Visiting Erie Street is like walking into a 1950s post-apocalyptic landscape. From all that is immediately apparent, it could have been abandoned in a hurry and forgotten for half a century. Rusting cars, trucks, and an old Greyhound bus sit deserted along the street as if their passengers had suddenly vanished (or worse).
Erie Street is most of what is left of Lowell, Arizona, a mining town incorporated into Bisbee in the early 1900s. Much of the town's residential area was demolished to widen an open pit copper mine. Losing most of its residents caused the commercial district to struggle, and many businesses failed as a result. Today, the street's special curiosities include a Harley Davidson repair shop with a now-defunct gas pump and Sprouse Reitz Co., a department store that is nearly empty except for a few appliances and a whole pile of mannikin parts.
Despite appearing untouched since its decline, further investigation reveals that Erie Street is continually restored by a vibrant and passionate community of residents and volunteers who want to remember a different America. So although you can no longer see a show at Lowell's movie theater or pay $0.22 for gasoline, the Lowell Americana Project has made it possible to experience the street as a living snapshot of another time. And not everything on Erie Street is purely decorative—visit the Bisbee Breakfast Club for an excellent Huevos Rancheros.
Just behind an auto dealership in Winamac, Indiana a pleasant surprise is waiting: the World of Motorcycles museum. It is a little out of the way but most definitely worth the trip.
The whole collection is rather large and consists of at least 100 motorcycles and paraphernalia, plus several classic cars. Many of the motorcycles are unrestored and have the original paint. One or two even have an oil pan standing under the engine to collect the drips. Other gems include an experimental Indian called "Black Phantom" and the owner's first motorcycle that was driven by a Maytag washing machine engine! If you're lucky you'll get a tour from the man himself, who started the dealership in 1962.
The narrow and winding Winnats Pass is located in the Peak District National Park in northern England near the village of Castleton. The road winds through a steep-sided valley surrounded by towering limestone ridges and pinnacles, including one which is, perhaps a little exaggeratedly, named Matterhorn Rib.
The pass was once thought to have originated as a large collapsed cave. However, a more recent explanation is that it was a ravine between the coral reefs, while the valley was formed by erosion after changes in elevation due to tectonic activity. Due to the narrowness of the road and its steep (1 in 3.5) gradient means that it is closed to buses, coaches and heavy vehicles. It has however regularly been used in cycle races since at least the 1950s.
There are numerous footpaths around Winnats Pass and a short walk up the pass and down by another route is well worthwhile. But do not be tempted to climb the sides of the pass unless you are an experienced climber, as it can be dangerous. In May 2016 a couple in their twenties scrambled up the pass side and got stuck near the top. They were saved after sending the mountain rescue team a selfie they had taken earlier.
At the bottom of the pass is one of the four tourist caves in the Castleton area, and probably the most unusual. The natural cavern is reached by a boat along a flooded lead miners' tunnel. Visitors board the electrically powered boats after descending a long steep staircase. The electric power is relatively recent; originally the guide propelled the boat by pushing against the walls with their hands or feet. The cave at the end of the underground canal includes some attractive veins of fluorspar and some nice stalactites and stalagmites but to many the novelty of the underground boat ride is the main attraction.
Also famous is the so-called "Bottomless Pit." This pit was an extremely deep (about 490 feet) vertical shaft, full of water. Originally the miners could not plumb the bottom and because tipping mine waste into it did not raise the water level they assumed it was bottomless. This hydraulic behaviour however was due to an overflow passage below the water level. After years of waste disposal the Bottomless Pit is now choked to within about 60 feet of the surface.
In 1999 the Speedwell system became even more notable in that a connection was discovered between the Speedwell Cavern system and a deep vertical shaft to the surface, Titan. The largest natural shaft in the UK, it is 464 feet deep and was itself discovered after many years of digging by cavers on the hillside above Speedwell.
On the northern flank at the bottom of Winnats is a small cave which can be easily explored with a flashlight (do not be put off by the name, Suicide Cave) and throughout the pass are numerous old mine tunnels and small caves.
Right on Ohio State University's famous Oval stands what some believe to be a spectral reminder of an unfortunate happenstance.
As the legend goes, a girl, staying late in Hopkins Hall to work on a project one night, got stuck in an elevator while attempting to return home. She screamed for help over and over again, slamming her hands against the walls of the elevator, doing whatever she could to make herself heard. She carried on like this all night, but apparently no one could hear her.
Supposedly, she was found the next morning, physically in perfect order, but emotionally imbalanced. By the time the elevator was up and running again, there was no indication that anything unusual had happened, save for the student's handprints, which covered the walls.
The student in question, name long since forgotten, is rumored to have died in a car accident later in life. Some blame her death on the depression which occurred as a result of that night spent in the elevator, and it is even said that she never forgave the university for what it did to her.
Today, the handprints in the elevator are long gone, but outside of the main entrance to the building sits a single black handprint, which, according to legend, cannot be scrubbed off. The obvious answer to this mystery is that it is the product of spray paint and a stencil (Hopkins Hall is one of the art department buildings), but the mystery will have to endure, regardless.
The Labyrinth beneath Budapest's Castle Hill is where Vlad Treves was held captive and tortured for 14 years, starting in 1463. We remember him now as Vlad the Impaler, better known as "Count Dracula."
For the florint equivalent of about six euros, you can walk through the Labyrinth tunnels. There's no map or guidebook; you simply follow a few incoherent signs through foggy, damp chambers dotted with mannequins dolled up as characters from the Phantom of the Opera.
About midway, you'll come to the Maze of Darkness. Hold onto the green garden hose and walk through pitch blackness for about five minutes. Don't let go of the hose, or you'll end up lost amongst historical prison cells that haven't been remodeled yet to be safe for tourists.
Toward the end, you'll walk past "Dracula's chamber," where a coffin is cast in eerie blue light. You can also try out some rusty shackles bolted to the wall and a "torture cage" that may or may not be safe to climb into.
Only open to the public since 2010, the Labyrinth is still a bit of hidden gem right in the center of the most touristed part of Budapest. This one ain't kid friendly.
Every year, all across the world, every nation that observes Daylight Saving Time (DST) will turn its clocks forward one hour in March and back an hour in November. That is, except for one tiny island off the coast of Australia. Lying 370 miles east of mainland Australia, Lord Howe Island is the only DST-observing region in the globe that doesn’t switch its clocks forward by one hour, but rather by just 30 minutes.
The reason for this unique timezone phenomenon is that Lord Howe Island follows a UTC +10:30 timezone, while the nearest land area, the state of New South Wales in mainland Australia, abides by a UTC +10:00 clock. Yet despite these 30 minutes of separation, the governor of Lord Howe Island, for reasons unknown, desperately wanted to share a time-of-day connection with New South Wales for at least part of the year.
An island-wide referendum was held and the governor’s plan was passed, setting the island’s time forward 30 minutes, not 60, during Daylight Savings Time to UTC +11:00, perfectly aligning the clocks on Lord Howe with those of a landmass hundreds of miles away.
Beyond its timezone anomaly, Lord Howe Island is also home to a variety of other bizarre occurrences, including a “hundred years’ war” against a rat infestation, the world’s southernmost barrier coral reef, and Ball’s Pyramid, which contains what may be the rarest insect on the globe. But among the timezone geeks out there, the island's half-hour clock switch has truly gained it its 30 minutes of fame.
