When every guest is a coronavirus patient, you're allowed to hug, hang out in the lobby, and gather for meals.

Noam Shuster-Eliassi was supposed to debut her one-woman standup comedy show, “Coexistence My Ass,” in the U.S. this year. Instead, in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, she tried out the routine in Israel, performing in front of strangers who crowded into a noisy lobby. Later, she joined them for Passover at tables laden with watermelon and wine. The atrium echoed with the sound of laughter, singing, coughing, and conversations in Hebrew and Arabic. Almost no one wore a mask.

This was the scene inside the Dan Jerusalem Hotel, where people of all political and religious stripes stay as they recuperate from COVID-19. They have already been sick and are thought to have gained immunity to the coronavirus—making this one of the few places where the rules of social distancing don’t apply.

Before her sojourn at the hotel, Shuster-Eliassi had been at Harvard Divinity School on a fellowship to develop her standup act, which she performs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and was performing with the Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Harvard shut down, so Noam decided to take a chance and fly home to Israel. She had a layover in New York City.

Within days of her flight, Shuster-Eliassi had developed COVID-19 symptoms and had to go to the hospital for supplemental oxygen. And there, her unfortunate situation led to a unique opportunity. “I did stand-up shows here in the lobby,” says Noam. “The fact that I got sick let me do what no other comedian is doing today: a show with a real audience, not on Zoom.”

The quarantine efforts at the Dan Jerusalem Hotel are coordinated by the Israeli military, part of a country-wide effort to control the spread of COVID-19. As of May 12, there have been more than 16,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in Israel and 258 deaths; all residents returning from another country are required to undergo a 14-day quarantine. Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank have faced shortages of medical equipment, and the Gaza Strip had only 90 ventilators for a dense population of two million; the threat of land annexation by Israel lingers, with reports of increased violence from Israeli settlers against Palestinians.

Hotels throughout Israel have been appropriated so that COVID-19 patients can quarantine and convalesce. “We have a special case here in the Jerusalem hotel, because the young people are taking care of the old people, there are Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, secular, religious, Palestinian, Jewish,” says Shuster-Eliassi, laughing. “I don't know what this is, but we're all getting along and I’m having the biggest identity crisis of my life.”

That sense of intense community at the hotel has been a balm for people who were very sick and isolated before they arrived. “One of the women that I really connected with is a Palestinian from Jerusalem, her name is Rafa,” says Shuster-Eliassi. “She's a midwife who works in a hospital, and she lost her husband a month ago to cancer ... She caught the virus and she left five kids at home.”

Shuster-Eliassi was moved by their friendship. “We made each other happy,” she says. Because they were around others who had tested positive for COVID-19, they were able to give and receive hugs. “Imagine, she has to get sick and come to this hotel to get hugs,” Shuster-Eliassi says.

Sima Segal, another hotel resident, had health problems for a decade before the pandemic. She had a constant cough and frequent fevers starting in 2010, and a parade of doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. This February, she went to see a specialized doctor who ordered a CT scan; as a high-risk individual, she also got tested for the coronavirus. When the tests showed she had both a lung infection and COVID-19, she almost fainted from fear and anxiety.

When Segal moved into the Dan Hotel, she spent a few days crying in her room. Then she ventured out into the riotous lobby, where she found her spirits buoyed. “At the age of 70, it's an amazing experience to meet young people,” Segal says. “To be welcomed and hugged by young people who are having so much fun with me."

Though the hotel provides food for the recovering patients, the residents are mostly left their own devices. One resident offered sunset yoga classes on the roof, while others played music on the hotel piano. Eden Dori, an asymptomatic 21-year-old, started a nightly Zumba class in the lobby. Every night at 6 p.m., she bounced and wiggled in front of participants in leggings, who filled the floor and shook their hips to the music. “Sometimes people don't do Zumba with me, but they just watch us,” said Dori.

Shuster-Eliassi grew up in Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, a village jointly founded by Israeli Jews and Arabs to promote peaceful coexistence, and she is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. In the hotel, she says, prejudices and societal divisions seemed to fall away. “I met an ultra-Orthodox man that was just constantly interested in why I'm speaking Arabic, and why I'm hanging out with the Palestinians, but from a very very good place,” she says. He was genuinely curious about her upbringing in the village, and the interaction was one of many reactions that surprised her. Remembering all this, she laughs. “We're all getting along—like, what the hell is going on?”

Shuster-Eliassi left the hotel on April 19, after finally receiving the required two negative tests for the coronavirus. Leaving was an emotional experience. “There was a sense of leaving a family,” she says.

Now separated from the community at the Dan Hotel, she is trying to process what she experienced there. She is careful to point out that the hotel felt like a home because it was so separate from the asymmetrical power dynamic of the real world. “In the hotel, Israelis and Palestinians got the same. We got the same meals, the same treatment, because it's a national effort that we all don’t get each other sick,” she says.

In her comedy routines, Shuster-Eliassi is often cynical about the possibility of coexistence in such a fraught political environment. But this experience has restored a little bit of her hope. “Israelis will never be okay if Palestinians are not okay,” she says. “We live in the same land. And we didn't need this virus to teach us that. But this is what I saw in the hotel.”

Even during a pandemic, someone's gotta feed the flesh-eating beetles.

A few weeks ago, Adam Ferguson entered an enormous walk-in freezer—one-and-half times the size of his bedroom—at the Field Museum in Chicago, where he works as the collections manager for mammals. A crowd of animal carcasses never smells great—under the best conditions, it “smells like skunk and freezer-burned meat,” he says. But in an adjacent part of the lab, where the team stores big bins holding bones waiting for preparators, he got a whiff of something unusually funky. The space reeked of “rancid fat and water with a little bit of ammonia,” he recalls. “Pretty ripe. That’s how I knew there was a problem.” The giant Tupperware holding South American tapir remains had sprung a tiny leak, not much bigger than a pinhole.

The tapir bones rest in a solution of diluted ammonium hydroxide, which pulls out marrow and fat and arrests bacterial growth. They are not far from the remains of okapi and goats that are wrapped in tarps, as well as squirrels, bats, and rodents that sit in containers on shelves. In this case, a little bit of the malodorous, milky-white fluid from the tapir’s bin had trickled out and pooled on the floor. Ferguson cleaned it up and went on his way. It wasn’t a crisis, but it was a good reminder: Museums are dynamic environments, and staff members are always doing their damnedest to fend off entropy.

Even though many natural history institutions are closed to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and most of their staff are hunkering down at home, some museum employees continue to make periodic rounds through their collections. “What museums are doing is stuff that’s about trying to limit the agents of deterioration,” says Jack Ashby, trustee of the Natural Sciences Collections Association, which supports natural history collections across the United Kingdom, and the manager of the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge. Those agents can be anything from water gushing in from a leaky ceiling to dust to pests introduced from the outside world or escaped from another part of the museum.

The task of deciding whose duties live under that umbrella tends to fall to people pretty high up on an institution’s food chain. At the Field Museum, that power rests with the executive team, says Ray DeThorne, the chief marketing officer; anyone trying to enter the building must flash a letter signed by a museum executive, saying that they have permission to step inside. (In an effort to enforce social distancing, the city has restricted access to the roads around the museum, which lead to the tantalizing shores of Lake Michigan.) The Field Museum has 480 employees and currently averages around 20 people in the building each day, DeThorne says. “We want a minimal number of people in the institution, and have two things we’re concerned about: The health and safety of employees, and the safety of our 40 million specimens and artifacts,” he says. At the Museum of London, most employees seeking access need sign-off from a department head and the security team, and must make arrangements in advance.

The crews keeping these institutions running typically include security workers, housekeeping, and building maintenance staff. They also include less-obvious characters, such as curators, collections managers, and social media managers, whose tasks include feeding beetles; pouring formaldehyde; refilling 230-liter tanks of nitrogen in cryogenic tissue storage facilities; and, in the case of the Field Museum, dressing up like a dinosaur.

Many natural history museums that still collect recently deceased animals enlist some little creepy-crawly “workers” to help out with the dirty work. Colonies of flesh-eating beetles, also known as dermestids, often help clean the bones—and even in a pandemic, insects gotta eat. Ella Haigler, a museum specialist and Osteo Prep Lab manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Museum Support Center, currently goes into the office in Suitland, Maryland, to check on the dermestid beetle colony and take care of other tasks about twice a week. The Smithsonian’s several thousand beetles live in darkness, scuttling around tanks and aquariums that sit in two nine-by-nine-foot converted freezers. Right now, they’re chowing down on the muscles and connective tissues of small birds, a sea turtle, and an elephant. (Active, voracious colonies can tear through small specimens in a few hours, and spend days or months working on larger ones.)

Flesh-eating beetles are picky about their living conditions, which they prefer to be balmy and steamy. The Smithsonian’s beetles are stored between 81 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, around 70 percent humidity. If the temperature in their tanks drops below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, they’ll refuse to eat; severe cold snaps can wipe colonies out entirely. Once they hoover up all the food on offer, the beetles stop reproducing, and larvae may go cannibalistic by devouring pupae. After a bloodbath like that, it can take months to get a colony up and running again—and museums depend on beetles across the stages of their life cycle, says the Field Museum’s Ferguson, who also checks on his team’s beetle colonies during his weekly rounds. The larvae, for instance, are the best bets for de-fleshing a house mouse, or the little limb bones of a shrew. Haigler keeps them busy (and keeps the peace) with frequent feasts, and if the specimen is desiccated or freezer-burned, she adds, she’ll soak it in such appetizing substances as fish oil.

What goes in must come out: Staff members also clean the frass, or insect excrement, from the tanks, and spritz the hard-working residents with a spray bottle of water. “You can tell they need the moisture,” Ferguson says. “They come out, like, ‘All right! A sprinkler in the summer.’” Anyone tending to dermestid colonies has to be cautious to check themselves for stowaways before they visit other parts of the museum, says Ashby, of the University Museum of Zoology: Rogue beetles that escape their tanks and gorge on collections “can take all the fur off of taxidermy,” Ashby says. He describes the beetles as some museums’ “worst enemy and their trusted employee.”

As they wander through galleries, offices, and storage spaces, curators and collections managers also keep an eye out for other pests. Fergsuon scours each floor where the mammals department has specimens, either on view or in prep labs. Paolo Viscardi, chair of the Natural Sciences Collections Association and zoology curator at the National Museum of Ireland’s Dead Zoo, has been checking on the collections weekly, and scans windowsills and sticky traps for evidence of unwanted creatures. As part of their pest management protocols, many museums place traps, such as the charmingly named “blunder traps,” to spot insects that scutter past displays. Viscardi also finds himself swatting and squashing webbing clothes moths with his bare hands. “When they’re flying around, you just hit them,” he says.

In natural history museums, the moths are “a perennial problem,” Viscardi says. They’re especially keen on taxidermy collections, with their appetizing fur and feathers, and also like to wedge themselves between the joints of crustaceans, where there’s sometimes a bit of dried meat. “We have 2 million specimens, and every single one of them is a small banquet for pests, except for the geology,” Viscardi says. When a pandemic isn’t raging, one tactic would be to freeze any affected specimens, because the cold temperatures kill the pests—but that’s not feasible at the moment, because the museum’s freezers are located in other parts of the city. It’s too complicated to coordinate transporting the objects under social distancing rules.

Those rounds are also a good chance to check on humidity levels throughout the galleries and storage areas. Too much humidity can encourage mold to grow, and also makes shrouds of dust sticky, attractive to pests, and difficult to remove. Dips and spikes in temperature and humidity can also cause objects to crack.

Many museums use sensors to monitor these types of fluctuations, but those sometimes require in-person maintenance, too. Every two weeks, Ferguson must change the paper reel in the Field Museum’s hygrothermograph, a machine that monitors a storage room for tanned deer and pig skins, which is kept at 50 percent humidity and 50 degrees Fahrenheit. (Researchers use the skins to extract samples of DNA, pathogens, and more.) Andy Holbrook, collection care manager at the Museum of London, is hunkered down in the countryside and hasn’t been to the museum in more than eight weeks, but colleagues who live within walking or cycling distance have suited up in personal protective equipment and popped over to air-conditioned galleries to change the batteries in temperature sensors. That task was “fairly quick, straightforward, and low-risk,” he says.

