An elephant can defecate 16 times in one day—and its 200 pounds of dung can double as paper pulp.

Grown-up elephants can eat more than 300 pounds of food—mostly grass, twigs, foliage, and tree bark—in a single day. In the same period, they may defecate 16 to 18 times, producing over 200 pounds of dung. In Randeniya, a small village in the lower wetlands of Sri Lanka, elephant poop is a renewable resource. The sun-dried, deep-brown dung piles up like haystacks in a painting by Claude Monet.

Visitors could be forgiven for thinking that the poop is useless. But at Eco Maximus, a manufacturer in Randeniya, it takes on a second life. More than 20 years ago, a man named Thusita Ranasinghe saw some dung and had an idea. “He thought he could make paper from it,” says the company's brand designer, Susantha Karunarathne, with a smile. At his office inside the company factory, Karunarathne wears a green t-shirt which says #elephantdungpaper and shows off some of his recent journal designs.

On a table nearby, a several women carefully design covers for multi-sized notebooks. On another, the finished product is packed and ready to be shipped. Today, Maximus creates a range of stationery and souvenirs, which are sold in the local market and in 30 other countries around the globe.

Eco Maximus was an early producer of elephant dung paper, and the first in Sri Lanka, and refining the manufacturing process involved a lot of trial and error. Elephant dung is brought in by nearby rescue centers, Karunarathne says during a tour of the factory. Fresh elephant dung, semi-solid and green in color, smells. But after it dries under the hot tropical sun, the smell disappears. Collectors gather the deep-brown, fiber-rich piles in a piping-hot steam boiler. “We boil for one hour, to ensure that the dung is germ-free,” says Vibhatha Wijeratne, the factory manager, wearing a pair of yellow gloves as he shows me a pile of boiled dung.

In one corner of the factory, bundles of paper with crumpled edges are stacked upon each other. There are different colors—earthy tones, blues, tropical greens, and deep reds. Thousands of years ago, much of the writing in Sri Lanka was inscribed on stones. Later, the islanders wrote on leaves, such as the fronds of the palmyrah palm, locally known as the tal. “Palmyrah leaves were boiled and sun-dried for writing, which was called pus kola (old leaves),” says bright-eyed Randika Jayasinghe, who teaches biosystems technology at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura.

Conventional papermaking began after Sri Lanka was colonized by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and then the British, who referred to the island as Ceylon. Most paper uses wood pulp as the main material, which is fibrous and rich in lignin and cellulose. “It is prepared by chemically and mechanically separating fibers from wood,” Jayasinghe says. “These chemicals are then released as wastewater.” The problem is that nearly 4 billion trees are cut down every year to manufacture paper. Some are farmed, but others are logged from managed and old-growth forests. “Since paper is biodegradable, we consider it to be eco-friendly compared to plastics,” Jayasinghe says. But it comes at a significant environmental cost.

After the British left Sri Lanka in 1948, the local government opened 12 factories in the 1960s to utilize waste straw from rice paddies for papermaking. But by 1993, only two of them remained. One of them was managed by Shirani Fairbanks. “I walked into the Export Development Board in Colombo, and by accident, I saw a sheet of paper made from banana fiber,” says curly-haired Fairbanks, collecting a bundle of vibrant wrapping paper from her office table. “It inspired me to start Trickledown.” Her company eventually moved beyond conventional papermaking, when they began using waste material—tea refuse, banana skins, pineapple fiber—to make paper. “There’s a huge demand for elephant dung paper products in the market,” Fairbanks tells me. They have a unique aesthetic appeal, which many young people love.” The company now sources paper from manufacturers around the country for their stationery, crafts and other products. One of them is Eco Maximus.

Back at the Eco Maximus factory, Wijeratne, the manager, shows off a 1000-liter cement tank known as the beater. A rubber hose pipes water into the tank from a nearby tap, and an employee uses his bare hands to toss in steam-boiled dung, which now resembles a yarn ball made out of earthy fibers. “This is the pulp we use for inner pages of notebooks,” Wijeratne says. “One-third of this pulp is elephant dung, while two-thirds of it is offcut.” Offcut is two things: leftover paper brought from warehouses in Colombo, and remains from Eco Maximus paper that has been leveled and cut into desired sizes. Finally, bucket of deep magenta liquid is added to the mixture. (Eco Maximus also makes paper from elephant dung alone, but its fibrous texture makes it unsuitable for writing or drawing.)

In one of the last steps of papermaking, a woman pours a jug of pulp onto a thin metal mesh. The mesh is dipped in water, and she uses her fingers to mix the pulp for a few seconds, leveling it on the mesh while the water trickles down. “This is for 150 GSM writing paper,” Wijeratne tells me, using the industry acronym for “grams per square meter.” (Printer paper is usually less than 100 GSM, while business cards can be as high as 400 GSM.) Two women hold the mesh up and press it onto a slightly larger cotton fabric, which is laid flat on a table by a third woman. She then folds the fabric edges in and seals it, which creates a fabric-pulp sheet. Smiling and chatting, they soon make a pile of sheets.

“We use this machine to compress the water out,” says Karunaratne, pointing to a large electric machine. A middle-aged man manually controls the machine, which squeezes a bundle of fabric-pulp sheets as water drips down. “Now you can remove the cotton fabric, and let it dry.” Karunarathne takes me to a large section of the factory where colorful papers are neatly racked. Drying takes place under the asbestos roof, as direct sunlight could bleach the blues, tropical greens, earthy tones, and deep reds.

Finally, two cheery ladies stand by a large aluminum sheet iron, which smooths out the creases and rough edges one sheet at a time. “Ironing is the final step of raw papermaking,” says Wijeratne. These paper sheets will be cut, leveled and turned into stationery.

The transformation of poop into paper is complete. Outside, in a neighbor’s garden outside the factory, it is about to start all over again. An elephant marches past, holding a clump of grass beneath his trunk. He leaves a pile of poop before he moves on. “It will be turned into paper tomorrow,” Karunarathne says, and laughs.

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Warm water and "sea star wasting disease" helped urchins take over the coast, a new study finds.

In 2013, California’s bull kelp forests began a vanishing act. First, the starfish blinked out, their tissue decaying in lesions until their arms fell off their bodies like petals. Next, the purple urchins multiplied in vast hordes like a glitch in the system, munching steadily on bull kelp until it had all but disappeared. All this time, the water kept warming, with temperatures hovering around 2.5 degrees Celsius above normal. Once the kelp was gone, the red abalone starved, leaving behind an underwater graveyard of upturned shells. But millions of urchins stuck around, carpeting the seafloor like violet-colored burrs.

For centuries, long stretches of northern California’s coastline supported sprawling forests of bull kelp. Fish, snails, and octopuses took shelter under the bull kelp’s blades, and a diverse population of mollusks and echinoderms held snug to the rocks. “You couldn’t even move without stepping on an abalone or red urchin,” says Francesca Koe, a dive instructor and free diver in the Great Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. “Now it’s empty of invertebrates, of kelp, of fish.”

Between 2013 and 2017, a perfect storm of factors resulted in the collapse of the northern California kelp forest and the animals that depended on it, according to a study published in October in Scientific Reports. Drawing on two decades of kelp ecosystem data, researchers found that 90 percent of bull kelp and 96 percent of red abalone disappeared from those coastal waters in a matter of years. “It’s as if all the redwood trees in California disappeared in two years,” Koe says. “This is the equivalent. It’s just that people don’t see it because it’s under the surface.”

When the oceans were healthy, Northern California’s coastal waters rivaled outer space in their abundance of stars—20 species, to be precise. Many sea stars prey on sea urchins, but the urchins’ primary predator was the massive sunflower star, which can grow up to three feet long. Sunflower stars were like oceanic roombas, gliding over the seafloor and grazing enough urchins to keep the population in check.

Scientists first noticed the coast’s sea stars were dying in the summer of 2013, according to Laura Rogers-Bennett, a co-author of the study and an environmental scientist at the University of California, Davis. The culprit was sea star wasting disease, which affects echinoderms and often appears in areas with unusually raised water temperatures. The viral disease causes skin ruptures that expose gonads, internal tissue, and finally their calcified skeletons. “It’s easy to recognize because the sea stars appear as if they’re melting away,” Rogers-Bennett says. “It’s really quite disturbing.” In the disease’s final stages, the lesions often grow so wide that the stars bodies fragment, arms coming loose from the center. From 2013 to 2014, the disease devastated the area. But while some populations have since begun to recover, no one has seen a sunflower star since 2015, suggesting the species has gone locally extinct.

In 2014, things got much worse when a marine heat wave known as “the Blob,” traveling south from the coast of British Columbia, reached California and mixed with warm El Niño waters, according to the study. For 226 days, the surface of the sea was 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer than usual, making waters nutrient poor and essentially unlivable for the kelp—and to top it off, an algal bloom released a neurotoxin that stranded many marine mammals.

In 2015, with few stars to prey on the purple urchins, the population of spiny critters exploded to 60 times their recorded population the previous year. Once appearing in small, dense patches, the urchins began to cover the barren ground like moss—but by this point, there was almost no food left. “Once they consumed all the fleshy algae and kelp, they started eating through the coralline algae, through woody stipes and tunicates,” Rogers-Barrett says. “They were eating through everything.” Some urchins that multiply in "barrens" have been known to survive without food for up to 50 years, according to a 2009 study in Tasmania.

As the urchins ate all the available food, they doomed nearby red abalone. At its peak, the abalone fishery attracted more than 31,000 visitors per year and fed $44 million into the surrounding coastal communities. But after the urchin boom, divers saw abalone inching up kelp stalks in search of fronds that were no longer there. “They’re strict herbivores and are susceptible to starvation within 18 months,” Rogers-Bennett says. Normally, abalone cling forcefully to rocks. “But they got smaller and weaker, to the point where you could just use your hand to pull one off,” Koe says. With nothing left to catch, the fishery shuttered in 2018.

Now, California’s coastal waters belong to legions of purple urchins—but they are far from thriving. The urchins survive on next to no food, their bodies shrunken and gonads empty. “The purple urchins aren’t evil creatures, but we created the environment that allowed them to flourish,” Koe says. “We shouldn’t forget that.” While the urchins are not invasive, their supersaturated presence is alarming. If any bull kelp spores were to latch on rocks, the seedlings would be immediately devoured by hungry urchins.

The bull kelp is unlikely to come back without help, especially given the likelihood of future marine heatwaves linked to climate change. And so in June, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife joined a nonprofit, the Greater Farallones Association, in releasing the Sonoma-Mendocino Bull Kelp Recovery Plan. The plan details a number of strategies to try and revive the forests, including seed banks, commercial ranching, and community outreach, and includes input from research groups, commercial divers, and local Native American tribes that have historically harvested the urchins and abalone for sustenance.

For the past several years, recreational divers affiliated with several conservation groups have been diving and removing the urchins, one by one. One group, the Watermen’s Alliance, removed 1.2 million purple urchins in 2018 and sent them to be composted in Utah, according to KCET. Of course, removing every purple urchin is impossible. Instead, the scientists want to clear strategic pockets of urchins to allow bull kelp the chance to come back in patches. “The strategy is to create this network of coves and oases up and down the coast,” Rogers-Bennett says, adding that these pockets could also serve as seed banks for the future.

For some Californians, the delicate balance between kelp, abalone, and urchins is nothing new. Bob Bertelli, the vice president of the California Sea Urchin Commission, which represents the state’s nearly 300 licensed urchin divers, started harvesting from these waters in 1975. He collected abalone at Killer Point by Half Moon Bay, but when the fishery closed each August, he’d switch to red sea urchins. They grew in such abundance that divers used rakes to detach them from the rock. “It was pretty much virgin territory back then,” Bertelli says. “You could anchor your boat pretty much anywhere in the kelp bed, swim down there, and pick 500 pounds in just a few minutes.”

Red sea urchins, which are bigger and spikier than their purple cousins, are a delicacy: Their gonads are served as uni in sushi. But the red sea urchin fishery collapsed alongside the surge of purple urchins, which outcompeted the reds for kelp. Now, when urchin divers spot a lone red and bring it to the surface, they find shriveled gonads that would never make it on a plate, Bertelli says.

Still, Roger-Bennett sees California’s purple plague as an opportunity. Like red urchins, smaller purple urchins can be harvested as food. “If you bring a purple urchin to market that’s empty, you can’t sell it as a seafood product,” she says. “But you can if you feed it for a short amount of time.” She likens the strategy to Florida’s marketing of the invasive lionfish as a seafood product. “This is going one step above sustainable. It’s a restorative seafood product,” she says.

From his years of experience as an urchin diver, Bertelli isn’t convinced that such an approach would be economically or physically viable. First off, he says, the urchins available for harvest are just too small, around the size of a silver dollar, making them hard to extricate. To get around this, the retired commercial urchin diver Jon Holcomb developed an urchin-sucking airlift, which sucks any animals and small objects in the nearby sand up a pipe and into a waiting net. The process is efficient, cleaning around 1,500 square feet of purple urchins a day, and far less backbreaking than plucking the critters by hand. But the technique is incredibly invasive, sucking up any living thing that happens to be loitering by the airlift. “You can try and put the critters back,” he says. “But who knows if they made it up the tube.”

