Go ahead. Try to book a hotel room in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, for the third weekend in August next summer.

You can’t. They are completely booked from August 19th through August 22th. And the same goes for hotels and motels in nearby Cadiz, Hardin, Oak Grove, or any other interchange along Interstate 24. Across the state line, Clarksville, Tennessee, may have a few rooms up for grabs when you read this, but you’re going to pay hundreds of dollars for your stay.

You could say the stars have aligned for Hopkinsville. Or, more precisely, the Earth, sun and moon will be perfected aligned. Next summer will be the first time a total solar eclipse—when the moon completely blocks out the sun—can be witnessed in the continental United States since 1979. (Viewers could view a total solar eclipse in Hawaii in 1991.) And in a cosmic twist of fate, on August 21, 2017, Hopkinsville will be the star around which the astronomical world orbits. As the moon crosses the United States at about 2,000 miles per hour, casting its shadow from Portland, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina, Hopkinsville (population 33,000) has been identified as the “greatest eclipse” location.

What does that mean? Well, it’s technical. It boils down to that as the moon makes its run across the country that night (the phenomenon has been dubbed The Great American Eclipse), when it passes Hopkinsville it will be the closest to the Earth. The area will be plunged into midday darkness for about two minutes and forty seconds. (Note: there is already a sort of heavenly body battle brewing with Carbondale, Illinois, which can claim the “longest duration” eclipse; it will be about two tenths of a second longer than in Hopkinsville.)

What greatest eclipse really means for Hopkinsville is that tens of thousands of astronomy buffs and other curious onlookers are expected to descend on this western Kentucky community, and the lucky ones already have dibs on rooms at the Holiday Inn.

Dr. Richard Gelderman, the director of the Hardin Planetarium at Western Kentucky University in nearby Bowling Green, understands the attraction of experiencing a total solar eclipse—earlier this year, on a NASA grant, he went to Indonesia to witness one first hand.

“A total eclipse is a complete and total change. A total eclipse is something that should not happen, and your body knows it. And everything in your body totally sends off chemical alarms saying, ‘Beep, beep, beep. Something is wrong here, because in the middle of the day, the sun just disappeared,’ he said. “And the most common expression when you look at videos of people experiencing a total solar eclipse is ‘holy shit.’”

The Visit Hopkinsville office, the area’s convention and visitors bureau which oversees tourism in the region, has known about the celestial occurrence for almost a decade, and not because they had somebody checking moon charts on staff. Nine years ago Cheryl Cook, the Visit Hopkinsville executive director, received an email from a prudent vacation planner and avid eclipse chaser - somebody who has devoted their lives to experiencing astronomical events - inquiring about hotels and the best viewing spots.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” Cook said. “We don’t work 10 years out.”

Since that time, Cook and other city officials and business leaders have become ad hoc astronomers to promote Hopkinsville as the optimal place to experience the Great American Eclipse and to prepare for the throng of visitors. Along with securing lots of public viewing areas, they’ve been stockpiling eclipse essentials, such as folding lawn chairs and official total solar eclipse viewing glasses. 

“Right now I already have, in my office, 50,000 glasses,” Cook said. “I sold 50,000 to different businesses. And I'm getting ready to do another order. I may order another 50,000.”

In a strange coincidence, August 21,the day of the 2017 eclipse, carries a lot of significance for Hopkinsville. That’s the day, in 1955, that a local farmhouse in nearby Kelly received an alleged visit from a band of extraterrestrials and a fierce gunfight ensued. Local police and military police from nearby Fort Campbell investigated, and the incident received considerable coverage from the national press.

The community now celebrates the event annually with the “Little Green Men Days” festival. Next year’s four-day spectacular will be capped off with a total solar eclipse, and probably considerable UFO conspiracy theories.

“I like to say the aliens were here to pick out their viewing site early,” Cook joked.

Given the volume of expected travellers, Cook hopes some visitors plan to come early to ease traffic congestion and to enjoy all the area has to offer, such as the official Hopkinsville Summer Salute Festival or an area distillery—one has already planned a special eclipse edition of their moonshine, which will certainly come in handy if the weather turns cloudy on August 21. 

“If you can’t see the eclipse, you can have some eclipse moonshine and it’ll make your sky go dark too,” Cook said.

Once known as the Gibraltar of the North, the mighty fortifications of Luxembourg were first built in 963. Over the following centuries, the city was held in turn by Burgundians, Spaniards, Austrians, French, and Prussians, as each group vied for military control of Western Europe. Finally demolished in the late 19th century to prevent further conflict, the Bock Casemates are the only part of this formidable stronghold that remain largely intact.

The Bock is the name for both the fortress erected by Count Siegfried in the 10th century, and the imposing rocky promontory on which it was built. Originally constructed as an impregnable position from which to protect Siegfried's holdings, over time the Bock became strategically critical to dominating the west bank of the Rhine, projecting power across the French-German border, and controlling the Low Countries. As such, the defensive structures of the site were continually expanded and improved upon by each subsequent owner.

The fortress's casemates (i.e., fortified gun emplacements) were started by the Spanish in 1644, using the cellars of the medieval castle as their basis. Extended by the noted French fortification engineer Vauban in the 1680s and fully realized by the Austrians in the mid-18th century, the Bock Casemates were ultimately much more than cannon perches.

Consisting of 23 kilometers (14 miles) of tunnels delving as deep at 40 meters (130 feet) below the fortress above, they included not only 25 artillery slots but also stables, storehouses, workshops, kitchens, bakeries, slaughterhouses, and barracks for 1200 soldiers. A well 47 meters (155 feet) deep supplied the installation with fresh water. The casemates helped the Bock resist a seven-month siege by the French Republican Army in 1794; when the Habsburg forces in the fortress eventually surrendered, the walls remained unbreached.

Ultimately, the Bock proved too valuable, and its destruction (as well as the perpetual neutrality of Luxembourg) was ordered by the 1867 Treaty of London in an effort to defuse tensions between France and Germany. The demolition took 16 years to complete. However, the casemates could not be destroying without also destroying part of the city, so 17 kilometers of the subterranean tunnels still remain.

