His scribbles—which mention the curative power of toad vomit—sold for $81,000.

Starting in the spring of 1665, an outbreak of bubonic plague devastated England. The disease was swift and brutal, leaving sufferers woozy with headaches, damp with fevers, and dotted with buboes—firm, tender lymph nodes that could swell to the size of a chicken egg. More than 7,100 Londoners died in a single week in September 1665, according to the National Archives, and by the time the outbreak subsided, around 15 percent of the city’s residents had perished. Those who could escape cities for greener pastures did just that—including brainiacs like Isaac Newton, who was then in his early twenties.

When the outbreak began, Newton fled Cambridge to hunker down at his birthplace, the bucolic Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. The landscape was sprawling and verdant, and offered the polymath’s mind ample space for gymnastics. There, Newton spent a lot of time gazing out the window, thinking about apple trees and gravity, prisms and rainbows—but he didn’t totally dodge the plague. At some point, probably after returning to Cambridge in 1667, he picked up a copy of Tumulus pestis, a text on the plague by the 17th-century chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont. A dutiful student, Newton took notes as he read. A two-page manuscript of his notes on van Helmont’s ideas recently went under the hammer in an online auction at Bonhams, commanding more than $81,000.

When the 1660s outbreak emerged, the English government published materials outlining dos and don’ts. Some 17th-century plague-halting tactics will be familiar to people who have spent the last few months versing themselves in social distancing. Borders were closed. Officials tamped down on public gatherings, and some revelry was paused: Justices of the peace, mayors, bailiffs, and others were encouraged to restrict alehouses to the number “absolutely necessary in each City or place.” Ill people were quarantined and shared surfaces were to be thoroughly cleaned—not scrubbed with wet wipes, of course, but “Fumed, Washed and Whited all over within with Lime.”

Other interventions reveal the contemporary uncertainty about exactly how the plague was leaping from person to person. Scientists now know that the disease was caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, transmitted by bites from fleas that hitched rides on rats. But at the time, people cast a wide net of blame. Some residents lit fires to try and blow away bad air. (Children were encouraged to smoke for the same reason, the National Archives reports, though that just fouled the air even more, and gunked up their lungs, to boot.) Officials were instructed to keep an eye out for any shops peddling “unwholsom meats,” “stinking fish,” and “musty corn,” and to halt any pigeons, dogs, cats, or swine wandering the streets or slinking from one house to another.

Helmont’s treatise prescribed some very different tactics. He had first-hand experience with the plague, having been on the front lines in Antwerp when an outbreak erupted early in the 17th century, and some of his advice seems fairly intuitive. For instance, in his notes on van Helmont’s text, Newton observed that “places infected with the Plague are to be avoided.” Other advice is likely more surprising to modern readers. Solid antidotes included sapphire and amber, Newton scribbled—but nothing worked quite as well as toad vomit. Specifically, the vomit spewed forth from a toad that had been “suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days.” Once the toad died, Newton added, the poor creature should be combined “with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area.” This “drove away the contagion and drew out the poison.”

It may sound puzzling, but “the idea of toad vomit and gemstones worn as amulets and being used as cures was not out-of-place in serious 17th-century medicine and science,” says Darren Sutherland, specialist in books and manuscripts at Bonhams. “These ideas which sound so strange to our modern ears, including toad vomit, were actually squarely situated in the medical traditions and science.” As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, keep practicing social distancing, wearing face masks, and scrubbing your hands. But please note that toad vomit is no match for the virus.

"If there are ways to manage our landscapes that can make them more exciting for all the insects and mammals, then why not do it?”

In one of England’s most iconic corners of history and intellect, a colorful and very modern transformation is taking place. After some three centuries as a perfectly manicured formal lawn, the grass behind the storied King’s College Chapel, at the University of Cambridge, has burst into the “glorious, Monet-style chaos” of a wildflower meadow—all in the name of biodiversity.

Those are the words that the college’s head gardener, Steve Coghill, uses to describe the view from where he sits on this day in early June. He mentions birds like house martins, swallows, and swifts that are swooping down to feed on insects attracted to the brilliant red poppies, white oxeye daisies, and intensely blue-purple cornflowers that have come up in the past few weeks.

The scene is a striking contrast to the immaculate lawn that has long been part of the famous view of the chapel from its rear (the “Backs,” as it’s locally known). “It’s been a great lawn since the 18th century,” says Coghill. “It was a big thing asking for the changes.”

Indeed, the origins of the grass expanse in 1772 included a particular purpose: to demonstrate wealth. (The land for King’s College was acquired in the 1440s by its founder, King Henry VI.) That wealth came through in displays of land that broadcast how much one could afford not to devote to activities such as growing food and raising cattle—a change in 18th-century fashion for landscapes and gardens that had once dictated exhibitions of affluence through the very opposite.

“All this productive lawn is here as an ornament,” Coghill says. “Then we began moving into the 21st century. Whilst that aesthetic is very important, we really have to think about sustainability. If there are ways to manage our landscapes that can make them more biodiverse and exciting for all the insects and mammals, then why not do it?”

The loss of biodiversity in the U.K.—a region where gardening, nature shows, and walks in the countryside are deeply cherished—has been followed closely by research and conservation groups. According to a 2019 State of Nature report, produced by a coalition of more than 70 such organizations in the United Kingdom, 15 percent of species are threatened with extinction, and 41 percent have shown strong or moderate declines in abundance since 1970. For the past 50 years, the report says, natural habitats have been hard hit by agricultural practices in particular, as well as urbanization, climate change, and pollution, among other factors.

At King’s College, says Coghill, the idea of converting a portion of the stately lawn to wildflower meadow took several years to implement, as approvals were sought and research studies were conducted. It turns out that what made the land difficult to maintain as a formal lawn—dry, sandy topsoil that’s poor in nutrients—made it ideally suited to a wildflower meadow.

(A soil survey also revealed a quirk of the landscape: Bones from a medieval churchyard that once occupied the site made the layer of soil beneath the top one rich in phosphorus, a generally important nutrient for plants, though not for wildflowers. As a result, the college was able to retain the topsoil for its meadow.)

A special selection of seeds for various wildflower and grass species was sown last autumn, and the meadow started flowering in May. Bees and birds soon followed. Coghill calls it “instant habitat creation”; the idea is to then wait and see what flourishes and arrives naturally.

“What we’re doing now is to stop mowing, stop watering, stop fertilizing, stop weed-killing—reintroducing plant species that we would expect to grow naturally on this type of soil, and seeing what establishes,” says Cicely Marshall, a King’s research fellow who plans to survey the meadow annually to see how its biodiversity is changing.

The less intrusive and less expensive management of the meadow is another benefit of the project, which the college has agreed to support through 2024 before re-evaluating. “There’s a huge amount of maintenance to keep the lawn short and green,” says Coghill, including mowing twice a week, fertilizing, and using herbicides and pesticides to keep out weeds and bugs.

The wildflower meadow—which occupies about a third of the hectare-sized (or 2.5-acre) lawn—will be managed like a hay field, he adds, with minimal intervention but more hand work. The grasses will be allowed to grow fully before they’re harvested in late July or early August, dried out, and then baled on site.

A pathway that was supposed to have been mown this year to invite people to walk through the meadow has been postponed due to restrictions from the coronavirus pandemic, says Coghill. When it is put in place, it will be the first time in centuries that the public is allowed to tread on the lawn’s premises.

“For the first time, people can ignore the ‘Keep Off the Grass’ signs,” he says, “and ramble through a beautiful meadow.”

Photographer Pelle Cass creates six feet of separation everywhere he goes.

Pelle Cass is a street photographer—sort of. Since 2008, he’s been taking his camera and tripod to public plazas and tourist hubs in Boston, New York, and other major cities, where, over the course of an hour or more, he takes several hundred photos of a fixed point. Back in the editing room, he spends anywhere from 20 to 80 hours Photoshopping a single image, finding, masking, and layering the people that make it into the final frame—a “still time-lapse” of an urban afternoon.

In the series “Selected People,” no one is repositioned or altered; they’re selected or omitted. Here Cass creates worlds populated exclusively by one type of person—male professionals in blue button-ups, for instance, or couples, or people wearing red. In his popular sports series, “Crowded Fields,” the action of an early-season swim meet or a women’s intramural field hockey game (he prefers to shoot events the press rarely covers) is compressed, so that many moments appear at once.

But claustrophobic images of overlapping bodies feel perverse during a global pandemic that spreads via person-to-person contact. Quarantined in his Brookline, Massachusetts, home since mid-March, Cass returned to his street scenes and sports pictures (and the thousands of individual photo files that comprise them). Then he reconstructed those images for the moment—replacing and removing some of the figures, so that every jogger and baby stroller crossing Harvard Bridge is now a perfect, socially distant six feet apart, and the balls on the tennis court hover freely and eerily, without players.

Cass rolls out the new edits on Instagram, where users express gratitude for his visualizations of a “new normal”—a new way of existing in a metropolis.

Atlas Obscura recently spoke with Cass about his series, and what it takes to bring to life a strange, spatially distant new world that, until recently, no one could have imagined.

What prompted you to rework images from "Selected People" during quarantine?

I used to [say that] I would never rework these pictures, but I do sometimes come back to them when I have time off. This is the first time I’ve done it in a concentrated way. I was stuck at home, of course, and suddenly my pictures looked wrong to me. I don’t think my work is always joyful or happy, but people take them that way. I thought that if I’m going to do something new, the focus shouldn’t be on energy but rather deflation—how somber and thin life was starting to look.

What is the process of making images “for the current mood”?

Usually I’ll take, say, 2,000 pictures, then go through all of them and find the most interesting or exciting figures, gestures, and expressions. Now I find myself looking for stillness. I’ll go out for exercise at a time when people should be anxiously rushing to work, and it looks like a Sunday morning at 7 a.m. Then Sunday morning at 7 a.m. comes, and it looks the same.

I like that things were normal when I took the pictures. The past contained the future. It was there; I just had to separate it out. These reworked pictures present a fantasy of what things actually look like now, of people spaced evenly apart. In the future, cities will resemble the scenes that I’ve created from memory and out of the past.

I think of my street pictures as a representation of subjectivity: A human being will always focus their attention on some things over others. You can’t see everyone in the crowd; you can’t see everything that happens in an hour.

And that’s one reason I don’t get bored doing these pictures: The crisis has completely changed my subjectivity, so suddenly people look interesting when they’re isolated. Before they looked interesting smashed together. Both were equally true in the real world, as people overlapped in time and were isolated by time.

How do you think street photography will change with mandatory social distancing, anxiety about physical contact, and a shift to work-from-home culture?

There are a lot of visual clichés that rely on crowds. The new clichés of “photography in the time of coronavirus” happen instantly, like the portraits of people at windows with their hand on the glass. They’re nice, and they’re moving, but they become obvious.

Out in the city, people will look fundamentally different because they’ll [be wearing masks]. I’ll go photograph downtown, and I may find 30 people with masks and eight people without. And that will be interesting when you look at the picture, because it’s almost political—who is doing it and who is not?

I sort of like the masks, because I’m introverted. You really can avoid people. I like individuals, but I don’t like strangers or meeting people for the first time on the street. I don’t usually photograph something like a protest, because it’s too crowded, and I can’t find single figures that I find interesting.

I recently saw a picture in the paper of people protesting in a city where they had put dots across the plaza, perfectly ordered. And it was exactly like what I was currently working on: a sports picture where everybody was on a six-foot separated grid. I said, “Why am I spending so much time on this? I should be out there photographing them setting up for that protest.”

What are your favorite cities?

Always Boston and New York, because they are my intimate cities. I thought I loved London, but then visited Paris and fell in love. Paris seemed to be unitary, made of the same material. Being in these little streets that were nice even when they were dull or bedraggled ...

I am one of those people who, if you’re walking to the supermarket and there’s this way and that way to go, and this way is so depressing you can’t bear it, you go that way, even if it takes longer. Architecture and the urban environment are very emotional.

Why do you make images about chaos?