Even well-preserved specimens need check-ups. “A lot of people think [museum] collections are pretty stable—you stick it in a jar and it’s okay forever,” Ashby says. “They aren’t.” Specimens suspended in fluid require a once-over, in case alcohol evaporates through old seals, Ashby says. Viscardi is busy with top-ups and other interventions, including rehydrating a withered frog. Without visitors milling around the hallways, he can bring the supplies right to the dead creatures in need. “You don’t want to be mucking around with a trolley full of alcohol or formalin when the public are in the building,” he says.

With visitors likely to be turned away for a while longer, many museums are also working to remind them about all the cool stuff inside—keeping them interested in the collection now, and hopefully nudging them to visit in person when it’s safe to do so. In service of delighting armchair explorers with shtick, the Field Museum’s social media manager, Katharine Uhrich, got special dispensation from the executives to duck into the museum back in March. She and her husband, Steve, donned an inflatable T. rex suit and stampeded around the empty galleries, in character as SUE, the museum’s star murderbird. In one iPhone video they filmed, SUE battles vending machines; in another, the dinosaur saunters around the Hall of Birds and waves to the taxidermy penguins. The videos are gloriously goofy, and loaded with substantive information the science of dinosaurs: The vending machine video, for instance, was a chance to talk about SUE’s foot-long teeth; the bird jaunt was a reminder that the dinosaurs known as theropods included T. rex, velociraptors, and the ancestors of modern birds. Uhrich and Steve made two visits to the museum and recorded more than eight videos, which have been watched more than 1.6 million times in total.

This strange time has helped museum employees be flexible and creative, says Viscardi, of the National Museum of Ireland. Museums hold practice drills for all sorts of emergencies, from terrorist attacks to floods. Viscardi’s team hadn’t prepped for a pandemic, exactly, but they had broader preparedness training last year. “It prepared us to rapidly change our practices and deal with emergent situations as they happen—not get caught up in, ‘This isn’t how we do things,’” he says. For now, beyond his in-person checks, Viscardi is working remotely, catching up on writing and research that had been simmering on the back burner. While museums are closed to visitors, curators and conservators are tucking into tasks that they have been meaning to do for years, while they also make sure the collections will be ready to greet the crowds that eventually return. This is “one of the few times people have had to actually take a breath,” he says.

They’re huge, rare, and melting all the time.

In February 2018, a storm pelted the Argentinian city of Villa Carlos Paz with hail. The icy balls were really, really big—sometimes bigger than a grown-up’s palm, bumpy as a rock, and hefty enough to imperil people and property. The largest of these might even best the biggest on record: an icy behemoth that tumbled down in Vivian, South Dakota, in June 2010, spanning eight inches and weighing more than a pound. In a new paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, an international team of 10 researchers argues that some of the Argentinian hailstones were so off-the-charts humongous that they might need new, oversized terminology. A local teenager, Victoria Druetta, put on a motorcycle helmet to protect her head, retrieved a seven-inch specimen from her yard, measured it, and stored it in her family’s freezer. Another hailstone disappeared before researchers could measure it directly, but video footage helped them estimate its size at between 7.4 and 9.3 inches wide.

Hailstones are balls (or spikes, or flattish pancakes) of frozen precipitation that measure at least 0.2 inches across, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Severe Storms Laboratory. Several other types of smaller frozen precipitation are known as “ice pellets,” reports the National Snow & Ice Data Center, and may take the form of graupel (soft balls of water droplets clinging to a snow crystal and looking like Styrofoam) or sleet (essentially icy raindrops). In the sky, either of these can serve as an “embryo,” the little nucleus around which a hailstone can grow. The longer a fledgling hailstone stays lofted in a thunderstorm’s fierce updraft, the bigger it gets. Beyond that minimum 0.2-inch threshold, there are a few finer distinctions between hailstones, thrown around by researchers and sometimes forecasters at the National Weather Service. “Severe” hail has a maximum dimension of one inch or more, “significantly severe” stones are larger than two inches, and “giant” hail is bigger than four inches.

“Giant” sounds pretty big, but this crop of researchers didn’t think it seemed quite big enough. A hailstone of more than four inches is “certainly very large,” says Matthew Kumjian, a meteorologist at Penn State University and lead author of the paper. But, he adds, while stones of that size are rare, “they are not exceptional.” Hailstones bigger than four inches are reported 30 to 40 times a year in the United States alone, he says. Stones larger than six inches, though, are few and far between. Kumjian’s co-author, graduate student Rachel Gutierrez, combed through reports and found about 10 confirmed instances in the last 10 or 15 years, mostly in the U.S. (There were a handful of unconfirmed reports in Australia, Africa, and Asia, but photos or official measurements were missing.)

The researchers suspect that there are probably more of these spectacularly sized hailstones dropping down across the country, but they’re likely going unnoticed. When measuring hail, time is of the essence: Hailstones vanish fairly quickly, especially in hot or humid conditions, or if they shatter on impact; even large ones with cushioned falls might be overlooked. The most severe hailstorms in the United States are in the Great Plains, Kumjian says, where people are spread fairly far apart. To find a large hailstone, “you have to be in the right place at the right time,” he says. “Or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on your perspective.”

In the 1970s and 80s, some researchers drove armored vehicles straight through storms, collected the hailstones in nets, and stashed them in freezers, Kumjian says. Contemporary researchers might pilot drones to after a storm to take aerial surveys of whatever plummeted from the sky. To measure hailstones’ size and mass, researchers typically just scoop them up by hand; if they want to hold on to them for further calculations, they may double-bag the hailstones in freezer bags, to decrease the chance of sublimation, or make a 3D laser scan. (It helps to coat the hailstone with a generous spritz of computer duster spray, an athlete’s foot remedy, or other aerosolized powder coating, to stall melt and help the machine read the bumps and grooves.) Kumjian has several replicas on his desk, and they’ll never turn into puddles.

Kumjian and his collaborators wanted a name to toast what he calls “extreme hailstones,” those rare ones that exceed six inches. Before deciding on a moniker for this most metal type of precipitation, the researchers noodled over a couple of options. “‘Gigantic’ was one of the considerations, but its dictionary definition was too similar to ‘giant,’” Kumjian says. (Gigantic means “exceeding the usual or expected,” while giant means “having an extremely large size, proportion, or power.”) “Ultragiant” seemed a little too clunky. The team settled on “gargantuan,” meaning “tremendous in size, volume, or degree.” It had gravitas—much like the hailstones themselves.

Kumjian doesn’t expect weather forecasters to start raising the alarm about “gargantuan” hail: Even when a supercell storm is on the horizon, rushing in with perfect conditions for hail, it’s hard to predict whether it will produce enormous pieces, or just tons of little ones. But he hopes the name will be accepted by other members of the research community—and that it will be sticky enough to lodge itself in people’s brains, and inspire the public to report specimens of gargantuan hail. If you do spot one, give a meteorologist a heads-up. That would be truly tremendous.

The writer was concerned about the rise of binge-drinking bros.

High school health classes, it turns out, have been around since the 16th century. That’s when a school rector in Bavaria, writing under the name Vincent Obsopoeus, published a poetic guide to responsible drinking, geared toward young men who—then as now—didn’t appear to know their limits. “Can it really be true?” asks “Drunkenness” herself in the book’s lyrical preface, written by a friend. “Should I really believe this book can teach people how to rationally lose control?”

Obsopoeus (pronounced “OB-so-PAY-us”) published this treatise, in Latin, in 1536. In April 2020, Princeton University Press published a new English translation by Michael Fontaine, a professor of classics at Cornell University. Entitled How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing, Fontaine’s translation speaks not only to the text’s historical moment, but to our very own, as alcohol sales have soared on account of the COVID-19 quarantine.

Nonetheless, says Fontaine, it’s important to read Obsopoeus with his time and place in mind. Though the popular imagination often pictures ancient Greece and Rome as decadent playgrounds of drunken excess, binge-drinking wasn’t actually culturally normative in those societies. For one thing, drinkers in those days tended to mix water with their wine. Moreover, their wine was less alcoholic than ours to begin with, as a lack of fungicides meant a shorter time for grapes on the vine.

Instead, Fontaine writes in his introduction, “binge and bro culture—so familiar to Americans—started not in classical Greece or Rome but in Germany five hundred years ago.” The reasons, in his analysis, have to do with the end of the Crusades. Young men were still being educated and trained to become knights, but that path was becoming increasingly obsolete, and men began seeking other outlets for their aggression. It was in that context, he writes, that “hardcore drinking” emerged as “a mark of he-man prowess …” It didn’t help that vineyards accounted for four times as much German land as they do now. Even doctors and hospital patients were allowed to drink nearly two gallons of wine per day.

“At our parties,” Obsopoeus observed, “the host’s chief objective is to send his guests home hammered ... From the get-go they’re pouring [wine] and playing competitive drinking games …” Next came his dreaded “beer chasers,” which the poet described as “an idea dreamed up ... when the gods were angry.” Eventually “the soaked floor is drinking in a huge amount of wine. Rivers upon rivers are pouring down the tables; on more than one occasion, I’d have sworn the bottles were swimming.”

Obsopoeus wouldn’t stand for it. Channeling Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a series of instructional writings on the subject of romance, Obsopoeus sought to systematize the art of getting drunk—properly, respectfully, safely. (The Greek pseudonym "Obsopoeus" was another nod to the ancients, as well as an attempt to obscure his peasant German name, Koch; both translate to "cook.") “Unless they worship [Bacchus, the Roman god of wine] with the precise art they should, those who worship Him will feel His wrath,” the poet warned. “Bacchus is mellow, you see, but if you underestimate His power and worship Him the wrong way, He becomes impossible to handle.”

As the poet saw it, moderation was good, including in moderation itself. He deemed some occasions, such as festivals, “suitable for overimbibing.” Much of his advice instead concerned the careful selection of drinking buddies. If “you’re going to drink wine and worship [Bacchus],” he wrote, consider “who you want to be with” (emphasis original). Find people with similar temperaments, in similar professions, people “who are tactful and modest in their language,” and “friends whose quality and loyalty are proven and unmistakable, time after time.” People, in other words, who won’t get goaded into a fight, who won't cheat at drinking games, who would never let you get behind the wheel. It’s as if he was writing a script for freshman orientation.

Obsopoeus was also ahead of his time, says Fontaine, in paying close attention to the gendered dynamics of drinking culture. He was appalled by the drunken banter to which many men were and are prone—what gets called "locker room talk" today. “When guys are drunk,” he wrote, “they brag about their hard-as-wood erections” and “spill the beans about raunchy sexual bouts …” They become, he continued, “pigs full of snakes and lizards: they’re spewing snake venom from their mouths. Their venom’s more poisonous than that of a real-live viper ... or a dragon.”

Fontaine points out that Obsopoeus—by repeatedly likening these caddish, intoxicated, peer-pressured exchanges to “venom”—was essentially identifying what we now refer to as “toxic” masculinity. The poet also mocked a drinking song that celebrated the carousals of germani. Fontaine notes that Germani means “Germans,” while germani means “brothers.” It’s as if Obsopoeus was calling out the drinkers for their glorification of “‘bro’ culture,” Fontaine writes.

The book concludes with a section advising readers who wish to succeed in drinking games. Yes, really. The poet's main advice? Make sure everyone follows the rules: “You need to stay focused when you’re drinking,” he wrote. You must “keep an eye on what drinks you’re assigning each person and make sure your friend’s running the same race you are. I’m speaking from experience.” He continued, “nobody tells the truth when they’re drinking, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll get cheated over and over.”

All in all, it sounds like Obsopoeus would’ve made an excellent drinking buddy himself. After all, he literally wrote the book on it.

Duchess Quamino was the embodiment of creative survival.

