Category: Bazaar News

New Jersey is a state that distinguishes itself in so many ways. One example of New Jersey’s unique charm may come as a surprise to visiting motorists, however, when they discover that it’s illegal to pump their own gas in the Garden State.

Until quite recently, New Jersey wasn’t the only state that didn’t allow motorists to pump their own gas. For years, Oregon drivers had to sit in their cars as well, waiting for an attendant to fill ‘er up. However, effective January 1, 2016, Oregonians in rural counties are allowed to dispense their own gasoline at night. The measure was designed to keep motorists from getting stranded in remote areas after gas station staff had gone home for the night—a very real problem in the state’s sprawling terrain. (In March 2023, the Oregon House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that would let all Oregonians—not just those in rural areas—pump their own gas.)

But let’s get back to New Jersey, a state that has made it illegal for people to pump their own gas. Why is this the case?

Enacted in 1949, the Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act and Regulations banned drivers from pumping their own gas in New Jersey, and the rules are still in effect. Like so many laws, the statute claims the ban is for drivers’ own good. As it states:

“Because of the fire hazards directly associated with dispensing fuel, it is in the public interest that gasoline station operators have the control needed over that activity to ensure compliance with appropriate safety procedures, including turning off vehicle engines and refraining from smoking while fuel is dispensed.”

But the government version may not be the whole story. The passage of the act was motivated by something a little less pure than safety: money. In the 1940s, when self-service was unheard of in most of the country, a gas station owner named Irving Reingold offered lower prices to customers willing to pump their own gas. The gimmick was wildly popular and soon became a threat to competing gas stations. According to Bergen County’s The Record, “rival station owners reacted by persuading state lawmakers to outlaw self-serve,” and the state legislature made Reingold’s tactics illegal.

As more and more states around the country began to offer self-serve gas stations in the 1970s and ’80s, New Jersey stayed put. Nowadays, some politicians will even refer to the matter as a source of state identity and pride. In a 2011 radio interview, then-Governor Chris Christie said, “People in New Jersey love the idea that they’ve got somebody to pump their gas,” adding, “I don’t see that changing.”

In 2015, then-New Jersey General Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon introduced a bill that would lift the ban. “I am offended by people that argue that New Jerseyans are mentally incapable of pumping their own gas without setting themselves on fire,” O’Scanlon said in a press statement.

O’Scanlon made one semi-concession to the old law, recommending that stations hang signs on gas pumps reminding people to turn off their engines. The recommended text seemed to mirror the assemblyman’s exasperation: “Do not, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, set yourself on fire!!”

Despite this helpful suggestion, O’Scanlon’s bill was not to be, as then-State Senate President Stephen Sweeney blocked the vote. “I will oppose any attempt to rescind the law that has effectively served the best interests of the state’s motorists for decades,” Sweeney said in a press statement. “As long as I am Senate President, the ban on self-serve will stay in place.”

“We’ve been doing it the right way in New Jersey,” Sweeney concluded. “We should not change.”

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

A version of this story originally ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

Sword swallowing is not just an elaborate visual trick. Trained performers really do stick at least 16 inches of blade into their bodies. Just how do they manage that? It’s all in the esophagus.

To master the ancient art of sword swallowing, practitioners spend many years learning how to wield control over involuntary bodily reflexes, such as their gag reflex. As a 2006 study of sword swallowers describes, performers train by “repeatedly putting fingers down the throat, but other objects are used including spoons, paint brushes, knitting needles, and plastic tubes before the swallower commonly progresses to a bent wire coat hanger.” The study goes on to note, perhaps unsurprisingly, that “sore throats are common.”

The sword has to pass through the upper esophageal sphincter—the muscles at the top of the esophagus that you use when burping, eating, vomiting, etc. Then, the sword swallower has to bend their body so that the blade passes around their heart. Finally, the sword must move through the lower esophageal sphincter, which is the entrance to the stomach. These muscles move involuntarily—they’re what keep the contents of your stomach from creeping back up your throat—and when one weakens these, it can cause acid reflux.

Through intense training, sword swallowers learn to open this sphincter on command, which is what allows the sword to pass into the stomach. One practitioner told The Washington Post that she didn’t even know how she did it, using only intense concentration to relax the muscles. Eventually, a sword swallower can learn to hold multiple swords in their throat at once.

And yes, it’s dangerous. With one wrong move, sword swallowers can poke holes in their throats and otherwise damage their internal organs. But when done right, it’s an incredible feat of bodily control.

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

Australian English is more than just an accent, and the Aussie vernacular can easily leave both English speakers and foreigners perplexed. Australian English is similar to British English, but many common words differ from American English—and there are many unique Aussie words, slang terms, and expressions.

The term for Aussie slang and pronunciation is strine (which was coined by Charles Dickens’s great-granddaughter, Monica Dickens), and if you plan to visit the world’s smallest continent, this list of some of the most commonly used slang is for you.

Arvo is Australian slang for afternoon. According to Australian National University’s School of Literature, Language, and Linguistics, “Arvo is an example of a special feature of Australian English, the habit of adding -o to an abbreviated word. Other such words are bizzo ‘business’ and journo ‘journalist.’ First recorded in the 1920s and still going strong today.”

Barbeque. The phrase shrimp on the barbie comes from an Australian tourism ad starring Paul Hogan, the future Crocodile Dundee—and what he actually said was “I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for ya,” not “I’ll throw another shrimp on the barbie.”

An uncultured person. According to the Australian show Bogan Hunters, a real bogan sports a flanno (flannel shirt), a mullet, missing teeth, homemade tattoos (preferably of the Australian Flag or the Southern Cross), and has an excess of Australia paraphernalia.

Bonzer can be used as an adjective meaning “splendid, great”; as an adverb meaning “beautifully, splendidly”; or as a noun to refer to a person or thing “that excites admiration by being surpassingly good of its kind,” according to ANU. Its etymology is uncertain: One theory is that it might trace back to the obsolete Australian word bonster.

An Australian word for a friend.

Australians have a dizzying array of nicknames for places in the country. Sydney, for example, goes by Dubbo by the Sea as well as Emerald City, Steak and Kidney, and World’s Biggest Theme Park, among others.

A insulated cooler for food and drinks.

A slang term meaning “genuine.” According to Merriam-Webster, it’s “often used as a general expression of approval.”

Since the 1930s, full as a goog has meant “very drunk,” “crammed with food,” or “very full.” In Australia, goog is a word for egg.

This Australian term for mosquito has been used since the early 20th century. As a 1916 issue of Punch noted, “Here in Victoria we go right along, cursing, the ‘mossies,’ fighting them every night, losing good sleep through them, and yet never attempting to use the nets.”

A pash is a long, passionate kiss, and a pash rash is red irritated skin as the result of a heavy make-out session with someone with a beard.

A relative. As ANU’s School of Literature, Language, and Linguistics notes, this term “is a typical example of the way Australians abbreviate words and then add the-ie (or-y) suffix.”

A term meaning “really great.”

A kangaroo. A baby roo, still in the pouch, is known as a joey.

In Australia, root is a term for sex. This one can get really get foreigners in trouble. There are numerous stories about Americans coming to Australia telling people about which team they root for. If you come to Australia and want to talk about the sports teams you support, use the word barrack instead. Per ANU, barrack’s “origin is probably from Northern Irish barrack ‘to brag; to be boastful.’ By itself barrack meant ‘to jeer’ (and still does in British English), but the form barrack for transformed the jeering into cheering in Australian English.”

A servo is a gas or service station, which are also called “petrol stations.”

These two Australian phrases both mean “everything will be all right.”

The term sickie is what Australians use to refer to a sick day. If you take a day off work when you’re not actually sick, it’s called “chucking a sickie.”

A 24-pack of beer.

The word sook is used to refer to a crybaby. If someone calls you a sook, it’s because they think you’re whinging, a.k.a. whining.

A phrase meaning “to shake things up” that dates back to the 1880s. Don’t confuse Australian possums with American opossums; they’re different animals.

A koozie or cooler. A stubbie holder is a polystyrene insulated holder for a stubbie, which is a 375ml bottle of beer.

This phase means “sweet, awesome.” Aussies will often put as at the end of adjectives to give it emphasis. Other examples include lazy as, lovely as, fast as, and common as.

How Australians say “thank you.”

A tradesman. Most of the tradies have nicknames too, including brickie (bricklayer), truckie (truckdriver), sparky (electrician), garbo (garbage collector), and chippie (carpenter).

A utility vehicle or pickup truck.

If Australians want to say “get on with it,” they’ll use the phrase we’re not here to fuck spiders. You can watch Aussie Margot Robbie discuss the phrase on The Graham Norton Show above.

This term for whining or complaining is also used in the UK.

This Australian phrase for hard work dates back to the 1840s and came from the Yagara language of Indigenous Australians in the Brisbane region.

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2024.

Poignant, funny, sad, weird, or mean—last words can make quite the impact as we shuffle off the stage of life. Here are 65 notable examples.

Wright, a linguist, edited the English Dialect Dictionary. His last word? “Dictionary.”

Italian artist Raphael’s last word was simply “happy.”

Composer Gustav Mahler died in bed, conducting an imaginary orchestra. His last word was “Mozart!”

Blues singer Bessie Smith died saying, “I’m going, but I’m going in the name of the Lord.”

Composer Jean-Philippe Rameau objected to a song sung at his bedside. He said, “What the devil do you mean to sing to me, priest? You are out of tune.”

Ol’ Blue Eyes died after saying, “I’m losing.”

George Orwell’s last written words were, “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” The 1984 author—whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair—died at age 46.

William Henry Seward, U.S. secretary of state and architect of the Alaska Purchase, was asked if he had any final words. He replied, “Nothing, only ‘love one another.’”

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre turned to his partner Simone de Beauvoir and said, “I love you very much, my dear Beaver” (her nickname, which was based partly on her surname and partly on her busy work ethic).

Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger’s last words were, “A party! Let’s have a party.”

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The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, “I don’t want the doctor’s death. I want to have my own freedom.”

Nostradamus predicted, “Tomorrow, at sunrise, I shall no longer be here.” He was right.

Author Vladimir Nabokov was also an entomologist, particularly interested in butterflies. His last words: “A certain butterfly is already on the wing.”

Moby-Dick author Herman Melville died saying, “God bless Captain Vere!” referencing his then-unpublished novel Billy Budd, found in a breadbox after he died.

Marie Antoinette stepped on her executioner’s foot on her way to the guillotine. Her last words: “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.”

Richard B. Mellon, a multimillionaire, was the president of Alcoa. He and his brother Andrew had a little game of tag going for about seven decades. When Richard was on his deathbed, he called his brother over and whispered, “Last tag.” Andrew remained “it” for four years, until he died.

When Harriet Tubman was dying in 1913, she gathered her family around and they sang together; some have said her last words were “Swing low, sweet chariot.” But there was an exchange of words after the beautiful musical moment. Her actual last words were, “Give my love to the churches. Tell the women to stand firm. I go to prepare a place for you.”

When Sir Isaac Newton died, he was humble. He said, “I don’t know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Leonardo da Vinci was also overly modest, saying, “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.” The Mona Lisa isn’t good enough?

The Comtesse de Vercellis let one rip while she was dying. She said, “Good. A woman who can fart is not dead.”

Drummer Buddy Rich died after surgery in 1987. As he was being prepped for surgery, a nurse asked him, “Is there anything you can’t take?” Rich replied, “Yeah, country music.”

Johnny Ace, an R&B singer, died in 1954 while playing with a pistol during a break in his concert set. His last words were, “I’ll show you that it won’t shoot.”

The physicist, author, musician, professor, and traveler died in Los Angeles in 1988. His last words? “This dying is boring.”

As Benjamin Franklin lay dying at the age of 84, his daughter told him to change position in bed so he could breathe more easily. Franklin’s last words were, “A dying man can do nothing easy.”

Albert Abraham Michelson dedicated his life to measuring the speed of light and was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Even as he was dying at age 78, he was measuring light. He wrote in his log: “The following is a report on the measurement of the velocity of light made at the Irvine Ranch, near Santa Ana, California, during the period of September 1929 to—.”

Thomas B. Moran was a pickpocket, known by the nickname “Butterfingers.” He reportedly stole as many as 50,000 wallets in his career. He died in Miami in 1971, and his last words were, “I’ve never forgiven that smart-alecky reporter who named me Butterfingers. To me, it’s not funny.”

Murderer James W. Rodgers was put in front of a firing squad in Utah and asked if he had a last request. He replied, “Bring me a bullet-proof vest.”

Lucky Luciano was a mob leader who helped the U.S. work with the Sicilian Mafia during World War II in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. His last words were, “Tell Georgie I want to get in the movies one way or another.” And it worked: His life story is told in the movies Lucky Luciano, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, and many more.

