An aerial view of Portland's airport and the Columbia River. (Photo: Bring Back Words/Flickr)

The Portland International Airport in Oregon just gave a whole new meaning to the term "getting high."

Since July 1st of this year, adults over the age of 21 in Oregon have been able to possess up to eight ounces of marijuana in private, and one ounce in public. Now, they can also fly on airplanes with it–as long as the flight remains in-state.

It turns out Oregon is a great state to fly over when one is less than sober. Ogling at towering mountain peaks, lush forests, and rugged coastlines while stoned could be quite a unique experience. From La Grande in the east, to Newport on the Pacific coast, Oregon has some of the dankest aerial vistas around. 

Newport, Oregon's airport. Prime Pacific real estate. (Photo: Jelsen25/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

While the TSA does not actively search for marijuana in pre-flight screening, possessing the plant is still against federal law. If a traveller is found with marijuana in Oregon, however, the TSA will contact the local police department, which will then verify that the traveller is of age, has an in-state flight, and is in possession of less than an ounce of weed.

If everything checks out, the traveller will be allowed to continue onto their flight.

Inland La Grande, Oregon. Very 'green'. (Photo: Sam Beebe/Flickr)

The irony of allowing people to bring their personal pot stashes on the plane while banning many cosmetic products is not lost on passengers. "I'm not anti-marijuana, but I'm pro-hairspray," one woman told Fox News. "Why can't I take my shampoo on a plane? I think it's a little lopsided. Silly, it's actually silly."

So there you have it, Oregonians. Feel free to get high before you fly. Just make sure your toothpaste isn't over 3.4 ounces.

Coastal Depoe Bay, Oregon. (Photo: Bob Heims/Public Domain)

This is Ball's Pyramid. The world's largest sea stack, it is taller than the Empire State Building—and all that is left over a 7 million year-old volcano. But hidden on its sheer rock walls was something even more amazing than the pyramid itself. 

Just as Lazarus was supposedly raised from the dead, science has its own stories of resurrection. "Lazarus taxon" species are believed to be extinct only to re-emerge alive later. The Coelacanth was a fish thought to have been extinct for 66 million years before being caught alive and well by in 1938. However no species has a great tale of resurrection than that of Dryococelus australis aka the Lord Howe Stick Insect aka the Walking Sausage. 

The story of how this six inch flightless insect managed to survive, was found, and was brought back from the very precipice of extinction is nothing short of a miraculous. 

Inside the abandoned Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois. (All photos: Walter Arnold Photography)

Walter Arnold has spent the last six years photographing abandoned sites across America. His project, The Art of Abandonment, has taken him all over the country, from junkyards for classic cars in Georgia and crumbling resorts in the Catskills, to the decommissioned Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois.

Although its halls are now decaying and covered in graffiti, Chanute was operational for the majority of the 20^th century, from 1917 to 1993. For those 75 years and over two World Wars, it functioned as a technical training center for the Air Force. At the time of its closure, it was the country’s third-oldest active base.

Arnold’s photos take us inside the eerie ruins of the Chanute base, which looks as if it has been abandoned for far longer than 22 years. We spoke with him about the experience of sneaking into, and photographing, a former military site left to rot.

The interior of the White Hall at Chanute. 

 How did you get access to the base?

While most of the locations that I photograph for my Art of Abandonment series are done with direct permission from the owners of the properties, Chanute was an exception to that rule. My brother, Will, lives down the road in Champaign, Illinois, and knew of a way to access the building. With his help we had no problem sneaking into the base.

At this time of this writing however, I would strongly discourage anyone from attempting this, as the city is currently preparing the building for demolition and as such it will be patrolled more than usual. 

Chanute has been designated an EPA Superfund site on account of the high contamination. 

What were your expectations before shooting the base – did you have any sense of how it would look?

I honestly had no idea what to expect going into this shoot, I only knew that it was a big place and had a rich history and that was enough to pique my interest. I was wholly unprepared for the magnitude of the building and just how much there was to explore there. Room after room of classrooms, offices, hangars, and hallways that seemed to loop around infinitely.

Many of the classrooms and hallways had hand-painted murals on the wall with motivating messages, renditions of famous statues, and logos of different squadrons. It was like an asbestos riddled Easter egg hunt tracking them all down! We spent the better part of a day shooting there and I am sure there were sections that we missed.

A Make Trax arcade game.

What was the most impressive part of the base?

 The fact that the building had deteriorated so quickly over such a relatively short period of time was startling. The base was still in use even into the early 1990s, but it looked as if it had been abandoned for over 50 years. This was easily one of the more toxic locations I have visited. 

Asbestos, and mold were abundant. Many of the inside rooms had standing water. Drop ceilings had fallen, along with light fixtures, and everything was rusted.  In most of the interior spaces there were calcium stalactites and stalagmites as if the ceilings were dissolving.  We used breathers in parts of the building, especially in areas that were closed off with no outside air circulation.

After the shoot I found EPA reports online that talked of heavy contamination on the grounds, and even some articles that claimed the possibility of “Agent Orange” on the site but could not be confirmed.  

Peeling paint and books on the floor. 

Can you tell us more about the history of the Chanute Air Force base?

Chanute Air Force Base, formerly Chanute Field (named in honor of Octave Chanute, a friend and adviser to the Wright Brothers), is located in Rantoul, Illinois, and dates back to World War I. Even though the U.S. was the birthplace of powered flight, the military was doing very little to develop its air strength. As of April 1917 the U.S. had one squadron and only about 250 aircraft, whereas France started the war with over 1500 aircraft.

Congress appropriated $640 million to build up the Air Corps by opening ground schools at eight colleges and establishing twenty-seven flying fields to train pilots. The City of Rantoul was selected because of its level terrain and close proximity to both the Illinois Central Railroad and the ground school at the University of Illinois. Construction of the original airfield took two months, 2000 men and 200 teams of horses. It was completed on July 22, 1917.

A ceiling collapses in a classroom. 

So it was operational for about 1.5 years of World War I. How about World War II?

Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, thousands flocked to Chanute to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. The 15,000-man quarters quickly became insufficient and many soldiers found themselves temporally housed in tents. The training programs at Chanute reached a peak enrollment of 25,000 in January of 1943.

Chanute is dominated by White Hall, a 500,000-square-foot building, equivalent to eleven football fields, and was the largest American military center before the Pentagon was built in 1941. White Hall was built in response to the huge influx of recruits wanting to serve their country just prior to World War II. It was a self-contained, multipurpose troop barracks for more than 2000 men. Its amenities included a barber shop, post office, communications office, mess hall, bakery, library, and study halls.

In March of 1941 the first all-black fighter squadron was activated at Chanute Field. Formed without pilots but with the purpose of training the officer corps and ground support personnel, the 99th Pursuit Squadron was the first unit of what became popularly known as the Tuskegee Airmen.  

What kind of life do you think the trainees pilots had while living there?

Chanute during WWII must have been a sight to see. So many people flocked there in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, that they didn’t have room to house all the new recruits. People were camping out on the lawns until White Hall was completed. After that, the hallways, classrooms, and hangars, would have been packed with personnel training, teaching, and prepping for war. During WWII the mess halls at Chanute served over 75,000 meals per day.

As a lifelong civilian, I can’t pretend to comprehend the rigorous schedule of physical and mental training that a soldier has to go through in order to be proficient at his assigned post. There are many comments from people who attended Chanute over the years in the comments section of my blog that help tell the story of life at Chanute. 

What do you know about the impact of the base on the town of Ranoul, and the continued aviation presence?

“Traumatic. Devastating. Eerie. As if a family member had died.” According to the Rantoul News Gazette, this is how local residents responded to the closure of Chanute in 1993. As with any town that relies heavily on one major institution for its economic prosperity, the closure of Chanute in 1993 had a significant negative impact on local economy. Literally half the population vanished, home values, plummeted, and commercial spending in the local economy dropped by over $100 million. Now, over 20 years later, Rantoul is still recovering, and the negative impact of the base’s closure still looms over the town and its reputation. 

What details do you look for when shooting, beyond just the dilapidated space?

I often search for a human element, something that people can relate to. Whether it’s a row of old, barstools, pool chairs sitting around an abandoned indoor pool, or a third grade spelling book from the ‘30s leaning against a chalkboard in an abandoned school house, these are the things that pull people in and help them engage and relate to the scene. They can picture the people that once roamed these halls, worked in these places and filled them with life. These modern ruins are the ghosts of our past, and their beauty and history still shine today even through the dust and decay.

A Swarovski crystal. (Photo: Alexander Baxevanis/flickr) 

There are gems, there are crystals, and then there’s Swarovski.

The improbably successful Austrian crystal manufacturer is the epitome of shopping mall luxury. It sounds foreign, exclusive, precious. Yet you can buy a pair of Swarovski earrings from Amazon for $17.60. The same total carat weight in diamonds, in a very similar setting, would cost you somewhere north of $5,000, depending on quality and provenance.

Swarovski makes glass and yet the company has managed to create for itself a brand that carries weight in the luxury world, something no other manufacturer of non-gems has ever even tried. How in the world did that happen?

Swarovski, which celebrates its 120-year anniversary this year, is a steward of a centuries-old Bohemian tradition, making use of natural resources in the Czech Republic and Austria. It’s a phenomenally innovative design studio and an impressively creative chemical laboratory, all in one. And, of course, it’s the beneficiary of absolutely genius marketing. 

Swarovski doesn’t talk about their process. They won’t tell anyone what they do to the glass, how they make it. But everyone agrees that Swarovski’s lead glass is the best that’s ever been made.

A kind of glass Bambi. (Photo: Politikaner/Wiki Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

“Glass-making, of course, is a very very ancient technique,” says Stefanie Walker, a jewelry historian who works for the National Endowment for the Humanities and teaches at the Bard Graduate Center (among other places).

To talk about Swarovski, she says, we have to first talk about sand. Sand is primarily composed of silica, which properly is called silicon dioxide. You make glass by melting sand and other chemicals. Sand melts at 3090°F, so some of those chemicals, as you might expect, are used to lower that melting point to make the whole process a bit easier. Others are used for stability, to ensure the glass won’t dissolve in water, and for various aesthetic reasons.

Glass is not a crystal; as science teachers like to say, glass is a particular type of liquid, so its internal structure is all a jumble. A crystal, like quartz, has a very strict molecular structure that allows it to grow, almost like connecting Lego blocks. To cut a true crystal, you have to “cleave” it, lop it off, at a weak point. To continue the Lego comparison, if you wanted to reduce or reshape a Lego construction, you wouldn’t attempt to break an individual block; you’d have to remove blocks where they connect to other blocks. That’s why gems have a particular array of shapes: creating a spherical diamond has become kind of an engineering challenge, because the crystal simply does not cut that way.

Glass is more like a popsicle. It’ll hold its shape, but you can make that shape whatever you’d like, and can change that shape by melting and reforming it whenever you’d like. Cutting glass can be tricky, but it doesn’t work the same way cutting crystals does.

