With land in short supply, families are forming new traditions.

On a warm December day in one of the last cemeteries in Singapore, Man Zu begins to chant. His orange Taoist robes stand out amidst the thousands of gray gravestones; his round face is tan and leathered from years of working in the sun. He is here today to help a group of siblings exhume and relocate the remains of their father, mother, and uncle.

Choa Chu Kang Cemetery does not look like the busy metropolis that is Singapore. There is barely a building in sight; the tallest structure stands about 1,000 feet away, a single-story building equipped with a food stall. In the vicinity, there is a branch of the National Environment Agency, situated near the cemetery to help families exhume their ancestral graves.

Much of the cemetery looks dilapidated, dotted with heaps of rubble and clumps of weeds. The air smells of mud, sand, and grass. Destroyed tombstones stand next to others that are still intact, scattered with miscellaneous debris: incense holders, empty Oreo packets, broken vase fragments. Stray dogs, a rare sight in urban Singapore, patrol the area.

The mass obliteration of graves—or, as it is more commonly known, exhumation—is a result of the government’s redevelopment plans. The Choa Chu Kang Cemetery Exhumation Programme was announced in 2017 to make space for the expansion of an airbase, which necessitates the relocation of more than 80,000 graves. The Cemetery is home to Chinese, Muslim, and Hindu graves. In the current phase, more than 45,500 Chinese graves will be exhumed.

Choa Chu Kang Cemetery’s fate is a mirror of what happened to Bukit Brown Cemetery in 2013. At the time, Singaporeans protested its destruction. Bukit Brown was the resting place of key historical figures and home to a quarter of the bird species in Singapore, but it was was demolished to make space for a new highway.

As recently as 1978, there were 213 cemeteries in Singapore, with burial grounds both large and small scattered across the island. (At approximately 278 square miles, the entire country is smaller than New York City.) By 2011, there were only 60 cemeteries. Many estates and malls stand on former cemeteries, from Singapore’s most popular shopping district, Orchard Road, to residential neighborhoods in the heart of the city-state.

Though most cemeteries have been demolished, the few that remain serve as reminders of the many communities that have called Singapore home. The Japanese Cemetery Park, established in 1891, offers a glimpse into the world of early Japanese settlers: soldiers, merchants, young women brought to Singapore as sex workers. Cemeteries also showcase Singapore’s religious and cultural diversity, with designated sites for Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and the different Chinese clans.

Today, only one—Choa Chu Kang Cemetery—is active. Even then, the government imposes a burial period of 15 years, after which families must relocate the remains.

Jo’s father, mother, and uncle have resided here since the 1980s. She is here today with the rest of her family to exhume all three graves. Since each exhumation takes about an hour, they have decided to divide and conquer: Jo oversees the exhumation of her mother’s grave with her children, and her brothers have split up to attend to the other two graves.

Two workers from the National Environment Agency stand by to help collect the remains, which will be cremated and stored at the government-owned Mandai Crematorium and Columbarium.

After the Taoist rites are complete, gravediggers clear away the soil, revealing the surface of a wooden coffin. A tarp, propped up by poles, covers the grave, preventing the dead from being exposed to sunlight. “Ma!” Jo exclaims, when they approach the grave. She starts singing a classic Chinese children’s song: “Only mother is good in this world.”

The worker breaks open the coffin. The lid is still intact, though visibly worn down. They had used good quality wood, Jo points out. The worker descends into the grave, muddy water coming up to his knees.

Calmly and deliberately, the gravedigger moves remains from the coffin into a white bucket. He also recovers pieces of clothing and a rectangular black block: joss paper, or paper money that was buried with the dead. Some of the bones are blackened from their years underground; some are large and long, while others are small and brittle. The last to come out is the skull. Jo calls out in the Chinese dialect of Hokkien: “Mama, we’re moving house.”

In 2019, a man named Tan helped his family move his grandmother’s remains from Choa Chu Kang Cemetery to a repository for ashes of the deceased, Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Columbarium. The family has yet to celebrate the annual Qing Ming, or Tomb-Sweeping Day, at his grandmother’s new home. He fears that few people will show up. “There’s no space here,” he explains, gesturing down a narrow aisle.

Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery is the largest monastery in Singapore, with two dedicated columbaria within the compound. Tan’s grandmother is located at the newer, more modern one, next to thousands of cremated neighbors. (Due to COVID-19, visits are currently by appointment only, masks are required, and groups are restricted to five members of the same household.)

The niches for each set of ashes are organized into blocks and lined up in rows inside the air-conditioned room. Some are so high that they can’t even be seen, and nearly touch the ceiling.

Death is expensive in Singapore, given the scarcity of land here: Prices run up to $7,000 for a single niche (less-visible units are cheaper). A few niches have been purchased but are not yet occupied, and some are marked with a hongbao, the red envelope usually stuffed with money for Chinese New Year. Others show signs of recent visits, such as flowers, keychains, and even small food magnets.

Tan says that his grandmother’s new home has changed the family’s traditions. “We would gather at seven in the morning at my father’s place, and then drive to the cemetery,” Tan explains. “Then we would sweep the tomb and the whole family would picnic together. How can you do that here?”

In the columbarium, there’s not enough space for the usual offerings of rice, roast pork, and other dishes to be placed near the ashes. Instead, the monastery has an allocated outdoor space where families can lay out feasts for the dead.

The practice of burning joss paper, too, has been streamlined for efficiency. An Eco-Burner has been installed in a parking structure nearby, where joss paper is collected from families and burnt in bulk by staff members.

By 1985, Singapore had already exhumed 21 cemeteries. According to the government, cemeteries take up too much space, and Singapore needs to grow if it is to accommodate its nearly six million residents. Some families scatter their ancestors’ ashes at sea; columbaria are a more permanent alternative.

Tightly pressed together, the rows of niches in columbaria look almost like Singapore’s ubiquitous public housing blocks, each one almost indiscernible from the next. It’s even possible that apartments will eventually replace columbaria, says Bernard Chen, who studied history at Oxford University and has experience in the funeral services industry.

Under British colonial rule, Chen explains, burial grounds were located on the outskirts of the downtown area. But as the city of Singapore grew and more space was needed, cemeteries were seen as “space wasters.” As early as 1952, a Burials Committee had already been set up to encourage cremation instead of burials.

“Whenever the state appropriates land for the dead as land for the living, it always uses the same narrative, which is that the land is for national development.” Chen says. “If you bring this to its logical conclusion, in time to come, there will be zero land for the dead.”

“When we are left without cemeteries, what is the next collective community to be sacrificed on the altar of national development? Columbariums.”

For the sake of national development, the dead are constantly moving house: from cemeteries to columbaria and perhaps even into homes. “Because the state squeezes the land out for the living, it's either you dump the ashes out to sea, or you bring the ashes home,” Chen says. “Every single unit [becomes] an urn space.”

In land-scarce Singapore, where a luxury apartment can cost thousands of dollars per square foot, urban redevelopment demands that the dead make way for the living. With that, rituals of death like Taoist rites and ancestral worship are uprooted along with places of death.

The destruction of Singapore’s cemeteries is striking, but it is not sudden or surprising. It is an ongoing project that started before the nation’s independence, and Singaporeans have accepted and adapted to it, with some reluctance. Still, Tan worries about what will be lost in a country without cemeteries as places to gather and remember the dead. “At Qing Ming, we would have 40, 50 people, three generations all attending,” he recalls. “It was the only time they would come together.” He looks at the columbarium, holds out a photo of his family at the cemetery, and shrugs. “It’s different, right?”

An image of a brave doctor, large enough to be seen from space.

In the parking lot of the Queens Museum, at the heart of one of the American neighborhoods most impacted by the coronavirus, a masked face now looks up at the sky, large enough to be seen from space. This is the face of the late medical doctor Ydelfonso Decoo, who was thinking about retirement before the pandemic struck. Rather than retire, he treated coronavirus patients from his community, and subsequently died of COVID-19.

Decoo’s portrait was completed in late May 2020 by Cuban-American artist Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada. Over the course of just six days, Rodríguez-Gerada painted an estimated 27,500 square feet. He’s calling it Somos La Luz, or We Are the Light.

Rodríguez-Gerada says he was looking for a project to commemorate victims of COVID-19, especially people of color, who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in the United States—African Americans in particular. According to the American Public Media (APM) Research Lab, “Black Americans’ COVID-19 mortality rate across the U.S. has never fallen below twice that of all other groups, revealing a durable pattern of disproportionality.” APM also reports that in New York, the site of Somos La Luz, Latinx Americans have suffered 26.2 percent of deaths, despite representing 19.2 percent of the state’s population. These numbers are largely attributable to people of color being overrepresented in lines of work deemed essential, resulting in increased exposure to the virus.

After a friend informed Rodríguez-Gerada of Decoo’s work and of his passing, the artist knew he had his subject. Decoo, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, had also been the secretary of SOMOS Community Care, a physician-led nonprofit that provides more personalized, culturally sensitive medical care to New Yorkers enrolled in Medicaid—“particularly Asian, African-American and Latino communities,” according to SOMOS’s website. To date, SOMOS has tested some 68,000 patients for the virus, says Ramon Tallaj, MD, the nonprofit's chairman.

Reproducing the photo on a scale visible from a satellite required careful planning, and Rodríguez-Gerada says the entire first day was dedicated to marking different spots within the museum’s parking lot: “the mask ends here,” “there’s a crease there,” and other reference points. Next, he had to figure out how much paint to use on any given spot, and configure his sprayers to disperse lines as wide as three feet or as thin as an inch. All told, he estimates that the job required a total of about $6,000 of paint, from five different stores. All of the paint—more than half an acre of it—had to be matte to mitigate the sun’s reflection, and that required some patient and persistent shopping.

As large as the mural is in scale, Rodríguez-Gerada’s priority was highly specific. The most important thing, he says, was rendering Decoo’s “exact gaze”—the “concentrated, driven” look in his eyes, which the artist based on one particular photograph. Though anyone can view the mural and understand the intention behind the tribute, Decoo’s family still had to recognize him in it, says the artist.

To that end, he adds, the mural does not contain any hidden messages. Instead, it’s “a straightforward, loving portrait of a man who gave his life,” who was preparing to retire but “decided to stay on the front lines …” Rodríguez-Gerada hopes that, despite continued social distancing, the parking lot can become “a place of mourning”—especially now, as nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism further highlight the inequities laid bare by the pandemic.

"We are the ones who are the most essential," says Tallaj, yet "we are the ones who suffer the most." Through tears, he names some of the other SOMOS physicians who have died of the coronavirus: Salvador Castells, Reza Chowdhury, Urena Harrell, Ashraf Metwally, Ruben Moronta, Mark Allen Respler, Jesus Zambrano, and Elda Ziko. "We were all afraid," he adds, but "we were more afraid not to act."

The mural, on its own, commemorates a man and the communities of color that have borne the brunt of COVID-19, but carries a broader message about racism and continued, systemic, casual violence. “At some point,” says Rodríguez-Gerada, “this has to stop.”

Families in need are receiving prosciutto and Pecorino di Pienza.

Giuliano Faralli's cell phone rings ceaselessly. "At midnight I am forced to turn it off—I need to sleep at least a few hours," he explains as he checks the dozens of grocery bags that fill the warehouse. Faralli is the director of a local chapter of Caritas, a charity run by the Catholic Church, in Montepulciano. Each week, the nonprofit distributes these bags to 500 families in Pienza, Chianciano, and other Tuscan towns.

In February, his Caritas sent food to around 120 families. But when the COVID-19 lockdown began, Faralli’s phone started ringing, as new families discreetly asked for assistance. In Tuscany, more than 3,000 people have registered with Caritas since the beginning of the pandemic, an increase of 91 percent compared to all of 2019. The next survey, which will be presented in June, will likely show the numbers increasing further.

“Since the outbreak of the pandemic, craftsmen, hairdressers, and owners of tourist shops, farmhouses, and bed and breakfasts have called me,” Faralli explains. Although the government has authorized all commercial activities to reopen, many business owners in villages that usually fill with tourists have had no reason to raise the shutters.

“A year ago, the street was full of people, tourists above all,” says Laura, who works in a bar steps from Porta al Prato, one of the entrances to the old town of Montepulciano. “Today it is empty, and perhaps it will be this way all summer.”

In the warehouse, Faralli prepares food packages based on the advice of a nutritionist: pasta, tomato puree, beans, canned tuna, biscuits, flour, sugar. But sprinkled among the pantry staples, there are Tuscan Hams and Finocchiona (local salami seasoned with wild fennel seeds) and Pecorino di Pienza. These gourmet foods, all of them local, are regularly exported abroad to fancy restaurants. The food packages are typically worth around $33; a kilo of pecorino cheese costs around $22.

The pecorino being delivered to in-need families is made by the Cugusi family, which has been producing the hard, salty cheese in the Tuscan hills since the 1960s. "In recent months our sales volume has decreased by 70 percent,” says Silvana Cugusi, gesturing at the hundreds of unsold wheels that have long since completed their seasoning. “And to make matters worse, for our 800 sheep, this is the moment of maximum production."

Lots of milk, but no market: In the United States, the same problem has led producers to discard potatoes, milk, and more. A thought that kept Silvana up at night. Many dairies, pasta manufacturers, and ham factories in Tuscany face similar struggles. Supermarket sales are still healthy, but those who usually sell to restaurants and farmhouses, or export to Europe, Japan, and the United States, have started to suffer.

“Fortunately it was not necessary,” says Silvana of his fears of throwing away milk and cheese. “Actually, now I'm calm.” He sold milk below cost to two large dairies that sell to major retailers, and then he donated cheese to Caritas. “This allowed us to continue production without laying off any of our 10 employees."

The same logic has motivated the makers of other prized Tuscan foods, many of which are stamped PDO or PGI, an EU certification recognizing specialty foods that follow rigorous standards. Alessandro Iacomoni, the owner of Salumeria di Monte San Savino, regularly sends dozens of hams, Finocchiona, and salami to the Caritas in Arezzo. A man of few words, he speaks of donating Cinta Senese, a prosciutto that comes from an ancient pig breed and costs around $100 per kilo (or $45 per pound), as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

“Putting these products in the packages we distribute has a great value,” says Alessandro Nelli, who manages Arezzo’s Caritas. “Families appreciate it.”

