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1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 21.

  1. Bruce Willis found acting was the one thing that eased his stutterAt his New Jersey high school, classmates mocked Bruce Willis's stutter with the nickname Buck-Buck. He joined the drama club and discovered that on stage the stammer faded. He we…
  2. Before Captain Holt, Andre Braugher was a Juilliard-trained Shakespearean and Emmy-winning detectiveMillions knew Andre Braugher as the deadpan Captain Raymond Holt of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Long before that comedy, he had studied engineering at Stanford, trained at Juilliard, won …
  3. Anne Hathaway won her Oscar playing the role that first hooked herAt eight, Anne Hathaway sat watching her mother play Fantine on the first national tour of Les Misérables, and fell for the stage. Decades later she played that same doomed woman …
  4. Five Oscar nominations, zero wins: Annette Bening's remarkable near-miss careerAnnette Bening has been up for five Academy Awards, two Tonys and a Primetime Emmy without winning any of them, which puts her in the rare club of actors nominated for the full Tr…
  5. Anouk Aimée's stage surname was a gift from the poet Jacques PrévertBorn Françoise Dreyfus, she took her first name from a role she played at 14, and the screenwriter Jacques Prévert suggested the surname Aimée, French for beloved. Over seven deca…
  6. Italy's heel has more coastline than any other mainland Italian regionApulia, or Puglia, forms both the spur and the heel of the Italian boot, and no other mainland region has a longer shoreline. People have lived here for at least 250,000 years, an…
  7. The chef of kings was fired from the Savoy for supplier kickbacksAuguste Escoffier gave the world peach Melba, the five codified mother sauces and the kitchen brigade system restaurants still use. He also confessed to pocketing supplier kickbac…
  8. Amanda Seyfried lost the Regina George part and built a career anywayAmanda Seyfried read for the queen bee, Regina George, in Mean Girls, but the producers handed her Karen Smith, the dim sidekick. That consolation role opened the door to an Oscar…
  9. Asked about the 1980 election, Amy Carter named nuclear arms controlAt nine, Amy Carter moved into the White House, roller-skated across the East Room and hosted sleepovers in a South Lawn treehouse while Secret Service agents kept watch below. He…
  10. One stage performance of Othello launched Aaron Pierre toward Green LanternAaron Pierre spent his childhood sprinting and idolising Maurice Greene, not rehearsing lines. Then Barry Jenkins watched him play Cassio at Shakespeare's Globe and messaged him a…
  11. The Paris opera house where a ceiling painter fell ill finishing on scaffoldingNapoleon III wanted a new home for the Paris Opera, and Charles Garnier gave him a building that leaves almost no surface bare. Seventeen kinds of stone and metal dress its front,…
  12. Paris's biggest square has changed its name five times since 1772Built to flatter Louis XV, the largest square in Paris became the stage where his grandson lost his throne and his life. It has been named for two kings, for the Revolution and fo…
  13. Beijing's Temple of Heaven is a cosmos drawn in wood, stone and ninesTwice a year a Chinese emperor left the Forbidden City, gave up meat, and prayed at a complex where every circle, square and pillar count stood for something in the heavens. One s…
  14. How a pennant seller gave the University of Florida its alligatorThe University of Florida began with 102 students and two buildings in Gainesville in 1906, stitched together from four older schools. Its mascot came from a local vendor who prin…
  15. Why the Washington Monument is visibly two colours of marbleThe obelisk honouring America's first president took from 1848 to 1884 to build, with a 23-year pause in the middle. Money ran out, a society fought over control, and the Civil Wa…
  16. Washington's Gothic cathedral took 83 years, from Roosevelt to BushTheodore Roosevelt watched its foundation stone go down in 1907; George H. W. Bush attended its completion in 1990, on the same September date. The National Cathedral sits on the …
  17. Thackeray gambled away a fortune, then gave 'snob' its modern meaningAs a small boy sailing from India, William Makepeace Thackeray had the captive Napoleon pointed out to him on Saint Helena. He grew into a six-foot-three satirist who lost his inh…
  18. Woolly mammoths still roamed an Arctic island when Egypt was a kingdomMost woolly mammoths vanished from mainland Siberia around 10,000 years ago, but a stranded population hung on at Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago. Frozen carcasses, dun…
  19. The Commonwealth's London headquarters was built with Dutch bricks shipped home as ballastMarlborough House on The Mall began as the Duchess of Marlborough's pet project in 1711. Her husband bought cheap bricks in Holland while on campaign and sent them back in empty t…
  20. The 9/11 Memorial's winning design ignored a key rule in the master planMichael Arad's design for the World Trade Center memorial, Reflecting Absence, was the only finalist that refused to let new buildings hang over the Twin Towers' footprints. Inste…