In the seaside city of Newport, Rhode Island, the corner where Farewell and Warner streets cross is sacred ground. Here, inside the city’s oldest public cemetery, is the area known as God’s Little Acre, the country’s oldest and largest collection of burial markers of both free and enslaved Africans.

During the summer months, when tourists flock to the seaport, lush green blades of grass surround the markers. And when cold winds replace the blustery summer breeze, the stones defiantly jut out from the snow. About 200 markers stand in this small area, memorializing the enslaved Africans who lived and worked in colonial Rhode Island, back when Newport was a major transatlantic slave port. Most were artisans—from stone carvers and candlestick makers to chocolate grinders and bakers.

Duchess “Charity” Quamino, the "Pastry Queen of Rhode Island," is one of the artisans found here in her final resting place. She is thought to be from either the West African countries of Senegal or Ghana, depending on who you ask. Keith Stokes, vice president of the Newport history organization 1696 Heritage Group, says that Ghana’s Gold Coast is a likely candidate for her birthplace, where she would have been born around 1753. Stokes came to that conclusion “based upon most other African arrivals to colonial Newport at that time.”

“That lines up with her husband, that lines up with dozens and dozens of other documented Africans at the time,” he says. “And as we look at the [slave] ship logs, it’s the Gold Coast that far surpasses any other West African destination.”

As detailed on her marker, Quamino died on June 29, 1804. She was 65 years old. Made of fragile slate, her gravestone has crumbled and deteriorated over the years. The legacy of her life, however, endures.

Quamino, who went by her nickname Charity, was a gifted baker. This was a skill she honed and developed while she was enslaved in colonial Rhode Island by the local Channing family. William Channing was the attorney general of Rhode Island, and his son, William Ellery Channing, would become a well-known and respected Unitarian preacher. While Quamino cooked meals for them, she started and grew her own catering business. She became, like countless others enslaved Africans who had access to kitchens, an entrepreneur.

Her specialty was a frosted plum cake, which she made for the wealthy and the influential people who passed through Newport—George Washington being one of them. “There is secondary information [stating] that when George Washington arrived at Newport, she provided catering for that venue,” Stokes says.

By 1780, Quamino was a free woman. Legend has it that with money she made from her catering business, she was able to purchase her freedom. Multiple accounts mention this in the same breath as her title as the local ‘pastry queen’ and various details of her life. While this is often offered as an undisputed fact, there’s no concrete evidence that this was the case. Some accounts also state that later, she also bought the freedom of her children, who she had with her husband John Quamino.

Her marriage to John Quamino was notable, as was her piety, which is even mentioned on her grave marker. The couple were members of the Protestant Church in Newport. Between the 1730s and 40s, even as the transatlantic slave trade peaked in Newport and New England overall, the Great Awakening changed everything.

This shift represented Christian values going beyond church attendance, instead becoming embedded in everyday life and action. Both John and Duchess Quamino were swept up in the movement. “By the time she’s a young adult, even as an enslaved person and later as a free person, she’s a very pious member of the congregational church,” Stokes says. “That is a part of her identity.”

It was part of John’s identity as well. After John won a lottery and bought his freedom in 1773, his pastor fundraised to send him to the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton, for missionary training. This made John Quamino one of the first Africans to attend an American college. He later died as a privateer during the American Revolution, a path that he had embarked on to raise the money to buy the freedom of his wife and children.

His death left Quamino to raise their children alone. But she sojourned on, making a way out of no way. Industrious and talented, Stokes refers to her spirit with a particular term. “We call it ‘creative survival,’” Stokes said. “It’s not something that the white community gave the Africans. It is something that they embraced to survive and persevere.”

Though Quamino is an exemplary example of creative survival, she is one of many free or enslaved Africans throughout Rhode Island at that time who figuratively, and sometimes literally, cooked their way to freedom. There’s Cuffy Cockroach, who is said to have developed the ubiquitous sea turtle stew of Newport in the 1760s, a soup still served in restaurants in Rhode Island today. His cooking skills were also born from enslavement. He cooked, served, and lived in the home of Jahleel Brenton, a British admiral born in Newport. Cockroach is remembered as the first caterer in the city, and each year for the winter solstice, the Brenton family hosted a dinner on Goat Island featuring his legendary sea turtle stew.

Elleanor Eldridge, who lived in Warwick during the early 1800s, was yet another one of these Rhode Island culinary entrepreneurs. Her speciality was cheesemaking. When Eldridge got in her groove, she made anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000 pounds of cheese each year. Thomas G. Williams, another caterer, also lived in Newport during the mid-19th century. He operated multiple businesses and restaurants in the city. Williams was also an activist, working alongside Frederick Douglas on the abolition of slavery, and later, Black equality.

Duchess Quamino’s story continues to resonate today. Along with her prominence in the community as both a businesswoman and a highly respected widow, she is always counted among Newport’s famous early Black cooks. A local reenactor has even portrayed Quamino at living history events, plum cake and all.

But the longest-standing tribute to Quamino is her gravestone, which was restored in 2017. The preservation of the gravestones of colonial New England’s skilled Black artisans is ongoing at God’s Little Acre. Last year, the Preservation Society of Newport received a $50,000 grant to aid directly in repairing and preserving the markers of Quamino and her fellow craftsmen in God’s Little Acre. Here, in their final resting place, their legacies are remembered.

At-home lessons and pro tips could help quarantined kids hit pay dirt.

There comes a time in every kid’s quarantine when the outside world starts to look awful irresistible. Maybe it’s the familiar warmth of springtime, or perhaps the stir craze that has come with being cooped up in the accrued months of social distancing. Whatever the cause, most kids right now are unable to hang with friends on the nearest (temporarily closed) playground and get their hands dirty.

“What can you do if you've got a bunch of kids with nothing better to do?” says Carenza Lewis, an archaeologist at the University of Lincoln in England. “Get them digging.”

So was created Dig School—a partnership between the university, the Council for British Archaeology, and the preservation organization Historic England. Led by Lewis, Dig School is now offering 20 online workshops, styled for junior archaeologists between ages 10 and 15, that teach the basics of excavatory science through at-home exercises and lessons from the field.

With even professional archaeologists’ field seasons foreclosed by stay-at-home orders, Dig School spotlights the progress that can be made from home, and serves as a reminder that archaeological inquiry is bound only by one’s curiosity—and, of course, whatever the local law might be concerning hole-digging where you live.

You might think that only seasoned, accredited archaeologists can unearth hidden treasures, but many discoveries are made by kids. The Dig School offers conceptual lessons as well as practical tips of the trade. (For instance, Lewis advises keeping the holes where you dig small. The bigger the square, the more likely you are to miss some stuff.)

Recent participants were asked to draw a room they knew well, and imagine it being found 2,000 years from now; then, everyone got someone else’s illustration, and attempted to reconstruct the original space.

In another exercise, participants were given an unmarked map of St. Kilda—an isolated archipelago off the northern coast of Britain that was settled in Neolithic times—then played battleships to figure out where others thought the most sensible disembarkation point was.

St. Kilda may be a bit remote, so it’s good to remember that ancient finds are everywhere. In fact, they may be just below your feet. For the intrepid archaeologist, discovery is a just trowel and a small square away.

“Even if your house was only built in the 20th century, there may be finds from half a century [ago] or more—covering periods when people spent much more time outside than [they do] today,” Lewis says. “Seeing an old plastic cassette tape (remember them?!) emerging from the dirt not only connects people with the past, but also shows how our lives become the archaeology of the future.”

The smoky, creamy Hot Ale Flip is a testament to crude ingenuity.

“Europeans looked down their noses at post-colonial Americans for just about everything—our fashion sucked, our music sucked, and our paintings sucked,” says culinary historian Sarah Lohman. “So, we really didn’t give a shit if they thought we were drinking swill, too.” Indeed, many early American beverages boasted all the refinement of enterprising yet unsupervised children, perhaps none more so than the Hot Ale Flip, a tavern favorite of the 1700s. The recipe called for frothing rum-laced dark ale with egg and spices before torching everything into a creamy, bubbling frenzy with the help of a red-hot fire poker.

The Flip, as it was known colloquially, had roots in England, where it was widely besmirched as a “sailor’s drink.” In the rugged world of the early colonies, however, where class distinctions blurred, the Flip's stigma evaporated as well: Everyone needed a drink now and then, and the Flip made great use of available resources. To survive a trans-Atlantic voyage in the 1600s, you had to be a bit of a sailor anyway; a little ash in your drink wouldn’t kill you.

According to Corin Hirsch, author of Forgotten Drinks of Colonial New England, the Flip was ubiquitous across the colonies by the mid-1700s. It was served far and wide, from high-society locales like New York City’s famed Fraunces Tavern (patronized by George Washington himself) to the lowly dives of Boston, where Flip-fueled bar brawls led to murder-by-fire-poker in at least one instance.

If Europeans looked down on the early United States, practices like the Ale Flip show a culture embracing its rough-around-the-edges identity. Thrusting a fire tool into an odd melange of boozy ingredients speaks to a scrappy resourcefulness, but, according to Lohman, a sort of indifferent ruggedness as well. “There was no accounting for taste, we just wanted something warm with calories in it,” she says. “And we didn’t care that Europe thought we were backwater—we were into that image.” She points to an 1842 Manhattan banquet held for a visiting British author named Charles Dickens, at which he and 3,000 of the day’s urbanites were served Roasted Bear.

“We weren’t even eating a ton of bear in America at the time,” says Lohman. “We just loved that wildness.”

Remarkably, this habit of unrefined ingenuity helped birth what historian David Wondrich calls "the first uniquely American cultural product to catch the world's imagination": the cocktail.

To be sure, New York City produced something of the world’s first celebrity bartender, Orsamus Willard, whose name was known by every American in 1839 for his summertime Mint Juleps and wintertime Apple Toddies. In 1862, another New York bartender, “Professor” Jerry Thomas, produced what is widely considered the first cocktail book, a collection of previously orally passed recipes that is still referred to by modern bartenders. In the mid-1800s, “Europeans would come over and sneer at American culture,” says Lohman, “but this was the one thing they would grant us as a beautiful artform that we introduced to the world—cocktails.” Sure enough, travelers’ accounts of the 1800s resounded in adoration of early American mixology. “That was the thing you did when you were British and you visited early America,” says Lohman, “you went and had a drink."

With the antiquation of hearths, the role of the fire-poker in drink-making fell by the wayside, though its presence echoes through every wondrous American cocktail bar—shuttered as they may be during the current pandemic. The Flip walked so the Julep could run; but that’s not to say the Flip can’t still walk. “What’s so funny about colonial-era drinks,” says Hirsch, “is that they sound so crude on paper and yet they can be so good. The fire poker adds this really delicious charred flavor to everything.” She’s careful not to ascribe early drinkers’ motives to taste, however. “Sometimes I wonder if they were just bored, trying to figure out how to make drinking more exciting.”

You can make your own poker-heated Flip at home using the below recipe. It’s been adapted from Lohman’s former blog, Four Pounds Flour, to suit the resource-strapped quarantine-time kitchen. There is fire involved, so a steady hand helps here.

While an open fire may not be an option for everyone, a version for a stovetop Flip adapted from Forgotten Drinks of Colonial New England follows. Drink historically, drink responsibly.

Hot Ale Flip

For the syrup
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup water
¼ nutmeg, grated (if no whole nutmeg, ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg)
1 cinnamon stick
2 cloves

For the drink
1 bottle (12 ounces) brown or amber ale at room temperature and preferably flat (open bottle, can, or growler and let it sit)
1 egg
2–3 tablespoons sugar syrup (above)
1 ounce dark or golden rum
grated nutmeg (to taste)

Fire Poker Method

Adapted From Four Pounds Flour

1. Make the sugar syrup

Combine all the syrup ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil without stirring. Remove from heat.

2. Build the drink

Combine the ale, egg, and syrup in a bowl and whisk until it’s slightly frothy. Add the rum. Transfer to a heat-safe mug or bowl wide enough to accommodate the top of the fire poker.

