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Ideas & Philosophy

1,886 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 8 of 32.

  1. How 4.5 billion-year-old space rocks reveal the Earth's hidden interiorA single meteorite fragment can act as a cosmic time capsule. By studying the chemical composition of ancient stones like the Allende and Imilac meteorites, scientists can reconst…
  2. The surprising reason movie theaters rely on popcorn to stay in businessFor decades, cinema owners actually banned popcorn to preserve a sense of high-class prestige. It took a global economic crisis and a revolution in film technology to transform th…
  3. Edward Said's Orientalism argued that Western scholarship about the East served empireIn 1978 the literary critic Edward Said took an old word for the academic study of Asia and North Africa and turned it into an accusation. Orientalism, he argued, was less a neutr…
  4. Orpheus sang his way into the underworld and lost everything with one glanceGreeks called Orpheus the greatest musician who ever lived, a Thracian singer whose lyre could make rocks dance and rivers change course. He charmed the rulers of the dead into re…
  5. Osamu Dazai turned a turbulent life into Japan's most confessional modern classicsBorn into one of the richest landowning families in northern Japan, Shūji Tsushima enrolled to study French literature without knowing French and boasted he never attended a singl…
  6. Ossian, a largely invented ancient bard, captivated Napoleon and JeffersonIn the 1760s a Scottish poet named James Macpherson announced he had translated the lost epics of a third-century Gaelic bard. Europe went wild: Napoleon adored them, Jefferson wa…
  7. Nostalgia was once diagnosed as a disease that could kill homesick soldiersA 17th-century medical student invented the word nostalgia, from Greek for homecoming and pain, to name the anguish of Swiss mercenaries serving far from home. For centuries docto…
  8. Dostoevsky's spiteful Underground Man demands the freedom to say two plus two makes fiveIn 1864 Dostoevsky published a short book narrated by a bitter retired clerk hiding in a St. Petersburg flat. He sneers at reason, science and the dream of a perfect society, insi…
  9. Nuneaton, George Eliot's hometown, took its name from a medieval priory of nunsWarwickshire's biggest town began as Etone, an Anglo-Saxon farming hamlet beside the River Anker. Around 1155 a Norman lord handed the manor to a French abbey that planted nuns th…
  10. A shy girl who thought she could beat a bad movie became a science fiction giantAt twelve, Octavia Butler watched Devil Girl from Mars and decided she could write something better. A year later an aunt told her Black people could not be writers. She kept typi…
  11. Oedipus fled a terrible prophecy and ran straight into itHis name means swollen foot, a reminder of the pierced ankles his father gave him before abandoning him on a mountain. Everything Oedipus did to escape the oracle's warning about …
  12. Bong Joon Ho's Okja was booed at Cannes, then won a four-minute ovationThe Cannes crowd jeered twice in the opening minutes of Okja's 2017 premiere: once at the Netflix logo, again when the projectionist ran the wrong aspect ratio for seven minutes. …
  13. A lightning strike at summer camp shaped Paul Auster's obsession with chanceAt 14, Paul Auster was at camp when lightning killed a boy standing inches away from him. He called it the seminal experience of his life and said he thought about it every day. C…
  14. A Verlaine poem about autumn violins told the Resistance D-Day was comingOn 1 June 1944, BBC radio beamed the opening of Paul Verlaine's Chanson d'automne to occupied France: long sobs of autumn violins. To the Resistance it meant invasion within two w…
  15. Missionaries gave Taiwanese speech a Latin alphabet and Taiwan its first newspaperChinese characters take years to master, so nineteenth-century missionaries tried a shortcut: write Hokkien in Latin letters with tone marks. The result, Pe̍h-ōe-jī, meaning verna…
  16. Pearl Buck told a room of missionary women that China didn't need themIn 1932, the year The Good Earth won her a Pulitzer, Pearl Buck asked a luncheon of Presbyterian women whether China really needed foreign missionaries. Her answer was a barely qu…
  17. The Peloponnese is called an island even though it is joined to GreecePeloponnesos means the island of Pelops, after the mythical hero said to have conquered it. For most of history it was a peninsula hanging off Greece by a narrow neck of land, unt…
  18. Rome's famous founding revolution may be mostly a story borrowed from AthensEvery Roman schoolboy learned how Brutus drove out the tyrant Tarquin in 509 BC and swore Rome would never again have a king. Modern historians suspect much of that tale was inven…
  19. At Blenheim, the trees were planted in the formation of a winning armyWhen Capability Brown laid out the grounds of Blenheim Palace near Woodstock, he arranged the trees like the victorious troops at the battle the palace celebrated. It is one oddit…
  20. The Paris Panthéon switched between church and national tomb again and againLouis XV promised a grand church to Saint Genevieve if he survived an illness. By the time it was finished, revolutionaries had turned it into a tomb for great citizens, and over …
