Search Results for: Scientific American

Catholic Churches Built Secret Astronomical Features Into Churches to Help Save Souls

High above the heads of church visitors, almost invisible in the arches of the cathedral, a tiny hole lets in a beam of sunlight. This beam is what allows the meridian line to function. Photo: GEOFF MANAUGH

Geoff Manaugh | Atlas Obscura | November 2016 | 14 minutes (3,658 words)

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Geoff Manaugh, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

A disc of light moves across the cathedral floor. The marble in its path lights up, revealing deeply colored swirls, rich with hues of burgundy, plum, caramel, and ochre. It is ancient rock, stained by terrestrial chemistry and by the infernal pressures of the inner Earth. Its surface is smooth and nearly reflective, testament to extraordinary craftsmanship but also to the effects of hundreds of years’ worth of penitent feet processing through the looming shadows of the church interior. The air smells of smoke and candle wax, and the occasional perfume of a passing tourist.

The source of this light is a hole punched through the roof of the church high above, elaborately accentuated by a brilliant halo of golden rays, painted to resemble the sun. The hole acts like a film projector. Daylight streams through, creating a narrow beam of illumination visible only in the presence of smoke or dust, as if something otherworldly has been forced into material form.

Seconds pass, minutes, an hour. Outside, the sun appears to arc slowly across the daytime sky; here, in response, the projected disc creeps inch by inch across the marble floor. At solar noon, when the sun has reached its highest point in the sky, the circle of light touches a long, straight line made of inlaid brass and copper, nearly 220 feet from end to end, or two-thirds the length of an American football field. Although this line extends more than half the length of the cathedral floor, it seems to follow its own geometric logic: it is a long diagonal slash cutting between two columns, against the building’s floor plan, as if at odds with the structure that houses it.

Stranger still, on either side of this brass line, words and celestial images have been carved directly into the rock. There are the 12 signs of the zodiac interspersed amongst Roman numerals and references to solstices. There is Aquarius, the water bearer; Capricorn, with its confusing mix of shaggy horns and the coiled tail of a sea creature; Sagittarius, preparing to fire a magnificent bow and arrow; and the pouting fish of Pisces. At first glance, these symbols seem pagan, even sacrilegious, as if the astral remnants of an older belief system have somehow survived beneath the feet—and beyond the gaze—of daily worshippers.

Yet these symbols are not there to cast horoscopes, let alone spells. They are there for purposes of church administration and astronomical science. This cathedral, the Basilica di San Petronio in Bologna, Italy, also doubles as a solar observatory—at one point, one of the most accurate in the world—and these signs of the zodiac are part of an instrument for measuring solstices.

Read more…

Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’

Kanishk Tharoor | Kill Screen | October 2016 | 13 minutes (3,204 words)

 

The following essay was published by Kill Screen, the video game arts and culture magazine, and co-funded by Longreads Members. 

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The pleasure of Sid Meier’s Civilization series is that it is at once tantalizingly grand and endearingly granular. The game’s approach to the past has always been playful. Abe Lincoln can lead war-bands against Mahatma Gandhi’s phalanxes. The Aztecs can build the first nuclear bomb. Every version of the game begins with the same wide-open promise: a settler, a worker, a few tiles of visible land, and an ocean of darkness—all the ingredients of a world ready to be discovered and made anew. Read more…

STAT: My Daughter’s MS Diagnosis and the Question My Doctors Couldn’t Answer

"Nearly 24 years later and still just that crazy about my kid." Photos courtesy of the author.

Maria Bustillos | Longreads | September 2016 | 40 minutes (10,049 words)

 

I.

In the first days of 2014, in her senior year at Oberlin and just a few days before the winter term she’d arranged to spend in France, my daughter Carmen’s legs went numb. First her feet got all tingly, then her ankles, calves, and knees. Over three days or so, the numbness crept up to the base of her rib cage, and then stopped. But it didn’t go away—a weird sensation all in her skin, almost as if the whole lower half of her body had been anesthetized. Shingles, the internist told us—really?—okay. The acupuncturist, too, told us he’d been seeing anomalous cases of shingles cropping up in younger people. Carmen seemed to get a little better, and off she went to Paris; the tingling and numbness subsided slowly over the next several weeks, just as we’d been told they would, and the episode faded from memory. But about a year later, they came back again: Not shingles, after all.

