Plutarch describes workouts (and public spectacles) in which girls ran, wrestled, and flung javelins.

Spartan girls were educated in mousike, or the arts of the muses, too—and while their brothers’ worlds revolved around military drills, the girls probably also fine-tuned their skills in music, reciting poetry, and dancing. Girls recited choral lyric poems written by Alcman, including one that mentions the “silver” face of a woman; Pomeroy interprets this to mean that she was glistening with sweat. Grown-up Spartan ladies were reportedly famous for a dance called the bibasis, whose cheeky and challenging choreography, Pomeroy writes, required a dancer to leap into the air and “thump her buttocks with her heels.”

As they grew, women lived a sporting life, sometimes hunting, running in competitions, or racing horses. They were probably the only Greek women to glug wine, Pomeory writes. Spartan women tended to marry at 18 or so—an age Pomeory describes as “substantially later” than the marriage age elsewhere in Greece—and though many privileged women owned property, they weren’t typically encumbered by it.

That's not to say that Spartan society was equal. One of the reasons that Spartan women could savor so many freedoms was that their culture subjugated others that their army had conquered—and women often offloaded domestic tasks to people such as helots, a group that the second-century Greek scholar Julius Pollux described as having a status “between free men and slaves.”

The primary task of Spartan women—to conceive and raise strong sons, or daughters who would do so—“did not require the full-time practice and scrutiny that was imposed upon the boys,” Pomeroy writes. “Thus, it would appear that they enjoyed some privacy and leisure.” Compared to other ladies of Ancient Greece, the womenfolk of Sparta “had plenty of time to do whatever they wanted to do.”

Still, many of the activities that occupied Spartan women’s time—working out, busting a move, throwing back a couple of drinks—weren’t just recreational. Poetry and music, for instance, were likely part of initiation rituals that signaled community values, such as marriage and motherhood. Ellen Millender, a classicist at Reed College, says as much in a chapter about Spartan women in the two-volume A Companion to Sparta. “This training instilled in Spartan girls the polis’ system of values through the medium of the poet’s verses, and thus prepared them to adapt to those gender roles, behaviors, and responsibilities that sustained Sparta’s body politic,” Millender writes.

Ancient writers also highlighted the way that strong individual bodies helped a culture flex its muscle: strong women begat strong children, they argued. Millender suspects that the emphasis on “cultivation of vigorous mothers of Spartiate warriors” was partly responsible for the prime place of athletics in Spartan life.

Thankfully, modern-day women don’t need to partake in an initiation ritual to enjoy a truly old-fashioned foot race, or a healthy pour of wine. This summer, go ahead and take a cue from a glistening Spartan lady. Whether you want to raise young warriors is up to you.

These artificial mountains were fast, thrilling, and probably very dangerous.

Russia is flush with chilly, wind-whipped mountains. Running north-south in the country’s western half are the Urals—older than the dinosaurs and stippled with spruce, pines, and firs. Down near the southern border, just above Georgia, is Mount Elbrus, a volcanic peak rising 18,510 feet among the Caucasus Mountains, with snow on its summit and hot springs on its flanks. The far eastern side of the country has one range after another swooping across it.

A few centuries ago, these icy peaks were temporarily joined by others—much smaller but ferocious in their own right. In public squares and private courtyards rose wooden structures sloped like hills. Once slicked with ice, they promised zippy, spectacularly dangerous fun.

From the 15th or 16th century onward, according to roller coaster enthusiast and historian Robert Cartmell, these “ice slides” or “flying mountains” went up in several Russian towns near rivers—St. Petersburg and its Neva River, in particular. These thrill rides were long, tall, and quick, and ultimately helped pave the way for today’s safer, but still scream-inducing amusements. “Most students of roller coasters believe the origin of the rides can be traced” to these water-slicked slopes, Cartmell wrote.

Intrepid riders clambered up a set of wooden stairs to as high as 70 or 80 feet in the air, according to Australian National University historian Carroll Pursell in the article “Fun Factories: Inventing American Amusement Parks,” published in the history-of-technology journal ICON. They settled into sleds—at first nothing more than a hollowed block of ice stuffed with a bit of straw and a single measly rope to fasten them in—and then plummeted down at a 50-degree angle. The slides were watered each day to keep them slick and smooth, and sand was heaped onto the track at the bottom to slow riders down.

By the 1700s, these winter amusements soared above the shore of the Neva as part of public winter festivals. The slides sometimes spanned several blocks and were flanked by trees, cut and re-erected to evoke a forest grove. The artificial mountains were often topped by ornate pagodas or flapping flags, and surrounded by torches that allowed the thrills to continue after dark.

Aristocrats and other well-moneyed people mustered their courage, too. In The Incredible Scream Machine: A History of the Roller Coaster, Cartmell cites a dispatch from the court of Anna Ioannovna, empress from 1730 to 1740. The writer describes “a new diversion” that was “wide enough for a coach” and “had water flung upon it, which soon froze, and then more was flung, till it was covered with ice of a considerable thickness.” The “ladies and gentlemen of the court” plopped themselves on sledges and girded themselves for a flight to the bottom, “for the motion is so swift that nothing but ‘flying’ is a proper term.”

But to that observer, the prospect seemed more fearsome than fun: "Sometimes, if these sledges meet any resistance, the person in them tumbles head over heels; that, I suppose, is the joke.... I was terrified out of my wits for fear of being obliged to go down this shocking place, for I had not only the dread of breaking my neck, but of being exposed to indecency too frightful to think on without horror."

The slicked mountains later caught the eye of Empress Elizabeth and then Catherine the Great, who is said to have slid down at least once, according to Virginia Commonwealth University historian George E. Munro, before commissioning a pair slides to amuse the courtiers at her Oranienbaum Palace on the Gulf of Finland. Cartmell writes that some Russian rulers even brought the mountains inside, sometimes swapping ice for soapy water. Tsarevich Alexei of the House of Romanov reportedly barreled down one atop a pillow instead of a sled.

One visitor to a winter festival in 1813, Scottish painter, author, and traveler Robert Ker Porter, described the experience in a manner relatable to any modern coaster aficionado. “The sensation excited in the person who descends in the sledge is at first extremely painful, but after a few times, passing through the cutting air, it is exquisitely pleasurable,” he wrote. “This seems strange, but it is so; as you shoot along a sort of ethereal intoxication takes hold of the senses, which is absolutely delightful.”

By the 19th century, when World’s Fairs had thrust midways and rides into the international spotlight, Pursell writes, the amusements had earned an appropriate moniker: “Russian Mountains.” In the 1880s, news of these frozen festivities had reached all the way to Minnesota, where the city of St. Paul built its own “Ice Palace,” featuring toboggan slides, an ice rink, and a curling tournament modeled after the Russian precursors.

