"Finally, I could have zero-gravity hair!"

Even in the dark, subarctic winters of the Yukon Territory, hot water flows from the depths of Earth’s crust into Takhini Hot Springs at the toasty temperature of 116 degrees Fahrenheit. The natural hot tub, which attracts hundreds of locals and tourists annually, lies just outside the city of Whitehorse. For most of the year, visitors spend hours relaxing in the mineral-rich and odorless waters, which are privately owned by the company Takhini Hot Pools. But much more is at stake during winter months, when the pools become heated arenas for the world’s only frozen-hairdo competition.

The Hair Freezing Contest is a challenge of both art and science. Participants dunk their heads underwater, emerge into the frigid air, and style their locks into stiff, eye-catching sculptures. Depending on one’s creativity and luck with the elements, the results range from frosty, mop-like tangles to dramatically manicured spikes.

“All this rising steam collects on your hair and freezes really quickly when it meets the cold air,” says Andrew Umbrich, co-owner of Takhini Hot Pools. “You can get good results within 15 minutes if it's cold enough.”

It’s worth splitting hairs when deciding on a final look: Winners for this year’s contest, which opened last December and closed earlier this month, earn $2,000 (in Canadian dollars), free soaks, and a 12-punch pass for a new facility set to open this fall. Hair must be completely frozen—a feat best achieved when the air is 40 below zero. Once coiffed, entrants ring a wireless doorbell to notify a staff member to photograph them.

“We want to see white frost everywhere,” Umbrich says, adding that the superficial layer of ice causes no damage. “People try to put snow on their heads and pass it off, but that never works. You want to try to defy gravity as much as possible, mold and sculpt the hair into a specific look.”

Humans have enjoyed the springs for centuries, starting with members of the Ta’an Kwäch’än First Nation. The council’s former leader, Chief Jim Boss, is said to have kept an old bathtub on the site; during the Klondike Gold Rush, he asked the Canadian government to recognize and protect his people’s lands, but was ignored. In 1907, two white settlers laid claim to the hot springs, purchasing them at two dollars per acre with the federal government’s consent. (The dispute was not settled until 1993.) Later owners introduced all sorts of amenities, from hot dogs to swimming lessons, that have come and gone.

The Hair Freezing Contest began in 2011. At the time, a manager believed it would generate buzz for the business during the region’s coldest months—and it has gradually ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity. “We get a lot of darkness in the Yukon, and we're quite isolated, so people can get a lot of cabin fever,” Umbrich says. “The contest can't even really happen in most places of the world as we're in a pretty unique location.”

The first three rounds were relatively small affairs—around 15 participants each, vying for a $100 award. But when Umbrich and his wife took over in 2014, they ramped up marketing. Since then, the competition has grown steadily, as has the prize money. This year drew close to 300 participants, some from as far away as Australia and Taiwan. They compete in five categories: Best Male, Best Female, Best Group, Most Creative, and People’s Choice, which is determined by an online vote. The contest’s international presence is steadily growing, Umbrich says, but 70 percent of entries are still from locals.

Nanae Takano first visited the springs in 2017, shortly after she moved to Whitehorse from Tokyo. “I was kind of negative about the extreme cold,” she says. “And then my friend told me about this competition. It was absolutely exciting and an unforgettable experience.”

Like many other inventive hair molders, Takano came armed with props: a comb and a pair of chopsticks. She used these to buttress her nearly 20-inch-long tresses, submerging her body every five minutes to stay warm. After nearly 30 minutes of attempts, with help from a friend, she shaped her hair into a near-perfect straight line. With slightly curled ends, the hefty ’do almost resembles a bird in flight. The final photograph earned Takano top prize in that year’s Most Creative category.

“I used to play with my hair and create funny hairstyles with shampoo in my childhood,” she says. “But my hair was too heavy to create the zero-gravity look, and it didn't last long. This helped one of my dreams come true. Finally, I could have zero-gravity hair!” With a little patience and stamina, you can too.

We want to help you find people, places, and projects that capture the spirit of discovery and community.

In the courtyards of Wuhan, China, thousands of residents chanted “jiayou” from their windows, encouraging one another to stay strong. Across Italy, multi-balcony concert sessions have broken out, with musicians and singers playing along together. In Seville, Spain, a fitness instructor led an entire apartment complex in a balcony/window exercise session.

At Atlas Obscura, we talk a lot about the search for wonder and the joy we find in sharing it. These values are at the core of who we are and what we do. They reflect our incredible community of travelers, colleagues, readers, and contributors around the world who make us an engine for global human connection. The impact of COVID-19 on individuals, economies, and our community near and far has been difficult to witness, and our hearts go out to those affected.

But this is not a message about our immediate plans. You can see those here—for our Trips and Experiences. And it’s not a message about safety. No doubt you have already gotten many of those, and we encourage you to follow them and stay home to help limit the spread of the virus. We actually want to send you another sort of message, because it’s something we believe in strongly. Wonder can be found all over, and right now, finding wonder matters. Over the coming weeks and months, we want to help you find people, places, and projects out there that inspire and help us all hold on to our spirit of discovery and sense of community. We’re calling it Wonder From Home—think of it as a different kind of WFH.

Most of us are stuck at home, staying away from others, for an unknown amount of time. Many of us are also trying to work from home, watch kids, or care for family members. We’ve lost not just the ability to go out and see the world, but even the basic daily interaction that fuels us. When I think about this I am reminded of something that guides Atlas Obscura and Josh and me personally.

Some people think that exploration requires long plane trips, selfies in exotic locales, or racking up a long list of countries one has visited. We disagree. This letter is a call to learn from and celebrate all the intrepid explorers out there who have never left their home state or province, but take inquisitive wanders around their neighborhood, or the explorers who can’t get out but find inspiration in the wide frontiers of the internet. The emotions that underlie our desire to explore are universal, and can be satisfied even at home. Exploration is more than travel—it’s a way of looking at the world. And when we’re all ready to go out and see the world again, Atlas Obscura will be here to help you do that too.

The emotions that underlie travel, that search for wonder, the yearning for discovery, and for the understanding of other people, all still exist and still find expression even when we can’t go. Like the people in the windows and balconies of China, Italy, Spain, and other places around the world, people are finding hope, solidarity, and joy as they give voice to these feelings. Even though we can't do it in person, we can find other ways of sharing the generous spirit that brings people to travel in the first place.

Just in the last few days, the internet has exploded with creative expressions of sharing. In some ways it is the best the internet can be, cultivating communities and nurturing strange and wonderful projects. Over the coming weeks, we want to help you find some of those projects, places, and people with “Wonder From Home,” a series of articles and more, from citizen science projects you can do from your window, to animal encounters by livestream, to amazing skills you can learn at home. And we also hope that you’ll take the time to keep exploring the world through our atlas of places, our stories, and our videos.

This is a difficult time for all of us. But amid all that is bad and scary, let’s all dedicate ourselves to feeding the part of us that makes us yearn to see the world and interact with each other: our sense of curiosity and wonder. We hope we can play a small part in reminding everyone that the world is still an incredible place, and bringing you all a little bit of wonder, every day.

In 1910, the deadliest snowslides in U.S. and Canadian history occurred just days apart.

John Wentzel was one of the only people awake in Wellington, Washington, early on the morning of March 1, 1910, when he heard a clap of thunder and a low rumble. Wentzel, a laborer for the Great Northern Railway in the Cascade Mountains, ran outside the hotel where he’d been staying just in time to see what he described as the end of the world.

A massive avalanche was roaring down Windy Mountain and heading straight for two trains loaded with passengers on the tracks below.

“It seemed as if the world were coming to an end,” Wentzel later said. “I saw the whole side of the mountain coming down, tearing up everything in its way … Trees, stumps, and snow were rolling together in gigantic waves … I saw the first rush of snow reach the track [and] swallow the trains.”

The two trains—one an express, the other carrying mail, both stranded for a week by one of the worst storms the Pacific Northwest had ever seen—were swept off a ledge and down 150 feet into a ravine, killing 96 people in what still remains the deadliest avalanche in American history.

In February and March 1910, avalanches all across the Pacific Northwest—from Washington and British Columbia to Montana—were hurtling down mountains and destroying nearly everything in their path. Few could have known at the time, however, that the deadly series of slides would change how humans study avalanches forever.

“The roots of our scientific research into avalanches in North America began in 1910,” says Blase Reardon, an avalanche forecaster in Montana. “The research that began back then continues today.”

While humans have been dealing with avalanches for ages, little scientific research had been conducted in North America prior to the 20th century. (The Swiss had done some work in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it wasn’t particularly extensive, and little of that knowledge had migrated to the New World.) Reardon, who has studied snow around the world and edited the American Avalanche Association’s scientific journal, says fewer people were in the mountains back then, and those that were, like miners and prospectors, accepted avalanches as one of the dangers of life on the frontier.

But that began to change in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as railroads and people began to spread across the western United States. Suddenly, remote mountain passes were becoming critical routes of commerce.

In the mountains, snow often piles up like a multi-layer cake. An avalanche occurs when one of those layers of snow collapses as a result of an external force. As layers pile up through the winter, the possibility for an avalanche—also called a snowslide—can increase.

That danger was on the rise in early 1910. That winter had been one of the worst anyone in the Northwest had ever seen, but it saved its most devastating blows for February. According to Corby Dickerson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, a number of locations throughout Washington received record amounts of snow that month, including Cle Elum, which on February 24 had approximately 40 inches of snow on the ground.

Midway through the month temperatures increased, resulting in heavy, wet snow falling in the mountains. At the end of February the snow turned to rain, adding even more pressure to a fragile snowpack. “The combination of these factors likely led to the catastrophic avalanches,” Dickerson says.

One of the first major ones that month came at 11:10 p.m. on February 27, in Mace, Idaho. The avalanche started at the top of a mountain and traveled more than a mile downhill, leaving a path of destruction 800 feet wide. The slide killed 12 people and destroyed 14 homes. The next day, another one came down in the neighboring town of Burke, killing another five people.

In Washington, two trains bound for Seattle were stranded by avalanches that had blocked the tracks over Stevens Pass. For days, railroaders had been battling drifts, but no matter how hard they worked, the snow kept piling up and sliding down the mountains.

On February 23 laborers were able to clear a path in the snow long enough to get the trains through a tunnel at the top of the pass. After the trains were moved, an avalanche came down where they had been sitting just hours earlier, destroying a building and killing two men.

The news terrified the stranded passengers, but officials assured them they were safe where they were. While some passengers wanted the trains parked inside the tunnel, the railroaders reminded them that the portal would fill with smoke from the locomotives. They believed that the stretch of track on the side of Windy Mountain was the safest place for the trains to wait out the storm, because no one had ever seen a slide come down that slope.

After days of snow, the weather changed and a heavy rain began to fall in the Cascades. Early on the morning of March 1, a rare winter thunderstorm rolled into the area. At 1:42 a.m. a rumble of thunder apparently triggered a slide on Windy Mountain. The snow roared down the slope and pushed the stranded trains down into a deep canyon. More than 100 people were on board at the time.

Laborers rushed to the scene and began to rescue as many people as they could, but for many it was too late. “The bodies … taken out are fearfully distorted and mangled,” one person later wrote, according to Gary Krist’s book The White Cascade. “The heads of some are smashed and limbs are torn in two and the bowels of some are torn out.” At least one supervisor provided laborers with whiskey to calm their nerves during the gruesome recovery.

While they were still recovering bodies in Wellington, another group of railroaders were busy trying to clear the tracks 300 miles north at Rogers Pass, British Columbia. On March 4, a slide came down Mount Cheops, blocking the Canadian Pacific Railway’s route to Vancouver. Laborers were sent to the site, where they worked well into the night trying to reopen the line. At about midnight, another avalanche came down, burying 58 men. Some died from blunt force trauma, while others suffocated inside the crush of ice and snow. It was the deadliest avalanche in Canadian history.

Avalanches are classified on a destruction scale. A D1 would be harmless to a human; a D5 could permanently alter the landscape. A number of the large slides in 1910 would have been rated a D3 or D4, according to researchers.

In total, more than 180 people died in avalanches in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana between February 25 and March 13, 1910. Later that year, a forecaster for the U.S. Weather Bureau, Edward A. Beals, wrote a report about the unusual series of snowslides. A few years later, he issued one of the weather bureau’s first-ever avalanche warnings.