The Pici produced by the Panarese pasta factory ends up in shops and supermarkets all over the world—and now in Faralli’s warehouse, too. Their sales are down, but as owner Alessio Panarese explains, “The moment is difficult for everyone, so as long as Giuliano sends me an email, the following day I’m always ready to send him tons of pasta."

These companies have chosen to donate their products to Caritas out of solidarity with their fellow Tuscans, and to continue producing without firing anyone or throwing anything out. "When we receive these delights,” says Faralli, who started directing the charity after retiring from the fire brigade, “we try to portion them in order to give a bit to everyone.”

But in recent weeks, a consortia of Tuscan PDO and PGI producers has reached an agreement to sell municipalities of the region their foods at production price (without, therefore, earning a euro) so it can be distributed to citizens who need it most—either in food parcels like the ones Caritas delivers, or by including them in the list of foods that can be purchased with “bonus-spesa,” a program similar to food stamps that can be used via a paper voucher or smartphone at the supermarket.

“The emergency phase is about to end,” says Nelli, “but now the most difficult part is coming. Because many families, in which no one has a job anymore, are facing up to that fact. Now in those houses, in addition to food, we will also have to bring hope.”

Patience and the right resources are key.

Archaeological remains are often closer than you might think—down the street, just next door, right under your feet. But even the sites beneath you are often easier to see from higher up. That’s why numerous recent finds—burial mounds, farms, quarries, and more—have been made by volunteers since stay-at-home orders were released in response to the coronavirus. Sequestered in their houses for months now, some folks have gladly volunteered to help local archaeological efforts.

Archaeology from above has been with us for a while. Well before the first satellites were launched into orbit, World War I pilots in the Middle East reported seeing artifacts that may not have been as easy to identify from the ground. Since then, of course, the advents of satellite imagery and lidar technology—by which laser pulses emitted from above a landscape can “read” the land’s topography and the subtle marks upon it, even through dense foliage—have greatly increased the ways in which archaeologists can scour the earth.

“It’s not a new thing, or a revelation that we might see things from above that really change our perspective,” says Damian Evans, an archaeologist affiliated with the European Research Council and the French Institute of Asian Studies, who specializes in the Khmer Empire of Southeast Asia. “What’s changed, really, is the ubiquitous accessibility of the technology. To have this special information in the hands of regular people, rather than specialists in the air.”

Evans has worked for years on the sprawling site of Angkor, in Cambodia, where lidar imagery is useful on the thick jungle that covers the region. But there’s more to the work than fancy software, which may be beyond most people’s means and grasp.

“Even though we use the latest and greatest tech like lidar to do archaeological prospection, archaeologists like me use tools like Google Earth and Google Maps every day for our work,” says Evans.

Archaeology has always involved excavation, and people have long used laboratories to analyze finds. But with the ongoing pandemic, archaeologists used to working in the field have found themselves cut off from their sites, and volunteers have found themselves similarly house-ridden.

“In people’s minds, archaeology is very much a fieldwork discipline. Even moving beyond the clichés and so on, there’s an idea in people’s mind that archaeologists are excavating a good deal of the time, and that it’s part and parcel of what we do,” Evans says. “That’s increasingly not the case.”

So in your stuck-at-home state, what can you do to explore the world? Perhaps practice some citizen science—in this case, lending your eyes to ongoing exercises in open-access archaeology.

Some countries, like the United Kingdom, offer a number of lidar repositories for public perusal. But even with that wealth of data before you, it can be hard to parse what is and isn’t archaeologically useful—to know what’s already been identified and what hasn’t. Oil and gas pipelines can look a lot like Roman roads from above, with their long, linear landscape scars. Seen from overhead, not everything is as it seems—especially to a viewer hoping for something more than what reality may bear.

“I think a great starting point is not necessarily with lidar data,” says Chris Smart, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter whose volunteers recently found a trove of prehistoric, Roman, and medieval remains in the English countryside by examining those open-access repositories. “The simplest way for people to start exploring archaeology and the potential for finding new sites, or new elements of old places, is … using [Google Earth’s] historic satellite imagery. A lot of archaeological sites show up as crop marks.”

Some sites are now actively looking for fresh pairs of eyes. The Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a woodland northwest of London, has a portal that allows users to scour their environs and take tutorials in lidar to better understand what they’re seeing.

A view from above isn’t an exact replica of the reality outside. But it offers a unique vantage point—and a peek at something new.

The first episode of TED's Pindrop podcast looks at the city's unique challenges.

Bangkok is a huge city—more than 10 million people with countless more coming in each day from neighboring provinces for work. The result, as you might expect, is a vast sprawl of bumper-to-bumper traffic: street cars, trucks, and motorcycles, sidewalks teeming with pedestrians, even canals full of boats.

The Thai capital’s infrastructure is part of the reason for the intense gridlock, since the city grew rapidly, with little land use or transportation planning. Its road surface area accounts for only about 8 percent of the metropolis, compared with 20 to 30 percent in other cities, according to Al Jazeera. In other words, it’s got less than half the number of roads it really needs. And that means waiting. Lots and lots of waiting.

Traffic is something you have to plan for in Bangkok, but there are, of course, times when life just won’t wait for the bus stuck in the intersection to make its way through. Take the young woman whose water had just broken ... in the back of a taxi. People who live in metropolises such as Bangkok have a way of adapting to these kinds of difficulties. In this case, the taxi driver didn’t call 911—there is no 911—but rather JS100, a local radio station. More than that, JS100 is an institution born of the city’s traffic: part emergency hotline, part entertainment, part lost and found. It’s the communications hub of the entire city. According to journalist and podcast producer Pailin Wedel, “They're the guardian angel watching over the city … From letting people know about accidents, to bottlenecks in traffic, to someone forgetting a huge amount of money in the back of their taxi they’re trying to track down, all the way to ‘Oh, someone's found a big python in their bathroom, can someone come rescue them?’”

The radio station staff then summoned the authorities to help, but not just any cops will do. In another nod to the intractability of Bangkok’s traffic, the city employs more than 100 specially trained motorcycle midwives, or officers who carry full medical kits on their backs and are taught how to tie the umbilical cord and ensure that a baby’s airway is clear of obstructions. They ride motorbikes to make it easy for them to weave in and out of traffic. Since the system was set up by the Royal Thai Police in 1993, they’ve successfully delivered 184 babies.

Wedel rode along—on the back of a motorcycle—with one of the midwife/police officers, Colonel Athibadi. And the call came in, via the radio station, for the woman whose water broke. In this case, Athibadi decided not to help her deliver in traffic, but rather to clear the cars and buses out to get the mother-to-be to the hospital. That itself is no easy task in Bangkok—two police motorcycles lead the way, sirens blaring to part the flood of vehicles. “I am used to riding on motorbikes in Bangkok, but weaving in and out of traffic on the back of the police motorbike was probably the fastest I've ever gone on two wheels,” says Wedel, adding, “It was exciting but also terrifying.” And … they made it, just in time for the arrival of the couple's first child. But Bangkok’s motorcycle midwives are ready for a roadside birth, if it comes to that.

To learn more about how Bangkok has adapted to its unique challenges, listen to Pindrop, a podcast produced by TED and hosted by Saleem Reshamwala that travels around the world in search of surprising and imaginative ideas. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

In the rural American South, these non-denominational sing-alongs are part of a long musical tradition.

At Sacred Harp singings, the country churches of the American South resound with the harmonious pulse of song. There are no instruments, just human voices carrying on in four-part, a cappella harmony. Loud and hypnotic, it doesn’t sound like a traditional, melodious sing-a-long. Rather, it's like a swell of voices chanting with such raw emotion, it sounds as if the room might burst.

In this style of music, the tenor, alto, and bass are independent of the melody. With the four parts so distinct, they’re printed on separate staves. This dispersed harmony creates an unusual blend of voices, giving Sacred Harp its signature sound.

During a singing, vocalists, arranged around a central square, hold their oblong songbooks so they can easily shift their eyes between the pages and the person leading the song. The leader, in the center of what is known as the “hollow square,” balances the same book in one hand while the other hand, open-palmed, steadily beats the rhythm like a metronome. Some singers mimic this motion with their own hands. Rows of wooden pews creak as the participants rock back and forth, their feet thumping against the floor.

Sacred Harp singing is an outgrowth of a form of musical notation known as shape notes. According to the president of the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association and lifelong Sacred Harp singer David Ivey, shape-note music was often the first, or only, form of musical training many rural Southerners had well into the 19th and 20th centuries. (Disclosure: Ivey is the author’s cousin.)

Shape-note singing took root during the 18th century when itinerant singing instructors began offering lessons to communities around New England. These singing schools taught the practice of solfege—associating each musical tone with a different syllable.

However, rather than the traditional seven-note singing scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti), in Sacred Harp the note-heads are printed as four different shapes bound to four syllables: fa for triangle, sol for oval, la for rectangle, and mi for diamond.

Instructors taught their students to “sing the shapes” before singing the written words. This system was designed to teach an effective form of sight-reading to those with no access to conventional musical education.

Eventually in the Northeastern U.S., where more structured European musical norms prevailed, shape-note singing became regarded as unsophisticated and old-fashioned. These singing schools needed a new home, so teachers migrated south.

Around this time, in the early 19th century, two important shape-note books were published by brothers-in-law from South Carolina: Southern Harmony in 1835, by William Walker, and The Sacred Harp in 1844, by B.F. White. The latter branded the name of this musical style “Sacred Harp,” in reference to the human voice. Influenced by 18th-century English church music, these songbooks were composed of hymns, anthems, and fuguing tunes, as well as 19th-century Southern hymns stemming from British and Irish folk songs.

Southern Harmony and The Sacred Harp helped promote shape-note singing in rural parts of the South, where it began to firmly root in what would become its permanent home. Both songbooks remain prominent in the shape-note singing community today, with The Sacred Harp having undergone numerous revisions to keep up-to-date with newly composed songs.

For many Sacred Harp songs, the words and the tune were not composed together. A common practice was to select a hymn with lyrics that metrically fit the melody. For example, sources have connected the meter of the hymn “Wondrous Love” with the 1701 English pirate song “The Ballad of Captain Kidd.” While the lyrical origins of “Wondrous Love” remain unknown, the first time the song’s words and folk tune were published together was in William Walker’s second edition of Southern Harmony.

Like many other Sacred Harp songs, “Wondrous Love” is full of spiritual elements, meditating on Jesus Christ bringing salvation to the world. Despite this, while many singers in the community observe shape-note singing religiously, Sacred Harp is and has always been inclusive and nondenominational. There is no sermon to accompany the singings.

“Sacred Harp brings together people with many differences,” Ivey says. “Those differences are erased as we sing to each other across the hollow square. Singing in a formation where you see all the others who are contributing to this glorious sound creates an instant bond.”

Another element in “Wondrous Love” that can be seen in many other Sacred Harp songs is its haunting minor key, and the celebration of what’s to come after death:

And when from death I’m free
I’ll sing on,
And when from death I’m free
I’ll sing and joyful be,
Thro’ out eternity, I’ll sing on

As evident by the lyrics of shape-note songs and the living traditions of both the Memorial Lesson and Decoration Day, openly discussing death is a common theme in Sacred Harp.

“The Memorial Lesson is a time of the singing in which we call the names of singers and friends who have died in the past year and sing songs of remembrance to them,” Ivey says.

Decoration Day, while also practiced by Southern United States and Liberian communities not associated with Sacred Harp, is an event during which family and friends gather to clean and decorate cemeteries, bridging a spiritual connection between present and past generations.

According to Ivey, at a Sacred Harp Decoration Day singing, four or five songs are sung in the cemetery at the first recess. Usually at all-day singings, including the ones that happen on Decoration Day, there’s “dinner on the grounds.”

“Having dinner on the ground—or as city people say, potluck—is an important time of the all-day singing,” Ivey says. “It’s an experience of sharing family recipes and stories that are as important as the singing itself.”

Shape-note singings are still held in the South today, primarily in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas. Just like in the early days of Sacred Harp, singers sit in a square with the four vocal parts on each side. The tenors, both men and women singing an octave apart, face the altos; the trebles—the highest-pitched part mixed between men and women—face the basses.

Keeping in line with tradition, singers sing the first verse as the shapes (fa, sol, la, mi) to lodge the tune in their memory before they sing the written words. The leader, a rotating role, stands in the middle of the square. That individual leads the song of their choice while keeping the others in rhythm by “beating time” with an open-palmed hand.

However, shape-note singing is not a performance—at least not in the same way as a recital or concert. “Sacred Harp is not about fitting some ideal of a pretty voice,” Ivey says. “It’s about the experience. There’s never any rehearsal. There’s no set of singers who definitely attend, so it’s nothing like a choir. People gather just before the start time with anticipation of what the sound of that day’s gathering will be. Then the pitch is given. The four parts ‘sound the chord’ and the singing begins.”

In the 2006 documentary Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp, Hugh McGraw describes the first time he experienced shape-note singing, in 1953: “I just walked in the back door and sat down on the back pew ... And when I sat down and heard [the singing], it was like I had received salvation.” Regarded as one of the leading Sacred Harp singers of the past 50 years, McGraw was essential in spreading shape-note singing across the U.S. in the late 1970s and early '80s. Today, Sacred Harp is now sung all over the country, as well as internationally.

Sinéad Hanrahan, who attends singings in Cork, Ireland, first encountered Sacred Harp as a performance module offered as part of her undergraduate degree. She has since traveled across Ireland, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe as a direct result of Sacred Harp, even working as a singing school teacher for an all-day singing event in Oslo, Norway.

“Our singings in Cork are pretty informal,” Hanrahan says. “To lead each song, we move around the square in turn. Everyone is welcome to lead a song, but it’s not obligatory. After the singing, all are welcome to join for a drink and a chat in our local pub.”

Both Hanrahan and Ivey agree that what pulls them to Sacred Harp is the community. “I can walk into a singing anywhere in the world and the familiarity of the space and the singing and the interactions means I immediately feel welcome,” says Hanrahan. “The realization that there is this community of people around the world, bound together by the shared love of this music, is quite a powerful thing.”

This community continues to keep shape-note singing alive and nourished. A testament to the important role music plays as an oral tradition, Sacred Harp connects the present and past and bonds singers with their heritage. It’s a bond that strengthens each time someone calls out a page number and sounds the chord—a bond between voices celebrating the shapes that taught the rural South to sing.

