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19/05/2022

How fear, s*x and power shaped ancient mythology
The mythical goddesses who broke the rules of s*x and power – and manifested our worst anxieties. Daisy Dunn explores the fierce deities who were both revered and feared
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In the 1st Century, bathers in the city of Bath who suffered the ignominy of having their clothes stolen while they were enjoying a soak knew exactly who to call upon for help. The goddess Sulis, who presided over the hot baths, cold baths and glistening plunge pools of the Roman complex, was known principally for her ability to heal, but she also had a remarkable capacity for vengeance. More than 100 ancient curse tablets have been excavated from her spring, many of them featuring strong-worded pleas for the goddess to punish those who'd made off with other people's possessions. Thieves beware.

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Sulis is just one of a number of goddesses who feature in an ambitious new exhibition, Feminine Power, at the British Museum in London. Examining the prominence of female deities and figures of reverence from six continents across thousands of years, the show is as rich in scope as it is in divine faces. Sharing the gallery with Sulis, a local manifestation of the Roman goddess Minerva, is everyone from the Egyptian deity Sekhmet to the Hindu Kali, the Japanese Kannon and the Mexican Coatlicue.

04/05/2022

Where people 'surf' tubular clouds
Around September or October each year, Burketown in outback Australia becomes the scene for a remarkable and rare natural phenomenon: the Morning Glory.
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At the end of a very long road in Australia's far north, on a remote stretch of coastline along the isolated southern shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria, is Burketown (population 238). Caught between savannah and sea, beneath a big outback sky, the town is not on the road to anywhere: if you're in Burketown, you either took a wrong turn, or you really wanted to be here.

This is a land of climate extremes. Droughts scour the inland in the Dry (as the locals call the dry season), which runs from May to September or October. Sometime in October, perhaps November, the rains arrive. These are not light showers. Rain comes down in torrential sheets. Before the road here was paved, Burketown could be cut off for weeks. Even now, a big Wet can cause flooding that submerges an area the size of a small European country.

At the tail-end of the Dry, just before the transition into the Wet, Burketown becomes the scene for one of the most remarkable natural phenomena in Australia: the Morning Glory, an immense and rare formation of tube-shaped clouds that has long drawn curious crowds and dedicated storm chasers.

Forming out over the tropical seas of the Gulf at a point where two wind systems collide, the Morning Glory takes shape at night when onshore air cools and slips beneath layers of warm air. The result is a turbulent formation of cylindrical roll or wave clouds in fronts hundreds of kilometres long. Although this dramatic and photogenic weather event occasionally occurs elsewhere in the world, including the Gulf of Mexico, Burketown is the only place on Earth where it happens on a regular basis, thanks to a unique mix of geography and local climate systems.

When the Morning Glory appears, it's an astonishing, almost apocalyptic vision that well reflects the power of this remarkable weather system. "The Morning Glory moves so much air that it can even be picked up on a seismograph," said Ernie Camp, lifelong resident and mayor of Burketown for the past decade.

03/05/2022

Garbology: How to spot patterns in people's waste
Whether it's indulgent food choices, s*xual habits or North Korean secrets, the stuff that people throw away can reveal all, says Chris Baraniuk.
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Dangling over the pool of sewage, at the end of a mercifully long handle, was a small fishing net. The Baltimore city worker wielding this instrument angled it gently into the fetid muck and scooped from the surface a sought-after prize – one used condom.

In the late 1980s, around the height of the Aids epidemic in the US, a team of health experts wanted to monitor whether people were following advice to practise safe s*x. So they began counting the flushed condoms, which turned up at wastewater treatment plants. By early 1988, workers were finding between 200 and 400 every day.

"It's certainly not a very pleasant job, but it is important," one Aids surveillance supervisor from the local health department told the Associated Press at the time.

Officials in other countries have since used the same method. In 2006, sewage workers in Eswatini (previously known as Swaziland) estimated that condom use had increased 50%. They noted how the prophylactics were just the right size to get stuck in the second set of filters at water treatment facilities, thus allowing them to be counted. A boom in condom use was also noted in Zambia in 2015 when thousands of them clogged sewers in the capital.

One person's trash, even in its most nauseating forms, is another person's data. Garbage, be it flushed, discarded or recycled, carries a wealth of information about people's decisions and behaviours, which you often can't get anywhere else. Those who dare to sift through this human detritus are known as "garbologists", and their efforts have helped us understand everything from people's health and food choices to the workings of secretive political regimes.

There's something refreshingly straightforward about studying rubbish, says anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen at the University of Oslo. "It gives you a very direct and a very privileged window into people's actual way of life," he says.

