Intellect PlusModern
551 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 7 of 10.
Thief, woodcutter or rabbit: every culture sees someone different on the MoonThe dark patches on the full moon are old lava plains, but people everywhere have read figures into them. Europeans saw a banished criminal, Vietnamese see a woodcutter clinging t…
Cause, manner and mechanism of death are three different questionsDeath certificates in Britain and the United States separate three things. The cause is the disease or injury, such as cancer. The mechanism is the final physiological failure, su…
Marine Le Pen expelled her own father from the party he foundedJean-Marie Le Pen created the National Front in 1972. His youngest daughter took it over in 2011, set out to 'de-demonise' it, renamed it the National Rally, and in 2015 threw him…- The hand-picked puppet president who exiled his puppeteer and seized Mexico's oilPlutarco Elías Calles chose Lázaro Cárdenas for Mexico's presidency in 1934, expecting obedience. Instead Cárdenas outmanoeuvred his patron, forced him into exile, nationalised th…
- Bolivia still marks a Day of the Sea for the coast it lostForty-four countries have no coastline, and two of them, Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan, are surrounded entirely by other landlocked states. Lacking a coast tends to mean pricier tr…
The world's nuclear arsenal has shrunk from 70,300 active warheads to about 3,900Nine countries are generally believed to hold nuclear weapons, though only eight admit it. At the Cold War peak in 1986 there were some 70,300 active warheads; by 2026 the Federat…
Millard Fillmore was the last president who was neither Democrat nor RepublicanBorn in a log cabin in 1800 and apprenticed to a clothmaker at 14, Millard Fillmore became president in July 1850 when Zachary Taylor died. He pushed through the Compromise of 185…
How Sweden's thousand-year crown turned from elected war chief into ceremonySweden's regnal list reaches back to Eric the Victorious, who died in 995, making its monarchy among the world's oldest. For centuries Swedes chose their kings; only in the 16th c…
Why faking the Apollo Moon landings would have been harder than doing themTwelve astronauts walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972, yet polls have found 28% of Russians and a quarter of Britons surveyed think it was staged. The doubt traces largely to…- The rabbit people see in the Moon, from Buddhist fables to Chinese roversLook at the full Moon's dark patches and much of Asia sees a rabbit working a mortar and pestle. In China it grinds the elixir of life for the goddess Chang'e; in Japan and Korea …
- The dead man with fake letters who helped fool Hitler about SicilyIn 1943 British intelligence floated a corpse off Spain dressed as a Royal Marines officer, carrying letters hinting that the Allies would strike Greece and Sardinia. The Germans …
- Kingsley Amis hurled away Money when his son wrote himself into itAccording to Martin Amis, his father Kingsley stopped reading Money and sent it flying at the exact point where a character called Martin Amis appears. The son went on to shape a …
- McCarthyism began before McCarthy, and some historians prefer to call it HooverismThe Red Scare named after Senator Joseph McCarthy was already under way when he waved his list in 1950: Truman's loyalty screening of federal workers started in 1947. Careers were…
Mein Kampf sold slowly until 1933, then was given to every newlywed coupleHitler drafted Mein Kampf in Landsberg Prison after his failed 1923 coup, hoping sales would cover his legal bills. It sold slowly at first, then became a bestseller once he took …- Why Gurkhas and Foreign Legionnaires are not legally mercenariesA mercenary fights for pay in a conflict that is not his own, and international law treats him differently from a soldier. A 1977 addition to the Geneva Conventions strips mercena…
Peter Weir learned filmmaking making satire on a Sydney TV station's equipmentBefore Dead Poets Society and The Truman Show, Peter Weir was a production assistant at a Sydney television station, borrowing its equipment after hours to shoot odd experimental …- France's hero of Verdun became the head of its collaborationist regimePhilippe Pétain was hailed as the Lion of Verdun in 1916 and restored a mutinous French army in 1917. Twenty-three years later he led Vichy France, the authoritarian regime that c…
- Poland's air force was not wiped out on the ground in 1939German propaganda claimed Poland's warplanes were smashed on their runways on the first day of the 1939 invasion. In fact the combat aircraft had already been dispersed to seconda…
Poland now spends a bigger share of GDP on defence than any other NATO memberIn 2025 Poland devoted 4.2 percent of its economy to its military, the highest share in NATO, and with more than 216,000 active personnel it fields the alliance's third-largest fo…
The world's fertility rate fell from 5.3 to 2.2 in sixty yearsFor most of history humanity grew at a crawl, roughly 0.04 percent a year. After 1800 growth soared, peaking at 2.1 percent during the post-war baby boom. Since then the average n…
