When the real world feels unbearable, why not chart a course through lands that are literally unreal?

Last week, we recommended some gloriously intricate maps to roam around in, from a 1913 schematic of the New York Zoological Park to the branching arteries of France’s early-20th-century train lines. This week, why not venture even farther afield, to lands that don’t really exist at all? Atlas Obscura recently asked map collectors and curators to suggest some diverting maps that chart imaginary terrain.

In and Around the Land of Oz

Tread lightly toward Vegetable Kingdom—who knows what you might find in the Deadly Desert or the Country of the Gargoyles? Garrett Dash Nelson, curator of maps and director of geographic scholarship at the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, points to several maps that appeared in the library’s 2015 exhibition, “Literary Landscapes.” One standout is this map of Oz, which looks like a patchwork quilt and appeared on the endpapers of Frank L. Baum’s book Tik-Tok of Oz in 1914. You could spend hours roaming other maps in the show, too, including Bernard Sleigh’s lavishly detailed 1917 mashup of figures and sites from mythology, Arthurian legends, folklore, and nursery rhymes.

An Island of Boozy Pleasure

If the shape of this island looks familiar, that makes sense—it’s a human skull, doing double duty as the so-called “State of Inebriation.” This satirical map, made by H. J. Lawrence in 1931, “lampoons Prohibition in its final days,” writes PJ Mode, a collector whose trove of maps is accessible through Cornell University. “Soused sardines” pass through the Whiskey Strait and swerve right toward Cocktail Inlet and Port Wine, which sit south of the lighthouse at Intoxication Point. A weather report in the lower-left corner forecasts a “gradual rise in temperature while drinking.” For a less-intoxicated swim through the human head, Ian Fowler, maps curator at the New York Public Library, recommends this 1516 frontispiece to Thomas More’s Utopia.

The Made-Up Map of Treasure Island

This landmass doesn’t sit in any real body of water—it’s a realm dreamed up by an author and his stepson. The map accompanied the first edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, published in 1883. “British and American authors of fantasy novels (think Jonathan Swift, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, George R. R. Martin) are very fond of publishing maps of the worlds they create,” says James Akerman, curator of maps at the Newberry library in Chicago. “It helps the readers conceptualize the spaces they've created and enhances their legitimacy as real places.” The published map, Akerman says, drew on a draft that Stevenson prepared.

A Wonderful, Woe-Filled Map of Matrimony

This map—another from Mode’s collection, likely made by John D. P. Douw in 1827—highlights several potential destinations in a journey from courtship to marriage. Some seem lovely; who wouldn’t fancy an afternoon in the Vale of Gladness? Others are much less appealing: The Land of Spinsters, for instance, sounds like a cruel and sexist place to be, and the potential for disaster is high in the Str. of Flirtation, where the map warns of “dangerous navigation.” As you sail around, try not to crash ashore on the Isles of Jealousy, and perhaps paddle over to more marriage maps here.

Today phones have grown critical for making personal connections. The first phone companies probably wouldn't have been thrilled.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep across the world, putting billions in isolation, many people are scrambling to stay tethered to friends, family, and coworkers. More than 80 percent of people surveyed in the United States and United Kingdom report spending more time squinting at their phones and other screens, according to data published by the World Economic Forum. Those little screens have come to feel like a lifeline, offering a sense of community and a sliver of normalcy.

That’s not exactly new. Decades ago, Bell and AT&T ran ads exhorting people to “reach out and touch someone.” The ads promised that phone calls could collapse the physical and emotional distance between people. In one commercial from the late 1980s, a kid phoning his parents from college was able to picture his family’s routine—sister primping for a date, brother rushing in from soccer practice, dad rifling through the refrigerator just a few hours after dinner.

But, of course, it wasn’t always this way. The last time a pandemic of comparable scale stampeded around the world, in 1918, only around a third of American households had phones, The New York Times recently reported—and, obviously, those devices were much lower-fi. For decades, people with phones had been largely discouraged from using them for gabbing, ostensibly because some towns only had a few lines to serve everyone. Then, when the flu began to devastate communities, some phone companies begged people to keep their calls to a minimum, Fast Company reported. In October 1918, for instance, the Michigan State Telephone Company took out an ad in a Battle Creek newspaper, asking locals to "please restrict your use of the telephone to calls which are absolutely essential," thus freeing up operators to attend to "the essential business of the community." Similar messages went out in New Jersey and North Carolina, where an ad asked the public to "refrain from using the telephone expect when necessary so that prompt service can be given to the sick."

“The sociability function seems so obviously important today, and yet was ignored or resisted by the industry for almost the first half of its history,” writes Claude S. Fischer, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, in a 1988 article in the journal Technology and Culture.

Atlas Obscura exchanged emails with Fischer, also author of America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, about how phones have helped people connect—sometimes, to the frustration of the phone companies.

When the telephone first emerged as a consumer product, how was it marketed, and who was encouraged to buy it?

It was originally marketed to businesses as a business device—a much-improved telegraph. When the Bell company started marketing to households, it focused for 30-plus years on practical household management: Get the phone for your wife so that she can call the doctor, the grocer, the police, and you can call her when you're coming home with company. That sort of thing.

How did that work out?

Household users did use it for these purposes, but almost from the start customers—notably women—used it for social purposes: To check in with others, to arrange social dates, and, frankly, to gossip. This was even clearer in rural areas, where the phones were a major social lifeline. The telephone industry for decades saw this as a misuse of the telephone, and even tried to suppress it.

What changed?

The shift was not the personal staying-connected use of the telephone, but the industry coming around to see these social uses as not a bug, but a feature. In the 1920s, the Bell companies switched from trying to repress chit-chat on the phones to marketing the phones as a great way to stay in touch with family and friends.

Now that we have so many other ways of staying in touch, what role does the phone play in times of crisis?

I see voice-to-voice communication today as part of a package of diverse and more flexible one-to-one communications, including email, texting, and the like. So people may, for example, text a few times a day, and arrange for a phone call on top. There is some evidence to suggest that the voice-to-voice remains the most intimate part of the communications package.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

An archeological site contains many of the foods Texans still eat today.

50 miles north of Austin lie the remains of a gravel floor and wall. While it may seem unassuming, it’s what’s left of the oldest-known house in North America. Just outside the home is a cooking site strewn with the ancient traces of meals cooked with fire. This is where the history of what can be called Texas Mexican food begins, and where it gets its character as comida casera, or home-cooked food.

The house is one of the extraordinary findings at the Gault Archaeological Site. Between 1999 and 2002, researchers recovered an astonishing 1.4 million artifacts in the area, among them the house floor, which researchers speculate could date back as far as 15,000 years. The burnt rocks outside are even older, at 20,000 years.

The people who lived there were “broad-spectrum hunters and gatherers,” according to Dr. D. Clark Wernecke, Executive Director of the Gault School of Archeological Research. They cooked pronghorn antelopes, turkeys, deer, rabbits, ducks, and quail, and his team has identified turtle bones, mollusks, and burnt frog bones “And if they are eating turtles and mollusks, I have no doubt they are eating fish and crawfish,” Wernecke adds.

They also ate other familiar Texan specialties, such as pecans and black walnuts, along with acorns, grapes, berries, and tubers. Although plant foods do not survive over millennia like bones, stones, and shells, archaeologists are able to analyze tools with a procedure called starch grain analysis. Starch grains are pretty indestructible, says Dr. Wernecke, and they adhere to the edges of tools. Some of the starch grains show signs that they were boiled.

Over the last 9,000 years, the repertoire of these early home cooks expanded from fire roasting and boiling to include baking in earth ovens, steaming, drying, smoking, stewing, and roasting. They utilized mortars to grind mesquite pods and nuts, and prepared dishes with squash, corn, and beans, all foods from that ancient period. In many ways, families who lived at the Gault site ate much like Texans eat today.

"Everybody we are talking about is a modern human being, exactly like us,” says Wernecke. They were a highly sophisticated and knowledgeable culture, but that’s not the history that is generally told about the first peoples of Texas. "It’s God-awful if you look at most fourth grade textbooks,” he says, noting that illustrations sometimes represent early Texans as "hunched over and hairy and somewhat apelike.” The Gault site is changing that false, demeaning narrative in two important ways.

First, it corrects the scientific record. Wernecke says that the story that many Texans are taught, that people arrived in the area 13,500 years ago, is false. Gault shows that people were here perhaps even 25,000 years ago, and that they did not constantly migrate, but settled into developed societies.

Second, and more importantly, the Gault site is "changing the notion that these are half-naked people running around after big animals,” he says. Their tools and cooking techniques were not ‘primitive,’ as they have often been described. Quite the contrary, those tools are important inventions, and according to Wernecke, "we still use every single one of them.”

These techniques were common throughout the entire central and south Texas region, where robust trade was supported by an extensive system of travel routes. Dr. Alston Thoms is an anthropologist at Texas A&M who has excavated and surveyed archaeological sites all over Texas. He says that the Gault site, together with others throughout the state, presents a clear picture that local indigenous people were well-travelled, even to what is now Mexico City.

This is why the indigenous food of Texas resembles the food of Mexico, with its squash, corn, beans, prickly pear cactus, chiles, and chocolate. Across Central and South Texas and northeastern Mexico, the Karankawa, Tonkawa, Coahuiltecan and others developed the distinct style that is today’s Texas Mexican food. By the 17th century, they had incorporated the pigs, cows, goats and sheep, as well as the spices like black pepper, cumin, and garlic brought by the Europeans.

But more recently, the names and identities of Native American peoples were erased. In 1837, the Standing Committee on Indian Affairs of the Republic of Texas issued its report to then-President Sam Houston and declared: “The People called Lipan, Karankawa and Tonkawa your Committee considers as part of the Mexican nation and [are] no longer to be considered as a different People.” Texas’s native peoples suddenly became Mexicans.

Thoms says that this type of erasure eventually led to expulsion. In the 1800s, groups that still held to indigenous identities, including the Tonkawa and Caddo, were forcibly removed from Texas into Oklahoma.

Yet indigenous peoples continued living in Texas under harsh circumstances, finding continuity and identity in their cooking. To this day, says Thoms, indigenous Mexican Americans in Texas today are “sustained on the same foods as their ancestors.” And beyond that, he notes that tomatoes, pecans, chiles, squash, and beans “are all Native American foods that sustain the whole world today, and they were domesticated right here.”

Attempts at erasure notwithstanding, Texas Mexican families continued cooking and enjoying the delicious culinary heritage of their ancestors. Comida casera still relies on ancient techniques, such as roasting for the famous barbacoa (beef cheeks) and drying for machacado (dried beef strips). The cuisine is also a feature of local Mexican restaurants. In Houston, celebrity chef Sylvia Casares, a native of Brownsville in South Texas, leads the vanguard, giving resonant cultural expression to a cuisine that has gone largely unnoticed, lost in the shadow of Tex-Mex.

Food writers of the 1970s began defining the Mexican food of Texas as an Anglo-Texan creation. They started calling it Tex-Mex, describing it as south-of-the-border food transformed by American tastes, with the indigenous roots of the food completely overlooked.

“I get angst when it comes to Tex-Mex,” says Casares. Knowing that her food can be described that way, she says it’s completely different from what most people have experienced. Her restaurants don't use spice powders or canned goods, and "our dishes don’t have all that yellow cheese,” she says. Instead, she cooks the regional cuisine she ate in South Texas every day until she went off to college.

At her two Sylvia's Enchilada Kitchen restaurants, the menus proudly list "North of the Border” plates such as calabacita (squash) enchiladas and crab in a creamy seafood sauce. She serves quail that’s grilled on mesquite, just as it would have been done by families at the Gault site thousands of years ago. It's served with corn, also grilled, and charro beans, made with the pintos which are an iconic element of Texas Mexican cuisine.

Casares, who has been invited to showcase her food at the James Beard House in New York City, says that people don’t necessarily understand that this food has evolved over millennia. "They just know it’s wonderful,” she says. “I cook the foods that our grandmothers, our mothers, our aunts cooked at home.” That’s the way it probably was in that home of 15,000 years ago at the Gault site as well, with people enjoying the pleasures of home-cooked food.

"I really think it’s gonna help the drive-ins. Will it last? Only time will tell."

Last month, John Watzke was going about a normal day at his drive-in theater in Ocala, Florida, when a customer called him to share concerns about COVID-19. Watzke, who has run the outdoor business since 2011, knew he had to think fast. “I got a window from my storage building, cut a hole in the concession’s sidedoor, and put the window in,” he says. “By the time everybody got here, they could safely pick up orders.” In less than a week, he gave the 72-year-old venue a total makeover: he acquired new food packaging, cordoned off parking spots to create buffer zones, and implemented strict sanitation guidelines for employees. The two-screen venue, which was relatively quiet this past winter, is now keeping busy even on weeknights, welcoming as many as 200 cars at once.

Though Florida is currently under a stay-at-home order, the Ocala Drive-In Theater is one of several drive-ins enjoying an unexpected renaissance, and says it received permission to remain open from the governor and local police. As the coronavirus pandemic has altered millions of lives across the U.S., these old-timey facilities offer a temporary escape from reality. Because visitors enjoy films from their cars, they can still practice social distancing.