Outside the company's headquarters. (Photo: BKP/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Because the key ingredient for making glass is so cheap (free, really) and abundant, glass has a long history. Glass beads, the earliest example of decorative glass, have been found dating back about 3,000 years. But as techniques and technology inches (and sometimes spurts) forward, glass-making has become more and more advanced. Around the 16th century is when glass-making really became an art, if not a totally above-board art. “When you talk about the 16th century, or the Renaissance, you have people talking about fakes, glass fakes, for valuable gems, all the time,” says Walker. But parallel to the development of counterfeit diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds is the concept of glass jewelry for its own sake.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, that concept exploded thanks to a development called glass paste. Previously, glass would be hand-formed by chipping away at it to get the desired shape. That sort of glass was cheaper than diamonds, but still fairly labor-intensive. Glass paste, on the other hand, is the first example of really high-end, beautiful glass jewelry. A French jewel designer named Georges Frédéric Strass in 1724 came up with the idea to mix in a bit of lead with the glass, replacing carbon that had been there before. This had two major effects. Glen Cook, chief research scientist at the Corning Museum of Glass, says: “Lead glass is actually quite easy to melt and shape, in terms of the temperatures needed and the skill required,” though he’s careful to note that it’s still pretty far outside the range of at-home DIY projects. And even better, lead glass has a very lovely sort of shine and luster—almost like diamonds.

Crystal Dome of Swarovski Crystal Worlds, Wattens. (Photo: Zairon/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Lead glass, sometimes (and technically incorrectly) called crystal glass, became hugely popular after its invention, especially in the Victorian era in the mid- to late-1800s. “Even aristocrats or wealthier people would be happy to wear glass paste jewelry,” says Walker. And jewelers began to really mess around with the possibilities of a beautiful, easily manipulated, and extremely inexpensive gem; they added colored lacquer to the settings to give the glass a color, or even inserted a bit of metallic foil underneath to increase their shine.

But fashions changed, and in the late 1800s, the claw setting became very popular.

The claw setting grips the gem while exposing as much of the gem’s body as possible, so you can get light flowing through the entire gem. Jewelers may have even pushed this style to fight back the wave of crystal glass, because at the time, crystal glass didn’t hold up to the scrutiny of that kind of full-through view. But the glass-makers responded, and the most important was Daniel Swarovski.

Bohemia, an area now part of the Czech Republic that borders Austria, has a very very long history of glass-making (and it remains one of the top three producers of silica in the world). Bohemians created lots of innovative techniques and processes for making glass; in the Renaissance, it was Bohemians who discovered that potash, potassium-heavy plant ashes soaked in water, when combined with chalk, could make for an easily workable and spectacularly clear glass, an innovation still used today. Bohemian glass was and still is widely known for its artistry and craft, and Daniel Swarovski’s father owned a glass-making factory. Young Swarovski was obsessed with glass, and in 1892 patented a new electric cutting machine, powered by hydroelectricity from the alpine waterfalls in the Austrian alps, for cutting glass.

In 1895 Swarovski founded the Swarovski company, originally called A. Kosman, Daniel Swartz & Co. (Swarovski changed his name due to rising anti-Semitism; as both a protective and marketing measure, it seems to have worked). The company’s factory was set up in the tiny town of Wattens, Austria, at the foothills of the Austrian Alps, to take advantage of the mountain’s hydroelectric possibilities.

What makes Swarovski’s crystals better than its competitors? It’s all about brilliance.

Swarovski Crystal Worlds park. (Photo: Costel Slincu/flickr)

The word “brilliance” is a shortcut to describing to the path light takes through an object, and how it appears to us during that process. “Brilliance refers to a property of glass that is related to two things scientists call the ‘refractive index’ and the “dispersion” of the glass,” says Cook. “The science here starts to get pretty complicated quickly, but the short of it relates to how much light is bent, or ‘refracted,’ when it passes through an object, and how much light of different colors are bent compared to each other or ‘dispersed.’”

Some gemstones are naturally very brilliant, meaning they have a high refractive index and high dispersion, “giving an illusion of the gem being larger than it actually is, and it becomes colored strongly as the light is broken into many rainbows,” says Cook. Diamonds are very brilliant. So is zirconia. And so are Swarovski crystals. The specific shape and the chemical makeup of Swarovski (which, again, they won’t share) combine to make them pretty spectacular. Though you’d be hard-put to find a jeweler who’d agree with you. “If you look closely, in the light, in particular, a well-cut diamond is always going to have more fire and more brilliance than a glass crystal,” says Walker. But that, really, is debatable, and also flexible: there’s only so much you can do to a diamond, but a synthetic material like Swarovski crystal has no limits. There’s no particular reason to assume that synthetic crystals won’t surpass diamonds in brilliance at some point.

Swarovski’s strength is two-fold. In sheer engineering muscle, the company is unmatched; its crystals aren’t just used for jewelry, but also for optics (binoculars, military stuff), abrasive tools, and intelligent, LED-based road lighting systems. But it became a household name thanks to its marketing and design department. In the mid-1950s, Swarovski worked with Elsa Schiaparelli to design custom-made Swarovski crystals for Schiaparelli’s jewelry. Chanel soon followed. Swarovski’s ability to create, basically, anything a designer wants, is unmatched in the fashion world; a jeweler can’t just make you a perfect cube of a sapphire, a neon orange sphere, or a dress made of a thousand rubies. But Swarovski can.

Rockefeller Center ornament. (Photo: karlnorling/flickr)

The company’s biggest new break came when they partnered with Alexander McQueen for his Spring/Summer 1999 collection. The collection is a perfect example of late 1990s/early 2000s prosperity run amok; it is a raucous, gaudy collection of thousands of sparkly perfect glass crystals, cubic headdresses, and exposed nipples. It brought Swarovski to the attention of Hollywood and New York: here were affordable, but wildly ostentatious gems that are somehow approved by the fashion cognoscenti. For the first time in centuries, it was cool to wear what is, in effect, costume jewelry.

In 2009, speaking to Metro UK about her new pink Bentley convertible (estimated cost: $400,000), Paris Hilton said: “It has Swarovski crystals everywhere. It’s the Paris pink from my brand.” Paris Hilton and Swarovski crystals go together like Britney Spears and denim. Swarovski’s designs following the McQueen show in 1999 were very of the time: aggressive, outsized, luxuriously in-your-face. This was the era of the Swarovski-studded Motorola Razr cellphone. In 2006, the New York Times wrote, “For many people who had never given much thought to crystals, confusing the multifaceted beads with, say, sequins, ‘Swarovski’ is now inextricably tied to fashion.” 

Swarovski Merc at Toyko Auto Salon. (Photo: Chris Brown/flickr.)

Every major designer—Chanel, Louboutin, Louis Vuitton, hell, Ray-Ban even got in the mix—could afford to jump in and do their own crystal riff. And Swarovski was happy to provide the crystals. A giant museum, the Swarovski Kristallwelten, was built in 1995 in Wattens, where the factory is. The Kristallwelten is still one of Austria’s biggest tourist attractions.

The company is less in the limelight than it was 15 years ago, but it’s still a thriving business; it makes the giant crystal that sits atop the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree every year, Rihanna wore a sheer dress covered in thousands of Swarovski crystals to a fashion awards show in 2014, and the company has an annual revenue of over $3.3 billion. Perhaps its strength is that while the '90s Swarovski fashions look pretty awful by today’s standards, the company’s wares, even though they’re nothing more than bits of colored glass, remain very pretty. Glass is, by definition, malleable. 

The tooth in question (Photo: Oxilia et al/Scientific Reports)

For millennia now, the human diet has cursed people with cavities. But a team of European scientists have now found indications that humans have tried to fix those cavities as long as 14,000 years ago—"the earliest evidence of dental caries intervention," they write.

In a new study, published in Scientific Reports, the team describes the lower right third molar of a 25-year-old man who died during the Late Upper Paleolithic era. Using a very powerful microscope, they examined striations and "extensive enamel chipping" on a tooth with cavities in it and concluded that those marks indicated that someone had tried to treat the cavities by chipping away at the infection with a tiny, pointed flint tool. 

It was previously known that ancient humans cleaned their teeth with tooth picks. But this is the earliest known instance of humans trying to actually fix dental problems.

Bonus finds: Gold coins, lizard embryos, buckyballs, ice mountains on Pluto

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Edvard Munch's 1893 painting The Scream. (Image: Munch/Public Domain)

Edvard Munch knew it, Wes Craven knew it, and no one knows it better than newborn babies—if you want to cut through the noise of the world, open your mouth and scream. There’s something about a good wail that’s penetrating enough to interrupt the deepest sleep or cut through the splashiest shark attack.

But what is it about screams that gives them that piercing immediacy?

A team of neuroscientists from the University of Geneva and New York University spent a couple of years straining their ears in order to find out. Their study, “Human Screams Occupy a Privileged Niche in the Communication Soundscapes” was published today in Current Biology. It explains what exactly makes screams different from average outbursts.

"The primal scream is the first vocal signal that newborn babies produce," says the paper's lead author. (Photo: Inferis/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

The key turned out to be a particular acoustic property called “roughness,” which is a measure of how quickly a sound changes from soft to loud.

“There’s a lot of stuff that’s loud and a lot of stuff that’s high-pitched,” and those things don’t inspire such a visceral reaction, senior author David Poeppel told Cell Press. It takes roughness to make everyone take notice, and the researchers found that the rougher a scream was, the more fear it inspired.

The paper’s lead author, Dr. Luc Arnal, was led to this topic by a conversation with a friend of his who had just become a father—the new dad told Arnal his baby’s screams were “literally hijacking his brain,” Arnal remembers.

To better understand this sensation, Arnal started recording and analyzing screams he found on YouTube and in horror movies. When the waveforms piqued his interest, he decided he needed better-quality samples—so he turned his colleagues into a corps of “volunteer screamers” and sent them to his lab’s recording booth to do their best Fay Wrays. The team then analyzed those screams and compared them to spoken sentences, singing, and various artificial sounds. They also played the recordings to a set of extra-brave volunteers, who listened to them from within the confines of an MRI machine.

Brain activity in people exposed to "pleasant" and "unpleasant" sounds. (Figure: Arnal et. al/Current Biology 2015)

This led to another interesting finding—when people hear roughness, they have more nerve activity in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with emotional reactions.

“Given the importance of screams in survival, it is possible that the sound information takes a fast direct route from the ear to that part of the brain,” explain Dr. Sukhbinder Kumar and Professor Timothy D. Griffiths, neuroscientists who were not involved in the study.

The instinct to scream dates back to a world where people were more often faced with immediately life-threatening situations, and is even shared with a number of animals (Arnal cites another Youtube favorite, the screaming goats). The special niche that roughness occupies in the brain means that we react to it viscerally, and the uniquely rough nature of screams means we aren’t constantly triggered by other loud things in the same alarmed way

There is one more class of particularly rough-sounding objects—fittingly, the same ones charged with protecting us from danger. Car alarms, house alarms, buzzers, and horns all displayed more roughness than your average artificial sound.

“There’s almost no paper saying that roughness should be used to make efficient alarm signals,” Arnal says, so sound designers must have figured out how to get maximum attention on their own. Here’s hoping this new knowledge doesn’t make them—or newborns—that much better at it. 

Falling produces a natural scream reaction, so roller coaster denizens like these are a great source of shrieks. (Photo: SFOTPR/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

John F. Kennedy knew how to speak American. (Image: NASA/Wikimedia)

Nearly a century ago, just after World War I had ended, there was a groundswell of linguistic patriotism in America. All of a sudden, scholars, writers and politicians were interested in studying, defining and promoting a distinctly "American" version of English.

In 1919, H.L. Mencken published the first edition of what would become one of his more popular books, The American Language. In the early 1920s, some of the country's leading linguists started work on the "Linguistic Atlas of New England", one of the first attempts to systematically document a regional dialect; in 1925, the journal American Speech published its first issue.

By 1922, Rep. Washington J. McCormick had introduced a bill to Congress proposing that the country's "national and official language" be "declared to be the American language." States followed suit, and while most of these bills failed, in 1923 Illinois actually did declare the state's official language to be "American."