Carmen in a hospital bed, uncharacteristically quiet and gloomy, the dark jungle of her curls against slick, plasticky polyester pillowcases. IV steroids, and more and more tests. Legs pretty numb, still. From pregnancy onward, I imagine, most parents harbor a cold little drop of inward fear, even as each day passes peaceful and undisturbed, through birth and babyhood and all the playdates and sleepovers and math tests, rock shows and summer vacations; at any moment, perhaps, from out of nowhere, comes the pounce. Here it is, then. Multiple sclerosis: I didn’t know anything about it really, beyond calamity, wheelchairs, and Annette Funicello. Instant by instant I composed my face and steeled myself as best I could for… what?

For every cliché in the world, naturally. A soul-wracked family, just like the ones you’ll see every day on the Lifetime Channel and the evening news; a brave young person, scared and in trouble; you register a fleeting hope that things will work out for them, in fact or fiction, as you flick to the next station. Now it’s your turn, but you won’t be changing the channel. Can this thing be treated? What is it? How do I discover how bad this will get? Or maybe let me just jump out this motherfucking window this minute, because I’m going to die of the panic alone.   Read more…

The Secret Nazi Attempt to Breed the Perfect Horse

Commemorative stamp for the Olympic summer games in Berlin. Via Wikimedia Commons

Elizabeth Letts | The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis | Ballantine Books | August 2016 | 19 minutes (4,567 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The Perfect Horse, by Elizabeth Letts. The book describes an American colonel’s quixotic mission in the waning days of World War II: to rescue Europe’s purebred horses from a secret Nazi stud farm mere hours before the starving Soviet army arrived and likely slaughtered the animals for food. In this excerpt, Letts explains the origins of the Nazis’ secret horse breeding project. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Like Hitler himself, the horses, once quintessentially Austrian, would be given a distinctly German stamp.

A herd of mares left Austria in October 1942. The herd made the 350-mile trip northwest from Piber to Hostau, Czechoslovakia, without incident, and were settled into the Third Reich’s most sheltered stud farm, located in Bohemia, just a few miles from the Bavarian border. Beyond the farm’s serene green pastures, golden valleys stretched toward distant mountains crested by dark waves of evergreens. The Böhmerwald, or Bohemian Forest, served as more than a beautiful backdrop for the farm; it formed a natural barrier between Germany to the west and Austria to the south and had withstood invasion and attack for centuries. During the Nazi era, this locale was known as “the Bohemian bastion.” Among Germans, it was thought to be the safest place to ride out the war, least likely to be invaded from east or west. It was here that Gustav Rau had secreted the Lipizzaner, as well as the finest Arabians from Janów, including Witez. Even in the middle of a war, here, all was deceptively tranquil.

Quiet villages dotted this part of Bohemia, each graced by a Catholic church with an onion-domed spire. Flanking each cluster of tidy whitewashed houses were well-kept farms growing crops that thrived in the region’s rich agricultural soil. But in the wake of Hitler’s annexation of the area following the Munich Agreement of 1938, its bucolic appearance was deceiving. Once a multicultural region where Czechs, Germans, and Jews lived side by side in peace, Bohemia, now called the Sudetenland, had turned into a firm cornerstone of Hitler’s Third Reich. When the Nazis annexed the area in September 1939, the local German-speaking population had lined the streets cheering to welcome Hitler’s forces. Local Czechs and Jews had either fled or been forcibly evicted. Those who remained had been transported to concentration camps. By 1942, when the first Lipizzaner arrived in Hostau, the local Nazi apparatus held a firm grip on the region, but Czech partisans also operated in the area, finding refuge in the hideaways offered by the Bohemian Forest. Though the border with Bavaria, Germany, was less than fifteen miles to the west, the mountainous barrier made it seem much more remote.

