From Tempo de Conhecer: "There is a book whose reading — or mere possession — proved fatal for many. Not because it contained subversive ideas but because the object itself was deadly. It is a 19th-century book known as Shadows from the Walls of Death — a dark title for an even
From PBS: "It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators. Barkers, including a young Cary Grant, called out to passersby, enticing
From Der Spiegel: "It’s two hours after midnight. The extreme mountaineer Kristin Harila is trudging through the death zone on K2, the second tallest mountain in the world, following the beam of her headlamp. To her left, the mountainside plunges almost vertically, hundreds of meters into the depths.
From the New York Times: "Interpol had been looking for a disgraced finance executive for weeks when Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, found him, hiding in Belarus. He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian
From MIT: "Arnhildur Pálmadóttir was around three years old when she saw a red sky from her living room window. A volcano was erupting about 25 miles away from where she lived on the northeastern coast of Iceland. Though it posed no immediate threat, its ominous presence seeped into
From Damn Interesting: "Paris, 29 May 1832. All through the night, a young Frenchman named Évariste Galois stayed awake, quill in hand, frantically scrawling notes and equations across dozens of sheets of paper. He had only been studying mathematics seriously for a few years, but he had proven to
From The Guardian: "A Chinese paraglider who was accidentally propelled more than 8,000 metres high by an updraft has been banned from the activity for six months after a video of his ordeal went viral. Peng Yujiang began from an elevation of about 3,000m in the Qilian
From the New York Times: "Kelly Wakefield, a professional gardener, was doing her spring cleanup of a public park in St. Albans, Vt., when she stumbled upon a mysterious metal box under a pile of leaves. She shook the box and heard the telltale jangle of coins. She opened
From National Library of Medicine: "The structure of modern residency programs in North America originated at Johns Hopkins Hospital during the last decade of the 19th century, under the aegis and influence of William Stewart Halsted. Halsted was a surgical innovator who greatly shaped surgical practice in the 20th
From The Wrap: "A remote indigenous tribe Amazon tribe in Brazil has sued The New York Times, claiming a story about its first exposure to the internet has led to widespread reports that its members have become addicted to pornography. Filed last week in Los Angeles, the Marubo Tribe
From The Atlantic: "Last week, Germany arrested Peter Fitzek, 59, an anti-government figure also known as King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah. Historically, attempts to arrest messiahs have met with mixed results, so to stay on the safe side, the Interior Ministry not only rolled up
From Now I Know: "In 2007, Tommaso was a homeless kitten, living on the streets of Rome — your stereotypical alley cat. He quickly became the feline equivalent of a rags-to-riches story when a woman named Maria Assunta, then either 89 or 90 years old, adopted Tommaso as her own.