A community of feminist crafters grapples with a patriotic quilt that a 99-year-old nurse left behind.

Shannon Downey, the creator of a website called “Badass Cross Stitch,” is a crafter, activist, and serial estate sale shopper. When the Chicago artist finds unfinished embroidery works on her household hunts, she often buys and completes them, so that their makers’ souls can rest in peace. Because she frequently adopts patterns that she would never choose herself—Downey gives the examples of “Bible quotes, cats, or ‘Home Sweet Home’”—many eventually end up at Goodwill.

But this October, in the bedroom of a stranger’s suburban home, Downey stumbled upon a project she immediately knew was different. Preserved in a plastic bin were the fabric pieces needed for a giant quilt made of hexagons, decorated with stars and the outlines of the 50 U.S. states, complete with their official birds and flowers. Its artist had finished stitching just two states—Alaska and Georgia—as well as a neat and intricate map of the country for the quilt’s center. Her name, Downey learned, was Rita Smith. She was a school nurse and highly skilled crafter who had died in August, at age 99.

“I almost started crying, because I was like, ‘This is so big, I can’t do this—but I must,’” Downey says. She bought the materials for six dollars and put out a call on Instagram, where she has cultivated a large and loyal following for her unapologetically feminist 'craftivism.' (One neatly embroidered message reads, “THE PATRIARCHY ISN’T GOING TO SMASH ITSELF.”) Within 24 hours, more than 1,000 people had offered their hands and needles. The volunteer pool kept growing as news outlets from The Washington Post to CNN lauded the project as a feel-good story about strangers coming together.

Downey assigned individual states and stars—already outlined by Rita on separate scraps—to the earliest responders and mailed the designs across America. (Two went to Canada.) She gave her collaborators some general guidelines, but for the most part, each had the freedom to add personal marks. Phyllis Liu, for one, filled their star with a poetic saying in elegant Nüshù, a script developed and used exclusively by women in China’s Hunan province.

Last Saturday, with the finished hexagons back in Chicago, 35 skilled quilters gathered to piece them together. They met at Wishcraft Workshop by invitation of studio owner Candice Blansett-Cummins, and for seven hours, they sewed under the guidance of seasoned longarm quilter Sarah Evans. They used supplies donated by the Canadian fabric company Fabricana and noshed on homemade cookies frosted with the project’s moniker, #RitasQuilt. While most quilters were local, a handful had traveled from other states, including a mother-and-daughter team from Minnesota. Also present: a camera crew from The Kelly Clarkson Show, which was filming the party for its holiday special.

To the volunteers, almost all of whom identify as women, #RitasQuilt is much more than a collective pledge to a late fellow crafter. “This is a wildly political and feminist act,” Downey says. “It’s women coming together to do something powerful and honor women who have, since the beginning of time, been stitching and sharing stories that might not have been seen. That the media, for the most part, has simplified this to That’s so sweet! Internet ladies! is so fascinating.”

More complex discussions have emerged among the volunteers. “We’ve had a lot of conversations about the valuation of women’s labor—that we’re taking back the value of our work,” says Hannah Allen, who stitched the outline of Kentucky using threads she dyed with native plants. While she intends to celebrate her home state’s natural beauty, she acknowledges that it is a “problematic place full of contradictions. I think about how these are very white, colonial borders and how to honor Cherokee and other tribal borders.”

The quilt’s pattern, incidentally, is published by Colonial Patterns, a quilt-design company that is still operating. It was originally introduced around 1976, when nationalistic red, white, and blue quilts to commemorate the American Bicentennial were all the rage. Evans, the longarm quilter, wonders whether Rita picked up the pattern around this time, perhaps wanting to participate in the nationwide excitement.

This spirit of idealized Americanness wasn’t lost on Michelle Beaulieu-Morgan as she stitched the outlines of Maine. On Instagram, the embroidery artist shared concerns about how she sees #RitasQuilt contributing to the erasure of indigenous histories while it inspires nostalgia for unity in this era of extreme divisiveness. “I’m really sad and disappointed that an opportunity to talk about the way white women have contributed to the erasure of communities of color hasn’t made it into the many many words written about this project,” she wrote.

In an email, Beaulieu-Morgan adds: “Maps, the establishment and depiction of borders, and the incorporation of large tracts of land into new political geographies erases what was already there. When we don't talk about that, we participate in uncritical nationalism and patriotism.” Beaulieu-Morgan sent back her finished hexagon with its US borders, but she is planning to crowdsource another version of the pattern that involves Native artists stitching Native borders.

Downey is intent on upholding Rita’s original vision, but she is glad that the pattern has led to conversations that complicate the ‘wholesome’ narrative. “A lot of people who follow me are white women,” she says, acknowledging that #RitasQuilt largely attracted white stitchers and quilters. “And I feel a great responsibility to gather them and be like, ‘Okay, y’all, let’s talk about white supremacy, let’s talk about intersectionality.’ We have so much work to do.”

Mary Scott-Boria, a Chicago resident who showed up to sew over the weekend, was drawn to #RitasQuilt because the collective endeavor reminds her of Gee’s Bend, a renowned community of African-American women with a long tradition of quilting, often as a form of resistance and preserving family history. The women of Gee’s Bend, many of whom are descendants of slaves, have been creating geometric designs since the mid-19th century. “Here is this woman who did this in isolation,” Scott-Boria says, hexagons in hand. “It’s beautiful to see another generation pick up where she left off and create community by doing something that is very indigenous to women.”

A veteran activist, Scott-Boria has participated in several political stitching projects to support imprisoned women, particularly black women, who face higher rates of incarceration than white women. She’s involved in an ongoing, nationwide quilting campaign that demands the release of imprisoned survivors of gender-based violence.

Beaulieu-Morgan suggests that such social justice efforts don’t necessarily gain the same viral traction as white-feminist craftivism, which has a strong presence online and in the mainstream media. “I think the embroidery community online is coming very much out of the history of Riot Grrrl, Nasty Women, the pink pussy hat takeover of the Women's March...which—regardless of who founded those movements—is primarily white,” she writes. “I think Black or Latinx or Indigenous and other women/people of color are rightfully skeptical that there might be real space for them in this community.”

Downey echoes those sentiments. “That’s the part I hope I’m working on,” she says. “Using my work in a way where, if I show up to town, I'm creating space for everyone.”

The final artwork will debut at Chicago’s Woman Made Gallery on December 21, after the back of the quilt is finished. In the spring, it will head to Paducah, Kentucky for the legendary annual Quilt Show. Downey also hopes to load it in an RV for a year-long road trip. Her national tour, for which she is currently raising funds, will include visits to volunteer stitchers so they can display it for their communities. Along the way, she hopes to teach people how to stitch in the name of toppling patriarchy. “Rita had some damn plans for us,” Downey says. “She was a kick in the ass in so many ways.”

“It’s a bizarre holdover from a previous age.”

The famous grave ship of Sutton Hoo was found, undisturbed, in a mound in East Anglia, England, in the 1930s. One of the most spectacular finds in the history of English archaeology, the burial contained no body, but was loaded with artifacts made of gold, silver, and bronze, from Byzantine silverware to a literally double-edged sword. The find is priceless beyond measure, but one thing it is decidedly not is “treasure.” At least that’s what a local coroner—following seven centuries of precedent—officially determined.

There’s a lot of history in England, and much of it still lies under the earth. Centuries-old objects turn up from under pastures in Sussex and wash up on the banks of the Thames in central London. Defining some of these objects as “treasure” has historically provided a source of revenue for the kingdom, and today it is a vital step in ensuring the preservation of the country’s cultural heritage. But through it all, the duty of declaring which uncovered objects make the cut has always fallen to the same people—coroners, the same ones who are responsible for determining causes of death.

In 1194, Richard the Lionheart’s England was financially strapped by the Crusades abroad and a suite of issues at home. The kingdom was in want of a bureaucratic upgrade if it was to survive. Few people were more qualified to orchestrate this managerial makeover than Walter Hubert, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Among the rules Hubert outlined in his Articles of Eyre was a new sort of county officer, one who could help settle local matters and, in the process, ensure a steady flow of revenue into the crown’s coffers. Hubert invented something called a coroner.

“The etymology of the word coroner comes from ‘crown’ and ‘crowner,’ and for centuries, they’ve been the crown’s representative in the regions,” says Ian Richardson, the Treasure Registrar at the British Museum, which today houses the finds from Sutton Hoo. In medieval rural England, coroners were the crown incarnate. They organized local juries and supervised county elections, looked into premature or suspicious deaths, and seized the assets of those who died with no clear heirs.

“The modern role is almost entirely focused on the investigation of deaths, but at the time revenue control was part of that,” says Matthew Lockwood, a historian at the University of Alabama and an expert in early British history, who wrote his dissertation on the coroner’s role in British life. “The responsibility for investigating treasure and wreck of the sea goes sort of hand-in-hand with the investigation of death.

“Some of the early broader roles are sort of swept away,” Lockwood adds, “so we’re left with treasure trove and investigating untimely deaths.” It is still up to coroners—who weren’t particularly associated with having medical knowledge until the 1800s—to distinguish between deaths accidental, natural, and foul, and to distinguish between trinket and treasure.

“It’s very obscure,” Lockwood says, “but at the same time it’s a bizarre holdover from a previous age that doesn’t seem like it should exist in the modern age, but it does.”

What is treasure and what is not was a significant distinction as far back as the Roman Empire, when treasure was defined, rather specifically, as a horde of money that has been buried so long an owner cannot be identified. It has been a subject of English law as far back as Edward the Confessor, who reigned in the early 11th century. And today, naming something as treasure still carries profound implications.

“Prior to [1996], it was very loose and in order for something to be classed as ‘treasure trove,’ a find had to be predominantly gold and silver. Its original owners had to be unknown, but it also had to be buried with the intention of future recovery,” says Richardson, who sorts though hundreds of treasure inquiries each year passed to him by local municipalities. “It means that in practice the majority of things classed as ‘treasure trove’ were coin hoards, obviously put in the ground by people with the hopes of recovering later and they never did.”

England is rife with plenty of coins, swords, and other valuables that had been deliberately buried. “It seems like that would be a rare thing, but burying goods is a primary way of keeping those things safe, especially in times of crisis,” says Lockwood. “Of course, it isn’t treasure because it’s not precious metal, but Samuel Pepys, the diarist, famously buried his wheel of parmesan cheese during the Great Fire of London.”

Today, law-abiding English treasure hunters (mostly metal detectorists) must first report any find to the local coroner within 14 days of discovery. The coroner then determines, with the help of a finds liaison officer, whether the find is a treasure trove or not. If it is not determined to be treasure, finders-keepers, and the object can be reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which helps the country keep track of where and what was found. But if it is treasure, it is subject to the the 1996 Treasure Act, which states that it is national heritage and must be offered for sale to a museum at a price set by an independent board of experts. Richardson’s office helps determine whether a museum will be interested in certain finds. If no museum wants to pay up, the crown—which technically owns any treasure—disclaims it, and it is returned to the finder or landowner.

“It’s much encouraged for the local museum to acquire the find,” Richardson says. “Because the British Museum has a lot. It can have a bigger impact locally.”

The Treasure Act also loosened the previous definition of treasure—the one that decided the non-treasure fate of the Sutton Hoo finds. (After failing to meet the treasure requirement, Sutton Hoo was at the mercy of the landowner, Edith Pretty. Thankfully, she donated the entire find to the British Museum.)

“Only a very small percentage of my work involves treasure—less than five percent,” says Andrew Haight, the coroner for South Staffordshire, a district outside of Birmingham, via email. “Typically the areas where England was invaded have more treasure finds—mainly Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex (East Anglia) and the Coroners for those areas probably spend more time on treasure (but still a modest percentage of their workload).”

In England and Wales today, treasure is any object that is at least 10 percent precious metal by weight and over 300 years old, in addition to a few other criteria, such as objects found alongside treasure. Pepys’s cheese, if found today, would only meet one criteria—so it would not be treasure. (It is still at large, buried somewhere under modern London.) But the new legislation saw no need to change the role of the coroner—one they had filled for 802 years at that point.

“When they modernized the law in 1996, they said, ‘Well, it still makes sense for the coroner to have a role,’” Richardson says. “For us it’s useful, because the coroner does have some legal authority and they can summon people to attend court. If a finder is reluctant to hand over a find, they can be summoned. If they don't, they can be held in contempt of court.”

This all makes the coroner the arbiter of what treasure hunters get to keep and what could end up in public museum collections. And the rules apply to archaeologists as well as amateurs. “[The Treasure Act] was seen as a way to rein in metal detectorists,” says Richardson. “This was [also] a way to show them that everyone was being treated equally, that archaeologists had to report their finds as well.”

Richardson wishes archaeologists didn’t have to do this, since their extensive documentation just adds to the already sizable docket on the treasure desk. Both coroners and museum officials have felt the impact of the law.

