Half a century of menus, matchboxes, and postcards finds a home.

Nearly 50 years ago, when Richard Gutman was studying at Cornell University, a British designer asked him about diners. Why do Americans love them? Why do they all serve the same thing? And why do they all look like that? In an effort that earned him his nickname, “Diner Man,” Gutman spent the next 48 years answering those very questions, amassing the country’s largest collection of diner artifacts along the way. Recently, he donated his collection to Michigan’s Henry Ford Museum—a move that will make it a go-to destination for diner devotees.

The 2,800-pound collection, Gutman estimates, consists of a 7,000-image library and 92 boxes of diner paraphernalia—menus, matchboxes, toothpicks, postcards, and more. When it wasn’t on temporary display in various museums, the contents stayed with him in his family’s home. “It’s part of the environment in which my wife and my daughter and I grew up,” says Gutman.

Coming of age in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Gutman was never far from diners. With four in walking distance of his house, they became a focal point of his early social life. “We got steak sandwiches—Allentown style, not Philadelphia,” he says, referring to the signature tomato sauce that defines the former. He took the landscape of humble eateries for granted until the British designer's inquiry. “The story of the diner hadn’t been written—nobody cared about it,” says Gutman. “I was fortunate to stumble upon an unexplored slice of life, and I’m still talking about it.”

Gutman made diner architecture the focus of his undergraduate thesis, starting his academic foray by photographing the Fenway Flyer Diner in Boston, Massachusetts. “I didn’t roll the film all the way in before I closed the camera, so there’s a light leak on that first image—a telltale sign this was number one,” says Gutman. He says his studies aligned with a nascent interest in the 1970s in everyday, material culture. A slideshow he delivered in 1972 at New York City’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts called “Adam and Eve on a Raft” (“that’s two poached eggs on toast—diner slang,” he says) was written up by the New Yorker’s "Talk of the Town" section, launching a nationwide tour of presentations on diner architecture and food. “It was the right time; I was very lucky,” says Gutman.

The years that followed saw Gutman pioneer the study of American diners. Eating in countless diners while on the road, he diligently logged each one’s unique history and design, gathering materials while taking photographs long before social media had normalized the practice. “Sometimes there’d be a guy who’d come out with a big butcher knife asking if you were from the Board of Health," he says. "Times have changed.”

While touring the country and accumulating a trove of artifacts, Gutman pieced together the story of roadside American diners as unique to a country so inextricably tied to the automobile—diners were the culinary appendage of a vehicular nation. To date, he’s restored dozens of diners, published four books, and presented lectures and slideshows at the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Geographic Society, and the United Nations.

Gutman says the greatest achievement of his career, however, is securing a place for the repository of his decades-long obsession in the Henry Ford Museum. “It’s the greatest place on earth. And I’m not just saying that because it’s got my stuff,” says Gutman.

The Detroit-area museum, an assemblage of historic American artifacts, is no stranger to “Diner Man’s” unique passion. Curator of Public Life Donna Braden tells me it was Gutman who informed museum directors that a beat-up lunch wagon selling popcorn in the museum’s mock American town, Greenfield Village, was in fact the last horse-drawn lunch wagon in existence. Gutman oversaw the restoration project that restored the Owl Night Lunch Wagon to its former glory. He’s also responsible for Lamy’s Diner, a 1940s-era silver-and-blue diner-car he procured from Hudson, Massachusetts, which is now a functioning eatery within the museum itself that serves visitors diner classics from fluffernutters to malted milkshakes and breakfast doughnuts.

While his life’s work is in the process of being digitized and curated for the Henry Ford Museum, Gutman is left with his lingering habits. When I ask him when he stopped collecting memorabilia, he replies, “I never did.” Shortly after finalizing his donation, while in at the famous Chuck Wagon diner in Denver, he asked the waitress for a menu. When she offered him a takeout menu, he says he replied, “I need the real menu—it’s going to join others in my collection.”

At the Field Museum, visitors can now get a whiff of the Cretaceous.

Sixty-seven million years before SUE the Tyrannosaurus rex became one of the Field Museum’s major draws and one of Twitter’s sauciest pundits, the toothy “murderbird” stalked the land that is now part of the Hell Creek Formation near Faith, South Dakota.

Hell Creek has yielded scores of fossils that have helped scientists sharpen their picture of the distant past. SUE’s bones (250 of 380, making this specimen the most complete T. rex ever unearthed) have helped researchers understand the creature’s biology and behavior, but the nearby fossils have yielded other insights—among them clues about the foliage that SUE peeked through and trampled each day. “We’re able to reconstruct this environment in an intense and layered way because the fossil record is so good,” says Meredith Whitfield, an exhibition designer at the Field Museum. As of this month, one of those layers involves a whiff of what the Cretaceous may have smelled like.

When the museum set out to reimagine SUE’s display—which reopened in 2018, after relocating from the main hall to a second-floor gallery—the goal was “to make people feel as much as possible as if SUE is in the room with them,” Whitfield says. Accordingly, the new exhibit engages several senses. One interactive display invites visitors to place their elbows on a table and touch their cheekbones as sound waves travel through, mimicking the sensation of the low-frequency rumble of a 40-foot-long predator stamping by. And then there’s the smell. “Scent is an unexpected way to bring an environment to life,” Whitfield says.

To make the smell of the Cretaceous vivid, the team settled on trying to simulate four smells, from the trees in the forest to the gnarly stench of dinosaur breath. To pull it off, they used paleontological knowledge, modern chemicals, and a whole lot of fiddling. As anyone who has wandered a forest knows, the smell of it all—the nose-prickling pine, the softer scent of flowers in bloom—is a distinct part of the experience. So the team had to first figure out which living plants were most similar to what would have grown around SUE and its fellow dinos.

“End-Cretaceous floras are pretty similar to a hardwood-dominated swampland today,” says Az Klymiuk, the museum’s collections manager of paleobotany. On the basis of fossils, scientists know, for example, that there were ponds covered with thick mats of Cobbania, a plant similar to living water lettuce, with floating, rosette-forming leaves. On land there was probably broad-leaved forest stippled with some conifers like cypresses and redwoods. The prehistoric record also includes leaves from the genus of the modern tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera. “I think of Hell Creek being similar to [present-day] Northern Florida or South Carolina,” Klymiuk says. “It’s not an alien landscape at all.”

So the paleobotanist came on board to help point the team toward modern smell analogues for Cretaceous flora. Chemically, “plant scents don’t change very much,” Klymiuk says. Once the team had some ideas of modern plant scents to work off of, and decided on ginger root, cypress resin, and the flowers of a tulip tree, the detective work and custom tinkering began.

Whitfield is a Tennessee native, but as far as she can recall, she’d never taken a whiff of the tulip tree, the official state tree, and one of the scents the team had agreed on as a good candidate. So in May 2019, when the Chicago Botanic Garden had one in bloom, she went on what she calls a “sniffing expedition.” Compared to other flowering trees, Whitfield says, “it smells a little greener, more like wet cucumbers or grass.”

The group spent the rest of the summer concocting and fine-tuning. The team wanted scents that were long-lasting and wouldn’t need constant top-offs, but some first attempts were a little too cloying or perfume-y, with too many notes. “One of the cypress ones smelled a little too vanilla-y, and we said, ‘We’re looking for straight-up one thing—plain cypress,’” Whitfield recalls.

Pinpointing other smells of the period was less like perfumery and more like a test of olfactory endurance. But that’s what you get when you sign up to simulate the smell of a giant predator. They quickly gave up on imitating T. rex poop. Most of the commercially available synthetic feces scents are imitations of human waste, and our generally omnivorous diets stray too far from SUE’s carnivory. Cat poop is slightly better, because they’re obligate carnivores, Whitfield says, but hyena droppings would be ideal, because that includes both chewed-up meat and ground bones, just like SUE’s deuces. Turns out synthetic hyena poop scent is hard to come by, so the team moved on. (But, Whitfield adds, “If you're at the hyena enclosure at the zoo and smell their poop, that's probably close to what T. rex poop smelled like.”)

Dino breath, on the other hand, was both tempting and feasible. “From anatomical studies of SUE’s teeth, we can say, ‘Well, you have the kind of anatomy that might suggest that you have some nasty raw meat decaying in your mouth,’” Whitfield says. “What did that smell like? The answer is: Bad.”

The team found a service that manufactures a range of prepackaged smells—mainly pleasant air fresheners for hotel lobbies and other benign places, but also stinky ones for police training exercises, so that officers can learn to detect stuff like meth labs, decomposing bodies, and other malodorous things. The one called “decaying flesh” fit the bill quite nicely—but the challenge for the design team was making sure the smell didn’t clear the exhibit with its foulness or make visitors retch when they caught a whiff. “One of the variants was so bad that I said, ‘This is probably really accurate, but I don’t think we can expose visitors to this,’” Whitfield says. The goal was to find “the line between, ‘This is gross and I can experience it being gross and then walk away,’ versus ‘It’s so gross that it’s making me physically sick.’” So they diluted, and diluted some more. Members’ nights gave the team a chance to see how the smells were landing before the galleries reopened to the public, so they could settle on a dilution that “got it across without whacking you in the face,” Whitfield says.

The smells are presented as oils stashed in little cylinders. They waft continuously, but are only detectable when visitors open little grilles that sit on top. Some of the final smells may conjure the assemblage under your sink. “Cypress is kind of a resin-ness that people would associate with pine—it smells a little like Pine-Sol,” Whitfield says. The ginger root scent evokes Lemon Pledge. The breath, on the other hand, smells like rotting meat, and has Klymiuk’s stamp of authenticity. There’s no reason to think that bacteria’s basic metabolic functions have changed much over time, they say, which means that “I have no doubt that rotting meat today smells like rotting meat in the past.”

Chatting with people wandering exhibits or attending public education events, Klymiuk often hears a similar refrain: that the Cretacous seems a little “too normal,” as if we might expect a 67-million-year-old forest to look and smell radically different from one today. The similarity can be hard to process. It can be uncomfortable to think about long-vanished creatures existing in a world that’s not so unlike ours. Imagining an otherworldly landscape, instead, “gives us comfort and keeps us at a distance,” Klymiuk says.

Klymiuk doesn’t think this discomfort is a bad thing. By making the past immediate and accessible, they hope that visitors will “think a little more about the world we’re in and how fragile it is”—how many birds are disappearing, how many tree species are struggling. “It’s eye-opening to see what is essentially a modern forest that you could walk out into tomorrow and stick a Tyrannosaurus into.”

Although widely considered Chinese American, the well-known treat was invented in Japan.

The streets leading to the vermillion gates of Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari Shrine are filled with mom and pop shops. Vendors sell shaved ice, grilled eels on skewers, lacquered chopsticks, and sweet potatoes baked over red-hot coals. But one man in a crisp white cap is making and selling cookies that don’t look Japanese at all.

Inside his shop, Hougyokudo, Takeshi Matsuhisa presides over a dozen or so round iron molds with long thin handles. Opening one, he peels off a brown disc of dough, then deftly folds it and tucks a slip of paper inside. The finished product is a bit bigger and browner, but otherwise it looks exactly like something most often found atop the check after a meal of spring rolls and chow mein: a fortune cookie.

Fortune cookies—that sweet treat served with a side of pithy wisdom—are such a staple in Chinese-American restaurants that many diners are surprised to learn they are not from China. Often described as an invention of immigrants in California, they can in fact be traced back to Japan, where bakers such as Matsuhisa still make the original version, known as tsujiura senbei or omikuji senbei. “These have been around since the Edo period,” Matsuhisa says.

Fortune-telling culture is strong in Japan. The custom of getting an omikuji, or a fortune printed on a slip of paper at a temple or shrine, stretches back at least a millennium. Worshippers still tie them to sacred trees on the way out. It’s also not uncommon to see palm readers on street corners, and the rokuyo calendar, which predicts lucky and unlucky days, is routinely used when planning weddings and funerals.

Tsujiura is a kind of fortune telling done by interpreting the conversations and characteristics of random people in crowds, especially in sacred places. In the Edo period, this kind of fortune telling became a populist form of entertainment, says Satsuki Matsuhisa of the Matsuya bakery in Kyoto. “In the middle of the Edo period, tsujiura was sold to the common people,” she says. “There were various types of poems written in the 7, 7, 7, 5 [syllable] style, playful poems about love between men and women.” They were sold on street corners and plied by geisha in teahouses.

This ancestry is still apparent in Kyoto’s shops. One fortune from Hougyokudo is a 7, 7, 7, 5 style poem that roughly translates to: “Until becoming a mother / Is not being a mother / Because of an argument at Izumo?” Since Izumo is a part of Japan where gods are said to reside, the implication is that having a child is up to the gods.

References to Japan’s fortune cookies go back centuries. One of the earliest is a passage in Tamenaga Shunsui’s “The Young Grass of Spring,” which describes brittle cookies containing fortunes. A woodblock print from 1878 depicts a character named Kinnosuke making tsujiura senbei in an Osaka shop using the same method followed by bakers in Kyoto today. And the zoologist Edward Morse memorialized them with a sketch in his 1883 book, Japan Day by Day Vol. II. He writes that the cookie was “pinched up in a triangular form” and “was made of molasses and was brittle, and tasted like a gingersnap without the ginger.” The message inside the cookie, Morse wrote, was a motto: "Determination will go through rocks, why then can we not be united?”

When the fortune cookie appeared across the Atlantic, in the United States, it did so in California, the home of fast-growing Chinese-Amercan and Japanese-American populations. Immigrants from China began arriving in large numbers in the 1800s, drawn by the Gold Rush and the need for agricultural, factory, and railroad laborers. Japanese immigrants came soon after, in later decades.

White Americans described their growing presence as a “yellow peril” and passed xenophobic laws in response. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 halted all immigration from China. When industrialists recruited Japanese workers to fill the gap, similar laws soon blocked their arrival, including, eventually, the 1924 Immigration Act that prevented all new immigrants from Asia.

As the Gold Rush waned, those in cities were shunted into low-wage jobs such as restaurant and laundry work, often congregating in enclaves due to policies limiting where they could live. It was in these enclaves that several people—of both Chinese and Japanese ancestry—claimed to have originated the American fortune cookie. But the best and earliest evidence points to San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden.

Established in 1894 by Makoto Hagiwara, who came to the U.S. in the 1870s and started several businesses, the Japanese Tea Garden still serves fortune cookies in Golden Gate Park. “There's been several references to the Hagiwara [Japanese] Tea Garden ‘tea cakes,’” says Rosalyn Tonai, executive director of the National Japanese-American Historical Society, in reference to the earliest accounts of American fortune cookies. Served with tea, the cakes contained thank-you notes, which, Tonai says, “evolved into the fortune cookie we know today.”

“The idea of writing something inside began with a party Hagiwara held for his vendors and other guests,” says Benh Nakajo, who has worked at the Japanese Tea Garden for 10 years and for nearly 50 at Benkyo-do, a confectionary in San Francisco’s Japantown that was founded in 1906. After the cookies were popular with visitors, he adds, Hagiwara replaced the thank-you note with a fortune.

The Hagiwaras introduced the cookie between 1910 and 1914, and outsourced it to Benkyo-do in 1918, when they could no longer handle the volume, writes Gary Ono, the grandson of Benkyo-do’s founder, Suyeichi Okamura. The cookie had a savory flavor from miso or soy that wasn’t as popular in America, so Okamura suggested they sweeten and lighten it by adding vanilla flavor.

As the cookies gained popularity, more Japanese bakeries in San Francisco and Los Angeles began making them. In addition to selling them to the public, the bakeries also supplied them to Chinese restaurants, many of which were owned by Japanese people, as Japanese food wouldn’t become popular for at least 50 years.

Pearl Harbor accelerated the fortune cookie’s cross-culture journey. When the United States entered World War II, the government rounded up Japanese Americans across the West Coast and interned them in camps. Their businesses and homes were shuttered, including Japanese-owned Chinese restaurants and most of the bakeries that made fortune cookies. Both the Hagiwaras and the Okamuras were imprisoned. The Japanese Tea Garden was renamed The Oriental Tea Garden, the Hagiwaras were replaced by Chinese staff, and the Hagiwara home and the Garden’s Shinto shrine were destroyed. Benkyo-do closed as well.

