Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.

Holy Week and the art of loosing:

Each Maundy Thursday, the members of our church’s altar guild carefully and lovingly remove the candelabra, cross, vessels, fine linens and paraments from the altar. They strip the altar to bare stone. When everything is removed, what is left is nude and vulnerable, not as imposing as one might expect. It seems almost a shame to see the altar that way, and so when the women are finished undressing it someone turns out the lights, and the congregation files out in silence.

How Jelly Belly creates all of its weird flavors:

“We’re nothing if not committed to making flavors as true to life as possible,” Jelly Belly spokesperson Jana Sanders Perry tells mental_floss, “and that includes the wacky flavors, too.” Still, no one at Jelly Belly is eating canned dog food or vomit to make these beans, or putting that stuff in the beans themselves—and yet, they taste just like what they’re named after. So how is it done?

Sports Royalty—Animal Mascots:

They become fixtures of campus life, and with the aid of social media, they establish distinct identities. In short, they can become beloved. And some colleges have decided to treat them the way they treat other beloved figures who have passed on. All dogs go to heaven, but some have elaborate resting places on earth as well.

The creator of “Mad Men” on LA Jews and the American Dream:

I felt like, I’m going to tell a story about opportunity and living in a world of excuses and victimhood. I’m going to say, “Look at how tough these people are.” When you see Disney movies, early Disney movies, and you think like, Who thought you could show Bambi to a kid? But during the Great Depression, plenty of kids went through extreme hardships. Those people were tough.

Unexplainable Sounds:

Upsweep is an unidentified sound that’s existed at least since the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory began recording SOSUS—an underwater sound surveillance system with listening stations around the world—in 1991. The sound “consists of a long train of narrow-band upsweeping sounds of several seconds duration each.” The source location is difficult to identify, but it’s in the Pacific, around the halfway point between Australia and South America. Upsweep changes with the seasons, becoming loudest in spring and autumn, though it isn’t clear why.

John Oliver meets with Edward Snowden to discuss the “junk” test: