A Low-Grade Fever: On Aziz Ansari’s Comeback Netflix Special

Maybe it was his nice-guy image or the fact that Master of None was so endearing. Maybe it was because the scene of mounting sexual pressure “Grace” described was, unlike the outsized horror of the Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby allegations, so disturbingly familiar. Whatever it was, for women across the internet, the sexual assault accusations against Aziz Ansari, detailed on Babe.net in January 2018, hit close to home.

The Scholar Mapping America’s Forgotten Feminist Restaurants

Food, Gastro Obscura

THERE ARE NO WAITRESSES AT Bloodroot restaurant. There’s no meat, either. When a small collective of women founded the Bridgeport, Connecticut, café and bookstore in 1977, they eliminated both meat and table service as part of a sweeping feminist vision.

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: LES Library, Public Domain

German Researchers Are Investigating the Science Behind Soft-Pretzel Scent

Food, Gastro Obscura

WORKING NINE TO FIVE IS no way to make a living, so why not quit your job and become a professional food smeller? These highly trained sensory savants are regularly hired by food manufacturers and scientists. They analyze the subtle pepper notes in coffee, the juicy, pear-like aroma of fine white wine, and—as in a study recently published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry—the delectable whiffs of sweat and malt in freshly baked soft pretzels.

The Struggling Vineyards That Helped Inspire Karl Marx’s Communism

$4 Wine, Gastro Obscura, Politics

A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING TRIER, Germany—the spectre of Karl Marx. Today, tourists to the small Rhineland city visit the house where Marx was born and gaze at the armchair he died in. They take selfies in front of a larger-than-life Marx statue, gifted to the city in 2018 by the Chinese government.

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: Public Domain.

Solved: The 300-Year-Old Mystery of Barbados’s Pigs

Culture, environmental justice, Food

RICHARD LIGON’S 17TH-CENTURY MAP OF Barbados shows an island surrounded by sea monsters. But the most mysterious inhabitants of Richard Ligon’s Barbados are also the most banal: five curly tailed pigs. Half of them are hairy and feral; the other half are smooth.

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: Public Domain.

For Sale: 300-Year-Old “Shipwreck Wine” Rescued from the Bottom of the Sea

$4 Wine

IN 2010, A TEAM OF underwater salvagers toasted a deep-sea discovery with a rare vintage. Their discovery? The very wine they were about to drink: 350-year-old bottles they had fished out of a decrepit shipwreck off the coast of Hamburg, Germany.

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: Mark Mornati, Unsplash.

Can Nigerian Drumming Teach You to Pick the Perfect Watermelon?

Culture, Food

FOR OGBODO NKIRUKA, THE SLAP of a hand hitting a watermelon is a welcome melody. A fruit vendor who’s been selling watermelons from a roadside stand in the Nigerian city of Enugu for 15 years, she identifies the ripeness of her wares by ear. Each melon has its own music, a deep, hollow thump—ba ba, ba, ba— indicating a fruit that’s perfectly ripe.

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: Kenogenic/CC BY-SA 4.0

Australia’s Growing Camel Meat Trade Reveals a Hidden History of Early Muslim Migrants

Food, labor

THERE IS A CAMEL IN Hanifa Deen’s kitchen. He looks down at her as she cooks, eyes proud yet warm, delicately flared snout smelling dinner. While the creature is merely an image on a poster, Deen, who has written several books on Islam in Australia, regards him affectionately.

Read more at Atlas Obscura. Photo: National Museum of Australia/Public Domain.