There’s a chaotic, twisting, writhing feeling in my work, but it’s also very ordered. I’ve carefully put the image together for reasons that are not completely conscious: They’re compositional. I don’t go in with a plan, because the physical manifestation is the plan: “This person looks right next to this person.”

It’s a feeling related to the real world, but it really is this thing inside of me: I want a chaos that is also kind of ordered. It’s somewhere between heaven and hell.

Speaking of real and unreal worlds, you've been debuting your reworked images on Instagram. How do you feel about the app as a medium for exhibiting photography, especially when gallery shows and other traditional avenues aren’t options?

[Instagram] has kept me as sane as I am. If it wasn’t owned by Facebook, I’d say it was great. It is a little creepy, but the original spirit still seems to be there; I don’t feel like I’m being soaked for advertising. I use it for following art accounts. And even if it’s an artist I like, if they start posting about their trips or food or stuff at home, I unfollow.

I was surprised that people really like my reworked posts (although they like them less than my pure sports pictures). I wanted people to see the crisis immediately, and Instagram is good for that.

The issue of scale is also interesting on Instagram, be it a plus or minus. Ideally you would see my prints very large, and you would be able to walk in a room and identify scenes all over, even on the ceiling. That doesn’t work on a small screen. In traditional photography, it’s like a sin to crop. But for me, it’s fun to fill the Instagram frame … It’s a profound thing that you only have this much space to play with, where only close-ups or middle-distance shots really work.

Your “selected people" are very rarely special people—the kinds of characters that make you stop in the street. Why photograph the mundane?

Early in my visual art education, I had a teacher who said, “Go out and take pictures. Then turn around and take a picture of whatever is behind you.” It’s not a novel idea anymore to turn your back on a beautiful sunset to take a picture of people looking at a beautiful sunset—that is now understood as photography that shows how photography mediates our world.

Looking for the marginal things instead of the main thing has always been second nature for me. I don’t even see the obvious. It’s almost a personality trait that I am attracted to the person talking on the phone or looking down instead of up. A lot of it is intentionally random in the way that regular street photography is …

But I will often pick figures for reasons other than what they’re doing or what they look like. They’re included because of where they’re standing. So that brings in all kinds of details that you wouldn’t think to photograph, or that are marginal. I’m making fun of street photography a little bit, and drawing on its rules at the same time.

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

How the muralist Matthew Willey learned to love bees.

The artist Matthew Willey used to instinctively avoid bees, as so many of us do—until one fateful day in 2008. “I was in my studio in the East Village and a little honeybee flew in and landed right in the middle of the rug,” Willey shares. “She was walking along the carpet, not flying around, so I had the opportunity to get down on the floor and really study this bee.”

Leery but curious, he grabbed a magnifying glass and began to examine the ailing bee up close. “The first thing I noticed was the fuzziness and the cuteness,” he says. “This looks like a little tiny puppy more than it looks like a bug to me,” he remembers thinking. For two hours, Willey “connected” with the bee—marveling at its intricacy, pondering its presence.

Willey believes the bee’s solitary demise was an act of altruistic suicide, an extreme behavior found in many social insects that protects colony as a whole from sickness or invasion. He began to research honeybees, and soon discovered that they are dying in droves all over the world. The implications are devastating for humans and the planet at large.

“Colony collapse disorder is a phenomenon first observed in honeybee colonies more than a decade ago,” explains Victor H. Gonzalez, a melittologist at the University of Kansas and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Melittology. It occurs when worker bees suddenly abandon the hive, leaving behind the queen, brood, and honey. “After years of research, it appears that many factors—including parasites, pesticides, and poor nutrition—are the main causes.” Honeybees are critical pollinators for many food products that humans depend on, and add at least $15 billion to the value of U.S. agriculture each year, Gonzalez adds.

Willey, who has painted murals for 25 years, including a 10-year stint as a muralist for the Washington Wizards, sat with his newfound passion for bees until 2015. Then a friend sent him an iPhone video of the side of a fifth-generation beekeeping company in LaBelle, Florida. “You should call them up and see if they want a mural,” he remembers her saying. “And I was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna.’”

The beekeeping company loved the idea, but they had no money for a mural, and neither did the town. “And on top of that, murals are illegal in LaBelle, Florida,” Willey remembers hearing. He wasn’t worried about payment—“I believe money is important and honor the energy of it, but I do not believe it should guide the human spirit,” he says—but admitted that he paints too slowly to go on the lam. “I didn’t figure they were ever going to get the law changed,” he says. “I hung up the phone and figured that was that.”

Two months later, Willey received a phone call and learned, to his amazement, that the law had been changed. He dutifully headed south and painted 16 bees onto the side of Harold P. Curtis Honey Co. He thought it was a one-time thing, but the bees apparently had other plans: Onsite, an observer with a honeybee perched on his shoulder approached Willey and said, “This bee is telling me to come and talk to you.” The man asked Willey how many bees make up a healthy, thriving hive. Willey had learned the number—30,000 to 50,000—just the day before. “He just looked at me and sort of flippantly said, ‘Do you think you could paint 50,000 of them?’” Willey recalls. “It was a lightning-bolt moment.”

Today, through Willey’s organization The Good of the Hive, the artist has painted 5,436 bees in 27 separate murals, each of which takes eight weeks or more. “Don’t do the math on the amount of time,” he jokes. “I’m figuring out how I can pick up the speed and get it done in 15, 20 years.” He’s painted 22-foot bees on a barn roof in Lyons, Nebraska—visible only to crop dusters whose wake can inadvertently hurt organic farmers—and a life-size bee on a child’s cochlear implant. He’s painted bees on a North Carolina elementary school, the Great Ape House at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, Burt’s Bees headquarters, and Post Office 12764 in the rural hamlet of Narrowsburg, New York.

The murals don’t feature bees exclusively—many incorporate birds and flowers, especially dandelions, a vital source of nourishment for bees. “Honeybees are not the only pollinators,” Gonzalez explains. “His murals also remind us of the pollinators we tend to ignore, like flies, butterflies, and beetles.”

By the time he paints the 50,000th bee, Willey hopes to have shifted public perception, spreading the message that humans are also members of a hive—and our health, ultimately, is collective. “It’s the idea that I’m not just me,” he says. “That whatever I’m doing—every thought, action, behavior, everything I discard to every positive thing I do in the world—has a ripple effect that goes out and affects others.”

The melody occupies a niche space at the intersection of ice cream, entertainment, and Black history.

In early June, an ice cream truck jingle rang out in Brooklyn, yet it drew no children, produced no soft serve, and evoked no nostalgia. It was midnight, and it came from an unmarked NYPD cruiser.

It was the third night of an 8 p.m. citywide curfew, issued by Mayor Bill de Blasio, ostensibly to curb looting and violence. Despite the order, peaceful protests continued well past 8 p.m. It was around 11 p.m. in the historically Black neighborhood of Crown Heights that police officers descended upon a group of protesters headed home. Sounds from the street brought Taylor, who wished to have his last name redacted, and many of his neighbors to their porches and windows.

“At least six cop cars showed up, and a few dozen cops in full riot gear popped out with their batons and started tackling and aggressively detaining the protesters,” says Taylor. “It was just sheer violence.” He says neighbors broke out in Black Lives Matter chants while the arrests took place, such as the call-and-response “No justice! No peace!” In response, says Taylor, the police taunted the neighbors. “They were yelling back, like, ‘Is that all you got?’”

The cruisers dispersed around midnight, though one unmarked car remained in front of Peter Chinman’s apartment. “They couldn’t start their car, and all the people in the surrounding buildings started really jeering at them,” he says. When they finally got the engine running, however, they made a curious exit. “They drove off giving everyone the middle finger, while playing the ice cream truck song.” A video of their departure taken by a separate witness and posted on social media immediately garnered thousands of likes and comments.

The next night, I heard the jingle as well. At 2 a.m., the unmistakable melody emanated from an N.Y.P.D. cruiser rolling slowly down a Bedford-Stuyvesant thoroughfare framed by housing projects. I returned to the Instagram post to find an outpouring of similar testimony. “They’re playing this in Harlem every night,” read one comment. “This is not an isolated incident,” read another.

So, why are police officers blasting this jingle from their cruisers in predominantly Black neighborhoods? As of the time of publication, the NYPD has refused multiple requests to comment. But with the nation in the midst of a racial reckoning, it may be illuminating to look at the melody’s place at the intersection of ice cream and Black history.

The tune many recognize as “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” first reached American shores with an influx of Scots-Irish immigrants in the 1700s; it was originally a fiddle song called “The Rose Tree.” Early Americans took kindly to the meandering melody, and by the early 1800s it became “Turkey in the Straw,” a playful exploration of rural Appalachian life. The jingle was borrowed again later in the century for an altogether new, and uniquely American form of entertainment: traveling blackface minstrel shows.

As Theodore R. Johnson writes for NPR, the earworm lost its innocence in the 1820s when it became “Zip Coon.” The song introduced a blackface character of the same name who, after finding freedom and moving into a metropolitan setting, clumsily attempted to fit into white society with fancy clothing and big words. By the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, “Zip Coon” was the most popular song in the United States.

The success of the melody as a vessel for white supremacy hit a fever pitch in 1916 with Harry C. Browne’s “Nigger Love A Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!,” released by Columbia Records. Oddly enough, music of this ilk found a happy home in American ice-cream parlors.

To keep American families entertained while they enjoyed their soft serve with sprinkles, many parlors housed music boxes that played popular songs of the day. Unfortunately, well into the 20th century, that meant minstrel show tunes like “Camptown Races,” “Dixie,” “Jimmy Crack Corn,” and, of course, “Zip Coon.” When ice cream went mobile in the 1920s, newfangled ice cream trucks kept the parlor soundtrack, blaring instrumental versions of the aforementioned hit songs into newly constructed suburban neighborhoods. Thus, the catchiest tune of them all, “Zip Coon,” became simply known as “the ice cream truck jingle.”

When Johnson’s article went viral in 2014, detractors argued that ice cream trucks were, surely, only playing the innocuous “Turkey in the Straw.” Yet as Johnson points out in a follow-up article, early-20th century sheet music for “Turkey in the Straw” featuring racist imagery proves that “Zip Coon” had made such a splash that even the once-innocent song leaned into its more problematic connotations. As Johnson wrote, “There is simply no divorcing the song from the dozens of decades it was almost exclusively used for coming up with new ways to ridicule, and profit from, black people.”

So is the NYPD playing this storied jingle as a joke, by coincidence, or as an obscure dog whistle? A quick survey of officers’ sense of humor suggests it could be the latter.

The NYPD’s challenge coins—small, members-only medallions bearing departmental insignias and slogans—offer a look at both a rich trove of departmental inside jokes and how they view the civilians in their jurisdiction. East Harlem’s 25th Precinct covers several drug-treatment clinics, an area they call “Zombieland.” Queens’ 42nd Precinct depict themselves (“Warriors of the Wasteland”) as muscle-laden vikings beating criminals with spiked bats. A “Justified 4X" coin pays homage to “supercop” Ralph Friedman, who killed four people on duty between 1970 and 1984, one of whom was a burglary victim who called the police for help.

The department’s impressive grasp on even antiquated racist tropes is public record as well. From displays as conspicuous as wearing blackface while tossing fried chicken and watermelon into a crowd from a Labor Day Parade float in 1998, to more subtle ones like flashing white-supremacy symbols at recent George Floyd protests, many NYPD officers have used an array of blatantly racist imagery. In 2015, a federal monitor tasked with overseeing police reform within the NYPD recommended new training that included “Do not tell or tolerate ethnic, racial, or sexist jokes.”

The ice cream truck jingle's history is as complicated as it is obscure. And while a look at the NYPD's historic sense of humor is telling, the officers' exact motives for playing the song in today's climate remain uncertain. For the time being, however, we can surely all agree that the jingle is best left to those who actually sell ice cream.

The Red Lion is considered to be the oldest Elizabethan playhouse—and it may have recently seen the light of day.

