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Eat Like a 1970s Radical With 'The People's Philadelphia Cookbook'

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The 1976 book included contributions from the Black Power and Gay Liberation movements.

“A Very Gay Meat Loaf” requires several key ingredients. First, wrote Michael Goldberger, a gay activist and neuroscience researcher, combine ground beef, pork, and veal with spices. Then, add partially-cooked spinach and—if you have the money—mushrooms, taking care not to overmix. Hard-boiled eggs and sour cream top it off.

Goldberger adapted the recipe from gay New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne and lesbian icon Alice B. Toklas, and included it in the 1976 People’s Philadelphia Cookbook. The book was compiled and published by the People’s Fund, a grassroots organization founded in 1971, with recipes from member organizations that included the Black Panther Party, the United Farm Workers, the Gay Activist Alliance of Philadelphia, and more.

Now, thanks to an enterprising historian, a flea market, and Twitter, The People’s Philadelphia Cookbook has a new life online. It's a record of an optimistic era, when activists believed that the elimination of racism, homophobia, and capitalism was just around the corner. While the revolution would not be televised, it would certainly be well-fed.

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Stephanie McKellop wasn’t looking for cookbooks when she went browsing in Philadelphia’s Uhuru Flea Market one spring morning in 2018. An independent historian, McKellop and her partner David Ryskalczyk enjoy combing Philadelphia’s sidewalk sales for quirky documents, especially those related to marginalized histories.

At first glance, the cookbook was unremarkable: a stack of old papers that a man had found in his recently deceased relative’s attic. “I looked through this box and it was all moldy and stinky, and I thought, ‘I shouldn’t,’” McKellop says. She kept walking. But the historian in her couldn’t resist. “I ran back and I was like, ‘I need to know more about this People’s Cookbook!’”

Almost two years later, to the joy of her online followers, McKellop and Ryskalczyk have finally posted the digitized book. “Maybe it’s not usually what I dig out of people’s trash, but it’s a wonderful piece of Philly history,” McKellop says.

Casey Cook agrees. “The people who made these cookbooks were working in a moment that felt like a crisis and an impending revolution,” says Cook, executive director at Bread & Roses Community Fund. The People’s Fund changed its name to Bread & Roses Community Fund in 1977, when it got tax-exempt status.

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For Ann Marie Doley, who worked at the People’s Fund from 1976 to 1988, the cookbook represents a pivotal moment in her life.

In 1976, Philadelphia was celebrating the nation’s bicentennial. For Doley and her fellow organizers, however, the work for freedom and equality was far from over. The Vietnam War had just ended, thanks in no small part to anti-war activism, and Nixon had been impeached. But in Philly, the struggle continued. Frank Rizzo was mayor, and he often targeted the city’s poor, people of color, and leftist activists.

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Doley had moved to Philly in 1967, to attend college at the University of Pennsylvania. She was quickly politicized by anti-Vietnam War protests. “I had friends who were in that war and who died in that war,” she says.

She moved to a collective house in Powelton Village, “a real hotbed of radicalism,” and took a part-time job for $3,000 a year at at the People’s Fund. Doley, pregnant at the time, recalls climbing the stairs to the Fund’s fourth-floor walkup on Walnut Street, then staying put for the day; just weeks before her due date, the steps felt like Mount Everest.

The People’s Fund represented a new kind of philanthropy: change, not charity. Member-funders from community organizations had equal say in where the money went, whether they gave one dollar or one thousand. They funded organizations that conventional philanthropists wouldn’t touch. When one of the founders expressed hesitance about giving money to the Black Panthers, Cook says, another asked, “Well, if we don’t fund the Black Panthers, what makes us different than anyone else?” The Panthers were included in the group’s membership.

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As with most democratic experiments, raising money for the fund was a continuous scramble. Members sold wontons from a cart on the Ben Franklin Parkway. They threw a benefit headlined by folk singer Bonnie Raitt. And, in 1976, they published a cookbook.

Forty years later, The People’s Philadelphia Cookbook is a snapshot of an era: turbulent, and contentious, but also generous and nourishing. The range of groups represented in the book—from the Black Panthers to the Grey Panthers, an anti-ageism organization—demonstrates an age of interconnected movements. “The People’s Fund optimistically hopes that those who like each other’s food will learn to like each other,” reads the book’s epigraph.

Puerto Rican Socialist Party activist Rafaela Colon Rivera included her sofrito recipe. “Like no Puerto Rican can give you how many teaspoons of this and that. When I’m cooking, I’m hyper; it’s like a bee,” she said, in the interview that accompanied her recipe. She had just moved to a new house, in a whiter part of town, she explained. “We make ourselves at home. The FBI does too; they found me—two days after we moved in—knocking at the door.”

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People’s Fund employees and community activists collected the recipes and drafted the interviews. “Our political lives and our personal lives were pretty much all connected,” says Dina Portnoy, now a retired school teacher, then a full-time activist living in a commune in Powelton Village. She interviewed her housemate, Rosemari Mealy, for the book.

Mealy is one of the few African-American voices featured prominently in the first edition, a fact that didn’t escape notice. When the People’s Fund sent the first edition to Chuck Stone, a local columnist, he refused to review it. “He was really mad about the book and said he wouldn’t write about it because it didn’t have enough African-American recipes in it,” says Doley. “He was right.”

The Fund included more African-American cooking in the book’s second edition, and Stone reviewed it in 1977. “The People’s Cookbook is an epicurean must for any kitchen that digs people, food, democracy, human togetherness, and one world,” Stone wrote.

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The same year, the People’s Fund changed its name to Bread & Roses Community Fund when it applied for nonprofit status so it could fundraise at a larger scale. Becoming a nonprofit didn’t blunt the group’s radicalism. In its original application to the IRS, Bread & Roses’s stated goals included “overthrowing the U.S. government.”

“They really thought overthrowing the U.S. government was possible,” says Cook.

“And tax-deductible,” adds Caitlin Quigley, Bread and Roses’s director of Communications and Development.

When McKellop posted a digitized version of the cookbook on Twitter, the response was enthusiastic: a thousand likes and hundreds of retweets in a matter of weeks. She says the book’s appeal rests in both its historical specificity, and its relevance to a society that continues to contend with what it means to live, and eat, in diverse communities. “A lot of the quotes from this book sounds like the discourse of today,” McKellop says.

While McKellop is as eager as anyone to recreate the very gay meatloaf, the importance of The People’s Philadelphia Cookbook goes far beyond the kitchen. “The recipes were the least important part of the book,” she says. “It was more about the people.”


How a Massive Fatberg Went From Sewer to Science Museum

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The underground menace is now a reminder that people should be kinder to their pipes.

Tracie Baker wasn’t sure what tools she would need for the dissection. Baker, an environmental toxicologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, studies the presence and effects of toxins and endocrine-disrupting compounds in water. She’d cut up fish before, but never anything quite like the tangled mess of fats, oils, grease, and trash that had arrived in her lab. It was two 10-pound chunks of fatberg, taken from a massive sewer-clogging bolus. Baker figured she’d need gloves, probably the thick rubber kind people use for washing dishes, and elbow-length seemed safest. Beyond that, she says, “We weren’t exactly sure what was going to work.”

Baker and her colleagues were trying to learn as much as they could about the fatberg, which had been hauled from a sewer in Clinton Township, a suburban Michigan community about 25 miles northeast of Detroit in Macomb County, while it was still fetid and fairly fresh. When they were done, it would be enshrined in a new exhibit at the Michigan Science Center.

Crews from Macomb County Public Works encountered the fatberg during a routine survey. The situation wasn’t critical, but officials knew it needed to come out, says Dan Heaton, the office’s communications manager. Fatbergs are always unwelcome guests, and this one had really made itself at home. The 50-year-old sewer pipes are about 11 feet in diameter, and the fatberg was almost exactly as wide, six feet deep, and a startling 100 feet in length—same as two school buses. Its 19-ton bulk occluded the sewage pipe enough that officials worried it would mean a backup of hydrogen sulfide—“sewer gas”—that could corrode the pipes’ cement interiors.

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It’s dangerous to send humans down into narrow, dark, gas-filled sewers, so crews generally enlist high-powered water jets first. These can be enough to get things flowing again—but they didn’t do much against the Macomb County monster. The public works team dispatched crews down into the belly of the system to attack it with hacksaws and axes. Little by little, the crew carved up the material and fed it into a wet-vac truck at street level. Extraction wrapped in September 2018, and in the light of day, Heaton says, the sopping slurry looked like an exceptionally unappetizing and “very thick stew.” The liquid portion of the blockage was sent on its “merry way to the treatment plant,” Heaton says, while the solids traveled to a storage area. A sample was calved for Wayne State researchers, and ultimately, traveled to the Science Center.

Pieces of the fatberg were worth keeping around for analysis because “so few fatbergs have been characterized,” Baker says. With the exception of a handful extracted in London, studied with gas chromatography or forensically prodded in front of television cameras, the usual approach to them is, “Let’s get this out of here, throw it in the trash, and move on,” Baker says. Along with her Wayne State colleague Carol Miller, a civil and environmental engineer, Baker applied for National Science Foundation funding to take a closer look at the Macomb County fatberg. The team wanted to know exactly what the mess was made of and how it might affect the ecosystem both inside and outside of the sewer.

But there was a bit of a delay—a few months between the time public works extracted the fatberg and when the researchers got to work. During that period, the festering thing was placed in two 10-gallon aquariums, wrapped in garbage bags. Baker and Miller had wanted something they could see through, and someone from public works had a couple handy at home, Miller recalls. But the tanks had a problem: They made for an inescapably humid environment. When the researchers received the tanks in the lab, the chunks looked like “gooey blobs,” Baker says—midnight black and wriggling with worms and larvae. The smell was overwhelming. When the researchers first opened the tanks, “We were in a small room,” she adds, “and everyone’s eyes were watering.” The team hurried the samples to a fume hood and let them dry out for a few weeks at room temperature.

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Once the fatberg was dry and as approachable as one could hope for, the team used a veterinarian's X-ray equipment to peer inside so they could see if there was anything sharp in there. “We obviously didn’t want to get poked by something metal that had been in the sewer,” Baker says. She then reached for tweezers, scalpels, tongs, and scissors. One aspect of the project involved disarticulating the trash matrix to see exactly what had gotten trapped in it. Baker found plenty of wet wipes—the kind often cavalierly labeled as “flushable”—as well as tampon applicators, lollipop sticks, plastic coffee stirrers, and cigarette butts, plus a mustard packet, Kit Kat wrapper, syringe, and pen cap.

The researchers also assessed the composition of raw sewage, fats, and oils throughout the sample, as well as the microbial menagerie living it up inside. They found oleic acid, commonly found in cooking oil, as well as some bacteria that isn’t typically seen in sewers or feces, Baker says. They’re hoping to take a closer look at those interlopers later. The research “confirmed some things that we intuitively knew,” Miller says, especially that “much of the problem associated with fatbergs is really human-created.”

Next time around, if there is one, Miller wants samples from different parts of a fatberg, such as along the pipe wall and in the fleshy middle, and from the upstream and downstream ends. And Baker would want to brave the stench and dig through a still-wet sample to see how bacteria get along in the fresh oils and greases.

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The fatberg chunks spent several months stinking up Baker’s lab. By the time they’d finished the dissection on the one piece—some of which they've held on to for future study—the other one was nice and dry, too. The researchers sealed it up in a box for its journey to the Science Center, where it has been on view since December 2019. Inspired in part by the Museum of London’s 2018 fatberg display, it is equal parts educational, titillating, and icky. Miller, Baker, and other collaborators contributed to the exhibit's informative graphics and text about how ecologically troublesome fatbergs can be and how much they cost to remove ($100,000 in this case). And there is a simple request: Please, please, please, stop flushing trash down the toilet.

The segment on display is sealed in a cylindrical tube that looks like a sewer pipe, but clear, revealing the array of white and soot-gray gunk and the sprinkling of colorful trash inside. It looks a little like the jumbled contents of a vacuum-cleaner bag, or an oversized owl pellet.

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As the exhibition evolves, Miller says, the organizers plan to add a game that some Wayne State computer science students have devised. Players will be tasked with tidying up a messy apartment by deciding what goes in the trash and what can be flushed or washed down the drain. Players will also be able sift through a digital fatberg with a little “laser” to see where they went wrong, and where the trash wound up. The idea is to demonstrate, with a little scatological silliness, that if bad or uninformed choices can feed a fatberg, good ones can starve it.

In a way, the whole episode has turned Macomb County’s Clintondale Pumping Station into a fatberg field station. By examining the trash that’s intercepted there, the scientists are checking to see if the exhibit and other awareness campaigns are paying off in changing behaviors. They’re also examining patterns in where fats and wipes accumulate. Do they cluster near known restaurant corridors? Do wipes mound up near areas with a lot of little kids or elderly people, who may use many of the pre-moistened scraps? “We’re still doing a lot of sampling,” Miller says.