John Arthur Spenkelink was executed in Florida in 1979. He spent his final days writing these last words on various pieces of mail: “Capital punishment means those without the capital get the punishment.”

Convicted murderer Thomas J. Grasso used his last words to complain about his last meal. He said, “I did not get my Spaghetti-O’s; I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, died at age 71 in his garden. He turned to his wife and said, “You are wonderful,” then clutched his chest and died.

Writer T.S. Eliot was only able to whisper one word as he died: “Valerie,” the name of his wife.

Actor and comedian W.C. Fields died in 1946. His last words: “God damn the whole friggin’ world and everyone in it but you, Carlotta.” He was speaking to Carlotta Monti, his longtime mistress.

Percy Grainger was an Australian composer who, with his dying words, told his wife Ella, “You’re the only one I like.”

Actor Michael Landon, best known for Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven, died of cancer in 1991. His family gathered around his bed, and his son said it was time to move on. Landon said, “You’re right. It’s time. I love you all.”

Football coach Vince Lombardi died of cancer in 1970. As he died, Lombardi turned to his wife Marie and said, “Happy anniversary. I love you.”

O.O. McIntyre was an American reporter. He died at age 53, and spoke his last words to his wife Maybelle: “Snooks, will you please turn this way. I like to look at your face.”

When he was 57, Edward R. Murrow died while patting his wife’s hand. He said, “Well, Jan, we were lucky at that.”

John Wayne died at age 72 in L.A. He turned to his wife and said, “Of course I know who you are. You’re my girl. I love you.”

Humphrey Bogart’s wife Lauren Bacall had to leave the house to pick up their kids. Bogart said, “Goodbye, kid. Hurry back.” Not quite, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” but close.

Before Ernest Hemingway died by suicide, he told his wife Mary, “Goodnight, my kitten.”

O’Connor was a singer, dancer, and actor known for his role in Singin’ in the Rain. He also hosted the Academy Awards in 1954. O’Connor died at age 78 with his family gathered around him. He joked, “I’d like to thank the Academy for my lifetime achievement award that I will eventually get.” He still hasn’t gotten one.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill was born in a room at the Broadway Hotel on what is now Times Square. He died at age 65 in a Boston hotel. His last words? “I knew it! I knew it! Born in a hotel room and, goddamn it, dying in a hotel room.”

Jack Soo was an actor on the TV series Barney Miller. On the show, there was a running gag about Soo’s character making crappy coffee in the office. Soo developed cancer of the esophagus, and when was being wheeled into an operating room, he joked to Barney Miller co-star Hal Linden, “It must have been the coffee.” In a tribute episode, cast members raised coffee cups in Soo’s memory.

Josephine Baker knew how to party. She sang, danced, and acted. She adopted a dozen kids and lived in Paris. On the last night of her life, she left a party being held in her honor, saying, “Oh, you young people act like old men. You are no fun.” Baker’s remains were entombed in Monaco after her 1975 death; in late 2021, she became the first Black woman to be inducted into the Panthéon. (According to The New York Times, “The coffin carried soil from the United States, France and Monaco—places that shaped Ms. Baker’s life. Her body, at the request of the family, will stay in Monaco.”)

Gussman was a writer and TV announcer who wrote the pilot episode of Days of Our Lives, among other shows. As he became ill, he said he wanted his last words to be memorable. When his daughter reminded him of this, he gently removed his oxygen mask and whispered: “And now for a final word from our sponsor—.”

When Groucho Marx was dying, he let out one last quip: “This is no way to live!”

Groucho’s brother Leonard, who was better known as Chico Marx, gave instructions to his wife as his last words: “Remember, Honey, don’t forget what I told you. Put in my coffin a deck of cards, a mashie niblick, and a pretty blonde.” A “mashie niblick” is a type of golf club.

Wilson Mizner was best known for his bon mots—including the line, “Be nice to people on the way up because you’ll meet the same people on the way down”—though he was a successful playwright, too. When Mizner was on his deathbed, a priest said, “I’m sure you want to talk to me.” Mizner told the priest, “Why should I talk to you? I’ve just been talking to your boss.”

As he was dying, Alfred Hitchcock said, “One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes.”

Basketball great “Pistol” Pete Maravich collapsed during a pickup game. His last words: “I feel great.”

Vladimir Ilych Lenin’s last words were, “Good dog.” (Technically, he said vot sobaka.) He said this to a dog that brought him a dead bird.

Blues guitarist Huddie William Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, said, “Doctor, if I put this here guitar down now, I ain’t never gonna wake up.” And he was right.

Thomas Fantet de Lagny was a mathematician. On his deathbed, he was asked, “What is the square of 12?” His last words: “One hundred and forty-four.”

Derek Jarman was an artist, writer, and filmmaker. His last words were “I want the world to be filled with white fluffy duckies.”

Sir Winston Churchill’s last words were, “I’m bored with it all.”

Actress Joan Crawford yelled at her housekeeper, who was praying as Crawford died. Crawford said, “Damn it! Don’t you dare ask God to help me!”

Bo Diddley died giving a thumbs-up as he listened to the song “Walk Around Heaven.” His last word was “Wow.”

Baseball player “Moe” Berg’s last words: “How did the Mets do today?” (For the record, they won.)

The poet’s last words were, “I must go in, for the fog is rising.” Nearly as poetic as “Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me – / The Carriage held but just Ourselves – / And Immortality.”

As Truman Capote—who was known to throw some pretty fierce insults—lay dying, he repeated, “Mama—Mama—Mama.”

The hardest-working man in show business said, “I’m going away tonight.”

Surgeon Joseph Henry Green was checking his own pulse as he lay dying. His last word: “Stopped.”

According to Steve Jobs’s sister Mona, the Apple founder’s last words were, “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

In her 2014 memoir, Ginger Alden revealed then-fiancé Elvis Presley’s final words before his death in 1977. During a night of sleeplessness, Presley told Alden, “I’m going to the bathroom to read.”

Source: Last Words of Notable People: Final Words of More than 3500 Noteworthy People Throughout History

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

A paradox is a statement or problem that either appears to produce two entirely contradictory (yet possible) outcomes, or provides proof for something that goes against what we intuitively expect. Paradoxes have been a central part of philosophical thinking for centuries, and are always ready to challenge our interpretation of otherwise simple situations, turning what we might think to be true on its head and presenting us with provably plausible situations that are in fact just as provably impossible. Confused? You should be.

The Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise is one of a number of theoretical discussions of movement put forward by the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea in the 5th century BCE. It begins with the great hero Achilles challenging a tortoise to a footrace. To keep things fair, he agrees to give the tortoise a head start of, say, 500 meters. When the race begins, Achilles unsurprisingly starts running at a speed much faster than the tortoise, so that by the time he has reached the 500-meter mark, the tortoise has only walked 50 meters further than him. But by the time Achilles has reached the 550-meter mark, the tortoise has walked another 5 meters. And by the time he has reached the 555-meter mark, the tortoise has walked another 0.5 meters, then 0.25 meters, then 0.125 meters, and so on. This process continues again and again over an infinite series of smaller and smaller distances, with the tortoise always moving forwards while Achilles always plays catch up.

Logically, this seems to prove that Achilles can never overtake the tortoise—whenever he reaches somewhere the tortoise has been, he will always have some distance still left to go no matter how small it might be. Except, of course, we know intuitively that he can overtake the tortoise. The trick here is not to think of Zeno’s Achilles Paradox in terms of distances and races, but rather as an example of how any finite value can always be divided an infinite number of times, no matter how small its divisions might become.

All of us know that if you ever travel back in time, you should definitely not kill your own grandfather, lest you create some kind of temporal paradox-slash-rift in the space-time continuum. This problem, known as the Grandfather Paradox, presents the main problem of time travel: If you go back and prevent yourself from being born, how would you ever have been able to go back in time in the first place?

The Bootstrap Paradox is another paradox of time travel that questions how something that is taken from the future and placed in the past could ever come into being in the first place. It’s a common trope used by science fiction writers and has inspired plotlines in everything from Doctor Who to the Bill and Ted movies, but one of the most memorable and straightforward examples—by Professor David Toomey of the University of Massachusetts and used in his book The New Time Travelers—involves an author and his manuscript.

Imagine that a time traveler buys a copy of Hamlet from a bookstore, travels back in time to Elizabethan London, and hands the book to Shakespeare, who then copies it out and claims it as his own work. Over the centuries that follow, Hamlet is reprinted and reproduced countless times until finally a copy of it ends up back in the same original bookstore, where the time traveler finds it, buys it, and takes it back to Shakespeare. Who, then, wrote Hamlet?

One of the more famous paradoxes, thanks in part to the Marvel show WandaVision, is the Ship of Theseus Paradox. Here’s a brief summary.

Theseus was a mythical king and the hero of Athens. (He was the guy who slayed the Minotaur, amongst other feats.) He did a lot of sailing, and his famed ship was eventually kept in an Athenian harbor as a sort of memorial/museum piece. As time went on, the ship’s wood began to rot in various places. Those wooden pieces were replaced, one by one. As time went on, more pieces needed replacing. The process of replacing rotten planks with new ones continued, at least in modern versions of the paradox, until the entire ship was made up of new pieces of wood. This thought experiment asks the question: Is this completely refurbished vessel still the ship of Theseus?

Let’s take it a step further: What if someone else took all of the discarded, original pieces of wood and reassembled them into a ship. Would this object be Theseus’s ship? And if so, what do we make of the restored ship sitting in the harbor? Which is the original ship?

This paradox is all about the nature of identity over time, and has been the subject of philosophical discussions for thousands of years. It appears in other forms, such as the Question of the Grandfather’s Axe and Trigger’s Broom, both of which ask whether an object remains the same after all the aggregate parts have been replaced. 

The idea even expands to questions of personal identity. If a person changes drastically over time, so much so that who they are no longer matches any part of who they once were, are they still the same person?

Another paradox about the vague nature of identity is the Sorites Paradox. The premise is fairly simple. It generally involves a heap of sand. If you take away a single grain of sand from the heap, it’s still, almost certainly, a heap of sand. Now take away another grain. Still a heap. If we continue this enough times, eventually it will be down to one grain of sand, which is, almost certainly, not a heap anymore. When did the sand cease being a heap and start being something else? 

The Sorites Paradox is all about the vagueness of language. Because the word heap doesn’t have a specific quantity assigned to it, the nature of a heap is subjective. It also leads to false premises. For example, if you try the paradox in reverse, you start with a single grain of sand, which is not a heap. Then, one could argue that one grain of sand plus another grain of sand is also not a heap. Then, two grains of sand plus another grain of sand is also not a heap. This continues until even the statement “a million grains of sand is not a heap” which, as we know, does not make sense. 

The name of the paradox, Sorites, comes from the Greek word soros, which means “heap” or “pile.” It’s often attributed to Eubulides of Miletus, a logician from the 4th century BCE who was basically a paradox machine. Most of his paradoxes deal with semantic fallacies, like the Horn Paradox. If we accept the idea that “What you have not lost, you have,” then consider the fact that you have not lost your horns. Therefore, you must have horns. And yes, most of his paradoxes are just as infuriating.

One of Eubulides of Miletus’s more famous paradoxes, the Liar Paradox, is still discussed today. It has a very simple premise but a very mind-boggling result. Here it is: This sentence is false.

Think about it for a moment. If the statement is true, then that means that the sentence is in fact false, as it claims. But that would then mean that the sentence is false. And if the sentence “this sentence is false” is false, then that means it’s true. But, if it’s true that it’s false, then—you get the picture. It goes on and on, forever. 

The Liar’s Paradox has been discussed and adapted many times, eventually leading to the Pinocchio Paradox. It follows the same general structure, but with an added visual component. Imagine Pinocchio uttering the statement “My nose grows longer now.” If he’s telling the truth, then his nose should grow longer, like he said. But as we know, Pinocchio’s nose only grows if he’s telling a lie. Which means that if his nose did grow longer, then the statement would have been false. But if “my nose grows longer now” is false, then it should not have grown in the first place … Has your brain exploded yet?

This version of the paradox was created in 2001 by philosopher Peter Eldridge-Smith’s 11-year-old daughter. He summarized it neatly like this: “Pinocchio’s nose will grow if and only if it does not.”

Imagine you’re holding a postcard in your hand, on one side of which is written, “The statement on the other side of this card is true.” We’ll call that Statement A. Turn the card over, and the opposite side reads, “The statement on the other side of this card is false” (Statement B). Trying to assign any truth to either Statement A or B, however, leads to a paradox: If A is true then B must be as well, but for B to be true, A has to be false. Oppositely, if A is false then B must be false too, which must ultimately make A true. The Card Paradox is a simple variation on the Liar Paradox that was invented by the British logician Philip Jourdain in the early 1900s.

