Heartwarming: When This Subway Employee Had To Walk 20 Miles To Work Because He Couldn’t Afford A Car, The CEO Of Subway Drove Alongside Him To Cheer Him On https://t.co/wiR09rD6FO pic.twitter.com/MKghbUeaqY
— ClickHole (@ClickHole) December 30, 2019
• • • the playlist i’m streaming • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
What we call New Year’s Eve falls near the Old Norse holiday of Dagr-Dauðiseggr; literally, “day of dead heros”. Vikings believed auroral displays to be particularly strong during the midwinter polar nights, and honored them as ghosts of warriors killed in the previous months.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 31, 2018
How a Cartographer Drew a Massive, Freehand Map of North America
Just ink and colored pencil, it took Anton Thomas almost five years.
This is what an eye for detail looks like.
NORTH AMERICA HAS NEARLY 10 million square miles of prairies, mountain ranges, forests, taigas, and deserts, rimmed by nearly 40,000 miles of convoluted coastline. It’s huge and lively, with more detail than most can imagine, much less commit to paper. But for four years and nine months—averaging more than 5,000 square miles per day—Melbourne-based Anton Thomas drew North America by hand, using a pen and about 24 colored pencils. His final product, completed in February 2019 and spanning 20 square feet, has completely reshaped Thomas’s life.
For Thomas, now—for the first time in his life—a freelance cartographer, who tours the world exhibiting the North America map, geography is a bit of a homecoming. He had begun drawing maps for fun as a child, and then took a decade-plus hiatus from it. He began sketching again while living in Montreal in 2012—on his refrigerator. The result was a detailed predecessor to his new map, which is pictorial, illustrated with all sorts of landmarks, fauna, and flights of fancy.
From the Arctic reaches of Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island (featuring a musk ox) to the tropical forests of Mexico’s Yucatán (with a toucan), the map is a stunning reminder of what can be accomplished with a little bit of skill, a lot of imagination, and even more hard work.
Atlas Obscura spoke with Thomas about the latest work, prints of which will be on sale in January 2020.
The details are densely packed and full of little surprises. Embiggenable.
Let’s start with the fridge. Why did you start drawing a map on your fridge?
I was working as a cook in the old port of Montreal. And in classic Montreal fashion, we had littered the apartment with things we found on the side of the road. And one was this big fridge. It had all these rusty, brown stains on it. My housemate Douglas, from Zimbabwe, had been urging me to draw him something as a memento, since he knew I was going to go back to New Zealand. He had painted the fridge with white house paint to cover up the stains and I thought, “What about the fridge?” …
In parts of rural Finland, New Year’s Eve is celebrated by burning effigies—typically intricate drawings—of one’s worst memories.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 31, 2018
The Decade in Which Everything Was Great But Felt Terrible
In the 2010s America achieved late capitalism.
If I had to pick the story that best captured the economy of the 2010s, it might be the tale of CamperForce: a group of elderly nomads, living in vans and RVs, spending their twilight years temping at Amazon fulfillment centers.
There’s a positive spin to the story. Some people want the structure and community that work can provide well into retirement age. They may want the freedom and mobility that comes with “van life”. Or the flexibility of temp gigs. But many members of CamperForce were grandparents who had been evicted from their homes during the housing collapse and were struggling to stay out of poverty. It’s a modern-day, AARP twist on The Grapes of Wrath.
Or maybe the most representative story is that of the former graduate student who ended up as a warehouse janitor. Or of the thousands of people who have gone online to beg for money to help them stay afloat through a life-threatening illness.
These kinds of stories felt most real and urgent and indelible to me this past decade, a decade without a single month of recession, when the United States grew to its wealthiest point ever—and when the middle class shrank, longevity fell, and it became clear that a whole generation was falling behind. The central economic dynamic of the 2010s was that no matter how well the market was doing, no matter how long the expansion lasted, no matter how much the economy grew, families still struggled. It was a decade that strained America’s idea of what economic growth could do, and should do, because it did so little for so many. …
The Middle Class Risks Consuming Itself
Americans are increasingly anxious about the costs of services such as health care and education. But these are the very same industries that increasingly sustain the middle class. Resolving this paradox is the key to creating the economy of the future.
It’s not much of a surprise to note that prices for most physical goods have dropped, but the cost of big-ticket services have become much higher:
As health care absorbs an ever-larger share of national income, many want the government to take over. Soaring tuition has spurred calls for free public college. Child care seems to have similar issues. These services represent a large amount of what people consume during their lifetimes.
