Prehistoric squee!

More than 100,000 years ago, a clutch of sea turtles hatched on the shores of South Africa. After breaking free of their soft, milk-colored shells, the hatchlings embarked on a clumsy, determined scramble toward the waves to begin their lives, doing their best to avoid the swooping maws of hungry birds overhead. This scene, which mirrors the first days of sea turtles today, can be seen in fossilized tracks discovered on what is now South Africa’s Cape South Coast and described in a new paper published August 23 in Quaternary Research by an international team of researchers. The tracks are the first known fossils of baby sea turtle trackways, and if Planet Earth had been around in the Pleistocene, David Attenborough would have been on the scene.

Jan de Vynck, a paleontologist at the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, and a coauthor of the study, first spotted the tracks on a large rock surface in 2016. He saw seven trails that run nearly parallel to each other—all heading to what would have been south, toward the sea. He hadn’t been looking for turtle tracks in particular, but was rather part of a team on a routine search for prehistoric prints. The Cape South Coast positively teems with them, including those from a prehistoric human, lion, rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe, and giant horse, among others.

The researchers identified two separate types. They believe the first tracks, distinguished by an alternating gait, were likely made by a hatchling closely related to the modern loggerhead turtle. The researchers say the second set of tracks, which are slightly wider, were likely made by a close relative of the modern leatherback. “The South African tracks named here are morphologically quite distinct from any turtle trackways previously described,” the researchers write in the study, noting that almost all previously known prehistoric turtle tracks come from freshwater species in the Northern Hemisphere. They created the names Australochelichnus agulhasii and Marinerichnus latus to identify the relatives of the loggerheads and leatherbacks, respectively.

Seaside tracks of this age can have many possible culprits—including crawling penguins, hopping frogs, or scuttling scorpions or crabs. But the distinctive pattern observed here helped the researchers eliminate the other options. Furthermore, the tracks were found in coastal deposits that reflect the kinds of setting where sea turtles would be likely leave their eggs, and the presence of seven parallel trackways suggests a flurry of individuals leaving a single origin point. The researchers believe the tracks were preserved after wind blew dry sand over the over wet, preserving the imprints. "It’s kind of amazing that the turtles would make these tracks for just literally a couple of minutes and the fossil record has captured this very unique activity," says Martin Lockley, a geologist from the University of Colorado Denver and a coauthor of the study. "It's literally the first steps these animals take."

Today, loggerheads and leatherbacks no longer nest on the Cape South Coast on the south side of the country. They rely on rookeries found more than 600 miles to the northeast, along the KwaZulu-Natal coast, and the coast of Mozambique. Lockley says the turtles might have commonly nested in more southern beaches in the past due to warmer global temperatures, but they report two anecdotal sightings of nesting turtles there over the past 20 years, indicating a slight overlap with the prehistoric turtles’ breeding grounds.

Though the newly described fossils are remarkably preserved, they are not necessarily surprising. “I confess that given the fossil record for sea turtles goes back to around 100 million years ago, and sea turtles currently live off the coast of South Africa,” Anthony Fiorillo, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University who was not involved with the study, writes in an email. “So one could make the prediction that such a fossil discovery was inevitable.” But Fiorillo says he finds the researchers’ case for the tracks’ origin to be convincing and well documented.

When Lockley first presented the fossilized tracks at a conference in South Africa, he says people gasped. "It's an iconic sort of trace fossil," he says, adding that he plans to go back to the coast this October to search for more trackways.

In Lockley's eyes, tracks like these tend to be overlooked and undervalued in paleontology, as they can more valuable than fossilized bone, as they allow researchers to reconstruct behavior. These tracks, for example, prove that turtles once nested successfully on this coast, something a fossilized eggshell could never prove for sure. "I often joke with my colleagues that people who study bones and skeletons just study death and decay," he says. "But people who study tracks are studying the living animal."

Though turtle hatchlings from 100,000 years ago may have started life with a familiar race to the sea and long odds of survival to adulthood, they faced none of the thoroughly modern threats of light pollution, oil spills, plastic bags masquerading as food, and entanglements in fishing gear. Hungry birds, on the other hand, are forever.

Scientists are trying to keep one of the world’s last great wildernesses intact.

It is possible, given the right equipment and a good reason, to cross over into the twilight zone. It is hundreds and thousands of feet below the surface; blue above, melting into an impenetrable void below. “The most striking thing is just how far down it is and how the light dissolves away,” says Joel Llopiz, a biologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “You look above and see a glimpse of light, but everywhere else is black.”

The twilight zone, or the mesopelagic zone, is the region of the global oceans between 650 feet and 3,300 feet deep, and it is one of the world’s last great wildernesses. It is vast enough to cover wide ranges of temperature, salinity, and density, as well as a menagerie of bizarre and brilliant life forms. Scientists are just beginning to understand how dynamic this massive, largely unexplored space can be.

The twilight zone is not currently under any specific threat, but a series of recent exploratory fishing efforts suggest this zone, located largely in international waters outside the jurisdiction of any one country, is ripe for human exploitation, according to scientists from WHOI and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, in an August 12 op-ed for The Hill. Over the past few decades, the decline of surface fisheries and the rise of aquaculture means the demand for fishmeal—that is, processed fish to feed to farmed fish to feed people—has never been higher. The twilight zone could be the solution. Scientists hope that with enough planning, they can take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to preserve an ecosystem before it’s compromised.

Located at the southwestern corner of Cape Cod, the WHOI research facility is actually several hundred miles away from the twilight zone. To get there, scientists travel by boat approximately 111 miles south to where the seafloor plunges downward like a gaping mouth. That is the edge of the Atlantic Continental Shelf, and where WHOI conducts most of its deep water expeditions, making it one of the best-studied areas of one of the least-explored regions of the world. “It’s very dark, out of sight, and out of mind,” says Porter Hoagland of WHOI, who studies the economics and public policy that govern marine resources. “As a consequence, it’s been neglected.”

The biologist Llopiz is one of many members on WHOI’s project focused on the twilight zone. This isn’t the first time the region has been studied, but it’s one of the most thorough and cutting-edge attempts to see inside a realm that was once entirely hidden. The WHOI project has developed and refined a number of technologies, such as remote sensors equipped with cameras and deep-sea robotic subs that can tail fish, to get a better sense of what’s going on down there.

Much of WHOI’s research is conducted with surface-based technologies, so humans rarely have to or get to enter the twilight zone. But in spring 2019, in waters off the Bahamas, Llopiz descended into the mesopelagic in a sub for the first time. The warmer tropical waters are far less productive than the North Atlantic, so Llopiz and his colleagues observed considerably less life than they had seen in their home stomping grounds. But they still saw what WHOI zooplankton biologist Peter Wiebe calls “the night sky in the deep sea,” the rippling fleet of bioluminescent organisms blinking in and out in blue, green, yellow, and red. Most things glow there, either to find a mate or eat or avoid being eaten.

Before remotely operated underwater vehicles, it was terribly hard to tell just what, if anything, lived in the twilight zone. In 1942, sonar operators from the U.S. Navy, on the hunt for enemy submarines, were confused by data that suggested an oscillating seafloor that rested a quarter mile down during the day and came all the way up to the surface at night. Researchers later realized that this was not a moving seafloor, but a mass movement of life—the nightly migration of plankton, fish, and other creatures from the twilight zone to the surface on the hunt for food. Taken together it’s the largest animal migration on the planet.

By dint of its sheer size, the twilight zone holds populations of incredible scale. Bristlemouths fish are wee, glowing things with gaping jaws, often the size of a finger. “Bristlemouths have gotten rough population estimates of around a quadrillion,” says Paul Caiger, a postdoc at WHOI. “Though that would be give or take a quadrillion. Well, maybe not take, because that would be zero.” He clarifies: “It’s a best guesstimate.” Though it holds an enormous amount of life, the twilight zone does not have a consistent population density, but varies bases on invisible boundaries and currents and biologically unproductive zones. Everything is spread out, and patchy.

The twilight zone is also home to lanternfish, a remarkably diverse family of small mesopelagic fish with more than 250 species. Lanternfish are a clear target of the nascent commercial fishing efforts—there are a lot of them and they have the right proportion of lipids and fluids to make good fishmeal. Each night, lanternfish migrate approximately nearly 2,000 feet—an astronomical distance for a fish around five or six inches long—to feed at the surface, Caiger says.

They undertake such a long nightly commute because while the darkness and relative emptiness (compared to the surface, at least) of the twilight zone offer a measure of safety from predation, the zone doesn’t offer many dining options. So mesopelagic species either migrate, Caiger says, or lurk around in the deep and wait for whatever food happens to fall, drift, or swim their way. The former strategy requires fish to endure a massive pressure change and exert a ton of energy—it’s a strategy of hustle. The latter requires species to convert their muscles into goo and limit their energy expenditure to almost nothing—the strategy of sloth. “The species that sit and don’t move that much encounter prey maybe once a week,” Caiger says. “They need to make sure they can catch and eat that prey, so you see a lot of tiny animals with giant teeth, giant stomachs, and little lures.” This group includes the aptly named fangtooths, dragonfish, and viperfish.

The twilight zone is also an in-between space where vulnerable or endangered surface-dwellers such as tuna, swordfish, and sperm whales migrate down to feed. But as far as scientists are concerned, there are no known fish or invertebrates currently endangered in the twilight zone. Gelatinous invertebrates such as sea angels and sea butterflies are struggling to make their own shells in acidifying oceans, Caiger says, and whatever hurts the surface impacts the twilight zone, and vice versa. The mesopelagic also plays a crucial role in the ocean’s global carbon sink, which means its fate means a great deal to the world. At any minute, a white blizzard known as “marine snow,” made up of flecks of dead fish, waste, and other creatures falls through the twilight zone—what Rachel Carson called “the most stupendous ‘snowfall’ the Earth has ever seen.” That drift of organic matter, along with the daily migration of fish, helps to fast-track the movement of carbon from the atmosphere down to the distant seafloor, where it can stay for thousands and thousands of years, Llopiz explains in a WHOI blog post.

Previous attempts to tap the twilight zone’s commercial fishing potential have never led to any measurable economic success. “Most historic examples of fishing in the twilight zone have been unprofitable and fleeting, attempted for a year or so and then abandoned,” Hoagland says. The most sustained effort occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Soviet Union caught lanternfish to use as livestock feed. The tiny crustaceans known as krill are also beginning to be exploited around Antarctica, even as they have been in decline due to climate change, according to the Greenpeace study License to Krill. In addition to twilight zone fishing for farmed fish food, krill and other open-water crustaceans such as copepods be present a valuable source of omega-3 fatty acids, a common ingredient in pet foods or nutraceuticals. “If we could grow a soybean that has the essential fatty acids that a farmed salmon needs, maybe we wouldn’t need the mesopelagic,” Llopiz says. But for now, no such soybean exists.

While lanternfish and bristlemouths would likely be the most direct targets of commercial fishing efforts, the only way to catch them is to cast a wide net—imperiling every other species that lives there or visits. Unintended victims include the glass squid, a deep-sea cephalopod that is almost completely transparent and can fold its head and tentacles inside its body, Caiger says. There’s the countless bioluminescent jellyfish and, one of Caiger’s favorites, the stoplight loosejaw, a fish that can perceive red light (which is the equivalent of night vision goggles in the deep sea).

Current regulation of commercial fishing in the twilight zone is just as obscure and sparse as the zone itself. Commercial fishing technology is still a little ways away from developing a profitable way to mine life in the mesopelagic, but there have already been a few attempts to restrict fishing there before the industry can catch up. In 2016, for example, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council established a moratorium on the harvest of mesopelagic fish in the exclusive economic zone off the West Coast of the United States.

On August 30, the United Nations concluded the third round of negotiations around an international agreement that would improve the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in international waters, including the twilight zone. The fourth and final session will take place in the first half of 2020. According to Hoagland, discussions like these have been ongoing for a decade and are only now becoming formalized. “It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen, as the treaty is still in its early stages,” he says. Though he doubts any specific fisheries management tool will come out of the treaty, the current discussions involve environmental impact assessments for activities on the high seas—a step in the right direction, at least.

Hoagland hopes that the twilight zone fares better than other parts of the world once considered vast, unending wilderness—such as the Amazon. “We need to think carefully about what the sustainable use of the twilight zone could look like, to ensure future generations can benefit from it as well,” he says. “Otherwise it’s the tragedy of the unmanaged commons.” The worst would be for the brilliant, unseen life of the twilight zone to disappear before we even begin to understand it.

A cabal of early cryptographers helped the government keep secrets and spy on enemies.

In 1516, in the locked back rooms of the Venetian governor’s palace, the city’s first professional cryptanalyst, Giovanni Soro, was hard at work trying to decipher an intercepted letter. Venice and its allies were winning the War of the League of Cambrai, just one among the drawn-out Italian Wars that embroiled almost all European monarchs., But the Venetians were unsure of the status of their rivals. The encrypted letter had been sent on April 3 from the enemy Captain Marcoantonio Colonna to an ally, the German Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian. In the letter, he begged Maximilian for financial assistance. “If the money is not sent within eight days, the Swiss soldiers will leave,” Marcantonio wrote. Soro struggled to uncover the contents for several days, and on April 8, he finally cracked the code. Within the year, Venice would be victorious.

A somewhat secretive figure due in part to his chosen profession, Giovanni Soro was a talented cryptanalyst. He could decipher texts in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish. In 1506 he was appointed Venice’s official cryptanalyst by the Council of Ten, the governing body that ruled the Venetian Republic. He deciphered encoded dispatches and missives intercepted from other diplomats and designed codes to protect Venice’s own diplomatic correspondence. He also went on to establish what would soon become the most elaborate cryptographic organization of the early modern period, what some historians have called the first professional cryptographers.

The 16th-century Republic of Venice was not the first government to use cryptography and cryptanalysis. Renaissance Venetians who read the Latin classics of the Roman Empire would have been familiar with ancient codes as recorded by the historian Suetonius in his book Lives of the Caesars. In two passages he described how Julius Caesar and his protégé Augustus used substitution ciphers—“B for A, C for B, and the rest of the letters on the same principle, using AA for Z”—in their private correspondence to protect military and “confidential” information.

Although cryptography wasn’t new in the 1500s, it was newly relevant. The demand for government secrecy was a part of larger political changes in the early modern world. During the 15th century, Italian states became more powerful, and rulers increased their military presence and strength. This in turn led to more states interacting through diplomats and agents in order to negotiate and handle conflict faster. Or as historian Matthew Anderson puts it, Italian city-states “competed with one another intensely for power, for territory, in the last analysis for survival.” These intimate connections encouraged monarchs to secure their correspondence about military movements, marriage alliances, and other confidential information with their diplomats.

The northern Italian city of Mantua, for instance, used cryptography to protect and strengthen its growing military. Surrounded by the more illustrious cities of Venice, Genoa, and Milan, Mantua fell into the hands of the Gonzaga family following a coup d’etat in 1328 and faced challenges on several fronts. Under Francesco I Gonzaga (1366-1407) the city built the castle of San Giorgio and successfully defended itself against attacks from Milan. Francesco also used cryptography to protect his letters from his opponents. When penning correspondence to the king of Hungary in 1401, Francesco’s secretaries employed the first homophone substitution cipher, which not only mixed the letters of the alphabet with new letters, but also substituted additional symbols for each vowel.

