Where Valentine’s Day is illegal; the audacious idea of ‘The Rescue’; how ❤️ led to the Taj Mahal; loose ends in the Amelia Earhart mystery; and the origins of ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’
|  | Monday, February 14, 2022 | | | | |
| In today’s newsletter, where Valentine’s Day is illegal; the audacious idea of The Rescue; how ❤️ led to the Taj Mahal; loose ends in the Amelia Earhart mystery ... and the origins of “Hispanic” and “Latino.” | |
 | PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOMAS VAN HOUTRYVE
| | By Kristin Romey, Senior Archaeology Editor and Writer
On the night of August 15, 2019, a Nat Geo editor, Rob Kunzig, was in a taxi stopped in a Parisian traffic jam over the Seine. “Is Notre Dame burning?” his wife asked, as she looked out the window.
Moments later, flames engulfed the iconic spire of the beloved medieval cathedral. Like so many others in Paris on that spring night, Kunzig watched the conflagration in horror. Nearly 20 years earlier, he had the rare opportunity to explore the “forest” of the cathedral, a vast attic latticed with enormous ancient oak beams. Now the burning roof cast a terrible orange glow into the sky. Had France—and the world—lost Notre Dame?
Absolutely not, reports Kunzig in his February cover story for National Geographic. A little more than a year after he watched the cathedral burn, Kunzig was back in the attic of Notre Dame, exploring the damaged interior with experts leading the multiyear restoration. But his story, with stunning photos and video by Tomas van Houtryve, also takes us to the constellation of people and resources around the cathedral—the conservators, engineers, laboratories, and even forests— that are critical to bringing it back. Van Houtryve used digital scans of 19th-century photo technology for the images of a chimera (below left), and Amélie Strack (below right) who tested a new laser technique in cleaning and bringing back two side chapels.
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| But what is “back”? In the immediate aftermath, some argued that this was an opportunity to add a 21st-century touch to the damaged roof of Notre Dame, à la the I.M. Pei addition to the Louvre. As they pointed out, the beloved spire of the 12th-century cathedral had marked the Parisian skyline for just less than two centuries. And who ultimately decides how and what to restore? The questions are fraught.
But in the case of Notre Dame, Kunzig writes, the direction is clear: The cathedral will be returned to the state architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc had restored in (and built the confectionary neo-Gothic spire) in the 19th century.
This latest restoration is not just symbolic—it is a celebration of resilience for a monument that has centered the lives of Parisians for almost a millennium. And just as Viollet-le-Duc had brought the beleaguered cathedral back to life, so do his inheritors. As Philippe Villeneuve, the chief architect leading the restoration, told Kunzig, “We are restoring the restorer.”
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| (Pictured, at top, a crane carries workers from the roof of the complex. Above left, technician Thomas Pagès restores a copper statue of St. Philip, which along with statues of the other apostle by chance were removed from the spire four days before the fire. Above right, the heads of the statues were taken off before their removal from the roof.)
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY TUMPA MONDAL, XINHUA VIA REDUX | | Where Valentine’s Day is verboten: Religious edicts and concerns about the spread of Western commercial culture have quashed today’s annual festival of lovers in parts of the world. Erin Blakemore gives us a rundown of where Valentine bans and mass arrests take place—and a glimpse of where lovers get around the rules. And Sydney Combs reminds us that Valentine’s Day wasn’t always about love. (Pictured above, a Valentine’s Day decoration in Kolkata, India, where Hindu nationalists often have protested the holiday.)
‘There was no Plan B’: That’s what a rescuer of Thai boys who were trapped in a cave said of the audacious dive to free them, Nat Geo reports. The effort, which attracted worldwide attention, is the focus of The Rescue, a documentary directed by Nat Geo Explorer Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, is now streaming on Disney+. See the trailer.
Hispanic? Latino? Latinx? Here is where those terms originated, and what’s going on with language now. Civil rights group and the U.S. Census pushed for hard data of various groups of people, but no one term can commonly describe everyone in those groups, sociologist Nancy López tells Nat Geo.
Celebrate Black History Month: Nat Geo has a roundup of stories right here. Other places, such as MasterClass, have free classes this month on Black history. And PBS has an array of free documentaries. | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY YVA MOMATIUK AND JOHN EASTCOTT, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION | | The kiss: A married Inuit couple shares a kiss in the settlement of Umingmaktok in the far reaches of Canada's Northwest Territories. This picture, featured recently in our Photo of the Day archival collection, originally appeared in the November 1977 issue in a story about the settlement.
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 | | MICHELE FALZONE/AWL IMAGES | | The price of love: You’ve seen India’s magnificent Taj Mahal in photographs (above, at sunrise), but why it was built and the fallout of the enduring memorial are striking as well. It was conceived by Emperor Shah Jahan to house the body of his beloved Mumtaz Mahal, who died while giving birth to their 14th child. He was so preoccupied by the construction that he neglected parts of the empire and a son wrested away control, History magazine reports.
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 | 100 blessings a day means you look for every single thing to appreciate about being alive every day.
| | | Michael W. Twitty
| | African American-Jewish culinary historian; Nat Geo Explorer | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH VIA BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
| | Amelia Earhart’s fate: Was the aviation pioneer, who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937, captured by Japanese soldiers on Saipan? Did she and navigator Fred Norman crash into the Pacific during a radio transmission? Two of the most influential figures in the decades-long search for Earhart died last month, but their theories live on, Rachel Hartigan writes for Nat Geo. (Earhart’s disappearance will be the subject of a special two-part Nat Geo podcast next month and prompted a state-of-the-art search by Nat Geo Explorer at Large Robert Ballard.)
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Today's newsletter was curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, and Monica Williams. Have an idea or link to a story you think is right down our alley? Let us know at david.beard@natgeo.com.
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