If you found yourself in 16th-century London with a bit of spare money and free time, you might have wedged yourself into an inn or a playhouse to see a performance. The space may have been a square, circle, or polygon, and it might have had a roof—thatched or tiled, and perhaps celestial in design, splashed with blue and spangled with stars. It might even have a trap door or two—one to welcome gods and goddesses to Earth, another to plunge sinners to Hell, says Farah Karim-Cooper, head of higher education and research at Shakespeare's Globe and professor of Shakespeare studies at King's College London. You might have encountered free-flowing beer, or handfuls of gingerbread, hazelnuts, or stone fruits. You would have stood shoulder to shoulder with fellow artisans, tourists, ambassadors, immigrants, students, and others who danced, sang, and clapped along with trumpets and lutes, and occasionally pelted the curtain with apples to urge the show along.

Centuries after the curtain fell on these shows and their players, historians and archaeologists are still learning about the performances and the spaces that hosted them. A team in London believes that they have recently excavated the earliest Elizabethan playhouse, dating to 1567.

What little is known about this place, called the Red Lion, mainly comes from two lawsuits brought against the proprietor, John Brayne, by grumbling carpenters. One from 1567 references timber scaffolding, while another, two years later, mentions an outdoor stage, and even includes its dimensions. Historic maps and land deeds suggested that the playhouse was probably somewhere around Whitechapel. When staff from UCL Archaeology South-East—the commercial arm of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London—recently excavated 85 Stepney Way there, in advance of a housing development project, they found what they believe to be proof of the playhouse, which was likely incorporated into an old farmstead or inn.

The crew uncovered the remains of a timber structure with dimensions that line up neatly with the ones in old lawsuits, plus postholes they suspect might be evidence of long-gone gallery seats. They also revealed several brick cellars, which they propose might have once kept beer cool—and they found several mugs, bottles, and glasses that attest to imbibing on a large scale. “The strength of the combined evidence—archaeological remains of buildings, in the right location, of the right period—seem to match up with characteristics of the playhouse recorded in early documents,” said Stephen White, who directed the excavation, in a release.

If this discovery is indeed of the Red Lion, it might lead experts to revise their picture of how theaters looked at the time, says Tiffany Stern, a professor of Shakespeare and early modern drama at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute. Until now, researchers have thought that stages of the period were flanked by galleries, and were typically “thrust,” that is, they extended out into a crowd of groundlings (audience members who filled the open space known as a “yard” or “pit”). Based on the archaeological evidence, this space doesn’t look quite like that. “As the Red Lion—if that is what it is—seems to have had a stage that is quite shallow, not as thrust as we might expect, and seems only to have had one gallery, we could argue that we should rethink our sense of basic theater characteristics—or, alternatively, that we should see this as an early attempt that didn’t fully work, and that paved the way for the later theaters,” Stern writes in an email. “I’m inclined to say that.”

Many scholars have historically distinguished between purpose-built performance spaces and spots that troupes fleetingly called home, but recent excavations—including this one—offer a more subtle distinction. “We used to think that there was a bright line between existing spaces that were temporarily taken over for performances, like city halls, town squares, innyards, or dining areas in great houses or colleges, and spaces built especially for performances,” says William West, co-editor of Renaissance Drama and a professor of English at Northwestern University. “The Red Lion is probably a good example of these gray areas, since it seems likely to have been some sort of existing building or complex of buildings adapted to putting on plays by constructing seating, a stage, or both.

“We know that plays were performed without stages, and that there were moveable stages that might not leave a clear archaeological record,” West adds. (Though, at the same time, he says, excavations at the Rose theater revealed wear patterns on the ground near the site of the stage, which locates it pretty firmly.) To West, remnants of a stage or seating, including postholes, are persuasive evidence of the presence of a performance space, as are pieces of the ceramic boxes where viewers dropped coins upon entry. At the Red Lion, in particular, Stern hopes to turn up evidence of trap doors and a turret, which the structure is known to have had. “I’d love there to be leftovers from ascents or descents, or some props (things to make thunder, birdsong, etc.),” Stern says, “as these would help us understand better the mechanics of the stage.”

Though the UCL team says they’re “pretty convinced that we’ve found the Red Lion,” they’re not quite positive, and haven’t found the trove Stern was hoping for. The artifacts are back at the lab for study. This particular story will continue to unfold, one act at a time.

Solar radiation and dead trees tell us when Por-Bajin was built—and why it was neither palace nor fortress.

On a balmy summer day in what is today southern Russia, a tree was felled for a monumental construction project: a palatial set of buildings that would never be used. The rectangular foundation of the structure was laid about 30 miles from the Mongolian border, on an island in Lake Tere-Khol.

Since its presence was learned from a stone near the Selenga river (a runic tablet with an inscription detailing the site), the settlement—known as Por-Bajin—has eluded understanding. A complex roughly the size of Buckingham Palace, with 30-foot-tall clay walls and numerous courtyards set alongside its numerous buildings, the eighth-century Uighur construction yielded surprisingly few of the archaeological artifacts you’d expect from a building of its magnitude—items that are usually telltale markers of a place’s purpose.

“There was a lot of mystery around the site,” says Margot Kuitems, an isotope researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and lead author of a new study that dates the site, published last week in the journal Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences. “Who built it? When was it built? But also for what purpose? Was it a monastery? Did it have defensive purposes? Or was it a palace?”

Now researchers may finally have some answers to those questions—answers they gleaned from the fickle fluctuations of solar radiation and the felled timber itself.

In 2012, a Japanese research team identified two historical spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide—the compound essential for dating ancient organic matter, from tree rings to human bones. Every year, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere changes. Most of the time these changes are subtle. But in the years 775 and 994, the researchers demonstrated, the amount of carbon floating around jumped, possibly due to increased solar activity.

Whatever the cause, the carbon spikes were swallowed up by medieval trees around the globe, from the Japanese cedars the team inspected to the stands of central Asia—including that tree that was eventually chopped down and incorporated into the foundation of Por-Bajin.

“More and more of these spike events are [being] found now, but these two [in 775 and 994] are the biggest found so far,” says Kuitems. “We can use these distinctive features in radiocarbon to anchor tree rings in calendar time.”

Like bones, trees generally develop concentric “rings” of growth for each year of life. Attached to these rings, but naked to the human eye, are reflections of the carbon levels in those years. Using the wood sample from the settlement’s foundation, Kuitems’ team was able to link the 43rd ring on the fallen timber to the carbon spike of 775. Two years later—during the development of the tree’s 45th ring—the tree was cut down. Simple addition allowed the team to conclude that the foundation of Por-Bajin was laid during or after the year 777.

History fills in the rest of the mystery. Tengri Bögü Khan, the head of the Uighur Khaganate—an empire that existed between the eighth and ninth centuries—had converted to Manichaeism, a gnostic faith, and made it the state religion. Many under the khan were unhappy with the move, and two years after the foundation of Por-Bajin was laid, Bögü Khan was killed in an anti-Manichaean uprising.

Based on the absence of a human presence at the site, and the timeframe of its probable construction, Kuitems’ team believes that Por-Bajin was neither a palace nor a fortress. It was a place for Manichaens to pray—a monastery.

“It’s pretty logical it was never used.” Kuitems says. “There was evidence that the construction period took only about two years. It makes perfect sense that [that’s how long it took to build, and that] right after it was built, the leader was killed, and it was completely abandoned.”

Next, Kuitems says, is the tricky work of teasing out the more subtle deviations in atmospheric carbon, in hopes that more archaeological mysteries can be solved.

“I think this is the future direction of radiocarbon dating,” she says. “There’s more focus now on annual precision. We get more knowledge into these anomalies that were previously hidden in the radiocarbon calibration curve.”

The precise dating of the settlement enabled the researchers to draw a logical conclusion, based on historical evidence, that otherwise would have been impossible. While the conclusion is not set in stone—Por-Bajin’s fortifications are made of clay, after all—it paves the way for future radiocarbon revelations.

The series joins a growing list of real-time archival initiatives.

Since March 2020, when the United States began locking down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, museums and historians have been collecting documents and testimonials in real time. Those efforts have redoubled since the end of May, when massive protests against police brutality and racism launched around the world. People are living with the sense that they are witnessing history, and that the moment ought to be archived for posterity.

The Library of Congress’s new Boccaccio Project now joins the list of initiatives dedicated to preserving this moment in time. Launched on June 15, 2020, the project will share 10 new musical compositions that the library commissioned in response to the COVID-19 quarantine. Over the course of 10 weekdays, one new piece is being unveiled daily through videos available on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the library's "Concerts" website. The final piece, from modern flute duet Flutronix, will premiere on Friday, June 26, 2020.

David Plylar, Senior Concerts Producer at the library's music division, says he has had something like this project in mind for about 20 years, ever since he first read Boccaccio’s Decameron. That text, written in the mid-14th century, contains a total of 100 tales told by 10 different narrators who had fled the city of Florence for the countryside to avoid the plague. (The book has received renewed attention and increased sales in recent months.) While it was not quite feasible for Plylar and Library of Congress to commission 100 new pieces for the Boccaccio Project, this homage-in-miniature transfers the poet’s form to music: All 10 compositions, says Plylar, are “non-narrative short stories” that offer different takes on life during a pandemic.

Though Plylar might have mused about this idea for years, there likely would have been no place for it had the library's 2020 concert series taken place as scheduled. At some point, like most of us, Plylar realized that lockdown would be “a longer-term situation” than he had thought at first, and he wanted to find a way to program new content. So he dug out his old Boccacio idea, and from that point things came together quickly. The Library of Congress reached out to musicians it had long wanted to work with, and asked those musicians to recommend composers, who were then picked by committee. By early May, all of the selected composers had signed contracts, and most then submitted brand new compositions within just two weeks. In most cases, each piece was then paired with a performer who would have a few weeks to learn it, perfect it, and record it. (Flutronix serve as both composers and performers for the final piece, "Have and Hold.")

Damien Sneed, whose composition "Sequestered Thoughts" opened the Boccaccio Project on June 15, as performed by pianist Jeremy Jordan, offers a kind of structural breakdown for his piece on the Library of Congress website. For example, the “virtuosic fluttering in the right hand” can be heard as mirroring “the many meandering thoughts that come to one when they find themselves devoid of human interaction and fellowship,” and an ascending scale toward the end reflects “hope for the future” and “peering upward in expectation.” Sneed submitted the composition on May 15, before the ongoing anti-racism protests began. Nonetheless, he says, his piece also relates to that more recent historical development, and that “motifs and directions” in the work “mirror protest and reconciliation.” More acutely, he says he also wrote another song about two weeks ago in response to the protests (to be released later in 2020), and he’s currently at work on a project about the Tuskegee Airmen.

Other kinds of artistic documents—paintings, novels, films, and more—will continue to emerge as windows into this COVID-19 moment as well. But musicians, says Plylar, face some unique challenges right now, making it all the more important to support their work. So much of what they do, he says—from performance to dissemination—“depends on other people,” and many musicians simply “don’t have the mode of expression that they once had.” Sneed sees additional value in documenting this history specifically through music. Unlike some other art forms, which require more time-consuming engagement, music distills emotions and briefly animates them. (Particularly these pieces, which all run between one and three minutes long.) It can be “replayed, repeated, experienced over and over again,” long after COVID-19 is confined to memory.

The second episode of TED’s Pindrop podcast chews over AFROBUBBLEGUM.

According to Nairobi-based director, producer, and author Wanuri Kahiu, African art needed a jolt of fun, fierceness, and frivolity. Too often, she says, the stories that come out of the continent are “limited to war, poverty, and devastation.” So Kahui cofounded an artistic movement called AFROBUBBLEGUM that flies in the face of those stereotypes. AFROBUBBLEGUM includes the work of many artists in a variety of mediums, including Kahui’s film Rafiki, which follows the story of Kena and Ziki, two women in Kenya who fall in love despite the political rivalry between their families and the conservative society in which they live.

Host of the TED podcast Pindrop, Saleem Reshamwala, spoke with Kahui about the movement, and how Africa and Africans are portrayed around the world. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What is AFROBUBBLEGUM?