But what is American, exactly? In every place that people speak English, whether it's Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Ghana, South Africa, or Canada, the language has its own essential character, sometimes so distinct that people from one place can hardly understand people from another. In this mish-mash of Germanic and Latinate forms, what distinguishes the language that's used in this country? How do you speak American?

English in America has always been different than the English spoken in the British metropole. In his 1992 book, A History of American English, the late linguist J.L. Dillard, who specialized in African American Vernacular English, demonstrates that the most originally American form of English was a pidgin, originating with sailor's language. Early explorers of North America, he argues, would have used nautical pidgins and passed those on to native people. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, there were people here—most famously the men the new arrivals called Samoset and Squanto—who already spoke a version of English that Puritans could understand.

But the English spoken by American settlers of European origin, too, quickly split off from the English spoken in Britain. At the beginning of the colonial period, America was a backwater. Not only was it distant from the cultural centers of Europe, it was far from the most happening place on this side of the Atlantic. So trends that surged in the language of London took longer to reach here, if they ever did.

It's more correct to say, for instance, that people living in England developed a new accent than that Americans "lost" their British way of speaking. Not long after the Revolutionary War, it became common among British people to drop r sounds—"card" became "caahd"—while Americans held onto their r-pronouncing rhoticity.

It was around this time, too, that Americans first started feeling a little bit nativist about their English. As Mencken reports, in 1778, one political directive advised that "all replies or answers" to a minister of England should be "in the language of the United States."

It's not clear exactly what that meant. Only recently had English emerged as the dominant language in New York City, which had been a polyglot town for centuries, and where Dutch held on as a major form of communication through the mid-1700s. Pidgin English was widely used by native tribes to communicate with people of European origin. Enslaved people had brought with them a version of English from the nautical, slave-trading regions of West Africa, and that had been developing for centuries, too.

Presumably, the nascent American government didn't intend to use any of these American Englishes in official communications. But already Americans had a reputation for using English more flexibly than British people.

Residents of the United States hung on to words that dropped out of British English: guess, gotten, cabin, junk, molasses. We also began using words lifted from native languages—maize, canoe. But, mostly, Americans would just make words up. Thomas Jefferson, who described himself as "a friend to neology,” created the word "belittle." British writers despaired over it; he simply made up more.

Belittle this, Brits. (Photo: Ingfbruno/Wikimedia)

And ever since, speaking American has meant enjoying the use of a whole vocabulary that originated here. We have stolen words from other languages, massaged them into new words, turned nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns, and smushed two words together to make new ones.

For starters, just think about some words we borrowed from Dutch and decided to keep: boss, cookie, stoop, scow, sleigh, snoop, waffle, poppycock, pit, when used to describe the seed of a stone fruit. Dumb might be Dutch, or it might be German, or it might be a bit of both, but it's a uniquely American bit of English.

There's so much more. In his book, Mencken amasses piles of particularly American words: rubber-neck, rough-house, has-been, lame-duck, bust, bum, scary, classy, tasty, lengthy, alarmist, capitalize, propaganda, whitewash, panhandle, shyster, sleuth, sundae, alright, go-getter, he-man, goof. Only in America can you go upstate for the weekend. Here, we engineer, stump, hog, and squat on a piece of land. We've stolen loads from Spanish: corral, ranch, alfafa, mustang, canyon, poncho, plaza, tornados, patio, bonanza, vigilante, mosey, and buckaroo. Americans are very talented coiners of words—including of "talented," another new one that sent British writers into spasms of horror.

"I could pile up differences until I not only convinced you that English and American are separate languages, but that when I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity an Englishman can't understand me at all," wrote Mark Twain. Walt Whitman celebrated the availability of "traitor, coward, liar, shyster, skulk, dough face, trickster, mean cuss, backslider, thief, impotent, lickspittle…I like limber, lasting, fierce words. I like them applied to myself — and I like them in newspapers, courts, debates, Congress."

It was this type of brawny English that early 20th century legislators wanted to codify as American. "It was only when Cooper, Irving, Mark Twain, Whitman and O Henry dropped the Order of the Garter and began to write American that their wings of immortality sprouted," wrote Representative McCormick, explaining his bill. "Let our writers drop their top-coats, spats, and swagger-sticks, and assume occasionally their buckskin, moccasins, and tomahawks."

The difficulty is, this is more of an attitude towards language than a grammar, a phonetic habit, or a lexicon, and it's hard to set into stone. Mencken identified three key characteristics of "American." One was its "large capacity for taking in new words and phrases." Another was its "general uniformity"—even within regional dialects, the English people spoke in one part of the country was intelligible to people living elsewhere. And third: "its impatient disregard for grammatical, syntactical and phonological rule and precedent." That's a hard set of standards to put down in law and require writers to follow.

Not long after the interest in American language swelled, too, the need to actively promote it dropped. In the 1920s, America's version of English was exported overseas from Hollywood, as the first American movies started showing in British theaters, and the British press began bemoaning the infiltration of Americanisms into youthful brains. The talkies only made it worse. And by the 1950s, after World War II, American English took on the same sheen as the rest of American's boom-era culture: it was cool.

"Think back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and how he sounded," says Mark Davies, a linguist at Brigham Young University.

"He’s not pronouncing his Rs," says Davies. "That was cool, because it sounded British. Right after WWII, pronouncing your Rs becomes cool. Why is that? It's because after World War II, we felt good about ourselves. We were powerful. All of sudden, we didn’t need to speak like the British any more."

What does American sound like today? There are some hints from the corpora that Davies put together: his Corpus of Historical American English contains 400 million words, drawn from sources from 1890 through 2009; his Corpus of Contemporary American English contains 450 million words, from texts, including soap operas, created from 1990-2012. With corpora this big and carefully constructed to draw consistently from a mix of popular and academic sources, linguists can look more carefully at how grammar and usage change over time. For instance, one hundred years ago, Americans would have said: "Have you any time?" "It's very British, very old fashioned," says Davies. Now, we would say: "Do you have any time?" We also might say: "You're going to end up paying way too much for that book." You're going to end up—that construction wasn’t around 100 years ago.

Ultimately, though, these sorts of details aren't a good guide for how to speak America. "It doesn't have to do with purely linguistic issues," says Davies. "It has to do with how we feel about the language, and how we use it."

With that in mind, here are a couple of loose guidelines for how to speak American.

Be flexible. Have fun. If Thomas Jefferson can make up words, so can you. And aim to live up to Walt Whitman's prediction: "The Americans…are going to be the most fluent and melodious voiced people in the world — and the most perfect users of words." 

A sea hare out of water (Photo: Michael L. Baird/Wikimedia)

Earlier this week, a beach-goer in the East Bay came across something odd. It was large, brown, and gooey-looking, and she thought it might be a human liver. A park ranger showed up to investigate. But this was not a crime scene, he determined. Instead, the mysterious lump of flesh was the most beautiful sea creatures ever to be mistaken for a human organ—a California sea hare.

Sea hares are a type of giant, hermaphroditic sea slug. Really giant. As ABC News reports, "they can reach up to 15 pounds and almost three feet in length." On land, they look like gross blobs. But underwater, they're actually quite elegant, if alien-looking, as in this video taken by James Frank, a naturalist with the East Bay Regional Park District:

Lately, they've been showing up all along the East Bay, as a result of "warmer than average water," the East Bay Regional Park District explains. And you have to forgive people for freaking out just a little bit. These creatures look like they might be the first monster of the week for the new X-files, or one of those creepy AI dreams that are still haunting the internet. Just look once again:

This is the world we live in.

Bonus finds: Bacon-flavored seaweed, new species of feathered dinosaur

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

The cover to 'Klaus', illustrated by Dan Mora. (Photo: Courtesy Boom Studios)

If you’ve ever heard an origin story for Santa Claus, it likely went something like this: kindhearted, immortal, elfin old man enjoys cold weather and children, chooses to express this sentiment in an annual gift-giving extravaganza with the aid of some aerodynamic reindeer. This Santa comes from a number of sources, but its popularity can generally be traced back L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus or its Rankin-Bass claymation adaptation.

Yet that’s not the only possible—or even historically accurate—myth. In a new a six-issue “comic miniseries” set to debut this November, comic book writer Grant Morrison has partnered with artist Dan Mora and Boom! Studios to reboot Santa’s origin story with Klaus, Its source is rather surprising: in an interview, Morrison elaborates that his “big, fantasy, sexy, superhero Santa” is inspired by the Siberian shamanism. “I suddenly thought, ‘How come no one’s told the ‘Year One’ of Santa Claus?,” said Morrison. 

So what aspects of Siberian shamanism specifically influenced the Santa Claus story? And how does that make a jolly old man into a sexy superhero?

The earliest known illustration of a Siberian shaman to have appeared in Europe, by Dutch explorer Nicolaes Witsen in the 17th century. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Shamanism has been practiced in Northeast Asia—including Siberia—for centuries, and remains a significant religious minority today. Shamans are generally defined as individuals with access to and influence over the spirit world, typically achieving an altered state of consciousness to interact with the spirit world on behalf of petitioners. Reindeer play a central role in Siberian shamanistic practices, reflecting their importance to nomadic herders, hunters, and farmers who keep them as domesticated animals. Reindeer sacrifices were integral to a number of rituals, including shaman initiation ceremonies, and reindeer antlers, skin, and hair were used to create the shaman’s costume and instruments. Imagery of flying reindeer is also central to Siberian shamanism; a significant ritual involves the soul journeying on a flying reindeer.

Piers Vitebsky’s book about the Eveny people of Siberia, The Reindeer People, describes an annual Midsummer’s Day ritual to mark the “death” of the past year and the “birth” of a new year. As the tribal elders prayed for an increase in reindeer and the strength and health of the villagers, each villager’s soul was believed to be flown on a reindeer to a land of plenty near the sun. This ritual—and the flying reindeer imagery—is echoed by the traditional costumes of the Eveny shamans, which sometimes included reindeer antlers tipped with feathers. 

So, we’ve got our flying reindeer. But what about the man in the red-and-white suit?

An illustration of Amanita muscaria from 1911. (Photo: Biodiversity Heritage Library/flickr)

The mushroom Amanita muscaria (commonly known as the Fly Agaric) can frequently be found growing beneath pine, spruce, fir, and other conifers that you might chop down and put up in your house in December. It also is famous for its psychotropic properties; it is speculated to be the “soma” described in the ancient Indian Rigveda hymns written between 1500 and 1200 BC. R. Gordon Wasson, the man who first argued for the soma-fly agaric connection, also reported that Siberian shaman frequently used the mushroom both ritualistically and recreationally. Other researchers, such as John Rush from Sierra College in California and Carl Ruck at Boston University, have continued investigating the role of the fly agaric in Siberian shamanism and its connection to Santa Claus, adding that shamans traditionally traveled among communities giving gifts of fly agaric during the winter solstice and often dressed in red-and-white to evoke the sacred mushroom. Donald Pfister, a biologist at Harvard University, has even pointed out that reindeer are known to find fly agaric tasty and may be doing some “flying” of a different sort.

Basically, replace ‘shrooms with toys—aren’t they both just triggers for creative, imagined experiences—and you’ve got yourself a Santa Claus.

A photograph from 1914, believed to be by Fridtjof Nansen, of a shaman of the Ket People in Siberia. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

This research isn’t without controversy: some historians argue that these shamanistic practices are overstated (if they’re accurate at all) and the odds that they influenced the Western idea of Santa Claus are slim at best. Ronald Hutton, a historian at the University of Bristol, told NPR that “shamans didn't travel by sleigh, didn't usually deal with reindeer spirits, very rarely took the mushrooms to get trances, didn't have red and white clothes,” instead attributing the Santa Claus mythos entirely the Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem, “The Night Before Christmas.”