Another variant of the Liar Paradox actually helped shape language in the 16th century. A crocodile snatches a young boy from a riverbank. His mother pleads with the crocodile to return him, to which the crocodile replies that he will only return the boy safely if the mother can guess correctly whether or not he will indeed return the boy. There’s no problem if the mother guesses that the crocodile will return him—if she’s right, he is returned; if she’s wrong, the crocodile keeps him.

If she answers that the crocodile will not return him, however, we end up with a paradox: If she’s right and the crocodile never intended to return her child, then the crocodile has to return him, but in doing so breaks his word and contradicts the mother’s answer. On the other hand, if she’s wrong and the crocodile actually did intend to return the boy, the crocodile must then keep him even though he intended not to, thereby also breaking his word.

The Crocodile Paradox is such an ancient and enduring logic problem that in the Middle Ages the word crocodilite came to be used to refer to any similarly brain-twisting dilemma where you admit something that is later used against you, and crocodility is an equally ancient word for captious or fallacious reasoning

Another place where having to make a choice pops up is Newcomb’s Paradox. Imagine that you walk into a room where there are two boxes. You can see that the first box contains $1000. But the second box is a mystery. 

Before you came into the room, an omniscient entity made a prediction about the choice you will make. If it predicted that you’d take only the second box, that box would contain $1 million. But if it predicted that if you’d take both boxes, the second box would be empty, and you’d walk away with $1000 and two boxes. 

So what to do? One side argues to take only the second box—this is an omniscient entity doing the predicting, after all. The other side would argue that the entity’s decision has already been made. Nothing you do now in that room will have any effect on the dollar values in the boxes, so might as well take the gamble. And people can be surprisingly split on what to do—in 2016, a nonscientific online poll by The Guardian—which called the paradox “one of philosophy’s most contentious conundrums”—found 53.5 percent chose just the second box and 46.5 percent chose both boxes.

Imagine that you’re about to set off walking down a street. To reach the other end, you’d first have to walk half way there. And to walk half way there, you’d first have to walk a quarter of the way there. And to walk a quarter of the way there, you’d first have to walk an eighth of the way there. And before that a 16th of the way there, and then a 32nd of the way there, a 64th of the way there, and so on.

Ultimately, in order to perform even the simplest of tasks like walking down a street, you’d have to perform an infinite number of smaller tasks—something that, by definition, is utterly impossible. Not only that, but no matter how small the first part of the journey is said to be, it can always be halved to create another task; the only way in which it cannot be halved would be to consider the first part of the journey to be of absolutely no distance whatsoever, and in order to complete the task of moving no distance whatsoever, you can’t even start your journey in the first place.

Imagine that a family has two children, one of whom we know to be a boy. What, then, is the probability that the other child is a boy? The obvious answer is to say that the probability is 1/2—after all, the other child can only be either a boy or a girl, and the chances of a baby being born a boy or a girl are (essentially) equal. In a two-child family, however, there are actually four possible combinations of children: two boys (MM), two girls (FF), an older boy and a younger girl (MF), and an older girl and a younger boy (FM). We already know that one of the children is a boy, meaning we can eliminate the combination FF, but that leaves us with three equally possible combinations of children in which at least one is a boy—namely MM, MF, and FM. This means that the probability that the other child is a boy—MM—must be 1/3, not 1/2.

Imagine a fletcher (i.e. an arrow-maker) has fired one of his arrows into the air. For the arrow to be considered to be moving, it has to be continually repositioning itself from the place where it is now to any place where it currently isn’t. The Fletcher’s Paradox, however, states that throughout its trajectory the arrow is actually not moving at all. At any given instant of no real duration (in other words, a snapshot in time) during its flight, the arrow cannot move to somewhere it isn’t because there isn’t time for it to do so. And it can’t move to where it is now, because it’s already there. So, for that instant in time, the arrow must be stationary. But because all time is comprised entirely of instants—in every one of which the arrow must also be stationary—then the arrow must in fact be stationary the entire time. Except, of course, it isn’t.

In his final written work, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (1638), the legendary Italian polymath Galileo Galilei proposed a mathematical paradox based on the relationships between different sets of numbers. On the one hand, he proposed, there are square numbers—like 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, and so on. On the other, there are those numbers that are not squares—like 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and so on. Put these two groups together, and surely there have to be more numbers in general than there are just square numbers—or, to put it another way, the total number of square numbers must be less than the total number of square and non-square numbers together. However, because every positive number has to have a corresponding square and every square number has to have a positive number as its square root, there cannot possibly be more of one than the other.

Confused? You’re not the only one. In his discussion of his paradox, Galileo was left with no alternative than to conclude that numerical concepts like more, less, or fewer can only be applied to finite sets of numbers, and as there are an infinite number of square and non-square numbers, these concepts simply cannot be used in this context.

Imagine that a farmer has a sack containing 100 pounds of potatoes. The potatoes, he discovers, are comprised of 99 percent water and 1 percent solids, so he leaves them in the heat of the sun for a day to let the amount of water in them reduce to 98 percent. But when he returns to them the day after, he finds his 100-pound sack now weighs just 50 pounds. How can this be true?

Well, if 99 percent of 100 pounds of potatoes is water then the water must weigh 99 pounds. The 1 percent of solids must ultimately weigh just 1 pound, giving a ratio of solids to liquids of 1:99. But if the potatoes are allowed to dehydrate to 98 percent water, the solids must now account for 2 percent of the weight—a ratio of 2:98, or 1:49—even though the solids must still only weigh 1 pound. The water, ultimately, must now weigh 49 pounds, giving a total weight of 50 pounds despite just a 1 percent reduction in water content. Or must it?

Although not a true paradox in the strictest sense, the counterintuitive Potato Paradox is a famous example of what is known as a veridical paradox, in which a basic theory is taken to a logical but apparently absurd conclusion.

Also known as Hempel’s Paradox, for the German logician who proposed it in the mid-1940s, the Raven Paradox begins with the apparently straightforward and entirely true statement that “all ravens are black.” This is matched by a “logically contrapositive” (i.e. negative and contradictory) statement that “everything that is not black is not a raven”—which, despite seeming like a fairly unnecessary point to make, is also true given that we know “all ravens are black.” Hempel argues that whenever we see a black raven, this provides evidence to support the first statement. But by extension, whenever we see anything that is not black, like an apple, this too must be taken as evidence supporting the second statement—after all, an apple is not black, and nor is it a raven.

The paradox here is that Hempel has apparently proved that seeing an apple provides us with evidence, no matter how unrelated it may seem, that ravens are black. It’s the equivalent of saying that you live in New York is evidence that you don’t live in L.A., or that saying you are 30 years old is evidence that you are not 29. Just how much information can one statement actually imply anyway?

While most paradoxes are presented through a spoken or written philosophical prompt, some are visual in nature. Take, for example, the Penrose triangle. It’s an object that is described by one of its creators as “impossibility … in its purest form,” but you can build one and show it to people. Obviously it’s a trick of proportions and viewing angles, but even after you reveal the trick, people will still see it as an impossible triangle.

You might know variations of these “visual paradoxes” from their representations in the works of MC Escher, who is the poster child for mind-bending art. His Waterfall from 1961, for example, depicts an impossible object.

Hilbert’s Paradox of the Grand Hotel is a famous thought experiment that is meant to show the counterintuitive nature of infinity. Imagine walking into a big, beautiful, hotel, looking for a room. How big? Infinitely big. This hotel has a countably infinite number of rooms. However, all the rooms are currently occupied by a countably infinite number of guests. (Countably infinite means you can one-to-one attach a natural number to everything in the set.) One might assume that the hotel would not be able to accommodate you, let alone more guests, but Hilbert’s paradox proves that this is not the case. 

In order to accommodate you, the hotel could, hypothetically, move the guest in room one to room two. Simultaneously, the guest in room two could be moved to three, and so on, which would move every guest from their current room, x, to a new room, x+1. As there are infinite rooms, everyone would get a new room, and now, room one is totally vacant. Enjoy your stay. 

What if we wanted to apply this idea to any number of finite guests? Let’s say 3000 people arrive and want rooms. No problem, just the repeat process but instead of x+1, simply do x+y—y, in this case, being 3000. 

What if a countably infinite number of people line up behind you, each of which wants a room? There’s a solution to that, too. The pattern would now be 2x. Simply move the guest in room one to room two, the guest in room two to room four, and the guest in room three to room six, and so on. This would leave all the odd-numbered rooms open, so each new guest could take one of the newly vacated odd-numbered rooms and the previous patrons would all be moved to the next even room. 

The basis of the Grand Hotel Paradox is the idea of counterintuitive results that are still provably true. In this example, the statements “there is a guest in every room” and “no more guests can be accommodated” are not the same thing because of the nature of infinity. In a normal set of numbers, such as the number of rooms in a normal hotel, the number of odd-numbered rooms would obviously be smaller than the total number of rooms. But in the case of infinity, this isn’t the case, as there are an infinite number of odd numbers, and an infinite number of total numbers. 

This paradox was first introduced by philosopher David Hilbert in a 1924 lecture and has been used to demonstrate various principles of infinity ever since. 

The interesting number paradox is debatably not a paradox at all, though it’s often called one. It basically goes to prove that all numbers are “interesting”—even the boring ones … which are actually interesting, of course, and not boring at all … because they’re boring.

Interesting, in this case, means it has something unique to it. For example, 1 is the first non-zero natural number; 2 is the smallest prime number; 3 is the first odd prime number. The list can go on and on, until you reach the first “uninteresting” number. It doesn’t have anything special or fascinating about it. But, being the first uninteresting number you stumbled upon, it is, in fact, unique, and therefore interesting.

This process can be repeated indefinitely, hypothetically. This idea was born out of a discussion between the mathematicians Srinivasa Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy. Hardy remarked that the number of the taxicab he had recently ridden in, 1729, was “rather a dull one.” Ramanujan responded that it actually was interesting, being the smallest number that is the sum of two cubes in two different ways. 

This story combines a piece written in 2016 with a list adapted from an episode of The List Show on YouTube.

Sometimes, devoted fans get a little carried away in their efforts to interpret their favorite shows, and become convinced that there’s more to what they’re seeing on TV. Here are nine wacky theories they’ve developed.

Before Saved By The Bell was a staple of NBC’s early ’90s Saturday morning programming, it was an ’80s Disney Channel teen sitcom called Good Morning Miss Bliss. After a 14-episode run, Good Morning, Miss Bliss was re-tooled and re-packaged for NBC. Some of the characters, including Zack, Screech, Lisa, and Mr. Belding, stayed on, while others—like Mikey, Nikki, Milo, and even the titular Miss Bliss—were cast aside for new faces. The setting was also changed from John F. Kennedy Junior High School in Indiana to Bayside High School in California. As a result, it is believed that Saved By The Bell is nothing more than an escapist fantasy of its main character, Zack Morris. 

On Good Morning, Miss Bliss, Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) was, to put it nicely, kind of a dweeb. Girls weren’t attracted to him, his classmates made fun of him, and Miss Bliss (Hayley Mills) was always on to his schemes. But when Zack made the jump to Saved By The Bell, he was magically transformed into the coolest guy in school. Because of this, some fans think that Zack manufactured his dream life in sunny southern California, creating a world in which all the girls want him, his peers idolize him, and he gets away with even his most ridiculous plans. 

According to the fans who subscribe to this theory, Saved By The Bell’s theme song perfectly illustrates Zack’s fantasy world. The lyrics describe his humdrum life (“By the time I grab my books/And I give myself a look/I’m at the corner just in time to see the bus fly by”), suggesting he’ll be okay once he’s saved by the bell—or when he enters his fantasy world.

Children’s Television Workshop

Even more outrageous is the belief among some fans that Count von Count is a bloodsucking Muppet vampire who preys on the children of Sesame Street. The number-obsessed vampire lures kids to his lair under the guise of teaching them math, so he can feed on their youth. (According to this theory, the Count is why the children who hang out on Sesame Street are constantly replaced.) Apparently, Sesame Street’s adult residents are in on the Count’s dastardly scheme too, because in the decades he’s been on the show, they’ve never made an effort to stop him. 

NBC

Some fans of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air are convinced that Will was dead for the duration of the show’s six-season run. Their theory fixates on the sitcom’s opening theme song, which states that Will Smith was hanging out—chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool, if you will—when some guys who were “up to no good” came along. As the song goes, he got into one little fight and his mom got scared, then told him he’d have to move in with his auntie and uncle in Bel-Air. But what if Will never made it to Bel-Air, and instead, died in the fight? These fans believe it was God who drove the “rare” cab to take Will to the Banks’ mansion—in this case, Heaven—which he refers to as his “kingdom.”

