Category: Bazaar News

If you’ve lived in Texas (or are lucky enough to have a grandmother from Moravia) you may be familiar with kolaches, the Czech pastry made of yeasted dough and traditionally filled with apricot, prune, poppy seed, or sweet cheese. These delicious treats have a European heritage and a very American following deep in the heart of Texas—and lately, from coast to coast. Here are some facts for the kolache novice to nosh on.

The word kolache (pronounced ko-LAH-chee, and also spelled kolace, kolach, or kolacky) is from the Czech and Slovak word for wheel. Legend has it that long ago, in the Czech Republic (then the Austro-Hungarian Empire), a mother was trying to bake bread, but her daughter Libuše kept pestering her. In an effort to appease her, Maminka (mother) gave the girl a small ball of dough to play with. Libuše happily rolled and flattened her dough, then snuck a plum from the table, slipped it into the dough ball, and put the dough into the oven with Maminka’s bread. When Libuše’s father came home from the fields for a snack, he grabbed Libuše’s creation, bit into it, and was squirted with scalding plum juice. Crazy with pain, he began hopping around in circles. Libuše found it all very funny and cried out, “Tatinek je do kola!” (“Daddy is making a wheel!”). The “kola” inspired the kolache.

In 1987, the community of Prague, Nebraska celebrated its centennial by baking a cherry-filled kolache that weighed 2605 pounds and measured 15 feet in diameter.

The Kolache Festival in Prague, Oklahoma is held the first Saturday of each May and attracts 30,000 people to a town of 2500. Women in the community begin baking kolaches months in advance; it’s estimated that some 50,000 of the pastries are consumed during the festivities.

When Czech immigrants arrived in Texas in the mid- to late-19th century, they brought with them their culture—and their beloved pastry. The number of bakeries serving kolaches in Texas abound. While several towns claim to be The Kolache Capital of the state, the area that runs along Interstate 35 from Dallas to Austin boasts some of the most renowned kolache in Texas.

The Czech Stop in the small town of West, Texas is easily one of the most beloved kolache purveyors in the United States. This hot spot, opened in 1983 by former marine Bill Polk, made national news in 2013 when a fertilizer plant explosion rocked the small town of West and customers of the establishment raised over $200,000 for relief. It’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and ships daily in the winter months.  

There are two varieties available: Beef Sausage and Pork and Beef Sausage. These breakfast kolaches are filled with meat and are wrapped up in kolache dough. The meat technically makes them klobasniky, a Czech-by-way-of-Tex iteration that is wildly popular in kolache shops across Texas and beyond. (Regular kolaches only contain fruit.)

If you can’t get to Texas for a kolache, how about Brooklyn? The Brooklyn Kolache Company makes theirs from all natural, often organic, and locally-sourced ingredients. These kolaches have evolved beyond the classic and traditional to include a variety of modern fillings that include Pan de Coco; Chocolate Ganache; Spinach and Feta; and Sausage, Jalapeno, and Cheese. Their signature pastry, an Instagram favorite, is the King Cake. This Louisiana-style bun—made with cinnamon, butter, brown sugar, and sweet cream cheese—is all rolled up in kolache dough and topped with purple, green, and gold candied sugar for Mardi Gras. Republic Kolache and Bayou Bakery in Washington, D.C., take their King Cake one step further by inserting a baby figurine, per New Orleans tradition, into some of their pastry. Symbolically a good luck charm, finding one in your King Cake here entitles you to a free kolache.

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Willa Cather learned to make kolache from Annie Pavelka, her Czech neighbor in Nebraska. Pavelka was the inspiration for the eponymous character in My Antonia, a novel that immortalized the Czech immigrant experience on the American frontier. Cather is credited as saying, “If security could ever have a smell, it would be the fragrance of a warm Kolache.”

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The FX series gave a nod to kolaches in season 3’s penultimate episode. Are kolaches a clue for the viewer, or merely a subliminal ploy to make us hungry?

The Leaning Tower of Pisa may be the world’s greatest spot for a tourist photo (5 million people visit annually), but there’s a lot more to this centuries-old icon than lighthearted images of your friends and family “holding up” the tower. Here’s everything you need to know about Italy’s most beloved architectural accident.

Construction on a campanile, or bell tower, to accompany the public cathedral in the Italian riverside city of Pisa broke ground in August 1173. By 1178, workers had made it to the third story of the structure, which was already tilting slightly to the north. Military conflicts with other Italian states soon halted progress on the tower, which did not resume until 1272. This time, construction only remained underway for 12 years before another war again stopped the work. A final wave of construction picked up again in the early 14th century, concluding with the installation of a bell chamber in 1372.

While some architectural follies are the product of unforeseeable bouts of bad luck, the Leaning Tower of Pisa’s signature tilt could have been avoided with better planning. A shallow foundation and the soft ground of Pisa—composed of sand, clay, and deposits from the Tuscan rivers Arno and Serchio—were too unstable to support the building even in the early stages of its construction. Amazingly, the builders noticed this error early in the two-century construction project: After the addition of a third story to the tower, the ground began to give, prompting that infamous slant. 

When construction resumed in 1272, the additional developments did not exactly help the tower’s posture. The stacking of additional stories atop the existing three jostled the building’s center of gravity, causing a reversal in the direction of its tilt. As the tower accrued its fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh stories, the once northward-leaning structure began to tip further and further south. 

Among Renaissance physicist Galileo Galilei’s most famous achievements was the discovery that gravity’s effect on an object is the same regardless of its mass. This epiphany is said to have hit Galileo atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa, from where he allegedly dropped a cannonball and a musket ball in 1589. The scientist’s biography, penned by disciple Vincenzo Viviani, remains the sole official assertion that such an experiment took place.

Modern scholars like Paolo Palmieri and James Robert Brown argue that the Leaning Tower of Pisa test existed only as a thought experiment of Galileo’s—devised perhaps at a much later chapter in his life—and was never carried out but was inflated by Viviani to buff the grandeur of Galileo’s discovery. 

In 1934, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declared the crooked attraction was a pockmark on his nation’s reputation and allocated resources for straightening the building. Mussolini’s men drilled hundreds of holes into the tower’s foundation and pumped in tons of grout in a misguided effort to rectify its tilt. Instead, the heavy cement caused the base of the tower to sink deeper into the soil, resulting in an even more severe lean. 

Even though the tower’s distinctive silhouette would seem to make it an easy target, the German army felt it was a prime lookout point during World War II because the tall tower provided optimal surveillance over the surrounding flat terrain. 

The German use of the tower nearly succeeded where gravity has failed in bringing the tower down. When the advancing U.S. Army was charged with demolishing all enemy buildings and resources in 1944, soldiers were too spellbound by the iconic tower’s aesthetic charms to call in artillery to bring it down. As detailed by veteran Leon Weckstein in a 2000 interview with The Guardian, the American troops braving the terrains of Axis-occupied Pisa were so entranced by the sight of the Leaning Tower that they couldn’t call for the volley of fire. Weckstein recalls preparing to attack the Nazi base before ultimately retreating under enemy fire, leaving the beautiful tower intact. 