Forget Vlad the Impaler. A 19th-century cholera outbreak in Sligo may have been Bram Stoker's chief inspiration.

An afternoon wind funnels down deserted Old Market Street, past shuttered shops and darkened restaurants. The rowdy Irish student town of Sligo has been frozen. It is two months into a strict nationwide lockdown enforced by the Irish government to combat the novel coronavirus, which has killed more people per capita in Ireland than in the U.S.

The last time Sligo was this empty—this lifeless, this restricted—was 188 years ago. Cholera was the culprit. That epidemic spawned not just death, poverty, famine, chaos, and desertion but also a legendary vampire. Yet only in late 2018 did Irish researchers make this startling discovery: Dracula was born in Sligo.

In 1832, on Old Market Street, a 14-year-old Irish girl hid in her home during the cholera outbreak, which killed more than 10 percent of the town’s population. The ghastly scenes around her—mass graves, corpses in the street, victims buried alive—she later recounted to her son. His name was Bram Stoker, and those bleak stories were a key source of inspiration for writing Dracula—one of the most influential novels in history. First published in 1897, this vampire tale has spawned dozens of movies, plays, TV shows, and books.

In Stoker’s novel, an English lawyer travels to the Transylvanian peaks of Romania, where he visits an isolated place called Castle Dracula. There he is attacked and imprisoned by the blood-drinking vampire, Count Dracula. The rest is fairly well known.

Among many longstanding theories about Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula, the most popular is that the author was motivated by Vlad the Impaler, a sadistic Romanian leader famous for torturing his foes. This 15th-century prince was also called Drăculea.

That, however, is where the links between Dracula and Drăculea appear to end. Despite the Transylvanian setting—and the fact that that region’s Bran Castle is now also called Dracula’s Castle—historical accounts show that Vlad had minimal connections with that area, and never actually lived in that castle.

So beyond the book title, where did Stoker get the idea for Dracula, a ghoul who is dead yet alive and infects those that he bites, turning them into vampires? The answer lies in Sligo, a picturesque town now home to 20,000 people on Ireland’s west coast surrounded by dense forests, green mountains, windy beaches, and salmon-rich rivers.

That’s the contention of Irish historian Marion McGarry, a member of the Sligo Stoker Society, which has done meticulous research into links between Dracula and Sligo’s cholera outbreak.

McGarry says Stoker was inspired by a grisly account of that epidemic written by his mother, Charlotte Thornley, who hid from the plague in her home before she fled Sligo with her family. Thornley’s essay remained unpublished and buried in a Dublin archive until the Society studied the text and, last year, had it widely circulated.

“Bram as an adult asked his mother to write down her memories of the epidemic for him, and he supplemented this using his own historic research of Sligo’s epidemic,” says McGarry. “Scratching beneath the surface (of this essay), I found parallels with Dracula. [For instance,] Charlotte says cholera enters port towns having traveled by ship, and can travel overland as a mist—just like Dracula, who infects people with his unknown contagion.”

The strongest link McGarry found, though, was between Dracula’s liminal state—being simultaneously dead and conscious—and Thornley’s description of cholera victims who were buried alive. Stoker was morbidly fascinated by this detail. So much so that the working title for his novel was The Undead, before his publisher later changed it to Dracula.

The cholera stories that Thornley told Stoker were realistic, says Fiona Gallagher, an Irish historian who studies that epidemic. The outbreak killed as many as 1,000 Sligo residents and caused pandemonium. To stop residents from escaping the disease-ridden town (and subsequently spreading the plague to other places), trenches were dug around Sligo and a road blockade was erected.

Cholera attacked Sligo so fiercely and rapidly that corpses lay in the streets, and 20 carpenters couldn’t meet the demand for coffins. “Many bodies remained un-coffined,” says Gallagher. Instead, about 500 victims were wrapped in sheets and buried in a giant trench. Most of Sligo’s doctors and nurses died from the disease, many of the clergy fled, and residents trapped in the town rioted.

To Sligo residents like Stoker’s mother, the world seemed to be ending. Sligo, Thornley wrote in an essay to her son, had become “like a city of the dead.” “According to Charlotte, as the epidemic escalated, terrified nursing staff would take cholera patients, stupefied by laudanum or opium, and simply place them alive in the mass graves,” McGarry says.

Such descriptions, he contends, were what fired Stoker’s imagination. Although he was famously private, the author acknowledged, in a rare interview about Dracula, that the story was “inspired by the idea of someone being buried before they were fully dead.”

In the past year, Sligo has embraced this newly discovered connection with Dracula, and hopes it can use it to attract tourism. Street art has been dedicated to Stoker and his vampire creation, a plaque was recently erected on the building where Thornley lived through the epidemic, and a Dracula-themed walking tour is being launched this year. One of Stoker’s descendants, Canadian author Dacre Stoker, visited the town last year to take part in an event celebrating Sligo’s links to Dracula.

All these years after Sligo descended into cholera-fueled chaos, it seems that something positive is emerging from the catastrophe. When Ireland’s coronavirus lockdown reaches its finish (scheduled to occur in July), the town can go back to touting its connection to one of history’s greatest fictional characters. A blood-addicted monster born not in Transylvania but right here, in Sligo, out of the remnants of death, disarray, and devastation. The literary product of an epidemic.

The social-distancing era is the perfect time to build a Rube Goldberg machine.

If you want to move a ball from one place to another, you have several options. You could roll it. You could bounce it. Or you could lob the thing. Any of these tactics would move the object along. But none would be nearly as fun—or as delightfully, needlessly complicated—as nudging it through a Rube Goldberg machine.

These homemade gizmos, named for the 20th-century cartoonist and inveterate tinkerer, are thrillingly convoluted chain reactions. They’re spectacularly inefficient and superlatively mesmerizing; that’s the whole point. They’re also a great way to grease your mental gears if you’re spending a lot of time at home.

Cree Ossner knows all about it. A 16-year-old high-school student from Middletown, New Jersey, Ossner has been making these contraptions for years. His latest—a sprawling outdoor setup he calls “The Swish Machine”—begins with a basketball that sails through the hoop and lands on a lawn chair, propped up at an angle by a recycling bin. That shot kicks off a 70-step reaction that relies on a haul that might be heaped in your closet or garage right now—everything from coolers to skateboards, bits of toy wooden train tracks, a shovel, a tire, and much, much more.

Ossner spent a month constructing it, and then another month fidgeting while trying to film the entire chain in a single take.

Atlas Obscura recently spoke with him about creativity, problem solving, and what you need to know to make your own marvelously meandering machine, wherever you are.

How did you get started?

I grew up watching a lot of YouTube, and Rube Goldberg machines were some of my favorite kinds of videos. I loved the idea of using household items in funny and interesting ways, and I knew I wanted to try and create one of these contraptions myself.

I started making Rube Goldberg machines in late 2013, but the first one I posted to YouTube was in January 2014. It consisted of only a few steps, starting with a marble rolling down a track, then some ping-pong balls rolling on my desk, and a domino line made out of books for the grand finale. It took years of experience to get to the level of building I am at now. But making machines is still just as fun as it was the first day.

What kinds of objects are best?

The best materials to use are ones that you can find around your house. For example, an empty paper-towel roll cut in half can be a great track for a ball. Cups can roll along a table, and books can be used as dominoes.

Finding random objects to use in Rube Goldberg machines is half the fun, but there are some materials that I use in pretty much every machine I make [like] tape and string … String can make transitions between tricks a lot easier, and tape can prevent objects from moving around. Ping-pong balls, dominoes, and popsicle sticks are some more common items I use in machines. Also, any kind of blocks can be super helpful too, since they can turn any flat item into a ramp when you put a block underneath one end.

When you’re working on a new Rube Goldberg machine, how do you begin?

Before I start building any part of a new machine, I establish a building location and a general path that I want the machine to take. After that, I look for items around the house that I might want to use. I experiment with these objects, figuring out if they can roll, bounce, fall over, or even be used in combination with another object to create a trick.

Rube Goldberg machines can be built wherever there is a lot of space. Most people will just build on a table, but I like to mix it up and try building in different spots around my house and yard. I have fun including parts of my environment in my machine, whether that's a kitchen sink or a pond in my backyard. I build my machines one step at a time, and in no particular order at all. I think of big tricks I want to include, and connect them with other tricks later on.

How do you know the thing will work the way you want it to?

I test each section individually before I try the machine all the way through. Even with excessive testing, I have never [gotten] a machine to work on its first try. In my most recent machine, I had the last couple of steps mess up multiple times, meaning I had to spend almost an hour setting the entire machine back up. Trying again and again is just a part of the Rube Goldberg machine process. But it is super important to fix the machine every time something goes wrong. If you don't do that, the machine might get stuck in the same spot over and over again.

What else can go wrong?

“The Swish Machine” was without a doubt my most complicated video yet. It was cool to think of tricks with large-scale items (such as ladders, shovels, and swings). But rain and wind definitely made the whole process harder than anything I was used to.

What advice would you give to folks who want to try making one themselves?

Be original. Watching videos of other machines for inspiration can be helpful, but coming up with your own ideas is the best part about making these machines. Don't lose motivation if your machine doesn't work right away, because the best ones on the internet take hundreds of tries, including mine.

Most importantly, have fun. I've been making machine videos for six years now, and I still love picking up random objects and thinking about how I could use them in a machine. I hope anyone who reads this tries to make a Rube Goldberg machine at least once in their life. They're a great way to pass the time, especially while social distancing, and overall I think it would be a great experience to have.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Highlights from an era of convenience, creativity, and Cool Whip.

In the 1950s, a food trend swept the United States: the sweet salad. World War II had ended, and with it wartime rationing, but Americans’ penchant for canned goods persisted. The combination of the increased popularity of preserved foods and the overall postwar atmosphere of abundance led to a widespread love for dishes that were modern, decorative, and convenient. This included technicolor “salads” made from multiple processed ingredients, like powdered gelatin and canned fruit. Epitomizing this mix of social forces, in all its trembling, fruit-filled, jewel-hued glory, was the Jell-O mold. Consisting of a mix of sweet, and often savory, ingredients suspended in elaborate rings of wiggly instant gelatin, these creations shone from the pages of Betty Crocker and The Joy of Cooking books, and festooned the countertops of suburban America.

But love for gelatinous, creamy medleys did not originate in the 1950s. Americans had been enjoying sweet mixtures of grains and dairy, like rice pudding, for centuries. Many early recipes were delicacies, involving expensive nuts and exotic, hard-to-find fruits like pineapple, or labor-intensive processes like making gelatin at home. But the rise of industrial food production in the 1900s, including the popularizing of canning and instant foods like Jell-O, mainstreamed and democratized these unique dishes. They gained further popularity thanks to midcentury brands advocating “modern” convenience cooking, like Betty Crocker.

Since they’re affordable and don’t spoil easily, these sweet salads have long been heavy-hitters at family gatherings, funerals, and church potlucks. From ambrosia to Coca-Cola, from cookie to frog eye, they remain beloved fixtures of community life across the American South, Midwest, and Mountain West. Functioning as either a dessert or a sugary side dish, they’re an airy spoonful of nostalgia for many diners. While everything else may be uncertain, these seven salads affordably and reliably give comfort. After all, canned pineapple and whipped topping will always remain (shelf) stable and sweet.

Ambrosia Salad

In the pantheon of sweet salads, ambrosia takes first place. The name “ambrosia” comes from the mythical food of the Greek gods. The first known written reference to modern ambrosia salad, on the other hand, dates to 1867, when Maria Massey Barringer of North Carolina included a recipe for it in her Dixie Cookery cookbook. That recipe consisted of nothing more than grated, sweetened coconut layered with pulpy oranges.

In the 1870s and ’80s, ambrosia recipes began appearing in syndicated cooking columns. They emphasized the novelty of fresh coconut and citrus, in an age when train travel had just made long-distance trade in perishables possible. By the early 1900s, the dish had become associated with Southern Christmas celebrations. As the 20th century marched on, tropical fruits grew more common. The popularization of mini marshmallows added another key ingredient to the mix, as did the rise of canned goods during World War II.

Today, there are about as many ambrosia recipes as there are Southern grandmas. But at their base, recipes still include the core ingredients of canned pineapple or mandarin oranges, Cool Whip or another creamy dairy (or dairy-adjacent) topping, and coconut (though sweet extras are often added). If you can’t decide on just one creamy, fruity addition, try this recipe from Mom on Timeout, which includes a cornucopia of coconut, citrus, pineapple, nuts, marshmallows, and maraschinos, all enrobed in a Cool Whip and sour cream topping.

Jell-O Salad

Jell-O salad is a chimera, as slippery to define as it is to physically hold. In its most basic form, of course, the dish consists of flavored, colored gelatin that's shaped in a mold, filled with fruit, vegetables, or meat, and served cold. But that only scratches the surface of the infinite flavor combinations—some sweet, some savory, some frankly shocking—the simple gelatin mold can hold.

In the dark ages before powdered gelatin, preparing a jiggly treat meant laboring for hours over a pot of boiling cows’ feet, regularly skimming the fat from the top as the collagen was extracted. In the 1840s, Peter Cooper, who invented the world’s first steam locomotive, patented the first recipe for powdered gelatin. Cooper’s invention didn’t immediately catch on—presumably, he had more important things to market than wriggly desserts.

In 1895, Pearle Wait decided to break into the emerging gelatin industry by adding fruit-flavored syrup to powdered gelatin, and the Jello-O brand was born. But Wait wasn’t a master promoter, either, and he quickly offloaded his budding business onto his neighbor, Orator Francis Woodward. Woodward was the true visionary who brought “America’s most favorite dessert,” as his advertising campaign declared, into the nation’s homes.

This led to an explosion of creativity, wherein anything that could be encased in gelatin, chilled in a mold, and displayed on a table, received that treatment. Partly thanks to The Joy of Cooking, that midcentury trove of jiggly excellence, the world of Jell-O salads includes everything from the avocado strawberry ring, which consists of lime jello with mayo, strawberries, and avocado, to the truly meta barbecue salad, which consists of a bed of actual lettuce crowned with shimmering cubes of barbecue sauce–flavored gelatin. Uniting all of these recipes is a colorful, geometric aesthetic, and a resolute refusal to be classified as either a dessert or a side dish.

