“It’s a really neat feeling to help people be able to print from hot metal.”

In an innocuous building in San Francisco’s Presidio, the Grabhorn’s Institute’s Brian Ferrett boils lead and casts metal type using techniques and equipment a century old. Ferrett, is one of perhaps 100 people worldwide who cast type. At 44, he’s unusually young. Most type-casters are decades older.

To make individual pieces of type, Ferrett fires up a caster, a fancy bit of mechanical gear with a motor, cams, and levers. He lights a gas burner to melt a pot of lead, antimony, and tin; a hood over each caster exhausts the gas and metal fumes. The recipe for this alloy dates back to the 1400s, and it’s formulated to quickly cool and harden.

The type is sold by the pound to letterpress printers. With letterpress printing, letters and images stand in relief, allowing their surfaces to be lightly coated in ink on a press, and then squeezed with carefully calibrated pressure against paper. That “impression” transfers the ink to make a printed page or poster.

More crucially, the type Ferrett casts is used to print limited-edition books in the Grabhorn Institute’s adjacent pressroom on letterpress equipment of a similar vintage. Sold for hundreds to thousands of dollars each, these books form the largest part of the institute’s revenue and sustain it for the future.

Although digital typesetting and offset lithography have largely rendered type casting obsolete, letterpress printing and type founding remains alive at Grabhorn. The institute conducts weekly tours of operations and has regular events in its gallery, which is open daily.

Rows of machines line both long walls of the foundry. Operations are managed by Ferrett, an 11-year veteran, and his colleague Chris Godek, at Grabhorn for eight. Both were trained by Lewis Mitchell, who worked for the foundry from 1950 across multiple locations in San Francisco and several owners through 2014.

Ferrett can select a type mold (a “matrix”) from one of an estimated hundreds of thousands in the foundry. Each letter in every size and style of a typeface requires its own matrix. They’re precious, both because their tarnished brass or gleaming nickel-plating is beautiful, and because they’re scarce: The last were made decades ago and some date back far longer.

Locking the matrix into place in a Thompson caster, Ferrett can trigger it to produce a rapid, automatic, and endless sequence of the same letter. The caster squirts hot lead under pressure into a form, ejects it, smooths and shapes its five flat sides, and spits it out, repeating over and over. Ferrett credits his mentor Mitchell’s long tenure for these machines remaining operable. “He is the only reason these things work,” Ferrett says. A certificate on the wall of the foundry celebrating Mitchell’s half-century of work remains in place, updated with pencil marks and sticky notes each anniversary through his 64th.

A metal type foundry isn’t where Ferrett thought he’d wind up. He and his wife had moved to the city 11 years ago for a job she’d taken. “I literally just happened to find it in a book on relocating to San Francisco—50 things to see when you first move, and I walked in,” Ferrett says.

He had trained and worked as a printer, but in offset lithography, the technology that largely replaced letterpress. “Litho” uses thin metal plates that take ink selectively. It’s efficient, but unromantic and fairly sterile.

Ferrett started with an apprenticeship and quickly realized that “I would be able to continue making these things that nobody was doing anymore.” He seized the opportunity, and now trains the next generation.

The type-casting profession went largely extinct in the 1980s after decades of slow decline. Yet visiting the Grabhorn Institute, which operates the type foundry and a fine-edition book publisher, printer, and bindery, you’d be hard pressed to realize you were stepping backwards in time.

In the day-lit pressroom, rows of type cabinets on one side hold hundreds of drawers of type, which is set a letter at a time by hand. On the other side, an array of presses can produce anything from quick small prints for proofreading text up to large sheets that hold several unfolded pages of a book.

The institute preserves this last generation of letterpress, in which intensely manual work sits alongside some of the best industrial machines ever made. Johann Gutenberg made this method practical in 1450, and nearly every book, every magazine, every flyer, every bit of the printed word relied on letterpress through the 1950s.

Letterpress has a unique charm: It’s tactile, visible, and weighty. Try to casually pick up a tray holding a column of type ready for press, and realize it weighs 10, 20, 30 pounds. Look at it, and you can read the letters, mirrored for printing. Rub your fingers over the top, and feel what will press into paper.

It can also be immediate and rewarding. Large type and images can be locked down on a flat proofing press, inked up, and posters pulled off nearly as fast as you can imagine them, but with the visceral pop of a protest song. At some marches, such as the 2017 Women’s March event in Seattle, letterpress prints are held alongside posters made with markers and paint.

By the 1980s, nearly all letterpress gear was abandoned for efficiency’s sake as offset printing took over. But craftspeople and universities kept the tradition alive with art prints, small editions of books, wedding invitations, and posters.

Those keeping letterpress going include Andrew Hoyem, who founded the Arion Press in San Francisco in the early 1970s. It owed its roots (and gear) to the two Grabhorn brothers, who began publishing in the city in 1919.

In 1989, after multiple moves and owners, Hoyem acquired the faltering foundry, Mackenzie & Harris, which began life in the city in 1915. He sustained it—as M&H Type—to feed his publishing needs and to sell type to remaining letterpress printers during the dark days when type and equipment were being melted down, burned, or thrown in dumps.

A drop in demand and rising real estate costs led Hoyem and others to start the nonprofit Grabhorn Institute in 2001. Hoyem retired in 2018 after nearly 60 years as a printer and publisher.

Grabhorn survives on the symbiosis between its foundry and press. The Arion Press produces a few titles a year. Its most recent was an illustrated Frankenstein, printed in a run of 220—its 115th title. The standard edition cost $1,200, while a deluxe version in a laser-engraved wooden box ran $2,500—and sold out.

On a recent visit, Frankenstein was in the bindery. Bindery apprentice Samantha Companatico used a book press with a heavy weight to compress a copy of the book’s pages and paint on binding glue. Nearby, lead bookbinder Megan Gibes glued a set of pages into the title’s covers. (Gibes is a former apprentice, and all the staff apprenticed at Grabhorn.)

For the kind of limited-edition books produced by Arion Press, bookbinding operations remain intensely manual to preserve quality and add fancy, time-consuming details, like fine foil stamping and—for the deluxe Frankenstein—a hand-sewn binding. (Keeping with a bookselling tradition dating back centuries at least, the press also offers a few sets of unbound printings for someone who wants to hire their own bookbinder.)

But these books wouldn’t be feasible if the many pages of text were set by hand, a character at a time. Instead, the foundry also keeps several Monotype type-composition systems running. Monotype was introduced in 1900, and favored for book work. It splits keyboarding and casting, almost like computer and printer. An operator types on the keyboard, which punches corresponding holes in a roll of paper tape, nearly as a song is punched into a player-piano roll. To reproduce the typing as lines of type, the tape is “played back” into the caster, which uses pneumatics and motors to pick the right type mold from a set of 225 and cast each letter.

Grabhorn bypasses the keyboards, though, which are more temperamental from wear than type-casting machines. The typesetters use an even more efficient method that looks like—well, a Frankenstein’s monster of circuit boards and pneumatic tubing. The CompCAT, designed by Bill Welliver and used worldwide, allows composition and text previewing on a Mac, and then fools a caster into thinking it’s reading paper tape to “output” type. It’s a neat bridge of old and new.

Regardless of the particular system involved, Grabhorn is a much-loved institution for those who love to talk type. “Anywhere I go that there’s a press, people are excited that we’re here,” says Ferrett. “It’s a really neat feeling to help people be able to print from hot metal.”

Hogging the limelight at the Kentucky State Fair.

Miss Kentucky sashayed around the room, cradling the State Grand Champion: a 16-pound, beribboned pinnacle of porcine splendor, laid out on a bed of roses. The winner of best ham at the Kentucky State Fair was about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder at the Kentucky Farm Bureau’s annual ham breakfast and auction.

Within seconds, the prized ham had reached bids in the hundreds of thousands. “Don’t stop to think now,” exhorted the auctioneer when the bids reached $900,000. “We left common sense long behind.” Just past five minutes into the auction, the ham sold for $1 million to Central Bank and the bank’s President and CEO, Luther Deaton. Deaton’s largesse in the face of award-winning cured meats has precedent: Last year he combined his own bid of $1.4 million with an equal amount from a competing bidder to buy the prizewinning ham for $2.8 million.

The Kentucky Farm Bureau’s annual country ham breakfast brings together business leaders, members of the state’s agricultural community, and politicians, and its high-stakes ham auction is a Kentucky State Fair tradition celebrating its 56th year. Proceeds from the auction support non-profit organizations and charities of the winning bidder’s choice. According to a press release by the Kentucky Farm Bureau, the money from the sale of this year’s ham will go to Transylvania University, the University of Kentucky Gatton College of Business, the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center, St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Northern Kentucky, the University of Kentucky Athletics Program, and UK HealthCare.

Some 1,500 attendees attended the auction on August 22 in Louisville, Kentucky, and listened to speeches by Governor Matt Bevin and Mayor Greg Fischer. In accordance with another beloved tradition, Miss Kentucky presented the ham to bidders.

Blake Penn, general manager of Penn’s Hams, which provided the Grand Champion ham, is still reeling from the shock and delight of the sale. “I think it figures out to $15,000 a slice, when you actually do the math,” he says. The local family business sells their country hams, which are salted, cured, and smoked over four to six months, for around $50.

Both companies and individuals enter their hams in hopes of being crowned at the fair. A judge evaluates them for symmetry, shape, color, and aroma, says Penn, using a metal probe to crack into the ham and smell it for richness. Occasionally the judge samples a microwaved slice. This is the third time Penn’s Hams has won the State Grand Championship, following wins in 1984 and 1999.

“I’m out here in a rural area trying to get our name out there,” Penn says of the recognition. “So it’s a big deal. It really means a lot.”

It did start as one, though.

This September, a cafe in Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood will serve 1,000 bowls of piranha ramen. Made with 300 kilos of piranha sourced from the Brazilian port city of Manaus, they will likely be the first ramen of their kind in Japan, if not the world. It was supposed to be a joke.

The idea came to Tom Yano, founder and CEO of the Tokyo-based events company Holiday Jack, while vacationing in the Brazilian Amazon. As he fished, cooked, and ate piranha daily, Yano acquired recipes from locals and became especially infatuated with a soup called caldo de piranha—a delicacy common to the Pantanal region of Brazil. The bony fish are chunked and simmered in a tomato-based soup with vegetables and herbs. “The taste was really good," he says. "That’s why I thought piranha soup and ramen [would] match."

Upon returning to his native Japan, Yano posted an article to his company’s website announcing a piranha ramen event. “The World’s First Piranha Ramen Is Born!” ran the headline. But the sensational article about “the most ferocious and dangerous fish in the world” cheekily noted in the final line, “Thank you very much for reading to the end. This is an April Fool’s joke, and there is no actual plan to offer Piranha Ramen.” Despite the disclaimer, Yano says more than 500 calls poured in from Japanese and international followers inquiring about tickets. “I didn’t expect the article [to] buzz,” he says.

Given all the interest, Yano is following through with the event and will be serving what he believes to be the world’s first piranha ramen. “The joke [became] reality,” he says. Yano spent three million yen ($28,000) flying more than 2,000 whole piranha fresh-frozen from Brazil to Japan, to the puzzlement of customs agents who detained the fish for 13 hours in Narita airport.

The process isn’t new to Holiday Jack. Yano tells me an announcement from three years ago about a piranha-fishing event in Shinagawa prompted a similar response once he admitted that it, too, was a joke. Again, he followed through, and Holiday Jack is now in its third year of semi-annual Piranha Fishing events. He sold 2,500 tickets to last April’s installment.

Yano developed the “piranha-men” recipe, as he calls it, in collaboration with the chefs behind Naritaya Ramen Shop, a renowned restaurant in the popular sightseeing Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa. Bowls of ramen noodles, vegetables, and “100% piranha broth” will be available for 3,000 yen ($28.20), and adding a whole, fried piranha on top will cost an additional 2,500 yen ($23.54).

Opinions on the culinary value of the freshwater fish vary. A lover of rare meat options, Yano says “it's good, it kind of tastes like red snapper—almost the same.” Others liken it to lemon sole, while Brazilians even more favorably note a “rich creaminess” and consider it an aphrodisiac. River Monsters’ Jeremy Wade differs, saying “it’s quite bony flesh,” adding “some people say it’s like steel wool mixed with needles.”

The ramen will be served from 5 to 9 p.m. on September 20th, and 11 a.m to 9 p.m. from the 21st to the 23rd, in Yano’s recently opened Ninja Cafe and Bar. The costumed servers, who have trained for a month in Japan’s ancient ninja stronghold of Iga, not only take orders and run food but perform martial arts, from throwing shuriken to blowing darts—just in case eating piranha ramen alone is too tame.

As Americans hit the road for Labor Day weekend, we salute the Tin Can Tourists—the DIY auto enthusiasts who started it all.

MR. LANDLORD HAS NOTHING ON US” begins a poem printed on a small Curt Teich postcard from 1921. Above the passage’s 13 lines—which call for “Alligator shooting” and “Razor-backs rooting”—a colorized photograph shows a shaggy outdoorsman posing in an overgrown Florida campsite, surrounded by oak trees dripping with Spanish moss.

It’s a dead-on depiction of the card’s subject: the Tin Can Tourists, a group whose DIY naturalist spirit paved the way for today’s RV campers.

Equal parts car club and camping collective, the Tin Can Tourists of the early 20th century were a membership organization based around camper travel in its incipiency—a sort of fraternity for nomads looking for a permanent life in transit. Their earliest organized meeting was in 1919 in Tampa’s Desoto Park (unintentionally establishing Florida as the perennial RV vacation spot for years to come). That's where 22 campers driving their “tin lizzies” worked to establish a culture of order and high moral values while retaining a sense of freedom behind the wheels of their tricked-out Model Ts.

The group's goal was to "unite fraternally all autocampers," and its word-of-mouth marketing led to a rapid growth in membership and annual events in the 1920s and ’30s. Gatherings were held in state and local parks from Florida to Michigan (and occasionally at the base of the Washington Monument in D.C.). Attendees numbered in the thousands, and as more American workers lost their jobs during the Great Depression, there was more time to attend Tin Can Tourist conventions around the eastern U.S. According to news reports, the club counted 150,000 members by the mid-1930s.

The Tin Can Tourists hit their stride during this period thanks to highway improvements across the U.S.—a precursor to the International Highway System, authorized in 1956 by President Eisenhower—and affordable, mass-produced vehicles (between 1908 and 1927, Ford built some 15 million Model Ts). Families found an affordable new way to travel and camp overnight, while other enthusiasts found a new hobby: redesigning cars to suit campers’ needs. Many of the group’s annual conventions—most took place in Florida, though Michigan and other states played host as well—doubled as expositions for displaying cars modified to carry kitchen equipment, barrels of water, and, in some cases, all the luxuries of a family home.