The study of snow got another boost following World War II, when members of the 10th Mountain Division—an Army unit trained in mountain warfare—returned home and began an outdoor-recreation revolution. Numerous ski areas across the West were founded by veterans, and understanding avalanches soon became an important part of the business.

Today, Reardon says, snow-workers can generally be split into two groups: ski patrollers, who conduct avalanche mitigation by firing explosives at a slope—triggering a slide can help eliminate the threat in a controlled setting—and those, like him, who work at regional forecasting centers.

Reardon works for the Flathead Avalanche Center, which puts out forecasts for northwest Montana, including Glacier National Park. He’s often in the office well before dawn, looking at weather reports and observations from across the region to predict the likelihood of avalanche activity. Forecasts include a color-coded level of danger for slides in a certain area: green for low danger, black for extreme danger. Once the morning report is out, forecasters head into the field themselves to gather data that will be used in future reports.

One way they do that is by digging pits in the snow and visually inspecting the layers to see how stable the snowpack is. That information is important not just to recreationalists but also to railroads and highway departments that need to protect infrastructure.

“It would be impossible to be an avalanche forecaster who just sits in an office,” says Erich Peitzsch, the former director of the Flathead Avalanche Center who now studies snow, ice, and glaciers for the U.S. Geological Survey. “That’s why a lot of us love this job—because we get to be in the mountains.”

Over the last few years, Peitzsch has been using tree rings to gather data about historic large-magnitude avalanches. By doing so, he can determine when a tree might have been affected by a slide. While the use of dendrochronology to study avalanches is new, Peitzsch says he hopes it becomes more widespread in the coming years to help determine whether infrastructure or homes should be built in certain areas.

That’s especially helpful as more people move into the mountains. Western states like Colorado, Utah, and Washington are among the country’s fastest-growing. As more people live, recreate, and travel in the mountains, Peitzsch says, it’s important that they better understand the world around them.

“What happened in Wellington could still happen today,” he says. “But now, because of research and avalanche forecasting, we have a better sense of when a slide might happen. We have a better grasp on the science.”

For pest control, this South African farm enlisted a fowl army.

On the Vergenoegd Löw Wine Estate, just outside Cape Town in South Africa, the daily commute of the workforce is slightly different than in New York or London. Here, the workers quack all along the way. And, you might have guessed, they are ducks. Ten-plus sub-species of Indian Runner Ducks, to be precise. (And, incidentally, it is only the females that quack.)

But why do ducks work on a wine estate? Gavin Moyes, the estate’s tasting room manager and enthusiastic colleague to nearly 2,000 ducks, explains that they serve as “natural pest control.”

“Every morning,” he says, “they head off to the vineyard to consume insect pests.”

The estate is one of the oldest farms in the country, dating back to 1696. They produce ranges of white, rosé and red wines, but the winery is best known for premium red wines, such as their Shiraz, Merlot, Malbec, and Cabernet Sauvignons.

Since 1983, Vergenoegd has been refining their approach to ecological pest control, biodiversity, and sustainability. “We started off with chickens, but they proved not to be so efficient. The ducks, however, love eating snails and mosquito larvae, and when they defecate on the field, their dung helps our vines grow,” says Moyes. “It helps us on our way to being 100 percent pesticide and fertilizer-free.”

Using ducks in pest control is not such an unusual approach. In Bali, ducks are used in the rice paddies. Before planting, they are allowed onto the fields to eat all the pests and to poop as much as they like to fertilize the ground. In 2000, during a locust plague in China, ducks were brought in to control the swarms, with each one capable of eating up to 200 locusts each day.

At Vergenoegd, the estate holds a daily duck parade. When the gate between the estate and the duck residences is opened, the birds march along a fenced path, all the way to the fields. The spectacle is unbelievable. Hundreds of ducks, all slender and walking upright rather than waddling, just keep on coming. There is the odd goose among the ducks. While the ducks ignore me, the geese come closer, staring me down.

The geese, Moyes explains, are the duck’s bodyguards. “The ducks have absolutely no defense mechanism and are spooked easily. But the geese take on the role of their protectors, and go completely crazy when a mongoose or an owl approaches and scares them away. It’s a natural relationship that works very well.”

The ducks seem happy with their lives, but I needed to double-check that they don’t end up on the estate’s restaurant menu at some stage. “Oh, no. That would be like eating your colleagues,” says Moyes.

The ducks even adhere to a daily routine. After waking up around 7 a.m, they march to work at 10:30. After a day of gobbling up snails and pests, they’re home by 4 p.m. “The ducks live in smaller flocks all around the estate’s lake and have dedicated full-time carers,” explains Moyes. They even get annual leave, each year around harvest time, so they don’t eat the juicy grapes instead of the snails. But, as the species reportedly loves routine, they still go on the duck parade each day. Quite often, their keepers allow them onto a large grassy patch, feed them treats, and put the sprinklers on for them if no rain is forecast.

When their parading days are over, their ends are just as peaceful. “Eventually, they retire onto the lake’s island,” Moyes says. “And every single one will die of old age.”

Your world might have shrunk—but you can still meet manatees, jellies, bears, and more.

If a tree topples in a forest that has no people in it, the animals that live there will still hear the thud. And though many zoos, aquariums, and parks have temporarily closed their grounds to visitors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, lots of big and little creatures are still going about their business.

You might not be venturing far beyond your bedroom or kitchen right now, and the world may feel a little small. But thanks to the livestreams below, you can check in on animals from afar.

Baby Osprey Cam

Maybe much like you, this osprey family is hunkering down—but they’re focused on nesting and breeding. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science trained a camera on the birds’ platform in the York River in Gloucester Point, Virginia. Click for rippling waves, ruffling feathers, and many, many twigs.

Penguin Cams

The Aquarium of the Pacific, in Long Beach, California, streams two views of its Magellanic penguins. One shows them wandering their rocky habitat—waddling, nuzzling, hanging around. Another showcases the underwater action—exciting dives, but also casually dangling flippers (or wings), adorable half-submerged bellies, and the calming gurgling of the tank. Each penguin sports an ID tag. Take note of the color pattern, and then get to know Shim, Skipper, Admiral Fancy Pants, and the rest of the gang online.

Elephant Watering Hole Cam

Cue up this Explore.org livestream of Tembe Elephant Park, a watering hole near the border of South Africa and Mozambique, and you might see elephants mucking around. Even when the largest visitors don’t amble by, the stream is still worth a look—you might see tiny suni antelopes, or hear the chirping sounds of one of several hundred species of birds. (If you can’t get enough, check out this other Explore.org stream—a broadcast of off-season highlights from the bison watering hole in Saskatchewan’s Grasslands National Park.)

Giant Panda Cam

You’ve got to eat lunch, and you might as well do it with Tian Tian and Mei Xiang, the giant pandas at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C. The duo plays, wanders, and feasts on bamboo, and you can watch their adorably bumbling antics.

Manatee Cam

This camera, at Florida’s Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park, is superlatively soothing. The manatees, which congregate around a natural spring, are in no rush. They swim slowly and mesmerizingly; sometimes they just plop down on the bottom for a bit, before drifting peacefully to the surface. Occasionally, they get close to the camera and boop it with their noses. When the manatees aren’t in-frame, enjoy schools of fish or an equally tranquil view of the blue-green water.

Jelly Cam

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s immersive livestream, which runs from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Pacific time, is wildly transportive. It’s full of beautiful, gossamer, ethereal jellies, doing what they do, and backed by a calming, synth-classical score.

Brown Bear Cams

If you like brown bears, you need to know about Katmai National Park and Preserve. The vast Alaskan landscape has scores of them, and the park lovingly celebrates the bears bulking up for hibernation with a popular online bracket challenge known as Fat Bear Week.

These cameras aren’t streaming live right now—they’re on in the summer, into the early fall—but you can log on to watch some especially charming moments from the previous year. Check out bands of bears fishing for jumping salmon in the frothy water of Brooks Falls, or cubs wrestling near the river.

Do you know of any other animal livestreams? You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

A preference for blending put the Great White North on the wrong side of industry standards.

Canadian whisky is all contradictions. It’s unknown and yet somehow incredibly popular. It’s critically dismissed but wins global whiskey awards. It’s blended, which whiskey drinkers have been indoctrinated to think means it’s inferior, yet blending is what gives it its quality. Canadian whisky is among the most fascinating liquors on the market. And yet, chances are, if you’ve bought some, you did it by accident.

“What shocked me the first time I wrote a piece about it was how big Canadian whisky was,” says Lew Bryson, a drinks writer and author of several books on whiskey. “It was like an iceberg. So much of it was below the surface, you never noticed it.”

Let’s start with the spelling. Canadians spell it “whisky,” Americans spell it “whiskey.” The former comes from Scotland, the latter from Ireland. Canada has a much larger Scottish influence than the United States does. In distillery-dotted Prince Edward Island, for example, more than 40 percent of the population claims Scottish ancestry, and Nova Scotia literally translates to “New Scotland.” Many of the country’s founding fathers—James Douglas, John A. Macdonald, Alexander Mackenzie—were either Scottish or Scottish-Canadian. In any case, the production of Canadian whisky is more similar to Scotch whisky than it is to Irish or American whiskey, so the spelling makes sense on several levels.

While American whiskey, especially bourbon, has lately carried the connotations of rural, traditional, authentic, and endemic, Canadian whisky largely doesn’t feel like any of those things. That’s probably due to the way the Canadian whisky industry began. The earliest Canadian distillers, which were founded much later than American distillers, in the 1830s or so, weren’t actually distillers, at least not primarily. Instead, they were millers. As a way to use up waste wheat, they fermented and distilled it into liquor. Canadian whisky didn’t start out with small craft distillers; it started with big companies. “It didn't take long before spirits, whisky, became the major profit centers for these businesses,” says Davin de Kergommeaux, whose book Canadian Whisky: The New Portable Expert introduced the world of whiskey criticism to the wonders of the Great White North.

For the first century of Canadian whisky, there wasn’t really a Canadian style. Individual distillers went their own way; some were English, and a surprising number, including important ones such as J.P. Wiser’s and Hiram Walker, were American. When the American Civil War disrupted the entire American whiskey industry, Americans imported whisky from Canada, and Canadian distillers even brewed “American style” bourbons specifically for export. Soon Canadian whisky was the best-selling whisky in North America.

But in a continuation of the long tradition of Canada being buffeted about by whatever dumb stuff the United States was doing, the Canadian whisky industry was battered by American Prohibition. Many distillers sold for pennies on the dollar, and Canadian Club sold for less than the value of the whisky in their warehouses. A couple companies did sprout up or thrive by figuring out how to supply the bootlegging market—the Bronfman family of Montreal did it so well that they were able to buy Seagram’s, a longtime Canadian distillery, a few years before Prohibition ended.

While many American distillers and brewers returned to their pre-Prohibition recipes, Canadian whisky evolved, turning into something new. Although de Kergommeaux says there’s no documentation, and no specific date of its creation, the Bronfmans are generally credited with creating the technique of making what we now know as Canadian whisky. By the 1940s, there was a definable style, one extremely unlike American whiskey.

Unfortunately for generations of Canadian whisky distillers, that style does not fit well into existing whiskey categories, especially the ones used south of the border, in the United States, where the majority of their customers reside. The labeling of whiskey in the United States is vague, poorly delineated, sometimes misleading, and rarely helpful.

For casual whiskey drinkers, there’s a firm divide between blended whiskey and single-malt whiskey. In the United States, marketing largely from Scotch whisky makers has hammered in the message that single malt, which is made from a single type of grain in a single distillery, is fancier, better, and more expensive, and that blended is the cheap stuff. “Single malt” has a legal definition in Scotland, but not in the United States.

A number of celebrated whiskeys, such as Kentucky’s beloved bourbons, are not single malt. But they are considered “straight whiskey,” made from a mix of grains including corn, rye, wheat, and barley, with each type of straight whiskey (bourbon, rye) having requirements of how much of each kind of grain is used. Straight bourbon must be aged for a certain amount of time, but most importantly, it cannot have flavorings or colorings added: What comes out of the barrel is what you get. If you make changes to it after it comes out of the barrel, you’ll have a blended whiskey—and Scotch makers have told us that “blended” means “cheap.”

The Canadian-whisky style pioneered by the Bronfmans is neither single malt nor straight. It is, technically, blended, which, due to the particular rules of American and Scotch whiskey labeling, has a terrible reputation.

