• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
The Depression-era children’s game of “Knock the Bobbin” was actually a form of capoeira developed by the British military
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 12, 2018
Generations of Handwritten Mexican Cookbooks Are Now Online
North America’s largest-known Mexican cookbook collection inspires both tears and restaurant dishes.
Chefs Elizabeth Johnson of Pharm Table in San Antonio and Juan Cabrera Barrón of Fonda Fina in Mexico City page through the collection’s oldest book.
THE STORY OF MEXICAN FOOD is usually told as a happy merging of indigenous ingredients and techniques with those brought by the Spanish in the 1500s, as if the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was just a means to a better burrito. In fact, what we now know as Mexican cuisine is the result of centuries of shifting borders and tastes.
“When it came to culinary cultural exchange in the colonial period, the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo referred to corn dishes as the ‘misery of maize cakes,’” says Stephanie Noell, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). “On the other side, the Nahuas were not impressed by the Spaniards’ wheat bread, describing it as ‘famine food.’”* The eventual confluence of native and European ingredients and traditions is, of course, what defines North American cuisine to this day.
Doña Ignacita’s cookbook, from 1789, is the collection’s oldest.
A rough timeline of this transformation exists in the UTSA’s Mexican cookbook collection, the largest-known trove of Mexican and Mexican-American cookbooks in North America. It started with a donation of nearly 550 books from San Antonio resident Laurie Gruenbeck in 2001, amassed during her decades of travel throughout Mexico. It now has more than 2,000 books, including some of renowned chef and scholar Diana Kennedy’s rarest books, as well as her personal papers. It has the oldest cookbooks published in Mexico (from 1831), elaborate vegetarian cookbooks from 1915 and 1920, corporate and community cookbooks, and much more.
The earliest book in the collection is from 1789, making it one of the oldest Mexican cookbooks in existence. This so-called “manuscript cookbook”—written by “Doña Ignacita,” who Noell believes was the kitchen manager of a well-off family—is a handwritten recipe collection in a notebook, complete with liquid stains, doodles, and pages that naturally fall open to the most-loved recipes. These manuscript cookbooks, never intended for public scrutiny, provide essential insight on how real households cooked on a regular basis. Though the UTSA only has about 100 manuscript cookbooks, they are impossibly rare documents that form the heart of the collection. …
The series of 1950s postage stamps that, when arranged into a specific pattern, formed a vulgar message intended for Stalin
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 12, 2017
‘We Knew They Had Cooked the Books’
The Trump administration’s attempt to kill one of America’s strongest climate policies has been a complete debacle.
On a drizzly day in January 2018, Jeff Alson, an engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency’s motor-vehicles office, gathered with his colleagues to make a video call to Washington, D.C.
They had made the same call dozens of times before. For nearly a decade, the EPA team had worked closely with another group of engineers in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, pronounced nits-uh) to write the federal tailpipe-pollution standards, one of the most consequential climate protections in American history. The two teams had done virtually all the technical research—testing engines in a lab, interviewing scientists and automakers, and overseeing complex economic simulations—underpinning the rules, which have applied to every new car and light truck, including SUVs and vans, sold in the United States since 2012.
Their collaboration was historic. Even as SUVs, crossovers, and pickups have gobbled up the new-car market, the rules have pushed the average fuel economy—the distance a vehicle can travel per gallon of gas—to record highs. They have saved Americans $500 billion at the pump, according to the nonpartisan Consumer Federation of America, and kept hundreds of millions of tons of carbon pollution out of the air. So as the call connected, Alson and the other EPA engineers thought it was time to get back to work. Donald Trump had recently ordered a review of the rules.
Speaking from Washington, James Tamm, the NHTSA fuel-economy chief, greeted the EPA team, then put a spreadsheet on-screen. It showed an analysis of the tailpipe rules’ estimated costs and benefits. Alson had worked on this kind of study so many times that he could recall some of the key numbers “by heart,” he later told me.
Yet as Alson looked closer, he realized that this study was like none he had seen before. For years, both NHTSA and the EPA had found that the tailpipe rules saved lives during car accidents because they reduced the weight—and, with it, the lethality—of the heaviest SUVs. In 2015, an outside panel of experts concurred with them.