Such secrecy played just as noticeable a role in Venice, with the earliest evidence for enciphered diplomatic correspondence in Venice dating to 1411. By the end of the century, the Italian states were in constant struggle over territory and competition over access to trade. The Venetians then decided to hire Soro, because they required more permanent officials to meet the growing demand for diplomacy as well as to counter their opponents’ use of cryptography.

At this time, around the outbreak of the Italian Wars, cryptography was no longer reserved solely for the elite. The mathematician Leon Alberti, for instance, wrote an instruction manual in 1467 titled De Cifris, which outlined the general principles for composing ciphers. The text was originally created for the Vatican but spread to individuals throughout the peninsula and was eventually printed publicly in Venice in 1568. In this work, for which later writers have dubbed Alberti the Father of Modern Cryptography, he explained how language can be symbolically and systematically represented by substituted letters. He also laid out the principles of frequency analysis with vowels and consonants, and, most famously, detailed a method called the Alberti disk that allowed the user to create a polyalphabetic cipher, or a complex encoding system.

Similarly, bankers and merchants copied government practices and encoded their correspondence. Tommaso Spinelli, a successful banker from Florence, used codes for instructions in his letters. In a letter to his brother dated October 13, 1442, Spinelli wrote about a certain Lorenzo di Niccolo in Bruges, who owed the bank a significant debt. Spinelli wrote, “I will initiate legal action against him through the papal court and will have him excommunicated.” He concluded the letter with secret instructions for his brother and a key to decipher them at the end.

The Venetian merchant Andrea Barbarigo also used codes in his private letters. Barbarigo was not a particularly wealthy merchant, but he employed agents who sourced and purchased spices, textiles, and other commodities he traded. He was not able to use government intelligence, and he relied on merchants to secure information about commodities and price changes. He would then send instructions on what and where to purchase to his agents in code to protect the information from other merchants, since he couldn’t access the government’s network “even though the need for such a code was unlikely,” according to his biographer and historian of Venetian merchants Frederic Lane.

Giovanni Soro, the “Father of the Venetian Cipher,” became an indispensable fixture of the Venetian administration. From 1505 to 1543, he was renowned for his talents at deciphering multilingual texts. Although our knowledge of Soro primarily comes from the diaries of the high-ranking Venetian official Marino Sanudo, he is recorded as having deciphered letters during the wars, including information on troop movements, as well as general dispatches of general intelligence. During this time, most of the codes employed special symbols for prominent individuals and location, and the most complex would replace vowels with several different letters. Regardless of the method, they contained valuable information that helped the Council make decisions regarding foreign policy and trade agreements.

Some evidence indicates that Soro also helped Venice create ciphers in addition to cracking the codes of their neighbors. According to the correspondence of the Venetian ambassador at Rome, Marco Minio, the ambassador had an official code. With the key, Minio could encipher his correspondence; and, when it arrived back in Venice, Soro would apply the same key to decipher it. Based on the monogram found on one of the letters, some historians claim that Soro had developed the new code that was being used by the ambassadors in 1519. Certainly, in 1529, Soro created a new code system that would work with ambassadors at Constantinople. The cipher key remains in the Venetian Archives and explained how the ambassadors at Constantinople were supposed to report on court intrigues and local affairs. The cipher was complex for the time and reversed the alphabet, depicted vowels in four different ways, and represented various monarchs and their states with unique symbols.

During the 1520s, as Venice entered the next Italian War, the War of the League of Cognac, Soro’s reputation spread beyond Venice. Pope Clement VII brought together an alliance of Venice, France, Florence, England, and Milan, against Charles V, the new Holy Roman Emperor, to expel the Hapsburgs from Italy. Because of Soro’s role in deciphering letters intercepted from Charles V’s ambassador in Rome, the French said he was “inspired by God.” When the Florentines intercepted private letters from Pope Clement VII to papal legates in France, the Pope sent copies of the letters to Venice to see if Soro could decipher them, claiming that “Soro can decode anything.” But apparently, Soro could not. Word came to the Vatican that the code had stumped him—a comment later authorities have suspected was only Soro trying to appease the Pope.

Soro was a wonder, but he was not immortal. Before he died in 1544, the Council of Ten commissioned him to train a new set of cryptographers, which established a bureau of professional cryptographers that would last for another hundred years. Trained in cryptographic skills, they passed entrance exams, studied frequency analysis and number theory, learned languages, and eventually had to decipher a document written in a complex cipher without a key. Upon completing their cryptanalysis apprenticeship, they would receive government salaries as much as 10 ducats a month, high pay considering other professions such as proofreaders received 4 to 6 ducats a month and master builders received just over 7.

The secretaries of secrets eventually melded into the rest of the Venetian administration in the 17th century, and the power of Venice declined throughout the 18th century until the city was defeated by Napoleon. Although other European states came to replace Venice’s role in the realm of secrets, Soro’s legacy as a cryptanalyst was summed up by his assistant and successor Alvise Borghi: Soro was “padre di questa rarissma virtu” or the “father of this rarest of virtues.”

They’re town pounds—forgotten livestock pens that played a key civic role in colonial life.

As cars zoom by on High Street in suburban Westwood, Massachusetts, Lura Provost, co-president of the Westwood Historical Society, stands beside the road next to a stone wall. Provost is 5’2”, and the heavy stones are nearly as tall as she is. Next to the wall is a plaque explaining the structure’s significance.

The passing motorists don’t slow down to glance at the plaque, or to wonder why someone would be standing there, in grass wet from a recent rainstorm. If they did, they might be surprised to learn about a nearly forgotten aspect of colonial American life.

Dozens of these stone enclosures—open at the top, usually square or circular, with a gap secured by a gate—remain scattered across New England. They were once a ubiquitous feature in the region. In fact, they were so necessary to the orderly functioning of a community that they were required by law. They were town pounds.

In 17th-century America, livestock were generally not fenced in as they are today. Back in England, grazing animals were guarded by herders. But in the New World, where labor was scarce, animals like sheep and cattle were turned loose to graze on common lands instead. (The town green, or common, was often used for this purpose.)

If an animal strayed and was found wreaking havoc on private property, it was brought to the pound, where it was corralled with other wayward creatures and watched over by a town-appointed "pound-keeper" (sometimes called a "pound-master," or "pounder") until its owner could retrieve it—for a fee.

(Prices varied by time and place. One community, according to Elizabeth Banks MacRury’s book Town Pounds of New England, set the bail of a horse, mule, ass, cow, or pig at 12 cents and 5 mills (a mill was a thousandth of a dollar). For a sheep, it was 1 cent and 4 mills; for a goose, 8 cents. Unclaimed animals could be sold at auction after three days (one day for geese). Stealing an animal from the pound incurred a fine of $7.)

Early colonists considered pounds so essential that communities were legally required to build them. The court of Massachusetts, for example, ordered towns in the colony to erect pounds as early as 1635. Details of their construction were discussed and voted on in town meetings.

Some local governments specified precise dimensions. One fairly typical Vermont pound was designed to be 30 square feet, with six-foot-tall walls that were four feet thick at the bottom and two feet thick at the top. Other town councils simply requested that builders make pounds “horse high, bull strong, and hog tight,” as the age-old farming maxim dictates.

Susan Allport, author of Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England & New York, writes that pounds were one of several types of fence that represented “the conflicting needs of crops and animals” in New England.

These concerns may seem arcane today, but remnants of town pounds still endure in the region’s character—and its laws. The position of "fence-viewer," for instance, once tasked with “perambulating the bounds” of New England towns, can still be found in the General Statutes of Connecticut: “Selectmen shall receive two dollars for each day's service as fence viewers.”

Town pounds became largely obsolete in the late 19th century, as common lands were divided and farmers penned their animals on private property. Today, most have disappeared (though the concept lives on in animal-control departments and vehicle-impound lots.) Yet while other mundane relics of early American life—covered bridges, little white churches, the aforementioned town greens and stone walls—have become iconic symbols of the region, town pounds are a niche historical curiosity, occasionally rendered slightly less mysterious by an informational sign or, as in Westwood, a plaque.

Over the roar of traffic, Provost describes the history of the Westwood pound, which was built in 1700. Despite its prominent location and the fact that it’s proudly depicted on the town seal—a stone square with an oak tree growing within its walls—“no one asks about it,” she says. Local history doesn’t resonate much in this bedroom community, which increasingly attracts newcomers from elsewhere.

The story is a little different in Sterling, Connecticut. Megan McGory Gleason, president of the Sterling Historical Society, says she sometimes receives requests for information about Ye Olde Voluntown Pound, which dates back to at least 1722. Located at the junction of two roads, it was rediscovered in 1931 by highway workers clearing brush, and later made into a picnic area.

Interest in the site has increased a bit since it was posted on a Facebook page for regional history buffs in 2018. It helps that the neatly circular Voluntown Pound—Sterling was carved out of Voluntown in 1794—is relatively well-restored.

“The establishing of a new Pound in a large area is the first inkling ... that the smaller section was considering their independence from the larger community,” writes MacRury, “even before a request to become a separate parish, or to have their own Church.”

Gleason says that after Voluntown was incorporated, in 1721, townspeople built multiple pounds—even as their plans for building a meetinghouse were “mired in bureaucratic nonsense” for nearly a decade.

This might sound familiar to anyone who has attended a New England town meeting in modern times. Indeed, MacRury and other experts see direct links between the ways of contemporary New England and the customs of its past. Pounds, she writes, can be seen as the foundations upon which our modern roads, governments, and laws were built, reminding us “of the paths, ways, and directions which have been made for us—which we follow knowingly or unknowingly.”

Given that many of the roads New Englanders drive today originated as cow paths, it’s worth considering how many of the region’s less tangible traits can be traced to those seemingly remote colonists. In 1974, The New York Times called New England town pounds “[America’s] Coliseum and Acropolis”—“important monuments to a departed way of life.” But perhaps, like the provision for payment of fence-viewers in modern Connecticut laws, that way of life is not so much gone as adapted to the times.

Some towns symbolically preserve the memory of these forgotten practices. Westwood, for example, still appoints a pound-keeper. So does Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. In 2007, the town named former Governor John Sununu and his wife, Nancy, pound-keepers. (They were also named "hog reeves"—a position once responsible for controlling and appraising damage caused by rogue swine.)

It’s all done in fun, of course. Even in the past, the post of pound-keeper was treated as a bit of a joke. The job was taken seriously enough that appointees swore a “Pounder’s Oath,” but it was unpleasant (pounders had to be on call to wrangle wayward animals when needed) and it didn’t pay well (a pound-keeper had to feed animals at his own expense, hoping for remuneration when the livestock were retrieved).

Decidedly uncoveted gigs like pound-keeper or hog reeve were sometimes jovially forced upon the “prissiest” man in town, assigned randomly—to, say, the most recently married man in the community—or considered a dues-paying step on the path to a political career. “One only wishes for as good a way of testing those who would run for office today,” writes Allport.

Today perhaps a hundred town pounds remain across New England. (They exist in other areas too. In addition to having mapped two dozen of New England’s pounds, users of the site waymarking.com have located one in a Nevada ghost town, and several in the U.K.) There are probably more.

Many could simply be hidden, as MacRury writes, “buried beneath trees and vines,” their carefully placed stones “tumbled and scattered.” And some may have already been located, but misidentified. Allport writes of a ranger leading a hiking group in Ridgefield, Connecticut, who told his charges that a stone circle in the woods was likely a pound—but the group decided, instead, that it was “a celestial observatory built by Druids.”

Others are easy to mistake for rock piles or abandoned segments of the stone walls that mark property lines and bisect dense Northeastern woods. When homeowners in Sterling, Connecticut, recently found a stone structure in an overgrown part of their yard, they thought it might be a cemetery.

Later, however, they “unearthed an 18th-century hand-forged iron animal harness buckle from inside the enclosure,” says Gleason, and asked the Sterling Historical Society to look into it. “As soon as I saw it I noticed the similarities to [the pound in] Preston City, so we started digging into the history,” Gleason says. She now believes that it may be the same pound mentioned in town-meeting minutes from 1735.

For those with sharp eyes and curious minds, take note: There are probably many more town pounds still out there—an unknowable number, in fact, simply waiting to be found.

One show of force had a cooling effect on Japanese summers.

It’s not just shaved ice. Rather than ground or crushed, ice in proper kakigori is shaved on a razor-sharp plane so thinly it more closely resembles freshly fallen snow. Topped with condensed milk and flavored syrup, the rich, cold treat melts gently in your mouth, carrying more flavor than crunch. While kakigori is a common tactic in Japan’s annual war against natsubate, or “summer fatigue,” it was not always so. A delectable once enjoyed only by the hyper-rich, its current ubiquity is thanks, in part, to one 19th-century display of American gunboat diplomacy.

The earliest mention of kakigori comes from Sei Shonagon, a lady of the imperial Heian court who wrote in her early-11th century The Pillow Book of a silver dish of shaved ice, topped with tree sap and flower nectar. Dr. Eric C. Rath, a historian of premodern Japan at the University of Kansas, writes that the Heian aristocracy relied on special cellars called himuro to keep ice shipped from the frigid mountains of Hokkaido frozen. Without access to ice and requisite storage, those of lesser means told ghost stories to chill themselves, says Dr. Rath, or hung small bells with streamers from windows to sound the “cooling” of a light breeze. “It was a delicacy for the one-percenters,” says Nathan Hopson, Associate Professor of Humanities at Nagoya University.

This began to change in 1853, when a U.S. naval fleet comprised of four of the world’s deadliest warships arrived in Tokyo Bay. Commodore Matthew C. Perry carried a letter from U.S. president Millard Fillmore for Emperor Kōmei of Japan, which asked him to end a 200-year-old policy of isolationism and begin trading with the West. Michael Booth, whose up coming book Three Tigers, One Mountain explores Asian political relations, describes Perry's arrival in Japan as “akin to [an] alien invasion movie. The ships were many times larger than anything the Japanese had.” The reaction onshore, as citizens viewed “black ships of evil mien” spewing clouds of black smoke, was one of horror. “The capital was thrown into a panic. Mothers ran about with children in their arms, and men with mothers on their backs,” wrote Arthur Walworth in Black Ships Off Japan.

The Perry Expedition was one of the first, but far from the last, exercises in American gunboat diplomacy. After stalling for a year, the Japanese received a second visit of nine vessels in 1854; the resulting Treaty of Kanagawa ended Japanese isolation.

Perry’s exhibition of military might had myriad unintended consequences. The Japanese saw Perry’s black ships as an existential threat. Made fearfully aware of the wider world’s technological advancements, Japan launched a modernization campaign, and a period of rapid social, economic, and military development ensued. Referred to as the Meiji Restoration, it earned Japan a formidable international reputation. Telegraph lines and railroads were laid, the first daily newspaper began publication, a national postal service was installed, and the Gregorian calendar was adopted.