NBC

The last half of The Office’s nine-season run featured a subplot focused on HR rep Toby Flenderson’s (Paul Lieberstein) obsession with the Scranton Strangler, a local serial killer. The Scranton Strangler was first mentioned during season six, and was eventually caught after a long police standoff in season seven. Toby’s fascination with the serial killer only increased when he was picked to be a juror on his murder trial. Eventually, the Scranton Strangler was revealed to be a character named George Howard Skub; Toby and his fellow jurors were responsible for sending Skub to death row. During season nine, Toby is guilt-stricken when he admits that the jury might have sentenced the wrong man to die. He even visits Skub in prison, who immediately jumps to strangle Toby.

Some believe that Toby’s extreme guilt is a sign that he is, in fact, the real Scranton Strangler. At that point on the show, they argue, he has nothing left to lose: his marriage has failed, he has a young daughter whom he rarely sees, his work life is shaky, and he is unable to make a go of it when he attempts to start a new life in Costa Rica. What’s more, the Scranton Strangler isn’t even mentioned until Toby returns to Pennsylvania. Skub, they allege, reacted so angrily to Toby’s presence because he knows that Toby framed him. 

FOX

Although it had a loyal fan base and was generally well-received by critics, Joss Whedon’s sci-fi drama Firefly was canceled in 2002 after airing just 11 episodes. While Fox claims the decision to cancel Firefly was based purely on its low ratings, conspiracy theorists are convinced that the U.S. government had something to do with the demise of the “space opera.” The show focuses on a group of independent outlaws who fight for civil rights under the oppressive and immoral Union of Allied Planets. According to the fans who subscribe to this theory, the powers that be weren’t pleased with the anti-government sentiment expressed by the show. What’s more, they point out, while the show was airing, the Bush administration was trying to build a case for the Iraq War; it’s no coincidence that it was canceled just three months before the invasion of the Middle Eastern country. 

CBS

Some theorists believe that the setting of Gilligan’s Island is not an island, but rather Hell, and that its sinful inhabitants all perished in the crash of the S.S. Minnow. According to this theory, each character on Gilligan’s Island represents one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The millionaire Mr. Howell represents Greed, while his work-averse wife represents Sloth. Sexy movie star Ginger stands in for Lust, while innocent farm girl Mary Ann envies Ginger’s beauty and lifestyle. The smart Professor is prideful because he can’t admit that he is unable to fix the ship or get them off the island. Skipper, meanwhile, symbolizes two deadly sins: Gluttony and Wrath, because he’s always taking something out on poor Gilligan. Not that you should feel bad for the titular dimwit; these fans believe that Gilligan represents Satan. He’s constantly screwing up the group’s plans for rescue, and what’s more, he’s always wearing red.  

Warner Bros. Television Distribution

 
This fan theory posits that the worlds inhabited by the Jetsons and the Flintstones exist concurrently. The Flintstones’ civilization was “bombed back to the Stone Age” during a nuclear war, and its inhabitants were forced to start over. That’s why the Flintstones use the materials (and animals) at their disposal to mimic modern technology (like when they use birds’ beaks to play records). Why would cavemen from the prehistoric past need garbage disposals and record players, if not to replicate how their society once was? 

The Jetsons, for their part, live in Orbit City, a metropolis built entirely above the clouds. Ever wonder what’s below Orbit City? Many people believe that the civilization depicted on The Flintstones is happening down on Earth. In addition, some fans suspect that the only thing dividing the Jetson and the Flintstone families is income. The Jetsons can afford to live in the fancy new society above the clouds, while the working class Flintstones are forced to make do in the ruins of Earth.     

When you consider the time period during which both shows were created, this premise doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. After all, both shows were developed at the height of the Cold War, during a time when Americans constantly feared a nuclear attack by Communist Russia.  

NBCUniversal

It’s believed that Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) on Murder, She Wrote is not just an author who writes mysteries, but is actually a serial killer who disguises herself as a novelist and amateur detective. How else could Jessica Fletcher, again and again, “randomly” stumble upon a dead body and later on, “figure out” who the murderer is? Consider, too, that Fletcher lives in the cozy coastal town of Cabot Cove, Maine, population 3,500. During the 12 years the show was on, 268 people were murdered, which would, statistically, make Cabot Cove the murder capital of the world. Either killers are flocking to the New England village, or Jessica Fletcher is a serial murderer whose gentle and pleasant British demeanor serves to throw people off her trail. 

AMC

Is Heisenburg’s blue crystal meth responsible for The Walking Dead‘s zombie apocalypse? At the end of Breaking Bad, Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) blue meth is becoming more and more popular across the country, eventually making its way around the world. Some fans think that users die, only to rise again in zombie form. Those who subscribe to this theory point to the handful of Breaking Bad references on The Walking Dead. 

In season one, Glenn (Stephen Yeun) drives a red Dodge Challenger, which looks very similar to Walter White’s car. And when Walter White goes to return his Dodge on Breaking Bad, he takes it back to the dealership’s general manager, whose name is also Glenn.

In season two, Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) is trying to bring down T-Dog’s (IronE Singleton) injury-induced fever, so he pulls out his brother Merle’s stash of drugs to see if anything in the plastic bag will do the trick. Pictured clearly at the bottom of the bag: blue crystal meth. Even more suspicious: before the zombie apocalypse, Merle Dixon (Michael Rooker) used to be a drug dealer. His supplier was described as “a janky little white guy” who threatened Merle with a gun and said, “I’m gonna kill you, bitch!” Sounds like Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) to me.

On February 28, 1995, the Denver International Airport (DIA) opened its doors and its runways to the public after falling over a year behind schedule and spending a reported $2 billion more than its original budget had dictated. 

The massive new airport didn’t just take up lots of time and money—it also took up a lot of space: More than two decades later, it’s still the largest airport in the United States by area (53 square miles) with the longest commercial use runway available in the country (runway 16R/34L is 16,000 feet long—approximately three miles). DIA replaced Denver’s old Stapleton International Airport, which was plagued by problems (runways too close together, a general lack of space for necessary expansion), and its creation helped meet some basic needs that Stapleton simply couldn’t. Denver needed more room to serve the various airlines that had made—and wanted to make—the Mile High City a hub of operations, and DIA did just that.

That all sounds normal enough, right? A city needed a new airport, and it got one, even though it took a lot more money and time than originally planned, as so often happens with large-scale public works (although there is some debate as to who actually funded the airport, but we’ll get to that). But people have wondered if DIA—giant, expensive, strange DIA—is home to something far more sinister … like a conspiracy. Or a lot of conspiracies.

Although one of the underlying themes of the various conspiracy theories regarding DIA holds that Stapleton was a fine airport and didn’t need to be replaced, there is one inarguable point: the runways at Stapleton were not smartly laid out. The parallel runways were too close together for safe landings in bad weather, which happened around 150 days a year and cut the number of arrivals an hour from 80 to 36. DIA doesn’t have the same problem, but it does have something far more nefarious: a shape that many people have noticed looks curiously like a swastika, at least from the air. Taken on its own, such a shape could be brushed off as being just a really terrible piece of planning, but combined with everything else, it all looks very odd indeed. 

Leo Tanguma’s two murals, which take up wide swathes of wallspace in DIA’s baggage claim, might have some nice names—they are called “Children of the World Dream of Peace” and “In Peace and Harmony with Nature”—but their actual content is terrifying. Death-masked soldiers with guns stalk children, animals are dead and kept under glass, and the entire world looks to have been destroyed. As if being at the airport isn’t bad enough.

Some believe the murals at Denver’s airport feature doomsday scenes. It doesn’t help that an inlay on the floor features the letters “Au” and “Ag.” Though this nod to gold and silver is appropriate—Colorado does have a rich mining history, after all—some believe the letters represent a dangerous strain of hepatitis that could serve as a biological weapon. Those two symbols, coupled with the unnerving mural, have fueled a conspiracy theory that the airport could be a hub for biological warfare. 

To his credit, the narrative of Tanguma’s murals ends on a happy note—with all that peace and harmony stuff—and the artist himself has said, “I have children sleeping amid the debris of war and this warmonger is killing the dove of peace, but the kids are dreaming of something better in the future and their little dream goes behind the general and continues behind this group of people, and the kids are dreaming that [peace] will happen someday. See how the little dream becomes something really beautiful, that someday the nations of the world will abandon war and come together.” Still, the last place anyone wants to see depictions of death and destruction in an airport.

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There is one very weird marker that’s hard to ignore: a dedication marker and capstone that’s been placed over a time capsule (which supposedly includes a credit card, Colorado flag, and DIA opening day newspapers, among many other things) that is set to be opened in 2094. The symbols on the marker are associated with the Freemasons, a charitable organization that is often subject to their own conspiracy theories. The marker also mentions the “New World Airport Commission,” an organization that doesn’t actually exist (or does it? Our brains are spinning!) but appears to be taking credit for building the entire airport. However, the contributors listed as part of the so-called NWAC, including an architecture firm and a metal company, do exist. And they just make buildings and metals. Well, probably.

The airport is home to a number of tunnels, including a tram that goes between concourses and a failed automated baggage system. That all sounds normal enough, but there is definitely something weird about that automated baggage system—mainly, that it cost a lot of money and then never actually worked. The system, which failed pretty spectacularly when it was first tested and just never got better, was one of the reasons for DIA’s delayed opening. By 2005, most of the airport’s concourses had abandoned it totally, making both its bloated price and long delays feel like even more of a failure—or at least a really weird way to cover up the building of tunnels.

But where do the tunnels go? Perhaps to some kind of underground bunker? Most of the people who believe in the various conspiracy theories regarding DIA seem to think that the airport is actually the headquarters for something far nastier than just an airport—like the New World Order or our own American government. This idea might sound pretty wild—but there is something very strange to back it up: buried buildings.

As the story goes, when DIA was first being built, five massive buildings were built somehow incorrectly. Instead of being blown up or otherwise dismantled, they were buried. Although theorists say that a construction worker ultimately blew the whistle on this very weird practice, finding his original testimony on the subject is almost impossible. 

It’s hard to deny the weirdness of DIA’s unofficial mascot. The massive horse statue, called “Mustang”—and dubbed “Blucifer”—has already killed at least one man. At 32 feet tall and 9000 pounds (it’s made out of fiberglass), “Mustang” is huge and imposing, and its glowing red eyes don’t help matters. This thing is giant and really scary—and it killed the man who made it. Really. Artist Luis Jimenez died in 2006 when a piece of the sculpture’s head broke off and severed an artery in his leg. His children finished the horse. Some believe the horse is cursed, and that its glowing eyes represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (they’re actually a nod to Jimenez’s father, who had a shop that sold neon lights).

A version of this story originally ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2021.

Saskatoon, a city of about 266,000 people in Saskatchewan, Canada, receives an average of 76.6 centimeters (30.2 inches) of snowfall per year [PDF]. On January 31, 2016, that proved to be enough of the fluffy white stuff to stage what organizers hoped would be the world’s largest snowball fight.

Thousands of Canada’s greatest winter warriors gathered in Saskatoon’s Victoria Park to gear up for the epic battle. The frozen fight was an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest snowball fight on Earth, but it had another purpose as well: it served as the official send-off party for the Canadian team participating in that year’s Showa Shinzan International Yukigassen World Championships, the annual professional snowball-fighting competition.

Filmmakers Preston Kanak and Dylan Hryciuk were on the scene to capture highlights from the event. Their short film, “World’s Largest Snowball Fight,” unfolds in beautiful slow motion, capturing the joy and chaos of the fight. The film starts with the final moments of calm before the battle, and then explodes into action as the air fills with spherical snow.

Not only does the family-friendly fight look like immense fun; the event succeeded in setting the Guinness World Record for the World’s Largest Snowball Fight (Outdoor), with 7681 participants hurling snow through the air. The film is a lovely tribute to what must have been an exciting day outdoors.

The people of Saskatoon seemed to have lucked out with the quality of snow at hand. Not all snow makes good snowballs: it needs to have the right proportion of moisture. Too wet and a snowball will be an icy (and potentially dangerous) projectile; too dry and the snowball won’t hold together. If the snow in your region is typically powdery, try lying on top of it to warm it up and thus increase its moisture content before assembling your arsenal. Here are more tips for making the perfect snowball.

A version of this story was published in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

El Niño has taken on an almost legendary quality in the United States, entering the collective mind of the public in the late 1990s as an epic weather pattern that drenches California in an unending deluge of tropical moisture.

An El Niño is the abnormal warming of sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. The event occurs when winds over the Pacific Ocean near the equator slow down or reverse direction, allowing unusually warm water to accumulate around the eastern part of the equatorial Pacific. When sea surface temperatures in this portion of the Pacific climb 0.5°C above average for seven consecutive months, it’s officially considered an El Niño. An upward shift of one-half of one degree doesn’t sound like much—but, in a similar way to a fever in the human body, it doesn’t take a lot of abnormal heat to make a huge impact both on the ocean and the atmosphere above it.

