Intellect PlusWriters
1,873 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 26 of 32.
West Point was America's only engineering school until 1824Founded to train army officers, West Point was for two decades the only place in the United States to study engineering. Its graduates laid out much of the young nation's first ra…
Bonn's university works out of a prince-elector's baroque palaceThe University of Bonn has no single campus. Its main building is the palace of Cologne's former prince-electors, its mineral collection fills another palace, and its alumni range…
A five-hour fire in 1694 gave medieval Warwick its elegant Georgian faceOn 5 September 1694 a blaze tore through Warwick, destroying 460 buildings in about five hours and leaving 250 families homeless. The rebuilding, designed to lure gentry and profe…
WashU began as a free night school whose first students ranged from 8 to 46Washington University in St. Louis had no endowment, no church backing and no buildings when it opened in 1854. Classes met in a borrowed schoolhouse lit by gas, tuition was free,…
Noah Webster gave Americans 'color' and 'center', then his dictionary sold poorlyNoah Webster was 70 when his great American dictionary appeared in 1828, with 70,000 entries, far more than any before it. Priced at $20, it barely sold. Federalists called it vul…
A quiet Surrey town built the world's first purpose-made motor racing circuitWeybridge takes its name from an old crossing of the River Wey, but its fame rests on Brooklands, the first purpose-built racing track anywhere, opened in 1907. It staged the firs…
America's Whigs named themselves to cast Andrew Jackson as a new King GeorgeThe Whig label was a jab: it likened President Andrew Jackson, dubbed King Andrew by his foes, to George III, the monarch Americans had revolted against. The party that grew from …
The free picture library behind Wikipedia now holds over 147 million filesAlmost every photo you see on Wikipedia lives on a sister site, Wikimedia Commons, where anyone may reuse the files for any purpose. Started in 2004, it holds more than 147 millio…
For forty years, William Cecil's life was almost the history of Elizabethan EnglandWilliam Cecil advised Elizabeth I for nearly her entire reign, so closely that one historian said his biography from 1558 is hard to separate from hers. He survived a dangerous pl…
Why pilgrims shower gifts on the Lord of Seven Hills at TirupatiEvery year hundreds of thousands of devotees leave generous offerings at the Venkateswara Temple in Tirupati. Legend supplies the reason: to pay for his wedding, the deity is said…
Veracruz, where Cortés founded the first Spanish town in Mexico, is also the Olmec heartlandLong before Hernán Cortés landed in 1519, the Gulf coast of Veracruz was home to the Olmecs, whose colossal stone heads date from a civilisation that peaked some 2,600 years ago. …- A TV show imagined a secret vault of cursed objects that began with Alexander the GreatWarehouse 13 sent two Secret Service agents to a barren corner of South Dakota to guard objects soaked in supernatural power, from Lewis Carroll's looking glass to Studio 54's dis…
- Before his march through Georgia, Sherman was a failed banker who feared San FranciscoThe general who seized Atlanta and marched to the sea had spent years flopping in business. William Tecumseh Sherman survived two shipwrecks, ran a bank through a panic, and later…
A girl relocated to San Francisco came home to lead the Cherokee NationAt 11, Wilma Mankiller was moved with her family from an Oklahoma farm to a squalid San Francisco hotel under a federal relocation scheme. Two decades later she returned home, and…
Wiltshire's locals are Moonrakers, named after smugglers who fooled the taxmenCaught raking a village pond at night, Wiltshire smugglers hiding kegs of contraband liquor told excise men they were trying to rake in a big round cheese, really the moon's refle…
Winona Ryder's godfather was Timothy Leary, and her surname came from a rock singerBorn Winona Horowitz on a rural Minnesota farm, she was named after the nearest town, given a middle name honouring Aldous Huxley's wife, and grew up with Timothy Leary as her god…
Kurt Russell's first film role involved kicking Elvis, whom he later playedAs a boy in his uncredited screen debut, Kurt Russell kicked Elvis Presley in the shin. In 1979 he played Elvis himself in a TV film directed by John Carpenter, earning an Emmy no…
Najaf nearly died of thirst when the Euphrates wandered awayNajaf, a city of about 1.41 million in central Iraq, surrounds the tomb of Ali, revered by Shia Muslims as their first Imam. It also holds the world's largest cemetery and oldest …
Taft never wanted the White House as much as the Supreme CourtWilliam Howard Taft is the only American to have been both president and chief justice. The second job was the one he always craved; yet he turned down repeated offers to join the…
McKinley enlisted as a private and left office with an overseas empireWilliam McKinley joined the Union army as a private in 1861 and ended the Civil War a brevet major, the last president to have fought in it. Three decades later he campaigned from…
