World’s Strangest

I’m a little late in posting this, but it’s too awesome to pass: Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note has a copy of a 1905 letter sent by Mark Twain to a patent medicine salesman who tried to sell bogus medicine. Twain was furious to have received the pitch as he was recently widowed after his [...]

Pope Benedict XV died on January 22, 1922, which isn’t all that notable by itself – after all, he was 67 and had been suffering from a pretty bad case of pneumonia all month. What is notable is that he had been declared dead several days before he actually died thanks to a foible by [...]

For more than a century, a war has been waged against adverbs by advocates of good writing, by the likes of such literary luminaries as Mark Twain, who said — I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me … There are subtleties which I cannot master at all — they confuse me, they mean [...]

Yesterday, you were shocked to learn how many amazing writers once called Brooklyn ‘home.’ (You were shocked, weren’t you?) Today, we’ll take a closer look at some of those writers and learn some odd facts about them. For instance, most people say Truman Capote formally established the non-fiction novel in 1965 with In Cold Blood. Cold [...]

Every Friday, I post a series of unrelated questions meant to spark conversation in the comments. Answer one, answer all, respond to someone else’s reply, whatever you want. Very casual. On to this week’s topics of discussion… 1. Let’s pretend you were granted the power to go back and alter your childhood in one important respect—the [...]