While the options for at-home Jell-O fun are truly endless, those looking for a double dose of nostalgia can turn to this recipe from House of Nash Eats for Coca-Cola salad: a jewel-toned concoction combining strawberry Jell-O, canned pineapple, cherry pie filling, and Coca-Cola. The soda fizz persists in the gelatinous finished product; no cow-foot-boiling required.

Snicker Salad

For Amy Thielen, a chef and expert on Midwestern American food who grew up in a small town in Minnesota, sweet salads are a nostalgic reminder of community events. But if you’re not a member of that community, there’s one way it’ll show: Calling this treat “Snickers” salad, with an “s,” will get you politely snickered out of Minnesota. “The locals would be like, awww,” she says, the exclamation tinged with knowing pity. “It’s ‘Snicker salad.’ I don’t know why.”

What Thielen does know, however, is that Snicker salad is a time-honored Upper-Midwestern potluck favorite. It’s a mix of Cool Whip, apple slices, and chopped Snickers bars that’s so creamy and crispy-sweet it belongs right in the center of the dessert table. Except, that is, when it belongs on the dinner table, right next to the hot dish (casserole).

Variations on the recipe sometimes include drizzled caramel or, like this recipe from Taste of Home, vanilla pudding mix. Whatever the add-ons, the result is always a sugar rush, and is never pronounced with an “s.”

Cookie Salad

Cookie salad pulls no punches. A combination of packaged fudge-striped cookies (the Keebler brand is common), whipped topping, pudding, buttermilk, and mandarin oranges, the dish is typically enjoyed in the Upper Midwest, where it occupies a classic place of ambiguity between dinner and dessert.

Cookie salad is particularly popular in North Dakota, where it’s a Thanksgiving favorite. Leading up to the holiday, North Dakotans search for cookie salad recipes online 189 times more frequently than in the rest of the country. Their devotion has been known to alarm and inspire out-of-towners like Molly Yeh, a chef from New York who moved to North Dakota a few years ago. “The summer I moved to the Midwest was the summer my perception of 'salad' was turned upside down, held firmly by the ankles, and shaken free of all the vegetables that were hiding in [its] pockets,” Yeh writes in her cookbook.

Purists looking to recreate that magic at home can opt for this version from I Am Baker, which follows the typical cookies/pudding/fruit script to delicious effect. If you’re seeking added sophistication, and want a project that will take a bit longer, you can check out Yeh’s cookbook, which features a recipe that calls for homemade Italian rainbow cookies rather than store-bought fudge stripes.

Watergate Salad

“My grandmother used to make Watergate salad,” says Thielen, who has a particular soft spot for this even softer dish. “I think that nostalgia is part of what drives people to continue to make [it].”

Variations of the salad, which combines whipped topping, chopped pecans, mini marshmallows, canned pineapple, and dried pistachio pudding mix, date to at least the 1920s, when Helen Keller published a recipe for a prototype of the dish. Keller’s version, however, lacked the pistachio pudding, a key innovation that likely accompanied the release of Jell-O brand pistachio-flavored pudding mix in the mid 1970s.

Recipes for the salad were given a further boost in 1975, when cooks, eaters, and newspaper recipe writers began dubbing the sweet, gloppy mixture the “Watergate” in the wake of the equally messy Nixonian break-in of the Watergate hotel. At the same time, a cake, also using pistachio pudding mix, gained the Watergate moniker as well.

So who named the dishes after the Watergate Hotel and scandal? Joseph Rodota, author of The Watergate: Inside America's Most Infamous Address, has an idea. "It could've been a Democratic partisan who wanted to make sure the Watergate name lived on," he told NPR. While the origins of the salad’s name remain arcane, its recipe is simple and straightforward. Check out this easy recipe from Mom on Timeout.

Frog Eye Salad

First thing’s first: There are neither frogs nor eyes in this salad. There is, however, acini di pepe, a kind of small, round pasta that—if you squint your own eyes—may vaguely resemble those of a frog. A classic of the “maybe it’s dinner, maybe it’s dessert” genre, frog eye salad is a sweet, creamy take on pasta salad. It's a sort of rice pudding, but with macaroni subbed in for the rice.

To make the salad, cooks first boil and chill the acini di pepe. Then they make a custard out of egg, sugar, and canned pineapple juice, and mix that custard with the pasta, drained canned pineapple, nuts, whipped topping, and mini marshmallows. The result is creamy, custardy, and starchy in a pleasant way.

While those outside of the Rocky Mountain region may have never heard of this dish, it enjoys widespread acclaim on its home turf. Frog eye salad is the most popular non-turkey Thanksgiving recipe in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Wyoming, and the third-most popular in Utah. That’s largely thanks to the salad’s status as a classic among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who are also some of the country’s most stalwart lovers of Jell-O salad and sweet salads overall. Home cooks can reproduce the magic by going straight to the source with this frog eye salad recipe from the Mormon Mavens kitchen blog.

Glorified Rice

Perhaps the most conventional of the sweet salads—after all, just about every culture has a version of rice pudding—glorified rice nevertheless manages to stay resolutely Minnesotan. Made of cooked rice mixed with canned pineapple or mandarin oranges, mini marshmallows, and whipped cream or whipped topping, glorified rice embodies the creamy, gooey texture that Minnesotan cuisine is known for.

Interestingly enough, this sweet, creamy cloud partly owes its popularity to an unlikely predecessor: lutefisk, a Scandinavian staple consisting of dried whitefish that's pickled in lye until it’s gelatinous. Thanks to a wave of immigration in the mid-1800s, Upper Midwestern culture remains heavily Scandinavian, apparent in the state's present-day Lutheran and Catholic church cultures. It’s also apparent in the state's cuisine, which continues to feature lutefisk, as well as dishes that have similar gelatinous textures.

Scandinavian immigrants brought their own rice-pudding recipes with them to North America. Upon arrival in the Upper Midwest, they also made contact with the region’s wild rice, traditionally harvested by the area's Obijwe Native people, who consider the grain a gift from the Creator. Some glorified rice recipes meld these influences by substituting wild rice for conventional white rice.

If you, too, would like a taste of glory, try this recipe from the Farmer’s Almanac, which eschews maraschino cherries and canned pineapple for heavy cream, unflavored gelatin, and maple syrup.

We gave you the opening lines. You gave us inspired storytelling.

Inspiration can come from anywhere—a conversation overheard at the grocery store, a site you see while traveling, a story in the news. From these starting points, you never know what twists and turns a story could take. So, a few weeks ago when we gave you the opening lines from 10 Atlas Obscura stories and asked you to write something new from them, we had no idea what to expect.

We got a treasure trove of epic journeys and alien creatures, mysterious islands and everyday problems. The stories ranged from a few sentences to many pages long, and even a couple of poems thrown into the mix.

We’ve compiled a few of our favorite responses below. Some are full stories and some are excerpts (with full text available in our forums), but each one takes the opening line in a unique direction. If you have a story of your own you’d like to share, you can head over to our community forum as well.

Abbe Wiesenthal

Atlanta, Georgia

On the island of Tashirojima in the Miyagi Prefecture, the cats outnumber people, and the people like it that way. But on the other side of the world, there’s a small village where the people are outnumbered by a herd of vicious, bloodthirsty alpacas, and no one goes outside during the new moon.

On a small island in the Pacific Ocean, the residents cower in fear as massive casts of crabs take over their dwellings twice a month. The crabs lie in bed, waiting for the people to bring them large baskets of fish, barnacles, plants, snails, shrimp, and worms. Only after they are satiated do the invaders return to the sea.

In a part of one of Switzerland’s cantons, which I have agreed not to name, the population stays at home every other Tuesday between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. when the marmots and snow voles invade the town and devour everything in their path.

It’s hard to estimate the number of places where the people are outnumbered by local fauna; and there are those who swear that revealing the secret will bring on further attacks. I talked to a man would not reveal his birthplace, but shared the terrifying story of the dingoes who … well, it’s safe to say you’ve seen the movie and according to him “Doesn’t know it by ‘arf'”.

No one knows why these people suffer such tribulations, while others get along famously with their resident species. Scientists have been studying them for years, and some have also fallen victim to this phenomenon. A graduate student on one of the south Antarctic islands disappeared, having ignored his team’s warnings about the massive waddles of bitter, vengeful penguins who emerge when the temperature hits 11°C and take their toll.

On the island of Tashirojima in the Miyagi Prefecture, the cats outnumber people, and the people like it that way. I hope this continues, but to prepare for the inevitable day when the cats turn on them would not go amiss.

Atlas Obscura User ferroequus

Marimo might be the cutest plant on Earth. And the deadliest. The agency needed a fail-safe emissary to infiltrate the target and knew Marimo, pretty, petite, fit, and brilliant, would easily charm the advance guards and outwit the superiors. The agency charged with dissolving threats and seizing assets could not have found a more capable or unsettling executrix than Marimo, who knew the culture, spoke the language, and was conspicuously motivated. When she was recruited her unique skills were known to the agency and her work ethic and efficiency both impressed and disturbed them. Their choice was foregone even knowing they could face trust and containment issues with Marimo.

Mary Clark

St. Louis, Missouri

It’s said that not all who wander are lost, and that’s mostly true.

Except in my case. I found myself lost. Completely. All alone in the depths of Marrakesh, Morocco. This was the first time my sense of direction and phone lost power at the same time. How could this be? I go through little alleyways with colorful shops on both sides. They are selling everything from olives to leather handbags.

At first I was wondering through the Sulk, this is what they call the thousand year old shopping district. It is a beehive of little alleyways filled with people, shops, motorbikes and odors. The colors drew me in. I kept walking down one alley into the next thinking I knew where I was going. It wasn’t until I started to try and find my way out that I realized I was lost, in Morocco, hoping and praying I could find someone that spoke English.

Initially I wasn’t too worried. Don’t all roads lead to home? As it became clearer that I was in fact lost I began to feel that little bit of fear in the pit of my stomach. Why did the men suddenly seem so menacing? Their dark hair and eyes along with their deeply tanned skin did not help to calm me. All I could think about was the headline “Old Woman Lost In Medina in Morocco” and that old woman was me! [Keep reading.]

Benjamin M.S., age 7

"Dark Forest"

When someone goes in the dark forest they get lost and disappear. There are demons and ghosts. Whoever goes to the dark forest will never come back. We never discovered this out. Scientists have gone there but never came back! Lots of people go there but never ever come back! We ever go to the dark forest. All of us know to not go into the dark forest, you know what happens. Now you know the dark dark forest. It's scary and dark out in the dark forest. We don't know if there are more things out there. We need to discover more. The dark forest is dangerous. Remember, "It's said that not all who wander are lost, and that's mostly true." Don't go to the dark forest. Be careful out there. I hope you learn not to go into the dark forest.

Lorelai Gerard, age 13

Brooklyn, Iowa

It’s said that not all who wander are lost, and that’s mostly true. Apollo wasn’t lost. He knew where he was going. He just didn’t know exactly how to get there. He glanced at the picture he was holding again, of the vision he saw constantly. In his sleep, when he closed his eyes, or just out of the blue. At first the image of the building surrounded by sandy clouds had just seemed like something made by his imagination, a product of his fascination with geology and architecture. After seeing it on a constant basis and hearing voices telling him to go, however, he decided it was more of some sort of sign. So he left his house. He hadn’t even told anybody. Apollo lived in an old Victorian style house far away from the rest of society, with a beautiful view of the land around. He loved it there, but he felt he needed to go, so he did.

Apollo had been walking for about three days now. He’d brought a backpack filled with maps and blank paper to illustrate his own map, along with essentials like a sleeping bag and sustenance. Here he was, staring at the drawing he’d made of the palace looking building, wondering if he’d made a mistake. Maybe they weren’t visions. Maybe the image was just a creation of his mind that he was taking too seriously. The building didn’t seem like something that would still be around, and if it was it most likely would have been made into a museum or attraction of sorts. His mind swirled with a storm of reasons why this may not be a good idea, and yet he kept walking. Something inside of him, even though it was almost drowned out by the sea of pessimism, told him that he was doing the right thing. Somehow that was enough for him to want to continue. [Keep reading.]

Atlas Obscura user myrahope

In the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, a giant has lived quietly for the past 80,000 years. The giant, whom local residents will soon know by her preferred name of “Judy,” produces surprisingly deft woven mats and rugs, given her enormous hands, and has a penchant for word games. Unfortunately for her fellow players, her vocabulary is 80,000 years old.

Casey Lowe

Alexandria, Virginia

"Get Me Chase Holden"

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. Everything seemed normal but it was all fake. Instead of New York, the scene was playing out on the backlot of a studio in Hollywood.

I was working on the set of a movie as an extra with my friends Kendra, Pam, and Brian. We’d worked on probably a dozen films together and it was always fun hanging out with them. This was good because despite the long hours, there’s a lot of down time on a set. Every new scene requires the movement of tons of cameras, lights, and people. While this is going on the actors go to their trailers and us extras go to a holding area which may or may not have food, working toilets, and comfortable seating.

On this shoot, though, we’d hit the trifecta: snacks were available at what’s called “Craft Service,” there were ample restroom facilities, and the holding area actually had sofas. Soft, comfortable, beautiful sofas! After the second or third scene of the day we had about an hour and a half to kill so we sat around and talked about the latest overnight success in town, Shonda Jenkins, and how every agent in the City of Angeles was calling her with audition offers.

In her best “Studio Boss” voice, Pam was yelling, “Get me Shonda Jenkins!” which put us all in fits of laughter for a good twenty minutes. Brian just smiled with an arched brow like he always did, and said, “We should make someone up, and start a rumor that everyone is looking for a meeting with them.” [Keep reading.]

Hugh Eckert

Arlington, Virginia

"The Maidens of Sparta"

The maidens of Sparta spent long hours under the bright sun,
Their minds half on their games, half on the night
That waited for them, reward for a hot day done.

There torches glowed from doors half-shut but still in sight;
Within those rooms, musicians and cup-bearers lazed,
Their minds half on their games, half on the night

Soon to fill with dance, and strong red wine that dazed
Yet somehow brought the sharpness of a blade
To those dim rooms where musicians and cup-bearers lazed.

And in the lamplit swirl of song their plans are laid
For deeds of sweat and blood and laurel crown
That somehow brought the sharpness of a blade

To thoughts of future practice outside town-
For hearts and minds must train to gain success
In deeds of sweat and blood and laurel crown.

Another dawn—they rise to give their all, no less;
The Spartan maids spend long hours under the bright sun,
For hearts and minds must train, to gain the success
That waits for them, reward for a hot day done.

