A "plant studbook" might help botanic gardens bring rare breeds back from the brink.

It was 2013, and botanist Seana Walsh had a pollen problem. She was working at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kaua’i, trying to breed a severely endangered Hawaiian plant. Brighamia insignis is known as the ‘ōlulu in Hawaiian; in English, it’s jokingly called “cabbage on a stick.” But when Walsh tried to collect pollen from the staminal columns of different flowers in the garden, almost nothing came off. The little pollen Walsh did collect turned out to have extremely low viability—similar to low sperm count in animals. For the ‘ōlulu, this meant low odds of the plants successfully reproducing.

The urgency of Walsh’s work came from an alarming fact: Only one ‘ōlulu plant was known to exist in the wild, hanging from its preferred cliffside habitat on Kaua’i’s Nā Pali coast. Walsh had never seen that particular individual, but she’d visited other plants in botanical gardens across the Hawaiian Islands. Now, she was studying the plant’s breeding strategy (likely accomplished with help from moths in the wild) and attempting to coax the reproductive process along by hand.

Walsh wasn’t sure what had caused the paltry pollen harvest. Maybe it was the result of environmental differences between the botanical garden and the natural habitat—it might be hotter or drier, for example, or lacking certain nutrients in the soil. Or maybe there was some Hapsburg effect happening: the plants had experienced too much inbreeding.

But what if Walsh could play matchmaker for Brighamia insignis plants with drastically different genes? Botanical gardens and private greenhouses around the world have cultivated thousands of them and other plants, in part to study and preserve species that are rare, or potentially useful. Maybe she could mix and match distinct individuals from the same species, creating a more genetically robust population of plants, and then return those healthy cabbages to the wild.

Walsh and colleagues envision what they call a plant studbook. The idea came from a tool for captive breeding in zoos: population management software, or PMX, which works to track the lineage of different species. Say you’ve got Siberian tigers in a dozen zoos around the world, but don’t know which individuals would be best suited as mates. If the species is being tracked by the software, it’s relatively easy to answer that question. (The logistics of bringing the new couple together may be a lot more complicated.)

Often, when plants are as rare as the ‘ōlulu, they’ll be preserved in seed banks such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. But only 80 percent of plant species are amenable to the seed banking technique. The other 20 percent don’t tolerate freezing, fail to produce enough seeds, or have some other quality that makes them less than ideal candidates for storage. In these circumstances, having a studbook available for breeding plants would be a huge advantage. “It’s a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t yet exist for botanic gardens,” says Kayri Havens, a plant scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Havens and a handful of others have teamed up with Walsh to test the idea out on three plants other than the ‘ōlulu: a cycad endemic to the Bahamas called Zamia lucayana, currently managed by the Montgomery Botanical Center in Florida; the Quercus oglethorpensis tree, threatened by chestnut blight; and Amorphophallus titanum, the famously smelly and seldom-blooming “corpse flower.” The researchers are currently working to document the lineage of these plants in garden collections around the world, either by genetic sequencing or based on their collection history. “There are as many as 50,000 species that might benefit from this approach,” Havens says.

We live in an age of extinctions, and plant species are going extinct even more frequently than animals. In 2010, 844 plant taxa were found to be extinct in the wild. Recent research found that since 1900, an average of eight plants have gone extinct per year. Botanic gardens are in a unique position as stewards of the last living individuals of numerous species. “We know these species will go extinct if we don’t do something, because we’re the last place they’re at,” says Andrea Kramer, another botanist at the Chicago Botanic Garden who’s involved in the project.

To understand the ancestry of Brighamia insignis, Walsh and molecular ecologist Jeremie Fant looked at the genetics of the plant to see how much diversity was left in garden populations, and identified three genetic clusters for the plant. This is too expensive a strategy to be used on every species, so for now the idea is to track mother populations, which produce the seeds or cuttings that grow into new plants.

But it’s a tricky process. Plant reproduction is significantly more complicated than most animal reproduction: Some plants reproduce asexually, some are pollinated randomly by the wind, some rely on specific birds or insects to act as pollinators (in the case of botanic gardens, humans fill in). The team thinks its technique could revolutionize how botanical gardens manage their collections. Even if the plants can never be returned to the wild, keeping them healthy will still mean they won’t go completely extinct.

Christine Edwards, a conservation geneticist at the Missouri Botanical Garden who is not affiliated with the project, thinks the concept holds great promise. “This type of software may allow botanical gardens to maintain fewer individuals while preserving a large proportion of the genetic diversity of a species,” Edwards writes in an email. “This may allow them to have additional capacity to conserve a greater diversity of endangered plant species.”

There are even bigger plans afoot for the ‘ōlulu. If the researchers can produce more robust plants, the goal is to get them planted back in the wild by 2023 or 2024. Right now, researchers aren’t sure there are any wild plants left—drone surveys are currently ongoing to see if the lone Kaua’i plant is still there. Any specimens that they plant in the wild will still have to contend with all the things that pushed them to the edge of extinction: hurricanes, ravenous goats, competition from invasive plants. But at least they’ll be genetically hardy.

Walsh is cautiously optimistic that the ‘ōlulu could come back from the brink. “If you asked me if I thought it was going to be possible to restore Brighamia insignis to the wild before I knew about these possibilities, I probably would’ve said no,” Walsh says. “But now I’m excited to see what comes out of all this.”

The author, known as the "Lord of Misrule," had the audacity to erect a maypole in Massachusetts.

Apparently, Thomas Morton didn’t get the memo. The English businessman arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 with the Puritans, but he wasn’t exactly on board with the strict, insular, and pious society they had hoped to build for themselves. “He was very much a dandy and a playboy,” says William Heath, a retired professor from Mount Saint Mary’s University who has published extensively on the Puritans. Looking back, Morton and his neighbors were bound to butt heads sooner or later.

Within just a few short years, Morton established his own unrecognized offshoot of the Plymouth Colony, in what is now the town of Quincy, Massachusetts (the birthplace of presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams). He revived forbidden old-world customs, faced off with a Puritian militia determined to quash his pagan festivals, and wound up in exile. He eventually sued and, like any savvy rabble-rouser should, got a book deal out of the whole affair. Published in 1637, his New English Canaan mounted a harsh and heretical critique of Puritan customs and power structures that went far beyond what most New English settlers could accept. So they banned it—making it likely the first book explicitly banned in what is now the United States. A first edition of Morton’s tell-all—which, among other things, compares the Puritan leadership to crustaceans—recently sold at auction at Christie’s for $60,000.

The Puritans’ move across the pond was motivated by both religion and commerce, but Morton was there only for the latter reason, as one of the owners of the Wollaston Company. He loved what he saw of his new surroundings, later writing that Massachusetts was the “masterpiece of nature.” His business partner—slave-owning Richard Wollaston—moved south to Virginia to expand the company’s business, but Morton was already deeply attached to the land, in a way his more religious neighbors likely couldn’t understand. “He was extremely responsive to the natural world and had very friendly relations with the Indians,” says Heath, while “the Puritans took the opposite stance: that the natural world was a howling wilderness, and the Indians were wild men that needed to be suppressed.”

After Wollaston left, Morton enlisted the help of some brave recruits—both English and Native—to establish the breakoff settlement of Ma-Re Mount, also known as Merrymount, preserved today in the Quincy neighborhood and park of the same name. Morton essentially asked his neighbors, “What if we just throw [Wollaston] out and start our own utopian colony based on Plato’s Republic, and also as a society of the Native Americans?” explains Rhiannon Knol, a specialist in the Books & Manuscripts department at Christie’s in New York. “And that sounded a lot better to them.” Some of them, at least.

The Puritan authorities didn’t see Merrymount as a free-wheeling annoyance; they saw an existential threat. The problem wasn’t only that Morton was taking goods and commerce away from Plymouth, but that he was giving that business to the Native Americans, including trading guns to the Algonquins. With Plymouth’s monopoly dissolved and its perceived enemies armed, Morton had perhaps done more than anyone else to undermine the Puritan project in Massachusetts. Worse yet, in the words of Plymouth’s governor William Bradford, Morton condoned “dancing and frisking together” with the Native Americans—activities that were banned even without Native American participation. It was basically an early colonial version of Footloose. Governor Bradford nicknamed Morton the “Lord of Misrule,” and it’s not hard to imagine him wearing that title like a crown.

There could be no greater symbol of such misrule than Morton’s maypole. Reaching 80 feet into the air, the structure conjured all the vile, virile vices of Merry England that the Puritans had hoped to leave behind. Throughout medieval Europe, maypoles had been a popular installation for May Day (or Pentecost or midsummer, in some regions)—encouraging human fertility as the land itself sprung up from winter. Now that was a tradition that Morton could get behind, and he gladly called upon the residents of Merrymount to drink, dance, and frolic around the pole. The establishment of Merrymount had been a provocation, but Morton’s May Day celebrations meant war.

During the 1628 festivities, a Puritan militia led by Myles Standish invaded Merrymount and chopped down the maypole. (The incident later inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” first published in 1832.) Morton was tried for supplying arms to the Natives, and expelled to an island off the coast of New Hampshire to be left for dead. Somehow, he managed to hitch passage on a ship back to England, where he sued the Massachusetts Bay Company. The trial provided him with the basis for his book, much of which was composed at London’s Mermaid Tavern with a little help from his friends, including famed poet and playwright Ben Jonson.

Heath is careful to stress that the book is not a literary masterwork, but he acknowledges that it has its moments. Knol says she was particularly struck by the nicknames Morton threw at his Puritan foes, whom he called “cruell Schismaticks.” It’s hard to know who got it worse between Standish and John Endecott, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Plymouth’s neighbor to the north): Endecott is known in the book as “Captaine Littleworth,” Standish as “Captaine Shrimp.” Even more radical than his belittling appellations were Morton’s subversive policy ideas, which went so far as to recommend “demartialising” the colonies. Unsurprisingly, the Puritans were appalled. Bradford, Plymouth's governor, called New English Canaan “an infamous and scurrilous book against many god and chief men of the country, full of lies and slanders and fraught with profane calumnies against their names and persons and the ways of God.”

It’s likely that the book scandalized England as well. The book’s title page names Amsterdam as the place of publication rather than London—but that’s hard to believe, as that very Amsterdam publisher was in fact a well-known purveyor of Puritan books. Knol says that Amsterdam was likely listed as a lie to protect the actual publisher in London.

After publishing the book, Morton braved a venture back to his beloved Massachusetts, only to be turned right back around upon arrival. He tried to cross the Atlantic once again in 1643, and was this time exiled to Maine, where he died. His maypole may have been chopped down and his book banned, but Morton’s legacy lives on in Quincy, though sadly there's no maypole in Merrymount Park.

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Trees seem to have cascaded down mighty mountain rivers in a matter of weeks.

Approximately 50,000 years ago, scientists believe a coniferous forest in the Himalayas was uprooted by some catastrophic natural event—perhaps a colossal glacial melt or earthquake—and traveled miles down a mountainside toward the sea. Over a matter of weeks, the trees were likely obliterated by rocks and boulders, passing through modern-day Nepal and Bangladesh before settling at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal. It was quite a journey for a log.

Though it seems unimaginable for high-altitude trees to wind up under the ocean, an international group of researchers studying sediments in the Bay of Bengal have charted this prehistoric forest’s journey in a new study, published October 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “People have seen wood being transported to the sea by rivers, and we’ve known it was a possibility, but did not know it could happen at this scale,” says Sarah Feakins, an earth scientist at the University of Southern California and co-author of the study. “We were not expecting it at all.”

The bottom of the Bay of Bengal is home to the Bengal Fan, which is around 1,900 miles long and 890 miles wide—the largest underwater accumulation of sediments in the world. Each year, the fan traps more than a billion tons of sediment flowing out of the Himalayan Mountains through the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers. “It’s been accumulating sediments for the last 40 million years,” says Christian France-Lanord, a geochemist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. “It’s a fantastic archive for exploring deeper and deeper in time.”

France-Lanord decided he wanted to study Bengal Fan sediments way back in the early 1990s, in order to better understand the relationship between tectonics and climate change—how things like monsoons and erosion can affect global climate patterns. But at the time, no other scientists had plans to drill in the Bay of Bengal, and scientific drilling vessels do not often sail for just one researcher. 20 years passed before there were enough projects in the Bay of Bengal for France-Lanord to finally board the R/V Joides Resolution and take cores from its silty, sludgy bottom.

