Dinah is a local legend for saving Stenton House—but she should be remembered for much more.

The unmarked grave of Dinah, a formerly enslaved Philadelphian who has become a local legend in the two centuries since her death, could be under any of the six grassy acres that make up Philadelphia’s Stenton Park. Her remains could be under the playground, picnic tables, or line of trees surrounding Stenton, a colonial-era mansion that belonged to James Logan. “We know she was buried somewhere on the grounds,” says Kaelyn Barr, director of education at the Stenton House Museum & Gardens. “We are not sure where.”

There is little doubt about James Logan’s place in history: He immigrated from Ireland in 1699, served as secretary to Pennsylvania founder William Penn, befriended Benjamin Franklin, assembled one of the finest libraries in the colonies, and negotiated with the Lenni-Lenape Nation. But we know barely anything about Dinah. She was one of several enslaved African Americans who lived and worked at Stenton in the 18th century, and is said to have saved the mansion from British forces in 1777. Now she is about to get her own permanent monument—one that is over a century in the making.

Dinah’s year and place of birth were never recorded, but according to a manumission document kept at Haverford College Library, she was enslaved as a child by the Emlen family of Philadelphia. She was brought to Stenton as part of a dowry when Hannah Emlen married James Logan’s son, William, according to his last will and testament. Dinah’s grandson, Cyrus, was also a part of the dowry, but the Emlens separated the family by keeping Dinah’s husband. (Their daughter, Bess, was already free.)

Dinah was eventually reunited with her husband at Stenton. At some point, she learned that the Emlens had sold him, and she asked the Logans to buy him. In 1757, they did, according to the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting Records. For another two decades, she was enslaved at Stenton, until she was freed on April 15, 1776. This was just months before the Declaration of Independence was signed a few miles away, and a year before British soldiers tried to burn Stenton.

In 1777, during the Revolutionary War, Dinah apparently worked at Stenton as a paid servant. In the winter, British troops torched 17 stately houses between Philadelphia and what was then its suburb, Germantown, in retaliation for American attacks at the Battle of Germantown. As a high-profile residence, Stenton was among the homes targeted.

The story goes that when two British soldiers came to set the house ablaze, Dinah was there alone. (George Logan, grandson of James, was in Europe studying medicine.) The soldiers told her their plan and headed to the barn, to find straw to use as kindling. Then a British officer rode up to the house, looking for deserters.

According to a diary kept by Deborah Norris Logan, George’s wife, Dinah cleverly directed him to the two British soldiers, who were promptly arrested. Dinah was credited with saving Stenton and its vast collection of manuscripts, which eventually became the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her story was repeated in Philadelphian history books in 1844; at first she appeared as an unnamed servant, but by 1897, her name was mentioned.

Finally, in 1910, Albanus Logan and the local Colonial Dames Society memorialized the event on a bronze plaque. It marked Dinah’s likely burial place, under an old pine tree southeast of the house. The language of the plaque was laudatory but outdated: "In memory of DINAH the Faithful Colored Caretaker of Stenton who by her quick thought and presence of mind saved the mansion from being burned by British Soldiers in the winter of 1777."

Eventually, the plaque was transferred to the Stenton House Museum to protect it from vandalism, and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation repurposed its granite base into a water fountain for the nearby playground. Four remaining drill holes were the only clue to its past function. Recently, a multimillion-dollar renovation of Stenton Park removed the stone marker entirely.

Dinah is usually remembered for defending Stenton from destruction by the British. “This is hard, because while she is honored in the community for her bravery, we also want to honor her for the person that she was,” explains Barr, the Stenton education director. “Not just because she is said to have saved the house, where, mind you, she was enslaved for a time in her life. It’s messy and complicated, and we are really hoping to do her entire story justice.”

In the absence of a physical marker, Dinah’s story may seem like a folktale—but soon, a sculptural project initiated by the museum will carve out a space dedicated to Dinah. The neighborhood is largely African-American, and museum staff asked the surrounding community what they wanted to see in the memorial. With its input, they selected Germantown-based artist Karyn Olivier, who will install a monument within the year. Its unveiling is tentatively scheduled for September 25. (Stenton House is closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the monument will sit on public grounds.)

In a city with 1,500 public sculptures, this memorial will be one of very few dedicated to an historical African-American figure. Philadelphia’s first such monument was “A Quest for Parity,” a 2017 bronze statue of 19th-century civil rights activist Octavius V. Catto, sculpted by Branley Cadet and located outside City Hall. Last year, a sculpture of an African-American girl playing basketball was unveiled at historic Smith Playground.

Olivier will create a place where viewers can remember Dinah, but also consider how little we know about her. When the artist researched her, she found only a few relevant documents. “There were some writings in historic archives with reference to her, and they speak of her with care,” Olivier says. “But it was amazing to me that there were so many unknowns.”

The monument will serve as a contemplative space connecting the historic mansion with the public park, with two engraved limestone markers and benches surrounding a small fountain. One plaque will list questions for the viewer to ask Dinah, such as: Where were you born? How did you get here? What was your greatest sorrow? How did freedom feel? The other plaque will ask questions of the visitor.

At a community meeting sponsored by Stenton House Museum & Gardens, a neighbor proposed another question for Dinah’s plaque: Did you ever wish you had let it burn? “That’s kind of a provocative statement, because the only thing we talk about is how she saved Stenton,” Olivier says, seeming to search for the right words. “But in that servitude, were there moments when—yes, it was your home—but in that repression of who you can be—maybe there’s moments for her, moments of ‘I could be free of this.’”

The barn where British soldiers gathered straw, and that Dinah famously rescued along with the house, no longer stands. Yet her name and story survived the centuries. The outlines of her life are vague, but they are still sharper than those of other enslaved men, women, and children who lived and work at Stenton, elsewhere in Philadelphia, and across the United States.

Olivier doesn’t want Dinah’s monument to neatly wrap up this history. It will be more complex than a feel-good bronze statue of a woman whose name endured, despite her oppression. “I’m interested in monuments that confound us,” she says. “How do I get away from monuments which treat history like a period at the end of a sentence? When we all know history has to be written in pencil.”

They need to get a grip.

Resilience is something shared by every surviving organism on the planet—they’ve all made it this far, through hundreds of millions of years of evolution and, so far, a few centuries of human meddling. But some species have managed to keep up with the rapid change we have brought to the world better than others, it seems. Take the anole lizards of the Western hemisphere, which may need to come to grips with intensifying hurricane seasons.

“We weren’t really sure, nobody was sure, what an anole is supposed to do during a hurricane,” says Colin Donihue, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and lead author of a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To understand how the slight reptiles respond to storm situations in real time, and unable to watch them during an actual hurricane, the team set about recreating a major storm.

“We got a leaf blower set up, and we filmed these lizards as they reacted to those hurricane-force winds,” Donihue says. “The lizards consistently reposition themselves around the perch so that they’re in the lee. A lot of the time, their back legs would get thrown off and they’d hold on with just their front legs.”

Grip can be a matter of life or death for a tropical lizard. The ability to scamper up and cling to a tree trunk to avoid a prowling cat is critical. And a hurricane is another kind of threat entirely; because of storm surges, hiding among tree roots is out of the question, and the winds are strong enough to take out trees and houses. What chance does a small lizard have against that?

The key to the anole’s grip is its toe pads, which provide traction that can vary based on their size. Donihue’s team wanted to understand how the surface area of these pads has varied from generation to generation in populations that survived storms. They began their hunt in Turks and Caicos in 2017, where the local anole—Anolis scriptus—showed that something was afoot.

“After Irma and Maria barreled through, that was the first indication that hurricanes had driven natural selections,” Donihue says. “The lizard survivors of the hurricanes had traits that differed from the population at large before the hurricane hit.”

They found that the size of the anoles’ mitts correspond to the severe storms that have torn through tropical regions in the last few years. The extreme weather blew smaller-footed lizards into oblivion, leaving only those with sufficient pedal wherewithal—larger toe pads—to breed the next generation, a textbook case of natural (in this case somewhat unnatural) selection. In the recent paper, Donihue’s team extended beyond Turks and Caicos to nearly 200 anole species ranging from Florida to Brazil, and saw the same trend.

It remains to be determined whether there’s a limit on toe pad growth, Doniue adds, though one must exist. They still have to be able to walk around.

“There must be a tradeoff between having big toe pads during a hurricane and not having absolutely massive toe pads that are so big you can’t really be a good lizard,” he says. “When I talk about being a good lizard, I mean having traits that give you an advantage in all the things you need to survive. Those traits aren’t necessarily the same as those traits that help you survive in a hurricane.”

Show us how you navigate your world today.

When most people picture tools, they’re thinking of a hammer, or a wrench, or a screwdriver. They help us change the world around us, but when it comes to understanding that world, there’s one tool that stands out from the rest: maps.

The oldest surviving world map we know of is a depiction of Mesopotamia etched into a clay tablet more than 2,500 years ago. Since then, they’ve been used for trade, navigation, art, and much much more—including as a form of escapism. In 17th-century Japan, for example, illustrated maps were often used as a way to traverse the country without leaving home—one map of the famous Tōkaidō Highroad measures 117 feet long. It’s a trip in and of itself.

It should come as no surprise that we love maps here at Atlas Obscura. We’ve shared quite a few of them, some hand-drawn, some filled with incredible detail, others that plot out places that don’t exist. Now, we want you to be the cartographer.

Think about, or have your kids think about, the place you want to map—especially within the new limits we’re all living under. It could be your home, the route you take on a daily walk, the world you see from your window. Then imagine the form you want it to take. And then grab what you have on hand and make a representation of your world and share it with us and your fellow readers. Here are a few of our favorite approaches.

Illustrated Maps

Use drawings and doodles within your map to highlight some of the best parts of a place. In The New York Times, illustrator Nate Padavick offers step-by-step instructions for making your own illustrated map. Don’t worry so much about accuracy—it’s more important to represent how a place feels to you than to capture exactly how far apart two streets are.

Thematic Maps

Pick out a theme and focus your map on it. You could plot the location of all the outlets in your house, or every Japanese restaurant in Honolulu. Or you could bring together your neighborhood trees, favorite buildings, or the restaurants still doing takeout.

Sensory Maps

Many maps are focused on what you see, but that doesn’t mean they can’t excite the other senses. Try making a map that relies on another sense, such as taste, touch, or smell. Could you chart the different flavors and textures in a meal, or all the different smells in your backyard, or how things sound different at each window in your home? For inspiration, check out this project that maps smells found across different cities.

Mix and match as many of these different approaches as you want to create something totally unique, then share it with us! No matter how simple or or advanced, we want to see them. You can post in Atlas Obscura’s forums, on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, or email them to us at places@atlasobscura.com. We’ll publish some of our favorite ones in a future article.

Clouds are "a wilderness within everybody's grasp."

If you have been hunkered down at home for several weeks, you may miss the sight of crashing waves, the smell of a damp forest or spring flowers, the happy ache in your legs as you tromp up a steep trail, or the sound of voices drifting across picnic blankets in a crowded park. If you wear a mask when you venture out, you might even miss something as simple as the feeling of the wind on your cheeks. There are still ways to stay tethered to the natural world in the time of social distancing, but it’s not quite the same as being out there.

But wherever you are, you can still look out the window and up at clouds. They’re always up there, from Mongolia to Manhattan. The sky “is a wilderness within everybody’s grasp,” says Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. “It’s the part of nature that comes to us.” Here are a few ways to marvel at and identify the meteorological mainstays and what they mean—anytime, anywhere.

Decide on a strategy

There are two main ways to approach cloud-watching, Pretor-Pinney says. One is “dreamy” and the other is “the more geeky way of doing it.” He recommends trying both.

The first approach is wistful—picture propping your chin against your hand and watching shapes drift across the sky. It’s a bit of a “meteorological meditation moment,” Pretor-Pinney says. “You’re not going to be worrying too much about what formation it is and why it looks the way it does.” It is an invitation to be awed by “something so common, everyday, and mundane that we’ve become blind to it. It’s an exercise in bringing to the foreground what’s generally in the background.” At a time when many people are spending nearly every waking hour stooped over phones or computers, there’s value, he says, in pulling our eyes up to the sky, above our worries, and simply “reminding us that we aren’t the center of the world.”