In the vacuum, Chinese businesses thrived. “San Francisco’s Chinatown quadrupled its businesses between 1941 and 1943,” writes Jennifer 8. Lee in her book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. “A sharp rise in the demand at Chinese restaurants combined with a lack of Japanese bakers gave Chinese entrepreneurs an opportunity to step in. One of America’s beloved confections emerged from one of the nation’s darkest moments.”

Chinese restaurant by Chinese restaurant, fortune cookies spread from San Francisco and Los Angeles across the country. Eventually, they became vastly more popular and well known than their Japanese ancestors, and so associated with American-Chinese food that Gary Ono had to rediscover the role his family, and Benkyo-do, played in bringing fortune cookies to America.

Today, you can still find fortune cookies being made traditionally in a few places in Japan. In the precinct around Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari Shrine, a handful of family-run shop owners are emphatic that tsujiura senbei are homegrown. “This kind of senbei has existed since the end of the Edo period,” says Masakiyo Go of Souhonke Inariya, whose grandfather founded the shop because he liked the area’s cheerful mood and spiritual atmosphere.

Along with nearby Hougyokudo and Matsuya, Souhonke Inariya’s’s cookies, says Go, are modeled on miso senbei from Ogaki City, which is about 70 miles away. There, a company called Tanakaya Senbei, whose process and product look just like the ones at Fushimi Inari, has been making cookies for 160 years. The one key difference is that Tanakaya Senbei’s cookies are flat, lacking the distinctive suzu, or “bell,” shape.

At Matsuya, you can watch the baker pour batter made from flour, sugar, miso, water, and sesame onto a hot iron-grill mold called a kata. Ten minutes later, as the batter starts to brown, the baker peels it from the mold and folds it in half, then again, tucking in a fortune while it’s still warm. Working a dozen or more kata at a time, he’ll rotate them as they bake. “They get shiny, which is different from regular rice crackers,” says shop proprietor Satsuki Matsuhisa. “They become glossy, which takes special technique and is not easy to do. I’m proud of these.”

To anyone familiar with American fortune cookies, the end result is both instantly familiar and clearly distinct. The brown, crispy cookies are nearly double the size of the typical American specimen. They’re thicker, too, more hearty and less sweet than their counterparts. The miso adds an underlying note of savory tang, and the sesame lends a nuttiness. The fortunes themselves are reminiscent of a shrine’s omikuji: great luck, middle luck, small luck, and future luck, accompanied by a cryptic line or two.

Japanese bakers are well aware of the fame of American fortune cookies. “Hagiwara is not the one that made the cookies originally,” says Go. “He just brought the technology from Japan.” Still, English-language articles mentioning Souhonke Inariya and Benkyo-do hang on the walls. Gary Ono, who visited in 2017, says he was struck by their similarities. At this point, both families have been making a version of these cookies for several generations.

For his part, Takeshi Matsuhisa reckons that sales of tsujiura senbei—to both foreign and domestic tourists—has picked up since people started to realize that fortune cookies originated in Japan.

Fortune cookies may have traveled from Japan to the United States, but you won’t find them on restaurant tables in Japan. Instead, people travel to these specialty shops and take them home to enjoy with tea or coffee. They might be harder to find, but the reward is even sweeter.

It depends on whether a natural process could explain them.

Fossils always happen by accident; there was never a mammoth that wandered out onto the steppe and died, knowing it was going to emerge from a farmer’s field some day. The same is true for trace fossils, or the remains of prints or trails or burrows that animals leave behind. Early humans, squelching wet the sand through their toes, could never have imagined we’d be counting them today.

Now, on the Cape South coast of South Africa—which is home to one of the best-documented collections of small pieces of Pleistocene art—researchers have uncovered some trace fossils that appear to be anything but accidental. These fossils seem to have been drawn intentionally by early humans, including possible sand sculptures that date to over 100,000 years ago. If their hypothesis about the finds is true, the researchers might even have stumbled upon the first known example of humans depicting animals. Everyone is thrilled—cautiously, cautiously thrilled.

“What we are describing is potentially of great importance and unprecedented,” says Charles Helm, a paleontologist at the African Centre of Coastal Palaeoscience and the lead author of a study documenting these markings, published in September in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. “Absolutely certainty is elusive,” he qualifies, but at least a few of the finds seem to be turning heads. “Some may be doubtful, but there are certainly also some that can only have been made by humans,” Robert G. Bednarik, a rock art expert who wrote a comprehensive survey of Africa’s Pleistocene paleoart in 2013 and was not involved with the research, wrote in an email.

The first known examples of what we think of as human art were created on permanent materials—rocks, cave walls, shells—and go back hundreds of thousands of years. But human art may have originated earlier on perishable materials, such as wood and sand, writes anatomist Gillian M. Morriss-Kay in a 2010 paper in the Journal of Anatomy. “We simply cannot know how much art was created in perishable materials and has therefore been lost to the archaeological record,” Morris-Kay writes.

Helm’s team has been thinking about perishable materials for years, as it trawls the beaches on the coast near Cape Town for ancient footprints that were made in sand and naturally preserved. The Cape South coast also teems with aeolianites, prehistoric sand dunes and formations that turned to rock as far back as 158,000 years ago. Though it seems ephemeral, in rare cases sand can actually make quite a lasting impression, especially when dry sand settles over moist sand, Helm says. His team has identified more than 140 vertebrate track sites on the Cape South coast.

But the fossils they’ve just described don’t seem like tracks, human or animal. At certain sites, Helm and his colleagues noticed recurring motifs, such as circles, cross-hatches, zigzags, and parallel lines, all made into sand that hardened into stone. These patterns all occur in other examples of paleoart, suggesting a human origin, Helm says. But simple patterns can also be caused by natural phenomena, so the researchers were careful to focus on trace fossils that displayed multiple levels of symmetry or combinations of patterns. “A hashtag pattern is hard to explain other than as a random assortment of grooves that happens to resemble examples of paleoart from the region,” Helm says, adding that there is, ultimately, no way to prove the marks are not random or natural. The researchers also noted whether the marks were found in close proximity to any other suggestively human traces, which could indicate a budding Pleistocene artist (or toddler).

With great caution and admitted uncertainty, Helm’s team has keyed in on several fossils that they believe must have been made by humans. They’ve even coined a new term for the phenomenon: an ammoglyph, which derives from the Greek ammos, meaning “sand.”

In Helm’s eyes, the smoking gun, if there is one, is a drawing made in the sand that consists of a circular groove with a depression smack-dab in the middle. The circle is nearly perfect and flanked by a pair of oval indentations that the researchers believe might have been made by prehistoric knees. They posit the circle could have been drawn with a forked stick, planted in the sand and spun around like a compass. “The traces associated with ‘markings’ are more interesting and could have a varied origin, including what they propose,” Matthew Bennett, a geologist at Bournemoth University who studies ancient hominin footprints and was not involved in the study, writes in an email. “Doodling with your spear point in the sand is a perfectly human thing to do.” In Helm’s eyes, it is their “most compelling example.”

The researchers considered other, more natural origins of the imprint, such as a frond or leaf stuck in the sand that scraped the circle out on a windy day, or that it might have been etched into the stone much more recently. But a frond would not have made such a consistent groove, and the knee-troughs suggest that the pattern was made before the sand had petrified. “I’m especially intrigued by their interpretation of knee impressions caused by kneeling,” says Anthony Martin, a trace fossil expert at Emory College, who was not involved with the study. But Martin says the possible knee prints would be much more convincing if they were attached to a trail of footprints, which is not present.

Modern researchers often underestimate the abilities of prehistoric humans, says Martin Lockley, a paleontologist who recently accompanied Helm’s team to provide a second opinion. He believes Helm’s findings could help reshape our understanding of this ancestral culture.

The team documented several other ammoglyphs that, while perhaps more exciting, are certainly harder to prove as having a human origin. In one sunny spot on the coast, the team noticed large, round tracks that likely belonged to an extinct buffalo. After returning to the site on an overcast day, they noticed several dark lines—barely visible in the sunlight—that form an isosceles triangle with two lines extending beyond the corners of the shape.

One interpretation is that it could be a crude representation of a long-horned buffalo, but some caution is warranted. “It was simply a matter of seeing an unusual shape beside a probable trackway of this extinct species,” Helm says. “This is by no means conclusive, just intriguing and the sort of example we hope other researchers will examine and provide insights on.” Helm acknowledges that his team is indulging in speculation. Martin says this is one of the few studies he’s seen on trace fossils (officially called ichnology) in which the researchers openly admit that what they’re seeing might be wishful thinking. “Ichnology is a discipline that is especially susceptible to pareidolia, ‘seeing’ the familiar in natural phenomena that might have nothing to do with what is there,” he says. “So my hat is off to them for [admitting] that.”

“It is hard to be definitive about these sorts of things, but they make a strong case with some excellent data and visuals,” Bednarik says, adding that he hopes future researchers offer their own critiques, whether to support or disprove Helm’s claims. In some cases the researchers have done this themselves, with one intriguing example credited to a cluster of seals—scientifically significant, but not human.

The most visually exciting and questionable trace fossil is a sand sculpture that seems to resemble a stingray. The cartilaginous fish occur frequently along the Cape South coast. The “putative stingray rock,” in Helm’s words, has an intriguing symmetrical shape, with a number of aligned grooves along what could be a spine that suggest the dorsal surface of a stingray. The rock also has a “bite” shape at the bottom, a possible indication of where a tail was once attached. “A random feature cannot be fully eliminated, no matter how improbable this may seem,” Helm says. “A stingray sculpture is, frankly, far removed from anything we expected to find, but the likeness was readily apparent. And plausibly this creature may have been of significance to our ancestors on this coastline.”

While Helm and his team await sample results that will provide a more precise age for the rocks, they continue to hunt for more artful traces in the sandstone. The day after Helm was interviewed for this story, he emailed to say that his team has stumbled upon another ammoglyph. He says he’s quite sure what it is, but he won’t say until the image is thoroughly documented. When it comes out, he’d like everyone to weigh in.

Another example of how, biologically, islands are deeply weird.

The specimen known as LB1 caused a stir in 2003, when its tiny skeleton emerged from a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. The little human, dubbed the “hobbit,” was from an extinct species, but the discovery (along with the remains of several other individuals) added an entirely new twig to our family tree—Homo floresiensis. Scientists have since examined everything they can about our diminutive cousin, from its potential diet to its ancestry—as a possible descendant of Homo erectus. For example, it turns out they may have lived as recently as 50,000 years ago—around the same time modern humans were arriving in Australia. The latest development is that researchers have run thousands of computer simulations to determine when—and how quickly—H. floresiensis evolved, and it turns out it happened pretty fast.

Many things on Flores grow very big and very small, an example of what is known as “Foster’s Rule,” or the “island effect.” A combination of fewer resources and the lack of natural predators on many islands mean that over time their smaller flora and fauna tend to balloon in size, while species that are larger on the mainland tend to shrink. This is offered as an explanation for why birds way taller than Big Bird once roamed New Zealand, and elephants the size of Mini Coopers meandered on some Mediterranean isles. The island of Flores hosts two of the most striking examples: the massive Komodo dragon (a giant monitor lizard), and H. floresiensis.

“Islands are special,” says Pasquale Raia, a paleontologist at the University of Naples Federico II and coauthor of the study, which was published in The Royal Society’s Biology Letters. “Morphologically and culturally speaking, evolution in other hominids was nowhere close to this.”

Raia’s team took a number of the evolutionary forces related to the island effect into consideration, and plugged them into a computer simulation, to see how quickly H. erectus might have miniaturized. Raia was surprised by the results, which suggested it could have happened in less than 10,000 years, just a few hundred generations—a sprint compared to the glacial pace often associated with evolution.

Raia says the results should be taken with appropriate caution, given how weird islands can be, evolutionarily speaking. “Island ecosystems are fragile,” he says. “Besides that, islands often stretch the limits of what we think adaptation can do.” Just ask the finches of the Galápagos, which are evolving quickly more or less all the time.

When the politician dropped it in a London theater, an usher swooped in to save it.

One night in January 1953, Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, went on a date. The pair headed to the Coliseum, a theater and cinema in London’s West End, to take in the musical Call Me Madam. When the couple arrived, their fellow audience members clambered from their plush-red seats to greet the couple with a standing ovation. Churchill, who was in his final years as British Prime Minister, grinned and flashed his signature two-finger victory sign, the Daily Telegraph reported at the time. At some point that evening, the politician also puffed on a cigar. When it tumbled to the ground, an usher named Violet King picked it up and pocketed it. More than a half-century later, the saliva-soaked memento is going under the hammer at Hansons Auctioneers on December 11.

Churchill’s love of cigars was legendary. He was often photographed with one hanging out of his mouth, and his tastes were wide-ranging. In Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill, Barry Singer—a writer who also runs a New York City bookshop entirely devoted to texts by or about Churchill—describes how, after economization called for scaling back on his beloved, pricey Cuban cigars, the politician reached for affordable American varieties. In 1935, he purchased 900 Royal Derby Longfellows from a New York cigar stand in a single order. Singer reports that, in a letter, Churchill described the brand as “both mild and cheap,” and declared that he liked them very much.

Recalling Churchill's visits to the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt reflected, "It was astonishing to me that anyone could smoke so much and drink so much and keep perfectly well." Though his public image was often jaunty, pugnacious, and tough, Churchill wasn't always as hardy as the former First Lady made him out to be. He was "susceptible to pneumonia," Singer writes, but wasn't interested in giving up cigars. When Churchill flew, Singer continues, "he kept close by him a specially constructed oxygen mask that allowed him to take oxygen and smoke a cigar at the same time."

This particular cigar has a buttoned-up provenance, because soon after King took the cigar home with her, she wrote to Churchill, asking him to certify the authenticity of her find. Jane Portal, Churchill’s private secretary, wrote back on stationery from 10 Downing Street, assuring King that Churchill “has of course no objection to your telling your friends that the cigar you found is his.” King’s family held onto the reply, and the note is presented alongside the partially puffed cigar.

Auction houses sometimes fold cigar sales into other ones, pairing them with, for instance, fine wines. Sotheby’s and Christie’s have both auctioned off cigars, and the 347 lots at a 2014 auction in London brought in more than $860,000, Cigar Aficionado reported, with bidders shelling out the most for pre-embargo Cuban cigars in pristine condition. “The demand for highest quality pre-embargo unique cabinets and boxes is at record levels,” Mitchell Orchant, managing director of C. Gars Ltd., which managed the auction, told the publication.

Hansons hasn’t published any information about when or where this cigar was made, or by whom. Its condition couldn’t be considered pristine—it is partially smoked, after all, and its little storage box is flecked with sloughed-off bits. The auction house expects it to fetch between $6,340 and $7,609 (or £5,000 to £6,000). Previous sales of Churchill cigars have commanded a range of sums, the BBC reported, from $12,000 to nothing at all.

Come December, you could own a remnant of Churchill’s treasured vice—a souvenir much more intimate than a ticket stub. “His cigars are said to have bolstered him through the major challenges he faced,” says Charles Hanson, owner of Hansons Auctioneers, in a release. “He puffed away at home, at work, and as we now know, even at the cinema.”

If only Jennie Wilde could have transformed society too.

If you stood on Canal Street in New Orleans on the night of February 28, 1911, you would have seen green monsters rolling on a sea filled with giant poppies, grapes the size of your head, and deep-pocketed businessmen in glittery nymph costumes waving at the assembled crowd.