AFROBUBBLEGUM is fun, fierce, and frivolous African art. It's art for art's sake. It's art for the sake of joy. I felt that we were missing out on being joyous and allowing ourselves to be joyous because so often, especially when you decide to become an artist from this side of the world, instead of being something more serious, like a doctor or lawyer or whatever your family expects of you. Our stories are never about joy. And if we don't see ourselves as people of joy, how do we know we're worthy? If seeing is believing and we don't see ourselves as joyful people, how do we know that joy is something that we can work toward, or we can attain, or something that belongs to us? So I started to look for joy in our art and saw that it had always existed. We've always been a people of joy and we should celebrate that.

How did the movement start?

It came about as a result of a conversation with other artists, including Muthoni Drummer Queen and Blinky Bill. We started talking about, “Why don't we have the right to be like pop and bubblegum?” Like, you know, AFROBUBBLEGUM.

I saw you made almost like a Bechdel Test of the specific rules. What are those rules?

It has three questions. In your piece of art, are two or more Africans sick or dying? Are they hopeless or lost? Are they in need of saving? And if the answer is yes, then your work is not AFROBUBBLEGUM.

Getting your art out into the world hasn't always been easy. Can you tell us about the pushback around the release of your film Rafiki?

Once the film was released, it was banned in Kenya, which means it couldn't be broadcast, couldn't be distributed, couldn't be exhibited, and couldn't be possessed within the Republic of Kenya. I know we shouldn't have been surprised, but we were still incredibly disappointed because not only do we love our country, truly love our country, but we also believe in the mandate that was set out, which is our constitution. And our constitution allows us freedom of expression. The classification board wanted me to change the ending because they felt it was too hopeful, and they thought it should be remorseful. When I refused, they banned it. They said that by keeping the ending—which is joyful, which is in keeping with my ethos on AFROBUBBLEGUM—that it normalized and glorified homosexual behavior.

Do you see the AFROBUBBLEGUM movement as political?

I think when you’re creating, you're not thinking about the reception, you’re thinking about the creation first. When I say that it's not a political story, I think this is what I mean. Love has become associated with politics. Depending on who you love and what color you are and what religion you are. So a white, straight couple, you wouldn't call that love political. But if you change the hue of the color of the person, if you change the race, the ethnicity, the religion of the person, then it starts being called political. So when you have two black women loving each other, it’s as if what they're doing is an act of politics, not an act of love.

What do you hope will come from this movement?

I'd love to project more hopeful, radical hope, ideas that are full of awakened curiosity that help us think in new ways, that help us value Africa in new ways. I really, truly think that once we begin to see Africa in a new light, it will help globally with many, many injustices that we still face.

To hear more from Kahiu and other artists in the movement, 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.

Age-old cuisine, from soup to sweets.

Historian Jean Bottéro concluded his 2001 article, "The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia," with an insult of sorts. "I would not advise trying to incorporate their culinary tradition, just as it stands, into our own," he wrote, speculating that a modern eater would not enjoy the garlic-heavy, salt-light dishes that people ate nearly 4,000 years ago.

But ever since, chefs around the globe have attempted Mesopotamian recipes, the oldest on record, in their home kitchens. Nawal Nasrallah, an Iraqi scholar and and cookbook author, has written about adapting the ancient recipes for modern kitchens. Nearly a decade ago, Laura Kelley, founder of the blog The Silk Road Gourmet, organized an ancient Mesopotamian cooking challenge. More recently, an interdisciplinary team from Yale and Harvard whipped up a Mesopotamian feast in 2018. All three endeavors had the same source material: a set of four ancient clay tablets in the Yale Babylonian collection.

The tablets provide substantial evidence for a haute Mesopotamian cuisine. 4,000 years ago, the Mesopotamian region, which includes present-day Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey, was already an established hotbed of innovation, encompassing the first cities, writing systems, and even the first recorded cuisine. Early scribes impressed wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets with reed styluses. Applying this method to the recipe tablets, scribes recorded culinary routines using Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language. Scholars estimate that three of the four recipe tablets originated around 1730 BC, and the fourth around 1,000 years later. Unfortunately, little is known about their origins, except that Yale added them to their collection in 1911, in a purchase of therapeutic and pharmaceutical texts.

For decades, their contents had historians stumped. In 1933, curator Ferris Stephens interpreted them as recipes for medicine. In the 1940s, curators Mary Inda Hussey and Albrecht Goetze came to the same conclusion, although Hussey later suspected that the tablets communicated more than just medical recipes. Nearly 40 years later, when Bottéro began retranslating the tablets for his research on Babylonian cooking, he found that the tablets were stamped with dozens of ancient Mesopotamian recipes.

After Bottéro’s initial discovery, historians continued to uncover surprising patterns. Portions of the tablets have either broken off or eroded with time, but astute translators identified both long and short recipes along with titles for individual recipes. While a few ingredients have ambiguous translations, Nasrallah has identified striking similarities between Mesopotamian and modern Iraqi recipes. “Some of the ingredients are unidentified, which is frustrating, but I do see similarities to what is being used in Iraq nowadays,” she says. “Such in the case of the herb erishtu, which I believe to be what we call today rashshād, pepper grass.”

The most complete of the tablets contains 25 recipes: 21 meat dishes, three vegetable-meat dishes, and one vegetarian dish. One of its simplest recipes, Bottéro notes, consists of only two lines: “Meat broth. Take some meat. Get the water ready. Add some fat. Some … [the word is lost], leek and garlic pounded together, and plain shuhutinnu.”

Though the recipes are short, with limited instructions and no measurements, they all call for multiple ingredients and likely took hours to prepare. To this day, why ancient scribes recorded these particular recipes remains a mystery. However, the expensive cuts of meat, elaborate techniques, and various seasonings could mean that chefs prepared these dishes for special occasions.

To sample flavors from the oldest cuisine in the world, today’s chefs must read between the lines. The recipe for meat broth doesn’t even specify what meat to use. However, census records from the time mention fowl, sheep, and cattle. When it comes to the unknown ingredients, consensus on their translations is rare. In the case of the broth, the jury is out on whether shuhutinnu is an onion, an herb, or a root vegetable. With all these varying translations, it’s impossible to argue for one interpretation with complete certainty.

Beyond Yale's tablets, additional Mesopotamian dishes appear in records on food rituals and upon archaeological artifacts. Mesopotamians not only fed themselves, but also assembled elaborate dishes for their gods. Sweets, which made their way into popular traditions and rituals, incorporated honey and date fruits. Mesoptomian pastry chefs crafted recipes for qullupu, a sweet date-filled cookie, and mersu, a date and pistachio candy. Ancient texts reveal that ancient Mesopotamians offered qullupu to the Sumerian goddess Inanna during the New Year and Spring Festivals.

Bottéro may not have endorsed Mesopotamian cuisine, but cooks today keep making it, using complex spices, unique textures, and diverse flavors while tipping a nod to the original texts. No matter what, there will be a few inconsistencies. Today’s versions can’t incorporate the same ingredients, use the same cookware, or utilize the same cooking techniques as 4,000 years ago. But you can still try for a taste of ancient Mesopotamia in your modern kitchen with recipes for meat broth and mersu. For a challenge, try searching the Yale Babylonian collection for the tablet recipes yourself, and cook up your own interpretation of Mesopotamian cuisine.

Meat Broth

Serves: 4

Prep Time: 30 minutes

Cook Time: 2 hours

8 cloves of garlic, sliced

1 cup leeks, sliced

1 1/2 cup carrots, sliced

1 lb beef chuck roast

3 cups water

Salt and pepper to taste (or go without, as the Mesopotamians did)

1. Prepare the Vegetables and Meat

Slice the carrots, garlic, and leeks. Using a mortar and pestle or a spoon, grind the leeks and garlic together in a mixing bowl. Set aside. Cut the beef into large one-inch cubes and season with salt and pepper, if you wish. Drizzle oil in a wide-brimmed pot, before adding the meat and browning lightly on both sides.

2. Start the Soup

After the meat has browned, turn the stove to medium heat, and add the carrots and mashed garlic and leeks. Quickly transfer three cups of water to the pot. When the pot starts bubbling, turn the stove to low heat.

3. Sit Tight!

Cover the pot and let the soup simmer for two hours, with occasional stirring. Before serving, skim off the beef fat with a strainer and flavor with salt and pepper to your taste.

Mersu

Servings: 12 mersu balls

Prep Time: 45 minutes

1 cup dried dates

2 cups pistachios, raw

1 tbsp butter, melted

1. Prepare the Dates and Pistachios

Cut the dried dates into halves and transfer to a medium bowl. Pour 2 cups of boiling water over the dates and cover with tin foil or a lid. Let the dates sit for 30 minutes. In the meantime, shell 2 cups of pistachios and grind the nuts into a fine powder using a blender. Set aside.

2. Mix the Ingredients

When the dates are ready, drain the water (leave a little water for easier mixing) and add a cup of pistachio powder and the melted butter to the bowl. Using a fork, potato masher, or mortar and pestle, grind the ingredients into a smooth mix.

3. Roll the Balls

Using your hands, roll the mix into 12 balls and coat each ball with the remainder of the pistachio mix. If you prefer smaller candies, you can make around 18 balls. Transfer the rolled mersu to the fridge to chill before serving.

Khulan have been on the wrong side of the tracks for far too long.

When a railway was laid across Mongolia's vast expanse, it cleaved the country in two. Constructed in the mid-20th century as a conduit through the Gobi Desert, the rail stretches from southern Russia into northeast China. But the railroad was, of course, built for humans. Which means its builders overlooked how it would affect other species, including the ungulates of the region—most notably Mongolia’s khulan.

Once the track was laid, the damage was done. The khulan, a Mongolian subspecies of the onager, or Asiatic wild ass, soon vanished from the country’s harsh eastern steppe, through which the railway runs.

Back then, in the 1950s, Mongolia “was nearly Terra Incognita,” says Kirk Olson, the Mongolia conservation director for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), via email. “The Gobi-Steppe dwarfs the Serengeti ecosystem in size. The [Mongolian] ecosystem has been defined by the boundary of the range of khulan and Mongolian gazelles.”

In the mid-20th century, the northern stretches of the country housed an eclectic assortment of nomadic herders, remote villages (some of which would soon host train stations), and, of course, the denizen species of the desert—khulan among them. But with the arrival of people, coming through in (relatively) large numbers, the khulan took leave.

“What seems to have occurred is that when the corridor fencing was put in place to keep livestock and people off the tracks (and probably also to prevent vehicles from trying to drive across), the khulan were no longer able to move freely,” Olson says.

A staple species of the steppe ecosystem, the khulan—a tawny, quarter-ton cousin of the donkey—found itself without 6,500 square miles of land on which it used to roam.

“It was often explained to me by some of the older herders when I was first working in Mongolia that [Soviet] soldiers would hunt khulan with great intensity,” says Olson. “The combination of hunting pressure and harassment, herders occupying natural water sources, and the completion of the railroad were likely all interacting to cause their disappearance from the east.”

But with scant field research at the time, Olson says, it’s hard to say for sure. One thing is certain, however: The last time a khulan was reported crossing the tracks was in 1955.

Until now. On March 16, a khulan was seen for the first time in 65 years, about 500 miles from Ulaanbaatar.

Since then, the WCS team has removed a small section of wire fencing from the concrete posts on either side of the tracks, creating a 2,300-foot gap in the hope of opening a wildlife corridor for the diverse species in the area. Herds of Mongolian gazelles began bounding across in no time, but the khulan were more skeptical—until one individual cautiously made the first steps back eastward.

It was a momentous event that happened far more quickly than the team had expected—“a result that could be compared to throwing a dart and hitting the bullseye from [65 feet] back,” Olson says.

It remains to be seen how these ungulates will adapt to their former territory. But one small hoofstep for the khulan certainly represents a larger step for this long-lost species of the steppe.

The complex ceremonies continue, but likely without hundreds of thousands of devotees.

The permanent residents of the Shri Jagannath Temple, in the Indian coastal town of Puri in Odisha, usually have busy schedules. Every year, three idols, representing the holy siblings Lord Jagannath, Balabhadra, and Subhadra see and bless millions of Hindu pilgrims. But every June, the idols go on sick leave, a fortnight of isolation and purification before emerging again for the Rath Yatra (“cart journey”) festival, in which three 45-foot-tall chariots, one for each deity, process through the town, with an audience of hundreds of thousands (“Jagannath” is the source of the word “juggernaut”). This year, as India reels from the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, most of the devotees are absent. The temple complex is quiet. Inside, however, a few priests and temple attendants are trying to ensure that the divine itinerary—illness, isolation, reemergence—is followed.

