Jessica Leigh Hester
Historian / Journalist / Writer

Selected Work

 

Selected Work

 
 

Most recent

“Letter of Recommendation: Trace Fossils,” New York Times Magazine

A paleontologist once told me that city sidewalks hold snapshots. If I trained my gaze toward my feet, he said, I would find evidence of all kinds of commutes: traces of hopping birds, the soles of humans’ shoes, restless leaves that fell and sank into wet concrete at just the right moment. I might see a smattering of little paw prints zigging, zagging, doubling back, evidence of important rodent business that didn’t often overlap with mine.

These marks are too recent to pass muster with scientific sticklers, but in all respects except age, they are fossils. There are many ways to make one. Some form when a creature is entombed in sediment: Water percolates through, flush with minerals, and over time the mixture infiltrates the bones, where it settles and forms stone. Other fossils are casts, made, for instance, when a shell dissolves and leaves behind a mold that eventually fills with sediment, which hardens into rock. But not all fossils involve remains; some catalog movements. These are the kind that stipple our sidewalks — nascent trace fossils, records of fleeting contact.

 
[Illustration by Carmen Deñó for Atlas Obscura]

[Illustration by Carmen Deñó for Atlas Obscura]

Longform & Features

“The Mystery of Harriet Cole,” Atlas Obscura

“Harriet” is a network of fibers fastened to a black board in a case pushed up against a wall. At the top, there appears to be a brain, plump and brown, and a pair of eyes. Scan your own eyes down and you’ll encounter an intricate system of skinny, brittle cords, pulled taut and painted startlingly, artificially white. The outline is recognizably human—there’s the impression of hands and feet, the hint of a pelvis, the suggestion of a rib cage—but it is slightly fantastical, too. The way the cords loop at the hands and feet, it almost appears as if the figure has fins. Elsewhere, the fibers look shaggy, like chewed wire, as if electricity is shooting from the margins of the body.

This is a human medical specimen, in the spirit of an articulated skeleton. But unlike that familiar sight, it represents the nervous system, a part of the body’s machinery that most people have trouble even imagining. Some who stand before “Harriet” wiggle their fingers and toes, as if trying to map the fibers onto their own bodies and make the sight somehow less abstract.

At the time of the dissection, no one paid much attention to the person whose circuitry had been harvested for this act of scientific and anatomical bravado. The story of “Harriet” emerged over the following decades, and swirled with mythology that calcified into fact. The specimen and the mythology surrounding it are marvelous and rattling, revealing how systemic inequalities endure into the afterlife, how “great” white men have propped themselves and each other up on the bodies of women, and how stories take root. How truth—like a pickled specimen on a forgotten shelf—can shrivel, bloat, or cloud with age, until it’s hard to decipher at all.

Ecology & Biology

“The Centuries-Old Mystery of How Florida Got Its Flamingos,” Atlas Obscura

It was late afternoon, and John J. Audubon still hadn’t found a flamingo. The sun was slinking toward the horizon, the sky scuffed by wispy clouds, and the boat was able to slice through the water with barely a ripple. Not a bad voyage, but Audubon had engineered this expedition to the islands off of Florida’s southeast coast for the express purpose of finding a flock of the long-necked crimson beauties. Where were they?

Audubon had seen an American Flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) in Florida before—in Key West, soaring toward a hammock of mangroves. (Naturally, he tried to nab it as a specimen, but it dodged the shot he fired.) He knew that flamingos were thick in Cuba, and had heard that the birds often congregated near Pensacola, and sometimes Alabama or South Carolina. Now, in May of 1832, he was desperate to shoot one, or even lay eyes on one—but so far, no luck.

Then, off in the distance, he spotted a flock careening with outstretched wings, elongated necks, and legs tucked back behind them. “Ah! reader, could you but know the emotions that then agitated my breast!” he later wrote. The birds changed direction before he could aim his gun, but Audubon watched them as if entranced, and didn’t tear his gaze away until dusk settled.

[Biodiversity Heritage Library/CC by 2.0]

[Biodiversity Heritage Library/CC by 2.0]

[Photo by me at Children’s Workshop]

[Photo by me at Children’s Workshop]

Archaeology & Collections

“Classroom Dig,” The New Yorker

About two and a half years ago, Miriam Sicherman’s fourth graders began fishing for treasure beneath the wood-plank floor of their classroom closet, at the Children’s Workshop School, on East Twelfth Street. First, they worked surgically, using pencils, chopstick style, to tweeze out objects that they spied through gaps in the boards. Then they used coat hangers as hooks. Now teachers have pried up a number of the planks, creating a full-on dig site, with strata dating back to the building’s construction in 1913. During free periods, the kids can choose between playing dominoes, mucking around in the compost bin, and kneeling beside the opening to sift through the jumble of relics that have fallen out of generations of jacket pockets and backpacks.