Oliver Hayes 
A Corpse, a Crowd, and a Bottle of Smelling Salts On September 3, 1840, Marie Lafarge walked into a courtroom in Tulle, France, dressed in mourning black, accused of poisoning her husband Charles, a foundry owner. The case became one of the first trials the public followed almost in real time, through daily newspaper reports. … Read more
The Cup You Were About to Throw Away Picture a paper coffee cup right after it’s been drained: crumpled rim, coffee rings on the cardboard, a few minutes from the trash can. Now picture that same cup with a clean line of lettering wrapped around its side, spelling out a joke sharp enough to stop … Read more
A Teenager’s Strange Little Project Sometime between 1940 and 1942, a British teenager did something most people would call pointless: picking up her cats’ shed whiskers from the floor, the hearthrug, even under the draft blocker on the back door, and keeping them. She wove each one into the page of a handmade book, dated … Read more
The Headline Time Forgot On November 4, 2009, Neatorama published a post built for clicking: “The 15 Best Man Caves on the Internet.” Neatorama was an aggregator blog, thriving at the time by trawling the web for weird, cool, or funny finds and repackaging them for readers who didn’t want to go looking themselves. The … Read more
The Image Doesn’t Match Picture Lincoln the way everyone does: gaunt, bearded, delivering the Gettysburg Address in a tall black hat. Now picture Pappsville, Illinois, 1832. A much younger Lincoln gives his first political speech, and when a man in the crowd shoves one of his supporters, Lincoln stops mid-sentence, throws the man down, then … Read more
A Packed House That Refused to Clap On September 18, 1809, Covent Garden Theatre reopened in London with manager John Philip Kemble playing the title role in Macbeth, alongside his sister Sarah Siddons, one of the era’s most celebrated tragic actors. Instead of applause, the audience chanted “Old prices!” straight through the performance, refused to … Read more
Apple’s One-Eyed Gadget That Never Was Picture a single polished lens, rimmed in brushed aluminum, hanging from a thin chain with the same quiet styling as a MacBook. Not a headset. Not a pair of smart glasses. One eye, dressed up like a next-generation Apple accessory. In 2013, tech sites were obsessing over wearable computers … Read more
The Hook: A Map Where Everything Shrinks Picture a map of the United States where New York City swells to take up nearly the whole page, while the other states get squeezed into vague, half-finished shapes along the edges, Ohio reduced to a gray smudge, California pushed off to one corner like an afterthought. That’s … Read more
You’re Not as Symmetrical as You Look Look in a mirror: two eyes, two ears, a face that splits evenly down the middle. Hands look like matching copies of each other. Open things up, though, and that balance disappears. Most people’s hearts sit toward the left, the liver sits to the right, and most people … Read more
The Star Wars Special George Lucas Wanted Destroyed George Lucas reportedly said that if he had a free afternoon and a sledgehammer, he would hunt down every surviving copy of one piece of Star Wars history and smash it himself. This wasn’t a fan-made oddity. It was an official, two-hour broadcast made with Lucasfilm’s blessing, … Read more