Either way, it is likely this is aspect of Siberian shamanism will directly influence Klaus.  A practicing chaos magician and advocate of the use of psychedelics (his Wikipedia page is listed under “Psychedelic drug advocates”), Morrison has explored psychedelics’ use in mysticism before, most notably in his comic series recounting a motley team that uses magic, time-travel, psychedelic trances, and straightforward violence to battle interdimensional alien villains, The Invisibles—a conceit that makes Klaus look pretty realistic. It is wholly unknown, though, whether Siberian shaman Santa could be described as sexy.

(All images: Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library)

In the 19th and 20th centuries, one particular class of explorers traveled overseas not to gain new knowledge, but to spread ideas they already believed in. European and American missionaries flocked to Africa and Asia with boxes full of Bibles and, often, minds closed by conviction. They brought back records and photos of their experiences, and, occasionally, new respect for other religions. These portrayals of worldwide faiths, filtered through a Christian lens, were as close as most Westerners of that time came to an idea of global diversity.

"Missionary Portrayals of World Religions," which runs through the end of October at Yale Divinity School, showcases artifacts from this era of clashing cultures—everything from voyeuristic photographs sent home to garner support, to written accounts and scientific inquiries driven by pure curiosity. Years later, as so often happens, they reveal at least as much about the photographers and authors as they do about the subjects. 

The Hindu men shown above expressed their religious convictions by walking on beds of spikes. This photo is by W.K. Norton, who traveled to Benares, India in the 1920s with the Baptist Pilgrims Mission. Norton used these photographs to convince Europeans to send more financial support. His mission: to save practitioners of other religions from what he considered "self-torturing activities."

The May 1862 issue of "Juvenile Missionary Magazine" was of many missionary periodicals for young Christians, which often described the religions and customs of children abroad in articles like "Idolatry at Bagadry" and "The Hindoo Girl."

Two Hindi men worship stone carvings of snakes in Varanasi, India, in another image designed to shock Europeans—also from the albums of W.K. Norton, who captioned it: "Many of the heathens believe their idols are demon possessed."

Dr. John Scudder, an American missionary to India, appeals to younger generations of Catholics in this hand-illustrated letter, in which he congratulates them on having raised money "to buy Bibles for the Heathen."

An example of a missionary postcard.  These postcards were produced by mission sending agencies and distributed throughout Europe and America with the intent of promoting support for the missions' work.

Crowds line the streets to watch larger-than-life effigies during a funeral procession in Shanghai, China. The photo was taken sometime between 1915 and 1920 by Bishop William P. Roberts, the last American Bishop consecrated to work in the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui (the Holy Catholic Church of China) before it was shut down during the Communist Revolution.

This photo, also from the albums of W.K. Norton, shows a Hindu man who vowed to "never again lie down." Ropes helped him stand up at all times.

Hanuman is a deity known for his strength, courage and selflessness, and is particularly worshipped by wrestlers and as a border guard. This etched illustration, from the book "Dr. Scudder’s Tales for Little Readers about the Heathen" by John Scudder, portrays an immature Hanuman, pestering saints in a forest before he learned to use his powers for good.

An engraved map of Florida by artist Jacques les Moyne, from 1591. (Image: Library of Congress/Public Domain)

There’s no arguing it—Florida is kind of nuts. Pull on that lever sticking out from the bottom of the U.S., and you might get giant lobsters, presidential vacation bunkers, or neon homes adorned with bowling balls. But long before this country was even a twinkle in Washington’s eye, what would become the Sunshine State was packed with pioneers, insurgents, and all sorts of counterculture.

In fact, it was its status as a hotbed of rebellion that inspired Spain to give it to the United States on July 17th, 1821. In honor of the 194th anniversary of its handover, we rounded up eight crazy things Florida had to offer before it even joined the Union.

1. The First European Woman and African Man on the Continent

A painting of Juan Garrido and Hernando Cortes exploring Mexico in 1520. Garrido is also thought to be the the first person to plant wheat in the New World. (Image: Public Domain)

When King Ferdinand of Spain decided to check out some land north of Puerto Rico in 1512, he sent a man named Juan Ponce de Leon. Ponce de Leon was your average conquistador—he was born noble and cut his teeth as a “gentleman volunteer” on Columbus’s second New World expedition—but a small fraction of his crew was not average at all. The two-hundred-strong team that supported his first voyage included at least one European woman, named Juana Ruiz, and one West African man, Juan Garrido. Each is believed to be the first of their respective demographics to set foot on mainland North America.

2. Huge Droves of Feral Horses
Wild horses enjoying their freedom in Florida. (Photo: Geoff Galice/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

To help them herd cattle, draw plows, and generally get around, optimistic conquistadors loaded their ships with stallions and mares from Spain. But the harsh realities of seafaring and colonizing meant that many of the animals were lost—not killed, but literally lost, freed on purpose during shipwrecks or abandoned after failed projects and explorations. Since prehistoric Floridians had eaten all the horses in the area, along with most other large mammals, ten thousand years earlier, the newcomers had no competition, so they took over Florida, where many of their descendants still roam free today.

3. The Oldest City in the U.S.
A 1589 map of St. Augustine, by Baptista Boazio. (Image: WikiCommons PD-US)

In 1565, half a century after Spain claimed Florida, the territory’s first governor established the city of St. Augustine. What started out as a thrown-together settlement quickly became a conflict magnet—over the next few centuries, it was burned, raided, and temporarily conquered by American Indian tribes, French armies, and English pirates. But it also started racking up milestones: the first child of European descent to be born in what is now the continental United States joined the world in St. Augustine, as did the first African-American child. St. Augustine currently boasts an airplane graveyard, the country’s narrowest street,and a number of intertwined, interspecies love trees. Most impressively, though, it outlasted the early attacks (and more recent snowbirds) to become the oldest city in the United States.

4. The First Settlement of Ex-Slaves
Fort Mose is now a state park. (Image: Justin Waters/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the late 17th century, the Spanish government began offering official asylum to all slaves who managed to escape the British colonies and get to Florida, provided they agreed to convert to Catholicism and serve in the Spanish military. The newly free (or free-er) people settled in a town called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé, a.k.a. Fort Mose. The fort was home to hundreds, and is now considered a precursor to the Underground Railroad.

5. Rowdy Rebels

In 1780, the British arrested three signers of the Declaration of Independence. They sent them to St. Augustine, where they were held in this prison, the Castillo de San Marcos. (Photo: Historic American Buildings Survey/Public Domain)

Spain traded Florida to Britain in 1763 in exchange for Havana. Most of the Spanish and freed people promptly left for Cuba, and the British went about repopulating with their own settlers, planting more lucrative crops, and establishing order in the form of more regimented legal and political systems. A mere 13 years later, though, the rest of America threatened to upset that nice new order by declaring the War of Independence. Floridians didn’t care for the idea—they had no complaints about the motherland, and when they got wind of the Declaration of Independence, the people of St. Augustine burned effigies of the Founding Fathers in a public square. And so Florida became a Loyalist mecca, full of anti-revolutionaries: the most rebellious stance possible in post-1776 America. 

6. Florida Crackers
Renowned painter Frederic Remington's depiction of a "cracker cowboy." (Image: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

When the Treaty of Paris established the United States as a new country in 1783, Spain regained control of Florida. Soon after, Americans from Georgia and South Carolina begun illegally crossing the border, and setting up small outlaw communities. Known as the “Florida Crackers” due to their wisecracking ways, many among this “lawless set of rascalls” ended up training those feral horses from before and working as cowboys.

7. “The Free and Independent Republic of West Florida”
The "Bonnie Blue Flag" of the Free and Independent Republic of West Texas was later co-opted by Confederates. (Image: Project Gutenberg/Public Domain)

The early 19th century saw the U.S. using the Louisiana Purchase and land-dispute legislation to annex small areas of Florida, but much of it remained under Spanish rule. In 1810, disgruntled British and American Floridians took matters into their own hands and successfully attacked a Spanish fort, raising a new flag and declaring the area “The Free and Independent Republic of West Florida.” Although the Republic was technically in what is now Louisiana, it was that Florida spirit that drove the rebels, who kept their new country alive for ninety days before it was scooped up by the U.S.

8. Abolitionist American Indians

The United States went to war with the Florida Seminoles numerous times. In this painting, Marines search Florida mangroves. (Image: NARA Archive/Public Domain)

After Fort Mose closed, the Seminole and Creek tribes picked up the slack, welcoming runaway slaves into their communities. When officials ordered their return, Seminoles reportedly responded that they “had merely given hungry people food, and invited the slaveholders to catch the runaways themselves.” Partially because of this, the American colonies began warring with Floridian Indians in the 1810s, and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams declared the whole territory“a derelict, open to the occupancy of every enemy, civilized or savage, of the United States and serving no other earthly purpose, than as a post of annoyance to them.” He convinced Spain to give up Florida to the United States so that they could tame it; on July 17th, 1821, the reins were officially passed.

Luckily, 194 years later, Florida remains just about as feral as ever. Just ask the Keys Alligators.

The rockstar in her current job. (Photo: Eve Alpert/Used with Permission)

How do you escape being a world-famous touring musician? Proud Montreal native and ultra-badass bassist Melissa Auf der Maur (MAdM) seems to have found the answer.

In the 1990s, Auf der Maur played bass in some of the biggest rock bands of the era including Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, before setting off on a successful solo career of her own. Auf der Maur toured the world almost constantly beginning in her early 20s, at a time when most people were just taking their first real job, either tearing up the stage as a musician, or promoting one of her other artistic works, be it her photography, a fantasy movie, or a comic book. She couldn’t be stopped.

Until she did.

After playing her last solo show in 2011, while eight months pregnant, Auf der Maur abruptly turned a corner on her globe-trotting, big city life, and settled down in the small town of Hudson, New York. Embracing motherhood, and a more stationary existence, Auf der Maur co-founded the music venue/artistic playground Basilica Hudson with her husband, filmmaker Tony Stone, in a 19th century industrial space.

We spoke with Auf der Maur about leaving the touring life, motherhood, and how Basilica Hudson is her new band.

Auf Der Maur on stage. (Photo: section215/Flickr)

What led you to decide to leave the recording and touring life behind?

It wasn’t a decision [to stop recording], it was just life.

2010 marked the last release of my second solo record, which also marked the last epic European touring I did. For me, the most satisfying part of touring is overseas and international touring. I like North America just fine, but the real fun stuff is when you’re interacting with cultures that are not your own. So for me, European tours are the biggest joy in life. Playing rock music to audiences around the globe, there’s nothing better. I do love being in studios and collaborating with my favorite musicians, but nothing beats the visceral reality of touring around the world.

So 2010 was my last extensive European tour. I went to Europe five times in one year, but on the last [trip] I did 17 countries in 42 days or something. So that was a gift, being to see the world and play music in that way.

My last show [on that tour] was in December of 2010 in Istanbul. I got home the day before Christmas, celebrated Christmas with my family, and the next day started taking iron supplements because I’m like, 'Oh man, I’m tired and I want to get pregnant!' I was pregnant within the month. I had never been pregnant before and thought I might be working on it for a year or two. But it happened right away. I had not totally finished the cycle of that album, so I was pregnant and I continued playing shows into 2011. At six months pregnant I was playing in Switzerland at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

My last show as a pregnant person was at a Toronto metal festival. I was eight months pregnant and the only woman on the bill, let alone the only pregnant person on the bill. It was Rob Zombie, Mastodon... just like a ridiculous, huge, amazing metal festival. And I was eight months pregnant. So that was the last show I played before I became a mother.