As time passed, the ground only further weakened beneath the tower’s heft. An early 0.2-degree tilt increased gradually over the subsequent centuries, maxing out at 5.5 degrees—or with the top 15 feet south of the bottom—by 1990. Over the next decade, a team of engineers leveled the soil beneath the tower and introduced anchoring mechanisms in an effort to rectify the landmark’s nearly catastrophic lean. The project allotted the tower a more secure stance, but it did not prevent continued tipping. By 2008, however, a second go at balancing the foundational soil halted the tower’s slouching for the first time ever. A 2022 analysis revealed that, since 2001, the tower’s tilt has corrected itself another 1.6 degrees; the first self-correction was discovered in 2018.

On paper, John Burland wasn’t exactly a prime candidate for a project like solidifying the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Burland admitted that soil mechanics, the area of engineering that played a pivotal role in the stabilizing of the tower, was his worst subject during his undergraduate studies at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He ultimately overcame his aversion to this subject to become a professor at Imperial College London (and saved the Leaning Tower of Pisa from complete collapse, of course). 

Barring additional efforts to prevent future leaning, the tower is predicted to remain stable for the next 200 years. If everything else remains constant, the ground should begin giving way again in the early 23rd century, allowing for the tilt to slowly resume. 

A number of other Pisani structures suffer foundational instability thanks to the river city’s soft grounds. Among these are San Nicola, a 12th-century church located about half a mile south of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and San Michele degli Scalzi, an 11th-century church about two miles east of the pair. While San Nicola, whose base is rooted beneath the earth, leans only mildly, San Michele degli Scalzi boasts a substantial 5-degree tilt. 

No building on Earth is more famous for its diagonal posture than the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but several others have challenged its superlative slant. In 2009, the Leaning Tower of Surhuusen, a German steeple erected between the 14th and 15th centuries, officially “out-leaned” its Pisani rival—Guinness record keepers calculated that the Surhuusen tower’s tilt extended a full 1.2 degrees further than that of Pisa’s, which had been modified from its pre-1990s peak of 5.5 degrees to a less-drastic 3.97 degrees. Another German tower, the town of Bad Frankenhausen’s 14th-century church Oberkirche, and the shorter of the Two Towers of Bologna have also bested the Pisa tower with 4.8-degree and 4-degree leans, respectively. 

Despite having been discovered by the French Antarctic Expedition, a particularly hefty rock dome in the seventh continent’s Geologie Archipelago is named for Italy’s prized tower. The 27-meter-long formation, first documented on Rostand Island in 1951, goes by the nickname of “Tour de Pise” thanks to its resemblance to the building.

There have been four major earthquakes since the beginning of the Tower of Pisa’s construction, and it has survived them all—which is somewhat surprising, given its lean and the soft soil the tower stands on. But the soil might actually be the key to the tower’s survival: According to the International Information Center for Geotechnical Engineers, scientists have determined that “The stiffness of the tower combined with the softness of the foundation ground causes the characteristics of a seismic vibration to be mitigated. This effect … functions in such a way that the tower does not resonate with the ground motion and therefore the forces acting on the structural elements of the construction are diminished.”

In September 2023, a truck lost control of its cargo and spilled 5 million bees onto a road outside Toronto. That’s a lot of bees, but they made up only a tiny fraction of the billions of tons of cargo transported by truck in North America each year. With so many trucks on the highways, this kind of event happens from time to time, with everything from beer to hagfish becoming a roadside attraction.

In August 2015, a 23-year-old trucker became distracted by his canine driving companion and lost control of his vehicle, swerving into the center median guardrail on I-75 in Florida. The Bud Light truck tipped onto its side and spilled Natural Light (owned by Anheuser-Busch) beer cans along the road and adjacent grass. The driver and his small pooch walked away without any injuries.

Just two days after the Natty Light spill, a produce truck dumped 22 tons of pears out onto the highway in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in China. Villagers in the area acted fast and arrived on the scene with bags to collect the stray fruit. Some loaded up entire cars and trucks, making multiple trips to capitalize on the accident. Although the pears were worth about 80,000 yuan (or roughly $11,000 in 2015), the owner did not mind the ransack because the produce was too damaged to sell. 

Thirty thousand pounds of frozen Butterball turkeys were on their way to Costco for Thanksgiving in 2014 when the truck took an exit too fast and tipped over on a California Bay Area highway. The turkeys were boxed and safe from harm but could no longer be sold in stores due to the accident. The food didn’t go to waste, though: It was donated to the Alameda County Food Bank in Oakland. 

In 2011, a truck carrying 40,000 pounds of Edy’s Ice Cream took a spill on Interstate 69 in Indiana. The truck was intact after the accident, but when tow trucks were pulling the truck to the shoulder, ice cream containers came pouring out. Thanks to freezing weather conditions, a good chunk of the frozen booty was preserved and loaded onto a different truck. The truck driver sustained only minor injuries and was checked into a local hospital. 

In 2014, a van loaded with live crabs collided with an SUV in Changsha, China, causing the crustaceans to be strewn about on the street. On top of the dozens of crabs, there was also a single crocodile (no big deal), which was safely netted. People who witnessed the incident immediately scrambled to pick up the little scuttlers and shoved them into bags, bins, and purses. According to The Daily Meal, “The scene was reportedly completely bereft of crabs within five minutes of the accident.”

In the fall of 2011, a truck overturned on I-74 in Illinois, letting loose 20 tons of food, including chocolate cake, doughnuts, cinnamon rolls, and bratwursts. (The accident did take place in the Midwest.) It took more than seven hours to clean up the delicious mess, but no one was seriously injured.

In 2012, a truck carrying 3000 gallons of paint toppled over near Manaus, Brazil. The spilled paint mixed together, creating a beautiful pastel swirl of colors on the street. 

A truck wasn’t exactly responsible for these spilled pieces, but it did cause a major kerfuffle on the highway. A family cruising on I-79 in West Virginia accidentally dumped their crate of LEGO bricks—which was strapped to the top of the vehicle—and scattered them across the interstate. The 11-year-old owner of the bricks was heartbroken, but many kind-hearted Facebook users offered to donate LEGO pieces and money to replace his collection.

In October 2015, a truck carrying hundreds of dead fish emptied its contents onto a road near Kilbarchan, Scotland. The fish were en route to a waste management company, and while it was an unfortunate incident, the upside to the spill is that it led to some incredible jokes. Even Traffic Scotland’s Twitter feed got in on the fun, noting, “cleanup ops now fin-ished & lane 2 o-fish-ialy repoened. Traffic getting back to normal[.]”

