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The Crumbling Art of Costantino Nivola, a Picasso for the People

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The Italian-born sculptor was celebrated in his lifetime but largely forgotten after his death.

The ruins of Costantino Nivola’s career are scattered across New York. In city streets and public schools, housing projects and showroom floors, the late sculptor’s creations were meant to be abstract, modernist monuments to the democratic potential of art in the postwar years. For many of his contemporaries, Nivola was a symbol of the American dream: an antifascist from Italy who emigrated to the United States during World War II, becoming one of the most consequential names in public art.

“Nivola was in many ways the municipal civic public sculptor for New York City in the 1960s,” says Michelle Bogart, an art historian at Stony Brook University. His visionary output, she says, inspired public officials to budget for major art projects for decades to follow.

But since his death in 1988, Nivola’s work has gradually faded into obscurity. Some of his sculptures have been destroyed. Many others have become like fossils, encrusted in layers of graffiti and beige paint. And one of the artist’s greatest accomplishments—a series of large frescoes depicting civic life—faces destruction as the Massachusetts state government prepares to demolish Government Center, the Brutalist building in Boston where it resides.

“It’s a huge concern,” says Steven Hillyer, the director of the architecture archive at Cooper Union, which is hosting a Costantino Nivola exhibition in New York until March 15. “We have to decide what of our culture is important to us, and Nivola has some really substantive work there that’s now in danger.”

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Nivola was the son of a mason, born in 1911 on the island of Sardinia. He initially trained there as a painter, before moving just outside Milan in 1931 to continue his studies on a scholarship. While at university, Nivola refused to make the fascist salute and was suspended for six months. Returning to school, he met his future wife, a Jewish woman from Germany named Ruth Guggenheim (who was not related to those other Guggenheims).

In 1939, the pair fled Italy for a new life in the United States, where Nivola became the art director of Interiors magazine. He met many famed artist-emigrés, such as Walter Gropius, Josef Alberts, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy. He also became fast friends with abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner.

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For four years, Nivola shared a studio with Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect who abandoned decorative styles in favor of purified, functional, and minimalist designs. Le Corbusier became a mentor and friend who guided Nivola toward an epiphany in the 1950s, when he came up with a unique sand-casting technique of sculpting, which involved pouring plaster or concrete into molds of wet sand.

Nivola’s innovative approach required speed and precision. He once compared sand-casting to “explorers who put plaster on the footprints of animals.” The results were often akin to cave painting, with natural elements such as shells or a handprint that complemented the colors and shapes he used. Nivola became known for his joyfully abstract depictions of democratic ideals, often celebrating themes of heroism and unity with a diversity of symbols and humanoid figures.

In 1954, Nivola created an enormous sculptural relief for the Olivetti Showroom on New York’s Fifth Avenue that helped to launch his career. That same year, he became the director of Harvard University’s design workshop. (The school later became a steward of Nivola’s legacy by installing a few of his creations on campus, including the relocated Olivetti relief.) But appreciation for the artist has dwindled. In 2006, Harvard Law School covered its Nivola work with a plain wall adorned with modern art.

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Throughout his career, Nivola endeavored to create a world where art binds communities together, and he often partnered with architects to raise money for monumental works. “Nivola championed the idea that arts should be accessible to everyone,” says Antonella Camarda, director of Museo Nivola in the artist’s hometown of Orani, Italy. “In fact, 15 of his metro New York projects were commissioned for New York City schools, highlighting the importance that Nivola placed on making his work for the community and in the art’s role within civic life.”

In 1968, for example, Nivola collaborated with the architect Richard G. Stein to create a playground for a public school in Queens. The men proposed a system of color-coded murals that segmented the space into different zones for play and rest. These paintings would include Nivola’s enigmatic graffiti, populated with humanoid figures and hieroglyphic doodles that expressed the type of roughhousing and fun of recess time.

Many artists avoid creating public art because it is expensive, bureaucratic, and time-consuming; politicians often underfund the work, and public criticism can ravage an artist’s reputation. Nivola did it anyway—at a moment when he could have made an otherwise lucrative career in the art market. He recognized the way that public art can humanize urban spaces. Seventeen of the artist’s works still exist in New York, yet despite their importance, many are in a state of disrepair.

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The Stephen Wise Recreation Area, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, captures the type of world Nivola was trying to build. Constructed in 1963 for the surrounding housing project, Nivola partnered with Richard Stein to fill an entire city block with avant-garde abstractions: cuboid cutouts in cement, a fountain made with two diamond-shaped boulders, concrete play horses, and a sand-casted relief carved high into the walls. Uniting these disparate elements is a freestanding sculpture in the northeast corner known as “The Nanny.” Created for a space that functions as a neighborhood playground, the strong but motherly figure seems to watch over the community, especially its young people.

But a trip uptown today finds these elements crumbling from neglect and riddled with graffiti. Advocates for conservation say that a survey of the damage alone will cost $14,000. Actual repairs could easily cost millions. As residents wait to see Nivola’s work restored, the condition of his sculptures continue to deteriorate.

Meanwhile, Nivola’s frescoes in Boston face even a more imminent threat, as the city prepares to replace government offices with a private development. His 1969 paintings greet visitors in the foyer with a three-tiered program of abstract symbols and strikingly realistic figures, including an allegory about the virtues of government, a family seated around the dinner table, and a hand depositing coins into a bank. It is a carefully composed symphony, incorporating Nivola’s many styles and quirks into one harmonious picture. The frescoes also serve as a subtle critique of American politics: It reminds viewers that the government is supposed to work for the people.

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“Losing the murals would mean losing an important representation of what government could be in a truly modern, egalitarian idiom,” says Roger Broome, an architect who spent the last seven years co-organizing the Costantino Nivola exhibition at The Cooper Union. “The mural is significant and shouldn’t be ignored,” adds Greg Galer, executive director of the Boston Preservation Alliance, a nonprofit working to save both the building and the painting.

Nivola spent a lifetime championing the virtues of good governance. It is a sad irony that now, the very institutions that he supported through his artworks seem to be uninterested in preserving them. “A work designed for a public space is less a work of art than a civic act,” the artist once said. “It concerns the ways in which we live together, and in which we influence each other.”


San Francisco’s Newest Bison Are Making Themselves at Home

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Five new urban ungulates are settling in.

Recently, the bison herd that thrives in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park welcomed five new additions to its seven grassy acres. The 550-pound youngsters seem to be getting the lay of the land just fine. “They’re eating and they’re drinking and they’re checking each other out,” bison keeper Elizabeth Kitazono, an animal keeper at the San Francisco Zoo, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Bison were first introduced to the park in the 1890s, and these big buddies are the first new faces in the herd since 2012. Since they raced out of the trailer that carried them from a northern California ranch, the yearlings have been eagerly getting to know their new digs, as well as the five old-timers who got there first.

The youngsters will spend 30 days separated from their wizened peers by a chain-link fence, but they can scope each other out from their neighboring pastures in the paddock. As soon as the new arrivals barreled out of the trailer, they scampered right over to the barrier to say hi. “Both sides regarded each other with curiosity,” wrote the Recreation & Parks Department in a news release. (The zoo tends to the bison themselves, while Recreation & Parks maintains the enclosure.)

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The amiability of it all probably has something to do with the fact that there are no guys in the bunch, Kitazono told the Chronicle. “It helps that they’re all females,” she said. In general, bison are social animals, “and when two groups in the wild are near each other, they will inevitably join up,” writes Jerod Merkle, a migration ecologist at the University of Wyoming, in an email.

But some group dynamics will be smoother than others. “Females and young males will be much more likely to group up with the current herd,” Merkle says. Merkle hasn’t studied the Golden Gate Park herd in particular, but based on his knowledge of dynamics in Yellowstone, Prince Albert, and Banff National Parks, as well as the scientific literature, he says, “adult males tend to spend most of the year on their own or in small bachelor groups.” The males typically only mingle with the rest of the herd during mating season, he adds—and then they’re likely to cozy up to several ladies.

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Still, friendship won’t necessarily prevail in groups of female bison, either. “Bison live in a fusion-fission society, where their groups come together and break up on a daily basis,” Merkle adds. While the animals might group up at first, he says, there’s a chance they will split off and do their own thing.

Depending on where the young bison are in their enclosure, human visitors can sometimes catch a glimpse of them, and sometime soon, we bipeds will be able to officially welcome the bison to the neighborhood. (The park’s 150th anniversary festivities, previously planned for April 4, 2020, are postponed in light of the outbreak of COVID-19.) When they do, housewarming gifts will not be necessary—the bison have all the Bermuda grass they could want.

How South Jersey Keeps Muskrat on the Menu

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An 80-year-old tradition brings a small town together to deep fry their mascot.

“When people hear you’re from Lower Alloways Creek, they ask you two questions,” Jerry Prouse, Jr., tells me in the fire department’s crowded kitchen. “First they ask, ‘Do you glow?’” alluding to the town’s nuclear plant. “Then they ask, ‘Do you eat muskrat?’”

The answer to the first question is, of course, no. The town is, however, about to celebrate its 81st annual Muskrat Dinner.

On this cloudless, early-March day, hundreds of residents will soon file into the fire station to sup on marshland rodents. They may be reviled varmints elsewhere, but here in Southern New Jersey, well-posed muskrats adorn murals and town fire trucks. The critter, whose pelt once fueled a lucrative local industry, is woven into the town’s identity. Turns out it deep-fries well, too.

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“I’ve been coming to these dinners all my life,” says Art Plummer, 77, the most senior member of the volunteer fire company, as he prepares the coffee machines. He’s what’s known as a “Cricker,” meaning he was born and raised here in the marshlands where the Delaware River meets the Atlantic. “The dinner you’ll see tonight’s same as dinners I grew up on.”

Locals of all ages slowly fill the banquet hall to near capacity—a patchwork of camo, flannel, and denim faded by genuine labor. Some stop to buy t-shirts bedecked with a muskrat wearing a fireman’s hat and holding a hose, as if to save its marshland home from an electrical fire.

“Man, I love the muskrat dinners,” says Plummer, smiling upon a swelling sea of longtime friends, neighbors, and family. “I hope it don’t stop, least while I’m still around.”


Muskrat once fed the region far more than an annual dinner. Since the 1920s, trappers from around the Delaware River Watershed made a living by selling pelts to overseas markets, where they became jacket liners, hats, and even teddy bears. (Many Canadian mounties still wear muskrat-lined hats, which the force considers ideal for keeping its officers warm.) The trade was often lucrative: A third-generation trapper showed the Philadelphia Inquirer records showing his grandfather made $11,299 in the 1926 season—that’s equivalent to roughly $165,000 today.

The leftover meat became the dinners that persist today. Neighboring towns Salem and Elsinboro have annual dinners too, but L.A.C.’s is the largest. Outside the station, the parking lot is filling rapidly.

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But the bedrock industry wasn’t bulletproof. As synthetic-fur alternatives emerged in response to animal-rights activism in the 1970s and ‘80s, demand for muskrat pelts abated. In 1981, 3,125 registered trappers culled around 290,000 muskrats. By 2015, the 1,340 remaining trappers harvested a mere 17,000. The Clean Water Act of 1972, ironically, didn’t help either. According to Andrew Burnett of the New Jersey Division of Fishery and Wildlife, less pollution throughout the Delaware River led to an explosion of native eagle, mink, and coyote populations across the marshland—bad news for supple, defenseless muskrats.

“They got no friends in the marsh,” says one firefighter over a warming deep-fryer. “Muskrat’s everything’s favorite food.”

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While muskrat is no longer the cash cow it once was, you wouldn’t know it from the annual dinner. It sold out in two days this year-–Plummer says it's always been that way. The running town joke is that the only way to get a ticket is if someone dies.

As the diners take their seats, the kitchen begins churning out platters of sides: green beans, sliced beets, peppered cabbage hash, potato salad, and dinner rolls. It’s an 80-year-old menu, and the sides are as fixed as the people assigned to them: The woman scooping cabbage has done so for years, same as the young man tasked with plating green beans.

The purists, however, will pass on sides altogether. They go all-in on muskrat.

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Preparing the muskrats is no small feat—the fire department butchers the animals themselves, then parboils them with onions, old bay, and “secret sauce” to cut the gaminess while tenderizing the meat. The legs are then finished in the deep-fryer. They figure each person will eat four rodents; 820 muskrats should feed the 200 in attendance this year.

The banquet hall’s limited space calls for seatings every hour, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Still, tonight’s affair is dwarfed by dinners of yesteryear, which drew 500 people and demanded over 2,500 muskrats.

The appetite is there. The sourcing, less so. To put on the dinner, the L.A.C. fire department buys muskrats from the few fur trappers who still take on the frigid, muddy task of trapping the creeks from December to March. A goodly representation of area youths in the dining hall indicates that South Jersey’s younger generations have inherited a taste for muskrat, but firehouse chief Steve Fisher worries trapping may be lost on them. “You got the kids on their iPads and all that, parents aren’t taking them out in the outdoors anymore.” He says he bought his own motorboat and started a trapping business on his own in seventh grade. Today, he’s one of the last full-time trappers left.