During your last solo show, did you have a sense at the time that it was going to be your last show?

Because of the little girl in my belly... I referred to her at the show, I was like, ‘I’m the only woman on the the bill, but there’s two women on stage.' Because of the power of this woman coming into the world, and being the woman on this male-dominated metal stage, there was something, so exciting about creating another person who might one day be on this stage (well, I don’t know if she will, she can do whatever she wants to do). That would be the moment where I realized that I’m stepping away so that someone else can come in. That’s what motherhood is, for quite a while. All women take a while to get back to themselves.

That show was so unbelievably cool. I played with some of my favorite bands. It was just so symbolic of everything. Sixteen years earlier from that show, I joined Hole, and we were the only women on that stage. That’s the kind of, big picture stuff. My life in music has been very much about the power of music, and the power of communing, and education through people and travel. But the other [focus] has been about the role of women in the world, and the role of women in art, and the role in the history of music. That’s been a recurring theme.

Right.

Since then, I simultaneously started this epic new project while pregnant. My partner in life and in love, Tony Stone, [he and I] through some bizarre cosmic accident acquired this massive 1880s factory in Hudson, New York. So while we were pregnant, we were chosen by a madman in the universe to take over the incredibly challenging, yet raw potential of this industrial factory turned art center. So we established Basilica Hudson right in that time, specializing in destination events of music, art, and avant-garde culture for the last five years. And that is why I have not made music.

Because by the time I had River, our daughter, between motherhood and our art factory mothering, it hasn’t made any time for music. But it has been totally worth it. [It’s] been an invaluable and difficult but exciting learning curve, because we now have learned how to embody the presentation of art and music and work.

In terms of music, I consider myself a music lover before even a musician. I only started making music because I was so in love with music. My music fandom has brought me everywhere I’ve gone. I’m devoted to music as a higher way of sharing with humans. Because that’s my background and why I got into music to begin with, to be able to create that experience, specifically through Basilica Soundscape, which is our annual music and art weekend. I have found myself on the other side. Which is, [I’m] the person creating the experience of sharing music.

It’s fucking incredible. It’s more work, it’s fucking hard. But it is such a beautiful feeling to be able to offer that to others, and to future generations. My daughter is growing up in a space where music comes through the doors regularly, and people who care about art and music come through all the time, and she gets exposed to it. So in some ways it was a practical thing. I want to be able to be rooted somewhere for my daughter, in the early years. Or possibly forever. It’s hard to say.

I’ve been traveling my whole adult life, and I wanted to learn how to embrace being in a home. The home I’m raising my daughter in is the first place I’ve lived in for more than a year since my mother’s house that I left when I was 17. I’ve never had a home before now.

So making this home and making a home for art and music is my chapter in building a foundation. It doesn’t mean I stopped making music. In fact I transferred the same love and commitment to another shape and form of it. But I will absolutely return to music after this incredible new experience of being on the other side and being a mother.

What’s the biggest difference between living a touring life and your new, more stationary life?

You mean my one block life? (laughs) In my house that overlooks the Basilica?

It’s pretty intense. I live in a small city of 6,000 people. I’ve only ever lived in major cities, I’ve lived in Montreal, New York, and LA, and then found myself in Hudson, New York. I don’t think I could have done it any other way. I don’t think it would have worked if I had just said, 'I’m just gonna settle down in New York City.' I needed to try something so radically different, and essentially be seduced. I fell in love with small town America. I’m a Canadian who’s been living in this country for 20 years, but I never even felt connected to the country. I hold a passport, but because I’m a very patriotic Montrealer, I didn’t feel connected.

I moved to Hudson and we got ourselves involved in a small community where you can see things change. You can make things happen. You can change the direction of something. You can walk into city hall and give a complaint. You can know your elected officials. You can start a center for art that affects the direction of the place you live. That’s pretty much what got me rooted.

I’m very committed to how motivating and inspiring the cause and effect of yourself on the place in which you live. LA and New York don’t have that anymore. You can’t really revolutionize a neighborhood. In the '90s I lived in Silverlake and I really did feel like we were on the verge of something, but you can’t really penetrate.

I don’t think I would have imagined in 2010 that I wouldn’t have made any other music by 2015. So this has not been the plan. I was not planning on quitting music. I’m into taking chapter breaks. After I left Hole and Smashing Pumpkins I took a couple years off to really contemplate what I wanted to do with music and where I wanted to make music live in my live. I decided to make solo records, but even with those solo records I took my time and I took [another] couple of years off. In one case I made a fantasy film, and brought it to museums, and [promoted it] in different ways than the traditional rock touring thing.

In the past couple years there’s been a possibility for a Hole reunion. I guess I could have gone on a big international world tour. Last year was the 20-year anniversary of Live Through This, and there were some conversations about it, but it just didn’t feel right.

Standing inside Hudson's arts/event space, Basilica Hudson. (Photo: Eve Alpert/Used with Permission)

What do you miss most about touring and being out there?

Seeing the world. Getting outside of your stagnant perspective. Even if you just roll through Berlin for a day you learn something. About world history and the current state of a place that artists are moving to from North America. You learn so much just by being there. You gotta work harder just to learn stuff when you are in one place. Right now, luckily between Basilica and becoming a mother, I’m learning profound new things. That’s why I was willing to sacrifice traveling and touring. I knew I’d have to learn another thing. I don’t know how to be in one place. I don’t know to inspire myself and motivate myself while staying, like, one block.

I miss the education of travel. That is the most priceless education. When I started the big worldwide touring in my early 20s, with Hole, I was reluctant. Because I was planning on continuing in the academic art world. I wanted to go do my masters in photography. I was frustrated at one point because I wanted to continue an education. But I realized quickly that I got a whole other type of degree by traveling.

And now, both in your role as a mother and as the caretaker of the Basilica, you are fostering the future of music still.

Yeah! Which I’m so into. We have this really avant-garde festival [at the Basilica] in the spring called the 24-Hour Drone: Experiments in Music and Sound. It was a 24-hour sound experience. Honestly it was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever been a part of. I actually played a 4 a.m. set that evening, but it was experimental noise with these other noise artists.

One of the most fascinating moments was this electronic noise artist from New York called Prurient. So Prurient was playing, and we’re fans of his, it totally worked for our space, and worked for the theme of the festival we were doing. I watched his set and it was bringing the space alive in all of the ways that I dream of making this place a temple of sound. I was watching it from the side, and feeling so satisfied in what we’d created and the experiences people were having. Then he walked off stage, all sweaty and moving all of his gear, and he shook my hand and said, 'I just wanted to thank you. Not only for tonight, but for everything you’ve done for music. We’re real.'

It was the most beautiful, touching moment. It was also unexpected. It’s not like he’s in some band like Hole, he’s a weird experimental noise artist. He was grateful for Basilica, but then he made a point to recognize the other stuff I had done prior to it. That is what makes me have faith that I’m in the right place. I want him to have an incredible night. I want to expose people to that power. To that sound. And then to have them pat ME on the back? This is why I’m not going to crawl under a rock.

Outside the Basilica. (Photo: Bill Stone/Used with Permission)

So what’s next for you? And the Basilica?

Our daughter turns four this year and she’s at this exciting place where you can be like, ‘You wanna go play with these people?’ So you have a bit more independence. If I had just been a mother, I would have been making music. But the Basilica has taken the shape of my love of music.

The Basilica has to set sail a bit more on its own because I am quite a hands-on director. I dream of being able to pull away. We are transitioning into a non-profit. We were an artist-owned-and-operated thing, and we did not realize what it takes to run a public events center. It was basically a passion project that’s gone really well with insane amounts of cost and labor attached to it. I’m working on getting Basilica stable so I can go back to some music.

This magical woman named Summer Dawn has moved to Hudson to help take over the [Basilica]. So I’m starting to get real sisterly support. Similar to starting a band. This is a fucking passion project, no one’s in this for money, we’re all in this to make the world a better place, and make music come alive for people. I’m very fortunate that we’ve stuck it out long enough that I’m now being supported by people who believe in it as much as we do.

The cool thing is, I’m in no rush. I’m not in misery. Of course I miss music. Of course I miss the experience of making music with people. But I’m very aware of the decisions I’ve made that’ve pulled me away from music for a while. Now I have a different form of relationship with my music. It’s cool, but it’s definitely a transition.

Even if making music means putting out a weird experimental noise song on the internet, so be it. That’ll be music to me! Maybe it’s just that I won’t be doing that thing where I go through a two year cycle of finding a label. That doesn’t even exist anymore, so lucky for me the whole world I knew doesn’t exist anymore. I’ve been liberated and I’m just making music to make music. If I’m lucky maybe I’ll tour again one day.

The Basilica sounds like your new band.

Exactly! Most of what I’m doing is trying to have a great life with other people. I really like people and I really want to share shit with them.

Basilica Soundscape is going down this September 11-12, 2015. Get tickets here.  

(Photo: Akos Nagy/shutterstock.com) 

The thing about Ellen Pao, or any high-profile quitter before her, is that, ultimately, you reach a limit of what you can do—or more importantly, desire to do—in a given medium, and you have to get some distance from it and go in a different direction.

And it’s worth the common reminder—success doesn’t necessarily equal happiness. Sometimes, you make that realization halfway down the road and find yourself begging for a new direction, like Michael Jordan did when he decided to become a baseball player.

Maybe you’re getting older and you’re comfortable enough with where you are that you don’t need to keep topping yourself anymore—maybe you’re in the Billy Joel mode, ready to drop the pop-rock stuff and create classical music instead. Or maybe you’ve said all you want to say in a given way—perhaps, like The Postal Service, you were ready to Give Up after a single album.

Even with money playing a factor, there’s a limit with what we’re willing to do if we’re just not interested anymore, or the weight becomes too much for us to bear.

“I left on a whim, the same day that I announced my decision. I had been unhappy long enough to know that quitting was the right thing to do,” said onetime model agent Marie Darsigny, discussing why she quit her “pointless” dream job.

There’s actually a good name for this in the realm of psychology. It’s called “goal disengagement,” and it’s actually a good thing when you get older. A 2011 study on the topic from Concordia University psychology professors Erin Dunne and Carsten Wrosch, as well as the University of British Columbia’s Gregory Miller, found that a willingness to give up goals that were no longer attainable actually helped decrease depression in the elderly.

“Goal disengagement can prevent repeated failure and associated negative emotions, and has been associated with lower cortisol levels, less systemic inflammation, and fewer reports of health problems,” Wrosch told The Atlantic in 2011.

People born between the years of 1957 and 1965 had an average of 11.3 jobs between 1978 and 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s roughly a 32-year period. Think that’s a lot? Well, between 1998 and 2011, millennials worked an average of 6.2 jobs—meaning they’re on a pace to quit more often than their parents did.

Former Apple employee Jordan Price parted ways with his highly sought-after job after less than a month. “I felt more like I was a teenager working at a crappy retail job than a professional working at one of the greatest tech companies in the world,” he wrote on Medium. 

However, leaving a field you have already succeeded in can feel just as necessary. “It became clear to me that from my background, I brought to the bureau certain assumptions that were not universally shared,” admitted longtime credit union executive Cliff Rosenthal, who spent a year with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before retiring. 

But something has to replace the thing you’re quitting.