How can warm water in the Pacific Ocean affect the weather thousands of miles away? Everything is connected. One of the most heavily advertised effects of El Niño is that it can squash the Atlantic hurricane season as the warm water triggers thunderstorms in the eastern Pacific, causing strong upper-level winds to flow east over the Caribbean and Atlantic. This wind shear tears the tops off thunderstorms, keeping tropical activity to a minimum. However, the warmer water can also alter the jet stream, which is how we most commonly feel its influence here in the United States.

The jet stream is a fast-moving river of air in the upper levels of the atmosphere that’s usually located between 25,000 and 35,000 feet, the typical cruising altitude for commercial jets. This ribbon of powerful winds is caused by the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles. Weather exists as a result of nature trying to balance itself out—in this case in the Northern Hemisphere, rising warm air in the tropics flows north toward the Arctic, turning east thanks to the Coriolis effect. The resulting river of westerly winds is the jet stream.

During the summer months, the jet stream is usually weaker and stuck in the higher latitudes. This is why weather is generally calmer during the summer, allowing long stretches of hot, humid weather only broken by occasional pop-up thunderstorms. During the cooler months, however, the north-south temperature gradient is much sharper, allowing the jet stream to dive south over the United States (and sometimes even farther south than that). This curvy, dippy jet stream provides us a constant offering of volatile weather, bringing everything from heavy rain or snow to extreme bouts of cold weather.

This is where El Niño factors in. There are actually two jet streams in the Northern Hemisphere: the polar jet stream, which circulates in the higher latitudes, and the subtropical jet stream, which we’ll often find around the southern United States. The polar jet is what brings us our deep shots of frigid air during the dead of winter, and the subtropical jet is often at least partially responsible for the huge, historic snowstorms that occasionally whomp the East Coast.

When the water in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean is abnormally warm like it is during an El Niño, it can affect air temperature above the surface. The warmer air allows the subtropical jet stream to grow stronger and establish itself over the southern United States, shoving the polar jet stream farther north near the U.S.-Canada border. This brings stormy weather to the southern half of the United States, often manifesting itself in wet low-pressure systems that smack California before slowly trundling across the rest of the country. This also tends to keep the northern United States drier and warmer than normal, though snowy conditions and arctic blasts aren’t uncommon.

If you hear people talk about El Niño causing flooding and snow out west or news anchors report that “El Niño brought heavy rain to Los Angeles yet again today,” take comfort in the fact that you now know that’s not true. El Niño doesn’t directly cause rain or snow or heat or cold in the United States, and El Niño doesn’t make landfall like a hurricane, either, since it’s just abnormally warm ocean water. El Niño won’t always be the cause of our weather woes, but it sure doesn’t help.

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

Goodfellas, which arrived in theaters in late 1990, has been called Martin Scorsese’s best movie by many fans and film critics. Others have called it the best movie, period. In celebration of Scorsese’s manic take on the mafia, here are some fascinating facts that will make you want to take a long walk through the back of the Copa, cut your garlic paper thin, and go home and get your f***ing shine box.

Author of the original book and co-writer of the film, Nicholas Pileggi described Goodfellas as a “mob home movie” to The New York Times, selling the film alongside Scorsese as being about the pursuit of money and the particular way this group of people chose to make it. While the violence is shocking, the bulk of the film is about the characters’s lifestyle, interpersonal relationships, who owes whom what, and the grand pursuit of materialism. It’s also owing to Pileggi’s background as a journalist and Scorsese’s obsessive focus on details and realism that the movie stands out as a rare peak into the underworld.

The real-life Henry Hill’s crime resume is way too long to fit into a single movie—even one with a meaty 148-minute runtime. In fact, Scorsese even left out a Hill crime that eventually became a national sports controversy: Boston College’s 1978-1979 point-shaving scandal. The scam was born when Jimmy Burke (De Niro’s Jimmy Conway in the movie) and Hill recruited Boston College players Rick Kuhn, Jim Sweeney, and Ernie Cobb to manipulate scores to cover point spreads. In the ESPN documentary Playing for the Mob, which chronicles the history of the scandal, Hill claims he mentioned the operation to federal investigators in passing after flipping on his mob associates in 1980 without knowing that point-shaving was illegal.

Also absent is the time Hill reportedly took cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder out for a drink as his buddies lifted more than $1 million worth of goods from her swanky New York pad.

As you might know, the business of filming is rarely chronological; directors tend to jump scenes for cost, scheduling, and efficiency reasons. For Goodfellas, the scene that broke shooting ground was the intentionally low-budget Morrie’s Wigs commercial, which plays just before Henry and Jimmy hassle Morrie about a debt near the beginning of the film. To get the feel of the commercial right, Scorsese contacted Stephen R. Pacca, who had created his own ultra low-budget ads for his replacement window company, to write and direct the Morrie’s Wigs ad.

The Goodfellas we now all know and love features Billy Batts living (and dying) to regret his “shine box” remark to Tommy right around the movie’s halfway mark, with just a teaser of Batts getting finished off in a trunk at the beginning. But the original shooting script actually featured Batts celebrating his ill-fated “welcome home” party in the very first scene, followed by the visit to Tommy’s mother, before cutting to Liotta narrating the immortal words: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster” and cutting to Hill’s life as a Brooklyn kid.

Before whacking Frank Vincent as Batts during the most disappointing “welcome home” party in human history, Pesci gave Vincent a proper beatdown in Raging Bull. Vincent would eventually have his revenge, brutally whacking Pesci’s character in Casino.

But Pesci and Vincent go way back offscreen as well, having started their entertainment careers as bandmates and equal halves of a comedy duo in the late 1960s. But it was their appearances in the low-budget 1976 mafia film The Death Collector that got the duo noticed by Robert De Niro and, ultimately, Martin Scorsese.

Goodfellas‘s “Copacabana tracking shot,” one of the most famous shots in cinema history, shows Lorraine Bracco and Ray Liotta walking from their car on the street, through a kitchen, and into the famous New York City nightclub. It also represents a profound change in Henry from a young kid enjoying the spoils of the illicit life he has chosen. He gets to double-park in front of a fire hydrant, no problem, everybody is glad to see him, and they roll out a table, center floor, just for him and Karen. According to Scorsese, it “had to be done in one sweeping shot, because it’s his seduction of her, and it’s also the lifestyle seducing him.” It’s also an evolution: Henry starts in the streets at the back entrance and ends up in the front row.

From Tony Bennett’s “Rags to Riches” over the opening narration to The Sex Pistols’s punk rock take on “My Way” over the closing credits, Scorsese’s use of music is frequently mentioned as one of the many reasons why Goodfellas is a classic. And, of course, Derek and the Dominos’s “Layla (Piano Exit)” after the discovery of Jimmy Conway’s Lufthansa heist carnage is frequently cited as one of the best uses of popular music in movie history.

While the genres included run the gamut, Scorsese abided by a very particular set of rules when picking songs: They had to at least vaguely comment on the scene or characters, and they had to be chronologically appropriate to the time the scenes were set in.

Propmaster Robert Griffon had a specialty jewelry store that would close up shop and let De Niro pick out whatever he wanted, which sounds like the start of a very different Uncut Gems. The pinky bling look was common in Hollywood portrayals of Italian mobsters, a tradition that Scorsese continued (and even examined) in The Irishman.

By all accounts, Lucchese crime family associate Thomas DeSimone, portrayed by Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito in the film, was every bit as ruthless, explosively-tempered, and murderous as his onscreen counterpart. Still, there were some major differences between the real-life DeSimone and Pesci’s character. First, DeSimone—who stood 6-feet 2-inches tall and weighed 225 pounds—hardly would have suffered from the Napoleonic complex implied by the 5-foot 4-inch Pesci’s performance. Also, Pesci was in his late forties when he took on the role, while DeSimone met his violent end when he was just 28 years old.

According to Hill, despite combining characters and slightly altering plot points and timelines, Goodfellas was about 95 percent accurate. Perhaps some of that remaining five percent has to do with the on-screen portrayals of Paul Vario, the one-time head of the Lucchese crime family, and Jimmy Burke, architect of the Lufthansa heist.

Vario (Paul Cicero in the film) was far from the relatively coolheaded powerbroker Paul Sorvino portrayed. A federal prosecutor called Vario, who served jail time for rape and had a notoriously unhinged temper, “one of the most violent and dangerous career criminals in the city of New York.” And while Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway comes across as cunning and conniving with a brutal streak, the real Jimmy “The Gent” Burke was, according to Hill, a “homicidal maniac,” brutally violent and responsible for at least 50 to 60 murders.

It’s hard to imagine Sorvino being unable to do anything, especially donning the cruel emptiness needed to play Paulie, but the actor came very close to quitting the project because he didn’t think he could pull it off. “What I didn’t know, and what I wasn’t sure I would find, was that kernel of coldness and absolute hardness that is antithetical to my nature except when my family is threatened,” Sorvino told The New York Times. “And that took two months, and I never thought I’d get it. One day I passed a mirror and startled myself.”

Despite its reputation as a violent movie, the number of onscreen deaths actually portrayed in Goodfellas is a surprisingly tame five (Spider, Billy Batts, Stacks Edwards, Morrie, and Tommy)—or 10 if you include the results of Jimmy Conway’s handiwork following the Lufthansa heist. Of course, it’s worth mentioning that violence, and the threat of violence, is a constant presence throughout the film. Still, compared to a body count of 214 in John Woo’s Bullet in the Head, released in the same year, or 255 in Saving Private Ryan, or even 24 in Scorsese’s Best Picture winner The Departed, Goodfellas isn’t terribly bloody.

The most famous (if not the most quoted) scene in Goodfellas comes at the beginning, when Pesci’s Tommy DeVito jokingly-yet-uncomfortably accosts Henry Hill for calling him “funny.” In addition to being the driving force behind the scene on screen, Pesci is also responsible for coming up with the premise.

While working in a restaurant, a young Pesci apparently told a mobster that he was funny—a compliment that was met with a less-than-enthusiastic response. Pesci relayed the anecdote to Scorsese, who decided to include it in the film. Scorsese didn’t include the scene in the shooting script so that Pesci and Liotta’s interactions would elicit genuinely surprised reactions from the supporting cast.

Most fans of the film know that it’s Martin Scorsese’s mother Catherine who plays Tommy’s mother in the infamous dinner scene following Billy Batts’s murder, but the family connections hardly stop there. Tommy’s mother’s painting of two dogs sitting in front of an old man (“One’s going east, and the other one is going west. So what?”) was actually painted by co-writer Nicholas Pileggi’s mother. Scorsese’s father Charles also pops up as Henry’s prison compadre who puts way too many onions in the gravy.

Because of Scorsese’s attention to detail and De Niro’s desire to avoid fake-feeling bills, property master Robert Griffon supplied $5000 of his own money for the actor to use as long as all of it came back to him. It’s Griffon’s money De Niro is wantonly tossing around in the casino scene, and after each take, Griffon would yell “Everybody freeze!” in order to collect it.

Did we mention Scorsese was obsessed with detail? His mom and dad ironed all those gigantic collars on set, and Liotta claims Scorsese tied his tie for him each day of filming so it would be just right.

Among the many things Goodfellas has become famous for over the 30 years is its liberal use of the word “f**k.” In all, the expletive and its many colorful derivatives are used 300 times, making it the 16th most f-bomb-laden film ever released. The script only called for the word to be used 70 times, but much of the dialogue was improvised during shooting, where the expletives piled up. Roughly half of them ended up being spoken by Pesci.

Two other Scorsese films outrank Goodfellas when it comes to this specific profanity: the word is dropped 422 times in Casino and a whopping 506 times in The Wolf of Wall Street.

When Mazar’s character Sandy meets Henry for the first time, she appears starstruck and trips slightly as she’s walking backward to leave the room. Turns out the stumble was genuine. Mazar bumped against the dolly track, and Scorsese kept it in because it added to Henry’s air of power and mystique.

Seriously. According to producer Irwin Winkler, Tom Cruise “was discussed,” and according to producer Barbara De Fina, Madonna was “in the mix” to the extent that Scorsese scouted her at a performance of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow on Broadway.

However, Scorsese was keen on Ray Liotta after seeing him in Jonathan Demme’s 1986 film Something Wild. Liotta eventually convinced Winkler, who was skeptical of his acting chops, that he was right for the role after a chance meeting in a restaurant. Scorsese liked Lorraine Bracco largely due to how well she related to Karen, having grown up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Bracco was the only woman co-star in a male-dominated story—and she understood that acutely. ”If I didn’t make my work important, it would probably end up on the cutting room floor,” Bracco told The New York Times. Although Scorsese tried to calm her concerns by telling her how much he loved Karen’s character, she still saw her position as adding pressure to her performance.

