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1,109 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 7 of 19.

  1. A famine is officially declared only when three measurable thresholds are crossedUnder the international classification used today, an area counts as being in famine only when a fifth of households face extreme shortages, acute malnutrition in children tops 30…
  2. Ancient Rome's first fire brigade haggled with owners while their houses burnedMarcus Licinius Crassus assembled 500 men who raced to burning buildings in Rome and then did nothing. Crassus would offer the frantic owner a pitiful price for the property. If t…
  3. Seventeenth-century London gangs wore coloured ribbons to tell rival factions apartLong before modern street crews adopted colours, London in the 1600s was plagued by organised gangs with names like the Mims, Hectors, Bugles and Dead Boys. They clashed with one …
  4. A celibate American sect practised sex equality in its leadership for two centuriesIn 1788 Joseph Meacham, head of the Shakers' central ministry, became convinced by a revelation that men and women stood on equal footing. He brought Lucy Wright in as his counter…
  5. The British Library adds about three million items to its shelves every yearPhysical books were long humanity's main way of storing knowledge, and the British Library alone holds more than 170 million items, growing by some three million a year. Publishin…
  6. Thomas Edison secretly bankrolled the journal Science and got friendly coverageWhen the journalist John Michels launched Science in 1880, Thomas Edison helped fund it. In return the inventor, then under fire for delays on his light bulb, received favourable …
  7. Scientific American once reported on a boat-lifting invention by Abraham LincolnAmerica's oldest continuously published magazine began in 1845 as a four-page weekly obsessed with the Patent Office. Its early pages covered perpetual motion schemes, the univers…
  8. America's largest television network is not ABC, CBS or NBC but PBSThe commercial giants dominate talk of American television, but the largest network is the non-profit Public Broadcasting Service. Unlike its rivals, PBS has no single central sch…
  9. The Hitchhiker's Guide began as a radio pitch about destroying Earth six timesDouglas Adams first proposed a radio series called The Ends of the Earth, six episodes each finishing with the planet wiped out in a new way. While drafting the first, he needed a…
  10. The word multimedia was coined to advertise a 1966 Long Island disco showLong before CD-ROMs and streaming, multimedia described a nightclub act. The singer and artist Bob Goldstein used it in July 1966 to promote Lightworks at L'Oursin in Southampton,…
  11. National Geographic began as a dry journal for just 165 membersThe first issue, in September 1888, went to 165 charter members and contained no photographs to speak of. Then, in January 1905, the editors ran several full-page pictures of Tibe…
  12. Nature turns away more than nine in ten papers submitted to itGetting published in Nature can make a scientific career: fewer than 8 percent of submissions are accepted. Yet the journal began in 1869 not as an elite gatekeeper but as a publi…
  13. NBC's peacock logo was invented to sell colour televisionIn 1956 NBC unveiled a stylised peacock to show off its pioneering colour broadcasts, and the Peacock Network nickname stuck. The company was already three decades old by then, fo…
  14. Why is man bites dog news, while dog bites man is not?News prizes the unusual. An ordinary event rarely qualifies, but a reversal of the expected does, which is the point of the old newsroom saying about men biting dogs. Across cultu…
  15. America's first newspaper was shut down immediately after its first issueIn 1690 Richard Pierce and Benjamin Harris printed a newspaper in Boston without government permission, and the authorities promptly suppressed it. It took a libel trial in 1735 a…
  16. Newspapers were not killed simply by the internet beating printThe obvious story says digital news defeated paper. The fuller picture is messier: most papers now publish online anyway, and anyone can subscribe digitally. What really drained t…
  17. The first news photograph ever printed had to be copied as an engravingOn 25 June 1848 someone photographed barricades in Paris during the June Days uprising. Presses could not yet reproduce photographs, so L'Illustration published it in July as an e…
  18. Playboy was almost called Stag Party, and its first issue carried no dateHugh Hefner planned a magazine named Stag Party until an unrelated title called Stag threatened to sue. His friend Eldon Sellers suggested Playboy instead. Hefner assembled the fi…
  19. One of the founders of public relations could not explain what he didIvy Lee rebuilt the battered Rockefeller reputation and, with Edward Bernays, drafted an early definition of public relations. Yet asked at a hearing to describe his job, Lee admi…
  20. Common law got its name from being common to the English king's courtsAfter 1066, Norman kings built courts whose rulings applied across all of England, slowly pushing aside local folk and manor courts. That shared, judge-made law spread through the…