A fertiliser process helped humanity grow from 1.6 to 7.7 billionIn 1800 about 1 billion people lived on Earth; by 2025 there were 8.2 billion. A key reason was the Haber process, which let farmers make nitrogen fertiliser from the air and has …
Pan-Arabism produced several unions, and none of them lastedPan-Arabism dreamed of one Arab nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea. It peaked in the 1950s and 1960s and yielded real mergers, including the United Arab Republ…
The Tornado jet was one plane designed to replace a whole fleetIn the late 1960s, several NATO countries wanted replacements for very different aircraft. Instead of buying many types, Britain, West Germany and Italy built one swing-wing jet t…
Before the Civil War, Robert E. Lee opened the upper Mississippi to steamboatsRobert E. Lee finished West Point without a single demerit and spent decades as an army engineer, mapping the Mississippi's Des Moines Rapids and opening the upper river to commer…- Robert Harris calls his Berkshire home 'the house that Hitler built'Robert Harris's first novel imagined a world in which Nazi Germany had won the Second World War. Fatherland sold so well that he quit journalism and bought a former vicarage, joki…
- Britain knighted Roger Casement for exposing atrocities, then hanged him for treasonRoger Casement's reports on the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon made him a hero of human rights and earned him a knighthood in 1911. Five years later the same government executed hi…
De Gaulle accused the first Commission president of acting like a head of stateIn 1965 Walter Hallstein, the first head of the European Commission, pushed plans that would hand Brussels its own money and strip France of a veto. Charles de Gaulle charged him …
A puppet state gets a flag, an anthem and a constitution, but no real powerA puppet state has every outward badge of a nation, from a name and flag to an anthem and law codes, while a foreign power pulls the strings. The phrase puppet government was firs…- Revanchism was born of France's bitterness over Alsace-LorraineAfter losing Alsace and Lorraine to Prussia, French nationalists of the 1870s nursed a craving for revenge, or revanche, so intense it got its own word. That grudge shaped allianc…
- Rob Reiner joked he'd be 'Meathead' even if he won a NobelRob Reiner became famous as Archie Bunker's liberal son-in-law, nicknamed Meathead, on America's most-watched sitcom. Then he reinvented himself as a director of rare range, movin…
Ancient Smyrna invented the worship of Rome as a goddess to win a new allyIn 197 BC the Greek port of Smyrna broke with its neighbour Pergamum and turned to Rome, a city it had no ties with. To create a bond, it founded a cult of Rome itself, and the go…
East Germany's ruling party counted one in six adults as membersAt its last official count in November 1989, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany had 2,129,250 members, about 17 per cent of East German adults. Weeks later it was scrambling to …- The Arab world's only communist state lasted 23 years at the tip of ArabiaFrom 1967 to 1990, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen was the sole communist state in the Middle East. Built on the former British port of Aden, it banned child marriage an…
- The SAS got its name from a bluff about paratroopers who did not existWhen David Stirling founded his unit in July 1941, it was labelled L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade, as part of a deception meant to convince the Axis that a large Britis…
How risky American home loans wiped out almost 9 million jobsBetween 2007 and 2010, a wave of missed mortgage payments in the United States rippled through Wall Street and around the world. Americans lost nearly 9 million jobs and about $13…
Before it was the Rust Belt, America's industrial heartland was proudly called the Steel BeltChicago was a rural trading post in the 1840s and as big as Paris by 1893. Canals, railways and Great Lakes shipping turned the region into America's factory floor, then from the …- Reborn after 123 years of partition, interwar Poland lasted just under 21 yearsAfter more than a century carved up between Austria, Prussia and Russia, Poland reappeared as an independent state in late 1918. The Second Polish Republic fought border wars, swu…
- Choosing the UN's top official is often compared to electing a popeThe head of the United Nations is picked through secret straw polls in the Security Council, where any of five permanent members can kill a candidate with a veto. In 1981 China ca…
- A 1996 border pact grew into the world's largest regional organisationThe Shanghai Cooperation Organisation began as five neighbours agreeing to build military trust along their borders. Three decades on, its ten members cover about a quarter of the…