  21. Proving a ghost exists would instantly stop it being paranormalThe paranormal has a built-in trap. Anything that science could confirm would simply become part of science, so no phenomenon can ever be verified as paranormal by definition. Tha…
  22. Patricia Arquette turned down braces because perfect teeth didn't fit herAs a girl, Patricia Arquette refused her parents' offer to straighten her teeth, saying a perfect smile would not match who she was inside. That streak of self-possession carried …
  23. Johnson, Petrov and O'Conor all hide a father's name inside themRodríguez began as son of Rodrigo, Powell as ap Hywel, and MacAllister as son of Alistair. Across much of the world, naming a child after the father's first name came long before …
  24. Patti Smith froze mid-song at the Nobel ceremony, apologised, and finishedStanding in for Bob Dylan in Stockholm in 2016, Patti Smith lost her place in A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, admitted she was nervous and started again to roaring applause. It fitted…
  25. A novel about a man with the world's best nose and no smell of his ownJean-Baptiste Grenouille can pick out the faintest odour across great distances, yet he himself gives off nothing at all. Patrick Süskind built his 1985 novel Perfume around that …
  26. Sarah Polley turned the secret of her own paternity into an acclaimed documentaryAs a child, Sarah Polley was teased by her siblings for looking nothing like her dad. As an adult she learned why: her biological father was the film producer Harry Gulkin, with w…
  27. Rome kept its treasury in the temple of a god whose statue wore woollen fettersFor most of the year, the cult statue of Saturn in Rome had its feet bound with wool. Only during his December festival, the Saturnalia, were the bindings removed, and the city br…
  28. Seamus Heaney won the Nobel while on holiday and nobody could reach himWhen the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Seamus Heaney, he was travelling in Greece with his wife. Reporters and even his own children failed to contact him for two days, t…
  29. Sheikh simply means elder, yet it names emirs, mystics and merchant families alikeAt root, the Arabic word sheikh comes from a three-letter stem tied to growing old. That humble meaning now stretches remarkably far: it is borne by Gulf royals, Sufi masters, Som…
  30. Moscow's busiest airport began life as a Soviet air force baseSheremetyevo was meant for warplanes. A 1953 Soviet decree ordered a central air force airfield outside Moscow, and it opened in 1957 for the revolution's 40th anniversary. Within…
  31. China's first great history weighed up to sixty kilograms in bambooSima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian runs to roughly 526,500 characters, longer than the Hebrew Bible. Written on bamboo slips bundled in groups of about thirty, the origina…
  32. Live television taught Sidney Lumet to shoot fast, and Hollywood never slowed himBefore his first feature, Sidney Lumet had directed roughly 200 television episodes, many broadcast live, where there was no time for second thoughts. That lightning pace followed…
  33. Romain Gary won France's top literary prize twice by inventing a second authorThe rules of France's most prestigious literary prize forbid winning it twice. Romain Gary managed it anyway: in 1973 he began writing in a new style as Émile Ajar, even getting h…
  34. The first Grail hero failed because he was too polite to ask a questionLong before Galahad claimed it, the Grail quest belonged to Perceval, a boy raised in a forest who knew nothing of knighthood. At the castle of a wounded Fisher King he watched a …
  35. Brazil received nearly half of all Africans forced across the AtlanticOf roughly 12 million Africans shipped in bondage to the Americas, about 5.5 million were taken to Brazil, more than to any other country. Sugar, gold, diamonds and coffee were al…
  36. Sorrento once had a temple to the Sirens, unique in the Greek worldSorrento, perched above the Bay of Naples, was known in antiquity for wine and fish rather than the lemons that now flavour its limoncello; citrus had not yet reached Italy. Legen…
  37. Southwark's firm ground is the reason London stands where it doesTwo thousand years ago the south bank of the Thames was mostly marshy tidal islands, except for one firm strip of ground. Roman engineers built their bridge there around 43 AD, an…
  38. The first sovereign wealth fund was set up by Texas to pay for schoolsSovereign wealth funds sound like a Gulf invention, but the idea began in 1854 with a Texas fund for public education. Kuwait launched the first national one in 1953 from oil mone…
  39. Spain's original plan to invade England needed 556 ships and 94,222 menPhilip II's first blueprint for conquering England was so vast, with over 94,000 men and a cost beyond even Spain's treasury, that it was abandoned. The scaled-down Armada of 1588…
  40. Four Latin letters have signed off Rome's official business for two thousand yearsSPQR, short for the Senate and People of Rome, was the Roman state's signature on coins, monuments and public inscriptions. The four letters outlived the Republic, the Empire and …