It feels a little strange that Al Pacino isn’t in the picture, and the rumor is thatt he said no to playing Jimmy Conway to avoid being typecast in the gangster role after The Godfather, but he took the role of Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy instead. Maybe playing a comic strip gangster didn’t count toward typecasting. Or maybe he just wanted to design his own make-up. Since it’s a small movie star world, Madonna was also in the mix for Goodfellas but ended up in Dick Tracy.

The young actor had been on Scorsese’s radar, but he became a lock simply because he tried to talk to Scorsese at the Venice Film Festival. Since Scorsese had bodyguards, that wasn’t an easy task. “When I went up to [Scorsese] on the beach and went to reach for him and his bodyguards held me off. Instead of saying [expletive] you, I calmly said, ‘I just want to talk to Marty,’” Liotta recounted to The Washington Post. “He said that’s when he decided to cast me as Henry Hill.”

While Pacino was choosing a comic strip villain over a real-life one, Liotta turned down a comic book bad guy in order to play Henry Hill. Granted, it would have been a small role. Liotta was offered a spot in Tim Burton’s Batman playing district attorney Harvey Dent (a.k.a. Two Face) but passed, and the role went to Billy Dee Williams.

Louis Eppolito, a police detective who had a bit part as a wiseguy in Goodfellas, was later convicted for carrying out hits for the Lucchese crime family, which is, of course, the family chronicled in the movie. According to screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, there was an open call for real wiseguys, and Scorsese “must have hired like half a dozen guys, maybe more, out of the joint.” Tony Sirico, who had a bit part as a wiseguy in Goodfellas but is best known for playing Paulie Gualtieri on The Sopranos, had a longer crime resume (28 arrests) than acting resume (27 credits) when the movie was released in 1990.

As Goodfellas makes clear, many of the mobsters involved with the $6 million 1978 Lufthansa heist—at the time the largest cash robbery in American history—were taken out by a paranoid and greedy Jimmy Burke, while more still were put in jail by Hill’s testimony on unrelated charges. But as of 2014, the Lufthansa heist case was still an active case, as evidenced by the 2014 arrest of Vincent Asaro (who was 78 years old at the time) on cooperating witness testimony. Authorities claim that Asaro served as lookout and helped the getaway. And in a tie to the movie, Asaro is believed to have taken Spider to get stitched up after he was shot.

In Goodfellas, Michael Imperioli—who is best known for his role as Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos—played Spider, the kid who is bullied by Tommy and shot in the foot for not bringing him a drink fast enough. Later on, when Tommy kills Spider by shooting him several times in the chest, Imperioli cut his fingers on broken glass while falling backward, and had to go to the emergency room covered in fake blood. “I went to the hospital but I had bullet holes in my chest and blood everywhere,” he told Good Morning America. “So at the hospital in Queens, they think I’m about to die. I think they think it’s some drug hit. And I’m trying to explain to the people how it’s my hand and I’m OK. And they think I’m delirious.”

Speaking of The Sopranos: Between Tony Sirico, Lorraine Bracco, Frank Vincent, Michael Imperioli, and many, many more, the show shares a huge number of cast members with Goodfellas.

However, the only actor confirmed to have appeared in the holy trinity of Mafia pop culture—the original The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos—is Tony Lip, best known for his portrayal of New York crime boss Carmine Lupertazzi on The Sopranos.

The fed laying out the ins and outs of the witness protection program to Henry and Karen after they get pinched? That’s U.S. Attorney Edward McDonald, reenacting his conversation with the real Henry and Karen after they flipped. McDonald volunteered himself for the part after Scorsese scouted his office as a possible filming location, and ultimately won it after a screen test. Like so much of the rest of the script, McDonald’s “Don’t give me the babe-in-the-woods routine, Karen” line was all improv.

While met with extremely enthusiastic reviews, Goodfellas was overshadowed by Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves at the 1991 Academy Awards. The film was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, but only took home the Best Supporting Actor trophy for Joe Pesci’s portrayal of Tommy DeVito. Pesci was up against two other mobster portrayals: Al Pacino’s Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy and Andy Garcia’s Vincent Mancini in The Godfather: Part III.

Pesci spoke just five words upon accepting the award (“It’s my privilege. Thank you.”), thus delivering one of the shortest Oscar acceptance speeches ever. According to Pesci, the speech was so brief simply because he didn’t expect to win.

Like almost every other film or TV show to portray the Mafia after 1990, The Simpsons‘s writers, producers, and animators probably took some cues from Goodfellas when constructing their very own mob crew. However, for one Goodfellas actor, the similarities were too close for comfort. In October of 2014, Frank Sivero—who played the ill-fated Frankie Carbone—filed a whopping $250 million lawsuit against the The Simpsons for appropriating his looks and mannerisms when creating a little-seen Springfield mob associate named Louie.

According to Sivero, The Simpsons writers lifted his likeness while living next door to him in Sherman Oaks in 1989, the year before Goodfellas’s release. Louie debuted on the show during the 1991 episode “Bart the Murderer,” and as of this year had appeared in more than 50 episodes of The Simpsons in total.

If anyone behind Goodfellas thought it might be a classic in the making, they hardly would have known it from the movie’s preview screenings. Pileggi claims that a screening in Orange County, California had roughly 70 walk-outs due to the violent content. According to an executive producer, one screening ended with the film team hiding at a bowling alley due to an angry audience, with one disgruntled moviegoer simply writing “f**k you” on a comment card.

 Pesci’s final scene in the film, featuring Tommy shooting directly into the camera, is an homage to the landmark 1903 short, silent Western film The Great Train Robbery, which ends with a similar shot. According to Scorsese, he saw his film as part of a “tradition of outlaws” in American pop culture and films, and noted that despite nearly a century separating the two films, they’re essentially “exactly the same story.”

Hill’s testimony against some of the most ruthless and powerful Lucchese crime family associates led to roughly 50 convictions. And as Hill learned in the very beginning of his career (and the movie), rule number one in the wiseguy world is “never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.” So why was Hill able to live to be a (relatively) old man and die of natural causes, instead of ultimately meeting a violent end like so many of his past associates?

According to Hill, he had absolutely no idea. In 2010, he told The Telegraph, “It’s surreal, totally surreal, to be here. I never thought I’d reach this wonderful age,” and hypothesized he was still standing simply because “there’s nobody from my era alive today.” Following his death in 2012, The Guardian hypothesized that bureaucratic disorganization in the organized crime world or fame might have kept Hill standing.

Mary Liotta was sick when Liotta got the part in Goodfellas, and he went home to New Jersey every weekend during filming to be with her. “One day I got a specific ‘You need to get home,’” he told The New York Times. “Marty told me, and my knees buckled.” Liotta was back on set working only a few days after her funeral and recalls losing himself to the part as a distraction from his grief.

Hill was paid roughly $550,000 for Goodfellas (not including additional money he made off of the fame resulting from the film’s huge and sustained popularity). But according to Hill, that’s chump change compared to wiseguy money he was making back in his gangster days, which ranged from $15,000 to $40,000 a week. However, the massive sums from his glory days hardly left him a rich man; he claimed he blew almost all of his mob money on partying and a “degenerate” gambling problem.

Originally, the real Henry Hill went to live the rest of his life as an “average schnook” in Omaha, but Hill and the Witness Protection Program weren’t exactly a match made in heaven. Hill never settled into the lifestyle U.S. Marshals had so kindly provided following his flip in 1980, and soon after, Hill was back to his wiseguy ways, contacting past criminal connections and goomars, and getting arrested on drug charges.

Around the time Goodfellas was released, Hill had been booted from the program for his uncooperative behavior and was left to fend for himself. Once again, he was hardly able to lay low, showing up at Goodfellas-related events, releasing a cookbook, selling art on eBay, and frequently calling into The Howard Stern Show before dying from heart problems in 2012.

Goodfellas ends with Hill living in witness protection obscurity as a “schnook,” which is exactly where My Blue Heaven picks up. The comedy stars Steve Martin as the Henry Hill figure, a former mobster living in witness protection under the supervision of Rick Moranis’s goofy Barney Coopersmith. While Goodfellas was based off Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, the screenwriter for My Blue Heaven had special access to Pileggi: she was married to him. Nora Ephron researched for the comedy and spoke by phone with Hill at the same time Scorsese was chatting with the former gangster for his crime drama.

Goodfellas was met with very positive reviews and scored some major award nominations, but it took a few years to catch on as a critical classic. However, Roger Ebert was an early adopter when it came to calling Goodfellas an all-time great, writing “no finer film has ever been made about organized crime—not even The Godfather” all the way back in 1990.

In 2000, Ebert rated Goodfellas as the third best movie of the previous decade, behind only Steve James’s inner-city basketball documentary Hoop Dreams and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. In all, Ebert handed perfect four-star reviews to 12 of the 23 non-documentary Scorsese features he reviewed—Goodfellas included, of course.

Created in 1988, the National Film Registry spent the 1990s securing the legacies of a century of film, but when 2000 rolled around, Scorsese’s f-bomb-dropping masterpiece was rightfully recognized as the first of that era to earn immortality. It joined the Registry alongside 1931’s Dracula, 1970’s Five Easy Pieces, 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi, 1937’s The Life of Emile Zola, and more older pictures.

This story has been updated for 2020.

They can’t put a ring on it, but when these animals find a mate, they’re ready to commit.

The furry, tree-swinging gibbon doesn’t monkey around with a lot of partners in its 35- to 40-year lifespan. Males and females form strong bonds and exhibit a surprising amount of relationship equality as they raise a family. They care for their young together, groom each other, and spend quality time vocalizing and hanging out. But not every relationship is perfect. Cheating, breakups, and remarriage all occur within the gibbon community. Sexting and online dating, however, do not. Yet.

What’s a nice girl like you doing in a human like this? There’s nothing romantic about Schistosoma mansoni, a parasitic flatworm that uses freshwater snails to get to humans. Once it attaches to human skin, it usually penetrates the epidermis through a hair follicle and deposits larvae that feed on blood in the lymphatic system and lungs. When the larvae migrate to the heart, they start looking for The One. Male and female larvae monogamously pair off and eventually travel to the mesenteric veins that drain blood from the intestines. Together, they reach sexual maturity and produce about 300 eggs per day. Postively heartwarming.

It’s usually “’til death do us part” for wolves. In the wild, they start breeding by age 2, and mated pairs build their wolf pack by having a new litter every year. (Most wolves don’t experience reproductive senescence, either, and can have babies until they die.) So when you see a lone wolf, have some sympathy: He’s single and looking for love, mourning his dead partner, or, in extreme cases, nursing a breakup with the pack.

Unlike most reptiles, the shingleback skink of Australia only has eyes for one mate. Males make a series of moves—including caressing and licking females—before copulating. Courtship takes months, but partnered bliss can last over 20 years.

Only about 3 percent of mammals are socially monogamous, but leave it to beavers to show us how it’s done. After mating, the rodents spend as much time maintaining their relationships as they do their dams and lodges. The males and females co-parent their young and stay together until one partner dies. Attached beavers occasionally philander, but it’s not enough to break up the family.

Some 90 percent of birds are socially monogamous, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely faithful to one mate. Barn owls, however, put all their eggs in one basket. Males woo females with screeches and gifts of dead mice. If the female responds with croaking sounds, she’s basically saying, “I do.”

Long-distance relationships aren’t easy, but bald eagles thrive in them. The birds fly solo during winter and migration, reconnecting with their mates each breeding season. Most eagles pair off by the age of 5 and stay together at least 20 years.

Don’t let the name fool you. These lovers are aggressive fighters that do almost everything as a pair—hunting, hanging out in the reef, and defending their territory. And you thought your ex was clingy.

The brainiest invertebrate of them all usually keeps others at eight arms’ length. But when it’s time to mate, they dedicate their lives to one partner. Well, sort of. Octopuses only live one or two years, so they spawn once and then die shortly after. But the Pacific striped octopus is an exception; it has the ability to lay multiple clutches of eggs. Instead of mating once at a distance to avoid being eaten, these creatures mate face to face a number of times and even appear to kiss and fondle each other’s suckers. Get a room, you two!

We’ve already established that birds of a feather like to flock together, but the commitment of the male swan really stands out. In addition to helping their mates build nests, they’re one of only two male birds in the Anatidae (ducks, geese, and swans) family that share egg incubation duties.

A version of this story was published in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

The Crow—Alex Proyas’s 1994 cult film about a man brought back from the dead to avenge the murder of his fiancée—was marred by tragedy when its star, Brandon Lee, was killed in an on-set accident just days before the film was scheduled to wrap, and not long before he was to be married. Here are a few things you might not have known about the film. (Warning: Violence and profanity in some of the videos below.)