With the onset of World War II, however, the group’s decline seemed inevitable. As a national war-first mentality took hold and rationing began in earnest, Tin Can Tourist membership dwindled. (According to a LIFE magazine article, attendance at an annual meeting in 1936 was over 1,500. By 1939, a mere 645 campers showed up for the same event.) At the same time, campers’ tastes were migrating toward spiffier mobile offerings, factory-designed for car camping.

Yet the Tin Can Tourists remain influential today—a group whose humble beginnings as a gathering of virtuous vagabonds managed to pioneer recreational mainstays such as group camping, summer trips to Florida, and modern-day RVing.

The archival photographs below capture the group’s heyday in encampments throughout the U.S.—barbecues, campground games, and all—and attest to their long-lasting influence on America’s holiday roads.

The endangered amphibians were found camped out in a lonely brown puddle in Chile.

The entire population of one of Chile’s rarest frogs once lived quite happily—whatever happiness might look like for a frog—in a single stream. But years of illegal water extraction for nearby copper mining choked and dessicated the waterway, squeezing the Loa water frogs that managed to survive into a puddle roughly the size of a small bedroom. When scientists realized that the stream had almost disappeared, they acted fast to evacuate the last remaining Loa frogs—all 14 of them, according to a press release from Global Wildlife Conservation.

“What happened is a sign of the great threat that exists [for] all these high Andean frogs,” Gabriel Lobos, an associate researcher at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History of the Atacama Desert, wrote in an email. “[It makes] the future very uncertain for these wonderful animals.”

Loa frogs, or Telmatobius dankoi, are brownish and quite small. They can comfortably perch on a human finger, as they rarely grow longer than two inches.

The frogs’ original habitat, which Lobos calls “Oasis Loa,” was confined to a small canal by the Loa River outside the city of Calama in northern Chile. This kind of micro-environment is typical for South American water frogs in the genus Telmatobius, which live in the Andean highlands, many occupying single streams or lakes.

The Loa water frog is so rare that it wasn’t officially described until 1999. The vast majority of the 64 recognized Telmatobius species are endangered.

In late June, Andrés Charrier, a herpetologist from the Chilean Herpetological Association, wanted to show the Loa water frog to some colleagues. But when he arrived, he saw that the stream—once nearly 2,000 feet long—had entirely dried out. He didn’t even find carcasses of frogs, meaning the area had been parched for a long, long time, as he told Global Wildlife.

Charrier returned to the site three days later, this time accompanied by Lobos and other researchers. They hunted around till they found a single pool, roughly a hundred square feet. “We searched between the mud and the water and could see that there were still a few frogs,” Lobos says, noting the amphibians were dangerously thin, slow, and dehydrated. But the researchers—who forgot to bring Tupperware or any of their usual frog-collecting equipment—realized there was nothing they could do.

Luckily, the National Zoo of Chile heard what was going on and offered to nurse the frogs back to health. So the researchers returned to the field—this time with Tupperware in tow—and collected all the frogs they could find: just 14 individuals. They then boarded a plane and flew back to the zoo.

The National Zoo of Chile is no stranger to frog care. Due to encroaching threats to the 10 or 11 supremely rare water frogs that live in northern Chile, the zoo has doubled as a conservation breeding center for these frogs over the past decade. Under the care of Osvaldo Cabeza, the zoo’s supervisor of herpetology, the frogs have begun their slow recovery—a regimen of constant meals comprising snails, invertebrates, and vitamins. Unlike the other water frogs in the zoo’s care, Loa frogs require a high PH level in their water, making them tricky to care for.

Now the researchers are calling upon the Chilean government to enact real protections for the Loa and other endangered water frogs in northern Chile. Lobos says the frogs face a whole host of threats, including global warming, water extraction, metal mining, lithium in the water, and various diseases. So they’re demanding, among other things, a long-term research and conservation plan, according to a declaration written by Lobos and other scientists, and clear, outlined steps to restore the frogs’ once-flowing stream.

Lobos has been fighting for years to see this tiny frog succeed in its homeland. In 2013 and 2015 he worked on environmental-education projects to spread awareness about water frogs, in hopes that the public will join his cause. One of their problems, he says, is a lack of PR: Loa water frogs are one of “those species that receive no attention and that are unknown.”

Until real intervention happens, however, the future of the dried-up stream looks bleak. Calama is a mining city, and the land containing the Loa’s stream was just sold to a real-estate developer. The Chilean government is currently investigating the copper-mining companies that may be responsible for the Loa’s fate.

Thankfully, the 14 Loa water frogs are blissfully unaware of all this, reveling in the watery comfort of their new zoo digs and munching happily on froggy vitamins.

Step right up!

Don’t look now,” he murmurs. Richard Margittay’s tone is conspiratorial—urgent, a little electric.

We’re facing each other, as if about to dance. I search for his eyes behind his sunglasses, or for the reflection of whatever has him so excited. He’s peering at something over my right shoulder. I’m not quite sure what he sees, but I’m curious.

It’s a Sunday morning and Margittay and I are wandering the midway of the Michigan State Fair. The event is among the oldest of its kind in America—it debuted in 1849, eight years after New York’s—and though it left its traditional fairgrounds in Detroit for smaller, suburban digs, it still delivers the standard fare. There’s a sprawling parking lot, a striped circus tent, and a buzzing exhibition hall where the air smells like damp sawdust and one can find pickle-flavored fudge, plump pumpkins, and prize-winning steer. Out on the midway, beneath the taffy-colored gondolas of a largely empty Ferris wheel, tents and stands peddle deep-fried Oreos and neon-colored slushies. A tinny soundtrack mingles with shrieks of delight and fear.

Like any fair worth its ribbon, this one has games—one after another, operating out of trailers or tents. Some invite players to shoot pellets or fling darts, others to lob basketballs through a hoop or hurl baseballs at a tidy stack of bottles. They’re fringed with blinking lights, and their operators all exhort passersby to “Step right up!” to which many grumble that there’s just no use in trying. They know that those hefty plush prizes—from golden-horned unicorns to parrots dressed as pirates—probably aren’t going anywhere.

Beneath clouds that look every bit like spun sugar, Margittay and I do-si-do. Over his shoulder, I see what had arrested his attention: A game that invites players to “Pitch till you win.”

The task is to toss a ring around a post from a few feet away. The premise sounds simple, but it’s not: The targets aren’t round—many of them are shaped like a rowboat, narrow on one side and chunky on the other. They’re draped with fake leis and prizes—plush animals, cinched at the waist, or pieces of paper trumpeting different things that could be yours. One post holds a few $20 bills, gone limp in the heat.

“That’s a bad game right there,” Margittay says. “I’m gonna get a picture of that before I leave.” He sounds both disdainful and energized. The way some kids perk up when they see a ride or a pile of chili fries—that’s how Margittay gets when he suspects shenanigans.

He sniffs out more at a nearby game. It’s a cluster of glass bottles—champagne, beer, soda—surrounded by sparkling shards of busted ones. Five dollars gets you three throws of a—well, the game operator insists they’re baseballs. If you break two bottles in a row, you win a prize. “I know baseball,” Margittay mutters as we wander off. “That’s no baseball.” He has six fresh stitches on his lip from taking a ball to the face in his 65-and-older league. He knows what a baseball or softball ought to weigh.

We don’t walk far without stopping again, this time at a shooting gallery, where the goal is to riddle a small piece of paper with enough pellets to completely obliterate a little red star at the center. Examples, labeled with the date they were vanquished, are posted around the booth. These are both trophies and ads, designed to convince us that the game is possible to win, and that we ought to try. The operator wants to know: Are we ready? Margittay has a proposition for him. “You can do it, I’ll do it,” he says. The guy demurs—he says he’s never tried. “It’s all a bunch of baloney,” Margittay says, as we move on.

Margittay wants to hover, unnoticed. But like the wasps buzzing around cast-off elephant ears, he’s not especially subtle. His fingers often drift to his belt loops, where his T-shirt drapes over a digital camera case worn like a holster. (His small-barrel Smith & Wesson, he says, is in the car.) All morning, he draws the camera quick and returns it just as fast, snapping scores of photos without spending much time framing or focusing them.

A retired police officer in Dearborn, Michigan, Margittay has found a second act as a crusader, and his cause is to root out, expose, and rid the world of shifty carnival games. He can’t stand when fraud stands in the way of fun. So in the place of fun, when he visits a fair, he collects evidence.

The games clamoring for eyeballs and dollars in carnival midways, beachside boardwalks, or arcades may look different from one another—some require an operator who takes your money and hands over balls, darts, or other implements, while others, such as claw machines, are more automatic—but all tend to have several things in common. They typically cost no more than a few bucks to play, and they are universally hard to beat. And when players do manage to get something out of them, the winnings are most often cheap trinkets. Many of these amusement games, explains business law scholar J. Royce Fichtner in an article in the Drake Law Review, are technically a form of gambling, partly because the outcome is more based on chance than skill. (For instance, in the dart-and-balloon game, the prizes listed under each balloon are often placed at random, so even a professional dart player is as likely as everyone else to come away with a bantam prize.) In many cases, only after many tries and many tiny little victories, does a player have the chance to compete for the bigger, more attractive thing that caught her eye in the first place. There’s a general understanding that the vast majority of players won’t ever get there.

Almost ever since games popped up on American midways in the 19th century, people have fretted over them. Amusement games have erupted as a cultural battleground, again and again, for ethics, values, and Americanness itself.

Long before investigators—including Margittay and some more official ones we’ll get to later—started combing midways for egregiously rigged games, the hand-wringing was about their sheer existence, and whether the fun they provided was too frivolous and a threat to the fabric of rural America. The state fairs as we know them today—crammed with rides, games, and butter sculptures—were preceded by more humble, local gatherings. In the 19th century, when they arose around the country, summertime fairs were often hosted by agricultural societies, which designed them to be educational. They rewarded labor and ingenuity, and were a place to swap practical tips and learn about new innovations. By the mid-1800s, though, some fair organizers suspected that they could bring more people in if things were just a little bit jazzier.

These financial considerations eventually persuaded many ardent agriculturalists that adding other sorts of amusements wouldn’t be so bad. After all, even visitors lured by the promise of something frothy would still be exposed to the agricultural displays.

Not everyone agreed. As historian Chris Rasmussen writes in Carnival in the Countryside, a study of the Iowa State Fair, “the uneasiness or outright antipathy that some agriculturalists, journalists, and fairgoers felt toward entertainments was not merely a cranky outburst against the prospect that someone might actually have fun at the fair.” Instead, it was about identity and what a community ought to stand for. “As Iowans debated the respective place of agriculture and entertainments at the fair between the 1850s and the turn of the twentieth century,” Rasmussen writes, “they were implicitly discussing the future of their state.”

Many agriculturalists considered the games—along with circus performers, musical acts, and other diversions—to be "the opposite of everything that the fair officially existed to promote," Rasmussen writes. Fairs should be about supporting the agriculture business and its future, including rewarding kids for taking an interest in breeding the hardiest stock or coaxing the most robust squash from the soil. Plus, Rasmussen writes, the anti-entertainment camp was worried about a flood of snake-oil salesmen, pickpockets, and other petty crooks eager to prey on distracted, money-bearing crowds. Ahead of a fair's opening day in 1875, Rasmussen reports, Iowa’s Daily Gate City newspaper warned locals to “fasten your windows, diet your dogs to a condition of ravenousness, and above all keep your revolvers in good working order.”

Underpinning all of this was the fear that the games and their operators were just cheating hardworking, good-hearted folks out for a good time. In August 1937, the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New York, ran a full-page pictorial spread under the headline, “You Haven’t Got a Chance.” The photos demonstrated the ways common amusements could be set up in the operator’s favor—including plants in the crowd—and declared, “when you play the sucker games on the midway at a fair or carnival, you’re bound to lose.” There was something sour and bitter about the notion that summer fun could be reduced to a seedy transaction between an operator’s eagerness to deceive and a player’s willingness to go along with it.

First, Sergeant George Scharf was mystified. It was spring 1939, and he was whiling away an April day at a local carnival in Detroit. There, he found himself glued to a game in which players hurled baseballs to knock down a cluster of four bottles. Five cents got a player three balls, weighing four ounces apiece. Scharf watched one player after another try. Time and again, three of the bottles toppled with ease and the fourth was stubborn. He watched until he couldn’t take it anymore. “The obstinacy of the fourth bottle at last became such an obsession with Scharf,” the Detroit Free Press reported at the time, “that he climbed over the barrier and hefted it.”

And no wonder. The bottle Scharf grabbed wasn’t wood, like the others—it was iron and filled with lead. It weighed 7.5 pounds, basically impossible to drop with a four-ounce ball short of launching it from a cannon. Scharf marched the offending “bottle” to a police station a block away. When he got back to the carnival, he saw that players seemed to be having a much easier go of it.

Eighty years later, there are still many ways to manipulate the outcome of a game, from physical funny business to psychological sneakiness. An operator might tinker with the objects of the game—heavy bottles, light balls, dull darts, crooked sights, basketball hoops bent into an ovoid shape. In the case of automated games, owners or manufacturers may fiddle with the back end, programming a claw’s grip to be too weak to lift many of the prizes, or to hold them long enough to make it to the prize bin. Or operators may use psychological tactics, such as promising a player that another $3 will get them closer to victory, even though, statistically, the chances of winning are just as low every time around. Several decades ago, Fichtner reports, FBI investigators tried to crack the secrets of a common game in which players try to toss a ring into a field of bottles to get it to land around the neck of one. In one test, they found it took 583 attempts to get the ring to land—and that one was only because of a lucky ricochet. In another test, it took more than 700 tries. (At $5 a play, that’s $3,500.)

There’s a simple reason operators have wanted to make their games hard to win but look easy: economics. In a 1997 article in the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin, former investigator Bruce Walstad, who then worked in the police department in Franklin Park, Illinois, breaks down the financial structure of midway amusements. Game operators often pay carnival operators a daily fee, known as a “privilege,” for a spot on the midway, he writes. The figure depends on the size and location of the lot. (The prime real estate is toward the front, on the right-hand side, Walstad notes, where operators can expect the most foot traffic.) From there, fees keep mounting. “Dings” go toward things such as hooking up electricity, Walstad writes, then there’s so-called “fuzz” money, allegedly funneled toward hushing complaints, or as a balm for scratchy relationships with politicians or other officials who don’t like what they see. They also have to pay for the prizes upfront, and their own expenses on the road.

Walstad crunched the numbers for a game at the Florida Mid-State Fair. The operator of a bushel-basket game (toss a softball into a tilted basket and get it to stay there) in a 20-foot trailer set up shop for 11 days at the cost of $1,600 per day. Just to break even, he would need to entice 3,520 plays at $5 each. At the Michigan fair, one operator, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, told me that he needed to rig his game—he bent his basketball hoop to keep balls from passing through easily—to turn a profit. "If I put up regular rims up there," he said, "I'd have to park a semi behind me to keep up with the stock I'd be [handing] out."