For Jennie Wilde, a designer responsible for two decades of artfully outlandish Mardi Gras spectacles, that was “such stuff as dreams are made on”—her spin on Shakespeare’s famous line, interpreted for the 1911 “Familiar Quotations”-themed Mardi Gras parade. That year, Wilde designed 20 original floating set pieces and approximately 100 costumes—fabric fantasias that allowed the richest men in Louisiana to forget themselves for an evening and revel in a dream world. (Though most of New Orleans donned costumes for Mardi Gras, only wealthy white men were permitted to ride on parade floats.)

Yet Wilde was never publicly credited for her groundbreaking designs. Her name was absent from the glowing press coverage of the annual festivities, and left off the illustrated broadsides that parade-goers snatched up for a dime. Back then, the making of Carnival (the local term for Mardi Gras) was a secretive affair, kept under wraps by the wealthy social organizations, called krewes, that funded it. Each krewe concealed its membership rolls and staff artists’ names, as a way to both preserve mystery and keep its inner workings free from public scrutiny.

The intervening years haven’t been much kinder to Wilde, publicity-wise, or more revealing. Though Tulane University published 5,500 Mardi Gras watercolor sketches—many of them Wilde’s—from its digital archive in 2012, she remains an obscure figure today. Yet without her acrobatic imagination and prolific, Art Nouveau-ish work—at a time when float and costume design was dominated by men—many of the era’s greatest artistic achievements would never have come to pass.

The trove of original watercolor designs published by Tulane showcase Wilde’s unique ability to transform krewe members into royals, gods, demons, women, or whatever else they fancied. For years she provided these wealthy white men with make-believe wardrobes any 6-year-old would be thrilled to wear: heavily beaded capes with lemon-yellow lining, scepters with dangling strings of stars, crowns packed with jewels.

As today’s designers prepare their floats and costumes for next year's Carnival, Wilde’s story, set in a competitive world of secretive, exclusionary clubs and rival designers, deserves a fresh appraisal—and a front-and-center place in the history of New Orleans’ biggest party.

Born in Georgia in 1865, Virginia Wilkerson Wilde (known throughout her life as Jennie) lived and worked in what many historians consider the golden age of Carnival—the period that stretched from the late 19th century to the early 1930s, when krewes spent big money trying to outdo one another in the pre-Lenten party business. (Each krewe reportedly spent more than $25,000 a year—an eye-popping $660,000 in today’s dollars—on the annual public parade and an invitation-only masked ball.)

Wilde was born into a prosperous, artistic, socially prominent Catholic family. Her grandfather was a statesman and the poet laureate of Georgia; both her father and brother were writers. Wilde dabbled in writing herself, but trained as a painter at the Art League of New York.

When she returned to New Orleans, she got her own small studio and found work as a muralist for local churches. Then, in 1891, the 25-year-old Wilde was tapped by the oldest of the Mardis Gras krewes—the Mistick Krewe of Comus—to design invitations for the club’s demon-themed ball. That Comus gig secured Wilde steady work until she died—in 1913, at age 48—while on a trip to England.

Distinct from her contemporaries, Wilde’s art shows an unabashed more-is-more ethos coupled with a Catholic’s respect for ornamentation. With more flowers, more jewel-toned clouds, and more strings of stars, her floats were mesmeric accumulations of detail. She loved the unruly, natural curves of Art Nouveau, a movement inspired by the sinuously lined botanical illustrations and Japanese prints that were sweeping Western markets in the late 19th century.

"Wilde became Carnival's high priestess of Art Nouveau," writes designer and historian Henri Schindler in his book Mardi Gras Treasures: Costume Designs of the Golden Age, "and the float plates of her maturity were animated by her hallmark dynamic energy—by turns elegant, frenzied, and spellbinding."

Also unlike other designers, Wilde was equipped to handle her krewe’s most erudite assignments. Each spring, just after the glitter had settled from February’s Carnival parade, the Krewe of Comus would assign her the next year’s theme. Wilde would take it from there. “I am given simply the name of the subject and have to think up, read up, imagine, and then design floats, costumes, invitations, tableaux, souvenir pins, dancing programs, and further arrange the plates for the newspapers," she explained.

The Krewe of Comus distinguished itself from other clubs with its classically themed floats, and directed Wilde to concoct sets based on world mythology, religion, and literature. Over the years, she managed to coax dynamic costumes and visuals from a diverse set of themes—from the life of the prophet Muhammad to obscure medieval love stories to the poetry of Lord Byron.

Wilde’s floats were built “from the wheels up,” says Schindler. (Today, the same basic structures are reused repeatedly.) In her sketches, krewe members, caped and helmeted, looked down from bronze piles of swords and shields in the “I Came, I Saw, I Conquered” float. They lounged inside pearly shells atop a turbulent sea in a “What Are the Wild Waves Saying” float (its title drawn from a popular 19th-century duet). And they cavorted among so many stars and dewdrops in Wilde’s “All That Glitters Is Not Gold” float that one New Orleans newspaper used nearly every known synonym for “shining” to describe it.

Yet behind all this beauty and whimsy was something much darker. The golden age of Carnival was not the golden age of inclusivity. Even as krewe members played with their own identities—gender, race, even species—on Carnival night, they kept their prejudices front and center. Jews, Italians, and African-Americans—no matter how much money they may have had—were never permitted to join the Carnival krewes. And as a woman, Wilde was allowed to work only behind the scenes.

Some krewe-commissioned costumes of the time were explicit parodies of sex and race. One year, before Wilde became the Krewe of Comus's main designer, the club put on a “Missing Links” parade that satirized Darwin’s groundbreaking theory of evolution with papier-mâché costumes that included a banjo-playing gorilla. In 1877, the krewe lampooned a future where women (or men dressed as women) could vote, and men kept house, in a float titled “Our Future Destiny—1976.”

Fortunately, not all of these old-line krewes made it to the late 20th century they so feared. In 1991—after New Orleans passed an ordinance requiring krewes seeking a parade permit to publish their membership rolls, to prove that they didn’t discriminate on the basis of sex or race—the Krewe of Comus decided to stop parading altogether.

Looking through the lens of Mardi Gras and its artistic, largely forgotten designers, we can see the best and worst of New Orleans—and America—during this time period. The story of Wilde's work is also the story of a prejudiced society, where only certain members—male, pale, and well-to-do—were allowed to transform themselves each year at Mardi Gras.

Yet Wilde—a marginalized woman who helped prejudiced white men play dress-up and flex their wealth and power—managed to create art that astonished the public for years. You didn’t have to be in a Wilde costume to be delighted by her work. In fact, if you were standing on Canal Street on a Carnival night, you would have received a priceless gift from this long-overlooked artist—entry into a poetic and glittering new world.

It's not as easy as returning stolen statues.

The shipworm is an unassuming creature—not a worm, actually, but a bivalve mollusk with a soft, naked body that coils out of a smaller shell like a beckoning finger. In the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London, the diminutive specimen is preserved in resin, and placed alongside pieces of a ship it had begun to devour, its skinny white body juxtaposed against fissured brown wood.

Natural history museums have all sorts of things in their collections, but even so, it might seem an odd choice to put this mollusk on such prominent display. But the shipworm was a creature of great interest to colonial Britain. The worm gets its name from its preferred diet, and they bored deep into wooden hulls, imperiling their structural integrity and, in turn, the entire empire. Though shipworms are spread across the globe, they swarmed in massive abundance in tropical waters along the coast of Africa and the Caribbean, posing a particular threat to traders who sailed there. No one knows precisely when this particular individual was collected, but it came to the Grant Museum’s collections sometime in the late 19th century from Bristol, one of the main shipping ports of the British Empire—and a major site of the transatlantic slave trade (when that was still practiced some decades earlier). The shipworm’s connection with empire and conquest is why it’s on display today.

There’s nothing in the museum’s records about the ship the bivalve came from or specifically when it had been collected, but, in a way, the sample is still associated with the business of moving millions of enslaved Africans to colonial holdings around the world. “It’s not a smoking gun,”says Subhadra Das, a curator at the Grant Museum. “[There's] nothing in the catalogue saying that the wood it came from belonged to a slave ship.” But in her eyes, it had been collected, studied, and preserved because of its impact on the British colonial economy—making the specimen itself part of it.

The history of natural science as we know it today is inseparable from the history of European colonialism. Both art and natural history museums have long showcased objects collected—some would say “stolen”—from faraway lands and cultures. The purpose of these institutions is educational, and they were also about glorifying the colonial empires that created them, according to a 2018 paper written by Das and Miranda Lowe, the principal curator of crustaceans at London’s Natural History Museum, and published in the Journal of Natural Science Collections. “Empire isn’t just putting down a flag and shooting people,” Das says. “The way you teach science is one way of creating an empire.”

Western art museums have begun to confront this history with what is called “decolonization,” or the process of removing or contextualizing racist depictions and, where possible and practical, repatriating artifacts. These issues become trickier when one swaps the Parthenon Marbles (acquired in Greece and on display in London) for, say, the skeleton of an extinct thylacine, collected in Tasmania. “When you talk about decolonization, you think of questions of repatriation and restitution, giving an artifact back to a former country and focusing on ethnographic and archaeological collections,” says Alistair Brown, policy manager at the Museum Association. “What Miranda and Subhadra are doing is taking some of the ideas developed around that work and turning that lens on natural history collections.”

In London, Das and Lowe, from two different natural history museums, have taken steps toward addressing the history of empire and colonialism in their collections by uncovering the hidden contributions of people of color, as well as the cultural context in which specimens were often collected. Conversations around decolonizing natural history museums have been going on for years—the Technical University of Berlin held a two-day workshop in 2018 devoted to the subject. And recently, the American Museum of Natural History in New York opened an exhibition to deal with criticisms around its prominent statue of Theodore Roosevelt in which the former president rides a horse—flanked by a subordinate Native American man and African man. But detailed scrutiny of these collections is not widespread, in part because it raises uncomfortable questions and in part because it is difficult.

“It would be very easy to talk about overt racism,” Das says. “But what we’re talking about is something different, which is that these stories have been left out.” Das and Lowe’s changes are small, slow, and at times imperfect, but they represent some of the first institutional steps toward reckoning with decolonization in science and natural history museums.

Natural history museums have their roots in the Enlightenment, when Europe pivoted from religion to science as a way to explain the world. They also descend from curiosity cabinets and ethnographic collections, such as that of 17th-century Danish physician Ole Worm, who helped put non-Western civilizations on the same level as natural oddities.

Racism was baked into many of the early scientific ways of looking at humanity. Taxonomist Carl Linnaeus himself described black people as “crafty, indolent, negligent” and European people as “governed by laws” in A General System of Nature in 1806. Museums, in turn, held the skulls of non-white humans as a way to establish the superiority of Caucasians, Das and Lowe write. In London, these skulls came from all over the empire. In the United States, Native American remains were commonly put on display.

The core collection of London’s Natural History Museum came from Sir Hans Sloane. As a young plantation doctor in Jamaica in the late 17th century, Sloane amassed more than 800 plant specimens—collected by the enslaved Ghanaian people on the plantation. Sloane later returned to London, married the widow of a plantation owner and, with his newfound wealth, dispatched surgeons on slave ships to collect more specimens. “Hans Sloane was a great scientist but the collections that he made didn’t exist in a happy world in isolation to what else was going on,” Lowe says.

In 1753, Sloane’s collection—which had grown to more than 71,000 plants, animals, gemstones, coins, and antiquities, from West Africa, South Asia, North America, and the Caribbean—was purchased by the British Museum, according to the Natural History Museum’s 2018 report on its historical connection to the slave trade. It’s notable that Sloane collection, and that of the modern museum in general, maps neatly onto the parts of the world the British colonized, with many specimens from India but precious few from China, Das says.

In 2018, a survey of lower-income people of color in London found that they often felt excluded by science museums. People from Somalia and Sierra Leone, for example, took issue with the depiction of Africa as a continent burdened by disease and “saved” by the West. Another, from Latin America, was disappointed that an exhibit of Colombian butterflies failed to mention any actual Colombians.

As people of color in predominantly white institutions, Das and Lowe have been thinking about issues of erasure and exclusion for their entire careers. Both are founding members of Museum Detox, a network for museum workers of color founded by Sara Wajid, who is now at the Museum of London. Like many British ideas, Museum Detox started in a pub, in 2014. “It’s like the Sex Pistols. Everyone says they were there that day,” Das says. “But Miranda and I definitely were.” Das, Lowe, and others had grown tired of seeing the museums they work for pay lip service to diversity and inclusion without looking inward, at their own histories, policies, and approaches to science communication. Museum Detox has since grown into a robust collective that advocates for diversity in museums, both in the people they hire and the collections they show.

In 2016, Das and Lowe saw a tweet from Danny Birchall, the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection. “Natural history museums are more racist than anyone will admit,” Birchall wrote. “Obviously natural history museums are more racist than anyone is willing to say,” Das says. “But how do we go about proving that?” After a couple of years of thought and research, in 2018, the duo presented a paper exposing the Natural History Museum’s colonialist history at a natural sciences conference in Leeds. “Everyone was so open and welcoming,” Das says. “But the consensus was ‘Oh, we’d never thought about that before.’”

In London’s Natural History Museum, Hintze Hall holds a veritable forest, if you look up. The soaring, vaulted ceiling is comprised of 162 gilt-edged panels illustrating plants of the world. Some are native to the United Kingdom, such as the English oak. A full 108 of them depict plants from English colonies or considered significant to the empire. Cotton, tea, and tobacco are among the delicate paintings. (The English oak, it’s worth noting, was used for the ships that gave the empire its global reach.)

One of the panels depicts Quassia amara, also known as the bitter-ash. Linnaeus named Quassia after Graman Kwasi, a Ghanaian healer and botanist, according to the museum's slavery report. Kwasi was enslaved as a child and taken to Suriname, then a Dutch colony. Around 1730, Kwasi had discovered the bitter-ash’s power to treat infection by internal parasites. He later sold the plant and the treatment recipe to a Swedish soldier, who took it straight to Linnaeus.

Lowe knew of Kwasi long before she started working at the Natural History Museum. His was one of the only stories she encountered in the field about a person of color, but was rarely mentioned as anything more than a footnote. Lowe’s father is from Barbados, the former British colony that provided the blueprint for all its subsequent slave colonies. “Growing up, I would hear all these stories about the Caribbean,” she says. “That’s why Kwasi resonated with me really deeply as a person of color.”

Kwasi’s legacy is complicated, as he helped the Dutch capture African people who escaped from slavery, but his is one of the few names known among the countless enslaved people who contributed to specimen collecting over the years (in part due to his relationships with white people). To Lowe, Kwasi exemplifies the hidden history of indigenous and African people who contributed to the museum’s collections, with little or no recognition.

Now Lowe tells Kwasi’s story in a tour she developed to highlight black history in the museum. On the first one—in October 2018, Black History Month in the United Kingdom—18 people showed up. “You’re really here for the tour? Do you know we’re making history?” Lowe remembers asking. “No one knew what they were going to get.” After leading them to a bust of Charles Darwin, Lowe told them the story of John Edmonstone, the formerly enslaved man who taught the biologist taxidermy.

Lowe, who has worked at the museum for 28 years, had been thinking about giving a tour like this for over a decade. As the principal curator of crustaceans, she is paid in part to care for 185 treasured Blaschka models, glass depictions of marine animals. Kwasi and Edmonstone do not technically fall under her purview, but she’s researched these stories and others on her own time, after hours. “It’s just something I do after five ’o clock, when the building is quiet,” she says. “It’s all about how hard you push within an institution where you work, especially if you’re one of very few people of color in an institution.”

Now, after the paper and in response to decolonization discussions, the museum has offered to train people to deliver Lowe’s black history tours—so she can spend more time making the museum more accessible and spreading awareness of its resources to marginalized communities. This outreach, again, is something Lowe has done for years on evenings and weekends.

Lowe sees her work as progress toward a goal that is, at its heart, unachievable. “I don’t believe you can fully decolonize a museum,” she says, noting that the Natural History Museum was built with the profits of empire, including those produced from the slave trade and other exploitative practices. In her eyes, you’d need to tear the entire thing down and rebuild it with ethical labor.

