Dsendros

Seven bullets  – one in the dude’s leg – from the cops. He survived. Yes, Florida. Where else?

So what are you guys watching tonight? Pacific Rim?Red 2? Maybe watch The Act of Killing to really bum yourself out? Wrong. All wrong. You are watching the deliberations of the city council of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. The case this ad makes is just too compelling:

Conservatives are eager to blame Detroit's problems hazily on "Democrats," and in most respects I think that's wildly misleading. But I do think there's an important sense in which they're correct. American cities across the board suffer from a lack of partisan competition that undermines democratic accountability.

My view of this is heavily based on the work of George Mason University's David Schleicher, and I really encourage you to look at his research for a long version of the story. But the short version is that ordinary voters rely heavily on party affiliation as a heuristic when deciding who to vote for. If you move to a new place with same-day voter registration, then pay zero attention to local politics up to and including the names of your local member of Congress, then show up at the voting booth to vote in a House election you're in fact perfectly capable of making a well-informed decision about who to vote for. If you generally like legal abortions, equal rights for gays and lesbians, higher taxes, and more regulation of private businesses then you should vote for the Democrat. If you want tax cuts, abortion bans, and lax regulatory enforcement then you should vote for the Republican. You may have a hard time making up your mind because you feel cross-pressured (say you love tax hikes and abortion bans) but it's easy to know what politicians stand for even without knowing anything about them. In fact, thanks to things like the Hastert Rule it actually barely matters whether the specific individual you're voting for is totally orthodox or not. Partisanship makes life easy.

Shift to a big city, though, and you have a mess on your hands. There are very few religiously observant white Christians living in large American cities. So Democrats have an overwhelming electoral advantage. That means that oftentimes a Democratic primary is tantamount to the election or else you have a nonpartisan election, and either way there's no sound partisan heuristic you can use. Meanwhile, the set of issues that arise in municipal politics is totally different from federal politics. The federal government regulates air pollution and the banking sector, the city government regulates liquor licenses and food trucks. There are some areas of overlap (K-12 education, workplace safety) but huge areas of total divergence (national security, zoning) and lots of issues that people feel very strongly about (abortion, marriage rights) don't occur at all at the municipal level and fairly technical questions (how to conduct cost-benefit analysis for a proposed new streetcar) that people don't have strong opinions on loom very large.

The result is that you don't have a coherent ideological politics. Even when something weird happens like Michael Bloomberg spends $90 bazillion to serve 12 years as mayor of New York, the City Council doesn't organize into stable pro-Bloomberg and anti-Bloomberg factions. Voters tend to cleave by ethnicity rather than issues, because ethnicity provides the salient heuristic that partisanship provides in national politics. This lax and non-ideological electoral politics encourages governance to be transactional rather than principled. In the best case, that means you get a politics that overemphasizes constituent services and NIMBY complaints over growth. In the worst case, you get corruption and total incompetence. In the suburbs, the dysfunctionality of local government is checked by competition. Since any given city has a bunch of different suburbs, you can switch from one to the other in much the same way that you patronize the stores you like and not the stores you dislike. But central cities are essentially monopolists—there's usually just one, so insofar as some large minority of the metro area's population has an active preference for central city living, they'll be forced to put up with a lower quality of governance than suburbanites would tolerate. Of course even a monopolist has strong incentives to avoid total collapse, which is why Detroit's sad fate is both unusual and noteworthy. The typical large American city just trundles forward with a baseline level of misgovernment that, though unfortunate, doesn't reach crippling levels.

When the Rose & Crown signboard blew down
George the landlord remarked with a frown,
“On the one to replace it
We’ll have much more space be-
Tween Rose and & and & and Crown.”

– Leigh Mercer

anemocracy
n. a government by the wind

Frank Hurley took the photo above during Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911. “The figure is actually leaning on a constant 100 miles per hour wind while picking ice for culinary purposes.”

In 1955, James D. Crenshaw patented the greatest shower head in the history of human civilization.

Unless you’re hung over.

For her 1974 book Lighter Side of the Library, Janice Glover asked American librarians to recall titles requested by confused patrons, and the books they turned out to want:

Requested: Who Is Your Schoolmaster?
Book wanted: Hoosier Schoolmaster

Requested: Entombed With an Infant
Book wanted: In Tune With the Infinite

Requested: The Missing Hand
Book wanted: A Farewell to Arms

Requested: The Armored Chinaman
Book wanted: The Chink in the Armour

Requested: King of the Ants
Book wanted: Lord of the Flies

Requested: The Wooden Kid
Book wanted: Pinocchio

Requested: Five Pennies and the Sun
Book wanted: The Moon and Sixpence

And so on: From Here to Maternity; The Merchant of Venus; “Allergy in a Country Churchyard”; My Heart Is Wounded, They Buried My Knee. One inspired library staff finally sent a student home with Homer’s Iliad; he had come in asking for Homeless Idiot.

A reader writes:

I’ve been following this thread and I have to wonder: I’m a straight guy who is dying to have sex with a beautiful, 100% passable, pre-op transsexual. What in the bloody blue hell does that make me??? I’d love to know if there’s a term (or a “letter”) for me!

Another:

I am a bisexual male who has been completely comfortable with his sexuality for over 25 years. I exist, I am real, and I happily have sex with both men and women – sometimes separately, sometimes together. My experiences with each gender are very different, as is my role in each encounter. I would not be complete without both of them. I am not monogamous; I am not gay; I am not straight. In fact, my most satisfying sexual encounters have been with people who don’t identify as either male or female. These transgender people don’t fit within the binary, and explode the whole notion of being attracted to a single sex.

Another:

Argh! I both love and hate this discussion. Human sexuality is so wonderfully fluid. And all the pronouncements about whether there are true this or true that just drives me nuts!

For the record, I’ve long identified as a gay-identified bisexual (despite my occasional forays, I’m part of the gay community). I love having sex with women even if it’s not frequent. And as an HIV+ person, I find the opportunities more difficult given that:

1) there are more gay men with HIV expanding my horizons and 2) I prefer all-out sex that is stymied by either some women’s rejection of sex as fun or my own coding of women as not to be purely sexualized (I’m from the South and our coding of gender roles was strong). I recently dated a guy who is bisexual and had an easier time having sex with women but is dating men exclusively right now to get better at it. And I have recently been having sex with and dating a good many FTMs who identify as gay men. The crux of the matter is that I like, um, pussy. And I also like masculine energy – at least that part that sort of is animalistic and allows us to nearly devour each other.

What does that make me? A freak. And I’m quite fine with that.

Another:

What I’d like to reinforce from all of the comments about bisexuals is that sexuality is complicated, and complex. Sexuality is different from gender, yet we define it based on gender. I know I myself can’t find a label, but use bisexual because it’s the most encompassing.