The other approach is more about trying to make sense of the sky. If you want to name what you see, brush up on the cloud types that you might vaguely remember from elementary-school science. Cirrus, cumulus, and stratus clouds were classified in 1802 by Luke Howard, an English pharmacist and meteorology buff. Since then, many more cloud types have been recorded—10 regulars at various altitudes, and then a handful of wildcards. And new classifications are still emerging. A little more than a decade ago, the Cloud Appreciation Society proposed a new cloud type, asperitas, marked by turbulent shapes that look like upside-down waves. Now they’re official: Asperitas is in the World Meteorological Association’s International Cloud Atlas. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a visual cloud-type primer for kids that is a solid reference for adults, too.

Carve out a little time

Cloud-spotting is a miniature pause from the rest of your life. “To watch the way a cloud changes is to force you to slow down, because it generally happens at quite a gradual pace,” Pretor-Pinney says. But it needn’t take hours. “You don’t have to spend your whole day walking around gazing at the sky and getting run over by a taxi,” he adds. Maybe set a reminder on your phone to stop and look up at the sky for a minute or so when you’re out walking the dog. “See it, engage with it for a few moments, and then carry on doing your thing,” he adds.

Grab some tools

You don’t need much, but to improve the contrast between the clouds and the rest of the sky, you might want polarized sunglasses. If you’re hoping to identify the clouds, you may want a so-called Cloud Selector, which has a little wheel that spins and allows you to align an image of the type of cloud you see with its name and some facts about it. (The Royal Meteorological Society and National Weather Service both have versions you can print and assemble at home.) The Cloud Appreciation Society’s Cloud-A-Day app also has instructions for identifying dozens of cloud formations and several optical effects.

Figure out what to look for and when

Though you’ll almost always be able to see something, certain cloud formations are more likely to show up at particular places or certain times of year. Pretor-Pinney particularly digs lenticular clouds, which look like flying saucers. He has seen fantastic examples in Minden, Nevada, near the Sierra Nevada, and in craggy Scotland, too. Since lenticular clouds tend to form downwind of mountains or hills, you’re less likely to spot them if you’re surrounded by flat terrain—though it’s not unheard of.

At high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s about to be prime time for noctilucent clouds, which are visible at night throughout the summer months. Wavy and wispy and typically blue or silver, they look like special effects from a science-fiction flick. They form in the mesosphere, more than 50 miles above Earth’s surface, typically when ice crystals form on very small pieces of dust left behind by streaking meteors. When you spot them in the sky, you’re seeing evidence of past events, writ large and slightly eerie.

Predict the weather

Long before he was a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Ernie Ostuno suspected that there was a correlation between cirrus clouds and rain. As a kid working on his parents’ farm in Connecticut, where he moved irrigation pipes by hand, he kept an eye on the sky to figure out when a downpour would interrupt their work. “Meteorology has a huge impact on what you do on a farm,” he says—and as a grown-up whose job requires him to forecast the weather, he has seen that childhood hunch borne out: You can indeed predict some things about the weather by studying the clouds.

One way to distinguish fair-weather clouds from storm clouds is to watch how they grow. “If you see little puffy cumulus clouds starting to grow upward, vertically, that could be an indication that there are going to be severe storms,” he says. There’s an old saying about clouds that look like “mare’s tails and mackerel scales” portending rain, and Ostuno says that the adage actually holds water. The whimsical descriptions nod to the appearance of cirrus and altocumulus clouds, the Farmer’s Almanac reports. The sight of them suggests that precipitation could arrive within a day or so, Ostuno adds, because they typically appear ahead of a warm front.

Use your body

You can use your limbs to help make sense of what you see, too. To distinguish between low-hanging stratocumulus clouds (clumpy waves), mid-level altocumulus (cotton balls scattered across the sky), and the higher cirrocumulus clouds (scraps of spilled confetti), use your fingers. Put up your three middle fingers, and then extend your outstretched arm at an angle of around 60 degrees above the horizon. It’s not a perfect science, Pretor-Pinney says: “Everything in cloud-spotting is a gray area, literally.” The gist is, you’re comparing the band of clouds to the width of your fingers. Stratocumulus clouds will be wider than the three and cirrocumulus will be narrower than one, while altocumulus clouds fall in between.

You can also use a raised fist to navigate the sky and find your way to cool optical effects caused by clouds. Take sun dogs, halos that form near the sun when the light refracts through ice crystals. On an evening when you see lots of wispy cirrus clouds, wait until the sun sinks low. Then stretch your thumb and pinky apart, to form an angle of about 22 degrees. Use that measurement to find spots 22 degrees from either side of the sun. You’re looking for reddish spots that almost look like secondary suns. Those polarized sunglasses might come in especially handy for this.

Cloud-gazing, Pretor-Pinney says, is a way of “being an explorer of the sky, where you don’t have to leave your lockdown space.” The only souvenirs you’ll have will be photos and memories, but in a lonely, uncertain time, it helps to have a little perspective, and see things bigger than us, indifferent to us, he adds: “Seeing something, paying attention to it, and letting it go.”

Eat like ancient Great Plains hunters with this simple recipe.

In Secrets of Polar Travel, explorer Robert Peary spends several pages waxing poetic about the merits of a ration he brought on his expeditions to the Arctic between 1886 and 1909. In addition to ranking it “first in importance” among his supplies, he genuinely enjoyed the food, writing that it was the only meal “a man can eat twice a day for three hundred and sixty-five days in a year and have the last mouthful taste as good as the first.”

Peary was talking about pemmican, a blend of rendered fat and powdered, dried meat that fueled exploration and expansion long before his attempts to reach the North Pole. Archaeological evidence suggests that as early as 2800 BC humans hunted the bison that roamed North America’s Great Plains and blended their meat, fat, and marrow into energy-dense patties with a serious shelf-life. A single pound of pemmican lasted for years and might’ve packed as many as 3,500 calories.

“Pemmican is a legit ancient indigenous energy bar,” says Shane Chartrand, a chef from the Enoch Cree Nation in central Alberta. Chartrand’s cookbook, tawâw (which, in Cree, means “come in, you’re welcome, there’s room”), contains a recipe for salmon-based pemmican, but he believes the food’s value lies in function more than flavor.

“Some things are not meant to taste good; they’re meant to make you survive. I’ve hunted all my life. When you’re way out there and you’re starving and you can feel your body breaking down and you’re tired and your sugars are low, it doesn’t matter if it tastes good. You want something that helps you live and helps you keep moving. That was pemmican.”

Archaeologists theorize that it was pemmican’s ability to help early Plains cultures keep moving that allowed them to spread and develop into the many indigenous groups that exist across the Northern United States and Canada today. As different cultures—from Cree to Ojibwe to Blackfoot to Sioux—made their own versions over subsequent millennia, names and recipes varied. Most makers used bison, while others opted for venison or fish. Some blended in dried chokecherries or saskatoons, while others cooked the final patty into a stew known as rubaboo. The end result was always high-octane, easily-portable nourishment.

By the 1770s, pemmican had attracted the attention of fur-trading companies that were expanding across British-controlled Canada. As voyageurs burned massive amounts of calories paddling canoes loaded with goods, they turned to pemmican to replace their inadequate corn-heavy diets. The Métis, a community of skilled bison hunters descended from French voyageurs and their indigenous wives, dominated the pemmican trade. In the early 1800s, the food became such a coveted commodity that actual battles over access—known as the Pemmican War—broke out between fur traders, settlers, and Métis. But pemmican’s popularity would be its undoing. By the 1880s, overhunting had caused the near-extinction of the American bison and, as a result, the decline of the food itself.

Some indigenous communities still make pemmican today, though, and it’s not difficult to make your own. The below recipe simply requires lard, meat, berries, and the patience to wait while the ingredients dry. While modern diners might not find themselves as enamored as a delicacy-deprived hunter or explorer, the slightly sweet-and-savory result offers a glimpse into the flavor and fuel behind North America’s original energy bar.

Inspired by the Recipe From FirstNations.org

1 cup dried meat (bison, venison, or beef)
1/3 cup dried berries
2 tablespoons lard (do not substitute shortening or butter)
Optional: sugar to taste

1. Dry the Meat

Whatever you choose for your meat, make sure it’s lean. Remember that it’s going to shrink as it dries (condensing nourishment into a smaller package is one of pemmican’s greatest qualities). For instance, about 1.5–2 pounds of raw beef will yield about 1.5–2 cups when dried. Cut against the grain into strips (chilling the meat in the freezer for an hour beforehand makes for cleaner cutting), lay out on a sheet, and place in an oven preheated to its lowest setting, typically around 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Depending on the thickness of your meat, it could take up to 12 hours to fully dry. You’ll know the meat is ready when it’s dry but still pliable.

For anyone who thinks buying beef jerky is a nice shortcut, think again: As historical-food re-creator Jon Townsend points out, commercial jerky has preservatives such as nitrates, which will negatively alter the final flavor, and it’s cut with the grain, which will make it more difficult to grind the meat into a powder.

2. Dry the Berries

Chokecherries or saskatoons are the most traditional choices, but blueberries, cranberries, and most other berries will also work. If you have fresh berries, you can either use a food dehydrator or an oven set to low heat. Depending on your equipment, times for drying out the berries can vary greatly, from several hours to a full day. If using an oven, break the berries’ skins (slicing or poking holes works fine) to allow their juice to evaporate. Keep an eye on them. You’ll know they’re ready when they’re completely dry with no juice left.

3. Make the Lard

If you don’t have lard lurking in the fridge, you can buy it premade or make it yourself. The first option is easier, but requires some sleuthing, as many prepackaged lards use unhealthy preservatives. Look for non-hydrogenated options.

But if you want reliably high-quality lard, you should make it yourself. Order some fatback or leaf fat from your local butcher. (Call ahead to see if there’s a way to arrange safe delivery or pickup. They won’t find it weird if you ask for a big batch of fat. People use lard for a multitude of reasons, so they’ve likely done this before.)

As with the meat, briefly chill the fat in the freezer, then cut it into small cubes. Place the fat in a slow-cooker or a pot on the stovetop with ¼ cup of water. Both should be set to low. The process typically takes two to four hours. Periodically check the pot, stirring occasionally. You’ll know it’s ready when most of the cubes have liquified. Filter out any cracklings with a strainer and cheesecloth or paper towel, then place the liquid in an air-tight container. Leave out at room temperature until it starts to set, then move to the refrigerator.

4. Make the Pemmican

Now it’s time to make your meat powder. Grind the dried meat in a food processor or, if you want to approximate the traditional method of a pounding stone, get your hands on a mortar and pestle. Repeat with the berries and combine the powders in a bowl. Melt 2 tablespoons of lard, then add to the bowl and mix until it’s sticky enough to be formed into patties. Add another tablespoon of lard if the mixture is still too powdery. If you’d like to add sugar, use about one tablespoon. Shape into patties and let dry.

The results won’t be beautiful, but appearances don’t seem to stop anyone from eating today’s bland-brick energy bars. Grab a piece of pemmican and savor the flavor of one of history’s oldest enduring meals.

“You can hear the creaks, smell the grain—you really feel the age of it.”

The Sturminster Newton Mill has quietly churned on the verdant banks of the River Stour since the 11th century. Through the Norman Conquest and the Black Death, through the Hundred Years War and the Blitz, its water-powered turbine ground wheat into countless sacks of flour for the markets of this medieval town. Even when it became a museum in 1994, the mill continued production, albeit tiny batches of flour to show tourists a bygone way of living.

The mill will grind through COVID-19 as well—just not as a museum.

With flour shortages dogging the United Kingdom and potential visitors trapped at home, the caretakers of Sturminster Newton’s ancient mill have pivoted from performance to production. “When you just have to mill and you don’t have to give a history lesson at the same time, you can just get on with it,” says miller Imogen Bittner. Since its return to the grind in early March, Bittner and her co-worker, Pete Loosmoore, have produced hundreds of pounds of flour to be safely distributed by several local businesses. While the mill needs the revenue as badly as area families need the flour, it’s not exactly what the pair had in mind for this year’s tourist season.

Bittner was born and raised within a short walk of the mill. “It’s something I’ve known all my life,” she says. With Loosmoore on the cusp of retirement, it’s something she’s due to operate on her own soon, as well. She had just finished securing supplies for the season when they decided to close in mid-March with COVID-19 at the gates. “We’d brought in all the grain from the local farm, had it all stacked and ready to go,” says Bittner, “but a lot of the volunteer staff are in a vulnerable age group.”