“People also need to find new purposeful activities,” Wrosch continues. “They have to reengage—find a different job or look for a different partner. Reengagement in turn has been show to predict higher levels of positive emotions and purpose in life.”

“I will say, though, that you know it’s time to go, when you have too much self-respect to stay. And when you’re so stressed out that you start losing your hair. Yes, that actually happened to me,” said Tess Vigeland, the former host of the radio program Marketplace, of her decision to leave. She didn’t have a Plan B, and she wrote a book about it.

In a world where we applaud people who “fail fast” or take massive risks for the sake of a potential large reward that’s not even guaranteed, it can be difficult to fathom the idea of people who are wired to leave something they worked incredibly hard for at the drop of a dime.

Everyone should quit something that really matters to them, at least once. We all need to feel what it’s like on the other side of a big success story. Only then will we all understand that quitting isn’t "giving up," but setting the stage for something else.

By resigning from Reddit, Ellen Pao is choosing to focus her attention on the other things that interest her. Eventually, you want the bandwidth back.

It’s not giving up, it’s disengagement.

 A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. 

Ever Wonder how capes came to be Thor-t of as superheroic? (Photo: randychiu on Flickr)

Simple in design, yet evocative of the utmost drama and intrigue, capes are sartorial shorthand for imminent action. To fasten one around your shoulders is to say to the world: “Some pretty major scenes are about to go down. And make no mistake: I am ready.”

It's a message that comes across regardless of whether the wearer is a warrior, a superhero, or Liberace. But how did capes come to be imbued with excitement and peril? That's a story that starts with the very etymology of the term "cape."

The Latin word for cape, cappa, forms the basis for the word “escape,” which comes from ex cappa. “To escape,” wrote Walter William Skeat in An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, “is to ex-cape oneself, to slip out of one’s cape and get away.”

From the early days of the cape, when Latin was still spoken on the streets, capes spoke of battle, status, and statuses in battle. Military commanders of the Roman Empire donned paludamentum—a long, flowing cape fastened at one shoulder—as part of their ceremonial battle preparations. Centurions fighting under their command got to wear capes, too, but had to settle for the sagum, a less majestic, less flowy version that fastened with a clasp across the shoulders.

 
Caesar and his cape-wearing cronies are unimpressed by this rider fellow in an 1898 painting by Lionel Royer. (Photo: Public domain)

Over the centuries, the cape and the sword came to be regarded as a package deal. In 1594, Italian fencing master Giacomo di Grasse penned a True Arte of Defence, in which he included several tips on vanquishing an enemy when armed with a sword-and-cloak combo. Wrapping one's cloak around the non-sword-wielding arm helps shield it from blows, di Grasse wrote, but the cloak itself can also be used as a weapon:

"when one hath his cloake on his arme, and sword in his hand, the advantage that he getteth therby, besides the warding of blowes, for that hath bene declared in the true arte is, that he may molest his enimie by falsing to fling his cloake, and then to flinge it in deed"

This "flinging of the cloak" is an early appearance of the cape as a mantle fit for bouts of flouncing. To throw back the sides of a cloak, or toss one side of a cape over one's shoulder, is a pleasingly dramatic way of revealing a weapon, showing one's true identity, or punctuating a satisfying riposte, whether physical or verbal. These seeds of "cape as garment of flamboyance," thus planted, would be harvested centuries later by cape aficionado Oscar Wilde, then augmented with glitter by performers like Liberace. 

The practical approach of wearing a cape over one shoulder in order to keep one's sword arm free became a fashion trend during the late 16th century, when gentlemen donned the "mandilion," a hip-length cloak with open side seams. Even when not engaged in a duel with a no-good roister-doister, men wore their mandilions slung casually on one shoulder to look cool.

Robert Devereaux, Second Earl of Essex, being all casual-like circa 1596. (Image: National Gallery of Fine Art/Public domain)

The cape as the preferred outerwear of adventurers gained ground with the dashing swashbuckler archetype, first established in literature of the 16th century but most popular during the mid-19th- to early 20th centuries. Many of the protagonists belonging to the genre were known to throw on a cape, grab a sword, and head for the forests in search of mischief. Among characters who couldn’t spell “caper” without a cape were The Three Musketeers, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Zorro.

Amid all the suave rapier-waving and damsel-saving going on in the swashbuckler genre, a work of literature emerged that dragged the cape into the world of the macabre and the supernatural: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Written in 1897, Stoker’s version of the eponymous Count did not, however, feature the high-collared, black and red cape to which pop culture is now accustomed. The only mention of Dracula’s outerwear in the book is this line from chapter three, in which the Count's startled estate agent, Jonathan Harker, describes his client scuttling down an exterior wall of the creepy manse he's been tasked with selling:

“I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings"   

The iconic Dracula cape now inextricably linked with the character was not established until the 1920s, when adaptations of Dracula hit the stage. And the cloak revamp had more to do with budgetary concerns and theatrical trickery than aesthetics, according to Jonathan Bignell in "A Taste of the Gothic: Film and Television Versions of Dracula": 

"Stage versions of the novel needed to have Dracula on stage in drawing-room settings, rather than appearing rarely and in a wide range of outside locations as in the novel. The need to turn Dracula into a melodramatic tale of mystery taking place indoors was the reason for the costuming of Dracula in evening dress and opera cloak, making him look like the sinister hypnotists, seducers and evil aristocrats of the Victorian popular theatre.

"The high-collared cape which we now recognize as a hallmark of the Dracula character was first used in the stage versions. Its function was to hide the back of the actor's head as he escaped through concealed panels in the set to disappear from the stage, while the other actors were left holding his suddenly empty cloak."

This practical costume change had a huge cultural impact. Bela Lugosi, who portrayed Count Dracula in 1920s stage adaptations and the 1931 Dracula film, became synonymous with the character in the cape—to the point that, when he died, he was shrouded in one of his Dracula cloaks before being placed in a coffin. 

Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Dracula. (Photo: Fair use)

The cape as a harbinger of impending violence and melodrama finds its ultimate expression, of course, in another major archetype: the superhero. Superman, the first comic-book superhero, rocketed into American culture in 1938 with an appearance on the cover of Action Comics #1. Depicted lifting a green car above his head in the presence of three astonished onlookers, Superman wears a long, red cape that flows gloriously in the wind as he displays his superhuman strength and steely approach to calamity prevention. 

A year after Superman's debut, Batman was introduced to the world in Detective Comics #27, sporting an even bigger cape—a billowing, swirling, ankle-length black version with a scalloped hem that alluded to the dramatic wings of his animal namesake. The designs of these two pioneering superheroes created a blueprint for all the comic book heroes that would follow in their belted-and-booted wake.  

Superman, blowing minds during his inaugural appearance in 1938. (Photo: Jim, the Photographer/Creative Commons) 

“More than anything else, cape says superhero,” says Daniel Kibblesmith, a long-time comic book fan, co-writer of upcoming Heavy Metal comic The Doorman, and writer for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “Capes are an indicator of self-awareness. I think a superhero who puts on a cape in 2015 is sort of doing an impression of Superman or Batman, whether they mean to or not.”

This evocation of the classics can have positive or negative effects. While a cape is now shorthand for action, its association with the aesthetics of the early superheroes—and the campy, low-budget '60s TV versions of Batman and Robin—can be a hindrance for 21st-century characters who need to look as dogged and bad-ass as possible.

Burt Ward and Adam West as Robin and Batman in the cape-swinging '60s. (Photo: Public domain)

“The old-timey, inaugural characters all wore capes, and then whenever they upgraded a character, one of the first things they did was get rid of the cape," says Kibblesmith. In 1984, when Robin outgrew his role as Batman's sidekick, he transformed into a new hero, known as Nightwing. In his new, more grown-up guise, the character formerly known as Robin sported a dark, tight-fitting suit and no cape.

As evinced by fashion designer Edna in Pixar's The Incredibles, capes can get snagged on a missile fin or caught in a jet turbine, turning a heroic moment into a needlessly fatal one. Wonder Woman, who was introduced to the comic book world in 1941, avoids such mishaps by restricting her cape-wearing to special occasions or formal events, such as when acting as an ambassador on behalf of her home nation, Themyscira. When Lynda Carter played the character during the 1970s, the cape didn't appear often, but when it did, it was accompanied by a bow-chicka-bow-wow soundtrack: 

But what does it mean when a character wears a cape these days?

"At Marvel, capes are worn almost exclusively by imperious characters with regal bearing," says Alejandro Arbona, an Editor at Valiant Entertainment who, prior to his current job, spent five years working on superhero stories at Marvel. "Monarchs, gods, sorcerers, and self-important blowhards" are among those he categorizes as regal within the Marvel universe.

Smaller publishers like Image Comics have less discernible cape-wearing criteria. Take the character of Spawn, an anti-hero birthed in the 1990s whose attire precedes him. 

“Spawn is more cape than man,” says Kibblesmith. “He is 90 percent cape.”

A cosplayer exhibits a modest, pared-down version of the Spawn cape. (Photo: Clavo beta/Creative Commons)

A murderer of innocents who returns to Earth after being cast into the depths of hell, Spawn exemplifies the conundrum of the cape: it is an odd confluence of traditional beat-‘em-up masculinity crossed with campy theatricality, with a dose of the macabre thrown in for good measure. Given their history, capes can't help but come off as a little ridiculous—but in a winking, self-aware, "Hey, I'm going to own this" way.

When Liberace played Radio City Music Hall for two weeks in 1984, he went all out in the cape stakes. In a feature on the eve of the engagement, the New York Times gave a sneak peek of what to expect:

“He will make his entrance onstage in a custom-made Rolls covered with tiny silver mirrors, and step out wearing a $300,000 Norwegian blue fox cape trailing a 16-foot train studded with bands of Austrian rhinestones.

Before playing his first number—on a matching piano covered with Austrian rhinestones, naturally—Liberace will summon a smaller Rolls to carry off the cape, which weighs 135 pounds. (Two of Liberace's costume attendants have already been operated on for hernias developed while handling the star's wardrobe.)”

Some of Liberace's many extravagant capes at the now-closed Liberace Museum in Paradise, Nevada. (Photo: Julia on Flickr/Creative Commons)

The sheer, excessive silliness of all that speaks to a tantalizing promise that capes offer: put me on, and the normal rules no longer apply.

Surprisingly, this principle translates to a civilian context. At Brooklyn's Superhero Supply Store, offerings include a range of brightly colored capes and a "cape tester," a platform equipped with a fan angled upward to create a brisk wind. Shoppers are invited to try on a cape, climb the stairs to the platform, and see how the garment billows in the breeze. Joshua Mandelbaum, Executive Director of 826NYC, the education non-profit that runs the Superhero Supply Store, says that anyone who tries it automatically behaves as though "they’re in the presence of something heroic."

“Once you’re up on the cape tester, the first thing you do is put your fist on your side and you strike that pose, or you turn to the side and you put your hands out as if you’re flying,” he says.

And it's not just kids who react that way. “I am always surprised by how many adult capes we sell. So much so that I am surprised I don’t come across more grown-ups wandering around Brooklyn in capes, because I have no idea what happens to them all when they leave the shop.”  

The cape tester at the Superhero Supply Store. (Photo: Alex Erde on Flickr)

The plains of Pluto (Image: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI)

New Horizons has already blown past Pluto, but it's going to be sending back data for years. Scientists have already found amazing mountains on the planet's surface and an intriguing, heart-shaped feature. Now, they've got a close-up of that feature, and they've discovered "a vast, craterless plain" in the heart's center left.