When a truck traveling on Highway 132 in California clipped a van and rolled over in 2015, it unleashed about 48,000 pounds of bottled wine. The truck driver and the riders of the van were taken to the hospital with minor injuries. 

Before the 2023 bee incident, a truck carrying a shipment of honeybees tipped over on a Washington state highway in 2015, and millions of the perturbed insects took to the sky after freeing themselves from the wreck. Beekeepers managed to save some hives, but most of the escapees had to be killed with foam after attacking innocent bystanders.

In 2007, a truck took a curve too quickly and flipped over on a Colombian highway—and the cocaine that had been lining the walls and roof burst out of its hiding place and all over the pavement. The driver was not hurt, but was definitely arrested. 

A truck driver caused a serious traffic jam in 2012 after forgetting to properly close the back of his vehicle. Motorists in Kolobrzeg, Poland, were held up as 24 tons of sardines spilled from inside the truck onto the road. The trucker was asked to pay $7500 for cleanup as well as a $75 fine.

In 2011, a Greyhound bus in Tennessee didn’t realize it had lost part of its load of bull semen when emergency personnel arrived on the scene. They found four small propane tank-sized canisters that gave off a vapor and an unpleasant smell. Learning that the vapor was just dry ice and not something more dangerous, the workers quickly cleared the canisters from the highway. 

In June 2015, a truck holding 70,000 pounds of bacon stalled on train tracks in Wilmington, Illinois, southwest of Chicago. An Amtrak train then collided with the vehicle, overturning it and revealing its mouthwatering contents. Remarkably, no one was hurt in the accident.

The city of Tainan, Taiwan, looked like the set of a slasher movie after a 56-foot sperm whale exploded on its way through town. The whale had beached itself earlier, and was being carted by a flatbed truck to a research facility for a necropsy. As the whale lay rotting in the sun, gases built up inside its carcass until they detonated in a flood of whale guts. 

In 2004, a wrecked armored truck spilled more than $2 million in coins on the New Jersey Turnpike (and another spill in 2018 dropped $300,000 on the same highway). In 2005, a truck caught fire and spilled $800,000 in scalding-hot quarters on an Alabama road. And in 2008, a vehicle carrying more than 3.5 million nickels (worth about $185,000) to the Miami Federal Reserve dumped its load after a violent wreck that killed the passenger.

What do you do when a 200-ton marine engine destined for a San Diego shipyard flips off its flatbed? Get a crane. Actually, get three cranes—and a new road. The massive engine pancaked three parked cars (there was only one occupant among the parked vehicles, who sustained only minor injuries), and even shoved one below the pavement.

In 2005, a truck carrying 35,000 pounds of explosives rolled over on a Utah highway and blew up moments after the driver and passenger escaped. The blast dug a crater 30 feet deep and 70 feet wide. It also sent concrete road barriers hundreds of feet in the air and twisted nearby railroad tracks like straws. Fortunately, no one was killed in the incident.

In 2017, motorists near Portland, Oregon, were stunned when a truck stopped short in front of a road construction site and accidentally disgorged 13 shipping containers of slime eels, formerly known as hagfish. About 7500 pounds of the slippery and, indeed, slimy jawless fish were strewn all over the road, other cars, and the drivers, who were forced to wade through ankle-deep puddles of mucous produced by the stressed-out eels. Said one witness to a KOIN reporter, “Our brains couldn’t process what was happening.”

A version of this story was published in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

The Great Wall of China is one of the oldest, largest, and most celebrated achievements of human ingenuity, but there are still a few things you might not know about China’s ancient landmark.

The Great Wall wasn’t the first fortification erected in Chinese territory to protect citizens from foreign invaders. As far back as the 8th century BCE, barriers were going up to repel nomadic armies. When Qin Shi Huang seized power over a collection of neighboring principalities in 221 BCE and kicked off the Qin dynasty, he began construction on a 5000-kilometer wall to safeguard his territory. Later dynasties continued this work and added their own flourishes. While construction began under the Qin dynasty, the recognizable segments that we think of when we visualize the Great Wall were largely the handiwork of the Ming dynasty, which created these facets between the 14th and 17th centuries CE. 

There’s a pervasive misconception that the Great Wall of China is one long uninterrupted structure. In fact, the wall is more accurately described as a 20,000-kilometer network of walls spanning the northern border of ancient and imperial Chinese territories.

The Great Wall is largely crafted from unremarkable building materials like earth and stone. More interestingly, glutinous rice—known colloquially as “sticky rice”—was incorporated into the mortar recipe thanks to its cohesive properties. Modern studies have indicated that the amylopectin of the rice (the substance that makes it sticky) helps explain the wall’s strength and endurance. 

In a particularly extreme version of modern community service, Great Wall construction, maintenance, and surveillance were regular duties of people convicted of crimes during the Qin dynasty. To distinguish outlaw laborers from their civilian colleagues, authorities shaved their heads, blackened their faces, and bound their limbs in chains. Transgressions ranging from homicide to tax evasion were all punishable with wall duty. The work was dangerous—some estimates state that 400,000 workers perished while building the wall. 

With so many lives lost during construction, grieving family members feared that the spirits of their loved ones would be forever trapped within the structure that cost them their lives. In an effort to grant deceased laborers spiritual emancipation, a mourner would cross over the wall with a rooster in tow. This tradition was believed to help guide a soul away from the fortification. 

The Shijing, a collection of ancient Chinese poems written between the 11th and 7th centuries BCE, predicts proper construction of the Great Wall of China with an entry describing a king’s efforts to fend off military invaders via development of a defensive barrier.

Lining the Great Wall are shrines and tributes to figures from Chinese history. Guan Yu, a 3rd-century general who served during the Han dynasty, is honored with temples built on the wall. Additionally, various points on the wall pay homage to Tiānwáng, the four heavenly kings of Buddhism. 

Despite all the effort that went into making the Great Wall the premiere component of China’s military defense system, many of the country’s enemies throughout history managed passage across the barrier. Manchurian invasion through the wall in the 17th century resulted in the fall of the Ming dynasty. 

China’s celebration of the Great Wall as a tourist draw and landmark is a relatively recent phenomenon, having only blossomed in the 20th century as a result of international interest. China first took note of the wall’s wide appeal in the 19th century, following its engagement in relations with other Asian and European countries. Travelers and merchants returned to their home countries with stories they translated into art and print, creating an enchantment with the Great Wall that helped spark Chinese appreciation for the structure.

Despite numerous accounts to the contrary, the Great Wall of China’s reputation for extraterrestrial visibility stands strong to this day. One good sign that this claim is specious lies in the fact that it dates back two centuries before humankind mastered space travel. English scholar William Stukeley outlined the idea in his Family Memoirs, written in 1754. The myth got a boost from journalist Henry Norman’s 1895 book The Peoples and Politics of the Far East, as well as a 1932 Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoon strip. More reliable sources—astronaut Neil Armstrong among them—assert that the Great Wall is by no means visible from the moon, much less outer space. At best, the wall can be spotted from a low orbit, sunlight and weather permitting.