Researching traditional foods led them to the revelations of an archaeological dig in Kentucky.

In March, a few weeks before COVID-19 shut down the country, chef Nico Albert and her longtime mentee, chef Taelor Barton, met at Duet Restaurant + Jazz to discuss plans for their upcoming Native American dinners and culinary classes.

Each November for the past two years, Albert has turned the menu at Duet Restaurant + Jazz into full Native American fare. While the seasonal, New American food that Albert serves year round has made the 140-seat eatery one of Tulsa’s most beloved fine-dineries, it is this menu of contemporary Native dishes, available only during Native American Heritage Month, that truly stands out. Locals and regulars flock to the restaurant, and Cherokee and other tribal members come from as far away as Michigan or Seattle. The offerings—which include persimmon frybread pie made with Pawnee heirloom corn and crispy, sumac-crusted snapper with roasted squash, wild greens, sweet corn hazelnut sauce, and pickled blueberries—routinely sell out.

The women, both members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, were slated to lead historical-foraging and Spring Onion Dinner experiences about pre-colonial foodways and matriarchal roles, and cook suppers of traditional Cherokee foods for local museums and historical societies.

They were also discussing possibilities for this year’s November menu at Duet. (Barton may be a guest chef.) Of course, it should continue to feature contemporary Native American food, whose presence at a fine-dining restaurant remains rare and special. But might it also debut their effort to restore one of North America’s oldest regional indigenous cuisines—one that has been almost completely lost, and is rarely referenced outside the pages of archaeology journals?

Barton suggests doing at least one entrée—perhaps rabbit legs seasoned with dried sassafras leaves and braised with cedar fronds in wild sunflower oil, served over a bed of quinoa-esque pitseed goosefoot grains and the plant’s sautéed leaves (reminiscent of kale) and okra-like milkweed seed pods.

If that happens, it will be the first time such tastes have been publicly available in at least 1,000 years, and one more step toward their shared goal of launching a restaurant to showcase it and other historic Native foods.

Barton and Albert stumbled upon the ancient cuisine essentially by accident. The two met in 2011 at an event on the future of traditional Native American foods. Albert gave a talk arguing for a chef-led revitalization that would educate eaters, foster cultural awareness, and preserve foodways through use. An industry of tribal farmers, foragers, caterers, and restaurateurs could, for example, grow, sell, and serve dishes with wild rice, a cherished Native ingredient long grown along the Great Lakes but displaced by boaters and home owners who see it as a weed.

Barton, then a student at the Oklahoma State University School of Culinary Arts, was impressed.

“That was a turning point,” she says. The truth hit her hard: Undermined by displacement and centuries of cultural assimilation, indigenous foodways were careening toward extinction. The hope, which motivates a number of increasingly prominent Native chefs, was that creating a nation of diners interested in Native American food would provide resources to maintain them.

“We’ve inherited this rich, beautiful history centered in a deep respect for nature and the sustenance it provides,” says Albert, echoing the punchline from her 2011 talk. “Our traditional foodways are the embodiment of that relationship. To lose them is to lose the essence of our cultural identity.”

The women became friends, and Albert soon hired Barton to cook under her at the first of various Tulsa restaurants. They researched historic Native foodways, visited tribal elders to document culinary traditions, explored obscure cookbooks (such as 1951’s Cherokee Cooklore), and used what they learned to craft contemporized dishes.

By 2015, the two were putting on Native dinners for local non-profits, museums, and educational organizations. Regional chefs such as Brad Dry joined the effort, and Sean Sherman—who won a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2019 for his efforts to revitalize and boost awareness around indigenous food systems in a modern culinary context— encouraged them to join national discussions around defining Native American cuisine.

Attending events like 2018’s Native American Cuisine Symposium and the 2019 National Native Food Sovereignty Summit brought separate but mutual epiphanies: Albert and Barton realized most modern Native cuisines, including their own, are pastiche-like. Without formal precedents or pre-colonial records, chefs have to rely on clues from early European descriptions, old cookbooks, and extant tribal foodways from around North America.

“On one hand, that’s led to a fantastically creative culture of interpretation and cross-pollination,” says Albert. On the other, menus often pair foods from radically different cultures—like, say, Floridian Seminoles and Southwestern Navajos.

There was also a problem of mixing historical eras. Chefs like Sherman focused on decolonizing their cuisines by using only ingredients present in the Americas before 1492. Others featured adaptions stemming from colonial influences, displacement, and cultural assimilation. Like echoes of a lost heritage, the latter pointed to a land-based ethos of foraging, gardening, and seasonal ingredients. But the picture was murky at best.

Citing the success of hyper-regional modern cuisines, Albert and Barton wanted to do something more Cherokee-specific. They began to focus on pre-European foodways from traditional Cherokee lands in the central and southeastern Appalachian Mountains, and surrounding areas—territory where the Cherokee lived until they were forcibly relocated by the U.S. government over the Trail of Tears in the mid 1800s.

The chefs’ historical reconstruction began with scholarly books and papers, then calls and emails with historians, archaeologists, and paleoethnobotanists. They learned about iterations of Three Sisters farming methods, which had proliferated throughout what is now the eastern United States by about 1300. They discovered reclaimed varieties of indigenous heirloom corn, beans, squash, watermelon, and pumpkins.

Still, they wondered, what came before?

The question led Barton to scholars like David Morgan and Kristen Gremillion, and obscure discoveries in places like Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, a 29,000-acre canyon system in the Daniel Boone National Forest.

Before the Gorge finds, archaeologists “assumed that the peoples of this region just sat around passively, waiting for others to send them the gift of agriculture,” says Morgan, director of the National Park Service’s Southeast Archaeological Center. “But that simply wasn’t the case.”

Plant materials recovered by archaeologists in the Gorge in the 1980s and ‘90s led to a historical revision “that fundamentally alters how we think about indigenous peoples of the [precontact eastern U.S.],” says Morgan. A trove of ancient seeds debunked then-dominant theories “depicting early inhabitants as backwater nomads that didn’t acquire agriculture—and thus the markers of complex society—until after A.D. 1, when maize arrived from Mesoamerica.”

Gremillion, a paleoethnobotanist, chairs the Ohio State University department of anthropology and is the author of Ancestral Appetites: Foods in Prehistory. She started working in the Gorge around 1989, using techniques such as direct radiocarbon dating and high-magnification microscopy to study ancient caches of seeds, food stores, cooking refuse, and human feces. She found specimens buried under massive stone outcroppings and in caves—all in remarkable condition.

“We found things like 3,000-year-old sunflower heads and baskets full of seeds,” says Gremillion, who compares the digs to opening storage vaults. The finds were unprecedented, and old vanguard archaeologists were dismissive. “They said the materials couldn’t possibly be so old.”

Gremillion’s research proved them wrong; the region’s indigenous peoples had been farming for more than 5,000 years. The work helped establish the Eastern Woodlands as an independent center of prehistoric plant domestication and agricultural development—alongside areas like southeast Asia, Mexico, and the Fertile Crescent.

“The importance of these finds cannot be overestimated,” says Morgan. They pointed to stable residential patterns, ideas about land ownership, and developed economies. To tribes that lived in semi-permanent villages within defined territories and grew canny agricultural complexes of crops.

Of particular interest to Barton was the nature of those crops. All were native to southeastern North America and had been refined for culinary purposes. The majority—along with the cuisine they underpinned—had been lost to history. Today, most are considered weeds.

“These gardens were radically different from those described by early Europeans,” says Gremillion. So too, the foods that came from them.

Barton wasn’t just learning about a few forgotten ingredients—she was rediscovering an entire food culture. When ancient Greeks and people around the Mediterranean were pressing olives into olive oil, tribes in the Eastern Woodlands were cultivating sunflowers and marsh elder to make cooking oil. Like rice farmers in ancient China, the ancestors of the Cherokee grew amaranth, maygrass, erect knotweed, and barley for pseudo-cereals and grains. Hog peanut and other bean-like fruits played a role similar to soybeans. Sugar was unknown in the Americas, so sweet tastes came from a slew of berries and fruits, including American black nightshade, savory ground cherries, and other interesting oddities. (Or at least they seem odd today.)

While squash, sunflowers, and berries remained staples, other crops were replaced by foods like corn, beans, and tomatoes from South and Central America. Archaeologists speculate they were abandoned because harvesting the tiny seeds and grains was tedious and labor-intensive. But that doesn’t mean the older foods weren’t tasty. Basically, says Gremillion, the new foods were easier to grow and brought better yields, which is why they eventually dominated agriculture throughout parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia, replacing longtime local staples.

Barton recognized the lost foods’ culinary potential immediately: It was as if, in a world without olive oil, where the only olive trees were wild ones, she was the only chef learning about the ingredients used a millennium ago around the Mediterranean. She shared her research with Albert, who found it equally exciting. Combined with other Eastern Woodlands traditions—like nose-to-tail butchery techniques, meats from wild game, unique approaches to fermented foods, and the use of rare varieties of heirloom vegetables, fruits, and spices—the crops could lay the foundations for an unprecedented historic cuisine.

Barton says fully relaunching the cuisine will take time. As with other rare native foods, “the biggest problem you face with something like this is sourcing [ingredients].”

For instance, while pitseed goosefoot—sometimes called lambsquarters, or pigweed—produces broccoli-like flowers and quinoa-esque seeds, you won’t find it at farmers’ markets. “You’re having to track down the seeds, establish demand, convince farmers to grow these plants that haven’t been grown for food in centuries—and all of that’s going on at more-or-less the same time,” says Barton.

To make it happen, Albert and Barton are developing partnerships with local Native American farmers and chefs, and organizations such as the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank, Pawnee Seed Preservation Project, and Sean Sherman’s North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems program. Barton is talking with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians about founding a specialty farming collective. The work is continuing through the pandemic, and the chefs are confident it will eventually yield a restaurant.

“The response to Native American items on the menu at Duet has been incredible,” says Albert. “Most people have never seen or experienced anything like this. And it’s really encouraging, because, once they’ve had a taste, they typically want more.”

Albert and Barton plan to use events like Duet’s Native American Heritage Month dinners to prime the waters for, and continue telling the story of, their ancestral Eastern Woodlands cuisine.

“Native dishes always come with a story,” says Albert. At Duet, she trains servers to teach patrons about ingredients and traditional uses. For instance, an appetizer of smoked trout and manoomin fritters (made with indigenous wild rice) topped with cranberry relish and finished with a drizzle of charred scallion vinaigrette is prefaced by an explanation.

“Manoomin, which literally translates to ‘good berry or grain,’ is the word Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes region use for wild rice,” says Albert. The long, dark brown to black pseudo-grain has been used for upward of 12,000 years. It’s sourced from tribal agricultural cooperative Red Lake Nation Foods.

Barton hopes to partner with Albert to expand the approach at an Eastern Woodlands-themed restaurant. She envisions pre-fixe meals that are both educational and reminiscent of a small ceremony.

“On one hand, it’s about recalling the symbiotic relationship we once had with the land, plants, and animals that sustain us,” and trying to replicate that in the context of a modern restaurant, says Barton. On the other, “we want to teach people about these incredible traditions and foodways.”

The meals will help tell the story of one of North America’s oldest regional cuisines—and transport eaters deep into the past, to 1492 and beyond. As Cherokee, the women say such meals offer a way to celebrate, affirm, and change perceptions around the ingenuity of their ancestors.

All you need is a good imagination. And a whole lot of patience.

In 2003, in the Wakayama Prefecture outside of Osaka, Japan, 51-year-old schoolteacher Kimiko Hirahata attended a festival for the local technical high schools, seeking inspiration for her lesson plans. Hirahata taught her students in a variety of media, from pottery and painting to lamp-making and calligraphy. But what appeared at the festival that day was something completely different.

“When I saw a doll carrying tea,” Hirahata says, “I was amazed.”

The doll was a karakuri—a traditional automaton. Like many other karakuri, the one Hirahata saw at the festival was entirely wooden, but also mechanical. A system of concealed gears (also wooden) within the doll allowed it, when cranked, to automatically perform a programmed task: in this case, to serve tea.

“When someone took the cup from the doll, it stopped. When they put the cup back on the saucer in its hands, the doll turned back on and moved to the start again,” Hirahata says. “I wanted to know the mechanism of it.”

The karakuri, as it turns out, wasn’t the work of any students but that of a local furniture-maker and autodidactic automaton-builder. Shigeo Tanimoto, then 68, lived about 10 minutes away. Inspired, Hirahata promptly headed over to pay him a visit.

Karakuri dolls got their start in Japan’s Edo period (which spanned the 17th to the 19th centuries). Perhaps the most popular were the “Zashiki” karakuri, which were employed for piquant parlor tricks, such as schlepping tea. Similar to Rube Goldberg machines in the meticulous time spent in their creation—and the rather frivolous ends those means achieve—the karakuri are a one-stop shop, with the capacity to conduct themselves and complete a task. But just one task.

For Hirahata and Tanimoto, it took years of commitment to make, ultimately, a very simple product. “I visited him to make the doll every Saturday. All parts were made by hand,” Hirahata says. “Furthermore, there is a rainy season in Japan. During this season or on rainy days, we couldn’t carve the wood because of the high humidity.”

The first doll they made—another tea doll—had five gears at its core, allowing it to move in an uncanny-valley manner. Hirahata estimates that it took them 20 days to make, working four hours a day. The body took 13 days to carve and prepare; the head, face, and hair another 17. The kimono alone required five days of construction. And so on. When Hirahata and Tanimoto started building the doll, it was May 2003. When they had finished, it was nearly 2007.

“I think that we took a long time to do everything,” she says.

The project was also rife with difficulties. Connecting the gears was a delicate process; too many turns on the crank and the gears would jam. Getting the automaton to pivot properly was also tricky, requiring a rubber band to operate smoothly. Every time the rubber band broke, Hirahata had to deconstruct the entire doll to replace it.

After the tea automaton they built a wooden archer, whose “engine”—again, wooden gears—was spooled up in a glass case on which the figure lay. As a second doll, stationed in the aforesaid case, mimicked the turning of the automatic crank, the archer on top of the box would nock and shoot arrows that had been custom-made for it. The archer karakuri took about three years to complete.

These days Tanimoto, now 85, is working on non-automatonic projects, like a lion mask. Once that’s done he and Hirahata—having formed an unofficial partnership—will spend time building traditional Japanese furniture together.