The stud farm at Hostau, located next to the village of the same name, had been known for breeding cavalry horses long before Hitler’s time. The most prominent local landowners, the Trauttsmansdorff family, had historically served as imperial equerries for the Habsburg Crown. In addition to the main complex of stables adjacent to the village, there were pastures in three neighboring villages—the entire establishment covered fifteen hundred acres and could accommodate more than a thousand stallions, mares, and foals. All in all, it was more than twice as big as Alfred Vanderbilt’s showplace, Sagamore Farms, which Rau had visited in 1938.

Rau had selected this expansive facility to put into motion the most exalted part of his grand plan. Throughout 1942, he had systematically transported all of the purebred Lipizzaner from the stud farms of Italy, Austria, and Yugoslavia to this sheltered location for safekeeping. He had also sent a personal emissary on a mission to purchase purebred Lipizzaner from wealthy noblemen who raised smaller strings of purebreds for private use. By the end of 1942, Rau had gathered almost every Lipizzaner in the world into a single location.

Austrian-born Hitler’s goal, expressed in Mein Kampf, was to bring all of the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe, including Austria, into the fold of the Third Reich. Just as Hitler aimed to eliminate “impure strains” and combine the different Germanic groups into a single “Aryan race” of people, so Rau planned to use the science of selective breeding to erase the individual differences characterizing the several strains of purebred Lipizzaner that had emerged since the end of World War I and replace them with a single mold: pure white, imperial, identical, and ideally suited for military use. Like Hitler himself, the horses, once quintessentially Austrian, would be given a distinctly German stamp. Read more…

The Mask of Deception: The Ultimate Test to My Recovery From Porn Addiction

Illustration by: Katie Kosma

Benjamin Obler | Longreads | August 2016 | 24 minutes (5,908 words)

 

When we first talked, it was on tenuous terms. That is, both telling implicit lies.

My lie was wearing a leather jacket and smoking cigarettes that night, which cast me as carefree and rebellious. In reality, I was a bookish Senior Editor with an educational publisher, a teacher, and a writer with aspirations. I loved my tennis and workouts—usually kept fit.

Her lie was the exact opposite: she cast herself as more straight-laced and serious than she was, and literary, noting that she was reading a challenging novel in the literary realism vein. But she wasn’t really of a literary disposition. I would learn soon that she was much more visually oriented, a photographer. She liked to go dancing, and to shoot guns at a range just for the thrill.

On the surface, these lies were harmless, but they masked deeper deceptions. She had no idea I was a recovering porn addict. I had no idea she was into taking semi-nude photos of herself and posting them online.

Her name was Franny, and I fell madly in love with her. Read more…

The Life and Murder of Stella Walsh, Intersex Olympic Champion

Stella Walsh, training in Cleveland, April 1, 1932 for the Olympic games. (AP Photo)

Rob Tannenbaum | Longreads | August 2016 | 63 minutes (15,868 words)

 

On the night she was murdered, Stella Walsh was in a great mood. The Cleveland resident spent much of December 4, 1980, thinking about her two passions: sports and Poland, the country she ran for when she won two Olympic medals. There was a women’s basketball match the next week between Kent State and the Polish national team, which Walsh helped arrange. Mayor George Voinovich asked her to be his proxy, and his office gave her a key to the city, which she planned to present at the game.

Walsh had planned to leave for Atlanta that day, on a trip with her co-workers at the recreation department, but two days earlier, she’d canceled her ticket, which she said was too expensive for her. She skipped work, slept late, went to the nearby Lansing Tavern in the early afternoon, then returned to the tiny home she shared with her bedridden 84-year-old mother Veronica. After dinner, without saying goodbye, she drove off to buy ribbons for the visiting Poles. She had a lot of money in her pocket, which rarely happened.

In Walsh’s brilliant career as a track and field star, she’d won 41 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) titles and set 20 world records in a range of events, from sprints to the discus throw. She was the first superstar of women’s track and field, a dominant performer who intimidated her competitors, and the only woman of her era whose box-office appeal matched a man’s. Walsh “is to women’s track what Babe Ruth is to baseball,” one journalist wrote.