The Grant Museum, one of the last university zoological museums in London, is decidedly old-school, with shelves crammed full of animals in jars and display cases. “It’s a really beautiful dead Noah’s Ark,” Das says. Many of the specimens seem remarkably ordinary, such as a fastidiously documented collection of termites, but others stand out, such as the thylacine skeleton, the box of dodo bones, or even the jar of 18 moles.

Smaller, more obscure institutions such as the Grant Museum, Das says, have a better shot at enacting demonstrable change than large, entrenched ones such as London’s Natural History Museum. The entire Grant Museum is confined to a single room, with just 68,000 specimens in its archives (compared with approximately 80 million for its larger sibling). “A small team can be creative in ways that larger institutions might not have the freedom to,” says Tannis Davidson, a curator there.

On September 19, 2019, Das opened the temporary exhibit called Displays of Power, which presents the museum’s collection alongside information that acknowledges how it is tied to empire. The show, designed by Darren Stevens, leaves the specimens where they are but adds labels to the glass that explain where the animal came from, who brought it here, and why it was collected it in the first place.

The Grant Museum has around 9,000 of its 68,000 specimens on display at any given time, and 31 got these new labels for the exhibition. “Any one of these could have that kind of story,” Davidson says. The label beside a trophy skull of an impala shot in Kenya in the 1960s reads: “Game hunting was encouraged by the British Empire as a way to push the colonial frontier further into Africa.” The label overlaying the shipworm reads, “Studying marine life that could damage ships—like shipworm—was important scientific work for keeping the Empire afloat.”

The star of the Grant Museum is that thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. The striped carnivorous marsupial became a poster child for extinction after it was hunted into oblivion by British colonists in the early 20th century. This, to many, is not a new or surprising story. But the label alongside the thylacine is about the Aboriginal Tasmanian people, who were the target of a genocide. “I was aghast by how popular the story of the tylachine and its extinction is, with no mention made whatsoever about the Tasmanian genocide,” Das says. “It was the same story happening at the same time, except the Tasmanian people are not animals.”

Another glass case, empty, holds only a note acknowledging how the Grant Museum has benefited from the profits of slavery.

Das received mixed feedback from her colleagues and researchers actively working in decolonization “Their reply was that it doesn’t go far enough,” she says. Some thought the labels could be more direct statements, outside of the quintessentially neutral museum voice. For example, the shipworm text mentions the empire’s ships, but not slave ships specifically. This is, perhaps, understandable, considering the displays had to meet the approval of the museum, which insisted on a very high standard of evidence for any connections that were made. “If you want to tell them, you’ll have to be able to prove it,” Das says she was told. In some cases she struggled to make certain connections—such as slavery and shipworm—explicit.

There is no easy road to decolonizing any kind of museum—art, natural history, or otherwise. “Decoloniality is also challenging because it is necessarily unreachable, necessarily indefinable,” writes Sumaya Kassim, in an essay published in Media Diversified, an online magazine dedicated to representation in the United Kingdom's media. “The legacies of European colonialism are immeasurably deep, far-reaching and ever-mutating, and so decolonial work and resistance must take on different forms, methods and evolve accordingly.”

Accordingly, Das and Lowe have no five-year plan for next steps in their work. But they remain engaged in the cause. Displays of Power is open until March 2020, at which point Das hopes the labels will be incorporated into the museum’s permanent text. “We don’t want temporary exhibitions. We want permanent exhibitions,” Lowe says. “We want it to be part of the workflow, so that you don’t have to think about decolonizing anything.”

Jenn Smith shares what it's been like so far to finally visit the country where she was born.

Since late August, Jenn Smith has been traveling across India as the winner of Atlas Obscura's First Journey prize. When she was a baby, Smith was adopted by a loving U.S. family from an orphanage in Kolkata. Now 37, she'd long wanted to visit her birth country, but had never had the means or opportunity to make the trip—until now. You can read more about Jenn's personal story, and how Atlas Obscura came to choose her as our $15,000 prize winner, here

Recently I caught up with Jenn now that she's more than halfway through her 10-week journey, which she's organized around attending cultural festivals, in locations all over the country. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

This trip is the culmination of years of dreaming on your part. Tell me about how you were feeling as you headed to the airport here in the U.S., and eventually boarded the plane and took off.

Leaving my family was more emotional than I had expected. My grandmother, aunt, and mom all got up early on Sunday to drive me to the Wassaic train station so I could head to New York City for the India Day Parade before my Monday flight. As they waved and blew kisses through the window as my train was leaving, I couldn't help but tear up. I know they were all worried because they love me so much.

My friend Jill, who lives in Philadelphia, met me in New York for the parade. It was nice to be with her and my awesome Airbnb host Sharon before I left. Experiencing a taste of India before I left was a really nice reminder of the community of people, religions, languages, and music that make up the diaspora.

I had a short Uber drive to the airport on that Monday morning. I felt both elated and a bit nervous, almost wondering whether this was the right time to be doing this trip. I questioned whether I was really ready and prepared for a 10-week journey. I teared up a little during takeoff, but then decided to just let it all go. No turning back.

What were some of your first impressions once you landed? On your drive into Delhi from the airport?

Wow. I did it. I'm actually here. Then nerves because I couldn't reach Ram, my driver for nearly an hour because of WiFi issues. But then we found each other, and I was so grateful for his patience. He brought me cool water, a bright smile, flowers, and great conversation. I felt both at ease in his company and in wonder at the industrial chaos that is Delhi.

For your first few nights in Delhi you stayed with a host family, and I remember you telling me that you hoped that arrangement would help make the beginning of your trip a little less intimidating. What did you learn from your host family?

Yes I opted for a homestay in Hauz Khas and was grateful to have a huge room, a garden terrace in the tree tops, and warm hosts. I found breakfast and dinner with good company here and eventually ventured out on my own into the neighborhood.

Murad, one of my hosts, shared his great history book with me, 80 Questions to Understand India, which gave me a lot to think on regarding the development and shifts in India as a country, as a people, as a culture.

Tannie, my other host, who was recovering from a surgery from a few weeks prior, is a lovely and progressive conversationalist, so we talked about everything from society to sex and her decisions to not have children.

We talked about food and my identity, and how, if I didn't speak too much, I could pass for a local Indian and not pay tourist prices. A lot of hosts I've stayed with so far encouraged me to embrace this ability and pass as much as possible. Because they have mixed heritage, I think I learned from Murad and Tannie how to both question and embrace it all.

I know you were a bit nervous before you left about how you might be received by locals in India, particularly because you look Indian but didn’t grow up in an Indian family. How are you feeling about that now that you’ve been there for a few weeks? What has your experience with locals been like so far?

I've opened up more with each new homestay and location. Every morning and evening, my new Indian friends and family are checking in on me: Where are you? Did you take lunch? Are you having fun?

After Delhi I went to Villa Khatun in Panjim, Goa, and quickly bonded with my host, Alim, a young father and businessman, who loves his home but doesn't much subscribe to a particular religion, despite being surrounded by devotees and temples.

In Ribandar, I fell in love with the host family and loved seeing Leo, the dad and Kenzie, a daughter, play music together. Jacqueline, the mom, is an amazing baker. I'm sad I didn't have the time to spend in the kitchen with her. I also began meeting other travelers here, swapping ideas, stories, perspectives and recommendations.

One traveler, Andre, joined me for my wander to Divar Island for Bonderam. There, we met Neves, who I was going to book a stay with, but he didn't get back to me in time. Instead, without ever asking for a dollar, Neves picked us up from the ferry, drove us to his amazing property, and made us tea and a walking map for the island. Later we all laughed and danced together with Neves's friends and neighbors during the Bonderam afterparty, with live bands and fireworks.

In Jaipur, my host family was so welcoming that my two-night stay became a week. I learned to almost master the art of using a squat toilet (definitely peed on my own sandals the first time) and Indian shower (bucket, dipper, hose). I ate dinner on the floor with between nine and 12 people daily. The last nights, as new couch surfers arrived, I slept on the floor in a room with three family members. I felt at home completely.

In Kerala, so far, my experiences have included warmth and love and incredible people. I've never been so happy! It's like one big hug, especially with the folks we met in Alappuzha. Jo, Nachi, and their daughter Leila are now my Kerala family. We also formed a tight bond with people we met in a neighboring hostel and restaurant.

What's something you’ve encountered so far that surprised you, or that didn’t end up being what you thought it would be?

Pulikali was something I had really been looking forward to, this dance tradition translating to "tiger play." The body painting itself is indeed a feat. The event, I left with mixed feelings. It's expensive for teams to participate. Last year there were 18 teams with 25 to 50 dancers each. This year, only six teams participated. It's also a very drunken and crowded event, it's hard to see the dancers. I went up to a press area and introduced myself to the only female broadcast reporter I saw.

But as I made my way back to my friends, I got caught up in a crush of people trying to photograph the dancers. Mostly hundreds of men. My bum got groped uncomfortably hard by many hands until I yelled and swiped. I almost lost my shoes. Thankfully my genitals were spared from being violated, but it could have been bad. Later, from the safety of a barrier and friends, I saw three floats featuring women. One depicted the harsh treatment of women, a mannequin hung by her neck from a rope. A young live model sat on a scale, with a giant stack of rupees on the other side of the scale outweighing her worth as a girl. I think I was the only one who clapped for their boldness. After my experience in the crowd, this float resonated all the more so.

“You ride the river and just hope you’re in the right spot when you need to be.”

For Carla Jenkins and her barge company, Vidalia Dock & Storage, the best towboat trips down the Mississippi are boring. What she worries about are all the ways they can get interesting.

A runaway barge could t-bone a bridge, sending cars plunging into the water below. The crew could fish the cold body of a woman out of the water, only to find that she has survived a fall of 120 feet without so much as breaking a bone. A deckhand could crush his leg between two barges and beg the surgeon to be careful amputating, because his work boots are new and just too nice to ruin.

The towboat crews of Vidalia Dock & Storage, headquartered in Vidalia, Louisiana, are tasked with loading, unloading, lodging, and transporting barges up and down the Mississippi. Jenkins’s deckhands often serve as mechanics and even impromptu rescue crews for boats that break down, run aground, hit bridges, catch on fire, and the like. For the past few months, they’ve been working on a two-year contract to move enormous barges full of crushed limestone from Harahan to Marrero, Louisiana.

It’s not a long journey. Depending on boat traffic, a round trip usually lasts three to four days. From the boat launch at Harahan, the crew will pick up six barges full of rock, push them through heavy traffic past the city of New Orleans, and steer through the Algiers Lock onto the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. (If the Mississippi is a major interstate, the ICW is a backroad primarily used by barges to access locations off the main path, such as their destination in Marraro.) Upon arrival, the crew will drop off the rock to be used in a construction job in southern Louisiana and pick up empty barges to immediately transport back to Harahan.

The journey begins on a muggy afternoon in July, when Jenkins’s captain, Pat Deckard, steers a 2,520-horsepower towboat, the Vidalia Dock, out of the Harahan Launch. A few hundred yards away, a row of barges are parked like cars along the riverbank, weighed down in the water by 30,000,000 pounds of rock each. They’ll transport six at a time to Marrero—90,000 tons of cargo lined up in two parallel rows.

The front of the towboat features rubber-padded columns, which are known as tow knees. The captain steers the towboat so that the knees align with the center of the first two barges. Then the deckhands leap over and secure them using wenches, cable, Spectra line, and lock line, and the boat backs out into the middle of the river.

At around 10 miles per hour, they slip under the Huey P. Long Bridge, which was the first built in Louisiana across the Mississippi River, and they pass by the French Quarter, the oldest and most famous neighborhood in New Orleans. From inside the wheelhouse, disembodied voices with Southern, Cajun, and Italian accents call out over the radio from the surrounding tugs, oil tankers, ocean liners, and cruise ships, all trying not to hit each other. A few hours pass this way until the traffic dies down, the sun starts to drop, and the captain steers the bow into the side of the Algiers bank for the night.

Across the water, on the outskirts of New Orleans, flames lick the tops of refineries along the darkened shoreline. Here, the Vidalia Dock will wait its turn to go through the Algiers Lock, which acts as a sort of door for river traffic between the Mississippi and the ICW. Boats are raised and lowered by way of the lock’s enclosed chamber, so that they can safely move between the two channels, which run at different water levels.

Jenkins came to work for her father’s business 38 years ago, and she’s been running the company for over 15 years now. On the trip to Marrero, she dangles her cowboy boots under the railing, lights a cigarette, and points it at passing vessels, critiquing their engines, propeller systems, and the business acumen of their owners, whom she’s had to deal with for years. “Most of them think I’m the secretary when they first meet me,” she says.

She frequently gets unwelcome calls in the middle of the night from her crew. Once, she was told that a collision with a bridge had left a gash in the side of a tank barge. “Now, that tank could be loaded with polystyrene, a CDC, I don’t know,” she says, using an industry acronym for hazardous materials, Certain Dangerous Cargo. “But I’m tucking my nightgown into my jeans and I’m jumping on a boat screaming down the river with all our floodlights on.” The gash was 35 feet long, and the tank was full of oil. “Couldn't even light a damn cigarette,” she says. Fortunately, on that night, the gash stopped just inches short of penetrating the tanks.

Because they typically lack propulsion of their own, barges strike bridges with some frequency. Sometimes they sink; once, a rice barge sank to the riverbed, and when the millions of grains hit the water, they expanded, warping the steel walls of the barge. Other times, they break loose and Jenkins’s deckhands have to go chasing them down like cowboys roping cattle. “You have no control out here,” Captain Deckard says. “You ride the river and just hope you’re in the right spot when you need to be.”

In the morning, it’s finally the Vidalia Dock’s turn to go through the lock and onto the ICW, which runs all the way to Texas. At the higher water level of the Mississippi, the towboat moves into the lock chamber. Once inside, water is slowly released through the front gate, dropping it down to the lower level of the Intercoastal Waterway. From here, the trip takes several crawling hours as the welding shops and steelyards along the banks are slowly replaced by a wilder landscape—sunbathing alligators, still waters, and kudzu plants swallowing the rusted bones of abandoned ferry boats along the banks.

In Marraro, Louisiana, a small towboat named the Rougarou, after the Cajun swamp monster reminiscent of a werewolf, helps the crew tie up the rock barges to a row of barges in the Ten Mile Exchange fleet, located, as the name suggests, 10 river miles up the ICW from the Mississippi. Then they secure six empty barges to the tow knees, and the captain immediately turns the boat around for the homeward journey.

In the early evening, the captain pushes into the bank to once again wait for the lock, and the crew argues over the best way to rid your boat of a snake, a rat, or a raccoon (sling it like a lasso, use lighter fluid, don’t leave the galley door open in the first place). This leg of the trip is usually peaceful, almost dull, but Troy Hollis, one of the deckhands, says not to let that fool you. “Some deckhands sleep on the boat like they at the Holiday Inn. But if something happens out here, no need to kick my door in to tell me.” he says. “Troy’s already gone.” In the 11 years he’s been doing this, he’s worked in snowstorms, alerted the authorities to dead bodies floating past the barges, and jumped from sinking boats.

One time, while standing on the end of the tow and helping turn loose a barge from another boat, his captain reversed, yanking him right off his feet and between the two. “All I could hear when I hit the water was those big ol’ engines,” he says. Falls off a barge are often deadly, but Hollis got lucky. His captain was warned just in time to keep the hulls from pushing back together.

But he can’t imagine working anywhere else. This industry employs more than 33,000 mariners. These guys work 14 days on, seven days off. Some even do 30 or more days straight on the boat. As another deckhand, Wesley Douglas, puts it: “I live here. My house is where I visit.”

At 3 a.m., the lockmaster directs the Vidalia Dock back onto the Mississippi. It slips quietly past the French Quarter and back under the bridges to drop off the empty barges, pick up more loads, and start the whole cycle over again. The only other people who are awake at this hour seem to be other towboaters, whose barges carry not only rock but also chemicals, lumber, grain, and so many other materials to be used all over the States, and even shipped across the Atlantic Ocean.