In June of 1964, at a Hackensack, New Jersey courthouse, pediatrician Dr. William Reilly was called upon to give testimony regarding the dangers of reading about “abnormal” sexuality. In the course of questioning, Dr. Reilly was asked to expand upon his distinction between “abnormal sex” (an umbrella term under which he placed voyeurism, fetishism, homosexuality, and flagellation) and “normal sex.” It came down to, unsurprisingly, a question of pleasure; sex is “God-given act” but non-procreative sex ends with “anarchy.”
“Hedonism,” he opined, “is pure pleasure for pleasure’s sake. It offers nothing to a society.”
The book that threatened such anarchy? A porno rag? Some mid-century dime store smut? No, it was John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or, as it is more commonly known, Fanny Hill—a novel that is broadly considered the first example of English prose pornography, and which had been stoking the flames of the nation’s anxious Puritanism since it was published in England over 200 years ago.
Written while Cleland was in debtor’s prison and published in two installments in 1748 and 1749, the epistolary novel is told from the point of view of Fanny Hill, a girl who, after being orphaned at 15, runs away to London and makes a living at a brothel. A lot of sex ensues. (From New York counsel’s motion to halt sales during trial: “In its 298 pages, the book describes in detail instances of lesbianism, female masturbation, the deflowering of a virgin, the seduction of a male virgin, the flagellation of male by female and female by male, and other aberrant acts, as well as more than twenty acts of sexual intercourse between male and female.”) Within a year of publication, Cleland and his publishers were arrested, and the book banned.
Still, Fanny found a way to her audiences. The novel proliferated through underground distribution, widely enough so that one unofficial copy, complete with original, lewd illustrations, drew the attention and scorn of the Massachusetts court in 1821, in the nation’s first ruling to ban an obscene book. It wasn’t until after Roth v. United States in 1957—the landmark case which redefined the nation’s definition of obscenity to require an obscene work be “utterly without redeeming social importance”— that a mainstream publisher, Putnam, dared to release it.
The blowback was immediate, and within a year, defense attorney Charles Rembar was representing Putnam in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Consistent among the panic was a real and tangible fear about the effects of such explicit literature on youth, and a reliance on religious testimony. In New York City, a mother directed her teenage daughter to buy the book to prove the ease with which a minor could access it; she brought her complaint to the D.A. who then brought a case to Albany asking for the prohibition of sales to minors. (He didn’t win.) After discovering her 15-year-old son had purchased the book, a Massachusetts mom brought her concern to the Massachusetts Obscene Literature Control Commission (a governor-appointed decency committee comprising clergymen, an educator, and a law enforcement official) who then advised the attorney general to move to ban the book.
Outside of the legal world, interfaith community groups were banding together to fight what they saw as a plague of immorality; a New York Catholic priest and rabbi joined in on a hunger strike protested pornography in general and Fanny Hill in particular.
Once the book was brought to trial, all manner of personal considerations and hypotheticals were suddenly fair game. What was Cleland’s motivation in writing—informing the reader about 18th century London, or simply titillating them? If the latter, can the book still be saved by coincidental social worth? On the flip side, why are readers reading? To be informed, or to be titillated? And should those in the latter camp ruin it for those in the former? Regarding the actual sex described: was it hyperbolic, or realistic? “Normal” or not? So vague was the concept of pornography that more than once prosecutors had to abandon questions directly related to it.
When the Massachusetts judge asked English professor Ira Konigsberg if the book was pornographic, Konigsberg responded, unsatisfactorily, “I know what I mean by pornographic. I don’t know what you mean.” (A precursor to the Supreme Court quote.) This scattered anxiety was unified on a holdover concept from a late-19th century British statute on obscenity: that the key trait of the obscene has the tendency to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.”
It is difficult, of course, to prove the effect of all of this immorality. In New Jersey, Dr. Reilly repeatedly referred to the unsubstantiated claim that reading pornography had “definitive” links to increased vandalism, juvenile delinquency, and promiscuity. For the average person, he said, a “constant perusal of this kind of material would definitely stimulate them to acts of sexual activity”—the obvious implication being that this wouldn’t be the good kind of sexual activity.
Still, the question wasn’t whether or not the book was erotic or pornographic—certainly it was. (Even Massachusett’s Assistant Attorney General John Sullivan admitted, “It did arouse prurient interest and impure thoughts in me. Fortunately I am well adjusted enough so it did not affect my daily life.”) The question was, does it have social value? Fanny Hill was an especially vexing book in this case. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer had both been brought to trial (and both defended by Charles Rembar) and deemed protected by the First Amendment. But Fanny Hill was written by a poor prisoner who could by no stretch of the imagination be called a great writer. Fanny herself didn’t help matters. In his ruling against Fanny Hill, Massachusetts Justice Tom Clark described the woman as “nothing but a harlot.” In his review of the book, John Hutchens condemned Putnam for their scheme to “cloak Fanny in an unfamiliar respectability.” Here was a young woman who shed patriarchal expectations and used her body to earn, in her own words, “if not happiness, then at least affluence, or independence.” It was nearly impossible to separate disgust with the book from disgust with her.
In New York, though the book was briefly banned for the duration of the trial, the judge ultimately decided Fanny Hill had enough literary merit to not be obscene, but the book did not fare so well elsewhere. In December of 1964, New Jersey justice Morris Pashman ruled Fanny Hill obscene enough to “forfeit protection of the First Amendment.” In Massachusetts, both the lower and state Supreme Court ruled the book obscene. Putnam powered on.
In 1965, two years after Fanny Hill’s publication and over 200 years after it was written, Memoirs v. Massachusetts made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6 to 3 that the book was not obscene. Those who dissented were horrified—now, would any pornographic material be safe as long as it had the remotest social value? The answer, of course, was yes, which is why the sort of censorship preceding the case is now mostly unheard of. Today, Fanny Hill is published as a classic, studied in college, and celebrated as the still-revolutionary story of a woman who sought pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and got it.
For nearly 50 years, Ralph Plescia has been making art and studying obscure passages from the Bible, extracting images and interpretations that he describes as forgotten stories, especially relating to Heavenly Mother and Eve.
In the process he completely transformed a pair of unassuming empty buildings on the south side of Salt Lake City into a walk-in sculpture garden. Huge, larger-than life statues of Eve and the serpent in the garden, the lion of Judah, dragons, Heavenly Mother and other figures emerge from the every floor. Some of these works are crammed in between antiques and junk left over from the buildings' earlier incarnations as a barber shop and auto repair shop.
In addition to a self-built, brightly lit dome on top of the building, Plescia dug down below the basement by hand, digging deep enough to reach the water table, in order to create a permanent pond from which concrete statues of desperate souls seem to emerge.
If you knock on the door in the afternoons on Fridays, Mr Plescia will give you a personal tour of his creation, which is still very much a work in progress (he's currently working on some large paintings based on the stations of the cross), and you can ask him yourself about what inspired him to devote his life to creating these amazing and unusual installations.
Gerrymandering has long played a worrisome role in U.S. elections, and North Carolina’s awkwardly shaped 12th Congressional District was the epitome of the problem. Dubbed the most gerrymandered district in the nation, it was until recently positioned entirely vertically, its border twisting and turning with multiple jutting arms.