Today, the surviving elements of the Great Wall of China stretch to a whopping 13,171 miles. Impressive though the measurement may be, it’s quite a decrease from what is believed to be the wall’s peak length during the Ming dynasty. More than 1200 miles’ worth, or approximately one third, of the construction from this period no longer stands.

During the 20th century sociopolitical movement known as Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government did quite a bit of damage to the Great Wall. Mao Zedong and the Red Guard recognized the wall as little more than a relic whose materials would better serve in the development of housing. Between 1966 and 1976, miles of the wall were stripped of bricks and repurposed to build civilian homes. 

Predictions about the Great Wall’s fortitude have grown increasingly dire during the 21st century. Natural weathering and human-imparted erosion may result in the disappearance of certain parts of the wall before 2040. Portions of the wall in the Gansu province are thought to be in particular jeopardy. 

Previously unknown stretches of the Great Wall have been discovered in recent decades. In the past 10 years, archaeologists have located some of the wall’s northernmost sections standing in and on the border of present-day Mongolia. 

“The Great Wall of China” is a nickname commonly used by Americans, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, while other Western nations prefer a humbler designation: “The Chinese Wall.” Within China, the wall has known a number of monikers, having been introduced in its inceptive days as “The 10,000-Li-Long Wall” (according to the 1st century BCE publication Records of the Grand Historian) and “The Long Wall of 10,000 Li” (in Book of Song, published during the 5th century CE), a li being a unit of measurement equivalent to about a third of a mile. Over time, the wall earned some more ostentatious handles, including “The Purple Frontier” and “The Earth Dragon.” Ultimately, China christened its human-made wonder with a simple but appropriate name: “The Long Wall.”

A version of this story was originally published in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

What goes around comes around, and we don’t just mean records on a turntable. Audiophiles swear by the sound quality of vinyl over CDs, MP3s, and other files, and now younger generations are starting to see the light. Vinyl sales continue to increase each year, which means that more and more young people are borrowing albums from their parents or buying their own, while those who grew up with them are perhaps dusting off their cherished collections.

New records are typically more expensive than other formats, but fans would argue that the listening experience and ability to hold the music in your hands is worth the premium. There is also a culture of collecting that comes with switching to vinyl that could pay off big time, if you know what you have or what to look for. First pressings by big acts like The Beatles or Bruce Springsteen and finds like misprints and pressings with alternate covers can greatly increase the value of vinyl if the copies are kept in pristine condition. Before you dig through those crates to listen to your favorite throwback LP or 45-RPM single, make sure that what you’re holding isn’t worth a full semester of college. Here are some records that you may have (or used to have) that are worth way more than their original sticker price.

Bob Dylan’s second album changed a bit just before it was supposed to be released in 1963, and those track changes can mean a difference of tens of thousands of dollars if your copy falls on the right side of the fence. According to Record Mecca, four songs were replaced with newly recorded tracks, but somehow, someone at the pressing plant used the old version instead of the new masters to press an unknown number of albums. Since the album’s release, only a couple stereo copies of the mistake pressings have surfaced, and fewer than two dozen of the mono copies are known to exist. Thought to be one of the most valuable records in the world, a mint copy of the former sold in 2022 for $150,000.

The Beatles’s self-titled double album (which later became known as the White Album) was originally released in 1968, but not all copies were created equal. The members of the band and executives at the studio were given copies stamped with serial numbers that began with A00000, each in consecutive order (A000001, A000002, etc.). The very first U.S. copy, which Clifford J. Yamasaki of Let It Be Records purchased from an executive at Capitol Records in the 1970s, sold in 2013 for $35,000, a year after the copy with serial number A0000023 sold at auction for $13,750. In 2015, Ringo Starr sold his copy (the first UK pressing) for $790,000. The odds that you once owned a copy of the album that had a low serial number are slim to none, but not impossible.

The original version of this David Bowie album was withdrawn because the cover artwork featured a dog’s genitals. The label, RCA, reportedly “got nervous” and decided to airbrush the area out for the final version, but some employees were smart enough to keep the originals. Back in 2003, a copy sold on eBay for $3550. In 2018, another sold at Bonhams for nearly $8000. And in 2022, it set a new record: $16,000.

As the story goes, English punk rock band the Sex Pistols were signed in early March 1977 by A&M Records, and then famously dropped from the label only six days later because of their behavior. When it decided to cut ties with the band, the record company had already pressed 25,000 copies of their single “God Save the Queen.” The order was given for the records to be destroyed, but over the past 39 years, several copies have surfaced. One sold in 2019 for nearly $17,000.

Between 300 and 1000 copies of this Hank Mobley jazz record (known as Blue Note 1568 by collectors) were released in 1957, and there is one small change that makes them more valuable than other records from the label. According to The Vinyl Factory, the rumor is that Blue Note ran out of labels halfway through the first pressing of the album. The standard address for the record label is 47 West 63rd NYC, but some of the records have labels that say 47 West 63rd New York 23 on one side. There is some debate about the value though, as one record that did not have the special label still sold for over $11,000 on eBay.

According to the Beatles Collecting Guide, the album Please Please Me was released in a hurry on March 22, 1963 in Great Britain. There were multiple pressings of the album in the first year, but collectors pay attention to the labels to tell which is the rarest of them all. The very first pressing features gold lettering on a black label and is considered the “holy grail” for Beatles fans. The mono version in mint condition is worth a few hundred bucks, while the stereo version sold for over $10,000 in 2018. If you or your parents were riding the wave with Paul and the boys from the beginning, hopefully someone had the foresight not to open the copy.

The original “butcher” cover of this record and its gruesome portrait of the Fab Four with some dismembered dolls was not well received, so Capitol Records spent $200,000 recalling the copies that had already been shipped to stores. The covers were changed, but as with most recalls, some of the original copies remained out in the world. In 2022, one still sealed in plastic sold for $112,500. If you unknowingly inherited one of those strays, it’s time to cash in.

Collector John Marshall of moneymusic.com told radio station KCLO that Springsteen’s first release with Columbia Records can fetch as much as $4000.

According to the 2011 listing for a record that Bonhams sold for $17,000, the original picture sleeve for the American release of The Rolling Stones’ single “Street Fighting Man” (with “No Expectations” on the b-side) featured a photograph of police brutality during riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. The record label decided it was too controversial and withdrew the sleeves. Bonhams estimates that there are between 10 and 18 copies out in the world. In 2022, one sold on eBay for over $22,000.

When Nirvana’s Bleach was initially released in 1989, the first printing was limited to 1000 copies, which were sold to music fans at Lamefest in Seattle. Those copies are now worth a couple hundred dollars, but they are not the most valuable. The label Sub Pop experimented with different marbling techniques for the subsequent pressings, and one in particular could now worth around $2000. More of a bundle than a singular record, the red-and-white-marbled LP was shrink-wrapped with a blue 7-inch, and there were only 500 numbered sets made.