Over time, these attractions gained wheels and tracks, and then traction among riders in France, where at least two coasters named after the Russian Mountains debuted in Paris and Belleville in the first quarter of the century. As the 19th century rolled into the 20th, coasters began to swoop across amusement parks all over the world, and found passionate fans in America, from New York to Orlando, and Long Beach to Cleveland, which now markets itself as a premier destination of the coaster world. (One ride at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, whooshes at 120 miles per hour, no ice needed.)

Meanwhile, the Russian roots of winter thrill rides live on. You can still race down an ice slide at winter festivals in Moscow and elsewhere. And when a thrill-seeker who speaks French or Spanish wants to climb and then plunge, wind roughing her hair and a happy shriek escaping her throat, you might hear her mention a montagne russe or montaña rusa. They're still the terms for "roller coaster."

When life gives you frozen bison, make dinner.

One night in 1984, a handful of lucky guests gathered at the Alaska home of paleontologist Dale Guthrie to eat stew crafted from a once-in-a-lifetime delicacy: the neck meat of an ancient, recently-discovered bison nicknamed Blue Babe.

The dinner party fit Alaska tradition: Since state law bans the buying, bartering, and selling of game meats, you can’t find local favorites such as caribou stew at restaurants. Those dishes are enjoyed when hunters host a gathering. But their meat source is usually the moose population—not a preserved piece of biological history.

Blue Babe had been discovered just five years earlier by gold miners, who noticed that a hydraulic mining hose melted part of the gunk that had kept the bison frozen. They reported their findings to the nearby University of Alaska Fairbanks. Concerned that it would decompose, Guthrie—then a professor and researcher at the university—opted to dig out Blue Babe immediately. But the icy, impenetrable surroundings made that challenging. So he cut off what he could, refroze it, and waited for the head and neck to thaw.

Soon, Guthrie and his team had Blue Babe on campus and started learning more about the ancient animal. They knew that it had perished about 36,000 years ago, thanks to radiocarbon dating. (Though new research shows that Blue Babe is at least 50,000 years old, according to the university’s Curator of Archaeology, Josh Reuther.) Tooth marks and claw marks also suggested that the bison was killed by an ancestor of the lion, the Panthera leoatrox.

Blue Babe froze rapidly following its death—perhaps the result of a wintertime demise. Researchers were amazed to find that Blue Babe had frozen so well that its muscle tissue retained a texture not unlike beef jerky. Its fatty skin and bone marrow remained intact, too, even after thousands of years. So why not try eating part of it?

It had been done before. “All of us working on this thing had heard the tales of the Russians [who] excavated things like bison and mammoth in the Far North [that] were frozen enough to eat,” Guthrie says of several infamous meals. “So we decided, ‘You know what we can do? Make a meal using this bison.’”

Guthrie decided to host the special dinner when taxidermist Eirik Granqvist completed his work on Blue Babe and the late Björn Kurtén was in town to give a guest lecture. “Making neck steak didn’t sound like a very good idea,” Guthrie recalls. “But you know, what we could do is put a lot of vegetables and spices, and it wouldn’t be too bad.”

To make the stew for roughly eight people, Guthrie cut off a small part of the bison’s neck, where the meat had frozen while fresh. “When it thawed, it gave off an unmistakable beef aroma, not unpleasantly mixed with a faint smell of the earth in which it was found, with a touch of mushroom,” he once wrote. They then added a generous amount of garlic and onions, along with carrots and potatoes, to the aged meat. Couple that with wine, and it became a full-fledged dinner.

Guthrie, who is a hunter, says he wasn’t deterred by the thousands of years the bison had aged, nor the prospect of getting sick. “That would take a very special kind of microorganism [to make me sick],” he says. “And I eat frozen meat all the time, of animals that I kill or my neighbors kill. And they do get kind of old after three years in the freezer.”

Thankfully, everyone present lived to tell the tale (and the bison remains on display at the University of Alaska Museum of the North). The Blue Babe stew wasn’t unpalatable, either, according to Guthrie. “It tasted a little bit like what I would have expected, with a little bit of wring of mud,” he says. “But it wasn’t that bad. Not so bad that we couldn’t each have a bowl.” He can’t remember if anyone present had seconds, though.

This story originally ran on January 26, 2018.

New research reveals that the hundreds of anonymous dead spanned both continents and centuries.

No one knows exactly how they got there—the skeletal remains of 500-some-odd people spread around Lake Roopkund, in the Indian Himalayas. Since the bones were rediscovered by a forest ranger in 1942, a number of haunting—if unsubstantiated—theories have circled the skeletons like vultures: Had these been Japanese soldiers who succumbed to the elements? Victims of a landslide or forgotten epidemic or attack?

Now an international team of more than two dozen researchers has thrown more than one wrench into this enduring and alarming mystery. As it turns out, the remains do not all date to the same historical period—and they don’t even share a common geographic origin. This means that, many centuries apart, different groups of different peoples from different parts of the world somehow all met their demise at this same spot, which has since earned the popular moniker Skeleton Lake. The researchers published their puzzling findings yesterday, in the journal Nature Communications.

Éadaoin Harney and Nick Patterson, biologists at Harvard University and two of the study’s 28 authors, say they were very surprised by what they found in their DNA analyses. With their colleagues they looked at 76 distinct skeletal elements, 38 of which provided full genomic information, and all of which combined to present an impressive diversity: Of the 38 individuals, the remains of 23 date approximately to the year 800, while the remains of the other 15 date approximately to 1800. Though the 23 older individuals all appear to have come from South Asia, Harney and Patterson say there is evidence indicating that they came from different places within the subcontinent, and the evidence indicates that their remains were “deposited in more than one event.” All but one of the other 15 individuals, meanwhile, came from as far away as the eastern Mediterranean—perhaps, says Patterson, from somewhere in the Greek-speaking world. The remaining individual had Southeast Asian ancestry, and so constitutes a third distinct group.

Ayushi Nayak, another author of the study and a PhD candidate in archaeology at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, emphasizes that those three groups were represented in the remains of just 38 individuals. How many more historical periods and geographical regions, she wonders, might lie within the site’s hundreds of bones? Looking at all of them was not feasible for just one study, but the remaining samples have been well preserved by the chilly Himalayan air, so more research is possible.

Until then, scientists can be kept plenty busy trying to figure out how people from the eastern Mediteranean ended up at Roopkund. Patterson hopes that the project will become even more interdisciplinary, with Indian and Himalayan historians combing archives for some indication of these mysterious travelers. (For now, the researchers say, the only hint is that the lake sits along a pilgrimage route, though that doesn’t necessarily explain these particular populations.) Harney and Nayak also hope that further research can uncover what caused these deaths, even if information about the groups’ identities remains elusive. Earlier research submitted that the deaths were caused by a hailstorm, but the new study shows that no single catastrophic event could explain it all.