Some might suspect that these high costs are filling the coffers of the country’s wealthiest individuals. But a quick perusal of the Forbes 400 list reveals that most of the super-rich made their fortunes in either technology or finance. The top health-care billionaire is Thomas Frist Jr., No. 41 on the list, who co-founded the for-profit hospital company HCA Healthcare. But he’s the exception; a handful of others made their money in medical devices, medical equipment or pharmaceuticals. Even fewer people make vast fortunes selling education.
This suggests relatively little of the soaring costs Americans pay for health care, education and child care is being sucked up by profits. Only 20% of hospitals are for-profit, and less than 10% of college students attend for-profit universities.
Instead, most of what Americans are paying for is the salaries of the people who work in services industries. And the number of those employees is growing; less than 5% of the workforce was in health care and education in the 1950s compared to more than 16% today. …
7 People Who Were Proven Wrong As Hard As Humanly Possible
Everybody’s wrong once in a while, like that time we dedicated a whole week to complex predictions about the podcasting industry going under and being replaced by a shadow puppet renaissance. But there’s being proven wrong, and then there’s getting owned so thoroughly and mercilessly that it feels like a spiteful deity is dunking on you. And these poor bastards experienced just that.
7. A Trio Of Billionaires Tried To Hide All The World’s Silver In Switzerland, Went Bankrupt
H.L. Hunt became one of the richest men in the world after buying the East Texas Oil Field and discovering all its, well, oil. Amazing how nobody knew about that. It was right there in the name. Anyway, Hunt’s sons Nelson, William, and Lamar (yes, the same Lamar Hunt who founded the American Football League and Major League Soccer), were of course also crazy rich. Especially Nelson Bunker Hunt, who became one of the wealthiest men in the world after using his dad’s money to discover that Libya also had a ton of oil.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his status as a billionaire, Nelson became an anti-government loon who feared that rising oil prices would lead to an apocalyptic worldwide financial collapse. His plan to safeguard his future? Initially, it was to buy silver. Then it was to buy a lot of silver. Eventually he convinced his brothers to join him in straight-up buying all the silver in the world in the ’70s. If you look closely at this graph, you might be able to figure out when this was happening.
When the Hunts ran out of money, they simply borrowed more to buy more silver, causing the price to jump by about 700% in 1979 alone. Not only did they buy 100,000,000 troy ounces of silver, which was somewhere between 33% and 50% of the world’s transportable supply, but they also insisted on taking actual physical control of the stuff. They flew it to Switzerland on private jets under armed guard in the middle of the night, all so the U.S. government couldn’t get them.
The madness that ensued was the world’s most obvious asset bubble. …
The Demagogue’s Cocktail of Victimhood and Strength
Poland’s ruling party argues it is both under attack, and the nation’s strongest defender.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our “Democracy Undone” series about the erosion of liberal democracy around the world.
WARSAW—For the European demagogue, victimhood and strength go hand in hand. In the agitators’ worldview, a host of powerful forces—domestic and foreign—are targeting their people, their nation, and their values; and only a single leader, or party, has a chance of holding off these threats.
Take Europe’s diversity as an example. To the liberal democrat, the continent’s greatest strength is that it is home to an array of cultures, each with its own history and language, packed tightly next to one another. For European populists, however, diversity is a handy propaganda tool: Any person or group standing in the way of their power is labeled a threat, either because they belong to a minority—and are thus defined as not representing the country—or, if they belong to a majority, because they have been coerced into their beliefs by an outsider wishing to see the country fail.
This exercise in cognitive dissonance is usually taken a step further when the ruling party deploys such rhetoric—those in power try to rally citizens against their critics by aligning themselves with the people. An attack on the party, therefore, be it by international press or locals trying to sound the alarm, is really an attack on the country. Only the party is genuinely acting in the national interest. It is, in this way, both the victim and the defender.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than in Poland. Throughout its history, the country has endured a great deal: pulled apart by its neighbors, occupied, and attacked over and over again. The population has an understandable feeling of historical injustice. Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice, has capitalized on this feeling, equating issues of policy to questions of identity. Poland, in the party’s telling, remains constantly under attack—from the European Union, from its stronger neighbor Germany, from domestic minorities, refugees, and even the billionaire financier George Soros. Thus votes on bills are not simply a legislative matter, they are a matter of Poland’s very survival. …
The Surprisingly Cheery Reason These Baby Birds Are So Fancy
As adults, American coots have a drab color scheme, with black bodies and white bills. Their chicks, however, have an aesthetic that’s part drunk friar, part disheveled lion, and part tequila sunrise. Their faces and bald pates are bright red, while their necks are encircled in scruffy yellow-orange plumes.