The Rath Yatra at the Shri Jagannath Temple is one of the more spectacular annual Hindu festivals, preceded by a quieter set of rituals. This year, of course, with the nature of the festival changed from public to more private, the services have changed in a way few are able to see. The rituals and traditions remain bound up with India’s caste system, which has been a source of great inequality and violence over the centuries and today, but continues to be a touchstone for the communities involved, in that it situates them in within Hindu notions of cosmic duty.

“Fifteen days before the festival the deities are in quarantine because they are unwell,” says Kirti Prakash Das Mahapatra, one of the traditional, caste-bound attendants of Lord Jagannath, also called a Daitapati.

This period, when the inner sanctum of the temple is shut, is called anasara, derived from Sanskrit word Anavasara meaning “no interval of leisure.” Worship of Lord Jagannath, lord of the universe, is thought to have its roots in tribal practices dating back to the second century, but the origins of this ritual are unknown. For the communities that nurse the deities back to health, the process is an act of cosmic hierarchy.

Mahapatra explains that 18 days before the Rath Yatra, on a full moon, the trio of idols appear in public for a holy ritual bath. After this, they are said to fall ill, and are brought to the anasara ghar, or isolation room. There, the Daitapatis are entrusted with healing the gods—in complete secrecy.

“There are usually thousands of people who attend the bathing ceremonies, but this year only a few temple attendants have come,” says Mahapatra, because many are worried about the pandemic, or thought it might mean the rituals’ suspension.

Daitapatis are on the lower rung of the ancient hierarchy of India’s complex caste system, despite their holy duties. The Indian constitution bans caste discrimation, but caste-based professions remain the backbone of temples such as Shri Jagannath.

Mahapatra, a small business owner, is among the 150 Daitapatis who annually return to the temple for anasara. They fast, avoid social engagements, and lead an austere life during this time. This year was no different for the 32-year-old, despite the lockdown.

“Jagannath is like us humans,” he says. “It is our job to cater to the unwell deities. We give them basic food, medicinal herbs and liquids, like we do to those who are ill.” That healing involves repainting the idols, among other works of maintenance. As art historians Eberhard Fischer and Dinanath Pathy note in their 2012 book In the Absence of Jagannatha, the act of repainting is an act of spiritual renewal.

Another caste, the Chitrakars, or artists, create the paintings to be worshipped in the absence of the idols—and it is the paintings and not the people that are considered pure and divine, in keeping with the general inequity and strange logic of the caste system.

A few days before the anasara, cotton cloth is glued together with tamarind paste and primed with a mixture of more paste and chalk. Paint is made with natural pigments and elephant appletree juice. In these paintings, Jagannatha is called Narayana, Balabhara goes by Ananta, and their sister Subhadra is known as Bhubaneshvari. The bejeweled sister sits in between her moustachioed brothers, and each god boasts four hands. Most prominent in each depiction is their large eyes, where the power to bless resides.

“Eyes are associated with the life of the image and the consecration is accomplished by the creation or opening of its eyes,” explains University of Copenhagen anthropologist Helle Bundgaard, who analyzed Odisha’s Chitrakar community for her 1999 book Indian Art Worlds in Contention. Historically, she found, the artists have served the temple and local kings for centuries—and serving the former continues to be a sacred duty, despite some having more lucrative opportunities for their talents. As Bundgaard explains, three factors motivate them: “Religious significance, reputation, and long-term economic interest.”

“We get together and paint day and night ahead of anasara,” explains Universe Maharana, 35, who lives near Puri in the artist-village of Raghurajpur, which has 200 Chitrakar families. “Since this is a collective process, we don’t sign the work. That’s not allowed in our community.”

The painting takes place in homes or workshops across Odisha, following ritual cleansing of the spaces. Women are allowed to prepare the surfaces, but not paint them. The chief painter can ask other male family members for help, but at the cost of hosting a feast. The compensation from the temple doesn’t cover the costs of the rituals, but the Chitrakars’ belief that painting the anasara, even a single brushstroke, guarantees entry to heaven ensures their participation every year. This year, however, few will obtain this honor, thanks to physical distancing measures.

Maharana is a successful artist outside of his sacred duties, but for many Chitrakars the temple is their only source of income. Select families are granted the right to paint temple murals, Rath Yatra carts, and anasara triptychs. The honor this bestows extends beyond the spiritual.

“Journalists and people come to take photographs of anasara paintings, and that exposure can translate to some economic gain later on,” says Bundgaard.

Once the anasara paintings are complete and mounted, the Chitrakars focus on the biggest job: the three massive carts of the Rath Yatra.

“Around 40 to 50 of us paint the rath,” says Maharana. “Each part of the cart has a name and motifs of dancing figures, animals, and birds.”

The raths are less carts than mobile temples, pushed by people and devotion, on 14 giant wheels each. After the festival, the carts are dismantled, and used as firewood for the temple kitchen and to light the funeral pyres of devoted Chitrakars.

Unlike the anasara, rath construction is a public affair. The main street leading up to the temple is choked by wood piles as temple attendants fashion the cart, watched by guards. The priests also grant families exclusive rath rights based on caste.

Despite COVID-19 concerns, some carpenters, florists, tailors, ironsmiths, and painters have worked on the rath in 2020, Maharana says. But, in a strange parallel, by ensuring that the gods emerge from their quarantine, these artists and craftspeople will be subject to their own two weeks of isolation, to much less fanfare. Maharana is not among them.

“If I participate, I won’t be able to see my family for the duration of the ritual, after which I will be quarantined in a government facility to make sure I haven’t got COVID-19,” he says. “Only those who are absolutely required will go, even the Rath Yatra may not have many people, which will be so strange and unprecedented.” Indeed it hasn’t. And it sounds like it will be strange. As of June 15, according to IndiaTV, the idols are in their period of isolation, and temple authorities are trying to craft a plan for their June 23 emergence, which may involve thousands of COVID-19 tests, and heavy machinery and elephants pulling the carts—with no crowd of devotees.

These traditions anchor the spiritual worldview of Chitrakars, Daitapatis, and other temple attendants, so they are glad that the rituals are proceeding, even if few will see them.

“The gods have to emerge out of quarantine,” Mahapatra says. The parallels between pandemic isolation and the isolation of the gods is tempting, but it only goes so far. The religious idea of quarantine remains restricted to purity and pollution, not public and personal health.

But in a bid to encourage more than 45 million Odiyas to self-isolate, the state government made the comparison between COVID-19 lockdown and anasara, according to news reports. Residents hope that there will be a joyous emergence soon.

“Jagannath is god. How can he stay in isolation forever?” says the artist Maharana. “I hope we can get out of this prolonged isolation, too.”

In Tirau, New Zealand, a classic construction material takes on a life of its own.

Steven Clothier never intended to become an artist. A mechanic by trade, the New Zealander used to work odd jobs around his home of Tirau, a small township of 800 people whose name means “place of many cabbage trees” in te reo Māori. Today, he’s known for his quirky outdoor sculptures and colorful signs made of corrugated iron, which can be found across the country, especially on the North Island. In Auckland, a smiling strawberry waving a flag marks the entrance to a berry farm. In Putaruru, a hulking meat pie rests atop a bakehouse, its savory innards appearing to spill out.

But it was a giant dog, bright-eyed and floppy-eared, that started it all. Lounging on a street corner in Tirau, the goofy canine is one of the town’s most famous landmarks and has helped earn it the nickname “Corrugated Capital of the World.” An example of mimetic architecture—buildings designed to look like anything that isn’t a building—it houses the town’s information center and public restrooms.

Clothier built the structure in 1998 for the local council, which had solicited design ideas from the community. “We wanted something different because we're in a little bit of a wacky town,” he says. “My father suggested that we build a corrugated iron dog, and he volunteered me to build it.” The mechanic had never worked with galvanized steel sheets before, but the council commissioned it, and he unveiled his handiwork—a white pooch complete with a lolling tongue—three months later.

For anyone who grew up in sheep country, a dog was a fitting choice for the project. The street corner was already occupied by another mimetic building, a merino wool shop shaped like a sheep; visitors entered through a door tucked beneath the cheerful creature’s chin. The addition of Clothier’s canine helped create a comical scene. It also sparked a demand for similar pieces from other residents.

“Once we had the big sheep and the big dog, the rest of the town sort of got behind it,” Clothier says. After finishing a few commissions for local restaurants and stores, he launched Corrugated Creations, a business dedicated to creating eye-catching artworks out of hardy, weather-resistant corrugated iron. His creations gradually began to dot the country; some made their way across the Tasman Sea to Australia.

Located at a major intersection of two state highways, Tirau is an easy and popular stopover for travelers, who today delight in photographing its outdoor corrugated art, from the big pūkeko birds lounging on a roof to a massive praying mantis hovering over a hydroponics store. Tourists might see these as eccentric roadside attractions, but more than presenting unique photo ops, the structures commemorate a material that has played a significant role in the country’s architectural history. “It does sort of hit home for New Zealanders,” Clothier says of the bent sheet. “Everyone recognizes it as a product that’s part of the landscape.”

British colonizers first exported corrugated iron to the islands in the 19th century. (Although widely identified as iron, the material is neither iron nor tin but technically corrugated steel.) It quickly became—and still remains—a popular and economical option for roofing, protecting homes, churches, barns, and other farm buildings. According to Wrinkly Tin, a brief history of corrugated iron in Aotearoa New Zealand by the late engineer Stuart Thomson, the utilitarian product inspires a sense of nostalgia for many New Zealanders. “Corrugated iron has been used in so many ways in the past that it has become a Kiwi icon, with a historic and aesthetic value we are emotionally attached to,” Thomson writes. “Its dominance has been challenged by a range of more sophisticated materials, but corrugated iron is still No. 1 and quintessentially New Zealand.”

For Clothier, the rippled metal holds all kinds of creative possibilities, whether as sculpture or architecture. In 2015, he embarked on his biggest work yet—an extension of the sheep-shaped wool shop, designed in the form of a ram. The resulting creature, made of nearly 500 feet of corrugated iron, is more detailed than its companions, featuring curved, three-sided horns, rounded tufts of wool, and a yellow ID tag on its ear. “It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but that’s why I enjoy it,” Clothier says of the building process. “It keeps the mind active.”

Some people have denounced some of his pieces as eyesores, Clothier says. But he believes that the sculptures have helped to place his tiny community on the map. “Tirau was one of those lil’ wee towns that you pass through on the way elsewhere,” Clothier says. “It's now become its own little destination because people come to actually look at the art. I think it has definitely helped this town.”

Joe Froggers tell a story of Black business ownership, slavery, and seafaring in Massachusetts.

Here is what historians have been able to piece together about the lives of tavern-keepers Joseph and Lucretia Thomas Brown. Lucretia Thomas was born in 1772 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a rough-and-tumble seaport just south of Salem. She was most likely born free, but her parents had been previously enslaved by Continental Navy Captain Samuel Tucker.

When Lucretia was a young woman, she met Joseph Brown, who’d been born into slavery as the son of an African-American mother and a Wampanoag Nation father. Brown had fought in the Marblehead militia as part of the Revolutionary army, which likely led to his emancipation from slavery and his reputation, according to one local memorial, as a “respected citizen” of the seaside town. Together, the couple operated a tavern from the small saltbox-style house they purchased in 1795, perched near a frog pond on Marblehead’s Gingerbread Hill.

Less is known about the cookie that bears Joe’s first name and whose recipe is often attributed to Lucretia. The Joe Frogger cookie is a kind of boozy gingerbread uniquely associated with Marblehead. It’s fat as a lily pad, sharp with rum, salty with seawater, Christmassy with ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice, and caramelly sweet with molasses. The combination of spice and molasses is fairly typical of British and American baked goods of the time, and reflects British colonial control of both the Indian subcontinent—a major source of spices like nutmeg—and Caribbean sugar plantations, where Europeans forced enslaved Africans to labor on stolen indigenous land.