Meanwhile, Heaton says, the county will pilot a fatberg prevention project that’s a little like an IV drip of a substance similar to dish soap. The idea is that it could help prevent fat and grease from building up in the first place. “As interesting as a fatberg is,” says Heaton, “the goal is to never have another one.”

Australia Needs Slow and Steady Rain—Not Golf Ball-Sized Hail

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The fire-scorched landscape needs water. But not the kind that recently fell on Canberra.

Earlier this week, the Australian capital of Canberra was pelted with hail the size of golf balls. Before the icy deluge, the city had been enveloped in smoke from the bushfires that scorched tens of millions of acres in New South Wales and beyond.

Australia is in dire need of precipitation, to end a drought that helped kindle the devastating fires. The landscape badly needs new growth, too: Vulnerable animal populations are currently grazing on human handouts. But hail? If anything, that’s more like “adding insult to injury,” says Kelly Mahoney, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory who studies extreme precipitation. Big, severe thunderstorms that drop hail, she says, are “adding additional destruction to a region that cannot take it right now.”

Hail is, of course, made up of frozen water, and when it melts it nourishes plants. But the hail poses a danger, too: When it crashes into the ground, it can thwack and maim seedlings, injure or kill animals, and destroy property. “The damage caused to vegetation by hail exceeds its benefit as a source of water,” writes Janette Lindesay, a climatologist at the Australian National University, in an email. “In the Canberra hail storm, leaves were stripped from trees and smaller plants were badly damaged. Most plants recover quite quickly after hail storms, but young and/or delicate plants could be damaged beyond recovery.”

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A single powerful storm “is not sufficient to ameliorate the drying effects of years of below-average rainfall, above-average evaporation, and reduced vegetation cover,” Lindesay writes, and it could even do more harm than good. Fires lead to changes in the soil that create a temporary seal on the crust, Mahoney says. This eventually peels off, blows away, or is disturbed by humans or animals, she says—but while it’s in place, it’s difficult for water to get through. That means that a one-off downpour isn’t going to be helpful, especially if burned vegetation is no longer holding the earth in place. “Vast expanses of burned soil are ripe for things like landslides,” Mahoney says.

Instead of a dumping of hail, what the region needs are visits from “lovely, slow, soaking rains,” Mahoney adds. Over time, a little goes a long way. “A rainfall total resulting from numerous days with light to moderate rainfall is more likely to lead to water infiltrating into the surface and alleviating dry conditions by replenishing soil moisture, than the same total from just one or a few days of rain,” Lindesay writes. The recent storm only dropped about a quarter-inch of rain over Canberra, she says. To raise water levels in local storage dams, she writes, they're going to need at least four inches.

The French Missionary and the English Duke Who Saved a Chinese Deer From Extinction

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A conservation tale 120 years in the telling. 

When visitors enter Beijing’s Nanhaizi Milu Park, they step onto a long wooden bridge that stretches over a marsh. It’s the perfect place to see a herd of odd-looking deer in the distance—large and tawny, with big hooves, branched antlers, long tails, and shaggy coats. On a gray and blustery November afternoon, the deer are spending their time leisurely, placidly kneeling near feeders stocked with grass

It’s a sight that wouldn’t have been possible 120 years ago. Though nearly 7,000 Père David's deer roam the wetlands of China today, the species was declared extinct in the wild in 1900. Its resurrection is due to an unusual event in the annals of conservation—an accidental tag-team collaboration between a French missionary-cum-zoologist and an English duke.

Fossil evidence shows that Elaphurus davidianus were prevalent in China some 2,000 years ago. But by the time Father (Père) Armand David, the deer’s French namesake, visited China in 1861, hunting had reduced the population to a single herd—the one kept under armed guard on the imperial hunting grounds near Beijing.

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David—also credited as the first European to see a giant panda—had been sent to China to spread Catholicism, but he ended up spending much of his time there collecting biological specimens that were new to Western science.

After a few years of traveling in China, David caught wind of the emperor’s captive herd. The private grounds were exclusive to the royal family, and David was forbidden from entering. But he managed to sneak an illicit peek, and described what he saw in a letter to a colleague.

“This spring I was able to hoist myself onto the surrounding wall,” he wrote. “I had the good fortune to see, far from me, a group of more than a hundred of these animals.”

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In Chinese, David wrote, the deer are known as milu or sibuxiang, meaning “not like the other four.” It’s an apt description for a visual frankenspecies, with the antlers of a deer, the head of a horse, the hooves of a cow, and the tail of a donkey.

After successfully bribing a few of the imperial guards, David managed to obtain a pelt and antlers, which he sent to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. The specimens piqued the interest of the French scientific community, and in 1866 French and Chinese authorities negotiated the transfer of a handful of the deer to zoos across Europe.

It was lucky they did. In 1895, a dire flood ravaged much of the imperial hunting grounds, decimating China’s last population. A couple of years later, the few surviving deer in China were hunted down during the Boxer Rebellion, a civil uprising against foreign influence and the imperial elite.

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Half a world away, Herbrand Russell, president of the Zoological Society of London and the duke of Bedford, heard about the species’ plight. He purchased the remaining 18 deer from the European zoos that housed them, and began raising them at his estate, Woburn Abbey.

“As a zoologist himself, Herbrand knew very well that the deer had no chance of survival with so few animals scattered around various zoos,” says French conservationist Dominic Bauquis. “While he did not know whether the species could be saved from extinction, he made a deliberate attempt to regroup them and give the Père David's deer a chance.”

All current populations of Père David’s deer are descended from the small herd kept at Woburn Abbey—a herd that barely survived the two world wars. In the first half of the 20th century, food restrictions and wartime diktats saw English straw reallocated to military horses, and a particularly harsh winter nearly depleted the already limited supplies. After almost losing the species during World War II, the later dukes of Bedford exported some of the deer to zoos around the world.

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One of those dukes was Robin Russell, Herbrand’s great-grandson, who dreamed of returning the deer to their homeland. He got the chance in 1985. With an economically developing China starting to focus on conservation and international collaboration, Chinese officials approached Woburn Abbey to discuss cooperating on a reintroduction of Père David’s deer.

That year Robin Russell traveled to China, where 20 of the deer were returned to the exact location that the species had last lived—the imperial hunting grounds in Beijing, which had since become a public park (now renamed Nanhaizi Milu Park).

But the park, located in a sprawling Beijing suburb, is limited in space. So the following year, China’s Ministry of Forestry teamed up with the World Wildlife Fund to transport another 39 deer to the Dafeng Milu Park on China’s eastern coast. The 300-square-mile reserve boasts coastal wetlands large enough to support populations in the thousands.

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Conservationists at Woburn Abbey then worked to open another reserve in central China, where the deer would have historically roamed. In 1993, 34 deer were introduced to Shishou Milu National Nature Reserve.

In 1998, Père David’s deer were once again beset by severe flooding, this time at the Shishou reserve. The deer scattered into the surrounding forests. Instead of recapturing the animals, conservationists wanted to first see if the deer could survive in the wild.

To Bauquis’s delight, the deer thrived—back in the wild less than 20 years after being reintroduced in the country where they’d been extinct. “It’s a beautiful story on many levels,” says Bauquis, “and it shows what international cooperation can achieve.”

Today, Chinese researchers say there are roughly 70 parks with Père David’s deer, many successfully reintroduced to the wild. The Dafeng reserve is home to the largest population, with an estimated 6,000. Bauquis says the Shishou reserve supports between 600 and 1,000 deer, while Nanhaizi park is home to around 200.

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Yuhua Ding, former director of the Dafeng reserve and a 30-year conservation veteran, describes the deer’s population recovery as “ideal”—meaning they’re breeding rapidly and, as of yet, not subject to disease—but notes that the species is still vulnerable. “Seven-thousand,” he says, “is a small number in terms of a species population.”

Monitoring the species’ genetics is key. Because these deer were brought back from such a tiny population, they’re at risk of what’s called inbreeding depression—adverse health effects caused by breeding between relatives. The smaller the population, the more likely the animals will be inbred. Given the minuscule starting point for Père David’s deer, it’s a small miracle that no signs have appeared.

But Ding says caution is warranted: The deleterious effects of inbreeding can take generations to manifest, making it imperative that wildlife managers keep close tabs on the current populations. To keep the deer healthy, conservation teams plan to transfer individuals between herds.

Researchers also want to know how the deer will adapt to their new habitats. These deer haven’t lived in the wild for ages, so scientists are curious to learn about their behavior in new surroundings—how they might respond to potential predators, such as tigers and wolves, what they’re eating, and how they’re mating.

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Still, things are looking up for Père David’s deer. Most species pushed to the brink don't have a resurrection story—a fact illustrated by the Nanhaizi Milu Park's macabre extinction graveyard. A winding series of marble tombstones there mark the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, and, midway through the queue, an erroneous placard that reads “Père David’s deer, 1900 extinct in China.”

One hopes that that's the only premature gravestone at the site. The last tombstone in the series is marked “mankind." Time alone will tell if it's prescient or not.

This Tank Graveyard Is a Monument to Eritrea's Struggle for Liberation

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With Eritrea and Ethiopia finally at peace, a massive military junkyard takes on new meaning.

A short distance from Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, lies a “tank graveyard”—a field littered with thousands of stacked military tanks, rusting trucks, and worn-out cars, remnants of a devastating, three-decade conflict with Ethiopia. Large cacti sprout within this steel maze, bearing orange and saffron-colored fruits. Children occasionally sneak their way into the graveyard, scooping up the fruit using long sticks topped with empty tin cans.

A man called Yonas takes shifts guarding over the site. (His name has been changed due to concerns for his safety.) Yonas doesn’t mind children coming in for the cactus fruit. Instead, he protects it from people who might steal scraps of metal, rubber, and other materials. Removing parts of the graveyard is akin to removing parts of Eritrean history, he says. And for him, Eritrea’s conflict-ridden history should be shared with everyone—especially now that the country has signed a historic peace declaration with Ethiopia.

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Eritrea’s war of independence lasted from 1961 to 1991, and is one of Africa’s longest wars in recent memory. It killed over 125,000 soldiers on both sides. Yonas is himself a veteran of the conflict. “The graveyard is for all to witness what happened during the war with their own eyes,” he says. Yonas sees the site as a “memorial” to Eritrea’s unlikely victory against the larger, better-equipped army of Ethiopia.

The difference between the Eritrean and Ethiopian armies during the war was truly startling, according to Terrence Lyons, a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University. “It really was peasant armies with sandals made out of tires and captured weapons, fighting against this army that had been supplied by the Soviet Union.”

The tank graveyard, Yonas explains, was meant to be an Ethiopian secret—but Eritreans exposed it for the world to see. During the war, Ethiopians would hide their destroyed military equipment just outside Asmara, knowing that leaving it on the streets would bolster Eritrean morale. After Eritrea’s victory in 1991, however, soldiers collected all the remaining machinery they could find, which was sprawled all across the country, and dumped it into the same site. It grew into a giant scrap-yard and public space.

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Not all the war machinery could be collected, however. Yonas recounts stories of Eritreans losing limbs after treading on forgotten mines. “There’s more, it's not all cleaned up,” he says. “There are areas that we can't even reach by car that still have military equipment.” As more of this military hardware gets found, the graveyard may grow even larger.


The history of Eritrea is a history of domination and struggle. In 1882, Italians became the first Europeans to build settlements in Eritrea, during the colonialist “Scramble for Africa.” In 1941, the British, hoping to curtail Italy’s ever-expanding influence in the Horn of Africa, defeated Italian forces in the Battle of Keren. Many of the soldiers themselves came from colonized lands, such as Sudan and India.

The conflict freed Eritrea from Italian rule, but the nation’s landlocked neighbor, Ethiopia, had plans to take over. In 1952, the United Nations made Eritrea and Ethiopia a part of the same federation, and soon Eritreans began to fight back. In 1962, Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia at the time, annexed Eritrea. In the 1970s, some Eritreans formed a Marxist liberationist movement called the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.

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Selassie was overthrown in 1974, and Debassai fought with the E.P.L.F. against the Soviet-backed regime that followed, known as the Derg. He still talks about the movement with pride. “We are strong, us Eritreans, very strong,” he says. “The Eritrean party that fought in the war was strong, invincible.”

Eritrea officially gained independence in 1993, after a landslide referendum. Isaias Afewerki, leader of the E.P.L.F. at the time, became president of Eritrea. “Isaias is a larger-than-life character and has been in Eritrean politics for decades now,” Lyons says. Afewerki may have led Eritrea to independence, but hostilities with Ethiopia continued. Back-and-forth border disputes escalated into a fully fledged war between 1998 and 2000, resulting in around 70,000 of deaths on both sides.