“Under the old law, there were only about 25 finds of treasure trove annually,” across the country, Richardson says. “We thought it’d expand by 10-fold. But in 2017, and it looks like it’ll be the same this year as well, there were over 1,200 cases of treasure trove in England.” And all of those have go across a coroner’s table.

“If people had to report their copper alloy finds,” on top of the more precious ones, Richardson jokes, “we’d probably have to close the whole thing down.”

The quantity of finds is high, as is the seriousness with which coroners fulfill their duties. Most of the time, this involves reviewing the analysis of the finds liaison officer, who is tasked with the report that the coroner ultimately signs off on in a legally binding treasure inquest.

“I do feel privileged to be a Senior Coroner and I endeavor to perform my role properly,” Haight says. “In particular with treasure cases, they do tend to be enjoyable ... which of course is very different to death cases.”

"If you build it, they will come."

Around five years ago, David Harasti had a big idea: to build a hotel. In fact, he wanted to build a whole chain of them around Sydney Harbour. The startup cost would be small, as the hotels were basically boxes made of chicken wire. He knew the demand would be there. After all, Australia’s endangered White’s seahorses—small curvy things that come in bright yellow as well as muddier shades—had lost almost all of their former habitat after a series of devastating storms between 2010 and 2013. Harasti built the first seahorse hotel prototype in 2018, and it was immediately occupied. “Everyone loved the seahorse hotels,” he says. “It was a real, ‘If you build it, they will come’ situation.”

Early next year, Harasti’s hotel chain will see its first large-scale expansion as a part of a new conservation program. Experts at the SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium are currently breeding the fish and raising the fry. Once they’re big enough, the babies will be tagged and released around new seahorse hotels where they will, fingers crossed, thrive, rent-free, for years. If it works, Harasti says, seahorse hotels could be a common site in reefs across the world. “If we lose our habitats, we lose our seahorses,” he says.

Harasti came up with the idea while diving around Sydney. He often spied small congregations of seahorses on discarded lobster traps or shark nets (meant to keep sharks out, not catch them). “They’ve become a spectacle to divers,” says Robbie McCracken, a biologist at SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium. “They’re a pretty crowd-pleasing animal.” Harasti soon realized the fish were attracted to these latticed structures, which offer many gripholds for their signature coiling tails. In accordance with the age-old scientific rule, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Harasti modeled the first prototype after a lobster trap. It resembled a cage, approximately three feet by three feet, with a metal bar frame and chicken-wire walls .

After installing the initial batch of 18 hotels in the first months of 2018, Harasti returned six months later to find that seahorses had already moved in. By the end of the year, 65 White’s seahorses had colonized the hotels, which also attracted octopuses, schools of fish, wobbegong sharks, neighborly algae, corals, and sponges. In this pilot stage of the study, Harasti experimented with three different prototypes. “The best design for the hotels is completely enclosing them, otherwise predators come in and out,” he says. Harasti has a forthcoming paper that details the specific advantages and disadvantages of each design. (Wire roofs, in particular, seem to be essential for keeping predators at bay.)

Though the structures don’t look like much, Harasti calls them hotels—rather than, say, apartments—because they are meant to be temporary. “I had only planned on them staying for a while, but these seahorses have actually become permanent residents,” he says.

The entire hotel is really just scaffolding to invite the growth of coral—which attracts plankton, copepods, amphipods, and other little animals that seahorses prey on—on which the seahorses can remain after the aluminum breaks down. “The success of the hotels depends on what accumulates on them,” Harasti says.

While Harasti builds the new batch of hotels for the 2020 release, McCracken keeps a watchful eye over their future residents at the SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium. For the past six months, he’s been breeding six mated pairs, brought in from the wild. They all live in one tank, which McCracken designed to replicate their “natural” environment—complete with some squares of shark net, algae, and a continual supply of live invertebrates. The tank has lights timed to fade in and out with the sun, which provides the environmental cues wild seahorses rely on for breeding, he says.

Since early October 2019, right before their breeding season, and the fish have had hundreds of babies. “I was nervous to see how they would assimilate in their new aquarium, and if they would get pregnant,” he says. “They’ve definitely gotten pregnant again and again and again.” When the babies are born, they’re approximately the size of grains of rice. Even though each pair has had several litters, McCracken still loves watching the fathers give birth through a series of violent contractions that push out teensy fry like a sprinkler. “Each time it’s different, anywhere from five minutes to 45 minutes,” he says.

The seahorses have been successfully bred in captivity before, but not on this scale. McCracken plans to keep watch over the babies until April or May 2020, when they ought to be large enough to survive in the wild without being eaten immediately. “When they pop out, little baby seahorses are small and crunchy, little underwater Maltesers,” Harasti says, comparing the animals to the British chocolate-covered malted milk treats originally marketed to women.

Before the young seahorses are released, McCracken will mark each with a code of three permanent neon spots—plastic elastomer injected just below the skin. They will allow Harasti and other divers to track who survives and sticks around in the new digs.

Harasti’s hotels are strangely cosmopolitan chain. He’s taking tips from other seahorse hotels around the world—variations of his initial prototype that conservationists have fashioned up. “There’s some scientists in Greece who use heavy duty mesh, which worked well,” he says. His latest hotel blueprint uses heavy-duty steel frames, which will corrode less quickly than the original aluminum ones.

Luckily for the scientists who study them, seahorses tend to settle in wherever they wrap their tails, Harasti says. The creatures are also rather long-lived, so Harasti has named a few of his favorites that he revisits whenever he can. A few years ago, there was the dark gray Grandpa. “He was quite old,” he says. And there was also Goldie, a real favorite until Harasti watched her get eaten by an octopus. “I ended up fighting with the octopus to get her body,” he says. He was successful and sent the body to the California Academy of Sciences for a genetic test. Goldie’s remains still reside there.

Now Harasti’s favorite is Dawn, a brilliantly yellow seahorse he first encountered five years ago. “She’s a local celebrity,” he says. Four years ago, Dawn got a boyfriend, a dark gray seahorse that Harasti named Dusk. They’re still together. “They fell in love,” he says, marveling at the two’s faithful commitment to each other, which is typical of the monogamous species but no less remarkable for it. Come to the seahorse love hotel for a night, stay for life.

One cunning business maneuver created a tradition and saved a franchise.

This year, millions of people across Japan will celebrate Christmas around buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Families will order “Party Barrels” weeks in advance, replete with this year’s offering of cole slaw, shrimp gratin, triple-berry tiramisu cake, and, of course, fried chicken. Santa-clad Colonel Sanders statues will stand at attention outside storefronts, grinning mutely through December as KFC Japan sales multiply tenfold, earning the chain a third of its annual income. The corporate promotion is one of Japan’s longest-standing Christmas traditions.

As with most Christmas traditions, it all started with a marketing campaign. For years, English-language media cited company spokespeople, who said the idea came from expats looking for an alternative to turkey. There was never a reason to doubt the company's account, until the man who brought KFC to Japan spoke up. Takeshi Okawara, manager of Japan's first KFC, came forward in recent years with a confession that upended years of innocent origin narratives—a confession that KFC denies. The man who brought the Colonel to Japan says it started with a lie.

After visiting a KFC test-store in the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, a young entrepreneur named Takeshi Okawara was smitten by the late-stage success of the company’s founder, Harland Sanders. A restless businessman himself, Okawara was humbled by the jovial American who job-hopped into his 60s before hitting the big time with his first KFC. When a recruiter offered Okawara an administrative position, he declined, opting instead to be the in-store manager of Japan’s very first KFC. “By doing that I can learn and study about how to make wonderful fried chicken, by myself, from scratch,” he told Business Insider’s podcast Household Name.

The KFC that Okawara opened in Nagoya in 1970 failed so miserably that Okawara was left nearly homeless, sleeping on sacks of flour in the kitchen to save on rent. The red-and-white striped roof and English signage confused pedestrians. “No one knew what the hell we were selling.” Okawara told Household Name. “They’d come in and say, ‘Is this a barber? Are you selling chocolate?’”

The only thing that kept him going was the magical taste of Sanders’s fried chicken. “The more I tasted it, the more I was convinced this business will be okay,” he told Household Name. On the verge of defeat, Okawara’s shot at redemption came from a nun at a nearby Catholic school.

In his telling, Okawara was hired to dress as Santa-san and hand out fried chicken for a kindergarten Christmas party. Knowing his business was on the line, however, he went above and beyond the call of duty. With the spirit of Colonel Sanders and Santa-san wrapped in one, he stole the show. “I started dancing, holding the barrel of chicken. ‘Kentucky Christmas, Kentucky Christmas, Happy Happy,’ like that,” he told Household Name. “I made up a song, and danced around. Kids liked it.”

After another elementary school hired him to do the same thing, Okawara realized Christmas could save KFC Japan. Nathan Hopson, professor of Japanese history at the University of Nagoya, writes in an email that by 1930, Christmas was firmly entrenched in the Japanese psyche: Newspaper ads depicted “The Old Man of the North” and families exchanging gifts, while Christmas Eve dance and theater shows were popular with at least the urban public. The only thing missing was a Japanese answer to traditional Western Christmas foods.

Okawara promoted fried chicken as a substitute for traditional Christmas turkey, which the Japanese knew from TV and cinema was eaten for Christmas throughout the West. Selling chicken and sides together in Christmas-themed “Party Barrels” and decorating his store’s Colonel Sanders statue as Santa-san brought in enough customers to save his business.

With word of the Christmas “Party Barrels” making their way across Japan, the national broadcaster NHK interviewed Okawara about his role in bringing the Colonel to Japan and asked if KFC for Christmas was a common custom overseas. Unable to turn down such a glaring opportunity, the young entrepreneur said yes. “I still regret that, but people liked it because it was something good [they thought came] from the U.S. or European countries,” he told Household Name.

The Christmas promotion saved his business, and once KFC Japan recalibrated its business approach to the Japanese market, the chain thrived. By 1973, KFC Japan had expanded to 75 locations (making it the largest fast food chain in the country, according to the Christian Science Monitor in 1973) and the Kurisumasu ni wa Kentakki, or “Kentucky for Christmas” promotion, ran at each and every one. By 1986, there were 600 locations, according to the Ottawa Citizen. Okawara had risen to CEO of KFC Japan, and a new holiday tradition was cemented.

A lack of pre-existing Christmas traditions among the largely secular Japanese, or perhaps Colonel Sanders’s striking resemblance to Santa Claus, made the infusion a shoe-in. It also helped that the associations most Westerners have with fast-food establishments such as KFC never made it to Japan.

“In the 1970s, KFC and other family restaurants were seen as trendy and hip, not just fast and convenient,” writes Dr. Eric Rath, professor of Japanese history at the University of Kansas, in an email. “One could bring a date there and not feel ashamed.”

Dr. Nathan Hopson, professor of Japanese history at the University of Nagoya, writes that in the same way that some young Japanese couples long for Christian-style “chapel” weddings, “Christmas has an association with a kind of exotic and romantic view of ‘the West’ that is entirely divorced from history, religion, or any other inconvenient facts.” He also points out that because so few, if any, Japanese homes feature ovens, buying take-out chicken fits the Japanese mold: “Christmas cakes and KFC make sense both in terms of the constraints of the typical Japanese home and as empty symbols—like Christmas itself—into which everyone can pour their own hopes and dreams.”

KFC Japan declined to comment further about Okawara’s story, and, half a century on, I could not locate the NHK tape that could confirm that Okawara birthed “Kentucky for Christmas” with a lie.

Regardless, its origins don’t negate the power the tradition has to unite families over buckets of hot food. Okawara’s business savvy saved his company and gave millions of Japanese families a reason to get together for the holidays. As one Japanese man told Household Name, eating fried chicken every year “is what makes Christmas, Christmas.”

The impact of 14 months at the edge of the world.

The Swedish geographer Otto Nordenskjöld did not love Antarctic winters. They were cold and dark, of course, but more than that, they were monotonous. They were lonely.

Sure, the landscape was beautiful. Nordenskjöld encountered snow and ice “of uncommon interest,” sometimes even“magnificently grand,” he and his fellow expeditioners wrote in the 1905 book, Antarctica, or Two Years Amongst the Ice of the South Pole. But the sights were a little same-y. There was little to see beyond open, empty swaths of white punctuated with odd bits of blue and muddy brown. It “had in the long run a fatiguing and depressing influence upon us,” he wrote. The crew tried to stave off the doldrums with rousing games of cards, or by celebrating birthdays “as heartily and thoroughly as possible.” Still, “in spite of all this, one always felt lonely,” he continued, and he “longed for news from the outer world, and to meet with other people.” Writing in New England Journal of Medicine nearly 115 years later, researchers have quantified some of the effects of the “hermit’s life” that Nordenskjöld experienced during Antarctica’s coldest, darkest months. The authors found that Antarctica’s infamously inhospitable conditions appear to shrink the human brain.