Among this great wave of innovation, two advances helped promulgate kakigori. Capitalizing on the new railroads and infrastructure, food entrepreneur Kahe Nakagawa was able to ship ice harvested from the mountains of Hokkaido to the greater Tokyo area at a fraction of the expense once paid by the imperial Heian court. His Hakodate Ice company opened in 1872. Competitors such as the Tokyo Ice Company and Aoyama Ice Factory opened in the 1880s, offering artificially made ice and further driving down prices. An ice-seller named Hanzaburo Murakami then patented an ice-shaving machine in 1887 that could—relative to tediously shaving by hand—finely and rapidly shave the newly accessible ice. In the midst of this flurry of development, kakigori shops began opening in the Japanese capital.

But as Hopson writes, these first shops were not roaring successes. The Japanese had adopted many Chinese medical traditions which discouraged the cooling of the body. Skeptical of this ancient confection of the elite, most Japanese settled on cooling hacks of historic provenance, such as eating zaru soba (cold noodles) or grilled unagi basted with sweet sauce. Hopson says that, until recently, most iced drinks were still widely viewed with suspicion by older, more rural Japanese.

With each passing summer, however, Japan warmed up to the icy treats. By the “Meiji-20s,” or 1890s, kakigori was increasingly accessible to middle class families, says Hopson.

New traditions quickly emerged from the popularization of kakigori. Colorful banners called hyoki began flying over ice shops authorized for sale by the regulatory body, showing the symbol kanji (ice) in red over a torrent of blue waves with green birds flying in the background. Their emergence in late spring became a harbinger of summer, much like American ice cream trucks. The popularization of homemade kakigori piggybacked on Japan’s earliest household refrigerators in the 1920s, leading to the birth of korikoppu: glass bowls designed to hold homemade kakigori. The world of haikus even recognizes the term kakigori as a kigo, or a synecdoche, to the summer season.

Today, the treat is “utterly ubiquitous,” Booth writes. Every season of matsuri, or summer festivals, brings about nuanced flavor combinations, sweet or otherwise. Ujikintoki is doused in matcha green tea and adzuki red bean paste; Shirokuma, meaning “polar bear,” is made to resemble the animal with an arrangement of fruit, condensed milk, and agar agar. Nancy Singleton, author of Japan: The Cookbook, says a shop near her home in Kamikawa-Machi sells a specialty miso-caramel kakigori. Per La Vita, an Italian restaurant in Shibuya, Tokyo, sells a tiramisu kakigori. Manhattan’s Bonsai Kakigori sells a Coconut Lime Crunch kakigori with toasted coconut and lime zest. Cousins of kakigori can also be found in neighboring countries such as Hawaii and the Philippines, where Japanese immigration brought the concept that evolved into the locally beloved shave-ice and halo-halo.

In a twist of historic irony, the newest technique in kakigori is one that allegedly produces harder blocks of ice that are both slower to melt and produce a finer, fluffier shave: In Heian fashion, it’s all the rage to source “natural ice” from mountain lakes and store them in sawdust to await the summer season.

By making everything from ceviche to ice cream, city residents show off their cooking chops.

A young girl, blonde head bowed and carrying a small straw basket, was walking quietly up and down a street in central Helsinki on a recent Saturday morning. On a hunch, I pointed to her basket and asked if she was in business. She said yes, and showed me the oat cookies she had baked the night before.

It was Restaurant Day in Helsinki, where on the third Saturday of February, May, August, and November, anyone can open a restaurant, anywhere. In the case of 13-year-old Ruut Sundman's basket, proceeds from her cookies would go to medicine for one of her rescue dogs. Last Restaurant Day, she ran a restaurant in her mother's jewelry shop with her friends. “We baked muffins and cookies, and we gave the money to UNICEF,” she said.

Not far away, in a quaint city square, Omar and Tammy were setting up a ceviche stand. Both from Spain, he worked at a hotel, and she was in hairdressing school. Tammy and Omar are typical Restaurant Day participants: amateur cooks who want to share a favorite food and connect with others in their city. “You meet new people, it’s open minded,” Tammy said.

Yet Restaurant Day began as a civic protest. In 2011, Helsinki resident Timo Santala wanted to start a mobile bicycle bar, selling drinks and tapas. Frustrated by red tape in a city where everything is highly regulated, he imagined a day where a restaurant could open with no licenses and no limitations. He and his friends came up with Restaurant Day, a food carnival where anyone can open a restaurant, anywhere they want, for a single day.

In May 2011, they launched their first event. Participants opened restaurants in lingerie shops, on unused railroad tracks, in people’s kitchens and attics, and in bus stops. There was a restaurant for babies. Cooks got creative, serving everything from crayfish soup on their boats to entrees made with grasshoppers. A Michelin-starred chef grilled hamburgers and gave them out for free.

In just six months, Restaurant Day had become a social movement, with events spreading across the country, and then the globe. Today, it’s even considered the world’s farthest-flung food carnival, with Restaurant Days taking place everywhere from Iceland to islands in the South Pacific. In Russia, the idea especially took off, resulting in some creative culinary endeavors, such as an intrepid chef cooking chicken in the steam of an old Soviet car motor. In Nicaragua, one restaurant owner took payment in the form of a poem or a song.

In a study from Finland’s Aalto University, researchers set out to find why Restaurant Day proved so globally compelling. “The participants found setting up a restaurant of their own a personally meaningful and ambitious project,” said researcher Henri Weijo in a university press release. “The movement's leaders were not essential—instead, every participant was.” Indeed, from the beginning Santala took a hands-off approach. Rather than imposing a particular vision, he left it as a creative free-for-all with nothing more than a common date and food as the theme.

Helsinki could have turned it into a cash grab, fining hundreds for operating a restaurant without a license. “In the beginning, the authorities and the owners of regular restaurants vocally opposed Restaurant Day,” said Weijo. “However, it attracted such a wide range of participants that opposition was almost impossible.”

In fact, the city actually came on board. Grasping the appeal of Restaurant Day, Helsinki’s tourism website now features it as an attraction. Which is a pretty extraordinary achievement for an event that deliberately side-steps the law. (It helps that there have been no known instances of food poisoning stemming from Restaurant Day, according to Elisabeth Rundlöf, a marketing manager for the City of Helsinki.)

Other cities have made Restaurant Day participation difficult to varying degrees, but due to the number of participants, most turn a blind eye. Restaurants are shared on social media or by word of mouth. “You should go to Kallio,” Omar the ceviche seller told me, referring to a gentrifying neighborhood in Helsinki. “There will be hipsters doing hipster food for other hipsters.”

Sometimes, temporary Restaurant Day endeavors become permanent, such as Werner, a fancy Helsinki eatery on a swish street. Werner is known for roasting whole fish on an open-fire wood grill, but it had a humble start as a Restaurant Day sausage and donair kebab pop-up.

But Restaurant Day has done more than help some businesses get off the ground. In Helsinki, a city where it’s said that the only time people talk to one another is in the sauna, Restaurant Day has impacted the social fabric. You can actually approach strangers.

I struck up a conversation with a woman, Iiu Laitinen, selling ice cream from a cart outside an apartment complex. There were several lawn chairs set up, occupied by people enjoying her treats. I asked her if she had salmiakki ice cream, and she laughed. “Most people who speak English don't ask for salmiakki,” she said. That’s true. The salty licorice flavor is an obsession in Nordic countries and an acquired taste everywhere else. I asked Laitinen why she chose this location. “Because I live in this building. And I need the power,” she said, pointing to a cord running through her front door. Her ice cream was made from condensed milk, yogurt, and flavors such as blueberry amaretto. She had come up with the idea while cleaning her new ice cream maker with alcohol.

In 2016, Santala stepped aside from running Restaurant Day, but remains a chairman of the board. Ironically, the activist was hired by Helsinki as a food culture strategist, focusing on market halls and cafeterias in schools, city-run offices, and senior housing. But someone was needed to run the Facebook page and update the map of pop-up restaurants. In 2018, Canadian Robert Courteau and two friends stepped in. At the moment, they’re creating a Facebook network of “Restaurant Day Ambassadors” to promote the event in their own cities.

Courteau discovered Restaurant Day when he was living in Prague, where participation in the event is second only to Helsinki. One Restaurant Day, he hosted a pop-up restaurant by the Charles River serving organic burgers. “Everything was grilled, including the salad, beef, and veggie burgers,” he remembers. “Everything was homemade, including the bread and ketchup. We sold out in three hours.”

Reactions to Restaurant Day can vary, even within the same city. Several years ago, city councillors in Montreal agreed to support the event. One councillor even opened his own restaurant. However, “cops don’t always get the memo,” Courteau says. On one recent Restaurant Day in Montreal, the police tried to shut down several pop-ups. Prague, on the other hand, “does a great job,” Courteau says. “They won’t make it easy, but you will not be shut down. All they do is ignore you. And that's all you need.”

Soon, Courteau is hoping to get a coffee table book together, with photographs of Restaurant Days around the world. And the event is still spreading. “I was contacted by a Finnish guy who moved to Australia,” Courteau says. “He said, ‘There’s no Restaurant Day in Sydney. I want to get it started.’”

It involves tiny straws and a whole lot of liquid nitrogen.

You can't just wander around the beige building: Access to the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation requires a guided tour, booked in advance. But close your eyes and try for a moment to picture it: A large, clean, secure room full of dozens of gleaming, cylindrical metal tanks, about waist high and five-and-a-half feet in diameter. They’re so cold that scientists must wear thick, elbow-length blue gloves to open them, and when they do, the liquid nitrogen inside boils to the surface. “We’re often looking through vapor,” says animal geneticist Harvey Blackburn.

This space is part of the Agricultural Research Service complex in Fort Collins, Colorado. Though it's dedicated to animals, including bleating sheep and methane-belching bovines, you won’t find any there. But they’re present in genetic spirit. That tank-filled room is the world’s largest stockpile of livestock semen.

If you have a sound reason to need a bit of semen from, say, a boar or a honeybee or a sheep or a catfish or a yak, chances are good you’ll find your way to Blackburn or one of his colleagues. Together, they’re the custodians of all of that fluid, in addition to testicular tissue, embryos, ovaries, blood, and more—amassed by the National Animal Germplasm Program (NAGP), and anchored in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Fort Collins compound. There, a bit of semen from a Duroc boar recently nudged the facility’s overall sample count to one million—952,127 of which are semen and sperm, specifically—from domesticated livestock and farmed aquatic animals, spanning 167 breeds and 36 species.

Like seed banks, this cache of organic material is a high-tech Noah’s Ark—insurance against worst-case scenarios. Its contents could help revive populations of critical animals obliterated or stressed by, say, a natural disaster, climate change, or a quick-moving infection. But the collection has other uses, as Blackburn and P.J. Boettcher, of the United Nations’ Animal Production and Health Division, outlined in a 2010 paper about best practices for stashes of animal genetic material. “The release of genetic resources from the gene bank need not be only in the case of crisis situations,” they wrote. “It is totally feasible for semen, embryos, or DNA to exit the repository for routine breeding and research activities.” As such, the NAGP team released about 7,000 samples to breeders or researchers who want to use them for various projects, including increasing the genetic diversity of a given flock or reconstituting a line of pigs used as research subjects.

Concern about the genetic diversity of livestock started to percolate several decades ago. The USDA joined the discussion in the 1990s, and the NAGP was formed in 1999. Gene banks have really taken off since the turn of the millennium, and were resoundingly endorsed by the branch of the United Nations dedicated to global food and agriculture. A 2015 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found that the share of the world's livestock breeds at risk of extinction had edged up in the previous few years, as a result of "genetic erosion," land-use patterns, and more, according to a release. Additionally, more than half of all livestock breeds faced uncertain risks, the report's authors wrote, because data about their populations are scarce. Now there are more than 120 livestock gene banks across the world. The USDA’s is the largest, Blackburn says, followed by ones in the Netherlands, France, and Canada.

These reserves must be cautious caretakers. Since different countries face different biological foes, they're not necessarily trading a lot of samples. Importing samples to the United States from any other country requires permits from the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and a clean bill of health for the contributing animal, Blackburn says. When banks do swap samples across borders, one in the United States would be much more likely to work with one in Canada, as both are similarly freaked by highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease (and therefore make sure it doesn’t get into their facilities), Blackburn says. On the other hand, neither would be likely to receive a permit to accession a sample from a bank in an area that has been affected by African swine fever. That virus has ravaged pig populations in Brazil, Russia, China, and elsewhere, and no one wants to see it stampede across North America.

Samples arrive at the NAGP facility in several ways. Back in 2004, ABS Global, a Wisconsin-based company that artificially inseminates livestock, donated 200,000 decades-old semen samples from more than 6,000 bulls representing 43 breeds. Sometimes, the NAGP researchers go looking for sheep or goats they want to add to the inventory, and collect and freeze their samples out on a farm. For boars, they have relationships with several stud operations in the Midwest, which are able to get them fresh samples within 36 hours.

When a fresh sample arrives, the team gives it a once-over—temperature, pH, sperm motility—and then cools it into a state of suspended animation. The scientists take a boar sample, for instance, from the transport temperature of 59 or 62 degrees Fahrenheit (15 or 17 degrees Celsius) down to 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), and package it in ½-milliliter straws that look a bit like cocktail stirrers. (One sample might require several of them.) These are then cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen; they get really cold, really fast. A boar sample hits -220 degrees Fahrenheit (-140 Celsius) in about three minutes. By the time it goes into long-term storage in the tanks, it’s down to -322 degrees Fahrenheit (-197 Celsius), where it will keep almost indefinitely. “There’s not going to be deterioration of the quality of the cell,” Blackburn says. “By storing them at the temperature we do, they should last 1,000 years,” he adds. “Once we have ‘em, we pretty much have ‘em.”

Every week, staffers just have to top off the liquid nitrogen. Each tank—spacious enough for 120,000 straws—holds 2,000 liters. “As long as the tank is in good condition and the right temperature, you don’t have to do anything else,” Blackburn says.

Removing a sample, though, is an exercise in precision and precaution. First, the scientists spin a kind of lazy Susan to access the right part of vat. They use two-foot-long tweezer-like tools to pull the chosen canister from the liquid nitrogen, then transfer it to a Styrofoam box with a splash of liquid nitrogen inside. They then reach for a finer-scale set of tools to pluck the specific straw. Once the sample is thawed, it’s ready to go—but can’t go back. “Viability goes down substantially if we freeze, thaw, and try refreezing again,” Blackburn says.

Blackburn estimates that the NAGP gathers between 20,000 and 25,000 new germplasm samples a year, mostly in an effort to stay up to date with the current genetic diversity across breeds and species. The USDA researchers collaborate with thousands of partners across the country to figure out where genetic change is happening most rapidly, and that tends to track with how long it takes a certain breed or species to reach sexual maturity. According to Daniel Buskirk, a beef specialist at Michigan State University, Angus bulls are usually bred from the time they're 18 months old until they’re four or five, at which point they’re replaced to keep the herd genetically healthy. For pigs and chickens, Blackburn says, new generations emerge in much less time.

This means that despite the general stasis of the collection, the researchers are always on the hunt for fresh samples. The task is unrelenting. The NAGP storage area currently holds about 60 tanks; there’s space for 200 more. “In the facility, we have a whole floor we haven’t even started to use yet,” Blackburn says. So, for now at least, they’ve got room to grow.