Watzke, a 63-year-old former projectionist, has heard of at least 11 drive-in theaters in America that are currently operating under strict public health guidelines. While that’s a small fraction of the 305 businesses known to the United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association, the response he’s witnessed has been strong enough to offer a glimmer of hope. “This could actually be an upslope of the industry that we haven't had in many a year,” Watzke says. Atlas Obscura asked him how he’s nurturing his business and his community during a pandemic.

How sizable is the uptick in Ocala’s attendance?

Business is almost double what it normally is this time of year. Now it’s more like the summer months. We are getting a lot of people from all over the state, some driving two hours or more. The last couple nights have been a little bit slow because I'm having trouble getting some new movies: Those I had scheduled from Disney, Universal, and Warner Brothers have been canceled. So I’m reaching out to some independent film companies. Regardless, I believe people will come as this gives them a chance to get out of the house. To watch a movie on a gorgeous screen in the state of Florida is totally different than watching a movie at home.

Implementing new social distancing measures is expensive, but you haven’t raised ticket prices. What makes all the extra effort and expenses worth it for you?

Number one: my employees keep their jobs. Two: I've been through several disasters in my life. I'm a Katrina victim—I was on the Mississippi coast. What I learned is that the things that bring just a few minutes of normal life to you are the things you remember.

I'm a great believer that mental stability is as important as physical stability. If people don't have a certain amount of normalcy in their life, it's going to affect them. Especially the smaller children—they've been taken out of school and locked indoors. They can't go see their friends, their grandparents. To them, they're being punished, and they didn't do anything. So if parents can take them to the movies and have a few hours of normal life, it kind of relieves the tension.

How are visitors responding?

Customers are thrilled to death that we are open and they have something to do. On Facebook, people are telling me how safe and comfortable they felt. There might be a dozen negative commenters, but I think it’s because they haven't come out here. For them, this is not an essential business. It is to me. You have to have mental stability, too. My family has worked in theaters since 1913. My grandfather was a projectionist. My dad was a projectionist. My brother and I were projectionists, and our sons were projectionists. Basically, the old cliche, “The show must go on,” is a way of life for us.

How else is the drive-in trying to give back to the community?

A nondenominational church has service here two nights a week so people have the opportunity to worship from the safety of their vehicles. My offer is actually out there for any church that wants to use my sound equipment and transmitters. I’m not saying it has to be affiliated with a certain religion: Everybody’s got their own faith. If they want to use my property, they’re welcome to it.

I've also offered my services at no cost to the county school board. In the event that seniors cannot have a traditional graduation, they could do a drive-in one. All the speeches and procedures would be projected on the big screen, and the students could walk up while maintaining a distance and get their diploma. It would only be immediately family, but we could live-stream everything so extended family could see it. The school board is considering it.

I put the offer out a few weeks ago after my youngest daughter, who is graduating in May from nursing school, called me saying they had cancelled the ceremonies. That’s likely the first time in her life that there was nothing I could say or do to make things better. I was thinking that I can't help her—she's 700 miles away—but I can sure make it better for the seniors here.

Do you think this surge in attendance at drive-ins around the country will help the industry in the long run?

Right now, I feel that customers are going to keep coming because they appreciate the extra effort I'm putting forth. And I think people will realize that, no matter the situation, they're safer at a drive-in than they are in a building with a crowd. I really think it's gonna help the drive-ins. Will it last? Only time will tell. I do think people will be looking for outdoor activities for quite some time.

Of course we still have a lot of obstacles that we fight regularly: weather, daylight savings time, DVDs. But I would love to see drive-ins make a comeback. I would like to see the next generation keep this going. This is a part of American history that shouldn't die.

“This is a shared understanding of bling, of what it means to be rich."

In all of the finds from all the ancient treasure hoards and tombs from Mediterranean civilizations that have turned up over the years, there’s a peculiar outlier. Among many, many funerary amphorae, pieces of gilt armor, and enticing piles of coins, there are also decadently carved eggs from the world’s largest extant bird: the ostrich.

The human relationship with these eggs dates back 60,000 years in South Africa, where ostrich eggshell fragments have been found in places occupied by humans. They had a use as food—after all, one ostrich egg is the equivalent of two dozen from chickens—but also provided a durable, attractive canvas for human art. In the Bronze Age, large, intact eggshells were decorated with carved motifs of animals and warriors, painted accents, and metal inlays, and placed in tombs or used as ornamented goblets by the ruling class. For decades archaeologists have wondered just how these gigantic avian baubles came to be. Were the ostriches farmed? How did ancient Greeks and Spaniards get their hands on delicate, perishable goods from the Middle East and Northern Africa? And once acquired, how were the eggs crafted and decorated?

No ostrich egg workshops have been identified in the archaeological record, and their bones aren’t found at ancient sites, further obscuring how eggs were sourced and then made into dazzling works of art.

But the hunt for more information hasn’t all been a wild goose chase, as a recent study published in the journal Antiquity suggests. A British and German team set out to analyze five whole ancient ostrich eggs and innumerable ancient eggshell fragments in the collection of the British Museum. (So large are the eggs that the scanning electron microscope they used had to be customized, and even then there were problems.)

The recent study also made use of modern ostrich eggs, for comparison—and for protein.

“It makes a lot of quiches, cakes, and omelets to keep you going in the basement of the British Museum while you’re looking at a scanning electron microscope,” says Tamar Hodos, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol and lead author of the new paper. “We ate well for three days down there.”

The results suggest a far-reaching geography to the ancient ostrich egg trade, as well as a complex chain of production. “We’ve just tended to focus on ostrich eggs turning up in elite graves, among the consuming cultural group,” says Hodos, “But not so much from the perspective of the producing groups.”

Today, an ostrich egg costs about as much as a boozy brunch for one. But in antiquity, the carved eggs were luxury goods, status symbols for the Mediterranean elite. Rulers and aristocrats worth their salt, from Assyria to Etruria, all had at least a few of them. To hash out how they made it around the Mediterranean, the scientists had to get molecular.

Ostrich eggs are rather like trees. Both are organic and grow, soaking in information about their environments as they do so. Using a triumvirate of oxygen, carbon, and strontium isotope analyses, Hodos’s team picked apart the climates in which the eggs were nurtured, and found that the eggs really got around.

“High-resolution microscopy has hardly been used for this region/periods,” says Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany who specializes in organic residue analysis. “It has been used a lot for Stone Age stone tools, but hardly for later periods, and Tamar shows the unique potential this method can have.”

At that level of analysis, it’s possible to tell the difference between wild-caught and farm-raised ostrich eggs. Farmed ostriches lay eggs that tend to be smooth, while wild eggs, on the other hand, have microscopic ridges, which Hodos believes are indicators of environmental stress.

Hodos’s study suggests that the ancient decorated eggs were sourced from the wild, which meant that they would have commanded a higher price than if they had been farmed. All of this suggests a vast supply and production line—chaine operatoire, to use a term of art—that fed the luxury market.

“You've got some schmuck who's being sent to go track the ostriches to begin with, and has to then try to steal eggs from a vicious beast that will kill you with a single kick or a peck of it's really sharp, nasty beak, and then bring them back, blow them [to remove their contents with the shell mostly intact], and then you have to let them dry out for an extended period of time before your artist can start crafting them,” Hodos says.

After that, she adds, there’s the challenge of perhaps fitting the eggs with metal accoutrements, sending them to port, transporting them across the sea, selling them to another merchant, and having that final seller convince a noble, probably speaking another language, to part with their own wealth in exchange.

“This is a shared understanding of bling, of what it means to be rich,” Hodos says. “It’s a really complex chain of operations in this luxury production industry.”

In a modern era in which we can have digital house parties with 20 friends scattered across the globe, it can be hard to imagine that the ancient, internet-less world was all that “connected.” Though it might have taken a little longer to make its connections, the ancient Mediterranean region was just that—a network of cultures and civilizations exchanging ideas and, evidently, eggs.

“We must not underestimate the connectedness in the past,” Stockhammer says. “For me, the second millennium BC Eastern Mediterranean was a globalized world.”

There's a wide world of recipes that don’t require buying yeast.

With active dry yeast in short supply, many home-bakers who are sheltering in place have succumbed to the siren song of sourdough. But people have produced bread without yeast across history, cultures, and climes, leaving an incredible array of styles to choose from when your leavening options are limited. From the sticky-sweet steamed bread of Colonial New England to the Icelandic rye that rises in a hot spring, here are seven breads that prove you don’t have to track down that elusive packet of yeast to bake something extraordinary.

Beer Bread

The relationship between brewing and baking dates back centuries and is especially prevalent within European cookbooks of the 1700s and 1800s. Brewers would skim the "barm"—a yeasty foam generated during fermentation—from the tops of their brewing vats and give the frothy mixture to bakers to leaven their dough. (This is why some old bread recipes, such as this one from the 1855 edition of An Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy, measure yeast in “pints.”)

But you don’t need to take up home-brewing to make beer bread. The carbonation provided by a 12-ounce can of beer helps get the job done. Simply start with a bland brew (think Miller Lite, PBR, or anything that won’t have a strong impact on the flavor), then add flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. If using self-rising flour, you don’t even need the baking powder and salt. Try the New York Times’ recipe for a tender loaf that still packs yeasty notes.

Barmbrack

This sweet fruit bread takes its name from barm and the Irish word for “speckled.” Originally, it was made with the yeasty foam, but most modern renditions use chemical leaveners. Of course, when it comes to yeast-less baked goods from the Emerald Isle, Irish soda bread is the most obvious choice. But why not try this darker, more ominous cousin? In addition to raisins, barmbrack comes speckled with portents.

Barmbrack is particularly popular during the Celtic festival of Samhain, which traditionally marked the end of harvest season and the transition to the darkness of winter. Samhain was also believed to be a time when the barriers between the living and the dead dissolved, and spirits roamed free. Superstitions carry over to the kitchen during Samhain, as well. In addition to cinnamon, nutmeg, and dried fruit, bakers pepper their barmbrack with four symbolic trinkets. Discover the ring in your slice, and you’re destined for marriage. Bite into the bean, on the other hand, and your romantic future doesn’t look so bright. Taste metal, and you’re in luck (provided you didn’t swallow): You’ve got the coin, so expect prosperity soon. But chew on the cloth, and brace for tough times.

Try this rich, sweet barmbrack recipe from Saveur, which includes tea-soaked raisins and currants. The world has had enough ill portents lately, so maybe just fill yours with coins and rings.

Hverabrauð

Bubbling beneath Iceland’s surface is an intricate network of volcanic hot springs. A dying breed of bakers harness this geothermal power to create a style of rye bread known as hverabrauð. To make this “hot spring bread,” Icelanders start with a dough consisting of rye flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, milk (or, if using baking soda, buttermilk), salt, and sugar or a sweet syrup. With their mixture sealed in a covered pot, they set off for the nearest spring, dig a hole in the sizzling sand, and bury the container among the waters that gurgle below. After unearthing the pot 24 hours later, they should find a gently-steamed, fully-formed loaf.

If you don’t have hot springs nearby, you can very loosely mimic the environment by covering your dough and leaving it overnight (about eight hours) to slowly cook in a 200-degree oven. The resulting rye should be dense, nutty, and chewy.

Try this recipe that Saveur excerpted from Icelandic Food and Cookery, which uses the oven method. If you don’t have the requisite buttermilk and want to avoid a trip to the store, try stirring in one tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar for every cup of milk and let it sit for 10 minutes or so, until it thickens and curdles just a bit. If you don’t have the recipe's requisite golden syrup, swap in honey or molasses (cutting the latter with maple syrup if you want a sweeter flavor). Before tearing into an entire loaf, beware: Its nickname, þrumari, or “thunder bread,” is no misnomer. It references the intense way the fiber-heavy food can rumble through one’s digestive system.

Canned Brown Bread

Pilgrims settling in 17th-century New England brought from their British homeland a penchant for steamed puddings and thirded bread (a cost-cutting recipe that combined rye, wheat, and oat flours). Blending these Old World culinary techniques with New World resources, they crafted a sticky-sweet bread that’s still a niche classic.

As the colonists adapted their thirded-bread recipe to their new home, they found themselves swapping in cornmeal for oat flour and making a sweet upgrade with molasses. While some baked their bread in a hearth, others boiled it in a pot, akin to steamed puddings. The dark, moist result came to be known as Boston brown bread.

In the early 1800s, a new invention that would forever change the food industry also changed the way many New Englanders made their beloved bread: the tin can. Home bakers often used large coffee cans or baking-powder cans to make cylinders of their brown bread, which continued to be popular well into the 1900s. Nostalgic New Englanders might remember growing up pairing slices with baked beans and hot dogs. The combination is so beloved that B&M, a Maine-based company that’s been making canned baked beans since 1867, is the one of the few producers that still sells canned bread.

Try this recipe from Serious Eats. Be sure to grease the cans for easy removal. If you don’t have buttermilk, use one of the substitutions mentioned above. When it’s ready, also be sure to open the can at the bottom to help coax the loaf out.

Cherokee Bean Bread

More of a dumpling than a traditional bread, this Cherokee staple relies on two of the three “sisters” that form the base of Native American cuisine: corn and beans.