“He told me that he wants to make a writing doll if he tries to make another mechanical doll,” says Hirahata, who is now 68 (the same age Tanimoto was when the two first met). “When he tries to make it, of course I’ll try it with him too.”

The monument in Birmingham, Alabama, became a flashpoint in the fight for racial justice.

Last week, as protests against police violence and systemic racism were spreading across the country, activists took aim at monuments around the American South. Some toppled a monument in Linn Park in Birmingham, Alabama, and covered the neighboring Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument, a five-story obelisk, in graffiti. They communicated their distress in red and black letters, scrawling #BLM, the “Black Lives Matter” hashtag, across the monument’s base. They climbed the obelisk and tried to topple it, too. They wanted the thing to come down.

More than 150 years after the Civil War, symbols of the Confederacy, and thus of racism and violence against African Americans, remain visible in public spaces and in the names of highways, bodies of water, and other places named after Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and “Stonewall” Jackson, among others. By the Southern Poverty Law Center’s count, at least 114 plaques, statues, or other symbols have been removed since 2015. (The organization began tracking these figures after a white supremacist murdered nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, the New York Times reported.) Even so, more than 770 Confederate monuments remained as of February 2019, with the largest number in Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama.

The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, in Birmingham, has been a particular flashpoint. A few years ago, the city built 12-foot-tall plywood screens around the base of the monument to hide celebratory inscriptions, such as "The manner of their death was the crowning glory of their lives.” But the Alabama Supreme Court unanimously ordered the screens to come down, NPR reported, deciding that the barriers violated the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which protects monuments that have stood on public property for at least four decades. This includes monuments to the Confederacy. The cornerstone of the Birmingham monument was laid in 1894, and the structure was dedicated in 1905.

Many monuments—Confederate and otherwise—are obelisks, and fit into a longer American tradition of borrowing gravitas from faraway places and the distant past. “In the 1800s, America was desperate to look like it had been around for a while,” the journalist Kat Escher once observed in Smithsonian. Historically, in ancient Egypt, “obelisks served as statements of political power, as an expression of a ruler’s ability to rearrange the past, and as victory monuments and symbols of elite self-promotion,” writes the archaeologist Paul Rehak. That was appealing to the builders of a young nation. Writing for Vanity Fair, Bruce Handy recounted how, for American designers and architects in centuries past, Egyptian-inspired structures evoked ideas of “permanence, stability…and the type of solid, well-built structure that remains standing through the ages.” (No wonder the Washington Monument, which was built between 1848 and 1884, is shaped like an obelisk, too.)

On May 31, as anger and grief swirled and protests targeted the Confederate Sailors and Soldiers monument, the Egyptologist Sarah Parcak tweeted a winking-but-informative guide to pulling down an obelisk. She emphasized that she meant the ones that “might be masquerading as a racist monument”—not the Washington Monument, and certainly not bonafide antiquities. Parcak wrote that it was all “hypothetical,” but added, “There might be one just like this in downtown Birmingham! What a coincidence. Can someone please show this thread to the folks there.” (She couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.)

Obelisks look simple—tall, skinny rectangles with triangles on top—but are famously hard to wrangle. In ancient Egypt, they were often painstakingly quarried in a single piece, hauled off on sledges, and loaded into sturdy barges; they often weighed hundreds of tons and stood dozens of feet high. (When an Egyptian obelisk later traveled to Central Park, it is said to have wound through the streets of 19th-century Manhattan at just 97 feet per day.) The heft makes them hard to topple, so Parcak recommended looping metal chains around the obelisk and affixing rope to those chains. Two lines of people would need to flank the obelisk, she wrote—maybe 40 people, total, for every 10 feet of monument. Each row would need to stand about 30 feet from the base, and then start rocking back and forth. She included a hand-drawn, “rough schematic” of two groups of stick figures apparently playing tug o’ war with an obelisk, which was labeled “racist monument.”

In the end, protestors didn’t dismantle the Birmingham monument—the city did. Earlier this week, crews took it down, piece by piece. Cranes lifted the heavy stone onto the bed of a truck, and crews laid the segments on their sides. Public information officers from the office of Birmingham’s mayor, Randall Woodfin, did not respond to Atlas Obscura’s requests for comment about where the pieces of the monument would go, or who would become the custodian of them. The state’s attorney general has already filed a lawsuit against the city for violating the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, and the city has been charged a $25,000 fine for removing the monument. Meanwhile, other symbols of America’s troubled past stand as reminders of injustices that are as old as the country itself.

Being fit and chivalric is as much a mental state as a physical one.

If you were trying to get ahead in 15th-century France, being a renowned warrior was a pretty good way to do it. Not only was there the fame and prestige of being a storied fighter; there was also the repute that came with following a chivalric code, and conducting oneself gallantly.

It’s hard to say whether fighting or manners are more difficult to master, but the former certainly leaves its subject more breathless. And since breathlessness is a goal of strenuous exercise, it’s worth revisiting what knights did to get fit in the Middle Ages.

Though we’re no longer contained in metal suits, we are confined to our homes. And while both are constraining, suits of armor—contrary to popular perception—actually offered a full range of motion.

That's not the only fact worth setting straight when it comes to knightly vigor (and vim!). There’s also the longstanding myth that knights had to be hoisted onto their horses by medieval cranes, due to the weight of their armor. In actuality, any swordfighter worth their salt could vault themselves onto a horse’s back solo, without so much as a squire to help.

Most movies set in medieval times aren’t very helpful when it comes to understanding a real knight’s regimen. Better, then, to delve into some of the documents of the day. In the High Middle Ages, few books dominated the cultural consciousness as much as Secreta Secretorum, or “Secret of Secrets” (clearly either a poorly kept one or a shrewd bit of medieval marketing). A pseudo-Aristotelian manuscript, Secreta Secretorum explores a range of topics relevant to the medieval state, knighthood chief among them.

Using the Galenic concept of humors as a foundation for its espousals on knightly health, the manuscript describes how a knightly body’s “thiknesse of the sholdres and of the bak, with a brode brest, shewith worthynesse ... [and] hardynesse.”

For knights like Boucicaut—a famed French military leader whose real name was Jean II Le Maingre—fitness was a means to an end: having a body that was honed for war. Boucicaut traveled from Prussia to the Ottoman Empire, fighting in conflicts that helped define the map of medieval Europe. And he couldn’t have done so without a stringent, self-imposed exercise circuit, ideal for someone traipsing around in a clattering metal outfit.

His routine is repeatable today—if you have a spare suit of armor. The fit French fighter insisted on doing his exercises—vaulting onto a horse, performing somersaults, climbing walls, and running long distances—while wearing what he would wear in combat.

To practice using his weapons, he employed an extra-heavy arsenal—not unlike the way a baseball batter uses a weighted ring (called a doughnut) before stepping up to the plate. In both cases, the idea is to make swinging the real thing—a sword or a bat—a lighter, faster experience.

Boucicaut’s most astonishing fitness feat, though, was scaling a ladder while clad in his 60-pound suit of armor, taking each rung with both hands at the same time, without his feet to support him.

This may all sound pretty esoteric. But with the exception of the horse, it’s not too hard to dig up the tools you would need to get in some knightly exercise at home. A weight belt, for example, is a modern analog to armor. And ladders, of course, have never gone out of style.

The true test, though, is your endurance. But at this point you’ve made it through at least a couple of months of global tumult (and this story). Perhaps it’s worth some more pain for future gain.

The biggest blow to beer since Prohibition.

This year is the 100th anniversary of America going dry. In 1920, some 1,300 breweries in the United States faced the onset of nationwide Prohibition—a ban on alcohol sales that many expected to be repealed quickly, but instead lasted until 1933. When it ended, less than a quarter of those breweries remained in operation, and, although new brewers opened up shop, many of the survivors failed in the following years, while the rest were absorbed by major manufacturers like Anheuser-Busch. Not until 2016 did the number of breweries in the U.S. top 1873’s record of 4,131.

Today, the coronavirus is exacting the largest impact on American beer since Prohibition, and the pandemic will similarly shape this country’s beer story—an insight that is guiding Smithsonian curator and beer historian Theresa McCulla, who is already working to document this pivotal moment.

By March 23, McCulla, who curates the American Brewing History Initiative at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, had put out a call via Twitter. Like her fellow curators, who are asking Americans to donate grocery lists, letters from patients, homemade masks, and other signs of the pandemic’s effects on everyday life, she asked brewers, bar managers, and beer fans to save material that captures what the beer industry is experiencing: packaging and labels like Hackensack Brewing Co.’s limited-edition quarantine cans, menus geared toward delivery and curbside pickup, hand sanitizer and other alternative products made by breweries, and business records. McCulla is also recording oral histories.

In short, McCulla is gathering the sort of artifacts and documentation she has used to study Prohibition so that she can do the same with the pandemic.

While it’s impossible to predict how COVID-19 will change the beer industry, she is already thinking about the story these objects may one day tell at the Smithsonian. “The means to protect ourselves [from the virus] is to withdraw, in terms of gathering in person,” McCulla muses. “The way craft beer has grown in the last couple of decades is to emphasize the importance of people gathering in taprooms.” Breweries can make and sell beer, but on-premise consumption is a huge chunk of their revenue.

The effect of losing those sales can already be seen: In April, a Brewers Association survey of small breweries found that a combined 58 percent said they would have to permanently close if social-distancing measures remained equally strict for anywhere from one week to three months. The same survey found that 66 percent of brewery employees had been laid off or furloughed.

As breweries attempt to make up lost revenue, regulations formed during Prohibition’s repeal often dictate whether they can deliver beer, ship it, and sell it across state lines.

“The federal government left it up to states to decide how to repeal the Prohibition,” McCulla explains. “That’s why, to this day, you can go somewhere like Las Vegas and buy alcohol 24/7, 365 days a year, but in other places, you may not be able to buy alcohol on Sundays.” A huge hurdle of the lockdown is that in addition to coming up with ways to boost sales, breweries often have to lobby local governments to be able to act on those plans.

Bart Watson, the Chief Economist for the Brewers Association, doesn’t think the pandemic will shape regulations as dramatically as Prohibition, but he does believe changes different states are making could stick around in some form. “We’re already seeing a shift in the short-term regulatory environment, with greater freedoms for breweries and off-premise operators for things like delivery and to-go,” says Watson. “It has the potential to set in motion a wave of different legislative structures because of the need for direct-market access for small producers.”

During Prohibition, breweries including Coors, Yuengling, Anheuser-Busch, and Pabst Brewing Company pivoted to make near-beer, soft drinks, infant formula, frozen eggs, ice cream, and ceramics. Many survived by leasing their spaces to other companies and industries—surviving on real-estate holdings that small, independent brewers lacked.

But McCulla is heartened by the increased support that exists for the craft industry now, and the inspiring creativity on display. In New Orleans, Urban South Brewery won a bid to make 50,000 bottles for the state’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness—it is one of many breweries and distilleries making hand sanitizer. In Milwaukee, Good City Brewing took over a vacant bank for drive-thru sales. “It’s been an absolute joy to watch our team roll up their sleeves, adapt, and execute a completely new business model,” says co-founder David Dupee. In San Francisco, Anchor Brewing Company partnered with Bay Area artist Jeremy Fish to post a version of the San Francisco flag on boarded-up restaurants and bars with a QR code that directs people to donate to the United States Bartenders Guild. In Brooklyn, Threes Brewing has taken its eclectic events lineup online and created an online store and its own delivery system.

A bottle of hand sanitizer from Urban South, a photo of Good City’s drive-thru, an art print from Anchor: These are the kinds of items McCulla will collect over the following months and years to tell the story of the pandemic and beer. As she does, she will have to determine which objects best tell that story and preserve our experiences. “That’s the great challenge and art of being a curator,” says McCulla, “trying to judge what those items are and how we can take care of them.”

In 1920 the "bad-man rendezvous" of Jackson, Wyoming, elected an all-female government. Will it be another hundred years till that happens again?

Picture, for a moment, Kamala Harris cleaning up a territory known for horse thieves and train bandits, Elizabeth Warren boosting the treasury tenfold, and Amy Klobuchar squaring off against her own husband in an election. Now imagine all these women running on a ticket together, throw in two more of your favorite female politicos, then pop the bubbly (or mountain moonshine) for their blowout victory.

That’s essentially what happened, on a much smaller scale, a century ago in Jackson, Wyoming. The 2020 presidential election may have given us an unprecedented number of female candidates—six in the Democratic primary—but 1920 yielded one of America’s earliest female-run governments.

This spring marks the 100th anniversary of the election of the “petticoat rulers,” the name given to the ladies who took over Jackson, the notoriously lawless town. On May 11, 1920, the all-female ticket—with Grace Miller as mayor and Rose Crabtree, Mae Deloney, Faustina Haight, and Genevieve Van Vleck as council members—claimed victory against an all-male roster. The election drew the most voters the town had seen at that point (Jackson was incorporated in 1914), and in many cases, the women bested their opposite-gender opponents by 2-to-1. Rose Crabtree even toppled her husband, Henry, to claim her spot on the council.

“Of course they knew the significance of the moment on some level,” says Jim Rooks, great-grandson of Genevieve Van Vleck and a high-school social-studies teacher in Jackson today. “But I don’t think they ever could’ve fathomed that 100 years later people would still be celebrating the event.”

“It’s a story that Jackson is really proud of and has been telling since the women were elected,” says Morgan Jaouen, executive director of the Jackson Hole Historical Society and Museum. Once the museum reopens this summer—it’s been closed since March 16 due to coronavirus—Miller’s jacket and side saddle will be on display as part of an exhibit called “Mountains to Manuscripts,” which highlights Wyoming’s rich history of female writers.

(Jaouen assembled a petticoat curatorial crew herself, enlisting only women to work on the project. It was set to close this spring but will likely remain in place through March 2021—something of a silver lining caused by coronavirus reshuffling).

The petticoat story still inspires local pride, but back in 1920, news of a lady-led government made waves from coast to coast. The New York Evening Herald ran the headline “Women Rule Western City; Gun Play Thru,” while the Los Angeles Times reported “Woman Mayor Running Former Bad-Man Rendezvous.” As far away as London, The Daily Chronicle trumpeted a “Town Ruled by Women. Would-Be Counciller [sic] Defeated by His Own Wife.” (For the record, Henry Crabtree is said to have taken his defeat in stride.)