That’s the thing: The new research, insightful as it is, hasn’t made Skeleton Lake any less mysterious or inscrutable—it actually seems to have made it more so. “We still don’t know why there are so many scattered dead individuals at this site,” says Nayak. That fundamental question makes this Himalayan lake a chilling scene indeed.

Temazcales helped indigenous people let off steam, until colonialism came along.

In ancient Mesoamerica, bathing was about more than cleanliness: It was about pleasure. The years before the arrival of Spanish colonizers were the heyday of the temazcal, a volcanic sweat lodge that allowed visitors to cleanse themselves not by immersion but by steam. In other words, every bath felt like what we would now consider a spa day.

Temazcales existed in the Americas for at least 700 years before the arrival of Spaniards in 1519, according to anthropologist Casey Walsh, who wrote Virtuous Water: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico. Temazcal comes from the word temāzcalli, which translates to “house of heat” in the Nahuatl language (also known historically as Aztec). Most temazcales resembled domed structures, some just large enough for a family and others for half a village. But they weren't meant for private use. “You wouldn’t build a temazcal for just one person,” Walsh says. The indigenous people of Mesoamerica often constructed them out of volcanic rock, which were practically fireproof. But researchers have found traces of other ancient temazcales made of adobe, sticks, and even grass, Walsh says.

A common way for bathers to create steam was by carrying superheated stones from an outside fire into the center of the temazcales, and then dousing them in cold water to create glorious, wafting clouds of steam. But other temazcales were adjoined by an exterior fire chamber, ensuring that heat from the flames would pass through the porous volcanic rock, Walsh writes. Then all you had to do was sit back, relax, and secrete profuse, gushing cascades of your own sweat.

To some, it may seem counterproductive to bathe in sweat. “Today, we have an exaggerated notion of cleanliness and hygiene and sanitation that’s wrapped up with notions of disease and germs,” Walsh says. “But for most of history, our ancestors bathed not to wash things off but to absorb the environment.” In Mesoamerica, people bathed to cleanse their bodies of maladies, sicknesses, and illnesses, as well as to recharge and recuperate after battle.

Though they no doubt felt incredible, temazcales were steeped in ritual and ceremony. When a person stepped through a doorway into a temazcal, they also symbolically passed through a portal to the underworld. Many temazcales in pre-conquest Mesoamerica were adorned with a statue of Tezcatlipoca, the god of healing and the underworld, or Tocitzin, also known as the grandmother of the temazcal. “They saw this as a place to engage with the spirits of the underworld,” Walsh says. “Especially spirits of water and spirits of fertility.”

Naturally, temazcales also served another purpose. Like other kinds of bathhouses across the world, temazcales were spaces for sex. “In ancient Rome, bathhouses were seen as places to conduct politics and hook up,” Walsh says, adding that the steam lodges were not separated by gender. “Temazcales were just the same.”

In fact, in the 1581 text The History of the Indies of New Spain, the Dominican friar Diego Durán noted that at many temazcales, it was considered a bad omen for a person to bathe without a person of the opposite sex around, writes historian Pete Sigal in The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture. Durán wrote, “I would not hold all this to be so unchaste and immodest if the husband entered with his wife, but at times there is so much confusion and laxity that, mingled and naked as they are, there cannot fail to be great affronts and offences to our Lord.”

Not surprisingly, when the colonizers arrived, they ruined everything. In the 1500s, Spanish Catholics had cracked down on bathhouses in Spain as an assault on religious purity, Walsh writes. So in the Americas, Spanish missionaries took note of this intimate sort of socialization. Their disapproval survives in surveys they conducted with indigenous bathers, to learn more about sexual practices the Church believed to be sinful. In 1569, in an attempt to stamp out these practices, a priest penned a questionnaire for Native Americans to answer in confession, asking respondents with whom they carried out which carnal acts.

In the tradition of more recent bathhouses, temazcales also served as a place for queer sex and hookups. One rather disapproving 16th-century priest wrote, "They committed other terrible wicked acts in the baths...Many men and women, and women with men, and men with men illicitly used and got into the bath," notes Alejandro Tonatiuh Romero Contreras in "Visiones sobre el temazcal mesoamericano: Un elemento cultural polifacético," a paper published in Ciencia Ergo Sum.

Over the next few centuries, as the colonial government rebuilt Tenochtitlán into its new capital of Mexico City, it also tried to crack down on temazcales, Walsh writes. In 1725, the government prohibited temazcales in the indigenous pueblo of San Juan Teotihuacán. They wanted to purge the temazcal of its indigenous heritage and redefine it as a space of cleanliness, not socialization. “They believed the proper use of [the bath] should be about healing and cleaning, not about religious, spiritual, or sexual pleasure,” Walsh says. But despite the colonial government’s best efforts, temazcales persisted for a while as an underground space for indigenous spirituality and sexual freedom, Walsh writes.

The baths became much less common as the new government pressured indigenous people to assimilate and modernize—a very un-chill end to one of Mesoamerica’s most relaxing spaces, and proof of one of history’s evergreen truths: colonizers are the absolute worst. But if you’re interested in sweating it out like they did in Mesoamerica, temazcales are still around and quite the tourist attraction.

For three generations, the Hansens have made summer sno-ball season in New Orleans.

Ashley Hansen grew up spending Saturday mornings watching 300-pound slabs of ice slide into her grandfather’s Jeep, grabbing chips with her sister as they splintered along the edges. Each week, Ashley and her twin sister clambered into the back of the two-door Jeep that her grandfather Ernest had transformed into a giant steel tray. Once her grandmother, Mary, had set down her purse up front, Ernest would navigate potholed streets to icehouses still wedged in odd corners of downtown or bulging in the empty spaces between suburban strip malls.

More than in most places, ice in New Orleans is a cherished and respected commodity: a requirement for the region’s seafood industry and manna for all who seek relief from the Louisiana heat. “[We] had to go early to beat the shrimpers to get the good ice,” Ashley recalls.

Sometimes Mary returned to the Jeep almost immediately, unsatisfied with the frozen offerings. Other times, she walked through warehouses like a sushi chef at Tokyo’s old Tsukiji fish market. As muscular men with giant metal tongs emerged with ice blocks from deep wooden storage rooms, she’d run a finger over each before moving in close enough to touch her nose. She could see what others could not.

The Hansens spent a day a week painstakingly seeking ice for a reason. They, as a family, had spent more than five decades on a quest to perfect New Orleans’ iconic treat: the sno-ball.