The Michigan State Fair doesn't have any formal sweeps in place to identify games that have been manipulated. “If the question is, do we as the fair inspect every game, the answer is no,” says Steve Masters, the fair’s executive director, and a former game operator himself. “But by driving around, we can see what’s happening,” he adds. Masters says that, to his knowledge, the games at the fair are all games of skill or prize-every-time games—not gambling. He would “certainly never knowingly allow” a manipulated game on the midway, he adds. “We are working to create a family environment and a friendly environment. Customer confidence is part of what we’re trying to do here.”

In his Drake Law Review article, Fichtner, the legal scholar, points out that it’s no secret that many games have historically been tampered with. Even in such cases, or ones in which a game definitely fits the legal definition of gambling in a place where that’s prohibited, that doesn’t mean anyone will be prosecuted, “possibly because carnival games constitute minor infractions that have persisted for so long that there is little incentive to start prosecuting them now,” he writes.

It’s hard for anyone to win at a carnival or fair midway, or out on the boardwalk, but both individuals and official agencies are out there trying to make sure it’s not impossible.

In the 1930s, Scharf, the Detroit sergeant, hated to see something sneaky going on so close to a police station. Decades later, Margittay, the former Dearborn cop, felt the same way. To hear him tell it, he was sitting at the front desk one day in the 1970s, writing up some reports, when someone came in to complain that they’d been ripped off at a carnival near the station. Margittay had strolled through with his girlfriend the night before, and he thought something seemed off. But right under the cops’ noses? That rubbed Margittay the wrong way, and it still does. These days, he is a lone wolf—propelled by a mission, but without power to enforce it, since he’s retired. He scopes out carnivals in between gigs photographing sports, or cruising in his 1948 Willys Jeep with his fluffy, friendly Alaskan malamutes. When Margittay takes matters into his own hands—by bringing complaints to the police or railing against operators in writing—he sometimes winds up in hot water: In 2012, a carnival company sued him for defamation, citing claims he made about their practices in his two self-published books. (A U.S. district judge dismissed the suit in 2013.)

While Margittay is a volunteer inspector, elsewhere there are people authorized to canvass for rigged games. On the sun-drenched New Jersey boardwalks, that task often falls to Joseph Chessere.

Seaside Heights, New Jersey, lives up to the promise of its name. Its streets are lined with low-slung beach houses and on-brand dives—the Surfside Motel, the Shore Thing Pub. Porches are speckled with beach chairs facing the ocean, even if there’s another building in the way. Swim trunks and towels drip over railings and flap like sails in the breeze.

On a mid-July afternoon in 2018, with thunder rolling in the distance, I meet Joseph Chessere on the boardwalk, where visitors can buy fried clams or an iced latte from Bada Bean Cawfee, where a dash of espresso is known as “a single shot to the head.” There are dozens of games scattered along the boardwalk and in oceanfront arcades—from balloon dart games to wheel-spinning games to claw machines—and Chessere’s job is to make sure that it's at least possible to win them.

Chessere has a warm face and deep, crème-brûlée tan, and today, he’s wearing a uniform—a collared, dark navy polo with a yellow-gold seal on the upper left. Normally, though, he keeps a low profile—and a change of clothes in the car, in case someone recognizes him.

Given his druthers, he’d rather be out when the boardwalk is thronged with crowds. That's when it’s easiest to blend in among the sunscreen-smeared masses. He doesn’t want to be detected until he flashes his badge, which is folded into a leather case with a metal insignia. “If I’m wearing a suit, [people] know I’m not on vacation,” he says.

He is an investigator with New Jersey’s Legalized Games of Chance Control Commission (LGCCC), a unit within the Department of Consumer Affairs, and uniquely equipped to be quite good at it. Before he started working as an investigator around 15 years ago, Chessere spent six years as a software engineer at an independent lab, he tells me, where he looked at amusements games’ guts. He says he left the lab, which was a small operation, for a more secure job with the state. He knows how games work, from the inside out—and that helps him detect anything awry.

The state has been licensing amusement games since 1959, first under the umbrella of the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, and within the Division of Consumer Affairs (DCA) since the 1990s. All summer long, Chessere and his colleagues follow up on complaints made to the DCA about boardwalk games. (The division acts on every one, he says, and each of the state’s 266 amusement game licensees in shore resort areas get a drop-in at least once a year.) When the DCA first took over enforcement, “It was more Wild West,” says executive officer Karl Reidel. Now, he says, “It’s closer to where licensees want to work with us—they understand that we’re not going away.”

At Lucky Leo’s, a sprawling arcade complex festooned with tinsel, ornaments, and candy canes for a Christmas-in-July promotion, Chessere demonstrates to me and a few other reporters how he might approach a claw game to see if it was rigged. Prizes have to be light enough for a claw to grab, and big enough not to slip through its fingers. If all of the big-ticket prizes from a claw game are outside of the playing field, that’s a violation. Chessere slides the claw to the right side of the game, and goes for a velvet bag. He’s got skills—he grabs it on the first attempt. When it drops to the slot, he fishes it out and opens it up to check for the prize inside. All good. Chessere says he’ll sometimes do a 50-play test on a game, just to see the range of prizes and confirm its consistency.

He also opens the machine up and checks a little box inside. It should include a line saying that the game is certified for play in New Jersey. “No one is allowed to manufacture their own game and put it in here like ‘Mu wha ha ha,’” says Kelly Whalen, manager of Lucky Leo’s, miming an evil cackle. “Things that weren’t approved for New Jersey won’t be here.”

If a game is found to be in violation of state regulations, the goal is that “it gets corrected before I leave,” Chessere says. When that’s not possible, he shuts it down. I imagine that this isn’t always popular with the operators, but Chessere won’t say anything more. “Everybody’s happy; it goes over well,” he says, halfway between a smirk and a grimace.

Chessere’s practice aligns pretty neatly with a primer outlined by Walstad, the former investigator, in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. An investigator ought to get the full, transparent spiel from operators, Walstad writes. Which prizes are there, and how does a player win them? What’s the formula for trading up from the shrimpy prizes to the bigger ones? The operator should climb over the counter and demonstrate the game from the player’s position, to prove that the players have a shot at winning—that the rings fit over the blocks, the balls can splash through the hoop, the darts are sharp enough to pop a slightly deflated balloon. If everything checks out, Walstad writes, “One of the inspecting officers should explain to operators that the rules and props cannot be changed or altered, that they may not move to another midway location, and that they must operate the game as it was explained and recorded during inspection.” No reverting to funny business once the officer has moved on.

“We don’t want anyone walking away from what should be an enjoyable trip feeling like they, or worse, their children, were taken advantage of by rigged games or deceptive sales practices,” New Jersey’s Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal said in a statement when the Commission announced their 2018 sweeps.

Still, the Commission puts a bit of the onus on consumers, too. Their website reminds players to look for operators’ licenses and posted rules, and states, “If you think you are being cheated, stop playing and walk away,” then file a complaint. “Consumers have to know what they’re willing to spend,” Chessere says. A player with dismal hand-eye coordination, then, shouldn’t approach a hoop game with Stephen Curry delusions. “If you don’t want to spend $50 and you’re not that good at basketball,” he adds, “maybe pick a different game.” We’ll help ensure that everything is legal, he’s essentially saying, but no one is prying sea-dampened dollars from your hands.

New Jersey’s LGCCC has issued more than 183 citations since 2014 (with final counts for 2018 and 2019 on the way) for several kinds of violations, from prizes that were too packed together to be grabbable to ones too heavy to be budged. One official told me that, in the past, they’d found handbags that were impossible to pluck from claw games because they were weighed down with rocks. Other regulations state that in New Jersey, no game can cost more than $10 per play, and a prize can't exceed $10,000 in value. First-time violators are slapped with a fine of up to $250. For repeat offenders, it can grow to $500.

There’s been some push among operators and manufacturers themselves to bring the games above board, as well. This is partly led by the American Amusement Machine Association, a trade organization. Its new code of conduct, effective as of December 2018, stipulates that players can expect to hone a skill, which will "improve with practice and experience," and that their actions will "influence the outcome of the game." All of the group's 200 or so members—manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers of pay-to-play games—are expected to comply, says executive vice president Peter Gustafson.

But Margittay, Chessere, and other anti-scam crusaders can’t save us from our impulses—they can only try to prevent game creators and operators from preying on them.

The trouble is, whether winning is just unlikely or truly impossible, people play anyway. Some are in it for entertainment or the quiet thrill of low-stakes, long-shot odds. I met a player like that at the Michigan State Fair—a tall, trim teenager with a University of Michigan T-shirt and swooping hair. He stepped up to a bottle-toppling game, took them out on the first try, and walked away with $40 cash. His name is Nathan Williams; he was 14 at the time and an athlete. When Margittay and I caught up with him near a game where you lob a ball into fish bowls to win a fish, he explained that he didn’t have a strategy, exactly—he just got a bit lucky. (Margittay suspected that operator goofed, and inadvertently organized the bottles in the player’s favor instead of staggering them.)

Other players knew they were kissing their money goodbye, and didn’t mind. In Michigan, I met Paul Lechevalier, posted at a coin-sweeping game, entranced. As I watched, he fed more and more tokens into the machine, which rakes the loot and other little prizes toward the player with the idea that one more coin dropping to the playing field might be enough to send an avalanche of loot into his hands. Lechevalier hadn’t won big yet—he and his family were out more than $40, all told—but he didn’t care.

“We come every year,” he said. “We like to gamble, and this is the closest thing to gambling there is.” He pointed to a little sign on the game: “Fun Matters!” with the last word underlined twice. (Another read: “Warning: Addictive,” with two exclamation points and one smiley face. "It sure is," Lechevalier said.) He knew there was no way to win, he said, but they were “playing for the heck of it,” for the “thrill of the chase,” and to pregame for a trip to a casino in downtown Detroit later that night. “That’s when it's go time,” he laughed. Between himself, an uncle, and a cousin, he figured they would spend somewhere between $1,200 and $1,500 that day on games at the fair and casino—not enough that they’d really miss it, he said, but enough that he thought they stood a chance at making it all back, and then some.

When I asked if he might feel gambled out after such a long stretch, he scrunched up his face and laughed. He stopped only long enough to repeat my question to a guy he introduced as Uncle Bobby. “She wants to know if we’ll be gambled out!” he called. “Ha! No.”

Still others play for the nostalgia—you only get so many summers, and you might as well spend them making memories with your kids. In New Jersey, I slowed when I saw a darts piling up in front of a balloon-dart game. I watched as a towheaded kid flung one after another. The kid’s mom nodded at me. “Keep walking,” she said. “We just spent $20 on this Pikachu.”

The three of us—Julie Kleedorfer, four-year-old Aiden, and I—sat down for a few minutes on a wooden bench facing the darkening sea. They had arrived earlier that afternoon from Leesport, Pennsylvania. Kleedorfer had set a daily budget for their six-day vacation, but they were already tearing through it: They’d only been at the shore for a couple of hours and they’d spent $50 on games.

Aiden wriggled in his mother’s lap. He was wearing a green Mario Kart T-shirt, and he wanted to play with his new plush Luigi, just one from a shopping bag of cuddly critters—a penguin, a pink turtle with dreamy eyes. Kleedorfer had won a necklace—gold mardi gras beads, which she’d already looped around her neck. It was cute haul, but it didn’t come anywhere close to $50 in value. “I can’t afford to spend another $10 on something stupid,” she told me, as Aiden asked if they could play again. But as a single mom, “Coming down here and trying to make him happy is a project.”

Whether you’re a kid or an adult, the midway or the boardwalk, with their flood of lights, sounds, and smells, are built to be playful and disorienting and transfixing. Yanking your attention, then clinging to it—that’s the job of both operator and design. As a player, you’re constantly recalibrating, trying to gauge the value of the prize versus the value of the experience versus the value of the money in your pocket.

It’s a shifting arithmetic. I saw that in action on the New Jersey boardwalk, when I came across a bunch of people huddled around a game I didn’t quite understand.

I asked about the rules and tried to make sense of posted signs, and this is what I surmised: Players handed over $2 for three tokens, which they could place anywhere on a board that was labeled with words and symbols. Someone pressed a little button that spun and stopped an electric wheel, something like roulette, only without odds you can count on. If the wheel’s arrow stopped on a something corresponding to where players had placed their tokens, they won. There were bigger prizes in a pile that recalled a department store’s clearance section: fishing rods, scooters, and pots and pans, a family-sized electric griddle, a set of knives.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to win the scooter, and it seemed that the players didn’t totally grasp the rules, either. “We’re figuring it out,” one woman told me, as she counted out crisp bills with her manicured nails.

But I understood the appeal. The premise seemed simple, the buy-in low, the prizes desirable. I’m not sure who, if anyone, won the rods or the griddle or anything else. All three of the players I watched went bust, and I hurried to the car before I could convince myself that I could walk away with something valuable for a couple of bucks—just before the rain began to splatter onto the boardwalk.

“Drancy is like the French bad conscience.”

It has been a time of particular unease in Paris, and the signs are everywhere. Tear gas has clouded the Champs-Élysées. Swastikas have been scrawled on public portraits of the French Jewish politician Simone Veil. Notre Dame burned. In the suburb of Drancy, a few miles northeast of the city, things are almost eerily calm, but the sense of malaise seems to carry. There, when you step off the bus at Liberation Square, you’re greeted by a U-shaped concrete building that partially encloses a wide-open grass courtyard. This pale yellow apartment block has changed from an affordable housing complex to an anteroom of death and back again in less than a century.

In the early 1940s, Nazis and their French collaborators rounded up more than 60,000 French Jews and held them here before dispatching them to death camps in what is now Poland, including Auschwitz and Sobibor. In the apartment complex—conceived just a decade earlier as a model for urban living— internees were hemmed in by barbed wire, wore yellow stars marked “Juif” (“Jew”), and suffered from dysentery and other diseases. Almost all of the people who passed through the camp, also referred to as Drancy, then died in the Holocaust. But the rooms they were interned in remain, now occupied by a new generation of people on the margins of French society.

The Germans called Drancy a “durchgangslager” or “transit camp”—“durchgang” meaning “the way through.” Nearly eight decades later, the repurposed housing complex remains a place of transit and transition. It houses immigrants, the working poor, and others who are looking for a way to their own version of belonging. To find it, they must contend with Drancy’s legacy—not just the atrocities it will always carry, but also age-old conceptions of Frenchness that nudge many to the periphery.

