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European Plague Doctor Garb Was Black, Beaked, and Very Bleak

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These haunting uniforms make today's masks look tame.

Four hundred years ago, dark figures with blanched white beaks stalked the streets of Europe. But these were no boogeymen. They were healers, dolled up to stave off the disease du jour: the bubonic plague.

Though plagues were nothing new at the time—bacterial outbreaks were routine in medieval Europe—the outfit was a morbidly chic addition to doctors’ protective arsenal. Today, plague-doctor uniforms—worn for centuries both by actual medical professionals and empirics, who were enlisted to help combat infectious diseases despite not having graduated from med school—remain an iconic reminder of how alienating illness can be as isolation takes hold, born of an imperceptible contagion.

The uniform is typically attributed to Charles de Lorme, a chief physician to several French kings, who around 1630 proposed the need for such wear to keep health workers safe from disease. It consisted of a thick black overcoat, gloves, circular glass to seal the eyes behind the mask, and often a wand, to inspect patients from a distance (and, when necessary, to fend them off as well).

Plague doctors also donned off-white leather masks that ended in a conical beak—like storks who’d spent the morning delivering a baby to a doorstep, and the afternoon haunting a funeral.

The beak was a vital component of the miasma theory—the long-since-disproven notion that held that diseases could spread through their stink. (Needless to say, rotting corpses from the Black Death, covered with pustules, had a ferocious odor, so masks thicker than an N95 were in high demand.) Plague doctors kept their masks stuffed with powerfully scented spices and herbs such as mint or lavender, to keep the stench of pestilence out of their noses.

Herewith are several timely depictions of these early, eerie health-care workers, wearing a costume that dominated plague epidemics up through the 19th century.

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The Long-Term Effects of COVID-19 on Field Science

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As scientists wait, worry, and hunker down, they’re also looking ahead to how their projects will need to adapt.

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

If this winter had gone as planned, Bethany Jenkins would be getting ready to board a 274-foot research vessel called Atlantis right about now to head east across the Atlantic Ocean. But everything changed when the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began to infect people worldwide and touched down on U.S. shores. In mid-March, the University of Rhode Island microbiologist received word that her team’s trip had been suspended. The future of their research project—a three-ship, multi-institution investigation of ocean ecosystems that has been over a decade in the works—is now uncertain.

But as Jenkins and her team begin to pick up the pieces, she doesn’t like considering what might have happened if the trip had gone ahead.

“The people on these ships leave their families behind,” she says. “If I’m at sea, I won’t be able to help anyone on land.” The opposite is true as well: “On these research cruises, there are four people sharing each bathroom, mates sharing a wheelhouse, professional crew in the engine room and sharing berths. If something went wrong, it would be really bad.”

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As the coronavirus has spread, reaching every continent except Antarctica and infecting almost a million people, scientific institutions all around the world have shut down or suspended field research like Jenkins’s, leaving many of these scientists’ work in limbo. Governments and health officials have told people to try to work from home using remote communication tools. But for the most part, field scientists can’t do that; their projects rely on gathering new information out in the world. Unfortunately, many attributes of field research—international travel, limited access to medical testing or care, long periods spent sharing close quarters—are also the very things that can help the coronavirus spread.

This halt has left scientists feeling stranded, uncertain of the future, and with more than a few logistical headaches. As grants approach their completion dates and researchers miss out on once-a-year or even once-in-a-lifetime observations, they’re beginning to grapple with how this temporary crisis will have permanent reverberations in the scientific community. The path forward for students and junior researchers, who rely on fieldwork to learn essential skills and collect data to begin research of their own, is now filled with obstacles, creating a knock-on effect for future scientific expertise. What’s more, the pause may mean delays for important advancements in many areas, from fighting climate change to preventing the next pandemic.

“Right now, we’re in a time of acute societal need that requires good science,” says Jenkins. “So there’s a real mandate to keep going forward with good science, while being empathetic with the health of the people that are really struggling during this.”


“You can’t Skype meetings with corals,” says Emily Darling, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, who coordinates monitoring for increasingly threatened coral reefs all over the globe. “Being underwater, and being with the communities that rely on reefs, is the only way we have information about the health of a reef. That information is not available remotely.”

Right now, though, human health is Darling’s priority. Her team has canceled travel to their study sites, asking all researchers to stay at home for the time being. She was particularly worried about team members visiting remote villages in countries like Kenya and Fiji, where communities might be isolated from the coronavirus until an outsider carries it unwittingly into their midst.

“While our national staff might have access to health care in urban centers, they’d be traveling into communities that don’t have that same level of care,” she says.

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As her researchers shelter in place, life in the sea churns on, and Darling knows they’ll miss out on important observations. One concern is that they may not be able to adequately monitor an outbreak of a different kind this spring: an often-fatal reaction to high ocean temperatures called coral bleaching, which is currently moving across the warming South Pacific. Some information can be gathered by flying above reefs in small aircraft, but few institutions currently have access to such flights, nor do they want to expose their researchers to the cramped quarters of a bush plane.

The nature of field work makes it difficult to reschedule around delays. Field research often can’t simply be pushed off by a few months; by then, the natural events scientists want to observe may have already ended. And research vessels and field stations might be shared by hundreds of institutions, requiring scientists to get in line years in advance.

Take the case of Jenkins’ research trip, part of a broad NASA-led effort called Exports, or Export Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing, that’s seeking to investigate how the oceans take up and store carbon from the atmosphere (including climate-warming carbon dioxide), potentially for thousands of years. Their cruise would have monitored tiny, floating ocean plants—phytoplankton—that have their biggest bloom in the North Atlantic for only a few weeks in the spring. Because any projects currently planned for after the quarantine will still go ahead, it will likely be at least two years before her team can book a new trip.

Over the coming months and years, delaying field work also means delaying the publications that would have come out of it. Down the line, that could affect policy decisions that would ideally be based on the best and most current scientific data. This is especially concerning for scientists and policymakers tackling issues that are already on borrowed time—like in the case of Exports, which is collecting data that will allow more accurate predictions of global climate change.

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With hundreds to thousands of other projects also put on pause, Jenkins sees how echoes of this shutdown will spread through the field of climate science: “If field programs that measure climate-relevant variables are being canceled or put on hold, this is a step backwards for our contributions to understanding a rapidly changing ocean.”

Ravinder Sehgal, an associate professor in the biology department at San Francisco State University, worries that delays in his field due to the coronavirus could hinder the collection of data that might help prevent the next pandemic. Sehgal studies how deforestation allows disease to spread from animals to humans, and his field work, which includes following the spread of malaria by mosquitoes and birds in Cameroon, is currently suspended. Projects like his all over the world rely on detailed timelines of how diseases progress that will now likely feature gaps of months to years.

“Without the continuity of yearly monitoring of populations, we don’t have the data we need for long-term study,” he says.


Like most science, field research often relies on grant funding that is given only for a specific time period. Because of this, chief among many scientists’ concerns is how project delays will impact early-career scientists, including PhD students and postdoctoral researchers.

When principal investigators apply for a project grant, they often will request funding to support a PhD student or a postdoctoral researcher. These funds may now expire before students can gather the data needed to finish their degrees or leave postdocs without a salary while they are still working on a project.

Matthew Smart could finish his degree without completing his field research, “though it would be a tremendous disappointment,” he says. A PhD candidate in geochemistry at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Smart planned to complete his dissertation using data from a trip to eastern Greenland scheduled for this summer. His research uses samples from a particularly well-preserved outcrop of rocks there to learn about what happened when Earth’s ancient plants developed roots and began to make soil. But that trip is only possible during a short window from August to September when the study site is not blocked by ice.

Smart is still holding out hope, but he says it’s becoming increasingly likely the work will be canceled. That will push him and his adviser past the time limits on the grants funding their work, meaning Smart likely won’t be a student anymore by the time he returns to Greenland.

“There’s a significant health element to this crisis that trumps science, frankly,” Smart says. “We have to make sacrifices in order to ‘flatten the curve,’” he adds—in other words, keep the rate of infection low enough to avoid overburdening health systems.

Some grant-funded projects may be able to extend their funding to make up for lost time. For example, all National Science Foundation grants are automatically eligible for a one-year, no-cost extension, as well as additional extensions contingent on the foundation’s approval. Many universities and private foundations are developing special exceptions for research delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, these extensions don’t necessarily guarantee any additional money—just extra time. This could leave research teams in a tight spot, especially if a grant must cover salaries during the delay in addition to travel expenses.

“If this continues for long enough, my main concern is that students will either drop out of their research altogether or move to other fields,” says Sehgal. “They can’t afford to not be doing anything.”


Like the hundreds of millions of others around the world currently held in stasis outside of normal life, scientists are thinking about the future of their work in the space between communal sacrifice and self-interest. Interruptions to normal habits are necessary, and they’re saving lives. But it’s also understandable to process the conditions of this social contract through a personal lens: as disappointing, frustrating, and worrying.

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Darling, though, sees the pandemic in another light: as an opportunity for scientists to rethink some of the ways they carry out field research. Her organization already relies chiefly on researchers based in-country, rather than flying in scientists from elsewhere in the world. That’s a model she sees as potentially helpful for other projects.

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One big benefit of doing this is that it reduces their research’s carbon footprint, but that’s not the only advantage. “We know so much about the inequity of scientific resources and training, where Western researchers can travel and fly and do ‘helicopter science,’” Darling says, using a term for when a researcher spends only a brief stint in a place to gather data before heading home.

“That’s not a model that’s sustainable, and it’s not a model that’s ethical,” she says. “So this new reality gives us a chance to develop online tools for collaborations, for conferences, for workshops, and identify where we really need to travel and be face-to-face with our work.”

For now, most researchers are still trying to get a grip on the situation before beginning to plan for the future. They’ll teach classes remotely, revise their writing, and read long-put-off papers. They’ll look for ways they can help. Many are donating gloves, masks, and chemicals that they now won’t need for their work. Some are volunteering their expertise on the ground. Given their training in microbiology, Jenkins and some of her colleagues have signed up to assist with COVID-19 testing.

And they’ll wait—perhaps missing the dramatic sweep of Arctic landscapes or the stark beauty of the middle of the ocean, but staying focused on the present.

“We’re really hoping that this passes, as I’m sure the rest of the world is, so we can get back out there,” Darling says. “But this is a fast-moving crisis, and we need to take care of people first.”

A Loopy Library of Sounds Features Sprinklers, Sirens, and Freud's Toilet

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The Museum of Portable Sounds normally resides on an iPhone 4S. Now, you can hear it via video chat.

Among the many curiosities owned by the Museum of Portable Sound, based in London, is an audio recording of the toilet flushing in Sigmund Freud’s former house in Vienna. Recorded in 2017, the rough gurgling initially resembles the grind of a garbage disposal, and then softens into pitter-patters.

“I've actually got three recordings of toilets in museums,” says John Kannenberg, the museum’s director, chief curator, and man responsible for this lavatorial relic. “It's really difficult to not come off as being someone who's obsessed with the sound of toilets.”

In truth, Kannenberg is obsessed with all kinds of sound. For more than 25 years, the London-based artist and researcher has recorded large and small sonic moments around the world, from an echoing call to prayer in Cairo to the hiss of an apartment radiator in Chicago. The museum does not try to fit its more than 300 field recordings into a building or a room; instead, they reside on a humble iPhone 4S.

Since its founding in 2015, the handheld institution has received more than 1,200 visitors. A typical trip requires booking an in-person meeting with the director, who simply hands over the device and waits nearby. Visitors guide themselves through the permanent collection with a physical map that visualizes four floors of 30 galleries—plus a “Frank Gehry Commemorative Wing” for temporary exhibitions. (A gift shop, hawking tote bags and tees, lives online.)

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Now, with a growing number of people staying at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, Kannenberg has made the experience virtual for the first time, via video chat. For £10 an hour, you can request playbacks of sounds or ask to see anything from the museum’s collection of physical objects, which includes items such as the first commercially available Compact Disc and a mini music box that plays The Internationale.

The museum began life as an experimental museology project when Kannenberg was a PhD student at the University of Arts London. “I had been thinking a lot about why museums themselves don't tend to collect and display sounds,” he says. “I wanted to bring about more balance between the experiences of sound and the visual world. So I was thinking, how would you display sound as an object? Why would you do it? I was interested in making recorded sound feel like a museum-worthy object.”

Nearly five years on, the collection features over eight hours of ear-candy from 20 countries. It touches on broad topics such as natural history, science and technology, and architecture and urban design, offering a unique trip through time and cultures. You can listen to a 2017 recording of the final bongs of Big Ben (now under renovation) or the bustle of a lunch service in Azerbaijan. The options range from soothing (waves on Lake Eerie, as heard from Pelee Island) to irksome (a broken fire alarm at the University of Michigan). Some are stirring, such as a recording of a crowd singing and whistling on the day that San Francisco legalized gay marriage. There are also a handful of auditory donations, including a scratchy 1910 recording of a nightingale from Cheryl Tipp, the British Library’s curator of wildlife and environmental sounds.