Ask any Hansen, and they’ll tell you that a sno-ball is not to be confused with a snow cone (“very coarse, syrup pooling at the bottom”) or a slushy (“more liquid than solid”). Ashley will describe a New Orleans sno-ball, pausing for emphasis, as “a cup of finely—finely shaved ice with flavored syrup.” As her father Gerard has explained, speaking of their sno-balls, “You actually put the syrup on in layers to get consistency throughout the body … The flavor stays with you throughout the process of eating it.”

While New Orleans is a town of many culinary obsessions and peculiarities, from the po’ boy to the Sazerac, from beignets to Andouille gumbo, none of these foods define an entire season. It is impossible to have summer in New Orleans without sno-balls.

On the family’s Saturday ice excursions, Ashley and her sister were not allowed to leave the car. But the pursuit of quality was practiced week after week, year after year. After a childhood spent “sitting on ice,” Ashley spent years with her 80-something grandparents ice-picking slabs into appropriately sized blocks, cleaning them with gallons of spring water, and then waiting “to let the ice harden” to an ideal point. After her grandparents passed away in 2005, Ashley, who had been running things for almost a decade, assumed control of the New Orleans institution that her grandparents opened in 1939: Hansen’s Sno-Bliz Shop.

Outside New Orleans, creating perfect snow is big business. Whether at one-run ski hills or in Winter Olympics host cities, getting man-made snow right is a multi-billion dollar industry. But Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, which recently celebrated its 80th year of a James Beard award-winning run, has done more than any institution in the U.S., if not the world, to perfect snow for eating. And the family has done it in a ramshackle concrete shed where the industrial warehouses of Tchoupitoulas Street meet the shotgun neighborhoods of Bordeaux Street.

In the summer of 1934, that time of year when the Louisiana humidity seems to intensify the tropical sun like a magnifying glass, a tired man in a white apron and cap came down the street through Bayou St. John. According to the story Ashley heard Ernest recount dozens of times, the man pushed what looked like a baby carriage, but in place of the bassinet was a wooden box, an ice chest topped by a rack of glass bottles filled with brightly colored liquids. “Ice cold sno-balls! I’ve got ice cold sno-balls!” he shouted and sang. “Lemon-lime-orange-strawberry-grape-and-nectar!”

Ashley’s uncle asked her grandfather Ernest Hansen for a penny, the going rate in Depression-era New Orleans for a sno-ball. “The street sellers,” she says, “they would open the box, run the rasp over the ice block” into a deepening groove in the melting top. Then they’d whip out the sno-ball like a rabbit from a hat.

By the Depression, sno-balls were already deeply ensconced in New Orleans culture, one of the many manifestations of ice that had become borderline necessities in the sweltering city. Indeed, the very popularity of sno-balls speaks to the logical question that any summer visitor might pose: Why would anyone choose to live here?

For the better part of five months each year, the city is oppressively hot and ridiculously humid. Air has weight here. Nearby Jean Lafitte National Historical Park, where a boardwalk runs through an unwelcoming, alligator-filled swamp, offers a sense of the original landscape. As the swamp was transformed, sugar was first successfully planted and refined in America, in 1795, by the slaves of Étienne de Boré, who was later appointed mayor, just a mile from where Hansen’s now stands. When the resulting sugar and cotton booms revived American slavery, New Orleans became the most important port city in America. To be sent here as an enslaved person—and forced to work in the cash-crop fields of the Mississippi River Valley—was seen as a death sentence.

Chitimacha Indians, the Spanish, the French, enslaved Americans, refugee Haitian planters, Europeans seeking fortunes: They all lived and sweated through New Orleans’ heat. The city’s urban landscape, with its canals and streets that follow the river, all speak to the unique ecosystem of the Crescent City, and the buildings reveal the fundamental battle with the climate: 14-foot ceilings, a transom in every room, and shotgun homes as long as wind tunnels are all innovations to keep cool. But even better are the city’s many icy treats.

In 1822, the first shipment of natural ice, cut out of Jamaica Pond near Boston, arrived in New Orleans. It had melted substantially during its months-long journey. Still, what emerged from the hold weighed nearly 250 pounds, solid, clear, and cold as could be. Its extreme foreignness in the humid port must have seemed wrong: New Orleanians tossed the unnatural (and probably cursed) Yankee import into the swirling brown of the Mississippi River. But four decades later, when a former New Orleans slave auctioneer lit the steam engines of the Louisiana Ice. Co., which could turn the waters of the Mississippi into 20 tons of ice each day, delighted locals gathered just to watch the water freeze.

Likewise, Ernest Jr. was delighted by his pink mound of street ice, but his father didn't think it was clean enough. “That’s filthy,” Ashley recalls of Ernest’s reaction. “I can make something better.” At the stand’s 50th anniversary, Ernest himself remembered that the origin of Hansen’s first motto, “Never Touched By Hand,” spoke to his vision: “I wanted the ice to go straight into the cup without touching someone's hands,” he said.

For his part, Ernest’s hands contained tremendous expertise. He was a master machinist who spent decades tending to ships on the Mississippi. His metalwork is as charming as it is useful (he made his wife a hatchet-inspired gift every year, her birthday being February 22, the same as George Washington of mythical cherry-tree-chopping fame). So with the skills, equipment, and inspiration of this river city, Ernest worked after hours on his idea for a sanitary sno-ball. In just five months, he cast and assembled several strange-looking pieces of aluminum and stainless steel into the world’s first motor-driven ice-shaving machine.

There is always a line at Hansen’s, and the wait is never dull. I have met tourists who, after one bite, come back every day of their visit. I have met construction workers and garbage men desperately trying to get a Hansen’s sno-ball during a quick break. I have met kids just out of school for the day. Black and white, young and old, all of New Orleans waits in this line for a frozen delight that sells for just two dollars.

Since 1939, reaching the front has meant not just getting to order, but to see Ernest’s machines fill your cup with a blizzard of snow. Ernest’s 1934 prototype (“Ernest Jr.”) sits above the fridge, while the machine Ernest built in 1939 (“Ernest”) and one other (“Nacho”) sit on the counter, each a bright silver contraption the size of a small dresser. “Mary” lives on a portable tray so that Hansen’s can cater events.

Since I first visited during Ashley’s reign, I’ve watched this muscly little woman feed rectangles of ice the size of a bread loaf into Ernest’s machines using a ratcheted metal arm. She holds a cup under the chute, but doesn’t fill it as snow starts to fly—when the blades spin, the end of the ice inevitably produces chipped ice and chunky snow. Only when the snow is perfectly fluffy does she fill the cup to almost twice its height. It’s this blizzard-like snow that blows out of the chutes hand-cast by Ernest that inspired an early customer to suggest the name “Sno-Bliz.”