“This war created two separate realities,” says Tekeste Negash, a professor of history at Uppsala University. After the war, Eritrea’s staunch isolationism worsened poverty and inequality in the country, while Ethiopia soon became a booming economy. By 2018, the disparity between the two countries was so stark that the tank graveyard had lost its David-and-Goliath symbolism, says Negash. “The tank cemetery had lost all of its glory value. It faded completely.”

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But then came a new era in the relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Since Abiy Ahmed became Prime Minister of Ethiopia, in April 2018, the two countries have forged peaceful diplomatic relations. For months, Eritreans and Ethiopians alike celebrated two peace agreements. And for the first time in two decades, a commercial airplane flew from Addis Ababa from Asmara, and telecommunication lines reopened.

Yonas is delighted to see Eritrean-Ethiopia relations improve. “We wanted peace with Ethiopia, and we're happy that it has happened.” But some things will never change, he says. “Even if there is peace, history is the same.” To him, the tank graveyard serves as a reminder of the countless soldiers who lost their lives fighting for independence, and the relentlessness of Ethiopian forces. “The sheer amount of equipment shows how much they were willing to use to make Eritrea disappear.”

While many have watched with amazement as two former enemies embrace, dance, and offer gifts, others are suspicious. Eritrea-Ethiopian relations may have changed, but Afewerki’s dictatorial regime has not, comments William Davison, senior analyst on Ethiopia with International Crisis. “This is an autocracy, where a lot of the decisions are made by the president and some key advisors, ministers, generals—it's a very small circle.Around 12 percent of Eritrea’s population has fled the country, largely to avoid repressive policies.

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To many of those who have escaped Eritrea, the tank graveyard is a dark symbol. “This against-all-odds narrative makes me sad because most of the people who fought are now in prisons,” says Meron Estefanos, a human rights activist and journalist. Estefanos says they were imprisoned for demanding reforms after independence. “The tank graveyard is a reminder of injustice in Eritrea.” The country still has no constitution, exercises full control over its media and, by 2013, had arrested at least 10,000 political prisoners without charge or trial.

Perhaps the real reason Eritrea and Ethiopia have come together is to defeat a mutual enemy, says Kjetil Tronvoll, director of peace and conflict studies at Bjorknes University College: the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Tigray is a region that borders Eritrea, and the T.P.L.F. has amassed vast wealth and a strong military force there.

Meanwhile, Negash, the historian, suspects that warming relations between the former rivals mask a hushed plan to reunite Eritrea and Ethiopia. He believes unification is all the more likely considering the deep sense of identity Eritreans and Ethiopians share.

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The tank graveyard’s symbolism is not static, says Lyons, the George Mason professor. It is constantly changing as history unfolds. “The armed struggle will have to be re-taught, re-learned, and the story will have to be re-told so that the tank graveyard takes on a different meaning,” he says. And as Eritreans who fought the war are replaced by a new generation, he goes on, the tank graveyard will “help them make sense of who they are and where their country came from.” To Negash, the tank graveyard epitomizes Eritrean independence; if Eritrean-Ethiopian borders really were to dissolve, he says, the graveyard’s symbol as a beacon of Eritrean independence would dissolve too.

In years to come, the symbolism of the tank graveyard will be in the hands of every Eritrean, including generations that will not remember the conflict with Ethiopia. But for now, there are those, like Yonas, who will tell the story of what it has meant over the years, and where it came from. “It makes you remember everything that we went through—the war, the young who died in combat,” he says. Yonas won’t forget his country’s painful history, but he’s relieved that Eritrean-Ethiopian relations have entered a new era. “There is peace now.”

What Happens When They Find a World War II Bomb Down the Street

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In German cities, it means alerts, traffic, evacuations, and at least a little anxiety.

I found out about the bomb down the street by text message on Tuesday at 4:22 pm, just as I was locking my bike outside our son’s preschool. It was a screengrab, actually: My wife had passed on a tweet from the Berlin police department with a photo of a huge archaeological excavation and construction site that we can see from our balcony in the center of the city.

“A World War II bomb was found today at about 11:30 during construction work on the corner of Grunerstr. and Juedenstr. Our colleagues have blocked off the area, the bomb squad technicians are on the scene.” What, my wife wanted to know, were we going to do?

This question is not as unusual as one might think, at least in German cities and others hit hard during the war. Between 1940 and 1945, Allied forces dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Nazi-occupied Europe. That’s about 1.25 million explosive objects in total—ranging from small incendiary charges meant to set fire to wooden buildings to multi-ton “blockbusters.” An estimated one in five bombs dropped failed to explode, which translates to about 250,000 duds. Often, the explosive-packed shells penetrated several feet into the ground, and were later covered up by rubble and debris from other, more successful explosions.

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This means many German cities are, more or less, built on top of live explosives. Western cities such as Cologne, Duesseldorf, and Bremen, which are closer to air bases in Britain and full of industrial targets, were particularly hard-hit, and bombs regularly turn up there.

Berlin, then and now the German capital, was a major target, too. Since the war’s end, more than 2,000 live bombs have been recovered here. Some experts estimate 15,000 more may remain hidden under the fast-growing city. In the surrounding state of Brandenburg, the scene of bitter fighting in the last months of the war, police deal with 500 tons of munitions each year.

On my way up the stairs to the preschool, I scanned the local news. No one seemed overly alarmed. Headlines focused on the impending traffic chaos, not the 500-pound bomb itself. The street that passes the construction site is one of Berlin’s busiest, and nearby Alexanderplatz is a major transport node, with several subway lines and regional trains connecting in its multistory train station.

We had dinner plans and a babysitter on the way, and were going to see a drag show across town later that night. I was optimistic: As far as I could tell, only the building site itself had been closed off. Strapping my son into the box of our cargo bike, I told him we’d ride home and see what the situation was.

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Thinking back on the whole thing a few days later, pointing my five-year-old in the direction of a live bomb was perhaps a sign I wasn’t worried enough. Defusing all these weapons, it turns out, gets trickier with time. The TNT and other explosives used in World War II munitions have no known expiration date, and their fuses get more unstable as the materials inside—including 1940s-era plastics, capsules filled with acid, and complex mechanical timers—decay and rust.

But as we rode towards the apartment around 5 pm, I saw neither police nor barricades. Our babysitter was waiting outside the building, and we all went upstairs. I grabbed an overnight bag and threw in some spare clothes, toothbrushes, and a Paddington Bear book. Just in case.

Within half an hour, my wife burst in with news. The police had tweeted again, this time with a map. The safety zone had been expanded to 300 meters, which included our historic neighborhood in the center of Berlin and Alexanderplatz, a massive, communist-era plaza that was the centerpiece of former East Berlin. Squinting unhappily at her phone, I saw a red line snaking right past our stoop. We’d all have to clear out while the bomb squad tackled the heavily corroded bombshell and its mechanical fuse.

Back on the cargo bike, my son and I stopped to talk with a police officer parked on the corner. “In a little while they’ll start knocking on doors and going through with loudspeakers,” he told me, leaning out of his window into the wintry night. “As soon as we’ve had time to clear everyone out they’ll start working on the bomb—no way to know how long it’ll take.” We had a head start, then.

It was getting to be dinnertime, and we decided to take a chance on a nearby pizza place. The host shrugged when I asked if they were going to stay open. “Didn’t they take care of that this afternoon?” he asked. “As far as I know we’re out of the blast zone.” Information, it seemed, was traveling slowly.

As we ate, our phones chimed periodically with updates from a WhatsApp group of neighbors: The loudspeaker trucks were outside, hotel rooms nearby were being hastily booked. Suddenly my wife pointed out the window: Police were stringing crime scene tape outside, blocking off the plaza. Our bike was parked on the wrong side of the red-and-white barrier.

I rushed outside to move it, briefly panicking the host, who thought I was trying to skip out on the check. After some fast talking, I was allowed into the closed-off, empty plaza to retrieve it. Soon I was rolling it back under the tape, past two amused young cops. “Go ahead, park it anywhere, just not in the danger zone,” they called after me. Meanwhile, loudspeakers were blaring into the night: “This area is now closed because of a World War bomb found nearby. Please leave.”

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By 8 pm, half the area had been cleared. Anyone who couldn’t afford a hotel or find someone to stay with was taken to the cafeteria of a nearby municipal building. By then we were drinking wine with friends who had offered us their guest room. Our son, apprehensive at first about leaving home and Legos so suddenly, was excited about the unexpected sleepover. School night rules were forgotten, and we stayed up long past his bedtime.

Because it’s 2020, we were getting live updates from the disposal scene via the police Twitter account. Once up close, the bomb squad discovered that the bomb was German, but equipped with a mechanical Russian fuse. In the final days of the war, it seems, the Red Army ruthlessly repurposed captured German munitions, arming them with Soviet detonators to rain German explosives down on the besieged German capital. Poetic justice. I poured another glass of wine.

At 9:38 pm, another neighbor posted a message to the WhatsApp group: For some reason they’d decided to stay until police knocked on their door, and now they were on their way out. Altogether, 1,900 people had been cleared from their apartments, offices, and hotels in the space of a few hours. Bus lines were rerouted, traffic backed up, and subway service to the area canceled.

By German standards, all this was pretty minor. In 2011, an unusually dry summer revealed a 4,000-pound bomb in the middle of the Rhine River where it passes through Koblenz. Authorities hurriedly cleared 45,000 people out.

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The threat is present and persistent enough that new construction projects often require permits from specialists, who sign off only after examining World War II–era aerial photography for signs of unexploded bombs. In 2017, authorities had to move 60,000 people out of central Frankfurt when a British bomb containing a 1.4-ton explosive payload was located based on aerial photos that had been taken from a spotter plane a few days after a raid. The logistics were daunting: The danger zone included two hospitals, 10 old-age homes, the city’s police headquarters, the German Central Bank, and one of the country’s national libraries.

Hell, our evacuation wasn’t even the biggest to take place that Tuesday. Around the time the bomb down the street from me was uncovered, 10,000 office workers in Cologne were cleared out of the city center at mid-day while technicians defused an American-made 1,000-pounder. “Those of us in Cologne are pretty used to this,” a police spokeswoman told the media dismissively afterwards. “We dealt with 25 bombs just like this last year alone.”

Still, as I went to sleep I felt a weird rush, as though after 15 years of living in Germany and writing about the country’s history, I had successfully completed a rite of passage. I was asleep around 11:45 pm, when the bomb disposal technicians began their work. At 12:13 am, less than half an hour later, the device was defused. In the early hours of the morning it was transported to a forest on the edge of town, where it will be safely detonated in the next few weeks.

The next day, our son had something new to tell his friends at preschool. Meanwhile, our neighbors posted updates to the WhatsApp group one by one—and couldn’t resist some commentary. “It was all a little over the top. Surely there are better ways to defuse bombs nowadays,” one wrote. “So much work and effort, and not even a little bang.” Berliners can be hard to impress.

The Chocolate-Brewing Witches of Colonial Latin America

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The Inquisition persecuted women who used cacao to entice lovers and spurn enemies.

It happened, perhaps, one hot, humid night, mist over the mountains that bordered the colonial city of Santiago de Guatemala. Melchora de los Reyes, a young, mixed-raced woman, had sex with her lover. When she met him, she was a virgin, a doncella, a status that made her eligible for marriage in the strict, Catholic society of 1600s Guatemala. But whether it was a look of love in his eyes, words sweet and thick as the mist, or promises that her lover would marry her, de los Reyes chose to have sex.

He didn’t marry her. And Melchora de los Reyes was left alone, unmarriageable, shamed and possibly pregnant. So she did what many other women had done before: She consulted an hechizera, a sorcerer. There were many such sorcerers in colonial society, often indigenous women who peddled potent potions and magical incantations to women who found themselves powerless before an unfaithful lover, a violent husband, or the all-consuming ache of unrequited love. The sorcerer gave de los Reyes special powders and instructed her to mix them in her lost lover’s morning hot chocolate in order to make him “subject to her will.” De los Reyes fed the faithless man. Then, she was reported to the colonial Inquisition.

De los Reyes is one of many women whom the Spanish colonial government in Latin America tried on charges of witchcraft—and one of many specifically accused of practicing magic through bewitched hot chocolate. Martha Few, a Penn State history and gender studies professor who has written several books about gender, religion, and medicine in colonial Latin America, first spotted the trend while poring over Inquisition archives. “I just noticed in the Inquisition testimonies chocolate coming up quite a lot,” she says.