  21. The average written constitution lasts about 19 years, close to Jefferson's guessThomas Jefferson thought a constitution should expire after roughly 20 years, since the earth belongs to the living. Modern studies find that newly written national constitutions …
  22. Justinian's law code banned lawyers from citing the very sources it was built fromBetween 529 and 534, Emperor Justinian's editors boiled centuries of Roman law down to a few books and gave every page, even a student textbook, the force of law. Consulting the o…
  23. Facebook started with two students each putting in 1,000 dollarsIn January 2004 a Harvard sophomore coded a site he called TheFacebook, and he and classmate Eduardo Saverin agreed to invest 1,000 dollars apiece. It went live on 4 February. By …
  24. The word meme was invented by an evolutionary biologist in 1976Richard Dawkins coined meme in The Selfish Gene as a cultural counterpart to the gene: a unit of culture that copies itself from mind to mind. Seventeen years later Mike Godwin ap…
  25. In America, a blogger reviewing a free gadget must legally say soThe US Federal Trade Commission requires bloggers who write about products they were given for free to disclose the gift. The rule exists because in the United States almost anyon…
  26. Le Monde was launched on de Gaulle's wish, then spent decades defying himIn late 1944 Charles de Gaulle wanted France to have a prestigious paper speaking to the world, almost an unofficial voice of the Republic. The man chosen to run it, Hubert Beuve-…
  27. Magazines share their name with gunpowder stores and Russian shopsMagazine comes from the Arabic makhazin, storehouses, reaching English through French and Italian. It first meant a military depot. In 1731 an English editor borrowed the word for…
  28. The first printed mass medium was probably not books but cheap European printsChina printed the Diamond Sutra in 868 and invented clay movable type in 1041. Yet limited literacy and costly paper held back a mass market there. The earliest true mass medium w…
  29. English courts no longer call it alternative dispute resolution, because it is normal nowFor years, a party in England who refused mediation could not be forced into it. A 2023 Court of Appeal ruling, Churchill v Merthyr, overturned that rule. Judges can now order lit…
  30. England only gave criminals a general right to appeal in 1907Babylon had appeal judges under Hammurabi, and Rome recognised a right of appeal from 509 BC. Yet English common law resisted the idea for centuries. It took at least 28 parliamen…
  31. The word assassin may owe nothing to the drug it seems named afterAssassin comes, via Italian and French, from hashshashin, a label pinned on a medieval Ismaili order and linked to hashish. The popular story says its killers were drugged. Many E…
  32. In law, you can commit assault without ever touching anyoneTraditional common law draws a sharp line: battery is the unwanted contact, while assault is the credible threat or attempt that makes someone fear it. A raised fist can be enough…
  33. In English law even the lightest touch can be a crime of batteryEnglish law treats battery as an offence against personal autonomy, so no injury is needed. The slightest unwanted application of force can qualify. Only an assumed consent to the…
  34. Civil rights began as the privileges of a Roman citizenThe phrase civil rights translates the Latin for the rights of the citizen. In Rome even enslaved citizens had some legal standing. Two thousand years later, the same idea travell…
  35. About 150 countries run on legal codes descended from ancient RomeThe world's most widespread legal system does not rely on judges building law case by case. Instead, roughly 150 countries follow compact written codes whose ancestry runs back to…
  36. Simón Bolívar dreamed of a union of American republics in 1826At the Congress of Panama in 1826, Bolívar proposed a league of newly free American republics with a shared army and a supranational parliament. Only Gran Colombia ratified the tr…
  37. Scouting began as a week-long experiment with 21 boys on an English islandIn August 1907 a retired general took 21 boys of mixed social backgrounds to Brownsea Island in Dorset to test some ideas. Within two years 11,000 uniformed Scouts packed a rally …
  38. The Commonwealth's head is Charles III, yet the job is not hereditaryFifty-six countries, most of them former British territories, belong to a club that imposes no legal duties on its members at all. They swap high commissioners instead of ambassad…
  39. Europe's blue flag with gold stars was designed for a different organisationThe circle of gold stars that flies over Brussels was created in 1955 for the Council of Europe, a separate body based in Strasbourg. The European Union later borrowed both the fl…
  40. The G20 was born from a string of financial panics in the late 1990sA Mexican peso crash, the Asian financial crisis, Russia's 1998 meltdown and the collapse of a giant American hedge fund convinced two finance ministers that the rich-country G7 c…