The researchers drilled at seven sites at the center of the fan. No one expected to find any intact organic matter. “They call it ooze because it just oozes through your fingers,” Feakins says. But in the ooze of the second core, they found the sludge peppered with small fragments that contained recognizable fibers. “It was a bit of a surprise to see these planks of wood, clearly of organic matter,” France-Lanord says. “There was so much wood.”

The wood had blackened and compressed over time, but there was no denying its vegetal origin. And when Hyejung Lee, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, sieved the sediments and studied its chemical isotopes, she found something even more surprising. Though the majority of the wood came from broad-leafed angiosperm trees, which would have grown by the coast, there were also distinct layers of chips that came from gymnosperms, or conifers. In the Himalayas today, conifers grow at high altitudes, nearly 10,000 feet feet above sea level. According to Feakins, conifers of 50,000 years ago would have grown in a very similar altitude. The researchers also found distinct carbon and hydrogen isotopes that identified the conifer chips as having grown at high altitudes, Feakins says.

“It could have been an earthquake or ice age release, something triggered a huge amount of material from the mountains,” Feakins says. “But it had to happen quickly because that wood is very pristine.” Though the researchers have no way of measuring the speed of the coniferous journey downriver, Feakins estimates it happened in a matter of weeks. “They didn’t sit around for a long time or they would have rotted.”

“I think it’s a very compelling interpretation of the findings,” says Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink, a geochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved with the study. Peucker-Ehrenbrink points out that this is not the first woody debris uncovered in offshore sediments, but its sheer quantity and quality is remarkable. “When I first heard of these layers, I thought of lake outburst floods in the Himalayas,” he says. “The river network then routes the ensuing debris to the coast, where the material is routed through submarine canyons into the deeper areas of the Bengal Fan.”

According to Feakins, these wood chips suggest that rivers functioned as a prehistoric pathway for carbon sequestration. “If a tree falls down in the forest, it starts to rot and decay,” she says. “But if it’s uprooted, transported down a river, and buried at sea, it doesn’t have time to decay.” For over 19 million years, rivers were responsible for exporting significant amounts of carbon following natural disasters such as monsoons and unusually large glacial melts. And the sheer amount of wood the researchers found suggests that there may be 50 percent more carbon buried in the fan than previously thought.

This kind of shuttling is no longer as easily possible down the Ganges or Brahmaputra, as dams and other structures have stanched much of its prehistorically powerful flow. “Natural ecosystems used to perform this service,” Feakins says. “But as we modify our rivers this affects the way that rivers move material.” According to Peucker-Ehrenbrink, if any catastrophic events were to happen now, he suspects the resulting debris would contain traces of human life, as well as wood.

The researchers hope to take cores from other sedimentary fans across the world to see if ancient forests lurk in those oozes, and if more of the world’s seafloor actually holds a secret vault of long-buried carbon. In her lifetime, Feakins doesn’t expect to see an event as rare and catastrophic as the one that buried the conifers 50,000 years ago. “We’d have to get really lucky for an event to happen while we were around, but obviously it would be catastrophic,” she says, pausing. “So actually we’d hope not to be around.”

Regifting the fruit created a potent political symbol.

In August of 1968, China was suddenly gripped by a mania for mangoes. The fruit was praised in poems, worshipped on altars, and toured across the country like a celebrity. People posed alongside mangoes in portraits, poured tea into mango mugs, and took drags from MangGuo cigarettes. In Guizhou, thousands of peasants fought over a black-and-white mango picture. Ironically, most of the fruit’s fanatics had never tasted one. In fact, just months earlier, the mango had been virtually unknown.

The mango cult developed amid the tumult and terror of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a decade-long crusade to purge the communist country of all remnants of capitalist thought and traditional Chinese culture. Mao’s credibility had been damaged by The Great Leap Forward—a series of agricultural and industrial reforms that led to famine and an estimated 45 million deaths. To reassert his authority and weed out political rivals, he called on Chinese youth to root out “capitalist roaders” and traces of the so-called feudal past.

The mission was eagerly embraced by millions of students, who were called Red Guards. Sporting military fatigues and red armbands, the teenage troops destroyed cultural relics, attacked people wearing “bourgeois” clothing, and slaughtered animals associated with the old, imperial regime. Suspected class enemies were publicly humiliated, beaten, and even killed.

“I saw so many people die because of the Cultural Revolution. People died right in front of me,” says Hongtu Zhang, an artist who lived through the Cultural Revolution. “I saw students following Mao’s ideas pile Chinese and Western books into a big hill and just burn it. It was not a Cultural Revolution, it was a culture being destroyed.”

Bonded only by their shared loyalty to Mao, the Red Guards quickly splintered into feuding factions and plunged the country into anarchic violence. After two years of bloodshed, Mao decided to restore order and reign in the rabid Red Guards.

On July 27, 1968, Mao ordered 30,000 factory workers to occupy Qinghua University in Beijing, which had devolved into a battleground between two student militias. Although the workers outnumbered the 400 or so students, they were grossly unprepared. Armed only with pictures of Mao, the workers faced a barrage of bricks, spears, sulfuric acid, and homemade bombs. They suffered casualties and sustained hundreds of serious injuries. But, with the assistance of the People’s Liberation Army, they prevailed.

As a token of his gratitude, Mao sent the workers stationed at Qinghua a case of mangoes, which he’d received from Pakistan’s foreign minister. The gift was accompanied by a message that declared the workers were now in charge of the revolution.

“Mao didn’t often give presents, so it was seen as a powerful gesture in support of the workers,” explains Dr. Alfreda Murck, a Chinese art historian and co-curator of the Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution exhibition at The Museum Rietberg.

“Few [people] had even heard the word [‘mango’], let alone seen one,” recalled Wang Xiaoping in Mao’s Golden Mango and the Cultural Revolution. “To receive such a rare and exotic thing filled people with a surge of excitement.”

“The workers decided not to eat them. They stayed up through the night looking at the mangoes, stroking them, and sniffing them,” says Murck. “The workers did not have any clue what they were, but because the mangoes were a gift from Mao, they were in awe of them.”

Over the next few days, military representatives delivered the mangoes to model factories, where workers attempted to preserve the precious fruit. At the Beijing People's Printing Agency, workers placed their mango in a jar of formaldehyde, which eventually turned black and withered like an oversized raisin. At the Beijing Textile Factory, workers sealed their sacred gift in wax, but after a few days, it began to rot. In response, they carefully peeled the mango and boiled its pulpy flesh in a large pot of water. Afterwards, the factory held a Eucharist-like service where everyone drank a spoonful of the precious elixir.

China has a rich repertoire of food symbols, which lent the mangoes additional layers of meaning and significance. The foreign fruit was compared to the Mushrooms of Immortality and the Longevity Peach from Chinese mythology. Thus, Mao’s gift was interpreted as an act of selflessness, in which he sacrificed his own longevity for the workers.

Workers weren't the only ones with mango madness. The fruit garnered widespread enthusiasm, much of which was based on the belief that the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had finally come to an end.

“There was this perception that Mao had stepped in to end the specific violence between the Red Guard factions on the Qinghua campus and the general violence of the Cultural Revolution,” says Murck.

In reality, Mao’s motives were far less noble. “Mao didn’t like fruit and didn’t want to eat these messy mangoes,” says Murck. “It was totally unexpected that they would be greeted with such awe and enthusiasm. It was a gift to the propaganda department.”

Indeed, the Party quickly adopted the fruit as a symbol of the transition of power from the Red Guards to the working class. Mango imagery was plastered on propaganda posters, often accompanied by the new slogan “the working class must lead in all things.” Gigantic papier-mâché mangoes decorated floats at the National Day Parade and wax replicas enshrined in glass vitrines were distributed as merit awards. Facsimiles were also publicly exhibited across China. No expense was spared in the mangoes’ grand tour: They traveled by private planes, special trains, and a fleet of custom “mango trucks.”

While the mango inspired genuine joy, there was a coercive undercurrent to the mass displays. Attendance at the mango exhibitions, parades, and celebrations was often mandatory. In the middle of the winter, oilfield workers in Daqing were forced into unheated buses in negative-22 degrees Fahrenheit and taken to a local mango exhibition.

“I don’t know how many people worshipped the mango from their heart,” says Zhang. “It was a simple way for people to show loyalty to Chairman Mao and protect themselves. If you didn’t pretend, you wouldn’t just be criticized by other people, you would die.”

The consequences of disrespect were dire. According to Wang, one of her colleagues was “admonished by senior workers for not holding the fruit securely, which was a sign of disrespect to the Great Leader.” In a 2007 essay, Murck recounts a fatal episode in Sichuan Province, where a man was dragged through the streets and executed for comparing mangoes with sweet potatoes.

A year and a half later, China’s mango fever broke. Once the anti-Red Guard policy was firmly in place, the mango disappeared from official propaganda. The mango replicas, devoid of their sacrosanct status, were used to wax thread and burned for light during power outages.

At the end of his career, the Bambino wanted the Bronx and got a different borough instead.

Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was torn down with a wrecking ball painted like a baseball after the team moved to Los Angeles in 1957. What was left of the stadium was scattered. Its flagpole ended up outside its distant descendant, the Barclays Center. Some seats ended up on Hart Island (the city’s potters’ field), and the marble plaque bearing the stadium’s name ended up in a pile of rubble in New Jersey—but little was left to commemorate the site itself, where Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier and where Babe Ruth spent his brief, ill-fated coaching career. Today, a metal plaque marks the spot of the old stadium’s home plate, in the shadow of the Ebbets Field apartment complex that was built on the site, a few blocks east of Prospect Park. But just like Babe Ruth’s history with the Dodgers, the plaque is easy to miss.

Ruth was many things: a slugger of legendary proportions, a World Series champion many times over, a hard partier, and an icon—perhaps the icon—of the New York Yankees. But despite his professed desire to, Ruth never became manager of his beloved Bronx Bombers. He only coached in Major League Baseball for a year, as a first base coach for the Dodgers in 1938. After that job, Ruth would never work in baseball again. In November 2019, Ruth’s uniform from this uniquely disappointing episode in his otherwise-illustrious career is up for auction.

“It was his only time coaching. This was a real departure for Ruth, who had been the top of baseball for most of his career,” says John McMurray, of the Society for American Baseball Research. “Here he was as a first—sometimes third—base coach in Brooklyn, and having to work his way back up the ladder.”

Ruth had been dreaming of a Yankees coaching gig since well before his playing career with them ended in 1934. At the time it was common for star players to become player-managers, and Ruth saw himself as a natural fit for the hot seat. When he finally got an offer to coach the baselines in Brooklyn, Ruth took the job, knowing that it might be his last chance to make a name for himself in the coaching ranks and maybe, just maybe, make his way back to the Bronx.

The uniform, which is being auctioned by Culver City–based Julien’s Auctions, and is estimated to fetch between $200,000 and $400,000, is gray flannel and has Ruth’s name stitched onto both the jersey and pants with red thread. Unlike the other Dodger uniforms, which were zippered, Babe had his custom-made with buttons, as he preferred. The 1938 season was the first year the Dodgers added the distinctive script lettering to their jerseys, and the uniform has a sleeve patch promoting the 1939 World’s Fair, which took place in Queens’s Flushing Meadows. Ruth was coaching for the Dodgers in what would be the world’s first televised baseball game.

“Ruth had a lot of missed opportunities,” says McMurray. “There were a lot of false starts, promises made and promises not kept.”

The Yankees passed over Ruth a couple of times in favor of other managers, namely Joe McCarthy. Ruth’s attempts to join up with several other teams fell through or soured. “There were 16 teams in the league,” McMurray says, “and he was linked with half of them.” When he finally got his chance in Brooklyn, Ruth developed a terrible relationship with the team’s outspoken star shortstop, Leo Durocher.

“Durocher wasn’t a star player the way Ruth was, and Ruth had apparently labeled him the ‘All-American Out’ and said he stole his wristwatch,” McMurray says.

The two scrapped in the clubhouse that October, and the team sided with Durocher, who became player-manager the very next year. And that was it for the Bambino.

“He was a fun-loving guy who was resistant to structure,” McMurray says. “You never knew what he would do next, and that doesn’t play very well for someone leading an organization.”

The best way to preserve a church in a shrinking city is often to convert it to a mosque or temple.