Fisher himself is working on getting his two teenage children and their friends into trapping. His eldest son needs no nudging. Last year, Fisher passed on the chairmanship of the dinner to his 24-year-old son Kyle, who now oversees the feast.

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But the decline in trapping remains an economic reality. While his father came from an era of “crab all summer, trap all winter,” Kyle must now add taxidermying to the mix to make ends meet. Every season is more precarious than the last, and this year, he says, was especially trying. His biggest customers, Chinese fur traders, were banned from travel at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. “They’d usually come to the fur auctions in Toronto,” he says, “now nobody can tell what the prices are gonna be this year.” Kyle’s generation may well witness muskrat-trapping in the marshes of South Jersey transition from livelihood to anachronism. “It’s just an excuse to get out in the meadows now,” he says.

Still, the dinner goes on. While he’s confident he procured sufficient meat this year, 2018 was different. An especially tame trapping season meant the fire company was forced to cancel the dinner for the first time. “There were a lot of upset people,” he says.

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While many quirky local traditions are lost to modernity, Lower Alloways Creek’s love for muskrat remains steadfast. It’s the mascot of the elementary school, and plastered around town on marquees and murals. A town-wide, person-to-person muskrat market helps keep trappers in business and sates appetites the rest of the year. Kyle says the Super Bowl tends to be a busy time of year.

Faced with the uneasy prospect of not having enough muskrat to sustain future dinners under his chairmanship. Kyle is resolute. “I’ll do everything in my power to get those meats,” he says.


The evening crescendos with the serving of the main course, as storied as it is divisive. “It’s an acquired taste,” says one woman with the Ladies Auxiliary. “One I’ve yet to acquire.”

Donald Hymer, however, is a muskrat evangelist. “It's probably the cleanest animal you’ll ever eat,” he says. “They don’t eat nothing but roots.” Indeed, a tinge of marshland mingles with the smokiness of the deep-fried game meat to create an incomparable scent. It permeates the room as a veteran volunteer unloads gloved fistfuls of fried, bony legs onto a parade of plates, the letters “L.A.C.” tattooed prominently on his forearm. Kyle bounces from the kitchen to the dining hall, greeting customers up front and lending a hand in back.

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The dark meat chews like roast beef, with a flavor somewhere between earthy and muddy. They look like darker, smaller chicken wings, with bones protruding from unexpected places. It’s bring-your-own-beverage and bring-your-own-hot-sauce, though most stick to water pitchers and the house sauce, a mild mixture of tomato juice and horseradish. I came to appreciate how the vinegary pepper cabbage cut through the rodent’s rich, dark meat.

Scheduled seatings be damned, the diners come and go at their leisure, forcing the kitchen into an hours-long montage of frying, scooping, and cleaning punctuated by the easy banter of decades-old friendships. Cakes from the Ladies Auxiliary hit the tables next to folks just starting out on their sides.

While the dinner slows with the sun setting over the marshland, the men mill about their posts, feigning business but really just enjoying each others’ company. I ask one firefighter about how well the meat holds up in the refrigerator, who shouts it over his shoulder to his comrades, inciting a barrage of answers shouted back at me. “There you go,” he says, while diving one last time into a deep tray of fried muskrat.

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Families and friends wrap up group photos before the mass of firefighters and helpers put out the leftovers and enjoy their fill. The ritual is so practiced, the dinner so ingrained into the town culture, that I quickly forget that the catalyst for such revelry is a rodent.

While it may not tempt the general public, muskrat binds this small town to a bygone era as much as to one another. “Muskrat’s not for everyone,” says Prouse, Jr., as the firefighters close shop. “But we’re okay with that.”

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

An Artist Immortalizes Hong Kong's Neon Signs, One Stitch at a Time

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Percy Lam uses embroidery to preserve an art form that's hanging by a thread.

Hong Kong’s iconic neon signs, which for nearly a century have cast the city’s streets in a psychedelic, supercharged glow, have been rapidly vanishing in recent years. The massive signs have inspired countless artists, especially photographers seduced by this fantasia of architecture and design. But the Hong Kong-born fiber artist Percy Lam favors a more unusual and tactile approach. Since 2017, Lam has painstakingly replicated dozens of neon signs from his homeland, hand-embroidering electric lines on an intimate scale.

Each piece in Lam’s ongoing project, Millions of Neon: The Light of Hong Kong, consists of technicolor stitches marching like ants through sheets of black paper, which measure just three inches square. Lam, 28, has finished more than 100 of these palm-sized works. Each one records the name, logo, and identity of businesses from restaurants to hotels to pawn shops. He spends up to seven hours on each one.

Neon first lit up Hong Kong in the 1930s. The luminous tubes enjoyed a golden age in the region from the ’50s through the ’80s, a period when advertising adopted new formats and Hong Kong’s economy surged so quickly that it was deemed one of four “Asian Tigers.” Once markers of dynamism, tourism, and nightlife, neon signs are now widely acknowledged as cultural heritage: In 2014, the local M+museum launched an online exhibition to map and document the history of Hong Kong’s signs, which are disappearing at an estimated rate of 3,000 a year. Its curators have since crowdsourced a database of nearly 4,500 photographs.

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Lam, who is currently a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, uses these images as source material. But instead of recreating them, he crops each scene so the resulting embroidery captures a fragment of a sign. The incomplete record invites closer observation of these objects, but also opens a question: How much of this history will never be described?

Atlas Obscura asked Lam about his process and dedication to this fading culture.

Why are Hong Kong’s neon signs vanishing?

A lot were built when there was no clear regulation. But as the city developed and businesses closed, signs were not being removed and maintained, so the government started to get concerned about safety. Those signs are big and heavy. Now, the government annually examines existing signage. If they don’t pass certain requirements, they get removed.

Another reason is that technology has developed. LED signs are cheaper and last longer. They are also easy to maintain and can provide more range of colors.

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What motivates you to replicate these signs?

Firstly, aesthetics. I previously used Pez candy and wrappers to build a Hong Kong cityscape. The colors and form reminded me of the architecture, then I began associating it with its neon culture. I thought I could replicate the signage using the wrappers, but I saw more of a similarity between the quality of thread and the light.

Secondly, nostalgia. I think about memories and my love of Hong Kong. I moved to Hawaiʻi when I was 17, so it was challenging to fit into U.S. culture. Even though I am a U.S. citizen, I don't really feel like my self is American. But I also feel a difficulty to connect to Hong Kong. So all my projects are a re-finding of identity—of who I feel I am.

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Stitching is such a time-consuming act. Why did you choose this particular medium for this project?

I feel like this not only celebrates the craft of hand embroidery but also the work of neon craftsmen. The lines can be seen as a mending, too, of the connection between myself and Hong Kong.

Have you seen any of these specific signs in person?

Not that I can remember. I don’t go to Hong Kong frequently, but when I visited last summer, I took some photographs of signs. I also contacted a local neon master because I wanted to learn how to bend Chinese characters. He told me stories of how the neon industry is dying: Now there are only seven active neon workshops left. That means that they don’t have projects all the time, but they are willing to do the work. He was pretty young—in his 40s—but a lot of workers are very old and will soon retire.

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Are there ongoing efforts to save this very particular visual culture of Hong Kong?

I’ve been following a Hong Kong group on Facebook that keeps track of the removal of signs. They ask people to notify them if they know a sign is getting taken down, so they can go there to create a final documentation of it. M+ has also saved some classic signage, but they can’t do it all, of course.

How do you hope to eventually display the series?

My initial idea was to make a quilt. But while I want to present the pieces as an object, I also imagine laying them on a long table, like specimens. Then people can walk around, sit down, and examine them. I want to provide a space for an audience to take a closer look, because I see this as an act of preservation. I’m creating an archive of a dying culture.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

How Native-Owned Restaurants Prioritize Native-Grown Ingredients

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Native American restaurants are sourcing traditional foods from near and far.

It’s easy to understand why fast-casual restaurants are popular with diners. They’re quick and often affordably priced, plus you get to build a meal to your exact tastes—think Chipotle’s burritos or Shake Shack’s burgers.

In Denver, the fast-casual capital, the concept has extended to Venezuelan arepas, South Indian curry bowls, and American Indian eats. The latter can be found at Tocabe, which serves build-your-own Indian tacos, fry breads, nachos, salads, and posu bowls. (“Posu” means “rice” in the Osage language.) Ordering one of the bowls feels routine. There’s the base (a scoop of wild rice or red quinoa with wheat berry), the meat or veggies, the beans, some mixed greens, the toppings (perhaps hominy and roasted green chiles), and a sauce. But though it looks familiar, this bowl is not like others.

While much of the food world continues to rally around the concept of “local first,” Tocabe lives by another motto: Native first, local second. In that one bowl, diners encounter wild rice from Red Lake Nation Foods, wheat berries from Ramona Farms, Séka Hills’ elderberries, and corn harvested by Bow & Arrow Brand LLC, all tribal- or Native-operated enterprises.

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When the first Tocabe location opened in December 2008, co-founders and co-owners Ben Jacobs, a member of the Osage Nation, and Matt Chandra had a simple goal: to serve indigenous foods and create a community restaurant, one that recalled Grayhorse, an eatery opened by Jacobs’ parents in Denver in 1989. “There were only certain times you could get our foods—at powwows, birthdays, [other] celebrations,” Jacobs says. He wanted the dishes and ingredients of his childhood to be more readily available, and to share the food traditions of other Native American tribes, too. Now, with two Colorado locations and a food truck, the duo’s concept is likely the largest American Indian restaurant chain in the country. “We’re reclaiming foods that have indigenous roots. We’re reclaiming the story of them,” Jacobs says.

Others are, too. In recent years, Native American eateries have found their footing across the country, such as Café Ohlone in California, Kai in Arizona, and Black Sheep Cafe in Utah. There’s an homage to indigenous cuisines inside the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., while Off the Rez, which started as a food truck in Seattle, now has a brick-and-mortar location in the Burke Museum.

While the mission of rewriting the narrative while serving delicious food is clear, the process to fulfill it has been slow. Not every proprietor needs or wants more than one location, but logistics and financials can make it a difficult prospect for those who do see a broader future. “It’s a fine balance of being culturally driven, culturally aware, and culturally appropriate while also being business-focused,” Jacobs says. “We spend more money on a lot of ingredients. A gallon of maple syrup could be $120.”

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Patience is necessary. As is flexibility. Jacobs has many conversations with Native purveyors and may wait years to gain access to an ingredient. If Washington’s Muckleshoot Tribe has huckleberries for sale, he’ll buy all he can and incorporate them into the barbecue sauce for Tocabe’s bison ribs. Or, he’ll make the sauce with the 100 pounds of chokecherries Red Lake Nation Foods has available, even if, realistically, he could utilize a lot more. The restaurant ran through 14,000 pounds of pinto beans last year. Jacobs would like to purchase them from New Mexico’s Navajo Pride, but the farm doesn’t ship in such large volumes yet, and he’s not able to drive to and from the property every month. Tocabe also buys most of its produce locally, but not from Native farms. Jacobs has discussed the prospect with Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Farm & Ranch Enterprise in southwestern Colorado, but growing produce is not within their capacity yet. (The farm does, however, grow the non-GMO corn Tocabe has used as a salad topping and in blue corn bread.)

For its part, Bow & Arrow Brand (the Farm & Ranch Enterprise’s retail and wholesale arm) hopes to expand its retail presence in the coming years. However, shelf space is competitive and its location—a couple of hundred miles away from the nearest big cities—adds to the challenges. Operations manager Simon Martinez says success depends on publicizing the company’s narrative. “It’s about where it’s grown. Who’s growing it,” he says. “Ben was one of our first customers. He’s able to share that story.”

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Some Native-owned restaurants go beyond sourcing from Native purveyors and instead rely on more traditional methods. Vincent Medina, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Louis Trevino, a member of the Ohlone Rumsen community, co-founded Café Ohlone. They hand-gather their ingredients—seasonal items that are indigenous to the Ohlone people and are found along California’s East Bay and in Carmel Valley—with help from their extended families. Even salt is harvested using age-old methods. “[We want to] eat the same foods our ancestors ate. Taste those same ingredients,” Medina says. “This place is old. It’s been settled for thousands of years, and the first people here are still present. There’s an established way of eating here.”

Medina and Trevino sometimes have to supplement what they’ve picked themselves with farmers’ market purchases because urbanization has made it more difficult to source certain ingredients. Acorns—“our most traditional food,” Medina says—used in acorn bread or bisque have to be gathered from oak groves farther east, because they can’t responsibly gather the amounts they need in urban East Bay. “We would, in the future, like to expand,” Medina says. “We want to be able to expand a presence within our homeland, as well as show people this is Ohlone land.” But doing so in a sustainable way is complicated. “We never want to overgather or act in a way irresponsible to these very delicate ecosystems,” he notes.