This plain is, by the standards of space and geology, pretty young—it was first formed 100 million years ago at the latest, and it looks like it's still taking shape. It's characterized by areas about 12 miles across and outlined by darker troughs. 

NASA says that there are two theories about what's formed these patches. They might be like "frozen mud cracks"—similar to a dried-up mud field—or they might be more like "wax rising in a lava lamp." No matter what process formed them, though, they're not anything that scientists expected to see.

Pluto's "heart" (Image: NASA/APL/SwRI)

Pluto's mountains (Image: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI)

Bonus finds: An 18th century shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, one sheriff's 3-ton stockpile of food, WWII bomb (that was blown up for beachgoers' safety)

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

I am a freak for the American road trip. And I'm not alone, as some of this country's best writers have taken a shot at describing that quintessentially American experience. “There is no such knowledge of the nation as comes of traveling in it, of seeing eye to eye its vast extent, its various and teeming wealth, and, above all, its purpose-full people,” the newspaper editor Samuel Bowles wrote 150 years ago in Across the Continent, arguably the first true American road-trip book.

The above map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature. It includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times.

Most interestingly of all, for me at least, you can ruminate about what those differences say about American travel, American writing, American history.

A word to close readers: I hand-typed most of these 1,500-plus entries and located their coordinates as best I could. Some were difficult to track down. I beg forbearance if you, a hermit in the mountains of Wyoming, find that I have pinned Mark Twain’s reference to Horse Creek in a place where it could not have been, or if you, a denizen of what Tom Wolfe rather unkindly called "the Rat lands" of Mexico, find my estimation of the precise location of Chicalote, Aguascalientes, somewhat inexact.

To be included, a book needed to have a narrative arc matching the chronological and geographical arc of the trip it chronicles. It needed to be non-fictional, or, as in the case of On the Road, at least told in the first-person. To anticipate a few objections: Lolita’s road-trip passages are scattered and defiant of cartographical order; The Grapes of Wrath’s are brief compared to the sections about poverty and persecution in California; the length of the trip in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is short in the geographical sense even if it is prodigiously vast in every other; and yes, The Dharma Bums is On the Road’s equal in every respect, and if you want to map the place-name references in all of Kerouac’s books, I salute you.

These passed the test:

Wild, Cheryl Strayed. 2012. After a series of personal crises, the author hits the Pacific Crest Trail and walks from Southern California to Portland. Self-actualization ensues.

The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1934. Scott and Zelda's wacky adventures along the muddy, unkept roads of the mid-Atlantic and the South, as they drive from Connecticut to her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America's Hoboes, Ted Conover. 1984. Conover, our most accomplished method journalist, studies with a merciful lack of sentimentality a subculture of transients that has long been mourned and romanticized more than it has been loved or even tolerated.

A Walk Across America, Peter Jenkins. 1979. Jenkins and his dog Cooper hoof it to New Orleans from upstate New York; along the way they encounter poverty, racism, hippies, illness, hateful cops and—at least for one of them—violent vehicular death. Oh, and in Mobile, Alabama, God.

Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, Robert Sullivan. 2006. As much a free-association history of the American road trip as the chronicle of one in particular, Sullivan's book is rare in that it documents a time-restricted straight-shot across the continent, interstates and chain-motels and all. Abandon nostalgia, all ye who enter here.

The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson. 2001. A sneering account of this exile's return from abroad and his re-acquaintance with his native country. Bryson seems to be reminded on almost every page of why he chose to leave it, and we of why we let him.

Blue Highways: A Journey into America, William Least Heat Moon. 1999. Not less critical of America and Americans than Bryson but more interestingly so, the author takes his van on the road for three months after separating from his wife and sticks only to smaller highways while avoiding the cities. He has long debates about local history and current affairs with people on the road and pays especial attention to quirky place-names--a traveler after my own heart.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac. 1957. Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty search for bop, kicks, speed and the night.

Roughing It, Mark Twain. 1872. Twain's book about his journey west by stagecoach a decade earlier is a incredible account of transcontinental travel before the railroad made it infinitely easier; his sections about the early Mormons in Salt Lake City, the mining settlements in Nevada and the pre-Americanized Sandwich Islands--aka, Hawaii--are also well worth the read. 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig. 1974. The author and his son ride by motorcycle to California; Profound Philosophical Ruminations ensue. Very 1970s.

Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck. 1962. The aging novelist, his black-poodle pooch and Rocinante, the customized van named after Don Quixote's horse, light out for the territories; Charley discovers redwoods, which depress him; Steinbeck discovers that you can't go home again. 

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe. 1968. Ken Kesey and the highly-acidic Merry Pranksters take the bus Further across the country to "tootle" its citizens out of lethargy. Neal Cassady rides again.

(Image: Chris Dlugosz/Flickr)

Above the mantlepiece in the living room of Janette Fennell's home, there's a painting in whites and pinks and sweeping blues and yellows. At the center, an angel is holding a baby. Behind her, two others hover. And then, there, in the bottom right corner, are two small, human figures. In contrast to the soft strokes of the rest of the painting, straight lines trap them in a small, squat box. They're crouched inside, squished together, one person's head at either end.

"Here we are, in the trunk," Fennell explains. "That's my husband, and that's me. That's where our hearts would be." She points to the soft yellow dot glowing inside each figure. "This picture is representative of what happened to us."

Almost 20 years ago, Fennell and her husband Greig were kidnapped from their garage, in the trunk of their own car. Left alone, still trapped, in a dark park in the south of San Francisco, they escaped. In the wake of that crime, Fennell has been working to make sure that no one dies trapped in a car and, in the process, has changed the way people in America drive.

Packing for a trunk release (Image: Courtesy of Janette Fennell) 

On October 29th 1995, when she was shoved into the trunk of the family Lexus, Fennell was 41 and had just had her first baby. Before her son was born, she had worked for Eastman Kodak for more than a decade and, later, for the cosmetic company Helene Curtis. "I was a fast-tracker, really dedicated, really workaholic," she says. For Kodak, she had moved 10 times across the country: every one of those moves meant a promotion, and, she says, "When you get into that corporate environment, everybody wants the next job. So I was happy to be chosen."

But on this Saturday night, she had spent the past nine months working only as a new mom and, on weekends, teaching at her church's Sunday school. The family had been over a friend's house for dinner, and since Halloween was just a few days away, Fennell was wearing, she remembers, an outfit that featured a black cat popping out of a pumpkin. As they pulled into the garage, just before midnight, she was thinking that she still needed to prepare her lesson for the next day.

As the garage door closed, two men rolled underneath, on their sides, like a dog might. They were wearing Halloween masks, one a grimacing werewolf, and they got on their feet, put guns to Janette and Greig's heads, and ordered them into the trunk. The two men tried to slammed the lid down, but the Fennells were sharing space with the baby's travel gear. They had to get out, unload, and stuff themselves back in.

Alex was still in his carseat, and, now closed into the trunk, the Fennells heard one of the two men say, "There's a baby."

That was it. The car backed out of the garage and started moving through the streets of San Francisco. They did not know what the two men had done with their son.

In the trunk, Janette, closer to the bumper, whispered, "Can you hear him? Can you hear him?" She had heard on Oprah that if you were kidnapped and didn't escape within five minutes, you were dead. More than five minutes had already passed. She could tell they were heading south through the city, and she thought: they're going to take us to L.A., or Mexico...She and Greig were both praying. Nothing made sense.

As the car moved through the city streets and then onto the highway, Janette started pulling on the carpeting in the trunk. She didn't know why, exactly. But she was able to expose a bunch of wires, and she was pulling at them. The weight of two adults in the backseat had the car bottoming out on the city streets, and she thought that if she could make the lights flicker or flash, maybe someone would see it, maybe they would call 911, maybe the car would be pulled over, and they would yell until someone heard and freed them.

But that didn't happen.

They left the highway. They left paved roads. And then the car stopped. The trunk lid popped open. Janette tried to poke her head out, and one of the men hit her in the head with the butt of his gun. They wanted cash. They wanted jewelry. They wanted bank cards and pin numbers. They had the Fennells repeat the code five times over, and they said that if it wasn't right they would come back, and they would kill them. And then they left.

When she and Greig were alone, Janette felt calm, she says. The two men had the right pin number, and they were gone. The trunk was totally black.

And then—this the part she calls the "woo woo" part—Janette saw a little light in the area where she had ripped out all the wires. Greig didn't see the light. But it was shining on the little piece of wire. The words, Janette says now, came from her mouth but not from her brain.

"I think I found the trunk release."

The San Francisco Chronicle, October 30, 1995 (Image: Courtesy of Janette Fennell)

In the painting in the living room, the baby in the angel's arms is Alex. After Janette had guided Greig's hands to that piece of wire, after he had pulled it and unlatched the trunk, after she had soared out of that trunk and back into the world, Janette first dashed to the backseat. There was no baby there.

They found an emergency key and found their way back to the city. They called 911 from a payphone in a dicey neighborhood, and while a car of undercover cops showed up immediately, followed by uniformed officers, they had to wait for the dispatcher to send a policeman to their house to hear, finally, that the baby was safe. The masked men had taken him out of the car, still in his carseat, and left him sitting outside the house.

He was fine. In the photo that appeared that Monday in the San Francisco Chronicle, he's smiling cherubically, his eye bright blue and his hand reaching towards the camera. Fennell's in the background, her blond hair feathered into '90s bangs, putting a borrowed car seat into a rented car. A police officer had told her the night before that usually, these stories didn't end so well. She could imagine all sorts of crazy things, but one question, she says, kept playing over and over, like a tape in her head: How does it end? How does it end? How does it end?

"I know it sounds silly but I can tell you, without any reservation, that after this happened, I got a fax from God," she says. "He said, Ok, I spared you and your family, and I've also given you talents. You can figure this out: now go out there and change it." She laughs. "Our minister said to us: 'I've heard of very different ways of people communicating with the Lord. I have never heard of anyone who got a fax.' But that's the way it was."

The Fennell family (Photo: Courtesy of Janette Fennell) 

She started by learning how these cases usually end. She'd comb through the results of wide-ranging, pre-Google internet searches and pick out cases of trunk entrapment to add to a hand-made database. She found out how these cases sometimes do end—brutally, with rape, drowning, or the car being set on fire. She started writing to car companies and working her way through federal government bureaucracies, showing them her database of hundreds of cases, and not getting particularly far.

By the summer of 1998, though, she had made an ally of then-Representative Bart Stupak (D-Mich.). They had met through a series of introductions, and Stupak, who had been a police officer and state trooper earlier in his career, understood the issue. For his first efforts to pass regulations, he "got a lot of grief" from automakers, he said at the time, but he was able to pass a provision requiring a closer look at the problem. Congress had directed the federal agency responsible for traffic safety to study the possible benefits of equipping cars with a device that would internally release the trunk lid. An expert panel was recruited to study the issue.

But before the first meeting, the issue became national news; that summer in just three weeks' time, 11 kids died of overheating, while trapped in trunks. 

Even with that background, though, when the agency's expert panel of advocates, medical and safety experts, and car manufacturers met that fall, it wasn't certain that the panel would recommend that an internal trunk release be required. In the second of three meetings, the panel discussed options, including letting car manufacturers install releases voluntarily. At the third meeting, Fennell remembers, "They were all backing down at the last minute." She pointed out that the group she had founded, Trunk Releases Urgently Needed Coalition, had been working with states to pass similar regulations. So, she told the manufacturers, they could just send different kinds of cars to every state in the union.

"We won by one vote," she says.