Along with the daily, house-made flavors pioneered by Mary, it’s this dedication that sets Hansen’s apart from the hundreds of sno-ball purveyors in New Orleans, many with loyal followings of their own. Ashley will discard some 40 percent of the snow as insufficiently fluffy—a reflection of Hansen’s permanent motto: There Are No Shortcuts to Quality. And when she’s not behind the counter, the sno-balls are not made by just any staffer, but by one of her Lost Boys, neighborhood guys (many second- or third-generation employees) who grew up in the stand and worked their way from cleaning bottles to the mighty honor of helming Ernest’s invention.

Working those machines is a three-limbed operation: one hand on the brassed ratchet holder, a foot pedal to maintain downward pressure on the ice, and one hand under the chute, waiting for the perfect snow. Every Sno-Bliz operator has a different style, a different feel for how to determine the moment that ice and blade along with hand and cup are working together in harmony.

Some count.

Others listen.

“If the ice is too soft, it will be watery and yucky,” says Ashley. But if it’s too hard, then “the machines chatter, and they don’t cut as fine.” She has to respond to changes in temperature and humidity and the blade’s sharpness. I have seen Ashley set ice blocks out to thaw when the line stretches long but she hears the machine whine at a certain pitch. “It’s about finding that balance,” she says.

When Ernest invented his machine, he could have become the Henry Ford of shaved ice. The machine spelled the end for the once-ubiquitous, hand-shaved street-ice vendors, who were quickly replaced by shops that could house and power this new technology. Ernest handmade about a dozen Sno-Bliz machines, a handful of which he sold to New Orleans businesses, most notably the Audubon Zoo, which is still where many tourists taste their first sno-ball.

As Ashley recalls, once, when Ernest went to the zoo to make a maintenance call, “He saw kids working the machines throwing nickels into the blades and shredding the nickels.” Ernest was horrified. “They didn’t understand the product, the quality he wanted, [so] he bought them all back and never manufactured another machine.” Ashley remembers her grandparents citing their motto. “[They] couldn’t sacrifice the quality or reputation.”

Competing stands bought similar machines from emerging rivals. But when someone asked Ernest if he was going to use his patent to stifle competitors, he demurred. The Hansens did not have money for lawyers or time to cook up lawsuits. They had two young boys and two sets of aging parents. But the crux was that New Orleans sno-balls still ranged in price from two to five cents. “Who was he,” Ashley remembers her grandfather explaining, “to tell someone they could not help feed their family with those two pennies?” The patent was about recognition, not profit.

Turning the best ice into delicious snow has only ever been one part of the Hansens’ pursuit of perfection: Mary spent 70 of her years and Ashley 30 of hers perfecting a dizzying range of syrups to match the magic of Ernest’s snow.

As soon as Ernest assembled his first machine, Mary, the Italian-American daughter of a family that owned a fruit stand, began crafting flavors, which she first served atop sno-balls under a chinaberry tree behind her parent’s house. Syrups such as Mary’s Own, a tart strawberry, reflect her own family history. Countless others speak to a city made by black and white people and infused with traditions of French, Spanish, and African ancestry. Cream of Coconut and the even more traditional Hard-Candy Coconut highlight the New Orleans that is more Caribbean than American. Vanilla Bean, the backbone of flavors such as Cream of Ice Cream and Nectar-Cream, reveals the city’s French connections, and the role slavery played in the succesful cultivation of the valuable vanilla orchid. Ernest’s Own, a root-beer flavor beloved by the stand’s founder, traces back to the Sassafras beverages concocted by native peoples throughout the Americas.

Unlike the syrups shipped around the world by Coca-Cola and other food and beverage titans, Hansen’s syrups are artisanal, practically farm-to-table, just more local. Making seasonal favorites, from Blood Orange to Pear, Blueberry to Kumquat, starts with neighbors dropping off bags of fruit from their backyard. The signature syrup, Satsuma, can only be made with this Louisiana citrus, whose trees spill out of yards all over New Orleans.

With her hyperlocal syrups, Mary matched Ernest’s uncompromising, often counter-capitalist commitment to quality. And just as Ernest could not sell his machines to anyone who might disrespect them, Mary, who came from a family that told guests to “sit down, mangiare-mangiare,” would never move a line along with maximum efficiency. Following in her footsteps, it is not unusual for Ashley to chat with longtime customers for 20 minutes before making them their Sno-Bliz, even as dozens of sno-ball seekers wait in the Louisiana heat.

When the Depression was at its worst, said Gerald Hansen, who is Ashley’s father and a district judge, people would come by with their children and say, “Oh, hi Mrs. Hansen. We just came to visit, you know, we don’t want a sno-ball today.” Without a moment’s pause, Mary would reply, “But today is treat day for children,” he added. “She’d give them free sno-balls … And you know she probably gave more away in the first five years than she sold.”

The result, from decades of this graciousness, is fierce loyalty and familiarity. When Hansen’s reopened after Hurricane Katrina, one of the first businesses in the area to do so, Ashley recalled a woman sweeping in and declaring, “I need a chocolate sno-ball. This is the only place I’m going to get my chocolate sno-ball ‘cause Miss Mary made the best and this is what she gave to me.” To paraphrase the poet of the shared meal, Anthony Bourdain—who himself broke snow with Ernest, Mary, and Ashley, and declared that there was nothing in the world like a Sno-Bliz—Sno-balls “make the society, hold the fabric together.”

Even in this city of endless food, drink and celebration, Hansen’s is on every list of must-do’s in New Orleans. But the hundreds-deep line that spills up Bordeaux Street on the hottest August days is not made up, even mostly, of tourists. All of New Orleans stands in that line, because despite neighborhood allegiances or even sides of the river, customers will not take shortcuts to quality either. They come for flavors that have defined New Orleans since the 1880s, sought-after toppings such as Bananas Foster over a chicory-strong Café-Sno-Lait Sno-Bliz or pink Nectar Cream topped with condensed milk. They come to be served that perfect snow. Customers know Hansen’s is there for them because everyone has always been served—during the Jim Crow era of segregation, the Hansens had refused to follow separate but equal laws since their backyard chinaberry pop-up.

Defined by its people, Hansen’s is beloved decrepitude. It is the James Beard medal shining near hand cut letters under 60 layers of pink paint. As you wait, the wait becomes important, an opportunity to take in the multitudes of this shabby glory. As you talk to people around you, you learn their stories and their flavors. You make friends. Photo collages of 50 years of neighborhood kids cover the walls, along with 50 years of peculiarly Crescent City traditions and poems and signage from every decade.

