Sometimes, history is gross. Really gross. Especially where diseases are concerned. We’ve all heard of the nasty stuff the past could serve up for our ancestors. What we might not know is just how many famous historic figures got walloped with these awful diseases. From the utterly weird to the utterly terrifying to the simply…
Author: Morris M
The world is full of “what ifs?” What if JFK hadn’t decided to go cruising through Dallas in an open-top car? What if Gandhi had never got teed-off with the British Empire? What if we’d been wearing pants that time the cops pulled us over? That’s the nature of things: we can never truly know.…
We’ve all been there. It’s the last Thursday of the month, you’re slowly looking from your paycheck to the stack of bills beside the fridge, and feeling your soul curl up and weep at how financially screwed you are. Yup, it’s a common feeling for many of us, especially if our postal address happens to…
Hey, you. Yeah, you, the dude reading this. Think you know America? We’re sure you do. You look like the sort of intelligent, handsome, perceptive person who really grasps the ins and outs of their home country. But what about the rest of the world. Think ya know it? Think again. Polling shows 50% of…
Doesn’t being in a crowd just suck? Catching the subway, getting in line at the airport, unexpectedly finding yourself in the mosh pit at a heavy metal gig… hey, we’ve all been there. But while those moments were likely among the least-pleasant of our lives, at least we had somewhere you could escape to after.…
New York. London. Paris. Munich. Nope, we’re not talkin’ about pop music. We’re discussing something much more intriguing. What is the most-important city in the world? Ever since Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, we’ve understood that sovereign states are where it’s at, both economically and politically. Or have we? The 21st Century has seen…
Travel is a wonderful thing. It broadens your mind, it allows you to explore new horizons, and it can totally end up with you getting super-killed in the nastiest way possible. Yep, despite all you might hear about the awesome benefits you’ll get from going off the tourist track, the truth is that the tourist…
Whenever something incredibly ancient and incredibly cool turns up, there’s always someone on hand to shout that it’s evidence of aliens. Awesome as it would be to know ET was hanging out here in 10,000 B.C. (or whenever), the truth is both much simpler and much more interesting. See, you don’t need aliens to explain…
We’ve got some awesome news for you. Right now, you are standing on the edge of history. Yeah, you. Sometime soon, something’s gonna happen that will send you tumbling over into a whole new era of human evolution. We’re gonna colonize Mars. You read that right. That big, cold, lonely lump of rock spinning through…
The Red Scare of the 1950s. The Japanese invasion panic of WWII. Fears of ISIS troops running amuck in our major cities… the US has long been a country worried that someone’s gonna invade it. Aliens, Commies, North Korea, you name it. Someone, somewhere, has fantasized about America being dominated by it. The most ironic…
If we humans were to have a collective hobby, it’d probably be ‘polluting the heck outta stuff’. As a species we chuck so much stuff into the atmosphere that there are arguably no pollution-free places left on Earth. Every year car exhausts, coal plants, forest fires and cow farts (seriously) wind up choking our atmosphere…
These days, it’s easy to feel like the world is a depressing place where nothing good ever happens. Bombs explode, wars trundle on, politics gets more polarized, and the future looks as black as can be. No wonder we wake up each morning reaching for the Xanax. But not everything has to be a non-stop…
How many countries are there in the world? It seems like a simple question, but the answer is far more complicated than you might think. The UN, for example, lists 193 member states, but this completely excludes not only Taiwan and Kosovo, but also Vatican City. Other means of measurement are just as difficult. Were…
Wars in the Middle East and eastern Europe. Terror on the streets of North America. Riots, violence, spiraling murder rates… sometimes, it can feel like the planet is going crazy. Confronted with all this mayhem, many of us want nothing more than to run and hide our families away somewhere where they can be safe.…
Over the last century or so, our world has become a pretty darn big place. Between 1980 and 2014, the World Health Organization estimates global obesity doubled. In the US alone, more than two thirds of all adults are considered overweight, with one third considered obese (33%). That’s gotta be a world leader, right? Well,…
We’ve all been there. Sat at work on a spectacularly boring day, gazing out the window and dreaming about moving somewhere less resolutely meh. But it’s one thing dreaming about moving to London, or Paris, or Tokyo, and quite another turning up there, looking at the square feet of space your meager savings will buy…
America. It’s one of the biggest countries on Earth, both in terms of population and sheer size. It’s the planet dominating superpower; the heaviest hitter where culture is concerned; a place known by nearly every single human on the planet… and, to all but the 4-5% of humanity who live there, it makes absolutely no…
Are you sitting comfortably? We don’t wanna shock you, but we’re here to talk about the F-word. No, not that one. We’re gonna talk about feminism. That shocked gasp at the back there pretty much sums up how people are feeling right now. Feminism today is a lot of things, many of them controversial. It’s…
According to the Department for Housing and Urban Development (HUD) there are over half a million homeless living in the US. Visit a country like, say, India, and that number rises comfortably into the millions. Even Japan, which has one of the lowest homeless rates on Earth, has over 20,000 citizens sleeping rough. We’re not…
Mexico’s international reputation isn’t exactly the greatest. Plagued by drug violence, hampered by poverty, and constantly getting bashed by US politicians, it can seem like a scary, far-away place where bad things happen. Even in the carefree days before the drug war, lots of Americans just saw it as the land of tequila, siestas and…
China is crazy-big. How crazy-big? Let’s just say if they were having a contest for ‘biggest, craziest nation on planet Earth’, the Middle Kingdom would not only win hands down, it would leave all the other countries scratching their heads and saying “whoa, get a load of that guy.” There are 1.357 billion people living…
No country on Earth is as powerful as the United States. The nation dominates the globe militarily, culturally, and politically. It stops other nations building nukes (or, in the case of North Korea, attempts to), it dictates entertainment choices for billions, and it has more money than any other nation by a country mile. China…
At some point, slightly over a millennia ago, the entire civilized world decided to collectively go nuts. European armies rampaged through the Middle East, Islamic armies rampaged through the Balkans, and a whole lotta people died in a crazy religious war. Known as the Crusades, this state of affairs lasted the best part of 200…
Our planet’s population is exploding. By 2050, it’s estimated that there will be 9 billion of us humans living on Earth. That’s 9 billion mouths to feed from our finite resources, and 9 billion who will expect jobs, opportunities, and medicine. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this could blow up in…