"Get the corona!" is starting to make an appearance.
Twanna Hines, who grew up in rural Illinois, moved to the Netherlands to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Amsterdam in 2000. Not totally used to the stream of bicycles and trams in the streets of Amsterdam, she wandered into a bike lane and got a mouthful from a passing cyclist. “And my Dutch roommate shouted back, in the Dutch translation, 'Get cancer, man!'” she remembers. “And I was like, ‘What the hell? That doesn't make any sense, why would you tell someone to get cancer?’”
This was not some bizarrely creative insult that her roommate came up with. The Netherlands, in fact, is home to a shockingly extensive list of swear words, and the ones you might use to yell at an errant pedestrian are largely medical in nature. You can tell someone you think they’re suffering from cholera, smallpox, or tuberculosis, you can tell them to “Typhoid off.” It is a truly strange quirk of the Dutch language, one that can be off-putting or offensive to those not used to it, and even some who are. Especially today.
“Even ‘Get the corona’ is in use already,” says Ewoud Sanders, a journalist and author who writes about language for NRC Handelsblad, one of the most important Dutch newspapers.
In general, cultures tend to form their profanity around concepts that they fear. In puritanical America and Japan, sexual terms are common. In Quebec, long ruled by the Catholic Church, it’s religious terminology. In the Netherlands, it’s illnesses, at least for some use cases.
The Dutch people I spoke with drew a line between different types of swearing. One kind is the general angry exclamation, what you might yell if you stub your toe. Those are often actually English words, like the ones that refer to excrement or intercourse. The other type is the more interesting one: what you say in anger to another person, or an object or situation that has enraged you in some way. And those are absolutely dominated by medical terminology.
The basic form of this type of swearing is to tell someone to “Get cancer,” with variations for a range of ailments and infections. From this foundation, one can build spectacular and often totally meaningless phrases. One method is also used in Quebecois French: Just list all the bad words you can think of, one after another. So you could say, “Get cancer-typhoid-smallpox,” and that is both more creative and more aggressive than the simple “Get cancer.”
You can also add other modifiers to these diseases to strengthen them. In Rotterdam, says Sanders, you might say, “Get the cancer that goes all the way over the Maas River,” which indicates a very large tumor indeed. That regional variation would be incomprehensible to someone from, say, Amsterdam. Or you could spice things up with animals. “Get the pig cholera!” you could scream at someone who bumped into you and knocked your stroopwafel to the ground. “If you ask 10 Dutch people, they would all have their own palette of the words they use,” says Dick Smakman, a linguist at Leiden University.
There is a limit to exactly which illnesses make any sense as profanity, though it’s a fluid repertoire. If you pick an illness that has never been used in the Netherlands in this way, you might get some quizzical looks. In general, mild illnesses, non-fatal annoyances, these don’t really show up in the dictionary of Dutch swears.
The most profane illnesses are, largely, major, plague-type conditions, ones that have swept through the Netherlands (and most other places) and wiped out huge segments of the population. Many are now sort of archaic, perhaps having been eradicated in the country itself. The newer (or more newly known) ones all share a certain mass-death element: AIDS, cancer, coronavirus. Another category that shows up is medicalized insults directed at one's mental abilities, some of which are today considered archaic or offensive.
“The Dutch people are very straightforward and blunt, we have a reputation of this, and that's also in the cursing,” says Sanders. But for those who aren’t Dutch, some of this can seem wildly inappropriate. “You're talking about a culture that celebrates Santa with slaves,” says Hines. “So there's a certain level of what might seem like outright racism or homophobia or a lack of general graciousness to people who are not like you.” The Netherlands is more than three-quarters Dutch, and the Dutch are, like people in most European countries, grappling with how to speak to people who don’t look or act like them, but who are now part of their nation.
Sometimes in the Netherlands this is portrayed as bluntness or honesty, or a rejection of political correctness. Those are thin, short-lived arguments, and curses do fall out of use. Sanders said that some of them are restricted to kids—perhaps like the way American kids use the word “gay” until they grow up and realize they shouldn’t.
By far the most common of the Dutch medical curses is “cancer,” or kanker, which in the Netherlands, as in many other places, is among the most common causes of death. In practice, it is a pretty mild swear word, and a versatile one. You can refer to your kanker shoes, which are worn out or uncomfortable. Kankeren, the verb, means “to complain.” You can attach it to basically any other swear word: kanker hoer, or “cancer whore,” is a popular one. You can also say, “You suffer from cancer coronavirus” these days. “It doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but it makes ‘Get the corona’ stronger,” says Sanders.
Most of these swears are fairly disconnected in use from the actual diseases they reference. Smakman had to really think about some of the examples I’d found. He knew and had heard them used as swear words, but hadn’t made the connection to the illness until I mentioned them. Klerelijer, for example, means “cholera-sufferer,” but the “cholera” part of the word is a little mangled and bastardized from the original. In fact, klere literally translates as “clothes,” which is even more confusing. Sanders says he thinks “corona” will eventually end up as krone, or something like that.
The basic question of why the Dutch use such a strange selection of words has no conclusive answer. “We're a densely populated country, and there's a tradition of being very neat and tidy,” says Sanders. In researching his book on this form of Dutch profanity, he uncovered versions of this illness-based cussing reaching back to the 1910s. At the time, it was sometimes very long and sing-songy, often rhyming. But the roots of the practice seem to lie somewhere in the Dutch character, or at least the stereotype of it.
It’s hard to rank countries by germophobia or cleanliness. There are plenty of accounts of the “military” cleanliness of Dutch households. One study suggests that the Dutch dominance in the European dairy industry, and its demand for hygiene, is connected with a Dutch love of cleanliness. On the other hand, the Dutch also showed up in a survey indicating they wash their hands after going to the bathroom less frequently than residents of any other European country, though that might just be classic Dutch honesty skewing the results. Even Dutch Americans, to honor their Dutch heritage, literally scrub streets before a tulip festival, though that seems to be like more of a guess based on stereotypes of cleanliness than something that’s actually done in the Netherlands.
“I think every epidemic or pandemic that came through the Netherlands brought new curses,” says Sanders. “It's just our biggest fear.” Smakman says the same thing. “I think absolutely we have germophobia, most people I know have that,” he says. “If Dutch people go to Sweden, we feel at home. But I lived in England, and the moment you cross over to England, cleanliness is much lower. Even if you go to a pub, you think, ‘This is not clean.’” Given that, it makes some sense that the worst thing you could wish on someone is to have an illness—historically connected to dirtiness, uncontrollable, and very un-Dutch.
In the past two years, Stephanie Shih has folded more than 1,000 ceramic dumplings.
Isolated in her Brooklyn apartment since March, Stephanie Shih has folded dozens upon dozens of dumplings. “I find it soothing,” she says. “I can do it without thinking, so it’s almost like meditation.” But Shih’s dumplings aren’t made of dough—they’re made of clay, and the results are delicate and porcelain-white.
In the past two years, Shih has made more than 1,000 ceramic dumplings, as well as many other replicas of Asian foodstuffs, from jars of chili oil to boxed tea drinks, each hand-crafted and hand-painted. Her work is a visual excavation of the Asian-American pantry, a space steeped in nostalgia and shaped by the experience of diaspora.
“I want to make groceries that feel iconic and are immediately recognizable to people within the community,” Shih says. “Because we have a limited number of brands to choose from—it's just what was imported—a lot of us have the same memories. I think the pull is so strong for people in the diaspora because these objects really do remind them of home.”
Shih is first-generation Taiwanese-American, but her ceramics speak to the multitude of cultures and culinary traditions within the Asian-American diaspora. She has sculpted cans of Spam, Morinaga caramel candies, Indomie and Chapagetti instant noodle packets, and Yakult—the Japanese probiotic drink that also appeared in the film To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.
The visual power of these everyday items is clear from Shih’s Instagram account. Scrolling through the feed can feel like successfully navigating an Asian grocery store: I find myself searching for signs of home, much like I do at the helm of a shopping cart in Mitsuwa Marketplace or H Mart. Shih’s ceramics prompt a familiar pang of comfort: Food is one of the most evocative vehicles of identity expression.
“This has gotten me to think about what it means to not really have a physical homeland,” Shih says. “We don't feel at home in Asia—China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, wherever—and we do feel at home in America, yet we're still othered here, especially now in a time that has brought out underlying xenophobia. The community is our homeland, in a way.”
Shih initially began folding ceramic dumplings not as a statement about the complexities of the immigrant experience, but as a personal way to connect her art with her heritage. When she posted images of the results, she received suggestions that she make dumplings that appear dipped in soy sauce or packaged Chinese takeout containers (originally a Western invention to hold oysters). “And a lot of the comments were from white folks,” she says. “They didn't mean it maliciously, but it did feel like it was a joke, like this work was a novelty.”
Shih’s subsequent piece, a bottle of Gold Plum Chinkiang Vinegar, slyly reclaimed the narrative. “I wanted to give a nod to everyone who actually knows the most important dipping sauce is not soy sauce, but black vinegar,” she says. “And that's how the whole grocery project started. The more excited the community was to see these objects, the more that drove me to think about diasporic identity.”
Shih often polls her followers to help her decide which food items to create. She asks them what brand of rice they grew up eating, or which oyster sauce is their ride-or-die household staple. The discourse often reflects shared experiences of roaming grocery-store aisles. “For some products, all the answers coalesced around one iconic brand—Kadoya, for sesame oil, Lee Kum Kee for oyster sauce,” Shih says. “But for soy sauce, I got so many answers. There wasn't really one clear winner.”
The process can also jog one’s memory. Some Asian Americans might recognize the way a product looks but forget its name, or vice-versa. “I can read a bit of Chinese, but I certainly can’t read everything on a soy sauce bottle, so I often think this is the bottle I grew up with, but I'm not sure,” Shih says. “Doing these polls is almost like asking a stranger what my own childhood memory was. It’s sort of a homecoming.” As Michelle Zauner wrote in a 2018 essay for TheNew Yorker, about shopping in H Mart, “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?”
Currently, the American Museum of Ceramic Art is showing several of Shih’s grocery store simulacra in a group show on Chinese American ceramics. (The museum is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the exhibition is viewable online.) She is also preparing for a solo exhibition, which will feature 30 soy sauce bottles and 450 dumplings. In the meantime, she continues to take commissions, and has faithfully reproduced such diverse goods as Betty Crocker Fudge Brownie Mix, a can of Goya pink beans, and a bottle of Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda.
“I’ve realized that even people who aren't in the Asian-American diaspora appreciate the sentiment behind this work,” Shih says. “They want to tap into that feeling. So that's been really meaningful for me. Even though I think of my work as very much ‘for us, by us,’ people outside the community are really relating to it, too.”
Though students are still studying for finals and finishing up their term papers, they’re not doing it on campus this year. Instead, dorms are empty, quads are deserted, and playgrounds are covered in caution tape.
Instead of cafeterias, students are now eating lunch in their own (or their parents’) kitchens, which, depending on the school, might be a step up or down. But a few schools have treats like no other, from an Albuquerque school district’s legendary peanut butter bar to a way of barbecuing chicken that has spread throughout Upstate New York. With prom on ice and graduations likely to take place over Zoom (if at all), our own kitchens can provide a taste of academia until school’s back in session. But whether your 25th high school reunion just got cancelled or you’re currently sweating over your grade point average, the following recipes can provide a dose of nostalgic comfort.
Jersey Dirt
University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia
It started as a prank. In the early ’90s, Tina Lesher heard that the University of Richmond was holding a “Recipes From Home” contest. Lesher, the mother of a UR student, copied a pudding recipe from one of her cookbooks and sent it in as “Jersey Dirt,” claiming it was her daughter’s favorite dessert. Combining cookies, pudding, whipped topping, and cream cheese, the dessert was a winner.
One day, Melissa Lesher walked into the dining hall and saw Jersey Dirt (which she had never tried) on display, along with signs stating that it was her favorite. “I was mortified. I lost it. I turned the cards over so no one would see my name associated with it. I was livid,” she told the alumni magazine years later. But the dessert lives on at UR. Writes alumnus Catherine Amos Cribbs, “That glorious mix of cheesecakey pudding and crushed Oreos could calm an overstressed brain or soothe a broken heart.” For our overstressed brains and broken hearts, you can use this recipe from the university itself.
UBC Cinnamon Bun
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
For students at the University of British Columbia, the ideal breakfast is one of the school’s famed cinnamon buns, typically made at the campus bakery. It all started with baker Grace Hasz, who began baking the famous buns for UBC in 1954 and didn’t stop until her retirement in 1971, at which point she was making 120 dozen per day. The university uses this recipe these days, which results in a “pillowy softness and caramelized edges,” writes Angelina Tagliafierro in UBC’s alumni magazine.
But that’s not enough for Eric Leyland. Hasz’s grandson went on a quest to remake his grandmother’s original cinnamon bun, which he maintains is different from the official version, seeing as “the buns should be almost black from the cinnamon, the smell overpowering,” he writes on his blog. After a number of tries, Leyland found a recipe that lives up to his memories of his grandmother’s specialty. As opposed to the university’s recipe, which makes 18 large buns, Leyland’s recipe, also available on his blog, fits into a 9-inch pan. As the rolls cool, he writes, make a cup of coffee, “then sit down, close your eyes and think of my grandmother.”
If you do end up making the UBC Cinnamon Bun, why not make some chili to go with it?
Though the combination of savory, beany chili and sticky-sweet buns might seem stomach-churning to some, the combination is actually a beloved school-lunch memory for students across the United States, from the Midwest to Montana and even the Pacific Northwest. Chili and cinnamon rolls may have started life as a hearty breakfast for loggers, before making the jump to schools. That heartiness is probably why they are a rare treat on school lunch menus these days—the mixture is something of a calorie bomb. But some restaurants still serve the combo, and no federal nutritional standards can stop you from making some chili (perhaps using this recipe from Southern Living) and soaking it up with a cinnamon roll.
Wellesley Fudge Cake and Peppermint Stick Pie
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
Wellesley is lucky enough to have two unique desserts tied to its name. One is old-school, going back to the late 19th century. At the time, fudge was the hottest new treat of the era, and it was especially popular at women’s colleges, where it was an illicit thrill for students to make in their dorm rooms after lights-out. A chocolate layer cake, topped with frosting that had been cooked much like fudge candy, became the specialty of Wellesley’s local tea rooms, which were often patronized by hungry students. In the 20th century, Baker’s Chocolate often included a recipe for Wellesley Fudge Cake on ads and packaging, and soon it became an old-fashioned dessert, instead of student fuel.
While the cake itself isn’t made often at Wellesley (it’s complicated to make at scale), the school provides its own recipe to make at home, though they also recommend a recipe from Cook’s Country as an excellent modern take. But students at Wellesley these days may be more familiar with Peppermint Stick Pie, a simple and sweet dessert of peppermint ice cream spooned into a graham cracker crust and topped with chocolate that’s often served at campus events.