3. Make it hot

Heat a fire poker in coals until red-hot. Pull it out of the fire and plunge it into your mug or bowl. Remove it when the bubbling stops. If a little ash gets in there, scoop it out with a spoon. If the drink isn’t warm enough, repeat. Top with a bit of fresh, grated nutmeg.

Stovetop Method

Adapted From Forgotten Drinks of Colonial New England

1. Make the sugar syrup

See instructions above.

2. Build the drink

Use two pint glasses or mugs. Pour the rum and sugar syrup into one, and beat an egg in the other until frothy.

3. Heat the beer

Heat the beer in a saucepan until steaming (but not boiling).

4. Mix the drink

Pour the beer into the glass with the rum and sugar syrup, then quickly pour that mixture into the cup with the egg in it. Mix further by pouring the contents back and forth (ideally over a sink) until they've blended into a smooth, creamy drink.

For more Sarah Lohman (and fire), join Gastro Obscura on May 16, 2020, for an online experience where she'll demonstrate the fundamentals of cooking over an open fire.

Caddisfly larvae are adapting to polluted waterways, but their recycling strategy has its drawbacks.

As humans fill the world’s waters with microplastics, the tiny synthetic shards are making their way through food webs. But one insect is making the most of the pollution—to its own detriment. Instead of noshing on the little bits of plastic, a species of caddisfly called Lepidostoma basale is hunkering down beneath them.

The larvae—which are found across Europe, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and elsewhere—live inside cone- or tube-shaped cases that they build themselves. Typically, the insect architects construct these homes out of sand. But field researchers in Germany have recently noticed that some of the cases are also studded with tiny microbeads, fragments, films, and fibers—jagged, translucent little chunks that can look milky-white or icy and blue.

To figure out how the larvae are using our trash, researchers from the German Federal Institute of Hydrology brought some of the youngsters into a lab and watched them work.

The researchers gathered larvae by hand from a stream called Brexbach, in the town of Bendorf, by plucking them, safe and sound in their cases, from bits of wood in the water. (The larvae use silk to tether themselves to the slick wood, but it’s easy to yank the 0.16-inch-long cases free without causing harm.) The crew carted them back to the lab in little water-filled containers freckled with leaves, which make for welcoming hiding places. Then they put them in petri dishes beneath a microscope and used blunt probes to gently nudge them out of their cases, so that they’d quickly get to work building new shelters.

When the researchers presented the tiny builders with both sand and two types of high-density microplastics—including fine bits of PVC, which sink in the water and mingle with the mineral grains on the bottom—they found that, over a 48-hour construction blitz, 79 percent of larvae with access to microplastics seized on those first before switching to sand.

That’s “probably because plastic is lighter than sand, and it is therefore easier for the larvae to lift the plastics and to quickly use it to cover their soft bodies,” says Sonja Ehlers, a biologist at the institute and lead author of the four-person research team’s new paper in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

Those shards may be easier for the larvae to wrangle—but trouble is, the plastic-studded cases are less stable than the ones made from compacted sand. And that can make the larvae more vulnerable to being gobbled by juvenile dragonflies and brown trout, the researchers write. (The plastic-encrusted cases, which look like tiny bits of rock candy, make for awful camouflage too.)

The effects of fewer caddisflies could ripple throughout the ecosystem, Matt Simon writes in Wired, because L. basale is a prodigious eater of woody debris and aquatic plants, including algae, and helps keep the vegetation from getting unruly. As winged, terrestrial adults, they’re also tempting meals for bats, frogs, and other critters.

There’s still a lot to learn about how animals live alongside fragments of plastic—large and small. Many species of birds, for instance, from ospreys to brown booby seabirds, have woven plastics into their nests. Ehlers is curious about whether terrestrial insects, such as termites, might also incorporate landlocked microplastics into their mounds, alongside natural grains. She’s likewise keen to learn whether the plastics could release toxins—and if so, how they might affect the larvae camped out so close to them.

In the meantime, the best way to cut these caddisflies a break is to clean up our act. Ehlers and company presented the larvae with a concentration of microplastics that mirrored the concentration in the Rhine River (where the Brexbach eventually discharges, after entering the Saynbach river). Wandering the bank of the Rhine, she says, you might see “a lot of plastic bags hanging in the trees—so light they can be lifted up and carried away by the wind.” Even in the quieter, less-trafficked Brexbach, where the researchers collected the larvae, they spotted bits of plastic bobbing on the surface.

If you’re offloading something light, prone to flying away on the breeze, make sure you’re discarding it in a bin with a lid, Ehlers says. (Or avoid it in the first place.) If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the larvae.

Henry the Aldabra tortoise turned 60 with a massive fruit-and-veggie confection.

Last summer, for the 50th birthday of Nenette the Bornean orangutan, one of the oldest in captivity, her keepers at Jardin des Plantes zoo in Paris presented her with a strawberry layer cake crowned with tropical fruit. Adelaide, a short-beaked echidna at Illinois’ Brookfield Zoo, also got a cake when she turned 50 last spring, although her gooey treat was frosted with wax worms.

Henry, an Aldabra tortoise with a decade on both dames, celebrated his 60th birthday with a decadent confection made of watermelon, cantaloupe, grapes, kiwi, sweet potato, broccoli, and edible flowers—all held together with raw spaghetti. The gentle senior of Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland in Pennsylvania usually grazes on grass and hay, and he had never received a birthday cake before; he munched on it while wearing a party hat. “Sometimes he tried to take another bite before swallowing the one he had,” says Kalin Palmatier, a Reptiland spokesperson. “This was a lot of fruit at one time, but you only turn 60 once!”

Reptiland began making birthday cakes for its critters a few years ago, joining countless other zoos around the world in commemorating their residents’ birthdays. These creative concoctions typically consist of ingredients an animal would receive in its daily diet, plus special treats. Whether made of broccoli or bugs, birthday cakes can serve as an appropriate source of nutritional enrichment, helping to encourage an animal’s natural behavior. “Keeping a wild animal in captivity comes at a cost to that individual,” says Lisa Riley, an animal welfare scientist at the University of Winchester who recently co-authored a study on environmental enrichment in zoos. “A birthday 'cake'—if it contains novel but appropriate food or presents food in a different way—has the potential to improve welfare by motivating the animal to problem-solve, try new tastes or textures, and making the animal engaged and satisfied.”

At the Taipei Zoo, panda twins Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan have been receiving stimulating birthday cakes since 2009. “Through the spreading of food and hiding it in the equipment we designed, they are willing to spend time solving the problem they face, just like they do in the wild,” a zoo spokesperson writes in an email. Last year, the 15-year-old twins enjoyed a playful ice-block cake in the shape of a unicorn that was loaded with balloons, bamboo leaves, sugarcane, and a lot of fruit. “It was a big surprise, as the amount of fruit was quite different from an ordinary day,” the spokesperson adds. “Tuan Tuan was excited.”

Birthday bashes for zoo residents have become trendy with the rise of social media, but they are far from new. The Bronx Zoo was one early adopter of the tradition. In the 1930s, its keepers began serving cake to its hippopotamus, Peter the Great, who lived to the ripe age of 49. Intrepid reporters at The New York Times attended his fêtes every year: “ZOO HIPPO’S PARTY UPSET BY HOYDEN,” read one 1933 headline, on Peter’s 30th birthday. (An elephant had swiped the birthday boy’s four-layer cake, and Peter ended up gobbling up the plate.) The following year was no brighter: “ZOO HIPPO GLUM ON 31ST BIRTHDAY,” the Times announced. “Boys Steal Cake, Promise of Rain Fails and Peter the Great Begins to Feel Age.” By his late 30s, Peter seemed to tire of the festivities. His keeper tried to dump a 50-pound cake of bran, ground carrots, oatmeal and hay—topped with 38 iced carrots—into the hippo’s maw. The Times reported: “ZOO HIPPO SPURNS A BIRTHDAY CAKE; Big Pete, Now 38, Merely Nips a Few Carrots in Bronx, Then Makes Beeline for Pool.”

If media frenzy is a measure of fame, the Peter of today might be Fiona, the Cincinnati Zoo hippo and internet star. The three-year-old has enjoyed birthday parties since her first birthday in 2018, when the zoo threw a day-long bash and distributed Fiona-themed goodies. The zoo’s nutritionist has since made the world-famous youngster a giant fruit cake every year, and thousands of fans, both in-person and online, watch her devour it.

This might be savvy marketing for zoos, which often face criticism from animal rights activists, but safe celebrations do have the potential to raise public interest in conservation efforts. “Having a birthday makes animals more relatable to people who care little or are disconnected to the natural world—particularly pertinent at this time when disrespect for nature may have caused a pandemic that challenges the livelihoods of people and animals across the globe,” Riley says. “Showing an animal is an individual with a name and a particular age that should be celebrated allows people to value an animal.” It also showcases the hard work of the animal’s keepers.

But even birthday boys and girls need to watch their diets. Many zoos have an on-site catering staff, which may work with keepers to design cakes that are both Instagram-worthy and nutritious. Recently, the Shedd Aquarium whipped up an extravagant but healthy sweet potato pie with a crust of tortoise pellets for Yam, its giant river turtle, complete with kale candles. (The 28-year-old demolished it in 10 minutes.) At the Toledo Zoo, an executive chef oversees the construction of edible arrangements for the park’s megafauna, including its herd of African elephants. “In the beginning, the cakes were more peanut butter-based, a little more of a treat,” says Kim Haddix, the zoo’s spokesperson. “Now, with some of the changes in animal care and diets, we try to give them more to fruits and vegetables and keep them on a little healthier side.”

Adjustments also have to be made for health reasons. The Virginia Zoo laid out a special picnic for the first birthday of its twin screaming hairy armadillos, Dora and Diego, feeding them their routine insectivore grain, fruit and veggies, and mealworms. But shortly after, Diego was diagnosed with megaesophagus—a dilation of the esophagus—and he now needs to be held upright and fed soft foods. So for their second birthday, last year, the twins received cakes of insectivore gel that were iced with a blend of baby food, honey, and food coloring. The reviews were still positive. “They ate it with gumption and didn’t leave anything behind,” says zoo spokesperson Tara Baumgardner.

The hirsute siblings turned three in late April, but they enjoyed a quiet birthday in their enclosure, away from the public eye. “We don’t always do a celebration for each animal’s birthday,” Baumgardner says. “It’s a lot.”

It reshaped the city and inspired a revolutionary vaccine.

Along the winding lanes of Bandra, a coastal suburb of Mumbai with a history of Catholicism, lime-washed crosses can be found near busy intersections. They are markers of a plague that ravaged the city more than a century ago, when this metropolis was still known as Bombay. Mumbai was shaped by a catastrophe it has largely forgotten.

At the turn of the 20th century, the bubonic plague killed 10 million people in India. It was carried on ships from Hong Kong and spread easily in the cramped and damp conditions of Bombay. Soon the port city became an epicenter of a pandemic. When the British colonial government tried to contain the disease, using ruthless tactics such as forced evictions and detention camps, some residents fled; the plague ultimately spread across the country. History was made when a Jewish doctor from Odessa, Dr. Waldemar Haffkine, arrived in Bombay and invented the world’s first vaccine against the plague.

The past seems to be repeating itself during the current pandemic. Eerily similar images have come out of Mumbai, showing an exodus of migrant workers at the start of a citywide lockdown. In response to COVID-19, the current government has invoked the 123-year-old law, which gave the British colonial government absolute control over Indians during the bubonic plague. To Alisha Sadikot, a public historian who specializes in Mumbai’s urban histories and culture, the parallels between 1896 and the present-day are striking. Atlas Obscura asked her about this forgotten past, and how it resonates with the history we are currently living through.

What was Bombay like in the 1890s?

The British wanted Bombay to become the first city of India, and the second-largest city of the British Empire, after London. In the mid-19th century, a period of early modernity and industrialization, Bombay was moving from trading port to world city, defined by its Gothic architecture and impressive monuments. A small, elite group of Englishmen and rich Indians were suddenly living in a place that was grand and awe-inspiring. But this was a facade. It was a showcase city, built on a tiny sliver of land facing the sea, to impress visitors. The vast majority of people who were migrating to Bombay, in response to industrialization, were the poor working class. They moved to the city to work in the mills and the docks, and their standard of living actually declined in those years. The city was not theirs.