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Sharing dishes like Indian lettuce and sorrel salad with elderberries, venison meatballs, and yerba buena and bay laurel sorbet with the public is an opportunity to magnify Ohlone culture and ensure these foods are sustained in their communities. Expansion will only be possible if the duo can maintain the educational aspects of their intimate brunches and dinners, currently served in the back of a Berkeley bookstore.

Many of these ingredients have been part of people’s diets for generations, but Native purveyors say they are seeing a broader resurgence. “It’s a renaissance for a lot of our tribes across the country, as people are finally getting a voice. And that translates into the food as well,” says Brandy Button, whose parents, Ramona and Terry, founded Ramona Farms on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona in the 1970s. (Ramona’s heritage is Akimel O’otham and Tohono O’odham.) The farm, which is certified organic, is independently owned and doesn’t receive any government, tribal, or grant money.

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Though its retail list has steadily grown—and includes Arizona’s Whole Foods outposts—Ramona’s staff still rely on traditional methods, such as roasting and drying corn out in the open. As an agricultural producer, Ramona’s heirloom tepary beans, garbanzo beans, corn, and wheat are at the mercy of Mother Nature’s whims, but the Buttons have found being honest about what they have in stock and what quantities they can realistically produce has allowed them to build relationships and grow, while remaining true to their heritage. “These are nutritional foods. These are our ancestors’ foods. There’s nothing written in the history books about it, and that’s why it’s my passion to bring them back,” Ramona says.

A decade ago, in 2010, Tocabe’s founders told The Atlantic they hoped to have 13 locations “in the near future.” That plan hasn’t yet come to fruition. While Jacobs still plans to spread Tocabe beyond Colorado, he’s not in a rush. As indigenous foods grow more popular—and healthy, ancestral ways of eating continue to trend—American Indian eateries and purveyors are working together to find a path forward. “It’s a long, slow process,” Jacobs says. But, he adds, “We are just as present and forward-moving as any other culture. We, the Native culinary world, are developing what the voice of Native foods is so it’s not another story told by someone else.”

How Soviet Science Magazines Fantasized About Life in Outer Space

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The Iron Curtain went to infinity and beyond.

A tall stele rises from a deeply cratered surface, casting a long, ominous shadow past a row of smaller towers. Straight lines connect the structures to each other, like streets on a map or the projected moves in a game of cosmic chess. The Earth floats serenely in the dark sky, next to the logo that reads Tekhnika—molodezhi, Russian for Technology for the Youth, a Soviet popular science magazine that launched in 1933. The magazine cover, from 1969, illustrated an article highlighting photographs from Luna 9, the Soviet unmanned spacecraft that was the first to survive a landing on the Moon a few years earlier.

This imagined moonscape is one of more than 250 otherworldly images from the upcoming, visually delightful book, Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR, by Alexandra Sankova, director and founder of the Moscow Design Museum, which collaborated on the book with her. Space Age artwork proliferated alongside the Soviet Union’s popular science magazines—there were up to 200 titles at their peak—during the Cold War. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, in particular, the cosmos became a battleground for world powers jockeying for global dominance. Though the Space Age began with the successful launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1, it was the United States that, just three years after Luna 9, first put a man on a moonscape like the one on the magazine cover.

Soviet illustrations, even ones with whizzing UFOs and bafflingly futuristic machines, were not drawn to entertain as much as to educate and promote the Communist project. An open letter from cosmonauts to the public in a 1962 issue of Technology for the Youth read “... each of us going to the launch believes deeply that his labor (precisely labor!) makes the Soviet science and the Soviet man even more powerful, and brings closer that wonderful future—the communist future to which all humanity will arrive.” Scientists, astronauts, and aircraft engineers were treated like legends, since outer space was such an important idea in the Soviet Union, according to Sankova. “Achievements of the USSR in the field of space have become a powerful weapon of propaganda,” she says. Soviet citizens lived vicariously through such images, and even the more surreal and fantastical visuals—living in space, meeting new life forms—demonstrated that the idea of cultural revolution need not be limited to Earth.

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Atlas Obscura spoke with Sankova about alien life, the inspirations of Soviet artists, and how the first man on the Moon changed everything. The book comes out April 1, 2020.

What do you think informed or inspired these artists’ distinctive takes on other worlds?

Two directions served as an inspiration for the illustrations: the intensive development of the scientific and technical sphere and the serious enthusiasm of designers and artists for new discoveries in various fields of science as a whole. Artists often had technical education. Another important factor that influenced the visuals was the upsurge of publications, books, novels, and short stories, and the production of science fiction films in the 1920s and the 1950 and 1960s.

Long before the dream of space flight came true, inventors and philosophers were convinced that travel between planets and even universes would become possible with time. In Russia, these ideas became widespread after the works of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky were published. In them, the scientist expressed his view that intelligent life must exist not only on Earth, but throughout the whole universe. Tsiolkovsky became famous not only for his work in engineering, but also for the conviction there must exist highly developed extraterrestrial civilizations capable of influencing the organization of matter and the course of natural processes, and for the aspiration to find a road to the cosmic intelligence and establish an organic connection between man and space.

Soviet writers had expressed the most unbelievable versions of encountering extraterrestrial civilizations. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, space fantasy faded into the background, giving way to chronicles of the real space exploration program.

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Where do these illustrations fit in the overall aesthetic of Soviet design?

Soviet graphic design always developed actively and responded to the situation in the country quickly. This was primarily due to the fact that posters, magazines, books, brochures, etc., were the most effective means of propaganda. They were fast and cheap to manufacture, and they presented material in a striking and vivid way, making information visual and generally understood.

Publishing houses throughout the country collaborated with individual artists and workshops that were part of the Union of Artists of the USSR. Scientific and technical magazines and design research institutes often provided sanctuary and official employment to nonconformist, underground artists. Working for magazines, they embodied unusual, fantastic concepts, reflected on the essence of things, made conceptual designs for cover pages, and drew a new reality that had nothing to do with their real environment.

The usual Soviet aesthetic was subject to standardization and unification. That was the only design appropriate in a country with a planned economy, where it was almost impossible to introduce anything new. The space and defense industries were the only areas for which new production lines were built.

Space also became the leading motif in design and architecture starting from the 1960s. The so-called “cosmic style” was taking shape in Soviet architecture. The houses and public buildings being constructed started to resemble interplanetary ships, satellites, and flying saucers. On playgrounds, wondrous planets, rockets, and improvised scientific stations appeared, and the walls of kindergartens and schools were decorated with stars and galaxies. Images of cosmonauts began to appear in the design of metro stations. The space theme was also dominant in the planning and design of the folk festivals that filled the lives of Soviet people and heralded the latest achievements of science, such as the launching of new ships. The streets were filled with slogans and posters saying, “Communists pave the way to the stars,” and “Science and Communism are inseparable.”

In addition to science, many of the illustrations feature alien worlds. What relationship did the Soviet people have with this kind of science fiction?

There might have been secret research institutes that were engaged in detecting an alien mind, but we don’t know this for sure. Soviet people showed no great interest in alien worlds. My dad, a Soviet engineer, has been reading scientific and technical magazines for all his life. When I asked him if there were aliens, he answered that probably there were, but he had never wanted to meet them. Space exploration influenced mostly the creative class of Soviet people. Meetings with alien civilizations then became a popular topic in movies and animation.

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Based on the books and stories, Soviet film studios shot films and created incredible, fantastic cartoons involving scientists and cosmonauts as consultants for the production process. Many films became real hits: It was impossible to get into the showings, and gathered around television sets were found not only several generations of a family at once, but also friends and neighbors.

How did the Soviet vision of alternate worlds evolve over time, and did it change after the first Moon landing?

In the 1950s, illustrations in magazines became realistic: The romanticization of space and anticipation of new discoveries were replaced by pictures of the universe obtained through the latest research. After the first artificial satellite was launched it became the main protagonist of the popular science magazines, constantly appearing on their covers. The illustrators of Science and Life and Knowledge Is Power increasingly depicted the newest versions of rockets and ships and transmitted surprisingly believable (even if, in fact, they were just fantasies of artists) details about flights to the Moon. It seemed as if real color photographs taken from space were being published in the columns.

However, images of humans in open space remained extremely rare at that time. Practically all of the artists portrayed researchers and space flight pioneers inside the cosmodromes where rockets and flying saucers were launched, or in labs where the Moon or planets were shown on giant screens. In these pictures, man was not the main protagonist but part of a futuristic landscape, the mere inhabitant of far-off planets on the roads of which droplet-shaped aerodynamic machines flew. The illustrations in Technology for the Youth were an exception.

After the Soviets and Americans made their first space flights, the designs of magazines were immediately filled with images of man in space. The cosmonauts were docking, gazing through portholes upon the expanses of space, and walking through cities and command centers on other planets. The scale of the dreams became completely different. If in the 1950s people were thinking about what technical tools would allow them to start mastering the expanses of the universe, only a decade later artists were already designing star cities, greenhouses, and massive stations where people could live for years. The “Khrushchev Thaw” was reflected not only in the content of the illustrations, but also in the palette. The style became vivid and futuristic, full of bright colors, and other planets seemed like friendly, welcoming worlds. A new avant-garde cycle began.

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In the 1970s, there was a shift in magazine design towards psychedelic graphics with characters and details, unusual perspectives in illustrations, and more complicated storytelling. However, most magazines with fascinating scientific and technical content were still being illustrated primarily with black-and-white drawings and diagrams—the cover and color inserts were the only colorful elements. Against this backdrop, Technology for the Youth was considered the most vibrant publication for many years.

Then idealistic images vanished and the illustrations grew gloomier. By the 1980s, not a trace of the dreams of the 1960s or the futurology of the 1970s remained. The designs of print publications became as realistic as possible, the colors less vivid, and the plots of stories centered on the everyday life of cosmonauts and scientists. By this time, the space race was already in decline. In 1972, an agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States on cooperation in the research and use of outer space for peaceful purposes had been signed. The pace of space exploration slowed down, and reports about work in orbit became ordinary news.

What is your favorite alternate world illustration in the book?

I really like the covers of Knowledge Is Power No. 12, 1969, and No. 11, 1971. They are abstract and convey the feeling that there are some parallel realities, other micro- and macro-worlds. Abstract covers depicting a very intuitive, associative artistic image of the unknown distinguish this magazine from other popular science publications having more realistic images on their covers.

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Does the Soviet view of space still have resonance today?

The interest in it is returning, or it’s more correct to say that the interest has never faded. The topics popular in the 1960s and 1980s are now relevant again—ecology, alternative energy, reasonable consumption, overpopulation, and waste recycling. Back then it was regarded as futurology, but for us it’s already the reality.

Today, perhaps, a certain romanticism has vanished. Space is not seen as an end in itself anymore, now it is a means of survival: a place harmful production can be transferred to or where new sources of energy can be found.

There is an announcement at the Roskosmos website (the Russian state space corporation) inviting young people to join the cosmonaut program. I found it while preparing for this interview. However, there is no hype around this, and the announcement was reposted neither in the press, nor by social media. Now everyone realizes that the job of a cosmonaut or astronaut is the same as any other.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Can a Salamander Find Salvation in San Antonio?

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A zoo lab's successful captive-breeding program may be the best hope for this critically endangered amphibian.

The last stronghold of an enigmatic amphibian is in the middle of Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. But what the species really needs to survive in the wild is what’s happening in a zoo lab in Texas—a big birthday bash.

“There were eggs all over the place,” says Bekky Muscher-Hodges, manager of the San Antonio Zoo’s Center for Conservation and Research (CCR). She was the first to spot dozens of small jelly orbs—laid in February by the center’s dozens of adult reticulated flatwoods salamanders (Ambystoma bishopi)—spread throughout the 40-gallon breeding tank. “I was happy dancing and ugly crying all around the lab, madly texting pictures [to CCR colleagues].”

Her celebration is warranted: The team has been trying for more than a decade to breed these amphibians in captivity, as A. bishopi is one of the most critically endangered salamanders on Earth. Now, Muscher-Hodges says, there’s a batch of eggs that should hatch in the next week or so.

A vital part of a healthy ecosystem, the species—officially declared endangered in 2009—once thrived in the pine flatwoods and savannas of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. “They have declined by about 90 percent in the last 20 years,” says wildlife biologist Harold Mitchell of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), who cites habitat loss from agriculture and commercial development, invasive predators, disease, fire suppression, and climate change as key factors.

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Today, just one self-sustaining population remains, on the Florida Air Force base. With its network of ponds and restored longleaf pine habitat on the Choctawhatchee Bay, says Mitchell, “Eglin is the mothership for this species” (though there’s also one smaller but still important population in ponds just outside of Eglin).

Reticulated flatwoods salamanders—finger-length amphibians with salt-and-pepper coloring and stout tails—spend most of their adult lives burrowed underground, where they’re tough to study. But they do emerge to mate, with winter rains triggering their reproduction.

“Changes in precipitation immediately mess with these guys, because they lay eggs in depressions that need to fill with rainwater [for the eggs to hatch],” says Danté Fenolio, president of CCR. (The larval salamanders go through a brief aquatic phase before morphing into land-dwellers and heading underground.) “If that doesn’t happen, the entire year’s recruitment is lost.”