I’m a male, but I tend to be attracted to women. More specifically, I tend to be attracted to boyish-looking women. Small breasts, small hips, short hair. Sometimes they’re butch, sometimes they’re trans men. And then there are the men I find attractive, which I can’t even define well. But I would say, as a whole, that it tends to be people that are not typically masculine or feminine, are gender-bending, or are non-gendered or androgynous.

I don’t know the term for this. I also know that butch women have been fetishized and I want to be aware of that. But at the end of the day, there’s my broad level “type”, and then there’s the individual who I get to know and have a relationship with. I call this being bisexual.

Another:

My husband and I are bisexuals, but we identify as gay. We have been together for over 20 years and are less promiscuous then we used to be, but in our younger days we did have several threesomes with female friends.  While I find women attractive, I have a hard time forming emotional bonds with them. I am also attracted to individuals that defy gender stereotypes, particularly feminine men and masculine women.

Another:

It goes to show the connection to your audience that I’m writing these thoughts down for the first time. I’ve been married for over 15 years and yet here I share them with you.

I’m 35 years old and male. My earliest memory of an erection was seeing Christie Brinkley in Vacation on home video. That led to finding guy-on-girl porn in my Dad’s extensive video and magazine collection. All through growing up, and looking back, my infatuation was with girls. I lost my virginity at 16, had only a few partners, then met my wife at 20 and have been monogamous ever since.

In the last few years I have found myself increasingly intrigued by anal play. But here’s the rub: I feel a longing in my prostate for stimulation. Over the last few years that need has started to grow more intense. Going back even five years I never had these feelings. The more I explore the area more convinced am that the biology is asking for things I haven’t felt since the first time I found masturbation. I suppose toys are the next step and asking my wife for a good hard pegging. The problem is that approach feels weird in a way that anal sex with a man does not. Toys have never been fun. I want human contact.

So am I gay? I love the thought of multiple female partners which my wife and I have discussed. I can’t say I’ve ever been infatuated with a guy or would love a guy. But would I fool around with a guy in a threesome with my wife? I don’t see any reason why not. And I expect we’ll soon be talking about that. If I really enjoy that experience, what does it make me? Is a biological urge for stimulation reducible to identity? What if my prostate is simply enlarging with age and so now I’m now just more aware of the pleasure it can lead to.

Honestly, I don’t see why I need an identity here. I am happily married. And to this point our sex life has been more than I need. But here I am with biological urges that my wife doesn’t have the equipment to satisfy. Going outside the marriage for that satisfaction seems like an exploration in the same way that different drugs, foods or travel might be. I just don’t see the sexual categories as adding anything of substance for my life.

Isn’t it enough that we’re sexual beings and in a way in which morality doesn’t apply among consenting adults?

Patented in 1986, Waldemar Anguita’s “greenhouse helmet” is lined with live plants to provide oxygen for its wearer:

Plants, each within a pot, are placed within the dome. The carbon dioxide of the ambient air will mix with carbon dioxide breathed out by the person to be used by the plants to produce oxygen to be breathed in by the person.

Strangely, Anguita never explains why a person might want to do this.

A reader writes:

The news from Afghanistan is hardly the first time the United States has scrapped military hardware on an industrial level. After World War II, a similar (and far more aggressive) scrapping took place. My own grandfather was in the Merchant Marine in August 1945, bound for the Philippines with a ship full of M4 Sherman tanks destined for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. When the ship learned of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the unconditional surrender, they were ordered to dump the tanks into the ocean and head home. Because it was cheaper than transporting them to the Philippines.

Is the waste we’re seeing stupid and sad and more than a little ridiculous? Yes. But it’s not especially indicative of America’s crumbling power.

Another has a bit of good news:

​I have some knowledge of the logistics of getting some of the equipment back from Afghanistan (is the vague enough for you?). They’ve cancelled lunch at a lot of facilities and forward operating bases. There are so many MREs floating around the country and the best way to get rid of them is in American stomaches. It helps that it saves money on the cafeteria contract.

Another circles back to the Second World War:

It’s interesting that the US is going to the expense of actually destroying the excess equipment.  There are other options.  In WWII, we established a huge base on Santo Island in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu).  At the end of the war they tried to sell the excess equipment to the British and French colonial authorities for ten cents on the dollar. But they refused, figuring they would get it for free when we left it there. Rather than do that, the US built a jetty and just dropped everything off the end into fairly shallow water.  It’s now a famous scuba site called “Million Dollar Point” that has probably made more money for the locals in tourism than the value of the equipment.  It’s eerie seeing all the jeeps, trucks, etc., rusting away 100’ underwater.

Photos here. Update from a reader:

One of those Google image results was not of military equipment. Well, not standard issue, anyhow.

Thanks for the laugh.

Jordan Weissman responds to claims that unpaid internships uniquely advantage the rich:

If anything, poor and middle class students are extra likely to get stuck in unpaid internships. Rich kids, by and large, seem to prefer collecting a paycheck. Such were the findings of a fascinating 2010 study conducted for Intern Bridge, a consulting firm that specializes in college recruiting, and one of the few major sources of data on the internship market. After analyzing survey responses from thousands of college students, the paper concluded: “Our findings do not support the common contention that students from the wealthiest families have greater access to unpaid internships, even among most for profit companies. Low income students have a much higher level of participation in unpaid internships than students from high income families.” …

There were a few important exceptions to these trends:

namely, Hollywood, Wall Street and, probably, a good chunk of New York Media. Wealthy unpaid interns, the study reported, tended to cluster in finance, the arts and entertainment. Less wealthy ones tended to work in transportation, health, and manufacturing. So glamour industries may indeed be shutting out the poor. But it’s an open question whether that’s because the opportunities often require working unpaid full time, or if it’s because wealthier students are just more likely to compete for them.

In a separate piece, Weissman picks apart the myth that internships are justified because they lead to better jobs:

For three years, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked graduating seniors if they’ve received a job offer and if they’ve ever had either a paid or unpaid internship. And for three years, it’s reached the same conclusion: Unpaid internships don’t seem to give college kids much of a leg up when it comes time to look for employment.

I've been in a long and winding multi-front Twitter exchange over the question of Senator Rand Paul and race. The specific impetus was my assertion that Paul's opinion that democracy "gave us Jim Crow" relates to his white supremacist inclinations. Inclinations that I think are evidenced by, for example, his previous stated opposition to key provisions of the Civil Rights Act. That prompted a debate with some competing strands of conservative punditry, with Charles C.W. Cook taking the view that Paul is right and the Civil Rights Act is bad while David Freddoso thinks that the Civil Rights Act is good but associating Civil Rights Act opponents with racism is slander.

