Topics

Ideas & Philosophy

1,886 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 32.

481. How Solzhenitsyn hid The Gulag Archipelago in pieces across MoscowAleksandr Solzhenitsyn never kept his account of the Soviet labour camps in one place. Owning it could mean years in prison, so he scattered sections among friends and worked on o…
482. Margaret Atwood insisted almost nothing in The Handmaid's Tale was inventedMargaret Atwood carried newspaper clippings to interviews about The Handmaid's Tale to prove a point: nearly everything in her 1985 dystopia had already happened somewhere. Its Re…
483. The Canterbury school that claims fourteen centuries of unbroken lessonsThe King's School in Canterbury traces its teaching back to AD 597, when St Augustine arrived to bring Christianity back to Kent, making it arguably the oldest continuously runnin…
484. Laurence Sterne's comic novel whose narrator takes three volumes to be bornTristram Shandy sets out to tell his life story and doesn't manage to get himself born until volume three. Laurence Sterne's nine-volume comedy, issued between 1759 and 1767, turn…
485. Leslie Howard refused to make The Petrified Forest without Humphrey BogartWarner Bros. wanted Edward G. Robinson to play the gangster Duke Mantee in its 1936 film of The Petrified Forest. Leslie Howard, who held final say over the script, said he would …
486. How Anne Frank's diary became letters to an imaginary friend named KittyAnne Frank picked out a red checked autograph book the day before her 13th birthday in June 1942. Weeks later her family vanished into a hidden annex in Amsterdam. By the time she…
487. Britain's only republic lasted under six years and ended with Cromwell's sonFrom December 1653 to May 1659, England, Scotland and Ireland were a single republic ruled by a Lord Protector. Oliver Cromwell held the post for life, divided England among milit…
488. Ishiguro's perfect butler realises too late what his loyalty cost himIn 1956, Stevens, a butler of the old school, borrows his American employer's car and drives toward Cornwall to see a former housekeeper he hopes might return to work. Along the w…
489. Yeats wrote The Second Coming while his wife recovered from pandemic fluIn 1919, with Europe exhausted by war, Ireland entering its War of Independence and his pregnant wife Georgie barely surviving influenza, W. B. Yeats wrote a short poem about civi…
490. Turner added a storm to the Zong atrocity, which really happened in calm seasJ. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship shows a blood-red sunset, a typhoon rolling in and a vessel sailing away from people it has cast into the sea. It recalls the Zong case of 1781. T…
491. Atwood's sequel reveals the Handmaid's Tale villain Aunt Lydia as a secret moleThirty-four years after The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood returned to Gilead with The Testaments, set fifteen years later. Its most surprising voice belongs to Aunt Lydia, the …
492. An English immigrant taught Americans to see their wilderness as EdenThomas Cole grew up amid the smoky mill towns of industrial Lancashire, emigrated to the United States at seventeen, and taught himself to paint. His brooding views of the Catskil…
493. Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes, spent seven years as a womanIn Greek myth, Tiresias struck a pair of mating snakes on Mount Cyllene and was instantly turned into a woman. Seven years later a second encounter with snakes changed him back. T…
494. Tom Stoppard fled the Nazis as a toddler and became Britain's wittiest playwrightTomáš Sträussler left Czechoslovakia on the very day the Nazis invaded in 1939, spent his boyhood in Singapore and the Himalayas, and arrived in England at eight speaking only Eng…
495. The Pilgrim's Progress was begun in a Bedfordshire jail and never out of printJohn Bunyan, a nonconformist preacher, started his allegory behind bars for holding unlicensed religious services. Published in 1678, The Pilgrim's Progress has been translated in…
496. Camus built The Plague on an Algerian city's real brushes with epidemicAlbert Camus set his 1947 novel The Plague in Oran, a French Algerian port sealed off by quarantine as rats die in the streets. He drew on a cholera outbreak that killed a large s…
497. Edinburgh's anatomy school got bodies through a secret tunnel Burke and Hare usedVoltaire called Edinburgh a hotbed of genius, and its university was a hub of the Scottish Enlightenment. It also had darker corners: corpses for dissection arrived through a hidd…
498. The University of London began as an exam board, not a place to studyFor its first six decades the University of London taught nobody. It set exams and awarded degrees, eventually to anyone who passed, wherever they had studied. That odd start made…
499. When Notre Dame students blocked the Ku Klux Klan at a train stationIn May 1924 the Ku Klux Klan planned a week-long rally in South Bend, Indiana. Students from nearby Notre Dame met the Klansmen at the railway station, kept them from getting off …
500. The French president who invited Paris garbage collectors to breakfast at the ÉlyséeValéry Giscard d'Estaing entered the Élysée at 48 wanting to seem less like a monarch. He rode the Métro, dined monthly with ordinary families and hosted Paris refuse collectors f…
501. A student who never died helped topple Czechoslovakia's communist governmentAfter riot police beat students in Prague on 17 November 1989, word spread that one of them, Martin Šmíd, had been killed. No such death had happened. The rumour, begun by an inju…
502. Tony Benn fought for the right to stop being a viscountWhen his father died in 1960, Tony Benn inherited a peerage he did not want, and with it lost his seat in the Commons. He campaigned until Parliament passed the Peerage Act 1963 l…
503. The first Moomin was an ugly doodle mocking the philosopher KantAfter losing an argument about Immanuel Kant with her brother, the young Tove Jansson drew the ugliest creature she could imagine on the family outhouse wall and labelled it Kant.…
504. A Tufts professor wired up a working telephone before Bell's patentIn 1875 Tufts physicist Amos Dolbear strung a working telephone line from his campus lab to his house, two years before Alexander Graham Bell received his patent. The college also…
505. 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…
506. 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…
507. 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…
508. 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,…
509. 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…
510. 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…
511. 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 …
512. 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…
513. 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…
514. 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…
515. 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. …
516. 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…
517. 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…
518. 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…
519. 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…
520. 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…
521. 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…
522. 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 …
523. 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…
524. 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…
525. 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…
526. 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 …
527. 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 …
528. 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…
529. 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,…
530. 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…
531. 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…
532. 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…
533. 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…
534. 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…
535. 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…
536. 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…
537. 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…
538. 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…
539. 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…
540. 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…

Open the feed