“The whole idea is to have genetic resources that are usable to any range of needs that the country may have,” Blackburn says. As long as there’s a livestock industry in the United States, the scientists in this Colorado complex will keep adding to their collection.

Up close with the 7,000-year-old Dolmen of Guadalperal.

This summer has been unusually scorching across Europe and beyond, and things have only grown more intense in the already hot and dry region of Extremadura in Spain. Months into an official drought that could be developing into a mega-drought, local farmers are facing the loss of hundreds of millions of euros. Many think this is just a sign of things to come.

Droughts, and the way that they strip the land of plant cover and drain lakes and reservoirs, for all the problems they cause, are often a boon for archaeologists. The water level of the Valdecañas Reservoir in the province of Cáceres has dropped so low that it is providing an extraordinary glimpse into the past.

“All my life, people had told me about the dolmen,” says Angel Castaño, a resident of Peraleda de la Mata, a village just a couple miles from the reservoir, and president of the local cultural association. “I had seen parts of it peeking out from the water before, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in full. It’s spectacular because you can appreciate the entire complex for the first time in decades.”

The dolmen he’s talking about is known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, the remains of a 7,000-year old megalithic monument consisting of around 100 standing stones—some up to six feet tall—arranged around an oval open space. It takes hours of hiking to get to the dolmen, which is now a few dozen yards away from the edge of the tranquil blue water. Visitors today are more likely to see deer than guards. Traces of aquatic plant life in the sand show that the site is dry and accessible only temporarily.

“When we saw it, we were completely thrilled,” Castaño says. “It felt like we had discovered a megalithic monument ourselves.”

Archaeologists believe the dolmen was likely erected on the banks of the Tagus River in the fifth millennium BC, as a completely enclosed space, like a stone house with a massive cap stone on top. And though it had been known, perhaps even damaged, by the Romans, it had faded beyond memory until German archaeologist Hugo Obermaier led an excavation of the site in the mid-1920s. Obermaier’s work wasn’t published until 1960, but by then the tide of the 20th century was on its way to the ancient site.

In his quest to modernize Spain, Francisco Franco’s regime carried out a number of massive civil engineering projects, including a dam and reservoir that flooded the Dolmen of Guadalperal in 1963. Archaeological studies and environmental impact reports before such projects weren’t regular practice at the time, says Primitiva Bueno Ramirez, a specialist in prehistory at the University of Alcalá. “You couldn’t believe how many authentic archaeological and historic gems are submerged under Spain’s man-made lakes.”

The Valdecañas Reservoir brought water and electricity to underdeveloped parts of western Spain, but that came at a cost. “The flooding was tragic on many levels,” says Castaño. “From the historic point of view, it drowned these megalithic monuments and most of the remains of a Roman city called Augustóbriga. [Portions of the ruins were relocated to a nearby hilltop.] From the human point of view, an inhabited town was flooded and people were forced to move out of their homes.”

As water levels in the reservoir have fluctuated over the years, the tips of the tallest stones sometimes become visible, but it is a rare occurrence—so far—for the entire structure to be high and dry. Dolmens like this one were tombs or sites for ritual—think Stonehenge—and ones like it appear in different cultures all over the world, from Ireland to India to the Korean Peninsula. One of the standout attributes of the Dolmen of Guadalperal is a large stone, or menhir, that marked the entrance. A human figure is engraved on its front, along with a long squiggly line on another face. Scientists believe it is a representation of a snake.

When Castaño, a philologist by trade, saw it, he saw an ancient map of the now-flooded portions of the Tagus River. It’s not a widely accepted theory, but there are similarities between the “squiggle” and the course of the river. If he’s right, it could represent one of the oldest maps ever found. “It was intuition,” he says. “Before the area was flooded, the river had a strange bend that matched where the snake’s head was supposed to be. I rushed to consult an old map of the river, and I realized that the curvy line corresponded nearly 100 percent to the river’s path.”

Bueno, who studied the monument in the 1990s, when the waters were low enough for the top half of the dolmen to emerge, has her doubts. “I appreciate his enthusiasm, but from my archaeological understanding, I would say that the line is geometric and similar to ones found in megalithic art across Europe. In this case, it could be identified as a serpent.” She adds that further studies are needed.

While the Dolmen of Guadalperal has widely been compared to Stonehenge—and rightly so—the Spanish example was once an entirely enclosed space. And it could also be around 2,000 years older.

When it was intact, according to Bueno, people would have entered through a dark, narrow hallway adorned with engravings and other decorations, probably carrying a torch. This would lead to an access portal into the more spacious main chamber, which had a diameter of around 16 feet, where they dead would be laid to rest. It’s also likely that the monument was oriented around the summer solstice, allowing, for just a few moments a year, the sun to shine on the community’s ancestors. Construction of such a large space, with such heavy materials, would have taken a great deal of both effort and ingenuity.

According to Bueno, archaeologists have also found that this region presents some of the earliest evidence of humans making flour (more than 8,000 years ago) and using honey (more than 7,000 years ago). By the third and fourth millennium BC, they were even brewing their own cerveza.

Odd as it might seem for something that is 7,000 years old and made of stone, the fate of the dolmen now depends on Madrid. The granite stones are porous and vulnerable to ongoing erosion. After more than 50 years underwater, some stones that were standing when Obermaier studied them now lie flat, others that were once intact are now cracked. Castaño and his organization are urging the government to move the stones to permanently dry land, but Bueno worries that this could just accelerate the damage, especially if the process is rushed, without extensive study first. And within a month the dolmen could again be swallowed up by the lake.

“Whatever we do here, needs to be done extremely carefully,” Bueno says. “We need high-quality studies using the latest archaeological technology. It may cost money, but we already have one of the most difficult things to obtain—this incredible historic monument. In the end, money is the easy part. The past can’t be bought.”

Sorry, everyone: Researchers found that a hybrid species is even more “vigorous” than its parents.

Shana Welles stands five feet eight inches tall. Not a remarkable height for a human, like Welles, but downright soaring for a tumbleweed. Welles is an evolutionary ecologist studying plants, and occasionally, out in California’s Central Valley, she’ll find the rare tumbleweed that goes head-to-head with her. The weeds have a long history of going a bit rogue—and as Welles and a collaborator report in a recent paper in AoB Plants, a newer tumbleweed on the scene, Salsola ryanii, may be especially poised for a growth spurt.

To the blissfully uninitiated, “tumbleweed” might evoke a desiccated plant blowing through a dusty ghost town, ricocheting off cacti to the tune of a low, whistling soundtrack. Long before it gusts along as a ball of branches, though, tumbleweed is green—“a good, true, medium green,” Welles says—and feisty. In Central California, the annual, invasive plants are everywhere: “If you’re driving down the road and know what to look for, they’re really obvious,” Welles says. The iconic somersaulting comes at the very end of a tumbleweed’s life, when a part of it breaks off and bumps away, sowing seeds all the while.

Several species fall under the “tumbleweed” umbrella, and they landed in the U.S. from Asia and elsewhere in the late 19th century. When she was pursuing her PhD work at the University of California, Riverside, Welles—now a postdoctoral fellow at Chapman University—zeroed in on Salsola ryanii in particular. S. ryanii intrigued her because it’s an allopolyploid: a hybrid species that has complete sets of chromosomes from both of its progenitors, Salsola australis and Salsola tragus (also known as Kali tragus), all of which are commonly called Russian thistle.

Allopolyploids aren’t so unusual in the plant world—some wheat and strawberry species are allopolyploids, too—but, Welles explains, those arose long ago. S. ryanii, on the other hand, formed fairly recently, Welles says—probably in the last century, which is barely a blink in evolutionary time. She and her co-author, Norman Ellstrand, a plant geneticist and Welles’s advisor at UC Riverside, figured that studying it now, while it’s still a relative newcomer, would give them good insight into whether allopolyploidy gives the plant an edge.

To see whether S. ryanii’s lineage makes it particularly formidable, Welles and Ellstrand planted the three species next to each other in a test garden and compared the whole crew over two years. They measured mass and volume, and gauged seed count by looking at a single branch on each plant and extrapolating from there. S. ryanii trounced the others across the board; in the first year, it had twice the mass of its forebears. (To prevent the “vigorous” seeds from spreading, the researchers offed the plants before that part detached and roamed away.)

S. ryanii may be tough, but it’s hard to say how many of the plants are getting ready to tumble. Back in 2012, Welles and Ellstrand conducted a survey across California and found that, while the plant’s range had expanded compared to previous counts, the species was still much less common than its progenitors. It’s tough to eyeball an estimate because, at a glance, they all look so similar. “Even people who are botanists but don’t work on this species would have trouble telling them apart,” Welles says. (When in doubt, she looks for molecular markers.) But it’s likely that as the range continues to expand, S. ryanii will be a force to reckon with. A single tumbleweed plant can hold upwards of 100,000 seeds, and S. ryanii’s forebears sowed theirs all over the place: S. tragus, for instance, has put down roots in almost every U.S. state.

Though Welles and Ellstrand didn’t dig into potential strategies to curb the spread of the wily weed, someone probably should. For generations, people in the Southwestern and Western United States have waffled between trying to make peace with tumbleweeds (for example, by stacking a whole heap of them into a glittery, makeshift Christmas tree or a grinning snowman) and trying to defeat them, as residents in California’s San Bernardino County did back in December 1977, when prolific tumbleweeds nearly smothered a trailer park. Crews hauled away five truckloads of the roving plants, which had barricaded doors and sparked “literally hundreds of calls” from complaining residents, Jim Rodgers, hazard abatement officer for the Central Valley Fire Prevention District, told The Sun-Telegram newspaper at the time. Drifting tumbleweeds can also plug up drainage ditches and worsen fires, Science reported. For organisms that only live for a year, tumbleweeds sure pack a lot in. “They’re kind of an amazing plant,” Welles says. “Even though they’re awful.”

Their work affirmed the insect's taxonomy too. Because you can’t spell “named” without D-N-A.

On July 13, 1871, Theodore Mead found a butterfly.

An American naturalist and entomologist, Mead snared the specimen—which would eventually be known as the western branded skipper (Hesperia colorado)—somewhere in the state that bears its taxonomic name. But like most collectors of his time, he didn’t document where he caught it. So for well over a century, the specimen collected dust on a shelf in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, imprecisely catalogued because no one knew exactly where it came from.

That changed this year, after researchers studied the butterfly’s genome to figure out its geography. Their work—which was pre-printed (meaning it was published before it was formally peer reviewed) in the open-source journal bioRxiv this week, nearly a century and a half after the butterfly was netted—could pave the way for curators to include provenance data on musty specimens.

“Many old type specimens have no locality data associated with them at all,” says Andrew Warren, an entomologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity and one of the paper's authors. “This is a problem for species identification.”

The western branded skipper is found in much of the western United States, not just Colorado, leaving modern researchers with a range of possibilities for the Mead butterfly’s original home. It’s a good illustration of a major taxonomy problem for museums—one that occurs most frequently with specimens collected before 1970. (That's the year when coordinate information—rather than location names, which can change—became standard info to include in the cataloguing process.)

“The further back you go,” says Lorenzo Prendini, an entomologist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York (who was not affiliated with this study), “the more of a problem it can be.”

Prendini says that collections over 100 years old often have vague geographic citations, like “Australia,” or outdated names, like “New Holland.” Some specimens have misspelled names attached to them.

Since Mead collected the butterfly nearly 150 years ago—and died 83 years ago—Warren’s team turned to the only testimony that can truly stand the test of time: DNA evidence. They set about extracting the butterfly’s genetic material in a way that didn’t cause the elderly specimen too much harm.

“The abdomen was removed from the specimen and soaked in a solution that allowed the DNA to ooze right out through the skin,” Warren says. “Then it was isolated from the solution and sequenced.”

The team collected a quarter of the specimen’s nuclear genome (its genetic building blocks) and its entire mitochondrial genome (which is often used to understand geographic distribution)—a sizable chunk of genetic material, considering the skipper's age. Holding its genetic information up to a database of 85 other skipper butterflies (collected since Mead nabbed his in the late 19th century), Warren’s team found a match: The butterfly was caught in Lake County, Colorado.

Warren says this new research could provide a lasting framework for geolocating other animals that were stowed in museums long ago. “Using this approach,” he says, “it should be possible to pinpoint the origins of ancient specimens if they retain sufficient DNA.”

Lilias Adie's head has been missing since 1938.

Most of a woman accused of witchcraft is lying there, beneath a slab of stone on a beach in the Scottish village of Torryburn. Her name was Lilias Adie, and her body has been in this lonely coastal grave—the only interment for an accused witch in all of Scotland—for centuries.

As Douglas Speirs, an archaeologist in Fife, recently told the CBC, Adie’s grave was opened in 1852 at the command of a local antiquarian and phrenologist named Joseph Neil Paton, who wanted to study the skull of a witch. But after the bones were exhibited in 1938, they went missing—and haven’t been seen since.

Now, on the 315th anniversary of her death, Scottish officials are hoping to find new information on the whereabouts of Adie’s missing parts. In May, a conference in the neighboring village of Dunfermline sparked new interest in memorializing victims of witchcraft and recovering Adie’s skull. The conference was run by researchers who’ve worked for the past few decades to clarify who and what historical witches truly were: innocent victims.

Lilias Adie died in 1704 in Torryburn, Fife—one of the many victims of a horrific series of Scottish witch trials that ran from 1563 to 1736. “They were imaginary crimes [that people were accused of],” says historian Louise Yeoman, co-curator of The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft at Edinburgh University. “People were tortured, pressured to confess, and then executed.”

There is almost no physical trace of the witch trials today, because the accused were strangled and then burned at the stake after a forced confession. With no bones left behind, the ashes were buried without ceremony near the fire pit.

The nature of these executions makes Adie’s grave unique, Yeoman says. Her bones survived because she died in custody while awaiting trial, after 29 days of incarceration, Speirs told the CBC. One theory is that she died by suicide to avoid a barbaric execution. But Yeoman says it’s just as likely that the poor conditions of the jail are what did Adie in.

Co-curator of a database called The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, Yeoman is rarely surprised by the cruelty of the witch trials. But she was fascinated by Adie and her story. Armed with a few 19th-century descriptions of where the accused witch was buried—including "the great stone doorstep that lies over the rifled grave of Lilly Eadie [sic]" and a rock with "the remains of an iron ring"—Yeoman and Speirs set out in 2014 to find the woman’s grave. They found a seaweed-covered slab near a railway bridge that fit the description, complete with a small dimple in its center that could have once held an iron ring.

“Her burial was not something I’d seen before,” Yeoman says. Adie was buried on the beach based on a Scottish belief that witches could not cross moving water. In their eyes, the constant movement of the tide would ensure that she stayed in her grave. For added precaution, they placed a large stone slab over Adie's coffin. These practices were common for victims of suicide, as people believed that such deaths could result in revenants—corpses that rose from the grave to torture the living.

“In medieval times, people believed in corporeal ghosts,” says Yeoman. “Like a ghost that could hit you with an axe.”