So to return to the beginning, there's no plausible meaning of "democracy" in which democracy gave us Jim Crow.

Even if you take democracy to relatively narrowly mean majoritarian voting procedures this doesn't work. In the periods between the Civil War and World War II, African-Americans were a majority in quite a few southern states and would have been a large—and potentially decisive—voting bloc in the others. If, that is, they were allowed to vote. But instead of voting, African-Americans were disenfranchised via a systematic campaign of terrorist violence. The same campaign that gave us the Jim Crow social system. The point of the Civil Rights Act, including its provisions regulating private businesses, was to smash that social system. And it succeeded. It succeeded enormously. The amazing thing about retrospective opposition to the Civil Rights Act is that we know that it worked. It didn't lead to social and economic cataclism. In fact, the American south has done quite a bit better since the smashing of white supremacy than it was doing previously.

I think the Cook/Paul view that we should somehow regret this and pretend that everything would have worked itself out on its own is bizarre.

But it's not only bizarre. It seems to me that it necessarily has to stem from not taking the interests and history of African-Americans seriously to even be comprehensible. The "respectable" thing to say about people like Paul or the late Barry Goldwater, I suppose, is simply that they are ideologues rather than people driven by some kind of racial animosity. But I think it's selling free market ideology short to suggest that government regulations meant to undue the outcome of a century long campaign of terrorist violence is just a straightforward consequence of a general support for free enterprise. You need to combine that ideology with a sincere indifference to black people's welfare to reach that conclusion, just as you need to combine Paul's ideology with genuine indifference to the history of race in America to reach Paul's conclusion about democracy's relationship to Jim Crow.

I like Greg Mankiw. He's a great teacher who has produced excellent macroeconomic research. I admire his Pigouvian gas tax proposal. But he has a huge blind spot when it comes to inequality.

Mankiw was an economic adviser to Mitt Romney, whose party platform and vice presidential candidate endorsed deep cuts in Pell Grants, Medicaid, nutrition and housing assistance, and other programs that benefit poor and low-income Americans. These proposed cuts were matched by deep tax cuts at the top of the income distribution.

In his latest essay, "Defending the one percent," Mankiw attempts to explain the philosophical underpinnings for such policies. Mankiw joins the tradition of grant economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Amartya Sen who have pondered inequality. Yet I'm puzzled by Mankiw's argument, which combines a breezy tone with extreme disdain for "the left," an ecumenical term he uses to describe everyone from President Obama to French President Francois Hollande to Joseph Stiglitz and the Occupy movement. At one point, Mankiw writes: "the same logic of social insurance that justifies income redistribution similarly justifies government-mandated kidney donation."

One passage is particularly puzzling:

[T] he educational and career opportunities available to children of the top 1 percent are, I believe, not very different from those available to the middle class. My view here is shaped by personal experience. I was raised in a middle-class family; neither of my parents were college graduates. My own children are being raised by parents with both more money and more education. Yet I do not see my children as having significantly better opportunities than I had at their age.

It's not surprising that a bright kid from a modest background who became a Harvard professor holds sunny views of American meritocracy. I wouldn't dismiss the reality of that. Yet almost by definition, most people have different experiences.

I'm surprised that someone of Mankiw's accomplishment and empirical skill would retreat to anecdata when pertinent data are so widely available. One study examined intergenerational wealth mobility between 1979 and 2000. A child in the top wealth quintile had a 55 percent chance of remaining in the top 20 percent, and only an 11 percent chance of falling into the bottom 40 percent. The comparable mobility figures for children in the middle quintile were 13 percent and 31 percent. More recent data on the top 1 percent surely telegraph more extreme differences in life chances.

Mankiw's personal experience seems not to include the lives of his own privileged students. The "Harvard Crimson" reports that 45.6 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from families with annual incomes exceeding $200,000, the top 3.8 percent of the American income distribution. Less than 18 percent of Harvard students have family incomes in the bottom 60 percent of the American income distribution.

Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose analyzed family background data regarding students who attended the top 146 colleges in the United States. Seventy-four percent of students come from the top quartile of family socioeconomic status. Only 10 percent came from the bottom half of the distribution. A mountain of evidence indicates that the top 1 percent enjoy many large advantages in gaining entry to the most selective institutions of higher education. Legacy admissions are only the most obvious non-meritocratic edge enjoyed by the most advantaged.

And that's merely the inequality among kids with strong academic skills. Many youths I encounter in violence prevention and public health work face learning disabilities, ADHD, substance abuse and mental health concerns. Lucrative industries of costly test prep services, tutoring, psychological supports, attorneys, learning consultants and treatment programs exist to support affluent children who face such difficulties. Exclusive school districts such as Bethesda, Md., acquire reputations for excellent resources, too. Many youths greatly benefit from such services and resources. Some attend colleges such as Landmark that cater to the learning-disabilities market. Landmark's annual tuition is $49,500.

The median annual family income in the United States is $62,272. Not many people with this typical level of resources can access such costly forms of help. Some kids will thrive anyway or will find wonderful people to help. Many will quietly fail along the way.

Mankiw's essay might have been more useful had he stuck to a more interesting set of questions:

To the extent that our society deviates from the ideal of equality of opportunity, it is probably best to focus our attention on the left tail of the income distribution rather than on the right tail. Poverty entails a variety of socioeconomic maladies, and it is easy to believe that children raised in such circumstances do not receive the right investments in human capital.

Outside the pages of "Anarchy, State, and Atopia," the most bitter political divisions in America focus on related questions: What share of America's national resources should be used to nurture the life chances and current consumption of the bottom-third of the income distribution? To what extent should taxes at the top end of the distribution be used to pay for that?

President Obama has proposed few measures designed to alter the fundamental income distribution of the United States. With one or two exceptions, he has conspicuously avoided populist Occupy rhetoric. He does favor mildly liberal policies that channel resources to poor and slightly less-poor Americans.

I wish I could have read Mankiw's explanation of how such Republican policies would actually advance equal opportunity for low-income Americans. Unfortunately, the word "poverty" reappeared precisely once, on the second-to-last page, when Mankiw offhandledly comments:

Transfer payments to the poor have a role as well, because fighting poverty can be viewed as a public good (Thurow 1971).

As Mankiw explains elsewhere: "Government-run antipoverty programs solve the free-rider problem among the altruistic well-to-do." Nowhere in sight is the idea that justice or fairness might require something more, or that the preferences of poor people themselves have independent weight, independent of the desires of their economic betters.