The church at 194 Ludington Avenue isn’t what it used to be. For 102 years, Saint Agnes offered the Catholic residents of Buffalo, New York, a place for worship. The building itself has always been statuesque, with cavernous halls and ornate stained-glass windows. But on October 21, 2007, after years of a dwindling parishioners, Saint Agnes held its last mass and quietly shut its doors. It was empty for two years, just gathering dust, until 2009, when a buyer emerged: a Vietnamese monk named Thich Minh Tuyen. In 2012, Saint Agnes reopened for worship, as the temple of the International Sangha Bhiksu Buddhist Association.

When a city shrinks, its buildings empty out. Houses, for example, molder until a private developer swoops in, or the municipality razes them. But churches are a different story. Vacant churches—large buildings designed for a specific use—are more expensive to either demolish or preserve, and less readily convertible than former residences and storefronts, according to Ashima Krishna, an urban conservationist at the University of Buffalo.

But several vacant churches in Buffalo have gained a new lease on life as a temples, mosques, and churches of other denominations, at the same time saving historic buildings and serving communities as they change. “Churches may not always be the most attractive for any kind of real-estate investment,” Krishna says. “That does not mean that they don’t deserve to be saved.” She wrote about two of these conversions recently in the Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability.

“Serendipitous conversion”—Krishna’s term for the practice—is not unique to Buffalo. Churches have found themselves leading interfaith afterlives for thousands of years. A famous example is the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, which was converted in the 13th century from a Greek Orthodox Christian cathedral to an Ottoman imperial mosque. It’s also a frequent, if usually unremarked upon, practice in post-industrial cities, including others in New York such as Syracuse and Utica, writes Daniel Campo, who studies urban planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore, in an email. “The appropriation and reuse of sacred sites from one faith to the other is fairly common and can be viewed as a form of responsive urban development.”

Buffalo in particular is primed for such conversions due to the city’s embrace of immigrants and refugees. They’re a welcome influx of newcomers for a city that has shrunk considerably, with less than half of its historic peak population occupying the same geographical area. When Krishna moved from India to Buffalo in 2014, she couldn’t help but notice all the abandoned churches, and she’d written her master’s thesis over a decade before on something similar: forgotten Hindu temples in India. “I have always been very fascinated by places of worship that are no longer in use and what happens with them,” she says, “places dying to have people breathe some life back into them.”

In the 19th century, Buffalo was booming. “Buffalo was located at the intersection of the Erie Canal, the Great Lakes, and markets in the Midwest,” Krishna says. “It was a massive hub of industry, and one of the major cities in the country.” The infrastructure and architecture swelled to meet the growing population, composed in part of immigrants, and the city peaked with 580,000 residents in 1950. It dropped fast, losing 50,000 people by 1960 and 100,000 in the 1970s, largely due to the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, according to the City Journal. A 2016 census places the population just under 260,000. But Buffalo remained a gateway for immigrants, according to Buffalo Spree. The early 20th-century Italian, Armenian, and Polish settlers gave way to new populations from Mexico and Puerto Rico and, in the 21st century, refugees from Burma, Bhutan, and Somalia.

Saint Agnes Roman Catholic Church was established in a small wooden building in 1883 to serve the city’s growing population of German immigrants. In 1905, with a wave of Italian immigrants, Saint Agnes moved to a more cavernous red brick building that could seat 840. But as the parish shrank with the city’s overall population, the Buffalo Diocese merged three parishes—Saint Agnes, Francis of Assisi, and Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary—into one, the new St. Katharine of Drexel Parish, according to Krishna.

Like the Germans and Italians who came before them, Buffalo’s newest wave of immigrants from Asia sought a place to practice their faith. Thich Minh Tuyen was looking for a space to open a Buddhist center, and churches made a natural fit. Tuyen wanted the space to be an international center for Buddhism and meditation, so he required an extra-large building that felt both holy and practical, with places to both worship and have meetings. After considering several churches in the area, he bought Saint Agnes for $250,000, funded through donations from the international Buddhist community, according to Krishna’s study. Now the temple predominantly serves Vietnamese Buddhists living in Buffalo and the surrounding areas, as well as those of Burmese, Thai, Indian, and Sri Lankan descent, the monks there told Krishna.

As it turns out, it’s pretty easy to turn a church into a temple. It took a three-year renovation—in large part because the building had been out of use and needed to be updated, but the International Sangha Bhiksu Buddhist Association made very few changes to the interior substance of the church, aside from removing iconography, including the crucifix and images of the Stations of the Cross. “They were quite in sync with the idea that this was a historic place of worship, and they wanted to make sure that they honored that history while putting an overlay of their own worship,” Krishna says.

Though the temple preserved the architecture and layout of the church, they reorgnized and replaced much of the furniture. The new tenants also added three 2,000-pound sitting Buddhas shipped from Canada, and six standing Buddhas that cluster around a shrine in the narthex. The monks replaced six pews with carpets for worshippers to sit on, but left the remaining pews intact for those who cannot sit on the floor. The brilliant stained-glass windows are as they were, and the monks added shades and hung colorful banners alongside them—a surprisingly beautiful juxtaposition. All this was done deliberately, as the founding monk, Bhiksu Tuyen, wanted to combine Buddhist iconography with the existing Catholic themes.

Faith-to-faith conversions work differently depending on the religions involved. In 2007, Buffalo’s Queen of Peace Roman Catholic Church, closed for two years, sold for $300,000 and became the Muslim Society of Buffalo, or the Jami Masjid. From March to August of that year, volunteers converted the space into something appropriate for Islamic worship, and this process required significantly more alterations than the Buddhist temple. “In Islam, [there is] a wariness with any depiction of a human or any living being,” Krishna says. So the volunteers painted all the murals sky blue (though it should be noted that many of the historic murals had been whitewashed in the 1980s by the church itself), removed statues at the altar, and replaced the church’s intact stained-glass windows with plain, frosted glass.

Now, the Jami Masjid has no pews, only Turkish carpets for Islamic prayers, Krishna says. Arabic calligraphy adorns the Gothic brackets. The orientation of prayer has changed so the imam stands along the eastern wall of the building, so that when worshippers offer their prayers and genuflect, they face Mecca. The main altar has been removed entirely, replaced by a carpeted space for reading. The church’s former apse, the area behind the main altar where the choir would sing, has now been screened off as a prayer space for women. There is also a locker room in which worshippers can wash their feet before entering the main prayer space. The Jami Masjid has since grown to act as a community center for local Muslims, including weekly programming, youth groups, and Quran classes.

Conversions often cannot preserve all the cultural material of the original building, “Yet isn't it better that the building is still standing and has again become a center of human activity?” Campo says. “The alternatives in most cases are continued decay or demolition.” The iconography and other church paraphernalia were moved to the Buffalo Religious Arts Center (housed in the once-vacant St. Francis Xavier church). “It’s a repository for religious history in the city,” Krishna says, adding that the center collects objects—including statuary and pews—when churches are put out of commission, and displays them alongside text about the church. “It’s a museum of sorts.” Some of the objects are sold to other churches or reused for new purposes.

But historic churches, even after they’re converted, can present new problems. “Churches are massive structures to heat and maintain, and upkeep becomes expensive,” Krishna says. While the Jami Masjid has made good use of the sprawling property, the Buddhist temple, which, as Buddhist faith requires, is a nonprofit, has had trouble covering its utility bills. In frigid Buffalo winters, heating a building that massive leads to bills that average to $2,500 a month, on top of all the expenses of an old building: leaks, water damage, overgrown lawns, and more. So the monks maintain the building through fundraising—as well as pocket change donated by four nuns who formerly taught at Saint Agnes and still live, rent-free, in their residences at the back of the church building.

Even in a community that generally has policies and opinions friendly to immigrants and refugees, Krishna says, some residents are disgruntled with the changes to places of worship. “There will always be some dissent, a sense of concern that the traditional Judeo-Christian way of life may be being lost,” she says. The mosque keeps a low profile in the press, out of concerns about Islamophobia and misinformation. Serendipitous conversions also happen among Christian denominations. Buffalo’s significant African-American population has converted several old Catholic buildings to Anglican, Baptist, and Evangelical churches. On the whole, locals see all of the conversions as positive developments in a city that has struggled with blight for decades.

And then there are places that serendipitous conversion has not been able to save. Campo points to the Jefferson Avenue Shul, the oldest synagogue in the city. First built in 1903, the shul was a landmark, with an onion dome and bricks the color of honey. In its heyday the shul sat 700, but it closed in 1962. After that it housed two Pentecostal congregations, according to Buffalo Spree. In 1996, Jewish organizations and former members of the synagogue attempted to restore the building and get it on the National Register of Historic Places. But those efforts failed, and the shul was demolished in 2014, despite the protests of two demonstrators who chained themselves to a pillar inside.

There is another version of more straight-forward historic preservation, but federal, state, and local ordinances can be incredibly narrow and impractical, and offer tax credits that only benefit private ownership and real estate sales, rather than community-driven projects such as serendipitous conversions. “These conversions are much closer to best-case scenarios than people might think and how preservation standards would judge,” Campo says. It seems that religious organizations and grassroots movements (such as Buffalo’s Young Preservationists Organization and Preservation Buffalo Niagara) are making the most progress.

Krishna hopes that faith-to-faith preservation can become a model for any struggling neighborhood with growing immigrant or refugee communities, in Buffalo and beyond. “Being able to set up a shared space is a positive outcome for people who have likely faced difficult circumstances in the context of places that they’re coming from,” she says. “And it becomes a way to invite other people into the community.”

In 2017, the Jami Masjid raised $80,000 to build a new playground on their property. The only other playground in the neighborhood, Schiller Park, has been considered unsafe for years, with broken glass and graffiti, according to the Buffalo News. The playground opened that August—to everyone.

A Victorian storefront made famous in a 1967 painting is on the market—winter wonderland not included.

Stockbridge, a town in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is a picturesque place to celebrate Christmas. When Norman Rockwell painted the town’s Main Street festooned for the holidays, he made it look dreamy and cozy: Amber light spills out of windows, smoke puffs from chimneys, bundled-up shoppers wander past. There’s an evergreen tree strapped to the roof of a car, and the sky darkens gently above the hills in the distance.

Rockwell’s painting, "Stockbridge Mainstreet at Christmas (Home for Christmas)," was published in McCall’s magazine in 1967. More than 50 years later, Stockbridge still embraces its past. Rockwell lived and worked in town—in the painting, a Christmas tree stands aglow in one of his studios, a second-floor space above the market—and today, Stockbridge is home to the Norman Rockwell Museum. The yuletide scene, one of the stars of the collection, is locally beloved. The Red Lion Inn, at the far right of the painting, is still open, and has reproduced Rockwell’s image on its brochures. Each December, the Stockbridge Chamber of Commerce leads the town in a re-creation of the scene, with a festival that convenes carolers and several dozen antique cars. They even tie a Christmas tree to one of the roofs. Now, one New England enthusiast can step into Rockwell’s world and stay there year-round, because a building in this storied row is up for sale.

When Rockwell painted Stockbridge at Christmas, the building at 44 Main Street—second from the left—advertised an antique shop and insurance office, in addition to the 7 Arts Gift Shop, which still sells records, memorabilia, and and tschotskes. Decades on, the exterior of the three-story Victorian structure, built in 1870, still looks much the same, with colorful stained glass and decorative wood details.

“To say the property is iconic would be an understatement,” Steven Weisz, one of the property’s listing agents with William Pitt Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s International Realty, told Boston.com. “You can buy posters, lamps, and Christmas ornaments with the likeness of the building.” Those trinkets are surely worth less than the $1,795,000 that the building is listed for, but hey—if you’ve got the money, might as well opt for the real thing.

Though the painting is recognizably Stockbridge, Rockwell also drew inspiration from elsewhere, and took a bit of creative license with the details. The golden storefronts reference his jaunts in the Dutch city of Delft, where he was impressed by light beaming from windows, and the way the tones varied from one to another, says Tom Daly, curator of education at the Norman Rockwell Museum, where the painting is on view.

Rockwell tinkered with the layout, too. “Certainly, he altered our Main Street to make it look more like a Main Street,” says Daly. The painter nudged the buildings to be closer together and nestled them along a straight line; in reality, some sit closer to the street, and others hang farther back. Rockwell also flattened the scene, so a viewer sees all of the buildings at once. And then there are those gently rolling hills. “There are no mountains behind Main Street,” Daly says. “Stockbridge was settled because it was a flat area.” In western Massachusetts, Daly says, the hills run north to south—not east to west, as the painting suggests.