Most years, between April and September, visitors explore the quaint property and tour the mill to witness a medieval undertaking: harnessing the Stour River to grind local grain with simple machinery. “It’s done very much how it was hundreds of years ago,” says Bittner. “The only thing is we use a Ford Transit to get supplies now and not a hand-pulled cart—bit quicker this way.” The sale of both tickets and the modest amount of flour it produces keeps the museum open, a model that COVID-19 swiftly thwarted.

At the same time, the pandemic also precipitated severe flour shortages throughout much of the country, though not for reasons you might suspect. There’s plenty of flour within England, but it’s all in the wrong bags: Only about 4 percent of the flour produced in the U.K. is sold through supermarkets—the rest is packed and shipped in bulk to commercial bakeries and other manufacturers. Even if larger mills could manage the pivot to smaller packaging, social distancing would preclude industrial-scale production, which demands many hands. Pre-industrial milling, however, can be managed single handedly.

For Bittner, it wasn’t much of a decision: “It was more of a logical step, really.”

As soon as Bittner and Loosmoore found several local shops and bakers to sell their flour, they got the old mill cranking. “When we’re taking visitors, we have to mill very slowly so the flour doesn’t spill out,” says Bittner, “but when you’re actually milling to mill, it’s different.” To date, Bittner and Loosmoore estimate that they have ground and sold just under 1,600 pounds of flour.

Bittner quickly dismisses questions over the durability of the mill’s machinery. “The mill could easily do 10 times what it’s doing today,” she says, calling it “very solid,” with a water turbine that was “just changed” in 1904. “It could go on forever,” says Bittner, “it’s we who get tired.” She says as long as the flour shortage persists and social distancing is enforced, production will continue through the tourist season.

For now, the mill has been saved and the townsfolk rejoice, inundating the supermarket’s Facebook page with expressions of gratitude. (The mill itself has no social media presence.) Unsurprisingly, the millers discovered a newfound appreciation for the old mill, as well. “It’s different when no one's around,” says Bittner, “you can hear its creaks, smell its grain—you can really feel the age of it.” It’s not the first crisis this building has seen; thanks to its stubbornness, it’s not the last one it will survive, either.

Arturo Schomburg's work is still inspiring researchers and cooks today.

The story that Arturo Schomburg would often tell went something like this: When he was a child in late 19th-century Puerto Rico, his 5th-grade teacher told him that Black people had no history, no heroes, and no great moments. The remark filled him with fury. He’d been born to a Black mother and German father. The incident kindled a lifelong quest to prove the instructor wrong.

There are conflicting claims as to whether Schomburg fabricated this anecdote. The legend is certainly in keeping with the overarching logic of his biography: Schomburg would move to Harlem in 1891, becoming a towering figure of the Harlem Renaissance, which reached its zenith in the 1920s. “The Negro has been a man without history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture,” he lamented in his influential 1925 essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” He succeeded in changing such perceptions through his writing and preservation of artifacts that could easily have evaded the public gaze, such as artwork and slave narratives.

Bibliophile, historian, scholar—the words that spring to mind when one hears Schomburg’s name have rarely included “gastronome.” But recipes were objects of scholarly obsession for him, too, where he located what he termed “Negro genius.”

Schomburg’s passion for food was no passing fancy. Around 1930, just eight years before his death at 64, he began writing a cookbook, hoping to assemble 400 Afro-Atlantic recipes that showcased the breadth of Black ingenuity in the kitchen. He never finished it, and no one quite knows why. For decades, the proposal languished as it sat in the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

In the past year, though, the proposal has suddenly gained new visibility. Schomburg’s unfinished work formed the basis of two very different books published in 2019: Rafia Zafar’s Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, and Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking. The final chapter of Zafar’s book is a detailed dissection of Schomburg’s cookbook. In Jubilee, Tipton-Martin writes that Schomburg’s outline gave her “a blueprint of black culinary history,” using his recipe list as a map for her cookbook.

That the proposal is so crucial to two divergent works—Zafar’s book is a narrative nonfiction book, while Tipton-Martin’s is a cookbook—speaks to the enduring relevance of his vision. If America wasn’t quite primed to embrace a project of Schomburg’s ambition in the decades after his death, it certainly is now.

Schomburg didn’t even title the mere 22 pages of the cookbook. These remnants contain only one recipe, for gumbo smoothed with slices of okra or filé powder, the dried and ground leaves from a sassafras tree. He obtained this particular recipe from the writer Lafcadio Hearn’s La Cuisine Creole, a cookbook published in 1885. Schomburg indicated that he planned to use some recipes from working chefs and caterers, but it’s unclear where he planned to source others. In her book, Zafar hypothesizes that Schomburg likely would have looked to extant recipe books such as Hearn’s for more inspiration.

Schomburg listed out, one by one, hundreds of recipes that would populate his hypothetical cookbook. For breakfast, items such as kidney omelets, shrimp with hominy, or conserve of wild roses. Dinners of turtle soup, crawfish bisque, or squab pies. Suppers of grapefruit aspic with almonds, fresh fig ice cream, or pickled asparagus. Though Schomburg’s stated intentions were to include “various specialties from Haiti and the West Indies,” his recipe list skewed disproportionately towards his adoptive home of the United States, indicating that this recipe roadmap may not have matched his geographical aims.

These recipes would sit alongside biographical sketches of “famous Negro cooks,” though he also sought to highlight the “anonymous thousands” of brilliant cooks whose names no one else thought to record. His primary goal was to “show how the negro genius has adapted the English, French, Spanish and Colonial receipts taught him by his masters just as he adapted the stern Methodist hymns and the dour tenets of Protestantism—to his own temperamental needs,” he wrote.

The sheer scale of such a pursuit may explain why Schomburg couldn’t complete his cookbook: It was a massive undertaking. All-purpose cookbooks like Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking commanded popular attention in the era. Had Schomburg completed it, that cookbook would’ve been unlike any America had ever seen.

Because the cookbook went unpublished, though, it existed as a mere footnote to Schomburg’s legacy following his demise. The proposal quietly started gaining traction in scholarly circles in 1984, when the academic John Brown Childs posited that Schomburg’s work “offers important hints for an expanded consideration of Afro-American cooking” in an article for the journal Theory and Society. It was through that article that the scholar Doris Witt learned of Schomburg’s proposal. She then decided to discuss it in the book that both Tipton-Martin and Zafar acknowledge as their introduction to Schomburg’s cookbook: Witt’s Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (1999), now a seminal study of Black foodways in America.

Witt, an associate professor at the University of Iowa, tells me that she visited the Schomburg Center in the early 90s as a graduate student working on a dissertation about the role of food in the works of Black writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. “I can remember the feeling of excitement about seeing it for myself, after having read Childs's essay,” she says, recalling how she pored over the proposal in microfilm. Schomburg essentially validated the work of people like Witt long before anyone else did. He took Black foodways seriously.

“To the best of my knowledge, all of us who work or who have worked in the area of African American food studies simply perceive that Schomburg was really the first person we know of who recognized that African diasporic foodways should indeed be a field of scholarly study,” Witt says.

Back in the 90s, though, few knew about Schomburg’s cookbook. Schomburg’s understanding of the sprawling nature of Black foodways was ahead of its time, but Witt hypothesizes that he may not have possessed the means to complete the cookbook because of its scope. He was just one man, after all.

Mentions of Schomburg’s proposal only occupy a few pages of Witt’s book. In it, she asserts that Schomburg’s manuscript went “underutilized” by scholars of the time. That lack of engagement has changed now. “That proposal was utterly inspired, truly visionary, and so I think it'll continue to be cited for years to come, and younger generations of scholars and food writers and activists will return to it with a fresh point of view,” Witt predicts.

She isn’t surprised that interest has tilted in Schomburg’s favor in the two decades since she wrote Black Hunger. Both Tipton-Martin and Zafar were likely drawn to his proposal because it’s “a model for the kind of work they want to do,” Witt says, the “recovery of a buried past, and also using that work to disrupt limited and limiting conceptions of African American culture.”

Witt notes how Zafar, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, approaches Schomburg’s proposal with more skepticism than Witt did two decades ago. Why, for example, does his list of recipes contain so little from the Caribbean and South America, in spite of his upbringing in Puerto Rico?

Questions like these nagged at Zafar when she stumbled upon his proposal in 2014, the year that a residency from the National Endowment for Humanities brought her to the Schomburg Center. “There, returning to the Schomburg text when surrounded by his presence, I found myself drawn deeper into the mysteries surrounding the text—when and why did he write it?” Zafar tells me. “Why didn’t he finish it?”

Encountering Schomburg’s proposal felt like a clarifying moment for Zafar: She didn’t even know about his cookbook when she first began work on Recipes for Respect, yet his project seemed spiritually linked with hers. Her aspirations mirrored what Schomburg had attempted nearly a century ago. “Knowing the singular importance of the Schomburg archive as I did and do, devoting a chapter to this tantalizingly unfinished project just made sense,” she says.

Zafar has a few conjectures as to why Schomburg’s proposal is such an ignored part of his legacy. The text is one of the few documented indications of his interest in food, for one. “As a married man of his generation, he probably did little to no cooking for his family,” Zafar says. The proposal is also somewhat inaccessible. It’s hard to find at the Schomburg Center, if you aren’t looking for it.

Writing about Schomburg’s proposal, though, taught Zafar a great deal about the man himself. She learned he was a lover of good meals and good company. Spending so much time with Schomburg’s work reminded Zafar of his greater importance to the study of African American history.“Schomburg sought to capture the world of African diaspora food culture because he saw knowledge about the Black world as key to moving us all forward,” she says.

Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee, then, reads like the direct outcome of Schomburg’s forward-looking vision. As she writes in Jubilee, Tipton-Martin began working on the book as a follow-up to 2015’s The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, her comprehensive study of cookbooks authored by Black women in the United States. Schomburg’s list of recipes provided her with a framework that she applied to the cookbooks she featured in The Jemima Code. She looked for patterns and recurrences in recipes that could tell her about the stamina of certain recipes across time.

In Jubilee, the “West Indies pork” that Schomburg lists in his proposal becomes a Caribbean roast pork flavored with rum, ginger, and allspice, grabbing cues from recipes by the artist John Pinderhughes and the singer Kelis. In the headnote for her corn and potato chowder with crab (inspired yet again by a Kelis recipe), Tipton-Martin nods to the butler William Deas’ legendary recipe for she-crab soup that Schomburg mentioned in his proposal. Like Zafar, Tipton-Martin finds room to acknowledge Schomburg’s blind spots, too, expressing surprise at how few cookies and cakes were in his list of recipes, in spite of what Tipton-Martin calls “a legacy of African American proficiency in baking.”

These gaps don’t diminish the prescience of Schomburg’s text. They just remind us that the proposal may best be read as an invitation to build on his life’s work and refine it, as if he foresaw that writers a century later would still be working to illuminate Black genius through food. His mission, born out of determination to find worth where others refuse to see it, isn’t over. Schomburg’s cookbook proposal gestures towards a future where the dominant culture finally honors Black creative wisdom instead of subjugating it. He knew that a people’s history, heroes, and great moments can be found in their food, too.

Join Gastro Obscura and the Museum of Food and Drink on Sunday May 3rd, 2020, for an online conversation with Dr. Rafia Zafar and Chef Therese Nelson on Dr. Zafar’s work, food writing as historical memoir, and the foundational legacy of Black culinary life.

A UCLA librarian has built a remarkable collection of century-old letters, diaries, and photographs.

On November 21, 1918, an Indianapolis schoolteacher named Hildreth Heiney wrote to her deployed fiancé, Sergeant Kleber Hadley, about the sudden appearance of face masks in response to the global influenza pandemic. “Yes, I wore one, and so did everybody else,” she wrote cheerfully. “There were all kinds—large and small—thick and thin, some embroidered and one cat-stitched around the edge.” An order to wear masks in public had just taken effect in Indiana, and Heiney seemed to take it in stride. “O, this is a great old world!” she went on, poking fun at funny-looking mask-wearers. “And one should surely have a sense of humor.”

Heiney’s colorful letters are part of a remarkable collection of “personal narratives, manuscripts, and ephemera” about the 1918–1919 flu in the biomedical library of the University of California, Los Angeles. There are letters from California mayors about influenza death rates; Thanksgiving postcards written by children; and laconic Yankee diaries, such as this tragic entry from a Mrs. Slater: “Rained. Spent the day home. Veree Clark died of influenza. E.F. King's wife funeral. Buzzed wood home.”