In a year, the U.S. domestic maritime industry grosses around $33.8 billion, and American towing vessels move more than 760 million tons of cargo. Towboats do have their disadvantages: At speeds averaging 5 to 15 mph, they’re not the fastest mode of transportation, and unlike trains and 18-wheelers, towboats can only ship to places on navigable waterways. For these reasons, trucks transport far more freight than either water vessels or trains, which are also limited by inflexible scheduling and confinement to particular tracks.

Water vessels are still the lowest cost per ton-mile of any mode of transportation, though. An 18-wheeler can hold 40 tons, an average freight car can hold 125, and one large barge can hold 1,800 tons. According to a 2009 study by the Texas Transportation Institute, barges emit only 19.3 tons of CO₂ per million ton-mile, in comparison to 26.9 tons for freight trains and a whopping 71.6 for trucks.

Captain Deckard says this two-year contract alone is a 3 million ton job. “Imagine if you took the barges away,” he says. “Do you know the amount of trucks you’d put on the road?”

But it can also be dangerous and grueling work. A towboater never knows whether the barge run is going to go right or very, very wrong. River life takes a different kind of person, the kind who doesn’t know what to do on dry land, where things might be a bit more predictable. “It’s kind of like the last frontier out here,” says Jenkins. “It’s a lifestyle, not a job. It has kicked my ass many a year, but I’m no quitter and neither are my guys.”

Researchers inspected 18,667 plant specimens to track down a caffeine-eating beetle.

In the 1910s, coffee crops around the world began to suffer a mysterious ailment. When plucked from the tree, the coffee fruit, usually plump and crimson, was riddled with round holes, and the damaged beans inside were nearly useless. Growers soon discovered that the culprit was a small beetle, the coffee berry borer, which has spread through the world like a caffeine-eating plague. Where did it come from? How could growers eradicate it?

Almost a century later, the berry borer’s path of destruction continues unabated. It’s responsible for around $500 million in global damage each year, including $300 million worth of damage in Brazil alone. And it’s proved impossible to eradicate. “It’s been studied for over 100 years,” says Fernando Vega, Research Entomologist at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, who has been studying the berry borer for decades. “Orthodox techniques don’t work.”

That’s because the coffee berry borer is an expert at evading detection. “It’s one millimeter across,” says Aaron P. Davis, a Senior Research Leader and coffee expert at the U.K.’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. “It’s like one speck of dirt on your finger, yet it causes terrible damage.” And it lives almost its entire life cycle within the cozy confines of the coffee berry, where—thanks to its ability to digest large doses of caffeine, a rare trait in insects—it’s born, feasts, mates, and perishes. “The male doesn’t have wings; it dies in the berry. All it does is mate with its sisters,” says Vega. “When they crawl out, the females are already impregnated.” Then, the lady borer enters another coffee berry, where it gives birth, and its offspring eat, mate, rinse, and repeat.

Despite the pest’s ubiquity, its origins remain mysterious. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the coffee berry borer originated in Central Africa. This is important information, says Vega, because if researchers know the climatic conditions of the insect’s origins, they can identify its natural enemies, hopefully harnessing these predators to destroy the bug, rather than relying on chemical pesticides. But scientists lack definitive proof of the borer’s origins, and short of taking a worldwide coffee tour or going back in time, researchers have been stumped as to how, precisely, to map its path around the world.

That changed, though, when Vega approached colleagues at the United Kingdom’s Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew in 2013.

Vega’s goal was to search through Kew’s vast collection for signs of berry borer infestation. Davis, who has been working with Kew’s collections for more than a decade, was skeptical. The collection houses 7.5 million plant specimens, some dating back more than two centuries, which are mounted onto paper, dried, and stored in cabinets in the massive, library-like herbarium. “I’d never ever seen one of these beetles or evidence of beetle attacks on the specimens,” Davis says.

But within a few minutes, a Kew researcher spotted a beetle. That set the team off on a multi-year hunt through Kew's and other herbaria's collections. They inspected 18,667 African and Asian botanical specimens, including coffee and other plants that thrive in similar environments, dating from 1900 to the present.

Using standing electron microscopy to detect hidden beetles, researchers eventually identified 72 occurrences of infestation. All of the infestations were on African coffee species, confirming researchers’ hunches that the berry borer was native to the hot, wet climate of the Guineo-Congolian forest, and that it's uniquely adapted to living on coffee rather than other plants. By mapping their results, researchers determined it was likely that the coffee berry borer, originally a bark-eater, adapted to digest caffeine and feed on coffee trees in Central Africa, then spread to coffee plantations worldwide by the early 1900s.

But the researchers’ findings don’t just tell us about the biology of the coffee borer beetle. By tracing the insect’s likely origins and its eventual journey around the world, their findings provide insight into coffee’s path from a wild Central African plant, to a colonial commodity, and finally to the ubiquitous global beverage it is today.

“Coffee spreads with colonialism,” says Casey Lurtz, an Assistant Professor at John Hopkins University who researches the history of coffee in Latin America. Native to Central Africa, it was first consumed by Ethiopians and South Sudanese people, who mixed it with animal fat to create a kind of early protein bar. By the 1300s, the plant had spread to the Middle East, which is where the beverage we know today likely originated. Muslim traders spread coffee through Asia, as far as Indonesia, and the Ottomans popularized public coffee houses. By the French Revolution, social coffee drinking had caught on among Europe’s intellectual elite. At that time, Europeans considered coffee a precious spice, costly and luxurious, similar to saffron, cinnamon, or—at least until the 19th century—sugar.

Empire changed everything. Previously, Europeans had relied on traders from Islamic areas to obtain coffee from Africa and Southeast Asia. But the advent of the colonial era—driven by an insatiable hunger for economic control, powered by enslaved human beings, and enabled by a combination of guns, political maneuvering, and disease—gave them direct control over Asian and African production. Europeans spread the crop to Latin America, where it was cultivated in plantations worked by enslaved people.

As coffee spread, so did the field of natural history. European powers embarked on programs of intensive scientific research, cataloguing the flora and fauna of the imperial holdings in order to extract as much value as possible. Around that time, they established the very natural history from which the berry borer researchers sourced the samples for their study. “Like it or not, Kew was involved in discovering plants and assessing their economic and commercial value,” says Davis.

By the late 1800s, Brazil had become the world’s coffee capital, and Brazilian scientists had become the foremost experts on coffee production. Ironically, says Vega, it may have been this very research that brought the berry borer to Brazil. In the early 1900s, the first berry borer outbreak hit the country. Though we can’t be sure of the means of contamination, Vega says a batch of infected seeds or berries, possibly imported from Africa for crop breeding experimentation, is likely the source. “There can be 280 eggs in one berry,” says Vega. “You only need one.”

Scientists have been working to eliminate the pest ever since. So far, attempts to harness predator organisms to kill the beetle, a common agricultural tactic, haven’t panned out. A Mexican roundworm reduces the beetles’ fertility, but doesn’t kill them. Some types of wasp from Mexico and Africa can locate and kill the beetle when it crawls out from the coffee berry, but the wasps haven’t survived attempts to introduce them to coffee plantations worldwide.

Meanwhile, the insect’s sheltered life cycle makes it particularly difficult to target with pesticides. What’s more, says Vega, the industry has neglected small-scale, independent coffee farmers, many of whom lack the resources to implement expensive pesticide regimes, and risk their own health with chemical treatments. It is these farmers’ livelihoods, rather than the profits of big coffee chains or the quality of a morning latte, that motivate Vega. “The grower is the one I’m concerned about,” he says.

By shedding light on the bug’s origins, the herbaria study should help researchers identify more of the borer’s natural predators, in the hopes of eventually finding one that can be adapted in plantations around the world. The colonial-era collections in Britain’s herbaria, like the coffee industry itself, are interwoven with the violent legacy of European empire. But these same collections may just hold the key to liberating small-scale coffee farmers from a different kind of invasive species.

Aerial views highlight a sliver of the huge business.

From above, the bamboo sticks look like beige sea urchins, their spines poking out in all directions. From the side, the twisted bundles look like sheaves of wheat, even taller than the people who are wrangling them. In October, the photographer Li Fusun visited a hub of chopstick production in Ji’an, a city of 4.8 million that sits within Jiangxi Province in southeast China. The sea of sticks is so vast that it dwarfs the workers who wade through it.

Ji’an’s bamboo operations are extensive, but also relatively recent, says Q. Edward Wang, author of the book Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History and a historian at Rowan University in New Jersey. The area is now home to a large chopstick factory, Wang says, “but I don’t think it has a long history.”

Broadly speaking, the roots of bamboo-chopstick production in China go deep. “Chopsticks were called ‘zhu’ in pre-20th-century China, written as 箸，筯，櫡, and pronounced the same as ‘zhu’ for bamboo, though with a different intonation,” says Wang. “All these characters for chopsticks have the bamboo radical, indicating the popularity of bamboo chopsticks since ancient times.” Wang points out that mentions of bamboo chopsticks date back to the Guanzi, the 7th century BC political treatise and philosophical tome attributed to the ancient thinker and statesman Guan Zhong.

Across the country, reusable and disposable chopsticks are a big business. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Daniel K. Gardner, a historian at Smith College who studies environmental issues in modern China, reported that some 100,000 laborers manufacture the implements at 300 factories.

China is the world's largest producer of disposable chopsticks, the Japan Times reported. Annually, Chinese chopstick factories fashion 80 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks, according to the South China Morning Post, and many of them wind up in the hands of diners elsewhere. China exported 165,000 tons of disposable chopsticks between 2000 and 2006, according to the Japan Times, from which 15 billion pairs wound up in Japan and South Korea. Writing for The New York Times, Rachel Nuwer reported that 77 percent of China's exported single-use chopsticks are shipped to Japan, 21 percent head to South Korea, and 2 percent land in the United States. Drawing on statistics from China’s forest service, Nuwer noted that “45 percent of disposable chopsticks are made from trees like cotton wood, birch, and spruce,” and the rest were bamboo.

Despite the export market, bamboo chopsticks aren’t equally popular everywhere they land. “In Korea and Japan, bamboo chopsticks are not as widely used as in Vietnam and China,” Wang says. In Japan, where disposable chopsticks are called waribashi, Wang says that bamboo varieties account for maybe 10 percent of chopsticks; in Korea, he adds, it’s probably even less. Where bamboo doesn't reign, metal, wood, or plastic varieties are more common. Meanwhile, the chopstick industry has been shaken up over the past few decades, as mounting fears about deforestation and mounds of trash have launched Greenpeace campaigns, taxes, and demand for reusable varieties in restaurants and homes, as well as the option to order food-delivery without the cutlery.

As a cooking utensil and eating implement, bamboo has a lot going for it. Because it’s not particularly porous and doesn’t absorb much water, it’s less likely than other woods to be teeming with bacteria, and it can take a lot of abuse in the kitchen. In terms of tensile strength—the extent to which a material can withstand being stretched before it snaps—researchers have found that bamboo holds its own against steel and reinforced plastics. Many bamboo chopsticks can be reused again and again. And unlike trees, bamboo grows at a dizzying pace. “The main reason for bamboo being so useful is that it is basically a grass which grows very fast—you’re looking at 36 inches in a 24-hour period,” says Wang. “It can grow 1.6 inches in an hour. It’s crazy.”

The production, from the rapid growth of the plant to the scope of the finished product, is hard to picture. Envisioning 80 billion of anything is a tall order. Viewing one small scene from above—the sticks on their own, then gathered into bundles—helps put it all in perspective.

Lowell’s preserves tradition—and maintains relevance—by adapting to the times.

As a gentle breeze blows through the open windows and Lyle Lovett croons on an old Sony boombox, workers and volunteers at Lowell’s Boat Shop do what they’ve always done. Saws buzz, sandpaper scrapes, and lumber bangs on floorboards coated with decades of sawdust and paint. Outside, on the Merrimack River, a line of wooden dories are moored near the shop. Cormorants sun themselves, wings outstretched, atop the gunwales.

Lowell’s is the oldest continuously operating boat shop in America. Located in Amesbury, Massachusetts, it's both a national landmark and a working museum—emphasis on working. Founded by Simeon Lowell in 1793, it was passed on to Benjamin Lowell, then to Hiram Lowell, and kept in the Lowell family for seven generations, until 1976. (After that it was bought by the Odell family, then the Newburyport Maritime Society, and finally, in 2006, Lowell’s Maritime Foundation, an independent nonprofit.)

The shop is famed for its dories—boats with wide flat bottoms and a simple construction that once abounded in these waters. Over the course of two centuries, more than a quarter of a million dories were produced in the U.S.

At Lowell’s, annual production was tracked on a beam inside the shop, where the years and numbers of boats produced were engraved—the way a parent might chronicle a child’s growth, ticking marks onto a door frame. In 1911, at the peak of its production, Lowell’s built an astonishing 2,029 boats—the prime engine of a then-mighty fishing fleet based in nearby Gloucester.

That vast output was possible thanks to the shop’s design and manufacturing innovations. Simeon Lowell made radical changes to traditional dory design, creating boats that were more durable and efficient than those that had come before. Thanks to their design, Lowell’s dories could be stacked neatly on larger ships—a key step when Gloucester fishermen, eager to boost production, began deploying fleets of dories from the decks of their schooners, rather than fishing from the schooners themselves using hand-lines.

The business was also one of the first in the nation to employ a sort of factory-type manufacturing. “Historically, the way it was done, these boats were mass produced,” says Graham McKay, the shop’s master boat-builder and current executive director. Each worker, he says, was responsible for a step in the building process, and the shop became like an assembly line. To improve efficiency, pieces of the boats were prefabricated. (During Lowell’s heyday, from the late 19th century into the early 20th, they could all be purchased from factories in downtown Amesbury.)

As the shop teems with workers on a sunny Monday, McKay explains the process. He points to a trap door in the attic through which stored prefab pieces were dropped to the main floor of the shop. There, the frames, stem, and transom were nailed to what would become the boat’s bottom—“literally bang[ed] ... together,” says McKay. The design was so streamlined, “you could almost have every piece made ahead of time.”

Once the base of the boat was built, the next step was to create the sides, through a process called planking. The lowermost plank of the boat’s hull, called the garboard, was fitted against the bottom of the boat. One by one, the next planks were added up from the garboard, against the frame of the boat, until the complete hull was formed—creating the boat’s shape from the ground up.

Lowell’s dories were planked using what’s called a lapstrake method, where the planks of the boat’s hull overlap one another; the bottom of each new plank was laid over the top of the plank below, up to the top. The increased thickness from these overlaps made the boats strong.

Once all the planks, from the garboard to the top, were overlaid and nailed to the frame, rails were fitted at the top. These fully assembled boats were carried to a door in the side of the building. Shop workers lowered them there, first to a deck by the river, then into a paint room in the lower level of the shop.

Workers there mixed the paint’s ingredients—white lead, turpentine, pine tar—together in a barrel. At one point in the early years, brick dust would be mixed in as well. “It made for a [distinctive] salmon-colored paint,” McKay says. “But it also made it kind of chalky. So it would rub off, versus flake off.”

At its peak, Lowell’s made an average of seven boats per day using this technique. Today, the shop builds about that many boats in a year. McKay and the shop's three other boat-building employees—along with dozens of volunteers—also do repairs and restorations.

But it’s only partly a commercial shop. These days Lowell’s has multiple revenue streams, including grant money, visitor donations, and the funds it generates from the boat-building classes McKay offers for kids and adults. The shop also hosts events, like rowing races; has an active presence on Instagram; and offers a membership program. It’s become less about building boats, and more about building a community around them.

“Most people preserve things by putting them behind glass,” says McKay. “We preserve ... things by continuing to do them and use them."

Some of the tools still in use at Lowell’s attest to this fact. A band saw, for instance, dates back to the late 1800s. A thickness planer, which takes a piece of wood and makes it thinner and thinner as it’s fed through and cut down to size, is from World War II. “They’ve always worked,” says McKay, “and they still work for what we’re doing.”