Mankiw instead trumpets what he calls the "just deserts" perspective:

According to this view, people should receive compensation congruent with their contributions. If the economy were described by a classical competitive equilibrium without any externalities or public goods, then every individual would earn the value of his or her own marginal product, and there would be no need for government to alter the resulting income distribution.

Mankiw defends a sanguine view of the top 1 percent, arguing that their outsized compensation mainly reflects their outsized productive contributions. I'm less convinced, but that's only one concern. Why should people's market wages so strongly determine what they deserve to have in life?

Productivity matters, but other things matter, too. On a good day, my brother-in-law earns $10 putting soap pads into boxes at a sheltered workshop. His just deserts reside in his claim to equal, dignified citizenship, not his meager ability to produce goods and services.

Mankiw expresses a decidedly narrow view of the mutual obligations that shape American democracy:

A third argument that the left uses to advocate greater taxation of those with higher incomes is that the rich benefit from the physical, legal, and social infrastructure that government provides. As one prominent example, President Obama (2012) said in a speech, "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. The point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

[H]igher taxation is being justified by the claim that the rich achieved their wealth in large measure because of the goods and services the government provides and therefore have a responsibility to finance those goods and services.

This line of argument raises the empirical question of how large the benefit of government infrastructure is. As I pointed out earlier, the average person in the top 1 percent pays more than a quarter of income in federal taxes, and about a third if state and local taxes are included. Why isn't that enough to compensate for the value of government infrastructure?

Mankiw misconstrues the president's real argument. Sure, the affluent disproportionately benefit from government and should pay more, but the point goes beyond infrastructure. It's about what we owe each other given our differing roles and resources in a prosperous, interconnected society.

One night, my car died on the highway. A tow truck arrived, and I chatted with the driver. He drives I-94 all night long, fixing flats, providing jump-starts and tows. That's hard work, but there's a large labor pool available for it. He supports his fianc and child on $31,000 a year. I believe it's presumptuous to believe that Greg Mankiw and I make fundamentally greater contributions merely because we hold more lucrative jobs. One might ask why two professors should have health insurance and he doesn't, why our kids should attend vastly superior schools. "It's your just deserts" is no compelling response.

I pay a quarter of my income in federal taxes, while that truck driver is in the 47 percent. My taxes help provide his child with subsidized lunches and preschool. I help provide his family with health insurance. That's as it should be. I still get a very good deal. He had my back. I should have his.

Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross professor at the School of Social Service Administration and co-director of the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago. He is a nonresident fellow of the Century Foundation.

In February 2012, the caretakers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were absolutely sure that the federal government would never recoup the $188 billion it spent to take them over. "The Enterprises' losses are of such magnitude that the companies cannot repay taxpayers in any foreseeable scenario," asserted the Federal Housing Finance Agency's strategic plan.

But then, the housing market came roaring back, and Fannie Mae was able to reverse a write-down of a pile of tax assets, sending money pouring into the Treasury. Now, Hamilton Place Strategies predicts that the agencies will be all paid up by the end of next year, before starting to generate surpluses.

"We think it's a pretty big deal," says HPS' director of research Patrick Sims, "and that Treasury would want to announce it." Like it did with the Troubled Asset Relief Program (though those calculations are disputed).

Maybe by 2014, we'll even have found a better housing system to replace them.

Kingdom Hearts.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0064607/

On This Day in Pittsburgh History: June 17, 1973

Sponsored by Gay Alternatives Pittsburgh, the city holds its first Gay Pride Week as 150 people march from Downtown to Schenley Park. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

For a great read, this dissertation discusses social movements in Pittsburgh from 1960 to 1980, including the origins of Pride Week.

This question originally appeared on Quora.

Answer by Cristina Hartmann:

I attended Phillips Academy from 2001 to 2003 for my last two years of high school. It was at Andover where I learned that luck isn't evenly distributed.

I'm not what you'd imagine a typical boarding school student to be. I didn't even know that schools like Andover, Milton, and Exeter existed until the year before. My parents are teachers, and I ended up using scholarship money to go. I come from immigrant stock, nary a drop of blue blood to be seen. A number of my childhood friends barely finished college (if at all) and hover above the poverty line.

Not only was I a hick from semi-rural upstate New York, but I was a lazy one. I was a good student, but I wasn't at the top of my class. My winning studying technique was to watch TV with a book open on my lap, deigning to study during commerical breaks. At my previous high school, transcripts only showed the average of the quarters' grades and finals. My strategy was to slack off for the first two or three quarters, getting B's and the ocassional C, then working hard to get A-pluses on the final and the final quarter. The result was a pretty decent honors transcript with mostly A's and A-minuses.

I'm still surprised Andover even let me stand on the Knoll, let alone allowed me to attend.

Moreover, as far as I know, I am the first (and only) deaf student to attend Phillips Academy. Legally, Andover wasn't required to provide me with any services, being a private institution. Andover, however, provided the best services that I've ever gotten anywhere. I got two sign langauge interperters. Two. At most schools, I had to fight for a single mediocre interpreter. At Andover, they handed over two excellent interpreters without a blink. Money wasn't an issue.

After an inauspicious first day (September 11th, 2001), I encountered an entirely new world at Phillips Academy. It wasn't a bad world, but it was certainly different than my old world of ordinary folks.

During my first month there, I was walking along a hallway in the gym, peering into the window that oversaw the pool. I saw some girls in the pool flinging a ball to each other, wearing funny swim caps that went over their ears and had straps under their chins. I pointed at the girls and asked, "What is this?" One of my dormmates responded, "That's water polo." I answered, "Wait, there aren't any horses in water polo?" Yes, I thought that water polo was an aquatic version of polo that Prince Charles plays. Over the next two years, I also learned about crew, $100 umbrellas, and the skiing in the Swiss Alps (not from personal experience).

Don't get me wrong, not everyone at Andover came from money. One of my friends was on a full scholarship (Andover admissions is need-blind) and had to go to a state school because she couldn't afford to go to a private university without a full ride. Andover is a lot more diverse (racially, socioeconomically, and geographically speaking) than you'd expect, but there are certainly people from old money as well as no money. At Andover, it was oftentimes hard to tell the difference between the two.

Cultural shocks aside, Andover expected far more of me than any of my previous schools had. For the first time in my life, I had to study and study hard. It's not just that the material is harder (it is), but that you're measured by a bigger and fancier yardstick. Your peers are smart and driven, high performers since the age of 5. You swim with them or you don't. (I, however, recommend that you don't try to swim with the student who went to the Olympics at 13.) For someone like me, it was a wonderful and much-needed kick in the seat of the pants.