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

In 1938, Orson Welles terrified Americans with his dramatic radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’s alien invasion novel, The War of the Worlds (though probably not as much as you’ve been led to believe). Which makes it strangely appropriate that, nearly 40 years later, Welles would go on to narrate another extraterrestrial tale—this time for NASA. 

In 1975, Welles provided narration for the short documentary Who’s Out There?, which explored a range of theories and beliefs about alien life, and featured interviews with prominent scientists, including Carl Sagan, George Wald, and Ashley Montagu. The film opens with Welles reading from The War of The Worlds and moves on to interviews with listeners who were affected by the radio program at the time.

A second narrator explains, “All of the people you will be seeing in this program—scientists, radio listeners, Orson Welles—have one thing in common: Each has had reason to believe in the likely existence of non-earthly life in the universe.” Welles would later have a crater on Mars named after him.

The documentary is a surreal and fascinating foray into extraterrestrial theory, science fiction, and science fact. Check it out above, then read up on Welles’s greatest insults, the time he met Hitler, and when he freaked out over frozen peas.

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

You may not like jibber-jabber or when life turns helter skelter, but it’s hard not to like words created by what linguists call “reduplication.” Sadly, not all reduplicative words, despite their charm, catch on. Here’s a look at 12 that deserve to be rescued from their mostly forgotten place in lexical history.

This word, which has been around since the 1500s, has the same meaning as its root, pribble, which is defined as “an argument or quarrel, especially one that’s petty or insignificant.” The expression pribbles and prabbles means the same. Needless to say, every comment section in the multiverse is full of pribble-prabble.

This word from the 1700s basically means “really curly,” so feel free to use it the next time you see someone with next-level curls. Curly-murly could also come in handy when making coiffure requests of well-read hairdressers.

Evo-devo first appeared in a 1997 issue of Science magazine, and it has a more scientific sense than the rest of the list: “Rudolf Raff and other pioneers have joined forces to create a young field called evolutionary developmental biology, or ‘evo-devo.’” So technically, evo-devo is an abbreviation, but it walks, talks, and looks like a reduplication.

This term is related to newfangled, which conveys a dismissive attitude toward new stuff, suggesting it’s a bunch of bells, whistles, and crapola. A fingle-fangle is either a piece of junk or an idea so whimsical and insubstantial that it’s barely worth discussing. The OED’s oldest example—from 1652—includes the phrase fingle-fangle fashion, which is fitting. Anything fashionable is probably not going to last.

Resembling words like rub-a-dub and pit-a-pat, the 16th-century term flaunt-a-flaunt was often applied to birds—or people who strutted like birds. An excessive touchdown celebration could be considered a flaunt-a-flaunt display.

This word for meaningless babbling dates back to the 1600s and is related to gabble, meaning “Rapid, unintelligible speech.” It can be an adjective as well as a noun, as seen in a 1693 reference to “Gibble gabble Gibbrish.”

This onomatopoeic word usually refers to a rattling sound. Here’s an 1874 example recorded by the OED: “On a mild evening, the tree-toads open their brittle-brattle chorus on the edge of the pond.”

Bibble-babble is basically babble—it can refer to any sort of empty talk and has since the 1500s. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare offered some sound advice: “Endeauour thy selfe to sleepe, and leaue thy vaine bibble babble.” In other words, “Shut up and go to bed.”

Here’s another word that turned up in Shakespeare: In Henry IV Part 1, the phrase skimble scamble stuffe refers to nonsense. 

We’re all familiar with the flip-flop—a favorite exercise of all politicians—but here’s a variation with a little something extra. Flippy-floppy has been around for more than 100 years, and it still pops up here and there, like in this 2003 Australian newspaper article about a dog: “Let’s face it, the Pommie with the goo-goo eyes and flippy floppy hair only ever acts as himself, a sort of feckless, loose goose with a few bob.”

Anything havey-cavey is uncertain or dodgy in some way. The origin of the term is itself havey-cavey, but it might be related to the word haver, a verb meaning “To talk foolishly or inconsequentially.” An 1891 glossary example shows that havey-cavey-ness can be a serious matter: “A young man who was very ill was said to be in a very havey-cavey state, tottering between life and death.”

This alternation of wobble isn’t common, but it’s shockingly productive, spawning at least two other rare variations. Anything tottering or oscillating can be described using the phrase wibblety-wobblety, and ungainly words or movements can be called “wibbly-wobbly.” In fact, that term turns up in James Joyce’s Ulysses in an expression that needs to be used more often: “Bless me, I’m all of a wibblywobbly.”

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

We’re approaching the end of winter and the inevitable climb toward summer. The annual ritual of warmth flushing out the cold makes the atmosphere pretty restless, allowing dangerous storms to bubble up on a regular basis. It’s critically important for everyone to know what to do when bad weather strikes, and staying safe begins with knowing the six terms meteorologists use most often to describe life-threatening weather.

The defining type of spring weather in the United States is severe thunderstorms. A severe thunderstorm is one that produces hail the size of quarters or larger, wind gusts that reach 58 mph or stronger, or a tornado.

Severe thunderstorms can seriously injure or kill you if you’re caught outside during one, or if you’re in a building that can’t withstand the fierce winds or damaging hail. After all, the wind gusts within a severe thunderstorm can cause as much damage as a tornado. Hail is no laughing matter, either—even small pieces can easily shatter windows, especially when it falls during strong winds.

Tornadoes are the best-known type of severe weather. These destructive forces can range in shape from a thin rope to a wedge that consumes the landscape. Most tornadoes are small and don’t cause much damage, but a handful of tornadoes every year are strong enough to level entire neighborhoods.

One of the most dangerous things about a tornado is that you can’t always see one coming. We can see tornadoes because of the condensation funnel, or the cloud that forms as a result of the low pressure within the rotating column of air. Some tornadoes—especially when they just start to form—don’t have that condensation funnel, making them hard to spot until it’s too late. To make matters worse, many tornadoes that form in humid areas are often wrapped in heavy rain, making one impossible to see until it’s right on top of you.

One of the most common terms you’ll hear during the spring and summer is watch, either a severe thunderstorm watch or a tornado watch. A watch means that conditions are favorable for dangerous thunderstorms to develop over the next couple of hours, and they’re issued to give people as much time as possible to seek safety. If you’re ever placed under a watch, it means that you should keep an eye out for urgent weather updates through the day.

Severe thunderstorm and tornado watches are issued for wide areas on a county basis, sometimes covering entire states. You should always know what county you’re in and what counties surround you—it could save your life one day.