Even if the researchers were able to establish a market for purple urchin uni, Bertelli doubts demand would grow high enough to extricate the needed amount of urchins from the kelp beds. “And the ocean is so dynamic that all this could change in a few years.” Instead, Bertelli advocates for the simplest, most time-tested method of urchin removal. “You take those purples and you crush them,” he says. All divers need is a rock hammer, armed with a spike on one end and a hammer face on the other, and the tiny urchins are easy to crack. (They can also serve as Christmas decorations.)

Still, to see if urchin ranching could become a reality, the Bodega Marine Laboratory at UC Davis has partnered with Urchinomics, a Bay Area shellfish company. Together, they’ve started an experimental urchin ranch. They collect purple urchins from the seafloor and fatten them up with pellets made from cuttings of the Japanese kelp kombu, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. So far, the project seems promising. The withered urchins take around six weeks to reach market size, and produce reliable roe with a sweet, umami flavor, Brian Takeda, the CEO of Urchinomics, told The Chronicle. If all goes well, the company plans to build a facility in downtown Bodega Bay, hire more divers, and eventually churn out 100 tons of purple urchin per year.

Since the California kelp collapse, Koe says she’s seen some patches of bull kelp take root in clearings off the coast of Marin County. But nothing comes close to the forests that were once so thick and tangled that divers would carry knives to cut themselves free of the kelp. Bull kelp’s natural life cycle includes fallow periods: The species naturally dies off and regrows each year. “This whole thing has shifted beyond cyclical,” Koe says. “It’s an unfortunate new world order.”

A century-old iron scow is inching closer to the brink of Niagara Falls.

For the past century, someone standing on the Canadian side of the upper Niagara River and looking out toward Gull Island—a little heap of rocks with a couple of scraggly trees and a few feathered residents—has been likely to spy a mangled mass of iron, partly submerged in the rapids. With a portion sticking up in the air, “it almost looked like was trying to fight its way upriver,” says Jim Hill, senior manager of heritage at the Niagara Parks Commission.

It’s a 20th-century shipwreck, sitting about 650 feet from the Canadian shore, and 1,800 feet from the brink of the famous Horseshoe Falls.

The wreck has languished there since August 1918, when a scow became untethered from the tugboat that was towing it and ran aground while drifting toward the falls. (Designed to be hauled, the hefty flat-bottomed sand barge lacked power and a rudder, leaving it rather helpless on its own.) The two crew members on board were rescued, but the scow had no such luck. Even if the boat could be salvaged for scrap, the potential payoff for individuals or companies wasn’t worth fighting the current to bring it ashore, especially with so much hydroelectric infrastructure nearby.

So, day in, day out, come storms and tumbling water, the 98-foot boat sat lodged in place—exactly where the crew had abandoned it.

Then suddenly, this past Halloween, it moved. Stimulated by a storm that felled trees, knocked out power, and deluged the already-brimming Lake Erie (whose waters sat at a record high last summer), the boat broke loose and went on a little trip downstream.

The trip was short and quick. The boat “appears to have sort of flipped on its side and spun around,” says Hill. Meaning when it moved, it moved on an angle—one side traveled 108 feet, the other 141 feet.

Or at least what’s left of it did. The boat has been steadily deteriorating over the years; a century in white-tipped water, barreling past at roughly 30 miles an hour, has done a number on it. “It was getting bombarded by rapids,” says Hill. “Much of it was already gone.”

The romantic vision of shipwrecks is one of peaceful, undisturbed slumber—artfully decaying vessels resting elegantly on a sandy bottom. In reality, shipwrecks are dynamic environments. “Every shipwreck is unique,” says Della Scott-Ireton, associate director of the Florida Public Archaeology Network in Pensacola.

Some wrecks are safer or more unstable than others, due to a number of factors. Many ships, for instance, fare pretty well in cold, fresh water, where there’s no salt to corrode their metal bodies. (Then again, even the shipwreck-studded Great Lakes have their share of problems: The aggregate weight of slews of zebra mussels—an invasive species—can overwhelm the ships and compromise their structural integrity.) Shipworms can make Swiss cheese of wooden hulls, Scott-Ireton says, while generations of oysters can colonize a ballast and cap it with their shells, creating a natural protective layer, as happened to a 16th-century Spanish ship in Pensacola Bay.

In general, a shipwreck that’s close to shore—in warm, shallow, oxygen-rich water—will degrade, says Chris Southerly, North Carolina’s deputy state archaeologist, who specializes in underwater archaeology. “Colder, deeper, siltier waters offer better preservation,” he says.

In any event, wrecked ships don’t tend to roam. “In most cases, once [wrecks] settle in place, they don’t often shift naturally,” Southerly says. But they can be nudged by salvage efforts or clean-up projects, and by fierce storms and floods. In 2005, Hurricane Dennis roared past Key Largo with enough force to right the USS Spiegel Grove, a deliberately sunk ship that was serving as an artificial reef but had rolled on its side. (When storms strike North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Southerly says, large fragments of wrecks can migrate up to two miles along the shore).

Scott-Ireton glimpsed the wrecked scow back in 2005, on a trip to Niagara Falls, and was struck by how precariously it was perched. “I was wondering when it was finally going to break loose,” she recalls, thinking, “‘Sooner or later, this thing is going to rust away to the point where a storm is going to push it over the falls.’”

Lodged amid the rocks, she says, the wreck had “no chance to get into the muddy bottom of the river and get covered by sediment, which is what would have protected it.” Had it been nestled down there, it “probably would have been fine and stayed there on and on.”

It’s hard to say how long the scow will stay in its new environs. Hill figures the scow could stay put for a while, because from a hydrodynamic standpoint, it has never looked worse. “It’s literally now a crumpled mass,” Hill says. The tie-off points, still intact on the hull, are now reaching into the riverbed, like accidental anchors.

But there’s no doubt that the boat will continue to disintegrate. After the scow's little jaunt, the Parks Commission launched a drone to fly over it and take aerial images, which revealed big punctures and gashes in the hull. Chunks are missing, and water is pouring through. “Our best guess is it’s going to continue to break up,” says Hill, “and that [it] will be scattered in the rapids.”

Before debris reaches the brink of the falls, he adds, it will pass through other shallows, where it could find itself wedged. (Hill suspects that some of the pieces that have come off over the years are scattered there already.) “It’s anyone’s guess what its next move is gonna be,” Hill says. If portions of the boat do stay intact long enough to topple over the falls, he adds, he expects them to sink.

Whether it vanishes from view or plunges down the falls, the wreck won’t be around forever. But Hill points out that it’s pretty remarkable it's survived this long. Another stranded ship—a wooden-hulled surplus Sunbeam, built as a World War I-era Navy patrol boat—had given up the ghost not long after it got stuck on a sandbar, and then a neighboring shoal, in 1923. The hull “disappeared in about 10 years,” Hill says,“and the metal left behind got swept away.”

The scow, on the other hand, “seems to be literally made of tougher stuff.” Lashed by the rapids, perched amid rocks, “it’s a mini miracle that this thing has held on.”

Hunting, fishing, and sharing the catch are all part of the program.

Like the territory itself, food in Nunavut is equally beautiful and bountiful. Within the landlocked center of Canada’s northernmost region, tuktu (caribou) is added to stir-fry or eaten raw in rich, buttery, deep-burgundy chunks. The stomach can be smoked for an extra-decadent snack. Near Iqaluit, seals are hunted on Frobisher Bay and hauled back to shore, where their gamey meat might be added to a hearty stew. Arctic char are wind-dried and smoked for a delicious, flaky appetizer. Maktaaq, or narwhal and beluga, is sliced up and passed around from a piece of cardboard on the kitchen floor. (Soy sauce and sriracha are favored dips to pair with the raw blubber.) If there’s extra meat from a hunt, someone will offer it up in a community Facebook page.

It’s one of the most interesting and sustainable cuisines on the planet, and that’s why Malaya Qaunirq Chapman is thrilled to host Nunavummi Mamarijavut, a cooking show highlighting local Inuit foods and traditions. The show, aired across the territory by the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, will broadcast its second season in December. The Inuktitut title means “the food we love in Nunavut.”

“This is literally the best job in the whole entire world,” Qaunirq Chapman says over the phone from Iqaluit. When we speak, she’s just returned from shooting episodes for season three in Salliq, Naujaat, and Arviat, with emphasis on fish, maktaaq, and tuktu. “I really passionately love food, not even just as a profession. As an Inuk, eating my country foods is liberating.”

Country food is the term for the traditional foods—tuktu, char, seal, whale—harvested from the land and sea in Nunavut. Each episode finds Qaunirq Chapman and a crew of two cameramen in a different community across the territory, learning to hunt and prepare local food in both traditional and contemporary ways. Shooting in Nunavut is at once simple and challenging: the landscape is consistently gorgeous. But the weather can be fickle, especially in winter when sunlight is sparse and temperatures plunge to -58°F. The show doesn’t try to airbrush over the occasional difficulty. “With this show, we aim to be true and authentic with who we really are,” says Qaunirq Chapman. “We don’t have to manipulate anything to make it better or more beautiful, because it naturally is.”

Qaunirq Chapman, who serves as host and producer of Nunavummi Mamarijavut, created the show along with producer and friend Sylvia Cloutier. Like most Inuit, Quanirq Chapman grew up on this food. Raised by her great-grandmother, the two relied on family members to provide food for them, so she never learned to hunt. Now, in each community she visits, she learns local hunting techniques. “I tell them, ‘I’m learning how to hunt, I want to learn how to butcher,’ and so my relationship with this has changed a lot because I’m now a part of the hunt,” she says. “As a woman, they never belittle me. If you’re a hunter, you’re a hunter.”

Country food in Nunavut is indeed plentiful, but communities in the territory still suffer from widespread food insecurity. It’s an issue caused and compounded by colonialism and colonization in the north, which intensified in the 1950s. Nunavut became a strategic military interest, and both American and Canadian military forces built permanent settlements around airfields. Previously-nomadic Inuit were moved into these new communities—if not willingly, then by deception and force. Food costs in grocery stories in the territory are now double or triple the national average.

Food sharing in the territory doesn’t eliminate these systemic issues, but the supportive, egalitarian ethic behind it is more reliable than ineffective federal government programs. Qaunirq Chapman says that when they’re hunting for a shoot, the food isn’t just shown on film. After filming a successful beluga hunt in Naujaat, a call was put out to a community Facebook page so that anyone could come collect some of the catch. “When we’ve gone hunting with these people, the food is open to absolutely anyone and everyone in the community,” says Quanirq Chapman. “They don’t charge us. They just give it for free. This is the beauty and essence of Inuit in the north: the beauty of giving what you catch, and generously, without any hesitation.”

But the catch in Nunavut is changing. When Qaunirq Chapman visited Arctic Bay, a hamlet on the northern peninsula of Baffin Island, one of the community’s elders told her that the skin of the fish now is thinner and more delicate than it was when she was young, and the fish themselves are less meaty. Tuktu used to be found all around Iqaluit, but now there’s a lottery for hunting tickets. Qaunirq Chapman says hunters are also observing more illnesses in both fish and caribou.

A 2016 book, The Caribou Taste Different Now, demonstrates this in first-hand detail. A collection of research and interviews with Inuit across Nunavut, it details the ways that the climate crisis has already affected local food sources. Just as modern cooking techniques and accessible ingredients allow for new twists on age-old Arctic staples, such as Arctic char antipasto, modern climate crises are impacting the Arctic at accelerated rates. Communities across Canada’s three northern territories have declared local climate emergencies, and abnormalities in freeze and melt timelines have upset migratory patterns and made hunting more dangerous. And while urban dwellers might not have noticed until fairly recently the impact of the climate crisis on their lives, Inuit have for much longer. Back in 2005, a Lakehead University study conducted with the expertise of residents of Arviat and Baker Lake in Nunavut already observed marked environmental changes over the previous decade.

This adds another dimension to Nunavummi Mamarijavut: the food it celebrates is under an ongoing two-pronged attack. First from the climate crisis, and second from animal rights activists who target Inuit seal hunts, damaging economic prospects. “There’s a lot of discrimination towards Inuit and our foods and how we hunt,” says Qaunirq Chapman. She says critics wonder why they have to continue their traditional hunts when there are grocery stores full of food—an argument which ignores the cost and poor quality of food in grocery stores across the north. But it also doesn’t account for a deep cultural connection to their environment and its offerings.

“What they don’t realize is that farms are not humanely operated, and the animals have horrible lives,” says Qaunirq Chapman. “Our view of farms and such are [that] it’s sad because the animal never got to live a life the way ours get to roam free. The relationship with Inuit and our food is more than just superficial.”

This intimate partnership is coded into every aspect of Nunavummi Mamarijavut. The show also demonstrates how community-based practices help keep this cuisine alive. When Qaunirq Chapman cooks with her guests for the show, it is not in a manicured kitchen set. It is in people’s homes, in their kitchens and living rooms, leaning on the counter, or cross-legged on the floor.