The historic method for making the bread involves soaking corn kernels in a lye-rich mixture of hickory ash and water, then grinding and working the hulled, washed corn into a dough. Modern cooks, however, can skip ahead by purchasing a premade form of this cornmeal known as masa harina. (It’s crucial to a good tortilla.) The cornmeal gets blended with water, cooked brown beans, and a bit of the liquid from the bean pot, then shaped into flat, oval dumplings.

Like canned bread, this recipe relies on steaming. If you want to be a stickler for authenticity, wrap the dumplings in hickory leaves, corn leaves, or corn husks, tie the pouch shut with grass, and boil the lot for an hour. But those in a pinch can swap in aluminum foil for the leaves. You’ll miss a bit of the earthy flavor imparted by the plants, but still get a close approximation of the real deal.

The resulting bread is a soft, moist, slightly savory taste of Cherokee history. Try this recipe from Nico Albert, a Cherokee chef based in Oklahoma.

Carta di Musica

Carta di musica has no need for the rising effects of yeast: It’s supposed to be as flat as possible. The Sardinian bread’s name comes from the fact that bakers keep rolling out the dough until it’s thin enough that you could read a sheet of music through it.

As the discs of dough start to puff up in the oven, bakers continuously slice them into halves until they become thin and cracker-crisp. The dried-out bread can last for months, ideal for the Sardinian shepherds who snacked on pieces as they wandered with their flocks.

While you might not be wandering anywhere for a little while, you can still try King Arthur Flour’s recipe for carta di musica. For ideal results, the recipe requires semolina flour, all-purpose flour, water, and salt, but King Arthur also offers substitutions (along with associated caveats) depending on what ingredients you might have on hand. Pair your crisp bread with wine and cheese, and imagine you’re traipsing through the Sardinian countryside.

Salt-Rising Bread

Popularized by pioneers in 19th-century Appalachia, this highly unusual bread also earned fame as the star of what the West Virginia Medical Journal declared "perhaps the most macabre experiment in culinary history."

How can a bread be macabre? That lies at the heart of what makes salt-rising bread unique. While yeast-leavened loaves rise with the help of carbon dioxide, salt-rising bread gets heightened by hydrogen. Creating that hydrogen are microbes that bakers cultivate by leaving a mixture of cornmeal (or sliced potatoes), boiled milk, sugar, and salt in a hot environment overnight.

Scientists eventually learned that the resulting bacteria is Clostridium perfringens, which also happens to be what causes a type of gangrene. Putting this connection to the test, one researcher actually used Clostridium perfringens from a soldier’s infected wound to make his own loaf of salt-rising bread in the 1920s. Thankfully, you don’t need a festering wound. As Gastro Obscura addressed in a recent article, you can find great injury-free recipes from James Beard and Harold McGee.

Death was not the end of the indignities the Chinese community faced during that pandemic.

As COVID-19 stops the world in its tracks, a 19th-century pandemic still haunts Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district. Nearly 130 years ago, the neighborhood was an epicenter of one of the deadliest pandemics on record. Like many former plague hotspots, the area still carries with it the weight of that tragedy.

In 1894, the waterfront city was a British colony and vital port of trade. As such, it experienced a mass influx of mainland Chinese laborers, from tradespeople to servants, who came to the city in search of employment. These almost 200,000 individuals settled primarily in Sheung Wan, then known as Tai Ping Shan or Taipingshan. In fact, the British had relegated the Chinese community to the area as early as the 1840s in order to develop land elsewhere.

At only about a half square mile, the impact of so many people on such a small area caused the neighborhood not to grow as much as distend, and before long families and workers were living on top of each other in unspeakably squalid conditions. Possessions, people, and even pigs shared single rooms, as did cattle, with calves often slaughtered in situ upon reaching maturity.

This was in dramatic contrast to the lives of the city’s European residents, who lived in comparative splendor just miles away. As Edward Marriott explains in his book, Plague: A Story of Science Rivalry, and the Scourge That Won’t Go Away, “in the ‘Peak District,’ on vast sprinklered lawns, in front of stuccoed palaces, lifting tumblers of fresh-squeezed lemonade from silver trays, women in white dresses spent the afternoons playing croquet.”

Taipingshan, however, was all but primed for tragedy and in early 1894, that tragedy arrived in the form of the bubonic plague. The area “was not only a potent reservoir of everyday illness, but a place where contagion, once started, would prove impossible to stop,” Marriott writes.

Fever, swollen glands, delirium, and even black tongue were only a few of the symptoms of the disease, the mortality rate of which was thought to be as high as 90 percent within Chinese communities. Just as the brutal physical ravages of the plague took their toll, there also developed a secondary, figurative kind of scourge, one that magnified the sociological schism between the ruling Westerners and the Chinese, and which lead to mutual distrust and hostility between the two cultures.

Although the true carriers of the disease were most likely fleas and rats brought to the region on opium ships, the blame for the plague’s arrival was placed swiftly on the shoulders of a specific group. “All that was needed now was a scapegoat, and the Europeans were of one voice: immigrants,” Marriott writes. “The only solution—propounded in language beloved of xenophobic despots down the ages—was to ‘purify’ the island by expelling the infected.”

Once those expulsion efforts began, they were swift, ruthless, and carried out with no real regard for Chinese customs, especially those concerning death. What the British saw as necessity, the Chinese saw as barbarism. What the Chinese saw as sacred, the British saw as superstition.

In May of that year, an aggressive assault began on the stricken district. A team of mostly British soldiers called the Shropshire Regiment, also informally referred to as the “whitewash brigade,” was assembled for a door-to-door inspection, disinfection, and in some cases, total destruction of homes. Those dwellings in which plague victims were found or even suspected were torn apart at the seams and the bodies of the dead immediately removed. Such was the fear of these armies that when they arrived at one particular dwelling, they found the body of a deceased plague victim propped up at a mah-jongg table as if actively involved in play. By the time these “inspections” were finished, some 7,000 people were displaced with over 350 homes destroyed.

The very same month a ship called the Hygeia was sent out less than a mile from the harbor. Billed by the British as a floating plague hospital, it was essentially just another method by which to isolate Chinese victims of the disease.

But death was not the end of the indignities the Chinese community faced during this pandemic. When managing the bodies of plague victims, the British violated virtually all Chinese rituals and traditions associated with death and especially burial. The philosophical crux of these beliefs is that in order to avoid suffering in the next life, a person must be buried properly in this one. A proper burial consisted, essentially, of three things: an intact body, a coffin, and an internment in one’s home village. As Zhijian Qian, assistant professor of art history at the New York City College of Technology explains, to many Chinese people, being buried in one’s homeland, is “like falling leaves returning to their roots, where we will eventually be reunited with our ancestors."

As virtually any account of the epidemic agrees, bodies of the dead that were taken from both the condensed Taipingshan area and the Hygeia were treated by the British more as potential disease carriers than sacred entities. Piling up in the streets, corpses were often disposed of in group “plague pits” or, in some cases, simply abandoned. When they were buried, often in cement-covered graves on the outskirts of the city, the goal was expediency over ceremony.

Impelled not just by the prospect of death itself, but by the threat of being denied a proper burial, close to 100,000 Chinese laborers began to return to their hometowns in a mass exodus, afraid that if they were to fall victim to the disease, their bodies would not be allowed to return. Not surprisingly, the evacuation caused the city to come to a virtual halt, leaving the Europeans to fend for themselves.

If anything helped ameliorate the situation, it was perhaps the Tung Wah Hospital. As Michael Ingham, author of the book Hong Kong: A Cultural History, explains in an email, the hospital provided free coffins to plague victims and helped facilitate the return of their bodies to their native villages. “The majority of the impoverished and destitute plague victims living in the Tai Ping Shan area would have been unable to manage or afford their own death preparations,” writes Ingham. Re-named Tung Wah Coffin Home in 1899, it is still in existence today, as part of the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals.

After the destruction of Taipingshan, Ingham notes that the area was rebuilt and gradually became something of a center for hospitals and other medical facilities. Although the Tung Wah Coffin Home eventually moved to the Sandy Bay area, the main hospital stayed and remains in Sheung Wan, where it is responding to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Prior to COVID-19’s arrival, Sheung Wan felt more like a hotspot of activity than a hot bed of pestilence, but some locals contend there are clues to the past in these side streets. Some assert there are actual spirits still left. John Fairman, founder of Honeychurch Antiques, formerly located on Hollywood Road, one of Sheung Wan’s main thoroughfares, says many feel the treatment of the plague victims’ bodies “left many unhappy ghosts in the neighborhood.” Others believe the coffin shops in the area may be tied to this event in history.

Regardless, whether real or imagined, the ghosts of the epidemic may not be here for long. The area’s rents have skyrocketed with its popularity and it’s not inconceivable that soon shops selling coffee will take over ones selling coffins. If and when they do, they’ll take with them a tragic, profound symbol of both the physical and psychological suffering that occurred here.

A set of paintings show the calm, lingering aftermath of a world-shaking event.

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa has often been described as a ferocious, earth-shattering event. It was: millions of tons of ash, superheated pyroclastic flows, city-decimating tsunamis, and the loudest sound ever documented by people.

It permanently altered the Dutch colony that would become the nation of Indonesia and in another, more subtle, way, it altered the world's imagination. For example, months after the eruption, artists in northern Europe and North America were inspired by the vivid sunsets its stratospheric ash created.

According to The New York Times in November 1883—three months after the eruption—“Soon after five o'clock the western horizon suddenly flamed into a brilliant scarlet, which crimsoned sky and clouds. People in the streets were startled at the unwonted sight and gathered in little groups on all the corners to gaze into the west.”

The thick, miles-high ash clouds in the Indian Ocean had lost their shape and drifted into the stratosphere, thereby forcing the light of sunsets around the world through an invisible diffractor. Edvard Munch, the famously morose artist behind The Scream—which features an infernal sky behind its ghoulish subject—wrote that “ … the Sun set—all at once the sky became blood red … clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord and the city [of Christiania],” and added, “I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.”

Volcanic eruptions have long inspired artists to try and replicate the vivid skyscapes they induce. Famed British painter J.M.W. Turner may have chronicled eruptions in his work. The Krakatoa event was captured by a later Brit, oil painter William Ascroft, who made more than 500 works trying to capture the light shows that occurred over the Thames. Across the Atlantic, Frederic Edwin Church rushed to Ontario to try to get a good view of the spectacle, for his own portfolio.

A different Edward—German naturalist and painter Eduard Pechuël-Loesche—saw something rather ethereal in the sky. His depictions of the volcanic aftermath, included at the end of a book prepared by German physicist Johann Kiessling, show off the contrast known to eyes adjusting to a new sight: muted, darkened landscapes paired with startling skies. Pechuël-Loesche’s work burns like embers, and was made with transparent watercolors, a style known as “aquarelle” that became popular in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. It is almost as though the last word on the fearsome eruption was something surreal and, perhaps, calming.

The Public Domain Review recently compiled some of Pechuël-Loesche’s images, and we have a selection here.

The Chinese Hospital in San Francisco is still one-of-a-kind.

California’s first Chinese immigrants arrived at a tumultuous time. From the 1860s to the early 1900s, a raft of epidemics, from smallpox to cholera, ravaged the San Francisco Bay Area, and especially Chinatown. Lacking scientific research on disease transmission, local health officials often blamed outbreaks on living conditions in Chinatown and the vices of its inhabitants. In 1877, the surgeon Hugh Toland told a congressional committee that Chinese sex workers caused 90 percent of syphilis cases in the city.

This history makes the recent uptick in anti-Asian discrimination, associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, seem searingly familiar. In 1885, San Francisco’s health officer declared Chinatown a “social, moral, and political curse to the community.” The Board of Health proposed draconian measures to quarantine and destroy buildings where infections had spread, demolishing many businesses and homes in the process. Public officials not only portrayed Chinese Americans as breeders of disease, but also denied the group access to health care, refusing to finance critical services in Chinatown and raising the cost of treatment for Chinese patients at municipal hospitals. As a result, the Chinese accounted for less than 0.1 percent of hospital admissions in the late-19th century, according to medical records from city and county institutions.

In response, the Chinese diaspora organized. Well-connected merchants of the Chinese Six Companies—a federation of mutual aid associations—decided to self-fund their own hospital. In 1900, the year the bubonic plague hit San Francisco, Tung Wah Dispensary opened its doors to Chinatown residents, becoming the first Chinese-American medical facility in the continental U.S. A quarter-century later, it became the Chinese Hospital, which now has locations all over the Bay Area.

Laureen Hom, a political science professor at CalPoly Pomona, wrote a case study about the origins of the Dispensary. Atlas Obscura asked her about the long history of discrimination and civic engagement in Chinese enclaves, and how they resonate in the time of the new coronavirus.

With practically no clinics in San Francisco’s Chinatown, how did the Chinese get treated for cholera, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases?

They relied on their own resources. Chinese immigrants from the same family lines or regions in China formed mutual aid associations, and provided the community resources the government denied. They maintained small, makeshift clinics for ailing members. People could also rely on folk healers who provided traditional medicine. These groups became the de-facto community governance in the face of exclusion.