The Bock Casemates were opened to the public in 1933, and were used as a bomb shelter for 35,000 people during World War II. Visitors today can still descend from the heights of the Bock to explore the expansive honeycomb military engineering marvel below.

For today's Video Wonder, we present Carl Sagan's poignant "Pale Blue Dot."

The text, originally given at a lecture at Cornell University, was inspired by a photograph taken of Earth on Valentine's Day, 1990 from the Voyager 1 probe. In the picture, the earth and everything on it is a mere pixel, a faint blurry pinprick. This is the last photo the probe would take of our planet before drifting off into deep space.

Sagan's speech and the video accompanying it serve as a reminder that everything good and everything terrible we know are but a minuscule portion of existence, and that there is simply much more out there.

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.

The small town of Luby in the Czech Republic has been the center of violin building for decades, going back to when it was called Schönbach and part of Austria-Hungary. The first violins in the area were built in the late 16th century, and by the 20th century almost everybody in the area was building musical instruments or their parts, especially guitars and violins.

The mining of cinnabar, beginning in the 13th century, brought throngs of miners to the Austrian town—and lots of musicians to entertain them. To earn a bit of extra income, many of the miners started to build musical instruments. Slowly but surely the production of violins and other string instruments became the major trade in the town Schönbach and the surrounding area.

By the end of the 17th century the town was considered the Austrian Cremona (the town in Italy where Stradivarius came from). Those who weren't themselves violin makers built parts for the instruments or fabricated strings and cases. Others bought and sold the special wood needed to craft the instruments or bought the completed instruments to sell. Instruments from “Schönbach” became known worldwide and the town's Musikschule (music school) became one of the best violin maker schools in the world. Many of the luthiers were well known names, and for the countless builders whose names are unknown, the town erected the Geigenbauer-Denkmal, or Violin Maker Monument, in 1927.

After World War I, Schönbach became part of Czechoslovakia. But not a lot changed for the people who lived there: They kept building master violins and did not care much about anything else. When in 1927 the Geigenbauer-Denkmal was unveiled, Luby had around 4,500 inhabitants of which around 1,500 played some part in manufacturing string instruments. But with the Second World War, problems came. First the economy slowed down and the demand for musical instruments decreased. Then the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, and most of the violin makers were drafted into the German Army and had to go to war.

When the war was over, everybody who spoke German was expelled from Czechoslovakia, among them around 1,600 instrument makers from Schönbach, which was now called Luby. Most of those instrument makers settled with their families in Bubenreuth, Bavaria, Germany, where they continued the tradition of violin making and soon earned fame for their new hometown. But as part of Czechoslovakia Luby was under communist rule. The workshops of the few instrument makers who still existed in the town were nationalized and put together under the brand name “Cremona.” Soon young luthiers joined the old ones and Luby became again known for its master violins, and the school continued to trained young violin makers.

Many things changed over the centuries, but one thing never did. Luby is still known worldwide for its string instruments and the Geigenbauer-Denkmal still watches over the town, a testament to 400 years of tradition and mastery.

Situated on the outer wall of St Bartholomew Hospital in Smithfield is a memorial to Sir William Wallace, who was executed nearby on August 23, 1305. Sir William Wallace was a Scottish knight who became one of the main leaders during the Wars of Scottish Independence, most famously portrayed by Mel Gibson in the film Braveheart.

A sequoia can live for over 3,000 years. There's one baobab tree specimen that has been dated at over 6,000 years old. These are some of the world’s most ancient trees—trees that have lived through countless generations of humans, under an infinite number of night skies. The timelessness of these trees and their starry backdrops inspired Beth Moon’s new photography book, Ancient Trees Ancient Skies. 

There were, of course, some logistics to consider for this project. In order to capture the most vibrant night stars, Moon sought out ancient trees in the most remote locations. As she writes in her introduction, “to find those skies, and the trees beneath them, I traveled for many hours without road signs, or even roads, to areas so remote and wild the darkness was almost palpable.”

Timing was also key. She needed to shoot under a new moon, and when the trees were bare, with clear weather. The results, in which each image is named after a star or constellation, is a vivid expression of the natural world's enduring beauty. 

House of Wax is the bar across from The Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn. To give this Victorian-themed bar even more remarkable flavor, it was built to include a 19th century wax collection of macabre medical models from Berlin, Germany that showcase anatomy and anomaly.

The menu includes themed cocktails as well as wine, spirits, and a local beer list. A few food items are also available, though given the subject matter, even a glance through the curiosities shown on the official website might be too much for some—viewer discretion is advised!

Living in the modern world is often stressful, and it’s easy to forget to give yourself some time to decompress.

To help you out, we’ve found this heart-melting video of tiger cubs posted by the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The 1,800-acre facility is home to several species, but few are as popular as the beautiful felines, who can boast being the largest in the entire cat species.

Tiger cubs are very dependent on their mother, as they are blind when they are born. Once they are adults, however, they separate and lead largely solitary lives. Females stay close to their mothers, separating more and more as the years pass, while males go far away as soon as they are able to take care of themselves. But before this happens, they enjoy a few years of cuddles and playfulness together. 

It's these years that the video captures. The tigers tumble around, yawn, and drink water, all while filling your heart with warm and fuzzy feelings. Don’t resist—you can get back to worrying in two minutes.

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.

Lithia water, called so because of natural lithium oxide deposits in the spring, has been touted as a health tonic since the 1880s (although it wasn't until 1949 that the scientific community acknowledged the wellness benefit of lithium salts). When the town of Ashland, Oregon realized it was sitting atop a gold mine in the form of a lithia spring outside town, it tried to capitalize on the fad by building a health spa. 