“That’s the show’s identity,” says Qaunirq Chapman. “We don’t need to use big fancy words and big fancy cooking methods to really showcase the beauty of where we come from. Put a piece of cardboard on the ground, put the meat on there, and just eat. It’s beautiful. It’s the only way I ever want to eat.”

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They could be related to the famous, ill-fated "Vasa."

In August 1628, King Gustav Adolf of Sweden was pretty pleased. Despite his country being at war with Poland-Lithuania, his top-of-the-line warship, Vasa, had just launched on its maiden voyage out of Stockholm. Everything was going swimmingly, until Vasa decided to sink instead of swim. The top-heavy vessel teetered, then tottered, then took on water, and quickly descended to the bottom of Stockholm Harbor. The ship was raised in 1961, and eventually became the centerpiece of its very own museum on Stockholm’s Djurgården Island. Now, two newly discovered wrecks from the same era may be the remains of the warships that followed Vasa (to much greater success).

“I was the first diver in the water,” says Jim Hansson, a maritime archaeologist with the Vrak – Museum of Wrecks, which is slated to open in 2020. “I started to swim a bit, and all of a sudden this big black wall turned up before my eyes. I got goosebumps inside my dry suit.”

After Vasa hit the bottom, Gustav ordered a series of new warships, among them Äpplet (Apple), Kronan (Crown), and Scepter (you guessed it). Unlike their unfortunate predecessor, these later ships had long naval careers. When they were no longer useful, the ships were intentionally sunk near Vaxholm, a bucolic archipelago outside of Stockholm, as a defense against the Danes and the Dutch.

The dives, conducted in cooperation with the Swedish navy by a team from the National Maritime and Transport Museums (which includes the Vasa and Vrak museums), revealed two wooden wrecks that appear to be similar in size and design to the ill-fated Vasa. Though they are in worse condition than the older ship, Hansson says he was able to make out deck beams, knees, and rigging details on one of the vessels. The other wreck, he says, was more degraded. Now archaeologists are doing the important work of dating wood samples from the wreck, to identify the wrecks for sure.

Since the 17th century, the Vaxholm archipelago has remained an important maritime corridor. Hansson says that bigger ships and ferries regularly come within 150 feet of the newly discovered wrecks.

“There are just two ways to enter Stockholm [by boat],” says Hansson. “By Vaxholm and through Baggensstäket, where only smaller vessels could pass. So Vaxholm was and still is a really important area for Stockholm.”

Preserved through a combination of good fortune and the chilly Baltic Sea, which isn’t comfortable for shipworms and other marine species that usually make short work of wooden wrecks, the two vessels could vastly increase our understanding of naval power of the time.

“We have learned so much from the Vasa, not just about Swedish warships but about European shipbuilding, early modern societies, technology, art, and much more,” says John McCarthy, a maritime archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who was unaffiliated with the project. “Although these wrecks are not as well-preserved, they add a major dataset that can be compared to Vasa and to other ships of this period.”

The waters of Vaxholm were investigated in advance of the Vrak Museum’s opening on the same island where Vasa now rests, high and dry. As a sister to the Vasa Museum, it seems only fitting that the museum’s dive program may have turned up one of Vasa’s sister ships, Äpplet, which had been built alongside Vasa but proved more seaworthy.

“We do not yet know if the ship is Äpplet, Vasa’s sister, but it could be,” says Fred Hocker, the Vasa Museum’s research director. “We need to look closely at the documentation made this past week and analyze the provenance of the timber before we would be able to be sure.”

“The plan is that people can follow the work with these new wrecks and other really interesting finds we have done recently,” says Hansson. “A more lively museum, not only permanent exhibitions.”

A street photographer set out to document single-story buildings—the anti-skyscrapers.

Adam Friedberg hit the streets early, when the sidewalks were as empty as they’d ever be, when street lights still threw an amber glow, when the city's low-slung buildings were still tucked to sleep behind dingy metal grates.

Starting in 2015, Friedberg, a photographer living and working in New York City’s East Village, roamed a lopsided rectangle that had him zigzagging through the Village and the Lower East Side. His route was bounded by 14th Street to the north, Avenue D to the east, Canal Street to the south, and Broadway to the west. He crisscrossed the map over and over again, in search of single-story buildings. To date, he has photographed 100 of them, from storefront churches to garages, warehouses, and bars. Fifty-four of his large-format, black-and-white images will be on view at the Center for Architecture beginning November 21.

Friedberg considers himself an environmental photographer, and says his interest in photographing architecture boils down to a fascination with order and where it splinters into disorder. He suspects that this curiosity took root after a disorienting spell of vertigo that had him laid up for days in the mid-’90s. Focusing on level shapes, he says, “made me feel like things weren’t about to be spinning.”

Vertigo is also an apt metaphor for the feeling of New York City. Stay long enough, locals often say, and reliable landmarks will start to disappear, as rents rise and higher buildings spring up. Friedberg recalls noticing the disconnect between one-story buildings and newer, higher, sleeker ones while wandering near Astor Place. He noticed that tall, glass buildings were soaring above a flatter strip that held a McDonald's, a bar, and a smoke shop. “It looked like the skyline got punched, and there’s a broken tooth right there,” Friedberg says.

Friedberg had been living in the area for nearly three decades, but he hadn’t paid much attention to his shortest brick-and-mortar neighbors. That’s partly because he didn’t find the single-story buildings especially eye-grabbing; they tend to be plain and box-like, he says, barely ornamented except with an old sign here and there. But he remembers thinking to himself, “Look, there’s a 20-story building next to this warehouse that’s starting to fall apart.” He was intrigued by the way the old and new sat next to each other.

In the absence of an index of the squattest buildings in his neighborhood, Friedberg relied on shoe-leather sleuthing, with help from maps and Google Street View. He knows he may have missed some, and they might be gone before he stumbles across them; a few buildings that he intended to photograph, including two gas stations, were demolished and replaced with condos before he got the chance. Others have disappeared since he recorded them.

Friedberg aimed to produce images free from hard shadows, people, and cars, to limit any visual distractions and put the buildings front and center. He also captured as much of the surroundings as he could manage, he says, “photographing the existing and having the new come in in the margins to show the discrepancy between the two.” One image of Katz’s Delicatessen, on Houston Street in Lower Manhattan, showcases a construction site on one side and a towering, glinting luxury apartment building on the other.

In many corners of the city, developers are building higher and higher; Central Park is now fringed with vertiginous “pencil towers,” spectacularly tall, surprisingly skinny buildings, such as the 88-floor residential skyscraper 432 Park Avenue. In New York City, height has always mattered: People have fretted over skyscrapers for over a century. “The city’s first zoning code was enacted as New Yorkers began to worry that tall buildings would cast the city into eternal darkness,” the New York Times reported in 2016. When Equitable Building went up at 120 Broadway in 1915, reaching more than three dozen stories tall on the site of an earlier, shorter skyscraper destroyed in a fire, it reportedly threw a seven-acre shadow across its environs. All these years later, the Times has mapped the shadows that the city’s buildings fling.

In the midst of all this change, some residents protest the disappearance of local businesses by inveighing against gentrification and celebrating the places that manage to hold on. The idea that the city’s character is diminished as chain stores expand is a central tenet of Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, by Jeremiah Moss, a book that’s part ode, part call to arms. Over the years, many small businesses and holdouts have given way to national chains like Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Walgreens, and MetroPCS—though in 2018, national chains lost ground in New York for the first time in a decade, according to a report produced by the Center for an Urban Future.

Change has always been a part of the East Village, writes journalist Ada Calhoun in St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street, a cultural history of one of the East Village’s central arteries. Manhattan was once home to the Lenape people, who were forcibly removed by the Dutch. Over several centuries, what is now St. Marks became farmland cultivated by Dutch settlers, a neighborhood full of heavy-pocketed merchants and statesmen, the territory of bootleggers, and a home base for working-class Polish, Italian, and Puerto Rican immigrants. It was a haunt for beatniks, then hippies, then punks. Each wave of arrivals complained that the soul of the neighborhood had shriveled, even as it rebloomed as something new. “Every cohort’s arrival, the flowering of its utopia, killed someone else’s,” Calhoun writes.

To Friedberg, the series of photographs isn’t a critique, lament, or elegy. He isn’t set on preserving the architecture. “I’m not against developers tearing down these buildings,” he says. After all, he says, there was a time when the single-story buildings weren’t there—and maybe something else was torn down to accommodate them, or else a vacant lot was filled in. His approach is more documentarian than rabble-rousing: He set out to assemble a record of the neighborhood’s buildings, and the changes happening up and down its blocks. “How is it changing right now?” Friedberg asks. “And is this the right way to change things?”

Only one farmstead in Monterey County still makes the famed cheese.

Depending on your point of view or your politics, you might subscribe to one of four theories as to who invented Monterey Jack cheese, all of which are detailed in essays preserved on the website of the Monterey County Historical Society in Central California:

One: It was Roman monks who taught cheese making to the Majorcan missionaries who founded the missions on what is now the central coast of California in the 1770s. (And who bulldozed over the native Rumsien and Esselen people to create a new Californio culture.)

Two: It was Doña Juana Cota de Boronda, a Spanish-Mexican-German woman. Her family received the 6,625-acre Rancho Los Laureles in the Carmel Valley as part of the Mexican land grants from Spain, before California became a state. Her great-granddaughter wrote to the Monterey Historical Society about her father’s memories of using a handmade jack to press the curds into cheese, then just called queso del país, or country cheese. Doña Boronda, stories go, had to sell this cheese door-to-door to feed her fifteen children after her husband was injured.

Three: It was a Swiss-Italian California dairy man named Domingo Pedrazzi, who also made a jack-pressed cheese in the late 1800s, which he sold under the name Del Monte Cheese.

But the most fun to tell by far is the tale of David Jacks, born David Jack in Scotland, who moved to California during the Gold Rush of the 1850s. The synchronously named Jack (the man, not the press) didn’t find precious metal, but he did eventually legally bamboozle the government out of 30,000 acres of land, an acquisition that eventually enabled him to buy up most of the peninsula from Pebble Beach to Monterey’s historic Mexican missions. That included many dairies making country cheese, including Dona Boronda’s well-regarded queso del país, which he started marketing and exporting around the country possibly on her behalf, probably with his name and “Monterey” on the boxes, so it eventually became known as Monterey Jack.

“They're all probably true; it’s not voilà—it’s Monterey Jack,” says Beau Schoch of Schoch Family Farmstead in Salinas, a third-generation California dairy farmer whose family is currently the only one making Monterey Jack in Monterey County. Like most who know the cheese’s history, he believes it started out as a process—the time and temperature at which the milk ferments, the way you cut the curd to make a smoothly textured cheese, the jack that presses out the liquid—and that likely many people were making it.

“At some point, somebody said, 'Oh, what’s this cheese? It’s jacks cheese in Monterey,'” says Schoch, whose grandfather was a German-speaking Swiss dairyman who came to the United States in the 1920s to escape the flu then ravaging Europe.

No matter your take on the past, Schoch is the standard-bearer of the future. It is an American travesty that most of us think of Jack cheese as the rubbery white squares sold in every supermarket. At its best—which is to say, as made by artisans such as Schoch—it is a rich, buttery beauty that deserves its due as one of this country’s first artisan cheeses, best eaten out of hand instead of melted on beans and burritos.

Several makers around the country do produce similar special versions, but Schoch is the only one to do so in its original terroir. This is hilly land just off Highway 101, land that has been grazing cattle since mission times, once a rancho owned by a Mexican land grant family by the name of Espinosa. (Their original adobe house was torn down by Schoch’s grandfather, says Schoch, but one of Doña Boronda’s still exists, if you want to see it.)

Cheese making is brand-new for Schoch’s family, who produce both regular and aged Monterey Jack, plus many other artisan rounds of Schoch’s own creation. For him it’s part of a broader plan to stay in business, now that they often earn less than it costs to produce their milk if they sell it to national distributors. (He originally thought about growing grapes and making wine, until he realized his family already grew cows.) The Schochs also make Swiss-style stirred raw-milk yogurt and bottle some of their own milk to be sold at local grocery stores and food shops along with their cheeses.

Decades ago, there were 300 to 400 dairies in this area. Now there are just two or three. Schoch remembers when his family used to graze twice as many cows in the fields across the highway, before the area’s huge fruit producers realized you could grow strawberries on those hills, too.

Schoch's family land is some of the most valuable agricultural land in the country because of the cooling fogs, constant sun, and fertile soils. In fact, this land is known as the “salad bowl,” home to much of the lettuce sold nationwide, as well as artichokes, strawberries, and cherries. In some ways, that’s good for milk, yogurt, and cheeses. Schoch's cows, a mix of Holstein, brown Swiss, Swedish red, and Montpelier, get leftover unsold fresh lettuce when they’re not eating his green grass. (“It’s better greens than you’re getting in New York City,” Schoch tells me.)

Today, their own labeled products are made from just 20 percent of the milk they produce, Schoch says, but he hopes to slowly grow the side business. Who knows? Maybe other Monterey County–area dairy producers will join him, making the region’s past their future.

The auctioneers think they’re Tiffany, but it’s actually hard to prove.