“Americans have an annoying habit of assuming that their definitions are the only definitions,” says de Kergommeaux. In the United States, a “blended whiskey” only has to contain 20 percent of “straight whiskey,” which is, you know, whiskey. In other words, American blended whiskey is often some kind of terrible neutral alcohol combined with a bit of cheap whiskey, caramel coloring, and artificial flavoring.

Canadian-style whisky is not about making fake whiskey—it’s made almost entirely from classic whiskey grains. But it’s different from straight whiskey in interesting ways.

To make American straight whiskeys, different grains are mashed together, then fermented, distilled, and aged. Canadian whisky is totally different. Instead of mashing all the grains together, Canadian distillers mash, ferment, distill, and age each type of grain separately. Then those finished whiskies are combined. That gives the blender an incredible amount of freedom—each individual grain can get individual attention.

Maybe you want to use toasted new barrels for your rye, heavily charred barrels for your corn, and very old barrels for your barley. Maybe you want to use a rye whiskey that’s been aged for a decade and a barley whiskey that’s brand new. It’s even permitted to add in up to 9.09 percent of finished other liquor. So if you want some sherry tones in your Canadian whisky, well, just add a percent or so of actual sherry. “There's a lot more paint on the palette,” says de Kergommeaux.

Blending in Canada is about making whisky more interesting, more versatile, almost chef-like. American whiskey is like a grilled shish kabob with zucchini, chicken, bell pepper, and mushroom all on one skewer. That’s not how skewered grilling is done in, say, Turkey or Japan, where chefs recognize that each of those ingredients have their own cooking needs. Canadian whisky is taking a skewer of all zucchini, all chicken, all pepper, and all mushroom, grilling them according to each of their needs, and then combining them later. It’s not a lesser form; it might be superior.

Because the Canadian style is so much more dependent on the blender than on the distiller, it can be hard to nail down. Bourbon always tastes like bourbon; the casks used and the grain proportions combine to create a fairly universal character of vanilla and oak, on the sweet side. Canadian whisky, being so wide open, can be made in so many different ways that it’s hard to find a through-line.

Well, except for one thing: Canadian whisky almost always uses a strongly flavored rye whiskey in its mix, which gives it peppery notes; “rye” is sometimes synonymous with Canadian whisky in Canada. “The trouble with rye is that it doesn't have much starch in it, so it produces very little alcohol,” says de Kergommeaux. “But it's a lot more flavorful. A little bit of rye really goes a long way to contributing flavor to the whisky.” Rye is a cold-weather crop, well suited for the climate in much of Canada’s growing regions. Corn, though grown by various First Nations peoples, especially in southern Ontario, was a minor crop among those of European descent in Canada until it took off in the 1960s, whereas rye already had a substantial history in American whiskey.

Despite its guilt by association with blended whiskey, Canadian whisky has, thanks to its popularity during Prohibition, maintained a stranglehold on the American whiskey market for decades. In fact, Canadian whisky outsold bourbon in the United States from the Civil War right up until 2010. Even today, you might be shocked to learn how many top-selling whiskies in America are actually Canadian: Of the top three, Crown Royal and Fireball are both Canadian whiskies. Canadian Mist, Black Velvet, Canadian Club, and Rich & Rare are also in the top 20 in sales.

Still, Canadian whisky hasn’t fared as well in connoisseur circles. Bryson explains that a representative of Crown Royal told him that internal polling suggested that 40 percent of Crown Royal customers had no idea Crown Royal was a Canadian whisky. To even explain what Canadian whisky is, and why it’s special, is kind of a complicated task. “That's what was really holding Canadian whisky back,” says Bryson. “People didn't understand it, and the Canadian distillers have admitted to me that they didn't do a great job of explaining it.”

Whiskey plummeted in popularity in the 1980s, and the modern whiskey boom only really started around the early 2000s. Bourbon, Scotch, and even Irish whiskies experienced a massive increase in sales and stature during the last two decades. “The Canadians were probably the last ones to that dance,” says Bryson. Only in the past couple of years has Canadian whisky begun to receive the attention it’s always deserved. In 2016, Jim Murray’s influential Whisky Bible named Crown Royal’s Northern Harvest Rye the whisky of the year. It was interpreted as almost a protest award, given to start the conversation about the value and quality of Canadian whisky.

Since then, most international contests have added a category for best Canadian whisky, alongside Scotch, Irish, bourbon, and others. It’s one of the most exciting categories in all of alcohol: By its nature, it’s encouraged to be wild, experimental, unpredictable. And due to its long reputation as bottom-of-the-shelf “blended” whiskey, even now it’s usually an outrageously good bargain. That 2016 winner sells for about $45. On the super high end, Bryson says, 42-year-old Canadian Club is similar in quality to a 40-year-old Glenfiddich. The Glenfiddich costs $4,500 for a bottle. The Canadian Club? $300.

Canadian whisky has been here all along, fascinating and wildly but quietly successful. It doesn’t demand your attention, but it deserves it.

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Turns out this big, striped lemur-eater didn't come from mainland Africa.

On the island of Madagascar, evolution has worked overtime assembling a menagerie like no other on Earth. That makes any interloper’s history all the more germane.



Take the resident non-native “forest cat,” for example—an animal whose origins have been the subject of much debate. Many scientists have long thought the feline’s ancestors were small wildcats that somehow reached Madagascar from mainland Africa. Others posited that Felis catus, the domestic cat, was also part of the gene pool (though historical and ethnographic data suggest that domestic cats didn’t arrive here until the 1800s—with a U.K. ambassador—after the forest cat was already established on the island nation).

Now, new evidence tells a whole different story. Recent genetic analyses by Michelle Sauther of the University of Colorado and colleagues indicate that the oversize, tiger-striped, lemur-eating feline came to the island by way of Arab trading ships up to 1,000 years ago.

After trapping and drawing blood from 30 forest cats in two Malagasy sanctuaries—the Bezà Mahafaly Special Reserve in the southwest and Ankarafantsika National Park in the northwest—the international team of scientists compared forest-cat genes to a host of cat genomes from around the globe. The data, reported in Conservation Genetics this month, tell a Middle Eastern tale: The animals descend from domestic cats of the Arabian Sea region, which includes the islands of Lamu and Pate, Dubai, Oman, and Kuwait.

Whether the ancestors were beloved pets, ship ratters, or sneaky stowaways, “these findings are consistent with human migration patterns of people arriving from the east,” says Tim Tetzlaff, chair of the Madagascar Fauna and Flora Group, an international consortium of zoos and conservation organizations, who was not involved in the study. “With so many fundamental mysteries about Madagascar’s past, beginning with how its iconic wildlife even got here, it’s gratifying to have any one of these questions sorted.”

Madagascar, an island country in the Indian Ocean with exceptionally diverse habitats and a host of species that evolved here and live nowhere else, has its own small carnivores. The largest, called the fosa (or fossa), is often described as “cat like”—or, some say, a cross between cat, mongoose, and dog—though it is not actually a felid. A member of the Eupleridae family, which covers all of the island’s meat-eaters, it prefers a deep-woods habitat and leans on lemurs for much of its nourishment.

“Fosa are only found on Madagascar; they are meant to be here,” says wildlife biologist Luke Dollar of the Department of Environment and Sustainability at Catawba College in North Carolina, who was involved in the genetics study. “They evolved to be, and remain, the top predators of Madagascar’s intact forests.”

Meanwhile, the non-native forest cats—sort of supersize tabbies that Sauther describes as having “uniform mackerel tabby markings,” straight tails, and bodies “about double the size and more robust than the wizened tabbies and little white kitties” from forest-bordering villages—have long been observed on the island. But no studies were dedicated to them until now.

Written evidence of their presence on Madagascar that clearly distinguishes them from other felines goes as far back as 1870. But the forest cats had plenty of time before that to hop aboard a Madagascar-bound vessel. Trade across the Arabian Sea has gone on for thousands of years, with a heavy influence by Arab visitors reflected in the island’s languages and architecture.

Sauther’s interest in the cats’ origins was piqued when one of her own study subjects, a ring-tailed lemur, went missing. “[Its] microchip turned up in the scat of one of the forest cats,” she says. “So, both the fosa and these other cats are noshing on my lemurs!”

Meanwhile, fosa appear to be taking out some of the competition, according to cat bones that one of Sauther’s students found in fosa poop. That fosa are eating some of the non-native felines is good news for other native species. Some Malagasy people are known to trap, kill, and eat the cats as well.

Exotic species, whenever and wherever they show up, can be devastating to local wildlife. The cats and dogs that live in Madagascar’s villages, for example, share pathogens extensively with the native animals, Tetzlaff says. “If striped forest cats do the same, this adds the additional wrinkle that these naturalized animals may be taking these [viruses and parasites] deeper into the forest.”

Whether that’s already happened is unclear. “The native animal populations in Madagascar have not been monitored for disease long enough to know how they are impacted,” says Duke University veterinarian Julie Pomerantz, who points to toxoplasmosis as an example of a disease that can affect lemurs and fosa alike and may, quietly, be having a significant impact on these native mammals.

Aside from their potential as disease disseminators, the forest cats prey on native birds, rodents, and snakes, and compete with the fosa for the endemic lemurs. But their estimated date of arrival means that they’ve spent centuries living on and adapting to Madagascar, becoming part of the island’s ecosystem as it functions today.

“They occupy the forest edges really, really well,” says Dollar—a case of a non-native species snagging relatively new digs (areas disturbed by human development) that competitors haven’t occupied. And with so many centuries as co-residents, he says, “things may be relatively balanced.”

For wildlife managers, learning more about these forest cats can help them decide what, if anything, should be done about them. “It’s important to follow these cats and really study them,” says Sauther. “We need to get to know them before doing anything dramatic that changes the system.”

On that note, filling in details of the forest cats’ origins leads to a complex and big-picture question for conservationists: At what point is an invasive species considered part of the fabric of the environment it once established? Is 900-plus years long enough?

“It’s quite the conundrum,” says Dollar. “When is it no longer justifiable for managers to [interfere with invasive wildlife]?” Especially, he says, when Madagascar is weighted down by many “more acute” conservation problems, such as population growth, lack of infrastructure, and the devastating effects of traditional agricultural practices.

“Is this a case where we should focus our efforts elsewhere—where we should leave a thing alone and let nature take care of itself? I really don’t know the answer, but this will be quite a debate!”

Regardless of what decisions are made going forward, these findings “give us insight into how things from outside adapt and change an existing ecology,” says Sauther. “We know humans came into Madagascar and changed a lot—cutting forests, raising cattle, planting crops. There were waves of heavy human impacts. And these cats are part of that story.”

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If you're cooped-up and curious, use your free time to decipher handwriting, tag images, and more.

If time at home has you missing life in the stacks or sifting through old papers in search of pieces of the past, fear not: You can do the same thing online. Slews of institutions are in the market for armchair archivists—volunteers who can generate knowledge by clicking through digitized resources, deciphering handwriting, tagging photos, and more.

Several institutions have already seen an uptick in digital detective work since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A transcription project at the Newberry, a research library in Chicago, has seen a surge in contributions: “In two weeks, we've received 62 percent of the traffic we typically see over the course of an entire year,” writes Alex Teller, the library’s director of communications, in an email. This past weekend, the By the People transcription project at the Library of Congress saw 5,000 more users than the previous weekend, says Lauren Algee, the team lead for the crowdsourced initiative. Here’s how you can join them. (Unfortunately, that delicious old-book smell is not included.)

Letters and Diaries at the Newberry

The Newberry needs your help deciphering handwritten letters and diaries and turning them into searchable resources. (This can sometimes be a tall order: Good luck making sense of Willa Cather’s chicken scratch.) Library staff are hoping to transcribe 51,259 pages in all, and only about 40 percent is complete. Brush up on the library’s preferred transcription practices here, and log on to dive into the lives of American families in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

Bentham Project at University College London

Given that the philosopher Jeremy Bentham left such detailed instructions for what should happen to his body after death (namely, transforming his bones into an auto-icon, an uncannily lifelike figure that still sports Bentham’s clothes), it should come as no surprise that he also left behind a prodigious pile of writings. The Bentham Project at University College London has already worked through some 23,000 pages of the philosopher’s musings, and they need your help tackling several thousand more. You can find the whole list of yet-to-be-transcribed work here.

Community Oral Histories, Menus, and Atlases at the New York Public Library

The New York Public Library has amassed a vast trove of oral histories about life in the boroughs, and is seeking folks to tidy up the transcripts generated by a speech-to-text tool. It’s a group effort—once a user tinkers with a line, others must listen and agree on the transcription. Grab some headphones and spend time with residents of Harlem, SoHo, Greenwich Village, and other neighborhoods that have seen rapid, seismic change.