Where we’re talking about severe weather, an advisory is more urgent than a watch but not as urgent as a warning. They’re issued for less dangerous conditions that may cause disruption or inconvenience if people aren’t adequately prepared. In spring, you may hear of advisories issued for high winds, dense fog, or potential flooding.

A warning is an urgent alert that means your immediate safety is at risk. When a severe thunderstorm develops, meteorologists at the National Weather Service will issue a severe thunderstorm warning that tells you about the imminent arrival of large hail or damaging winds. A tornado warning means that meteorologists detect rotation in a thunderstorm or that someone has spotted a tornado on the ground.

Warnings are issued ahead of individual storms using polygons on a map that cover areas most likely to see dangerous weather. Most severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings are issued 15 to 30 minutes before the storm arrives, but sometimes there’s little or no warning ahead of time. If you’re ever placed under a warning, you have to act quickly to protect your life.

Sometimes when a large tornado is barreling toward a city, the National Weather Service will issue an extremely rare “tornado emergency” instead of a tornado warning. The enhanced language is designed to drive home the point that you need to seek safety, stat.

The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) is a branch of the National Weather Service that’s devoted to predicting severe thunderstorms. The agency issues thunderstorm forecasts up to seven days out. The risk for severe weather is conveyed using a five-category scale that ranges in severity from “marginal risk” to “high risk.” Days featuring a high risk—a 5 on the scale—are extremely rare, saved for the worst severe weather outbreaks that could produce widespread destruction and claim dozens if not hundreds of lives.

You should check the SPC at least once a day during severe weather season, and more often if hazardous weather is on your doorstep.

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

Lemons and limes are both citrus fruits, and their juice and zest are often used interchangeably in recipes. So why do lemons (and most fruits) have seeds while limes don’t?

The majority of limes sold in the U.S. are Persian limes (Citrus latifolia). While often thought to be its own species, according to the Los Angeles Times, this fruit is “a natural hybrid of true lime and citron.” Also called Tahiti or Bearss limes, these limes are parthenocarpic, meaning they’re produced without fertilization and are thus seedless. On the other hand, true limes (Citrus aurantifolia, but known commonly as Mexican, Key, or West Indian limes) do have seeds.

Because Persian limes are bigger, have a thicker skin, and are more resistant to diseases than true limes, they have a longer shelf life. But where do they come from if they don’t have seeds?

Despite buzz you may have heard around the internet, the reason that most limes don’t have seeds has nothing to do with GMOs (a.k.a. ”genetically modified organisms,” something whose DNA has been changed). In fact, seedless fruits are not a new phenomenon.

As two biologists at Brookhaven National Laboratory explained to Scientific American in 2000, normal fruit starts to develop when a flower’s egg cell is fertilized by pollen. Parthenocarpic fruit, in contrast, develops without fertilization. Fruit can be parthenocarpic for a variety of reasons, such as problems with the eggs or sperm, problems with pollination, or chromosomal imbalances.

Seedless or “large-fruited” limes have three sets of chromosomes rather than two. While some parthenocarpic fruits occur naturally, this genetic abnormality makes wild reproduction extremely rare for Persian limes. To overcome this, farmers use a technique called grafting, where part of a seedless lime tree is removed and inserted into a new tree. This essentially clones the original tree, ensuring that more seedless limes will be produced. (Farmers can also use grafting to fix fruit trees that have been injured.) Grafting allows farmers to produce seedless fruits on a commercial scale.

While most limes you see in the supermarket are probably seedless, some varieties of lime do indeed have seeds. And although most lemons have seeds, some lemons are actually seedless. You may find an occasional seed even in “seedless” lemons due to cross-pollination if the lemons were grown near other fruits. Lemons without seeds are more difficult to find in grocery stores than regular ones, just as limes with seeds are harder to find in stores than their seedless counterparts.

Now that you know the answer to this citrusy mystery, get to the bottom of a few more food-based head scratchers—like whether a tomato is a vegetable or a fruit, the difference between shrimp and prawns, and what horseradish sauce is, exactly—and find out why we call defective cars “lemons.”

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

You use your hands every day to do thousands of things, but have you ever wondered why you refer to your fingers by names like thumb and pinky? The origins of body part names can be hard to pin down because of the way language evolves, but here’s what we know about why thumbs are thumbs and why little fingers are pinkies.

Different from the other four digits in that it’s shorter and wider and only has two phalanges instead of three, the thumb earned its name from a description of its physical characteristics in relation to its neighbors. In medical terminology, the word for thumb is pollex. The term thumb was first used before the 12th century and is believed to have come from the Proto-Indo-European term tum, meaning “to swell,” which makes the thumb “the swollen one.” There is some debate as to whether the thumb can rightfully be called a finger, but classification aside, the name fits.

Next in line after the pollex is the digitus secundus manus. Index comes from the Latin indicō, which means “to point out”; that’s also where the term pointer comes into play. Although it is the second digit (after the thumb), the index is recognized as the first finger, which explains why forefinger is also sometimes used.

The second finger (third digit) has the most literal meaning of all. Less commonly referred to as the long or tall finger, the digitus medius manus sits in the center of the hand, right between the digitus secondus manus and the ring finger. How the middle finger became an offensive gesture is another story altogether.

Known medically as the digitus medicinalis, digitus quartus manus, or digitus annularis manus, the origin of the term ring finger dates back to 2nd century Egypt and has to do with the heart. Egyptians believed that there was a vein in the fourth finger, known as the lover’s vein, that was connected to the heart—an untrue theory that Romans also came to believe many years later. To signify that a man had a hold of a woman’s heart, he would follow the gospel of Beyoncé and put a ring on it, a practice that lives on today.

The fifth digit and smallest of the fingers is the digitus minimus manus. According to World Wide Words, pinkie was used by Scots to refer to something small, as explained in An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language by John Jamieson, published in 1808. The term comes from the Dutch pink, meaning “small.” Jamieson writes that “to pink” means to “contract the eye,” and the adjective pinkie is “applied to the eye, when small, or contracted.” The Collins Dictionary lists the origin of a related word, pinkeye, to the Dutch pinck oogen, which also appears in Jamieson’s dictionary entry for pink and translates to “small eyes.”

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

Professional dog trainer Hana Kim decided to document the challenging and adorable process of turning a puppy into a full-fledged guide dog. Shooting just one second of video a day, Kim created a moving timelapse of a puppy named Gumbo as he went through training.

In the end, it turned out Gumbo didn’t quite have the calm, unflappable personality it takes to be a guide dog, so Hana adopted the excitable pup herself. She instead trained him to be a therapy animal, which she believed would be a better suited to his affectionate disposition.

In Kim’s “One Second A Day—GDB Guide Dog Training,” the 10-week-old Gumbo (formerly named Lombard) goes through approximately one year of training, learning basic commands, walking with a harness, and goofing around. Over the course of the above video, Gumbo grows from a tiny pup to an almost fully grown dog.

