A Strange Tribe of the Northern Californian Lowlands Picture an anthropologist’s field report describing a tribe whose male members bind a strip of brightly colored silk around their throats each morning before entering their communal structure. The highest-ranking individuals carry a handheld device pressed to their ear, communing with distant invisible spirits. Below them, workers … Read more
The House That Won’t Stand Still Picture a house sitting not on a foundation but on a pivot. As morning light arrives from the east, it faces east. By midday, it has swung south. By late afternoon, it has turned again. Nobody is steering it. The whole thing just follows the sun. This is the … Read more
Everyone half-remembers the same ending to Mozart’s life. A jealous rival poisoned him out of professional spite. It’s a tidy, dramatic close for a composer who wrote more than 600 works and shaped everyone from Beethoven to Tchaikovsky. It also probably never happened. The Movie That Made the Myth Permanent The version most people carry … Read more
The Stalled Car Picture a McDonald’s drive-through on an ordinary afternoon, the line crawling forward in its usual rhythm. Then, three cars from the window, an old sedan just stops. The engine won’t turn over, and the smooth single-file line becomes a wall of metal stretching into the parking lot, then out onto the street. … Read more
He Conquered Half the World. He Died in a Rowing Boat. On September 28, 48 BCE, a man who had cleared the Mediterranean of pirates, conquered Armenia, Syria, and Palestine, and served three times as Rome’s consul stepped off a ship near the Egyptian coast and was stabbed to death in a small boat. He … Read more
From Gold Records to Police Recruits In 1969, Bobby Sherman had four Top 10 singles, including “Little Woman,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. His breakthrough on ABC’s Here Come the Brides had made him one of the network’s most recognizable faces. Less than twenty years later, he was teaching police recruits … Read more
A Byline Worth Reading Twice Most writer bios are the part you skip to get to the actual article: a name, a list of outlets, maybe a joke about hobbies, then you scroll past. Kenneth Partridge’s page on Mental Floss, active since July 4, 2016, reads that way at first glance. He’s a Brooklyn-based music … Read more
A Butter Dish, a Bowling Ball, and a Secret Navy Lab The mouse under your hand looks unremarkable: plastic shell, a scroll wheel, maybe two buttons. Trace it back far enough, though, and you land on a classified British radar project from 1946 and a Canadian military lab in 1952, where engineers wired a five-pin … Read more
A Beach You Almost Cannot See Greg Conklin, an American businessman from Michigan, arrived at Haeundae Beach on the coast of Busan, South Korea, and found something that matched no beach he had ever encountered. The strip of sand, roughly nine-tenths of a mile (1.46 km) long and about 130 feet (40 m) wide, was … Read more
The Most Unlikely Album of the Nineties Picture the pitch meeting: we’d like punk and alternative rock acts to record children’s cartoon theme songs. Not as parody. Not as a joke B-side. As a fully produced, 19-track album on a major label. That album exists. MCA Records released Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits on December … Read more