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Chocolate was an everyday drink, as common then as a morning cup of coffee is today. But, Few noticed, it often emerged in the records as a vehicle for women’s magic spells, and, in turn, for European anxieties about ruling a majority non-white population, filled with women who wouldn’t do what they were told. “It also became this flash point between social conflicts that were racial and gender conflicts,” says Few.

At root, the Inquisition's crackdown on chocolate-related brujería, or witchcraft, was a campaign to eliminate indigenous and African spiritual practices from colonial society. It was an attempt that failed: Despite persecution, Latin American communities continue to practice folk healing and magic to this day.

Based on chocolate’s history as a ritual beverage in pre-colonial society, it makes sense that the drink became a receptacle for Spanish fears of sorcery. Indigenous people have cultivated chocolate in the Americas for at least 3,000 years, and archaeologists have identified chocolate residue on Mayan vessels from as early as 250 BC. Chocolate was a high-status drink, shared by diplomats and served to couples in marriage ceremonies. When the Spanish colonized the Americas, chocolate’s striking taste, caffeinated buzz, and indigenous ritual significance made it an object of European adulation and paranoia.

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People of all genders drank chocolate, but women prepared it. Traditionally, cooks dried, roasted, and ground cacao beans, mixed the powder with water and spices such as vanilla and red-tinted annatto, and shaped and stored the thick paste in blocks. To prepare the beverage, they combined this paste with water and beat the drink until it foamed. Indigenous Mesoamericans associated chocolate with vitality, the warm crimson liquid representing the blood of life itself. Aztec Emperor Moctezuma drank chocolate, in one Spanish eyewitness account, “for success with the women.” Mayan women, writes Few, consumed it to strengthen themselves during menopause and childbirth.

The association between chocolate and health carried over into the colonial era. After their defeat of the Aztec and Maya, the Spanish prohibited the use of several ritual Aztec plants, such as psychotropic mushrooms, writes Manuel Aguilar-Moreno in his history of chocolate in colonial Mexico. But the Spanish adopted the practice of chocolate drinking, and its ritual connotations lingered. In Mexico City, according to Aguilar-Moreno, newly converted populations left offerings of cacao in front of images of Christ. In Santiago de Guatemala, current-day Antigua Guatemala, the site of Few’s study, people of native, Spanish, African, and mixed ancestry regularly consumed the beverage, made by women who learned to prepare it from indigenous servants or neighbors. “By the late 17th century, it’s for sale in the market,” says Few. “People are drinking it every day.” Priests drank chocolate while meeting the faithful, colonial hospitals stocked chocolate to fortify the sick, and husbands expected a morning cup from dutiful wives.

Chocolate was one of the hallmarks of the new, composite culture emerging in colonial Latin America, one that was heavily African and indigenous. By the 1600s, says Few, Santiago de Guatemala’s mixed-race people had outstripped Europeans, who were only about 15 percent of the population. Fearing that they were outnumbered, European elites imposed a series of repressive laws against non-whites, including curfew and laws prohibiting people of African descent from wearing jewelry or dressing like indigenous people.

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Colonial authorities turned toward another tool: the Inquisition. The Spanish government, closely allied with the Catholic Church, had incorporated the Inquisition into their rule for centuries. Beginning in the 1200s, the Catholic Church had established a group of ecclesiastical tribunals, or religious courts, collectively dubbed the Inquisition, to weed out heretical practices. The Inquisition spread across Europe, and when the Spanish colonized the Americas, they took their tribunals with them.

In the 1500s, colonial witch hunting was informal, brutal, and targeted indigenous elites. “There was burning at the stake and extreme violence used against native people,” says Few. By the second half of the 17th century, the colonial Inquisition, as state agencies of death eventually do, had bureaucratized. With Maya and Aztec elites long since defeated, officials turned their attention to policing the increasingly blurry racial lines of a mixed society. They decided that everyday indigenous people, as newer converts to Christianity, should be educated, not executed, so they founded a body specifically dedicated to eliminating pre-Christian practices from their midst. Another body kept tabs on Europeans, Africans, and mixed-race people, who, as presumed earlier converts to Christianity, were more severely punished for deviations from church teaching.

But monitoring a diverse population’s religious practice was harder than the colonial government may have imagined. Spain’s colonial holdings were made up of conquered peoples, and conquest, whether by sword or bible, is always incomplete. This was the case in Spain, where, despite the Inquisition’s attempt to stamp out traces of Islam and Judaism, all three Abrahamic cultures tint the peninsula to this day. And it was the case in colonial Latin America, where indigenous world views suffused the European colonizers’ culture like the minerals in bedrock permeate well-water.

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Women bore the brunt of this policing, perhaps partly because they often interacted across racial divides. Spanish, indigenous, African, and mixed-race women mingled in markets and kitchens. They shared recipes for homemade cures, which blurred the boundaries between what we’d now call science and magic, and they often consulted indigenous healers.

Whether in Europe or the Americas, witch hunts have long targeted women. Healing was traditionally women’s work, and accusations of witchcraft were a means of regulating women whose knowledge and economic power threatened male control. In Latin America, this gendered knowledge coupled with fears of indigenous ritual power to make women particularly vulnerable to the Inquisition.

Many of these cases centered around chocolate. As a daily drink with indigenous origins, made and served by women, chocolate evoked male fears. “Men would complain that women were bewitching them through food, and they were always suspicious of what they were served,” says Few, noting, however, that even the fear of poisoning wasn’t enough to make men cook for themselves.

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These duel fears—of poisoning and domestic labor—are precisely what motivated Juan de Fuentes, a 33-year-old mixed-race construction worker, to approach the Inquisition. As Few writes, de Fuentes alleged that his wife Cecilia had bewitched his masculinity away. Not only was de Fuentes seemingly unable to maintain an erection, but he also found himself strangely compelled to make the morning hot chocolate for his wife. Surely, the colonial authority concluded, a man serving his wife breakfast in bed could only be the work of the devil. “All this cannot be a natural thing,” the court commented about his testimony. Cecilia was sent to jail.

Other testimonies hinged not upon sorcery that compelled husbands to prepare chocolate, but magic served to men in hot chocolate itself. “A lot of women who got accused of being witches were widows or single, and were active in local economies,” Few says. Like Cecilia, many of the women whose stories Few uncovered used potions to defy traditional roles of wife and mother, or to assert their sexual agency.

One mother-daughter pair, the wealthy mulata, or African and European, widow Francisca de Agreda and her daughter, Juana, mixed their pubic hair and nail clippings into a cup of hot chocolate. They served the brew to Juana’s love interest, the local village priest. But they were thwarted by their slave, who reported the women to the local authorities as witches. María de Santa Inés, meanwhile—described by contemporaries as a “one-eyed, dark-skinned mulata”—earned the nickname La Panecito, The Pastry, for allegedly feeding her enemies bewitched chocolate pastries. Several neighbors testified to her nefarious motives. Doña Luisa de Gálvez, meanwhile, didn’t want revenge or seduction: She just wanted her husband to stop beating her. Following the advice of an indigenous healer named Anita, she washed her genitals with water and mixed the water with magic green and cinnamon-hued powders in a cup of hot chocolate. The healer went to a religious jail; we don’t know if doña Luisa was ever freed from the prison of her marriage.

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Records don’t reveal what became of Melchora de los Reyes, the woman who mixed magic powder into a faithless man’s hot chocolate. Colonial officials, after all, weren’t concerned with the hope and strength of a woman who, like so many before and after, was pushed to the fringes of society by the carelessness of a man she loved. To the Inquisition, de los Reyes—a descendent of slaves, in touch with indigenous magic, and able to turn a daily act of female servility into an assertion of erotic power—was a threat to be stomped out. But thanks to scholars such as Few, and the Latinx women who continue to pass down traditional healing today, stories like de los Reyes’s live on. The Spanish may have colonized an entire hemisphere, but they never could defeat the magic of everyday women.

The Snorkeling Grannies of New Caledonia

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They're senior citizens turned citizen scientists. And their work is changing marine biology, one sea snake at a time.

New Caledonia is an archipelago of a dozen islands in the Coral Sea, about a thousand miles off the east coast of Australia. Rich in thriving, colorful marine life and home to one of the two most extensive coral reef structures in the world, the gigantic tropical lagoons here—a UNESCO World Heritage Site—attract tourists for scuba diving and scientists for research.

For the latter, sea snakes are the star attraction. In fact, says Claire Goiran, a marine biologist at the University of New Caledonia, the Baie des Citrons—a small bay off the archipelago’s capital, Nouméa, that’s framed north to south by free-standing coral caves and arches—is one of the best spots on the planet for observing sea snakes of all sorts.

But not all of the snakes are easy to find. One species, called the greater sea snake—the five-foot long Hydrophis major (also known as Disteira major), a venomous, lethal serpent colored in shades of green-and-black blotches—had been sighted only six times in Goiran’s 15 years of research here, and was, until recently, thought to be very rare in the South Pacific.

Enter the Fantastic Grandmothers, a group of seven snorkeling senior citizens turned citizen scientists who range in age from 60 to 75. Collectively, they’ve managed to track down a whopping 257 greater sea snakes and collect data crucial for studying them—more detailed ecological information, in fact, than has ever been collected for any wide-ranging species of sea snake. Their work to date has changed scientists’ understanding of the species, including its feeding and behavioral patterns.

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Prior to the grandmothers’ contributions, little was known about them, and data on their lifestyles were scarce. The grandmothers’ research results—which Goiran describes as “astonishing”—recently led to a paper published in the journal Ecosphere.

The grannies entered Goiran’s orbit in 2017, when the marine biologist, then researching a smaller species of sea snake, bumped into an old friend from the local diving center named Aline Guémas, while the two were out snorkeling. When Goiran mentioned the trouble she’d been having finding greater sea snakes, Guémas, who is 61, offered to help. She invited some of her retiree friends to join her, and had soon gathered a task force clad in snorkels and fins.

“Before I realized what was going on, I had this team of seven grandmothers working for me,” says Goiran. “Not all of them knew each other before, but they became good friends.”

The Fantastic Grandmothers are an active bunch. Prior to meeting Goiran, they were all fond of outdoor activities and nature, and familiar with the life aquatic thanks to their individual passions for sailing, diving, and snorkeling.

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What began as a helping hand for Goiran soon became a full-fledged, methodical citizen-science project. Every morning, including weekends, the Fantastic Grandmothers would meet at 8 a.m. (8:30 in winter) to inspect the reefs in the bay—swimming nearly two miles a day, taking photos of any snakes they saw, and following them as they fed.

“Seven pairs of eyes will see seven more things than a single [pair],” says 75-year-old Monique Zannier, one of the Grandmothers. “There is so much to discover and be amazed [by]. It was unexpected but very rewarding.”

The grandmothers have proved to be skilled and dedicated to marine-biological research. “It is much easier to work with grandmothers than with students,” says Goiran. “When I work with students, I have to take care of them. Grandmothers take care of themselves and of each other.”

Each greater sea snake’s body markings are unique, and the grannies were soon able to create an extensive database by recording the color patterns on their tails via photo identification. The results have helped marine biologists like Goiran understand how abundant these snakes are in the waters off Nouméa, how their reproduction cycle is seasonal (they court in winter and give birth each autumn), and how impactful their ecological role is in the food chain (the fact that they munch exclusively on catfish means that their prevalence alters the catfish ecosystem as well).

All of which advances research in an underexplored field whose lethal subjects live far off in deep waters, and can be hazardous to handle. (Despite being venomous, though, greater sea snakes are largely docile; there are no records of an attack on a human in New Caledonia. Plus, the grandmothers don’t actually touch or capture the snakes; they just take pictures.) Most data about these snakes are still collected accidentally, when they wash up on shore or are caught by people fishing.

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Baie des Citrons is now the Fantastic Grandmothers’ favorite place to snorkel, given its exceptional biodiversity and number of underwater habitats. Nor do the grannies look only for sea snakes. They also seek out frogfish, octopus, cuttlefish, and sea slugs. Sometimes they even hunt for zebra-shark eggs.

Turning their hobby into fruitful scientific research has been an honor, they say. And a soothing balm in their own lives.

“I feel calm and weightless [in the water],” Zannier says. “All the worries stay on the land.”

In learning about sea snakes, they’ve also learned about themselves.

“Before I was part of this research program, I was scared of snakes, marine and terrestrial,” says Guémas. “Dr. Goiran taught us to understand and love them. Now when I take photos, I spend time observing their behavior, the way they swim, how they forage and breathe.”

Another granny, 63-year-old Marylin Sarocchi, agrees. “Now I find [sea snakes] beautiful, undulating along the reef. I talk to them. Before, I used to run away from them.”


Glowing Dutch Greenhouses, As Seen From Way Up High

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Photographer Tom Hegen captures a bird's eye view of the future.