Two things, however, make Joe Froggers unique among spice cookies. First, the addition of rum and seawater is a Marblehead specialty, reflecting the region’s many distilleries and its nautical economy. Most important, however, is the legend of the couple now widely credited with the cookie’s invention.

As the story goes, Lucretia Thomas Brown invented Joe Froggers as tavern fare for the hungry neighbors that frequented the couple’s establishment. She allegedly named the cookie after her husband and the nearby pond’s lily pads that the wide, flat rounds resembled. Because the cookie lacked milk and eggs, which spoil easily, it kept for a long time, and the addition of rum and salt water further acted as a preservative. The shelf-stable sweet soon became popular among Marblehead sailors, who took it with them on sojourns to the high seas.

“They were theoretically made in the shape of a lily pad, and that shape was their distinctiveness, as much as the salt water,” says Harris, who selected Joe Froggers for inclusion in the menu of the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Sweet Home Cafe, alongside supervising chef Albert Lukas. The cookie makes up one part of the cafe’s rich menu, which Harris curated to showcase a mix of rare and iconic dishes that embody the regional diversity of African-American cuisine, including selections from the North States, the Agricultural South, the Creole Coast, and the Western Range. “We got away from that great monolith of, ‘It’s all just soul food, it’s all just Southern,’” Harris says.

Joe Froggers are a perfect fit for this mission. They’re hyperlocal, a proud Marblehead tradition strongly associated with the Browns—and, by extension, the Black Americans who fought in the Revolutionary army. At the same time, their ingredients highlight the tension between a North that simultaneously celebrated individual free Black people, while continuing to rely on slavery as the basis of its economy. The cookie’s inclusion of rum and molasses, staples of New England cooking at the time, highlights the ubiquitous influence of the brutal triangular trade, in which Euro-Americans exchanged Caribbean molasses and New England rum for enslaved African people, who were then forced to work on the same sugar plantations that helped to make these products.

Joe Froggers also embody the mix of myth and conjecture that characterize even our most iconic legends around food. “All of that is possibly apocryphal,” Harris says of the cookie’s association with the Browns and their frog pond. For one thing, there are few written records associating Joe and Lucretia Brown with Joe Frogger cookies before the 1950s, when recipes for the cookies began gaining popularity in cooking magazines across the United States. For another, the cookie’s name and nautical association is strikingly close to “Joe Flogger,” a kind of flat, often prune-filled pancake documented among New England ship fare as far back as the 1850s. It could be that, while Marblehead did produce a rum-and-molasses cookie, the name didn’t come from Joe Brown’s lily pond at all, but from the round treat’s resemblance to the seafaring pancake.

For Harris, this kind of uncertainty is a fundamental part of culinary history, and especially the history of African-American food. Culinary histories of anyone but the most elite tend to rely heavily on the oral traditions of women and working-class people, who are most likely to be unable to read and write. This is especially the case for Black Americans, whom racist laws largely forced into illiteracy until decades after the abolition of slavery. As a result, Harris is well-practiced in reading the historical archive to find what has been left out, a practice she calls “studying the silences.” “You read between the lines, you look at the things that weren’t said, the things that were alluded to but not detailed,” says Harris. “It’s circling around something until you hit it.”

In the case of Joe Froggers, what isn’t there is a detailed picture of who Joe and Lucretia Brown really were. Marblehead legend often reduces them to the caricatured figures “Black Joe” and “Aunt Crese,” descriptions that evoke racist tokenism. It’s also telling that, while Lucretia is credited with the invention of the cookies, we know far more about Joe, a manifestation of the racial and gendered “silences” Harris contends with in her research.

These gaps in record point to the complex history of oppression and resourcefulness surrounding the mythology of the Froggers. The cookies’ alleged inventors were free in a time when most Black Americans were enslaved, yet its star ingredients—rum and molasses—are inextricably tied to the brutality of slavery. Joe and Lucretia Brown were turned into stereotypes by later Marbleheard residents, but they were also Black property owners and community elders, who commanded the respect of a largely white town. Today, Marblehead continues to celebrate the Browns, with a commemorative gravestone for Joe and a nature preserve dedicated to the couple near the tavern’s original frog pond. Now a private residence, the tavern building itself still stands.

Equal parts pungent and sweet, Joe Froggers encapsulate the stark contradictions of the time and place of their invention. The uncertainty around their origins, foggy as the New England seas, reminds us of the countless marginalized stories of food, joy, and struggle that remain to be brought into mainstream history. “As with so much of African American history, we are really only now beginning to see the tip of the iceberg,” says Harris. “There is so much more research to be done.”

Today, bakeries in Marblehead, as well as the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Sweet Home Cafe in Washington, D.C., sell versions of the Joe Frogger. But you can also recreate this sweet-and-salty piece of history at home with simple ingredients from the grocery store.

Adapted From the Town of Marblehead’s Recipe

3½ cups flour

1½ teaspoons sea salt

1½ teaspoons ground ginger.

½ teaspoon ground cloves

½ teaspoon grated nutmeg

¼ teaspoon allspice

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup molasses

1 packed cup brown sugar

2 tablespoons white sugar

½ cup room temperature butter, vegetable shortening, or lard

2 tablespoons dark rum

1/3 cup hot water

Make the Dough

First, whisk the salt, baking soda, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and allspice in a medium-sized bowl until they’re well-combined. If you like a zingier cookie, you can up the ground ginger to 2 teaspoons.

In a larger bowl, beat together the molasses, brown sugar, and your chosen fat. Your choice of fat depends on what you’re looking for in the final outcome. The original recipe, like many spice cookies of the time, likely used lard, though some colonial spice cookie recipes did use butter. Butter will result in a slightly flatter, crisper cookie, while shortening will result in a fluffier one, though the texture of both will be pleasantly chewy if you leave the dough slightly thicker than ¼ inch. If you’re a purist, you can embark on a lard adventure with Gastro Obscura's handy guidelines in this recipe.

Whatever fat you choose, beat for a few minutes until the mixture becomes lighter in color and fluffy. Then, in a separate bowl or measuring cup, combine the hot water and rum. If you like a boozy cookie, you can increase the amount of rum and decrease the water proportionately. Some early recipes called for no water at all, so you’ll be in good company.

Now, stirring continuously, alternate adding the dry ingredients and the water-and-rum mixture to the sugar-and-molasses mixture. Continue stirring as the mixture coheres into a dough. If it’s too dry to mold, add a little water. It’s okay if the dough is a little sticky; it will firm up while chilled.

Cover the cookie dough and leave it in the fridge, for at least two hours and up to a day.

Shape the Cookies

Right before you remove the dough from the fridge, preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Lay down a layer of parchment paper onto your work surface, and sprinkle it with white sugar. You can add a dash of salt as well, if you’d like to enhance the seawater flavor. The idea, based on the Sweet Home Cafe recipe, is to coat the cookies with a bit of sugar as you roll them out. The sugar also helps keep the dough from sticking to the parchment.

Roll out the dough until it’s about ¼ of an inch. Traditional Joe Froggers are quite large (think lily pads). You can use a typical round cookie cutter, but if you want the full effect, feel free to improvise with something larger. Try an empty coffee can, a small bowl with a well-defined edge, or a wide jar. Keep re-rolling and cutting your dough scraps as needed.

Bake the Cookies

Place the cookies on greased or parchment paper–lined baking trays. Depending the size, you’ll have several cookies per tray. Bake them for 10 to 12 minutes. You’ll know the Joe Froggers are done when they begin to brown on the edges, and are still slightly soft in the center. You’ll smell the sugar and molasses as the edges start to crisp.

Cool and enjoy on all your seafaring voyages.

Muralists across the country are painting new visions of Black liberation.

As racial justice protests continue to erupt in cities across the world, prompted by the killings of George Floyd and many other Black Americans, so too has another phenomenon: the proliferation of murals honoring their lives and critiquing systemic oppression. The murals are united in their themes, but artists everywhere are adding their own unique spin.

#CreativesAfterCurfew

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The artist Leslie Barlow lives just a few blocks away from the Cup Foods where a police officer killed George Floyd. “It just wasn't something I could escape from,” Barlow says. “Even if I wanted to.”

So she didn’t. Minneapolis is home to a thriving arts scene where artists of color, like Barlow, are in constant communication with each other. After Floyd’s death, she and an artistic collaborator, Olivia Levins Holden, joined #CreativesAfterCurfew, a collective of artists of color who meet up in different parts of the city to paint murals together. “Artists have a really important part to play in this movement,” Levins Holden says. “We’re helping with the narratives that are taking root.”

Their system is chaotic, but there’s a method to the madness. Over 40 artists are part of a group chat on Signal, the encrypted messaging app. They are split into muralists and organizers, who help with planning and sourcing art supplies. Each mural is centered around a sketch or design that an artist has created, Levins Holden explains. Once it’s been sketched out with thinned-out paint or chalk, different artists will fill in different sections of the mural, understanding that the goal is speed, and not always perfection.

The process can take anywhere from six to 30 hours, over the course of one to three days, before an artwork is complete. But in just a few weeks, murals from #CreativesAfterCurfew went up all over Minneapolis. And while the hashtag is being used on social media to identify each piece, the art never includes a signature. “The focus isn’t on us as artists, it’s not about our own personal platforms,” Barlow says. “This is about a community, and the work we’re doing from the ground up to push that message forward.”

Robert Upham

Olympia, Washington

A few days after the death of Floyd, Robert Upham figured out what he could do in response. When the building where he rented office space began boarding up its windows, Upham arrived with spray paint, stencils, and a vision. Over the course of several days, Upham began a 90-foot mural on plywood that was used to surround the building, which sits across from the Capitol Theater on Fifth Avenue in downtown Olympia.

Upham’s art is rooted in his culture as an American Indian of primarily Dakota Sioux and Salish Indian descent. Next to portraits of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, he painted John T. Williams and Sitting Bull, Native Americans who were killed during encounters with the police. He also included other important motifs from Native American history, such as stencils of salmon that allude to the fish wars.

The design of the mural is Upham’s, but fellow artists Ayda Rose and Vincent Li were also key collaborators. Rose provided the stencil of Floyd, while Li contributed portraits of individuals who have been killed by police, including Trayvon Martin. Other volunteer artists use a combination of spray and acrylic paint to complete the mural, adding yellow and red hues to Floyd’s face and a colorful tint to his eyes.

Upham says he’s spent over 128 hours on the mural in the past week. Often, Upham will begin each morning alone before volunteer artists join him later on in the afternoon or evening. “It’s not even done yet—it’s a process,” Upham says. “I’ll still be working on it until they tell me to take it down.”

Jules Muck

Greater Los Angeles, California

Since June 1, Jules Muck has single handedly completed over 30 paintings of Floyd around greater Los Angeles—and she’s still going. It all started when some of Muck’s friends began closing their stores in anticipation of protests. They reached out to Muck to spray paint murals on their boarded-up windows and doors, as a show of solidarity. “I’m moving really fast,” Muck says. “Floyd has incredibly strong features, his face is very recognizable. It looks like him right away, within seconds of sketching, you can tell who he is.”

Muck has painted portraits of Floyd, Taylor, Ahamaud Arbery, as well as other Black victims of police brutality such as Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Stewart. After priming with generic house paint, Muck outlines the figure and uses artist-grade spray paint to complete the project. In a few hours, she’s done with each one.

Muck isn’t making money off this work. Instead, she’s asking the store owners to send her receipts from donations to bail funds. Since COVID-19 has made it difficult to acquire supplies from stores, she’s also accepting donations of art supplies to help with her project. “I just hope that the murals bring comfort to both the victims and their families,” Muck said. “I hope they know that they’re being heard. Every shop owner I’ve painted for is on their side.”

Lucille Bishop Smith's famous recipe boxes are still sought after.