How did the plague come to Bombay and why was it particularly devastating there?

The plague had been spreading across China for decades, and announced in Hong Kong in 1894. The bacteria, present in the fleas carried by rodents, travelled from the ports of Hong Kong to Bombay. The city was damp, there were heavy monsoons during those years, and an ineffective drainage system meant that there was a lot of stagnant water, a great breeding ground for rodents. We also had an inadequate sewage system, so there was unsanitary human and animal waste. And during those three decades of rapid industrialization, there was very little thought put into infrastructure. “Chawls,” or tenement housing, was built next to mills, and unskilled laborers set up tents or slums nearby, on unpaved ground. With no building regulations in place, landlords would build without thought to light or ventilation. The way Bombay was structured made its inhabitants particularly susceptible to it, and the plague crisis continued in Bombay for almost 20 years.

How did the British colonial government respond to the outbreak?

The government looked at the outbreak as a problem of the working class and the overcrowded areas they lived in. They went into these areas, found and isolated people who had symptoms or were in contact with patients, disinfected the area, and razed houses to the ground. Their plan was to quarantine, segregate, and disinfect, and they went at it with the full might of the Crown. Effectively, they were displacing people to hospitals and “plague camps,” often forcefully. There was a huge social backlash against this, and migrant workers began fleeing Bombay.

It must have looked similar to the images from Mumbai last month, when crowds of migrants gathered at train stations, attempting to flee. What it meant then was that the plague would spread across India, along the railway lines. It was disastrous for the economy, halting all trade with Bombay. And after 30 years of ignoring what was happening in the city beyond its rich, southern tip, the government finally had to ensure better living conditions for other classes. However, their brutal response to the plague effectively became an attack on the poor and working class.

In the meantime, bacteriologists were trying to find a cure. What was happening in Room 000 of Grant Medical College?

At the time, researchers didn’t really know what they were dealing with. Doctors here were trying to isolate and verify that the bacteria found in Bombay was similar to the one being studied in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Dr. Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, a bacteriologist from Odessa, was in Calcutta administering the vaccine he had developed against cholera. After news of the outbreak, he was called to Bombay where he started research in a makeshift laboratory in Room 000 of a government medical school.

Haffkine was successful in growing plague cultures in a high-fat broth made using ghee, or clarified butter, and created a vaccine out of the weakened bacteria. He injected himself with his own vaccine after tests on rabbits were successful. For the next 30 years, this was known as the most effective vaccine in the world. It took time to convince the government officials of the science behind it, but when they were persuaded, they gave Haffkine the Governor's mansion in central Bombay, where he converted the ballroom into a laboratory and started to scale production of the vaccine.

How did the crisis change the city?

People started coming back to Bombay by the 1910s, when they realized that the plague was everywhere. The question of how the city would change was an important one for the government. It’s a question we’re asking even now—how will cities adapt after COVID-19?

In 1898, the British set up the Bombay City Improvement Trust, a government city planning body. They began barreling through old neighborhoods and creating public spaces—especially streets under which they were able to lay drainage pipes and sewage lines. They were breaking down homes and displacing people, and they never found a way to rehouse those communities.

Their next approach, which took them almost a decade, was to create planned suburbs, catering to the middle classes. They took areas that were previously “plague camps” and put in the skeleton of sewage lines, roads, public transport, amenities—whatever people might need if they were to live there. This period saw more banks, jobs, colleges, parks, religious spaces and railway lines crop up, all within the neighborhoods. Today, more people are thinking about going back to this idea of self-sufficient neighborhoods, and that was the legacy of the Bombay City Improvement Trust.

Since you give walking tours of the city, what strikes you as portentous about the history of the Bombay plague? And why is it forgotten?

The plague history is a part of every walk I conduct, because you can’t understand the city without the plague. In Bandra, plague crosses with marble plaques say something like, “For protection from the pestilence.” But most people don’t notice them. To me that’s the strangest thing about the plague history—no one remembers it. It changed the way we were building and living. Bombay suffered for 20 years. Why have we not learned from the past?

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You might want to try it, too.

You know how you can sometimes view something you love through such a nostalgic lens that you begin to lose track of whether it still exists or may have tiptoed out of fashion? That’s how Kalu Downey felt about la once, or Chilean tea time.

It was 2017, and the Santiago resident wanted to find out if Chileans still gathered around a table each afternoon for their so-called “fourth meal.” Was la once dying off with grandmas, she wondered? Or had it adapted to the elongated workdays and hectic schedules of 21st-century life?

Downey set up an Instagram account with the goal of collecting 100 photos in 100 days that showed what modern tea times looked like. What she discovered was that not only was la once very much alive, but her fellow Chileans were offended she ever thought otherwise. Proyecto Once (Project Once) was born.

Proyecto Once tells stories of modern-day tea time through various platforms, including Instagram and a column in one of the nation’s largest women’s magazines. “It’s really been a beautiful project,” Downey explains, “because it’s allowed co-creator Renata Tesser and I to build a register of both how onces look and what people in Chile eat today.”

Fact and fiction swirl together in the not-so grandmotherly origin stories of la once, yet almost every tale eventually circles back to a common theme: alcohol. Specifically aguardiente, the cheap and generic “firewater” swigged across Latin America.

Brits are believed to have brought their tradition of elevenses, or a short tea break at around 11a.m., to Chilean shores in the 1800s. It was popularized in English-owned saltpeter mines scattered across Chile’s legendarily harsh and rain-starved Atacama Desert. Though it’d be easy to assume that “once” (eleven in Spanish) was a simple translation, the most commonly told origin story is that it was actually coded language for a secret ingredient miners slipped into their teas to get through the work day in such an inhospitable environment: the eleven-lettered aguardiente.

The fad for boozy tea died in the desert in the early 1900s when the Atacama’s boomtowns went bust. However, tea time quickly spread across Chile, morphing into a wholly unique ritual and turning the nation into one of the world’s 15 largest per capita tea consumers. Meanwhile, la once inched ever later in the day to when modern Brits indulge in happy hour (roughly between 5p.m. and 7p.m.).

“Make no mistake: la once is not the English tea time,” says documentarian Maite Alberdi, whose 2014 film La Once follows a group of elderly women who’ve plotted the course of their 60-year friendship through monthly tea gatherings.

“Our version is not nearly as sophisticated,” Alberdi adds. “It’s much more egalitarian, with rich and poor families using mostly the same items.”

Chief among them is bread. Chile is, by leaps and bounds, the largest bread consumer in Latin America. The roll-like marraqueta and biscuit-like hallulla are preferred styles, accompanied by jam, butter, cheese, and scrambled eggs. Avocado is another staple, making la once something of a predecessor to the California-style brunch. “Avocado toast may be super hipster and trendy around the world, but here it’s as normal as bread and butter,” Alberdi says.

When the filmmaker envisions afternoon tea in England, she pictures dainty cucumber sandwiches, fluffy little pastries, and bite-sized scones. “Here, it’s all about abundance,” she says. If it’s a weekend, you can expect a hulking slice of something sweet, such as sponge cake, lemon pie, or milhojas (a gut-busting pastry oozing with dulce de leche, known locally as manjar).

Of course, there are regional differences. In the German-influenced south, forest-dwellers tend to couple their tea with kuchen (cake) sweetened by Patagonian berries. Up north, desert-dwellers pair theirs with empanadas stuffed with candied alcayota (a fibrous gourd). In the fertile Central Valley, you’ll find strips of fried dough with lemon zest and powdered sugar known as calzones rotos (literally “broken panties”). A fisherman on the coast might cap a workday with a fried-fish sandwich, while those in the interior prefer sopaipillas (fried pastries spiced with pumpkin). Age also plays a role in one’s tastes. Downey says she once interviewed a 100-year-old woman for Proyecto Once who put condensed milk in her tea, something she says would merit a vomit emoji from the younger generation.

But no matter where you are, or what your age, onces almost always revolve around family. “Food is a way of showing love and care in Chile,” Downey says. “The aroma of toasting bread is the smell of my childhood. The fragrance of cake in the oven speaks of family to me.”

Onces are often the preferred meal for birthday celebrations, particularly for kids or the elderly. They’ve also evolved in more urban areas into a meal that can replace dinner altogether, in which case it’s called an once-comida. The ritual—and time slot—have become difficult in places such as Santiago, whose nearly 7 million residents have some of the longest workdays in the world.

Yet, onces appear to be making something of a comeback in the age of coronavirus.

“I think today, during the quarantines, people are really starting to get to know their kitchens again,” Downey says. “They’re starting to experiment, try new recipes, watch YouTube tutorials, ask their moms, ask their grandmothers. There is this moment where it is difficult to see anyone beyond your four walls, but you can feel close to your family through la once.”

The vast majority of those who follow Proyecto Once on Instagram are between the ages of 25 and 35. Moreover, according to the most recent National Survey of Food Consumption, which was conducted between 2010 and 2011, 80 percent of Chileans report having onces. Downey says she’s happy her initial assumption was proven wrong. Once may not look the same as it used to, or take place as often or have quite the same rituals, but it isn’t going anywhere.

Suddenly confined in a small space, Afia Zecharia painted every wall.

In a small housing project apartment within the town of Shlomi, Israel, an 80-year-old woman stood and painted Yemenite embroidery patterns on the walls and ceiling. Neighbors claim they heard the woman talking—to herself or to her paintings. After her death, the project apartment and its concealed treasure began attracting hundreds of visitors every year.

The woman, Afia Zecharia, passed away in 2002. She was born in the early 20th century in Southern Yemen. Her parents married her off when she was 10 to prevent her from being kidnapped and married outside the faith, and during her youth she used to paint on the walls of affluent houses. In 1950, she immigrated to Israel with her jeweler husband. Along with their six children, they settled in a house in the ruins of the Palestinian village al-Bassa. Zecharia wanted to paint on the walls of their house, but her husband forbade it.

Shlomi was founded in 1950 along with an immigrant absorption camp on the remains of the Palestinian village. The town officials decided to expand and build an industrial park on the camp grounds. In 1980, Zecharia, a widow, received an official document and was asked to sign it. She was illiterate and signed with her fingerprint. Only after signing did she realize she had been relocated into a housing project. She suddenly found herself confined by white walls. She bought pigments and began to paint again, at night, covering the walls with Yemenite embroidery motifs, which traditionally signify social and financial status, as well as the expression of emotion and fantasy.

Dr. Amit Alon, a scholar of Jewish thought, remembers well the day he visited Zecharia with some of her relatives, back in the 1990s. “Shlomi is a desert-like town,” he says, “but this was a particularly yellow day.” The relatives, including his wife, told him about Zecharia. “My cultural conditioning kicked in: I imagined an elderly woman weaving Yemenite baskets.” Then Alon walked in and, seeing the floor-to-ceiling patterns in vivid colors, felt a strong sense of vertigo. “I couldn’t tell up from down. It was a total shock.” Zecharia made Yemenite soup for the family. “We sat and ate soup inside a painting, the small kitchen was entirely covered with patterns,” Alon remembers.

Today, Zecharia is recognized as a genius but obscure Mizrahi artist. In the eyes of many, she reclaimed the sterilized, anonymizing space that was assigned to her, and instead of being oppressed by it, made it her own. “Afiya Zachariah’s apartment is a classic example of the Mizrahi revolt,” Haviva Pedaya, an Israeli cultural researcher, and professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University, has said. “[I]t is, in fact, an import of a denied space into the Israeli sphere.”

“Afiya spoke Yemenite Arabic so we couldn’t understand each other,” Alon says. “She was distant, as expected from someone like her: a great artist with a great ego.” Zecharia had not received public attention for her work, “because back then there wasn’t much written yet about artists creating outside the cultural center. Afiya wore dramatic make-up and lived in a dramatic world and looked like the ruler of a kingdom.”