Not only did Andover have dedicated buildings for subject areas (plus its own indoor track and pool), but it also had a course offering rivaling a small college's. If you were a math genius (I wasn't), you could take college-level linear algebra classes. If you were an English whiz, you could take a class dedicated entirely to Jane Austen novels. The classes and teachers were incredibly flexible in how they taught. Andover was the first place that rewarded me for my "creative" way of expressing myself in writing. You had to attend Saturday classes once a month as payment, or as revenge, depending on how you looked at it.

Despite the fact that blue-blood money matters less and less in today's world, there's something empowering about knowing that great men and women once sat where you're sitting. It fills you with confidence that the world is yours for the taking. That confidence brings you luck and opportunities.

Plus, I knew at least a few of my classmates would make it to high places. It's a surreal feeling to know that you could be rubbing elbows with future CEOs and United States presidents. It's not just future potential; you also get to meet some pretty high-up folks at Andover. In my two short years there, I met George H.W. Bush, Desmond Tutu, and Peter Jennings, among others. Being surrounded by great men and women makes you want to be great too.

For many, Andover was just the start of a string of prestigious insitutions. When the college admissons season rolled by, everyone knew where people got in (and didn't). You see, the mailroom is a social centerpoint, one of the few places where students could just hang out. Everyone could see a fat (or skinny) envelope you took out of your mailbox. I even got a few comments about why I went to Cornell over my other options (some of which were more highly ranked and respected).

At our graduation, we didn't wear a cap and gown. Instead, the girls wore white dresses and boys wore blue blazers with khakis with bagpipes blasting as we walked. How delightfully preppy is that? It was pretty damn picturesque, which is more than I can say of most high school graduations.

After Andover, I've gotten mixed reactions, ranging from "Uh? What's a boarding school?" to "Poor you, your parents must've hated you" to "Wow, fancy-pants!"

It's the Harvard Syndrome to a lesser extent. People who know what Andover is will reassess you upon finding out your pedigree. You either rise or fall in their estimation. Some will assume that you're a terrible snob; others will assume that you're a rich genius. People, including yourself, also expect more of you. People who attend top boarding schools aren't supposed to fail. They're supposed to become presidents or something.

Ten years after graduating, I look back on my time at Andover with great fondness. It was at Andover where I discovered that I could run with the big boys. I grew more confident about my own abilities, enabling me to take calculated risks and to follow my own dreams. For that, I owe the admissions committee at Andover an eternal thanks.

...


Answer by Eva Glasrud:

I attended Phillips Exeter Academy from 2001-2005.

I did not know when I applied—nor, indeed, until I was on the bus from the Boston Airport to PEA—about the  8 a.m.-6 p.m. class schedule. I don't think I even really understood about Saturday classes, either. So that was a bit of a surprise.

But once classes started, I didn't really mind either of those things. Classes were awesome. We weren't lectured at. We weren't expected to spend hours memorizing facts and completing busywork. Classes were about thinking and communicating—and what could be more important than that? Everything was discussion-based, and we were expected to learn as much from our classmates as from our teacher.

And I think this is one of the major ways in which elite schools differ from honors programs in public schools. A lot of "honors programs" are the same as the normal program ... you just read the books twice as fast. This is not an engaging way to learn. This doesn't teach you how to think—just speed read and memorize.

Part of the problem is that most teachers aren't trained to work with gifted youth. And most public schools don't have the resources to provide the richest possible experience to them.

But top boarding schools tend to have experienced teachers, large endowments, and generous alumni. The year I started at Exeter, a brand new, $40 million science building opened. In it, we had an aquarium, touch pools, a humpback whale skeleton, and all kinds of lasers and electronics and chemicals and gadgets to make learning awesome.

Our campus also featured the world's largest secondary school library, with over 100,000 volumes. If, somehow, the book/movie/journal you needed wasn't there, you'd just tell the librarians, and they'd order it for you. We had a nutritionist, free and confidential mental health services, a wonderful music program, and about a billion languages to choose from. These are opportunities that are hard to come by elsewhere.

In spite of all that, one of the best and most beloved resources is the classmates. Think of it this way. There are a ton of really bright 13-year-olds in the world. And a lot of them end up going to college and doing great things.

But how many of those kids are so driven and so excited about learning that they can't wait until they're 18 to begin their journey? That they take the SSATs, get 4-5 teacher recommendations, fill out a very comprehensive application, submit their transcripts, and attend either an on-campus or alumni interview? Because they want a bigger challenge? When they're 13?

They are some of the most intriguing and least complacent people I've ever met—and that's awesome. It's wonderful to be around peers who want everything. Especially in a world where so many people are passive recipients of life.

Your classmates inspire you, and you form really special bonds with them. You all start out in the same boat—you're there, at this school, 14 years old and (semi) on your own. You live together, study together, play sports together, and eat every meal together. You get up at 7:30 a.m. on Saturday to eat breakfast and go to Latin class together. You get really close, really fast.

It's a special kind of relationship I haven't really witnessed anywhere else. And yet, some of your favorite friendships are with your teachers—many of whom are qualified to teach at a college or university, but who chose, instead, to work closely with a special group of kids at a truly magical place.

In the old days, they used to say, "Exeter is not a warm nest." But things have changed—Exeter is a very warm nest. If you ever need help on an assignment, your dorm is full of older students who have taken the class and can point you in the right direction. If you do badly on a test, the teacher will invite you to breakfast in her home to bring you up to speed and talk about what you can do differently next time.

As recently as 20 years ago, many boarding schools didn't have as much Internet as they do now. They had one phone per dorm, and students would call home once a week. But today, there is Internet in every building. There is one phone line per person per dorm room (in addition to the cell phones almost every student carries). It's very cheap and easy to stay in touch with your family—and even if it weren't, you'd probably be too busy to miss them, anyway.

Finally, there is a common misconception that people who go to boarding school are rich snobs. This is not so. Apparently money used to be big, and need-based scholarships used to be stigmatizing. But today, most of the top schools are either need blind, or offer generous financial aid packages to their middle- and low-income students. When I went to Exeter, something like 35 percent of us were on some form of financial aid. Today, that number is closer to 50 percent.

In fact, Phillips Exeter Academy is free to those with need. As of 2007, any student whose family makes $75,000 or less attends the academy for FREE. (Normal tuition, room, board and mandatory fees total about $46,900/year.) Moreover, the admissions office spends a lot of time and money recruiting students from rural and inner city areas. This all makes Exeter a more diverse experience.

I can't speak highly enough of my experience at Exeter. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.

Note: Although they had Saturday classes when I was a student, Saturday classes are no mas. I was sad to hear it: I think they really added to the Exeter experience.

More questions on boarding schools:

• How do parents think about the decision to send their kids to boarding school?
• What are the pros and cons of sending your kid to boarding school?
• Which are the best residential prep schools in the world?

