tragedy
Stories that end the way you hoped they wouldn't.
The Bear Went First
Sam Patch's final act opened with him shoving a bear cub off a hundred-foot waterfall in front of eight thousand people.
The Man With an Instinct for the Regrettable
What are the odds that the same man invented leaded gasoline and the chemical that punched a hole in the ozone layer?
The Rational Heat Motor
Why would a millionaire inventor lay out his nightshirt, mark a small cross on his diary, and fold his overcoat beneath the railing?
The Woman Who Drowned in the Desert
How does a woman who spent her whole life trying to vanish into the Sahara end up killed by it in the one way no one saw coming?
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?
I Have Not The Time
In prison, drunk for the first time, he told his cellmates he would die in a duel over a woman. Nine months later, a woman wrote him a letter.
The Man Who Was Grimaldi
What does it cost a man to teach the world how to fall down for a living?
The Necessary Jew
A terrified little man taught crafts to bored teenagers in Drohobycz and wrote two of the strangest books of the twentieth century, until the SS officer next door decided he wanted a Jew of his own.
The Empress and the File
What does a 19th-century empress do in a room called the Toilette- und Turnzimmer?
The Bucket List
A college dropout found him in four days with a bucket list.
The General Who Conquered an Empire and Then Had to Give It Back
He took the fortress that defeated Napoleon, routed the Ottoman army, and marched to within a hundred miles of Constantinople — and then his father told him to wait.