Coauthor Alexander Stahn, an assistant professor of medical science at the University of Pennsylvania, along with collaborators from Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the Alfred Wegener Institute, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and more studied the brains of nine people who spent 14 months hunkered down at the Neumayer III Station on the isolated Ekström Ice Shelf, an area the size of Puerto Rico, about 5,000 miles due south of West Africa. The futuristic-looking station, which is operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, is propped up on 16 legs, and looks like a Star Wars ship. The view out its windows offers only endless snow and ice—a flat, white blanket, spreading out in all directions.

Stahn primarily studies the effects of extreme environments, such as space, on human bodies, and thought of Antarctica as an interesting analog to study how a monotonous environment and limited social interactions might affect the brain.

In the paper, both crew and mission go unnamed, but Stahn says the team consisted of two engineers, a radio operator, two geophysicists, an air chemist, a meteorologist, a cook, and a doctor. Unless they hit some snag—and no one wants to hit a snag down there—their daily tasks were pretty consistent. “It’s basically the same thing, day by day,” Stahn says. Days, weeks, months blur together.

Before the crew headed off for their expedition, Stahn’s team popped them into an MRI machine and looked at gray-matter volume and the region of the hippocampus known as the dentate gyrus, which is known to be central to forming memories and generating new neurons. One crew member wasn’t able to receive an MRI, but Stahn’s team also measured the protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which is key to forming new neurons. For comparison sake, they also scanned the brains of nine control subjects who wouldn’t be going to the end of the Earth.

Like many people who work in extreme environments, researchers at Neumayer III live in a small world. The entire facility—including mechanical areas, living quarters, labs, recreation spaces, storage, and more—covers about 20,000 square feet, a little larger than the size of your local chain drugstore. And there's nowhere else to go; outside is gusting snow, miserable temperatures (as low as -58 degrees Fahrenheit near this station), and, for much of the year, inky darkness. It’s not quite like being in space, exactly, but it’s definitely extreme.

Like spacefarers, the Antarctica crew had to navigate the limited space and persistent sameness with roommates they had no hand in choosing. “The big issue is that it’s really a small group,” Stahn says. “At some point, they’ve said everything to each other.”

Some of the coping tactics are the same as in space, too. Similar to the crewmembers of the International Space Station, who take breaks to tend to plants or watch a lot of television, the researchers stationed in Antarctica had their own ways to relax or blow off steam. The Australian Antarctic Division recommends lots of books, the internet, drinks, or playing snooker or darts. Some at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station strip down to their skivvies (or to nothing at all) and sprint from the geographic South Pole to a sauna—a tradition that has been dubbed the “200 Club” or “300 Club,” based on the temperature difference they undergo. Some hubs, like the National Science Foundation's McMurdo Station on Ross Island, are so big and stuffed with amenities that "it’s more like a small town,” Stahn says. Davis Station has a library, plus areas for volleyball, badminton, cricket, soccer, and golf, and the nearby snow is sometimes striped with tracks from snowboards or skis. At Casey Station, options include an indoor climbing wall and a photo darkroom. Neumayer III is on the smaller side, but it contains a billiards table and television, plus a small gym. “But it’s not like a nice gym,” Stahn says. “It’s more in the basement, and there are no windows. It’s not quite sensory stimulation, compared to going to a regular gym.”

Stahn’s team collected BDNF measurements during and after the mission, and also rolled the crew back into the MRI machine after their 14-month Antarctic stint was up. The dentate gyrus portion of the expeditioners’ hippocampi had shrunk, by anywhere from about four to 10 percent. Concentrations of BDNF were down even just a quarter of the way into the expedition, and the dip remained even a month and a half after the crew went home. These reductions were correlated with poorer performance on tests of attention and spatial processing. Stahn’s team suggests that what they’re seeing is the neurological impact of isolation and limited stimulation.

“The brain is a bit like a muscle—it will not adapt if you expose it to the same stimuli all the time,” Stahn says. Stahn suggests that people stationed in Antarctica would benefit from switching up whatever they can, because practicing a novel skill revs up the hippocampus and related areas. Learning a new language or trying out rock climbing—which requires both mental and physical dexterity—could all be helpful, Stahn says. Picking up an instrument could help, too (though the rest of the crew might resent it). Stahn’s team admits that their sample size is small, and more research is needed—but if they’re onto something, maybe future Antarctic visitors will remember to do anything they can to stay stimulated in that seemingly unchanging, ferocious, lonely landscape.

When climate change comes for attractions like Victoria Falls, visitors can find new ways to appreciate them.

Victoria Falls, in southern Africa, cascades over a 330-foot cliff with such power that Zambians know it as Mosi-oa-Tunya, or “The Smoke Which Thunders.” Lately, though, there hasn’t been much thundering at all. Hydrological data collected in the Zambezi River near the falls revealed that November 2019 saw its most sluggish flow in years, rolling in just below the previous low measured in 1995. “When the water is low,” says Kaitano Dube, a lecturer in ecotourism management at Vaal University of Technology in South Africa, “the smoke that thunders is not there.” This could also mean a reduced flow of tourists on both the Zambian and Zimbabwean sides of the falls.

There are always seasonal fluctuations in the flow, says Dube, who wrote his dissertation on Victoria Falls. The falls tend to be especially full between March and June, and then a bit slower between July and September. Low season spans October, November, and December, and then the falls start to swell before they get clapping again. These swings are affected by El Niño events and droughts, Dube adds, but measurements that are consistently lower than earlier data “is indicative of climate change.”

As part of his research, Dube surveyed nearly 370 people about when they’d be most excited to visit the falls. Most reported that they’d be especially jazzed to see the waterfall tumbling instead of dribbling, Dube says, “though a significant number indicated that they would want to see it in its varied seasons.” That data plays out in real-world tourism, too, Dube adds: “The low season for tourism arrivals coincides with low flow season. They love to see the falls when it’s at its peak.”

Figuring out how to navigate extreme weather and climate change is a major issue around natural wonders in southern Africa, Dube says. Gravel roads in South Africa’s Kruger National Park have recently been closed to visitors, following deluges of rain. At the other extreme, droughts can leave flora parched—and if tourists snub the dried plants, that can threaten economies that are built on visitors. Writing in an article in the journal Environment, Development, and Sustainability, Dube suggested that resorts and parks near Victoria Falls “manage tourists’ expectations in light of the noted change.”

Part of this approach, Dube says, could include reminding visitors about activities that are better during the low season. At Victoria Falls, the low season is a good time for swimming and white-water rafting, Dube says—neither of which are a good idea when the falls are really roaring, because “people can be swept away.” The gorge itself isn’t bad, either: “It’s a geological splendor.” Visitors get a better view of the walls when when the curtain of water isn’t veiling them. There's lots of wildlife around, too. As climate change comes for parks around the world, visitors will need to recalibrate what they consider wondrous in those landscapes. There will still be a lot to see, Dube seems to say—it’s just that, in a changing world, age-old attractions might surprise you.

The photographer is a skateboarder, but there's not a board in sight.

No one is sure who first decided to put wheels on the bottom of a plank of wood, but skateboarding has a spiritual home, and it’s California. In Southern California in the 1960s, when surfers lacked good waves, they started to “sidewalk surf” on skateboards—giving birth to an entire culture. In the mid-1970s, some took things a step further and took their skateboards into backyard swimming pools that had been drained to save water during the years of drought that plagued the area. This helped spawn a wave of purpose-built skateparks, and the first in California, Carlsbad Skatepark in San Diego, opened its concrete surfaces to the public in 1976. Today there are countless skateparks all over the world, and the sport will make its Olympic debut in Tokyo in 2020.

In his book California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks, artist Amir Zaki presents his photographic take on complexly engineered skateparks. He feels a personal affinity for the concrete bowls, half-pipes, and ramps of these spaces. “As someone who grew up skateboarding, I experience and understand these skateparks in an intense, sometimes painful, physical manner,” Zaki writes. But approaching a skatepark with a camera instead of a board took a change in his mindset: “... because I almost always work alone, there was a sense in which I felt that I was capturing something special and ephemeral.” So much photography of skateboarding culture involves capturing very fleeting moments, but Zaki’s images take many minutes and multiple exposures to create, “an extended temporal experience.” The results are sculptural landscapes that appear timeless and otherworldly, save for the occasional bird in flight.

Zaki tells Atlas Obscura about his process, his time on a board, and how it all came together.

What prompted you to first start photographing California skateparks?

Since photographing the built and natural landscape is something that I’ve been doing for about 20 years, I’m always looking and observing the contemporary landscape, often looking for the commonly overlooked. Skateparks are interesting because, for the most part, they are hidden from street view. They are excavations that one happens upon and discovers when one gets close enough. Even then, they are often uninviting to the general public because there are usually fences, and the terrain seems unusual. But I grew up skateboarding, so I know how to navigate these spaces and I’ve always loved the forms they make. I like how they look like mountains, waves, valleys, and other parts of the natural landscape. I’m also a big fan of the way concrete looks and photographs. It’s kind of a perfect storm as far as my personal and artistic interests go.

When did you first start skateboarding, and how did that history affect how you approached this project?

I grew up in Beaumont, California. It was a rural-verging-on-suburban town at that time. It was kind of boring. But my friends skateboarded, and that was the group I felt close to. This was in the mid-80s, in the middle of the Bones Brigade video phenomenon [starring a team of elite skateboarders]. We’d watch those videos, memorize the lines, and then try to copy their tricks and styles. We skateboarded on my best friend’s backyard half-pipe, and on the street. Skateboarding became our mode of transportation, a way to express ourselves, a way to exercise, and a way to bond with friends. I never had a chance at that time to photograph concrete parks. They were rare and far away. But in my late 20s and early 30s I started skating again, and I would skate in local concrete parks. I loved them. I wanted to make sure that the views and perspectives I was depicting felt like you were deep inside, not an outsider looking in.

The architecture has a bit of an alien quality, especially without people, and once you digitally removed graffiti and stickers. Why did you approach the parks that way?

I never photograph people in my art practice. The alienation is a quality that I try to cultivate. I like to have the viewer experience space in a contemplative and open way, but somewhat unfamiliar and unsettling, like how we feel when we are on a walk alone and we come across something new and unexpected. We stop and wonder. It’s a solo experience. Plus, how many thousands of photographs of skateboarders shredding already exist? I like a lot of those photographs, but I wanted the background to become the subject. As far as graffiti and stickers go, I believe that text, logos, language, etc. are all very powerful visual signs. I try to keep language out of my photographs because reading and observing the world are two really different kinds of experiences.

What was the biggest challenge of the project?

The most challenging aspect was probably access. Some parks are only open during certain hours and, of course, are loaded with skaters. I photographed all of the parks at dawn, shortly before and shortly after. I had a very small window of time to work. I had to find creative ways to gain access to parks that have restricted hours. The process I use is very slow-going. Each photograph is a composite of anywhere between 20 and 70 photographs. So the images represent an extended period of time, five to 10 minutes. It requires a lot of patience and planning ahead of time. It’s not a spontaneous "shoot from the hip" process.

What did you find unusual or surprising once you got into it?

The day I photographed a skatepark in Fontana, I arrived when it was still dark and the winds were howling, like 30 to 40 miles per hour, and it was freezing. I had to make special arrangements way in advance for the guy who runs the park to meet me there at 5:30 am to open the gates. The conditions were horrible and I thought the day was going to be a bust. But a beautiful thing happened when I climbed down into the deepest section of the park. Everything got super calm. All the concrete that surrounded me was shielding me from the wind and cold. I made some of my favorite images in the series that day. So much of photography is experiential for the person making the images. Viewers don’t have access to that, and I think a goal I have is to create a space for viewers to have their own surprising experiences.

From skin to sourdough, jenipapo blue has become a culinary craze.

Lately, dishes in Brazilian restaurants are turning curiously blue. From îles flottantes to tortillas, sourdough bread to quinoa salad, blue has become the trendiest color in the local gastronomy scene. And it’s thanks to jenipapo, a grayish, sour native berry.

Jenipapo berries, which can grow anywhere from the size of a kiwi to a melon, are used by Brazilians to make compotes, syrups, and a famous liquor. But it’s the unripe and bitter fruit that has piqued the interest of cooks and chefs all around the country. When it’s unripe, jenipapo contains high amounts of genipin, a substance which reacts with proteins and amino acids in the presence of oxygen or heat, resulting in an edible blue pigment.

Brazilians have long used jenipapo for various purposes. During the colonization of South America, European conquerors reported curiosity about the use of the fruit’s juices as temporary tattoo ink by communities such as the Tupinambás and the Pataxós. “Its most widespread usage was as a dye substance, especially for body painting, to which it has been attributed magical properties in some tribes,” wrote researcher Victor Manuel Patiño in the book History and Dispersion of the Native Fruit of the Neotropic. In some tribes, lines and geometric shapes can differentiate clans, families, and even marital status.

Patiño also described the ancient use of the ripe fruit as a regular food. But it wasn’t until the 2014 publication of the book Unconventional Food Plants in Brazil by professor and biologist Valdely Kinupp that chefs began using jenipapo as a vivid food dye.