There was a time when the Drancy housing complex was all optimism. Its pre-war planners saw the project as the pinnacle of 20th-century living. French architects Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudouin hoped to provide safe, affordable housing to as many city-dwellers as possible. The four-story U-shaped building that served as the wartime Drancy camp was erected in the 1930s, and construction had begun on five 14-story towers adjacent to it, packed with studios and one-bedroom apartments. “Before the war, there were postcards of those towers,” says Benoit Pouvreau, a historian at the Department of Cultural Heritage in Seine-Saint-Denis, the region where Drancy is located. “It was a symbol of modernity.” Altogether, the development consisted of 1,200 units.

The planners dubbed it Cité de la Muette (The Silent City), evoking the peace and quiet residents would find within. But this sanctuary never materialized. Soon after conquering Paris in 1940, the Nazis took over the still-unfinished housing complex and converted it to the primary French staging ground for their campaign against Jews. The name Cité de la Muette remained relevant in a different way—the complex became a city of the voiceless.

After World War II, many of the buildings stood empty for a long time. In the 1970s, they were pressed back into service as French army housing, but this revival didn’t last. Most of the complex, including the imposing 14-story towers, was knocked down in 1976. The only building spared was the U-shaped “horseshoe” that had served as the internment camp.

More than 70 years after the end of the war, the surviving building at least nods toward Lods and Beaudouin's original intent, as public housing for the area's most vulnerable residents. But it’s hardly a modern paradise. In the foreground of the block-long courtyard, a single train car—the same kind used to move Jews to Auschwitz and other camps—sits on a displaced section of track as a memorial. Jungle-green birds, most likely invasive ring-necked parakeets, huddle in the top branches of a clump of courtyard trees, transplants from warmer climates somehow thriving in northern France.

During the war, the horseshoe building’s layout was the same as it is today: a series of evenly-spaced doorways at ground level, each of which opens onto a salt-and-pepper-tiled lobby and four flights of stairs. Apartments cluster at each landing. Nowadays, each small apartment might house a single family, but back in the 1940s, as many as 50 to 60 Jewish inmates were crammed into each unfinished room. Some were seized off Parisian streets in surprise roundups and arrived at the camp without even a change of clothes—a situation they could not remedy, since detainees were often not allowed to receive packages.

According to historian Renée Poznanski’s Jews in France During World War II, the camp management supplied one bar of soap for every 10 inmates, and a single faucet in each room trickled washing water into a wooden trough. Every day, and sometimes twice a day, inmates were herded out of their rooms for long roll calls in the courtyard. Barbed wire ringed the building and courtyard.

The courtyard now has an expansive, open feel, closer to the clean, minimal space the planners and architects were aiming for. Still, there are clear visual specters. There’s the massive boxcar—one of the first things you see as you arrive—and a memorial of pink granite pillars that form the Hebrew letter shin, signifying the name of God. As you walk toward the stacked apartments, it’s hard not to imagine what once filled this space: tinny loudspeakers, the long latrines where prisoners could exchange bits of information, the fleets of buses that ferried prisoners to Bobigny or Le Bourget train stations, where they were shipped off to Auschwitz.

During the war, some of the building’s entryways were designated “deportation stairwells,” to be used only by prisoners marked for immediate removal. The rest were to remain at the camp for a few weeks or months before it was their turn. Today, these entryways are all supposed to stay locked, accessed only by residents coming in and out. On a chilly day not long ago, one of the faded pink doors was propped a little, and gives way to a gentle push.

The odor of mildew hangs over the interior, followed by a chaser of urine. Shallow craters pock-mark paint layers on the walls and banisters, and some of the stair risers have chunks missing. The scene recalls any number of public housing projects past and present, from austere council flats in London to high-rises in Chicago. While most of Chicago’s original projects have met with the wrecking ball, the Drancy “U” will likely remain standing for years in some form, as the French Ministry of Culture recognized it as historically significant in 2001.

Relatively few locals besides the residents ever visit the Drancy site, but it does host a steady trickle of visitors from farther away—relatives of camp victims, the odd historian or journalist. Understandably, the people who live there are wary of outsiders, who tend to ply them with questions. “People [in] Drancy have always lived with that,” Pouvreau says. “The questions make them feel guilty for being there.”

“It’s better to live here than somewhere less nice,” says a red-haired woman toting a torso-sized shopping bag, who does not want to give her name. She says she’s lived at the complex for 50 years. Asked how the place has changed over time, she starts to get fired up. Prostitutes work in front of the complex now, she claims. She called the police just the other day to report what is going on. “It’s not a community,” she says, her voice rising. “It’s a brothel.”

“It’s a good place for families,” says Brahim, who emigrated from Algeria 14 years ago and recently moved to the complex. He’s aware of the place’s history and thinks it’s important to keep it alive. “We must keep it,” he says with conviction, switching from French to English. “We cannot put it out.”

Just across the street from the courtyard is a busy café that sells high-voltage espressos for €0.50. The regulars around the counter are willing to ponder Drancy’s legacy. Kamel, who’s also from Algeria, says that a lot of locals don’t want to live at the complex because they don’t want to be associated with its past. In fact, he says, his sister turned down an apartment there. “She refused, because she knew it was a kind of prison.”

After the complex was listed as a historic monument, the regional government carried out some restoration projects. As old doorways were being refurbished, workers found messages from deportees scratched onto some of the original plaster wall panels. These panels, along with other artifacts and stories, are now housed at a new museum next to the café. Some comment on life in the camp—one reads, “The toilet is forbidden after 10:00.” Others are desperate voices in the dark, recording writers’ names and deportation dates: “Lonker Otton / Lonker Mindel, deported February 11th, 1943, destination unknown.”

Compared to the apartment building, the Mémorial de la Shoah de Drancy museum—subsidized by France’s foundation for Holocaust remembrance—feels pared-down and immaculate. Its glass facade offers a panoramic view of the housing complex and courtyard below. On one of the weekly museum tours, the guide narrates Drancy’s history and its Nazi-guided evolution into a transit camp. The main gallery features dozens of period artifacts, from letters prisoners wrote after their arrest to pencil sketches of camp life by interned Jewish artist Georges Horan. There is also a precise scale model of the camp in bright white. But the tour does not venture into the complex itself—the place where people live and where others were crammed dozens to a room, as they waited to hear if they would be sent to “destinations inconnues,” or “unknown places.”

Near the end of the tour, discussion turns to who was responsible for what happened at Drancy during the war. The guide explains that while the Nazis set up the transit camp, French collaborators helped carry out its deadly mission. The guards at the camp, she says, were French armed police. At this point, people on the tour start to look uncomfortable. “It was the occupiers,” one woman objects.

The uneasiness about French complicity at Drancy, as well as the current conditions at the complex, suggest a broader national reluctance to confront the calculus of social exclusion. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” have defined French identity since the revolution in 1789, but in recent years a vein of intolerance that long pulsed below the surface has begun to bleed into the streets.

Periodic hate crimes tend to make the news—such as the stabbing of 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll in her apartment in 2018—but there is a broader attitude that parallels the rise of the far right all over Europe and the world. In France, it takes its most public form with Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party. It is a discomfort with things and people seen as not-French-enough, some of whom now occupy the Drancy complex. These days, Parisian suburbs like the one where the former camp is located are largely populated with North Africans and other minorities, who remain literally and figuratively on the outskirts of city life.

In a 2018 survey by French polling firm IFOP, 58 percent of French respondents were opposed to the influx of immigrants. Only 30 percent saw immigration as positive for France, down 10 points from just three years earlier. Le Pen, when she ran for president, billed herself as “not against immigrants, just against immigration.” The infamous anti-establishment “yellow vest” protests, too, are largely white. Minorities, according to news outlets such as Al Jazeera, tend to stay away so they won’t be branded as troublemakers.

In Drancy, it’s hard to escape the uneasy, slightly alarmist thought that history is a wheel, that the increasing fervor of anti-immigrant rhetoric is leading people down a familiar and dark path. People around the complex might assure you nothing like the Holocaust could happen again, but how possible did such a thing ever seem? In its quiet way, the Cité de la Muette testifies to that level of guilt, disbelief, and concern for the future. “Drancy,” says Pouvreau, the historian, “is like the French bad conscience.”

Maybe, if the goal is to protect elephants from the ivory trade.

If you shaved the wooliness from a woolly mammoth, from trunk to tail, it would still be easy to see its relationship to its extant cousins, the elephants. There’s the overall size and shape, and the prominent head ridge and of course the trunk, and also the tusks—though those actually help distinguish a mammoth from an elephant, since they're so massive and audaciously curved. But ivory is ivory, and both pachyderms’ tusks sell for a pretty penny, though only mammoth ivory is legal in many markets. By about 10,000 years ago, mammoths were mostly extinct, likely due to a combination of human activity and climate change. And strangely, it’s those tusks that are driving a recent effort to bring the mammoth back.

No, the woolly mammoth is not about to be cloned, though the prospect has been discussed for decades. Rather, regulations put before the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), the international treaty that protects endangered plants and animals, recently proposed that the long-extinct mammoth be listed as an endangered species.

“The CITES gambit is brilliant, although probably doomed to failure,” said Ross MacPhee, a curator of mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, before the vote, which took place on August 26, 2019. He was right. It was withdrawn from consideration, after it looked like the proposal would fail, according to National Geographic.

In their day, mammoths ranged across much of the planet, from northern Siberia to Central America. The cool and grassy northern segment of their range—the mammoth steppe, as it’s known—hosted a wide array of furry Ice Age megafauna. It was, MacPhee says, a “good place to be an ungulate.” As the planet warmed, the giant mammoths were forced farther and farther north, until the end, when a small population on Russia’s Wrangel Island was the last one left, holding out until about 1650 B.C. (by which time the Pyramids of Giza were already 1,000 years old).

When mammoths died, many ended up entombed in permafrost, which encased, deep-froze, and preserved their bodies. Now, as the permafrost begins to thaw, more and more of these prehistoric pachyderms—and their spectacular tusks—are emerging, and paleontologists aren’t the only ones picking up the pieces.

“Tons of tusks are found each year, but almost all of them are sold to ivory traders,” says Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan who specializes in the paleobiology of mammoths, which he studies through their tusks and teeth. “Doing the science we would like to do to learn more about mammoth ecology and history has therefore become much more difficult over the last couple decades.”

The lack of legal markets for elephant ivory means that the much more lightly regulated mammoth ivory is in high demand, particularly in East Asia. In the Canadian Yukon, Yakutia in Russia, and other northern reaches, mammoth remains are being blasted from the earth by prospectors with water cannons. MacPhee says that this creates big holes in the permafrost, especially in the famous Lena and Yana River deltas, which have yielded some of the best preserved Ice Age faunal remains.

“It’s actually a big deal, this level of mining using water cannons,” says MacPhee. “They’re just going to blast through the smaller animals. And that’s a real pity, because in many cases you probably do have very intact specimens, complete skeletons, and once you start blasting to smithereens, you lose all those connections.”

There are few international legal resources to protect these places, which is why the Israeli delegation to CITES put forward the proposal to put the very extinct mammoth on a list of endangered (but alive) species. They argued that then the trade in all kinds of ivory could be even more closely monitored, which could provide a benefit to living elephants. At the CITES 2016 meeting, Israeli delegates had proposed similar rules, but without the provision that mammoths be listed as endangered. Though extinct animals have been involved in CITES discussions before—the thylacine was featured in regulations as recently as 2016—never has an animal so demonstrably dead been considered in efforts to keep a different species alive.

If the proposal had passed, the woolly mammoth would fall under Appendix II, the classification that covers species “not necessarily threatened with extinction, but [for] which trade must be controlled in order to avoid utilization incompatible with their survival.” Given the mammoth’s situation, the proposal might seem like little more than a stunt. However, once carved, mammoth ivory and elephant ivory are hard to tell apart. Regulating both could curb the practice of “laundering” elephant ivory by labeling it mammoth ivory. Though the proposal was generally regarded as dead-on-arrival, it seems to have had some impact—CITES recently announced on Twitter that it would review the trade in mammoth ivory and how it affects elephants.

“We were disappointed with the result on the mammoth proposal, which would have helped ensure that elephant ivory is not laundered as mammoth ivory,” says Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy for the Wildlife Conservation Society. “But we are glad that a decision was adopted to further study the issue in a CITES context.”

But many specialists don’t think that the listing of mammoths in CITES would have made much difference beyond drawing attention to the problem. “Someone in Africa who is poaching elephant ivory to make money is not going to stop poaching—it is not as if he/she can just move the operation up north to Siberia,” says Jim Mead, a paleontologist and the director of research at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota, via email. “The Siberians will make the profit and the Africans will still poach elephants for ivory and an income. Now we are losing both types of ivory.”

At least 20,000 African elephants are killed for their ivory each year, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Though China has closed its legal ivory markets and Hong Kong has plans to do so in 2021, critics argue that the black markets pose just as much of a problem.

Daniel Stiles, a wildlife trade investigator who has spent years following the ivory trade, holds the often unpopular view that the elephant ivory trade should be legal and regulated to combat poaching.

“You can regulate [ivory] and make sure it’s not being overexploited and cause harm to elephants,” Stiles says. “When you have a black market, you have nothing but a black hole. It’s all hidden.”

MacPhee and Stiles have differing views on whether ivory markets should be legal, but both compare the ivory trade to the War on Drugs—expensive, fueled by demand, and extremely hard to win.

“The only thing that’s ever going to change any of this is a change in taste,” says MacPhee, “Meaning that people will no longer want stuff made out of animal parts. It’s anybody’s guess as to what that timeline is.”

One collection of fake produce is a reminder of both ingenuity and loss.

The city of Turin, in northern Italy, is famous for unusual museums, from the National Car Museum to a museum dedicated to personal finance. But hidden in one of the city’s iconic Baroque buildings lies a cultural oddity overlooked by most guidebooks. More than 1,100 life-size models of apples, pears, peaches, and grapes sit on display in two large rooms adorned with 19th-century frescoes.

Until recently, the resin and wax fruits were scattered around the Royal Station of Agricultural Chemistry, a research outpost run by the local government. When the Royal Station closed in the early 2000s, workers sorting through old books and equipment discovered the unusual artifacts, abandoned for almost a century.

The models turned out to be the work of Francesco Garnier Valletti, an eclectic 19th-century artist and scientist. “We really had no idea that the fruits were there,” says Paola Costanzo, head of the curatorial team tasked by the municipal government to arrange the collection for display. There was so much material that it took 10 years for the Fruit Museum to open in 2007, inside the University of Turin’s Anatomical Studies Palace. Some fruits dominate the collection, with 494 types of pears, 286 types of apples, and 44 types of apricots on display. Their shiny skin, real stalks, and blemishes make them virtually indistinguishable from actual fruit.