If you thought that recent good news about the federal budget deficit would calm elite clamoring for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the US Chamber of Commerce has other news for you. Today Bruce Josten, their executive VP for government affairs, delivered a speech and launched a new initiative around the urgent need to cut these programs.

The basic issue, as the Chamber sees it, is that the improving deficit picture and waning political interest in a grand bargain requires them to double-down on this subject.

Even though I disagree with the Chamber I'm heartened in some ways to see them doing this since they're confirming what I've said about why new budget facts won't change the debate and why the powers that be will always hate Social Security. A perception of concern about budget deficits is a nice entry point into a politics that's built around cutting federal spending on retirement programs, but its people loafing around on the dole and not anything to do with the budget as such that drives the conflict. Simply put, from a business viewpoint there's nothing worse a government can do than pay people to not work. And yet that's the whole point of federal retirement programs! Their existence depresses savings and labor force participation.

It just happens to be a functional and popular way of ensuring that elderly people get to have nice lives. I'd say that's a worthy aim. The leaders of the American business community disagree. But it'd be great to have that debate out there in the open. There's no unique right answer to this question. Paul Krugman says "France has made it much too attractive to retire at 55" even while strongly opposing efforts to make it less attractive to retire at 65 in the USA. I'd say the fact that labor force participation among older people is increasing even during a terrible labor market is evidence that we don't need a change in this regard. But I do think it's a good debate to have, and it's an especially good debate to have outside the context of a farcical debate over an alleged short-term debt crisis.

This question originally appeared on Quora.

Answer by Sheila Christine Lee:

It can be really, really fun.

Background: I hated eating alone. I've gone out of my way to avoid eating alone, because it makes me feel awkward and extremely self-aware. I packed a salad spinner on a self-cation in case if I couldn't handle eating alone in a restaurant. By the end of that trip, I had eased myself into eating alone (mostly sitting at the bar), and it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.

But really fine-dining alone? Table for one at a dress-up restaurant? Crazy talk. I've been extremely lucky to enjoy a few incredible fine dining experiences with close friends, and attribute much of the meal's enjoyment to derive from the company surrounding me.

Until March 2013. I'd secured season tickets to Next, which means three trips out to Chicago this year. A friend said that while in town, I had to go to Grace, relative newcomer to the Chicago food scene and (finally!) Curtis Duffy's very own restaurant. I made a reservation for four on a Friday night.

The week before, four became three. Changed the reservation. I flew in the morning of, and that afternoon, my two friends had to last-minute cancel. I tried to find replacements, but to no avail. I called Grace, panicked and stressed, and the hostess graciously said that they would be happy to accommodate just me (She very thankfully didn't bring up the cancellation fee or hold me to it. I must have sounded awful on the phone.)

I dressed up, and headed over to Grace. I felt extremely self-conscious checking in, but no one reacted funnily or gave me strange looks. Here are some highlights/thoughts from my dinner:

Once seated at my table, my server asked me if I'd like any reading material; they had both the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. This made me feel much more at ease, and as the meal progressed, I got braver and stopped hiding behind the pages.

I usually hate having my phone out during meals, but since I was alone, I was prepared to take a few photos. When I drew out my phone, my server nearly immediately brought me a little pillow for my phone. Wow.

I looked around, and really, no one was staring at me. Especially at a restaurant like Grace, the point is to be enjoying your meal with your friends. Really, no one cares.

Maybe because I was alone, or because I had brought a notebook, about a quarter of the way into my meal, my server let me know that they decided to bring me a few extra dishes so that I could try a few more things, and to not worry about eating everything. I think this is when I realized there definitely can be some good to dining alone.

Since I didn't have any friends to chat with over dinner, I spent more time talking to the servers, mostly about the food. My server kept on prodding me to ask any and all questions I had, so I learned how to puff quinoa, the nuances of the carrot dish, and why the dessert was influenced by Filipino cuisine. If she didn't know the answer, she always vowed to find out, and would return a few minutes later with the answer.

(related to the above point) I think I enjoyed the food more. There were no distracting conversations away from what was right in front of me, so I really focused on the food.

At the end of the (13-course) meal, my server took me over to the kitchen, and introduced me to Curtis  (My server, to Curtis: "She finished everything." Curtis: "That was a lot of food.") Added bonus of dining alone: getting direct face-time with the chef, rather than being one of the group.

I left Grace with a chocolate bar and signed menu, floating. It was the best meal of my life. Pretty funny, because whenever people would ask me what are my favorite restaurants/meals, I'd always preface my answer with "well, a lot of this depends on who I enjoyed the meal with." Turns out my hands-down favorite meal was one I ate completely alone (Today, I called Grace to make a reservation for my next Chicago trip. I decided to make the reservation for one).

More questions on Dining:

• What is the protocol when another man sends a drink anonymously to your wife during dinner?
• What are the top things one should never do at a dinner party?
• What are some visual cues of a bad restaurant?

This question originally appeared on Quora.

Answer by Bill Lee, Author, Chinese Playground:

I was just 8 years old when I got into the gang life. It was around the time I witnessed my first shooting, which occurred during a rumble between Chinese and black gangs. I basically grew up living a double life. In college, while I was consistently on the dean's list, I was also engaged in the most violent Asian gang war in U.S. history, which took place in San Francisco Chinatown.

I started in low-level gangs, stealing, peddling goods (such as fireworks), getting into fights, gambling, and bullying other kids. I was primarily acting out and escaping from the non-stop trauma in my home. The streets were unsafe and unpredictable, but it still served as a sanctuary; essentially, the lesser of two evils. I learned early on that in the streets, it was dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest. If you turned the other cheek, it was open season on you. Forgiveness meant you were weak, afraid, or both.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the violence in my neighborhood escalated, and by 1970, a major gang war had erupted. Organized criminal groups (Tongs) were instigating it. At stake was the desire to control Chinatown's underworld, which entailed lucrative gambling, extortion, fireworks sales, politics, etc.. Kidnappings occurred, hit men were summoned from out of town, and the entire community felt terrorized. Gang membership required a different mindset. It was a life and death proposition. I avoided the hardcore gangs for years, but close friends were continually joining up, so the temptation was always there. I gradually began spending more time with this particular gang, and eventually became the driver for one of the gang's leaders.

We recruited kids beginning in middle school, offering quick cash, guns, cars, girls, money, muscle; essentially, a (false) sense of empowerment. Many guys were bullied and turned to gangs for protection and revenge. We helped them settle scores, but they soon realized that bullying occurred within the gang as well, often more brutal. By then, it was too late to get out. We encouraged kids to rebel against their parents. Most of us were already ashamed of our parents. As far as we were concerned, they were working "coolie" jobs and didn't have time for us.