Lilias, who was in her 60s when she died, was accused of having sex with the devil. “It’s a standard crime,” Yeoman says. “It sounds bonkers, but the idea is that instead of seeing Jesus as your husband, you’re doing naughty things with the devil.”

Like most people accused of witchcraft, Adie's confession came after seven interrogations interspersed with torturous sleep deprivation. At that point her health was failing, compounded by poor conditions in the prison.

To Yeoman, the tragedy of Adie's confession has a modern resonance. “It’s a horrifying miscarriage of justice, being tortured and pressured to confess,” she says. “But a lot of those things still happen.”

Adie's grave was first disturbed in the 19th century, says Yeoman, when people dug up her bones on Paton's orders. They also stole pieces of her wooden coffin, part of which was later fashioned into a walking stick for Andrew Carnegie, who was born in Dunfermline. Adie's skull wound up at St. Andrews University Museum, where it was studied and displayed at the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. But after the exhibition was decommissioned, Speirs writes in an email, the skull was never seen again.

Yeoman’s best guess is that it has simply been misplaced. “It’s probably in somebody’s attic or cupboard,” she says, “perhaps of a family with connections to St. Andrews University.”

Luckily, St. Andrews photographed the skull before it was displayed. In 2018, Christopher Rynn, a forensic artist at the University of Dundee, was able to reconstruct Adie’s head as a 3D virtual sculpture—the first time anyone has seen the face of a Scottish woman accused of witchcraft.

On August 31, Fife held a memorial service for Adie to highlight the history of witch persecution, according to The Scotsman. The vast majority of victims—83 percent—were female, though some men were killed for supposedly being warlocks.

Fife authorities launched the campaign to find Adie's missing skull the week before the memorial service. There are also plans to erect a national monument to honor everyone in Scotland who has been executed as an accused witch, Fife Councilor Kate Stewart writes in an email.

Speirs says that authorities in Fife hope to build a memorial trail from Culross to Torryburn in remembrance of witchcraft victims. The trail would stop at three points: first in Culross (a one-time witch-hunt hotbed), to memorialize all the women executed for witchcraft; then at Valleyfield, in the spot where Adie was accused of meeting and dancing with the devil; and finally at her intertidal grave.

It's still there today, lapped by the tides and waiting for Adie's skull to be returned.

A generation of creators is carrying on the Arab World's history of expression and frustration.

Joseph Kai wears a scraggly beard, a black mock turtleneck, and tortoiseshell glasses, and is eating smoked salmon on a bed of greens in a Beirut café. He has just returned home from the French hillside village of Angoulême, which hosts the International Comics Festival, Europe’s premier gathering of comic artists and graphic novelists. Kai and his colleagues who publish the zine Samandal were only the second non-European winners of the festival’s prize for alternative comics, a banner moment for the Lebanese cult publication. “It was the first time we felt that we’re part of a big community, part of a movement,” he says. “It was a new feeling.”

Alternative comics or alt-comix are graphic narratives for adults that encompass fiction and nonfiction, the gritty and the intimate, stories far beyond superheroes, with a diverse range of influences, from literature to reportage to pulp. They’re auteur-driven, often deeply personal, and not professionally produced. Alt-comix were once an underground phenomenon in Europe and the United States, but today many of their most prominent authors have graduated to become mainstream provocateurs, who hit the bestseller lists and spark debates on the evening news. Graphic publications in Lebanon, though, remain a novelty. But they are not new. A little-known history connects Samandal and these Lebanese artists and creators with their spiritual forebears who, a generation prior, used comics to document the fallout of the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s.

Samandal, technically, is a comic collective that publishes an eclectic zine in various shapes and sizes, and has incubated a new movement of young Lebanese artists and graphic talent. (The prize-winning issue was its twentieth full-length edition.) An underground favorite of those who haunt Beirut’s cafes, bookstores, and galleries, Samandal the zine is a fattoush of memoir, romance, adventure, fantasy, and the surreal, depending on the whims of each edition’s editor-artist, who choses the theme and constraints. Though the comics are decidedly adult, Samandal is often mis-shelved with children’s books, in part because there’s no other place to put it in Lebanese bookstores.

“The scene is developing,” Kai, 30, says. Tonight he and friends will receive another award, the Comics Guardian Prize from the American University of Beirut’s Arab Comics Initiative. With two accolades, Samandal’s international profile is growing in parallel to other comic-art collectives in Arab capitals.

While alt-comix are a new phenomenon—Samandal was founded in 2007—as a political mode of expression, cartooning has been widely used for over a century in Lebanon and across the Middle East. Samandal is, in a sense, an evolution of this, “the display window for what’s happening,” Kai says. Since the 2011 revolutions of the Arab Spring, the spread of underground comics has accelerated across the region, which has seen a fluorescence of similar scenes in Algiers, Amman, Baghdad, Cairo, Casablanca, and Tunis, taking on topics as varied as migration, war, love, and addiction to social media.

In 2019, as the promise of 2011 has curdled, the Syrian war rages on, and millions have become refugees, Arab comic artists like Kai and others are considering their place. Do they have a responsibility to address conflict and crisis, to grapple with war at a local level? For those in Beirut, the question is unavoidable, as the peaceful city has become an enduring hub of displacement, from the historic refugeedom of Palestinians to the new waves from Syria and, increasingly, other Arab states.

For some Arab and Lebanese comic artists, these crises are urgent and irresistible. But creating and consuming graphic art can also be an escape, a declaration of new priorities that extend beyond the global reputation of the Middle East as a place of civil wars, religious conflicts, and terrorism. “Others might want to shift their attention to something else,” Kai says. “This is another way of claiming their life, this is how they can exist.”

Samandal, which means “salamander” in Arabic, publishes in three languages, uses creative translation techniques, and solicits work from comics artists all over the world. Though their outward image is avant-garde—a highbrow art journal that alternates between automatic drawing and grotesque visual humor—the collective also conducts public education. It is, in many ways, a product of its time and place. Artists from the crew lead workshops for refugees in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, where many Syrians have landed. Samandal also brings comics into public school classrooms, and recently worked with the anti-poverty group Oxfam to publish a comic featuring the stories of women called هُنَّ, or Huna (the feminine form of “they”).

“We are aware of our responsibility to give tools to people who want to write about these issues,” says Kai. “That is why we intervene in refugee camps.”

Kai was recruited to draw for the zine in 2010, while he was pursuing a masters in illustration and comics at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. Francophone comics, or bandes dessinées, are popular on Beirut newsstands, and Kai grew up with the adventures of Tin Tin and Asterix. As a student, he found the work of inventive comic artist (and jazz trumpeter) Mazen Kerbaj, in particular his dreamy, rough-hewn 2004 chapbook 24 poemes. After years of studying fine art, Kai saw something authentic and interesting in Kerbaj’s work: “black and white, totally free, totally improvised. Nothing looked real or conventional.”

During the summer 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel, Kerbaj maintained a visual blog, a rough, visceral sketchbook of 33 days under siege. In self-deprecating self-portraits, he conveyed the quotidian aspects of living amid air raids, including an illustrated backpack survival kit, in case you get stuck at a friend’s house:

my life in a bag

each time i leave my flat, i take with me:

my passport and evan's one
a mini-disc recorder + microphone
2 t-shirts
2 underwear
2 pairs of socks
a notebook and pens
my trumpet
binoculars
a book
tobacco
a small camera
a lighter
a usb key
a toothbrush
4 batteries

“I wanted to draw like this,” Kai says.

Fun fact: Kerbaj is ambidextrous and can draw with both hands at the same time. he is also downright prolific, with books upon books of strips. Anexhibition, co-created with his mother, Laure Ghorayeb, a poet and artist, is called Laure et Mazen: Correspondance(s), was recently on view at the Sursock Museum, a recently reopened modern art palace. There, his frenetic output wraps around the rooms like a scroll of slapdash lines and jokey speech bubbles in three languages.

Kerbaj began publishing comics in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so he connects Samandal to an older history of Lebanese comics—both underground and in the public eye. Lebanon has had political cartoons since the turn of the 20th century. Comic books for kids grew popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Cairo was the source of beautifully colored, action-packed children’s comics, from local titles such as Samir and Sindibad to Arabic translations of Mickey Mouse, Superman, and Little Lulu comics. A cohort of artists left Egypt in the 1950s as the military took control of the state. When president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the press after the 1967 war, the space for free speech in Egyptian media further contracted, after which Beirut emerged as a new capital of commercial Arab comics for children. At one point more than 35 comic magazines graced its newsstands.

But it wasn’t just popular comics that Kerbaj and Samandal built upon, but another, less-known tradition that documented how the civil war of the 1980s ravaged lives through panels and bubbles. They were explicit. They were graphic. They were for adults.

In 1981, as Israeli planes bombed the Lebanese capital and warring militias enforced curfews and checkpoints, JAD Workshop produced dark comic reflections of the war. Three decades before Samandal would be mis-shelved or not shelved at all, JAD Workshop also couldn’t find couldn’t find bookstores to distribute their dark, oversized comics and graphic novels.

One of the founding artists of JAD Workshop is Lina Ghaibeh, who, as the inaugural director of the Arabic Comics Initiative at American University in Beirut, is today responsible for elevating the study and practice of graphic narrative in the Middle East. In 2015, with funding from a wealthy Lebanese businessman who had once dabbled in cartooning, Ghaibeh established the first archive in the Arab world dedicated to early examples of caricature and cartooning from the 19th century, and the various spheres of underground cartooning they evolved into.

That archive, in a basement corner of the university’s modernist library, includes the early satirical broadsheets by Yaqub Sanu in Egypt, as well as the first children’s periodicals, which initially appeared in black and white. Ghaibeh, whose scholarly post is in the School of Architecture, is captivated by the design and layout of the early generation of children’s comics, as much as by the language, content, and singular aesthetic styles.

What many of these cartoonists from the earliest generation have in common is that they themselves were displaced. Sanu fled Egypt for France in 1878, many children’s comics authors left Nasser’s Egypt for Beirut, and later under Sadat a group of leftist cartoonists fled as well. Some landed in Lebanon and others in the emerging Gulf states. In the archive, there are also monographs of prominent Arab political cartoonists, such as Naji Al-Ali, the Palestinian critic who was gunned down in 1987 in London; and Ali Ferzat, a Syrian cartoonist who survived an attack by Assad’s thugs in 2011 and now lives in exile. On the shelves are also the latest zines from collectives in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and more, which Ghaibeh has collected while traveling to comic festivals across the Mediterranean.

With silver hair and knee-high Doc Martens, Ghaibeh is the hip doyenne of the Lebanese comics scene. She calls comics a “critical tool” and, in her drawing and curating, has prioritized “documentation and representation of displacement.”

She has collaborated with her husband, George Khoury Jad, since the early 1980s, when he established the JAD Workshop and published the first graphic novels in the region, including a biocomic called Freud and a surreal nightmare-scape called Carnival, all of which are out of print. Jad exhibited at Angoulême in the 1980s and met the notorious Charlie Hebdo cartoonists Cabu and Wolinski, who were killed along with their colleagues in the 2015 attack on their Paris offices.

“If you want to start a movement of comics for adults, start local,” Jad says, wearing his signature black baseball cap, with his gray ponytail hanging out the back. “And don’t be pretentious.”

The Arab Comics Initiative’s fourth annual symposium of artists and scholars took place in the spring. (Note: The author was an invited speaker, and serves on the editorial board of the university’s new book series on Arab comics.) In a large lecture hall along the gusty Mediterranean coast, Jad delivered a moving talk about early-20th-century exodus stories in American, European, and Arab comics. He noted the trend of reportage and nonfiction portraits of contemporary, failed states, historical conflicts, and postcolonial migrations. Some were made by graphic journalists who visited refugee camps, squats, and border crossings; others by those who spent extended periods of time with survivors of conflict to create illustrated oral histories. These comics largely come from European or U.S. traditions of adult comics, and build upon a similar ethos of documentation through art. There are stories from Smyrna and Alexandria and Algiers and Armenia, written in a cacophony of languages, with a fine sense of detail and expressing great universalities, such as humor in the face of unthinkable conflict.

“From refugee camps in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, [to] the unwelcome immigrants camps in Europe, artists volunteer to go witness, defend, and collect stories of people with names, coming from villages and cities that have names, running away from torturers who have names, waiting for an unknown future,” Jad told the crowd of students, professors, and artists. He was unable to hold back tears. “Through these artists, [their] names … won’t be forgotten.”

The next night, the night of the conference’s award ceremony, artist and students squeezed between oversized panels from comics about exile, deportation, and identity. The remodeled building where the gathering took place had, during the country’s civil war, been the fault line between East and West Beirut. Today it is, by design, still pockmarked with old bullet holes and studded with rubble—a stark, aestheticized reminder. Kai and I, on the lookout for Ghaibeh and Jad, ambled up six flights of stairs to where snipers had targeted passersby. From the windows of what is now a gallery, we could see Syrian refugee children below, weaving between cars on the streets to ask for money. The exhibition in the gallery, In-Transit, curated by Ghaibeh, includes the work of 37 artists, around 30 of whom mingle around, awkwardly holding champagne flutes. A group of undergraduate students walked in as local news crews filmed Beiruti society mingling with scruffy cartoonists, hipster artists, introverted graphic designers, and jovial children’s book authors. A Syrian ducked so as to avoid a video camera. Discussions could be heard flipping between English, French, and Arabic, with Algerian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, and Tunisian dialects in the air.

Samandal artists had work on display, including Barrack Rima (a chart of statistics about the refugee crises) and Nour Hifaoui Fakhouri (an intimate take on being Palestinian in Lebanon). There was also the work of Western artists, such as the cityscapes of Raqqa by New York–based artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, who delivered the show’s introductory remarks after arriving on a red-eye. Documentation via illustration, she said, can “make the oppressors unhappy.” Crabapple coauthored, with Syrian reporter Marwan Hisham, a 2018 graphic memoir, Brothers of the Gun, about his escape and return to ISIS-occupied Raqqa. Refugees’ stories are often flattened by outsiders, she said, paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, and she called upon refugees to tell their own stories.

Among the framed works and origami-like boards of comic panels sit two pages of Jad’s new comic, Aleppo Bataclan, his first long-form work in decades. It’s a narrative of inky terror that alternates between a woman whose partner was killed in the 2015 Paris terror attacks and a boy whose father died in a concurrent strike in Aleppo, Syria.

What is an Arab alt-comic, if such a thing exists? Is it stories rooted in language or geography, or is it driven by aesthetics or themes? Ghaibeh emphasizes “the diversity of language of comics out there.” In the pages of Samandal, the common thread appears to be a taste for the uncommon.

Asked about Lebanese comics, for example, Sandra Ghosn, a Paris-based artist originally from Lebanon, says, “I feel there is no such thing.” She drew the cover of Samandal’s award-winning issue, a depiction of a woman-animal hybrid with strange limbs, like a furry cousin of Ed Roth’s Rat Fink. The artist, not the monster, wears a denim jacket, John Lennon glasses, and red lipstick, with a flash of gray in her tied-back hair. “I don’t believe in borders and nations. I feel it is outdated. I don’t think I am inspired by a specific nation,” she says. “Maybe I don’t have enough distance.”