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The term "garbology" was coined by a US writer and activist in the early 1970s, but it was the anthropologist William Rathje who took garbology to more scientific territory, a few years later. In a now-famous study called The Tucson Garbage Project, Rathje and his colleagues scoured landfills, excavating and categorising great piles of waste dumped by residents of Tucson, Arizona. He also compared the contents of consenting individuals' rubbish bins with what they said about their eating and drinking habits in questionnaires – only to find that people clearly downplayed the amount of junk food and alcohol that they consumed.

30/04/2022

Is America's best restaurant in Puerto Rico?
Rooted in the rural tradition of cocinaos (casual cookouts), Bacoa takes rustic whimsy and elevates it into culinary excellence and once-in-a-lifetime meals.
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In the wee hours of a debauched night at La Factoría, the world-renowned bar in the Old San Juan neighbourhood of the Puerto Rican capital, one of its owners, Leslie Cofresi, swung his arm around my neck in a half-hug, half-headlock. "Tomorrow," he said, "I will take you to real Puerto Rico. Be ready."

The following afternoon we bounced along dirt roads in his Jeep through the countryside's lush tropical hills and mountains for an hour before coming to a red-roofed farmhouse in a clearing by a pond. The restaurant, Bacoa, opened in August 2019; by October of that year, humanitarian chef José Andrés was already visiting and shooting a television show there with Spanish adventurer Jesús Calleja.

In January 2022, Lucas Sin, one of Food & Wine's best new chefs of 2021, took a $100 taxi from San Juan straight to a nearly four-hour dinner at Bacoa (then another $100 taxi back), describing the restaurant as "seriously one of the most special restaurants in America".

"That was my favourite meal in a long time – maybe the last two years – and certainly probably one of those meals I'm going to remember for the rest of my life, on par with insane technical achievements at fine-dining tasting menus," said Sin, also comparing Bacoa to New York's Blue Hill at Stone Barns, often cited as one of America's best restaurants.

26/04/2022

Maamoul: A sweet celebration for Christians and Muslims
Maamoul is made at the end of both Lent and Ramadan, leading up to Easter and Eid al Fitr. But this year, the biscuit is extra sweet as both religions enjoy it at the same time.
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This spring, along the ancient streets of the holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a sweet smell wafts through the air. Inside, people's homes are hives of activity as extended family members and neighbours come together to make a biscuit-like treat that's very special to both Muslims and Christians.

"You can't have Easter without maamoul because it brings the happiness," said Rawan Ghattas, a Christian from Bethlehem, who works with famed local chef Fadi Kattan.

Like Ghattas, Rawan Bazbazat, a Muslim art teacher and jewellery maker from Jerusalem, has been baking the sweet since she was a child with her mother. "On Eid al Fitr, we always have to make maamoul. We can't celebrate this holiday without it," Bazbazat said.

Maamoul is made from a dough of semolina and ghee (though butter can be used as a substitute) and flavoured with mahlab (crushed cherry seeds, which are found inside the pits) and mastic (also known as Arabic Gum), which is the resin from the acacia tree.

While the delicate shortcrust-style sweet melts in your mouth, its design adds even more decadence. Before baking, the dough is either stuffed with pistachios drizzled with rosewater, walnuts mixed with sugar and cinnamon, or dates that have been ground to a paste with a little oil or butter. As Anissa Helou, author of Feast Food of the Islamic World described it to me, "The date maamoul is like having a cream-filled biscuit, but less fluffy."

Each of the three flavours is then placed into its own specific wooden mould called a qalab, or formed by hand using a spiked tong called a malqat. The date maamoul traditionally has a circular shape with a flat top; the pistachio version is more like a pointy ellipse; while the walnut-flavoured biscuit is a smaller circle with a domed top.

25/04/2022

A symbol of liberty, the handspun textile khadi was celebrated by Gandhi. Now it is sought after again, writes Kalpana Sunder, as designers tap into its transformative power.
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Part of the strong textile tradition of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, khadi is the coarse, handspun and hand-woven material usually made from cotton yarn. The making of khadi (derived from the word khaddar) involves converting the fibre into yarn with spinning wheels, and then weaving the yarn into fabric using looms. Hand-spinning and weaving have been a part of the social and cultural life of India for centuries.

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During the Vedic period (1500 to 1100 BCE) , a spinning wheel was considered a precious wedding gift. Archaeological evidence of terracotta spindles, figurines wearing woven fabric and fragments of cotton cloth have been found in the ruins of the Indus Valley Civilisation. In the murals of the Ajanta Caves from the 5th Century, images of women spinning cotton yarn adorn the walls.

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