In 1972, three days before Christmas, a historic church on the South Side of Chicago burned for eight hours straight. The flames licked the interior of the St. James Catholic Church until its insides were hollowed out. In an attempt to stanch the fire, firefighters destroyed many of the church’s towering stained-glass windows. But two enormous panels survived, having recently been stowed away in the church’s basement for repairs. Their carefully rendered depiction of the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus were blanketed in soot, but a quick swipe of the finger proved the glass had survived the fire.

Desperate for funds to rebuild the church, the parish sold the windows, which languished in a suburban garage for years, gathering dust and in need of restoration. Now, the windows are up for auction at Donley Auctions on November 15. “They’re masterful,” says Mike Donley, who co-owns the company with his brother Randy. Randy hasn’t seen any windows like this come through their shop in 45 years.

Demolished in 2013, St. James was first built in 1880 to accommodate a growing parish of Irish-American families. After the fire, the church sold the windows to a restoration architect named Paul Straka, Donley says. But it’s not easy to take panes of glass that once peered into a church and properly display them in a suburban home, so Straka stacked the two windows in his garage, along with others he purchased from the church. They sat there for 50 years, Donley says, until the older Straka realized he would never do anything with them, took them out from under a removable truck shell, and sold them to Roger Merenkov, the owner of Touch of Beauty Brass and Lighting. “I saw a picture Roger took of that pile of windows, and it looked almost like an archaeological dig, just a pile of glass and lead,” Donley says. “In the 1970s, people didn’t think of them as the treasures they are today. They saw them as just another window.”

The incredible artistry of the two windows has convinced the Donley brothers that the panels are the work of the iconic Louis Comfort Tiffany, who designed many stained glass windows for churches during his career. They believe the windows were installed in the initial construction of the church in 1880, which would make them early examples of the glassmaker’s work.

The windows display incredibly fine detail that are characteristic of Tiffany’s work. “These windows were meant to be viewed from 50 feet away, but close-up you can see the individual hairs in their beard,” Donley says. “One pane of glass literally looks like it has a sunbeam shining down on Baby Jesus,” he says. “That was Tiffany’s artistry, the way he used glass to paint a picture in 3D.” He also points out that the glass depiction of the Virgin Mary’s skirt was created by folding glass, creating an incredibly realistic effect. “People ask me, ‘Well, how do you know it’s a Tiffany?’” Donley says. “You just know a Tiffany when you see it.”

At least one Tiffany expert disagrees. Wayne Boucher, a mathematician at Cambridge University, created the Tiffany Window Census, a catalogue of where Tiffany’s art is now, and where it once was. Boucher knew St. James once had several Tiffany windows, three of which were titled the “Annunciation”, “Transfiguration”, and “Nativity” after the scenes they depicted. “This auction came as a surprise to me since the 1972 Chicago Tribune article about the fire said that three Tiffany windows had been destroyed,” Boucher writes in an email. (He acknowledges that the Tribune could have its details wrong.)

The Donleys contend that the two Tiffany windows date back to 1880, but Boucher’s research conflicts with that date. Tiffany published records of his windows in 1897 and 1920, and Boucher only saw a reference to St. John in the 1910 entry. “The two windows in the auction, if they are indeed by Tiffany, date to post-1910,” Boucher says, adding that he believes the "Nativity" window in the auction may in fact depict another theme, the "Adoration of the Magi." He doesn’t disagree that the windows could be Tiffany, and say they look like they could have plausibly been crafted by the artist. But he says the windows also could have come from Church Glass and Decorating Company, a company founded in 1899 by ex-Tiffany employees.

Though the windows may not be Tiffany originals, they certainly are a beautiful piece of South Side history. Whoever buys them will have to restore them, as small pieces of glass have broken off during the windows’ many years in storage, Donley says. Fortunately for the would-be buyer, when Tiffany Studios closed in 1933, the company left behind thousands of sheets of glass that make Tiffany glass restoration easier than it might sound, he says. So even if the windows aren’t Tiffany originals, they could be brought back to their former glory with the artist’s own glass.

How did a pigment that Vermeer used in the 1600s wind up on Egyptian art from the 6th century BC?

The Pharaoh Apries was not exactly popular. He lost his kingdom to someone who, according to Herodotus, once farted in his face, and in 570 BC was strangled by the Egyptians he once ruled. But he had an excellent palace. Built in the northern part of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, Apries’s palace was a sprawling 524 feet by 354 feet. The Pharaoh would enter the grounds through an enormous gate decorated with seven limestone reliefs, one of which depicted the pharaoh under a star-filled blue sky. Other scenes have been lost to time.

Though the colors of these reliefs have dulled to what seems now like variations on tan, they were once spectacular, with vivid greens, creamy whites, and brilliant Egyptian blue. Now, an international team of archaeologists has analyzed paint samples from Apries’s gate and found two, unexpectedly “new” yellow pigments that have never before been identified in Egyptian antiquity art. “We did not initially have a clue of what they were,” says Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a chemist at the University of Southern Denmark and a co-author of the group’s study, published this summer in Heritage Science. Other team members are based at the Glyptoteket in Copenhagen, the British Museum, and the University of Pisa.

With an abundance of Egyptian palatial ruins to choose from, the team decided to study Apries’s because it was constructed after a long period of isolation, at a time when Egypt had opened up contact with the Mediterranean and constructed a trading colony on the Nile Delta, Rasmussen says. “We thought that maybe we could contribute to the enlightenment of the Greek-Egyptian relations and the exchange of culture between them,” he says.

When researchers analyze pigments found in old paintings, they often take samples smaller than a millimeter in in length, order to preserve the image. But with massive Egyptian sculptures, scale is less of an issue. The samples from Apries’s gate ranged from 10 to 20 square centimeters. “They are small on an Egyptian scale, but certainly not microscopic,” Rasmussen says. The researchers studied a column adorned with palm fronds and four relief fragments. The full scenes have long since crumbled away, but they depict a number of recognizable subjects, including a lotus leaf, half a loaf of bread, and the name of the jackal god Wepwawet.

The researchers ran each fragment through a battery of non-invasive tests, including microscopy and examination under ultraviolet fluorescence. At first, the paint told a familiar story: Several pigments were commonly used in Egypt at the time, such as white made from gypsum, green from atacamite, red from hematite, and Egyptian blue from copper. But the yellows proved much more vexing.

Most yellow pigments that the ancient Egyptians were known to use consisted of yellow ochre, a mixture of clay and iron oxide. People have painted with ochres for hundreds of thousands of years: The earliest example dates back 285,000 years, at the Homo erectus site GnJh-03 in Kenya, according to LiveScience. Other ancient Egyptian yellows included orpiment—an arsenic sulfide mineral that glittered as brilliantly as gold but, as its name suggests, was dreadfully poisonous—and iron sulfates that produced pigments the color of a lemon.

The researchers expected the yellow lotus leaf fragment to be a pigment that archaeologists were already familiar with. “We all thought that the yellow color must come from orpiment,” Rasmussen says. Research on Egyptian painting after the Bronze Age shows that Egyptians often painted large-scale reliefs using a mixture of orpiment and yellow ochre, the authors write. (Pure orpiment was reserved for the gilded look of sarcophagi.)

But after analyzing the pigment with micro-X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, they found clear traces of arsenic, lead, and antimony. “We realized of course that this could not be only [orpiment],” Rasmussen says. The elements they detected suggested the presence of other lead-based components, specifically lead-antimonate yellow and lead-tin yellow. The fragments they examined also included a superficial layer of wax, which Rasmussen speculates might have made the yellow even shinier. “Maybe they tried to emulate the luster of gold,” he says.

These lead-based yellows were way ahead of their time: They had previously been found in paintings dating back to the Middle Ages, with lead-tin yellow appearing in the 14th century and lead-antimonate yellow appearing at the beginning of the 16th century. Lead-tin yellow can be spotted prominently in Johannes Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid,” painted in either 1657 or 1658. Both pigments disappeared from popular use in the mid-19th century. “The Egyptians at this time had the technology to either manufacture these pigments, which would be amazing, or had the knowledge to identify them and the knowledge where to find them in nature,” Rasmussen says.

The authors now believe that these pigments originated in Egypt, but they hypothesize that Europeans “(re)invented” them during the Middle Ages. Now that the researchers have pushed back the historical timeline of sophisticated yellow paints, they hope to hunt down any other uses of the pigment in the ancient world. With ancient trade routes in mind, Rasmussen knows where he wants to start looking. “Could it be in Greece?” he asks.

A recently scanned cat mummy was probably not a scam, but the remains of animals that died on a sacred site.

When French scientists scanned a 2,500-year-old mummy in 2017, they expected to see the skeleton of an ancient Egyptian cat. What they actually saw was the image of several ancient Egyptian cats—specifically, five hind legs, most of three tails, and a little ball of cloth. Given that the biology of cats has not drastically changed since the 5th century BC, the biology of the cat mummy came as a bit of a surprise.

Though the cats lived and died in Egypt, the mummy resides in France, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes. To see inside the mummy without unwrapping it, researchers from the National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) performed a CT scan and reconstructed the skeleton in 3D, according to a statement from INRAP. “Some researchers believe that we are dealing with an ancient scam organized by unscrupulous priests,” Théophane Nicolas, a researcher at INRAP who assisted in the reconstruction, said in a statement. “We believe on the contrary that there are innumerable ways to make animal mummies.”

Though a five-legged, three-tailed cat may seem like a monstrous cryptid worthy of a scam, these potpourri-style mummies are more common than you might expect, according to Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo and the editor of Divine Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt. “With mummies, the packaging does not always reflect the content,” she says. “We have various explanations for this, ranging from the cynical to the far less cynical.”

In a study of mummified cats and cat parts found in several tombs at the Bubasteum Temple in Saqqara, Egypt—a veritable feline necropolis—archaeologists identified 184 cat mummies and 11 “packets” that contained a smattering of cat bones, the archaeologists Alain Zivie and Roger Lichtenberg write in Divine Creatures. Several of these packets held the bodies of two to six cats, making them easy to spot due to their gigantic size.

In the case of this particular five-legged, three-tailed cat mummy, Ikram has three possible theories. First, it could be an example of Egyptian priests ripping off pilgrims who came to purchase mummies, now knowing that they often contained something other than what their exterior suggested. Second, the mummy could reflect the synecdochic Egyptian notion that the part of something symbolized the whole, and that the correct chants could render the cat bones into a whole cat in the afterlife, which Ikram says is an extrapolation of ancient magical texts. Third, the Egyptians believed that anything that died in a sacred space died with divine purpose, perhaps because they belonged to whatever deity who watched over the tomb, and were subsequently mummified. And sometimes, an incomplete skeleton could simply be a matter of human clumsiness. “When you mummify something, things can fall off,” Ikram says.

Luckily, the Rennes mummy holds one clue that might solve the mystery. Its dried flesh and bones had decomposed prior to their mummification, and were freckled with holes from the mouths of corpse-eating insects, Nicolas wrote in an email. With this knowledge, Ikram believes the Rennes mummy is a prime example of the third theory: The cats likely died around a tomb and, found in a state of decay, were made into mummies. “With this particular mummy, they gathered pieces of dead animals within the sacred space to give them a happy afterlife,” she says.

In recent years, the actual contents of animal mummies have been studied far more than human mummies, as their smaller size makes them easy to slide into a scanner, Ikram says. And as more mummies are scanned, more reveal surprises. Two-thirds of the cat mummies collected at Bubasteum showed evidence of a violent death, suggesting that priests would often raise cats for the purpose of slaughter and eventual mummification. These mummies would not show bites like the Rennes mummy, because they would have been bandaged soon after death.

But even in the case of these more slapdash, inconclusively-sourced cat mummies, Ikram is wary of calling these mummies scams. Instead of setting out to deceive pilgrims with mummies made of incomplete skeletons, priests likely were doing the best they could with such a high demand for cat mummies and a limited supply of cats, Zivie and Lichtenberg write in Divine Creatures. Maybe for mummies, what’s on the inside doesn’t always count.

Extreme heat, ants, and stray cell phones are big concerns.

The largest radio telescope in the world—part of it, at least—is in the Australian outback, nearly 200 miles from the already remote west coast city of Geraldton. But this is not the kind of telescope most people are familiar with. There are no lenses or domes, rather a patchwork of spindly antennas, arranged in groups of 16 and set on large tiles planted in the desert floor. Some parts of the installation look like a copse of skeletal metal trees. From above, the whole thing resembles a constellation of bridge parts, all connected with thick black cables. The facility is Australia’s part of an international, multi-billion dollar project to amass the input of hundreds of thousands of radio antennas, scattered across, in total, a million square meters. Hence the project’s name: the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

There are few places on Earth better for hearing the subtle murmurings of universe than deep rural Australia, far away from the sources of interference that come with people, roads, and cities. (Another primary part of the SKA is in South Africa’s Karoo Desert, and other pieces are similar isolated in 11 other countries.) But this electromagnetic tranquility comes at a price: the challenges of a harsh desert environment and its denizens, both of which seem eager to impede the interstellar investigations.