  41. The World Court's rulings are final and binding, but it cannot enforce themFifteen judges in The Hague decide disputes between nations, and their judgments cannot be appealed. Yet the International Court of Justice has no police, no bailiffs and no army.…
  42. Interpol arrests nobody, and its name began as a telegraph addressFilms show Interpol agents kicking down doors, but the organisation is not a police force at all. It is a clearing house linking police in 196 countries through databases and comm…
  43. Woodrow Wilson won a Nobel for the League his own country refused to joinThe American president was hailed as the chief architect of the League of Nations and received the 1919 Peace Prize for it. Yet the United States never became a member. That absen…
  44. The premature obituary that supposedly created the Nobel Prizes may be a mythThe legend says Alfred Nobel read his own obituary in 1888, headlined The Merchant of Death Is Dead, after a French paper confused him with his brother Ludvig, and rewrote his wil…
  45. OPEC members broke 96 percent of their production promises, one study foundOPEC is the textbook cartel: agree to pump less, and everyone earns more. The catch is that each member profits most by quietly pumping extra. A political scientist who tracked co…
  46. A Cold War talking shop in Helsinki became Europe's election watchdogMoscow wanted the talks to lock in its grip on Eastern Europe. Finland wanted to show off its neutrality. The West hoped for calmer relations and better lives behind the Iron Curt…
  47. The African Union governs a bloc bigger than any nation on EarthFifty-five member states, more than 1.5 billion people and about 30 million square kilometres, from the Sahara to the Nile. The African Union, launched in Durban in 2002, replaced…
  48. Was the Arab League built to fail on purpose?Two political scientists looked at the Arab League's record and concluded its weakness was a feature, not a bug. Leaders praised Arab unity to shore up their legitimacy at home, t…
  49. Three leaders in a Belarusian forest signed the Soviet Union out of existenceOn 8 December 1991 the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met in a nature reserve near Brest and declared that the USSR had effectively ceased to be. In its place they proclaime…
  50. Scientific journals began as a Paris review of books and court rulingsBefore journals, scientists shared ideas by private letter. In 1664 Denis de Sallo, writing under a pseudonym, and printer Jean Cusson won a royal privilege from Louis XIV to publ…
  51. The word cartoon started as heavy paper for frescoes, then became a jokeFor centuries a cartoon was a full-size design drawn on sturdy pasteboard, used to guide painters of frescoes and weavers of tapestries. The funny meaning arrived in 1843, when Pu…
  52. The school edition of Fahrenheit 451 was itself quietly edited about 75 timesRay Bradbury's novel about a society that burns books became a classroom staple, yet the Ballantine paperback most schools used contained roughly 75 edits, omissions and changes f…
  53. A single broken window can help a hurricane tear the roof off a houseWhen one window or door shatters in a severe storm, wind rushes inside and pressurises the house from within, making it far likelier that the roof lifts away. Closing interior doo…
  54. Countries rarely count who leaves, but some have built walls to stop themMost nations keep careful track of arrivals yet record little about departures, so emigration figures often have to be reconstructed from other countries' immigration files. Some …
  55. London banned smoky sea-coal in 1272, centuries before the green movementIn 1272 Edward I proclaimed a ban on burning and selling sea-coal in London after its smoke became a citywide nuisance. The fuel took its name from lumps found washed up on beache…
  56. Philosophers have spent decades trying to pin down exactly what euthanasia meansThe Greek roots simply mean good death, and the Roman historian Suetonius used the word for Augustus dying swiftly and peacefully in his wife Livia's arms. Turning that phrase int…
  57. Propaganda began as the name of a Vatican missionary office in 1622In 1622, as part of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church set up the Congregation for Propagating the Faith to spread Catholicism in non-Catholic lands, known informally as…
  58. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was designed like a Greek templeRené Cassin, the French jurist who shaped its final structure, pictured the 1948 declaration as the portico of a Greek temple. Its preamble forms the steps, the opening articles o…
  59. Why English law says will and testament when either word would doPeople often assume a will once covered land and a testament covered belongings, hence the double name. Records show the two words were used interchangeably. The pairing comes fro…
  60. One eyewitness quadrupled guilty verdicts in a mock trial, despite unreliable memoryIn a 1988 experiment by Elizabeth Loftus, mock jurors heard the same criminal case in two versions. With only circumstantial material, 18% voted to convict. When a shop clerk clai…

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