In 1980, long after her last world record, Walsh was working for Cleveland’s recreation department at an annual salary of $10,400, which was the most she’d ever earned. She bought a bag of ribbons at the Broadway Avenue location of Uncle Bill’s, a chain of Ohio discount department stores, on the city’s southeast side. In the parking lot, men approached her, one of them holding a .38. Walsh, 69, was still remarkably strong. As she tried to grab the gun, a bullet scratched through her stomach and intestines, and severed an artery in her pelvis. The thieves ran off without checking the pants pocket where she had her money.

Walsh was unconscious when a policeman working security inside Uncle Bill’s found her face down in the parking lot. As the officer turned her over, a wig fell off, and he recognized it was Stella Walsh. He asked for an ambulance to be called, but the nearest one had a flat tire, which created a delay in her care. Instead, a police station wagon came for Walsh, and officers took her to St. Alexis Hospital, less than a mile away, where she died on the operating table. A hospital inventory of her personal property included $248.17 in cash, a 1932 Olympic ring, and a pair of falsies, as they were called, for padding her bra.

In the 25 years prior to her murder, little had been written about Walsh. Born as Stanislawa Walasiewiczowna—that’s the story she told reporters, though, like many aspects of her life, it turned out to not be true—in the rural Polish town of Wierzchownia, she’d had a groundbreaking athletic career. But she also had little charisma, made bad copy, and kept to herself. Although she’d lived in the U.S. since she was 15 months old and spoke almost without an accent, she’d won her Olympic medals for Poland. Even her nickname, “The Polish Flyer,” identified her as an alien. She didn’t experience any of the twilight glory that often comforts athletes late in life; there was no documentary about her, no Congressional Medal of Honor. While she was working for the city, handing out softball permits, her fellow pioneer and ’36 Olympic contestant Jesse Owens was making speeches and earning more than $100,000 a year.

“One of the great women of sport was murdered last night,” Walter Cronkite intoned on the CBS Evening News. “Stella Walsh, who was 69, was shot and killed in a Cleveland parking lot. No suspects have been arrested.” In Slavic Village, the Polish-American neighborhood where she spent most of her life, everyone knew and loved Walsh. She tended bar at a local tavern, coached young athletes, and was viewed as an example of Polonia’s greatest virtues. “Children were her life,” one friend said. “She loved to train them, and she always trained them to be winners.” She’d been “a Cleveland institution,” Mayor Voinovich told a reporter.

Because Walsh had been murdered, an autopsy was required. On the eve of her funeral, a Cleveland TV station went on the air with a news bulletin that rattled the city, then the country, then the world: Stella Walsh was a man.

The station’s claim about Walsh was incorrect. It was neither the first nor the last mistruth told about her. Because women athletes were carelessly documented in her era, and because she cultivated mystery, there are lots of conflicting statistics and incompatible stories about Walsh, ranging from when she arrived in the U.S. to how she died. As best as these tales can be sorted out or disproven, here’s the first full account of her incredible life. Read more…

A Fish So Coveted People Have Smuggled, Kidnapped, and Killed For It

Photo: Qian Hu

Emily Voigt | Scribner | May 2016 | 18 minutes (4,498 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The Dragon Behind the Glass, by Emily Voigt. This story is recommended by Longreads editor Mike Dang.

* * *

Taiping, Malaysia, May 11, 2004

Chan Kok Kuan still wasn’t home. Too worried to sleep, his father, Chan Ah Chai, stood at the window watching for a sign of his son through the blinding downpour. The rain had started at midnight and was still pummeling the ground at 4:00 a.m.—flooding the streets and overflowing the lakes in the public gardens, where the century-old saman trees stretch their massive canopies over Residency Road.

A wiry, exuberant man of thirty-one, the younger Chan was not the type to stay out late without calling. He had been home for dinner that evening, as usual, after working all day at the aquarium shop he opened a few years back. Even as a child, he had loved anything with fins. Now he was expert in one species in particular: the Asian arowana, the most expensive tropical fish in the world.