In his book, Kinupp detailed his process for extracting an edible pigment from jenipapo berries. “The jenipapo gained a fashionable status with the publication of the book,” he says. “Before that, hardly anyone talked about the fruit in the dining scene. It has become a trend, with blue bread, blue milk, blue pudding, and a multitude of bluish recipes.”

But it was a 2017 article by nutritionist and food writer Neide Rigo that really started the blue wave. A prolific blogger and columnist for O Estado de S. Paulo, one of Brazil’s most prominent newspapers, Rigo wrote about how she had used genipin to create bright blue dishes. Using the methods from Kinupp’s book turned food a blue so dark it was nearly black, she explains. Finding that genipin was at its most vivid when it reacted to proteins and amino acids, “I wondered what kind of food I could use as a versatile blue base to be added to many recipes,” she says.

After several tests, she discovered that the best method was adding jenipapo pulp to milk. “It was from there that many people started using the blue milk as a dye. It has opened a range of possibilities,” says Rigo. Since then, she has published recipes for blue tortillas, sauces, porridge, bread, pasta, and cakes.

Her recipes have taken the internet, and Instagram, by storm, catching the attention of both chefs and amateur cooks. Just browse for #jenipapo on social media and a multitude of blue food photos will appear, mainly of blue bread, one of the first recipes shared by Rigo. (Jenipapo's hue is also serendipitously similar to the Pantone's 2020 Color of the Year, Classic Blue.)

Reading Rigo's recipes, chef Cesar Costa came up with the idea of ​​creating a jenipapo dessert for his sustainably minded restaurant, Corrutela, in São Paulo. One day, pondering the classic îles flottantes, a traditional French dessert, he thought about having the "islands" (white, light-as-air meringues) float in a velvety blue sea.

Costa ferments jenipapo in brine for a week to extract its bitter flavor. Crushed and dehydrated, the result is a thick powder that Costa can use all year long. (Jenipapo is a seasonal fruit that ripens at different times across South America.) Then, using the powder, he dyes the crème anglaise that's the base for the fluffy meringue clouds.

In dishes with lower concentrations of amino acids, such as bread or pasta, jenipapo lends a more grayish-blue hue. But since Costa’s crème anglaise has two high-protein ingredients, eggs and milk, there is also a higher concentration of amino acids that bind to the genipin, turning the cream into a deep indigo.

Costa was entranced by the final result. “When I finished the dish, I realized the plating looked more like the sky and its clouds than the sea with a floating island, which made the dish even more beautiful,” he says. The silky dessert became an instant hit on his menu. “Guests are petrified when they see the dish,” he says. “It’s something pretty new for most of them.”

The extreme reaction may be because blue is not a common color, even in nature. Aside from blueberries, blue corn, and some blue tubers, few naturally blue foods can be found at a farmer's market or grocery store. The main compound that gives foods a blue color is anthocyanin, which makes grapes and eggplants purple and some berries red.

In a broad spectrum of colors, there are few foods that we can consider really blue—usually, the vegetables and fruits rich in anthocyanin tend to be more purple. Genipin is found in fewer plants, all from the Rubiaceae family, such as gardenia fruit and the jenipapo. Plus, as Kinupp, Rigo, and Costa discovered, there’s a considerable process to extracting jenipapo’s vivid blue.

But the rarity of blue foods means that they always amuse. “I think the blue color has a magical, playful appeal,” says Costa. In Portuguese, he points out, blue has an optimistic meaning. "When someone says ‘it's all blue,’" he notes, "it means it's all great.”

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

Human and plant, working together.

On the border of India and Bangladesh, bridges can build themselves. Under the dripping green overgrowth, root systems—guided by human hands, historically the indigenous Khasi and Jaintia people—twist and tether together gradually, forming structurally sound “living bridges” across ravines and rivers. Earlier this year, a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) analyzed the famous, remote bridges to see how they take shape over centuries.

India’s Meghalaya State is one of the wettest places on Earth, with nearly 500 inches of rainfall in the average year. Bridges are more than helpful, they’re downright critical in monsoon season, when the rain can turn meandering rivulets into torrents in the region's varying topography. That topography makes traditional construction challenging, as well, so living bridges have grown to fill a critical need. And the people who make and maintain them know the ins and outs of the process.

“Construction techniques make use of the specific adaptations of growth of aerial roots of Ficus elastica,” says Wilfrid Middleton, an architect at TUM. “This is important—all living architecture techniques must reflect the trees from which they are grown.”

F. elastica is, as its name suggests, is a rubber tree native to Southeast Asia. The new research, published in the journal Nature, examined and mapped 74 different living bridges in the area, all made from the roots of the rubber tree. The tree’s aerial roots—spindly, vine-like feelers that latch on to anything nearby for support—are directed by people over rivers by bamboo or palm stems, which form a sort of scaffolding for the plant to follow. Once a guided root grows across to the opposite bank, the root walkway and railings begin to thicken. This is not an overnight process; nurturing seedlings into towering trees and guiding their growth can take generations.

An additional useful feature of the rubber tree, Middleton says, is how their roots graft together, so that multiple trees, on opposite sides of a chasm, can grow to become one sturdy construct. “Combining these,” he says, “construction techniques are developed, like tying a network of knots that create a stable deck and handrails.” The most robust bridge structures can hold dozens of people at once.

But the bridges don’t stay so sturdy on their own. Locals maintain and guide them daily, Middleton says, by either tying the roots into the existing structure or pruning them back where necessary.

The result is a remarkable display of teamwork between the plant and animal kingdoms. Not only do humans benefit, but the plants on either side inosculate—a fancy term for two a merger of root systems that allows plants to share water and nutrients.

“From a structural perspective, the inosculations provide two functions,” Middleton says. “A network of roots distributes forces between roots across the whole structures, possibly preventing damage. The complex network also provides redundancy—if any root is damaged, many other roots can take up their slack as load paths or water transport routes.”

The living bridges of Meghalaya are difficult to get to, but it’s worth the trip to see a wonder that is both man-made and natural at the same time.

The city's iconic pods are famous for innovative–and often outlandish—culinary creations.

Some of Portland’s best—and most creative—cuisine comes from food carts, tiny mobile kitchens clustered all over the city in collectives known as pods. The offerings are as diverse as the city, and in many ways these restaurants on wheels make up their own version of Portland in miniature.

Unlike their roving food truck counterparts, food carts are trailers outfitted with a kitchen that’s much smaller, and less mobile. They’re typically parked in a leased location, where they stay for months and often even years.

Food carts have thrived in Portland since the 1980s, but morphed into a full-blown phenomenon—and became enmeshed in the city’s identity—amid the Great Recession.

In those tough times, “it was hard to come up with money and capital to get into a brick and mortar,” says Leah Tucker, a former food cart owner who now serves as the executive director of the Oregon Mobile Food Association. “But you don’t stop desiring that dream as an entrepreneur, as a restaurateur.”

At the same time, landowners struggled to sell or develop their properties and were looking for ways to pay their taxes. Enter an unusual tenant—the mobile restaurant. “It was just this weird kind of perfect storm of things that happened during the recession that really just lit the fire underneath this industry,” Tucker says. “And that kind of organically created these strange pod things that we see now.”

Over the years, food carts have served as launching pads for some of Portland’s best-known restaurants: Nong’s Khao Man Gai, outlandish sandwich shop Lardo, and the Salt & Straw ice cream behemoth all started as food carts. So it could be that the sandwich you’re eating from a compostable carton or the unexpected fusion dish you’re slurping in a gravel lot might be from the next James Beard Award-winning restaurant.

Experiencing Portland's Food Carts First-hand

From pod to pod, the city's rich diversity shines, providing hungry crowds with the opportunity to experience flavors from all over the world like Montreal-style pastrami at Pastrami Zombie and Vietnamese soul food at Matta. Or take a different journey by way of Texas barbecue at Matt’s BBQ Tacos and some Indian-Mexican fusion at Poco India. On average, most food cart finds are $10 to $15—significantly less than that trans-Atlantic plane ticket.

All told, there are more than 30 pods in the Portland area. Here are a few to whet your appetite for experiencing Stumptown through a gastro lens:

The Bite on Belmont
4255 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR 97215

Pay a visit to Viking Soul Food and skip the flight to Norway. This Airstream-turned-kitchen is tucked at the back of the Bite on Belmont pod. Viking Soul Food’s modern take on Scandinavian fare will warm you up, as will the heated tent where you can sit and eat kicked-up classics like Norwegian meatballs covered in caramelized goat cheese gravy and wrapped in lefse, a thin potato flatbread. Other favorites in this cluster located in the heart of the Belmont District include Herb’s Mac and Cheese and the entirely plant-based Dinger’s Deli.

Cartlandia
8145 SE 82nd Ave, Portland, OR 97266

This self-proclaimed bike-centric super pod, located near the junction of SE 82nd Street and the Springwater Corridor Bike Trail, is home to more than 30 carts in Southeast Portland. People descend on this popular pod for staples like morning bagels at Puddletown Bagels and stay for its indoor gathering spaces. Whether you’re after morning fuel, or fare inspired by Mexico, Thailand, Puerto Rico, and India, this pod that caters to cyclists delivers. Diners here choose between a kid-friendly outdoor space, or tucking into the Blue Room Bar, which serves 12 taps of local beer and cider and allows patrons to bring in food from the carts.

Portland Mercado
7238 SE Foster Road, Portland, OR 97206

The tropical colors covering the exterior of Portland Mercado, a public market in the Foster-Powell neighborhood, hint at the Latin flavors that await inside. The development has a public market at its center, while nine carts on the periphery serve Mexican, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Peruvian, and Venezuelan cuisines alongside other Latino-owned businesses, including a coffee shop and bar. Built with the belief that food brings people together, Portland Mercado aims to replicate the experience of a trip to Latin America right in the very U.S. corner farthest from it.

This hub is unique in that it also runs a business incubator program to encourage and support entrepreneurs. “It’s brilliant,” says Brett Burmeister, the man behind the encyclopedic website Food Carts Portland. “This idea of teaching someone the next steps and breaking down some of those fearful barriers in our society makes this one of the best programs I’ve ever seen. And this pod has become an anchor for a changing neighborhood.”

Cartopia Pod
1207 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR 97214

This is one of the oldest pods in Portland, and a favorite late-night destination. The lot offers a covered, heated seating area amid the quirky gift shops and bookstores of Southeast Hawthorne Street. Cartopia is a lunchtime staple, but as the day goes on, carts blend in with the neighborhood’s nightlife scene of pubs, beer bars, and music clubs. Barhoppers sit at picnic tables under string lights and dine on Latin-style roasted chicken with chimichurri at Chicken and Guns, and over-the-top poutine at Potato Champion, where toppings include palak paneer, pulled pork, and peanut satay with raspberry jam. Hungry crowds can make their way down the street to one of Southeast’s newer pods, Hawthorne Asylum, just two blocks away.

Hawthorne Asylum
1080 SE Madison St, Portland, OR 97214

Hawthorne Asylum is named for its street as well as its nod to Oregon’s past. Visitors enter through an iron gate that once led to the now-defunct Oregon Hospital for the Insane. Today, the pod accepts donations to support mental healthcare for children.

This bustling food court offers an eclectic mix of twists on familiar foods and fermented drinks, along with plenty of favorite dishes. Diners gather around a massive rectangular fire pit surrounded by steampunk metal sculptures. Innovative fusions like grits and po’boys at the Southern-meets-South-African cart South give visitors plenty of reason to return, while vegans come for Egyptian stand Peri Koshari.

New flavors and fusions are continually being introduced to the area, and these pods are just a few examples of how Portland's food scene is always evolving. Track the newest pods, or stay true to a local favorite. However you take it in, there's no right or wrong way to experience Portland's cart culture.

“This tears off one branch in the tree of life and rearranges it another way.”

In the early 1980s, Tom Guensberg was working as a geologist for Getty Oil, but he was thinking like a paleontologist. Getty had a private geological library, and one day, while poring over a geologic map of Utah, Guensberg spotted what could be a gold mine for fossil hunters. He'd noticed an area in the Great Basin with extensive swaths of ancient, fossil-studded rocks. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, only that he might find something extraordinary. “Of course, this was a gamble,” he says. “But it paid off.”

Guensberg, who returned to academia and is now a research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago, has prospected the lands of the Great Basin in a series of visits from the 1980s until the present. On several of these trips, he collected specimens of crinoids, often called sea lilies, with unusual arms. Modern sea lilies resemble flowers fastened to the seafloor, crowned with a pinwheel of frilled arms, but researchers have never known exactly how the lilies evolved from earlier, armless echinoderms, a phylum that includes starfish, sea urchins, and sand dollars. Guensberg’s unusual specimens, which he deemed Athenacrinus broweri, helps solve that mystery, according to a recent paper in Cambridge University Press.