When fellow gang members were attacked and killed, retaliation was not only justified—it was expected. And when your buddies are jumping someone, there was immense peer pressure to join in, whether you wanted to or not. There was also constant pressure to prove how tough you were.

A typical day (which usually began in the afternoon) in the gang would involve hanging out at arcades, pool halls, playing hoops, gambling, planning crimes, and lots of cruising the streets. With the stereo blasting, we drove around trying to look cool, keeping an eye out for rival gang members, marking our turf, intimidating (often assaulting for no reason) residents, and doing our best to stay a step ahead of the police. One day, two of our members were cruising in separate cars and communicating by CB (Citizens' Band) radio. They communicated over the air where they should hook up, inadvertently alerting our enemies, resulting in an ambush. At nightclubs, if the proprietor refused to pay protection money, we didn't always have to resort to violence. We simply occupied all the tables, planting one member per table, and scaring all the customers away. We cleared dance floors by simply walking up and staring down the patrons.

The gang I was involved with was responsible for the infamous San Francisco Golden Dragon Massacre. I was questioned by the police about the murders and nearly killed because I was suspected of being an informant. The police department formed a Gang Task Force, which subsequently cracked the case wide open, essentially breaking up the gang, which had grown to approximately 150 members. Shortly thereafter, I graduated from college (with honors) and decided that I was through with gangs, but it was easier said than done. Physically, I may have left the gang, but the gangster was still inside of me. I had virtually zero coping skills and was accustomed to resorting to threats and violence when conflicts arose. I entered the corporate world dressed in a business suit, but deep down I was nothing but a frightened, insecure little boy. I knew how to instill fear in the neighborhood, but not respect among my colleagues. The personal issues that led me to be a gangster were still unresolved. It's taken many years and hard lessons in order to transform my life, which is still a work in progress.

These days, I devote time to counseling at-risks and troubled youths, including gang members who are incarcerated. They remind me so much of myself when I was their age. I don't lecture or tell them what to do. I simply share my story.

More questions on gangs:

• Why can't the government declare war on street gangs and eliminate them once and for all?
• How can a teenage boy or young man get out of a street gang?
• In the feud between the Crips and Bloods, is one side winning?

This question originally appeared on Quora.

Answer by Trini Lopez, introvert turned extrovert:

I used to be very awkward and anti-social, but those who know me now refuse to believe it. I was that kid in middle school with sweatpants and bifocals who got picked last at every sporting activity and had no friends to speak of. Now in my 30s, I have a full and healthy social life, many close friends, and am able to sustain long-term and meaningful relationships with women. I have worked hard on becoming the person that I want to be. This is how I did it.

1. Have a deep desire to connect with people
2. Take risks
3. Observe, listen, and adjust
4. Don't get discouraged

1. Have a deep desire to connect with people
I was incredibly awkward, got tormented in middle school (and high school), and didn't have a girlfriend until my twenties. But I really wanted to connect with people. I wanted them to like me, and I wanted to have deep meaningful relationships all around me. This was the driving force of my transformation, and without that I wouldn't have gotten very far.

I am assuming from the question that you have such a desire, but it's important to not to take that as a given. Why do you want to be a social person? Is it because you truly want to connect with other people, or because everyone else in your family is social and you feel like the black sheep? Being a social person is not intrinsically better than being an non-social person. Everyone is different. See whether you truly want this for yourself, or whether you're trying to live up to the expectations of others. if it's the former, move on to step two. If it's the latter, work instead on embracing your own traits as valid and accepting yourself.

2. Take Risks
Unless you're a natural socialite (and even if you are), it can be scary to talk to new people. But in order to break through your own social limitations, you have to take risks. That means deliberately putting yourself in situations that you know make you uncomfortable. There is no magic potion (well, besides alcohol) that will make you comfortable without going through a gauntlet of situations that make you face and overcome your fear of social situations. You gotta go through it.

And start small. You don't have to start with a stand up comedy routine, just make conversation with the guy at Starbucks. Smile at someone while you're pumping gas. These little things will give you confidence and make larger social situations more accessible.

One thing that helped me in this regard was some advice an employer gave me once. I was working backstage at an outdoor concert and was asked to walk out on stage in front of 15,000 people to give water bottles to all the performers. I was terrified. I asked a barrage of questions:

"How should I do it? Do I just put it in front of them? Or hand it to them? Do I walk behind the speakers or in front?"

My boss looked at me and said, "Just go out there and pretend like you know what you're doing."

I've used that technique throughout my life whenever I'm doing something for the first time, and it's helped me immensely. In other words, pretend like you're the kind of person that is very social and comfortable with people. Play a character. This helps you break out of your own self-imposed social limitations by making you feel that you're actually someone else. And before you know it, your alternate character will become a part of who you really are.

3. Observe, listen, and adjust
Pay attention to how people behave with each other, how they respond to social cues, and how they respond to things you do and say. See how the words and actions of others make you feel. Who makes you feel comfortable? Why?

Pay attention to body language, both of others and your own. Watch humans interact as you would watch the nature channel. See what makes them laugh, what makes them feel comfortable, and what does the opposite. See how people's body language affects the way you perceive them, the way others do. People are incredibly perceptive, and our social dynamics are much more complex than they might seem. It has been said that only 7% of human communication is in the words we speak. The rest is body language, tone of voice, etc.  (Source: Body language)

Pay attention to everything. Then adjust accordingly. Rinse and repeat. Enjoy the process of learning and challenge yourself to pick up on social cues through observation, emulation, and most importantly, self-awareness.

4. Don't get discouraged
Jimi Hendrix didn't just pick up a guitar one day and play "Purple Haze." He picked up a guitar and at first, it sounded like crap. But he worked at it for many hours until he became one of the greatest to ever play.

You're going to make mistakes. That's a given. You're going to say or do something that is socially awkward, or makes others uncomfortable, and you will be mortified. But don't give up. It will take time, and you will get better. I still feel that deep down I'm a very awkward person, even though by almost all outward accounts, I'm extremely social and comfortable with people.  That's because it's a skill that I developed, and not something that necessarily comes naturally. Trust me, if I can do it, anyone can.

More questions on introverts and introversion:

• Why do introverts dislike phones?
• Are there inherent benefits to being an introvert?
• What does it feel like to be an introvert?

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There is a disturbing circularity to the story of "La Isla de la Munecas," aka "The Island of the Dolls."

More than 50 years ago, Don Julian Santana left his young wife and child and moved onto an island on Teshuilo Lake in the Xochimilco canals of Mexico, where he said a young girl had drowned. Most, including his relatives, agree that Don Julian Santana merely imagined the drowned girl. Regardless, Don Julian Santana devoted his life to honoring this lost soul in a peculiar way: He collected and hung up toy dolls by the hundreds. 