At a time when many small businesses are struggling to survive without their regular patrons, you can also tune in to hundreds of community stories available on the project’s website, and listen to people wax nostalgic about the neighborhood institutions they have loved. The library has a sprawling collection, and volunteers are needed in other corners of it, too. You can peruse and transcribe the dishes on thousands upon thousands of menus, or take a stroll around historical insurance atlases and add addresses, correct building footprints, and more.

Madam C.J. Walker Collection at the Smithsonian Institution

Since 2013, nearly 15,000 volunteers have helped transcribe the Smithsonian’s holdings, and there are plenty of current projects that need a boost, including the papers of astronaut Sally Ride and notebooks where women at the old Harvard College Observatory recorded their celestial computations. If your social-distancing grooming routine has gone a little lax, pop into the Madam C.J. Walker materials from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and learn how the early-20th-century beauty entrepreneur made herself a millionaire, and trained thousands of other African-American women along the way.

Scenic Byways at the National Archives

If you’re dreaming of the day you can roam outside again, perhaps you’d like to help America’s National Archives tag details in photographs snapped along 150 roadways across the country. Looking at a palm tree isn’t quite the same as loafing or lounging beneath one, but clicking through the photos may temporarily satisfy your wanderlust. You can also help transcribe an 867-page court case brought against Charlie Chaplin, slews of speeches by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and much more.

Rosa Parks Papers and Spanish Legal Documents at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress’s By the People project needs help transcribing Rosa Parks’s papers, including her correspondence with her husband and mother, as well as a vast collection of 17th- and 18th-century Spanish legal documents (written in English, Spanish, and Latin). If you’re soothed by swimming through statutes, this is the collection for you. Other popular projects include transcribing letters to Abraham Lincoln and the papers of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross.

The token-size stones offer insight into life 20,000 years ago.

Long before being sequestered at home meant lounging on a sofa or investing in a good internet connection, some ancient humans on the stirrup-shaped island of Sulawesi, now part of Indonesia, decided to make some art in their free time. They etched familiar things—the sun, a local bovine critter—into the stones they found. Now, 20,000 years on, those innocent little doodles are taking on newfound meaning as the first tiny figurative artworks found in the region.

“Small portable artworks … are something archeologists in this region have been searching for for a long time,” says Michelle Langley, a research fellow at Griffith University’s Research Centre for Human Evolution and the lead author of a new paper describing the find. “We now know it was just that we hadn’t dug enough.”

The 11th-largest island in the world, Sulawesi punches above its weight when it comes to ancient art. An isle peppered with volcanoes and mountains at its center, sloping into jungle and beaches on its perimeter, Sulawesi’s topography has allowed ancient remains to be preserved into the present day.

In the past few months, the island has been flipping the script on continental Europe, where most famous ancient artworks have been found. In December 2019, another group of researchers described ancient cave art that dates back farther than the famous cave murals in Lascaux, France, and Altamira, Spain.

The new paper, published in the journal Nature: Human Behavior, describes two engraved plaquettes—literally “small plaques”—found buried in a pile of ancient trash. One plaquette is carved in flowstone and depicts an anoa, a small cousin of the cow (now endangered) that is unique to Sulawesi. The other—an oval carved into the center of a piece of limestone, with lines emanating from it—resembles a celestial body. The anoa plaquette, the researchers say, is the first bas-relief found outside Europe.

While the “sunburst” plaquette was identifiable from the off, the subtler incisions on the anoa plaquette—which is a bit deteriorated, if you can believe it, from its 20 millennia in a Sulawesian rock shelter—had to be put under some high-quality lighting to be discerned.

“At first I thought I might be seeing things, though I became more convinced the more I looked,” Langley says. “We were pretty excited about the identification of an engraved animal—we knew it was a first.”

The ancient Indonesian artworks are pint-sized, akin to ancient European figurines—probably so that they were easily portable for the residents of Pleistocene Sulawesi. The presence of such mini-works moves the needle of archaeological equity a bit, by highlighting that early groups in Southeast Asia worked on art projects similar to their European contemporaries.

“We hope that people are able to appreciate and celebrate the similarities and diversities of our first cultures and communities the world over,” Langley says. “People 20,000 years ago were doing some pretty interesting and amazing things in Africa, in Europe, in Asia, and in Australia. We are only just scratching the surface of the complexity of people living back then.”

The chance encounter has led to insights on how insects make it to distant islands.

On a moonless night in spring 2014, a Brazilian Navy ship traveling to Rio de Janeiro from the Trinidade and Martin Vaz Islands paused in the open ocean, nearly 250 miles from the coast. The crew illuminated the white hull and deck with 10,000 watts of spotlights as it lowered a device to measure currents associated with a nearby underwater volcano. Minutes later, the ship was swarmed.

“It looked like shooting stars were flying straight at the ship from all directions, in relatively straight paths,” says Ruy Alves, a botanist who was on board the ship.

Hundreds of insects were incoming, with most crashing into the hull and dropping into the ocean. Alves and his colleague Nilber Silva scrambled to capture the few that landed on the deck. They used their bare hands and improvised envelopes from pages torn out of a field notebook. Though the botanists were on the voyage to study plants on Trinidade Island, a largely barren volcanic hunk in the South Atlantic Ocean, they knew that they were witnessing something potentially new to science.

Upon their return to the mainland and the Museu Nactional, Alves and Silva contacted several entomologists to tell them what they had seen. The insect experts were astonished by the story they told.

Some insects, such as monarch butterflies, are widely known to migrate long distances, but they tend to avoid flying over big obstacles such as oceans. They prefer to stick to routes where they can take breaks to rest and refuel. Adding a further wrinkle to the night swarm at sea, these migrating insects also usually travel by day. “I think the fact that they were flying at night and on the open ocean is fantastic because both are uncommon,” says Angelo Pinto, an entomologist at the Universidade Federal do Paraná in Brazil. Pinto and his colleagues identified the insects collected from the ship’s deck: a dragonfly, three moths, and 13 stink bugs. All of the specimens were deposited at the Museu Nactional, where they were housed until 2018, when a catastrophic fire destroyed them, along with most of the museum’s 20 million artifacts and specimens.

For a dragonfly to make the trip over the water isn’t entirely surprising, given their penchant for long-distance travel. The species on the ship is known to cover impressive ground by gliding with its long, slender wings. But stink bugs are another matter. “They aren’t gliders like dragonflies,” says Pinto. “They have to flap their wings continuously to sustain flight.” He had never heard of a stink bug—shield-shaped insects belonging to the order of Hemiptera, or “true bugs”—migrating over open ocean. Either the stink bugs had actually been stowaways on the ship, or they had made an incredible, uncharacteristic journey.

There are nearly 5,000 species of stink bug all over the world. The ones familiar to most people today are brown marmorated stink bugs, native to Asia and considered a major invasive agricultural pest in the United States. The ones from the ship were actually giant strong-nosed stink bugs. Unlike the brown marmorated ones, these big bugs hunt other insects, using strong mouth parts to pierce their prey and suck up their internal fluids. The species is found all the way from northern Argentina to the southern United States and probably originated in South America.

Giant strong-nosed stink bugs are also found in the Galápagos Islands. Norwegian zoologist Alf Wollebaek discovered them there in 1925, nine decades after Charles Darwin’s famous visit aboard HMS Beagle. Wollebaek and the other members of his expedition arrived on Floreana Island on a yacht, aptly named Floreana, that was transporting Norwegian settlers. The Norwegians ultimately failed to establish lucrative fishing and whaling, but Wollebaek was decidedly successful in his collection mission—by the end of his five-month exploration, he had gathered more than 500 specimens, including tortoises, sea lions, birds, lizards, and several species of insect, including the introduced giant strong-nosed stink bug.

Since its discovery there, the bug has spread to three other islands in the Galápagos, but it’s not an alarming invasion, says Charlotte Causton, senior research scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation. They aren’t nearly as troublesome as other alien insects in the archipelago, such as Philornis downsi, a blood-sucking fly that is annihilating the Darwin’s famous finches. According to a scoring system Causton devised to describe the threat level of non-native insects on the islands, the blood-sucking fly has the highest score, a seven, while the giant strong-nosed stink bug is a three.

Causton says the stink bug’s limited spread, to just four of the 19 islands “suggests that, at least in the Galápagos, it is a poor disperser and colonizer.” This is perhaps in part because it’s a weak flyer, according to Luiz Campos, a stink bug expert at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, with puny wings relative to its body size. The species wasn’t believed to be capable of flying the hundreds of miles from the mainland to the Galápagos Islands; scientists always assumed that people carrying exotic plants had brought them over.

So what were these poor-flying bugs doing hundreds of miles out in the South Atlantic? It was an ecological mystery. According to Pinto, the most plausible explanation—that the insects had boarded the ship in Brazil and come along for the ride—was quickly ruled out. “They saw the swarm of insects flying on the open ocean; they did not see the insects flying from the ship and coming back,” he says.

At the same time, the entomologists agreed that the stink bugs couldn’t have made the journey under their own power—so they must have had help. Small insects sometimes rely on the wind to carry them over long distances. In rare cases, large insects, even ones larger than the nearly-inch-long stink bugs—can get blown by strong winds—even across an ocean. “African locusts have been documented to reach South America assisted by heavy storms,” says Pinto, so it was possible that the giant strong-nosed stink bugs had gotten a natural lift.

Pinto and his colleagues worked backward to reconstruct the path the stink bugs might have taken, accounting for the strength and direction of the wind that day—information that the navy ship had fortunately been recording. The data pointed to a stretch of the Brazilian coast as the swarm’s most likely starting point. With a push from the wind, the insects could have covered the 250 miles from the coast to the ship in as little as 34 hours, according to an analysis the researchers published in the journal PeerJ.

Campos, who was not involved in the report, says it makes a case for the role of wind in long-distance dispersal of large-bodied insects, something that wasn’t considered much of a factor before. But there are still unanswered questions. What prompted the insects to migrate in the first place? Where were they heading? Had they continued on their path, with a steady wind, another week could have put the swarm in Africa, yet none of the species that were part of the swarm have ever been recorded on that continent. Depending on their heading, they also could have run into winds blowing in the opposite direction, possibly right back to Brazil.

The discovery is also raising new questions about the arrival of the species in the Galápagos. “Our observation on the open ocean opens a new window to investigate how these insects arrived there,” says Pinto. Perhaps rather than hitching a ride on plants being carried by people, they might have blown over, just like the stink bugs on the ship.

“I think it could be a good alternative hypothesis to the classic plant transportation scenario,” adds Campos, though he notes that it’s still speculative.

“More research is necessary to confirm our conclusions,” Pinto agrees, but he believes that the chance encounter between a well-equipped ship and a wayward swarm is “a very very first step to understanding these insects’ migratory process.”

Including its old Victorian-era nails.

Lots of music appears to be emerging from the world's windows and balconies, in some cases recalling The Beatles' famous rooftop concert from 1969. Now some enterprising fan out there might be able to replicate the band's very first concert—from almost a decade earlier—on the actual stage where they played.

On April 10, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the band’s breakup, California-based Julien’s Auctions will offer a slew of Beatles memorabilia (with live online bidding available), from the handwritten lyrics for “Hey Jude” to corduroy trousers worn by John Lennon himself. While it may not look so illustrious, this set of wooden planks pulled straight out of the floor are in fact witnesses to history, and a marquee item that could fetch as much as $20,000.

Like all matters of diehard-fan minutiae, the precise date of The Beatles’ first concert is up for debate. It depends how you define the band: Their origins date back to the late 1950s, when Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney played as a skiffle trio called The Quarrymen. This wooden stage from Liverpool’s Lathom Hall isn't where they first played as that band, but it does predate the Fab Four as we know them. On May 14, 1960, the band performed as a quintet, with Stuart Sutcliffe on bass and Tommy Moore on drums, at Lathom Hall. (Ringo Starr didn’t get involved until 1962.) They had also not yet settled on their final name, and played the show as The Silver Beats. Neither Harrison nor McCartney had yet turned 18, and the young group walked onstage not just for their debut gig, but also to audition for local concert promoter Brian Kelly.

It went over well, and Kelly booked The Silver Beats to return to the Lathom Hall stage the following Saturday night. This time, he'd even put their name on the bill.