“We are still talking about a very, very small scene,” Kai explains. “It’s super-difficult for me to think of one aspect that is Lebanese…. It has very, very different and various references, and inspirations.”

The reputation of alt-comics in the Arab World today, if they can be said to have one, is leftist, liberal, activist, and progressive, though Samandal is so wide-ranging that it’s hard to see that directly reflected in the collective’s work. Kai, for example, is more interested in form than politics, and doesn’t do reportage.

Last year, he moved to Paris to take up an artist residency at Cité internationale des arts. His graphic narratives unveil personal stories of coming of age and gender and sex. “In France, I feel it might be boring even,” he says, explaining that queer comics get a very different reception there than in Lebanon, where they’re still considered highly subversive. “It’s not something new [there]. I’m just trying to put together my way of representing it. Working on the individual [character] … his body, his dreams, how he moves. Somehow it’s also a study of the queer individual.”

In other cases, national identity is in the foreground, especially as it relates to migration. “I was raised in a family where I had to hide my identity,” says Fakhouri, who is Palestinian and grew up in Beirut. “None of my friends knew I was Palestinian till I was a much later age,” she says. Individuality and the boundaries that nationality places between people—even or especially when they share the same space—figure prominently in her work.

Fakhouri, for one, is concerned that an emphasis on politics would take some of the energy and diversity out of the community. “It’s really important to keep this place for everyone, because there is a lot of violence, suffocation in a way,” she says. “So I think it’s important for artists who want to tell stories to have a platform that offers them a kind of freedom.”

That’s not to say that there aren’t some things in common among Arab or Lebanese comic artists. After further reflection, Ghosn says, “War. War is common. The memory of war, more precisely. I was born in the war; everything I do goes back to this phase that I blocked out completely.”

She recalls the 2006 Israeli invasion as a “mentally intrusive” experience that pushed her to leave Beirut for Paris. “I was really petrified, paralyzed,” she says. “I can’t stay in this country. I couldn’t draw. I had to leave in order to survive mentally. I felt there was a ceiling put on the sky. A closure. The bombs.” Art, illustration, and comics provided a place to reinterpret and recompose those memories.

But pushing those limits in the tradition of alt-comics means that offense, controversy, even danger are possibilities. Censorship has been perhaps the most visible marker of how Arab alt-comix are seen by the outside world, since many of the governments of the region don’t take kindly to criticism of any sort. And any discussion of offense and criticism must mention 2009, when the Catholic Church sued Samandal and the collective was compelled to pay $20,000 for caricaturing Jesus on the cross. It’s not an alarming judgement compared to more violent acts of censorship across the region, but such actions against creators aren’t uncommon, and certainly impact freedom of expression. In addition, the optics are peculiar: the might of the Catholic Church looming over the ragtag collective of artists. But that most public experience is not what this scene wants to be defined by.

“At some point, we need to move on,” and create satisfying works of art, Kai says. “We cannot just mourn this censorship case forever.

The case shows that even being small, independent, or highbrow is no protection from threat—legal or otherwise. The risks run like a current through the community, even under the cosmopolitan veneer of modern Beirut.

This year’s symposium and exhibition were dedicated to honoring artists who have experienced and captured dislocation, migration, and war up close. For at least one displaced artist—who does not want to give his name for now, and who isn’t sure where he’ll live next—the exhibition was overwhelming, too close to home while home is too far away.

This cartoonist, like several among the crowd of creators in attendance who have been displaced, found the outwardly staid presentations about free expression and storytelling to be urgent. In his decade of drawing for the Egyptian press, this artist had endured government harassment and readers’ trolling—through the 2011 revolution, the 2013 military coup, and President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s ongoing consolidation of authority. (Today, tens of thousands are imprisoned on political charges, and the former general has extended term limits.). From Cairo, this cartoonist had tracked the incredible changes in the Arab World with no small amount of visual humor. His work, in contrast to that of many in the Beirut alt-comix scene, is political, and that used to be okay in Egypt, where political cartooning had a wide leeway. But today that space has shrunk considerably. This cartoonist was arrested and spent a night in an Egyptian jail in February. Then he, like other artists, writers, and critics, fled.

Now, he is trying to figure out how to write (or more likely draw) his story. In the meantime, the banal bureaucracies of consulates and functionaries hold his future in the balance while he waits on a visa.

Outside the symposium, he chatted with peers and scholars about home and statelessness. Asked about it again later that night, in the back of a busy, smoky bar, he laughed, and shared the details of his brief stint in an Egyptian prison.

Like it was for a generation in the 1960s, he said, Beirut has become a way-station and stomping ground for artists who no longer feel safe, as dictatorships proliferate and deepen across the Arab world and beyond. But it’s not something he wanted to be reminded of at that moment.

“Let’s go dance,” he said.

Researchers squeeze into an underwater habitat off Florida to help prepare for missions to the Moon and beyond.

To Csilla Ari D'Agostino, the Aquarius Reef Base—submerged in green-blue water, encrusted with algae and barnacles—looked more like a shipwreck than a place to live. D'Agostino is a comparative neuroscientist at the University of South Florida, and an avid diver who has visited the underwater worlds in Hawaʻi, Indonesia, the Philippines, Ecuador, the Maldives, and more. In June 2019, she spent nine days living inside the Aquarius facility, 62 feet underwater, more than six miles off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.

D'Agostino packed into the 400-square-foot laboratory and living space with five other crew members of NASA's Extreme Environment Mission Operations, which conducts expeditions to simulate the environments that astronauts might face in the course of space exploration. Down on the ocean floor, the crew mimicked rescues, tested out new equipment, and—for D’Agostino’s work—kept meticulous logs of what they thought and felt along the way.

Atlas Obscura caught up with D'Agostino once she had readjusted to life on the surface.

What can researchers learn about humans in space by studying them underwater? After all, the moon is very different from the ocean floor.

Basically, the idea is that we can simulate weightlessness because we are underwater. That's the only possibility on Earth unless you do an airplane ride where there's a few-second free-fall to mimic weightlessness. Other than that, the only option is underwater.

It's important to understand how equipment responds when there's no gravity, or there's a different kind of gravity than we experience on land—and how our body can handle that kind of equipment. We might think, “Oh, we can just easily pick that up and put it here or there,” but it's different.

When we went out of the habitat, we sometimes tested equipment that needs to function in different gravities. We had our regular dive gear and a heavy helmet on, which weighs 32 pounds. Still, we were kind of floating. On Mars and the lunar surface, there is a certain amount of gravity, so we put lead cubes on to weigh ourselves down to get as close as possible to the kind of gravity we would experience. We had a cart that we loaded with some of the equipment we needed to collect and analyze samples. If we didn't have enough weight on, we couldn't pull with enough power to actually move the cart.

Our crew tested a lunar evacuation system that the European Space Agency has been working on. If an astronaut is unconscious or injured, or not able to help themselves, another astronaut would need to transport that person to safety. Sometimes it's hard to handle things in bulky dive gear or space suits, and hard to move even not-so-heavy objects, so they developed equipment to make this process easy—to pick up and transfer an unconscious astronaut from one point to another. The whole purpose was to test the equipment and give feedback to improve and optimize things.

How did you get down there, and then in and out of the habitat?

You swim down, like a regular scuba diver. There's a "moon pool" [also known as a wet porch]. Imagine that you turn a cup upside down, and press it down in the water. The air is still inside the cup; you're in an air bubble. We just swam underneath and went inside the habitat. The habitat is basically open—there's an opening to the water all the time. But the air pressure in the habitat means the water can't enter.

We could easily go in and out of the habitat to conduct experiments, but not up to the surface. After 24 hours at that pressure, our bodies became saturated with nitrogen. Without a decompression protocol, we could die. That's the other thing that's similar to space: You can't just return to land.

I know that astronauts sometimes take things with them to space, from seeds to a ham sandwich. Did you pack anything special?

There's not much room to store anything at all. Just basic clothing, whatever you need for diving, and maybe one or two smaller personal items. I took a family picture, and a Hungarian bookmark—I'm from Hungary—from my parents. Red, white, and green—the colors of the Hungarian flag—are embroidered on it.

There's no room for extra stuff, and it can also be dangerous for various reasons. Things can be flammable down there that wouldn't be flammable on land; because under the higher pressure, oxygen is more flammable. Somebody a couple missions ago was trying to use a hair dryer, and it got a little spark because there was a little piece of hair stuck in it. Chemicals that you would use for experiments or preservation on land could cause serious issues down there.

What did you do your last night on land? Any last hurrahs?

We knew we'd be eating basically freeze-dried camping food down there; it's not like everyone's taking their favorite meals. We knew that the next nine days were going to be a little restricted. Before we left, the crew, together with our spouses, went to a very nice restaurant by the sea and we ate everything we wanted. I had chocolate cake, and I was really full!

Basically, down there, you just put hot water in a packet, let it sit for 10 minutes, and then it's a warm meal. Mainly, I ate chicken breast with mashed potatoes. That was my favorite. They also had beef, rice, and vegetables. It was pretty good, surprisingly. Well, after eating the same thing for nine days, it wasn't that enjoyable. But it was relatively good.

How did you spend your days down there?

Our schedule was very tight, and was determined months before the whole mission. It was on software called Playbook that we checked all the time—you saw the current time and your scheduled tasks. We knew that when we woke up, we had 10 minutes to do this, 30 minutes to do this, two hours to do this.

In the mornings, we had to fill out a test about how stressed we were, and then check on our iPad to see what our tasks were. Sometimes there were things we needed to do before breakfast, such as test our blood before eating or drinking anything. Usually in the morning we had a meeting with surface mission control to go through what we needed to pay attention to during the day. We had a radio channel kind of thing, like a walkie-talkie, and they also had 24/7 video access to us. There was a meeting in the evening, too—what went wrong, why did it go wrong, how should it have been better, what's the plan for tomorrow.

Everything was scheduled very specifically. Some experiments needed more space, or space that other people would use for other experiments, so we couldn't overlap, because there's such limited room inside. If an experiment needed two laptops, we had to work after each other—we couldn't fit two laptops on the desk. Sometimes technical issues came up, things shifted, and we had to work hard to get back on the schedule.

Sometimes we would go outside and do more physically strenuous stuff for five hours [to simulate spacewalks]. We tried to shift so everybody had a day of rest inside and then a day outside and then a day inside. It didn't always work like that, but that was the goal.

There was a way to get a bit of exercise inside, too. We had to test an exercise machine that they are planning to send to the International Space Station [ISS]. The goal was to give feedback—what's good, what's not so good, how should it be better? It was kind of like a rowing machine, but you do it standing, and the weight is attached to your waist, and you basically do squats. There were different playful things on the screen that give you directions about when and how to squat. We were laughing so much.

Was there anything about life in the habitat that was harder or easier than you expected?

The shower and bathroom area was really, really small. Six of us needed to use one bathroom. It was basically just a curtain in the corner. People were working around you when you were in the bathroom. They had stuff to do in the meantime!

I know you were interested in tracking cognitive performance—reaction time, memory, decision-making, and more—and also data about sleep quality and stress. How did you measure that?

We used questionnaires, which included questions about how you feel, whether you're stressed about what's coming up today, whether you feel rested. We had many, many questionnaires, and specific times we would answer them. When we wanted to look at how task load influenced our performance, we would ask questions when we came back from five hours of doing technical stuff on the coral reef. Then we would ask questions about how physically strenuous it was, and how much time pressure you felt, and how mentally difficult the task was. People either filled out the questionnaires on paper, if they were in the habitat, or on waterproof iPads if they were outside.

On the iPad, we used the same software that they use on the ISS to evaluate working memory, problem-solving ability, reaction time, and more. These are short, couple-minute tests. I was curious to see how the workload, pressure, stress, the time, all these variables would affect it. We did it before the whole mission, inside the habitat multiple times, outside when we went to the simulated spacewalk. We wanted to see how simply being in the water affected your reaction time, compared to how five hours working on a mentally or physically demanding exercise underwater was influencing these variables. I'm still analyzing lots of data, and then we need to publish it in scientific channels. It's probably going to take a couple months or even a year.

How did you sleep? It's hard for me to picture sleeping underwater for so many nights.

We didn't really feel like we were underwater. At first, when we got inside the habitat, we felt a little bit of pressure in our ears, but we got used to it in like half an hour. After that, you don't really feel like you are underwater. It's just the basic white noise, all the hums, of the systems operating. I didn't care—if I am sleepy, I will sleep.

I knew I had to wake up at 6:30, and we had a schedule until the end of the day, and then I added some more experiments I wanted to do that were not NASA-related. I also have a National Geographic Ocean Explorer project, and I wanted to run a small remotely operated vehicle from the habitat at night [to study sponge spawning]. I had to wait until it was completely dark. Those days were the ones with the longest daylight, so I had to wait until almost 10:00, and then had to start doing something. I didn't go to bed until 11:00, maybe.

Every single day was scheduled, and I didn't really have time to check my emails, and my students were helping coordinate some things on the surface. Sometimes at night I woke up thinking, "Oh my god, I didn't check my email," and responded to emails then. I didn't sleep much, but I didn't feel sleep-deprived then. After the whole mission, I felt that I needed much more sleep than normal. I think my body was just catching up.

How did nine days underwater stack up to other diving you've done?

What made it easier is that we prepared for a long time and very, very thoroughly for everything—for all kinds of circumstances. We knew that about 100 people were watching us continuously, and would help us if anything went wrong. If you think about it, it's probably safer than much of the regular scuba diving people do around the world. We mentally and practically prepared so much, so I wasn't that stressed. Sometimes, when I go on a regular scuba dive and we don't expect difficult conditions and those do come up during the dive, that can be more stressful.

I've always loved reading astronauts' accounts of looking down and seeing Earth far below them. You kind of had the opposite perspective. What did you see, and how did it affect the way you think about the planet?

We had windows, so we could see outside. We saw everything you see diving in a tropical ocean—turtles, rays, groupers. Because there were lights around the habitat, plankton and little organisms came to the window or near the habitat, and those attracted bigger fish, and then those attracted bigger fish, too. Of course, we couldn't spend too much time on the animals.

We could also see the light, and approximately how the weather was—sunny or stormy, maybe, if the visibility got bad because waves had stirred up the sand. We had some kind of connection with the land, but we were very much aware that we were trapped, in a way—we couldn't just return whenever we wanted to.

It was some kind of relief to be back to our normal environment. It made me appreciate the forces of nature, and the sea, and the life-forms that are able to adapt to it. It wasn't even that harsh where we were—but imagine how many deeper, harsher places there are. It made me appreciate what's able to cope in those circumstances. Obviously, we are not able to—we're dependent on technology.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

257 small steps for our human cousins, one giant leap for paleoanthropology.

Of the variety of ancient hominins who have roamed this planet, Neanderthals are among the most recently departed. Long stigmatized as lumbering, backwards versions of us—think “caveman” and all that implies—scholarship is increasingly overwriting this view. Neanderthals, it turns out, were culturally and socially complex beings (who interbred with humans for thousands of years).

We know what we know about Neanderthals from a sparse fossil record and a healthier lithic one, but a new discovery, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has advanced our knowledge by baby steps—many, many baby steps. Ossified in the escarpments of Le Rozel, in Normandy, France, are hundreds of footprints of our close relatives, including those of children.