How did the Chinese Six Companies get the funding and manpower to build Tung Wah Dispensary, which was later rebranded the Chinese Hospital?

When we learn about early Chinese history, we focus on working-class laborers. But there were also immigrants from the merchant class—what we would consider the elite. They became leaders of these associations and interacted with public officials to bring services to Chinatown. They were the middlemen. They also had transnational links with associations back in China, which was another way to pull in resources.

What kind of services did the Dispensary provide, and how did life change after Chinatown finally had a hospital of its own?

The introduction of new medical technology was a source of tension in treating Chinese patients, so Tung Wah Dispensary tried to provide both traditional and Western medicine, which was unique. There were three white physicians, and interpreters. Other health care facilities didn’t have that sensitivity. But the results were kind of mixed. The Chinese knew of the high mortality rates at other hospitals and were reluctant to go to what they thought of as the “Death House.” Many saw the Dispensary as a last resort for medical care—a place where you go to die.

After the 1906 earthquake that devastated most of Chinatown, the association began the process of rebuilding the community. They wanted to provide better health facilities and more care, to make sure the Chinese Hospital evolved from the Dispensary. When it opened in 1925, the era was still one of exclusion, and building a hospital in Chinatown was a very important symbolic statement. At that time, Chinese immigrants were seen as “birds of passage”—not a permanent presence in the country. Creating any kind of institution is a way of asserting visibility. It also showed that Chinese people considered themselves Americans.

What are “yellow peril” and “medical scapegoating”?

“Yellow peril” describes this global phenomenon that was happening in the mid-19th century, from this rising fear that people of Asian descent were taking over Europe and the U.S. In the U.S context, it concerns new immigrants coming in and taking over jobs—starting with the Chinese in the 1850s to ’60s. (Today, it’s happening more with Latinx immigrants.)

Economic anxieties led to xenophobic policies to halt immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made Chinese immigrants ineligible for citizenship. They weren’t seen as deserving of resources and services. Medical scapegoating came about through this mix of explicit racism and exploitation of their lack of legal status and social standing as non-citizens. It’s because they were racially excluded that they Chinese had to live downtown, near the industrial core, which was already dirty and deprived of basic services. The exclusion and neglect then fed into the belief that the Chinese were barbaric and unsanitary, and likely carriers of diseases.

What do health care services look like in Chinese-American enclaves today?

The Chinese Hospital in San Francisco is still the only independent hospital run by the Chinese community in the U.S. But the two other major Chinatowns now have their own health care facilities: Chinatown Service Center in Los Angeles [and elsewhere in Los Angeles County] and Charles B. Wang Community Health Center in Manhattan. These are federally qualified health centers that serve low-income groups in particular.

There have also been more social services agencies in Chinatowns since Tung Wah Dispensary came around. Los Angeles has the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, New York has Asian Americans For Equality, Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. They’re nonprofits that have the cultural sensitivity to serve.

Chinatowns have not reported unusually high rates of COVID-19, but restaurants and shops emptied long before people were ordered to stay home. Do you see a connection between historical anti-Chinese sentiment and recent reactions to the coronavirus?

Chinatowns still have a large working-class population. When I see a lack of cases, I also think about the lack of testing and access to health care. Do these high-poverty regions have clinics that provide basic services? I think it’s indicative of a larger, structural problem. Even in newer Chinatowns like Flushing, Queens, or suburban Chinatowns like Irvine, California, business has slowed. It does have a lot to do with the negative association people have with Chinatown. There was a lot of misinformation, and our leadership didn’t do a good enough job clearing that up.

The makeup of the Chinese diaspora has changed dramatically since the 19th century. Many are young and American-born, and more outspoken against injustices. But many don’t live in or feel very connected to Chinatown. Could they learn from the lessons of the Six Companies and Chinese enclaves of the past?

These associations reflect an older immigrant history. Chinatowns are old, Cantonese areas. Since 1965 [with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act], Chinese immigrants have become more diverse and educated. These groups have lost their original role and became more symbolic cultural institutions. They represent a heritage. The concern in Chinatown now is about the generational shift, and having a new era of leadership. With young people, knowing Asian-American history, and the history of organizing by the associations, is important. That knowledge shapes how you want to be politically engaged. It shows you’re connected to a collective, social history, even if it’s not your own.

Nonnas of the world, unite!

When Jody “Joe” Scaravella opened Enoteca Maria in 2008, he was sorely in need of a grandmother. Scaravella grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, where his Nonna Domenica cared for him while his parents worked.

“I remember her going to the market everyday, bringing her shopping cart,” Scaravella writes. “She stopped at the vegetable shops and bit a peach or tasted a cherry.” If the fruit was up to her standards, Domenica bought it. “Otherwise, she spit it on the ground with a disgusted expression on her face.” None of the shopkeepers complained about her trail of half-bitten peaches. Then again, the whole neighborhood knew Nonna Domenica, and who would dare come between an Italian grandmother and fresh produce?

These shopping trips sowed the seeds of Scaravella’s love of food, and his respect for the family elders, usually women, who pass down culinary heritage. It was this passion that guided him when, in 2008, freshly reeling from the loss of his grandmother, mother, and sister in just a few years, he decided to open up an Italian restaurant. But this wouldn’t be any old Staten Island red-sauce joint. Enoteca Maria would be staffed not by Michelin-starred chefs, but by Italian grandmothers.

The concept took off. Soon, Enoteca Maria was packed, and the grandmothers were appearing in local news and digital documentaries. In 2015, Scaravella expanded the Enoteca vision to include a rotating cast of grandmothers—specifically, female elders who were primarily home cooks—from around the globe. For the past few years, the restaurant’s weekend dinners have been cooked by one of dozens of enterprising elders, described by Scaravella as the “Nonnas of the World,” who offer full menus based on their home cuisines.

The resulting atmosphere is fiercely joyous, and as sprawlingly diverse as the City itself. In February 2020, the restaurant featured nine different Nonnas, including chefs from Morocco, Brazil, and Uzbekistan. March and April's lineups were poised to include Nonnas with roots in Argentina, Greece, Sri Lanka, and Puerto Rico. Then came the coronavirus.

Like most restaurants across New York City, Enoteca Maria has closed shop in light of social-distancing restrictions. “Our motto is ‘grandmother’s kitchen,’” says Scaravella. “The grandmothers are the most vulnerable among us, so we shut down.” Scaravella has instead converted his kitchen to make weekly batches of soup for first responders; so far, they’ve served lentil, butternut squash, and chicken. “It keeps me busy,” he says.

Meanwhile, with the exception of essential workers, New Yorkers, including the Nonnas, have largely hunkered down at home. Half of the city is currently struggling to afford food, and many of those who do have the money for groceries are too medically vulnerable to risk a trip to the store. At a moment when community elders are at heightened risk, the Nonnas’ knowledge—often gleaned from decades of spinning culinary joy from limited ingredients—is especially precious.

I caught up with four of the Nonnas who were slated to chef this past month: Ploumitsa Zimnis from Greece, Carmen Bernardo from Argentina, May “Dolly” Joseph from Sri Lanka, and Irene Rivera from Brooklyn, with roots in Puerto Rico. They shared stories of how they had come to join Nonnas of the World, how they were faring during social distancing, and the recipes giving them comfort.

Nonna Carmen

When Carmen Bernardo picks up the phone, she immediately launches into a recipe.

“Yo ahora estoy haciendo un pollo con batata,” she tells me. “Right now I’m making chicken with sweet potatoes.” Bernardo came to the United States from Buenos Aires eight years ago to help her son and his wife care for their newborn daughter.

My Spanish is slow; she is patient. Dapples of unexpected light shine through the cracks in our conversation. When I mistakenly ask her, “How can I learn how to cook?” rather than, “How did you learn how to cook?” she nonetheless gives a revealing answer. “That’s easy,” she says. “With love!”

Talking to Bernardo, that love crackles over the phone. She’s spent the past few days making more than 100 fabric masks for her neighbors in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. But her first foray into the power of all things handmade came 65 years ago, as a child watching her mother make pastel de carne—meat and potato pie—and empanadas. “From when I was a little girl, I loved to cook,” she says.

Now, two generations and thousands of miles removed, Bernardo has recreated those memories in Enoteca Maria. Bernardo was originally hesitant when she went for her initial interview with Scaravella, in response to an ad he’d posted searching for home cooks.

“I said I just make homemade food, home-style, my mother’s food, my grandmother’s,” she says. “He said this is what we want: grandmothers’ cooking. So I started.” She’s been filling Enoteca Maria’s kitchen with the carmel-sugar scent of panqueques con dulce de leche, thin, crepe-like dulce de leche pancakes, ever since.

Bernardo’s cooking style remains improvisational. “I’m not very good with electronics,” she says when I ask her to send a recipe. Besides, she doesn’t have precise measurements to share. “We do it by eye.” So, in classic grandmother style, Bernardo dictates a freeform recipe for bifes a la criolla, stewed steak with onions, tomatoes, and peppers, over the phone. “Look, you make it like this,” she says.

Nonna Carmen’s Bifes a la Criolla

• Oil
• Beef or veal, thinly sliced
• A few onions, sliced
• A few peppers, sliced
• A few tomatoes, sliced
• Salt, oregano, and paprika to taste

In a pan with a little oil, lay down a layer of beef slices. On top of that, put sliced onions, sliced peppers, and sliced tomatoes. On top of that, put another layer of meat. Then repeat: onion, pepper, tomatoes. Finally, you add chopped potatoes. Season it with salt, oregano, and paprika. Cook it on the stove on medium heat, covered, for 45 minutes to an hour. Then it’s ready!

Nonna Ploumitsa

Ploumitsa Zimnis came to Enoteca Maria during a time of mourning. In July 2016, Zimnis lost her husband. For two months afterward, she says, “I stay home and cry and cry.” One day in late summer, Ploumitsa received an intriguing message from her daughter, Maria Zimnis: A restaurant on Staten Island was hiring grandmothers to cook. Would Ploumitsa try out?

“I just saw an advertisement on Craigslist looking for international grandmothers,” Maria Zimnis says. At first, Maria was suspicious. “Who would want grandmothers?” she asked herself. “I thought it was some kind of scam.”

Despite their skepticism, on September 4, 2016, Ploumitsa’s birthday, the pair traipsed from their home borough of Queens to Staten Island to meet with Scaravella. At first, Ploumitsa was shy. “I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m not very good. I never worked in a restaurant,’” Ploumitsa says.

But when she met two of the Italian Nonnas, the chemistry was immediate. “She went over there hugging and kissing. They didn’t know each other. But they just took to each other,” Maria says.

Ploumitsa grew up on the lemon-bright Greek island of Chios. Her childhood was scented with its flavors: salt, squid, mastic. She watched her mother make chicken soup with lemon and delicate handmade macaroni, each hole formed around a thin stick plucked from a local tree.

In 1969, newly married, Ploumitsa and her husband boarded a ship to America. “It took 51 days to come to America,” she says. When she arrived, New York harbor was drab with autumn. “It was so dark, the day, the port,” she says. “I don’t like it over there. I don’t feel good.”

Soon, however, her feelings about New York changed. Ploumitsa’s husband owned a restaurant, but she cooked at home, drawing on his lessons and handwritten recipes from her mother. Over years of experimentation, she became a master chef and baker, trying out pastry recipes on her coworkers at a New York Public School cafeteria.

As a younger woman, Ploumitsa had fought to work outside of the home. When she started cooking at Enoteca Maria, this entrepreneurial spirit kicked into full gear. She began posting videos of her creations online; before long, Maria Zimnis, who works at the City Board of Education, found herself in a second full-time job as her mother’s social media manager.

Now, Nonna Ploumitsa’s Instagram and Facebook feeds overflow with recipes and videos in English and Greek, and she manages a direct-order online shop—all part of what she calls her budding “baking empire.” Maria says that translating Ploumitsa’s intuitive style to standardized recipes is a challenge. “She doesn’t use measurements at all. Everything is based on texture, how things feel, how it looks.”

Ploumitsa was scheduled to cook a Lenten codfish recipe at the Enoteca in March—she cooks every year on Greece’s Independence Day—but her session was cancelled because of COVID-19. Instead, she’s keeping herself busy at home by candying oranges, frying pastries, and posting everything on social media. When her children drop off groceries to her apartment, Ploumitsa keeps a few things for herself, and returns the rest to her doorstep in the form of ornate meals for her family.

Nonna Ploumitsa’s Fava Bean Soup

• 2 cups fava beans
• 5 cups water
• 2 medium red onions coarsely chopped
• 1 garlic clove
• ¾ cup extra virgin olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 20 cm sprig of fresh dill (or 1/2 teaspoon dried)
• 1 lemon
• Olive oil, Kalamata olives, and fresh onions to garnish

Wash fava beans. Pour water in a pot over medium heat, add fava beans, and leave pot uncovered. Once water boils, remove all the foam that appears on the surface. Add chopped onions and whole garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper and bring to a boil. Lower heat to a simmer. Cover pot and stir fava regularly with a wooden spoon to prevent it from sticking, for about an hour. Add dill and continue to simmer for an additional 15 minutes. Once cooked, remove from heat and squeeze fresh lemon juice over fava and stir.

