From the archives: Complete gibberish
Fake slang of the Seattle grunge scene, nonsense as a propaganda tool, the American accent as imagined by an Italian singer, and the ultimate expression of engineering technobabble.
Category: Website
Featured category: Theatre
Ayn Rand’s choose-your-own-adventure play, the magician in the oven, the shortest play in history, and the cross-eyed kabuki pose.
From the archives: A bridge too far
The ingeniously twisted canal bridge; the first bridge of iron; the “bridge” to Sri Lanka; and folding, curling, tilting, swinging, and submerging bridges.
Featured category: Language
An international alphabet, the tongue-twisters of click languages, language chains across continents, and the five million dollar comma.
From the archives: The West in the East
Mongolia’s answer to the Beatles, the Soviet Union’s answer to cowboy films, the Russian adaptation of The Hobbit, and Western music etched onto old x-ray film to get through the Iron Curtain.
Featured category: South Asia
The juggernaut’s kitchen, patenting yoga, the thousand names of Vishnu, and the strange chain reaction that led from anti-inflammatory drug use on cattle to a leopard invasion.
From the archives: Shipwrecks
The 17th century warship sunk the same day it was launched, the deepest shipwreck in the world, the dreadnought sunk by a human torpedo, and the cyclone that ended gunboat diplomacy in Samoa.
Featured category: Weights and measures
The measure of a one-in-a-million death, the problem with Australian tablespoons, counting prayers, and why an ounce of gold weighs more than an ounce of feathers.
From the archives: Electricity
Electric cars of the 19th century, an unjustly electrocuted elephant, the electrified corpse of George Forster, and the river mouth with year-round lightning.
Featured category: Prehistory
Prehistoric surgery, prehistoric mathematics, the first undisputed dog, and a preserved prehistoric brain.
From the archives: Ice
Battleships made of ice, the death of a glacier, electric viral space ice, and how ice helps aircraft punch holes in the clouds.
Featured category: Military
The shortest war in history, medieval rocket launchers, art in the trenches of World War I, and the US Navy’s love of acronyms.
From the archives: The Sahara
A marathon across the Sahara, an artificial river underneath the Sahara, the ancient green Sahara, and the wall of trees meant to check the desert’s advance.
Featured category: Oceania
The plan to move an entire country, the yacht club in the middle of Australia, the Samoan independence movement, and the kidnapping of half the population of Rapa Nui.
From the archives: Law and the supernatural
The trial of the ghost murderer, ghost marriage, combined werewolf / witch hunts, and the strange case of the New Haven piglets.
Featured category: Computer science
The hardest problem in computer science, computer chip graffiti, and why programmers sometimes need to give the queen a duck.
The Generalist Academy 