The artist Maya Cohen Levi, who visited Afia Zecharia a few times during the ‘90s, recalls a different experience: “there was no ego in our interaction, but it was clear she understands that she’s creating something important. She created space in the deepest sense of the word: a space for herself.”

“She lived in a project housing apartment with three tiny rooms,” Cohen Levi remembers. “The rooms reeked of car paint, but the house was clean and the beds had pressed white sheets. I will never forget the dozens of raspberry juice concentrate bottles under the kitchen sink, and how she would serve guests with juice. In our conversations, which mostly consisted of hand signs, I realized that she is reconstructing ritualized actions from weddings in Yemen. I see her paintings as an act of magic.”

Ayelet Bar-Meir, a tour guide who wrote a book about women in the Galilee, takes groups for visits in Zecharia’s house, which, like all visits to the place, are coordinated with the Shlomi municipality. She says visitor reactions are often similar: “Some people come up to me, pale, to ask where is the door, where is the exit. Others weep. They identify with the feeling of emptiness and isolation.”

One of Afia Zecharia’s granddaughters told Bar-Meir that her grandmother used to paint in the dark “because these are the hours when the angels appeared.” Curator Asia Dublin, who restored the paintings in the house last year, would also work there at night. “I worked for two months,” she says. “The patterns in Afia’s paintings seem to repeat themselves, but when you go over them with a brush you realize that no two are alike.” Nevertheless, she says, Afiya’s painting is “structured, methodical and logical.”

Dublin didn’t get to speak with any angels, but according to her, the house had its own presence. On Cohen Levi’s last visit to Zecharia, the door was locked. “That time, Afia, whose door was always open for visitors, peeked out suspiciously from the window, and opened the door only after she recognized it was me. In that last visit, her face was covered with temporary tattoos. Afia had covered the walls, the ceiling, dolls, photographs. When they were all covered, she began to cover herself. This was the last stretch of her life: she put herself into the painting.”

We'll get you started, the ending is up to you.

For many writers—from kids to professionals—the first line of a story is often the hardest. When you’re staring at a blank page, how are you supposed to figure out where to start?

Stephen King, maybe the most prolific author of our age, told The Atlantic that he spends “weeks and months and even years” perfecting the words that begin each of his stories. They’re important—they set the tone and beckon to readers to keep going.

Luckily, there are ways to goose your imagination. To help make that blank page a little less scary, we’ve collected 10 opening sentences—each from something that has been published on Atlas Obscura—to serve as writing prompts. Where the rest of the story goes is up to you!

We’re challenging you, your friends, and your kids to use one of these first lines to write a short story. These are some of our most delightful, intriguing, and sometimes baffling opening lines, and we want to see you do with them. Your stories can take place in the real world or an alternate universe. They can be a few sentences or much, much longer. They can even have illustrations if that's how you want to tell your story. The only rule is that they need to start with one of the lines below.

When you’re done, you can post your story in Atlas Obscura’s forums or email it to us at places@atlasobscura.com. We’ll publish some of our favorites (in full or as excerpts) in a future article.

Opening Lines

(And the stories they originally came from.)

• Marimo might be the cutest plant on Earth.
  (An Adorable Algae Ball Mystery Has Been Solved)
  
  
• Just before nine on a drizzly, slate-colored Saturday morning, the grassy patches and paved paths around Central Park’s Turtle Pond were wild with activity.
  (Squirrel Counting Is a Great Excuse to Explore Central Park)
  
  
• It was a normal day at the lab for Dave Remsen—until one of the guests escaped from its room.
  (The Woods Hole Lab Where Mysteries of the Deep Are Solved)
  
  
• Have you ever traveled through time and foolishly forgotten your Pastport?
  (The Echo Park Time Travel Mart)
  
  
• Jean-Jacques Megel-Nuber didn’t always imagine he’d be living in his bookshop, but he knew he wanted it to move.
  (What It’s Like to Build and Operate a Tiny Traveling Bookshop)
  
  
• On the island of Tashirojima in the Miyagi Prefecture, the cats outnumber people, and the people like it that way.
  (Cat Island)
  
  
• In 1799, a reindeer farmer named Ossip Shumachov began a strange yearly ritual.
  (This Terrible Mammoth Drawing Was a Giant Help to 19th-Century Naturalists)
  
  
• In the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, a giant has lived quietly for the past 80,000 years.
  (Pando, the Trembling Giant)
  
  
• The maidens of Sparta spent long hours under the bright sun.
  (The Swole Women of Sparta Wrestled, Danced, and Drank)
  
  
• It’s said that not all who wander are lost, and that’s mostly true.
  (The World’s Most Famous Ghost Ship Is an Enduring Symbol of Empire)

"Invite them to capture the way they see the world."

The oldest surviving photograph, taken by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1827, was of the view out his window. The image took several days of exposure to sunlight—with a method that used an entire room (called a “camera obscura”) to yield a faint impression of buildings and trees from his family’s estate in Burgundy.

Photography has come a long way since then. Today we take for granted how pocket-sized smartphones can capture countless incredibly detailed images in a fraction of a second. With such speed and convenience at one’s fingertips, literally, it doesn’t take an inventor or a professional to take amazing photos. All it takes is an eye, and kids certainly have that—especially in the age of Instagram. Texas-based photographer Justin Hamel writes in an email, “I find that kids ... are much more used to thinking visually than anyone my age (30s) ever was because of growing up with so many devices and photo-sharing apps.” Atlas Obscura spoke with some professional photographers about how to entice kids to focus their perspective and curiosity on more than random selfies.

Give them a scavenger hunt.

Make an adventure by asking kids to find specific things with their lenses, which could be on a phone, a tablet, or a dedicated camera. When architectural photographer Matt Lambros’s very young daughter started pretending to “take pictures like daddy,” he gave her a children’s digital camera to take on their daily walks in the yard during the pandemic. He says, “We started with taking pictures of things of a certain color (four pictures of something red, something blue, etc.) to searching for flowers or bugs to photograph.” Besides color and objects, travel photographer Erin Sullivan, based in Los Angeles, also suggests trying to search for more subtle things to shoot, such as different kinds of light or texture. She says, “So much of photography is about noticing.”

Give kids permission to obsess.

Get young shooters excited to see familiar things anew by having them photograph a single object, person, or pet in 10 to 20 different ways. They learn about point of view and attention to detail. When Portland, Maine, photojournalist Greta Rybus taught photography to kids, she instructed them on “angles and perspectives by having them photograph from an animal’s viewpoint: a bird, an ant, a dog.” Multiple people doing this together can make it even more informative and insightful. Mallika Vora, a documentary photographer currently based in Mexico City, suggests that “at the end everyone can compare their results and talk about how they see the same thing differently through a lens. This is a good way to explore perspective, and show how every person looks at things in their own unique way, and how the same subject can be represented in infinite ways.”

Paint with light and motion.

The word “photography” comes from Greek: “drawing with light.” An entertaining photo activity “that can keep you busy forever is painting with the light” during a long exposure, according to Matjaž Tančič, a photography artist based in China. First set the camera (a phone or tablet with an app that has manual controls works) on a tripod or flat surface in a dark room, then set the exposure time to a minute. With a flashlight, lit cell phone screen, or small lamp, he says, “you can put the light on yourself, then move, light yourself again, and keep going. You will see your clones in the photo.” Or use the light source to create glowing drawings in the air. Hamel recommends “glow sticks or sparklers (if you’re outside) and see all the fun designs they can make.” Long exposures by themselves can still be intriguing. “I think that slowing the shutter down to a few seconds and letting [kids] run around and create blur is exciting,” he adds. More importantly, especially if you’re sheltering in place, he says “it’s a way for [the kids] to get some of that pent up energy out.”

Invite kids to tell their own stories.

Older kids can convey complex and meaningful ideas with photographs through composition, multiple images, or adding words. Something as simple as cutting a rectangle out of cardboard to make a frame can be a powerful tool. Rybus says to let kids “walk around, using the cardboard hole to consider how composition can be used to include or omit information.” The young photographers learn that by choosing or not choosing to include certain things—people, shadows, movement—in the frame, the story and impact of their pictures can change.

Having them compose stories with images can be a critical exercise. One photo can add meaning to another, especially when limited by a time frame, such as a day. In the time of the pandemic, Jerusalem-based photojournalist Heidi Levine, who teaches workshops, suggests asking kids to document the poignant scenes around them, such as “their own bedrooms, maybe still images of a dress they were hoping to wear to a party, capturing images of their Zoom calls with grandparents, the daily washing of food deliveries that come into the home, and so on.”

Adding actual words can be valuable, too. “I believe that if [kids] get into the habit of writing down a paragraph or more a day to accompany their images, then that would create a really nice visual journal that could be uploaded and shared in some way between the students and remain an important historical document,” says Levine. “It could … bring the students closer together as they share a sliver of their lives with one another.”

The technical and storytelling skills kids develop in the home will be useful when travel is possible again—and on simple, local jaunts. Travel and documentary shooter Mark Edward Harris writes in his book, The Travel Photo Essay: Describing a Journey Through Images, “Your own hometown will undoubtedly have some hidden and not so hidden treasures that could yield great travel photo essays. After all, where you live represents a travel destination to someone else. You don’t always have to get on a plane or train or even in a car to generate a dynamic photo essay.“

Remember that it doesn’t matter whether kids have the eye or technical prowess of Cartier Bresson or Annie Leibovitz. It’s about process and experimentation and expression—“invit[ing] them to capture the way they see the world,” Sullivan says. The results are not as important as how it makes kids feel. “When you’re getting into it,” Hamel says, “there’s no such thing as a bad photo. It’s all about having fun.”

Japan’s feudal fighters were plenty tough. But they didn’t ditch their day jobs.

In feudal Japan there were few folks you’d want to cross less than a samurai. The military nobility of the country’s Tokugawa period were equal parts martial artists and state representatives, serving as the loyal officers of local daimyo (domain) lords.

But though they were born into the warrior caste, samurai didn’t emerge from the womb as the fit foot soldiers you might imagine. That required training, and lots of it. Starting in childhood, samurai went to special schools or to private tutors to learn the various martial arts that would come to define who they were.

But what would working out like a samurai look like in the 21st century? And how could such a regimen be adapted for life at home today?

“A lot of calisthenics in the afternoon,” says Michael Wert, an expert in samurai history at Marquette University who has taught Japanese archery in the Milwaukee area for about two decades. “[You] could swing a broom.”

Swordsmanship was a diverse enterprise: By some estimates, about 700 different styles were practiced across the archipelago. (Archery, another important samurai martial art, had only three main styles). In practicing with a sword, samurai would iterate and reiterate key motions, sometimes using a wooden practice blade for the exercises.

Swimming was also an important skill for the warriors, and a version of samurai swimming is still practiced today. “It was good for your health,” Wert says. “But it was also useful for, like, ‘How do you cross a river when you have your weapons?’ ‘How do you shoot a bow and arrow while you're treading water?’ That kind of thing.”

After their training, which spanned childhood to early adulthood, many samurai took an extended break from fitness, focusing instead on the various administrative duties for the empire—accounting, for instance—with which they were tasked. After a war in the 1630s, the Tokugawa period ushered in centuries of peace. The samurai tradition continued unabated, but generations of these famed warriors never saw battle. In this way, says Wert, samurai were really “sword-wearing bureaucrats.”

“A lot of samurai just did the basic minimum they were required to do, and then the[ir] swords just kind of sat around,” he says. “Sometimes they would forget to carry them, and they [got] in trouble. They weren't as gung-ho as we all imagine.”

That’s not to say that samurai weren’t fit. Many were in great shape, especially in their early years—a period in a young warrior’s life that was crowded with lessons in Confucianism and a mix of personal training sessions and classes with local teachers, who instructed them in the varied disciplines of swordsmanship, archery, and horseback riding. But when they got older, things changed.

“Some of them were busy with their jobs; others were busy pursuing their own hobbies, or just partying or whatever, and martial arts was not really something they were into,” Wert says.

For the trained warriors who stayed consistent with their regimens, workouts took place alongside other samurai—an untenable situation during any stay-at-home order. Instead, try grabbing the nearest broom and start practicing your sword motions (though that may not be such a good thing for your knick-knacks or light fixtures).