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Most of these recordings aren’t particularly rare or remarkable, and last no longer than one or two minutes. There are galleries devoted to doors and windows, elevators and escalators, weather and water. One of the biggest sub-collections features recordings Kannenberg made while roaming other museums over the last decade: experiences for the ears, created in spaces designed for the eyes.

“My goal is to try to get people more comfortable with listening to things that aren’t music,” Kannenberg says. “I want this to be an exercise in attentive listening—actively paying attention to sound, not listening to it like background music.” For this reason, he refuses to make all the files accessible online or turn the museum into an app. “People would download it, play it while they’re doing dishes, then delete it as soon as they need more room on their phone for photos.”

While Kannenberg won’t be able to make any recordings outside his home for the foreseeable future, he says he still comes up with new ideas: “The Big Bang, any active volcano, a sonic boom,” he says. “The oldest door in London. The Chouontei Garden behind Kennin-ji temple in Kyoto.” He may get to them one day. For now, Freud’s toilet remains a personal favorite.

Why Europe's Cave Bears Were—and Weren't—Made for Hunkering Down

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Their big sinuses were both an evolutionary boon and bust.

As we’re all learning these days, not all hibernations are happy ones. Some are punctuated with boredom, bad sleep, and morose, empty food stores. Cave bears could relate. Turns out their long hibernations—combined with their veggie-heavy diets and spacious sinuses—may have been what caused their demise.

Alejandro Pérez-Ramos, a paleobiologist at the University of Malaga in Spain and lead author of a new study published in the journal Science Advances, says that cave bears developed big sinuses to help them hibernate for long periods of time. But evolution giveth and evolution taketh away: In doing so, the bears’ capacity to chew with their front teeth was impaired.

Bears are famously omnivorous animals, known for their spectacular fish-farming on salmon runs and their deft tree-clambering to access acorns, berries, and, of course, honey. But cave bears were different. A species that could grow up to 50 percent larger than today’s grizzly bears, they spent most of their time indoors, sequestered in the many caves of Europe, before going extinct at the height of the last Ice Age, about 25,000 years ago.

A prevailing theory posits that humans seeking shelter in those caves are what threatened the bears’ homesteads and survival. Now, Pérez-Ramos’s team suggests a second culprit: The cave bears’ large sinuses, they say, prevented the animals from acclimating to a frigid world with fewer greens.

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Using 3D computer simulations of different feeding scenarios, the team analyzed how the bites of 12 different bear species distributed strain across their skulls. Cave bears, with their large frontal sinuses—which may have promoted hunkering down to hibernate—held most of their chew power in their molars (good for fibrous foods, as is the case with pandas).

Cave bears are thought to have hibernated for longer periods than their modern relatives, due to those long Ice Age winters. Pérez-Ramos says that while their large sinus area helped make their hibernation efficient, their sparse diet could have led them to run out of fat reserves during their months-long slumber.

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When the Ice Age reached its peak chill—a time when temperatures plunged to 10 degrees lower than today’s average—it changed what was on the environmental menu. Vegetation couldn’t grow and fuel the ecosystem’s meat-eschewing habitants. While other predators could hunt down prey and satisfy their protein needs, cave bears were out of luck, their grinders biomechanically opposed to the meaty menu that the ecosystem was offering.

That, and the expansion of humans into Europe’s grottoes, ultimately proved too much for the lumbering cave dwellers.

While few of us can afford to doze for months on end, the fall of the cave bears is a friendly reminder to make sure your pantry is well-stocked—and not just crammed with toilet paper.

The 1700s Plague Cure That Inspired an Uncannily Contemporary Cocktail

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An art historian, a culinary researcher, and a Twin Cities distillery teamed up to recreate the herbaceous drink.

When Nicole LaBouff and Emily Beck first decided to create a modern version of plague water, the potent herbal liquor that early-modern Europeans believed could help prevent epidemics, they had no idea how contemporary their experiment would soon prove. It was spring 2018, two years before a novel coronavirus would lead to the worst global pandemic in a century, and LaBouff was looking for a way to illuminate 18th-century French nightlife.

LaBouff is Associate Curator of Textiles at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), whose holdings include 18th-century period rooms from Paris and Providence, Rhode Island. She wanted to create sensory experiences to bring these rooms to life for a contemporary audience. “What we’re trying to do is get people to understand that real people lived here,” she says. One day she wondered: Why not try booze?

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So LaBouff turned to Emily Beck, an Assistant Curator at the University of Minnesota’s Wangensteen Historical Library who specializes in historical recipes. While modern doctors tend to think of food and medicine as distinct categories, for much of human history—and in many cultures today—the two categories were interchangeable. Early-modern European cookbooks were mostly costly, handwritten tomes found in elite households (most people couldn’t read or afford books). They had guides to making everything from poultry to poultices, from pickles to plague water. “I often describe them as early-modern Pinterest, because it’s basically recipes for anything you can think of,” says Beck.

Consisting of dozens of herbs distilled in alcohol, plague waters were a common feature of these cookbooks. Medieval doctors, part of the Galenic medical tradition, believed that illness was caused by imbalanced bodily humors triggered by “miasma,” or foul-smelling air. Aromatics, such as the herbs in plague water, were believed to help counter these smells. A plague outbreak in 1666 England, which killed 750,000 people, reinforced the need for households to be prepared. Even by the 1700s, when boozy nightlife was heating up Parisian parlors, the legacy of regular, catastrophic sickness meant that recipes for plague water shared cookbook pages with more festive intoxicants.

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Many early-modern Europeans, says Marissa Nicosia, a Penn State scholar of 17th-century English recipes, made their own plague water in household distilleries, from gardened or foraged herbs. (Nicosia wasn’t involved in the MIA project, but recently did her own research on plague water recipes.) Recipes could call for dozens of different herbs; the one Nicosia recently posted, from 1670s England, called for 27 different herbs, including rue, wormwood, mugwort, and something called “dragons.” The recipe on which Beck and LaBouff hoped to base their recreation, meanwhile, called for two dozen herbs and herbal infusions, including green walnuts, elderflower, juniper berries, and “Venice treacle,” an early-modern apothecary cure that included viper’s flesh, skink bellies, and opium.

When Beck and LaBouff set out to replicate plague water recipes, they realized that—unlike early-modern Europeans—they could not try this at home. Home distillation is illegal in the United States, and the daunting list of aromatics wasn’t available in the grocery store.

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The historians turned to Dan Oskey, founder of Tattersall Distilling in Minneapolis, to recreate the drinks. Oskey, LaBouff, and Beck combed hundreds of historical recipes, settling on several sweeter, more straightforward options, such as pear ratafia, a fruity cordial, and milk punch, a rum-based brew that had fortified transatlantic sailors. Plague water was the most complicated. When Oskey encountered the recipe’s old-fashioned language, he says, his first reaction was, “What the heck does that mean?”

So Oskey and the two scholars embarked on some culinary detective work. First, they had to figure out which herbs the recipe actually meant. “The name might have changed over time, or it might have been a region-specific name from 400 years ago,” says Oskey. Then, they struggled with historical recipes’ notorious imprecision. “We were trying to determine, What’s a handful? Was it fresh? Was it dry?” he says. A more serious roadblock: Some of the ingredients were unavailable, not approved for human consumption, or even poisonous. A 1667 recipe from The London Distiller, for example, called for ambergris, an aromatic substance that comes from whale intestines. A 1670s recipe, from a home English Cookery and Medicine Book, called for pennyroyal, an English herb since shown to cause liver damage.

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“There was a lot of improvising,” says LaBouff. After months of trial-and-error—dropping the Venice treacle, and substituting the herb lepidium for unethical ambergris—modern-day plague water was born. The drink was aromatic and bitter, a “big, fresh, green herb flavor,” says Oskey. “It has this kind of mushroomy, umami quality to it,” says LaBouff. The team unveiled the elixir at the Tattersall Cocktail Room at a March 2019 fete. Guests milled around to music, snacking on early-modern English pastries and sipping milk punch. At the time, the reality of pandemic seemed so distantly historical that the event’s starring cocktail was whimsically dubbed “Plague Party.”

A year later, Tattersall’s cavernous Cocktail Room is empty. The distillery has shut its public-facing operations in accordance with social-distancing guidelines, the result of a pandemic that past party guests likely couldn’t have imagined. Tattersall's distilling rooms, however, are frenetic. Every morning for the past few weeks, while many Twin Cities residents shelter at home, employees enter the premises, keeping a six-foot distance from one another. They work 12-hour days to make a modern version of plague water: hand sanitizer.

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Tattersall has converted its facility to make isopropyl alcohol, rather than the ethanol of drinking liquor, for first responders, homeless shelters, and other public services. It’s part of a public-spirited attempt by distilleries around the U.S. to augment the country’s dire lack of medical supplies. The demand for hand sanitizer is so high, says Oskey, that even after producing more than 9,000 gallons of the stuff in the past week, the company still faces a backlog. “Everybody needs it and wants it,” says Oskey. “We can’t keep up.”

There’s an irony, of course, to Tattersall’s transition from artisanal plague water to mass-produced hand sanitizer. While drinking the herbal alcohol likely didn’t help prevent plague, the medieval apothecaries who connected distilling to public health were onto something. They just didn’t realize that rather than drinking alcohol, they could have been using it to clean their hands.

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LaBouff finds a kind of comfort in the sudden, uncanny relevance of her research. “It does get you to forge this empathetic connection with people in the past,” she says. “Being in the midst of it now, you experience it in a whole new way.”

“It’s almost an attempt to try to take control over a situation that doesn’t make sense,” Beck says of historic plague water recipes. She sees similar meaning-making attempts today, as COVID-19 throws daily routines, and deeper certainties, into question. “Can I still go to the grocery store? Do I have to quarantine my mail?” Beck asks. “It’s so unclear to people.”

In the midst of this uncertainty, we turn, as our ancestors have always done, to what is familiar and fortifying: food and booze. While both the MIA and public health officials advise against heavy drinking—excessive alcohol use can weaken the immune system and increase vulnerability to COVID-19—plague water recipes reveal that, in times of social crisis, humans have long sought a stiff drink. If you do find yourself having a cocktail while sheltering in place, you’re in good company. “Drinking throughout the day?” says LaBouff. “People were doing that in the 18th century, too.”

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Plague Water-Inspired Cocktail

From Tattersall Distilling and the Minneapolis Institute of Art

• 1 ounce Green Chartreuse (substitute for Plague Water)
• ½ ounce Becherovka (substitute for Aqua Mirabilis)
• ½ ounce pineapple juice
• ¼ ounce honey sage syrup
• ¼ ounce lemon juice

Honey Sage Syrup: In a saucepan, add 1 cup honey, 1 cup water, and 1 tablespoon fresh sage roughly chopped. Cook on medium, stirring until simmering. Reduce heat and simmer five minutes. Cool and strain.

Combine Honey Sage Syrup and remaining ingredients with ice. Shake. Strain. Pour in coupe glass. Garnish with lime wheel.

You can see the MIA and Tattersall’s full selection of historical recipes online at Alcohol’s Empire. Public service providers in Minnesota can request Tattersall hand sanitizer through the All Hands site.

How a Globemaker Navigates a Digital World

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“It’s kind of a joke, but in some sense, I almost feel like I could start a war.”

Nearly a decade ago, a shipment of several hundred globes from Hillside, Illinois, arrived at a port in Chile. There was nothing inherently wrong with them—they were round, depicted Earth with some measure of accuracy, and would have passed muster almost anywhere else—but customs officials sent them right back to Replogle Globes, the United States–based manufacturer. The problem was that the maps on them didn’t fit with Chile’s view of the world, which includes Chilean dominion over certain disputed territories—claims that are likely of little to no concern to most other nations. “It’s funny, what we find is [one country] usually doesn’t care about anything outside that country,” says Kevin Dzurny, chief cartographer at Replogle, of the company’s international customers. “But I’ll be darned if that political border isn’t showing.”

Dzurny is responsible for the accuracy of the maps on the hundreds of thousands of globes Replogle sells in 100 different countries every year. When he was hired at Replogle 27 years ago, Google Maps was more than a decade away. Replogle had not yet hit its all-time sales peak, which would come in the fourth quarter of 2001, in the wake of 9/11. At that time, at school and at home, globes, atlases, and paper maps were how we made sense of the world’s geography and scale. Now, in an age when you can “walk” down streets in a web browser and pinpoint any place in the world in a matter of seconds, globes, particularly in America, are becoming less primary references than decorative objects. “In a lot of schools, globes will be sitting there for 15 years, which blows my mind,” Dzurny says. “Geography here is not as important as it used to be.”

But abroad, in many of the other countries where Replogle sells globes, they’re still in use in classrooms, according to Dzurny—often in countries where territorial conflicts are ongoing or fresh in the national consciousness. “Geography overseas—in China and Japan, Serbia, places like that—is huge,” Dzurny says. “They teach it and they enforce it and they want people to learn about the geography of the world, not just their country.” For countries such as Chile, a globe can be something more than decorative or even educational—it can be an expression of national identity, a manifestation of pride and a certain geopolitical view of the world. As the company’s lead mapmaker, Dzurny is responsible for plotting and tracking these variant takes of the world, and making sure that the right globe is made for the right country.