In the dim of night, a mosaic of neon-colored rectangles glow like a disco dance floor. This patchwork of yellows, and sometimes purple-pinks, are modern greenhouse complexes sprawled across the countryside of the Dutch province of South Holland, equipped with LED lights that boost year-round growth of crops of fruits and vegetables. Tom Hegen, a German photographer whose aerial photography projects show the impact of human intervention on Earth, captured expansive views of these climate-controlled farms from more than 1,500 feet in the air, out the open door of a chartered helicopter.

The Netherlands is a small country by size, but is huge when it comes to agricultural exports—second in the world behind the United States, by some counts. Indoor agriculture—forever altered by energy-efficient LEDs that can produce parts of the light spectrum most helpful and attractive to plants—is a significant area of research and innovation for the industry there. “The Dutch have created the most advanced area in the world for controlled environment agriculture and have become world leaders in agricultural innovation,” says Hegen on his website. “However, there are also consequences this growing method brings with it, like light pollution.” In some places, the photographer explains, ordinances have been put in place requiring these greenhouses to use blackout screens and curtains at night.

Hegen—who is known for photos taken from great heights, including his striking series on Dutch tulip fields—discussed his inspiration and the challenges of shooting his “Greenhouse” series with Atlas Obscura.

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What inspired you to photograph these greenhouses in the Netherlands? How did you discover them?

My work is based around the topic of the Anthropocene [the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment]. One of the main questions that will affect our future life on Earth will be how we can feed the ever-growing world population with shrinking resources. According to the United Nations, the world's population will grow from today's 7.5 billion people to 10 billion in 2050. And as natural resources such as farmland and water become scarce, feeding the world will become an even greater challenge. Those indoor farms are a prototype to experiment on how to maximize the yield with little space and limited resources.

I was reading a story about food development in a science magazine and got introduced to the idea of cultivating plants in LED-lit greenhouses. I was wondering how these greenhouses may look in the dark, if they are covered, and how they integrate into the surrounding environment. All this made it appealing for me to visit the area.

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What challenges did you encounter?

The lights of those greenhouses are all programmed and remote-controlled. They don't light the entire night due to light-pollution prevention rules. It made it difficult to photograph as you could not say in advance when and where was the right spot to photograph them.

I also wanted to visit some of these greenhouses from inside, but it was kind of impossible. I went to a couple of companies, but they said that they were having a problem with a virus at this moment, so they can not let anyone inside the greenhouse, to protect the plants.

What do you hope these photos will communicate about the future of food security?

Most fruits and vegetables that we find in our supermarkets are available in enormous amounts and all year-round. This is a luxury that we take for granted. We don't even ask where it comes from, how it grows, and what it takes to grow. A great number of tomatoes that we see in stores have never touched natural soil or rain. Showing these places makes the circle of the food supply chain more transparent. I want to sensitize the viewer to what it takes to keep our luxurious living standards. These photos are, for me, a mirror of society, economy, and technology.

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The Monumental Undertaking of Moving Into an Old Masonic Temple

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The 20,000-square-foot house requires endless renovations, but the ceiling is high enough to fly a drone inside.

An iconic emblem greets visitors to Theresa Cannizzaro’s home: a brass 'G,' flanked by a square and compasses, that is inlaid into the floor. The previous tenants, who were Freemasons, left it behind. Cannizzaro lives with her husband, Atom, and their three children in an old Masonic temple.

The temple in Huntington, Indiana, wasn’t the house the couple had in mind when they decided to move east from San Diego, where they’d grown up and started their family. Atom was into aquaponic gardening, a pursuit that can take up a lot of land, and land costs a lot less in the Midwest. But a few years ago, while visiting family, they happened across the sprawling, stately building and noticed that it was on the market.

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As it turned out, the Freemasons had decamped for a smaller, one-story building, Cannizzaro says, partly because it was getting hard for aging members to climb to the third-floor meeting space. (Several old Masonic temples have fallen into disrepair across the country, as membership has sunk; in many cases, the structures prove difficult to reuse.) The couple waffled a little, but the building had good bones; the roof had been redone recently, and the heating and cooling systems were fairly new. On a sticky August day, Cannizzaro noticed it was blessedly cool inside, even without any air conditioning cranked on. The temple was theirs for $89,000.

After closing on the building in the fall of 2016, the family had to figure out how to turn a 20,000-square-foot space, built in 1926, into a home for a family of five. Renovations kicked off in spring 2017, starting with a bathroom—there were six restrooms in the building, but no showers. Then came a new kitchen: There’s a big, commercial cooking space in the basement, Cannizzaro says, but hauling food up and down the stairs “got old really fast.” The family built a smaller kitchen up on the second floor, the part of the house they use as their living space. They also winterized 71 windows. They keep the thermostat around 65 or 63 degrees, and a little lower at night. “We tell people to wear a sweatshirt when they come over,” Cannizzaro says. Last winter, the highest monthly heating bill was $350.

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Though the Freemasons have moved on, traces of the fraternal organization are everywhere. That ‘G’ symbol, which is typically associated with geometry, or a Great (or Grand) Architect of the Universe, appears on 65 doorknobs, many glass doors, and the carpet in the sprawling, third-floor space that was once used for large gatherings. The Freemasons left behind some furniture, too, including a long, black-walnut banquet table—a little too fancy for everyday family use, Cannizzaro says, but great for Thanksgiving with friends.

Cannizzaro has a plan for some of the nooks in the vast structure: She intends to renovate a portion of the third floor, which she says once stored ceremonial garb, and list it on Airbnb; the basement could become a rental space for events. Other portions, such as the massive third-floor meeting room, which has a mezzanine and an organ, will be in limbo for a little longer. “We literally have no idea what we’re going to do with it,” Cannizzaro says. There’s some water damage and busted plaster that need repairs, but for now, the family has rigged up a projector, and likes to watch movies or play Mario Kart on the soaring wall. With 25- or 30-foot ceilings, she adds, it’s also a fun place to fly a drone. A big open space on the fourth floor could eventually become a personal music studio, “but that’s far in the future,” Cannizzaro says. “It’s not on the top of any priority list.”

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So far, the family has sunk between $30,000 and $40,000 into the home makeover project. “We take our renovations really slow because we’re doing it debt-free,” Cannizzaro says. She figures they’ll be tinkering with the temple for the foreseeable future. They’re hoping to build a rooftop garden in the next couple of years, once they’ve installed railings. “We are the tallest building in almost the whole town,” Cannizzaro says. “When I get up on the roof, I can see forever.”

Utah's Great Salt Lake Could Hold Clues to Life on Mars

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The mineral mirabilite is the key.

Though it can appear static on its surface, Utah’s Great Salt Lake is anything but. The lake’s contents are less plain water than primordial soup of minerals: fundamental building blocks like calcium, magnesium, sulfate, and—perhaps obviously—sodium and chloride, which account for all the saltiness. But while the ingredients for some life are there, the lake's particular biochemical recipe makes matters difficult for its most familiar forms.

Last October, however, a veritable laboratory for life emerged from the lake’s depths, in the shape of salty, sulfate crystals. The mineral’s name is mirabilite, or Sal mirabilis—"wonderful salt"—and it may provide clues about how life could exist on Mars.

“Mirabilite precipitates in the lake water, and it sort of gets washed ashore,” says Mark Milligan, a geologist with the Utah Geological Survey. “You [usually] get these windrows of mirabilite. It can look ... like a slushie or something.”

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The lake, a vast expanse of salinated water with a sprinkling of mercury and other minerals, is bisected by a railroad causeway that has created two distinct chemistries—one on the north side of the water, another on the south. Mirabilite forms on the saltier north side, where it ordinarily flows out of underwater springs and dissolves into the water.

But last October the north side's surface level was lower than usual, which allowed the mirabilite to lap up above the surface and crystallize, forming four terraces of the mineral—each up to three feet high and dozens of feet across—along the shore. As the mirabilite rises from the springs and crystallizes, it slowly cuts off the sulfate-rich font below.

“They tend to seal themselves off,” Milligan says of the underwater springs. “They seem to precipitate mirabilite that seals their plumbing.” But every time enough of the mineral obstructs the underwater seeps, another spring spews forth more mirabilite.

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While mirabilite occurs in many places that are wet, cold, and salty—it was mined by Native Americans in Mammoth Cave and other parts of the Smoky Mountains, and formed last year on China’s Yuncheng Salt Lake—its terrace structure in Utah is unique, and makes it look like the Great Salt Lake is having a bad acne outbreak.

Because this was the first time the mirabilite manifested above the surface, it offered researchers a great opportunity to investigate the mineral.

The mounds of mirabilite are made possible by a perfect storm of sulphate-heavy springs, cold weather, and water. Once upon a time, all these conditions were present on Mars. And at least in the Great Salt Lake’s mirabilite, life has found a way, according to recent surveys by Elliot Jagniecki, a geochemist with the Utah Geological Survey.

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Jagniecki’s inspections of the dissolving pools of mirabilite turned up green cyanobacteria and other bacterial strains—extremophiles that thrive in hostile environments. Jagniecki theorizes that these microorganisms could help oxidize the sodium sulphate that makes up the inhospitable springs, paving a way for more life.

In any case, the microscopic life forms and the tough circumstances they face in Utah’s Salt Lake makes the water body another analog for alien environments—a position also held by the natural laboratories of Chile’s Atacama Desert and the lava fields of Iceland.

“If there [are] sulphates on Mars, and there’s groundwater, what’s ... fascinating and intriguing is the possibility that it could preserve life” says Jagniecki. “Things are entombed in the crystal ... A tomb of bacteria.”

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Jagniecki plans to check in on the mirabilite seeps in the summer, when the cold weather that formed the bizarre structures is long gone, but the springs will still be producing the sulphate-rich mineral underwater. He hopes that seeing them in a different environment may clue his team in on how the small signs of life manage to exist in a water body that's chemically repugnant, and reeks of sulfur.

“I’ve a feeling they’re going to be different from what we identified in the lake,” he says. “They’re extremophiles. The conditions [right now] are just right for them to thrive.”

The Curious Case of the Deep-Sea Bone Worms and the Vanishing Underwater Gator

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Scientists dropped three alligators to the bottom of the ocean. One of them was never seen again.

About a year ago, scientists dumped three dead, frozen alligators into the ocean from a ship in Louisiana. They sank a little over a mile before making contact with the seafloor. Scientists have revisited the sunken reptiles several times since. One gator’s status is unknown, one gator has been slowly devoured by a new species of bone-eating worm, and one gator mysterious vanished—eaten or carried off whole by some enormous creature of the deep. “That one genuinely surprised us,” says Clifton Nunnally, a research scientist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. “There was not a single scale or scute left of that gator.”

Nunnally and Craig McClain, the executive director of the consortium, are the engineers behind Louisiana’s great gator experiment, which involved dropping the reptiles into the deep sea to see what animals would come to feast and, ultimately, to gain a better understanding of food webs in the deep sea. Their reptilian research is a passion project, spun off from more formal research on food oases around deep-sea pieces of wood. But it has already offered valuable insights, some of which were recently published in PLOS One.

The team’s biggest revelation came from the carcass of Alligator Two, which dropped on February 20, 2019. McClain and Nunnally observed the site with a remotely operated vehicle for 16 minutes, at which point a single rattail fish came to investigate, but they soon had to leave to monitor a piece of wood. They weren’t able to return to the site until April 12, at which point the crocodile had been reduced to a sloping heap of bones, many of which were covered in a reddish hue. “We dropped down and saw a red shag carpet,” McClain says, adding that the color is a clear indication the bones were colonized by a species in the genus Osedax, or bone-eating worms. It’s the first time any Osedax species has been observed in the Gulf of Mexico.

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McClain’s team collected the worm-riddled bones and shipped them off to Greg Rouse, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. Rouse’s initial scans revealed the gator-bound worms are genetically distinct from all known species of Osedax. Rouse will describe the new species in an upcoming paper. “Describing the species is a whole new publication, which can take a considerable amount of effort,” McClain says. Rouse is probably up the task, having once described 14 species of the bone-eating worms in a paper called “An inordinate fondness for Osedax.”

Alligator Three, which dropped on April 15, 2019, offered no concrete discoveries, but opened up an oceanic mystery. When the researchers revisited the site eight days later, the gator was gone. “There was just a massive depression where the alligator was,” McClain says. His team searched the surrounding area for a 45-pound weight they had tethered to the gator, to ensure it stayed in one place. Eventually they found it, nearly 30 feet away.