The serpentining District 12 resembled an archipelago more than a symmetric, evenly spaced region, its warped shape so narrow that a state legislator once remarked that “if you drove down the interstate with both car doors open, you’d kill most of the people in the district."
The jagged boundary line was a strategical political move, looping and contorting throughout the state along racial lines, in order to group majority-black neighborhoods into one district while excluding white neighborhoods—a strategy you can see in action by overlaying the district’s borders atop the Racial Dot Map. However, drawing boundaries on racial lines was ruled unconstitutional by the Federal District Court, leading the state to redraw the district in 2016.
Many argue that these “minority-majority” districts give political power to the black community, but the real effect is often the opposite. By consolidating Democratic-leaning black voters into a small minority of congressional districts, the other districts become majority-white and majority-Republican. It’s no surprise, then, that despite having a near-equal mix or Republicans and Democrats in the state, 10 of the state's 13 congressional districts—whose borders were drawn by the Republican National Committee—had Republican representatives.
Update 2016: As a result of litigation, the congressional district was redrawn for the 2016 elections but no updated map is yet available. The maps above reflect district lines as they were in 2014.
You might have seen what today's electoral map would look like if only women voted. Well, here’s another version of that map—a “suffrage map” from early 20th century America. Suffrage maps played an influential role in the fight for women’s suffrage, and “The Awakening,” above, is one of the most striking examples.
Published in Puck Magazine in 1915 and illustrated by German-born artist Henry Mayer, the map depicts women with faces turned to the light that Lady Liberty is bringing east. Her flowing robes are emblazoned with the words, “VOTES FOR WOMEN.”
By 1915, the Western states marked in white had already given women the vote; another suffrage map of the time was labeled“9 States of Light Among 39 of Darkness.” In this map, you can see the desperation on the women’s faces and in their movements, as they stretch themselves towards the votes that ought to be theirs.
It’s a case of women using cartography—a field long controlled by elite Western men for imperialist purposes—for their own purposes: equality and social justice.
The map appeared during the Empire State Campaign, which was fighting to amend New York’s gender-based voting restrictions, which it accomplished in 1917.
“Are political rights to be a question of geography?” one campaign committee flier asked. “The women of New York will be eligible to vote for the next President if the men of the Empire State are as generous-minded as the men of the West have been.”
Maps like this one were printed on posters, pamphlets, paper fans, banners, and broadsides to be handed out across cities and communities, snowballing into powerful movements that broke free of family parlors and spread to the streets.
Suffrage maps were painted on walls and positioned in prominent public places, such as state buildings, banks, and businesses. They showed up on drinking glasses, baseball programs, parade floats, and sandwich boards.
In a 1913 essay called ‘‘Walks and Wins with Two-Ft. Map,” one suffragist noted that “Men are much impressed by the ocular proof of our advance”:
I wear it [the suffrage map] sandwich fashion, and walk about my crowded streets. It attracts everyone’s eye, and an explanation of the colors excites deep interest and makes a great impression.
Impressed, perhaps, but not always convinced by the actions of other states—a man from Massachusetts wrote to the New York Times in 1913, after it published an earlier suffrage map, “…not a single State east of the Mississippi River had adopted woman suffrage: every ‘white’ State on the suffrage map is in the weird and woolly West.”
Additionally, the coloration of the map is problematic in its treatment of race, with its focus on white women only. (Black women did not get the vote until 1920, no matter which coast they lived on). The women pictured in “The Awakening” belonged to an upper middle class movement—if you peer closely, you’ll see their hairstyles and headpieces are finely fashioned.
Yet maps like this one were a shared anchor between women across the country, as well as a powerful form of media and advertising. The suffrage maps were soon pervasive, broadly referenced, and cited in publications across the country.
If you look closely under the map itself, you’ll see a poem echoing many of the thoughts and fears women voters still experience today. It is a work by Alice Duer Miller, a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and feminist whose work includes Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times.
With election day looming over us tomorrow, we leave you with this powerful map and the final verses of Miller’s poem:
The came from toll and want, from leisure and ease, Those who knew only life, and learned women of fame, Girls and the mothers of girls, and the mothers of these No one knew whence or how, but they came, they came.
The faces of some were stern, and some were gay, And some were pale with the terror of unreal dangers; But their hearts knew this: hereafter come what may, Women to women would never again be strangers.
Whatever your politics, the fact that a 102-year-old woman, born before women could vote, just cast her ballot for the country’s first female presidential candidate is monumental.
Watch any modern depiction of the Greeks and Romans on TV and you’ll see an endless montage of exciting sex, often involving scores of topless women and writhing orgies. Fun as these exaggerated portraits are, they tend to leave out the less glamorous aspects of consensual sex in the ancient world.
In an era lacking in scientific knowledge, the ancients were on their own when it came to addressing sexual predicaments and unwanted pregnancies. Many methods were effective, some were not. Others were downright dangerous. What was it like to have sex in antiquity?
For some people it meant dealing with sexually transmitted infections and the mockery they could evoke. Ancient authors didn’t write about them often, but when they did, the context was often malicious humor. Take anogenital warts, which Roman poets called “figs.” In one poem, Martial describes a man named Labienus who became the unlucky possessor of an entire “orchard of fig trees.” Their association with promiscuity led Martial to label S.T.I.s under the umbrella category of indecens morbus, or “unseemly disease.”
Although ancient Romans knew little about infectious diseases, Martial’s poem about Labienus suggests they saw a connection between sex and illness. According to the Roman poet Catullus, even body odor could be transmitted sexually. He informs a man named Rufus that women refuse to have sex with him for fear of catching his vile scent, which Catullus calls a “plague” (pestis in Latin). This wasn’t entirely a joke, since the Romans believed smells could be vectors for infectious disease. In his history of Rome, the writer Livy describes a plague spreading to the living through the smell of the decomposing bodies of its victims.
Gonorrhea, or at least a disease with that name, shows up in antiquity, too. The Greek physician Galen was the first to coin the word using the Greek terms for “seed” and “run.” Writing in the second century C.E., he describes the condition as an “unwanted” and “involuntary” secretion of semen that occurred when the patient didn’t have an erection. A similar description comes from Galen’s contemporary Aretaeus, a Greek physician from Cappadocia. That runoff, he says, is “thin, icy, pale, and sterile.”
Modern physicians doubt this condition was what we now call gonorrhea—still, it seems clear that regardless of how it was contracted, it would hinder future attempts at sex. Nor, says Aretaeus, was the problem limited to men. Women could contract it too—and if they did, they suffered from what he called “an indecent desire for intercourse with men.”
For most people in the ancient world, having children was a major reason to have sex, since children provided status in Greek and Roman society and heirs to personal assets. For some adults, pregnancy was also an opportunity for fun on the side. The Roman author Macrobius claims that Julia, the daughter of the emperor Augustus, used to joke that pregnancy was what allowed her not only to sleep with men other than her husband, but lots of them.
Of course, bearing children could be deadly to women in antiquity, given the state of medicine at that time. Pliny the Elder’s descriptions of care for women giving birth does not inspire confidence in ancient obstetrics. He claims that girls are more difficult to deliver than boys. To speed up a delivery, he suggests placing the right foot of a hyena on the woman, or having her drink a mixture of goose semen and water. As a painkiller, he recommends drinking a concoction of sow’s dung mixed with honey wine.
