obsession
Couldn't stop, wouldn't stop, didn't see why anyone would ask.
The Man Who Found Troy
What does a man who made three fortunes — in indigo, saltpeter, and Sacramento gold dust — do for an encore at forty-eight?
The Man Who Drew the Curtains
He sailed to Tahiti, India, and Japan in 1920 and never left his cabin — so what exactly was he doing in there?
The Hatchery Sessions
What does a composer do when the bulldozers show up before the last take is finished?
The Weatherman Was Wrong Again
For ten years, a Chicago dishwasher kept a secret diary grading the local weatherman against reality.
Play a Strawberry
Who feeds a band one cup of soybeans a day for a month and calls it rehearsal?
The Rubber Man
The man who invented vulcanized rubber spent $30,000 he didn't have to build a palace of rubber furniture inside a building made of glass.
The Butterflies of the Soul
He won the 1906 Nobel Prize for proving the brain is built from separate cells. He found out by drawing them, on an ink-stained tablecloth, for fifty years.
The Milk Came Out the Neck
A Soviet surgeon coined the word transplantology, taught the man who did the first human heart transplant, and spent his afternoons sewing puppy heads onto German shepherds.
The Empress and the File
What does a 19th-century empress do in a room called the Toilette- und Turnzimmer?
The Off-Center Wheel
Why would the man who invented the bit build a unicycle that bobbed up and down on purpose?
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 Man Who Set Mathematics Back a Month
He owned two half-empty suitcases, had 511 collaborators, and once won a $500 bet he immediately regretted.