A cabinet of lovable weirdos
Tiny true stories,
lovingly odd.
Weird science, forgotten history, and human quirks — each one true, each under a minute, each a little stranger than you’d expect.
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Grandma Moses
Ribbons for the Jam
At the Cambridge Country Fair, Anna Mary Robertson Moses entered her paintings alongside her preserves, and won ribbons for the jam.
At seventy-six, arthritis ended her embroidery, so she took up painting — house paint on Masonite, glitter for snow. She entered canvases beside her preserves at the county fair and won ribbons for the jam. Her name was Anna Mary Robertson Moses.
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The Clockmaker Who Retuned the Universe
What does an 82-year-old who just solved the longitude problem do for an encore?
The Queen's Poet
What do you do when a voice in your head orders you to write, the verse is catastrophic, and the Queen's polite rejection reads, to you, like a coronation?
The Almost-King of Albania
In 1920, an Albanian delegation walked into the League of Nations looking for a king and asked the nearest plausible Englishman.
The Empress and the File
What does a 19th-century empress do in a room called the Toilette- und Turnzimmer?
The Drum Generally Heals Up
What kind of man asks his colleagues to poke him awake if he stops breathing, and considers a perforated eardrum a social asset?
The Surgeon Who Wouldn't Give It Back
She was exchanged man-for-man for a Confederate major, and that wasn't even the strangest thing about her wedding.
The Off-Center Wheel
Why would the man who invented the bit build a unicycle that bobbed up and down on purpose?
The Last Flight of Roald Amundsen
Why did the most meticulous explorer who ever lived climb into a prototype flying boat to rescue a man he openly despised?
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.
Lights Off
She was being read by twelve million people a day and answered every fan letter by hand. So she dynamited a boulder on a treeless rock and built somewhere to hide.
Prizes Are For Boys
What does it take to invent modern estate planning, compose polytonal symphonies on weekends, and then leave a Pulitzer-winning piece in a drawer for thirty-six years?
The Boy in the Garden
A country doctor famous for birds made two small cuts in his gardener's eight-year-old son — and then did it again, and again, for years.