As desirable as children were, they were also expensive. So while most people wanted children, many would have used contraceptives to avoid having too many. Women engaged in sex work likely would have tried to avoid having children altogether. Many of their methods are lost to us now, as they were likely transmitted orally, but ancient medical treatises devote a lot of space to birth control and abortion, so we know that women had options to choose from.
Some of these methods may have been more effective than others. In his treatise On the Nature of Women, famed Greek physician Hippocrates suggests an oral contraceptive containing “moistened copper ore.” Consuming copper would not have been an effective abortifacient, but his advice does suggest that the Greeks were vaguely aware of the link between copper and contraception that the modern hormone-free IUD relies on.
Additional helpful advice comes from Soranus, a Greek author from southwestern Turkey who lived under the Roman Empire in the second century. Soranus was so interested in women’s health that he wrote a treatise called Gynaecology, which covers matters like who makes the best midwife (quiet women with extensive medical knowledge) and whether lifelong virginity is healthy (it isn’t). His recipes for oral contraceptives include ingredients like rue and pomegranate peel, which are verified abortifacients.
Modern historian John Riddle suggests that the ancients learned about plants that could be used to prevent pregnancy by observing how animals, in addition to human beings, reacted to them. Theophrastus, a Greek writer who studied under Plato, writes that a plant called the death carrot (Thapsia garganica), which was used a few centuries later as an effective abortifacient, could kill cattle that ingested it. Observations like this may have led people to experiment with the plant as a contraceptive and encouraged them to pass on this knowledge. As a result, rue, copper, and many of the other substances that Greeks and Romans used to prevent pregnancy emerge in medieval antifertility advice, too.
Unfortunately for the ancients, many of their ideas about contraception and abortion were ineffective and even perilous. In the second century, the Roman author Pliny stated in his Natural History that stepping over a viper could induce a miscarriage and should be avoided by women who wanted to keep their babies. Soranus, in addition to dispensing advice that would have worked, suggests a vaginal suppository of lead and old olive oil, presumably to clog the vaginal canal and keep semen out. It’s possible that this method would have prevented pregnancy, but the toxicity of the lead would have been extremely dangerous to any woman who used it.
Soranus is also the author of some of the funniest contraception advice to survive from antiquity. Indeed, he seems to have added his own twist to the pull-out method. Oswei Temkin’s translation of Soranus’ advice reads, “During the sexual act, at the critical moment of coitus when the man is about to discharge the seed, the woman must hold her breath and draw herself away a little, so that the seed may not be hurled too deep into the cavity of the uterus.” Soranus adds, “And, getting up immediately and squatting down, she should induce sneezing... She might even drink something cold.”
As strange and funny as many of these recommendations seem, they reveal how little the ancients had to go on when it came to finding ways to enjoy sex and how surprisingly successful they were. Overall, though, sex in the present seems much safer and more enjoyable than it was 2,000 years ago.
On January 9, 1991, police arrested Aileen Wuornos while she was drinking a beer at The Last Resort biker bar in Port Orange, Florida. Though she was arrested for an outstanding warrant, a decade later she would be put to death for the murder of six men.
Wuornos has become a controversial figure. She was clearly a complicated, tragic figure (she grew up poor and sexually abused, claimed that the murders she committed were in self-defense as her johns attempted to rape her, and was poorly represented by an attorney who called himself "Dr. Legal"), and she was depicted this way in the 2003 film Monster. Given the rarity of female serial killers, Wuornos' case gained widespread media attention, but she also became famous for her last words before her 2002 execution: "Yes, I would just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus. June 6, like the movie. Big mother ship and all, I'll be back, I'll be back."
Since the incident, not much has changed at The Last Resort. It's still frequented by bikers, and features a "Japanese garden" of motorcycles dangling from an old oak. However, the decor has been altered to remember Wuornos' last drink here. Pictures of her plaster the walls, including her mug shot. A mural on the bar's brick wall depicts her craggy face and a list of her victims. Perhaps less tastefully (but more tastily) the bar has also branded its own "Crazy Killer Hot Sauce."
In 1930, work began to renovate and expand the fishery harbor in the port town of Uozu. As the project progressed, a strange discovery was made: the remains of an entire forest, buried under the seabed and swallowed by the waves.
The forest, which consisted mostly of Japanese cedars, was about 500 years old when it was buried roughly 2,000 years ago. The most likely cause for the disappearance was a river flood that engulfed the forest in soil runoff. The local sea level subsequently rose, leaving stumps, root systems, and toppled trunks preserved in the submerged mud.
Today, the gnarled, twisting treasures of this unique find can be seen at the Uozu Buried Forest Museum, which was built around the original excavation site.
The buried forest is one of the three mysteries for which Uozu is known. The second is the spring appearance of firefly squid, bioluminescent creatures that fill the waters with their bluish white glow as they rise to spawn. The third is the regular occurrence of mirages over Toyama Bay, which also happens in the spring. These so-called "superior" mirages—a phenomenon often referred to as a Fata Morgana in Europe—shift the image above the point of origin, resulting in what is often described as visions of cities or ships in the sky. The atmospheric conditions needed to create this effect are rare, and thus superior mirages are far less common than familiar inferior mirages (e.g., illusory puddles on hot pavement). The Uozu Buried Forest Museum has a designated mirage lookout point, where visitors can hope to catch a glimpse of this rare phenomenon.
In the middle to late 1990s, the frenzy for neuroscientific explanations for everything from why we laugh to how we fall in love was only just gaining a toehold in the popular science. And word was there was some interesting data coming out of a small lab in a Canadian hinterland. Really interesting: Dr. Michael Persinger, an American ex-pat and cognitive neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, had found God.
In the brain. Your brain, my brain, the brain.
“As a neuroscientist, I realized that all experiences are determined by brain activity. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean causal, but it means it could be correlation, and the correlation could be so high that you could consider it causal,” Persinger explained on the phone from his lab. It was 8:30 am London time, 3:30 a.m. his time. He works better at night, he said. “That is, the brain is generating all experiences: The experience of love, the experience of knowing who you are, the sense of presence, the sense of yourself, the feeling that you’re real and that you’re important, these are all products of brain activity in terms of various configurations within different regions in the brain.”
But he wasn’t actually trying to find God in the brain or rather, the neural correlates of religious experience. “I could care less about God, I think it’s a useless and out of date concept,” Persinger said. “We were interested in something that I think is much more important, which is creativity.”
To put this in context, Persinger explained, neuroscience says that the “sense of self is primarily a language-based phenomena, primarily involving more left hemispheric activities.” The right hemisphere, by contrast, is the intuitive, emotional hemisphere; this is where inspiration strikes, if it strikes at all. He wanted to find out what would happen if you stimulated the right, creative hemisphere with electromagnetic fields; he’d written several papers in the past about the resonance that certain electromagnetic fields have with parts of the brain. To do this safely, he turned to his Laurentian colleague and technologist Professor Stanley Koren to help him design a helmet that would be able to apply magnetic fields to the temporal lobes, the parts of the brain associated with hearing, speech, processing sensory information. The first helmet was actually a snowmobiling helmet, bumble bee yellow with two black racing stripes down the top, with two solenoids—a coil of wire that acts as a magnetic when electricity is applied—affixed to either side, roughly above the ears. It looked like a prop from Ghostbusters.