In 1981, 21-year-old James O’Barr was drawing combat manuals in the Marines when he decided to start The Crow. He hoped it would be a healthy way of dealing with the death of his fiancée, who had been killed by a drunk driver. “I tried all the typical angst-ridden outlets, like substance abuse and going to clubs or parties every night and just basically trying to keep yourself numb for as long a period of time as possible,” O’Barr told The Baltimore Sun in 1994. “Eventually I was smart enough to realize that that was a dead end, and so I thought perhaps putting something down on paper I could exorcise some of that anger.”

Pivotal to his comic book’s plotline was another tragedy O’Barr heard about: A couple killed over an engagement ring. “I thought it was outlandish, a $30 ring, two lives wasted,” he said in a book about the production called The Crow: The Movie. “That became the beginning of the focal point, and the idea that there could be a love so strong that it could transcend death, that it could refuse death, and this soul would not rest until it could set things right.”

The Crow comic book debuted on February 1, 1989. Shortly after the second issue came out, O’Barr—who at that time was doing auto body work—was approached by a young director who was interested in buying the rights to The Crow for a one-time lump sum. “All rights, all media, in perpetuity,” O’Barr said in The Crow: The Movie, “but the money was pretty good, considering. I was going to do it.” But his friends convinced him to consult with a Hollywood agent, who advised O’Barr against selling the rights to the comics for a lump sum.

Then, right when the third issue was coming out, O’Barr met writer John Shirley and producer Jeff Most, who were eager to adapt the book into a movie. “Their enthusiasm convinced me that the film would be done correctly,” O’Barr said. “Even though it was for far less than what I had previously been offered, I wasn’t selling out my copyright, and it was the best chance of the film turning out to be something I’d want to see. I just went with my instincts.”

Shirley and Most got to work right away adapting The Crow into a script. They made a few changes, downplaying Eric’s drug use and bringing the love story to the fore. They also made the crow an actual animal—not just Eric’s psyche, as it is in the comics—that spoke to Eric telepathically.

While Shirley worked on the script, Most took the treatment and the comics and went about shopping the screenplay. Eventually, independent producer Ed Pressman signed on to help make the movie, and for the next two years, Shirley honed the script. He added an older brother for Sarah (a version of a character from the comics), a young girl with a drug addict for a mother who befriends Eric and Shelly, and turned the Skull Cowboy, a manifestation of Eric’s mental anguish that appears three times in the comics, into a guide.

Eventually, O’Barr thought the creative team had gone too far with their changes, so he created a 10-page outline explaining his characters’ motivations to get them back on track. Not long after, horror writer David J. Schow (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III and Critters 3 and 4) came onboard to do a rewrite; he told Pressman that Eric Draven should be a “Gothic, rock and roll Terminator.” Schow cut back on the number of villains, gave the remaining ones a clear hierarchy, and added Devil’s Night as the motivating factor behind the initial attack on Eric and Shelly, “just to give the villains a more esoteric agenda,” he said in The Crow: The Movie. Making that decision also grounded the movie in Detroit, a city that regularly experienced fires and mayhem the night before Halloween.

Pressman had Alex Proyas, an Australian director who at that point had helmed music videos and commercials, but no features, in mind to direct The Crow. Though Proyas was very much in demand in Hollywood, he was waiting for the right project—and The Crow was it. He signed on in 1991.

The producers first looked at musicians to fill the role of Eric Draven, among them Charlie Sexton, a rocker from Texas. But ultimately, their first choice was Brandon Lee. At that point, Lee—son of famed actor/martial artist Bruce Lee—had appeared in a few films, but hadn’t had a breakout role yet. “We had considered some more established actors and we were concerned that certain of these actors did not have the athletic ability,” Pressman said in The Crow: The Movie. “Other people had the athletic ability but not the acting talents. Brandon combined it all. When Brandon walked into this office, it was an immediate flash. We knew we had our Eric Draven that instant.”

Once Lee signed on to star in The Crow, he read the comic book. “After the script was written, Alex [Proyas] and I went back to the comic book and tried to find the beats of the story that didn’t make it into the script,” Lee said at one point during production. Proyas took Lee’s feedback seriously, and often incorporated his changes into the script. That included cutting one super-villain, an Asian character out to steal Eric’s powers, whom Lee thought was a stereotype.

There’s a persistent rumor that Eric Draven’s makeup was inspired by Alice Cooper or KISS—and it’s a rumor that O’Barr denies. At a comics convention in 2009, O’Barr said that The Crow’s look came from a marionette mask, which he saw painted on a theater in London: “I thought it’d be interesting to have this painful face with a smile forcibly drawn on.”

Regardless of what inspired the makeup, getting it right was very tough. It took between 35 minutes and an hour to apply the grease makeup, which could stay in place for hours; special effects artist Lance Anderson created a rubber mask that had slits in it, so that the pattern of lines around the eyes and mouth would be consistent.

But Proyas and Lee weren’t fans of the freshly applied look. “The first few times Brandon and I looked at it we were both really unhappy with it,” Proyas admitted in the DVD commentary. “It was hard to get it to the point where it didn’t feel self-conscious. We were both happy with it when it was distressed—he almost wanted to sleep in the makeup and then come to set the next day. That’s when it would look really great.”

Some of the actors cast as villains in The Crow went through training to portray their characters; Laurence Mason, for example, worked with stunt coordinator Jeff Imada to learn real-life knife-fighting moves in order to play Tin Tin. Others donned costumes: Michael Massee, who played Funboy, wore outfits inspired by Iggy Pop and some outfits taken directly from the comic. David Patrick Kelly, who played T-Bird, used a more literary inspiration to get into character: John Milton’s Paradise Lost. T-Bird quotes Milton in the flashback sequences; Kelly bought an antique copy of the book to use in the scene.

Animal trainer Larry Madrid trained five ravens for the production. Because The Crow filmed at night—when ravens sleep—he had to get the birds accustomed to that, as well as flying in the rain (which is also unnatural for the birds) and in a wind tunnel. One of the ravens also had to be trained to be comfortable sitting on Lee’s shoulder.

The Crow didn’t have a huge budget, so the filmmakers sometimes relied on trickery to get the shots they needed. For the opening sequence, which shows a city on fire, the production used miniatures and projection technology. “We went to elaborate lengths to project flames into a miniature set,” Proyas said in the DVD commentary. “We had a screen set up so we could project into the miniature on multiple passes. It was really the very early days of digital imagery, and we didn’t really have the money to use them, so we tried to do things in much more of an optical way.”

For one iconic shot in which Eric dumps a bunch of rings into the barrel of a shotgun and fires it, Proyas “cut to some oversized rings being dropped towards the camera through a puff of smoke,” he said. “The way it’s cut, you really think you’re seeing a bunch of rings that were dropped into a shotgun.” The production didn’t have the money—or the space—to shoot a car chase sequence, so they did it with miniatures instead. And the final rooftop confrontation between Eric and head-villain Top Dollar (Michael Wincott) was shot not on the roof of a church, but on modular pieces sitting on the soundstage floor that were made to look like a gothic cathedral.

For a scene in which the crow attacks Myca (Bai Ling), Anderson built a mechanical bird to do the attacking; it had separate controls for the wings and the claws. His shop also built mechanical hands that looked just like Lee’s for a scene in which Eric is shot in the hand and his hand heals. “What we ended up doing,” Anderson said in The Crow: The Movie, “was closing it to a point and then taking filler and filling the hole in so it would close totally clean and go away, like stop motion.” They also created a full dummy of Top Dollar to be used in the climactic fight sequence where he’s impaled on the horn of a gargoyle.

He’s the looter who steals a television in the aftermath of the explosion at Gideon’s Pawn Shop.

The cast and crew worked long, grueling hours, in the rain and at night, on the set of The Crow, which was plagued by misfortunes almost from the start. In February 1993, a carpenter was seriously injured on set when the crane he was working in hit live power lines. That night, an equipment truck caught on fire. Later, a sculptor who had worked on the set for just a few days drove through the plaster shop after he was let go. A construction worker accidentally drove a screwdriver through his hand. Then, in March, a storm destroyed some of the sets.

On March 31, 1993, the production was filming a flashback sequence that showed how Eric died: As he walked into the apartment he shared with Shelly to find her being raped and beaten by Top Dollar’s henchmen, Funboy would pull out his .44 Magnum and shoot him. According to People:

“The script of The Crow called for a close-up of the loaded weapon. The crew, following standard procedure, used dummy bullets, which are nothing more than bullets without gunpowder. When the close-up was finished, the gun was unloaded, then reloaded with blanks. Blanks sound as loud as real bullets, but when they are fired, only the harmless cardboard wadding with which they are packed is ejected from the gun. This time, though, the action was far from benign. Massee pulled the trigger, and Lee slumped to the ground, a hole the size of a quarter in his lower right abdomen.”

The crew didn’t realize that Lee was injured until Proyas called cut and the actor didn’t get up. He was rushed to the hospital, but doctors couldn’t save him. Lee died later that afternoon; he was just 28 years old.

It took some time to figure out what had happened, but according to The Telegraph, both the dummy bullets and the blanks used on the production “had hastily been fabricated by taking out the gunpowder from real bullets because of the time pressure crew members were under.” The lead tip of the dummy bullet became lodged in the barrel of the gun and, “pushed out by the blank charge, scratched the bottom of the shopping bag before perforating Lee’s navel, and managed to puncture the stem of the aorta where it branches to provide blood supply to the legs.”

After the accident, Paramount—which had agreed to distribute the movie—dropped out, leaving the film in limbo (Miramax eventually picked it up). Producers, with permission from Lee’s family, wanted to finish the film, and after a six-week bereavement period, the cast and crew returned to Wilmington to complete filming The Crow.

No criminal charges were ever filed in Lee’s death, but his mother, Linda Lee Cadwell, did file a lawsuit against the producers and production company, which was eventually settled. In 2005, Massee spoke out about the accident for the first time. “It absolutely wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t even supposed to be handling the gun until we started shooting the scene and the director changed it,” he said. Afterward, “I just took a year off and I went back to New York and didn’t do anything. I didn’t work. What happened to Brandon was a tragic accident … I don’t think you ever get over something like that.”

One month after Lee’s death, Pressman and Proyas began rewriting the script, ultimately presenting, according to Entertainment Weekly, “an emotionally softened, reworked script.” The filmmakers opted to use Lee’s half-finished scenes in montages, and they cut one character altogether: the Skull Cowboy, played by Michael Berryman, a guide who laid out the rules of Eric’s return to the land of the living. According to The Crow: The Movie, those rules were “ice the bad guys, receive a reunion with Shelly—but ‘work for the living, you bleed.’”

In the DVD commentary, Proyas said he cut the character for a number of reasons. “I was never happy with the effect … I felt he lowered the standard of the film, made it a little cheesy,” he said. “But also because I felt that the character was kind of unnecessary. I feel that you get what’s going on, you understand it, you don’t really need someone telling you, as an audience, what’s happening at various points, and that seemed to be the function that he was playing. We [also] only got to shoot one scene with him, and there were two other scenes planned that we didn’t get to shoot. How do you make more of him without Brandon to relate to him, and why would you even want to bother? It was an easy decision to drop him.”

The Skull Cowboy’s exposition was replaced with Sarah’s narration, and Eric only becomes mortal when the crow he’s been following is killed.

Other scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor involved Skank (Angel David) being robbed by children and an extended fight sequence between Eric and Funboy in which Funboy actually wounds Eric. Proyas said on the DVD that they cut the fight for two reasons: One, because now that the Skull Cowboy was gone, the conceit that Eric doing something for the living would make him vulnerable wasn’t clear, and also because “we had so little time to shoot the fight scene that Brandon and I, neither of us were particularly happy with the results,” Proyas said. “He had choreographed a really beautiful sequence, and I really hadn’t been able to capture it in the time we had.”

Thanks to the changes, “In a way, the film became about something different,” one source told Entertainment Weekly. “It became about how you deal with grief. What happens when someone you love is taken from you? How do you incorporate that into your life?”

In addition to having doubles stand in for Lee, and filming those scenes as long shots in shadows, the production relied on the VFX company Dream Quest Images to fill in some of the blanks. Using footage of Lee from other sequences, the visual effects company finished seven shots. In one sequence where Eric enters his abandoned loft, Dream Quest took a shot of Lee stumbling down an alley and digitally removed the background; by adding a matte painting of a doorway, they were able to make it look like he was actually walking into his apartment. In another shot where Eric sees himself in a broken mirror, Dream Quest once again digitally isolated Lee from an outside shot. Using a shot of a double in front of a shattered mirror as a guide, they were able to create a grid that allowed them to composite Lee’s image onto the mirror (you can see how they did it here). Even more extraordinary, the company did this on handheld footage—a far cry from most visual effects shots at the time, which were carefully planned and staged and shot with a steady camera (just-developed image-tracking software helped them pull it off).