Russell Johnson, a curator of history and special collections for the sciences at the UCLA Library, says that he created this intimate collection “from scratch.” Originally slated for a career in behavioral neuroscience, Johnson ended up in library school instead, where he studied the history of neuroscience and medicine. “I fell in love with cataloguing,” he says.

Today, the influenza collection includes boxes of original letters, diaries, and photographs from 1918 and 1919. In these century-old artifacts, civilians and military personnel recount harrowing and sometimes humorous experiences of life in the shadow of influenza. Many of them have special resonance in the time of COVID-19. Atlas Obscura asked Johnson how he amassed the collection, what unique lessons can be learned from these personal stories, and what became of a soldier named Alton Miller.

How did you start putting this collection together?

The UCLA biomedical library covers the history of medicine and science. Contagious diseases, such as smallpox and cholera, have always been part of what we collect. About 10 or 12 years ago, with the anniversary of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic coming up, I wasn’t seeing much in the way of personal letters and diaries. So I just started buying them individually, a lot through eBay. Now they’ve become very competitive to get on eBay, because other people are looking for them.

Who’s selling you personal letters and diaries from 1918?

Sometimes people come into big troves of letters and diaries [through family]. Or they’ll find things in storage lockers that were sold off, or estate sales. I never go to estate sales myself because they’re so competitive, but I depend on other people to go and sell to us. For example, once people saw that we were creating this collection, a bookseller up in Berkeley sold us the album of the complete Alton Miller correspondence. Booksellers love to find stuff for us. They like building collections with institutions and collectors.

Can you describe the Alton Miller correspondence?

It starts with this young man who is a chauffeur or driver. He's inducted into the army and starts off at Fort Dix in New Jersey. He writes home to a sister, Adah, and to his mother and his father. We don't see their letters, so I think what we're seeing is probably what Adah held onto. Alton transfers to Camp Zachary Taylor, in Louisville, Kentucky, and writes to his father on October 5:

“Don’t get frightened but I have had the influenza for four days but I have not let the authorities know about it.… Our hospitals are overcrowded here and I think in another week the whole camp will be quarantined. The treatment you get in the hospitals is absolutely rotten, they say. It is so crowded that you don’t get enough to eat and it is very dirty and most of the nurses and attendants have got it, too.... Once get in you have a hard job getting out.”

Then he writes letters to his sister that paint a little more serious picture than what he told his parents:

On October 5: “There are nearly 10,000 cases down here and 22 deaths were added today. I don’t know how many deaths there are all together.”

On October 6: “Adah, ambulances are running in every direction out here. They haven’t closed the camp yet, but I think they will soon. I am coming in good shape. I am very glad I did not report it and go to the hospital. They say you are lucky if you get out alive once you get in.”

And then you see a letter from a friend and from the chaplain essentially saying to the parents, “You should come, your son is in the hospital with influenza.”

Then you see an October 11 telegram from the army, saying: “Your son Alton Miller died at base hospital at one o’clock today. Wire me if you want remains shipped at government expense and to whom remains will be consigned." It's heartbreaking. There's a couple of condolence letters, and then this medal at the end that was awarded the year after the war, by the community, to Alton’s mother.

How come there are so many letters available from this time?

This was during World War I, and soldiers could send letters for free, indicated by the label “soldiers’ mail.” You also see some letterheads from such institutions as the YMCA, or other organizations that provided free stationery to soldiers. Soldiers were encouraged to write. The expectation was that you do your day’s work, and then at night you sit down and write two or three letters, even when overseas. The amount of mail that went back and forth between soldiers and families is just incredible. It would be like texting today.

What can you learn from these personal narratives that you can’t really glean from reading the news and public announcements from the time?

You learn a lot of particulars of how people dealt with each other. It’s the very personal, very immediate experience that you don’t see in the news or an official report. People are talking about the inconveniences of theaters and shops being closed, or people wearing masks and how funny, how odd they look. Then it becomes commonplace because everyone is doing it.

Then there’s the day-to-day life into which influenza was intruding. When people were talking about others dying, they would distinguish whether it was with the influenza or something else—because everything else was still happening, like it is now. We're so focused on coronavirus, and yet people are still having babies. People are still dying from heart attacks and cancer. Sometimes you might forget that this is just a component of our lives, or their lives in 1918.

What did you learn from these letters that surprised you the most?

In many letters, like that diary of Mrs. Slater, or the letters from Hildreth to her fiancé Kleber, was how much the influenza became a part of their lives—but it just seemed to be one more part of their lives. There was tragedy, but they overcame it. And the humor that they could use! Hildreth was a schoolteacher. At first, when the schools were closed, she called it a vacation: “The four weeks of vacation as a result of the epidemic of influenza almost cured me of any desire to teach school,” she wrote. There's still this time to joke with her fiancé. Even though this horrible stuff was happening around them, life went on.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Gaze into the depths of the ocean—from space.

After five rounds of eye-popping competition, NASA’s Earth Observatory has anointed a winner in its Tournament Earth contest‚ the ideal springtime bracket challenge for science and photography nerds. If you’re keen to take a mental vacation from the woes of this world, let your eyes wander the details in the winning image—a depiction of ocean sand and seaweed in the Bahamas, snapped from space.

Home to deep trenches and busy volcanoes, the ocean floor is anything but flat—and in addition to these persistent geological features, the watery terrain is also continuously shaped by currents and tides. Those forces sculpt and whittle the ground into some pretty striking shapes, such as the jagged forms depicted in this winning false-color image, captured by the Landsat 7 satellite in 2001.

This image was favored by 66 percent of voters who cast an online ballot in the final round of the tournament. It bested the plume spewing from the Raikoke Volcano, an image of the Moon passing between a spacecraft and Earth, and a glimpse of our planet as a little freckle from the Cassini spacecraft, roughly a billion miles from Earth. (More than 165 images of Saturn’s icy, dusty rings were stitched together, and various frequencies of light were adjusted to fit into the visible spectrum; the color was tweaked to match Saturn’s true hues. Our home planet is a little speck near the top left.) The ocean image may have been voted the most wondrous, but all of the competitors are worth getting lost in.

Ancient topography lurks beneath the white expanse.

On its surface, Greenland doesn’t exactly live up to its name. It’s very cold and covered in a massive ice sheet that’s nearly two miles thick in places. But beneath that sheet there is a giant, rocky island that wasn’t always frozen over, with an undulating topography of valleys and river corridors, including one canyon as deep as the Grand Canyon in places and longer than its famous cousin—spanning the distance from New York to Washington, D.C., twice over.

“The Grand Canyon is something you can stand on the edge and see,” says Benjamin Keisling, a geologist and lead author of a new study on the formation of Greenland’s canyon published in the journal Geology. “The Greenland canyon we only know about through radar that can see through three kilometers of solid ice.”

According to the study, the canyon in northern Greenland came to be through repeated heavy flood events that forced water through the bedrock. “The canyon has been mapped before by other teams, but it’s also been enigmatic why it exists, and what relationship it has with the ice sheet itself,” says Keisling, a geologist now at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who conducted the work as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “We proposed a mechanism for how the canyon may have formed.”

Temperatures on Earth have long fluctuated, most recently in the famous ice ages of the Pleistocene, which ended a little over 10,000 years ago. Over the course of many older fluctuations, dating back more than two million years, the Greenland ice sheet—the second largest in the world, to Antarctica's—has had the chance to thaw, refreeze, and thaw again. Keisling’s team proposes that in times of rapid thawing, water may have collected in the depressed bedrock, and then broken through ice dams in diluvian outbursts, scouring the land with immense pressure.

The alternative theory for the shaping of the canyons would be the scraping erosion of glacial retreat and advance, the same process that created the Great Lakes and left big scrape marks in the schist of New York’s Central Park. But the canyon is too old for Greenland’s most recent ice sheet, and its veiny offshoots suggest a more liquid origin.

“We know also from previous work that when you map out the canyons underneath Greenland in a detailed fashion, they look more like river networks than if they were eroded by ice,” Keisling says.

He adds that the Greenlandic ice sheet was previously thought to have been frozen 2.7 million years ago and just stayed that way since, a concept now being challenged from multiple angles. Digging into the ancient climate through the events that shaped the land under Greenland’s ice has useful implications for the understanding of modern climate.

“We know from studies of the bedrock in Greenland that the ice sheet has disappeared in the past,” Keisling says. “Before that, a lot of people didn’t think that was possible. It revolutionizes our understanding of how the ice sheet behaves, which gives us a better understanding of how the ice sheet will behave in the future.”

At least as long as we have it.

Easy foraging can add a touch of the forest to your tea, stews, and even bath.

No trees feature more prominently in Native American folklore than evergreens. Pines are a symbol of reconciliation to the Oneida of New York state; spruce represents good fortune to the Salish tribes surrounding Puget Sound; cedars retain protective ancestral spirits for the Cherokee of the American Southeast.

If evergreens are pervasive in folklore, they're even more popular in Native American kitchens.

The indigenous practice of steeping evergreen leaves is as simple as it is ancient, though it’s no relic. “Evergreen” is a multi-purpose ingredient employed in modern indigenous households wherever evergreen trees grow. It can be sweetened and taken as tea or salted and used as a stock; believed to retain cleansing properties, it can even be employed to purify the air in your home or give your bath a detoxifying aroma. Most importantly, if you live in proximity to any number of spruce, juniper, pine, or cedar trees, you can make it yourself.

To Joseph Shawana, chef and owner of downtown Toronto restaurant Kūkŭm Kitchen, the smell of evergreen leaves simmering in a pot of water brings him back to his childhood home. “Having cedar tea brewing in the kitchen is part of any indigenous household,” he says. “Especially in the winter months when the flu is going around.” He recalls his uncles and cousins drinking the tea before heading out to play hockey, a popular sport in the Wiikwemkoong Unceded Indian Reserve where he grew up. “It just warmed them up, gave them a boost of energy before their games,” he says. At Kūkŭm Kitchen, evergreen tea closes out guests’ meals before they receive the check. “It just keeps the conversation going. It’s like being at your grandmother’s house.”

Many indigenous chefs use evergreen in braises and stews as well. “You get floral notes from that pine flavor,” he says. According to Shawana, it imparts an earthy flavor on poultry and beef, while arousing game meat’s natural flavors. “It’s what a lot of these bigger game animals like deer and moose would eat: pine branches and cedar boughs.”

While Shawana uses evergreens in their time-tested roles of drinking and cooking, he’s not afraid to break new ground at Kūkŭm. In fact, his restaurant’s most popular desert is his pine needle sorbet. “It tastes like playing out in the woods with your friend in the wintertime,” he says.

If you want to make your own multi-purpose indigenous ingredient, here’s how Chef Shawana recommends you do it.

Source your needles

While the list of evergreen trees runs long, the ones you’ll want for steeping are few: You’re looking for spruce, cedar, pine, or juniper. They all make for good evergreen, but the flavor will vary depending on the trees you find and where they’re located.

Juniper and pine offer softer, sweeter notes while spruce and cedar are more bitter, according to Shawana. Whatever you’re after, he recommends you work for it. “The deeper you go into the woods,” he says, “the more flavor the trees will have.” The fewer toxins a tree is forced to filter from cars and trucks, the better.

Once you’ve found an adequate evergreen, make sure you know exactly which species you’re sourcing from. Shawana is careful to note that the Western Red Cedar, for example, is toxic to humans– consider consulting a book or tree-identification app like iNaturalist. When you’re sure the tree is safe, there’s no need to take the whole thing home with you: Run your fingers against the grain, so to speak, to separate the leaves from the branch. Shawana does it bare-handed, but there’s no shame in bringing gloves or even scissors.

Prepare your leaves

To prepare the evergreen, set a pot of water to boil while you rinse any dirt or debris off the leaves. For every gallon of water, you’ll need one cup of leaves or needles.

Simmer

Once the water is boiling, bring down the heat, add the leaves, and simmer for 20 minutes. The leaves will turn from green to a pale brown as the simmering extracts the natural oils and your kitchen fills with a distinctly arboreal aroma.

Strain

Strain out the leaves, and the aromatic liquid that remains is a base of evergreens you can use however you’d like. Add honey or maple syrup to make it a cozy, warming tea. Add some salt and you’ve got a handy stock you can add to braises or stews for earthy flavor.