Indeed, with winter rains starting later and the landscape drying up earlier in recent decades, “their breeding season has been truncated, which is a big threat to their survival,” says Mitchell.

In the lab, the San Antonio Zoo team, having developed its own care-and-feeding methods, has had great success raising these salamanders from wild eggs to adulthood. But the big prize—captive-laid eggs—had eluded them. For the past two years, Muscher-Hodges has been tweaking the salamanders’ captive environment—adjusting the temperature and humidity, incorporating native plants—to better mimic their natural habitat, in hopes of encouraging the adults to lay.

“We’d spy on them at night, to see if we could catch them” in the act, she says. They saw hopeful signs—salamanders following each other around, genital swellings. Still, “actually coming in to find the eggs, after all our hard work, was pretty mind-blowing.”

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Being able to captive-breed can help ensure an endangered species’ long-term survival in the wild. In order to remain viable, says Mitchell, these salamanders need about 100 metapopulations—separated groups that interact and breed with one another—each of which requires some 200 acres of land and three occupied ponds. “There’s a whole formula to determine what will sustain them—how many are needed, and how much land—so they can survive random events [like natural disasters],” he says.

Based on those figures, the plan would be to return these animals to where they once thrived “while avoiding inbreeding and protecting the genes that are already out there,” he says. Most likely, captive-bred salamanders will eventually be placed in areas where A. bishopi has disappeared, rather than where the species is still present, “to avoid mixing the soup with too many ingredients.”

The first translocation—assuming the breeding takes off from here—may be to a forest fragment in southwestern Georgia that’s within the salamanders’ original range.

Saving the reticulated flatwoods salamander has taken a broad collaboration, notes Fenolio, including the USFWS, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Eglin Air Force Base, and Virginia Tech, all cooperating with the San Antonio conservation team. “Each partner is handling unique aspects ranging from field studies to lab work, and all are essential,” he says.

It’s worth the group effort, the experts agree. “Salamanders are a hard sell compared with the furry and the feathered,” says Mitchell. “But these animals are an important part of the landscape, indicative of a complete and functioning ecosystem. We are weaker without them.”

“Imagine cutting away strands of a circular spider web,” says Fenolio, and you get a sense of the effect of losing an animal like this salamander. “If we keep tinkering with nature by snipping away at biodiversity, at some point the entire web will collapse.”

An Elegy for Colombia's Tropical Glaciers

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"We are the place on Earth where glaciers shouldn't be, and they are here.”

As Jorge Luis Ceballos scales the steep mountain slope, the memories of the past 15 years wash over him. His shoes crunch on frigid gray rock. Only a few years before, it was covered in the ice of Nevado Santa Isabel, one of Colombia’s few remaining “tropical glaciers.” But he’s watched it disappear before his eyes, leaving behind only dates, spray-painted in red on nearby rocks—1960, 1970, 2003, 2006, 2013, 2017—each farther up the mountain than the one before. According to the latest research, in 30 years or less, all that will be left of Colombia’s glaciers will be those numbers.

“This is a glacier that is perishing,” Ceballos, 56, says, his backpack full of heavy scientific gear. The thin scientist comes across a lingering patch of wet, crackling ice and lets his hiking pole sink into it. “It’s dying.”

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The very existence of tropical glaciers—rivers of ice near the equator—seems to defy logic: flukes of weather, nature, and topography. These formations survive in the tropics because of both elevation, high in the mountains, and connections with lower ecosystems—in this case Andean forest and alpine grassland called páramo that keep them fed with precipitation.

Only three zones of the world have such glaciers: the Andes (Peru has the most tropical glaciers by far), scattered mountains in East Africa, and parts of island Southeast Asia. Existing in such a precarious balance, it’s little surprise that these ice islands in the sky are disappearing rapidly.

“They are truly at the front line of climate change,” says French glaciologist and science television host Heidi Sevestre. “These are not glaciers that are going to disappear in 100, 200 years, these are glaciers that are going to disappear in the next few years.”

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As a whole, Colombia has already lost 90 percent of its ice, according to a report by Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology, and Environmental Studies (IDEAM).

Ceballos has tracked these melts since 2005, the first year the government began to collect comprehensive data on them. Now Ceballos travels through Colombia’s coffee region and up into the sky once a month to reach the most “terminally ill” of the six, Nevado Santa Isabel.

The glaciologist—sometimes with a team, sometimes alone—winds along a rocky road in a 4x4, first through dense jungle that fades into highland meadows, where he hikes for hours among espeletia plants, sunflower relatives also known as “frailejones” or "big monks." With mules led by a local farmer lugging scientific equipment, Ceballos arrives at the ice cap, which sits wedged, almost hidden, in a crook of the mountain. Few Colombians even know the country has glaciers amidst its snow-covered peaks.

Among the six glaciers in the country, and one more in Venezuela, El Cocuy is the strongest, Ceballos says. It winds between 21 robust snow peaks up against the Venezuela border. The Sierra Nevada lies in indigenous lands near the northern coastal city of Santa Marta, hovering over dense jungle and largely inaccessible even to the scientists attempting to study it. In neighboring Venezuela, Humboldt is even more deteriorated than even Santa Isabel, and is letting out its last gasp.

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“As a scientist you're not supposed to talk about emotions, you're not supposed to talk about the way you feel,” says Sevestre. “But you couldn't help but feel so sorry for these glaciers.”

For years Ceballos’ work has involved drawing lines—literally—as he spray-paints rocks to mark the level of the ice, and then returns to see how much farther the ice has retreated. He soon connected with researchers in Peru and Argentina—which have many more glaciers than Colombia—and increased the detail of his studies by drilling holes in the ice to document the melt with long orange poles.

“It was the first data, you could know how a glacier here in Colombia behaved,” he explains. “How it grows, and shrinks, grows, shrinks. We began to see that it was shrinking more than it was growing.”

Surrounded by low-hanging clouds, Ceballos and his assistant Andres Cruz Mendoza check the poles sticking out of the ice, take measurements and photographs, and then scrawl the bleak results into a notebook.

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In just a month, the glacier had lost, staggeringly, nearly nine feet of depth. Ceballos says his hope has gone with it.

“The damage has already been done,” he says. It’s almost as if he’s playing historian when he visits nearby schools to explain his work. “Now I'm turning into a storyteller about what happened.”

Young activist Marcela Fernández has the same impulse, but where Ceballos saw an elegy, she saw a call to action.

The Colombian was surprised to learn—just a year ago—that the glaciers even existed, when she read a story about their decline in a Colombian newspaper. They were “disappearing in silence,” she says, so she formed Cumbres Blancas, a coalition of glaciologists, including Ceballos and Sevestre, photographers, mountaineers, and activists dedicated to at least documenting the glaciers.

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“We have to say goodbye properly. If they are going to disappear, they are not just going to go away and vanish all of the sudden,” she says. “They need company, we need pictures, we need to document. You don't let a terminally ill person die alone. That's what's happening with our glaciers.”

Sevestre is particularly concerned about what the loss of the glaciers will mean for local populations who rely on them as sources of water. For Fernández, the rapid melts are also a sign of pieces of indigenous and Colombian culture withering away.

Deep in the Santa Marta mountains, near the Sierra Nevada glacier, the Kogi indigenous people believe that humankind’s purpose is to maintain the nature around them. The culture worships the interconnected ecosystems represented by their glacier—the cycle of water, snow, and ice that also feeds the páramo and the dense jungles below. Their traditional dress includes white, bell-shaped hats to represent the snow peaks.

“They know everything is interconnected and that the drop of water that comes from up there, Fernández says, “it's the one that feeds the crop, it's the one that makes snow clouds.”

Scientists believe these glaciers are past saving, but Fernández says Cumbres Blancas hopes to use their example to spur action to save other tropical glaciers around the world.

In recent months they’ve worked on a documentary to pressure Colombia’s government to allocate more funds to preserving the glaciers and showing the public that they exist. If nothing else, they want Santa Isabel to stand as a warning.

“We want to make Colombia the place where this glacier revolution starts,” she says.

“We are not Antarctica, but we don't have to be Antarctica. We are the place on Earth where glaciers shouldn't be, and they are here,” she adds. “We still have hope, and we still have snow.”

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As Ceballos treks along Santa Isabel, he peers up at the cracks zig-zagging up the ice face, streaked with ash from the nearby volcano. They seem to mirror his mood.

“It makes me feel …” he says, trailing off.

“Nostalgia?” asks Mendoza.

“No,” he answers, “something more feo, ugly.”


In 1893, a Swedish Playwright Thought He’d Captured the Stars

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August Strindberg’s failed photography experiment continued to evolve, chemically and beautifully, long after his death.

August Strindberg wanted to get closer to reality. The storied 19th-century Swedish playwright, essayist, poet, and painter was also an avid photographer, but he refused to use lenses. He even dismissed the ones in human eyes, on the grounds that they distort the “real” world. So in the interest of taking lens-free photos, he began fiddling with photograms and pinhole cameras. But even that wasn’t enough. He needed something more immediate.

On a crisp winter day in 1893, Strindberg took a number of photographic plates into the Austrian night, outside the village of Dornach, and laid them under the stars in a tub filled with developer, so that he could capture the heavens. To everyone but Strindberg, it went terribly.

His attempt at a new photographic medium, which he called a celestograph, is actually a chemigram—an image created when chemicals react with photosensitive material. The cloudy, particulate-speckled exposures were awesome to Strindberg, who thought he'd captured the starry skies in all their galaxy-laden, supernova-infused splendor. (To the unfamiliar eye, the celestographs resemble very moldy cheese, or Mark Rothko paintings. They are dark, liminal, and soft.)

The amateur astronomer wrote to a friend, “I have worked like a devil and have traced the movements of the moon and the real appearance of the firmament on a laid-out photographic plate, independent from our misleading eye.”

Though he was wrong, and the project stalled after just 16 celestographs, Strindberg remained sure he was right up until his death, in 1912.

Yet his celestographs continued to evolve, as the photoreactive plates accrued exposure in the years after they were placed in the archives of Sweden’s Nordic Museum and, later, the National Library of Sweden.

As Douglas Feuk wrote in the journal Cabinet, ink stains—perhaps from a burst pen in some archival drawer—chemically altered the plates and left dark blotches on them. An unseen hand touched them as well, at some point after Strindberg’s death, leaving ghostly fingerprints on one of the celestographs, and adding a surreal touch to the artwork. The compositions—originally crafted under the sky, to mirror it—also reflected their journey through the decades.

Though the actual celestograph plates have disappeared—in museums, objects can sometimes hide in plain sight, or vanish altogether—a collection of these faux-astral exposures remain part of the National Library of Sweden’s online library. These are a few of them.

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The Archaeology of Those Weird Metal Things That Open Your Soda Can

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Meet the man building the world's biggest—and probably only—reference collection of pull tabs.

Jobbe Wijnen keeps his collection organized. That’s what any typologist must do with their most precious material—the cache against which all other finds are measured. After all, that’s what museums around the world do with their invaluable type specimens—the individual examples that embody and define a species’ characteristics and help researchers determine whether, say, a leech they find in their fieldwork is thrillingly new to science or the cousin of one floating in a jar inside a museum cabinet.

Wijnen is working to amass a reference collection of scores of types, so that any researcher following in his footsteps can examine what they’ve found and slot it into the appropriate place on the taxonomic family tree. Yet unlike some of his peers, Wijnen doesn’t need any jars, preservatives, or cabinets: His specimens are small, and designed to be sturdy. The representatives of the 70-plus types he has recorded so far are cradled in plastic sleeves—the kind a coin collector might use to store her loot. They fit easily inside a leather binder about the size of a photo album.

Wijnen’s collection suggests that he is probably the world’s most passionate and rigorous collector of pull tabs—those humble little things that help you crack open anything from tins of fish to cans of beer.

The whole concept of Wijnen’s project, which he calls Pull Tab Archeology, started out as a joke. By trade, he’s a contemporary archaeologist, studying the physical evidence that humans have left behind over the last several decades. Instead of plumbing the ground for items that have been there for centuries, or even millennia, he focuses on things that have only been around since the 20th or 21st centuries.

In the Netherlands, where Wijnen lives and works, many archaeologists had long swooned only over things that are well and truly old, he says, and hadn’t been especially keen on newer finds. Until fairly recently, he adds, anything more recent than the medieval period wasn’t particularly alluring to old-school archaeologists. But in the past few decades, archaeologists began doubling down on their efforts to excavate World War II–era sites. “It was completely a new duck in the pond,” says Wijnen.

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About 10 years ago he was excavating some World War II–era trenches around the Grebbeberg—a hill in Rhenen that was the site of a bloody defense against German forces—and found that the top layer of soil was littered with pull tabs. Over the next few years, he started facetiously kicking around the notion of collecting as many as he could, and seeing how they stacked up against one another.