Learning to become a guide dog involves more than just mastering basic commands like “sit,” “stay” and “come.” The dogs must learn how to navigate around obstacles like parked cars and other pedestrians. They’re trained in various simulations to make sure they’re up for the job once they’re out in the real world.

Not every dog is eligible to be trained as a guide dog. Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, and German shepherds are the most common guide dog breeds. The Seeing Eye, a nonprofit in New Jersey that trains guide dogs, only works with canines they breed. And even some of those specially bred pups don’t wind up making the cut. The prospective guide dogs receive medical testing and months of training before they’re officially selected.

The dogs aren’t the only ones who get trained—the people they’re assigned to also have to learn how to work with their four-legged guides. 

“Failing” as a guide or service dog doesn’t condemn the animal to a life of shame. They’re usually put up for adoption. The Seeing Eye, for instance, typically gives the volunteer who raised it as a puppy first dibs. There are various programs that match prospective pet owners with pups that didn’t pass all sorts of service training programs. 

And just because a dog “failed” training doesn’t mean it’s a bad egg. In fact, some service dogs get booted from their programs from being too friendly or low energy.

A version of this story originally ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

What is likely the world’s largest cane toad—dubbed Toadzilla—weighed just shy of six pounds when it was found in Conway National Park in Queensland, Australia, in January 2023. “I reached down and grabbed the cane toad and couldn‘t believe how big and heavy it was,” ranger Kylee Gray said in a statement. The Queensland government believed the ample amphibian “could set a new record.”

Cane toads (Rhinella marina), native to Central and South America, are a prolific invasive species in Australia, Fiji, Hawaii, and Florida. Like environmental wrecking balls, the toxic toads threaten native fauna. Here are the essential facts.

“The Choco Indians of western Colombia used to ‘milk’ toads by placing them in bamboo tubes over an open fire,” Christopher Lever writes in The Cane Toad: The History and Ecology of a Successful Colonist. Concentrated poison trickled into a bottle, and the dangerous substance was smeared over arrowheads and blowgun darts.

The average wild cane toad usually reaches a length of 4 to 6 inches and weighs about three pounds. Some specimens have grown much larger, though. Before Toadzilla, the biggest one on record weighed more than five pounds. The toads are sexually dimorphic; females are usually larger. Males also have rougher skin and make an assortment of vocalizations.

In 1900, Australia’s sugar cane growers asked the government for solutions to the frequent beetle and insect infestations that killed their crops. The Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations (BSES) tried various pesticides, but none worked. Then, in 1935, staff entomologist Reginald Mungomery was sent to Hawaii with instructions to round up some cane toads, which had been introduced there to save the islands‘ sugar crops from the same insect problems. The BSES set up a captive breeding program with the imported toads, and later that year, unleashed 102 cane toads in northern Queensland. Their population skyrocketed, and totals about 1.5 billion toads today.

A few days after a female cane toad lays her eggs, they hatch into tadpoles, a chapter in the life cycle that lasts for four to eight weeks. The tadpoles are prone to cannibalism, and have been known to eat the eggs and tadpoles of other cane toads (they don‘t eat their own siblings, though). While the young can make short work of each other, anything else that tries to eat them is in for a bad experience: Both cane toad eggs and tadpoles are poisonous.

When threatened, cane toads secrete a dangerous cocktail of chemicals, including 5-methoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine. People who ingest this compound, usually by licking the toads, experience strong hallucinations and a full-body rush. Unfortunately, their symptoms may also include severely weakened muscles, intense vomiting, seizures, and death by heart stoppage. Keep your tongue away from the toads!

These toads aren’t picky eaters, and they are happy to devour anything that can fit into their mouths, including beetles, bees, ants, crickets, frogs, snakes, aquatic snails, and even small dogs and cats. In residential areas, cane toads are often seen climbing into dog food bowls and chowing down on the contents.

Cane toads’ hides can be turned into a bumpy, poison-free leather. As a wedding gift to the then-Prince Charles on his marriage to Diana Spencer in 1981, the Australian Defense Department offered the royal couple a handsome book bound in the skins of four cane toads.

For reasons previously stated, you’ll want to keep live cane toads as far away from your mouth as possible. But—if they’re properly prepared—cane toads are actually edible. In recent years, Australian chefs have incorporated cane toad legs into their entrées. These juicy treats may be sautéed, stir fried, or thrown into a nice salad. “It’s healthy foodstuff,” Philip Hayward, an island studies professor at Southern Cross University, told ABC. “We can severely reduce numbers … and at the same time have a healthy, economically viable product.”

“Buffy,” as residents call her, commemorates the town’s sugar cane farmers. It began life in 1983 as a papier-mâché ornament on a float in that year’s Apex Sugar Festival. The model was then cast in fiberglass and moved to Broad Street in central Sarina.

Researchers at the University of Queensland have been assessing the medical benefits of this notorious toxin since 2010. Experiments have shown that cane toad poison selectively kills cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact.

“We could process the [toxin] for medicine, ideally in a tablet because it tastes absolutely awful,” Dr. Harenda Parekh, a senior lecturer at the school of pharmacy, told The Guardian in 2016. The product would be similar to chan su, a traditional Chinese medicine made with poison from an indigenous Asian toad, to treat skin conditions, heart failure, and sore throats. Poison from Australian cane toads may offer an alternative source and save the native amphibian. “The cane toad is a pest here to stay and we are fighting a losing battle against it,” Parekh said, “but we could turn them into a lucrative export.”

Islands often come to represent places of extremes: They serve as utopias, purgatories, or ultimate dream vacation destinations. When it comes to mythological islands, utopias are especially popular. The Greeks had their Fortunate Islands, or Islands of the Blessed, where the luckiest mortals whiled away their time drinking and sporting. The Irish had a similar concept with their Mag Mell, or Plain of Honey, described as an island paradise where deities frolicked and only the most daring mortals occasionally visited.

But mythology isn’t the only engine creating islands that don’t actually exist—some of these legendary land masses popped up on maps after miscalculations by early explorers who interpreted icebergs, fog banks, and mirages as real islands. Some of these cartographic “mistakes” may have been intentional—certain islands depicted on medieval maps might have been invented so they could be named after the patrons who funded the explorations. Even explorer Robert E. Peary wasn’t immune: Some say he invented “Crocker Land,” a supposedly massive island in the Arctic, to secure funding from San Francisco financier George Crocker. Crocker Land didn’t exist, although that didn’t prevent major American organizations (including the American Museum of Natural History) from sponsoring a four-year expedition to find it.

Much like the fictional Crocker Land, here are 10 more imaginary isles, all of which have a place in world history, literature, or mythology—despite not having a place on the map.

Supposedly located off the coast of Newfoundland, this landmass (sometimes depicted as two islands) appeared on 16th- and early 17th-century maps, and was named for the mysterious cries and groans mariners reported hearing through the mist.