He and his team designed their experiments to gently batter the right hemisphere with weak but “physiologically-patterned magnetic fields”.“Now that’s the critical key: If you apply a sine wave or a square wave, that doesn’t do anything, there’s no information in it.” The information in these magnetic fields employ the “electromagnetic signature of the key correlates of experience that the brain generates during various kinds of states”, he said—in other words, mimicking the kind of electromagnetic jig that your brain does during, for example, an epileptic seizure or a transcendental experience. Persinger hit upon one of these patterns, he said, in the 1980s, when he was watching the EEG of a woman meditating in his lab. “Basically, she was having what we call an absence seizure. It was localized, so it would be technically speaking a complex partial epileptic seizure. Right hemisphere. And I looked at her and she smiled… You’ve seen people have god experiences, their face has that glow about them, from the sebaceous secretion, their eyes may flutter, when they’re feeling that kind of euphoria that goes with an ecstatic state or rapture,” he recalled. “So I asked her, ‘What happened?’ She says, ‘God was here.’ I said, ‘Can you describe it?’ She said, ‘He was all in the laboratory, I felt his presence.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was having a seizure.”
Persinger used her brain pattern in trying to induce a similar state in other people; they called it “Burst X”. The other pattern he used, he said, is associated with the generation of fear. As to whether he was concerned that the patterns could have an adverse reaction on someone, he was not. “First of all, I try everything on myself at the beginning,” he said, adding that the fields are on the order of microtesla—very weak, not even as strong as putting your head near your computer.
Back to the helmet. “So when we stimulated the right hemisphere, we were surprised to find that many people reported a sensed presence, a feeling of a sentient being standing nearby,” he said. “And it suddenly struck us that what the right hemispheric experience is, the sensed presence is, is the right hemispheric equivalent to the left hemispheric sense of self. And the minute we knew that, everything fell into place.”
And Persinger does mean everything. “With respect to how to recreate it, what parts of the brain were involved, and why it’s a powerful phenomenon that drives the human species, often into killing each other to determine whose god that verifies that sensed presence is the strongest.”
Hundreds of people have since sat in the now well-worn armchair, in the darkened room with the blindfold over their eyes, and the helmet on their heads, while Persinger’s team monitors their EEG output, for 50 minutes; most, at least at the beginning, were told they were taking part in a relaxation study. “The technique is pretty simple,” Persinger explained. First, he applies a small amount of magnetic field strength to the right hemisphere. Then another field, which produces a more relaxed state. Simple, right? At least 80 percent of their subjects, Persinger says, have felt a “sensed presence”, someone else in the room with them. “People feel at least something, unless they fall asleep, which is why we run an EEG at the same time,” he said. It’s the “young males” who usually tend to fall asleep.
Some people are more likely to have an experience than others: “Females are very receptive, they’re used to introspection,” he said, but also people who are rated as more temporally sensitive than other on his Personal Philosophy Inventory, a questionnaire he designed to determine temporal lability. Some people do not do well with the experience when they have it; at least one subject tore the helmet from his head and ran from the room. Persinger says the individual’s interpretation of their experience comes down to their cultural circumstances and personal beliefs—they might call the presence they felt “God”, or the ghost of their recently departed grandmother, or they might believe it was an alien, or they might just feel like they were hanging out with a double of themselves. (The general trends in who or what people see have largely remained the same, he says, over the last 30 years of research.)
But what is actually going on here? In some ways, people who said they felt a ghost aren’t entirely wrong. It’s simply that the ghost is yourself. Persinger believes the effect is a kind of temporal lobe mismatch, a by-product of our bicameral brains. Though there is a good deal of overlapping between the two hemispheres of our brains, there isn’t a ton of sharing—only about 1 percent, Persinger said, of the neurons in our brains cross over from one hemisphere to the other. “The vast majority stay intra-hemispheric, they stay within their own hemisphere. So basically, we are two brains to begin with, it’s just that it’s our natural state that we don’t realize it.” But if we do realize it, if something happens to disrupt the normal coordinated, yet independent function of these hemispheres, it’s jarring.
“The basic mechanism by which sensed presence occurs is that there is an enhancement of right hemispheric activity and that ultimately ends up being represented within the left hemisphere and you become aware of it,” said Persinger. In other words, the sense of self that is generated in the left hemisphere might become aware of the experience of the right hemisphere, and interpret that as a self. Because we can’t have two selves, the information is re-understood to be coming from someone else entirely, a presence.
In the years that followed Persinger’s initial experiments and publications, the story of the helmet and its implications made the media rounds. By 1999, the helmet was being widely referred to as the “God Helmet”, although its given name was the Koren Helmet, after its co-creator. That year, Wired’s Jack Hitt wrote a fantastic piece about his pleasant but not exactly divine out-of-body experience in the helmet. Other articles and media attention followed, including a spot on BBC’s Horizon program in 2003, which seemed to cast Persinger as a kind of neuroscientific ghost hunter. One segment used dramatic re-enactment to show Persinger’s detective work in finding that a clock radio near a teenage girl’s bed was emitting electromagnetic fields and causing her nightly sensed presence episodes with particularly religious overtones; when the clock was removed, the visions stopped. Persinger talked about his work in terms of “neurotheology”.
But the flurry of attention was marred by the fact that other labs were unable to replicate Persinger’s results. In a study published in 2005, a Swedish research group, unable to produce the same effect with a similar helmet, concluded that Persinger’s results were down to “suggestibility”; Persinger rejects their study, claiming that they didn’t try to do a faithful replication of the experiment. Another team, lead by Dr. Chris French of Goldsmiths, University of London’s anomalistic psychology department, attempted to replicate the sensed presence, paranormal effects of the helmet using a “haunted” room conceit. In the experiment, subjects spent 50 minutes in a round, featureless room with temporally complex but weak electromagnetic fields, such as those in Persinger’s experiments; this was combined with infrasound, sub-audible sound that is purported to cause anomalous experiences consistent with hauntings. Participants did report strange experiences in the room, was no definable correlation between them and the electromagnetic fields or the infrasound; French and his team attributed the experiences to mild sensory deprivation and suggestibility. The results were published in 2009. It wasn’t until 2014 that an independent lab, in this case two Brazilian researchers at the Integrated Center for Experimental Research, Curitiba, Brazil, was able to replicate the original study’s results, albeit not as spectacularly or on as large a scale.
Laurentian University has been described as in a kind of Canadian hinterland; Persinger’s research might described as inhabiting a similar location in the scientific community. He’s not bothered. “I don’t pay much attention to the scientific community,” he said. He is the kind of person who says “sebaceous secretions” instead of “sweat”; he’s funny and personable, but there’s something Vulcan about his apparent love of logic. Emotions, and things like whether people like him or believe in his work, don’t seem to sway him – he clearly believes in the usefulness of his work. “I never label myself, because one thing that I’ve learned is that you can’t really monitor or describe your own behavior correctly,” he said, when asked if he is an outlier in neuroscience. “One thing I do know is that scientists, many of them, are interested in what we do, but they say, ‘If we did this we would lose our grants. If we do this kind of work, we would lose our credibility.’”
