Lincoln’s beard
One month before the 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln was clean shaven. By inauguration day, he had a full beard, and wore it until the day he died. He grew it because a twelve-year-old girl told him to.
Recent Posts
Final speakers
Around the world today, several languages have just one native speaker left. When they die, their language dies with them.
Tiniest car
The Peel P50, manufactured in the Isle of Man, is the smallest car ever to go into mass production. It’s really, really small.
Original cabbage
What’s your favourite green vegetable? Kale? Broccoli? Cabbage – regular, red, or savoy? Brussels sprouts? Cauliflower? Trick question. They’re all the same species.
The Fall of Icarus
In the myth, Icarus flew too close to the sun on wings of wax and fell to his death. 16th century Dutch / Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder asked the question: what if no-one noticed?
Puzzle cups
Europe has a long tradition of puzzle and prank cups and jugs: to drink out of these vessels you must first solve a mechanical challenge.
Handed, footed, eyed
Everyone is born either left- or right-handed (or, rarely, mixed-handed or ambidextrous). But everyone also has a dominant foot, and a dominant eye.
Backwards street
There is a street in Hong Kong called Rednaxela Terrace. Why is that interesting? Try spelling the name backwards.
Red-headed pharaoh
Ramesses II was the most famous and powerful pharaoh of Egypt’s New Kingdom. And we’re pretty sure that he was a redhead.
Placebo surgery
When trialling a new medicine, it’s standard practice to test it against a placebo medicine. But what do you do if you’re trialling a new surgery instead?
All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters
Peter the Great founded a drinking club when he was a young man. Because he was tsar, he took it too far.
The queen’s duck
Have you ever had a boss who just had to contribute to your project in order to prove their worth? There’s an easy way to counteract that: just add a duck.
Prisons of the imagination
M. C. Escher drew impossible objects – things that could not actually exist in three-dimensional space. But an Italian engraver named Giovanni Battista Piranesi was drawing them more than a hundred years earlier.
Ghost murder
If you kill someone because you think they’re a ghost, is it murder or manslaughter? Or self-defence?
The king, the twins, and coffee vs. tea
King Gustav III of Sweden was so convinced that coffee was bad for you that he enlisted two criminal twins to prove his case scientifically.
Gender colour coding
Pink for girls, blue for boys. Or is it pink for boys, blue for girls? A persistent myth holds that colour stereotypes flipped some time in the 20th century.
The Generalist Academy 