When serving, drizzle olive oil on top, and garnish with Kalamata olives and fresh onions. Served with a side of tuna fish in olive oil, and olive bread.

Nonna Dolly

When I ask May “Dolly” Joseph how it feels to be a famous chef, she laughs. “I don’t know about that,” she says. But when she talks about the recognition of her work at Enoteca Maria—the Nonnas have appeared in several television shows and documentaries—you can feel her smile, even from a distance. “Once there were two little children, not even 10 years old,” she recalls. “They said, ‘Oh, that’s the Nonna we saw on TV.’ It’s a nice feeling.”

Joseph was born just outside of Colombo, Sri Lanka. When a nanny held the chubby baby, she called her “my doll.” The nickname Dolly stuck.

As is common among middle and upper-class households in South Asia, Dolly grew up eating food cooked by domestic workers. When, at 13, her family no longer had the money to pay cooks, she and her sister learned to cook themselves. They would skip to the store after school for sugar, pluck coconuts from the trees in their gardens, and make sweets: fluffy marshmallows, sticky milk toffee, cinnamon- and rose water-scented Sri Lankan “love cakes.”

Dolly became a caterer, and when she migrated to Staten Island some 20 years ago, she began making mail-order sweets for diasporic Sri Lankans. For the past few years, she’s been serving Enoteca guests fish, meat, and vegetable curries with rice and hoppers (egg-filled rice-flour crepes) several times a month.

Usually at this time of year—much of Sri Lanka celebrates New Year in April—business would be booming, as Dolly fries rice flour- and coconut-milk-based sweets to send to customers for the holiday. But this year, like the rest of New York, Dolly is stuck inside. Sheltering in place in her Staten Island home, Dolly still has culinary projects, and phone calls with friends, to lighten her days.

“I’m very happy when I cook,” she says, though she’s happier cooking for a crowd. “When they say, ‘The food was good, Dolly,’ that is like going to heaven.”

Nonna Dolly’s Lentils

• 1 cup of yellow lentils
• 1/4 teaspoon turmeric
• Salt to taste
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 4 cloves of minced garlic
• A few curry leaves
• 1/4 teaspoon mustard seeds
• 2 tablespoons oil
• Crushed chili to taste
• ¼ cup milk

Rinse the lentils four to five times. Put them in a pan with the salt and turmeric powder. Cover it with water and boil until tender. Once it's boiled, add the milk and let it be for about five to seven minutes. Then, heat the oil in a separate pan. Once it's hot, add the mustard seed, and after two minutes, add the onions, garlic, curry leaves, and the crushed chili. Once the spices are fried, add the cooked lentils and let it cook for two more minutes. Stir well.

Nonna Irene

Irene Rivera may be the only former NYPD detective turned member of an all-grandma culinary crew. Rivera, who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Brooklyn, served on the force for 21 years. After retirement, she filled the gap in an unusual way when, in search of a creative project, she signed on to cook at Enoteca Maria. “I miss it in a way, the camaraderie that you get from your brothers and your sisters” on the force, she says. “You get that too from the restaurant.”

Rivera never learned to cook, exactly: She absorbed it. “If you know anything about Latino, Hispanic families, little girls go into the kitchen,” she says. “We just watched and helped, and by the time you’re eight or nine, you pretty much have it all together.”

When she had children of her own, those early lessons returned in a flood of sensory memory. “It just comes back to you like nothing,” she says. The flavors of her childhood, which she recreates in Enoteca Maria, are “humble”—salted cod, corn meal—with roots in the meals of agricultural laborers. Now, when she cooks in the Enoteca, she lets her intuition, and a strong sense of scent, guide her. “Now what I do is to recreate the same flavor, the same smell,” she says.

As she shelters in place with her husband and grandchildren in Staten Island, food offers a rare form of continuity. “It’s scary at this time,” she says. When the quarantine lifts and her children come back to visit—from upstate, from Maryland, and from right there on Staten Island—they will be embraced by the same scent Rivera associates with her own grandmother.

Nona Irene’s Sofrito and Salted Cod

Sofrito

• 4 to 6 cloves of garlic
• 1 small onion
• 1 green pepper
• 1 red pepper
• 1 handful of fresh cilantro
• 1 handful of fresh culantro
• 2 teaspoons of cumin

Place ingredients in a mixer and you will have a fresh, pungent mix of sofrito. You can place in ice cube trays and use as needed. It can last for six months if covered.

Salted Cod

• 1/2 pound of salted cod fish, soaked overnight and rinsed (find true cod fish that has been salted—many brands use hake or other fish because it’s less inexpensive)
• 8 ounces of tomato sauce (any kind will do)
• 1 bag of frozen okra, or about a pound of fresh okra, cut into small pieces
• 2 tablespoons of fresh sofrito (see above)
• 2 teaspoons of adobo seasoning (any brand)
• 1 tablespoon olive oil

Poach the fish in fresh clean water for 15 to 25 minutes until cooked, to loosen and remove salt residue. Drain, break apart into small pieces, set aside, and let cool.

Cover a skillet with a tablespoon of olive oil. Add fresh sofrito. Let it simmer on low heat for a few moments to release the flavors. Add tomato sauce and mix well. Simmer, keeping on low or medium heat. After two minutes, the sauce should turn an orange color.

Add your drained codfish. Simmer for two or three minutes. Add the okra. Mix well. Add one quarter cup of water and flavor the mixture with adobo. Let it simmer for 15 minutes or until the okra changes color from a deep green to a light green.

Then it’s ready! Serve over white rice with a side salad.

You can collect and archive recipes from the elders in your life over the phone with the interactive Nonnas of the World Digital Cookbook. You can also sign up for a “Nonnas in Training” cooking class, which offer community members free one-on-one lessons with a Nonna, and will resume after the pandemic.

Dozens of crowdsourced food photos reveal inequality, but also generosity.

On March 24, scores of Indians hooked to their TV sets learned that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was to address the country at 8 p.m. Just days ago, in a similar address, he had requested a self-imposed, one-day lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus.

When he heard the news, Abhisar Bose shifted in his chair at his home workstation in Mumbai. He had just enough eggs, bread, and packets of instant noodles in his pantry to make it through the next three days. His wife was already in Delhi with his in-laws. Soon he would finish editing the film he was working on and fly out to be with her.

Amy Parrish looked at her phone in Kolkata—her 10,000-rupee ($132) grocery order had just been cancelled by Amazon. Minutes later, her husband told her that a 21-day lockdown was starting in a few hours.

In Delhi, Irshad Alam Khubi received a phone call asking him to help arrange meals for daily wage earners. With the lockdown, they would be out of work, and no wages meant no food. A professional storyteller, Alam Khubi had grown up in the nooks and crannies of Delhi’s Turkman Gate area, and he knew several such workers personally.

The lockdown that Modi announced that evening was sudden: In just four hours, at midnight, a country of 1.3 billion people would be crippled with restrictions. Though rumors had been ripe of a longer lockdown, questions arose. Was movement restricted? Could you buy food and essentials? Did you need to stockpile for all 21 days?

The following day, it became obvious that not everyone was equally challenged. Food posts and news clips on social media spoke to the stark contrast between rich and poor, and between those prepared, or better able to adapt, and those who could not.

As an experiment, I took to social media to ask people for images of their first few meals during the lockdown. Nearly 100 people responded, and the photos they sent ranged from generations-old recipes to hurried bachelor meals, frugal meals to artisanal foods. They came from community-run kitchens and doctor's tiffins on the medical frontlines.

Writer Ritu Bhatia’s photo from Mumbai is of a delectable chicken breast on a bed of lettuce that she salvaged from her pantry. Bhatia has turned her kitchen into a zero-waste zone. “My freezer is like a grocery store: Pesto in ice trays, even leftover Sangria. I freeze the peels of my vegetables and chicken scraps that I turn into stock.”

Reem Khokhar, a Destination Marketing Consultant, similarly says that “the lockdown has made us much more mindful of our consumption.” Her photo of spinach rice and a spicy okra curry is one of four meals rehashed from the same ingredients. She generously gave her elderly neighbors downstairs fruits and vegetables when they were stuck without groceries.

Bose never took that flight. In the days that followed, all flights were cancelled, and supply and delivery of food essentials ceased. Though deliveries later resumed, bachelor’s meals like the one in his photo were a staple for Bose. Still stuck at home in Mumbai, he says his wife is fundraising for charity kitchens in locked-down Delhi.

Parrish, an American photographer who has lived in Kolkata for eight years, was stuck without food staples as grocery stores around her neighbourhood shuttered. As she scrounged her neighborhood’s limited options, perishables were especially hard to find. Parrish’s home was also running low on drinking water. Since, in most urban homes, packaged water is the only safe option, she had to borrow a bottle from a neighbor. Her photo shows meaty coconut shells that she chanced on in the local market, and later turned into a refreshing ceviche meal. “Cancellation of my food delivery services taught me how to value the local shops,” she says. In gratitude, she wants to continue buying from them even after this is over.

Kohinoor Bibi did not send me a photo, but talks at length about her aged father, who was stuck without food in her village in East India. From her slum in Kolkata, it took several phone calls to convince someone to check on him and deliver food. Sadly, he was not alone. Several million Indians spent the first day of the lockdown without a single morsel of food. In villages of North India, children made headlines for eating grass to sustain themselves.

Alam Khubi started two community kitchens in response to that urgent call for help. Completely crowdfunded, they have fed nearly 2,000 unemployed workers every day, he says, and the food plate he sends me shows a surprisingly sumptuous chicken biryani. “Watered down lentils and rice, though [it] may look cost effective, actually ends up being just the opposite,” he explains. “People waste more.” He says they do not compromise on quality in his kitchens. “It’s about granting human dignity to those who are already battered.”

Anurupa Roy, who is a puppeteer, also served meals—in her case, to hundreds of migrant workers who were forced to walk back to their villages after trains and buses came to a halt. She shares photos of the food containers and tells me of a migrant who had been walking for two days without food. When prompted to take a second helping, the man said, “If I take more, how will the person behind me eat?”

Despite the huge disparities I witnessed when comparing these nearly 100 photos, and the apathy of a lockdown announced with a mere four-hours’ notice, I learned that closed gates did not mean closed doors. The grim reality of privilege that laces some of these plates was balanced by generous portions of empathy and compassion. Just like you cannot eat grass, you cannot eat gold, and that is something this virus is teaching us.

What happens when you have too much of a good thing.

Sargassum is like red wine or cologne. It can be very good in moderation. Sargassum is the umbrella term for a group of marine algae species—within a larger group called seaweed—that’s fundamental to the health of an entire region of the Atlantic and the many species who either live there or pass through. Sometimes, though, it explodes in growth, creating a continent-sized bloom that thoroughly freaks out multiple countries. These blooms have long happened and are perfectly acceptable if they happen rarely. They have not been happening rarely.

There were huge blooms in 2011, and then 2014, 2015, and 2017. In 2018 and 2019, the blooms were much bigger than they had been before 2011. “Prior to 2011, there was almost no sargassum impact in the Caribbean,” says Chuanmin Hu, a professor of optical oceanography at the University of South Florida who has studied sargassum for about a decade. “So yes, in the long-term history, this is very unusual.”

Sargassum gives its name to the Sargasso Sea, located in the Atlantic, north and east of the Caribbean. It is a truly unusual place, the only location given a proper “Something Sea” name but with no land boundaries. Instead it’s bounded by currents, including the all-powerful Gulf Stream, which runs up the East Coast of North America. These various currents bring in and then trap anything that floats within that portion of the Atlantic, creating both the Sargasso Sea and the North Atlantic Garbage Patch.

The Sargasso Sea is about a thousand miles wide and three thousand miles long, roughly the size of the United States. Scattered across this sea are huge mats of sargassum, floating with the aid of grape-like bubbles of trapped air that act as little buoys. Because it’s free-floating, the sargassum moves around, making it tough to measure. It also reproduces while out at sea. It does this vegetatively; a piece of sargassum detaches and grows from there, kind of like the way you’d propagate a pothos or succulent houseplant.

Because this sea has no land around it, and the water is quite deep throughout, it does not at first glance seem to be much of a habitat for animals. And yet it is, because in the absence of real islands, huge floating rafts of sargassum become de facto land masses, shallows, places of shelter.

A whole host of species live some or all of their lives hidden among the gigantic floating pads. Many of these animals have evolved to look pretty much like the sargassum itself. Various shrimp and crab species, small fish, sea slugs, various eels, and even baby turtles come to take cover within the impenetrable maze of yellowish-brownish plant matter.

“In the ocean, sargassum has been regarded as a critical habitat,” says Hu. Most of the species that live in and sargassum are found nowhere else on Earth. And sargassum is also a fairly efficient carbon sink; it sucks in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it. This is all to say that under normal circumstances, sargassum is widely considered very good, providing all sorts of useful ecological functions.