That’s an unverifiable statement, but it is true that funding is limited for research of this kind. Persinger says that he’s always paid for the helmet research out of his own pocket, from money made treating patients with head injuries and epilepsy using electromagnetic fields in his clinical practice (sensed presence, he says, is a common feature of the experience of his patients, in whom there is a breakdown of the inhibition of the function of the two hemispheres; Persinger also reports some success treating patients with, for example, depression using electromagnetic fields). And the university that he works for has, he says, tried to fire him twice. Early this year, he was forced to stop teaching a first-year psychology course he asked students to sign a “statement of understanding” that there might be offensive language used during class, as part of teaching exercise on how words impact thought processes. He attributes to the fact that the university is nominally Catholic and therefore not excited about the notion that God is diminishable to a network of excitable neurons or electromagnetic resonance in the brain. “They feel it is particularly offensive to even ask the question,” he said.
Does he worry that calling the device the God Helmet and his area of study with it “neurotheology” has problematically changed public and scientific perception of his work? “Insufficient data,” he responded.
***
It’s perhaps not surprising that in addition to media attention, Persinger’s work has also attracted the interest of notable skeptics. Famous atheist Richard Dawkins, for one, visited Persinger’s lab for the Horizon program. It didn’t go well, although there would seem to be some nominal sympathy between Dawkins’ militant anti-theism and Persinger’s belief that the inclination to religion is a neurological impulse. Dawkins reported some odd physical sensations, but was otherwise unimpressed.
Prominent American skeptic and atheist Michael Shermer has also spent time in the helmet. “[Persinger’s] a controversial figure in neuroscience. It’s not clear where he stands on the paranormal… He’s looking for the neural correlates of the paranormal. Where does that lead?… He’s always kind of walked that line that makes other neuroscientists kind of nervous,” he observed. He doesn’t seem to be an “out-and-out New Ager”, Shermer said, but neither is he completely free from those associations.
In 1999, Shermer visited Persinger’s lab; his experience was more in line with what Persinger reported others feeling—he felt himself rush by himself. But Shermer still has questions about the difficulties other research groups have had in replicating the experiment; about Persinger’s methodologies and controls; and the fact that the electromagnetic fields are incredibly weak, so weak that is might be impossible for the helmet to produce currents strong enough to depolarize neurons and have an effect. So his biggest question is the one that everyone thinking about this has: Is it actually the God Helmet—and therefore the electromagnetic fields—that’s inducing the experiences?
“The sensed presence effect is a much broader effect that might have multiple neural correlates, but basically, it is the sense that there is somebody else nearby by in your room, in your tent, in the dog sled, on your bike, running alongside you in your ultra-marathon,” Shemer explained. If you put someone in a darkened room and limit their sensory input, it’s not unlikely that they might start hallucinating, he said, and experiences of the kind that people in the God Helmet experiment report are not specific to the helmet alone. The features, he continued, seem to be some sort of extreme state—being hungry, alone, sleep deprived, extraordinarily anxious, or some combination of all of those. Shermer had his own weird hallucinatory, sensed presence-like experience during his attempt in 1983 to cycle from the Santa Monica Pier in California to New York City without stopping. He’d made it as far as Nebraska—83 hours, 1800 miles on a bike without sleep—when he became convinced that the motor home carrying his friends, family, and support crew was actually an alien ship and that they’d all been replaced by alien replicas. “I really, truly thought I was being abducted,” he recalled “My motor home pulled up, and I thought it was an alien space ship that was trying to abduct me. They looked just like my friends coming to take care of me… but they had stiff little fingers,” he continued. “That’s what I thought, and I was quite resistant to getting into the spaceship, the motor home. Then I slept for 90 minutes and I woke up and went, ‘That was weird.’”
But because these experiences happen outside of the electromagnetic field disruption of the God Helmet, the cautious are skeptical that Persinger’s helmet works the way he says it does. Margee Kerr, an American sociologist who studies why people willingly engage with high arousal stimuli that are typically considered negative, such as fear or pain, agreed with Shermer that the helmet might not be the source of the experiences. She’s written about the God Helmet, as well as other potential environmental causes of haunting experiences in her book, Scream. Buddhist monks, people who practice meditation can induce this kind of euphoric, sensed presence state on their own without external influence, she pointed out. “It’s hard to know what the mechanism that is working in this situation, whether it’s the environment, whether we’re getting to this spot through meditation and focus, whether it’s external influence,” she said.
And even without wearing the helmet, undergoing an intense endurance challenge, or meditating, many people have a lot of weird experiences that defy ready explanation: A recent data analysis study by the World Health Organization showed that 6 percent of people had had a hallucination unrelated to drugs, alcohol, or psychiatric disruption.
The thing is, probing the validity of the God Helmet doesn’t have to be entirely up to science. Because for just a few hundred dollars, you can make your very own God Helmet.
In 2014, London-based experience design group Bompas & Parr did just that, using a custom-made God Helmet in their “Sensed Presence” event. Their helmet was in actual fact, a riding helmet painted silver, but it did use solenoids to emit weak, but complex electromagnetic fields in the same type of patterns that Persinger did. The event was held at the Kirkcaldy Testing and Experimenting Works, a former Victorian iron and steel testing facility that is precisely the kind of place you’d think was haunted; the 15-minute experience was intentionally theatrical, involving smoke machines, chanting music, candles, sinister scientific equipment—Bompas & Parr were trying to induce visions and weird feelings, after all. And they mostly succeeded. Visitors were asked to record their experiences in ledgers; most people reported feeling weird, seeing faces in some cases, or the feeling of someone standing near them or behind them. Others felt nothing more than a deep sense of relaxation; some said they regularly meditated and that this was similar to that.
Sam Bompas, co-founder of the group, explained that he learned about the helmet through an entry in the Dictionary of Hallucinations. “It’s such a provocative topic. It’s talking about not only your consciousness, but the nature of God and the divine and the supernatural, because you’ve got ghosts in there as well, and aliens,” said Bompas. “It can be used to explain all sorts of lurid complications, right on the border of legitimate science, what science is confident speaking about without being considered right outsiders.” Bompas is not convinced that it was the helmet that caused the experiences people reported; he thinks it’s more likely that it was that people were separated from their phones, and that the experience was heavily “choreographed”. “If you can’t have a profound experience sitting in the dark by yourself for 15 minutes in a building in that is redolent with history, being asked to think about your relationship with superstition and God, you’re probably brain dead,” he said.
But perhaps this is the real legacy of Persinger’s work, namely, pushing the neuroscience behind human experience, for sure, but also pushing the conversation about the nature of God and man in other areas. Like art. So whether or not the helmet is a reliable way to induce feelings of religious ecstasy is almost not the point; the helmet, as Bompas pointed out, raises some uncomfortable and important questions. If, in our quiet moments, we seek God, the divine, the mystical, and we find it, are we actually finding something outside ourselves?
Persinger’s remained interesting and important in part because it is trying to come up with plausible solutions to anomalous experiences, to figure out if it’s just us or something else. That’s an admirable, useful pursuit. “There’s no such thing as the paranormal or the supernatural, these are just words we use as linguistic fillers to explain things we don’t know yet,” noted Shermer. Persinger seems to be one of the people trying to explain those things we don’t know yet.