APS Gold Bars
Albuquerque Public Schools, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Former students in Albuquerque still dream about their Gold Bars. Once sold for 25 cents at schools, the simple unbaked bars consisted of peanut butter, actual butter, Rice Krispies or graham cracker crumbs, and powdered sugar with a chocolate topping. Recipes abound for Gold Bars online, especially as they’ve gotten rarer in schools themselves. And arguments abound too. Should Rice Krispies or graham cracker crumbs be the base? Should the topping consist of melted Hershey bars or Magic Shell? But most agree that the final result should taste something like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, and that they should be kept cold to prevent meltage in the Albuquerque sun.
Cornell Barbecue Chicken
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
College students are crazy about chicken tenders, building websites to keep their fellow students informed of when they’re available and all but rioting when they’re taken off the menu. But the ancestor of the tender was the nugget, a prototype of which was created by Dr. Robert C. Baker, a Cornell food science professor who specialized in all things poultry. In a less-breaded flash of inspiration, Baker published a new way to barbecue broiler chickens in 1950 that endures not only at Cornell cookouts, but across New York State. Thanks to a vinegary, egg-enriched sauce used to both marinate and baste the broilers, the result is complex, tasty, and inexpensive enough to fuel generations of fundraiser and state fair attendees.
The original recipe has some pitfalls, due to the raw egg and the sheer amount of salt, but some still swear by it. Modernized versions of the recipe retain the egg, the magic ingredient that helps the sauce bind itself to the chicken.
Concord, California, and Yakima Valley, Washington
Though they are hundreds of miles apart, select students in California and Washington State have something in common: the Cheese Zombie. The concept is simple: a cake-like slab of yeast bread or a roll with a layer of creamy American cheese baked inside. (“Just like the undead, Cheese Zombies need time to rise,” notes the Yakima Herald.) Their origins are murkier. Did the bakers Decla Phillips and Helen Beloc invent them for Concord’s Mount Diablo High School in 1963? Or were they first whipped up when the Yakima School District received a huge amount of government cheese in the ’50s?
Whatever the source, the simple pleasure of a Cheese Zombie has lurched out of school cafeterias into local restaurants in both regions. And the Zombie is the rare example of an old-school favorite that’s still considered nutritionally acceptable to serve to young students. It helps that they can be made with whole-wheat flour. The Yakima Herald has two recipes: one small enough for a household and one big enough for a horde.
The true, stranger-than-fiction, adventure of eight visionaries who spent two years quarantined inside of a self-engineered replica of Earth’s ecosystem called Biosphere 2.
Premiering May 8th
Spaceship Earth is the true, stranger-than-fiction, adventure of eight visionaries who in 1991 spent two years quarantined inside of a self-engineered replica of Earth’s ecosystem called Biosphere 2. The experiment was a worldwide phenomenon, chronicling daily existence in the face of life threatening ecological disaster and a growing criticism that it was nothing more than a cult. The bizarre story is both a cautionary tale and a hopeful lesson of how a small group of dreamers can potentially reimagine a new world.
RSVP HERE: LeVar Burton Moderates a Conversation on 'Spaceship Earth' Join us Saturday May 9 at 8 pm EDT on our Facebook page for a Live Q&A session moderated by Levar Burton. Spaceship Earth director Matt Wolf and Biospherians Mark Nelson and Linda Leigh will join us to talk about the film and their experience embarking on this revolutionary experiment to change the world.
A few weeks after I finished making Spaceship Earth, I needed a mind cleanse, so I decided to watch the landmark British documentary The Up Series. In 1964, the filmmaker Michael Apted got a group of fourteen 7-year-olds together in London, and he asked them to talk about their lives. The first installment, Seven Up!, was meant to be a one-off broadcast about UK class disparity, but it evolved into one of the most epic documentary experiments of all time. Every seven years, Apted would reconnect with his subjects to show how their lives changed. Last year, the ninth installment was released, and the 7-year-olds are now 63. Most people have watched the series in installments over the past five decades—I watched it in four days
My friends called it my “7 Up Obsession,” but what I was doing—unconsciously or not—was simulating the passage of time. I was transfixed, and I needed to find out what happened next in the course of these ordinary lives. Their stories aren’t very dramatic, but to see a person’s lifetime of wisdom, hardship, ambivalence, and hope compressed into a concentrated period of hours is profound.
I guess I wasn’t actually taking a break from Spaceship Earth, because in a lot of ways, this is what my film is about. We follow a very unusual group, who call themselves “synergists,” from the time they meet in the 1960s as young idealists until today. During that half century, they built an enormous ship and travel the world, start a performance troupe called The Theater of All Possibilities, and they create a miniature replica of the planet in a geodesic pyramid in the Arizona desert.
It’s amazing to watch footage of the synergists growing up, to see their evolving hairstyles and fashion over the decades. You can see when certain periods in their lives are exhilarating, and when others are more trying.
When I was making Spaceship Earth and watching The Up Series, I was thinking a lot about what imprint I might make on the world, and which relationships in my life will last (you know, the light stuff). Now that my 7 Up obsessions is over, I’m onto the next documentary epic, Eyes on the Prize—the seminal fourteen-hour history of the civil rights movement. But I also do time travel in less cerebral ways, like reorganizing all the shelves and drawers in my house during a global quarantine.
Still there’s one thing I’ve been doing to simulate the passage of time for my entire adult life. Starting when I was 18-years-old, I wrote a letter to myself on New Year’s Eve. Each year, I write a new letter after reading all the previous years’ in chronological succession. Twenty years later, this tradition has been going on for over half of my life. Each year, I have the opportunity to literally see myself grow up, and to take stock of my life. Obviously crazy things happened (remember 9/11?), but over the course of these two decades, what’s most surprising is how much stays the same. I think that’s true of the synergists in Spaceship Earth—they’ve led epic lives full of adventure and experimentation—but in the end, what they have left is each other
—Matt Wolf
Earth 2.0: How a voluntary 1990s quarantine experiment captured the world’s attention
The adage about truth being stranger than fiction is exemplified in the odd—but true—tale of a largely self-contained experiment in the desert. Starting in 1991, eight people lived for two years and 20 minutes in a microcosm of Earth—dubbed Biosphere 2—on a 40-acre plot of land in Oracle, Arizona. The glass terrarium-like structure covered seven million cubic feet (that’s 3.14 acres) and included seven distinct biomes: a rainforest, ocean, mangrove wetlands, savannah grassland, fog desert, an agricultural system and human habitat. The experiment’s mission was to simulate a closed system to see if humans could live somewhere else in the universe.
The four-year construction process on the sealed greenhouse began in 1987, and the public followed it with interest. Calling it “Noah’s Ark: the Sequel,” Time magazine wrote of the “gleaming, 26-meter- high (85-ft.) cathedral-like latticework roof of steel tubing and glass,” how it is “both an architectural wonder and a scientific tour de force,” and how the Biospherians would be “sealed inside for two years, getting nothing from the outside but information, electricity and sunshine.” Discover called it “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon.” The night before the crew stepped into the structure that would be their home for two years, 2,000 revelers including psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary and actor Woody Harrelson attended a party to celebrate the launch.
The first day of isolation was marked by pomp and circumstance: blessings were issued by a Crow Indian shaman, a Tibetan Buddhist monk and a Mexican dancer burning incense before the jumpsuit-clad crew entered and the air-lock door was closed by Bass, who funded the $150 million project, complete with 3,800 species of plants and animals.
Things seemed to go well initially, but challenges quickly became clear. The team was supposed to raise their own food—and demonstrated success growing crops including rice, papayas, sweet potatoes and bananas—but cloudy weather made it difficult, and the inhabitants had to break into an emergency food supply. Information began to leak that engineers installed a carbon dioxide scrubber and that staffers were making twice-monthly deliveries of necessities like mouse traps and seeds to combat pests and failing crops. Many members of the crew lost a dramatic amount of weight and interpersonal tensions threatened to boil over. Outside intervention became necessary when soil bacteria proliferated, driving up the concentration of carbon dioxide to 12 times the air outside. Free oxygen levels plummeted and the crew became ill and disoriented (a condition similar to altitude sickness). In January 1993, thousands of pounds of liquid oxygen had to be pumped into the structure.
When the original Biospherians emerged on September 26, 1993, they were a gaunt, rag-tag bunch. The following year, a second crew attempted to live in Biosphere 2, but they were plagued by similar challenges and only lasted from March to September. The highly-publicized project remains the largest closed system ever constructed, a mash-up of Big Brother, The Truman Show, The Martian. Though the experiment failed to prove that humans could survive in a similar structure in outer space, it did pioneering work in the realm of water recycling and other fields of study.
Today, Biosphere 2 is managed by the University of Arizona and researchers study things like the effects of the ocean's acidification on coral and ensuring food and water security. Fascinated by this too-strange-to-believe saga? The 2020 documentary Spaceship Earth offers a vivid deep-dive into the crew’s day-to-day—as well as the cult-like group dynamics—and offers insights into this both hopeful and peculiar story of scientific discovery, conservation and human-will.
Elsewhere on Atlas Obscura
Want to learn more about Biosphere 2? You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.
Take a virtual tour of the now non-sealed biosphere and get a closer look at the over 3,500 exotic species growing in the dome today.
There are 1.9 million objects to explore. What are you waiting for?
Over its centuries of domination and expansion, the British Empire collected its fair—make that unfair—share of stuff, much of which now resides in the British Museum. Of course, like most other museums in countries heavily affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the British Museum is presently shuttered. But that doesn’t mean you can’t examine its holdings.
Last week the museum opened up about half of the objects in its collections—meaning an astonishing 1.9 million items—for public perusal online. While it’s in the public domain (as the Smithsonian’s collection is), the British Museum’s trove will operate under a non-commercial CC-BY-4.0 license, which allows the public to view the images and share them with friends.
The breadth and diversity of the items now on view is as far and wide as the British Empire was at its height, from modern campaign buttons to Iron Age figurines. Some of the objects are iconic touchstones of world history, like the Rosetta Stone. Other pieces are less renowned, like a decadent porcelain elephant from 17th-century Japan. What all the stuff has in common is that it pulls you away from the current moment, offering an opportunity to delve into the past.
The world of discovery now accessible at home is limited only by one's imagination (and, in this case, an understanding of how to use the catalogue’s search function). Whether you’re down the street in Kensington or around the world in Shanghai, the British Museum’s new initiative is a reminder that even when we're sequestered at home, we're only as far from other cultures—and the past—as we let ourselves be. And exploration of the unknown is just a search away.
Head over to our forums to share your favorite finds in the British Museum’s massive archive!
Some of your creations are even more extraordinary than their real-life counterparts.
A few weeks ago, we set out a challenge: Draw a picture of a place from Atlas Obscura using only a written description for reference. The results were beyond impressive. We received submissions from readers young and old, experienced artists and casual doodlers, each with a unique take on one of places in the challenge.
We saw submissions that came pretty close to matching the real thing, and others that were something completely fanciful and new. They came in a variety of mediums, from pencil to ink to oils, such as Alexandrea Farquhar's beautiful oil painting of the Swing at the End of the World, above.
While we couldn’t include all of the artwork we received, we’ve compiled a few of our favorites here—followed by images of the actual place. If you still want to try the challenge yourself, stop scrolling now! We'd love to see what you create in the forums or by email to places@atlasobscura.com. Thanks to everyone who participated—keep an eye out for future Obscura Academy challenges!
On the edge of Black Rock Desert in Nevada, this otherworldly hot spring formed around the site of an improperly-sealed test well. If a large rock with multiple cone-shaped geyser spouts weren't strange enough, the mound is covered in algae that color the surface bright red and green. Some of our readers it as tall and skinny, others short and squat. And one young artist put his math skills to work determining the geyser's proportions.
Wisconsin's most beloved monster—depicted in a statue in the town of Rhinelander—is described as a mashup: a frog's head, an elephant's face, a dinosaur's spiny back, thick short legs like a komodo dragon, and a tail covered in spikes. With that many different parts of the animal kingdom in play, it's hard to figure what this beast is supposed to look like. We saw a lot of elephant trunks. (Understandable!)
At this Buddhist temple in Thailand, an enormous green dragon scales bubblegum-pink walls. Young artist Joshua Backhouse was able to capture a very close likeness—without seeing photos!
It's not every day that you see a museum shaped like the artifacts it displays. But the El Cemi Museum in Jayuya, Puerto Rico, gets both its shape and its name from the cemi, a spiritual object that is important for the Taíno, an indigenous people of the Caribbean. Hugh Eckert pulled off a pretty close rendering, and even gave us multiple angles!
The elements are simple enough: a sturdy tree, a wooden treehouse, a hanging swing. But what sets this place apart from the average backyard swing is its location—on the edge of a cliff, near an active volcano.
There are so many different styles in this eccentric palace in Sintra, Portugal, that drawing it would be challenging even with a photo. The estate is huge, filled with grottoes, fountains, tunnels, and caves. This drawing from Elena, age four, captures its spirit, some of Quinta da Regaleira's towers and spires, and a pair of cats for good measure.
The real thing:
We were so excited about the response to this challenge, and can't get enough of your Atlas Obscura–inspired art. Some of the places described in the original story were not included here, if you want to try capturing one of those mysterious places. Keep your eyes peeled for another round—we'll do this again soon with a whole new set of places.
We wouldn’t exist without curious explorers like you.
From the very beginning, more than 10 years ago, Atlas Obscura has been driven by our community. One of the early user-created entries in our database of wondrous places—published just a few months after we launched in 2009, by username "bertieinindia"—was The Root Bridges of Cherrapunji, a series of centuries-old bridges grown from the tangled roots of Ficus elastica trees.
There was so little published about the bridges at the time that it took work to even confirm they were real and that, as bertieinindia told us, they were under threat of being replaced by modern bridges. Today, that article on the root bridges has been seen by thousands and updated nearly a dozen times—and, most importantly, the bridges are being visited, cared for, and studied by scientists. This is Atlas Obscura at work—connecting people with amazing places, surprising ideas, unusual experiences, and each other.
Our mission has always been to inspire wonder and curiosity about the incredible world we all share. As the world has been forced to close its doors, all of us at Atlas Obscura have worked harder than ever to continue bringing you that sense of wonder, including through our "Wonder From Home" series, which features livestreams and online experiences, in addition to our places, videos, and stories.
Your membership supports the work of finding wonder in these challenging times. But membership means more than supporting what we were already doing; it's a chance to build something new together. Members will get perks, such as member-exclusive events and $100 off your next Atlas Obscura trip, and we're planning to roll out new offerings all the time, including early access to new travel tools, an improved site experience, additional members-only experiences, and more. And we want to hear from you, too, about what tools and content you most want.
And sometimes involves storing dead fish in your in-laws’ freezer.
If May 2020 was like any other spring, Daniel Bolnick, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut, would be wrapping up a semester of teaching and preparing to head into the field. He and as many as two-dozen collaborators would be fanning out to sites in Alaska and Canada’s Vancouver Island, where they would traverse lush forests with snow-capped mountains in the distance, and splosh into lakes and streams.