McKay grew up down the street and once took a boat-building class at Lowell’s himself, during high school. That’s where he first learned how to build dories the traditional way. After leaving home to work on tall ships and in boatyards, he came back about 10 years ago, when Lowell’s needed someone to run the shop.

“I didn’t realize that I was one of the few people around that knew how to do it—to use those notes and go through the process,” he says.

Now, he’s passing that tradition along, not just teaching students how to build boats but also cataloguing the slew of archival dory plans in the shop’s attic. He does his best to ensure that the plans he and the students use to build their boats are as close to the originals as possible. At Lowell’s Boat Shop, it seems, what’s old is new again.

As they’ve repaired and restored old vessels over the years, the boat-builders at Lowell’s have used a few modern technologies to identify—and prevent—recurring issues. In the 1970s and ’80s, for instance, the shop would slather the insides of its dories with epoxy, which creates a waterproof seal that prevents leaks. Now, the shop incorporates fiberglass into its boats, which makes them more durable.

Jeff Lane, a boat-builder and instructor at Lowell’s, is experimenting with a foam bottom for a 20-foot-long surf dory—a tack some boat-builders take to add stiffness and buoyancy. It’s something Lowell’s has never tried before—“it’s crazy by the standards around here,” Lane says—though it’s not exactly a novel technology.

It’s all a balancing act, says McKay—figuring out how to introduce modern innovations to a time-honored tradition, without changing what worked so well in the first place. That includes the materials. Most of the wood Lowell’s uses is still pine (from a mill just over the New Hampshire border) and locust (which is milled in the shop), just as it’s always been. “We use those because they’re local, they’re historically what was used, and they still work totally fine,” says McKay.

Today the museum drives a large part of Lowell’s traffic, and helps keep the shop afloat. A small exhibit space occupies what was once the paint room, where thousands upon thousands of dories were painted over the years. The remnants still cake the floors here, at some points thicker than the floorboards themselves, forming what McKay calls a “paint glacier.” There are also a few placards in this room, along with display cases and a television, mounted on the wall, that plays a video about the founding and progression of Lowell’s and its dories.

The goal of the museum space, which opened in 1994, is to give thousands of visitors each year—in 2017 there were 4,680—a sense of Lowell’s enduring place in the maritime industry over two centuries. But while they may appreciate the historical context, says McKay, “their primary interest is in what we’re doing now.”

That includes one of the shop’s current projects: restoring a replica of a light sailboat from the 1620s. Called a shallop, it’s a vessel that the Mayflower would’ve brought with it to America. Lowell’s is rebuilding this one to mark the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival in the New World. (Visitors will have to see it while they can, before it’s returned to Plymouth next April.)

When McKay first started at Lowell’s, he says, the place was pretty dead. “I was basically here by myself all day long, working on boats.” Now, he says—with the shop’s high-school apprentice program, a bustling events calendar, class offerings, and a healthy supply of volunteers—“you can’t get a day to yourself here unless it’s snowing out.”

Lowell’s is located on Main Street in Amesbury, which runs alongside the river. People drive by all the time, says McKay. He hopes that the shop’s maritime timelessness will continue to be a draw for curious visitors, and their donations.

“We exist now to host people who are interested in this kind of thing, and we just want them to come,” he says. It’s the educational aspect, the human interest, that keeps Lowell’s alive. It relies on people these days, not boats. If they cease to visit, Lowell’s will cease to exist.

But the best reason for visiting Lowell’s ultimately comes back to quality. “Your reputation relies upon making good boats that last,” McKay says. “And if you don’t adapt with the times, then you’ll go out of business. This place has always adapted with the times, which has kept it in business.”

Welcome to Haberman, Queens: Population 0.

Maps are reflections of our world—how it is organized, how we experience it—or at least that’s what they’re supposed to be. At their best, maps help you understand the space around you, but at their worst, they can warp reality, by stripping communities of their power or rights, for example. And you thought bad directions were the worst that could happen.

Maps are contentious in part because land is so often tied to identity. Urban neighborhoods, as one of the more nebulous and amorphous spaces for cartography, often make for interesting, if low-stakes, confusion. And when the desire to name and label everything runs into data and algorithms, strange things can happen.

In summer 2018, Jeff Sisson, a 31-year-old software engineer, was a new arrival to Queens, the largest borough in New York City by some 40 square miles. Sisson was getting to know his new environs by foot and bike, and one day while surfing Google Maps, he noticed something strange. He saw a designation on the map for something he had never heard of before, a place called Haberman.

“After having to route myself into some areas that are near that particular place in Queens, it just sort of stood out to me,” he says. “The size of it was large enough that implied something very real, present, and visible, but it was not totally clear what it referred to.”

The name was prominently displayed on the map, denoting a locale in western Queens. So Sisson decided to do some detective work. Was it the newest neighborhood rebranding effort by real estate moguls? Or the revival of an old, long-forgotten locality? A technologist by trade, Sisson started looking for answers via the same company that raised the question: He googled “Haberman.”

“I was just looking for things that are available to mere mortals,” Sisson says, “that might point to some origin about why this was on there.”

His search turned up a surprising (or unsurprising) number of local businesses that appeared to offer services to residents of Haberman: a dentist, a pressure washing company, bed bug exterminators. The businesses appeared to be legitimate, but Sisson thought the online presence a little fishy. The sites all seemed to be programmatically generated, with similarly awkward phrasing on each one, such as saying "in Haberman - Queens, NY" over and over again, probably to trick search engines into driving any kind of neighborhood-focused search traffic their way. “They were all a certain kind of website, one that’s sourced from piece of data that’s freely available,” he says. “It pointed at some not-exclusive-to-Google source for the data.”

So Sisson dug deeper. Where were all these websites pulling their information from? Between the uncanny business listings, Sisson found a brief Wikipedia entry for a long-defunct operation.

In September 1892, the Haberman Manufacturing Company in Maspeth, Queens, got a rail station to service its workers commuting from Long Island and elsewhere. The company specialized in enameling ironware—a pretty significant industry at the time, apparently. In 1893, the Haberman company even had a case heard before the Supreme Court. (It lost.) Though the company closed in 1920, the Haberman train station remained, at least until 1998, when the stop on what has come to be known as the Long Island Rail Road was permanently closed due to low ridership. (The previous year, Haberman averaged three riders per day.)

But how did this defunct train station end up looking like a neighborhood on Google Maps? Sisson got lucky in his search—one site specified a Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) number for Haberman, part of a system used by the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS maps had spaced neighborhood and train station names differently so they could be distinguished from one another, but somewhere along the line there had been some confusion, and Haberman was clearly listed as a populated place. Sisson speculates that a USGS employee made the simple mistake when the old maps were being digitized, and then those data got a second life then they were picked up by Google Maps’ algorithms.

On the most widely used maps—those made and distributed by tech companies such as Google, Apple, and Yelp—infinite amounts of information can be displayed. All you have to do is zoom in. So they’re data-hungry. Matt Zook, a geographer at the University of Kentucky, says that “Google is sort of promiscuous about data. It’ll pull it wherever it can find it.” But when it can, the company prefers reputable sources, such as the USGS.

The site of the former Haberman station is an industrial area populated mainly by extrajudicial NYPD parking spots and some package pickup depots. But it is still in the middle of a densely populated city. Sterling Quinn, a geographer at Central Washington University, is primarily focused on the West, but his work provides some insight into the curious case of Haberman. Out there, in an industrializing United States, train stations had become vital landmarks in sparsely populated areas. Today, many depots’ names remain prominent in Google Maps.

“In New York City, [Haberman] is kind of hidden among a bunch of other stuff. Let’s say you apply an algorithm that works out West, maybe it doesn’t work in this urban context,” he says. He points to the Hutterites, an ethnoreligious group that has a commune in rural Washington, west of Spokane, among many others. The Hutterites live in relative isolation, but as a populated place, their community has a GNIS number. In turn, in Google Maps, the Hutterite communities, with a variety of names, stick out like a bunch of sore thumbs on Google Maps.

“It’s ironic,” Quinn says, “because I think one goal was for them to get as off-the-map as possible.”

In a city, on the other hand, historical names that have long fallen out of use drift through and surface in the data in a whole new way—less as waypoints and more as artefacts of automation.

“Maps don’t only represent places, but they have the potential to create them,” says Quinn, who specializes in OpenStreetMap, an open-source, user-generated platform, and has recently spent time looking at disputes over names and borders that arise in online maps. “There is potential for maps to create, or at least exercise, an influence on the landscape,” he adds.

The Haberman case is relatively innocuous, but in 2008, concerns arose in Buffalo’s historically black Fruit Belt neighborhood when Google Maps algorithms labeled the area “Medical Park,” a nod to the rapidly growing medical center nearby. The misnomer was replicated across dozens of websites, a geographic error that had the effect of wiping a neighborhood and its history off the map. (Google revised their map in February 2018, a decade later.)

“What it basically comes down to is that people don’t like blank spots on a map,” Zook says. “You think back to Age of Exploration maps, the reason they put the little sea dragons and the ‘Here be monsters’ on the map is because they didn’t know what was there.”

Zook believes that there’s a “similar kind of thing” happening with Haberman. “This area was industrial,” he says. “There wasn’t a neighborhood feel to it. Since it really didn’t have an identity, I can imagine someone just saying here’s a name on this map, let’s add it.”

Haberman was a glitch, a mistake carried over, a relic, a product of the cartographic desire to display as much of the world as possible. Though, in strange twist, it may return. in 2018, a New York City Department of Transportation study actually recommended reviving Haberman station, among others.

Shortly after Sisson published his analysis on his research blog, Haberman disappeared from Google Maps. Though it’s possible that the algorithm corrected itself, the timing strikes Sisson as suspicious. And even if the peculiar case of Haberman is never fully settled, Sisson is sanguine.

“The thing I really wanted was a Google engineer to reach out to me,” he says. “I’m sure there’s an NDA reason that wouldn’t happen in a million years, but I hope that one day, in some bar, some guy will lean over and tell me ‘Hey, I deleted Haberman.’”

A tourism bureau's embrace of a tribal dish brings both promise and peril.

Three years ago, Sivarama Krishna, a senior chef at a hotel management school connected to the Andhra Pradesh Tourism Department, was scouring the southeastern Indian state for a dish that could put it on the map. He found what he was looking for in a lush mountain valley called Araku: bamboo biryani. The dish had all the right components of a breakout food star—it was delicious, hyperlocal, relatively unknown, and visually interesting. As an added bonus, it would once again give Andhra Pradesh a claim to biryani.

Andhra Pradesh had lost its claim to the popular rice dish due to a political divorce. When the less-developed region of what is now Telangana, whose residents long felt neglected and underrepresented, split to become its own Indian state in 2014, it took with it the thriving IT hub of Hyderabad, along with the city’s famed biryani. Made of layers of rice and meat slow-cooked with cardamom, saffron, and other spices, biryani came to India from Persia and became a staple across India’s Muslim communities. But even as it gained popularity and became one of the country’s best-known culinary exports, biryani has remained synonymous with Hyderabad.

For the state’s tourism bureau, this was a big concern. Last year, one official told the Indo-Asian News Service he worried potential tourists would think, “Even the famous Hyderabadi biryani has gone to Telangana. What is worth seeing in Andhra Pradesh?” Bamboo biryani was one response—perhaps Andhra Pradesh could have a biryani of its own.

That is because the bamboo-cooked variety of biryani is not from Hyderabad; in fact, it’s not from a city at all. Instead, its origins can be traced to the dense forests of Araku Valley, where indigenous communities, known as Adivasis (or “original inhabitants”) traditionally live. As centuries of migration and newcomers shaped what would become modern India, Adivasis lost access to much of their land, and British colonizers stigmatized many tribes. Today, despite being a minority group, 104 million Adivasis live in more than 700 different tribal communities across India. According to the Andhra Pradesh Tourism Department, there are 15 communities within Araku itself.

As part of the government’s push to increase tourism, Krishna visited those Araku communities in 2017 to collect Adivasi bamboo biryani recipes. He went on to teach nearly 80 other chefs, students, and stakeholders across the state the techniques, and encouraged them to put the item on their hotel and restaurant menus. As their traditional dish grows in fame thanks to this tourism strategy, the Adivasi cooks of Araku Valley have responded not only with interest, but innovation.

Sowbhagya Lakshmi, who comes from the Konda Dhora tribal community, is one of those Araku Valley-based chefs. In the village of Chaparai, she sells platters of bamboo biryani while her four-year-old son, Babu Muna, plays around her stall. Cars whiz past on the bridge where she cooks, and families wade in the waterfall behind her. Eight years ago, when Lakshmi started cooking bamboo biryani for a living, there were only a few stands like hers, she says. Now, during peak tourist season from November to January, there are close to 30 just on this road.

“We are slowly becoming popular,” she says. When I ask what makes bamboo biryani special, she replies, “Try it, then you’ll see!”

Generations ago, tribal communities in Araku made chicken and biryani in bamboo shoots as an alternative to expensive pots and pans. They discovered that bamboo is essentially the pressure cooker of the forest—its thick green shoots help food retain moisture while protecting it from high heat. Traditionally, bamboo chicken has been simple fare: chicken mixed with salt and red pepper, placed in bamboo and then set on an open flame. (With rice added, occasionally, to make biryani.) But despite the common misperception that indigenous traditions are locked in the past, Adivasi chefs like Lakshmi are using this ancient cooking technique alongside new and complex spices and flavors.

Lakshmi’s variety involves cubing chicken and mixing it with freshly diced red onion, tomatoes, and green chilis, before tossing in seasonings including bay leaves, ginger, cilantro, chili powder, coriander powder, a homemade masala of cloves and cinnamon, and a bright-red powder she calls jaji puvvu, or pulverized mace. Then she adds tangy rock salt blended with lemon in large pinches. After stuffing the hollow bamboo to the brim with chicken and rice and capping it with leaves, she places it directly on the fire for 45 minutes, where its green hue slowly morphs to charcoal black. After the outside has completely burned, she removes the leaf cap, and tips an aromatic meal of rice and chicken onto a bamboo leaf.

The stalls where Lakshmi works are now a destination for Indian tourists. One teen, Vishal, is visiting from Hyderabad, the city he says has “the best biryani ever.” He is curious what this rival biryani has to offer. Badri, another Hyderabadi teen, is skeptical. After his first bite, he says, “This one tastes different. Yes, the masalas are completely different.” But then he admits that he likes it and finishes off his plate.

Araku is connected to the rest of India by a narrow highway and a railroad that passes through tunnels and steep mountain switchbacks before emerging into a forested valley. Known for its coffee and cacao crops, most of the valley consists of villages linked by dirt roads, but downtown Araku is relatively developed and includes tourist attractions meant to showcase the region’s cultural and agricultural history. Here, visitors can walk from the somewhat-neglected Tribal Museum to the more polished Coffee Museum, and finish at a large chocolate shop with products made from locally grown cacao. Hotels and squat shops populate the main drag, and the stunning Eastern Ghats mountain range is never far from sight.

Within a block of the Tribal Museum, a cheerful man named Dombo shows off his family’s roadside stall. On this day, Dombo, who comes from the Bagata tribal community, is joined by his 15-year-old daughter Bhuvana. The two make bamboo biryani in practiced harmony; she takes the lead on seasoning the chicken and rice while he builds the fire. Dombo was a day laborer until five years ago, when an influx of tourists piqued his interest. He started an Adivasi food service with his wife after witnessing the rising popularity of bamboo chicken and bamboo biryani.

Bhuvana, who says that she likes her family’s bamboo biryani better than the more famous varieties, mixes together a blend of spices and—somewhat unusually for this dish— a healthy pour of ghee. Ghee, she says, helps prevent the biryani from sticking to the insides of the bamboo shoot when roasting.

