From Nautilus: "It’s impossible to know exactly when each of the five mutations happened. When, deep in my marrow, one thing after another went awry, and divided my life. Like all people who have been ill, my life is split into Before and After. Did a mutation occur
From the WSJ: "In the spring of 2023, a London banker-turned-bookmaker reached out to a few contacts with an audacious request: Can you help me take down the Texas lottery? Bernard Marantelli had a plan in mind. He and his partners would buy nearly every possible number in a
From The Guardian: "Nobody can recall who first phoned the police on the morning of 4 September 1990, but everyone remembers the girl. Her body, hanging from a pine tree on a steep slope above the Spanish frontier town of Portbou, was visible to anyone looking up from the
From The Standard: "She fell in love with the book, originally written by Erich Maria Remarque in 1928, in high school. Taking the German point of view, it follows soldier Paul Baumer through the trenches during the last years of the First World War. It had twice been adapted
From Amusing Planet: "Sometime in the summer of 1791 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart fell ill. By late November, his condition worsened dramatically. He became bedridden, suffering from swelling, pain, and persistent vomiting. Around two weeks later, on 5 December, he died at his home in Vienna. Mozart himself was deeply
From the ICIJ: "Although his own empire’s resources were depleted, Churchill wanted the United States to control the Soviets in Europe through the use of nuclear weapons. The Soviets still appeared far away from developing their own atomic weapons, and would respect American dominance if exerted. Dropping the
From The Guardian: "Rudi Herrmann took a deep breath and asked his son Peter to sit down. “I have a story to tell you,” he said. Rudi had been preparing for this conversation for several years, running over the words in his mind. He was about to tell his
From Now I Know: "LaChappa is 41 years old right now. His three-year pro career topped out in the low minors more than two decades ago. But if prior history is any indicator, sometime in the next few weeks, the San Diego Padres will sign LaChappa to a minor
From the Tribune: "A researcher claims to have solved the 136-year-old mystery of Jack the Ripper, revealing a 100 per cent DNA match linking the infamous serial killer to a long-standing suspect. Russell Edwards, who has spent years investigating the case, says DNA extracted from a bloodstained shawl found
From the CBC: "Joshua Haldeman was just one of thousands of Saskatchewan farmers who lost their land in the drought of the Dirty '30s. While that trauma shaped the lives of everyone who went through it, the crisis affected Haldeman so much that he never stopped raging at
From Wikipedia: "Alessandro Zanardi is an Italian former professional racing driver who won the CART championship in 1997 and 1998, and took 15 wins in the series. He also raced in Formula One from 1991 to 1994 and again in 1999; his best result was a sixth-place finish in
From The Hustle: "Just after 11 PM on February 15, 1992, a janky ball machine at the Virginia State Lottery HQ spit out 6 winning numbers on live television: 8… 11… 13… 15… 19… 20. In the coming days, officials would find out that one “person” had secured not
From Wikipedia: "Martin Pistorius is a South African man who had locked-in syndrome and was unable to move or communicate for 12 years. When he was 12, he began losing voluntary motor control and eventually fell into a vegetative state for three years. He began regaining consciousness around age
From Atlas Obscura: "As the railway grew more popular in the 1850s and 1860s, trains allowed travelers to move about with unprecedented speed and efficiency, cutting the length of travel time drastically. But according to the more fearful Victorians, these technological achievements came at the considerable cost of mental
From WTOL-11: "A Michigan resident died from rabies after receiving a transplanted organ in Lucas County earlier this year, according to the Toledo-Lucas County Health Department. Dr. Carl Schmidt, a deputy coroner, said the recipient, who had undergone a kidney transplant in December, contracted the viral disease through the
From LARB: "An early 20th-century journalist and travel writer, William Seabrook was once among the most successful wordsmiths of his day, a progenitor of both gonzo journalists and contemporary Vice contributors, his work anticipating the former by decades and the latter by almost a century. He joined camel raids
From ProPublica: "Early last year, Matthew Allison could be found at the Space Banana dance club, awkwardly swaying to his own beat. Clutching the cheapest house beer, he’d greet people with a bear hug, a broad grin and his familiar, “Yo, bro!” salutations. Allison, then a 37-year-old convenience
From Wikipedia: "James Carter was born in 1925 to a Mississippi sharecropping family and as a young man was several times an inmate of the Mississippi prison system. In 1959, Carter was a prisoner in a Mississippi State Penitentiary when Alan Lomax recorded him leading a group of prisoners
From CNN: "Traveling along the highways of Europe, a campervan named Stella Vita has driven almost 2,000 kilometers without stopping for fuel or plugging in to charge. Described as a self-sustaining house on wheels, the campervan has solar panels fitted to its roof and is powered by the
From Space.com: "Space is an airless vacuum, so technically, you can't smell anything. However, space is not a complete vacuum. It's full of all manner of molecules, some of which have their own strong odors when we smell them on Earth. During the Apollo
From the BBC: "In the early hours of 14 September 2019, Eleanor Paice jolted awake to the sound of smashing glass. Living in a staff flat above Blenheim Palace, the guest services supervisor was used to strange noises. But when fire alarms began to blare, she knew something was
From Atlas Obscura: "In 1997 — at the height of a wave of exposés, lawsuits, and public outrage against the tobacco industry — a man named Puzant Torigian, a Hackensack, New Jersey-based entrepreneur, launched a new brand of cigarettes called Bravo. Bravo cigarettes contained nothing but lettuce, dried and cured to
From CBC: "Snowball fighting is a Canadian tradition which can run from the impromptu raid on passing pedestrians to an all-out war. It's also an international sport. Yukigassen, a Japanese word for "snow battle", takes a schoolyard snowball fight, and adds precision, professionalism, and competition.
From Marginal Revolution: "As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not