By day, they would wade into the cold water to study threespine stickleback—metallic little fish that measure approximately two inches long and weigh a little more than a penny—and investigate ecology, evolution, and immunology, focusing on, among other things, the comparatively enormous parasites that hunker down inside the fish. (Picture a translucent gummy worm about half the mass of the unfortunate stickleback itself. Or wince at the thought of a 150-pound human wandering around with a 75-pound worm wriggling inside them.)
At night, the whole team would crash in a cozy cabin, with people sleeping wherever they could find room—on the couch, on the porch, in hammocks in the nearby woods. “In a normal year, it’s fun and entertaining, and people get along well, so it works,” Bolnick says. “But cramming 10 people into a 600-square-foot cabin would not be a good idea right now, to say the least.”
In May 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, nothing is normal—including seasonal fieldwork. Bolnick and his team, like many researchers around the world, are scrambling to figure out how to make it happen in the era of social distancing.
Bolnick’s ears perked up about COVID-19 back in January; by February, he was convinced that the field season was in trouble. In March he took to Twitter to put out a call for other researchers in the same position—and for people who already lived in the areas where he was looking to do fieldwork, and might be able to help.
For Carolyn McKinnon, the request came at just the right time. Before the outbreak, she had been working as an educator at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre on Vancouver Island, taking students—ranging from kindergarteners to university groups—out to the beach or for rides on a boat, and teaching them about the ocean. The gig dried up in mid-March, she says, when many Canadian public schools went remote.
McKinnon was able to hang on to a job for a few more weeks, working on lesson plans and other tasks, before she was laid off at the end of March. Fortuitously, she says, “my friend is on science Twitter a lot, and knew that I was looking for work, because my summer job wasn’t looking like it was going to go through.” That friend came across Bolnick’s call. McKinnon got in touch with her résumé, then Bolnick enlisted her to go out and collect stickleback, euthanize them in accordance with animal-use protocols (which often include administering an overdose of an analgesic), and store their bodies in a freezer.
The call came at the right time for Diana Rennison too. An assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of California San Diego, Rennison also studies stickleback—and was lamenting a similarly scuttled research trip to Vancouver. Rennison is Canadian, and the postdoc on the project is a German citizen. Neither of them has a U.S. green card; both are on temporary work permits. A few months ago, as travel bans came into effect, the researchers began to worry that they would have trouble hopscotching the borders. “We realized we were going to have to throw in the towel at the end of February or first week in March,” Rennison says.
When she saw Bolnick’s call, she thought maybe they could team up. “By chance, he and I were both planning to collect [stickleback] from largely the same set of lakes,” Rennison says. “So if we weren't in this situation, we would have sent independent field teams to these lakes, and now are sharing a lot of the same samples.” Now they’re co-hiring a small field crew—including McKinnon—to work at the same sites and tackle projects for both of their labs.
The field season should be kicking off this month, but it hasn’t been seamless so far. Even though they were able to hire McKinnon and a few others who can set out traps and, say, distinguish a stickleback from a salmon, there have been several other logistical hurdles to clear. They had to update their permits, and in addition to the sites Bolnick and Rennison planned to sample in the Campbell River area—a four-hour drive from where McKinnon is, along a slow, winding road pocked with potholes—the researchers are keen to secure approval to sample stickleback close to Bamfield, on the southern side of the island, where McKinnon has already been living.
Before sampling some of the sites near Bamfield, McKinnon is waiting for permission from the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, which must sign off before she can collect on any lakes in the group’s treaty territory. Storing the collected specimens will require a bit of creativity too. Rennison’s in-laws happen to live on Vancouver Island, and she plans to stow her samples in a freezer in their garage until she can drive up from California and retrieve them.
Many isolated communities around the world are bristling at newcomers who are fleeing cities, which tend to have dense clusters of disease, and McKinnon thinks researchers who are doing fieldwork in remote areas have an obligation to mitigate the risk they’re adding to the mix, and ask themselves whether their particular projects really need to happen right now.
“It’s a lot of stress that’s pushing you to go out into the field,” she says. “But I do think taking a minute to really think about the impact your research could have on the community you’re going to is important. If you can find a workaround like Dan has, where he’s already hiring people living and working near the communities he needs samples from, that seems like a better option.”
It’s part of the appeal of doing fieldwork near Bamfield too—she wouldn’t be traveling into the community from somewhere else, which may have a higher rate of COVID-19. “I think I’ll get approval to do lakes around Bamfield because that will just be me,” she says. “I don’t think I pose much of a COVID risk to the community.”
For scientists there are financial considerations, which often dovetail with a desire not to raise specimens whose lives would be wasted. Bolnick’s team has spent upwards of $50,000 breeding and caring for fish that can be released only on Vancouver Island in a narrow window this year; take them through another generation, and the genetic components of the experiment unravel. “Either we use them in the next month,” Bolnick says, “or we don’t use them at all.”
There are professional worries too. Graduate students and postdocs who aren’t able to get into the field might have incomplete data sets, which could endanger publication prospects or blunt their chances in an already fierce job market. One of the Vancouver Island projects is run by a postdoc gearing up to find a job. “Having him potentially lose an experiment he’s spent two years building up is quite sobering,” Bolnick says.
And then there are almost-too-good-to-be-true opportunities that researchers can’t bear to squander. On the Kenai Peninsula, in Alaska, for instance, Bolnick’s team is in the middle of an experiment that he says “could never be restarted.” The researchers recently had the chance to introduce stickleback to a “tabula rasa environment”—nine lakes where the Alaska Department of Fish and Game used the chemical rotenone to evict northern pike, an introduced species, by wiping them out. (Other species were collateral damage.) As far as natural laboratories go, it would be hard to ask for a better setup.
“We’re not going to have nine lakes at our disposal to repopulate ever again,” Bolnick says. The first-generation piscine residents will breed this year. “Every summer that we miss sampling, we’re missing a generation.”
For the Vancouver Island fieldwork, the plan is to dampen the risks of COVID-19 transmission by encouraging the crew to practice social distancing as much as possible—from the rest of the community, and from each other. Members of the field crew are being asked to self-isolate for two weeks before they come in contact with one another, Rennison says; Bolnick says that they’ll travel from site to site in separate cars. Some may visit different lakes on different days.
But total solitude isn’t ideal either, he adds, because a lot can go wrong in the woods. Someone on Bolnick’s team once tumbled over a root and broke an arm; another punctured a foot on a stick. “Accidents happen, and no one wants to be heading to the hospital in this era,” he says. An extra set of eyes might be welcome.
But out at the wonderfully lonely field sites—thickly fringed with forests and tousled by breezes—Bolnick expects it will be easy to stay fairly far apart. The wide-open water, he says, “is about as safe a spot as can be.”
You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.
From above, a lone figure with a backpack can be seen peering down at a brown river that flows at the bottom of what appears to be a deep desert canyon. Los Angeles–based travel photographer Erin Sullivan did not not ride a helicopter or use a drone to get this remarkable aerial view. She used stacks of pancakes.
When Sullivan’s travel plans were canceled, as nearly 40 million Californians were ordered to stay at home in mid-March for the COVID-19 pandemic, she channeled her curiosity for nature into creativity—using her pantry, laundry, and other household items. Pancakes, onions, gelatin, and other edibles helped her recreate the wonder of outdoor adventures, and she also used aluminum foil to make a shimmering lake and tie-dye sheets to evoke an ice cave. She then photographed her scenes to make it look like they were actually captured out in the wild.
“This has definitely been an opportunity to learn, and has taught me a few things,” Sullivan wrote in an email. “Because I'm making these tiny scenes and trying to make them seem grand and real, I have to pay attention to the details in each item—the light, the texture, the color.” She has inspired others with her Instagram by sharing the challenge to create their own miniature indoor adventures. Sullivan posted, “Staying home is literally a life saver right now, and your inner artist can thrive given any restriction.”
Atlas Obscura talked to Sullivan about missed trips, glowing caves in New Zealand, and her inspiration in challenging times.
What travel were you planning when shelter-at-home started in Los Angeles?
Normally I spend about a third of my time on the road, shooting and filming for tourism boards, brands, and other projects. Before things got serious in L.A., I was home preparing for upcoming trips. I had several shoots planned, to film episodes of the miniseries I host for REI called In Our Nature, about the future of the outdoors. Since we can't shoot those episodes right now, we've been creating a few mini-episodes about how the pandemic is affecting our connection to nature, among other topics. For international travel, I had been planning a hiking trip to the Dolomites in Italy for a group I had previously led on a Greece adventure, and I was in the midst of planning a couple of personal trips and hadn't landed on a location yet. Guatemala and Mexico were options I was looking at for the spring.
I was keeping an eye on how things were going in Italy and assumed it could go that way for us here in the States. So while hiking was still allowed, I was going on solo hikes and enjoying peaceful time in nature. I started to think about how I could pivot my business if all of my trips were canceled. A few weeks later, they were.
What inspired you to start recreating outdoor scenes?
I pursued a career in travel and outdoor photography because I love it. I cherish the time I spend outdoors and around the world, and I miss it dearly. But I also see this as an invitation to turn inward and push myself creatively. The idea to recreate outdoor scenes in my house came when I began asking myself how I'd stay creative and connected to the outdoors while following stay-at-home guidelines. When I was a kid I'd imagine little adventures happening in corners of my bedroom or in my blankets when I couldn't fall asleep. That came to mind when I was brainstorming. I thought, “Hmm, maybe it would be fun to create a series of images of tiny adventures made of household objects.” I sketched out a handful of ideas and created them, and saw quickly that this could be a series that really works. I've never photographed miniatures before, so this is new for me!
How are you staying creative and motivated?
I have to release the expectation of it. I have to let it be fun. I'm definitely not motivated to create every single day—I think now is a time to be really gentle with ourselves. I have been trying to create three to four sets of images for this series every week. Journaling, going for walks around my neighborhood, prayer/meditation, listening to music, reading, and dancing like an idiot have all been immensely helpful. Over the years I have learned which of my practices help me to stay creative and keep things flowing. Journaling is probably the biggest. I don't write anything groundbreaking, but it's just to get the gunk out of my brain and keep things moving.
What’s your favorite shot from the series?
My favorite shots from this series are the ones that have the most sentimental value for me. At the top of the list is the “Glowing Cave” I made from rain jackets and tin foil. It took me about 20 minutes to set up, and I spent about an hour shooting the scene. I had a super-clear idea in my head all day of what I wanted to create, and which materials would help me to accomplish it. By the time I had a free moment, it was 10 p.m., but the idea was so clear that I didn't want to wait until the next night. (This one had to be shot in darkness.) Once I had things set up, I played with the objects looking for different angles. I also experimented with putting a canoe in the "river" but ended up liking the people standing as a better way to communicate scale.
Ever since I first visited New Zealand in 2014, I have been completely fascinated by glow worms and the caves they live in. I wanted to create an image that represents how it feels to stand in one of those caves. There are certainly elements of fantasy in this set, and that's purposeful. These images aren't meant to be 100 percent literal, but to communicate the way the outdoors and travel make us feel when we are experiencing them.
As beaches started to reopen, locals came to see the light show from a distance.
This piece was originally published in The Guardian and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration.
Mother nature has provided a radical gift to nighttime beach-goers in southern California, in the form of bioluminescent waves that crash and froth with an otherworldly light.
The event occurs every few years along the coast of southern California, though locals say this year’s sea sparkle is especially vibrant, possibly related to historic rains that soaked the region and generated algal bloom.
For some, this year’s light show was especially meaningful, coming just as beaches began to reopen after an almost month-long closure due to coronavirus.
Dale Huntington, a 37-year-old pastor at a church in southeastern San Diego, got up at 3 a.m. after beaches reopened to surf the iridescent waves. “I’ve been surfing for 20 years now, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Huntington says.
The neon waves owe their color to blooming microscopic plants called phytoplankton. By day, the organisms collect on the water’s surface to give the water a reddish-brown hue, known as the red tide. By night, the algae put on a light show, dazzling most brightly in turbulent waters.
One photographer off the coast of Newport Beach, where crowds in recent weeks have protested against closures, recorded a dolphin jetting through bioluminescence like a sea specter.
The phosphorescent display has captured the attention of locals in southern California, with many emerging from shelter-in-place restrictions to catch a glimpse of the surreal scenery.
One San Diegan, who lives in a neighborhood along the coast, implored local officials to restrict access to the beach, complaining that the red tide has drawn large crowds comparable to a “Fourth of July on steroids."
For surfers like Huntington, the spectacle has provided joy and relief amid the challenges of the pandemic. “My favorite part was paddling out—it was almost like there was a glow stick around your hand,” he describes. “My board left a bioluminescent wake. There were a few of us out there and we were giggling, grown men shouting ‘this is so cool’ and splashing around like kids in the bathtub.”
Red tides, which stretch from Baja California up the coast to Los Angeles, have been observed since the early 1900s and can last from a few days to a couple of months. Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, who study the phenomenon, say the glow shows are most lively at least two hours after sunset.
Scientists don’t know exactly how long this year’s red tide will last, but for Huntington, this year’s light show was doubly welcome. “I think we’re all looking for light in a dark time,” he says. “And this sweet moment was an opportunity to find joy amidst struggle.”
A little star twinkling sounds like a cute thought—until that star starts rapidly growing in size, forcing you and everyone nearby into shelter as it pelts the Earth with extraterrestrial strata. Meteorites rarely cause even injury with their otherworldly masses, but in August 1888, a space rock apparently went the whole nine yards, striking and killing one man and paralyzing another in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The death was recently ID’d in documents found in the Turkish state archives, and reported in a paper published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. Among 60-million-odd archival papers recently digitized was a 130-year-old manuscript that recorded the lethal meteorite strike.
“We were looking [through] the archives for a long time,” says Ozan Ünsalan, a physicist at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey, and lead author of the new study. “[We searched] keywords like ‘meteorite,’ ‘falling stones,’ and ‘fireballs.’”
The report was originally written in Ottoman Turkish—a language read and spoken like modern Turkish, but written with an admixture script of Arabic and Persian—which is why it may have evaded detection until now.
If you knew the true frequency of meteorite impacts, there’s a good chance you’d never leave the house. NASA’s fireball database looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, with a profusion of multicolored dots perforating a map of the world.
That said, actual meteoritic casualties are extremely rare. Though injuries by meteorite and meteorite shockwave have occurred before—in 1954 a woman in Alabama named Ann Hodges was smacked by a fallen meteorite while snoozing (she fortunately survived); in 2013 hundreds in Russia suffered secondhand injuries from broken windows and other shrapnel linked to the Chelyabinsk blast—no deaths from a strike have ever been credibly verified.
The newly discovered Turkish documents precede the famously massive Tunguska explosion of 1908, which may have killed two people, and are more evidence-based than a 1677 manuscript from Italy—which even NASA cites—in which an Italian monk was killed by a stone “projected from the clouds.”