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Such geopolitical reconfiguring has always been a part of the business at Replogle, which was founded by former school supply salesman Luther Replogle at the start of the Great Depression, and blossomed during World War II as President Roosevelt encouraged listeners to “get out your globe” during his fireside chats. As Dzurny’s predecessor LeRoy Tolman, who worked at the company for 44 years, told The Wall Street Journal in 1986: “The customer’s not always right. But he’s always a customer.”

Let’s take those Chile-bound globes, for example. Any globe acceptable to Chile’s National Department of State Borders and Boundaries must include the country’s territorial claim in Antarctica, which overlaps with both British and Argentine claims. It also must denote a maritime claim that dates back to the 19th-century War of the Pacific, in which Chile won land from Peru and Bolivia, and later claimed a large portion of the bountiful fishing waters off the southern coast of Peru, though the maritime borders were not officially resolved at the time. In 2014 the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled in favor of Peru, removing 8,000 square miles of ocean from Chile’s claim—but not from its globes. “Chile supplies us with the actual dimensions of the maritime line and the latitude and longitude and direction of that maritime line,” Dzurny says.

Dzurny confirms country-specific adjustments with the relevant government agencies in those countries, but mistakes still happen—“99.999 percent of the time, an error in shipping,” he says. The globes shipped to Chile were in Spanish, but did not include the approved cartography. So back they went.

Chile is one of 11 countries—along with Japan, China, Argentina, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Greece, Israel, Ukraine, and Russia—that require special cartography from Replogle. “In order to sell globes in those particular countries, you have to abide by the rules and regulations of that country,” Dzurny says. “It’s kind of a joke, but in some sense, I almost feel like I could start a war.”

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A current hot-button example is Kashmir, the predominantly Muslim Himalayan territory claimed by both India and Pakistan. In August 2019 the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s special status as an autonomous region, sent in thousands of troops, and cut off all phone and internet access in the region. In the next three months, “I probably got 15 calls on Kashmir,” Dzurny says, noting that both American and Indian customers have inquired about how Replogle depicts the region. The answer depends on where you’re seeing the globe. For globes sold to India, he says, “we have to make sure that our borders comply with the government of India,” and show Kashmir within its borders. Otherwise, Dzurny defaults to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook take, which places dotted lines around the region so as not to demarcate it as belonging to a particular country.

In China, globes have to show Taiwan as part of the larger People’s Republic, using the same coloring as the mainland. They also depict the Nine-Dash Line, a claim to a significant portion of the South China Sea, where countries including Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Taiwan have also asserted territory—and a claim on which The Hague has ruled China has no legal standing. (In early October 2019, the border appeared on a map in the animated movie Abominable, causing Vietnam and Malaysia to pull the movie from theaters.) “If you don’t include these zones, these lines, you definitely won’t be able to sell globes in China,” Dzurny says.

The cartographer isn’t bothered by making these changes, and the world views they reinforce. “Do I have any political stance? Not really, I mean I couldn't have one in this job, in a sense. It’s about trying to get our product out there to help people learn,” he says. “You can't just say, ‘China's wrong for teaching [their view] or India’s wrong for teaching about Kashmir.' That's their policy ... it's no different than what we do here.”

To Dzurny’s point, the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN), a federal body that works with the Secretary of the Interior to implement uniform name usage throughout the federal government, and which Dzurny relies on as a key reference, is strongly influenced by American policy. As Trent Palmer, the BGN's executive secretary for foreign names explains, “Because we’re a part of the U.S. government, we need to present a unified U.S. government position on foreign places, which gets into foreign policy.” The Foreign Names Committee is comprised of about 15 members from various federal agencies, including the State Department, CIA, and Library of Congress. “The State Department may have a position about something, and in order to be consistent with that foreign policy, it will result in a certain name being the one BGN authorizes for use,” Palmer explains, leading to name choices that can be controversial, such as the Sea of Japan (disputed by Korea) or the Persian Gulf (which Arab countries call the “Arabian Gulf”). “Names are very powerful.”

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Though globes are increasingly less common, Dzurny says that over the past decade he’s noticed an increase in geographic awareness, and particular attention to out-of-date borders, naming, or mistakes. More customers, it seems, have been calling in to complain. “People are more aware of updates to maps than 10, 12 years ago,” he says. “It seems like people follow more politically what’s going on in the world.”

Now that Google Maps becomes the world’s most influential cartographer (so influential, in fact, that in 2010, Nicaragua used a border error as an excuse to invade Costa Rica), Replogle has maintained its business by focusing on globes as artifacts, relics that, unlike Google’s ostensibly real-time and agnostic digital maps, capture the geopolitical moment of their making and the design sense of the customer. For example, Replogle CEO Joe Wright notes that the Frank Lloyd Wright Series, which offers stands based on the architect’s aesthetic, is currently “enjoying a resurgence in Japan.” Presumably those globes also include that country’s claim to four of the Kuril Islands—part of a dispute with Russia that dates back to 1945.

Dzurny understands the current lay of the land. “I keep the cartography up to date,” he says, “but most people just care what it looks like.”

Holed Up in a Portuguese Cave, Neanderthals Supped on Seafood

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For skeptics, no amount of crab legs and speared shark are enough to upend the caveman stereotype.

On a mountain range in western Portugal, in a cave high above the modern coastline, a remnant of the ancient seashore can be found. The cramped, low-ceilinged grotto, which lies on a peninsula about 20 miles south of Lisbon, holds a diverse and decadent marine menu enjoyed by ancient humans—and further proof that Neanderthals weren't the knuckle-dragging dimwits we've long imagined.

Clam. Crabs. Seabirds. Seals. Perhaps dolphins. Certainly sharks. All were par for the course for the Neanderthals of what is now coastal Portugal, as researchers discovered during a dig that stretched from 2010 to 2013.

But that wasn’t all they found. There were also horse bones. Ibex remains. Deer. Aurochs (a giant cousin of cattle). Even a porcupine (ouch!). All were detailed in a recent study, conducted by a multinational European team and published last month in the journal Nature.

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The culinary cornucopia provided a swath of new information on Neanderthal diets, exposed in the middens (ancient rubbish heaps) inside the Figueira Brava cave. When Neanderthals occupied the site, about 100,000 years ago, the cave was roughly a mile from the coast of modern-day Portugal.

Some of the food may have been scavenged, but much of it—including the sharks, which could be speared in shallow waters or sourced from isolated tidepools—would have been within Neanderthals’ capacity to hunt. The assemblage represents a different diet than most ancient humans ate, and what would have been on the menu for the coastal Neanderthals’ inland neighbors—a combination of woolly rhinoceros and mammoth, among other large steppe mammals.

The cave findings broaden our understanding of Neanderthals’ complex behaviors. Evidence of early modern humans—people more like us than Neanderthals—eating seafood stretches back 160,000 years in South Africa. But as João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona’s Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and the lead author of the paper, points out, it may have been assumed that Neanderthals didn’t have similar preserved marine eateries because, until now, none had been found.

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Zilhão says it’s all part of a longstanding anti-Neanderthal, pro-modern human bias.

“On the positive side the evidence [of early humans eating seafood] existed,” he says. “And on the negative side, no such evidence existed among the Neanderthals. So it all fit together in this very neat narrative. How the chosen people become the lords of the Earth.”

Poor Neanderthals. On their discovery—in a German quarry, back in the early 19th century—the ancient humans were construed as lumbering oafs: “cavemen,” if you will. Only recently has their fossil record come into focus, and more open-minded interpretations of archaeological sites begun to give them their due.

This isn’t the first time Neanderthals have surprised us with the lengths they would go to for food. In January, shells found in an Italian grotto suggested that the earlier humans were leaving their cave shelters to dive for clams on the Mediterranean seabed.

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Neanderthals were artists too. An earlier study of Zilhão’s identified the earliest known cave art in Europe as their work.

Yet they’ve been imagined as a backwards branch on the evolutionary tree since the first Neanderthal skull emerged from the German valley that gave them their name. Archaeologists like Zilhão have been trying to fix that misconception ever since.

“For some people, the notion that Neanderthals were a different species [than Homo sapiens], and less capable, is a matter of belief,” he says. “And therefore they are impermeable to facts and reason.”

Figueira Brava is another stepping stone in Neanderthals’ long walk to grace. Along with artistic capabilities, caring for loved ones, and physical prowess, a diverse, delicious appetite can now be added to their repertoire.

The Woods Hole Lab Where Mysteries of the Deep Are Solved

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Nervous sharks, flight-risk octopuses, and fish that walk are just a few of Dave Remsen's cases.

It was a normal day at the lab for Dave Remsen—until one of the guests escaped from its room. The alarm was raised by a staffer, and a hunt ensued. After some frantic searching and mild panic, the guest was located, then scooped up—carefully—and plopped back into their tank.

“They’re escape artists,” Remsen explained as he peered into a tank containing another wily resident. He was referring to cephalopods, the tentacled group of guests that reside here at the Supply House of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at the University of Chicago’s Woods Hole campus, in Massachusetts.

“We have had occasions where they’ve crawled out of their tanks—even when we’ve put bricks on the lids,” he said. “They just find ways.”

Cephalopods are marine animals, part of the mollusk family that includes cuttlefish, octopus, and squid. At the MBL, they reside on the second floor, to lessen the chance that they’ll escape the building. Another safeguard is to line the perimeter of their tank with AstroTurf, because “octopus[es] don’t like crawling over that. They can’t get suction on the turf.”

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Remsen has never had a “pod” escape into the outside world, but he has had one die—in 2018, when the lab staff couldn’t find an octopus in time. The escapee was unable to keep oxygenating its gills. “That,” he said, “was a shame.”

Remsen is the director of Marine Research Services at the MBL, where he runs the Department of Marine Resources, collecting and rearing marine animals for scientific research. The laboratory specializes in cellular, developmental, and reproductive biology research, and works on biodiversity and environmental studies as well. Over the years everyone from early-career scientists to Nobel laureates has conducted research here. The lab was founded in 1888, by a group of Bostonians interested in marine life, and remained independent until 2013, when it became formally affiliated with the University of Chicago.

Remsen—who's been working from home since the coronavirus hit, and remotely directing a skeleton crew at the lab—first started work here in the 1980s, as a diver collecting species during his summer vacations from college, where he studied zoology and animal biology. After graduating, he worked as a freelance software developer in Boston, and fixed his schedule so that he could be a full-time volunteer at the New England Aquarium. He joined the lab full time in 1991, and held a variety of roles for the next 15 years.

He developed the MBL’s website and species databases, designed a biodiversity data service that’s now used by research communities around the world, and became an instructor in biomedical informatics—using big data to provide insight into scientific research.

After a six-year stint doing biodiversity work in Copenhagen, he returned to his hometown of Woods Hole in 2012—and to the MBL. Today the married father of two lives in the nearby town of Falmouth, where he has a dog named Rocky, owns 10 chickens, and avidly keeps bees as a hobby.

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But when it comes to his work, everything’s under the water. It’s a perfect job for someone with a naturally inquisitive nature, who loves to play detective.

“When we get the phone call from a scientist asking us to house a species,” Remsen said, “we then have to figure out, ‘Where do we acquire them, and what do they require? Who's going to build the tank containment system? What temperature do we have to keep them at, and what do we feed those things? Does anybody know? And if nobody knows, then there's some investigation work needed.”

When Remsen gets a call from a scientist in Okinawa, Japan, who wants to get hold of a rare octopus, or an email from a biologist in Adelaide, Australia, who’s found a creature he can’t quite identify, he views it as a challenge—a quest, really—for his team of seven.

“It’s this challenge of, ‘Do I have the knowledge and experience to provide this, to go out and know where to find this? Do I have the experience to identify this unknown thing, to make the unknown known?’ Whatever people want to have here, we have to get in. And whatever people need help with, we try to provide that.”

Okinawan squid, Indonesian cuttlefish, Filipino octopuses, and North Pacific dogfish are just some of the inhabitants at the lab this season. Local species are kept here too, but they’re typically released or given foster homes after a time, provided they’re healthy and haven’t been treated with medication. (The lab does have some “retired” fish, however—animals that have been in captivity so long that Remsen doesn’t feel comfortable releasing them, including a hybrid striped bass that has lived in the lab for more than 25 years.)

A large wing of the MBL’s second floor is dedicated to the cephalopods, one of the best-funded research projects, which has its own team dedicated to caring for the creatures as scientists try to discover the best way to rear them in captivity. Remsen’s office is on the same floor, but he spends most of his time downstairs, in the “tank room,” where pipes—draped from the ceiling like thick rubbery vines—feed carefully controlled seawater into a cornucopia of tanks housing various species.

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Remsen patrols the room each day, pausing to check on some of his favorite guests. On an unusually dry and sunny day in April, he stopped at a duck-egg-blue steel tank and peered in at the horseshoe crab inside, then picked it up, its alien-esque exoskeleton glistening with water.