At first, Costanzo and her colleagues thought that the hyper-realistic produce served as a teaching aid for students. According by Jules Janick, a horticulture professor at Purdue University, botanical research relied on illustrations and wax models of fruit before the invention of photography. But after a dive into the dusty archives of the Royal Station, Costanzo and her team quickly dropped this initial assumption. From information stored in official letters, ancient invoices, and research bulletins, they pieced together that it wasn't education that spurred Garnier Valletti to create hundreds of fake fruits. It was advertising.

Francesco Garnier Valletti was born in 1808 in Giaveno, a village near Turin. In his youth, he trained as a candy maker, specializing in sugared almonds and herbal sweets. By 1830, he had moved to Turin and expanded his craft to fake flowers and fruits. Local noblewomen enjoyed his wax and paper-mâché bouquets, and eventually his work came to the attention of the Austrian governor of Milan. It wasn’t long before he called Garnier Valletti to serve as the official modeller of the Austrian crown in Vienna.

As explained by Anne Odom in the book At the Tsar’s Table, many European royal families used elaborate tabletop decorations to showcase their wealth. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, families hired trained craftsmen to create centerpieces made of sugar, marzipan or wax. Subjects went from flowers to fruits all the way to actual buildings—Odom cites a banquet in honor of Saint Peter the Great’s birth, which featured a stunning sugar model of the Kremlin. Russians were especially known for their displays of exotic plants and fruits, and soon Garnier Valletti’s skill was sought out by Tsar Nicholas I, who called him to his service in Saint Petersburg.

But political turmoil around Europe, coupled with his wife's sudden illness, forced Garnier Valletti to go back to Turin in 1848. There he met Auguste Burdin, an entrepreneur from France who ran a successful plant delivery business. “Burdin was running an Amazon of seeds,” Costanzo explains. “He would showcase his plants in local greenhouses and ship seeds all over Europe.”

Burdin’s greenhouses featured in some of the earliest Turin travel guides and attracted clients from all over Europe. But the entrepreneur struggled with communicating the value of his plants to prospective clients. People often visited when only a few trees were in bloom, with only illustrations to communicate the full potential of each plant. When Burdin heard of Garnier Valletti’s work, he immediately saw the advertising potential of fake fruits that could be shown to clients year-round.

In 1853, Burdin commissioned Garnier Valletti to create an exhaustive inventory of more than 1,200 types of fruits and vegetables. For each type, Burdin demanded three identical life-size models. Garnier Valletti accepted the commission, but struggled with Burdin’s request for identical models. Throughout his fruit modeling career, he had produced faithful replicas of organic life. But he never found a way to make identical figurines. Until, one night, the ingenious artist envisioned a new technique.

As Costanzo explains, Garnier Valletti was a self-taught scientist with an all-encompassing sense of curiosity. Unlike many of his counterparts, he was interested in folk wisdom and traditional remedies. His 732-page book, Collection of All Kinds of Secrets, contains a long list of folk remedies, from a freckle-reducing concoction made with hen blood to a love potion. Perhaps because of his belief in the occult, Garnier Valletti attributed his greatest invention to a dream. An entry in his journal dated from March 5, 1858 reads: “Artificial fruits are to be made with alabaster powder mixed with wax, rosin and dammer resin … Discovery made on March 5 1858 during a nightdream.”

The “secret” consisted of creating a plaster mold of a piece of fruit, then pouring in a mix of melted wax, rosin, and dammer resin that was easy to model, compared with other kinds of wax. The plaster mold allowed for more than one figurine to be made for each fruit. Referencing sketches of each type of fruit, Garnier Valletti went the extra mile to add realistic detail. With a sprinkle of powdered wool, he recreated the downy skin of apricots and peaches. Thanks to a thin layer of crushed white stone, his fake grapes even gleam like a fresh-picked bunch. Plus, “his formula resulted in more durable models,” Costanzo explains, adding that only 38 fruits had to be restored before being displayed to the public. “And its aesthetic results are for all to see.”

Burdin was equally pleased with such an impressive collection. But a few years after receiving his innovative advertising catalogue, he went out of business. Garnier Valletti was left jobless, but kept making fake fruits and vegetables until his death in 1889. One of his most notable customers was Prince Henry of Orange, who commissioned 870 fruit models for the School of Agronomy in Amsterdam.

Burdin’s collection was first donated to the Agricultural Science faculty in Turin, and then used by a local peddler who toured rural farms to showcase wonders from the cities. Eventually, all the fake fruits were bought by Francesco Scurti, the director of the Royal Agricultural Station, where they remained until the early 2000s.

According to Costanzo, Scurti used the collection as three-dimensional catalog of local cultivars. Cataloguing local fruit varieties was part of the Royal Station’s mission, but Scurti was especially interested in testing each type of fruit against cold weather and ice. “Scurti was operating at a pivotal time in agricultural history,” Costanzo says. “Thanks to refrigeration, fruit could be preserved for months and travel to far-flung locations.” In order to master his knowledge about refrigeration, Scurti equipped the Royal Station with one of Italy’s first rudimentary fridges.

By the 1950s, refrigerators became a staple item across Italian households. But precisely because of this innovation, local biodiversity was lost. “Farmers used to keep many varieties of fruit to ensure produce across seasons,” Costanzo says. “Once fruit could be easily preserved through time, they opted for cultivars that were easier to grow and transport.”

Today, the local supermarkets offer three or four varieties of apples, compared with the nearly 300 modeled by Garnier Valletti. According to Valeria Fossa, a botanist that helped catalogue the collection in 2007, nearly 70% of the cultivars on display at the Fruit Museum have gone extinct. In the museum’s guestbook, visitors exclaim over the breadth of fruit types once common in the area. “This collection is many things at once,” Costanzo says. “It’s a work of art, a science document. But most of all it’s a historical memory to remind us of what’s lost.”

Atlas Obscura readers recommend their absolute favorite rail hubs.

Train travel rules. In addition to being a wonderfully civilized way to get from here to there, the stations and structures that support railways are often incredible. From ultra-modern, almost futuristic transit hubs to gorgeous historic stations that have been lovingly maintained, all over the world you can find train stations that serve as destinations unto themselves. We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community Forums to tell us about the most incredible train stations they'd ever encountered, and they came back with suggestions that made us want to book a ticket straight away.

Check out some of our favorite responses below, and if you have an inspiring train station of your own that you'd like to share, head over to our forums and keep the conversation going! Is there such a thing as train-station-spotting?

Bangkok Railway Station

Bangkok, Thailand

“Love that you chose Bangkok railway station! I had a six-hour wait there back in 2016, and was not bored for a second watching the people, monks, trains, architecture…” — NJP

St. Pancras Station

London, England

“Not only a great transportation nexus (underground, regional trains, sleek Eurostar carriages!), but a vaulting, inspiring piece of Edwardian iron, brought back from the dead a few decades ago like the rest of its neighborhood. It’s attached to a beautiful hotel, some of whose rooms look out onto the Eurostar platforms. Right next door is King’s Cross, where you can see the Hogwarts Express platform. And St. Pancras has witty, memorable art: a bronze man holding his hat while gazing upward, a pink neon love letter overhead, and best of all, a giant couple embracing, epitomizing the bittersweet sense of goodbye and hello that train stations evoke.” — SpiderHugger

Antwerpen-Centraal Railway Station

Antwerp, Belgium

“It’s such a beautiful train station! Definitely, the best way to arrive in Antwerp! I took these pictures when arriving in the city last year.” — andreiacalhau

Madrid Atocha Railway Station

Madrid, Spain

“So many stations I haven’t been to yet, but I fell in love with Atocha Station in Madrid.” — explodingirl

Hua Hin Railway Station

Hua Hin, Thailand

“I found the station in Hua Hin, Thailand to be like stepping back in time. I don’t recall the year that it was built, but I would guess possibly in the 1920s.” — jimminton

Toledo Art Station

Naples, Italy

“The stations of Naples underground are all decorated by pieces of art, or are pieces of art themselves. Look at the Toledo Station as an example.” — diegotonini

Kyoto Station

Kyoto, Japan

“I was struck by the vast space in the Kyoto, Japan station. When you walk inside, you’re awestruck by the size.” — alinagrafik

Kiyevskaya Station

Moscow, Russia

“In 2014 I visited Moscow and was amazed by the beauty of the train stations. If only the rest of the world could put so much effort and detail into the designs and upkeep of these places for the public to enjoy!” — justineph

Union Terminal

Cincinnati, Ohio

“Cincinnati’s Union Terminal is certainly a great example of the art deco form and one of my favorite buildings anywhere.” — sofarsogood261

Milano Centrale Railway Station

Milan, Italy

“During my first trip to Europe, I started in Italy and rode trains from Florence to Milan and then to the Netherlands. The train station in Milan was breathtakingly beautiful—marble floors, marble walls, HUGE marble columns at the entrance. I was fortunate to have several hours to explore both the train station and the nearby area. A must-do stop if you’re ever in Italy.” — laurawith150globes

Dunedin Railway Station

Dunedin, New Zealand

“Call me biased, but my hometown station is absolutely adorable. Dunedin Railway Station was built during the city’s heyday as New Zealand’s wealthiest, and fastest-growing city. In an eclectic, revived Flemish renaissance style, the station is constructed of dark basalt with lighter Oamaru stone facings, giving it the distinctive light and dark pattern. The foyer itself is an absolute delight. Although tiny by world standards, this is, in my opinion, an absolute gem and needs to be on everyone’s list of fab stations." — gedmaybury23

Jungfraujoch Railway Station

Fieschertal, Switzerland

“I love train travel and am generally pretty impressed by train stations, but I’ll mention the peak-tourist station, Jungfraujoch, the highest station in Europe, with its windows on the Alps. What a terrifying thing to construct.” — onoma

Lisbon Oriente Station

Lisbon, Portugal

"In terms of beauty, I was impressed with Lisbon’s Estação do Oriente as well as its artful metro." — onoma

York Station

York, United Kingdom

“My favorite rail station is definitely York Station. Located in-between London and Edinburgh on the east coast mainline, it’s not well known. It has the nation’s museum of rail and has excellent architecture as well.” — Tibz_Traveller

Luz Station

São Paulo, Brazil

“Might not be the greatest one, but Estação da Luz, in São Paulo (my hometown) is definitely nice. It was inspired by King’s Cross, and in a relatively young country such as Brazil, you don’t see many antique constructions like this one.” — elokyrmse

The unique portrait-maker has survived wars, invasions, and fundamentalist tyranny. But digital photography may be too much to overcome.

When I first started photographing, I couldn’t even reach the camera,” says Abdul Haq Baratali. His hands trace the contours of a wooden box that sits before him, brightly colored and decorated with patterned vinyl fabric. “I had to stand on a chair in order to operate it. My father had just died, there was no one to feed us, and I was unable to go to school. So I learned photography to earn for my family.”

The 69-year-old photographer is sitting on the porch outside his cluttered one-story house on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, remembering when he was six years old. Back then he had to use whatever was on hand—usually cameras from the Soviet Union, which he borrowed from his sister’s husband.

A few years later, however, things changed. A prominent carpenter in Kabul named Ali Ahmad gifted him a curious boxy camera—a kamra-e-faoree (“instant camera” in Dari). “Ali used to come to my sister’s husband’s shop, and he saw my interest in photography,” says Baratali. “He gave me a kamra-e-faoree of his to practice on.”

Used in Afghanistan for decades, the unique handmade device—like Baratali himself—has lived through a lot. Over the years, as its popularity waxed and waned, it survived the Soviet invasion in 1979, the civil war that followed it, Taliban rule in the 1990s, and successive conflicts in the years following the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

But now the Afghan box camera is a facing foe it may not be able to overcome: digital photography. Its rise and ubiquity, along with other developments in Afghanistan—including legislative changes, dying knowledge of the art, and lack of access to the necessary materials—may do what wars, invasions, and fundamentalist tyranny have failed to accomplish: push the kamra-e-faoree to extinction in its homeland.

In the dappled afternoon light of a summer afternoon, Baratali is standing in the courtyard of his house in the Afghan capital, explaining the camera’s odd technology.

The kamra-e-faoree is a self-contained device—a manual camera and darkroom in one. The lenses are shutterless, so the camera utilizes an internal focusing system: A rod on the back of the box works with an adjustable sanded-glass plate inside. Chemicals and paper are stored within, in small trays.

The photographic process is completely analog, using only natural light to expose the paper. With the aid of an eyehole on top, the photographer can follow the development process in real time. To develop a negative by hand, the operator inserts an arm through a sleeve of cloth to access the camera’s interior.

In the past, says Baratali, “you would buy boxes of a hundred large photographic papers that you could cut into smaller pieces. The paper would come mainly from Japan, Germany, or Russia. We would make a fixer solution at home using Metol, sodium carbonate, and sodium sulphate … and a developer solution from Pakistan [that] used bromide.”

To balance out an image’s contrast, box-camera photographers would add a red tint to the negative. “If someone had something wrong with their eye in the photograph, we would put a little bit of sulphate on the pupil to fix it,” Baratali says with a wink.

Afghan box cameras were built by local carpenters, who made the structure sturdy enough to withstand Afghanistan’s extreme temperatures and survive Kabul’s narrow streets, no matter how precarious the transportation. The most prominent of these carpenters was Ali Abdul. Baratali remembers Abdul making most of the box cameras in Kabul, including the one he gave to Baratali. (To supplement his income, Abdul sold some cameras in nearby cities too.)

“He was fast,” says Baratali. “He could make one in a week. And no one else could make them like him.” Every box camera Abdul made was subtly different. Dealing with their idiosyncrasies—from light leakage to rickety tripod legs—was part of the photographer’s job.

In the 1950s, a kamra-e-faoree cost 500 Afghanis (roughly $6 in today’s U.S. dollars). For a time, portrait photographers in Kabul could eke out a living using the box camera. But not much more than that.

“On a good day,” Baratali says, “I would earn about 200 Afs ($2.50).” If he was very lucky, he’d get a customer who’d ask for large-print photos—or better still, hand-colored ones, which fetched a higher price.

As Baratali talks, he hunches over the albums that litter the floor of his home—shots from his military days showing jet planes at Shindand Airbase in Herat Province, gleeful young soldiers posing with rocket launchers and tanks, enlisted men sprawled out in poppy fields. “Army men would ask me to take their pictures, so that their families could see that they [were] healthy and alive in Kabul,” Baratali says.

His studio’s walls bear further witness to the past half century in Afghanistan—and to the singular camera that recorded it. Portraits of curious children and red-lipped men in flared trousers share space with shots of fellow street photographers at work.

“I would go and ask the ironsmith to create crowns for me to keep in the studio as props,” Baratali says. “Or we would give a client a wooden gun to hold in the photograph, to mimic the kings in the Bollywood movies.”

No one can pinpoint the exact origins of the kamra-e-faoree. Many photographers in Kabul say it reached Afghanistan from India in the 1950s, if not earlier. Before it arrived, the country had few photographers, and those that existed catered exclusively to the wealthy.

