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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Monsieur Le Blanc
What do you do when you're convinced Napoleon's army is about to kill your pen pal mid-proof?
The Cure He Boiled Away
In 1747 he proved two oranges and a lemon cured scurvy. Then he spent forty years boiling the cure into a syrup that didn't work.
The Carpetbag Method
She told her relatives she was going on a pilgrimage, packed one carpetbag, and did not come back for sixteen years.
The Bait Camp Visionary
How does a shrimp seller who couldn't swim, living alone on a sandspit reachable only by boat, end up on Betty Parsons's walls beside Pollock and Rothko?
The Dancer Who Toppled a King
What does a woman do after horsewhipping a Prussian gendarme, a Ballarat editor, and assembling a private army of law students?
The Beast of Netherwood
What does the wickedest man in the world order for breakfast when he's a sixty-nine-year-old pensioner in a Hastings boarding house?
The Woman Behind the Lattice
A Greek priest's daughter, taken by raiders at fourteen, spent the next forty-six years running the Ottoman Empire from behind a latticed screen above the Imperial Council.
The Bandit Queen's Funeral
Her husband, her son, and the neighbor all had reasons — and the mourners brought cornbread to the grave.
The Only Englishman to Win the Iron Cross
What does a Soho safecracker have to do to get personally decorated by the Nazis?
The Reluctant Emperor
What kind of emperor reads fourteen languages, pays his own train fares, and orders a hundred telephones on the spot?
The Verdict She Kept
A woman in a Manhattan parlor convinced the nineteenth century that Tibetan Masters were mailing her letters through the ceiling, and somehow we are all still speaking her language.
The Philosopher Who Took His Own Medicine
What happens when a philosopher who hated water contracts a disease made of it?