“I always have loved horseshoe crabs, because they’re safe [to handle] but creepy looking,” Remsen said, turning the crab over as its 10 legs wriggled and writhed. “They kind of checked off a lot of boxes for kids. You could freak people out because they look creepy from the underside. You could say ‘Oh, this is just a crab,’ and then you turn it over and there’s all this stuff cluttering and clattering.”

Horseshoe crabs are prehistoric arthropods that live in shallow coastal waters. Their blood is used in limulus amebocyte lysate tests, which can detect the disease-causing bacterial endotoxins in humans—something first discovered at the MBL in the 1950s, when the crabs’ circulatory systems were being studied.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a boy whose favorite creature was a horseshoe crab grew up to manage a department at one of the most famous marine research labs in the world, in a location locals call “Science City” due to the vast number of science facilities here. NOAA Fisheries’ Woods Hole Science Aquarium, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Woods Hole Research Center are just some of the institutions that call this quaint Cape Cod village home.

“As a kid,” Remsen said, “the supply department [at the MBL] was where you came to get bait for fishing. I’d walk over from my house, which was about 10 minutes away, and they would give me a squid.”

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After returning the crab to its quarters, he strolled past another tank, this one a large circular drum with a “Do Not Disturb” sign attached. Inside was a single dogfish shark—a particularly nervous individual given to jumping out of the tank when startled (an ill-advised move that would, of course, lead to eventual asphyxiation). Visitors are asked to speak quietly when nearby.

Remsen’s team includes three full-time marine animal care specialists, one of whom spends most of his time looking after the zebrafish facility (setting up adults for spawning, and collecting and caring for embryos, is a demanding, time-consuming task).

Beyond the tank room, the MBL has two boat captains and two staff divers who collect specimens. The team also hires seasonal summer help, including technician assistants who scrub the tanks and assist with the smaller critters. The teams contract and expand depending on funding, which comes from a mix of public and private sources.

For the length of the guests’ stay, it’s up to the MBL team to assemble life-support systems, get the water chemistry just right for each species, and figure out what to feed the creatures—all of which requires specialized knowledge. The lab deals with species that few people have studied before, so there’s often a lack of information on how to rear and care for them. In some cases, Remsen and his team are the first to try to raise a complete generation in captivity, which can mean developing novel methods.

“Just because I know what it is doesn’t mean I know how to take care of it,” Remsen said. “Sometimes I don’t get it right.”

He approached a shallow tank and stared down into it, at a sandy bed full of starfish, sea urchins, and other spiny creatures. Just that morning, he’d had to write an email to a scientist at NYU, to explain that “once again” he’d killed the professor’s little ciona larvae (a type of sea squirt).

“The embarrassing part? He can keep them alive in New York City, and here we are on the coast unable to do so.”

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That’s not the only puzzle Remsen is trying to solve. For years he’s tried to incubate the local species of squid. Over the course of the summer, the lab hatches around a million baby squid, but the team has yet to get one to grow from a millimeter to a centimeter.

“I’ve got some of the world’s best experts here,” Remsen said. “And still I can’t do it yet. It’s a detective job.”

One such recent investigation involved Amy Herbert, a postdoctoral research candidate in developmental biology from Stanford, who arrived last May. Herbert studies sea robins, sometimes called the “fish that walks” thanks to their appendages on pelvic fins that look—and act—a lot like fingers.

The lab had to figure out where to find them—in the Atlantic Ocean, it turned out, between Nova Scotia and Florida—and then work out how to feed them, fertilize them, and collect their eggs and sperm. It’s a mixture of trial and error, research, and calling around the lab’s vast network of contacts.

Just outside the lab is the dock, where the supply house’s collection boat, Gemma, is moored, and a collection of waders hang out to dry. Remsen waved at the two men working on the vessel, which was out of action for repairs.

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A lot of the nearby fishing is done on the Gemma, which was needed last spring to collect Herbert’s sea robins. But when it wasn't in shape to make the trip, and Remsen’s usual Plan B—a local fisherman—had a broken boat as well, he had to call on someone else: one of his sons.

“I was so desperate to get these sea robins that my son and his buddy were down at the beach fishing, and I paid them $5 each to get these fish,” he said with a laugh. “You essentially have to acquire them by any means necessary.”

Which is a pretty good way to describe Remsen’s job in general. For instance, he said, “At the moment, I’m out all night catching squid with a fishing pole with lights until our boat is repaired, so I can keep the National Institutes of Health squid person in squid. Then on Friday I have to go diving for worms.”

Remsen is fiercely protective of the ecosystem his lab is part of. The reason those escape-artist cephalopods reside on the second floor is that in case they do escape, they’d have to make it all the way downstairs before they reach the ocean.

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“We're very clear that nothing [from the lab] goes in[to] the water out there,” he said, pointing to the bay, “because invasive species [are] a huge issue, and it's a risk we don't want to take. We have to be so careful [that] animals in here do not escape into our local waters.” The lab even treats the water it uses in its tanks before it goes down the drain, so that there’s no chance of it contaminating the local ecosystem.

For Remsen, every day at the lab is unpredictable. But he relishes the fact that he’s been able to make a job out of a childhood passion.

“Me and my friends were immersed in all the science that was going on at Woods Hole even as kids,” he said. “I remember all the noise of the tanks, the critters, everything. I knew about all of this. I loved all of this. And I wanted to do all of this. And now I am.”


A Trailblazing Japanese-American Sculptor Is Getting Her Own Postage Stamps

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Ruth Asawa also championed arts education—and had a great recipe for salt dough for sculpting at home.

Ruth Asawa’s legacy comes in many forms. It sits on a wall in the Guggenheim, a six-pointed star that dissolves into fractals on its fringe. It hangs in the tower of San Francisco’s de Young Museum as a cloud of massive inkblots. It is also present, if invisible, at the Santa Anita racetrack in California, where Asawa, a Japanese-American, was interned for most of 1942. (She was later interned in Arkansas as well.) Now Asawa’s oeuvre will live on in the latest stamp assortment from the U.S. Postal Service.

Asawa, an outlier in a field dominated by white male artists, cultivated friendships with abstract painter Josef Albers and quixotic inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller. She was also a student with Robert Rauschenberg at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College.

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The 20 new stamps commemorate some of Asawa’s most iconic constructions, the wire sculptures she began to produce in the 1940s, which made her a household name a decade later. The method was a variation on wire-knitting techniques used by villagers outside Mexico City, where Asawa visited in 1947. The eccentric geometrics overlap and envelop one another, transparent from one angle, solid from another. Only up close does the intricacy of her work truly emerge. Now, the art will grace doorsteps and mailboxes in America and beyond.

Asawa, who died in 2013, was also an advocate for arts education, particularly for children, and served on a number of boards to further that goal. Just as she had developed her own techniques for making, she urged young students to "learn by doing." She created a famed art activity for making works like hers from milk cartons. And something you can do right now is try out her recipe for baker’s clay or salt dough that can be made with a few pantry staples.

Appreciating America's Overlooked, Forgotten, and Discarded Post Office Murals

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Painted during the Great Depression, they're lingering expressions of civic pride.

Chiseled into gray granite of the James A. Farley Building, the main post office in New York City, are the words: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” So far during this pandemic, post offices have remained opened to serve the people throughout the country, though they are beginning to buckle under the strain.

During the Great Depression, another time of national crisis, postal stations were used to inspire citizens. Public art in federal buildings, including post offices, was created by artists employed by the United States government to beautify the country. In one federal program, 1,400 post office murals were created in more than 1,300 cities and towns. “The murals boosted morale by celebrating local industry and historical events. Today these murals often go unnoticed, almost like real-life Easter eggs of art hidden across the country,” writes Texas-based photographer Justin Hamel in an email. Hamel documented nearly 375 of these works of civic art while traveling across the United States. According to him, the local industries that are depicted in many of the paintings still drive the economies of the communities they grace: cotton in Camilla, Georgia, for example, or wheat in Anthony, Kansas. In some areas, life has moved on more dramatically. Take one of Hamel’s favorite murals, Locomotive Repair Operation by Harold Lechman in the Renovo, Pennsylvania, post office—near where the photographer grew up—which shows six men working in the Pennsylvania Railroad repair shops that are now no longer there.

Atlas Obscura spoke with Hamel about how he found these murals, how the paintings have survived, and the ones he really hopes to shoot someday.

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What inspired you to start this project?

From 2015 to 2017 I was spending more than half my year traveling throughout the United States, photographing ad campaigns for hotels. The first one [mural] I remember photographing was of the 1932 Olympics in the Lake Placid, New York, post office. From there I began to research the murals closest to where my next jobs would be. At first, I would pick and choose which ones to photograph, usually murals that depicted local industry over landscapes. Eventually, I began to photograph them all, even if the subject matter didn't interest me.

How do you find where these paintings are located? How have they survived?

One of the best resources for finding Post Office Murals is the website www.livingnewdeal.com, which catalogs and maps Works Progress Administration projects. A year or two into it I came across an official list of remaining murals from the U.S. Postal Service that someone had received through a Freedom of Information Act request. I believe that 900 to 1,000 are remaining. Every year murals are lost due to the closing or sale of post offices or outright negligence. At the same time, murals are sometimes discovered in the basement of a post office, underneath paint in the lobby, or in the back room of a local museum. Lately, I've been trying to focus on the murals that are no longer in operating post offices or that have been relocated. The majority of relocated murals are in local museums or libraries. Examples of these are the murals in Borger, Texas (Hutchenson County Museum); Brevard, North Carolina (library); Enterprise, Alabama (library); Fort Pierce, Florida (City Hall); Idabel, Oklahoma (Museum of the Red River); Lamesa, Texas (community center); and Sebring, Florida (library). The most interesting location a mural now hangs is in a hotel suite in Covington, Louisiana.

How have locals responded to your attention to these artworks?

Unfortunately, most people that I've talked to haven't noticed the murals or given them any thought until they see me photographing them. That is a shame because it’s one of the largest, if not the largest, public art program in the country. You can watch people pause, look up, and take in the artwork, and really begin to appreciate it. During the proposed federal budget cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, I would talk to people in line at their post offices and explain how the murals were funded by the government during the Great Depression to employ artists and bring civic pride to rural communities. At the post office in Kelso, Washington, I could see the look on a man’s face change as he began to see the local impact of taxpayer-funded artwork. Occasionally I'll run into someone who says their great grandparents are the people depicted in the murals. In Jefferson City, Tennessee, a woman regaled me with stories of her grandfather delivering the mail by horseback—she still has his USPS saddlebags.

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What were your most surprising experiences during the project?

It's hard to narrow down, but I had heard there was a mural in the post office in Williamsburg, Kentucky. When my partner and I arrived, we discovered the post office had been abandoned, taken over by the county courthouse, and used for storage. A woman working for the county was kind enough to give us a tour and pointed out that all of the boxes scattered about were filled with 2016 election ballots. Up until then, I had never thought about where ballots are stored after election day.

A year later I was searching for The Last Home of the Chactaw by H. Louis Freund in Idabel, Oklahoma, when I arrived unannounced at the Museum of the Red River. After talking with the person at the front desk and then the museum director, they led me into their back storage room and not only let me photograph the mural leaning up against the wall, but also gave me a quick tour of their archives. It really goes to show how kind people are, and proud to share their local history.

Is there a post office mural that you haven’t photographed yet, that you really want to?

Hands down the four murals by Stevan Dohanos in the Charlotte Amalie, Saint Thomas, post office in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Not only are they in a beautiful location, but I believe these murals are the only remaining New Deal–funded artworks in a United States territory. It’s also quite likely the last ones I'll photograph, unless someone hires me for a story on them.

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When the Government Banned PBR, Pabst Made Cheese Instead

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Selling dairy products helped the brewery survive Prohibition.

In the early 1900s, Pabst was a paragon of success. What started in 1844 as a tiny Milwaukee brewery had become the largest beer maker in the nation by 1874, producing more than a million barrels a year in 1893. That same year, the company started claiming that one of its lagers had won a blue-ribbon award at the Chicago World’s Fair. It was pure malarkey. But the blue silk ribbons they tied around bottle necks put some prestige behind the brand, and helped turn the Pabst family into millionaires.

Yet as America moved towards Prohibition, the folks at Pabst recognized that their beer empire was about to dry up. So, soon after the nationwide ban on alcohol went into effect in 1920, Pabst pivoted to making a “delicious cheese food.” They called it Pabst-ett and sold it in block and spreadable forms, as well as in cheddar, pimento, and Swiss flavors.

This wasn’t the only side hustle the Pabst Brewing Company pursued in 13 years of prohibition, nor the most profitable of them. But it exemplifies the mindsets and tactics American brewers adopted to ride out the decade and resurge after 1933—something only a few dozen of the nearly 1,300 brewing companies active in the U.S. in 1916 managed to do.

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According to beer historian Maureen Ogle, the key to survival for breweries during Prohibition was to realize that it wasn’t a passing political phase. Many brewers reportedly thought the country would break and revise the law after two or three years, and so took a deadly sit-and-wait approach. Brewers who chose to act had to find new ways of working with what they had on hand: their machines, supply chains, and expertise.