But the mid-1950s was a boom time for the kamra-e-faoree, especially in the country’s capital. Studios sprung up across Kabul. The camera’s low cost democratized portraiture for photographers and customers alike, allowing ordinary citizens to have their portraits taken relatively cheaply.

The camera served at least one other practical purpose. In the 1950s, legislation was passed requiring that the Afghan national identity card—the tazkira—have a photograph on it. The national government subsequently trained scores of new photographers to use the kamra-e-faoree and create instant IDs in towns and villages across the country. This provided a steady income for many of them—particularly for very young men, who found a niche market making portraits of women. (It was, and still is, more acceptable in Afghanistan for a boy to photograph a female customer than it is for an adult male to do so.)

Baratali would travel to the suburbs in search of work, taking his tripod and camera, which was encased in a brightly patterned box to attract passersby. “I would strap the camera on my bike and go from house to house to take people’s pictures,” he says. “Sometimes they would pay me in bread and eggs, because they were poor.”

Locals were transfixed by this peculiar device. In rural areas, the beautiful photographs it produced were the first images many customers had seen of themselves.

But when the Taliban came to power, in the 1990s, they banned photography, calling it an affront to Islam. Hanging a portrait or displaying an image—of any living creature—became a crime punishable by beating or imprisonment. Most Afghan box-camera operators hid or destroyed their equipment to avoid retribution.

Taliban leaders, however, decided to make an exception for themselves. Their hypocritical and narcissistic desire for photo IDs, ironically, allowed the trade to continue, as they permitted a few Afghan photographers to keep their box cameras.

In 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan by U.S. forces and their allies, and the subsequent fall of the Taliban, saw the Afghan photo industry flourish anew, as citizens rejoiced in their political and cultural liberation. Studios were quick to cash in on the fresh demand for personal and family portraits.

But by this time new camera models were available on the market—smaller and quicker, cheaper and more efficient. Another blow to the kamra-e-faoree came when Afghanistan's educational system was overhauled, in 2001, and all compulsory ID photographs had to be in color, rendering the box camera’s services obsolete.

Baratali’s studio is still open today, but now it’s run by two of his sons. Baratali himself stopped working eight years ago. His eyesight is bad, his hands shake, and he can no longer carry the cumbersome camera. (The box on its own weighs about 18 pounds. The tripod is heavier still.)

But even if Baratali could work, he probably wouldn’t have much to do. In Afghanistan these days, the kamra-e-faoree is rarely seen in action. Over the years, as box cameras were outlawed or forgotten, many were thrown away or left to gather dust in their owners’ homes. Most are now unusable, with the materials they require to produce photos hard to come by in Kabul.

Digital photography, of course, has taken over the world. Photo studios today can now digitally reproduce old family portraits, remove tears and wrinkles, and create several copies of a single photograph that was taken decades ago with a box camera.

“People don’t use this camera anymore,” says Baratali, “because they can take pictures on digital cameras and mobile phones. These cameras will die out eventually. But I’m grateful, because this camera allowed me to earn a living. If I didn’t learn photography, I probably would [have been] a laborer, burning under the sun every day, or pushing dirt around.”

As he approaches his 70th birthday, Baratali shares his deep knowledge and photographic craftsmanship with his four children and 33 grandchildren. Most photo studios in Afghanistan are family operations, and the pride of passing down a craft runs deep in Afghan culture. Baratali knows that the box camera’s time in Kabul has come and gone, but nevertheless hopes—like most artisans do—that his descendants will continue to practice his craft long after he’s gone. The truth, however, is that there simply isn't much work today for the humble box camera in Afghanistan.

Elsewhere, however, is a different matter. While the kamra-e-faoree may be nearly extinct in Afghanistan, it has captured the imagination of a new audience abroad. In the wealthy Western world, it seems to be enjoying a renaissance.

Fascinated by its simplicity and colorful history, vintage-photography fanatics in the U.S. and Europe are able and eager to purchase the materials necessary to operate it—materials that low-income photographers in Kabul can no longer afford or access. Many are now learning how to build and use Afghan box cameras as a hobby.

What began as an artistic but pragmatic means of survival for Baratali and his cohort in Afghanistan may now, ironically, live on as an elite niche item far beyond the historic streets of Kabul. Baratali understands this, and philosophically accepts the fact that change is something both constant and eternal. But for him, hope remains.

“In life, people progress,” he says. “They don’t go backward. They will build new cameras, and [box] cameras will be gone eventually. But my hope is that our story of Afghanistan won’t be forgotten. I hope it lives on through kamra-e-faoree photographs.”

Harald Strümpke didn’t just create a lost archipelago, he created a sensation.

In the 1950s, tragedy struck the Pacific archipelago of Hy-yi-yi. It was once a tranquil place, populated only by little rodents with strangely specialized snouts, and the smattering of scientists who studied them. But an unfortunately timed spree of nuclear weapons testing by the U.S. military coincided with a conference that drew all the world’s experts on the rodent population to the islands. Soon the entire island chain was gone, and with it all of the snouty shrews as well as their dedicated researchers, including one Harald Stümpke.

Fortunately for Stümpke, he never actually died because he never actually existed. Nor did the shrews nor the islands nor the blast that wiped them all out. But this fantastically elaborate hoax—including a meticulous aping of comparative anatomy papers of the day—captivated the scientific community and has become one of biology’s most infamous and beloved hoaxes. There’s even a taxidermied snouty shrew in the permanent collection of France’s rather reputable Strasbourg Zoological Museum and other natural history institutions.

Harald Stümpke was the pen name of a real German zoologist named Gerolf Steiner. Born in 1908, Steiner earned his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 1931 for research on the hearts of American cockroaches, writes Joe Cain, a science historian at University College London, in a 2019 paper published in the journal Endeavour. Steiner then hopped from teaching position to teaching position over a 40-something-year career with no notable focus or burst of discovery. At one point, he studied meat flies. At another, amphibians of central Europe.

One of Steiner’s most consistent interests was outside the realm of zoology. He loved to draw, and moonlighted as an illustrator during World War II. One day in 1945 when food was scarce, a student named Toni Stirtz offered him vegetables. To thank Stirtz, Steiner decided to draw a whimsical creature inspired by the German absurdist poet Christian Morgenstern, who once described a small animal that walks on its nose. Steiner was so pleased with his illustration that he decided to make another copy for himself. Rhinogradentia, the nose-rat, was born.

In 1946, Steiner began trotting his nose-rats, also called snouters, out in public. He spoke of them in classes and lectures, occasionally in the guise (and scraggly beard) of Stümpke, a favored alias.

Pretty soon, Steiner’s story evolved past the joke stage. The universe of the rhinogrades he had created was vast, intricate, and internally consistent, Cain writes. In other words, it had all the trappings of real science. There were notes on their comparative anatomy and Linnean hierarchy, embryological studies, phylogenetic speculations, anatomical drawings, and even fictitious monographs and journal articles that referenced an entire field of study surrounding them. “Together, it created an interlocking network of citations, tying back, eventually, to the fictitious biological station on the Hy-yi-yi,” Cain writes. “This was presented with an air of cold seriousness and professionalism.”

Stümpke (Steiner) wrote that a Swede named Einar Pettersson-Skämtkvist found the archipelago of Hy-yi-yi in 1941 when he wrecked on the island of Hy-dud-dye-fee (fleeing, of course, a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp). Stümpke noted that, rather tragically, Pettersson-Skämtkvist’s head-cold killed off all the approximately 700 indigenous people living on the island.

Once alone, Pettersson-Skämtkvist found a cornucopia of snouts among the island’s distinctive mammalian species. Stümpke described the 15 species of Rhinogradentia, and divided them into single- and multi-nosed groups, according to Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia, the first publication of his work. Some bounced on curved noses like a pogo stick, and others walked upside-down on a set of four noses, their arms and legs nearly vestigial.

Snouters of particular note included the earwig, Otopteryx volitans, which used its nasal appendage as a rudder when it flew backward on the strength of its enormous ears, which flapped at a rate of 10 strokes per second. There was also the snuffling sniffler, Emunctator sorbens, which hunted by emitting long threads out of its nasal appendage that trapped tiny aquatic animals like flypaper.

Stümpke’s notes included scientific jargon so dense—"Now, anatomical investigations (here we follow Bromeante de Burlas’s discussions) have shown that in the polyrrhine species the nasal rudiment is cleft at an early embryonic stage, so that the rudimentary individual nostrils that develop from it have a holorrhinous differentiation, i.e. each forms a complete snout (cf. Fig. 1).”—that it was hard to even know where to begin to question it.

Stümpke’s manuscript on the rhinogrades first came out in 1961 and sold out quickly. The book’s first run offered no indication of its imaginary origins until the magazine Der Speigel called Steiner on his bluff in 1962. But zoologists and scientists of all sorts seemed to enjoy the gag so much that they were hell-bent on prolonging it.

In 1963, legendary paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson published a straight-faced review of the French translation of Stümpke’s work, Anatomie et Biologie des Rhinogrades, in the very serious publication Science (everyone was in on the joke). Simpson waxed poetic about Stümpke’s astonishing discovery and the lack of coverage it received, as well as the adaptations of the rodents themselves. “The ancestor of the rhinogrades was plainly a shrew, the only one ever to penetrate far out into the Pacific,” Simpson writes. “There it encountered not only open niches but also yawning cavities in the ecology, and its descendants filled them with uncontrolled exuberance almost as fast as you can say ‘Galápagos,’ or ‘Drepaniidae.’”

Simpson even included his own translation of the real Morgenstern poem that inspired the whole thing. As he clarified in a footnote: “As a matter of fact, this is a translation of the French translation and not of the original poem. A German translation of the English translation of the French translation of the German poem will be prepared in my laboratory as soon as we receive another grant.”

Steiner’s book continued to sell, and was further translated from German into Japanese, Italian, and English, the last of which successfully rebranded the rodents as “snouters,” the name they carry today. The snouters’ popularity offered Steiner a host of publishing opportunities in science education as examples of evolution and adaptive radiation—fantastical versions of Darwin’s finches. After the 1960s, Steiner never wrote another peer-reviewed zoological paper, having successfully pivoted more or less completely from science to education via prank maintenance. It’s hard to nail down whether Steiner initially imagined the creatures as a teaching tool, Cain writes, or if it was just a fortunate side effect of a joke.

Over the years, the hoax maintained a hold in the scientific community. Natural History, then the official magazine of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, published the entire first chapter of Stümpke’s work in their April 1967 edition without any hint of its origin. The New York Times followed suit with a snouter story on the front page on April 1, 1967.

Rhinogrades have also taken up residence in natural history museums, often without context among taxidermied specimens of real extinct animals. On April 1, 2012, the National Museum of Natural History in France held a two-month exhibit on Rhinogradentia, pegged to their claim of the new discovery of a snouter that eats wood by using a nose that rotates like a drill. Fake taxidermied rhinogrades also nosed their ways into an exhibit at the Museum of Ethnography in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and the permanent collection of the Haus der Natur museum in Salzburg, Austria.

The legacy of Stümpke—and, to a lesser extent, Steiner—even ripples out into the real world. Three species of actual animals bear the zoologist’s name and pseudonym, including a snout mouth and two shrew rats. One of the shrew rats, Hyorhinomys stuempkei, lives only on Mount Dako on Sulawesi in Indonesia, according to Mongabay. It also has a nose that resembles a hog's, extremely long teeth, and strangely extended pubic hairs. The rat is so unusual it was given its own genus, and might make us question whether we've been had again—though the discovery was announced in June 2015, not April 1.

He never even cashed it.

The list of what's available for streaming may be getting longer all the time, but make no mistake—even now, some experiences are only available in analog.

That point was made dramatically last week at Seattle’s Easy Street Records, when a flimsy, folded-up piece of paper wedged within a used record collection revealed itself to be a royalty check issued to ... one Kurt D. Cobain.

Dated March 6, 1991—six months before the singer, songwriter, and guitarist became a global icon with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind—the uncashed check was worth $26.57 (or about $50 today, when adjusted for inflation). Nirvana had released only one album at the time—Bleach, recorded for $600 in 1989—and its modest sales figures had offered no hint of the megastardom on Cobain’s horizon.

Though no one knows exactly how it got there, the check fittingly ended up at Easy Street. The record store has been a mainstay of Seattle’s music scene since 1988, before the city became synonymous with the so-called grunge movement headlined by local acts Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains.

In an email, Easy Street owner Matt Vaughan says that the store purchased the record collection in 1993 or 1994, and that it came with some Nirvana tour itineraries that were promptly placed in the “storage basement for years until recently we saw em again (kinda spaced that we still had em) and went through em more closely.”

Vaughan found the royalty check among those forgotten itineraries, along with other rock-star relics, including a money order for Cobain’s rent and an overdue medical bill.

Vaughan told the British music publication NME that the collection and its accoutrements could have come from any number of people within Nirvana’s circle—“girlfriends, roadies, management, sound companies”—and that it wasn’t particularly noteworthy at the time for the store to receive tour itineraries.

“Seemed like every band in Seattle had tour itinerary books,” Vaughan told NME. The city “was a smaller town then.”

His nonchalance today testifies to the truly local and tight-knit nature of the city’s music scene, even at a time when it was home to some of the most popular acts in the world. That spirit has stayed alive at spots like Easy Street, even though Seattle’s grunge scene dissolved long ago. According to the store’s website, Easy Street’s two locations (one of which has since closed) have hosted over 500 musical performances from acts including Patti Smith, Lou Reed, and Pearl Jam, to name just a few.

Maybe those artists ought to take another trip to the store—and try to track down anything they've lost on the road over the years.

Norfolk's ghost ponds project wants to help biodiversity, one small wetland at a time.

Norfolk is a wet place. And it used to be even wetter. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were nearly one million ponds around England and Wales that housed a wide array of fish, amphibians, birds, and plants, and Norfolk alone hosted more than 30,000. Today, hundreds of thousands of these small habitats, in Norfolk and elsewhere, are gone. They became what are called “ghost ponds.”

These ghost ponds were formed by farmers pushing brush into small wetlands to create more arable land or pasture. And like ghosts, it turns out it is possible to bring these ponds back from the dead. In fact, once you find where they used to be, this act of resurrection isn’t difficult at all.

“At least 8,000 ponds were lost in the county of Norfolk due to this,” says Carl Sayer, a geographer at University College London. “We have been resurrecting these ponds by finding out where the ponds used to be and by digging them out.”

In 2014, Sayer founded the Norfolk Ponds Project with doctoral candidate Helen Greaves, as a way of restoring the area’s natural wetlands and encouraging lost species to return. The project team encourages English farmers to restore the small ponds on their land to benefit the wider region’s biodiversity. The farmers “sometimes need a bit of persuasion,” Sayer says, but generally are on board.