A compact cardboard box full of recipes on index cards was a hot item at a virtual rare book fair earlier this month, selling for $1,650. But this wasn’t your average recipe box. Instead, Lucille’s Treasure Chest of Fine Foods was the work of Lucille Bishop Smith, a trailblazing Black chef, educator, and entrepreneur whose legacy lives on, at both a Houston restaurant named for her and in her sought-after collection of recipes.

Smith was born in Crockett, Texas, in 1892. She parlayed years of schooling into a career in education, teaching students through Fort Worth Public School District’s vocational education program. While working at Camp Waldemar, she met her husband, Ulysses Samuel Smith, the “Barbecue King of the Southwest.” Between them, they cooked for decades for the campers. She also wrote household service manuals and instituted a training program for food service industry workers at Prairie View A&M College. She is often credited as Texas’s first African-American businesswoman, eventually founding and incorporating Lucille B. Smith’s Fine Foods, Inc. in 1974.

But long before, in 1941, Smith published a cookbook in the form of a box of recipes. Lucille’s Treasure Chest of Fine Foods includes more than 400 cards, from Appetizers to Vegetables, and features Southern favorites such as hush puppies, spoon bread, and hominy casserole. Less familiar dishes, such as banana flake salad and potato fudge, also make an appearance in at least one of the following editions, of which there were many. Smith’s recipes proved successful enough to reprint in 1945, 1947, 1960, 1969, and 1972, although the extent to which they changed or evolved is, as yet, unstudied.

Which may be why not one but two Texas institutions tried to acquire the 1972 edition that Adam Schachter of Houston’s Langdon Manor Books listed for sale last month. Within hours, the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries had purchased it. For a second buyer, the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Schachter dug into his stock, coming up with a 1960 edition for them to purchase.

Brenda S. McClurkin, head of special collections at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, explains that her department had already researched Smith. So when she spotted the recipe box on offer, “I instantly knew what it was, who she was, and what an important role she played in Fort Worth and Texas history.” McClurkin says she envisions the object being “a regular part of our instruction on African American history.”

Russell L. Martin III, director of the DeGolyer Library, has been actively acquiring cookbooks for 15 years. But he’d never seen a Treasure Chest until now. “It fits perfectly within our cookbook collection,” Martin says, one that he notes is especially rich in Texan and western cookbooks. “Cookbooks can be approached from so many different angles: social history, publishing history, women’s history, local history, business history. Not to mention culinary history,” he says. “They really are mirrors of the age, and help us to see our cultural life in a unique perspective.”

A worthy project would be to secure copies of all the editions and track how they changed over the years, but the boxes are “institutionally scarce,” according to Schachter. A WorldCat search of holdings in libraries turns up only one, a 1960 edition at the Texas Women’s University Library in Denton, but scholar Rebecca Sharpless reports that the Fort Worth Public Library has one as well. It’s possible that the challenge of cataloguing a cookbook-in-a-box may be obscuring other extant copies.

Still, its collectability appears to be on the rise. Toni Tipton-Martin, who brought Smith to wider attention in her 2015 book, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, owns a Treasure Chest and keeps it “under lock and key in a fireproof safe,” she writes on her blog. Several of her readers have chimed in over the past nine years, either to ask where to buy one or to announce an eBay listing. For some, the appeal is nostalgic—recalling, for example, the delicious fare served at Camp Waldemar. But others are drawn by another facet to Smith’s story. Tipton-Martin points out that Smith not only coached “young African American cooks toward culinary proficiency” but also wanted to “empower others by using food as a tool of social uplift.”

Smith led by example. In 1965, during the Vietnam War, she baked Christmas fruitcakes for every service member from her county. She raised funds for church and civic service projects; notably, her famous hot roll mix was developed in the mid-1940s as a benefit for her church and went on to become the first commercially packaged mix for instant dinner rolls. Smith’s rolls are still on the menu at Lucille’s, the Houston restaurant owned by her great-grandson, the chef Chris Williams.

Smith’s history of civic engagement also continues at her namesake restaurant. When Williams was recently interviewed by CBS This Morning about donating meals during the pandemic, he said,“When stuff goes bad, that’s when we step up, that’s when we stand up. We look for these opportunities … that’s the core of our business here. It’s about service, as it was for my great-grandmother, as it is for my family, period.”

Then, on June 8, another opportunity arose. Lucille’s hosted George Floyd’s family and former Vice President Joe Biden in a private dining room that doubles as a shrine to Smith. In the room, another one of her Treasure Chests sits, permanently on prominent display.

When anxiety set boundaries on her life, this adventurer found solace and excitement in Google Street View.

Her physical adventures have been curtailed by agoraphobia and anxiety, but from her home in London, Jacqui Kenny has seen the world. Since 2016, she has wandered beneath cerulean skies in the American Southwest and among the shadows cast by tapered trees in Puebla, Mexico. She has visited horses on windswept expanses in Mongolia and ambled along a snow-flanked road in Kyrgyzstan. She has done it all through Google Street View, and collected some 40,000 snapshots of her travels.

At the peak of her web-based wanderlust, Kenny devoted up to 18 hours a day to her wanderings. “I kind of felt like I just jumped into this world, and then came out a couple of years later,” she says. “I was going through a time in my life where I just needed to go into another world.” Her roaming has decreased recently, as her agoraphobia has abated a bit, but she still posts snapshots from her digital travels on her Instagram, the Agoraphobic Traveller.

Atlas Obscura talked to Kenny about serendipitous sights, captivating landscapes, and finding wonder next door and around the planet.

How have agoraphobia and anxiety shaped your life and approach to travel?

I started having panic attacks about 25 years ago. Over time, they got progressively worse. I started fearing places that I might get a panic attack, especially flying on planes. I feared being trapped and not being able to get to an exit and go home. I found that the farther away I was from home, the harder it became. When you're on a plane, 30,000 feet up in the air, there's no way you can jump out and go home that easily. Then [the panic] came more and more often, and not [from] such big things like flying on a plane—on the train, on a bus. It wasn’t just transportation, either: [I panicked] anywhere I felt a little bit lost, or if I didn't know exactly how I could get back home again. I could just be walking down a few streets and get a bit disoriented and then start panicking.

I started noticing that my world was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. Then it would be things like meetings—I couldn't go to meetings because I thought that I would have a panic attack. I started managing my life so I didn't have to go anywhere. I realized that I needed to get some help because you know, it was just progressively getting worse.

What leads you to choose which places you want to visit this way?

At first, it was anywhere and everywhere. I started in Brazil, because I'd been looking at some street art; I forget who did it. I started looking around and decided to go a little bit further. And that's when I started seeing, “Oh, my god, this is incredible.” Brazil is beautiful—the colors, the vantage point, how Street View makes everybody look miniature, like they're on a stage. It's surreal.

I started traveling around and looking at other places and getting excited about lots of things.

Then I realized that it was a certain look that I really liked. I found a lot of that was around the equator or anywhere with extreme temperatures, especially the desert. I realized that I liked a sense of space and isolation, so I would leave the city and go into small towns.

These are places that, for someone with agoraphobia, it's hard to imagine being there physically. You're so far away from home, and the desert itself is something that I find quite frightening—fascinating as well, but frightening, because the idea of exiting the desert … There's something about the vastness of the desert that's quite scary. I was probably attracted to places I would be quite fearful going to, but also loved.

In cities, it's really hard to get a good composition because there's always something in the way. You can't move anything; you can't ask somebody to do a different pose. That's another reason why I started reaching out into towns, so I could get the shots that I liked. For practical purposes, but—I just got really, really, really into it. Obsessed is probably a better word.

What do you like most about traveling like this?

You can just parachute anywhere. You can be on one side of the world and then two seconds later be on the other side, and never have to worry about flying, borders, any of that.

It's the opposite of how you normally travel. You don't have any itinerary, you don't have a planned holiday. You don't know exactly where you're going, you don't know exactly where you're going to land. So, many times I would jump in and go, "Oh my goodness, where am I?" and then do some research on the place. Then suddenly you know something about a place that you didn’t know anything about before. It kind of shakes up your idea of travel. Even though it's kind of this strange, parallel universe, I just loved all the connections, and that sense of, "We're all in it together."

What advice would you have to people who feel a sense of wanderlust but are mostly at home these days, due to COVID-19?

Everybody's going to revisit how they travel now, I think. Over the last few years, I’ve discovered how great it can be to enjoy your local area. You’d be amazed at what you don’t even know exists. You don’t have to always be thinking you have to go on a holiday to find yourself.

Have you wound up going in person to any of the places that you have visited online?

No. I hope to, but I'm not sure if it's going to happen. Even though I'm feeling better, those places are still quite remote and far away. It would take quite a lot for me to go to those places.

Beyond the sights, some of the joys of travel include the smells and the sounds. Do you ever try to recreate those at home?

I haven’t done that. It was just all in my head. I would imagine scenes, so many little films. I can't even really remember it being connected to the real world.

Obviously it's such a different experience from traveling physically, because you use a lot more senses when you're traveling normally. But the thing with me is that, because I'm so anxious traveling and have been for a really, really, really long time, I was never able to enjoy any part of the process of traveling. So even if it's just visual, in my imagination, to me—for the time being—that makes a lot of sense.

The project will rescue forgotten peaches, plums, and apricots.

On Governors Island, just a five-minute ferry ride from Manhattan, art professor Sam Van Aken plots his fantasy orchard. He plans on opening a public park with 50 blossoming trees that bloom into a mosaic of pinks, reds, purples, and whites. Come summer and fall, after the flowers have faded, visitors will be able to leisurely pick among 200 rare varieties of peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, and apples.

Van Aken is a master at grafting, an agricultural practice that involves transplanting one type of tree stem onto another, forming a sort of arboreal chimera. For his most well-known project, his “Tree of 40 Fruit,” Van Aken gathered rare varieties of stone fruit and grafted 40 different cultivars onto a single tree in Syracuse, New York. Now, he wants to open an entire orchard of these fantastical fruit trees. Van Aken hopes his Open Orchard will be both a breathtaking art installation and a living library that documents New York’s lost agricultural history.

“I think it's a great way to maintain diversity,” says Amit Dhingra, a professor of horticulture at Washington State University who works in rare-fruit conservation. On top of the novelty for the public, a repository of fruit genetics can help scientists like Dhingra learn more about disease resistance or hardiness in the face of climate change. “These types of projects should be planted wherever they can,” he says. “I’m envious that we don’t have one in my own town.”

Van Aken’s fervor for multi-graft trees can be traced back to an interest in hoaxes. As a conceptual artist, much of Van Aken’s work has toyed with ideas surrounding illusion. He learned that the term hoax comes from hocus pocus, which in turn may originate from the Catholic liturgy “hoc est corpus meum,” a phrase used when bread and wine are transformed into the body of Christ.

“I thought that was a pretty interesting concept—where the appearance of a thing could remain the same while its reality changed,” says Van Aken. He began thinking about everyday objects that could be transformed into the unexpected and envisioned a tree that would look like any other during the winter, but come spring, would erupt into an array of different colored blossoms. He chose the number 40 because in Western religions it often represents a “number beyond counting.”

To create his colorful Tree of 40 Fruit, Van Aken first needed to hone his skills at grafting. Having grown up on a farm, he was familiar with the technique. “My great grandfather made a living grafting trees,” he explains. “Everybody talked about him like he was a magician.”

The process involves inserting a cut tree stem into a matching incision on an established root stock. If all goes well, the vascular systems of the tree and stem conjoin, and the two varieties grow as if they are one.

“The majority of trees—not even just fruit trees—are actually grafted now,” says Deanna Curtis, curator of woody plants at the New York Botanical Garden. Fruit trees such as apples, stone fruits, pears, and citrus have seeds that are genetically distinct from the parent, so the fruit they bear will have a different taste. Grafting ensures that the same fruit can be grown over and over again.

Curtis has heard of people making multi-graft trees with three or four varieties as a novelty before, but nothing remotely close to 40. And while making a single graft on a tree isn’t complicated per se, having 40 different varieties growing on a single tree means years of research, planning, and experimentation.

“You have to know what varieties are compatible,” says Van Aken, “but what it really comes down to is timing.” The grafting needs to be done just as the tree’s vessels begin flowing again in the beginning of spring, and it can take two years before it’s apparent that the stems have conjoined. “You can have a graft that takes, but it doesn’t bear fruit,” says Van Aken. “That’s probably the greatest skill: patience.”