If the flavor doesn’t suit you, Shawana says evergreen features elsewhere in indigenous medical and ceremonial practice. It’s scorched over hot coals in sweat lodges to purify the air and is believed to help detoxify your skin when used in a bath. “Every time we’re going through something rough or we’re grieving,” he says, “we take cedar baths. It just helps your mental state."

Making a batch of evergreen is an exercise in pragmatism and self-sufficiency, but it’s also a celebration of one of the oldest culinary practices in North America. It’s a cup of tea, a stew, a soothing bath, or a pine-scented kitchen thousands of years in the making.

Its dedicated, sagelike maker isn't at all upset.

For the thousands of people around the world who’d once visited and admired the world’s largest treehouse in Crossville, Tennessee, the news came as an awful shock. In October 2019, a blaze consumed the singular construction. But for Horace Burgess, the treehouse’s architect, this is just how things go. He was well acquainted with how it feels to lose your own, self-built treehouse in an angry conflagration. Heck, he’d already burned one down himself.

“It was just evil,” says Burgess of the older treehouse he built and then razed back in the 1980s. There was “no good about it.” The house had ended up serving as Burgess’s hideaway for doing drugs, which he committed to quitting after the deaths of some friends. Trouble was, the house itself had become part of the habit. A voice came to Burgess, saying that he had to burn the house down if he was going to rebuild his life. And it wasn't just any voice.

People typically think “you’re a little bit crazy when you say that God spoke to you,” Burgess admits, “but really he’s the one that tells us to put our pants on in the morning.” Looking back, Burgess says that burning that first treehouse down—on God’s advice—was “probably the most sane moment in my life.”

Having freed himself from the demons trapped in that treehouse, Burgess, a pastor who grew up in Crossville, set about dedicating his life to religion and his community. Ironically, those commitments quickly brought him right back to building treehouses. After all, he knew he could do it well, and he understood that if he could share it with others it could serve as a positive force in the community rather than as a destructive force in his private life. “It was just something I enjoyed doing,” he says, seemingly uninterested in understanding why. As an aside, he mentions casually that he’d actually completed five or six treehouses in total by that point in time—even if people only ever seem to talk about the one that was about to come.

So, in 1993, Burgess got down to work on his family’s farm—139 acres that, according to Burgess, once contained a “zoo” with two of each animal, like a landlocked Noah’s Ark in central Tennessee. Not knowing where things would lead, he simply started by building a staircase, one he actually called the “Stairway to Nowhere.” It was more meditative than anything else. “I had totally turned my life over to the lord,” he says, and inspiration struck one day when he was actually “sitting down and praying for anything but a treehouse.” It was then that “the Spirit of God quickened me,” he says, and Horace Burgess gave in to the treehouse impulse and resolved to turn the Stairway to Nowhere into the world’s largest arboreal construct. And why not the largest? God had promised Burgess, after all, that he would never run out of material as long as he kept building, and building, and building. It sounds Old Testament stuff.

"I’m getting ready to build the world’s largest treehouse out here,” Burgess told his neighbors after the revelation. Half-informing them of his decision, half-asking for their permission, he understood that the undertaking would impact the whole community. “Someday you’ll have to watch when you pull out of your driveway,” he told them. They told him to go for it, though he suspects that “about 12 years later, they were wishing they had never agreed.”

For the next dozen years, Burgess just kept building. Higher and higher, wider and wider, until, plank by plank, nail by painstaking nail, he had single-handedly built a mansion extending 97 feet into the air. The numbers—a quarter-million nails, for example—are just one way to appreciate the scale of Burgess’s achievement. With such a monumental product at the end, it can be easy to overlook the daily grind, the unromantic resourcefulness that turned his inspiration into reality.

Burgess says he “tore down barns and outbuildings, and people would have different kinds of places that they would want me to clean up” in exchange for the dislodged materials. This ongoing bartering process allowed Burgess to state that the entire treehouse was made of recycled wood, and with other kinds of recycled materials. And, thank God for that. Burgess says that over the course of the 12 years of construction, the cost of nails more than doubled.

He never stopped, never doubted the project, never got hurt beyond small cuts from nails here and there. He says he saw it like his own personal Field of Dreams, encouraged by the conviction—“without a shadow of a doubt”—that if he built it, “they” would come. Indeed they did. Once Burgess put a roof over the treehouse and opened it to visitors, in 2005, he was quickly welcoming guests from all over the country and even the world. Many simply caught chance glimpses of the treehouse as they passed through, many others planned road-trips specifically to see it. Still others, says Burgess, flew in from as far away as England, France, and Guatemala, among other places. Couples even started lining up to get married in the treehouse, and Burgess told The New York Times that he officiated some 23 weddings there. On account of Burgess’s vocation and the elevated aura, the site came to be known as the Minister’s Treehouse.

Those who made it to the treehouse, even years ago, still attest to its grandeur, as if it was an icon of ancient architecture. “Looking up at it from the ground, I couldn’t get my head around the fact that one man had created this place all by himself,” says Chad Gallivanter, a videographer who visited the treehouse back in 2009, in a written message. “Just like architectural marvels of old, it was a modern-day example of human ingenuity and determination.”

Pete Nelson—a professional treehouse architect who has built more than 350 over the course of his career, and who hosts the show Treehouse Masters on Animal Planet—was similarly impressed. “As a builder,” says Nelson, “I was just really intrigued by how he managed to take what were clearly just leftover scraps and turn them into this edifice.” With first-hand knowledge of what goes into creating “something like that, and knowing it was just him,” all Nelson could say was, “Wow, this guy is the real deal.” Indeed, Nelson returned years later with a camera crew to shoot an episode of Treehouse Masters about Burgess’s creation.

And so, for years, Horace Burgess played the humble carnival barker, welcoming strangers into his mystical offroad apparition. That changed in 2012, when the authorities permanently shut down visits over safety concerns. According to Burgess, a retired engineer who had come by the treehouse wrote to the state that he “had seen some things that was unsafe,” leading to an inspection that resulted in the declaration of a public hazard. The state, says Burgess, wanted him to pay for new engineering work to be done to bring the treehouse up to code. Burgess wasn’t interested.

“Everything in it was unsafe,” Burgess admits with a laugh. “I see no way that you could make a 97-foot treehouse safe,” at least not in the legal sense. While no visitors had ever been hurt, Burgess didn’t fight the decision—just as he had done before, he simply let it go. He sold the property and returned to private life, his massive creation looming just down the road in majestic obsolescence.

Glenn Clark, the most recent owner of the property, told local television station WBIR that he had no intention of tearing the treehouse down, had no idea what caused the fire, and was upset about its destruction. Clark could't be reached for comment.

Not everyone, however, was willing to let it go. Lindsey Turner, a graphic designer from western Tennessee, visited the treehouse years after it was formally closed, and trespassed onto the property in 2015. “I just love strange, relatively little-known, off places,” she says, likening the treehouse’s spirit to that of the "Mindfield" in Brownsville, Tennessee, a kind of physical diary documenting the life of the artist, Billy Tripp. The treehouse, she says, was “a living piece of art that was constantly changing. I just thought that’s something I’ve got to try to see”—even if that meant getting loose with the law.

She braved the condemned public hazard on her own, and wrote in a blog post that “I felt my stomach jump up to my throat as I thought about how I was two, three, four, five floors up on wooden boards that were constructed by a man with no blueprints”—a sensation not exactly quelled by the “widely spaced floor boards” that allowed her to look down and see just how high she had climbed. Still, in yet another nod to Burgess’s amateur architectural prowess, she says it all felt “surprisingly stable.”

The musician Lilly Hiatt, who visited the treehouse just in summer 2019, felt safe for reasons beyond the building’s structural integrity. She understood that Burgess “had so much thoughtfulness in his heart when he was making this,” and she could feel that. She “felt very comforted,” she says, “by the inspiration of it all,” adding that the feeling she had in the house was more intense than any she’s gotten inside a traditional church. “It felt very loving,” she says, and in turn she “didn’t feel too guilty about the trespassing.” It was clear from standing inside that Burgess “built this because he wanted people to see it and feel inspired by it, and that’s what I came here to do.” If she were caught, she figured, “maybe he’ll pardon me.”

Each of these visitors remembers the treehouse for its sheer expansiveness and scale, physically and spiritually, the sense that it was somehow infinite unto itself. “Just when you thought you couldn’t go any further,” writes Gallivanter, “another staircase revealed itself.” Exploring it was a kind of journey through unrelated ephemera that combined to create their own world: furniture, appliances, statues of the 12 apostles, a basketball hoop, graffiti. At its center was an enormous chapel, replete with pews, a pulpit, and a large cross. “I couldn’t get over how massive this room was,” writes Gallivanter. “It was a testament to the man’s faith and what he valued in life.” Burgess thought it fitting to have a church in the trees: “There’s just something about being up above things,” he says, that makes it all “a little bit more tolerable.”

That peace of mind seems to have returned to ground level with Burgess, who met the treehouse’s demise with predictably sagelike stoicism. Fifteen minutes—that’s all it took for the flames to consign his masterpiece to memory. And we’ll probably never even know why: The weather was clear on that October night, and there was no electricity in the structure. Trevor Kerley, Chief of the Cumberland County Fire Department, says the current property owner declined to have the fire investigated.

It’s tolerable for Burgess, in part, because he had already lost something before losing the structure itself. What meant most to him about the treehouse was meeting “a lot of wonderful people” whom he would never have otherwise met—but those introductions essentially stopped when the site was closed.

Past visitors seem to be taking it harder, and in the initial weeks following the fire, Burgess says he was hearing from several people per day. “You don’t know how anything touches another person,” he says. “It’s just story after story of how people were blessed when they visited the house.” Hiatt says that her visit filled her with “a lot of hope,” with “realizing how compelled humans can be by a higher calling.” The Minister’s Treehouse didn’t charge admission, or propel Burgess to any sort of conventional fame. It just was—a defiant, aspirational, proudly strange manifestation of arbitrary inspiration. It “will now be the stuff of legend,” says Turner.

Don’t expect Burgess to tell you what, if anything, will rise in its place. “I’m just waiting,” he says, “on what God wants me to do next.”

While you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you can judge a pundit by his books.

In late March, the satirist behind Uma Página Numa Rede Social, a humorous political analysis project based in Portugal, noticed a curious shift in the evening news. With offices closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the most sought-after politicos were Skyping into national television, just as the rest of us Zoom into staff meetings.

“We saw a paradigm shift taking place before our eyes,” the satirist says. (He asked not to be named because he fears retaliation for his political work.) As Portuguese analysts and media personalities put social distancing into practice and began sifting through the day's events from the comfort of their home offices, “the previously sophisticated sets, where interviewers and interviewees competed for the audience’s attention with catchy chyrons and elaborated graphics, were replaced with the erudite backdrop of plain old bookshelves.” The evening news had joined the work-from-home movement, and just like that, the home offices of famous people went temporarily on public view.

It was hard not to notice the sheer number of books suddenly on display. Rather than bring in a potted plant or a sleek humidifier, commentators from every political tradition—almost all of them men, and most of them wearing scholarly-looking beards—chose to sit with their impressive home libraries, as though everyone on TV was competing for Portugal’s classiest, most library-esque bookshelf. Since no such competition existed, Uma Página became its unlikely host. The author of the page compiled some of his favorite home libraries into a Twitter thread, called it the 2020 Portuguese Bookshelf Championship, and waited for his audience to pass judgment.

As expected from a nation with one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, the Portuguese rallied behind the Bookshelf Championship. All of a sudden, book-related opinions were all over social media. “He's stacking books horizontally to fit more,” a Twitter user said of his preferred contestant, journalist Nuno Rogeiro, whose all-embracing bookshelf featured books wedged into every available cranny. Some contemplated the definition of a bookshelf: Should a shelf full of binders be disqualified, or was it a “spectacular variation” on the theme? Others called for the “immediate resignation” of the Minister of Education, Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, on the grounds that his video conference set-up featured zero books. It didn’t take long for the debate to make it, in an apt twist, onto the evening news. Ricardo Araújo Pereira, one of Portugal’s top comedians, submitted his formal entry by taking a conference call from a deserted university library, where he sat flanked by tidy bookshelves in perfect social isolation. Twitter deemed his entry “extremely strong.”