But, true to the spirit of rock 'n' roll, the band blew off the gig. When they were supposed to report for duty at Lathom Hall the following Saturday night, they were actually in Scotland, backing a singer named Johnny Gentle. They’d received the offer at the last minute—in between the first and second shows at Lathom—and neglected to tell Kelly that they’d accepted it.

And so The Silver Beats were basically fired, and forbidden to play any of Kelly’s venues for several months. By the time the promoter changed his mind and invited the band back to Lathom Hall—in a nod to their rising profile and burgeoning reputation—the group had already changed its name twice: first, to The Silver Beetles, and then to The Beatles. They played the Lathom Hall stage 10 times between January and February of 1961.

That venue, Lathom Hall, was founded in 1884 as a Victorian social hall. It later became a movie house, before it was converted into a dance hall in the 1950s. Over the subsequent decade, the venue became closely associated with the Merseybeat musical movement—essentially the early British wave of rock 'n' roll—named for the River Mersey that runs alongside Liverpool. Today, Lathom remains open as a Merseybeat-themed throwback bar. This stage itself reflects the building’s long history, measuring about 20 feet by 10 feet, with the original Victorian-era nails still peaking out of the planks, all of which are numbered for easy reassembly.

The Julien’s auction was originally slated to take place at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square, but the auction house has changed its plans in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. While the auction is still scheduled for April 10, CEO Darren Julien says that bidding will be remote, and that the auctioneer and phone operators working the room will all be distanced at least six feet apart from each other.

An online video raised a strange question: Do whale sharks make sounds? And would it matter if they did?

Jonathan Green first heard the sound late at night during the summer of 2016, while watching 10 hours of a whale shark swimming through open ocean. Green was reviewing footage captured by a camera that had been stuck temporarily to the whale shark’s head, which he and his team had put in place to film for the BBC’s Blue Planet II documentary series.

Around 11 p.m., after hours of hearing nothing but the hiss of water passing by the camera, he had the volume turned down. Then he heard something unusual: a “low, gravelly whisper.” He hit rewind and turned the volume up. Then he woke up the rest of his team.

The crew sat together in silence as he played the sound over a bluetooth speaker, over and over.

“We were thinking, okay, this has gotta be mechanical, it can’t be coming from the whale shark. But it doesn’t sound mechanical,” Green says. “We just sat there and thought: What the hell are we listening to?”

The video is filmed from just in front of the animal’s dorsal fin, providing a first-person perspective of the largest fish alive. The whale shark was swimming near Darwin’s Arch, an inverted stone U thrusting out of the Pacific Ocean, chalky white and red-brown against deep blue. Just beyond that is Darwin Island, a high, grassy plateau that drops into vertical cliffs. This remote outpost sits roughly 100 miles north-northwest of the Galápagos Islands, where Charles Darwin did his famous work.

Darwin himself never came here, as there was nowhere dry to land. But if he had stuck his seasick face into the ocean here, he might have delighted in the profusion of life around these places named in his honor. Green and hawksbill turtles, manta rays, fur seals, dolphins, yellowfin tuna, and fish in all colors and sizes call the food-rich waters around Darwin's Arch home—as do sharks in their multitudes. This area is said to have the highest concentration of sharks in the world: silky sharks, Galapagos sharks, tiger sharks, whitetip and blacktip reef sharks, schools of scalloped hammerheads, and whale sharks, which return to the Galapagos every year from June through November. Though whale sharks grow as large as a yellow school bus (and the largest measured was bigger than a semi-tractor trailer), these massive animals are filter feeders, and they come to the Galapagos to vacuum up the small fish and plankton that bloom there in abundance every summer. (They also might come here to have their babies—but that’s another story.)

You don’t see much of Darwin’s richness in Green’s video. Mostly, you see the blue-green gradient of open ocean and the whale shark’s massive, spotted head, swaying as it swims. Then, there’s the sound: two pulses of a rough, rasping groan, one long and one short. The camera shakes slightly; there’s a click, and then another brief groan, lower and quieter. Just after the sound trails off, you can see a smaller shark species swim up from beneath the spotted head, flashing its pale belly after brushing against the whale shark’s underside.

Here’s the thing about the sharks: as a general rule, they don’t make sounds. Across sharks' 400-500 species, no one has ever found an organ even capable of making sound. (The closest is a New Zealand shark that "barks" by expelling water.) So after it was captured, the BBC team sent this video to be reviewed by multiple experts. None could tell them what exactly they were hearing.

Green thinks it’s unlikely that the sound came from a boat; Darwin Island is an extremely remote location, where few other boats venture, and based on the video’s time stamp, his own boat wasn’t running at the time. But the experts couldn’t even say whether the sound was natural or man-made.

“At the 11th hour [the BBC] said no, scientifically, we can’t air this noise until we confirm what it is,” Green says. “They even recorded something with David Attenborough. Much to our disappointment they had to pull it.”

For years, the video sat in a file on Green’s computer. Then, in the summer of 2019, he decided to post it on the Facebook page of the Galápagos Whale Shark Project, the research organization he leads. He saw it as a way to get the sharks some much-needed attention: In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) changed the whale shark’s global status from “Vulnerable” to “Endangered.” With their global population decreasing, whale sharks needed every bit of public awareness they could get.

In his video, Green dubbed the sound the “Dino Roar,” an homage to the fact that whale sharks’ ancestors swam our prehistoric seas nearly 60 million years ago, just after the fall of the dinosaurs. The response was enthusiastic. Galápagos Whale Shark Project normally gets around a thousand views on its Facebook videos; to date, the Dino Roar video has gotten over 12,700.

But the video did more than just catch the public’s eye. It has also connected Green with whale shark researchers who had stories of their own.

Within an hour of the Galápagos video being posted on Facebook, Heather Barrett started getting a lot of notifications. She had been tagged in the video by friends three separate times. Not long after, she got in touch with Green by email to share her own experiences, from over three years investigating unusual sounds around whale sharks.

Barrett was an undergraduate student when it started. At the time, she was volunteering for a research project on Mexico’s Bahia de los Angeles. Perched beside the cyan waters of the Gulf of California, the remote research station where she spent the summer of 2010 could only be reached by three days of driving through stark desert, studded with cacti and extinct volcanoes. It was perfect for studying whale sharks. Every summer, massive blooms of tiny plankton drew hundreds of whale sharks to the shallow, protected bay.

Snorkeling beside the sharks, Barrett’s job was to photograph each animal’s pattern of spots—each one unique, like a fingerprint—for a catalog documenting the individuals that visited the region every year. Every third day or so, she estimates, she began noticing a strange noise in the water around them.

During her photo ID swims, Barrett started taking videos, hoping she might catch the sound on camera. After a couple of attempts, she got one: two pulses of a short, harsh rattle, picked up while swimming next to a scarred 12-foot male named Shredder. She thought it sounded like two strokes over the ridged back of those wooden frog noisemakers sold to tourists in every Mexican market.

It was the only video that Barrett managed to capture that summer, but she was determined to keep trying. That winter, the sounds “became a bit of an obsession,” she says. She knew there was nothing yet that showed they had anything to do with whale sharks. But Barrett had grown up in a family of scientists, taught from childhood to pursue out-of-the-box questions—and she thought this question was compelling enough that it might make a good subject for a Master’s thesis.

She started designing a research project, and found someone who would loan her a basic recording device. But when she reached out to experts for advice, making “a lot of cold calls and emails, trying to get my foot in the door to learn about acoustics and shark physiology,” Barrett hit a snag.

“When you start going to a shark biologist about possible sound production ... I feel like it was very discouraging,” she says. “I got a lot of ‘no’s, got a lot of laughter, a lot of, ‘Why would you focus on that?’”

Barrett had expected skepticism from the shark community; sharks don’t have vocal cords, so they can’t make sounds in the way whales, seals, or humans do. They also don’t appear to have the ability to make sound in the way that some particularly vocal fish do. Their rows of tiny vestigial teeth aren’t large enough to grind together. They also don’t have swim bladders, which some fish use to control their buoyancy, to drum up against.

“It is fair, for people to be very skeptical,” says Barrett. Looking back, she understands that these researchers were evaluating whether her left-field question was worth dedicating time and money to. She wonders if some were trying to protect her, still early in her career, from wasting her reputation and her time.

“I realized it pushed questions out of our current box,” Barrett says. “Asking that question was hard for people because the box was safe. More funding comes from the box, there’s less risk in the box.”

Barrett was able to go down to Bahia de los Angeles twice more, in the summers of 2011 and 2012. Swimming in those crystal waters, she gathered a small library of the short croaking sounds, just like those she had first heard next to Shredder.

She also captured one additional, particularly intriguing recording. In 2011, just as a storm was moving in over the boat, Barrett managed to get her recorder in the water during a feeding frenzy. At least eight to 10 whale sharks were feeding on a ball of baitfish, alongside sea lions and diving clusters of blue-footed boobies. The resulting recording sounds something like a woodland pond in the thick of summer, with frogs calling from every direction: a layered series of drum-like pulses, sounding off at different volumes, almost like they were coming from different individuals.

Not long after that trip, however, Barrett realized she had to move on. No one she spoke to wanted to focus on potential whale shark sounds. So she applied to graduate school under a different project, focusing on sea otters. She made one more attempt to record the sounds in 2016, but the weather didn’t cooperate, and she went home empty-handed.

“Maybe I was being naive and youthful, but it was not realistic to keep it up and fund it,” she says of the project. “[To do this project] would be multifaceted, and expensive, and involve lots of collaboration. But what it comes down to and what I was met with a lot of times is, people are like, ‘Who cares?’”

Barrett and Green’s stories invite that very question. In the relatively small world of whale shark research, experiences with, and opinions on, odd sounds run the gamut.

“You would think we would have heard it,” says Dr. Alastair Dove. Dove is Vice President of Research and Conservation at the Georgia Aquarium, one of the few places in the world that keeps whale sharks in captivity. “We have four at the aquarium. People are diving with those sharks every day. I’ve been in there dozens of times. And we’ve never heard those animals make any detectable noise.”

Marina Padilla, a marine biologist who guides tours with the company Baja Charters in La Paz, Mexico, has been in the water with them nearly every day during whale shark season for the past five years. She had no croaking, grunting, or purring to report—but she did say that one of her coworkers had heard such sounds.

Dr. Dení Ramírez Macías, the director of Tiburón Ballena México (Whale Shark Mexico), has been studying whale sharks since 2001 and is currently focusing on the population in the Gulf of California. Macías noticed unexplained sounds around whale sharks from the very beginning; while doing her PhD in the Caribbean, she remembered one large male shark who seemed to make a sound every time she and her teammates jumped in the water around him.

Macías compared the sounds she’s heard with the rapid knocking or clicking vocalizations made by sperm whales.

“You feel where the sound comes from,” Macías says. “To me, it’s pretty evident that it comes from the shark and not from a boat.”

Rafael de la Parra, Executive Director of the research organization Ch’ooj Ajauil AC in Quintana Roo, Mexico, has a similar tale. For 17 years he’s been studying a massive aggregation of whale sharks (thought to be the largest in the world) that come to the Caribbean annually.

“We are almost terribly sure we’ve been listening to some kind of roar, or purring, like a big cat purring,” de la Parra says. “One of my children, who has been working and collaborating with us, he used to say when we listened sometimes: ‘Did you hear that, she was singing to us!’”

What these stories share with each other, and with Barrett’s experiences, is a description of a seemingly similar sound: a low, rapid vibration. What they also all share is an air of careful skepticism.

“We have to be quite careful about saying it was the whale shark,” says de la Parra. He points out that many whale sharks are surrounded by an entourage of fish that follow everywhere, using the shark’s bulk for protection and scavenging any bits of food the shark misses. “As long as any of these fish have a swim bladder, they are in theory able to produce sound.”

Several researchers also noted that whale sharks often ingest air when they feed at the surface, and that you can see bubbles emerging from their gills after a big gulp of plankton. The sounds might therefore be nothing more than escaping air—like a very large, underwater burp.

If it were proven that whale sharks made sounds intentionally, that would be another story. Researchers agreed that, if these sounds did have a function, whale sharks would face being drowned out by human noise in an increasingly noisy ocean. That’s already becoming a problem for other species.

Plus, “with these very vocal animals like whales, sound production is very much linked to social behavior,” says Dove. “It implies there's some higher level of cognitive function. If whale sharks are talking to each other, maybe they’re more social than we thought.”

