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1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 21.

  1. Transgressive art only works if there is a line to crossA shop-bought urinal signed 'R. Mutt' was refused by exhibition organisers in 1917, and Marcel Duchamp quit their society in protest. That porcelain object became a founding examp…
  2. An ancient painter lost a contest by trying to pull back painted curtainsZeuxis painted grapes so lifelike that birds swooped down to peck them. Then his rival Parrhasius invited him to draw aside a pair of ragged curtains, and Zeuxis reached for fabri…
  3. Ugly Betty was so costly to lose that California changed its tax lawWhen Ugly Betty packed up its Los Angeles sets and moved back to New York for a state tax credit, local crew lost their jobs. A California assemblyman answered with the so-called …
  4. Two dreams over lunch became the founding film of surrealist cinemaLuis Buñuel told Salvador Dalí about a dream of a cloud cutting the moon like a razor. Dalí replied with his own: a hand swarming with ants. Buñuel declared they had their film. U…
  5. The humble dollar bill carries the oldest design in American walletsThe back of the US one-dollar bill has barely changed since 1935, and the front since 1963, giving it the oldest design of any American note still in use. Notes of five dollars an…
  6. Vaporwave turned elevator music and Windows graphics into an internet art movementTake smooth jazz or a forgotten 1980s pop hook, slow it to a crawl, drown it in reverb and loop it past the point of usefulness. Pair it with Greek statues, glitchy 1990s web grap…
  7. Leonardo fixed a Roman architect's maths by moving the square's centreVitruvius claimed a man with limbs outstretched fits both a circle and a square centred on his navel. Artists tried and failed to draw it. Around 1490 Leonardo da Vinci made it wo…
  8. The Yorkshire chemist's son who took kitchen sink realism to the OscarsTony Richardson, born in Shipley in 1928, helped launch Britain's angry young men on stage, then filmed their working-class stories in grainy realism. In 1964 his romp Tom Jones w…
  9. Tracey Emin went from Britart provocateur to the Royal Academy's drawing professorIn 1999 Tracey Emin put her own unmade bed, stained sheets and all, into the Tate as a Turner Prize nominee. Twelve years later the Royal Academy made her Professor of Drawing, on…
  10. Trajan's Column tells a war story almost nobody could actually readA stone ribbon 190 metres long spirals 23 times around Trajan's Column in Rome, packed with 2,662 carved figures. Yet tall libraries hemmed it in so tightly that no Roman could fo…
  11. The Winter Palace has 1,500 rooms and began as a log cabinRussia's tsars governed almost a sixth of the planet's land from a green-and-white palace on the Neva with 1,886 doors and 117 staircases. Yet the first royal home on that spot wa…
  12. The oldest securely dated printed scroll was a gift made for free distribution in 868Printing in East Asia grew out of Buddhist belief that copying sacred words earned merit. Early printed charms were buried rather than read. The Diamond Sutra found at Dunhuang, 1…
  13. Many famous woodcuts were never cut by the artist whose name they carryFor centuries a woodcut was a team effort. The artist drew the picture, a specialist carver called a formschneider cut away everything else, often destroying the drawing in the pr…
  14. Yama, the Hindu god of death, started out as the first man to dieBefore he was a buffalo-riding judge with a noose for catching souls, Yama in the oldest Vedic hymns was simply the first mortal who died. Having found the road to the other world…
  15. Yayoi Kusama's famous polka dots began as hallucinations she had at tenAs a child in Matsumoto, Yayoi Kusama saw fields of dots, talking flowers and fabric patterns that multiplied until they swallowed her. She called the feeling self-obliteration an…
  16. The first YouTube Poop was uploaded months before YouTube itself existedA chopped-up Super Mario cartoon, stitched together in Windows Movie Maker and posted to SheezyArt on 22 December 2004, is counted as the first YouTube Poop. The deliberately crud…
  17. Yves Klein sold eleven identical blue paintings, each at a different priceIn Milan in 1957, Yves Klein hung eleven canvases that all looked the same, every one coated in the same deep ultramarine, and gave each its own price. Buyers were meant to find s…
  18. Wampum beads carried treaties, names and titles long before colonists spent them as cashShell beads drilled from whelk and quahog were how Northeastern Woodlands peoples recorded treaties, confirmed a chief's authority and handed a dead person's name to a successor. …
  19. Bouguereau painted 822 known works, won every honour, then fell out of fashionIn his lifetime William-Adolphe Bouguereau was the model salon painter: prized in France and America, showered with official honours and paid top prices. The Impressionists loathe…
  20. Voted the best worst band in the world, Motörhead went to number oneEarly on, NME readers crowned Motörhead the best worst band in the world, and by April 1977 two members were ready to quit. A farewell gig that never got recorded turned into a st…