Jovem Conservador de Direita, an up-and-coming Portuguese comedian and unofficial spokesperson for extremely online millennials, was also quick to join the fray. “When the pandemic broke out, I myself was forced to buy a bookcase with books to be able to appear on live broadcasts,” he quips. “It’s hard to imagine that, after the pandemic, people will ever again trust commentators who do not appear in front of bookshelves.” Of course, says the anonymous founder of Uma Página, “It is fair to assume that not all have read the works they so proudly present behind them.” One center-right politician, Luís Marques Mendes, had a copy of The Communist Manifesto on the shelf behind him.

If we learned anything from Robert Kelly, the so-called “BBC Dad” whose live interview was famously gatecrashed by his children in 2017, it’s that social media loves a commentator who works from home. Another Twitter account, Room Rater, began poking fun at Skype backgrounds in April, and has already racked up more than 100,000 followers. There's nothing quite like peeking into another person's space.

But how does this natural curiosity play into Portugal’s sudden interest in the home libraries of famous people? There seems to be more than mere nosiness at play, Conservador de Direita says. A shelf crammed full of books is a shelf crammed full of knowledge: When the audience sees it, “it is as if they are absorbing the energy of those spines.” Short of being just bookshelves, these are symbols of braininess and authority: They suggest that we can trust what a person says, and perhaps even repeat it to our friends without sounding ignorant.

To get a leg-up on the supposedly better-read competition, Conservador de Direita has put together a humorous list of highly recommended quarantine reads. Among the featured titles are Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and Ulysses by James Joyce (distinguished bricks that will burnish any bookshelf and/or reputation), a travel book about India (for those who, prior to the pandemic, had booked Eat Pray Love-style journeys of self-discovery), and Strawberry Shortcake: Makeover Madness (where friendship and capitalism intertwine in a hokey, heartwarming tale). Peculiar choices for peculiar times, but maybe the point is to simply stay home and read. Really, has there ever been a better time to tackle that tsundoku?

The anonymous creator of the Portuguese Bookshelf Championship is happy that his comedic creation has caught on. “I tend to think anything that works as a silver lining in this bizarre era is more than welcome,” he says. “After all, we’re all locked up inside our houses, and we need things to help us kill some time.” It can be hard to watch the news these days, but at least the bookish backgrounds keep getting better and better.

Back when reptiles were all the rage, Adalatherium really stood out.

In July 1999, David Krause was enjoying the balmy winter weather of Madagascar as he dug in the dirt for dinosaurs. The island’s soil was fertile ground for life in ancient times. At the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago, Madagascar—already an island at that point, having chipped off of a drifting India some 20 million years prior—crawled with the legendary reptiles of the age, from meat-eating theropods to a 20-foot-long constrictor snake.

Which is why three years later, when Krause opened a plaster jacket that contained the fossils from the dig, the last thing he expected to find was a mammal.

Yet there it was. Tucked into the mold, along with a small, ancient crocodilian, was Adalatherium hui—a stubby-tailed mammal from the Cretaceous, preserved exquisitely after its demise in a mudslide. The oldest mammal yet found south of the equator, Adalatherium had a unique set of characteristics that set it apart from all other living animals at the time, as well as Gondwanatheria—the mysterious mammals that evolved as the supercontinent Gondwana broke apart.

“Once the jacket was open, I recognized an elbow joint and knew it was mammalian,” says Krause, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and lead author of the paper. “ I didn’t sleep for two days, I was that excited.”

Studying the fossil remains of Adalatherium took nearly 20 years, as researchers tried to decipher every twist and turn in its strange morphology, from its toes to its teeth. Last week a new paper was published in the journal Nature, describing the find.

Scrawnier and more modern looking than their giant, scaly contemporaries, Cretaceous mammals were few and far between—especially in the Southern Hemisphere, which has fewer, and less scrutinized, fossil deposits than the Northern Hemisphere. The mammals that preceded an asteroid’s impact in modern-day Mexico, catalyzing the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs, were generally eensy—a trait helpful for hunkering down to survive a global cataclysm, but troublesome when it comes to finding fossils. Adalatherium was a clear exception to that rule.

“It was a giant in its time, in the sense that during the Cretaceous, most mammals were shrew- or rat-size,” Krause says. “This thing is about 100 times larger than your standard house mouse.”

Adalatherium was a product of the island effect, which posits that large creatures shrink on isolated landmasses, while little critters get big. Perhaps inspired by a couple of reptilian goliaths that resided on Cretaceous-era Madagascar, Adalatherium grew to the size of a small dog.

Besides its unusual size, Adalatherium had a bevy of traits that make it an “outlier” on the evolutionary timeline, even when compared to the oddball fossas, lemurs, and aye-ayes that now inhabit the island nation. With forelimbs tucked close together underneath its body but hind limbs that splayed out on either side, it was a walking paradox. Among other things, it had a hole in its skull just above its nose that paleontologists still don’t fully understand—even after two decades of study and analysis. Adalatherium also boasted two pairs of upper incisors—and back teeth that defy explanation.

“The teeth are the standard thing to look at across early mammalian evolution,” Krause says. “These teeth are truly weird. There’s just nothing like them in any living or extinct mammal.”

When the asteroid hit, Adalatherium was among the many mammals wiped from the Earth. But Madagascar’s unique modern fauna evolved nonetheless.

How, you ask? Krause suggests that life may have found a way on large rafts of vegetation, drifting over from Africa—a theory that’s been floated for various combinations of species and continents, Madagascar is a particularly appealing subject given its close proximity to Africa, and the amount of flotsam that still washes off the east coast of the continent after heavy storms.

“If this happens within our puny lifetimes, what are the chances of success over 65 million years?” Krause says. “The improbable becomes much more probable with the passage of time.”

Matt McKnight caught a botanical maelstrom on camera in Eastern Washington.

At the end of April, Matt McKnight was driving Bessie, his Westfalia campervan, on State Route 240 in Washington when he encountered something he hadn’t wagered on: dozens of tumbleweeds whipped into a vortex, and heading right for the van.

McKnight is a Seattle-based journalist for Crosscut, an independent news site, and has been traveling across the state to cover the COVID-19 crisis. Bessie is a good companion on these journeys—McKnight can load her up with provisions and then sleep in the back at night, so that he’s not imperiling himself or the communities he covers. He was driving through a vast expanse of flat land when the tumbleweed storm arrived.

Tumbleweed is the final chapter in the life cycle of Russian thistle (an umbrella term that includes Salsola tragus and several other species), a plant introduced to America from Eurasia roughly two centuries ago. When the plants mature, a part of them breaks off and blows away, sowing seeds as it somersaults. Tumbleweeds are commonly seen on American highways, and they snowed in this stretch of State Route 240 back in December; they had to be cleared away with snowplows. But this was something else. “I’ve lived in Wyoming and Idaho and Utah, and the High Desert of California, so I'm not a stranger to tumbleweeds," McKnight says. "I'm not a stranger to dust devils, either, but I've never, ever in my life seen two of them merge together and then come straight at my face.” McKnight tweeted that the sight looked like a “tumbleweed tornado.”

A few minutes before the bizarre sight, McKnight saw a lone tumbleweed scuttling down the road; he thought it looked cute, and kept driving. “Then I saw kind of a mass of them coming—maybe 15—and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s kinda cool. There’s more.’” He slowed down a little, but pressed on. Then he and Bessie crested a small hill. “I saw a tumbledevil, a tumblenado, whatever you wanna call it, forming on the side.” It seemed like a good time to stop. “I was like, ‘Okay, hell no. I’m not going to be driving into that thing.”

McKnight put the car in park but kept the engine on, and he propped his cell phone up against the dashboard. He started filming a video, and within seconds, tumbleweeds were battering the windshield, just a few inches from his face. In the recording, they sound like noisy, flapping wings, and McKnight says it was even louder in person. The video also features a little creaking, as McKnight steadied himself to get a good angle—but there aren't any shrieks. "I wasn't nervous as they started hitting me," he says. "I was like, 'Okay, this is kinda crazy,' but at the same time, I had my journalist I'm-just-gonna-be-calm-and-see-this-through type of demeanor."

It was over in five or 10 seconds, he says. When the storm passed, he looked behind him and saw it clearing the fence onto the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which once produced plutonium for the bomb that detonated over Nagasaki in 1945. By the time the “tornado” blew onto the grounds of the old facility, it had lost some steam. “I think it tapered off pretty quickly,” McKnight says.

He didn’t stick around to find out. “My biggest concern in that moment was, I've got a running engine and dry tumbleweed,” he says. “Knowing that tumbleweeds are really dry and they've been known to start fires, I wanted to get out of that pile really quickly.” He drove through a heap of 30 or 40 tumbleweeds that had surrounded Bessie, and then pulled over around 50 feet down the road to pick bits of tumbleweed from the grill and from underneath the van. It was still pretty windy, but not dangerous, and a few more tumbleweeds kept bumping toward him. “It was just normal tumbleweeds hitting the van, and me kicking and cursing them.” Days later, he found a bit of charred tumbleweed while tightening a loose screw in the engine.

McKnight thought his footage would appeal to his coworkers, and maybe to a couple buddies in Seattle. Instead, it racked up more than 1.2 million views on Twitter and was broadcast on Good Morning America. McKnight suspects that it was a welcome break from news about the pandemic, and he's been hearing three kinds of responses to the footage. Some people think he should pair it with the winsome, wistful Sons of the Pioneers song, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” Others joke that it’s proof that we’re all doomed—or that “nature is healing” with many of us hunkered down at home.

“Apparently, everybody needed the tumbleweed tornado,” McKnight says. “You just look at it and it spins and it either makes you feel scared or happy.” McKnight and Bessie will be back on State Route 240 in the coming week or so—hopefully, this time, without any tumblenados along for the ride.

Scientists in the Indian Himalayas deal with low oxygen, zip lines, and paths blocked by giant boulders.

At least twice a year, Dr Parmanand Sharma embarks on a multi-hour, potentially treacherous commute to work—by car, foot, and zip line. To reach his version of the office, he takes the Manali-Leh Highway; an expanse of road that winds through the Indian Himalayas, ascending from 6,000 feet to 17,000 feet. At that height, Sharma’s closing in on the Himalayan Cryosphere or “the Third Pole,” an epithet for the largest mass of ice outside the polar region. It’s this frozen terrain that Sharma is here for; specifically, its glaciers.

“Climate change is altering the glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH),” says Sharma, 48, a glaciologist with India’s National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research (NCPOR). “We haven't even scratched the surface in understanding how fast the glaciers are melting and what happens next.” Over 1.6 billion people depend on the 19 rivers emerging from the 2,175-mile-long HKH and recent studies show a third of the glaciers are in danger.

Unlike the many thrill-seeking tourists who take this route, Sharma is heading straight for Himansh, a research station located at an altitude of 13,000 feet in the Chandra Basin. This basin feeds the Indus river, which gets nearly 80 percent of its water from HKH. Nearly 250 million people live in the Indus Basin alone.

“We have been looking at six glaciers, which had a total area of 115.8 square miles in 2009. In 2019, it was only 86.9 square miles,” says Sharma. “There’s thousands of glaciers like these.”

“Our aim is to study the response of the third pole to climate change, and its hydrological impact,” says Dr Thamban Meloth, 50, head of NCPOR’s polar science department. Meloth also spearheaded the center’s foray into the third pole in 2013.

Sharma, who heads NCPOR’s Himalayan Cryospheric Studies program, studies the mass balance of glaciers to examine the accumulation and loss of water; essentially “budgeting” how much water comes and goes. He does so with the help of a network of insulated bamboo sticks fixed at various spots across the glacier to measure the level of ice and snow over time.

Reaching the glaciers isn’t for the faint hearted. Alpine trees of the outer Himalayas vanish as the weathered “highway” enters the cold desert of Lahaul-Spiti. At 13,000 feet the air thins, the oxygen level around 41 percent less than at sea level. A few memorials for deceased motorists, endless ranges, and ravines keep you company for the 77 miles to Himansh. The path is often blocked by large boulders jettisoned down the mountains by the violent energy of snow-melt waterfalls. At Batal, the last motorable point along the Manali-to-Kaza road, the easiest part of Sharma’s journey ends.

From here the scientists trek for nearly four miles, or use a zip line going over the Chandra river to reach the station. Distance is measured in time and the process can take four to five hours for the uninitiated.

Scientists say studying the Himalayan glaciers can help inform water management, policy, and infrastructural changes that could save millions of lives. So why isn’t there more widespread and rigorous research on the Himalayas?