As he turns over the bamboo shoots on the fire, Dombo wryly notes that he grew up eating a far simpler version of this dish. “I didn’t think much of it then,” he says. “I had it when I went to visit my family in the interior forest,” land that has belonged to Adivasi communities for generations. But like many tribal communities in Araku, Dombo’s relatives moved to the ever-expanding town, where developers from outside the community have felled swaths of trees to make way for new hotels and shops.

While Andhra Pradesh has embraced Araku’s most intriguing dish, the same cannot be said of the land where it comes from and the people who make it. Bharath Bhushan Mamidi, the director of the nonprofit Centre for Action Research and People’s Development, has spent several decades working with Araku’s tribal communities, and says that the valley has completely transformed over the past 20 years, largely to the detriment of the indigenous communities.

Because indigenous communities are often poor and unfamiliar with property deeds, Mamidi says that businesspeople from outside the valley have purchased their valuable property for a pittance. The state government spent more than a decade trying to mine bauxite (used to make aluminum) in the area, which would have catastrophic impacts on the environment. Community pressure has halted the project.

The new hotels and shops springing up across the region have brought Adivasi communities new opportunities and a broader customer base, but have also restricted access to their own land and natural resources. Government support, when it comes, has not made a serious dent in the low literacy rates and poor health outcomes of many tribal communities. And, Mamidi says, the indigenous communities often don’t benefit financially from the marketing of their cultural heritage, which is packaged and sold by businesses and the government without their input.

A middle-aged Adivasi woman who performs at a hotel run by the tourism department agrees. When growing up, she danced for celebratory events in her village. But now she and a troupe of 16 performers walk through the mountains each day to dance for tourists, earning around $2.50 each. “The money is not enough,” she says. She also has to work as a day laborer and care for her daughter, and she can’t afford to cook bamboo biryani herself.

While most Adivasis chefs speak more positively about tourism, many also recognize the risks and challenges that come with it. As Bhuvana splits a fresh bamboo shoot in half, presenting biryani on a natural platter, Dombo says he is happy about the food’s popularity. He has become a small business owner, and he has been able to experiment with variations on his traditional foods. Still, he notes that “people come from all over to try our food, and then copy it.”

Now, with more non-indigenous chefs cooking the dish across the state, it’s possible that the original Araku version won’t seem as unique. But the biryani cooks of Araku hope people will continue to make the trip over and through the surrounding mountains to eat bamboo biryani made by the people who know it best.

In a letter to her sister, the novelist politely recounts a grisly scene.

After dinner one evening in September 1813, Jane Austen sat down to write a letter to her sister Cassandra. Austen, who had published Pride and Prejudice earlier that year, had much to report from the home front. She had accompanied three nieces and her brother Edward to a Wedgewood china shop, she wrote, where they’d perused the wares. Other news was less pleasant: Earlier that day, they’d been to the dentist for an hour of “sharp hasty screams.”

“The poor Girls & their Teeth!” Austen wrote. “Lizzy’s were filed & lamented over again & poor Marianne had two taken out after all.” The dentist—a Mr. Spence, who could have been one of several Spences working as dentists at the time—had even gone after her niece Fanny’s teeth, though they had seemed in decent shape. "Pretty as they are," Austen recounted, the dentist had "found something to do them, putting in gold & talking gravely." That didn’t sit right with Austen, who wrote that the tool-happy man “must be a Lover of Teeth & Money & Mischief.” Austen remarked that she “would not have had him look at mine for a shilling a tooth & double it.” Her note, which is going under the hammer at Bonhams on October 23, is an intriguing (if squirm-inducing) dispatch from an era of grisly dental work.

At the time Austen penned the letter, dentistry was still painfully unstandardized. Treatments varied widely, and troublesome teeth were often yanked out by people from all sorts of professions. “In London and large towns, surgeons were available to pull out teeth, but elsewhere, apothecaries, quack tooth-drawers, and even blacksmiths might oblige,” write historians Roy Adkins and Lesley Adkins in Jane Austen’s England: Daily Life in the Georgian and Regency Periods.

Austen’s reference to filings in the letter “shows the diversity of practice because of the lack of scientific understanding of the causes of decay,” explains Rachel Bairsto, head of museum services at the British Dental Association Museum, in an email. There was a lot of disagreement about whether various interventions would offer the patient relief, or just plunge them deeper into pain. Though filing had historically been used to smooth out uneven teeth, Bairsto adds, some practitioners recommended it as a way to prevent cavities. Others disagreed, arguing that it “made more space to trap food.” In any event, Bairsto writes, “overzealous filing could make the teeth more sensitive.”

Even where tooth-pullers and oral hygiene tools were available—and it was mostly the wealthy who could access them—they weren’t necessarily a good idea. “Early toothbrushes with their horsehair bristles often caused more problems than they prevented,” writes medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris in The Guardian. “Toothpastes or powders made from pulverised charcoal, chalk, brick or salt were more harmful than helpful.” Eighteenth- and 19-century animal-hair bristles were breeding grounds for bacteria, which could make any existing mouth trouble even gnarlier.

Though holes in teeth were sometimes patched, fillings “were not commonly practiced, as they were expensive and often didn’t last long,” Bairsto writes. Extraction was the more common, and decidedly miserable, route. An extraction was often accomplished with the help of a dental key (also called a tooth key), which Bairsto describes as “rather a fearsome-looking instrument.” It’s a nightmarish claw-and-rod contraption, and it would have been wielded without anesthetic. Bleeding and infection often followed.

Once the infected incisors or meddlesome molars were out, they would sometimes be replaced with dentures, which could be made from walrus or hippo ivory, porcelain, or teeth removed from other unfortunate people, living or dead. (When the Battle of Waterloo felled thousands of soldiers, “clients back in England were happy to wear dentures made from the teeth of fit young men killed in battle, which became known as ‘Waterloo teeth,’ or, more coyly, ‘Waterloo ivory,’” Adkins and Adkins note.) Dentures weren’t without their drawbacks, Bairsto writes: They had a tendency to stink and rot in the mouth, “and the use of a fan was required to waft the stench.”

By the middle of the 19th century, the world’s first dental school had opened in Baltimore, Maryland, Collectors’ Weekly reported, and across the pond, Queen Victoria had helped make it fashionable to own a personal set of dental tools. Her scalers—tools used to scrape off gunk—were outfitted with mother-of-pearl handles and gold detailing. That was of no help to Austen.

Because oral hygiene was expensive, Bairsto writes, “it is unclear" whether the Austens routinely used toothbrushes. For the most part, writes historian and Austen biographer Lucy Worsley in Jane Austen at Home, “Jane and her family simply had to put up with the small aches and ailments of life.” Even so, references to dentistry—and the anxiety that a visit to a dentist might incite—appear in some of the writer’s fiction. In Emma, Harriet has “a tooth amiss,” and is reported to appear a bit “out of spirits.” That’s “perfectly natural,” readers are told, “as there was a dentist to be consulted.” In Austen’s realm, even fictional characters knew that a visit to a dentist could sour an afternoon.

Janeites are a devoted bunch—the sight of her writing table, at the Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, England, often prompts rapt reverence, or even tears—and the letter is likely to be catnip for her most enthusiastic reader-disciples. (Bonhams expects the letter to sell for somewhere between $80,000 and $120,000.) For everyone else, it’s a macabre memento from a time when the sharp end of a dentist’s tool was a place you really, truly did not want to be.

The Tay Whale brought together science, spectacle, and hucksterism in the quest to turn a buck.

In the winter of 1883, the Scottish city of Dundee was a good place for an enterprising showman, a frustrating place for a comparative anatomist, and a truly terrible place for a wayward humpback whale. That season, and for months after, a deep-pocketed oil merchant hauled a massive cetacean carcass across the United Kingdom and charged bystanders for an up-close glimpse, while a curious scientist named John Struthers did his best to tune out the crowds, the cameras, and the tooting band, and learn something.

In December of that year, some local folks caught sight of a spout or fin in waters where they didn’t expect to, in the Firth of Tay, the estuary where Dundee sits. It was unusual to see a humpback so near the coast, and locals suspected it may have been enticed by a particularly large shoal of European sprat, a fish in the same family as herring. (Though humpbacks have a mouth full of baleen, most often associated with a diet of krill, they also feast on small fish.) The young whale had little chance of getting out alive. Whalers who cruised Arctic waters frequently wintered in Dundee, and at the time the city “was the premier whaling town of the British Empire,” said Mike Sedakat, curator of botany and zoology at The McManus in Dundee, where the whale’s bones would eventually come to rest and are still on display today, in a video produced by the museum. “So, unfortunately, this was very bad timing on this whale’s part.”

The sighting sent excitement rippling through town. "Many of the townsfolk knew about whales but had never seen one, and many came to watch it leaping out of the water, including adults who skived off of work and children who skived school," writes Sedakat in an email. "After a few days, the whalers, both professional and amateur, decided to catch the whale."

“On 31 December, the quarry was finally struck by several harpoons,” according to M.J. Williams, a consultant physician at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, in a blow-by-blow account published in the Scottish Medical Journal more than a century later. Though the whale was hit by “a four-foot-long iron, two marley spikes and several nuts and bolts,” it ultimately snapped the harpoon line and swam free. But the whalers were “convinced mortal injury had been done.” A week later, they were proved right.

A group of fishermen approached what they believed to be a capsized ship, only to discover that it was the carcass of the whale that got away, Williams writes, still “bristling with the Dundonians’ hardware.” They towed it to shore in the town of Stonehaven, in Aberdeenshire. "The local pubs made a lot of profit from visitors who wished to see the whale and have a pint afterward," Sedakat says. Soon, John Struthers sped over to take a look. A surgeon, comparative anatomist, and Darwin devotee, Struthers had set out to open a zoology museum at the University of Aberdeen, stocked with specimens that would illustrate Darwin’s theories.

Struthers measured the whale, but he wasn’t permitted to cart it back to his lab. The fate of the 45-foot, 29-ton cetacean was decided at auction, where a local oil merchant named John Woods—“Greasy Johnny”—paid £226 (about $34,000 today). It came to be known as the Tay Whale, for the body of water it had strayed into. Twenty horses hauled the carcass half a mile to Woods’s scrap yard, Williams writes. It took 26 hours.

Almost immediately, Woods went into the souvenir business. He commissioned commemorative photographs of the whale, Williams writes, “whereby the dull surroundings of the yard were replaced by a scenic view of the Silvery Tay, with rail bridge and a sunset on imaginary hills.” And he began charging for views. On a single Sunday afternoon, 12,000 visitors paid to gawk. In a town of 200,000, some 50,000 turned out to see the whale. "Enthusiastic visitors even jumped on the whale's back and did somersaults on it!" Sedakat says.

The exhibit inspired a poem by William McGonagall—a writer the Scottish Poetry Library has ruthlessly (and hilariously) derided for “his unwitting butchery of the art form,” laden with “erratic scansion, wince-inducing rhymes, and naif treatment of weighty subject matter.” McGonagall’s giddy “The Famous Tay Whale” ends:

Then hurrah! for the mighty monster whale,
Which has got 17 feet 4 inches from tip to tip of a tail!
Which can be seen for a sixpence or a shilling,
That is to say, if the people all are willing.

Though he had been outbid for possession of the whale, Struthers, the anatomist, still wanted a crack at it. Woods wasn’t keen to lose his cash cow, but he was willing to play along. They cut a deal: Struthers could dissect the whale as long as Woods could invite the paying public to watch. The procedure would boast the “added attraction of background music by the band of the 1st Forfarshire Rifle Volunteers,” Williams writes.

Woods also needed Struthers to help salvage what was left of the decaying creature. Dead things smell terrible, and even in the Scottish winter the whale was decomposing fast. The creature “has not been looking quite his best since he was brought to terra firma,” the Aberdeen Journal reported on January 26, 1884, and with each passing day, the whale “became less attractive to the eyes, and especially to the noses, of its visitors.” Because so much of the carcass had rotted away, the paper added, it was getting harder to even tell what it was: Many were disappointed to discover after paying their entry fee that the whale’s “only recognizable feature was his tail.”

On a stormy day at the end of January, Struthers set to work—surrounded by a crowd and accompanied by a band playing tunes that were anything but solemn. He was dressed to the nines, in a top hat and tailcoat, according to Stuart Waterston, a plastic surgeon who coauthored an article about Struthers’s anatomical exploits. Struthers opened the animal “with a massive incision from umbilicus to anus,” Williams wrote, working through skin, blubber, and viscera before removing its heart. (He would go on to use the organ in lectures, the Aberdeen Weekly reported, to show the creature’s anatomy and speculate about how well-oxygenated blood helped the whale stay underwater for long stretches of time.) As Struthers worked, the decomposed “viscera and muscles … poured out in a messy pulp” up to his knees, Williams writes. The sprinkling of sawdust, meant to absorb the gore and the stink, wasn’t up to the task. “To anyone with a dainty nose,” the Aberdeen Journal reported, “it would be almost, if not quite, intolerable.”

After the dissection, Woods hatched a plan to extend the afterlife of his money-making scheme. He had the carcass embalmed, stretched over a wooden “backbone,” and stuffed back into some semblance of its original shape. He took the show on the road, carting it to Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and farther, the Glasgow Herald reported in 1884. The tour finally wound down in steamy August—seven months after the whale was killed—and Struthers dissected what was left of the body, including the head.

In one of the dissections, Sedakat says, Struthers stumbled across something surprising and sad: an unconscious human man inside the whale's remains. "One of the audience recognized him as a homeless man from Fife, a district across from Dundee, who used to sneak on the ferry," Sedakat says. "It is thought that he was looking for a warm place to spend the night and went inside the whale's mouth whilst it was on a train carriage [traveling between cities]. Unfortunately he could not be revived, even with shocks from galvanic batteries and gunfire."

There was at least one more stop on the whale's postmortem journey: “Several lorry loads of the flesh and bones were then packed up and consigned to Aberdeen University,” the Herald stated, where Struthers would prepare an articulated skeleton.

But whale bones can’t go on display right away: They’ve got to be stripped of any lingering flesh—a task that can involve compost and hungry beetles—and degreased to remove the oil that suffuses their bones. The entire process is a slog. By May 1887, nearly three years later, Struthers predicted that they still had a ways to go. “The smell is still strong in those of them which remained so long in the body during the time it travelled, the contact with the blubber having both discolor them and apparently made them more full of oil,” he was quoted as saying in the Aberdeen Journal. “I believe it will take the sunshine and wind of the whole summer before they are sweet enough to be placed in a museum without offense to the visitors.”

The whole performance—the auction, the attraction, the dissection, the tour—were in keeping with a kind of rogue showmanship that was in vogue at the time. Other hucksters had lured paying visitors with the promise of something natural-seeming, wondrous, and unfamiliar. There was the mediocre statue billed as the Cardiff Giant, excavated in New York in the 1860s and touted as a petrified man—evidence that biblical giants once roamed the Earth. P.T. Barnum, not one to let such a moment pass him by, commissioned his own copy of the hoax, and already had a history with the so-called FeeJee Mermaid, a sharp-toothed, taloned, scaly creature that is part carp, part papier-mâché, and zero percent mermaid. That little pastiche of a creature eventually wound up in the collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. “It speaks to early museums and early collecting practices, which are a mix of scientific natural history and the spectacle,” said Diana DiPaolo Loren, a curator at the museum, in a university video. “And this clearly is the spectacle.” Unlike those examples, the Tay Whale was real flesh, blood, and blubber—but it shared with those other examples the 19th- and 20th-century impulse to merge science, entertainment, and creative license to turn a buck.

"The inhabitants had mixed views" about the famously killed whale, Sedakat says. "Many condemned the carnage inflicted on such a magnificent animal." The writer of the 1884 Aberdeen Journal article about the whale did chew over whether it could have been an attraction and still be left to its watery life. “He might have taken kindly to the beautiful estuary which forms the mouth of the river, and paid it periodic visits—and surely that would have been honour enough to Dundee,” the writer mused.