Thanks to a provision in the law behind Prohibition, which allowed the production of less than 0.5 percent alcoholic drinks, most breweries pivoted to making “near beers.” Anheuser Busch, whose co-founder Adolphus Busch was apparently wary of rising temperance movements and bracing for nationwide Prohibition as early as the 1890s, led the pack by promoting a near beer called Bevo in 1916. But every big name in American beer eventually had one: Miller had Vivo. Schlitz had Famo. Stroh’s had Lux-o. Yuengling had Juvo. And Pabst had Pablo. (At least six breweries received permission to brew beer as a medical product, including Narragansett, which apparently distributed a high-iron porter to hospitals as a tonic for pregnant women.)

A number of breweries started making alcohol-free soft drinks, too. Anheuser-Busch even experimented with carbonated coffee (Kaffo) and tea (Buschtee). “At one point,” Ogle notes, “Pabst studied the possibility of investing in artichoke juice.”

Yet while drinks like Bevo did well initially, advertising restrictions, market crowding, and the rise of massive bootlegging operations cut into near-beer and non-beer sales. Breweries also struggled to use their malt-making expertise to break into the already established candy-making world, or even to sell malt extracts as baking products. (To customers who clearly wanted to use them to home brew, much to the government’s consternation.) Business was bad enough that the Miller family tried to sell off their company in 1925, but found no buyers.

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A few breweries got more creative. Coors tapped into the clay deposits near its facility to make ceramics, while Anheuser-Busch and others adapted their facilities to produce machine parts. The Busch family invested heavily in the 1920s in learning how to make and sell groceries—everything from infant formula to frozen eggs. Anheuser-Busch, as well as the Pittsburgh Brewery, Stroh’s, Yuengling, and a few others, realized their refrigeration and storage equipment could be parlayed into ice cream making and distribution to tap into rising demand for the frozen treat.

In the years leading up to Prohibition, the Pabst family had already dipped their toes into the dairy business. They’d initially acquired farmland in the late 1800s to raise French Percheron horses to haul their beer wagons, but as Ford’s Model-T cars started to displace equine labor in the 1910s, they swiftly shifted to rearing Holstein dairy cows. One of the family’s scions, Fred Pabst, Jr., seemed especially keen to expand the Pabsts’ agricultural interests. So when the company took stock of its assets just before 1920, it seemed logical to draw on its herds of dairy cows and brewery ice cellars to make cheese and other dairy products.

The Pabsts marketed Pabst-ett and other dairy products as “digestible” and hyped their industrial purity—a 1927 ad touted “pure Holstein milk from our tuberculosis-free herd”. The company released at least one cookbook for housewives, Recipes the Modern Pabst-ett Way, about the ease and splendor of working with their cheese spreads. And Pabst reportedly sold at least eight million pounds of the stuff during Prohibition. But Ogle suspects that this barely bolstered the company’s profits—although that’s hard to prove.

Instead, it caught the eye of the Kraft Cheese Company, which was founded in 1909 and had recently started consolidating the dairy industry through acquisitions. In 1923, Kraft acquired The Velveeta Cheese Company and its spreadable processed cheese. Seeing Pabst-ett, a later product, as a copycat, Kraft sued Pabst and won, although they reportedly gave the brewery a royalty-free license to keep making Pabst-ett. (No one I spoke to for this article was sure why they would have done that; a Kraft Heinz spokesperson said they had no information on Pabst-ett.)

In the end, Ogle argues, real estate rather than cheese spread got the Pabst family—and many other breweries, including Miller—through Prohibition. Like other brewing magnates, Fred’s father, Frederick Pabst, Sr., who led the company throughout the late 1800s, had snatched up hundreds of plots of land to build beer gardens, restaurants, and taverns that would serve and advertise Pabst. He also invested in multiple hotels, Milwaukee’s first skyscraper, and a Wisconsin resort. By 1893, 20 percent of the Pabst Brewing Company’s assets were reportedly in real estate, and by 1910 the family owned more than 400 plots in 187 cities. During Prohibition, they spun off a dedicated realty company to rent or sell those plots—even leasing their core brewery space to Harley-Davison. “They managed that well,” says Ogle, “earned good returns on it, and so had cash on hand in 1933 [when Prohibition ended] to rebuild their brewery.”

A few breweries that survived Prohibition kept their side hustles running, including Coors, which spun its ceramics business off into CoorsTek, a still extant company that at its peak was valued at more than $1 billion. Stroh’s and Yuengling kept their ice cream operations alive for decades, until Yuengling shuttered that side project in 1985 and Stroh’s sold off its ice cream brand in 1990. (It’s since bounced between owners.)

But Pabst snapped its attention back to beer above all else. The brand, Ogle argues, had always been primarily concerned with large-scale national markets and industrial innovations. So as the agriculturally-inclined Pabsts withdrew from the business (Fred, Jr., sold off the family’s controlling share in the company in 1933), its new managers likely didn’t see much point in competing with Kraft and other big dairy powers when they’d never mastered cheese retailing or wholesaling. (Pabst did not respond to a request for comment.) They sold Pabst-ett to Kraft (which may have continued to sell it into the 1940s, though its fate is wholly murky) and focused on developing beer-canning techniques and making strategic acquisitions.

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In retrospect, that decision was a bit of a shame, because “low-brow” chefs have repeatedly proven that cheap cheese and Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR), today the brand’s most famous beer, go together well in dishes such as PBR mac and cheese and PBR cheddar nuggets (served in a cut-up can).

But just because Pabst-ett vanished after Prohibition, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily gone for good. In 2014, Yuengling revived its ice cream brand; they did not respond to a request for comment, but this seems like a nostalgia move. And after ages spent being more brand than brewer—for decades, Pabst has paid Miller to make PBR, and other beer brands it has bought up—Pabst has slowly opened smaller-scale and more diverse operations, including a microbrewery and restaurant in its original Milwaukee location. Perhaps, with enough public interest, they might consider playing around with processed cheese again as well.

The Ambitious Plan to Digitize 100,000 Historic Texts in Belgium

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Two major Antwerp institutions are putting some of their voluminous holdings in the cloud.

Come September, a fleet of secure vehicles will pull up to a 17th-century building in Antwerp, Belgium, receive cases full of heavily protected cargo, and then abscond with the goods to a confidential location. The booty? Five thousand rare, centuries-old books, on their way to a 21st-century treatment.

Recently, the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library and the Plantin-Moretus Museum, both in Antwerp, announced a partnership with Google Books aimed at digitizing more than 100,000 historic works over the next three years. For Google, this is just the third initiative of its kind in the Low Countries (following work at Ghent University Library and the Royal Library of the Netherlands), and it could significantly influence future research into the history and literature of the region.

These works have traveled a long and rather perilous road to the web. The Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, which now houses more than 1.5 million volumes and occupies a large, stately “Sodality” (or former Jesuit fraternity house), was founded in 1481, when a local official donated 41 books to the city. The budding collection, however, was not long for the Town Hall, where it was originally housed: The building burned down in the 1576 Sack of Antwerp—leaving probably just three surviving books, according to Steven Vam Impe, the library's Curator of Early Printed Books and Manuscripts. It took several centuries—and several more moves—for the library to rebuild and grow its collection before it settled into the Sodality in 1883. But the inventory kept growing, so much so that the old building had to be expanded twice, including as recently as 1997.

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Today the collection spans more than 20 miles of bookshelves, so one can imagine why researchers might relish the opportunity to more simply search for that they need. It’s a major victory for anyone interested in “Antverpiensia,” the Belgian city’s equivalent of Americana. According to the library’s website, “[t]here is an almost complete set of ordinances and city edicts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century,” a set that's still growing, as the city continues to stash all its official publications in the Heritage Library. The collection is also a repository for the records of local institutions from the Bar Association, to the Cathedral of Our Lady, to the Zoo.

Equally valuable is the collection of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, a UNESCO world heritage site. The museum is named for Christophe Plantin, the printer-publisher who lived and worked there in the 16th century, and his son-in-law Jan Moretus, who inherited the operation from him. According to UNESCO, Plantin-Moretus “is the only surviving printing workshop and publishing house in the world dating back to the Renaissance and Baroque periods,” and it “was the most prolific printing and publishing house in Europe in the late 16th century.”

The printing house spawned an astonishing array of influential publications: from the first Dutch dictionary, to a treatise on decimals that later helped create the American dollar, to an illustrated botanical guide that, in the 16th century, was second only to the Bible in number of translations. It even printed—be still, our hearts—the very first atlas, by Abraham Ortelius. (They won’t be digitized, of course, but it bears mentioning that the Museum is also home to the world’s two oldest printing presses.)

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Because books will have to be transferred out of and then back into Antwerp by the thousands, the institutions estimate that it will take three years to digitize the 100,000 selected works, and more works will be added to the queue each year as their copyrights expire. Some, of course, are too fragile to travel, so they will be scanned on-site at the library or museum. Liesbet Wante, the project manager, says she cannot disclose the location of Google's digitization facility.

COVID-19 quarantines will hopefully be over long before the entire collection is up and running, when it will serve as a source of Wonder from Home. Until then, the project is a timely reminder of all the stories still awaiting discovery, and all the uncharted territory that still exists—even in the digital world.

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

Even More Ways to Help Librarians and Archivists From Home

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As long as we're all cooped-up, here are six digital projects that could use your curiosity.

A couple weeks ago, we shared six digitization and transcription projects that curious and cooped-up readers can contribute to from home. As countries continue to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, many libraries and archives remain closed, and will likely stay shuttered for months. In the meantime, try sublimating your intellectual wanderlust with more ways to give researchers a (virtual) helping hand. These projects won’t help you stretch your legs, but they will give your brain a workout.

While away the hours with New England whaling logs

Nantucket was once a beating heart of the American whaling industry—and though harpooners are no longer slicing through choppy waters in pursuit of leviathans, they left a prodigious written legacy behind. Unfortunately for contemporary scholars, the log books that kept track of daily life aboard the ships are often scrawled in cursive that is tricky to read. Since October 2019, the Nantucket Historical Association has been working to digitize and transcribe its collection of more than 400 log books, including 11 kept by seafaring women. “Many of the logs are illustrated and feature poetry and personal anecdotes,” writes Sara David, the digitization archivist at the institution’s research library, in an email. “Some of them read like they could be Moby-Dick.”

If you’re ready to help decipher the salty scribbles, log on to the project portal on From the Page, a hub for crowdsourced transcription, and sail through logs such as the richly illustrated one kept by Milo Calkin, who shoved off Nantucket on a whaling ship called Independence bound for the Pacific Ocean. He found himself quite at home. “I very soon became familiar with the duty of managing the ship,” he wrote. “And if I could only have learned to chew tobacco, drink rum, swear and lie I should have made a first rate sailor.”

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Escape the Earth with science-fiction fanzines

What better time to zip into a happily unfamiliar realm? The DIY History project at the University of Iowa Library, which invites people to help transcribe digitized objects from the library’s special collections and other holdings, could use your help with its massive trove of science-fiction zines. Some date back to the 1930s; all were collected by the late James L. “Rusty” Hevelin. More than 10,780 pages of the Hevelin Fanzines collection have been transcribed so far, but there are still around 500 left to go. If you need a mental break from this planet and its familiar troubles, pop into this project and spend a little time somewhere else.

Dig into Alabama history with diaries and licenses of note

The Alabama Department of Archives and History brims with documents, and many of them need to be transcribed. These include the 1891 medical licensure exam written by Halle T. Dillon, a black woman who studied at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and would go on to become the first woman licensed as a doctor in Alabama. As you read through her responses, you’ll also get a crash course in obstetrics, anatomy, and more. If all that detail has you feeling a bit faint, try the diary in which Lavinia Bright Walker—an elementary school teacher who moved from Alabama to Detroit as a child, in 1920—jotted down her young-adult musings about dating, fashion, and more, with the larger issues of racial tensions and economic struggle rumbling in the background.

Fix up transcripts from public broadcasts

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the station WGBH in Boston, is recruiting volunteers to help tidy up transcripts of public radio and television programs seen and heard around the country. The FIX IT+ initiative asks participants to comb through computer-generated transcripts and correct the mistakes, making it easier to search, say, a conversation with James Baldwin, or a visit to a soap company in upstate New York. Several thousand programs, spanning 60 years, are still waiting for someone’s eyes, ears, and fast-typing fingers.

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Gaze into celestial notebooks and photographs

At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, dozens of women hunkered down at Harvard to study the sky. Known as the Harvard Computers, these workers were tasked with comparing, classifying, and cataloguing objects in the sky, mainly based on photographs. Some, including Annie Jump Cannon, who discovered several new stars and hatched a new idea for a star-classifying system, went on to achieve some measure of individual fame—but many of their contributions were eclipsed by the larger project at the Harvard Observatory and the renown of Edward Charles Pickering, who directed it.

Now, the Wolbach Library at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is enlisting help with a newer endeavor, called Project PHaEDRA (or Preserving Harvard’s Early Data and Research in Astronomy). One arm of the project involves transcribing several Computers’ notebooks; the Star Notes portion asks people to digitally leaf through those notebooks in search of plate numbers, which will allow researchers to match notebook entries with the glass plate photographs the women were referencing. To participate, sign up here.