  21. MTV's moon landing ident aired 48 times a day until 1986At 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, MTV went on air with NASA's lunar landing photos, the flag on the Moon swapped for a flickering MTV logo. Then came the Buggles and Video Killed t…
  22. Natalie Portman skipped The Phantom Menace premiere to revise for examsIn 1999 Natalie Portman was playing a galactic queen in a film that would gross 924 million dollars. She was also a Long Island high school senior with finals coming up, so she mi…
  23. America's film archive exists partly because of a fight over colorizationIn the 1980s studios were adding colour to black-and-white classics, and directors like Frank Capra and Martin Scorsese lobbied Congress to stop the tampering. The result was the …
  24. Evangelion's giant-robot hero keeps saying he mustn't run away. Its creator disagreesShinji Ikari tells himself again and again that he mustn't run away. Many fans took that as the show's moral. Director Hideaki Anno says otherwise: the final episodes tell Shinji …
  25. Tarkovsky's first film abroad climaxes with a man carrying a candleIn Nostalghia a homesick Russian writer promises a strange Italian recluse he will cross an empty spa pool holding a lit candle without letting it go out. He tries again and again…
  26. The small-town English student who became rock's most restless voiceMike Patton planned to be a writer. Then a demo tape by his teenage band reached Faith No More, who had auditioned more than fifteen singers, Chris Cornell among them, and picked …
  27. Nobody wanted Million Dollar Baby, and then it won Best PicturePaul Haggis spent four years trying to sell his boxing script. Even with Clint Eastwood attached to star and direct, studios said no, and Warner Bros. balked at a 30 million dolla…
  28. Chaplin wrote dialogue for Modern Times, then refused to let the Tramp talkBy 1934 sound had taken over Hollywood, and Chaplin drafted a dialogue script for his next film. His tests persuaded him the Little Tramp would lose his worldwide appeal if he spo…
  29. Monty Hall got his name from a billboard typoMonte Halparin of Winnipeg wanted to be a doctor, but secret quotas on Jewish students kept him out of medical school. A Toronto radio station shortened his surname and misspelled…
  30. Michael Moore funded his first documentary partly with bingo nights and a lawsuit settlementFired from Mother Jones after four months, Michael Moore sued, settled for $58,000 and poured it into a film about General Motors abandoning his hometown of Flint. Roger & Me laun…
  31. HBO's Green Lantern show swaps cosmic battles for a small-town murder in NebraskaTwo space cops with power rings land in Rushville, Nebraska, to investigate a killing. Lanterns, HBO's take on DC's Hal Jordan and John Stewart, borrows its mood from True Detecti…
  32. From small-town deputy to NCIS director, Lauren Holly built a career across two countriesLauren Holly met Jim Carrey at an audition she lost, then married him after they made Dumb and Dumber together; the marriage lasted under a year. Her steadier partnership was with…
  33. Letterkenny began as two guys trading insults on YouTube and ran twelve seasonsIn a fictional Ontario farm town of 5,000, the hicks, the hockey players and the local drug schemers all talk in rapid-fire puns and surprisingly well-informed opinions. Letterken…
  34. A sitcom about army surgeons produced the most-watched finale in American television historyM*A*S*H ran for eleven seasons, far longer than the Korean War it depicted. Set in a mobile army hospital, it lurched between slapstick and grief, quietly needled America's Cold W…
  35. Marion Cotillard is the only actor to win an Oscar speaking FrenchPlaying Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose earned Marion Cotillard the Academy Award for Best Actress, and no other performer has ever won an Oscar for a role delivered in French. She h…
  36. Before its $30 billion universe, Marvel sold off its heroes to other studiosMarvel Studios built the highest-grossing film franchise ever, yet for decades the company licensed its characters away, starting with a 1944 Captain America serial that handed hi…
  37. One point on Metacritic cost a game studio its bonusFallout: New Vegas averaged 84 on Metacritic. Its publisher had set 85 as the threshold for extra royalties, so developer Obsidian got nothing, despite five million copies sold. A…
  38. Britain's spy agency officially did not exist until 1994MI6 was founded in 1909 and spied through two world wars, yet the British government only admitted it existed in 1994, when a new law finally gave it a legal basis. Even its famou…
  39. Mia Farrow survived childhood polio, then became Hollywood's most haunted young motherAt nine, Mia Farrow spent three weeks in a polio isolation ward and later said it ended her childhood. By 23 she was the terrified expectant mother in Rosemary's Baby, a role that…
  40. A lonely hitman, a twelve-year-old apprentice, and a houseplant that finally gets rootsLuc Besson's 1994 thriller put Natalie Portman on screen for the first time, playing a girl who talks her way into a killer's apartment after corrupt drug agents wipe out her fami…