Santana began collecting lost dolls from the canals and the trash near his island home. He is also said to have traded produce he grew to locals for more dolls. Santana did not clean up the dolls or attempt to fix them, but rather strung them up with missing eyes and limbs, covered in dirt, and generally in whatever state he found them in. Even when dolls arrived in good shape, the wind and weather quickly turned them into cracked and distorted versions of themselves.

Despite the fact that most people found the isle frightening, Don Julian saw the dolls as beautiful protectors, and he welcomed visitors, whom he would show around, and charge a small fee for taking photos.

In 2001 Don Julian Santana was found drowned.

More photos of the La Isla De Las Munecas can be seen on Atlas Obscura.

More dolls from the uncanny valley:

• A Japanese company creates clone dolls that look almost, but not quite, human.
• The Vent Haven museum houses the world's only collection of ventriloquism dummies.
• Robert, a legendary "evil" doll has been haunting the citizens of Key West for over 100 years.

Brad Plumer spots new research suggesting that juvenile detention is counterproductive:

[T]o figure this out, Aizer and Doyle took a look at the juvenile court system in Chicago, Illinois. The researchers found that certain judges in the system were more likely to recommend detention than others — even for similar crimes. That is, it’s possible to identify stricter and more lenient judges. And, since youths were assigned to judges at random, this created a randomized trial of sorts.

What the researchers found was striking.

The kids who ended up incarcerated were 13 percentage points less likely to graduate high school and 22 percentage points more likely to end up back in prison as adults than the kids who went to court but were placed under, say, home monitoring instead. (This was after controlling for family background and so forth.) Juvenile detention appeared to be creating criminals, not stopping them.

The authors lay out a couple of reasons why this would be. Going to prison can obviously disrupt school and make it harder to get a job later on. But also, as other researchers have found, many people who end up behind bars end up making friends with other offenders and building “criminal capital.” Prison turns out to be excellent training for a life of crime.

Another troubling new report looks at sexual abuse in the country’s juvenile detention facilities:

Hundreds of teenagers are raped or sexually assaulted during their stays in the country’s juvenile detention facilities, and many of them are victimized repeatedly, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey. The teens are most often assaulted by staff members working at the facilities, and fully 20 percent of those victimized by the men and women charged with protecting and counseling them said they had been violated on more than 10 occasions. …

The Justice Department survey—covering both secure juvenile detention facilities and group homes, the less restrictive settings into which troubled youngsters are often ordered—involved more than 8,500 boys and girls. In all, 1,720 of those surveyed reported being sexually assaulted. Allen Beck, the author of the report, said that the rates of staff-on-inmate abuse among juveniles are “about three times higher than what we find in the adult arena.”

Atlas Obscura on Slate is a new travel blog. Like us on Facebook, Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter @atlasobscura. Below is an excerpt from a forthcoming Atlas Obscura book.

The Mundaneum was, to put it mildly, an ambitious undertaking. Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine established the project in 1910 with the aim of compiling the entirety of human knowledge on 3-by-5 index cards. The collection was to be the centerpiece of a “world city” designed by Le Corbusier, a nucleus of knowledge that would inspire the world with its libraries, museums, and universities.

To address the daunting task of arranging bits of paper into a coherent compendium of world history, Otlet developed a system called Universal Decimal Classification. Over the next few decades, a growing staff created and cataloged more than 12 million cards summarizing the contents of books and periodicals. Having assembled this wealth of knowledge, Otlet began offering a fee-based research service. Queries came in by mail and telegraph from around the globe at the rate of 1,500 per year.

With the paper-based system becoming cumbersome by 1934, Otlet hoped to move onto another system: a mechanical data cache accessible via a global network of what he termed “electric telescopes.” To his dismay, the Belgian government had little enthusiasm for the idea. With World War II looming and priorities elsewhere, the Mundaneum moved to a smaller site, eventually ceasing operations after years of financial instability. The final blow came during the Nazi invasion of Belgium, when soldiers destroyed thousands of boxes filled with index cards, hanging Third Reich artwork in their stead.

Otlet died in 1944, his Mundaneum and World City mere memories. He is now regarded as one of the forefathers of information science—his vision of a globally searchable network of interlinked documents was a very early version of the World Wide Web. 

The remains of the Mundaneum—books, posters, planning documents, and drawers with original index cards—are now on display at the Musée Mundaneum in Mons. More photos of the Mundaneum can be seen on Atlas Obscura.

Unusual repositories of knowledge:

• Mormon Genealogical Archives, the largest repository of genealogical data in the world, kept in underground bunkers
• The Wooden Books of Padova University are bound in bark, and built from their subject matter
• The Morbid Anatomy Library, a quiet place  to research death

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The Atlantic Road, a 5.2-mile segment of County Road 64 in Norway, consists of several causeways, seven bridges, and four viewpoints to take in the ocean views. Known as Atlanterhavsveien in Norwegian, it is one of the most scenic routes in the world. 

The curvy road dips and arches over the brutal Norwegian Sea as it winds its way across an archipelago of tiny islands connecting the communes of Eide and Averoy. During construction, the road was subjected to 12 hurricanes. 

Driving along the Atlantic Road is like teetering on the edge of the sea. Waves crash over the pavement during storms. The road's rollar coaster feel, curvy bridges and phenomenal views have made it a favorite of road trippers and motorcyclists. It was also deemed a Cultural Heritage Site, and was awarded the title, "Norwegian Construction of the Century."

More photos of the Atlantic Ocean Road can be seen on Atlas Obscura.

Dangerous roads: 

• North Yungas Road, known as the death road of Bolivia
• A tunnel dug through the side of a mountain by hand provides convenient yet death-defying access to a small village in China.
• The North Carolina railroad trestle known as "the Can Opener" is a notorious big rig executioner.

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In 1784, French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée proposed building an enormous cenotaph for Isaac Newton, a cypress-fringed globe 500 feet high. The physicist’s sarcophagus would rest on a raised catafalque at the bottom of the sphere; by day light would enter through holes pierced in the globe, simulating starlight, and at night a lamp hung in the center would represent the sun.

“I want to situate Newton in the sky,” Boullée wrote. “Sublime mind! Vast and profound genius! Divine being! Newton! Accept the homage of my weak talents. … O Newton! … I conceive the idea of surrounding thee with thy discovery, and thus, somehow, surrounding thee with thyself.”

As far as I can tell, this is unrelated to Thomas Steele’s proposal to enshrine Newton’s house under a stone globe, which came 41 years later. Apparently Newton just inspired globes.