Type up essays in the American Prison Writing Archive

Since 2012, the American Prison Writing Archive at Hamilton College has gathered 2,340 essays by incarcerated writers. (The project, which is backed by the National Endowment for the Humanities, solicits submissions through newsletters circulated in prisons.) America imprisons people at a higher rate than any other country, and the project invites the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. to tell their stories in their own words. Many of these reflections are handwritten, and Doran Larson, a professor of literature and creative writing at the college, welcomes help from people who are able to type them up. If you’d like to transcribe, fill out the application.

In 19th-Century America, Fighting Disease Meant Battling Bad Smells

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The history of unpleasant odor, or miasma, has unexpected relevance in the time of COVID-19.

In 1858, a businessman calling himself “Olfactorious” sent an angry missive to the New York Times. Following his doctor’s advice, he had moved out of the city in search of “sweet, uncontaminated air” in the countryside. But like many suburbanites, he still had to commute to the city for work, and he complained bitterly that his journey was dangerous given the stenches along his route. Each day, he passed a “festering” sewer, the source of “an effluvium sufficient to start the yellow fever.” Next came a milk factory with its “peculiar, penetrating, stump-tail odor,” and then a fat-rendering establishment that filled the air “with an odor exactly like roast mutton, only more so.” Thanks to the theory of miasma, which had a long and global history, Olfactorious feared that he would fall sick if he inhaled these foul smells.

Melanie Kiechle, a history professor at Virginia Tech and the author of Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of 19th-Century America, 1840–1900, researches how Americans once tried to use their sense of smell to stay healthy. Until germ theory was widely accepted and viruses were discovered in the 1890s, Americans looked to the environment to understand the spread of disease. Nineteenth-century doctors blamed miasma, a noxious form of “bad air,” and worried about the poisonous fumes and putrid smells of America’s growing cities.

Back then, urban environments were olfactory nightmares: Chicago reeked of its slaughterhouses, New Orleans smelled like its gasworks, fertilizer factories dumped stinking heaps of waste in the middle of Manhattan, and animal carcasses rotted in the filthy canals of Providence, Rhode Island. For the first time in history, large numbers of Americans lived in overcrowded cities, many in poorly ventilated apartments, and killers such as cholera, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and typhus could strike at any moment, and often did. The campaign to eradicate foul odors and disinfect the air that urban dwellers breathed gave rise to a public health movement. Its founders took as an aphorism the words of a British health reformer: “All smell is disease.”

Atlas Obscura spoke to Kiechle about America’s olfactory anxieties, 19th-century fears of disease, and what these histories can teach us about the COVID-19 pandemic.

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What did 19th-century cities smell like?

If you were dropped from the present into a 19th-century city, you would say that it stinks. Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, chickens, and a host of other animals made their homes on city streets, where they found food and deposited their waste. Cities smelled strongly of manure as well as industrial activities. I’m talking about slaughterhouses and bone boilers, fertilizer manufacturers and leather tanners, fat renderers and distillers that fermented grain to make alcohol. Nineteenth-century Americans called these the “offensive trades” because they offended the nose. After the mid-century discovery of petroleum, oil refiners joined the list.

Even though many of these odors were familiar, 19th-century Americans worried about them because they were concentrated to new intensities. Since air was supposed to be “inodorous”—even Webster’s American Dictionary said this—strong odors were a bad sign. The New York Times warned Americans: “Here, in the City, you respire disease. Odious gases regale you at every step. The air is heavy with noxious smells.”

How did bad air become synonymous with disease?

Miasma theory, which held that bad airs spread disease, was a widespread belief with a long history. At the end of the 18th century, scientists discovered that the air humans and animals exhale could kill. Experimenters such as Joseph Priestley put mice in airtight bell jars and observed that the mice died when alone, but lived longer if there was a plant inside. These experiments led doctors to warn against inhaling “carbonic acid gas” (today we call it carbon dioxide) by breathing in air that others had exhaled––a common occurrence in crowded urban spaces like theaters, schools, and churches.

In the 19th century, miasma theory no longer came from physicians, but was common sense, in that most people shared this understanding and regularly acted on it. Americans learned from a young age to cover their noses, to grow sweet-smelling plants, to close their windows against stinky breezes, and to avoid places that smelled badly to protect against everything from headaches and nausea to cholera and yellow fever. People were very attentive to changes in the air they breathed.

Now that we have a scientific understanding of microbes and bacteria, it is no longer valid to believe that miasma causes illness. However, this was the best understanding that people had before germ theory, and it often resulted in people doing the “right” thing to protect health, just for what today we know is the wrong reason. And the idea that a disease is airborne is still very much alive and valid.

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How did 19th-century Americans try to protect themselves from the spread of disease?

In the 19th century, women and men carried perfumed handkerchiefs, smelling salts, and sachets, or they wore nosegay—a fragrant flower pinned to the lapel—so that when they encountered bad odors, they could cover their nose or bury it in the flower. In 1862, when Chicago’s aldermen formed a “smelling committee” to investigate the sources of the city’s foul odors, they carried bottles of cologne, camphor, chloride of lime, lemons, cigars, and handkerchiefs.

At home, women believed they could disinfect their air by filtering it through sweet-smelling plants. They planted lilac bushes below their windows and filled window boxes with rosemary, sweet peas, and other fragrant plants. Recommendations for specific plants could be found in newspaper columns and in the writings of Catharine E. Beecher, essentially a 19th-century Martha Stewart.

The new coronavirus spreads primarily through respiratory droplets, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently recommended cloth masks to slow its transmission. Were face coverings also common in the 19th century, albeit for different reasons?

Absolutely! Chicago’s aldermen investigated the city’s smells because dockworkers on the Chicago River had started wearing nose guards to defend against stench. Fearing these workers would quit, the Board of Trade petitioned the aldermen to do something to reduce the city’s bad smells.

People also dreamed up new inventions, like a fragrant lotion to rub under the nose. In Scotland, chemist John Stenhouse patented a charcoal respirator, an uncomfortable-looking device built from wire gauze and filled with powdered charcoal, a known deodorizer, that covered the nose and mouth. Many chemists believed it would be standard issue for workers in the offensive trades.

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It’s difficult to evaluate how healthy or not these 19th-century responses were, since today we’re operating with a different understanding of disease causation. Charcoal does work as a filter, so I think the charcoal respirator is a sound technology, but I cannot say if Stenhouse’s respirator was effective or even widely used.

Ozone generators were another weird fad based on concerns about the air and its effects on health. After the discovery of ozone in 1839, scientists began measuring it in the environment and found that ozone levels were high in areas people associated with good health—pine forests and at higher elevations—and very low in cities, especially during epidemics. Current knowledge is that inhaling ozone seriously harms the respiratory system, so ozone generators would be dangerous for household use. Plus, ozone is combustible.

What’s important to remember is that solutions to large-scale problems like the spread of disease require society-wide solutions. In the 19th century, many Americans implemented personal strategies to try to improve the air they breathed, but these were always limited to who could afford them. Real change came not from these small-scale adjustments, but from large-scale interventions, most notably in public health regulations of industrial practices, the precursor to the Clean Air Acts in the 20th century.

What connections do you see between the COVID-19 pandemic and earlier ideas about the spread of disease?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this question. Given the early and larger outbreaks of the coronavirus in cities, and strict instructions to maintain social distancing and at least six feet of space from one another, it’s clear that dense populations are still a health liability. This reminds me of how 19th-century Americans feared inhaling the “vitiated air” that someone else had exhaled. They did not know about viruses, but 19th-century ideas have a strong resonance today.

I’ve also been paying attention to reports that a sudden loss of smell is an early coronavirus symptom that means you should self-isolate. This is clearly a different reason to heed our senses than the 19th-century insistence that bad smells would cause disease. But it does suggest that one way that we can protect and monitor our health is by paying attention to our sense of smell.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

This Week in Wonder From Home

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Our schedule of new offerings on Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more.

Atlas Obscura’s mission has always been to inspire wonder about the incredible world we all share. Now, more than ever, we must stay connected, not only to our sense of wonder, but to each other. Each week, in addition to our Wonder From Home stories and virtual exploration with our atlas of more than 19,000 wondrous places, we’ll now be broadcasting live—on Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, and more—and posting new videos on YouTube. We plan to bring you the unique, curious, and unusual, from our staff and the amazing people who lead our Trips and Experiences.

Here are the wonders you can enjoy from home this week:


Monday, April 6


AO Loves New York

Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

New York City is going through a tough time. To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.


Tuesday, April 7


AO Loves New York

Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

New York City is going through a tough time. To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Music for Stargazing

Zoom, Instagram Live, 9 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Wherever you are, the night sky can be an endless source of wonder. We’ll set the mood for stargazing with celestial music, while expert astronomer Moiya McTier guides us through the cosmos. This week’s musical guest is TAKUYA NAKAMURA, also known as Space Tak, who will play the piano and electronic music—live from Japan.


Wednesday, April 8


Premiere: Show and Tell: The “Radio Guy’s” Collection of Scary-Looking Headgear

YouTube, 9:45 a.m. EDT

In our first episode of “Show and Tell,” Atlas Obscura co-founder Dylan Thuras makes a virtual visit to the house of Steve Erenberg, a collector known as the “Radio Guy.” For years, Steve has been on the hunt for strange objects, and has amassed an impressive collection—including a variety of masks and headgear—that look like they came straight out of a macabre sci-fi movie.

AO Loves New York

Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

New York City is going through a tough time. To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.


Thursday, April 9


AO Loves New York

Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

New York City is going through a tough time. To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Studio Tour With Artist Dorielle Caimi

Instagram Live, 7 p.m. EDT

Artist Dorielle Caimi makes paintings full of vivid color and strong symbolism to reclaim and recontextualize societal ideas about women. Join us for a live visit to her studio, where she’ll share her art, her creative process, and the reasons she loves Santa Fe.


Friday, April 10


AO Loves New York

Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

New York City is going through a tough time. To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Strange Sounds & Unusual Instruments

Instagram Live, 8 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Join Adriana Molello, Atlas Obscura’s music curator, as she explores some of the most unusual instruments and sounds with guest musicians from all over the world. As a professional violinist, Adriana has an affinity for strange instruments. In fact, she trekked to the remote reaches of Romania to hunt down a Stroh violin—a violin without a wooden body that projects its sound through a horn.


Saturday, April 11


Armoring Oregon's Rockaway Beach

Zoom, 2 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Writer and geologist Ruby McConnell will discuss the policies, politics, and attitudes that have shaped Oregonians’ relationship to the shoreline and response to climate change.


Follow #wonderfromhome for inspiring stories, incredible online experiences, and livestreams with the Atlas Obscura community.


7 YouTube Channels for the Stay-at-Home Food Adventurer

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Get inspired by these imaginative cooks from around the world.

Food is both a comfort and a necessity. Thanks to grocery-store workers, delivery people, and many others, those fortunate enough to be sheltering in place at home are sustaining themselves with bread-baking projects, foods from childhood, and new recipes.

But along with its comfort value, food can be transportive. In the last few years, a certain kind of food channel on YouTube has become an island of charming calm in an ocean of frenetic cooking competitions and sped-up, hands-and-pans vertical videos. Filmed in the countryside, or in a quiet kitchen, they feature people around the world making use of ever-more inexpensive technology to film themselves cooking and crafting. They rarely offer instruction—instead, the viewer watches in awe as a cook deftly makes something wonderful.

Liziqi

The queen of food and handcrafts on the internet may very well be Li Ziqi, a young woman from Sichuan, China, with millions of fans and dozens of videos. With intense focus and Herculean effort, she forages, crafts, and cooks in rural surroundings that have the beauty of a fairy tale. Clarissa Wei, a senior reporter for Goldthread, notes that for many people in China, these videos are nostalgic, as they offer "a glorified version of domestic viewers’ childhoods" in the countryside. Li Ziqi and her Yunnan-based counterpart Dianxi Xiaoge both have plenty of fans outside of China as well, she adds. "But the difference is that foreign viewers are amazed by everything they do and see their lives as a type of escapism."

Xiao Xi's Culinary Idyll

From a village in Hunan comes a more technical but equally soothing video series. On the channel Xiao Xi's Culinary Idyll, the host makes dishes ranging from soup dumplings to stewed radish, a process complicated by the fact that he often weaves the bamboo steamer or forges his skillet himself. (He noted in an interview earlier this year that viewers are often much more interested in the food he cooks than the tools he makes.) In this video, Xiao Xi makes Tibetan-style braised chicken in a stone pot, but only after he chips himself a pot out of a rock picked up by the riverside. Xiao Xi has also addressed the current global pandemic by filming himself making Wuhan's hot dry noodles, a dish that has become a symbol of resilience.

Grandpa Kitchen

Out of all the culinary feats performed on the internet, those of Grandpa Kitchen are the worthiest. Narayana Reddy, from the Indian state of Telangana, started the channel in 2017, documenting himself and his assistants cooking massive amounts of food for orphaned children and filming it for awed fans around the world. The food itself ranges from Indian classics to massive red velvet cakes and milkshakes, all made outdoors in a lush green setting and enjoyed by hungry children.