With that first taste, that perfect spoonful of perfect snow, everyone wishes their own town or street had a branch of this perfection, this joyous place. And yet, as you walk outside, you realize the impossibility of this stand in some gleaming space in the French Quarter or, God help us, another city or state. There cannot be Sno-Bliz franchises or a factory churning out machines, because a Hansen would not be behind the counter and Ernest’s hands would not have made the machine. You can get shaved ice and syrup the world over. Some places even call what they are selling a snow-ball—visit Baltimore for a taste. But a Sno-Bliz, this quintessential representation of all that is New Orleans, could not exist anywhere but here.

For decades, Mark Edward Harris captured the calm and intimacy of onsens.

Clouds of mist billow around three relaxed nude bodies, as cascades of water pour over them from pipes. A figure, submerged in a large pool with puffs of rising steam, gazes at scenery through a window. A woman is seated on a stone by water, outside in a snowscape, a thin haze around her. These are photographs of people hanging out in onsens—Japan’s natural hot springs. Stripping for a soak in such a thermal bath is a long-standing tradition in the country, and is known for its therapeutic effects. A Japanese text from almost 1,300 years ago describes how aches, pains, and skin problems could be cured by “the water of the gods.”

When shooting onsens, steam is key for award-winning travel and documentary photographer Mark Edward Harris. “I often shoot more toward in winter because the steam from the hot water mixing with the cool air definitely helps create the surreal feeling in the images,” he says. Japanese winters also lend themselves to another tranquil onsen practice the photographer recommends: “There’s something called yukimi, yuki meaning snow and mi to see, and so you do snow gazing from the baths. You can also do yukimizaki, which means snow gazing while drinking sake … which is really good.”

With or without the sake, onsens remain an important part of Japanese culture today, with well-established rules of etiquette, such as no soap, swimsuits, or large towels. The country boasts more than 20,000 geothermally heated springs, and hence thousands of onsens, so the variety of onsen experiences, Harris says, is “neverending.” And he should know—he’s been shooting these incredibly relaxing spots for 30 years, and intends to keep going.

For Harris, there’s a spiritual aspect to dipping into these mineral-laden pools. “It’s for bathing the soul, not the body,” he says. And that connection comes through in the third edition of his photo book The Way of the Japanese Bath.

Atlas Obscura spoke with Harris about the variety of onsens and how simple parts of the project were their own reward.

How did you first encounter onsens, and what inspired you to photograph them?

Back in 1992, I went to Beppu with a friend. She exposed me to this surreal world, which I had no clue existed. Fortuitously she had suggested Beppu, which, if you were to pick one city that’s completely immersed in the hot spring tradition, Beppu is it, on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. I shot some of the hot springs there, including one that has a takiyu, which is basically a cascade onsen where the water comes out of pipes from a relatively high altitude. If you position your body so that it hits you on the shoulders or your back, it’s extremely therapeutic, but it’s also extremely photogenic.

Bathers are nude in your photos. How did you get your subjects to participate in the photos?

Some of the women in the images are friends of mine, but I’m just letting them do their own thing. As the late, great photographer Mary Ellen Mark told me, “You can never do better than reality.” When I was on the men’s side, I’m this gaijin with a camera but I’m in the bath, too, and I’m just holding what’s called a tenugui, which is a small towel. I just have one camera and one lens, but still—”Who’s this gaijin showing up?” But because I can speak Japanese fairly decently, I would just say what I’m doing and I’d ask, “Do you mind if I shoot a photo?” and then people would almost always say, “Yeah, that’s fine.”

Did you discover anything surprising while you worked on this project?

The amazing thing is just the variety of different bathing opportunities. So many have incredible scenic views. You could see Mt. Fuji in the distance, or you could be bathing in a place like Lamp no Yado Aoni Onsen in Aomori Prefecture in midwinter, or one of my favorites, Takaragawa in Gunma Prefecture at any time of the year, surrounded by beautiful mountain scenes. You could be sitting in the middle of a snowstorm and just gazing at the snow, or in Ginzan Onsen in Yamagata Prefecture, which has an amazing view of the surrounding forest as well. Then you can retire from the bath to your room in a ryokan, a Japanese-style inn, and that’s the perfect combination.

Tell us about your favorite part of the project from a personal perspective.

Very recently I shot a couple of images for the latest edition of my book at at Kita Onsen Ryokan in Tochigi Prefecture, where many of the scenes for the Japanese comedy Thermae Romae were filmed. I wanted to make a pilgrimage there because I love the movie. The film picked this particular ryokan and the baths there for a reason: It is a historic ryokan with lots of different types of bathing experiences. One bath has a tengu, which looks like a big devil, hanging on a wall, overseeing the bathers. Then there’s the konyoku, which is mixed bathing—a huge bath outside, and then private family baths. Also it’s a very, very traditional ryokan that’s off the beaten path. There’s just so many reasons to make that one of my top experiences.

What was the biggest challenge in this project?

I’m shooting in a sort of raw-as-possible way. Not just me—being naked with just a tenugui—but also with one camera, one lens. I actually find it very liberating. With so many other projects, like with the orangutans in Borneo, I have to be prepared for them being up close and also way in the distance, so I’m carrying everything from a 20mm to a 500mm lens with me and two camera bodies in a ThinkTank backpack. Having shot in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, jungles around the world from Brazil to Borneo, hiking the Everest trek on a Nepal earthquake recovery project for Vanity Fair, and another one for them on the tsunami recovery in Japan—I feel pretty spoiled every time I get to literally sink myself into this ongoing project. I fell in love with the hot spring experience in Beppu almost three decades ago and that feeling has never left me.

Used from time immemorial, this traditional technology is now fading away.

In the last few decades, much has changed in Las Barreras de Órgiva. This Granadan village, in southern Spain’s Alpujarra mountains, was once home to dozens of pottery workshops. It was an industry that fed hundreds of people. Along with the potters, workers labored at tasks from extracting the clay, processing it, and collecting wood for the ovens.

All of that is long gone. Only a handful of potters remain in Las Barreras. One of them is Rafael Orellana. In his small workshop, Orellana still crafts and sells clay objects, just like his father, grandfather, and grand-grandfathers did before him. Business is not booming, but he still has customers. Many come for his botijos.

At first glance, the botijo looks like a simple clay jug, albeit one with several appendages. They can be found in nearly every rural Spanish town. But the botijo is an ancient, ingenious system for cooling water. Also known as a búcaro, pipo, piporro, barril, and botija in different parts of the country, many of these words likely stem from the Latin butticula, which is also the origin of the Spanish word botella, or bottle.