After the researchers clear the surface from vegetation and dig a hole where the pond used to be, nature takes over. Water fills the depressions in the land and buried seeds—even centuries-old ones—begin to germinate, Sayer says. And the water and plants are all it takes to attract amphibians such as newts from nearby wetlands. Waterfowl and other birds then flock back to the ponds to feast, and the researchers give fish, namely the crucian carp, a helping hand.

In some cases, it’s not even tricky to find where the ponds once were. Many of them once bubbled up from aquifers, so even once they are filled in, they leave brown patches and puddles (which means they’re not even good for grazing). This fall, Sayer’s team is embarking on what they call the Big50 campaign, with a goal to to resuscitate 50 ponds in Norfolk and the nearby counties of Lancashire and Gloucestershire.

To date, the program has resurrected 60 ponds in Norfolk, ranging from glorified puddles to ones as big and deep as swimming pools. Swift Pond, one of the earliest ghost ponds to be revived, went from a clump of shrubs and less than six inches of standing water to a thriving ecosystem of dozens of species.

“You just can’t kill a pond, so ‘ghost pond’ was the right word,” says Sayer. “Even when ponds are filled in they are never quite dead.”

A bear named Claverina has stoked an age-old debate about where predators belong.

This summer, a brown bear named Claverina has been the talk of the Pyrenees, the mountains that form a natural border between Spain and France. She has been busy, killing eight sheep on the Spanish side of the mountain range. Along the way, Claverina has stoked the fires of a decades-old European debate about shepherds and bears, as well as the people and parties that seek to protect the bears, Phys reported last month. And while the answer might seem simple—stop bears from killing sheep—the reality is much more complicated.

The Pyrenees aren’t really facing a conflict between people and bears, says Guillaume Chapron, a wildlife ecologist at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who studies human relationships with large carnivores. The conflict is between people who do not tolerate the bears and other people who want to conserve them. The issue is local, Chapron says, but it has global implications. “As soon as we have some species that some people don’t want to preserve and we let those species go extinct, we accelerate the biodiversity crisis,” he says. “That means preserving brown bears even if that makes some people unhappy.”

Hence Claverina. Eurasian brown bears remain common in Northern Europe and Russia, but in the Pyrenees they were hunted nearly to extinction in the 1990s, according to The New York Times. So last October, an anesthetized Claverina and another female bear, Sorita, were helicoptered in from Slovenia as the most reintroduction of wild bears to the Pyrenees. It was the latest in a string of French-led reintroductions over the last 20 years. Recent estimates suggest the Pyrenees support a population of around 40 to 50 bears, compared to Slovenia’s booming population of over 500.

After their release, the bears wear tracking devices so conservationists can monitor where they go and what, if anything, they attack. Claverina is the more adventurous of the two, while Sorita stayed on the French side of the mountains and gave birth to two cubs, the BBC reported. Angry farmers staged a protest in August with signs that read “Bears, the ruin of the rural world,” Phys reported. According to Chapron, this contingent is “small but very vocal.”

France has a legal obligation to protect the bears because of the European Union Habitats Directive, Chapron goes on. Bear hunting has been illegal since 1962, putting shepherds in a bit of a bind. There is only so much they can do to protect their flock from prowling bears, as acquiring additional fences and guards (both human and mastiff) gets expensive. The bears are omnivores by nature, feeding mostly on roots, fruits, or various prey, Chapron says. But dry summers leave the bears with scant options to build up fat sources for hibernation, which may be why Claverina went after the sheep.

More often than not, though, the bears are not harming sheep by devouring them. In June, more than 250 sheep died after running from a bear and over the edge of a cliff, according to Phys. As of August 22, more than 600 sheep have died, mostly as a result of similarly ill-fated cliff escapes, Phys reports. (Exit, one might say, pursued by a bear). The deaths over the past two years have increased “exponentially,” sheep farmer Olivier Maurin told Radio France Internationale.

The French government, which compensates farmers who lose sheep to bears, recommends keeping sheep locked up in pens overnight. But farmers say this compensation is not enough, and locking up the sheep would put an end to the herds’ traditional summer migration across mountain pastures.

Chapron sees an inconsistency between France’s reluctance to protect its brown bears and the high conservation standards the country calls for other countries, such as Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Mozambique. In 2015, for example, France banned the import of lion hunt trophies in an attempt to stanch poaching in Zimbabwe. In those countries, humans live alongside carnivores much more dangerous to people, such as lions and leopards. “France is the fifth economic power in the world, but it is not able to live with 40 brown bears?” he says.

According to Chapron, the largest threats to Europe’s shepherds are economic, not ursine. In the 1980s, France tried to protect its sheep farming industry with boycotts of lamb imported from New Zealand. But after the French secret service sank Greenpeace’s ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand, which had planned on protesting French nuclear tests in the Mururoa Atoll, the United Nations ordered France not to interfere with New Zealand's trade negotiations. As a result, France had to keep its homegrown sheep farming industry afloat with subsidies, according to a 1986 story in The New York Times.

For now, at least, Claverina isn’t going anywhere. In the eyes of Chapron and other conservationists, the best possible future for farmers, bears, and sheep in the Pyrenees is one of coexistence. It's a middle ground between resurgence and disappearance. “The notion of coexistence implies some level of conflict,” he says. “The challenge is to make sure that we keep coexisting, and this does not drift toward the eradication of farming or toward the eradication of bears.”

Eve Adams was eventually murdered at Auschwitz.

It took Officer Margaret Leonard three tries to get her hands on Eve Adams’ book of lesbian short stories. We don’t know what, exactly, the New York Police Department officer experienced when she first slunk undercover into Eve Adams’ Tearoom at 129 MacDougal Street. But it’s easy to imagine a group of artists gathered under gleaming electric lights on a hot June night, reciting poetry or discussing the latest performances in the Provincetown Playhouse next door. Leonard’s mission was simple: to “catch” Adams “in the act” of lesbianism, either by eliciting a romantic move or by finding evidence of obscenity. Lesbian Love, a book of short stories Adams had self-published and distributed among friends, was just the evidence Leonard needed to have the tearoom proprietor arrested.

Established in 1925, Eve Adams’ Tearoom, also known as Eve’s Hangout, was one of the hottest nightlife spots in New York City’s flapper-era West Village. While the establishment is often remembered as a speakeasy, Barbara Kahn, who has done extensive research on Adams and wrote three plays about her life, says the lack of police allegations of alcohol possession suggest that it really did serve tea. But more was on tap at Eve’s Hangout than just after-theater beverages. A magnet for the The Village's diversity, the tearoom was an open space for Jewish and immigrant intellectuals, who weren’t always welcome in the xenophobic cultural life of the time. Above all, it was a safe space for women, who frequently could not venture into restaurants without a male guardian, and particularly for lesbians. The tearoom’s ethos was summed up in a sign that greeted visitors: “Men are admitted but not welcome.”

“It was probably a joke,” says Kahn of the sign. After all, male cultural figures frequented the tea room. Still, Eve’s Hangout was undoubtedly a safe space for queer women, and hosted after-hours, locked-doors meetings, where women-loving women could share their experiences without fear of censorship or discrimination. Ironic or not, the sign reflects Eve’s Hangout’s historical significance. Despite the tea room’s popularity, the story of its proprietor was lost to the public for decades. But amid current efforts to retrace LGBTQ cultural history, researchers such as Barbara Kahn are restoring Adam’s tearoom to its place of honor as one of the first lesbian establishments in the United States.

Tea and poetry kept the Hangout going, but Eve Adams was its soul. Described by commentators as “the queen of the third sex” for her masculine appearance (language commonly used at the time), Adams was popular among the bohemian literary figures of 1920s New York. Born Chawa Czlotcheber (sometimes spelled Zlocsewer, Zlotchever, or Kotchever) to a Jewish family in Mlawa, Poland, Adams immigrated to the United States as a young woman in 1912, and spent several years traveling before settling in Manhattan’s Washington Square. At some point, she Anglicized her first name to "Eve" and took “Adams” as her chosen last name. The name, writes George Chauncey in his history of gay New York culture, was “an androgynous pseudonym whose biblical origins her Protestant persecutors might well have found blasphemous."

Adams was just one of many 1920s New York artists and writers who lived political and sexual lives that went against the mold. Eve counted many of these figures among her friends: author Henry Miller, whose work was frequently banned and to whom she loaned money when his wealthy mistress couldn’t front his bills; Anaïs Nin, whose crystal-sharp stories are full of lesbian tension; Emma Goldman, the New York labor activist whose practice of free love was as famous as her anarchism. While Adams, likely due to her sexuality and immigration status, lacks the fame of these companions, she and her tearoom were popular among this elite cultural crowd.

Like all women ahead of their time, Eve Adams also made enemies. Chief among them: Bobby Edwards. A writer for the Greenwich Village Quill, where he covered society life, Edwards didn’t like the increasing gay and immigrant presence in the village. “He was an all-purpose bigot,” says Kahn. He wasn’t the only one. “There were tour buses that would go down to the Village to see all these terrible places: all these bohemians, all these ‘perverts,’” Kahn says.

While Bobby Edwards covered events at Eve’s Hangout, he spared no kindness for Adams herself. “Eve’s Hangout,” he wrote in a June 1926 guide to Village clubs, “Where ladies prefer each other. Not very healthy for she-adolescents, nor comfortable for he-men.” This animosity is why, when police raided Eve’s Hangout in 1926, word on the cobblestoned Village Streets was that Edwards had something to do with it.

At the time, police raids targeting local speakeasies were common. In Adams' case, however, the NYPD’s tactic was decidedly personal. After spotting the undercover cop at Eve’s Hangout, on June 11, 1926, Eve Adams finally asked Margaret Leonard to the theater. Later, Leonard alleged that Adams took her dancing, held her too close, and “had her hand on my bosom” in the cab. Worse, said Leonard, Adams had invited her up to her bedroom and ostensibly threw her onto a bed and, according to a police report, “attempted to commit the crime of conenlinguism.” At this point, Leonard left the scene and phoned the police station. She had slipped out with what seemed, to the morality police of New York City, a Sapphic smoking gun: a copy of Lesbian Love, a collection of short stories that Adams had printed in a small run. (Several copies of the book exist today, though they’re privately owned; Kahn says one went missing, possibly purloined, from the Yale library a couple years ago.)

Cops arrested Adams at her Hangout that night. She was charged with obscenity and disorderly conduct, and sent to a New York workhouse for six months. An uncle in Hartford offered to post $1,000 bail, but the City of New York wouldn’t take it. Instead, immigration and police authorities pursued “evidence” of Adams’ sexual orientation, including a letter from Adams’ neighbor, Jay Fitzpatrick, alleging she regularly brought young women to her apartment for sex. “I know personally of decent girls who have been corrupted by this woman,” Fitzgerald wrote.

In a twist of fate, Adams crossed paths with another notable woman in jail, Mae West. The famous writer had been sentenced to 10 days imprisonment for the alleged obscenity of her acclaimed Broadway play, Sex. While West dined with the wardens and was quickly released, Adams was deported to Poland in 1927. For Kahn, the reason for the difference in treatment was clear: The United States government had no sympathy for an immigrant, Jewish lesbian. “I love this country with my whole heart and soul, and I have made application for my final papers. I want to become a citizen,” Adams said in a deposition. “If I am deported, my life is ruined.”

As with many immigrants who fled persecution, the facts of Adams’ life sometimes fall out of focus. Look Adams up online, and you’ll find a dust storm of apocrypha about the era after her deportation. Some say Adams opened another tea room in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne. Some say she went to Spain in the 1930s to join the struggle against Franco or to report on the Spanish Civil War. Kahn, who has tracked down her deportation records and found mentions of her in the letters of Paris-based cultural figures, says there’s no evidence she ever went to Spain. Instead, it seems this story has origins in Adams’ family, some of whom said that she had left the U.S. voluntarily to fight fascism.

What we know for sure is that, by the early 1930s, Eve Adams had saved up enough money to move from Poland to Paris. At first, life in the romantic, lamplit city was as electric as it had been in 1920s New York. Adams remained part of a circle of bohemian artists, and made a living selling English literature to tourists and expats. She had sold avant garde literature from her New York tearoom, and in Paris—in homage to the censorship that had cost her a home in the United States—she specialized in the banned. In letters between her and Henry Miller, there are mentions of her selling his book Tropic of Cancer, and complaints from Adams that people couldn’t get enough of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (D.H. Lawrence was a notable homophobe.)

But the antisemitism and homophobia that had already uprooted Adams found her again. In 1940, the Nazis marched into Paris. Like many Parisian Jews, Adams fled to southern France. She desperately sought help from friends and foreign governments, but with only an expired Polish passport and a discontinued American citizenship application, she had no luck. Some of her family members in Poland had already been displaced or murdered by Nazis.

Adams was in Nice when Nazi officer Alois Brunner assumed control of the territory in 1943. She was rounded up alongside hundreds of other Jews. Allied pressure was building; by August 1944, thousands of Allied soldiers would land on beaches in southern France. But by then, many of Nice's Jewish residents had already been captured. After her deportation, Adams was held briefly at a transit camp in France before being sent onward. Like other immigrants and refugees to whom the United States denied residence, in 1943, just two years before the camp was liberated, Eve Adams, the beloved proprietor of one of the world’s first lesbian restaurants, was murdered at Auschwitz.

The city's iconic buildings inspired some monumental desserts.

If you're an architecture buff, then consider the cake. Baking is really, in essence, just an exercise in engineering. Taste is only part of an equation that involves tricky feats of texture, temperature, and more often than not, a dash of visual panache.

Recently, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of its built environment education program, the University of Melbourne hosted a competition in celebration of the similarities between baking and architecture. “Batter, Bake & Build” challenged bakers to faithfully replicate iconic structures from Melbourne’s City Centre in cake form, and more than 140 contestants (many from beyond the university) answered the call. On August 17 and 18, judges from the University, as well as the culinary and architectural communities, narrowed the entries down to a shortlist of 30, then 12 finalists, and finally the five winners below, each one a feast for the eyes.

First Prize: Flinders Street Station by Zarah Noriel—$1,500 Australian Dollars (AUD)

Noriel, a pastry chef in a self-described "love affair with Cake Decorating," even added a mobile tramcar to her exquisitely precise rendering of the iconic train station. Flinders Street Station itself was based on a design that also won an architectural contest, back in 1902. Had a different design won, this cake would have never existed.

Second Prize: Southbank Theatre by Monica Nam—$700 AUD

Nam, an artist, calls her Black Forest cake “Structures in Chaos,” and said it represents “the geometrical white frames of the Southbank Theatre.”