The portion of the SKA in the outback is called the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, or MRO, and is itself made up of a couple of distinct arrays of instruments. Amid brush and bungarras—large desert lizards—the MRO is listening for evidence of a time, epically named the Epoch of Reionization, within the first billion years after the Big Bang. It was when galaxies and quasars first started to form, light reappeared after millions of years of darkness, and the cosmos as we recognize it today emerged. We can sense echoes of this time, 13 billion years ago, if we pay close enough attention.

“Obviously we know stars had to form at some stage, but we don't know precisely when,” says Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, the director of the MRO. “It's somewhere between 400 and 700 million years after the Big Bang.”

Unlike an optical telescope that looks for electromagnetic waves in the visible spectrum, the observatory is sensitive to radio waves, which have a much larger wavelengths. “That’s a great thing about radio astronomy,” says Mia Walker, an engineer at the MRO. “You don’t have to wait until the sky gets dark before you can do some work.”

Much like light from the sun makes it impossible to see the stars during the day, a radio telescope can't sense anything unless it is isolated from other sources of radio waves—which means it needs to be far away from just about everywhere. And even once researchers have found a place free of AM and FM signals, wireless communications, and more, it’s always a challenge to keep it that way.

“The MRO is special because it is preserved as a radio quiet zone,” says Johnston-Hollitt. “The observatory itself is 127 square kilometers [50 square miles] and is protected under Australian law from radio transmissions.”

And that’s why most humans are prohibited from going anywhere near it. We’re loud, and the electronics in our pockets are constantly emitting radio waves—the pings from our cell phones as they search for a signal. Trying to sense the residue of the early universe while carrying a cell phone is like to trying to hear a mouse’s footsteps next to a rocket launch. For that reason, Johnston-Hollitt says, the public (and only 300 members of it) can visit the site, on one weekend every two years.

The important thing—keeping humans away—has proven to be the easy part. The site’s scientists, engineers, operations staff, and contractors also have to deal with a bevy of beasts. Some are small, some are big, and many seem to take an intimate, vested interest in sabotaging the cosmos-probing instruments.

“Ants love electricity and can short out the electronics in our antennas, termite mounds can actually grow up around our antennas—they can have those ones—kangaroos have kicked over our hardware before, and wild dogs can get curious about our equipment too,” says Walker. “I remember seeing puppy paw prints on a solar panel.”

The ants pose a particular problem. Their size allows for more electrical havoc than the other animals, even the drop-kicking kangaroos, can muster. “They crawl onto the little circuit boards inside our antennas and their bodies are small and conductive enough to bridge the gaps between parts of the circuit, which can make things short out and fail,” she says. “Reeeally annoying when you have to walk two kilometers into the desert to change out electronics because of ants!”

The giant lizards, which can grow well over four feet long, are less of a problem. “The bungarras are harmless, and they’re all named ‘Steve,’” says Walker. “The running joke is that they are all the same Steve, the same bungarra. One time, ‘Steve’ was obviously pregnant, so he temporarily became ‘Stevette.’”

Even accounting for humans and animals, the biggest obstacle to the ongoing performance of the radio telescope is the desert itself.

“Fauna are sometimes a problem, as with any remote site, but in terms of things we have to protect the telescope from, the weather is probably the most important,” says Johnston-Hollitt, citing lightning strikes, water runoff, extreme heat, and ultraviolet radiation, which can disintegrate components all by itself.

Deep time will tell whether the frequency sleuthing at the MRO pays off and provides greater detail on the moment—technically lasting hundreds of millions of years—when the universe began to resemble the giant expanse of wonder and nothingness we know today. But amid the disturbances—human, animal, climatological—the scientists out there persevere, their ears and instruments open to the stirrings of the cosmos.

How grilled ape, braised bear paw, and steamed camel hump came to symbolize national unity.

A special menu is currently on offer at the Macau restaurant Fook Lam Moon. Highlights from the “Manchu-Han Imperial Feast” include sea cucumber, wild goose, pigeon egg, leg of water turtle, and bird’s nest soup. Rather than a modern gastronomic undertaking, the menu hearkens back to a legendary feast from Chinese history–one so magnificent, of such grandiose proportions, that it pacified sworn rivals and stabilized a nation. It was a feast for the ages. It was also a feast that probably never happened.

Instead, a misrepresented episode from Chinese history is today an enduring national symbol of ethnic harmony and reconciliation, reenacted time and time again in restaurants throughout the country.

The Qing Dynasty Emperor Kangxi (1654–1722) was no stranger to opulent dinner parties. He neutralized the Mongolian threat to China’s northern border early in his reign by holding a series of “Mongolian Vassal Banquets” in the Forbidden City, famously sending his princely guests home with leftovers. Later in life, he invited 3,000 of Beijing’s septuagenarians to his 61st birthday party for an event dubbed “The Feast of a Thousand Elders.”

When members of the Manchu ethnic group began taking over ministry positions long-held by the ethnic Han, tension gripped the country. As the story goes, Kangxi, himself a Manchu, turned to a proven solution: food. He planned his 66th birthday feast accordingly.

The three-day feast’s political effectiveness came from fusing two disparate cuisines. Northern Manchu fare was typified by communal “meat gatherings”: In one scene from the Unofficial History of the Qing Dynasty “anyone who shouted ‘more meat’ repeatedly would be greeted by immense gratitude” and “anyone who failed to finish at least one plate of meat would be met with contempt.”

Han cuisine, on the other hand “prided itself on flavoring food with a wide range of staple ingredients and a great variety of condiments,” writes Dr. Isaac Yue, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Hong Kong in an email. As an example, he points to an excerpt from the famed novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, where ten lines of text are dedicated to instructions on how to cook an eggplant.

Legend has it that no expense was spared in providing the attending rival ministers with a prodigious fusion feast. It seems no animal from land, sea, or sky was spared either, if a sample menu from an 18th-century reenactment “Comprehensive Manchu-Han Banquet” translated by Dr. Yue is to be believed.

An opening salvo featured soups of pork tendon and sea cucumber, crab and shark fin, and kelp and hog maw. Marquee dishes of the second course included braised bear paw with carp tongues, gorilla lips with rice dregs, “imitated leopard fetus,” (“I have no idea what those were,” says Dr. Yue) and steamed camel hump. Another soup course featured one each of pig brain, soft-shelled turtle, and silkworm. The final meat course brought grilled ape, porridge-fed suckling pig, and minced pigeon, before a dessert of dried fruits cinched the feast.

Over the course of so many courses, it’s believed that the Manchu and Han ministers found it in themselves to bury the hatchet. Their settlement ushered in a period of peace throughout China, making the Manchu-Han Banquet the greatest in Chinese history. That the sample menu was dated to the reign of Kangxi’s successor shows that the banquet began spawning imitations almost immediately, as a potent symbol of reconciliation and unity.

To the fact-bound among us, however, the story is likely just that. “The romantic in me would love to believe that the desire for ethnic harmony was part of the reason for inventing such a feast,” says Dr. Yue. “But tried as I have, I’m unable to find evidence to back this up.”

Instead, extravagant banquets in the name of peace-making suited both newfound Chinese affluence and the political aims of the day. The overthrow of the Ming Dynasty in 1644 saw a period of reconstruction throughout the empire. “It took a few decades to recover from major war losses and food shortage,” notes Dr. Yue. The empire only found stability with the onset of food surpluses and the opening of trade routes in the early 1700s, right around the time of the mythical banquet. With ethnic reconciliation high on the list of imperial Qing priorities and Emperor Kangxi already owning a reputation for politically motivated feasts, the two phenomenon created the inspiring, if inaccurate tale of epicurean peacemaking.

Facts (or lack thereof) aside, the ethos behind the legendary feast made its way into modern Chinese historical identity. A frequent reference in television and film, the episode became a point of national pride, akin to the United States’ celebration of Thanksgiving. A tradition has emerged among skilled jewelers of recreating standout dishes from the legendary banquet, carving bear paws, turtles, and fish from rare stones to be presented as a “feast” in mineral & gem shows. “The myth of ethnic harmony is what today’s society believes in,” says Dr. Yue. “So that’s what it means when the feast is evoked.” The very term Manhan Quanxi, or “Manchu-Han Banquet,” is now shorthand for any ostentatious meal or showy dinner gala.

Nor have gourmets ceased trying to recreate the fictive feast on tables across the country. Dr. Yue notes that after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, restaurants scrambled to hire chefs from the emperor’s kitchens who might reproduce an imperial banquet for their customers. The obsession became international in 1977, when the Tokyo Broadcast System commissioned a Hong Kong restaurant to recreate the feast over three months, with 160 chefs who created over 100 “original” dishes.

In 2010, Beijing restaurant Cui Yuan charged well-heeled customers $54,000 to indulge in 268 dishes over the course of a year for an “Imperial Feast” that included minced swan, deer’s lips, and peacock drumsticks. According to a press release, Fook Lam Moon’s feasts will run until the end of 2019, “encapsulating 5,000 years of Chinese history, drawing from the culinary traditions of China’s different ethnic groups.” All claim to have served the most authentic of recipes. Yet there was never an official menu to begin with, much less recipes.

The continually embraced falsification stands in for what, at this point, may as well have been an actual event. “Emperor Kangxi couldn’t have hoped for a better result in bringing peace and harmony to his people,” Dr. Yue says, “had he been the one to invent this feast as society now commonly believes!”

William Hughes was a buccaneer with an early recipe for “the American Nectar.”

If you had met him the year his famous book was published, you might have mistaken William Hughes for a mild-mannered gardener. By that time, he had settled into his role at the country estate of the Viscountess Conway, a noblewoman and philosopher, and had published a book on grapevines. But the old man was more than a tottering plant enthusiast. When his treatise on New World botany, The American Physitian, dropped in 1672, its contents revealed a swashbuckling history.

“He was a pirate chocolatier,” says Marissa Nicosia, Assistant Professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington and co-founder of the Cooking in the Archives blog. Nicosia recently recreated Hughes’s hot chocolate recipe for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s “First Chefs” exhibition, a celebration of the first American culinary celebrities and the indigenous and African people who shaped American cooking.

William Hughes had not intended to become a chocolate celebrity. When the Englishman, who was a botanist by inclination, set out for the New World sometime in the 1630s or ‘40s, it’s possible he had never heard of cacao at all. “Britain was late to the game in terms of exploiting the resources in the Americas,” says Amanda Herbert, an Assistant Director at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Hughes’s botanical studies, and his piracy, were a game of catch-up with the Spanish. His treatise on American botany, one of the first eyewitness English-language accounts of cacao planting and production, alerted the English of the New World resources they had yet to exploit. His notes on hot chocolate preparation, gleaned from encounters with indigenous, colonial European, and African Americans, helped bring the intoxicating brew, once regarded with wariness, to the tastebuds and imaginations of England’s upper classes.

But first, Hughes took to the high seas. He writes that he served on “his majesty’s ship of war,” a polite reference to privateering. At the time, English ships often had charters from the crown entitling them to capture and exploit ships from other countries, a kind of state-sanctioned piracy. Hughes’s ship privateered its way around the Caribbean, from Jamaica and Hispaniola to Florida. As a low-ranking sailor, Hughes was often stuck with the dangerous and tedious job of venturing out in a longboat to explore unknown coasts. But that gave him plenty of time to work on his passion project.

Published decades after his return to England, The American Physitian includes notes on sugarcane (“both pleasant and profitable”), lime (“excellent good against the Scurvie”), and prickly pear (“if you suck large quantities of it, it coloureth the urine of a purple color”). But the longest entry of the book is dedicated to cacao, “that Fruit, which is the chiefest-ingredient of the deservedly-esteemed Drink called Chocolate.” This drink was so piquant and tempting, so symbolic of the lush riches of the New World, that Hughes dubbed it “the American nectar.”

While he was one of the first to write about it in English, Hughes wasn’t the first to bring chocolate into the European archive. That honor goes to Christopher Columbus himself, who, on his fourth voyage to the Americas, in 1502, encountered a boatful of indigenous people off the coast of Honduras. Their cargo contained a number of strange pods, which a stymied Columbus could only describe as almonds.

Indigenous Central Americans knew better. They had been consuming chocolate since at least 1400 BC. Pre-Columbian cultural artifacts are full of images and traces of cacao, which they fermented, crushed, and drank with hot water for special occasions. The Codex Zouche-Nuttall, a 14th-century document from the Mixtec people, depicts a couple marrying by sharing a frothing cup of the beverage. Scented with vanilla, honey, and other florals, colored red with annatto, and crowned with a signature crimson foam, cacao embodied life itself. “There was a lot of play around chocolate being like blood,” says Marcy Norton, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote a book on chocolate.

Indigenous Americans also presented cacao to diplomatic guests. It was, perhaps, in this context that Europeans first encountered the drink. In 1518, a group of elite, likely Mayan-speaking Caribbean people presented a Spanish expedition with turkey stew, corn tortillas, and a cacao drink. The Europeans loved the turkey and tortillas, says Norton, but “the cacao drink was very strange to them.”

“Strange” is an understatement. At first, many Europeans simply couldn’t stand chocolate. Benzoni, an Italian traveler in 1500s Nicaragua, said that chocolate was more fit for pigs than humans. A Jesuit traveller in the 1500s compared the foam—one of the most important aspects of the beverage for indigenous Americans—to feces.