But the effect is comforting. Locals are tucked into warm clothes; the town is cradled snugly in a valley. Daly suspects that some of the painting’s popularity stems from the little details—glowing windows; doors slightly ajar; conversations in progress, with room for a viewer to imagine joining in. In sum, they suggest that this is a place where you’d be warmly welcomed. Rockwell had tremendous affection for the town: He once called Stockbridge “the best of America, the best of New England.” The Stockbridge in the painting doesn’t look exactly like the town, then or now, Daly says: Even decades ago, the stretch wasn’t so sleepy that kids and dogs could safely roughhouse in the street. Instead, he says, “It gives you that sense of a Main Street the way you’d like it to be.”

In 1936, the Party suddenly switched from denouncing bubbly to mass producing it.

In the early 1930s, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. The chaos of collectivization, combined with poor harvests and brutal socio-economic policies, devastated the country’s grain-growing regions. Millions died of starvation, and corpses accumulated along railway tracks and roads, filling the air with the sour stench of decomposition. Hordes of hungry peasants roamed the countryside, desperately searching for work or anything remotely edible: corncobs, acorns, grass, cats, dogs, and, most horrifically, even each other.

Just three years later, while basic necessities were still scarce, the Kremlin turned its attention to another shortage: the lack of champagne. In 1936, the Soviet government passed a resolution to dramatically increase the production of sparkling wine, setting an ambitious goal of producing millions of bottles over the following years.

The idea to create a communist champagne industry—a Herculean undertaking, given the context—came directly from Joseph Stalin, who hailed from the Republic of Georgia, home to the world’s oldest winemaking culture. He proclaimed that champagne was “an important sign of well-being, of the good life” that socialism would make available to all—a far cry from Lenin’s simple promise of “bread and peace.”

The push to uncork a sea of champagne came only a year after the withdrawal of ration cards in 1935. Desperate to show that the Soviet Union had more to offer than privation and persecution, the government launched a concerted effort to mass produce and democratize champagne and other high-end products.

“The idea was to make things like champagne, chocolate, and caviar available at a rather cheap price so that they could say that the new Soviet worker lived like the aristocrats in the old world,” explains Jukka Gronow, author of Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin's Russia.

But before the proletariat could pop bottles, winemakers needed to make bubbly on a budget. This required production on an industrial scale, which wasn’t possible using the traditional, bottle-aged method. The answer came from winemaker Anton Frolov-Bagreyev, who ditched the French process of bottle fermentation in favor of pressurized tanks, which condensed the three-year maturation process into a month and allowed batches of 5,000 to 10,000 liters to be made at a time.

To turn Stalin’s sparkling rhetoric into reality, the Soviet government unleashed a flurry of resolutions. Bureaucrats ordered the construction of new vineyards, factories, and storehouses as well as the recruitment and training of thousands of new workers. Resources were diverted, and the State bank opened a special account dedicated to financing the multi-million ruble initiative.

The ambition of Stalin's vision was mirrored in official output targets, which projected the nascent industry producing 12 million bottles a year by 1942. Since champagne had been condemned as a bourgeois indulgence, many vineyards had been destroyed or repurposed to cultivate other crops. The surviving state-run wineries were barely operational.

The dismal state of Soviet viticulture made the production targets impossible to achieve. “The projections were never realistic, but if factories didn’t live up to them, the people working at them or running them could be labeled enemies of the people and purged,” explains Darra Goldstein, a food scholar and author of the upcoming cookbook Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore. When the Abrau-Durso winery on Russia’s Black Sea coast, fell short of expectations in 1938, the Soviet newspaper Izobilie questioned the director’s loyalty and suggested the winery “be cleared of class enemies.”

The production of Soviet champagne prioritized quantity over quality. Grape growers uprooted acres of indigenous vines from Moldova to Tajikistan and replaced them with durable, high-yield varieties that catered to Stalin’s sweet tooth. Large, centralized factories processed grapes from across the region and sent the bulk wine mixture to massive bottling plants, which churned out thousands of bottles an hour using Frolov-Bagreyev’s tank method and a mechanized bottling system. The result was Sovetskoye Shampanskoye, a cheap, syrup-sweet sparkling wine for the ordinary Soviet worker.

“The quality wasn’t so high, because it was all about mass production,” says Goldstein. “Questions of taste or refinement were secondary to that.” Indeed, factories often cut the bulk wine product with preservatives and sugar to mask its poor quality.

The taste is often considered too sweet for Western palates, which are accustomed to the dry bite of Brut champagne. “To me as a child it always tasted like sparkling soda but with alcohol,” says Anya von Brezmen, a culinary writer born in the Soviet Union. “It has a kind of slight sweetness and just tasted kitschy and fun. You could guzzle it.”

But behind the Iron Curtain, it was the only bubbly available, and for those who grew up in the Eastern Bloc, its taste is indelibly intertwined with layers of memory and nostalgia. “It is difficult to separate the taste of the drink from everything else that I experienced during some hot, late summer evenings in Moscow or on the high banks of the river Dnepr in Kiev in my youth,” says Gronow.

By the end of the decade, Sovetskoye Shampanskoye was widely available in Moscow and other large cities, offered on tap in stores. Later, in the 1950s, it was also sold by the glass at Lenin Stadium. While it remained too expensive for everyday consumption, champagne became an important ritual aspect of all major Soviet celebrations. “You couldn’t imagine a New Year’s celebration without champagne. It was absolutely requisite,” says Goldstein.

The mass production of Soviet champagne was part of a larger propaganda campaign intended to showcase the cultural and economic advancement wrought by socialism. “It was like the Coca-Cola of the Soviet Union. It symbolized the good Soviet life,” says Gronow.

“It was a very contradictory period. There was this whole happiness industry that produced uplifting musical comedies and films. The champagne and chocolate were part of this,” explains von Brezmen. “There was a lot of cheer, but at the same time people were being arrested at night and were terrified.” Champagne was even colorfully advertised on the sides of the Black Maria, which transported prisoners from Soviet cities to the Gulags.

The paradox of Sovetskoye Shampanskoye highlights the contradictions of life behind the Iron Curtain, where the shelves were empty but champagne was affordable. “It shows that life in a totalitarian state was complicated. It wasn’t all just grey and terrible,” says von Brezmen. “There were these moments of joy and happiness and celebrations that really meant a lot in an era that was filled with terror.”

Memories of this levity are fueling Soviet nostalgia in modern Russia, and driving demand for Sovetskoye Shampanskoye, which is now produced by private companies, and other tastes of the era, which can even be enjoyed in restaurants that evoke communist canteens. Yet, the thirst for Soviet champagne often blurs the line between reminiscence and revisionism. “They are very difficult totems. It’s kitsch and cool and funny on the one hand, but it was a tragic time,” says von Brezman. “I think they’re kind of loaded symbols. They are sort of bombs in a champagne bottle.”

The kinds of beads they made were coveted far and wide a thousand years ago.

In 2010, two graduate students from the University of Florida landed on Raleigh Island, an uninhabited piece of Florida’s western coast, to check for environmental damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which gushed more than three million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. They didn’t find oil, but amid the dense stands of palmettos and cedars there were dozens of large ring structures, where pre-Columbian people lived and ran a factory for making beads out of shells.

“They came back and told me and I was like, ‘Yeah, right,’” says Ken Sassaman, an archaeologist at the university and coauthor of a recent paper on the finds in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences. “‘Let’s check it wasn’t from some target practice range or mining work.’ Because there’s no precedent for it.”

Along Suwannee Sound, around 60 miles from Gainesville, the land fragments into a patchwork of islands and estuaries that are now mostly recreation areas and wildlife refuges that protect everything from manatees to black bears to bald eagles. Prior surveys had shown some signs of human presence on Raleigh Island, less than a mile from the mainland, but the scale of the site and its purpose were unknown until now.

The University of Florida team used drone-mounted lidar equipment to survey the island’s topography below the dense foliage, and conducted test excavations. They found 37 rings of varying sizes, but each large enough to enclose a living space, some up to 12 feet tall, and all made of discarded shells dating to between 900 and 1200.

“[The site] is unprecedented in terms of form, but we were also surprised to find it was as late as it was,” Sassaman says. “Architecture like that—rings—were pretty common in the southeast 4,500 years ago, but nothing like Raleigh. Everything was surprising, everything was unprecedented.”

Each ring had lots of oyster shells, but also evidence of the making of beads from marine snail shells, mostly lightning whelk. The scale of the site suggests that it was a major production area for the beads, though archaeologists found fewer of them than they had expected.

“We have a lot of evidence, all that you’d need, that they’re making a pretty substantial amount of beads,” says Terry Barbour, a doctoral candidate at the university and lead author of the study. “[But] we don’t have a whole lot of finished products. Just bits and pieces, enough that there should be substantial amount of finished product.”

Researchers suspect that the finished beads may have been collected for trade. Shell beads like these would have been of great value as far inland as the major cultural centers of Cahokia (where 25,000 of them were placed in a single grave) near modern St. Louis, and Moundville, near Tuscaloosa, Alabama. They were used in bartering, art, and gambling, and also carried symbolic value, as the lightning whelk was associated with the sun.

“Demand is huge right after the rise of Cahokia,” says Barbour. “Marine shell has waxed and waned for the past 12,000 years of history and in the Mississippian [culture period], things reach the highest they ever did. We happened to find a community that’s right there at the source.”

Though Raleigh is now only inhabited by raccoons, rattlesnakes, and some rampant feral hogs, one can kayak the marshy environs and marvel at the industrious effort of the island’s pre-Columbian residents.

In 2020, guests will be able to bask in the glory of a seven-story, basket-shaped hotel.

On October 20, the Big Basket opened its doors, and people wept. The seven-story, basket-shaped building in east Newark, Ohio—once the main office of the now-defunct Longaberger Company—was offering its first public tour since closing in 2016. More than 600 people showed up for the occasion. They came from small towns across Ohio, such as Irontown and Washington Court House, some driving up to four hours to make it in time. They lined up at 11 a.m. for tours that started at 1 p.m. “People were in tears and hugging each other,” says Joyce Barrett, the executive director of Heritage Ohio, who helped organize the tour. “They were so happy to be back in the Basket.”

The one-day-only tour was held on a Sunday, the day before Heritage Ohio announced that the famed Longaberger Basket Building will soon re-open as a luxury hotel—securing the future of a building that many thought was doomed. But nobody knew this on Sunday, so they swarmed with questions about what was going to happen to their beloved basket. “One person wanted it to be a senior citizen center,” Barrett says. “Others wondered if the company was coming back.”

Though the company closed its doors for good in 2018 and has no plans to return, Longaberger is still a household name in Ohio. At its peak in 2000, Dave Longaberger’s company employed more than 8,200 people, making it one of the primary employers in the Dresden, Ohio area. Longaberger, the son and grandson of basket-weavers, sold America on his handmade, well-crafted Longaberger baskets with Amway-style sales associates, who earned a percentage of any commissions made by the people they recruited. The Facebook group “Preserving Dave Longaberger’s great American story” has more than 4,000 members.

The Big Basket, which opened in 1997, is a scaled-up version of Longaberger’s signature Medium Market Basket. Most of the cherry wood used in the Big Basket came from the grounds of the Longaberger Golf Club in Hanover, according to Jim Klein, a former president of the Longaberger Company who was present at the tour. “It may appear kitschy on the outside, but it’s absolutely spectacular inside,” Klein says, referencing the 30,000-square-foot atrium and curving, cherry-wood staircase. The Big Basket also boasts two enormous handles, heated during the winter to thaw ice. “The basket is a symbol of overcoming adversity, of what you can achieve,” Klein says, adding that he and his son, like Longaberger himself, have dyslexia.

The tours were led by former Longaberger employees from every level of the company, including a former executive, machinist, and groundskeeper, Barrett says. They volunteered after Klein put a call-out on the Facebook page and received 500 responses for 40 slots, according to the Newark Advocate. The guides showed the first two floors of the building, including the marble entryway, and stopped by the Big Basket’s auditorium, which looped a seven-minute time-lapse video of the building’s construction. “Some people sat and watched that video several times,” Barrett says. (The rest of the tour consisted of more mundane, less-baskety office spaces and conference rooms.)

