Tabla de contenidos para July-August 2023 en Smithsonian Magazine

THE CREATURE WAS enormous. Sailors said it “looked more like an island than a fish.” When feeding, according to a 13th-century Old Norse manuscript, the beast, known as the hafgufa, would rest with its mouth open wide, luring in unsuspecting fish, then snap its jaws shut to capture them. Hair-raising accounts of a similar sea monster were recorded by Alexandrian scribes as early as the second century A.D.; these accounts spread through Europe and Asia in Arabic, Coptic, Latin and Old English translations. Now researchers argue the mighty hafgufa, and similar sea monsters described by the ancients, were not mythical creatures but rather whales engaged in a behavior that was only recently documented: “trap feeding.” In 2011, marine biologists studying whales in the wild first observed “trap feeding,” in which…

AFEW MINUTES PAST midnight on July 30, 1945, two Japanese torpedoes struck the 10,000-ton USS In dianapolis. In just over ten minutes, it went under. For more than three days, sailors battled shark attacks, dehydration and salt poisoning. Only 316 of 1,196 crewmen survived. When JD Smith finished his drawing of the India-napolis, in 2019, he took a drive past a burial ground for veterans in Los Angeles and wept thinking about those who had died on the ship. “When I feel I’ve captured the ship and its essence … enough for the crew of that ship to say, ‘OK, this representation is our ship,’ that’s when I get the tears,” he says. Over the past 15 years, Smith has dedicated himself to creating some of the world’s most intricate…

LANDING IN AUSTRALIA, THE BRITISH COLONISTS weren’t much impressed with the small-bodied, slender-snooted marsupials called bandicoots. “Their muzzle, which is much too long, gives them an air exceedingly stupid,” one naturalist noted in 1805. They nick-named one type the “zebra rat” because of its black-striped rump. Silly-looking or not, though, the zebra rat—the smallest bandicoot, more commonly known today as the western barred bandicoot—exhibited a genius for survival in the harsh outback, where its ancestors had persisted for some 26 million years. Its births were triggered by rainfall in the bone-dry desert. It carried its breath-mint-size babies in a backward-facing pouch so mothers could forage for food and dig shallow, camouflaged shelters. Still, these adaptations did not prepare the western barred bandicoot for the colonial-era transformation of its ecosystem, particularly…

Across 1 Monte ___ (resort)6 Nine-digit ID: Abbr. 9 Group of scouts…or a rhyme for “group” 10 When the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed, for short 11 Undergoes a chemical change (with)  13 Sworn statement 14 Willa Cather’s The Song of the ___ 15 Perfect paradise 17 Poet ___ St. Vincent Millay  19 Suffix with neutr- or Filip-  20 Ancient inhabitants of Nahal Ein Gev II 23 Cuba’s ___ of Pigs  24 Pottery oven 25 Maker of Peanut Butter Cups 27 ___ Club (wholesale chain) 31 “This is wrong ___ many levels!” 32 Home of a culture reflected in Marques Hanalei Marzan’s artwork 34 Get exactly right 35 Passed out, as cards 36 Gen ___ (boomer’s kid, informally)  37 Male duck Down 1 Bottom-left PC keyboard key 2 Locale 3 Loud sound from…

THE DISEASE WAS FIRST NOTED on the Midwestern frontier in the early 1800s as settlers expanded into new territory with their herds. Known initially as “the slows,” “the staggers,” “the trembles” and eventually “milk sickness,” the disease had a terrifying progression. Within days, a formerly healthy person could be bedridden with vomiting, often followed by coma and eventually death. Daniel Drake, a doctor in Cincinnati, described the symptoms as sly and baffling, beginning only with “a general weakness and lassitude, which increase in the most gradual manner.” It tended to strike in the summer after periods of little rain. It wasn’t present on the East Coast. There was no record of similar illness anywhere else in the world. Settlers were flummoxed—and terrified. Some blamed spooks and witches. Others, poisonous vapors…

IT’S THE PLATONIC ideal of the sailboat, unmistakable in lakes and coastal waters across the country, with its colorful, equilateral triangle sail pulled taut in the summer breeze. It’s also the most popular sailboat ever made, with more than half a million built since the first launch in 1952. The design of the Sunfish came from Cortlandt Heyniger and Alex Bryan, friends whose company, Alcort, was building a rescue paddleboard for the Red Cross. On a whim, Bryan added a simple sail to the wooden board to create a basic but elegant sailboat. As legend holds, his wife, Aileen Bryan—née Shields, a sailing scion and racing champion—tried sailing the craft and wanted a little more room to maneuver, as she was then pregnant. So Alcort’s first employee, Carl Meinert, designed…