By the early 1600s, however, tastes were changing. Maybe it was because Spaniards had spent a century sipping chocolate in diplomatic meetings with indigenous leaders, part of the strategic military alliance that enabled European conquest. Maybe it was the addictive shock of caffeine in the era before coffee and tea captured Europe. Or maybe, as Norton argues, it was a result of the ever-permeable nature of colonial relationships, in which—without intending to, often without wanting to—the colonizer can’t help but take on the tastes and habits of the colonized.

Whatever it was, by the early 1600s, chocolate had seduced Spain. Sold from street carts and chocolate houses favored by missionaries, traders, and others embedded in Transatlantic networks, the frothy beverage enchanted Spaniards as much as its indigenous origins alarmed them. “There’s a lot of satirical and literary production where people are very playful about how taking chocolate makes you an idolator,” says Norton. The fear was real enough to prompt European doctors, priests, and scholars to debate at length how much chocolate was too much, and whether it could be drunk while fasting.

By the time Hughes traveled to the Americas, Spain and the New World were already connected by the habit of hot chocolate drinking, part of a new transatlantic culture forged by trade in sugar, spices, and human beings. Hughes’s description of common hot chocolate ingredients reflects this worldly milieu of traders and the spices they coveted. Variations of the beverage could include "milk, water, grated bread, sugar, maiz, egg, wheat flour, cassava, chili pepper, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, musk, ambergris, cardamom, orange flower water, citrus peel, citrus and spice oils, achiote, vanilla, fennel, annis, black pepper, ground almonds, almond oil, rum, brandy, sack."

The bitter undertones of cacao alluded to equally unsettling histories. By the time of Hughes's voyage, the great pre-Columbian empires had all but fallen. Hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had been killed by European guns, forced labor, and disease. Thousands of enslaved Africans were being taken to American plantations to replace them. As a result of this violent, vibrant exchange, a new Mestizo culture was born, indigenous, African, and European all at once. These people in Empire's margins—enslaved Africans coaxing sugarcane from island soil; Mestiza ladies mixing indigenous knowledge into chocolate for their Spanish employers or husbands—are the real authors of Hughes’s book.

As with many natural historians of the time, says Herbert of the Folger Shakespeare library, Hughes’s work “was an act of information possession.” His botanical buccaneering was a stand-in for the colonial project as a whole. Like all Europeans in the New World, he extracted resources and knowledge from lands and people that were not his to take. Yet this, says Norton, is the great irony of Europeans’ enduring obsession with cocoa. Hughes may have tried to possess American knowledge, but chocolate, and the indigenous traditions that created it, have possessed Europe ever since.

William Hughes’s Hot Chocolate

Adapted by Marissa Nicosia of Cooking in the Archives for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s “First Chefs” exhibition, part of the library’s ongoing “Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures” series.

Ingredients

This recipe makes two cups of hot chocolate mix.

• 1⁄4 cup cocoa nibs
• 3 1⁄2 ounces or 100 grams of a 70% dark chocolate bar, roughly chopped
• 1⁄2 cup cocoa powder
• 1⁄2 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1⁄4 cup breadcrumbs or grated stale bread (optional for a thicker drink)
• 1⁄2 teaspoon chili flakes (substitute 1⁄2 teaspoon ground cinnamon for a less spicy drink)
• Milk (1 cup of milk to 3 tablespoons of finished mix)

Preparation

Toast the cocoa nibs in a shallow pan until they begin to look glossy and smell extra chocolatey. Combine all ingredients in a food processor, blender, or mortal and pestle. Blitz or grind until ingredients are combined into a loose mix. Heat the milk in a pan on the stove or in a heatproof container in a microwave. Stir in three tablespoons of mix for each cup of heated milk.

Notes

Hughes lists many other ingredients that indigenous Caribbean people as well as Spanish colonizers added to their hot chocolate. Starting with a base of grated cacao, they thickened it with cassava bread, maize flour, eggs, and/or milk, and flavored it with nutmeg, saffron, almond oil, sugar, pepper, cloves, vanilla, fennel seeds, anise seeds, lemon peel, cardamom, orange flower water, rum, brandy, and sherry. Adapt this hot chocolate to your taste by trying these other traditional flavorings.

Scientists used it to conduct a survey of them in the country's dive hotspots.

Joseph Heard had journeyed to Orchid Island to find a seahorse the size of a paperclip. Typhoon season had just passed in 2019, and a diver had reported spotting a single female pygmy seahorse—Denise’s pygmy seahorse, Hippocampus denise, specifically—coiled around a gorgonian sea fan off the coast of the Taiwanese island, almost 100 feet below the surface. Marine biologist Heard and his team of divers located the sea fan—it wasn’t terribly hard, as it was only one in the area, right next to a drop-off—and looked for at least 10 minutes, examining every latticed crevice of the nearly 10-foot-tall soft coral. There was no tiny seahorse, but instead a hawkfish, one of H. denise’s known predators. Mystery solved.

This might be a pygmy seahorse researcher’s greatest challenge: finding them in the first place. “You can spend hours and come back with nothing,” says Heard, from Tunghai University in Taiwan. “I never want to have my hopes up.” It’s not just that pygmy seahorses are small—and they are itty-bitty—but also that they’re aces at camouflage. That can make it impossible for any one person to document the critters alone, so the few scientists who study them often rely on social media. People know that pygmy seahorses lurk in the waters near Taiwan, and divers that spot them often take pictures. So Heard and Colin Wen, another marine biologist at Tunghai University, used social media to complete the first-ever survey of Taiwan’s known populations of pygmy seahorses. They found that the waters boast enough distinct species to be considered a biodiversity hotspot. Their study was published recently in the journal ZooKeys.

Heard and Wen first came up with the idea for the survey while studying something much larger: schools of fish such as milkfish and sea breams. But the ocean is a big place and, like the seahorses, the fish proved surprisingly hard to spot—for a reason. “We were collecting data to prove that parts of Taiwan are being overfished,” Wen says. So in their downtime, the biologists began looking for other, more cryptic, species. That’s when they learned from the scuba community about the H. denise sighting. Heard wanted to find it.

Pygmy seahorses, which rarely grow over an inch long, can spend their entire lives on a single coral colony. Some species, such as Denise’s seahorse, live exclusively on one or two species of sea fans, and have evolved to match their coloration and texture to them exactly. Scientists only discovered the first pygmy seahorse, Bargibant’s pygmy seahorse, H. bargibanti, because one turned up on a sea fan that wound up on a dissection table in New Caledonia in 1969.

With no Denise’s seahorse, Heard and Wen had nothing to report. So they set themselves on a data set larger than a single individual of a single species, and considered how they might create a distribution map of all of Taiwan’s pygmy seahorses. “All pygmy seahorse distribution data to date is based on haphazard sightings here and there,” Wen says. “If one person sees a pygmy seahorse in one country, that becomes a population.”

Since they were unable to find even one, the scientists figured they’d have to enlist an army—and there are a lot of divers who frequent the waters around Taiwan and its smaller islands in the western Pacific. They pored through posts on Facebook and Instagram, between 2017 and 2019, that included the term “豆丁海馬”—Chinese for “pygmy seahorse.” They also dug into underwater photography message boards. “I constantly scour underwater photography websites and social media to see if any unusual fishes have been observed and photographed by local divers,” Graham Short, an ichthyologist at the California Academy of Sciences who was not involved in the survey, writes in an email. “Thank god for Google Translate!”

According to Heard, there’s a fine, fine line between regular seahorses, which are small, and pygmy seahorses, which really small (and dwarf seahorses, which are tiny regular seahorses). Aside from size, pygmy seahorses have a single gill slit opening and trunk brooding, compared with a pair of gills and pouch brooding in the others. Some species are mistaken for pygmies, such as the paradoxical seahorse and the bullneck seahorse, which are both actually dwarf seahorses. Luckily, the diving community knows its hippocamps; the majority of the social media posts did not make this mistake.

From 75 photos and 275 social media posts of professional and amateur divers, the researchers identified 78 individual animals and triangulated where they might live. The photos also confirmed that there are five species of pygmy seahorses living in Taiwanese waters: Bargibant's, Denise’s, Coleman’s (H. colemani), Pontoh’s (H. pontohi), and the Japanese pygmy seahorse, or H. japapigu, which was discovered just last year.

The Japanese species had only ever been recorded in southern Japan. In 2017, a diver saw a cluster of seven of them off the coast of Hejie, Taiwan, clustered in halimeda algae—a throng, by pygmy standards. H. japapigu is found in the lower reaches of the Kuroshio Current, Hiroyuki Motomura, an ichthyologist at Kagoshima University who helped discovered the species, writes in an email. Taiwan is at one end of the current, explaining how something so small might have a range that could span over a thousand miles of ocean.

As the researchers collected data and photos of the striking creatures, Heard grew determined to see them in Taiwan himself. Orchid Island was a bust. In one area, Heard and two other divers spent three hours peeking inside every nook and cranny of a rock. Later that month, Heard tried Green Island, on the basis of social posts by the owner of a local dive shop. It took an hour and a half, but he finally found one: a single individual in a clump of algae. “He was larger than I expected,” Heard says. “Which is to say, not very big at all.”

Heard tried to take a photo, but “He was being really uncooperative. Every time we took a photo, it would turn away.” Eventually they got the snap and collected the specimen for study. “Coral people, whenever they find a new species it just sits there for them!” Heard says. “I’m jealous.”

Though Heard originally identified the specimen as a Coleman’s, he’s found a few traits that don’t quite fit. “The coloration is a bit different, and the shape of the coronet is short,” he says, referring to the group of spines that crest the seahorse’s head like a mohawk. Genetics and CT scans are next. Until then, the critter is in Heard’s fridge, almost impossible to see in a small bottle.

For all these reasons, very little is known about pygmy seahorses, Heard says. No one has managed to keep one alive in a lab, but for now, the researchers hope their distribution map, though far from exhaustive, will help guide development along Taiwan’s coast, Wen says. “The first step to conserving a species is knowing where they occur in your country,” he says. “There are still so many species that are undiscovered.” Green Island has already begun to adopt it’s tiny stars: Photos of the animals decorate storefronts and a children’s book. The photos are, needless to say, larger than life.

Genetic research suggests a more local solution to meet demand.

The ancient Egyptian pantheon abounds with animal-headed gods—Sekhmet (lion), Horus (hawk), Thoth (ibis), and others—and accordingly there are lion, hawk, and ibis mummies. These preserved animals have turned up everywhere from pharaoh’s tombs to city necropolises. Ibises in particular have been found by the millions, but archaeologists have not had concrete evidence of how the birds were acquired to be sacrificed by priests, who then mummified and sold them as devotional offerings. Were they domesticated and raised on an industrial scale or captured from the wild? Now, research published in the journal PLOS One suggests the latter was more likely.

“To investigate the possibility of domestication, we used ancient DNA stored in the ancient Egyptian ibis mummies to tell about how the priests ran their business,” says Sally Wasef, a paleogeneticist at Griffith University in Australia and lead author of the study. “We analyzed and compared the mitogenomic diversity among these mummies to that found among modern sacred ibis populations from throughout Africa.”

Mummies were in extremely high demand in ancient Egypt. At temples and necropolises, devotees could purchase a small animal mummy to ask for a god’s favor or pay respect to the dead. This meant there was big business in the animal mummy trade (and, in turn, for forgeries, made up of other animals). The ibis mummies, crammed (ceremoniously) into conical jars, folded beak over body, would mostly have been made in honor of Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, writing, and magic. That array of symbolism made ibis mummies among the most popular offerings, hence the millions of dead birds strewn across Egypt.

There are five major ibis mummy–packed catacombs in Egypt: Abydos, Thebes, Kom Ombo, Saqqara, and Tuna el-Gebel, the last alone hosting some four million ibis mummies. While ibis farms did exist—a practice known as “ibiotropheia”—it is not known if they alone could account for all the mummies. Wasef’s international team of scientists took DNA samples from 14 ancient ibises and 26 modern birds. The ancient ibises turned out to have genetic diversity akin to that of today’s wild birds, indicating that they hadn’t been subject to domestication, which would have made them more genetically similar to one another over time.

“[The evidence] suggests a more likely scenario,” Wasef says, “namely that priests sustained short-term taming of the wild migratory sacred ibis at local lakes or wetlands for the ritual yearly demand, contrary to the suggestion of centralized industrial-scale farming of sacrificial birds.”

It appears that the great Egyptian religious ibis mummy industrial complex was a little more local and bespoke than once thought.

More than a century ago, Takei Nekketsu mapped Japanese-owned businesses for recent immigrants.

We don’t know much about Takei Nekketsu. The proprietor of a dry-goods store, he was one of the many small business owners who made up the thriving Japanese community of early 20th-century Honolulu. But Nekketsu had a number of special talents. He wrote some of the earliest Japanese-language histories of Hawai’i, and he made maps.

One map in particular, from 1906, shows his skill. Census records don’t tell us if Nekketsu had formal cartography training, but the map’s precisely labelled lines, crisp angles, and delicate calligraphy reveal a practiced hand. And the contents of the map reveal a practiced palate.