As he did, he realized that he had hit on a solid idea. “I started to realize, ‘Whoa, this is not just a joke,’” he says. “There’s much more to learn here than I would have expected.”


Though archaeologists probably wouldn’t throw in the trowel on honest-to-goodness treasure, many also realize that trash can be a goldmine, because the things we shed in the course of our daily lives offer unfiltered insight into what we buy and how we live.

“You could argue that trash is one of the things that make us human,” Rebecca O’Sullivan, a public archaeologist with the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN), said on an episode of “The Materialists,” the archaeology podcast she co-hosts. “There’s truly nothing that archaeologists love more than garbage.”

Bits of trash are valuable snapshots of how people went about their days. As they cruised down U.S. Route 66, for instance, winding from America’s Midwest to California, drivers and passengers once lobbed cans, bottles, and the dregs of picnics out their windows. That trash accumulated in mounds just pitching distance from the asphalt, and researchers have learned much about midcentury recreation by taking stock of what those heaps held.

“It’s funny that someone would throw these bottles or cans out and not think that in 50 years they’d be in a museum somewhere,” William Parker, chief of science and resource management at Petrified Forest National Park (the only one that contains a segment of the old asphalt artery), told Atlas Obscura last fall. “As we progress through time, things are constantly becoming historic.”

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Most people have probably handled a pull tab to crack open a can of soda or soup, and would recognize the object without having looked particularly closely at it. The metal gizmos all look somewhat similar—a bit like a freshly filed fingernail—but they have scores of subtle differences that point to the time and place they were manufactured.

Canned drinks really took off after the second World War, and over the next few decades, punch-top cans gave way to tabbed ones. Some pull tabs are single loops, like little rings that someone would stick a finger through; others, known as “Sta-Tabs,” were designed to push a tear strip into the can to create an opening, while the tab remained on the can so it didn't wind up on the ground. Different tabs have different perforations, different angles, and slews of other other variations.

Wijnen is keen to get a handle on how different manufacturers’ styles have varied across time and place. “Two types that I know of—very early ones, called zip-tops and U-tabs—have never been produced in Europe, as far as I know,” he says.

Looking for something so mundane can turn out to be a little wondrous. Pull tabs are ubiquitous, but also easy to overlook—they blend into the background of the various bits of trash, debris, leaf litter freckling the ground. “It’s a silly thing that no one looks at normally,” Wijnen says. “But when you do, you start seeing them everywhere.”

He recalls one collaborator in Saratov, Russia, saying that he wanted to comb his neighborhood for tabs, but didn’t expect to find any there. “Then he went out to look for them,” Wijnen says, “and said, ‘Oh, my God—they’re everywhere.’”

Parks, schoolyards, and areas around restaurants or delis are often fruitful places for tab-hunting, Wijnen says. Some tabs, decades old, might suddenly be revealed again by a gust of wind. “Aluminum deteriorates very poorly,” he says. “[Tabs] stay in the environment for a long time.”

Wijnen says that before 2018, he was a bit of a lone wolf, prowling for tabs on his own, with occasional help from colleagues who would pass their finds on to him. Then, “in 2018, I said, ‘Let’s do it big time, and do it globally, and ask everyone in the world to send me the pull tabs they can find.” So far, he has amassed more than 3,060 tabs.

“Suddenly I get an envelope in my mailbox from Taiwan or Shanghai or Australia or Texas,” he says, “and I never would have found them myself because I don’t have time or money to travel.”

Ideally, these donated tabs come with beautifully precise location information, down to an address where they were collected. That allows Wijnen to map them all.

(One note before you scoop up a bunch of old tabs: Different countries have different laws about what is considered historic, and under what circumstances something can be moved. It’s a good idea to look into the regulations where you are, lest you violate a heritage law.)

If you can participate, Wijnen hopes you will. “I want people to know that it’s an interesting topic if you look closely at it,” he says. Trawling for these little metal bits of the past, he adds, is a way of connecting with stories that are often mainly accessible to people with credentials and equipment.

“I like the idea that this is a kind of archaeology that everyone can do for themselves.”

The Hidden Lives of Laundry Workers in Pakistan's Biggest City

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Karachi once depended on its dhobi ghat. Now the neighborhood is struggling to survive.

Along the banks of the Liyari River in Karachi, Pakistan, a vast outdoor laundromat stretches for more than a mile. The largest and oldest open-air washing facility in a city of 15 million, Juna Dhobi Ghat has been home and workplace for thousands of dhobis, or professional laundry workers. This centuries-old community can seem wary to the point of mistrust. Muhammad Naqeel, a third-generation laundry worker in his fifties, stands beside a clothesline of weather-beaten towels. “If you’re here for a detergent commercial that will humiliate us, it’s already been done,” he says. But efforts to earn his trust eventually pay off, and his wrinkled face rearranges itself into a smile.

Naqeel is one of the last few dhobis in Karachi. He learned the trade from his father, starting when he was eight. In the dhobi ghat of his childhood, dhobis lined up early—often starting at 4 a.m.—just to get a turn to wash their ample bundles of clothes. After they completed the sorting, marking, washing, flogging, starching, drying, and ironing process, they loaded the clothes on to their donkey carts for delivery. Naqeel accompanied his father to family homes to tally clothes, where he felt like “one of their relatives.”

In the years after 1947, when Partition split the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, dhobis served as a marker of social status and stability. “The weekly visit of the dhobi was an integral part of our childhood,” says Almas Riaz, a program director at an elementary school. “Inviting the dhobi to a family wedding, or attending his, was not unheard of.” Some Pakistani students still sing poems about dhobis, to learn to count in Urdu.

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But this nostalgia is fading, says Sajjad Ahmad, who teaches social science courses at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi. “Now, decision making has shifted largely from older generations to this lot in their 30s and 40s, who are choosing convenience over tradition,” he explains. Ghazanfar Bajwa, a graduate student, adds, “During Pakistan’s industrial development, we’ve moved towards mechanization. More middle-class homes have washing machines.”

Today, Juna Dhobi Ghat seems faded and at risk of irrelevance. Its poverty sets it apart from similar neighborhoods in India or Singapore; it has resisted modernization and subsequent economies of scale. Coal-powered irons remain the norm, and electric washing machines remain uncommon. Kilns rage to “cook” out stains. Instead of paying for clothespins, dhobis here ingeniously intertwine their clotheslines between precariously anchored bamboo poles. Disintegrating ropes still stretch over crumbling cement tubs.

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At 9 a.m. one morning, which is typically time for a last dash of clothes wringing, only a few weary dhobis are trickling in. They count and sort their bundles, hoping to reach that elusive saikhra, which means 100, Naqeel says. He and his peers wash 100 items of clothing for 1,000 Pakistani rupees—less than $7, including donkey-cart delivery. (The cart is expensive in itself: To purchase one, dhobis often join an informal money-lending system called a committee, and feeding the donkey costs around two dollars a day, Naqeel says.)

Farther down the bank, the acrid smell of chemicals coalesces with smog and waste in the river. The term “river” may be a misnomer: “The Liyari River was historically a river with clean water, but unplanned urbanization and dramatic population increase have rendered it a channel for sewage and unfiltered industrial waste,” says Ahmad, the international relations lecturer.

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The disappearance of clean water was an existential threat to business for dhobis. In 2017, following the first detailed study of the river, one of Pakistan’s leading newspapers ran a story about the “toxic river” and its risks to public health. It described high concentrations of cyanide, lead, arsenic, and phenol, which can cause cancer and other conditions.

Concerns about hygiene escalated with the construction of the Liyari Expressway, in 2018. “Our civic authorities failed in garbage disposal,” says Ahmad. “The heaps of garbage around the dhobi ghat stink and often give a foul smell to clothes.” Forced evictions by the Karachi City Government made way for construction, shrinking the area available to dhobis.

Naqeel insists that dhobis are conscientious. “We take clothes home to wash in clean water, then lug them back to dry.” Eight hours of daily power outages and frequent gas shortages don’t help. He says that he and his wife often sleep only a few hours, so that they can complete the ironing process.

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According to Naqeel, many Pakistanis lack respect for the workers who do their laundry. “We all have the right to dignity,” he says. Recently, he visited the grandchildren of a family he had served for decades. They offered him water—but it came in a grimy plastic cup. “I wash your clothes, which are apparently clean enough for you to pray or attend weddings in,” he remembers telling them. “But when it comes to drinking from the same glass, you deem me dirty, sub-human.” Naqeel now prefers to get his business from the dry-cleaners, who outsource their excess laundry.

The ghat is a part of Naqeel now. After years of work with harsh chemicals, his hands are weathered and scarred. When he created a bank account, his severely eroded fingerprints did not register on the biometric verification machine.

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Muhammad Jameel, also a third generation dhobi, finds his business the old-fashioned way, because he does not want to pay a middle man. Sitting under a makeshift tent, made from a blanket draped over clotheslines, he and others mark clothes. It is quieter here; the sound of bulldozers and overhead traffic is muffled, and there is great solidarity amongst the dhobis. It is nearly lunch time, and these men always eat together.

Jameel’s eyes shine with pride when he talks about his son, who went to primary school and now works as a salesman in a local retail shop. Through his connections, Jameel has gotten a few customers in more affluent neighborhoods of the city. His greatest fear now is losing an “imported item,” which could set him back weeks in earnings.

As he talks, Jameel stacks the clean clothes on his shoulder. Will he ever leave the profession? “My grandparents, parents, and family members are all buried right over there,” he says, pointing toward the nearby Mewashah cemetery. “We never really leave the ghat.”

Why Soviet Russia Named a Tomato After an American Celebrity

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Singer, actor, activist...tomato?

In 1990, Marina Danilenko founded a seed business with her mother. As the owner of the first private seed company in Moscow, she purchased seeds from a network of farms and eventually sold approximately 500,000 packets through the mail to Russian gardeners.

One of her specialties was tomatoes, as her mother was a tomato collector. These days, Russia is the 12th largest tomato producer in the world. While that’s fairly far down the list, tomatoes are extremely popular in Russia, and are grown in almost 90 percent of home gardens. They're a vital ingredient in soups, stews, and sauces, and pickled tomatoes are eaten throughout the year.

Many Russian tomatoes have evocative names. There’s the Mother Russia and the Black Sea Man. But perhaps the most unusual of all is the Paul Robeson tomato. Named after the African-American singer, actor, and activist, his namesake tomato has become a cult favorite in American gardens.

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Born in 1898, Robeson was born to a once-enslaved father and a mother from a Quaker family. While attending Rutgers University, he won 15 varsity letters in a variety of sports and graduated as valedictorian of his class. At Columbia Law School, he met his future wife, Eslanda “Essie” Goode, who convinced him to try acting. (Robeson was already well-known throughout New York’s black community for his singing voice.) In the end, Robeson only practiced law briefly, quitting his firm when a white secretary refused to take dictation from him.

While still in school, he played his first role, as the lead in the play Simon of Cyrene. Then, in 1924, he played the lead role in Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun Got Wings, which led to other lead roles in Othello and The Emperor Jones. However, Robeson may be best known for his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” in the musical Show Boat, which he performed onstage and on film.

As he found fame and fortune, Robeson became increasingly interested in the rights of workers, particularly those of southern blacks. Soon, he found himself sympathizing with Communist causes throughout the world. When Robeson traveled to Moscow in 1934, he said, “Here I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life.”

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During his trip to Germany just days before, he was attacked by Nazis. In contrast, in the Soviet Union, he was received by adoring and respectful crowds. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin even marketed the Soviet Union as a place of opportunity and equality for African-Americans. Ultimately, around 18,000 African-Americans traveled there in the 1930s.

By the 1940s, Robeson became active politically. He espoused that unions were crucial to civil rights, and condemned discrimination and violence against African-Americans. His affiliation with both the Civil Rights Congress and the Council on African Affairs made him a target for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In 1950, the State Department denied Robeson a passport, stating that “his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the US should not be aired in foreign countries.” Robeson testified before Congress again in 1956, after he would not sign an affidavit saying that he was not a Communist. When asked why he had not remained in the Soviet Union, he replied, "because my father was a slave and my people died to build the United States and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you.”

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Despite his bravery, Robeson’s efforts took their toll. His later years were marked by bipolar depression and suicide attempts. His son believed both were due to years of government harassment and surveillance. After years of seclusion, Robeson died at age 77 in 1976.

Less than two decades later, Kent Whealy, the co-founder of Seed Savers Exchange and an advocate for organic agriculture and saving heirloom seeds, met Danilenko in Moscow. After learning about her company, he arranged for her to visit the United States for mentorship (as most Russians did not know how to operate a business after the collapse of the Soviet Union). In 1992, Danilenko visited Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Mineral, Virginia, for three days to learn about the operation of a seed company.

In return, over the course of two visits to the United States, Danilenko donated 170 varieties of Russian tomatoes to the Seed Savers Exchange—including a tomato called the "Pol Robeson." In turn, Jeff McCormack, founder of the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, introduced the tomato to the American public via their catalog.