Third Prize: Storey Hall Annex by Sharyn Frantz—$300 AUD

Sharyn Frantz of Blackbird Cakes took on quite a challenge by baking a building which fuses rather divergent architectural styles. Storey Hall, part of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) campus, was originally built in a classical style in 1887. Since 1995, it has sported an audacious modern annex.

Student Prize: Arts Centre by Caroline Lee—$1,000 AUD

Lee, an architecture student, used the Australian staples of Lamington cake and Vegemite to replicate Southbank’s Arts Centre. She said that the mixture of the two iconic flavors represents an ode to Melbourne’s multiculturalism.

People’s Choice Award: Manchester Unity by Xin Ying Choo—$1,000 AUD

To render the behemoth 12-story office building and shopping center, Choo—a self-described "architect by day; baker by night"—used sugar paste and ginger biscuit on the outside, chocolate ganache-coated lemon cake with Italian meringue buttercream and lemon curd on the inside.

Can the university hold a cake-eating contest next year? Asking for a friend.

Atlas Obscura readers recommend their favorite oversized attractions.

What's better than a duck? An absolutely huge duck, of course! All around the world (though especially in the U.S., Canada, and Australia), you can find "world's biggest" versions of animals, fruits, everyday objects—essentially monuments designed make the mundane seem incredible. Erecting giant versions of things is such a popular pastime, in fact, that it's almost impossible to catalog them all (though we can think of at least one person who's giving it a go). Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community forums to tell us about their own favorite big things. We got a large response.

Check out some of the best submissions below, and if you have a favorite "world's biggest" attraction of your own that you'd like to recommend, head over to the forums, and keep the conversation going! It's always a great time to be a great big thing.

World's Largest Hockey Stick and Puck

Duncan, British Columbia

“Duncan, British Columbia, has the world’s largest hockey stick and puck.” — LeighE

World's Largest Pistachio

Alamogordo, New Mexico

“Giant Pistachio, north of Alamogordo on Highway 54, in New Mexico.” — Asta

Hat 'n' Boots

Seattle, Washington

“The Hat 'n' Boots, originally at this gas station in Seattle (hat hung over the office, and boots held the bathrooms). They were later restored and transferred to Oxbow Park.” — Asta

Giant Strawberry

Strawberry Point, Iowa

"The 15-feet-tall painted sculpture in front of City Hall." — Asta

Giant Buffalo

Jamestown, North Dakota

— Asta

World's Largest Axe

Nackawic, New Brunswick

— Asta

Giant Baked Potato

Blackfoot, Idaho

“GIANT POTATO.” — annacborg

Uniroyal Giant Tire

Allan Park, Michigan

“Maybe not my favorite, but a fun one none-the-less. It can be found along Interstate 94 West, between the Southfield Freeway Interchange and Outer Drive overpass in Allen Park, Michigan. It was created by the Uniroyal Tire Company for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, as a Ferris wheel.” — PQPP3

Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox

Klamath, California

“I was sure I had more of these, but particularly the Brobdingnagian Paul Bunyan and Babe at Trees of Mystery outside of Crescent City, California.” — MisterCustomer

The Vegreville Psyanka

Vegreville, Alberta

“The world’s largest psyanka is in Vegreville, Alberta, Canada.” — ronlavoie

The Gaffney Peachoid

Gaffney, South Carolina

“The Peachoid, in Gaffney, South Carolina! My family drives past it almost every year, and never fails to gawk at it.” — quinnm321

World's Largest Mailbox

Casey, Illinois

“The tiny town of Casey, Illinois, along Highway 70, about an hour from Indiana, is home to seven of the world’s largest things (verified by Guinness) and a bunch of other big stuff. Golf tee, knitting needles, crochet hook, wind chimes, mailbox, rocking chair, wooden shoes. My family discovered it by accident a few years ago and we return once in a while to see what they have added.” — JeffSTL

Blue Whale of Catoosa

Catoosa, Oklahoma

“Next time you’re in Tulsa, pack a picnic lunch and head for the Blue Whale.” — maddie_on_the_move

Lucy the Elephant

Margate, New Jersey

“Lucy the Elephant in Margate, New Jersey.” — bowmancheryl

World's Largest Chopsticks

Long Beach, Washington

“Also, right across the street at the amazing Marsh’s Free Museum (home of Jake the Alligator Man) there are a pair of the world’s largest chopsticks right in front.” — val

Salem Sue

New Salem, North Dakota

“In addition to the world’s largest bison in Jamestown, North Dakota, and the sculptures on the Enchanted Highway posted by another reader, I-94 also hosts Salem Sue, the world’s largest cow in New Salem, North Dakota.” — val

The Big Duck

Flanders, New York

“I’m certain I’ve mentioned this before in another thread, but I love the Flanders Duck on Long Island. Much cuter than most oversized road attractions I think!” — maren

Randy's Doughnuts

Inglewood, California

“Don’t know how I could have overlooked this as an Angeleno, but Randy’s Donuts and FREE THE TAIL-O-THE-PUP!” — MisterCustomer

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

New research reveals the link between bars and new inventions.

In Silicon Valley, it’s only a six-mile drive from the Googleplex to Facebook HQ. In Manhattan, Madison Avenue has long been lined with renowned advertising firms. And in San Francisco, the city’s best burrito joints are clustered in the Mission District.

A few years ago, Mike Andrews became interested in this human geography—the way that innovation and invention emerge from specific places. This phenomenon of the best coders, ad men, and burrito chefs clustering together interests everyone from economists to sociologists.

“Researchers tend to think that informal social interactions—people bumping into one another and swapping ideas—is vital for innovation,” Andrews says. A postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, he means that quite literally. An oft-cited research paper on Madison Avenue ad agencies found clear benefits to headquartering close together, but only within a half-mile radius.

What bothered Andrews, though, is that no one knew exactly how and where these vital interactions took place.

“If you press economists on this when they’re giving talks, and ask why it matters that everyone’s in the same city or within a few blocks, they’ll say something like, ‘People get together and talk at the bar,’” says Andrews. “I’ve actually heard this multiple times. [But] I don’t think direct evidence of that has ever existed before.”

So, during his PhD days, Andrews came up with the idea of finding that evidence. He’d do it by looking at that time the United States shuttered all its bars overnight: Prohibition.

Prohibition in the United States began long before Congress imposed a nationwide ban on alcoholic beverages in 1920. In the prior decades, towns, counties, and states had voted on local prohibition laws, often in referendums. When temperance activists succeeded in passing statewide bans on alcohol, they did so with the support of teetotaling areas (where no legal drinks had been served in years) over the objections of wet towns and counties (whose bars and taverns overflowed on Fridays).

Across the United States, these new laws promptly shuttered the imbibing regions’ bars and taverns. A century or so later, Andrews realized this was the holy grail of social-science research: a natural experiment. He downloaded patent data, compared the number granted to inventors in the wet and dry counties before and after statewide prohibition began, and came up with a measurement of the importance of slightly drunken discussion to invention.

The result? A 15 percent decrease in the number of patents. The areas whose saloons shuttered had become less inventive.

This is a meaningful change, comparable to the effect the Great Depression had on invention across the United States. In other work, Andrews has calculated that the establishment of a new university results (eventually) in a roughly 45 percent increase in local patents. This suggests that the bars’ closure had an effect one-third as strong as a county gaining a university—albeit in the opposite direction. Which is pretty remarkable! After all, universities are centers of knowledge, and bars are businesses that exchange money for beer.

A careful researcher, Andrews road-tested his theory and results. He looked at patents received by women, who were generally unwelcome in pubs and taverns at the time, after local laws against alcohol went into effect. As expected, the decline was much smaller for female inventors. Similarly, he looked at serial inventors, who often worked for companies and might be inspired by in-office conversation and collaboration. They too were less affected by prohibition.

Andrews has written a working paper about his research, titled “Bar Talk: Informal Social Interactions, Alcohol Prohibition, and Invention.” In it, he’s careful to note that alcohol itself does not explain the dwindling innovation of dry America. In fact, the trend reversed itself within a few years, well before nationwide Prohibition was repealed.

“My guess is that a lot of the informal communication shifted to places like the church picnic, the public park, the barber shop, or the bowling alley,” says Andrews. Bars were just one place where conversation could inspire new ideas. (Speakeasies were probably inferior replacements—the need to speak quietly and avoid police detection prevented the free exchange of ideas.) Once people shifted their social scenes to new venues, invention continued apace.

The point of looking at Prohibition, Andrews writes, is that it was “one of the largest involuntary disruptions of social networks in U.S. history.”

Prohibition disrupted much more than nightlife. In a tradition dating back to the country’s origins, Americans had long favored beer and bars over coffee and cafés. “The American Revolution was basically plotted in local taverns in Boston and Philadelphia,” says Andrews. Repudiating the tea-loving Brits they’d fought against, Americans viewed bars as venues of culture. Taverns hosted lectures and served as community centers, information hubs, and employment bureaus. Some sported names such as “Mechanics’ Exchange” and “Stonecutters’ Exchange,” reflecting their clientele’s association with specific industries. “So much of the interaction we [now] think of happening in coffee shops happened in the saloon,” says Andrews.

That changed during World War I. Amidst the growth of the Temperance Movement and local bans on booze, the United States went to war against Germany, exporter of breweries and beer halls. “Almost overnight, the cultural mood toward the saloon relative to the coffee shop basically flips,” says Andrews. Nationalism set the United States on a course toward coffee shops full of aspiring novelists and hand-shaking executives. Andrews’s next project, in fact, is investigating whether the rise of Starbucks had an impact on patents. Findings from this data-crunching research project, he says, are “on tap.”

That doesn’t mean bars have stopped being hubs for sharing ideas and inspiring invention. In his paper, Andrews cites the example of the Homebrew Computer Club—the computer-hobbyist group whose members included Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—meeting regularly at a now-shuttered Bay Area bar and grill, as well as the trope of inventions and new business ideas being sketched on cocktail napkins. (Among many examples, the team that dreamed up Discovery Channel’s Shark Week recalls doing so over drinks.)

And while Andrews’s research was agnostic on the merits of alcohol for invention, he did notice, when he drilled down into the data, that talking in bars, rather than at other venues, influenced the patents produced. During the booze bans—even a few years in, when the number of patents had rebounded—inventors who’d previously worked together no longer partnered up.

For his part, Andrews came up with the idea for his research while chatting with other graduate students at a bar, Joe’s Place, in Iowa City. “I find the bar to be a great place to air out lots of ‘bad ideas’ in a setting that is safer than the seminar room,” he says, adding that it’s often in bars where he talks to members of different departments. Reflecting on that, he seems cheerful: It’s one more data point supporting his research.

The teeny menaces turned up in a core taken from the floor of the Santa Barbara Basin.

Sand, soil, and rock all hold traces of our past. Scientists can read the layers of sediment like chapters in a story: footprints from vanished creatures and ripples of long-gone waves preserved in petrified seabeds, evidence of fires deposited in soil, bits of skeletons or feathers embedded in stone. Sediment is often a way to look in Earth’s rearview mirror, but researchers in California recently found that our more recent obsession with plastics shows up in the record, too.

Plastics, which are mostly made from byproducts of petroleum and other fossil fuels, were first synthesized in the 19th century and boomed after World War II. These days, debris from these cheap, durable materials shows up just about everywhere, from mountain peaks to deep crannies of the Mariana Trench. Pale nurdles collect in heaps on Texas beaches; scraps of plastic bags ensnare and entangle corals. To figure out where and when plastics landed in marine sediments, a team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Birch Aquarium at the University of California San Diego set out, in 2010, to take a core from the floor of the Santa Barbara Basin.

This location, roughly 20 miles from the California coast and close to the Channel Islands, struck the team as a smart sampling site because the conditions are fairly anaerobic—meaning things don’t break down quickly—and the sediment is relatively undisturbed, leaving an intact record reaching back thousands of years, according to Jennifer Brandon, a biologist at Scripps who studies microplastics.

From a research vessel, scientists dropped coring equipment to the seafloor, more than 1,900 feet below the surface. The crew hauled up a sample of sediment about 30 inches long and six inches wide, which represented 175 years of accumulated debris. (Every 0.2 inches of the core represents roughly 2.2 years of material that has snowed down from the waters above, including fish scales, plankton exoskeletons, and more.)

Fresh out of the water, the core looked greenish brown, striped with lighter hues. The darker layers are evidence of winter months, Brandon says, when phytoplankton blooms and carbon proliferates (and eventually falls to the bottom as silt). The lighter swaths represent summers. “You can literally see every year,” says Brandon, who is lead author of the team’s new paper describing their findings, published this week in Science Advances. “You can basically look at these cores as a record of whatever happened right above it.” That includes everything from weather events to the buildup of plastics.

The Santa Barbara Basin is no trash gyre: There were no obvious chunks or slurries on the surface, and even in the core, the majority of the plastics didn’t leap out to the naked eye. “Some of it is big enough that you can see it, but it’s confetti-sized,” Brandon says. “Most of it, you can only see under a high-magnification microscope. It’s not one of those places you see when you type ‘plastic pollution’ into Google Images.”

The team dried the core and sifted it through a mesh sieve before scouting it for the fibers, fragments, films, and little spheres that they could visually identify. This was a little tricky: When flimsy, soft plastics like bags and wrappers age, they turn yellow and brittle, Brandon says, and “kind of start to look like a piece of a molt or shell.” To sort the organic material out from the synthetic stuff, the researchers looked for telltale patterns that would point to an exoskeleton or shell. Then, for a definitive diagnosis, they analyzed the plastic pieces with a Fourier Transform Infrared spectrometer, which involves shooting a laser at the object to reveal the structure of chemical bonds inside it. “Specific plastics are always bound the same way,” says Brandon. By zeroing in on the distinctive microscopic structure of the plastics, she adds, this kind of analysis can “tell you what your eye can’t see.”

The trouble with studying plastics is that they’re everywhere—and new plastic debris can contaminate samples. A lot of lab equipment contains plastic; even lab coats contain synthetic materials. Sometimes, teams will wear the same colors every day, so any fibers that slough off their clothes are easier to identify. Brandon’s team briefly tried wearing all red—but “it gets really complicated, really fast,” she says. In this case, the researchers threw out any plastic data that appeared in the core sample prior to 1945, before consumer plastics really took off, and also subtracted the signatures of the plastic equipment that they knew came into contact with the core.

Adjusting for all of that, Brandon and her collaborators found that, since the 1940s, the amount of plastic in the sediment of the Santa Barbara Basin has roughly doubled every 15 years. Other research teams are still investigating exactly how plastic affects organisms throughout the food web; in the paper, Brandon and her collaborators advocate for "limiting the plastic waste stream that enters the ocean, since plastic sedimentation is directly mirroring the ever-increasing production trends." For now, it’s clear that traces of our use-it-and-toss-it lifestyle are embedded far below the surface, in records that will outlive us.