Flagstaff, Arizona
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For no explainable practical reason, humans are enamored with – and even empathetic toward – specific inanimate objects. Our first car. A choice coffee mug. And for a particular subset of the population, that extends to a dimly lit frozen sphere currently 3.3 billion miles away.
Several hundred of them pilgrimage to Arizona each February for the I Heart Pluto Festival. Flagstaff is the site where, nearly a century ago, a telescope lens picked out what was hailed for decades as the ninth planet of our solar system.
Today, schoolchildren are taught that adding Pluto to the roster was a mistake — that there are only eight proper planets after all, and…