“There’s a store selling Japanese wine, there’s a store selling Japanese confections,” says Li Wei Yang, curator of Pacific Rim Collections at the Huntington Library, which recently acquired two of Nekketsu’s maps. “They’re little grocery stores probably selling things that would cater to Japanese immigrants, that are owned by Japanese immigrants.”

The map is printed on paper, and would have been distributed to Japanese-speaking residents and visitors to Hawai'i. While the city has changed, the map roughly corresponds to today's Chinatown. Descriptions on the map and notes around its edges advertise steamed buns and Japanese medicine, banks and photo studios. In short, everything that recent arrivals might want to feel at home.

By 1906, Hawai’i had already been home to a Japanese community for several decades. The first group of Japanese immigrants entered Hawai’i in the mid-1800s. They were indentured laborers, recruited from Japan to work on sugar plantations for low pay in brutal conditions. Economic desperation drove them across the Pacific. “Earning a livelihood in Japan at the time was not easy,” says Yang. Land was limited, and most peasants had no path to farm ownership. So in the late 1800s, the Japanese government gave Hawaiian industrialists permission to recruit laborers directly from Japan itself.

By the turn of the century, Japanese immigrants had gained access to greater economic power, becoming key players in the island’s fledgling Kona coffee industry, and opening small businesses alongside Chinese and Korean immigrants in Honolulu’s budding Chinatown neighborhood. By 1940, people of Japanese descent made up around 40% of Hawai'i's population. Nekketsu’s map, made at the beginning of this population boom, reveals a network of businesses for both travelers from Japan and new residents to frequent.

While bakeries and Japanese liquor stores are well-represented on the map, sit-down restaurants are scarce. One exception was the Hanseong Inn, named after the previous moniker of Seoul, South Korea. According to a Japanese-language advertisement on the map, visitors at the hotel could enjoy Japanese or Korean food and meet other new arrivals.

The Hanseong Inn has shuttered its doors, but Honolulu’s Japanese food scene remains vibrant. Visitors today can sample mochi sweets from a shop founded right after the publication of Nekketsu’s map, eat the clear-brothed saimin noodle soup invented by plantation workers, or have a noodle-and-tempura lunch in one of the many small, local okazuya shops, deli-style eateries that have been around since the 1900s. The establishments Nekketsu mapped may be long gone, but you can still top off your food tour with a modern variant of the same snack Japanese immigrants were greeted with when they arrived in Hawai’i all those years ago: a steamed bun.

Welcome to the "throw zone."

As America’s highway system sprawled in the middle of the 20th century, families began to spend vacations on the road. Route 66, also known as the “Main Street of America” or the “Mother Road,” was one of the country’s major asphalt arteries. Beginning in the 1920s, it took drivers west and back—more than 2,000 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles. Parents folded and unfolded maps, while the kids saw Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona blur past from the backseat.

Though Route 66 was more or less out of commission by the mid-1980s, you can visit portions of its old path—and, if you look closely, you’ll still find evidence of the drivers and passengers of decades past, in the form of the garbage they chucked out their windows.

Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona is the only national park that contains a segment of Route 66. The park is famous for its stony, sculptural tree stumps and sherbet-striped desert, but amid the sagebrush are a dozen or so old telephone poles, stripped of the wires that once linked them. That’s the old highway, and it’s strewn with a trove of midcentury trash.

That section of Route 66 was bypassed in 1958 by what became I-40. “Almost immediately after it was bypassed, the park removed asphalt from the surface, but left the roadbed itself,” says William Parker, the chief of science and resource management at the park. The roadbed is composed of the heaps of dirt and aggregate that elevated the road so it wouldn’t flood and wash out in storms, and it was flanked by ditches. That’s where the trash accumulated.

As the remains there show, desert drivers might nurse a 7-Up, or Kist soda, or A-1 beer, an Arizona speciality. When a bottle or can was empty, they just flung it. “It was socially acceptable at the time to just roll down the window and throw the trash out,” says Parker.

The densest concentration of trash came to rest about 10 to 15 feet from the roadbed, in a band Parker and his colleagues affectionately call the “throw zone”—“about as far as you can huck a bottle out of a moving vehicle,” he adds. It was once so thick with garbage that it looked as though someone had torn open a trash bag and shaken its contents loose. Decades later, the “throw zone” is still home to smashed porcelain plates, bits of car door handles and mangled tires, and toys, such as cap guns and marbles picked up at the “trading posts” that once dotted the highway. Accessories such as aviator sunglasses turn up, too. There are easily hundreds of bottles and cans.

Some of the sun-baked, sand-whipped items are too scoured or rusted to read, but their shapes, materials, and mouths are clues to their identity. The cans are largely steel instead of aluminum, Parker says. They might be flat-topped—requiring a churchkey to open in the days before pull tabs—or have a conical top that evokes a can of motor oil. “They’re all from the 1930s to the 1950s, which is exactly what we’d expect,” Parker says, since that’s when the highway was active. Some of the bottles are stamped with the city where they were made. Parker can imagine a family stopping for soda in Gallup, New Mexico, driving west, and then needing to replenish their supply by the time they passed through the park en route to Flagstaff.

Immediately after the highway was torn out, Parker says, park staff did a cursory tidying up of the ditches, but they didn’t pick them clean, and it would have been hard even if they’d tried. Over time, some of the trash was buried by blowing dirt. (At the time, the park and much of the private land around it lacked trash pickup, Parker says. Garbage elsewhere in the park was either burned or deliberately buried.) Now, along the roadbed, more “throw zone” trash is resurfacing as the mounds shift and erode.

Though Route 66 hasn’t existed in decades, there’s still a lot of nostalgia around it. It hits all the most resonant Americana notes—a journey, big skies, no looking back. The road “is a cultural resource in its own right,” says Jason Theuer, now cultural resources branch chief at Joshua Tree National Park, who worked at Petrified Forest in the 2000s. During his time at the park, Theuer says, he met visitors who fondly remembered driving the original route.

In 2006, the park installed a turn-off spot that commemorates the highway with a smattering of little attractions, including an interpretative panel and a rusty, wheel-less 1932 Studebaker propped up on concrete supports. Parker estimates that somewhere between a quarter and a half of the park’s 700,000 to 800,000 annual visitors stop by the display. About a dozen artifacts from the “throw zone,” mostly kids’ toys, are on display in a permanent exhibition at the park’s Painted Desert Inn. A few dozen representative objects have also been added to the park’s museum collection, which is generally locked up in metal cabinets. Elsewhere, the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, a Park Service project, has compiled oral histories, preservation reports, and ephemera, and produced an itinerary for contemporary road-trippers, including everything from lodges to chicken joints.

These days, Parker says, “for the most part, visitors are good about putting things in cans.” The only fresh trash he observes are tangles of paper and occasional plastic bags that blow in on gusty fall days.

If you do see some old-looking rubbish in the park, just leave it be: Trash that is more than 50 years old and left in place is considered historic. Think of it as a window into midcentury recreation. “It’s funny that someone would throw these bottles or cans out and not think that in 50 years they’d be in a museum somewhere,” Parker says. “As we progress through time, things are constantly becoming historic.”

The tribe finally completed a ceremony interrupted by a massacre in 1860.

On February 26, 1860, the people of the Wiyot Tribe had gathered on Duluwat Island in what is now Humboldt Bay, California, for a sacred, annual ceremony meant to last seven to 10 days. The dance had finished, but there was more yet to do—completion of the ceremony the next day, the Wiyot believe, would bring balance and healing to the world. The next morning, a group of white ranchers encircled the Wiyot and massacred more than a hundred of them. The few survivors either fled the island on canoes or were taken to a nearby fort as forced labor.

“When the massacre happened on the island, we were not able to complete that ceremony and bring the world back to balance,” says Wiyot tribal chair Ted Hernandez. “We were not able to heal.”

Three days before the massacre, a man named Robert Gunther had purchased all 280 acres of the island. Soon white settlers built dikes and drained the land for cattle grazing and lumber mills. On the northernmost part of the island, they built a boatyard on top of an ancient shell mound dating back to the year 900. The Wiyot population, which hovered around 3,000 in 1850, had dropped to just 100 in 1910.

For the Wiyot, Duluwat is more than an ancestral homeland. It is the spiritual center of the universe, a place of great power, and the tribe has fought for its return for more than a century, according to Michelle Vassel, a tribal administrator. On October 21, 2019, it finally happened. The city of Eureka voted unanimously to return Duluwat to the Wiyot Tribe. The vote, many years in the making, marks the first time a local municipality has voluntarily given land back to the indigenous people who lived there originally. “It’s unprecedented,” Vassel says. “The island was a missing piece for hundreds of years.”

The tribe had long hoped for the return of Duluwat, but didn’t officially ask for it until the 1970s, with a phone call to the government of Eureka, the city of 27,000 that then owned most of what was officially called “Indian Island.” They heard only laughter, writes Thadeus Greenson in the North Coast Journal. When Cheryl Seidner, a Wiyot tribal elder and former chair, called again decades later, she heard stammering instead.

In 1992, Seidner and her sister, Leona Wilkinson, held a vigil on the last Saturday in February to memorialize the land and those who died in the massacre. It became a yearly tradition on the west side of Woodley Island, a smaller plot between Duluwat and the mainland. “You’d start with a fire and people would sing their songs and talk about healing,” Hernandez says. “It was an opportunity for people to tell their stories and remember our ancestors.” Over time the vigils attracted as many as 300 people from the greater Eureka community.

In 1996, Seidner spotted a real-estate listing for a 1.5-acre plot of on Duluwat, the site of the former boatyard. The tribe began fundraising any way it could—benefit concerts with Native artists such as Floyd Red Crow Westerman, and selling T-shirts, tacos, and fry bread. “You name it, we did it,” Hernandez chuckles. Neighboring tribes donated thousands of dollars, and the Wiyot eventually raised the $106,000 they needed.

What they found there was a disaster. Rusted boat parts and an enormous diesel-powered winch poked through the ground. Years of toxins, sludge, and debris capped the shell mound like sedimentary rock. And the midden itself was visibly pockmarked by pot-hunters, Vassel says. “You could not walk on the property, what with the metal debris, lead paint, and big barrels of liquid of undetermined origin.” The shell midden, having eroded over the years, was held up by a makeshift retaining wall of old marine batteries.

So the work began, with a team of dedicated volunteers working weekends. They removed the rusty debris, including the huge winch, which they got off the island and onto a barge using traditional methods—a bed of rolling logs. As they cleaned up the shell mound, volunteers sometimes found bones, which they believe belonged to victims of the Wiyot massacred in 1860, according to Hernandez. “This is where our ancestors are and this is where their blood was shed,” he says, “and yet they’re covered in chemicals.”

In 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency provided a Targeted Brownfields Assessment grant to clean the site more thoroughly. Testers found hazardous levels of pentachlorophenol, dioxins, and furans, and high levels of arsenic, according to an EPA report. “People were shocked to see people in hazmat suits digging up the soil,” Vassel says. The agency worked with the tribe to remove as little soil as possible, and screen what they excavated for artifacts and remains. The battery wall was replaced by shells donated by a local oyster company.

In 2004, Eureka donated an additional 40 acres of land of the northern tip of Duluwat to the Wiyot, including the tribe’s former burial grounds and the rest of the shell midden. There, volunteers cut back invasive cord grass to allow native eelgrass to recover, and planted cuttings of native willows from a neighboring island. They tore down buildings, repainted a metal shed, and capped the remaining contaminated soil with sheets of fabric covered with soil, crushed shells, and native grass seed, according to the EPA report. The island received an official clean bill of health from the EPA in 2014. After 13 years, 70 tons of scrap metal, and 26 tons of soil, Duluwat was ready to be danced on.

In spring 2014, one month after the Wiyot’s last vigil and 154 years after the massacre, the tribe returned to Duluwat to hold their World Renewal Ceremony. The Wiyot’s religious beliefs are interconnected with those of four other tribes in the area: the Hupa, Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa (the Chilula was another former, connected tribe), according to Vassel. The five tribes all celebrated the ceremony, but without the Wiyot, “the circle was broken,” Hernandez says. “But our four cousin tribes have kept the ceremony going for us.”

The tribe dove into preparations. After the massacre, the surviving, splintered members of the Wiyot Tribe had lost precise knowledge of the ceremonial dance. They had to reconstruct it from the related dances of the other tribes, Seidner told the North Coast Journal. “The Yurok and Hupa helped us bring back the ceremony we lost,” Hernandez says, noting that the Yurok Tribe lent dugout canoes to transport people to the island. Before the dances started, Hernandez spoke with with a Yurok elder who had come to see the ceremony to fruition. “He said he’s always been waiting for us. And that he was happy to see us back in the circle.”

The dancers also needed something to wear. Most of the Wiyot’s traditional regalia now resides in museums or private collections, Hernandez says. Here the cousin tribes helped again by lending some items, while others were crafted anew, with condor feathers donated by Sía, the Comanche Nation Ethno-Ornithological Initiative, according to the North Coast Journal. “We’re building up our collection again,” he says.

To prepare for the ceremony, dancers fasted for seven days. People slept on the island, in tents, in the repainted metal shed, and even outside in the nippy March air. Younger members listened to elders tell stories of the island over the sounds of lapping ocean waves. Hernandez says the island’s stillness and isolation made him forget that there was a freeway running over the southern tip of the island and another society just miles across the bay in Eureka. “We were in our own little world,” Hernandez says. “It felt like we were back at home.”