Though the culprit will likely never reveal itself, the researchers have suspects in mind. “It had to be something that could drag a 45-pound weight,” McClain says. “It was the first time I felt like an underwater detective, coming back to the scene of the crime and trying to piece together what happened.” The researchers knew the gator had to have been abducted by a predator strong enough to sweep away the gator and its accompanying weight, most likely by a large shark. The most likely suspects that are known to swim in the Gulf of Mexico at depths of 6,500 feet are the sixgill or Greenland shark, two large predators that can grow as long as 16 to 22 feet, respectively.

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A less likely possibility, Nunnally says, is a giant squid, prowling the seafloor for a meal. “But that would have been a sloppy feeding, with bits and pieces left around,” he says, adding that the two suspected sharks have large enough mouths to swallow the gator. “I have yet to see a squid that could devour a gator whole, and I don’t want to be on the ship if we ever discover it.”

McClain’s lab has no upcoming plans to drop any new gators into the ocean, having set their sights on something bigger. “We want to do a whale fall,” Nunnally says. “We want to find the time and funding to do it right, with a whale that washes up dead on the coast.” Until then, the two will continue retrieving and analyzing their wood falls, which Nunnally says will take years. There’s currently no research money for future gator drops, McClain says. But they hope to do it again one day.

The Art and Science of Kashmir's Pink Tea

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Green tea becomes rosy with the addition of a special ingredient.

On chilly winter evenings in Lahore’s Lakshmi Chowk, a bustling marketplace famous for street food, tea vendors sell a pink beverage known as Kashmiri chai. Made with green tea, Kashmiri chai has a savory taste that belies its strawberry-milkshake appearance. The millennial-pink beverage is wildly popular, as both a drink and a color. In Pakistan, upscale cafes sell Kashmiri chai cheesecake, and “tea pink” is a trendy shade for wedding outfits, men’s shirts, and even lingerie.

Originally a Himalayan drink, pink tea goes by many names across South Asia, some which reference its unusual color and flavor, from nun chai (salt tea) to gulabi chai (rose-hued tea.) Salt and baking soda are key ingredients. Salt acts as an electrolyte to prevent dehydration at high altitudes, and baking soda is the catalyst that turns it pink. Infused with spices such as star anise and topped with crushed nuts, the tea is tailor-made for cold weather. In Kashmir, nun chai is drunk piping hot several times a day, accompanied by an array of breads: crispy kulcha, dimpled girda, or bagel-like tsochwor.

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Salty with a hint of bitterness, pink tea mirrors the current mood in Kashmir. A geopolitical turf war between India, Pakistan, and China has torn the region apart, making it one of the most militarized zones in the world. Following a terrorist attack last year, the Kashmir Valley lost its status as an autonomous region within India and was cut off from the outside world. Life in the valley ground to a halt. Kashmiris will readily admit that in times of uncertainty they savor quotidian pleasures like tea breaks. Pink tea helps chase away the blues. One Kashmiri blogger writes: “It’s the closest thing to an antidepressant.”

Making pink tea is a painstaking process that is both science and art. The first step, a prolonged boiling of green tea leaves with baking soda, involves a bit of chemistry. Certain fermented teas, when boiled with a pinch of soda, change color from amber to deep maroon. Scientists call that an acid-base reaction, where sodium bicarbonate neutralizes mildly acidic tea, enhancing the color but also taking the edge off its astringent tannins. An international biochemistry journal, which held a contest called the “Pink Tea Challenge,” explained the science behind the color change: “Polyphenols in green or Kashmiri chai act similar to phenolsulfonphthalein, a common pH indicator better known as phenol red.”

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Once the tea turns burgundy, the liquid is shocked with ice or cold water to preserve the color. BBC journalist and food blogger Aliya Nazki uses a Kashmiri colloquialism to describe the perfect hue. The concentrate, she writes, should look “just like pigeon-blood.” When milk is added, the tea turns pink. At this point the boiling liquid is repeatedly poured back into the pot with a ladle and vigorously aerated, a technique similar to frothing milk for coffee. “It is very laborious work,” says a London pink tea vendor featured on YouTube. It takes her four hours to produce a batch of hand-frothed Kashmiri chai.

Traditionally made in a copper samovar, pink tea is related to the salty milk teas of Central Asia, among them etkanchay, a Uyghur tea, and Mongolian suutei tsai. The story goes that the tea came to Kashmir from Yarkand (now in Xinjiang, China) through the Silk Road. But the use of soda hints at connections closer to home. Adding alkaline salts to po cha (yak butter tea) in order to obtain a darker brew originated in the Tibetan plateau, where abundant deposits of natural soda were part of the rugged terrain.

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The saline landscape extended into Ladakh in eastern Kashmir, where soda crystals gathered near hot springs were used for making gur gur cha, the local version of butter tea. The Kashmir Valley picked up the tea drinking habit from their neighbors, importing the natural soda, known as phul, from Ladakh as well as brick tea from Lhasa. But Kashmiris adapted the tea to local tastes. They took the yak butter out, replacing it with milk and cream. Stripped of fat, the tea revealed its true colors: a rosy blush often referred to as “peach flower.”

Charles von Hügel, an Austrian explorer who wrote an extensive account of his travels in Kashmir during the 1830s, was one of the first westerners to give the world his unvarnished opinion of pink tea. “The taste is like that of a strong soup made out of scorched flour,” he wrote. Even Kashmiris acknowledge that salty tea is an acquired taste. Journalist Scaachi Koul joked that the tea is “one of our worst culinary contributions to the world and we should be ashamed.”

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But the Kashmiri teas sold from Lahore to London are crowd pleasers, more sweet than salty. As pink tea moved away from its Himalayan roots, salt became a minor player. The Chai Spot in Manhattan serves a creamy pink tea infused with cardamom and sweetened with brown sugar. In Afghanistan, rosy qymaq chai does not contain even a token pinch of salt.

More than just a daily beverage, pink tea is a state of mind. 15 years ago, the novelist Salman Rushdie wrote an allegorical tale about love and betrayal in Kashmir. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie describes his ancestral land as “a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant’s teeth,” whose inhabitants were weary of never-ending war. All they want is azadi. Freedom, in other words, to worship as they please and to “drink salty tea.”

Visiting One of the Last Fragments of Miami's Eccentric Native Forest

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Pine rockland grows on the most stable land in Florida, which is why it’s doomed.

It’s January in Florida—divine, sun-soaked, not humid enough to be buggy—and Frank Ridgley is driving a golf cart across the sprawling grounds of Zoo Miami. The zoo is home to many endangered species, from the native Florida bonneted bat to the African painted dog, but on this day it’s not an animal Ridgley is going to see. Behind its menagerie, Zoo Miami hosts one of the world’s most endangered habitats: pine rockland forest. The forest once covered 185,000 acres of Miami-Dade County, from North Miami Beach to Long Pine Key in the Everglades. But today, this ancient, snaking ridge is largely indistinguishable from its surrounding habitat: crystalline condos, strip malls, and asphalt voids. Today less than two percent of the pine rockland remains intact in the county, scattered in pockets so small that even most locals haven’t heard of it.

Ridgley, who moved to Miami from Buffalo in 2007, has lived here long enough to be considered a local. He joined Zoo Miami as a wildlife veterinarian and now works as the head of conservation and research. Since 2011, he’s been on a mission to restore Zoo Miami’s pine rockland to its original glory. Ridgley, a magnetically friendly guy, even behind the opaque black sunglasses that now rest atop his head, expertly steers the golf cart through the zoo’s strangely labyrinthine parking lot—the site was once an airfield for blimps in World War II—to a towering chain-link gate. “Just in case the animals get out,” he says. As soon as the gate whirrs closed, he pauses to tune out an alert on his walkie-talkie—something about the dung compost bin? “Welcome to the pine rocklands, or what’s left of it,” he says, gesturing to a spiky, almost alien assemblage of plants on the side of the road.

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Before Miami was a city, it was a forest born from the bottom of the ocean. Stilt-like slash pines stretched toward the sky and jagged bunches of saw palmetto fanned out on an ancient limestone ridge, the fossilized remains of a coral reef over 100,000 years old. This ancient substrate is also so incredibly hard—more rock than soil—that its slow-growing plants have complicated root systems that feather deep into the ground to absorb nutrients. Though the Everglades certainly appear lush and teeming, it’s pine rockland that boasts the highest diversity of plant species of any habitat in the state.

“Before the air base, this whole site was a continuous pine rockland forest,” Ridgley says. “No one realized how unique and special this habitat was until it was all gone.” Even this patch isn’t actually original; it was restored just a few years ago after invasive species had taken over. The plants are still young and short, and fade into swaths of older pine rockland behind it. “This is what Miami originally was like,” Ridgley says, dropping his sunglasses over his eyes.

Miami wasn’t just built on this forest, but from this forest. Dade County slash pine, which grows up to 100 feet tall and boasts incredibly hard and blessedly rot-resistant timber, was harvested to near-extinction for the development of the city in the early 20th century, according to the Coral Gables Museum. Pine rockland vanished so quickly because the elevated rock ridge it grew on is some of the highest, most stable ground in Florida—a state that is otherwise on track to slip into the ocean as climate changes. It had other benefits as well. “In the summertime, we don’t even have mosquitoes here because water doesn’t say pooled up,” Ridgley says. “It’s the perfect place to build.”

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As he speaks, Ridgley stands in the middle of the road, between the crisp patch of pine rockland and an enormous, camel-colored mass of Burma reed, a powerful invader that escaped from a test garden in a suburb of Miami and quickly colonized much of the surviving forest. It’s a stark juxtaposition: a vibrant array of pines, palms, succulents, and wildflowers next to a homogenous tan heap the size of a rhinoceros. Ridgley then drives on, staying close to a moat that encircles much of the zoo’s property—another failsafe for escapees, he says. “It happens more often than you’d think. Especially the younger male antelopes.”

The majority of the pine rockland habitat in the Zoo Miami grounds has been swallowed by Burma reed, which ordinarily could not take root in terrain this rocky. Once the ground is disturbed, however, there’s an opening for it to proliferate. “We still have scars from 80 years ago, where the blimps landed,” Ridgley says. That, along with heaps of soil brought in by the military, invited in Burma reed. “If you look at a historic map of the base on Google Earth, you can see the circles where blimps would land and tie down,” he says. “Those spots are all covered in invasive plants now.”

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To restore pine rockland, you have to get rid of all of this, and strip the land down to its original limestone cap. This process turned out to be much more painstaking than Ridgley had anticipated when the restoration project began in 2011. “We thought it would just be a few piles of substrate with invasive plants,” he says. “It ended up taking two front end loaders and two dump trucks two weeks to get down to the actual rock.” And that was for just one acre—a fraction of the forest that could be resurrected by Zoo Miami with enough time, effort, and money.

Though it may be pretty, a fossilized coral reef can’t exactly be replanted by hand. Once the overgrowth was cleared for the first restoration planting in 2011, Zoo Miami staff drilled holes into the rock so volunteers could plant native flora. The line-up of endangered plants have wild names that seem right at home in Florida: crenulate leadplant, Coker’s creeper, Havana skullcap. Ridgley has led several other group plantings for patches of pine rockland since then. The process takes a long time, and he estimates it would take another decade of steady work to clear out the Burma reed from Zoo Miami’s admittedly small patch of pine rockland habitat.

Almost as soon as the native plants enter the rock, wildlife returns, particularly native butterflies. One of the most frequent visitors to the restored rockland is the endangered Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak butterfly, which depends upon a single host plant, the pineland croton. “One volunteer was planting a croton, and before the plant was in the ground, a Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak landed on it and began laying its eggs,” Ridgley says. Other endangered animals, many of which depend on narrow niches in the specialized ecosystem, have benefited from the restoration. A prime example is the Miami tiger beetle, a tiny, iridescent green bug thought to be extinct until its rediscovery in 2007. The beetle requires pockets of quartz sand, a habitat feature unique to pine rockland. It is now only found in just two populations, including one near Zoo Miami, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

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The future of the zoo’s pine rockland appears secure for now, but the habitat has far fewer guardians elsewhere in the city. A significant slice of one of the last remnants—one of the ones that hosts the Miami tiger beetle—is about meet its horrifically mundane future as a Walmart, LA Fitness, and Chili’s, according to the Miami New Times. Despite years of activism from environmentalists and private citizens, construction began in 2018, and in 2019 the activists lost their final legal stand against the project, called Coral Reef Commons, according to the Miami Herald. “South Florida is starting to look like a well-gnawed chicken bone," Matthew Schwartz, the head of the South Florida Wildlands Association, told the New Times.

The few patches of pine rockland outside Miami-Dade County are in the Florida Keys, where they are even more imperiled by sea level rise. The only healthy forest is on Big Pine Key, right next to a ghost forest subsumed by the ocean, according to a report from the Miami Herald. “We’re going to lose so much,” Ridgley says. It only takes half an hour to cover the entire loop of the zoo’s pine rockland in a golf cart, and soon Ridgley has emerged from the waves of Burma reed, past the antelope-proof gate, and back into the parking lot. There, below the asphalt, is a preview of the future of much of the remaining pine rockland habitat—past the point of saving.