Even before the final regulation made the change mandatory, though, Ford began putting trunk releases in all their vehicles. The company invited Fennell to come to the auto show where they'd announce the change. After the announcement, a photographer asked her: Would you be willing to get in the trunk of the car and demonstrate it?

Not everyone who'd gone through the sort of traumatic experience that Fennell had would have agreed. But, she says, "I"m in sales and marketing. I know how those things go."

In the picture, her legs are tucked behind her and one arm scrunched beneath. Her right arm is reaching upwards, to show the glow-in-the-dark, T-shaped pull that would be standard from then on.

 Fennell and Rep. Stupak at a conference in 1999 (Image: Courtesy of Janette Fennell)

Today, Fennell works out of her house in the Main Line, just a short ride from Philadelphia, with two rescue dogs, one large and fluffy, the other smaller and shyer, as company. Alex, now in college, plays Division I tennis, and her second son, Noah, is still in high school. In the living room, along with the angel painting, are framed copies of the bill Fennell most recently helped pass through Congress; her office is decorated with copies of news articles telling her story. On a bench, there's a collection of toddler-sized stuffed animals, part of a campaign she's currently working on, to keep kids from dying of heat stroke while trapped in hot cars.

After winning the regulation on internal trunk releases, Fennell thought she was done. But while she was working to push that through, she had heard from parents of kids who had died in other ways, too. Once again, she started collecting data. Even 15 years ago, many of the cases she found dealt with heat stroke. But soon she saw two spikes: kids being strangled by power windows and kids being run over by cars that had been knocked into gear. She started a new group, Kids and Cars, and expanded the issues she worked on to "non-traffic" incidents, that happen off public roads and highways.

In past decade and a half, Fennell's work on these safety issues has changed the way that cars work in small but vital ways. In cars that are made today, the switches that control power windows, that automatically roll up, require a finger to scoop them upwards, so that no kids can accidentally activate one while leaning on the door. It's now required that cars start only when the driver has a foot on the brake, so that the car won't start rolling backwards without warning. And within the next few years, every new car will be required to have a rear view camera that actually shows what's behind a reversing car. 

Each of these tiny changes, though, is a battle of its own. The rule to put in rearview technology, for instance, was first required in a safety bill passed in 2008, the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act. (It's named after a two-year-old whose father backed over him in the driveway.) The Department of Transportation had three years from the date of the law's enactment to publish final standards, and in 2010 a proposed rule would have mandated a rear-view camera for all vehicles, with a phase-in period ending in 2014. But by 2014, the final rule was still being delayed. "I remember Ray LaHood," the former Secretary of Transportation, "saying: You'll just have to be patient," Fennell says. But she had been patient. Her group, along with Public Citizen, prepared to challenge the DOT in court over its delays. The day before the hearing was scheduled, the department issue the final rule. The deadline for automakers to install the cameras is now 2018.

These hard-fought changes might be small, but they also make a huge difference. "We have not been able to uncover one case of a person dying in a trunk since those releases were put in," she says. "We have plenty of stories of people getting put in the trunk by a thief, and taken to the ATM. But they found the release and jumped out."

Not everyone would have turned a narrow escape into this sort of crusade. After she and Greig were trapped in the trunk, people would always reassure Fennell that she didn't have to talk about it. But she says, talking about it helped. "The way that I was able to heal was talking about it and warning other people," she says.

The Fennells actually kept the Lexus that they were trapped in for years after the incident. (The locks were changed.) "It's a great car!" she says. "We only had one, and we didn't put many miles on it, so we kept it." But when they were finally ready to be rid of it, Fennell called a friend at Toyota who had offered once to buy it. The company sent a huge truck to their house to take it away, and put it in the Toyota museum—the car from which internal trunk releases were born.

Not long ago, Fennell and Alex were in Southern California, for a tennis tournament, and they went to visit the car in the museum. Alex, Fennell says, got in the car.

"So this is the car where it all happened," he said.

"I stood on one side, and he stood on the other side, and we put our hands on the roof," Fennell remembers. "My friend took a picture. It was really fun."

Janette Fennell today (Photo: Courtesy of Janette Fennell)

There is an inverse world of tourism—the antithesis to Sandal's resorts and Carnival Cruises. 

Called dark tourism, ruin tourism, urban exploration, or simply travel, depending on the context, it revolves around people visiting places with a troubled history. These are often places that are famous for what has gone wrong. Instead of the Eiffel tower there is Chernobyl, for instance, or in place of Machu Piccu, there are the modern ruins of Detroit. 

Centralia ranks high on this dubious list. Made famous in the 1980s for the coal mine fire burning under the town, Centralia became international famous, all the while slowly dissolving as an actual town. Yet even as curious travelers (ourselves included) make pilgrimages to the abandoned highway and reflect on what went wrong in Centralia, the coal mine fire that made the town so famous has moved on. Those expecting to see a fiery hell scape are met instead with new growth forest.

Even a stretch of Route 61 abandoned due to the fire, has become a playground for ATV's, motorcyclists, and barbecue cookouts. It mixes intrigued visitors with locals happy to tell them the true stories of Centralia. The entire stretch of road has an air of relaxed fun. Suddenly the "dark tourists" to Centralia are transformed into merely curious travelers getting to know the locals and spending a nice summer day in a small Pennsylvania town with an unusual history,

(Photo: U.S. Navy on Wikipedia)

Your instruments are frozen. You’re losing altitude. It’s inevitable. You’re going to crash. But wait! There’s one more option. The ejector seat!

In a split second decision, you reach for the emergency trigger and deploy it. Within seconds you are violently rocketing into the sky, until the parachute that was simultaneously sent out catches air and rights your seat. Your plane hits the ground in a distant ball of flames, as you gently float to relative safety.

This is the sort of exciting tale most people envision when they think of the ejector seat, but where did this life-saving technology come from?

While several people essentially invented ejection technologies independent of one another, it is widely accepted that the first ejection seat (as they are properly called) was patented in 1916 by a man named Everard Calthrop. He was a railway engineer and innovative inventor who had seen his friend, Charles Rolls (of Rolls Royce fame) die in a biplane crash. This tragedy inspired Calthrop to devise a pilot safety system that would allow airplane pilots to quickly evacuate their doomed craft. His first patent described simple but effective contraption that would, at the pull of a handle, tilt the seat backwards to prime the pilot for ejection. Then, with a blast of compressed air, a parachute (which Calthrop also had a hand in inventing) would deploy and yank the pilot out of the craft to relative safety.

From this simple system, the idea of an onboard system to jettison pilots from their craft was born. However, it was not until World War II that ejection seats as we know them began being standard parts of planes.

It was the Germans who first took to the trend, creating the first production craft to come equipped with an ejection system, the Heinkel 280. Developed in 1940, the turbo-powered jet never went into full production, but the nine of them that were made were outfitted with a seat that would be blown clear of the craft using compressed air. During testing the Heinkel 280’s escape seat even managed to save the life of pilot Helmut Schenk after his instruments froze over. Schenk is now seen as the first person ever to be saved by the use of an ejection seat.

Not long after the Germans started using ejection seats, the trend began to spread. Just a year after the Heinkel debuted, the Swedish SAAB company created an ejector seat technology for one of their planes, and by 1946 the United Kingdom and the United States were working on systems to safely jettison their pilots as well. Soon, compressed air was replaced by gun powder as an accelerant, which was in turn eventually replaced by a chemical accelerant in modern ejector seats. Other safety features such as stabilization rockets and automatically inflating life boats were added. After decades of innovation in the field of ejection systems and pilot safety, the seats themselves are almost as complex as the jets they fly in.

Currently the Martin-Baker Company is the largest creator of ejection seats, having created over 70,000 exploding chairs for 93 air forces around the world, touting themselves as the “World’s Leading Manufacturer of Ejection and Crashworthy Seats.” A former aircraft production company, they turned their focus to ejection technology after a tale similar to Calthrop’s, wherein the titular Baker was killed in a plane crash in 1942, inspiring the titular Martin to devote his company to pilot safety.

Starting with the Mk1 and leading all the way up to the current Mk17, Martin-Baker marks the cutting edge of safely getting pilots out of speeding aircraft as safely as possible. The Mk17 is actually a pretty simple ejection seat with just a chair on blast plate, streamlined for lightweight and training craft. But the Mk16 is a bafflingly advanced creation built for fighter jets. The seat has five different modes that automatically deploy based on the altitude of the craft when the seat is deployed; it features a back-up air supply, a homing beacon, short-burst stabilizing rockets, a life raft, and arm, leg, and neck supports, just to name some of the advanced features. Yet even with all of these bells and whistles, firing one’s self out of a high speed aircraft is still insanely dangerous.

In a modern scenario, when a pilot activates an ejector seat, a few things happen in rapid sequence. First the pilot’s overhead canopy is blown off, then an explosive charge or rocket shoots the chair straight up out of the vessel on a guide rail. Then a group of stabilization rockets briefly fire, pushing the chair even further from the craft and helping keep it from wildly tumbling in the wind. A small guide parachute known as a drogue then deploys that keeps the chair upright. Depending on the altitude (automatically detected by the chair using oxygen sensors) of the ejection, a primary chute may deploy immediately or the chair may freefall for a bit, getting the pilot to a more oxygen rich part of the sky with a bit more haste. Finally, the chair falls away, and with luck, the pilot drifts to safety. Depending on the specific seat other things may happen, but the basics are much the same across the board.

In a 2002 interview with Smithsonian Air and Space, a pilot who only identified himself as Captain IROC described the experience of ejecting from a jet going 600 mph at 15,000 feet, as “the most violent thing I’ve ever felt in my life.” The immense wind speeds and stresses of g forces placed on the pilot, rarely leave them unharmed. Before limb stabilization was added, arms and legs would whip in the wind, breaking bones and dislocating joints. Even in advanced ejection seats, 1-in-3 pilots who eject from their planes fracture their spine as they are rocketed out of the plane. Modern ejection seats have a survival rate of over 90%, but it is definitely a last resort.

According to the counter on the Martin-Baker website, their seats have saved 7,480 lives. So while ejecting from an airplane may not be as smooth and cavalier an action as James Bond makes it out to be, it definitely beats the alternative—falling.

(Photo: Hohum on Wikipedia)

The tunnels were reinforced with metal (Photo: National Trust/Chris Tapley)

The stark face of the White Cliffs of Dover faces France, across the famous Strait of Dover, and during World War II, Winston Churchill ordered that a network of tunnels be dug into the cliff face. After 100 days of work, there was an underground world that could house up to 189 people (4 officers, 185 men) and that included a hospital and bombproof chambers.

In the 1950s, when they were no longer useful, the British military decommissioned the tunnels, and they were filled in with dirt. But recently, they were rediscovered and re-excavated. Now, they're open to the public.

Inside, there's graffiti on the walls, carved by the soldiers who lived there. The team that cleared out the tunnels also found books, tickets to a soccer game, wire hooks, and a thread of khaki wool still attached to a needle. 

Tours of the space are guided, and the Guardian warns: The hard-hat descent, lit by handheld and head torches, is described as “an adventure in a dark, dirty and wet environment, and is not suitable for those who are claustrophobic or unsteady.”

Sounds like our kind of afternoon adventure.

(Photo: National Trust/Richard Crowhurst Corvidae)

(Photo: National Trust/Barry Stewart)

(Photo: National Trust/Chris Tapley)

(Photo: National Trust/Chris Tapley)

The White Cliffs of Dover (Photo: Pkuczynski/Wikimedia)

Bonus finds: Photos of a very, very early Nirvana gig, the latest in a series of mysteriously murdered chickens, shimmering white underwater pools of carbon dioxide

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.