Dove doesn’t completely dismiss investigating the concept. He was part of the team that helped place the BBC camera on the “Dino Roar” shark, and still finds the video fascinating. What interests him most is the sound’s timing. “There’s an awful lot of swimming around in the blue on the video, and that sound coincides with the one time a shark happens to swim up near [the whale shark],” Dove says. That could mean that the sound was voluntary, a reaction to the smaller shark.

But perhaps the most common view among researchers is that, though these sounds might be interesting, they’re dwarfed by much bigger issues. There are so many fundamental questions left to answer about whale sharks that these sounds fall to the bottom of the list.

As Macías put it: “At least from my point of view, it’s been a small curiosity rather than a major focus.”

Green himself feels this pressure acutely. “We have to focus our work on very specific areas,” he says. For instance, though his video might have spurred other conversations about whale shark sounds, he doesn’t anticipate looking into the sounds anytime soon. His team’s next two years focus on investigating whether whale sharks do indeed give birth around the Galápagos.

He added: “Audio is not the priority, because it’s not going to help in the long term with conservation.”

After talking to whale shark researchers, it’s easy to see why these sounds haven’t made it past the curiosity phase. They speak to the very nature of how risk and compromise work in science. How do you choose to pursue the out-of-the-box questions, the left-field curiosities, when doing so would require a massive leap? And how do you take that leap when it’s over a chasm filled with questions that are just as, if not more, important?

Perhaps the best way may be a baby step rather than a leap. Barrett’s original plan for her recordings was to publish a short communication called a biological note, which doesn’t require the amount of data needed for a full scientific paper. Since watching Green’s video, she’s resolved to revisit, and eventually publish, the draft she started years ago. With the help of an acoustician, she plans to focus the note on the sounds themselves, rather than the controversial possibility that they are coming from whale sharks.

“In 2020 I want to dust it off, and talk to some people that could really help me,” she says. “That way, if anyone is ever able to get funding, it’s listed somewhere, to say: This occurred, this could be an interesting question.”

Worldwide, whale shark numbers are thought to be decreasing due to pollution, ship strikes, and accidental injuries in fishing nets, as well as some targeted hunting that still happens for the shark fin soup trade. The effects of climate change are also a growing concern.

That knowledge adds a sense of urgency to the questions that remain about whale sharks. Whether they are purring or bubbling or just cruising silently through the blue, it’s clear these gentle giants have even greater depths than we’ve yet plumbed.

With a new filling and a new crust, an American innovator changed pie forever.

California is the “Land of Opportunity.” That term was never meant to apply to pie-making, per se, but no one ever told Monroe Strause.

The future Pie King started from humble origins. Monroe Boston Strause was born to salt-of-the-earth parents who left the Midwest for sunny California, raising him and his siblings among the towering palm trees and sky-high hopes of early 20th-century Los Angeles.

As a teenager, he joined his uncle’s wholesale pie business in 1919, where he was soon confronted with a crisis: rising competition from cakes, which were becoming increasingly accessible for home cooks since standardized ovens made baking easier. His industry was in trouble. And thus, the young, curious, and ambitious Strause entered the Roaring ‘20s with a burning conviction to innovate the humble pie.

Strause considered pie to be the “Great American Dessert,” and deemed it superior to just about every other food. A natural perfectionist, his driving motivation was to create better versions of the dish. But unlike housewives and grandmothers, the patron saints of pie, Strause approached pie-making in a way that reflected the growing emphasis on scientific thought that took root in the 1920s. He treated new pies as individual inventions, and methods of preparation as equations to solve. He even referred to his recipes as “formulas.”

In his 1939 book Pie Marches On, Strause’s publishers summed up his approach: “He has reduced pie baking to an exact science and measures each ingredient with the care of a pharmacist.” This style meant no volume measurements (Strause wrote that “the tea cup and teaspoon are the greatest enemies of a good pie”) and endless experimentation. Once, he made 150 different versions of cherry pie. His pie fixation also meant he had the tendency to get a little high-and-mighty. Strause once sniffed that housewives “tend to be too slipshod for scientific pie-making.”

One problem in particular vexed him. He was supremely unsatisfied with cream pies, which were thick, heavy, and reminded him of cornstarch pudding. This characteristic was a personal insult. Strause once ate so much cornstarch pudding as a child that he became sick, and he couldn’t stomach it at all afterwards. So he began experimenting on a new cream pie.

The result was the Chiffon Pie, the crown jewel of Strause’s illustrious pastry career and a genre of pie that endures to this day. Inspired by recipes for French pastry cream, Strause developed a pie filling that incorporated stiffly beaten egg whites into a cornstarch-thickened cream. The result was a delicate, airy filling that retained its firmness and volume, one that “stood up like a soldier on parade,” as the New York Herald Tribune later described. As for the name, the story goes that when Strause first presented his mother with his new creation, she exclaimed that the smooth, light filling was “like chiffon.”

The silky texture wasn’t the only innovative element of Strause’s new pie. It was piled high in the middle and rounded off in a dome that was a first in pie design. And though the sexy new filling got all of the glory, the pie’s crust proved arguably more influential. Strause found typical pie crusts to be too thick for such a light filling, so to house his edible chiffon, he developed a new crust made from graham cracker crumbs, patted into the pie pan and pre-baked to a buttery crunch. The graham cracker crust he invented went on to become a foundation of American pie-making, holding up everything from cheesecake to key lime pie.

The Chiffon Pie was first sold as a novelty in Los Angeles for $0.35 a slice, or a little over $5.00 today. The exact date of its debut is unclear, though it was most likely in 1926, at the height of the Jazz Age. The new pie caught on quickly, becoming a pastry sensation and bringing both business and fame to its creator. The delicate, refined pie—a stark contrast to heavy, rustic fruit versions—aligned with the glamor and elegance of Hollywood and the film industry. Strause made the connection explicit. In his book, he included a photograph of silent film star Mary Pickford, along with an Orange Chiffon Pie.

The pie’s rise to prominence also coincided with an emphasis in American cuisine on feminine food. Beginning as early as 1907 with the cookbook Sea Foam’s Collection of Dainty Receipts, dessert recipes began trending toward the ethereal, with ingredients like cream, gelatin, and whipped egg whites. These dishes were aimed toward women as a reflection of their femininity, and women’s magazines encouraged them to master elegant, dainty desserts that transcended hearty “masculine” fare. Arriving in the 1920s, the Chiffon Pie was perfectly timed to this trend, capitalizing on the fetish for airy concoctions.

Within a few years of the Chiffon Pie’s debut, Strause had one of the biggest pie operations in the West. He made a fortune off his creation by keeping his recipe close to his chest. At one point, he traveled up to 30,000 miles a year to teach hotels and restaurants how to make it. Within a handful of years, the Chiffon Pie’s recipe leaked and became public knowledge. But by that time, it had already done its work. The public crowned Strause as the Pie King.

On the back of his pie’s unprecedented success, Strause skyrocketed to fame. He became arguably the first pastry celebrity in America. In many ways, his widespread fame and relentless drive for innovation made him the Dominique Ansel of his day, almost a century before the famed pastry chef invented the hit Cronut of 2013.

Throughout the 1930s, Strause traveled across the country, delivering lectures, consulting for restaurants, teaching classes, and more. In Chicago, he won a pie contest against over 2,500 other desserts. Media-savvy and with a flair for showmanship (he once baked a novelty pie 24 feet in diameter for newsboys in Los Angeles), Strause sat for interviews with newspapers across the country, bolstering his brand as a “pie engineer” and presenting himself as the country’s foremost expert on the subject. His success didn’t just bring him fame, either. According to one profile in The Globe and Mail, he made “a bank president’s salary out of pie.”

Yet, for all his influence, the latter half of Strause’s life is obscure. By the 1950s, his prominence waned, and the widespread acclaim he enjoyed for his pie inventions dwindled. It’s unclear how he spent the last years of his life, though one hopes he still enjoyed plenty of pie.

Strause used his skill to create confections that captured the spirit of his era. As the Roaring ‘20s exploded with glamour and modernity, the Pie King brought a bit of that ephemeral magic to the pastry world. Today, others have since taken up his innovative mantle. From Lauren Ko and her geometric modern art designs to Nicole Rucker’s bright and breezy California creations, bakers continue to experiment with the Great American Dessert.

Artists are bringing back Amabie, a 'yōkai' associated with protection from disease.

In the first half of 1846, a kawaraban, or cheaply printed broadside, recorded a strange account in Japan’s old Higo Province on Kyūshū island. A local government official had spotted a curious creature in the water one evening: a scaly, three-legged figure with long hair and a beak. Even more curious, it had warned him of a forthcoming illness and instructed him to draw and distribute its image for protection. A sketch was printed next to this account, and as the kawaraban spread, so did tales of this mysterious half-merperson, half-bird, from Kyūshū all the way to Edo.

Known as Amabie, this yōkai, or spirit, has become associated with refuge from epidemics. It makes sense, then, that it has resurfaced during the global COVID-19 pandemic, only this time on social media. Illustrations of Amabie are circulating on Twitter and Instagram under the hashtags #amabie and #アマビエ; artists around the world are drawing and sharing Amabie in hopes of repelling disease, or at the very least honing their talents and finding community while social distancing.

“I drew this Amabie with the intention to remind others to stay calm and never lose hope at times when we feel like giving up,” Ceruzen Lee, an artist from the Philippines who recently drew a cotton candy-pink Amabie with blue hair, writes in an email. “It was truly inspiring to find out that many other artists still remain optimistic despite the events in our world today.”

Scholars believe that Amabie is a local variation of Amabiko, a similar Japanese creature that appears from the sea and prophesies good harvests and outbreaks of disease. “In accounts of Amabiko, it is sometimes said that the image itself can ward off the epidemic,” says Jack Stoneman, a professor of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University. “This is not unusual in Japanese cultural history—images as talismans.”

Illustrator Kaori Hamura Long, who lives in Fukuoka city on Kyūshū, felt flu-like symptoms earlier this month. Unable to get tested for COVID-19 due to Japan’s limited testing capacity, she decided to stay at home and draw Amabie. Her creation floats above rolling waters, a glamorous figure with flowing white hair and sparkling eyes. In one version, Amabie wears a mask; a second rendition shows the yōkai unadorned, with an apparent smile on its face. “I shared this image of Amabie hoping that the virus will die down and people all over the world will unite to fight the disease instead of finger-pointing each other,” Hamura Long writes in an email.

Japan reported its first positive test for the new coronavirus on February 20. According to Matthew Meyer, an artist who has written extensively on yōkai, the Amabie-drawing trend picked up steam in the first week of March, when Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzō Abe called for schools nationwide to close. The country now has over 1,100 confirmed cases, and has postponed the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo by one year.

“It's likely that it was a reaction to the sudden disruption of the daily routine,” Meyer, who also runs an illustrated database dedicated to yokai folklore, writes in an email. “People are still posting about one per minute, so it’s still going strong.” His own illustrated Amabie, a cheery character perched on a rock, doubles as a printable coloring page.

Amabie is just one of many yōkai believed to wander Japan and ward off evil. Originally disseminated through woodblock prints, this class of supernatural beings—such as Hakutaku, Jinja Hime, and Kotobuki—flourished in the Japanese popular imagination in the second half of the 19th century.

“These yōkai appeared during the period when Japan's isolationist policy was forcefully ended by U.S. warships,” Meyer writes. “While the increase in trade brought lots of ideas and inventions to Japan, it also brought brand new diseases, such as cholera. The popularity of these yōkai was in response to the sudden and frequent epidemics that repeatedly struck Japan in the latter half of the 19th century, killing hundreds of thousands.”

These contemporary Amabie artworks seem to be born of the same impulse—to offer hope and relief in a moment of collective uncertainty.

3,000 years before the Aztecs, Mesoamericans were already playing ball.

Rubber balls made their first European appearance in 1528, in the court of King Charles V of Spain. The courtiers who witnessed it were astounded. The balls were used in an exhibition match of an old Aztec ballgame, featuring two full-strength squads of Aztec players who’d been forced across the Atlantic by the Spanish conquistadors.

But Mesoamerican ballgames were already ancient when they debuted in 16th-century Spain. Evidence of them goes back thousands of years. Until now, however, that evidence has been confined to the areas that produced rubber: the lowlands around Chiapas and Veracruz, Mexico, the latter of which was once home to the ball-playing Olmec people.