In 1911, Ashland discovered it was situated next to the most lithium-loaded spring water other than New York's Saratoga Springs, and set to work on building a world-class resort. Officials went as far as to pipe the spring water into town for the spa, but plans for the resort fell through as the health fad lost popularity. Instead, a multi-spouted drinking fountain was built and the land reserved for the spa was used as a public park near the center of town.

The lithia water fountain is still maintained today, though more as a local oddity than for the water's supposed health benefits. The lithia water might have been popular in the early 20th century, but today it's just known for tasting terrible.

Imagine picnicking in central Florida when, suddenly, you hear some leaves rattle, and, from the shade of the trees, the curious face of a rhesus macaque emerges. The macaques, which were introduced to Florida decades ago by a boat operator, have taken up residence in the state with determination, expanding rapidly because they lack natural predators.

But they are mostly benign, and this one seems pretty benign too. So, what should you do? Offer it food? Try to pet it? Or just ignore it?

You can probably guess the right answer, even if, for decades now, other humans have been guessing wrong, leading to 31 attacks from 1977-1984, according to an official report.

And while most of those injuries turned out to be minor, nowadays you might not be so lucky, as officials warn the public about a more dangerous threat: a strand of herpes carried by the rhesus macaques that is mostly harmless to them but can be deadly to humans. 

No such fatal case has yet occurred, but the panic has encouraged the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) to declare the monkeys a public health threat, and recommend that humans avoid contact with them.

Which means that if you do see a monkey come upon your picnic, you'd be best served observing it from afar. Do you really want to die by way of monkey herpes? No. No, you do not. 

What kind of herpes are we talking about? The particular strand of herpes carried by the rhesus macaque is called Macacine herpesvirus 1, and is comparable to the human strain of herpes that causes cold sores, according to Dr. Jim Wellehan, an assistant professor at the Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences at the University of Florida.

And while most primates carry some kind of herpes, a strand of herpes that's benign in one species can prove deadly in another. That's because over millions of years of evolution, herpesviruses have diverged with their hosts, but not other species, meaning that while Macacine herpesvirus 1 might only give rhesus macaques a cold sore, a human is much, much more vulnerable, as over half of documented cases of human infection have ended in death. 

Still, don't blame the rhesus macaques. The only reason they are in Florida, in fact, turns out to be perfectly Floridian. Native to south and central Asia, six of the macaques were transported to the state in 1938 by an entrepreneur named Colonel Tooey (real first name) who put them on an island in Silver Springs State Park.

Tooey's plan, such as it was, was for a type of amusement park, selling tourists tickets to his Jungle Cruise Ride, which promised to pass by the incredible “monkey island," where he'd introduced the macaques. The plan, for a time, worked, but while an influx of tourists rushed in to see the monkeys in action, the animals themselves began their escape. 

They first swam across the river, and rumors soon began to circulate about a wild pack of rhesus macaques roaming free. Meanwhile, some people claimed that they had been stars in a Tarzan movie (a rumor that continues to be spread). Others, that they were reproducing at a fast rate, and that there were now thousands and thousands of them in the area.

The truth was far less dramatic, but the reality is that, without natural predators, the rhesus macaques were here to stay, expanding in Central Florida, even reaching cities as far as the Gulf of Mexico. And for years, the FWC has considered many solutions, including extermination, relocation, and population control, but nothing, so far, has proven effective.

Plans of complete extermination, for example, were thwarted in the '90s by animal rights protesters, and attempts at sterilization have proved impractical. More desperately, the state has even issued permits for catching and selling the monkeys, though this approach has also been criticized since most captured individuals end up in research facilities for life. (The FWC did not respond to a request for comment.)

While the thought of dying because a monkey gave you herpes is terrifying, the rhesus macaques might feel the same way about you. In fact, there are more recorded cases of humans infecting their pet monkeys with human herpesviruses than vice versa.

But as of now, the humans and monkeys remain in an uncomfortable stalemate. And while most human interactions with the monkeys continue to be benign, do yourself a favor and leave them alone if you see them out in the wild. Macaques' first instinct is not to attack a primate several times its size, but they will if they feel cornered or threatened. And, as Wellehan explains, herpes can only be transmitted by close contact where fluids are exchanged. 

Mostly, though, Wellehan says, the herpes-carrying monkeys are "a hell of a lot less scary than climate change.”

In August of 1958, the proud B-17 bomber known as Preston's Pride was flown into Mefford Field outside of Tulare signaling the end of her flying career.  She now sits across the street from airfield as a memorial to the residents of Tulare County who served in World War II.

This particular plane was produced at the end of World War II and following the war served as a control plane for drones used during the atomic tests at the Bikini Atoll in the mid-1940s.  She was reassigned to work as a drone controller stateside and continued this task until retired in 1958 at which time General Maurice A. Preston, a Tulare resident and former commander of the 379th Bomb Group brought her to her current home.

Since her arrival, she has been hit by a truck and was subsequently repaired.  The fencing around the monument was reinforced to prevent further damage.  Fans of B-17 aircraft  lament her current situation of sitting in the elements and being allowed to decay. Compared to many remaining B-17s she is in fairly good condition and it is speculated that she could be restored and returned to flying condition.  For now, she sits at the side of the freeway beckoning drivers to make a short stop and pay tribute to the veterans of World War II.

Peggy Guggenheim's ashes are interred in her private palazzo and museum in Venice, and her companions in death are much the same as her companions in life. It's her beloved "babies," her 14 Lhasa Apsos.

The niece of Solomon Guggenheim, founder of the famed Guggenheim Museum, Peggy Guggenheim was arguably the greatest art collector and patron of the 20th century. She eventually opened her private collection to the public, and it soon became one of the most popular museums in Italy and the most visited in Venice.

After she died of a stroke in 1979, Peggy Guggenheim's ashes were interred in her palazzo, Vernier dei Leoni, which is connected to the museum. Here, visitors can drop by to see the stately plaque commemorating the art lover. However, the plaque next to Peggy's eulogize those she loved most. It's not one of her many lovers or her ex-husband, painter Max Ernst. Peggy had Cappuccino, Peacock, Pegeen, Toro, Foglia, Madam Butterfly, Baby, Emily, White Angel, Sir Herbert, Sable, Gypsy, Hong Kong, and Cellida interred next to her so that they might spend the afterlife together.