Over the past decade, we have not been experiencing normal circumstances. It is natural for sargassum to eventually blow westward and die, and end up on the beaches of the Caribbean, from South Florida to Aruba. This is part of sargassum’s life cycle, and Hu compares it to leaves on deciduous trees turning brown and falling in the autumn. But something has been changing in the past few years, and those dead and dying masses of sargassum have exploded in quantity. “When you have a very large quantity of sargassum, either on the beach or in coastal waters, then you have a problem,” says Hu. Hu’s team tracked this washed up sargassum to a strip they’re calling the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, a larger area than the Sea, stretching all the way from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Sargassum has always lived in these areas outside the Sargasso Sea, but never before in these quantities. Since 2011, it’s all become an essentially uninterrupted, massive strip—tens of millions of tons of seaweed that weren’t there before.

Excess sargassum can cause any number of problems. The algae floats when the mats are alive, but when they die, they sink. That can lead to suffocating blankets coming to rest atop delicate ecosystems such as coral reefs. Even worse, bacteria in decomposing sargassum suck oxygen out of the environment. Coral reefs in the Caribbean are struggling to survive as it is, and fundamental coral species have already been listed as endangered.

The problems don’t stop at water’s edge. Sargassum has always washed up on Caribbean beaches, but huge outbreaks can pose a significant threat. “If you don't remove them in just a couple of days, they start rotting, and they smell very bad,” says Hu. More specifically, they smell like rotten eggs, thanks to the hydrogen sulfide they release. (Not, thankfully, in enough density to combust the flammable gas.)

Rotting sargassum also attracts insects and bacteria, which makes it potentially dangerous to anyone walking on it with, say, an open cut on the foot. More importantly, perhaps, it also destroys the aesthetics of Caribbean beaches—aesthetics that, alongside tropical weather, have literally kept several economies alive. Tourism is by far the largest industry in most Caribbean nations and territories, including the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Turks and Caicos. (All of this comes on top of the complete disappearance of the 2020 tourism season due to COVID-19.) Ruin the beaches, and you ruin nations.

As a result, there have been increasingly desperate attempts to figure out how large the sargassum outbreaks will be, and to deal with the seaweed before it reaches the beaches. Prediction, Hu says, is still extremely limited to the short term. His models rely on tracking the movement of existing patches of sargassum farther out to sea. That means predictions can be accurate a few weeks to a few months out, but nobody can tell you what the situation will look like next year.

“People are not just concerned,” says Hu. “They're seriously concerned. It's not just the tourists: The local governments, they're really concerned about their economies.” And that has led to extreme action in some cases. The Mexican navy has spent several million dollars building huge ships to sargassum away from its eastern beaches. In Florida, Miami-Dade County has brought in bulldozers and backhoes to pick up and remove the sargassum that washes up. Throughout the Caribbean, countries and territories spent an estimated $120 million in 2018 to fight the massive beaching of sargassum, according to Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism. Several companies have sprung up to sell sargassum booms—basically floating barriers designed to trap the sargassum offshore, so boats can head out and rake the stuff up for disposal.

All of these efforts deal only with the symptoms of sargassum outbreaks, not the cause. After all, sargassum was always out there and never really a problem until about a decade ago. The obvious question is, what happened? The answer, unfortunately, is elusive.

We know what you’re thinking. But climate change does not seem likely to be a direct culprit. Sargassum actually suffers when sea temperature rises. Warmer waters slow its growth and can actually kill it. “We don't know what exactly is going on,” says Hu. “We have some speculation, but it's better not to put too much speculation out there.” One of the possibilities—Hu is careful to say that this is just a possibility, with no proper, peer-reviewed studies to back it up—is what’s coming into the oceans.

Of the many rivers that feed into parts of the ocean that eventually become part of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, the Amazon is the biggest. And there’s a lot more stuff in the Amazon than there used to be, thanks to vastly increased logging, agriculture, and ranching along the river. Waste products from those industries make their way into the river and eventually into the ocean. Those products aren’t necessarily toxic. In some cases, they’re basically or literally fertilizer. Theoretically, at least, organic material spread on a soybean farm in the Brazilian interior could be feeding sargassum growth, which then blows over and ruins a tourist season—and livelihoods—in the resort towns of Mexico.

The biggest issue raised by that theory, of course—in the way of all complex problems that connect disparate parts of the world, from climate to plastics to pandemics—is that there’s no end in sight.

“Here was a piece of history that you could pin to your lapel."

In 1981, Robert Moeller traveled to Moscow to visit his wife, a graduate student who was doing research there, and she handed him some Soviet rubles. Maybe he could pick up a warm fur hat, she said, or perhaps some of the “silly Soviet pins” for sale all over town. Called znachki in Russian, these tiny works of art honored all kinds of subjects, from Soviet cities and Communist Party anniversaries to the space dog Laika and the latest Lada sedan.

Moeller, now a retired professor of European history, watched with fascination as pin collectors, mostly middle-aged men, approached the huge displays of znachki at the GUM department store by Red Square. “Each pin had a discrete number; they’d go in with the ones they were missing and make their orders from there,” he says. Soon he, too, was hooked: “Here was a piece of history that you could pin to your lapel, material culture that embodied the past and celebrated the present.”

Moeller bought around 100 znachki during his stay in Moscow. Today, his collection—expanded with eBay purchases and gifts from friends—contains close to 4,000 pins, sorted into jars by theme and hung on the walls of his Irvine, California, home. His Instagram account conveys the sheer breadth of the form. He has pins awarded to outstanding young workers and winners of “socialist competitions” held by factories. There are znachki in Estonian, Tajik, Ukrainian, and other languages of the 15 Soviet Socialist Republics. He has Lenins for all tastes—you can find the revolutionary authoritarian as a curly-haired toddler; wearing a cap; bald; or staring out from a tiny, metal book inscribed with the words “for excellence in studies.” Some of Moeller’s znachki are comically niche: One of his favorites is a pin from the All-Union Association of Cactus Lovers’ Clubs, which bears an image of a flowering Turbinicarpus schwarzii.

While many znachki are miniature pieces of Soviet propaganda, the form is much older than the 1917 revolution. Russia’s first medals committee was created in 1722, and “by the nineteenth century, Russian skilled workers wore the pins as recognition for their labor in industrialization projects,” wrote Cathleen S. Lewis, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum who has studied the role of space-related znachki, in the anthology Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture. Under the Bolsheviks, they could be earned for attending political meetings. “Party delegates took to wearing congress pins much in the way war veterans wore military medals,” Lewis says.

Znachki were an important branding tool for the young Soviet Union, helping create a sense of collective national identity. They commemorated revolutionary anniversaries and military prowess, with pins for excellent snipers, land mine specialists, medics, army cooks, and drivers. To earn the rare 1939 “Tourist of the USSR” pin, which is coveted by today’s collectors, you had to master “skills in pitching a tent, lighting a fire, and orienteering using a compass” and complete a six-day journey “by foot, on skis, on a bicycle, in a rowboat or sailboat, or finally on a motorboat, motorcycle, or automobile driven by the tourist,” writes Diane P. Koenker in a Slavic Review paper called “Travel to Work, Travel to Play: On Russian Tourism, Travel, and Leisure.”

The number and range of pins exploded after World War II, launching a collecting craze among children and teens. According to Lewis, this was no accident. Znachki were part of “the Soviet effort to appeal to the youth market and control the emerging student movements of the early 1960s,” she wrote. “Youth organizations introduced znachki to student groups in the late 1950s and encouraged their collection through their official organs.”

Pinheads such as Valerian Artsimovich, featured in a 1963 USSR magazine article for accumulating over 11,000 znachki, displayed them proudly in their homes or squirreled them away in boxes for safekeeping. “It was the culture: Do something and you get a pin,” says Sergei, a 43-year-old collector in Moscow who runs a Russian-language website dedicated to cataloguing Soviet znachki, in an email. Since the pins were cheap to buy—about the same price as a loaf of bread, Sergei says—collecting them was an accessible hobby. With znachki for sale at every kiosk across the country, “it was hard not to buy them,” he adds. “Some people purchased them as gifts, others bought their own and got into it.”

By the mid-1970s, the pins had become so popular that Soviet authorities warned their production was “‘growing catastrophically’ and using up precious raw materials,” the New York Times reported. Factories and metal shops all over the U.S.S.R. manufactured znachki rather than any one state body; this decentralization allowed for gems such as the tiny toilet seats that a group of cheeky plumbers apparently created for “Best Plumber of the Azerbaijan Sanitary Technical Assembly Enterprise,” according to the Times. This also means nobody actually knows how many different pins were produced in the Soviet Union.

Officials came to feel that pin production, once encouraged by the government, was getting out of hand. But demand for znachki remained high. As Lewis notes, they were “a commodity in a society that was notorious for the absence of consumer goods.” They also allowed people to own and hold a little piece of something bigger, transferring “public commemoration of national accomplishments from solely mass events to a personal scale.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union, many pin collectors sold their znachki to foreign tourists and eBay buyers like Moeller. His online transactions sparked an interesting business relationship. In the late 90s, Moeller bought some pins from a man he’d rather not name, who lived in one of the Baltic states. The seller was rich in pins but really wanted Western music magazines, which were scarce in Eastern Europe and featured Björk and other stars. The man had his magazines shipped to Moeller, who forwarded them on in exchange for more pins. (At one point, the two were eyeing the same lot of 1500 Lenin pins from a seller in Ukraine; when Moeller scored them for $225, the man emailed him, “I see you got the Lenins,” and proposed another trade.)

Despite fun anecdotes such as these, Moeller said, he is saddened by an awareness that most of his znachki “came from collectors who were wildly trying to get hard currency in the 90s,” when the U.S.S.R. dissolved and the ruble crashed. As someone so enthralled by the pin-collecting culture, he worries that he played a part in its demise.

While mass interest in znachki has largely faded in Russia, some hobbyists are still on the hunt. For Mikhail Semenov, a 33-year-old artist and designer who blogs about the history of his hometown, Sergiev Posad, and collects pins related to the city, it’s part of a bigger fascination with the past. “Znachki are a story about the city,” he says in Russian. He marvels at the meticulous designs packed into a small space, and how the pins show changes in Sergiev Posad’s coat of arms. You can read the pins like “a book, just in a different format.” He adds to his library through gifts from friends and by corresponding online with other collectors, many of them a generation older than him.

Like Moeller, Semenov shares photos of his pins on Instagram. “Since childhood my father collected znachki and now it’s my turn,” he writes in one post, next to a delicate rendering of a 14th-century monastery on a tiny metal rectangle. Pin collecting is like a drug, he says; each new addition is a chapter of history “you can touch with your hands.”

There's no social distance between you and your face mites.

Since social distancing was imposed in New York City, I have hardly ventured out. I have gotten to know each paint-and-plaster corner of my apartment and the strip of sidewalk I can see from the window. I’m well-versed in the shrieks and hisses of the pipes on cold nights; the chirps that drift in through the screen; the local dogs and their preferred places to squat. After five weeks of going nowhere, I was smug in my certainty that I had mapped nearly every inch of this place. But it turns out that there was a lot I was missing: I knew the terrain, but not my fellow citizens. Even though I’m the only human around, I have a lot of company—a whole host of arthropods and other tiny creatures that share my home. So I asked entomologists how to get to know them better.

No matter where you live, your home is probably teeming with skittering, winged, or multi-legged life. In 2012, with the help of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, conducted a census of the arthropods in 50 homes in Raleigh. The team inventoried more than 10,000 critters spanning several hundred species. A few years later, Dunn and collaborators launched a similar project on iNaturalist, the digital citizen science platform, inviting people to report any sightings of non-domesticated creatures in their homes. That project, called Never Home Alone: The Wild Life of Homes, is now global in scope, and as of April 2020 has amassed more than 10,500 observations across more than 2,100 species.

Ecologists didn’t always take an interest in domestic spaces. For centuries, scientists prized pristine landscapes such as the Galápagos Islands. The idea, Dunn says, was that “if we study nature, we should study it where its rules are intact and undisturbed.” When Dunn undertook graduate work more than 15 years ago, he traveled to the Bolivian Amazon to study insects as a proxy for forest health and regrowth. At the time, he says, many scientists in the field believed that the city was “a muddier version of the world.” A house would have been seen as even less worthy of study.

But in the last two decades, Dunn says, researchers have become more focused on interactions between humans and other animals, instead of prioritizing only what they do in our absence. And over the past decade, he has seen an uptick in the study of homes as ecosystems for animals, and a growth in entomological study beyond just figuring out how to zap the pests we live with. Still, the lives of indoor insects remain mysterious. “Book lice are in almost every house, and we don’t know what they’re doing in there,” Dunn says. “But they’re super cool!” The same goes for familiar spider species, he adds. “Houses are just nuts with spiders, and no one is studying them.”

If you want to look for cohabitating creatures, you won’t need much—maybe a pencil and paper, if you want to sketch whatever you find or jot down some notes about it. Even better, Dunn says, pick up a macro lens for your camera.

When he’s looking to meet local fauna, Dunn often begins by unscrewing a light fixture from the ceiling, and shaking out its contents onto a cookie sheet lined with a white sheet of paper. (Many insects gravitate to the light and meet their end there.) Dunn uses a small paintbrush to sift through the contents, and typically finds between 10 and 25 species. Beyond lights, look where people don’t tend to poke around: cellars, attics, windowsills, behind cabinets, and in corners. “You’d be surprised how much good stuff is waiting in corners,” Dunn says. If you have potted plants, scour the soil and leaves for stowaways. And if you want to expand your menagerie to include fungi, check your bread.