Although it is unknown who developed or named this tomato, it can be easily surmised that the name derives from its color once it ripens. The Paul Robeson is a brick red tomato that often takes on a black hue. In Danilenko’s words to McCormack, “the more the summer, the more the black color.” But the moniker is also a tribute. Even as he was denounced in the United States, Robeson remained beloved in Russia. In 1952 he received the Stalin Prize, which was the highest honorary distinction in the country, and in 1964, an article in the Russian magazine Krugozor stated, “Whoever heard Paul Robson at least once will not forget his voice. We know well this big man with the eyes of a wiseacre and the smile of a child, a great singer and a courageous citizen, whose name has become a symbol of a freedom fighter.”

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The seeds can be purchased from heirloom seed companies (such as Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange). Often, though, they sell out immediately. Both seed catalogs and those lucky enough to have tried it have described it as sweet, smoky, complex, and tangy.

Although he was often vilified in life by his government, Robeson’s artistic and civil rights work has resonated long after his death. That everyone, regardless of race or creed, can enjoy the Paul Robeson tomato is the ideal testament to his legacy.

Sold: An Ornate Piano Found on a World War II Battlefield

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It traveled three continents, survived desert warfare, and accidentally ended up with a man who'd been looking for it all along.

In 1942, after driving the German forces out of El Alamein in northern Egypt, British troops went minesweeping and—surprisingly, one can only imagine—heard music come out of the ground. Buried beneath the sand was a piano, encased in plaster, and its strings had vibrated in response to the magnets of the minesweepers. For reasons no one could divine, the Nazis had lugged this instrument through the Libyan Desert all the way to El Alamein, before abandoning it upon retreat.

Whether out of curiosity, appreciation, or sheer indifference, the British opted not to destroy the instrument and lugged it themselves to Tel Aviv, where they unloaded it rather unceremoniously, without peeking inside the plaster. We can’t know for sure why they didn’t just discard it, though we can be glad: It was no ordinary piano, but the famous, ornately decorated Siena Pianoforte, also known as the Harp of David, to list just two of its acquired titles. Nearly 80 years after it was pulled out of the sand, the adventurous piano recently sold for $320,000 at Winner’s Auctions in Jerusalem.

An immaculate instrument distinguished by ornate woodwork, it had been played by some of Europe’s best-known musicians. The piano had belonged to the Italian royal family before the Nazis decided they’d rather have it for themselves. When the British found it at El Alamein—its visual splendor obscured by that protective plaster—they knew nothing of its illustrious history, or what it was worth. They certainly didn’t know that the best part of the story was yet to come.

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According to a 1955 article in Time, work on the piano began around 1800, in Turin. Rumor has it that harpsichord maker Sebastian Marchisio used wood from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem—unlikely, perhaps, but not necessarily impossible, as the Romans may have brought pieces of the sacked temple back to Italy. It’s believed that they were used in churches, and that Marchisio salvaged the wood for his piano after an earthquake struck one of those churches.

About 25 years and two generations later, Marchisio’s grandsons, Luciano and Raffaelo, put the finishing touches on the instrument and gave it to their sister, Rebecca, who lived farther south, in Siena. There, the piano became something of a local attraction and was regularly played in public performances, favored for a unique sound, somewhere between that of a piano and a harpsichord.

The Marquis of Siena thought that a piano with such a special sound deserved a more special look, and around 1860 two artists were hired to give the exterior an upgrade. (One of them was Rebecca’s son, Nicodemo Ferri, so the work on it ultimately spanned four generations of the same family.) According to The Piano: An Encyclopedia, the finished product—still a fully functional piano—was adorned with carvings of the Ten Commandments, some 20 cherubs, and likenesses of George Frideric Handel and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, among several other composers. It represented Siena at the 1867 Paris World’s Fair, and was then gifted to the Italian Crown Prince Umberto. Franz Liszt played the instrument at the prince’s wedding.

As Umberto later ascended to the throne, the instrument came to be known as The King’s Piano, and was played at the palace by members of the royal family, courtiers, and renowned musicians. One musician who longed to play it was Mattis Yanowsky, a Russian-Jewish refugee whose playing had impressed Umberto. The King had told Yanowsky about the piano, but was assassinated before he invited Yanowsky to play it at court.

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Haunted by the missed opportunity, an aging Yanowsky urged his grandson, Avner Carmi—himself a budding musician—to one day play the piano on his late grandfather’s behalf. Carmi tried, as far as we know, but he lacked the connections to get an invitation to the Italian court, and had bigger problems to deal with once the Nazis came to town.

In a cruel twist of fate, Carmi would have—and miss—his first chance to play the piano at El Alamein ... where he was serving with the British Army. Years later, after the war had ended and Carmi had moved to Israel, he came across the plaster casing in a Tel Aviv junk shop, bought the instrument on the cheap, and wore the plaster down with 24 gallons of acetone. Only then did he realize that he had discovered—purely by accident—the elusive piano of his late grandfather’s dreams. A piano tuner by trade, he thoroughly repaired the instrument, got it back into playing shape, and invited top musicians from around the world to have a go.

It’s possible that the recorded story, in all its detail, is indeed slightly embellished—but even the confirmed broad strokes seem too good to be true. Somehow, this piano had seen three continents, survived looting and desert warfare, and then fell into the hands of an anonymous tuner who’d been chasing it all along at his grandfather’s behest. It may or may not be made of Biblical wood, but this is an instrument worthy of a thousand myths.

The Fight to Resurrect the U.K.'s Underwater Meadows of Seagrass

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Seagrass captures carbon and creates marine habitat—so scientists are bringing it back.

This piece was originally published in The Guardian and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration.

“We think this whole bay was once carpeted with seagrass,” says Evie Furness, waving across the sparkling, sunlit waters of Dale Bay in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

The underwater meadow is long-gone, though, a victim of past pollution and shipping. So from a boat half a mile from shore, Furness is feeding a long rope into the water, which carries a little hessian bag of seagrass seeds every few feet. “We’ve passed the 800,000-seed mark now,” she says.

The Seagrass Ocean Rescue project will ultimately place more than a dozen miles of rope and a million seeds on the shallow seafloor, where they will sprout through the bags and restore the habitat.

Seagrass meadows were once common around the U.K. coast, but more than 90 percent have been lost as a result of algae-boosting pollution, anchor damage, and port and marina building. The meadows, however, store carbon 35 times the rate of tropical rainforests and harbor up to 40 times as much marine life than seabeds without grass, facts that are driving the effort to bring them back.

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“We face a growing climate emergency and a biodiversity emergency, and we have to make rapid steps to fight those,” says Richard Unsworth at Swansea University and lead biologist on the $460,000 project, which is supported by the World Wildlife Fund and Sky Ocean Rescue.

Seagrass covers just 0.2 percent of the ocean, but provides an estimated 10 percent of its carbon storage. It is in trouble around the world, and Unsworth hopes the first project of its kind in the U.K. may help boost take-up of this nature-based solution to the climate crisis.

Seagrass can grow to more than three feet long. Its flowers are pollinated by shrimp and other creatures, as well as water currents. The seeds are like small pine nuts, and many have been placed in their growbags by volunteer schoolchildren. The first green shoots should appear by October.

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The huge past losses of seagrass means allowing nature to recolonize the bay in its own time is not an option. “It’s hard for people to understand how screwed the ocean is. It’s out of sight and out of mind,” says Unsworth. “The environment here has got stuck in an anoxic, algae-rich, muddy state. You have to intervene.”

The project is the culmination of eight years of laboratory and sea trials and extensive discussions with the local community. “This is perfect habitat, really sheltered, and it’s all coming together here,” he says.

The seeds were collected over 300 hours of diving at the few remaining seagrass meadows at the Llŷn peninsula in north Wales and on the coasts of Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall. “It’s like underwater blackberry picking,” says Unsworth, describing plucking the “spades” that contain the seeds. The seeds harvested at Llŷn were about 0.05 percent of the total, so the meadow there was not damaged.

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Seagrass has a high turnover of leaves, and the dead ones fall into oxygen-poor sediments below, where they trap carbon. The meadows also slow currents, allowing other organic material to drift down and be trapped, potentially for thousands of years.

The meadows are also a rich habitat, providing shelter and food for juvenile cod, plaice, and other species. The 215,000 square feet being restored in Dale Bay could also support cuttlefish, pipefish, and seahorses, and 200 million invertebrates such as the snakelocks anemone, stalked jellyfish, and colorful snails.

Seagrass meadows around the world also provide nurseries for a fifth of the world’s biggest fishing species, including pollock, herring, and whiting, meaning their restoration can improve catches.

Unsworth says the process of gathering seeds and planting them could be made less expensive in future with mechanization. A large restoration project in Chesapeake Bay in the U.S. used underwater equipment akin to combine harvesters to collect seeds, and where the currents were favorable, they were able to simply scatter the seeds.

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U.K. waters are cleaner now following European Union water directives in recent decades, Unsworth says: “We want thousands of hectares of seagrass restored and the opportunity exists in this country now. The Stour, Orwell, and Humber estuaries, for example. These places are ripe for it.” Next in the team’s sights are locations in North Wales, if funding can be obtained.

"Seagrass can store about half a [metric] ton of carbon per hectare per year, and more when it is mature,” he says. “It could be part of nature-based solutions [to climate change], and a significant part of it.”

Alec Taylor, WWF’s head of marine policy, says: “Seagrass restoration ticks so many boxes: climate, fisheries, water quality, biodiversity. But we will only get the benefits if we act now and at scale.”

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"We want the oceans to play a hero’s role” in the fight against global heating, he says. “And we want the U.K. government to play a hero’s role too.” The U.K. hosts a crucial UN climate summit in November.

One government action would be to make it easier to get permits for restoration. “Officials say it’s a wonderful idea, but when you apply for licensing you are treated as the criminal until you are proven innocent,” says Unsworth. “It’s almost like we are a problem, rather than a solution.”

Looking across Dale Bay, Unsworth concludes: “As a scientist, and as a father, I could spend the next 20 years writing awesome academic papers about seagrass decline, or spend the 20 years doing something about it. We have a responsibility as scientists to act, as well as report.”

How New Orleans Made a Medieval Sicilian Tradition Its Own

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St. Joseph protects communities during times of sickness and famine.

In the Middle Ages, the story goes, a great famine ravaged Sicily. Peasants starved. The rain refused to come. In desperation, villagers prayed to Saint Joseph, the Biblical carpenter whom Christians believe to be Jesus Christ’s earthly foster father. If the Saint would intervene on their behalf, the Sicilian people promised, they would honor him with a selection of their harvest from then on.

The rains came, and an abundant harvest of fava beans restored order to the land. Ever since, Sicilians have celebrated St. Joseph’s Day each March. To mark the occasion, communities feast and offer alms to impoverished neighbors in the form of lavish dinners. And they erect elaborate culinary altars, whose ornately symbolic contents, from bread sculptures to pastries, represent the abundance the saint restored to the island.

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You can still find St. Joseph’s Day altars in Sicilian churches and piazze. But it’s one of those folk traditions that may actually be more popular in the diaspora. The holiday is particularly visible in the United States, where, every March 19, Sicilian-American communities enjoy traditional St. Joseph’s feasts of pasta con le sarde: bucatini pasta with sardines, fennel, pine nuts, and raisins.

One of the most lively St. Joseph's celebration is in a seemingly unlikely place: New Orleans, where celebrations blend Sicilian, African American, and other European immigrant traditions. While popular representations of Italian Americans—think The Godfather or The Sopranos—focus on New Jersey, New York City, and Chicago, the city of New Orleans has a significant history of Sicilian and Italian immigration. Despite helping to shape the city’s famous Creole culture, says Justin Nystrom, a Loyola University history professor and author of Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture, Italian immigrants are often erased from conventional accounts of New Orleans. But Sicilian immigrant influence continues to permeate New Orleans, from more popular cultural icons like the music of Louis Prima and the muffuletta sandwich, to the diaspora's less well-known, but equally important, role in shaping the region's citrus trade.

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“New Orleans tells the same stories about itself: antebellum,” says Nystrom. “This really big immigrant influence got lost.” Popular New Orleans histories tend to glorify pre-Civil War Days, focusing on what Nystrom calls “hoopskirt” tropes of genteel Southern society. This risks whitewashing the horrors inflicted on African Americans during slavery, and obscuring the influence of immigrants.

St. Joseph's Day embodies the dynamic role Sicilians played in shaping New Orleans's creole culture. Celebrations include elements of Italian tradition, African American Mardi Gras culture, and Irish immigrant festivities. For weeks before the feast day, churches, neighborhood associations, and families erect elaborate altars to the saint. Neighbors and relatives visit from door to door, and gather for feasts of pasta con sarde and traditional St. Joseph’s Day zeppole pastries.

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At the climax of the holiday, the Italian American St. Joseph’s Day Society, a local cultural organization, sponsors an elaborate community dinner. “It’s 500 pounds of pasta con sarde in a six-foot pasta bowl,” says Mark Fonte, a member of the Society's board of directors. The dinner is accompanied by a festive French Quarter parade, in which tuxedo-and-evening-dress-clad community members ride through the streets on floats. A massive, mobile St. Joseph’s altar reigns over the parade, and participants toss Mardi Gras beads and fava beans, a symbol of good luck, to onlookers.