Among European and Western culture, Polish cemeteries are unique. In a remarkable display of remembrance, they are often lavishly covered in flowers, pictures, mementos and candles, particularly around Roman Catholic holidays and especially on All Saints' Day. Strangers will often look after graves of non-family members; it’s rare to see an uncared-for or unclean tombstone.

The Polish word “zakopane” translates into English as "buried," so it should be no surprise that one particularly notable Polish burial ground can be found in the popular ski resort town of the same name.

The Old Zakopane Cemetery (as it is commonly known), or Pęksowy Brzyzek (its actual name, meaning roughly "Pęksa's Brook"), sits behind the old wooden Church of Our Lady of Częstochowa. The hallowed grounds contain over 500 grave sites. Some of Poland’s most celebrated denizens—particularly those hailing from the surrounding Podhale region in the Tatry mountains—can be found among those interred in the cemetery. Among the honored dead are Polish war heroes and Nazi resistance fighters, who lie side-by-side with authors, architects, mountain climbers, poets, musicians, artists, scientists, and engineers.

What really stands out are the stylistic representations of the grave markers themselves. In a stark contrast to traditional cemetery plots, the burial sites in the Old Zakopane Cemetery are adorned with memorials carved from raw rock and metal, or built in the form of tall wooden totems and sculptures. These monuments to the departed are true pieces of art in their own right, incorporating gnarly branches and moss-covered boulders, sudden visionary protrusions festooned with names and dates. The effect is a dreamy, magical, fairytale environment, with the impression that the entire ensemble is growing organically from the ground.

In October of 1993, Lois Taylor entered the Harlem apartment of Dorian Corey, a drag performer and dressmaker who’d died of AIDS two months earlier at the age of 56. Accompanied by two men searching for Halloween costumes, Taylor, a fellow New York drag queen and caretaker of Corey in her final days, was hoping to sell them a small fraction of Corey’s wardrobe. They rifled through fabric, feathers, and sequins before they encountered a large closet, where, Taylor said, the sight of a musty green-plaid garment bag folded over on the floor piqued their collective interest.

“I only weigh 135 pounds. I couldn’t lift that thing,” Taylor told New York magazine in 1993. Resigning to her powerlessness to find the zipper, Taylor handed a pair of scissors to one of the men, only to learn that what the curious mass lacked in portability, it made up for in distinct malodor. Without inspecting further, Taylor called the police.

Peeling through multiple layers—first the bag’s fabric, then taped wrappings of what was likely Naugahyde, a type of faux leather, and plastic—detectives revealed a grisly sight: a partially mummified body in the fetal position, its formerly brown complexion now purple and yellow, its ears mere cartilaginous vestiges, its blue-and-white boxer shorts tattered, with a bullet hole in its head. Encased within the layers, detective Raul Figueroa observed, were detachable pull-tabs from flip-top beer cans, whose prime in the United States ranged from the 1960s to the 1970s.

Despite the technical hurdles posed by decay, Figueroa managed to extract fingerprints from the corpse. The body was identified as Robert “Bobby” Worley, born December 18, 1938. The only extant records from Worley’s life were criminal; he’d been arrested for raping and assaulting a woman in 1963 and served three years in prison. By most accounts, he was estranged from his family and hadn’t been seen since the mid- to late '60s. Coupled with Figueroa’s pull-tab dating method, detectives concluded the shooting must have happened at least 20 years prior.

Superficial cues might dictate that Dorian Corey had little reason to engage in violent crime. A graduate from the Parsons School of Design, she had a knack for graphic design, which she parlayed into repute as a costumer. In the Harlem drag ball scene—where veteran drag queens and their young breakdancing and voguing counterparts participated in tongue-in-cheek pageants to showcase humor, irony, and ambition through performance—Corey was a stalwart diva. Her experience led her to mentor and support young queens as the mother of her drag family, the House of Corey. “You lend money to your friends—not very much money—and [give] advice...sometimes, if someone got evicted or whatever, you might take them in,” she explained on a 1991 episode of the Joan Rivers Show.

What stands in starkest contrast to the gruesome implications in her closet, perhaps, is Corey’s demeanor. The most extensive video footage of Corey is from the 1990 Jennie Livingston documentary Paris Is Burning, an examination of the aforementioned ball culture; in interviews, she was witty, realistic, and unflappable. In contrast to the grandiosity of aspiring models and housewives, she had a self-possessed cadence and world-weary observations, which endeared her to a comparatively mainstream audience.

“Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world,” she says in the film. “Then you think, you’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name...If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.”

Yet it’s apparent, from her interviews and an alleged silence about her life with Worley, that Corey was also guarded. Considered in tandem with the circumstances of the discovery, plenty of questions remain. Why might she have committed murder? What was her relationship to Robert Worley? How and why was the body preserved and not disposed of? Despite a lack of evidence or sources who are still living (many queens who knew Corey have succumbed to either disease or violence), these questions have provoked a number of theories.

Though the idea has now fallen out of favor, some posited that Corey was “protecting” the real murderer. In 1988—between the probable time of Worley’s and Corey’s deaths—Corey moved from her apartment at 150th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue to one located 10 blocks over on West 140th Street. The notion that the body was in the closet before she moved, the hypothesis goes, is more plausible than that of Dorian’s lugging a corpse from one home to another.

Others maintain, more credibly, that Worley was a burglar who broke into Corey’s home, prompting Corey to act in self-defense. Corey lived in later-20th-century Harlem, where violent crime ran rampant. (Livingston recalled numerous gunfights outside Corey’s apartment during interviews for the film.) For her own protection, she presumably owned a gun; her friend Jessie Torres affirmed she had “a little .22” in an interview shortly after news of the murder surfaced. More telling, Corey had allegedly attached a note to the body reading “This poor man broke into my home and was trying to rob me.” Furthermore, the theory suggests a possible reason she kept the body: a black drag queen who lived in a poor, dangerous area in the ‘60s or ‘70s had little chance of garnering sympathy from the police.