Of course, most space rocks don’t make it through Earth’s atmospheric aegis. And those that do need to be big enough—and have a one-in-an-unscientific-million trajectory—to hit a human target. Which is why those two individuals in late-Ottoman Kurdistan were very, very unlucky.
The manuscript documenting the death and paralysis describes a “fireball” and a slew of meteorites striking a hill in Sulaymaniyah—now in eastern Iraq (also: a sister city of Tucson, Arizona)—and damaging crops. What was left of the meteorite was sent by the governor of Sulaymaniyah to the central Ottoman government.
The meteorite sample has long since vanished, but Ünsalan believes it could be buried in some forgotten corner of Turkey’s science collections—perhaps in the archaeology museum in Istanbul. More documents from the old archive are still being digitized, so the team is hopeful it will learn more about this event—one that occurred at the literal intersection of space and time.
“The feeling [we have from our work thus far] is just awesome,” Ünsalan says. “Because we[‘ve] contributed to science and history at the same time, with one shot.”
Atlas Obscura staff recommend immersive and inspiring international series that you can stream now.
After weeks of social distancing, you may want to distance yourself from your own house. Luckily, we've got just the thing to help you do that. We asked Atlas Obscura staff to share TV recommendations that showcase weird and wondrous settings, from 1920s Berlin to 19th-century Malacca to a futuristic, pessimistic São Paulo. Lose yourself in these 11 global shows that you can watch now.
Itaewon Class
Seoul, South Korea; streaming on Netflix
Park Saeroyi is a teenager when his father is killed in a hit-and-run accident, setting off a chain of events that pits him against South Korea’s most powerful food company. What follows is a slow burn of revenge and redemption set in Itaewon, Seoul’s hip international district, where Park Saeroyi starts a food company of his own. Itaewon Class is a dramatic, sensory experience: The superbly dressed cast moves through the narrow, neon-lit streets of Itaewon to a memorable K-pop soundtrack. They also eat incredibly well. I found myself coveting (and attempting to make) their soft tofu stew, stir-fried pork, and kimchi. —Cecily Wong, Senior Writer
Babylon Berlin
Germany; streaming on Netflix
This dark and stylish neo-noir, based on a series of novels by Volker Kutscher, will take you on a riveting ride through Germany's capital at the end of the Roaring Twenties. In the waning years of the Weimar Republic, a World War I veteran named Gereon Rath joins the murder department of the Berlin police. As it turns out, he can't investigate suspicious deaths without uncovering all kinds of other suspicious activities, from a local extortion ring to police shootings of Communist protesters. Meanwhile, Charlotte Ritter, a flapper from the tenements of Neukölln, rises through the ranks of the male-dominated police force, leading a double life that gives her access to the city's underbelly. Babylon Berlin's creators have a long history in German cinema: Their filmography includes Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) and Good Bye, Lenin! Their newest project is as edgy and eye-popping as it is mysterious and morally complex. —Daniel A. Gross, Senior Associate Editor
Typewriter
Goa, India; streaming on Netflix
A quartet of precocious kids, a supernatural threat, a charming cop with a mustache who’s raising an adolescent girl by himself—stop me if you’ve heard this one. Typewriter has the same kind of horror pastiche that made Stranger Things so much fun, but this time with a malevolent, shape-shifting ghost instead of a faceless eldritch horror. It shows off the tropical, colonial, eclectic state of Goa, as well as some inventive, multilingual swearing. It’s a bit like a roller coaster missing the last section of track, but it’s still a goofy, fitfully frightening ride. —Samir S. Patel, Editorial Director
Fortitude
Arctic Norway; streaming on Netflix
A friend convinced me to watch this British show by describing it as “like Twin Peaks, but in the Arctic.” Fortitude is the name of the show as well as its setting, a fictional town inspired by Svalbard, Norway. A man is found on a snowy beach in the jaws of a polarbear—but we soon discover he was tied up and left as bait. Stanley Tucci plays the investigator and finds the murder to be the first of many strange goings-on in this remote settlement. The show weaves themes of loneliness and community into an engaging and psychological thrill, and the drama unfolds against a bleak and beautiful backdrop. —Nicola Beuscher, Software Engineer
The Ghost Bride
Malacca, Malaysia; streaming on Netflix
Set in late 19th-century Malacca, this Netflix original series revolves around a young woman named Pang Li Lan, who is asked to become a “ghost bride” for a family’s recently deceased son. While she weighs this decision, which could save her family from financial ruin, she finds herself deeply embroiled in a murder mystery that may implicate her childhood flame, an otherworldly entity, and even Li Lan herself. To find answers, she must venture into the afterlife.
The Ghost Bride crafts funny, tragic, and well-written characters, but even more, it captures fascinating details of 19th-century Malacca—particularly the colorful Peranakan culture, an intermingling of Chinese and Malay cultures in Malaysia. Light, delicate, and intricate kebayas are on full display; the camera often lingers on the dining table, panning over brightly colored kuih desserts. Even though the show is primarily in Mandarin with subtitles, the show captures the diversity of Malaysia with little flashes of the Malay language and different dialects. As someone who grew up in Malaysia, I felt transported to a mesmerizing place that also looks and sounds familiar. —Samantha Chong, Senior Audience Development Manager
Crash Landing on You
North Korea; streaming on Netflix
When a high-strung business type from South Korea survives a parachute accident during a freak storm, she tumbles across the demilitarized zone and ultimately falls for a North Korean soldier. I was skeptical about watching this Korean romantic drama—the genre isn’t usually my cup of soju—but I’m glad that I did. Crash Landing On You is one of the highest-rated Korean dramas in cable television history, and its writing team includes a North Korean defector, which creates a realistic peephole into a hidden world in the midst of an absurd, fanciful show. —Larissa Hayden, Associate Director of Community Hosted Experiences
Dark
Germany; streaming on Netflix
Strange things are happening in the fictional town of Winden, Germany. When children start disappearing next to the town’s nuclear power plant, secrets about four local families begin to materialize. With an undertone of mystery and Cold War-era nuclear anxiety, Dark also ventures through Germany’s moss-covered, fairy-tale forests—and even the fabric of time. The show’s meticulously crafted storylines will send you racing to solve its puzzles alongside its characters. —Jeanette Moreland, Supervising Producer, Video
Welcome to Sweden
Stockholm, Sweden; available for purchase on YouTube, iTunes, and Amazon Prime
This short-lived comedy from NBC is loosely based on the life of Greg Poehler, the creator of the show and the brother of comedian Amy Poehler. He plays an American accountant who meets a Swedish woman, falls in love, and moves to her homeland. Assimilating into everyday Swedish life proves a bit more challenging than expected. He struggles with everything from the language and customs to the sense of humor—which makes for some hilarious viewing while you get to see and appreciate parts of Stockholm. —Alexa Harrison, PR Manager
Midnight Diner
Tokyo, Japan; streaming on Netflix
In this fiction anthology, a small, nondescript diner in Tokyo becomes an entry point into the lives of the city’s characters. Each episode explores the backstories of patrons through the dishes they order. You won't see too much of Tokyo itself, but you'll learn an awful lot about the city’s comfort food. —Alexa Harrison, PR Manager
3%
Brazil; streaming on Netflix
Why not escape one dystopian world for another? 3% is a Brazilian post-apocalyptic thriller set in an unspecified future São Paulo, where most of the population lives in poverty. When young people come of age, they get one chance to pass a series of tests called the Process, and the top three percent get to live in a paradise called the Offshore. (It’s like The Hunger Games, but with less teen romance.) The first season focuses on the journey of a main character, Michele, and the wild twists, challenges, and corruption she encounters along the way. As a huge fan of dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives, I liked seeing a familiar genre from another culture’s perspective—and how no matter where it's set, many of its elements remain the same. —Ashley Wolfgang, Newsletter Editor
The Untamed
China; streaming on Netflix
The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, an online Chinese novel that was serialized in 2015 and 2016, is something of a phenomenon: It has inspired an animated series, heaps of merchandise, a line of Cornetto ice cream flavors, and finally The Untamed, a 50-episode television series that’s now streaming on Netflix. The show is an introduction to Chinese fantasy genre xianxia, which generally means magical weapons, characters seeking immortality, and monsters. And don’t forget about the undead: The main character, Wei Wuxian, might best be described as a manic pixie dream necromancer.
The Untamed begins with Wei Wuxian’s death and resurrection, then launches into a 30-plus episode explanation of how he died in the first place. You may find yourself humming the theme song for weeks. (There are a lot of plot-relevant flute solos.) The show will transport you to a high-fantasy version of China. Though the series can be heavy-handed with CGI, settings such as the Cloud Recesses and Lotus Pier, which are based in the real-life Chinese regions of Jiangsu and Hubei, are as pretty as they sound. —Anne Ewbank, Gastro Obscura Associate Editor
An author's end-game expertise has never been more timely.
In the late 1990s, at a former Han Dynasty military base in China called Xuanquanzhi, archaeologists excavated wall inscriptions and writings on silk that had been buried underground for more than 2,000 years. But some of the artifacts on which ancient Silk Road travelers left their mark came not so much from their minds as from their rear ends. In a latrine used between 111 and 109 BC, researchers discovered a trove of bamboo "wipe sticks," each wrapped at one end with a bit of cloth—the oldest bum fodder on record.
Around the same time that sticks were doing their hygienic duty along the Silk Road, the Chinese invented paper. Initially produced and sold as a luxury good, paper had a wiping prowess that wouldn't be discovered by members of the Imperial Court for another 700 years. Several hundred more years would pass until toilet paper began to show up outside of China, replacing cheap local hygiene solutions like leaves and shells in an effort to soothe beleaguered bums.
Today the coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new era of toilet-paper appreciation. In the past several months, shoppers from the U.S. to Australia have been hoarding rolls by the cartful, as if it were the only thing between civilization and total chaos. But while nobody anticipated the current hysteria over toilet paper, human comfort has been tied for thousands of years to the objects we use for personal hygiene. For his 2017 book, Bum Fodder: An Absorbing History of Toilet Paper, Richard Smyth went deep into the bowels of toilet-paper history, beginning with TP’s invention in China sometime around the sixth century.
Atlas Obscura recently sat down with Smyth to talk about the types of bottom cleaners humans have used throughout history, why we should be thanking the Chinese for finding an alternative to "wipe sticks" (aka “shit sticks"), and whether coronavirus will have an impact on the way we wipe our bums.
Your book focuses on the Western history of toilet paper, but we know that it was actually first used in China around the sixth century. Before it made its way to Europe and then the Americas, what did people use to clean their bums?
Well, even when paper was first introduced as paper, it was a high-quality luxury product. It wasn’t something people had lying around as waste. And there is some record of it being used at the Chinese court as toilet paper. But this wasn’t something that ordinary people had.
So for many centuries people were getting on with business, so to speak, in their own improvised, ad hoc way. You have things that tend to reflect landscape and the habitats that people are living in. You have people in coastal areas using shells, which seems quite a robust way of dealing with the problem. Wool, obviously—sheep's wool scraps. Leaves. Later on, in rural America, the corn cob—a dried corn on the cob with the corn taken off—was almost iconic. It had this quality that was so symbolic of Corn Belt America.
The “shit stick" was literally a flat wooden stake used for wiping in early Buddhist practice. Archaeologists have found bamboo shit sticks in latrines on the Silk Road in China that date back over 2,000 years, and shit sticks from Nara, Japan from the eighth century. Besides the term, which made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary by the end of the 16th century, the shit stick never really caught on in the Western world.
I’m not an authority on the shit stick, so to speak, but as a general rule Asia has this whole parallel history [to the West that] is much more sensible. The main thing you use is water, because [your bum is] dirty and you need to get it clean. Meanwhile, the Western world is thinking, “Where can I get this expensive dry paper to wipe off this excrement?” It puts our practices into perspective.
In ancient Rome, the preferred bum fodder was the xylospongion. What was that exactly?
The xylospongion is a sponge on a stick. It was a purpose-built product. But the thing about that is that it was multiple use. So you would go into your Roman latrine, do your business, use the sponge on a stick, and then put it back. You would rinse it off in the waste bathwater and put it back in a jar of vinegar, ready for the next user.
Now how many uses you would expect a xylospongion to go through I’m not sure, but [definitely] more than one. Which is more than most modern users would be comfortable with.
The sponge part seems quite reasonable. But why did they need the stick?
Well, yes—that is the curious part. Weirdly, given that they were very [relaxed about] sharing bum fodder with each other, there’s also a degree of modesty in Roman latrines. So you don’t sit on an open latrine or urinal or anything like that. You sit on a closed box, essentially, that has a hole in the front. You do your business, then you insert the sponge on a stick through the hole. You do this kind of keyhole surgery procedure on your undercarriage, and then you replace it in the jar.
So, yeah—the stick is slightly mysterious, until you understand the mechanics of the Roman latrine.
Wiping with the neck of a goose was apparently considered a luxury at one time. There’s even a rumor that it was Elvis Presley’s preferred method.
Yes, there is. This is one of the great Elvis myths. It was Rabelais, the French Renaissance writer who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is this absolutely absurd epic work full of filth and gratuitous nonsense. And there’s a section where Gargantua, this giant child, tries to find the best thing to wipe your bottom on. He goes through a horrendous list of things—various forms of livestock, all kinds of fabric, various kinds of hats, all manner of different things—and he decides in the end that the best thing is the neck of a live goose. It’s the kind of thing that people remember and pass on when they read it, and eventually they forget that it was in Rabelais, and they think that it was in some historical source.
It was actually John Harrington, who was one of the inventors of the first toilet in England, who helped to further the rumor that it was an actual person at the French court who popularized [wiping with a] goose. It was very recently [that] Liam Gallagher, from the rock group Oasis, said he thought it was great that Elvis had a box full of goose necks in his toilet that he would wipe his bum on. Which, as far as I’m aware, is not true—absolutely not true. It just shows you what people will believe.
There’s an interesting subculture about what we believe people do in the toilet. This is one of the reasons this whole history is so interesting to me—because you have no idea how the people you know best in the world [act in the toilet]. There’s this whole secret world that everyone has to themselves.
And humans aren’t the only species that wipe their behinds, right?
Chimpanzees are our closest relatives in this regard. There have been studies where they use leaves, as you might imagine, to wipe feces. In many ways it’s just an extension of natural hygiene. I mean, all animals get rid of waste; even the smallest animals get rid of waste and avoid poisonous dirt.
We have taken this slightly ridiculous leap away from that because, back in the day, we were doing the same thing. We used leaves or whatever it was that we had lying around—wool or shell[s] or whatever.
In your book, you describe how printed materials like books and catalogs were commonly kept in latrines for bum fodder before toilet paper was available to the masses in the 19th and 20th centuries.
We used to use waste paper in the 19th century, and well into the 20th century. Everyone did. The idea of using special medicated paper [to wipe your bum] was a quack’s idea. This is the genius of toilet paper. It's a quack remedy for hemorrhoids. [American inventor and early toilet-paper pioneer] Joseph Gayetty came up with the idea that printer’s ink causes hemorrhoids—which is rubbish—but it eventually caught on, and people stopped using printed paper.