  21. China's Nationalist government promised democracy in three stages but stalled at stage twoSun Yat-sen's plan for China ran in three steps: unify by force, tutor the people in their rights, then hand over to a constitution. The Nationalist government that ruled from 192…
  22. Cahokia, a Mississippian city, held more than 20,000 people by 1250 CECenturies before Europeans arrived, people on the Mississippi were building Cahokia, a mound city of over 20,000. Estimates for the pre-contact population of the modern United Sta…
  23. Mesopotamia's last native empire rose, peaked and fell inside ninety yearsNabopolassar was crowned in Babylon in 626 BC after a revolt against Assyria. Within two decades his alliance with the Medes had toppled Nineveh, and his son Nebuchadnezzar turned…
  24. A 1209 quarrel in Oxford sent scholars off to found CambridgeOxford takes its name from a river crossing for oxen, and its university grew from teaching that began in the 11th century. Relations with the townspeople were often ugly: in 1209…
  25. Empress Joséphine never actually called herself Joséphine de BeauharnaisThe woman history files as Joséphine de Beauharnais went by Rose until Napoleon renamed her, and she dropped the Beauharnais surname once she married him. The label stuck only bec…
  26. Manhattan's name probably comes from a Lenape word about gathering bow woodLong before skyscrapers, Manhattan was Lenape country crossed by footpaths, one of which became Broadway. Its name most likely comes from the Munsee manaháhtaan, a place for colle…
  27. The iPhone 11 Pro's three lenses thrilled critics and unsettled trypophobesApple's first iPhone to carry the Pro label arrived in September 2019 with a square bump holding three 12-megapixel cameras. Reviewers called the camera the big upgrade; some peop…
  28. Before the White House, Jackie Bouvier roamed Washington as a 25-dollar-a-week street photographerJacqueline Bouvier's first real job was asking strangers witty questions for a Washington newspaper column, camera in hand, for 25 dollars a week. Within a decade she was first la…
  29. A homesick Florentine queen planted Paris's Luxembourg Garden with 2,000 elmsIn 1612 Marie de' Medici, widow of Henry IV, set out to recreate the gardens of her Florentine childhood beside a new palace in Paris. Four centuries on, her park belongs to the F…
  30. Fifth Avenue began as Middle Road, a track through land nobody wantedManhattan's most expensive shopping street started in 1785 as a surveyor's access lane through unsellable common land. Mansions, Vanderbilts, department stores and bronze traffic …
  31. A fisheye lens and a passing freight train made a trainspotter a fashion starLuke Nicolson quit a Rolls-Royce engineering placement in 2021 because his trainspotting videos, filmed as Francis Bourgeois with a GoPro inches from his face, had exploded. Withi…
  32. He lost a statewide race by 0.17 percent and chose not to contest itIn 2002 Gary Peters lost Michigan's attorney general election by about 5,200 votes, even though one Dearborn precinct had logged 96 votes for him instead of 396. He let the result…
  33. A splintered lance killed Henry II and helped end royal jousting in FranceIn June 1559 Henry II rode in a tournament celebrating the peace that ended decades of Italian wars. A fragment of his opponent's lance slipped past a badly fastened visor into hi…
  34. Chinese dragons fly without wings, thanks to a lump on their headsUnlike Europe's fire-breathing monsters, the Chinese dragon brings rain, luck and prosperity. It has a stag's antlers, a carp's scales and an eagle's claws, yet most versions have…
  35. The Chrysler Building's steel crown was tested for 30 years and barely agedFor 11 months after 1930, a Manhattan tower paid for by a car magnate out of his own pocket was the tallest building on Earth. Its gleaming crown used a German stainless steel nev…
  36. Babe Paley made the best-dressed list 14 times, then entered its Hall of FameA brain surgeon's daughter from Boston, Babe Paley rose from an entry-level job at Glamour to fashion editor at Vogue, married the man who ran CBS, and became the socialite Truman…
  37. Canada still gets Dutch tulips every spring because of Queen Beatrix's wartime childhoodBefore she was Queen of the Netherlands, Beatrix was Trixie Orange, a refugee pupil at an Ottawa primary school while Germany occupied her homeland. She later reigned for 33 years…
  38. Britannia only swapped her spear for a trident in 1797The helmeted woman with a trident on British coins began as a Roman idea. A marble frieze from the first century shows her crushed beneath Emperor Claudius. It took Elizabethan na…
  39. The giant Canada goose was thought extinct until a flock turned up in 1962Written off as extinct in the 1950s, the giant Canada goose reappeared as a small wintering flock in Rochester, Minnesota. Breeding programmes followed, and today the species is s…
  40. Italy's Trieste spent over five centuries as Austria's great seaportTrieste sits on a thin sliver of Italy squeezed between the Adriatic and Slovenia, which lies about 8 km away. For more than 500 years it answered to the Habsburgs, growing into t…