Archaeologists have now identified an early ballcourt from the Mexican highlands of Oaxaca—indicating that the pastime was more far-reaching than previously suspected.

The court was recently excavated by Víctor Salazar Chávez and Jeffrey Blomster, archaeologists at George Washington University, in collaboration with the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico (INAH) and independent researchers in the town of San Mateo.

Along with the ballcourts at Etlatongo, the team found small figurines of ballplayers, which confirmed that the site was indeed a field of play.

The research, published in the journal Science Advances, “suggests that the highlands, especially Oaxaca, was a really important player in this template for what a ballcourt should look like,” says Blomster. “The idea of two long parallel mounds with an alley—that’s a template that exist[ed] until the Spaniards [arrived].”

The newly discovered ballcourt—found beneath another, later court on the same site, on a hill in the village of Etlatongo—dates to 1374 BC, making it the oldest in the highlands by 800 years, and the second oldest in all of Mesoamerica. The discovery began with the excavation of a large stone wall, the purpose of which was at first hard to discern. It turned out to be a platform for the ancient Mesoamerican sport.

“We kept trying to find a corner to this wall, and it just kept going and going,” Blomster says. “We weren’t even thinking of looking for a ballcourt.”

With today’s sporting world put on hold—along with everything else right now—it’s a good time to put things in perspective, and give credit where credit is due. Long before the NBA or the Olympics—even the ancient ones—Mesoamerican ballgames were in full swing. They were played in venues big and small, in prominent stadiums and in rural villages. Some iterations were played using players’ hips and rumps to strike the ball; others required sticks to bat it around.

The architecture of the court—with its steep walls and high, circular goalposts—often became part of the game, with players bouncing the elastic rubber ball off the stone. Some versions of the game are well known to archaeologists; others are shrouded in obscurity. Like reverse engineering the rules of a board game using just the board and its pieces, ballgame archaeologists often have only the sport’s architecture to interpret.

These ancient ballgames could be recreational, but often had political or religious significance, and implications off the field, such as debt settling or sacrifice. If rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen, and soccer is the opposite, Mesoamerican ballgames were in a league of their own—equal parts intense creativity and high-stakes competitiveness.

They were also social events par excellence, and many Mesoamerican communities’ traditions were intertwined with the games.

“The ballgame was linked to creation stories, sacred events of heroic/mythical ancestors, and also a key element of the history of the revered sacred ancestors of rulers,” says Michael Blake, an archaeologist at the University of British Columbia who is not affiliated with the recent study. “Yet versions of the game were also played in smaller communities and engaged in by many everyday people—who probably played versions of the game in open fields and not in elaborate courts, as the elite members of society did.”

The court layout is consistent across the thousands of ballcourts that have been found over the years: a flat gulch separating tall stone or earth embankments on either side, forming the perimeter of the field of play (imagine a giant earthen Kit-Kit, snapped in half).

At Etlatongo, there was also considerable infrastructure. The ballcourt had stone walls, was lined with benches, and had a total area of about 13,000 square feet—roughly the size of three McMansions.

Though the courts were ubiquitous across Mesoamerica, different communities had different rules and styles of play. Unfortunately, few of these rules were ever written down—not even by the historians in King Charles V of Spain’s court, who doted on descriptions of the rubber ball rather than the game or the court.

“They never had the decency to describe the rules of the game,” Blomster says wryly. “What we’re doing is using bits and pieces like the costumes on the figurines to decide the kind of ballgames that would’ve been played.”

While theories abound regarding the origin of the ancient sport and the exact rules of each variation, what’s certain is that many Mesoamericans were playing. Lowland and highland groups had long-standing, complex interactions, Blomster says. And the spread of the game was likely a product of those same connections. The ballcourts at Etlatongo—just a quarter century younger than than the oldest court found (by Blake, in Chiapas)—speak to a contemporaneous development of the ancient sport elsewhere in Mexico.

“What is most important about this new research,” Blake says, “is that it shows the great antiquity of the game and its formally constructed courts in the highlands of Oaxaca.”

The sculpture was loathed as a public-art installation. Now its 4,000 aluminum birds are treasured in private collections.

On a dairy farm in eastern Australia, along a road that winds its way into the hills inland from Byron Bay, six aluminum birds decorate the stump of a tree, glinting in the late afternoon sunlight.

The birds belong to Debra Allard, a 57-year-old farmer and cheesemaker. A few months ago, they belonged to a sculpture—a 30-foot-tall shiny metallic mass. Or, as many local residents called it during its nine months of life as a public-art installation, a metallic mess.

Allard, like most of her neighbors in this district, “didn’t like it” at all when she first saw it. In fact, she says, “Everyone enjoyed having a laugh about it.”

But sentiment has changed—and so has the sculpture. Allard’s birds are now among 4,000 pieces of the sculpture that are enjoying a second life.

The story starts in 2018, when the Byron Shire Council decided that an artwork should adorn a newly constructed traffic roundabout on the main road into Byron Bay, Australia’s playground for Hollywood A-listers like Chris Hemsworth, backpacking travelers, and new-age hippies.

The laid-back region features gorgeous beaches, a rugged cape with a white lighthouse, and a series of cute-as-a-button towns. But the roundabout itself is such an ugly traffic juncture that a beautifying piece of public art was deemed necessary.

The problems started when the commissioning process became, by the council’s own admission, a rushed affair—with only one month for artists to pitch their ideas, and insufficient money to fully realize the artist’s vision. The result was a universally loathed installation, officially called the “Bayshore Drive Lighthouse Sculpture.”

The aluminum artwork was supposed to look like thousands of birds circling a lighthouse. What it actually looked like—though it was never fully finished due to the controversy it attracted—was a mess of aluminum foil, or a hurriedly stored Christmas-tree tinsel. Thanks to its phallic shape and shiny texture, the nickname “Disco Dong” was coined—and stuck.

Vitriolic campaigns to remove it, waged on social media and in local papers from the moment the Disco Dong was installed, proved both strong and effective. In September 2019, just nine months after it was put in place, the sculpture was decommissioned.

During its short life in the roundabout, the artist, Corey Thomas, was subjected to online ridicule and in-person hatred. Even before the sculpture was completed, drivers were yelling insults at him out their car windows as he worked in the traffic circle.

The hatred was so intense that Thomas, a Melbourne-based sculptor, went to ground. He removed his website and social-media accounts and declined requests for comment. For this story, however, Thomas decided to speak publicly about the installation for the first time, saying that “the process of the Lighthouse Project has [left] tangible lacerations” on him, both as an artist and a human being.

Soon after it was decommissioned, the Disco Dong was thoroughly dismantled. After it was taken down by cranes, the individual birds were removed by hand and cleaned up.

The birds—which range in size from an outstretched hand to a large platter—were sold off by the council in December for AUD$20 (about $12 U.S.) each. Interested buyers registered their intention by email, then collected their birds at an indoor sports arena on a designated pickup day. The sale—an idea that may have first been suggested by a community member in a social-media post—aimed to both recoup costs and ensure that valuable metal didn’t go to scrap.

And so, like a flock of phoenixes rising from the sculpture’s ashes, the artwork has been reborn as 4,000 individual birds.

Since December, the birds have been gradually hung in gardens and fastened to walls. Others are sitting in garages, waiting for their owners to find time and inspiration. Many can now be seen throughout the Byron region, and some have made their way abroad—via mail or suitcase—and now appear as far away as Singapore, Switzerland, and Canada.

The birds are overwhelmingly beloved by their new owners. But not everyone is a fan. One local who has no interest in owning a bird is Rob Jansson, a 52-year-old originally from Connecticut who now lives near Mullumbimby, the second-biggest town in the region, known for its hippie vibe.

“For me, the lighthouse birds represent suffering and bad karma,” he says. “The entire sad debacle is not something to celebrate or remember.”

Jansson considers the entire process, including the artwork’s original inspiration, to have been a failure. “The sculpture was a monument to a whalers’ lighthouse rather than to natural beauty or the area’s rich indigenous history,” he says. “It was a waste of energy—as aluminum is very electricity intensive—as well as a waste of time, money, and community focus.”

Jansson says he’s also upset by the viciousness that was directed at the artist.

For his part, Thomas—who says he was involved in the decision by local officials to decommission the sculpture—says he’s pleased by how his work has been reimagined. “It was a decision for the artwork that I made with the council,” he says. “I’m really happy with this emergence.”

He considers the discrete birds a “new activation” of his work, rather than an entirely new piece of art. “I see all these birds as part of the original artwork, just scattered and dispersed,” he says, adding that the process has prompted him to reconsider the meaning of public art.

“This reincarnation seems to allow bite-size chunks to inhabit the community—an echo or trace [of the original sculpture] that has been created by the people for the people. It has many poetic associations—winds, change, migration, climate, flight, and freedom.”

Allard agrees. As her cows gather for their afternoon milking, she says that while she’s not much of an art lover, a combination of curiosity and the birds’ quirkiness is what drew her in. Now her birds are a welcome part of her daily life.

“I’m alerted to the arrival of the milk tanker by catching a flash of its metal in the sunlight as it comes down the road,” she says. “Now, from my workbench, the birds give a similar flash.”

Allard says she hopes that Thomas will approve of his work’s new placement. “He’s more than welcome to come over to see the birds and have a cup of tea,” she says. “Or a glass of milk.”

Owners of the lighthouse birds have become the subject of envy. People inquiring about buying unwanted ones are increasingly common. But Allard won’t be selling hers anytime soon.

“They cause joy,” she says—an emotion much needed in a region recovering from a summer of drought, bushfires, and flooding rain. “They are a little piece of history.”

Gaze out the window or at your computer, in the name of data.

The natural world doesn’t slow down just because humans have to. Outside, buds burst from branches; high, high above them, distant objects traverse the solar system. And while the world keeps going, science does, too. If you have a computer, a phone, and a window, you can help with these citizen science projects.

Gawk at galaxies

From where you sit, you may be able to glimpse a sliver of your neighborhood, with its trees, homes, and maybe a faint, distant skyline. But if you’re hankering for a view that will leave you a little more starry-eyed, maybe you’d like to wander around Galaxy Zoo. There are some 100 billion galaxies freckling the observable universe, and this project, recommended by Sarah Barker, author of 50 Things to See in the Sky, invites participants to log on and classify some of them by shape. The images, mainly captured from the Victor Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile, reveal such dazzling details as how many spiral arms a galaxy has—and those characteristics shed light on whether a galaxy is still revving up for star formation, how old it might be, and more.

The project is run by a sprawling, international team of researchers, and lives on the citizen science site Zooniverse, a collaboration between Chicago’s Adler Planetarium and the University of Oxford. If galaxies set your head spinning, there’s plenty of other fodder for you: you can transcribe labels on old herbaria; tag drone images of Antarctic penguins, their chicks, and their eggs; and help an algorithm learn to identify the sounds of jackhammers, human voices, and other elements of the urban symphony.

Compete with computers by classifying plants

For more than 150 years, scientists thought that two species of liverworts were one and the same. Genetic evidence has since proven otherwise, but they appear “very similar and can be considered what we call ‘cryptic species’—species that might be morphologically identical or near identical,” says Matt von Konrat, Head of Botanical Collections at the Gantz Family Collections Center at the Field Museum in Chicago. Scientists are increasingly turning to algorithms to identify physical traits and to classify specimens, but von Konrant’s team wants to know whether humans have additional (or different) observational acumen than the machines we have built. “Maybe humans might be able to detect something machines are unable to distinguish, and vice versa,” he says.

Humans and machines are currently neck-and-neck, according to Beth McDonald, an intern at the museum who is working on the project as part of her master’s work. You can help the museum’s Cryptic Species project (and defend our species’ honor) by putting your eyes to the test with a short survey. It only takes around 20 minutes.

Survey the sky at night

If you’ve ever been seduced by the stars, you might be miffed by the way that light pollution can blot out the view. (It also screws with creatures’ routines, and mucks up astronomical research.) The Globe at Night project, run by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and other groups, asks participants to go out after sundown and see what they can spot. (If you do go outside, remember to avoid congested places and busy times of day, and follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines about social distancing, including leaving at least six feet between yourself and others.)

You’ll need to pinpoint your precise location and give descriptive details about the sky conditions—is it hazy, cloudy, or twinkling and clear?—and also about the light sources you see around you, from glowing vending machines to porch lights spilling out into yards. If you happen to have a Sky Quality Meter, which collects precise measurements, that’s even better.