But this new study asserted the opposite: The Obama-era rules, it claimed, killed almost 1,000 people a year. …
‘Trust your dog’: extraordinary pets help solve crimes by finding bodies
After grueling training, a rare few civilians and their dogs are allowed to participate in criminal investigations by searching for cadavers.
Sundance, a nine-year-old dog searches for a buried sample in the woods of St Tammany parish, Louisiana.
Bob Ward keeps baby wipes, canned soup, and bottled water in his truck. “If I need a bath or a meal, there it is,” he explained in a Walker, Louisiana Waffle House. Calls can come at anytime, and his truck remains loaded, his bag packed.
Today is a rare day off from both of his jobs: a nine to five at a printing company and volunteer work looking for dead bodies with his Australian shepherd, Niko. Ward and Niko are one of approximately 500 volunteer cadaver dog-handler pairs across the country who assist law enforcement in recovering human remains.
Ward remembers a call a few years back: a missing female, suspected homicide. He put 1,500 miles on his truck over the course of a month searching for her, but they found nothing. Then, on a scorching day in a wooded field, the humidity weighing on Ward and 15 law enforcement officers, Niko started running. After a few yards, he abruptly sat down. He had found part of a pelvis and a leg, all bone, unburied. Soon they found most of a full skeleton.
“That one has stayed with me for some reason. I knew the victim’s name,” Ward said. “You take the emotions, and you set it aside, because you’ve got a job to do. You deal with the grief, or the anger, afterwards.” …
6 Sleazy Tactics Tech Companies Use To Get Ahead
It’s no secret that tech companies use unethical schemes to get ahead. For instance, the infamous blood testing company Theranos was just guessing results based on your star sign while selling your blood to hot dog manufacturers. But while they collapsed in infamy and shame, plenty of tech giants were punished for their bizarre and cruel scams by, uh, getting even richer. Look at how …
6. Uber’s “Safe Rides Fee” Was A Lie For More Profit
In 2014, Uber faced bad publicity over drivers assaulting passengers. So they rolled out a new $1 safe rides fee on every trip, pledging to use “industry leading” driver screening to ease anyone’s fears of getting into a stranger’s car. Your cab driver might spend the whole ride snorting lines off a flensing knife, and your Lyft driver might pull up with a necklace of human toes and a running chainsaw, but with Uber, you were safe. The safety fee was right there on the receipt!
The new fee was a huge selling point that brought in an estimated $500 million over the next two years. It was even higher in some markets, costing $1.35 in San Francisco, presumably to fund anti-Zodiac screening, and a whopping $1.65 in Los Angeles, where each car had to be equipped with a turret gunner in case they drove past Harvey Weinstein’s house. We’re just kidding, of course. What Uber actually did with that $500 million was … absolutely nothing.
Uber never planned to roll out new safety features, and its driver screening remained a joke. The whole program boiled down to a few instructional videos, which were unlikely to stop the Mazda Mangler from striking again. An Uber insider later said the fee was “devised primarily to add $1 of pure margin to each trip. It was obscene.” It does take a certain kind of depravity to read passenger safety horror stories and only hear cartoon cash register noises.
In 2016, Uber was sued and paid a settlement of $25.8 million to passengers. That’s about 0.82 cents per passenger, and as any math teachers in the audience may know, $28.5 million is substantially smaller than $500 million. But don’t worry, Uber was also required to rename the “Safe Rides” fee to a “Booking” fee — a brutal punishment which we’re sure will dissuade corporations from ever trying something like this again. …
People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia
The possible explanations could help us better understand the condition.
It as something Tom Pollak had heard whispers about—an odd factoid, referred to now and again, usually with bewilderment: No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Over the past 60-some years, scientists around the world have been writing about this mystery. They’ve analyzed past studies, combed the wards of psychiatric hospitals, and looked through agencies that treat blind people, trying to find a case.
