• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
Arkansas Senator Hattie Caraway’s signature snakeskin pipe was engineered to emit seven different smoke formations, with which she would surreptitiously direct compatriots during tense floor sessions.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 24, 2019
Why Trees Are the Most Reliable Historians of Early America
Dendrochronology doesn’t just work on forests. It works on buildings too.
The recently dated Pitsenbarger Farm in Franklin, West Virginia, is on the state’s list of endangered properties.
DESPITE OUR BEST INTENTIONS, HUMANS can be awful recordkeepers. There are personal biases and faulty memories to consider, older means of documentation that can decay or crumble (thereby jumbling any meaning there was to begin with), and so many other inherent hazards. So it’s no wonder that hazier parts of the historical record require an entirely different species of historian.
Increasingly, American researchers are turning to trees, and reading them to fill in the gaps. A new study, published in the Journal of Biogeography, looks at the tree rings of West Virginia’s historic log cabins and other wooden structures to better understand the period in which they were built. It’s just the latest example of what the science of dendrochronology can tell us.
As trees grow each year, they sprout new rings of tissue under their bark. These rings are formed by the rate at which trees grow over the course of the calendar year—slower in winter, when there aren’t many nutrients, and faster in the spring and summer. Each new ring, a testament to the tree’s survival, encircles the older ones, inscribing a hidden historical record beneath the bark, in concentric circles.
Sanded tree cores up close. The lines delineate the beginning of new years.
Tree rings encode a trove of data—the state of the climate in each year of the tree’s life; the amount of nutrients the tree collected in each season; and, obviously, the times of birth and death. The older the tree, the more comprehensive the history. The cross-sectioned trunk of a giant sequoia at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, for instance, has over 1,400 rings, revealing information about its native Californian environment since the fall of Rome. …
Meet the Faraday cage in which, according to legend, Nikola Tesla confronted time travelers sent by Thomas Edison to sabotage his work.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 24, 2019
America Has Come Full Circle in the Middle East
“We are opening a Pandora’s Box,” Dwight Eisenhower warned when he ordered the first U.S. combat mission in the region. Little did he know how right he would be.
Marines arriving on a beach outside Beirut, Lebanon, on July 15, 1958.
In 1958, U.S. leaders stood at the threshold of an American era in the Middle East, conflicted about whether it was worth the trouble to usher in.
A year earlier, in the context of the emergent Cold War and fading British and French power in the region, Dwight Eisenhower had articulated and received congressional approval for what became known as the Eisenhower doctrine. The United States had for the first time staked out national interests in the Middle East—oil, U.S. bases and allies, Soviet containment—and declared that it was prepared to defend them with military force.
Sixty-two years before President Donald Trump dispatched a drone to Baghdad to kill Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, this is how American combat missions in the post–World War II Middle East began.
Eisenhower felt compelled to issue his doctrine following a showdown over the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Arab nationalist whom U.S. officials perceived as allied with the Soviet Union. The U.S. president had pledged to honor requests for American military assistance by countries facing aggression from proponents of “international communism.”
That U.S. commitment was tested when insurrectionist Iraqi army officers executed their country’s last king, the Western-friendly Faisal II, in Baghdad in the summer of 1958. Camille Chamoun, the Christian leader of Lebanon and an opponent of Nasser, asked for American aid against the backdrop of the coup in Iraq and looming civil war in his own country. (The revolution in Iraq had little connection to Nasser, but the U.S. didn’t initially grasp that.) In keeping with the grand domino theorizing of that period, U.S. officials worried that if they didn’t act decisively, U.S. partners such as Lebanon and Jordan would be next to fall to Nasserite nationalism and, by extension, Soviet communism. …
5 Techniques Fearmongers Use To Create Moral Panics
In the days before the Information Age, it was perfectly ordinary for huge groups of people to believe wrong, deranged things. For example, for most of the ’80s, many Christians believed Satan was hiding in the salacious lyrics and beats of popular music. For instance: I’m Phil Collins and this is my blood orgy, baby / my murder fuck pit, baby.
I read over a dozen books about Christianity’s war on rock, and I’ve realized that even though they lost that war, and badly, their impotent witch hunt is the perfect template for modern lunatics to manufacture outrage. In fact, some of you might be doing it already. So let’s look back on how an entire religion lost its mind fighting a make-believe enemy, and how you can do it too!
