madness
The line between genius and lunacy, and the people who lived on it.
The Composer Who Flooded His Neighbors
What was the greatest composer in Europe doing upstairs that kept soaking the ceiling below?
The Ping-Pong Ball
What are the odds the first autobiography in English survived because a colonel hunting a ping-pong ball was talked out of burning it?
Notre Grande Chasublerie
His ceilings were 1.65 metres high, which suited him perfectly. Every guest he ever received had to crouch.
The Diagnosis
What happens when a Soviet prison doctor has to diagnose the man who invented Russian absurdism?
The System of One
What happens when the man who proved no system is complete builds one with a single trusted element?
The Smell of Sin
What does it take for a 13th-century shepherdess to become the patron saint of psychiatrists eight hundred years later?
The Code That Wasn't
For decades scholars thought a Swiss novelist's tiny notebooks were a secret code written from inside an asylum.
The Accountant of Skt.-Adolf-Wald
Issued one pencil a week, he spent thirty-five years balancing the ledgers of a universe he'd crowned himself emperor of.
The Long Walk Home
In 1841 a celebrated English poet walked out of his asylum and covered eighty miles in four days, eating grass and his own pipe tobacco, to reach a childhood sweetheart he was certain was waiting for him.
The Prince Who Painted Hell
What kind of man commissions an altarpiece of himself praying, then hangs it in the room where he prays?
Hugo Ball and the Lobster Bishop
What happens when a man in a cardboard lobster suit accidentally starts chanting Catholic mass?
Peter the Hermit and the Donkey
What kind of person gets caught deserting during a famine, weeps, is pardoned, and then gets promoted to diplomat?