In the early ’90s, shortly before he helped think up Snopes, the first (and favorite) website for fact-checks, and way before he was banished from the very thing he’d helped build, David Mikkelson was quite a character on message boards. He wasn’t looking for love necessarily, but it found him nonetheless.
“A lot of people thought it was made up,” said Dr. Brusatte, a professor at the University of Edinburgh. “They thought it was filmmakers trying to do something crazy.”
Far from crazy, feathered dinosaurs have become a well-established fact, thanks largely to a trove of remarkable fossils that have been unearthed in northeast China since the mid-1990s. Now Dr. Brusatte and other paleontologists are trying to determine exactly how feathered dinosaurs achieved powered flight and became the birds that fly overhead today — an evolutionary mystery that stretches more than 150 million years.
Many of the visitors who do venture here stay at one of the few lodgings in town: the World Famous Clown Motel. It’s hard to miss. A pair of 20-foot-tall wooden clowns surveil the parking lot. A pink and powder-blue post topped with a brightly lit juggling clown beckons motorists in (or warns them off). Known as “the scariest motel in America,” it’s said to be haunted. It may well be.
I came here in January, wanting to learn more about why America — my adopted home for 16 years — so strangely and uniquely fetishizes its brutal past. Nowhere is this more true than in the American West, and nowhere have I seen it better epitomized than in Tonopah.
True progress requires reckoning with the past. A plethora of recent books has revealed a much more complex story than that which many of us were taught — one of hidden figures and once-marginalized peoples whose contributions shaped our world. In “Into the Amazon,” the journalist Larry Rohter delivers an exhaustively researched account of yet another vital, challenging character generally unknown to the English-speaking world.