Many of the creatures you’ll encounter, for example in light fixtures, will be dead. To up your chances of meeting live ones, try leaving the lights off and then flicking a single one on—any insects that are attracted to light will be drawn toward it. Some insects are only active at night, so be sure to canvass for critters at different times. If you’re hoping to photograph a live creature—say, to ask for identification help—Dunn recommends moving slowly. “Imagine you’re stalking a deer,” he says. “But in your bathroom.”

Crawly compatriots vary from place to place, but maybe not as much as you think: While New Zealand homes host a few insect species found nowhere else, several of the species found in ancient Egypt eventually hitched rides around the world, and today show up in places like Raleigh. On the iNaturalist project, the most frequently reported roommates are the long-bodied cellar spider (Pholcus phalangioides), with its spindly legs; the brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys), with its shield-shaped body and pungent potential; and the house centipede (Scutigera coleoptrata), with its army of appendages. Dunn’s lab put together a guide to identifying some of the common critters; iNaturalist is a useful resource for identifications, too.

While you’re stuck at home, you might as well treat your own body as a field site, too. Everyone’s skin is crowded with mites, which tend to congregate on the face—as well as other slick surfaces, such as nipples—because they thrive in the greasiest places they can find. (The two species that scamper around the oily hair follicles on your cheeks and forehead both belong to the genus Demodex; the name borrows from Greek words that translate to “lard-boring worm.”) Don’t be afraid: Everyone has mites, and they seem to be passed down to us as infants; they only live a few weeks, but the ladies of the mite colonies can reproduce either sexually or asexually, which keeps things moving indefinitely—and makes the mites hard to wipe out.

For the most part, the mites are pleasant enough neighbors and don't cause many problems, according to a 2016 report by a trio of researchers from the Charles Institute of Dermatology at University College Dublin—though they can sometimes cause dermatologic issues when their populations boom. “I know someone who has beautiful skin but a crazy number of face mites,” says Michelle Trautwein, curator of flies at the California Academy of Sciences, who also researches what mites reveal about human evolution, ancestry, and migration.

You can get to know your mites by gently pulling or scraping them off your skin, Trautwein says. Because the mites are only as long as a single strand of hair is wide, they’re way too small to spot without the naked eye. Trautwein slides them under a microscope at 100x magnification in order to bring them into view. “A 400x microscope makes a beautiful mite close-up,” she says. If you want to see them, the key is to harvest a few.

One way to do that is by placing tape on your face overnight, and then peeling it off in the morning. (The creatures seem to frolic while we sleep.) You could also yank out an eyebrow hair or eyelash and look for mites gathered at the root. Trautwein has had some success using a bobby pin to scrape a bit of earwax out of the canal, too; smeared on a slide, “it makes a beautiful mites-stuck-in-amber medium that looks really nice,” she says. (Don’t try that one at home.) The most effective tactic involves putting a thin, pea-sized dollop of superglue on a microscope slide, placing it against your cheek or forehead for somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds, and then slowly removing it. “It’s not as terrible as it sounds,” Trautwein says. And for someone seeking mites, it’s worth it: That strategy typically yields up to 150 of them. When you wiggle the slide under a microscope, Trautwein adds, “you can look for tiny mite arms waving in the forest of hairs.”

One more mite-seeking scheme involves dunking a cotton ball in glycerin, dabbing it on your face, and then using a flat gelato spoon to scrape and heap the gunk onto a slide. It’s not as reliable as the superglue strategy, Trautwein says, but this way, you might “find a whole mite lying in repose,” or “splayed out in their glory.” Alive and stretched flat, they look somehow prehistoric, like thin, translucent versions of Ankylosaurus’s armored tail.

It can be hard to wrap your mind around the idea of your body being a shared space, host to a menagerie of critters. “Even as someone who thinks about them a lot, they never cease to weird me out,” Trautwein says. But she means that in a good way. Noodling over the fact that there are thousands of animals clambering over your body might make you a little itchy—but it’s also wondrous. Scientists have so much more to learn about what the mites are doing, and how they’re interacting with each other, with our skin, and with our microbiome. Their world exists in tandem with the one we can see, Trautwein says. “It seems magical.”

Meeting the insects you live with is a reminder of how much diversity exists everywhere you look, as soon as you zoom in. Even Dunn was surprised to learn that there have been at least 12 spider species in his house. “If you were to ask me before the project, I would have said two,” he says—“a squat, Sancho Panza one, and a tall, Don Quixote one.” And there’s a lesson to be learned about empathy, Dunn adds: “You can still hate a mosquito and find the crazy details of its body remarkable.”

There’s a lesson to be learned about awe, too. When philosophers of old waxed about the sublime, Dunn says, it was often in the context of huge, sweeping landscapes that were undeniably grand: steep, craggy rock faces, or lush meadows rolling out beneath a wide sky. For those of us stuck at home, our kitchens and bathrooms and windowsills become the wilderness, and there’s striking, startling beauty there, too. “There’s something sublime about these small creatures,” Dunn says. “They go about their lives in remarkable ways that can also move us.”

It waited 1,000 years in the desert, just for you.

Humankind still can't make it to every part of the Moon, but the Moon can still send bits of unexplored territory to us.

Headlining RR Auction’s Space Exploration sale is a slice of a lunar meteorite known as Northwest Africa 5000, or NWA 5000. At the time of its discovery in July 2007, NWA 5000 was the largest known lunar meteorite—that is, a chunk of space rock on Earth known to have come from the Moon. At more than 25 pounds, it was a larger piece of Moon than anything in NASA’s Apollo collections, and may well originate from a region of the satellite not yet visited by astronauts. The meteorite has since been cut several times, and an even larger one has since been found, but the slice currently on the block represents an aesthetic and scientific anomaly. No wonder it’s projected to fetch a quarter-million dollars.

Adam Hupé, a computer engineer and meteorite collector who consigned NWA 5000 to RR Auction, says he got “first crack” at the historic rock after it was discovered in the Western Sahara Desert, likely by nomadic people in an area under Moroccan control. Over the years, he had developed relationships with some of Morocco’s mineral and fossil dealers, and arranged with them to be notified of new discoveries before anyone else. But he had never before purchased anything with the heft—physical, financial, academic—of NWA 5000. “You could buy a house,” he says of the price he ultimately paid, though he won’t disclose the figure.

Among NWA 5000’s several distinguishing features is (was, actually) its wholeness. In other words, unlike most meteorites, it seems to have survived its crash landing on Earth intact. Hupé says the surrounding area of the Sahara was combed for 10 years in search of “pairings,” or fragments that broke off from the mass. None were found. Research later determined that it had been sitting undiscovered in the Sahara for a millennium—more than enough time to stabilize and equalize with the terrestrial atmosphere. According to RR Auction, it requires “no special care other than that of security.”

Eventually, however, Hupé did begin slicing the rock up. There were several reasons to do so. First, he could distribute smaller pieces to researchers, and he was interested first and foremost in learning what he could about the rock. Similarly, dividing NWA 5000 made it possible for fragments to land in more museums and reach more of the public. (The largest piece, an “endcut,” currently resides at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.) Slicing the meteorite and selling some of the pieces, also gave Hupé an opportunity to recoup some of his investment, which had proved particularly burdensome; he had acquired NWA 5000 just a year before the Great Recession began in 2008. Still, for posterity, he commissioned an artist to create an exact replica of the uncut meteorite before cutting into it. The rock—and its subtle, grayscale contrast—is “almost impossible to photograph,” Hupé says, so he needed the duplicate. It’s exact in all but weight.

Cutting the rock up ended up yielding another benefit: being able see its interior from two sides. And that interior is something to behold. NWA 5000 retains metal that is 4.5 billion years old—the most iridium-rich naturally occurring metal ever identified, according to Hupé. The singularity of this material, he says, suggests that NWA 5000 actually comprises another meteorite that impacted the moon and became embedded. Think of it like a real-life artifact from Norse mythology: NWA 5000 gets us closer to understanding "these ancient cosmic hammers," says Munir Humayun, a geochemist at Florida State University, in an email.

That insight, and inside look, makes “complete slices” more desirable than endcuts, Hupé says. The slice currently on the auction block, which Hupé nicknamed “The Perigee,” is the largest of the seven complete slices that exist, and measures about the size of a salad plate, about a third of an inch thick. (At 1.5 pounds, it represents roughly six percent of the original.)

“I tried not to get too attached to it,” says Hupé, as he prepares to part with The Perigee, “but I’ve put thousands of hours into micromanaging every aspect of it.” He may now want to consult our guide to finding meteorites if he's keen to find a replacement.

Johl Whiteduck Ringuette wants to give indigenous Canadians control over their own food.

Johl Whiteduck Ringuette’s life changed when he took part in a Shake Tent ceremony in the early 2000s. An indigenous rite in which participants attempt to make contact with spirits for guidance and healing, the ceremony was a way to recover something he felt had been stripped from him: his Anishinaabe identity. This set him on a ferociously ambitious path to not only establish an indigenous restaurant and catering business in Toronto, but to stake a claim for indigenous food sovereignty in Canada.

Born in a rural area in northeastern Ontario, he learned from his parents and older siblings how to snare rabbits and partridges, ice-fish, and cook over an open fire. This established his early love of food and cooking. Still, though his father was part Mohawk and his mother from the local Nipissing peoples, he was not familiar with rites and ceremonies traditionally associated with everyday indigenous life.

After high school, Ringuette, now 52, moved to Toronto and worked at a series of catering and food-service jobs to get by. By the 2000s, he had switched to community service, working at, among other organizations, Aboriginal Legal Services, which helps indigenous people navigate the legal system. Through this work, he saw firsthand how indigenous people were sometimes locked up for loitering because, he says, they were simply “sitting on a bench.”

“The obstacles against indigenous people are so enormous and so embedded that we just accept that that’s how things are,” Ringuette said on a recent morning, sitting in his small Toronto restaurant, NishDish. (“Nish” is short for Anishinaabe, a group of culturally related indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. Like many other restaurants at the moment, NishDish is now closed.)

As in the U.S., Canada put native people on reserves and sent their children to often faraway boarding schools, where their native languages and traditions were suppressed. Many suffered horrible physical and sexual abuse, under the cover of a system set up to “assimilate” them into white society. The last of these so-called residential schools closed only in the late 1990s.

These days, Canadian school children dutifully listen to a daily “acknowledgement” to the First Nations before the start of the school day. In 2015, residential schools were recognized as “cultural genocide” by a government-issued report. Yet native reserves still face high rates of drug abuse, suicide, and violence. And clashes are frequent between indigenous groups and the “settlers,” pointing to “this country’s troubled reconciliation efforts with indigenous peoples,” as a recent Toronto Star article put it. Part of what was lost during this difficult history was indigenous culinary knowledge, the focus of Ringuette’s work.

At the same time that Ringuette was carrying out his community service work, he was also seeking to learn more about his heritage. Sent to consult Mark Thompson, an Ojibwe elder and medicine man, Ringuette experienced a traditional Shake Tent ceremony for the first time.

Crucially, Thompson told Ringuette that he was a part of the Mink clan (through family affiliation, indigenous people may be associated with different animals, which symbolize different roles in the community). The mink, Ringuette explained, is “a defender of the community. In my case, they said I’m a bringer of things.” His role, he was told, was to ensure food and shelter for his community. On Thompson’s advice, Ringuette gradually moved away from jobs in social services and turned toward his “gift.” “You have the gift to bring traditional food back,” Thompson told him. “To bring the Anishinaabe diet back to the people.”

This mission would allow Ringuette to join his love of food with his commitment to social justice. A few years after the Shake Tent ceremony, in 2005, he began his successful catering business, and later—delayed by a slow rehabilitation after he was struck by a city bus in 2013—he opened the restaurant in 2017.

“Here I am bringing the food,” Ringuette said, gesturing to his restaurant. He recalled how hundreds lined up for the grand opening. “It was so beautiful … That’s how many people were excited to have some of their own traditional foods,” he said, noting that perhaps three-quarters of those customers were indigenous people.

In late February, Ringuette held forth at a Toronto community health center, addressing some 25 seniors about indigenous medicinal plants and foods. Among his many projects, giving talks occupies a substantial portion of his time. To the attentive audience, he broached the central conundrum of his work.

“What is indigenous food?” he asked. “Most of our people don’t even know.” He evoked historical Canadian laws that outlawed hunting, fishing, and trapping, and that banned native languages and customs. “As a result, we don’t know what our culture is.”

As he recounted to the seniors, in the 19th century, indigenous people were often forcibly separated from traditional food sources, and non-native foodstuffs like flour, sugar, and salt were introduced in their stead. He blames these European-introduced foods for the high level of heart disease and diabetes among aboriginal people. To address such health problems, he advocates eating traditional foods. “But how do you do that when traditional foods have been eradicated?”