“Systematic studies (continuous monitoring for 10-30 years) in this region are difficult due to logistical hurdles,” Sharma, who visits the Arctic region and the Himalayas every year, explains.

The challenging terrain combined with geo-political interests (the HKH crosses over eight countries) makes it impossible to carry out sustained research, resulting in gaps in data. For instance, there are 9,575 glaciers in the Indian Himalayas as per the Geological Survey, but the Indian Space Research Organisation puts the number at over 32,392. The area itself varies from 17,345.6 square miles to 14,478.9 square miles, depending on who you consult.

Kamini Meshram, pursuing a doctorate in geochemistry of glaciers at NCPOR, made her maiden voyage to the third pole in 2019. “The lack of oxygen and the dangerously steep slopes was a huge problem,” she says. “You feel giddy and nauseous. Your legs don’t move at times. Things appear closer than they are in the Himalayas.”

“Most research students never come back after the first visit,” says Sharma. But Meshram is among the few who can’t wait to return.

Stations like Himansh, established by NCPOR in 2016, become the backbone of long-term monitoring projects. Himansh comprises three white huts made of prefabricated insulated materials and encircled by a small compound wall, which seems an embellishment rather than a necessity here. These are the only structures in sight within hundreds of miles of inhospitable snow-capped mountains and glaciers. The station can house eight researchers in two dorms, and has toilets, a kitchen, and a laboratory.

From Himansh, the six glaciers under observation are anywhere between 1.3 miles and 63 miles away, each with different glacier lengths (0.6 to 18 miles) and area (0.6 to 68 miles). In this terrain and altitude, it can take a day or sometimes even a week to reach them. There’s no network, road, or facilities beyond the research outpost. The scientists are on their own.

Porters, who work on a government contract, are a crucial part of managing the logistics. To set up Himansh, they carried supplies and equipment weighing hundreds of pounds from Batal. Twice, the journey proved so arduous that porters dropped the equipment midway and walked off the job. Sharma calls these two incidents the most arduous phase of his career.

“Porters are our lifeline,” says Meshram. “For expeditions to the glaciers, both scientists and porters carry the equipment and food.” In her two months there, porters became a source of strength and support. Visits to larger glaciers may require camping in inhospitable conditions, and the porters connect these remote camps with the main station.

“We work in a small time frame, from May to October. We return before the winter begins,” Meloth says.

“We have to be prepared for the worst,” Sharma says. “Field scientists go through a rigorous health check up, but in my experience that is not enough to work in the Himalayas. The fittest people have had to leave.” In extreme cases, lack of oxygen at high altitude can cause pulmonary edema. The nearest hospital is half a day away.

“Glaciologists have different challenges in different regions,” Meloth says. He was part of India’s first scientific expedition to the South Pole in 2010, and currently focuses on Antarctica. “I have been to all three poles and I can say the Himalayas is the toughest.”

Meloth’s experience in Antarctica and the Arctic before he visited Himalayan glaciers to set up Himansh was not as relevant as one might think. While it’s freezing in Antarctica, the continent’s comparatively smoother terrain allows scientists to use snow vehicles.

But the terrain of the Himalayas doesn’t support vehicles, and basic technology like drone imagery is useless. Since scientists had to carry their own equipment on expeditions, there was only room for a limited number of instruments. Add the harsh geography, lack of logistics, inclement weather, and occasional avalanche and you have quite the hostile work environment.

When they return from the field, the scientists and researchers live at the edge of the coastal city of Vasco-Da-Gama, Goa. The average work day at “Antarctica,” as the taxi drivers call the NCPOR main office, is vastly different from Himansh. Insulated in a quiet world of an Antarctic Ice Yard, freezing labs and air-conditioned offices a few miles from the tropical sandy beaches and partying crowds, the scientists continue their work.

At his office, Sharma is surrounded by the memorabilia from expeditions. He summarizes his two-decade-long experience of chasing glaciers: “There needs to be more research in the Himalayas.”

“By studying one basin or glacier, we cannot provide conclusive insights on the HKH region. We need collaboration,” he says. NCPOR’s multi-institutional, interdisciplinary program HiCOM (Himalayan Cryospheric Observations and Modelling), which began in 2017 to undertake long-term projects across the region, is still in its nascent stage. The rate of glacial retreat, however, is not as slow.

“It is not just the people who live immediately downstream who will be affected if the glaciers melt,” Meshram explains. “We may not live near the Himalayas, but all our lives will be impacted.”

“We’re trying to collect everything before it’s gone.”

On a sunny spring day in Kyiv, Ukraine, two people stand before a massive mosaic on the side of the Institute for Nuclear Research, stepping back a few feet to take it all in. It’s rare for people to stop and take notice; most locals walk right past this artwork—wearing coronavirus masks, of course—oblivious to its dizzying array of textures, materials, and colors. Images of two working men span the width of the building, each several stories high, their bodies a rich spectrum of browns and grays. Their gaze is on the red-hot core of a star in the center of the building—a rainbow of orange and yellow rays emanating to the edges of the panel, titled “Blacksmiths of the Present."

Across Ukraine, there are hundreds of works of art like this one. Big, bold, and bright, they convey variations of the communist propaganda that was spread across the country during Soviet times. For better or worse, they also tell the story of Ukraine’s history.

To Lubava Illyenko, it’s a story worth saving.

Born in Komsomolsk-na-Amure, Russia, Illyenko moved to Ukraine when she was 14 years old. Today she’s an art historian writing her doctoral thesis at the University of Augsburg in Germany, with a focus on Ukraine’s Soviet mosaics.

She’s also involved with a project to catalog these mosaics that’s supported by Izolyatsia (“isolation” in Russian)—a nonprofit organization that aims to create systemic changes in Ukraine via cultural initiatives. Originally located in a former insulation-materials factory in Donetsk, Ukraine, Izolyatsia was founded in 2010 by a businesswoman named Lyubov Mikhailova. It was forced to move to Kyiv in June 2014, when the territory was seized by armed representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.

Today, Illyenko—along with Izolyatsia’s curators and a team of volunteers—is pushing forward a key project to protect, preserve, and draw attention to Ukraine’s Soviet-era mosaics. “We’re trying to collect everything before it’s gone,” Illyenko says. “We’re trying to collect information about [these mosaics], the artists who created them, when they were made, and so on. Any related information, we are trying to find out.”

Many of these mosaics are falling into disrepair or, because they represent cultural and political ideals from the communism of yesteryear, being destroyed by Ukrainians eager to move beyond their Soviet past.

Izolyatsia is agnostic when it comes to artistic messaging. For Illyenko and others in the organization, the goal is to protect, preserve, and document all the mosaics that artists created during Soviet times. Those include several by Alla Horska, who produced controversial anti-communist works in the 1960s. Deeply involved with the Ukrainian national democratic movement of the time, she was hired as an artist by the Soviet Union to uphold Soviet ideals. Yet she simultaneously—and paradoxically—created artworks that defied them. In some ways, says Illyenko, Horska’s egalitarian spirit is what animated Izolyatsia in the first place.

Illyenko says the first phase of the project has entailed locating and identifying the surviving mosaics.

“We started taking photos of them, we started searching for information, and we were the first people trying to persuade local people to tell us about mosaics they knew about,” Illyenko says, noting that this work has inspired similar, smaller-scale preservations on a local level.

As an art form, mosaics typically consist of small glass or ceramic pieces. But in Ukraine, the umbrella term “Soviet mosaics” is more accurately defined as “art decorating architecture.” Many of these pieces, like “Blacksmiths of the Present,” are the height and width of the buildings on which they’re constructed. Some are made from ceramic tiles and glass, but others are sculpted from metal, clay, and various different materials. Most importantly, they are always found on or in buildings—and their surrounding environments are just as important to their stories as the art itself.

“When we talk about preservation, the mosaics were created exactly for these places, for these buildings. It was an architectural decision,” Illyenko says. “It’s very important that it should be preserved there, in the place it was created, because it is a synthesis of other mediums—of architecture, of space, of meaning of the space, and so on.”

Found across Ukraine, Russia, and other former Soviet republics, these mosaics—whose creation peaked during an economic boom that lasted from the 1960s to the 1980s—are heavily concentrated in cities that were industrial hubs after World War II. Their messages center on the communist propaganda narratives of community, labor, patriotism, friendship, and teamwork.

Many were damaged or destroyed in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union splintered and a wave of decommunization efforts swept through Ukraine. A second wave came during Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and the 2014 Maidan Revolution—and especially in April 2015, when the Ukrainian government approved laws forbidding communist symbols such as state flags, coats of arms, and the iconic sickle and hammer. At the time, many mosaics were destroyed or covered over by sheets of metal.

“For me, because I wasn’t born in Ukraine, it was ... strange to see how all Ukrainians were demolishing the statues of Lenin—hundreds of them,” says Illyenko. “For me, every piece of art should be preserved.” She says that her status as an outsider in Ukraine is perhaps what allows her to see the inherent merit—the artistic, historic, and cultural value—in these politically fraught pieces.

The oldest mosaics Izolyatsia has cataloged are from the 1930s—portraits of Lenin and Stalin, located on a brick water tower in the city of Novhorod-Siverskyi, Ukraine. Beyond their historical value, Illyenko says, there’s another reason to preserve them: They encourage present-day discourse.

“Blacksmiths of the Present” is one such piece. Many people would likely recognize this mosaic—created in 1974 and located on the street-facing side of the Institute of Nuclear Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine—from the recent HBO miniseries Chernobyl. The 1986 nuclear disaster in northern Ukraine was a deadly nadir in Soviet history, in part due to the U.S.S.R.’s shameful attempts to cover up the tragedy. Today, conversations about government transparency remain a hot topic among Ukrainians (and throughout the world).

Illyenko says the piece is also aesthetically significant because it merges Soviet-specific imagery and messaging with local Ukrainian characteristics, such as vivid colors. “I really like it because it combines [communist messages] and decorative characteristics of the period on one hand and modernis[t] traditions in composition on the other hand,” she says. “I think this mosaic is very Ukrainian—its colors, its figures, its composition.”

For Izolyatsia, preservation challenges abound: natural deterioration of the mosaics due to age and the elements, private owners who don’t care about the artworks on their buildings, and construction workers who place panels over the works when they add insulation to Soviet-era structures. Furthermore, because Soviet mosaics are integrated into their architectural surroundings, they can’t just be removed and preserved like other forms of long-lost art. And very few of these pieces are protected by the national government; that usually happens only if an entire building is protected.

But Izolyatsia is doing what it can. Its signature project is an online, open-source archive aimed at cataloging all the Soviet mosaics in Ukraine. Its website includes a map of known mosaics and biographical information about the artists. Inviting Ukrainians to participate—and keeping them up to date on new findings via Facebook—has helped make cataloging possible. (Illyenko says, however, that the website isn’t as current as it should be, due to a lack of volunteers.)

Nonetheless, Illyneko says that people are enthusiastic about the project—especially foreigners who visit or live in Ukraine. “It’s very interesting to see in practice how the mosaics are bright in the eyes of others, of people who are not Ukrainian people,” Illyenko says.

On that bright spring day, half a dozen people walk past “Blacksmiths of the Present” and pay it no mind. If they did, they might notice that the vibrant piece both stands out from its gray, nondescript surroundings and is naturally integrated with them. More than 40 years ago, two people—with histories and stories of their own—created this work of art under Soviet conditions, one small, colorful piece at a time. And for more than 40 years, it has decorated the side of this building—as scientists convened inside, as the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, as the Soviet Union broke up.

Which is precisely what makes it worth saving.

When nothing in the world seems to fit together, “dissected maps” offer a cognitive balm.

As millions of people hunker down at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the humble jigsaw puzzle is enjoying a renaissance. Several puzzle-makers recently told NPR that in March and April, they saw U.S. sales leap by 300 percent or more compared to the same time last year. That means that kitchen tables and living-room floors are probably scattered with bits that add up to all kinds of scenes: litters of kittens, beers of the world, monuments and streets that are now forlorn.

But several centuries ago, jigsaw puzzles were mainly made out of maps—and if you’ve already assembled every last puzzle you have sitting around, you can throw things back to the objects' cartographic roots by trying your hand at new customizable digital versions made by a team at the London-based map-and-prints dealer Daniel Crouch Rare Books.

Maps were always a natural fit for puzzles, says Daniel Crouch, the outfit’s owner. Geographic boundaries were already irregularly shaped, and boasted interlocking borders. Early jigsaws, known as “dissected maps,” made use of those ready-made attributes: They were often cut along county Iines or other borders, instead of being randomly cleaved.

