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
From The Ringer: "It was January 2001 when Harvey Silikovitz first tried to get on Jeopardy! He was working as an attorney in New York City and turned up at the audition in a Manhattan hotel at the urging of his friend Adam Taxin, who had just won more
From Slate: "Jan. 15 isn’t just National Bagel Day. It’s also National Strawberry Ice Cream Day, National Hat Day, and, of course, National Kombucha Day. Jan. 16, if you didn’t know, is National Nothing Day. May 9 is the eternally solemn National Lost Sock Memorial Day.
From CrimeReads: "In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, reports of crimes attributed to ghosts abounded in mainstream newspapers. But few of these stories garnered fervent attention like the mystery of a farmhouse just outside Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Alexander MacDonald had built the house in 1887. He lived there
From Wikipedia: "After Coltrane's death, a congregation called the Yardbird Temple in San Francisco began worshipping him as God incarnate. The group was named after Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist. The congregation became affiliated with the African Orthodox Church; this
From The Guardian: "One autumn morning, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located 600 miles east of Moresby, across
From New York: “Gene Fleming was well known in Hastings. An eccentric inventor, he lived on a sprawling, unusual estate — a Navy ammunition depot he and his wife had renovated just outside . In September 1988, Fleming visited his brother-in-law‘s farm and noticed a new goose — it didn’t have
From NPR: "Beginning in 1940, a man named George Metesky hid 33 pipe bombs in public spaces in New York City. Twenty-two of those bombs exploded, injuring 15 people. Until he was captured in 1957, Metesky was known to the press, the police and an increasingly anxious populace as
From The Guardian: "During the second world war, young women broke traditional gender barriers by working in Britain’s forests as part of the Women’s Timber Corps. As many as 15-18,000 young women left home for the first time, aged 17-24, to fell trees with an axe
From the BBC: "One of the world's most prolific blood donors - whose plasma saved the lives of more than two million babies - has died. James Harrison died in his sleep at a nursing home in New South Wales, Australia on 17 February, his family said
From Scientific American: "In 2011 an anonymous poster on the now infamously controversial image board 4chan posed a mathematical puzzle about the cult classic anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The first season of this anime series consists of 14 episodes that were designed so that you can
From the WSJ: "Eleanor Maguire wasn’t great at navigating the streets of London, and she started to think that the brains of the people who were expert navigators—the city’s famous cabdrivers—might actually be different than hers. She burst into her lab at University College London
From National Geographic: "A young woman is swept from her home into a foreign, enchanted world. Her captor is no mere mortal, but a powerful and mystical fairy or beast. So begins the odyssey of Feyre, the protagonist of Sarah J. Maas’s bestselling A Court of Thorns and
From the Wall Street Journal: "Lead pollution in ancient Rome was so high that it dropped the population’s IQ by around 3 points, if not more. Elites were exposed to lead through water pipes, cooking pots, bath tubs, cosmetics and the syrups that sweetened their wine. But the