“The footprints were preserved by being quickly covered by sand brought by the wind,” says Jérémy Duveau, a paleoanthropologist at the Museum of Mankind in Paris and coauthor of the study.

Formed 80,000 years ago, the prints were made by about a dozen Neanderthals, who occupied the site seasonally. At Le Rozel, archaeologists also found evidence of stone tool making, and a butchery area where they processed carcasses they hunted or scavenged. There were even handprints, too, Duveau says, “maybe [caused by] individuals leaning on the ground when they are sitting, or when they wish to stand up.”

“I love footprints because they’re a moment in time," says William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist affiliated with the City University of New York and the American Museum of Natural History. "When we have a fossil, we can infer things about its behavior, but we can’t really say much about what it was doing in any one particular moment of time.”

Though no Neanderthal bones were found on the site, Duveau’s team was able to estimate the ages of the members of the group based on the size of each footprint—from what would today be a men’s size 11 to a baby’s size four. Most of the individuals at the site were children and adolescents, with the youngest being about two years old.

Whether the site was a sort of Pleistocene playground or something else is hard to say based on the footprints alone. Though prints of Neanderthals and even young ones have been found before, at the Greek cave of Theopetra in 1996, the Le Rozel site is the largest trace fossil site of any ancient human species, much less Neanderthals. In a fell swoop, the discovery at Le Rozel now makes up 95 percent of all known Neanderthal footprints.

“It is currently impossible to know exactly why there were so many children at Le Rozel,” says Duveau. “We can only make assumptions.”

Duveau says the children may have stayed while the adults went off-site to conduct tasks. It remains one of the big questions as work on the site continues. The seasonal camp at Le Rozel is a complex social tableau frozen in time, and a portal into Neanderthal life.

"Overall, it’s a lovely discovery," says Harcourt-Smith. "The big question is how much it can really tell us."

“It's the pleasure of being on the coast, and enjoying summer days and the fresh aroma of carpets.”

On a sunny August morning, a traditional family outing is taking place in Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the banks of the Baltic Sea. Children are equipped with typical seashore paraphernalia: beach toys, fishing rods. Parents carry beer and picnic baskets—but today, they are also lugging a thick carpet, a bucket, a wood brush with plant-based bristles, and a bottle of pine oil soap.

These Finns are about to participate in an age-old tradition: cleaning carpets by the seaside. The family heads down to a wooden pier where other families have gathered, each with their own carpets, brushes, and buckets. At the pier, they hang their carpet over the edge and proceed to throw buckets of seawater at them. When they are nice and sodden, they lay the carpets on tables built into the pier, apply the liquid cleanser, and scrub. Finally, they again hang the carpets over the edge of the pier, throw more water at them to rinse off the soap, and leave them to dry. While the parents are doing this, kids are playing nearby. Some have been having fun jumping off the pier into the sea. Others visit the nearby ice cream kiosk.

This scene plays out at one of Helsinki’s 13 mattolaiturit, or carpet piers, built especially for this activity along the Baltic Sea. The city even has a map of them, featuring around 20 additional “carpet cleaning points” in the surrounding areas. Probably the most popular carpet-washing pier is right off Kaivopuisto, one of the oldest parks in Helsinki. It hosts a chic café called Mattolaituri where locals can soak up the sun, drink champagne, and clean their carpet all in the same vicinity.

In both rural areas and big cities, outdoor washing has been part of the Finnish landscape and culture for decades. It is as popular an activity as White Night cultural festivals. The portrait of an outdoor laundry washer by the painter Pekka Halonen, called Avannolla, even hangs in the Ateneum, part of the Finnish National Gallery. But why are Finns so obsessed with washing their carpets by the seaside?

Mikko Lindqvist, a local historian at the recently-opened Helsinki City Museum, says that waterfront cleaning began as a rural practice. “We have a lot of lakes,” Lindqvist says. “It was common to wash your laundry in lakes. Then, country people started moving to the city, bringing the rural practice, and it became an urban phenomenon."

In the museum archive, Lindqvist points out some turn-of-the century photos of carpet-cleaning piers, including works by the photographer Volker von Bonin, who recorded everyday life and leisure of Helsinki residents. He shows off an image of a woman doing her washing in a “Pyykkäreiden,” or laundry painting, by the Finnish Expressionist Tyko Sallinen. “If you look at this picture it shows blue lakes, fresh water,” Lindqvist says.

That’s the first thing you need to know about Helsinki carpet washing. It’s considered cheery and rustic, not a chore. These Finns, Lindqvist says, are “really enjoying the pier.” The design and materials of these piers haven’t changed much over the years, he notes. “They are really vernacular structures without any interference of architecture.”

Typically, people come early in the morning to wash their carpets, which are usually made from quality cotton or wool. Then they spend the day swimming and sunning while they wait for the carpets to dry. (Sometimes, a carpet can take two days to dry, in which case Finns have to trust their neighbors not to steal it.)

Lindqvist says that in the early days of Helsinki, residents washed all kinds of laundry in the Baltic. But as the city grew, Lindqvist goes on, the seawater was polluted by industry and settlement. “From the 1870s the water system was monitored and the city determined that it had to instigate a laundry campaign,” he says. “Gradually it was not good enough for laundry. Newspaper articles told about infectious diseases that could be caught from washing blankets and bed linen in seawater.”

But carpets were a different story. The city promoted the idea of using collected rain water and gray water for washing, and fresh sea water for rinsing them. At the same time, some Finns tried moving carpet-cleaning away from the coast: In the early 20th century, an inland carpet-washing center opened in the working class (now gentrifying) Kallio neighborhood. Lindqvist says this was not popular. “Baltic Sea is brackish water, the salty aspect is pleasant and makes the carpet smell like fresh clean air,” he says.

More recently, amid environmental concerns, an inland rug washing station was opened in the city’s Pukinmäki neighborhood, where dirty and soapy water are diverted into the sewage system. “This initiative got quite a negative reception,” says Jari-Pekka Pääkkönen, of the municipality's water protection department, which is in charge of monitoring the state of the sea in front of Helsinki. And so, “the city council decided that existing piers will stay.” This sits well with the locals. Whenever talk of closing down the carpet piers arises, members of several "pro-mattolaiturit" Facebook pages get pretty vocal.

Pääkkönen’s department produces data for decision-making about the city's waters. They say that traditional, biodegradable liquid pine soap does not badly affect the seawater. “There are signs at the piers which instruct users to use only solvent-free soaps such as this,” Pääkkönen says. (The piers are designed so that visitors wash and rinse with buckets of seawater on the pier’s tables, so that the pine soap does not run straight into waterways.)

In July, Pääkkönen visited all the piers, and says they seemed to be doing well. “With current maintenance, carpet-washing will continue for years,” he says.

Lindqvist also hopes that the tradition will continue to thrive. “It is my hope the culture should remain,” he says. “It's the pleasure of being on the coast, and enjoying summer days and the fresh aroma of carpets.”

Amid sputtering engines and towering stacks of books, people gather to revive a suppressed language.

It happened one night in 2006. The actor and singer Mendy Cahan, accompanied by two bitter and exhausted movers, parked a large van with a container in the parking lot of Tel Aviv’s New Central Bus Station. Cahan quietly opened the container, and the trio began to pull out large boxes sealed with duct tape. Shortly after, they had carried the boxes to the station’s fifth floor.

Construction of the Central Bus Station, which was supposed to be the world’s biggest shopping mall, began in 1967, but the plans for developing it as a shopping center collapsed. The station opened in 1993, in a grand, fanciful ceremony attended by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Its architects promised a five-star-level shopping and transportation center, but its levels, corridors and wings confused shoppers, so they stopped coming. Levels 1 and 2, which included stores, bus stations and a passenger hall, were found to suffer from severe air pollution shortly after the opening, and were closed off. Now, some areas teem with life, while others are almost abandoned. Levels 4 (the street level), 6, and 7 are currently active. The fifth floor has come to be known as “The Artists’ Compound.” When businesses began abandoning the station in the mid-1990s, the city of Tel Aviv decided to offer spaces as cheap studios for artists. Most of those artists have since departed.

Cahan opened the door to a former studio on the fifth floor, revealing a large, empty space. Over the course of more than 24 hours, he filled this space with boxes containing more than four tons of books in Yiddish. Thirteen years after the original Yung Yidish library opened in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv branch was born. Its non-circulating collection is perhaps the largest array of Yiddish books and newspapers in Israel, yet the institution survives on a lean diet of donations.

When he opens the door today, more than a decade after that night, Cahan is surrounded by a wide, low-ceilinged space containing tens of thousands of books. Between the mounds of books there is a mish-mash of sofas and couches. Yiddish works from the late 19th century bloom between late 20th-century concrete walls and air vents. A bus departs from the floor above once every 30 seconds, and its roar sends a vibration through the ceiling and the Yiddish books. Below the library, on the fourth and third floors, there are stalls selling clothing, food, and porn, alongside synagogues and churches. A wide hallway overlooking the third floor is called Manila Street, and holds shops operated by Filipino migrant workers.

We sit around a low coffee table at Yung Yidish that holds a bottle of Slivovitz brandy. Next to us there is a messy pile of cardboard boxes holding 4,000 books and newspapers in Yiddish. “The Yiddish library owners are dying,” says Cahan. “These boxes came from a huge Yiddish library in central Tel Aviv which is about to be closed down. They asked us to save what we can.”

Cahan was born into a Modern Orthodox family in Antwerp. “The first language at home was Yiddish, but French and English were also spoken, and the book cases held religious books next to books by Camus and Sartre,” he says. His parents were born in Romania. During the Holocaust, his father was sent to concentration and labor camps. “He was an attractive man,” says Cahan, “and in one of the labor camps a young Christian woman approached him and offered that he live with her. She left him a key to a hiding place. My father held on to the key that entire night, tormented by guilt. God, the Torah and the Mitzvahs were a living thing to him. After a sleepless night, he threw the key away.”

Before World War II, there were about 11 million Yiddish speakers worldwide, approximately 60 percent of the global Jewish population. The murder of millions of Yiddish speakers in the Holocaust and the suppression of Yiddish speakers by Stalin have almost obliterated it. “Yiddish during the Holocaust underwent a transformation,” explains Cahan. Its vocabulary was reduced because everyone was “living in constant terror, fighting to survive.” “We know about this change because inside this hell there were anthropologists and philologists who kept working, kept paying attention.”

Cahan decided to leave religion in his early twenties.” During that time, he immigrated to Israel “because of the sun” and studied philosophy. Shortly after arriving in Israel, Cahan began collecting Yiddish books at home. The number of books grew, and the collection moved between spaces. In 2006, he squatted on the current space. The landlord, Nitsba Group, soon became aware of his presence and began charging rent and municipal taxes. Cahan wanted his space to be recognized as a private museum, which would allow him to pay the discounted tax rate awarded to nonprofits. When he refused to pay the full business rate, municipal inspectors seized his rare Yiddish typewriter, produced in 1910. He still hasn’t gotten it back, though he did eventually pay his taxes in full. During these times of struggle, now long over, there were also other challenges: flooding, leaks, some birds that nested between the piles of books, a cat who had kittens here.

Today, the library of the Yung Yidish non-profit includes about 60,000 titles, brought here from the inheritances and libraries of private individuals from Lithuania, Russia, and Argentina. It offers poetry readings and music shows, hosts festivals and Yiddish courses, and collects and preserves Yiddish magazines, records, and letters. And all this, while consisting on a lean diet of donations.

The quest to revive Yiddish, not just preserve it, is not a simple one. The estimated number of current Yiddish speakers varies according to the source. Rutgers University’s Department of Jewish Studies estimates 600,000. According to the National Authority for Yiddish Culture, there are currently two million Yiddish speakers worldwide, including a few hundred thousand in Israel (the ultra-orthodox in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Bnei Brak) and a similar number in the United States (mainly New York).

In the case of Israel, the challenge is even more complex. The Zionists who built the country viewed Yiddish as a threat to the revival of Hebrew and took steps to suppress it, sometimes aggressively. My father’s and mother’s parents, whose native tongue was Yiddish, never taught the language to my parents. Like me, most of the secular Ashkenazi Jews in Israel don’t speak Yiddish.

Cahan views Israel’s Zionist founders as an “exotic bunch”. But he understands the steps taken by the revivers of Hebrew. “In that point in history, your grandmother had the choice between 600 wonderful children’s books in Yiddish, and three children’s books in Hebrew,” he says. “If she had exposed your mother to the rich variety in Yiddish, your mother would never have chosen Hebrew.”

Spoken Hasidic Yiddish is almost unexplored in the academic world. “We treat spoken Yiddish as marginal, but a language spoken by half a million to [a] million people is not marginal,” says Dr. Kriszta Eszter Szendroi, an Associate Professor of Linguistics at University College London and a leader of a major research project studying contemporary spoken Yiddish in the Hasidic communities worldwide.

Szendroi, a native of Hungary who has been living in London for the past 20 years, began studying Hasidic Yiddish about three years ago. Cahan was one of her teachers, and they have built a friendship.

“As soon as I walked into Yung Yidish, I felt at home,” Szendroi says. “As a Jew on my father’s side and a Christian on my mother’s, integrating into contemporary Europe wasn’t easy for me, and in Yung Yidish I feel at home because it’s a place without black and white. In today’s world, it is important that such places exist.”

On my way to Yung Yidish I walk through a maze of recesses in the bus station, some that are hidden as the one used by Cahan. In a nearby corridor, a group of Filipino migrant children rehearses a street dance. Last year they performed in a festival hosted by Yung Yidish that included artwork, fanzines, performances, music, and poetry readings. Over the years, Yung Yidish has served as a Good Samaritan for many of its neighbors, in many small, everyday ways.

While I’m at the library, Ramon Mendesona, the owner of a nearby ceramics studio, enters the place. “My work is very repetitive,” he says. “I work 12 hours a day and come into Yung Yidish in the evening to have a cigarette and drink wine, talk, break the routine.” He immigrated to Israel from the USSR in 1991, “before the revolution, before the empty shops and the chaos.” When he first visited Yung Yidish, he decided to study Yiddish here, in order to understand the language spoken at home. Mendesona’s experience is different than that of Cahan’s father. “The image of the USSR is that everything was forbidden there, but it’s not true,” he says. “The older generations in my family spoke Yiddish without fear of suppression, and it died because people left religion and opened up the world and it was no longer needed in daily life.”

Night falls. I ask Cahan if he ever felt like staying here overnight. “It’s tempting, but also uncomfortable,” he says. “There are thousands of voices here. I’ll have a hard time sleeping here.” He finishes the last shot of Slivovitz, picks up his motorcycle helmet and walks to his bike out in the parking lot, where it all began.

Steinway & Sons' Victory Verticals were tougher than your average upright.

Banging out a melody on the ivories doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with winning a war, but that doesn’t mean that pianos haven’t had a place in the American military. New York–based Steinway & Sons even had a model of upright piano—known as Victory Verticals or G.I. Steinways—that were built specifically for troops in World War II.