Although you can find them in many different shapes and colors, most botijos share a few features: round, with a handle on top and two holes, one on each side. One of the holes is wide, and used to fill the jug. The other one is at the end of a spout. When drinkers heft the jug into the air, it pours a thin stream of water into their mouths. (Touching the spout with your lips is taboo.)

The oldest botijo known so far dates from the Early Bronze Age. Discovered in the 1960s at the Puntarrón Chico de Beniaján archeological site, which was a village between 1,700 and 1,500 BC, it’s a remnant of the Argaric culture that once flourished in southeast Spain. Today, this crude botijo rests in the Archaeological Museum of Murcia.

At first glance, the explanation behind the botijo’s cooling powers seems simple. When the jug is full, water completely permeates the porous, unglazed clay. Then, the water molecules on the surface evaporate, taking warmth with them. As a result, the water inside the botijo cools down. The mechanism is much the same as how the human body cools itself with sweat. In fact, it’s said that the botijo “sweats” as its surface dampens during the process. When placed in a warm place with dry, moving air, the botijo can decrease water temperature up to 10ºC (50ºF) in just an hour⁠—a blessing during a hot Spanish summer.

But behind its apparent simplicity, the details of the botijo’s cooling system are incredibly complex. In the 1990s, two Spanish scientists developed a mathematical model to explain the details. They placed botijos in an oven and measured the water evaporation rate and the temperature drop over time. In the end, they came up with two lengthy and complicated differential equations to explain the mechanism.

Yet botijos have become a relic of the past. They were handy in old rural Spain, where people worked the fields under a scorching sun and houses did not have electricity. But today, there are fewer farmers than ever, and it’s hard to find a house without a refrigerator. Why would someone drink from a heavy clay jug when they can comfortably use a glass?

Plus, traditional pottery is no longer profitable. Artisanal clay products can’t compete with cheaper plastics. Orellana admits he can’t afford to hire an apprentice. “Sometimes I’m busy and sometimes it’s a bit more quiet,” he says. “But I am always working on something. If I don’t have assignments, I make things to keep a stock.” If nothing changes, the botijos of Las Barreras will die with him.

Variations of this story can be heard all across Spain. In La Rambla, a city in the province of Córdoba with a long pottery tradition, there have been a few campaigns to promote local clay products in general and the botijo in particular. One of them asked Whatsapp, Spain’s messaging app of choice, to add a botijo emoji.

Still, botijos hold a fascination for people across Spain. Part of it stems from a feeling of nostalgia. A rural exodus during the 60s and 70s swept Spaniards into cities. Many of today’s urban dwellers love the jugs as a reminder of the villages their parents and grandparents came from, where botijos were part of everyday life. Spaniards appreciate botijos as symbols of their roots, even if they use them only occasionally.

Plus, they’re very collectible. There are a surprising number of botijo museums and collections across Spain. One of the latter can be found in Pampaneira, another village of the Alpujarra mountains, just a few miles uphill from Las Barreras. It was the pride and joy of José Martín Aragón, a local trader who passed away 20 years ago.

The collection now belongs to Martín’s children, who keep it in a large and dusty attic that is only opened on request. The attic is cluttered with botijos on tables, shelves, closets, and the floor. There’s just enough space to walk from one room to another. They estimate the collection has between 800 and 1,000 jugs.

According to José Ginés, one of José Martín’s sons, his father was a patron of artists and craftsmen, who happened to have a thing for botijos. Due to his job, he often worked with potters and ceramists and regularly commissioned them to produce his favorite jugs. “He went to the artisans and told them, ‘Do whatever you want! I’ll buy it!’” recalls José Ginés.

This creative freedom is one of the first things that stands out in the collection. There are jugs of all colors, shapes and sizes. No two are alike. Since Martín usually acquired the botijos in batches, the collection is grouped in clusters of up to 20 jugs that share a common theme or a specific style. In some cases, the artistic evolution of the artisans can be seen across the series.

These botijos weren’t really made to drink from. Instead, they’re prized works of art. In fact, most of them can’t cool water, either because they were made of materials other than clay or because their surfaces are glazed. However, many of them keep the elements that make the botijo easily recognizable: the round shape, the handle, the filling hole, and the spout.

Beyond Spain, botijos have been held up as a solution for sustainably cooling water across the world. In 2014, two researchers identified regions where botijos could potentially be used. They considered four parameters: air humidity, average temperature, access to drinking water and the presence of clay. It turns out that there are large swaths of the planet meet all these conditions: most of Africa and Australia, large parts of Europe and Asia, and some regions of North and South America.

But in Spain, it’s hard to know if they’ll make a comeback. But even if they don’t, botijos won’t be easily erased from Spain’s collective imagination. They are deeply entrenched in the culture, and remain the most characteristic symbol of the Spanish rural world.

At the South Pole, the freezer is just a hole in the wall to the ice outside.

When Philip Broughton boarded a flight to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in 2002, he didn’t intend to become an Antarctic bartender. Following a terrible day at work, he had decided to get away, and, after a Google search and a two-year application process, he found himself on an American research station in Antarctica, working as a cryogenics and science technician for a year and a day.

A few weeks after his arrival in the summer of 2002, Broughton walked into the local watering hole, Club 90 South. “The only seat left was the one behind the bar,” Broughton says of his initiation into the pantheon of South Pole bartenders.

Broughton sat behind the bar and put his feet up against the beer case. Inevitably, someone asked for a beer. Glaring, Broughton handed one over. “Don’t get used to that,” he said.

But then someone asked if he knew how to mix anything. Which, thanks to a Playboy cocktail guide, he did. Using his own stash of Angostura bitters, he whipped up a Manhattan.

“And there I stayed for the rest of the year,” Broughton recalls.

Explorers have always packed booze. Ferdinand Magellan never sailed without wine and sherry. During the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, Sir Ernest Shackleton stocked his ships with whisky to fight off the cold and endure voyages that could last more than three years.

Just as it was with Antarctica's first visitors, so it is with its current residents. Every year, thousands of scientists, researchers, station staff, and even artists descend on Antarctica’s 45 research bases to live and work at the end of the world. (There are even more research stations if you include stations staffed only for the summer.) But those thousands winnow down to a persistent and hardy several hundred during the six nearly sunless winter months. (Once summer ends, planes and ships can rarely reach Antarctica due to storms and sub-zero temperatures that freeze fuel.) Their only external contact is through phones and the Internet. So the “winter-overs” come prepared … with heaps of alcohol.

Club 90 South was one of the many bars that serviced Antarctic research stations during Broughton’s winter on the continent. Broughton says that almost each of the 45 stations has a bar.

After stepping inside from temperatures that reached -100 degrees Fahrenheit, says Broughton, Club 90 South felt like a portal back to the real world. Constructed by the Navy “Seabees” Construction Crew out of building and shipping scraps, the cozy space had the warm, smoky atmosphere of harbor-side barrooms, with chairs, couches, and a classic wooden bar scattered around a low-ceiled room.