Prevailing sentiment, however, contends that Corey and Worley had a turbulent romantic relationship that reached a tragic conclusion in a crime of passion. According to Taylor, Corey wrote a short, third-person story about a transgender woman who killed her lover after he browbeat her into having sex reassignment surgery. Handwritten on a piece of paper yellowed with age, the story seemed at least loosely autobiographical—Corey had had breast implants and possibly taken female hormones—and was peppered with references to her life, including the Pearl Box Revue, a touring drag show she’d performed with in the ‘60s.

Additional clues point to this supposition. Torres had relayed that Corey, hospitalized and in a haze of AZT and morphine, had confessed to her friend Sally in Corey’s final days. Richard Mailman, whose upcoming play Dorian’s Closet explores the story, says that, according to a police interview with Worley’s brother, Worley “showed up at his [brother’s] house one night drunk, and he was going on and on and on about Dorian. There was that sort of corroboration that he was in a relationship and did know Dorian.”

Indeed, any relationship they had was fraught. Reg Flowers, whose one-man play Out of the Bag plumbs the psyche of Robert Worley, suggests that Worley may have struggled to reconcile the pressures of appearing masculine and straight with his attraction to Corey, lashing out at her in bouts of frustration. “Being in a relationship with someone who was abusive would make sense [as an explanation], especially when you’re talking about when men are attracted to trans people,” he says. “My sense is that we’re talking about someone who might be closeted about their homosexuality as well, and so there might have been all kinds of internalized hatred and internalized oppression. My sense of it is that it was a dangerous situation that Dorian needed to get out of.”   

As for the body, Mailman postulates that Corey, fearing disposing of it would be too conspicuous in congested Manhattan, covered it in baking soda and wrapped it tightly to neutralize the inevitable odor. Decades’ worth of chemical reactions likely rendered an amateur mummification job. “I don’t think she had a criminal mind. She didn’t plan the murder, and when it happened, she had to think fast,” he says. “In the mind of someone who commits a crime of passion, that kind of makes sense.”

Still, how did Corey get away with murder? At least three factors may explain this: Corey’s consistent cool and grace, and Worley’s estrangement from his family and the lack of documentation about his life, and the suppression of the corpse’s stench. But perhaps the murder’s obscurity is primarily owed to a fourth, socioeconomic factor: the othering and invisibility of two poor, sexually complex black people navigating internal and external turmoil in 1960s and ‘70s America.

A definitive answer remains elusive and probably always will. It’s unsurprising: Corey was part of a highly marginalized world, and her life—even the part ripe for a campy tabloid headline—attracted little attention. Still, whatever brought these two together—and whatever happened the day of Worley’s death—Dorian Corey has made an indelible mark.

Outside of one of Poland’s largest cities, down an old dirt path in the middle of a forest, are the abandoned remains of one of Nazi Germany’s largest ammunition plants. Today, it’s been turned into an underground museum.

In 1876, the Alfred Nobel & Company changed it’s name to Dynamitaktiengesellschaft (DAG). Alfred Nobel & Co was founded just eleven years prior by it’s namesake and successfully developed the stable explosive, dynamite, launching Nobel and his company to eternal fame.

Fast forward more than half a century to World War II and the German company’s primary products had switched to explosives and ammunition for the Nazi military. In occupied Poland in 1939, with the aid of Nazi government grants, DAG began construction on a new facility outside of Bydgoszcz with the primary purpose of increasing production and aiding the war effort.

Over the next 6 years more than 1,000 buildings, 400km (250 miles) of underground passageways, and 40km of underground railroads were built over a 23 square acre site. Some 30,000 to 40,000 workers, many from local concentration camps and Poles from surrounding villages, were forced to build the massive compound and it’s dangerous merchandise.

The spread layout and underground character of the factory had two purposes: to provide camouflage from spy planes and to provide protection and safeguard other buildings in case of an in-line explosion. Many of the underground tunnels and buildings still remain, and have recently been turned into an eerie, walkable museum.

The expansive character of the museum happens along a 2km route and follows dimly lit underground tunnels through various ammunition production facilities where visitors learn about Alfred Nobel, his company, the events leading up to the war and life for Polish residents during German occupation. It continues with exhibits on the forced laborers, weapons used during the war, and a history of major conflicts. One of the final rooms finishes on a somber note as it touches on the future of modern war and the world annihilating weapons that could destroy us all.

Most people know the artist Grant Wood for “American Gothic,” the iconic painting that typifies his unique style of Regionalism. While lesser known, some of Wood's largest works in the Regionalist style are not in a museum or gallery, but on the walls of the Parks Library at Iowa State University.

There are several walls of the old section of the library that show Wood’s work, including the agrarian-themed murals in the foyer titled “When Tillage Begins (Breaking the Prairie).” There are others highlighting the farming and agricultural arts (animal husbandry, veterinary science, and farm crops), and other fields of a working and artistic life (chemical, mechanical, aeronautical and civil engineering, as well as home economics, and ceramics).

Wood designed the murals for the original library building under a commission from the University and the Civil Works Administration (CWA), an offshoot of the Depression-era Works Project Administration (WPA). The paintings were then executed with the help of local Iowan painters, who were chosen by Wood from those he had seen exhibit at the Iowa State Fair.  

Wood led a trio of artists known as the “Regionalist Triumvirate” in the mid-1930s, dedicated to throwing off the conventions of European movements in favor of a specifically American style using rural subjects. The Library Murals are a perfect representation of the style, honoring the value of work and the American Midwest at a time when the country was falling deeper into the Great Depression.

Bringing Wood’s work to the public, at a university library rather than behind a velvet rope, provides a rare opportunity to experience one of America’s great artists right up-close. You can see other examples of CWA murals here and here.