These traditions represent the abundance St. Joseph brought to medieval Sicilians. But the history of Sicilian immigration in New Orleans wasn’t always characterized by such largesse. Ever since Arab conquerers brought lemons and citrons to Sicily in the 800s, the island has been a center of the citrus trade. In the mid-1800s, Sicilian citrus merchants migrated to the American Gulf Coast, where they set up shop trading in oranges and lemons. Those relatively wealthy initial migrants became padrones, labor agents, who facilitated the entry of thousands of working-class Sicilians fleeing the poverty and social turmoil of Southern Italy. Many settled in northern urban centers such as New York, and became factory or food-service workers. But others migrated to the American South, where many became waged plantation laborers. Soon, Italians had become pivotal to the region's food system, as small grocery store owners, restaurant owners, and food distributors. In the 1800s and early 1900s, an estimated 40,000 Sicilian immigrants entered the United States through New Orleans. By 2000, there were 250,000 people of Italian descent living in the New Orleans area.

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In Sicily, St. Joseph’s Day is a regional holiday, and its celebration varies by village. But when Sicilians moved to the United States, St. Joseph’s Day came to embody their immigrant identity. “You may have had people who didn’t do St. Joseph’s in Sicily, but when they came to the United States, they fell into the culture of people who did,” Nystrom says. In New Orleans, celebrations to mark the holiday rippled beyond Sicilian communities to incorporate and influence other European and African American traditions unique to New Orleans.

The community's main sphere of influence: food. By 1900, Sicilians had a substantial presence in New Orleans's corner grocery stores and eat-in restaurants, and they dominated the local oyster trade. Soon, even New Orleans's American-born elite had developed a taste for red sauce. “By the 1920s, ladies are going to spaghetti restaurants,” Nystrom says. These restaurants spurred a new, uniquely New Orleanian Sicilian cuisine, which produced Italian-American staples such as the immensely famous muffuletta sandwich and the “Wop Salad.” Named after a slur for Italian-Americans, the salad mixed Sicilian ingredients such as asparagus and anchovies with Worcestershire sauce and Gulf Coast boiled shrimp.

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Sicilians’ role in the “hustle” of the restaurant industry brought them into close working relationships with the city’s African American residents, and the emerging genre of New Orleans jazz. “Italians are creolizing themselves because they’re in a hustle,” Nystrom says. Black musicians often played in Italian restaurants, and Italian musicians combined elements of this music with folk tunes from Italy to create a style of zany, often self-deprecating immigrant jazz. The genre is perhaps best embodied in the brassy bravado of Louis Prima. “The Sicilians are kind of like cultural chameleons," Nystrom says.

However, relationships across racial and ethnic lines were often tense. Sicilians were at the receiving end of anti-immigrant discrimination. In 1891, following the murder of a police officer, a mob of New Orleanians lynched 11 Sicilian men. In 1922, an Alabama judge ruled that a Sicilian immigrant was “inconclusively white,” and therefore her African American husband couldn't be punished under Jim Crow laws prohibiting miscegenation. Some left-leaning Italian immigrants attempted to forge labor solidarity with African Americans. Many others perpetuated anti-Black racism, and mainstream Italian-American newspapers often used racist tropes to assimilate Italians into the privileges of U.S.-born whiteness. Today, New Orleans' once-racially mixed neighborhoods are increasingly segregated.

But St. Joseph’s Day continues to reflect the historic diversity of New Orleans. “St. Joseph’s Day also has this syncretic quality about it,” says Nystrom. Even during times of formal segregation, neighbors often visited St. Joseph’s altars across racial lines. “You’d see people of different racial groups come in and eat spaghetti in your home."

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Today, Catholic churches around the city, including historically Black-led and integrated churches such as St. Augustine’s, erect St. Joseph’s Day altars. Several communities of Black New Orleanians who famously don feathery displays during Mardi Gras also parade the weekends before and after St. Joseph's Day—a tradition that community leader Chief Shaka Zulu dates back to mixed Black and Sicilian neighborhoods. The week after St. Joseph’s Day, Italian and Irish communities celebrate their historical coexistence in the annual Irish-Italian Parade.

For Susan Vacarella, who lives with her family just outside of New Orleans, the holiday is a reminder of the role faith played in sustaining Italian immigrants. "I just can’t say enough about St. Joseph. He’s been very good to our family," she says. For two decades, Vacarella has spent months preparing food for her family's altar. Her husband's ancestors appealed to St. Joseph for help when they first came to the United States. Just like the famine-struck medieval Sicilians, Vacarella erects an altar each year as an expression of thanks.

The tradition began in 1931, when Benedicta Mangano Vacarella, Susan’s husband’s grandmother, needed the Saint's intercession. Vacarella’s family had left Sicily 20 years earlier to work as waged laborers on a Louisiana plantation. As the Great Depression emptied out American larders and bank accounts, Benedicta’s son fell deathly ill.

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So Benedicta made St. Joseph a promise. “If he would intercede for the recovery of her son, then she would start her altar,” says Susan Vacarella. Benedicta's son recovered, and she later taught Susan Vacarella, who did not grow up in a Sicilian family, how to make her own altar. Now, Vacarella carries on the tradition. For the past 20 years, she's spent months preparing sweet and savory dishes for the elaborate display. “I usually start right after Christmas,” she says. “By mid-February I have the altar up.”

Each object carries symbolism. Ornate bread sculptures, shaped like crosses, fish, and carpenter's tools, represent St. Joseph’s woodworking profession. Mountains of confections froth from the white tablecloth, including rainbow-colored, fig-filled cucidati cookies, sugar-syrup-dripping pignolata cookies, and puffy, cream-filled zeppole. Bright oranges and lemons evoke the island’s famous citrus trade. Fava beans, a reminder of the gift that broke the mythical famine, dot the display; Sicilians in New Orleans call them “lucky beans” and hand them out to visitors.

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“If you put it in your pocket, or your purse, or your food pantry, you’ll never be without food,” Vacarella says. With over 100 neighbors visiting her altar in the course of a regular season, Vacarella has a lot of luck to give. A statue of the saint, framed by flowers and carrying the infant Jesus, guards the offerings—and, the faithful hope, his devotees.

This March, St. Joseph’s guardianship carries even more weight for the faithful. In contrast to the raucous parades and pasta suppers that usually accompany the feast day, 2020’s festivities will be muted. New Orleans has cancelled all parades, including the St. Joseph’s Day parade, to prevent the further spread of COVID-19, which the World Health Organization has labeled a pandemic. As of March 16, the CDC advised against gatherings of more than 50 people, and President Donald Trump discouraged gatherings of more than 10. With more states mandating lockdowns, Louisiana may soon follow suit. That means even small gatherings to mark the occasion are likely to be called off.

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Vacarella has already spent months preparing her altar. The disrupted festivities are disappointing, but she connects them to the holiday's core story. The current public health crisis evokes the medieval Sicilian famine, and the illness and miraculous recovery that first motivated Benedicta Mangano Vacarella to erect a St. Joseph’s Day altar in thanks.

This year, as she lays her altar, Vacarella hopes that St. Joseph will continue to comfort those who love him. She puts her trust in “Those three f’s: faith, family, and friends," she says. "Especially in this time.”


Wondrous Museums You Can Visit From Your Couch Right Now

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Your living room is the perfect place to see the world.

At Atlas Obscura, we’re all about wonder and exploration—and since many of our readers are spending time at home to stay safe and healthy, we’re highlighting ways you can be awestruck to matter where you are.

As governments and medical workers respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of us (including yours truly!) are hunkering down at home. Museums, libraries, galleries, and other treasure troves have paused their in-person programming as officials ask residents to practice social distancing to limit the spread of the coronavirus.

But a growing number of well-trod and more offbeat institutions have found ways to stoke your curiosity from wherever you are, with digital tours and livestreams. Here are a few ways to cultivate wonder without venturing beyond your living room.

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Museo Galileo

This Italian museum is brimming with tools, large and small, that have nudged scientific inquiry along. Wander and look at elegant astrolabes, beautiful compound microscopes, and much more.

Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum Tour

Step into this San Jose, California, museum’s 360-degree gallery tours to learn about the afterlife, alchemy, and much more.

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The Museum of London’s Fatberg Cam

When the Museum of London exhibited a putrid chunk of a fatberg in 2018, things got really gross, really quickly. Though the museum’s experts dried out the chunk, and tried to sanitize as best they could, it still went a bit funky in its vitrine, the museum reports—hatching flies, sweating, and changing color. The exhibit wrapped up and the fatberg is in storage, where it continues to molder. Since entering storage, the museum writes, the “fatberg has started to grow an unusual and toxic mould, in the form of visible yellow pustules.” You can stream this bit of sewage history 24 hours a day, for a reminder that nothing is forever, and gross things can always get grosser.

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The Frick’s Garden Court Tour

The Frick Museum, an opulent house-turned-museum in New York City, is stuffed with stunning paintings and decorative arts. It’s also home to a blessedly peaceful garden court, flanked by leafy plants and bathed in light. Visit it in 360-degrees, and imagine you’re anywhere but your couch.

University of Oxford's History of Science Museum

This museum is stocked with sundials, octants, and a whole lot more. Ogle the old scientific instruments from a safe distance as you poke around a 3D tour.

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Google Arts & Culture Tours

Hundreds of large and small museums around the world showcase their galleries through tours and other online extras on Google’s Arts & Culture pages. You can zoom around the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, the British Museum, the National Museum in New Delhi, New York’s Guggenheim museum, and many, many more.

You might also want to click around Google Arts & Culture’s Open Heritage project and lose yourself in such 3D spaces as 12th-century Syrian bathhouses and Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral. For even more digital tours, follow the #MuseumFromHome hashtag on Twitter. Tell us about how you’re visiting museums remotely, and stay tuned: We’ll have many more ideas for finding wonder from home.

Scientists Want You to Photograph This Curious, Enigmatic Giant

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Keep an eye out for the giant sea bass's spots.

For a goggled human, coming face to face with a giant sea bass can be a little unsettling. Gray and gargantuan—sometimes growing more than seven feet long and topping out around 550 pounds—the husky Stereolepis gigas are “the rhinos of the kelp forest,” says Molly Morse, a project scientist at the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The heftiest marine bony fish close to California’s shore, the aptly named creature is prone to spooking divers, Morse says. “Imagine being underwater, where your senses are already on overdrive because you’re experiencing all this stuff you’re not used to,” she says. If the hulking fish starts to swim into your peripheral vision, “Initially, you might assume, ‘Oh, my gosh—it’s a great white shark, I’m going to die.’”

But the giant sea bass isn’t out for human blood: It’s usually unusually affable, Morse says, and curious about human antics. Unfortunately, that gentleness once led fishers to identify it as an easy target and drastically hobble the population, which is known to swim only along the coasts of California and Mexico.

Commercial fishing of the giant sea bass peaked in the 1930s, Morse says, and recreational fishers really went to town in the 1960s. According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, fishing contributed to the population shrinking by as much as 95 percent, and it still hasn’t fully rebounded: The giant sea bass is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), and has been legally protected in California since the 1980s.

“The assumption is that if we have laws in place, and they’re being followed, [the fish] should be able to reproduce,” Morse says. Scientists speculate that the species is probably bouncing back, she adds, but because population estimates are still opaque, “there’s not a lot of evidence to demonstrate that scientifically.” And even if their numbers are creeping back up, the fish face other problems.

“We don’t know how many giant sea bass are actually out there,” writes Chris Chabot, a biologist at California State University, Northridge, in an email. Based on his research—some of which was published in Fisheries Research in 2015—“the amount of genetic diversity existing within the current population of giant sea bass is VERY low,” he says.

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To help give the big fish a boost in the wild, divers are plopping several hundred giant sea bass reared by the Aquarium of the Pacific and the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium into the ocean. At the beginning of March 2020, close to 200 babies from the Cabrillo aquarium began to settle into the waters of Santa Monica Bay; the Aquarium of the Pacific’s brood was next.

To gather scientific evidence about how these and other members of the species are faring out there, a citizen-science project is tapping recreational divers in California to send in photos of the fish they encounter in the watery neighborhoods they swim through.

The aquariums lucked into a windfall of eggs from Cal State Northridge, where researchers studying giant sea bass last spring found themselves with more eggs than they knew what to do with.

Raising young marine fish (also known as saltwater fish) in captivity can be tricky, partly because they need to chow down on so many different types of crustaceans and fish as they grow. That means aquariums have to stock and care for those creatures too. Newly hatched giant sea bass feed on rotifers, a type of zooplankton, “but that only lasts a week or a couple of weeks before they’ve grown enough to need a larger-sized plankton, and then a few weeks later they’re on to a different one,” says Sandy Trautwein, vice president of husbandry at the Aquarium of the Pacific, where she oversees the conservation and research program for giant sea bass and other creatures.