These garish colors are very strange. Most bird chicks come in dull, camouflaged hues. And while nature is full of animals with elaborate, conspicuous ornamental traits, from the resplendent tails of peacocks to the branching antlers of deer, many of these traits are about sex. They make their bearers more attractive to mates, either because they’re sexy in their own right or because they’re honest signs of health and vigor. So why on Earth would a baby bird be so fancy? It clearly has nothing to do with sex. And as Bruce Lyon and Daizaburo Shizuka from the University of California at Santa Cruz have shown, the garish colors aren’t signs of quality chicks either. They’re the opposite.
The life of a coot chick can be brief and brutal. The parent birds lay six to 12 eggs, but almost always more than they can actually raise. The eggs hatch one by one over the span of a week, and the resulting chicks scramble and compete for their parents’ food and attention. It’s an unforgiving hunger game, which the youngest, smallest ones typically lose, at the cost of their life. About half of the chicks die before they’re a week old. This seemingly wasteful system makes sense for parent coots. They overproduce chicks on the off chance that they can procure a glut of food and raise a larger-than-average family. If they can’t, the surplus chicks will just die off—no harm, no fowl.
After the first week, when the weakest chicks are all dead, the parents change their behavior. Each now picks a favorite among the survivors, and provides that chick with 80 percent of the food it collects. These golden children grow rapidly, while their unchosen siblings are grabbed by the head, vigorously shaken, and chased away. In the 1990s, Lyon learned that parents pick their favorites in part because of their gaudy plumage. By trimming the orange feathers around the chicks’ necks, he showed that the more ornamented chicks got more food and grew faster than their siblings. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
In the middle of the New Mexico desert lies Spaceport America, a glittering, alien structure advertised as the very first purpose-built commercial spaceport. It’s home to Virgin Galactic, a space startup that promises to send tourists into orbit as early as next year. But even if that milestone happens, it will follow years of delays, setbacks, and even tragedy. Local residents in the nearby town of Truth or Consequences were told to expect big things when New Mexico joined the private space economy, but many now wonder if the dream of a space industry will ever materialize.
Most “America, f**k yeah!” story of 2019? This dude jumping on a submarine and banging on the door until someone opened it. #TDSbestof2019 pic.twitter.com/BaITRBPKdk
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 30, 2019
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available to embed.
A look back at Donald Trump’s best words of 2019.
Happy birthday to Donald Trump, Jr., who’s always been his own man. #TDSbestof2019 pic.twitter.com/9yczLpgJLc
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 31, 2019
This story really stole our hearts in 2019. #TDSbestof2019 pic.twitter.com/HnGRtyEWr0
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 29, 2019
Count Vaminous de Stradivarius was married six times to six women—all of whom were played by his housekeeper
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 27, 2017
FINALLY . . .
L. Frank Baum wrote part of the “Wizard of Oz” series in this wooden Victorian beach resort.
Hotel del Coronado.
SINCE ITS DOORS FIRST OPENED in 1888, the Hotel Del Coronado has hosted presidents, royalty, and perhaps most famously, writers. L. Frank Baum stayed in the hotel while writing parts of his Wizard of Oz series. He also designed the featured chandelier in the hotel’s famous Crown Room.
The “Hotel Del,” as it is known to locals, is just across the water from San Diego. It’s one of the only surviving examples of an American genre of architecture, the wooden Victorian beach resort. You may recognize it as the inspiration for Disney World’s Grand Floridian. It’s a National Historical monument, and the second largest wood structure in the United States.
The hotel is known for many things, including the famous ghost of Kate Morton; the world’s first outdoor electrically lit Christmas tree; and its featured role in Some Like it Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis. The resort was considered a wonder of technological structure in the early years, and both Nikola Testa and Thomas Edison counted among its guests.
Today, the Hotel del Coronado has both the original building and a newer wing, but the Crown Room and other featured rooms from past eras remain intact and frozen in time. …
Ed. Another barely interesting at all place I’ve been.
When Georg Wilhelm Rutgers died, medical examiners discovered that he was actually the outer covering for something else
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 21, 2017
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Back on Saturday… maybe.