Getting the flavor of...

The world’s longest cave

An awful lot of history fits inside a 1,000-mile cave system, said Kenan Christiansen in The New York Times. Western Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave once rivaled Niagara Falls as America’s top tourist destination, yet that’s hardly this natural wonder’s only claim to fame. Lost tribes scraped at its limestone walls 50 centuries ago. Slaves mined the same rock to produce gunpowder during the War of 1812. Two decades later, the great-great-great-grandfather of current guide Jerry Bransford was one of the daring teenage slaves who pushed deeper into the darkness, opening up the cave’s era as a virtual underground amusement park. Some 600 miles of the cave system remain unexplored, but Bransford will show you the natural rotunda where orchestras once played and the underground stream that once teemed with eyeless fish. He always stops to read the names his forebears wrote overhead with candlestick ash. “Whenever I see a signature from my kin,” he says, “I feel awed by what they did.

Sherlock Holmes in Ohio

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I focus hard, trying to help Sherlock Holmes solve a mystery, said Susan Glaser in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Not that I imagine myself to be Dr. Watson, of course: I’m just visiting an exhibit about the fictional sleuth that will be on view through Sept. 1 at Columbus, Ohio’s Center of Science and Industry (cosi.org). “The International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes” also surveys the life of author Arthur Conan Doyle and displays props from the recent hit films and two current television series based on Doyle’s late-19th-century creation. But the exhibition’s centerpiece is the visitor-participation crime investigation. Our group has been told that Holmes is unavailable, leaving to us the challenge of studying a series of Victorian-era rooms to determine if a man who’s been found wounded has murdered his missing wife. Carefully I study the blood splatters and other finely fabricated clues and then reach my conclusion. It’s wrong—but at COSI, every sleuth gets a second chance.