5. Blindly Pick An Enemy
One day, God told Dan and Steve Peters that rock music was evil, and they turned that unlikely story into a lucrative writing and ministry career, though not a successful one. Their lord gave them a purpose, and also congenital idiocy, so they set out to destroy rock and roll. I know the hilarious conceit of this article is that you’re a terrible person looking for ways to be worse, but I want to get real for a second: If you ever notice your raison d’etre is word-for-word the scheme of a Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling villain, you blew it.
For the first 44 pages, their bestselling 1984 book Why Knock Rock?is an essay about rock. They did not take for granted that readers would be music experts, so they wrote it specifically for a being emerging from an ocean trench knowing only fear and nothing of “moo-sic?” It’s as boring as it sounds, but also weirdly catty. Dan and Steve call every artist from 1947 to 1985 a knockoff or a sellout. This is, of course, in addition to accusations of witchcraft and demonic possession. Crazy isn’t an exact science, but by my estimation, sounding like a reprocessed Adam Ant clone is 17.4 times worse than being a literal demon, and having sex is 3.1 times worse than that.
The Peters brothers’ core belief is that if a band did it, then it must be bad. Success, drugs, rhythm guitar — all are presented as evidence for moral crimes. Try to imagine 500 biographies authored by a bad writer who hated all 500 people for every single thing they ever did, take away the fun, and that’s the message The Actual God needed Dan and Steve to share. I know one of the perks of Christianity is the complete lack of internal logic, but if any of this book is true, then God is a basic, jealous bitch. …
In this new neighborhood, every building will be made entirely out of wood
Copenhagen’s new Fælledby development will house 7,000 people, all in multistory wood buildings.
In an effort to build a more sustainable future, architects and policy makers are nodding to the past with structures entirely made of timber. From a 70-story timber skyscraper in Tokyo to an all-wood, 200,000-plus square foot university residence hall in Arkansas, constructions that have eschewed steel and concrete for forest-grown materials have been sprouting up across the world. Next up in this timber trend: a Copenhagen neighborhood built fully with wood, with housing for 7,000 people, a school, and a focus on integrating nature with city life.
Danish architecture company Henning Larsen is designing the development, called Fælledby, and working with the city of Copenhagen and public developer By & Havn to bring this all-timber neighborhood to fruition. It’s set to be built beyond the city center on a former dumping site, transforming a junkyard into a place where residents can not just live alongside nature but actively participate in bettering it, says Signe Kongebro, the Henning Larsen partner in charge of the project, over email.
“We hope that to live here is to become a better citizen of nature,” she says. “That might mean things as small as not moving a birds nest from your balcony or things as big as maintaining a microclimate on site. This is more necessary today than ever.” The neighborhood was designed in collaboration with biologists and environmental engineers, and preserves 40% of the 45-acre project site as undeveloped habitat for local flora and fauna. Nature is also literally integrated into the infrastructure: nests for songbirds and bats will be built into the housing facades; Fælledby will be comprised of three “mini-villages,” with the center of each featuring new ponds as habitats for frogs and salamanders; and community gardens will provide flowers to attract butterflies. …
The deeply unsettling tale of Thomas Edison’s “little devilfishes”, and how they came to redefine corporate espionage
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 24, 2018
Scientists Are Simulating Mass Animal Die-Offs in an Oklahoma Prairie
Understanding the ecological impact of hundreds of dead feral hogs.
Mass animal die-offs, simulated here in an Oklahoma hog body farm, can negatively impact the surrounding ecosystem.
IT’S THE SMELL THAT WILL never leave Brandon Barton. He has spent years dealing with tons of decomposing hog carcasses, and considers himself a “grizzled old pro,” impressively desensitized to the noxious stench. But even miles away from the field where the hogs were placed—in the name of science—sometimes the smell comes back. “Every once in a while, something will hit me,” Barton says. “If I look at the pictures of those carcasses, my brain can smell it.”
Barton, an ecologist at Mississippi State University, studies and simulates mass mortality events—MMEs, for short—to understand how a heap of dead creatures can alter the ecology of where they wind up. “There’s a long history of decompositional ecology,” he says, noting that researchers have studied the pile-ups of dead salmon that accumulate after spawning or the mounds of millions of cicadas that hatch and promptly die after waiting underground for years. But MMEs are a little different, as they represent the stuff that’s not supposed to happen, rather than as part of the natural life-and-death cycle of a population. “I study anomalies,” Barton says, such as a 2016 lightning strike that killed 323 reindeer in Norway or a warm summer in Kazakhstan that allowed a single bacteria to kill approximately 200,000 saiga antelopes. In other words, if Barton were to dump dead salmon in a river where they die en masse every year, that wouldn’t shock the ecosystem enough to count as an MME. “But if I dump a bunch of dead salmon in a forest in Mississippi,” he says, “it does.”