  41. The actor behind the Punisher once caught for a Russian baseball teamBefore he became television's go-to hard man, Jon Bernthal dropped out of college, moved to Moscow to study acting and spent his spare time as a catcher for a professional Russian…
  42. Jordan Peele learned at summer camp that telling scary stories kills your own fearAs a boy, Jordan Peele told a frightening campfire tale and noticed his own fear had vanished. If you make the horror, he reasoned, you need not be scared of it. Decades later tha…
  43. Americans once trusted Judge Judy more than the entire Supreme CourtA 2013 Reader's Digest poll found Americans had more faith in a television arbitrator than in all nine Supreme Court justices. Judith Sheindlin earned that trust the hard way, hea…
  44. A chance chat with Richard Burton on a plane launched Kevin Costner's careerFlying home from his honeymoon in 1978, an unsure Kevin Costner walked up to Richard Burton and asked whether he should act. Burton said yes, and even told him an actor's private …
  45. Kodachrome, the film behind Afghan Girl, was perfected by two concert musiciansThe colour film that shot Steve McCurry's 1984 Afghan Girl portrait began with two schoolboys who thought a 1917 colour movie looked awful. Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr.…
  46. HBO is filming Harry Potter again, one book per season, over a decadeForty thousand young actors auditioned before HBO chose three unknowns to play Harry, Ron and Hermione. The new series treats each of J. K. Rowling's novels as a full season, so t…
  47. Heroes was built like a comic book, and its creator planned to keep swapping the castTim Kring meant Heroes to rotate its characters out every season. Then audiences fell for a cheerleader who heals, an office worker who bends time and a nurse who copies powers, a…
  48. Before HD television could exist, video had to be squeezed about a hundredfoldUncompressed 1080p video needs more than a gigabit every second, far too much to store or broadcast. High definition became practical only after a compression method first propose…
  49. Bollywood is not Indian cinema: it is only the Hindi-language slicePeople say Bollywood when they mean all Indian film, but the name covers only Hindi-language movies made in Mumbai. Even so, that slice is the biggest: of 1,986 Indian features in…
  50. Nobody called anything a horror film until Dracula arrived in 1931In the silent era, reviewers used the word horror for war scenes, drug stories and melodramas about thieves. According to historian Gary D. Rhodes, the phrase horror film was not …
  51. Futurama has been cancelled and revived across four different outletsMatt Groening's cartoon about a pizza boy frozen for a thousand years keeps refusing to stay dead. Fox dropped it, Adult Swim reran it, Comedy Central brought it back twice, and H…
  52. Gary Cooper's famous stiff walk came from a botched cure for a hip injuryAt 15, Frank Cooper hurt his hip in a car crash, and a doctor prescribed horseback riding on the family ranch. The therapy left him with an off-kilter gait and a tilted seat in th…
  53. Before ER, George Clooney failed a Reds tryout and sold women's shoesIn 1977 a teenage George Clooney tried out for the Cincinnati Reds and was cut in the first round. He dropped out of college, sold shoes and insurance, cut tobacco, and spent year…
  54. Glee started life as a film idea and ended with 729 songsIan Brennan first imagined his show-choir story as a feature film. Reworked for Fox television with Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, Glee ran from 2009 to 2015, staged more than 729 …
  55. Venice gave no Golden Lion at all for over a decade after 1968From 1969 to 1979 the Venice Film Festival handed out no Golden Lions. The Biennale itself explains that its awards still ran under rules written in the fascist era, and after 196…
  56. Groucho Marx's wisecracking persona was born when audiences booed his German accentIn vaudeville, Julius Marx played a comic German with a heavy accent. After the Lusitania went down in 1915, crowds turned hostile and booed the character. He dropped the accent a…
  57. Harrison Ford was a working carpenter when George Lucas came callingFed up with bit parts, Harrison Ford taught himself carpentry to support his wife and two sons, building for clients such as Joan Didion. He landed Han Solo almost sideways: Georg…
  58. Forrest Gump's film version invented the leg braces and the famous runTwo of the most remembered things in Forrest Gump, the childhood leg braces and the years-long run across America, never happen in Winston Groom's novel. The 1994 film took the fi…
  59. The Friends cast bargained as one, and pay rose to a million an episodeWarner Bros. wanted to negotiate with each Friends star separately. Before season three the six actors refused and bargained as a bloc instead. Their pay climbed from 22,500 dolla…
  60. Come and See waited eight years for Soviet censors, then refused to compromiseElem Klimov wanted the world to know about the hundreds of Belarusian villages burned during the Nazi occupation. Soviet film bureaucrats blocked his script as too realistic for e…

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