The unpopular president
Five US presidential elections (so far) have elected presidents who received fewer votes than one of their opponents.
Category: Politics & law
Winston Churchill, fashion icon
Winston Churchill invented an adult romper suit and then wore it everywhere during World War II.
The extinction of Nosferatu
The classic horror film Nosferatu was nearly lost forever because of Bram Stoker’s widow.
Regicide at the masquerade
King Gustav III of Sweden was warned of assassins at his masquerade ball. He went anyway.
Chain across the Baltic
In 1989 two million people formed a human chain stretching 675km from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius.
Electoral fairness
The Gallagher Index measures how well the makeup of a legislative body represents the proportion of votes cast to elect it. Some countries do this much better than others.
The game is the rules
To win the game Nomic, you need to change the rules so that you can win the game Nomic.
Pride vs. the cyclone
Three American and three German warships spent months in a standoff in Apia Harbour in Samoa. And then a cyclone hit.
Da Vinci and Machiavelli steal a river
Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli once teamed up to steal the Arno river.
Switching sides
In the early morning of September 3, 1967, the entire country of Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right.
Blessing scam
You are being followed by a ghost. Put all your valuables in this bag. I’ll bless the bag to banish them. P.S. Don’t open the bag for a month afterwards.
Thwarting the biopirates
India prevented people patenting their foods, traditional medicines, and yoga poses by recording them all in an online database: 34 million pages’ worth.
The biter bit
Sigurd the Mighty, Earl of Orkney, died in 892 CE when he was bitten by the severed head of his foe, Máelbrigte the Bucktoothed.
From the barricades
Twelve years before Orson Welles’ classic radio play The War of the Worlds, BBC Radio broadcast a hoax revolution in which government ministers were murdered and Big Ben demolished by trench mortars.
Out of many, pesto
The United States motto, e pluribus unum, appears in several classical sources. In one of them, it’s part of a recipe for pesto.
Dam the Mediterranean
In 1929 Bavarian architect Herman Sörgel proposed building a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar and shrinking the Mediterranean.
The Generalist Academy 