When South Africa Was Home to the 'Firewalkers' of Karoo

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The reptilian critters may not have survived, but they made sure to sign off feet first.

South Africa has pretty much always had megafauna. Today, the country is peppered with safari parks and game reserves for the large carnivores, ungulates, and other creatures that abound throughout the African continent.

But nearly 200 million years ago, at the onset of the Jurassic Period—the age that saw the rise of such popular creatures as Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops—it was a fiery hellscape, plagued by regular volcanic eruptions that pushed life in the area to its limits.

But life did persevere, as evidenced by the recent discovery of dinosaur footprints on South Africa’s famous Karoo Basin, which boasts a trove of fossils dating back to when the area was part of the supercontinent Gondwana.

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“The tracks are preserved in sandstone, sandwiched between basalt layers,” says Emese Bordy, a sedimentologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and lead author of the new study, published today in the journal PLOS One. “The properties of the sandstone allow us to tell that the tracks were deposited in seasonal streams that ran during flash-flood events.”

Bordered by ocean on three sides and located at the nadir of the continent, South Africa today is tropical and lush. But even now, some of it is semi-arid—and in certain places, entirely devoid of water. The term Karoo, after all, comes from a Khoisan word for “land of thirst,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

That term couldn’t be truer for the area in ancient times. A hundred million years before the ascendance of T. rex, large volcanoes here vomited lava across the region, burning up the surrounding land and smoking out organisms in search of new habitats.

On a South African farm—located through a combination of academic detective work and citizen science—Bordy’s team found 25 footprints from a slew of ancient animals. One of them was a new ornithischian—a dinosaur group whose members boasted birdlike hips, like Stegosaurus—in addition to carnivorous two-footed dinosaurs and some of their four-footed herbivorous prey. Other footprints belonged to early synapsids, the mammal-like animals that would eventually evolve into, well, us.

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The team catalogued the footprints in three dimensions using photogrammetry, which helped researchers extrapolate the approximate weight, size, and speed of the Early Jurassic dinosaurs. They determined that the creatures likely trotted and scrambled across the streambed during a brief respite from the violent eruptions that seized the area—a respite that conveniently preserved the footprints between two massive layers of cooled lava, which today form large basalt deposits that blanket the South African landscape.

"All in all, one would imagine that it was not very nice there all the time,” says Bordy. “But clearly it was habitable between the eruptions.”

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Trace fossil beds like these, called ichnosites, aren’t common in South Africa, though the entire country is filled with fossils. Despite the bone troves, though, it’s hard to say what made the volcanic region of Karoo a literal hotbed for life.

“One possibility is that at least between 265 and 180 million years ago—that is, for over 85 million years—this part of southern Africa was a fairly stable continental interior,” says Bordy. Clearly it was home to a vast array of terrestrial animals and plants that thrived under varying conditions. But, says Bordy, “questions like ‘why so many fossils are here’ and ‘why these organisms found the Karoo a hip place to live in’ are not easy to answer.”

As hip as it was, neighborhoods change. After the frenzy of volcanic activity, Gondwana broke up, and the tranche of earth containing the Karoo Basin drifted for millions of years. The life on it changed all the while—evolving, dying out, evolving again, and eventually forming the South Africa we know today. But some of the ancient world’s residents refused to leave without first leaving their mark.


How Climate Change Helped Spawn an East African Locust Crisis

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Pictures from the ground show an insect storm of biblical proportions.

This story was originally published by Grist and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

An alien species visiting Earth in the year 2020 would be forgiven for assuming that humankind had succeeded in pissing off some kind of vengeful God. This month alone, mega-wildfires ripped through Australia, massive king tides swept California shorelines, and, now, billions of desert locusts have descended on East Africa in an insect storm of biblical proportions. But climate change, not an angry deity, is to blame.

East Africa had an unusually wet year in 2019—warming waters in the Indian Ocean produced a high number of tropical cyclones, which doused the coast and created “exceptional” conditions for locust breeding, Nairobi-based climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker told the Associated Press. Now, swarms of hungry insects are feasting on crops in the Horn of Africa, where millions of people already lack reliable access to nutritious food.

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The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says a swarm the size of Paris can gobble up as much grub as half the population of France. To make matters worse, desert locusts can travel up to 80 miles a day and multiply at terrifying speeds. Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, the FAO said, are dealing with swarms of “unprecedented size and destructive potential.”

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Kenya plans to spend $5 million to curtail the worst locust invasion it’s had in 70 years. Meanwhile, the FAO is asking wealthier nations to take urgent action and calling for $70 million in emergency funding. The problem, the organization says, could quickly spread to other parts of East Africa.

Pictures from the ground show the extent of the burgeoning crisis. If these desert locusts aren’t reined in soon, the FAO says, swarms could be 400 times their current size by the beginning of summer.

The Belgrade Book Collection That Survived War, Fascism, and Neglect

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One family has kept it going—and growing—since 1720.

Viktor Lazic pauses in front of the first glass case on the ground floor of a small museum in Belgrade, Serbia. A parched manuscript lies below.

“This is made of rice,” he tells the group of visitors he’s showing around. “It’s a book from China, which you can eat if you are very hungry.” He gestures to the adjacent case, which contains a book from Thailand. “Then there is a book I don’t recommend you eat,” he says, with a smile and a flourish. “This is made from the dung of an elephant.”

The group titters.

Lazic is a 34-year-old writer, translator, and lawyer. He’s also a former president and trustee of the civil-society organization Adligat, which administers this vast and vibrant private collection of books that’s been in his family for nine generations. Founded by an ancestor in northern Serbia, the collection is divided into two parts: a book and travel museum, where the tour is taking place, and a museum of Serbian literature.

Lazic is leading the evening’s guests through a one-hour tour of the family home and library, where just a fraction of the million-plus books in the collection are currently displayed. The collection, spanning time and space, includes books from India, Algeria, Ethiopia, and Indonesia; books made from bamboo sticks, silk, and sheep foetuses; miniature books and scrolls; first editions and signed copies.

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Lazic moves through the floors, unveiling trapdoors that lead to passageways and closets filled with books, books, and more books—a virtual tour of the world through the written word. Then he walks his guests through the Serbian rooms, which hold the letters of Nikola Tesla and the personal libraries and effects of Nobel nominee Miodrag Pavlovic and the novelist and poet Milovan Danojlić, among others.

When Lazic became aware of the collection as a young boy, in the 1990s, it had already survived since 1720, through multiple generations, wars, and dictatorships. Started by Mihailo Lazic—a forefather who was a priest, and therefore among the lucky few at the time to be educated—the library first opened to the public in 1882. It is a family enterprise that has grown with every generation, save for a brief stutter in the second half of the 20th century.

Before the tour began, the Lazic living room was buzzing with the strains of merriment, as writers and intellectuals sipped wine, snacked on hors d'oeuvres, and browsed through some of the works on display. They were here for the unveiling and donation of a new “legacy,” or personal collection, belonging to Tanja Kragujevic, a major Serbian poet, and her husband, Vasilije Vince Vujic.

Their works were gathered straightforwardly enough, but not everything in the collection has been. Indeed, Lazic later recounted dramatic instances of Adligat rescuing books from libraries about to shutter, and preserving valuable volumes slated for destruction.

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“We are [like a] Red Cross for culture,” he says, after the tour. “We have a whole network—many institutions in Serbia and Europe—where when people [learn about] ... books [that are going to] be destroyed, they call us.”

A recent example, he says, occurred some years ago, when a valuable collection at a Serbian library was about to be pulped. Concerned library officials called Lazic, and soon Adligat had 28,000 new books in its collection for safekeeping.

Other volumes in the Lazic library involved derring-do—and loss. According to one family story, Lazic’s great-grandfather Luka attempted to safeguard his own books from the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I by stitching them into his clothes. At the time, Luka lived in Vojvodina, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the war began, he fled to Serbia to avoid joining the army. He took several books with him in his thick sweater, believing they would be safer than at home.

Luka continued to carry them later, when he had joined the Serbian army, and—after Austro-Hungarian forces surrounded them on three sides—marched with troops (and civilians) through the snowy Albanian mountains. That episode, in 1915, was part of what came to be known as the Great Retreat—one of the most tragic episodes of the war.

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Later, while traveling by boat from Greece to Corfu, Luka’s ship was torpedoed. The stash of books he had carried from home was lost when the boat capsized. Yet Luka continued to collect books during and after the war.

Many of the volumes collected from this period, deemed “important and fragile” by the British Library, were digitized in 2015–16 by the Belgrade University Library under a grant from the U.K. national library’s Endangered Archives Programme. The digitization covered 50,000 pages of damaged Serbian books, newspapers, war journals, calendars, and images.

“Serbian war publications are of great global importance because of the role and importance Serbia had in World War I,” says Vasilije Milnovic, an academic who received the grant and worked with the Belgrade University Library on the project.

The Lazic family collected and protected books through the next war as well.

As Lazic tells it, when the Germans invaded Serbia in 1941, his grandfather Milorad, Luka’s son, already had a thriving private library that rented books to people through an intricate network of bicycle routes. For the Germans this was ideal: They could deploy the network to distribute their own information and propaganda, and Milorad had little choice in the matter.

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But since they didn't trust him—perhaps because of his education, or his involvement in the previous war against the Germans—they enlisted his illiterate wife, Danica, instead. The first thing she did, Lazic says, was to contact communist groups fighting the Germans, and to offer to work for them as a spy.

During those years, the Lazic couple saved copies of all the written material they could, from both sides of the war, for their library.

Once the war ended and Josip Broz Tito came to power in Yugoslavia, the communists wanted the couple to turn over the material to the National Library of Serbia. But they were hesitant, both because of their personal attachment to the project and their concern that material perceived as anti-communist might be destroyed by the new regime.

“When the war ended,” says Lazic, “we had more than 50 editions of Mein Kampf. And my family didn’t want to destroy [them]. My grandfather said, ‘If you destroy Mein Kampf you won’t harm Hitler. [You will] harm our own history, because you [will be] destroying the physical traces of history.”

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Milorad was determined to save the collection for posterity. So the Lazic family gave several books to relatives and friends for safekeeping, and, in 1946, buried 2,000-3,000 volumes in the ground beneath Vojvodina, eventually retrieving the books decades later, in the 1970s.

“Luka, my great-grandfather, had one rule,” says Lazic. “He wrote it down: [It was to] ... preserve every kind of book, regardless of context.”

For a while, the Lazic family library was inactive. Milorad died in 1977, and the collection languished for a time. Lazic’s father’s generation, including his father’s siblings, lost interest in maintaining it, and the next generation was still too young to help out.

In the 1990s, when Yugoslavia cleaved into different states amid the fall of communism, books about communism became threatened under the new regime. By this point Lazic had been inducted into the family business of saving books by his aging grandmother Danica.

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“We saved those books the same way we saved fascist books,” he says. “Not because I love communism, but because it’s part of the history of this nation.” The Lazic collection today includes more than 30,000 books about communism.

Lazic’s uncle Milorad Vlahovic, a nephew of Danica’s, had also heard the stories of his aunt’s work as a spy during the war, when she adroitly used the bicycle routes for sharing information with partisan resistance groups. Vlahovic, 61, was familiar with family lore as a child, breathing in the library’s ancient scents and marveling at the endless stacks of books. That the legacy continues is, for him, a matter of joy.

“This is in Viktor’s blood,” says Vlahovic, as his daughter Milica translates from Serbian. “He was always obsessed with the collection. We are happy and proud that he has done this for the library, for the family, for the country.”

Adam Sofronijevic, the deputy director of the Belgrade University Library, had also heard several of these accounts from Lazic and his parents. “Some of these stories are fascinating and tell us a lot about Serbian society and culture,” he says. “[Taken as a whole, it] is a story of book-loving, book-keeping, and enthusiasm beyond and above the usual.”

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Now overseen by a trust, Adligat—formally registered as a nonprofit in 2013—has a skeletal staff of five unpaid volunteers. Financially it’s sustained through multiple means: by charging scholars for access, as a ticketed museum with organized tours, through donations, and by family and state funding.

Each workday, about a thousand more “units”—books, magazines, and manuscripts—are donated by various institutions, private collectors, and individuals. “To give books is good karma,” says Filip Tomasevic, a local collector who donated about a thousand euros’ worth of books on the evening of the tour.

A prime resource for researchers, Adligat also lends parts of its collection to museums across Europe. Lazic, who remains on the hunt for more books, travels around the world—sometimes buying, sometimes receiving donations, sometimes accepting books and passing them on to other libraries. The day of the tour, Lazic said his car contained books from various donors worth more than 30,000 euros.