By the early 20th century toilet paper was sold as a roll of perforated sheets. But advertising, purchasing, and even having it visible in the home was considered quite shameful. What creative ideas did people come up with to avoid having to talk about or look at toilet paper?
Well there’s all sorts. This whole idea is fascinating to me. I remember in suburban Britain in the [19]70s and ’80s—and I’m sure still in some places today—you get the lovely frilly toilet roll cover that lives in the bathroom. Used to be a dolly—a little plastic dolly with huge skirts that covered the shameful roll. Everybody knows what was under there, but you never look at it or speak of it.
There were other elaborate things. A ladies’ fan that unfolded to reveal folded sheets of toilet paper—a sort of James Bond gizmo. And even when you’re in a chemist’s or pharmacy buying toilet paper ... one of the manufacturers produced a coupon in their advertising so that you could just take that into the shop and hand it furtively to the pharmacist, and you would never have to say the words “TP.” It would just say, “Give the bearer two rolls of Scott,” or whatever it was, and they would presumably slip it to you in a brown paper bag under the counter.
So it’s this fascinating idea of secrecy and shame, but it also goes hand in hand with a strange idea of refinement. Around the same time, the toilet roll was the thing that the refined lady had around the home—clearly because it was expensive. Once consumerism takes over, it becomes this desirable commodity, and people start showing off about it. So there’s this uneasy balance between “Oh, this is disgusting, let’s hide it” and “I paid a fortune for this, I want everyone to know I use quilted three-ply.”
In the last few months people have been really hoarding this stuff in response to the coronavirus panic. When did the purchase and the use of toilet paper go from being shameful to shameless?
Well, I think we’re still stuck in that slightly uneasy balance. I mean, obviously we buy it and we use it. But we still don’t like to think about it. Very recently there was a campaign in England, one of the big companies, and all they did in this advert was they had a few people ... talking about whether they scrunched or folded toilet paper.
Again, this is one of those things—you don’t know about your nearest and dearest, whether they scrunch or fold. Some advertising guy had this idea to talk about it. I thought it was quite a good idea, but they got loads of complaints. People actually took the trouble to write in, phone in, email “This is disgusting! I’m watching television and I don’t want to be reminded of folding and scrunching.”
That was only like, what, five years ago? So we’re still in that situation where we spend fortunes on it, we buy this ludicrous high-end, multiple-ply whatever. And yet we’re still very embarrassed about what we actually do with it, which does make this panic buying quite interesting. People are lining up, very obviously filling their trolleys with loo roll. But you ask them what they’re gonna do with it, and they go all shy.
You think the golden age of toilet paper may now be coming to an end based on a variety of factors, one of which is environmental. Does what’s happening with the coronavirus right now change your prediction at all?
General despair might change my prediction.
Ha ha.
I don’t know. I would hope that people start to realize we’re cutting down mature forests to make paper that we’re gonna wipe shit on. Is this sustainable? And you’d hope it would be one of those industries that would feel pressure in that direction.
But another problem is that people don’t want to talk about it. And when people don’t want to talk about it, it’s quite difficult to effect change. It’s heroic work—particularly in the developing world, where people have to be genuinely brave to speak out [on issues of personal hygiene and waste]. This whole toilet business needs a revolution. But that’s a tough revolution to lead.
This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.
Just beyond the shores of Venice proper—a city that comprises dozens of islands—lie two uninhabited isles with a rich history. Today these landmasses are landscapes of grasses, trees, and worn stone buildings. But once they were among the most important gateways to this storied trading city.
The islands, known as Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo, are now yielding fascinating insights into Venice’s response to one of the most famous pandemics in history. In the mid-14th century, Venice was struck by the bubonic plague, part of an outbreak known as the Black Death that may have killed up to 25 million people, or one-third of the population, in Europe. This spread was just one of several waves of the plague to strike Northern Italy in the centuries that followed.
Venice, as a trading center, was especially vulnerable. “They saw that the only solution was to separate people, to take away the sick people, or suspected sick people,” says Francesca Malagnini, of the University for Foreigners, Perugia, who is herself a Venetian, linguist, and member of an interdisciplinary team researching Lazzaretto Nuovo. “This was the only way to protect everyone’s health and allow the economy to continue.”
Beginning in the early-15th century, the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio was designated for isolating and treating plague-stricken Venetians. Later, Lazzaretto Nuovo became a spot where ships coming from places experiencing the plague, or those with suspected sick passengers or crew, anchored. There, people and goods spent a period of quarantine before being allowed into the heart of the city. (We owe the English word “quarantine” to the Italian term for 40 days, quaranta giorni.)
Together, these islands were at the center of Venice’s vast public health response to the plague. Building on earlier traditions of separating the sick from the healthy, the Venetian government became the first in the Mediterranean region to systematically use large-scale methods of isolation and information-collecting to monitor and fight infectious diseases.
The effort was even more impressive given that science then could not explain how diseases spread. A germ theory of disease would not exist for another 400 years.
Today, as much of the world finds itself under various quarantine, isolation, and stay-at-home orders and facing uncertainty related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Venice’s quarantine history and the archaeology of isolation hospitals is especially relevant. Researchers’ findings echo many modern experiences—particularly where public health, policy, and economics intersect.
Venice’s municipal records have long preserved the story of the Lazzaretto islands. In 1423, the government established what later was called Lazzaretto Vecchio to house people who had the plague, and in 1468, a government decree dedicated a second island—then home to a monastery—to a new isolation hospital, literally, “Lazzaretto Nuovo.”
Vecchio offers archaeologists a handful of buildings to study. They reveal that the island was a treatment base for infected patients. There, doctors, wearing the elaborate beak-like plague masks of the period, did their best to treat the disease.
Few structures remain on Nuovo. Historical records, however, suggest Nuovo consisted of warehouses for goods, along with more than 100 rooms to quarantine sailors and crews before allowing them into Venice. A 16th-century historian, Francesco Sansovino, wrote that Nuovo’s buildings had “the semblance of a castle.”
The largest warehouse, or Tezon Grande, still stands: a long rectangular brick building lined with arched doorways and topped by a vaulted roof. According to historical records, a team of armed guards and porters worked to unload ships’ cargo into this space. “They were working hard and also risking their lives to protect the health of the city,” says Malagnini.
This team followed specific protocols for airing out and clearing goods with smoke from aromatic herbs and saltwater. They used vinegar to wash their hands after handling potentially contaminated items.
“[City officials] knew that trade and the flow of goods was not possible if health was not guaranteed,” explains Daniele Andreozzi, a professor at the University of Trieste who studies ancient port cities.
While it operated, the Venetian system involved hundreds of city officials. Prior to it, community care for the sick was relegated to charity efforts and religious orders.
It was not a temporary response to disaster but rather a permanent, government-run, continuous monitoring effort that endured until military general Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of the region in 1797. And that approach was necessary: The bubonic plague swept Europe repeatedly over the centuries.
Despite the city’s vigilance, monitoring the population was difficult. “The plague does not send to warn which ship it arrives on,” wrote an 18th-century Venetian health official. Officials could not check every caravan or smuggler, nor stop all wedding feasts attended by potentially infected people, Andreozzi says.
In addition, officials did not have deep medical or scientific knowledge of how the plague spread. They had no understanding, for example, of the timeframe between exposure to bacteria and the emergence of symptoms.
As a result, though some experts believe the system limited the size and frequency of outbreaks, the plague continued to ravage Venice, with outbreaks into at least the 17th century. An especially large episode in 1630 killed approximately one-third of the population in Venice and Bologna.
Archaeologists are gaining insights into the limits of the Venetian system by studying mass graves on both islands that were discovered in the past two decades. Matteo Borrini, a forensic anthropologist and lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, has examined and studied about 200 bodies discovered on Nuovo.
Borrini explains that patients were generally bound for Vecchio. However, the remains on Nuovo reveal that, when the plague did reach the city, Venice became so overwhelmed that medical officials also sent sick people and the bodies of those who had died to Lazzaretto Nuovo.
The graves on Lazzaretto Nuovo showed signs that they had been reopened multiple times to add bodies, he said, “layering them like a lasagna.” Most significantly, the graves illustrate how the plague spared no one.
A study of the bones offers clues to the victims’ diets. Some remains came from people who consumed a lot of meat, an option only for wealthy Venetians. Others who died had dined on middle-class fare, rich in fish and vegetables. Still others ate mainly grains, typical among the poor.
"A pandemic is in many ways really a democratic event,” Borrini says. “Plague could kill anyone, more or less at the same ratio, so, in the cemetery, you also have a perfect picture of Venetian society frozen in that moment.”
Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw, author of Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice, notes that Venice’s quarantine history, however flawed, holds enduring lessons. “It shows, then and now, how difficult it is for a cosmopolitan trading center to escape infectious disease,” she says.
Nonetheless, Venice’s maritime quarantine became a model for other parts of Italy and the world more widely, influencing American lazarettos that quarantined incoming immigrants. Indeed, Crawshaw notes, Venice’s approach was a way for the government to put its citizens at ease.
“On a deeper level, this really shows how public health has always been about more than medicine. It’s also about politics and economics, and societal benefits, like making people feel safe,” Crawshaw says. “The quarantine system in Venice made the port seem more trustworthy and safe. It looks as though you are taking some responsibility.”
An author's end-game expertise has never been more timely.
In the late 1990s, at a former Han Dynasty military base in China called Xuanquanzhi, archaeologists excavated wall inscriptions and writings on silk that had been buried underground for more than 2,000 years. But some of the artifacts on which ancient Silk Road travelers left their mark came not so much from their minds as from their rear ends. In a latrine used between 111 and 109 BC, researchers discovered a trove of bamboo "wipe sticks," each wrapped at one end with a bit of cloth—the oldest bum fodder on record.
Around the same time that sticks were doing their hygienic duty along the Silk Road, the Chinese invented paper. Initially produced and sold as a luxury good, paper had a wiping prowess that wouldn't be discovered by members of the Imperial Court for another 700 years. Several hundred more years would pass until toilet paper began to show up outside of China, replacing cheap local hygiene solutions like leaves and shells in an effort to soothe beleaguered bums.
Today the coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new era of toilet-paper appreciation. In the past several months, shoppers from the U.S. to Australia have been hoarding rolls by the cartful, as if it were the only thing between civilization and total chaos. But while nobody anticipated the current hysteria over toilet paper, human comfort has been tied for thousands of years to the objects we use for personal hygiene. For his 2017 book, Bum Fodder: An Absorbing History of Toilet Paper, Richard Smyth went deep into the bowels of toilet-paper history, beginning with TP’s invention in China sometime around the sixth century.
Atlas Obscura recently sat down with Smyth to talk about the types of bottom cleaners humans have used throughout history, why we should be thanking the Chinese for finding an alternative to "wipe sticks" (aka “shit sticks"), and whether coronavirus will have an impact on the way we wipe our bums.
Your book focuses on the Western history of toilet paper, but we know that it was actually first used in China around the sixth century. Before it made its way to Europe and then the Americas, what did people use to clean their bums?
Well, even when paper was first introduced as paper, it was a high-quality luxury product. It wasn’t something people had lying around as waste. And there is some record of it being used at the Chinese court as toilet paper. But this wasn’t something that ordinary people had.
So for many centuries people were getting on with business, so to speak, in their own improvised, ad hoc way. You have things that tend to reflect landscape and the habitats that people are living in. You have people in coastal areas using shells, which seems quite a robust way of dealing with the problem. Wool, obviously—sheep's wool scraps. Leaves. Later on, in rural America, the corn cob—a dried corn on the cob with the corn taken off—was almost iconic. It had this quality that was so symbolic of Corn Belt America.
The “shit stick" was literally a flat wooden stake used for wiping in early Buddhist practice. Archaeologists have found bamboo shit sticks in latrines on the Silk Road in China that date back over 2,000 years, and shit sticks from Nara, Japan from the eighth century. Besides the term, which made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary by the end of the 16th century, the shit stick never really caught on in the Western world.
I’m not an authority on the shit stick, so to speak, but as a general rule Asia has this whole parallel history [to the West that] is much more sensible. The main thing you use is water, because [your bum is] dirty and you need to get it clean. Meanwhile, the Western world is thinking, “Where can I get this expensive dry paper to wipe off this excrement?” It puts our practices into perspective.
In ancient Rome, the preferred bum fodder was the xylospongion. What was that exactly?
The xylospongion is a sponge on a stick. It was a purpose-built product. But the thing about that is that it was multiple use. So you would go into your Roman latrine, do your business, use the sponge on a stick, and then put it back. You would rinse it off in the waste bathwater and put it back in a jar of vinegar, ready for the next user.
Now how many uses you would expect a xylospongion to go through I’m not sure, but [definitely] more than one. Which is more than most modern users would be comfortable with.
The sponge part seems quite reasonable. But why did they need the stick?
Well, yes—that is the curious part. Weirdly, given that they were very [relaxed about] sharing bum fodder with each other, there’s also a degree of modesty in Roman latrines. So you don’t sit on an open latrine or urinal or anything like that. You sit on a closed box, essentially, that has a hole in the front. You do your business, then you insert the sponge on a stick through the hole. You do this kind of keyhole surgery procedure on your undercarriage, and then you replace it in the jar.
So, yeah—the stick is slightly mysterious, until you understand the mechanics of the Roman latrine.
Wiping with the neck of a goose was apparently considered a luxury at one time. There’s even a rumor that it was Elvis Presley’s preferred method.
Yes, there is. This is one of the great Elvis myths. It was Rabelais, the French Renaissance writer who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is this absolutely absurd epic work full of filth and gratuitous nonsense. And there’s a section where Gargantua, this giant child, tries to find the best thing to wipe your bottom on. He goes through a horrendous list of things—various forms of livestock, all kinds of fabric, various kinds of hats, all manner of different things—and he decides in the end that the best thing is the neck of a live goose. It’s the kind of thing that people remember and pass on when they read it, and eventually they forget that it was in Rabelais, and they think that it was in some historical source.
It was actually John Harrington, who was one of the inventors of the first toilet in England, who helped to further the rumor that it was an actual person at the French court who popularized [wiping with a] goose. It was very recently [that] Liam Gallagher, from the rock group Oasis, said he thought it was great that Elvis had a box full of goose necks in his toilet that he would wipe his bum on. Which, as far as I’m aware, is not true—absolutely not true. It just shows you what people will believe.
There’s an interesting subculture about what we believe people do in the toilet. This is one of the reasons this whole history is so interesting to me—because you have no idea how the people you know best in the world [act in the toilet]. There’s this whole secret world that everyone has to themselves.
And humans aren’t the only species that wipe their behinds, right?
Chimpanzees are our closest relatives in this regard. There have been studies where they use leaves, as you might imagine, to wipe feces. In many ways it’s just an extension of natural hygiene. I mean, all animals get rid of waste; even the smallest animals get rid of waste and avoid poisonous dirt.
