Imagine peeling an orange, then trying to lay the peel flat. Map-making is the art of manipulating the orange peel until it yields.

• By Adrienne Bernhard

Women wore, and sometimes designed, their own clothes in California prisons until the 1990s, when the state began issuing uniforms to its female inmates.

• By Libby Rainey

Arsenic was long a preservative in the taxidermic process, despite criticism of the method as unnecessarily dangerous. But at least one contemporary scholar has suggested that metabolized arsenic extended the lives of late 19th-century taxidermists by decades.

• By Jack Denton

No other president in the last 50 years has attempted to shrink the national monuments designated by his predecessors.

• By Morgan Baskin

How the world has—and hasn't—changed since Pacific Standard's first Issue.

• By Morgan Baskin & Jack Denton
• Member Exclusive

The Pentagon has paid more than $42 billion to clean up contaminated sites—mostly to private contractors—with little evidence of improvements, a ProPublica investigation found.

• By Kate Wheeling

In 1567, wealthy citizens who could afford to purchase tickets for England's first National Lottery were guaranteed indemnity from arrest for crimes (excepting murder, treason, piracy, and other felonies).

• By Jack Denton

Awareness that a brand is widely counterfeited can make shoppers more willing to pay for the real thing, a 2012 study found.

• By Katie Kilkenny

A 2016 survey found that 48 percent of record buyers don't actually play their purchases, suggesting that, for many, vinyl is more aesthetic collectible than functional art.

• By Max Ufberg

More than 130 Berliners died trying to cross the "death strip," the no-man’s-land between two massive concrete walls that divided their city for nearly 30 years.

• By Morgan Baskin

Kodak embraced the ideals of the Progressive Era early on, aggressively marketing cameras to women from the outset with the launch of advertisements featuring the Kodak Girl—a pretty, camera-wielding woman—in 1893.

• By Elena Gooray

Public support for criminal registries has grown despite inconsistent evidence that they reduce crime, which social scientists attribute to a human need to feel a sense of control over threats.

• By Meghan Walsh

Vigilantes who hunt down feral cats run up against animal-cruelty laws and social norms; one Texas veterinarian sparked outrage after she bragged on Facebook about killing what she thought was a feral tomcat with a bow and arrow.

• By Peter Andrey Smith

In the 1940s, the mass-produced tract homes that formed Levittown, New York—one of America's first suburbs—specifically barred "any person other than members of the Caucasian race" in their leases.

• By Madeleine Thomas