As soon as Guensberg left Getty Oil, he convinced Daniel Blake, his former advisor and a paleontologist at the University of Illinois, to join him on a road trip to Great Basin National Park. The dry and mountainous wilderness, which crosses from Utah into Nevada, is a cragged kind of beautiful: towering mountains approximately 13,000 feet high, ancient bristlecone pines, and fossilized sea creatures dating back to 480 million years, when Utah was a shallow tropical sea. As soon as the duo got to Great Basin, they knew “there had to be some good stuff,” Guensberg says.

Guensberg returned to the site a handful of times over the next decade, venturing into empty land in the high desert populated not by people but coyotes, jackrabbits, and golden eagles. “It’s really the middle of nowhere,” he says. The closest town, Baker, Nevada, is 60 miles away and has a single restaurant. “If you get into trouble, there’s nobody to get you.” Over the years, he collected six specimens of the ancient sea lily he would come to call Athenacrinus broweri. The one Guensberg remembers best was nestled in some exposed rocks on the other side of a mountain ridge. He wrapped it in paper towels and stashed it in his pack.

Guensberg didn’t realize what he had found until he returned to the Field Museum. He had uncovered a dismembered crinoid fossil, a seemingly common find. Crinoids, which are made of connected calcite plates, are especially tricky to track down in the fossil record, because the animal’s plates separate after death. Some of these plates—such as the circular disks in a crinoid’s spine—look like little more than miniature Cheerios, meaning that you need to know what you’re looking for. But this fossil stood out because of the unusual structure of its arms, which contain skeletal plates in internal cavities.

Scientists have spent a lot of time debating the evolutionary roots of sea lilies. In 1846, scientists proposed that they must have descended from ancient creatures called cystoids, which also looked like stalks with arms, Guensberg says. Over the next century, some scientists disagreed, chalking up this physical resemblance to mere coincidence. But over the years, studies have kept this early theory alive by cherry-picking certain fossils, Rich Mooi, an echinodermologist at the California Academy of Sciences and a co-author of the paper, writes in an email. “This debate has dominated echinoderm paleontology for well over 100 years,” Guensberg says. “We’re now saying that’s wrong.”

The new study proves that early sea lilies did not descend from cystoids. “This tears off one branch in the tree of life and rearranges it another way,” Guensberg says. Though cystoid and sea lily arms may have resembled each other on the outside, their internal structures are wildly different. These two creatures evolved to look similar, perhaps because they both survived by grabbing food that floated past.

The journey to understand Athenacrinus broweri lasted more than a decade. Guensberg even traveled to Argentina and Siberia in search of similar fossils in similarly-aged rock, though that didn’t pan out. “We spent three weeks floating the river in the coldest inhabited place on earth and found nothing,” he says. “I would not recommend that for anybody.”

As it turned out, Utah had held the key all long. Guensberg was last there three years ago, and plans to return soon, to look for new fossils. He doesn’t know exactly what he’s looking for, but he knows he’ll find something.

One woman had 30 images or symbols adorning her body.

Egypt’s Valley of the Kings is famous for its grave sites, hewn directly into the sedimentary rock on the bank of the Nile, from the grandiose burial chambers of Ramesses II to the imposing edifice of Hatshepsut’s tomb. Much is known about these pharaohs, but far less is known about the nameless thousands who hauled, carved, and painted their pharaonic legacies. Many of the valley’s workers lived in Deir el-Medina, a sprawling UNESCO World Heritage Site that has revealed extensive information about how the grand structures of ancient Egypt were made, mainly through the tens of thousands of scroll fragments that have been found on the site, alongside the mummies of some of those laborers and artisans. Now, infrared technology is being used to study those mummies, and add knowledge to a fairly obscure aspect of Egyptian culture: tattooing.

“One complication with the textual record is it biases our understanding of the past to what was recorded,” says Anne Austin, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who studied the Deir el-Medina mummies for three years while working with the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo. “These tattoos reveal new information that does not appear in the textual record and give us the potential to better understand women’s experiences in the village.”

Evidence of ancient tattooing appears around the world, but is mostly hard to come by. It’s difficult to understand how widespread the practice was because of how skin preserves in the archaeological record, though depictions of ancient tattoos abound in artworks from places as far flung as Japan, Papua New Guinea, and Romania. Nevertheless, some actual human remains have managed to make it to today with their ink intact. A Scythian woman with elaborate animal tattoos was found in a fifth-century BC burial mound in disputed land between Russia and China in 1993. The famous 5,000-year-old Italian “Iceman,” Ötzi, bears the world’s oldest tattoos, in the form of geometric patterns, the purposes of which are still debated. For ancient Egypt, where skin can often survive well because of mummification, and where many “tattooed” figurines have been excavated, only three tattooed mummies from pharaonic Egypt had been found—at least until the latest discovery. The infrared work on Deir el-Medina has identified tattoos on seven mummies, all women.

“The mummification process colors the skin and obscures the tattoos from being visible,” Austin says. “Infrared is a longer wavelength than visible light, so it can penetrate deeper into the skin than visible light and return information about what is under that surface.”

The mummies date to the New Kingdom’s Ramesside period, about 3,000 years ago. The team found tattooed patterns and figures. Some depict animals such as cobras, cows, and baboons, and others resemble familiar Egyptian symbols such as the wadjet, or Eye of Horus. Other tattoos appear to be hieroglyphs, perhaps reflecting the roles of these women in the community.

“It seems that women were primarily being tattooed,” says Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist with the American University in Cairo who helped Austin scan the mummies. “The [tattoos] from Deir el-Medina are on women associated with temples as priestesses, who had roles in singing and dancing and performance.”

The most eye-opening find was a single mummy that bore at least 30 tattoos, based on the current analysis. Some of the tattoos, adorning the arms, chest, and neck, were visible with the naked eye—and sound more Brooklyn than Egypt. Many of the tattoos are thematically linked with the Egyptian goddess Hathor, a sort of predecessor to the goddess Isis, who is associated with fertility, motherhood, and love. Much is still unknown about the tattoos—how they were made, or what with—or the women who rocked them. In the world of tattooed mummies, this find is a bonanza, but in the world of science it's what’s called a small sample size. And there’s a lot of Egyptian history out there.

“Given how sparse the data currently are, it is hard to know how tattooing developed and changed over Egyptian history,” Austin says. “Predynastic mummies are thousands of years older than New Kingdom ones, so understanding the difference between the tattoo practices of the New Kingdom and the predynastic would be like understanding the difference in practices between today and the Romans.”

Infrared imaging has proven to be a useful tool, but it doesn't see all. Some resins used in mummification conceal tattoos from that technology as well, according to Renee Friedman, a research curator at the British Museum who found tattoos on predynastic mummies in 2018, 120 years after their arrival at the museum. “It is hoped that other technologies will be found that might provide better visibility,” she says. There could be many more ancient Egyptian tattoos out there, hiding in plain sight.

For now there’s a lot more work to be done with the mummies from Deir el-Medina, including looking for more tattoos, studying the ink used in them, and better understanding the significance of the body art.

“I will continue working at Deir el-Medina in January to identify whether more tattoos are present. I anticipate we will continue to find more tattoos at the site,” Austin says. “My hope is that through a larger corpus, we can better understand what this tradition meant to the Egyptians.”

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Tourism can be a support system for young men who spent years studying, collecting alms, and meditating.

About 10 years ago, in the northern countryside of Laos, a boy named Sounanh Oulaxay was feeding buffalo when he noticed a few bald, barefoot men in orange robes walk by. When he asked his father about them, he was informed that they were Buddhist monks—and if he wanted to be a good man, he should think about becoming one. So he did: At the age of about 12, Sounanh moved to the city of Luang Prabang to become a novice.

In the spring, a hot haze—a result of the yearly crop-burning season—coats the low-lying buildings of Luang Prabang. Small temples were tucked into the corners of every street, orange robes hung from balconies, and monks used small brooms made of bundled sticks to sweep leaves away from golden statues of Buddha. Oulaxay spent several years studying and living in the temple, working his way toward becoming a monk. But his time in the monastery didn’t last.

On a steamy day in March 2019, Oulaxay meets with a group of American and Canadian tourists near the gate of an unassuming temple, Wat Paphaimisaiyaram, not far from the Mekong River. Now 19, he’s dressed in denim—the clothes of a layperson, not a monk. He discusses the rigid rituals and schedules of the novices: waking up at 3:30 a.m., chanting, collecting alms. Young novices go to school, he explains, while adult monks spend their days studying in the library, cleaning, or in a state of deep meditation. Monks are not allowed to interact with laywomen, he says, and should never try to shake their hands.

The visitors react with disbelief. They pepper him with questions. Oulaxay just smiles and answers: “People always say, ‘Oh my God, how do you do this?’ But here in Luang Prabang, this is all just normal.” An older man in a straw fedora asks politely, “Why did you leave the monastery?” Oulaxay, who was a novice for seven years in total, laughs. He mimics typing on a keyboard and makes a ‘ch ch ch’ sound. “I want to study computer science.”

In Laos, there is a long tradition of young men leaving rural areas to to become novices in the city. Joining the holy life is a way of getting a decent education, two meals of sticky rice a day (Laos has the highest per capita consumption of sticky rice in the world), and shelter in a temple, which reduces the economic burden on families. Most importantly, joining the monastery brings families “merit.”

Merit is a key concept in Laotian Buddhism, according to Ian Baird, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who has researched Buddhism in Laos. It has to do with karma, he explains: You do something good, then you gain a kind of spiritual credit for the future. “If a boy becomes a novice,” Baird explains, “his mother and father benefit, not materially, but otherwise.” As such, many families expect that at minimum, the eldest son in a family become a monk.

But what happens when you don’t want to be a novice anymore? Leaving a Laotian sangha, or Buddhist monastic order, is not in itself frowned upon. In fact, it’s commonplace. “In Laos, just having been in the sangha is taken as a very good thing for oneself and for the family,” says John Holt, a professor of Asian religious traditions at Bowdoin College. In other countries where Theravada Buddhism is widely practiced, such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar, former monks can sometimes face stigma. But in Laos, Holt says, “ordained monks who revert to the laity have an honorific word attached to their formal names. There is life-long prestige for having been a monk.”

Even so, the transition can be extremely difficult. In part because UNESCO considers Luang Prabang culturally significant, the rules for monks are strict compared to other cities in Laos, or in neighboring Buddhist countries such as Thailand. They are not allowed to ride on motorbikes, have cell phones, or attend university with local people. “Adjusting to lay life can be difficult, especially since there is no support system in play,” Holt says.

Many novices eventually leave monasteries in Luang Prabang for universities in cities like Vang Vieng or Vientiane, the Laotian capital. When Oulaxay left the monastery this year, he wanted to continue his studies. But he had no way to pay for university, and few practical skills besides meditation. As a way to cover the cost of living without his family in Luang Prabang, he continued learning English and became a tour guide.

Oulaxay answers more questions as the group of tourists enters the gates of Wat Paphaimisaiyaram. A few monks are quietly sweeping leaves near a giant gong. Oulaxay invites the visitors to remove their shoes and enter the temple, so that they can learn how to prostrate.

Oulaxay’s employer, “Orange Robe Tours,” is just a two-minute walk down the street from his tour. Luke Tavener, a 26-year-old from the United Kingdom, runs the business out of a small storefront on a dusty road. Tavener came to Laos in 2015 to teach English, and he began to notice a pattern in his classes: Ex-monks, some of them working as tuk-tuk drivers or waiters, wanted to gain a marketable skill. Tavener says he founded Orange Robe Tours so that former novices could find work as guides.

Luang Prabang’s tourism industry has blossomed in recent years because of its artistic energy, its proximity to the Mekong River, and its calm spirituality. There are signs all over the city asking tourists not to use flash photography in the early morning, when the monks collect alms, and to cover up if they enter a holy space. Ian Baird, the geography professor, suspects that many novices ultimately want to work in tourism.

Still, Orange Robe Tours portrays tourism as a good thing for those who have left a sangha. “Ex-monks and novices are able to find their way back into society, and laypeople learn what is appropriate in a temple—what clothing is appropriate, to face their feet towards Buddha,” Tavener says. “We have had a lot of trouble with tourists here. I have heard horror stories of people doing yoga in temples during chanting!”

On the day that a monk leaves the sangha, Tavener says, there is a small leaving ceremony. “You give your robes back and change into layperson clothes,” he says. “Then you are left to yourself.”

Sunti SouliPhone, another 19-year-old tour guide, moved to Luang Prabang to become a novice in 2010. This year, he decided to leave the temple and continue his studies. “When I decided to leave, a tear came down from my eye,” he says. “But for now, I don’t have much money, and I cannot live far from my mom.” SouliPhone adds that despite the difficulties, he works to live by the principles his abbot gave him before he left. “I want to learn about life outside, and how it’s different from inside. But I very much liked our lives inside, because it was very happy and quiet.”

