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1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 3 of 21.

121. Britain's stopgap diesel train outlived the futuristic project it was meant to coverIn 1970 British Rail needed something quick while its tilting Advanced Passenger Train stalled. The fallback was a diesel with an engine at each end, and a designer hired only to …
122. Basquiat went from spray-painted riddles to Documenta's youngest artist in four yearsIn May 1978 a Brooklyn teenager and a friend began tagging Lower Manhattan walls with cryptic slogans signed SAMO. By June 1982, aged 21, Jean-Michel Basquiat was exhibiting in Ka…
123. Jenny McCarthy's path ran from MTV host to America's loudest vaccine scepticA Chicago cheerleader who called herself an outcast became a Playboy Playmate in 1993, an MTV dating-show host two years later and, eventually, a co-host of The View. Along the wa…
124. Frank Miller rescued a failing Daredevil, then remade Batman as an aging vigilanteIn 1979 Daredevil was selling so poorly that Marvel kept talking about cancelling it. A young penciller called Frank Miller saw promise in a sightless hero living in a visual medi…
125. How gyaru turned brown hair and loose socks into a Japanese rebellionIn a country that prized pale skin, dark hair and a future as a housewife, gyaru girls dyed their hair brown, tanned deeply and piled on makeup. Critics called it racy and delinqu…
126. Forbidden Planet's robot swallowed almost 7 per cent of the film's budgetRobby the Robot cost MGM roughly 125,000 dollars, nearly 7 per cent of the 1.9 million dollar budget for Forbidden Planet. The 1956 film earned that splurge back in influence: it …
127. The man behind Miss Piggy and Yoda never wanted to be a puppeteerFrank Oz gave voice and movement to Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster and Yoda. Yet by his own account he had wanted to be a journalist, and what he really longed for was directing. Afte…
128. Greater London is not officially a city, and the City sits outside itMost people call it London, but Greater London holds no royal city status. Only two places inside it, the City of London and Westminster, do. Stranger still, the ancient City, wit…
129. Tragedy may mean goat song, or possibly a harvest hymn to barleyNobody knows for sure where tragedy got its name. Aristotle linked it to a goat song sung by satyrs for Dionysus. Other scholars have proposed a race with a goat as prize, a word …
130. Hamilton earned a record 16 Tony nominations, yet nobody may license itLin-Manuel Miranda turned Ron Chernow's 2004 biography of a Founding Father into a musical that is sung and rapped from start to finish. Hamilton won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for D…
131. Hanuman's devoted following arose a thousand years after the RamayanaHanuman, the divine vanara who serves Rama in the Ramayana, is venerated in temples and images more than ever. Yet early texts and archaeology show little devotion to him. His ris…
132. The art of interpretation probably isn't named after Hermes after allPopular lore links hermeneutics, the study of how to interpret texts, to Hermes, messenger of the gods, inventor of speech and celebrated trickster. The fit is poetic, but it is f…
133. Family Guy was cancelled in 2002, then DVD buyers brought it backFox axed Family Guy after its third season in 2002. That should have been the end. Instead, strong DVD sales and big ratings for syndicated reruns persuaded the network to revive …
134. Fiddle or violin? Usually the same instrument, played for different endsA fiddle and a violin are usually the very same object. What separates them is how they are played: fiddlers chase a danceable beat, quick note changes and improvised ornament, wh…
135. Film genres are easier to spot than to define, and they keep shiftingWhen The Great Train Robbery came out in 1903, it was sold as a chase film, a railroad film and a crime film. Today it counts as a landmark early Western. Film genres feel obvious…
136. Before the Blues Brothers, Dan Aykroyd drummed behind Muddy Waters in OttawaDan Aykroyd's love of the blues was no comedy bit. As a teenager in Ottawa he haunted Le Hibou, a club where touring blues greats played, and one night he sat in on drums for Mudd…
137. Dick Van Dyke ate bananas to get into the air forceRejected again and again for being too light, a teenage Dick Van Dyke finally passed his wartime weigh-in after stuffing himself with bananas and water. Pilot training soon gave w…
138. Double entendre sounds French, but the French never used it that wayThe phrase we borrow for a cheeky second meaning is itself a kind of trick. It comes from an old French expression that simply meant ambiguity, and it only picked up its suggestiv…
139. Is drama even a genre? Some screenwriting theorists say it is too broadFilm and TV drama started as a leftover category: on the stage, a drama was a play that was neither comedy nor tragedy. Screen industries adopted that narrow meaning, and today th…
140. Epaulettes began as ribbons to stop belts sliding off soldiers' shouldersThe gold-fringed shoulder pieces on dress uniforms started life as a practical fix. In the late 17th century, soldiers tied bunches of ribbon on their coat shoulders, partly for s…