The general consensus among newspapers at the time was that with women in power, Jackson would no longer enable a kind of Wild West criminality the area was known for: bands of horse thieves, fatal barroom brawls, gold miner murders. Though most of its citizens were law abiding, the town of Jackson, which is the center of Jackson Hole valley, had a reputation for being an outlaw refuge, thanks to its isolated mountain setting.

Jackson’s Hole Courier put it this way in 1920: “Whenever a serious crime was committed between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast, it was pretty safe to guess that the man responsible for it was either headed for Jackson’s Hole or already had reached it.”

Even if purported gun play was “thru,” at least one bandit from the crime-riddled region didn’t seem to mind. When the women went on to win a second term a year later—this time by a 3-to-1 margin—Ed Trafton, a convicted stagecoach robber fresh from prison, sent a congratulatory letter to Miller. “I believe your little city has the distinction of being the first in the U.S. to elect its city government of women,” he wrote. “It not only shows the confidence placed in its intelligent women, but the progressive intelligence of its citizens. Hurrah for Jackson, WY.”

Actually, Grace Miller’s group wasn’t the country’s first all-female town council; Oskaloosa, Kansas, elected one in 1888, and Kanab, Utah, welcomed its own in 1912. But Jackson’s was perhaps the most famous.

That’s in large part due to timing: Ladies in politics was big news in 1920, the year the 19th Amendment was ratified and women across the country finally won the right to vote. (Wyoming had actually granted suffrage over 50 years earlier, in 1869—the first state to do so, thereby earning the nickname the Equality State.)

Jackson’s all-female town council was also exemplary in appointing only women to fill remaining government roles. Marta Winger became the town clerk, Edna Huff the health officer, and Viola Lunbeck the treasurer, while Pearl Williams—a five-foot-tall, 22-year-old dynamo—nabbed the position of marshal.

“She says that a while ago, she killed three men and buried them herself and that she hasn’t had no trouble with anybody since,” reported Jackson’s Hole Courier in May 1921 of Williams’ time as marshal.

In reality, Williams, whose pre-marshal résumé included only one job (soda squirt), spent most of her time keeping swine and cattle out of the town square. “I had a horse, so [the all-women council] thought I could keep the cows out of town,” Williams (who became Hupp by marriage) told her nephew in a 1983 interview. The rest she played up for the papers, though she did occasionally have a prisoner in her one-room jail.

What wasn’t exaggerated was the effectiveness of Mayor Miller’s government over the course of its three-year tenure. Within a fortnight, the women raised the town coffers from $200 to $2,000 by rounding up money due (the previous male leaders hadn’t bothered to actually collect taxes). They created a more concrete town square by grading the surrounding streets and installing electric lights. Mindful that Jackson needed a proper place to mourn, the ladies (all described as “councilmen” in the official minutes) bought the title to a 40-acre plot that became Aspen Hill Cemetery and built a road leading to the graveyard. They also instituted a bit of civility by prohibiting cattle grazing in public areas (thanks, of course, to the help of Williams), as well as the launching of firecrackers and other explosives.

“I remember my grandma describing her mother’s, Genevieve’s, expression that they needed to ‘settle up this place,’” says Rooks, explaining that the phrase comes from homesteading. “If you got a homestead, you had to settle it up; you had to improve it.”

This pragmatism may help explain how the women took over Jackson in the first place. “There was a practical approach to it: We need this, and we’ll do it ourselves,” says Michelle Rooks, another Van Vleck descendant (and Jim’s sister).

And yet, despite proof of petticoat success, Grace Miller’s government didn’t exactly set a precedent. Jaouen points out that Jackson didn’t have another female council member until the 1980s. Nor did the town elect another female mayor until 2001, when Jeanne Jackson became the executive. Sara Flitner, elected for a two-year term in 2014, was Jackson’s only other woman mayor.

“I do think [the petticoat rulers are] an inspirational story for young girls and for women,” says Jaouen. “But it did not set a standard or a path forward to where this became normal and accepted. I think women still have to work really hard to be in positions of leadership and power.”

Wyoming as a whole has had a tough time with gender representation in recent years. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, when it comes to women serving in the state legislature, the Equality State ranks 48th.

As for why the political gains of the 1920s didn’t continue to build, Jaouen says you have to do a deeper dive into why the petticoat rulers were elected in the first place. The answer, she says, is quite nuanced. Rather than a sweeping call to feminism, the all-women government was born of circumstance. Even though they ran against men, the women were elected to do a job that wasn’t particularly popular at the time.

“People were focused on other things, like farming and just trying to make a living,” says Jaouen. “They didn’t necessarily have time for civic duty.”

Statewide, experts theorize that women’s diminished role in politics over the last century is due in part to Wyoming’s shift from pioneering territory to settled state. When Grace Miller’s group took office, homesteading, which would last until 1927, was still a viable way to earn land. During that period, male attention was focused elsewhere, away from government roles. That’s, of course, in addition to blatant sexism and a belief that women shouldn’t lead.

Like Jaouen, Michelle Rooks struggles to reconcile what happened in 1920 with the century that followed. “Sometimes I discount what this meant,” Michelle says of the petticoat government. “And you know, maybe they weren’t politically motivated, but think about what it means.” But she quickly follows up her marveling with a question: “That happened 100 years ago, and we still have only had two female mayors following that … what’s that all about?”

While petticoat rule feels like a flash in the pan, ghosts of the all-woman government remain in Jackson today. Grace Miller’s ranch still stands and is part of the National Elk Refuge. Genevieve Van Vleck’s former home has become a restaurant, Café Genevieve. And a replica of the hotel that Rose and Henry Crabtree owned is now a retail space called Crabtree Corner (look for the Häagen-Dazs).

Additionally, a locally iconic photo of the 1920 town council, snapped on Van Vleck’s front porch, hangs in bars, restaurants, and grocery stores around town.

In the grand scheme of American politics, the 100th anniversary of the petticoat rulers is a reminder that momentum is never guaranteed—a lesson to keep in mind as we come off our most diverse presidential primary in history. And on a smaller scale, the story of Grace Miller and her lady gang illustrates how female-pioneered pragmatism helped tame a disorderly mountain town. It’s a legend in how the West was won—by women.

1,550 and counting.

Scott Wiener thinks that putting a pizza in a pizza box is a terrible idea. “It traps all the steam,” he complains. “It's the same reason you don't take fresh bread and put it into a plastic bag, because if you do that, you trap all the moisture and it gets soggy.”

There’s a deep irony there, considering that Wiener owns the world’s largest collection of pizza boxes. He’s held the title since 2013, when the Guinness Book of World Records listed his collection of 595 boxes from around the world. Unlike most pizza boxes, which end up soaked through with grease and crammed into trash bins, his boxes are pristine.

Throughout a decade spent accumulating pizza packaging, Wiener’s hobby has attracted intense interest. Though he’s also the founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours and the non-profit Slice Out Hunger, Wiener dryly notes that “people more often want to [talk about] the pizza-box collection than anything else I do.” But next week, he’ll be certifying his title once more. This time, he has 1,550 boxes.

“Give or take,” he says with a smile.

In the New Jersey town where he grew up, there was some good pizza, and “some really crappy stuff,” but nothing particularly memorable, says Wiener. But recently, stuck at home during the COVID-19 lockdown, he found himself paging through diaries from the early 2000s. “I didn't write about anything but pizza,” he says with awe.

At the time, he didn’t have a food career. He went from job to job in the music industry until a unique gig let him pursue his pizza passion. With room and board handled by caretaking duties on a historic New York boat, the Yankee Ferry, he suddenly had the financial freedom to quit his job. When he wasn’t showing visitors around the 1907 ferry, he spent his free time dragging the boat’s owners to dry land to sample pizza spots around New York City. He soon wondered if he could combine tours and his love of pizza, and founded Scott’s Pizza Tours. He has now been “professionally obsessed with pizza since 2008,” he says.

But the journey to the world’s largest pizza-box collection started in New Jersey, when Wiener spent much of 2009 rounding the state to choose its best pizzerias with Peter Genovese, food writer for Newark’s Star-Ledger. In Genovese’s Munchmobile, a van topped with a gigantic fake hot dog, Wiener and other readers visited 333 pizzerias. “Visiting so many places, you start to notice differences,” he says. He fixated on the pizza boxes. “Pizza boxes are not all the same, and that means they’re interesting,” he says.

One pizzeria they visited sported a box from the distributor Roma Foods. “It said ‘Tour of Italy,’ and it had a picture of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence,” he remembers. Enticingly, the side of the box said it was “Volume Two.” Wiener pauses to mime a gasp. “It was like, ‘Volume Two?’ What’s One, and is there a Volume Three and Four?”

“Obviously, this was collectible,” he adds. “But I don’t think anybody else took the bait.”

In 2010, his collection kicked off, during his second year of running a fundraiser that donated money from dollar-slice pizza sales to hunger-relief organizations. While Slice Out Hunger has been a non-profit since 2015, back then, its success was not so assured. “Foolishly, I thought, ‘We need a reason for people to show up to this thing,’” Wiener remembers. “I forgot that dollar slices of pizza would be enough.”

So, he put out a call for interesting pizza boxes. At the event, he attached them to the venue’s white walls like paintings in a museum. But afterwards, the boxes kept coming, from people who heard about his collection. “I get packages every week,” he says.

Over Zoom, from his Brooklyn apartment, he digs through a sliding tower of boxes to show me his treasures. “Someone sent me this out of nowhere,” he says, tilting a tiny McDonald’s-branded pizza box towards his screen. “I don’t even know how she got my address.” The box is a remnant of when the burger brand jumped on the pizza bandwagon in the ‘90s. Another box, from Pizza Hut in the United Kingdom, is made of cardboard but can serve as a projector with the addition of a smartphone.

One Italian pizza box he owns is decorated in full color like an oil painting—the eerily detailed face of the baker on its lid reminds Wiener of George Clooney. But such individualistic boxes aren’t the norm, as many mom-and-pop pizza joints buy boxes from wholesale distributors who largely stick to a few clip art-esque motifs: the chef making an A-ok gesture, Italian monuments, or happy cooks in chef’s whites.

Designs change from generation to generation, and even from region to region. One box Wiener shows me is a "Chicago folder." It’s designed to be dismantled and lay flat, making it easier to scoop up slices of the city’s deep-dish pizza. On the East Coast, the solid Walker-style pizza box is the norm, held together with a thick cardboard lip in the front of the box.

Despite their differences, the material of choice is corrugated cardboard. That’s only as of the 1960s, Wiener notes. Before that, many pizzas were considered a baked good, and bakeries plopped them in floppy pastry boxes. Even earlier, they were simply sheathed in paper bags. But when pizzas got bigger and sold in greater volume, Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s, championed the thick corrugated cardboard box, which was sturdier and could be stacked.

Since then, pizza box manufacturers haven’t wavered too much from the standard square. But Wiener has some interesting prototypes in his collection, including Apple Inc.’s bespoke pizza box for employees, shaped like a round, white clamshell with a hinge, and a flappy, inflatable pizza bag from Denmark. But he doesn’t expect either style to take off soon.

“Pizzerias are notoriously not good at changing things,” he says. During the pandemic, he’s noticed, delivery-focused parlors have done well, while those that historically have relied on dine-in service have struggled.

Wiener himself has had to adjust. He’s making his own pies, but missing physical shops. “The people and the smells and everything else,” he says. Instead of his in-person pizza tours around New York City, he’s moved to offering online pizza-history classes and pizza-making tutorials nearly every night. Plus, according to Wiener, Slice Out Hunger, in collaboration with the pizza delivery app Slice, has sent more than 25,000 pizzas to front-line health care workers and first responders around the country. "When I hang up, I'm going to order tomorrow's pizzas," he says, noting that they'll be headed to dozens of hospitals.

He’s currently looking for more volunteers to call health-care centers to ask if they’d like some pizza relief. And hopefully he’ll get them. But when it comes to collecting pizza boxes, he’s a community of one. “There are zero other people who collect these boxes,” he says wistfully. “There's no one saying, ‘Oh, I've got five McDonald's boxes, I'll trade you for that Disney box.’”

Join Gastro Obscura and Scott Wiener on Saturday, June 13, 2020, for an online pizza party and a virtual tour of the world's most unusual pizza boxes. Register here.

They "were essentially stuck in their bunks for the whole winter."

It was a clear, summer day in the Antarctic when Lizzie Meek saw the penguins lie down. All around the historic expeditionary hut at Cape Adare, penguins dropped to their stomachs, beaks pointed toward the wind.

“So, it's really quite obvious that they're getting ready for something,” recalled Meek, a conservator for the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZAHT). That something turned out to be a summer storm with winds that reached over 70 miles an hour.

Meek and her colleagues had reached the rocky peninsula traveling by plane and helicopter. The nearest humans were 250 miles away on the Italian Antarctic base. All the group could do was ride out the storm inside the century-old wooden hut they had come to restore.

In 1899, 10 men on an expedition led by Anglo-Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink rode out an entire Antarctic winter in the tiny structure, which they’d assembled from prefabricated segments. Photos from the time show snow up to the eaves. Inside, the men not only lived but also worked in a darkroom and taxidermy studio on the expedition’s mission to document the continent.

“The only private space his men had was their own bunk,” says Meek. Some were enclosed by a sliding panel, as on a whaling ship. The size of the hut meant that they “were essentially stuck in their bunks for the whole winter.”

For decades after the original expeditions, this hut and others like it sat mostly full of snow and ice, which had the effect of preserving them long beyond their intended life-span. But the structures, many of which were dug out again starting in the 1960s, had still deteriorated. The restoration work, currently undertaken by heritage trust teams from New Zealand and the U.K., involves shoring up the huts, weighed down by snow and ice and weathered by the Antarctic winds, and attending to the objects inside.

Meek has returned to Antarctica for part of almost every summer since 2005 for the NZAHT, which began a major restoration campaign in the early 2000s of the five sites in its care. These include the hut at Cape Adare and three others dating to the early 20th century “Heroic Era” of Antarctic exploration, and a fifth built in 1957 by Sir Edmund Hillary. Another set of structures falls under the responsibility of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust.

Gordon Macdonald, a heritage carpenter who has accompanied Meek to Antarctica says that early expedition leaders tried to set up the huts they used as a base close to food supplies—meaning seals and penguin colonies.