SouliPhone is still unsure what he will do, now that he is no longer on his way to becoming a monk. He’s considering being a tour guide for good, or maybe an English teacher. But he still finds comfort in the Buddhist community. “We don’t know about the life outside yet,” he says. “Sometimes I feel a bit excited. I lived there for many years and my heart is in contact with the temple, so I go chanting every day. I promise myself I will not forget where I lived, and what I was before."

Oulaxay is still friends with the people in his old temple, and he visits often. Once he has saved up enough money, he says, he hopes to attend university in Vientiane, where monks are more integrated into society. “I still wake up at 4 a.m. every day,” Sounanh says. Before the sun rises, he goes to pray in the temple where he once lived. “It is still very special to me.”

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Sixty-three bakeries pitched in to build a mega-stollen.

It’s a windy winter morning in Dresden, and snowy-white wisps blow onto the crowd gathered in front of the city’s Kulturpalast concert hall. But it’s not snowing. Powdered sugar from the 8,700-pound cake sitting upon a garland-lined, horse-drawn wagon is dusting the crowd. This is Stollenfest, a supersized celebration of Dresden’s signature holiday treat, Christstollen.

Rich, buttery, and studded with rum-soaked raisins and candied citrus peel, the city’s version of stollen holds such a hallowed position in Dresden that thousands of fans flock to the city to watch a parade in its honor, held this year on December 7.

“The giant stollen is the beginning of Christmastime for Dresden,” says Marcel Hennig, a third-generation master baker who helped make the large cake this year. “It’s a must-do for Dresden bakers.” Proudly clad in white chef’s jackets and blue-and-gold scarves, almost every baker in the city marches behind the giant stollen as it winds through the Old Town. Following the wave of white and blue is a long procession of marching bands, costumed residents, and an annually appointed ambassador known as the stollenmädchen (“stollen maiden”).

But it’s not all empty fanfare. The parade tells the history of the city’s prized Christstollen. One man, for example, marches in a long red cloak, with a cross dangling from his neck and two Swiss guards trailing behind. He represents Pope Innocent VIII, and he clutches a scroll symbolizing Die Butterbrief, a missive that helped set stollen on a course to deliciousness.

Christstollen’s medieval predecessor was just a bare-bones brick of flour, yeast, and water that Catholics used to refuel during Advent fasts. When Saxony nobles decided that their holiday carb-loading needed some richness, they appealed to the pope to overturn the Church’s ban on butter and milk during fasting periods. In 1491, they got their wish: With his Butterbrief, the pope permitted dairy, forever changing how bakers made stollen.

Over the years, the cake picked up additional flavorful ingredients and evolved into the Christstollen that Dresden celebrates today. While its original upgrade was the result of rule-breaking, modern Christstollen must follow a rigid set of requirements set by the local Stollen Association, enforced by randomized testing at bakeries. The basic recipe is inviolable, but there is some leeway for individual bakers to add optional spices, such as cinnamon and mace.

When a bakery passes muster, it can adorn its Christstollen packaging with the association’s official golden seal, featuring a man atop a rearing steed. That man is Augustus II, elector of Saxony from 1694 until his death in 1733. At Stollenfest, he’s portrayed by an actor draped in a blue velvet cape and crowned with a tricorn hat. A fan of life’s finer things, Augustus was responsible for much of Dresden’s current baroque architecture (albeit in a restored form, as World War II bombings destroyed most of the city center) and treasure collections such as the Green Vault.

The ruler applied these lavish tastes to the table, as well. In 1730, he ordered a nearly two-ton stollen for a banquet. Part of a festival meant to showcase his military’s strength, the large loaf required a team of 100 bakers and the construction of a special oven. On a copper plate etching commemorating the original event, eight horses pull a wagon containing the giant pastry.

While the bakers succeeded in producing an impressively large cake in 1730, it was far from perfect. “They tried to make it in one big oven, but that didn’t work,” Hennig says. “It was burned on the outside and the dough inside was uncooked.” When Dresden’s bakers recreated Augustus’s cake caravan at the first Stollenfest in 1994, they dodged this dilemma by making separate sheets of stollen at their own bakeries, then assembling them into one large mound.

A week before this year’s festival, Hennig worked on the team that stacked 450 sheets of cake sourced from 63 bakeries onto the wagon, glueing them together with sugar and butter. With the cake assembled, they carved its top into a curve to mimic the shape of a normal-sized stollen, then coated everything in powdered sugar.

The only appropriate way to cut a cake so gargantuan is with an equally large knife. Five feet long and 26 pounds, the Dresden Stollen Knife is a surprisingly elegant slab of cutlery based on the one used at Augustus’s original 1730 banquet. (In the copper etching depicting the first giant stollen, it appears on a banner held aloft by an angel.) More for show than anything else, the knife is used only for the ceremonial first cut. This year, the honor goes to Hella Helbig, who recently retired from teaching baking at a local vocational school.

As the final act of Stollenfest, Helbig climbs a platform that’s been placed beside the cake wagon. It takes a few slow saws before she’s able to cut a slice. After the first piece is shared among a small group, a crew of bakers descends on the wagon to cut the rest of the cake into half-pound chunks (this time, with normal-sized knives). These are sold to the crowd for six euros each, with some of the proceeds going to a local hospice.

Many festival attendees don’t wait to take their piece home, wandering into the adjacent Christmas market with powdered sugar around their mouths. Though it was baked days before the procession, the cake is still soft, with a buttery density that’s offset by the sweet raisins and sour, aromatic citrus.

To Veronika Weber, a 23-year-old pastry-making apprentice and this year’s Stollen Maiden, sharing the giant cake is the most important part of her duties as the face of this Dresden specialty. “For me, I always bring some kind of stollen to my home, to my parents,” she says. “Now I can bring stollen to more people, and I can bring my kind of Christmas to more people.”

If they're Norway spruces, that's just their nature.

Any decades-old tree has probably been through a lot: It has likely withstood droughts, deluges, and a pest or two. Currently, the nonagenarian Norway spruce in London’s Trafalgar Square—which came of age in the woods near a lake called Trollvann, in Oslo—is facing yet another threat: It’s being bullied on Twitter for looking less than cheerful.

Every year, Norway gifts England a Christmas tree, in gratitude for assistance in World War II. This year’s specimen was supposed to delight visitors and draw merrymakers to Trafalgar Square—and while plenty of revelers are indeed stopping by, the spindly thing is also fending off some grinches, one of whom described the tree as “patchier than my beard,” NPR reported. Several cities’ evergreen attractions have been the butt of online jokes. New York City’s Rockefeller Center tree sometimes doesn’t look so hot, either, and in 2017, Rome’s 72-footer earned the unfortunate nickname Spelacchio, which the New York Times translated as “mangy.” By the end of its run, its branches looked like the exhausted bristles of a toothbrush destined for the trash bin.

Donald Leopold, a professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, says there’s a simple explanation: Many big-city centerpieces are wild-grown Norway spruces, which “is probably the single worst species” you could choose.

Generally speaking, any massive, wild-grown tree is going to look rough around the edges compared to one cultivated on a Christmas-tree farm, explains Chal Landgren, a Christmas tree specialist at Oregon State University’s North Willamette Research and Extension Center. On farms, crews limit the height of trees and shear their outer branches, which “helps increase the density by increasing the number of buds on the tree and the number of branches,” Landgren says. That nudges the tree toward the iconic, plump cone shape that celebrators of Christmas have come to expect.

Norway spruces have several particular problems. They’ve got a naturally droopy appearance, almost as if they’re sighing, and like other spruce trees, they readily shed their needles, Leopold says. They’re also not especially tolerant of shade, and when upper branches cast too many shadows on lower ones, the tree can develop a scraggly, uneven shape. “As long as Noway spruces are selected, they’re going to look that way,” Leopold says.

The tree in New York City’s Rockefeller Center is donated, and it’s almost always a Norway spruce. (Anyone can nominate a tree; Rockefeller Center reports that successful candidates are usually at least 75 feet tall and 45 feet in diameter.) This year’s green thumb, 80-year-old Carol Schultz, told the New York Times that she had whispered words of encouragement to her tree over the years, planting the idea that it could make it big. Leopold suspects that Norway spruces keep showing up because the people who planted them, decades ago, didn’t know what they were signing up for. “They plant these beautiful little pyramidal trees in front of a window or doorway and don’t realize they’re going to become these monster trees,” Leopold says.

The trouble is, once a Norway spruce is cut down, it starts looking pretty bad pretty quickly. The trees are often felled weeks before they’re installed, because it takes a while to lug them to the city and string up thousands of lights. Someone setting up a tree at home would probably make a fresh cut, and then balance the trunk in a little dish of water to stave off needle drop. At the scale of a massive Norway spruce, Leopold points out, that’s not really feasible.

A balsam fir would make for prettier, more fragment tree option, Leopold says, with its tight form and “needles that will last until Easter.” Alas, on the East Coast, balsam firs top out around 40 feet tall, Leopold adds, and hauling taller balsam firs or other soaring varities from out west would be expensive. Landgren says that sparse trees are sometimes padded with additional branches to make them look a little lusher, and trees in public places are occasionally sprayed with fire retardant, which can incidentally “cement the needles to the tree.” Back in 2010, researchers from Nova Scotia Agricultural College and Université Laval experimented with ways to stifle balsam firs’ production of ethylene, a plant hormone that has been associated with needle loss—but Landgren suspects that wouldn’t be feasible in a big, busy space.

The Norway spruce is what it is. Chances are, a huge specimen that winds up as a municipal tree “wasn’t a tree that was developed to be a Christmas tree in the first place,” Landgren says. “It’s going to look scraggly at the beginning, and probably going to continue to look scraggly.” Haters could challenge their hearts to swell a couple sizes, and make peace with the tree’s droopy comportment. “That’s just the way it’s going to look,” Leopold says. “Accept it and enjoy it.”

At Fletchers, cookies and bagels come with a side of food history.

Shortly after I take a seat on a high stool to peruse a menu, a trombonist starts playing deep notes that blend in with the packed room’s chatter. It’s early afternoon at Fletchers, the café inside the Museum of Jewish Montreal (MJM), and klezmer brunch is underway. Amidst the music, my eyes halt on the bagel board, stacked with gravlax cured in Moroccan ras el-hanout spices, pickled lemon cream cheese, and a bagel from local institution St-Viateur, slightly sweet from a bath in boiling honey water.

The bagel board has become a staple here since the café’s founder, Jewish food historian Kat Romanow, put it on the menu in 2016. It’s a perfect example of what she’s setting out to do. From the outset, Romanow says, she wanted to provide a tasty way for visitors to interact with global Jewish culture, while showing that the food of Montreal’s long-standing Ashkenazi Jewish community “is so much more diverse than just bagels and smoked meat.”

For her master’s degree, Romanow studied the city’s Moroccan Jewish food. Her bagel board combines the Ashkenazi staple of bagels with Sephardic Moroccan spices to “marry those two communities that are the biggest ones in Montreal, in one dish,” she says. Food was also Romanow’s way into Jewish culture. Growing up, her Roman Catholic family owned an Italian bakery right by her house in Rosemont, an area just a few neighborhoods north of where Fletchers is located today. Her family gatherings always centered around eating, and something that connected her to Judaism early on was “the focus on food,” she says. After the lengthy, traditional process of study and consultation with a rabbi, Romanow formally converted to Judaism last March.

What also drew Romanow to Jewish food was its diversity, the result of the displacement of Jews from the Middle East to far-flung locales around the world (including Canada.) When North Americans think about Jewish food, Eastern European Ashkenazi classics might come to mind: beef brisket, or latkes. But Sephardic Jews, who originated in Spain and Portugal and eventually moved across the Mediterranean, incorporate plenty of chickpeas, olive oil, and spiced ground lamb into their cooking. As for Mizrahi Jews in the Middle East, they’re known for dishes featuring pomegranate and tahini sauces along with rosewater-laced desserts.

Montreal is a particularly appropriate place for an eatery based on global Jewish cuisine. The city is home to the nation’s oldest synagogue, and the Plateau neighborhood where the MJM is located was the landing spot for many Eastern European Jews in the early 20th century, including my great-grandparents. It’s where my Zaida, or grandfather, attended the now-shuttered Baron Byng high school a five-minute walk away, as did the famous Jewish writers Mordecai Richler and Irving Layton.

Before founding Fletchers, Romanow and her business partner Sydney Warshaw created The Wandering Chew, an organization that hosted dinners around the city showcasing Jewish food from across the diaspora. Now, the pair has found a permanent home at the MJM, where they put on everything from brunch with a side of Eastern European Jewish music to cooking workshops.

Last year, on a cold November evening, the MJM hosted a soup night with every major branch of Judaism represented in a bowl. The evening started with cozy Ashkenazi Ukrainian cabbage borscht, followed by Tunisian hlelem soup, a blend of pasta and lentils. This dish is emblematic of Sephardic history, with ingredients moving across the Mediterranean from Southern Europe to North Africa. The meal ended with a Mizrahi soup from Yemen, with root vegetables cooked in a spice mixture of cumin, coriander, turmeric, cardamom, and black pepper called hawaij.