As of 2015, 75% of the deceased in the U.K. are cremated, but this wasn't always the case. It used to be that most people were buried, and in England, the finest coffins were made by the Newman Brothers.

Alfred and Edwin opened their business in 1882, originally just casting brass for toys, jewelry, and furniture. Their coffin castings (hinges, crucifixes, handles, etc.) were the most profitable products though, and this eventually became their primary business. Coffins made at the Newman Brothers factory would be the final resting places of both Winston Churchill and Princess Diana, among many others. The final owner of the Coffin Works started out as a lowly secretary, and when the company was dissolved in 1999 she set about preserving it as a historical visitor attraction.

The company didn't update after the 1960s, so walking into the factory is like stepping back in time. Much of the original machinery is still present and in working order. Visitors are encouraged to "punch in" on arrival and are shown round by former factory workers turned tour guides. Attendees are even allowed to test some of the equipment to fully experience the "sights, sounds, and smells" of working in a midcentury funerary furniture factory.

For a factory whose industry relied on death, the Coffin Works Museum is actually quite cheery. The museum hosts a series of events including craft workshops, art exhibitions, and Día de los Muertos parties, as well as educational events that detail the ways in which death rites have changed from the 19th to the 21st century.

Consisting of the remains of a long-extinct volcano, Slemish Mountain dominates the County Antrim landscape. The mountain likewise casts a long shadow in the cultural landscape of Ireland, thanks to its association with the early life of the island's legendary patron saint.

According to his Confessio—widely accepted to have been written by the man himself—St. Patrick was captured by pirates at the age of 16 and brought to Ireland as a slave, where he was put to work as a shepherd. Held in captivity for six years, the lonely and isolated youth turned to regular prayer as a source of comfort; this practice yielded visions that inspired him to escape his captives and return home. Legend has it that his shepherding days were spent on the slopes of Slemish Mountain. After his self-liberation and subsequent ordination, Patrick returned to Ireland as a missionary to convert the island to Christianity. A church found at nearby Skerry Churchyard is thought to be one of the first churches he established in Ireland.

Slemish has a geological history that dates back millennia. The mountain is all that remains of a volcanic plug much more durable than the surrounding rock, which has been eroded through millions of years of blustery Irish weather.

The mountain is accessible year-round. Many people partake in an annual pilgrimage on St Patrick’s Day, which draws large crowds prepared to take the climb to the top. On a clear day the summit offers breath-taking views of the surrounding countryside, the Sperrin Mountains, and even the Scottish coast. The climb itself takes under an hour.

The meme hit in 2012. A noble Tumblr artist first created it. It was picked up by BuzzFeed, followed by a flood of YouTube uploads. In 2016, you’ll see tweets about it. Justin Timberlake has acknowledged it with typical good humor, deigning to sing the meme when asked—even now, more than a decade and a half later.

It’s not super fun to explain a meme, but we kind of have to, so: The “it’s gonna be may” meme is a reference to NSYNC's 2000 hit “It’s Gonna Be Me,” in which lead singer Timberlake memorably sings the title of the song as “it’s gonna be may.” But I think what makes the meme resonate is that “it’s gonna be may” is just one example of a linguistic tendency that was weirdly popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Think of Mandy Moore’s “Can-day,” Britney Spears growling “oh bay-bay bay-bay,” Gwen Stefani chanting “hey bay-bay hey bay-bay HEY.” The trend to turn the “ee” sound into “ay” continued for years, maybe most memorably in Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” (Cray-zay, really.) This isn’t one guy’s vocal quirk: this is a trend, maybe a virus. Why did all these singers change their vowels in that particular way?

Accents in singers are an exercise in frustration; it’s often impossible to connect the accent in a singer’s speaking voice with the accent in his or her singing voice. Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day—born and bred in Northern California—sings in a British accent. Adele, a Londoner, has an indistinct North American accent in her songs.

But I thought this one might be different. I asked some linguists if there are any accent groups in North America who turn their “ee” into “ay,” and sure enough, there are: the South. “The Southern Shift lowers and diphthongizes the vowel /i/, which is the pattern you're observing here,” says Kara Becker, a linguist at Reed College. That’s a bit to unpack, but she’s referring to the Southern Vowel Shift, which is responsible for the changing of various vowel sounds in Southern speech. A “shift,” in linguistics, is a kind of broad-scale changing of vowel sounds: if one vowel sound changes, then something else will probably change to take the place of the first vowel. The Southern Vowel Shift is why, in Southern speech, “ride” sounds somewhere between “rod” and “rad,” “rat” sounds like “ray-at,” that kind of thing.

Southern speech also has a tendency to “diphthongize” sounds. In linguistics, a monophthong is a simple, single-part vowel, like, well, “ee.” A diphthong is a two-part, more complex vowel. The “ay” sound, like in “may,” is a diphthong: it’s constructed by starting at the monophthong “eh” and sliding to the monophthong “ee.” Southern speech has tons of diphthongs, even some triphthongs (that’s a three-part vowel), way more than other dialects in North America, which is part of the reason why Southerners have a reputation for “drawling” or speaking slowly. It’s not actually slower, Southern vowels just have more stuff crammed into them.

So, okay, turning “me” to “may” is kind of Southern. This makes sense! Justin Timberlake is from Tennessee, Britney Spears is from Louisiana, Mandy Moore is from Florida, and Cee-Lo Green, the singer of Gnarls Barkley, is from Georgia. Southern singers using Southern vowels! Problem solved, right?

Except, no, not really. Those singers don’t use any other Southern vowel sounds in their songs, and we still have the vexing problem of Mandy Moore, who, though she was technically raised in the South, is from Orlando, which does not have a traditional Southern accent, and Moore doesn’t demonstrate any Southern elements in her normal speaking voice.

Audible Southern accents are exceedingly rare in this kind of pop music. They’re common in pop-country, of course, and there are some R&B singers who will slot in Southern elements to pay homage to the fact that R&B was created in the South (using the word “ain’t,” for example). But certainly nobody would say that Britney Spears or NSYNC were Southern-sounding pop acts.