When Klein moved from Princeton, New Jersey, to serve as Longaberger’s president, in 2006, he spent many of his first weekends alone in the Big Basket. “I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I would watch Dave Longaberger videos on marathon and get inside his head,” Klein says. The office had a view of a small red barn with a racetrack, and every day before noon the barn owner would take his trotter horse out on the track. “To me, that horse represented the passage of time, and the limited amount of time we have on Earth,” he says.

The current interior of the Big Basket also has a limited amount of time on Earth—but luckily for the extended Longaberger community, the building is scheduled to reopen in 2020 as a luxury hotel. The co-owners, Bobby George and Steve Coon, of Coon Restoration & Sealants, purchased the building on December 29, 2017, one month before a foreclosure auction. They plan to use historic-site tax credits to renovate the interior; architects will have to get creative in adapting the Basket’s long windows, which appear between the gaps of its seemingly woven exterior. “If you make them in hotel rooms, you’re going to need to put two rooms per window,” Barrett says. But the new owners say that the Basket will live on. “This will stay a basket,” Coon told the Newark Advocate. “It’s going to be a basket forever.”

Areniy Kotov finds inspiration in urban exploration and concrete cityscapes.

Concrete is a common, humble material—sand, gravel, and cement—but Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sang its praises for the better part of a passionate, detailed, two-hour speech he delivered to an industrial conference in 1954. He proposed that concrete should be used for anything and everything, especially prefabricated and standardized buildings that would help accelerate construction and development. It was, he argued, absolutely vital to the Soviet project. The subsequent boom in mass housing was described by The New York Times in 1967 as an “architectural sputnik.” (Though the piece did also state, “There is no real style in Soviet cities yet.”)

Concrete is abundantly present in the contemporary cityscapes of Russian photographer Areniy Kotov. Images from his his upcoming book, Soviet Cities: Labour, Life & Leisure, often depict rows and rows of high-rises, marching endlessly across the horizon. Yet within the cold-looking concrete blocks, he also manages to capture the warm glow of life in apartment windows.

Kotov was born in 1988, so he did not experience much of Soviet life, but he admires the period’s “great civilization” of architectural and cultural heritage. The country is changing fast, but nostalgia for Soviet aesthetics is strong.

Kotov traveled to hundreds of Russian cities over three years, and plans to visit more. “Every new place hides its secrets,” he says via email. “It is normal here (in ex-USSR cities) to feel yourself like an archaeologist, who came to the ruins of great ancient civilization, and didn’t know what you would find!”

The photographer spoke with Atlas Obscura about his enthusiasm for Soviet history, fascination with rockets, and nighttime adventures. His book will be published in 2020 by FUEL Design & Publishing.

What inspired you to photograph Soviet architecture?

I got my first camera when I was 22 and had just finished university. It was interesting for me to try out different genres, and more than anything I liked city landscapes. So every evening I went to different corners of my hometown to take pictures from different high-rise residential blocks. Around 70 percent of Samara (my hometown) was built during the Soviet era. I started to see beauty in their strict plan and strong forms. Then after three years, when I was 25, I decided to travel for some time. I lived in Sochi, St. Petersburg, and hitchhiked across Russia, and went to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine. In every place I saw interesting details, not only in individual buildings, but also in whole city plans. I had the idea to make a collection of the most outstanding buildings and districts.

What makes you want to document this particular style of architecture?

Actually I like the process! More than anything, I enjoy traveling in my homeland, and in Russia and the former Soviet Republics, all of them are somehow similar to what I saw in my hometown before. Nowadays the things that unite these separate countries are slowly but surely being destroyed. Sometimes it is time and severe weather, sometimes crazy revolutions, sometimes indifference of people, privatization, or many other reasons. All this urban environment that is so close to people's hearts, who grew up in 1980s and 1990s, is disappearing. That's why I decided to document the traces of Soviet civilization. Soon there will be nothing to document.

Were people surprised to see that you had come to photograph everyday Soviet architecture?

Most people do not recognize Soviet architectural heritage as something noteworthy, because in their childhoods it was more customary to admire ancient Orthodox churches or European cities with palaces, castles, and narrow streets. During my childhood, a few people had just started to recognize Constructivist architecture of the 1930s and the Stalin period as something interesting. And in early 2000s some specialists started to talk about Soviet modernism. Architecture needs time to become recognizable, so now the time has come. I don't blame people that they don't know anything about this kind of architecture; in several years they surely will.

You used to work in a rocket factory. Did that influence your work?

I worked for three years at a factory where Soyuz rockets are manufactured. It gave me an understanding of how strong and powerful our industry was before. Most other space factories are already abandoned, rented out, or destroyed. When I started my job as an engineer, the factory was semi-abandoned; there were colossal workshops that were completely empty, with Soviet slogans and posters still on the walls. In the courtyard was a huge red hammer-and-sickle monument with "Glory to Labor" on it. I liked to walk around the factory in my spare time, and I was sad that the great story of my ancestors was in the process of being abandoned and forbidden. I think it inspired my photography somehow.

Your photos have a strong sense of pattern and lighting. How do you achieve these effects?

I try to find interesting structures by satellite maps and understand from which place it will be best to photograph them. For city landscapes, I always try to get higher—usually it is possible to get to the roof or public balcony or even to a hill. I always plan every evening. I know when and where the sunset will be, and I try to choose a position that will avoid backlight from the sun.

What was your most challenging site?

In my childhood, I liked to read books about discoverers who were the first to visit unknown regions and put them on a map. One of them was [Alexei] Fedchenko, who was a Russian officer and explorer. The Fedchenko Glacier in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan is named for him, and is the longest outside of the polar regions. And on this glacier there was a unique construction—a meteorological station. After the collapse of Soviet Union, people abandoned it, but it is still in good condition and all the original interiors were safe there. To get to this station I traveled for seven days. The region is absolutely wild, there are no people there except a small camp of shepherds in one canyon. Visiting this abandoned station was the biggest challenge for me.

Do you have a favorite site from the project?

One of my favorites was the trip to the abandoned part of Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world's first and largest operational space launch facility. It is located in the desert steppes of Kazakhstan and is secured by Russian police, so the best way to get in there is during the cover of night. About three years ago it was discovered, by one Russian urban explorer, that the last great Soviet space projects, the Buran shuttle and Energia rocket, are hidden and abandoned in gigantic workshops there. So after a 35-kilometer [20-mile] hike through the night, it was a fantastic feeling to arrive and get into the enormous workshops where the future of Soviet space program is buried.

Is there someplace that you haven’t photographed yet that you really want to get to?

I really want to get to Norilsk! It is a northeastern city with more than 100,000 inhabitants that was built for miners who work on largest nickel deposit in the world. Summer is very short and winter is long and harsh there, but the landscapes are fantastic: snowy tundra with an industrial city and no trees.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Whales meant margarine, and margarine meant victory.

As a corporal in World War I, Adolf Hitler watched a British naval blockade strangle German supply lines, forcing his country into submission, defeat, and shame. As Führer in the years leading up to World War II, he planned to sidestep the mistakes of his predecessors. This time, Germany would have whales.

Hitler’s “Four Year Plan” in 1936 aimed to circumvent Nazi dependence on foreign supply lines altogether. He handed the tall order to Herman Göring, a high-ranking, flamboyant Nazi official with a reputation for partying. The goal was autarky, or complete military and economic self-sufficiency, by 1940. A sort of “hunkering down” for protracted, all-out war, the plan set specific targets for amassing stores of weapons, commodities, and, of course, food. “The final solution lies in extending … the sources of raw materials and foodstuffs,” Hitler wrote in a confidential memo, in which he also banned the distillation of potatoes into alcohol.

At the time, margarine was central to German kitchens. Replacing cow’s milk with leftover animal fat made the still-spreadable answer to butter a favorite among working-class families. The French invention never caught on in France, but Northern Europeans took a liking to it, and Germans in particular. By 1930, they consumed 17.5 pounds per person annually.

It was also around this time that manufacturers discovered an even cheaper way to produce margarine: with whale fat. The advent of kerosene created a surplus of whale oil, which was previously used as lighting fuel, leading to a massive buy up at low-cost. In 1929, the two companies that would later merge to form Unilever—Margarine Unie, a Dutch company, and Lever Brothers, a British firm—successfully incorporated their vast stores of whale oil into widely popularized margarine products.

Whale fat was also widely used to wage war. Liquified blubber served as a handy machine lubricant and proved useful in manufacturing the nitroglycerine needed for explosives. In fact, Britain declared it a “national defense” commodity in 1938. Crucial to kitchens and battlefields alike, Germany and Britain that year purchased 83% of the world’s whale harvest between them. Many of those whales came from Norwegian whaling, which led the world in whale harvests by hunting along an unclaimed Antarctic coastline, today called Queen Maud Land.

German Councillor of State Helmut Wohlthat saw two birds and one stone. He pitched Göring on an ambitious expedition: If they could spoil Norway’s claim to Queen Maud Land, they’d win access to resource-rich waters that spelled margarine and explosives. Without much to show two years into the Four Year Plan, Göring approved. In May of 1938, planning began for the German Antarctic Expedition.

With alliances signed between Italy, Japan, and Germany against the Soviet Union, the covert Nazi mission to secure Antarctic territory and whales embarked on the eve of war in December, 1938. The hodgepodge crew of soldiers, scientists, and whalers led by Captain Alfred Ritscher sailed on a retrofitted freighter made to catapult two 10-ton seaplanes borrowed from Lufthansa airlines. The men were selected based on polar experience rather than military standing, as the mission was largely surveillance-based. One Nazi official was on board to oversee an adherence to party standards, notably mandating a listening party during Hitler’s Christmas speech. The ship was named Schwabenland, named after the Swabia region of Bavaria, and the land they set out to claim would be called Neu-Schwabenland, or “New Swabia.”

In some respects, the mission was over before it began. On January 14, 1939, Norway made their claim over Queen Maud Land official by royal proclamation, just as the covert German fleet was reaching the Antarctic circle. Nevertheless, Nazi seaplanes covered 10,000 miles of previously unexplored Antarctic land, dropping four-and-a-half foot darts inscribed with swastikas along their path that plunged deep into the Antarctic ice. These were meant to claim “New Swabia” for Germany.

While they increased the known size of Antarctica by 16 percent and discovered new mountain ranges, a lack of proper ground control made accurate mapping all but impossible. While some old German maps refer to the land around Queen Maud Land as New Swabia, no other country ever recognized the claim.

The sole benefit of the expedition for Nazi Germany may have been the knowledge Göring requested about the functioning of airplanes at low temperatures. The information proved useful during the subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union. Just not useful enough.

They repurposed cardboard boxes, old paper straws, and toilet paper rolls to create homes for local bees.

In September, millions of youth activists around the world took to the streets to fight for their right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and not have to suffer the wrath of the climate crisis. But that’s not the only way kids are taking climate action into their own hands.

In Colorado, the task of saving bees from the consequences of climate change has fallen to the girls who sell us the best cookies: Over the summer, at a Girl Scout day camp in Denver, Girl Scout troops fashioned tiny homes for wild bees called “bee hotels,” to fight the depopulation of bees across the country.

Bee hotels are like birdhouses for wild bees. Since wild bees don’t make honey, they don’t live in hives, but they’re always in need of a suitable habitat. Out in the wild, these bees often nest in holes in fallen logs, dead trees, and broken branches of bushes. But natural habitats can be hard to come by in developed areas, which is where bee hotels come in.

The troops repurposed cardboard boxes, old paper straws, toilet paper rolls, and other materials to create homes for bees in their local community. The project is part of a new initiative called Think Like A Citizen Scientist Journey, in which girls from grades six through 12 develop real-world sustainable projects to create change. After some brainstorming and research, the scouts at the day camp chose saving the bees.

“There were times it was hard because there were so many girls and lots of ideas, but we worked together, and it was fun,” says 11-year-old Imani, one of the girls who participated in the project. “We found a way to come to a compromise and work together to make a fun bee hotel so the bees can fit their fuzzy little buns in.”

Working with bees can be a daunting task for kids around Imani’s age. Many children are afraid of bees, because they only know them from the pain of their sting. But Girl Scouts learn to overcome their fears. “I’m afraid of bugs, so it was hard for me to go look at the bees and learn about them,” says Imani. “I’m glad I did. I’m still scared, but I understand how we need bees for food and flowers and that they have a purpose.”

The U.S. has more than 4,000 wild bee species, and 40 percent of invertebrate pollinators are now facing extinction. The depopulation of bees is due to a number of factors including human activity, pesticide overuse, disease, and the changing climate.

Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an associate professor of entomology at the University of Maryland, College Park, says that bee hotels can play an important role in maintaining bee populations. They aren’t only habitats, but also a safe haven for bees to lay eggs. If built correctly and well maintained, vanEngelsdorp says, bee hotels can attract new bee species to areas that need pollinators.

“Bees, in general, not just honeybees, are keystone species,” he says. “They’re the ones that keep ecosystems together, they allow for trees to grow, and so, really, they’re cornerstone species.”

After building their bee hotels, the girls went out to install them in green pockets of their community, such as community gardens and the local botanical garden. They also donated one to a local beekeeper who spoke to the troops. “The most interesting thing I learned is probably when you think of bees, you just think of honeybees, but there are so many different types out there,” says Aimee, another 11-year-old Girl Scout.

In addition to helping maintain bee populations, the bee hotel project plays an important role in building a new generation of engaged citizens. “I want to show the girls that they have so many different opportunities to make the world a better place, and that they have many different assets already in their strengths that are all so viable,” says Tiffany Stone, one of the troop leaders.

It’s important for kids to learn that “every effort counts,” vanEngelsdorp says. “What you’re seeing is that you need bees to survive, and so who better to be concerned about that than the people who are going to inherit the next generation?” he says. “These efforts are really good because hopefully they set up a lifelong commitment to preserving biodiversity.”

An undergraduate archaeologist is trying to make sure the prewar city isn't forgotten.

Emma Marsh didn’t discover Crosby Beach for herself, even though it is right outside of her native Liverpool, until she left town. She was studying archaeology at the University of Durham in 2018 when she got a call from her family urging her to investigate what they stumbled across while walking the dog. They had encountered a long stretch of beach covered in historical, pulverized bricks, mortar, marble, tilework, and more, from granular to gargantuan in scale, covering every grain of sand in a pavement of red, white, and beige architectural bric-a-brac.

The rubble wasn’t exactly a secret; it had been discovered countless times before by locals and visitors, but Crosby Beach has never been officially recognized for what it is—archaeologically valuable wreckage from World War II. Marsh is trying to change that.

“I’ve really never seen anything like it. There are some pieces that are absolutely massive pieces of stone,” says Marsh, who is completing her undergraduate dissertation on the Crosby Beach rubble. ”I really want there to be signs put up at the beach. If you don’t know what the rubble is before you go there, you won’t know.”

If things were dumped on Crosby Beach before England went to war in 1939, they’ve long since been buried under tons of wreckage from the bloodiest conflict in human history. Besides London, Liverpool was one of the cities hardest hit by the German Luftwaffe.

“Liverpool was a target because of its importance as a port. Nearly 3,900 are killed,” says Charlotte Wildman, a historian of modern Britain at the University of Manchester. “As a child growing up in Merseyside during the 1980s, there were bombsites and bits left over from the Blitz everywhere!”

The barrages came throughout the war, with the worst of it in 1941. Businesses, homes, and thousands of lives were destroyed indiscriminately. All of this destruction left behind a lot of rubble in British cities, and something had to be done with it. Tons of the rubble were shipped off to other countries during the war as ballast on ships delivering weapons and supplies. (Some of it became landfill that helped Manhattan expand its East Side.) But German barrages kept replenishing the stock of cluttered stone.

“Basically, where the rubble went is still a bit of a mystery,” says Peter Larkham, a planning historian at Birmingham City University. “In Berlin there were ‘rubble mountains’ around the edge of the western sector that I saw still in 1988.”

In Britain as in Germany, many tons were simply dumped on the outskirts of towns. And perhaps nowhere is evidence of the blitz as visible, overwhelming, and extensive as on Crosby Beach, which is about five miles from the center of town. It’s not certain when the material was schlepped to Crosby Beach, but it accumulated, and then, when the war ended, was promptly forgotten. “Liverpool never had a comprehensive reconstruction plan,” says Catherine Flinn, an urban and architectural historian and author of Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities: Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities. “Everybody had to submit plans, but Liverpool’s was really focused on traffic circulation and redesigning streets rather than reconfiguring where business were, or where City Hall was.”

Without buildings as a focus of the Liverpudlian reconstruction efforts, the rubble has languished, its edges softening with every tide. Some curious souls wander among what used to be Liverpool, according David Lewis, a writer and Liverpool native who wrote about the rubble in his The War Memorial in the Sea. “Visitors pick over the site, but most are unaware of the history,” he says. “It’s not a very attractive place. To the unknowing eye it looks like a few hundred meters of illegally dumped builders’ rubble!”

Marsh is casting a knowing eye on the historical wreckage. Whenever she is back at home from university, she is at Crosby, where she has been documenting the shapes and sizes of what she sees. The first challenge is distinguishing the World War II rubble from additional dumping that took place in the 1970s. The second is being safe, as there are asbestos-laced building materials from the early 20th century. When Marsh finds interesting or distinctive pieces—elaborate masonry, old-timey lettering, or anything that offers a compelling clue—she uses photogrammetry to document the objects in 3-D. Then she tweets out her finds, crowdsourcing tips from Liverpudlians with a strong sense of history or urban knowledge. By cross-referencing that information with her own research, she is starting to rebuild prewar Liverpool, bit by bit.

“It’s history that’s quite important to people,” Marsh says. “People mention grandparents and the like. There’s that human connection.”

So far, Marsh has had luck with fragments that are uniquely ornamented or incised. Time and tide have not made matters easier, and add a sense of urgency to her work. “It’s a matter of years until they’re all eroded,” she says. While many red bricks are little more than red herrings, one undistinguishable from the next, Marsh has had her fair share of successes.

“One of the big ones I found—that I thought was really kind of shocking—was a gravestone,” she says. “I tracked that back to who the people were using census records. I found the church it was from, which was bombed, and used as a warehouse post-Blitz.”

The problem is that it’s unlikely she’ll be able to find or identify other pieces of the church unless they’re as distinctively marked—the dumping was just as indiscriminate as the bombing, after all. But that doesn’t detract from the nature of the puzzle, not when so many pieces are sitting right there, waiting to be put back together—enough for a lifetime of work for an intrepid young archaeologist with a nose for history.

“You can understand what Liverpool was like during the war,” she says. “Just in pieces.”

Here's how you ship the skeleton of long-dead megafauna across the Atlantic.

Eleanor Harvey knew that she wanted to bring the mastodon back to America, where it had lived, roamed, and died by the close of the Pleistocene. She just wasn’t sure it was possible. How do you cart a half-ton, long-dead elephant cousin from Germany across the Atlantic and into a gallery? How do you even get it through the doors?

Harvey, a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C., is mounting an exhibition opening in spring 2020 about Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century naturalist whose fascination with climate, taxonomy, and other fields of study profoundly influenced scores of researchers. Harvey had compiled a list of paintings, sculptures, maps, and other artifacts that testify to Humboldt’s legacy. But she also wanted the bones.

That’s because these aren’t any old mastodon bones. They’re what’s left of the creature sometimes known as “Peale’s mastodon,” an American mastodon (Mammut americanum) named for the painter, naturalist, and Philadelphia Museum curator Charles Willson Peale, who rushed to Newburgh, New York, in 1801 and recruited more than two dozen laborers to help pull the gargantuan fossils from the ground.

It wasn’t so unusual to come across a monumental mandible or hulking rib: Mastodons and mammoths once ranged across North America, and proof of their presence is still buried in fields and streams. This particular skeleton became especially famous, though—maybe more for its place in historical anecdotes than for any unique scientific value.

Before the bones wound up in Europe—where they’ve spent over 100 years winding through England, France, and Germany, and came to rest in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt—they were powerful symbols of an America still finding its way. The country was young, and many detractors viewed America as a kind of Diet Europe—less robust, less appealing, just a little bit worse all around.

This really chafed Thomas Jefferson. The politician was also a passionate naturalist, and he was fed up with the arguments advanced by people like the French naturalist and polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who insisted on a “Theory of American Degeneracy”—an argument, published in his hefty, multivolume Histoire Naturelle, that outlined how life in the New World blunted and stunted people and other creatures until they were puny, weak, and irredeemably unimpressive.

In the face of this scientific sneering, Jefferson was delighted by mastodon bones (though he, and most everyone else at the time, thought they were mammoths). They were huge! They were awe-inspiring! They were proof that America was built on a foundation of giants that made the ground shiver when they strode across it!

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the 1780s, Jefferson trampled on Buffon’s theory, writing, “the bones of the mammoth which have been found in America are as large as those found in the old world.” He was keen to find more.

What America lacked in centuries-old cathedrals or imperial ruins, it made up for in bones. So celebrating the megafauna became a patriotic project. “There’s a huge amount of civic pride attached to this mastodon skeleton,” Harvey says. “Jefferson [was] pinning America’s robustness to natural landmarks and this gigantic skeleton.” Jefferson even helped usher in the use of “mammoth” as an adjective to describe something remarkably massive.

Dinosaurs hadn’t really been excavated yet. Though bones had turned up even in antiquity, they were largely attributed to giants or monsters until later in the 19th century, when digs in the English countryside revealed bones linked to ancient reptiles, according to Mark A. Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. So, in Peale’s day, some thought the mastodon might be the biggest thing to have ever stomped across the land.

When Humboldt came to America in 1804, he was feted with a feast beneath the skeleton, which Peale had installed in his museum in Philadelphia. Humboldt joined Jefferson in “seeing America as a place that is rich in natural wonders, even if it’s short on man-made wonders,” Harvey says. “He and Jefferson basically accelerate[d] us down the path of believing that our national identity is grounded in what’s already here.”

Harvey wants the mastodon in her exhibit “to make the point that it’s natural history and natural monuments that bond Humboldt with the United States.” Displaying the mastodon, she hopes, will evoke the feeling that swelled in the early 19th century, when Peale put the skeleton on view. It was a cocktail of paleontology, patriotism, and peacocking—a way of saying, “‘Hey, you know, we’re not some brand-new republic that has no history and no credibility and maybe no future,’” Harvey says. “It was really a matter of saying, ‘If robust creatures like this once walked the earth of North America, think of where our future is going to lead us.’”

As she began to plan the exhibit, Harvey had good reason to think that she might not be able to bring the bones home: They hadn’t left Germany since they’d arrived there in the mid-1800s, after Peale’s museum went belly up; France needed to offload them during the tumultuous 1948 revolution; and the British Museum passed completely.

In the winter of 2019, Harvey visited Germany and met the mastodon and its custodians at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt. To her surprise, they were game. Oliver Sandrock, a curator and paleontologist in the museum's department of Earth and life history, appreciated Harvey’s plan to frame the prehistoric creature as key to the fledgling country’s self-conception and what it had to offer. “I said, ‘Yes, that’s a good story,’” Sandrock says. “So we’ll do it.”

But there were still slews of logistics to think through. Long before curators load a loaned object onto a plane, they’ve got to puzzle out each step of the process to ensure that things will go smoothly on the other side. Is the thing stable enough to transport? Will it make it into the building? Moving crates can be “like turning a semi,” Harvey says, and there’s not always a lot of wiggle room for maneuvering in museum hallways. Harvey had to figure out whether she could wrangle the mastodon on and off of freight elevators and shepherd it into the third-floor gallery where she plans to install it. (And, for that matter, whether the floor can withstand the weight.)

Sometimes curators get creative: Once, to ease a large painting into the building, Harvey’s team enlisted a crane to hoist it in through a glass-free window, then replaced the panes after the artwork had been safely settled inside. In the case of the mastodon, Harvey realized it would be a close call. When the skeleton arrives at the museum this winter, Harvey says, the tallest of the crates will just barely make it out of the freight elevator that opens into the exhibition space. At most, it will have just two inches of headroom.

"The elevator is plenty big, but the exit doors are smaller," Harvey adds. When the building was constructed, “No one expected to be moving a mastodon.”

Once everyone was convinced that the plan wouldn’t fall to pieces, the German team began preparing the mastodon for its journey. First they cleaved the skeleton into five segments based on existing armature running through the skeleton. The skull is one unit. The second and third are made up of the right and left forelimbs. The fourth—the largest of them all—is the barrel-shaped rib cage. And the pelvis and hind limbs comprise the last section.