During the war, the U.S. government essentially shut down the production of musical instruments in order to divert vital resources such as iron, copper, brass, and other materials to the war effort. Yet the government also determined that the war effort ought to include entertainment that could lift soldiers’ spirits. But just any old piano wouldn’t do. They needed ones hearty enough to withstand the trying conditions out in the field—including being packed into a crate and dropped out of a plane. “That music was deemed to be such a powerful morale boost that pianos were actually built to be parachuted around the world is incredible,” says Jonathan Piper, manager of artifacts and exhibitions at the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, California, which has a Victory Vertical in its collection. Steinway & Sons—the president of which had four sons in the military at the time—had shifted its efforts to constructing tails, wings, and other parts for troop transport gliders before the commission for the rough-and-ready pianos came through.

The company was famous for its pianos, but those finely tuned models weren’t well-suited to where soldiers were stationed, including in the tropics. “While preserving a high level of craftsmanship, Steinway designed a piano that was rugged and durable,” says Piper, and they had to be economical in their use of materials. That started from the ground up: The Victory Verticals didn’t have legs like most upright pianos, Piper says, because they wouldn’t have withstood an airdrop. Other special features included water-resistant glue and anti-insect treatments, keys covered with celluloid instead of ivory, and bass strings wound in soft iron instead of the traditional copper. They were designed to contain only a tenth as much metal as a normal piano. There were also handles placed under the keybed and the back, so that four soldiers could carry the 455-pound instruments. “And beyond all that, the instrument is visually interesting,” Piper says. “Because of its purpose-built design, the Victory Vertical has an elegant simplicity. Then there’s the colors: Unlike the vast majority of pianos that come in a black or dark wood finish, the Victory Vertical was painted in olive green [like the example at the museum], blue, and gray.”

By the end of the war, Steinway had produced about 5,000 Victory Verticals, roughly half of which went to military service. (The others were sold to schools and churches.) Piper notes that the specially designed instruments were an incredible moment for the makers of musical instruments, and their resilience through the war years. But more remarkable were the moments of comfort, joy, and camaraderie those pianos created in difficult times. The company has a 1943 letter from a Private Kenneth Kranes, stationed in North Africa, to his mother back in New York. “We all got a kick out of it and sure had fun after meals when we gathered around the pianna [sic] to sing," he wrote, just a week before he was killed in battle. "I slept smiling and even today am humming a few of the songs we sang."

Lactose intolerance was no match for a prehistoric desire for dairy.

For the lactose intolerant among us, the lure of ice cream can sometimes be too much to bear. But as a recent discovery shows, this dietary dilemma dates back to prehistory. By examining plaque on the teeth of British Neolithic remains, a research team found what is, to date, the earliest direct evidence of humans consuming milk from other animals anywhere in the world, as a University of York press release notes.

Sadly for the prehistoric farmers, they were likely lactose intolerant.

Around 6,000 years ago, seven people living in three British Neolithic sites—Hambledon Hill and Hazleton North in the south, and Banbury Lane a bit more to the east—imbibed or consumed enough milk products to leave traces behind on their teeth. They were recently found by researchers affiliated with and based out of the University of York, who have previously examined teeth for signs of milk consumption and sourced these human remains from the archeological collections of institutions such as the Dorset County Museum.

While dentists shake their heads over tartar, in this case, it allowed researchers to make this exciting discovery. In the mineralized dental plaque of seven of the 10 individuals examined, the researchers discovered peptides from beta lactoglobulin, a milk protein that doesn't naturally appear in human breast milk. But it is present in cow, sheep, and goat milk.

During the British Neolithic period, farming and animal husbandry first appeared in the area. Along with wheat, barley, and domesticated meat, farmers seemingly turned to milk as a source of nutrition. While the exact animal milk is not certain, the study notes that a peptide found in the analysis of an individual from Hambledon Hill suggested the presence of goat milk, while others showed that people from Hazleton North were likely consuming milk from cattle and/or sheep, but not goat.

These farmers' milk consumption pre-dated the ability for adults in the area to digest lactose, which may have appeared in European humans some 4,000 years ago as the result of a genetic mutation. That's why the research team suggests that early farmers may not have been drinking the milk at all. In a press release, lead author Dr. Sophy Charlton noted, "Because drinking any more than very small amounts of milk would have made people from this period really quite ill, these early farmers may have been processing milk, perhaps into foodstuffs such as cheese."

While prior research on pottery dug up around the world has shown that humans consumed milk products for thousands of years before these farmers, this study traced dairy more directly to human remains. By following this line of investigation, Dr. Charlton and her peers hope to learn more about the still-mysterious process by which humans overcame lactose intolerance and learned to love milk.

Put a bird on it!

A curious eye peers up from the cup, its head cocked to the side, its beak small and sharp against the tufted plumage of its chest. Ku-san brings the cup to her lips, and its taloned feet disappear. Ku-san has been making bird-themed latte art for 10 years, and she showcases her whimsical creations on her Instagram account, @Kunit92. Each cup holds a miniature portrait of a feathered friend: a proud cockatiel with rosy orange cheeks and an electric mohawk; a sweet sparrow with dun wings; a plump yellow-breasted magnolia warbler.

A native of Aichi Prefecture, Ku-san has lived in Tokyo for five years. She’s not a professional barista and has never worked in coffee. Instead she makes the lattes at her home in north Tokyo as a hobby. She’s a coffee lover and frequent café patron, and became interested in latte art when she bought her first espresso machine. At the time, the latte art she saw was mostly hearts and leaves. “My first attempts weren’t very good,” she says (you can see some of those early cups in the annals of her Instagram account). “But in one of those failed hearts, I saw a bird’s chest.” And so Ku-san’s bird latte art was born.

Latte art is big in Japan, which is home to latte-art books, magazines, and championships. Japanese baristas regularly take home accolades in international competitions such as the World Latte Art Championship and the Latte Art World Championship Open. The burgeoning field has produced formal categories. Baristas using the free-pour technique control the flow of milk and foam with just the movement of their wrist, without touching the surface of the drink. To create more intricate designs, baristas using a technique called etching draw designs in the foam with the tip of a metal thermometer or bamboo skewer. Other techniques include heaping foam to form a character that rises out of the cup (3D latte art), or even machine printing a photographic image on the foam with ink made of coffee (photo latte art).

Ku-san starts with a free pour to make a foam circle that forms the bird’s body. She then uses a metal skewer to add lines and details. After the foam shape is done, she uses natural food dye mixed with foam for color accents, and occasionally chocolate syrup. And although she most often uses espresso as a base, she also uses matcha, which provides a lush green background that matches her tropical subjects well.

“My father keep parakeets, chickens, and doves," says Ku-san. "And as an adult, I first kept a cockatiel as a pet.” Her current “ai-chou” (literally love-bird; in Japanese the designation “ai” or “love” is added to the front of an animal to denote a pet) is a Bourke’s parrot named Sakura. Ku-san draws inspiration from Sakura and her previous cockatiel. On Twitter, she sometimes asks people to post their birds as models.

“I make bird lattes most every day, whenever I want to drink coffee," she says. "Lately, I have been getting a lot of pictures from people who say it’s okay to use their pets as models.” Because of the size and the shape of the canvas, small, round animals are easy to make, which explains the popularity of cartoon teddy bears and rabbits in latte art. Bird latte art, however, is not very common, explains Ku-san. “Given the drawing area, small parakeets are easiest to make.” She tries her hand at other, bigger birds too, including peacocks and swans.

Though Ku-san’s latte art isn’t available in any cafe, she sometimes makes her creations at bird-themed popup events, where bird lovers gather to shop for avian arts and crafts. She also draws and crochets; her handiwork includes small crocheted birds and tiny felted coffee cups with latte art.

“I try to make each latte in seven to 10 minutes, with five minutes being the goal," she says. "You don’t want the drink to be lukewarm.” Rather than perfecting every detail, she prefers to work quickly and make something impressionistic. The work is, after all, extremely ephemeral, lasting only about five minutes before the lines start to melt and disintegrate.

Ku-san says that combining her love of coffee and her love of birds simply makes her happy. Daily life is often a series of mundane moments punctuated by small pleasures. A coffee break is a short reverie, and the icing on the cake, in this instance, is the foam on the latte.

For decades, the Mississippi River town of Muscatine was the pearl-button capital of the world.

Clusters of clam shells lie on the banks of the Mississippi River in Muscatine, Iowa. Look closely and you’ll see each shell is dotted with perfectly neat holes. Many decades ago, these shells were plucked from the bottom of the river by the ton, soaked, steamed, and swept of their meat and pearls. Circular saws cut multiple discs out of each shell. These were called “blanks.” Each blank was sanded down into a perfect pearl button, ready to be sewn onto a dress, jacket, or glove.

Muscatine’s pearl button industry hit its peak between 1908 and the ’20s, when factories in the Iowa town produced 1.5 billion buttons, or one-third of the world’s pearl button supply. These buttons were worth $3.3 million, according to the 1910 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. But few of us who grew up along the Mississippi, who’ve held those milkweed-grey shells with holes in them, have actually held pearl buttons or heard a cohesive origin story about the industry. To get the definitive history I went to Terry Eagle, the Director of The National Pearl Button Museum at The History and Industry Center, in Muscatine. “The story of the pearl button is a national growth story, a national treasure story, and an environmental lesson,” Eagle says. “And if you don’t believe me now, I’ll prove it to you.”

As a kid, Eagle grew up hating the hole-filled shells leftover from the pearl button industry because they wouldn’t skip across the Mississippi. He used to work at the Muscatine Fire Department, where, at least three times a week, a parent would bring in their kid, who had their finger stuck in the holes of the blanks of the shells. “They were thought of as a navigational hazard, you couldn’t walk the Mississippi without cutting your feet,” Eagle says, “but Boepple saw the value in these seemingly worthless clams.”

That would be German button artisan John F. Boepple. In 1890, he came to the United States because a new German tariff on imported oceanic mother-of-pearl left him little room for profit. Pearl buttons were Boepple’s best sellers. He made buttons out of wood, bone, horn, and hoof, but they didn’t fly off the shelves like the pearl versions.

An acquaintance from the U.S. sent Boepple a mollusk from the Mississippi with “bark,” or an exterior that was milkweed grey. Inside the freshwater shell, Boepple found high quality freshwater mother-of-pearl, which resembled the high-quality oceanic pearl that Boepple used prior. Mollusk shells are coated with an opalescent substance called nacre. When an irritant like sand or rock gets inside the mollusk, the creature will coat the irritant with nacre and potentially produce a pearl.

“Clams and mussels will position themselves toward the current so they can gather nutrients brought downriver,” Eagle says. Boepple took out his map of the United States, saw the bend in the Mississippi by Muscatine, knowing the river slowed down in that area and with his knowledge of the bottom feeder, hypothesized the Iowa town’s waters would be carpeted with clams and when he waded into the water and pulled up a muscle the size of a baby elephant’s ear, the hypothesis was correct.

In 1895, after gaining investors and opening his first pearl button factory, Boepple hired shell miners called clammers. As the industry grew, clammers mined rivers of 19 states around Iowa along the Mississippi. In shallow waters, they’d “pollywog” alongside their boats, bravely feeling for clams with the bottoms of their bare feet. In deeper water, they’d take out an iron chandelier structure with crowbars and hooks to rake the bottom of the river. Once the hooks touched their open mouths, the clams slammed shut in a millennia-old defense mechanism.

To kill them, the clammers put the shells in vats of hot water. They swept the meat, searching for pearls, before chucking the insides back into the river or into a bucket for fish bait, if their find was unsuccessful. “No one ate the muddy meat, because it wasn’t palatable,” Eagle says. Farmers worked as clammers to supplement their income; they initially used the clam meat as fertilizer and feed for their livestock, until they found out that feeding livestock mussel made their meat taste like the Mississippi. In Iowa there’s a saying: “The smell of money smells like pig shit.” Back then, in Muscatine, money smelled like rotting fish.

The shell buyers brought the wholesale shell to the button factories and loaded them into the soaking room. Here, “men shoveled shell into large livestock troughs, soaking them for at least a week,” according to Melanie K. Alexander’s Muscatine’s Pearl Button Industry. The soak softened the mussel's shell enough for it to be drilled into without splintering. Yet a jet of water was still needed to cool the shell to limit the dust. The circular saw cut into the shell and produced coin-like pieces of shells called blanks. An expert cutter could get several blanks out of one piece of shell, though different sized shells produced different sized buttons. The average button cutter went through about 100 pounds of shell per day, producing around 3,600 blanks. The blanks were reclassified by size and taken to the finishing floor, where women sanded them on emery wheels. They’d bring the buttons home to sew onto cards, earning one cent for every five cards they made.

By 1908, Boepple’s business was booming. But competition was on the horizon. The advent of machinery electric motor prior to 1910, created an industrialized button trade to replace Boepple’s people-powered one, and caused the button boom around Muscatine. McClure’s Magazine wrote in 1914 that “Muscatine was button mad.” Boepple was an artist, not a businessman, and other button factories put him out of business around 1909. Still, barges and railroad cars full of shells continued to flood into Muscatine, the Pearl Button Capital of the world.

The pearl button industry was composed of 19 American states whose streams and rivers supplied shell. In the late 1930s and ’40s, clammers at rivers in the center of the U.S. started reporting a scarcity. The large shells had disappeared. They couldn’t even find smaller shells to blank smaller buttons. A whole workforce would collapse if the shells were gone entirely.

To combat this dire possibility, the federal government set up the Fairport Federal Hatchery biological station in Muscatine to re-seed the rivers by inoculating fish with mussel larvae.

Boepple spent hours bent over the water watching these animals and logging their behaviors. One day in 1912, wading through the Mississippi, he split his heel on a sharp clam. He contracted a blood infection and died shortly after in Bellevue Hospital in Muscatine on January 30, 1912. Muscatine’s mayor asked all of the button companies and other businesses to close shop during Boepple’s funeral. The true irony doesn’t lie with Boepple dying from stepping on the shell of a clam, but in why he waded through the river. The man who perfected the process of creating the pearl button wasn’t taking from the river; this time he intended to bring the mollusk back.

Soon after, the invention of plastic, bolstered by WWII, introduced commercial grade plastic accessories and zippers, sending the pearl button into decline. Pearl buttons couldn’t keep up with modern washing machines, detergents, and dry cleaners like plastic could. “In the ‘50s you couldn’t sell a pearl button,” Eagle says. “Warehouses full of pearl buttons were thrown away in dumps.”

Before Boepple immigrated to the U.S., the entire Mississippi mussel population was untouched; possibly the cleanest it was ever going to be. The river had over 300 species of mollusks before Boepple and only 200 after. He made the mother-of-pearl from mussel and clams a national resource through pearl button production. And the pearl button industry provided employment, keeping families fed during the Great Depression. The pearl button and the hole-drilled shells they leave behind are symbols of humanity’s fumbling balance between resource-based-industries and overlooked species conservation techniques.

“The pearl button industry was no different than the Chicago meat packing plants, the Pittsburgh steel, textiles, coal, the cotton,” Eagle says. “All the machinery invented back in those days were invented for production. Nobody had safety on their mind back then. God bless America, we got better. Polish this history like a pearl and people will come and hear about it.”