  41. Stalin reportedly brushed off the word Stalinism as dangerous flatteryWhen his associate Lazar Kaganovich proposed swapping the slogan Long Live Leninism for Long Live Stalinism, Stalin reportedly called it excessive, suspecting such praise could on…
  42. The songwriter who made Swanee River famous barely set foot in the SouthStephen Foster wrote more than 200 songs, many steeped in Southern scenery, yet he never lived in the South and went there only once, on his honeymoon. He died in New York at 37 w…
  43. The Vicar of Dibley's choirmaster also runs one of Britain's boldest theatre companiesFilm audiences know Simon McBurney as a spymaster in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or the voice of the house-elf Kreacher. On stage he is the founder of Complicité, a company whose sh…
  44. Sinclair Lewis turned down a Pulitzer, then became America's first Nobel literature laureateWhen Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer Prize, Sinclair Lewis refused it, still stung that Main Street had been passed over. Five years later he became the first American to win the Nobe…
  45. Sylvia Plath's only novel first appeared under the name Victoria LucasIn 1963 a British publisher released a novel about a gifted student who wins a glamorous New York magazine internship and then slides into depression. Its author was listed as Vic…
  46. Poe's The Black Cat turns a hidden crime into a confession by howlEdgar Allan Poe's narrator is sure he has committed the perfect crime. Police have searched his cellar and found nothing. Then, boasting about how solid the walls are, he taps the…
  47. How Christopher Nolan was coaxed back to finish his Batman trilogyAfter The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan was reluctant to make another Batman film. He agreed only once he, his brother Jonathan and David S. Goyer found an ending worth telling. …
  48. Oscar Hammerstein called teenage Sondheim's first musical the worst thing he'd readAt 15, Stephen Sondheim proudly showed his school musical to his neighbour and surrogate father, Oscar Hammerstein II. The verdict: terrible, though not untalented. They spent the…
  49. Storm and Stress: when young Goethe and Schiller rebelled against reasonFor roughly fifteen years from the late 1760s, German writers traded Enlightenment balance for raw feeling, revenge plots and heroes answerable to nobody. The movement took its na…
  50. Why Malevich hung a black square where Russians kept their holiest iconIn 1915 Kazimir Malevich unveiled a plain black square and placed it high in a gallery corner, the spot Orthodox households reserve for their main icon. The gesture announced Supr…
  51. Susanna Clarke spent ten spare-time years on a novel that fetched £1 millionWhile editing cookbooks in Cambridge, Susanna Clarke wrote a vast novel about English magicians in stolen early-morning hours, never sure it would be finished or published. A deca…
  52. Sydney Sweeney pitched her parents a five-year business plan to start actingAs a child in Spokane, Sydney Sweeney wanted to act after auditioning as an extra for a local independent film. To win her parents over, she handed them a five-year business plan.…
  53. Stallone drafted Rocky in three days after watching a long-shot title fightOn March 24, 1975, a struggling actor watched journeyman Chuck Wepner take Muhammad Ali deep into their fight. Three days later Sylvester Stallone had a first draft of Rocky. He i…
  54. Tekken's family feud has run three decades without a single rebootMost long video game series eventually wipe the slate clean. Tekken never did. Since Namco's 1994 original, its brawlers have fought over control of the Mishima Zaibatsu while fat…
  55. Thomas Hardy defiantly subtitled Tess 'A Pure Woman' and Victorian England bristledThomas Hardy's twelfth novel follows a Wessex farm girl who is wronged, abandoned by the man she marries, and finally hanged. Its subtitle called her pure anyway. First serialised…
  56. Stephen Graham's dyslexia means his wife reads his scripts firstThe Kirkby-born actor behind This Is England's Combo and Netflix's Adolescence cannot easily read the scripts he is offered, so his wife, actor Hannah Walters, reads them and help…
  57. Thelonious Monk had two left hands, according to one Harlem record dealerA Harlem record dealer once told Monk's champion Lorraine Gordon that the pianist couldn't play and had two left hands. Monk's jagged melodies and sudden silences sold poorly for …
  58. Neil Hannon's one-man band that also wrote the Father Ted themeThe Divine Comedy has had many players since 1989, but only one constant: Neil Hannon, a Northern Irish songwriter who sometimes plays everything except drums and orchestra. Betwe…
  59. Arundhati Roy sketched her Booker-winning novel like a building before writing itArundhati Roy bought a computer in New Delhi in 1992, wanting work she could do alone, and did not realise at first she was writing a novel. Four years later she had The God of Sm…
  60. How Baz Luhrmann turned Sydney into Long Island for his Great GatsbyBaz Luhrmann's 2013 Great Gatsby was filmed not on Long Island but around Sydney, where a business school played Gatsby's mansion and its palm trees were digitally erased. Critics…

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