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It’s hard to quantify exactly how much food the giant sea bass gobble as they grow, Trautwein adds—“but it’s a lot.” To keep a fully stocked buffet for the finned residents, the Aquarium of the Pacific has 15 or 20 tanks of various sizes dedicated solely to raising “live foods”—that is, nurturing creatures for other creatures to eat. Captive-raised giant sea bass may chow down on everything from squid to sardines to clams, and they go bananas for shrimp.

“Shrimp is always served last because it’s like ice cream to baby giant sea bass,” Andres Carrillo of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium told the Los Angeles Times. “They’re like little kids: If you offer giant sea bass shrimp first, they won’t eat anything else.”

The Aquarium of the Pacific has been able to breed and raise giant sea bass in captivity in part because it was able to simulate the natural world, Trautwein says. Sunlight pours in through skylights, and darkness does too, meaning that the fish are exposed to the same photoperiods that their relatives experience in the wild.

The Cabrillo aquarium had additional success by slightly tweaking the water temperature, Trautwein says. The Aquarium of the Pacific had kept the water in the bracingly pleasant high-50s Fahrenheit; the Cabrillo aquarium bumped that up by just a few degrees. Researchers there found that the sweet spot for giant sea bass babies is in the low- to mid-60s. The fact that nudging the temperature so slightly made a difference portends big changes for marine life in warming waters, Trautwein says: “Just a few degrees of warming or cooling can significantly affect the life cycle.”

The newly released fish will have two main items on their to-do list, Morse says: “Avoid getting eaten, and find something to eat.” Young giant sea bass are known to roam sandy bottoms, where they feast on mysid shrimp. When they grow up, they flock to kelp forests and rocky reefs—including the areas around Casino Point, on Catalina Island, and the artificial reef at Hermosa Beach—and hunt for larger prey. Some descend into the cold depths more than 160 feet below the surface, where they’ve been spotted by baited underwater cameras beaming a small halo of light into the inkinesss. What the fish do between youth and adulthood, though, is murky. Trautwein calls it “the missing link.”

To fill in the blanks about life cycle and migration patterns, Morse’s team at the Spotting Giant Sea Bass project calls on divers to share observations of the fish they see—and specifically of the spots that speckle them.

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Individual giant sea bass have unique spot patterns—get a clear photograph of them, and you should be able to identify one that is sighted again later. Morse’s team collects these photos and runs them through an algorithm that she says NASA once used to detect patterns in constellations.

If the researchers get lucky, a bass will also sport a scar, a clipped fin, or another distinctive marking. Those dings and dents are helpful because the spots aren’t always on display: The fish “have the ability to turn them on and off,” Morse says, though researchers aren’t sure why. Sometimes the spots appear to be absent on a fish that was once spangled. “We will get photos of the same fish where it has very clear spot patterns, easy for us to recognize, and get an image of the same fish—maybe with identifying scar or something—and it doesn’t have any spots at all.”

Sometimes divers, pressed for time or luck or just distractedly excited, will photograph only one side of a fish. Since the two sides may hold different spot patterns, a single fish can be mistaken for two. The aquarium fish were photographed before their big journey to the sea, and Morse’s team has those images ready to go for a quick comparison if they’re spotted again.

Because so many observations of giant sea bass come from recreational divers, who tend to swim in the summer and fall, scientists are also keen to know what the fish do during the rest of the year. Reported sightings and photographs drop off significantly in the winter and spring, Morse says, so traditional tagging methods and more baited cameras could help scientists figure out whether the fish are up to their same old routines in their same old swimming grounds, or whether “we weren’t seeing any giant sea bass because there weren’t any giant sea bass,” Morse says.

If you see any swimming off the coast of California—little or really, truly giant—give them some room to roam. But, if you can, snap a picture of their spots. Morse would love to see it.

The Oregon Creamery Making Vodka From Milk

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“It's a tribute to the cows.”

As long as humans have enjoyed the bacterial miracle that is cheese, cheesemakers have struggled to make use of its byproduct: whey. Every pound of cheese produces about nine pounds of whey—the translucent liquid you may recognize from the top of a freshly opened tub of sour cream. Excess whey can fertilize fields or feed pigs, but artisanal creameries are often still hampered by massive amounts of leftover whey. They pay thousands of dollars to have it disposed of in landfills.

Luckily, a niche field of researchers and an eager group of craft creameries are taking an unexpected approach: turning all that whey into “vodka.”

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Dr. Paul Hughes is an Assistant Professor of Distilled Spirits at Oregon State University, a nascent department and one of the few of its kind in the country. After an aspiring graduate student approached him about fermenting whey into a neutral spirits base, he began running experiments to prove that the solution was both environmentally sustainable and cost-effective for small creameries. His work showed that a cheesemaker selling cheese for $40 a pound could, with a proper fermentation system, make half again as much in retail sales on alcohol. In the last several years, he says, he’s been approached by more than a dozen creameries from across the country looking to ferment their whey into alcohol.

Todd Koch, owner of TMK Creamery in the rolling hills of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, remembers reading about Hughes’s work in the newspaper early last year. Large, corporate-owned creameries can afford the expensive equipment that converts whey into profitable products such as protein powder. But at his family-owned, 20-cow farmstand creamery, Koch and his wife simply fed their whey into the fields through a nutrient management system. Rather than continue to bury the byproduct, Koch decided to ferment as a means of profitably upcycling the whey while bringing visibility to his animals. He teamed up with Dr. Hughes and a nearby distiller to manufacture the creamery’s newest product: a clear, vodka-like liquor they call “Cowcohol.”

Not only is it an effective means of upcycling, but it also “creates another vehicle to showcase our true heroes, the cows,” says Koch. “We call them cow-lebrities.”

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Koch says the cow-based spirit has a caramel-like sweetness with a smooth finish. Dr. Hughes, who has officiated the American Craft Spirits competition, says it’s refreshingly neutral. He would have no problem serving it neat to a friend, though he admits his peripheral involvement renders him biased. Judging from public demand, the partnership produced a hit: TMK is overwhelmed by demand for “Cowcohol.”

Outlandish as it may seem, TMK is not alone at the intersection of dairy and liquor. A sixth-generation dairy farmer from Dorset, England, turns his whey into Black Cow Vodka. Tasmania’s Hartshorn Distillery ferments their sheeps’ whey into award-winning vodka, gin, and liqueur. Ontario’s Dairy Distillery turns problems into profit with a product they call “Vodkow.” Indeed, Dr. Hughes imagines a future in which a concentration of creameries are bound by a cooperative distillery fermenting what would otherwise be a cumbersome byproduct.

Whey fermentation offers a brave, new world for small creameries, both in decreasing their environmental footprint and ensuring financial security in an age of mass conglomeration. For Koch, a life-long, self-proclaimed “cow person,” the possibilities of bovine booze are a relief to him and his beloved herd. “Going through college, I was like ‘Man, if I could just figure out how to get cows to make alcohol, we’d be set,’” he says. “So I guess we’re one step closer here.”

How Chilean Protesters Painted a New Story Atop Old National Monuments

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Photographer Camilo Vergara has documented color, graffiti, and anger.

Front and center in a landmark plaza in central Santiago, Chile, stands an equestrian sculpture of General Manuel Jesús Baquedano González, a 19th-century war hero and politician. The plaza, which bears his name (and is also popularly known as Plaza Italia), has often been a site of gathering and protest. During the late 2019 civil protests that rocked the South American country, this symbol of its colonial past—Baquedano led conquests of the indigenous Mapuche people—turned into something else entirely. Protestors unofficially renamed the site Plaza de la Dignidad (Dignity Square), and set about redesigning the dull bronze statue. Color and graffiti were splashed across it—including the word “feminism” spray-painted across the horse’s belly. Many other monuments received the same treatment during the civil protests, turning each of these staid, easily overlooked symbols into something between protest, cry of outrage, and crowdsourced public art.

New York–based photographer Camilo Vergara, who documented some of the Chilean monuments defaced during mass protests, saw graffiti expressing a wide range of emotions, from anger at the wealthy, the police, and the treatment of the Mapuche, to support for feminists and vegans. In this way, monuments became public message boards as well, full of proclamations and social demands. "Sculpture and monument have been used as a place of showing the conflict,” said Luis Montes Rojas, a professor of the arts at the University of Chile, in an interview with El Pais. In some cases the graffiti is so thick that it almost obliterates the identities of the historic statues, and redefines them as something raw and new.

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Atlas Obscura spoke with Vergara about what he witnessed in Chile, the importance of eyes, and monuments that were spared by protesters.

How long have you been documenting street art, and what was the first defaced statue you encountered in Chile?

I have been a documentarian of street art in the United States for 50 years. My illustrated essays depict and analyze what people in poor, segregated communities tell us through the words and images they paint on structures. Now I find myself observing and analyzing the eruption of images piling atop one another in the faraway nation of Chile, my birthplace. I arrived in Santiago in December 2019, some two months after the start of mass protests against a whole array of injustices that have rocked the nation’s largest cities. People have been shocked by the unexpected burst of anger and violence that has left much of the country bitter and uncertain about its identity and future. My first encounter with vandalized monuments was with the 1949 statue of Presidente José Manuel Balmaceda in Santiago. The massive sculpture, erected to last forever, had its eyes and mouth painted red, and his greek toga had been sprayed with white and yellow paint. Glued to its base and obelisk, the monument had feminist and pro-Mapuche posters.

What did you find the most intriguing about the graffitied statues? The most meaningful?

There is anger and energy and a lot of red paint in the graffiti, which renders these once unseen and reassuring monuments disturbing. The most unsettling and pervasive of all the street images, and the one that I can’t get out of my mind, is the image of a bloody eye socket. Its ubiquity is a reminder of the more than 220 demonstrators who lost an eye to rubber bullets shot by the police.

An icon of the southern city of Puerto Montt, a prominent statue entitled Sentados frente al Mar ([Lovers] Sitting Facing the Sea) on Avenida Costanera, symbolizes the current revolt. The eyes of the lovers are painted red and their faces are partially covered with black masks that recall those worn by protestors. Graffiti on the woman’s arm reads, "There is no money to buy bread.” In addition to bloody eyes, they have wounds from rubber bullets on their bodies. The statue has become a symbol of the revolt of disenfranchised youth, their poverty, their suffering, their love for one another. Robinson Barria, the sculptor, expressed the desire for the statue to remain graffitied.

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Were certain statues affected more than others?

Few statues and monuments in downtown Santiago and Valparaíso have been spared. Monuments such as the statue in Concepción of Pedro de Valdivia, the first royal governor of Chile, have been toppled and are waiting to be repaired or discarded, while many others have been almost completely graffitied-over after being unchanged for a century or longer. These monuments had become so familiar that people had forgotten who they represented and why they were there.

The protesters are selective, however. Statues honoring a volunteer fireman in Valparaíso and Santiago have been spared. In Valparaíso the 1886 monument to the Heroes de Iquique, "the pride of the republic," "the polar star in our southern seas," permanently guarded by armed marines, has not been touched.

The history of public monuments in Chile dramatically changed in 2019. In the 21st century, statuary has fallen out of fashion. I doubt that the most severely damaged pieces will ever be repaired. In 2020, these monuments in Chile's most-visited places stand as terrifying symbols of fear and uncertainty.

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Help Atlas Obscura Find the Smithsonian’s Weirdest Items

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With 2.8 million new artifacts on view, there should be plenty to choose from.

At Atlas Obscura, we’re all about wonder and exploration—and since many of our readers are spending time at home to stay safe and healthy, we’re highlighting ways you can be awestruck no matter where you are.

A creepy crawling baby model. A patent submitted by Abraham Lincoln. The Apollo 11 Space Command module.

Images of those things—and over 2.8 million other artifacts—are now available for public use through the Smithsonian Open Access initiative.

Comprising 19 museums, galleries, gardens, and a zoo, the Smithsonian is a hive mind of American culture. Though the institution dates back only 174 years, some of its artifacts date back millions. Now, millions of images of artifacts both ancient and modern are making the jump into the public sphere.

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Reaching a billion digital visitors a year is one of the Smithsonian’s goals right now, says Effie Kapsalis, the institution’s senior project officer. “It’s a little daunting,” she says. “But we know that when we do open up something [to the public], it gets a lot more use.”

For historians, the online repository means that hundreds of thousands of vital archival documents and imagery are now available at the click of a button (assuming you have a healthy WiFi connection, of course). For students—many of whom are currently learning remotely—the trove offers plenty of resources to further their understanding of class material.

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“This is useful in so many different facets of what people are doing,” Kapsalis says. “I just want to make sure everyone finds their own use.”

Today, the most visited item in the vast Smithsonian open-access repository is a quarantine unit built by NASA for astronauts returning from the moon, to ensure that no lunar pathogens would be spread on Earth. Suffice it to say, NASA’s interior decorators knew what they were doing.

Head over to our forums to share your favorite finds in the Smithsonian’s massive archive!

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