141. R.E.M.'s drummer wrote Everybody Hurts, then barely played on itEverybody Hurts began as Bill Berry's one-minute country tune with no chorus. After R.E.M. reshaped it into a slow, Otis Redding-flavoured ballad, the drummer ended up absent from…
142. One Indian royal family ruled for six centuries, split across three capitalsFrom the 6th to the 12th century, the Chalukyas governed huge stretches of southern and central India. They did it as three linked but separate houses, based at Badami, Vengi and …
143. Ancient India had a school of materialists who doubted every inferenceLong before modern empiricism, Charvaka thinkers in ancient India trusted only what the senses reported. They rejected ritual, treated every conclusion drawn from observation as p…
144. Broadway's Chicago grew out of two real 1924 murder trialsRoxie Hart and Velma Kelly were not invented. They were modelled on Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two women acquitted of murder in Chicago in 1924, whose trials a young Tribune…
145. Cumbia began on Colombia's coast and ended up across the AmericasCumbia is one of Latin America's great travelling sounds. It grew on the Colombian coast from a colonial-era meeting of Indigenous, African and Spanish traditions, is said to trac…
146. Bob Odenkirk wrote sketch comedy for years before becoming Saul GoodmanLong before audiences knew him as the slippery lawyer Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk was a behind-the-scenes comedy writer at Saturday Night Live and co-creator of the cult sketch sho…
147. Breaking Bad was a modest cable show until Netflix found it an audienceA chemistry teacher with lung cancer turns drug manufacturer in Albuquerque: the premise sounded bleak, and early ratings were modest. Then the first seasons landed on Netflix, vi…
148. Cabarets started as Paris restaurants that charged by the plateBefore it meant smoky stages and a sly master of ceremonies, a cabaret was simply a smarter kind of Paris eatery, with tablecloths and food priced per plate rather than per mug. T…
149. Camille Claudel went from Rodin's pupil to his rivalShe walked into Auguste Rodin's workshop in 1883 as a gifted student and left as a sculptor whose vigour some critics rated above his. Camille Claudel died forgotten in 1943, yet …
150. By 1945 Carmen Miranda was the best-paid woman in AmericaThe woman in the towering fruit hat was born in a Portuguese village, raised in Rio and started out making hats in a shop. Within six years of arriving on Broadway, Carmen Miranda…
151. Poems T. S. Eliot wrote for his godchildren became a megamusicalIn the 1930s T. S. Eliot wrote playful poems about cats for his godchildren. Decades later Andrew Lloyd Webber set them to music, investors balked at the premise, and Cats went on…
152. Ballet's hardest trick is hiding how much the body is sufferingA professional ballet dancer spends years teaching muscles, joints and feet to do things they were never built for, then performs as if it costs nothing. That illusion of ease is …
153. The silent clown who won a Tony for talkingBill Irwin built a career on wordless clowning, co-founding a San Francisco circus and playing Mr. Noodle for Elmo. Yet his biggest award came for Edward Albee's ferociously verba…
154. Blue Man Group began by burning a Rambo doll in the streetThree friends in blue masks marched through Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1987, torching a Rambo doll and a chunk of the Berlin Wall. That street stunt grew into a mute, drum-pou…
155. The Blues Brothers sequel that lost Jake and still floppedEighteen years after the original, John Landis and Dan Aykroyd reunited for a second Blues Brothers movie, this time with John Goodman riding alongside Elwood. It cost $30 million…
156. Attack on Titan hid its real story behind a wall and a basement doorHajime Isayama's manga opens as a siege story: humans cowering behind three giant walls from Titans. Over twelve years of serialisation it turned that premise inside out, revealin…
157. The person behind the mixing desk may be an artist or a physicistAudio engineer covers two very different jobs: the studio or concert specialist who places microphones and balances a mix, and the degree-holding scientist who designs the algorit…
158. Bali's rice terraces are run by water temples, and have been for centuriesAbout 4.2 million Balinese make up 85 percent of their island's people and stand apart in Indonesia by practising Balinese Hinduism. Their farming depends on the subak, a web of c…
159. Hollywood spent a decade trying to film A Chorus Line, then critics shruggedRichard Attenborough's 1985 screen version of the Broadway hit about auditioning dancers came after years of rights sales, refusals and studio infighting. Producers put in twenty-…
160. Nobody can define an altered state without first defining normalPsychologists still lack an agreed definition of an altered state of consciousness, because any attempt depends on pinning down what an ordinary waking mind is. Yet humans may hav…