We have taken this slightly ridiculous leap away from that because, back in the day, we were doing the same thing. We used leaves or whatever it was that we had lying around—wool or shell[s] or whatever.
In your book, you describe how printed materials like books and catalogs were commonly kept in latrines for bum fodder before toilet paper was available to the masses in the 19th and 20th centuries.
We used to use waste paper in the 19th century, and well into the 20th century. Everyone did. The idea of using special medicated paper [to wipe your bum] was a quack’s idea. This is the genius of toilet paper. It's a quack remedy for hemorrhoids. [American inventor and early toilet-paper pioneer] Joseph Gayetty came up with the idea that printer’s ink causes hemorrhoids—which is rubbish—but it eventually caught on, and people stopped using printed paper.
By the early 20th century toilet paper was sold as a roll of perforated sheets. But advertising, purchasing, and even having it visible in the home was considered quite shameful. What creative ideas did people come up with to avoid having to talk about or look at toilet paper?
Well there’s all sorts. This whole idea is fascinating to me. I remember in suburban Britain in the [19]70s and ’80s—and I’m sure still in some places today—you get the lovely frilly toilet roll cover that lives in the bathroom. Used to be a dolly—a little plastic dolly with huge skirts that covered the shameful roll. Everybody knows what was under there, but you never look at it or speak of it.
There were other elaborate things. A ladies’ fan that unfolded to reveal folded sheets of toilet paper—a sort of James Bond gizmo. And even when you’re in a chemist’s or pharmacy buying toilet paper ... one of the manufacturers produced a coupon in their advertising so that you could just take that into the shop and hand it furtively to the pharmacist, and you would never have to say the words “TP.” It would just say, “Give the bearer two rolls of Scott,” or whatever it was, and they would presumably slip it to you in a brown paper bag under the counter.
So it’s this fascinating idea of secrecy and shame, but it also goes hand in hand with a strange idea of refinement. Around the same time, the toilet roll was the thing that the refined lady had around the home—clearly because it was expensive. Once consumerism takes over, it becomes this desirable commodity, and people start showing off about it. So there’s this uneasy balance between “Oh, this is disgusting, let’s hide it” and “I paid a fortune for this, I want everyone to know I use quilted three-ply.”
In the last few months people have been really hoarding this stuff in response to the coronavirus panic. When did the purchase and the use of toilet paper go from being shameful to shameless?
Well, I think we’re still stuck in that slightly uneasy balance. I mean, obviously we buy it and we use it. But we still don’t like to think about it. Very recently there was a campaign in England, one of the big companies, and all they did in this advert was they had a few people ... talking about whether they scrunched or folded toilet paper.
Again, this is one of those things—you don’t know about your nearest and dearest, whether they scrunch or fold. Some advertising guy had this idea to talk about it. I thought it was quite a good idea, but they got loads of complaints. People actually took the trouble to write in, phone in, email “This is disgusting! I’m watching television and I don’t want to be reminded of folding and scrunching.”
That was only like, what, five years ago? So we’re still in that situation where we spend fortunes on it, we buy this ludicrous high-end, multiple-ply whatever. And yet we’re still very embarrassed about what we actually do with it, which does make this panic buying quite interesting. People are lining up, very obviously filling their trolleys with loo roll. But you ask them what they’re gonna do with it, and they go all shy.
You think the golden age of toilet paper may now be coming to an end based on a variety of factors, one of which is environmental. Does what’s happening with the coronavirus right now change your prediction at all?
General despair might change my prediction.
Ha ha.
I don’t know. I would hope that people start to realize we’re cutting down mature forests to make paper that we’re gonna wipe shit on. Is this sustainable? And you’d hope it would be one of those industries that would feel pressure in that direction.
But another problem is that people don’t want to talk about it. And when people don’t want to talk about it, it’s quite difficult to effect change. It’s heroic work—particularly in the developing world, where people have to be genuinely brave to speak out [on issues of personal hygiene and waste]. This whole toilet business needs a revolution. But that’s a tough revolution to lead.
This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.
Toppings include pineapples, peanuts, and cucumbers.
Swedish food columnist Daniella Illerbrand remembers her first Taco Friday well. She was 14, and it was the first time her parents, who cooked everything from scratch, decided it was okay to buy ready-made ingredients like tortillas and spices.
“That was a big deal for us,” says Illerbrand, who works for Sweden Foodtech, an organization that works with food startups and businesses. “My parents liked traveling, so they were into trying something new."
It was her first real Fredagsmys, or Cozy Friday, a beloved Swedish tradition. Across the Scandinavian country, families stay home on Friday night, watch TV, and eat Tex-Mex-style tacos. This dinner choice is so common that, for most Swedes, Cozy Friday is also Taco Fredag, or Taco Friday.
A few elements conspired to make Taco Friday a Swedish institution. In 1990, the country was emerging from a financial crisis, and Swedes were eager to spend again and try new things. Around the same time, government deregulation of television allowed advertising for the first time. Prior to that, Swedes had only seen on-screen ads in cinemas.
The Swedish chips company OLW popularized the slogan “Now it’s cozy Friday time” in its commercials. These days, most Swedes can still hum the catchy jingle by heart. This is widely believed to be the origin of the term Fredagsmys, and in 2007, it was even adopted into the Swedish dictionary.
Chips are still part of many Swedes’ Cosy Friday routine, but it’s Tex-Mex that truly benefited from the idea of staying in and eating processed foods on the sofa. Old El Paso, which had been attempting to break into the market in the 1980s, experienced success as its ads demonstrated taco assembly.
Meanwhile, the Swedish spice company Nordfalks, which marketed their Tex-Mex products to appeal to a Swedish audience, eventually changed its name to Santa Maria due to the popularity of its tortillas and tacos. Their TV spots suggested tacos as a staple of Cozy Fridays, and for Swedes, who were already used to smörgåsbord or potluck-style meals piled onto one plate, tacos were something new and exciting, yet familiar too.
“Commercials were very important in showing how you could put together tacos because before that we didn’t have anything where you could put it together in front of the TV like that,” says Richard Tellström, a food historian and professor at Stockholm University.
Soon enough, grocers and restaurants rallied around the idea, promoting Cozy Friday with discounts and take-out specials. Taco Fridays even became a staple of Sweden’s free lunch programs for schoolchildren.
“I remember being a teenager when you would start having dinners for school functions at restaurants, and the restaurant would make a taco buffet,” says Illerbrand. “That was, like, the best thing ever.”
Tex-Mex was a hot American import, just like the series and movies on the tube. But once it arrived, it morphed, becoming infused with Swedish food culture. Spin-off recipes emerged, such as taco pie (also available in frozen food aisles), taco soup, taco pizza, and taco burgers. “Anything where you could add the packaged spice mix, really,” says Tellström. Americans might recognize the ground meat, soft or hard tortilla shells, peppers, onion, tomatoes, and guacamole of Swedish tacos, but not necessarily the cucumber, peanuts, pineapple, and yoghurt sauces that Swedes added to suit their own cultural tastes.
Cucumbers, which are perhaps the most curious ingredient, reflect a particularly Swedish love affair: Historically, Sweden’s summer months were jokingly called “cucumber time,” and you’ll still find cucumber on most dinner tables. It may be pickled, sliced and doused with vinegar and salt, or atop a salad; it’s also often a topping on kebab pizza, another ubiquitous national dish imported and adapted for the Swedish palate.
Over the decades, Fredagsmys has become a national institution. On Fridays, Swedish families gather at home, hang out in their pajamas (or base layers in winter), and relax. Friday evenings are a primetime slot on Swedish television, in contrast to what’s known as the “Friday night death slot” in the United States. According to Tellström, tacos are the preferred meal, but it can be anything eaten by hand: burgers, pizza, guilty-pleasure processed snacks, or pick-and-mix candies (a national obsession that is also indulged on Lördagsgodis, or Saturday sweets).
As a family tradition, Taco Fridays haven’t changed much over time. “What we haven’t seen is hipster tacos—no making the shells yourself or cooking the meat for 24 hours,” says Tellström. “It’s still mostly canned, packaged ingredients.” But its imprint on Swedish food is clear. Walk into any supermarket and you’ll find a sprawling Tex-Mex section, sometimes even larger than the baked-goods aisle. Market research shows that Sweden is now the highest per capita consumer of Mexican food in Europe, along with Norway, which practices Taco Fridays too.
However, a study by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet shows that Tex-Mex products don’t sell as well in supermarkets in immigrant neighborhoods. “It does tend to be more [practiced by] Swedish middle-class families,” Tellström says.
“Tacos have become known as something classically Swedish,” says Swedish-Brazilian writer Rafaela Stålbalk Klose. “The kids from Brazil or Gambia I hung out with had no time for tacos, they ate their own food for dinner … But I grew up in an all-white neighborhood, and the kids I went to school with were all Swedes and they ate it.”
Sure, pairing tacos with pizza, candy, chips, and beer and soda bucks modern-day wellness trends, but according to Tellström, Cozy Fridays has mental health benefits. In Sweden, family meals are less frequent than in other Nordic countries, so tacos are a convenient meal that allows people to spend more quality time together.
“It’s not about increasing your body standard, but your family standard,” he explains. “It’s healthy to have a family and someone to live with. For Swedes, the purpose of food is to eat it with other people.”
How scientists and law enforcement officers pioneered a new brand of underwater justice.
Something didn’t look right.
It’s not illegal to fish at night off the coast of Oahu, of course, but there was something about the boat that seemed suspicious to the Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement officer who was on patrol. Then, as he approached the vessel, he saw big splashes—the men on the fishing boat had thrown something into the water. But by the time he had actually climbed on board to look around, there was nothing there to see. All that remained was a wet gill net, some tiny fragments of coral, and the fish the men had caught—none of which, alone, constituted anything illegal.
But that doesn’t mean things were on the up-and-up. The officer suspected that the men had something to hide—specifically that they had been using their nets illegally. Most likely, they had placed them on the bottom and left them there unattended for a while before pulling them up. That particular use is against the law, because the nets left like that are more likely to get entangled in the coral, and then rip large chunks of the fragile, legally protected animal colonies up when pulled free. Plus, the law requires fishers to inspect their nets every two hours to release any undersized, illegal, or unwanted fish that get stuck. But without definitive evidence that large pieces of coral had been broken off and hauled up, there was no clear evidence of wrongdoing. So the officer temporarily confiscated the boat, and called David Gulko.
“That was one of my first cases,” says Gulko. Then, as now, a coral expert for the state of Hawai‘i, Gulko was able to identify the coral fragments, but they weren’t the key piece of evidence. That was other animals he found on the boat. “I went on the deck and started finding all these little tiny, tiny, tiny little crabs and shrimp,” he explains. Those species only live deep inside large pieces of coral. “That was the evidence that they had brought up big heads of coral in their net—the presence of a little tiny shrimp and crab on the deck,” he continues. “That's what made the case and got the conviction.”
For the authorities, the entire case had been a series of lucky breaks. Back in the early 2000s, when this all happened, marine regulations were rarely enforced successfully. Agencies were understaffed, but there was also no standard training for conducting forensic investigations on and under the sea. With no accepted techniques for collecting and analyzing this evidence, even a strong case wouldn’t hold up in court. Marine biologists like Gulko knew how to study and monitor reefs, but that’s not the same. “We just weren't doing well trying to hold people accountable for damaging reefs,” he says. In 2005, Gulko saw that officers from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority were holding a session on enforcing marine regulations at the first ever International Marine Protected Areas Congress in Geelong, Australia. He knew he had to attend.
But the session wasn’t what he’d hoped for. It turned out that pretty much everyone around the world was having the same kind of problems that he and the state of Hawaiʻi were having. Despite their best intentions and efforts, the people and corporations breaking laws and damaging coral reefs were finding it all too easy to weasel or buy their way out of convictions.
“We're bringing up the science and they're able to just turn it around [on us] in court because none of us are trained in those sort of things,” Gulko recalls lamenting with his colleagues at a bar after the meeting. One of them joked that what they needed was “Coral Reef CSI”—just like the endless and popular American television series, but for marine biologists. Laughing, Gulko drew a little logo on a cocktail napkin. As the night progressed, he added notes and ideas that the group came up with.
That napkin ended up in the U.S. State Department—and Gulko became the head of the working group charged with making the idea a reality.
Gulko’s group was given a little less than a year to put something together, specifically a draft of protocols for how coral reef crime scene investigations could be done, in time for a training session at the next year’s meeting of the International Coral Reef Initiative in Cozumel, Mexico. “We were charged with basically coming up with a way to train resource managers, research agency scientists, and enforcement officers how to do investigations underwater to hold people accountable,” Gulko explains.
For the project Gulko quickly recruited a team of underwater scientists, including Patricia Ramírez Romero, an aquatic ecotoxicologist who is now a professor at Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City, and fellow marine biologist Angelique Brathwaite, who recently cofounded the conservation-minded investment NGO Blue Finance. They knew the underwater world very well and certainly could identify the difference between a natural disturbance to a reef and one caused by illegal activity. But he knew he needed someone else.
“It didn't matter how good your science was. It came down to the legal things, and you have to understand the legal things as you were doing the science or you were going to be screwed,” Gulko says. “I knew how to do things underwater, but I didn't know how to collect evidence. So I went and found the guy who did.” That guy was Ken Goddard.
Goddard began his career in law enforcement as a homicide detective in California. “I started in 1968 out in the desert, digging up bodies and shallow graves,” he says. After more than a decade of forensic investigation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recruited him to design and run the only national laboratory dedicated to investigating wildlife crimes (located in Ashland, Oregon). But his vast experience ended at the surface of the water. When he was told he was to join Gulko’s working group, he didn’t even know how to scuba dive.
The first time the pair met, they quickly discovered that adapting forensic techniques for use underwater was not going to be easy. Almost nothing you do on land can be done the same way there. The smallest details could prove problematic, Gulko says—even something as simple as taking notes. “I'd be telling Ken, ‘Okay, we do this, this, and this,' and he'd go, 'Goddammit Gulko, you can't use a pencil to write down notes—every cop knows you cannot use pencils to take notes.’ And I'm like, ‘Goddammit Goddard, get your head underwater. You can't use pens underwater.’”
So they both did some homework—Goddard learned to dive and Gulko studied forensic science. The problems went beyond pens and pencils—they had to figure out everything, from the very first step. “The first thing you're supposed to do at a crime scene is set a scene perimeter,” Goddard says. “Well, that's fine if you've got a body in the middle of the field, but not if you've got a half-mile long coral reef.” It’s not clear how to rope off a three-dimensional space, he adds. “And crime scene tape? I don't think so.”
Goddard searched, but there didn’t seem to be any existing forensic protocols for conducting investigations underwater. There were bits here and there, but no standard methods—no guide for them to start from. They had to devise and write their own guide, from scratch.