  41. Camp knows it is fake, and that is exactly the pointKitsch and camp both love excess, but only camp is in on the joke. The word may trace back to Italian slang for getting by, passed through the gay argot Polari, and it grew from s…
  42. A 1945 sex-hygiene film was supposedly seen by one American in tenKroger Babb's Mom and Dad posed as moral instruction about an unplanned pregnancy, toured as a roadshow and ended up the third-highest earner of the 1940s. It set the template for…
  43. Kitsch makes you cry twice, and the second tear gives it awayMilan Kundera said kitsch works in two steps. First you are moved by children running on grass; then you are moved by how nice it is to be moved along with everyone else. That sec…
  44. Cheap B-grade films once kept Kerala's whole film industry afloatIn 2001, about 57 of the 89 Malayalam films released were low-budget softcore pictures, many starring one actress, Shakeela. Critics called them crude, yet historians broadly agre…
  45. The Muses were not always nine, and one tradition gave them just threeEveryone knows the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory. Yet older cults on Mount Helicon honoured only three, named Song, Practice and Memory, while Delphi named its trio aft…
  46. Southern Gothic began as an insult that Eudora Welty refused to wearIn 1935 the novelist Ellen Glasgow sneered at Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell for their aimless violence and fantastic nightmares. The label she helped spread, Southern Gothic, beca…
  47. Shakespeare's first sonnet scolds a beautiful young man for refusing to have childrenThe opening poem of Shakespeare's sonnets is not a love letter but a lecture. Its speaker tells a gorgeous, self-absorbed addressee that hoarding his looks is a kind of greed, and…
  48. In Sonnet 15 the poet declares war on Time using grafting as his weaponSonnet 15 starts with a gardener's gloom: everything that grows is perfect for only a moment. The world is a theatre watched by the stars, and people swell and wither like plants.…
  49. Shakespeare calls his own poem barren and says a child would do betterMost poets boast that their verse will make someone immortal. In Sonnet 16 Shakespeare does the opposite. He calls Time a bloody tyrant, then admits his rhyme is too feeble to fig…
  50. Sonnet 17 fears future readers will dismiss its praise as a liar's exaggerationWhat if your most honest compliment sounded like flattery to everyone who read it later? Sonnet 17 worries exactly that. Shakespeare imagines his yellowed pages mocked by future r…
  51. The most famous summer comparison in English actually argues summer is not good enoughSonnet 18 sounds like a gentle compliment, yet its logic is a demolition job. Shakespeare raises the idea of comparing his beloved to a summer day only to list everything wrong wi…
  52. Sonnet 19 lets Time destroy lions, tigers and the phoenix, but not one faceSonnet 19 opens by handing Time a licence to wreck the natural world. Blunt the lion's claws, pull the tiger's teeth, burn the phoenix alive, the speaker says, do anything at all.…
  53. Sonnet 20 calls a young man the master mistress of the poet's passionSonnet 20 is the sonnet that makes readers sit up. Shakespeare describes a man with a woman's face, painted by Nature herself, and calls him the master mistress of his passion. Th…
  54. Robert Browning grabbed a séance ghost and found the medium's bare footAt a séance in 1855, a spirit face appeared that the medium Daniel Dunglas Home said was Robert Browning's dead baby son. Browning seized it and found Home's bare foot. He had nev…
  55. Shakespeare's Sonnet 10 treats refusing to have children as a kind of self-hatredIn Sonnet 10, Shakespeare stops flattering and starts scolding. The young man he addresses is adored by many yet loves no one, and the poet frames that coldness as a plot against …
  56. In Sonnet 11, Nature carves a young man as her sealSonnet 11 imagines a person as a printing stamp. Nature, Shakespeare says, cut this young man as her personal seal, meaning him to press out copies rather than let the original va…
  57. Sonnet 12 turns a summer harvest into a funeral processionShakespeare's Sonnet 12 starts with someone counting the strokes of a clock and then piles up evidence that everything fades: a wilting violet, dark hair gone silver, bare trees, …
  58. Sonnet 13 treats a young man's beauty as property held on a leaseShakespeare's Sonnet 13 borrows the language of landlords and tenants. The friend's good looks are only rented, the poet argues, and the lease expires at death unless it passes to…
  59. Shakespeare's Sonnet 14 swaps the night sky for a friend's eyesAstrologers in Shakespeare's day claimed to forecast plagues, famines, storms and the fortunes of princes. Sonnet 14 waves all that away. The poet says he does practise a kind of …
  60. Emily Dickinson painted autumn as a landscape bleeding scarletMost autumn poems reach for gold, mellow light and gentle decline. Emily Dickinson reached for anatomy. In twelve short lines she gives the season the colour of blood, lays arteri…

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