In Chinese, the creature is known as long yu, the dragon fish, for its sinuous body plated with large scales as round and shiny as coins. At maturity, the primitive predator reaches the length of a samurai sword, about two to three feet, and takes on a multihued sheen. A pair of whiskers juts from its lower lip, and two gauzy pectoral fins extend from its sides, suggesting a dragon in flight. This resemblance has led to the belief that the fish brings prosperity and good fortune, acting as a protective talisman to ward off evil and harm. Read more…

A Reading List for the Fourth of July

In between bites of hot dog and sunscreen applications, you can read about police brutality, what the rest of the world thinks about the United States, one woman’s American wardrobe and so much more. Happy Independence Day, America!

1. “Quintessential American Fiction, According to the Rest of the World.” (Lit Hub, July 2015)

J.D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, Yiyun Li, Julie Otsuka and Annie Proulx are just a fraction of the authors cited by this “deeply unscientific survey of nearly 50 writers, editors, publishers, critics, and translators, representing 30 countries.” I feel patriotic just reading this list!

2. “How to Be Canadian on the Fourth of July.” (Stephanie Hallett, Pacific Standard, June 2016)

Read more…

What Ever Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’?

All Illustrations by Michael Tunk

Alex Mar | Atlas Obscura | June 2016 | 27 minutes (6,812 words)

 

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Alex Mar, author of the book Witches of America, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

I am standing in the living room of a wood-paneled modular house out in the Nevada desert. Alongside me is Barbara Williamson, once called “the most liberated woman in America”; and slinking toward us, across the grayed-out carpeting, is a large, muscular, wild animal.

Now 78, Barbara had driven me here in a massive red pickup. The plan was to make tea and have a good talk in her office (just past the meditation room). But first, she wanted to introduce me to someone.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

Sure.

I followed Barbara through the kitchen.

Peggy Sue,” she called out gently. “Are you awake? Peggy Sue…”

We turned the corner into the living room, and that’s when I saw her. Her eyes are huge and almond-shaped, her ears point upwards (a signature of the breed), and her paws are striking in their size. Peggy Sue is a Siberian lynx, over 60 pounds, with powerful legs and sharp, two-inch-long canine teeth. She has not been de-clawed. I’d been aware of this fact, but only in this moment does it truly register: Barbara shares her home with what is, more or less, a small tiger.

“I wanted the wildness,” Barbara says. “I have a streak in me that just has a lot of wild desires, and it makes me feel really good to be accepted by a wild animal—I don’t know for what reasons. Back to the old motto: ‘If it feels good, do it!’”

Barbara, with her close-cut, bright-white hair and fuchsia lipstick, in light blue jeans and an ’80s-graphic parachute jacket, strokes the thick fur on the animal’s back and invites me to do the same. As we stand closer, each of us stroking Peggy Sue’s flanks, Barbara tells me they sleep together in the bed at night, sometimes curled up around one another.

Nearer now, the lynx looks a little raggedy, her skin a little loose, her long tail capped with two strange clumps of fur. She recently turned 20 years old—that’s how long ago Barbara retired to the small desert town of Fallon, Nevada, with her husband John. Out here on their 10-acre plot, the two created a spontaneous, guerilla-style sanctuary for “big cats.” Gradually, though, the creatures died of old age: three cougars, four bobcats, two tigers, two Barbary lions, a serval, two lynxes—and finally, three years and one month ago (Barbara keeps count), John himself. And now Barbara lives alone, with a single exotic animal, elderly herself, as her closest companion.

The lynx butts its head up against my legs.

“That’s a love gesture,” Barbara says.

The enormous cat does it again—two, three, four more times. I can feel the size and weight of her skull as she pushes me.

I’m aware that the affection she gives she can take away in a second. Read more…

Everything in Moderation, Including Moderation

I’ve been drinking more beer in the last three months than I have in the last fifteen years. Meaning, I’ve been drinking beer at all. I gave it up because it made me sluggish, but I’ve fallen back in love with beer’s flavor. Is this an unhealthy development?

In his 2014 Pacific Standard article “The Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy,” Stanton Peele not only argues that moderate alcohol consumption protects you from cardiovascular disease and helps you live longer, he treats abstinence itself as an undeniable risk factor in heart disease and shortened life spans. “Well-informed Americans,” he says, “think that abstinence is better for them.” The reason: “…Americans’ addiction-phobia, which causes them to interpret any daily drinking as addictive.” A psychologist and addiction specialist by trade, he cites studies that show the positive effects moderate and even “excessive” drinking have on health and longevity. Peele traces this deep-seated cultural issue back to the temperance movement on through modern health care, where the U.S. public health establishment’s standard treatment of alcohol’s cardiovascular benefits is a resounding, systematic silence.

