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+7 +3
Why Can't America Love a Ukrainian Heavyweight Boxing Champ?
American fans' interest in heavyweight boxing may have disappeared along with American boxers' dominance of it—and that's a shame for spectacular talents from other countries.
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+19 +4
Violent Kellogg's cereal ad from 1908
Wow talk about eye catching.
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+8 +2
Watch Felix Baumgartner's POV as he jumps from the stratosphere
The whole breathtaking feat, which took place in October last year, was sponsored by Red Bull and required months of training, several practice jumps, and lots of rescheduling due to gusty wind. Intermittent footage of the scary nine-minute jump had been released online previously, but now Red Bull has published the entirety of the helmet cam footage, along with the 44-year-old Austrian's steely biometrics.
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+18 +4
Death Avenue, New York, 1910
It was named for the many pedestrians killed along the New York Central's freight line there.
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+9 +3
The wreck of American Star (SS America)
SS America was an ocean liner built in 1940 for the United States Lines and designed by the noted naval architect William Francis Gibbs. She carried many names in the 54 years between her construction and her 1994 wrecking, as she served as the SS America (carrying this name three different times during her career), the USS West Point, the SS Australis, the SS Italis, the SS Noga, the SS Alferdoss, and the SS American Star.
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+12 +1
The scary new chapter of America’s 223-year love affair with debt
America might have too much debt for its system to cope with. No, not the financial system. Sure, at $16.7 trillion, the US government has a lot of debt. But despite what you might hear, America is not bankrupt, any more than a homeowner with a mortgage is bankrupt.
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+12 +3
A psychological history of the NSA
Before the NSA came to life on the eve of Dwight Eisenhower's election, its job was done by a loose group of three independent intelligence outfits in the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
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+15 +5
Why Abraham Lincoln Loved Infographics
Near the end of 1861, with the American Union crumbling, President Abraham Lincoln became obsessed with an unusual document. Nearly three feet in length, it appeared at first to be a map of the southern states. But it was covered with finely rendered shading, with the darkness of each county reflecting the number of slaves who lived there. South Carolina, the first to secede from the Union, featured a particularly dark coastline.
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+16 +6
Hitler's Female Henchmen
Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields returns the Holocaust to something of its original horror. It is a study of German and Austrian women on the eastern front, and the simple revelation behind their story is that women were no less capable of brutality than men.
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+12 +3
Did Al Gore Invent the Internet?
Anytime someone online writes about internet history, the comments inevitably fill up with jokes about Al Gore. There's a popular myth that Gore once claimed to have invented the internet, which means many people think that "Al Gore" works as both a set-up and a punchline. What these jokesters might be surprised to learn is that Gore actually deserves some credit.
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+10 +1
Why did men stop wearing high heels?
For generations they have signified femininity and glamour - but a pair of high heels was once an essential accessory for men. Beautiful, provocative, sexy - high heels may be all these things and more, but even their most ardent fans wouldn't claim they were practical.
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+15 +4
Jeff Bezos’s League of Shadows
Amazon can be a uniquely challenging place to work, with its question-mark emergencies and the occasionally volcanic outburst from the visionary chief executive. It’s a place where promotions are hard-fought and sometimes painfully public. But there is also a job at Amazon (AMZN) that is highly coveted throughout the company and that nearly anyone in business would kill for.
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+16 +5
The True Story of ’12 Years a Slave’
The moving —and utterly brutal—film 12 Years a Slave tells the real story of Soloman Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free African-American man living in Saratoga who is kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery. Director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley film were largely faithful Northup’s 1853 biography, Twelve Years a Slave. Here’s how the film and the biography match up
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+13 +3
Concorde and supersonic travel: The days when the sun rose in the west
It's been 10 years since Concorde's last passenger flight. There was nothing quite like flying supersonic, says Simon Calder, but it's an experience he's unlikely to be able to repeat soon
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+14 +3
'12 Years a Slave': A captivating story of survival, reviews say
Critical acclaim continues to mount for Steve McQueen's historical drama "12 Years a Slave," which has garnered near-universal praise since its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in late summer. Adapted from the 1853 autobiography of the same name by Solomon Northup.
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+15 +1
How Science Figured Out the Age of the Earth
For centuries scholars sought to determine the earth’s age, but the answer had to wait for careful geologic observation, isotopic analyses of the elements and an understanding of radioactive decay...
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+8 +2
9 Weird and Unreliable Ways to Avoid Burying Someone Alive
How can you be sure that someone is really, truly dead? Before the age of modern medicine, it was much more difficult for physicians to confirm that someone had died, and researchers developed all sorts of tests for telling living people apart from corpses. Many of these tests were pretty odd, and a good number simply didn't work.
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+11 +1
How Ripped Became an Ideal
A historic look at images of masculinity
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+15 +3
The Loch Ness monster's Hollywood origins
OF ALL THE "real" monsters that stir the Western imagination, there are few so romantic as the Loch Ness monster. I'm not even slightly immune to that romance. My love affair with Nessie blossomed early and strongly. What could be more wonderful than the idea that a living plesiosaur might slide undetected through the frigid waters of a Scottish lake?
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+20 +7
Living United States Presidents
Being president takes its toll: 8 out of 44 US presidents have died in office. There have never been more than 6 living presidents at any one time in US history. There are also a few periods where the only living president was the one currently in office, most recently in 1974 during Richard Nixon's administration. Currently there are five living presidents: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
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