As time goes on, larger data sets have emerged: In 2018, a study led by a researcher named Vera Morgan at the University of Western Australia looked at nearly half a million children born between 1980 and 2001 and strengthened this negative association. Pollak, a psychiatrist and researcher at King’s College London, remembered checking in the mental health facility where he works after learning about it; he too was unable to find a single patient with congenital blindness who had schizophrenia.
These findings suggest that something about congenital blindness may protect a person from schizophrenia. This is especially surprising, since congenital blindness often results from infections, brain trauma, or genetic mutation—all factors that are independently associated with greater risk of psychotic disorders. …
Photo of mice squabbling on subway platform wins prestigious photography award
embiggenable
The sight of two mice scurrying across a London Underground platform in the evening is, to many, an unwelcome feature of life in the city.
But a young photographer is hoping his award-winning shot changes that perception.
Sam Rowley’s “Station Squabble” has been picked from more than 48,000 images to claim a wildlife photography award from London’s Natural History Museum, voted for by the public.
The image features two mice fighting over a few leftover crumbs in a subway station.
“Everybody knows about the mice on the Underground but I don’t think anyone’s seen them in that light before,” Rowley, a 25-year-old researcher at the BBC, told CNN.
He admitted that he got a handful of “strange looks” from commuters while laying on the floor of various central London stations, but added: “People were quite curious — they were quite chatty and nice about the whole thing.” …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
3D-printing innovations in recent years have brought a sea change in the fabrication of everything from automobile parts to human bio-tissues.
VICE’s Krishna Andavolu delves into the cutting-edge research behind what’s being called the next industrial revolution, meeting the scientists and entrepreneurs pushing the boundaries of manufacturing, material science, and even space exploration.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Ronny Chieng breaks down the misinformation and racism surrounding the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
President Trump held a rally in Concord on the eve of the New Hampshire primary to take the spotlight off Democrats and get out some important messages about family and health.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
"G.I. Gerard", the biodegradable action figure that Hasbro introduced in 1978—and has been trying to forget ever since
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 12, 2017
FINALLY . . .
The Unexpected Elegance of Apocalyptic Seed Vaults, In Photos
The images, by artist and professor Dornith Doherty, are ethereal and oddly comforting.
The kangaroo grass, Themeda triandra, looks delicate.
NATURE PHOTOGRAPHERS OFTEN ZIP ON warm coats before lugging their cameras into the wintry outdoors. Dornith Doherty, an artist and professor at the University of North Texas, bundles up to photograph nature indoors—and sometimes in suspended animation. Doherty documents the vaults and research hubs that store seeds for any number of uncertain futures.
These archives are sometimes known as “arks of the apocalypse.” Inside, seeds are dried, stored, and safeguarded, often at subzero temperatures. The facilities are insurance against pests, disease, and other forms of destruction that could strike a species. Each seed bank is a botanical backup plan: The hope is that humans can draw on these reserves to save plant populations on the brink.
Since 2008, Doherty has visited these collections to photograph their operations and contents. She has traveled to Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and Brazil, as well as around the United States. She has documented the Desert Legume Program in Tucson and Yuma, Arizona, and the National Collection of Genetic Resources for Pecans and Hickories, in Texas. Doherty visited Svalbard, the snow-flanked vault on a Norwegian archipelago north of the Arctic Circle, and Sussex, England, to step inside the Millennium Seed Bank, which stores more than 2.3 billion seeds spanning more than 40,000 species. Arranged in rows of glass jars on shelves, they look like pantry staples, such as decanted beans, oats, or rice—but with much higher stakes.
The results are photos of the spaces themselves, and x-rays of the seeds and tissue specimens housed there. Doherty sometimes arrays these in ethereal, gossamer collages that evoke Anna Atkins’ pioneering, 19th-century cyanotypes of British algae. More than a decade on, the project is still in progress. “I think it will continue indefinitely,” Doherty says. “There are over 1,700 seed banks worldwide.” She corresponded with Atlas Obscura about cold vaults in a warming world. …
35 years ago, this small Indiana town was nearly devastated by a science experiment that went disastrously wrong. Now the Department of Energy wants to re-open the lab
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 12, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? I have absolutely no idea.