He regularly faces this problem in his own catering and restaurant business. According to Canadian law, it is illegal to serve wild game in a restaurant; it must be farmed. The white corn Ringuette uses in his Three Sisters Stew (the “three sisters” are corn, beans and squash) and corn soup comes from the sole commercial provider in the area, Bonnie Skye of the Six Nations of the Grand River, the largest First Nations reserve in Canada. Every six weeks, a NishDish employee has to drive the hour and a half southwest of Toronto to pick up a supply.

Toronto is traditionally a wild rice territory. But today, Ringuette has to get deliveries from Flying Wild Rice, an indigenous grower 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) northwest of Toronto. Used in both sweet and savory NishDish offerings, such as wild rice casserole, duck and wild rice soup, and wild rice-wild blueberry pudding, the rice is grown on a remote lake. When supply runs out, Ringuette admits that he has been forced to buy wild rice at the commercial chain Bulk Barn, which does not offer the same quality product. As his goal is to establish sustainable practices that give indigenous Canadians control over their own food, a chain store is clearly not his provider of choice.

To address these concerns, Ringuette founded a series of interlacing businesses and not-for-profits. In addition to NishDish, Ringuette created the Ojibiikaan Indigenous Cultural Network, a not-for-profit dedicated to indigenous food sovereignty in the Greater Toronto area. Among other initiatives, it plants indigenous gardens. Plus, through partnerships with private landowners and universities, he is researching how he might bring white corn and wild rice farming to the Toronto area. His Red Urban Nation Artist Collective has festooned a Toronto school board complex with murals, a site that hosts the occasional Indigenous Harvesters and Artisans Market, events that he hopes will become more regular.

Ringuette has targeted this complex and the public Christie Pits Park across the street as the hub of perhaps his most ambitious project, spearheaded by another one of his not-for-profit groups, the Toronto Indigenous Business Association. In an area west of Koreatown, Ringuette envisions creating what he is calling the Anishinaabe Village District, a neighborhood where indigenous people could find resources of all kinds, including businesses, libraries, and social services. Looking beyond the current coronavirus crisis, he is in talks to reopen an expanded NishDish Restaurant and Marketeria in this envisioned district. Through outreach to other local community groups, grant applications, and projects like the murals and community gardens, he is gradually making progress toward these goals.

He acknowledges, though, that fulfilling his all-encompassing mission will not be easy. As he told the seniors at the health center, he sees that establishing sovereign food lines will take generations—which only spurs him on. “Someone has to start doing something now,” he says.

Even after 15 years in the fight, he is ready to devote a lifetime to it. But he stays humble. “I’m not an elder,” he told the roomful of elderly Canadians. “I’m just a regular person learning my own culture.”

They're filled with handpicked books and a bag of tea or coffee beans.

In late-March, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced Boulder, Colorado, to close all non-essential businesses, the city’s bustling pedestrian hub for food and shopping, Pearl Street, went quiet. Without its usual flow of foot traffic, Trident Booksellers and Cafe had to choose whether to close or to totally change its approach. Its owners realized that instead of having the public come to them, they could bring the books, coffee, and tea to the masses.

Founded in 1980, Trident is the oldest cafe in the area, filled with new and used books, coffee, and every type of tea you can imagine. It normally serves locals and University of Colorado students, and its windows look out on the city’s iconic rock formations, the Flatirons. During a lockdown, of course, its prime location wasn’t much of an asset. As its income dried up, the store laid off 80 percent of its 25-person workforce. But in recent weeks, one of Trident’s four owners, Andrew Hyde, has brought a few of them back to take online orders for “mystery bags” of books, to be delivered to your door. “At first, I posted the idea to Twitter, almost as a joke, but we received 10 orders in the first few hours, so it was a go,” Hyde says.

By early-April, they had sold over 300 bags. “About half are Boulder locals and the other half are from around the world,” Hyde goes on. At $50, each bag is packed with four to six used books that are chosen by the staff with input from the customer. Some people requested science fiction, others wanted political biographies, and a few have left it entirely up to Trident. In addition, customers can choose a bag of coffee beans or tea.

For orders within the city of Boulder, a Trident team member will put on gloves and a mask and hand-deliver the bag via bicycle. For anyone sheltering in place outside of biking distance, they’ll mail the mystery bag via USPS, for an additional $5 flat rate. “It’s so much fun to pick great books for people,” Hyde says. “Lots of obscure things.”

Trident acquires used books from sellers throughout the country. In non-pandemic times, an average used book spends about three months on the shelf before it sells. “We’re not just moving old inventory, we’re packing bags with books we’d be excited to receive,” Hyde says. But the endeavor hasn’t been without challenges. “Keeping up with demand is something we haven’t been used to,” Hyde says. “We ran out of delivery bags and coffee bags. Then we ran out of shipping envelopes three times.” They’ve also run out of sci-fi options, and sometimes struggle to fill requests within specific themes.

For many, the bags are functioning as a way to support the community. When Boulder resident Mike Gehard ordered a mystery bag, he didn’t make any special requests; he let the staff at Trident choose his books at will. “I ordered a bag because I’m friends with Andrew and wanted to support a local business,” he says. “I want to support as many local businesses as I can through this.” Some of the books were titles he might have picked out himself, while others were surprises.

Sarah Shapiro, a resident of Boulder County, received a mystery bag from her husband as a gift. “My husband ordered it because I was stressed out,” she says. “He knows I like books about death and religion, so that’s what he requested.” Currently, she’s reading From the Bodies of the Gods: Psychoactive Plants and the Cults of the Dead. She says she looks forward to reading a horror fiction collection that also came in her bag.

The mystery bag sales are helping to keep Trident solvent, Hyde says. “The decisions we have now are not, ‘Should we close?,’ but rather, ‘What other online strategies should we try as we weather this storm?’” He recently posted on social media: “Give me more ideas for what Trident can do for the community.” He’s already received requests for kids’ bags and video-chat events.

Trident has historically been a brick-and-mortar store: this is Hyde’s first time managing an online store and inventory. He’s enjoyed the challenge of next-day fulfillment, and also the exercise of bike delivery. But he’s not immune to the trauma that the world is going through. The work has helped him with the depression that many are experiencing right now. “It just gives me a challenge and purpose and that makes me, and others, happy,” he says.

Learn to draw, craft up a storm, or boogie like it's 1979.

For decades, public television programs have been teaching handy-dandy skills, from repairing homes and sowing seeds to knitting scarves and even building yachts. “Public media in general started out being an educational channel—that was its sole purpose,” says Karen Cariani, the executive director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives in Boston. Back in the 1960s, Newton Minow, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, grumbled that television was a “vast wasteland,” far from living up to its potential to engage viewers. Instructional content soon boomed, including Julia Child’s plucky program “The French Chef,” which debuted on WGBH in 1963.

Soon, there were programs about everything from weaving to birding—and several of them wound up in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress. Cariani is its project director. The instructional programs are “a record of a moment in time in our cultural heritage, and a lot of the material is evergreen,” Cariani says. “They’re quirky, and people can relate to them.” It’s as good a time as any to pour your restlessness into a new hobby, so Atlas Obscura poked around the archive’s digitized videos to round up some skills you can pick up right now.

Groove with “Dancing Disco”

Haul your furniture out of the way and shimmy into 1979. Affable, elastic dance instructor Randy Deats will teach you some slick moves—best busted out while wearing all the sequins you can rustle up. And if you really want to commit to period dress, try making a bobby-pin necklace like the one modeled here by an editor at Mademoiselle magazine. If you really start flailing, you may need one of the pins to wrangle your ’do.

Get crafty with Erica Wilson

Erica Wilson earned her nickname, “the Julia Child of Needlework,” by introducing the handicraft to the TV-watching masses with a warm, easy charm. Grab a needle, thread, and old pillowcase and practice your stitches while watching this episode from 1971.

Learn to draw with Ture Bengtz

If you can’t venture to a museum right now, you can still try your hand at some exhibition-worthy sketches of your own with this instructional video from 1956. Grab a pencil or charcoal and some paper as Bengtz, who was head of drawing and graphic arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, explains how to build figures from a foundation of cone shapes.

Cook perfect rice and tea with Joyce Chen

In this 1966 episode, the Beijing-born chef and culinary entrepreneur demonstrates how to prepare tea and cook spectacularly fluffy rice, without scorching it on the bottom of a pan. Chen’s restaurants helped Americans fall in love with Mandarin cuisine. Follow along, and then tuck into a pillowy meal of your own. If you're still hungry, dig into the history of Cajun and Creole cooking, with this 1990 episode of "A Taste of Louisiana," starring chef John Folse.

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Messages of respect, hope, and frustration have appeared in our largely empty public spaces.

The bright yellow wall with bold, black words shouts for attention. Next to it there is a figure wearing sunglasses and a face mask, holding open a coat to reveal the word “HOPE” tucked into the pockets. Artist Corie Mattie found a wall in West Hollywood, California, and painted this mural by herself in less than 48 hours, according to her Instagram account. She is now seeking additional walls to deliver her illustrated tidings of hope.

Throughout the ages, artists have taken their messages to public spaces, from Pompeii’s walls in Roman times to New York City’s subway cars in the 1980s. Driven by the current pandemic and its unique aesthetic—knobby viruses, face masks, messages of solidarity—creatives around the world have continued to express themselves publicly. Cities and beyond are studded with love for healthcare workers, cynicism for politicians, frustration at the crisis, or simple encouragement.

Atlas Obscura has compiled a collection of these messages—direct, witty, poignant. The streets may be mostly empty of people during lockdown, but they're not empty of humanity.

Yancia the bulldog even made the local paper: "This Seattle Dog Wears Flu Mask."

Dr. Woods Hutchinson had opinions about a certain epidemic. "The reason for the spread? Pig-headedness, not another thing," he raged in in Des Moines on November 25, 1918. "We knew it was prevalent in Europe and that it would find its way here." His speech on the so-called Spanish influenza was colorful, to say the least. "The 'flu' germ doesn't care a hang for your state of mind," he noted. "After he takes up residence in your nose, he doesn't give a blankety-blank whether you're afraid of him or not."

Nevertheless, Hutchinson was anti-quarantine. Instead, he whole-heartedly espoused the use of masks, pointing to the West Coast, where some cities made mask-wearing mandatory in public. Photos from the time show people going to and fro, with the lower halves of their faces swathed in gauze. Like today's makeshift masks, their effectiveness may have been limited. But some Americans took flu safety one step further: they masked their cats, too.

One image, dating from the years when Spanish flu rampaged across the United States, shows a unknown family of six, in Dublin, California, all wearing the standard mask of the time: "white and fastened around the head," as Catharine Arnold writes in Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History. A behatted woman holds a bouquet of flowers. And the family patriarch holds a tense-looking masked cat under his arm, like a loaf of bread. Faint wrinkles under the cat's right ear show where the gauze is bunching up, and a faint shadow marks the spot of its triangular nose.

People worldwide are fretting over their pets catching COVID-19: A recent study suggested that cats can contract it, at least under laboratory conditions. Dogs seem to be less susceptible, though dog masks have popped up on eBay. In February, news stories showed unfortunate cats in China whose owners covered their faces completely with masks, simply punching out holes for the eyes.

The photos inspired worldwide hilarity, and perhaps they were meant to—it's hard to imagine a cat actually putting up with a face mask for any significant amount of time. Humor may have been a motivation for photographs of masked pets from the early-20th century, as well. The families and friends in these images may have felt fear, apprehension, or even the weight of history on their shoulders. Putting Puss in a mask probably would have lightened the mood.

But there was genuine fear that pets could carry Spanish influenza. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, one councilman insisted that dogs and cats were responsible for the spread of the illness, proposing that they all be killed or at the very least shaved to prevent more infections. In Phoenix, it was rumored that dogs could carry influenza. Police killed strays, while some people killed their own pets. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some influenza viruses can pass from certain birds and mammals to humans, though it's rare for them to directly make the jump to people.

When dogs did get the mask treatment, it was treated as a joke. "What is believed to be the first masked ball game ever staged," trumpeted once newspaper, when two teams went head-to-head in Pasadena, California, in early 1919. The umpires, players, spectators, and the mascot's dog gathered for the game in linen and cheesecloth masks. The dog's picture made the local paper, as did that of Yancia, a 5-year-old Boston bulldog whose masked muzzle graced the pages of The Seattle Star in late 1918. "This Seattle Dog Wears Flu Mask" read the headline, and her owner told the paper that "she has made the best of it in good spirit, as we all have."

According to Tyler Phillips of the Dublin Heritage Park & Museum, the identity of the family of six was who posed with their cat a century ago is unknown. The same is not true of another photo, taken in 1918. In it, five women and two cats sit on a porch. All of them are wearing masks. The names of the women and the cats are listed on the back: “Top row, Anna Kilgore, E.K. Barr, Ms. Anna S. Shaw. Lower row, Penelope and Tommy, Mrs. Shaw and Golly.”

The photo is part of the collection of Dan Eskenazi, the curator of Seattle's Giant Shoe Museum. Eskenazi's friend Pat Dorpat, a columnist and historian, found that four of the five women lived together in a still-standing house on 43rd Street in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. One can imagine the ladies—bored roommates during a seemingly endless epidemic—trooping outside in their glorious hats, then slipping the inglorious masks over Tommy and Golly's heads. The photographer who snapped their photo captured a moment of levity in the middle of a scourge.