Culture & Words
Language, art, music, sport and the habits people picked up along the way. 19 stories, a few minutes each.
- The Origin of OKOn March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post published two letters that would become the most recognized word on Earth.
- Why Shopping Carts Needed Paid ActorsWhen Sylvan Goldman introduced the first shopping cart at his Humpty Dumpty supermarket in Oklahoma City on June 4, 1937, customers refused to use it.
- The Inventor of Pringles Is Buried in a Pringles CanFredric Baur spent most of his career at Procter & Gamble developing food storage technologies. He created frying oils, engineered freeze-dried ice…
- Why Golf Balls Have DimplesA smooth golf ball hit by a professional golfer would travel only about half as far as one with dimples. The textured surface seems…
- Why Barns Are Painted RedThe red barns scattered across the American countryside are not painted that color for aesthetic reasons. They are red because rust was cheap.
- GiethoornIn the Dutch province of Overijssel, about ninety minutes from Amsterdam, there's a village where you can't drive a car. Not because it's…
- The Library of Unwritten BooksIn Richard Brautigan's 1971 novel *The Abortion*, there's a library in San Francisco that accepts any book anyone wants to deposit. Not published…
- Shakespeare Has No Living DescendantsWilliam Shakespeare had three children. Susanna, the eldest, was born in 1583. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in 1585. By 1670, every direct line…
- The Great Stork DerbyWhen Charles Vance Millar died in Toronto on October 31, 1929, his will contained a clause that would consume the city's attention for a decade.…
- The Day Sweden Switched Sides of the RoadOn September 3, 1967, at precisely 4:50 in the morning, every vehicle in Sweden stopped.
- Why Old Books Smell GoodThe smell of old books has a name: bibliosmia. It's a compound aroma produced by the chemical decomposition of paper, binding glue, and ink over…
- The Tree That Owns ItselfOn a quiet residential corner in Athens, Georgia, there stands a white oak tree that legally owns itself—and the eight feet of land surrounding its…
- How Mauve Changed Fashion ForeverIn 1856, an eighteen-year-old chemistry student in London accidentally created the first synthetic dye while trying to synthesize quinine, a…
- The Whistling Language of La GomeraOn the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, people communicate across deep ravines by whistling. The language is called Silbo Gomero, and it…
- How Lego Nearly Went BankruptBy 2003, the Lego Group was losing roughly a million dollars a day. The Danish toymaker that had defined construction play for half a century was…
- The 1904 Olympic MarathonThe marathon at the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis is widely considered the most absurd sporting event in modern history. Of the 32 runners who…
- The Invention of the ForkThe fork is one of the most common objects in the Western world, yet it took roughly a thousand years to catch on. For most of European history,…
- The Hermitage CatsThe Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, is one of the largest art museums in the world. It houses over three million items, including works…
- Why Stradivarius Violins Sound So GoodBetween roughly 1680 and 1720, Antonio Stradivari built about 1,100 string instruments in his workshop in Cremona, Italy.