Toward the twilight of the samurai period—the late 18th and early 19th centuries—styles changed. Those hundreds of swordsmanship styles began to be supplanted—not with firepower, but with bamboo. Weapons and armor alike were made out of the plant shoots, and used in a fast-paced combat style that laid the foundations for modern-day kendo.

But personal training never went away. For samurai, the mountainous archipelago of Japan was perfect for some challenging cardio work. If you have a trail nearby, take note.

“Samurai would [always] go somewhere to train,” Wert says. “So if [you can’t] go and train anywhere because all the gyms are closed, then go hiking or jogging or running.”

Even if you don’t have a katana lying around, or bamboo armor on hand, you can still work out like a samurai during the pandemic. All you really need are a half-decent pair of sneaks—or a filing cabinet that needs some attention.

Both traffic in the sublime, and have helped us grok new frontiers.

If there were ever a good time to ponder the cosmos and our place in it, this is it—a moment when the preciousness of being alive is evident in the everyday. Exploring the wonders that lie beyond the Earth and the Milky Way offers an even broader context for that appreciation.

Since the Hubble Space Telescope became a pivotal eye in the sky, three decades ago, it has provided astronomical photos of breathtaking beauty—like “Cosmic Reef,” recently released for Hubble’s 30th anniversary—that raise our awareness of life within a vast, dynamic universe.

It has also helped us intuit the immensity of the cosmos, which can be overwhelming: Just how do you grasp 14 billion years (the approximate age of the universe), or gaseous plumes that span some 30 trillion miles? Thanks to the Hubble, we’re now able to visualize the far reaches of space and vividly imagine things like the birth and death of stars. Such pictures have become tangible guideposts in our discovery of the unknown—aesthetic gems, rooted in science, that spark our imagination and sense of wonder.

But it’s not the first time that dazzling pictures have helped us imagine and envision new frontiers. In the 19th century, magnificent scenes of the American West emerged in landscape paintings by several artists who traveled to the western territories, some as part of geological survey expeditions. Their aesthetic interpretations of earthly formations like pillars, cliffs, and canyons were a powerful conduit for the public at a time when few people could actually visit places like Yellowstone and the Colorado River.

Elizabeth Kessler, a Stanford University lecturer and author of the book Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime, says the dramatic, idealized scenes of towering rock formations and roiling clouds created by painters like Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, inspired viewers to contemplate the power of natural forces and the landscape’s epic scale. In much the same way, she says, the Hubble photos—some bearing poetic titles like the “Pillars of Creation”—transcend their scientific underpinnings.

“[Hubble’s] views of ethereal nebulae and glittering galaxies and star fields—they’re not just compelling visualizations of scientific data,” Kessler said during a recent online lecture for the American Institute of Physics. “Like the 19th-century paintings, they evoke a powerful aesthetic response. They encourage us to see the universe as sublime.”

The Hubble Heritage Project, formed in 1998 by a small group of astronomers and image processors at the Space Telescope Science Institute, regularly invoked landscape tropes when releasing new images and descriptions of celestial phenomena. For the “Pillars of Creation,” for instance—an astonishing image showing those massive plumes of gas in a region of the Eagle Nebula—the star-formation process was compared to the forces that shape the buttes of the American Southwest, notes Kessler.

The aim of the project, like those 19th-century Western landscape painters, was to create aesthetically rich images of exploratory observations. Today, astronomers and astrophotographers work closely together on the cosmic images that have revolutionized the way we perceive the universe.

“I would work with the images in a way that any photographer would,” says Zoltan Levay, a retired astrophotographer who played a key role in creating Hubble’s images for 25 years at the Space Telescope Science Institute, a research facility for NASA. “We tried to stay as close as possible to the data … The more subjective areas are how you render the image and adjust brightness, contrast, and color.”

The raw material arrives as black-and-white photos, says Levay, because Hubble’s cameras don’t produce color images. Following astronomical conventions, colors are assigned to reflect wavelengths of light emitted by stars and gases: hotter is bluer, cooler is redder. They can then be adjusted for visual impact.

Other cosmetic interventions include cropping and orientation, cleaning up light specks (caused by cosmic rays bombarding the orbiting telescope), and making selective choices about contrast (such as removing harsh glare or superblack spots) to ensure that certain features or details are visible to human eyes.

The results are sweeping panoramas of heavenly phenomena that fire the senses and imagination. The importance of their public appeal can’t be underestimated: In 1995 the “Pillars of Creation” helped rehabilitate Hubble’s reputation after a flaw in the telescope’s mirror was discovered and required a repair mission. “Here was visual proof that this was an incredibly valuable scientific instrument,” says Kessler.

Levay finds resonance in the comparison of Hubble’s pictures with the historic landscapes of the American West. An astronomer by training with a passion for photography since high school, he reflects, “The images are a hook. Our hope always was that people would look at the images and be curious enough about them to delve more deeply into the stories about what they represent.”

In Bierstadt's 19th-century landscapes, Kessler notes, the painter created composite images from his travels to highlight the power and grandeur of the majestic geography he beheld. Such images—of the American West then, and the vast cosmos today—not only inspire curiosity; they also allow us to viscerally grasp experiences we might not otherwise be able to process.

“When confronted with the sublime,” Kessler says, “there’s an opportunity for transcendence. The sublime pushes us outside and beyond our everyday experience—it pushes us to another level.”

There’s never been a better time for this forgotten frugal classic.

In 1888, a woman named Hester A. Pool recounted her visit to a Shaker village in Mount Lebanon, New York, in a periodical known as The Manifesto. While the community lived simply, Pool found herself marveling at the advancements within its kitchen, “a large handsome room fitted with every convenience” that left her “with the feeling of pity for the housewife who does her cooking in the ordinary way.”

While Pool doesn’t describe everything she saw, it was not uncommon for Shaker kitchens to impress visitors with their tools and the exacting precision of the “kitchen sisters” who operated them. Giant ovens with revolving shelves baked multiple pies and loaves at a time, double-stacked rolling pins created awe-inspiringly thin dough, and slicers clamped to tabletops allowed for easy, speedy vegetable chopping.

Kitchens showcased the artful efficiency that became a hallmark of Shaker communities. As Shakerism, which originated with a dissenting group of British Quakers in 1747, took hold in the United States, communities appeared across the Northeast and as far as Ohio and Kentucky. By 1840, more than 3,600 Shakers were living according to the tenets of equality, celibacy, separation from “worldly” society, and a faith in God expressed through goodness in all tasks. The drive for self-sufficiency and well-executed labor spurred Shakers to develop or adopt incredibly efficient methods and tools.

Shaker furniture is the most well-known embodiment of the culture’s elegant execution of humble work. But those looking for a more delicious example can turn to Shaker lemon pie. Beyond the crust, it consists of just sugar, lemons, and eggs that bake into a sweet-and-sour filling. The epitome of thrift, the 19th-century recipe uses every part of the lemon but the seeds.

“At first, I was a little skeptical,” says Amber Hokams, the head chef at the historic Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. “With the rinds and everything, I thought, This can’t be good. But it's very well balanced. It’s not punching you in the face with sugar, but it’s also a little tart.”

While Pleasant Hill’s days as an active Shaker village ended in 1910, the site now operates as a living museum that showcases the architecture, agriculture, craftsmanship, and cuisine of its original residents. Hokams works with an archives team to find old journal entries that inform her menu. “Most of the food that they were eating was a little bland compared to what people find palatable now, ” she says. For that reason, Hokams adds modern, Southern spins to most of the dishes at the village’s Trustees’ Table restaurant. Otherwise, “I would have a hard time filling seats,” she says. But the one dish Hokams does not modernize is Shaker lemon pie. It’s not only the most historically authentic dish on the menu; it’s also the most popular.

Despite its deliciousness, one would never devour the pie voraciously at a Shaker table in the 1800s. Table manners dictated slow, mindful, quiet dining. According to Ann Lee, Shakerism’s first leader, diners were to “eat their food with thankfulness, without murmuring, and therefore be able to worship in the beauty of holiness.” Scarfing food was frowned upon, but so was not finishing it. Those who failed to do the latter would be admonished to “Shaker your plate” and polish off every last crumb.

By the early 1900s, Shaker populations started to dwindle. The commitment to celibacy required constant recruitment, which proved unsustainable, especially as the world advanced well beyond the Shakers’ simple lifestyle. Outside of villages that became living museums like Pleasant Hill, only one active Shaker community, Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, Maine, remains. But even though Shakerism has largely disappeared, its contributions can still be appreciated. Try the below recipe for Shaker lemon pie from Pleasant Hill for a taste of how this humble culture made simplicity into an art.

Shaker Lemon Pie

Adapted From the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill's Recipe

For the Filling
2 Lemons
2 Cups Sugar
4 eggs
1 tablespoon cornstarch

Pastry for 2 Crusts

1. Macerate the Lemons

The key to this pie is slicing the lemons paper-thin. A mandoline is ideal, but if using a knife, briefly freeze the lemons first for cleaner cutting. One evocative recipe says the slices should be so thin that they flop over a bowl’s edge like a surrealist clock in a Salvador Dalí painting. Remove the seeds and place the slices in a bowl. Mix in 2 cups of sugar and let the bowl sit at room temperature for 24 hours, occasionally stirring to mix further. Some recipes say two hours will do, but sufficiently offsetting the lemons’ bitterness with sweetness takes time. For beautifully syrupy lemons, wait the full 24 hours or, if you can, two to three days.

2. Make the Crust

Use whatever pastry crust recipe you’d prefer, but the “Flakier Pie Crust” recipe from The Best of Shaker Cooking blends 1½ cups flour (sifted) with ½ teaspoon salt, ¼ cup cold butter, ¼ cup lard (for a tutorial on how to make lard, see Gastro Obscura’s pemmican recipe), and cold water. The recipe doesn’t specify water amounts, but 4 to 6 ounces should work; add a little bit at a time and see how your dough responds. Divide the dough in two pieces (with one half slightly larger than the other), form each into a round shape, and place in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. Roll the larger portion an inch or two larger than your pie tin, then line the pie tin with the dough. Roll the other half about one inch larger than your tin (this will serve as the top crust), and chill both in the refrigerator while you prepare your filling.

3. Make the Pie

Beat 4 eggs and mix in 1 tablespoon cornstarch. Many old recipes don’t list cornstarch, but without it, the eggs sometimes bake too quickly. (This results in a pie of scrambled eggs resting atop citrus instead of one smooth, consistent filling.) Mix the lemons and any accompanying syrup or juice with the eggs and pour the mixture into the unbaked pie shell. Add the top crust and cut small vents for releasing steam. Place in a 425-degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes (the crust should turn light golden), then reduce heat to 375 degrees. Bake for about 20 to 25 more minutes, or until a knife inserted into the pie comes out clean. Cool for an hour, then tuck into a slice. Don’t forget to Shaker your plate.

How Lorenzo Reina’s open air theater made southwest Sicily a cultural hotspot.  

When Lorenzo Reina picked up his phone on a sunny morning in December 2017, he thought it was a prank. “The voice on the other side said I had been selected for the Venice Biennale,” he says. “I thought it was a joke and hung up.” Two days later, he received an official email from Mario Cucinella, curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture, stating that Reina’s work, an open-air theater called Teatro Andromeda, had been selected from among 20,000 projects to represent works from Southern Italy. “Teatro Andromeda was selected because of its potential role in reviving the social and cultural fabric of rural territories,” Cucinella explained in a statement. The 2018 Biennale, held in various locations across Venice between May and November, attracted a record number of 275,000 visitors from around the world.

Reina is an unlikely art-world success. He is by trade a shepherd, from the Sicani Mountains, a beautiful and remote patch of the Sicilian hinterlands. The only son of a family of shepherds, his destiny seemed predetermined: taking his father's role as leader of the flock. Now, at age 60, he is considered a key figure in contemporary Sicilian architecture.