I read this the other night while pouring myself a pint. Maybe I should explore my motives for resuming drinking in case I’m unconsciously reaching for some delicious way to manage the increasing stress in my life. But in terms of volume consumed, there’s no issue. When I drink, I drink one beer. Too much alcohol disrupts my sleep, so I keep it between three and five beers a week. Most people laugh. Five a week? How about five a night! 

According to the Mayo Clinic, my weekly three-to-five fall within the moderate range, which the CDC lists as up to two drinks a day for a man, one for a women, with a drink defined as 12 ounces of beer and 5 ounces of wine. “When it comes to drinking alcohol,” the Mayo says, “the key is doing so only in moderation.” Peele encourages moderate consumption, as does Aaron E. Carroll’s recent The New York Times piece “Drink to Your Health (in Moderation), the Science Says,” which offers stats about how people who don’t drink have a higher death rate than those who drink moderately.

With so many articles giving conflicting information about the pros and cons of contentious foods ─ coffee is good for you, coffee is bad for you; dark chocolate helps your heart, too much fat harms it ─ it’s hard to figure out moderation. 

Moderation lies the core of American dietary thinking. “Everything in moderation,” goes the old line, meaning don’t binge, and don’t abstain, but do take it easy on the bad stuff. Between the two poles of asceticism and indulgence, moderation is about never giving up or fully giving in. It’s a reasonable approach: walk the rational temperate middle road to health. Moderation works well for those of us who want to limit something for physical or ethical reasons, like meat, dairy or dessert, but not abandon it entirely. Life without chocolate is no life at all, but you don’t want to suffer from too much of a good thing, despite what Mae West said. Another example, I’m a weekday vegetarian. I abstain from animal flesh Monday through Friday, and I indulge on Saturday and Sunday. The reason: I object to factory farming on ethical grounds, but I can’t afford to buy only small farm, humanely raised meat. But by abstaining five out of seven days I balance my values with my financial inability to fully live by them, and also accommodate my taste for certain foods, since I do love pork. The result: moderate intake of animal fats and cholesterol; more regular intake of vegetables, legumes and fruits; greatly reduced participation in an unethical farming system; and only moderate guilt about not being able to skirt that system entirely. This approach loosely fits within the Aristotelian idea of the golden mean, and maybe in Confucius’s Doctrine of the Mean.

If I wonder whether I should worry about my sudden return to beer, Peele says it’s because this sort of worried thinking is part of our distinctly American problem. As a nation, we’re ambivalent about alcohol. We see it as poison that’s healthy to avoid, yet we drink it at games and parties and dinner. So we binge, sober up, and wrestle with our urges and guilt, when more of us should be sipping responsibly like so many Europeans. Peele acknowledges that it’s moderate consumption which science has found to have the most health benefits. But in order to reap those benefits, Americans need to get over the idea that daily moderate drinking ─ meaning, a drink or two at night ─ is somehow unhealthy, or a sign of a mounting problem, and the health community needs to stop telling the public that seven drinks a week for women is healthy, but ten is excessive. Peele distinguishes himself from the standard “everything in moderation” ideology in favor of Oscar Wilde’s quip about “Everything in moderation, including moderation because, he says, “the evidence that abstinence from alcohol is a cause of heart disease and early death is irrefutable.” Alcohol’s “benefits are greatest if you drink moderately. But even drinking more than is ‘perfectly’ recommended, without displaying clinical symptoms of problem drinking or alcohol dependence (and these are not subtle), is generally better for you than drinking nothing.”

He isn’t talking about just drinking a few beers. He’s saying drink to live. I love it when science tells me what I want to hear.

***

Additional Reading:

“Drink to Your Health (in Moderation), the Science Says” (Aaron E. Carroll, The New York Times, Dec. 21, 2015)
“The Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy” (Stanton Peele, Pacific Standard, Aug. 12, 2014)