So Persinger is still pursuing the wilder frontiers of neuroscience; recently, he says, he fired the electromagnetic fields at dead brains to see what would happen. The results were surprising, although perhaps not if you’re Persinger. “We found that of all the various fields that we applied, the ones that showed the greatest changes in conductivity within in fixed tissue—when we say fixed tissue, remember, the neurons are still intact; it’s not alive, but the fibers are still there—those two patterns we used had the greatest effect in fixed human brains, suggesting that there is something intrinsic to the structure of the brain itself,” he said. The study is currently under review for publication.
“We know a great deal about the brain. There’s nothing mysterious about it,” Persinger said. “What’s unusual about it is that there are 7 billion of them and they have individual differences.”
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The '80s were by and large a time of peace for the United States. The Cold War was thawing, and most of the conflicts the U.S. did get in took place over secured phone lines, rather than on the battlefield.
Pop culture was far more likely to arm itself to the teeth during this era: Military-inspired cartoons like G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero ruled the after-school airwaves, while films like Rambo and stars like Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren were bringing explosive military action to the cineplex.
Not everyone was so happy about this state of affairs, however, and as I highlighted in this Worlds of Wonder piece back in September, toys were often the main targets of this disdain.
Not that it ever truly stopped their success. According to statistics from the National Coalition on Television Violence, sales of war toys increased by 350 percent between 1982 and 1985, accounting for $842 million in sales each year. Four of the five most popular kinds of toys released during the era portrayed some form of violence.
The largest of all? A little ditty called G.I. Joe, which became perhaps the biggest toy trend of the 1980s due to a combination of savvy marketing and loosened regulations.
It was great for the toymaker Hasbro, but not so great for anti-war activists.
For those that haven't followed the history of G.I. Joe, here's a two-second primer: In the 1960s, G.I. Joe looked a heck of a lot different from the Real American Hero that is popular today.
The toys of the early G.I. Joe era, in the mid-1960s, were 12 inches tall, and could be realistically posed any which way. But the Vietnam War happened, and suddenly, toys inspired by soldiers seemed like not such a great idea.
A 1970s version, which de-emphasized the war and military concepts, failed to catch fire. But eventually, a new approach, tied to a storyline straight out of the comic books, did the trick.
Working with Marvel Comics, Hasbro came up with an original storyline for the toy line, complete with new characters and a common enemy—one you might know as COBRA. It played more with the military elements, but it wasn't tied to actual U.S. battles. And instead of selling giant dolls, Hasbro could now sell toys that were just 3.75 inches high, thanks to the success of Star Wars. That meant the company could save money and focus on building accessories for this massive universe Marvel helped them create.
The partnership, at first, also allowed for a clever skirting of advertising rules. Animation couldn't be used to promote toys on television at the time—it could only be used partly, and the ads required pictures of actual kids playing with the toys. As Mental Floss notes, Hasbro and Marvel got around that rule by promoting the comic book on television, a comic book which just happened to use the toys that Hasbro was selling.
It was the first ad for a comic book ever aired on television, and it set the stage for a massive cartoon success, one that came about in 1985, after the Reagan administration deregulated the kinds of cartoons that could air on television.
It helped that the toymakers had someone in their corner at the Federal Communications Commission. Mark S. Fowler, the head of the FCC during most of the Reagan years, felt that television in general, and children’s television in particular, was controlled too tightly by federal regulations.
"I believe that for far too long the government, with its programming content guidelines, has indicated what is best for the public,” Fowler said in 1981 comments to the New York Times. “I’d rather eliminate those guidelines and let the marketplace decide more surely what the people want."
Fowler's let-the-market-decide approach to children's programming had significant effects on the kinds of programs that appeared during this era, which greatly benefited shows based on toys, but put a damper on the kind of educational programming that defined the '70s.
G.I. Joe, with its military themes and tightly integrated marketing strategy, won big. But it created a massive backlash of concerned parents and anti-war activists.
By 1985, G.I. Joe and other action-heavy toys were massively popular, but that success was raising some larger concerns for parents, educators, and peaceniks.
And during that holiday season, the movement against war toys started picking up steam in the U.S., through a variety of advocacy groups and other organizations. One such group, the International War Toys Boycott, held mock funerals for military toys, complete with eulogizers such as Vietnam vet Max Inglett, who became an anti-war protester after returning home, going so far as to hitchhike across the country in a wheelchair to draw attention to his crusade.
"Since childhood, we have been conditioned by being told it is fun to play war," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I had numerous conversations in Vietnam about the fact that we are conditioned by war toys to think it's OK to kill in battle. I think we need to learn at a very early age that war is not a game."
Author and peace activist Deb Ellis, in an article for Peace magazine, suggested that the Iran hostage crisis created the environment that allowed war-friendly toys to thrive once again.
"Something as ugly as war needs to be beautified before it hits the market. Memories of American boys being slaughtered on national TV fade into the background when Rambo is around," she wrote. "America is seen as taking control of violence again, rather than as being a victim of it. Being kicked in the head is not glamorous, but doing the kicking is glamorous—and even virtuous."
Even celebrities got in on the movement. Michelle Phillips, a vocalist for the Mamas and the Papas, was inspired to join the Ban War Toys movement after seeing that a friend's 6-year-old son had been given toy machine guns for his birthday.
Perhaps the most prominent voice throughout this whole movement might have been a psychiatrist named Thomas Radecki. Having chaired the National Coalition on Television Violence throughout the '80s, Radecki was often the key advocate against violent imagery in the media and a commonly quoted figure. His views could be a bit out there at times—specifically, when criticizing Dungeons & Dragons, a game he claimed was behind a number of deaths. (And just watch him tell Larry King, straight-faced, in this 1989 clip, that Archie Comics are just as good an option as anything in the Marvel Comics stead.)
But he nonetheless gave weight to advocates for banning war toys, at one point finding, through his own research, that playing with He-Man toys often created more antisocial behavior among preschoolers than playing with Cabbage Patch dolls. The study was criticized due to its small sample size, but Radecki's voice gave it weight.
"The evidence is quite strong that we are transmitting an unhealthy message encouraging children to have fun pretending to murder each other," Radecki said, according to the New York Times.
The toy industry, understandably, was skeptical of the criticism it was facing from some of these critics.
"Imaginary play in no way makes ax murderers," stated Donna Datre, a representative of the Toy Manufacturers of America, in comments to Mother Jones in 1986.
On that front, point to Datre. Lots of He-Man and G.I. Joe toys were sold throughout the '80s. Few of them created any ax murderers.
What's fascinating to me about the war on war toys that dotted the Reagan era is the fact that it appeared to come from a place of liberal conscience, unlike many movements of its type.
It makes sense, then, that the strategy saw the most success in culturally liberal Scandinavia. In fact, the most prominent regulation around this issue, which discouraged toy producers and retailers from producing war toys, was already implemented into law in Sweden in 1980, well before G.I. Joe had relaunched.
That means that in 1986, at the movement’s peak, there was an example to point to. That year, the academic journal Prospects - Quarterly Review of Education published a report by a Swedish National Board of Education official that highlighted the progress the nation had made with its restrictions. Other nearby countries, such as Finland, eventually followed suit.
More successful were efforts to do the same thing to video games in the early '90s. As Joe Lieberman will tell you, game companies eventually adopted a ratings system based on the former senator's pressure on the issue.
Every once in awhile, someone still makes the argument that war toys need to be thrown out. One such example of this comes from South Carolina politician Tom Turnipseed, who wrote in 2009 that Inez Tenenbaum, who served as head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission for much Barack Obama's presidency, should make it a priority to ban war toys, for safety reasons.