The Winchester rifle grew out of a fragile invention and a bankrupt companyBefore it was sold as the gun that won the West, the Winchester was a chain of flops: a fragile 1848 repeater, a bankrupt company, a weak bullet called the Rocket Ball. Its larges…- Stalin's eldest son died a German prisoner after his father refused a swapWhen Field Marshal Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad in 1943, the Germans offered to trade him for a captured Red Army lieutenant: Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin's firstborn. Stalin sa…
Yellow journalism was named after a comic strip kid in a newspaper warIn 1890s New York, two press barons fought for the pennies of men buying one paper a day from shouting street vendors. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst filled pages wit…- The Sudetenland was never a single region until nationalists named itHitler's 1938 demand made the Sudetenland famous, yet the word itself was barely a generation old. It borrowed the name of a mountain range and stretched it over every German-spea…
- Two diplomats carved up the Ottoman Middle East in six days of secret talksOver roughly six days at the end of 1915, Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France met almost daily and left no record of what they said. On 3 January 1916 they …
The T-34 won by numbers: Soviet factories kept making it cheaperMore than 57,300 T-34s rolled out of Soviet factories by the end of 1945, making it the most-produced tank of World War II. Its sloped armour and powerful gun startled German gene…
A lost planet called Theia may be buried inside Earth right nowAbout 4.5 billion years ago, a world perhaps the size of Mars is thought to have slammed into the young Earth, and the debris gathered into the Moon. Nobody has ever seen Theia. Y…- Molotov chose a name meaning hammer and became Stalin's most enduring lieutenantBorn Vyacheslav Skryabin, a shy merchant's son renamed himself after the Russian word for sledgehammer because it sounded industrial. Rivals such as Trotsky dismissed him as medio…
A reporter asking directions helped wreck the surprise raid that began WacoFederal agents planned a sudden daylight raid on a Texas religious compound in February 1993. A reporter tipped off about it asked a mail carrier for directions, and the carrier h…
For twelve years, China's government was whoever controlled the strongest armyWhen Yuan Shikai died in 1916, the young Republic of China splintered. For the next twelve years rival generals from the Beiyang Army and regional strongmen fought over provinces …
Watergate began with a leak-plugging squad and ended with a president resigningThe burglars caught inside Democratic headquarters on June 17, 1972 were not a one-off. They came from a White House effort to stop leaks that had already broken into a psychiatri…
Sixty to seventy-five million dead, mostly civiliansFrom September 1939 to September 1945 two coalitions pulled nearly every country into total war on a scale never seen before. Historians put the death toll somewhere between sixty…
Three leaders redrew Europe sixty-five kilometres from BerlinFor one week in February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta to decide what postwar Germany and liberated Europe would look like. Soviet forces already sat about s…
A South Slavic state that lasted from 1918 to 1992Yugoslavia—“land of the South Slavs”—united Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and neighbours into one country after the First World War, then reinvented itself as a socialist federation aft…- October 1929 turned a boom market into a banking nightmareShare prices on the New York exchange collapsed in October 1929, shredding confidence in American banks and helping usher in the Great Depression. Roaring Twenties profits had pou…
- A ten-cent nitrate tax cost Bolivia its coastlineFrom 1879 to 1884 Chile fought a Bolivian–Peruvian alliance for Atacama coastal claims rich in nitrates. A Bolivian tax hike on the Chilean CSFA mining firm violated the 1874 boun…
- Moscow answered NATO with a May 1955 eastern allianceIn May 1955 the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc states signed the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance—a collective defence pact meant as count…
Phoney War silence broke with blitzkrieg in May 1940London and Paris entered the war against Germany on 3 September 1939 after Poland was invaded, yet months of Phoney War saw little continental fighting beyond a timid French Saar …- A Balkan assassination ignited a four-year world warFrom late July 1914 to mid-November 1918 the Allies and Central Powers fought the Great War, killing an estimated fifteen to twenty-two million people. Gavrilo Princip's late-June…
The Arrow seizure reopened Britain's war for Chinese marketsOn 8 October 1856 Qing officers seized the British-registered lorcha Arrow and arrested Chinese sailors. Consul Harry Parkes protested; Viceroy Ye Mingchen returned most crew but …
Asia's World War began years before Pearl HarborFull-scale war between China and Japan is usually dated from the 7 July 1937 Marco Polo Bridge clash near Beijing, yet many Chinese histories now start the fourteen-year war with …