From Texas Monthly: "Erik Maund had always lived the high life, as you might expect of a man whose surname had been blasted on TV ads for decades. By the time he was in his forties, he was an executive at Maund Automotive Group, a car sales business whose
From NPR: "The modern idea of stress began on a rooftop in Canada, with a handful of rats freezing in the winter wind. This was 1936 and by that point the owner of the rats, an endocrinologist named Hans Selye, had become expert at making rats suffer for science.
From New York magazine: "Vlad Artamonov told prospective investors, many of them his former classmates from Harvard Business School, that he’d discovered a hidden way to learn which stocks Warren Buffett was buying early, an edge that would make him a lot of money. It involved, he said,
From Hormones Matter: "To treat young healthy prepubescent girls with a known carcinogen to stunt their adult height sounds like a bizarre science fiction experiment, but it is unfortunately true. From 1959 through the 1970s physicians and researchers from the Royal Children’s Hospital and the University of Melbourne,
From Alta magazine: "After moving to Los Angeles, Dee Ann found her guru: the famous writer Carlos Castaneda. She joined his cult and became a witch—as his female followers called themselves—or a chacmool, a word from ancient Mexico for revered statues depicting guardians of the gods. As
From Historic Flix: "Mauro Prosperi, a former police officer from Italy, is a seasoned ultramarathon runner. His hobby saw him enter the Marathon des Sables in 1994, an annual six-day ultramarathon that takes participants through over 150 miles of scorching Moroccan desert. For their whole week in the desert,
From Literary Hub: "It was a fine early summer afternoon in England, and the port at Chelsea was just slipping out of sight when Benjamin Franklin—at the urging of his fellow passengers—kicked off his buckled shoes and tossed aside his heavy jacket. John Wygate, a fellow printer
From Hackaday: "The Brennan Monorail was a train from the early 1900’s that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Not only did it keep itself perfectly balanced on a single rail, but it mysteriously leaned into corners without any driver input. This was a real invention – and
From Vice: "One day last spring, near an old rural cemetery in southern Brazil, a black man named Marcelo Gomes held up the corners of a Confederate flag to pose for a cell-phone photo. After the picture was taken, Gomes said he saw no problem with a black man
From WBUR: "hat’s most shocking about Jeremy Pauley isn’t his tattooed eyeball or the metal spikes protruding from his scalp. It’s his openness about trading in human remains. Standing in the doorway of his rural Pennsylvania home, dressed all in black, he greets an unannounced reporter
From the New York Times: "After six weekends of deliberating, a group of Austrian citizens decided how to divvy up the riches of the heiress Marlene Engelhorn, who is donating the bulk of her inheritance to charity in an attempt to challenge a system that allowed her to accumulate
From The Guardian: "Jordan Hatmaker knew something was wrong as soon as she tried to open her parachute. “You’re meant to look up to check: is it there? Is it square? And is it stable?” she says. It was none of those things. This was the second time