"Inez's top priority should be banning war toys," Turnipseed wrote on Common Dreams. "War toys are products threatening the safety of people everywhere with or without lead paint."
Such a ban, despite concerns about our country's mass shootings, seems unlikely. But if we ever did decide to do so, we'd have some interesting company on that front. Last year, Afghanistan—a country at the center of American wartime efforts for more than a decade—banned toy guns, with the goal of stemming violence.
According to Agence France-Presse, Interior Minister Noor-ul Haq Uloomi cited "physical and psychological damage" as a reason for such a ban.
John Rambo might not know how to compute that news.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
When you hear the name “Product 19,” you’ll either flash on an experimental invention from some corporate R&D department, or, if you're one of its fans, you might think of the health cereal, rare in the aisles of American supermarkets yet loved all the same.
But earlier this month, Kellogg's announced that it had officially discontinued the cereal. While most people these days seemed to barely know of its existence, Product 19 died a slow, oaty, fade to black, leaving devoted fans desperate.
What was Product 19, though? For nearly 50 years, it was simply an answer to a business problem, first released in 1967 as Kellogg's answer to General Mills’ Total, which had hit the market six years prior. As the current slogan still contends, Total aimed to provide 100% of the daily amounts of nutrients like vitamin E, calcium, iron, and more. Kellogg’s needed something to compete with this healthy new blockbuster, so they began attempting to develop a vitamin cereal of their own, eventually settling on Product 19.
The name, immediately, was a bit curious, and its origins, perhaps fittingly, remain apocryphal. According to one story, it was so named because the end product was the 19th iteration of the cereal they were developing. Others say it was simply the 19th product Kellogg's developed that year. Either way, Product 19 stuck, a workmanlike name that echoed what the cereal promised to do: provide a base of nutrition, nothing more or less.
The cereal was made up of flakes made from a combination of lightly sweetened corn, wheat, oats, and rice, and promoted itself as providing the full daily amounts of “Multivitamins and Iron.” On the more modern boxes, this would be specified as, “Vitamin E, Folic Acid, Iron, and Zinc.” The original box was so covered in charts and blocks of text, it truly looked more like some experimental substance than a breakfast cereal.
Product 19 sold itself as a cereal for health-minded adults and older people, barking about how the cereal would make you feel young again. According to MrBreakfast.com, the cereal’s original slogan was, “Instant Nutrition - New cereal food created especially for working mothers, otherwise busy mothers and everybody in a hurry.” However the focus of their marketing quickly shifted. In the early 1970s, Product 19 used former Heisman trophy winner, Tom “Old 98” Harmon, then in his 50s, as its spokesman in a series of television commercials. He presented the cereal as a part of the wellness routine he used to stay active. At the same time, Total was rolling out its now iconic commercials featuring a comparison of how many bowls of a competing cereal it would take to get the same vitamins.
And whether it was due to marketing or flavor, Product 19 never gained the household name recognition of competitors like Total, or even Special K, but the cereal did manage to hold on to a devoted fan base. Updating its brand throughout the years to sell itself to younger consumers (the most modern package featured the image of someone doing yoga), the cereal maintained a presence on store shelves through the 2000s, sticking with its simple red and white motif and industrial name. But as sales of Product 19 began to slump, it began slowly disappearing from stores. In a thread from 2014 on Kellogg’s official product forums, a Product 19 fanatic pleaded that the cereal not be taken from shelves, but an official rep responded that Product 19 had gone into limited distribution.
Facebook groups like “Bring Back Kellogg’s Product 19” began popping up around the same time, with people posting images of the final remaining boxes of the cereal they found on store shelves. Then it stopped.
Without much action on social media in the two years since Product 19 went into decline, Kellogg's released a statement officially declaring that Product 19 had been discontinued. The statement reads in part, “We are sorry to announce that Kellogg’s Product 19 cereal has been discontinued. Unfortunately, sales of this cereal were not strong enough to support continued production, so we had to make the difficult decision to discontinue it.”
Despite a nearly 50 year history as an underdog of the healthy cereal market, Product 19 has gone the way of so many other beloved breakfasts, passing into the Great Lunchtime. But to its diehard fans, no substitution will ever taste the same.
You’re craving a soda and have just spent the last five minutes scouring through every pocket of your backpack and looking around on the floor for any lost nickels you can find. Finally, you manage to collect $1.25 and with exhausted joy you place the coins into the vending machine one by one. You press the magic combination that will finally quench your thirst, you see the swirl of the machine twist to release the can, and...the can gets stuck.
This horrible yet universal feeling of disappointment is ever-present in Unsatisfying, a short film by Parallel Studio. The video has no storyline, no plot, no meaning, nothing except an excellently animated compilation dedicated to capturing that feeling we all dread so. The subtle disappointment, frustration, and utter sense of futility you feel when you aren’t able to grab the teddy bear with the claw, or a file won’t finish downloading, or a nail bends as you hit it with a hammer.
Faithful to the quest of encapsulating this particular feeling, Parallel Studio is having an animation contest that is open to the public. The call is for animations of the moments that, as the studio explains, are “so painful to live and even to watch.”
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Walking the four miles of swirling paths that wind around the green hills and swales, the world's largest work of "Earth art" is so big and so abstract that it’s hard to reconcile into a unified form. But get a little distance or some height, and all 46 acres magically come together to create “The Lady of the North."
The enormous reclining female figure was constructed from clay, dirt, and slag-waste from its next-door neighbor, the Shotton Surface Mine, in northern England. For the owners of the mine, the project was a way to help offset the damage done by stripping the land for coal. Looking at an aerial view, the contrast is stark between the mine and its redemptive sculpture.
The park that encompasses the figure is called Northumberlandia, and was conceived and built by architectural theorist, social critic and landscape designer Charles Jencks. The Lady isn’t the first time he’s tackled massive land manipulation–going back to “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” in the late 1980s, Jencks has spent decades combining his unique brand of social and scientific criticism with large-scale earth-sculpting.
Northumberlandia was officially opened by in 2012 by Princess Anne. It took £3 million pounds and a million and a half tonnes of mine waste to build it, on earth donated by the owners of the Shotton mine and nearby Blangdon Estate. Rising 112 feet at the highest point and nearly a quarter mile long, she goes a long way to heal some earthly wounds.
Maryland's strangely shaped 3rd Congressional district stretches all the way from Baltimore to Montgomery, and contains portions of both cities along with some rural areas in between. It weaves through skinny ribbons of four different counties. Some portions of the district don't even touch the rest of the district. Some say it looks like a praying mantis. One judge compared it to a "broken-winged pterodactyl."
This nonsensical border is widely considered one of the nation's most egregious examples of gerrymandering, in which legislators manipulate the boundaries of a district to favor one political party over another. North Carolina's 12th Congressional District was another notorious case, but gerrymandered districts exist all over the United States. This redrawing business often ends up cordoning off minority groups, and has drawn a lot of criticism. Some even call it election rigging.
In the case of this region, it's the Democratic party that holds power. Though courts found the district's borders to be constitutional and a 2012 referendum vote failed to call for a redrawing of the district, many Marylanders have protested the scattered district. For now though, the 3rd District remains.