Captain Kirk finally reached space at 90, aboard a real rocketFor nearly three decades William Shatner commanded a fictional starship. In 2021, at 90, he rode Blue Origin's suborbital NS-18 flight and became the oldest person ever to go to s…
Poulenc adored what he called bad music, then wrote profound sacred worksFrancis Poulenc's mother, a capable pianist, played everything from classics to lowbrow pieces, leaving her son forever fond of what he called adorable bad music. He became known …
A magazine piece about Oregon sand dunes grew into Frank Herbert's DuneFrank Herbert was sent to write an article on the Oregon Dunes near Florence and gathered so much material that the piece never appeared. Instead the idea grew, over six years of …
French kings sold noble rank while officially insisting nobility could never be boughtNobility in old France could not legally be purchased, yet commoners routinely bought offices and landed estates that carried it. Scornful aristocrats nicknamed one purchased rout…
The Norse harvest god who gave away his self-fighting sword for loveFreyr owned a sword that battled by itself in wise hands, and he handed it over to win the giantess Gerðr. The trade came at a steep price: myth says that at Ragnarök, weaponless,…- A Hokkaido farm taught Hiromu Arakawa the central law of Fullmetal AlchemistIn Fullmetal Alchemist, nothing can be gained unless something of equal value is lost. Hiromu Arakawa drew that rule, called Equivalent Exchange, not from old alchemical texts but…
- Why Fullmetal Alchemist was animated twice, and the remake became a classicThe first Fullmetal Alchemist anime ran out of manga to adapt and invented its own ending. Six years later the studio Bones started over, this time tracking Hiromu Arakawa's compl…
America avoided field marshals partly to spare George Marshall an awkward titleWhen the US Army needed a rank to match Britain's field marshals in World War II, planners balked at the name. Marshal already meant a civilian law officer, and George Marshall wo…
An original Dadaist talked Fluxus out of calling itself neo-DadaGeorge Maciunas first pitched his circle of experimental artists as neo-Dada. Raoul Hausmann, one of the original Dadaists, wrote back that neo means nothing and any -ism sounds d…
Asimov modelled Foundation on the fall of Rome, and it nudged Krugman into economicsIsaac Asimov said the idea for Foundation came to him on the way to see his editor, drawn from Edward Gibbon's history of Rome's decline and fall. The result, a mathematician fore…
Revelation never calls the first horseman PestilencePopular culture often names the Four Horsemen as Pestilence, War, Famine and Death. The Book of Revelation, though, gives a name only to the fourth rider. The white rider's identi…- Garibaldi set out to conquer a kingdom with about a thousand volunteersIn 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from near Genoa with roughly a thousand volunteers to take on the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a state with a bigger army and a stronger navy. Wi…
Some of Felix Mendelssohn's published songs were really written by his sisterFanny Mendelssohn wrote over 450 works, yet most went unpublished while she lived, and six of her songs appeared under her brother Felix's name. Social rules and family doubts kep…
Fatty liver disease affects nearly a third of Westerners, often silentlyAbout 30 percent of people in Western countries have fat building up in their livers from metabolic causes, and most feel nothing at all. In June 2023 liver specialists renamed th…
A car crash into a ditch helped launch the Futurist art movementIn 1908, speed-obsessed poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti swerved into a ditch outside Milan to avoid two cyclists. He climbed out, by his own account, a new man, and the following y…
Portugal's first republic got through 45 governments in just 16 yearsBetween the revolution of 5 October 1910 and a military coup on 28 May 1926, Portugal had eight presidents and 45 ministries. The First Republic was less a stable system than a tu…
Britain's key wartime convoy escort was adapted from a whale-catching boatWhen Britain needed anti-submarine escorts in a hurry in 1939, a Teesside firm that built fishing boats offered a design based on its whale catcher Southern Pride. The result, the…
The bridges on euro banknotes do not exist anywhere in EuropeEvery euro note shows a window or gateway on one side and a bridge on the other, yet none of them is a real structure. They are stylised examples of historic European architectura…- Evanna Lynch beat 15,000 hopefuls to play Luna Lovegood with no acting experienceAt 14, with only school plays behind her, Evanna Lynch went to an open casting call in London and walked away as Luna Lovegood. Years earlier the Harry Potter books had helped her…
America's only four-time Pulitzer playwright was born in a Times Square hotelEugene O'Neill came into the world in a hotel room on what is now Times Square, grew up trailing his touring actor father, drifted through years at sea and nearly died in a waterf…