Reina was born in 1960 in Santo Stefano Quisquina, a town of 5,000 located 2,300 feet above sea level. It takes a little more than an hour to drive there from Agrigento, on rural roads lined by barren fields and limestone hills that resemble a slightly greener version of the American Southwest. Reina himself, with his cowboy hat and riding boots, would fit right in there as well. He left school at the age of 13 to be trained to keep livestock, while his sisters enrolled in high school. “I feel like I had no childhood,” he says.

Every morning just after dawn, Reina took his father’s flock out to graze until the early afternoon. Time went by slowly, punctuated only by the movement of the sun in the sky. It was during these long and solitary hours that Reina developed a passion for sculpture. At first he just made assemblages with pieces of wood and small pebbles. Then he began carving the soft alabaster rocks typical of the mountains with a knife.

His artistic endeavors may have filled him with joy, but they didn’t impress his father. “He thought sculpting would just distract me from my job,” Reina says. Sometimes, neighbors showed up at the Reina’s place to complain that the family’s sheep were wandering off because of the inattentive young shepherd. “My father and I had many fights about this,” he adds. He may not have been encouraged by his family, but Reina’s passion for sculpting informed some key decisions in his early life. At age 15, a local farmer put a gun in his hand—an informal invitation to join the Sicilian Mafia. The shepherd replied that he was “more interested in chisels than guns.”

It wasn’t until 1979, when he was in his early 20s, that he left the farmstead for compulsory military service in Naples. That was when he really began to develop his sculpting skills. After sneaking out of his military compound one night, he met Gabriele Zambardino, a talented but broke local sculptor. Zambardino took him on as an apprentice and taught him how to work with professional tools such as chisels, ribs, and scrapers. Reina eventually returned to his farmstead and put together his first exhibition. His early works, measuring up to five feet tall, were mostly anthropomorphic forms, made of stones and wood he found in the pasture.

Attendees from larger Sicilian cities were impressed with his work, and Reina soon got a steady flow of commissions, mostly for religious subjects such as crucifixes and Madonnas. After he sold $3,000 worth of work, his father's attitude shifted. “Suddenly he was more open to the idea of a sculptor son,” he says. Reina could finally dedicate himself fully to sculpting, and soon completed some well-acclaimed works, including a portrait of Princess Orietta Boncompagni Ludovisi carved in volcanic rock from Mount Etna.

But a few days before he passed away, in 1998, Reina’s father asked his son to keep a promise. “He asked me not to let all the things he had built in his life go to waste,” Reina says. “That meant I had to go back to herding sheeps.” In a funny twist of fate, those sheep ended up inspiring his signature work, the one selected for the Biennale.

One summer, Reina started to notice how his flock often stopped at a specific spot on top of a hill, at sunset. “They looked like they were contemplating the landscape,” he says. “I had never seen them so calm.”

Reina began to pay daily visits to the spot, 3,000 feet above sea level, overlooking the gentle green slopes that lead down to the Mediterranean. After a few months he laid the first stone of what would become Teatro Andromeda.

After leveling the hilltop with a digger, he picked up local limestone and brought it up the hill in a pickup. “I built it the way my father and grandfather used to build sheep shelters,” he says, a technique that, save for the use of the truck, was the same one used by the Nuragic people, an ancient civilization that inhabited parts of Southern Italy and Greece from 1800 to 500 B.C.

In this process, unaltered rocks are placed one on top of the other, held together only by weight, with no mortar or other binding substance. Indeed, the exterior of Reina’s theater looks like a well-preserved relic from the distant past. When one steps inside, however, it begins to feel much more contemporary. The flat stage within the walls is an ellipse with a circle in the center, aligned east-west. The “seating plan” is composed of 108 blocks of marble, distributed in the area before the stage according to the positions of the 108 stars that make up the constellation of Andromeda. Astronomy is one of Reina’s interests, along with mythology and ancient architecture. A few yards from the theater lie, seemingly scattered, a statue of Icarus, a depiction of an ancient Greek mask, and a sandstone-and-copper statue honoring the concept of language.

Other than reading up on it, Reina had no formal training in prehistoric construction techniques. He credits his work to intuition and constant observation. “I understand stones better than people,” he says. For the outer part of the work, he picked local yellow sandstone, and for the internal area, volcanic rocks and white alabaster.

When he started to take rocks up the hill, locals questioned his sanity. “What do you need a theater for?” Despite the skepticism, Reina kept working on the project whenever he had time off from his livestock. Old photos hanging in the dining room of his house show him standing on top of the hill during early phases of his project, looking both defiant and vulnerable.

Reina worked on the theater for 14 years, until its completion in 2012. During that period, he married his wife Angela and had two sons, Libero and Christian, who took on their father’s love for art. Christian is now a photographer while Libero writes music. Together with Reina, they also take care of the farm’s orchard and the 70 donkeys Reina acquired a few years ago, in the hope that they would require less minding than sheep. When travelers first started to take note of Teatro Andromeda on blogs, Reina was invited to an art show but replied he could not attend because one of his jennies was in labor. “Life has priority over art,” he told a local reporter in 2015.

With the completion of the theater, Reina started to promote the site for cultural events such as concerts, performances, and ceremonies to celebrate the summer solstice. In the summer months, tickets often sold out, as people from around Sicily flocked to see artists perform against the shifting sunset.

Despite these events, Reina’s day-to-day life had been much unchanged. The donkeys and the garden took up most of his time, at least until the Biennale shook up his tranquil rural existence in 2018. Within a few weeks, photos of Teatro Andromeda went viral on social media, to the tune of 400,000 views on Instagram.

The impact of Reina’s sudden fame rippled through the town. “Santo Stefano suddenly became one of the most visited places of southwest Sicily,” says the mayor, Francesco Piccolo, noting how the town has been contacted by cultural organizations looking to host events there. “Teatro Andromeda helped reframe this territory as a place of culture,” he adds. The attitude of the locals changed as well. “People used to mock this project,” says Libero, Reina’s son, noting how now many Quisquinesi, as residents of Santo Stefano are known, are now proud of coming from the same land that hosts the work. “Some people even add me on social media and make up the fact that we're long-time friends,” Reina says.

Reina is pleased with the theater’s nationwide fame, but says that the greatest satisfaction has come from reading comments left by visitors. “Many people seem to get a sort of groundedness when they come here,” he says. “That’s worth more than any award.”

After the success of the Biennale, Reina’s theater even began to draw visitors between November and March, usually considered as low season for tourism in Sicily. But the visits stopped with the COVID-19 crisis, which hit Italy like a thunderstorm. “We had hundreds of visitors each day up until the lockdown,” Reina says. “Now, the passing of time is once again only punctuated by the movement of the sun in the sky.” He keeps busy with the never-ending list of tasks for his farm, from plowing, to spraying copper sulphate on vines, to tending the donkeys. And nearly every day he still makes small changes to the stone arrangement of Teatro Andromeda, based on sudden sparks of intuition that strike him late at night or as he walks the Sicani hills. His quarantine resolution is to translate into Italian a documentary about him that was shot in Sicilian dialect by director Davide Gambino in 2013. “I actually think it could become the start of my autobiography,” he says. “I just turned 60, it’s about time I start to tell my story.”

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The ruby-red drink is a mainstay at spirit houses and shrines.

They are everywhere, ubiquitous to the point where they are nearly synonymous with the spirits themselves: small, plastic bottles of strawberry Fanta, placed solicitously in front of shrines, straws helpfully tilted towards the gods for easier sipping.

Turn the corner just off of Bangkok’s Charoen Krung Road, and you’ll spy a single Fanta in front of a simple concrete spirit house. At the popular night market Asiatique, a battalion of crimson bottles vie for space before the resident spirits. Even the mighty Erawan Shrine, a pre-Covid magnet to thousands of tourists daily, warrants a bottle or two of red Fanta, left among the flower garlands, coconuts, and platters of fresh fruit donated by those hoping to have their prayers heard.

But how did Fanta nam dang, “red water,” become the spirit drink of choice? How did Thailand—a country physically smaller than the state of Texas—become Fanta’s fourth-biggest market, ahead of both the entire United States and China? How did a strawberry version of the soda concocted by a Coke-deprived, World War II-era Germany find its way into the culture of a country halfway around the world?

“Thais aren’t the only people who give food when praying,” says Kalyanee Rudrakanchana, who points out that the Tibetans, Chinese, and Japanese also offer food to placate unhappy spirits. Rudrakanchana serves as a spiritual adviser to individuals and companies in search of auspicious locations for their businesses and offices. But she must also occasionally serve as a “ghostbuster” for locales already infected with restless spirits, finding ways to put them at ease.

The spirits she has communed with have yet to ask for red Fanta. Yet “offering sweet, red water at a shrine is something that is uniquely Thai,” Rudrakanchana explains. “Nobody knows why it has to be strawberry Fanta, but it probably has to do with its bright red color.” After all, she notes, “Thais are a very visual people. They probably think it looks pretty in front of the shrine or spirit house.”

The demand for Rudrakanchana’s very specific services shows how Thailand teems with the supernatural. Often, concessions are made to extrasensory beings to keep the peace. Many Thais believe that spirits reside in trees and the land itself. As a result, the small shrines known as spirit houses—also a tradition in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia—are a common sight, since spirits must have a place to reside when they are displaced by construction, lest they decide to move in with the humans.

Although 95 percent of Thais are Buddhist, animist beliefs are so firmly entrenched that spirit houses can be found at almost every building in Thailand. It’s just a matter of course, then, that these spirits must occasionally be appeased, or called upon for favors, with small gifts: a box of pandan-scented coconut jellies, an iced Frappuccino, or more commonly, a sweet, cool bottle of strawberry Fanta.

Coca-Cola, which today owns Fanta, is quick to point out that any soda consumption beyond its intended targets is beyond its control. “Thailand is renowned all over the world for its variety of delicious fruits,” says Karthik Subramanian, a marketing manager for Coca-Cola Thailand. “Fanta has successfully replicated those fruitful flavors in a more fun and colorful way, hence its popularity with Thais.”

Formal shrines for more widely recognized deities—currently closed to prevent the spread of Covid-19—also demand their own sugary tributes. Normally, the hundreds or even thousands of visitors to Bangkok’s many shrines deck them out with sodas, cakes, fruits, alcohol, and even full meals. In a country where female tree spirits receive regular offerings of pretty dresses and even the water buffalo can be magical, spirits available for petitioning include the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, popular household divinity Kuman Thong (who often appears as a sweets-obsessed young boy), and real-life historical figures, such as the revered Thai king Rama V. They all require their own specific gifts.

“It comes down to what is known, supposed, or perceived to be what the deity wants,” says Phil Cornwel-Smith, author of the pop culture book Very Thai. “Kuman Thong always seems to have both red and green drinks in pairs. Rama V shrines are offered cigars and shots of brandy, as he liked those treats.”

The rules about what to offer are widely understood. Buddhist monk figures may receive pure water, but animist spirits, saints, and deities get nam waan, or “sweet water,” says Christina Krause, a half-Thai non-governmental organization worker who has lived her whole life in Bangkok.

According to Krause, the families of many Bangkokians originally hail from China, where the color red is auspicious and lucky. Many Thais associate the color red with blood, signifying both fertility and sacrifice. Before soft drinks existed, Thais sweetened and colored water for the spirits with nam ya thai thip, a pink-hued blend of palm sugar and six herbal essences. Today, sodas such as red Fanta provide the same result, with less effort. “Strawberry Fanta represents sweetness, the color red, and convenience,” says Krause. “These three factors are embedded in the Thai culture.”

But it might just simply come down to personal taste. Offerings to the spirits are often what the worshipper prizes themselves, whether that means juicy roast duck, steamed palm-sugar cakes topped with shredded coconut, or an icy bottle of red Fanta. That’s according to bartender Vipop Jinapha, of the Bangkok speakeasy Q&A. Jinapha, who enjoys mixing strawberry Fanta with rum and pineapple juice for a spin on Planter’s Punch, says red Fanta’s popularity at the shrines is obvious. “It just tastes good,” he says. “It takes you back to when you were a kid.”