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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Santorio Santorio
The Chair That Would Not Let Him Eat
What does a Renaissance physician discover when he rigs his dining chair to yank the table away the moment he has eaten his ration?
He weighed his food, his sleep, his feces, and, by his own accounting, his sex life. For thirty years he sat in a chair that took his dinner away. Santorio Santorio, founder of quantitative physiology, discovered that we are all quietly evaporating.
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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.