161. Warrior Pose looks ancient but was probably invented around 1940Patanjali's Yoga Sutras never name a single posture; they simply ask that a seat be steady and comfortable. Many poses now treated as timeless, including Warrior I and the Salute …
162. Chaucer planned roughly 120 pilgrim stories and stopped at twenty-fourGeoffrey Chaucer sent some 30 fictional pilgrims from London toward Becket's shrine, each supposed to tell four stories. Most scholars think he died with the project unfinished at…
163. The Grimms softened wicked mothers into stepmothers but made the punishments bloodierJacob and Wilhelm Grimm set out as law students hoping to rescue old German stories, not to entertain children. Their first volume of 1812 was attacked as unfit for young readers,…
164. Some of humanity's oldest literature may describe volcanoes erupting 34,000 years agoLiterature comes from the Latin for letter, yet much of it was never written down. Aboriginal Gunditjmara stories from south-western Victoria tell of volcanic eruptions, and a 202…
165. A Thursday-night sitcom that a Vice President credited with shifting American attitudesWill & Grace paired a gay New York lawyer with his straight best friend, an interior designer, and made them the centre of prime-time comedy on NBC from 1998. Early critics called…
166. A bus driver's son from Karnataka became the face of Kannada cinemaNaveen Kumar left home at 16 with his parents' warning that failure meant no coming back. As Yash, he worked through theatre and television, refused film offers without seeing scr…
167. Four silent-film stars built their own studio to escape the mogulsIn 1919 Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith set up United Artists so performers, not studio bosses, would own their films and profits. A rival exe…
168. The humble VHS cassette beat Betamax and ruled living rooms for two decadesJVC launched Video Home System in September 1976, and within a few years a half-inch strip of magnetic tape had turned the family television into a private cinema. VHS won a bruis…
169. The PPK's K never meant short, and an American law reshaped itWalther's PP pistol of 1929 was built for European police and packed safety ideas that later became standard across the industry. Its compact offspring, the PPK, is often assumed …
170. Four brothers from Pennsylvania made the studio that taught films to talkHarry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner began with a small film company in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1910. Thirteen years later they incorporated Warner Bros. Pictures, and in 1927 …
171. A Houston philosophy graduate turned symmetry and melancholy into a film brandWes Anderson grew up shooting silent Super 8 films starring his brothers. He met Owen Wilson as a university roommate, made a flop that critics loved, then built a career on grief…
172. Why every Millionaire host worldwide once had to wear an Armani suitWho Wants to Be a Millionaire? began on ITV in September 1998 and went on to air in around 100 countries, making it the best-selling television format in history. Its franchisers …
173. The Sting borrowed its swindle from real con men, and its music from JoplinThe 1973 caper that reunited Paul Newman and Robert Redford drew on actual cons pulled by the Gondorff brothers, as recorded in a 1940 book called The Big Con. Its ragtime soundtr…
174. The White Lotus began as a lockdown show one hotel agreed to hostIn 2020 HBO asked Mike White for something that could be shot inside a pandemic bubble. Australia's visa limits ruled it out, so he took over a Hawaiian Four Seasons for 13 weeks …
175. The Wire won no major awards on air, then became a landmarkDavid Simon's Baltimore drama drew middling ratings and no major television prizes while it aired on HBO from 2002 to 2008. Its creator insisted it was never really a cop show but…
176. Disney's costliest hand-drawn film sent Treasure Island into space and floppedTreasure Planet turned Stevenson's pirate classic into a voyage between stars aboard ships with solar sails. At $140 million it remains the most expensive traditionally animated f…
177. Three Tolkien films, one shoot: how New Zealand made Middle-earth at oncePeter Jackson did not film The Lord of the Rings one instalment at a time. All three parts were shot together in New Zealand across roughly fourteen months, on a budget of $281 mi…
178. A Star Wars show became a film after strikes stalled its fourth seasonThe Mandalorian was meant to return as a fourth television season. Then the 2023 Hollywood labour disputes froze production, Lucasfilm rethought its plans, and the story of Din Dj…
179. The American Office only took off after making its boss likeableNBC's version of The Office began as a near copy of the British pilot and drew mixed reviews. The writers then brightened the lights, softened Michael Scott and gave the supportin…
180. Just fourteen episodes set in Slough made The Office a global comedy exportWhen The Office first aired on BBC Two in July 2001, few people watched. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant made only two short series and a Christmas special, yet the misadventur…

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