Shockingly, linguists have not really studied the linguistics of early 2000s pop singers. But others have thought intensely about the way these stars sing. I called Lis Lewis, a professional voice teacher based in Los Angeles, who over the past 40 years has trained a dizzying array of pop stars: Rihanna, Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears, Miguel, Courtney Love, the Pussycat Dolls, many more. Her job as a voice teacher isn’t just to get a singer’s voice sounding good. She also functions sort of like a physical trainer, getting these singers prepared for the hardships of belting out songs for hours every day while on tour or in the studio. Without proper preparation, it’s easy for a singer to, essentially, pull a muscle, and lose or weaken his or her voice for a period of time—very dangerous, given the amount of money on the line.

“We have two voices, one is the high voice and one is the low voice,” says Lewis. “The high voice is called 'head voice' and the low voice is called 'chest voice.' When a song gets really big and exciting, usually toward the bridge and the last chorus, the chest voice gets higher and kind of angst-ridden, it makes it sound really urgent.”

This is very complicated and not very well understood; physiologically, there isn’t wide agreement on what makes up chest voice as opposed to head voice, or where the divide is. There doesn’t seem to be any difference in how the vocal cords vibrate, so some voice teachers avoid it, but it’s been ingrained for singers for so long that it’s still the norm to talk of the two. Generally, amongst vocal teachers, it’s taught that chest voice is a range of notes wherein the breastbone is felt to vibrate, and head voice is the range higher than that, where the bones of the jaw and skull are felt to vibrate. (Falsetto, for the record, is something different.) More power is thought to come from chest voice.

What Lewis is talking about is the very upper end of the chest voice, which comes with a set of characteristics: emotion-filled, maybe a little scratchy, certainly loud. This is what we’re talking about when we say someone is “belting” out a note. This is right at the top of the range for the singer’s chest voice, meaning that the emotion-filled tone is the result of, basically, the singer having to strain to hit that note.

Certain vowel sounds are easier or harder to sing when you’re straining so hard to hit a high chest voice note. “When the vowels stay small, like in ‘ee’ or ‘ooh,’ you can’t get up as high,” says Lewis. “Ee” and “ooh” are very, in linguistic terms, “tense” vowel sounds, which means that the opening of the mouth is very small. Belting out an intense, top-of-your-range note using a tense vowel is really difficult, and, says Lewis, can even lead to straining the singer’s vocal cords.

“When you’ve got those little vowels, you tend to want to slide over into your head voice,” says Lewis. But sliding into head voice would lose the power and tone you want. “So when you need a high note, you’d generally open a word like ‘me’ to ‘may,’ or ‘candy’ to ‘canday,’ or ‘you’ to ‘yuh,’” she says. Ah ha! We’ve solved it!

Listen to Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” The line “thirteen-month-old baby,” in most of the verses, is pronounced with a clean “ee” sound. Until, just like Lewis predicted, the build-up to the last chorus, when Wonder takes the melody higher and more intense. Listen at around 3:00 into this for his sudden change to “thirteen-month-old baybay.”

Except, most of those examples, especially “it’s gonna be may” and “canday,” aren’t especially high notes for Justin Timberlake or Mandy Moore. They aren’t actually straining to hit them. So why are they acting like they are?

Lewis’s theory, which makes sense to me, is that this is an attempt to co-opt the signifiers of intensity without actually needing to use them. Wonder sings “baybay” late in “Superstition” because he’s worked his energy level up, he’s hitting a high, hard note, it bursts out naturally because that’s the way it’s comfortable for him to sing it. “It’s gonna be may” is not like that; Timberlake could sing a clean “me” there perfectly comfortably. But listeners like the intensity of lines like Wonder’s; it’s big and bold and passionate. And Wonder’s vowel sound there has come to indicate to listeners that he’s being big and bold and passionate. Timberlake, Moore, and Spears all just...use that signifier, without any of the physiological need for it. It’s fake energy. Fake passion.

Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” is different; when Cee-Lo Green sings the word “cray-zay,” he’s belting out a difficult high note, hence the mutation. But the very next line ends with a much lower note in “possibly,” which he sings with a clean “ee” sound—he doesn’t need to sing “possiblay,” so he doesn’t.
Turning “ee” to “ay” when it’s not strictly necessary is a savvy kind of trick. In a recent interview, Justin Timberlake even said that Max Martin, the songwriter and producer of the song (along with “I Kissed A Girl,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “I Want It That Way,” and about a billion other songs), told Timberlake to sing it that way. Timberlake said he thought Martin wanted him to “sound like I’m from Tennessee.” 

It seems like a millennium has passed since Donald Trump announced he was running for President in June 2015. Now the businessman is president-elect, with the U.S. split between celebrating, protesting, and drifting into a black hole of nihilistic depression. Clearly, the reasons why Trump resonated with so many American voters are complex. But one of the Republican candidate’s main draws, throughout the campaign, has been his celebrity and outsider status.

Before 2015, most people recognized Trump best from the reality show The Apprentice or his antics on the WWE; sixteen years ago, his candidacy was a fly-by joke on The Simpsons. When former first lady Barbara Bush labeled Trump more of a “comedian or a showman” than a politician, it was not seen as a compliment. Yet Trump’s lack of political experience is something he and his supporters frequently cite as an asset, so it’s worth examining the celebrity-politician phenomenon.

Trump joins stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono, and Shirley Temple Black in making a successful turn to politics. But while a dearth of previous political involvement would normally hurt a candidate’s chances, in the case of celebrities it seems not to matter much. So why do people embrace celebrities running for political office? And what are the pros and cons of starting out in Hollywood, and going on to influence legislation?

Well, at a time when only 16 percent of Americans think the government does the right thing “most of the time,” celebrities might be viewed less negatively than politicians are, says Robert Erikson, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Some stars may feel like a known quantity to voters already—even if their stances on various positions are unknown.