The standout part of the final course actually came on the side, in the form of snail-shaped kubaneh bread. The dough is rolled with plenty of butter, “baked low and slow,” Romanow says. Though she told me first-hand about her process for making the Yemenite yeasted shabbat loaf, I’d already learned about it on the print-out that accompanied the meal.

Romanow’s hunger for learning is what keeps propelling her forward into the seemingly endless nooks and crannies of the Jewish culinary world. She’s “looking to draw from people in the community, on their experience, their stories,” she says. “To learn from them, collaborate, and share.” Her quest for new recipes and ingredients means scouring the internet, keeping an ear to the ground while visiting new countries, and interviewing keepers of age-old recipes.

After my first meeting with Romanow in 2016, she sent me home with massafan cookies. These almond, cardamom, and rosewater goodies are practically impossible to find outside of Iraqi Jewish homes during Passover. However, at Fletchers, you can dunk them in a latte or get two sandwiching ice cream during the hot summer months. To get the recipe, Romanow sat down with Evette Mashaal, a grandmother who left Baghdad for Montreal in the 1940s and has kept making the treats ever since.

Last October, Romanow held a workshop on how to make these flourless cookies, along with sambusak, a type of Iraqi turnover filled with curried chickpeas served with a pickled mango sauce called amba. The latter dish and its spices were brought back to Baghdad by Iraqi Jews doing business in India in the 18th and 19th centuries.

When I return to Fletchers the day after klezmer brunch to chat with Romanow, the museum smells homey and a bit sweet thanks to vegetables roasting in the oven. If you can’t make it to Montreal, she’ll soon be digging into her archives and posting research-based recipes on the MJM website. But here on the Main, Montreal’s traditionally Jewish stomping ground, Romanow’s goal is to host even more workshops and events that showcase the wide diversity of Jewish cuisine. Whether it’s for Persian Purim, klezmer brunch or a bagel-making workshop, Fletchers keeps people coming back to connect with Jewish culture in delicious ways.

A new committee digs into the lives of 18th-century colonists who may have lived outside the norm.

On September 26, 1777, Prussian military officer Baron Frederich Wilhelm von Steuben arrived in America with his French live-in secretary and interpreter, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau. Von Steuben had been summoned by Benjamin Franklin to train the Continental Army, at a time when the Prussian was being hounded in his homeland by rumors of his homosexuality, writes journalist Randy Shilts in Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military. After serving as a major general in the war, and as George Washington’s chief of staff, von Steuben did not marry but rather moved upstate with two young men whom he legally adopted as his heirs.

In his time in the military, von Steuben often passed through Williamsburg, Virginia. Today, the city would be unrecognizable to the general, except perhaps for the living-history museum known as Colonial Williamsburg. Recently, the museum formed a new committee dedicated to exploring the history of 18th-century residents who did not conform to gender or sexual norms—what would now be considered a queer history.

“Desire is nothing new,” says Michael Bronski, a historian at Harvard University and author of A Queer History of the United States. “There’s no reason to think that everything that happens now in terms of desire and sexual activity didn’t happen back then.”

“I just want to tell the whole story of Colonial Williamsburg,” says Aubrey Moog-Ayers, an apprentice weaver at the museum who identifies as queer. She has worked there for about seven years, and fields many questions from visitors about what life was like for the colonists. Several years ago, a gay male couple had asked her if anyone in Colonial Williamsburg is known to have been queer. Moog-Ayers began doing research on her own time, but she still didn’t really know what to tell people when the question came up. In 2019, she and other staff members signed a petition asking the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to dive into the city’s queer history. The foundation agreed, and the committee was born.

The committee, which is still in its early stages, currently plans to create a sourcebook to educate the Colonial Williamsburg staff on the history of people centuries ago who lived lives we would now call queer. Some members of the committee have particular focuses. One member is keying in on von Steuben—though his case is rather special. Due to his political power and identity as a cis white man, von Steuben is one of colonial history’s very few fleshed-out figures known to have been queer. He definitely stands out during a time in which most historical proof of nonconforming sexualities exists as criminal records.

And that’s why the committee’s research began with court records, but even that didn’t make things much clearer. Same-sex sexual behavior was often ill-defined, and might be considered “a crime that dare not speak its name,” Bronski says. Moog-Ayers and other members of the committee are pursuing poetry and letters, as well. These could be much more revealing, but there are concerns that a lot of this material may have been destroyed to protect certain individuals or families from disgrace.

In the often tragic-seeming court cases—in colonial Virginia, the maximum sentence for sodomy was death—it can be hard to distinguish consensual encounters from sexual assault. “We rarely glimpse in the surviving court records any feelings that defendants may have had for one another,” historian Richard Godbeer writes in the first chapter of The Routledge History of Queer America. According to Bronski, a good rule of thumb is to consider the power differential between the two accused individuals. Two male citizens who are both merchants are much more likely to have had a consensual tryst than, say, a propertied man and a servant, he says, though not always.

A glaring example of this in Williamsburg would have been encounters between white colonists and the black people they kept as slaves. During the 18th century, more than half of the residents of Williamsburg were free and enslaved black people, according to the Washington Post. DeAndre Short, an actor who plays formerly enslaved barber John Hope at Colonial Williamsburg and is a member of the committee, says he fields many questions about the sexual abuse and rape of enslaved and other disenfranchised people, such as free black men and those with mixed racial heritage. Occasionally visitors ask if his own character was ever sexually abused by a white man. “It’s a difficult topic to discuss for anyone in public history, but it is a part of our history that we need to have conversations about,” he says. He tells them what he can, in Hope’s voice: that he does not know if it happened to him, but that it did happen to other black men, both enslaved and free.

When Short first joined Colonial Williamsburg two-and-a-half years ago, he assisted in research on interracial relationships to bring a new kind of story to life at the museum. It has all been part of many colonial museums’ recent efforts to include more diverse and honest representations of enslaved and formerly enslaved people. Last year Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, opened an exhibition dedicated to Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman in his household.

Short hopes that there’s a way to bring these two threads together to unearth the stories of enslaved and formerly enslaved people who might have lived queer lives in Williamsburg. But the history of enslaved black people is further complicated by being told through a white lens, when it is told at all. “We do have research that states that sexual abuse happened against male enslaved individuals,” Short says. “But we don’t have evidence of those men who were performing those heinous acts toward enslaved males ... if they identified as queer.”

There is fragmentary evidence to suggest queer relationships among enslaved people. In 1828, a witness described an enslaved woman, Minty, in order to support a white woman’s claim for monetary compensation after Minty escaped from Maryland. The account noted that Minty had two surnames, Gurry (the name of her husband, with whom she had separated) and Caden (the name of another formerly enslaved woman with whom she formed “an intimacy,” writes historian Leila J. Rupp in A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America). The scholar Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley argues that the history of enslaved people must be open to different kinds of evidence, at the risk of total erasure, in her paper “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

A similar issue of erasure plagues any documentation of the Native American communities who visited Williamsburg. The Cherokee Tribe, which often came to the city for negotiations, has historic examples of men who lived as women, according to Cherokee scholar Qwo-Li Driskill in Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory.

Every character at Colonial Williamsburg is a factual representation of real person from history, and the product of months of research, so there’s a considerable burden of proof when new characters are introduced, according to Megan Rhodes Victor, a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Archaeology Center who used to work in public excavations at Colonial Williamsburg and identifies as queer. The museum is intended to provide an accurate (if also creative) slice of local life in the last half of the 18th century. So any potential new characters would have to have lived or passed through Williamsburg around that time.

There is at least one vivid historical example of a person who did not conform to gender norms in Williamsburg: Thomas/ine Hall, who lived in the 17th century—before the period captured by the museum. But their story is still relevant to the committee’s research, Moog-Ayers says. Born Thomasine Hall in England in 1603, they were assigned and raised female and worked as a servant, Rupp writes. They later settled in colonial Virginia and began living, alternately, as a man—Thomas Hall—and a woman. After a suspected dalliance with a female servant, Hall was subject to multiple physical examinations to prove their sex until a Virginia court ruled Hall was both a man and a woman, and ordered them to wear men’s clothing with a woman’s cap and apron, Rupp writes. “It was clear they meant to ostracize this person,” Moog-Ayers says, adding that Hall, who might now be considered intersex, later disappears from the historical record. (Modern-day Colonial Williamsburg, it's worth noting, has non-gender-specific restrooms available to visitors.)

There are also contemporary examples of people who might be considered queer and lived in the 18th century, but never went to Williamsburg. Bronski points to the case of a preacher in Rhode Island who gave up their given name in 1776 to be reborn a genderless evangelist named the Public Universal Friend, or P.U.F. for short.

Any future panels, lectures, or character-driven programming on queer life in Colonial Williamsburg is far in the future. From her experience working as an archaeologist there, Victor, from Stanford, believes von Steuben has the highest chance of becoming a character, primarily due to his historic visibility. “Plus, it’s not unknown that he was gay,” she says. Victor also points to von Steuben’s identity as a Prussian immigrant and a military leader as more information that could be offered to museum visitors. “For example, he could be discussing military programming with the Marquis de Lafayette,” Victor says. (Lafayette, a current character at Colonial Williamsburg, once penned letters to George Washington with intense homoerotic tones, Bronski says.)

Portraying someone such as Thomas/ine Hall, however, would be more difficult. Even beyond the anachronism of putting a 17th-century person in the 18th century, their story is far more obscure and complex. “I would prefer to see Thomas/ine Hall, as there’s also so much to be said about the life of a servant as opposed to the life of a great individual,” Victor says. But in her opinion, von Steuben represents an easier way to introduce the notion of queerness to Colonial Williamsburg and its visitors, many of whom have “very vitriolic opinions on history,” she says.

Victor’s research focus is on what are known as “molly houses,” or 18th-century meeting places for homosexual men in England, often in the back rooms of taverns or public houses. Molly houses have yet to be identified in America, which is something Victor hopes to change, as she believes the practice is highly likely to have carried over to the colonies—especially to a big city such as Williamsburg. She believes that identifying colonial molly houses and, subsequently, evidence for raids on them, could excavate the names and stories of more queer individuals, and even queer individuals of color. “It speaks to the enduring nature of the human spirit,” Victor says. “How we are capable of carving out paths for ourselves and finding each other when we need it.”

Omsk was promised a Metro system in 1979. Forty years later, locals salute a subway that never saw the light of day.

Earlier this year, a Russian transit app made a satirical update by adding a map of Omsk, a Siberian city around 1,400 miles from Moscow. The map showed an icon for the local airport, along with a train station on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Interestingly, it also showed a single red dot to mark a local Metro stop. There were no lines connecting it to nearby stations, and information about buying a ticket was nowhere to be found.

A subway map with only one station sounds like an absurdist gag. But the joke, pulled by the app Yandex.Metro, hit too close to home for residents of Omsk, who had been promised a functioning subway system since Soviet times. After decades of sporadic development, all that was accessible to pedestrians was a single underpass—complete with an M logo that adorns rapid-transit systems throughout Russia.

As a transportation project, the Omsk Metro was an ambitious dream that fell victim to a changing economic landscape and a dearth of federal funding. As a cultural phenomenon, it joined the ranks of many symbols for a struggling Siberian province. At the same time, for many citizens of Omsk, the subway that never was became a way to share appreciation for the city.

Compared to many other cities, Omsk was always well-connected to the rest of Russia, because it was a hub for both historical and modern routes of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Getting around the city itself, however, was hard—especially when it grew across the Irtysh river after the construction of an oil refinery. Walking anywhere became impractical, and the bridges of Omsk became traffic bottlenecks.

Around 1979, the population of Omsk hit a million, making the city eligible for a subway system funded by the Soviet Union. A few years later, the lead engineer on the Omsk Metro project, Vladimir Ryzhov, wrote in Metrostroy magazine that city was short on bridges and railway overpasses. Harsh frost, icy roads, and snowdrifts were also taking a toll. “Current means of public transportation in Omsk are not able to provide adequate service to commuters,” he concluded.

Ryzhov expected the construction to begin within five years. But he didn’t account for the cultural crisis within the communist regime, which led to drastic economic reforms and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In part because of the turmoil of that time, construction didn’t commence until 1992. The end of the U.S.S.R. created a new economic reality: Russian regions were expected to reduce their financial dependence on Moscow.

The Omsk region had the resources to sustain itself. Sibneft, a company that owned the refinery and oil plants, was one of Russia’s biggest petrochemical companies, and Omsk’s biggest taxpayer. But in 2006, the company moved to St. Petersburg after becoming an arm of a state-owned Gazprom, which deprived the region of $219 million in annual taxes.