The Nutcracker began as a story by a Prussian lawyerEvery Christmas, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker fills theatres, but its source was written by a Prussian civil servant who also composed music, drew savage caricatures and invented stra…
The man behind 'It was a dark and stormy night' also named a Canadian townEdward Bulwer-Lytton gave English some of its stickiest phrases, from the pen being mightier than the sword to the great unwashed. He also opened a novel with a dark and stormy ni…
The idea for electroconvulsive therapy came from a Rome slaughterhouseUgo Cerletti got the idea for shock treatment after watching pigs being stunned with electricity before slaughter. His 1938 procedure spread worldwide, was vilified after One Flew…
Ancient Greece's most famous secret rite kept its secret for two thousand yearsFor roughly two millennia, initiates walked to Eleusis to relive the story of Persephone's abduction and return, and almost none of them ever revealed what happened inside. The cl…
England's golden age was bankrolled partly by raiding Spanish treasure shipsShakespeare, the defeat of the Armada and a flowering of music and poetry define the reign of Elizabeth I. Less glamorous was the money behind it: privateering against Spanish shi…
Emma Thompson is the only person with Oscars for acting and writingPlenty of actors write and plenty of writers act, but only Emma Thompson has won Academy Awards for both. She took Best Actress for Howards End, then wrote and starred in Sense an…
A 4th-century deacon taught theology through choirs of womenEphrem of Nisibis wrote his theology as songs and had choirs of women sing them, founding the tradition of deaconess choristers in Syriac churches. So loved were his hymns that fo…
Esau traded his birthright for lentil stew, and gave English an idiomA hungry hunter comes in from the fields and swaps his rights as firstborn for a bowl of red lentils. The Genesis story of Esau and his twin Jacob gave us the phrase about selling…
The whale that sank the Essex gave Melville the ending of Moby-DickIn November 1820 a huge sperm whale charged the Nantucket whaler Essex twice and sent her to the bottom of the Pacific, some 2,000 nautical miles from South America. Twenty men to…
Providence literally means seeing ahead, and theologians still argue how farThe word providence comes from Latin roots meaning to see ahead. In theology it names God's care for the world, but traditions split sharply over the details: does God steer every…
Dylan Thomas squeezed a son's fury at death into nineteen strict linesDylan Thomas wrote his most famous poem in Florence in 1947, apparently for a father who would not die until late 1952. It is a villanelle, one of poetry's tightest forms, and its…- A Sheffield-born Etonian became the American cop McNulty in The WireFew viewers of The Wire guessed that Baltimore detective Jimmy McNulty was played by an Old Etonian from Sheffield with a Trinity College Dublin degree. Dominic West's accent drew…
How a Bronx parking attendant became the novelist of White NoiseDon DeLillo quit an advertising job in 1964 not to write, he said, but simply to stop working. He was living on sixty dollars a month in rent near the Queens–Midtown Tunnel, and i…
Doris Lessing heard about her Nobel Prize while carrying in the groceriesWhen a journalist told Doris Lessing in 2007 that she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, she swore mildly and kept unloading her shopping. She was then the oldest person ever …- Rejected by 44 publishers, a fashion designer's first novel took the BookerDouglas Stuart drafted Shuggie Bain around twelve-hour days as a senior design director at Banana Republic. Thirty-two American publishers and twelve British ones said no. Grove A…
Duke University began as a one-room subscription school with four other namesBefore it was Duke, it was Brown's Schoolhouse, then Union Institute Academy, then Normal College, then Trinity College. A tobacco fortune moved it to Durham in 1892, and a $40 mi…
Stalingrad lost its name and Stalin lost his tomb in 1961Within a decade of his death, Joseph Stalin's body was carried out of Lenin's mausoleum, his name was cut from the Soviet anthem, and Stalingrad became Volgograd. The turning poin…
As a Barnard freshman, Cynthia Nixon ran between two Broadway hits nightlyIn 1984 a teenage Cynthia Nixon played in two Mike Nichols productions at once, dashing the two blocks between theatres because both parts were short. Decades before Miranda in Se…
Famine on a Greek island seeded a green mountain colony in eastern LibyaAround 631 BC settlers fleeing famine on Thera founded Cyrene on Libya's eastern bulge, giving the whole region its name. Cyrenaica is an unexpected slice of the Mediterranean: a …
Lemony Snicket's creator saw his first novel rejected 37 timesBefore he became Lemony Snicket, narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler wrote a satirical novel about a teenage girl so dark that publishers turned it down 37 …