Many campaigns begin by telling the public their story of who the candidate is, something celebrities don’t really need to do. And most of the time, people vote along party lines, rather than for a specific politician, according to Joshua Tucker, Professor of Political Science at NYU. “Most of the votes for offices on the ballot besides president, and maybe governor, senator, and representative—most people have never heard of any of those people, so they just default to party,” Tucker says. Perhaps unsurprisingly, voters the world over tend to be more responsive to candidates they are familiar with.

But it’s not just that. “Actors can be good at acting and that is a requirement of politics. Reagan was successful playing the role of president,” says Erikson.“Celebrities can have more experience and talent in front of audiences than politicians,” he adds. “See Trump as an example.” These on-camera talents can help them navigate scandals more deftly than normal politicians might, since the public may view drama as part of a celebrity's personal brand.

Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, became president after acting in Hollywood for nearly 30 years. “As president, Reagan combined a masterful use of television and radio with a great sense of pseudo–event theatrics,” West and Orman write. “Indeed, he threw himself into the role of president as much as he worked himself up for the role of George Gipp in the Knute Rockne movie. Reagan became an outstanding performer in the drama of national political life.”

In the book Celebrity Politics, Darryl M. West and John M. Orman point out that celebrities aren't far from politics to begin with; politicians are often endorsed by celebrities. When voters don’t know what a politician stands for, they look to trusted guides—which include celebrities. Indeed, there isn’t much difference between the way the public sees politicians and entertainers, says professor Benjamin Bishin of the University of California, however different they may be. We often view our political leaders through the same mediums where we get our entertainment, which mixes our perceptions of them. 

When a candidate is shifting their arena from entertainment to politics, advertising their lack of political credentials is often “a choice the candidate is making in trying to frame his or her appeal,” says Tucker. “A candidate like [former Minnesota Governor Jesse] Ventura or Trump, however, can also try to appeal to people who want someone "outside the system" to "shake things up.”

In 1998, when Jesse Ventura left his tie-dyed spandex pants behind him at World Wrestling Entertainment and ran for the Mayor of Minnesota, his campaign ads featured him as an action figure, wearing a suit. As two kids played with the toy, a voice announced: "You can make Jesse battle special interest groups!" and “Don't waste your money on politics as usual!” Far from ignoring his wrestling past, Ventura wanted Minnesotans to take the metaphor of fighting in the ring to fighting for policy.

“Voters often prefer an outsider who can either promise to fight corruption, or who will promise to overcome partisan division and fix things,” Bishin says.”This is an always unmet promise of being post-partisan.” Arnold Schwarzenegger, while distancing himself from his roles in action movies like Terminator, asserted in campaign ads for Governor of California (which he won in 2003) that “politicians are not doing their job.” He promised to “bring California back again.” 

While scandals are often the ruin of politicians’ careers, we expect celebrities to have faults and marry multiple times; when they smash through glass doors with their bare hands in a drunken stupor, we shake our heads. But politicians are held to a different standard. “The "dirt" on Trump has not harmed him as much as one might think,” Erikson says. “I cannot imagine a politician bragging like he did with Billy Bush and the women coming forward.” While he adds that Bill Clinton was a popular president when his own scandals were revealed, “an ordinary politician—say a middle aged senator with a family—could not have gotten away with it.”

Celebrities are drawn to both of America's major political parties, but sometimes circumstances drive a party to look for candidates in unlikely places, particularly if they’re lacking a ready pool of politicians looking to advance their careers. “I have noticed for instance that Republicans often tap local TV newscasters or even weathermen as candidates for office. They are celebrities at the local level,” Erikson says.

There are definite benefits to being a celebrity when going into politics, but it doesn’t guarantee success. “The bigger disadvantage would be in not knowing how to be effective as a politician,” says Tucker. He explains that in a presidential election, politicians know it will become a two-candidate race, and it’s the norm for most politicians to reframe their campaign toward the center of the political spectrum to appeal to more voters; celebrities don’t necessarily capitalize on this strategy, and sometimes suffer for it. 

Jello Biafra, who runs record label Alternative Tentacles and is famous as the lead singer for The Dead Kennedys, ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979 with the slogan “There’s always room for Jello”, and ran for president under the Green Party in 2000. But his serious policies, which included elections for police officers (by the people they patrol) and legalized squatting in tax-lapsed buildings, were overshadowed by his punk history and the part of his platform that required businessmen to wear clown suits. Biafra later became involved in campaigns for Ralph Nader and Gore, and still engages in political discussion on Youtube.

Debates, Tucker says, can also be a problem for people who weren’t trained to handle them. While Trump’s celebrity background might have helped him during the primaries when he was interacting with others onstage, “he certainly looked inexperienced when compared to Clinton in the one-on-one general election debates,” Tucker says. “I doubt a polished politician would have walked around on stage, for example, the way Trump did in the second debate.”

When celebrities do manage to learn the ins and outs of politics, though, their fans show their support. Shirley Temple Black, who became a foreign ambassador, told the New York Times in 1989 that “Shirley Temple opens doors for Shirley Temple Black.” Ben Jones, who was famous for his role on The Dukes of Hazard and later served two terms as a Democratic congressman of Georgia, said in an interview that, “It’s a funny thing, I was sort of the last guy you would think to run for Congress and it turned out I had a knack for it.”

The 2016 election has arguably been the most anxiety-infused political event in recent history. Noting how we vote and why is as important as ever, as it’s likely that we’ll see more celebrities running for political office. We won't know for a while which scripts they'll be following, though. With his divisive rhetoric, Trump seems to have tossed the blueprints for both normal politicians and celebrity candidates out the window.

Actor and writer Orson Welles once pointed out that the two professions are two sides to the same bizarre coin. “I don’t think [politicians] are crooks; I think they are actors,” said Welles. “But that kind of acting is not lying, as long as it refers to and reflects and exhausts the essential commonly held ideals of a culture. Those performances are part of our culture even though they are performances.”