Then they splayed out the bones—and the wooden additions that take the place of missing pieces, and make the skeleton look complete—for several weeks of cleaning. An alcohol-based cleaner and gentle blasts of dry ice will remove the old, yellowing varnish without compromising the bones beneath, and allow researchers to parse the skeleton from painted wood. (Topped with centuries’ worth of accumulated gunk, it’s hard to tell the difference.) Sandrock is noodling over ways to help viewers distinguish between bone and wood, now that he and his team have the chance to give the creature a thorough refurbishing. He thinks it’s a distinction worth noting.

“Paleontology has nothing to do with completeness,” he says. “It’s bone fragments, tooth fragments, skull fragments. In my opinion, it’s important that visitors see the fragmentary nature of fossils.”

The museum will also take the opportunity to correct some previous interpretive mistakes. For one thing, says Sandrock, the creature’s skull and tusks aren’t quite right: The top of the skull was never found, and the current iteration, capped with gypsum, is too pointy—more like a woolly mammoth’s. The original tusks were never retrieved, either, and the newspaper-stuffed stand-ins are too swoopy—again, more suitable for a mammoth than a mastodon.

The skull will be shaved down with a saw, and then remade with molded epoxy resin to the specs the team has found in high-resolution 3D scans of complete mastodon skulls online. New resin tusks will be straighter, and the existing ones will go to the museum’s pedagogy department, where educators will refer to them as proof that “a museum is a living thing,” Sandrock says, grappling with its past and growing from it.

Once cleaning and tinkering are complete, and a blacksmith has built a high-grade steel structure that will connect the segments with joints that will make it simple to disassemble and reassemble, each will be tucked into its own custom-built wooden crate. They'll likely be packed with carved foam that snugly cradles the shapes (similar to how you might ship expensive wine). No one will “close any box until they’re 100-percent sure that not a single phalange is moving” en route, Sandrock says.

The crates and their contents are designed to insulate the object inside from vibrations and drastic temperature fluctuations. Unlike most museum galleries, the belly of a plane isn’t climate controlled. “It’s going to get cold up there,” Harvey says. “Crates are engineered to make sure that temperature change is not going to damage the work.’

Still, transporting valuable objects can be a nail-biting process, whether the object in question is high-profile or flying incognito. As Frederic Church’s painting The Icebergs made its way to Dallas, after selling at Sotheby’s in 1979 and smashing auction records for American paintings, it was packed in an unassuming crate marked “household goods.” Its importance was so thoroughly disguised that the crate wound up being bumped to a later flight, and spent a day lounging on the airport tarmac. “It’s like, ‘Whoa. Oh, my God. Please, no,” Harvey says. “I think everybody was a little bit horrified, but fortunately, the painting was not damaged.” Other high-profile objects have been ushered through the streets with a convoy of museum staff and police officers.

This mastodon won’t get a police escort, but it will be accompanied by a few museum chaperones, who will ride with it by truck from Darmstadt to Frankfurt, then by plane to JFK, in New York, and then pile into a truck again to drive to Washington, D.C., Sandrock says. They’ll use cranes to hoist the the heaviest parts into place in the gallery. In all, Sandrock expects that assembly will be about a day's work, with four crew members working together.

Jefferson tried to make the case that mastodons were both a precursor and a promise—because America had once been home to these huge creatures, the country's future was bright. But fossils aren’t prognosticators: They’ve been swaddled in layers of dirt and rock longer than any politician has been alive, and stay there with little mind to anything going on above them. Harvey points out that the mastodon skeleton has been in Europe for much longer than it was ever displayed in the United States.

How does a prehistoric fossil become American, and when does it become something else? Its legacy, now, is as a well-traveled creature that puddle-jumped the pond and earned fans on either side. But for a few months, in a rotunda on the third floor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, one of the country’s most dearly departed tusked residents will be back on its old trundling grounds.

The sweet and salty noodle dish started out in a prime minister's kitchen.

As World War II approached, Thailand was in a precarious position. For years, the country’s leaders had clutched their independence closely, worried about the French and English, who had colonized neighboring Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. Now, Japan was expanding imperially into East Asia, having invaded China in 1937.

In response, Plaek Phibunsongkhram’s government took action. As part of a national campaign called “Noodle is Your Lunch,” the Public Welfare Department gave Thais free noodle carts and distributed recipes for a new national dish: pad Thai.

At the time, the dish was little known, and no one called it “pad Thai.” In rice-centric Thailand, then known as Siam, the dish seemed more Chinese—similar noodle dishes likely arrived in Thailand centuries earlier with Chinese traders. But Thailand’s prime minister, who first rose to power as part of a military coup against the longtime monarchy, had spoken. As part of his strident nationalism, he wanted all Thais to eat pad Thai.

A noodle project may seem trivial in the context of world war. But Phibunsongkhram, better known as Phibun or Pibul in the West, thought it was the very seriousness of the situation that demanded this response.

Phibun believed that a strong national culture, including pad Thai, was key to Thailand remaining independent. Thailand was surrounded by colonies that European powers had justified on the basis of civilizing and modernizing their populations. Plus, Japan, which coveted control of natural resources, was creating an empire in East Asia. “We must be as cultured as other nations,” Phibun told his ministers in a speech. Otherwise, “Thailand would be helpless and soon become colonized. But if we were highly cultured, we would be able to uphold our integrity, independence, and keep everything to ourselves.”

This was the highly charged atmosphere in which Phibun pursued his noodle project. Phibun, who liked to compare himself to Napoleon, cast himself in the mold of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and mandated fawning coverage of himself as “The Leader.” As noted in Priceonomics, he pursued Thai nationalism by banning the Chinese language from schools, removing ethnic Chinese people from prominent posts, and having Chinese food vendors kicked off the streets.

“[Phibun] was determined that his most important objective was a cultural revolution,” wrote Thamsook Numnonda, author of Thailand and the Japanese Presence, 1941-45. “The heart of“[Phibun's] campaign was to instill a love for Thailand and to stir up pride among the people in all things Thai.”

A new national dish was just one part of the revolution. Eager to signal a break from the country’s feudal, monarchical past, he made sweeping changes that ranged from switching the country’s name to Thailand to dictating how Thais should dress. Wearing traditional Thai clothing, instead of the trousers for men and hats for ladies that Phibun preferred, could result in a fine. (He had thoughts on color choices too.)

Many national dishes represent long histories of local ingredients, immigration, and symbolism. But pad Thai’s culinary coronation was more a matter of chance. According to Penny Van Esterik, author of Materializing Thailand, Phibun “simply had this particular version of a Thai noodle that was made by his housekeeper in his kitchen, and he really liked it.” Phibun’s son, Nitya Pibulsonggram, told Gastronomica in 2009 that his parents “actually made pad Thai popular during the War.” While he doesn’t recall who exactly introduced the dish to the household, he said that his father and the government “thought it would be useful to popularize it because it is so nutritious.”

To Phibun, ensuring Thailand’s greatness required raising its standard of living, and officials were concerned about the Thai diet. Pad Thai, with its hearty mix of ingredients and the emphasis on cooking it in clean pots, fit the nation’s updated, modern nutritional guidelines. Like many Asian leaders, Phibun had studied in Europe. He associated Western ways with modernity, hence his desire to stamp out traditional Thai clothes in favor of European suits and skirts. But he also aimed to unify his diverse country around national pride.

In 1941, Japan attacked Thailand, and Phibun agreed to an alliance that gave Japanese troops free movement throughout the country. After the war, Phibun defended his cultural mandates as necessary to prevent Thailand from fully falling under the influence of much-more-powerful Japan. Near the end of World War II, Phibun was driven out of office. But while the new government rolled back much of his cultural revolution, there was no backlash towards pad Thai.

Generations later, the Thai government found itself once again promoting pad Thai. To boost international awareness of the country and promote tourism, Thailand made it easier to export Thai ingredients, gave loans to Thai restaurateurs abroad, and established visas specifically for Thai chefs in countries such as New Zealand. The smashingly successful Global Thai program sent tourism soaring and dramatically increased the number of Thai restaurants globally.

In Thailand today, there’s little sign of pad Thai’s origins as a bureaucratic project. Its best iterations draw crowds of enthusiastic eaters. It also has to compete within a rich food scene without government boosting and support, which is why it’s often outshone by dishes such as khao soi, the curry noodles of Thailand’s gastronomically rich north.

Abroad, though, Phibun’s original aim has been realized. Like a designated dignitary, pad Thai’s sweet noodles, tofu, egg, fish sauce, bean sprouts, and lime tell the world that Thailand is a place worth visiting, with a rich and distinct culture. Even if pad Thai is a curious choice of representative.

It's for science, promise.

In what may be the farthest-reaching drink order of all time, a dozen bottles of Bordeaux were blasted aboard a rocket from Wallops Island, Virginia on Saturday, bound for the International Space Station. By Monday, they’d reached their destination, without a corkscrew.

A strong-willed crew of international astronauts will leave them unopened for an entire year as part of a study conducted by Space Cargo Unlimited, a Luxembourg-based research startup. As company co-founder, CEO, and proud Bordeaux native Nicolas Gaume said in a statement, it's a “once-in-a-lifetime adventure."

The space-bound vino will be examined after twelve months against a control batch remaining on Earth to gauge how microgravity and space radiation affect the aging process. “Systems such as wine are at the center of chemo-physical research because of the involvement of thousands of components,” explains company spokeswoman Maryse Camelan. The mission is the first of six that Space Cargo Unlimited has scheduled over the next five years. Plants, yeast, and bacteria will leave the big, blue marble behind to begin studying the future of agriculture.

The mission’s advisor, wine scientist Dr. Philippe Darriet, mused in an interview with with Quartz that the unique environment of the ISS “could have a positive impact” on the wine. NASA’s own website claims knowledge gleaned from the mission could lead to the “development of tailor-made taste and smell components and enhancements for food products.”

It’s notable that when Ardbeg, a Scotch distillery, sent samples of their whiskey to space for a thousand-day orbit in 2011, they aged twice as fast in color and taste as their earthly equivalents. To be sure, the Bordeaux’s space-trip is just the latest episode in a history of astral libations.

Shortly before taking humankind’s first steps on the moon, Buzz Aldrin radioed to NASA asking for a moment of silence, during which time he controversially snuck a sip of communion wine from a chalice he was gifted by his church. “In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup,” he wrote in 1970.

While NASA was quick to sweep the episode under the rug, the Soviets took a different tack. Not only were Russian cosmonauts rationed vodka and cognac, they were directed to regularly drink by space-program doctors. “We used it to stimulate our immune system and on the whole to keep our organisms in tone,” retired cosmonaut Alexander Lazutkin said in an interview.

The boozy allowance was still insufficient for one Igor Volk, who admitted to a clever scheme to smuggle (more) cognac and snacks into space. He and his partner fasted for a whole week before take-off, careful not to compromise the launch with excess weight. “When we were being dressed, we placed the bags in our spacesuits,” he told Russia Beyond.

The name of the winery that produced the best Bordeaux in space has yet to be released, though company founders Gaume and Emmanuel Etcheparre have deep ties with the region’s wine industry. While it's likely a fine wine, the secret ingredient of space radiation might still need some marketing work.

A shiny mineral called galena, once prized by the Mississippian people, left its mark on the soil.

Most of the time, in most of the world, archaeology is the study of various shades of brown. There’s dirt brown, soil brown, and often clay brown. “Sometimes there’s gray!” says Jeremy Wilson, an archaeologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). “And we have a system to categorize those browns.” But Wilson is unusually lucky for an archaeologist: He studies dirt that sparkles.

By archaeological standards, Kincaid Mounds, the site of a prehistoric Mississippian city occupied from 1050 to 1400, is downright glitzy. Located at the southern tip of present-day Illinois, the mounds are riddled with galena, a lead sulfide mineral that resembles supersized chunks of glitter. Wilson says that archaeologists working in the Midwest will often stumble across galena chunks as big as dice, which stud the dirt like brutalist leaf litter, as well as a distinctive spangle that coats the inside of prehistoric homes. A thousand years ago, the Mississippians took advantage of this natural bounty and created an ancient glitter factory, smashing the galena blocks into a fine, glimmering dust that still lingers over the mounds. Wilson and Broxton Bird, a paleoclimatologist at IUPUI, examined the surprising legacy of Mississippian galena in a study published October 15 in Geology. “Clay isn’t supposed to shimmer, but it does here,” Wilson says.

Wilson and Bird discovered these monumental levels of prehistoric lead more or less by accident. The duo first partnered up in 2013 to investigate a larger mystery: why the Mississippians seemingly abandoned the Kincaid Mounds in 1400, leaving the site empty until the arrival of American settlers 300 years later. “We wanted to investigate the relationship between climate and the exodus of people from this area,” Bird says.