“I wanted to build a safe haven—a place where people of culture can entrust what’s valuable to them,” he says. “My family gathered something that is important for the nation. We hope to preserve it for the future.”

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How Serbian Immigrants Made an Ohio Town the ‘Fried Chicken Capital of the World'

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From Vojvodina, with lard.

You can only try pahovana piletina in two places. One is Vojvodina, Serbia, where the unique style of fried chicken was born. The other is Ohio, where “Barberton-style fried chicken,” as it’s known there, became one small town’s claim to fame. What started as a comforting meal for an immigrant family came to define a community, turning a humble Ohio town into the “Fried Chicken Capital of the World.”

Smiljka and Manojlo Topalsky weren’t the only Eastern Europeans to leave home for a burgeoning Ohio farm-town called Barberton in the early 1900s. Their grandson, Milos Papich, points out that one of the oldest Serbian social clubs in the country is there, an hour south of Akron. The emigrated family owned a successful 300-acre dairy farm for decades.

During the Great Depression, though, the Topalskys lost everything but the farmhouse. Luckily, Smiljka could still cook.

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On July 4th, 1933, the Topalskys opened an eatery out of that farmhouse. They called it Belgrade Gardens, and sold soups, chillis, and sandwiches to their struggling neighbors. “But it wasn’t enough to raise a family,” Papich says over the phone. One day, the story goes, Smiljka was in the back cooking a classic Serbian chicken dish for her family that she’d learned from her mother. After it caught the nose of one outspoken bank-teller, says Papich, he demanded they sell it to their regulars—a mishmash of recently immigrated Eastern Europeans who longed for a taste of home.

Once they had a taste, they couldn’t get enough. The chicken became an overnight hit among town denizens, and love of Smiljka’s fried chicken wove itself into the fabric of the community. “It kind of fell into their lap,” says Papich. “My grandparents never would have dreamed that the food they grew up with would be so well-received.”

Within seven years of putting Serbian fried chicken on their farmhouse menu, the Topalskys were able to buy back 65 acres of land from the bank, says Papich, current owner of 87-year-old Belgrade Gardens. The restaurant stayed with the family as much as pahovana piletina stays with Barberton. And to the purists in this still chicken-smitten town, Smiljka’s original dish is all but scripture.

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Before explaining how to make it, Scott Marble makes one thing clear. “You need to keep it what it is," says the owner of famed fried-chicken vendor Village Inn Chicken. "There is a recipe.” To make the dish, you break down a fresh, young, 2 ½- to 2 ¾-pound chicken and brine it in salt. Frozen chickens will not do, and it’s not to be seasoned beyond salt. Importantly, you must use the whole chicken. “We sell a lot of chicken backs, but we call them ‘chicken ribs,’” says Papich. “There’s not a whole lot of meat on them, but the meat that’s on those backs is sweet.” After an egg wash and a breading, you let it sit overnight. Finally, you fry the chicken low and slow in pork lard for 20 minutes—just as Smiljka did.

This “porcine baptism,” writes John T. Edge, author of Fried Chicken: An American Story, leaves the chicken "sheathed in a crisp but slightly chewy mantle.” Papich says the frying method leaves the poultry with soft, porky notes. As made standard by Belgrade Gardens, restaurants plate the customer’s selected cuts of chicken with coleslaw, french fries, and a “hot sauce” born of Serbian djuvuce. The meal has survived in Barberton for nearly 100 years without venturing much beyond it.

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Throughout the 1900s, Smiljka’s comfort food reshaped the small town to which it emigrated. Over time, Serbian-owned chicken joints, often female-led, propagated across the Barbertonian landscape. Helen DeVore was a long-time employee at Belgrade Gardens before she opened Hopocan Gardens in 1946; Mary Marinkovich opened Whitehouse Chicken in 1950; the Milich family opened Milich Village in 1955. They all sold, essentially, Belgrade Gardens’s legendary chicken dish as quickly as they could be eaten.

And they could be eaten quickly. Throughout the 1960s, Ron Koltnow, author of Barberton Fried Chicken: An Ohio Original, claims Barbertonians ate 30,000 chicken meals, or some seven tons of chicken every week. On Mother’s Day 1969 alone, he claims, the small town ate 25,000 chicken meals. So fervorous was the fowl-frenzy that Koltnow’s Ukrainian Jewish grandparents allegedly broke kosher to partake in the hyper-local food fad. During a decade that Koltnow termed “the golden age of chicken” in an interview with Cleveland Magazine, Barberton declared itself the “Fried Chicken Capital of the World,” a moniker yet unchallenged.

For his part, Edge, who quite literally wrote the book on fried chicken, proposes the town has earned at least the title “Fried Chicken Capital of America.”

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Throughout, Belgrade Gardens has remained a noble torchbearer of this old-world custom, while becoming a local landmark and casually winning awards into the present day. Papich is honored to carry the legacy of an institution that’s served several generations of Ohioans, adding that the current mayor once worked there as a busboy. Belgrade Gardens has air-mailed fried chicken all over, from Alaska to Florida, to those celebrating birthdays or anniversaries, or battling homesickness. During wartime, chicken was shipped to Barberton residents posted in Vietnam. Papich says it’s even been, by explicit request, several folks’ last meals.

While the remaining chicken houses of Barberton all pay homage to the same seminal meal, minor variations in sourcing, breading, and frying earned each chicken house its own character. Each Barberton family, in turn, has their own preferred house, while neighborly owners engage in mild rivalries.

“Everyone has their favorites. We think we’re the best, they think they’re the best,” says Papich. In fact, Belgrade Gardens’s fried chicken went head-to-head with Whitehouse’s in a 2010 episode of Food Network’s "Food Feuds." “We won, but there’s no reason to be argumentative,” says Papich.

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While slight differences and friendly competition have emerged between the houses, they all face the same looming threat.

“We’re all shells of what we used to be,” says Marble. He recalls people lining up around the corner with a police officer directing traffic out front. “We’re far from that anymore. New blood doesn’t want home cooking.” He cites the recent proliferation of fast-food establishments across town as unhelpful competition; they certainly make 20-minute fried chicken feel like slow food.

“Families just don’t sit down for dinner anymore,” says Papich, who notes that his take-out business, if nothing else, is expanding. When asked if he’d compromise his Barberton fried chicken dish to, say, cut down on wait time or cost, he wastes no time answering. “I’d rather close on a high note than water things down. My parents would agree. My grandparents would agree.”

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At 'Soda Springs' in the Philippines, The Seafloor Bubbles Like Champagne

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The bubbles are mostly carbon dioxide, and gurgle up from the ground in streamers or curtains.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to float in seltzer water or swim in a glass of champagne, you should go diving with Bayani Cardenas.

Cardenas, a hydrologist at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, recently dove in Secret Bay, off the southeastern tip of Mabini in the Philippine province of Batangas. A local diver had tipped Cardenas off that far beneath the surface of the water, spectacular quantities of bubbles gurgled up from the bottom.

Some bubbles came a few at a time, in little hiccups, while others twirled like streamers. “At first, you see maybe a bubble spring every 50 feet or something, and then 150 feet down, you see a whole curtain from a distance,” Cardenas says. In some patches, he adds, the bubbles were “just gushing.” The researchers went down nearly 200 feet.

This area sits along the Verde Island Passage, a watery corridor between the islands of Luzon and Mindoro known to harbor immense marine biodiversity. The bottom of Secret Bay was so effervescent that the researchers dubbed it Soda Springs—and though Cardenas and his collaborators were there to investigate groundwater discharging into the ocean, they figured that the bubbles warranted a closer look, too. Armed with carbon dioxide sensors, they swam through the bubbles to measure the concentration of the gas.

It wasn’t always easy to stay focused on the scientific tasks: The bubbles were uncomfortably itchy when they hit the exposed skin on divers’ hands and faces, Cardenas says, and it would be easy to forget to monitor their oxygen tanks while distracted by the “surreal” visuals. It helped to try to mute the sensory stimuli, Cardenas says, because “you want to make sure you’re not too excited.” Everything, from flailing your arms to scratching your nose, is more arduous in water than it is in air, and Cardenas and his dive partners rehearsed their game plan over coffee and breakfast, plotting out how they’d pass instruments back and forth and then stash them.

In some portions of Soda Springs, the divers measured carbon dioxide concentrations of up to 95,000 parts per million, Cardenas and 10 collaborators report in a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters. That’s more than 200 times the concentration found in the atmosphere, which is around 412 parts per million, according to a 2019 report from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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The researchers also got to the bottom of the all-natural bubble machine: They report that it’s the product of gas seeping out of seafloor vents. The area is a hotbed of volcanic activity; the Taal volcano recently erupted just 23 miles away. “Where these vents are, there are probably faults underneath there that we’re not seeing, that are all covered up by sediment,” Cardenas says.

The next question, Cardenas says, is how these outpourings of carbon dioxide affect the coral reefs and other life nearby. Although the gas becomes less concentrated as it rises, the team detected elevated levels of carbon dioxide along portions of the shoreline, along with increased acidity. Researchers who choose to dive into that research question will also get to frolic in all the bubbles they could ever want.

The Aftermath of a Fire at the Museum of Chinese in America's Archives

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Staff are hopeful after the first recovery effort found 150 boxes in a salvageable state.

On the evening of January 23, Yue Ma, the director of collections at the Museum of Chinese in America, was on her way home from work when she got a phone call from a colleague. A fire had broken out at 70 Mulberry Street, the home of the museum’s archives, where Ma has kept careful watch for 13 years. As soon as Ma stepped off the train, she got in her car and drove straight to back to Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. When she arrived, around midnight, flames were coming out of the windows on the fourth floor of the building. “I was so shocked,” she says. “We thought our collection could be destroyed.”

The fire burned throughout the night and into the next day, battering the historic building, which also houses the Chen Dance Center, a senior center, and other community groups, according to The New York Times. Nine firefighters and one civilian suffered minor injuries. Museum officials, after learning they might not have access to the building for three weeks, feared their collection of 85,000 objects might be destroyed, not from the fire but the water used to extinguish it. But on January 29, that city workers began recovering boxes that appear to be salvageable, Gothamist reported. 150 boxes—fewer than earlier estimates—were recovered on the first day of retrieval, Ma says. It’s a small fraction of the entire archive, the fate of which still hangs in the air as the recovery process continues and water seeps in.

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Approximately 40 of the boxes recovered showed clear signs of water damage, Ma says. They were immediately shipped to Allentown, Pennsylvania to be frozen and freeze-dried, a process that prevents future damage. These boxes were the worst-hit in part because they contained paper documentation, including books, photographs, and magazines, Ma says. The other boxes contained a potpourri of history. “We found porcelain dishes from Chinese restaurants and costumes and a stage prop from a Cantonese opera,” Ma says.

While museum officials wait for the city to announce when the next retrieval process will be, Ma keeps thinking of different objects in the collection that remain in the building. “We have a Chinese typewriter machine, which is really rare and might be one of two in America, and we have paper sculptures, which are probably damaged by water,” she says. “And we have rare books, letters, family histories, materials from businesses and grocery stores, school records, and immigration materials.” But Ma says she’s also been thinking about what has been saved, such as flight logs from Hazel Ling Yee, the first Chinese-American woman pilot, which were recently transported from the archives to go on display at the museum’s main building on 215 Centre Street.

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The museum started in the 1970s as the Chinatown History Project, the brainchild of local activists Charles Lai and John Kuo Wei Tchen. The two collected trash off the street and interviewed elders at the senior center at 75 Mulberry—the beginnings of the collection that has, at least in part, escaped destruction, according to The Nation. In 2009, the expanded and official Museum of Chinese in America moved into its new home on Centre, a former machine repair shop redesigned by architect Maya Lin, but the archives remained on Mulberry. Earlier this year, the museum was criticized for cooperating with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to build a new jail in Chinatown, which activists saw as a sign the museum was contributing to displacement and gentrification in Chinatown.

Though the fire’s effects may still be devastating to parts of the collection, Ma says she feels grateful for the outpouring of support she’s received from museum donors. Many called to ask if she and her staff and interns were okay, and to offer to donate more of their personal belongings to help rebuild the museum’s collections. “That made me feel so warm and supported, like my work is important to them,” she says.

On January 29, the first item to emerge from the green blockade shielding 75 Mulberry was a Chinese orchid belonging to H.T. Chen, the founder of Chen Dance Studio, which was on the second floor. Chen was amazed to see his orchid still very much green and alive. “Chinese people say that the orchid represents fertility, refinement, thoughtfulness, good luck and prosperity,” he wrote in an email. “Certainly unexpected and hopefully a sign of rebirth and better times ahead.”

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