Look for flowers

If the air is heavy with the smell of lilac or dogwood, the National Phenology Network wants to hear about it. Researchers have long been curious about why genetically identical plants behave differently in different places—in particular, when they flower and shoot out leaves. By showing researchers when the flowers burst into bloom near you, you’re helping them get a sense of how environmental conditions affect buds, blooms, and more. To track common lilacs, sign up through the Nature’s Notebook portal. (Flower-sniffing is optional, but certainly not discouraged.)

Whither the weather?

If you notice anything that strikes you as unusual about the weather or season where you are (for instance, if there are more bugs flitting around, or if they’ve swarmed when you wouldn’t expect them to), you can log it in the ISeeChange project. The project, which partners with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other groups, compiles photos and observations about what looks remarkable to residents, and how they’re adjusting.

Watch for moving objects in space

If anyone has ever said you’ve got sharp eyes, you may be just the person for the Backyard Worlds project. Researchers from NASA, the American Museum of Natural History, and elsewhere want to learn more about brown dwarfs and other objects at the margins of our solar system. They need hawk-eyed folks to flip through images from NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft and look for objects on the move. The scientists recruit algorithms for the task, too, but it’s easy for machines to miss certain things, especially objects that are faint or packed into crowded corners of the solar neighborhood, says Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History and a co-founder of the project. “The discovery space is still wide open.”

To get started, log on, flip through images, and mark the ones that seem to show something of note. (It might help to do this in a darkened room.) Experts confirm the identifications with the help of telescopes; in December 2018, Faherty traveled to Las Campanas Observatory, in Chile’s Atacama desert, to pinpoint some of the objects that citizen scientists had spotted. Your observations could guide a future trip—and if you become an energetic user, you can snag an invitation to shoot the solar breeze with the scientists in a weekly digital hangout. You could even be a co-author on a scientific paper about your discoveries.

Annotate your backyard

You don’t have to venture very far to find something a little wild. “If people have access to the outdoors, it’s a good time to dig deep and see what’s in your garden—turn over rocks and look for snails and build a species list and see what’s there,” says Rebecca Johnson, co-director of citizen science at the California Academy of Sciences.

Even if you only have the chance to get up close to a single slug or a solitary tree, you can snap some photos to upload to iNautralist, the vast nature hub that gathers data about species sightings. (It's run by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.) If you’re not keen to go out and make new observations, you can also just plop on the couch and upload old nature photos still sitting on your phone (ideally, they’d be stamped with the date and location, or you’d remember enough details to place a pin). “It’s a time suck, and that’s kind of what we need,” says Johnson. “It gets you off of Twitter for five minutes so you’re not freaking out.”

iNatualist could also use some help organizing observations that are a little light on tags. Users have logged more than 33 million observations on the platform, but 240,000 are just a picture and location, lacking any identification. Some identifications do require a degree of expertise, but it’s pretty easy to start with big-picture things, like whether a particular photo depicts a plant or animal, a bird or a beetle. Even that level of information is helpful, because some expert users might have alerts set up to ping them whenever someone tags, say, “eagle” and “Golden Gate Park.” Then they’d be able to swoop in and help out with the heavier lift of identification. “It wouldn’t take that long to make a big difference,” Johnson says.

Be on the lookout for birds

Even if you aren’t able to venture outside, you may be able spot feathered friends out the window. Jordan Raphael, the park biologist at Fire Island National Seashore in New York, recommends uploading photos of them to eBird. A project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird maps bird sightings across the world. “Whether you know birds or don’t know birds, there is a possibility you might see a rare bird,” he says. “In the face of climate change, we might see a fluctuation in species migrating and coming in than we might normally see.”

Raphael typically works at the old, gnarled Sunken Forest, and, like many researchers, is currently ordered to work from home—on reports, grant proposals, and more. Though documenting a few avian neighbors isn’t the same as being immersed in the sea-tousled woods, after many days indoors, it’s nice to get away from screens for a while. “I plan to have a glass of wine and stare at the bird feeder for about three hours after the workday is over,” Raphael says. Maybe you’ll feel the same.

Track your symptoms

If birdwatching offers a moment of blissful escape from the news cycle, this next project is the exact opposite—but it’s important, and a strikingly simple way to contribute to research that’s urgently needed right now.

The COVID Near You project, a collaboration between Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard epidemiologists, and others, compiles a data-driven snapshot of who feels sick where, and exactly what’s getting them down. If you’re feeling fine—and we hope you are—just enter your age, gender, zip code, and flu-shot status. If you’re ill, select your symptoms (fever, fatigue, runny nose, headache, cough, and more) and answer questions about your recent travel and known exposures. The data will help public health researchers learn more about when and where symptoms emerge, and who experiences them. (Questions about how your data will be used? You can find the project’s privacy policy here.)

The small Massachusetts outfit supplies local police, firefighters, and hospitals.

Dirty Water Distillery in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is best known for its “Velnias,” a honey liqueur whose recipe was passed down to owner Pepi Avizonis by his Lithuanian grandfather. The distillery’s biggest product these days, however, is hand sanitizer. That recipe comes straight from the World Health Organization.

Avizonis and his team join a growing number of craft distilleries around the country weaponizing their facilities in the fight against COVID-19. To shore up a national dearth of disinfectant, they’re forgoing distilling to manufacture and distribute vast quantities of hand sanitizer to vulnerable citizens, government employees, and healthcare workers, free of charge. While Avizonis is happy to flip an age-old connotation with distilling on its head, he hopes the day will soon come when he can return to his beloved craft.

According to Avizonis, Dirty Water was the first distillery in the state to make the unexpected pivot. He got the idea in early March when he went shopping for cleaning supplies to disinfect his taproom, which was then still open to customers. “The shelves were empty—you couldn’t find anything anywhere,” he tells me in the middle of his whirring distillery.

When he returned home empty-handed, his wife showed him a recipe from the WHO website for homemade sanitizer. If Dirty Water had the necessary facilities, they had credentials in spades, too: Avizonis has a Ph.D. in physics, and his head distiller, Brenton MacKechnie, has a degree in chemistry.

Aside from ethanol and distilled water, both available in droves at the distillery already, the recipe called for glycerol and hydrogen peroxide, easily procured ingredients. After their first five-gallon test batch came out well, Avizonis and MacKechnie jumped to a 40-gallon batch the next day. In two weeks, the distillery has produced and distributed about 200 gallons of hand sanitizer, and they’re just getting started.

While most shops around the quaint New England town sit shuttered with posts of well-wishes on storefronts, it’s all-hands-on-deck at Dirty Water Distillery. MacKechnie fills hundreds of 375 ml glass bottles with their finished sanitizer for Avizonis to label and box before the delivery truck comes. Not only is Dirty Water an essential business as a liquor store, but they’re now crucial to supplying public-facing government workers with needed supplies. “I view us as essential, and if someone differs, they can talk to the state police who just picked up a couple gallons of sanitizer,” says Avizonis. The gung-ho staff at Dirty Water haven’t taken a day off since the pivot.

Today’s batch is for local police and fire stations, but they’re also distributing to EMTs, elderly-care facilities, and a handful of Massachusetts hospitals. The general public is welcome to bring in one empty two- to three-ounce bottle per person to be filled at the distillery, though, during my visit, the 30 gallons they mixed earlier were running low. In the past week alone, the IRS, ATF, and the FDA have also approached Dirty Water—not with audits, but with orders for sanitizer.

“Liquor is definitely on the back burner right now,” says Avizonis while he loads a dolly full of boxes. With distilling on hold, Dirty Water is breaking into the reserves they’d produced ahead of the busy summer season. Fortunately, they’re not the only alcohol producers showing their samaritan side.

Avizonis called on a network of area distillers, brewers, and other companies to work together in distributing sanitizer. “If everyone pitches in, we can go further, longer,” says Avizonis. A local print shop donated the labels adorning the bottles of sanitizer, and the trucks that delivered them throughout the area refused payment.

A handful of area microbreweries answered Avizonis’s call to donate their “distillables” to the cause, as well. In other words, one Dirty Water employee had the mournful task of pouring out hundreds of otherwise-drinkable canned beers into a 55-gallon copper barrel, the ethanol from which will be distilled to make more sanitizer. “It’s rare that life gives you a chance to truly be helpful,” says Avizonis of these bizarre circumstances.

While Avizonis doesn’t plan on making sanitizer forever, he’ll do so as long as he has to. “People knowing that there are resources in their own community makes them feel better,” he says. “It’s psychological.” He sees his distillery’s efforts as a stopgap while bigger players such as Tito’s and Bacardi can make similar pivots. For now, says Avezonis, “we’ll keep doing this until the epidemic is over or until we run out of money.”

Dirty Water Distillery and the hundreds of other distilleries making sanitizer are upending a conventional narrative about the ills of liquor-making. “We’re not all evil drunks, you know?” says Avezonis. “We’re compassionate, caring people, and this unfortunate opportunity is finally giving us a chance to help those that help us.”

The power of seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard.

When the German government banned group religious services in response to the COVID-19 crisis, a Catholic priest from the St. Pankratius parish in Oberhausen made a request on his church’s website. He asked parish members to light candles and place them in their windows each day at 7 p.m., a collective act of comfort, solidarity, and hope painted in light across the cityscape.

In these alarming and unusual times, windows, balconies, and roofs have become more than architectural details, but stages for the human spirit to shine. Citizens of the United States, Italy, Spain, India, Brazil, and other places have been on lockdown, forced to create new ways to connect and not be alone. Music has been shared from rooftops, exercise classes across balconies, messages of faith and creativity posted on windows. Collective outdoor applause has been scheduled to celebrate health and other public workers.

We're sure to see a lot more images like these in the coming weeks. For now, Atlas Obscura has collected some of these expressions of community and creativity.

A training exercise in 1958 sent the USS Stickleback to the ocean floor.

The crew of the USS Stickleback didn’t expect things to end this way—rising from the depths on May 28, 1958, only to be broadsided by the hull of a friendly American destroyer, the USS Silverstein. The Stickleback sank to the bottom, an 11,000-foot journey to nowhere.

Now, 62 years since the sub disappeared from any radar screen—and became one of only four U.S. Navy submarines lost since the end of World War II—it’s been found again.

The sub—named for a spiny, scaleless fish native to many northern waters—was found off the coast of Oahu, Hawai’i, by the Lost 52 Project, an independent initiative to find the 52 American submarine wrecks from the World War II era.

The great depth of the wreck (over two miles beneath the surface), and the fact that its precise resting place was unknown, allowed the submarine to elude discovery until now. The project found the sub by cross-referencing old records with modern sonar technology and remote submersibles, which eventually located the ship split in two at the bottom of the sea.

Subs are solo actors in naval warfare, says Tim Taylor, head of the underwater-technology firm Tiburon Subsea and founder of the Lost 52 Project, who recently spearheaded the team that identified the Stickleback. Unlike ships, he says, “when they went missing, there was no fleet close [by] to witness and record the loss.”

The Lost 52 Project, Taylor says, often finds itself parsing flawed wartime data to decipher the location of wrecks. Ironically, the sonar technology used to find the Stickleback was developed largely due to the advent of submarine warfare—the same reason the Stickleback existed in the first place.

For Taylor and his team, challenges abound. “We have many items to overcome [in our work], such as international permits, weather, mechanical, and technical issues that arise on all expeditions of this nature,” Taylor says. “The [biggest] challenge is looking for lost ships using limited 75-plus-year-old data.”

The Stickleback’s sinking could have been far worse. It occurred in 1958, after the sub had come out of decommission—ship retirement—to serve in the Korean War. A training exercise gone awry had caused it to plummet through the depths; when the sub managed to resurface, it found itself in the path of the Silverstein. A collision was unavoidable, yet no one was hurt, and the Stickleback’s crew scrambled onto the friendly destroyer before the sub foundered and slipped below the waves, this time for good.

The Stickleback is a rare example of a submarine wreck without any casualties. “Submarines are built to keep water out,” Taylor says. “What they also do, by virtue of that, is they keep men in. For a [wrecked] submarine, it guarantees those men are in there.”

Without a soul on board, the sunken submarine off the Hawai’ian coast is a piece of human history that exists in a very different environment than, say, a history museum.

“The ocean floor at these deep depths [is an] alien environment,” says Robert Neyland, the head of underwater archaeology for the Naval History and Heritage Command. “I think people are really attracted to something they can recognize there, and the sacrifices people have made in the past.”