The researchers extracted sediment cores from Avery Lake, a floodplain lake bordering the mounds. The layers revealed peaks of concentrated lead from three time periods: the Baumer (300 BC to 300), the Mississippian, and the modern era (since 1800). The first and third peaks were easy enough to explain: the Baumer settlement produced pollution from using fire to clear the landscape, and the modern pollution originates from leaded fuel and coal, Bird says.

The sheer size of the Mississippian peak, however, came as a surprise. Anthropologists have long known that Mississippians, particularly those living in the prehistoric city of Cahokia, used galena and other minerals in rituals and as decoration, according to Thomas Emerson, an archaeologist at Illinois University who was not affiliated with the study. “They would mix it with pigments, ochres and reds and yellows, or leave it by itself as a silvery powder,” Bird says. “It was a shiny metallic substance that imbued beauty and made things special.”

But the researchers were taken aback by just how much they found: approximately 1.5 metric tons of lead deposited in Avery Lake during the era. Though galena bricks were originally traded as a mineral, people began grinding and crushing the lead into a powder during the Mississippian period; Bird suspects that the lead trickled into Avery Lake via wind or rain. “To have incorporated such a volume of galena into religious or social events as to actually leave a signature in lake sediments is unexpected,” Emerson writes in an email.

Bird traced the lead isotopes to galena deposits in southeastern and central Missouri, as well as other areas in the Upper Mississippi Valley, suggesting that the settlement at Kincaid Mounds may have been the hub of an extensive trade network for far-reaching Mississippian settlements. Prior excavations of Midwestern Mississippian sites reveal galena sourced as far south as Florida, Bird says. “It’s so thought-provoking that there would be a sustained exchange network, with galena being transported by boat or by foot across the Mississippi River,” Wilson says. Though the Mississippians did not have the technology to smelt galena, they needed very little equipment to mine the crystals from rocky outcroppings. “You could just pick them off the surface,” Bird says.

The researchers now plan to investigate how this pollution may have affected the people living in this prehistoric, glittery cloud of lead. They do not plan to touch any human remains at Kincaid Mounds in this investigation, however. Due to their sudden disappearance in 1400, the Mississippian settlement has no known connection to tribes currently recognized by state or federal governments. But the remains of Mississippian people are still protected by state laws and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. “Out of respect to the descendent tribes today, we don’t plan to do any invasive testing,” Wilson says, adding that no tribal members have come forward yet about the remains at Kincaid Mounds.

There are ways to study the impact of lead on prehistoric human populations without studying the humans themselves, Bird says. He plans on sampling non-human remains from the era, such as dog remains, to see if lead affected their bones or the enamel on their teeth. The question isn't whether lead pollution affected the Mississippians, but rather—to what extent? “We’d hypothesize that there were health impacts,” Bird says. The researchers also hope to take sediment cores from other bodies of water in the Midwest and Southeast, to find out whether this level of pre-Columbian lead pollution appears elsewhere.

In Wilson’s eyes, the study underscores the complicated relationship humans have with the natural environment and natural resources. “When you look at our readings going up the sediment core, we see the burning of fossil fuels in 1900s and leaded gasoline,” he says. “And the reading we get for the Mississippian layers in the soil mirror those levels of lead.” In other words, the Mississippians show that pollution is much older than industrialization. According to Wilson, “It’s a fascinating and sad story about humanity, and the harm we can do unintentionally.”

Moving them from island to island is one way to conserve them.

The Galápagos Islands are often considered the cradle of evolutionary theory, where Charles Darwin developed an inkling of how creatures relate, persist, and change over time. But since the 19th century, a human presence there has reshuffled the archipelago’s faunal cards, introducing invasive species and pushing native ones to extinction.

Perhaps no species has been subject to this existential rigmarole more than the three types of Galápagos land iguana—terrestrial cousins of the famous local marine iguanas. In January 2019, scientists repatriated 2,150 of these three-foot-long lizards to Santiago Island from the overpopulated North Seymour Island, in an effort to re-establish the animals in their native habitat—a place they haven’t been seen since the days of Darwin.

According to researchers, it was a herculean task. “Transferring such a large number of animals required a tremendous coordinated effort,” writes Luis Ortiz-Catedral, a conservation biologist at Massey University in New Zealand and a scientific adviser for the operation, via email.

But even the idea of such a transfer—in this case, a collaboration between the Galápagos National Park Directorate and the Galápagos Conservation Trust—may not have been possible without a man named George Allan Hancock. In January 1932, nearly a century after Darwin’s time in the islands, Hancock, a ship captain and industrialist, was sent by the San Diego Zoo to collect live iguanas from the Galápagos.

But when he arrived on Baltra Island, where the greatest abundance of lizards were then living, Hancock found iguanas that looked malnourished and gaunt—probably thanks to the non-native goats there that had been chewing up the lizards’ habitat. Worse still, he couldn’t find a single iguana on neighboring North Seymour Island.

Putting two and two together, Hancock did what any ad hoc conservationist would do: He shipped iguanas from the former island to the latter. Though he’d been sent to the Galapagos only to retrieve the lizards, he may have figured his job would be for naught if he took some of them home and let others die off.

“A good idea I believe,” wrote Cy Perkins, a scientist aboard the expedition. “No harm anyhow, as far as I can see.”

And so began a longstanding conservation technique that’s still practiced today. To keep the Galápagos land iguana population strong and evenly distributed, scientists regularly transplant the reptiles from island to island.

Not long after the Hancock expedition, cats, rats, dogs, and the construction of an American military base killed off the Baltra Island iguana population—the only place today where humans and land iguanas overlap. (The reptiles were repatriated to Baltra in 1991, taken from the North Seymour population that Hancock had first propagated.)

Thankfully, the logistics of moving big lizards have evolved since Hancock’s gung-ho efforts nearly a century ago. After being kept in quarantine for 30 days, these iguanas were put in crates and boated nearly 90 miles to the coastal regions of Bucanero and Puerto Nuevo, on Santiago Island (where Darwin once complained that there were so many iguana burrows that his team couldn’t pitch their tents).

Time will tell how they take to their once and future home. “Currently we are monitoring the iguanas to understand their dispersal behavior in their new home,” writes Ortiz-Catedral. “We are also trying to understand their diet and the establishment of nesting areas.”

One thing Santiago Island’s newest residents won’t have to worry about is dangerous neighbors: Invasive species like donkeys and goats, which chew up the habitat, and cats and dogs and feral pigs, which prey on the lizards’ eggs, were eradicated in a separate conservation effort in the early 2000s.

With those destructive invaders gone the way of the dodo, land iguanas in the Galapagos may find that this new chapter of life is a little smoother—and will last a little longer—than they’re accustomed to.

The socialist establishment, which is still slinging scoops, seated 1,000 customers.

In the 1960s, Fidel Castro faced many challenges by becoming an ideological enemy of the United States. One was being seen as the tip of the Soviet spear, a menace to democracy just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Another was that America maintained the Guantanamo Bay military base, which was capable of sheltering 50 warships, on the southeastern tip of Cuba. But arguably the most vexing issue for Castro, especially on a sweltering summer day in Havana, was the United States cutting off Cuba’s dairy supply.

That was a problem, because Casto was obsessed with ice cream. When he was still a young revolutionary in the jungle, a wealthy supporter, Celia Sánchez, sent him an ice-cream cake via mule for his birthday. When the rebellion succeeded, he established himself at the Havana Libre Hotel, where he habitually enjoyed the cafeteria’s milkshakes. In “A Personal Portrait of Fidel,” novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez described Castro polishing off 18 scoops after Sunday lunch. His affection for ice cream was such that the CIA attempted to poison his milkshake. “That was the closest the CIA got to assassinating Fidel,” a retired state security general told Reuters in 2007.

But when the United States announced a total embargo in 1962, cutting Cuba off from the American dairy market (along with every other U.S. export), Castro found himself the leader of a milk-free island that was too warm for dairy cows. Undaunted, he demanded, in 1966, the construction of the greatest ice cream parlor the world had ever seen. Visitors to Havana can still eat there today.

Castro put the project in the capable hands of Sánchez. The daughter of a wealthy doctor, she had provided supplies to Castro and Che Guevara, eventually joining the young rebels in the jungle and in combat. When Castro came to power, she became his closest aide and an essential member of the socialist government. Opening a cathedral-like ice cream parlor was not the only odd assignment in her sprawling political portfolio: In the wake of cigar makers fleeing Cuba, she took charge of setting up factories to produce Castro’s favorite cigar.

In line with the Cuban Revolution’s wide-eyed optimism, Sánchez and Castro decided to build and open the parlor within six months. Sánchez, meeting with architect Mario Girona, asked him to design an ice cream factory and parlor that could serve 1,000 people. “At one time?” he recalled asking, shocked by the size and scope. The establishment was named after Sánchez’s favorite ballet, Coppelia, and staffed by waifish women who looked like ballerinas. The logo was a pair of plump legs in a tutu.

When Sánchez met with Girona, Cuba was not completely without cows—Castro had spent the four years since the embargo designing a dairy industry from scratch. Supplying Coppelia and the rest of Cuba with local milk became an obsession equal to his passion for ice cream.

Cuba had zebu cattle, a hardy breed that is found in many tropical countries, but provides little milk. So Castro imported Holstein cows—the iconic black and white variety—from Canada. But even when housed in air-conditioned barns, they failed to thrive in Cuba.

“A third of the Canadian cows died in a matter of weeks,” writes Mark Kurlansky in Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas, “leading Castro to pronounce they would have to invent a new Cuban breed, ‘the Tropical Holstein.’”

Castro believed that developing Cuba’s own dairy industry was worth the expense. "We have known the bitterness of having to depend on others,” Castro said in a speech, alluding to the American embargo, “and how this can be turned into a weapon against us." He was motivated, too, by a desire to show socialism’s superiority. In another speech, he explained that while capitalism made better products at first, it eventually produced lower quality goods than socialism. Coppelia was his main example.

In the 1960s, American and Russians valorized their astronauts. Cuba had Coppelia and its cows. Specifically, it had Ubre Blanca, by far the best of Castro’s Tropical Holsteins. Castro loved to show her to journalists and foreign dignitaries, and Cuba’s press reported her every exploit. Kept in a guarded, air-conditioned stable and constantly monitored by specialists, she produced, in one record-setting day, four times as much milk as the average cow, smashing the previous record set by an American bovine, Arleen. For Castro, who peppered his hours-long speeches with statistics about the triumphs of Cuba’s socialist economy, it must have felt like when Russia put a man in space before the Americans. Dairy was his space race.

But the combination of Castro’s forceful personality and micromanagement often led to poor outcomes—in one case, Castro ordered underlings to cross two cow breeds that every animal husbandry student knew would not produce successful offspring. Ubre Blanca was a rare exception, and Castro’s dairy industry faltered.

While Castro’s dairy dreams died, Sánchez still delivered with Coppelia. In One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution, writer and photographer Nancy Stout describes the ice cream parlor as "one of Celia and Fidel's greatest projects.” The domed, two-story ice cream palace, she writes, was a "dazzling, spun-sugar white.” Open to the air, the palatial structure had stained glass and seating for 1,000.

“Before the revolution, the Cuban people loved Howard Johnson’s ice cream,” Castro told a visiting journalist shortly after Coppelia opened, referring to the iconic American brand. “This is our way of showing we can do everything better than the Americans.” And, indeed, even visitors from the U.S. conceded that Coppelia was likely serving the world’s best ice cream. Coppelia had dozens of flavors and sent them, packed in dry ice, to dignitaries, international food festivals, and friends of the revolution, such as Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh.

Castro never achieved his dream of dairy self-sufficiency, and, at times, that has meant that the poor economy and economic embargo led to Coppelia having fewer, or lower-quality offerings. But to a surprising extent, his vision has endured.

Coppelia remains a singular place to enjoy ice cream. The line to order snakes outside each day, just as it has for decades, reflecting both the parlor’s popularity and the shortages that afflict Cuba. In One Day in December, Stout describes Coppelia as the type of place where you go on a first date or take your mother.

One of the few elements of the original Coppelia that didn’t last were the delicate servers, who couldn’t keep up with the heavy demands of the ice cream palace. To this day, the most popular order is an ensalada—a five-scoop sundae—and, in a very Castro move, it’s common to order three.