MMEs happen throughout the world, but they are nearly impossible to predict by their very nature. But new research suggests these events are on the rise and likely to become more frequent as climate changes and environments are stressed in new ways, according to The Guardian. In Australia, for example, recent record-breaking bushfires have led to one of the largest MMEs ever recorded, with over a billion animals estimated to have died, according to ABC News. The best way to understand the impact of these mass die-offs, Barton says, is to “gather a big pile of dead animals and watch what happens.”
While interesting, dumping several tons of salmon into a Southeastern forest isn’t exactly a cost-effective way to simulate an MME. Barton instead uses one of the one of the region’s most inexhaustible and irritating resources: feral hogs. “The Southeast is just about at all-out war with these pigs,” he says. Local trappers were happy to provide the hogs that he needed. …
Lady Buxton-Battersleigh-Croydon, a famous court socialite who was never seen outside her carriage, was actually a hand puppet
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 24, 2018
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
VICE Media founder Shane Smith has been traveling to North Korea for years, including during some of the most acrimonious periods in its history. Back in 2018, the country was on a charm offensive and appeared to be slowly emerging from its isolation.
In the wake of a series of inter-Korean summits and the first ever DPRK-U.S. summit, Smith returns to the Korean peninsula to see how Seoul and Pyongyang are reacting to the new détente.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at House managers in the Senate impeachment trial seeking to prove that the president is a criminal who’s unfit for office.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on a comical arrest up in Canada.
おもちゃの好みが違うまるとはな。興味があるおもちゃとないおもちゃとでは、こうも反応が違う。猫は正直。Maru&Hana are different in the preference of the toy.
FINALLY . . .
Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours
My life seemed to be getting busier, faster: I felt constantly short of time – so I stepped outside it for a day and a night and did nothing.
IT WAS EARLY SUMMER, AND I WAS on the verge of turning 40. I found myself entertaining a recurring daydream of escaping from time. I would be hustling my son out the door to get him to school, or walking briskly to work on the day of a deadline, or castigating myself for being online when I should have been methodically and efficiently putting words on paper, and I would have this vision of myself as a character in a video game discovering a secret level. This vision was informed by the platform games I loved as a child – Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog and so on – in which the character you controlled moved across the screen from left to right through a scrolling landscape, encountering obstacles and adversaries as you progressed to the end of the level. In this daydream, I would see myself pushing against a wall or lowering myself down the yawning mouth of a pipe, and thereby discovering this secret level, this hidden chamber where I could exist for a time outside of time, where the clock was not forever running down to zero.
My relationship with time had always been characterised by a certain baleful anxiety, but as I approached the start of the decade in which I would have no choice but to think of myself as middle-aged, this anxiety intensified. I was always in the middle of some calculation or quantification with respect to time, and such thoughts were always predicated on an understanding of it as a precious and limited resource. What time was it right now? How much time was left for me to do the thing I was doing, and when would I have to stop doing it to do the next thing?
This resource being as limited as it was, should I not be doing something better with it, something more urgent or interesting or authentic? At some point in my late 30s, I recognised the paradoxical source of this anxiety: that every single thing in life took much longer than I expected it to, except for life itself, which went much faster, and would be over before I knew where I was.
Much of this had to do with being a parent. Having two young children had radically altered my relationship with the days and hours of my life. Almost every moment was accounted for in a way that it had never been before. But it was also the sheer velocity of change, the state of growth and flux in which my children existed, and the constant small adjustments that were necessary to accommodate these changes. I would realise that my son no longer mispronounced a particular word in that adorable way he once had, or that his baby sister had stopped doing that thing of nodding very seriously and emphatically when she heard a song she liked – that she was, in fact, no longer a baby at all – and that those eras had now passed for good, along with countless others that would pass unnoticed and unremembered, and I would feel sad and remorseful about not having lived more fully in those moments, not having stopped or at least slowed the flow of time. And when I felt this way, I would succumb to the daydream of the video game, the secret level, the escape from time itself. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The Long Read.
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Probably, maybe.
Feel free to retweet the following.
It's fairly accurate. https://t.co/KYGK7lMHMr
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) January 24, 2020