In this video, he cooks an immense amount of falooda, a sweet, creamy dessert made with vermicelli noodles. Reddy himself passed away late last year, but his work continues, with recent videos showing his nephew Srikanth cooking orange chicken and American-style fried rice.

Peaceful Cuisine

All of the videos on this list are far from frenetic, but Peaceful Kitchen from Japan takes it a step further, offering each video with and without music (the latter for those who like the ASMR effect). Plus, host Ryoya Takashima cooks with vegan ingredients (in a 2014 interview, he expressed a desire to be a vegan Jamie Oliver). His videos range from Japanese takoyaki to Turkish simit bread to everything in between, including a how-to on vegan California rolls. The videos, though quiet, are beautiful and thought-provoking, in line with Takashima's mission to show "how adopting a vegan lifestyle, even at a small scale, can make a significant difference."

JunsKitchen

Junichi Yoshizuki is perhaps best known for his video of himself turning a rusty old knife into a sleek kitchen tool once more. On his channel, JunsKitchen, he often ventures out on a bike, with his large fluffy cat, to source ingredients. Once home, he whips up homemade tofu, sushi for his cats, and, as in the above video, a glorious model of a cherry tree made out of tempura and somen noodles.

De Mi Rancho a Tu Cocina

For those who like more than just pretty visuals, Doña Angela delivers the practicality. On her channel, De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina, she walks viewers through each step of making pozole (a pork and corn-based stew), mole, enchiladas, and gorditas over the course of dozens of videos. Her channel's title translates to From My Ranch to Your Kitchen, and Doña Angela's ranch in Michoacán provides many of her ingredients, such as the slightly wilted pumpkin flowers she harvests for the quesadillas she cooks on her wood-fired stove.

Cooking With Marobud

While many videos in this genre feature traditional cooking, the series Cooking With Marobud looks even further back to recreate Viking cuisine. Using ingredients that would have been available to ancient Vikings, Marobud, a Czech reenactment group, cooks flatbreads, meat, and soup with elegant tools and neat efficiency. Though a good number of Marobud's videos are devoted to cooking, the remainder demonstrate other essential skills for Vikings, such as how to start a fire with flint and steel, how to make a Viking backpack, and how to undertake an 800-mile journey to Rome with only Viking-age equipment.

Inside the 'Circus Capital of the World'

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The big top came to Peru, Indiana, in the late 19th century. It never left.

Nostalgic slices of everyday Americana are served up in small towns across the nation, but few rival Peru, Indiana (population: 11,000) in cast and color. None are so steeped in the daring and willful trust of children flying through the air, ready to grasp the wrists of a teammate dangling upside-down from a trapeze bar, or balancing on the shoulders of a friend riding a unicycle across the high wire.

The circus doesn’t need to come to this town. It’s here every day, in the form of ongoing shows, historical remnants, and the blood of its residents.

Every July, Peru hosts an eight-day circus festival, culminating in a parade. (This story was reported in July 2019. As of today, circus training sessions have been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Peru still hopes to host the festival in July 2020.) On parade day, music and cheers drift down Main Street. A human wave ripples the sidewalk as the crowd stands in the heat to honor the passing flag. Two helicopters sweep the route, signaling the start of the action.

Pat Kelly, son of the original hobo clown, waves to the crowd from a Volkswagen Beetle with a smile, despite the elaborate frown painted on his face. He wears a derby cap and patchwork tweed jacket, torn at the seams, just like his world famous father Emmett “Weary Willy” Kelly.

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Horses prance down the street, pulling beautifully restored circus wagons stamped with names like Cole Brothers, Terrell Jacobs, Hagenbeck-Wallace, and Robinson Brothers. These names might not mean much to the mainstream, but in circus subculture, and within Peru’s city limits, they are royalty.

Peru got its first taste of the circus in 1884, when Civil War veteran and established livery owner Benjamin Wallace acquired a few rail cars worth of circus equipment and started his own show. It was called Wallace and Company’s Great World Menagerie, Grand International Mardi Gras, Highway Holiday Hidalgo and Alliance of Novelties. While the name wasn’t exactly catchy, the show proved successful. Wallace solidified his victory when he purchased the rights to the famous Hagenbeck Circus and rebranded as The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. Each spring the tour began in Peru with a parade featuring the circus band and exotic animal menagerie.

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Circus troupes and acts like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show once lived like family at the Winter Quarters where Wallace kept his livery, just outside Peru along the Mississinewa River. Wallace built his village and painted every inch yellow, opening to his circus employees and animals in 1892. There were barns for the elephants and big cat standards, but also for ostriches, giraffes, camels, and even a hippo. There were equipment sheds, wagon shops, a clubhouse, and hospital. The community was quiet in the summer months, but every fall the railcars rolled in and circus migrants strode back through town toward the winter quarters to the tune of “Back Home Again in Indiana” streaming from the calliope.

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Today one of the antique calliopes from those old circus days stops in front of downtown Peru’s permanent circus building, blaring its whistles in announcement of the annual show for all to hear. The town’s youth have been performing shows that rival their professional counterparts here every summer for the past 60 years.

Inside the circus building, senior ringmaster Bruce Embrey strolls through before the afternoon show. Embrey came to Peru early in his career as a judge, a post he held for 28 years before becoming the county prosecutor. He is coming up on his 40th year with the circus. “I came down here in 1981,” he says. “My daughter wanted to be in the circus, so I volunteered and I was a rigger. Right after the show they had a road show in Montpelier, Indiana and the two ringmasters couldn’t make it, so they asked me to do it. I’ve been doing it ever since.” He has since retired from his day job, but isn’t ready to give up his ringmaster whistle.

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In the farthest ring, the hive-minded high wire troupe methodically works on rigging—raising the net and securing ladders and platforms. Kamon and Cassandra Blong are siblings in the act. Kamon led the world’s youngest six-person pyramid across the wire at age 13. Now 16, he explains how, seven years ago, his mother (a wire walker herself) pushed him to try out for the unconventional sport. “The first two years my mom forced me to do high wire,” he says. “I didn’t want to at all.” He has come to enjoy it.

At circus tryouts a few months ago, 10-year-old Cassandra got jitters just climbing the ladder to the high-wire platform. Today her braids bounce as she chatters with confidence despite being the team rookie. When asked if she is nervous she says, “Not really, I am used to it now.”

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Before the show, some of the troupe ritualistically wills fears away with aromatic oils. But not Kamon—he doesn’t like the smell.

The Ringling brothers eventually took over the circus community in Peru, but took a big hit during the Great Depression. In 1941 the doors to the Winter Quarters closed for good, and to save space and minimize maintenance, they burned the old circus wagons, and the town’s history shriveled and smoldered. With the wagons up in smoke and no Winter Quarters to return to, there seemed to be a circus-shaped hole in the heart of Peru. Many circus folks found it hard to leave, so they joined the “normals,” as they called them, laying roots in Peru that are still growing today.

Back in the downtown circus building, Embrey’s wife delivers his ringmaster vest and he retreats to a small dressing room to collect his thoughts before the show. He breathes deeply and acknowledges his nerves. “They keep me sharp,” he says. He enters the arena wearing white gloves and a sparkling red jacket. He holds a single silver whistle, ready to cue the band. The show begins with the National Anthem, sung by Peru local, Shelly Ploss-Ostopa. She is the great-granddaughter of Clyde Beatty, who cleaned circus cages as a teen in the 1920s and went on to become a famous lion tamer. The crowd roars.

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“The circus is 100 percent in my blood,” says Ploss-Ostopa, standing by the ticket counter after her performance. “It is something I just always wanted to do. This is home.” She is excited for her young son to become a fifth-generation performer. Although he is not yet a year old, she says he is already a circus buff.

In the 1950s, Bob Weaver, local art teacher and circus fan, campaigned for Peru’s Winter Quarters circus history to be recognized and celebrated. Out of this effort came the town’s Circus City Festival and accompanying Peru Amateur Circus, which celebrates 60 years in summer 2020. Performers in the early shows were all ages and trained by the retired circus professionals who stayed in Peru. Today performers are required to be county residents aged 7-21. Many come from circus families.

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In the 1980s Embrey helped broker a deal to bring the International Circus Hall of Fame from Sarasota, Florida to the Winter Quarters in Peru, solidifying Peru as the Circus Capital of the World. The Winter Quarters were once again thriving, offering the public a glimpse of circus wagons and artifacts from all over the world, as well as professional Big Top shows each summer during Circus City Days. Currently, the professional shows are no longer running, and despite being added to the National Historic Register, the Winter Quarters and Circus Hall of Fame are desperate for repairs and attention.

The sold-out arena is dark, and with one shrill blast, Embrey’s whistle sends the band into an ominous opening number. The spotlight lands on Kamon Blong, who sits steady in a chair on the half-inch high wire, 25 feet in the air. He is calm but intensely focused as he moves to stand atop the chair, every muscle clenched to avoid that net.

In the next trick, Cassandra, light on her feet, rides the wire standing on the shoulders of a unicyclist. The band’s music merges with the scene, cresting as the single wheel reaches the end of the rope and Cassandra is pulled to the platform. The crowd cheers then quickly quiets again when Embrey announces the six-person pyramid led by Kamon. The only sound that cuts through the arena during this dangerous feat is the sharp command, “Step!” called at precise intervals by Corey Brockover, last in line. They reach the end safely and celebrate.

After the three-hour, talent-packed show, the full cast of nearly 200 parades the arena for the ninth straight day. Like those that once paraded back to the Winter Quarters every fall, these young performers call this place home and the people around them family. “We are teaching circus skills, but what we really are teaching are life skills,” says Embrey. World-famous markswoman Annie Oakley, the star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show once said, “Aim at a high mark and you'll hit it. No, not the first time, nor the second time. Maybe not the third. But keep on aiming and keep on shooting for only practice will make you perfect.” Today the young performers keep aiming for that high mark. Here they learn to meet fear on top of the wire or on any given day, and walk it calm and cool to the other side, one step at a time.

A Show & Tell With Upstate New York’s 'Radio Guy'

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His collection of scary-looking headgear from the past is sure to get into your head.

A short train ride north of New York City is a 9,000-square-foot warehouse crammed with centuries worth of objects, all of which share one essential feature: Steve Erenberg needs to explain to you what they were used for.

Radio Guy Antiques, Erenberg’s shop, has items ranging from functional necessities to cosmetic novelties—some of which are weird, evocative, and maybe even a little frightening. The objects are “very difficult to track down,” Erenberg says. “You can’t hunt for them. They find you.” As if they weren’t spooky enough.

Recently, for the premier episode of Show & Tell, Atlas Obscura’s new series exploring unusual collections, co-founder Dylan Thuras sat down with Erenberg to remotely explore, understand, and revel in unusual, intriguing objects in the Radio Guy’s collection. Here’s some of what we saw.

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Conformateur

Contrary to what some modern baseball caps may say, one size doesn’t always fit all. This was especially true in the late 19th century, when if you were to invest in a hat, you wanted it to fit properly. (Some folks were concerned that if a hat fit too tightly, it would cut off blood flow to the scalp, causing hair loss.)

Resembling the diadem of some unusual gardener, the spring-loaded, trowel-spiked conformateur sits low on the wearer’s head. The spades projecting from the metal circle then convey the measurements and shape of a person’s head, for the hatter to then create a personalized topper.

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Kaleidoscopic glasses

Steampunk fans, eat your heart out. Erenberg’s kaleidoscopic glasses are the real thing. Found in Prague and dating to about the late 18th century, the contraption features cut, inch-thick crystal lenses mounted to rotate. When strapped to the user’s skull, the glasses slice and dice the light-filled world into a warped reality of fissured colors.

Though today’s iterations are made of cheap plastic, this antique is heavy, custom-crafted, and evidently built to last.

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Fire rescue helmets

Erenberg’s collection boasts an array of smoke and gas helmets and masks, and the two he showed off to us look like they may have inspired Star Wars characters.

The turn-of-the-19th-century rescue helmets—one French and one German—resemble two noteworthy sci-fi metalheads: C-3PO and Darth Vader. Their actual purpose was far more sober: to allow firefighters to enter smoky rooms while being supplied with fresh air. Being metal, the masks were not likely to have been used for wading into infernos, which would have heated them to incinerating temperatures.

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Early dental phantom

Even through the 19th century, dentistry was not its own domain, but rather a side-hustle for physicians and barbers. But medicine improved, and by the time of industrialization, diseases of the teeth were on the downswing—in part thanks to dentistry’s development as a distinct profession.

Dating to 1910, Erenberg’s dental teaching phantom was exactly what any dental trainee needed before working on the real thing. The bulk of it is a wooden mannequin head, and the focal point is the set of the real teeth held in place by wax gums and affixed to metal jaws. (Think Robocop.) This dental phantom is particularly early, and signifies a major shift in American medicine.

The Surreal Sight of Disinfecting Historic Sites

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Unsung workers around the world on the front lines of the pandemic fight.