Over the bar, empty Crown Royal bags (the drink of choice at Club 90 South) hung from strings of Christmas lights like bulbous, satin ornaments. The freezer was a hole in the wall to the frigid snow and ice outside. Entertainment consisted of poker tournaments, watching TV, listening to music, reading left-behind books, talking with family and friends back home, and experiencing the station tradition of stripping naked (except for shoes) and running from the station sauna to the South Pole marker.

No one owned Club 90 South, and no one paid. Instead, people shared supplies they brought from home (as part of the allocated 125 pounds of luggage per person) or bought from the station store. Bartenders did not earn salaries—only kudos. Broughton started tending bar Fridays and Saturdays, and soon he spent most nights after dinner mixing cocktails and pouring a “disturbing number” of Prairie Fire shots, which Broughton made with tabasco and tequila. He served absinthes from the astrophysics team, Black Seal rum from a Bermudan at McMurdo Base, and Bundaberg rum from an Australian. Mixing his research job with his side hustle, Broughton made cocktails using liquid nitrogen, bringing the haute cuisine trend of molecular mixology to the bottom of the world.

The best (and worst) part? No official last call.

Club 90 South, with its homey, pool-room decor and casual atmosphere, became a lifeline for many barflys. In a place of near-eternal darkness that lacked restaurants and movie theaters, it doubled as a station “melting pot.” The bar “bridged the gap between the ‘beakers’ and ‘support,’” says Broughton, referring to researchers on National Science Foundation grants and contractors who operated and built the stations.

“A few months in, everyone in the bar knew everyone’s stories,” he adds.

But it wasn’t all cryogenic cocktails and sharing news from home. During the long months on a barren, isolated ice cap, drinking was often the only escape from the cold and monotony.

It’s an understandable reaction. Sink into a smooth glass of a favorite liqueur, and the cold bites a little less. The distance from loved ones feels more manageable. The time until the flight home, just a bit shorter. Some people drank to make the days go by faster. Regulars used pickaxes to clean frozen vomit off the ice outside Club 90 South.

Alcoholism can be a big issue in Antarctica. While there are no official statistics, some stations held Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and the hearsay was troubling enough that in 2015, the Office of the Inspector General audited several American stations. Due to reports of drunkenness on the job and alcohol-fueled fights, the National Science Foundation, which supports and operates U.S. scientific interests on the continent, is considering mandatory breathalyzer tests.

But Broughton says the honor system and communal atmosphere at Club 90 South helped prevent the affliction.

“It got people to drink together, rather than alone in their rooms,” says Broughton. “While you might drink more than normal with good company, that is still healthier than unchecked drinking alone, as good company might also slow you down.”

Broughton says he swapped out soda for booze when people drank too much, and he preferred to serve people so they could pass out in the bar, instead of watching them stumble out the door where, completely inebriated, they could hurt themselves or pass out in the snow.

After Broughton left the research station in 2003, Club 90 South closed during an effort to modernize Amundsen-Scott. But the legacy endures at other station bars, including Gallagher’s Pub, Southern Exposure, and the Tatty Flag. Broughton, meanwhile, is working as a radiation safety specialist at UC Berkeley, and he credits his time in Antarctica with his newfound interest in alcohol history and his appreciation for good, high-quality booze.

“I learned that if I’m going to consume alcohol, I’d better actually enjoy what I’m putting in my mouth,” he says. “Enjoyment is more than mere flavor.”

And would he go back?

“I would happily return for another winter” if my fiancée could come along, Broughton says. “I dream of Antarctica most every night. It is a haunting place.”

This story originally ran on November 1, 2017.

To chill like a marauding Norseman, drop your sword and take up these ancient winter sports.

A legendary Viking execution was called the blood eagle. In these ritualized killings, unlucky victims were prostrated before their ribs were cut out with a sword. Then their lungs were spread out through the opening and fanned out across their backs, like wings. It was a little gruesome, to say the least.

But there was more to Vikings than just their mythic bloodlust. These coastal marauders, who terrorized Northern Europe from the 8th to 11th centuries, also had a chill side. When they weren’t in longhouses playing their "hnefatafl” board games and downing flagons of ale, Vikings took to the iced-over fjords and snow-covered slopes of Scandinavia, where they raced and shred the gnar.

Vikings didn’t invent skiing or ice skating. Skis were originally dreamed up in central Asia during the Stone Age, and later appropriated by the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia. As for skates, the earliest ones date back 4,000 years. By the time the Vikings took up these winter sports, skis and skates had already gone through several rounds of evolution.

But Vikings were the ones who popularized these activities. In fact, they gave skiing its name, from the Old Norse skríða á skíðum—“to stride on skis.” Skiing was often combined with hunting, which the Vikings so excelled at that the foundational Gulathing Law of 1274—written in Norway, where Vikings ruled through the 15th century—outlawed the hunting of elk while on skis, to protect the species from extinction. There were even two Norse gods involved in the sport: Ullr and Skaði, who were elevated in ancient Icelandic literature such as Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda and commonly depicted on skis.

While Viking skis were made of wood (mostly pine, though some were birch), Viking skates were usually crafted, like the skates of other cultures, from animal bones (though some were iron).

In August 2014, archaeologist Runar Hole visited a recently melted glacier in the mountains of Reinheiman National Park—about 60 miles east of Ålesund, Norway—to look for artifacts encased in ice. He found a single ski, complete with leather straps, dated to right around the start of the Viking Age.

While archaeologists usually find ancient preserved skis in glaciated mountain passes, ice skates—once commonplace throughout medieval Europe—have been found everywhere from Birka, Sweden, to the former Viking stronghold of York, England. Some have even been dug up in Dublin.

The technology hadn't been refined by the the Middle Ages, so skates were sometimes lubricated with animal fat. Both sports required Vikings to propel themselves forward with wooden poles.

The medieval chronicler Olaus Magnus detailed the skating Scandinavians of his time—the Vikings’ descendants—as nimble on their feet. “The other kind of men are those who attach to the soles of their feet … the flat bones of deer or oxen, the shin bones, that is,” he writes. “These are slippery by nature because they have an inherent greasiness and achieve a very great speed, though only on smooth ice.”

Magnus also describes a sort of medieval speed skating, where Vikings who wore iron skates were always outmaneuvered by those racing in bone skates. The winners would take home copper pots, silver spoons, swords, and young horses, “but more often the last.”

Though the Vikings achieved notoriety for carving up their enemies, it seems that their wintry antics—carving up slopes and making figure-eights—have been largely forgotten.