The oldest, at Cape Adare, “is located adjacent to a huge colony of Adélie penguins, and the Adélie penguins kind of co-opted and inhabited the huts after everyone left,” he says.

Even today, worksites are prone to visits by curious penguins. Put something down, he says, and you’re apt to return to find a penguin has hopped on top of it to get their feet off the cold ground or slipped around the back to get out of the wind.

Inside the huts, “what's left behind is the day to day stuff,” Meek explains, since the expeditioners mostly took home scientific tools, many of which have since entered museum collections around the world.

On-site, conservators have found lots of canned food, clothing—some labeled with the owner’s name—a 1912 calendar, and at least one immaculately preserved, tinned fruitcake.

Ernest Shackleton’s hut—which you can look around via Google Street View—alone contains 5,000 items.

“I think that, to me, that's what's interesting is the picture you get when you're in the building of what it was like to live and work there, how hard things were used, and reused and repaired. It's just a very human experience,” says Meek. “We’ve got board games and lots of books and periodicals and you can just see how well-read many of them were.”

The members of Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910 expedition delivered evening lectures to each other in their hut, some accompanied by slides, on topics ranging from volcanoes to penguins to a presentation from the resident artist on sketching technique.

Antarctic expeditioners also made elaborate, multi-course dinners during their enforced confinement (polar explorers, they’re just like us!), “where everyone would dress up to the best of their ability with whatever they had,” says Macdonald, “with a multiple course meal and they would prepare menus, and all of this sort of drama and theater that would go along with the meal would make it more fun.”

“We are living extraordinarily well,” wrote Scott in his diary during that same expedition. “At dinner last night we had some excellent thick seal soup, very much like thick hare soup; this was followed by an equally tasty seal steak and kidney pie and a fruit jelly.”

Cooking, it turns out, is still a favorite leisure activity of visiting historic restoration teams, who spend between six to eight weeks on the continent during the Antarctic summer, working 12-hour days, six days a week. The variety of provisions is limited, says Macdonald, but workers make do with basic ingredients by “bringing along a few personal spices.”

The conservation work the teams do also differs in key ways from a historic house in less extreme climes.

“Conservators,” says Meek, “will go to sleep in their sleeping bag at night with their adhesive in the sleeping bag with them so that it doesn't freeze.” Materials behave differently in the cold. Cameras and electronic scales run through batteries.

Then, normally, object conservation involves treating items to delay deterioration, which, in a climate controlled, museum setting, can become virtually imperceptible.

The Antarctic huts are far from weather-proof. Over the years, sea air and salty snow has coated most of those items in a layer of salt, which together with the damp can corrode materials like metals.

Conservator Sophie Rowe told a museum conservation podcast about a “particularly amusing” find during a trip to the Antarctic for the UKAHT, “which was a tin of [table] salt, where the tin had just absolutely disintegrated and you're left with literally a pillar of salt on the kitchen shelf.“

Meek can do some delicate work, including desalinization treatments, in lab-like conditions at the modern Scott Base research facility. Ultimately though, they all go back in the huts, where they will go through inevitably damaging freeze and thaw cycles.

“We can't control the environment down there. We just try and work with it as much as we can,” Meek said.

The question of how much to interfere with these sites is one of the “serious questions that conservators agonize over,” says Macdonald.

Polar conservation “is taking place in the context of a rapidly changing global climate,” he says. Then, “these are places that we're conserving for the enjoyment and inspiration of future generations. And yet they can be loved to death if we're not careful.”

Many historic sites around the world, he points out, now have to cordon off areas for fear of damage. And, pre-pandemic, the huts had been receiving an increasing number of visitors, part of a growth in Antarctic tourism.

In the Antarctic, says Macdonald, “We want people to be able to experience the magic of going inside one of these buildings and all the smells and the sounds of them and they're just sort of evocative. They're, they're lovely places.”

The major restoration work to the huts has been completed for four of the five sites in the care of the NZAHT. Macdonald says they have been working their way out to completing the most remote, at Cape Adare, with plans to return in January of 2021 if COVID-19 does not keep him confined at home.

A sculptor hitched the cackling bird to a trailer and is taking it on the road.

Farvardin Daliri, a sculptor who lives in suburban Brisbane, Australia, recently built an oversized, electrified laughing kookaburra that stands roughly 15 feet tall. Laughing kookaburras, formally known as Dacelo novaeguineae and native to Eastern Australia’s eucalyptus forests, are known for their calls, which ring out like peals of laughter at dusk and dawn. (Some mornings, when kookaburra cries clatter through the neighborhood, Daliri’s wife thinks that he has slipped outside and switched on the giant bird.) Daliri installed a secondhand car battery and motor to crank the bird’s beak open and closed; inside its metal body, he nestled an amplified recording of a real-deal kookaburra. When the automata is flipped on, the oversized bird seems to cackle.

Though Daliri made the sculpture to delight the area’s human residents, it seems to intrigue the feathered denizens, too: “Some come closer and closer and sit on electric lines and watch,” he says. “Other kookaburras laugh back.” Daliri doesn’t monkey with his enormous creation in the morning, though. When laughter drifts in through the windows, “it’s the real ones laughing,” he adds. “Mine is sleeping.” Atlas Obscura spoke with Daliri about larger-than-life sculpture, and why laughter matters now.

Australia is full of big things. What draws you to oversized art?

I've made many sculptures, and most of them are oversized. I made a mythological snake that was a totem for the First Nations people in Burdekin Shire, and a 33-foot crocodile as a tourist attraction just before entering Townsville. Once you make [sculptures] in this size, they're impressive. Their body shape and anatomy is so fascinating.

Why build a kookaburra?

The kookaburra is considered very mythical by the First Nations people in Australia. It's considered a good omen. Also, its laughter is contagious: You want to laugh when you hear them laughing. When the COVID-19 lockdown happened, I decided to make the laughing mechanism really work. It's the first sculpture I've made with moving parts. Against the background of so many sad things happening—natural disasters, health disasters, human-made disasters—we find hardly anything to be happy about, and we need to really start thinking about having a laughing session.

Used my time in lockdown to build a giant laughing Kookaburra. #giantlaughingkookaburra pic.twitter.com/1GWguIcpA4

— Dr Farvardin Daliri (@DrDaliri) May 26, 2020

How did you pull this off?

Inside, it's made of round steel cords, turned round and round in circles, and interlocked and welded together. The bird is welded to the trailer that was in my backyard. The backyard was slightly sloped, so I had to level the trailer with cinder blocks—but the structure is so strong and sturdy that I can put my foot on it, like a step.

Fabricating the outer shell was a challenge, because anything you use is going to add a lot of weight—fiberglass or plaster could be so heavy that movement would be difficult. I had to keep it light. The top surface is bamboo straws, all natural fibers, knitted together with wire and then painted. From a distance, it looks like feathers. I used fiberglass for the beak, ceramic for the eyes, and then wire, glue, and paint.

How did your family and neighbors feel about you working on this in the yard?

I have very supportive neighbors! They brought their kids around to look at the progress. Some of them kept photo diaries of what's happening. My work isn't noisy, because I work mainly by bending and shaping the steel, not banging. Sometimes I have to use the grinder to cut certain things, but unless I burn myself or drop something into my shoe and scream, you don't hear much. (That happened quite a few times.) When you're working from a height and welding above your head, a bit of melt from the steel can roll down and drop, and it burns.

My wife was a little concerned about the mess because the grass had overgrown, and there was dog poop underneath the trailer and a lot of off-cast pieces of steel. She asked me to move it.

What was the most rewarding part of the process?

My favorite part is getting my hands on the sculpture. As soon as I start working, I can go forever—until the sun dies, until I'm dead. That's how sculpture is for me.

What’s the bird up to now?

Now it’s parked in front of the house. We brought it out once, my son-in-law connected it, and we went around the block, for maybe 10 or 20 minutes, to check the laughing mechanism, balance, everything else. It will eventually go to Townsville, about 870 miles away, and to other receptions. We will have a laughing session wherever we go. There’s a need for people to have a break.

And why the scars left by meteoritic impacts tell us about life, the universe, and everything.

Imagine standing on the edge of a giant crater, knowing nothing about how this massive hole in the ground came to be. Or figuring out that a cataclysmic event like an asteroid hitting the Earth killed the dinosaurs, but having no visible evidence on the planet of a collision of that magnitude.

Scientists and explorers have faced such puzzling moments in our history. They may have had inklings that giant collisions happened in the universe, but where and how and whether they still happened are things that modern scientists are only now able to answer with some degree of certainty. Until they started to, around the mid-20th century, craters like Arizona’s Meteor Crater and those on the moon were largely thought to be volcanic in origin.

Like detectives piecing together clues across time and space, scientists who study impact craters are revealing the stories of these fascinating planetary and lunar scars. Most recently, a new study on the Chicxulub crater in Mexico concludes that the asteroid that led to the dinosaur-ending mass extinction 66 million years ago likely struck at a steep angle and high speed that maximized the lethal effects that followed.

Computer simulations in the study, published in the journal Nature Communications, show the impact blowing open a hole some 19 miles deep and 50 miles wide in the Earth’s crust, which quickly rebounded upward into a mountain of rock higher than Mount Everest before collapsing into the crater formation that remains today—all within about 15 minutes.

The speed with which the crater formed is “one of the most awe-inspiring aspects of all this,” says Gareth Collins, the study’s lead author and a professor of planetary science at Imperial College London. “The asteroid was moving astonishingly quickly—probably around 20 kilometers [nearly 12.5 miles] a second—when it struck. That’s about 100 times the speed of a jumbo jet.” (It’s also, perhaps unnervingly, a common speed for asteroids that have pummeled our planet.)

Incredibly, the crater (or what’s left of it) can’t be seen on the Earth’s surface: It’s now buried about two-thirds of a mile beneath the Yucatán Peninsula. The team of researchers, from more than a dozen countries, compared 3-D simulations of different hypothetical impact angles and speeds with geophysical observations of Chicxulub that enable them to interpret features of the crater beneath the Earth’s surface.

The results suggest an asteroid trajectory that was particularly deadly. The catastrophic visitor, thought to be about 7.5 miles across, struck at an angle of around 60 degrees to the horizon in what was seawater at the time, says Collins, triggering a tsunami and unleashing a massive amount of debris and climate-changing gases into the upper atmosphere. The prolonged period of cooling and choked-off sunlight that followed wiped out much of life on the planet.

As Chicxulub demonstrates, impact craters offer extraordinary evidence of dramatic events that define the landscapes—and even the state of life—we observe today. In a sense, crater investigators like Collins have to work backwards to figure out the narratives behind these mighty geologic imprints.

The tale of Arizona’s Meteor Crater is particularly instrumental in how we’ve come to understand the very existence of impact craters. A popular tourist destination that was once a mining site and training ground for astronauts, the Barringer Meteorite Crater, as it's known to scientists, is thought to be 50,000 years old and stretches three-quarters of a mile across.

“Planetary scientists make pilgrimages to Meteor Crater because it’s so exquisitely preserved,“ says David Kring, a geologist whose extensive work has spanned the Barringer, Chicxulub, and lunar craters. “It is considered to be the first proven impact site by the scientific community.”

Trying to prove that an object from outer space created it, however, cost the crater’s namesake, Daniel Moreau Barringer, his mining fortune and caused a scientific stir at the turn of the 20th century.

In 1896, G.K. Gilbert, then head of the U.S. Geological Survey, concluded that the depression was the result of a volcanic steam explosion. Meanwhile, Barringer—a Princeton-educated mining engineer and self-taught geologist—pushed his theory about a meteoritic impact in papers he published in 1905 and 1910. He cited, among other things, meteoritic iron found both beneath the crater floor and scattered in a concentric ring around the crater, plus inverted layers of rock—an indication that material in the hole had been thrown out and then landed upside down following the impact.

Granted, Barringer bought the site in hopes of making money selling pieces of meteorite metal. But he ended up unable to find the enormous extraterrestrial object that he thought still lay beneath the crater. “Barringer was understandably fooled,” says Kring. “He got the impact origin completely right, but he didn’t appreciate how much of the impact object was destroyed.” (Scientists now know that asteroids are largely melted and vaporized during a crash.)

Kring notes that Barringer’s theory wasn’t widely accepted until around 1960, when work by Gene Shoemaker, co-discoverer of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, helped validate his ideas. During Barringer’s time, the notion that catastrophic events still happened was a paradigm shift from what was then the prevailing school of thought, known as uniformitarianism. A fundamental principle of modern geology, it says that Earth’s geologic processes have been consistent and slow-moving throughout the past and present.

The philosophical resistance that Barringer encountered continued well into the 20th century, says Kring. The theory that lunar craters were created by asteroid impacts, he notes, remained a minority belief until the Apollo missions to the moon returned with lunar rocks exhibiting radical alterations that only shock pressures and extreme heat from impact events—not volcanic ones—can cause.

“With Apollo, people grudgingly accepted the idea there were impact processes—but only in the past,” says Kring. “It wasn’t until the Shoemaker-Levy comet hit Jupiter, in 1994, that people realized that oh, this can still happen.”

Kring—who in 1991 identified Chicxulub as the site of the dinosaur-extinction event first theorized a decade earlier—says that one need only look to the moon to see what the asteroid impact looked like before it became buried and degraded, like many of the approximately 200 impact craters known on Earth.

The moon’s nearly 200-mile-wide Schrödinger basin is a virtual twin of the Chicxulub crater, only bigger, notes Kring. They are so similar, in fact, that Kring and Collins, in a 2016 study with other researchers, used Schrödinger’s exposed features to better understand what transpired at Chicxulub.

Looking at impact craters on Earth and other bodies in the solar system, it turns out, go hand in hand. “On other planets, we get a better picture of what a pristine crater looks like, but we only see the surface,” says Collins. “On Earth, we rarely see the surface because there’s so much activity and erosion. But through geophysical and geological mapping and drilling we can learn about what’s beneath the surface. By putting those two observations together, we get a more complete picture of what a crater is and how it forms.”

The knowledge unlocked by studying impact craters goes even further—potentially to the origin of life on Earth itself. According to Kring, the Schrödinger basin is a high priority for exploration in future moon missions—a way to shed light on questions that include whether an intense period of bombardment in the early solar system may have seeded life on our planet.

“Those are really big questions,” he says. “Not just about lunar geology, but questions that reverberate across the entire solar system.”