The final three days of the ceremony were devoted to dance. “Our youngest boy who danced was maybe nine, and the oldest was 70,” Hernandez says. “To have so many generations was an amazing feeling.” On the last day, sea lions came up and sat on the beach to watch. When they completed the final dance, it began to rain heavily. “It cleansed the land that we were dancing on, and we knew the ceremony was complete.”

Duluwat’s ceremony was private, but the true return of the island was markedly public. On October 21, 2019, hundreds poured into Eureka’s Adorni Center at 10 a.m. on a workday. The joy in the room was tangible, according to Cutcha Risling Baldy, department chair of Native American studies at Humboldt State University, who is Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk. “There were times when you could have heard a pin drop,” says Kim Bergel, a Eureka City Councilmember.

At the ceremony, Seidner set up two chairs beside the podium: one adorned in a quilt donated by the people who helped raise funds for the initial purchase of 1.5 acres, and the other left empty to remember the victims of the massacre. A group of Wiyot people performed the healing Bush Dance. Hernandez was so moved that he left the podium to join them.

Though Eureka City Council first voted to return the island in 2015, legal hangups delayed the process until 2019. “This should have happened 100 years ago,” Bergel says. A fourth-generation Eurekan, Bergel first ran for the council because she wanted to help return Duluwat. “I had to practice my speech before the ceremony so I wouldn’t be crying the whole time,” she says.

Eureka’s decision marks one of the first times a U.S. municipality has given back any Native American land freely. For most tribes, the only way to regain ceremonial land outside of a reservation is to wait for the tract to go up for sale, and then find the money to purchase it. Hernandez hopes the decision could spark a chain reaction for other sacred lands. “It’s not a bad thing to give something back,” he says.

According to Risling Baldy, Duluwat’s return conjures a vision of the future in which land return is a common, grassroots practice. “We have never been asked to imagine what is possible,” she says. “I believe what is possible is anything we can imagine to be possible.” Risling Baldy suggests national parks as a logical place to start large-scale land return, pointing to recent studies that suggest that indigenous-managed lands boast more biodiversity. And it’s not just governmental bodies that have the ability to do this. In October, forest management company Green Diamond returned 50,000 acres near the Klamath River to the Yurok Tribe. “I’m not trying to pretend like this is an easy process,” Risling Baldy says. “But this is an opportunity to ask what a future could look like that respects and engages with indigenous peoples, and that builds toward a lasting future for all people.”

Around 10 percent of Duluwat is still privately owned. But Seidner has made it clear that, though the tribe is open to buying those plots of land, it wants to coexist with its neighbors for as long as they’d like to stay. “We know what that feels like,” Seidner told the North Coast Journal. “We know how it feels to be taken away from our land.”

Though the return of Duluwat represents the culmination of decades of activism, physical labor, and mourning, this is just the beginning for the Wiyot Tribe. They have plans to rebuild a village, and maybe even build a dance center. For now, they just want to continue to restore the island. And they’re partly there. When Hernandez walks on the shell mound now, he can hear the crackle of old oysters and clams shifting beneath his shoes, almost touching the work of his ancestors.

At the College Street market in Kolkata, India, independent booksellers fear the arrival of a massive mall.

Shortly after dawn in Kolkata, India, musky plumes of incense waft through the passageways of Das Gupta & Co. bookstore, diffusing among the decades-old volumes on its steep mahogany shelves. The smoke billows out of the shop’s peeling, pale-blue doors and onto Kolkata’s College Street, the largest secondhand book market in the world.

Each morning, as part of a common Hindu tradition known as puja, a daily prayer ritual usually intended to praise a deity, the bespectacled Arabinda Das Gupta swings a brass censer around his old shop. He is a fourth-generation bookseller; the object of his worship is the written word. “Puja concentrates your mind on the books,” he says. “There’s chaos and movement before, but then the words go still like grains of rice. I need that sense of calm to go about my day’s work in this place.”

Das Gupta’s shop is the oldest in the entire market. When Arabinda’s great-grandfather, Girish Chandra Das Gupta, arrived in Kolkata in 1886, he had little competition. “Very few books were available at the time, so he imported them to meet demand,” he says. The shop opened that year with a noble mission: “the spreading of knowledge.” It had just 50 books.

Nowadays, the market can trade that many books in a few minutes. College Street, known by locals as Boi Para (which roughly translates to “Book Town”), spans more than a mile and covers a million square feet. Bigwigs of Bengali publishing coexist with makeshift stalls hammered together from wood, bamboo, tin, and canvas, in a chaotic matrix that runs from Mahatma Gandhi Road to Ganesh Chandra Avenue.

College Street has every imaginable type of text, available in Bengali, English, Mandarin, Sanskrit, Dutch, and every dialect in between. Precious first editions and literary classics sit cheek by jowl with medical encyclopedias, religious texts, and pulp fiction, often precariously stacked in uneven piles that resemble jagged cliff faces. Wily booksellers peer from raised wooden stalls; bearded collectors rifle through stock; mothers drag first-year university students through the aisles to collect their required reading.

The old-world charm of College Street may not last forever, however. Flyovers and shopping malls have sprung up across the city, courtesy of rapid modernization projects that are flattening unique histories. More than a century after the book market was founded, some booksellers are worried that change is coming to College Street.

Kolkata’s rich literary heritage dates back to the 18th century, when the East India Company helped to make it a major printing center. Under Lord Wellesley, the British colonial governor who organized construction of the city’s central roads, the Hindu College was built in 1817, later followed by the Calcutta Medical College, the first medical school in the country, in 1852 and the University of Calcutta in 1857. These colleges set up a syndicate with several shops in the 1870s, catering to India’s intelligentsia and British colonizers alike, and College Street market was born.

Decades ago, the British poet and translator Joe Winter described College Street as “a planet littered with books, a crazed sales pitch wherever one looks.” His description still rings true. Yellow and green tuk-tuks, or auto-rickshaws, fly by; men drag carts of books; bicyclists squeeze through narrow gaps with bags of books balanced on their handlebars. Even more books arrive on the city’s technicolor buses and yellow taxis, which are shaped like turtle shells.

“Although books aren’t a necessity like they once were, with so many alternative ways of getting information, somehow we keep going,” says Pinaki Majumdar of APC Ray, arms tucked pensively behind him. He wears the unofficial College Street uniform: a striped, short-sleeve shirt and a round belly that belies the sedentary lifestyle of a reader and Kolkata’s fried street food. Majumdar is one of the longest-serving of the cheeky, chattering booksellers. APC Ray bookstore was set up in 1910, boasting of rare editions from Bengali greats such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. “Books are everything to me,” adds Majumdar. “I started reading when I was just five years old and never stopped. I even love them more than my wife.”

But a new development could cut deeply into the business of the hawkers who have thrived here. For years, the state government has been pushing ahead with an ambitious, centralized book mall that will stretch over a million square feet, as large a floorspace as all of the existing bookstores combined.

According to the project’s architects, the Barnaparichay Mall is to launch next summer, and will offer sleek, modern boutiques, a library, an auction center, translation services, and cafés. “The mall is to enrich the book culture and habits of Kolkata,” says Sankalan Tatar, of the architecture firm Prakalpa Planning Solutions. “It will be an integrated book mall. Literature, life, and leisure will be under one roof. This will be the most happening place in north Kolkata.”

Traditional booksellers fear that the mall will threaten the traditions of College Street. “The place will be soulless,” says Das Gupta. “But I’m worried that people will prefer the cheap prices and comfort of the book mall, so I’m considering taking a place there.” For some of the less-established booksellers, the mall’s rental prices will be prohibitive. “The book mall is too expensive for me to move,” says Ranjit Biswas, owner of a cupboard-sized stall full of dusty books. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

According to Tatar, some concessions will be made. For example, on Sundays, the mall’s escalators will be switched off for two hours, allowing the makeshift booksellers to come into the mall and ply their trade in certain spaces.

Many booksellers remain unconvinced. At the market’s famous Indian Coffee House on Bankim Chatterjee Street, a historic meeting spot for Kolkata’s writers and thinkers, the mall is a constant subject of adda, the Bengali art of wide-ranging conversation, often practiced here among students.

Akashleena Bhaduri, a third-year engineering student at the University of Kolkata, sips on a sugary coffee and makes the case for the book mall. “This place is outdated, the roads are dirty, the hygiene is poor, and in the summer it’s unbearably hot,” Bhaduri says. Ohit Banerjee, a postgraduate researching comparative Indian language and literature, fires back. “My elders told me that Mahatma Gandhi bought a rare book from here, and that he said it was a special place,” he says. “We must protect it.”

Whatever awaits Kolkata’s College Street in its next chapter, the community has already survived innumerable challenges. It has been through two world wars, has managed to remain a center of political and literary activism since the 1930s, and witnessed the beginning of the revolutionary Naxalite movement in the 1970s. According to Das Gupta, violent protests broke out against the stocking of controversial books, such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. On May 30, 2004, his shop suffered a fire that caused enormous damage and destroyed maps of Bengal dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries.

Still, College Street has gone on to become the beating heart of India’s literary world, with intellectuals such as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, a Harvard economist and frequent visitor, making it a home away from home. Institutions such as the fifth-generation Bani Library, known for its science collection, and Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir, a religious center established in 1941, has made it a pillar in the city's identity. These achievements, the booksellers say, can never be taken away.

During a rare moment of afternoon calm, Das Gupta sits down for a chai masala, boiled in huge pots and served in tiny, ceramic cups. In the background, booksellers lean lazily over their stalls; others squat down low to gossip, or calmly leaf through thick tomes. There is a sense of togetherness. “This is the way that I see it,” he says, widening his silver eyebrows. “We’ve written this history and we won’t be forgotten.”

New lessons from resurgent herds.

In October 2019, four bison bulls leapt out of a tractor trailer in South Dakota and charged with what might be interpreted as joy down a shallow, snowy hillside. They slowed to a trot as they took in their new digs. These bison were the first to walk and graze on this land—a newly designated swath of Badlands National Park—in nearly 150 years. And their return may provide insight into how reintroduced populations learn to engage with and impact land they haven’t trod in decades.

“I think there’s momentum to return bison to public and tribal lands, and that’s very exciting,” says Chris Geremia, Yellowstone National Park’s lead bison biologist and co–lead author of a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that analyzed how bison migratory and grazing patterns engineer spring’s green-up.

“Spring is such a key time,” he says. “The thought that bison moving across North America shaped spring speaks to how important bison are to the North American grasslands.”

Across the Great Plains, perhaps no species is as iconic—and, at one time, ecologically impactful—as the bison. Once numbering in the tens of millions, bison were hunted to the brink of extinction by the turn of the 19th century, and disappeared from places as far afield as Ohio and Texas. (The bison is also, ironically, the national mammal of the United States.) After dwindling to around 100 individuals, the population at Yellowstone has surged to around 5,000. The Badlands population, 350 miles away, had been entirely wiped out, but 50 bison were reintroduced there from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota in 1960. The population has since grown to 1,200, which earned it classification as a conservation herd. The park’s new acreage—22,000 acres in total—was acquired from a private ranch in 2014 but hadn’t yet seen a bison. That’s where this new group, brought over and released from the park's existing herd, was set loose.

“There now are in the neighborhood of six or seven that are hanging up near that pasture,” says Blaine Kortemeyer, acting chief of interpretation at Badlands National Park, who livestreamed the reintroduction. “It’ll probably be quite a bit of time before we start seeing bison in the central part of the new unit.”

Meanwhile, Geremia’s team in Yellowstone has been studying its more robust populations from the ground and from the air, including using satellite imagery to track grazing patterns, as a kind of preview of what the new Badlands herd could do, given time and space. They found that the herds follow new plant growth to higher elevations for a time, but then stop and amass, and wait until late summer or early fall to proceed farther.

“We thought, ‘What the heck are they doing when they stop?’” says Jerod Merkle, a migration ecologist at the University of Wyoming and coauthor of the paper. “We found that the bison are, through their movements, facilitating high-quality grasslands.”

“What bison do is they start aggregating, forming massive groups of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals. They move in synchrony across the landscape, grazing the same areas again and again,” he says. “Normally there’s an inch or two of new plant growth, and they bite it off. And when the plant grows a new shoot, it’s like spring is happening again.”

As the animals roam, they turn plant growth into new fertilizer, and germinate the soil with their hooves. Bison herds pave the way for new life, and shape their environment just the way they like.

It remains to be seen how the new Badlands population will settle in, and whether it will grow and encourage a green-up the way the huge herds of Yellowstone do. “I think that’s why the park wanted to put them out there,” says Jim Matheson, assistant director of the National Bison Association. But it is clear they’ll take all the room to roam they can get.

“Looking at implications for Badlands, bison need to be able to form big groups. They need to be able to move across large landscapes, and they need to be able to move and live across landscapes where there are patterns to how plants green up,” says Geremia. “The challenge, I think, that places smaller than Yellowstone will face is ‘Can you provide enough space for bison to be bison?’”