Jigsaw puzzles made from maps are generally thought to date to at least the 1760s, and are often credited to the London cartographer and engraver John Spilsbury. But it’s hard to pin down who introduced the idea, says Anne Williams, a professor emerita of economics at Bates College and author of The Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing Together a History.

Lady Charlotte Finch, who was royal governess to the children of George III when Spilsbury was pasting maps onto wood, owned a handsome wooden cabinet fitted with drawers for storing puzzles that the young royals assembled. She also commissioned some dissected maps for those little puzzlers, including ones made from plates in atlases by the French cartographer Jean Palairet. Some of those are now in the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood, which also owns a 17-piece map of Italy, “possibly drawn” by Finch, and cut to her liking.

Others argue that Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont—a French author known for pedagogical lessons and her classic 1756 version of “Beauty and the Beast”—beat the others to the puzzle punch. Yet the question of who first made dissected maps, and when, remains thornier than an enchanted rose.

“Finch and de Beaumont have their champions, but not everyone agrees, and there are no surviving puzzles with their labels,” Williams says. She notes that some scholars have suggested that other European mapmakers made puzzles even earlier than these three.

Whoever made them first, the puzzles were clearly intended for kids. “Map puzzles were most often political maps with familiar territories like states and counties, and they were used in classrooms and as educational toys,” writes Garrett Dash Nelson, curator of maps and director of geographic scholarship at the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, in an email.

Assembling puzzles was a good way for kids to hone their visual-spatial skills. But Megan Norcia, a scholar of children’s literature and material culture at SUNY College at Brockport, has argued that they also taught kids to think about the world as something to be ordered—possibly toward political ends. Slotting the pieces together, she wrote in a 2009 article in the journal Children’s Literature, tasked kids “with the responsibility of assembling the diverse pieces of the world into a comprehensible whole.”

In the 1760s, Williams says, dissected maps were extremely expensive, “intended for aristocratic parents whose children would become rulers of empires.” The imperialist mindset, apparently, was present in both work and play.

The 32 digital puzzles the Crouch team has produced thus far aren’t a ploy to inspire you to pillage or conquer. They do, however, give you a lot of room to roam. There are world maps, large-scale maps, pictorial maps, and prints, so you can choose from aerial depictions of Amsterdam, Rome, and St. Petersburg; colorful maps of the London Tube; and the British painter James Northcote’s striking image of a stalking tiger. You can change the number of pieces in the puzzles too; if 300 tiny tiles seem daunting on your computer screen, toggle to 24.

At a time when so much is maddeningly uncertain and fixes feel far off, Williams says, an engrossing puzzle can feel like a balm; it’s no surprise that puzzlemania spiked during the Great Depression too. “Puzzles offer an escape, and a sense of triumph when completed,” she says.

So if you could use a small victory, go ahead and start clicking. Then watch the world fit together—for a few minutes, at least.

For decades, Jim Beam made decanters shaped like Elvis, the Mount St. Helens eruption, and more.

Charles Barrett can rattle off the more than 200 cars in his collection like a waiter might list salad dressings.

“There’s a 1908 black Oldsmobile, a 1909 Thomas Flyer in both blue and ivory, a 1978 blue Corvette, a 1970 Dodge Challenger, a 1957 Thunderbird, a 1964 Mustang, a Jewel Tea truck, a covered wagon,” Barrett says. “If you can think it, I probably have it.”

His armada has never transported a single person, though. Each of the 14-inch-long model vehicles in his fleet are decanters. They’re hollow and, at one point or another, were filled with a fifth of Jim Beam whiskey.

In the 1950s, Jim Beam was looking for a way to sell excess eight- to 10-year-old liquor. Vodka companies were staking a claim on the American South, and whiskey sales were plummeting. So Jim Beam needed a gimmick to get people to buy the alcohol they were aging in expectation of big paydays.

Enter campy ornamental decanters. Unlike the sleek, understated crystal decanters widely sold today, these decanters were often ceramic statuettes, meant to be collected and displayed.

It wasn’t just classic automobiles. Between 1955 and 1992, Jim Beam collaborated with the Illinois-based ceramics company Regal China to produce thousands of decanters. While other bourbon and whiskey companies, including Jack Daniels and Sazerac Company, the makers of Old Rip Van Winkle, manufactured their own versions, none came close to the breadth of Jim Beam or the zeal of its impassioned collectors.

Barrett can tell you all about the Jim Beam decanters. Because he has just about all of them. He has decanters that look like Elvis and Hank Williams (both senior and junior), Paul Bunyan and Santa Claus. His shelves are crowded with woodland critters and circus animals and decanters that evoke decades of current events, from an early personal computer to the Mount St. Helens eruption, complete with a vial of ash from the 1980 explosion. Oodles of them are niche models made for conventions or causes. He even has eight-foot-long train sets, where each piece is its own decanter. Barrett keeps his collection meticulously organized in his Tennessee home, grouped by theme and arranged, an inch apart, by size and color. A dedicated dusting schedule keeps each piece show-ready.

In 1980, Barrett and his late wife, Betty, came across Jim Beam decanters for the first time. “We didn’t know anything about them, we just liked them,” Barrett says.

Their first eight depicted states. They scooped those up with the intention of collecting all 50, but the company never got around to making every state.

“One thing led to another, and once you get 10, you want 20, and once you get 20, you want 50,” Barrett says. “We just kept collecting.”

Their first real indoctrination into the Jim Beam collectors’ world was at a flea market in Nashville. Amidst 3,000 vendors, Barrett spent most of his time talking to another couple that had twin tables of decanters for sale. The proprietor told Barrett there was a bottle show happening in the basement for the Jim Beam Bottle and Specialty Club. There, the Barretts found their people.

Beth Hellwig, the current president of the International Association of the Jim Beam Bottle and Specialties Club Collectors, says during their organization’s heyday there were more than 7,500 paying members and likely thousands more casual collectors. Zealots had their prefered decanter dealers, and rivalries could be fierce, since the Jim Beam company stoked the consumerist fire by frequently releasing rare items. Now the roughly 500 remaining members, most of them octogenarians, have mellowed with age, like a nice whiskey.

Barrett has always done his tchotchke hunting on the road. Each Saturday for a decade, he and Betty got up early and drove towards Knoxville, Nashville, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Birmingham, or Chattanooga, hopping between flea markets and antique stores. While many of their finds are valued between $5 and $50, their four rarest decanters are worth a combined $68,000, at least in the eyes of collectors like Barrett. Now 84, Barrett says he’s never wanted the Internet or a mobile phone, not even for collecting. Much of the appeal was the time spent with his wife.

Though the Barretts didn’t attend international conventions in recent years due to Betty’s heart issues, they are well known because of the magnitude of their collection. Barrett says he’s sure he has the biggest in the country. In fact, they built an addition onto their home just to display it all.

“Betty told me when we started, ‘I don’t care how many you buy, but you’re not going to stack them up on the floor or put them in boxes,’” Barrett says. “She said, ‘If you’re going to have them, you’re going to display them.’”

Their 900-square-foot addition is filled with 52 custom-made, all-glass cabinets. Each one is 34 inches long, 76 inches tall, and full of Jim Beam decanters. He says he has more than 1,650 decanters and 1,000 more auxiliary Jim Beam trophies, such as decorative plates and statuettes.

Although the decanters could hold more than 330 gallons of whiskey (roughly the holding capacity of a hot tub), Barrett lives in a dry county, and he doesn’t drink. For him and Betty, it was purely about collecting. Of all those in his vast collection, Barrett says his favorite decanter is always “the next one I don’t have.” According to Barrett, he’s only missing two Jim Beam decanters, which he hopes to get this summer on his way to the 50th National Convention of the Jim Beam Collectors. His new favorite, he’s sure, will be a model of the shuttle used for tours at the Jim Beam distillery.

Betty’s favorite was a space shuttle, modeled after NASA’s The Enterprise. Her least favorite was one of King Kong. “I could never figure out if she didn’t like it because it was ugly or because a pretty flight attendant gave it to me,” Barrett jokes.

Barrett doesn’t do as much hunting anymore—it’s not as fun without Betty riding shotgun—but he still enjoys it on occasion, even though he rarely finds something he doesn’t already have. Barrett is also trying to find a home for his collection, which he doesn’t want sold off in pieces after he’s gone. He’d rather donate it all so others can enjoy this piece of Americana history.

“I’m real proud of our collection,” Barrett says. “For a long time, this was a way of life. And it was wonderful.”

All you need is an idea, an envelope, and a stamp.

In the 1950s, the New York–based artist Ray Johnson pioneered a new form of expression known as “mail art.” The idea was that artists could distribute their work privately, through the postal service instead of through galleries and other exclusive institutions. It’s been observed that Johnson, in some ways, anticipated how the internet and social media would influence the dynamics of the art world. It may be the COVID-19 pandemic, however, that brings his original, analog way of doing things back into vogue.

Artnet News reports that, in this time of social distancing, a variety of artists and patrons are re-engaging with mail art as a safe mode of communal creativity. Nashville-based artist Jason Brown, for example, has called for submissions using a simple prompt: "my view from home." Brown is open to both real and imaginary renderings of what you see from inside quarantine, so think carefully if you plan on submitting to his project—he’s going to donate the full haul to the Vanderbilt University library. Your submission could one day end up in an art history student’s thesis on visual representations of COVID-19.

On his website, Brown celebrates one of the central tenets of mail art: that absolutely anyone (with an envelope and stamp) can create it. All techniques (painting, drawing, mixed media, and beyond) are welcome, nothing will face a jury, nothing will be sold, nothing will be returned to sender. Brown quotes a simple definition of the form, from the University of Buffalo: “A work of art becomes Mail Art once it is dispatched … ”

Printed Matter, Inc., a New York-based nonprofit purveyor of artists’ books, has captured that roving spirit with a recently launched mail art initiative. Manager Johanna Rietveld says that the organization has received nearly 500 works of art so far, ranging from textiles, to a punny can of SPAM, to old leather book covers that had been removed to allow rebinding. The artists, meanwhile, have included a 101-year-old, a five-year-old, and an incarcerated person, she told Artnet. Printed Matter—which will publish a book featuring a selection of the works—issued a broad prompt: “We live in real time.” Rietveld told Artnet that the prompt refers to “experiencing the moment, moving through life in real time, while also looking ahead to the moment when we’ll be thinking back on it.” Like Brown’s, Printed Matter’s project will function as a kind of living history archive.

Not all curators, however, feel the need to issue prompts to solicit mail art. Jason Pickleman, whose Lawrence & Clark gallery in Chicago has held annual mail art exhibits since 2018, feels that “the less you say the better, and the more authentic the response.” Artists have certainly run with that freedom. About two weeks ago, Tony Tasset sent Pickleman a list of instructions entitled “Burning Man for a Lockdown.” The request? Burn a roll of toilet paper, dance around naked, film it, and post it on social media. Pickleman gladly obliged, though the video was taken off of Instagram “for obvious reasons.”

Pickleman adds that he always follows mail art instructions—and they often carry tasks for the reader to execute—“to the letter,” with one exception: He did not heed the piece of mail art that told him to destroy all mail art, though he appreciated the ambitious, auto-destructive impulse behind the idea. (For the record, Pickleman also receives more traditional, non-instructional works, such as collages—even if one sender did claim to be living on the planet Jupiter.)

While Pickleman’s gallery has showcased mail art for several years—he has been interested in the form since attending a Ray Johnson exhibit in the 1980s—he says that the COVID-19 quarantine has greatly increased the volume of submissions he receives. Johnson, he believes, was “subversive” in the way he was able to circumvent the galleries. For different reasons, Pickleman believes, mail art has maintained this subversive cast by defying the pandemic itself.

Typically, he notes, art is something that can’t be touched, with museum guards in place to remind us. Mail art, meanwhile, is physically handled by its creator, its couriers, and its recipient. There’s a “tactile quality” to the experience that quarantiners can’t find on Instagram. “In this moment of social distancing, where the idea of touch has become so suspect,” says Pickleman, “this idea of absolute physicality has a renewed sense of purpose.”

To get started, choose one of the initiatives asking for submissions—or just choose a friend to send your work to. Whether you're looking to express all your intense feelings, pass the time, give future historians a hand, or just clear out some clutter, now's the time to make a masterpiece and have it delivered.