“My contribution to the whole process was trial and error—mostly error,” Goddard says wryly. When he tried to solve the problem of tagging evidence, for example, the marine biologists all had a good laugh.
At a crime scene on land, an investigator can just lay out little cards or placards with numbers on them to identify the location of different clues. The constant motion of water on a reef makes that impossible. “I came up with the idea of a cork painted like a resistor,” says Goddard. Different banding patterns would indicate the different numbers, and the corks could be tethered to float at around the same height in the water, allowing investigators to see and photograph their relative positions.
He thought it was a perfect solution—until he tried it. “Groupers showed up and started grabbing the corks and running off with them,” he says. “I was not used to having things that bite show up at my crime scenes.”
Not all his ideas played out that poorly, though. “All his experience with land wildlife was perfect,” gushes Ramírez Romero. “Having him was a great addition.”
The lack of protocols for processing underwater crime scenes is an issue both for marine biologists and ordinary law enforcement agencies, says Rhonda Moniz, a veteran dive scene investigator.
Like Gulko, Moniz came to underwater crime scene investigation from the science side of things. “When I was a little kid, I went to see the movie Jaws and I did the opposite of what everyone else did. I immediately fell in love with sharks and diving,” she says. She became scuba-certified as a kid, and went on to become an instructor, a dive safety officer, and an underwater filmmaker. She even learned to pilot underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and joined the underwater team of Bob Ballard, the oceanographer most famous for finding Titanic.
Because of her expertise in both diving and marine technology, she was often called upon by local law enforcement in New England to help locate bodies or pieces of evidence. It was while helping out on those sporadic cases that she came to realize that most law enforcement agencies simply have no idea what they were doing underwater. At best, she says, they were trained to respond to emergencies and had a team of capable divers that could get in the water and look around, but “to this day they still don't really get the proper training to process a crime scene underwater.
“When processing the crime scene on land, they're very particular and meticulous,” she says. “They take samples from where they found the body, they take all these photos and video and they really process that crime scene. But underwater that doesn't happen. They go in, they get the body and they remove it—and that's it. There's so much evidence that's lost.”
That’s why, around the same time that Gulko and his team were developing Coral Reef CSI, Moniz and her team of experts were putting together their own set of protocols and developing workshops to teach police and other law enforcement officers how to apply what they do on land to submerged crime scenes.
And in 2013, she founded Underwater Investigative Group, a Massachusetts-based firm that provides training and information about conducting forensic investigations in aquatic environments. “I teach an entire semester of basic underwater forensics,” she says. The only problem is, “most organizations or agencies just don't know what's there. They don't know what exists.”
The full Coral Reef CSI Toolkit—a 290-page guide for coral reef managers and investigators—was completed in 2008. And in the years since, Gulko, Ramírez Romero, and their colleagues have provided Coral Reef CSI trainings around the world, improving upon and adapting the material each time.
Gulko really wanted to teach people how to recover bodies, for example—especially non-human ones. “Anybody can bring a body up from underwater, but bringing it up in a way where we preserve the evidence around the crime that that was involved with the body—that's a little harder in the marine environment,” he says. And poaching or illegal fishing cases might be made or broken based on an investigator’s ability to recover evidence from a large, dead animal, so he wanted to train people to do that, too.
He got it into his head that he would need a life-size leatherback sea turtle model that he could use for training. And no matter how big you think a leatherback is, it’s bigger—fully grown, the animals can be over six feet long and weigh over 1,000 pounds. “I wanted it to be as realistic as possible, but I wanted it made out of a soft material so I could take it with me and then just stuff it somewhere and sink it in a pool,” he says. And when he described this dream to one of the instructors he’d hired for a workshop in Thailand, she instantly knew the perfect seamstress for the job.
A couple of days later, she drove Gulko into “the really seedy part of Phuket,” and that’s when he realized why she’d thought of that specific seamstress. The woman was a costume designer for the local kathoeys (sometimes called “ladyboys,” a group distinct from transgender women in Thailand), and was particularly skilled at sculpting rubberized foam garments. “To make a long story short, she made this amazing leatherback sea turtle,” he says. “I'm on my fourth version of it right now. We use it so much.”
After lots of hands-on, in-water work, Gulko’s training sessions always include a mock trial in which the investigators-in-training have to make their case. The goal, he says, is “to show them how these little mistakes they make out in the field collecting and preserving the evidence will affect their case months or years later.”
And they’re ruthless. “We go after them harder than they'd ever get in court,” says Gulko. He even cheats: ”We also go in and doctor their evidence when they're not looking to really get across to them the idea of chain of custody, and that they have to maintain chain of custody,” he says. “We take it to ridiculous levels because I want them to fail in that training so that they don't fail when they're doing it for real.”
Chain of custody is a big deal on land, too, because it can be an easy target for defense attorneys. Every person with the opportunity to alter a piece of evidence has to testify that they didn’t (if there’s any chance evidence was tampered with, it can be deemed inadmissible). Of course, for land-based crimes, it’s usually fairly straightforward to keep this chain short: You close off the scene so only a few have access, and then have those few carefully document the evidence, seal everything in tamper-evident containers, and transport it themselves.
But underwater, it’s difficult or impossible to totally seal up every object separately, especially if you don’t want to carry around gallons of seawater. And if you don’t, then everyone on the boat or who meets the boat at the dock ends up roped into the chain of custody, too, since there’s no way to prove they didn’t mess with the evidence somewhere along the way. “So you've got to put together this huge chain-of-custody list of people who will have to testify that they didn't alter, switch, change things,” says Goddard. “That's a complication.”
The most challenging part of conducting investigations underwater, though, is the most obvious. “We humans need air to live,” says Ramírez Romero. “In order to work most of the cases, you need to be a very experienced scuba diver. But even then you have to learn to work fast, because you can be underwater for only a certain amount of time.”
Not surprisingly, a lot of the things Moniz and Gulko train people to do are things that help them make the most of that precious time. As Moniz put it, you have to solve a puzzle, “except you're under more pressure and not just literally, because you are, but also because you do have a clock.”
But the two differ on their approach to incorporating technology.
“The underwater environment is so, so different,” Moniz says. “And because of that, there's techniques and training and things that need to be approached in a very different manner than processing something like that on land.”
Underwater crime scenes are dynamic, for example—and often, inherently dangerous. “I've definitely worked in zero-visibility conditions,” she says, “and that's always a very uncomfortable and hairy situation to be in.”
Because of these difficulties, Moniz sees ROVs and other technologies as important tools of the trade. “It takes out the guesswork, and it takes out the amount of time that those divers have to be risking their lives in that water,” she says. Better yet, swimming robots can see using sonar in conditions people can’t.
Gulko doesn’t discount the usefulness of the higher-tech equipment, but his emphasis has always been on accessibility. “Most countries don't have the funds or the technology,” he says, “so a lot of the materials that we developed had to make use of easily available things that could be gotten in any country.” They figured out how to lift fingerprints from poached shells using materials that could be bought at any hardware store, for example.
Gulko was working with officials at a marine park in Mexico that kept getting hit by conch poachers. The poachers entered the water like tourists, but then pulled the meat from the shells underwater and shoved it in their wetsuits. Then they slipped away, leaving behind piles of empty shells.
Officials knew the poachers had to be handling the animals bare-handed because the park bans gloves in general. But like most people, they thought that water—especially salt water—would destroy any potential prints (if they thought about leaving evidence behind at all). “Nobody was really thinking you could pull fingerprints off,” Gulko says.
He and his team showed local authorities that careful soaking in fresh water could remove the salt. Then, the prints on the shells could be revealed with an old-school cop field method—using a metal trashcan, a bit of aluminum foil, superglue, and an acetylene torch borrowed from an auto shop. “Sure enough, there were all these nice little fingerprints on the inside,” he says.
In total, Gulko’s team—now known as the International Coral Reef CSI Field Training Program—has taught Coral Reef CSI in more than 40 countries, and there are always agencies asking for more.
Moniz, too has felt the demand—her classes sell out and then some. “I'd like to see more training than what is out there now available to all of these dive teams that have to go out there,” she says, but it feels like that’s “fighting an uphill battle.”
“It's so frustrating because it always seems to come down to the same thing,” she says, “money.”
Properly investigating crime scenes underwater can be expensive, in both time and resources. Even dive gear may not be in the budget, so Gulko has given trainings that were entirely snorkel-based in areas where there was no dive team to train. (It’s even harder to do everything while snorkeling, he says. Cheaper, for sure, but harder.)
But in the end, the investment is worth it.
Marine and freshwater environments are facing a multitude of threats. “These resources are everybody's, and we need to take care of them since we depend on them for food, medicine, tourism, etc.,” says Ramírez Romero. “We’re not only leaving something beautiful for the next generation, but also making sure that they will enjoy the benefits of it.”
While there may not be much she, Gulko, and the others can do about warming waters or ocean acidification, through Coral Reef CSI training, they can empower people around the world to protect their local aquatic resources. And the army they’ve been slowly building is finally holding polluters, vandals, and poachers accountable.
The Tanana River's annual melt has thrilled gamblers for over a century.
For eight hours a day Mitch Duyck sits in a simple lifeguard-like tower in Nenana, Alaska and alternates between watching the clock and river outside his window. He’s neither slacking off nor hoping for a Disney-esque rescue. He’s waiting. Duyck needs to be there to write down the exact time the alarm goes off. A potential six-figure pay-out to some lucky Alaskan depends on it.
Alaska is one of five American states without a lottery (the others being Hawaii, Nevada, Utah and Alabama). The state also doesn’t allow slot machines or betting on most things, ranging from scratch-off tickets to horses.
But one thing Alaskans can bet on is when the breakup will happen.
Not the breakup of favorite celebrity couples or local politicians, mind you. Rather, the breakup of the ice on the Tanana River.
Each year since 1917 a 26-foot-tall spruce tripod has been embedded 300 feet from shore on the first weekend of March. Cables are attached to the tripod and rigged to a rope-and-pulley system attached to the tower. When the tripod has traveled 100 feet downriver, the antique clock is stopped and a flood siren sounds throughout the town, signaling the end of the contest and winter, a particularly long season in Alaska’s remote interior. For $2.50 a ticket, Alaskans (or those visiting Alaska) can place their bets on when the ice will melt enough for the siren to go off. Whoever guesses the closest minute wins. Duyck is just one of a group of guards who watch the tripod round-the-clock.
Last year an Anchorage-based woman won the whole $311,000 pot. In 2017, the 42 people with the right guess each received a payout of $4,584.75, after taxes (though those who entered as a pool had to split their winnings even further). The most number of correct guesses was in 1973, with 58.
The guessing game was developed 1917 by surveyors building the Alaska Railroad. It both helped them pass the time and stay vigilant of river conditions—big blocks of ice could potentially take out bridges. The original wager cost $1.00 (a sum that amounts to $20.21 today) and was only open to Nenana residents. But after a few years, word of the contest grew and attracted participants from across the territory.
Soon ticket books were distributed to grocery stores, gas stations, and bars throughout Alaska by bush plane, rail, car, and dogsled (a model that’s largely still used today). For two months a year, people place their bets in special red cans that are returned to Nenana in early April. There, teams of locals sort the guesses by hand, entering the tickets into an elaborate analog database that’s checked and cross-checked by myriad workers for accuracy. Even though there are roughly 100 employees working six- or eight-hour shifts, it’s so time consuming that in recent years the contest has been over well before the tickets are all accounted for.
Manager Cherrie Forness has worked for the Ice Classic for 24 years. When she first started, they’d just switched over from typewriters to computer docs to input the then $2 tickets. Other than the 50 cent increase (done to help cover overhead, but keep the game accessible to everyone), nothing has really changed. Nor is change something the Ice Classic is itching for—there are no plans to move to a digital system in the near future.
“The Ice Classic is owned by the people in the community,” Forness says. “It employs people. And they’ve always just wanted to keep it the way it’s been. It’s traditional. This works for us.”
Last year employees sorted through roughly 287,000 tickets. It’s unlikely that contest organizers will know how many were purchased in 2020 until, best case scenario, early summer—they haven’t yet sorted the guesses because of COVID-19 hunker-down orders and as of now, they don’t have a timeline for when winners will be announced.
Beyond employing oodles of locals, the contest is also known for its charitable donations.
Though the Alaska legislature is currently weighing the option of opening the state to more gambling revenue streams, right now the only gaming industry allowed is nonprofit.
The Classic is a hold-over from Alaska’s more Wild West, pre-statehood years. Before becoming the 49th state in 1959, Alaska had a robust gambling culture. Membership in the union changed that. The Alaska Legislature legalized charitable lottery-style games in 1960, largely to allow the Classic to continue (and making it one of the oldest continuously running betting events in the country). Sixteen percent of all ticket sales are used for scholarship programs, local causes, and sporting groups, and a handful of larger medical charities. Last year the Ice Classic was able to donate $90,000.
The Ice Classic isn’t just a little lottery in Alaska. It serves a globally important purpose. Data generated from the tripod’s history has come to be an invaluable source of climate data for scientists.
“The Nenana Ice Classic is a unique climate record in Alaska in that break-up has been determined at the same place, in the same weird way, in a town that is almost the same population for 100 years,” says Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Ice thickness measurements have been made for a much shorter period of time and are much more difficult to do because thickness typically varies significantly over short distances.”
With so few variables (the single channel river has never been dammed and the town is remote), Thoman says, despite its quirkiness, it’s highly accurate, even after 104 years.
Thoman recently co-authored a study produced by the International Arctic Research Center, titled “Alaska’s Changing Environment: Documenting Alaska’s physical and biological changes through observations,” that referenced the fact that the break-up is trending earlier.
The report states: “Four of the past six years have seen break-up earlier than all but one year prior to 1990. The earliest break-up in the history of the Nenana Ice Classic, by six days, was in 2019.”
In the weeks leading up to the tripod’s polar plunge, Ice Classic enthusiast Rebecca Troxel did daily live streams on a Facebook fan page to talk about ice thickness at various points along the river. In the comments, locals beseeched the tripod to pull a Humpty Dumpty and come tumbling down near their betting time.
In the final days of the contest, Troxel spent much of her day hanging out by the side of the river, watching for changes.
“This is amazing,” she gushed on one of her many live streams as a few sizable chunks of ice broke loose from the bottom of the river and breeched like whales. “This never gets old.”
Troxel says her favorite break-up was the first one she witnessed.
“You could feel it and hear it, as all the ice was churning down the river,” Troxel says. “It’s like a thunderstorm, huge and uncontrollable, just groaning and rumbling as the ice is hitting each other. It’s around you and consuming you. That started my love for this.”
Troxel isn’t alone in her zeal for ice melt. She says at any given time there’s roughly 20 other groups of people watching and waiting (this year mostly from the safety of their cars). In the days leading up to the finish, the number was more than double.
Dylan Hooper lives 10 hours away from Nenana on the Kenai Peninsula, so he was unable to watch in person, but sporadically watched the live stream. He had a lot of money riding on this year’s contest. For the past three years, he’s organized a pool of bets, though this year, it’s just him and his brother chipping in on upwards of 1,000 tickets.