While making a multi-graft tree with three or four varieties can be done in a single year, the Tree of 40 Fruit took five years and was completed in 2015. Since then, Van Aken has created around 20 other sites across the United States that bloom into a palatable pastiche every summer. For each site, he researches varieties that were historically grown in the region and sources the grafts from local growers, so each tree serves as a sort of horticultural ledger.

Now, after a decade of practice, Van Aken says that around 75 percent of his cross-variety grafts—like tacking a peach branch onto a plum tree—are a success, while 95 percent of same-variety grafts—like a peach onto another type of peach—take.

These years of practice, patience, and planning weren’t the only challenge. When Van Aken first embarked on the Tree of 40 Fruit project, he also ran into difficulty finding 40 different stone-fruit varieties that were historically grown in New York—a surprise to him since 2,000 varieties of peaches and nearly 2,000 types of plums were once grown across the United States. But swathes of these were lost when highway infrastructure paved the road for industrial production of fruit in the 1950s. Only the fruit most compatible with mass production, long-distance shipping, and shelf life could be sold in grocery stores, leaving other varieties—many healthier or tastier than their commercial cousins—to peter away into obscurity.

Learning about the plight of the heirlooms and tasting the fanciful fruit got Van Aken “in deep” with conservation. That’s why he collaborates with local growers to try and restock some of these dwindling cultivars.

“I have some that are favorites for taste and others that are favorites because of stories,” he says. The finicky green Gage plum, which Van Aken can only get fruit from about once every three years, is “really crazy … you bite into it, and there’s a bouquet.” Another plum, the Washington Gage plum, has a host of competing origin stories, but Van Aken’s favorite is that an old green Gage tree was struck by lightning and the roots “shot up another sucker.” The resulting tree produced a new variety with “amazing fruit” that was popular across the East Coast before falling out of the mainstream in the 1800s.

Now, Van Aken plans on leveling up the conservation crusade. “I was like ‘Oh, I’m going to set out to preserve all of them,’” he says, but recognized the task was probably too ambitious for just one person. That’s when he realized he could rally the help of the public while sharing his blossoming bounty.

He got the idea to create an Open Orchard, a public park that would double as a gene bank for the endangered fruit varieties. He began asking around New York City if anyone had acreage to spare, and finally got lucky with Governor’s Island. On the 172-acre island, Van Aken currently has a nursery of 300 trees, each grafted with four fruit varieties. He plans on sharing 250 of them with community gardens around the city, while 50 will stay to populate his Open Orchard.

The orchard hosts workshops on grafting and conservation (currently done virtually due to the coronavirus), and Van Aken anticipates the trees will bear fruit next summer. The summer after that, members of the public will be able to pick the low hanging fruit while orchard staff harvest the rest. Van Aken has also collected historic recipes and plans to give some of the harvested fruit to local chefs who will recreate vintage recipes. “I really just want people to taste the fruit,” he says.

Philippe Arnello is the custodian of the daily cannon—a 150-year-old tradition in the coastal city of Nice.

When the clock struck noon on May 11, the day that France began to lift its COVID-19 lockdown, a celebratory boom echoed through the city of Nice. The midday firework was not a response to the gradual ebb of a pandemic, however—it was a return to a decades-long tradition. “Just like towns have their church bells, the countryside has its roosters, and fields have their cows, for the last 150 years, Nice has had its cannon,” Philippe Arnello wrote on Facebook that morning.

The gloomy weather and requisite face mask couldn’t conceal Arnello’s delight to be returning to his patch of Castle Hill, the original settlement of the southern French city, after eight weeks. “So happy to be able to resume this tradition,” he wrote. Arnello is a second-generation pyrotechnician who has been responsible for Nice’s midday cannon since 1992, through his family fireworks business, Azur Fêtes. It’s a ritual that takes many first-time visitors by surprise, but for locals, the boom at noon is an indispensable cue to step away from their tools, tasks, or computers, and pick up their forks.

"For me, the cannon means that it's time to get ready for lunch,” explains Anthony Lannerretonne, a photographer who has lived in the city for 29 years. “It’s a reminder to find somewhere to sit down and to raise a glass of fresh rosé to my lips and grab a pissaladière or piece of socca,” he continues. Both of these street foods are classic niçois, a word that means distinctively from Nice.

The quaint midday explosion dates back to the mid-19th century, when British nobles frequently spent the winter in Nice. In 1862, a punctual lord from Edinburgh, Sir Thomas Coventry, is said to have tired of waiting for his wife to return from social engagements to join him for lunch. “He organized for a cannon to be fired at noon as a sign for her to come home for their meal,” writes Alex Benvenuto, a local historian, in an email.

“When he returned to his castle in Edinburgh, he left a pretty sum of money to Nice’s city council to maintain it,” Benvenuto continues. “The mayor at the time, François Malausséna, then voted in a municipal decree to ensure his wishes were upheld.” Coventry may have been inspired by a similar practice in his hometown: Edinburgh Castle still fires a gun at one in the afternoon, for ships in the Firth of Forth. (Rome also has a midday cannon tradition.)

Today, Castle Hill contains few markers of the area’s history, from the arrival of the Greeks in the third century B.C. to the destruction of its once-impregnable citadel by Louis XIV’s soldiers in the early-18th century. A leafy public garden has sprung up in its place, and at 300 feet above sea level, it offers a panoramic view across the terracotta rooftops of Vieux Nice, or old town, toward the Promenade des Anglais and Baie des Anges beyond.

The modern-day midday cannon is not an elaborate ritual, and is not in fact a cannon at all—it was replaced in 1886 by a firework. “It’s colorless, so there are no streaks of gold, red, or blue,” Arnello says. (There are exceptions: For heritage days and other special celebrations, Arnello and a small cast of actors sometimes reenact the firing of the original cannon in full period costume.) His designated space, which is technically part of the police department and is flanked by the Israelite Cemetery, is more utilitarian than decorative—a place to park council vehicles and let off small pyrotechnics.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no show. As the church bells start to chime for noon in the narrow streets of the old town below, he lights the fuse of a small 5.6-ounce bundle of gunpowder. The first boom can only be heard by those present; seconds later another, louder explosion reaches all but the outermost edges of the city. A plume of white smoke rises sky-high, resting for a brief moment before being swept away by the wind.

Arnello only lingers after midday on days when he has company. “Sometimes people call the town hall, other times they hear the noise one day and come looking for me the next,” he explains. He can also be contacted through his business. Whatever way he’s found, he says he is always happy for the audience.

“In almost 30 years, I’ve only been late twice,” he says. However, there are two days of the year when he breaks with his own tradition. On July 14—Bastille Day—the cannon stays silent to honor the 86 victims of the 2016 Nice terror attack. And on April 1, he likes to mix things up. “I usually let it off at 11 a.m., but now people expect that, so it’s no longer a surprise,” he says with a mischievous grin. “Maybe next year it will be at 1 p.m., who knows?”

France’s COVID-19 lockdown lasted 56 days, which was Arnello’s longest-ever stretch away from the post. He says that the local newspaper, Nice Matin, was inundated with calls from residents, who wanted to know why the cannon was deemed a nonessential service. “I also had friends messaging to tell me that, since I stopped lighting the cannon, they were no longer remembering to eat lunch,” he says with a laugh. “This niçois custom has existed for 150 years and I am very proud to play a part in continuing it.”

We asked Ivvet Modinou about the underwater creature that shares her name: P. modinouae.

When Ivvet Modinou got the call, she nearly fell out of her chair. A translucent, blue-green worm had been found in the deep ocean off the coast of the Falkland Islands. It was slender and miniscule—about as long as a capital letter is tall on this website. The wriggly thing had three antennae, two pairs of eyes, and fleshy, tapered protuberances sticking out on either side of its body—about as unfamiliar to us humans as any of the other odd animals that roam the ocean depths. The creature looked like a ghastly millipede, pressed into submission by some deep-sea rolling pin.

But for Modinou, a former volcanologist who became a science communicator, the worm’s discovery wasn’t even the best news. The worm was a new species in the genus Prosphaerosyllis, and was to be named for her: P. modinouae, a moniker proposed by Ben Scott, a friend of Modinou’s at London’s Natural History Museum and a co-author of the paper introducing the new species.

Now the Head of Engagement at the British Science Association, Modinou joined Atlas Obscura to talk about how species are named after people, and how it feels to serve as inspiration for the name of a deep-sea worm.

The worm in question lives off the coast of the Falklands, which is a place you have never visited. How did you end up getting this deep-sea worm named for you?

I worked for, like, 10 years at the Natural History Museum in London. My job was to work with a lot of the researchers, to help tell their stories to the visitors. Over the course of time, I got to know some of the scientists, and I was particularly close with the deep-sea team, and they found these new species.

The way naming species works is that you can't name it after yourself. You have to name it after someone else. They always look for a new person to name it after and, well, yeah. They named it after me. I'm now a trivia question—like, "What do I have in common with Beyonce, Donald Trump, and David Attenborough?"

How did your friends and those close to you take the news?

When I was telling my friends, half were like, “What? that's so weird.” And then the other half were like, “This is the coolest thing we've ever heard.” I was definitely in the second camp. I completely fell off my chair when I heard.

I'm of Cypriot descent, and my surname is going to die out. There's me, and then my cousin has already married and changed her name. There's no male descendent, in terms of the surname surviving. So my mom's always like, "When're you going to marry and give me grandkids?" And I'm, like, "Mom, our name is going to be in history forever."

It's that sweet thing of being able to leave that history behind in some way. It's nice that my surname isn't that common. That'll get recognized as well.

You mention that you almost fell out of your chair when you heard. Was it a surprise?

I think I found out over text, a message that said something like, “How would you feel if I named a worm after you?” It was the end of last year or the beginning of this one, so it'd been quite some time. But it was an amazing surprise, especially since I spent so much time working at the museum. It was very special. Like, "I have a worm!" I was almost embarrassed by how excited I was. It's great.

What was your first impression of the worm when you saw it?

I asked, “Is it an ugly worm? Is that why it's being named after me?” You go into your own self a little bit, and ask yourself, “Is this an honor?” But I looked up images of the worm and thought it was so cute. It's got these pincers, and it's really spiky. I was like, "Yes!"

What would an ugly worm have looked like?

The research team would say there’s no such thing as an ugly worm. But one of the first things I worked on with the team was a group of worms called Osedax mucofloris, which means something like “bone-eating snot flowers.” That's a literal translation. Deep-sea worms are always very elaborate and alien-looking. But [Osedax mucofloris] are beautiful, really, for zombie worms.

When I was growing up, the only worms I'd associate with were earthworms. Or in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, I remember watching the film and they put worms in people's ears and it somehow killed them. It was the most traumatic thing I ever watched as a child. But now, my opinions of worms have changed.

What do you see of yourself in this worm? Do you relate to this worm?

I think I'd relate to its resilience. That fact that it can survive in the deep ocean, in what I imagine are hostile conditions. It just being a surprise to people.

Of all the animals that could have been named after you, would deep-sea worm have been your first choice?

I probably would've gone for a moon jellyfish, because I think they're just incredible, but I'm extremely pleased with my deep-sea worm. Some people are like, "Surely you would've wanted a dinosaur." Nah.

I imagine there's probably a pecking order now that I've entered a club I don't even know the rules of. I imagine that it's like, "Oh, but you don't have a mammal named after you. You're not that cool."

Believe it or not, there's something on social media called #WormWednesday, which is when researchers post things about their favorite worms on Twitter.

You mentioned you haven't been to the Falklands. Do you want to see your worm in the flesh?

I'd love to see my worm in the flesh, but I'd have to go down to the deep ocean, and I am a bit claustrophobic. I'm also terrible in boats. But I am going to see it in the Natural History Museum when social distancing is over, in its little jar.

I'm not sure what its dimensions are—I'm still just reeling from the fact that I have one. It's like when you have a child. I don't care what it looks like, it's mine!

This interview has been edited and condensed.