“In the very first test screenings we had, two or three people out of 300 would ask, ‘Why is it that Eric Draven is the guy that can come back with these powers? Why can he come back from the dead?” Proyas recalled in DVD commentary. “I’m going, ‘Who the hell cares …’ I remember this was a really big thing for everyone at that time, but now, see the movie, it’s obviously ludicrous. It’s a suspension of disbelief, and people go with it.”

The Crow was released on May 13, 1994, and was the number one movie in America in its first weekend. Critics, including Roger Ebert and Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, praised the movie. Its total domestic gross was nearly $51 million.

O’Barr bought his mom a car, and a surround sound system for himself, then donated the rest. “I was really good friends with Brandon, so it just felt like blood money to me,” he said at a comics convention in 2009. “I didn’t want to profit at his expense. And I kept that secret for as long as I could. It’s not charity if you get credit for it.”

“It wasn’t utmost in my [mind] to create a franchise, but I was aware that it could do that, and you don’t want to make that impossible,” Proyas said in the DVD commentary. “You can see all the elements there. If Eric Draven was going to come back again, there had to be some layers to it, there had to be some reason for him to come back … I would have been delighted to make The Crow 2, and if Brandon had been involved, we would have made a great movie.”

Even without Lee, though, the sequels came. The Crow: City of Angels, starring Mia Kirshner as Sarah and Vincent Perez as The Crow, Ashe Corven, was released in 1996. In 1998, there was a short-lived TV series called The Crow: Stairway to Heaven starring Mark Dacascos. Then, in 2000, Kirsten Dunst and Eric Mabius starred in another movie, The Crow: Salvation. That was followed in 2005 by The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which starred Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, and Edward Furlong.

Talk of a reboot of The Crow has been percolating since 2008. The movie lost several stars and directors, and weathered a production company’s bankruptcy, but news recently hit that the movie—directed by Rupert Sanders and starring Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, and Danny Huston—was acquired by Lionsgate, which is planning a 2024 release. “We appreciate what The Crow character and original movie mean to legions of fans,” a Lionsgate executive said, “and believe this new film will offer audiences an authentic and visceral reinterpretation of its emotional power and mythology.”

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

Sometimes there are words that you’ve seen, read, and maybe even used in conversation whose meaning you can never keep straight—even after looking it up, the right definition doesn’t stick. Some of the words on this list look like they have a negative element in them, but either because their positive counterpoint has fallen out of use or because it never existed in the first place, the word doesn’t really have a negative sense. Other words below are often confused for their opposite or have come to have connotations not quite reflected in their dictionary definitions.

Definition: “Filled with bewilderment”

If it looks like there’s a negative at the beginning of nonplussed, it’s because, etymologically speaking, there is—it’s from Latin non plus, “no more, no further.” Still, there is no word plussed, and that can get confusing.

Definition: “Only partly in existence; imperfectly formed”

It may look like the in- at the start of inchoate would be the same as the one at the start of words like incomplete or inadequate. Although that may be a good way to remember it, the first letters of this word are not a negative. The word comes from Latin inchoare, which meant “to begin.” Inchoate things are often just beginning.

Definitions: “an indication of approved or superior status”; “distinctive and stylish elegance,” respectively

Shades of meaning between cachet and panache are often confused. Cachet is more about prestige, and panache is more about style. Having high tea at Buckingham Palace can have a lot of cachet in your social circle, but the genteel way you sip your tea can have a lot of panache.

Definition: “Showing sustained enthusiastic action with unflagging vitality”

In Latin, it was possible to defatigare, or “to tire out,” but only the negative version prefixed with in- survived the journey into English (via French). Indefatigable is a word you have to say quickly, and if you get through all those syllables, it’s almost as if you’ve proven the definition: It takes “unflagging vitality” to reach the end.

Definition: “Surpassing the ordinary or normal”

The word canny is rare but not unknown as a word that means “cunning” or “sly.” The only problem is that that’s not the meaning of canny contained in uncanny. Canny used to mean “knowing and careful,” and therefore uncanny meant “mischievous,” coming to refer to supernatural spirits who toyed with mortals. Comic book fans have a huge head start with this word, having grown up with the Uncanny X-Men, who all have supernatural powers.

Definition: “Not embarrassed”

This word is one where the positive version did exist but has fallen out of use. Abash meant “perplex, embarrass, lose one’s composure’ in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, so unabashed means “not embarrassed.”

Definition: “Wasting time”

The word dilatory is confusing because it sounds like it’s potentially related to words like dilate or even depilatory. It’s not related to either of those words, but luckily there are ways to remember what dilatory actually means—the word almost sounds like delay or dilly dally, both of which relate to the word’s definition.

Definition: “Someone who demands exact conformity to rules and forms”

This word looks and sounds like marionette, the stringed puppet, which is a pitfall to avoid, because it can lead you to believe that martinet means the exact opposite of what it actually means. A martinet has some power, and no one is pulling their strings.

Definition: “The common people generally”

This is confusing because it’s an obscure word for the common folk, and sometimes it’s hard to keep straight whether the upper or lower crust is being discussed. Hoi polloi literally means “the many,” with polloi being the plural of the well-known Greek prefix poly.

A version of this story was created in 2016 in partnership with Vocabulary.com; it has been updated for 2023.

The Great Lakes of North America span 750 miles from east to west and form the largest freshwater system on Earth. Here are 10 facts about the fab five.

Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater lake, straddles the U.S.-Canada border and touches Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In terms of surface area, the numbers are staggering: it’s 350 miles wide and 160 miles long. It boasts 31,700 square miles of surface water and 2726 miles of shoreline. The lake’s average depth of nearly 500 feet extends to a maximum depth of 1332 feet. Its volume of 2900 cubic miles is more than enough to fill all the other Great Lakes combined.

Lake Erie, which borders Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, measures 241 miles across and 57 miles long, larger than Lake Ontario’s 193-mile-by-53-mile footprint. But Erie’s average depth is just 62 feet and has a volume of around 119 cubic miles, much smaller than Ontario’s average depth of 283 feet and volume of 395 cubic miles. The two lakes are connected by the 35-mile long Niagara River.

As its name suggests, Lake Michigan and its 1180 cubic miles of water, 22,300 square miles of surface water, and 1600 miles of shoreline is the only one of the Great Lakes that lies entirely within American borders. It is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by volume and is connected to Lake Huron by the Straits of Mackinac between Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas.

The Great Lakes Commission established the Circle Tour in 1988 as a scenic tourist drive around the five lakes and through the eight bordering states and Ontario, Canada. Just to navigate Lake Michigan’s 900-mile Circle Tour alone would take approximately 14.5 hours without any stops.

A fire on Ohio’s Cuyahoga River in June 1969, and the iconic image that was published thereafter, helped spur a number of environmental regulations aimed at cleaning up the waterway that feeds Lake Erie, as well as America’s lakes and rivers in general. Amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, now known as the Clean Water Act, were enacted in 1972 regulating water pollution and discharge, and gave the Environmental Protection Agency broader pollution control powers. In addition, the United States and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Act in 1972 to “restore and protect the waters of the Great Lakes.”

Of the thousands of islands scattered throughout the lakes, the largest is Manitoulin in Lake Huron. It is the largest freshwater lake island in the world at 1068 square miles and has a population of around 13,000. Georgian Bay, a part of Lake Huron, includes about 17,500 islands, while the archipelago in the St. Lawrence River known as the Thousand Islands actually encompasses around 1800 islands.

Lake Erie is named for the Erie people who lived along the lake’s southern shores; Erie is a shortened version of the Iroquoian word erielhonan, meaning “long tailed,” or alternatively rhiienhonons, “raccoon nation.” Lake Michigan’s name comes from a French spelling of the Old Ojibwe term meshi-gami, “big lake.” Huron is an obsolete French adjective meaning “bristle-haired,” which may have referred to the headdresses of the Native people that French settlers encountered in the region. Ontario comes from the Mohawk word ontari:io, “beautiful lake.” And finally, French explorers dubbed the largest of the Great Lakes le lac supérieur, or “upper lake.”

The Canadian and U.S. lake fleets, made up of carriers, tankers, bulk freighters (“lakers”), tugs, and barges, transport more than 100 million tons of cargo a year. The main cargoes are iron ore, coal, and limestone, while major agricultural shipments contains wheat, corn, sorghum, and soybeans. Other cargo includes steel, scrap metal, iron products, fuel, and chemicals.

Fishing is a revered pastime on the Great Lakes, one of the largest freshwater fisheries in the world. There are 139 native fish species, including lake whitefish, yellow perch, walleye, lake trout, large and smallmouth bass, coho and Atlantic salmon, and muskellunge. Lake sturgeon are the biggest species of fish found in the lakes; these ancient fish can weigh up to 300 pounds and grow to 6 feet long.

While the wreck of the famed S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior has generated a hit song, memorials, and conspiracies surrounding its sinking, a number of other commercial ships have sunk around Whitefish Bay near Whitefish Point, Michigan. The wooden steamerVienna sank in 1892 on Lake Superior and is now a popular spot for divers; the Comet also sank on Lake Superior and took 11 lives with it in 1875; the John M. Osborn collided with the Alberta in 1884 and drowned four crew members; and on its second voyage, the S.S. Cyprus sank near Deer Park, Michigan, in 1907, killing 22 of its 23 crew members.

The dangerous stretch of water on southern Lake Superior between Munising, Michigan, and Whitefish Point has been called the “Graveyard of the Great Lakes” and “Shipwreck Coast,” because hundreds of ships have been lost in the area. It’s estimated that 6000 ships have sunk in the five Great Lakes with a loss of nearly 30,000 lives.

A version of this story was published in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

Every evening, the caves in Malaysian Borneo’s Mulu National Park begin to squeak and rustle as close to 3 million bats prepare for their nightly hunt. The enormous colony, home to at least 12 species of bats, emerges in what looks like dark ribbons rippling through the sky; they travel in groups to protect themselves from predators like bat hawks that lurk nearby.

This nightly bat exodus, which occurs most early evenings between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., is one of the most popular attractions in the park, which is located in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. In the below video by Urzala Productions, the bat colony rises from its caves in spectacular formations and disappears into the forest to search for food. It’s a spectacular ritual, captured in silhouette against a cloudy evening sky. According to the Mulu National Park website, the bats travel up to about 62 miles each night, before returning home in the early morning. 

People who want to see the spectacle in person have to go on a roughly 2.36-mile (3.8 kilometers) trek along a raised walkway. It’s a scenic route; one that wanders through the forest and along rivers. There’s even an observatory people can gather at outside the cave to watch as the millions of bats take to the sky. Just make sure you go when it isn’t raining, as the winged creatures tend to stay within the caves on wet evenings.

According to the park, an individual bat eats anywhere from five to 10 grams’ worth of flying insects. After feasting all night, the millions of bats head back to Deer Cave, where they then deposit a ton of excrement. Those with sensitive noses should probably stick to watching the bats from outside. As writer Anthony Dennis wrote for Stuff in 2017, the cave stinks from “heroic amounts of bat guano.”

A version of this story originally ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

Chances are, you probably haven’t spent a lot of time studying images of Julia Grant. But if you have, you may have noticed that nearly all representations of Ulysses S. Grant’s wife (the pair met in 1844 and married in August 1848) were taken or painted from a side profile. That’s because Julia was born with a condition called strabismus, a disorder—more commonly known as “crossed eyes”—that prevents both eyes from lining up in the same direction. When she was younger, one of the best surgeons in the country offered to perform the simple operation that would fix them. Julia wasn’t keen on surgery, however, and declined.

Decades later, Julia changed her mind. “Now that my husband had become so famous I really thought it behooved me to try to look as well as possible,” she explained in her autobiography.

Her appearance bothered her so much that Julia was willing to overcome her fear of surgery. She consulted the same doctor who had offered to help her so many years earlier, but he informed her that it was too late to correct the condition.

When General Grant found out his wife was trying to change her eyes, he asked why on Earth she would consider such a thing. She explained her reasoning, saying, “Why, you are getting to be such a great man, and I am such a plain little wife. I thought if my eyes were as others are I might not be so very, very plain, Ulys; who knows?”

Grant was horrified. “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with these same eyes?” he asked. “I like them just as they are, and now, remember, you are not to interfere with them. They are mine, and let me tell you, Mrs. Grant, you had better not make any experiments, as I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”

Though she put the idea of surgery to rest, from that point on, the first lady was careful about how she posed for pictures.

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.