Franklin Kills a Man Who Isn’t Dead On October 17, 1733, Benjamin Franklin predicted that his rival, almanac publisher Titan Leeds, would die that day. Franklin had launched Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1732 and needed an edge over competitors like Leeds. The date passed. Leeds was alive, furious, and said so in print. Franklin doubled … Read more
This Fish Doesn’t Swim. It Walks. The footage is brief: a cone of torchlight off the coast of Bali, Indonesia, catching a fish that isn’t swimming, gliding, or flopping. It’s planting itself down and shoving forward, one awkward motion at a time, as if it’s feeling its way across the sand. The diver, Emeric Benhalassa, … Read more
Half Horse, Half Hero, All Nonsense (In the Best Way) Picture a lawman patrolling the frontier of outer space who is also, somehow, part horse. He spots trouble a ridge away with a hawk’s eyes, hears a getaway ship warming up with a wolf’s ears, overpowers an outlaw with a bear’s strength, and outruns a … Read more
One Photo, Zero Clues On June 5, 2008, Neatorama ran the 65th installment of its collaboration with the blog “What Is It?”, a weekly feature with a simple dare: here’s a photo of an object, now tell us what it is. No caption, no category, no hint about whether it belonged in a kitchen, a … Read more
A Crowd Picks Its Nightmare On September 28, 2007, a Neatorama writer named Alex wrote up a ranking making the rounds online: the fifty greatest dystopian movies ever made, compiled by a blog called Snarkerati. The method was simple: take a film’s Rotten Tomatoes score and its IMDB rating, and average the two into a … Read more
A Pizza Box Nobody Touched On the night of June 15, 2015, a pizza sat on a porch on Valley View Road in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and nobody came out to get it. Inside the box: two 20-inch Uncle Chrises, the restaurant’s version of a Hawaiian pizza, plus two 2-liter sodas, an order worth about … Read more
The Sign That Broke Physics Somewhere in the parking garage at Loyola University Chicago hangs a sign: “USE BOTH EXITS WHEN LEAVING THE PARKING STRUCTURE.” It’s ordinary signage meant to keep cars from bottlenecking at one lane on the way out. One physicist read it differently. In the Annals of Improbable Research‘s November 2001 issue, … Read more
A Swelling Near His Left Eye A 16-year-old boy in India noticed a small, painless lump near his left eye. For about a month it didn’t grow or change, so he left it alone. Then two hard, whitish points pushed through the skin, far more solid than any pimple or cyst would produce. His family … Read more
Thirteen Miles, on Purpose A small group sets out walking through Edinburgh on a route that loops for about 13 miles (21 km), roughly half a marathon. They aren’t lost, training, or protesting. Their own records describe the outing as “verifying a species.” That species is a cow, outlined by the city’s own streets. The … Read more
A Woman, Facing Away The video opens with her back to the camera. She rocks at a steady pace, humming under her breath. Her fingers glide along a keyboard without pressing a single key. She twists a drawer knob back and forth, again and again. At one point she slaps a sheet of paper against … Read more