Using gloved hands and utmost care, assistants carry the treasures out of storage and place them on a table in a well-lit viewing room. The small, rare photographic portraits are encased in hinged velvet-lined metal cases. “Look at her, isn’t she stunning?” says Eleanor Jones Harvey, a senior curator here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). She points to a portrait made in 1859 of an African American woman with center-parted hair, lace gloves and a look of tremendous poise, style and confidence. The woman was Rhoda Goodridge, and the man behind the camera was her husband, Glenalvin Goodridge of York, Pennsylvania. Largely forgotten today, Goodridge was one of the most important African American photographers of the 19th century, who, along with James P. Ball of Cincinnati and Augustus…

PAULA REGO FOUND inspiration just about everywhere. In Bible stories told by her Catholic grandmother, in Walt Disney and Jane Eyre, in the cobalt tiles that decorated her childhood bedroom: Tidbits she tucked away turned up decades later in her paintings and pastels. But the year that the Portuguese-born artist spent in residence at London’s National Gallery in the early 1990s offered a true gold mine. “I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement,” she recalled. Among the treasures Rego, who died in 2022 at age 87, discovered in the vast museum’s galleries was the Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli’s paneled altarpiece La Madonna della Rondine, created for an Italian chapel in the 1490s. It would inspire Rego’s monumental Crivelli’s Garden, a…

GEORGE WASHINGTON was a man of many talents. Writing speeches was not one of them. He wasn’t great at delivering speeches, either. And he was thin-skinned. Washington managed each of those imperfections on its own, but when he had to contend with all three at once, he struggled to maintain his legendary self-control. Such moments of apparent weakness are a gift—not so much for him as for me, one of his biographers: Poignantly, they bring Washington to life. If Washington had had his way, he never would have been president. “My movements to the chair of Government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution,” he wrote to a well-wisher in an uncharacteristically rueful moment ahead of the first…

Nahal Ein Gev II was settled roughly 12 millennia ago by the Paleolithic people known as Natufians, who apparently lived at the site year-round. Researchers have uncovered evidence of habitation spanning 200 years or more. Right, skeletons were excavated in 2022 from an area that served as a burial ground. THE VILLAGE Gourd-shaped structures, likely homes, were built to a standardized plan. Dozens may lie unexcavated in the surroun-ding area, which covers 13,000 square feet. KEY 1 Entrances Fallen stone slabs suggest doorways 2 Early pottery? Several burnt, red clay objects found in 2022 3 Hearths Fire installations built into structural wall 4 Posthole One of several, likely used to support a roof 5 Bench Short interior wall made of large, flat stones 6 Foxhole Pit dug by soldiers in 1960s, revealing the site 7 Curved walls…

“We thought of the legend of Prometheus, of that deep sense of guilt in man’s new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it.” J. ROBERT OPPEN HEIMER IN FEBRUARY 1943, the Los Alamos Ranch School, an outdoorsy institution for boys, abruptly closed its doors so the U.S. government could take over the campus. A local poet named Peggy Pond Church, daughter of the school’s founder, later described the “element of extreme haste and mystery” that surrounded the whole operation. As bulldo-zers arrived on the New Mexico campus, she had her first glimpse of J. Robert Oppen-heimer. “Cowboy boots and all,” she wrote, “he hurried in the front door and out the back, peering quickly into the kitchen and bedrooms. I was impressed, even in…

Six miles outside Red Cloud, Nebraska, the blackness is absolute. Before sunrise the moonless stars sizzle and hum high above the prairie. Down here—stillness. Even the wind isn’t up yet. And it’s too dark to see your own boots. Then the light sneaks in, a single gray-scale brushstroke low on the horizon. The next deeper and richer than the last. In town, dawn silhouettes the rooflines and the chimneys across the street an hour before it casts a shadow. Then all at once a new day tangles itself in the trees. Folks work early here, and late, and when harvest comes to this part of Nebraska the big trucks rumble through town at every hour. Down at the depot and out at the co-op, mountains of grain wait to be…