But presented with an opportunity to make a buck, the writer ultimately concluded, who could say no? When life gives you a whale—in this case, less “given” than “taken,” with great sweat and expense—you make the most of it. The same impulse nearly drove the humpback and other whales to extinction, and threatened many other species. “The purpose of converting [the whale] into as much money as possible was one of the most natural that could be entertained,” the reporter wrote. That sense that the money-making instinct is “natural” and something to be celebrated is what sent the creature on its long, stinking, sad journey across a country—even as it fell to pieces before visitors’ eyes.

Plautilla Nelli was likely the first woman in history to paint the iconic biblical scene.

In the early 1990s, Jonathan Nelson was searching for a little-known but historic Florentine painting: “Last Supper” by Plautilla Nelli, an Italian nun who is said to have taught herself to paint in the 16th century. Nelson, an art historian, was working on the first-ever book about Nelli, but he wasn’t sure whether her painting of the famous Biblical scene still existed, or where, exactly, it had ended up. He tried the museum of Santa Maria Novella, a Dominican church where it was last seen in the 1930s. When he couldn’t find it there, he asked the father superior for permission to enter the Santa Maria Novella monastery.

“It was in the refectory used by the friars,” says Nelson, who now teaches at Syracuse University’s Florence Program. “I had to go see it right after lunch.” A refectory is a dining hall or cafeteria used by nuns or monks, traditionally decorated with a Last Supper, and this refectory, Nelson recalls, was far from monumental. “This was a simple, modern room that had this Renaissance painting on the wall, and beneath it was a Formica table that had the remains of the friars’ lunch,” he says.

Nelson didn’t even notice Nelli’s signature in the painting’s upper left corner, until he returned to study the work with conservation-grade lighting. “It says orate pro pictora, which is ‘pray for the painter,’” he says. “So the scene you should imagine is that, with some dirty plates next to us, in a dirty, humble room, we’re looking at an unknown work that virtually no one had ever seen. And we found the artist speaking to us, asking us to pray for her. It was a moving moment.”

Nelli’s “Last Supper,” completed around 1568, was remarkable for several reasons. Of eight iconic paintings in Florence that showed Jesus dining with his 12 apostles, six were frescoes, painted directly onto wet plaster and nearly impossible to move. But this one was portable, painted on a canvas that had moved several times over the centuries. More strikingly, this was the first-known depiction of the Last Supper by a woman worldwide. Both these facts help explain why the painting still exists—and why it was just unveiled in public for the first time in 450 years.

Plautilla Nelli first picked up a paintbrush at Florence’s Santa Caterina da Siena convent, which she entered at age 14 in the footsteps of her older sister. The convent attracted many creative women from respectable Florentine families, and within its cloistered walls, Nelli and her sisters painted and sold manuscripts, devotional paintings, and embroidered textiles. Nelli is often described as Florence’s first woman painter, and she was either taught how to paint by another nun, or, more likely, taught herself.

Soon she was painting large, elaborate compositions, highly uncommon for women at the time. Her “Last Supper,” created for the refectory of Santa Caterina, was especially ambitious. At roughly 23 feet wide and six-and-a-half feet tall, the canvas was almost as long as Leonardo da Vinci’s famous take on the subject, and filled with life-sized figures. Nelli’s grand project would have required scaffolding and assistants, an expensive undertaking that the nuns proudly paid for themselves.

Nelli didn’t paint her “Last Supper” background to look like the dining hall it was designed for, a trick other artists used to make the scene relatable. Instead, she showed Jesus and his apostles dining on the same food that Santa Caterina’s Domincan nuns ate: a whole roasted lamb, bread, wine, heads of lettuce, and fresh fava beans—the last two dishes unprecedented in any depiction of Christ’s last meal. The fava beans were a wink to local cuisine, a Florentine specialty normally eaten by peasants (and nuns).

Giorgio Vasari, the early art historian, saw Nelli’s “Last Supper” when it was still surrounded by dining tables at Santa Caterina. “She shows that she would have done marvelous things if she had enjoyed, as men do, opportunities for studying, and devoting herself to drawing and representing living and natural objects,” he wrote in the 1568 edition of his book Lives of the Artists. Vasari’s comment recognizes Nelli’s talent, but also hints at the fact that Nelli was limited by what she could teach herself. Nelli couldn’t paint in the highly technical and physically demanding medium of fresco, which was then considered strictly a man’s job.

The nuns dined alongside Nelli’s oil painting for over two centuries—but then came a new era. In the late-18th century, Napoleon’s forces invaded Italy and began to suppress religious orders. In 1808, the Santa Caterina convent was dissolved, and Nelli’s “Last Supper” was almost lost to history.

It is said that when God closes a door, he opens a window. When the powers-that-be shuttered Santa Caterina, Nelli’s masterpiece began a journey that would ultimately allow the public to see it. The helpfully portable oil painting was rolled up and moved to a still-active Dominican order, Santa Maria Novella, just a mile away. It migrated a few times within its adoptive home, first to the attic (where some damage and paint loss occurred) and then to a grand 14th-century refectory that would serve as a long-term home.

By the 1930s, it was in the smaller, more modern dining hall where Nelson spotted it. It remained there even after Santa Maria Novella’s historic refectory opened as a museum in 1983. “The monks wanted it in their dining hall, essentially,” explains Linda Falcone, director of Advancing Women Artists (AWA), an American nonprofit that identifies and restores art by women in Tuscany. “They chose to have it in their private quarter.”

The friars were supportive of restoration efforts on Nelli’s “Last Supper,” but they didn’t want to permanently release it from their refectory. “They saw it as part of their day-to-day life and were very concerned that I and other art historians and officials would want to remove it from their dining room,” Nelson recalls of the monks’ attitude when he saw the painting in the 1990s. “Which is exactly what happened.”

As it happened, AWA advocated for the restoration and relocation of the painting. Jane Fortune, the late founder of the nonprofit, embarked on a 10-year project to raise $220,000 for conservation, research its legal ownership, and negotiate its placement in a public space. In a strange twist of fate, Napoleon’s reforms not only closed Santa Caterina, but also provided the AWA with a legal justification for moving the painting to a museum: Under Napoleon’s law of suppression, the “Last Supper” became public property when it was removed from the convent.

It’s not easy to relocate a monumental painting in Florence—a city that can feel more like a museum than a metropolis, with every church, building, piazza, and bridge packed with original cultural treasures. For one thing, there’s the tricky matter of moving a wall-sized canvas. Not wanting to roll the “Last Supper” up like Napoleon’s henchmen, six art movers carefully conveyed the painting out of Santa Maria Novella’s refectory.

“They built scaffolding and had mechanical things to lay the painting flat and lower it,” Falcone recalls. “Almost like Legos, or a car jack.” The art handlers hoisted the painting into a truck and drove to a restoration studio, where they built more scaffolding to bring it in through a window. “There are two flights of stairs to get to the first floor,” explains Falcone. “The painting couldn’t make the turn.”

Of course, you can’t just hang a painting anywhere you want in Florence. “Whenever you put a painting in a public museum, there has to be a historical justification for it,” Falcone explains. The Santa Maria Novella Museum seemed like the most suitable new home, because it is part of the same church complex and has a refectory that is big enough to accommodate it. It will also share the space with another Florentine “Last Supper,” painted around 1582 by Nelli’s contemporary, Alessandro Lori. “It’s going to be placed in an environment in which the painting is dialoguing with other paintings of its time,” Falcone says.

Falcone hopes this dialogue adds to a different Renaissance narrative, one in which more women artists have a seat at the table. Nelli’s “Last Supper” is the only permanently exhibited original artwork by a woman at Santa Maria Novella, which has become a hub housing in situ masterpieces by Italian Renaissance greats such as Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Ghirlandaio (made with help from his apprentice, Michelangelo). Starting in October 2019, visitors can buy tickets to see it any day of the week.

After the long and winding history of Nelli’s “Last Supper,” its installation in Santa Maria Novella’s museum was surprisingly straightforward. Nothing had to be cleared from the wall of the rectangular refectory to make room for her “Last Supper.” A 23-foot stretch of wall was already available, sandwiched between the historic monastery’s basilica and grand cloister. “The wall was waiting," says Falcone. "It was waiting for Nelli."

Justin Yip's satay is winning over nationalistic eaters.

Italy is undoubtedly one of the world’s culinary epicenters. Techniques and recipes honed over centuries, brought to or born on the fertile peninsula, have spread worldwide, attracting millions of tourists each year seeking pinnacles of gastronomy.

On the other hand, Italy’s international food scene leaves much to be desired. Justin Yip pulls no punches: “It’s the worst place in the world for non-Italian food.” Two years ago, he opened the first and likely only Malaysian food truck in the country.

In many ways, Yip’s truck, Sate & Sake, is the antithesis of Italy’s food culture. Selling traditional satays and currys to the robust student population of Turin, Malaysian-born Yip stands for fast-casual foreign fare in the home of three-ingredient masterpieces and the Slow Food movement.

He’d hoped to build a business by feeding Asian exchange students. Instead, it’s the Italians themselves who are the backbone of his clientele—over 90 percent, by Yip’s estimate. “I was hoping to win over some Italians, but I didn’t expect this many,” he says.

The culture isn’t exactly begging for alternative eating formats. In 1986, hundreds gathered at the Spanish Steps in Rome to protest the opening of Italy’s first McDonald’s franchise by handing out free bowls of penne. The protests birthed the Slow Food Movement, whose ranks now number in the millions, spanning more than 160 countries. It’s headquartered in Bra, Italy – an hour from Yip’s truck.

Italians don’t have the world’s most adventurous palates, either. “My friends say it’s too spicy,” says Andrea Fogli, an Italian engineering student who travels alone to eat Yip’s food. “I think it’s because they’re wary to try something new.”

Another Sate & Sake regular, Malaysian-born transportation student Hasan Rosman, runs into the same issue cooking for Italian friends. “They’re very arrogant about foreign food. They’re used to simple ingredients, so when they try something more colorful and vivid, they worry they’ll have stomach problems.” A 2011 study showed that 40 percent of Italians had never eaten any foreign food.

Given this lack of appetite for foreign fare, Turin, like many Italian cities, offers little in the way of non-Italian cuisine. The handful of Chinese buffets and sushi restaurants it does offer, says Rosman, “lack a certain level of emotion."

If the generalizations are just that, municipal legislation is illuminating. In 2009, the Tuscan city of Lucca stopped issuing permits to non-Italian eateries, as one city council member said, “to preserve our cultural and historical identity.” The same happened in Forte dei Marmi in 2011, and again in Florence in 2016. Culinary patriotism hit a fever pitch when the Minister of Agriculture appeared in a news conference to back these measures that banned foreign cuisine. Asked if he’d ever eaten kebab, he replied, “No. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I refuse to even eat a pineapple.”

Yip moved to Italy nine years ago and earned a degree from the University of Gastronomic Science in Bra. He says he fell in love with the country and opened the truck as a means to stay, but also to expose Italians to a world beyond their own heritage. “I hate to see people turn their nose up at something they’ve never tried before. They don’t want to know. I wanted to change that.”

He knew he’d have his work cut out for him. When presenting something new in a food mecca, says Rosman, “you have to make it right the first time.” To change minds and make a good first impression, he spears more than 200 chicken skewers, which soak overnight in a marinade he’s spent years perfecting, every morning.

But unrealistic food-truck regulations made simply parking his truck a challenge all its own. By law, the truck must be relocated every hour, even though it takes him 15 minutes to set up and another 15 to pack up. He’s also barred from operating within 200 meters of a school or 100 meters of a church. “But this is Italy,” he says, “there’s a church on every corner.”

Yip quickly learned that if he parked under a pedestrian bridge between two buildings, the authorities would leave him be. The son of a nurse and a surgeon, he's not sneaky by nature. To run his business, however, “I’m totally flouting the law,” he says, “but I guess that’s a very Italian attitude itself.”

Over the years, Yip has perfected the art of employing traditional Malaysian techniques to make satay Italians love. “I’ve lived here so long I can almost think like an Italian in terms of food,” he says. While he cut the spiciness and sweetness from Malaysian standards (“Sweet and savory don’t mix here”), he takes care to spear a bit of chicken skin between each chunk of thigh meat. “That’s how traditional satay sellers do it in Malaysia, that’s the secret,” he says. A healthy charring adds flavor as well as texture.

Yip knew getting Italians to eat fast-casual Malaysian would be an uphill task, but figured, “Who doesn’t love barbecue?” Italian-born media student and now Sate & Sake-regular Lorenzo Dell’Anna certainly does. “I didn’t know what satay was,” he says. “It was a bit crunchy, but also tender, which really made it one of a kind. There’s nothing like Justin’s truck anywhere in Italy.” For Rosman, Yip’s satay hits on nostalgia; he grew up in a Kuala Lumpur neighborhood called Kajang that's famous for its satay. “Justin makes satay just how I remember eating it as a child,” he says.

The warm Italian reception still surprises Yip. “Seeing my customers every day, I can sometimes forget that not every Italian would like my food. But whatever, it’s a free market.” If the next two years look like the last, he is prepared to open a brick and mortar location in Turin. He now hopes, with his food, to invite others to faraway lands: “I want to let them experience a world outside of Italy which is scary, which is exotic, and might have some offensive flavors.”

Without jumping in the frigid North Atlantic.

On a stormy October night several centuries ago, Melckmeyt (“Milkmaid”), a Dutch merchant ship, wrecked off the miniscule Icelandic island of Flatey, in a smuggler’s run gone awry. Since the wreck of the 108-foot vessel was rediscovered under 40 feet of water in 1992, maritime archaeologists have pored over the remains to learn everything they could about it and the circumstances that brought it to Iceland and then sent it to the depths. Now, to commemorate the 360th anniversary of the shipwreck, archaeologists have released a 360-degree virtual dive experience so the public can experience Melckmeyt (nearly) firsthand.

The dive, which can be navigated on YouTube (below; click and drag to look around) or using a VR setup, takes viewers on a brief tour of the length of the vessel’s remains as they appear today, with labels for the parts of Melckmeyt. Then, the experience takes another pass—this time alongside a reconstructed Melckmeyt, showing what it may have looked like the day after the storm that ended its maritime career.

John McCarthy, a maritime archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, built the model, which was originally only available to be experienced at the Reykjavík Maritime Museum. He describes it as 2.5-D, since a more immersive 3-D version would have taken some serious computer power, making it available to fewer people.

“We wanted it to go out into the public, and show it to people,” he says. “We showed it to every single person that lives on [Flatey]. All five of them.”

To build the model of the wreck as it appears today, McCarthy’s team created a photogrammetric mesh—combining sonar data with actual photos—of the entire wreck. And to develop the historical view of the ship just after it sank, McCarthy used as a reference his collection of dozens of model ships.

“I've traveled all over Europe to get them, to try and build up this library of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch merchant ships,” he says. “These are some of the most famous ships in the discipline of maritime archaeology.”

Melckmeyt was a flute ship—what some call the “workhorse of the merchant marine,” McCarthy says. It was owned by Dutchman Jonas Trellund, for whom business was booming in 1659. Sweden was at war with Denmark, and Trellund was a merchant of the most intrepid sort. He sent his fleet of seven ships to Danish-ruled Iceland under a false Danish flag, which enabled him to fill the trade vacuum created by Sweden’s pressure to keep actual Danish ships in port. So the wreck of Melckmeyt represents war profiteering, gutsy commerce, and the opportunism of the Dutch mercantile empire. Though Melckmeyt was the only ship that ran aground that night, Trellund’s fortunes turned in time, and he died destitute around 1680.

“The Baltic was filled with thousands of these ships every year,” says McCarthy. “They were the backbone of the wealth of the Netherlands. You see them in a lot of paintings, but actually finding intact shipwrecks of the type is quite rare.”

Now digitally recreated and widely available, Melckmeyt offers a glimpse of this submerged history to people who would rather stay high and dry than brave the frigid North Atlantic in person.

“Most people have never been to Iceland or these remote locations where these shipwrecks are found,” McCarthy says. “I'm hoping that people will get an otherwise completely impossible chance to experience what it's like to visit this site.”