The island was given a somewhat more solid identity after 1542, when nobleman and adventurer Jean-François de Roberval was instructed by the king of France to establish settlements along the North Atlantic coast. He brought his niece, Marguerite de La Roque de Roberval, along for the voyage, but she began a passionate affair with one of Roberval’s officers. Annoyed, Roberval put his niece (and maybe the officer—accounts differ), as well as her nurse, ashore on an otherwise unspecified “Isle of Demons” in the St. Lawrence River. Marguerite gave birth on the island, but the child died, as did Marguerite’s lover and nurse. However, the plucky Marguerite survived alone for several years, using her firearms against the wild beasts. After being rescued by Basque fishermen and returning to France, she said she had been beset “by beasts or other shapes abominably and unutterably hideous, the brood of hell, howling in baffled fury,” according to the contemporary explorer Jacques Cartier.

Marguerite’s story appears in several historical accounts, including versions by Franciscan friar André Thevet and the queen of Navarre. Still, the location of the “Isle of Demons” has never been found for certain. Some geographers associate it with Quirpon Island in the Strait of Belle Isle, which separates Newfoundland and Labrador. Maritime historian Donald Johnson identified it as Fichot Island, which lies on Roberval’s course and is home to a breeding colony of northern gannets—a type of seabird whose guttural cries, heard only while breeding, may have been taken for the sounds of demons.

Also known as the Isle of Seven Cities, Antillia was a 15th-century cartographic phenomenon said to lie far west of Spain and Portugal. Stories about its existence are connected to an Iberian legend in which seven Visigothic bishops and their parishioners fled Muslim conquerors in the 8th century, sailing west and eventually discovering an island where they founded seven settlements. The bishops burned their ships, so they could never return to their former homeland.

According to some versions of the legend, many people have visited Antillia but no one has ever left; in other versions of the tale, sailors can see the island from a distance, but the land always vanishes once they approach. Spain and Portugal even once squabbled over the island, despite its non-existence, perhaps because its beaches were said to be strewn with precious metals. By the late 15th century, once the North Atlantic was more accurately mapped, references to Antillia disappeared—although it did lend its name to the Spanish Antilles.

First mentioned by Plato, Atlantis was supposedly a large island that lay “to the west of the Pillars of Hercules” in the Atlantic Ocean. It was said to be a peaceful but powerful kingdom lost beneath the waves after a violent earthquake was released by the gods as punishment for waging war against Athens. There have been many attempts at identifying the island, although it may have been entirely a creation of Plato’s imagination; some archeologists associate it with the Minoan island of Santorini, north of Crete, whose center collapsed after a volcanic eruption and earthquake around 1500 BCE.

In Greek mythology, Aeaea is the floating home of Circe, the goddess of magic. Circe is said to have spent her time on the island, gifted to her by her father, the sun, waiting for mortal sailors to land so she could seduce them. (Afterwards, the story goes, she would turn them into pigs.) Some classical scholars have identified Aeaea as the Cape Circeium peninsula on the western coast of Italy, which may have been an island in the days of Homer, or may have looked like one because of the marshes surrounding its base.

Also known as Country o’Breasal, Brazil Rock, Hy na-Beatha (Isle of Life), Tir fo-Thuin (Land Under the Wave), and by many other names, Brasil (Gaelic for “Isle of the Blessed”) is one of the many mythical islands of Irish folklore, but one that nevertheless made several appearances on real maps.

Like the Mediterranean’s Atlantis, Brasil was said to be a place of perfect contentment and immortality. It was also the domain of Breasal, the high king of the world, who held court there every seven years. Breasal had the ability to make the island rise or sink as he pleased, and normally only let the island be visible when his court was in full swing.

According to legend, Brasil lay “where the sun touched the horizon, or immediately on its other side—usually close enough to see but too far to visit.” It first appeared on a map made in 1325 by Genoese cartographer Daloroto, who depicted it as a large area to the southwest of Ireland. (Later maps placed it farther west.) Its shape was usually drawn as a near-perfect circle, bifurcated by a river. Numerous explorers searched for the island, and some, including Italian navigator John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), even claimed to have found it.

Today, scholars think Brasil may have been a reference to Baffin Island, or to now-sunken lands visible only when sea levels were lower during the last ice age, or else an optical illusion produced by layers of hot and cold air refracting light rays.

In the Indigenous Yolngu culture in present-day Australia, Baralku (or Bralgu) is the island of the dead. The island holds a central place in Yolngu cosmology—it’s where the creator-spirit Barnumbirr is said to live before rising into the sky as the planet Venus each morning. Baralku is also the spot where the three siblings who created the landscape of Australia, the Djanggawul, originated. The island supposedly lies to the east of Arnhem Land in Northern Territory, and the Yolngu believe their souls return there after death.

This piece of land was said to have been discovered by Irish abbot and traveler Saint Brendan of Clonfert and his followers in 512 CE, and to be located in the North Atlantic, somewhere west of northern Africa. Brendan became famous after the publication of Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot), an 8th or 9th century text that described his voyage in search of the wonderful “land of promise” in the Atlantic Ocean. The book was a medieval bestseller, and gave the saint his nickname, “Brendan the Navigator.” The island was said to be thickly wooded, filled with rich fruit and flowers. Tales of St. Brendan’s Isle inspired Christopher Columbus, among others, and had an important influence on medieval cartography. Sightings were reported as late as the 18th century.

For the Greeks and Romans, Ultima Thule existed at the northernmost limit of their known world. It first appears in a lost work by the Greek explorer Pytheas, who supposedly found it in the 4th century BCE. The Greek historian Polybius wrote that “Pytheas … has led many people into error by saying that he traversed the whole of Britain on foot … and telling us also about Thule, those regions in which there was no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three of the consistency of a jelly-fish in which one can neither walk nor sail, holding everything together, so to speak.” Later scholars have interpreted Thule as the Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands, Iceland, or possibly Norway, while the Nazis believed Thule was the ancient homeland of the Aryan race.

First mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century Historia regum Britanniae, Avalon is the place where the legendary King Arthur’s sword is said to have been forged, and where he was sent to recover after being wounded in battle. The island was said to be the domain of Arthur’s half-sister, sorceress Morgan le Fay, as well as her eight sisters. Starting in the 12th century, Avalon was identified with Glastonbury in Somerset, in connection with Celtic legends about a paradisiacal “island of glass.” Twelfth-century monks at Glastonbury Abbey claimed to have discovered Arthur’s bones—although later historians believe their “discovery” was a publicity stunt to raise money for abbey repairs.

In ancient Egyptian mythology, the Island of Flame (also known as the Island of Peace) was the magical birthplace of the gods and part of the kingdom of Osiris. It was said to have emerged out of primeval waters and to lay far to the east, beyond the boundaries of the world of the living. It was a place of everlasting light associated with the rising sun.

A version of this story ran in 2019; it has been updated for 2023.