In 2011, the now-infamous Pushkin Library station opened in central Omsk, to great fanfare. A bright red M was installed above the underpass, reflecting the high hopes that the city officials had for the project. Tunnels connected the station to the other side of the Irtysh River, though they were sealed to prevent trespassers. Leonid Polezhaev, the region’s governor who envisioned most of the construction, proclaimed that the subway would be put into operation within three years. This turned out to be wildly optimistic.

Yet for the city’s more creative citizens, that M was enough: Instead of waiting for the subway to be finished, they pretended it already existed, and started shaping its image. In 2016, Anton Oleynik, a photographer, copied the logo and drew the Pushkin Library archway on a napkin. Later, that sketch turned into a set of freshly minted coins, which could pass for real fare tokens. The tongue-in-cheek souvenir proved popular enough for the initial batch of 300 tokens to sell out. “The orders were coming from many different, remote cities of Russia. There were even buyers in Los Angeles and Las Vegas,” Oleynik says.

Graphic designers Violett and Dmitry Stolz decided to go even further. The same year, they created an original visual identity for the subway system, complete with logos and billboards. Violett Stolz, who has since moved to Prague, remembers a time when Omsk officials proposed a metrotram system, as a lower-cost alternative to a subway. “It would have been a great idea,” she says. “For me, the Omsk tram is the best public transit.”

Ultimately, even that alternative proved to be too expensive. In 2019, citing the lack of funding, Omsk officials announced that they were putting the development on hold. Forty years had passed since the idea first took hold. Some of the tunnels will be filled with sand and concrete, to preserve them for the future. “My whole life wouldn’t be enough to build everything. We were supposed to build four stations by 2016,” said Polezhaev after his retirement. “I didn’t get a chance, and I’m sorry.”

That didn’t stop people from looking for new meanings for the subway. “It’s hard to live in a city with a corpse lying in the middle of it,” says Ivan Pritulyak, a former radio host from Omsk. “But Siberia is a place where everyone has to help each other and make the most of any resources.” Pritulyak envisioned a two-year series of art events on a Pushkin Library station, and the idea has built momentum.

The first exhibition, organized by the Vrubel Museum of Fine Arts, is scheduled for December. But Pritulyak doesn’t think the station should be seen as just an underground museum hall. “Let’s look at it as a multipurpose space,” he says. “It can host visual arts, but it can also be used for concerts, plays, media arts.”

Recently, research conducted by the Russian Ministry of Construction and Strelka KB awarded Omsk 104 points out of 360 in the index of urban environment. While the researchers didn’t compile a comparison chart, the score puts Omsk in the bottom 10 of the list, making it the least pleasant Russian metropolis to live in.

Transportation infrastructure continues to be one of Omsk’s weakest points. Irina Ogarkova, a merchandiser, has to take a ride from Neftyanikov district, in the northwest part of the city, to Moskovka district, in the southeast. Her 13-mile ride goes through the busy city center, and marshrutkas—minivans run by small businesses—keep jamming the traffic.

As nice as it would be to have an underground alternative, Ogarkova admits the city might never be ready for it. “It would be nice to spend 15 minutes to move from one point to the other—not two hours,” said Ogarkova. “But given the financial state, I think it’s impossible. The subway would be an expensive toy for a city facing a budget gap. If it was built, I think only a small number of citizens could afford to take a ride daily.”

For many Russians in the rest of the country, Omsk can seem like more of a meme than a real city. It has earned a sarcastic slogan: “Don’t try to leave Omsk.” At one point, the motto was even blamed by the acting governor of the region, Alexander Burkov, for scaring away investors. In the 2000s, Russian web users suggested a new name for “Winged Doom,” an eerie painting of a bird by Heiko Müller. They called it “Omsk Bird.”

Even while embracing the failure of the subway, citizens of Omsk want the symbol of the city to carry a more positive meaning. “I associate the city with self-development,” adds Violett Stolz, the graphic designer. “Omsk is shaped not by its officials, whom I can say nothing about, but by its local projects, young people, and places and businesses they build.”

Clues about the victims’ diet cracked the case.

The bodies were at the bottom of a well: 20 people, their hands, feet, and limbs removed, their skeletons cured in layers of clay and limestone. All but one of the victims, an 18-month-old child, had been decapitated. Their bones bore knife marks from the butchery, and burn marks from where they had been scorched to facilitate the removal of muscle and skin. “The person who was carrying this out wanted to destroy the physical entities of the victims as clearly as possible,” says Nicolaus Seefeld, a pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican archaeologist at the University of Bonn.

Seefeld was part of the team that found these remains in 2013, in the pre-Columbian city of Uxul, in the lowlands of what is now Mexico. The grave wasn’t the scene of a contemporary murder. Instead, it was the millenia-old remnant of a brutal conflict between sparring factions during the Maya period. Thanks to their limestone grave, the remains were astonishingly well preserved. “The bones looked like they’d be 100 years old,” says Seefeld. “But even better: They’re 1,400 years old.”

Despite the suggestive scorches, there were no teeth marks or other evidence of cannibalism, which some Mesoamerican indigenous groups likely practiced. Instead, the precision of the dismemberment suggested ritual murder. But scientists were stumped on a key detail: Who were these people, and why had the residents of Uxul so elaborately and violently executed them?

To find out, they turned to culinary detective work. Using an isotopic analysis of the victims’ teeth enamel, researchers discovered that the victims had grown up at least 95 miles from Uxul. This suggests they were prisoners of war in one of the many skirmishes between Uxul and neighboring city-states.

Isotopic analysis is a powerful method of tracing the origins of human remains. We all grow up in unique geological landscapes, which have a kind of indelible chemical terroir that enters our drinking water, food supply, and, ultimately, us. These elements end up in our teeth enamel. Since teeth develop in early childhood and their composition doesn’t change during adulthood, researchers can test them to discover where a person is from. By comparing the concentration of strontium isotopes in teeth with that in surrounding environments, researchers can discern the diet, and thus the origins, of deceased humans.

In the past couple decades, isotopic analysis has enabled scientists to solve lingering archaeological mysteries and address current humanitarian crises. They’ve used dietary information to study the remains of people who starved during the Irish Potato Famine, and to test ancient Native American remains, allowing their descendents to claim traditional burial grounds. They've also used the method to identify contemporary migrants who died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to unite families with their lost loved ones’ remains.

The murdered people found in Uxul likely ate primarily corn and beans, pan-American indigneous staples that bore the elemental signatures of geographic formations about 95 miles from Uxul. Inspecting the victims’ teeth also revealed unique designs, still visible after millenia: elaborate jade insets and precise, intricate etchings, traced on the incisors and filled with black ink.

The combination of dietary evidence, mode of murder, and adornment suggests the murdered people were likely elites from a neighboring city, captured and brought to Uxul. “The Maya region, it’s not an empire—there was no central political power,” says Seefeld. Instead, Seefeld compares the region to ancient Greece, where neighboring city-states had competitive and often belligerent relationships. Defeats led to public performances of extreme, ritualized violence against captives. Some of this violence is represented in Mayan codices, folding books written on tree bark by Mayan scribes before European contact, some of which contain images of people being flayed and disemboweled.

Seefeld and his collaborators’ work highlights an eerie aspect of such rituals: that in Uxul, like in most global civilizations of the time, cultural and social sophistication existed alongside haunting violence. “It’s a very pedantic process almost,” Seefeld says of the murders. “You’re trying to destroy the human body as completely as possible.”

These traditional handicrafts require exoskeletons, magnolia buds, and a steady hand.

Along the gray brick houses of Beijing’s hutongs, or traditional neighborhoods, stores are lined wall to wall with the typical Chinese arts and crafts—paintings and calligraphy, engraved lacquer, or cloisonné vases. In a shop across the street from the Temple of Confucius, calabash gourds dangle from the ceiling while shelves are stacked with handmade wooden appliances. Furry little figurines re-enact snapshots from Old Beijing. Some are posed selling bright red skewers of candied hawthorn, another pair plays Chinese yo-yo in the park. Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the figurines' limbs are made of insect legs.

These figurines, called maohou in Mandarin (directly translating to “hairy monkeys”), are an obscure folk craft made with the fuzzy bud of a magnolia flower and the sloughed exoskeleton of a cicada. The dioramas typically capture an essence of Beijing folk life, harkening back to a time before urbanization uprooted the ambiance of the ancient city.

“Hairy monkeys are something unique to Beijing,” says Buo Ling, a carpenter and sculptor who co-owns the shop selling traditional Chinese handicrafts. Ling developed an interest in making hairy monkeys after seeing them on TV and passed the skill onto his niece, Ying Li, who made the figurines on display at their store—one of the few places in China where hairy monkeys can still be found.

According to local legend, the craft began during the late Qing dynasty—around the late 1800s—at an apothecary called Nanqing Rentang in the south of the city. The shopkeeper had a reputation for being ill-mannered, and one day, lashed out at an apprentice. Later on, the apprentice, bored at work and resentful of his boss, began fiddling around with items in the apothecary. He took the legs and head from a shed cicada exoskeleton and fashioned them to the furry body of a magnolia bud. He used beiji, a sticky medicinal ingredient made from orchids, as glue to hold the figurine together, and another herbal medicine resembling straw to make a small hat.

The apprentice, amused by the resemblance the figurine bore to his manager, showed his coworkers, who also began making the hairy monkeys. When their manager found out, rather than be upset, he saw a business opportunity.

“In that time they didn’t have that many toys,” says Ling about people in the Ming Dynasty. “And this is really original and really simple.” The hairy monkeys were displayed in the shop window, and the apothecary even began selling kits so customers could assemble the unusual toys at home.

“I’ve heard older people say that wherever there was a market you could find these things,” says Ling. “And they’re really cheap. You can pick cicada sloughs in the summer and magnolia buds in the winter. You don’t even need to buy them. For the background you can find sticks or paper or leaves—whatever you scavenge around can be used, so in the past there were a lot of people who made this.”

But China saw dramatic changes in the 20th century. With the Cultural Revolution and rapid economic modernization, many of the country’s folk arts have faded into obscurity. Hairy monkeys virtually disappeared between the 1940s and 1980s. During the 1980s, dioramas began cropping up in folk art exhibitions, reviving their reputation.

Ling thinks he first learned about the craft over 10 years ago. “I saw them on TV, but I just didn’t know what the furry parts were,” he says. Ling went searching for the materials in a pharmacy, but the pharmacists didn’t understand what he was looking for. Luckily, he was dining at a restaurant one day and the soup was seasoned with magnolia buds. Recognizing the herb, he asked the kitchen for some to take home and began making the dioramas himself.

According to Ling, the hairy monkeys are quite easy to assemble. The difficulty lies in imagining unique scenes and accurately imitating character and mood. “Another difficult part is the props,” he says. “The figurines are only an inch tall, and according to this proportion, the props will be tiny.”

Other artists have made dioramas of wedding ceremonies or retro-style bathhouses and barber shops, and some have incorporated more modern designs. The Olympics, for instance, have inspired artists to feature skiing, volleyball, or weightlifting. “I rather like making the history-related stories or folk stories,” says Ling. “They’re traditional toys, so when someone sees them they can understand a bit of history. You can always use them to replicate modern feelings, but I always feel like it doesn’t quite match.”

Li’s designs often portray timeless scenes that can span multiple generations, and she draws inspiration from people-watching. One diorama depicts a kite factory while another re-enacts a picnic in the park. Another diorama shows a vendor selling youtiao in the street—a popular, deep-fried breakfast pastry.

Li concedes that hairy monkeys can only be pursued as a hobby and not a career, and at 75 RMB per diorama (around $11), it would be difficult to make any sustainable living. That said, “since it’s a passion of mine, I’ll always make them.”

Hairy monkeys can only be purchased in three or four shops around Beijing, and while another artist with a hutong shop has expressed concern that the art will die out again, Ling is doubtful. He thinks that the craft won’t be lost because it’s an irreplaceable tradition and that anyone interested can pick it up. “As long as you have hands you can make them,” he says.

My grandparents and mother are trained in Chinese painting, and as such, possess a niche knowledge of the traditional arts. Inspired by Ling, my mother and I purchased some magnolia buds and cicada sloughs to give the craft a try. The design I settled on was inspired by a retiree practicing calligraphy in a park. He wrote out poems on the sidewalk with water and a giant home-made paintbrush.

I was befuddled about what I could use for props. Where did Li get tiny watermelons and teapots? After some bumbling around the house and chin scratching, I resourcefully, and admittedly creepily, made a minuscule paintbrush by gluing a snip of my grandmother’s gray hair to a toothpick. It worked surprisingly well. I made the tree by stabbing a grape vine, devoid of all grapes, into a foamy pomelo rind. Pebbles were selectively sourced from a flower pot, and to top it all off, I trimmed a few dried flowers from a vase that had been tucked away in a cupboard.

In summation, Ling’s verdict was right. Aided by a pair of dissecting forceps and super glue, assemblage was easy enough. The teeny props, however, required some creative thinking. It would be difficult to imagine making any sort of profit off the craft, but it certainly made a fun activity for a Sunday afternoon.