The Giza pyramid complex. The Leaning Tower of Pisa. The Western Wall. These historic sites and others all over the world are usually teeming with tourists, vendors, and guides. But as they close and empty due to COVID-19, the tourists have been replaced by other figures. Municipal workers from sanitation and utility departments, as well as volunteers, can be seen sanitizing these public places. Usually clad in masks, gloves, and protective suits, their job is often to pressure wash these famous spots or spray them with disinfectant.

Sanitation workers are vulnerable even in the best of times, and now they’re even more vital to maintaining a livable public environment. Alongside healthcare workers, they're certainly “essential personnel,” at the very front lines of facing the pandemic.

Atlas Obscura has collected some images of those giving a helpful hand at historic sites that, thanks to their efforts, will one day welcome tourists again.

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Around the World in 6 Quarantine Pantries

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How chefs in Bolivia, Malaysia, Italy, Rwanda, Canada, and Thailand are preparing for lockdown.

With many cafes, restaurants, and bistros shuttered to halt the spread of COVID-19, a new era of at-home self-reliance is upon us. Worldwide, people are making last-minute forays into markets and grocery stores before retreating home, prepping their kitchens for a prolonged period of sheltering in place. It’s an unprecedented moment in which pantries from Milwaukee to Mogadishu, Sarajevo to Saigon, have become the focal point of our at-home lives.

For a global perspective on this rare moment, I spoke to chefs from six countries about how different cultures are quarantining and sheltering in place. What stands out is the importance of agricultural know-how, the ability to be your own safety net, and the importance of familial and social networks. Recalling lessons from our parents and crafting nostalgic comfort foods is a common panacea. And while many are keen to experiment, the economic crunch also demands frugality and resourcefulness.

These are the kitchens of the coronavirus age.

Chef Anis Nabilah

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The Kuala Lumpur that Chef Anis Nabilah left in late February was not the same city she returned to in early March. Malaysian officials announced a partial lockdown while she was in Mecca with her family for their Umrah pilgrimage. “Half the people didn’t take it seriously,” she says, “and the other half went on a panic-spree and emptied all the grocery stores.” By the time she returned, she couldn’t even find flour. Luckily, her parents live nearby, “and their kitchen is like a mini-mart.”

While classically trained and versed in international cuisines, Nabilah is spending her time at home re-familiarizing herself with Malaysian ingredients and cooking for the Malaysian palate. “Even when I make pasta, it can’t be that Italian,” she says. “I have to add some Asian flavors to make it work for my family, lots of chili.”

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Her parents have a range of rices and rice noodles that function as the bed of many Malaysian dishes. Powerful flavor-makers such as dried fish, dried shrimp, and garam masala mark the unmistakably spicy funk of many Malaysian dishes. A backyard garden with chilies, lemongrass, turmeric, and galangal allow for a range of curry bases as well.

With this trove of ingredients, Nabilah has been crafting Indian mulligatawny and Thai thom yum goong, reflective of Malaysian cuisine’s blend of regional flavors. “We’re big on soup,” says Nabilah, “it’s comforting for them.” She recently made a traditional Malaysian short rib soup called sup tulang, fragrant with star anise, cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom, topped with lime, coriander, and spring onion, though she worries it’s still not as good as her mother’s.

While the globetrotting chef is happy to revisit the flavors of her youth, she’s careful to balance lavish meals with more spartan ones. After our conversation, she says she plans to mix a can of tuna with chilies, raw onions, and coriander over a bed of rice, topped with lime and spring onions. “A spicy little rice bowl,” she calls it. “This is no time to indulge. I just make sure I have three meals and that’s that.”

Chef Joseph Shawana

Toronto, Canada

Chef Joseph Shawana’s downtown Toronto restaurant, Kū-kŭm Kitchen, has been closed since mid-March. Still, he’s far from bored: He chairs a nonprofit called Indigenous Culinary of Associated Nations and serves as the Indigenous Culinary Advisor for Toronto’s Centennial College. The only problem is that he’s locked out of his pantry, in a way. “You can’t forage much from the sidewalk in Toronto,” he says.

A member of the indigenous Canadian Odawa group, Shawana was born and raised on Manitoulin Island, part of the Wiikwemkoong Unceded Indian Reserve, a six-hour drive north of Toronto. It was there that he learned how to live off the land, watching his mother and grandmother forage, cook, and eat with the changing of seasons. “Watching them stretch one ingredient to create so much stuff was eye-opening,” Shawana tells me, “and that’s the mentality of indigenous people, to utilize what you have.”

After a handful of COVID-19 cases were confirmed in mid-March, however, his reserve was put on lockdown. Luckily, Shawana made sure to bolster his pantry beforehand. His quarantine pantry is filled with dried blueberries and wild strawberries; dehydrated dandelion, osha, and cattail roots used in stews and soups; wild mushrooms like chanterelle, morel, and candy cap; and acorns to be ground into flour. His freezer is full of hunted game meats ranging from moose, elk, and venison to pickerel, bass, and whitefish.

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With his restaurant closed, Shawana is making home-cooked dinners with his wife and son—a rare treat for a working chef. He’s been oven roasting rainbow trout stuffed with wild leeks, mashing roasted sunchokes, and even experimenting with an indigenous-style crème brûlée he calls reverse colonization in a bowl: duck eggs, corn milk, Mexican vanilla, and candy cap mushrooms. “That’s what I try to do every day—utilize pre-contact ingredients and reintroduce them in a contemporary style of cooking."

Still, he’s careful to pace himself. “I’m trying not to use too much because we’re still not sure when we’ll be able to go back North,” he says. Toward that end, Shawana makes sure to have a healthy stock of “evergreen” in his pantry. The multi-purpose ingredient is made by simmering juniper, spruce, cedar, or pine needles in water. It can be taken as a tea by adding honey or maple syrup, or treated like a stock to impart an earthy flavor onto braised meats.

A go-to public figure for all things foraging, Chef Shawana says he’s noticed a resurgent interest among younger indigenous Canadians in foraging skills. “This virus is taking a lot of people back to their roots,” he says. “They want to learn how to hunt now, how to fish.” It’s a cause he’s championed for years. “We can’t always depend on the street lights being on, you could say.”

Chef Dieuveil Malonga

Kigali, Rwanda

“There is no going back to our old ways after this,” writes Chef Dieuveil Malonga from his home in Kigali, where he is hosting several employees from his restaurant, MEZA Malonga. Of the sundry lessons to be gleaned from this pandemic, he hopes one in particular will resonate. “When it comes to education and career choice, I hope people will finally stop overlooking the importance of agriculture.”

While he hails from the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malonga’s move to Rwanda places him in a country whose main economic activity is agriculture. In a small plot behind his restaurant, Chef Malonga himself grows corn, peas, sugar cane, and wheat, while bean producers in the nearby Great Lakes region keep a variety of legumes accessible. With his guests in mind, he caught and preserved 45 kilos of catfish and mamba from nearby Lake Rweru before the virus reached Kigali.

Still, there are ingredients he’s going without. With borders closed, he’s unable to source rice from neighboring countries. “As an alternative, we currently rely a lot on corn as well as cassava leaves and flour for dishes like fufu,” he writes, referring to a traditional African method of boiling and pounding starches into a dough-like consistency.

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With regional staples including yam, sweet potatoes, and sliced plantains, Malonga’s pandemic pantry underscores locavorism, another charge he hopes the post-pandemic food world takes more seriously. “There are many products we chefs love to cook with, but don’t necessarily need, that contribute to deforestation,” he writes. “I challenge our industry and governments to simplify the food chain and introduce communities to ingredients that are equally good for their health and the planet’s.”

He points to an ongoing regional crisis overshadowed by the pandemic. “The nearby Congo Basin Rainforest of my homeland has been in flames for months. It is the second green lung of the planet after the Amazon, which also has been burning,” he writes. “How interesting then that COVID-19 attacks our respiratory system?”

Chef Anissa Helou

Sicily, Italy

It’s a long story, but suffice to say that the daughter of a Syrian father and a Lebanese mother, whose cookbooks are cited as introducing Western audiences to Middle Eastern cuisine in the 1990s, wound up in Trapani, Sicily, because it reminds her of home. “The produce, the warm hospitality, the seasonal approach to food,” she tells me, “not to mention the Mediterranean.” (Though she admits that a stroll along the latter earned her a scolding from local police.) She’s making her walks shorter, but her time in the kitchen longer—not inventing new dishes, but perfecting old ones.

An evangelist of Levantine cuisine, Helou keeps her pantry festooned with staples such as burghul, tahini, orange blossom water, apricot leather, 7-spice mixture, salep, and pepper paste. It helps that an Italian devotion to freshness precluded food deficits seen elsewhere. “The mentality here is different,” she says. “It’s not in their nature to ‘stock up,’ so there have been no shortages.”

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“If I want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, I spend it on food I was brought up with,” she says. That means dishes such as tabbouleh, fattoush, and kibbeh. “Anything that takes time but also demands precise skills: chopping the parsley just right, laying the kibbeh very evenly, rolling out the dough just so.” Kaba karaz, in which lamb meatballs are gently simmered in a bath of sour cherries and pomegranate molasses, is quintessential Aleppian cuisine, a taste of childhood summers spent in Syria, in the midst of this strange spring.

Helou is only breaking from her nostalgia mold for homemade saffron ice cream thickened with ground orchid tubers, a treat otherwise known as “mastic ice cream” or booza. It helps satisfy a lifelong, and perhaps inevitable, sweet tooth: Her Arabic last name, Helou, translates to “sweet” or “sweetness.”

Chef Marsia Taha

La Paz, Bolivia

Marsia Taha is the head chef at Gustu, a one-of-a-kind restaurant high up in the Bolivian capital. A wedding of Bolivian ingredients and fine dining, Gustu’s fare is typified by plates such as llama with Andean tubers and ostrich tartar with maca, two new menu items Taha rolled out days before the restaurant was forced to close. “After the first confirmed case, they shut the country down bit-by-bit,” she tells me. “A week later the country was in complete self-quarantine.”

Taha largely abstained from the panic purchasing that gripped much of her city—she’s content to stretch traditional Bolivian staples to meet her family’s needs. She makes sure to have chuño and tunta, two types of potatoes preserved using an ancient Andean method of freeze-drying; quinoa, the forgotten-then-beloved grain first harvested around Lake Titicaca; Padilla chilies from the Low Andes; maca root for roasting and stews; and coca leaves for infusions (despite Gustu’s boundless meat options, Taha eats mostly vegetarian). She also keeps Bolivian wine on hand, sourced from producers who are able to maintain vineyards 10,000 feet above sea level.

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While city markets are open until noon daily, Taha explains that the last digit of Bolivians’ ID card grants individuals one day a week to go food shopping. “It’s very strict,” she says, “the police check IDs and everything.” Luckily, producers and farmers are still at work, stabilizing the country's supply chains.

Holed up with her immediate family, Taha finds herself cooking traditional Bolivian comfort food such as Sopa de Maní, a simple peanut-based macaroni soup with onions, carrots, and beef that nods to Bolivia’s role as the birthplace of the peanut.

A self-made chef who came to head one of the best restaurants in Latin America, Taha is using this time to draw up plans for a new menu at Gustu and conduct research for Sabores Silvestres, an interdisciplinary project preserving ancestral Bolivian gastronomy. “The internet is a perfect tool to keep learning, to keep the mind in shape,” she writes. “We have to spend time reinventing ourselves, learning from this crisis.”

Chef Ian Kittichai

Bangkok, Thailand

The once-frequent guest on Iron Chef: Thailand and current international restaurateur Chef Ian Kittichai is overseeing the reorganization of his several businesses in the wake of the pandemic. Still, he’s making time to wake up at 3 a.m. for the sake of his sourdough starter. “The proofing was done,” he writes in an email, “and it had to be baked.”

At home in Bangkok with his wife, son, and two dogs Mei Hua and Charlie, Chef Kittichai is a model of self-sufficiency. He’s blending his own oat milk and cashew milk (“cashews are very plentiful in Thailand,” he writes), which he uses to make overnight oats that he’ll top with Asian pears and banana. With many markets closed and a strict curfew in place, he’s turning his perishable vegetables and stocks into chilis, soups, and stews to portion and freeze for later use. He also grows betel leaves on his balcony garden, the base of the classic Thai finger food miang kahm.

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Still, the chef is leaving room for comfort foods. He’s whipping up fast classics such as krapow moo, a wok-fried dish with holy basil, chilis, and pork, and slower ones such as jok, a breakfast rice porridge of Chinese influence that brings to mind the mornings of his youth, spent with his late parents and seven sisters in Bangkok’s working-class Klong Toey neighborhood. He’s been making a Thai variation with riceberry, a varietal from Northern Thailand, to which he adds pork and seaweed meatballs.

As Chef Kittichai pivots his businesses to a delivery-based model, with all proceeds going directly to his staff, he’s committed to flexibility in the coming weeks and months. “The world today is a very different place than it was yesterday,” he writes. “I don’t know what tomorrow will look like, but we have to keep going.” He cites a Thai phrase, Suh-suh, used in instances of hardship or difficulty. “It means ‘keep fighting, don’t give up.’ That’s what we are doing.”

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