“I try to make a prediction of the most likely day it’ll go out,” Hooper says. “I got the idea from a friend who teaches statistics and I’ve done some math modeling with the data available. I dug into the data and started seeing some patterns that might tell us something.”
Hooper says they’ll identify the most likely day and purchase a swath of tickets for that day and a few days on either side of it. Hooper said it’s such a nerve-wracking time in his household that his wife has since put a moratorium on talking about it in her presence.
“It’s stressful watching things unfold,” Hooper says. “Last year I spent a lot of time staring at the live feed. There’s nothing you can do about it, though.”
His first year betting, Nenana saw a late cold snap and their guesses were way off. Last year they’d chosen the right day, but the ice gave way in the middle of the night—a time that was statistically unlikely—and the bulk of their guesses were midday.
This year, though, the clock stopped on April 27 at 12:56 p.m. (Alaska Standard Time). One of Hooper’s guesses was spot on. He’s won, but will likely have to wait until mid-summer to know if he was the only one with the correct time.
Over 11 million Getty images are on ice near Pittsburgh.
To get into the Bettmann Archive, about 90 minutes north of Pittsburgh, you need more than a library card. You need the proper credentials to get past the armed guards at the door. You need to be gloved and swaddled in several layers to deal with the cold. And you need to be OK with claustrophobic conditions, since the trip requires being shuttled hundreds of feet underground.
If you meet all those conditions, you might get a glimpse of Getty Images’ hidden trove of photographic history.
Eighty-five years ago, 32-year-old Otto Bettmann arrived in New York with two heavy steamer trunks. Bettmann had hustled out of his home country, Germany, after being fired from his job as a rare book curator—his crime: being Jewish—on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power. (It wasn’t long after Bettmann’s departure that the Third Reich decided that books, too, had to go.)
The steamer trunks Bettmann hauled across the ocean weren’t loaded with clothes; Bettmann had left all of his behind, save for the ones he wore. They weren’t loaded with money either; that had been seized by the Nazis as Bettmann skipped the country (part of the so-called Reich Tax that removed assets from Germans, especially German-Jews, for leaving).
What those trunks were crammed with was photographs and negatives—the humble beginnings of what would become, by the end of the century, one of the world’s largest collections of iconic photography.
The suitcase contents, according to a New Yorker article in 1939, could be traced back to Bettmann’s fascination with books. The young curator—and accredited historian, thanks to his 1927 doctorate in history—had trekked across Europe, taking photographs with his Leica of book illustrations and other literary materials in libraries and museums.
Having written his university dissertation on literary piracy and copyright issues, Bettmann knew early on that he would do more than just collect images. He would curate and catalog them too, as he had done with books in Germany, and license them to the clamoring clients of a newly booming media industry. Magazines like LIFE, Look, and Time were beginning to take their popular place in American life, and Bettmann was there to cater to their needs. After he arrived in the U.S., he expanded his collection by posting advertisements seeking photographs in some of the very magazines to which he would later license images.
“His business grew over the years; he became known as ‘the Picture Man,’” says Bob Ahern, the director of archival photography at Getty. “At that time, there was a massive explosion in photographs and magazines. There was a massive appetite to see the world, and Bettmann took advantage of that.”
Wherever things were happening, Bettmann (or an employee of an affiliated photo agency) was there. War zones. Rock concerts. Economic upswings and downturns. When Truman defiantly held up a Chicago Daily Tribune declaring Dewey the victor of the 1948 presidential election, it was a Bettmann photograph that memorialized the historic gaffe.
So ubiquitous was the Bettmann name in print media that when a dinner partner of the unassuming German learned his name, she exclaimed, “I thought you'd died 300 years ago,” according to a laudatory New York Times profile. He was “[p]art scholar and part Barnum”—a doctor by degree and a showman by trade.
Over the decades that followed the collection grew, swollen with images of practically every event worth writing on a calendar. When Bill Gates bought the Bettmann collection—in 1995, three years before its namesake’s death— Bettmann declared that Gates “now owns the history of everything.”
But by 2001 the collection could no longer remain in New York. With fluctuating temperatures in a city with four distinct seasons (including hot, humid summers), “the conditions were pretty terrible,” Ahern says. “They had to place this collection somewhere where it’d be preserved, and that place is one-and-a-half hours out of Pittsburgh, 220 feet down a limestone mine.”
When Gates moved the collection into the mine, he simultaneously erected a digital paywall, thereby securing the collection across both physical and digital space.
Sold in 2016 to Visual China, which immediately gave photo licensing rights to Getty, the Bettmann collection has remained in its subterranean home-cum-fortress, to keep the trove of images—some of which date back to the inception of photography itself—from disintegrating.
The 11-million-image Bettmann collection is a small piece of Getty’s 100-million-image photographic empire, but it’s the only one secreted below the surface of the Earth, protected by armed guards. The limestone mine is part of a facility known as Iron Mountain, which once supplied Pittsburgh’s steel mills. Today Getty shares its labyrinthic passageways and cool, dry environment with other collections—including confidential government and private records—in a space that protects and preserve Bettmann’s photographic legacy.
The Bettmann Archive is maintained day to day by Leslie Stauffer and Sarah Kubiak, archivists who call themselves the “Queens of the Bettmann”—an apt nickname given the 10,000-square-foot facility they oversee.
“There is a 5,000-square-foot space consisting of what we call ‘classic library finding aids,’ such as card catalogs and microfilm readers, as well as modern archival technology, including scanning equipment and state-of-the-art software,” says Stauffer. “We also have a 5,000-square-foot cold-storage archive containing all of the multimedia content.”
The trove is equal parts secret library and semi-natural refrigerator. The mine’s temperature is typically a little lower than that of the outside world, but far more constant. There’s also a separate, fully refrigerated section within its halls—the section that houses the most delicate materials, which can’t handle any temperature deviations.
“Since we maintain the temperature inside the cold-storage archive at a constant 37 degrees [Fahrenheit], we often wear hats, coats, and gloves year-round,” says Kubiak. “While the cold temperature can be physically challenging for us as archivists, it is of the utmost importance to preserve the visual history of the late 19th and 20th centuries.”
Bettmann’s archive is large enough that not all of the images are in the cloud; some reside exclusively in the Pennsylvania mine, waiting for the moment when a client pulls them from the underground repository of history. Ahern says that much of the archive’s contents has never been published.
Whether Bettmann could have foreseen the burial of his life’s work is hard to say. Yet even hidden away, his archive remains one of the most utilized image libraries in the world. It’s probably safe to say, however, that most people looking at one of his pictures would never know that it was pulled from underneath the ground in the Pennsylvania countryside.
Below are a few choice examples of the diverse and voluminous photographic portfolio Bettmann collected in the decades he spent building the collection.
Rural restaurants are providing a market for endangered edibles.
Early morning paints yellow stripes on the garden as Plantina Mujai selects a pumpkin. Carrying it inside, she hoists the gourd onto the kitchen counter, then turns to boiling fat red grains of red rice in a large steel pot and preparing round mounds of yam to cook with meat. After Mujai sorts her vegetables, she picks her main ingredient for the day: chutney ktung tyndong bad sohkhymphor, a paste made from papaya and dried fish, smoked in bamboo over hot ash for 10 days.
Mujai is the owner of a Mei-Ramew café, housed in a small bamboo hut that overlooks grazed paddy fields within Khreng Village, in the Indian state of Meghalaya. Mei-Ramew translates to ‘Mother Earth’ in Khasi, the name of both the tribe to which Mujai belongs and the language she speaks. Mujai’s café is run with support from NESFAS, the North East Slow Food & Agrobiodiversity Society based in Shillong, the state’s capital. For many years, NESFAS has been documenting the region’s unique crops while educating farmers on their nutritional and market value. With three Mei-Ramew cafés in Meghalaya so far, the organization seeks to popularize indigenous ingredients and encourage entrepreneurship.
Here, thousands of age-old crops have resisted erasure: the black and red rice, unique edible greens, hundreds of kinds of yams, and potatoes in a rainbow of purples, reds and whites, not to mention the tubers with names unknown to languages outside those of the regional tribes. “Even between here and the next village, the vegetables and rice taste different,” says Mujai.
But this biodiversity is under threat. In India, many indigenous crops have gone extinct since monocultural, large-scale farming systems took over during the 1970s. “In Meghalaya, hybrid, high-yielding varieties of seeds are subsidized by the state,” says Janak Singh, a senior researcher at NESFAS. “These interfere with traditional systems, affect the quality of the soil, and also make farming with local seeds all the more expensive.” In Meghalaya, traditional foods are slowly being replaced with cash crops such as broomstick grass, areca nut, sugarcane, and ginger.
This is where the Mei-Ramew cafés come in. “We want to help promote the consumption of local food, encourage local crops, and generate income,” says Singh, explaining how the cafés serve produce that is indigenous to the soil and the communities that live in the region. “The knowledge is already there, the farmers know what to do,'' says Singh. “We are just supporting them, creating a market, and giving their efforts a push.”
Mujai, now in her late 60s, learned to cook when she was a young girl. “I would go to the fair and ask older women to let me do odd jobs,” says Mujai. “My mother would scream when I returned with my payment. ‘Aren’t you a child!’ she would say.” But Mujai always sought to keep herself busy: peeling nuts from their skins, pounding turmeric and ginger into pastes.
In her café, Mujai chops up jailer, a foraged leafy vegetable she will cook with dried fish and yam stems; scoops jama, a dish made with sweet potato and fermented fish, and stirs wangpanai bad dohnud sniang, a warm stew of mushrooms and pork liver. The Khasi palate leans towards sour, sweet, and bitter tastes, punctuated by nutty rice, rich meat, and the pungent dried fish that accentuates most dishes. “It’s never boring,” Mujai says. “I always think of new ways to use what we have.” Behind her stovetop, her door opens to the garden, where she grows mustard leaves, bitter brinjal, or eggplant, tree tomatoes, and chilies. She also rears her own chickens and pigs, and keeps a shed where she grows mushrooms to sell on the side.
As she cooks, a local farmer passes by to sell her small yams. “Do you know how many varieties we have in this region?” she asks, rhetorically. “Hundreds.” But Mujai mourns the loss of krai, or millet, which formed a prominent part of the Khasi diet before it was completely replaced with rice. “Krai is much more nutritious, it gives strength, and we farmers need that,” she says, recalling the days when she would eat millet rolled into small mounds as dessert. “Khasi millet is also climate-change resistant,” she adds. “It grows without much coddling in any season.”
Though Mujai cooks all day, she doesn’t eat in her own kitchen. Instead, she walks to her neighbor Dial Muktieh’s eatery, the second Mei-Ramew café in Khreng. “She’s a great cook,” she says, as she eats Muktieh’s meal for the afternoon: local rice, a piece of fried river fish, and a salad made with muli, the local radish.
As her customers eat, Muktieh watches intently, often bounding across the room to add condiments to their plates: bamboo pickle, fresh salad leaves, a dollop of rosella jam. Along with lunch, her café also provides local snacks, such as putharo, made from boiled beaten rice wrapped in a banana leaf, and pusla, sweet rice and jaggery sugar steamed together. Before Muktieh started the café, she sold Indian-Chinese cuisine, the junk-food preference of the region. “But I didn’t like the taste,” she says.
Muktieh, in her 30s, spends all day in her café. She compulsively grooms the benches and the soft pink curtains that filter the light into her establishment. Her counters are covered with pickles she has bottled, and she constantly notes down dishes to cook during the week—pork intestines with herbs, black rice sweetened into pudding. “Why are the markets full of foreign vegetables when we can grow so much here?” she asks, mentioning the timid-tasting cauliflowers and foreign cabbages eaten across India. “My aunt used to say, ‘Dial, when you look at your plate and you look outside your window, you should see the same things.’ That is the way to eat.”
As Khasi women like Mujai and Muktieh work tirelessly to bring their tribe’s food to the forefront, in Meghalaya’s West Garo Hills, another Mother Earth café run by Hendri Momin has the same quest. Darechikgre is a winding 10-hour drive from Khreng Village, and it is populated by the Garo tribe, the state’s other indigenous community. The café in Darechikgre is called the Aman-asong Café, which still means ‘Mother Earth,’ but in the Garo language.
While they live in the same state, Garos, in custom, folklore, and culture, are distinct from the Khasis. “People always tend to look at indigenous tribes as one big blanketed group,” says Chenxiang Marak, a Garo researcher with NESFAS. “But that is reductive, it is why indigenous food gets no representation when the apparent diversity of Indian cuisines is fussed about.” The West Garo Hills are warmer, the pumpkins are smaller, the rain heavier. But as with the Khasis, Garo specialties have begun to vanish over time. For example, kharchi, a vinegar made from bamboo ash used to add salt to food, has disappeared from the region.
In his café, Momin prepares breakfast: a local version of paratha, the popular Indian flatbread, made with tapioca flour and sprinkled with sesame seeds, and fritters made with an herb called samskal. Momin learned to cook in kitchens in the capital, but here, he can prepare mana muni, a local variety of spinach, smoke his own beef, and juice oranges from his own orchard.
But Momin is worried. “There is no taste anymore for local produce,” he says. In Meghalaya, the local rice is red, and flour can be made from tapioca and millet, but refined flour and rice have infiltrated people’s palates. “Refined flour is cheap, and therefore becomes a very invasive taste,” he says. Momin is trying to bring back local ingredients through his cooking. A wildly popular dish at his café is bhujia, a fried snack that he makes with dried black rice instead of flour. “To change minds, you slowly change what people are used to,” he says.
Even though Garo Hills are plush with produce, the region shares a border with Assam, which allows the flooding of its markets with cheap crops from neighboring states. “We grow many kinds of gourds,” says Gytelallin S. Marak, a farmer and indigenous seed custodian in the village. “The Garos eat the spike gourd, the bitter gourd. And we grow beans—broad beans, green beans, long beans. But our farmers aren’t able to pay rent for shops, so they have to sell on the street, and often give their vegetables to middlemen for very low prices.” Under Marak’s supervision, many households now store indigenous seeds on their own. “Modified seeds given by the government are not always high-yielding, nor are they pest-resistant,” he says.
Climate change has already made things difficult in the region, one of the rainiest in the Indian subcontinent. Now during monsoons, it pours endlessly for days, Momin says, destroying many crops. Marak adds a story of an acidic rainfall that ruined the village’s plants. “We didn’t create the change,” he says. “But we are affected.” He believes that one mitigating step for locals to take would be to once again grow regional, resilient crops.
As Momin prepares snacks for the evening, he also sorts through seeds of sipin, the local variety of sesame. Meanwhile, customers demand pitta, a flatbread eaten with tea. “There is no value for indigenous knowledge, it is treated like it is second-hand,” says Marak, as he helps Momin trim foraged herbs and wrap them up in paper parcels for the customers to take home. “But when we do not act, we are sacrificing our wealth, our histories, and our land.”
